《Godclads》 THE INDEX the index slang/referential consang: a term denoting closeness; or kindredness. can be used mockingly. derived from the word: consanguinity. nova: a term referring to the potency or coolness of something. stay zero: stay calm; don''t be rash. numb: a drug; also means to chill out joy: a nanotech drug that causes blood to clot together and sets the mind afire with hours of rapturous ecstasy. joyhead: someone who habitually uses joy. chromer: someone who is heavily augmented with cyberware; usually seen as low class and crassa street snuffer. razorboy/razorgirl: a chrome aesthetic that foregoes armor in exchange for blades, reflexes, and speed. squire: an unofficial reference to an honorable and reputable street merc operating in new vultun. necrojack/necro: someone who uses ghosts to hack minds, steal memories, or inflict severe cognitive damage. they spend most of their time diving in the nether and engaging each other using ghosts and phantasmics. enforcer: an in-field asset to a syndicate or a guild; someone who engages enemies in person. drone-jock/jock: someone who links and connects to various vehicles, missiles, and platforms to pilot them from afar. grafter: someone who fits you for implants, alters your gene code, or grafts augments in general. agnos: an agnostic of the old faithsthe few people who are permitted to know scripture under their pact with jaus and the guilds. are unaffiliated to all factions and perform metaphysical tunings and maintenance for liminal frames, heavens, and hells. coldtech: natural technology. no thaumaturgy. thaumaturgy: the quintessence of a god that warps and usurps reality in certain and specific manners. jaus: a phrase of astonishment, excitement, or surprise. taken from the name of jaus avandaer, former leader and crownbearer of the eight guilds after his passing. against his will no less. the man didn''t want to be revered as a god. snuff: to kill; to snuff out someone''s existence.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. null: to mutilate someone''s mind so badly that they succumb to madness or are rendered catatonic. dive: to cast deep into your subconsciousness and ride one''s mind like a vehicle through the nether, traveling from memory to memory; alternatively, it means a contracted gig commissioned to a necrojack or a team of street squires. rotlick: a derogatory term for a ghoul; a creature that likes to eat rotting bodies at times. synced: slang meaning to understand; if one is on the same page as another. scalpel: when a guild lobotomizes someone with a heaven of light from on high. paler: a term for a ghoul; popularized amongst those of ori-thaum during the war. voidship: a spacecraft built for sailing the expanse of deep space; unable to fly through the sunderwilds. sunderwilds: vast eldritch wounds scabbing over into reality from years long prior. horrific entities and primordial beings lurk in their clefts. the guilds irregularly send expeditions into its depths to procure more souls. at once a natural disaster and a major resource point. this is a major reason why void travel is extremely difficult. fallwalker: a unaligned, mercenary godclad. they gained the name "fallwalker" by being the only units that are commonly capable of fighting in regions affected by ruptures originating from fallen heavens. due to being godclads, they bear intra-sovereignty rights, recognizing each of them as a sort of "foreign dignitary" and bestowing them with knightly privileges that are afforded to few others. this is mainly to put an end to the constant dueling between rival fallwalkers seeking claim each other''s heavens and hells. wombrash: a metaphysical contagion that leaked into the world after the rupturing of the heavens of lust, love, and fertility. due to this, the physical intimacy ban is in full effect for new vultun and the surrounding areas. all lustful activities must be conducted using proxies in the nether, and any physical intimacy will trigger an outbreak of the rash, which causes a body''s biomass to begin producing womb sores that incubate half-formed homunculi. the transmission vectors of wombrash are: physical, auditory, and visual. all physical intimacy conducted in reality constitutes a felony of the highest order and will be monitored by guild exorcists. the maw: a great hellvent built into the bottom of the city made to dissolve disposed matter and waste. runs across the city in grand chasms and is built in a sigilic symbol through the city''s divided sovereignties. the underhive: an undercity that once was the seat of power to the hungers of old noloth before their destruction during the godsfall. was briefly the territory of the low masters before they were massacred during the fourth guild war. comprised of the umbra and penumbra. warrens: the unofficial "topside" of new vultun. where natural ground level is. separated into three layers and built like a stacked city of increasing prosperity as it goes upward. layer one parts the gutters from the spine of the warrens. layer two parts the spine from the throat. and layer three parts the throat from light''s end. the tiers: a vast, ringed mountain made from memetic matter that holds up the core of new vultun were the arks of the guilds are based. only anchored to reality, the tiers are actually far larger than they appear, spearing into the clefts of space itself to be an expansive city scape of blooming wealth and splendor, but also hyper-competitive rat races due to the limited number of citizenship slots. at the very bottom of the tiers is the undercroft, where most wagers, low-guilders, and newly minted citizens reside. above that are purgs (short for purgatories), each of which is a different plane unto themselves, rooted to a different ark and a different guild. these are populated by mid-level guilders and established fallwalkers. then, at the very apex, above even the arks are the elysiums--"paradise" realms where only the elites reside. it is their ultimate goal to overwrite reality with their elysiums. or so they claim. thaumaturgy thaumic mass: the quintessence of a soul, and that which allows one to manifest and grow heavens and hellswhich are officially referred to as ontologics. thaumic mass can best be understood to be ontological capacity--or how complex of an alternate reality a soul can create and project into reality. complexity and vulgarity (how deeply they affect the natural laws) cause the mass of heavens to grow, so the soul must in turn generate more thaums to support it. thaums: effectively the metaphysical fuel of raw willpower and belief. claimable only from dead beings capable of self-awareness and worship. in previous ages, thaums were expended entirely to fuse into miracles, necessitating rituals of mass sacrifice in return for the gods to manifest. essence: a standard willpower unit measured in echoes and taken from the dead. becomes thaums upon being fed into a soul. thaumic cycler/essence cycler: a metaphysical construct created through the sacrifice of a dragonan leviathan that eats itself eternally in a looping stasis of immortality. it is through this method that liminal frames are capable of being the perpetual miracle machines that they are. soul: an eldritch fire that burns, ever-bright, ever-unfading. this is the quintessential and key ingredient to the overall structure of a liminal frame and of the fallen gods. souls cannot be replicated and are effectively the rarest substance in-setting with their place of origin now formally shrouded in myth. hence, godhunts and harvests in the sunderwilds inevitably result in massive skirmishes between the guilds. heaven: hollowed vessels of eldritch gods now lobotomized and slain. each one is shaped by a specific concept or aspect of reality, which serves as its primary domain or domains. hell: a implanted module meant to be attached to a heaven as a "thaumic recoil compensator." effectively, while a heaven is creating its miracles, a hell uses the parts from the heaven to create counter-miracles of equal and opposite impossibility, thus balancing out the rend. liminal frame: a metaphysical rig that is burned over one''s ontology--fusing itself over your consciousness and not allowing your death to dissolve your being as it anchors you just beyond the threshold of reality, serving as something of a metaphysical respawn point. canons: metaphysical codes that usurp the laws of reality while a heaven is active. hubris: something that a heaven is explicitly unable to do; a leftover from old scriptures and primal heavens. most modern guild-made heavens do their best to remove hubris or reduce them. rend: the vulgarity-damage a heaven''s manifested miracles inflicts on reality. can be converted to entropy and vented from a hell. rupture: when a heaven overloads from building up too much rend, causing localized reality to tear and become unstable. fallen heaven: a heaven with contradictory canons or a constantly triggered hubris that continuously spikes its rend and constantly ruptures. must be contained or they will grow indefinitely, albeit slowly without active thaums to feed them. thaumic backlash: the sudden spiking of rend within the system of a heavenusually triggered by incurring hubris or encountering a paradox. paradox: the clashing of two absolutes, creating an impossibility. example: a heaven of indestructibility clashes against a heaven of destruction or one that dissolves matter. the resulting collision between two counter-simulated realities projected from clashing soulsregardless of thaumic mass or designresults in both spiking with rend and the need to vent their hells. spheres: a rating system for the reality-twisting potential of a liminal frame and its heavens. heavens of the first to third sphere are usually tactical-level threats, capable of destroying entire megablocks or brigades. from the fourth to sixth, they become strategic category threats capable of reshaping entire engagements from multiple asymmetrical angles. from the seventh onward, the user of said frame will be marked as a priority target in any engagement due to their capabilities at outright editing or retconning major parts of reality to suit their needs. Chapter -1 Hunger chapter -1 hunger this was not the dream. -last words of jaus avandaer 0-1 prologue: hunger soul online igniting thaumic reactor warning: thaumic reactor output minimal - 1 thaum/c initializing resurrection - 1% restoring memorywarning! memory sequence corrupted reverting to core memory; initializing rebuild the flesh of his brother was the sweetest he had ever tasted. for two months he hid in the underhive. the deconstructor swarms ruled here now. not the low masters. not his brothers. like locusts, they had flayed all matter they deemed hostile. the great halls and grand tunnels of rune-scribed bone peeled from existence. now, he hid within an unfamiliar nest of metal. the swarms had replaced organic matter they ate with cold metal: a total usurpation of what was. by the last days, he survived by feeding off mind-dead aratnids, devouring them palps, flesh, and all. above, the world shook as the war continued. nuclear detonations lessened but did not stop. they never stopped. in the winnowed dark, he sat, stewing in feelings he lacked the vocabulary to explain. infantile rage bled into despondent sorrow. his low masters had planned. plotted this for years. they created his kind, the ghouls, to serve as their instrument of vengeance. expanded the umbra to create a truly labyrinthine stronghold below their enemies. and then, they waited. schemed. waited for the guilds to fight amongst themselves as they had so many times before. when the day finally came, they rose and took the warrens, beginning the uprising to liberate their homeland, to reclaim the stolen flame of their gods and rightful heavens. numbering a billion strong, they flooded up from their staging points, emerging through the soil on towers of bone. it was to be a bloodletting, a reckoning long owed to the last true faithful of noloth. in a tidal wave of savagery, fury, and bloodlust they rose to face the guilds in what was to be the feast of flesh; a crusade for all that was holy. they lasted three months. the guilds massacred them for three more. unable to upload latest instance of optimal ontology resurrection paused - 12% reverting to prior ontological iteration - 22% ontological reversion - 66% accelerating memory beneath the slope of the tower, he caught the scent of fresh blood and souring flesh. the taste was familiar. intimate. he knew it to be close to his own. there, in a shallow artillery-made basin, another of his kind lay dead. a gauss-flechette lay buried in the skull of his brother. death mustve come instantly. yet, where the mind was dead, the blessed blood within their veins struggled on, the self-moving ichor of the corpse wrestling vainly against the tungsten shard, trying to dislodge it. the ghost slipped out of him, taking with them the gift of lucidity. abandoned by strength, unconsciousness fell upon him like dirt on a coffin. it was only when the first flow of blood splashed against his tongue that he woke again. it tasted rich. deep and pure. like a nu-dog, he lapped at the flow, slaking his thirst. he heard the pulsing heartbeat of another. it was so close to him. weakly, he nursed himself on the mans opened wrist, savoring the sweet flavor of blood. the ghoul opened his eyes toward his savior. fresh amidst the caustic toxin hissing from the wastes, the scent of citrus spilled out from the man. his hair was dark as coal and his skin was like copper. there was nothing truly remarkable about him in terms of height or mass. nor did he infuse his flesh with any unholy metals. kneeling down, the mans eyes shone with an unnatural blueness. it was as if the clearest sky had decided to peer through him. you look hungry, the man said, pulling a cube of tasteless meat from his coat. hunger. food. taste. the feeding that came was frenzied. blind. the substance went down barely chewed, and a warmth settled in place of cold empty thoughts. he felt the mans arms slide under him, lifting him as if he bore no weight. he gave no struggle, for there was no order to resist. for the first time, he felt an invader touch him and inflict no violence. he succumbed deeper into the mans arms. surprised to see any of you topside, the man said, chuckling as if he found a diamond in the rough. suppose the guilds had each other to contend with. sloppy. the man spoke the heretical tongue with a slow pace that seemed to come with age. but there was something deeper in it. do you have a name? resurrection - 99% beginning ontological anchoring name? he had known his brothers by scent and sound. bestowed crude titles to some of them and the meaner masters, though he would never admit it. but names were for the chosen, and he was merely a thrall. a creature fortunate enough to serve the blessed. he had no name. shivering, he shook his head feebly, the meager act taxing him to his limit. the man hummed. suppose well have to fix that. the light of the darkstar settled on them. as they emerged from the shade of the tower, weak breezes licked chills across the devastation, emerging as whistles through cracks in crevices, singing a constant trill to their egress from the ruins. the man fixed him with a wry stare. you got the look of someone who walked out of one of the low hells, consang, anyone ever tell you that? he thought about that. only memories of vulgar violence answered his recollections. no. well, you do, the man continued. time upon time ago, before all this, before even the fall, folks used to name their blood after ideas. expressions meant to align them to the heavens of certain gods. probably why my kin were so mad when i took the name walton. like throwing the blessing back in their face. he looked down again, his face taking an inscrutable expression. youre a survivor, you know. deserve a good name. one thats worthy of you. worthy?" tell you what, the man said. ill give naming you a shot. and, down the line, if you ever find a better name, you can do what i did. how does that sound? he didnt know what to say. mainly because no one had ever asked his opinion before. unsure what to do, he just grunted. calling you survivor would be laying it mighty thick. but thankfully, the same meaning can belong to different words if you know enough tongues. he cocked his head down, and, for the first time, smiled. how about i call you resurrection - 100% implanting nous Chapter 1-1 Resurrection chapter 1-1 resurrection the heavens have fallen, and we have trapped ourselves beneath its rubble. such it was. such it still remains. for all that we have sacrificed, defiled, and transgressed, i see now that meager hubris has tainted our rightful emancipation, and damned us more than the pantheons ever could. how quick were we in the claiming of sovereignty over the corpses of our great abusers? how quick we were to fashion the instruments of our ascent from their blood, to clad our frailties using the chassis of their beings? and how quick did we cast the weight of our chains down upon the others? in these words, i can only offer you the ache of truth rather than the salvation you so deserve. for this, may i be damned to the deepest of hells. all i wish is for you, dear kindred, to know the truth of our transgression and beg your forgiveness. we sought to create paradise. but in practice with our avarice, we unleashed an apocalypse." -jaus avandaer, chains from chains 1-1 resurrection avo woke atop a mountain of rust and rot. his sore lungs filled with a whistling gasp. his mind was sheathed into his vessel as existence shuddered around him. his senses reeled from the muted depths of nothingness to overload in space of seconds. he was alive. the pain flaring across his body made him wish he wasnt. ontology reverted resurrection completed memory restored warning: memory sequence missing, unable to locate memories within the span of [1 week, 3 hours, 5 minutes] thaumic mass insufficient - unable to sustain metamind reverting to zero burn lines of cog-feed data dissolved from avos perception as if they had never been. one by one, sensations greeted him, few of them pleasant. the shrill winds grated upon his ears and the stench of rust and rot snaked up his nostrils. a dim chasm of light shone down on him from far above, stabbing into his bleary eyes. agony flared across every inch of his body. he shuffled. his wounds flared. he stopped shuffling. a strange pressure rested upon his chest. looking down, the remains of a corpse lay spattered upon him, its blood seeping deep into his sodden undersuit. sniffing, he could taste the bitter tinge of adrenaline flavoring the corpses flesh. tentatively, he licked a scoop of mangled meat from the body. it didnt taste good, but it was enough to fuel his blood cells and spur his wounds to heal. he ate what he could on his back using only his tongue, trying to move as little as possible. sitting or standing was beyond him. he needed time for the haze in his skull to clear, for the static to fade from his limbs. for a few minutes, he just lay there, getting reacquainted with his injuries, waiting for the world to stop spinning. beneath him, a carpet of limbs shivered and shook. avo sniffed. corpses. he was resting on a pile of corpses. below, he felt a constant vibration. engines screamed overhead, the noise funneled down from the edge of the pit. the sound was near deafening. around him, the winds coiled and folded, bifurcating past him. through blurred eyes, he saw something else fall. it struck nearby, pulping a few of the corpses close to him. his sight cleared enough for him to see what it was: a burning aerovec. looking up again, he finally noticed the industrial clamps pouring in more bodies and detritus into the great bowl he was laying in. where the hells was he? how did he get here? again, he looked up into the light. he seemed to be moving, but it could just be dizziness. blinking, he tried to clear his eyes. still too far. didnt help that his kind were nearsighted by the limits of their biology. being grown and designed in dark and claustrophobic tunnels by woefully inept creators did that to a ghoul. still, he had his smell and hearingenough to give him some bearing on his situation. there was also the question of why his cog-feed was malfunctioning. and what was this about resurrection? his metaminda cognition-augmenting smart construct made from the phantasmal matter of ghostsseemed to be offline again. more importantly, however, resurrecting him was definitely not one of its functions. the phantasmic applications he had engrammed to his metamind were only meant for interfacing with other minds or the nether itself. for him to be resurrected required something on the level of a phylactery at the least. something that could anchor his being and pour his consciousness into a new-grown vessel without breaking his mind in the process. being technically considered a piece of property instead of a citizen pushed obtaining a phylactery firmly out of his reach even if he had the imps to make the purchase. his social merit rating just didnt reach that high. as he tried to rise again, he heard two heartbeats pulsing above him, coming from just beyond the edge of the pit. sniffing, he sorted through the various smells and found himself narrowing in on two contrasting musks. one smelled more akin to oil, while the other, alcohol. both reeked of stale sweat. hows the dig today? came a phlegm-filled voice. a wet hack followed. masked by the wailing engines, avo almost couldnt hear the slosh of pneumonia coating their lungs. another replied. they sounded younger, more nasally and girlish. same as yesterday, consang: shit, shit, and fucking shit. nothing but stiffs and husks. the cougher laughed. shame about the ghoul, yeah? if it was alive we could have chained him to the wall. farmed it for easy organs till the tumors took em. the girl snorted. dont have strong enough chains for a fucking ghoul, preed. go piss off and be a half-strand somewhere else. busy here. need to count the bodies. is that what youre doing? his eyes came to halt on the aerovec again. avo tilted his head. it looked about twenty feet long. he grinned. it still looked solid enough to be workable. digging his claws into its weakened frame, he pulled up and pushed. his muscles coiled and sprung across his body, the taut strands fire like twitching whips. a ton of metal, glass, and electronics toppled over a carpet of bodies with a squelch. avo ignored the squishing beneath his digitigrade claws as he limped forward and repeated the action. the aerovec flipped again. more bodies came apart beneath the vehicles weight. he listened for the heartbeats of those above carefully. if he heard them, he''d go back to playing dead. considering how they were talking earlier, he doubted them to be friendly. not that anyone particularly liked ghouls in this city. the missing arm made shouldering the aerovec against the walls a struggle. halfway through, something soft bounced off his chest through the cracked windshields. he ignored it. carefully, he braced the weight of the vehicle against himself, shrugging it higher and higher until he lodged it against a clump of bodies. looking down, he noticed what had struck him. a stuffed animal. some kind of nu-dog that had the stock canine features, but with added spines along its back. a tinge of mens cologne wafted from the toy. squeezing it, a holograph flickered from its center and began to play. the form of a human toddler manifested. she wore a synth-dress and had an orange bowl cut. he noted that her eyes were likely implants by the unnatural way they shone. regardless, the holograph just looped her giggling and dancing. under the foot of the plushie, he found the name edda signed like a chicken scratch. written by a childs hand, no doubt. beneath it, another line of writing followed. it was far more legible. daddy misses you every day. mentally, he tried to scan the toy and see if his cipher engram could trace anything else from the object''s history. nothing happened. disappointment followed. right. no metamind. no phantasmic engrams. no functions. he needed to see an agnos if he managed to make it out of this. see if his metamind was missing, out of power, or just fragged. more than what happened to him or who tortured him, he wanted to know what was going on with his smart construct. it was the last thing he inherited from his adopted father, walton. he couldnt accept it being broken. wouldnt accept it. he would get it working again, whatever the cost. inside, the beast growled in pleasure. already, it was whispering to him to track the heartbeats. to climb out from this pit and sample some flesh. avo sighed. another problem to face without the metamind. no morality module to suppress his psychopathy. shaking the tightness from his body, he listened for a moment. no footsteps. the heartbeats seemed to hold in place. whoever the others were, they werent moving about. slowly, he clambered onto the aerovec. it slid with each shift of weight. its frame bent as he climbed. he felt it peeling off the wall with a screech. halfway between the pilots seat and the ledge, he leaped and caught himself with one hand. the claws on his feet buried into the wall as he cleaved his way up. as he crested his first threshold to freedom, he looked over the horizon. his blood froze. cold terror rose within him. he was on a slow moving barge with four industrial grabbers. over a nigh-endless chasm of trash and bodies, the ship sailed on currents of anomalous wind. as far as he could see, the landscape was an expanse of ever dissolving trash and waste. massive portholes lined a gorge of ebony with an endless tide of sewage pouring free from each opening. hells, avo muttered. realization stabbed into him like a stake. the dissolving motes he saw clinging to the bodies. the fact that he was in a barge filled with corpses. the narrow chasm of light that shone down upon him. this was the maw. he had fallen farther down than he ever thought he could. onward, the canyon sprawled out across the outer rings of new vultun like a snaking labyrinth. he mustve gotten picked out of the endless wastes below by the scavenger barge. but how did he end up in the maw in the first a heartbeat skipped a pulse close behind him. avo spun, catching sight of a bald, fair-skinned girl. floating gang hap-tats flickered across her face, playing an animated clash between a warg and a nu-bear. her forehead was specially reserved for holo-ads selling a new type of chem for the dose-chasers. she towered far above him on a spreading walkway that went from bow to stern. a half-eaten sandwich tumbled from her hands, and bounced off the controls of her rig, mashed juice-beetles spilling through the grates at her feet. seated at the heart of a cheap industrial rig, she piloted the amplifier suit more than she wore it. exposed metal ribs projected hud overlays across her face. a cord ran from the inner spine of the rig into the back of her skull, neurally lacing mind to machine. from her spine emerged three different limbs. one for manipulation. one for drilling. one for scanning. her legs spilled out four crab-like appendages. for a beat, they just stared at each other. the corpse-barge poured more trash into the pit he just crawled out of. the girl twitched, blood draining from her face. behind one of her control panels, he thought he caught sight of a holstered pistol. she looked at it as well. avo held up a slow hand. wait one of her hands snapped out, groping wildly for the gun. he turned on instinct, unsure where to run. if he went right hed get sucked through the six aero-engines. if the funneling winds didnt denude his corpse, then hed get to enjoy dying in the maw below. he wondered what it would be like to be swallowed by tides of concentrated entropy. more than that, he wondered why the motes avoided him earlier. toward the stern, he saw two more figures piloting their rigs toward him. not good. he spun. a burst of gunfire roared. three-rounds. hard impacts slammed against his shoulder, breaking skin but crumpling against the thickness of his layered muscle. it felt like being stung by a mantis-wasp. still, he growled in pleasure, the beast slowly seizing hold of him. they didnt have enough firepower to kill him. how unfortunate for them. avo stumbled and winced. the girls hand was shaking wildly, her eyes looked bloodshot. no way she could have made the shot unassisted. smart-gun. faintly, he could feel the faint presence of a whispering ghost rippling from the gun. cheap ghosts could make anything a smart-gun these days. metal limbs hammered down against ringing grates from behind. ahead, the girl tugged the trigger again. a single shot rang out. the guns barrel burst. the bullet broke against his sternum, sending him staggering backward. shaking his head, he saw the dolloping flaps of the overheated weapon. bad piece of hardware. mustve been a cheap quick-fabbed piece of kit. unfortunate. inside his chest, he felt his blood surge, and his senses sharpen. he could hear her heartbeat, her quick, hyperventilating gasps coming from her. closer, he identified her sweet scent as a cheap perfume, making her smell like peaches despite the sweat she earned from her toil. desperately, she worked to fix her gun. painfully, he fought the urge to tear her apart, to eat her. rationally, he knew he couldnt blame her. he would have done the same in her place. ghouls were dangerous. ghouls were monsters. ghouls were all the things the topsiders said and more. he cannibalized more than his share of other monsters to know that. but knowing wasnt the same as feeling, and without his metamind, his morality module wasnt flooding his mind with the right emotions to suppress him. that meant he wasnt getting doses of suppressive emotion. injections of humanity. for the first time in years, his bestial nature rose unchecked. his want for violence grew closer to a need. he ran his tongue across his fangs. he flexed the claws of his right arm. on mending legs, he made for her. behind, her cohorts approached. they wouldnt be fast enough. right now, the only person that could save her from him was him. for the first time in years, avo faced the beast without the aid of his metamind or adopted father. he didnt know if he was strong enough to prevail. Chapter 1-2 Scavengers chapter 1-2 scavengers i told you this would happen. the only laughable thing about this is how much you fucking gerents are surprised. seems like immortality doesnt prevent senility. you want an explanation? fine. ill give you three. apathy. bitterness. fatalism. what else do the fateless in the warrens got? the entire sectors of the city are still no-go zones affected by countless ruptures. this was something we pledged to fix immediately. its been eighteen years! they own nothing and rent everything from the guilds, meaning that they functionally have no concrete value in the market. no freedom. education is free, but considering the undercroft is already ten billion lives over capacity, they wont be making it up even if there were geniuses among them! they cant even have any physical intimacy, for jaus sake. forget sex, a godsdamned kiss on the cheek will cause an outbreak of the rash. then, they get to watch their block get glassed. you know what, the hells with this. i resign. fuck each and every one of you! i signed up with ori-thaum to serve a republic, to see that everyone is represented and supported. unity is destiny? my ass. we broke their homes and our promises. were goddamn bastards. same as highflame. same as voidwatch. same as the no-dragons and all the other great guilds. the next time you ask why the warrens are filled with organ-smugglers, joy-fiends, gangers, snuffers, and scavengers, think to yourself how much theyre worth to us alive versus how much their essence can fuel our souls when dead. were running on a necro-economy. and they know. they know but they cant do anything about it. theres no difference between us and the gluttonous gods that used to rule us. i quit. i quit. i quit. -chief admin revo ikuritas resignation speech to the court of elders of ori-thaum 1-2 scavengers the girl was still fiddling with her broken gun when avo mantled the walkway. scaffolded over the dozen or so scavenging pits built deep into the keel of the barge, the rusted railings of the crudely festooned walkways spilled across the top of the ship, its loosened bolts rattling to the breath of the wind. encompassing two pits a row, all of the walkways were interconnected, segmenting the top of the ship into cubes until it finally trailed off at the prow, with holo-haptic interfaces for the industrial cranes lighting each intersection as a milestone, neon embers amidst the murk of the maw. behind, avo heard heavy metal limbs hammered against the grating and two other rising heart rates as he closed on hap-tata moniker he granted to the girl that shot him. he peeled her face from his mindthe act coming easily from his years of practice diving in the nether. dehumanizing the opposition into something akin to an object was common practice among most necrojacks. most in his profession did it to avoid traumatizing themselves when jacking into the memories of their victims. avo was taught to do it because hurting people fed pleasure to his cruelty. an equally bad habit, considering he had a habit of fragging apart more of their minds than he needed to. avo loped in on all fours, his movements between a dash and a stagger. his muscles, though sore, felt functional. down the narrow path, hap-tat''s face quavered in the projected glow of her rig. scintillating glints reflected off the piercings that dotted her right cheek like constellations. her heart roared like rising war drums in his ears, spurring him onward. desperately, she chucked the broken gun at him. he caught it, and, just as her rigs drill whirred to life, he cast it back at her. lagging, the drill lanced out too late to block the gun. it cracked against one of her hud projection ribs, making hap-tat flinch. her eyes snapped shut. an unwise thing to do when a ghoul was close by. three-hundred and fifty pounds of ghoul slammed against a ton of rusted metal. the more rusted pieces of plasteel on her rig groaned and cracked on impact. her response was sloppy. unfocused. she flailed at him, mechanical arms snapping out, clamping only air as he slipped low. ramshackle her rig might be, a glancing blow from it would be crippling. it was meant for scavenging; menial labor, not combat, but avo knew what a fusion drill could do. at its highest intensity settings, it could strip titanium. hard as the low masters made him in comparison to a flat, titanium he was not. put simply, if she plugged him with that drill, his flesh would do more than strip; his insides would spill. on his side were momentum and agility. he smuggled himself under her left and drove into her at an angle. the rig toppled back, breaking the crane interface she was operating. staggering, her rigs crab-like legs gripped the walkway tight, trying to keep itself upright. metal groaned. servos wailed. he struck her again. this time, he lashed his remaining arm through the projection ribs, feeling a spine-shivering delight as his claws unzipped sinew and skidded off her bones. she screamed. he pressed. in the back of his head, he kept track of the other two heartbeats. they were approaching from the next pit over, their rigs clanking on at a leaden pace, coming at him from perpendicular paths. he needed to finish hap-tat now. a mechanical whine sounded from above him as the articulated limb bearing her drill descended. on instinct, avo twisted out of the way. barely. a line of pain flared along his spine, the drill sliced a shallow avenue of pain down his back. avo snarled. his thoughts slipped from him. the beast inside him took hold. as the drill shot past him and punched through the grating beneath them, he wrenched the flat flaps of her projectors from their sparking joints, hoping to get at the screaming meat behind. a weak fist bounced off his jaw, showing him just how unaugmented she was. he responded by clamping his hand around her head and squeezing. her skull felt so small between his claws. like an oversized egg. in his grip, bone succumbed, fracturing. her voice greeted him with a muffled cry, growing to choked screams as he clenched tighter. mine, avo hissed. with a vicious yank, he drew her halfway out of the rig. her arms and legs snapped at the sockets. she cried out. avo chuffed in annoyance. if she thought dislocations were bad, she should try losing an arm. a choking wheeze filled her lungs. the other two were close now. their heartbeats told him they were closing. fifteen feet. maybe less. he didnt care. hap-tats safety harness clung tight to her torso and fought him. hed deal with that later. instead, he went for the metallic cord slotted to the datajack on the back of her head. unhinging his jaw, he brought his fangs down on the cord. plastic, metal, and micro-tech came apart in his mouth. with the connection severed, her rig went slack, its frame toppling against the bending rails. spitting pieces of broken cord, avo slashed through the harness and pulled his prize free. hap-tat weighed akin to a feather in his hand. in the darkness, he saw the tears rolling from her eyes, and heard the pleas spilling from her lips. her heart was tearing itself apart from her at the pace it was beating. avo grinned. it was a pleasure to hurt and it would be a delight to feed. saliva dripped from his mouth. the arrival of the other two rigs broke his trance. as the beast looked away from its prey, the shifting of focus allowed the rational remnants of avo to resume control. blinking, he let out a hissing breath as he worked his excitement under control. he had gone too long without his metamind suppressing the beast. glaring at his two new adversaries, he did his best to ignore the writhing meatenemy. the writhing enemy in his clutches. standing ten feet away from him, he glared at the new arrivals. a beat passed. no one moved. hap-tat whimpered. avo wrestled himself. he didnt need to drink from the sweet that was her blood. he didnt need to take a sampling nibble from her adrenaline-bittered flesh please, she whimpered, the circuitry of her haptic-tattoos malfunctioning. error codes spilled over her forehead. something had broken beneath her skin when he was crushing her skull earlier. please, ii just got aa nu-dog. he ate a cloned nu-dog before. not nearly as good as humans. but that was by design. ghouls were made to prey on humans. baseliners. flats like her. nothing buzzed a ghoul''s brain quite like human flesh. just as nothing was quite as euphoric to them as violence. the weight of his impulses was heavier than the aerovec, heavier than the rig. still, avo fought it. he had to. it''s what walton taught him to do. the beast has to win sometimes, walton had told him after catching him gorging on an aratnid nest. surrendering is human. but choice? choice is divine. fighting your body might just lead to failure. but mastering it, and choosing when to give in to it gives you choices. its not about repression. its about expression. expression of free will against yourself. i think theres true freedom to be found there. avo snarled. hap-tat shuddered and clamped her eyes shut, unwilling to face the end. instinct warred against rationality. reason won. barely. closing his jaws with a repressed grunt, avo considered the next best use for her. lifting hap-tat past the rails and dangling her over the pit, avo turned to face the other two problems that he had yet to solve. there wore rigs bearing much of the same make and quality as hap-tats. they faced him, their heartbeats high with tension, their breaths misting the air thick in nervous respiration. avo sighed. since he wasnt trying to eat anyone presently, he might as well negotiate. bargain. he had no idea where he was or how he was going to get back home. not without his metamind working anyhow. hed leverage what he could from them for a start. see if they could get him back up to the surface. or at least to the warrens. getting left here was a death sentence. hells, it already had been if he wasnt hallucinating about being resurrected earlier. oh, gods, oh jaus dont let me die, hap-tat muttered. avo frowned at her. her lip quivered. speak. speak to them, he said. she blinked. you can talk? tumor face frowned. the fuck? thank you? she laughed, more confused than amused. whywhy thank you? needed a reason, avo said. a reason? tumor face asked. avo didnt reply instead, he pulled hat-tat away from the edge and pulled her in front of him. she went still. her eyes widened. looking past her shoulder, he saw the other two scavengers, just watching, waiting for him to react. she wasnt that heavy. tumor face wasnt that far. he could make the throw. youyou gonna let me go? hap-tat whispered. yeah, avo said, his grin spreading all the way to his ear-nubs. technically, he wasn''t lying. she whimpered and let out a breath. oh, thank every strand of muscle across his body exploded with motion. with a primal snarl, he launched the girl from his grasp like a javelin. the sight of her sailing away, choking on her own screams was joyous to behold. like a spear molded from the softness of flesh and unlaced bone, she broke against tumor faces rig with a satisfying splat, ribs cracking, a lung popping. tumor face stumbled back in surprise. pure reflex made her shrug the mangled body of hap-tat over the railing. green eyes, the most focused of the three, stomped forward. slow as he was, avo felt an aura of danger about him. this one was good at mastering their fear and going forward. part of avo respected that. the rest wanted to know if the man would taste any different. the thrumming vibration beneath avos feet called his attention. hap-tat''s drill. climbing over hap-tats disabled rig, he found the drill dangling through a wound made in the melted grating. it had been left running when he severed the connection. poor safety protocols, but useful for him. a feral smile spread across his face, his fangs barring from ear to ear. hiding behind the rig, he listened for green eyes approach as he took hold of the drills connective articulations. taking it in his hand he waited for the right moment to drop down onto the hull itself. he intended to drive his new weapon into green eyes from below. somewhere behind green eyes, tumor face roared as she began stomping over. rotlicking half-strand fuck! the walkway creaked as green eyes approached. a bolt popped. avo jumped, disappearing over the side just in time for his newest victim to smash past hap-tats disabled rig. landing, avo ignored the lancing pain traveling up his legs and limped below where green eyes was standing. looking up, avo saw the confusion splashed across green eyes face. his projectors were detecting nothing. poor fool was looking in the wrong direction. kald! below!" tumor faces warning came far too late. avo leaped, driving the drill up through the grating and into the underside of green eyes rig, feeling as it chewed through metal and meat. the wafting taste of exposed organs greeted avo. green eyes screamed. blood spilled. avo opened his jaws wide and fed on the deluge running down from above. the drill spun twice more in the scavengers abdomen before fizzling and dying. disappointing. green eyes'' fat boiled and popped between the edges of his wounds. blood foamed in his mouth. he barely had time to struggle with the drill before avo pulled back hard. ghoul-muscle battled the unmaintained machine servos of his rig. green eyes body bore the burden of defeat. bone snapping, flesh flaying, he came free from between the ribs in a welter of gore, his datajack snapping loose from the back of his skull. he landed nothing more than a brutalized pulp against the grating, his last breath a sobbing whimper. with a final violent tug, avo drew his prize down through the gap he made in the walkway using the now useless drill. above, another rig-toppled, pilotless. tumor face stomped forward far too late, a wail of absolute despair tearing free from her throat. avo didnt hear it. he was too busy gorging himself on good meat. the man tasted divine; the sweetness of his lingering diabetes only added flavor. as he fed, however, avo sensed something else. something entirely different. he felt it more than he tasted it, but it was coming free from the corpse all the same. an unseen rippleno, an echo poured into him. impossibly, avo heard green eyes whispering in the back of his mind, chanting muted prayers to a god unseen. suddenly, avo felt himself ignite in an incandescent burst. the world expanded around him. existence shivered momentarily. he saw himself as a chasm between a shroud of primordial fire, a world between him and where he was right now. his mind spun. his body felt hollow and heavy at the same time. it was as if he was both a conduit and an anchor at the same time. the moment passed as fast as it came. suddenly, he was back in his own skin like nothing happened. then, data lines from his cog-feed flashed behind his perception, its system booting. a ghost-glitch? didn''t matter, the metamind was working! a ripple of phantasmal matter bloomed out and expanded into a five-ringed halo. a paltry wisp of a ghost spilled out from the center and swirled into a thin spread along the outer accretion of his mind, unshaped and unsequenced. avo laughed with genuine joy. his metamind working again, he awaited to hear the voice of walton greet soul online igniting thaumic reactor - 2 thaum/c essence cycler online - 2 thaum/c metamind online - [1] ghost active [0] phantasmics engrammed warning: insufficient thaumic mass unable to manifest liminal frame [0] heavens grafted [1] hells grafted: infernus (first circle) even as the world around avo came alight with new color and clarity, he frowned. the single ghost he just claimed was already fine-tuning his perception, feeding his mind with visual data to counter his nearsightedness. in the narrow lane far above the maw where the lights of the city spilled in, avo sensed the countless sequences of ghosts spreading across the entirety of new vultun in a grand skein beyond the surface of existence. avo didn''t have enough ghosts to reach it yet, but he could hear the nether calling to him. he ignored it. this wasnt his metamind. it didnt sound like walton. it didnt have any of his engrams. it sounded like him. how could it sound like him? he never had his mind cloned a howl of rage interrupted his thoughts. rotlick! tumor face leaped over a railing and dented the ground in a rough landing. he noticed the thin wisp that was her ghost oozing out surface thoughts from the center of her mind. her emotions bled angry clumps of thoughtstuff as she made for him. yet, as she approached, he found himself wondering why there seemed to be a rippling echo inside her core as well. essence detected - [1] the words flashed in his mind and were spoken to him through a voice copied from his own. essence? avo frowned. souls burned essence to make thaums. why was this metamind detecting essence? why was it telling him it had a soul online? he wasn''t anywhere near a megablock right now. he couldn''t be linked to any of the reactors. tumor face thundered close, her shadow creeping over him as he shook off his new questions. if she didn''t snuff him, he could take his time to figure out what his situation was after. mull it over with the meal that was her corpse. right now, he was still starving and found the hunger in him ran deeper than before. letting the beast inside him slip the leash once more, he met his new prey mid-charge, seeking more than mere meat. Chapter 1-3 FATELESS chapter 1-3 fateless fateless: an unregistered civilian; an individual who has yet to earn guild sponsorship via merit or lottery. fate: a metaphysical system in the nether used by the guilds for tracking and indexing citizens. -the new vultun standard dictionary 1-3 fateless tumor face tried her best. her best wasnt enough. avo empathized. with a surplus of rage and a scarcity of capability, she came at him, the bulk of her rig hammering the ground like she was heavy cavalry from a historical memory-sim. blind with aggression, she thrust herself into the jaws of the beast. what little of him was capable of emulating the human emotion of respect commended her. the bulk of his mind, still riding high on bloodlust, set itself upon the task of her exsanguination. in his hand, a last gouged pap of flesh claimed from the remains of green eyes dribbled as she came. avo squeezed it. blood ran through the crenulations of his claws. it would do. with a mental command, avo tried engaging his trajectory calculator. a flashing null response in the back of his mind reminded him he had one ghost and no phantasmic engrams. he would have to do this manually. the alloyed appendages of her rig reared as she approached. just in time to catch a splatter of gore across her projection ribs. blood dotted her face and blurred her eyes. she swung, three limbs cleaving a mangled gorge through the metal walkway above, severing it halfway through. she would have hewn avo shoulder to hip if he remained before her. carried by blindness, anguish, and momentum, her crab-like legs sparked along the metal deck, internal machinery overworked, jamming and hissing. behind, avo stalked her like the predator he was designed to be, the scratched grooves her skid marks left in the hull serving as nice grips for his claws even as the barge suddenly descended. she came to a violent halt after grinding several more feet. they were near the edge now. the flaring engines emanated a corona of unnatural light, casting her in shadow. the rigs arms slashed out wildly. avo dove low, between her legs. tumor face was still blind, still missing when he tore into her, claws spread, lower jaws unhinging as he prepared to feast. her pilots harness was a small canopy, just big enough to fit a flat of her size. the rig itself lacked the mass or capability to seal her properly beneath a layer of shielding. cheap as it was, her life was likely even cheaper. there was plenty of labor to go by in these depths and not much material to support it with. her life was worth more to the city lost than it was preserved. avo tore up into the softness of her belly, a waterfall of red filling his eyes. the scent of intestinal fluid and the taste of rust mingled. he chipped his incisor fangs on laced bones reinforced by cheap titanium and worked on her sinews instead. through the near-thuds of her heart, he could hear her screams, the sound muffled by the blood filling his ears. he reared back and tore out from her innards, sinew, and gristle between his fangs. he emerged baptized. invigorated. yet, even as a savaged ruin, tumor face gasped on, clinging to life as she grasped for him, eyes still burning with hate. beyond the nest of the projection ribs, the rig was lurching, unable to discern signals from a mind so embroiled by pain and hate. she decided she didnt need the machine. with a defiant squeal, shrill with outrage and pain, she slammed her skull against his. avo felt the thud shudder through his bones. spent, she sank against him and spat strands of blood and disrespect across his cheek. fuckin...half-strand bastard. mustering what little remained in her, she lifted her head and glared at him, staring him down even as she died. she was more a ghoul than he at this point; body broken, mangled, but still fighting; spirit burning on with the embers of hate and loathing; actions purposeful, but futile. he took hold of her by her head. so close, the phantasmal aura that his cog-feed painted her with had cast her in a holy sheen of light. best you could do, he said. he didnt know if the comfort was for her, or spoken to his past self, her body an altar, a confessional. all he knew was that this was a torturous truth that bound the both of them. all you could do. she looked at him, hate unfading. jaws clenched, she didnt see what he was trying to convey. there was no shared understanding. perhaps at this moment, the inverse was true: he was more human than she by merit of philosophical gnosis and life better provided for by an adopted father. the moment passed with the next beat of her heart; the wafting pungence of her exposed innards calling to avo. he pulled her head back. she tried to reach from the haptic controls projected from one of the ribs. the reach became a spasm as her neck folded between his teeth. his fangs glided through her unaugmented softness with ease. flats made for easy feeding. her suffering didnt last. his jaws, wide as a serpents, had closed around her neck. skin and muscle parted. the bite found its halt against her columns of spine. didnt matter. he pulled free, a mound of flesh coming with him. succulent. her head folded forward. when he finished with her trachea, he continued with her eyes. the eyes were always his favorite. in the periphery of his awareness, he felt the echo he sensed within her earlier. it poured into him as it did from green eyes. inside, he felt a flash again, like a radiant star bereft of heat. static interfaces formed and faded in the back of his mind. in the corner of his cog-feed, two lines of information flashed and faded. essence cycler - 3 thaum/c ghosts - [2] memory artifacts detected - initiate auto-sequencing? avo ignored that for now. necrothurgy took time. hours and days at the least to sift through all the contents and traumas that could compose a useful phantasmic. ultimately, sequencing ghosts was both psychological artistry and metaphysical engineering; a practice usually done while the body was unconscious. despite all his present mental vulnerability, unless existence was willing to loan him eight hours of time to make some wards, he needed to push on without. he still didnt fully understand what was happening to him, but right then, he didnt care. he basked in the joy of the kill, feeling his haemophagic cells breaking down the biomass he just subsumed, converting all that was tumor face into material for sustenance and repair. his blood. the crowning achievement of the low masters thaumaturgy. a colony self-moving, pseudo-sapient organism unto itself. it ensured that a ghoul fed with maximum efficiency. it also allowed for the infection and conversion of any living creature with enough organic tissue and brain matter. ghoulification, people called it. it was how the numbers of his kind swelled from mere dozens to billions in the span of years. it was how they were able to sustain themselves without the need for food or rest for extended periods. just a shame they were created at a time when the flesh had long since been usurped by alloy and technology. he finished with the rest of tumor faces'' corpse in minutes. while feeding, he willed his healing to accelerate as his hunger waned. the worst of the beast had been slaked. rationality and thought remained. and so came the feeling of shame. looking at the bodies of the two scavengers, it was like a veil lifted, fierce joy replaced by dawning disgust at what he had done. walton would not have condoned this senseless murder, slavers though they were. that was self-delusion. their admission of immorality simply gave him justification for violence. the truth was he just wanted to eat them. to make matters worse, he had no idea the layout of the barge, and now he was left with a heartbeat pulled his attention. avo heard strained gasps wheezing out from a collapsed lung. wiping the viscera dangling from his jaws, he found hap-tat crawling along the deck of the ship. her legs were bent at awkward angles, and a trail of blood dripped from the rails she was cast against before she fell. the memory of tossing her into green eyes to knock him off balance returned to him. it seemed so pragmatic then. now, the act had struck him as pointless. something merely to satiate his desire to hurt, to maul. for the first time in years, avo was glad of his adopted fathers death. avo had chosen his surrender, as walton had taught him, but without his metamind adjusted to inject doses of shame, horror, or revulsion at the psychopathy, he felt like an addict surrendering to old desires he followed hap-tat, unsure of what he was going to do. a series of cracks shuddered through his legs. the mending of his lower body was almost complete. his gait was less stagger and more stride now, claws tinking against the deck with each step. at the sound of his coming, her heartbeat quickened. she shot a look of terror over her shoulder and whimpered. no, she sobbed, no, jaus--fuck, please no! she wiggled her way across the ground, limbs useless, body quivering. a pool of waste spilled out from her. she seemed a mocking mirror to how he had woken in the pit. he passed her with ease and came to a stop beside her. her open wounds still smelled delightfully bitter with adrenaline, but he pulled his focus away from that. flicking his mind through his cog-feed, he tried to scan her for injuries, but nothing came up. the memories he had weren''t usable yet; they needed sequencing. for now, all he had was a perception-enhancing overlay and two ghosts of unrefined rawness. that was going to be a problem. he couldnt remember a time when his mind didnt have a metaphysical fortress shielding it from incursions. not since walton decided to take him up the first tier. avo looked up at the chasm above him again. the light was mocking him. the skein of the nether itself was mocking him, far beyond the reach of his two ghosts. this metamind wasnt his. didnt matter if it was built from a copy of his mind or not. his metamind was created as an echo of walton. the last thing he had of walton. and now it was missing, lost somewhere in the continent-wide expanse of new vultun. trying to hunt a metaphysical construct down would be like picking out an individual air current in a hurricane. didnt matter. he would find it, whatever the costs. but first, he had to climb out of the maw. a soft sputter came from hap-tat again. right. he was trying to review her wounds. no engram for it. he had to rely on his paltry guesswork and experience, but from how her organs were filling up with fluid, he doubted she had long. didnt mean it, he had wanted to say. he decided against it. he did mean it. would mean it again when the throes of hunger returned. biting back a hiss of frustration, he remembered what walton had told him about using the truth, embracing it even if it hurt. iregret, avo said, straining from the effort of this farce. it felt absurd. that this happened. it wasnt an apology. even now, he wasnt sorry that he had mortally wounded her, and butchered the other two scavengers. all he was really sorry about was the fact that walton wouldnt have approved. that he had failed to master himself; surrendered to the beast at the first chance. across the stretch of the barges deck, the withering winds of the maw whistled. alone, the ghoul faced the girl he was going to kill and continued. didnt want to do this. hunger he trailed off. hunger was just an impulse. he made the choice. everyone chooses. everyone lies to themselves. truth is ugly. truth is i want to hurt you. truth is i want to eat you. tried to fight it. i did. i lost. again, he wasnt sure if this was for her or him. it was always easier for him to speak to the dead. to sort and sequence memories from ghosts, turn them into vessels for him to use. perhaps it was a thing of power. that he could only express the truth when he couldnt be hurt. he saw a tear spill free from her left eye. along her forehead, the error codes of the implanted ads continued pulsing. i dont want to die here he sniffed. he could smell her encroaching death. it was evident in the blood loss. she didnt have any regenerative implants, biostasis mods, and she definitely didnt make near enough imps to afford a phylactery to house her consciousness. she was poor. she was weak. she was going to die. and new vultun would grow all the stronger for it. you will, avo said. she cried softly at his words. imsorry. he considered how to make things better for them. at least a bit. debt slaves: the fateless. where are they? shadows lengthened around the corner. the steps drew closer. a whistling tune came with it. a stout, bald man sauntered down the walkway, an orb-shaped drone hovering behind him. in a burst of violence, avo dashed the drone against the wall with a vicious backhand before snatching the man off his feet and dragging him into the room. throwing the man against one of the beds, avo leaned and whispered: scream. ill open your throat. blink if you understand. this proved to be hard as the man had what looked to be cheap-chrome blinkers for eyes. they flashed between red, yellow, and green. avo sighed. the fool had traffic lights implanted. nod if you understand. the man nodded. avo thought of his plan. how many on the ship. three-hundred and thirty crew, the man croaked, terror staining his voice. plus the captain. fewer now, but the man didnt need to know that. phase-pens? red eyes looked at him confused. two levels below. why avo barred his fangs. the man remembered who was asking the questions. take me down. no. control center first. he needed to take the ship. if he could seize the ship he could seal the doors. take control of its locus and channel its store of ghosts to null the minds of the crew without a fight. the man led avo out quietly, his pace gripped with tension. aside from the mans eyes, he was practically a flat. probably not that far removed from being a refugee or a newcomer to the city himself. most natives in new vultun had something in them that wasnt natural. most snuffers were mostly inorganic due to their profession. the guilders had no need for chrome. with their bioware and nanoware, they were already postmortals walking amongst apes. the fact that they held the monopolies on souls and had most of the godclads under their employ meant that they didnt just have favor with the metaphorical deck, they essentially owned it. still, this boded well for avo. a shipful of flats and lesser-chromers meant he was unlikely to run into someone with military-grade titanskin or an accelero. if he ran into someone like that, it wasnt a question if he could win, but how much of his corpse theyd leave behind. most of the crew were in their rooms or gathered in other chambers to avoid the worst of the maws radiative entropy. avo had no idea how much the titanium shielding of the ship would help them, but something told him they wouldnt be enough. scavenging was bad for longevity. in his periphery, he noticed a dim flame burning, piercing into his attention through the walls. avo frowned. shutting off his cog-feed for a moment, he watched as it faded. he activated his cog-feed again and caught traffic-sight by his scruff. avo pointed in the vague direction of the flicker. whats that way? reactor room, the man said. i can no. keep going. he would study the reactor later when he had the time. something about it called to him. called to his hunger. inexplicably, he wanted to know its taste. right now, he needed control. it took a few more turns before he found himself finally descending down an incline. the door leading to the bridge was a layer of rusted steel. it looked dissonant beneath the green tarp and insulating foil that seemed to plaster the walls of the interior. still, as traffic-sight approached, the door hissed open. on the other side, a mountain of a woman in a coat made of melted slats was glaring down at a bloodied man on his knees. his face was mangled and swollen. his lower lip was clenched in her left hand, gloved in gleaming scale. he reeked of pain and torture. she stood over him, a tower of indifference radiating rank annoyance. unnoticed, avo gripped his hostage in warning and watched. her face was a patchwork of cyberware and scars. her jaw was a thing of chrome running far up the right side of her face. acid burns marred what little flesh there was on the other side. both her eyes glinted like coals in the dark. as her coat drew back, avo noticed that her legs looked akin to industrial pistons. the captain certainly made an impression. even unintentionally. in the background of the narrow chamber, numerous holo-feeds were projected on a concave screen, lighting the dimness of the room in a glower of blue. the largest feed showed a few of the crew holding knives to the necks of two women. twins. they shared features with the man currently kneeling before the captain. the captain sighed. her lungs bellowed air in gales of breath. again, mr. streklov, the eldest or the youngest? we signed a debt contract for two. i currently count three people in your family. i might be a no-good useless drunk piece of shit long past her heyday, but i can still do arithme she paused as a wind blew in through the hatch leading into the bridge. frowning, she noticed avo and traffic-sight and tilted her head. engineer yully, she said, are you aware that theres a ghoul standing behind you. hostage, avo explained. the woman nodded. like this was an everyday occurrence to her. she had probably seen weirder. this was new vultun after all. right. ghouls talk. they can do that. just dont remember any of them taking hostages she frowned. sighing, she casually pointed her palm at the manstreklovsface. a flash of light speared out. a clean beam cored an open wound into the mans head. his daughters screamed. the captain cut the feed with a wave of her hand. still, the echo and the ghost spilled over into avo, sinking into him like before. essence cycler: 6 thaum/c ghosts - [5] metamind adjustments recommended - foundational structure reaching capacity there, the captain said. debt contract absolved. on to the next issue. she looked avo up and down. you can understand standard, yes? avo grunted. perfectly. as if she didnt hear him speaking it earlier. right, she said. just had to make sure. i had a bit too much to drink earlier. was afraid i hallucinated you into existence. avo wanted to tear into her. no. needed a better means of attacking her. he didnt know the depth of her implants and her capabilities. the lack of properly built ghosts meant he couldn''t scry her either. instead, he repeated one of his old tricks. with a sudden thrust, he launched traffic-sight at her and darted at an angle. the man collided with her and bounced off. the captain sighed, unaffected. avo closed in, claws open he made it two steps before a twin-layered halo rippled over out from her mind. avos eyes widened. over the crown of her halo, a phantasmal sigil ignited into a symbol of a sword. like a constellation, the memories of her ghosts erupted from the center of her halo, flooding over his senses. this, then, was the difference between a poorly sequenced collection of ghosts and a factory-setting metamind. a tidal wave of trauma swept into him unimpeded. without properly made wards, he had no counter. no defense. at the whims of her will, pain exploded across his nerve centers as her ghosts usurped his mental functions. avo gasped, toppling as her ghosts burrowed deeper, tearing through his surface thoughts, and rendering his mind porous. hard to cling to. warn- his cog-feed sputtered out. a flood of madness poured into his mind. he descended into a maelstrom of dreams, of chaos. memories of being beaten and tortured overwhelmed his senses. it remained for a while until his mind was dulled enough to recede like waves returning to the ocean. a curtain of darkness remained over his eyes; a miasma of static parted him from his senses. through a narrow pinprick of awareness, he felt his body spasming against the ground. he tried to stand. his body wasnt listening. the captain was actively intercepting snatching his thoughts before they could travel across his body. is it dead? he heard traffic-sight ask through the darkness. no, the captain said. that would be a waste. its a talking ghoul. dont see that shit every day. frantic footsteps rattled down the hall from whence avo came. captaincaptain! "yes, yes, i know. ghoul on the ship. kald, tagma, and jessa are all dead. li-yings missing. a beat followed. the captain sighed. i think i can deduce why. yully. get the crew on high alert. see if hesinfected anyone. ms. katha, take him down to the pens. put him across the product and link him to the locus. dose him with nightmares. he wont stay out otherwise. fucking rotlicks. the pens? the unfamiliar voice asked. yes, the pens. so we can sell it later. the captain scoffed. its already killed three of mine. might as well spin a profit from it somehow. i just thought chuck it in the maw? the captain laughed. why? so its death can be nice and painless. no. when we get back to mazzas junction well offload it with the fateless. at the sound of that, the beast within him exploded. it raged against the ghosts latched to his mind. it raged uselessly. a curtain of discord descended over his thoughts. his mind was drowned in a whirlwind of confusion, his senses flaking away from his awareness. he thought he was being pulled upward by something before he dreamed of a screaming saw slicing into the side of his abdomen. next, he saw butterflies spill out from his wounds before the intestines he shouldnt have had turned into serpents and sank their fangs into his eyes. then, came the final memory. he was falling into a burning house as he choked on smoke. the haze grew thick. so thick that they were all that remained of his thoughts. a growing fog ate away at him, drowning him in darkness. Chapter 2-1 The Crucible chapter 2-1 the crucible its impossible to shut the snuff market down. wouldnt matter if we had enough liminal frames to field a thousand more of us. too much ground to cover; too easy for the syndicates to cut their losses and run the black. what we can do is keep this from happening to any guild-sponsored citizens. wont be hard to track them using their fate markers. the warrens belong to the syndicates and the ghouls. they want to rule over that festering pit, let them have it. we do what we can with what we save. -internal paladin memo, the growing problem of snuff vicarities 2-1 the crucible a ghost usurps both your mind and senses when it takes root inside you. a parasite of cognition, a weaponized ghost made thinking akin to clutching water in a clenched fist. discordant fragments of secondhand memory spiraled over avos awareness like a typhoon, trapping him in a cage of dreams. lucid, but contained, avo waited for control to be returned to him. there really wasnt much else to do. flesh and will matter little without a properly sequenced metamind to channel them through. this, he knew from experience: being a necrojack, he dove through his share of minds. with that being said, the nightmare loop they knotted into his mind to keep his consciousness partially suppressed was slapdash at best. missing details. unloaded figures. placeholders for clothing and infrastructure from all the wrong eras. even if he wasnt a necro, this was an obvious mem-sim. within the nightmare, he had been cast into the body of a priest and made to kneel before a burning church. before him, the blurred contours of snarling soldiers were throwing the rest of his flock one after another into the conflagration. their laughter was warped. discordant. the dream reached its end when they finally grabbed him and fed him to the flames as well, the heat swallowed his flesh, boiling him from the inside. then, the memory looped, taking him back to the start again. a traumatizing memory for a human mind, perhaps, but avo had felt the flaying glare of a fusion lance. had to pull himself loose from the skin of his melted brothers as guilder golems rained eldritch fire upon them. before a scalding heat so vicious that every breath speckled simmered flakes from his lungs, the church fire was but a sauna. besides, there was another reason he wasnt impressed. the entire design was not chaotic enough to be a naturally occurring dream and not consistent enough to be remotely well-made. avo felt more insulted than traumatized. it boiled his blood to see his craft so demeaned by the hands of a pretender. even more that he fell victim to a phantasmal assault so poorly designed. alas, preparation and knowledge were key when diving against another necrojack. and when he was storming his way blindly onto the bridge, unequipped and improvising, he experienced the old kosgan adage. better to be a middling practitioner than not at all. the nightmare looped again, starting anew. the heat of the flames stung weaker than the barbs of humiliation. when this was over, if he was still alive, he would find that captain, and he would demonstrate to her how to properly knot a nightmare into a mind. for anything between seconds to hours, avo waited, counting the mistakes of badly interlaced memory artifacts, sneering quietly at the sloppy build. sometime after his two-hundred-and-eighth loop, the nightmare dissolved mid-way through. a pulse of cog-data flowed through his mind. his metamind activated as his senses burst into being. snapping back up into his flesh from deep within his hijacked mind, avo blinked as spots cleared from his sight. cog-banding. thats what it was called when a consciousness was pulled out of the body and released like a bowstring. the sudden lurch was dissonant in the best of cases and inflicted psychosis in the worst. possessor detached systems clearing scanning cognition review complete: cognition stable the physical world hit him all at once. the comforting cold was the first thing he adjusted to. near-freezing, but not quite. the chill was a hissing breath against his skin, pouring through his flesh and stiffening his numbed strands of eel-like muscles. a low mechanical whine sounded from behind as he felt himself being lowered. he tried moving, but his body refused to obey. a strange weight was lodged in his back. directing his blood, he felt at a series of needle-like mechanisms were drilled into his spine. a sudden flash pierced avos eyes as he stifled a growl. blinking the spots from his vision, he noted the four tube-shaped projectors brightening in front of him. in the narrow coffin that contained him, he felt packed. claustrophobic. the feeling brought memories of his infancy back to him; the sensation of squeezing through crevices while hiding from his older brothers, desperate to avoid becoming prey. confirmed. you have a one-in-eighteen percent chance of survival. would you like to make a bid? all imps will be transferred to you upon your ascent into the warrens, should you survive. avos unease grew. the beast within purred with delight. beneath his feet, he felt the clicking of delicate machinery. something was opening up. avo remained silent. without his old metamind, he was effectively destitute. nothing to bet with and no place for the imps to go after. thank you for your participation fourteen. we hope you enjoy the festivities. avo frowned. he had a bad feeling about this. he thought to ask the bot what it meant but decided against it. limited answering parameters. waste of time. he steeled himself in ringing silence as unease bubbled up from inside him. the projectors flashed and went dark. a low hiss whistled out from beneath him. avo wanted to look down, but with the bolts in his spine, his head wouldnt bend. he didnt think that getting kidnapped would offer so many more questions, no answers, and more problems coming by the minute. a series of clicks and snaps sounded. whistling trails of warm air rose from beneath him reeking of stinging disinfectant and the fading taste of blood. but the blood smelled wrong. polluted somehow. like there had been something added to the mixture. drills whined as servos and motors thrummed behind him. without warning, the weight caging his spine retracted. a series of cracks rattled up his spinal column. he drew in a breath he didnt know he was holding. twisting his neck, he relished the ability to loosen his bones and stretch his muscles. better. reaching over, he rubbed the growing nub on his left arm. it was past the elbow now. a few more hours and a few thousand more calories and hed get his arm back. kidneys too, if he really accelerated it. didnt want to risk the cancers though. a crackle went through his pod again. please brace for ejection. avo froze at the statement. ejection? avos freed neck craned down and saw thin lines of light spreading at his feet. the familiar sound of a maglock disengaging snapped. the floor gave way beneath him with a shunting noise. gravity took him. light speared into his eyes, blunting his sight, but not yet bright enough to blind him entirely. the drop was a short one, fortunately. he slammed feet-first into what felt like plascrete. it smelled like it too. the cold in the room was at the freezing point; the thin sheen of ice he stood on demanded that he dig his prehensile claws in for traction. the loud roar of a thruster singed his scalp and deafened him. through squinted eyes, he saw his pod fly up and disappear into an alcove. stumbling to find a wall or a corner, avo blinked spots from his eyes as he heard additional thrusters echoing down from all around him. it sounded like he was in a tunnel. flowing wind washed over him from several directions. the air was scrubbed. stale. familiar somehow. a whisper slithered over his mind, intruding into his thoughts. a taunt. +theybrought us a ghoulie to play with this time.+ the ghost bore a voice most shrill and girlish. a lingering sneer could be felt in her pronunciation. +going to enjoy breaking you, paler. going to watch you die good.+ turning, avo braced himself for another phantasmal assault. it wouldnt matter much, but if he was ready, it should at least protect him from deeper cognitive damage. a roar of gunfire distant rumbled. avo went stiff. faintly, he heard footsteps pattering down from his right. +attention!+ a loud, monotone voice announced in a pulsing wave of near-tangible thought. +survivor: fifty-seven has been liquidated. hunter: nudognuday228 has drawn first blood.+ through his cog-feed he watched as a massive phantasmal wave composed of ghost-carried thoughts washed through matter, bringing with it a building static of secondhand excitement. voices chittered in the back of his mind. bets were traded. insults were cast and laughter followed. a reticule directed him to look up. a hundred miles above, past countless walls, his cog-feed located a massive nexus of ghosts interlaced into a chain around what looked to be a star formed of living minds. he figured that was a locus. a big one to keep the local nether stable. but why would they need such a massive construct. it didnt make sense unless suddenly, avo realized where he was and to whom he had been sold. truthfully, he should have figured it out sooner. the machine calling him a survivor should have given it away. another voice washed over him. the waves were splashing down from the locus above. +go-oood evening, viewers and contestants,+ the new voice was youthful. girlish. practiced. familiar. he knew this voice. heard it before during several of his dives. +thank you! thank you for streaming in on an ursday evening! another hard day of work in the biggest of the big! another night of fun that you wont find anywhere else! as always, im your girl, little vicious, delivering you the play-by-play for all your violent delights! a roar of pure desire flooded the atmosphere. the weight of a near-billion viewers was hard to hide, especially in the nether. that answered why they needed a locus so large that he could detect its signature from here. the crushing weight of radiated emotion from poorly tuned ghosts spilled over into reality on a tidal wave of descending consciousnesses. they were all here to feed the same urge. there werent many emotions that burned similarly in a human and a ghoul, but bloodlust was one of them. its going to be a messy one tonight, consangs. three hundred survivors, some volunteersothers volunteeredagainst our players. fan favorites like visekeles, gravemarrow, slaughterman, and r3surr3t are here tonight, so stay synced and keep your wards up. wouldnt want the exorcists to be knocking on your doors in the middle of tonights crucible!+ Chapter 2-2 Hunted chapter 2-2 hunted why did i volunteer for the crucible? because i didnt want to give the rest of my natural lifespan as some organ farm or debt enforcer to the syndicates. why should i submit to the customs of a slave when i have the prowess of a master? i came from wan nan. you know what that means in standard? ten-thousand woes. as in the land of ten thousand woes. being hunted by some golem jocks was practically a relief compared to the thousand plains? have you seen a fallen heaven, sister? lived in one? its not something you can face. not as a mortal, anyway. did i like the crucible? i loved it. it even got me into the circuits. and dont lie to yourself, the city loves it too. no secondhand thrill like dancing down the edge of the blade, a billion watchers cheering you on, screaming for you to fall. in the end, we all do what we can to climb the tiers right? i wanted to see the arks. swim up that neon waterfall of the inner ring. go from koi to god. i wanted. i chose. i prevailed. and thats the only truth anyone needs in new vultun. winner takes all. hows it been; how it''ll be. -paladin interview of ying yang wei, stormsparrow former refugee and freelance godclad 2-2 hunted the crucibles. something between a live-stream snuff vicarity, short-form improv torture theatre, and immigration control. out of the frying pan of the maw and into the fire. new vultun had an interesting way of welcoming him back into its arms. from the overwhelming doses of secondhand emotion flooding the nether, the bloodlust of the spectators was almost tangible. human emotion, primal and thick oozed over his mind like gauze. he had tasted this flavor in his time as a necrojack far too many times. crucibles, after all, were great environments for smuggling mem-data. with a concentration of ghosts that was somewhere north of enormous, the sheer information capacity that any lurking guilder exorcists had to sift through to hunt down their quarry was too staggering. a single mind blessed by proper education and intellectual brilliance was already quite the ocean. link it to a parapsychic network through streams of ghosts? the scale went from oceanic to cosmic. stretch that out across the continent and you had a network built on self-supporting anarchy where the nether was concerned. the guilds could have tried to suppress it all they wanted. short of twisting existence back in time via a universe-sized soul, the freedom of information was here to stay. jaus avandaer made sure of that. the host continued, her shrill voice projecting cherubic glee with an undercurrent of savagery hinted beneath. +today, we bring you a new and harrowing tale of survival! three hundred survivors have been dropped across the low umbra of the underways. three hundred contestants of all clades, cultures, and capabilities. and three hundred they will remain if they can muster the skill to survive an hour or make it to the checkpoint. but if not+ avo could practically hear the announcers'' coquettish shrug of indifference. his eyes had adjusted well enough to see the wall he rested against for support. it gleamed, the surface an endless spread of purple hexagonal cells that layered over each other in studded pieces. nanoduranium laminate. something that voidwatchs deconstructor swarms installed after clearing the underways. his metamind spun. filtering the patterns of his memory, his cog-feed played a recollection through his minds eye. he remembered running from the ever-devouring swarm, watching his more foolhardy brothers dissolve before the tide at a molecular level. how he managed to evade them for those months he would never fully know. the recollection came in stuttered and broken fragments. much of what he had was lost to stress and age, recorded long before he even had his first metamind burned into his mind. from one perspective, avo was home. that perspective wasnt his. he left this place before the end of his infancy. the low masters were long dead. his kind was broken. the dream of restoring old noloth was lost. he belonged to new vultun now. he belonged to walton. looking to his right, he found himself down a narrow tunnel. veins of light shrouded the width and height lane he was in. it was like being in the belly of a vast serpent, jaws wide enough to swallow a small building some five stories high and twice again as wide. +anyway,+ little vicious said. +for all you squires out there that dont know the way things roll, heres the jab. spectatings free but playings gonna cost skin or imps. interface with one of our mods to pull up our rentable sheathes for you to cast yourselves into. dont worry about insurance. we got that covered.+ she giggled. +for those of you that crave that edge-on-edge though, cast us a vicarity showing your most recent kill. consider it anaudition. well try you out and sign you up. who knows? you might just be the next stormsparrow.+ wasnt a bad pitch. down here, even beneath the warrens, brutality was the way of things. there wasnt enough room above, so room had to be made. an empty spot in the city was another slot in the lottery. so it went all the way up to the arks. still, the audience ate it up with a chorus of excitement and glee. there would be a few hundred thousand sign-ups before the end of the day and from those, the syndicates would pick the best among the twisted to be their hitters. what could avo say? new vultun was a city built on absolutes and extremes. coming second just got you dead. winning, on the other hand, just might net you a chance at claiming eternity. winning let you be a legend, something more than mortal. a godclad. +anyway, lets get the blood flowing and the bodies rolling!+ avo felt the weight of little vicious focus wash over himand likely every other survivor as well. +citys gonna eat well tonight! let the crucible begin!+ the bellowing of the initiation horn roared through his mind and deafened his thoughts. shrugging off the disorientation, avo fled like a scuttling aratnid, seeking the comforting shield that was darkness. sliding unevenly along near-frictionless flooring, he took in his surroundings as best as he could. the paths led forward and back. forward ran up, a slight incline curving him to another level. back led down and probably into the maw again. didnt want to go back there. up and forward it was. around him, the walls drained away heat and scent from the air through nano-vents. the air tasted clean. too clean. voidwatch air scrubbers were second to none. a cry echoed from ahead. for a second, the smell of chrome and perfume graced him. the scrubbers killed the trail in seconds. didnt matter. he was heading up. he had enough dives through these crucibles to know that these games were built to be slaughterhouses. lacking an incognito phantasmic or probably ghost-jammer, anyone could scry his thoughts out and mark his mem-print down within minutes from miles beyond sight. stealth was impossible. he needed to move. take the gambit a sudden weight plunged into the depths of avos skull. he grunted at the discomfort of a second consciousness weighing down on his. external emotions and surface thoughts leaked into his own. whoever was piggybacking his consciousness had linked to him with a very, very poorly sequenced series of ghosts. studying the strand of ghosts cycling between him and the locus, avo sneered. the fool forgot to layer the ghosts over their own mind properly, the sequences were all intertwined. they had no respect for the craft; necrothurgy was meant to be sublime, not sloppy. +hey, hey, consang, check it out. im inside a ghoul.+ the snorting laugh that rattled in the back of his mind was obnoxious. the fact that he was being piggybacked by what he could only assume was a juvie made his skin crawl. avo hated juveniles. +consang, look, look, im insidelike, the joke is it sounds like im fucking the ghoulnot literally, sis, i dont actually want to trigger an outbreak of wombrash. contemplating the merits of giving himself a concussion, avo decided that he rather regrettably needed the fullness of his faculties to survive this. again, he regretted that he didnt have the time for a nap to shape his ghosts into function. it would have allowed him to dispel the link at the very least instead of being an open door to every deviant in the city. as he climbed to the top of the tunnel, the path ahead broke off into one that curved left while another shot right. through the right, an opening led out into what looked like a factory. inside, he saw and heard the rumble of working machinery. industrial lighting. this close, not even the scrubbers could suppress the smell of the dead. +waitwait, shut up, man, the ghouls trying to think. oh, shit! whats it gonna choose? whats it gonna choose? go right. go into the plant, rotlick. come on! go fight some shit. dont be a half-strand!+ avo bit back a sigh. he was going to do something stupid. he was going to do something very walton. get off. the boy blinked. avo tried not to growl. if he was going to save the man, he needed the boy out of the way. as he reached down, the boy shouted defiance and, to avos disbelief, bit him. soft teeth gummed against leathery ghoul-skin. the boy blinked. a dull amusement bubbled in avo. shaking the child off, he lightly backhanded the boy across the jaw, the childs modded skin absorbing the impact evenly. like a collapsing deck of cards, the child flopped off his father and onto his side, eyes watering in shock and pain. fixing the boy with a glare, avo held a clawed finger up to his lips before bringing it down across his throat. the boy stayed silent, by fear or understanding. reaching down, avo threw the father over his shoulder with casual ease. lacking implants and being close to baseline meant that man felt like a feather, despite avo having only one arm. the man would need a two-thousand more pounds of mass before avo started feeling the strain. motioning for the boy to follow, avo comforted himself knowing that if he was about to get run down by some horrific monstrosity, at least hed die protecting an idiot and his loyal offspring. somewhere, the impossibly idealized image avo had of his adopted father would look upon him with pride. somehow, that was enough. the boy chittered something at him, motioning behind them. asking the monster you just met to fight the monster youre running from? avo said. the boy just repeated the same noises. avo missed having an omni-lingua. or even a cheap thoughtscanner sequence for his ghosts to pattern. the boy followed, chattering while the hunter drew closer, their heels clinking louder with each step upward. avo had no idea what he was dealing with. for all he knew, he could be facing someone with a military-grade accelero implant and would find himself dead in microseconds. the boy made more noise. avo got the bulk of what he was saying already. help us! help us! avo leaned the father a few feet away from the tunnels entrance and left him, impossible to miss. the walkway was barely large enough to fit the three of them, anyway. wait here, avo said. the boy just repeated the same noises. avo pretended that was a yes. phantasmal noise crackled in the back of his head again. +yo, consang? i think this ghouls helping the kid. no. im not shitting you sis! come over.+ looking out across the plant, avo considered his options. the chamber ran on for a near-mile. machinery and rust lined the walls. bodies still poured out from chutes built into the four corners of the room, piling on conveyor treads still served by spherical grime-coated drones. the drop from the walkway was a good eighty feet. survivable for him but not the other two. even he would probably sprain something. walkways led down from both the right and left, but he didnt want to test his luck in a sprinting match. whoever his hunter was, he gave them good odds of having some kind of reflex booster. if it was anything above civilian grade, he was going to be slower than them. pair that with a frequency blade, and he would put good imps on the hunter peeling him apart before he could blink if this was to be a straight fight. he needed to approach this from a different angle, much to the whining bloodlust of the beast. his nature demanded that he throw himself against his adversary with fangs bared and fury flowing free. his desire for self-preservation offered better options: flee or ambush. looking at the chamber and the lack of cover, fleeing was going to be hard without catching a flechette to the back. his goal was to get on the cylinders and ride it topside. couldnt do that with someone chasing him avo noticed how well the gaps on the walkway fit the curving talons of his prehensible feet. there was also the missing railing on the sides to consider. avo grinned to himself. ambush it was then. avo spun around and studied the boy. cry, avo said, doing his best to mimic tear trails with a single hand. the boy stared at him confused. crycrying. water from eyes! the thing humans do. a sniffle came. a sob. avo let out a breath of relief. thank jaus for little miracles. stepping over the edge of the walkway, avo dropped down to dangle off the side before looping his claws through the gaps in the walkway. bringing his feet up, he clambered into position upside down as he positioned himself near the inner wall, where it was harder to spot him. +ohoh! fuck, man! consang! come here! no seriously! cast into the ghoul, man! the ghoul is doing some strategist shit! im not fucking with you! im not. just do it.+ another voice manifested in the back of avos skull. this one was nasally, but just as juvenile. +i swear, if youre doing this to make me blow my impswhy the fuck are we upside down?+ +ghoul-guy is about to do an ambush. about to do some ambush-shit. grettin ready to flip upways and fuck a hunter in their exposed a-a-ass. avo gritted his fangs. looking down, he counted a good fall. going to drop headfirst. splatter myself. don''t want to hear either of you talking." +whoa!+ the nasally one said. +it speaks standard real good too! +smartest ghoul,+ the other one agreed. +like saying, thethe cleanest ass.+ they laughed in the back of his head, snorting with immature glee. letting go and falling headfirst to his death had never been so tempting. the rattling sound of someone stepping onto the walkway drew his focus. finally. time to see who was to become prey. a thin, twitching hunter emerged above him, her body littered with so many implants and ad-tats that she was more metal than meat. as she stepped into the light, avo knew that he had made the right choice. ghouls were monsters compared to flats; could tear through dozens with ease. for someone with the right implants? ghouls just belonged in the corner of a snuffers hud with the rest of the kill-tally. today, though? today he intended to make her part of his. Chapter 2-3 The Ascent chapter 2-3 the ascent the flesh is slavery. the flesh deceives. the flesh fails. replaced by metal, our weaknesses are purged. crowned by ghosts, our minds are made pure. through the thaum, our mortality ascends to divinity. reject what is. seize what you can be. take the flame and seek the highest path. such is apotheosis. such is the dream of jaus. -book of the new alloy, verse i, apotheosis i 2-3 the ascent the huntress twitched with every step, her movements blurred twitches of motion bereft of steadiness or pace. typical symptoms of neurachem overdose. she probably had a street grafter jailbreak her civilian-grade implant for an extra kick. her midsection was a thin spine of metal, lengthening and shortening with her whims. it made her look almost serpent-like with how elongated she was. four different frequency blades extended from her titanium-laced spine, gripped by arms of fibrous gold. her two organic arms clutched a holo-decorated twin-barreled submachine gun close to her chest. through the slits of the walkway, avo couldnt make out if her eyes were also augmented. breath held, even stilling his blood, he waited for her to notice him, for one of her blades to pierce down and cast him into oblivion. she never noticed. the blow never came. the fullness of her focus remained on the father and his boy. she strode menacingly over to the weeping child. avo trailed her quietly from below, doing his best to time his moments to the rattling footsteps. a loud thrum sang out from one of her blades. she lifted it over her head in a mocking salute to the boy. brave little soldier. protecting his father. how valorous. she ran a copper-tipped tongue over her blade. sparks of electricity leaped between the blade and implant. chatters of anxiety and excitement tinged the atmosphere; some whispering ghosts brayed for her to butcher the boy, and others pleaded for his life to be spared. the boy quivered, tears coming free and loud, drowning out even the building murmurs of ghosts. the father remained out of it, too disoriented to be of any use, even as he groaned and came around. good. avo hoped that this huntress was a sadist. that boy cried loud. it would keep her distracted long enough for his mad plan to work. avo had sampled both ends of being ambushed. having a bead on your prey while they remained unaware was essential. but what followed had to be fast and thorough. if not, if your target was still standing, you might just find yourself greeting the big nothing at the hands of a 5-ton brawler who was endoweaved with hyper-muscles. the huntress blade rose. the boy winced back, clutching his father tight. she laughed. cheap thrills, to derive such terror from a child. avo wondered what broke her so much she acted like one of his kind. this torment was something a ghoul might inflict for amusement before making the kill. he turned away from her at an angle and held on with his prehensile talons as he reached for the edge. her blade rose high. her eyes dilated. her breath quickened; the rasp in her gasp betrayed the unsheathing of her ecstasy. avo shot up and reached over the edge before locking his fingers around her ankle. with a jerk, he tore the huntress from her feet. momentarily surprised, she flailed as he crumbled her balance. two shots rang out from her gun as she tumbled. as she bounced against the walkway, her blades lashed out in surprise. beneath her, metal flayed. a bloodied flap opened across avos left thigh as a stray slash hewed through. sparks scattered. avo snarled as he dragged her toward the edge. +oh, ho ho, whats this!+ little vicious said, her haunting voice drifting in from everywhere. +visekeles had found some easy meat. but look below her. number fourteen isis that a ghoul?+ the announcer sounded taken aback. maybe even annoyed. +whyuh, number fourteen is determined to make a fight for hisits life.+ for all the surprise he had on his side, she was still reacting several times faster than he. her limbs blurred. his snarl broke into a screech of pain, something lancing deep into his flesh, severing muscle and kissing bone. she wasnt half off the edge when one of her blades struck clean, skewering into his shoulder. his hand slacked from the damage. she tumbled free of his grasp. another series of blurs. avo watched his blood splurt free from his chest before he even felt the cold lines of pain even begin to ebb. she tore into him faster than he could perceive, his life only spared by the growing gulf of space between them as she fell toward the factory floor. an inch closer and her blades would have inflicted mortal wounds. half a millisecond into her descent, she counterattacked. her body twisted unnaturally, submachine gun roaring the song of auto-kinetic fire. tungsten-tipped rounds stung and burst against avos skin in splashes. micro-frag munitions. thundering pain erupted across his muscles. something in his sternum fractured. alone, the shots were an annoyance, but the damage was building fast. another round struck his head. his brain rattled, near-concussed from the force. whatever self-mastery avo had snapped like a rusted chain. the beast took hold. he launched himself off the bottom of the walkway. it was an action born of hunger and madness, but he needed to kill her now. he would never claim initiative again if he didnt, and if he let her regain the momentum with her speed, he doubted that he would survive a second when she wasn''t unbalanced. a spike of thrill and excitement surged into him as the ghosts haunting him spilled waste emotion over into his mind. they were whooping. cheering the fight on. +su-i-cide! su-i-cide!+ someone chanted. near four hundred pounds of ghoul greeted chromed flesh in a ringing clash. his elbow crumpled the cheap subdermals she called armor, snapping her head back. avo felt something break against his arm. she hadnt been expecting that. and he hadnt been expecting such fragility from her. she should have put more imps into making herself survivable as well. ghouls werent particularly strong in new vultun. not when your average ganger with a ten thousand imp loan could afford to get carbon nanotubes lined over their muscles. but he had the mass. and they were in freefall. the only thing he really had to do was land on top of her. seeing how her flesh folded before his blow, he was curious to see the color of her insides when they struck the ground. yet, for someone with a reflex booster, the fall was more than enough time to retaliate. violence flowed between them. pain was traded for pain. for every blow he dealt her, she struck him five times. he bit into her, his claws digging into the back of her head. pain exploded down near his ribplates, hammering impacts breaking against his bruising muscles like a jackhammer. broken fragments spilled off his sloughing skin, plucked free from the meat beneath by the grip of air. her blades slashed out blindly. gorges of wounds split open across his back, flapping with the winds drag. inch by inch, she was working through his muscle toward his spine. avo bit harder and felt his fangs crack, depressing cheap armor. visekeles screamed. the clicking of her gun sounded beautiful. locked in a fatal embrace, he bore down on her. the ground rose, a speeding anvil rising to meet the hammer that was avo. the huntress? in the end, she was just glass trapped between. they shattered the ground in a deafening crash. a wave of pain tore through him. the insides of visekeles smeared him in a spray of warm splatters. her taste lingered on his tongue even as he tumbled off of her and met his halt against a crumpling console. numbness spiked through his body. hurt oozed from every pore. swallowing back mouthfuls of blood, avo lay there, his broken body a miasma of injuries. yet, he felt euphoric with triumph. not far from him, visekeles greeted him as a mangled heapa near puddle. he could see her clearly now. crushed glass spilled out from half-caved eye sockets. remnants of her optical implants. her soft insides oozed and welled through rents of metal, squeezed free from the pressure of the impact. she was trying to mouth something at him. one of her frequency blades twitched. the arm holding it sparked and sizzled. n-notfair. blood and coolant came free from her lips. she laid back and exhaled one final time. +iwhatno!+ little vicious said, her voice filled more with dismay and horror than surprise. +ii meancongratulations to number fourteen for triumphing over visekeles!+ as the crowds cheered, avo felt a foreign presence brush over his mind, speaking to him directly. +she was one of my best earners, rotlick. she had potential. star potential! youyou ruined that for me. iim gonnaoh, youll find out. youll find out.+ delirious with pain, avo wanted to laugh, but groaning took priority. difference between him and chromers: his flesh could mend, but metal was just bricked. mustering what strength he had left, he clawed over to her remains, tongue already lapping at the pool of visekeles blood from the dust-stained ground, nourishing himself with each swallow. sweeping his cells through his body, he mended his muscles and straightened his bones. hurt, but not fatal. as long as he had biomass to burn and his skull was intact, he could keep going. still, he felt like a giant had just stepped on him. pulling himself over to the dead huntress with a half-crawl, half-stumble, he found a nice open wound and fed. the mood staining the world around him was raucous for some and silent for others. shock flooded the air. in the back of his mind, he heard his piggybackers chattering. he half-listened while he fed. +fuck, yeah! fucking ghoulguy kicked her ass!+ his first passenger cried. the nasally one snorted. +ghouls a pussy. if it was me, id get up on that walkway and stand the half-strand down.+ +shut up. i saw you run from a ratnid. you aint gonna stand down shit for fuck.+ +fuck you!+ his passengers argued. avo regretted not getting a concussion during the fight. he did his best to tune the noise out from his focus. again, he missed having a sequenced metamind. couldve used that to dispel intrusive ghosts and ward off his mind from the public. thaumic cycler: 7 thaum/c ghosts - [6] right. he just absorbed another ghost. and echoing thing. thaum. however that worked. because this was something he could do now. he was too hungry and hurt to think. right now, he concentrated on moving the new biomass to plug up all the leaks in his tissue to replace the damage. he wished he could eat visekeles eyes. eyes tasted goodwhy did everyone replace their eyes? at least she wasnt overly armored on the inside. made her more like an oyster than a crab he had to crack. +iit appears that survivor fourteen has defeated visekeles!+ static crackled over the back of his mind as little vicious repeated. +...someone find out who sold us that ghoul. this is a joke, right? and whys he dressed? he didnt eat the kid? thats easy meat right there. shit! wrong lobby.+ static returned. avo continued ignoring the commentary in favor of sucking up sinews like noodles. at some point, the boy and his fathernow awakewere standing next to him. they looked upon him with a mix of fear, reverence, and respect. it took the better part of his will to just eat the huntress. this close, they smelled quite enticing. speaking in excited tones, the boy tugged on his fathers pantlegs as he pointed at avo. the man winced and rubbed his head. they were going to talk to him. while he was eating. avo didnt want to talk with people while he was eating. he didnt want to talk with people in general. the man took a step closer. avo steeled his will. the man looked quite plump. probably wouldnt be too gristly either. e-excuse me, the father said in halting standard, his face a pleasant smile. his voice was a baritone. sounded practiced from years of oration. avo wondered if his vocal cords would taste different from others he had eaten. slurping back what remained of visekeles triceps, avo fixed him with a glare. the man was approaching him, clearly unnerved by what he saw, but still coming forward. strange. refugee. foreigner. meat for the city. easy meat. avo shook his head and swallowed his meal, he forced himself to imagine the man as a blur. same thing with the boy. they would continue to be boy and father for as long as they were with him. no sense in remembering the likely casualties of this city after all. the man cleared his throat. my name both hands, avo said, passing the frequency blade to one of his feet. he shot a look at his missing left arm. it had grown up to the wrist now. he was healing faster than he used to. strange, but welcome in these trying times. needed to check for tumors later. use both hands. dont know how far down. you fall, you stay. not going back.. my son isnt armless, avo said. jaus. they were going to die. they were going to die and here he was helping them. are you smiling across that big nothing you wanted to go to, walton? does the void let you feel pride in me? awkward whispers went between father and son. avo heard every syllable and understood none of it. gods, losing his old metamind was worse than losing his left arm. worse. it was like he was simple. couldnt think nearly as well. deprived of his full capabilities. with a functioning metamind, he could at least ward his mind. build some new phantasmics on the fly using a phantasmic that offered a dichotomous consciousness function. reinstall a morality injector of some kind so he didnt need to guess what he should and shouldnt do. make it harder for him to eat the boy. he could hear the hot blood sloshing inside the child. it smelled delectable. avo grunted in discomfort. right now, without his phantasmics, he was just fragile meat. anomalous meat that infected and consumed any and all biomass to sustain itself, but still, just meat. no ability to affect his own design. no way to scout or scry. always reacting. reacting. reacting was how one eventually ended in the big nothing. reacting got you dead. thank you, the fatherthe burdensaid, ruining avos thoughtful silence. well, thoughtful anxiety. t-thank you, the father said again. avo didnt sigh. not externally anyway. i said heard you, avo said. oh. i just want to thank me, avo replied. he scanned around him, checking if any players were feeling cute enough to cast themselves into one of the half-finished bodies around him. he doubted it. none of the dead had locuses or something that could pass for a mind. ghosts didnt affect matter on their own. only cognition. yeah. i know. dont. another blessed silence followed. good thing possessor ghosts were banned for the crucibles. made the kills harder. more entertainment. he remembered that used to be a thing, up until the griefers decided to possess the contestants and make them all kill themselves in various ways to win bets or just for the giggles. syndicates put a ban on that pretty fast after views started dropping. why do you do that? the father asked. avo sighed. do what? help me and then ignore me, the father said, with a small laugh. youyou are like a cat, you know? you know cat? the man almost reflexively tried to gesticulate what a cat was at him before he had to recommit to his grip. know what a cat is, avo said. nu-cats litter the city. oh. my son likes cats. most of them are capable of eating children youre doing it again! avo gnashed his fangs together. it wasnt because he was annoyed. its just a habit when his potential meals asked him too many questions. doing what? you help and then you ignore. you are nice and then you are mean. you save my life and you strike me. you are between actions all the time. committed to my survival. then why do you keep helping us? i told you. impulse and stupidity. the father studied him. the scripture of artad speaks highly of the virtuous. those who are willing to sacrifice and risk for another, be they kith or stranger. artad is dead. the father seemed indifferent to the barb. yes. for centuries. but still, the teachings survive. without them, we, of vaylos, would have never survived this journey. and my son and i would have never survived without you. that how it is now? what? a god dies. gets turned into philosophy? avo shook his head. was wrong about you. have a future in this city. well live and make it to the warrens. gonna find a guilder. any guilder. need someone to help them with rebranding. do they offer housing avo growled. he was actually annoyed this time. being facetious. the man smiled at him. i know. avo looked away from the now laughing man and contemplated opening his throat. see him laugh then. bastard. the father just kept chuckling. are your kind capable of laughter? no, avo lied. low masters carved it out of us. truly? how sad. dont feel that much either. what do you feel? hungry. and what do you a low whine pierced into avos ears. the wind shifted along his right arm. looking up past the ringed opening, avos eyes dilated to pinpricks, trying to trace the source of the noise. little vicious voice flicked over his mind again. +hey, rotlick. i thought of something. got a little fun for you to experiencebut i''ll let you find out for yourself.+ she cut out as soon as she cut in. avo worried about her growing fixation with him. he didnt want the host to be actively gunning for his death. didnt seem good for his short-term health. a low whistle came from above. the father stopped laughing. avo felt his right foot clench harder around his new blade. another whistle. and another. the man went stiff beside him. the boys eyes were wide with terror. something was coming. a low wail rose through the air now, the blaring noise akin to screaming engines. through the gap leading from the bottom of the factory to the processing wing, the frame of an aerial drone flicked and disappeared. emotional waste spilled out from his wake. it was being piloted by someone using a ghost. avo tasted the secondhand thoughts from the mind of the pilot. it reeked of glee and savage delight. another hunter. or hunters. little vicious voice cut into the public lobby again. +alright, you bloodthirsty freaks, its been ten minutes and already weve dropped passed the big one-o-o ceiling. looking like a real dicey night. special mention to number fourteen. looks like we found a ghoul with a heart of gold. or maybe it''s just full. anyway, good work snuffing visekeles. didnt think you had it in you. still, if you wanna make it into the city proper, there''s still a ways ahead of you yet. keep your eyes open and remember: death can come at you from high and low.+ she giggled. avo wanted to meet her in person so he could tear her throat out. the father gawked. what are those? drones, avo said. drones? the man asked, confused. modern technology was clearly unknown to the man. the boy clung to his father tighter. avo grunted a bitter laugh. they''d understand soon enough. Chapter 2-4 Titanium Phantoms chapter 2-4 titanium phantoms times change. war changes too. with this new epoch of innovation of thaumaturgy and coldtech, an arms race has begun, affecting levels both macro and micro. with our advancements in phantasmic engrams and the ease of mass production using nano-fabrication, our forces would be better served by a legion of multi-platform pilots than wasting them as cannon meat. hence, we present to you, the x-1 bodkin, our newest recon drone pattern. with complex loci allowing for long-distance possessions via ghosts, we believe that even with a dearth of proper training, a critical mass of these cheap expendable platforms piloted by an immortal militia of our citizenry will be more than enough to overload and overwhelm highflames pre-cogged planar fortresses. -ori-thaum research and development, x-1 bodkin development log 2-4 titanium phantoms avo ignored the fathers questions as he clambered up the cylinder. if there were drones past the gap, he would force them to engage first. too bad the submachine gun broke earlier. couldve really used that. rising out from the floor of the factory, avo peeked through the gap leading into the assembly line proper. countless conveyor belts and assembly drones latticed the area around him as if he was in a web of silicon, plastic, and metal. massive reactors hummed at the very end of the cylinders, a grumbling turbine gasping as sparks rained down. the interior of the factorys assembly floor was as large as a megablock. it mustve run on for a mile or two in width and length. twice again that in height. it was as if he had climbed into an industrial forest. chaos reigned around him, a symphony of working machines, whistling mechanisms, and sparking wires. it was enough that he didnt sense the first drone coming until it was too late. the wind lashed avo from behind. whipping his head, he barely caught sight of a chrome-tipped arrowhead slamming into a festooned corpse a scant foot below him. clamps and corpse harnesses buckled and broke. the exterior of the cylinder dented as the spinning mechanisms within the machine began to wail. sparks flew below as warped plates of metal came free. as the ringing subsided, avo felt a series of stings dance across his right thigh. something parted against the blade held in his right foot. a chorus of engines sang from above. a second sortie came from below. avo shifted his blood and pushed the metal shards out from his leg. hunger itching, he mended the wound. darting between a sprawl of machinery and vine-like assembly lines in this alloyed forest, avo caught sight of five titanium-hulled drones circling around him from two different directions, wolves on the hunt, cleaving through the air like arrows in flight. +lucky ghoul,+ the nasally one said. +shit drone-jock,+ a new voice interjected. +i wouldve liquified the rotlick easy.+ +yeah, sure you would+ you, avo snarled, trying to catch sight of the father. the man was huddled tight against a corpse now, his son clutching his chest tightly. wait till the gap passes. then get off. the father blinked. get off? hed figure it out. avo pushed off a loosened metal slat. the engines were getting closer. he looked at the nearest assembly belt. ten feet. easy jump. avo leaped. he landed on the belt just in time to witness two more drones slam and detonate over where he just was. the structure of the cylinder began to scream. groaning, its top half began to bend, the tearing metal opening the spinning turbine, now on fire. another suicide drone was approaching. the air was tinged with static thrill and excitement. still clinging to the crumbling hull of the cylindrical corpse elevator, avo watched as the father pawed blindly through the smoke, coughing and choking, completely missing that he was now right near ground level and could disembark at any time. idiot. sense told avo to just run. hunger wanted avo to at least snatch the boy so he would have an easy snack. the memory of walton reminded him and compelled him to stay and do good. avo wondered if saving the same two lives repeatedly made up for the four separate ones he ended earlier. sighing, he passed his frequency blade from foot to hand and jumped back down. the ringing song of the machete-shaped weapon was an impediment to his hearing this close to his ears. it made it harder for him to judge where the next drones were going to come from. the cylinder broke and folded, its cheap metal core twisting as the father screamed. a deafening chorus followed as it plunged through countless worker drones and belts, rolling over on its side. branches of assembly belts caught and broke under its collapse. metal and flesh spilled free into the air. the father and his son began to turn under with the spin. with no time to contemplate, avo leaped back down, gravity drawing his veins back like a bowstring as he fell. he landed hard, claws denting cheap steel. something clipped the back of his scalp. a deafening scream of wind tore past him, the deep cut beginning to well blood. drone. close. any closer and hed be without a head. as the drone speared passed him, he noted that one of its leftmost engines was sputtering with fire. mustve sucked in a piece of debris during its dive. +lucky fucking ghoulie!+ this time, the other ghost-riding freeloaders agreed. sprinting over with the rolling metal, avo noticed the father scrambling up as best he could. the idiot was trying to run up a rolling cylinder. the boy, meanwhile, was content to scream and offer no help at all. the father gripped onto an outcropping of metal, clambering upward blindly. his handhold cracked and broke. the father screamed and tumbled back. the boy, unprepared, slipped free from his shoulder, hands clawing at empty air, his cries raising an octave higher. avo launched himself from a run and dove after them. something exploded behind him. if it was the cylinders machinery or another drone, he couldnt tell. he was just glad he jumped. lashing out with reflex-guided instinct, avo felt the claws of his feet dig into the tender flesh of father and son. their screams synchronized as he felt himself dig into their shoulders. a primal thrill slithered up his spine as he felt the beast inside him stir. his leap pulled them free from getting rolled over immediately, but avo hadnt thought that far afterward. open air and a shortfall awaited. scant feet behind, the cylinder continued its warpath, tearing through the assembly wing. a disoriented worker drone hovered by, its cone-shaped propulsors searing avos shoulder. the smell was delicious. lashing out, he hooked his blade through its chassis. his shoulder jerked and tore at an angle. a dozen fibers of muscles snapped like overstretched strings, but enough remained for him to keep his grip. the drone pulled him up into the air unevenly for a few feet before its engines gave out. a conveyor belt passed below. from the periphery of his sight, avo watched the cylinder slam into another of its own kind. a cataclysmic blast sent a rain of spearing shrapnel into the air. another turbine caught fire. a new rain of bodies fell, burning embers in the wind. they came to a crashing halt over another belt. avo tumbled, his grip on his burdens unyielding. the same couldnt be said about his frequency blade. the shattering drone tore his weapon from his grasp and sent it sliding along the assembly belt. it ended up embedded in a muscular torso. just a torso. pure adrenaline surged through him. it had him so deep in its hold that avo didnt realize that he was dragging the claws of his feet against naked scapulas. the father roared in pain. the son struggled, little hands prying against avos claws. avo released them, the red of their insides coloring the paleness of his claws so nicely. the way they writhed pleased him. hunger rose. involuntarily, he tongued his fangsno. avo bit back the urge. he was trying to save them. he needed to save them. eating them would defeat the purpose. the boy whimpered, compressing his wound with a hand too small. rivulets of delicious crimson ran through the cracks of his chubby fingers. avo pulled his gaze away. another whine made him look over his shoulder. more drones. not over yet. not nearly. make him silent, avo said, not even looking at the father. another whine made him look over his shoulder. not over yet. not nearly. a smoking drone spun overhead, its engines spraying plumes of fire as it shot past the belt. avo watched as it crashed amidst the debris below. he tilted his head. was that the one that sucked in debris earlier? avo watched as it met the ground in a sparking landing, flesh and half-implanted limbs smearing apart in its wake. a sudden idea formed in avos head. something that might ensure his survival, and give him some patchwork functions for his metamind. drones had loci that allowed ghosts to interface with them, allowing a drone-jock to pilot the machine from leagues and leagues away. if he was fast enough, he could siphon some ghosts and their sequenced phantasmics from the wreckage. download those engrams. regain some cognitive augments he was currently missing. constellations flared above the inch-thin metaphysical halo that was his metamind. most pleasingly, a latticework of connected memory-forged battlements fused around the borders of his halo, cycling the trauma of his ghosts into a chaotic flood to prevent unwanted entry. at once, his former guests were cut from his mind, ejected in spooling ejection of phantasmal matter back into the nether. he would tune back into the public broadcast if he wanted to hear what they were saying. right now though, he savored the peace that greeted his mind. atop his metamind, a blazing hand clung to a misted spire by sinews of interlacing thought and will. more and more ghosts began flooding into the sequences to support his new augments. new functions and interfaces manifested in his metamind. the cog-load grew. scanning through the functions he momentarily deactivated, avo grunted in disgust. too many phantasmics and not enough ghosts poached. he would have rather it be the other way around. the osarai memguard wasnt exactly what he wanted for a sequenced mind-ward either. too porous, too simple, and a half-century out of date. the mind-ward was currently running at a flat twenty-five percent upkeep for his ghosts. it would spike if someone tried to intrude into his mind, but through skill and mentalism, the cost could be reduced. he''d examine the patterns of the other phantasmics later. right now, he still had a bodkin to brick. without hesitation, he slotted the locus back into his new drone and poured his mind into it. menus and interfaces manifested in his awareness, avo mantled the drone. there was a certain risk in the action he was about to undertake. a high likelihood of death, but he didnt have nearly enough ghosts to guide the machine from afar with his ghost-link. that would overclock his processing capacity exponentially and would have required him to have at least a few hundred ghosts to direct or be linked to a local nexus. that meant he needed to keep close to the drone and stay close. he fought the urge to sigh. looked like his old passengers were right: he was going for a ride. the downed bodkin was barely larger than he was, and the damage it sustained made it whistle and crack under his weight. multiple damage reports from the drone screamed inside his skull so loud he could scarcely hear himself think. the drones hull integrity menu displayed catastrophic damage to the left engine. whatever it sucked in mustve completely shredded it. with a thought, he routed resources from the damaged engine and shifted over to the others. three thrusters roared to life as he felt the bodkins power core begin its spin. beyond swaying belts dangling amidst the devastation, the last drone was descending on him, accelerating toward him like a spear cast by the gods. it was his good fortune that he was dealing with an old platform from two centuries ago instead of a modern war golem. avo commanded whatever capacity of ghosts he had left to calculate impact trajectories. his perception was twisted and restructured as ghosts ferried through his mind. within the center of his mind, his phys-sim flashed. lines of transparent blue bled into red; the calculations of the ever-changing velocities affecting his surrounding environment became known to him. impact estimates were fed directly into his mind, warning him that his flesh had no capacity to survive direct contact with the incoming drone rapidly accelerating to mach two. he inquired his ghosts about possible options to avoid the drone, his mind plotting vectors of evasion. each dissolved within seconds as intercepting lines threaded through them, pruning his paths. on foot or atop his new drone, he had no chance of fleeing the incoming threat. it had four functioning engines. he had two. so, he moved on to what he didnt want to do. intercepting it instead. he commanded his ghost to plot a new course for a near-miss. phys-sim calculating - 44% avo looked at his frequency blade. he looked back up at the impending drone. a feeling of absolute madness settled over him. above his head, his previously scant halo rippled with new complexity, growing to take the structure of a crown. peering down beyond the skin of reality, he tuned more of his perception to the wavelength of the nether. it was better to use the incoming drones leaking thoughtstuff to track it. less chaotic to sort through than the sheer sensory havoc that was spatial existence right now. reality faded. the space around him dissolved into a sea of impulses fed by spilling thoughts leaking from reaching ghosts. he could see countless tendrils reaching down from the great locus above, the small hydra-like heads of ghosts directed by the spectators lashing at the minds of the boy and his father. they were huddled together. their thoughtstuff leaked without order, coming from them like pooling porridge, free to be sampled by any and all. it was a fascinating horror to behold them, then, realizing that they were as vulnerable in mind as they were in flesh. in them, the denizens of the city were certain to find easy prey. calculating - 66% a thousand spectating ghosts wisped around avo in a spiral, their constructs like drifting tadpoles. they were leashed through nigh-transparent streams of thought, the faint contours of the minds that piloted them burned like embers within the ghosts. leading down from the locus above in chains, the metaphor of the forest stayed. instead of one being constructed of metal and matter, avo stood amidst a grand willow of memories, the branches all bleeding over into each other. through the thick of the nether, past the emotional residue of his surrounding ghosts, avo found the massive corona of circling patterns directing the incoming drone. a chain of ghosts coiled around it like a knotted flagella as, from a distance of unknown miles, a pilot tugged the drone to its final destination using thought and will alone. if avo had enough ghosts to fuel his possessor, he could have assailed it from afar. tried to crack its sequence. sadly, what he had was woefully inadequate for para-psionic combat. he needed to solve this physically. the incoming bodkin was within a hundred feet now. his phys-sims impact lanes flared red. avo directed the drone he was standing by to rise. he let the ghost do the flying. his cog-cap spiked into the nineties. his halo swirled as his mind felt like it was starting to cook. even with so much support, the sheer logistical overload was bleeding over into him. he needed to see this done fast. all he needed to give were the commands. calculating -99% a sudden golden path materialized in his mind. his possessed drone rigged itself to the rails of its new pre-determined path. trajectory locked his cog-feed marked the incoming drone with a target reticule. a simulation pre-played in avos head. it was a straight path to hit him. his drone needed to make up for a missing engine along with a compromised hull. the incoming bodkin was too fast. no counter-impact would save him from the shrapnel either. instead, it would meet it head-on and deviate from its path at the last moment. avo snarled and pushed the remaining engines of the bodkin to maximum thrust. he clung to the drone with his left hand and angled the frequency blade with his right. it would dodge. he would cut. and if this went right, his would be the only drone left. the world blurred. avo ordered his possessed drone onward. he dipped momentarily back into reality. matter and sound flooded back into the world. the winds were screaming. the chorus of spectators held their breath. avo sank his focus back over to the nether. on folding winds, he rode to meet his adversary, their titanium phantoms fated for a final clash. the drone-jocks mind coiled violently. the incoming bodkin twisted up and curved down at an angle. avo hissed. the trajectory dissolved. new paths manifested before him, unfinished in their calculations. yet, the nature of his take hadnt changed. he chose the vector that would put him in line with his incoming adversary. the impact loomed. the winds howled. avos drone dove. unthinking, he lashed up with his blade. its singing vibration became muffled for a microsecond, meeting resistance. an inch overhead, engines screamed and sputtered past. something splashed to his left and right. shards of metal and flashing fires burst across avos vision. the heat licked at him, close and intimate, the thrill of surviving on the edge like a drug. this was how the low masters made him. this was what drove his kind. roaring with savage laughter, avo pumped his sword into the air as he spun to stare at the parting pieces spilling from his enemys bifurcated drone. it splashed and tore across the ground in a tumbling ball of fire. here was a martial feat he wouldnt soon be repeating. avo grinned. he would have made quite the snuffer in another life. +dead fucking gods!+ a spectator cried out into the lobby. avo had tuned in just in time to hear the uproar; he needed to get a glimpse into where the next threat was coming from. +holy shit. the ghoul just out-jousted a godsdamn recon drone.+ +told you this ones differe+ avo didnt hear the last accolade he earned. something sharp tore out his cheek at an angle, entering through the back of his skull. the world went white in one eye. only then did the ringing sound of a gauss gun follow. as a flash of light silhouetted the contours of an immense shadow in his peripheral vision, avo noticed broken strings of cog-data and half-finished physics calculations trail out from his parting jaw. most of the strings were dedicated to his spraying blood while a single slide vector highlighted in red due to already impacting his person marked the path of what he could only guess to be a mag-fired spike. the strings lasted a moment longer before they dissolved, his metamind glitching with the sudden relocation of his brain matter. avo stumbled back, toppling from the drone. who shot him? from where? he tried to reach up and check his wound. his arm wouldnt raise. his thoughts grew sluggish. the ground drew close. the last droplets of coherence bled out of him as warning vectors flashed through his cog-feed as his phys-sim calculated an imminent impact between him and the ground. he didnt care. wasnt enough brain matter left in his opened skull to care by this point. dying felt calming. dying was easy. dying came as a relief when felt his skull splatter apart against the ground. but calming as death was, it wasnt going to last. vessel deceased - preserving consciousness reverting to last stable instance of ontology Chapter 2-5 Resurrection: Block War chapter 2-5 resurrection: block war attention: warheads are inbound. technothaumic reactor operating at maximum efficiency. memetic integrity at one hundred percent. there is no need for panic. please stay indoors and stay put until the end of this broadcast. for residents who wish to view block war entertainment options, please cast into one of our loci. optical telemetry from our interceptor missiles and drones is available for public view. to participate in hostilities, please register with your local guild official for militia training and certification. if you are still experiencing emotional distress, we offer fantastic discounts toward phylactery options in the event of your untimely demise. simply sync your metamind with the memory-code displayed in the corner of your perception to sync to our mind-lobby. a representative will be with you shortly -megablock psa 2-5 resurrection: block war resurrection - 10% engaging anchor-memetics - loading memory the first nuke went off in a blossom of light, unfurling a scar of brightness. neon-soaked drizzle falling from the skies scythed at the blast, culling the radiation down to acceptable levels. spreading shockwaves pulsed through the groaning exterior of the megablock, but failed to inflict any permanent damage. inside the block, in a cramped hab-cell, a second-hand kosla-12 nethernexus media system strained its ghosts at max capacity to stream that little war happening beyond the walls. basked in its glow, a man and his infant ghoulling watched, beholding war as entertainment. all the while, a splashing broadcast spread from cell to cell, up level to level on winds of thought. the cube-shaped machine swallowed a good fourth of the space remaining in the room, its hovering crystal locus spinning hot. the geometry of the hab-cell melded into a blended flurry around the gleaming needle that was its artificial mind, composing thought and memory into viewable phantasmic constructs. a static-stained overview of the battlefield was projected as a whirlpool in the center of the room. countless other menus displayed localized perspectives pulled from the various patrolling specters swimming beneath the flesh of existence. theirs was a design of reaching thought, crackled and unclear, but cheaply offered for all to see. avo was less interested in viewing their feeds, however. he found himself drawn more to the ghosts peering down through the eyes of surveillance drones in a sub-void defense grid. this block war was essentially a knife fight. separated by a meager avenue and a hypertube station, a mere four hundred feet stood between the two feuding megablocks. that made the distance of engagement near instant and the exchange of nukes constant. across the hulls of both blocks, gauss launchers flashed while spreading chasms of radiance yawned. from kiloton to megaton, the blast yields climbed, but no damage lingered. neither did the radiation. some sixty thousand feet above, thousands of drones tore the midnight firmament into lattices of fire and shrapnel. avo didnt get to see from those drones though. those drones were offensive platforms piloted by professional jocks. instruments that could phase forward through time and engage underwater, in the atmosphere, and in the stable-void. the surveillance drones instead hung more like eyes in the sky, watching the pluming explosions cascade and dissolve from existence. walton said they stayed that high up to avoid the electro-mag pulses and people ghostjacking them somehow. avo didnt fully understand how that worked. all he knew was that everyone had one of the crowns here. it was as if everyone was a low master in this tier. but then again, they didnt really treat each other that way. resurrection - 25% ghost-possessed missiles slammed down and detonated between the station. as with the blocks, the streets remained unblemished as did the crystalline glass plating the local hypertube. such was the benefit of living in the inner rings of new vultun, up the first tier. things here were forged from memetic matter, which meant the streets, tubes, and blocks were unbreakable so long as someone remembered their existence. hence, there were no attempts at interception for the warheads. nukes were mostly used as suppressive weapons these days anyway. something meant to delay the arrival of drones, mechs, or golems to an assault. as another flash of light bloomed, the already blinding radiance grew painful to behold. still, avo refused to look away, his mind as ravenous as his body, taking in a world beyond his understanding. bright, hissed avo, rubbing his eyes. within the cramped confines of the hab-cell, it was like being inside a box with the sun. a month ago, he was below the city, waiting to die amidst the ashes, last thoughts tied to hunger and delirium. now, he mostly suffered bouts of confusion and wonderment. of his brothers, only he had ascended the first tier, but the undercroft had been nothing like hed imagined. squinting through the blinding flash, he found himself drawn to another blast, this one expanding against the northwestern corner of their block. the ghosts reconstructed and scrubbed the visuals clean in real-time, the details as if seen through his own eyes. beside him, the masteravo reminded himself that the not-master wanted to be called waltonlaughed. use the visor. theres a reason i told you to steal them from that hellminer. ah, here, let me. through the blinding haze, avo saw something reaching out for him. sheer reflex made him flinch back. huddle into himself. his mind screamed for him to prepare for a backhand. a whip. or worse of all, a sad-stick. the low masters always used the sad-sticks on brothers who didnt listen. what he got were a few careful tugs. with a final pull, avo felt a strap tighten over the back of his skull, the visor now fastened tightly across his sensitive eyes. resurrection - 45% kid, walton said. yes, mastwalton. remember what i told you yesterday after you tried to eat the neighbors nu-dog and i told you to stop? don''t! avo said, doing his best to mimic waltons voice. the man closed his eyes and his lips flattened into a rueful smile. after that. i wont hit you,avo said. speaking the invaders tonguekosgan standard, as they called itstill felt wrong, but up in the undercroft no one spoke nolothic of the high or low dialects. yeah: im still not going to hit you. walton chewed his lower lip in focus as he adjusted the visors leather straps. despite the sweltering heat and leaking sewage dripping from the pipes within the walls, a tangerine scent wafted from the man. even now, avo wasnt sure how he managed to keep the fragrance. there, done, walton fixed avo with a wry grin. youre jumpier than a cat on nova, you know that? the statement made little sense to avo. despite having standard imprinted into his mind by the low masters, the native speakers of the language had strange phases that were beyond his understanding. through his new awareness, he saw walton then in the nether for the first time, no longer a man but a bird of prey molded from smoke and oil. a single burning eye occupied the crown of its skull. each of its feathers played a memory, the exterior lined like blades of trauma, the layers beneath, comfort and warmth. through the forest of sprouting minds that was the nether, walton rose, his attention narrowed to seek the gleam of minds, shrouded beneath a skin of ghosts. avo felt his adopted father grin. the emotion was purer than any expression could muster. in a near-instant, they closed on their quarry. +cant run incog forever,+ walton said. +ghost capacity has limits. the more minds that are aware of you, the more sequences are needed.+ as if to demonstrate this, spears of memory lashed out from waltons feathers, plunging into one of the shrouded minds. the swirling ghosts around them tried to fight back, but waltons spears transformed into jaws and bit down, severing them before they could form. a chaotic deluge splashed through avos thoughts now. a foreign cog-feed sputtered and flashed with warnings. it took him a moment to realize that he was looking out from the inside of a snuffers mind. her face flashed through avos perception: a pink-haired waif with twelve eyes grafted along the side of her right cheek. an icon displaying the condition of her body and mental stability frizzled and dissolved as walton sank deeper into her consciousness. from a first-person perspective, avo watched as the snuffers chromed limbs seized while wailing sirens rang on in her mind. +ward breached! ward breached! ward breached!+ resurrection - 99% beginning ontological anchoring through her bloodshot eyes, avo saw another lance of tungsten liquefy one of her companions. the last of them blinked out from his sight, blurring into a run before he too was cleaved in half by a shot too fast to perceive. +now, you see what happened here?+ waltons asked. avo nodded. well, it felt like he nodded. +there are several things that went wrong here. the first is that this was clearly a suicide operation they attempted and they shouldnt have done it. the second is not accounting for unsuppressed weapon emplacements beyond visual range.+ he paused. +the third is trying to kill me.+ a flash of surprise rose through avo. +kill you?+ walton hummed. +the explosion earlier. i scried it with my mind. before we moved in here, i rented two cells. this one. and another closer to ground level. a snuffer team inside the block activated and tried going for us there right when the initial barrage of nukes was launched. they managed to make it to the hab-cell i was supposedly in. unfortunately, their necro wasnt good enough to notice my ghost-triggered explosives. a shame.+ avos mind was still whirling at all that had just been told to him. +dont understand+ walton chuckled. +sometimes i dont either. like why someone would send a perfectly good lance of snuffers to their deaths. its stupid. meaningless. an insult.+ a speck of rage burned across waltons mind. back in reality, avo shivered. +they werent ready for this,+ walton said. +theyre new. the snuffer i just nulled: her name is kriggi mevlo. i have her fate-skein. i have her local bank information, home address, transaction history, and the mem-code to her apartment. she lives in little huang sha, block f-14, tower b, room 24-5a. like tearing a blade from the guts of an adversary, he wrenched his consciousness out of her mind. suddenly, the world around them went black. they were back in the nether now. between waltons talons, withered strips of fragmenting ghosts peeled away from the screaming wisp that was kriggis fading mind. +better this way,+ walton said. +spares her from getting her mind slaved to feed processing power to a mind-lobby. her dreams might die, but theyll be her dreams in the end.+ avo couldnt understand why walton was offering so much mercy to a woman that was supposedly trying to kill them. she was an enemy. prey. something that could be eaten. this was pointless. +no,+ walton said, reading the thoughts directly from avos mind. +she made a choice to attack the block, to try and come for us. thats true. but this isnt about her. this is about me and what choice i make. what world i want to see manifest. and right now, i want a world where fewer juvs grafted into over-auged bodies get thrown into the grinder because of me.+ avo still didnt understand. +because of you?+ +she is here because she made a choice,+ walton continued. his owl-like head stared off blankly at the massive coalescing trunk of minds spiraling up from their block. the nether was a strange place. +we all make choices. those choices pull us. intertwine us. bind us to each other. the pain in her life drove her into the embrace of implants and violence. my choice made me her target when i leaked details about how her employer was running an organ farm in the warrens, deliberately selling tainted bioware to poison the choiceless that choose to buy from him. all to see them dead as fuel for his thaumaturgy as per the conditions of the contract.+ walton shook his head. +greed is an ugly thing, avo. all vices are. they wear you. make you choiceless. you should always fight them. remain in control of yourself.+ +choiceless?+ avo asked. he barely understood the rest of what was said. it was like his mind were jaws, and what walton presented was too much to swallow. +yes,+ walton said. +the fateless. the ones in this city who cannot claim their dreams. who are bound to the wills of others. like you were. all choiceless. all without the means to decide on your own dreams.+ avo considered that. walton continued. +did the low masters ever give you the option to walk away? to live your own life? did they ever offer you any kind of agency? self-determination?+ the questions were beyond avos understanding. quietly, he chittered, his fangs grinding together as nervousness descended upon him. he wanted to hunt.he wanted to kill. killing was a choice. eating was a choice. walton shook his head. +where does your slavery end, i wonder. in instinct? in conditioning? in habit?+ a thoughtful emotion flashed through walton. +avowould you like to learn to be a necrojack? learn my art, as i know it?+ the offer was granted like a piece of candy. something cheap. easily offered. but avo had spent his life fearing the halo, fearing the ghosts. he wasnt worthy of its power. he wasnt +yes,+ avo said. his admission surprised even himself. he wasnt worthy. but he wanted to be. he wanted to know powernow more than ever as he bore witness to what a necro could do. he wanted to know what it was like to be a master, rather than a ghoul. that struck a beat into his thoughts as well. when had he ever wanted anything that wasnt in service of the low masters or his instinctive bloodthirst? when had he wanted to be something else? an incandescent smile spread through waltons being. +you know, im not sure if this is a choice either or just a reaction to a lifetime of powerlessness. suppose well find out together.+ resurrection - 100% implanting nous Chapter 2-6 Slaughterman chapter 2-6 slaughterman the thing about chrome is that it lies to you. some street punk going from meat to metal gets their wires twisted. too much too fast. starts getting wrong ideas about who they are now. accelero makes you think youre the fastest thing in the world. titanskin? makes you think youre invincible. whistlers are just plain unfair, lets you kill without being in the same room. put all these things together youyou start getting these flashesmoments of fuckin pure euphoria. makes you feel like a god. heh. that delusion lasts until the first time you go up against an actual clad. hells, it lasts until you run up against a proper necro. dont get me twisted, the chrome still makes you better than some flat meatbag, but there are levels to this game just like there are levels to this city. dead metal is just step number one. qualifying round. make it through that and maybe you might just bag yourself a soul someday. then, youll get to see how deep the big rabbit hole in the sky goes. -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers, head of the scalpers syndicate 2-6 slaughterman avo breathed. the world around him screamed with echoing cheers and crackling flames. a tungsten flechette materialized an inch in front of his right eye. it clattered onto the soot-smeared ground before him, still wreathed in brain matter. his brain matter. ontology reverted resurrection completed memory restored soul online igniting thaumic cycler: 7 thaum/c loading phantasmics he shouldve been dead. he shouldve been. clawing his back up to his feet, avo felt a pulse run through his mind, rejuvenating his senses. he was dreaming just now. remembering. the hab-cell he lived inthe block war. that was seventeen years ago up in the undercroft. just a month after walton took him in. with a shudder, he wondered how the memory could have played. a metamind doesnt work when the actual brain it was laced to gets splattered. resurrection should have been impossible for him. but here he was, coming back to life for the second time that day, no phylactery needed. he was running out of possibilities as to how. avo blinked. his cog-feed booted and began filtering data inside his mind. stumbling away from where he lay, he saw the broken chassis of his drone plastered against the wall, hissing smoke. bricked. he stepped in something slick. avo looked down and found a smear of blood painting the trajectory of his death. mustve been made by his body when he fell. considering how fast he was going, the gore was quite insubstantial. pieces of skull and brain matter coated the disfigured floor in a crimson drag. a flap of metal had kept part of his scalp as he slid against it. overhead, broken assembly belts swayed like parts to an alloy willow. drones rained down in fragments and pieces. increments of gauss fire hammered out from above, flashing down through the looming dark from on high. a figure fell, their trajectory immediately marked by his phys-sim for a certain collision. for a fraction of a second avo saw them, he noted that they were dressed in the fashion of a hellminer. industrial limb transplants. goggles. implanted tubes ran from their necks into tanks on their back. the figure pulped against the ground, a mangled mess along with the rest of the falling detritus. avo picked up his pace before something ended up landing on him. another explosion flashed above. seemed he wasnt the only one that decided going up this was a good idea. he decided to try and spot any thought signatures that were still present. maybe he could locate the father and the boy again that way. or get eyes on the person who killed him. hed like that. sample their taste. see the flavor of their brain in return. navigating through the roiling smoke and ruins left by the collapsed cylinders, he diverted more cognitive capacity to scrubbing the thick-hot fumes that enwreathed him. immediately, he heard his ghosts begin to wail. overcapacity. he turned off his phys-sim momentarily to alleviate the load. he''d turn it back on again when he needed to engage someone from afar or calculate something. instantly, his vision refreshed and it was like the smoke around him never was. more helpfully, it allowed him to avoid running chest-first into a jutting pike. smears of oozing thoughtstuff caught his attention. from a distance, avo could see two figures fleeing through a conveyor gate leading into another wing of the factory some fifty feet above. the father and the son avo guessed. at least they were alive. he had no idea how long he spent dead, but seeing as they only just getting out of this area, he mustve been resurrected quick. he was about to call out to them when a bright flash seared into his vision overhead. avo winced and narrowed his eyes. the ghosts tried to adjust but the issue wasnt with perception, but biology. he needed starshades or goggles for his eyes to withstand high brightness. a thrust pack gunned its propulsors repeatedly through the air. a deafening voice boomed as wild laughter filled the room. as his sight cleared, avo watched the vague bright-wreathed outline of an enormous being dash into the same conveyor gate as the father and son. hunter. one who was running the chrome build of a bruiser and had a powerful enough thrust pack to achieve lift despite weighing a few tons. wonderful. avo grinned. more of them to eat. to make matters more interesting, their thoughts were shaped into an opaque, opalescent dome, but lacked the ripple of a metamind. probably just a ward then. avo knew how to crack wards. and judging from how it wasn''t cycling, he guessed it was probably really cheap; something he could make in an hour. the hunter pried the gate wider and squeezed his way in. machinery broke. metal walls groaned, folding. the figure threw back his head and chuckled, his voice the sound of caustic thunder. all the while, the ghosts kept cheering his name. +slau-ter-man! slau-ter-man! slau-ter-man!+ run, flats! run! slaughterman bellowed. like a wolf descending into a rabbits den, the slaughterman followed the boy and the father. the hunter drifted out of sight in the physical world while his mind faded into the jungle of thought and ghosts comprising the local nether. avo shifted his perception deeper into the nether, trying to keep track of his new prey. logic told him this was the perfect opportunity to run. let the boy and his father face their fate, that they were certain to die. but walton wouldve tried to help them. and the beast wouldnt just leave perfectly good prey alone. ethics and desire joined forces. good sense was overruled. all was wonderful in the world. the overlay of the nether grew thicker and brighter, instilling his environment with an etheric resonance. pulsing ghosts of myriad designs leaking spills of emotion and surface thoughts crowded his vision. there were thousands of watchers in this room alone. they bore chimeric visages with parts of their pseudo-ontology shaped to resemble nu-birds, robots, warships, and even long-dead celebrities. connected by dangling strands running far up to the massive locus above, their hosts took in the festivities through the eyes of their phantasmal constructs in the safety of their own habs. it looked strange from the other side. avo felt a strange sensationhow he should have been among the ghosts, delivering mem-drops or planting nightmares into other hosts for his dives. rarely did he pay attention to the little people serving as his distractions, doing the surviving and dying while he made his imps. suppose it was the same experience that let him spot the hunters trail so easily. the ghosts were mostly tethered together. their leaking thoughtstuff bubbled and dissolved. the hunters thoughts, however, left a trail: an oily vector that painted an arc through the open air and down through the crumpled gates. a leak in his wards. unfortunate. found you, avo whispered to himself. faintly, he was aware of a tendril of ghostly matter leaking down from one of the ghosts above him. it stung out at him. and splashed across his active wards like water. the ghost itself spasmed back as an injection of concentrated trauma flooded it. suddenly, it fragmented into pieces. avo chuffed a low laugh. the host cut the link out of reflex. ejected the damaged ghosts from their metamind. osarai memguard - integrity holding - 99% damage report: outer accretion damage minimal fragging damage replacing memory integrity - 100% through the chamber, more ghosts turned their attention to his presence now. instead of swirling down to latch onto his consciousness, they kept a distance from him. an example had been made. the rest were wary. good. he was no more a vicarity to them; not a puppet of meat to perform and entertain for their amusement. a small measure of freedom reclaimed via his skill. this was a display of expertise. this was what walton would have wished him to show. mastery and skill. satisfaction rose within avo, but still, the potential pleasure of a possible kill called to him. he tuned into the thoughtwaves of the public lobby as he went after the slaughterman. +jaus! fucking jaus alive! the ghoulie is back up.+ one of the snakes twitched where her lip should have been. +fucking answer me!+ little vicious snarled. oh. he mustve hurt her betting pool something bad by not dying. +why are you here?+ +trying to survive,+ avo replied. +thats all.+ she scoffed. +really? a ghoul with a necrojacks capabilities turns up in my godsdamned crucible just trying to survive? fuck. you. you hear me? fuck you! give me an honest answer? who are you?+ except he didnt have one to give. the paths ahead of him narrowed. avo realized that no matter what he did from this point on, her attention would be on him. fixed to him. and if she could, she would see him dead if only to regain control. her rage told him that this had gone beyond being professional into the personal. +me?+ avo said. +someone who chooses. choosing to survive. choosing to leave. didnt want to be here. wasnt up to me. cut me from the system. let me go. i fade. take those two. you wont find us again.+ a wheeze between laughter and outrage sputtered from her mind. +youarrogantfuck! what the fuck was that? i asked you who and why! you give me a half-answer of cryptic shit about choosing? and then make demands? you gotta be a guilder? this a suicider? you wearing that body on a suicide run? busting up my show for fun? are you with the reg?+ the reg? a regular was here? avo sighed. more questions. more confusion. this conversation started nowhere and was going nowhere. she wanted something to vent her anger at, but in honesty, he was about as in the dark as she was. he hadnt a clue as to how he found himself in the maw. even less about how he was constantly coming back from the dead. ultimately, he didnt have any good answers to give her. and besides, she was cutting into his feeding time. +you trying to save the kid?+ little vicious asked, suddenly switching gears. +that was an easy meal that you skipped out on. tell me, how hard was it? how bad was the fix calling to you in the body?+ taunting him now. trying to get a rise. avo stopped responding. there mightve been a path where he could have persuaded her to release him. to trade something for his freedom. he didnt have the skills and attributes for that path. what he knew how to do were kill and jack. right now, he intended to do both and keep moving. something in the back of his mind told him that after this, every last asset little vicious could deploy would be on him. right now, he didnt care. death was light on his shoulders and growing lighter yet. he didnt know how many more times he could come back, but he was two lives for two deaths so far. what else to do but play those odds further? +not enough,+ avo replied. he changed his thoughtwaves and rose out from the lobby. the last sensation he felt was little vicious'' erupting rage. almost worth it. but now, he needed to work fast because, after that, every last hunter would soon be on him. he needed to deal with slaughterman, and fast. a plan formed in his mind. well, more like a series of interconnected hopes manifested from growing hunger. reaching down, he plucked a loose piece of metal and threw it across the chamber as far as he could. it skipped a few times before bouncing against the wall. he was already mid-run by this point, preparing to leap. something mechanical was turning on the other side. jumping up, he mantled the side of the ovaline machine, climbing over it as the large printed letters spelling disposal glared at him. ah. this machine was where the disqualified wights were burned then. ascending to the top, he found himself a full ten feet above the still unaware slaughterman. its helix cannon was pointed at where the metal shard struck the wall, too late to fire upon avo as he descended down, blade angled for a killing thrust. or so he thought. the helix cannon snapped back into place. avos eyes widened. faster than both he or slaughterman could reach, the cannon fired on auto, flashing as a coruscating beam ignited the air. a pillar of heat sank through avos gut and cored through the ceiling as well. he bellowed in agony. the cannon flashed twice more before he concluded his descent. twice more, avo screamed. blindly, he lashed down with the blade and felt a sudden pressure pass through his blow. the cannon suddenly stopped firing. the frequency blade sank an inch further into slaughtermans shoulder. the three implants acting as the hunters eyes flashed. behind him, his thrust pack expanded in a corona of light. slaughterman struck avo like a tidal wave of metal, burrowing against a wall. inside, avo felt his bones shatter, darkness creeping up from the corner of his eyes as the pain followed. just in time for slaughterman to swat the blade from his snapped wrist. cold titanium fingers locked tight around avo''s neck, sinking deep as his vertebrate popped in a chorus. weakly, avo lashed out, feet and arms ripping, his claws squealing uselessly against metal. slaughterman laughed and slammed avo against the wall. once. twice. the third and all the rest blurred into one big beating; a miasma of pain. the tidal wave that was slaughterman became a tsunami of raining blows. avo felt his muscles fray, his bones fracture. again and again, the hunters punches sank through him, the smacking sounds of the impacts wet with ripping skin and spilling blood, made even heavier by the timed bursts of his thrust pack. a mouthful of bile and blood poured out between avo''s broken fangs. titanium fingers thick as batons clenched him tight, holding him aloft. bloodied and concussed, avo found himself gazing up at the three glowing eyes of slaughterman. the hunters nose was missing, his teeth were like monofilament chainsaws. avo chuckled even as he hacked up his insides. the hunter looked like a child glued too many razorblades to a melted dolls face. it was absurd. thought i killed you, slaughterman said. his voice was like the growl of an engine, more machine than human. couldve sworn i saw you come apart on the ground. neat trick with the drone though. very impressive. for a ghoul. missed, avo said. he coughed. three of his fangs fell out. the sheer force of the blows left the right side of his body paralyzed. shuffling his blood into his spine, he found what was wrong: part of his lower columns was now embedded in his left ribplate. not good. sword missing. time for the other option. badshot. slaughterman laughed. suppose i am. but it wasnt too bright of you to come after me. ihehyou know you pissed off vicious something fierce. shes yelling in my brain now. screaming for me to kill you. you did come close, though. ill give you that. a thoughtful expression came over slaughtermans face. how long does it take for you to heal spinal damage? wait, dont tell me. he slammed avo against the wall again. something slid out of place. avos nerves came afire as a conflagration of agony. the sounds that came from him were tortured. animalistic. familiar. pain was pain. pain and its fleeting nature were what it meant to be a ghoul. pain was focus. avo activated his ghost-link. plan b. jacking a mind, at its base, was fundamentally simple. you were not attacking the will of an individual. that was a separate metaphysical construct altogether. no. you were altering memory and wielding trauma as a weapon. what most ghost-links did was connect minds together via ghosts. it was more a bridge than a weapons factory. that being said, however, avo had an option up his sleeve: one that he almost never used. the four initial ghosts he claimed on the barge were raw. unsequenced. untuned. the deepest memory imprinted on them was being murdered by avo. pain. fear. agony. horror. all condensed together. avo was too beaten to spoof the ever-shifting wards of ghosts that shielded slaughterman. but he didnt need to. he just needed to plant the ghosts deep enough. in an instant, avo condensed and amplified every ounce of trauma his metamind could identify from the scavengers'' ghosts and fused them together into a piercing bomb. pushing it out using his ghost-link''s connect function, he thrust his makeshift weapon into slaughtermans wards. immediately, he felt sinews of infectious thought bite back at him, trying to flood him with countermeasures. also composed of trauma. the climbing memories infected his bomb first, increasing its damage potential. avo grinned. fool. he pushed the ghosts deeper using his ghost-link and then ejected them from his system. ghosts ejected ghosts - [24] immediately, the wards cracked. a fissure ran deep. avos grin grew wider. slaughterman cried out, clutching his head with a wince. agh! that stung! howd you suddenly, the opaque shell that was slaughtermans wards fissured as the bomb went off. multiple expressions flashed over the hunters face. none of them were peaceful. a choked sound tore from his throat as he shook and spasmed. in the nether, avo could see the blasted threads of slaughtermans mutilated thoughtstuff flowing free, dissolving spill by spill. there was still enough solidity at the center containing something of the mans ego, but it too was beginning to collapse. insanity, followed by catatonia, then, were the next steps. youyou slaughterman gasped. he tried to close his fingers around avo''s neck. break him. something major was missing from his mind. he couldn''t do it. avo laughed, still held against the wall by the hunter. not how he wanted to win. or imagined it. but still, he broke the slaughterman. he broke the door leading to maintenance opened. someone blinked out from the door like a streak of lightning to the chattering voice of the boy. the top half of slaughtermans skull vanished at an angle. blood splashed over avos eyes, coating his tongue with flavor, and blinding his eyes with the splatter. reaching up with his left hand, the chromed bruiser pressed his fingers into the softness of his brain tissue. the physical damage matched his cognitive ruination now. fitting. shit, slaughterman muttered as the last breath wheezed out from him. he toppled backward, his grip on avos neck loosening. his body met the ground with a final thunderous tremor. sliding off the furrowed slope of the wall and flopping down to one side, avo could do nothing but wait as the clinking of metal against metal slowly approached him. from the corner of his right eye, he saw the pointed tip of his recovered frequency blade pointed low in a hand not his own. a low contralto voice greeted him. huh. i dont remember your kind ever wearing clothes. Chapter 2-7 The Right Kind of Broken chapter 2-7 the right kind of broken implants dont make a regular. weapons dont make a regular. not even training makes a regular. regulars are made through trauma. through experience. through fortitude. the kind of fortitude that no amount of cog-conditioning can replicate. the willingness to adapt to any kind of physical alteration made upon their vessels and the stability to bear extensive neuro-modifications. through these trials and tribulations, what is already raw steel can be shaped into a proper weapon. to call them hammers would be too limited. to call them scalpels belies their capacity for damage. to call them soldiers betrays the purity of their service. so, if you think you have what it takes to be war incarnate, focus here to stream your details to your nearest highflame recruitment center -highflame nether ad, so you wanna be a reg 2-7 the right kind of broken his savior approached with the caution one might take treading toward a minefield. fusing his spine back together using his cells, he waited for the prickling to spread through him and return the use of his limbs. he couldnt even remember when slaughterman broke him. he remembered drinking the hunters echo even less. igniting thaumic cycler: 8 thaum/c a scant foot across from him, the gargantuan hunter lay still, the contents of their half-mechanized brain spilling across the war-mottled ground. avo didnt receive a ghost this time. wasnt much of a ghost to claim seeing how ruptured his cognition was from the makeshift ghost bomb. transferring a slapdash explosive made from raw trauma was a desperation trick. wouldnt have worked against even remotely competent memory-wards. thing about wards though: without a metamind, theyre more a cage. directly rigged to your base-mind, theyll tear up your psychology and bleed protective memories into your own. schizophrenia is a common byproduct. as is anxiety. cheap products always incurred hidden costs. +fuck,+ little vicious snarled, her voice cutting through the room. +i knew it! i knew you were with the fucking reg! youre a lucky half-strand, ghoulie. lucky, lucky little shit. put good imps on slaughterman snuffing you. good imps now lost. oh, but this isnt over. not even close. see you soon ghoulie. you and her both.+ the public broadcast snapped into silence as he felt little vicious presence depart. avo felt a growing tension replace her. this was the second time the host of this little playground of horrors mentioned a regular. eyes fixed on the frequency blade approaching him, he suddenly wondered if he was about to take another trip down resurrection street. if he was dealing with a reg right now, then his life was pretty close to forfeit. saying a reg didnt like ghouls was like saying an exterminator took issue with aratnid infestations. shadows shifted across the floor. avo looked up, momentarily distracted from his potential murderer. the father and his son emerged from their hiding place, bodies stale with sweat, heartbeats decelerating. the regular moved, cutting the two off in a sudden blink. it was like they were in one place, then another. a gust of wind splashed over avo. they had moved faster than he could perceive. had an accelero frame-flex implant the least. not even visekeles seemed that fast earlier. the boy chittered something at the regular. they didnt respond immediately. instead, there was a shuffling noise as they walked over to stand over avo. the regular had mag-boosted running blade transplants instead of standard legs. explained how they moved so fast. the edges of their feet were rimmed with gore and glinted with a simmering heat. with a simple nudge, they flipped him over with a kick, uncaring how their bladed legs burned him. avo didnt mind much either. not while he was already hissing from the agony ebbing through his back. staring up at the ceiling, the regs face remained shrouded in brightness, so shrouded by the light that they stood a towering shadow, their holocoat projecting waterfalls of grey around their torso, masking their physical frame. slowly, with blade at the ready, they leaned down. a rough-faced woman came into view. her hair was knotted in a thick coiled braid that disappeared past her right shoulder. the shape of her face was hard; sharp cheeks matched with a square jaw. the jagged claw scars running down her eyes were probably more statement than injury. it didnt take much to strip scars from tissue. avo knew those scars too. they were the type one would get from a ghouls claws. likely earned in close quarters down in the underways. down in a place like this. somewhere far from artillery and air support, with things collapsing into a desperate melee. something about her told him she didnt much care about the lack of support. it was in her eyes, the absence of softness or worry; no fear, only focus. the holotags dangling from her neck swayed through the veil of her coat. the tags design drew him into the embrace of memory, prying him ever so slightly out of pain''s grasp. they were marked with a many-eyed creature bearing eighteen burning wings and a serial number. the highflame insignia. definitely a regular, then. still, what was an official guild operator doing in the crucible? the strength of her heartbeat interrupted that line of questioning. it pulsed once and then stayed silent. across the length of seconds, it stayed quiet. every sinew within his body was flooded with worry. it was uncanny not being able to hear the heartbeat of a human. something that made them feel like something more than prey. of course she had an enhanced circulatory system. maybe even respirocytes in her blood instead of just an augmented pump. maybe a full nanosuite. whatever she had boosting her systems, it was far superior to the cheap chrome so commonly used by the chaff in the warrens. strangely, her metamind was a simple single-ringed halo compared to his. it had a spiraling set of intersecting wards that cycled through memories, switching them between layers of lanes. avo frowned. he knew that design. ori-thaum. oruboro-class. required twenty ghosts to run at baseline. probably ate up ninety percent of her cog-cap. that told him two things. first: she was definitely not a necrojack. second: her relationship with highflame had to be something special. ori-thaum was the rival guild to their ambitions. somehow, he couldnt imagine the two sides mixing products, even if it was pragmatic. as he studied her, so too did he notice her studying him. her expression was cold and blank. her molten-gold eyes glared down at him with an inscrutable intensity. the cold war of silence persisted between them. neither wanted to give ground. from her perspective, what was there to say to a monster, who ate the innocent in the name of the low masters. from his, what words did he have for an old killer, whose extermination squads massacred a billion of avos kind as a lesser backdrop to a greater war? between them, what was there to say to an old enemy, who doubtlessly lost allies and kin to each other during the uprising? not much was the answer. avo still remembered the dreams he smuggled from former regulars in the nether, the canvas of their midnight delirium painting screeching hordes of ghouls feeding themselves into kill boxes held by drones, artillery, golems, and soldiers; flashes of claw breaking against hyper-auged soldiers shrouded in nano-armored combat-skins. the ghouls were made to be expendable monsters. the regulars were made to be far more than mere soldiers. they werent equals. not even remotely. why havent you shot me yet? was what avo wanted to ask the reg. that required more sentiment than he possessed. it sat next to avo. halted at the entrance to the maintenance hall, the father and the boy just stared, wonderment and horror blended across their faces, trying to comprehend how the dog came to be. living beyond the walls of new vultun probably meant anomalies from ruptures and fallen heavens was probably commonplace items for those two. but still, true thaumaturgy was still a deviant sight to behold for the eyes of merest mortals. the regular offered avo her hand. the fingers were still flesh. callous and natural, at least on the surface. the woundhound growled at her, inching up next to avo. he sent it a thought and ordered it to heel. it whimpered. her lip twitched. dogs not going to be fast enough. take your head off before you can sic it. she wasnt lying. she killed slaughterman faster than he could perceive. an alpha-grade reflex implant will do that: make you ten times as fast as a flat. still meant she was four times faster than him. he doubted the dog would even touch her if he let it loose. his best advantage against her was still his skill in necrotheurgy, but he needed more specialized phantasmics to deal with her wards. it wouldnt be just smuggling a makeshift bomb into her mind via a communicative link. wordlessly, avo took her hand. the beast inside him imagined whipping a claw across her throat, slitting her arteries, and slipping his tongue through the cleft of welling blood. his rational mind imagined the last sight he would actually behold would be his ascending body as his head toppled from his neck. stained with his warring desires, his woundhound growled. avo bite back his urges and glared at the dog. it whimpered and went silent. with a casual tug, she dragged him to his feet as if he weighed nothing. he rose, finding himself a foot taller than she, but her bulk considerably thicker. just her forearms alone were thick with enhanced muscle. unlike the slithering eel-like organs he had inside him, hers were like taut bowstrings. through her skin, he could faintly smell the carbon of the nanofibers. she clutched his hand tight. draus. what? my name. youre taking point. stay ahead of me. dont lag. dont do funny shit. you stay straight and narrow and maybe i wont snuff you. she slid his former frequency blade down past the veil of her coat. then, she extended a hand again, offering him a curve-barreled pistol. it had a layer of lenses running down the center of the barrel, fused in place by a lattice of cheap plasteel. an auto-laser of some kind was his best guess. dont bother turning that on me none either. dont got the stopping power. and you dont got the pace. avo frowned. strange that she was giving the gun to him. it was built for her hands, so he could barely get his fingers around it. still, it felt awkward in his grip. like there was too much weight missing. never shot a gun before, avo said. nearsighted. ghoul. she shrugged. it shoots itself. got a smart-aim system. link your ghosts to it and point to where they tell you. then squeeze. dont jerk. better with sword, he said. why not just return my sword? you use gun. she snorted. functionally, youre slow. likely, youll just drop it again. presently, you cant take it from me. all good arguments. avo accepted the gun. the weapons detail began interfacing with his possessor phantasmic. mirrashard-0227 auto-laser pistol an ammo counter manifested in his minds eye. twenty charges left. currently tuned to burst fire. chlorofusion cells were still operational. generating one charge every five seconds. useful. another frown graced her face. still havent told me how you got to be a necro. how you got that meta. dont know, avo said, half lying. she didnt need to know about walton, and he didnt know enough himself about the metamind. real box of mysteries, aint you? for her and him both. he didnt even have any ideas about how he ended up in the maw. her eyes went dark; no more scanning. she motioned him to head down the walkway from whence she came, past where the father and the boy were huddled. avo shrugged and accepted. better odds than facing all the hunters alone. he crossed by the father and son and noted their uneasy expressions. they had no idea what to make of the regular either. probably didnt know much about the uprising. as they trailed behind, he felt his woundhound nudge them out of the way, snarling. father and son obeyed. faintly, he could feel the dog in his missing injuries, like it was anchored to his wounds. it felt strange, but anything was better than being crippled. direction? avo asked. getting out of here. heading for an old corpse delivery station connecting up to one of the blocks. need to get a mile and a half up before we beat the game, and enter the warrens proper. that or we can kill the rest of the hunters. the regular shot the father and son a look. well, maybe we could do it. puts them at risk though. avo tried to hide his salivation. part of him knew this to be unwise. he got lucky with one and nearly got snuffed by the other. wouldve been his death if he didnt get tricky with his meta. mightve even still gotten killed if draus didnt come in when she did if slaughterman managed to keep his mind together for another second. still. he couldnt deny that he wanted this. he hadnt fed from live prey in years. he missed the thrill. he missed the taste. he noticed that his cog-feed was screaming again. close to overcapacity again. he sighed. ejecting those ghosts was a necessity but had left him with less to work with. he disabled the ghost-link and cast his consciousness forward as a specter. it would prevent him from being ambushed within a fifty-foot radius. peeking back at her, he watched as her thoughtstuff was contained like a pallid nodule at the center of her oscillating wards. no other phantasmics to speak of. no active scouting on her end. definitely not a necro, that one. relied more on getting things done in the material. he guessed her wards were good enough, but he expected something more robust for her mind. if he had his original phantasmics, he definitely could breach her mind. specter? she asked. he grunted in acknowledgment. how many. one. only got fifteen ghosts for my cap. twenty-two. but what she didnt know was in his favor. ones good. just keep it ahead and around and not on me. you catch a scent or hear a sound im gonna ask you to make that ambush-screech your kind used during the war. remember which one? he shot a look at her. another uncomfortable silence. he hated how much better she was at weathering them than he. he knew which sound she wanted him to make. the noise had never left him. it came to him when he was sequencing his own nightmares, sometimes. watching your brothers get massacred by fire and metal tended to engrave the memories pretty deep. yeah. good. keep going down maintenance. were gonna take a left somewhere up ahead, cut through this madhouse. avo acquiesced. after all, what was there to say to an old enemy, made a companion of convenience through this game of death? Chapter 2-8 Mem-Locked chapter 2-8 mem-locked insufficient. thats the word every snuffer hates to hear. reflex isnt a want. its a necessity. dont have an accelero booster or a framejacker? you wont see what kills you. durability is a necessity. cant survive shrapnel or concussives? youre going to die the first moment a micro-missile hits youand it will hit you. skill is a necessity. the one thing that separates the rusts from the gleamers. gotta be able to use what you got and kill out of your weight class. jaus knows youll be fighting off your back plenty of times. you put all this together and you might burn brighter than most. new vultun is a land of dreams, consangs, but theres a hell of a lot more of you than there are opportunities. at the end of the day, someones got to be the candle for others to be the flame. -quail tavers, school of the warrens, page 14 2-8 mem-locked scrying through the warpath draus left behind in maintenance made avo realize he was walking next to a hurricane. as far as he could stretch his mind to see, from this room to the ones that paralleled it, devastation marked the way. he counted seven dead in total. seven heavily augmented hunters armed with weapons both exotic and practical, all doubtlessly lent toward the purpose of snuffing hapless survivors for entertainment. the same seven encountered a reg in combat and were found wanting. now, only five pattered beneath the flickering lights in these cracked and dented halls. at its head, avo found his hunger roused by the aroma of death. smears of gore and stripped limbs lent the trail a macabre aesthetic. the words no hope scratched into the wall by what avo guessed to be a previous batch of survivors only added to the effect. mangled viscera oozed free from broken implantsthe bodies that they were formerly attached to were unrecognizable, smeared across the area as something between a carcass and a scrap heap. a low snarl filled avos mind. an ambiance of whispered awe and other chains of spinning ghosts kept a respectful distance. a building surge of rage filled the air with heat and frustration. +she killed them too?+ little vicious whined. her voice was on the verge of tears. +thatsi paidits not fair! you were supposed to die! you were all supposed to die! die! fucking die! this was supposed to be fun! youre ruining it! shes ruining it! ruining my show!+ avo shot draus a look. the regular shrugged. crashed better crucibles. she aint special. +fucking half-strand piece of shit!+ little vicious snarled. avos foot slipped into the brain pulp of a dead hunter. the rest of their skull was caked against the twisted barrel of a shredded drone. +youjust you wait! ill get you! ill fucking get you both!+ the broadcast went dead. avo shot draus a look. do this for fun? just keep walkin, draus said. she fixed her handiwork with casual disregard. they werent so different there. well, she smelled different. her blood, for instance, smelled entirely too novel. inside him, the beast hummed in delight. it watched her, waiting, preparing for the moment she would be struck down by weakness. prime meat. it thirsted to hurt her. eat her. he never managed to eat a regular. perhaps no. avo repressed the beast. he had fed enough earlier. he still had enough energy to go. this was just instinct, just a blind urge. one that would get him killed if he gave into it. he fought down the shivers and kept his focus on his specter. a bend came ahead. he peeked around it. no one was there. no thoughtstuff either. quiet. no damage. looked like they were entering a peaceful stretch. got more impulse control than most of your kind, draus said, from behind. he shot her a look over his shoulder. howd that come about? she noticed his twitching. guessed how he mustve been feeling from that. how naked it made him feel. he hated operating in the material for that reason. harder to mask his nature, harder to contain it. he envied her holocoat, then. it shrouded her loadout from sight. it couldve shrouded his quirks. practice, avo said. that drew a laugh from her, a raspy noise her throat was unused to making. practice, it says. avo shot her a glare. her laugh turned to a disbelieving chuckle. jaus. you aint lying. story behind you grows stranger n stranger. avo grunted. he left it at that and focused on scouting again. his single specter extended out from him like a groping limb, feeling its way through space and matter. he had taken its design from the bodkin earlier and could see data surging down his spinning ghosts through his cog-feed. with his limited operating power and unoptimized memory-cap, he could only shape his specter fifty feet in one vector. if he wanted to adjust its functions, he would need to sleep. mod the memory artifacts in his composition. replace its central emotional impulsers. he could probably squeeze out four times more distance from the specter if he dropped his wards, but that would also leave him an open door for a rival necro. great way to get nulled. besides, even though he hadnt seen proper necro after him so far, he had no desire to let the spectators dive into his mind again. their presence made his mind feel like a hostel that serviced junkies exclusively. still, their little avatars flowed and reached around with their specters as well, resonating similar wavelengths of thought on the public frequency, leaking spills of thoughtstuff through their unsecured wards. their tendrils continued to wreathe the area tight like the limbs of a forest. every three seconds, his cog-feed would ping with a link request from one of his fans. he sighed. while peering ahead through his specter, avo frowned and realized that he had made a mistake. right now, even if he noticed a threat, he would still be first in line to get shot. but he didnt have to be. in a flash, avo studied the build of his counterpart. single specter connected to a wisp-thin trail of ghosts. that didnt indicate they had much cog-cap to bear. good. neither did he right now. his awareness affixed to their position, he studied their location in the material. his adversary was through the walls to his right. avo screeched, the sound coming quickly like the rasping of a blade. draus shoved both father and son prone without a moments hesitation. down against the grime of the floor, the two toppled. through his specter, avo watched as his counterpart slowly reeled back into the nest of spilling thoughtstuff that pervaded the nether. if his metamind was better tuned, he probably could have cast the frequency of his perception even further, expanding the net of his awareness more than they could him. detect their thoughts first and maneuver. right now, they were dagger to dagger. unsurprising seeing as his new phantasmic was pilfered from a drone centuries out of date. how many, draus said, flicking the frequency blade out. its hum filled the air, infusing the atmosphere with pregnant violence. a shudder ran through the walls. a light chorus of ringing came from the loosened bolts spinning from a warped vent. something large was descending, grinding its way down beyond the threshold of these thin walls. one avo said until several more probing specters pushed down from above. four from the look of it. he got a better look at them this time as they approached. each one was paltry. minimal in memory and sequence. missing wards too. avo barred his fangs in a grin. none of them were necros either. no necro would dive with their mind barred. the grin turned to a frown when he realized he had no way of taking advantage of the situation offensively. not without a ghostjack. four, he corrected. maybe five. maybe five? draus asked. first one pulled back. might not be with new group. no wards. minimal cog-caps. going to push them. see what i can scry. draus planted a hand on his shoulder. could be a trap. avo nodded. could. one could. an entire group? unlikely. too many weak links. no one to plug. could also have necro in reserve. but makes no sense. i would have probed. sensed those two, avo pointed to the father and son, huddled against the ground. nulled them first. right now; no probe; no attack. just scrying. more lack than trap, i think. jaus, draus whispered, you actually sound like you know what youre doin. he grunted. nothing to say about that. his brothers didnt exactly earn him the best reputation in terms of intelligence or impulse control. definitely not enough for most ghouls to be good necros. a moments consideration passed. the four specters were holding still, staring at him. he guessed they were afraid of his wards. fearing that he was a trap. good. he could use this one of the specters broke from the four, pushing forward. avo felt the splash of its attention spill past him and draus before washing over the father and the boy instead. snarling, avo drove his specter into its approaching counterpart. the frequency of its perception tore back to him too late. its host tried to pull back. avo speared his mind forward, using his wards as a makeshift weapon. bracing, he plunged layers of weaponized trauma into his counterpart. his cog-cap spiked, wards overtaxed from the impact. he lost grip on his thoughts as the outer layer of his metamind sawed into the softness of his enemy. thoughtstuff snapped free like tendons and oozing fluid both. avos wards cracked. through his ruptured defenses, however, he gained accidental secondhand insight into his foes as frayed drips of thoughtstuff spilled in. cog-capacity overclocking - 124% warning: memory damage incurred disabling phantasmics restoring damaged memory sequences - 88% avos cog-feed flickered. interfaces quavered in his minds eye, unstable from the impact. it had been a desperate action. one that he had been reluctant to do for fear of it overloading his limited systems. however, pieces of foreign memory drifted over him like oil over water. good news. meant the fool that tried scrying the father and boy was certainly nulled. flashes of screaming echoed in avos recollection, moments of someone toppling over on a platform of some kind. a massive elevator. they were foaming at the mouth. twitching as their personal cog-feed flashed with crackling static and glitched, overloaded by damage. beside him, four other hunters rushed over, holding him down, trying to stabilize him. between his newly gleaned glimpses from the comatose hunter and the other specters pulling back, the situation grew clearer to avo. they had seen the father and the boy. and he had seen them. no more hiding now. nulled one, avo said. they know where we are. opposite is also true. theyre on an elevator. large. coming down. past these walls. eighty feet. or less. elevator from the block above us, draus said. think i know what youre talkin about. before avo could continue, another spray of perception washed out over them, narrowing on the father and the boy more like a targeting beam. avo hissed as spectral reticles flashed over their heads. they were mem-lockedhappened when an exposed mind was scanned enough to have a long-term memory tagged and mapped in the nether. draus, avo said, pointing. there wasnt the need. she saw it too. she blurred. the frequency blade hummed. when next he saw her, she was already standing over the father and the boy, a clashing spark flashing along her blade as she cleaved a gauss-fired projectile. it had been slowed by passing through layers of wall, but still, avo blinked. the exit wounds on the walls were the size of avos fist. metal folded inward like curved petals, whorled by torque. pieces of shrapnel split across avos cheek, forcing him to duck with a hiss. twice more did draus parry, and twice more did impacts ring. her speed was something else, but there was an economy of motion as well; the way she used the weapon was as much a part of her as her bones. then, through the widening rents in the wall, a final shot slipped through. fast as her augs made her, projectiles were always faster. the shot struck her, dead on against her chest. Chapter 2-9 Angles of Attack chapter 2-9 angles of attack there are four main tenets to any tactical engagement: force, mobility, survivability, and asymmetry. all four concepts must be studied and mastered by the agent and applied to the variables of circumstance. understanding how to wield and alter these concepts is the art of miracle-making. the agent must be overwhelming where their foe is soft. the agent must maneuver to deprive their foe of sustained force vectors. the agent must survive to adapt and learn from their mistakes. and the agent must always strive to claim--and reclaim--the angles of asymmetrical initiative, to be the sole possessor of applied force; strike far when the enemy is close; strike mind when the flesh is hard; strike unseen when their foes have dominion. -osjon thousand, death pruning, page 1 2-9 angles of attack between the shot and draus'' subdermals came a roar of thunder; a tungsten needle cast against alloy-infused flesh that knew nothing of fragility. she rose, a single leg sparking against the screaming matter beneath her feet, torn from her stand as if by the backhand of a giant. she struck the wall, and in her place, the metal groaned, curving to accommodate her launched mass. +yes!+ little vicious voice returned. a shrill, mocking chorus of laughter followed. the spectators were alive with excitement. bloodshed was back on the menu and they wanted it now. +thought i was just going to let you all walk out of here? thought the game was over! its not! its never over! not till i say it is!+ draus pushed off her imprint and cracked her neck, grinning viciously as if she had just taken a punch instead of a gauss-projected projectile to the chest. her holocoat glitched for a microsecond and reset, concealing her form beneath its wave-like veil anew. she spat a fresh globule of blood onto the ground and slipped back next to avo. sniper, draus said, sounding more annoyed than worried, but he could hear the spills of wind whistling through the tear in her left lung. on her tongue, he smelled her blood and sensed the clotting already beginning to set in. she was mending faster than he was. but still wounded. still close enough to human. think theyre reloading. four shots. tungsten piercers. heard the gun charging just now; old railgun i reckon. probably a valquist g-7. she laughed. piece of shits been out of date since the second guild wars. the blood dripping from her chin made him chitter involuntarily. she was hurt. maybe he could tear into her now. maybe. but the way she held that blade warned him otherwise. a hurt reg was still a fighting reg, and a fighting reg could still snuff him easy. avo considered peeking through the exit wounds left in the walls and thought better. his cog-feed was still destabilized; loose debris of thoughtstuff mended slowly in his mind as if broken strands poured back into the shape of a chain. he was getting his phantasmics back, but he couldn''t rely on them for now. the remaining specters of his foes were frozen in place, their hosts too terrified to push forward after the casualty he inflicted. this lull would not last. panic was impermanent, and the minds of men were ever so skilled at forgetting. soon, one side had to push. claim the momentum and claim the initiative. in this, avo found his inner beast and his mind in alignment: four specters did not mean four hunters. those could have just been the scouts. he imagined himself and the regular trying to hold the halls, but the memory of slaughterman''s shot punching through his skull worked at his patience like a saw. to a mag-thrown slug, he was as much glass as the father and his boy. survival came from killing rather than being killed right now. the boy whimpered. the father choked out hushed words of compromised calm to him. they struck avo as two crumbling bridges holding each other steady. with a thought, he directed his woundhound to shield them. the bulk of the dog''s length curved, wrapping them in a protective wall. no shots followed. he kept the dog there anyway. through the public lobby, little vicious was ranting about her vengeance again. details about her hunters were the best that imps could buy, of the people they''ve killed and other details regarding guns, orifices, and corpses. street-squire talk. avo heard it all before. ghoul, draus said. she didn''t bother looking at him, choosing to wipe another smear of blood from her lips. a click rattled from beneath her cloak. it sounded like the chambering of a round. "i''m thinkin'' i got an idea of how to go about snuffing these half-strands. going to do some delayed hammer-and-anvil. we''re gonna push through--get close and bloody with them. you hungry?" he responded with a low growl of pleasure. truth be told, it was getting hard keeping his impulses in check while she bled that premium blood of hers. a distraction would be good. "always. plan?" "i storm up first. force some shock action on them. draw their fire. you come in after with the hound and break their cohesion. got enough cog-cap to pull that trick again?" "no," avo said. "two minutes reconstruction. at least." "shame. could''ve made it easier." he shrugged. "could make it quicker. cast your ghosts over. i''ll use your ward." she stared at him in disbelief. no. "you''re not using it much," avo said. "better with me. got the skill." she looked at him, incredulous. "what are we? consangs? no." avo growled. pointless argument. "fine. wasting time. need to push before they do. you ready?" draus grinned. "never not." her metamind rippled. this close, he studied its design and realized it was closer to a bunker than a fortress, her mind layered under thick wards, parting her from intrusion. across its accretion, a phantasmal chain lashed out from her and began interlacing with his surface thoughts. it was his turn to stare incredulously. he never guessed there would be a day when he had to sync minds with a reg to survive. new vultun was endless in its surprises. ghostlink request incoming - accept? avo accepted. link confirmed syncing synced he felt his awareness widen. multiple new windows opened up inside his mind. he could see through draus eyes now, see her combat-tuned cog-feed highlighting things through the walls, predicting firing trajectories for her. phys-sim; medi-scan; a couple of wind and temperature recording icons. not the best sequence he''d seen. definitely not the quality he expected from a reg, but still, more than workable against their current competition. in the upper left corner of her perception, her deepnav was a chaotic mess much like his. syndicate nether-jammers probably; interrupted long-distance mapping for all thoughtstuff not on its wavelength. "sure you can find the way out?" avo asked. "yep," she said, rising to her feet. "it''s through them now. thought about making a climb up the stairs, but now we got ourselves an elevator. how nice." she shot a final look at him and loosened her shoulders. "i''ll move in first. give me five good seconds of engagement before you follow. don''t need you catching a stray shot and dyin'' before making yourself useful." he barred his fangs at her. he wasnt military. his understanding of warfare amounted to doing what the low masters and his instincts told him. however, years of diving in the nether and his tutelage under walton had taught him that going into a situation unprepared and ignorant of the parameters was a great way of getting snuffed. he certainly wasn''t stupid enough to run headfirst into a slaughterhouse. that was her job. he was just here for the main course after. "try not getting snuffed yourself," he said. draus grinned. know their heaviest dont got enough kick to penetrate my subdermals. know that they aint all that fast. for you, avo muttered. distantly, he heard the whine of a mag-charge building up. time was almost up. father and son were going to catch a shot soon. "now or never draus. get going." "yeah," she said. "was waiting for the half-strand to cycle up the shot. make him waste it. remember. i go in. suppress. draw fire. five seconds. you follow. hit them from behind. run them down. they''re street trash. we can snuff ''em." avo looked at the pistol she gave him earlier. he doubted its stopping power. better than just his claws though. "wish i had the sword." something hooked through his shoulder, a tug of agony dragging him up in an arc. the world around him blurred. he spun, slamming hard against the platform, denting metal as he folded its shape with his right shoulder. he winced but clenched his guns tight, refusing to let go. the hook pulled on him again, whipping him up out of the smoke and dashing him against the walls. across jutting plates of metal and hissing vents, he was dragged. took less than a second for his chest to peel open into bouncing flaps. the hook yanked on him again, bringing him high into the air. for a moment he saw everything: the tether impaling him, a flash of draus running up the walls next to him, firing another missile from her wrist, and blood trailing from her ribs. distantly, the head of a hunter kneeling atop one of the gears exploded in a bloom of meat and metal. the tether drew taut, snapping avo back down. he heard the reeving before even saw the flash of revolving teeth. he got to learn it was a chainsaw after it punched through his abdomen, already spinning. avo screamed. the pig-masked hunter laughed, his fat lips opening wide, his spinal-mounted tether retracting from avo''s shoulder with a squelch. +yes!+ little vicious cheered. pig-masked leaned in, cackling, mouth round. just wide enough for avo to shove his new shotgun through, breaking teeth and peeling gums. tears suddenly filled pig-faces eyes. the chainsaw stopped. the hunter blinked and reached for the gun. "mhphfhh!" avo pulled the trigger and painted a new exit through the back of the mans skull. +no! no!+ little vicious screamed. a deafening roar went up in the nether, the bloodlust and thrill of the audience rising to a fever pitch as little vicious descended into a wailing tantrum. they cared not for who lived or who died. they cared only that there were people surviving and dying. worked for avo just fine. thaumic cycler: 11 thaum/c ghosts - [25] tearing himself loose from the chainsaw, avo held his leaking midsection as best he could before he bled out. pig-mask was twitching still, his fat tongue and lower jaw mostly intact. avo knelt down and tore into the tongue, taking a mid-battle spongy treat. he worked in another few mouthfuls of food to encourage his stomach to start healing and tried to get back into the fight. he considered taking the chainsaw with him but it looked too heavy. especially since his insides were spilling everywhere. another flashing gun pulsed through the smoke. avo aimed, hand shaking as he pulled the trigger on his shotgun again. it clicked. empty. avo sighed. the auto-laser hadnt recharged yet either. the beast inside him told him to cast the guns aside and charge. avo ignored it and stayed low. he didn''t want to find out how many resurrections he still had left in him before he was off to the big empty for good. a whistling sound tore through something. avo heard a body drop. stray staccatos of gunfire came from a corner of the room, ringing and bouncing against something. it managed half a dozen rounds before draus got to him. what she did to the last hunter happened too fast for avo to perceive. from his side, he listened as metal wailed, bones broke, and flesh tore. silence became the room, its vigil was broken only by the humming drifting down from the silo. "you still kickin, avo?"draus asked. was that the first time she called him by his name? he couldnt remember. "called me by my name," avo said. "what are we? consangs?" a beat. she snorted. "not even close. you hurt?" fine, avo said, spitting out a mouthful of blood. just need to eat. he didnt wait for her to respond, choosing instead to crawl back over to pig-mask, the plumpest among the hunters. biting into the mangled stump where pig-heads skull used to be, avo was delighted to find remnants of eye tissue. he purred, delighting in its sweet flavor. draus stumbled up beside him. after a few minutes of sating himself, he turned to look up at her. her holocoat was glitching a bit now from the damage. he could see her left arm had a projectile launcher built into the wrist. a hovering needle sank back into its chamber. micro-missiles. he wondered how many more of those she had. he tried taking another peek at her overall kit but she cut their connection too quickly. link lost still didnt trust him. she studied him blankly, probably wondering if he felt bold enough to go after her. he couldnt deny it. at that moment, if she showed him any weakness, he very well mightve. between glitches of her coat, her exposed torso was welling with rapidly scabbing blood, filling the cracks of her ceramo-plated power vest with a waterfall of hardening red. not invincible. not nearly. he sniffled. her wounds smelled sterile. she likely had a nanosuite working in her blood. she spat out a piece of shrapnel. it found its way into her mouth somehow. one of the bastards pulled a vezumo farewell. blew themselves up all dramatic-like when i ran em through. she frowned. lost the cutter. avo glared at her, disappointed. got hurt pretty bad for it. lost it quick. served its need, draus said dryly. avo went back to nursing on pig-mask''s neck stump. he didnt really want to think right now. he just wanted to eat. dimly, he found himself aware of the echoes and ghosts slowly washing toward him, as if he was an island of magnetism pulling at the tides. thaumic cycler: 18 thaum/c ghosts - [32] again, all the metaphysical spoils of the slaughter went to him. inside, a weight was growing, swelling, expanding like a living chasm. the feeling was ineffable. it felt bright there. his cog-feed glitched as well, flickering as it began to take on an increased cog-cap. he had killed--what was it? three? draus killed seven. her efficiency was admirable. he wondered if the one he nulled earlier was among that number. a splashing footstep came from behind. the boy was looking at avo, face pale at the gore around them. the father had a faint taste of bile on his lips as well. like son, like father. both of them were pukers, it seemed. draus groaned at the sight of them. "hey, genius." she gestured at the father to come over. the man barely reached her chin. he looked like a malnourished child standing before a copper giantess. "yes?" he asked. she cuffed him lightly across the head. the force made him stumble regardless. "what part of ''stay low, we''ll be back'' was hard to get?" draus asked. she flicked her gaze across the other bodies, taking inventory of what to loot perhaps. "bodies ain''t secure. shit. ain''t even sure they''re all snuffed yet. come walking up with the boy like that and you could''ve made this all pointless." the boy shouted something at draus. she rolled her eyes. he shrugged. suppose we should head up next, draus said. march out this place before we get anyone else thrown at us." avo grunted, and stilled. in the corner of his eye, he noticed the boy, shivering, staring at him. the fathers lips were pursed tight, face swollen and pleading. avo narrowed his eyes at the two. what did they want? why were they looking at him like that? he looked down at the corpse he was eating and understood. "ah," he said. he plucked a loose piece of gristle he had been working on out from between his teeth. the beast still wanted to eat. and it would. avo just decided that he would wait. do it in the corner. no sense in hurting the boy, good as the cruelty might make him feel. walton would have smiled on that little bit of control, at least. "bad etiquette. for the boy to learn." the father shot him a thankful nod. a more concerning thought came when he realized he couldnt hear little vicious yells or feel her rage anymore. she was gone. missing in the nether. he wanted to believe that she was done and finished. that her tantrum was thrown and this was the best she had. but new vultun wasn''t a city of wants. new vultun was a city of takes. he needed to get his metamind stable again and restore his phantasmics. he needed to stay prepared for whatever was to come next. beneath the pillar, draus reached out with her metamind, interfacing with a blood-splattered console. "goin'' up. close now. real close." her words were for the father and the son. for avo, she offered but a look, her eyes still focused, still serious. yeah. she didn''t believe this was done either. not by a long shot. with a groaning rumble, the gears spun to life and began to rise, taking the platform on its slow climb upward. Chapter 2-10 The Golem chapter 2-10 the golem all golems are drones, but not all drones are golems. the difference lies in their ontology. drones are pure coldtech: nothing thaumaturgical about them. a reliable fusion reactor. no soul. no heavens. golems on the other hand, run on thaumic mass and have a heaven grafted to their reactor. some of the more sophisticated models have soul engines, but most designs dont have the luxury. souls are things of scarcity in a post-scarce world. unless you''re a guilder, simple arithmetic means you got to work with what you got. -fallen heaven: a treatise on thaumic arms and platforms 2-9 the golem there was something absurd about working together with a reg. here he was, not attacking his old enemy, just sitting back while suckling strips of flesh off the neck stump of a pig-headed bruiser. draus, on the other hand, indulged in another kind of cannibalism, casually looting and mutilating the dead for guns and lootable implants. she was watching him too. she didnt try to hide it. her face was on the border between discomfort, hatred, and confusion. how did he feel about her? same as he felt about anyone he couldnt reliably kill. frustration and hunger. phantasmics restored running: [ghost-link]; osarai memguard]; [phys-sim]; [specter] inactive: [auto-seance] his cog-feed stabilized and his phantasmics loaded. studying the cognitive distribution flowing between his ghosts, he noted that one amongst the dead hunters mustve had quite the remarkable memory capacity for him to suddenly be able to support another phantasmic. he would have to sequence that one out when he went to sleep later. for now, he applied the knowledge that his cognitive defenses were back to his anxiety like a paltry balm. good thing he was this deep in the underways. werent that many actual necros down in warrens either. most the metaminds he pilfered through were used secondhand by the hunters. explained why some of the metas were outright insane as wellthought-dissonance was fraying for both minds while synchronization enhanced thinking exponentially. that made them usable by him. the fact that their wards and phantasmics looked to be counterfeit sequences put together worse than what he already had watered the gardens of his disappointment with another splash of warm piss. they were going up now. the massive platform rumbled up to the waste recycling beneath a megablock. or so draus claimed. she said it was abandoned by the guilds. said whatever syndicate running the district above them owned it now. which meant that they could have been ascending to meet their death for all he knew. thin wisping strands slithered around him. the ghosts were drawing closer again. through them, he tasted a budding excitement. they were whispering about the slaughter they just witnessed. ghoul and reg butchering hunters together. a clip of that was going to flush through the nether lobbies across the city tomorrow. left a bad taste in avos mouth. gaining any kind of notoriety was bad for him, especially considering what he was, and especially considering his trade. it had been a good twenty minutes of climbing through the battle-warped interior of the elevator silo. the walls were scarred and pockmarked by gunfire and shrapnel; the last vestiges of bygone massacres. avo wasnt the first to ascend these paths. not him. not draus. definitely not the flats. but maybe, just maybe, they would be the ones to finish the ascent. wouldve been easier to delude himself with that hope if he knew what little vicious was doing. something about the hosts absence caused a yawning pit to grow in his stomach. she didnt sound like the reasonable kind. the kind to know when to cut her losses. she had taken his continued survival personally. avo would bet his half-formed kidneys shed make another run at them somehow. he frowned. didnt she say there were only supposed to be ten or so hunters left? well. that was a lie. but what did he expect? for the murderous host to a carnival of snuff to practice the virtue of truth? +fuck me, but that slaughter hit the spot,+ one of the spectators whispered in the public lobby. +not every day you get saved by the dread draus herself. mad fuckin half strand. who the hells crashes crucibles for fun?+ +were watching a crucible for fun, dumbass.+ +yeah, but shes living it. like i said: mad.+ +pft. fuckin regs got a better health plan than we do. she dies, she gets her consciousness ported over to her backup sheathe. we die and thats it. donezo. snuffed. off to the big nothing or looped into a soul to feed the heavens for the rest of time.+ chains of ghosts were circling the platform, but still keeping their distance. wise. avo had half a mind to null a few more of them to make a couple more examples but decided the amusement wasnt worth the cost. he had more ghosts and an increased cog-cap, but the spectators had wards of their own. the best case was mutually assured damage. he needed to conserve what he had for when he needed it. after finishing his meal, he spent some time going over the dead with draus. she said that they were something of a fire brigade. syndicate hired rapid-response units. not really part of the festivities and held in reserve mainly for interfering variables like her or stream-raids from their rivals. not a word about why exactly she spent her time crashing crucibles, though. between bouts of feeding, avo peeked looks at the regular, studying her. earlier, he thought her implants to be advanced. alphware even. and maybe for a time, the chrome she had was, but the fight earlier made him question the last time she went to the grafters for an upgrade. she was fast. plenty strong enough too, but this was nothing compared to what a regular was supposed to be capable of. the way she fought was practiced and fluid, but ultimately too close to a lesser human for his suspicions. he wondered if her evident limitations came with not being her in combat-skin or this vessel just being a diminished sheathe for her to wear as recreation away from her prime body. avo frowned at the possibility of her having multiple sheathes. it was hard keeping a consciousness anchored after the destruction of the vessel. took a lot of ghosts and phantasmics to keep the mind stableegos tended to disintegrate and lose sanity without enough physical feedback. the number of imps it took to afford that kind of resurrection was somewhere north of owning multiple megablocks. he stared at draus again and found her pilfering a grenade from another corpse. yeah. she didnt strike him as the wealthy kind. had all the wrong habits. not far, the boy emptied his stomach again. so did his father. avo could smell the stink of an infected wound from a mile off. their injuriesthough comparatively minorwere raw, reddened with swelling, and bordered by a wall of growing pustules. right. they were still living on one-point-oh immunes systems, and new vultun had bombarded itself with enough viruses to kill a flat in seconds over the course of the last two guild wars. only reason the two werent dead yet was because voidwatch constantly updated the nanoclouds above with new and improved vaccinations to be applied to the public via the nightly downpour. if they lived to see the surface and made it to taste the midnight rains, theyd make it. if. draus tossed an organic eye at him as she walked by. he caught it and sniffed at the organ, his apprehension and hunger doing battle. why? member your kind liking eyes. you different about that too? avo scooped the eye into his mouth and savored it. the way it popped between his fangs was always satisfying. no, he said to her when he finished chewing. she gave him the faintest nod. she had a railgun poking through her coats shoulder now, its length protruding from the holographic veil like an iceberg from water. it was probably what the hunters were firing at them earlier. he recalled the name. valquist g-7. indeed, he saw the lettering imprinted over the right barrel of the gun. she handed him a few more bullets for his new shotgun. the drum holding his multi-alloy ammo was about as large as his fist and contained around twelve spikes. strangely, it had a crude belt knotted around its exterior. didnt look like that came with the gun. strap it on, draus said. avo did just that. the weight of the bandolier hung from his shoulder awkwardly, but it was better than holding a bunch of loose bullets. be useful for reloading when you need to. reckon you should keep doing what you were doing with it. its thick and sturdy enough to be a blunt instrument. staying close also keeps you from missing. avo grunted. like the recoil. he noticed that draus was still staring at him, her expression growing increasingly inscrutable. something to say? yeah, draus said, though the dryness in her drawl made her sound on edge. uncertain. you uhthat trick with the specter you pulled. using your wards as a weapon. that wasnt a normal tactic. stranger thing is, ive seen it done more than once before in the field. avo grunted. not a good idea. unplanned. desperate. sloppy. a curve of folded metal bent over along the edge. avo realized those were the gates leading into the megablock. it looked like something inhumanly powerful had forced them open manually. considering how mangled the alloy looked, he wondered just what could have crumpled a thirty-foot-high gateway like tin. ghostlink request incoming - accept? link confirmed syncing synced draus had connected to him and he accepted without hesitation this time. through her eyes, he could see her cog-feed scanning down. one of her battle scanners had something bright marked. sixty feet to arrival, she said, more for the father and the boy than avo. get to the edge. stay there and make for the door fast as we arrive. got less than a minute of climb-time left. get ready to run. the father nodded and pulled the boy over, out of the way the screaming of steel grew louder. the brightness marked by her battle scanner drew closer. something within avo yearned to grasp for it, to take it into himself. the way the radiance shone gave off a slowly diminishing resonance. it didnt look much like a fire, but a reflection that somehow possessed a metaphysical vibrancy. through the exit hole he made with his shotgun, the heavy scent of blood slithered up avos nostrils; the types were mixed but the volume was intense. the only times he tasted so much intermixed blood together of such quantities was in illegal grafter clinics. he cast his specter down through the platform. joined to his mind, draus dove along with him. slipping past the material world, he guided his perception five feet, then ten. for a moment, all there was around them were the floating ghosts and the vast nothingness before them. in their minds eye, it was like they were in the depths of the ocean, waiting for something colossal to appear. then, the faintest of phantasmal chains flashed. a thread of ghostly matter. a spill of flowing thought. something was wrong. a single strand of thought didnt manifest on its own. and avo couldnt recall seeing the nether so silent in a spherical expanse before either. then, he tasted the spill of thoughtstuff. a familiar rage greeted him, its taste only recently missing after boiling this very silo. little vicious. he began pulling back. draus turned to look at him. sit-rep? vicious, avo said. its her. im pulling ghostlink lost a pulsing wave tore through the nether, smashing down against his wards like a tidal wave and snapping his link with draus. they both grimaced as a spike of pain throbbed through their skulls. not far, both father and son cried out, their trains of thought viciously wrenched loose from their minds, surface thoughts scalped away by the waves of a hostile detonation. around them, the spectators and ghosts were cast out like bodies in the riptide. someone just detonated a thoughtwave bomb. someone was trying to suppress the nether. someone was deliberately going above and beyond to counter him. avo hissed, trying to get the attention of the father and the son. they were sweating, clutching each other as they coughed and shivered. they turned, eyes blearily, confused as to where they were. overhead, the ceiling descended. the folded gates held out its bent frame toward them, as if in a welcoming gesture. next to the central pillar of the elevator, a ten-foot lance of flowing red punched through countless feet of steel like there was nothing in its way. draus spun. her wrists flashed. her micro-munitions struck and splattered the lance, smearing it across the walls. in an instant, the red came back together and reformed into a spinning hyper-thin lattice of whips. the new constructs slashed out for them. avo ducked. he felt something chip an inch out his shoulder. draus blinked, covering the father with her body. just in time for one of the tendrils to slice a clean line deep through her lower back. her holocoat fizzled and popped. error codes were raining down along her body now. still, she betrayed no pain, only turning to cup a hand to her wound. then, as fast as it came, the haemokinetic constructs sank back out from the new punctures it made through the platform. the boy whimpered. the father muttered a choking prayer. almost there, draus said. her breathing was controlled. smooth. avo could smell her hurt better than even last time. we arrive, we run like hell. what is attacking us? the father asked. golem, i think, draus said. she gave a laugh of disbelief. how the fuck do they got a golem? i dont know the platform beneath them thundered and bent as something heavy slammed into it. avo stumbled. a shrill, haunting laugh filled the air. +you didnt think it would be that easy, did ya?+ little vicious returned, her voice booming loud, announcing the climatic moment to the evening''s festivities. something tore into the underside of the platform. its alloy began to wail. the edges began to bend. immediately, avo heard a new name being chanted by the returning spectators. +golem! golem! golem!+ +you smashed up my show, reg. that wasnt polite. that was pretty fuckin mean, actually. you know how long it took for us to find the proper candidates for this event? you want to know what it took to prepare the venue? how many imps it cost?+ little vicious paused, taking in the jeers from some of the audience, decrying her as a cheater. she sneered with laughter. +still nothing compared to what im gonna do to you and the ghoulie. this was my big night. my day off. and you fucked it. you two absolute half-strands fucked it. im gonnaoh, im gonna enjoy hurting the two of you!+ a surge of force bent the platform over from one of its edges, the impact sending avo bouncing off a wall. two new crimson appendages punched clean through where he stood, mauling the pillar, and tearing through it from below. a loud grinding crash rumbled. a gear was flung loose, descending toward avo. the platform screamed like it was dying, making the final few feet of its ascent just in time. on his hands and feet, avo scrambled toward the gate. ahead, draus was shepherding the two flats. and him. it struck him then that she could have run off at any time. she was more than fast enough. +you shits better start running,+bubbling flows of blood flooded through the rents of the platform sawing it apart with hyper-thin lines of razor floss. through the rents beneath him, avo caught sight of his unseen pursuer. it resembled the chimeric union between a blood-forged serpent layered with countless groping arms and a spear-tipped spire. stumbling past the crack, avo heard his metamind wailing in his stead. his cog-feed flickered, blunting the damage. he just beheld something unnaturala defiling of the natural order. below, a thaumaturgically constructed behemoth coated in ever-flowing rivulets of blood was tearing through metal to get at him. a golem, something both machine and miraclea weapon platform infused with the partial corpse of a god. without a beat, avo sprinted after his group already fleeing past the lip of the gate in the megablock. part of him wanted to stay. fight. drink the freely offered blood. as delicious as the thought was, his legs kept moving. the beast didnt whine much about that. not even it liked its odds against a god. sangeist, draus said, spitting information as fast as she could deliver. stormtree golem. its blood mimics the properties of the solid matter it deconstructs. dont let it close. itll tear us right up. avo checked his phantasmics again and considered his options there. little vicious probably had far superior wards than the hunters she employed, but more than that, she was actively using the thoughtwave bomb to suppress him. part of him was flattered. the rest of him was occupied with the fact that he couldnt even pull a ward-bash on her now. no constructs he sent beyond the sanctuary of his wards would be stable anyway should the bomb go off again. he wondered if there was any way he could have engaged even if he had his complete kit. not easily, was his conclusion. he wouldve needed an opening. some subterfuge. maybe walton could. but avo wasnt walton. no one was walton. i got point, draus said, trying to keep her footing as they fled deeper into the depths of the block. ghoul. take the rear. she shot a look at the father and the son. they were haggard. sickened. every step they took was a stumble. behind, avo watched as more spider-like limbs cleaved through the platform, cupping it in on itself as it twisted the pillar into a knarled knot with deliberate ease. were close, consangs. promise. youll be seein the city soon. nu volton, the boy tried to say, his breath coming labored as he bounced in the arms of his spriting father. yeah, kid, draus said, rounding the corner as stacks of storage units came into sight. new vultun. Chapter 2-11 Blood Metal chapter 2-11 blood metal the sangeist assault golem distinguished itself quite remarkably in the fourth guild war when five stormtree brigades, faced with encirclement by no-dragon forces, pulled a fighting retreat out of the district of nu-scarrowbur. survivors of the battle claimed that the breakout would not have been possible if not for the sangeists matter-mimicry capabilities. indeed, official military sources also cited the golems capability to rapidly fabricate multi-megaton warheads from blood. this allowed it to suppress the no-dragons swarm-pattern bioforms and saved the brigades from being overrun. -the fall of nu-scarrowbur: annals of the fourth guild war, page 888 2-11 blood metal the storage level of the megablock was so cluttered it made the area a honeycomb formed from plasteel containers. columns of stacked crates, boxes, and cargo modules partitioned the path into narrow avenues and claustrophobic alleys. a rain of stale coolant spilled down from the exposed pipes threading overhead, their lengths caked with fungal biomatter and rust. n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. this place was abandoned. unwanted. worse, this place had lost all order for its layout. avo couldnt tell which way they were supposed to flee. casting out a specter would be akin to allowing his consciousness to be pruned with the next thoughtwave blast. blindly, he followed draus. behind, the gates groaned as something enormous plunged through the walls. thick barriers of plascrete outright shattered before the golems encroach. avo chanced another glimpse at his foe. he caught sight of its crimson mass, its texture something that was blood and alloy both. through the toppling cascade of debris, it skittered after them, its shrouded form rearing eighty feet into the air. as the golem was enwreathed in a fog of dust, his metamind didnt quail at its presence this time. still, he watched as the thoughtstuff of the ghosts around him quivered. wards protected minds from insanity but the presence of a god still inflicted its strain. it was like the mind knew that what it was beholding shouldnt be, couldnt be, but against all odds, still was. only the bravest amongst the spectators were clinging close now. getting ones specter splashed by a thoughtwave bomb was like asking for a seizure. they pushed through a narrow gap where two containers were pulled to face each other. draus had plucked the father off his feet by this point, holding him while he held the kid, dashing forward. avo trailed a good twenty feet behind, muscles springing, legs pumping. he couldnt help but laugh. even unencumbered, he didnt move near as fast as the regular. the blades that were her legs blurred like slashing wheels, chipping gaps into plascrete flooring, giving him a path to follow even as she turned. a deafening crash burst from behind. something was bending, folding. a shadow sailed through the air, trailing down as it cast its presence over avo. he whipped his head in a brief look over his shoulder. he regretted the action almost immediately. two things assailed his attention at the very same time. the first was the twisted remnant of metal that used to be a ten-ton storage unit plunging down toward him like a javelin. the second was the golemoh, gods the golem. his metamind screamed, warnings flashing behind his eyes as his wards were strained. warning: cog-cap at 88%-- he deactivated the specter. couldnt risk using that now anyway. the cog-cap dropped down to 55%. the flickering feed stabilized. didnt stop the presence of the golem from being branded into his mind. rivulets of blood flowed from a shrouded spheroid platform at its core, fusing around it to form a ribbed tower. at its precipice was a jutting wolf-like jaw with its teeth replaced with the palps of an arachnid instead. the light greeted its shell, basking it in a metallic sheen. limbs of various shapes and designs spilled free from its structure. massive hammer-shaped hands to swat containers; piercing legs to move its body along the ground; darting tendrils to steer its surging momentum. it lumbered in their wake, a chimera between tide and titan, its bulk smashing through all that was in its path. avos phys-sim clocked it going at thirty-five miles an hoursome inefficiencies with its mass and design. of course, its lack of speed mattered little considering the falling container dipping rigged to a red-colored trajector lane. his phys-sim screamed of an imminent impact. ahead, draus spun, her arm snapping up to fire a burst of three missiles. a series of three blasts blossomed against the side of the container, knocking it free from its fated trajectory. avos phys-sim went from red to blue again. she fired again, this time at the golem. where the micro missiles struck, the blood coagulated, hardening into slats of self-supporting, self-repairing armor. where a thin layer of red was chipped away, more flowed to reinforce. little vicious shrill laughter flooded the room in a deafening rumble. +keep running! make me work for this! make me fuckin earn this!+ distantly, spectators cheered and whooped with her, thrill building on thrill, coating the room with excitement. a cone of crimson darts ripped out from the golems fluid shell. jagged glints of red sprayed free into their air, alchemized into nanometer-thin darts. a rain of unaimed shards sheared through the rusted storage units all around avo. he only managed to evade getting perforated himself thanks to his phys-sims estimates. whatever her blood was mimicking right now, it was far more than mere steel. avo! duck! draus called. he didnt hesitate. the valquist g-7 was an old gun. a railgun when most modern arms were designed on a gauss standard. didnt stop it from ringing loud against the outer shell of the golem. like a stone cast from a sling of ancient myth, the shot sailed and met interlocking cells of haemokinetic armor. it struck. some of the blood bent in and folded at an angle. the flechette skid off. little vicious laughed. draus cursed. shit. didnt penetrate. keep going. deeper into the stacks! shouldering the rifle, she pulled the father and boy tight to her with both arms as she sprinted. ahead was a winding set of stockades made by rusted overturned cargo crates. lagging slightly, avo followed. the last sight he caught of the golem before they rounded into the labyrinthine paths was its jaws splitting through the plascrete floor like scissors gliding through the fabric, bifurcating through the ground itself to get after them. cant outrun it, avo shouted. draus didnt reply. need to lose it instead! draus led him on a turn left. then right. then left again. she pointed up. with a single bound, she cleared a full ten-foot leap. annoyance filled avo. the low masters had designed his kind to overrun and storm the tiers. yet, here was a regular outside of her combat-skin, casually outperforming any of his capabilities. eight feet tall. capable of moving a ton on his shoulders. rapid cellular recomposition for survivability. cellular infection vectors to remove the logistical need to recruit willing participants for a standing army. all these qualities made up a ghoul. and all were entirely worthless against a modern combatant. that was what it meant to be a ghoul. to be pre-made into obsolescence by masters of a long-conquered nation built on blood, slavery, and violence. with a snarl of frustration, he jumped, the sounds of the golem closing in. draus reached down and pulled him by an arm before he could finish mantling. his jaw opened wide before he caught himself. it took everything he had not to tear into her arm, to bite and take her hand. old habits. physical contact meant violence. wont outrun her, avo repeated. behind, a stack of five crates came apart. a lashing blood-metal limb slid out, parting metal like an axe attached to a pendulum. meanwhile, avo could already hear the thundering hearts of the father and son, smell the exhaustion on their sweat, the fever burning above their brows. they were mere humans in a city that had long left that behind. how fragile they were. even softer than he. not tryin to outrun it, draus said. just need to her left shoulder burst apart. her coat veil began spewing out more error codes. draus spat blood, the first true sign of alarm flashing through her eyes. raw instinct took hold of avo. he barreled into her, knocking her, the father, and the boy over. two more crackles followed. avos phys-sim lined blue trajectories leading back to a distant stack of storage units and the control station of a crane attached to the roof of this level. more railguns. snipers. this was another kill box. in the public lobby, the distant cheering was approaching a deafening pitch. the violence and thrill of the engagement grew rapturous, some cheering for little vicious and her group to kill him and the regular, some calling for them to keep fighting, to survive. another crate sailed past them, missing by an inch. the golem was coming for them, little vicious fury now mixed with nigh-psychotic laughter. they had seconds before the golem was on them again. a choice had to be made. simple calculus. they couldnt pull a fighting retreat with the father and the boy. draus couldnt be weighted down. the answer was clear. avo pulled the two from her. kill sniper, avo said. ill get these two. stash them. come back for you. draus glared in annoyance at the tattered sinews still connecting her left arm with its shoulder and nodded. dont eat em. or ill come for you after. try not to. no promises. she rolled off the side of the container and blurred out of sight. mustve fired her reflex implant again. probably couldnt go that fast earlier without turning the flats into misting gore. she was probably running an accelero. now there was an aug avo would have wanted if his blood didnt reject or subsume every bit of foreign matter placed in his body. grabbing the boy by the neck and pulling the man to his feet, avo started running along the top of connected containers. behind, the golem smashed through where they were standing. stumbling, but not falling, avo continued his sprint, dragging father and son along as he began to consider a plan. +wherere you going, ghoulie? theres nowhere to run!+ can you do it thirty seconds? she asked, tilting her head. no. yes. she shook her head. youre a strange godsdamned ghoul, you know that? barefaced lyin? thats somethin people do. so people kept telling him. what then? split apart. she shook her head. dont know their full numbers. you and i can lead them off. then what? we make contact. she shot a glance at the father and son. they hide. terrible plan. avo said. theyre drawn to entertainment. were good stock. we make good entertainment. boy and his pa amount to hot piss on a summers day. oh, jaus and his eight, she was being serious. she actually wanted to do this. yeah. entertainment, avo said. entertainment for a moment. and no more. golem. four las-drones. maybe three more hunters. youre injured. im soft. easy kills. make it a minute. she smiled. the fact she was capable of such an expression gave him whiplash. bet you wed make it two. it was then that avo had a sudden epiphany about the regular. something he should have seen in her from the moment they met. it wasnt hate that she radiated toward him and the others. no. what stood the gulf between her and everyone else was neglect. she wasnt afraid of him. she wasnt afraid of anyone or anything. this whole thing seemed to bother her as a little more than a momentary annoyance. you dont care if you die, do you? avo said. she snorted. do you? youre a yes! avo snarled. i care! i care! his admission struck the smile from her face before it could form. another impact. the sound of something scraping along the ground. the groaning of weight digging through plascrete sounded like the golem was smashing through different parts of the room, looking for them. he should stay quiet. keep as much as he could and find another way to run. but still, avo couldnt let it go. he needed the regular to knowto admit he was a person too. he didnt want to die again. he already lost enough. he already fell far enough; died enough. you afraid, ghoul? she asked, genuinely curious. yes, avo said. want to go home. want to go back. feed fishes. find my metamind. my metamind. not this one. find who did this to me. pay rent. pay taxes. watch soaps. play sims. live my life. my life! is it much? no! do i own much! no! but i was happy! satisfied! safe! not hunted! and i belonged! to myself! not slave! not monster for low masters, or toy for syndicate, or wager for guilds! i was free! and i will not die here for them! them. the father and the boy. the two flinched as he stabbed a claw toward them. walton wouldve been so disappointed, but avo wasnt half the person his father was. all he knew was that if the golem caught him, it would break him for its own amusement, to slake the thirst of its pilot. he had enough. of little vicious and her games. of the tiers above that never cared about him. of the warrens below that hated him for what he was. he just wanted to go home. draus stared wordlessly. the golem was growing closer, clattering limbs sounding its approach. brother, sister, the father said, approaching them, please, we must you have a home? draus asked. undercroft. pendross ravine. block-12. level 324, room 52-a. next door is guild-sanctioned grafter. belongs to no-dragons. her name: auntie peng. specializes in bioware. grew me some new fish last week. salmon. love salmon. he thought. it felt like last week. he still couldnt remember anything between then and now. draus blinked and let out a breath, looking away. thats great, avo. real good. slowly, awkwardly, strangely, she shrugged. get those two safe. ill get you two minutes at least. im still good enough for that much at least. avo looked at the father and son and spun back around at her in disbelief. she was going to go to her death. just like that? no arguing? no mockery? avo shook his head. the father and son werent going to make it out in two minutes. avo barely knew where they were going to go. and the only one among them that could fight worth a godsdamn had a death wish. before he could say anything, draus blinked out of sight. she was gone again. he was staring at the rusted side of a container. a crude drawing of the megablocks administrator was scratched into the side with the words no future holo-tagged over them. avo growled and spun on the father and son. stay. run toward middle. what? the man asked. avo took him by the collar and snarled. run. get to platform. avo held out his mirrashard. wouldnt work on the golem anyway. keep the gun, avo said, handing the man the auto-laser. the father promptly swept the boy with the gun. avo sighed. idiot. take one of the side paths. get toward middle. circle the room or something. dont know. the father shook his head. i dont even how to avo decided to spell things out for him. it''s for you. for the boy. if something finds you. his words struck the father silent, much as a blow across the head would. avo continued. if i and the reg get snuffed, it''s just you. and the boy. need to do the right thing. they find you, theyll play. youre entertainment. the ones who play dont care about children. youre not a citizen. youre not protected. do the right thing. only one who can. spare the boy. he cant choose. you have to. it occurred to avo that this mightve been the longest unbroken bit of dialogue he had with the father. and all of it about killing his son. the father mustered a nod. youre going after avo grabbed the man by the jaw and clamped his mouth closed. get the boy. start walking. no more sentiment. go. without waiting for the father to respond, avo turned and began trailing draus by her scent. wasnt particularly necessary considering that she hadnt gotten far, but with irregular thoughtwave detonations, it was still hard to track people by their thoughtstuff. two minutes, avo said to himself. he chuckled. three at least. it was suicide. he hated himself for doing this. hated the idiot he had to keep alive and not eat. hated not killing the boy and drinking from his flesh earlier. the boy waved as the father took him in his arms. avo ignored him, instead focusing on how much he hated draus and her suicidal inclinations. damned reg was determined to discover how many times he could die before he stopped being able to come back. against his better judgment, avo found himself walking toward certain danger, off to die alongside an old enemy. Chapter 2-12 Counterattack chapter 2-12 counterattack heavens can best be understood as metaphysical vessels for the gods. something like a body, but also an entire plane unto itself, bridged to base-existence through domainsforces like fire, materials like glass, or even feelings and concepts like sadness. something for the heaven to emanate into reality. ultimately, the only true limitation is how vulgarly the heaven bends reality, and if the hell or hells connected to the heaven can drain enough rend to ensure reality remains unruptured -thaumaturgy: the scaffolding of reality ch 2. heavens, hells, and other ontologics 2-12 counterattack it didnt take avo long to track draus down via scent. the golem was still rampaging blindly, smashing through crates and crumpling stacks. avo scoffed. a little bit of karma there. it could have tracked him via his thoughtstuff easily if it didnt detonate the thoughtwave bomb earlier. still, he knew the effects wouldnt protect him for long. better to seize the initiative again just like they did earlier against the hunters in the silo. draus was scouting from the inside of a high-stacked storage unit. clambering up from the two other units beneath it, he moved with quiet and caution, listening for the drones as they did another sweep. as he made it past the lip into the stack proper, open jaws greeted him, snapping out to claim his head. avo flinched back. unnaturally pearlescent teeth froze an inch away from his face. no, draus hissed. her woundhound whimpered and shuffled back into the darkness of the unit, letting him up. it was smaller than the one avo had produced earlier. the wounds draus had suffered were less severe. a floating arm, a punctured lung, and a good amount of blood swirled across its fur. it growled silently at him as if daring him to approach draus. looking at the regular, he noticed her dismembered limb had been returned to her. it was still wreathed in enhanced muscle, but he smelled the carbon fibers no longer. woundhounds replace wounds, draus said. their myth dont say nothing about metal. she spat, as if annoyed. he would be too if one his arms was suddenly much weaker. the thing about thaumaturgy is that it rooted itself in its own laws. despite usurping reality, avo knew that all gods needed some element or channel within reality to take shape; mythology to give itself a proper vessel. thats why the guilds imposed thought-bans on knowing the names and scriptures of gods for unlicensed personnel. through the other side of the storage unit, avo realized she cut out a small vertical embrasure for her to peek out. it wasnt particularly wide, but he guessed that was the point. she needed as small a window to functionally shoot from as she could while avoiding detection. out in the distance, avo watched as the ichor-fueled golem stomped down on another container in a fit of rage. the container folded. little vicious roared something about cowards and her show being ruined. nothing new there. she lashed at the mangled container beneath her with scything limbs of blood. unactivated wights spilled out in pulped pieces. avo guessed those were undelivered units from the factory far below, meant to be taken up and distributed across the warrens. back before this entire part of the city went under, anyway. shifting next to her, he spotted the drones as well. four remaining as he had thought. light drones that they were, they still had more than enough firepower to kill him should they sweep his head with one of their beams. ghouls and concentrated light or fire didnt do well. hells, the suns could cook him if he stood out beneath the naked rays long enough. they were circling the sky over the golem, casting their scans out across different containers in scrying sweeps. problem was they were scanning the same area. as a group. he was lucky their pilots were idiots. they could have covered so much ground if only they scattered to different corners of the room. thought you had a life to get back to? draus said. better odds with you, avo said. she fixed him with a brief glance. a quiet laugh escaped from her chest. the low masters make you with a conscience or does this here merit belong to that father of yours? father, avo said. morality was hard. didnt work the same without phantasmic. emotional simulator. gave me ethics instead. a bitterness burned inside him after saying that. havent been doing well there. the ethics? draus asked avo grunted. yeah. that dont make you special. draus spat. just makes you a new vultunite. a jingling sound drew his attention. avo noticed draus clenching her holotags in her fist, a mantra of silent names slipping from her lips. outside, little vicious'' outbursts grew more and more severe. yet, with each savage exertion, the golem seemed to shrink. avo blinked. was its eldritch brightness losing its luster? seemed like it was getting smaller, its tower-like shape shrinking. with a final mutter that ended halfway, draus sighed and let the tag go. she had more to say. she just didnt sound like she had the strength to say it. prayer? avo asked. the guilds banned worship, but how people viewed what was worship could be very interpretive. hard to punish someone when they just claimed the act was psychological or pure traditional. it''s one of the few bans that the guilds unofficially gave up on enforcing. too much bureaucratic capacity was required to achieve it manually and too hard to sequence if they wanted ghosts to do it auto. draus smiled then, and it struck him how the age in her eyes clashed with the youth of her features. age had been blunted by those with the merit or imps to afford the treatments. avo had little doubt that draus had a few of these rejuvenating measures overriding her natural biology. still, the mind filled. memories grew. psychological scars could not hide. they just got thicker. names of dead friends, draus said, less holy. more meaningful. you got shit to get off your chest, nows the time. got less than five before the fights back on. good odds that one or both of us greet the big nothing. cant piss you a gold thread to hide that. avo tried to think of something. something poignant. walton would know what to say. unfortunately, walton was as dead as her friends, and sentimental wasnt how avo would describe himself. he stuck to dry honesty. if you die, going to eat your eyes. never had reg-meat. draus smile broke into an incredulous guffaw. her voice sounded battle-worn, but her laugh was true. genuine. humor was so very hard to achieve. walton would have been proud. avo kept going. regs swear to serve citizens, avo said, breaking the tension before whatever came. technically, am owned by waltons wardcrafting llc. im citizen-adjacent. demand service. youre a weird godsdamned ghoulie, avo, you know that? draus said, wiping tears of mirth from her cheeks. avo didnt laugh. the snort didnt count. heard a few times. for a moment, avo forgot to remind himself to hate her. got a plan? got a vague notion of one, yeah, draus said. she pointed to the golem. golems a hard target. tried punching through it with the railgun. shot bounced right off. didnt even make penetration. its got at least seventy-five tons of blood alchemized around the command module. started with ninety. losing mass? avo asked. yep, draus drawled. stormtree never built a soul into these here golems. not worth it when they could just replicate the same messenger-grade heaven over and over. theyre built to be cheap. expendable. hells, im figurin some locals mustve pulled it out from a gutter somewhere after it got abandoned. surprised they managed to get it working. probably siphoned some thaums off from techno-thaumic fusion reactor thats still working somewhere. keepin it charged between fights. good to know. how long tills its dry? couple more hours is my reckoning. from my reckoning, this thing aint nearly vulgar enough against the real to be a power-hogger. so died avos dreams of outlasting the thing. right now, draus continued, battlefield is shaped to their advantage. they got eyes in the air with those drones. couple of them tagged me. minimal penetration, but still opened up my skin something bad. means theyll rip you right up, and we dont want that. you dont? little vicious sounded a far cry now from the sweet and coquettish host of the show that she started the night as. good. the crucible she was hosting had already killed him once and slaughtered two hundred more already. if he got the chance, he was eating her. she made a choice. she was fair prey. the golem she was piloting tore into the stacks that were draus last known location. the regular was probably long gone and making for the crane at full surge. meant he needed to work faster. get his part done. peeking up quietly, avo studied the position of the snipers again. both their guns appeared to be pointing out from the same point. no spotter between them. two gunners. uncommon, but these werent soldiers, just over-chromed muscle. the woundhound growled, hungry to leave existence and see its duty done. it had its eye on the prey as well. get the bigger one, avo told the hound, his mind already telling it what to do. it clambered up a stack and he followed. together, they climbed, the two snipers still firing blindly, their shots threading through countless other storage units in rhythmic crackles, unaware of the encroaching threat. the hound got atop the snipers container first. avo was just a second behind. their combined mass made the entire stack wobble. below, he noticed the thoughtstuff of the hunter suddenly spike in fright. you feel that? one of them asked the other out loud. even muted somewhat by the metal, avo could hear their heartbeats, and smell their sweat. he placed his shotgun right against the top of the container. he aimed, treating the yolk-like accretion of their thoughtstuff as targets, picking the one on the right for his first kill. his gun roared. the thin sheet of metal between him and his prey burst apart beneath a wave of hyper-accelerated alloys. his arm snapped back along with the gun. through the gap, the woundhound squeezed in, its mass funneling into the open rent as if it was a liquid. again, he blinked. draus said these dogs were standard? never knew they could do that. a moment after, he felt himself draw in his new harvest, sown with a spray of his gun. thaumic cycler: 19 thaum/c ghosts - [33] plunging a claw into the rent, avo peeled the metal back with all his might and entered. the sniper he shot had been bifurcated down the metal, their metallic spine cord the only thing distinguishable from the mush of their remains. the other snipersans an arm and coughing up bloodgreeted avo before he could even land. he made a miscalculation. he should have stayed on top and fired again. she slammed into him like a flashing blur, pinning him against the wall. the storage unit shifted. avo felt gravity lurch as they tilted at an angle. half her face was denuded; caused by the spread of his shotgun. her missing arm told him that the woundhound had got to her. the fact that her exposed skull was layered in a full inch of plasteel told avo that her chrome mustve cost her a fortune. before he could react, something expanded beneath his chest, punching clean through his right pec. avo screamed. she twisted and dragged her arm up. an implanted arm-spur had sliced him open, peeling his flesh like it was hot butter. seizing her bouncing face-flap, he pulled. the butchered remains of her cheek snapped free between his claws. she screamed and pulled back, her spur coming free of his tissue. he seized the momentum, unwilling to waste any more time. he rammed his shotgun into her neck, rooting her against the wall. her eyes widened. he pulled the trigger. the roar of the gunshot within the confines of the container blew out three more layers of his eardrums. one layer left. if he lost that one, he was going to need to wait a while before he could hear anything. the sniper, meanwhile, looked less like a person and more like loose threads of sinew smeared along crenulated notches of metal. with a gasp of pain, he examined his wounds. she had opened him pretty badly. he could see part of his pec cut loose and lodged in the pale bone of his exposed sternum. he winced. thaumic cycler: 20 thaum/c ghosts - [34] suddenly, a sudden burst of force tore out of him. the bodies around him turned to motes of nothingness, while the metal of the container scattered into kaleidoscopic patterns. the weight in him had grown immense. wide. whispers snaked and chanted ineffable mantras from a place deeper than his bones. a flame spread out around him, sundering existence from matter, force, and space into naught but malleable concepts. thaumic threshold reached liminal frame online available ontologic slots - [1/2] heavens - [0] hells - [1] - first circle - domain (matter/entropy) sovereignties - [0] no grafts detected - defaulting to zero-burn the flames around him suddenly flashed out of existence. gravity took hold of him as he tumbled down, landing in a deep depression. he found himself face-down in a smooth crater eight feet deep into the plastcrete floor. it was as if the space around him had been shorn from existence altogether. a loud weight pounded against the ground, tearing him from his thoughts. another. how long was he in that crater? golem. the golem mustve seen the fire spilling out from him. if it had been chasing draus, it was now after him. crawling out from the rent, avo winced as the hyper-sharpened ledge he reached for cut deep into his hand. mantling over and stumbling into a wincing run, avo looked up and made for the crane. from the corner of his eye, he saw a looming tide of red spearing its way through the stacks. it looked smaller, why did it avo felt his foot splash into something sticky, the smell coppery. like blood. he looked down, a pool of blood extending like a crimson carpet beneath his feet, spilling out from around the corner. twisting, he leaped for a stack, jumping to get off the ground. a sting weight punched clean through his calf and dragged him back down. in his periphery, he could see more blood flowing in from the intersection paths ahead and behind him. the shadow of the golem rose over him, its reflection looming like a sword head high. +yeah,+ little vicious laughed. +i learn too. fancy that. i think your reg friend might call this an encirclement. told you id get you, ghoulie.+ from the spread of blood around him, two more tendrils shot through him, pulling him down. avo activated his specter and cut every phantasmic aside from it and his wards. using all his newly obtained phantasmal mass, he cracked his armored consciousness like a lashing whip into little vicious surface thoughts. spots exploded through his vision. his mind screamed as exploding spikes of pain were plunged deeper into his skull. through ringing ears, he heard little vicious scream, her voice hoarse as some of her thoughtstuff spewed out an already mending crack in her wards. +fucking ghoul!+ she howled, her madness amplified by the sheer trauma he struck her with. the blood across her golem quivered, the focus of its pilot scattered. avos cog-feed drifted in broken splashes of data and screaming ghosts, blinding and deafening him as he found himself splashing down into the blood. with a whimpering groan, he pulled himself to his feet, blind instinct guiding him while his fractured mind was slowly being fused back by his metamind. it was deleting pieces of damaged cognition and cloning backups in their place. it will work. mend him soon. he just remembered that he needed to get to the crane. crane. draus is at crane. behind, little vicious wailed, her broken voice sobbing with laughter. +r-run, ghoulie! run!+ avo did as she demanded. she didn''t need to tell him twice. whatever plan draus had for the golem, he hoped it was a good one. Chapter 2-13 The Monster and the Ghoul chapter 2-13 the monster and the ghoul in simplicity, thaums can be considered ontological massthe metaphysical space or capacity a soul can hold in existence. indeed, it is the soul that is the foundation on which our society rests today; the plucked hearts of our former gods powering their corpses which we wield and pilot. through its structure, heavens and hells can be made manifest, expressing their miracles and twisting the fabric of reality revisions, be it only evanescent. it is with that in mind that all must beware of facing ontological inertia. for the expenditure of miracles is not eternal, and the weight of reality will revert even the greatest soul fueling the most efficient of heavens should there not be enough thaums. so, keep an eye on how much youre burning. wont do you much good if your golem suddenly goes empty halfway through a fight. -golems: gods upon the machine, chapter 4 2-13 the monster and the ghoul avo toppled left. the ground spiraled and spun. his steps were chasing the floor as it snaked away from him, moving to evade his touch. his skull met the side of a container in a ringing impact barely felt, for right then, the confines of his skull were already subsumed beneath a raging storm of clustering headaches that pried at his loose thoughts. lumps of misshapen thoughtstuff bubbled out from his cracked metamind.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. a pillar of crimson punched deep into the ground next. shards of plascrete splashed up, breaking against the roughness of his skin. above, an enormous crimson mass loomed, its uneven shadow spilling over him as they both shook and fumbled between two ever-narrowing rows of intersecting stacks. on instinct, avo flopped his gun behind him and jerked its trigger, expecting to feel the kick of recoil. nothing. he twitched his finger across the trigger twice again and gave up. he hadnt reloaded. and now, he couldnt even remember where the ammo was. a dozen wire-thin threads of blood whipped through the air. containers and storage units came slumped apart, unzipped by the sheer undiminishing sharpness of the haemokinetic constructs. little vicious giggled madly, the insanity of her voice diminishing by the second as her metamind mended her broken mind as well, ejecting damaged memories like unspooling strands while replacing them with simulated mimicries. a net lashed out at avo. too far overhead. an overturned cargo loader came apart in three separate pieces, spewing hydro-coolant. +almost got you, ghoulie!+ she cackled, her golem bumbling into a stack and knocking it over. it was as if she was drunk, but he was no better. ahead, avo saw the crane swaying in the wind, its contours a vague blur to his nearsighted eyes. he couldnt see draus, but with his cog-feed broken, he couldnt see much of anything at all past fifty feet. everything was a blur, and his drilling migraines made it worse. maybe she already left. ran off to help the father and son after using him as bait. that would be cruel. but it made sense. she was used to killing things like him. they were the ones she promised to protect. a lurching groan came from the toppled stacks as the golem pushed off it, leaping. its form ground momentarily against the ceiling; pipes speared down like javelin-like rains while flakes of paint served as snow. the golem struck the ground next to him in a deafening impact, carrying him off his feet, and throwing him into the air as force carried him with the rock and debris. a rusted hinge bounced off avos shoulder. the decomposed body of a wight splattered against him. he struck a nearby column with a sudden lurch, his ribplates expanding like spiderwebs before the impact. avo slumped down, wheezing, clutching his stomach. every breath he took felt like he was forcing his insides through a grater. as he lay there, desperately trying to remember which muscle groups to coordinate so he could stand, the golem staggered toward him, its tower-like body melting, drip by drip. gazing upon its presence with his bare mind drew a tortured noise out of his chest. he choked. he hissed. eyes rolling back, he shrank into himself, like a child before a descending belt. too small. how could something like him face that which feasted upon the flesh of reality? inside the golem, he saw the drifting cracks of a ripple slowly slide back together around an ovaline command module, a bobbing organ amidst crimson translucence. shaking limbs inched out from its body, long and sharp. they were metal but shaped in extending branches by incremental spurts of blood. a nest of thorns was being grown out from the golems very chest. a crack shuddered through avos mind. consciousness surged back through him. pain took a more comprehensible shape as the world stopped trying to dodge him. his cog-feed sputtered back into his awareness as he groaned, only noticing just now that he had been drooling like a dull animal. as the golems existence planted its withing kiss upon his mind again, he felt its touch through the tattered fortifications of his metamind. this time, the madness came with a degree of separation. his outer accretion of ghosts howled in despair as they diverted to take the brunt of the harm. it was like he was hiding in a basement born of his own psychological architecture as horror hammered his outer walls like artillery. the golem was shrinking. that wasnt a misjudgment earlier, even if it had diverted some mass to flank him. still, to go from eighty feet to a mere seventy or so lent him no advantage, and what it did to defile the natural laws governing blood and matter tortured his perception, the sight of its being a fraying thing, something that all mortal minds on a cellular level knew to be unnatural. eldritch. with a grunted shout, avo pushed from the ground and made to run again. he needed to break the line of sight. lose it before getting to the crane a harpoon of glistening red whipped out through his shoulder. a choked rasp squeezed free from avos throat. thrust out by the extending limb, avo felt the back of his head crack against the cold, cracked face of the column. he fought it. clawing and biting into the lash. little vicious mind bled perverse joy as he saw her accretion take shape as well, the damage to her slowly coming undone. her growing branches and briars spilled down the lash, snaking themselves through the clefts of avos wounds. ghouls dont scream so much as they screech. something about their vocal cords and pitch. when the tendrils sank into him, they began to alchemize his blood, little vicious flaying touch spreading out even from within. in seconds, he felt his flesh turn from being merely broken to an altar of pain. to lay agony upon agony, little vicious slammed him head-first against a nearby container; one already torn in the middle with frayed flaps of teeth-like metal awaiting him. avo recognized it from the stacks she knocked over earlier. desperately, he struggled, but she grasped him within, her haemokinetic blood clutching his skin like a glove. +call out to your friend, ghoulie? call out to the reg.+ avo looked toward the crane and saw no sign of draus. she was gone. probably left him. for the first time, he was glad about it. could that have been the crane? avo wondered if it was his mind going for a moment, but decided it didnt matter. even if he was deluding himself, it was nicer to delude himself into thinking draus was trying to help him. he deserved that at the least. he wanted to go with the thought that at least someone would remember him as more than just a slavering monster when he went. even if he could come back again. nuh-no, avo said, swallowing sour spit and bile. d-dontcare aboutthat. little vicious cocked her head. oh. you dont? well, then. while were here, ill listen: tell me what you do care about? avo wanted to mock her. but frankly, pretending the torture wasnt getting to him was bad enough. so, he gave it words and cast his hate right back at her. you, avo said. little vicious threw her head back and laughed. you care about me? want to knowwhyyoure pathetic. her laugh ended as abruptly as it started again. what? her voice cracked, croaking in disbelief. but gods was she so easy to rile avo continued. you. pathetic. nice clothes. nice life. even genes are bought. but still here. down in the gutter. killing those who cant choose. he swallowed back a mouthful of blood. you. people like you. like litter. everywhere. staining the city. not unique. not special. nothing new. seen you before. seen you in the face of my brothers. too stupid to live. too hungry to just die. seen you in the face of every joy-fiend. the dose. never high enough. seen you in the face of every mid-guilder. just another cog. more lubricant than person. all impulse. no control. no choice. avo grinned at her. sub. human. like me. i greet you, sister. fury exploded from her mind, the intensity too much for her ghosts to bear as they quailed. her expression mustve twisted into something of pure hate, pure rage. youyou dont fucking know anything! familys made up of guilders. you have money. but always, you felt less. less than your peers. avo was just guessing now, blood loss taking him on a final, feverish rant. lacked something they had. they fit. they enjoyed life. seemed able to. you couldnt. family grew you. grew you in the vat to be perfect. but still, here you are. with me. overhead, he heard a hum growing closer. little vicious mustve been too focused on him to notice. avo was glad that his face had practically no skin left on it. otherwise, she mightve seen him smile. the blood controlled by the golem was practically boiling. she puppeted him, pulling him closer using her blade-like grasp, actions made sloppy by her feelings. tears spilled out from her eyes. he could smell the salt. hear her choked sobs. her hands were shaking. faintly, he heard the rasp of a monoblade. ah. she was pulling a knife, planning to end this personally for that slight. avo chuckled. how accurate he had been. and how predictable she had been. pathetic, he muttered. he heard her cry out with a snarl. a spark of surging electricity cracked above him, a sudden static spilling over his skin. without warning, he was torn upward, the golem and little vicious soaring up with him. the branches inside him dissolved as little vicious screamed, losing the focus to maintain her construct. he heard her knife sail past him as her cockpit snapped shut. metal screamed and bolts broke. little vicious was roaring curses, trying to wrestle her golem back under control. inadvertently, she cast him loose, releasing him into the air. then, suddenly, there was nothing holding him anymore. cut free from his torturous cage, avo flopped and tumbled across the ground as above, golem greeted crane in a snapping clash. faintly, he could hear little vicious howling. for a moment that stretched on forever, he chuckled, content to lay on the cool ground as his mind began to unravel from hunger and pain. a rising percussion of footsteps approached. someone was standing over him. he could hear their heartbeat. their blood smelled tasteless. pure. jaus, he heard them whisper. or did they? was anyone there? draus? draus. avo? oh, deep hells, what the fuck did she do to you. he tried to say something. all that came was a cough. alright. she picked him up as if he weighed nothing. considering how much of himself he burned trying to stay alive, that mightve been the case. above, little vicious continued to struggle. it sounded as if it were cutting against the crane now. come on. lets get, consang. avo grunted. it was getting hard to think. draus yeah? i was worth coming back for? consangs?" draus laughed. she increased her pace. "crane''s fuel cell was fried. had to rig a replacement from an aerovec i found in one of the units. kept it in stasis. real lucky. now it was his turn to laugh. lucky as he bounced to the rhythm of draus'' footsteps, he felt a flash of light spear back into his right eye. he blinked. his sight returned to him. faster than it normally grew back. of course, the first thing that greeted him was the golem sinking the jaws on its crown into the walls, taking a bite out of the plascrete. suddenly, its flowing rivulets flashed red. no longer did the blood gleam metallic. now, the flows grew thicker, mottled. like plascrete. the golem descended from the crane then, unaffected by magnetism. like an anvil, it struck hard, cracking and mending blood and plascrete both. avo sighed. draus. run. run faste Chapter 2-14 Heaveneater chapter 2-14 heaveneater whatever you do, do not graft more ontologics than your thaumic mass can bear. do not. are you hearing me? do not. the system cant support it. itll make your heaven fall and have you start looping deaths until you manage to fix whatevers causing the dysfunction in your heaven. keep a least twenty thaums of mass between your maximum sustainable mass and what you have functionally equipped. it will allow you to make the necessary changes you need. tweak your builds for survival. second thing is to keep an eye on your rend. dont vent your hell unless you need to; let it digest slowly or you will find yourself vulnerable during expulsion. mortal. tempo, tempo, tempo. never overextend. overusing your heavens will also see you isolated and killed. hells, worse yet, the enemy might force you into creating a rupture by making you overload, see your cadre snuffed alongside your incompetent ass" -santanado starsinger mondelles, combat instructor to axtraxis academy of highflame 2-14 heaveneater for moments, avo lost focus. the world grew distant around him. his sight and hearing went in cycles. his skin felt prickly. the agony of his wounds folded into numbness then back again. in bouts of delirium, he laughed and hissed in equal measure. if he had the strength or coordination, he would have tried biting draus, if only to taste the sweetness of flesh one last time. as she ran, he clung to her, to life. his blood spilled out from his brutalized body, leaving a trail behind him. he was jealous of the humans then. even the flats. at least they could pass out fully from the pain. here then was another benefit of his blood; a ghoul''s cells served as an extension to their mind. their haemophagic cells formed a hyper-conductive synaptic fluid that supported consciousness. the fact that avo found himself drifting in and out of awareness meant his blood loss was somewhere north of severe. for the third time that day, he was close to crossing over into the big nothing. his arms dragged against the ground. they were too long. each bounce ignited coiling pain in his left shoulder where his arm had torn free from the socket, dangling. internally, he was almost out of metabolism to burn. a crash sounded behind him. struggling, he found himself barely able to look up. the world around him was a blur of motion. draus was going fast. the golem behind them was still coming, still charging. it had adopted a tide-like structure to its lower half, sweeping forward and knocking all in its path aside like a tsunami of melted plascrete that carried a quavering, shrinking tower. the golem had paid a price for this realignment of its alchemy. going from metal to plascrete was a great transition. the matter and molecular structures were too different. the cost could be seen in the jetstreams of blood peeling around the sides of the golem-like wings. these jetstreams were not alchemized into plascrete. they were just mundane. basic blood. the god was shedding its flesh, waning in the struggle against reality. getting slower. avo hacked a wet laugh. mightmight liveafter the words grew slippery. his thoughtstuff fogged his accretion like vapors, lacking any solidity. the world around him grew distant again. a curtain of shadows descended. chaotic rainfall down the windshield of his consciousness. the colors of the world bled from the canvas of his cog-feed. sound droned away into silence. his senses sank into the abyss beneath his flesh. for a beat, there was nothing. pleasantly nothing. no thoughts. no awareness. no pain. perhaps this was what it was like to die the final time. the big nothing. a place beyond any paradise or eternal torment. just a final stop where everything was not. then, he felt the cold touch of metal press against his back. beneath him, gears and servos groaned. energy thrummed below him. he was rising, carried on a pedestal. a small, warm hand caressed his face before something snatched it away. avo gasped, air wheezing through his collapsed lung. awareness exploded out from the center of his mind. draus was staring down at him, her face battered. bruised. the wounds were new. when had she gotten them? pain clung to his every sinew, every pore. with one hand, she was holding the boy back while the father watched. the child had been reaching for him, trying to touch him. slowly, it dawned on him that they were on the platform, that they were going up. stacks were sinking below them as they ascended slowly. in the far distance, some twelve rows of overturned containers away, an ominous spire of red was still rushing toward them. infectious, avo said. his word came as a choked gasp. dead gods, he wanted to tear the boy apart. eat him. eat his father. infectiousto good that draus pulled the boy back. they didnt have the vaccine in them yet. his blood could convert anything that had a bit of brain, enough biomass, and insufficient immuno-defenses to overcome his cells into a ghoul-nest. same as the ghoul that sired him. even now, he could remember eating out from his nest, the first to hatch from the long cold corpse of his host. golem, he said, trying to point with his working arm. he just didnt have the strength. his left arm resembled a mangled clump of meat now. better that he lost it entirely. trying to heal it in its current state would undoubtedly leave him with tumors. he drew what blood was left out from the limb and let it die. you''re hurt! the father proclaimed. avo wanted to strangle the man. he knew he was hurt. he could feel every bit of that hurt. really, avo said, staring at the rapidly decaying clump he had for an arm, this my blood? draus laughed. dont worry about her. shes behind us. were gonna make it. were gonna make it. draus knelt down next to him. strangely, it was as if her eyes were staring through him, seeing someone else in his stead. its almost midnight. just gotta get you outside. out beneath the rain. youll live. youll live. with an uncertain look, she drew a small knife from beneath the glitching veil of her damaged holocoat. she pulled out a small knife and dragged it across her arm. holding it above him, she drip-fed him a steady flow of blood, an odd look of consternation clouding her face. hows this for service, citizen. avo didnt speak. he was too busy lapping the flowing liquid. it poured down his throat, tasting thicker and more clotted than any he had ever sampled. inside, his remaining cells met the nanosurgeons in open battle. her internal augmentations were far superior to his biology, but en masse his cells could still overwhelm a nanomachines capacity to fend. when he finally broke her nanite defenders down enough, he thought he just might live off the nutritional richness in her blood alone instead of ever even needing to feel the touch of the midnight rains. every few seconds, she had to reopen her arm. she scabbed too quickly for it to stay a wound. he didnt complain. as long as she was willing to bleed, he was willing to feed. desperate to feed. for a few moments, he nursed, until she finally drew the knife away. instinctively, he bit at her, snarling, wanting more. she held him back with a single arm as he struggled to get at her. a wry smirk tugged at a corner of her lip. right, you had enough there, joy-fiend. avo wrestled a modicum of control back from the beast. if he wasnt such mangled effigy, he would have undoubtedly tried to eat her or go after the boy and his father. wanted eyes, he muttered. still need em, consang, she said. besides. dont think youd like the circuitry. avo laid back and laughed. he hurt. everything hurt. sinking his perception into the nether, he could see a literal forest of specters looking down at them, spectral chains coiling, like a birds nest in the nether. savaged as he was, he could hear the whispers. violent arguments clashed between different spectators, their phantasmal sequences lashing out at each other. there was dismay in his survival; joy in his triumph; confusion as to why draus hadnt left him; mockery at little vicious failure. he checked his cog-feeds. systems were still destabilized. overloaded. a pity. he wouldve liked ward-bashing her one more time before he went. he had nothing left. draus had nothing left. so close. but not enough. surrounded on an island untouched by the anomalous blood, the father and son clung to each other, horror staining their faces. the man held his auto-laser with quavering hands. the gun was clicking. empty. avo hadnt even noticed him fire it. and neither did little vicious for that matter. not until right then. a thread lashed out from the surrounding pool and pierced through the fathers shoulder. bone fragments burst and skin tore. the man toppled in a scream. the boy followed, clinging to his father, wailing. avo forced himself to forget their faces. there was no point in seeing them as people now. death was here for them, and it wanted its fill. again, tendrils of blood began to spread like metal roots within avo. the renewed pain worked animalistic cries of pain he thought himself beyond making. she worked him twice as intricately this time. his muscles screamed. he felt the unmistakable sensation of something drilling through his bones, sawing through the remainder of his tendons, piercing through what organs he had. he realized then that she was growing what amounted to a tree inside him. a thing rooted to him by pain. and halfway through the spreading of the branches, she stopped. if avo had the ability to weep, he wouldve. at that moment, he would have collapsed to his knees and proclaimed his abuser the patron saint of mercy for stopping the hurt. but this wasnt a culmination. no. just punctuation; a lull before the next course. faintly, avo heard little vicious laughing through the nether. she sounded close. felt close. she pulled him back and held him up next to her. the golem wasnt so large anymore at all. from its considerable mass of over eighty tons, he doubted she was operating with more than three right now. so thin were her defenses that he could practically reach out and touch the command module, its vents pumping and sparking, one pluming smoke and darkness into the blood from overwork. +thought i was just going to give up?+ little vicious said, her voice seething like a crackling fire. +all of you are going to die. all of you!+ the boy flinched as he pressed his palm to his fathers wound. the mans breathing was labored. tears flowed from his eyes. terror emanated from his naked mind. why? the father cried, leaning against his son. why? why? we just want to come to the city! we have done you no wrong? committed no ill. little vicious scoffed. +because you dying gets me views, half-strand!+ she was going to say something else but ended up laughing instead. when she next spoke, her words were tinged with pure cruelty. +observe.+ a crudely-shaped pike punched through the boy''s gut from behind, tearing him off the ground. avo heard the father shrieking in despair, blood-formed limbs holding him against the ground while tilting his head up, forcing him to watch. the boys face paled. he clutched at his chest as his eyes bulged. redness poured from his mouth as he went stiff in shock. three more haemokinetic hands forced the boys mouth open. +what was that you called them,+ little vicious asked. +choiceless?+ she chuckled. +yeah. ii like the term. it fits.+ even through the pain, avo knew what she was going to do. was horrified by it. had spent his entire life avoiding it. no, he pleaded, his voice barely a whisper. this wasnt his choice. he didnt want this. kill me. kill me. not this. he knew begging was wrong when he heard little vicious laugh. its not up to you, consang. held over the boy, avo struggled with all that he had left, trying to escape before the inevitable. below, he could hear the father roaring, straining. draus pawed weakly toward the sound, crawling with her one remaining limb. the boy stared up at avo in horror, mouth open, weeping. didnt want this, avo said, trying to convey his regret. the beast hungered for the boys flesh yet, desperate for meat on the cusp of death. the rest of him loathed every second of this. he had struggled, fought so hard to keep his fate his own. all taken by a teenage psychopath who just wanted more eyes on her product. wouldve killed you. spared you grasping limbs sank into the flesh of his back. fingers pushed through his shoulder blades, dislodging his spine and mangling his flesh to bloody pap. the world disappeared into a miasma of agony. his blood poured free, raining down with his viscera into the boys open mouth. infecting him. cackling with laughter, little vicious watched her work. her pointless work. the ghosts were gone. her thoughtwave bomb had ensured that. a child was dying for her amusement alone. the boy spasmed in the grip of her fists, his body twitching. gore-stained foam bubbled from his mouth as his eyes rolled back and his biomass began to grow sallow. +look at that,+ little vicious whispered. avo realized she was recording the moment. saving it for upload later. think of the views for this night. she sniffled. +this perfect, perfect night. its all thanks to you, ghoulie. all thanks to you. here: your reward.+ the limbs holding his insides tugged in opposite directions. barely managing a final howl, avo came apart in two. the light went out of his eye as the last sinews within his skull tore in twain. for the third time, the jaws of death clamped down upon avo. but neither darkness nor memory greeted him this time. instead, he felt the shaped blood that killed him descend with him into the throes of death. downward, he descended into the embrace of an inverted flame. initializing resurrection - 1% attention - heaven detected [domain: blood; matter] designation: sangeist no liminal boundary detected extracting heaven - initializing graft - 1% Chapter 2-15 Apotheosis chapter 2-15 apotheosis do you know why the guilds banned the old scriptures? redacted the canons of the old pantheons? to stop us from building our own heavens, consangs. theyre trying to keep us in the gutters. this was not the dream. we were promised more than these gutters. when jaus joined the eight and crowned this city with his arks, he had a vision. a vision of existence shaped by a new order. an order where divinity was made to serve the people, not hoarded by the elites. this was not the dream. we are the people. and we are starving. i say i had enough. id say we had enough. its time to take back what theyve been stealing from us, what theyve been using our lives and labor to fuel. this was not the dream. they drink our lives. they fuel their machines! they think they can take the future from us and that well just watch? fuck them! fuck that! lets build our own god. a new god. a true god. lets take it to these half-strands one final goddamn time. this is the dream. this is the new promise. this is our holy war. this is the last apocalypse. -cas eldcanduir, rockstar, cult leader, terrorist 2-15 apotheosis resurrection - 10% grafting heaven - 44% required thaums - [20 thaums/c] reviewing mythology for paradoxes. warning: insufficient thaumic mass [hell: first circle] simulating liminal frame no memory carried avo out from the jaws of death this time. no lull in time was felt between the moment of his death and his consciousness transition to this nigh-infinite expanse of nothingness. around him burned an inverse flame, brightness funneling into his being, drawn to him like a star spilling into a singularity. it was like no flame he had ever beheld, for it burned with a pellucid shine. no heat poured from its presence. instead, the flames ebbed outward in shimmering waves, each pulsing emanation simulating a hue of radiance, stretching as if establishing the borders of all existence. avo tried to move. no limb answered him. the absence of limbs or even flesh struck feedback from his mind. somewhere between isolation and tranquility, he languished. he did not know if ghouls were beholden to the frailties of the human mind. he was molded to be psychotic by design, in knowing this, he wondered how much more deranged he could ever even truly get. perhaps this was hell. a place of perpetual torment that he was predestined for. but if that were to be true, then why was he bereft of hunger here? why did the streams of his thought flow free? unimpeded? yet, as he cast his perception downward, he found an actual hell greeting him. a single concentric ring that ran as far as his fire could shine. two blurred sigils took up opposite positions from each other as they spun slowly. he knew those sigilshad seen concentric chasms with this very same symbology built beneath techno-thaumic reactors. they were meant to expel the wastage of miracles. he guessed that what he found serving near-nonexistent bedrock beneath him was shaped for the very same purpose. within the hells gaping depths, a spiral of darkness swirled, draining down nigh-endlessly to an end avo found himself unwilling to fathom. the hell was a strange, flickering construct. ethereal. as if it was missing something, something to fully anchor it before it could materialize. a counterweight of sorts. staring into it began to disquiet his mind. avo felt a surge of emotionless dread. only his consciousness was struggling. straining. he forced it to still. long-buried words from walton returned to him. a lesson: the first lesson. accept to adapt. lies can be unraveled once you subsume them and assimilate the facts. reality, however harsh, could be survived as long as one did not cleave themselves between the pulling tides of want and necessity. pouring all anxiety, all distractions from his mind, avo thought not of his most recent murder. he ignored the ineffable ache he felt at being used by little vicious to infect the flesh of the boy. he also accepted that the primary thing he felt as the boy wailed in pain was hunger, however much the situation befouled the palette of his ethics. instead, he faced this small cage of brightness around him and realized he could feel all that existed around him. suddenly, the metaphor of this place being a cage was wrong. this placethis plane of existencewas him. or perhaps was simply laced to his consciousness that he could feel the mechanisms of this reality. if his mind dreamed at the center of this machine, then the flames were akin to his nerves and memory both. as far as they could ripple, he tasted the emptiness around him. a moment passed. the brightness of his fire spilled out again, disturbing the tapestry of nonexistence. as the ripple spun from him, he felt an eldritch serpent molded from gleaming mercury circling him just beyond the flames. within it, he heard the echoing minds of those he had killed, drawn into his being. they were whispering to him. praying to him. worshipping him. with each cycle, they would dissolve beneath the boiling incandescence of the flame. yet, they would manifest anew when arriving where the serpent ate its own tail, returning as sure as the passing of seasons. eighty-tons. just like the golem. beneath the tower, he felt the spinning chasm of hell he sensed earlier pulse momentarily and sputter. disappointment filled above. the entropic chasm was spinning counter to the serpent bound to his heaven now, but it wasnt solid enough to manifest. he lacked the thaumic massmore sacrifices were needed for it to be grafted unto him. all these sensations greeted him at once. he felt like a newborn festooned within the body of a giant. his quintessence flowed through every sinew, across every plate he could have, his fire forging trueness into the shape of his new frame. so overwhelmed by all that was unfolding before him that he didnt feel a rogue shard of memory snap free from the center of his awareness. what was that? how long had that been there? like a dagger, it plunged into the blood that formed his body, sinking deep before the shape of a man rose, breathing through the surface like a seed bearing the fruit of a ghost. overwhelming, isnt it, a familiar voice greeted avo even before the figure fully emerged from the hardened slats of crimson. before avos awareness was walton, standing upon a turbulent sea of blood, he himself a facsimile of thaumaturgy and blood. for a moment, avo just watched on in confusion and disbelief. walton was dead. he had died five years ago when all the cojoined heavens of love and lust fell and wombrash consumed the city. still, here the man was, standing before him. same face. same coat. same smell of citrus. how did that smell linger, even here? resurrection - 85% walton? avo asked. his mind rumbled like the voice of thunder here. his blood vibrated and shaped into letters in standard. his control here was absolute. all-encompassing. total. walton didnt seem to notice. avo, if youre seeing me now, that means youre dead. like me. good news is you wont be dead for long. better news is that you probably managed to get your first heaven.would be hard to simulate this memory i planted inside without a domain or two, id say. the man shrugged sheepishly, the muted expression the closest he ever had to shame. i know it''s a lot to...hehtake in, but i will be as ive always been with you, and tell you the truth: this is the beginning. this is as simple as things get. youre now a godclad of the first sphere. the mundane will quail before you. the ones with power will want to feed from you. andyou might just lose yourself in all this. avo didnt understand. as was often the case when he spoke to walton. experience told him to wait. the memory of walton played on. his father was always a mystery, but never obtuse. he always told avo the objective. when something was withheld, it was for the sake of discipline or education. this time would be no different. you might be trying to talk with me right now. might not be. i dont know the state youre in, but i have faith that you are still unbroken. still whole. walton gave a soft smile. your nature has given you a fortitude that most would envy. and, rightfully, i think my teachings have instilled in you the ethics needed for you to succeed. if avo could whimper, he wouldve. succeeding was not among the things he had been doing recently. walton rubbed his jaw and looked down. he was thinking of what next to say. there are some things you dont know about me. some things that even i dont know about me. but thats not what matters right now. right now, you need to know that this city, the ones who cant choose, need you. why? why father? right now, you need to go to the easy armistice at lights end. depending on where you are right now, youll need to descend the tier and go down to the warrens. his father pursed his lips and sighed. i know that yourplace of origin troubles you. but remember what i taught you. you are what you do. you are the choices you make. and you dont need to be the same person tomorrow as you were yesterday. once you get to the easy armistice, talk to fredritch three-eye and tell him that you''re with the ninth column, and that the dream is broken. hell give you an engram containinganother itinerant of me. ihell tell you morebut with this being said, theres no going back now. walton shrugged his shoulders, the act almost mournful. i didnt want this for you. wanted you to have a life. at least for a while. a million more questions swirled in avos mind like a whirlwind. ninth column? easy armistice? another iterant? he didnt even know how he got cast down into the maw? was this liminal frame what allowed him to possess a heaven? to come back from death? and how did walton even know about any of this? just how dead was his father avos mind screamed all those questions in unison at walton. around him, the red waves swept up in a grim reflection of the cataclysm brewing within. but walton just stood, unbothered by the crashing waves of turbulence, and smiled as if there was nothing wrong. avo. i might be gone. but the best of me still echoes in through you. i know you dont feel it cant feel it, but im proud of you. always have been proud of you. i chose you for this not as a punishment, but because i want you to be more. to see all the colors existence has to offer. and maybe change its course. youre going to have to make some choices soon. few of them easy. none of them are enviable. but you need to climb the tiers. you need to ascend the arks. you need to reach the ladder and stop the guilds. this utopiathis purgatory that theyve madeit has to stop. before they tear existence asunder, it has to stop. resurrection - 99% the inverted fire fused over avos consciousness now, squeezing him down into himself as walton began to dissolve. waitwait! this was not the dream, walton said, an expression like steel even as came he apart. i wish i could''ve seen--" resurrection - 100% implanting nous avo felt his consciousness fold over the veil of his heaven, surging forward into the light of existence, back to the place of his murder. Chapter 2-16 Welcome to New Vultun chapter 2-16 welcome to new vultun want to know what happens when two heavens clash? a paradox. paradox forms. and if theres too much paradox, rend backlash turns to thaumic overload, then someones heaven falls and ruptures reality. if it''s suicide you want, i got a dealer you can call. they got the stuff that will make your heart pop instead of killing everyone else. -captain osjack wells, guest lecturer at axtraxis academy of highflame 2-16 welcome to new vultun ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn engaged psychology baselines established - removing memory stabilization feature soul online engaging thaumic cycler: 20 thaum/c loading phantasmic warning! traumatic overload! nether unstable! nether unstable! existence stuttered. reality screamed. as his senses crashed back into him in a muted rush, avo felt a supernova bloom within him as he broke free from a puddle of blood, manifesting in reality. around him, space itself quavered like a dimmed candle, his brightness usurping the natural laws and subverting them with the heaven that was now grafted upon his being. he knew what he was now. there was no way to deny it now. he had beheld this radiance nightly, gazing upon the blots of fused chimeric gods that dotted the naked flesh of the sky as they formed from ascending pillars of techno-thaumic energy. he and those gods stood kindred in a way. but he was whole while they were merely puppets; a godclad. his liminal frame had exiled him from mortality now, returned him to life, and bound him to the deeper powers that dwelled with the metaphysical, the divine. this too must have been why his new metamind sounded like him. because the system had to be forked from his mind to prevent consciousness rejection. with this known, a million more questions ignited inside him, but he cast all that aside as he found himself aware of the toppled cockpit, bobbling like a shell down a shallow pool. inside, avo felt the blood flowing inside little vicious, and could somehow see the rushing currents of red surging through her body as her heart screamed with fear. blind to all other desires, avo strode past the father. the man was soaked in red, weeping. in his arms, the boy spasmed and twitched, hemorrhaging from his orifices. his skin was sloughing off from his body as his muscles atrophied as sagged, his metabolism burning away to nothing. impossibly, avo also felt the haemophage eating away the childs organs, breaking down all his mass and drawing it up to his prefrontal cortex. soon, only a misshapen hive of flesh. perhaps just enough to produce one ghoul. it was only a matter of time now. a-avo. draus. her voice came from behind him, hoarse with pain. he would speak with her later. now, he had a debt of pain to squarean act of cruelty to inflict. perhaps it spoke much of how base he was in that moment, so deep in his vicious intent that his mind and the beast hummed the same bloodthirsty thoughts. he could detect no ghosts around him. the spectators were still afar, mostly peeled back around the locus above them, holding its exterior in the nether as if standing in defensive formations, not daring to approach. the golem, on the other hand, spewed broken drifts of thoughtstuff before him. something sparked and smelled of melted microplastics, a flame rising in a slot on its backside. currents of chaotic memories and emotions washed over him, bifurcating against his wards, a stream cleaved by a yielding crop of rocks. he had been torn in half earlier. he had felt it. draus and the father had undoubtedly seen it. witnessed it with their own eyes and minds. yet, there was no sign of his body anywhere. in fact, if it werent for the infection of the boy, it was as if all the pain little vicious had inflicted on avo had never been. striding across a carpet of gore, avo felt the blood he was in tactile contact with gravitating to his will, surging like a tide to his footsteps in by desire alone. though his knowledge of thaumaturgy was lacking, his instincts guided his new capabilities. his momentum became the bloods momentum. his strength became his blood''s strength. reaching out into his domain of blood, felt his haptic senses widen, the pooled blood beneath his feet greeting his cognition like a newly implanted limb. above the lights of the approaching level flickered, the platform wailing upward as its warped matter ground against the mechanical pillar. below, in the reflection of the red, avo beheld himself not in flesh, but as the burning avatar that was the sangeist. but then again, it was now as much a part of him as his thoughts were. with a simple act of will, he shaped the blood beneath him. a new interface manifested through his cog-feed, feeding his mind with new reports. the structure of his heaven greeted him, the cognitive menu dense with information and overwhelming to behold. several menus were flashing red. he knew little of rend or how it was supposed to affect him. all he knew was that it was bound to his hell, and his hell was currently nonexistent. he needed more deaths before it could kick in. from his shoulders, a thin helm of blood instinctively clasped over his face, coating the right and left of his head in armor shaped like a hounds jaws. above his rippling metamind, a new pattern burned, its structure spinning the properties of plasteel into the blood. perfect. avo shaped all the blood he could control, mapping the design after his own clawed hand. connected to him by wisp-thin threads, he controlled his new haemokinetic constructa near ton of matter bearing the qualities of both blood and metal. rearing it over the ejected cockpit of the golem, he brought it down. and knocked. the beast inside him wailed, unwilling to wait. but avo didnt want it to be easy. he didnt want it to be just another killing. no. the torture and pain she had inflicted on him aside, she had infected the boy using his blood. that was an act that fit his former masters. that was an act upon the choiceless. and for that, avo thought he deserved to eat her eyes. vicious, avo said, unable to contain the chuff of slavering excitement inside him. open the door. he felt her blood rush through her body at twice the rate it did before. the knowledge pleased him, and like a joy-fiend building up to a buzz, an uncontrollable grin spread across his face. now he knew what it was like to be her. how intoxicating. staring at his prey, avo gave a sigh as he heard the crunch of something pushing against the roof of the boys skull. the child was dead. avo couldnt hear his heartbeat. still, better this way than in some gutter. at least the last thing he knew was hope and joy. that would prove to be his last forever. as he drew little vicious in close, he found her looking everywhere but him. he cupped her face into his hands and forced her to meet him, eye to eye. you had a choice. you chose. you chose to hurt. you deserve this. no, she whimpered. you deserve this, avo said, uncertain who he was trying to convince. he wanted this. she should die. she killed the boy. but the torture. the cruelty. that wasnt for her. that was for him. walton might have killed her. but not tortured her. avo wasnt walton. with a thought, all his threads folded, and her body did the same. the sounds he earned from her then were demonic, primal, pure. he left her spine and skull intact, but everything else began to shift and tear. she came apart and began pouring out from herself, his will sculpting her organs into inverted wings mocking her descent to oblivion. she mightve begged him at some point. he really didnt hear. when he was finally done, her disfigured skull and spine hovered, a mangled totem that served as a centerpiece to the fused blocks of her organs. her heart still pulsed as he forced blood through it. her liver was still warm on the inside. one of her lungs popped. sloppy on his part. but he had delivered his loathing back to her. the feeling was wondrous. eyes empty, her thoughtstuff spurting as chaotically as the fathers, all her tangled cords were capable of producing now were whistles. short shrieks of belonging more to a bird than a girl. placed his hands around her headso small that his fingers could wrap all the way around-he buried his fangs around her eyes and sucked. in a sense, his hunger was the last thing she ever got to see. avo feasted. and for a moment, the world was perfect. rend capacity: 90% vent! vent! vent! warning: no hell manifested unable to vent engaging safety overrides adjusting to zero burn suddenly, felt his connection to heaven break. a flash of incandescence pulsed through him as little vicious flopped free from where the pillar used to be, her organs pouring loose like offal. in his cog-feed warning icons were flashing through the menu of his heaven. several icons were burning at capacity. he didnt care. he was too busy chewing on her eyes. they were delicious. after he finished, he heard another crack coming from behind. the boys body wasnt much of a body anymore either. his limbs had detached at some point, drained dry of all substance as a porous sac swelled from where his chest used to be. something inside was swimming. pushing. traveling up the sack and nursing on the remaining brain matter within the skull. a ghoulling was about to hatch. inside, avo heard the tiny hisses of his offspring. just the one. the father was clinging to the boys hand, even as he whispered broken prayers. artad this. artad that. artad was dead and so was the boy. and avo, even with all his newfound power, could never make that right again. avo ignored the man and walked over next to draus. she was looking up at him, her wariness returning. only when he matched gazes with her did he realize that she was probably thinking if he was going to kill her. nest. about to hatch one. beaten. maimed. weary. she rolled onto her back over her scab-coated stumps and let out an exhausted breath. yeah. i know. didnt want to infect him, avo said. going to deal with it. she flicked her eyes over to him. you. you got a liminal frame. how? he shrugged. cant remember. she scoffed a laugh. jaus fuckin avaundaer. course you cant. another crack. a flap of the skull was lifting off. distantly, avo could hear the pounding of heavy footsteps approaching with a course of whining servos. exo-rigs, it sounded like. approaching from beyond the desiccated marble columns, standing like parapets before the partially collapsed walls. probably syndicate hitters, draus said. come to collect us. or finish us off. avo walked over to the boy. he didnt look at the childs face. he did his best to let there be no memory at all. with practiced ease, he brought his foot down on the boys skull, pulping it and the ghoulling festering inside. the crunches came with two echoes but only one ghost. thaumic cycler: 22 thaum/c ghosts - [35] ah. right. one more of each from little vicious as well. the father, past the point of breaking, just stared on as the blood pooled toward him. avo dragged him away to avoid repeating the same act on him later. no sense in letting the man get infected too. as avo returned, he looked down into the blood at his own neon-basked reflection. he expected to see the sangeist again. what he got was just a ghoul in a tattered undersuit, the holographic glow of a voidship rising over his skull like a crown. he shook his head and chuckled mirthlessly. the city was welcoming him back. the only way it knew how. missed you too, avo said. Chapter 3-1 Reception chapter 3-1 reception the warrens didnt used to be a part of new vultun. much the same way the crust around the rim of your toilet didnt actually start a part of your toilet. people outside the arks are renewable resources. fuel, if you will. genetic specimens to be cataloged for the breeding vats. their minds can be mined for ghosts upon their deaths. lesser miracles and cheap cyber too obsolete for even the undercroft are smuggled to the countless desperate souls in the sprawling squalor that is the warrens. just an unfortunate fact of the system. the arks were made to hold maybe 10 billion people. there are 100 billion living inside them now. even with the inner tiers explosive growth, the warrens below expand twice as fast as new refugees and immigrants flock to our sovereignties by the day. last estimates put them somewhere north of 300 billion. and this is with the waves of wombrash brought on by sporadic attempts at natural breeding. the harsh fact is that not enough people died during the godsfall. its just too much weight. -leaked audio recordings of ark admin [redacted] the sanctons purges miniseries 3-1 reception draus blood called to avo. her wounds were still hot, the sweetness in her flesh taunting him with its novel flavor. he had never eaten a regular before. the beast rattled inside his bones. screeching, hissing at him. begging him to indulge. telling him that he might never get this chance again. avo looked at the messy soup he had made of little vicious after his meal. his insides felt full. he ignored the urge. the beast howled, and avo felt satisfaction triumphing against his greedy pleasure and decided that he liked the sensation. three alive. three out of over two hundred survivors. this was three more than how most crucibles ended. long abandoned, the space around him was more waste dump than living quarters. mountains of abandoned luggage rose and fell in rolling hills. whoever lived here fled in a hurry. past the entrance, decayed columns stained with hap-tags stood beneath the collapsed outer shell of the building. a gouge ran through the midsection of the block, the winds and sounds of the city whistling in as if through a ravine. neon spilled through what naked stretch of the sky they could see. no starlight shone through the haze of light pollution brought on by an overdose of holo-ads. cleaves of light carved along the open cracks of the block, infusing the moisture in the air with an etheric glow. droplets of rain slipped in from cracks and rents. they were like colored beads, each connected in the eyes of avo as if an abacus shifting the burdens of the citys expenses down into the warrens. a ripple washed out, crackling with dissolving ghosts. avo grew aware the audience was filtering out. a few had tried to approach him, tried to come and take a closer look at the carnage. they traveled for less than a scant second before the locus they were tied to blinked out in the nether. the connection was cut. it was like a star going out in the dark. a silence of external thought followed. where once he could taste a mass of minds screaming, chattering, bleeding their emotions into the nether, now was just him, draus, and the father. the three unidentified approaching signatures of ward-shielded thoughtstuff notwithstanding. beside him, draus was wheezing with every breath. she lacked his cellular regeneration, but whatever military-grade implants she had ensured she was a hard target to snuff. still didnt mean she was invincible. far from it. the father wept behind him, whimpering at the puddle of viscera that once was the skull of his son. avo wanted to say something to him. no words came. the man was beyond comfort anyway. he had gone to that special place he couldnt follow. psychosis, walton had explained to him. when the human mind was so inundated with trauma that something broke. avo wondered what it was like to suffer cruelty rather than feed from it.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. they faced down a light-assault platform and survived. barely, and not all of them. more than that, the heaven that gave the golem its powers was now dormant inside him, its form smelted into existence by the resonance of his eldritch flame. among this little ragged band, only he emerged intact. disregarding his two deaths and many prior wounds that were somehow removed after his resurrections of course. come to think of it, when he found himself on the barge, why was he so injured? the last two times had seen him return unblemished. not even a scratch. now, his heaven wasnt working. in the back of his mind, he could still see the flashing warning signs, the ringing klaxons telling him to vent now. more revelations. more questions. walton had engrammed a message into his subconsciousness from beyond the grave, and avo felt a headache coming on. too much too fast. he needed to deal with what he could first. draus was alive. healing. but she was a mangled ruin compared to what she used to be. her rasping breaths told him something was filling one of her lungs. he wasnt sure if her nanosuites were equipped to deal with that. ninety, avo finally said. ninety percent. she let out a breath. shit. not good? she didnt answer immediately, choosing to ask him another question instead. is it going down? he checked the bloodforge interface. no. still stuck at ninety. telling me to vent. how many thaums is your soul outputting per cycle? eigh he caught himself. at some point, it had become nine with his killing of little vicious. twenty-two. she groaned. fuckin figures. looks like you got a new build, consang. got it planted in you before it was even fueled proper. twenty might be enough to manifest a minor heaven maybe, but sure as shit not a hell at the same time. not even a first circle. too many technical details. he didnt have the knowledge to parse through what she was telling him. explain in functionality. what are effects? what is danger? danger is that your heaven is effectively unmanifested right now. liminal frames safeties are still in place, im guessing. probably triggered zero burn, yeah? avo nodded. zero burn means your liminal frame is effectively burning as quietly as it can. outputting just enough thaums to keep the cog-feed and feed the attached metamind, but not nearly enough to maintain anything else. she paused. enough to bring you back too, usually, but youre not going to want to die right now. why not? draus chuckled. cause then youll be stayin dead. a rend is like aa tear in the fabric of reality. you know how fallen heavens can make ruptures that mess up continents and turn parts of the voids into sunderwilds, yeah? well, imagine pushing your ontology through a shredder of raw chaos. aint much that emerges on the other side. frame could revert you to an earlier instance, but itll have to push you through the same shredder to reinject you into existence. do the math for what comes after. suddenly, the cold breath of mortality hissed across the nape of avos neck. like a shot across the bow, fear licked at his mind again, taunting him as his brief bout of assumed immortality fled from him. draus grinned. funny. you look plenty human when youre worried. almost like half the guilder juvs i had to babysit on their first walks into a rupture. avo was about to continue asking her more questions but the sound of rolling pieces of rubble and encroaching footsteps slashed a halt to their conversation. and theres the muscle, draus said, leaning back into the cockpit. stay zero, avo. my guess is that they want us alive. wouldve just jocked a missile into this block if they wanted to see us dead. she sighed, spent. probably to take us so that we can have a chat with our local syndi-reps. partake in some...diplomacy." servo-propelled footsteps added percussion to the overall ambiance within the lobby of the megablock. they were getting closer, their bulbous shadows pouring forth from between the columns of the entrance. rocks cracked. glass shattered. avo prepared. he knew better than to run. that would just strike him from the sky. use a drone. his wards would prevent a mem-lock until they finally managed to crack it, but he still had a heat signature, and unless they were running real gutter-level kit, he expected motion tracks. he harbored no illusions about his chances out on the run and with his new heaven offline he doubted his odds against them in a straight fight. what he did have were his phantasmics, few as those might have been. he tethered a few more shivs of trauma to his ghost-link. worse comes to worst, someone will learn to empathize with little vicious last minutes, whether they like it or not. partway through making his third shiv, they emerged, standing as titanium-clad shadows, marching between the enshadowed gulfs between the columns. their bodies, thick with armor, aged and battle-scarred, the wear obvious even from a distance. yet, that wasnt what drew the bulk of avos attention. what pulled his focus were their faceshelmets, to be more accurate. silvery glass caged their heads as if they were wearing wrapped mirrors, reflecting all that was around them. the ovular shape of their masks stood out from the rest of their war-touched kit. that was something new; crafted with extreme precision to fit each and every one of them. like a symbol. or a motif. quiet harbingers of tension, the syndicate muscle approached, their guns live and ready, a dozen or so micro-drones pushing forward of ahead to secure the room. avos phy-sim marked twelve lanes of fire lined directly at his head. and here he was, with only two shivs. it looked like he was going to have to get diplomatic. at least for now. avo hated being diplomatic. Chapter 3-2 Stay of Execution chapter 3-2 stay of execution simple. one guild has to finally win. or at least decide to stop funneling arms down to fight their proxy wars. -chief paladin naeko, answering what it would take for crime in the warrens to go down. 3-2 stay of execution the drones dove in first, guided forward along threads ghosts connecting them to the three syndicate enforcers. they were small models, barely larger than the boy. well, around the boys size when he was still whole and not mangled pulp. from needle-tipped scanners, the drones cast out a holographic threshold, securing the area like paladins would a crime scene. most of the dozen or so drones hovered out in a defensive array, circling and securing the outer edges of the premises. two of them narrowed in on avo, their jagged forms forwards shivering with bottled energy. a faint pulse shone over their matter for a moment. his cog-feed had identified similarities between it and the matter his heaven was channeling right now. tungsten. if he said something wrong, or maybe if the enforcers decided that they just didnt like him being alive, these drones would probably punch through his head in a blink. jaus, one of the enforcers muttered, staring at the sheer amount of gore and viscera left over after the nights festivities. i think thats viciouswhat the fuck. avo could smell the disgust rising in their throat. interesting. their rigs werent vacuum sealed. told him about the quality of their kit. their drones scythed scanning grids over the hosts remains. she was dead. dead as he could make her. her eyes tasted so sweet. the muscle dispatched to retrieve them was your standard syndicate muscle: probably over-auged with cheap coldtech implants before locking themselves beneath the mechanized plates of titanium they called an exo-rig. chrome in, chrome out. each of them had some personalization to their armor, but the models were the same: domed heads, and bulbous bodies. looked more like diving suits back from the bygone ages. the exterior of their armor was harshed with holo-haptic decals of black and red, lining their bulbous shells with slurs and skulls. a few even had recordings of some of their previous kills and atrocities playing across their bodies. probably a habit they picked up from criminals that the paladins sin-marked. once you got your crime burned into a constellation for everyone to see around you, it made it impossible to hide who you were, even if you emerged sane after getting your mind used as processing power for a locus. three weapon systems were festooned to their rigs.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. a las-cutter jutted over their shoulders on a focused beam emitter. it seemed more anti-air than anything. something to fry a drone or cook a missiles targeting systems. in their wrists, they had the requisite fusion burner, spinning with a spreading barrel of gleaming gold. it had become standard for most close-quarter operators after the fourth guild war. good for slagging halls and burning the oxygen out of rooms. made clearing habcells a matter of capturing o2 junctions rather than a room-to-room firefight. avo fought the urge to flinch at the sight of the weapon. fusion burners, more than anything else, painted his nightmares with an eternal incandescent crackle. the last system they had was just a shuriken. a particle-lancer. their models looked slightly less modified than what slaughterman used, but close enough that avo knew what to expect. they came to an unsteady halt about twenty feet away. a beat of silence followed as midnights long-scheduled rainfall began gaining momentum. basked in lights of enshrouding red spilling from the drone scanners, avo studied his reflection in their pallid helms. his undersuit dangled from him in tattered pieces and his skin was flecked in rivers of red. blood. some of it was his, from a past life. some of it was from little vicious. a drone hovered by, scanning the command module. draus finger rose from the inside, her rude gesture matching the ascent of the holographic voidship in the ad. tryin to enjoy my internal bleeding in peace here. find yourself elsewhere. with a thought from the frontmost enforcer, the drone obliged, slinking back as its jock strode forward. speak standard, ghoul? probably better than you can. just fine. his lack of snarling or incoherence seemed a surprise to them. a synchronized whine of servos sounded as they all turned to stare at each other. they probably wanted him to be a feral. just another monster festering in the streets. all they needed to do then was shoot him and move on to the others. less paperwork that way. data says youre fourteen. i was, avo said. another pause. another glance between the enforcers. avo felt a dull resignation set on him. whatever was going on with them, he wished they would just get on with it. if they were going to shoot him, he doubted that he could stop them. after all the beatings he took, he was all out of fear. the leader turned back to look at him. the system also says you''re dead. avo looked down at himself. his body had shed its scabs, his cheap temp-skin undersuit a shredded mess. besides that, he was as healthy as he had ever been. he lifted his arms in a show of health. wasnt informed. the leader just studied him for a moment. a smartass ghoul. never thought id see one of those? avo glared. can do math too. the father got no better care from the enforcers after. they dragged him up the rubble, his head bouncing and shaking, face pulled and sliced on outcrops of glass and rebar. strangely though, it was his tear-stained eyes and gushing nose that made him look beyond wretched. avo sneered. hey, meat. the enforcer turned to glare at him. fuck you want, rotlick? not me, avo said, biting back the urge to shove one of his mind-shivs into the enforcers cheap wards. your boss: he going to be happy when you bring this one in cold? those his orders? or maybe hell do you like your friend. avo shrugged. the enforcer looked away from him. carry him proper, avo continued. survived the games. should survive you too. city decided it wants him. maybe it was the threat of the enforcers boss stepping in. maybe avo was more persuasive than he remembered. whatever it was, the enforcer slung the father over his shoulder instead of flaying him against the ground. thank jaus for small mercies. surmounting the toppled ruins, avo looked up and found himself beholding the underside of the warrens. stacks and stacks of blocks rose into the smog-gripped sky. gunfire and thundering bass echoed from the forest of bridges connecting each megabuilding to another. so far down, he could only see the underside of platforms and the jutting extensions of the buildings. light from the upper tier made its way down in dappled flashes. here then was why they called this place the warrens: the sheer urban density had reduced the environment into a near-continent-sized sprawl connected by burrows of glass and metal, studded with towering blocks that were barely maintained. flashing holo-ads bloomed from all angles, splashed against the underside of avenues and bridges, booming at maximum volume. above, a swirl of error codes was projected over the bottom of layer one where a moon should be. running some hundred feet above, a hexagonal series of district-wide techno-organic bone plates expanded like a city-sized umbrella, grown to separate the refuse at the depths of the warrens from that which was still salvageable on the surface. as they were led through a series of winding paths, they were led out to a parking lot that looked more akin to a landfill. droplets of rain splashed down on them and stopped, the rainfall choked with every other step. the infrastructure above them was so dense that most of the spillage could barely get down. cheap ads burned in both reality and the nether, with the most common sight being offers of debt bonds and organ-breed sponsorships. distant gunfire pulled his attention. through the air, a curving salvo of missiles tore through the thickness of traffic filling the skies to punch down into the abandoned megablock they were emerging from. a plume of dust and debris rose into the air. the block trembled. its walls crumbled a bit more. the enforcer carrying the father sighed. its those scalper fucks again, i bet. half-strands wont stop going for us. the new leaderthe one called chambersgroaned in agreement. raid! raid! double time! the two hitters exploded into motion, but they still werent particularly fast seeing as they were running in a near-ton of armor. new missiles bent through the chaotic floods of aerial traffic. drones shot up to intercept. las-cutters flashed, the beams blinking in wide flashes. rumbling explosions bloomed behind them. avo found himself pushed ahead of the group as he went from follower to shepherd on these empty streets strewn with waste. crossing out into an exposed part of the warrens, the rain hammered hard down on him. as they pulled the father into the deluge, avo noticed the wounds on the mans face already closing. a group of street-juvs glared at them, bloodied knives in their hands. their cut wrists rapidly mended. who needed healthcare when the guilds seeded the midnight rains with miracles? that wasnt the right question down here. the right question was who controlled the street corners where the raindrops actually landed. for a stretch, the rain poured so hard that avo could hear it knocking against the bone of his skull, stinging him. chambers did his best to expose draus to the wet. she, in turn, opened her mouth and took in mouthfuls of water. that would resolve the internal bleeding somewhat, but she would still need a grafter for surgery. someone to replace her augs and limbs. another missile landed much closer this time. daring a look behind, avo saw a trailing specter following close, triangulating the shots. with a snarl, he flung his ghost-link out at it. it rejected his request to connect, but he left it planted with a special surprise. his shiv sank deep through the poorly maintained specters wards, injecting its insides with an expanding memory from one of the hunters he killed back in the crucible. it was like staking a snake made of glass, and few things were more satisfying than watching a mind come apart at the seams. chambers shot him a double take as they kept moving. the hells was that, ghoulie? avo shrugged. enforcer didnt need to know his capabilities. guess their jack got nulled? a chorus of whistling engines drew his attention back ahead. a tunnel opened impossibly through a curtain of rain in the distance. the deluge parted along four invisible slopes as an unclear shape approached. they were at the edge of the parking lot now. there were fewer hills of debris here; more space to land. what approached them was much, much smaller than an aerobarge, but still large enough to fit one of the enforcers. even in the rig. the aerovec was shaped like a sleek arrowhead with four tetrahedral engines hissing microfusion propulsors. avos phys-sim simulated its most likely trajectory and drew a lane curving down from the outer edge of the layer one hexagon. avo wondered which district he was in; which sovereignty. chambers handed draus back over to avo. better not drop her, ghoul. he took her into his arms. she coughed out some rainwater and glared at the enforcer. gotta work on your cardio, consang. could feel your heart hammerin'' even through the armor. the aerovec spun and landed in front of them. chambers jabbed avo in the head with his fusion burner. listen, i dont give a shit what happens to you or the fucking flat but this one was a reg. she deserves better than this. this is as close to begging as i get, ghoul: do not fuck with mirrorhead. he will make you wish i killed you. you synced with me, consang? you saw what he did to yulens back there?" yeah, avo said. synced. chambers gave him a nod. get on then. and dont fucking lie to him. hell know. a blast of cooled air washed over avo as he felt draus shiver in his arms. the aerovec had opened its rearmost doors to him. an inviting ambiance greeted him with soft cellos playing and musky aromas nibbling at his nose. he sneezed. the light was a dim purple trailing off into what should have been darkness. but avo saw just fine without light and beheld an immaculately dressed individual in a monochrome suit. his face was featureless, reflective. the same could be said about his hands. there, against a large curving sofa with wyvern scales running down the armrests, sat mirrorhead. and immediately, avo realized he wasnt even dealing with some random syndicate boss. no. this was someone with a name worth knowing. someone that screamed danger. right then, avo wanted to do anything other than get into the aerovec. few people got what they wanted in this city. Chapter 3-3 Mirrorhead chapter 3-3 mirrorhead my scalpers. our syndicate. were bad. i know were bad people. juvs down the corner. their gene-parents. they all know. problem is were also the only game in nu-scarrowbur. only real game anyhow. you show me a wager running official contract-gigs, working for imps on the second, and ill show you someone whos bound to get their organs harvested or dosed out on joy in a month. without us, the flats and fugees are easy meat for the others. better they stay our meat. besides, theres plenty of reasons why people join us. some want the chrome. some want to hurt folks. some want to move their families up a layer. something about there being better air scrubbers and fewer ghouls. ultimately, the choice is simple: were all gonna die down here. all of us. i just want to do a bit more of the hurting than being hurt before i go. live a little. -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers head of the scalpers syndicate 3-3 mirrorhead they threw the father in with him after he carried draus aboard. the man tumbled across the black velvet carpeting the floor, his rain-soaked body dripping into the softness beneath him. behind, the rear doors snapped shut with a hiss and the engines throttled up. with a lurch, avo felt the aerovec rise just as a distant explosion shook the air with turbulence. pick any seat you want. unlike when he spoke to his enforcers, mirrorhead seemingly did nothing to disguise his voice here. his voice flowed like the texture of the velvet avo was standing on. deep. smooth. languid. none of the thunder from earlier though. nor did the glass in the aerovec crack. mirrorhead sat with a single leg crossed over the other. one of his shoes shone like a gleaming opal. the other was more akin to polished ebony. delivered as he was, avo felt like a rat presented to a king. which, in a sense, was kind of what was happening here. never taking his eyes off the expressionless mask of mirrorhead, avo watched as his every moment was reflected. no ripples or wards sprung over mirrorheads mind, the sight suffusing avo with dread. no metamind. no phantasmics. no thoughtstuff. mirrorhead was somehow projecting no signature into the air, nor trailing any memory signatures. which was functionally impossible. everything that thought, that held any capacity for cognition emanated thoughtstuff and released ghosts upon death. but here mirrorhead was, defying one of the fundaments avo had spent his entire life studying; exploiting. it was like staring into an absencea void that could strike out at you without ever being struck in return. he laid draus on her back along one of the couches protruding from the walls. he deliberately kept her as far as he could from mirrorhead. turn me round, she said, jabbing him with her remaining arm. avo winced as he felt her knuckles rattle his ribplates like a gunshot. even dismembered, she packed a punch. wanna see the half-strand. if mirrorhead took any offense to the insult, he did not show it. the interior of the aerovec was spacious. absurdly so. beyond the ramp, soft leather couches formed an inverted u shape. small magnetic trays extended from armrests, their stretch bearing the weight of crystalline glasses with strips of metal on the bottom. looking up, avo noticed the ceiling was also paneled with polished glass, separated only by a rod that shone a dim monochrome glow. disturbingly though, mirrorhead was entirely missing in that reflection. in his place, an eldritch presence trembled faintly, the vagueness of its structure only existing in intermittent instants, manifesting to ripples of thaumic mass. avo tore his gaze from the ceiling before he gave the game away. he didnt know what mirrorhead knew about himif he could perceive the liminal frame that burned within avo. once again, if the manor whatever mirrorhead wasknew, he betrayed nothing. instead, he just sat there, waiting. watching. avo was unable to shake the feeling that he was a sparrow in the jaws of a lion, waiting for the teeth to fall. the beast inside him was screaming for him to fight. die fighting. or break free and run. be a ghoul. but doing that right now would undoubtedly see him snuffed. he was dealing with a godclad. one more cognizant of their abilities than he was. one that actually had a working heaven and hell right now. for now, avo did his best to play the role of the ignoramus, turning to pick the father from the ground. mirrorhead was scrubbing the glass now, working the material meticulously. another psychological tactic? or maybe he just liked clean. didnt matter. avo was going to have to tread carefully here. he had no idea what mirrorhead meant by fiber but outright lying wasnt a good choice. talking about how little vicious died, however, was suicide. for all he knew, it would make mirrorhead snuff him right then and there and toss his corpse out the aerovec for a guild to claim. syndicates were bottom feeders; carrion businesses. they fed off what they could steal from the downtrodden and what scraps the guilds left unguarded. but a fox didnt cut its teeth on fighting dragons. if mirrorhead knew what avo had inside him, what they both shared, the syndicate boss would either cut the liminal frame out for his own use or ransom it up to one of the great eight for a big payday. so, the whole truth was off the table. the next best thing instead was a lie of omission. happened when the elevator was going up. golem broke. malfunctioned. mirrorhead hummed casually. some of the spectators claimed that they saw you get torn in half. be there any truth to that? avo winced. she hurt me. couldnt kill me. healed. mirrorhead stopped scrubbing the glass. and then started cleaning the other way around. the golem. tell me how it malfunctioned? not sure. hm, mirrorhead said, looking distractedly at his glass. a sudden series of five rings pulsed out through his head from within. avo felt his stomach drop. the syndicate boss had activated his metamind. the ghosts were emerging from beneath mirrorheads face, spilling out through a distant boundary. little wonder why avo couldnt detect anythingthe adversary was probably broadcasting from another part of the city entirely, using reflections to transport the information. clever. it was good counter against most necrojacks. prevented the opposition from studying your sequences, getting a mem-lock on you. if you cant offer an answer, you should at least offer me a theory. one worth swallowing. avo thought carefully about what he was going to say next. right now, he was on the edge. his ghost-link still had one thought-shiv attached to it. but if mirrorhead could transport his own ghosts through reflections, avo wasnt sure how sophisticated of a metamind pattern he was up against. mirrorhead could be in a specially-tuned amplifier lobby for all he knew. avo shot a brief look at draus. she ran her tongue over her bloodstained teeth and winked. he had no idea what the hells that meant. avo shuffled awkwardly. not really sure. she caught up to us. used decoy golem and thoughtwave bomb to distract us. used me toto infect the child. but something happened with the golem while it was tearing into me. problem with locus, i think? the commands mirrorheads interruption came without any hint or prelude. you know, she spent a frankly unreasonable amount of resources trying to kill you, two flats, and a dishonorably discharged reg ten years out of the service? a dozen snuffers under my employ: all dead. an assault golem that i personally fueled using my soul: broken. more, it appears that the heaven itself is gone; beyond the presence of the coldtech shell of the command module, anyhow. and to plant a sour cherry on an already bitter, bitter cake, my host is dead. mutilated. achieving less than nothing after wasting an inordinate amount of imps to kill just. four. people. less than nothing. avo wasnt designed for empathy, but even a ghoul knew that two hundred people was enough to feed on for at least a week. ethics aside, if avo himself had killed that many people himself, that was more than enough thaums for him to have both his heaven and hells. probably worth a good amount of money for the echoes of those slain to be fed to a tech-thaum reactor somewhere. mirrorhead scoffed and shook his head. i would have snuffed her personally for thisfarce. but i suppose i have to thank you. avo didnt know what to say, so he defaulted to reflex and grunted. why are you special, fourteen? that question stymied avo for a second. not special. just ghoul. well, you have to be special. have to be. with the money she spent trying to kill you, i could have bred a thousand ghouls from the slaves i could buy. and please, dont push this over to former captain jelene draus here, mirrorhead regarded draus with a small nod. she responded by spitting on his carpet. shes a known variable. a problem that was eventually going to be dealt with. but she wasnt who vicious spent the most time hurting. dont say you are not special. little vicious clearly believed that you are. she died believing you were special. tell me why you? what to say here? what made him special? jaus, was this an interview or an interrogation? it was like mirrorhead was judging him for a job. or trying to make him admit to having a soul inside. i think she wanted me to fail. maybe had money against me. made her mad by not dying. mirrorhead tapped the edge of the cup with his fingers. the clinking noise was jarring. i see. the crystal cup suddenly cracked and sank out of existence, into the reflection in mirrorheads hand. the syndicate boss sighed and stood up, adjusting his coat. ithink youre bullshitting me. with a snap of his finger, the back ramp of the aerovec hissed open. outside, rain fell hard to the percussion of thunder. Chapter 3-4 Lying chapter 3-4 lying lying used to be so much easier without ghosts leeching the truth from your memories. of course, finding the truth also used to be simpler as well; hard to tell what is and whats just a planted memory when anyone with a meta and the right sequence can mod a mid. but thats where the art comes in. being a necrojack is more than being a con artist, or a memetic engineer, or even both those things put together. being necrojack is about shaping belief; diving in to know what people want and twisting it to serve your needs. -white rab, constructs of deception, page 96 3-4 lying avo growled and prepared to fight for his life. there werent a whole lot of ways to interpret the back of an aero opening up as a friendly gesture. this was why walton used to do the talking. he pressed mirrorhead, preparing his ghost-link, his jagged tip of trauma prepared to spring. at least it was until something tore him through the ceiling. an impossible force seized him along the scruff of his neck, its grip piercing, slashing into him as it drew him through the reflection in the ceiling. panic seized him. primal. animal. he felt his body lurch as he crossed through an unseen threshold; pulled into a place that simply couldnt have existed without the presence of thaumaturgy. or a heaven thalassophobia: the fear of the deep waters. necrojacks suffered from time to time due to the nature of the work; it wasnt uncommon to run into a leviathan of trauma hiding between folds of seemingly unconnected memories. but even then, there was always a recourse. a way out. to cut the ghosts and part your consciousness. to hide amongst the chaos and wait. here, before that thing of piercing wings that gleamed, of circling bands warping its three chasm-sized eyes, avo felt his ghost wail and his metamind brace. no place to hide. no place to run. his wards spiked, straining before the sight. he tore his gaze away, the weight of madness lessening, but still present. its eldritch mass was far larger than the sangeista leviathan capable of swallowing cities rather than a meager tower. yet, as its fire burned, ebbing rising licks of unfathomable iridescence, avo felt something deeper within it screaming a mournful note. twice-walker, seraphid of the chorus such was its designation. such was what it called itself. the presence of its existence tasted like a wound to avos mind, a weight of naked memories of ghosts bleeding forth from it eternally, like a scar carved into the flesh of all that was. and then, with contemptuous ease, it swallowed him. suddenly, he was seeing the world out of a narrow, oblong pinhole. he emerged from the reflection, his body squeezing free from the narrow confines of mirrorheads skull, pulled loose by the impossible strength presiding within syndicate godclads cold fingers. avo snapped free, thrashing instinctively, mind whirling at just what was happening. avo fought. thrashing. clawing with blind animalistic rage. all in vain. the arm drawing across the veil was beyond any strength he could fathom. his claws tore through the outer layers of a suit but sank into the reflective material that formed the bedrock of mirrorheads flesh. where his claws dug in, they tore out, bleeding his own form as mirrorhead twisted the attack back on themselves. avo managed three swipes before even realizing he was mauling himself, flensing pieces of flesh off his chest. mirrorhead sighed. now that was very wise of you. he poured avo back into his skull with a simple shove. the world narrowed, growing unbearably tight. avo felt himself pass through the threshold again, toppling out from the ceiling now. his senses spun, and he gasped as if he was surfacing from deep waters. struggling, he found himself held over the edge of the ramp. the rain stung his body like needles. beneath, the raging winds misted the streets below through murky sheens of neon, hiding just how long he would fall if dropped. nausea roiled through him. faintly, he could hear the rain more clearly now, taste the soothing power imbued into the air. he didnt lie, draus snarled, dragging herself across the carpet. pull em back. avos mind spun. what had just happened? how did mirrorhead stood over him, adjusting the collar on his tattered suit in a show of raw control.. the syndicate boss tapped his face as avo saw his own wretched visage reflected, a soaked, pale creature in the casual grip of something far beyond. reality submits to metaphysics, mirrorhead began. and though im no agnosno proper theologian of the broken divines and the heavens that once composed their bodies and manifest miracles for our cities, mirrorhead said, his hand turning like a lecturing theorist, i do know a few things. like how unlikely it is for a few mortals to overcome a golem. even one running a heaven as obsolete as a sangeist. lightning flashed, reflecting pale, branching scars through clouds clotted with darkness via reflection, via mirrorhead. the gutters flowed like a rash of urban decay, of hollowed buildings dotted with little fires. so, lets try this again: what happened to little vicious? we know the nether was disrupted at the moment of her death. we have remembrances from a few spectators from afar confirming that the golems heaven fell. we know that you ate her. and my necrojackers didnt detect any intrusions, so how your n-sec is terrible, avo growled out through mirrorheads grip, the sheer audacity of the statement actually striking the syndicate boss silent. elaborate, mirrorhead said, fingers tightening. avo felt a series of cracks sound through his neck. spots began to form in his vision. and you better not lie to me. you lie, and i drop the flat first. he was talking about the father. and then our former guard-captain draus. and finally, you. avo breathed in as best as he could, trying to remember what walton taught him about social deception. considering the proximity between the species, psychopathy was a natural trait for a ghoul to be ingrained with. it wouldnt do for a clade of bioformed monsters to suffer emotional turmoil when their prey cried out for mercy. he liked fixing broken things, avo said. we all got ourfixations. gathering the shards of broken glass he had in his hand, mirrorhead tossed them through his face. why did he do that? these things happen, you know, mirrorhead continued, motioning for avo to sit. in fact, until ms. draus admitted to things, i knew you were juking me. dont know why a reg would save a ghoul. hells. maybe she thinks you''re like a souvenir from her olden days. makes her nostalgic for all the others in her unit. the orphans. tell me, captain, i heard another of your number died last month. my condolences. nearby, avo could hear draus heartbeat quickening. mirrorhead had struck something deep with his words. behind, the father was groaning in pain. within mirrorhead was all silence. no sound. no heartbeat. no scent. like there was nothing there. youre lucky, you know that, mirrorhead said. avo grunted. lucky. lucky he had a liminal frame preventing the maw from draining him empty. lucky it could bring him back from the dead. lucky it could tear a heaven from a golem and graft it onto him. so, now the big question remained: where and when did he get a liminal frame burned into him? still nothing. like those memories had been scalped clean from his mind. couldnt mean anything good. lets talk about arrangements, mirrorhead said, startling avo back into focus. arrangements? avo asked, confused. mirrorhead waved a dismissive hand. i own you now. now, how i own you and how i use you can be discussed. avo understood the words but found a barrier blocking his full comprehension. you own me? youre a ghoul, consang. mightve had a nice master, but lets be honest: you dont have rights. youre a weapon at best, mirrorhead laughed, but frankly, to me, what the low masters made of your kind was more aart project. jaus, hes serious. avos mind was reeling. bought me from scavengers. put me in a crucible. and nowi belong to you? yes, mirrorhead said like it was the most natural thing in the world. something strange about that? the aerovec began to slow, and descend. a light near the rear doors flashed twice. mirrorhead stood straightening his monochromatic suit. the man flicked his holographic tie off. follow. avo looked at mirrorhead. he looked at draus. he looked at the father, still clutching his head. dont mind them. i have other designs for them. and do not mistake my statement for a request. follow. the door hissed open again. the rain had weakened to a mere shower now, the haze broke enough to reveal the pulsing of distant neon and strobing lights. clashing music echoed from distant ghosts, interspersed with exchanges of gunfire. this was the heartbeat of the warrens. this was how people down here lived. go on, draus said. get after him. avo stared at her. he didnt know what to say. draus she chuckled. shut the fuck up and get out of here. ill be fine, keep an eye on the flat. see about bumming some new arms and legs off these half-strands if they dont try to torture me. she snorted. be like going through basic again. ghoul. mirrorhead voice rumbled through the glass. he didnt sound like he was going to ask again. avo wanted to say something to draus. offer her a promise. something. but mirrorhead was listening. watching. peering through every reflection. every curve and bend in the room. the shackles of paranoia settled on avo, and a new weight clung to him. so, he didnt say anything. instead, he quietly extended his ghost-link over to her, hiding his shiv as best he could. transferring ghost ghosts: [34] lost one fragging the specter earlier. and another, wrapping his thought-shiv in a nice little package. confusion momentarily flashed across draus features before her face flattened. he could see the twitch of a smile on her cheek. yeah, she whispered. thanks. Chapter 3-5 Sanctum of Mirrors chapter 3-5 sanctum of mirrors the guilds built the warrens to be temporary. the widening of the tiers was supposed to be a continent-wide project. a stable haven for humanity to re-expand across this broken world. and what more poetic place to do it than from the forge that once made the gods themselves? the blocks were fabbed by voidwatch. an act of unity between the voiders and the terrestrials. a cleansing of old wounds. highflame provided most of the souls. ori-thaum built the nether. the no-dragons reseeded the world with life while stormtree wrestled the ecosystem back from the hypercanes and chronostorms. hells, even the mandate got in on the action, mauled as they were. filled out the local oceans and rivers again while sanctum stiched the broken planes of geometry back in place. ashthrone? their hells made the whole enterprise logistically feasible. just a shame about how the others tried to cut them out afterward. some say that was what started the wars again. truth is, peace cant last; existence cant uphold eight different utopias. not after all the blood thats been shed. -revo ikurita, the false peace, prologue 3-5 sanctum of mirrors mirrorhead made avos blood churn. there was something wrong with the syndicate godclad, and it wasnt the heaven he possessed. rather, it was the discordant nature they went about things that gnawed at avos nature. for all mirrorheads pretenses of control and refinement, they were at once naked power and fleeting attentionseemingly more lost in their own mind and questions than focused on the world around them. perhaps that was a natural outcome of peeking out at the world from within a glass cage. emerging into the night, the warrens wailed at avos senses. through the nether a line of loci burned like miniature suns, each bound to the next through megablock after megablock, junctions to traffic ghosts. in the material, avo found himself in a place far different than where he emerged. there was a certain density in the local ecology. a thickness in the air like life was overflowing. it was a place that slumming topsiders would take mem-shots of in disposal sheathes, taking in the sights and the daily lives of the mortals, before splashing the remembrances in their memory palaces for their friends to see. some called it art. others called it madness. walton wouldve called it expression. descending the landing pad after mirrorhead, the topside of layer one greeted with noise and motion from almost every inch of space. if the gutters below were characterized by abandonment and decay, then this section of the sprawl would be a biomechanical swamp at war with itself. biotech and alloys splashed against each other here. rising fungal rot and bio-engineered shitslugs ate their way up the mid-levels of the blocks. meanwhile, drones and holographically constructed aero-lanes lined the skiesarteries of flowing matter dancing to the age-old rhythm of red-yellow-green amidst all the neon. before avos eyes, a cybernetic leviathan-whale swam through the air. its narrow head snapped along as its colossal tendrils undulated behind it. aerovecs blared their horns at it as the eighty-foot-long chimeric behemoth inched forward languidly, spewing plumes of fire from bulging pustules filled with helium. avo looked away from the bombardment of physical and phantasmal ads burned across the creatures moon-bright body. he had caught sight of the flashing blurs of a local suicide and organ repossession center. just staring at it caused part of the address to whisper itself to him. whoever designed it also instilled the ghosts with an added kick of compulsion. unethical, but effective. ultimately, ignoring the whale was far easier than ignoring the smell. the inevitable mingling of piss and perfume, of spice and stink, of deliciousness and disgust. new vultun was a city at war with itself in every way, and it never let you forget. here then was where the light beheaded the shadow. here then was where the alloy crowned the flesh. mirrorhead trailed away, suit barely shivering, the wind drifting into him, whistling through his being like air currents sucked through a chasm. they mustve been at least fifty stories above ground level here, and at least ten miles up from where the maw was. a long distance to rise in a single day. avo liked to think of the totality of the warrens as a rash. a chaotic sprawl of urbanization spread out around and beneath the tiers like an allergy of the skin. where the topmost districts still shone with their spires and archways of glass and metal, it did faintly little to hide the chaos bubbling below. strobing lights of passing traffic slashed across avos peripheral vision. he winced and looked away. wailing horns interspersed with beats of gunfire and explosions echoed, the noises bouncing across the war-weathered bulks of each block. he pushed through the chaos with practiced focus and continued following mirrorhead down a descending staircase. peeking into his cog-feed, avo commanded his ghosts to interface with the local nether. his memnav display flashed in the back of his head as the ghosts ferried and scanned the mem-pack before installing them into his metamind. he was in the stralhurst district, and it was five-thirty-three on thulsday morning. the district was part of the yuulden-yang sovereignty, with major ownership percentages going in favor of stormtree and no-dragons: thirty-two and forty percent respectively. what little remained belonged to highflame. the post-mortem echo-tax would be divided amongst the three guilds at the same percentages. mirrorhead led him toward a massive polychromatic bulkhead that hid like a depression a full dozen feet past the edges of the block itself. this structure was old. probably built a century ago during the hundred-year truce. unlike most blocks around it, there was a bit of ground around the edges. drawing more trajectory data into his phy-sim, he guessed that the bulkhead was a recent installation, as it was all edges while the standard plascrete encompassing the rest of the structure was more curved in design. he wanted to cast out a specter. reach up and scry a bit further. get a birds eye on his situation. he didnt. he wasnt equipped to deal with proper opposition should he encounter trouble in the nether. for now, he contented himself that he was far from the crucible and the deeperand some might say truewarrens that spilled out far below. a rumbling hiss pulled avos attention back to the door in front of him. it folded upward. gears ground on for a full minute before a small crack opened itself at the very middle, revealing a miniature entrance to what looked to be an ancient elevator. he struggled not to stare incredulously at mirrorhead. elevator? avo asked. no one used elevators in the tiers. not even the undercroft. it was a blatant structural weaknesssomething that could be used to bypass levels without id scans. lets go, mirrorhead said. the syndicate boss marched forward with his hands in his pockets, never once bothering to look at avo. mirrorhead snorted in derision. cute. conflux. conflux, avo said. because black-white convergence? or syndicate having both legal-illegal businesses? mirrorhead suddenly didnt have much attitude about that. he tugged on his collar, defensively. its effective. cute. that was what avo wanted to say. he went for a less suicidal statement by just grunting. the elevator had started playing some kind of chronobass. avo hated chronobass. it was the looping of two different tracks crossing over each other that made his ears ring and his head hurt. peeking at the unmoving mirrorhead out of the corner of his eye, avo tried to come to terms with that, no, the syndicate godclad apparently was taking this all in stride. no awkwardness about nearly throwing him, draus, and the father out mid-transit. nothing about the slavery talk. not even any mention of where he was going to move the other two or if he was going to provide them with any help at all. it suddenly occurred to avo that he mightve been dealing with someone even more socially antagonistic than he was. that probably merited mirrorhead a reward. slowly, they sank below the courtyard and avo learned something that day: he learned that elevators were slow and he despised them. reflexively, he wanted to reach out into the nether again but froze mid-action. unwise to commit to anything next to mirrorhead. especially if the latter knew of his capabilities. might take his ghosts moving around as a threat. instead, avo occupied his mind with another, more interesting question. if his heaven was working, could he kill mirrorhead? would a spike of blood and tungsten pierce his foe? avo studied the syndicate boss again. he had no idea what heaven the man had grafted or how much thaumic mass he had, but it felt larger. greater. but that didnt mean it was more effective in direct combat. of course, there were several other issues, like how he was to go about procuring the requisite amount of blood first before engaging mirrorhead, or what limits the enemy godclad truly possessed. their heaven of glass and reflections mustve had its own canons; its own hubristic limitations. knowing those might just be the path to survival. what avo needed was some privacy. somewhere to study, experiment, and practice without someone watching. right now, he needed to figure out several things in order of importance. the first was getting his heaven active again. judging from his cycler, he was just seven or so kills away from getting it working again. the second was getting a chance to sleep so he could resequence his metamind and mod and fab some new phantasmics. after that came the bigger questions, like how he ended up in the maw to begin with; what happened to a weeks worth of memories missing from his mind; or where was his previous metamind; and how did he get a liminal frame burned over his ontology? and that wasnt even getting into waltons last message about theeasy armistice or whatever the ninth column was. lots to do, with all of it needing to be done circumspect or upon being fully emancipated from mirrorhead. difficult but not impossible. avo spent most of his career as a necrojack being subtle. hed find an opening. there was always an opening. the elevator door rang. avo twitched. he was more used to ghosts announcing his arrival in the back of his mind than just blasting noise at you. he hated coldtech. the door opened to a long, red carpet surrounded by several marble busts of pre-modern nu-cats and nu-dogs amongst other animals, now rendered extinct through biological obsolescence. mirrorhead marched on. the room ahead expanded in a gulf of brightness. spears of blinding light pierced deep into avos eyes as he winced. as he stepped forward, however, he felt his claws click against what felt likeglass. his wince became a shudder. avo pushed through the glaring radiance to realize that he was standing in a room made of naught but crystalline reflections, each pane polished to crisp perfection. ahead, mirrorheads skull grew hard to spot amidst the curving reflections. if not for the syndicate boss suit, it would have been hard to keep track of the man at all. eyes darting around, a disconcerting fear snaked through avos veins: ghouls were made to be predators, not prey, but he had survived long enough to know when he was entering the den of another. this chamber was a place of power for mirrorhead. somewhere they were nigh-omnipotent, nigh-omniscient. greed and envy followed the fear in avo. he realized that he wanted this: what mirrorhead hadsanctuary. and, continuing from an earlier thought regarding whether he could beat mirrorhead should his heaven be functional, he wondered if he could take mirrorheads heaven from them instead. as they traveled further still, the room widened into a round expanse. no ghosts or thoughts penetrated this domain. the nether went quiet. dead. no electric cameras that avo could see either. just mirrors. reflections. in every direction. a bunker of glass. the effect was so encompassing that avo couldnt even find the way out as the elevator doors shut behind him, for they too, were reflective. avo sighed. mirrorhead didnt just use his gimmick like a brand. no, he cut its corpse open and literally used it as his skin. they made it halfway across the red carpet to nowhere before mirrorhead suddenly took a step off it. now, they seemed to be heading toward a random curve of the room-sized mirror without a hint nor reason. suddenly, a flash of rippling fire burst from mirrorhead. avo cocked his head. there was something wrong with the other godclads flame. it wasnt flowing; it looked frozen. dead. before avo could dwell further on that, mirrorheads heaven pulsed in the reflection and speared a shard of its wing back through mirrorhead himself. the act was reflected across every surface in the room. avo shook off a rising bout of nausea and looked away. mirrorhead motioned directly ahead. proceed. every instinct yelled for avo to stop, that he was going to bounce off the mirror, that he was walking into a lair of an eldritch monster beneath the glass depths, waiting to devour him. but avo knew natural instinct had died at the hands of this world long ago. without a better option ahead of him, avo took his first step through the pseudo-looking glass. Chapter 3-6 Crystal Cages chapter 3-6 crystal cages you might encounter some bitter cynics who tell you that dealing with the syndicates is like dealing with the guilds. frankly, this is outright ghoul-shit. guildsfor all the warring they doprovide structures of economic exchange, laws, and the foundations of security and infrastructure. they are, effectively, nation-states. the only reason im reluctant to call them such is because most high-guilders act like godsdamned cultists and would like to see the world collapse into another apocalypse if it would achieve their desired utopia. i cant even give the syndicates that much. theyre just leeches. stealing old licensing chips. exploiting the fateless. fighting their own little gutter wars for hedonism and profit. they might tell you they provide security and stability for the warrens in absence of greater powers. to this, id say that i could also tell you my piss contains the cure to wombrash, and you should buy it from me and drink it deep at 10,000 imps a cup. -quail tavers, new vultun sunrise interview 3-6 crystal cages avo felt the same self-inverting pressure peeling free from the reflection as he did when mirrorhead tore him through the ceiling. this time, however, there were no unfathomable depths infested with an eldritch god. instead, a small office greeted avo. it too, of course, was entirely made of glass. avo sighed. the walls were mirrors. the desk was cast in mirror polish. even the chair was reflective. and being the self-satisfied, dominance-abusing half-strand that he was, mirrorhead decided to emerge out from the glass of the chair, stretching themselves through a narrow tunnel of space. avos skull spiked with pain as his natural mind failed to comprehend the transgressions inflicted upon geometry. materializing into his seat, mirrorhead pulled another two glasses out from his face. he clicked them both down against the desk and, with a wave of his hand, manifested a small barrel shape stool across from the desk. a small barrel-shaped stool that he motioned for avo sit on. avo shot mirrorhead a naked glare. his legs would end up ascending past his chest if he sat in that. it would be like doing a squat. i dont get many ghouls, mirrorhead said, dryly. yes. the only other seat you own is from the toddlers section so we dont visit, was what avo wanted to say. instead, he awkwardly doddered over and leaned down, staring at the seat. reflective too. probably in case mirrorhead wanted to give him a prostate scan while they were talking or something. the syndicate boss would probably end up going on about how staring up someones rear was more a dominance thing than something that might induce the rash. carefully planting himself down on the stool, avo still found himself a head taller than mirrorhead. he struggled not to grin. the syndicate boss didnt seem to care. a waifish six-feet though mirrorhead might be, avo supposed the godclad had other, more important qualities he concerned himself with. like pulling a decanter from his skull. this time, avo watched carefully, attempting to better glean how his enemys heaven functioned. could mirrorhead store things inside himself or was it just like pulling things through a doorway? what was the scope of the syndicate boss miracles? and what if the mirror was smeared or shattered? mirrorhead dropped the decanter onto the table with a loud clack. he shoved it over to avo. pour us a drink. avo obeyed. the other option was likely death. didnt mean he liked it. so, mirrorhead said, waving for avo to stop the glass filled halfway. avo deliberately spilled some as he pulled his arm away too early, pretending to wince. mirrorhead ignored him. as i said earlier: i have a use for you. being the survivor of a crucible has qualified you for certaincircuits in the warrens. there are other games id like to enter mirrorhead trailed off into a sigh as he saw avo raising his hand. what? didnt want to interrupt raising your hand is interrupting, ghoul, mirrorhead said, his simmering annoyance made evident by the edged rumble in his voice. avo loved dealing with reasonable people. you want me. toparticipate in another crucible? do another snuff-stream? a circuit? avo asked, trying to understand. what kind of reward for winning was this? the boon for surviving a slaughterhouse like the crucible should be no more crucible and a ticket out of this den of misery. now mirrorhead was trying to get him to do another? yes, mirrorhead said without a hint of shame. its a good use for you. you are capable: a champion to one of the harshest crucibles in the city. someone the viewers can remember. someone i can use to shape a narrative. across the nether, i could use someone who is distant from my official dealings. another angle of attack, so to speak. great. perfect. it was all avo ever wanted. to get famous making snuff vicarities for a control freak. how could he ever thank mirrorhead enough? you asking me to keep doing these crucibles? a trail of ghosts spilled past mirrorheads face. again, avo never even saw them manifest. that was going to be a problem. detecting incoming ghosts and not getting detected in return was part zero of surviving the nether. without a glance at the greater sequences mirrorheads ghosts were anchored to or what phantasmics he was using, it wasnt going to be easy to gauge how good of a necro he was. with a wave, the syndicate manifested the metrics for the most recent crucible stream produced under conflux along with several highlight headlines. avo blinked. ah. a phantom phantasmic. odd. most people still used holograms for visual representations. phantoms were, after all, solely perception-based phenomena; something that couldnt be stored or itemized other than through remembrances. the phantoms swirled into a variety of figures and graphs. nine hundred million views; a few hundred billion imps in revenue; images of dead hunters, a broken golem, and little vicious brutalized remains. are these not among your deeds? mirrorhead asked. with a thought, the phantoms returned to the moment where avo found himself engaged against slaughterman. you havepotential. but youre clearly rough. untrained. sloppy. mirrorhead deliberately cycled through moments of avo getting brutalized by the oversized hunter. yet, your resourcefulness and surprisingcomprehension of necrothurgy are evident. what you managed with the drones was a fine feat. i commend you. mirorheads approval was as blunt and stilted as he was. but aside from skill, your biggest deficiency is within your attributes. your sluggishness. a pitiful failure on the part of the low master in your design. modifications will be necessary. implants dont work, avo said. ghoul. blood rejection. dont think you have nano-surgeons here. ones good enough to tune my blood. there are other means of enhancement than just chrome, mirrorhead said. the no-dragons have achieved interesting medical breakthroughs experimenting with your kind. do you know that your blood has very effective qualities? more than being an infection vector. the synaptic nodules each cell possesses presented new opportunities for research. and products. that piqued avos interest. bioware? mirrorhead nodded. a prototype. procured from a raid on one of the no-dragons subsidiaries. something that will solve yourlack of pace. grafting them to me? avo asked, incredulous. no one gave something for free. there was a catch. there was always a catch. yes, mirrorhead said. i cant have my newest nu-steed lacking in acceleration now, can i? besides. you have already made me far more imps than the cost of the graft. consider it more reward than gift. investing a lot in me, avo said. mirrorhead scoffed. im investing far less than what you have earned me. giving you a tool i was originally going to have to sell, to begin with. most among my ranks lack thebiology necessary to sustain the implant, anyhow. there is also the matter of your necrojacking experience. a sudden excitement rose within avo, greater than even potentially getting a workable implant for his reflexes. i will speak plainly. it offends me. a creature like yourself should not be capable of the art. and it stands as a threat to me. a threat that i cant accept. you will need to beleashed. avo felt his excitement plummet into near-fury. the beast snarled beneath avos skin. he shivered, trying to keep it bottled in. attacking mirrorhead now would see him killed. nothing came of that. staying alive allowed him to survive longer. study. wait. find an opening. here he was again, going from one cage to the next. a nice, more opulent cage, but still a cage. avo had enough of those. he had enough of being owned after a lifetime of unconditioned kindness from a father he never deserved. at that moment, avo hated mirrorhead. hated him with more vehemence than he ever felt. the emotion could only manifest itself in one way: hunger. avo wanted to know how mirrorhead tasted, wanted to tear the heaven from the man and subsume the fires of his soul. the syndicates wanted to play as minor guilds to the fateless and downtrodden. mirrorhead likely wanted to carve a small fiefdom out here with his powers and influence. except he still lacked the weight of guild support and was just a trout in a cod pond. sure, when you bring in a few auged-up hitters in old rigs you can clear out an area and take part of a block, but throw a few chromers against a paladin and the only outcome youll get is a mass casualty event floating by midnight news as an infographic. possible also a bump in guild stocks if enough people die to fuel a new heaven. avo swallowed his bloodlust. time to bide his time. by this point, mirrorhead was just staring at him, wordlessly. yes, avo said, forcing the word out. i understand. injection? silence became mirrorhead. good. you know. in honesty, im impressed. your impulse control is remarkable for your kind. and your intellect is mirrorhead trailed off. a threat? avo provided. interesting, mirrorhead said, sounding almost disgusted in himself. i find myself fascinated with you, despite our stations. i see now why little vicious was so driven to kill you, despite her incompetence. you are an aberration, avo. an abomination. mirrorhead chuckled.the city is going to love you. practice made things remarkable. focus and clear objectives allowed for improvement. that was what avo knew. the beast could be contained; directed. "still. i must ask, as my curiosity demands it: how do you know about the injection. "worked for clubs. joy parlors. lots of sudden aneurysms on certain days. lots of interesting information leaking from their ghosts after. reaching under the table, mirrorhead produced a thinmirror-coated of courseneedle. well. suppose that saves me the need for getting to the hard part then. avo looked at the little coldtech bomb swirling inside the needle. funny how you could kill just anyone with a little damage in the right place. like a cortex bomb. fried synapses were hard to come back from. that was ultimately the greatest advantage coldtech had over thaumaturgy: low upkeep for consistent effectiveness. a ghost made to traumatize someone into compliance needs to be made specifically in opposition to an individuals mind. bombs worked all the same on almost everyone. he gave mirrorhead his best shrug. if he couldnt avoid this, he might as well seize the choice first. let me do it. straight in the veins. yes? again, mirrorhead was taken aback. fine. slowly, he offered the syringe. the diamond tip of the needle could pierce augmented skin without issue. with a slow press, avo injected the contents into himself. he felt nothing, which told him the machines were too small or complex for his blood to notice without aid. but were they too small for him to eject with his heaven? and would they still be inside him after a post-death reversion? this concludesnegotiations? the syndicate boss huffed a laugh, wagging a finger at avo, as if a child had said something amusing. negotiations, he chuckled, downing another glass of ambrosia. id like to meet this walton. man mustve been cut from the cloth of jaus avandaer himself to do what he did with something like you. avo grinned to hide his snarl. i ever get the chance, ill acquaint you with him. in ignorance, mirrorhead drank to the threat as a toast. Chapter 3-7 The Symbiote chapter 3-7 the symbiote the apotheism movement was born from generational powerlessness and dysmorphia. this much is commonly known, but often the old wounds inflicted on each of the great cultures go less examined, and from the reason beyond each guilds predilection for a certain kind of augmentation goes unexamined. to wit, look no further than afflictions suffered by the scaarthians at the hands of szaseangeachthe flesh-weaver. by its will were the binary sexes of the scaarthian people fused into one. and now remember that it did this to first of the joined kith by fusing husband and wife together through interlacing roots, weaving their beings inextricably through the stormtree. from thence, all were born male at their birthing and expired as female at the twilight of their age. in the present, the scaarthian view their flesh as something both sacred after years of chronological refinement, but also something easily shed. in understanding this, their reluctance to impregnate their flesh with chrome is understandable due to the volatile nature of their morphic biological architecture, but so is their willingness to accept bioware, nanoware, or symbiotes that will align with their biologies rather than intruding outright. 3-7 the symbiote ultimately, avo was surprised the syndicate boss even allowed him to do the injection himself, being a creature of egomania and vague opportunism. couple that with a spontaneous capriciousness, and avo found dealing with mirrorhead outright disorienting. indeed, as soon as mirrorhead culminated the signing of the contract marking avo as his property via the ever-reliable method of employee retention cortex bomb, he immediately ordered his new star to walk through a nearby reflection for the procedure. no other instructions followed after that. avo wasnt sure if the recruits that conflux hired had orientation or even a mentor to lead them through an onboarding process, but so far, something about this organization felt too haphazard. mirrorhead seemed like he was involved with almost everything. it felt like the entire middle of the organization was outright missing. this lead into the first and immediate question: why was mirrorhead dealing with him directly? micromanager? yes, but the initialization process didnt require him; such was a thing that shouldve been done by an administrator of some kind. pair that with the lack of lieutenants, liaison officers, deputies, operational conductors, logistical supervisors, and internal harmonists, and avo found himself looking at a two-rung structure thus far. mirrorhead. and his enforcers. maybe avo hadnt been there long enough, but still, missing infrastructure gave off a loud silence. it was like expecting to hit a speed barrier but drifting right on through. didnt feel right. emerging from the glass into the room where his grafting was supposed to take place, avos expectations were ambushed yet again. the room was pristine. tiles of blinding white lined the room while the air was laced with stinging decontaminates. twin hovering cylinder-shaped drones unfurled into a host of medical implements at his approach. one was marked with a stripe of black along its center, while the other was white. mirrorhead really liked his thematic colors. at the center of the room, a grafting station whirred upright into view, assembled by several magnetically charged appendages. above it was a showerhead undoubtedly filled with the rainwater of midnight. made mending flesh easyfar more affordable than the meld-tanks that guilders used to install their augmentations. shaking his head, avo grunted. this was absurd. the quality and equipment here were better than most of the grafter dens in the undercroft. holo-screens swirled around the station showcasing a variety of implants and mods available along with the certified licenses to which guilds they belonged. the funding that would take to operate this grafting station alone was astronomical. avos suspicions grew starker. this definitely wasnt high-class enough to be a guilder facility, but a street squire or your average chromer-muscle wouldve killedand have probably killedto get bled at a place that could afford the original alpha-grade hardware. please proceed to the grafting station. the white-striped drone said. they sounded human. intelligent. feminine, yet, he could see no ghosts trailing into them, sensed no thoughtstuff or thought-accretion ebbing from their loci. were they connected through coldtech alone? were they just autonomous? bot? avo asked, curious. beep-boop, black-stripe said, chuckling. their voice was deeper than their counterpart and was possessed of a lyrical wryness. osjack white-stripe warned. people. they were definitely, absolutely people. no ghosts, avo said. oh, no, nothing so sophisticated as a ghost, black-stripe said. osjack. osjack was his name. just neurally-laced through good old h-wave transmissions. pity us poor voiders and our lack of magical bullshit. osjack, white-stripe said, stop wasting time with the bioform. aye, osjane. whatever you say, osjane. oh. not names. pseudonyms. avo blinked. wait. voiders? his grafters were going to implant him jocking these drones from the void? just how much imps did mirrorhead have that he had actual voiders in his employ? please proceed to the grafting station, osjane said. reluctantly, avo did as she said and walked up to the station. to call what he was facing a grafting station felt wrong. it was too minimalist. beyond a tetrahedrally shaped mag-field projector and eight floating clamps, there was little else to the station itself. high for humans, she said. thankfully, your blood cells offer a lot more bandwidth than your creators were capable of utilizing. a shame. with even a rudimentary reflex boosting organ grown into you, your effectiveness would have been exponentially increased. she sounded genuinely mournful. we are going to begin the procedure. please do not struggle. due to your biology anesthetics. useless. i know. avo shrugged. he had been through this before. he doubted they could hurt him worse than little vicious had. forcing himself to relax, he found even the beast inside him was quieter than usual. perhaps it liked the offering? wait. yes? osjane replied. show me. i want to see it. see it clearly. she hovered closer to him and turned the vat translucent. the creature no longer looked much like a mass. instead, it almost seemed like a wrinkled arachnid of some sort. it was shivering at a pace nearing a frequency blade. as he tilted his head, it twitched in response. the beast wanted to eat it. the drones were going to implant it. either way, his body was about to get some new meat put in. somewhere in there was a dirty joke that ended with everyone dying of wombrash. avo grunted. rip me open. get it done. you heard him, osjane, osjack said, lets see it done. slowly, the magnetic clumps spun him around, turning him to look at the ground. the titanium steps leading down into the drains greeted him with a shimmering gleam. they kept this place clean. he wondered if it was bright enough for mirrorhead to peer through. didnt matter really. mirrors lined the outer wall of the room so there was no escape from his new boss''s gaze. avo took a breath and relaxed. considering what he was, they were probably going to have to make repeated cuts while the process was ongoing. peel away scar tissue before it clumped up. that might be why there needed to be two grafters on standby. a series of low whirls sounded from behind. avo was mid-attempt trying to relax his muscles when one of the drones cleaved into his flesh and bit down into his spine. in his ears, the chipping of bones being drilled drowned out his sibilant hiss. a force pulled at the incision along his back, opening his flesh like petaled flaps. a faint surge of hunger grew within him. mentally, he held onto his blood as much as he could, his cellular lattices clinging to each other. a waterfall still seemed to spill free from his vivisected flesh. the pain was a five. not pleasant. not the worst thing he experienced. avo didnt mind being cut too much. not nearly as much as being burned or flayed. he was mostly succeeding at keeping his spasming to a minimum. that mostly succeeding dissolved as he heard the vat open. a wet, stickiness filled the air as something spread its limbs. a stinging sensation whipped into his back, needling into the cleft of his spine. another followed. then, a series of cracks burst through him. it wasnt pain he felt. no. pain was natural. this was like something was putting him on like he was a riga meat suit. foreign impulses shot through his body. his limbs jerked and quivered. the clamps held him in place even as his joints popped and tore from the violence of explosive motion surging through him. a series of new stings ran up along his shoulders, into his neck, and finally needled into the base of his skull. a buzz filled his brain as numbness spread through his digits. it was like he was back in the maw again, just waking up. reflex test, osjack announced. avo heard a spark. a small shock ran through him. that small shock exploded into a lightning bolt, burning across every last nerve he had. his back arced. as much as it could arc against the mag-field. but that wasnt the strange thing. the strange thing was the building heat inside his skull and a growing oscillation to the lights above him. looking down, he noticed his trickling blood falling like molasses. his senses felt razor-sharp. feeling spiked back through his fingers as he felt every inch of pain across his opened back, heard every sound between the drones articulations, and felt the crackles in his bones as his muscles fired faster than his structural base was used to. the state broke. suddenly, the world sped back up. he slumped back down. the pace of reality returned to normal. implant installed, osjane said, sounding like she had a hint of a smile in her voice. symbiote accepted. artificially cultured haemophagic cells integrating. no rejection. no subsumption. success. avo felt something fold the flayed pieces of his back into place. a scythe of heat lanced across his wounds, sealing them, and filling the air with the aroma of sizzling meat. overhead, the showers came on dousing him wet as the waters ate his wounds out of existence. by now, avos hunger was throbbing inside him. with measured slowness, avo spun back to uprightness by the mag-clamps. something jabbed him in the shoulder. a flood of energy surged through him. he felt good. hungry. but good. heavier and quicker at the same time. look at that, osjack said. took to it in seconds. think of the number of nanos it would take to replicate the same adaptive survivability in one of us? not an apt comparison, osjane said. its not human. its a war-grown bioform; bad initial foundations aside, it likely can serve as a useful sheathe if further tweaked. planning on turning ghoul, osjane? no. but they would be useful as pre-embedded shock-troopers if their impulses were quelled and their blood potency was enhanced. likely what the low masters were going for but failed to achieve. they scanned him again. can you feel your limbs? avo clenched and unclenched his claws. yeah. deactivate clamps, osjane continued. the mag-clamps spun him around. he found himself staring at a narrow exit leading to a closed doorway. avo slipped from his restraints. the door opened, a scanner spilling a motion grid in front of it. osjack hovered over to the door, and upon being scanned, the door clanged shut. the drone floated back over. alright, ghoulie: lets give you a live exercise, he said. see how the symbiote fires when actively triggered, shall we? Chapter 3-8 Celeritys Burn chapter 3-8 celerity''s burn the first implant you should get is an accelero. everything else you get slotted should work to augment the accelero. skin replacements to reduce air friction. bone lacing and muscle fibers so nothing breaks or tears. nervenet so your senses dont get all torqued. that kind of shit. for jaus sake, dont go installing pistons or industrial-grade frames onto yourself, alright? theyre pretty much just dead weight half the time and they wont be enough to keep you standing against high-ex. you move to lose shooters. your subdermals are for the shrapnel. hit hard. hit fast. hit once. break contact. get out. get nothin twisted, consang, new vultun aint a city where you get to shoot second. shoot first. always shoot first. and always be gone afterward. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 3-7 celeritys burn avo stared blankly at the door for a beat before glaring at the drones. trying to get me cut in half? osjack laughed. sure. itll do that. a civilian resident cheap-fab crushing our eighty-thousand imp ghoul right after we cut him open. loathe as i am to admit it, i do agree with the bioform, osjane said. we can gauge a baseline using the drones. theres no need for thisceremony. ceremony, osjack said, imitating her voice. you make it sound like im trying to amuse myself. no. got to see if it works practically. contained environments are nice and all, but i doubt our employer wants his pet cannibal someplace safe. theres really only one reason why someone wants to field a ghoul, and its almost never to turn them into a manservant. avo bristled slightly at being referred to as a pet. right now, he was technically closer to an indentured servant seeing how he had an unpaid organ latched onto him. his blood swirled overand through it. it had capitulated to his cells utterly. no transplant rejection. it writhed snuggly against his spine, its added weight feeling less than natural at his core. it was as if a ridge of tumors spread out into every part of his body like roots. the organs tendrils were spreading out even deeper, as if budding in his limbs, enwreathing his structure in a new shell. the installment fascinated him. when he could, he needed to get a medcon phantasmic running. see just how the celerostylus was integrating with his biology. maybe even find methods of optimization and improvement. osjack sighed. dont got all day, ghoulie. avo. my name. use it. dont got all day, avo, osjack repeated in the same bored tone. get through the door and come back before it closes. please? for me? avo shot osjacks drone an annoyed look. no one really ever said please before, but he was pretty sure the grafter was being condescending. still, he wanted to find out what he was capable of with this new augment. see how it changed things for him. he frowned. implant: how do i activate it? osjane scanned him. do you feel a new weight along your core? like a muscle. where your sternum and t-four meet? t-four? avo asked. upper spine, she said. tense it. there was a weight there. a growing numb ebbing throbbed within the cage of his ribplates. he wondered if this was what having a heart felt like. the organ was slow to respond at first, his attempts to tense it making its spasm. it was a lot like tightening his lower back. then, he felt it, a different squeeze distinct from all his other muscles. he was about to ask her what was next to follow when it suddenly surged, chaining its voltage through his blood cells and buzzing his mind with energy. as the implant hypercharged the flow of his synaptic signals, avo felt the lights around him oscillate and dim. the drones around him were almost frozen except for their spinning optics that moved in increments of scant micro-inches before his hyper-accelerated perception of time. avo blinked. a searing pain shot through his eyelids as he felt micro-tears form. his body, it seemed, was far behind in adapting to how fast it could move. more interestingly, he was being to feel a building ache in his skull, the insides of his brain cooking as heat swelled. warning: cog-capacity diminishing good of him to find out now. the pressure in his head was fast building. it hadnt even been two seconds yet and there was already a problem. taking a tentative step forward, avo tried to keep his movements as controlled as possible. his leg lashed out before a counter impulse flowed through the limb, dragging him into a near stumble. it seemed the new inhabitant in his body was trying to get used to him as much as he was getting used to it. another step. another stagger. six seconds. the pressure was slowly beginning to ascend into the territory of a headache. ahead, the door was still a hallway down, taunting him. crackling energy and boiling tension washed out from his core, instilling a sharpness in his movements. it was like he was floating on a sea of static, something actively compensating and adjusting as he moved, tuning his nerve impulses; honing his dexterity to fits its requirements. through the door, he looked at the wall. cheap plascrete. worst comes to worst, it would break against him. maybe see a few of its supports bent inward. taking the plunge, avo pushed off the ground in a sprint. the hall suddenly blurred around him. his first few steps made him wince. the ground dented beneath his blurring feet. a claw snapped at the tip. it felt like a giant was plucking the tendons in his legs as if they were strings. his arms ground hard in their sockets, chewing against his softer tissues. the air around him grew thicker as if it was growing closer to water tension. wind folded across his face. with a thought, he activated his phys-sim. spilling velocity vectors and impact trajectories littered his vision. as he tore past the doors scanner, he found that he was already in the red, lined with an impact trajectory with the wall ahead. his speed was listed at somewhere north of sixty-five miles an hour and climbing. can we keep him? osjack asked. avo couldnt tell if the man was actually being serious or not. no, brother osjack. this is unbecoming and our sessions are being recorded. we cannot keep a clients property. osjack smacked his lips. the sound emerged as static and crackles through the other side. shame. goodbye, sassy ghoul. or maybe see you later. who knows? if your master decides he wants to continue these installments, you just might end up on our station again. begrudgingly, avo had to admit: these two werent the worst grafters he knew. far from it, in fact. even the undercroft had establishments that offered a varying expanse of products and qualities. it took walton some time to find one that was halfway decent at tumor removal. thanks. for not severing spine. praise from a ghoul, osjane said glumly. truly, my practice has reached its apex. off you go then. the client is contacting us again, doubtless to harry your departure. osjack snorted. half-strands about as patient as a lit fuse. do not speak ill of the client, osjack. im not speaking ill, osjane. im speaking truth. shouldve been a philosopher. and i should have had a better partner. but we must face life as things go, no? and what are you still staring at us for? have you not been summoned. avo studied the two drones a moment longer. question. last one. make it quick, osjane said, voice tight. you two got public idents? a mem-scan that links to a palace? for contact. oh, i think the ghouls asking us out, sister osjane, osjack said. in accordance with tenet 3-a under the nu-scripture, a practitioner of the new alloy is not to be attached to the flesh which they will come to strip, osjane said. avo tilted his head. does that mean no? that means, ghoul, that should you require our services again, you may submit a request to the church of the new alloy under voidwatch and schedule an operation. should you possess the means and funds, we will provide services for any modifications you so desire. yeah, osjack said. but if you want to see us again specifically. just ask for mayflower-3288-b and terror-3285. no b for her? im not a duplicate, osjane said as if that explained everything. purist bigot, osjack said, sounding like he was smiling. mayflower. terror. avo repeated the words. he guessed those were the names of ships. walton said the voiders were bound not by parentage or culture, but by the voidships that printed them. however that worked. supposedly the ships were references too, a name taken from long-lost vessels from eons before when the fabric of the void was still calm and the stars had yet to succumb to madness. he recorded a remembrance of this conversation in his metamind. avo gave the two drones an awkward nod and departed. they bantered on behind him as their drones began to dismantle the grafting station. he wondered where they were bound to next. new vultun was a big place, and there was no shortage of flesh to temper with the alloy; no shortage of work for these post-human pilgrims. curiosity flickered inside avo. he always wondered about the stars. perhaps someday, if he didnt find true-death along the way, he could greet the voiders in person. see how they really were. a great gulf remained between those who woke amidst the cold emptiness of the void and those that were born in a place long sustained by now-silenced gods. the synaptic burn had subsided by this point. avo guessed it took close to a minute before he recovered. his new transplant didnt seem nearly as enduring as what draus had, but still, he felt likehe was more. greater. he just wished this happened in a circumstance where he wasnt owned by another. freedom was easily lost and hard to win back. he couldnt be too disappointed. he did also have a heaven. a dormant one. but still, a heaven. avo grinned as he marched toward the glass. mirrorhead was still unaware of the problem he had on his hands, thinking he merely stumbled into possessing a controllable ghoul. for now, it was time to prepare. leech what he could from his new master. figure out just what happened to him and how he got his liminal frame. sequence and rebuild his metamind. kill enough to manifest his hell and get his heaven back online. and with the celerostylus working in tandem with his domain of blood and matter, new options were being made available for him. what was that the canon said? that the speed and force of his blood will mirror his natural limits unless the canon was altered. well, his canon hadnt been changed, but he had. an image came to avo of his blood lashing out at speeds greater than even his body could contain. yes. there was potential here. great potential. a chance for greater bloodshed. a chance to sample the flavors of flesh that were previously unimaginable to him. the beast growled gleefully inside him as stepped back through the threshold of the mirror, his senses lurching. time to see what mirrorhead wanted from him. he had a thirst to slake. Chapter 3-9 The Bait chapter 3-9 the bait ghouls take the bullets, you shoot the enemy. gather up the dead ghouls. pour their blood into your prisoners. infect some more meat. wait three months. do it again. works practically forever. i can see why the low masters made them. efficient. expendable. predictable. replenishable. only problem comes with feeding them if they survive. these half-strands dont ever seem to get full. -vincentine ripperjack javvers on deploying ghouls as disposable assets 3-9 the bait as avo stepped through another threshold of glass, he found himself in a narrow hallway of mirrors. narrow beams of crimson ebbed and dimmed overhead, casting the room in an eternal struggle between light and dark. to his sides, ritualistically fashioned plates of glass were layered in folding feathers, like wings sprouting from wings. he continued, traveling down this liminal pathway until he emerged, squeezing through a narrow band of brightness. he staggered out into the confines of an elevator. his cog-feed spiked his awareness with new details, ghosts drinking in a sea of mem-data from all the thoughtstuff ebbing around him in the nether. multiple loci across the immaterial horizon like ethereal suns. one shone just above him. the traffic flowing to it, however, was enervated. minimal. the type you expect for a private lobby. someone cleared their voice to his right. he noticed a still, nervous mouse of a woman in the corner. there was little remarkable about her other than the multi-colored dendrites she had for hair and the gleaming optic that burned at the core of her forehead like a gem. the optic flashed then, a beaming sweep of light washing over him in a scan. youyou moonblood? she asked, swallowing hard, face ashen. he grunted. her heart rate was thundering. he could sense her blood circling through her veins, flowing ever so slower in her right arm. a heavy sweetness tanged the air around her, a heavy scent that avo found himself all too familiar with. she abused joy in her spare time. the nectar-like substance tended to clog up arteries. avo had been a witness to more than one death from the congealing substance. she walked over to the front of the holo-haptics controls and struck an icon. the elevator stopped. a breath escaped from her, nervous and shallow. hands shaking, she drew from her filth-stained monochrome coat a mirror-plated mask. taking a few breaths more to steady herself, she held it over her head as if she was about to plunge a dagger into her skull, and only with a final exertion of will did she manage to put it on. there was a fatalism to her action. a finality. considering who she worked for, avo couldnt blame her. explained the joy habit too. when your boss could crush your skull and strike at you from any reflection, what respite could spare your nerves from fated lassitude? again, a spill of writhing ghosts seeped through the glass, linking to her through the reflection. a voice rumbled out from her, then. sonorous. expected. mirrorhead. +did you appreciate my gift?+ he asked. avo didnt answer immediately. the question was secondary to his interest. mirrorhead was speaking through this girl. the implications breathed upon the fires of theory. was the person avo interacted with on the aerovec even mirrorhead himself or just another miniona conduitfor the syndicate to channel his heaven through? such was a possibility. for all avo knew, he could have been fighting an advanced synth-sheathe. just another gateway to mirrorhead''s true power. +is this wait contemplation? or disobedience?+ mirrorhead asked, his voice dipping ever so lower. thinking, avo said. implantsappreciated. though bones are lacking. overtaxes nerves too. +then, it is working as intended,+ mirrorhead said. +what you have is only a prototypeand a sample of the gifts that i alone can continue to offer. so long as you heel. so long as you obey. besides: you will be needing this prototype for the task to come.+ delightful. the syndicate boss was planning something. the woman mimicked a sweeping gesture that mirrorhead made a habit of performing; a rising slash with his right arm while the left remained folded behind his back. +i have a use for you. consider it a test for both you and the implant. something to tease our viewers. a promotional, if you will.+ promotional, avo said, trying to keep the weariness out of his voice. most entertainments held little sway over avo''s time. he was a creature of task and purpose, made so by biology, augmented so by good habits learned from a caring father. reviews and tutorials on metamind sequencing and new phantasmic builds occupied the majority of his streamed content. applying his learnings to action consumed much of his remaining time. he did find himself following a hunting/cooking hybrid channel called flesh of the fall. it detailed hunting aberrant beasts that spawned near major ruptures caused by fallen heavens. last he remembered, it was put on hiatus after the host got her spinal marrow infested by fractal-wasps after looking in the wrong direction. +indeed,+ mirrorhead said. +new vultun, as you might understand, is a thirsting city. it thirsts in more ways than one. you, my novel little acquisition, offers it a chance at a new dish; a new cocktail of violence. but first, we must beat the deluge coming from the competition, and thus i need something eye-catching. something that will send ripples across lobbies acrosses the city. something controversial.+ controversial. the way mirrorhead said those words sounded like the man wanted avo to attack a nursery. as tasty as new-grown infants were, walton would have most certainly frowned upon the mass consumption of half-formed babes. better to wait until they grew a bit and sinned. in time, there was reason enough to find anyone deserving of being devoured. ii saw the stream, she began. you were, uh, ii didnt think you could do it. he just studied her blankly. it always felt awkward for him when a potential meal tried to indulge in small talk. perhaps it was the clash between his mind understanding that he was dealing with another self-aware creature against his instinctual savagery that wanted its delights. yeah, avo said, mind only half-tuned to the conversation should inject the other arm instead. can smell the joy. she cupped her right arm as if the limb itself was shy. she was hiding it from him. i dont use that much. avo grunted. so you say. doesnt matter to me. her lip quivered. he forced himself an inch back. he wished there was someone else in the elevator with them. some kind of muscle. a new suspicion kindled itself within avo, telling him that this too, was mirrorheads doing. perhaps the woman was meant a reward as well. a post-transplant meal to start the festivities. it fit. the syndicate boss knew what he was; understood his impulses. simply leaving her would be an act transcending the careless into the callous. this had to be deliberate. she was being used as bait. like she was an aratnid. which made avo the nu-cat in the metaphor. all toys and tools for mirrorhead to pit against each other. what a delightful company culture his new boss fostered. its all i got consang. her eyes flicked at the glass around them, trying to see if anyone or anything was looking back at her. she swallowed. just want toto forget that im being watched. not judging, avo said. the shape of her cheeks reminded him of that of a hogs belly. he wished draus was here. the thought surprised him. short as his time with the regular was, she provided him with a net. a bulwark against the beast. someone he could count on to stop him from disgracing walton. do what you can, avo said, barely managing to choke the words out. choose better, if you can. she shrank into herself, folding against the curved angle of the elevator. the lights above her flickered. over her, his encroaching shadow loomed. in his periphery, in the glass where she was just staring, he saw spills of saliva running down the side of his cheeks. it was as if he was a passenger in his own flesh, taking a backseat to his basest hunger. she wasnt going to stop using. and in her, he saw a echo. they were all only as strong as the elevator door rang. he shivered. his celerostylus fired. the world slowed for a beat. the woman''s eyes were only widening. she hadnt even begun to stumble backward yet. so fast were his senses that he found himself in exile; time courting his mind back into its rightful place as he watched her expression coil into terror. what was he doing? what was he about to do? he quelled his new organ. standard time reasserted itself. the user''s hyperventilating breaths ground at his senses, her eyes bloodshot and wide, her fear naked and raw. a cool flush of air flooded the insides of the small space, cupping avo and dousing the last flames of the beast. her lips were quiet but her body screamed, the terror leaking out from her poorly stitched ward. stiff and still, her fingers were likely clenched around a small switchblade of some kind. inefficient against him. inefficient against this city. she couldnt choose her fate. she couldnt choose anything. if even a ghoul could take her life from her, then what choice did she ever have? fateless. choiceless. how close he came to breaking his promise. how weak was he still in will that he could be drawn astray so easily? shaking his head, he pulled himself away from her. he caught the closing doors before they could shut and damn him to a certain mistake. as soon as he looked away, the joy fiend crashed back against the railing, sobbing in relief. the salt of her flowing tears hit his taste buds immediately. the elevator shook. a red light flashed over the elevators control interface, warning its passengers not to shake. goodgood luck, she muttered. avo didnt respond, choosing instead to leave. he had done enough to her. she would still have to suffer in the city afterward. closing his eyes and releasing a tense breath, avo looked down as he pressed forward, wondering what tribulation he would have to suffer next. he made it three steps before he ended up bouncing forehead-first off a jaw made from reinforced titanium. stumbling back, avo looked up and found himself looking up into eight burning eyes. each one was a different style of implant, a different color, and implanted on the same snarling face. phys-sim impact vector flashed red a moment too late. avo frowned and deactivated the phantasmic with a thought. behind him, the elevator doors closed. it took no second glance for him to know what he was looking at. she was scaarthian. her eight and a half feet of height made that clear as the stars'' shine. five skald marks were carved along her bare, musclebound arms through conjoined whorls of complex ritualistic scarification spread up to her neck. each coiled ridge of tissue was supposed to represent another decade survived. she had five on each arm. eight industrial-class legs of segmented titanium hissed steam into the air, each as thick as his thigh. they coiled and twitched behind her, bolted into her spine, hydraulics whistling, tips wicked and piercing. rantula. as in tarantula. oh, these chromers and their cute little gimmicks. the only skin that adorned her face was pasted thinly along her cheeks and forehead. from a single knotted braid swinging down from her flame-mutilated scalp, the fingerbones of creatures she supposedly killed were left as hairpins and mementos. looking down, she sneered at avo, unimpressed. was hoping hed gotten something bigger. like one of hose no-dragon jade-mastiff nu-dogs. she leaned down, her putrid breath probably smelling close to his. theyre sure harder than your like. she snorted again and spat a thick gob of phlegm past him, the wet pulp sliding closed doors of the elevator. avo sighed. one winning personality after another. come along, moonblood," she said, leading him away. "cant let you be late for the performance. Chapter 3-10 Like Dogs on Leashes chapter 3-10 like dogs on leashes the circuits are an easy way to get out of the warrens. of course, by easy, i mean either you get recruited and offered a guilder contract or you end up dead. either way, cosang, youll be well on your way gettin a soul grafted to you or being burned inside a soul. same difference, really. circuits come with plenty of variety. largest pool of recruits comes from the drone-jocks since they dont tend to fucking die the first time they make a mistake. getting a second chance at the cost of burning a few thousand imps and all that, but dont get it twisted, adamantine-hard street squires have and will always be a commodity. what can i say? everyone loves a good pit brawl. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 3-9 like dogs on leashes if there was one thing avo hated about these syndicate types, it was their pointless theatrics. slaughterman. rantula. mirrorhead. every last one of them had a stupid concept they just wouldnt let go of. it was like tumbling from into a world where everyone liked buying new clothes for their guns and giving a themselves a new name by slamming two random nouns together or sometimes an adjective. the paths that rantula led him down were covered in layers of tarp. bulged pockets inflated with gusts of wind. rantula continued. see the boss decided to get a new pet. she folded her arms over her chest. they were twice as thick as his, each muscle natural and not. scaarthians were modded from times of yore. first by their environment, then by their gods, now by themselves. with rantula, it looked like she was just the continuation of a repeatedly botched job. the ground staggered beneath her weight, each step thumping up eruptions of dust. the patterns of the particulates were strange. looking up, avo understood why. bullet holes and poorly threaded wires ran through the ceiling. flashes of movement cut over the gaps, bobbing to the flow of thoughtstuff. people were upstairs too, heading in the same direction as he was. eight burning optics flashed in his periphery. rantula was glaring right at him. cant say i see what''s so special about you. yous just like any other ghoul i know. can do the alphabet backward, avo said. she spat again. didnt know she hated literacy that much. the hallways they were walking through were cramped. dim. avo heard the distinct chitters of aratnids scampering through the vents. the walls were lined with half-molted battle foam. instantly deployable cover. probably leftovers from a gunfight some time back. the walls themselves were lined with an insulating tarp, patches of which swelled with the flowing winds. the fact that the currents could course this deep into the structure meant a few things. the most likely was that someoneor more likely a wing of dronesput a lot of holes through the block at some point. probably was a holding point during the last war, now reinfested with gangers and other vermin of the like. as they went further into the block, two enforcers sharing similar aesthetic implants moved to flank her, peeling out from an intersection they passed. their inferiority to her was evident: six industrial legs on their backs instead of eight. one was bald. the other had a translucent dome lined with twitching antennae. probably called themselves something glib, something to do with insects. they were decidedly not-natural born scaarthians though. they had the scarification but no bones. more evidently, their hearts were beating on the left rather than the right. just another questionable piece of scaarthian biological design. came unnaturally with a god who enjoyed molding flesh like clay. jareg, issig, you see our new pet? rantula asked. annoyingly, the two decided to add a grunting chorus of laughter to her words. it was like a scene from a trashy academia-setting vicarity: watch the rich vat-grown guilder gang up on the hardworking womb-born wager who was drafted up from the warrens on their own merits. unfortunately, the narrative didnt echo here. his "bullies" were closer to genetic refuse or scrap metal, and he was a cannibal created by a terror cult trying to retake a homeland that never was. trying to make a ghoul feel bad from social ostracization was like trying to insult a fish for its lack of wings. cant lose something you never had. turning, she shot him another glance. her lip twitched, revealing clenched slab-like teeth. hes an ugly one he continued, walking past her. which way? being too slow. got work to do. the faint sneer drained from her visible skin, replaced by the building red of outrage. he didnt know what she was expecting. banter? confrontation? he was a ghoul; she was some half-strand working for mirrorheadbasically a ganger who had to wear a team uniform. the sooner they could move this along the better. his daily allotment of patience had long since run dry. he had no problem getting bloody in the hallway with her, and judging from how her thoughtstuff protruded in oozing clumps from her wards, it was little wonder why mirrorhead ordered him to keep his mind away from hers. with how poor her metas build was, he might literally be able to crack her just by dumping an overdose of memories into her. a metal limb hammered down in front of him, tearing the tarp and chipping plascrete. debris clicked as they bounced along the floor. avo stopped to study her implant. he could see the servos, the naked hydraulics inside. a poor choice to leave it so exposed. he wondered how many technicians it took to keep her running. more importantly, he wondered if it would still work if he lodged something inside the moving parts. something sharp. as he studied her limb, she drew closer. he had his new organ tight and prepared to fire. she lowered herself by a few inches to greet him face-to-face, trying to stare him down. avo barely suppressed a smirk. if she thought he was going to look at her and make this a moment, she had another thing coming. these were power games she shouldve played with a human. his only interest in her was in her eventual pain. and taste. scaarthians were such a rare delight to sample. next to his ear, she drew close, a growl under her breath. her two walking skin-tags were leaning in behind her, shadowing her as they puffed themselves up, flexing their implants. it reminded him of how nu-dogs had little contests of dominance. if she tried pissing on him, he was going to crack her mind, didnt matter what mirrorhead commanded. smell of piss took too long to fade. rantula hissed. listen, rotlick. mirrorhead said avo stopped listening at that point. whatever appreciation he had for mirrorheads hiring standards earlier was rapidly leaving him. from osjane and osjack to this. was this the caliber of personality that he had to deal with in the warrens? her breath stank of some kind of seafood as she spoke. calamari. she wasted a few more sentences and jabbed him in the chest with a finger. a sting of pain followed. avo looked down to see one of her jagged nails an inch into his chest. he looked back at her, unsurprised at the return of her sneer. calamari, he said. the sneer went away again. it was like she had two expressions. sneer for when she was trying to provoke someone. confusion when someone deviated from her expectations. a cheap locus was probably more complex than her actual mind. theres a cafeteria here? her mouth opened and closed. now she reminded him of the fish he had in his aquarium. except he didnt have the urge to flay and wear the mangled heads of his fish as a makeshift dunce hat. lets get things done. hungry. want to eat. he took a step back and felt her finger slide out of him. he clotted the wound immediately, not wishing to leak anymore in her presence. he didnt know if her immune system was augmented, but he felt obliged to conduct a murder-suicide if she hatched any ghoullings. their stupidity would be a shame too great for him to bear. without another word, he stepped aside from the limb she had buried deep through the floor. he continued walking until she howled a slur at the back of his head to tell him he was going in the wrong direction. just like the nu-dog she acted, she pushed herself past him to reassert her place in this little march. things returned to a state of acceptable boredom after that. she still shot him brief glares of malice beneath the swirling lights of neon green as they proceeded toward their destination. frustration lined her posture. hers and her two companions. seemed they mightve had a conversation with the boss as well. not hurting the new merchandise and all that. and with all the reflections lining the ceiling, avo was pretty sure the boss could''ve been watching at any moment. a day ago, he wouldve doubted his odds in a straight fight against any one of them. now, the celerostylus gave him options. fleeing, at the least, was quite reliable. burning up more of his ghosts, loathe as he was to do so, to use as thought-shivs was also an option. it was as if only then did avo behold him for the first time. so hard had he tried to forget the useless man in the crucible that he cast the father and the boys faces from his mind. he had not wanted to burden himself with their humanity, made to dream of them like he did walton. he did not feel. not as humans did. but he knew regret, and the memories of his failures bore him more sour than secondhand injections of emotion ever could. oh, the father smiled. his lips curled up. his eyes stayed dead. artad blesses me again this day. you are alive, avo. alive and well. avo doubled his pace toward the father, knowing that he would not be able to reach the man in time. that was fine. he had another goal. ahead, the enforcer clenched a fist as currents flowed down the wire of the leash. the father did not cry out, but his body did spasm, and his eyes did roll. cruelly, his overseer held a moment longer than was needed. wet stains ran down the father''s pant legs. the man had relived himself. flat, avo growled, hes a flat. cant take it. he cant take behind him, the ground cracked to a chorus of screaming hydraulics. a shadow shot into the air. rantula. as expected. avo fired his celerostylus. the world brightened, and the gears governing the pace of time ground against his surging synapses, coming to a near halt. spinning on his heel, he dug his claws into the plascrete and dashed toward the impromptu gun range. in the room, all the enforcers reacted with varying speeds, the fastest of amongst only barely on par with him. a faint crackle of pleasure burned inside avo. for all the pain of dealing with mirrorhead, this implant almost made it worth it. almost. bounding on unsteady legs, he ignored a sharp snap in his left leg as he slid knee first into the ankles of one of the gunners turning to shoot him. his hyper-accelerated mass greeted the enforcers ankle in a popping crackle. something was broken. another problem with these gutter types. all bone and muscle, no ligament protection; less aesthetic to have smart-gel cartilage than bone-lacing. as the enforcer toppled, their face a blooming howl of pain, avo shook away the spots in his vision as the heat built. he seized his falling prey by the neck in one hand and caught their falling gun in the other. next time he did this, he would make his metamind manifest a timer. twisting his hip, he launched them backward. they careened, arms whipping wildly from the sudden thursut, and slammed back-first into their other two cohorts. avo didnt press the attack. not even as they all went down. instead, he shouldered the only thing that would truly give him some breathing room once he quelled his celerostylus. a gun. picking up the weapon that his most recent victim dropped, its specs began flashing into his mind, its ghosts lacing with his. it had a small locus embeded, something to compensate for his nonexistent shooting skills. good that he had some experience with the mirrashard draus gave him. wouldve looked a fool trying to figure it out now. iyygua-2o recoilless ordinance rifle twenty shots. high explosive. rated to shred nine hundred and fifty millimeters of armor in a single shot. currently condition-yellow: some maintenance needed. these enforcers were filthy. avo spun around, raising the gun barely in time to plant the barrel against rantulas throat. her eight limbs froze scant inches away from closing around him. a headache spiked, feeling as if nails were emerging from his eyes. he stopped tensing his celerostylus. it took most of what he had not to drop his gun from pain. it took the rest of what he had to hide the fact that he was in pain at all. the room was tense, but not silent thanks to someone wailing about their broken ankle. the remaining enforcers were standing, weapon implants bared and fists clenched. the biotechs, meanwhile, were making as fast they could for the doors. rantulas face broke into a snarl. fuck me, moonblood. boss wasnt lying when he said he gave you the good shit. avo responded by spitting phlegm on the ground next to her. he needs to go. she backed away from him slowly, hands raised. trust me, im not interested in a soft-belly like him. not even a little. but the boss has found a use for him so she shrugged. hey, hey, ghoulie. were all dogs here. nu-dogs, heeding the hand that feeds us. you know you cant help him. mirrorheads got a use for him now. best you can do is let him go. the headache was receding. slowly. avo counted the number of enforcers in the room. more than twenty shots. good thing he had more than one gun to use. flicking a glance at the father, he reactivated his phy-sim and began estimating impact trajectories. he would have to kill rantula first. her threat was clear avo, the father said, lifting his hands in a near shrug. it is well. it is well. i am fine with it being this way. ii dont care. it doesnt hurt. i dont care. the man laughed. "i don''t care." deserve to be free, avo said. that was promised. you were supposed to get into city. survived crucible. a crackle of laughter came from rantula. deserve. fucking crackling me the fuck up ghoulie, shit. the laugh drained out of her eyes as her voice rose to a braying roar. what fuck do you think ''deserves'' got anything to do with our lives? doesnt, avo admitted. should. jaus. a fucking ghoul optimis no, avo stopped her. not optimist. just honest. seen the way you live. he deserves better. and there it was. he needed her to understand. this wasnt her world. her miserable little life didnt mean any more than he did up the undercroft, where contracts and agreements were enforced by the paladins. new vultun wasnt about optimism, cynicism, or any ideology. at its heart, new vultun was enforcing it. whatever that it may be. a dark shadow passed over rantulas face. that guns got twenty shots. youre holding it wrong. linked to the ghosts. youll miss. not this close. she glared at him. he stared past her, keeping an eye on the father. sighing at the struggle, the man gave him a nod. what was he doing? i appreciate all you did for my son. i will tell him of you when i see him. again. again. again. and so the metaphor played on. the father tugged on his leash, and, like a nu-dog asking to be walked, was led out into the flashing neon of the mall proper. avo, struck by the sight, just stared, gun frozen in hand. all that for nothing, huh, rantula said, shooting a victorious grin at the door that the father just left. avo grunted his non-answer. for the first time, he met rantulas gaze. still need to get me ready? her sneer returned. nah. you look plenty ready enough to me. before this day was over, he was going to make a victim of her. Chapter 3-11 The Flesh of My Brothers chapter 3-11 the flesh of my brothers making the ghouls was a mistake. i see that now more than ever. duringwhen we were trying to liberate old noloth, we wanted something that would spare the people. something that we could make easily. a mass-producible bioform like the no-dragons had. no. no, we didnt get the bio-template from them. we made the ghouls ourselves. how? iyou need to find a low master to tell you thatii was just an acolyte. i was just following scripture. i didnt want this to happeni didnt mean for so many to die. trust me, if it were up to me, every last ghoul would be dead. they were a mistake. they were a mistake. -paladin interview of acolyte sewe agwar, former low cultist 3-11 the flesh of my brothers avo kept the gun with him. he might have mirrorheads protection, but the strength of orders and contracts got real soft when some over-chromed street butchers decided their feelings were hurt. the enforcers had their eyes on him all the way. like moving slabs of metal, they all faced him from a center profile. in a sense, they were peacocking at him. some of them sprang blades out as he passed by, ostensibly to test if their implanted aug worked. the lifter added more tons to their grav-bench, the mag-chains laced to the size of the bar ensuring more stability. rantula, true to her habits, just stared, eyes fixed on avo like the spider she wanted to be. the discomfort stayed even after they finally opened the doors to lead him out. before avo was a place awash with sound, light, and roaring bloodlust. not so different from the crucible, besides the fact that all here were of conflux, each individual bearing a mirrored mask on their hip, marking them with mirrorheads favor. the mall, if avo could even call it that anymore, stood bifurcated along with the rest of the structure, a gouge of glass running clean through its expanse, scar doubtless left by an instrument of heat. overhead, pulsing lights spilled from hovering drones while guitars growled on from pillar-sized speakers. from a deck a hundred levels high, tides of humanity lined the stories below, their implants shining, their thoughtstuff clotting into a blended flurry. this was to be an experience shared. an experience conjoined. the festivities of the circuit called back to times of old, back when the gods did reign and lives were offered in sacrifice and supplication in colosseums made vaster by myth. at the very bottom of the stairs, the growing gradient of decks lining the intact section of the mall sank before a crude moat bridged by a cracked billboard. beyond the billboard rose massive pylons that arced with a constant thrum of volts. within its confines of the electric cage, a place that used to be a food court greeted avo with all its typical properties. extendable tables. holo-ads. service wights still shambling around, dressed in mocking referees garb. right now, two enforcers were messily brawling in the center, hammering each other with blows that would have liquefied most baseline creatures. smears of blood and the remains of dead bioforms drenched the floor. avo smelled some nu-dog. guess they had a war-variant in play earlier. crowning the arena itself was a massive hologram showcasing the prize that awaited the participants that drew the most views. it was a newly acquired exo-rig. nightmantis. in the corner next to its blinking blueprints was a mem-code. after a second of staring, avo copied its data into his metamind and let them run in his minds eye. a remembrance played. the body the memory was hosted in stared at the exo-rig with admiring eyes. the nightmantis wasnt particularly large, lined in small cells of hexagonal plating that made it look more like a shelled bioform than the literal tanks that most enforcers preferred. what it did have was a jump-jet system and a zks-89 precision cannon attached to its back. three thin glares of light shone through its armor-splined faceplate. behind it, a prehensile echo-pulser granted it full spectrum awareness. each quality and function lined itself to a specific part of the armor. this was a demo, then. something to entice the vicious and savage like luxury voidships and custom demiplanes did for bored guilders and celebrities back up the tiers. avo could see the appeal, but the appeal was still beneath him. if he was in visual range of someone he intended to snuff, something had gone terribly wrong. now if the prize offered was a suite of fully sequenced combat phantasmics made by ori-thaum, he too might be as excited as those around him. still, having an exo-rig made up for some of his other deficiencies. made him harder to kill. better he take it off the hands of his competitors than be faced with it in active combat down the line. aint gonna be yours, ghoulie, rantula said, her voice taunting. doubt you know how to use it anyway. they were standing on opposite corners of the staircase, both eyeing the other from their periphery. twenty feet of distance separated them and avo wanted twenty more if only so he could be in front of a speaker. the beast inside him was screaming loud now, its belly full of unslaked savagery from earlier when he didnt tear into rantula. frankly, being boxed in by so many syndicate goons wasn''t making his mood any better. a loud crack echoed out from the area, followed by a roar of agony. looking down, it looked like one of the brawlers had won. snapped the left leg of their opponent in half. a strange show of sportsmanship and caring surprised avo afterward, when the victor lifted the loser out in their arms, laughing all the while. mightve been doing it for the spectators. might not have. war drums began to thunder around him as the next match was announced. the speakers behind him crackled. alright you bloodthirsty savages, the announcer growled. her voice was, honestly, too high for her to achieve the desired effect. but she was trying. and hard. its time for our next event, specially requested by the one, the only, rantula! rantula lifted her armsall of themand flexed. from the decks below, hundreds of conflux personnel cheered while spectators clapped. she turned to avo as the announcer droned on. time to give up the gun, rantula said, holding her hand out, expecting him to just hand his weapon over. dont worry. i wont hurt you. yet. the boss wants this to be a personal affair down the line between me and you. youre gonna be up in a minute. he stared past her blankly. still havent told me what i need to do. she grinned. itll be obvious, ghoulie. alright. avo bent the gun. it cracked down the middle. rantula frowned at his act. good. best that she was confused. with a grunt, he cracked the magazine open as well, letting most of the ammo spill out. while her attention was pulled by the falling clatters of micro-rockets, he cupped the two left and hid them in his fist. careful, avo said, as multiple enforcers backed away around him, cursing, might go off. should get someone to clean them up. they would be useful for what he planned later. the only problem was that his temp-skin undersuit was too shredded to hold anything anymoreit dangled from his upper body in tatters. he would have to replace it with something more rugged, more avo noticed an unattended synth-leather jacket bedecked in plates of rusted metal hanging over a nearby chair. he reached over and took it. owner was probably someone he would eat anyway. he put it on and found his arms far too long for the sleeves. a common problem for most clothes he wore; had to get them custom-made. still, it fitted him well enough. he slipped his two micro-rockets into its inner pocket. you just steal a jacket? rantula asked, her confusion growing. yes, avo said. ...and for our next vicuhcontestant, one of the survivors of last nights crucible! offered to the circuit under rantulas recommendation, give it up for essus sibupan! an ensemble of jeering cheers rose as avo narrowed his eyes. down, standing right in front of the pylons, the father stood. the enforcer had already taken the man''s collar off and handed him a steel-headed cudgel far too heavy for a flat to bear. yet, like a hollow puppet, the man dragged the weapon behind him as he moved forward. the electric field dropped. the fathernamed essusentered to find an end to his pain. the end didnt take long to come. the smell betrayed them first; their hissing voices after. stepping to the edge of the top deck, avo saw an oozing cluster of boiling thoughtstuff, the wavelength of violence and bloodlust so familiar to him as it mirrored his baseline. from the other side, beyond the rumble, the pylon''s dropped their field as pale monsters bound over tables and tore into the wights. avo fired his celerostylus. the firstborn twitched back, freezing as a coursing bolt of electricity lit his skin, looking as if ivory beneath naked moonlight. the other four moved no faster, their pace clenched to a near halt, bade to stillness in avos perception. by fractions of inches, they moved, unprepared for what was to come. and by fractions of a second, he would part them from this world. striding, he wasted no time stepping past the father to claim the cudgel. it was an ugly thinga clump of thick steel on a rusted pipe. felt like it weighed over a hundred pounds. little wonder why the father couldnt even hold it well. but a ghoul could. with a weapon in hand, avo proceeded to his task. what followed was no fight, and could never be considered one. a fight entailed someone fighting back, capable of a struggle. there was no struggle in the moments that followed. avo struck. the firstborns head pulped inward, brain matter spewing loose from a fissuring skull. the rival ghoul didnt even know how he diedlikely didnt see how he died. the last thing the firstborn probably remembered was a blur of motion. then nothing. carried on rising bloodlust and momentum, avo tore into the rest of his kind, hissing, cudgel rising and falling. the tendons in his arm tore and ripped amidst his swinging onslaught. he didnt care. the survivors of the nest died. their heads folded behind their necks at unnatural angles. fangs were shattered. skulls burst. but always, avo made sure to crush their brains. anything less was to leave a chance for a ghoul to mend and rise again. as he brought the final blow through the forehead of his last brother, a discord roiled inside him. how easy this was. how base was his kind. three real seconds had not passed yet. his mind wasnt even burning. why then, did the low masters make his kind? for combat? look how parted he was from their weakness with but a single alteration. what worth were they against the alloyed peoples, against machines armed with gauss and fire? they never had any chance to win the war. none. to the guilders, they were nothing but fuel for a soul. to the warrens, they were just monsters that never should have been. avo quelled his celerostylus. time resumed its pace. his arms fell by his sides, limp, the cudgel bouncing from his grasp. around him, five skulls finished splattering apart, the bodies collapsing almost synchronously, their deaths timed to perfection. thaumic cycler: 29 thaum/c ghosts - [42] a new flick flashed inside him. the mass of his liminal frame was expanding. growing. one more, and he would have his hell. roaring cheers and calls for an encore came up in the crowds. drifting ghosts called out his stage name, cheering him on for his nobility for defending the father. the father. essus. turning, avo saw the man he came to defend leaning against a chair, looking at him. sobbing. his heartbeat was pulsing a near-constant. blood and snot poured down from his nose. i wanted it to end, the father whispered.i just wanted it to end. there were words that could have been said to this man. words that could coat his pain with comfort, at least temporarily. avo knew nothing of those words. the best he could do was cut the boy from his memories with the right phantasmics. remove the pain altogether. but something in the fathers face told avo that forgetting was never going to be in the cards. there you have it, consangs! moonblood! the good-ghoul! the one! the only of his breeding! the announcer coughed briefly. hatched not from the flesh of basest-beast, but a fallen saint of absolute virtueone bearing the will of jaus! praise him! praise the moonblood! glory to his strength. glory to his humanity! praise him searing aches ran down his arms. his joints and sinews healed, reknitting after the exertion he put them through. bringing a shaking claw up, avo looked at his bloodied hands, and between his claws, at the bodies of his brothers. humanity, he said, laughing mostly to himself. he glanced at the father again. the man was broken. weary. wounded. he needed to leave. he needed medical attention. avo needed to bring this nights affairs to a close. turning, he pointed out at the crowd. time to give mirrorhead what he wanted so he could see this day done. praise me another way, he called out. the crowds went silent. floating specters splashed their rapt attention down from on high, bathing him beneath a hundred thousand eyes. praise me by giving me rantula! he pointed up, right where rantula was. he knew she would answer. she thought she wanted this as much as he did. she was wrong. forced a flat to fight your games, avo said. a survivor. now without a son. did my part. now you fetch. a rift opened amongst the watchers. the enforcers in the decks scoffed and spat with indifference and scorn. the specters bled rank horror at the accusal. two different worlds. to the latter, the father became a full person the moment he made it into the citysomeone who by survivalshould have earned a spot in the citizenship roster. such was the opinion of those bearing massist political leanings, anyway. the enforcers on the other hand were just backing up their own. snarling with laughter, rantula descended, her steel-tipped boots ringing loud with each step. she rolled out her arms and extended her spider legs. with a sudden push, she thrust herself high into the air, leaping forth from the heights of the deck and darting into the air. on the same limbs, she landed, shards of linoleum flaring out in a tide. avo pre-emptively fired his reflexes again and stepped in front of the father. the soft tips of the shrapnel pierced his skin slightly but penetrated no deeper. he halted his reflexes. as the dust settled, he walked over to reclaim the cudgel he dropped, keeping his eye fixed on rantulas thoughtstuff. his arms were healing, but he could still feel a throb ebbing through them. he would need to make his swings count. his tendons werent built for how hard his muscles could twitch in tandem with the celerostylus. a titanium leg drew a semi-circle through the debris as the curtain of dust lifted. rantula stood behind the fog, greeting avo with a grin. she bore a bronze hammer in her arms the size of avos body. he stared at his cudgel and suddenly found it wanting. scare you that much? avo asked nah, rantula said. just want to make sure you stay down after i tap you. mirrorhead said he dont want you deadhells, im willing to bet he told you he wanted the same fucking thing for me, yeah? yeah. rantula nodded. she flipped out her lower lip and shrugged with a hand. suppose i wont go for your head, then. feed you your brothers after im done so youll get all better. after. her lip curved up. but i am gonna kill the flat. avo grunted. wont crack your mind. promised mirrorhead. wont feed you my brothers if i win. but i am going to make you beg. rantula snorted derisively. clever ghoulie. clever fucking ghoulie. she spat, shouldering her hammer. youre smart. you. are. smart. even i can tell that. her mechanical limbs rose into a slow shrug. but it aint gonna change anything. you might got some fancy new reflexes, but youll get tired. and when you do she brought a leg down and buried it deep into the ground. avo grinned. he could still feel the two micro-rockets in the pocket of his new jacket. little did she know, his thinking ahead was going to affect everything. she would live. he wouldnt touch her mind either. not phantasmally. but when he was done, the enforcers in the stands would beg him to grant her mercy. Chapter 3-12 To Joust a Spider chapter 3-12 to joust a spider alright, im going to say this one more time for you half-strands that wont stop asking about it: do notyou hearing me? do. not. implant yourself with assault-grade chrome. you wanna know why people call it assault-grade chrome? because most implants of that kind probably belong better on a drone. and youre not a drone. youre a street squire. least i hope you aredont know why a drone-jock will be taking any advice from me. as street squires, your biggest advantage is that youre high-speed and no-drag. you engage and disengage. push in. mark something. snuff someone. get out. the moment your chrome pushes you past the two-ton mark is the moment that you stop being no-drag and start being a logistical liability. the heavy lifting should be done by your rig, not your body. your body should be oriented for speed and survivability, not raw durabilityand certainly not layered in heavy weapons. why not? iyoutell me, juv, how many calories do you consume in a day? how many nutriboosters can you shoot up in a row without emptying your stomach? whatever you say, it aint enough to fuel 2 tons of alloy, a neuro-op system, and however many heavy weapons you want to graft into yourself. i swear to jaus, you fuckin kids are nuts these days. you keep thinking about how you can make yourselves assault drones or tanks when they already bloody exist! -quail tavers, school of the warrens 3-12 to joust a spider rantulas metal legs twitched, rearing at avo as a spider might as she slowly circled him. randomly, she would strike the ground, chipping chunks from the floor in an effort to get him to flinch, to prematurely fire his reflexes. he thought it appropriately dog-like of her to play these games. she was hoping to burn his nerves out before the fight even started. it wasnt a bad plan. the problem was avo had a measure of her pace alreadyan advantage she betrayed when she struck her subordinate earlier. as such, he kept thirty feet between them, mirroring the arc of her movements. inside, avo coaxed his inner beast. he wouldnt be able to keep it chained forever, but his earlier slaughter of the enforcer and his brothers had sated it, if only slightly. now, deaf to the rising jeers of the crowd, he waited for rantula to break first. hed keep his celerostylus quiet until after she moved. then, he would begin by crippling her. tension was building through her body; she gripped her hammers handle so tight her fingers grew pale at the tips. her optics were narrow pinpricks, all eight locked on his form while they paced, circling each other. then, he caught one flicking over to the father before swiveling back to him. rantula grinned. avo glared. wasnt hard to guess what she wanted to try. she probably got the idea from little vicious when she finally trapped draus using the boy as bait. poetic, in a sense, but it made her plan obvious. avo adjusted his cudgel. go for it. you know what, rantula said, licking her hammer, i think i just might. two of her spider-legs descended, digging deep through the material of the floor and flinging outward toward the father, hammer raised, voice roaring. avo fired his celerostylus. she slowed, her pace stymied as if she was pushing through a pool of water. still, she was faster than his brothers. fast enough that he wasted no time in enacting his own strategy. if she wanted to steal a trick from little vicious to use on him, he would pull one of his old tricks on her as well. avo moved, striding first to tear a pulp of flesh from the savaged remains of one of his brothers before pushing for her. the father was leaning against a gore-coated table, his head tilting all too slowly to even see the descending hammer. but that wasnt all rantula had prepared. avo activated his phys-sim, numerical data spilling from her moving limbs as dissolving strands within his perception. rantula, for all her obvious stupidity, had a low cunning. her hammer wasnt the only thing giving off velocity markers, for her spider legs had reacted, shortening as potential energy began to build up within, the hydraulics ringing loud even with his heightening perception of time. she closed. eighteen feet and falling, her legs and hammer extending her reach by another eight. ten feet in function. avo wouldn''t make it in time. he didnt have to. cupping the handful of flesh, he called a trajectory lane with his phys-sim and cast it loose along the calculated arc. dripping viscera sailed free of his hand, a fracture rattling through his index finger. avo winced. all that force concentrated on one digit was more than the bone could take; needed to favor his other hand when using his weapon. like a pebble of trailing crimson, the pulp of flesh darted closer and closer toward the plotted point of intersection with rantulas head, her face barely turning in time to reveal her surprise. one of her metallic legs pushed forward to deflect, but too late. red burst across her face as the pulp of flesh disintegrated into a misting cloud, doing its job. a furious cry free from rantulas lungs. blinded, she swung with her hammer, missing the father by a full foot. her alloyed legs speared, shredding naught but air and the edge of a table. avo felt a simmer of heat radiating from the center of his skull. the clock was ticking. three feet between him and the father; four before another one of rantulas wild swings came into impact radius. avo caught the father by the collar and shoved the man onto the ground. just in time for his phys-sim to wail. avo shifted back, angling just as an extending segment of titanium plunged through the rippling air where his head was. a stinging pain flared along the side of his skull. one of rantulas legs had opened a thin slice on his scalp as she shot past him, her momentum guiding her down toward the moat. hissing, he spun and brought his hammer down on the back of her calf before she was out of range. he struck, and felt a vibration flood through his hand, his broken digit flaring with pain. it felt like he was hitting a mountain, her muscles akin to veins of ore. his blow had all but bounced off. snarling, he hit her twice before the burning cauldron inside his skull made him stop. backing away, he dragged the father with him as he retreated, watching the distance grow between him and rantula as she landed in a rising spray of fragments, waiting until the thirty-foot boundary was reestablished before releasing his celerostylus. his hold on time dissolved. spiking pain twisted through his skull. his knees and his elbows felt like someone had been hitting him with a hammer instead the other way around. across the foot court, rantula turned around, rubbing the back of her right leg as she crackled. that was dirty, ghoulie. dirty. but you got the swing of a flat. as she turned, he focused his phys-sim on her. numbers flooded his awareness, and he got his confirmation: mass was resting more on her left now. she wasnt nearly as unaffected as she acted. pretty quick though, she said, wiping the blood from her augmented eyes. nice to have speed advantage for once in your life, aint it? shame bout them bones and sinews though. too soft. too weak. he was only half listening to her. he plotted his next course of action. the cudgel was barely enough to bruise her calf. would be entirely useless against her torso and head with all the subdermal lining. could continue targeting the same leg. force her to walk on her spider implants, and reduce her vectors of lethality; force her to leave one of her exo-limbs planted long enough for him to drop his micro-rockets into the exposed hydraulics. as his shadow slipped over her, she stopped crying out for a moment and swallowed. alright.! she snapped. alright, fuck ghoulie! smart play. good play! you win! you w he picked up a detached tip from one of her formerly implanted legs. her lip quivered. ghoulie. he took a step over her. moonblood his shadow slid over her body like a snake. avo, no! c-six, he said, chuckling as he remembered his time with the grafters. pulling back, he viciously plunged the titanium stave beneath a random column of bone. the scream he tore from her lungs was loud enough to burst the first layer of his eardrums. the second layer went when he wedged it deeper, and booted the flat side of the stave, levering her already ruined spine into two loose pieces entirely. mirrorhead said to break her body. well, who was he to leave a job half-finished? the enforcers in the first row were silent, their faces ashen. a mixture of horror and triumph rained down on him from the spectators as he proceeded to the next component of his mutilation. an ear. he plunged a claw into her softest tissue, and when he found something that clung to him, he pulled. ropes of the prolapsed organ came spooling out of her with each tug. her lungs carried the weight of agony louder than the heavy metal still blasting from the speakers. above, he heard the announcer call out for the fight to end, that he had won, that there was no need for this. avo heard her. avo didnt care. drove his claws into her face, carving around her optics as he worked to finish her blinding. by this point, rantula was whispering faint pleas of mercy. he flipped her over so that her working ear was facing him. im in your mind, avo whispered. going to be there. always. when you close your eyes. when you look at a reflection. thats mirrorhead. but when you dream. thats me. he tore an optic free from her face. always and forever me. he was rearing back to take another one of her eyes when he heard a sound. a crackle of debris to his side, fifteen feet toward the moat. the father had crawled past them and was making for the electric field. dust and blood trailed behind him in a smear. avo struggled to stop himself from hurting rantula more. brutalized, beaten, broken. the fool was trying to fry himself. most of avo didnt care. the part that belonged to walton couldnt let it happen. not until the man was clear of mind to choose self-termination properly. oh, how he wanted to finish rantula. kill her. take one last echo and manifest his hell. how he wanted to spit in mirrorheads face and leave this place. but he knew better. knew to be patient. knew that before he could ever escape, the syndicate boss would need to be dead and devoured. avo was not going to spend the rest of his life fearing every reflection he came across. you live now, avo whispered to rantula. live. but never heal. not inside. you see me again, eyes stay on the floor. like a dog. heel. dog. heel. he shoved her head down and cracked the tiles beneath her, leaving her sobbing there amidst the detritus. staggering and limping, he trudged behind the father as his flesh continued to mend. wait, avo said. wait. the father kept crawling. avo tried firing his celerostylus, but the pain blooming through his nerves was too much. three feet between the flowing arcs of electricity and the man. ten between avo and the man. he wouldnt close the distance in time. essus! the man stopped and turned to look at avo. you know? you know my name? avo nodded. the field cut out. i know. the fatheressus stared. do you know my sons name? what was the answer to this question? no? i dont care. what would walton say? tell me? avo asked. you can tell me. essus blinked and let out a breath. aurrie. his name iswas aurrie. he too, then, joined in rantulas example and began to sob. he held himself and shivered. avo exhaled. his mind felt numb. his body felt frail. his insides felt hungry. looking back up the decks, the enforcers were half-standing in outrage, half-silent with indecision, and all too cowed by mirrorheads presence to do anything about the ghoul that had brutalized one of their own. exhausted, avo stumbled over and pointed out at someone random. a random girl in the first deck. you, avo said. the enforcer was young, with gleaming ebony skin and metal stilts for legs. the other enforcers around her inched away, leaving a space around her. it was like he cursed her. me, she pointed to herself. he could barely hear her voice from so far down. yes, avo said. he gestured weakly at essus. get him medical assistance. he shot a glare at rantula. and a mop for her. then, show me where cafeteria is. hungry. hurt. need food. she mustve been a genius among her comrades because she wasted no time doing what he told her to. it was good to be feared. Chapter 3-13 Lunchtime Chat chapter 3-13 lunchtime chat if politics is defined as the activities pursued in relation to governance and power, then the greatest conceit in new vultun is thinking what the people want matters at all. thats not to say that youlittle persondont matter. you matter. you matter a lot in the big equations that make new vultun the biggest, baddest, goddest city there ever was. of course, the way you matter is the same why hydrogen cells matter for the aerovec i got for my seventeenth: sure would be good to have more; sure would be bad if we ran out. so, with that properly set, here is the major divide for terrestrial politics: massist or saintist? power shared by the manyor diluted by the mob. power enforced by the fewor dominion in the hands of singular tyrants. calla marlowe, fateless radio 3-13 lunchtime chat avo left the mall-brawl basking in the glorious silence. he had seen to it that the enforcers present deposit the father, essus, into a medi-drone for treatment. all the while, he felt the burning gazes of all who were present atop the deck, watching him, judging him. the spectators lapped at him, praising his violence with uproarious delight. yet, the flavor of their favor found itself diluted by the synchronous emotions of horror and despair from those of conflux. there were no smiles or jeers coming from the enforcers anymore. no calls for continued violence. their expressions were childlike, eyes wide at the sight of one of their own so mauled. it was clear that rantula was someone to thema creature of fear and respect. but their creature. their monster. their champion. and through his act, he reminded them that in this godless age, not even deification spared one from the desolation of violence. limping up the steps that split the deck, avo nursed on a pre-lunch snack: the arm of the fathers former handler, now crisp and fried from the electrocution. disgust played across countless faces that faded as they sank past his periphery. their thoughtstuff remained. above the food court, the holographic display of the arena continued to play, scenes of med-techs trying to stabilize the still whimpering rantula, attempting to ready her for drone transport as well. more pleasingly, a single line of text had been burned across the nightmantis rig. claimed. another gift was claimed. or delivered, as mirrorhead would so say. the idea of being harmed less pleased avo; the thought of getting actual food after days of feasting on raw meat, even more. miserable as this day had been, he was still here, still burning. and if it wasnt for his liminal frame, he wouldnt have been. death had touched him thrice this day, and thrice he walked back out of its gates. his fears were beginning to dull, he realized. in his past life, before whatever happened to him over the course of the last week, he would have never engaged rantula so. hurt her, yes. but only after getting away, and finding a sliver of memory he could infect with one of his poltergeists. now, he greeted his problems in a different way. a savage new pathway had unveiled itself to him, and avo found himself wanting more. or perhaps it was the beast that desired bloodlust. it was getting increasingly hard to distinguish where his instincts began and his mind ended. with every act of brutality committed, he felt like the sinews of his being were intertwining. guided by the stilt-legged enforcer he called out earlier, he ordered her through grunts to lead him to the cafeteria or mess hall or whatever these street-scrum called the place they ate. he was hurting. he was healing. he neededno, deservedmore food. body tense with fear and reluctance, she obeyed. no one stood with her. no one pulled her away from him. how solitary it was to be an enforcer? how helplessly alone. already, she was about to lead him into an elevator and no one had stopped him. it made him loathe the other oi, rotlick! avo heard a voice call out from behind. the heartbeat and scent were familiar. he sniffed again. ah. they smelled bad. one of rantulas minions. he didnt care to remember either of their names. a click followed. avo turned, staring unimpressed into the jutting barrel of a gyrojet rifle. it was in the hands of the bald one again. their hands were shaking, their breaths tense with withheld gasps of air. they were scared. genuinely, truly scared of him. avo chuckled. how amusing it was that he, by all accounts a failed ghoul if judged from the standards of the low masters, would be the first to experience a taste of self-actualization. fights done, avo said. won. finished. go lick wounds. find a new master. f-fuck you, the enforcer spat, sweat clinging to their brow. was he issig or jareg? avo shrugged. you godsdamned monsterwhat you did was good for her, avo said, digging at the thugs wound. she was weak. slow. stupid. and all the augs cant fix that. he chuckled an exaggerated laugh as he pointed a claw at the enforcers implanted limbs. six insectoid legs. six limbs to weigh them down. look at you. deadweight and no will. no skill. best part of you didnt even come from you. bought from a grafter. how much did it cost? three thousand imps? thirty thousand? wasted. all of it. just like you. little wonder why mirrorhead wanted me: current stock doesnt light the wick. the enforcers gun cracked apart in his grip, his thoughtstuff boiling as tears of primal rage spilled from his eyes. oh, avo said. thats right. cant shoot. mirrorheads orders. one good thing about rantula: she was good nu-dog. listened. obeyed. avo took a step forward. his foe took a step back, wilting, lips quivering like a child. another thing about rantula. she was a screamer. tell me: you the same way? something broke inside the rantulas former peon. his face cracked, raw fear burning away the roots of his hate. the gun slipped from his hands. he inched back. then stumbled back a step. fuck, he whispered, his thoughtstuff coming apart in wide strands, his will shattering under the weight of terror. spinning on his heels, he ran, ejecting the limbs from his back, shedding that which tied him to rantula so he could flee faster. the sight burned itself into avos eyes as a precious memory, something to savor in his dreams tonight when he was sequencing his metamind. this is power, avo muttered, mostly to himself. it was like a light had come on in his head. his celerostylus; the heaven; his hell soon to manifest. all those were a power of physical and metaphysical disciplines. yet, what he just achieved, the control he had over the fear of another, was equally absolute, equally destructive in its capacity. this is power. a ring sounded from behind him. his head spun. his guide was currently hitting the interface of the elevator as fast as she could, trying to get the door to open before he closed on her. slowly, he walked next to her, his shadow shrouding her. which floor? avo asked. joined tables made from insta-fabbed plastics ran from wall to wall. the chairs, meanwhile, were metal stumps. had to be with how heavy some of these enforcers were. this place was still mostly empty right now. strange. he expected there to be more people here, eating. it looked like it could seat a few hundred easily. but with the wealth that mirrorhead displayed so far, he was pretty sure the sydnicate boss had more than this single establishment, this single location filled with personnel and equipment. no one concentrated all their goods in one place. not if they wanted to keep playing this game for long. ved found a nicely vacant row for them. there were ten chairs to the left and the right. the eyes of the others in the room were still locked on avo. he wondered if they were planning to attack him at some point, and found that doubtful with how placid their thoughtstuff were. it was tense. tense, but not nervous. just a dull acceptance that there was a ghoul in their midst, and that he had hurt one of their number. besides, avo doubted anyone here could actually ambush him properly with their pounding footsteps and thundering hearts. the constant chattering was a dulling miasma of noise to his senses, but he had lived in different undercroft megablocks all his life. those had millions of bodies all packed together across a few hundred levels at the most. the noises warred, a symphony of eternal discord. and the smells. what to say about the smells, other than the fact that his feelings regarding the smells were better left unsaid? it taught him compartmentalization if nothing else. family, avo said, as they were seated, pawing a handful of pork-beetles. the little spliced bugs struggled in his palm as he tossed them into his mouth. he munched them, the crunching bringing him an ineffable satisfaction. strangely, he had expected to gain an echo from that. there was a question in that: what made one death release an echo, while another gave nothing more? was it tied to the ghosts? could it be that only the intelligent, the self-aware granted him echoes? what? ved said, blinking. avo fed himself another mouthful of food before he could sigh. writhing little limbs prodded against his tongue, tickling the roof of his mouth. his fangs fell like a guillotine, splitting their little bodies. the oozing of their juices on his taste buds was sublime. sour and sweet, each coming apart with a satisfying pop. glorious food. all the killing had been worth it for this alone. ved watched him with paling features. iuhi didnt understand the question. swallowing the second mouthful of bugs, avo waited for the food to go down before talking. manners were important. walton said so. you were talking. about family. oh, ved said, understanding. ohoh! yeah, uh! so as i was saying my mothers mothers mothers this went on for some time. it appeared ved had an aversion to using the word grand in front of mother. even a, my distant ancestors would have been better. for a few minutes, avo just pretended to listen, nodding and grunting as the family backstory began to expand into a metaphorical territory avo regarded as beyond useless. he did his best not to remember anything that ved told him aside from the essentials. minds had limited space and he didnt want veds story about her grandmothers funny wart to be using any of it. ...i mean, jaus, consang, it was like she didnt even care about mom. after everything mom did for us, she just leaves. takes the fucking guild job and leaves. complete half-strand behavior, the fucking sow. fuck. cant believe were related. yes, avo said, the sow. whoever the aforementioned sow was. probably family. people hated their families. he interjected before ved could go off on another spiel. ved. rantula. ved went silent. nervous. her heart pace doubled. she respected? he swallowed. rantulas one of the classics, consang. been working for the boss since day one. but you messed her up good. the shit you did to her... she cupped her ear and swallowed, steeling herself for something to come. wasnt right. you shouldve stopped. shouldve let her be. she surrendered. we all heard. you couldve stopped. avo understood the sentiment. but understanding didnt mean acceptance. would she? would she what? she was being deliberately obtuse now. didnt want to answer. avo didnt care. would she have stopped? with me? with the flat? would any of you? ved opened her mouth, words slow to come as she mustered all her tact to put what she felt into words. avo knew what was coming. he had known for years. he just liked hearing it said by another, to remind him of what the city thought about his kind. youre a ghoul, consang, ved said. those words explained everything. there''s no one in this room who didnt lose someone to your like during the uprising. a moment of silence settled between them. low masters, avo said, wanting to trade honesty for honesty. she had been brave. that was a virtue. virtues should be rewarded. they said that we were saving you from guilds. that our sacrifice was for you. that made ved laugh. jaus avandaer said he was going to give everyone their own heaven, consang. she mimed getting stabbed in the chest. suppose nobody predicts getting stabbed by their own kid, yeah. avo grunted in acknowledgment. no one really wanted this. no one asked for this. they just got what they got and chose from there. i didnt ask to be. ii know, ved said, unsure how to respond. want to hurt you, avo continued. across from him, ved went stiff. want to hurt everyone. eat them. always. not easy, trying to deny it. but i choose. you understand. and thats why i hurt rantula. she never chose. shes a coward. shes like my brothers. dont be coward ved. dont be like the sow in your family. whoever she was. be a blaring blast wave of ghosts tore through the level. the lights flickered. avo felt a surge of adrenaline flow through him. +situation in medical! repeat! situation in medical! staff down! patient missingthe regular is loose! she''s fucking loose! send helpsend+ a loud rattling scream cut the flow of thoughts off. the ghosts snapped with the termination of the host, dissolving as the phantasmal broadcast broke away into nothing. draus. it had to be. avo left that shiv with her on a whim. just in case she wanted to make her own options. avo hid a smile. good for her. but wasnt the father bound for medical as well? sighing, avo stood, taking the bowl of pork-beetles with him. medical? avo asked. where? ved blinked. its the second to last level. all the way." lead, he said. get the elevator. i follow. Chapter 3-14 Unwilling Survivor chapter 3-14 unwilling survivor chrome is a money trap. this isn''t a statement. this is an objective fact. lets look here at your standard implanted limb. sure. it can be made of solid adamantine. you know what isnt as tough and strong as adamantine? your spine. your skin. shoulders. so, every implant is a full-body package too. but thats okay, i hear some of you say. the nanosurgeons can fix it right up, ignoring the fact that if you could afford nanosurgery, youd be purchasing less invasive augmentations anyway. so, that leaves the poor and downtrodden with limited options. sure, they can visit a grafter or, if theyre brave enough, a street sculptor. plenty of old exo-armors laying around to protect you from the mean streets. just need to bolt that to yourself right? energy. dont forget about energy. thats a category-e microfusion cell for the cheapest linear combat rig. you could make an argument about getting a category-a cell and cybering yourself to the roots and sinews, but by that point, youre already spending enough imps to build a void cruiser, while only being about as effective as maybe a heavy drone. compare that to a wager with market-standard biomods, and youre looking at a net loss in both effectiveness and longevity. compare that to premium nanosuite injections, and the question of hardware and software begins to blur. there is a tax that comes with the alloy, and it stays long after the implant gets chipped in. -dissertation on cybertechs effects on the socio-economically disadvantaged populations of new vultun 3-14 unwilling survivor back down to the guts of the warrens avo found himself descending. again down, two hundred levels, and more. he was beneath the plates of the surface now. he could taste it in the air, in the rumbling weight of the city above him. the question he had for why the medical levels were located so far down was a fleeting one. building essential facilities far below layer one was a deliberate choice for most organizations. there were too many points of insertion on the levels above, and it still wasnt clear to him if conflux controlled the entire structure or not. with how mirrorhead had them stationed, there was a feeling that they were mostly squatting in the block rather than formal occupants. ved, he asked, watching as the elevator sank down toward the four hundred and fiftieth level; thirty-five more to go. medical: is there anything lower? she blinked at him momentarily, not understanding the vagueness of his words. the underways? we got a motorpool. well, almost a motorpool. we got, like, three golems; two shadowcrawlers and a galeslither. she chuckled. and only half of them work. avo stared at her in confused disappointment. why laugh? unprofessional to have broken equipment. and how does half a golem work? his answer made ved wilt. theuh, galeslither has a busted engine. still flies though. can it land? avo asked. not sure. havent really tried. avo frowned. then you have one working golem. ved didnt have much to say about that. fitting. a broken tool wasnt a joke but a sign of incompetence or ill-discipline. such displays reflected poorly on mirrorhead. for all his resources, the morale of his people was certainly abysmal. imps could buy motivation, but having a boss that constantly monitored you and could kill you at any point from a reflection likely left everyone here risk-averse. flaws upon flaws. mirrorhead probably viewed his control over conflux like a master with a leash. apparently, he forgot that when you pulled too hard, a leash could also be a noose. the elevator doors chimed and opened. a flurry of movement was already underway, med-techs and their medical drones already in a whirlwind of motion. overhead, another plane of mirrors coated the ceiling while cone-shaped surveillance drones whistled through narrow vents along the walls. the shine of the room made him reflexively wish that he had found some shades or goggles. it was hard to see, even with his ghosts tuning his perceptive brightness. the cognition of sight could be adjusted, but the light stung his eyes all the same. he needed to find something to blunt brightness if he eventually found himself operating during the day. going with the flow of foot traffic proved to be a sound idea as the hospitals layout was a maze. hallways led to twisting turns that ended in plascrete-sealed dead-ends. doors were melted shut or clamped down with mag-locks. it looked like they secured this place in the aftermath of a siege and never renovated it. following the crowd into a larger chamber, a hive revealed itself to avo, the walls lined with hexagonal hab-cells, each meant to serve as a treatment center of some kind. judging from the scuffed numbering painted over each cell, however, it was obvious this used to be a coffin hostel of some kind. this is c-wing, ved said. used to be a capsule hotel. back when the blackways were the underways. back when the darkness wasnt infested with ghouls, avo finished for her. yeah. one of the last insults from the low masters, the blackways. infusing all darkness beneath the city with a heaven of liminal spatiality was one thing. connecting that spatiality with random alleyways across the gutters to ensure their ever-replenishing nests of feral ghouls would always be a problem, meanwhile, was deliberately cruel. starring beyond an entire shredded wall of c-wing, avo found himself look down quick-fabbed plasteel railings leading to a twenty-foot drop to the former underway station below. rusted rails left unused for a nearly decade stung at his nose with a familiar stench of decaying metal. three tunnels had been fused shut with battle foam and plascrete blockades, while a final path looked cored clean through by some impossible force. oh, fuck me, ved said, sounding stunned, i think the reg punched her way through using a shadowcrawler. got nothing else down here that can do that. a team of enforcers was gathered in front of the new opening, their guns raised, lights burning away the encroaching limbs of the whispering darkness, wanting to drag the unsuspecting into its depths. avo could taste the sheer anxiety in their voices, hear it in their gasping lungs as they faced the black and called for their engineers to jock into a construction drone and fill the gap. all avo could hear of the father and his hostage were brief heartbeats as he crossed into the room. a nagging way still pried at his will. he could walk away. let someone else handle this. the father really wasnt his problem anymore. unfortunate as the boys death was, it was as it went. people died. it was part of the bargain: the city gave you heavens and miracles, and when it came time to die, you went back to feeding the city. in a weird way, the boy was closer to new vultun than any of them would get for a while. avo had helped the man as best he could. saved him well over five times now. so why the hells did he still feel responsible? walton. walton was why. sometimes, avo wished he had never met the man. sometimes, he wondered if his life and eventual death would have been easier if he became a feral like so many of his brothers. a beam-butchered corpse greeted avo as he entered the room. blood did not pool and organs did not show, but it was clear that someone had taken to slashing the corpse repeatedly with a high-intensity laser until the bodys face hung in burning strips and arms were hanging from smoking sinews. avo counted something north of a hundred slash-wounds, sloppily carved into cold flesh, driven by undiminished hate. reaching over, avo pulled a piece of fried skin and ate it. it tasted crispy, but not nice. overcooked. let it burn for too long. burnt. not cooked. nothing came from the father. no laugh. avo frowned. his attempt at initiating this conversation through humorous small talk had failed. he had to think of something else. the space of the room wasnt that large, but a holo-veil shrouded what lay beyond the halfway mark of the thirty-foot room. avo wondered if that was draus doing as well. this had all the makings of a good ambush with the obfuscation of the veil. if avo didnt have his metamind, he wouldnt even notice essus presence or his hostage. gonna step through the veil. beam me and i eat you. no response. avo passed through the threshold. there, laying upon a dull grey gurney, the father stared. a glinting plate of chrome had been installed over his forehead. in his hand, he had what looked to be a spherical module connected via wires to the tetrahedrally designed surgical drone hovering over his bed. avo tilted his head. a cluster of glowing cells shone from the back of the drone. additional power cells jury-rigged by draus, avo guessed. explain the intensity of the surgical beams. in the corner, next to an iv stand, the surviving hostage whimpered, a brown-haired juv wearing monochrome medical scrubs. he didnt look much older than the boy did. avo, the father said. he gave a surprised chuckle. the joy didnt reach his eyes. for a few moments, neither one of them said anything, the only sound was the thudding of heavy boots outside. probably enforcers arriving. the med-techs were talking, but the boots didnt stop falling until ved interjected. i asked her to leave me, the father said. why? avo asked. because you were right. i was a dead man. still am a dead man. i do not need to weigh you or her down anymore. i will find a resolution here. with them. the venomous hate that spilled out with the last word didnt fit the father. it was like something else had taken to nest beneath his skin. what a fascinating thing, to watch someone learn to truly hate in real time. she left? avo asked. he was asking about draus. essus understood. she wanted me to leave. i wouldnt go. she had already escaped by the time i got here. somehow, she had disabled her doctor. stole his prosthetics. the machine, he pointed at the surgery drone, she was using it before she gave it to me. it was not something someone as useless as i could manage to do. essus laughed. the hostage stared at avo. his eyes were square implants, pulsing with strobing scanners. the juv wanted to plead for a rescuer, but his face wilted when he found himself greeted by a ghoul. you kill the other one? avo asked. or draus. essus blinked. i think i did. avo gave another look at the mangled corpse. from inside the veil, he could see out without issue. deep lacerations revealed the whiteness of the corpses spine, along with a variety of other wounds. yeah. the recklessness fit. draus was efficient; ruthless. she would have taken lives in single slices. so, essus asked, where do we go from here? dont know, avo admitted. came in because if not me, then enforcers. theyll kill you. probably. essus blinked. i do not think i care that much. i wish you let me die. avo crouched and met the tired mans eyes. tired, but there was something else there. despair. sorrow. hate. maybe an angle he could work against mirrorhead. essus was a flat, but his mind was ripe with potential. something that could be used to feed a phantasmic. or a re-weaponized memetic contagion, built to infest others with misery and loathing. the boy, avo said, considering his next steps. his name. aurrie? essus blinked. a tear fell. yes. tell me about him. Chapter 3-15 Heart of the Machine chapter 3-15 heart of the machine everything we offer, for so little in return; the gulfs of our lives last mere seasons, but the succor of your miracles is shorter; mere moments. why then, do we breed? why then, shall we have children? why then, do we seek heaven? the road of spreading futures trails out, like blood seeping through cracks, turned to roots. but be any of the paths ours? be we ever happy? oh, my god, my god above all other gods, what reason am i to stay alive, if i am just another rhyme in this unending hymn? fated to be forgotten. fated like all before, all after. -heretics lament, historical text detailing the last words of an apostate before their enforced sacrifice to the seraphic choirs of old kosgan 3-15 heart of the machine the fathers fingers tensed around the controls. with twitching fingers, he turned the haptic icons on the sphere, the beam-emitter of the drone tilting ever so slightly toward the hostage. pressing himself against a wall, the terrified med-tech assistants heart was going off like an artillery line. perhaps bringing up the boy wasnt the best thing to ask. for a moment, avo considered whether he wanted to take a step back as he watched a storm of emotions twist through essus face. his thoughtstuff was like a hurricane, flashes and memories spiraling along the edges as the man was trapped at the eye, lost amidst a storm of his past. negotiations had always been more of waltons forte. try as he might, empathy was a hard thing to learn for avo, the nuances of morality too elusive, too fluid in rules and cultures. ghosts, meanwhile, were far more direct. they revealed all if one could unravel their interwoven memories and divest from it a useable sequence. but that was the partition between a living mind and the remnants of a dead one: will. ghosts mirrored the willpower of the living, tethering themselves to an organism that could make choices. without the linkage, all a ghost could do was fragment. dissolve. be forgotten. the instrumentalization of these ghosts was what made a necrojack artist and engineer both. considering the path before him, avo contemplated how he would proceed if he was using the mined pieces of the father''s memories to create a functional ghost. pain would likely constitute the mass of such a ghost by this point. it was unavoidable. emotions were like fuel or energy for a ghost to burn, and with every sequence related to the boy now afire with damage, all he could do was sheer the most erratic branches away; keep the funnel of pain and rage down to a limited set of options and features. but that didnt mean fighting the ghost. a necro never fought a ghost. they merely altered it. implanting other, symmetrical branches of memory to alter the overall structure, unbinding bits that were more abscess than an asset to the function of the construct. wont be hard, avo said, trying a new approach. come back to the boy later. try more present in the current moment. essus snapped back to alertness as if just remembering avo was there. the man swallowed, he looked tired. confused from trauma both physical and mental. what wont be hard. killing him, avo said. the hostage made a whimpering noise. avo was quite glad the juv managed to avoid pissing himself so far. the smell would have made this distracting. essus turned and stared at his hostage. iyes. they killed him. they killed my boy. his face darkened, warping darkly into a seething rage. they killed my boy. he shook, voice choked by a growing tightness, more tears trailing down his face. they killed my boy. avo grunted in agreement. the sadness was good. meant that there was more sorrow than rage from what he could tell. sorrow was useful in making someone give up. not go on a suicide run. but go too far and you hit despair, and depression was illegal in all the highflame-ruled sovereignties. been that way ever since the demi-sophists corrupted an entire locus by despair-bombing it with specialized depression-based constructions using their ghostjack phantasmics. suicides spiked to three million an hour that day; fried all the gamma-quality wards too. killed your boy. yours. and a thousand others, avo said, navigating the waters carefully. too much, the man would give. too little, and hed lose him again. told you. youre new here. dont know the heart of the machine. the machine? asked essus, blinking erratically. his eyes were flicking between avo and the other person he murdered earlier, horror-induced paleness staining his face. new vultun, avo said. citys an engine. gives life. eats death. feeds and is fed upon. essus nostrils flared. anger? thoughtstuff was boiling around the edges. definitely anger. still manageable. are you saying my son was a sacrifice? yes, avo said without hesitation. you. me. the boy. draus. every last jock and enforcer. the syndicates. the wagers. all of us. sacrifices. for what! essus raged. his thoughtstuff exploded outward. avo waited, wondering if it would spike again. essus directed the drone away from aiming at the tech and sent it a beam slashing out with a wild flail of his arm. avo twisted, the pulsing stream of radiance spilling through the holoveil behind him. rippling glitches pulsed from the light-made partition from where the piercing laser traced. avo considered tearing the surgical drone apart. breaking it. but doing so might break essus mind utterly. again and again, the man had his agency deprived. again and again, he was rendered impotent; he was practically the epitome of being fateless. a thrum of microdrones began to sound from behind. avo guessed the syndicate goons were getting impatient. how unfortunate for them. they would need to wait a little while longer, or incur his ire. he should have gone a bit further with rantula. perhaps she did not serve as an example enough for the others. theythey told me that new vultun was a great city, the father said, a rant building on his breath. thatthat it is protected from the fallen aethers? avo frowned before he understood. right. a different term for heaven. protected from the cults and the ruptures! can also use them to take things out. the father looked sick by this point. cancan they put my sons mind back no, avo said. no for the boy. hes dead as jaus. no phylactery for him. gone now. nothing left but pieces of memory; echoes of knowledge. the syndicate. they can do worse to you. worse, essus moaned, what could be worse? avo shrugged. could take his last memories. chain them to your mind. to a memory trigger? let you relive his death when you think of him. essus grew paler still. that''s why i want to ask your name. yours. the boy. so i could remember. in case they decided to break you. the father looked at him, dread creeping over his features. he opened his mouth, but nothing came. no sounds. no words. avo couldnt tell if his attempt to properly prime the father against the syndicate was working, or if he was just tormenting the poor fool. right now, the father going on a suicide run was wasted. the fathermade cautious by fear and made focused by hatecould be a wieldable asset. just a question of how well he can hold against the pressure; how much avo could shape him. they can take him from you too, avo said, twisting the proverbial knife ever so slightly. tear every memory of him from your mind. his smile. his laugh. the first time you held him. his name. everything. everything. the father looked at the hostage and avo. his eyes darted back and forth, the strain of what he was being told consumed his features with agonized stress. he dropped the module. he clutched his head and moaned. i do not wish this doesnt matter what you want, avo said. matters what they can inflict. matters what you can stop. he motioned for the assistant to flee with a wave, not even looking at him. the juv wasted no time, shooting up and rushing for the exit on pumping legs. so there were smart people in this syndicate after all. avo picked up the drones control module and cast it to the side, letting it clatter against the ground. before him, essus was hugging himself, folding inward as he grew wracked with sobs. ohoh artad. oh, artad, i killed my son! i killed my son, my god! i shouldnt have comeive killed my son. awkwardly, avo placed a palm on the weeping mans shoulder, trying to remember how walton used to do it. was easier for walton though, considering his distinct lack of claws. avo leaned in, considering what to say. he needed something that could instill a sane baseline. something to keep the man stable, at least until he could be used against the syndicate. sorry. dont like seeing you hurt like this. wasnt entirely a lie. the fact the man had been treated so poorly despite his survival offended avos ethics. need you to focus and listen now. the father kept crying, holding himself as he shook between choking gasps. avo leaned in closer. they did kill your boy. they did steal your dreams from you. keep the hate. keep the pain. will need it. useful for us. stay sane. stay sane and i will give true retribution. avo extended his ghost-link and, with a single sting of phantasmal matter, injected a thought into the man''s mind: a concept of a memetic weapon, instead of a word. something that essus could deliver without drawing attention to avo, thus avoiding the cortex bomb. youyou can help me do this? essus asked. you can make my mind a weapon? the man was ragged, bloodied, weary, but now also very pliable. and all it took was the potential for revenge. yes, avo said, without a hint of doubt. just need some time. a night or two for sequencing. additional items as well. need to arrange things. prepare yourself. dulled by exhaustion, concussion, mania, and sadness, the man looked at him and offered a little less than a weary nod. he tried to grip avo by the arm, but his weak fingers missed and fell down amidst the sheets. promise me you will do this. so avo committed to the easiest pledge of his life, beast, and mind in alignment as he spot. yes. mirrorhead will die. the syndicate will die. everyone involved will die. then, he pulled away from essus and stepped back. stable. sane. all i need from you. for the first time, avo saw a flash of steel sliding beneath the mans features. he didnt reply. he didnt need to. his thoughtstuff still ebbed, but accretion''s currents ran slower than before. most pleasing. when avo emerged from the hab-cell, two teams of faceless enforcers were just standing around, glaring at him through their reflective helmets as he wandered out, ignoring them. he surrendered. hurt him. i hurt you. like rantula. he kept going, walking past them before any of them did something stupid like talk to him. he had enough of talking for one day. wanted to go to sleep. start fixing his metamind. preparing his plan to escape. ved and the med-techs were nowhere to be seen. he guessed they got cleared out. and still no mirrorhead for that matter. very strange. for a moment, avo considered where to go. frankly, sleeping was the most important thing he could do right now. he could perform necrothurgy anywhere so long as he was unconscious, thanks to his metamind. only issue was that he needed to avoid being disturbed; sequencing ghosts was a delicate art. getting pulled into awareness with one could leave some lasting damage. as he wandered down the path he came, he studied the cells and considered if any of them could serve his needs. too close to the enforcers. wouldnt work. he needed something more out of the way, something that didnt know ghouls could be gentle, a voice called out from behind. heavy footsteps thumped closer. someone in an exo-rig. avo slowed and sighed. he didnt want to talk. go away. annoyed. hungry. eat you. still, the enforcer kept coming, chuckling as he got closer. a port opened along the hip of their rig. something thin extended outward, reeking of smoke and taped in ringed gold. avo prepared to fire his celerostylus. Chapter 3-16 Might-Coulda chapter 3-16 might-coulda quiet wars are called quiet wars because they can happen under your nose. quite literally. thats the thing about clads. its not the scale of their powers that hurts the mind, but the unnatural angles they occupy. knew a fallwalker who had a heaven of filth once, and let me tell you, deep impressions are made when the first time you meet someone is them materializing in someone else''s ass while they were shitting. never thought id have nightmares going to the toilet, but, hey, the hells does an old woman like me know, right? -quail tavers, school of the warrens 3-16 might-coulda didnt know ghouls could be gentle, the enforcer said, a note of amusement in his voice. or maybe that just you, huh? just me. avos phys-sim told him that no weapons were trained on him, but the object in the enforcers open rig-port was still unidentified. not knowing what something was got you dead in new vultun. the enforcer reached down. avo tensed, preparing to fire his celerostylus and jam a shard of trauma into the man standing across from him. long day for both of us, i guess, the enforcer said. there was something about their voice that evoked a memory in avo. something familiar. he thought he knew this thug from somewhere. a clicking sound popped from the enforcers exposed port, and he finally pulled the object free. avo blinked. was that a cigar? you smoke? the enforcer asked as he lifted his glass helmet off his head. a messy mop of dirty blonde hair appeared. the enforcer had emerald green eyes modded to shine like gems. his face, gaunt and somewhat sculpted, was small of nose and sharp of chin, giving the man a weasel-like appearance. he met avos glare with a wry smile, the expression more befitting a mischievous child than an enforcer of a criminal organization. i got the good shit: sanctus thrillsoriginally grown hiflass. turns your skull all jelly-like. lights the world up. the smokable stank of something horrid to avo. it was like the bladder of a burning dog. yet, more than the smell, it was the contents of the substance that bothered him. hiflass was radioactive. radioactive wasnt great when combined with a ghouls lifespan. no. gives you cancer. that earned him a laugh. so does firing a fusion burner. but thirteen surgeries later, i''m still kickin. twelve more, avo said. hm? beat you by twelve more.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. oh, right, ghoul. competitive shit, arent you. whats next, you gonna one-up me by dyin more times than i can. chambers snickered. if the fool only knew. so. one of my consangs told me that you gave rantula an ear exam. friend of hers? avo asked, still ready to finish the fight. chambers face was exposed. fight could be over before it started. no need to waste a ghost. chambers barked another laugh. rantula dont have friends. and you can tell her that chambers said that. chambers? avo tilted. chambers. he knew that name. one of the enforcers that came to secure him from the aftermath of the crucible. same person? my name, he said, chuckling. you managed to bully the flat into telling you his right? thats what you were whispering to him all that time? trying to get him to empty his sob-sacks about him and his dead boy. welp. heres mine, free of charge. chambers shook his head and snorted. fuckin fugees, consang. come here with stars in their eyes and end up crying about the ghosts. ''must be the only one smart enough to sign this deal. oh, oh, no hes enslaving me. oh, fuck me, my son died. chambers shook his head in annoyance, mimicking a man being leashed. ah. poor, stupid half-strands. fuck do they think that was going to happen? it took avo a moment to realize the man was trying to make small talk with him. and was using speciesism and cruelty as a crutch against lacking substance. maybe he thought avo appreciated the topic. harsh, avo replied. chambers cackled, his voice like a hyena. the sound was distinct. something told avo that the sound would soon become grating. what? you one of those tier expansionists the nether keeps whining about? one of them save everybody massists? shit, consang, tell me if you are, cause that combination is so fucking rare that you might as well be a cryptid. can get you on new vultun sunrise and make a million imps from the finders fee for that interview. avo grunted in vague non-acknowledgment. he was dimly aware of what an expansionist and a reductionist were in terms of political ideology. something about distributing resources evenly amongst people and opening the arks or the opposite. there were arguments about public-use heavens as well, but those were usually more fringe-party items to fight over. ultimately, avo didnt care too much. wasnt represented by either leaning anyway, considering the policies of most guilds'' regarding ghouls were to either regard them as illegal bioforms designed for war and therefore fateless by default, or just burn them on sight. going to keep him here for now? avo asked. who? the flat? chambers shrugged. well, someone will probably ask him a few questions and then judge him for what hes worth. hes a sheen from the oily shit he sweats, so maybe thats worth something. least for lube. could rub our guns on em; oil them up. makes him more useful than most flats. definitely more useful than the floaters. not the squidheads though. love me some squidheads. chambers alternated between slurs without hate or consideration. the insults came like breaths to chambers, as if the refugees coming to new vultun were unfortunate seasonal allergies he had to deal with. let him live? yep, chambers said. survived the crucible, already, didnt he? and frankly, everyones just gonna blame the dead tech on the reg, ya know? tough luck. die when you gotta die in this city is all im sayin. fuckin mirrorhead, consang. half-strands getting real lax with our performers these days. aint that many tippers into seeing kids run the crucible is all im sayin. cold city, but since the rash, real sore spot opened up there. come on, chambers said, putting both hands over his heart. youd eat me if i lied to you. not if dead. mirrorhead will find a new ghoul to eat me if i lost you. avo paused. that, however, was indisputably true. fine. chambers produced a fob of some kind. avo squinted.omnitech solutions was burned along its backside, a double-layered infinity sign gleaming. its the access marker to the busted galeslither. inside should still got enough room for even a bean pole like you. might need to bend those arms though. avo studied his limbs. the length was an old issue. even now, wearing his new stolen jacket, the garment clung to him more like a vest, his arms far extending the coverage of the sleeves. avo took the marker and grunted. thanks. jaus, he can be polite too, chambers said, waving his hands in mock horror. avo stared blankly. think you''re funny? avo asked. chambers chuckled. eventually. im more of a quantity guy than a quality guy. shows. fuckin ouch, ghoulie. breaking my hearts. get another. where is galeslither? six-hundredth floor, chambers added. just follow the repair drones. should be covered in a tarp. aint that many actual personnel up there. not since the scalpers attacked. scalper. another syndicate. the one that fired a missile at them. conflux had more enemies that didnt fear a godclad, it seemed. avo shook his head. no organization. hm? chambers asked. expected some kind ofdiscipline. chambers sneered. mirrorhead dont want an army, consang. were just muscle. we start getting together and actually practicing, we might end up getting ideas instead of just following orders. cant have that. avo wasnt sure what to say about that. conflux was increasingly looking like an organization that existed despite seemingly no effort being put into its structuring, organization, or long-term goals. it was like the entire syndicate was just a blunt instrument for mirrorhead to wield and apply pressure. something about that idea clung to avos thoughts like tar, but his brain was too fogged with exhaustion to think. he needed sleep. more importantly, he needed to finally sequence his ghosts. going up now, avo said. sleep. find me for milk-run later. chambers gave him a half-hearted salute. hope the boss doesnt rough you up too much. maybe next time you wont be a glassjaw and have a smoke with me avo walked away. next time. making his way back to the elevator was more an endeavor of time than it was navigation. again, avo questioned the need for one syndicate to operate an entire megablock, especially with so much of it being outright rubble or blockaded. by the time he found his way, his want of sleep had become a descending hail weight on his skull. he noticed that his hands were shaking and that his body was shivering beyond his control. a spot of hunger was creeping back into him already. he frowned. that was fast. probably the symbiote, then. burning through his metabolism as well. again, nothing was for free. hitting the call icon, avo leaned his head against the cold matter of the wall as he waited for the elevator to descend. too much has happened to him in one day. too much. only now did he have a chance to even just think. reflect. as the doors opened, he stumbled through and entered six hundred into the interface. leaning against the rails, he found himself anticipating the rise back past ground level, waiting to study the ebontas again. better change of scenery than the endless mirror, plascrete, and rusted metal of the subterranean anyhow. something cracked next to him. avo sighed. by this point, he was too weary to even react in surprise as mirrorhead slipped into existence through the reflection of the walls to the right. the syndicate boss adjusted his suit. there was a stiffness to his posture that avo hadnt seen before. a projection of rigidity that looked unnatural, even for mirrorhead. like a circling wolf, the godclad deliberately crossed around behind avo, a spot of silence and nothing to the ghouls senses. mirrorhead loomed as he passed avos left shoulder, his presence making up for his middling height. i heard, mirrorhead said, his smooth baritone betraying nothing but coldness, that you had a busy day. Chapter 3-17 Performance Review chapter 3-17 performance review orithaum will likely kindly remind all citizens that possessing guild intellectual property within your private metamind is strictly prohibited. please ensure that your workplace memories have been properly stored in your guild-provided nooprox instead. failure to adhere to guild guidelines will result in a decrease in your citizenship merit rating, a credit fine, and a scheduled memory-extraction appointment (free of charge)." -orithaum public nether psa 3-17 performance review within the elevator, the glass cracked, shards peeling inwards in jagged symmetry, like daggers dripping from daggers. the sheer presence of mirrorheads heaven manifested at such a close proximity gripped at avos chest. it was like he was a flame burning with a flame, hoping the greater fire did not notice; did not swallow him. have you nothing to report? mirrorhead asked, tilting his head at avo. the glass inched inward, drifting away from the walls toward avo. the room shrank. thirty square feet before. now, perhaps twenty-five. yet, he stole inspiration from mirrorhead himself, and took to being a expressionless reflection; betraying nothing, the ghoul turned to address its supposed master, face blank of expression, but not of thought. was fun. breaking rantulas flesh. he pushed forth his first lure to the syndicate boss. the statement was obvious, but mirrorhead sought more than meager feelings. they must have if they proceeded in an inquiry so deliberately tense. obtuse as always, the syndicate godclad gazed upon his unknown adversary and let the silence boil the atmosphere between them. avo hated talking to mirrorhead. hated the lack of any tells coming from his enemy. for all intents and purposes, the sydnicate boss was a blank spot in the rooma void which all flowed inward, but nothing came out, as if descending into a bottomless chasm. the shards drifted inward another inch. i believe, mirrorhead said, i specified my will. avo grunted. you did. and do you believe, mirrorhead continued. their voice was flat but the glass crackled with tension, like the snapping jaws of a beast half-submerged in reflection. that you followed my will? the consideration, then, that mirrorhead would just draw the glass in and shred him was not far from avos mind. the beast inside him rattled against the will-wrought cage that was avos discipline, trying to get him to attack pre-emptively, to escape. stealing quiet breaths, avo tempered himself. no, avo said, committing to chambers advice. no point in denying what was obvious. a direct insult after humiliation might just drive mirrorhead to see an end to this farce, regardless of investment or not. the blades sank inthe jaws of the heaven close. the twice-walker was near now, its leviathan sending ripples beneath the flesh of reality. and why did you spite my will? mirrorhead asked, voice dropping to a chilled rumble. was the gift not enough? was my attempt to make something from your mongrel existence too displeasing for you? no, avo said, trying to ignore the glinting shards in his periphery. not your problem. then ghoul, avo interrupted, leaning down to show mirrorhead his fangs. for the first time since he could remember, the syndicate boss took a step back. the beast hissed with delight. a crack, perhaps. a show of human surprise or weakness? avo let hope and elation wash through him without holding onto it. he continued. you tried. i failed. more honesty. twisted honesty. interpretive honesty. but honesty nonetheless. thats what mirrorhead always wanted, but only honesty that was palatable to him; something that absolved the man at the top of all burdens or mistakes. didnt touch her mind. not directly. just wanted to work on the flesh. at first. then. what. changed? mirrorhead asked. the godclad had caught himself, replanting his heel and pressing back into avo. across the expansive of the syndicate boss mirror-bright skull, avo saw the sharded wings draw closer but burdened with a new languor. maybe this was all a game of pressure with the godclad. maybe in going along with what mirrorhead wanted to hear but still no breaking, avo had found himself slipping between the cracked edges. maybe. she cried out, avo said. she was in pain. had to hurt her more. mirrorhead, for all intents and purposes, was a weaponized enigma. someone to always keep you guessing, always a breath between praise and violence. right then, the shards shivered. one pulled away from all the others, spinning and nicking through the surface skin at the base of avos neck. and so you defied my want? avo grunted. yes. shock. stress. not well. why did you notkill him? mirrorhead asked. it is your nature, is it not? avo thought for a moment. was full. and that was all it took. not complicated. mirrorhead adjusted his collar. i suppose not. tell me: what would you do of someone like him? that made avo wonder if he could even use the father as a mem-weapon platform anymore. if mirrorhead wanted to make an example of the father, there wasnt much that could be done. fix him. then let him go. free of charge? mirrorhead asked. made you money in the crucible. ah, mirrorhead said. i suppose you are right. and likely more than that tech was worth. the syndicate boss considered his options for a moment. i will see if i can find a new use for him. muscle is certainly out of the question. i saw how he fought. perhaps as an organ farm a twitching wince flashed across avos face. now the question was if essus would be sane. organ farms grown inside people were usually something north of agonizing. more importantly, though, a slow understanding of mirrorhead began forming in avos mind. the man was addicted to a twisted kind of arithmetic. he didnt see the events in between, focusing only on outcomes. pluses made him like you. minuses in any form made him mad. the task of appeasing him suddenly seemed a lot more surmountable. shame about the reg, though, mirrorhead said. would have been nice to have one of those. he chuckled. i had an idea for her. wanted to keep her with you, on the same team. the same circuit. old enemies. now allies. quite a sell. brings back the old days. avo grunted, playing along. old days. the elevator chimed. the door slid open. quite the first day, mirrorhead said. would you not agree? quite. are you going to insult me again with your defiance? insult? avo planned to eat him and suckle the marrow from his bones. perhaps even claim a new heaven in the process. no. good, mirrorhead gestured forward, allowing avo passage. be on your way then. consider yourselfspared of duty. until i call for you. or send someone for you. tentatively, avo made his retreat from the opened elevator doors. he was a step across the threshold when mirrorhead called out to him again. one more thing, mirrorhead said, halting the closing doors. do youhave any idea on how the regular might have escaped. she supposedly had no offensive phantasmics. yetthe guard i had watching her seems to be missing an intact ghost. avo went still. if he had a heart, it would have skipped a beat. shes a reg. who knows what she has. mirrorhead considered his words with a languid chuckle. words learned from experience. the godclad released the door and faded from sight as it shut. avo found himself alone beneath a buzzing light. the halls were layered in hardened plascrete and lined with strip-shaped construction lights. ahead, he could hear drones buzzing. shooting another look over his shoulder, he proceeded onward, pulling the golems marker from his pocket. one day and he already had enough of mirrorhead. enough of him, and his entire syndicate. avo wouldnt abide by this. why should he when he had to power to change things? just one more kill. just one more and he could have a hell avo considered that. he had no idea how that might manifest. if mirrorhead would notice and realize he was also a godclad. paranoia rose from within. he needed to make the kill while mirrorhead was distracted, and clean the evidence afterward. to do that, he might just need a new phantasmic. before more trouble could find him, avo redoubled his pace, making for his temporary shelter. soon, he would slumber, and in waking dreams, he would reconstruct the fortress that his metamind needed to be. Chapter 3-18 Instruments of Memory chapter 3-18 instruments of memory memory is a weakness; memory is a weapon; memory is a place; memory is water. memory, ultimately then, is a thing of modularity and malleability. but stilland do not forget thismemory is matter incorporeal. and it must be the will of the necrojack that infuses it. -forge of the fallen 3-18 instruments of memory ved was lying about the state of the galeslither. first, it wasn''t in the motor pool, it was rotting away in a quarantined cesspit. second, the golem wasnt just brokenits heaven was outright missing. upon approaching, avo tasted no resonance ebbing from its shell, no shine of the dismembered flame that once burned within all gods. instead, the narrow combat platform lay in three jointed segments some thirty feet long. it looked almost train-like in its design, with a roundel-shaped head and a deflated lattice made from unknown materials clinging to its back. rust coated its exterior as well. a sign of decay and negligence. truly, conflux kept their treasures like trash, leaving something that could still be salvaged to languish instead. a picture began to form in his head regarding the syndicates woes. lingering hisses of whispering ghosts trailed in the airthe unmistakable presence of decaying mem-contagion strands snaking uselessly against avos wards. someone was targeting conflux. and nigh constantly. might even be the same group that jocked those missiles after him just as he left the crucible and entered the gutters. something to consider. producing his mem-marker, avo held up the small stick-like device as it pulsed a spray of memories from its micro-locus. the ghosts it cast out splashed over the golem as it began to groan, a door on its side hissing and grinding open with a squeal. looking around to ascertain there was no one else visibly or phantasmally tracking him, avo studied the room. shredded tarps and sloppily poured plascrete were the aesthetic of this floor. clumps of hardened matter sealed former breaches while the light shone through the tears on the tarps. a large gate was fused into the walls; its metal frame melted in pools that spilled into webbed fissures. this mightve been where aerial vehicles could launch from. or it was, before the block was made so destitute, so damaged. stepping into the golem required avo to dip his head. clearly, this was not designed with ghouls in mind. the primary control module was located in the middle segment of the golem, which itself was split into an upper piloting gimbal and two lower auxiliary stations. neither gimbal nor stations would serve his purpose; he simply wouldnt fit. however, the walkway between the two stations offered eight feet of room. activating the marker again, avo laid down upon the soothing chill of the ground before closing doors could even shut away the outside lights. between two dormant locinow seated at the center of concentric slotshe settled his head and embraced the comfort of darkness. it mightve taken promising chambers a favor for the marker to sleep within this golem, but at that moment, it was absolutely worth it. no noise. no distractions. no mirrorhead.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. just him, his metamind, and the darkness. good enough conditions to begin reconstruction. stretching out his neck one final time, avo plucked mem-data from the local locus and looked at the time. it was five in the afternoon. which meant that he had been awake for nearly eighteen hours now since the night before. he didnt know how much time he would have to himself for his sequencing, but at least for now, it seemed that his use to mirrorhead had run its course for a day. still meant that he needed to prepare and modify his essential phantasmics before anything else. best that he got his sequencing completed before someone else got the drop on him. avo preferred to hold the initiative instead of reacting. and these days, he had done a lot of reacting. with a thought, he set a timer for six hours. six hours wasnt much, but he wasnt in his workshop and didnt have the tools he needed to tune complex constructs. thankfully, what he needed right now wouldnt require anything too complicated, though he could do with more ghosts. ghosts - [42] forty-two was workable, but not ideal. much like with his liminal frame, he needed to claim more victims. two hundred offered a much vaster expanse of options. that was where a metamind went from a mere tool to being a phantasmal operations platform. avo shook his head. ifs, buts, and coulds. those didn''t matter. he needed to focus on the now. prepare dive, he said to his metamind. received initializing meta-dive he could have done the command mentally, but it was better enunciated. more brain activity for the metamind to pick up; sped up the descent of his consciousness. a white flash splashed across his cog-feed, spilling over his vision like stretching needles. and suddenly, as if a blade had cut him free from the strings tethering himself to the weight of his body, avo plunged into his own mind. like a raindrop of pure color, he fell into a vast grey expanse. the horizon around him was factory setting, barely adjusted. this metamind mustve been new. just recently forked from a clone of his mind, but not tuned into a palace yet. guiding himself down like a tungsten rod from the heavens, avo envisioned the memory that would form the foundations of this place. the memory came to avo clear and solid, refined and shaped through years of visualization. and with this memory swelling inside him like a seed, he plunged into the greyness of the land. out the clay-like depths, he rose, pushing free from the shapeless nothing as around him the megablock of his youth rose, a bright thirteen shining on its side. with four arches running across its corners and an open-air lobby, detail began to bleed from avos mind into the building around him. doors, columns, and spiraling jump-tubes spread through the building like veins. a single blackdred tree stood, three hundred feet high and half again as wide, its spear-like branches expanding from the tumorous growths that domed its bark. next to the tree, a web of tubes splashed, bodies flitting to and fro across the entirety of the block. slowly, the lobby took shape, spreading until the light began shining through between the dancing holo-ads of the entrance. shaped from the matter of thought itself, avo pulled himself loose from the soil of his mind and made to leave his still-growing home. function: allows the extension of conscious awareness by 60 feet and the deliverance of cog-data within said field of awareness; can be extended by multiples should more sequences be used this would allow him to thought-shiv someone through a wall, at the very least. saved him the trouble of getting close. of course, he was still burning a ghost due to using them as a fragmentation weapon. but there was no easy way to replicate the functions of an offensive phantasmic like a ghostjack. of course, he probably didnt want to build something that ghost-intensive or sequence-demanding either. not unless he wanted mirrorhead to get suspicious and trigger the cortex bomb, that was. with his new phantasmic made, avo grouped the ghosts that fed its sequences into a specific area of the palace. it would make pruning them easier when he had the time. always better to have a stable of ghosts specifically dedicated to keeping a phantasmic functional. turning his attention to his other constructs, he passed by the phys-sim without too much attention. [phys-sim] cog-cap: 18 sequences (fixed) structure: a missile locked to an aerovec, ever inching closer, dodging incoming point defense fire function: calculates the acceleration vectors and impact lanes of up to twelve dynamic objects he could probably improve on it, but that was going to require more components. better design. best to leave it for now. focus on his wards. with his current cog-cap limitations, he doubted he would be running the phys-sim and the whisper at the same time anyway. he just didnt have the sequences between those two and his wards. uninstalling his whisper for a moment, he let his phys-sim run. overhead, he watched as the missile chased the non-descript aerovec, bullets tracing through the air in a ballet of violence. good. no issue. he moved on to the final modification he wanted to make this night: the wards. [osarai memguard] cog-cap: 20 sequences (baseline) structure: a hurricane twisting and hurtling screaming figures and broken structures function: guards the mind using a layer of traumatic memories: capable of withstanding and reforming against heavy-mass phantasmal intrusions; vulnerable to narrow-build invaders. avo frowned. no reason that should have eaten up the attention of twenty ghosts. the only good thing was that pretty much all his ghosts could simulate the structure needed. still, the enhancement here was simple but time-consuming. he would make the storm thickerhe would bind the trauma of the ghosts into a lattice where he could. there was another thing all necrojacks could do, but few mastered. linking symmetrical memories together. for the remainder of his time, he worked, binding similar traumas together from ghost to ghost, weaving what used to be mere milestones along the storm''s border into a net. from his mind, he stitched memories. the first two he joined were between hap-tat and little vicious. turns out, both had lost nu-dogs in their time. the only difference was hap-tat lost an actual dog and little vicious watched her ten-foot tall dog-looking bioform get turned into paste by a gauss-cannon fired from a block over. he was about to connect another two when a dull ringing sounded from on high. avo froze, stopping his work as he waited, wondering if it was a secondhand memory bleeding over into his mind, or if he was actually the ringing grew to a hammering then. definitely not a memory. external presence detected return to consciousness? avo stared glumly at his wards, barely fractionally strengthened. no time. never enough time. at least he planted his foundations down. let him continue building his palace next time. make things easier for himself. yes, he said, turning to stare at his megablock. end dive. light suddenly flashed into avos eyes. his body still felt tired and sore but his mind was refreshed; ghosts drained most of the cognitive burden while he worked, metamind lucid while his brain slumbered. blinking, he heard the hammering sound thumping against the door to the golem again. turning, he spotted a glint of thoughtstuff shining through the wall. mornin, consang. sleep good? did you dream any ghoulie dreams? chambers said, voice muffled by the plating of the galeslither. didnt look like there was anyone else but chambers. did he want the favor back already? no, avo said, grunting as he felt a tension headache begin to build. his ligaments were screaming. it felt like his joints were on fire. his body was still punishing him for abusing the celerostylus. asked you two questions; you just gonna answer with no. yes. real sociable. do i need to lube your conversational bits up with a daily hostage incident so that i can get a full sentence out of you? i think i can still find the flat. hand him an actual gun this time. see how many techs he takes hostage and how many he kills. no, avo said, rubbing his head. you. why are you here? gotta take you to go rig-fitting. time for you to put the nightmantis on. take it for a test run. mirrorheads orders. turns out, since ol chambers is the only one willing to deal with you, so you mightve just got my ass a promotion. looks like im your personal nanny now, moonblood. the enforcer laughed his hyena-like laugh. avo stared at the ground and sighed in annoyance. at least he was getting a plate of armor out of the deal. Chapter 4-1 The Exo-Rig chapter 4-1 the exo-rig most syndicate combat exoskeletons are usually bashed together from centuries-old industrial or explorer variants. dont get spoofed by these half-strands. their promos are gonna be fake and the shit you get will be years out of date. guild licensing issues. all it takes is a ghost-sweep from our owners up the tiers to find if anythings got leaked. thenwell, then they start scalpelling people from on high. here''s something to remember: you dont own what you cant keep someone else from taking. not your feelings, thoughts, materials, or even your death. not in new vultun -quail tavers, school of the warrens 4-1 the exo-rig the armory was some two hundred levels down, and so, seizing the opportunity, avo made a brief pitstop in the mess hall to feed himself again. his bones and muscles felt raw. like a chisel had run up and through his insides, working pockets of pain into him. for the celerostylus to still inflict such torment on his body was a sign of deeper nerve damage. his surface biomass should be healed. but the more intricate systems within him had yet to adapt to this new state of suffering. stumbling over to the auto-chefs as chambers whined behind him, avo punched a request for a ten-thousand-calorie meal. listening to the machine hum and churn, he grabbed his quota. and reconsidered. he made the meal twenty, just in case. whats that fucking noise i keep hearing? chambers asked. they leaned back as they watched the auto-chef rattle, straining to produce such a dense meal. the hells did you order? nutri-paste, avo said. it wouldnt taste very well, but it was a solid dose of calories. it''d be like taking bites directly from a biocell. from such nourishment, he may yet last the day without the need to eat again, but avo doubted that. there was a burgeoning tension around him in the air; fated violence that clung to him like an invisible shroud. better that he had the energy to heal when he needed it. no shit? chambers continued. the thing sounds like it''s goddamn screaming. whatd you do to it? ask it for a ten-thousand calorie tube of sludge? twenty. jaus? you trying to give our godsdamned machines a mechanical hernia? chambers snickered as if having a hyperactive metabolism was a punchline of some sort. fuck, man the techs are gonna hate you. your monthly meal expenditures have to be insane. such was why he started his own nu-fish farm and aratnid nests. supplementing his diet using rapidly breeding bioforms cost less than constant takeout and was more effective than trying to store tons of meat. the shipping would have drawn too much attention as well, there was always a chance that someone could have audited him on his suspicious meat consumption. wasnt something he wanted to deal with. after a painful few mechanical groans, a hefty tube of paste slid out from the processing slot as a coiling rope of thick sludge. noticing a distinct lack of a bowl, avo shrugged and took the slug-like texture of his meal into his hand. the bubblegum taste of the meal was most unwelcome. lets go, avo said, eating while he walked. he stared at where he sat with ved yesterday. she was missing right now. couldve been too early for her. couldve been that she was trying to avoid him. shame. her affability was refreshing compared to the other enforcers, and she didnt laugh nearly as much, nor as gratingly as chambers did. as they got back into the elevator chamber clanged his armored hands together. alright, heres whats the what: gonna be walkin you through using an exo-rig today. real basic shit. stuff that even a ghoul can handle. avo stared. chambers giggled.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. we''ll get you set up first. walk you through the pacesthe ush. but chambers lifted an eyebrow wryly. when we get to the test run later, i need you" want me to do the favor. the enforcer snapped his fingers and mimed firing guns at avo. want you to do me that favor. trust me: total milk run. much easier than brawling with rantula. he pointed himself with a thumb. boss man wants you to be showtime-ready on the quick, but dont worry, your new masters gonna make sure everything turns out to be a-okay. new master. avo grunted. cute. new master. didnt know essus was getting promoted already. maybe i should also kill a tech. see if i get promoted too. might even get freedom back. chambers laughed. fuck you. you know i was talking about me. avo wolfed another few bites down as the floors slide by, ebontas appearing and passing, numbers flashing overhead. from where he stood, the entire block felt deathly quiet. the elevator was stained with new smells: a stinging musk of cheap cologne mixed with the faint whiff of numb or some other paralytic drug. alcohol and puke were more subdued, but still there. the armory was a vast open floor that was lined with groaning pistons hissing along the walls. a literal legion of drones assembled and attached exo-rigs to different stations, sawing and charging different pieces of machinery, making adjustments to guns, and imprinting symbols and holotags upon hardened alloys. to the left, countless weapons of all shapes and sizes were festooned across the magnetic plates layered over the walls. the guns were haphazardly organized, with no sense or logic to their groupings. more than once, avo saw two drones fighting over the same item, each tasked to bolt it onto a different rig for different enforcers. stranger still, few actual personnel were present. beside him and chambers, only two techs worked at the very edge of the room, directing a swarm of drones as they continued adding extensions to the arms of a rig. under twenty minutes, chambers shouted, suddenly. both the techs jumped, startled by the sudden noise. chambers shook his head. fuckin half-strands. he pointed at avo. pay up, you fucks. told you i could bring him down here, no trouble. show me the imps. ducking down low to avoid getting clipped by any of the erratically flying drones, avo found himself standing before the exo-rig. the nightmantis. the first thing that avo noticed wasnt the neural lacing bands, nor the cheap polymater coating the exposed power grid. no. he noticed the razor-thin rows of needles built where his spine was supposed to fit. it made the rig look more like an ancient torture device than an exoskeleton. needles catch your eye, huh, chambers said. wont bullshit you: it hurts like godsdamn shit when those fucking neural drills sink into your spine. see them make a cripple or two in my time. drills? avo asked, trying to see if the man was just having a laugh. chambers managed to hold a straight face for half a second before breaking. half a second longer than avo thought he could. fuck no, consang. its supposed to just get you with the tip. works in tandem with the neural lace so the armor moves with you. without those, youll be wrestling with two-thousand pounds of second-war era ghoulshit that may or may not dislocate your limbs when the servos overreact. great. one anxiety for another. chambers grinned. hey, before we do the other shit, step inside the armor. mirrorhead is sending one of his pet necros out with us and i wanna see the look on her face when you suddenly start talking inside the armor. great way to get nulled using a ghostjack, avo said. trust me, shes more likely to dump a ghost into her own mind. shes got no taste for the hurt business. avo just glared at him, unconvinced. great. another necro watching him. last thing he needed. had to keep his modified phantasmics hidden from her. he didnt need mirrorhead to know more about what he was capable of. come on, consang. dont be a glassjaw. itll be a laugh. not unless you want to induce a seizure in him, avo heard janand mutter. avo couldn''t see the techs face but he felt the annoyance all the same. seemed chambers liked testing people. havent even adjusted the neural interface to sync with his synapses. shit. with his biology, i dont even know if i can. synapses? avo said, as loudly as he could. what? chambers said, sounding confused. janand was whispering to himself. something about synapses. seizures. me. jannard, chamber said, his face spreading into a grin as he narrowed his attention on the exhausted tech, how do you plead? saying our ghoulie heres got brain problems. ino. well, yes, but it''s with the machine, jannanrd said, stepping out from behind the station. the metal bands implanted into his skull were spinning fast. on his back, a large coldtech machine of some kind hummed a dull ambiance. the nightmantis hardware isnt designed for hyper-boosted reflexes like his. some of our other enforcers with wired reflexes or cheap dilation boosters also got clobbered by similar bugs. considering the clustered strands of his new bioware, we could be looking at a reaction differential by point three seconds. means im too fast for the machine? avo asked. means that you might feel stuttering with linking to the machine. worse: maybe it won''t get the full data from your mind due to being unable to keep up with your mental pace. potentially even pairing rejection if your, uh, minds biology is too deviant for it to understand. chambers laughed. what? you saying avo here is too weird for the machine to handle? janand sighed. im saying that i have no idea how the machine might react to him. hes a ghoul. probably the first one to ever step into a rig. judging from hisbiology, he should just be close enough to pass for a human when interfacing with the machine. should be, but im not sure. chuckling, chambers jagged at avos shoulder. hear that, chambers said. hes complimenting you. avo glanced at the armor, frowning. so? usable or not? well, janand said, ill need to do some adjustments while youre inside. you might experience some disorientation for a moment though. avo looked at the needles and then back at chambers. this kills me, i eat you. chambers smirked. hm. sounds fair. wordlessly, avo ascended the rig station''s steps with a scowl, turning as he stepped into the open armor, its neural drills glinting at him the entire way. a wary apprehension built up inside of him. he didnt know why a dozen feeble little needles were making him feel this way. not after the sheer agony he suffered at the hands of little vicious. but still, the idea of letting them sink into his backbone made him shiver. he felt his celerostylus twitch too. maybe it was something simple, with how it looked like a contraption for torture. maybe it was the fact that he spent most of his infancy fighting incomprehensible and implacable foes clad in shells much like the one that he was about to entomb himself in. ultimately, something felt deeply wrong about doing this. but things hadnt felt right since he found himself in the maw. stifling a sigh, he turned, ignoring the saccharine smirk plastered across chambers face. machine leaves me mind-dead; shoot me. chambers scoffed. hells no. ill keep you alive and sell your kidneys for as long as i can. avo nodded in resignation. again, at least the enforcer was honest. more than one could expect from most these days. Chapter 4-2 The Tubes chapter 4-2 the tubes early on, before the advent of golemics and imbuements, most in-field operators used exo-rigs. now, rigs are probably closer to being a combat platform than armor most times, but the conceptualization of its design is simple: to create adaptive, survivable light infantry for a new hyper-lethal era of warfare. of course, with the following advent of quick-fabbed atomic and newly created heavens, the rig themselves lasted barely more than two centuries before being consumed by obsolescence. that being said, most criminals and low-class enterprises still use outdated models from centuries prior for their ease of procurement and lack of licensing controls -kare kitzuhada, dissertation, stillborn metal: the weapons new vultun left behind 4-2 the tubes inching back-first against the drills was an affair more ticklish than painful. neither fear nor worry greeted him in that instant, and oddly it was this lack of worry that spurred a flicker of anxiety within him. he had died twice just yesterday. thrice, if he counted his first resurrection in the barge. now, it seemed that mortality was taking its weight off him, that long-familiar dread of oblivion losing its hold. yet, he knew that if he died now, his consciousness should be eternally shredded by the rend stored within him; that entropic property draus had warned him about. how close lay the borders between liberation and hubris? with that dormant power that yet burned within his being, avo wondered how far he would go again once he made his next kill. already, he was feeling itthe addiction. the beast had tasted the ichor of blood and supped flesh from people he never dared dream of sampling in his past life. a slight whine of machine servos sang as the needle tips of the drills cupped along his spine and spun. unlike his surgery at the grafters, he didnt feel much cutting, nor did pain come in any capacity. instead, it felt like his body was expanding, his senses filtering out as his celerostylus wriggled along his spine, accommodating the pricks of neurally-binding needles. one by one, he felt the digits of the rig twitch. the connection, already, felt far more fluid than that which held the scavengers on the barge. sinking deeper, his legs slid to the bottom of his armors sabatons, claws scraping all the way. janands skull implant flashed red, coming alight across his head like a band. expand sabatons. ten inches. two drones darted by and began plucking and untightening bolts within the boots. avo felt his feet stretch out slowly, the interior of the armor loosening to fit him better. a dozen clicks sounded across his spine as he felt clasps rise to stabilize the position of his torso. a semi-circle sprouting thin metal threads closed around his skull before he saw the armor begin to close itself up. like disappearing into a lightless cage, the outside world was sealed from him. gridded segments of plating spilled over his vision as the world was suddenly encased in darkness. n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. for the length of a minute, he felt at peace, enjoying the quiet. the world outside could barely be heard aside from dull murmurs. macabre thoughts greeted him as he wondered if anyone had starved to death within one of these armors, or if there was a way to tear his way out from the inside if he needed to. a static jolt cleaved into his awareness as the threads stung into the flesh around his skull. avo blinked as he felt a wave of stuttering pulses rush through his mind. flashing pictures and choked flickers of sound speared into his perception in irregular doses. all of a sudden, avo felt his awareness yawn open like a fissuring chasm. he was suddenly seeing in front, behind, to his sides, and from his hands. each of his new eyes also offered him greater clarity and more detail than his natural eyesight could ever muster. yet, it was not as intuitive as his cog-feed was. the rig couldn''t detect thoughtstuff for one. vertices and other icons streamed into his mind as the armor fed new telemetries and data into his brain, his metamind working to accommodate this most direct of intruders. sweeping his eyes tentatively across the room, he saw chambers making a vulgar gesture at him. reflexively, he found himself zooming in on the gesture through the optics built into his shoulder. the sheer dissonance and overload of angles he could perceive made him nauseous. he wondered what would happen if someone fouled themselves in the armor. from what he could tell so far, this thing didnt have any waste disposal ports. a crack of sound went off as if directly beside his ears. avo.avooooo! the sudden spike of the pitch made him wince. well, that wasnt normal. ghouls had a multi-layered cochlear organ for an ear. the low masters supposedly put it into them to reduce their weakness to sonic weaponry. reduce, however, did not mean remove. avo! the greeting was deafening, the sound patched directly into avos innermost ear layerings. hey! ghoulie! can you hear me! yes, avo said, wanting to rub his skull. when he tried anyway, he ended up just uselessly tapping a metal finger where he vaguely felt his head was. it was like he was blind to his own body. the dissonance just increased his nausea. too loud. coordinating multiple eyes to zoom in on chambers, avo watched the enforcer snap his fingers at janand. a light buzzing thrummed through avos mind. chambers spoke again. how about now? better, avo said. project sounds to my outer ears if possible. a static series of pops sounded to his sides as if the noise was moving further and further away from him. hows that? good. alright, chambers said. now, raise your arm as fast as you can. reflex test? avo asked. because chambers fucking said so test. do it. grunting a quiet note of displeasure, avo raised his arm. and for a while, it did just that. in those twenty years of relative peace, a growing spirit of prosperity had blossomed in new vultun. even quiet wars were choked to a halt by attritional stalemates and growing economic interdependence between the great guilds. the additional influx of the first voidborn immigrants offering skilled labor and massive leaps in thaumaturgy brought explosive development. each ark stood the epicenter of industrial expansion, meant to serve as the central pillar of guidance and command to bring the warrens into the tiers and bring stability to the battle-scarred wastelands of the city. then, like all the false starts that came before, the guilds found a large enough piece of a god or a heaven, and suddenly the expenses of a new war were justified by the allure of domination. just what the low masters had been biding their time for. in the g-station nested within confluxs megablock, avo stared down along the walls toward the ground. between carvings of heat-borne glass that once bubbled through the melting plastics within the station, the shadows of long-slain ghouls and fateless shaped were imprinted on the walls in vague contours, bleached eternally by the brush of fusion burners as an unintentional mural. he wondered if he was personally to blame for this damage, or if his brothers had been the ones to deliver a mem-bomb to this station. the ghouls hit all the stations at once when they surged out of the deep darkness below during the uprising. they had taken the tubes first and foremost, cutting off transportation and opening new vectors of attack. the g-stations turned from public transit to slaughterhouses. avo wondered how many lives he bore a debt of blood for. thousands? millions? a flash of an abandoned storefront was there and not. in the flicker, avo caught sight of the yet-flickering hologram of a once-popular childrens mascot. back when natural-born children were still a thing. charlie the chimera. even now, it continued to dance, playing a jiggle with its duck-like face, goat-like legs, and its ape-like paws. the toll inflicted on the citys youngest, perhaps, was one of the greatest blemishes of being a ghoul. the low masters had taken deliberate action to attack the youngest, imprinting ghouls with the desire to hunt supple meat. severing the future,avos former masters had called it. here now, in the northwest section of the hundredth floor was the g-station. once vibrant. now abandoned. a porcelain-smooth gravity capsule hovered down the steps, its frame shaped like a reverse raindrop. avo had taken the elevator along with the techs and chambers, stumbling and staggering in his armor, learning to walk again. having a working capsule was another sign of confluxs dissonance. to possess something as expensive as a capsuleand for it to still be in such pristine condition spoke of either immense material resources or masterful maintenance. with mirrorhead, the former was far more likely due to the obvious lack of the latter. chambers, avo asked. how long? how long what? chambers said, grinning. gotta use more of your words there, moonblood. how long is my d capsule. the station. how long have they been active? chambers snorted. fuckin, long as mirrorheads been the head of this outfit. he gestured at the room. boss is the only guy around thats got a soul, ya know? kinda hard to keep this running without the thaums. behind them, fused plascrete blockades left narrow openings behind shattered doors of glass. ahead, past the dormant ticketing barriers stood the capsule hovering on plates of flowing ferromagnetic liquids, rising around the capulse to wreathe it in a weave of concentric tubing. avo saw a dim flicker of divine fire in the rings. there was a heaven here. a faint one. close to drying out already. it seemed that mirrorheads determination to ensure himself as the sole fulcrum of power within this organization went even further than avo expected. looking at the rings around the capulse, something inside avo hungered. his sangeist spurred, briefly spinning up his soul before it recoiled and sputtered against an impenetrable gate. the rend was still caging his power, holding his heaven in a death-grip. avo growled silently. the beast urged him to kill chambers. or at least one of the techs. wake his hell. crown himself with the full mantle of his power. it took more will than avo liked to resist. it would be folly to commit anything that could out his full capabilities to mirrorhead right now. not when the cortex bomb was still inside him. not when essus was still unused. not when he didnt know more about his enemy. still, his soul burned for a tastea drip of what stood before him. his liminal frame wanted to grow. wordlessly, the side of the capsule split open, revealing a far more rugged interior. plush carpets were stained and torn by all the heavy machinery dragged aboard. a rig station awaited avo along with a dozen more microdrones. the techs had more modifications they wanted to make during transit. quietly, avo deposited himself upon the clamps of the station. all the while, he watched the mirrors, the reflections. mirrorhead was still absent in flesh, but was he absent in attention? and how far did his power reach? a burning suspicion rose within avo. perhaps his esteemed owner wasnt there today at all. perhaps he was hiding again. the doors to the capsule shut. a map flashed into being, showing three segments of their journey. three segments amidst a massive sprawl. it was like they were traveling down the spines of a hydra. plotting route to burners way, an automated voice toned. "time to arrival. five minutes. please stay within your gimbals. thank you." avo looked around. the only evidence there were ever any passenger gimbals were the bolts still left stuck along the walls. fifty feet wide, this thing could''ve fit more than a few people per slingshot. strange that they were only carrying four and a dozen drones. come to think of it, where were the other enforcers? other techs? someone to communicate with if things went wrong? what was procedure? the way conflux functioned was beyond nonsensical. chambers? avo asked, a growing doubt manifesting inside him. mirrorhead. he approved this? chambers shrugged. yeah, you know. more or less. avo stared. more. or less. dont worry about it, chambers said. as i said: i know how the boss works. we aint disobeying shit, so you can just numb on the worryin. he isnt going to pop up and yell at us. i''m getting you to do the tests that he wants. we''re just going a bit above and beyond, is all. with a thought, chambers manifested the model of a sloped megablock and pulled it up for avo to see. tell me, ghoulie? what do you know of beta-grade biomods? sells good, avo said, suspicions growing even greater. exactly, chambers said leaning in, his chrome-sheened teeth gleaming in a broad smile. sells really, really good. you--uh--see where i''m going with this?" a sigh worked itself loose from avo''s chest. this wasnt going to be a milk run. not at all. Chapter 4-3 The Gouge chapter 4-3 the gouge burners way. now theres a godsdamned tragedy if there ever was one. you wanna know how often communities genuinely cross blocks and come together to make a better home? fuckin never. you wanna know how often all the blocks in a district decide to band together and establish something of a pseudo-parliament of the clades and colors? elect actual representatives to interface with our owners? less than never. and you wanna know what it took for all that to go to hell? one night? one night, thanks to one billion cannibalistic subhumans and their half-strand masters that couldnt let go of a long-dead empire. fuck the low masters. fuck the ghouls. and triple-fuck the guilds for using the uprising as an excuse to bomb the district. we all know why they did it. be with jaus, burners way. you were a better dream than we ever deserved. -quail tavers, the night of the long feast 4-3 the gouge the space beyond the windows of the capsule blurred along needles of motion. even attached to the rig, avo felt a certain inversion to gravity, as if he was falling sideways, pulled by a force at growing velocity. yet, there was no danger of toppling, nor any sensation of falling. the powers of a heaven were at play, and the miracles it delivered inflicted an uncanniness on avos equilibrium. before him, chambers prattled on, showing no signs of discomfort. familiarity within the capsule, even. from his crudely sequenced metamind, a spill of three ghosts fused into a phantom phantasmic, their vapourous forms manifesting to zoom in on the midsection of a megablock. this block, however, had no number, no identifier. that mightve been because someone colossal had gouged an entire portion free from the middle of the structure, shredding a half-mile deep into its foundations. it was a testament to new vultuns infrastructure that the building was standing if nothing else. to the flicks of chambers fingers, the phantoms drifted down, scrolling past the damage and dissembling the block into its component floors. swiping up for what felt like a minute, chamber grinned and found his prize: floor one hundred and seventy-seven. just seventy-seven floors above layer one. he pulled the floor free, as if pulling a plate free from its stack, and flipped it vertically so avo could get a top-down perspective of the structure. there we go, he said grinning. heres your playground: level one-seven-seven of the gouge. gouge, avo said, considering the name. name. because the damage? yeah, chambers said, smiling darkly. i saw it happen, you know. was just a juv. middle of the uprising. one of stormtrees clads was pushing hard, trying to dislodge a no-dragon firing position. manifested a leviathan out of godsdamned raindrops and took a bite from the block. staring at it made me shit myself. ma told me i spent most of that week just cryin. avo grunted. that sounded like a useful heaven to have. of course, he didnt know how it would even interface with his current heaven. getting his hell working was the top priority, and if he was meticulous, perhaps he could even reactive his liminal frame without chambers noticing. but that meant he needed to survive this run, and he couldnt just trust what chambers was saying. that was a rule about being a necro: never let someone else plan your dives. full details, avo said. opposition. positioning. defenses. capabilities. surrounding map too. open up terrain. five-mile radius. want to study local environment. whoawhoa, chambers said, laughing, fuckin, going all strategery on me there, ghoulie. a bit too much for your consang chambers. trust me, its a simple milk avo glared and repeated his words verbatim. full details. opposition. positioning. defenses. capabilities. surrounding map too. open up terrain. five-mile radius. show me local map. a twitch of frustration ran through chambers face. the enforcer sighed and tugged at the front of his hair. you know, ghoulie, youre a very aggravating person to talk to. that made avo chuff with irony. you must be rubbing off. chambers snickered. he pressed a rude gesture against one of avo''s optics. fuck. you. no. the enforcer just laughed louder. alright, he said, expanding the map to show the surrounding area. the buildings surrounding the block looked just as mangled. none had gone untouched by the war in some way, and the streets above layer one were pockmarked by artillery as far as avo could judge. only two structures remained nearby the gouge, and one towered over it still, looking as if an abandoned broadcast tower with its layered dishes. between the tower and the block looked to be a distance of five hundred feet. avo couldnt jump that, but if he had a parachute or a jump thruster of some kind yeah, chambers said, waving away the broadcast tower, know whats ticking inside your head. cute. totally a good idea on a scry, but it wont work. avo frowned. why not. fallen heaven, chambers said, bringing up the floor plans for the gouge again. lingering contagious ruptures or some shit. somethings fucky about the spaces inside all the buildings. makes it hard to get out, and breathing in the air inside spores you with hydrapedes, supposedly. fuckin painful when they start hatching in your lungs. chambers sounded like he was speaking from experience. loci? avo asked, taking an approach he was more comfortable with. he might not have his full list of tools in his metamind, but he could still make this work. especially considering the quality of the local necros. the wards he saw on the enforcers were appalling. something to jack into. just minds, chambers said. not worth it either. decent necro could null most people in the district easily but this is a run-snatch-dash gig. nothing more complicated than that. wouldnt want you to waste a ghost on these worthless fucks, would we? as the rig station released the nightmantis, avo felt himself drop. the capsule bobbed as if a boat on the water. rolling his shoulders, avo took his first tentative steps toward the opening doors. light greeted him like a blinding wave and he winced. immediately, his optics began to make the necessary adjustments, polarizing to protect his vision. his cog-feed could tune visual details, but it couldnt get rid of his sensitivity to light. that was a physiological problem. listen, chamber said, reaching up to place a hand on avos shoulder. ill walk you through it. all of it. chambers here has got your back. all i could ask for, avo muttered. im serious, chambers said. ill walk you through it. even send out a few drones to give you overwatch if need be. shit basic street-gangers wont have. a fucking child could do this, trust me. yes. trust the enforcer who decided to plan an entire smash-and-grab operation under the nose of his godclad of a boss. trust you? trust my self-interest, chambers said. we get this stuff and bring it to mirrorhead and chambers kissed the tips of his fingers, sweet, sweet imps for me, and probably lots of screaming children for you to feed on? how does that sound? the capsules doors sheathed themselves vertically, opening the path for avos departure. rather have beef. chambers shrugged. beefs expensive. fugees are free. avo didnt bother giving the enforcer an answer. slowly, he stomped out from the capsule, feeling the weight of neural lag pulse from his nerves into his armor a moment too late. janands adjustments made the responses of the exo-rig more fluid but it still felt a half-second behind avos body. or maybe he was just faster now, thanks to the celerostylus. both could be true. whatever the case, the sooner he got this done, the sooner he could be finished with conflux. get his frame working again, and his freedom back. then, he needed to get his bearings and deal with mirrorhead before the syndicate boss came looking for him first. check-check, chambers said, switching to communicating with him directly through the armors coldtech communicator. avo was about to ask why the enforcer didnt use ghosts, but seeing the condition of the mans sequences, decided that he didnt want a link to a mind that compromised anyway. hearin me, ghoulie. avo grunted. alright. janards here shouldve uploaded a map into your rigs enhanced intelligence. should lead you to the right path. just stick to the blinking lane and youll be right as the midnight rain. you can do that right? avo grunted again. what? you taking a shit in the rig? use your words. no, avo said. the sensation of being spoken to through dead metal was still uncanny. each ghost had aspects of personality and memories. it made communicating feel natural like there was something there that resembled the aspects of ones own mind. with coldtech, everything was numbers. code. it wasn''t that avo was bad at math, but the sheer emptiness of the machines left him starving, in a sense. the g-station at burners way had clearly been bombed. repeatedly. jutting beams and half-melted plascrete dolloped along the skeleton of the floor above, the light of day pouring in through a particularly large chasm. peeking out from the optics on his shoulder, avo noticed that the tunnels leading down to the next station were long collapsed. all they had was three stops. three stops more than he expected considering the sheer ruinous force the guilds brought down on the city during the war. stumbling past translucent pathways made by fusion-burned glass, avo found only slagged stumps where the ticketing barriers were supposed to be here. three hunched figures stood in the corner of a burning aerovec power cell placed in a barrel. over the flames writhed the impaled body of an aratnid, eight jagged limbs stabbing blindly into the air. one by one, avo watched the eight eyes pop across the creature''s rat-like face, trailing down to feed the fire like ichorous tears. inside the rig, avo clacked his teeth in hunger. aratnid. juicy and tasty. he wished the rig was easier to open. he wanted a bite. dont tell me you wanted to eat that, chambers said, a note of disgust in his voice. meat is meat, avo said. good nutrition. bleh. jaus, your breath must smell like death. no, avo said. breath smells like nothing. just... shut the fuck up and keep moving. you can stare at frying spider-rats later. ascending the narrow steps leading out of the station was easier than avo thought it would be. the mass of his armor helped. with every step, the blades he had for feet dug furrows into the superheated ground. he found himself frowning at that. obvious track marks. not very good if he wanted to hide his tracks. exiting into the city itself, the sheer ruination inflicted on the district struck avo like a blow. bloated maggots some six feet in length and double again in width clawed up and down the desiccated skeletons of the buildings around him. yet, what pulled his attention more were the human faces pressing out from the soft skin lining the creatures backs, static pulses of thoughtstuff still misting from within their jiggling forms. those people avo asked. as i said, consang. fallen fuckin heavens. dont need to make sense to work. such is the way of the guilds, as was the way of the gods. chambers spat again. avo couldnt hear a smile in his voice this time. sick shit. shouldve at least burned em. finished the bombing properly. gave em mercy. avo supposed chambers was more talk than he let on. warily, avo moved on, walking down into the forest of urban decay ahead of him. flickering neon pulsed overhead as he followed the indicated path flashing across his visual feed. a mile away, the gouge, a wounded monolith at the center of this hive of damnation. a single reticle narrowed upward, seventy-seven floors above. slowly, avo accelerated his approach to a slow jog. best that he figure out what this rig could do before trouble found him first. Chapter 4-4 A Milk-Run… chapter 4-4 a milk-run... the sru nightmantis was a good platform. dont ever let the syndicates fool you about that. not the rigs fault those bastards keep doing direct assaults using a scout-exo. course, a recovered nightmantis is still far superior compared to say, an atlas lifter model with some armor plates bolted onto it. dont get me wrong. its got problems. substandard power grid. single weapon hardpoint. audio-glitches. but those are more current problems. mantis was made by voidwatch some five-hundred and sixty years ago. the fact were still using it is a testament to its design. why is the nightmantis so popular? same as any other armor the syndicates like to use: licensing. the corp that made the nightmantis is dead as jaus, so theres no one enforcing the proliferation of its design. of course, most of these rigs are still secondhand hand-me-downs because the auto-fabs themselves are licensed and the guilds wont outright sell one to the little people down below. something about the balance of power and all that. cant have the fateless get too creative with their own lives, now can we? -quail tavers, school of the warrens 4-4 a milk-run on wounded streets of cracking rust did avo begin his run. speckled pockets of thoughtstuff lined the periphery of his cog-feed, and ebbing indicators flashed through his armors hud. as the dappled shine of the daystar spilled across his war-touched rig, avo felt himself an intruder in this local ecosystem, his gleaming form like a knife descending once again into an open wound yet to heal. broken bridges and shattered streets caked in mucus lined the sprawl around him with an oily sheen. left by the slugs was avos guess. visual telemetries scanned the substance through his myriad of optics, yet his database came up empty. didnt know if that was because there was nothing on the creature or if his rigs internal systems were just a blank slate after whatever the syndicate did to it. alrighty, chambers said. avo thought he could hear ruffling papers. papers? was the enforcer looking at an instructions manual? good a time as any to explain your sensory suite. all you have to do to trace a specific sound isis focus on it as if you were trying to listen to one sound specifically or some shit. jannard, the fuck does omni-cloaca mean? you mean omni-cochlear? thats what i said, jadan. avo heard the tech state his actual name once more. chambers responded by telling him to throat a fusion burner. avo ignored the conversation and decided that he would have an easier time figuring out the rig on his own. carefully he focused his attention on the ripples of two nearby voices, the rigs hud narrowing on their position. immediately, he felt diminutive flaps and dishes extend along his shoulders. pulsing representations of sound waves bounced along walls, guiding him to a more optimal position to perform his reconnaissance. avo heard a crackle run through his ears. another sputter, and suddenly he was listening to a drunken conversation between two slurring men, their position triangulated to be three stories up in a run-down tenement. loose looping threads of thought pulsed free from their minds. works, avo said, interrupting chambers tirade against the tech. stop yelling. ...and and i says, a slurring voice crackled. a squatter, avo presumed. i says to him, i says, look here you half-breed of a half-strand, you stepped in my territory. and so i popped out my mono-knife and guess what he did? pulled a gun? a softer voice this time. another person. more static with their words. the rigs ei was compensating hard to sort their words from the general ambiance. pulled a gun, he did. stole my good knife from me. the analysis had both of their vocal signatures recorded and stored for future analysis. additionally, it had placed a pulsing outline of their best-estimated position. updating its systems to the new data, avos ei sent him recommendations for engagement. a solution for a firing vector appeared in his hud. the walls of the tenement were mottled and porous. they looked to be of cheap plascrete to begin witheasily penetrated material with little chance of stopping a precision gauss cannon at close range. his hud was calling for him to move a foot to his right so he could get both targets with one shot. with a thought, avo layered his phy-sim over the armors calculations. phantasmic and binary targeting lanes ran up exactly. chambers, avo said, curious. the tech? how early? how early what? jaususe your words, consang, come on! how early was the tech developed? avo grunted. shit, ghoulie. rigs are six centuries old. well, six centuries old since the voider-fucks sold it to us terrestrials for squatting rights on the moon. those half-strands probably had this shit for thousands of years. thousands of years. a coiling discomfort twisted inside avo. the low masters had made their kind within the century. they were supposed to be monsters beyond monsters; a bioweapon to surmount all bioweapons. come to realize that even just one of the guilds could have slaughtered his kind centuries ago. it didnt take a regular to kill a ghoul. all it took was someone in a rig. there was a special kind of horror to realizing you were created obsolete; useless. the low masters were fools. with draus, at least he could bath himself in the delusion that she was specifically better than her kind. more weapon than a person; a proselytizer of death and messenger of the big nothing. now, in this armor?n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. a child would have made quick work of a dozen ghouls. he knew it. felt in his movements, in the lesser omniscience it offered him. even in the dark when he thought he was safe, in the depths where he thought he was hidden, they could see him. they could always see him. pure fortune was the only reason he survived the war. so, you gonna shoot those squatters or not? test the gun? avo turned away from the firing vector. another interface flashed into his mind. he felt the weight of the cannon inside him, tuned to fire on mental command. it had twelve shots a stack, and three stacks in total. seeing that each dart was the length of one of his fingers, he doubted they were meant to be wasted on infantry, much less fateless. still, it was a struggle to spare them. part of him wanted to just put the shot through them. watch their flesh bloom and liquefy before supping up their ghosts and essence. that would let him have his hell and reactivate his liminal frame. he wanted to shoot. he was going to shoot. spinning on his heel, he aimed at the ruined chassis of a downed aerovec. with a thought, he felt the gun begin to link to his mind, a firing trajectory lined by both his phys-sim and his hud. it was a strange presence, being able to feel the gun. it felt more like a weight in the back of his head than a proper limb or phantasmic. still, the ease with which it acclimated to his neurology surprised him. if not for the ease and maintenance of ghosts, idheim wouldve still been ruled by metal, silicon, and circuitry. that was a world that would have belonged to voidwatch, indisputably. instead, in the world that was, the voiders hid close to their lagrange points, their fleets scattered wide in fear of terrestrial thaumaturgy, well aware of their vulnerability before the godclads. avo commanded the gun to fire. he felt a surge spike through his armor, the power grid along his ribs whining loud. a spike clicked into place, spiraling between the barrels before it tore loose with a lurch of mag-flung force. sighing with a disgusted snort, avo began his slow approach to the gouge. to his left, he studied the factory block he wanted to ascend for a vantage point. maggots littered its sides in clumps. looked like that was off the table now. good thing the opposition was even softer than expected. made things all the easier to deal with. despite that, he still moved cautiously, moving to clamber over the walls surrounding the gorge instead of just trudging in through the front gate. feeble and loose of thought though the guards might have been, it was still better for him not to get their attention. best for all sides to keep this from being a mess. as far as avo was concerned, he was still untrained with his rig. chambers clearly didnt know what he was doing and janand was just going along with what he was being told to do. any escalations would be avos burden to bear, and he was getting pretty close to being done with that arrangement. as he reached the topside of the barricade, he peeked over using the optics on his hands and looked for patrols. a long drop into a deep channel filled with stale water greeted him. avo frowned. holy shit, chambers said, actually sounding impressed, the half-strands built a moat. on the wrong side, technically. but still. avo looked at the ditch filled with dirty water. moat? fuckin...super ancient warfare fortification. doesnt let people on horses just ride up to your walls. avo blinked again. horses? that question actually stumped chambers for a moment too. think its like a nu-dog thats big enough to ridbesides the point. its fucking cute, but youre in a rig. jump over it. get in there. get my case, avo said, finishing the enforcers words. i know. all you want is the case. aiming for a particularly soft patch of soil to cushion his landing, avo pushed off from the barricade and landed, the weight of his rig kicking sprays of soil into the air. scanning the area through his omnidirectional optics, he waited for a moment before continuing. no guards. no patrols. just lights and music pulsing down overhead. the hallways inside the former megablock were exposed to him like someones ribs. it was like looking at a mortal wound that just didnt take. a low humming drew his attention as two drones drifted on by, hovering unevenly in the air. they scanned the ground beneath them, and not much else. ten feet away, avo went undetected. chambers laughed. oh, this is so adorable. shit, i almost wanna take a picture of this. two drones as overwatch. thatll stop someone. studying the flight patterns of the drones, he watched as both rounded the sides of the tower simultaneously, leaving entire sections unmonitored. poorly programmed patrol patterns. it was beginning to look like the milk run chambers had promised. avo approached the tower, treading slowly over stretches of ovoid depressions parted into squares within a grid of glassed matter. it appeared that bored artillerists had indulged in a game of tic-tac-toe during the war. amusement finds a way. keeping low, avo detected a trio of gangers stumbling out from the partially collapsed front entrance of the block. smiles stretched each of their faces in an unnatural rictus and sharp giggles escaped from their throats. their bodies looked atrophied and withered, cheap cyber with faulty servos keeping them moving despite their sapped muscles. their clothes clung to them in tatters and flecks. a few of them seemed to have murky pustular growths along their necks. there was a translucent sheen to the living cancers. they reminded avo of the jiggling backsides of maggots. fucking joyfiends, chambers said. he spat the slur without any jocularity; all rancor. dont like happiness, avo said, prodding him in return. dont like it when people take that joy shit. its poison dressed as something else. avo heard the enforcer swallow. aint right. something was more personal here, like a weight resting on a nerve. avo wanted to prod again, see what reaction he could provoke, but his better senses warned him against it. he waited for them to saunter behind the block, making for a shack. they were laughing, weeping with joy, finding amusement in everything and nothing. it wasnt an uncommon sight in the undercroft. but joyfiends were easy fuel for the snuffing. getting close to the block, avo found himself studying his choice of ascent. the front door was seemingly unguarded, but that was too direct. would pull too much attention to himhe didnt want to risk anything that might catch someones attention. he knew the armor was stronger than his flesh, but if anyone here had explosives, he would probably just end up as pasted meat inside a can. last he checked, the rig didnt have inertial dampeners built into it. meant he still bowed to the whims of physics when it came knocking. the other option, then. down the sides of the tower ran opaque panes of glass frozen as if tides mid-undulation, parted into four sections by strips of holojectors. without something being projected, however, it made the tower look like a studded, wavy paddle of some kind. ridiculous, in a word. at least the projector strips allowed him something to latch onto. his ascent was thereafter a quiet affair, with him using his optics to keep track of the patrols beneath him. thankfully, they were too drugged out or inattentive to look up. the climb continued to the accompaniment of chambers humming a new pop-tune to the lyrics of slurs. despite the vulgarity of the mans parodies, avo had to admit the enforcer could carry a tune. wrong line of work, chambers. what? a compliment? from you? avo grunted. he left it at that. he settled into a near-meditative trance as he rose. beneath the false light projected by layer two, beside a gleaming tide of blackened glass, it occurred to avo that he was experiencing something he never enjoyed before. he was outside during daylight hours without wearing a shroud, without masking his eyes behind mirrorshades. he took a moment then to savor the moment, lifting a hand as if to clench the holographic orb that was supposed to mimic the daystar in his fist and claim its mantle for his own. it was such an absurd act that he nearly laughed. but he enjoyed what little power he gained over the light all the same. and then, the moment was promptly ruined when a pane of glass was lifted above him. a puff of smoke gusted out as a wheezing ganger stuck her head over the edge to empty the wetness coating her lungs. her face was a collection of copper piercings, strobing neon-bright hap-tats, and prehensile hairs that changed styles from minute to minute. avo froze in place, his fist still grasping for the light. she was a few floors above him, coughing out from the window of floor one-hundred and seventy-seven. the destination marker shone in avos hud like a beacon. he pulled himself close to the building. alright. this was simple, he just needed to she leaned down and spat a mouthful of bile. bile, which then splashed down over shoulder of avo''s rig. blinking, she rubbed at her eyes and froze, noticing him. holy shi avo fired his celerostylus. Chapter 4-5 …Is Never a Milk-Run chapter 4-5 ...is never a milk-run why scalpers? heh. names leftover from a bad habit i picked up during my days serving in the skaldglas. was posted in nu-scarrowbur during the war, but spent most of my time beneath the plates, fighting the ghouls. there is a certaindesperation that fills you when you fight the ghouls. a thrill. its like you looking down the throat of death unchained, and you just have to keep feeding the big nothing. explosives. guns. drones. golems. flechettes. knives. kill the monsters however you can, but you gotta go for the brain. if the heads intact, the ghoul aint dead, was the saying. guess i took that too close to heart. -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers, head of the scalpers syndicate 4-5 is never a milk-run his body surged. his armor caught up nearly an eternity later. the neural connectors in his back came afire with heat as avo hissed in pain. his body wasnt feeling the strain with the rig moving on his behest, but something was wrong with the connection. it felt like his nerve centers were being cooked along his spine, flashing pulses of pain and hurt surging through his skull. but even in the haze of confusion, he still struck before the target could retreat. he zoomed up the side of the building, a wild hand reaching out for her. he tried to grab her. he ended up slamming a palm into her nose instead. a spurt of blood escaped through the gaps in his armored fingers. he felt the ridge of cartilage that was her nose sink below her carving face, her teeth cracking free like scattering pellets. carried by the sheer force of the blow, she met the ceiling back-first in a thunderous impact. a loud crash of shattering titles and rattling metal made avo wonder if he killed her outright. the lack of flowing essence or a ghost drifting into him meant otherwise. avo stopped tensing his organ. the sudden tidal wave of pain that shot through his body nearly made him lose his grip. he buried his fingers tighter through the surface of the projectors. the celerostylus really didnt like interfacing with the armor. another problem that should have been resolved earlier. taught him to trust chambers or janand to ensure his in-field efficiency. he expected they would ensure his functionality if nothing else. but it should have taken little foresight to see them bringing about his death through raw incompetence alone. he should have insisted on examining his own kit. the same rules between equipment and phantasmics applied here. across the commlink, he heard chambers roaring with laughter. jaus fucking corpse, he swatted that poor girl! you see that shit janard? the bastard tech was laughing at that too. reminded avo all his new coworkers were part of an amoral snuff industry. peeking over the open window, avo saw a bent metal doorframe directly across from him. a smear of blood ran along the cracked ceiling, with the recently made jutting edges still clinging to flaps of skull tissue. the girl he just hit lay next to a folded door, confirming her survival in wet sputtering breaths. she mustve had laced bones seeing that her neck didn''t snap in half from the hit. avo doubted any flat could take a blow like that and come out alive. more than surprise, he felt the rage of shame bubbling inside him, building with chambers choked chortles. milk run. milk run didnt mean avo could let himself be this sloppy. walton had trained him to be better, to focus more on the task than being smitten with a new tool. with him treating his new armor like a toy, the distraction cost him his focus, and in turn, his resulting incompetence made him inflict harm on the choiceless when it could have been avoided. well, before he had enough cause, anyway. he would gladly kill and eat her if she granted him proper cause. crawling into the room, he tore the window loose from its hinges and forced his way in. around him was a bathroom of some kind, vast in its design. a square-shaped bathtub filled with stale water sloshed about to his right. dead flies danced along the bobbing waters, rising up and down like freckles upon the face of the turgid waters. a bent showerhead swung back and forth above him. to his right, five gold facets protruding over a large grime-coated sink added a dim note of ambiance to the room, playing soft dripping drums. the girl moaned in pain. avo clanked his teeth out of habit. the beast wanted to finish her off. open her throat and drink from her. avo resisted. he had done enough to her. more than he knew she deserved anyway. her thoughtstuff indicated that she was still conscious, but concussed past the nine hells with how her surface thoughts were popping before they could even congeal. something moved through the walls. avo looked up. three signatures of thoughtstuff filtered into the room past the door. none of them were warded. gangers were equipped even worse than the syndicate''s goons down here. the nightmantis audio-detection functions narrowed in on several sources of sound. the walls werent thick, but there was a steady undercurrent of volume he needed to work through. the chambers marker pulsed beyond the bent door, lighting the entirety of the room. it was here. the biomods. the package. he just needed to ta-zzzie? the electro-modded voice toned. whoever was speaking sounded like an electric guitar of some kind shredding faint approximations of syllables into existence. cooonnnnnnsangg! you al-right! avo cringed at the sudden spike in volume pulsing out from the speaker through the busted door.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. oh good, chamber said. its shred. snatch him. hell tell you where the biomod is. save you the trouble of tearing through the room." avo squeezed out a hiss of frustration. know him? yeah. pretty fucking annoying guy. had a voice modular implanted in his throat. crazy into the nautcore useful details, not hobbies, avo said, interrupting. i sold the package to him, okay? hes the guy who should have it. this important, but previously unmentioned detail brought blessings of headaches and tidings of building fury. it was like applying for a job under a chem-addicted guilder in the undercroft; the details and duties he had to fill under conflux were seemingly dependent on the whims and moods of whatever handler he had at the time. inside the armor, avo was licking his lips as well. the scaarthian had proven to be prey worth eating, but prey that was still too unethical to claim. the beast coiled, writhing against its restraints. avo swallowed his saliva. sorry about the leg, avo said. the scaarthian frowned in confusion. and before the ganger could rise from his knees, avo shifted to the side and stomped down. a bladed leg bit through an achilles tendon. the scaarthian winced but didnt cry out. not even when avo took the other leg from him as well. immediately, before even hitting the ground, the ganger clawed out, trying to bring avo down with him, anything to keep the fight going. avo nodded. another time, another life, the old war gods of the skuldvast would have proudly poured great blessings upon this one. right now though, the ganger was just a stubborn brawler in a foul bathroom. one that was eating away at too much of avos self-control and time. reaching down, he slammed a final punch into the previously exposed tissue of their inner ear. the scaarthian roared, voice carrying more fury than pain as he toppled, balance fleeing his body. it took three more heavy punches before the bruiser was finally incapacitated. still, he was broken, not beaten, and took to pawing in circles, muttering slurred demurs at avo. fuckin--fuckin half-strand fucker coward, the scaarthian growled, worming near-blindly on the ground. his body was done. his will wasn''t. tearing his focus away from the oozing wounds left on the ganger before the beasts urges overwhelmed him, avo was about cross back into the room when chambers chirped in. wait, hold on, chambers said. zoom your optics in closer on his face. wanna get a profile. why? thinking of poaching him later. tough godsdamned bastard. for once, avo thought chambers to be making a wise decision. wise for a messed up bunch of thugs and criminals anyway. recruiting good hitters couldnt be easy. this one would be persistent, if nothing else. crossing back into the main suite, avo found shred crawling on his hands and knees, trying to make it to the doors. puddles of puke lined the path behind the flailing ganger, likely a direct outcome of being punched in the chest by someone wearing an exo-rig. as avo approached, shred rolled, pulling out a cheap switchblade. avo hummed with amusement before swatting the weapon free from the gangers hands. it darted against the holovision and snapped in half. the frontier piece kept playingscenes of scaarthian raiders charging kosgan gun lines unfolded in a most cinematic portrayal of slaughter. motherfuc shred said. avo grabbed him by the back of the neck, the gangers curse trailing off to a riffing yelp. the man was a near-flat. wiry, if not for the bulging vocal amplifier built around his throat. he wore a leather jacket under a leather coat and had too many belts. shred? avo asked, trying to confirm if he hit the right guy, or if the one with the broken collarbone was his man somehow. yeah! im shrrrreed! wha-t! the fu-uck do you wan-ant, half-str--ra-ra-rand! avo tapped his voice aug, causing shred to choke. talk normal. or ill remove it. communicate by notes afterward. shred coughed and nodded in the first hints of obvious fear. alright, alright. biomod, avo said. where? shred blinked. did chambers send you? chambers suddenly cut in. avo dont avo grunted. the response was so vague that shred just looked at him, confused. on second thought, i dont know why i was worried. biomod. where? avos voice a sibilant hiss. frankly, this couldve all been much neater if he just used his whisper. they didnt have any wards, and digging through their thoughtstuff using a ghost-link was probably easier than any interrogation he could conduct. but cracking their minds was much the same as killing them in avos opinion. leave them catatonic for the rest of their lives at the least. walton probably wouldnt appreciate avo using the art this way. avo frowned. father probably wouldnt have appreciated any bit of this endeavor. there was always some grey to dives, but avo had done his best to avoid hurting the choiceless when he could. right here, right now felt like a betrayal of those ideals. one born of deception, but functionally, the outcome was the same. ganger though these men might have been, they didnt ask for this invasion. nor did the girl in the bathroom ask to be struck across the face. chambers had much to answer for when this was done. as would all of conflux. but he needed to survive long enough to turn the tables. al-alright, consang, stay zero, shred said, holding his hands up. its right over a loud knock hammered against the front doors of the suite before shred could answer. hey, shred! i brought them scalpers up with me. the person behind the door laughed. you ready to cut a deal? Chapter 4-6 The Scalpers chapter 4-6 the scalpers the scalpers should be considered more paramilitary death cult than syndicateand vincentine, if youre watching this, its not a fucking compliment. whatever the hells happened to him when he was down in the dark fighting the low masters touched him good and deep. knew him before he went down. didnt know him after he came back up. cant say i blame him. the low masters only had primal heavens, but before we go about forgetting, theyre still shells of dead gods. and theres nothingaint nothingthat can prepare you for facing a god on your own. best metaphor i have is like emptying your gun into a hurricane. inevitable. just inevitable. -quail tavers, new vultun sunrise interview 4-6 the scalpers shitshitshit, shred whimpered, eyes flicking between avo and the door. shit! shit! shit! chambers cursed. janand! scramble the drones! scramble now. avo! get the bioware and get the fuck out of there. fucking scalpersfuck, how the fuck was i supposed to know they were going to be there avo tuned chambers out. the enforcers panic was unbecoming and unprofessional, but his folly was not one to be shared. beyond the door shone the accretion of six minds. six, and an endless sea more of flowing thoughts suffusing the entirety of the block. five among them were warded, though poorly. the type of quality avo saw in conflux enforcers. still, if the scalpers were properly set up for insertion into the room, the momentum would be their advantage. soft as their minds were, avos phantasmics were going to be hard-pressed to engage six targets, especially if they were shooting at him at the same time. worse yet, he knew nothing of the scalpers equipment, numbers, or even if they had a necrojack with them. to his advantage, he had a working metamind, a functional but outdated exo-rig, and a head start for whatever he wanted to do. worse comes to worst, he needed to make a killget his liminal frame up and running again. get rid of his rend and keep from staying dead. the person outside the door hammered against the door again. shred? dont tell me you went and shot up before this? avo leaned down next to shred. tell him to wait. shred nodded, face flush with stale sweat, their body shivering with fear. i-im clean right now. there was a choking lilt to shreds voice, his gulps sending out echoes of guitar twangs through his modulator. sure, shred, the ganger said. their scoffing laugh told avo that they didnt believe shred, but belief wasnt needed right now. a delay was. anyway just a second, shred choked out. imim getting the shit. im trying to get the shitforgot the combination again, alright? a beat followed. an ebbing flow of disappointment spiked into the nether. avo tasted the emotion in the near-waters of thoughtstuff and scowled. he had no idea why their minds were bare, or why they couldnt be bothered to even get some cheap wards installed. it was like bleeding into the water. jaus, shred, get your shit together. two minutes, alright. we need this fuckin deal done, consangyou set it up. dont glass-jaw on us now. fuck, man, alright, shred shot back. just need tojust gotta get it open is all. just give me time. thats all i need, okay? fuck! hey, hey, fine, relax. just get the shit, yeah? we need their imps. farm''s gonna fail otherwise. yeah, shred said, looking down at the ground. yeah. through the door, avo watched as the sphere of thoughtstuff bobbed away. muted voices were exchanged. questions regarding if there was a problem. hurried assurances that the gangers were professionals, and that the bioware was just being screened to ensure there werent any issues. a plan formed in avos head. first thing. secure the package. he already broke in and committed a transgression against his ethics, no sense in leaving a job half-done as an insult to his professionalism as well. please shred said. avo released the ganger. in the corner of the room, the bio-gunner was still groaning in pain, clutching at his neck. the lumbering bruiser continued groping against the tiles of the bathroom, palms smacking hard against the ground. dont beg. get mods. i leave. you live. understand? shred nodded. okay! okay! nice job, ghoulie. so, i scrambled the drones and im thinkin-- no, avo snarled. no more thinking. not from you. i get you the package. i finish delivery. but you have thought enough. your plan caused this. your lack of research. preparation. sloppy. unprofessional. shamed the dive. shamed me! a lull of static-charged silence followed. i, uh get drones over gorge. fly high. need overwatch. find how many scalpers. find where. need exfiltration route through alleys. streets open. rig light. direct run too dangerous. chambers sighed. ghoulie avo felt his descent lurch as his new parasail caught its first draft of wind. within the rig, he growled with satisfaction as he felt himself catch a gale of wind, riding upon its currents. his phys-sims falling numbers stabilized. good. at least janand did good work. all he needed to do now was a flashing mote of light tore out from a distant alley and struck avo in the chest. an impact trajectory manifested, but before avo even saw the redness that was its color, the micro-missile detonated against his chest. the rig screamed, integrity exploding in a tide of orange, armor warping before the blooming shockwave. inside, avo felt his muscles absorb the impact the inner rig lining couldn''t. tendons snapped. he felt something inside him fracture. the bio-sail he was gliding on disintegrated, torn from his back as he was blasted back into the gouge. spinning, tumbling, limbs twisting, and armor hissing, avo crashed through two walls and scrambled on hands and knees into a room. people were screaming around him. blurring feet and fleeing shadows shot past him. children were sobbing. looking up, he found himself in a cramped living room, the haggard faces of a family staring back at him. avo drooled blood over himself and groaned, trying to shake off the dizziness. chambers was cutting in and out. the hud was flickering. cracking with glitching errors. half the optics were gone. sorry. about the room. dazed, he pulled himself up using the walls and a stump-like holovision stand. another flechette crackled down through the ceiling, and the holovision burst apart. the family screamed. more shots followed from above, the room was coming apart. stumbling, avo moved for the doors, smashing through as the family kept screaming. growling, he stumbled deeper into the structure, skull throbbing, flesh aching. external air was whistling into the rig. the armor had prevented the missile from punching through, but at a cost. petals of twisted metal dangled free from his chest, the glow of a sparking power grid exposed. system errors rang through his mind as he pushed further down the hall turning. behind him, he heard whistling. two dagger-sized drones swooped around the corner. they scanned and marked him. he, in turn, used his still functional phys-sim to make up for his rigs failing systems and fired his precision cannon. the shot threaded through both targets. the recoil-balancer pulsing from the back of his cannon cut a clean slice through the wall behind him. a good shot, though still a waste, obliterating two drones with a precision cannon made to kill light vehicle platforms. of course, it would have been a bigger waste if he ended up dead. more voices rose into screams. men. women. children. animals. he was trapped in a gunfight among the choiceless. he didnt want this. he didnt someone burst down through the ceiling above him, blades flashing. on instinct, avo fired his reflexes, and hellfire exploded through his nerves. he ducked back, barely evading the first slashes. the armor didnt work well with his celerostylus during the best of times, and now it was like trying to keep focused while molten metal licked pain through his veins. the scalper that assailed him had two vibrating frequency blades extended like scythes across their shoulders. their rig was the shape of a skeletal grasshopper, legs bent, arms jagged with autocannon barrels. with how fast they were moving still, they mustve had some kind of reflex booster as well. probably one that worked with the rig, and didn''t make them feel like they were coming apart from the inside. the scalper drove forward, barrels raised, blades rearing. avo, too consumed by agony to play fisticuffs, slammed his whisper into their wards againthis time bearing a thought-shiv as a spear tip. his phantasmal dagger sank past their wards before they could bury their frequency blades into him. ghosts - [41] the scalper cried out, toppling as their thoughtstuff shattered free like a dish breaking against a wall. avo released his celerostylus. he tried to right himself but ended up vomiting inside his rig instead. his limbs were twitching despite his struggle to control them. at his feet, the scalper began to whine, a low keening of madness signaling the death of their personhood, their descent past the jaws of madness. lining a firing trajectory with his phys-sim, avo put the scalper out of their misery. the shot bifurcated clean through their head in a spraying mist of brain matter and titanium. avo made it three more steps past the body before he toppled over himself. faintly, he could hear the whining servos of more rigs approaching along with the low hum of gauss guns spinning tungsten along their barrels. he tried to stand. his nerve clusters screamed. his skull screamed. his insides stung. he was going to die here. he was going to thaumic cycler: 30 thaum/c soul online engaging thaumic cycler: 30 thaum/c heaven [sangeist] online manifesting hell [first circle] hellvents activating: ejecting rend and, like an entropic flame tearing free from an alloyed cocoon, a gusting shroud of darkness poured loose from avos very being as matter around him began to decay and dissolve. the floor flaked and crumbled away beneath him, peeling out of existence along with pieces of the nightmantis. avo fell. rend capacity: 81% and dropping Chapter 4-7 The First Circle chapter 4-7 the first circle the impossible cannot be balanced by the natural. for every heaven, there needs to be a counterbalancing hell. a certain counterweight of impossibility from the miracles created by a heaven. but dont get it twisted: the hell is still an ontologica weapon. from the first to the ninth circles, each hell is bound to a domain, and from that domain they will vent their designated rend. as such, if you ever want to qualify as a proper godclad, you will learn the canons of your heaven, and will understand what daemons it might accrue -santanado starsinger mondelles, gods of self 4-7 the first circle the fall did not stop. even after avo plunged past the first floor, and then a second. hardened plascrete and rebar shattered into particulate upon greeting his skin. from his black, plates and pieces from the nightmantis spilled free, its dissolving matter spreading out from the entropic shroud that clung to avo. down through rooms and halls, avo sank, his body like a cursed stake driven into virgin soil. solid matter around him withered away into flakes of crumbling sand, the spilling shell of his former rig unspooling like water-painted wings of chrome from his back. yet, more than the devouring gales that rippled forth from his body, avo felt his awareness blossom again. it was like a limb was returning to hima part of his being that had been forgotten, asleep, now reawakened and roaring back into existence. through the darkness, a chasm of inverted flame began to burn. within, he felt it. controlled it. his blood flowed and fused to his whims, shaping itself to his will. the sangeist within him exhaled the strain that suffused its insides, and finally, it opened itself to the world. the entirety of the block came alight in glowing veins. all solid matter around him greeted his gaze as flashing patterns; the source code of their ontological architecture.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. it was as if another pair of eyes had opened beneath his own, and opened fully. he felt the weight of his heaven now, burning deep within him as his soul spun bright. below, an ebbing reflection danced in opposition to the sangeist, supping from it the building rend, balancing its mass with a counter presence of its own. a hell for a heaven. rattling shots sounded from above. reaching out, avo tried to halt his fall but found that though he could guide the gusting shroud spilling free from his inner flame, he could not stop it from unmaking all solid matter around him. not until he halted his venting. venting paused rend capacity: 55% like a gas choked away with a twist of a valve, the shroud broke from reality as existence shuddered and reset. as the blackness vanished, however, it suddenly became evident to avo how much damage his hell had done. across multiple levels, decay reigned, and a certain rot had eaten away even more of the gouges skeleton. for a thirty feet radius, it looked like his rend had vaporized countless tons of matter, peeling through walls and exposing horrified families. the entropic gusts that enwreathed him had eaten through metal and glass with equal ease, sparing only liquids and gases. more interestingly, however, was the fact that the lingering edges left in his wake dribbled with falling rivulets of blood. avos phys-sim screamed, snapping his attention back to the present. an orange lane lined the encroaching impact between him and the ground coming up three floors below, threatening to meet him head-first in a collision, with his exposed flesh certain to be caked between the remains of his armor and floor of tattered carpeting exposing hardened plascrete. reacting more on instinct than thought, avo shaped six limbs from the blood within him and drew them out from his pores. bearing the properties of tungsten and blood both, avo felt the new limbs greet his senses as he plunged their jagged tips into the walls. like hooks digging across chalkboards, the surfaces around him screamed, sprays of jagged shrapnel spilling free. out of his shoulders, avo felt a lattice of blood blossom into shape, caging his face between the closed hound-like jaws of the sangeist as the symbol representing the pattern of tungsten exploded over his skull like a flaming crown. this was the smallest the sangeist had ever been. far less than even a ton, but still, avo could feel the blood that used to flow inside him coat over his body, pushing the neural drills of his destroyed rig out from his spine like rising adult teeth. a growing hunger burned with him. using himself as the channel for this miracle held its own expense. still, he could not deny its coursing power. as the final drill clicked free from his spine, avo landed. the impact would have broken his legs if this was a natural fall, but as he fired his celerostylus, he hammered into the ground with expanding pistons of blood shaped from his haemokinesis. the ground groaned, fissuring, the plasteel beams inside groaning as they bent. he released his reflexes. nothing inside him hurt this time. without the limiting feedback of his rig and or the fragilities of his body, his blood heeded the whims of his accelerated mind like a perfect instrument, never breaking and easily shaped. a feral smile spread across avos face. rend capacity: 58% without hesitation, he pushed his whisper out the block to check which floor he was on now. twenty third. between the missile and his hell, he experienced quite the fall. sweeping his perception up in a wide splash, a building full of naked thoughtstuff greeted him, the emotion of fear pouring free from the minds of gangers and tenants into phantasmal stratocumulus. five warded minds were diving down the exterior of the building, maneuvering to fire at him from the outside in, their perceptions yet to notice his whisper. four more were positioning themselves some ten floors beneath him, seemingly hoping to establish a horizontal-vertical l-shaped firing position to cut him down. a final unit of two was already skittering down through the dust-choked openings his hell made while venting his rend, the contours of their rigs gleaming like missiles in a sandstorm. reflex boosted. they were probably of a team as the scalper he killed earliercome too late to support their comrade. rend capacity: 21%...15% beneath him, his blood pooled, the ground cracking and sinking as the floor destabilized. as the last hissing whispers of his rend came spilling free, avo lashed it through the last floor and sheared the winds through the building. he didnt get far enough to kill the scalpers, but the way was clear. rend capacity: 0% with a thought, he drew all the blood he was in contact with back over himself, the sangeist layering over him in seconds as he dove. his humiliation this day was approaching completion. he had been fooled into partaking in a fools errand by a short-sighted idiot. he had shamed himself when he failed to do his due diligence to prepare for said fools errand, proceeded to intrude into the lives of three people that didnt earn the pain he brought them to steal a package, likely lost said package surviving a missile strike during his escape, and now got a bystander killed in the crossfire. avo had enough. the scalpers were going to die. and when he got back to chambers, the man will find the fates met by his syndicate rivals to be far more merciful. diving down, avo pulled himself down what walls remained like a spider. the collapsing structure poured confusion into the enemys firing pattern. still, he could see the pulsing flashes of their guns even through the smoke, the dull shine of their ward-protected thoughts in the nether. for the third time within thirty seconds, avo fired his celerostylus and struggled not to scream. he expanded the veins inside his head using his own blood to prevent an embolism from the stress erupting through his body. he slammed down in their midst like an unfurling flower, his petals lashing wisp-thin blades. around him, the scalpers screamed and gurgled. a stray shot cracked deep, halted inches from his shoulder. he felt his slip, chipping through the thickness of titanium before slipping through flesh without resistance. with every stroke, he cleaved a life free from existence, claiming them for his soul. limbs and parted pieces jutted loose from bodies. screams choked off into silence. a blind haze of ravenous hunger exploded at the center of avos mind as the world turned red, his violence unchained from his thoughts, the beast slipping free of its leash. thaumic cycler: 40 thaum/c ghosts - [51] he knew not how long he spent afterward mutilating their corpses and shredding through their armor. all he knew was that by the time his conscious mind managed to usurp the feral creature wearing his body, he found himself striding past the front door, the flayed skin of his recent victims clinging to him like a cloak. avo blinked. he looked down at his hands. they were shaking. he looked behind him, and the open doors to the megablock smashed outward in a welter of gore and mangled bodies caking the soft swallow soil beneath his feet. his rend was empty. he mustve vented again at some point. he mustve. but he couldnt remember. he clutched at his head and strained to contain his rage. bubbling with tension, he dug his claws across his body, tearing into himself. he promised walton he would be betterthat he would wield choice of instinct. for the last few years, he did his best to serve the ideals of his late father; offering piety to the ideals of the man in place of their person. today, avo failed his father. today, he let the beast run free. today, he was unethical. a ghoul. a wet cough caught his attention. not far ahead, leaning against the rusted husk of an abandoned aerovec, one last surviving scalper muttered into her comms, her auburn hair stained red with blood running down her scalp. oh, right. he saw her fall. he took her arm. legs. but didnt finish killing her. the jagged edges of her frayed armor were sawing into her spilling intestines while the right half of her face hung denuded, swaying from her jaw. l-longship, she said into her hissing rig, re-request e-extraction. teams f-fucked. ne-need immediate her voice trailed off. beneath the shadow of the gouge, scalper and ghoul greeted each other for the first time. kivvers? kivvers? come in kivvers? galeslither has been dispatched. what is your condition? ki she killed her comms by driving her thumb into the exposed electronics of her rig. something delicate broke. spitting blood at avos feet, she barred her teeth in resigned defiance. di-didnt think y-your kind could beclads. amam i hallucinating right now?" she tilted her head and narrowed her working eye. "d-do i know you from... somewhere." avo looked at her globule of blood. he looked up back at her. he said nothing, choosing just to shape a lance from the blood in his veins. "does it matter?" she closed her eye and scoffed. t-hats it, huh? just gonna kill me. no questions. yeah, avo said, the boiling urge to hurt her still there, still gnawing at him. he wanted to stick his fingers into the clefts of her wounds, to use his heaven to keep her alive for longer. find pleasure in cruelty. he fought it. he fought it. thats it. around him, the wind began to kick up unnaturally, swirling on concentric patterns as the air grew thicker. the scalper grinned at avo and lifted her throat, offering her life, but giving no surrender. be seein you real soon "no." avo thrust the lance through her left eye. she choked, face twitching into a grimace as a low death rattle sounded from her throat. her hand jerked twice before she slumped over. before he tore her blood free from her body, shaped it into a hammer, and pasted her skull with a violent snarl. as her body slumped over, blood pouring, avo listened to the building wails on the rising winds. her words finally caught up to him. galeslither. golem. reinforcements. the beast reared itself again as a low rumble of bloodlust burned within avo. more prey. Chapter 4-8 Fallen Heaven chapter 4-8 fallen heaven a single angle of attack will no longer suffice for the demands of war. as our capabilities have grown, so too has the butchers bill widened. once, we spoke of things in the complexity of range, firepower, shock factor, and mobility. these concepts remain ironclad but only serve as the foundations for the maturation of war. beyond the physical, we must consider the phantasmal. ghosts of the past dead bearing traumatic memories by the century. deceptive poltergeists slip through your mind to steal operational information. all must be warded. all must be faced. beyond the physical, we must prepare for the impossible. by the will of heavens, sound can be woven into wavelengths of fire. light can be twisted into a slicing blade. a song could expose an entire area to radiation. we live in a time of no sanctuary; no escape. as such, everything must pivot into an attack. -osjon thousand, newly risen supreme commander of the highflame warhost 4-8 fallen heaven it didnt take avo much scrying with his whisper to confirm that the bioware he came to claim was gone. dissolved with much of his armor when he vented his rend. inside the block, people were weeping, their thoughtstuff spiking as fear cojoined with sorrow, voices pleading for help. the scent of blood and clashing odors choked the air, flowing through new ventilated hab-cells. there had been other casualties during the engagement. these walls were lined with plascrete, but against gauss-propelled weapons, plascrete just didnt do. like a vulture, avo fed upon the corpses he left behind, refilling his body with nourishment, and readying his metabolism for more wounds to come. from the dead, he also claimed their blood, the domain fusing around him in ascending plates of armor. shame about their guns and implements. mem-printed to their minds. bricked upon death. another demonstration of confluxs comparative lack of professional procedure. how did they manage to survive in the face of such opposition? was it merely mirrorheads power? a gust of wind spilled over him. avo shook the questions out of his mind and finished his assessment. his current blood mass was paltry. easy as his heaven was to shape into piercing implements, his survivability was still limited. he could spin his blood fast enough to cycle a shot aside, but was still far too vulnerable against explosives. as such, he had a choice to make. did he make his stand in the block or should he seek a better position? the winds were sweeping hard through the district as if blown from the lungs of a titan. outside the gouge, the ruined husks of aerovecs squealed along the cracked roads. debris skipped. inside, the walls creaked and the winds howled. the galeslither was coming. and avo didnt know what else was coming with it. fleeing was not an option. he wasn''t going to outrun a golem, nor did he want them to just blast his capsule mid-transition through the g-tubes. he caught sight of the local nether during his brief jaunt out the window. mostly pockets of thoughtstuff. concentrations of ghosts. wouldnt take much for a properly equipped syndicate with control over the sky to bombard. nor would it be difficult for them to detect a single runner fleeing away from the other minds. that was fine with him. after his day so far, the low growl of violence was still burning hot in the back of his mind, and he wasnt done with the killing. but it was that small spark that belonged to walton that made him leave the block. the choiceless had suffered enough. because of his foolishness, of chambers idiocy, of the scalpers cold cruelty. with his whisper cast high into the air sixty feet above, avo scried his path forward as he moved to depart from the gouge, leaving its battle-carved visage behind him. there were other blocks here. a few looked abandoned. he would make a stand there, perhaps. draw them in and cut them down in close quarters, the same as he did in the block. what he wanted to do was to force the fight subterranean, inside layer one. if they caught him in the open, his counters toward a ranged assault or ghost-jocked missiles would be limited, if that. that, and they could doubtlessly box him in, fire at him from all sides. as he leaped over the moat and tore through the scrap metal barricades leading outside, avo suddenly spotted a titanic broadcast dish dotted with puncture wounds. right, the place he wanted to use as an insertion point into the gouge. the one chambers claimed was infested with a fallen heaven. without a moment to waste, avo spun haemokinetic legs, his new blood-shaped constructs galloping against the pull of the grinding winds. he was godclad. the scalpers were just chromed-up snuffers. now, provided he died clean of rend, his demise would prove a temporary setback. a boon that his foes sorely lacked. unless they too had someone bearing a liminal frame. but somehow, with how mirrorhead hid at the mention of other godclads, avo doubted the syndicate boss would have set up this close against a dreaded rival.??vl-b!n. rend capacity: 2% as he came upon the walls of the block, he fired his celerostylus for a beat and cycled the blood around him as fast as he could. rend capacity: 11% warning: rend capacity spiking rend capacity - 97% external resonance bleeding over vent! vent! vent! feeling the building thaumic mass of another heaven flowing into him, avo gasped as he released his hold on the sangeist and unleashed the waste building within his first circle. a tidal wave of annihilation flowed out from him, cleaving through scalper and matter alike. thaumic cycler: 52 thaum/c even as he vented, he felt the flow of new echoes flooding into him. one by one, the thoughtstuff of the scalpers winked out, their essences joined to him through the ritual of his killing. yet, their ghosts did not answer. instead, their broken minds dissolved into fragmenting ghosts, nulled before he could even claim them. as the roaring eldritch radiance faded around avo, as he vented the last gasps of the rend within him, he found himself staring at a path of clean destruction panning an eighty-foot length through furrows and gulfs cleaved clean through the porcelain surfaces of the chamber. only sheared pieces and gnawed parts remained of the scalpers and their ships. from their skin, writhing hydrapedes pushed free, the chitinous shell of the writhing insect fusing from skin, bone, and armor alike. and finally, when the eldritch creatures drank enough matter to comprise their bodies, they dove up and sank through the folds of space, their six-headed bodies skittering out of existence toward a place unseen. before him, the gouts of fire from the turbine crackled at him, mocking him with its laughter. so. that was a fallen heaven. that was the heart of a rupture. if the stray miracles leaking free from this block could do this, avo could only wonder in quiet awe at how people could survive beneath the continent-blotting chasms of anomalous ruination where the old pantheons broke. little wonder why so many were fleeing to new vultun and the other megacities. but before avo could ruminate any further at the horror he just beheld, a sudden hurricane exploded into existence from above where the spear-ships punched through. drawing the sangeist over himself, avo felt lighter than he was. weaker. he was wielding only the blood in his veins now, the rest doubtless subsumed by the rogue miracle to create more hydrapedes. as such, when he speared two limbs into the ground to stop himself from being pried out of the chamber, both his mass and strength were found wanting, and like a bug swallowed by a vacuum, he snapped free from the ground he was clinging to. spinning, he cracked against the walls, a hip dislocating with a pop. still, he held his outer armor as best he could, his slatted cells sparking as he was pulled up along the walls until he reached the lip of the opening of the ceiling. like being launched free from a catapult, he spun high into the air, and for a moment, he passed by a coiling presence that ebbed brightly with firefar more intact than that which could be detected within the broken thaumic reactor. pushing through turbulent clouds into the sprawling green of the megablocks hydroponic gardensalso infested with hydrapedes writhing free from the leaves and branches of the plantsavo watched as the galeslither pushed through the membrane of impossibility into reality. from its sides sprayed wet mists, its cloud-like presence bringing with it two more golemsboth rival sangeists. even flung free into the air, avo hissed a note of glee, feeling the semblance between the fire that burned with him and its two cousins. across his body, his blood wailed in recognition, the heaven screaming from within. error: heaven [sangeist] is--- makemewhole! makemewhole! makemewhole! the voice of the dead god came alive and roared like a nuclear explosion, the last vestige of its wants and will bleeding over into avos ontology. he gasped. he didnt even know it could do that. yet, as he lashed a tendril of blood into walls and pulled himself atop a tree, a gushing tide of clouds washed forward, coating the galeslither from existence as it flowed free on torrential winds. but from its fading form fell another five scalpers clad in heavy exo-rigs. they landed unbothered by the winds as if the galeslither had exempted them from its pull. through the blurring winds, their arms flashed bright with humming flames, fusion burners singing the dreaded thrums of activation. avo shuddered as if struck. he remembered that sound from during the uprising. often, it followed him to sleep at night. letting the two eighty-ton sangeists push forward as vanguards from opposite angles, smashing through the overgrowth trees of the hyper-stimulated garden and pulping the ichor of stray hydrapedes, the infantry pushed down the middle, setting the gardens ablaze. above, the galeslither wafted, building to be a small hurricane that was pressing down. from four angles, the scalpers made to claim avo''s life. and, with his whisper cast free in the nether, and threads of blood extending from his claw tips, he made to claim theirs first. Chapter 4-9 Apotheosis II chapter 4-9 apotheosis ii a pre-modern assault group of golems is called a knot. vaguely based on godclad cadres, a knot is typically structured with thenow outdatedfour specializations in mind. porter. seer. breaker. maker. in tandem, the designated porter of the group works to position their alliesmost typically the breaker and makersto ensure maximum kinetic output and battlefield shaping capability. likewise, the porter must work in sync with the seer to maintain a strategic dominance of the battlefield. a knot, then, usually serves as the maneuver and firepower core of a fist with a fist denoted as two teams of operators, a knot, and two drone squadrons; parted into variant assault platforms and logistical aid -[redacted], the old war 4-9 apotheosis ii launching his whisper high, avo studied the opposition and found himself playing a game of simple arithmetic. even by raw numbers alone, he was outnumbered. overwhelmed. moreso than that, they had the firepower and range advantage as well. three golems. five enforcers. uncertain if they had any drones left. bad odds, even with a heaven. if he let them collapse on him, his death would be certain. more certain than it was now, anyway. with the galeslither bearing its weight down on him, he couldnt climb, couldnt even maneuver all that easily. there was a growing pressure pressing down the room, bending branches, cracking trees. presently, he was moving like an inverse marionettea spider, driving his body and limbs into motion using the blood inside himself. with a flex of his mind, he snapped his floating hipbone back into place before the grinding winds could pry it entirely free from his body. forced into nothing but bad choices, he took inventory of the essentials needed for his survival. he needed to break through one of the units pushing on him so that he wasnt fighting in the corner. more than that, he needed more blood to buffet his survivability. and with that, the path became clear to him. spraying tendrils of blood out from his claw tips, he felt his constructs bite into the sterile floor, sinking through crystalline material as he grappled off the coiled tree infested with hydrapedes. lanes of fire cleaved into his sight. he tensed his celerostylus against the winds, warring against its staggering pressure. numbers and variables screamed across his vision as his ghosts tried to focus. the galeslither was building pressure around him, two warring vortexes trying to flay him by applying opposite axes of force. already he could feel it. more than that, lines of fire sliced past him, distant guns trained on his person. around him, the thicket provided paltry cover against either wind or gunfire. suffusing his flowing blood with the full celerity provided by his implant, he lashed his way across the ground in desperate grapples, flinging himself at the rightmost golem smashing through a row of encased trees to his right. trails of gauss fire lanced past him by bare inches as he twitched, averting his foes aim more than the speed of their flechettes. rend capacity - 22% with how diminished he was now, he doubted he could even spin a single round aside. his phys-sim screamed constantly. the enforcers were thundering closer, sixty feet. the other golem was forty. the one he was going for was twenty. desperation and humming bloodlust collided in his mind, fusing to become a nigh-fatalistic determination as he quelled every one of his phantasmics aside from his whisper, spearing it down toward the golem. immediately, with his capacity expanding vastly, he drove his ghosts down, using his wards as a drill, priming a single ghost pregnant with trauma as a disposable dagger. looming forth, the widening form of the rival sangeist mirrored his own, its blades lashing wildly in a crimson embrace. for a moment, a surreal weight washed through avo. not a day prior, he had been here, fleeing from little vicious. here and now, he was charging the very golem that killed him, spurred on by dilemma and bloodshed both. and deep within, he could still hear the voice of his heaven pleading, crying out. makemewhole! makemewhole! makemewhole! three blows landed concomitantly. the first was a gauss flechette shredding clean through avos right arm. the second was the shredding of the tree he was standing on by inversely spiraling gales. the third was avo, his mind crashing against the pilot of the sangeist, his wards greeting theirs in a cataclysmic burst as he felt his surface thoughts disintegrate outright. ghosts - [50] even as his train of thought slipped free from his mind, he felt a deluge of spilling memories washing over him, his phantasmal shiv punching deep into their palace and detonating. his focus cracked. his cog-feed peeled from his sight like particles of dust, his nearsightedness returning in full force. on instinct alone, he managed to keep his arm, his reaching tendrils of blood latching on and reforming the limb in a lattice of pseudo-matter. the bones within, meanwhile, remained parted like shrapnel. cog-capacity overclocking - 103% warning: minor memory damage incurred disabling phantasmics biting back pain in both flesh and body, avo fired his reflex again, feeling a sudden lightheadedness pop behind his head. a loose spray of hyper-accelerated blood came free from his flopping arm, more clutched by his blood than reattached. before him, the mind-screams of the pilot told him that the golem fared no better, and did not expect such a hit. madness mingled with maudlin spilled from the shattering thoughtstuff of the pilot as the sangeist toppled, the command module tearing through a screen of blood. the machine within the miracle shot past avo and slammed into the other sangeist in a thunderous impact. thaumic cycler: 52 thaum/c the fact that the pilot had died did not capture avos notice. instead, his focus was drawn to the burning shine of thaumic resonance. the flesh of a gods heaven was installed in its domains, after all, and that which belonged to the golem was washing forward within a tide of blood. dimly, a flash of light speared into his eyes from the periphery of his sight. a flash of arcing electric sparks spewed from the exposed coils of a gauss cannon. without looking, he vented his rend, coating himself in a second-skin of decay as he pushed toward the golem with all his might. the wind was shrieking, plucking at him. fire ran down from his skull into every sinew, every nerve. speckles of pain stung his body as grains of metal tore into him; micro-filaments leftover from flechettes that passed through his shroud. rend capacity - 20%...18%... mauled in thought and guided more by the screaming want of the heaven burning inside him, avo dove to greet the collapsing sangeist, arm outstretched as the very ground he strode upon was disintegrated by his shroud. each step was a battle against the howling gales, feeling as if the world itself was pulling him back, trying to tear him loose from the ground, the pressure ever-building. the claws of his feet snapped amidst the struggle. with a snapping tear, his blood lost its grip and his dismembered arm came loose. rend capacity - 12%...4%... a shower of blood connected to the golem greeted him in an invigorating torrent. the world grew wide in avos mind, the inverse flame within him surging bright rend capacity - 0% the first shot blew a chasm through his ribs. the next three cleaved his torso into strips of quavering sinew. what started as a cry in avos throat ended as a choked spray a dozen more shots tore into him, his body misting apart in splatters of gore. delightful. he still knew absolutely nothing about what all this meant, or what separated a first sphere frame from one that was in the ninth. creating blood out of thin air shouldve been just as impossible as using said blood to channel the properties of solid matter. initializing resurrection - 66% but time was not an ally and should he return as he was before, another death would surely be inevitable. his mind speeding, avo defaulted to his experience as a necrojackbuild from symmetry. build from foundations. to the domain of blood, he offered a prayer. a new canon. this time, an egg connected to his domain of matter hatched, a new marking spilling down to join its sigil. domain of (matter) canon: haemification - the master of this domain can now subsume solid matter into blood; the conversion will only proceed on tactile contact and if the blood submerges the matter entirely hubris: only solid matter can be converted. any attempts to convert liquid or gas will result in thaumic backlash. initializing resurrection - 86% muted sounds greeted him, modulated voices sounding as if they were underwater. or he was. already, he could feel the flames of his soul clenching his consciousness, priming him for reinjection into the world. thoughts accelerating, he thought of what he truly needed from his domain of blood. right now, he could control the blood in his body. wield in accordance with his speed and force. add an aspect of reach to it as well? a haemokinetic field, perhaps? something that would allow him to tear the blood from his foes as well? unable to process canon missing bridging domain [space/force] of course. that would have made things far too easy. sensing his resurrection counter pass ninety percent, a memory flashed into his mind. cover. the enforcers had gunned him down before the galeslither got to him. if he could just make his blood harder or eject his hardened blood as pieces of quick-fabbed matter then maybe another egg hatched from his domain of blood. a horizontal column extended from the center of its sigil. domain of (blood) canon: linger - the master of this domain can now eject the constructs they shape from their blood; a binding percent of rend will be generated for each construct fabricated in correspondence with their shape and mass hubris: only up to eighty tons of blood can be manipulated at once likewise, the hubris melded here as well. what were the rules? what was the cost? reassembling heaven modifying [sangeist] grafting heaven - 100% reviewed - mythology stable heaven grafted - [sangeist] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 40 thaum/c with another 20 thaums added to the cost of manifesting his heaven, avo felt the mass of his sangeist double, but more than that, he felt its shape change. from within the jaws protruding, another pattern rose, quavering like a blistering eye beneath the symbol of the matter he was channeling. between the layered slats lining the body of the tower-like heaven, a ventral jaw expanded into existence, and from its baleful depths spewed a deluge of blades, bullets, and other instruments. all instruments that avo had recently shaped in service of slaughter. initializing resurrection - 99% with the new additions to his ontology, avo felt a growing weight settle against his hell. a pale reflection of his heaven danced like a flickering ember down through the concentric gates of his hell. resurrection - 100% implanting nous fingers of flame clasped over his consciousness, and with a push, avo rose, cast back through the threshold of death, back into the screaming embrace of reality. ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn engaged engaging thaumic cycler: 52 thaum/c loading phantasmics avo tore out from the pool of blood left by the golem he nulled, his celerostylus firing even before he fell upon the unprepared team of scalpers. Chapter 4-10 Reap the Winds chapter 4-10 reap the winds the laeygyr galeslither was not a golem designed for combat. but as was the case with the engines of void ships, if someone had a soul, it had the capacity to be a weapon. a heaven of air with the domains of wind and space, the galeslither was designed as a transport-logistic golem capable of moving over 300 hundred tons per mile shift between reality and the plane known as the yondergales. during the four guild wars, however, it found additional success as a makeshift bomber and a fast extraction unit alongside its more traditional functions, though it suffered unacceptable losses once ori-thaum learned to counter them by jocking micro-frag missiles into the yondergales just as the galeslithers made their shifts... -caes eldcalder, annals of the fourth guild war 4-10 reap the winds an instant. a moment. a millisecond of surprise. thats how much time avo claimed upon his return, emerging from the veil of blood left behind by the golem he broke as if it were a gate. into the screaming embrace of reality, he burst free, with the light curving before his surging synapses. with a thought, he drew layers of armor over himself from the very element he used to ingress into reality, the domain that served as his doorway now becoming slatted plating, the new and improved form of his upgraded sangeist fusing around him. with a flick of will, a lashing construct tore free from his blood, lancing out toward the unprepared scalpers scanning the perimeter. he knew not how long his death had been in existence, only that they were still there, that the beast still wanted its kills. his licking blade flicked through the helmet and skull of the first enforcer. the armor ruptured, and from the rent, flesh burst free as roping sinews. avo continued guiding the blade, building a rippling curve to its trajectory, its upper edge folding to spear into the knee of another enforcer. thaumic cycler: 53 thaum/c in the brightness of the blocks hydroponics center, a slitted wound opened across their leg, revealing the glinting grey of an augmented meniscus. they toppled with a low cry. one that went unfinished as avos haemokinetic-grip surged into their wound and fused a dozen tungsten clots within the vessels in their brain. thaumic cycler: 54 thaum/c and then the momentum balanced out. suddenly, the scalpers shuddered, their own reflex implants firing as they spun, festooned guns roaring in a wild deluge of suppressive fire. immediately, avo drew more mass to his control. his form swelled, he cocooned himself at the epicenter of his metaphysical shell made manifest, rising ten feet, then twenty. shots skipped off against the torque of his spinning armor as he fused the thirty tons of blood that he drew upon, the rest parted from his tactile senses by cracks and fissures in the ground. the enforcers doubled back, their augmented legs working against his galloping limbs as a lattice of ghosts flitted packets of thought near-instantaneously between the scalper kill team, now three instead of five. from what looked to be the team commander, two more phantasmal chains spilled out. one to the other sangeist, thirty feet away and out of position to be any aid. the other ghost-link went to the galeslither sliding across the currents overhead, only just beginning to spin up its storm. for now, it was just him and the the ghost-links between the scalpers suddenly disappeared from avos cog-feed. what were they a tide of spreading distortion burst free from the leader of the scalpers enforcer team. the impact splashed avos surface thought from his mind, striking a gap in his focusin everyones focus. mind drifting, avo stopped clenching his celerostylus. time resumed. for a breath, all combatants went still. and when the thoughts filled the accretion of all their metaminds, violence resumed. necro! a scalper cried, their shoulder-mounted autogun snapping back to life, firing gyrojet rockets. godclad! another screamed simultaneously, fusion burner still thrumming up to readinessnot nearly fast enough to come online and save them. a series of crackling blasts bloomed puffs off avos armor, the rippling property of his blood canceling the concussive force. as the last sputters of thought reattached themselves to his mind, he immediately fired his celerostylus again, as nails of pain slid through his nerve endings. biting back his hurt, time slowed again and he lined his arcs. his rend flooded down his hell at a rate nearly triple the speed it used to. the additional mass of his heaven bore a cost. rend capacity - 42% his whisper was out of play now with how destabilized the nether was, but there were only ten feet between him and the scalpers, the gulf closing by the micro-instants. lining three kill paths with his phys-sim, he shaped a dozen wisp-thin threads made from pressure slicing. their armor was thick. titanium. but titanium was mundane metal, and in this new age, mundane just didnt light the wick anymore. he pulled down his instruments like the strings of a marionette. through trees and glass did his new-grown limbs sink and pass. and along a cage of intersecting cleaves, he would lay claim to the newest of his thaums when he finally slew the enforcers. at least he would have, until the wind wretched his strikes off course. the cutting lance of fusion flame left a gleaming wound through the ovoid command module, and the bricked machine core of the golem came loose amidst a falling shower of blood. rend capacity - 66% from its depths, avo heard the deafening wail of the pilot. her screams were of a mellifluous melody, his opportunism rewarded, his appetite awakened. the scent of her cooking flesh wafted through his nose as he pushed for the last scalper enforcer, the wide shoveling construct beneath him swallowing swaths of plascrete as his tonnage began to swell past ten feet. rend capacity - 77% mihada! the scalper cried, their voice keening with anguish, directed toward the cooking pilot crawling free from the melting ball that used to be the titanium heart of their golem. shaking the strain from his skull, avo was just about to fire his celerostylus when a gust of wind wafted over. and through him. a rapid splash of roaring clouds pried avo free from where he stood, drawing him into a constant free fall. firing his celerostylus, he caught sight of the wisping mane of a roiling three-headed steed. the creature was shaped from blackened clouds and its eyes were pinpricks, like centers of swirling storms. wisping torrents of spraying rain formed the misting main of the horse, and a frozen bolt of lightning fissured like a cage of clasping ribs holding the midsection of the horse intact. its body flowed, the snapping bones of the machine enwreathed at the center of the metaphysical heaven zooming toward avo like a speeding lance, the winds coalescing around it. its hooves, then, ran on rings of pulsing air as it dove toward avo, flicking between machine and steed. his phys-sim screamed numbers flashing through his cog feed as a million moving variables overloaded his ghosts and drove up his cog-cap. with a snarl, avo deactivated the phantasmic before the overload could cascade through his metamind. as petals of speed peeled from behind the galeslither, avo realized what it was about to do, and how it had him in its sway. his rend was still full, and it was charging at him at mach speeds. desperate, he fired his celerostylus to buy him a bit more time. an eruption of pain bloomed behind avos eyes. it took him every ounce of will to keep his organ tensed even as spots formed in his vision. immediately, he began venting his rend out. except it wasnt going down. because no matter was dissolving. no matter other than the shell of the galeslither. the pilot didnt think this through. between him and the pilot, their spiking terror split into two halves, mutually shared. avo, desperate not to be real-deathed as he fell, guts clenching, the pilot of the galeslither likewise unwilling to bifurcate themselves upon the shroud of entropy blooming out among the storm clouds, its presence a spot darker than blackness. the galeslither tore to the side, the flashing steeds neighing loud like passing thunder. avo felt every layer of his eardrums burst apart as his sense of sound left him. thrown free into a spiraling descent, he suddenly felt cast back into reality, falling from on high. outside the block now, plunging down toward the broadcasting dish that crowned its top. to his left, the galeslither screamed as it tried to right itself. no. it was pulsing in and out of the winds as it tried to right itself. did hishell infect its structure somehow? the thought didnt linger. instead, avo found himself in free fall, the blackened gout of his shroud gusting as he greeted the dish. he cast his entropy ahead in a wave, burning a hole through the dish''s thinness as he fell, and kept falling. equilibrium lost, avo cleaved at everything he caught sight of with his shroud, chipping his path clean with wide-arcing scythes. rend capacity - 68%... 58%... 46% down, down, down he went, like a dollop of blackened plasma eating through all in his path. plascrete, glass, metal, and biomass came apart before him as chasms opened up down the levels. howling in desperation, he vented as much as he could, spreading his gusts wider, longer, hoping that he could finish out his debt before he splattered. rend capacity - 33%... 21%... 15% for a beat, as he plunged into the hydroponics center, a snapshot of two figures and a hound snapping to stare at his falling form burned itself into his mind. rend capacity - 8%... 0% and, as avos rend finally emptied, his shroud disappeared. and so did his protection. for the second time within a minute, avo''s smeared apart in the hydroponics chamber, casting him beyond the coil of mortality and back into the embrace of his soul initializing resurrection - 1% simulating liminal frame Chapter 4-11 Galebreaker chapter 4-11 galebreaker why godclads instead of golems? the fact you phrased the question that way tells me youre looking at this wrong. the question is why should we attach a soul to one person via a liminal frame rather than mass-producing a bunch of cheap heavens juiced up with thaums and a pocket for a pre-dump of rend? tempo. intensity. sustainability. anyone can pilot a golem with training, but a liminal frame is special. its burned into the ontology of an individual in a process thats half thaumaturgical genius, half ritual suicide. a good golem can fight for three hours at high intensity without requiring a rend-dump followed by a thaumic refuel. a godclad can keep fighting. theoretically forever. yes, there is the issue of their thaumic cyclers effectively causing them to over-produce rend and need to vent at nearly ten times the ratio compared to a golem with an equivalent heaven, but the fact that they have active hells within them instead of needing to store that waste in a physical hellsink is the difference between pushing your enemies back or needing to abandon your golem because theyre just too full of reality-tearing waste heat to fire up without godsdamned rupturing. -captain osjack wells, guest lecturer at axtraxis academy of highflame 4-11 galebreaker initializing resurrection - 31% avo despised the galeslither. even coated by the waterfalling flames of his soul, the rancor that seethed within him stung hotter, the feeling more akin to the heat of an infection rather than the warmth of a flame. it was two and nothing now. twice the golem had killed him. twice it left him less than a smear. without his ability to resurrect and the sheer blind chance he didnt cast his shroud out in the wrong direction, his death would have been permanent. learning to be a godclad was a lot like training to be a necrojack in a way; avo might have had the tools, but lacking the mastery and a proper plan, all the heavens, hells, and phantasmics were wasted on him. quelling his impotent rage as best he could, he reverted to his best practices when faced with an impasse. he accepted the situation, as walton always did, and began working at the problem from there. he had ruined a sangeist with each deatha pity that he didnt manage to paint his remains over the newest golem he killed. didnt know why it''s heaven was misfiring by the end either. he was like a blind ghoul manually piloting an aerovec when it came to metaphysics. guesses and hopes were all he had. there was a saying in new vultun: if you were going to hope in one hand, you best have a gun in the other. his raw power was unreliable against the galeslither with its miracles far out-angling his. he needed to stick to the fundamentals. build a overarching plan of attack, like he did with his dives. letting his rage simmer in the background of his thoughts, he broke the situation down and approached it with as much candor as he could muster. against him were the following obstacles: the galeslither could fly; the galeslither could tear him out from reality and throw him into its demiplane; the galeslither could engage him at leisure; the lingering effects of the thoughtwave bomb removed his offensive phantasmics from play in the near-term; the surviving enforcer and their fusion burner were still in the equation. initializing resurrection - 31% to his advantage, he was dealing with a far more even field now. there was a single enforcer left. the pilot of the other sangeist might still be alive. he didnt remember drinking in her essence. what he did remember before he splattered, however, was the shape of a dog and two people in the room. so, he had a woundhound to avoid if that was true. thankfully, he knew how to deal with that problem. kill the host. he willed that the pilot didnt know how to transfer hound ownership as draus did. if such was the case, it only left him, the pilot, the hound, the enforcer, and the galeslither in play. avos thoughts halted to a screech. the enforcer. avo had puppeteered one of them to kill the final sangeist a mere minute ago, their fusion burner working through blood and alchemized matter to slag the command module. yet, more than that, enforcers rippled with thoughtstuffgave off signatures in the nether, at least when it wasnt all distorted by a thoughtwave detonation. a most enticing flicker of an idea crackled ablaze like the fires that formed avos metaphysical sinews. the sangeist he was nested in shuddered with pleasure, blood rippling as the roots of a plan began taking hold. the plants around him were burning. a consequence of biomatter getting kissed by hyper-heated air generated from multiple fusion burners firing as one. forty feet away, cupped upon a small dais created by constant clotting pustules ballooning in an inverted u from the broken husk of the second sangeists chassis. something burned wrong with its heaven. avo could feel it. whatever urge he once had to shape from its blood or claim its radiance to enhance himself fled in an instant. right now, the thought of taking from it was like supping from a bowl of contagious tumors. the enforcer staggered then, but too late. their fusion burner came up in an arc just as two haemokinetically projected spears punched through their shoulders.the enforcer howled, their struggle was all but vain as avos control expanded through his bloodstream, holding the scalper like a flesh-mitt. avo released his symbiote. the fires around him suddenly cried in unison, their crackles unheard during the dilation. behind, the pilot finally collapsed. with a flex of his claws, avo tore every ligament and connective sinew in the scalper''s limbs. to their credit, they only choked out a muffled shout, shuddering as the pain consumed them. through the gap in the ceiling, a vortex poured in. debris danced in spirals, the synchronized motion an augury for the coming of the galeslither. perfect timing. told him the duration of his resurrections ran longer within the confines of his soul than in reality. avo checked his rend. rend capacity - 12% almost nothing. good. hide. wait. jaus, the scalper coughed, voice wet from internal bleeding leaking into their lungs. as avo stepped past them, they twitched, surprise somehow shining through despite their crippled state and body language. ghoulgodclad? ghoulclad? a delirious giggle rang from their rigs voice modulator. avo heard pain. he also heard genuine incredulity. what the fuck. profanity aside, avo was inclined to agree. the soul burning within him made him feel powerful beyond measurehad given him access to prey he previously couldnt even dream of consuming. it also wasnt meant for something like him. draining and converting the debris around him, avo funneled the glowing mass of his blood to form the shape of a sangeist around the enforcer. wait, they cried, what the fu avo encased them utterly and released his hold over the scalpers right arm, where the fusion burner was installed. immediately, the sonorous thrum rang within the flowing crimson of the decoy sangeist. already, avo was feeling his blood evaporating, fleeing from his control. before he could accidentally trigger a backlash by clinging or trying to shape gashowever his hubris workedhe inflicted his decoy with linger and watched as a pinprick of brightness began to bloom. rend capacity - 55% the column of neon-bright radiance avo stood under just moments prior faded, a coiling vortex surging low, the winds washing in with a neighing scream. a throb of discomfort clicked through avos ears as he dove for the glass-coated tunnel he and the enforcers had a hand in making earlier. as he dropped down and peeked over the edge, he watched as rivulets of blood were melting from his decoy, its insides bright like a lantern. not noticing or simply too late to stop, he watched the galeslither wash over the three-ton sangeist bearing a special package of entombed-enforcer. from sight did the currents slip into faint nothings, the galeslither peeling the brightness of his decoy out from tangible existence with itself. the clashing winds wafted loose and spun inversely out through the long series of punctures avo made during his fall earlier. sweeping out his shroud, avo carved a final chasm into the hydroponics chamber and vented his rend. as soon as his capacity was empty, he immediately began spiking it again, forming hound-like jaws from his body to snap through the bulk of an ash-claimed tree. in moments, avo reached the mass needed to produce his grapple. triggering his celerostylus againmomentarily this timeavo launched a javelin of blood into the ceiling and felt it punch deep. he expanded gripping roots from its point of impact before using the link to reel himself up. rend capacity - 23%... 31%... as soon as he reached the lip, avo clasped himself in skittering insectoid-like legs, pushing and bounding upward as he smashed through the already wind-frayed edges of the exit wounds leading up and out of the block. light spilled down from above in dappled undulations of shadow. and as avo finished his ascent, he understood why. smoke was flowing free from multiple currents of air, leaking up into existence as blood would trickle from a cut. within the wind, a chorus of explosions thundered, and the draughts laced with smoke began to concentrate, began to fissure, and began to rejoin. and from where once was just open air and clear skies, a burning steed tore screaming back into existence. one of its heads was shorn clean off, and between flickers, saw that a segment of its command module had been utterly cored by what looked to be a concentrated beam of heat. here then, was his hope. and there, burned through the body of a much-loathed foe, was the sign that his aforementioned gun had gone off. like a meteor, it trailed, speed and impact zone lined in avos cog-feed via his phys-sim. he clacked his fangs, the beast hungering for the flesh of the pilot, his soul yearning to consume a new heaven. through a distant series of squat blocks, the whinnying husk of the galeslither met aged plascrete in a thunderous clash, smoke and rubble erupting high into the air. clambering down the block, avo rode out with steed-shaped legs of his own, galloping to claim a new heaven. Chapter 4-12 Loud chapter 4-12 loud you ever see two clads past the first sphere fight? heh. fight. the word dont light the wick for the clash. the ordeal is like something from an ancient myth bled out before you: a small apocalypse that goes unnoticed across the city. the first thing that you feel is your mind straining, trying to keep its parts together. were creatures of pattern. order. our eyes are picky eaters in a sense. we like some standardization to theuhviewing process. so let me tell you when the concepts of light and time are forcibly mangled down into a block-sized ingot, parting you from the outside until the clads finish their little scuffle, you dont come out quite right. even with your wards up. and then you realize why they fight these wars quietly. because godclads aint heroes of wonder and miracles, but weapons built for existential defilement. weapons choked by the wants and flaws and little idiosyncrasies like like us. too much like us said we were creatures of pattern earlier. well. aint no pattern more consistent than reality. its almost like a parent to us. cradling us in a cradle of reason. and with that, there aint a better way to flay comfort out of a childs eyes than by hurting their parent, is there? -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers, head of the scalpers syndicate 4-12 loud flowing smoke clinging to streams of sweeping wind lashed avos skin with a tongue-like warmth as he drew closer to the galeslithers crash site. a bend of rising fire crowned on columns of smoke rose in the distance over burners way. the streets were empty and ringing crashes signaled the sound of closing doors. avo didnt stay out in the open for long. local nether mightve been all distorted by the thoughtwave but that didnt affect drone surveillance much. skittering through the alleys of the district, avo listened as thumping heartbeats sounded through the walls to the ambiance of urban decay lined with a chorus of fire. the scents of unwashed bodies whispered to avo that there were people here just recently, frying an aratnid over a barrel, bleeding themselves with joy. through fissures spreading along the walls, he noticed small spins of thoughtstuff shining naked over the eyes of a glaring voyeur, who fell back, screeching with madness as they beheld his presence. no wards--their mind boiled, witnessing something that they couldn''t bear seeing. didnt matter to avo. he planned to snatch his heaven, and he planned to make a leap down into the gutters, beneath layer one. he left a body behind and shrouded himself in the armored form of the sangeistnow charging at a reliable ten tons, rend building steadily. rend capacity - 42% too steadily. he needed a new hell. something to soak up all his waste energy better. his heaven had grown far beyond the already lacking equilibrium in his system. still, thinking back to what just happened, he wondered if his traces were covered by the body he left behind, or if anyone back at the gouge got a good enough look at him manifesting his heaven of blood again. his guess was no, seeing how much strain it put on his wards to even gaze at a heaven. a naked mind staring at the corpse of a god wouldnt have much of itself left afterward. following the sound of the crackling fire, he emerged from the winding paths of the alley into what looked to be a narrow sidestreet between two factory silos, the g-tube running between them missing. along the edges of both blocks. the cut was clean as if a mountain-sized blade had surgically removed a sphere of space some eight hundred feet in area. past the sputtering flashes of the only working street light in the area, avo watched as glitching holograms danced overhead, flashing from the holojectors festooned to the corners of an industrial overpass. welcome to burners way, the forge of tomorrow. out of all the words, tomorrow seemed to flicker the most. the skies over the promontory of rubble where once stood five pentagonally stacked temp-blocks were incandescent with a swaying flame. stinging chemicals from melted plastics and popping electronics made avo gag. still, he carried on, the promised ecstasy of new power spurring him on, the gluttony of his soul wed to the avarice of his mind. though a fire burned in reality, the shine of the galeslithers heaven was absolute, its radiance choking away, but not dead, still tangible enough to be subsumed into his being. he could feel it. screaming aerovec engines sounded on the horizon, prying his attention loose to look past a reaching bridge that ran perpendicular to the factories. across a grand expanse of open air, a translucent threshold was marked in his cog-feed. nu-scarrowbur. the district where the scalpers were based. that fool chambers should have known better than to sell to a junkie living right next to a rival syndicate. of course, the fool thing was selling to a joyfiend, to begin with. business required some semblance of reliability to work, lest it became stretches of tense trade punctuated by instances of opportune theft that would eventually prelude several very deliberate assassins. draus ran her tongue behind her cheeks. nah. i aint that cruel. her new limbs were chitinous, her arms bearing mantis edged blades along the elbows while still extending onward into workable digits. her legs, however, bore resemblance to that of a grasshoppers. along her back, the clasping legs of a biomechanical rig expanded out around her, connecting her to her new limbs via an external centipede-like organism slotted into the back of her skull. in her hand was a standard gauss rifle. avo swallowed and gnashed his fangs. draus stared. for a moment, neither acted, just watching. he had gained power, but the opportunities it granted him also unveiled new temptations. it was much easier resisting the urge to eat her in the crucible when he knew he couldnt kill her. the beast snarled, but avo smothered it with a burst of willpower. draus wasnt choiceless. there was probably a reason he could find to justify killing her. but she knew more about the functions of his liminal frame than he did. that, and he still felt like he owed her. he couldn''t stop thinking of her open wrist, of the sweetness in her blood, his bestial hunger clashing against ingrained honor. new limbs? he asked. she looked at her insectoid limbs and shrugged. got em at a discount. she studied him for a moment before her face cracked in a ghost of a smirk, and shook her head. you were thinkin of making a go for me just now, yeah? wont lie. odds are in your favor now. but id spit the same bout all the other clads i helped put down. no, avo said, the words coming out choked with effort. wont try to snuff you. not right. she squinted at him. what? you tellin me im out of your diet now?" no. yes. found me. how? waited for you to make a mess, she said. and then i followed the noise. and godsdamned did you make a lot of noise. reckon it might even be enough to pull the attention of the paladins down here. and trust me, you don''t wanna tangle with them just yet." should leave, avo said. reckon we should, draus said. just gotta pick our new friends up is all. avo''s eyes narrowed. new friends? found in the g-station. they were trying to pull a runner. leave you hangin from how it looks to me. avo growled. he was going to flense the flesh from chambers body slowly before dipping him in salt water. still there? avo asked. nah, she said. bricked the capsule takin them. secured other means of extraction. mine. cant rely on syndicate equipment, see. little problem with it being compromised. so, you comin with? avo studied her, listen for her slow, methodical heartbeat, and used his heaven to watch the flow swimming at a constant pace through her system. if mirrorhead was a blank, then draus was stability. she didnt betray much about herself either but then again, she didnt have much to betray in the first place. when you stole the golem. thought you did a runner. expected it. draus face cracked into a sneering laugh. she took a step closer, standing a scant foot away from avo. even with her new limbs, he still towered over her by half a head, but her musculature made him look outright malnourished. did you kill mirrorhead yet? avo frowned. no. then this aint over. then we aint done. know his typeburned my life fighting for his kind. the boys highflame, through and through. or he was. suppose that makes him and i birds of a burning feather, but i dont cotton to sullying myself by association, so he can stay in that there classification alone. and immediately avo remembered why he missed draus during his very, very brief tenure with conflux. unprofessionalism and incompetence were like cancers. it got into you and around you, and before long, it would see you dead. yet, within seconds of meeting draus, she came prepared, with his former comrades bagged, more information on his former employer, and potentially a means of attack that didnt require using the father as a triggering mechanism for a mem-con phantasmic. avo leaned down. coming with. but mirrorhead. when we take him. going to eat him. hurt him. drink his heaven. strip his frame. crack his mind. draus nostrils flared. well, if you want to eat an ex-guilder, i think i got the condiments. Chapter 5-1 Bad Cop/Cannibal Cop chapter 5-1 bad cop/cannibal cop torture is inefficient for information, but an absolutely wonderful way of getting new offensive phantasmics. but theres an art to this! a wonderful, wonderful art! you cant bake a cake with a broken egg, after all, haha! am i right, novitiate? [tester screaming] you see thats thats already too much. look into the mirror and stare at your eyes i mean, really look into them. you see that. youre going somewhere else. minds already breaking from the pressure i put on you. too much too fast. your ego pouring out with the tears. too much. too much. i got to peel slowly. so, lets start with someone more sublime. [tester pleading; begging] oh, this isnt the moment where it gets bad. this is just an initiation. remember, your memory will be cleared after this. you are experiencing this through a proxy. this is only to get a gauge as to where your limits lie. do you understand? [tester sobbing]n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. now, you said you loved your father? now, let us learn what might happen if i sprinkled some abuse on those cherished memories -first instructor kanaede, incubi entrance exam, ori-thaum 5-1 bad cop/cannibal cop it was the smell that caught avos attention first, hinting at what kind of vehicle draus had decided to procure for this extraction. hovering past a narrow weave of alleyways over the edge of the district, the trash barge was a long plow-shaped vehicle with mem-tags sprayed all along its rusted exterior. a narrow v" formed its primary windshield and a dozen mechanical arms folded and dormant along its sides. a cake of filth crowned the sealed top of the barge, crusting it with fecal enamel. and without difficulty, it blended into the sheer dilapidation of the environment, looking just as used and worn as the buildings and the people here. trash barge, draus said, sniffling. comes cheap; got space; lined with lead. best flyer you can get for movin round these parts. she cast a darting chain of ghosts into the front of the vehicle, flinging a thought command at the locus. slowly, the vehicle began to turn, shifting to angle its backdoor to them. yet, as avo drew close, he noticed the frizzling ripples coming from three minds, their thoughtstuff scattered and spiking with sudden alarm. his former comrades, avo guessed. how nice of draus to pack a hefty lunch for their trip over to draus. avo asked. location? where? xin yunsha, draus said. avos cog-feed caught the sangshanese and began filtering a loose translation from the memories of his ghost. proper localization needed an omniglot phantasmic, but right then, he had enough mem-data to pump out something raw. new cloudsand? he asked. the regular shook her head. translation''s too literal. its a line from one of them sangshan poems. something about the time being like the clouds and the sands. avo grunted. he never held much interest in poetry. required too much sentiment. sentiment that just didnt burn inside him. why there? got a fixer there. cloned from the line of qing, named green river. also got half a dozen other names there, but the important things that shell be putin us up for now. got a hab thats out of the way. and somefacilities that you and i can both find useful. they take ghouls? draus grinned. why, avo, when you sell a fully functioning golem to a local arms broker, all sorts of taboos make like.. uh clouds and sand. she breathed mockingly at him. an intrusive thought snaked into his mind, images of him opening her throat and eating her trachea. he wondered if she would still smile at him then. inside, his blood rattled, snapping together like prisoners clanging their chains against the steel of their cages. he could shape a blade through her skull. it would be so easy avo shook his head and continued toward the barge. fine. he croaked. he needed to kill chambers. someone. someone to dull the edge. he could hear the flowing of her blood running through her veins. his hunger was growing stronger. getting worse. it was like eating that heaven had torn a gaping wound into his stomach. he was full. his bodys metabolism wasnt burning. but he wanted more. it felt like his blood was coming afire, compelling him onward via a building heat from within. it wouldnt be long till it became a need. open door, avo said, staring at the glaring three ripples of thoughtstuff inside the barge. their flows came muted, the terrible opaqueness of their wards leaking, filled with exploitable cracks. if he had a ghostjack phantasmic installed, he wouldnt need to dismantle cracked minds so utterly to lick the faint traces of memetic nectar from their minds. as it stood, he didnt have a ghostjack. their minds werent going to be intact. there wouldnt be much of them at all by the time this was done. avo ran his tongue along his inner teeth. he was going to enjoy this deeply. hey, avo, draus said, the roughness in her voice an unwelcome intrusion, piercing his murderous reverie. he tilted his head, not bothering with a full turn, choosing to stare at her out from the periphery of his right eye. if that offended her, she didnt show it. you aint eatin them. you heard? rolling onto his back, chamber stared into the light, gasping with sobs. his eyes widened. he leaned up. avo? holy fucking shit! avo. aavo, help me? kill this crazy fucking reg sow! she came out ofavo? pulling free from the brightness outside, avo strode into the darkness within the barge, his skin taking on a strange glow in the ambient light, making him resemble the bastard offspring between leather and jade. beneath his skin, he felt his heaven twitch, the blood flowing with him clicking, chipping together in anticipation. it seemed the more he fed his heaven, the more alive it felt. not unlike the symbiote, in a certain regard; it was a part of him, like a new organ layered into his being, granting him new limbs to reach, and new eyes to see. and see he did. see the sudden flush of terror as the haemokinetic circuits that formed chambers system, his heart filled with explosions and deflating like a balloon. the sound of the organ throbbing loudly was the truest expression of terror "h-hey," chambers whimpered, "i-it''s me, consang. i--i gave you a place to sleep at night." going to eat your eyes, avo said. eat your left for leaving me. eat your right because im hungry. chambers spun back over draus, the fact that she crippled him a distant memory. fuck! he cried, worming over to her, bouncing on his chest and neck. fucking, youre a reg, arent you? stop the ghoul! stop the fucking ghoul! draus sneered down at him, like a hawk judging a worm. sorry, consang, but my discharge was dishonorable. ah, fuck, chambers moaned. behind them, the door snapped shut, silencing the outside. with a low hum, the barges engines fired as it sank, diving low to embark along its pre-navigated path. with a nudge of her foot, draus shoved chambers into a pile with the two techs. janand wailed as the syndicate enforcer landed back-first against his snapped leg. in the corner, the other tech lay still, unconscious. so, heres how its gonna be, draus began. me and the paler here might-gotta a few questions yall could answer. so, i suggest that when i talk you speak up, because draus could help but snort a laugh, --though neither of us is what id describe as the social type, only one of us might eat you if you dont spit true right now. you synced? janand hissed, staring blankly up at the ceiling, stress and exhaustion forming a catalyst of post-traumatic apathy in his expression. dont know anything. just a fucking tech. ask uh whats his name? ... jambers? yeah. ask him. hes the one mirrorhead promoted. chambers roared. you glass-jawed, sell-your-new-boss-out, death-courting fuck! he turned to wriggle hatefully against janand. the tech continued frowning at the ceiling, silently wishing for death. draus sighed and dragged the enforcer away, casually tossing himself in the other corner. a blaring horn sounded from the outside. the barge dipped hard to avoid traffic. avo stumbled, claws squealing along the steel to stabilize himself. janand rolled. chambers bounced hard against the walls, head ringing against metal. draus barely reacted, her balance untouched. slowly, she knelt down before chambers. with both of them out of the rig, the contrast between them looked as if a champion of myth speaking down to a scoundrel. lets start with mirrorhead. want some details about him. whend he show up? whered he come from? whats he want? that kind of stuff. showed up a year ago, chambers said. sometime during the eighteenth day of the waxing. i dont know. just showed up one day. started throwing imps aroundmean really throwing imps. hired every two-bit street squire wannabe into his ranks that could hold a gun. paid wager rates for contract work too. we all thought shit was nova working for conflux. and then you let him jab you? avo finished. and then he started jabbing us, fuckin yes. chambers froze. ah shit. oh shit! hes gonna fry our synapses nowhes gonna chambers hyperventilating slowed. he blinked. avo tilted his head. the enforcer was thinking. chambers laughed, a chuckle rising to a cackle. he aint gonna do shit. chambers lifted his head, smiling. he aint gonna do shit, and you know why? do tell? draus said. ''cause hes hiding, chambers said, a bit of spittle coming free from his lips. hes hiding from another godclad. he goes missing every time the nether talks about it. well, chambers said, grinning at avo, you raise enough hell to make the local lobbies think that another guild war was starting. heardheard the rumors flyin that the scalpers even sent out a knot while i was trying to bug out avo hissed. chambers wilted. milk. run. shit, man, you cant blame me. i didnt know this was going to happen. do blame you. should have known. avo growled, baring his fangs. innocents died. my fault. your fault. scalpers fault. cant fix me. but i fixed scalpers. and i can fix you. chambers winced away from avo. okayalright i can make it up to you. i can help. ill help you get the flat out. iii know his name! i know his real name! draus held out a hand. avo blinked as he ran into it. had he still been going for chambers? he lost track of himself for a moment. within the recesses of his mind, the beast seethed hatefully at draus. you good? draus asked. yeah, avo said, backing up. chambers. whose name? mirrorhead, chambers said. i know mirrorheads real name. Chapter 5-2 The Second Fortune chapter 5-2 the second fortune in principle, we are inverting what the gods used to do to us. where once they channeled their divine miracles and heavens using our vessels as expendable conduits, we of highflame have risen beyond meager grudges to seek greater aspirations. what we are offering all those who commit to our color is simple: agency; choice; the ability to hold your own leash. were not here to use and burn you at our leisure. we broke our gods for this transgression. all we want for you is to take the flame through your merits and become someone that can provide a better future for humanity unchained by mortal limits. here at highflame industries, we stand alone but rise together. should any of you prove yourself worthy of divinity, youll find yourself amongst a court of peers and equals, a place where iron is sharpened by iron. but that is only if you have the will and skill to claim your place. idheim has suffered enough from mediocrity. blessed be the worthy!" -supreme seraph veylis avandaer, commencement address for the highflame academies 5-2 the second fortune draus expression twisted as if she tasted something sour. shaking her head, she tilted, glancing at avo. you believe this? a name. our friend here is gonna buy our goodwill with a name. everyones got one, avo said, clacking his teeth lightly, trying not to think of how the soft inner flesh beyond chambers eye sockets would glide against his tongue. i got one. its mirrorheads real name, chambers said, straining to keep upright with all his limbs snapped. his efforts came in wiggles, the motion reminding avo of the strange slugs he saw back in burners way. im not trying to juke you. the regular scoffed. didnt say you were now, did i? just meanin it probably aint worth spit to us. know plenty of names already. osjack. osjane. oswin. ling. yang. uwayde. kossolo jhred, chambers interrupted, jutting his chin forward, his rat-like grin masked beneath shadows and bruises. hows that for a name? know that one? the barge twisted again, turning hard. chambers twisted hard, jerking to stay upright, but his back made a squealing noise as he toppled, a light smear of blood marking his face-first pitch against the corner. shit! shit! shit! the enforcer''s head rang against the metal again, forming, cupping him in place. fuck! ow! an inconsistent pulse sang out from within draus chest. for the first time, avo heard her biology betray her emotions. through his heaven, he felt a surge of force run through her veins, her heart thundering twice. if chambers had a drum, that beast that beat in her chest was an artillery piece. over her head, the nigh-transparent crown of her metamind rippled, her thoughtstuff boiling at the frequency of rage. know the name, avo said. it wasnt a question. not when the effect was so obviously written across the regs features. yeah, draus said, the playfulness leaking out of her like blood from a slit wrist, yeah, i reckon i do. reaching down, she plucked chambers up and laid him against the corner. a small bump was building as a thickening bulge along his head. draus glared down at him. alright. you was right. you werent lying. got my attention. chambers smiled. problem is: you got my attention. so if i dont like what im hearing, im gonna get real forgetful about why i need you alive, and let avo here do the talkin for me. chambers smile melted into a twitching gulp. im gettin you loud and clear, maam. nothing but the truth from chambers. across the floor, janand snorted a laugh. thisll be good. shut the fuck up, janard. roll over and pretend youre dead or whatever the fuck you were doing. chambers sighed. alright. so, lets start with his name she flipped him over. chambers yelped. hey, the fuck are you doing? im trying to tell you avo, draus said. pluck the bomb. avo stared at her. he could tell more. he could. he dont need to. i need you to sweep his mind later. but i know who hes talking about. get the rest by divin. pluck the bomb. d-dont you even want to know how i draus struck him across the jaw, the flow like a blurring sledgehammer. chambers head whiplashed, but drausin a feat of speedcaught him before he struck the wall again, allowing him to flop down silently. avo frowned. you good? how odd it was he that promised her to remain in control. even the beast was momentarily silent in confusion, his bloodlust abated by the sudden violence from draus. nah, draus said. and im hankerin to get worse. pluck the bomb. i just need a second is all. huffing slightly, avo extended roots of blood from his wrist. draus winced, the flash of discomfort gone in an instant. janand, though, caught full sight of the miracle, and whimpered, turning to empty his stomach. all over his unconscious partner. avo snarled. pathetic. the father held stronger against little vicious. and the man was a flat. reaching into chambers body with his heaven, avo dug through his bloodstream and collected the pieces of the cortex bomb. the ease of the act startled avohis powers allowing him to conduct casual nano-surgery. in the matter, avo saw hints of the old war towers that the low masters aped during the uprising. he wondered how much truth there was to his old owners getting their support from the no-dragons. as they came to a circular door at the back of the tower, the tiger stood by, head now bowed low, gesturing for them to enter the courtyard. keep your foot off the bar-crossin, draus said, pointing to the rising protrusion of bone protruding along the bottom of the door. sang get real particular-like if you offend their customs. avo grunted. he knew. one of his old fixersnine foxwas sang. still, it was good to keep that in mind. he supposed that was the reason why the eunuchs were trailing along with thema reminder of what awaited those who transgressed, outsider or kindred. into a square-shaped courtyard where a tumorous expanse of roots grew, skin tags swaying instead of willow leaves, avo breathed in the scents of flesh and bone around him. few things were of inorganic design. the glass. the titanium carapace armoring the nu-ox and the nu-tiger. the loci implanted within them. that was it. there was nothing here that couldnt be grown in a nest of flesh or a sufficiently developed organ farm. yet, unlike the sloppy transplants that gangers plied, there was a symmetry here, an engineered art. standing before the tower, veins of bioluminescence lined the exterior in neon. beneath large sangshanese words, a secondary line flashed into avos cog-feed. welcome to the second fortune. as avo stepped past the threshold of the front door, he felt a sudden wave of enervation cleave through him. he gasped, hand snapping out to hold himself upright using the hinges, claws digging furrows into the frame. a warmth spilled from inside him, blood trickling from his orifices like snot. with a thought, his heaven flickered and he drew his leaking ichor back inside himself. you alright? draus asked. he nodded, forcing his blood to still. by now, the discomfort had nested itself deep inside him, boiling his veins. the pain was muted by the strength of his heaven, but he knew it would always be present so long as he was in sang territory. not unless someone gave him a neuter-mask coded toward femininity. the dragon-curse was radiation and ontological alteration both. infested in the surviving bloodlines of the sang, the affliction killed all that it deemed male. it started with chromosomes. and then it moved on, its effects lessening but never quite wavering, going from a hemorrhage down to a nosebleed depending on your habits, principles, diet, speech pattern, and even facial shape. in the attempts of the dragons to break their former slaves, they had culled over three-fifths of the old lines of the sang. they thought it was enough. they judged the death of the patriarchs and the solars of the family to be that which stemmed the tide of rebellion. a classic mistake of divorced cultures between the rulers and ruled; one that the dragons were educated upon via their own enslavement and mass slaughter when the godsfall came. still, the curse remained. and no matter how many dragons were forced to divide for additional dissection and experimentation on the parts of the no-dragons, they just couldnt quite crack the changes the dragons inflicted on them. the firstalways the first thingthat struck anyone about the no-dragons was the fact that they usually wore some kind of bio-organic rig that counted as a living creature. incarnates, they were called. it was their main method of circumventing the infliction of the curse should they be required to battle or conduct activities understood by the dragons as masculine. in such a respect, it could be said that it was the creature they wore that did the act instead of the sister that did the piloting. entering the establishment, they found more eunuchs tending to the room, holding up curtains of skin that blocked draus and avo from the sight of the other patrons, feasting on dumplings and steamed vegetables, voices bright with laughter and drowned by flowing rice wine. regular, the fourth sister greeted, her designation assigning her labor. she stood guard at the entry deep past the lobby. she too shared arm-limbs of similar design to those transplanted upon draus, though she stood taller on the legs of a spider. the third sisters waiting for you. the fourth sister swiped her eyes over him, the motion like the flick of a blade, not even lingering on him. i see you found a pet monster. shall we place it in the kennels while hes called avo, draus said, leaning in close to look up at the sang. but youre right about one thing: he is a monster. do well to remember that. the fourth sister shot avo another glance and shrugged. your suggestion is taken with gratitude, now please, our sister has been waiting most politely. and it just wasnt the no-dragon way unless there was that slight spark of passive-aggressiveness. tea, but with a bit of spit in it. led on by the fourth sister, they followed, the bright orange bioluminescence cast from the organ lanterns in the last room turning into a thick droning red. along the walls, ink slithered beneath patchworks of perceived skin, the blots coming together to form ads and showcase the latest bioware and symbiotes for sale. avo stared, wondering if they had anything that could work on his biology. mirrorrhead managed, and the sang were the best in idheim at biomancy. the problem with them was less of a matter of could and instead one of would. he was a monster, after all. draus bringing him in was faux pas enough. like bringing a nu-dog to a club. deeper and deeper into the casino they went. drugged-out joyheads leaned against the walls inside padded lung-like cells of frosted glass, ghosts swirling over their heads, faces distorted with expressions of unending, ever-climbing bliss. stepping through a side room, a scent of blood struck avo as he peered over the rails. far below, a fight was happening between two piloted incarnates, the stands filled with braying spectators and drifting ghosts. the fight was between a twenty-foot serpent and a spider that could fire swarmers from its shoulder hives. through a veil of rattling jade beads, the fourth sister led avo and draus to stand before a flesh-caked door with a narrow eye implanted at its center. squinting maliciously, it blinked twice as the bone slats along the wall clicked. the door swung open, and there, at end of the narrow chamber lined with luxuries of flesh and matter both, green river sat upon a grand oaken chair. a patch of tumors had grown over where her eyes should have been while the long scarf-like body of a vulpine unwrapped itself from where it was grafted into her neck. its pale green eyes locked on avo and draus as the fourth sister guiding them bowed and backed away out from the door, eyes never meeting green rivers. former regular draus, green river smiled, the vulpine attached to her sharing the expression, your return pleases me. come, drink with me. the fox turned to stare at avo. you too, moonblood. a sparrow i know told me quite a tale regarding the two of you. now, i wish to hear it from the source. Chapter 5-3 In the Foxs Den chapter 5-3 in the fox''s den do you know the sang paint their skins before they re-carnate? use their skins to wrap up the newer infant variants of themselves that came with them when they hatch from the husks of their old bodies. the ratio of young that comes out with them is always the same. four girls and a dying boythe latter has no chance of surviving less you tomb them in one of those voidwatch med-vats. why? it aint up to the sang. dragons. always goes back to the dragons. dont know what made them different from the likes of our gods, but it seemed like those half-strands could cross over whole. didnt need any domains or heavens to step into the real. from what was told, it sounded like they were proto-clads in a sense. cept for the part of them forcing the sang to create other gods, before wearing the bodies of the sang themselves to channel said miracles second-hand like.??vl-b!n. what makes em different also be why the guilds still breed them; keep em around. no other way to make thaumic cyclers. dont know any other beings that can loop their own chronobiology -quail tavers, new vultun sunrise 5-3 in the foxs den the blood architecture within green river was a faade of chaos. in her palm, the tea swirled. in her body, three different hearts guided an intricate system of arteries and veins, the biology between the woman and the fox interlinked, organs fusing together in a melding clash. yet, only a single accretion of thoughtstuff rippled, belonging to the sang resting gracefully in her seat. does the rhythm inspire a hunger in you, moonblood? green river asked, a placid smile adorning her face. no mockery clung to her words, only genuine curiosity, unchained by fear. but past the woman, the fox was staring at him too, and in its eyes, he saw the languorous gaze of a predator watching for weakness. always hungry, avo said. good at ignoring it. draus tilted her head in a low nod. he aint lyin. green river chuckled. her grafted fox squealed, its notes mirthful and sharp. be my very words so accusatory? i only tease. the fox bit at avo, ever-playfully. but first, before more words, a drink. with practiced ease, the sang cupped the tea in both hands and brought it to her lips, blowing. to your health. now she sounded like she was mocking him. an intrusive fantasy of tearing the top half of the vulpines jaw off and beating green river to death with her own graft appeared. he did his best to hide the gnashing of his teeth. reaching down, the regular plucked a bone-carved cup filled with a yellowish fluid. a petal of folded tea leaves drifted, their shape a sang character that he couldnt recognize. their light floral scent suffused itself into the steaming water and tickled against avos olfactory senses. black jasmine? he asked. the fox perked up in surprise, and its human half frowned. quite so. he grunted. walton preferred the common-soil flavor. if that was the accurate translation. just another thing he didnt get to ask before his father passed. listen, river, draus said, doing her best to barrel through the layers of ceremony, not that i dont wanna speak with you, but we got something we have to your rooms are being prepared. the supplies you requested have been stocked. your prisoners are being chained. and your associate is already on her way. green river smiled. i understand your haste to greet your task. i have been there. so, i implore that you understand when i say there is not the need. all there is to do for now is wait. relax. that is your role as a guest. leave the rest to me, in my role as host, and master of this abode, to ensure the slave work is done thoroughly. that is why you came to me, is it not? sold me the golem. draus eyed her flatly. its also my role to ensure that things are done proper. youve been where i am? you should know that too. courtesys courtesy. but that only burns so long before you run out of wick. green river drew in a breath and held it. carefully, she tugged at the leathery collar of her green and white gown of pearlescent shine. a qipao. or at least that was how avo remembered it being pronounced. i respect green river began, ... candor. and i will honor your candor with some directness of my own. the fox flicked its gaze at avo, all playfulness lost, its expression growing focused, body perching on the womans shoulder. your survival. how did it occur? the stream grew thin at the end when that fool-child disrupted her own event. but i saw enough. i saw two refugees, a ghoul, and a regular long stripped of rank and resources flee from a golem. a sangeist. tell me how did you survive? draus shared a look with avo, their joined expression both empty, bereft of expression. he considered linking with her using his whisper, but seeing the interlacing rings protecting green rivers mind, he doubted she was ignorant to be fooled by the obvious. did more runnin than fightin then, draus said. made it to the platform up. tried to leave it behind. green river pressed. but how did you leave it undone? draus sighed. river, youre askin an awful lot of questions. third daughter, requesting permission to speak. third daughter, granted permission. please speak. the most traditionalist of the no-dragons and those associated played games such as this. games. because thats what they were. walton had ensured he knew enough about the cultures of each of the eight major colors that he knew deliberate deception when it was being portrayed. ultimately, the sang were nowhere near as obtuse or rigid as they pretended to be with outsiders. he gave it good odds that this was plannedeven rehearsed. whoever green river was, she did not hold a senior enough position in the eternal cycles of the sang. this ceremony was aped from the habits of one far older than she. the rooms of our exalted guests have been prepared, along with all other requested facilities. furthermore, the third party has arrived and is waiting to greet them in their chamber. no difficulties have transpired in the meantime. we beg of our leave. most excellent. leave granted. backing away without turning, the third sister bowed upon reaching the door and disappeared upon its shutting. a low sigh slipped free from green river, uttered by both woman and fox. i shall release you thusly. i beg your pardon for twisting pleasant conversation into seeming interrogation. nah, were all curious sometimes, draus said, brushing past things but sounding unconvinced. already water under the bridge. green river smiled, her expression genuine. splendid. well. i suppose i shant keep you longer. you both look tired. tense. you should enjoy my facilities while you are here. we have a most excellent gambling arcade, and there are local circuits to enjoy. chess too, if your battleground is more of strategy than savagery. she spoke the last words eyeing avo. he met her gaze then without issue. i dont doubt that you do, draus said. but as you said tired. may we request permission to leave? green river laughed, her voice a lyrical bell chiming in the wind. you may. it has been a most insightful conversation, despite what little has been said. yeah, draus said, rising from her seat and rolling her shoulder. come on, avo. we got some sleep to catch up on. looked like he was going to be diving again soon. finally. more time to fix his sequences. improve his phantasmics. rising, they made for the door to leave, the path opening automatically as the living door sensed their encroaching footsteps. oh, green river said, one final thingtwo, actually. draus halted and turned. avo just twisted his head. should you desire to participate in sport for the circuits, know that the doors are open to you. both of you. and, mayhaps this might be more interesting to the moonblood, but we have a most excellent in-house grafter as well. one with personal experience working on your ilk. perhaps it will do you well to see her. improve upon strengths and fill lacking attributes. wordlessly, avo grunted. she wasnt wrong. that did feel interesting. it also felt like a perfect opportunity for them to implant him with a specially engineered virus. he left the room ahead of draus, deliberately planting a foot on the bar-crossing below. behind him, he heard draus huff a low laugh. just had to be a shit at the end, didnt you. need to leave. playing games with us. testing us. place is her den. unwise to stay here. draus hummed. would agree, but these are the warrens, consang. dont got no other place to stay less you wanna do some gutter divin. and she owes me enough to be good for it. avo nearly hissed with annoyance. honor? thats your justification? justification is that we signed a contract, marking us as sworn-bound. shell catch the bleeds n die before she can betray us proper-like. oh. that changed things. but yous right. they onto us. lookin close and seeing what they can get. think shes no-dragon? avo asked. draus laughed. her. no. too young. too soft. her expression then flattened. but if she finds proof for whats she suspectin, i reckon thats gonna go up the chain internally. good thing is that she wont sell us out to any outsiders. bad thing is that she might just be angling to become a proper no-dragon. part of avo was disquieted at draus openly speaking the words as a junior sang came to greet them, to take them to their residences. but looking around, there was little hidden from obvious suspicions. the walls here were alive, after all. and they were listening. they were always listening. Chapter 5-4 The Agnos chapter 5-4 the agnos the agnos are not theologians. nor are they worshippers of the old faiththough some among their number most certainly wished they were, and could be. instead, they are engineers of metaphysics. those who know the structures of metaphysical philosophy and scripture so well that they know what parts of each canon can be tweaked, and what must remain for a god to be anchored to their domains. under their guidance, the offeredthose sacrificed and sent in to fix a heaven or liminal framefor the only method of access to the absolute by creatures of mortal design is to diemaintain the power of the city and help the guilds keep their hard-fought peacen??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. -[redacted], trials of agnosis 5-4 the agnos one of the junior sang had led them toward their abode, slithering instead of walking for her body was joined with that of a twelve-foot serpent spliced with the fur and muscles of a hound. between kitchens with walls lined with chimeric wombs delivering wailing creatures biosculpted to taste both novel and delectable, avo and draus followed, their presence shrouded from the proper clientele, guided toward the employee elevator. at once, the structure reeked of iron and bone, a corralled enclosure shrouded by a layer of muscle and tissue, pulsing with each moment. it struck avo then that he was looking upon something analogous to a heartthat there was an active force lancing through the entirety of the shaft. he could sense the surging, pressurized liquids propelling the elevator up and down. blood. his primary throne of power. one that ensured his victory against the scalpers even when paired with his lacking skill. and now, all around him, he could feel a building mass automatically gravitating toward him, like he was singularity on the cusp of emergence. all he needed to do should he wish to collapse this place was plunge a tendril into the walls, and tug. then, by heaven and rend, he would cast this place into ruination. stepping into the elevator, a shiver of pleasure ran up his spine at the thought. the urge teased his mind and incensed the beast. through the entirety of the establishment, he counted hundreds of accretions scintillating with thought, moving like a dance of constellations. how many could he claim in thaum and ghosts? how many could nourish his strength and you doin alright there? draus asked, her voice thin, the intent behind her words cutting at him. split free from his building bloodlust, avo blinked. yeah. the regular nodded. good. keep it that way, if you can. warily, the sang turned to fix avo with a wary glance. he glared back at her, trying not to imagine what it would be like to strip her of flesh from the inside out and how nicely she would suit him as a mangled coat. she drew away, lip-twitching, and turned to draus. does it always reek of murderous intent? does the sun always shine? avo asked, tired of being ignored. draus wasnt his owner. mirorrhead wasnt his owner. he had no owners, and now that he was a godclad, he would greet death eternal before he went back to being someone elses pet. the sang flinched at the harshness of his words; a child not expecting such a stern reprimand, especially from a creature considered barely more sophisticated than a nu-dog. draus chuckled. word of advice, girl: dont make no assumptions bout folk in their presence. its rude. its impolite. and itll get you snuffed. iyes, apologies, the junior said. not to me, draus said, flicking her head at avo. to him. and im not kiddin. you was rude. i dont like rude no more than he does, you gettin my sync? again, the sang turned, her mouth opening, eyes narrowed at the absurdity of what she was about to do. i beg your forgiveness and understanding, esteemed ghoul. esteemed. avo chuffed a low laugh. how fascinating the way someone quailed when pressed with the weight of superior force. how easy it mustve been to spend life coddled in such a way. a sudden silence intruded into his mind, preluding the spark of an epiphany. was this how mirrorhead knew life? the guilds? a world that bent to themalways bent to them? how warped would he be if such privilege was all he knew instead of bloodlust? instead of hunger? all chained to our design, avo said, trying to fuse the matter of his words with his fleeting thoughts. draus fixed him with a look. whats that? understanding, avo said. i think. she didnt press him further. and for that, avo was thankful. at the top floor of the second fortune, the atmosphere was infused with a muted serenity set by the ambiance of waters flowing down from canals of bone along the walls, while the air was suffused with flavored incense, sweet and crisp. their room, was far down the corner, in the southern section of the building. past walls of hardened bone inlaid with jewels and jade depicting grand battles from the depths of the sea to the cold of the void, they finally reached their destination. room of the crane. 88. avo pushed his whisper through to get a closer look. just three. the junior; the third party; an augmented nu-dog carrying an alloy shotgunthe same kind avo used in the crucible. opening a narrow crack, draus muttered her thanks and let the newcomer in. the third party was a mouselike woman, dwarfed both in height and musculature by draus. cybernetics ribbed the right side of her skull, an exo-cortex. no doubt then that this augment was to make up for the damage she suffered to her visual memory capacity. external storage to bulwark against metaphysically inflicted wounds of cognition. she was dressed in a red polymer synthcoat, and a thin translucent veil ran along the right side of her face in the fashion of the ori, hiding her clan mark from outsiders. fright bled off her every movement and tension lined her sweeping gaze. her thoughtstuff fared no better, splashing and spiking with each new sensation that greeted her. and when she laid eyes on avo, her breath hitched and she reached out to grab for draus. the act was so childlike and helpless that he had to fight his instinctive predator response to maul and kill her. draus closed the door. the stranger began to hyperventilate. dr-draus, she squeaked. g-g-ghoul! draus shot avo a look and grinned. what? him? aw, kae, you dont need to worry yourself none bout avo here. he shit, he bites plenty, but i dont think youre part of his diet. kae quivered, shuffling back a few steps to stand behind draus. the regular rolled her eyes and made the introductions. avo. kae kusande. agnos. well, former agnos. kae, avo. hes a hes somethin different. belief didnt touch the shine in kaes eyes when she nodded. i-i see. alright, draus said. reckon we should link up. get this meetin started. with a wave of her hand, she activated the mechanism she threw down earlier. a stack of three autoguns extended, each tracking something beyond the walls via vibrations. with the perimeter covered, avo drew his whisper back in and held it forward. draus connected to him first, her peripheral thoughtstuff pouring into his. kae, terrified and slow to follow, offered her broken mind only after draus did. immediately, avo could taste the metallic coldness where the machine simulated thought for her. ghost-link established closed chain formed: [3] +yall hear me fine?+ draus asked, walking over to sit down on the bed. the lung mattress began pumping hard, gathering more air to comfort her mass. +y-yes,+ kae nodded frantically, arms wrapped around herself. awkwardly, she inched past avo and went to draus. he stayed standing. preferred it that way. +alright,+ draus said. +avo. kae heres someone i trust. with my life. now, in a moment, shes gonna take a look at your frame. but that might need you+ +i-i might need you to be dead,+ kaes thoughts surged out, hammering into them. draus closed her eyes, a twitch of discomfort running through her. avo, more obviously, hissed in pain. +s-s-sorry.+ +sfine,+ draus said. +just keep countin. like i taught you.+ kae nodded. +okay. okay.+ she ran her fingers past her weary eyes, grabbing her at stray tufts of hair. between her index finger and thumb did she grind the strands, her lips chanting counts as she tried to catalog each one, fibril by fibril. +alrightokay. a look! letslets take a look.+ she turned to avo and swallowed. +gonna need you to die soonif thats okay.+ well, that was the first time someone politely requested his demise. in a strange way, he found it endearing. as much as a ghoul could find anything endearing; his desire to kill her waned ever so slightly. +hes fine with it,+ draus said, speaking on his behalf. +done it plenty by now. should be more than used to it.+ he slashed his eyes over at her, the strength of his glare made twice so by raw incredulity. +more than used to it+ a thought equivalent to a derisive snort rippled from out of her mind. +aw. sorry. did i assume too much? well, kae, seein as the ghoul here feels mighty bad about dyin and dont wanna see whats burning under his hood+ +fine,+ avo growled, his thoughtstuff crackling. +do i need to do it myself?+ kae shook her head and pulled a syringe from her coat. +manticore. k-kills the p-physical mind in seconds. a-and then ill follow you in a moment.+ +follow me? how? you going to die too?+ +n-no. going togoing to use a false-hev.+ avo blinked. +a false-heaven.h-have it b-bound to me.+ he kept staring. +iits like a shared lobby.+ she held out the needle, the tip near vibrating in her unsteady hands. +cancan you please c-come over? we do it on the b-bed.+ avo grunted. well, since he was so keen on collecting ways to die, what was one more? +give it over. i inject. your hands. they shake too much.+ looking down at her hand, she nodded. +yeahyeah. g-good idea.+ Chapter 5-5 Immortal Architecture chapter 5-5 immortal architecture death is the only bridge between man and god. of course, it is. what else can a mortal do thats more absolute than death; more total? the gods i would never have called them omnipotent. such a term would be absurdmoreover if ones power has no borders how are they to define the differences between themselves? but the gods are absolute. from greatest to the smallest. parasitic to the broader tapestry of existence, but stillabsolute. each holds a specific aspect of a domainno matter how small. it is in carving these little groovesthese niches of absolute sovereigntythat god can hold shape in reality, can influence the world. but then again, it might just be because they didnt want a rival god of the same domain to eat them. after all, how should reality delineate between two gods that can weave fire from the air. its too vague. again. borders. a heaven only has as much shape as its clarity allows -high agnos ossam hariruda, on the eldritch 5-5 immortal architecture (i) +when do i start dying?+ avo asked, his attention fixed on two schools of squirming fish clashing in the overhead aquarium. beneath him, the lung bed breathed while its skin folds struggled to find the right temperature for his body. within his body, he briefly considered surging the manticore toxin through his system until he realized that would inflict him with a debt of rend. something he probably should avoid. through the sculpted arteries lining the insides of the second fortune, the haemo-aquatic lifeforms made war on each other constantly, their patterns of slaughter, feeding, birth, and death all a chaotic orchestra, yet never overwhelming. there was always enough fish to fuel the slaughter. always more emerging from the suppurating womb canals that dotted the ceiling. seated demurely on the other bed, kae, draus agnos, swallowed. she studied him wordlessly as her left index and middle fingers beat a steady rhythm, trying to wrestle calmness into her heart, the unruly organ shoving blood through her system in uncontrolled staccatos. +i-it take-take much longer than uh not much longer.+ avo let out a low breath and tried to think of anything but brutalizing the waifish woman not eight feet away from him and plucking each rib of her exo-cortex out from her skull. the murderous desire grew with each inhalation, the scent of her chrome working up through his nostrils like a whetstone. +dont know why you cant do it.+ avo said. +told ya,+ draus replied, sounding annoyed, +we gotta do this real subtle-like. dont need green river learnin anything more bout you than we need. that you+ a wave of self-inflicted delusion crashed over her surface thoughts. avo knew the flavor well. +the liminal frame she mentioned. it dont necessarily+ +yes. it is.+ avo said. +i have it inside me. have a meta-fac. only reason i probably survived the scalpers earlier.+ the regular was busy assembling some kind of microdrone. it looked to be a drone the size and shape of a nu-bird. canary or a sparrow perhaps. avos knowledge of nu-ornithology was only slightly north of none. the diminutive machine held no weapons but possessed a bulb-like camera on its underside. scouting implement. like his whisper. always useful. outside, her facial demeanor was one of pure focus. inside, her thoughtstuff tensed, drawing together as if anticipating a ward breach. +i aint gonna lie, avo.+ draus said. +were in a world of shit.+ we, avo wanted to ask her using his ghost. except his words grew slippery, while his thoughts dissipated like smoke. he blinked. he forgot why he blinked. he wanted to move his arms, but lead seemed to line his muscles and veins. he made a noise then, a sloppy gurgle as his tongue slipped free out from the corner of his mouth. it looked akin to a dead serpent hanging from a ledge in his periphery. spots formed in his vision embers singing through old rolls of film. dappled blankets of spreading blindness formed like snowflakes over his perception, each epicenter flattening out to join the others. the last thing that greeted him was kae, her face rapt with curiosity, more student greeting specimen than broken agnos quailing away from a ghoul. a single shining tear was sliding down the corner of her right cheek. strange, how it shone +w-wow. took three minutes t-to achieve pa-paralysis. ithe m-must particularly resilient, even for a ghoul.+ through the narrowing tunnel that was his mind, a final dollop of thought dripped. +un-unless he has s-something that is actively-actively tuning his s-synapses+ and then, for the briefest of moments, actual nothingness. it was like true slumber. it was silence. it was bliss. and from his muted paradise, avo fell, his consciousness tearing through the thinness of mortality down into the eldritch resplendence of his soul. it was brighter than he remembered. wider. initializing resurrection - 1% simulating liminal frame and floating across the crimson sheen that was his sangeist, a new presence greeted his descent, the sound of howling winds rising, beckoned by his arrival to the clapping of thunderous hooves. like an arrowhead cast into a pool, he felt his consciousness plunge into his heaven, the blood pulling upon him, embracing him. as the inner confines of his ontological vessel manifested with another ripple of radiance cast from his souls ever-turning flame, the winds around were alive with motion. across from him, gripped in a thin sheen of translucence was the galeslither, its presence forming and fading with paltry sups of secondhand light spilling loose from within the heaven of blood avo had grafted unto himself. the separation between his heavens lay in a place beyond his understanding. fortunately, this time, another presence descended. it was the shine of a falling teardrop of crystalline, its bright drinking from his. initializing resurrection - 7% like a division line, the comet trailed between his current heaven and the galeslither, a partition; a sage sent from on high. it was then that avo realized what looked to be a comet was no comet at all, but a daisan altar formed from tessellated matter, celestial and ineffable in its patterns. and as the platform descended to a hover, its empyrean-bright archway greeted him, its position to him so close that its curves looked like the doors to a stable, with the galeslither''s three heads swaying dormant, existing only instants between brushstrokes of wind. atop the dais, then, came the form of the agnos, kae. it grew obvious to avo why it descended as a teardrop. the entirety of this platformthis false-heavenwas streaming out from her right eye in streams coruscating and pellucid. her tears parting, the structure of her vehicle bent and fused above, around, and beneath her. an altar shone in front of her speck-like figure, the shape and size of her being dwarfed by his sangeist. it was the difference between a hawk and a gnat. avo? kae asked, her voice surprisingly stable here, her tone fluent. can you sense me? yes, he said. across his heaven, the blood rippled, and the twin patterns that burned atop him shone down on the agnos like a glowering spotlight. here though, she quivered not before him. it was a contrary thing, how frail she was in reality compared to this self-actualization of her being, come to greet him. kae froze. from her right eye, the shine of her false heaven flared. streams of silvery tears slashed over him as she peered into his ontology. what are you doing? avo asked. false-heavens used to be called oracles. the thing that gods would gift us. mortals. usually took an eye. gave a piece of anomalous glass or marble. let them gaze through the ancients they chose. but but we learned how to turn it around. learned how to use it to peer back through them. between the flowing strands of shimmering pale flooding from the pinprick that was her right eye and the twin burning symbols boring down from the jaw-like spire of his sangeist, it looked like they were cleaving at each other with blades of clashing light. avo. ii need you to bring up the specs for your sangeist. and your first circle.+ heaven - [sangeist] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 40 thaum/c hell - [first circle] domain: (matter/entropy) thaumic requirements - 10 thaum/c rend vents online her tears dripped in through the veil of his exterior, interfacing with the fires of his soul. canons and hubris too, please. domain of (matter) canon: alchemization - the master of this domain can now subsume and mimic the structure and effects of one piece of physical matter; only one piece of matter may be mimicked at a time unless the canon is altered canon: haemification - the master of this domain can now subsume solid matter into blood; the conversion will only proceed on tactile contact and if the blood submerges the matter entirely hubris: only solid matter can be converted. any attempts to mimic liquid or gas will result in thaumic backlash (x2) domain of (blood) canon: haemokinesis - the master of this domain can now accelerate and manipulate all blood they are in contact with; speed and force of the blood will mirror the masters natural limits unless the canon is altered canon: linger - the master of this domain can now eject the constructs they shape from their blood; a binding percent of rend will be generated for each construct fabricated in correspondence with their shape and mass hubris: only up to eighty tons of blood can be manipulated at once (x2) hell - (first circle) canon: the breath of the withered - the master of this domain can now expel their total rend into an entropic gust of wind that causes the rapid destabilization of matter; all physical matter will be affected aside from the master - this canon is absolute daemon: expelling excess entropy into a single point of matter will birth an anathema of ruin to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved two extra canons? she uttered. where did they attention: (prototype) meta-fac functions activated my my gods, kae whispered, disbelief stretching her eyes wide. from the roots of his frame, the mem-data flowed up her tears and into her skull. they they couldnt have. this itll make the agnostics useless. a sudden understanding flashed across her face. make us obsolete. thaumic cycler. show me. thaumic cycler: 57 thaum/c fifty-seven fifty-seven. she was pacing before him, running her fingers and counting strands of hair again. youve killed fifty-seven people. about. draus got some. took them afterward. come to think of it, why hadnt that happened earlier with the pilot of the galeslither? kae, interfaced with his being, drank in his thoughts. it didnt happen because in the in the crucible theres. no sovereignty. no no pre-marked soul for delivery. when when you kill on the surface, its been direct? youve made contact with their vessels using your heaven? yes. kae threw her head back and let out a squeaking laugh. you youve been stealing essence from the guilds. echoes that belong to them. kae looked incredulous. how how did you even get this burned into you it couldntno, right, draus said you couldnt remember. that drove a spike of displeasure into avo. draus had given away too much. revealed too much about him. between necrojacks, this would have been grounds for a nulling. butbut, kae said, her expression beaming, a new vigor alight behind her eyes. this is new its very new. but i can figure it out. show you how it all works. you can store heavens. it remembers heavens. it doesn''t just implant them. thats thats why the fire ripples! its alive. or or simulating your thoughts. like.. a like a metamind. its brilliant. its design is fantastic. its she paused. lets start with something simple. open the sangeist. show me your bare soul. taken aback by the agnos sudden explosion of passion, avo did as she asked slowly, warily, wondering just how much more she knew compared to him. with a slight thought, he compelled the blood to open around his sangeist as she peered in. as she stood, bathed before his eldritch furnace that was his heart, kaes mouth opened slightly in wonderment. your flame it burns inwards it''s pouring down into you its inverted. soulfire shouldnt be inverted. meaning? avo asked. it means that i have a theory. she turned then to stare at the dormant galeslither hovering behind her, head tilting. a thoughtful expression took hold of her. perhaps, it is time for me to impart upon you the basics of agnosticism. and how our blessed frames were meant to be used." she giggled again. "they... they can''t excommunicate me again... again." Chapter 5-6 Immortal Architecture (II) chapter 5-6 immortal architecture (ii) do you know what i think curtailed the gods during their long reign over us? reactivity. worship they were like... like parasites! they fed from our deaths, and our deaths shaped them. it was like they deliberately shackled themselves to the design which we bestowed upon them to better feast from us; to better rule their corners of reality. as they shaped us, so too were they shaped by eating us. ha. it''s... it''s a bad diet! ahem. sorry. i... this isn''t funny to anyone else but me. oh, no kae, you''re apologizing to yourself now... anyway. a common blood slave meant to be meat for the eldritch in years yonder had such parochial dreams compared to that which festers within the slavering bloodlust of us new vultunites. do you think a slave dreamed of chrono-chain bombs and spatiokinetics? we did! and by fusing our dead gods, we made weapons that could squeeze excess time into ingots of matter from the shine of a star! we could build planar fortresses not bound by structure but by disjointed flows of space twinned to running streams of water! i suppose in a strange way, the chains between us and the gods ran both ways... like... chains from chains... -mem-log of agnos kae kusande,musings 5-6 immortal architecture (ii) learning from the mind-shattered agnos reinforced avos gratefulness for waltons tutelage. where his father was concise and focused toward practical application, the agnos was a leaking cauldron: filled with knowledge but leaking, and always trying to grasp at vaporous theories that had once been solid to her. ...s-so. this. this place around us? its another realityreality. kae strained momentarily, trying to keep her mind and words running on the same track. butbut as you can tell, itsits not that large. not compared to the totality she drifted again. it already felt like she had been talking for days, but his resurrection was still stuck at twenty-one percent. the little agnos liked to lecture. avo strangled his annoyance. she was broken. possibly more than that. with how utterly ruined the outer shell of her mind looked, he wondered just how much lingering damage ori-thaum left festering within. it would not be beneath or beyond them to pour viruses into her memory chains, to eat away thoughts before they could manifest properly. he wondered what she might''ve done to incur such a wretched fate. --the totality of existence! she suddenly declared. she gestured toward his soul again. yours its differentdifferent, yes, because its more like software and hardwarehardware? she clutched at her head and gave a frustrated moan. ii used to be able to tell people thingshold onto my wordsmemories took so much from me broke mebroke me for doing the right thing. he couldnt tell if she was sobbing or just lamenting. through her false heaven, she had been crying this entire time so her anguish came masked. but her moment of self-pity did not linger. sighing, he watched as something steeled inside of her. a thought perhaps. a new approach that she could try. she clenched her fist as if trying to grasp his soul. soul. its not an engine its everything. simulation of another a reality under a reality. but also something that can overwrite prime reality. understand? the soulfire burns to spread swallow... usurp existence with with your own reality and then layer your heavens over it. hells too." avo halted her. "wait. summation. soul is a subreality? one that can grow larger? one that can swallow parts of the... main?" "the... the technical term is overriding," kae said. the simplicity of his words made her face contort with discomfort. strangely, he knew the feeling; the bitter taste one gets when trying to convey the full magnitude and complexity of necrotheurgy to someone of the laity. still, what he needed right now wasn''t theory. it was understanding. the academics of thaumaturgy could come later. right now, he needed to comprehend its design as a weapon. "i suppose you can see it as that..." kae said, sounding slightly disappointed that her earlier lecture has splashed against him, rather than filling him. when... when the soul over-overwrites, reality rupturesbut your heaven pulls it back inside. inside. then then counter-miracle. your hell. the anti-heaven. inflicts opposite rend. inverse damage. rend plugs rend. entropy leaves the system. equilibrium is maintained. and finally, a flash of clarity. insight caught flame in the corners of his mind as he began to understand. a liminal frame was a metaphor for many things because it was many things. it was supposed to be a system unto itself, but still capable of spreading the fundamental laws that ran the confines of its enclosure over reality. she spoke of this, then. the progress coming hard, but even drips could fill the bottom of a bucket. the assembly of his form came in three major aspects. the soul. the cycler. and his nous--a construct she best described as the melding of his mind and willpower. two things left dismantled from a person''s being upon death after the godsfall. once, souls could not grant themselves ever-sustained succor. hence the need for mass sacrifices and hyper-inflicted dogma. like tyrants festering beneath your mind and flesh, the gods had taken to ravenous feasts to fuel their needs. empires rose and fell at their whims, the history of this period a calculated slaughter in the great game between the eldritch lords. idheim was a slaughterhouse. the gods were butchers and feeders both. and humanity was the meat. wasn''t hard to see where the guilds got their habits from. sometimes, your abusers can still inflict their power over you. even long after their passing. so was avo reminded by the constant burning violence that boiled through his every sinew while he was still clasped in his living flesh. "you... your heaven, then is like a... a living coat over... uh... an element. or concept." kae was getting slightly better at holding herself together. her growing focus might''ve come from the narrowing of her topic. "gods... gods used to be purely elemental... you know--very interesting... but with there being many gods of fire, they started eating--" "focus." his interruption startled her, but she took no time getting back on track. "your... your heaven. the sangeist you''re using right now... has many parts. the first.... first is the domains. what... what aspects or concepts in reality it alters... it''s..." she chuckled as if fondly remembering something, "something shaped by us. to narrow the throne of a god." "... not... usually the way it''s done... at least one domain needs to match. otherwise," she gesticulated, pushing the fingers of one hand into the palm of her other, "it''s not lined parallel. perpendicular domains are asymmetric, and... and the rend doesn''t cross over right. subrealities aren''t aligned that way." symmetry. sequencing phantasmics relied much on the concept as well. necrothurgy and agnosticism were both studies under the school of thaumaturgy, by technicality, but the nature of the latter was deleterious to reality, while the former was like scaffolding--affecting only cognition. on the topic of hells though, a problem yet remained. he was generating too much rend and wasn''t soaking it fast enough. "hell. i''ll need a new one. where?" the way he asked it knocked a stutter into kae''s dais. "i--uh, do you have a... a chronologically accelerated plane? or prison?" he judged her expression to see if she was mocking him, but found only confusion. "no." she winced. "could... could claim one from an enemy godclad. or... or..." she blinked. "you have a meta-factory. you can... you can unmake heavens... deconstruct them?" "yes." a smile spread over her face like a growing fire, savagery briefly glinting in her eyes. "good. you can... can build a hell then. break down a heaven. fold it inward. link it to your heaven... heaven of a shared domain." a location of interest sparked in avo''s mind. each district had at least one techno-thaumic reactor contributing a local heaven or two to the overarching sovereignty. ten districts made up a guild-taxable sovereignty; that was the case during more reasonable times, but after the war, plenty had been left fallen. in disrepair. like burner''s way. there was a fallen heaven there. right across from scalper territory, but there was a promise... "how can a rupture be stabilized?" avo asked. "a fallen heaven?" the agnos'' response was all reflex, slipping free before she even fully realized what he was implying. "should the... heaven''s system be returned to equilibrium you can... you can break it down without..." her voice trailed off. her eyes widened in dawning comprehension. "you want to harvest a heaven from a reactor?" no sense in hiding it. he would need her to help him understand how to conduct the stabilization process properly. at least for the first time. he should also make a vicarity of the operation for the sake of being thorough. "that... it''s..." she stuttered. "you object." "it''s a great... i love the idea! fu... fuck the guilds!" unexpected. again, a shine of that hatred there, but it dissolved fast along with her thoughts. it seemed that the only thing keeping her mind together and not a blank mess was the external cortex she had implanted. his prior curiosity regarding the damage inflicted upon her sprouted seeds of genuine interest now; hers was a story he would delve into once he claimed a ghostjack. "you... you''re going after one of the fallen heavens right... right?" his sangeist warbled blood in a loose approximation of a grunt. "okay. right now, you have a heaven of blood. domains are matter and blood. hell is tied to matter... matter--i recommend you keep going for matter if you can. if... if you can. if... if you can get a one-to-one ratio in terms of thaumic mass... or more in favor... favor of the hell... you can have... keep your miracle-vent cycles minimal." "equilibrium is primarily based on mass? of the same domain." "y-yes. from... uh... from one aspect of subreality into a parallel one. like... like an abacus. avo thought he got that, though he didn''t fully know what an abacus was. "i--it''s mostly thanks to your soul, you know," she smiled, and this time, there was no hate tied to it. she was happy; a creature in her element. "yours... it''s the most advanced subreality i''ve ever seen. it''s... it''s nearly alive and it''s... it''s entirely integrated with your nous. no... no core-tuning needed... at-at all. but if it was so special, how did it end up with him? why wasn''t it burning inside some ark-top guilder? unfortunately, avo had a guess for this question. walton. his father had something to do with this, despite being dead. whatever ninth column was, he would not meet them unprepared and ignorant. his continued survival could not be left to coincidence. "so. my system has a meta-fac. and is more reactive. can break down heavens internally?" "automatically... is what i''d say," kae said. "it''s like a condensed system of self... self-worship. no need to throw in sacrificial prisoners to modify or rebuild." she sighed, looking on in admiration, the expression matching that of a wager leering at a new aerovec. your flame. its specialspecial. its inverted. also, it''s rippling. expanding. other patterns of soulfire older ones, yes, those theythey dont ripple. its an external furnace built around a... a cycler. fixed size. dismembered from a god. no growth. no meta-fac. like... like dead matter." wait, avo said, halting her questions. mine emits. others cant do that? a strain spread through her features. her hand sifted through her hair again, her lips counting as if she was passing prayer beads through her fingers. its its like yours is a sea. itswater. deep. growing. but remembers as well. and also more than water. cancan shape things. older ones are are like a container. uh... you have something like... like a full-spectrum nanosuite. normal... normal souls are just... just cybernetics. one soul. heavens. hells. fixed build. needs sacrifices to tune. and that, then, was also why he was gaining ghosts and thaums with every kill. at least when he made physical contact with them. he was pulling them into himself. drinking them empty, and snatching them away from the guilds through the act of killing. "there''s... there''s more but..." kae turned and looked at the galeslither again. behind her, the horse-heads stared on blankly, the stuff of their skulls a swirling mass of storms centered around their eyes. the fissuring ribs of lighting at the chest remained frozen then as if the bolts were not allowed to flow--were not granted enough stay in the local reality flow. "i want to conduct an experiment," she said. "i want you to switch heavens." Chapter 5-7 Tower or Sea chapter 5-7 tower or sea "the fuck is this shit? a galeslither? the heaven you earned is a fucking galeslither? a heaven for a first-sphere? your liminal frame... a first-sphere too? jaus fucking alive--why the fuck did we spend so much on you, then? is this my fault? didn''t i give you the best genes? the best life? what''s that? i did? then why didn''t you even manage a second sphere? your half-sister managed it! and she''s practically a subhuman mongrel. her half-strand father didn''t even splice her! you had every fucking advantage you worthless piece of godsdamned gene trash... -conversation between a mother and her son, axtraxis academy of highflame 5-7 tower or sea disentangling from the sangeist was a disquieting sensation. it felt like he was hatching his mind out from his flesh. considering his current ontological state, however, perhaps the analogy was closer to fact. sinuous arteries lined like metal and blood both snapped free from the fires of his soul, parting at a shrug of his will. dismembering himself from the sangeist was akin to ejecting both limb and senses from his body. behind him, the shed heaven shivered like a mirage, remembered, but no longer solid. heaven detached - [sangeist] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 40 thaum/c avo wondered if it would be possible to rename the heaven down the line. it wouldn''t be fitting to keep the designation of sangeist once its capabilities outstripped that of a common golem. a tool needed a name that matched. "kae. heavens. can they be redesignated?" his thoughts were bound to her false-heaven now, her tears bouncing up and down like a wavelength. she blinked, not expecting his sudden inquiry. "y-yes. root functions. dive down while your... uh... dive down inside the heaven." he wasn''t looking forward to that. the last time was like trying to drown himself in a sea of data. it was like thinking through a deluge that flooded your mind constantly with thoughts and excess mem-data. but then again, that was what the root was supposed to contain: foundational mem-data. the galeslither greeted him as a foreign entity. he would have fancied possessing the powers of flight as a younger ghoul; during a time when he constantly hungered for mockeries and other birds. now, his favor lay more in the practical aspects. when he faced this heaven as a foe, it had killed him twice, both times trapping him within its demiplanar embrace, claiming him in a cage of howling wind. that power belonged to him now. or so it seemed. he had yet to graft it to his soul, after all. as his father had often told him: "before success is confirmed, disappointment''s always got a fighting chance." his presence greeted the solidifying vortex that formed the outer flesh of the galeslither. from his fire, the heaven''s three heads grew animated, wind sparking with repressed static steaming from their nostrils, their storm-enameled ribcage crackling with life. beneath hooves shod with grumbling, ink-black nimbuses, miniature tornados screamed their hate at the world around. shrouding the heaven was a veil of currents feeding into it, collapsing down and coursing into its body like an eternal delta, the heart of the plane, the rider of the storm. so it was through roaring swells of storming winds that avo plunged into the newest vessel he would use to clad his ontology. and where the galeslither was the heart of the storm outside, so too was he the master of its domain within. the weight of torquing air spun deep, suffusing his heaven as his cycler began to spin in pace with the whirlwind fortress that was his new vessel. grafting heaven [galeslither]... heaven grafted - [galeslither] domain: (air/space) thaumic requirements - 55 thaum/c like the sangeist, two symbols manifested to the sides of his heaven, each representing a domain. air and space were his to wield by way of wit, will, and canon. domain of (air) canon: aero-vectoring - the master of this domain can now guide and accelerate the direction of their surrounding winds with a thought at speeds comparable to that of a typhoon; only wind currents within a 400-feet radius may be drawn upon hubris: attempting to draw and shape hyper-heated air will result in thaumic backlash fascinating. another hubris that results in a rend-spike upon encountering an environmental deviance. "the... opposites are... is a common hubris," kae explained, her voice pealing clear like a crisp bell despite torrential spiral lashing at her pedestal. "most... most stormtree and sanctus heaven-builds use opposites as a template... because... because it''s like a hell. something... something that the agnos can easily modify." "hubris. can they be entirely removed?" "no," kae said. "drastically... drastically reduced at... at the cost of increasing thaumic mass, yes, but not removed. its... it''s a deliberate design. something that a god uses to set boundaries... to like a decided weakness but--but to know that it exists. like... a drawing the borders of your own personhood... maintenance of self--uh, what was i saying... self-awareness." kae studied his galeslither and gestured at his sangeist as well. "that... said, you might just... i think you can do both... you can... swap... swap heaven at... any time now..." avo peered down and noted a distinct lack of a circle attached to his thaumic cycler at the foundations of the galeslither. "sure. just need a hell first." two strange thoughts greeted him, one following the other. "kae. can i control two souls? or can i run two heavens at once?" "i... it''s been tried but... tears the nous in half and kills you. two realities do things to your being... doesn''t clone--it fragments. as... as for the heaven... yes. you... it''s been done. very popular for stormtree, in fact... but you''ll.... you''ll need more than one thaumic cycler to interface with each heaven you want. easier to fuse heaven in most cases." "thaumic cycler? how do i get one?" kae giggled. it was a hopeless sound. "simple. kill... kill and absorb the essence of a dragon." avo fell silent at the thought of that. "where are dragons now?" "no-dragons will sell them to you... from... grows nulled versions of dragons on a farm. but the cost is high... the natural-born dragons... the no-dragons'' original masters... either long massacred or missing. hiding in places between places. too valuable to be left... left alive." avo grunted, and through his new heaven, the horses neighed. "simple. not easy." "like... like many things in this city." her remaining lectures and elaborations added more to his fundamental understanding of just what he had become. through this, the waters of worry within him had calmed somewhat, this new gnosis--and the possibility of the agnos'' continued aid--proving to be a salve to his confusion. she spoke on while he half-listened. in silence, he plotted. procuring a ghostjack top priority, but after that, more task essentials grew clear for him. he needed two new hells--one to sate his sangeist, the other for his galeslither--he needed to dive through chambers and the two techs'' memories before executing whatever draus wanted to do with them; and finally, he needed to start doing step-up work on the conflux megablock. he was free now. the momentum had shifted to his side, but the task, as walton would understand it, was half done. mirrorhead was still alive, and the father was still trapped. two things avo couldn''t abide by. how clashing were these two ideals as well, the act of killing the rival godclad one of selfish hunger and retributive bloodshed, while the need to save esssus was rooted in his ethics? "...any.. anyway, i think you can probably... probably remember enough to use the frame now... somewhat..." she swallowed. "avo... i... i wanted to apolo--uh--apologize." avo''s full attention slid back over her while confusion slipped over him. "apology? why?" "i... i assumed that... as a ghoul that..." "i''d want to hurt and eat you?" "yes. that, and you being an... an animal." "not wrong. when i''m... in the flesh. i want to. hurt and eat you." kae fell silent. "oh... i thought..." "can control it. can''t ignore it." "like... like me and... my thoughts," she laughed. "no. someone hurt you. someone made me to hurt. you were born a person. i was a poorly made weapon." here, inside the soul cut away from his biological impulses, the truth flowed ever so easily, like all was weightless. "i... see," kae said. "well, i--" "changing back to sangeist now," avo said. "also. want to make you a deal." "deal?" "you help me with thaumaturgy. heavens. the art. keep teaching. want to keep learning. return: i''ll try and fix your mind." she took a step back as if the deal was a dagger driven into her gut. avo continued. "will also need to vet you first. scan memories. you understand. know draus. don''t know me." "i... do... do you really think... think you can fix it... my... my mind?" "yes," avo said, more out of selfish curiosity than certain capability. "then, i... i think we... we just might get along," she said with a faint smile. if her damage was as stimulating as it looked, avo didn''t care about getting along. what could he say? one person''s crippling was another''s education. Chapter 5-8 Alignment of Interests chapter 5-8 alignment of interests there ain''t no weapon i fear more than a ghostjack. it''s the reason i run mem-matches every day; it''s the same damned reason i don''t cast into public lobbies. you never know what kind of seeded mem-tags they got sprinkled through the public mem-packet downloads. and understand that when i say "they" i mean fucking everyone. the freedivers do it for the art and thrill; some up-jumped ganger who lucked into getting a ''jack; ori-thaum incubi, already shaping minds and memories for their shadow war... point is, if the half-strand you''re fighting''s got a ''jack, he''s the one you want to make sure is snuffed by fight''s end. because if you don''t, if you let a ''jack slip, trust me, they''ll come back for you. they''re gonna pull a visual memory of you and throw it into a recollector registry is what comes next. then? then, you best make good on the disappearing and running. new name. new look. new sequences for your meta. ''cause if you don''t, you just might wake up remembering only how to scream your own name, seein'' how they pruned all the other paths out from your mind. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 5-8 alignment of interests the practice of resurrection was bound to the nature of ones being. for those vacant of domains, resurrection is a thing of deception; a sleight of hand played against reality. this was also the method that kae had instructed him to use for his return instead of emerging forth from a threshold of blood. the nature of a resurrection was intrinsically tied to ones available domains and canons. in his prior deaths, his return had been tethered to the tactile, overwriting his original corpse to re-manifest or, in the case since his ascent from the crucible, emerging nearby the nearest concentration of blood. position anchored to where he lay dead on the lung bed, avo felt reality shudder violently, his ascent from death striking it across the jaw in a cracking backhand against all that was right, all that was sensible. as his senses clicked on, he found himself held in the boiling grasp of the beddoubtlessly heating itself to match the post-mortem cold that was his former body. resurrection - 100% implanting nous ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn engaged engaging thaumic cycler: 57 thaum/c loading phantasmics across the room, a narrow depression cupped the apartment''s entertainment system, holovision spraying particles of light in pinpricks of static. there draus sat at the end of a couch, working away, basked in the neon fractals cast by the holovision''s projector, ignorant to his return. before her, a vertical stack comprised of three revolving rings chained by an axis wrought from magnetism sang a low whine. at the center of this coldtech concentricity, a clot of beam-printed materials emitted from the inner curves of the rings burned matter into shape, fabricating plassteel carapaces from congealing particulates. on the ground before her were two spinal clasps, freshly fabricated and emitting a kaleidoscopic radiance from their ventral projectors. a field-fab. avo didn''t know she even had one on her. but then again, it shouldn''t have surprised him. regs liked to keep themselves prepared, and draus'' habit remained long after the dissolution of her rank and service. "we should envy her," avo muttered, looking up at the fishes. they didn''t respond in words, choosing still to tear into each other, darker sprays of blood pluming into the shining red waters that lined the aquarium, preying and being preyed upon. but he supposed they were as close to joy and terror as anything could be. feeding and fed upon. more impulse than choice or enlightenment. perhaps things should be seen as the opposite. perhaps it is he and the fish that should be envied, true children of new vultun that they are. from his periphery, he saw a strand of thoughtstuff slowly creeping into notice, manifesting indicators in his cog-feed. kae was trying to initialize a link-chain again. trying, but halted. through the horrendous cracks inflicted over the outer lattice of her mind, he heard the ghosts within her squirm, their presences swimming beneath her thoughtstuff in the form of bubbling anxiety, as an eternal clash, her exo-cortex constantly reuploading her memories, her affliction constantly dissolving them. fragmenting strands of thought hissed from the wounds of her mind like steam from a cracked tea kettle. the beast inside him twitched. her weakness, plain in flesh and mind, aroused his violence like a herb-scented meal would one''s hunger. still, her damage was too fascinating--he couldn''t consider killing her until after his study was finished. but to even begin, he knew what he needed. had known since he resurrected in the maw. he needed to get his ghostjack back. without hesitation, he connected his thoughtstuff to the agnos and regular. the former winced, her form looking small on draus'' lung bed, back to the wall and rubbing her arm awkwardly. the latter, however, gave nothing away. she merely continued tuning the holo-model of that which she was printing. ghost-link established closed chain formed: [3] +how long since death?+ avo asked. across the room, the fabricator whined its last as draus pulled an oblong-shaped helmet from its containment field. +''bout six and a half hours. would''ve figured you for dead. ''cept kae''s been crying into you for a while. never get used to that.+ she turned and stared at the agnos from the corner of her eye. +so? how''s our ghoul''s soul? is shit ''bout as fucked as i reckon?" kae shrugged so timidly that it might as well have been a shiver. +p-probably worse. m... single most... uh... advanced liminal frame i... i ever interfaced with.+ she chuckled. +a different frame... f-fit for a different kind of godclad.+ draus'' lip thinned. +can''t tell if that''s a compliment or an insult." avo, too, found himself curious. +c... compliment!+ kae provided, a sudden panic overtaking her. her side of the link spiked a rising wave of nervousness that crashed through the chain. it rattled draus'' end but splashed back into straightness on avo''s. he sensed it coming from the shifts in her thoughtstuff. the couch squelched as draus rose, the ground beneath pushing the furniture leggings out from its carpet-like biomass with the parting of weight. picking up her newly printed helmet and a holocoat clasp, she walked over to avo. "here," she said, speaking directly instead of using her meta. "for you." she handed him the helmet first and the clasp after. "took the initiative to scan your skull while you were sleepin''. found some time to work in a fab-job after digging through mem-data relatin'' to conflux hq. it''ll protect your eyes from mean ol'' master daylight if you gotta look up for some reason." avo took the helmet from her. its exterior was like the shell of a beetle with three v-shaped outer lenses for him to see. different visual functions probably. cautiously, he peered inside trying to glean some understanding from its design despite holding no comprehension of coldtech. +yeah.+ draus frowned. +that his name? i asked him before i pulled a runner. wouldn''t answer me or nothin'' then.+ +found out through syndicate circuit. used him as entertainment. ghoul-feed.+ a flicker of loathing manifested itself as a twitch in the regular''s expression. +it''s why i wanted to keep them three alive,+ draus said. +the two techs and the one that likes to talk. might get some useful intel from them. maybe you could turn them too if you''re as nova of a ''jack as you say.+ +yes,+ avo said, understanding the use of chambers now. with a proper possessor phantasmic and a well-designed auto-seance, the enforcer could go from mirrorhead''s puppet to his. some parts of the idea pleased him. mostly, he still just wanted to eat him. +will need ghostjack first. before i can do anything. present phantasmics insufficient to conduct this dive.+ almost silently came kae''s thought. +y--you could b-buy the sequences to one... to one in the deep bazaar. place an order... have... have it dream-dropped into your... your mind.+ it was an idea. something that made sense from a glance, but not from practice. avo had done his fair share of dives for the deep bazaar, and he knew how they worked. more importantly, however, he knew how ghostjacks worked, in form, function, and market. to put it simply, ordering the sequences to a ghostjack was like trying to buy an antimatter bomb: there were ways of doing it, but those ways tended to get you scalpeled by one of the guilds upon tracing your transaction. his whisper and a ghostjack were technically both phantasmics in the same way that a cheap mizuhada seagull and a voidwatch supercarrier were both vehicles: one had a specific set of functions it was limited to, and the other could modify and edit memories down to the minute of details. with a whisper, he could crack poor wards and pierce minds by leaving using them as unstable thought-shivs of trauma--a sloppy, desperate way of fighting that incurred a cost on him each time he slammed his wards against theirs. using a ghostjack, however, he might not need to fight at all. with it rising over the structure of his metamind like a pylon--a broadcasting tower--he could mimic memories and smuggle his thoughtstuff past the wards of another, or alter the sequences of his ghosts to make them proper weapons. that would let him reach into someone else''s mind and-- avo''s mind stuttered to a halt. he didn''t need to buy or assemble a phantasmic. why do that when he could just take it... and settle a grievance at the same time. the captain. the one who captained the ship he woke on. the slaver. it was how she cut his senses directly, tearing the fabric of his cognition and rewiring his mind to drown in looping nightmares. he didn''t know her name, but he remembered her face, and more importantly, he had the names of her crew. that, then, was something that just might be purchasable as information. +draus,+ avo asked. +green river. does she have a recollector here?+ +depends.+ draus turned. +mostly on the imps i throw at her? and before that: why?+ +because i know who to get a ghostjack from,+ avo said. +you like traffickers?+ a faint semblance of disgust crawled over draus'' face. +only when they scream. you?+ +thing of taste for me.+ kae shivered. how fast she was to forget he was a ghoul. it was flattering, in some regard. draus leaned back against the couch and sighed. +how big a run is this gonna be, you reckon? and do you even know where to look?+ +mazzas junction. deep gutters. got her face. got the face of her crew. remember the ship. works in the maw. not a hard target if we surprise her.+ quietly, draus studied him. +avo. you be straight with me. we goin'' after this... smuggler. is it just because you know she got a ghostjack?+ he considered lying to draus, but something just didn''t feel right about it. and why should he lie? his reason was justified. there were just additional wants involved as well. +no. also want to eat her. and she sold me to crucible.reasons coincide. practical. pleasurable.+ a stretch of silence followed. draus stared at him. he stared at draus. the agnos'' eye flicked between the both of them as if they were her parents, on the verge of a fight. +with the ''jack i''m better,+ avo said. +can sequence you better phantasmics. can maybe fix her.+ draus shot a glance at kae and turned her attention back to avo. +we do this fast. and i set the op. you synced with me on that?"+ +yeah,+ avo said, trying to hold back his salivation beneath his helmet, +i''m synced.+ +c... can i come... come too?+ kae asked. both avo and draus looked at her. the regular picked at her nose. +well, kae,+ draus said. +that depends. can you get real good at snuffin folk within the next day or so?+ kae considered the question and scrunched her face hard, trying to keep her thoughts. +i could... could potentially trick avo... into dying after accumulating too much rend and perform a usurpation on him... take... take over his frame. so... yes.+ avo stared. draus stared. +i say we take her with us,+ avo said, very interested in what a "usurpation" was. +worst case. she dies. i eat her. we find a new agnos.+ kae nodded. +i... i''m fine with that. i... i''m not staying here... alone. don''t... don''t trust them.+ she squeaked. +the--the no-dragons, i mean! the sang are lovely people!+ avo grunted. +don''t care for how they taste.+ draus'' stare trailed off as she frowned, eyes growing distant. +dra... draus?+ kae asked. +yo... are you okay?+ the regular nodded slowly. +yeah. just... not used to being the... stable one is all.+ Chapter 5-9 Subtle chapter 5-9 subtle a run is not about meticulous planning but objectives. a planner''s task is not to anticipate every possibility down to the most minor detail but to layer every preventative measure possible to ensure that the team is always the one with the momentum and to ensure their extraction before the tides can turn. for the group''s ultimate survival in the face of ever-shifting circumstances, however, the charge lies with each and every member to do their part. selection of assets in new vultun comes into a few categories. cheap and replaceable at the bottom. powerful but expensive at the top. despite common advice, there is merit to possessing a roster of "feed" operatives for a blender-op. if nothing else, their deaths will serve as a decent roadmap for your actual squires down the line... -[redacted], chapter 12 of the troubleshooter''s doctrine 5-9 subtle captain aseleri of the mawfarer ii was an easy woman to find. it took less than three hours for someone bearing her visual and audio markers to be flagged by the no-dragon''s recollector. the phantasmal engine''s scans ran only four thousand imps thanks to being narrowed down to the gutters of mazza''s junction and had located several figures of note from avo''s mem-data. the captain and her crew were daily customers at the local circuits, especially a moderately-known establishment called the butcher''s lair, which hosted special showcases on different nights, ranging from beast-on-beast battles with the creatures sculpted from bidded designs to mini-crucibles in which new bioforms were showcased to potential buyers via their efficiency at killing badly armed survivors. from the second fortune, draus had procured a "secondhand" doldrum class commercial aerovec. it was a century out of date in terms of design and avo suspected the delightful scent of brain matter still wafting in the air belonged to the car''s former owner. judging from all the past-due bills stuffed in their glove-box, their probable demise reeked of being caused by a debt-related issue. still, it served their needs most nicely, with five passenger gimbals within its confines, a full spectrum optical array for three-hundred-and-sixty-degree situational awareness, and a bead-wrapped locus that looked more like a piece of decor. "heh," draus had chuckled upon interfacing her ghosts with the locus, "safe travels." she shot a look at the ceiling, the spinning shine of her augmented eyes picking up something avo''s couldn''t. "sang consider it a bad omen to ride in somethin'' stained with the stench of death, you know?" "can''t like me much then?" avo said. the regular snorted. "nah. they don''t see much difference between you and a particularly vicious nu-hound variant." the inception-assassination they were plotting could barely be considered a run. it was also an operation that draus reserved the right to pull the plug on should something even feel sour to her. prior to their departure, avo pulled street models of the local area for study. the butcher''s lair''s entrance was right next to the elevators of a formerly abandoned megablock turned syndicate gutter market. it was placed that deep down to keep it far and away out from the notice of official authorities. from the way it was described, it looked to be a sort of "neutral" territory between the syndicates; a place of numbness for gangers, wagers, and street nomads alike. the enforcement of local rules, then, was enforced by a loose collective of a mixed band of peacekeepers provided by the sovereignty''s major syndicates. groups like the scalpers, dead lotus, maharada''s glaives, and the neon bleeders were all named as primary sponsors. conflux went unregarded, a silent note before its rivals. avo wondered how mirrorhead tolerated that. from the actions of his former owner, the man couldn''t tolerate any will that wasn''t his own. but then again, perhaps that was why the other godclad didn''t participate. because he would have to share his toys and profits. mirrorhead did have that stench to him--the want for relative dominance over absolute gains. traffic ran clogged through the arteries sprawling across the spine of the warrens, with each change of sky-lane inflicting a micro-tax. syndicates owned different parts of the city, and the veins of public transit were just another piece of the pie. just one level above the anarchy of the gutters, a faint mimicry of civilization was being attempted by a group of thugs cleaved between legitimacy and criminality. by technicality, there were guilders down here. district councils. local constables and guild-sanctioned security. but in function, they wouldn''t be seen until one went a level above to reach the throat. by the point someone rose to light''s end, the stench of the underlayers would be choked off by the plate beneath them, and proper paladin-enforced order would take hold, and proper thoughtscans to parse the fated and fateless would soon follow. it took a total of a hundred and ten imps for them to finally slip over the lip of layer one. as they slipped past the threshold ruled by the syndicates and the roiling darkness lashed with fractals of neon and speckled with intermittent bursts of gunfire. where they descended, few other aerovecs followed, and those that did were armed and armored. the gutters was something between a sprawling wound and a doorway after all. down here, the darkness came alive at times, hacking out its daily supply of feral ghouls and other horrors leftover from the uprising like phlegm. and that wasn''t even getting to the gangers and syndicates trying to expand their corners. draus pulled up the deepnav maps avo downloaded of the local area. the stalls of the gutter market dotted the steps leading up into the foyer of the block, while quick-fabbed bridges and watchtowers housed turret drones meant to keep the peace. spottings of syndicate grown nu-dogs also displayed a second layer of security--one that was meant to prevent the use of bombs or bioweapons. as they slowed to finish their approach, a thousand rings of shimmering thoughtstuff greeted avo. most of the crowd wore their thoughts naked. too poor to afford even a secondhand meta, too poor to afford wards. good. that would narrow the search radius considerably, with the captain being one with their mind properly encased in phantasmal armor. "so," draus said, "from what we got, we know that our to-be-victim here is a nightly visitor of this here butcher''s lair. seeing that we''re running close to dusk now, i think we oughta make this run all quiet-like. snuff her nice and quiet before she makes it down. took a peek at the body density in the den and it ain''t pretty. no easy kills there." "that''s all we ask," draus said. "we cast into the vec''s locus when we need you. that fails, switch to your coldtech frequency. you know the one." kae nodded. "y-yeah." with a thought, draus opened the doors. air rustled in, bringing with it that familiar gutter ambiance of gunfire, screaming engines, and distantly booming music bearing so much bass that it could probably shake dust free from water. just ten feet below were the cracked roof windows of an abandoned g-station. "alright, avo," draus said. "i''ll drop first. you follow after." "like before," he said. "yep," draus said. "''cept you ain''t such a soft-target no more." she jabbed him lightly in the shoulder and stepped over the edge, plunging down with the pull of gravity. "avo," kae said. he turned. "we... we should be far enough from... from the sovereignty that most thaums and ghosts flow... uh... ghost flow directly to you. physical contact is... is most optimal for... for your frame, but... but proximity should work. so... so a ranged option... is-is also theoretically possible." "good to know," avo said. she smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. something about her vulnerability made her seem deeply out of place down here; something else about how fast she warmed to his presence ever since he mentioned his interest in trying to fix her mind made him wonder if she was always so trusting. bearing such thoughts in mind, he leaped down after draus, trying to imagine who the agnos was before the unmaking of her mind. a carpet of glass cracked in a chorus as he landed. draus was already peeking along a corner, the microdrone she was tinkering with earlier hovering over her shoulder. following in her stead, he cast out his whisper and splashed his perception over all that was around them. a few gangers in a nearby alley; half-dressed, half-chromed, poorly armed. across the street, the homeless mingled with the joyfiends, looking for new scavenge to sell on the streets. what caught his eye were the warded minds of six holo-veiled figures, their forms veiled but their movements limping and staggered. street squires. that was avo''s guess. freelance mercenaries that worked for imps and nothing but. "path ahead''s cleared," draus said. "think there''s a cadre of squires passin'' the streets in front of the market. they look green enough to shoot anyone who looks armed." avo grinned. that would give him a reason to fight back. "i''m unarmed." "you''re also tall, thin, and move all jittery. avoid them before we post up. don''t need them rememberin'' us in any way, you synced?" "yeah. not my first dive." "ain''t a dive, avo, it''s a run. shit can get stupid right-quick during runs." she turned to look at him again. "and i wasn''t shittin'' you about the pullin'' the plug. if i say abort, we abort. better that we let ''er slip than get exposed ourselves." "yeah," avo agreed. the beast inside him didn''t. four hundred pounds of meat back at the second fortune and already it was beginning to itch again. it was as if all the recent killings had opened a chasm in his appetite. they exited the g-station like two specters, their bodies lined with the coned translucence of neon as ads slid over them, bathing the world around them in light. across the street, four guards stood at watch outside the perimeter of the block. the walls of the structure were plated with additional sheets of plassteel, plugging up any rents or fissures leftover by the war, and leaving only the entrance accessible. still, it was a better option than taking the typical route of using the elevator itself. one that required the syndicates to vet and confirm your identity before allowing you entry. not exactly what avo or draus needed right now. scents warred in the air, exotic meats and different gene-spliced meals trickling forth from the market. the gutters themselves carried the same combo it always did: stale water, fecal matter, and tangy rust. +four guards out front,+ draus said, casting her ghost into his mind. their wards shone opaque and dull, shells rife with vulnerabilities. +could crack them. drop them. even with what i have right now.+ +leave ''em. keep it quiet. they ain''t bright, but even a complete fool can see when a mind''s leakin''. we do this with minimal noise.+ with a wave, she sent her microdrone after them, the little machine sailing forth more needle than arrow. yet, like a thread it greeted the guards, piecing four necks in quick succession. a stumble entered their gait, and then came the nauseous expressions. groaning, the four stumbled aside, fleeing to their separate corners to empty their stomachs. avo frowned. +hm. still seems noisy to me.+ draus shrugged. +they ain''t dead. and they ain''t gonna report the fact they got sick while on watch to their bosses. be like it never happened. now. let''s go find our victim and get this done.+ and, shrouded by their coats and unseen by the guards, two figures slithered into the gutter market to find their mark. Chapter 5-10 Blindside chapter 5-10 blindside "look, sometimes shit just goes sideways, and you''re not the one who fucked it up. that''s not your fault. that''s just new vultun being new vultun. but... sometimes... sometimes things just work out." -quail tavers, school of the warrens??vl-b!n. 5-10 blindside +nothin'' like shitty syndicate perimeter-sec, eh avo?+ draus asked. they slipped through the unmanned entrance like phantoms given shape only by wind, their holocoats making them peripheral entities; not yet invisible, not quite noticeable. a lone turret drone spun lazily upon its high axis, casting its grided gaze over the four retching guards knelt over by the entrance. unsupported, its cone-like field of view rendered it an instrument worthy of mockery rather than concern. piercing through the thinness of the market''s outer defenses, ghoul and regular stalked past sloppily patrolled checkpoints. drifting specters of rudimentary sequences splashed their perception in narrow beams across the foyer, protecting the inner confines of the block''s central courtyard. they were tethered to softly warded minds, wobbling high overhead on strings of phantasmal sinew. avo scoffed at their make with scorn. the use of a specter was not in the length of its gaze but in scouting. hence, the ease of their sequencing; hence, the practice of using them en masse to conceal their deficiencies. with positions so obvious and routes so rote, it took little for avo to conduct a bit of counter-scrying of his own measuring, using his whisper to see where the intersecting paths of perception lay. as they trailed up a narrow staircase bathed in a clash of flickering neon, a ghost-infused tag along the cracked walls greeted avo''s cog-feed in a blossoming swirl of phantoms. head left to enter to carnal-cluster... and a cluster of carnality it was. within the market, kiosks and stalls spilled out as if cancerous growths, dotting the entirety of the courtyard and even rising up several stories on platforms and stacks. quick-fabbed stairs dripped in dollops of clumping matter, the half-life of the print-job encroaching. yet, the customers cared little, their feet hammering hard down against every step, their eyes fixated only on the flashing ads screaming of new synth-drugs to purchase, or new vicarites to sample. music bled into ceaseless battering that entrapped avo in a cocoon of sound, the breaths of customers and merchants alike coming in gasping inhales as they flagellated any and all who were unfortunate enough to hear their words. booming vibrations crashed discordantly out of rhythm with one another, like the war drums of two clashing armies, both bereft of discipline. a haze of angry red slithered over avo''s perception like someone had opened a vein in reality and just let it bleed. other colors then greeted him like scars amidst the crimson ambiance. the shine of thoughtstuff burned like the simmering detritus of a cigarette cast over a piece of paper, and the blinding shine cast by the storefront signs shrouded an ever-flowing tide of bodies in bright light and shadow, the aesthetic of both people and word myriad in their forms. to call the gutter market an urban jungle was an insult to its density. this was no jungle. the better conceptualization of its shape was to use suffocation as a noun. no. cluster. now the use of the word made sense. and exposed to so many lives, their scents all varied, all appealing, the beast licked at the pleasure centers of avo''s mind, urging him to consider--just contemplate--the thrill of letting his domains loose here. the color upon the plascrete then would match the shine in the air. red on red. and inside, his soul would burn... +avo,+ draus said, her voice striking him free from his reverie like a steel rod. the urge shattered and the beast slithered away, seething at the regular as it settled into primal depths burning within avo''s mind. he grunted. her veil was casting her face into fractals now, nothing of her appearance discernable. still, he could smell her, taste the purity of her scent, and hear the intermittent strength of her thudding heart. the market was flowing chaos, but draus stood like a defiant stone amidst the river. a bloodied bruiser encased in the bones of a half-wrecked exoskeleton cracked into her and staggered. before he could turn to hurl a curse, the moving crowd tore him away, a riptide of flesh carried on clicking knees and weary feet. a beat of silence ran within their link, though the world yet roared with noise. for a second, he thought she was going to cancel the run. for a second, he could taste the doubt slipping over from her end of their connection. instead, she primed him with a question. +you good for this?+ +yes,+ avo said, trying to shed the hunger from his voice. +was just...+ +thinkin'' ''bout killin'' everyone? eatin'' everyone?+ +always.+ even as deafening synth-pop exploded from his left, avo heard draus chuckle. +was an exercise they teach us, back before i was formally a reg. was about visualization, to help some of those... less mentally stable among us stay zoned. basically, whatever you imagine doin'' to someone, imagine you''re doing it to yourself. think of feelin'' it. the good or bad. whatever it is. keeps you grounded. helped me some for a while.+ a quiet visited avo''s mind with the concept. to eat another. to eat himself. to kill another. to kill himself. he understood her intent and the purpose of the exercise. to center one''s ego as a lodestone against any atrocity or virtuous deed committed. but a ghoul feasted on pain and violence, and it cared not from whence it was derived. in his infancy, he watched more than a few of his brothers succumb to autosarcophagy--the act of devouring oneself. after all, why seek flesh that is harder to claim when the succulence grew on your very bones? avo had taken care not to bite into himself after beholding the outcome. the low masters let the faultier of his brothers run their course, and in turn, his other brothers found the self-devourers a most cooperative feast. +i''ll keep control,+ avo said. +haven''t shown me otherwise yet,+ draus replied. there was a latitude she was showing him. a growing trust. he wondered if it was because of the trials they shared in the crucible. or perhaps she just found him too interesting to kill. if that was the case, he could not claim the feeling to be mutual. the beast instead wanted him to kill her, to end her and feed from her in a triumph against an old foe. but avo wouldn''t. he refused. draus wasn''t quite a friend. honestly, he couldn''t even claim to know what a friend was. but it had been a long time since there was someone he could rely on since walton''s passing. she wasn''t the same. no one would be the same as walton. +am i in trouble now?+ draus breathed, considering. +please,+ avo added. +...it''s what a consang would do. we can go free more slaves from her ship. is good. ethical.+ a strange absurdity filled him as he cast the word at her using his mind. he felt as if a ghoulling again, begging walton for permission to eat the neighbor''s nu-cat. the answer to that request had often been a soft no. +ethical.+ draus said. +you know, avo. i''m beginning to wonder if you''re just... using that word when you want to justify a killin'', but...+ the captain clamped down on the shock trigger to the girl''s collar, forcing her skin to shift its colors and earning a hoarse scream out from the mod-slave. a beat followed. a spark of bloodlust simmered into their shared link, and this time, it didn''t come from avo''s end. draus sighed. +hells. you think you can do that thing you did with vicious again? the one where you make wings out of their organs.+ avo grinned. +might be able to do better. can also dissolve evidence now. hell''s working this time.+ +well,+ draus said, cracking her neck, +suppose that''ll be interesting to see. want me to make the approach?+ +yeah,+ avo said. +might still remember my voice.+ the regular approached the captain with casual confidence. her veil had switched to reflective fractals and she intercepted the path of the drunk maw-diver. "hey, you," draus said, trying to keep the scorn out of her voice. "hold on a minute there. how much for her?" a slight burp worked its way free from aseleri''s mouth as she looked draus up and down, frowning at the obfuscated figure before her. holocoats weren''t uncommon in the city, but they were made popular by street squires and snuffers specifically. generally, people who didn''t want to leave a visual footprint. said kinds of people also weren''t exactly the most trusted types in society. "right, right," aseleri said. she tried to point at the prices projected from the girl''s holotag, missed, then managed on her second attempt. "see you aren''t much of a reader. it''s... uh... written right here." "nah," draus said, shaking off the giantess'' words like they were nothing. "i mean the real price. somethin'' that might just make us keen to a bit more business. maybe by the batch?" a momentary confusion peeled across aseleri''s face as she tried to decipher what was being asked. "i... yeah. mr. larkton." she handed the leash over to one of her accompanying crew. "i must apologize. haven''t... haven''t made your acquaintance yet. captain aseleri of mawfarer ii." she hiccuped and grinned. "and... unofficial destroyer of the mawfarer i." draus just nodded. "well. good meetin'' you, aseleri. you know a place where we can talk proper?" she revealed a flash of her imps, a constellation of motes shining like diamonds before the slave runner''s eyes. aseleri immediately sobered up at the sight of currency and cracked a broad smile. "yes, yes, i think i do. you uh... you come along now. let me get you a proper drink." the detour that followed was a short one. draus trailed behind the babbling aseleri and her crew while avo lingered a bit further, trying to keep some distance in case anyone was watching. they might not be able to locate him using a recollector thanks to his holocoat, but a tail was still something that could be obviously spotted. he found the journey''s end to be a long cluster of cubes lining the corner of the courtyard. shines of thoughtstuff flashed through the opacity of each glass chamber squared along the wall. he guessed this was where certain syndicate deals were struck. pitiful. with a scan of her meta, the captain called open the doors to one such booth and waved for draus to head in first. with the crowd thinning along this quarter of the market, avo clung closer to the shadows and moved with caution, casting his whisper to get a bird''s eye view. it was only when the booths were quiet and straying eyes were few that he made his move. the local nu-dog was missing and the turret overseeing the area likewise was too narrow to notice him again. drawing upon the power of his heaven, he pushed his blood along the doorframe and unlocked the haptic mechanism from the inside. the door hissed open. he stepped into the booth, its length more like a miniature meeting room. "... and so, i ended up installing the neuraskin in her," aseleri said, gesturing to the shifting shivering girl kneeling before draus, the mod-slave''s colors a constant flux of change. "even got a new tagline for it. neuraskin: think gorgeous, think pretty--" she finally noticed avo standing at the end of the room. with a wave of his hand, the doors closed again. "ah," draus said gesturing to avo. "my associate''s here." aseleri blinked. "asso--" avo fired his celerostylus and his heaven free. from his veins, he cast three branches of flowing blood. two crashed into aseleri''s crew, piercing their bodies. with a thought, he alchemized their blood and bent their bodies under his control, slamming them hard against the ground. aseleri, possessing a lesser reflex booster but a reflex booster nonetheless, unleashed her ghostjack on him again, her phantasmal weapons flashing free at the speed of thought. a constellation of sequences burned across her metamind as the shape of her ghostjack flared into existence. yet, despite possessing such a powerful instrument, despite bringing him low a mere two days ago with a casual thought, this time, her ghost-fused weapons crashed against him and splashed off his wards. his cog-feed screamed, the strain placed on his cog-cap high but sustainable. she disgusted him. blessed with the single most versatile phantasmic there was, she wielded it sloppily like a phantasmal hammer, making nothing but missiles of trauma to be dashed against his wards. his final branch sank through her gut and snapped her into the air with a flick. aseleri gasped, a mouthful of blood spewing free. avo caught the flow and forced it back into her mouth. he manually kept her blood flowing. she would not get to die so easily. not from internal bleeding. not from the trauma. grasping feebly at the pillar of crimson forced through her liver, aseleri gasped and writhed. "f-fuck... why... who?" avo dropped his veil and lifted his helmet. through the haze of pain on her face, he watched as recognition dawned across her features and knew it to be a beautiful thing. "oh... oh, jaus... oh, fuck me." "must apologize," avo said, drawing aseleri in close with a twitch of a finger. "we''ve met. but i haven''t formally made your acquaintance. was rude of me. now. i''m ready to make up for lost time." the fact that draus was grinning as well didn''t escape his notice. Chapter 5-11 Ghostjack chapter 5-11 ghostjack you know... i didn''t have a father growing up, but i remember being raised by several. one was abusive. the other two were just there. the last was a decent man who died too soon. but... you have to understand, none of them were actually mine. they were just burned into me, memories spreading like... like conflagration. have you ever gotten your mind jacked? the feeling don''t fit the mold of my words... hard to describe it. have you ever drowned in your own memories without even noticing? it''s like that... except they aren''t your memories sometimes. new pieces are added in. you remember talking to someone you never met. you remember a nu-dog you never owned. and eventually, as the deception metastasizes inside you, whoever you were isn''t the same anymore. caught a mem-con during the war. was the lucky one in my unit--the delta carrier for the plague. low masters sequenced a vile thing for us, it was like a silent wildfire burning through our links, pouring the smog into my mind. ... what the fuck was i saying again? ah. never mind. just remember to kill the necrojacks first. -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers, head of the scalpers syndicate 5-11 ghostjack thaumic cycler: 59 thaum/c ghosts: [52] rend capacity: 7%... a mingling spillage of sloppy viscera pooled across the floor, leftovers from the meal avo made of captain aseleri''s two former aides. they had been wrung clean like towels of shattering bone and tearing flesh after avo discovered the limits of their use. then, he found a final use for them. unlike jessa--the one avo named hap-tat--killing them was an easy thing. walton hated slavers, and there was no closer one could get than directly making a sale. avo smiled and imagined his father to be proud. so rare. meanwhile, aseleri''s screams betrayed her unfamiliarity with pain. a weakness most unfortunate seeing as avo was unlatching her ligaments from her bones. her tissues were woven with strength, and that strength betrayed her. no ordinary diver nor snuffer could have afforded bioware of such sophistication; bones and muscles built to serve her body in a synchronous union. she reeked of low guilder. disgraced low guilder, judging from the cost it would take to engineer a body like hers and her actual living. she was someone that had known the pleasures of the tiers, but fell hard from grace, crashing down into the putrescent sprawl that was the warrens. he held her aloft on wires of blood, his tendrils snaking beneath her skin, the slicing root tips of his heaven growing deep. beads of sweat cascaded down her forehead mingling with her flooding tears. the way the pleas sang from her throat was like that of a child, whines, beggings, tantrums all coiled together. the captain''s arm was folded backward along her back, the ball of her limb scooping her cartilage free from its socket. he had mangled her insides again when she made a second try to lash his mind with her ghostjack. this time, he was more audience than an adversary in judging her capabilities; again, he found her wanting. this ghostjack was not hers--it could not be. her use of it was that of an ignoramus-- a child gifted the hammer and forge from a smithy. she had taken to using it as a blunt instrument, shaping missiles of trauma from ghosts and ripping at his memories, her feeble attack sliding off his wards, like nails snapping upon a chalkboard. from her, he wrought dry the last of her will and drew her up on wires of tungsten-infused blood, arms spread. she swayed there like a piece of battered meat, gibbering, thoughtstuff straining against the cage of her shoddily maintained protections. he greeted as a butcher would a prime cut of meat. too bad she still didn''t fully understand her situation. aseleri spat a clatter of teeth and blood at his feet. avo nodded, accepting her ill feelings toward him. and then promptly responded by fusing sharp grains of jagged blood inside her kidneys, and letting it flow along the tubes of her tract. the sounds he earned from her made the beast nesting beneath his skin chitter with glee. there was a spice that torture added to the body and mind; something that would come useful when he sequenced new phantasmics down the line. but ultimately, that was just a secondary reason why he was inflicting this pain. the truth was that she made for good feeding, that she could make the beast go quiet if but for a while. "aseleri," avo said, waiting for the captain''s eyes to finish rolling. "hear me? have a few questions to ask you." behind him, he could hear draus laughing in disbelief. "jaus. avo, you''re supposed to ask the questions before you torture someone. even if they are a half-strand." "got carried away." "yeah," she said, looking at the enmeshed mess of interlocking flesh that remained of the captain''s aides, "reckon ''carried away'' would''ve gotten me an official court martial for the war crimes you''re committing." "war crimes?" avo said. "guilds follow those?" "sure. when they''re fighting other guilds and, uh, official citizens..." draus cocked her head at the captain. "the fateless, well, they''re a work in progress, so to speak." now it was avo''s turn to laugh. "fuck... you, both," aseleri said, barely managing to spit the words free. clumps of viscera dangled from her cracked teeth. she turned to glare at draus with her bloodshot eyes. "are you just going to let this... fucking thing torture me. work me to death? i was a citizen. i was somebody! i lived in the fucking tiers!"??vl-b!n. "well, that makes the three of us, then," draus, for her part, flicked a glance at the former slave. the husk of a girl was huddled in the corner, her skin boiling in an aurora of hues. her eyes trailed off, transfixed by the unfolding brutality being inflicted upon her former enslaver. a broken expression between horror and schadenfreude crept over her face. her mind, meanwhile, hissed in puffs of steam, her thoughts vaporous; the steaming hiss belying her mental collapse. "yeah," draus continued, "yeah, i suppose i am fine with watching him torture you to death. what can i say? shit rolls uphill; shit rolls downhill." her focus shifted to avo. "but that bein'' said, you played long enough. i let you feed the ghoul, and reckon it''s plenty fed. get what you came for. get this done." draus'' request immediately drew the beast''s attention. it pleaded with avo now to keep going, to kill the captain, take her ghostjack, and kill the regular as well. but, sated as it was, the urges were weaker, more easily wrestled. avo exhaled. stepping away from his bloodlust was long a struggle, like scrubbing tar using only his hands. some of it always clung. but today, it was weaker after being fed. and so, he shoved it back down, knowing that once he had a ghostjack, he would finally be able to reclaim a modicum of control. the regular nodded at that. "so. we done here?" avo grunted. reaching out with his blood, he collected the gore and viscera he felt behind, squeezing it all together in a swirling clump. "wanted to see the hell right?" draus leaned back and gestured for him to show her. he vented, netting the sphere of gore with his entropic squall. in seconds, the gust sheared all physical matter away from existence like salt slaved to the flow of water. "well," draus said, nodding appreciatively, "that would''ve come in real handy for some of that wetwork i used to do. you keep workin'' at that godclad thing. might even be a new heaven for you to make. avo: heaven of corpse disposal." avo hummed in response. jesting though she was, the idea did make him wonder if he could somehow make his entropic shroud last longer, use it as a deployable bomb instead of a lashing limb. good thing he had an agnos to consult. he collected what few drips of blood he missed and drew it inside himself. around them, the dim ambiance of the booth gave nothing away. no cameras nor ghosts scried upon their persons. none would be witness to his deeds. none, other than the girl. in the corner, the former mod slave continued to sob, inconsolable now that her momentary reverie was broken. she saw herself, and the reflection stuck bone, reopening prior wounds and leaving her unmade. draus made to take the girl. leave no evidence. avo halted her with a gesture. "she can walk," he said. the expression on draus'' face told him of her doubt. "i know she technically--" his ghostjack flared a burning sigil calling upon a swell of ghosts. the constellations of his phantasmics shone through the blacked sheath of his storm-coated wards. from the halo of his metamind, he cast his thoughts at the girl and poured his cognition into her like an avalanche. bare and unwarded, he could have connected to her mind with his ghost-link as well, but sharing a mind with her or planting a shiv inside of her was what it could do. using his ghostjack, he didn''t bridge with her. no. he swam. bereft of a proper palace, he pushed his mind deep into hers, submerging into a grey, mechanical ocean, its water running in conflicting spirals, each flowing to their own sequence, the tides alive with madness. "avo?" he heard draus call, "what are you--" "quiet," he said, only faintly aware of his own body. he was a diver, surgeon, and engineer right now. more than that, he was an architect and artist. this was his practice. this was his worship. and within seconds, he found the screaming rapids that led to the trauma he sought. bubbled by the submersible that was his wards, he checked again and deactivated all his presently useless phantasmics besides the ghostjack and the memguard. diverting the majority of the capacity to his protection, he pushed deep into the angry maelstrom. the structure of her inner mind was different than what was beyond. metaminds gave simulated representations for navigation. here though, deeper yet, were the memories themselveshardened strips of remembrance that lingered. from her eyes, he watched as she saw the death of her father; tasted her despair as her sister died on the operating table next to her, body rejecting the mods. the sequence was raw and hot with pain, cooking against avo''s armor and spiking cognitive capacity. the additional ghosts he downloaded from aseleri''s mind had proven to be an ample buffer against her hurt, but her trauma was immense. cog-cap: 28% and immensely valuable. avo smiled in appreciation, mouth widening in delight. her pain was not for nothing. it would serve him as a most potent weapon to shred enemy minds once he tore down their defensive traumas. he wondered if the hurt he caused aseleri herself would match it. downloading trauma-pattern [aseleri''s folly] a fitting name for a versatile weapon. one he could bind to delivery constructs like triggers, bombs, contagions, mind strikes, or even missiles. ghosts: [81] he fed one of his ghosts an overdose of positive memory sequences, filling it to the brim without more detailed work. with a thought, he released it into her turbulent waters, its joyous burn greeting the inferno of the girl''s pain, the strain of her trauma lessening almost immediately. when he had the time, he would need to finish this dive properly. something to do while unconscious to achieve maximum focus. the trauma inside her was a spreading inflammation. if it wasn''t cut out entirely, it would consume her. right now, he lacked the proper patterns. he needed more joyous memories to weaken the traumas. constructs of melancholy to root her mind in fixation while he was conducting the extraction. specific traumas to perform precise edits without shearing an essential concept from her mind and leaving her vegetable. for now, addled would do. halting the broadcast of his ghosts, avo a faint prickle of static rain across his body as his physical senses was at the forefront again. inside, the beast recoiled, suddenly noticing the return of his mind. the loudness of her pain had drowned it out momentarily. it was afraid. good. it was going back inside its cage, where it belonged. a morality inducer wasn''t a complex construct to make, and avo remembered the design well. walton had made sure of that. across the room, the girl giggled and sobbed in equal measure, rising as emotions cycled across her face. "jaus, avo," draus said, disturbed by the insanity playing across the face of the former slave, "the fuck did you do to her?" "diluted trauma with a cluster of joys. mind defaulting. should be compliant right now. won''t last. ghost will fragment eventually. should take her and go now. you take her. i''ll deal with the guards. draus nodded. "hey, uh. we''re gonna... we''re gonna get you out of here." "okay," the girl said, smiling brightly as tears trailed down her cheeks. her skin was a battleground between between red and blue, the inky colors clashing in a grand charge. "okay." Chapter 5-12 Exhalation chapter 5-12 exhalation avo... you can do that. you can. it isnt that efficient is the thing. no two wards are the same. no two phantasmics are the same. even ones made from similar sequences. people remember the same thing differently. and different things? even more, so-- wait. let''s refocus. yeah, i know there''s an aratnid in the vents. a whole nest actually. if you pay attention, you might just be able to discern the thought accretion that bubble from its young as well. yeah. the aratnid''s a mother. how long does it take for aratlings to grow up? ...heh. now that''s a question i don''t know. come on. let''s comb the nether." -"walton," instructing [redacted] on the basics of necrotheurgy. 5-12 exhalation departing the carnal cluster was a bit less than a trifle. the greatest folly rested mostly on the syndicate necrojacks, their gazes pointed outward, with scant few amongst them running patrols. even then, those diligent few played at their duties with half-hearted intent, flying their specters high and visible as if kites for all to see, making them easy to avoid. from the gathered crowd, avo stole flickers of knowledge, palming small pieces of surface thoughts with the pooling presence of his ghostjack. his broadcast was subtle, spoof memories to meld with minds unwary and unprotected. he slipped in beneath notice, connecting to them by the exploitation of their short-term memories. who would think it strange to suddenly remember a random kiosk they just saw, after all? or regard the sudden appearance of someone wearing a synthjacket in their mind''s eye as more than an intrusive thought. yet, shrouded beneath their ignorance, avo plucked at their recent memories, using them to avoid the patrols and nu-dogs all the same. throughout it all, he savored the sensation of reaching out into the nether again. not merely floating. not merely a vehicle. now, he was melded, his ghostjack allowing him to reach up into the cognitive plane that was scaffolded atop reality. by the time he reached the perimeter, escape was a simple thing of injecting a crude edit of distilled rage into a customer who had already been swindled twice. it was enough to bridge the gulf between their frustration and fury proper. few questioned why their anger grew when it already had a reason to burn. and few in the crowd were surprised when a disgruntled wager finally leaped into a stall to begin "renegotiations" regarding a faulty product they were sold. they drew the attention of the guards when the first punch was thrown. and where attention was drawn, gaps formed. the metaphorical dam of security began to tear, opening in folds and leaks. the guards of the outer perimeter were still incapacitated when ghoul, regular, and slave crossed them, bodies sheened with sweat, with puddles of fetid clumps painting their writhing bodies. +thank jaus for syndicate security,+ avo said, echoing draus'' earlier words. she laughed. through the dark of the gutters again, they crossed a quiet street, neon ads clashing, flashing, and changing as higher and higher bids showcased a cyclic war of eternal product placement. at the end of the street, the gazes of gutter-juvs remained fixed on the fire, their emaciated bodies laden with cheap chrome surrounded by patches of scabs. they extracted in the same vehicle they came in on. the inauspicious doldrum served their purpose well, sinking low behind the cover g-station as its side doors opened to allow for boarding. "i... i circled the area... three... three-hundred and twenty... twenty-two times," kae said, proudly. "made... made the patterns random... i think... i think my... my forgetfulness helped!" she giggled bitterly. "for once--it... uh... it was useful!" "yeah, sounds great," draus said, her words thin and distracted, her mind occupied by other concerns. avo held a fair guess as to what. her eyes had been fixed on him during their exfiltration. a conversation was undoubtedly in their future. guided by her leash, the former mod-slave boarded the aerovec giggling like a child between sobbing chokes. none gave her much regard within the market. just another overly neuromodded, overly engineered piece of meat; a creature so commonplace that she was a bland offering amidst the many eccentricities in the market, more wallpaper than a person. "who... who''s this?" kae asked, her tone taking on a confused note. "salvage," draus said. she shot avo a look. "and test-subject if we''re gonna be all honest." leave it to the former highflame regular to carry old fears of cognitive defilement. such was the art that ori-thaum wielded against them, after all. where highflame was a thaumaturgic and militaristic powerhouse in the real, they survived only behind vast, warded fortresses in the nether, constantly straining against the unending assault that ori-thaum and other freelance necros inflicted upon them. what a strange thing it was, to be a lion in one world, and a lamb in the other. avo studied the thoughtstuff of the mod-slave. already, his ghost was fragmenting, the flow of her mind clamping inward akin to a jaw closing around a beam of cracking glass. soon, the blue clouding her flesh would swallow the red. injected feelings were things ever-fleeting, but traumas and emotions anchored properly to a mind were like scars and wells both. so long as the thinker remained, how then could they run dry of their own memories? "she''ll be broken again," avo said. he strapped himself within the aerovec''s gimbal, watching draus do the same for the slave. "soon." "put any thoughts as to what we''re gonna do with this one?" draus asked. "ain''t keepin'' her with us, that''s for damn sure. ain''t equipped to fix someone this broken." at that, kae narrowed her eyes at the regular. "i... i think she can get better." draus nodded. "yeah. sure, so do i. but you gonna be the one to pay the imps for her therapy?" "i''ll extract the sequences," avo said. "useful. good for weapons. bioware also useful. aesthetic. sell it to the no-dragons. leave her with them." "don''t like leavin'' a trail that leads back to us, avo," draus said. short was the distance between a little government and a syndicate. somewhere, the sang that governed this place must''ve indulged in their own set of horrors. but after conflux, his appreciation came easy for an organization that could maintain its own buildings. +steeeeeeeeeammmmm bunssss!+ a loud wail of phantasmal excitement washed out from a hovering aerovec. it projected a holovid of a dancing nu-bear of some monochrome variant riding on a massive tiger made of animated dough. +any dog-headed wanderer can court death amidst the metal mountains of new vultun! but only the wise will move to pre-emptively still the groanings of their stomachs. be you wise or a dog-head, wanderer?+ that drew a low laugh from him. he thought walton might''ve bought him a meal from an auto vendor much like this one. a lion head was his metamind''s direct translation. still, despite the delectable scent of meat, avo never had the taste for dough. soft and clingy, it clung too much to his fangs. behind him, he heard the pattering footsteps of the girl stop. "wait," she said. he could already see the top of the second fortune. the sooner he got back and met up with draus, the soon the girl could be offloaded to the grafter; her bioware sold for profit. "please, wait," the girl choked out, her eyes red. turning, he glanced at her mind and found his earlier shot of joy dissolved. yet, despite the obvious tumult afflicting the waters of her thoughts, she had not caved in as she had before. not yet. "i... i want to eat." beside them, the auto vendor roared with mind-drowning laughter. +master baozi senses hunger! master baozi says: you cannot channel the full powers of the heavens when hungry! fill your core, wanderer! do not let your body down, lest it let you down in return!+ avo studied the former slave. a conversation occurred between the many voices governing his person. the beast was the first to be strangled, its desires nothing but brutal banalities. practicality, then, called to avo. to pull her along. with her being an obvious mod slave, the people of the district might take note. might remember. he needed to get her out of the street before-- a sour note bled out from her mind. most human emotions splashed off against avo''s mind. too much asymmetry; too little empathy from his end. what she bore against him, however, was potent. just the right angle. just enough pressure. hunger. she reeked of pain and hunger. even the beast recoiled at her pain, the suffering not beyond its instincts to comprehend. "please," she said again. avo sighed. the light-bathed streets were few of walkers at this hour, but never few of watchers. someone could still track aseleri''s death using her. she would be an easy find for a recollector. he would need to edit her mind extra meticulously. just in case. ensure that even if someone connected her to aseleri''s death, they would find nothing through her. he would burn himself, draus, and kae from her mind; leave a false trail leading to a nonexistent group of squires in their stead. avo sighed. more trouble though this act might incur, he knew walton would''ve smiled upon him. "what do you want?" she swallowed. a trickle of a tear spilled out from the corner of her eye. "steamed bun." "how many?" "one," she said, choking again. "thank you." one. how insignificant her hunger compared to his. he chuffed, a low chuckle hissing out from his throat. people hated ghouls. people massacred his kind like vermin. people treated him as less than nu-dog. yet, for all the delights that new vultun bestowed upon him, he never once wished he could''ve been human. for in her was the fate that branded the vast majority of the species. broken. impotent. exploitable. fateless. imps: [2697] avo flicked the imps over to the auto vendor''s locus, placing his order with a thought. +virtuous indeed, wanderer!+ the bear cried, backflipping to catch two dishes of food using its feet. it began to cycle the plates back and forth as the machine began printing the food, rumbling as clone-meat melded with the sludge of grav-molded dough. a holo-projection of a percentage bar filled up rapidly, finishing with a triumphant ring as the machine ejected the bun. planted neatly atop a quick-fabbed plate, the white of the bun glistened still with a pearlescent sheen. a spill of soy sauce ran down its top in the form of the stormsparrow, looking at her shoulder with a faint smile in sponsorship of the bun. avo plucked the meal from its port and handed it to the girl. "eat and walk. you can do both." nodding numbly, she took the dish from his hand as they carried on. "i... thank you--" "already said that," avo replied, cutting her off. "don''t talk. just eat. keep walking." quivering, she did as he said. he didn''t want to make nor risk small talk with her. if she formed deeper memories of him, if she started forming the sediment of affection when it came to his person, it would add hours to his work. and she wasn''t the only one. her. kae. chambers. the techs. draus. himself. the memories he got from aseleri. they all needed work, and he was the only one who could deliver. at least for now he had some room to breathe. claim more thaums, ghosts, heavens, and hells. contemplate. investigate. prepare. avo exhaled. for so long, an opposing momentum had seized him, dashing him along obstacles and adversaries like he was crashing from rock to rock, caught in the rapids. now, the waters were slowing. and when they stopped, he would see about driving it back the other way. Chapter 6-1 Synchronized chapter 6-1 synchronized the auto-seance phantasmic is the most commonly utilized phantasmic in idheim. its function: communication; the capability to connect minds from almost anywhere covered by the reach of the nether. though no two phantasmics are ever truly alike, they can however cycle memories so similarly that the memory''s oscillatory frequency will be easy to distinguish from all the others, thus allowing for quantum-level pairing across even the vastest of distances... -tools of the necrotheurgic trade, 00:38:02 - 00:51:33, "auto-seance"??vl-b!n. 6-1 synchronized initializing meta-dive the sun bled in broken instants of existence, its light leaking out in an oozing wound that stained the firmament and blackened the seas. like a battered egg, it twisted, peeling apart into a kaleidoscopic coil. to call it decay ignored the new shapes pouring into form; to call it growth was a lie used to cover the built-in disorder that constantly gnawed at the structure of the construct. atop a mercury-thick pool of quavering moonlight, avo stood, tuning the memetic frequency of the phantasmic. with each adjustment, the tremoring liquid grew more stable, while the discordant world took on more steady incrementations of alteration. the alignment was close. he could feel it in his mind, a sense of synchronicity building. he plucked a ghost out from his mind, a moment from the eyes of a child, contentedly embracing an eight-limbed nu-cat after a playful chase, and fed it into the waters beneath his feet. for a moment, chaotic architecture pulsed and reset. when it finished reloading, avo felt a ringing rattle his mind from high above as the auto-seance phantasmic finally snapped in alignment with another running the same sequences of alternating memories. with a stutter, draus loaded into the simulated construct, appearing mere feet away from him upon a carpet of liquid opalescence. the sun pooled together from sprays of incomprehensibility and shone briefly before repeating its earlier destabilization. auto-seances were always loud. always obvious. there was no true stealth in the nether, for how could thought disappear in a realm made flesh by the tendons of cognition? yet, the vast billions populating new vultun and the world beyond offered opportunities to mask their presence. all avo needed to do on his end was to slide the construct beneath a shroud of shapeshifting memetics. [auto-seance] cog-cap: 2 sequences (baseline) structure: a star bleeds into a spiral of spliced memory snippets [error: memory artifacts too brief for review...]" function: allows omni-synchronic communications between two or more minds across all areas encompassed by the presence of the nether "good," avo said, "works." it had taken him the better part of three days to conceive a sufficiently chaotic collage of memories to properly encrypt this seance session. now, he and draus could communicate with diminished fears of scrying eyes. kae had to wait. his brief peek at the damage cradled between the broken shell of her thoughtstuff offered him a glimpse at something astounding. whatever ori-thaum inflicted on her was a masterpiece that demanded the totality of his skill to face. hence, it would be the last thing he interfaced with, and only after he collected a surfeit of ghosts to buffer himself. for now, he needed to finish testing the new line of communication between him and draus. avo chuckled. now there was something he never saw coming: being part of a shared mem-session with a regular. "could''ve made the sun less nauseatin'' to look at," draus said, blinking at the phantasmal star dissolving into the primordial yolk of randomness again. "don''t look at it," avo said. a dull pang fired in the back of his head as the beast whispered its familiar words of honeyed violence. presently, his morality injector was only half finished. its structure was already burrowed deep into the roots of his mind, yet the ingredients he used to combat the beast remained missing. joy; regret; sadness; embarrassment, all emotions he needed to synthesize the cocktail of pseudo-chemicals used to blunt the beast''s nature and cage his inhibitions. that would be the next thing for him to finish--a project he was truly excited for. he had survived the crucible, escaped mirrorhead''s grasp, and now, on the precipice of severing the chains that bound him from within, he would once again return himself to who he once was. more, in fact. the soul burning inside him changed things. placed new options in his lap. of new flavors unsampled and roads untraveled. turning her eyes to the skies mottling into a peel of faces and locations, draus nodded appreciatively. "yeah. encryption''s looking pretty gleamin''. figured it would''ve taken you longer..." "no," avo said. "one of the first things you learn to build as a necro. guild exorcists have query artifacts bound to their functions. search-memories. in-built recollectors. stable memory architecture easy to piece. might as well be a curtain instead of a wall. this is like hiding in a box inside a hurricane. more secure." "yeah," draus said. "but i can''t remember the other necros i worked with ever makin'' something so... detailed. can barely make sense of nothing from nothing after it stops bein'' a star. maybe bits and pieces but nothin'' more." avo chuffed, pleased that his work was affecting the regular. if this was proving chaotic even for draus, who possessed a keenness of awareness sharpened by years of battle, then nothing short of a dedicated exorcist mem-breaker team would be able to crack their conversations. with a thought, draus manifested a phantasmal replica of the block, the sloping devastation in its middle nesting the makeshift ring used for the mall-brawl. "good idea. did a little intel gatherin'' of my own while you was busy. did a fly-by of the block. ''spoke'' to a few of their local operatives. turns out, chambers was right: your little brawl with the scalpers got mirrorhead spooked somethin'' bad. he''s been issuing orders specifically through proxies now. they haven''t seen him personally for days." well, that was something. syndicate boss feared other godclads for some reason. might be useful to find out why. avo''s growing curiosity stripped some disgust away from needing to dive into chamber''s mind. imbecility aside, the enforcer knew mirrorhead''s habits well--even his true name somehow. just how chambers came upon that knowledge was worth a dive alone. the enforcer was likely not smart nor brave enough to acquire such knowledge via sleuthing, so the only other possibility was happenstance. and a chance encounter was far easier to parse than an epiphany manifested by deduction. "will need more time," avo said. "more ghosts too. need them for independent constructs. also loci to anchor them. can use ones from aerovec for now. drones too." draus nodded. "you and me both. right now, i think our best bet is to keep bein'' quiet. mirrorhead''s a real glassjaw. might pull a runner on us if he think''s we''re comin''." a bitter sneer spread from her lips. "''course, if he does pull a runner, he might just be his mother''s boy." and there it was again. that hate. the same look in her eyes when she struck chambers in the back of garbage aero."never told me why mirrorhead''s name bothered you," avo said. "jhred. made you hurt chambers." a twitch shivered through the regular''s face, the tremble shaking her typically granite-still jaw with a flare of rage. such was the fury fanned within her, kindled by a mere utterance. "jhred greatling," draus began. he tasted the steam of rage hissing from her nostrils through the nether. if this was but a fraction of what she was feeling, then hate was not nearly intense enough to describe what she was truly feeling. "if mirrorhead is... jhred greatling, then i knew his mother. i knew her well. and it was my fuckin'' pleasure to listen to ori-thaum dissect her mind and broadcast her screams through the nether." suddenly, a long-dormant memory caught fire in the back of avo''s mind. flashes of him fleeing sweeping tides of living fire, scouring his brothers from existence, hiding in cracks and crevices, hugging the darkness as he retreated toward the shadows in the gutters, to the embrace of a pathway leading him back down in the umbra. he faintly remembered the screams then. the howls of a woman as her memories were gouged free in clumps from her mind, cast out into the nether for all to sample. it was as if her captors were chucking pieces of her flesh free into the waters, using her to feed the fish. "oh, i know that look," draus said, her smile emerging as the afterbirth of a snarl, "yeah, you tasted a piece of her too, didn''t you. probably everyone in new vultun felt her mind go that day." "maybe," avo said. "was a long time ago." draus scoffed. "not for me. anyway. his family and the regs? me? we got history. old, bloody, highflame civil-war type-shit history." "that bad?" "worse. greatlings managed to kill more regs than any of our actual enemies did." she gave avo a sardonic shrug. "thing about enemies is that you know what to expect. with the commander of your theatre? things ain''t so easy. but you might know a thing or two more about bein'' fed to the grinder than i do, don''t you?" "don''t really think about it," avo said. "how''s that working?" "most brothers dead. low masters dead. i''m not dead. worked pretty well." draus chuckled. "still. we best keep treadin'' carefully. i asked kae about mirrorhead''s possible heavens and she narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities. none of them good for our chances if he ever finds out where we are. priority now is to keep track of his movements. while that''s happening, we need to get your frame optimized. kae said something about the fallen heaven in burner''s way to me. said you could get a new hell from that." "yes," avo said. "talked about that inside frame. still need to consider plans for thaums." "what ''bout... we, uh..." "kill my brothers?" avo asked. "slaughter them to fuel my frame." draus grimaced. avo grunted. "could work. problem is the dark. some of it''s alive. womb and plane both. pulls you in. creatures in its depths. high risk for minimal gain. might be better if we just buy ghouls from a farm somewhere." a thoughtful expression came over draus. "i''ll ask green river. she might be able to offer something." right. on the topic of green river, there was another thing he had to do: breach her security and find out what she knew. avo moved that to the far rear of his backlog. green river wasn''t exactly ori-thaum but the no-dragons and their associates had good scrying phantasmics. dealing with them would take time. "i''ll get us more arms and armor in the meantime," draus said. "by the way, you cleanin'' our mem-data from that slave girl yet?" avo shook his head. "no. i''ll deal with her in two days. need to finishing scrying for traumas inside her." "seein'' what needs to be fixed?" "seeing what weapons i can mine. her pieces will be useful when diving into chambers." Chapter 6-2 Preparation chapter 6-2 preparation squires live and die by their legwork, and guilds bleed or are bled by their rivals through the successes and failures of their shaping operations. preparation. you''ll never have enough of it. and before you even get to the fun shit like going over what kind of ordinance you''ll need or which squires you wanna hire to form the core cadres of your lance, you got to get the fundamentals down. and by fundamentals, i mean intelligence. awareness. knowing what the other half-strand is doing and not letting them know what you''re doing. you know. people watching. mem-mail reading. real riveting stuff; and the most essential things you can do. culture; habits; flaws; leaders; personnel; other shit. all this is essential. power ain''t enough to light the wick in this city. not when a golem can flip a switch and change the rules of reality. the fight is won and lost before it even begins. so, you best get phylaceried or get good at playing the long game. improvise? sure. that''s important too. but only the ready get to improvise. the rest of the bunch usually just gets dead. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 6-2 preparation work slickened the passage of time, and ever was avo pleased. more than pleasing, however, was the splendorous radiance that formed the bars to his newest phantasmic. it was still a thing in progress--the skeleton of a cage fusing into shape around the megablock that served as the nexus of his palace--but already the sequences of memory he had to draw on were promising. flashes of a parent hugging their child; a moment shared between loved ones; a girl calling after the fading form of her father''s aero, stabbing through a curtain of falling rain. all these lost instances offered heat; an intensity of emotion that rivaled the output of his beast. with these memories synthesized properly, in practice, their fire would choke the maw of cruelty and hunger that dwelled beneath the fabric of his being. the composite for the neuro-metals of the morality injector was woven from strands of regret, fear, joy, shame, revulsion, and an even vaster multitude of emotions, all synthesized to serve as a grand cocktail to drown the beast. at the bottom of the cage were fanned blades, sharpened to dig into his metamind''s tissue and pierce into his instincts. if his mental architecture was sound and the phantasmic was stable, it would draw out the worst of his nature like a syringe and counteract its properties with an equal loop of counter-emotions. functionally, it would allow him to tranquilize the beast without overdosing himself on undistilled and secondhand rememberings. he examined the unfinished construct again. he would need to shower it with more time and effort before it could greet its conclusion. and shower it he did. work on it he did. hours washed past him as if currents, his tasks a joyous multitude, pressing down on him with the weight of comforting responsibility. streams of mem-data played like a constant symphony in his mind, ever-present be he awake or asleep. he had spent the better part of the last four days in a deep dive of his own mind, nested snuggly in a lung bed. waking only to feed and talk with kae regarding the nature of his frame, a semblance of his past life returned to him. again, he was giving himself over to his craft; necrotheurgy his practice, his worship. a worship that was interrupted every so often when draus began synchronizing with his mind through their encrypted seance session. these days, draus'' mind remained close and easy to access. though he had promised to leave her cognitive structure untouched, they had found an accord in limited mutual transparency. a syndicate was a complex organism to poison and butcher, after all, and it would take the leveraging of many skills to see it undone; what he lacked in combat experience and tactics, he provided in terms of phantasmics and signal-based infiltration. +deployin'' larks,+ draus said, without further elaboration or fanfare. avo grunted. they both knew what was about to follow. if his phantasmics were sequenced right, the drones would remain hidden and serve as their instruments of aerial spycraft. through stuttered instances of nether-lag, he started from draus'' perspective and watched her cog-feed trigger the ejection process. a trio of icons flashed into existence at the back of both their minds, each a micro-drone released from the bottom of the aerovec. in his mind''s eye, avo spun his deepnav to a top-down perspective and watched the drones come alight with rectangular vertices. masked by the howl of the traffic and the haze of the rain, they moved, pace twinned to the midnight traffic, already beginning to filter mem-data up into the nether. it had taken avo a few days more to sequence the ghosts needed to direct each drone along their routed path. presently, they ran on minds most paranoid and anxious. he had tested their pathfinding and ensured they never took the same route twice. the pattern deviation would help them avoid the notice of syndicate patrols long enough to get the intelligence they needed. across the deepnav--a three-dimensional simulation of the city as mapped by constantly updated mem-data--the drones separated, each taking one of the three major skylanes outside conflux headquarters. running down arteries of holo-projected light, the loci of the lark-pattern drones sang in a symphony of synched memories. with a thought, avo slotted another session of memories into his auto-seance, his thought-frequency tuned in tandem with the drones. draus cut out momentarily as he twinned his mind to one of the larks. immediately, a second window of awareness opened in the back of his mind. his thoughts masked by the ghost anchored to the lark''s locus, avo swept his gaze over the district of mazza''s junction. drone-spec data dotted the corner of his perception as mem-code ran through the back of his mind as a constant spray of information. shi-wa class [lark]-pattern reconnaissance drone size: length 3 feet; wingspan 1.5 feet weight: 20 pounds speed: 130 mph operational period: 1d/22h/24m payload/engine: micro-fusion reactor integrity: optimal he swept his mind through his optical sensors and zoomed on the streets expanding from the core of the block. accretions came alight in his vision as pedestrian foot traffic littered the streets, vagrants, peddlers, refugees, wagers, and gangers running thicker than the pouring rain. flashes of gunfire were detected and logged in the drone''s sensory suite. warnings played constantly through its phys-sim. the lark wasn''t his best job. not even close, but it would serve his needs for now. peeking out from its optics again he found himself gazing upon the bifurcated form of conflux headquarters. mirrorhead had other establishments he could flee to--maybe even up the tiers if he got desperate enough--but the critical density of the syndicate boss'' forces were centered here. to abandon them would relinquish the last real foothold he had over this little pseudo-kingdom he played at ruling. something that his ego wouldn''t allow him to forsake without a fight. there was no room for both of them to share. he tasted the inevitability of a clash between them somehow. or at least the tension, as if they were two hounds circling each other, one curious, the other wary, both trying to cling to an advantage. +alright,+ draus said. +think i''m going to make another lap near burner''s way and see how vincintine''s butchers are gearing this fine thulsday before finishin'' today''s rounds. see how chilled things are. far as i''ve gleaned from the past few days, them scalpers scraped their dead out of the block where the rupture is and bugged out.+ +if luck keeps favorin'' us, they''ll keep on hittin'' conflux, seeing how they considered you a special operative. bad news is that they''re definitely sure you''re still alive and know you got a frame burning inside you. one of my old contacts embedded with them said you got an internal bounty on your head. two hundred thousand imps. not for outside distribution. figure they want what you got for themselves. my guess was that the scalpers you snuffed were running visual cyberware. send snapshots of visual feed back up the chain. nether might''ve been all jammed up durin'' your little brawl in burner''s way but... sometimes coldtech got poise that thaumaturgy lacks.+ a grunt of annoyance sounded in avo''s throat. he had been so certain the lives he shed in combat against the golems were enough to cast prying eyes off his trail. draus was quick to dissuade his hopes from achieving the bloom of delusion. he knew much of how the nether worked, but the nature of pure technology evaded him still. with a twin-aspected system, it seemed that they sidestepped a great many matters that crippled his communicative capabilities. little wonder they were so willing to use thoughtwave bombs. here was another thing he needed to supplement down the line. as much as he loathed the impenetrability of coldtech, for the sake of his enduring survival, he needed to get accustomed to more of its functions before he found himself blindsided again. +going to keep working on morality injector,+ avo said. +assemble that first. think about how to approach mod slave after.+ +that what we''re going to keep callin'' her?+ +that''s all she was,+ avo said. +won''t be anything more to us after. can''t afford a tail trailing behind us. she''s a traumatized flat without meta. without wards. fresh meat for all the predators in the city. best we can do is plant her somewhere safe here. move on.+ +yeah,+ draus said. +get ''er done. want us to be plugging chambers and the other two with your mem-cons and scry-ware before the week is over. they''ll offer another angle on mirrorhead if we don''t find something to press on from the exterior.+ avo grunted. +keep you updat--+ a flashing call sounded in his mind, interrupting his thoughts before they could be packaged and sent. frowning, he glared at the small interface manifesting in the upper right corner of his cog-feed. strange as it was for most to have an active perception filter in his own mind-scape, necros tended to keep theirs on at all times. link request incoming caller: [su, bright-wealth] it took him a few moments to realize that he was being contacted by the junior. the one that draus had assigned to personally escort kae. the one that was now again gifted the new and glorious task of ensuring the mod slave didn''t self-terminate. avo made a mental note to update to an omniglot language phantasmic after he was finished with more pressing matters. he was still getting the most literal one-to-one character-meaning translations. with a thought, he let the call come through, and su''s face came into shape as a ghost-made simulation of her current state. +hey, yao-guai, the crying one says she want to talk to you. says she is finally ready to let go.+ the sang wrinkled her nose. he could still taste the unease she held for him, her faulty wards leaking spills of alarm each time she looked upon him. her fear wasn''t primal, but that of a human looking into an uncanny valley. the sang made far superior predators than ghouls. made them a century ago, even. yet, he stood different from most creatures in their collection. a monster that somehow drifted from his fated course. +be there soon,+ avo said. a beat followed. +did she try it again?+ +no,+ su said, frowning. +not last night. but she still screams. she always screams. loud as motherfucking shit, she is.+ good thing the second fortune''s walls were good insulators of sound. or perhaps they were built to ensure the ease of listening for green river, and green river alone. either way, her presence drew little attention in the real or the nether as avo observed. soon, if avo performed his task right, she would be just another bland backdrop for thoughtscans to slide off. with a thought, avo ended the call and emerged from his palace. returning to consciousness sitting up, he found kae watching the preliminaries of the new vultun grand prix on the holovision. a great rupture splayed the flesh of reality open in a metaphysical gash, the wound made all the clear for the former agnos to examine as she used the haptic functions to zoom in closer across the concave holo-screens. in the lead was gaed angeld, representing stormtree. her projected velocity had her about to lap the planets diameter for the third time in an hour, the satellite zooming in on her heaven flaring at full burn as she tore across the horizon as an arcing javelin of lightning. behind her, the first casualty of the race was listed. ressler kandred, of highflame; real death via thaumic overload. it looked like he was using a heaven that could alter geometries. had used. space seemed to fold and bend in a span of 10 kilometers, up and forward bleeding together, crumpling physical matter into flattened shapes. multiple golems were being scrambled to clear up the damage then. they didn''t look like any models he had seen before. "new golems?" avo asked. kae sudden shook, looking startled. "i... i... oh, oh! no. those are hellsinkers. just... just there to soak up the rend. stabilize the rupture." she gave a humming laugh. "are... are you going to see... see lucille again." "yes." avo took a step toward the door and froze. slowly, he turned to kae again. "kae. you know her name?" the agnos, bless her mem-burned mind, nodded, not comprehending what she did wrong. "you... you don''t?" "no," avo said. "makes things more difficult that way. cements us more in memory. will take me even more time to dislodge you from her mind." it took a moment for the sadness to creep across kae''s face. "oh. s-sorry. she was just... there''s so much pain in her. thought she could use... use someone to talk with." avo grunted. "new vultun. as it goes. going to see if i can finish with her today. someone breaks in you know what to do." kae nodded. "shoot myself." avo grunted. "won''t be able to fight them off alone. don''t want to be taken alive." "alright," kae said, cheerfully. "i''ll try to remember." Chapter 6-3 A Chance Encounter chapter 6-3 a chance encounter okay. first things first. whenever youre diving into someones mind, you are not the host. you might be able to change the design. you might be able to steal a memory. you might even be able to unmake all the supporting architecture. but you are not the host. say it with me, avo. i am not the host. good. you keep that in mind when you dive. ive seen more than one necro lose themselves inside the mind of another. things get very, very complex when strands of thought become intertwined. should your memories become entangled, who''s to say where you begin and they end -"walton," instructing [redacted] on the basics of necrotheurgy 6-3 a chance encounter holocoat. undersuit. helmet. these articles now clung to avo like a second skin, sparing him the attention of the meek and hateful. it served him better being a figure cloaked in light-shrouded mystery than an obvious beast of gluttonous savagery. so it came that avo found himself twice glad of his new outfit upon his descent in the elevator, accompanied by a family of three. aside from the one he guessed to be the mother, the twin pre-adolescent sons were enwreathed by dancing shadows, coated with presences twisting and translucent. a mask of painted monochrome flowed with the movements of their heads, its design from that of old sangshan shadow operas, blessed with patterns meant to denote the wearer as female. these, then, were neuter-masks: instruments of deception granted shape through thaumaturgy. once such items were the scarcest of artifacts; rarities gifted to foreign dignitaries for them to spare them from the dragon-curses notice. now, it was little more than a commercial appliance. commonly seen and widely used. by those that could afford them, anyhow. the mother was weathered and worn, the unmistakable light whine of an implanted weapon glinting beneath her left sleeve. small traces of cybernetic circuitry lined her face, caging her visual aesthetic in the trappings of long outdated augmentations. there was a presence about her. something that told avo she wasnt unfamiliar with violence, awkward though it still might be to her. her children, then, were of a different make. enhanced from the cell to the sinew. molded toward superiority. her virtues were exaggerated in them while her flaws were spared. their attire was subtle; muted in color and lacking all ostentation in their design. yet, it clung to flawless skins of glowing amber, and the scents coming from their bodies breathed earthly aromas fresh and unknown to the warrens. the taste was also helpful for blunting avo''s bloodlust. overfed on raw meat as he was, the taste of soil was just another barrier against the predilections of the beast. from the flowing constellations of clenched lightning that lined their thoughts in a defensive lattice, avo guessed they were using a sanctus starseeker. a most competently made set of wards, though his compliments ended there. it gave too much of a trail, and a journeyman necro could spoof in from all the gaps left unprotected. there was also the question of why children needed wards of such high potency. several guesses sprouted like seeds in the back of avos mind. there were only so many possibilities that could force a mother to bring her children down to a place like this. they reeked of exiled privilege, stripped of status but not of their habits, their design. they had to be. it took a special kind of desperation for a mother to bring her male offspring to a place guaranteed to boil the blood in their veins. the children continued to chat and laugh away, their small fingers jabbing at the bioluminescent advertisements dancing across the inner folds of the elevator. animated figures darted and dashed, flirted and fought, until their forms melded together to become some kind of new energy drink with a mem-code to scan. the second fortune was a place of new novelty for the twins, and they were here sampling a buffet of flavors. a vacation. unlike her boys, however, the mother stood a sentinel, watching avo from her periphery. her porcelain-sheened eyes shone like diamonds or cracked glass. her muscles were loose but her jaw was set, her trinary hearts beating a slow but heavy rhythm. a new suspicion slid over the waters of his thought like a film of oil. this was not the habit of some fleeing wager. no. she had the ethics of someone familiar with living in the warrens, body projecting caution but not confusion nor terror. this was more of a homecoming for her. a place that she knew. sanctuary. it seemed green river was a popular lady. one willing to accept all manner of lost and damned. "you working?" the mother asked, the question finally hurled out over the clamor of her children. her eyes were still fixed on him. her implanted gun was pointed straight down at the ground now, its impact trajectory coming alight via his phys-sim. visiting someone, avo replied. not you. the children seemed confused about the last part. the mother wasn''t. she offered a slow, still distrustful nod and kept her gun primed. smart, though it wouldnt have saved her if he truly meant harm. she exhaled slowly, trying to expel some of her tension. three in. three out. she knew how to breathe. wasnt the first time she did something like this. he looked at her implanted gun again and guessed its design. didnt look cheap either. or pure-kinetic. probably something particle then. spatial-kinetic if she really had the imps for that kind of firepower. the type of stuff an ex-street squire would loathe to part with, even after they got out of the life.??vl-b!n. "had to ask, she said. strange place to have your coat''s privacy functions on." "private person," avo replied. "you understand. casino. strange place to bring children." the mother winced. "short notice. unfinished business. needed to get them out of the way for a while. you understand." her twins were looking at him now, their eyes glinting with mirth, as their faces twitched with mischief. rivers of ghost-made chains ran between them as they spoke to one another, likely mocking the tall stranger before them, bearing no sense of fear or worry. he wondered if they were bound for death as well. yet, in their faces, he saw nothing of the boy. where his was a fate of softness and brutality, a certain fated mercy that would see them guarded against true peril. it was a twisted mockery of essus folly, avo thought, that this woman was likely to preserve the lives of both her children by heading downward, where the boy found only an unjust demise during his pilgrimage toward hope. but for the warrens, avo supposed there were worse places one could hide than xin yunsha. the elevator rang as two swirling blots of ink fused together to form the sang character for "four" overhead. this was his stop. this was where he and they would part, hopefully never to see each other again. yet, before they closed, the professional within avo demanded that he speak his piece. "get new wards. starseeker''s for squires. youre not on a run. youre hiding. keep it that way. if she did that, there was a reasonable chance that he might not possess enough control to stop himself from making a victim of her. looking around, he considered his approach and tagged the nearby cameras in his cog-feed. it always helped to be prepared. make her laugh loud, yao-guai, bright-wealth said, gliding entirely out of the way, sarcastically ceding ground to let the master perform. he was wrong. her people did deserve the curse if it made her life any more inconvenient than it could have been otherwise. but, shedding the annoyance, it would be a display of mastery to help reweave the girls mind so. good practice for the intricacies he was soon to perform on chambers and the techs once he was done with her. entering with little more than a shove and a low growl, avo ignored the half-moon of a grin that pulled at the sangs lips, prodding him forward toward his task as if a spear. it was avos call to keep the mod slave separate from where they stayed. his intent was to keep her parted from the group to best help him reduce what he needed to prune. he had ensured local measures were set up to mask her presence as well, deliberately leaving a cracked locus in the room, leaking the ghosts from the local lobby into the room. such an action held little risk of damaging the girl as well, seeing as she was already buried in her grief; a mountain nigh-inconsolable would not be swept aside by the feeble waters of a river. the cracked locus also allowed him to siphon the excess ghosts running through the establishment to his own ends. with the eighty-one ghosts currently serving as the foundations of his metamind, the task would have taken more than a week to complete. with the firehouse of phantasmal resources on tap thanks to green rivers purchased generosity, avo needed but hours. he wondered then what draus had done for the river that earned her so much favor. avo had his own fixersones that he needed to get back in touch with soon for the sake of reconstituting his missing arsenal of phantasmicsbut the offerings gifted to the regular were beyond that of even friends. avo had tried asking draus what she did, but much like the matter with mirrorheads mother, she spoke of it only vaguely and clenched the matter away, her stubborn silence closing around the affair like a fist. comparatively, lucillelong regarded as merely mod slave in avos mindwas a fountain of damage, her mind shredded clean and raw. she didn''t rise to greet him even after he entered the small, cramped room, choosing instead to stay entombed beneath the folds of her lung bed. the space she was given was scarcely half the size offered to draus, but it was cheap, and avo was technically paying. beside the bed, the locus spun on a bedside nightstand, fissuring strands of phantasmal sequences into the near-nether. the break was done most technically, allowing a concentrated breach of substance instead of a wide and uncontrolled spread. aside from the locus, only a small holovision hung from the ceiling, and a narrow bathing cubicle occupied a narrow groove in the corner. a shadow moving in the dimness, avo arrived at her bedside to study his subject. she looked back up at him then, her gaze blank and features ill. after the steamed bun he gave her nearly a week ago, her relationship with food grew capricious. for days, it looked like she trying to starve herself, eating only when bright-wealth demanded it. on other days, she was an endless font of hunger, insatiable during bouts of sudden mania. a deep blue had stained her skin, drowning her skin with the tones of a midnight ocean. the extraction of her bioware left to take place after the cleansing of her mind, a thing decided on by draus. the regular had thought it best to leave the girl with a start of imps with her separation from old wounds and memories. whatever the bioware was worth, part of it would go back to her. the likelihood was that she was either going to end up working for the casino if her restoration proved to be stable or just another joy-fiend or suicide if not. but that was a choice best left to herself. truth be spoken, avo cared little for the girl beyond the value her mind offered and the chance to correct an ethical debt. with how many aseleri had sold, he doubted she would be the last amongst the slaves he would encounter, especially if he was to take a gander through the maw-barge when mirrorhead was good and snuffed. ultimately, the sooner he finished her neuro-edits and copied the damaged sequence, the sooner they could part. he caught a taste of her vulnerability before and found it most unpalatable. it reminded him of being a ghoulling. choiceless in the most direct of senses. though he could ignore the urge to eat her now, he wasnt capable of shaking off the shroud of annoyance he felt toward her. like she was some kind of insect, one better served to feed the flames of his soul than any other purpose. the strange thing about that was he couldnt remember if his animosity burned so intensely before he was bestowed with his liminal frame. im ready, she said, her dry throat cracking the glass that was silence. her words were lies. that fact could be read from the way her eyes were drifting about, from the lethargy impairing the fluctuance of her thoughtstuff; her pace of thinking was crippled by weariness, and her weariness then was a malady brought upon by night terrors. readiness was beyond her. and that is the way it would continue to be until he cleaned the harm that festered inside her. but it was a lie that mattered little. he was the one that needed to be readyprepared for her onslaught of trauma. she, on the other hand, merely needed to make a choice. i still i dont want to forget, lucille said, eyes searching the ceiling. hers was bereft of an aquarium, leaving only a swaying light and blank enamel in its place. i want to remember my sister, my father. a shiver of hurt bubbled over her. aselerei. yes, avo said, considering the challenges her requests presented. anything else? she shook her head. i want to be me when this is done. i want to still be myself. still be her. it was laughable. it was understandable. it was human. new vultun ate humans. wont change your fundamentals. just edit damage. make you stable. unroot some of the pain. okay, she said, voice growing thick. im scared. can stay scared. wont affect process. will it hurt? avo chuffed a near-laugh. opposite. feel better by the end. even laugh. now, she finally looked at him, fixing him with a baleful glare from one of her eyes. dont mock me. a hint of steel; a whisper of anger. it meant nothing before aseleri, and so, it weighed even less when placed upon avo. not mocking, avo said, looking over her mind wounds one more time before he began the process. just telling you whats going to happen. sitting down against the wall, he linked with the locus and felt a tunnel of ghost flood out. he did not, however, allow them to use his brain as a junction. no easier way to catch a mem-con. instead, he would purify them, and use the hyper-extended sequences from the second fortune to serve as a bulwark against her trauma while he reshaped the roots of her damage. with a thought, avo guided a tide of ghosts to funnel into her cracks. wardless, it took little more than an edited idea of tiredness smuggled into the folds of her surface thought for her to fall asleep. the rest of the task, though, would be immensely more challenging. good. no better way to get back into form. initiating meta-dive Chapter 6-4 Mind Dive (I) chapter 6-4 mind dive (i) no one metaphor can describe what it is like to traverse the confines of someones mind; analogy fails to capture the totality behind the frivolities of psychology. diving into anothers mind, in a sense, is an exercise in separation; in ensuring the waters which you swim belong to ensure that you dont drown amidst the black of a mind most foreign. psychosis, then, is a common outcome for those that are unprepared. you can get lost inside someones mind. be prepared. have an arsenal of memories. and when in doubt, jack out. always, always jack out. -incubi mind-diving mem-sim, ori-thaum 6-4 mind dive (i) most necros dont make it past the amateur level with how many shatter their minds during their first dive. it was a thing of both preparation and artistry that allowed most necros to operate the paracosm of another mind. back when he first rescued lucille, his wards had served him against the immensity of her trauma; an operation conducted hastily for maximum effect. now, unrushed and with ample time to focus, he applied his ghosts with careful focus, his peripheral phantasms brushing against the turbulence of her surface thoughts. he had the capability of punching through, but none of the desire. broken was how she greeted him, but intact will be how he leaves her. and much of that will rely on him walking paths of lesser resistance, of symmetry and alignment with her memories and thoughtsto slip in unnoticed between clefts of memory, more shadow than an intruder. her mind was a hurricane of trauma yet, barely held in place after his last two visits. the damage aseleri had inflicted on the girl was total, gouging her from thought to ego. total, but not nearly the worst case avo had seen. that remained a street squire that walton had worked on once, who somehow had a thoughtwave detonator fused into the depths of their memories as a method of torture. to this day, avo still couldnt fathom what his father did to restore that squire even toward partial functionality. like a bird of prey sailing over a maelstrom, studying the currents to find the softness of the eye of her torment, his ghosts ferried information back to him, telling him of what occupied the outer layer of her thoughts. much of her thoughtstuff roared as rapids of raw emotion, the pain like coursing hellfire, searing even to avos awareness. tiredness joined it as an auxiliary, the low quality of her sleep shrouding the lands of her innermost kingdom in a misted haze. like a musician, he plucked her mind slowly, injecting her with intrusive thoughts to see if the waters would change. for the last few times, he studied her damage, he noted three major sectors that rested as the roots of her trauma. the death of her father, the death of her sister, and the forcible implantation of her bioware. he needed to get to them indirectly. trying to seal those wounds by brute processing force was possible, but it would likely crack her mind in the process, akin to him forcing his claws inside the cleft of an actual wound to draw out whatever shrapnel remained buried within. any direct insertion could see her mind crack asunder, with the fissures of her trauma finally spreading across the broken ocean that was her mind. host awareness: 0% in the back of his mind, the indicator tracking her minds reactivity played on, his presence undetected. for professionalisms sake, he needed to keep this within the sub-fifty percent range. the measurements were more estimates than auguries. for a few moments longer, he brushed her mind, and she recoiled, the entirety of her consciousness bearing a bruise the same dark nebula-like hue that spilled across her body. then, between considerations of suicide and fear of final death, he caught a glimpse of something that glinted, that resonated even with his own mind. ah. a memory of the steamed bun. a golden tunnel amidst the overgrowth of scar tissue that coated her spirit. the sight of such a memory being his key to smuggling himself even deeper into the depths of her mind pleased him. he had scorned himself for capitulating to her want at the time, virtue or not. walton wouldve been pleased, but he was a ghoul, and could only guess at the comfort of which his gift delivered. now, however, he had something to directly reference, sample, and comprehend. rare was decency rewarded, and rarer still did a good deed smile back at avo. there was something he needed to grasp here. he couldnt fully conceptualize what yet, so he left a reminder in his metamind to review this memory later. right then, however, he had a task to proceed with. it took almost none of his cognitive capacity to spoof himself into the memory for he was already a part of it. it did, however, need to be edited afterward. cleared of him, of draus, of kae. perhaps it would be best for him to restructure the memory in a way that had lucille buying the bun herself; an act of self-sufficiency after suffering often stood as a bulwark for an individuals ego. words and whispers began to sound. her internal monologue. avo spent a moment shuttling fragments out using the pull of his ghostjack. quietly, he fused a few pieces together and built a crude mem-log. +this is my fault! this is my fault!+ the girls mind was a howl of regret and sorrow. +i should have waited! i should have waited alone. i should have! but but i didnt know they were gonna scan usoh, i should have waited! i could have found my own way into the city+ clarity, then, dawned over why the hurt was so severe. it was partially her fault, in a narrow, unexpected sense. more memories filtered down through the depths, as he plundered her knowings to piece together the wholeness of her backstory. she was born in a rupture enclave, her family retainers to a fallwalkeran independently operating godclad who was bound to no guild and commonly hid in regions claimed by fallen heavens, hence their title. her patron fallwalker was a young godclad who called himself greten stonebreath. he dubbed himself thus, foolishly deciding to announce that he had a heaven of stone and wielded miracles relating to petrification. under the indifferent governance of the fallwalker, lucille led a simple life, working to sustain the enclaves hydroponics along with her family. such was her story for fifteen years. then, one night, a radiant lance seemed to slash through the folds of space itself, cleaving through the entirety of the enclave. the sudden assault left the thousand or so retainers untouched but vanished the fallwalker and his family. no explanation followed that. whoever their attacker or attackers were, they merely kidnapped greten and his kin before leaving, ignoring those that lived in the enclave, and throwing them before the tender mercies of the ruptures and anomalous creatures. she and her family had fled after that, marching blind through a place where all vertical lines manifested small snakes within ones eyes, and then deaf through a place where a chiming song of infectious winter played, freezing the unfortunate and unprotected enough to hear the tune from the inside. her mother had met her end that way, her noise-canceling audio-set malfunctioning along the road. a lattice of ice hatched from her corpse. they had to leave her, for her corpse began to ring with the chimes as well, and up close, the noise was near deafening. after weeks of venturing through the local sunderwilds spreading out like pus from the ruptures, they finally managed to make it to a voidwatch-run refugee camp where they were issued waiting permits by the guilds and given a number. one that would have seen them waiting their turn to enter new vultun. the fragments he paired from her memories played on. they stayed in the camp for well over two months, and its population swelled to that of an entire sovereignty, numbering a good hundred million people. they dwelled in a battered quick-fabbed shack, living as best as they could while bathed beneath the eldritch fires of the fallen heavens. for a while, she, her father, and her sister were content to wait, to nurse the sorrow of losing their mother. but then lucilles sister grew sick with an anomalous plague. eggs began growing along the walls of her lungs. when the auto-doc scanned her, the drone told them that it was a thaumaturgic infestation and that there was little they could do. they begged, asking for aid from local voidwatch immigration officer and the terrestrial guilders. in both attempts, they found only setbacks. they were fateless, which made off-world transit impossible, and they were anomaly-touched, which placed them in a quarantined quarter of the camps. avo tried reaching deeper, wishing to see more but the sequences he grasped felt far too brittle. her mind shifted, the waters whipping into motion. host awareness: 5% he retracted from the broader pool of her long-term memories. despite her rising awareness, he did not regret his digging. with what little of the outside world he saw, memories from beyond new vultun always made for most entertaining vicarities. it was one of the few commodities most fateless had for sale. moreover, it helped avo judge the flavor and effectiveness of her traumas even better. he realized that the devastation this chain of memories played on the girl wasnt just from seeing her father die, but also the fact that she, too, might have been at partial fault for it. from his guesses, her father mightve been able to strike a deal with a smuggler in the camp, buying tickets for two people into new vultun while hiding the fact that his daughters were twins. seeing as the trip was likely to get lucilles sister to taste the midnight rains, the fact that both of them were dead, and she was still alive worked at her insides like a knife stuck in her organs. perhaps if she just waited, if she just let her father and her sister leave first they would still be alive. avo regarded such a thought as pure delusion, for aseleri was a slave-runner, and the father and her sister, at best, wouldve been displaced if they lived long enough. fortunately, what was harm for her was a mineable weapon for him. casting his ghosts to stretch out over the sequence, avo began to copy its properties. lucilles anguish and regret formed a venom that bore layers of harm. the torment of watching her father die was most damaging. the regret she felt thereafter was like corrosion inflicted upon the ego, a vector of hurt that also applied a modifier of self-loathing if shaped into an armament. downloading trauma-pattern [lucilles regret] avo didnt waste any time. from the sequence he drew the mold of another fragger for use; the second weaponized memory pattern to be stored in his current metamind right after aseleris folly. as the download began to fill, avo found his focus drifting over to the girls father, her, her sister. for there, he began to contemplate how to whittle down the hurt that gnawed within this root of pain before he moved on to the others. Chapter 6-5 Mind Dive (II) chapter 6-5 mind dive (ii) how much damage does a thought fragger do? what kind of question is that? this aint arithmetic, consang. what cracks my jaw might just bounce off yours. as for how much damage they deal to your wards, well, thats more a matter of how theyre built. you got something like a memory of being set on fire, right? that shit can mess the both of us up. we dont like that. but a pyromaniacnatural or conditioned by phantasmicsmight see that as a duck sees water. heh. same thing with wards. are the ghosts simulating a hurricane? a flood or a natural disaster? yeah, throwing human-scale traumas doesnt get through, though theyll still crack the mind behind the wards plenty if you can smuggle them in. it''s how my necros used to explain it to me anyway. hells. theyd probably explain it better to you than i ever could. well, if any of them were still alive maybe. the point is, you have to treat phantasmics and mem-weapons like things of relativity. its not a gunfight like it is in the real. the nethers about trying to slip in through someones cracks after you dump a bunch of cog-missiles on them, and even during the bombardment. fragging up a mind is part art and part psycho-engineering. its the reason why there really aint that many true necros. it takes a very particular person to face the darkness, most fucked up shit you can find inside someones ego, and go: yeah, i think i can build something real nova with this. -quail tavers, new vultun sunrise interview 6-5 mind dive (ii) mending a mind from the inside was one part sleight of hand and three parts subversive architectural reconstruction. recovery wasn''t the right world for lucille. much as she wanted her personality to remain intact, the world that encapsulated her interior was already warped by the blows she had taken. life had treated her cruelly, and so the shape of her mind gave what it could in capitulation. but when she witnessed her sister die on the grafter station next to hers, an indelible hurt buried itself inside her so deep that every memory to do with her sister, and her father came afire when avo interfaced with them. they were like new nerve endings to a pain supreme. piloting the vessel that was aseleri from one memory to the next, his metamind groaned as the trauma battered his protective cage. the hurt was all personal, all individual, so the asymmetry played to his benefit. a recollection made to manifest in the shape of storms feared not the torments of a single girl, torturous as they were. cog-cap: 16% haste, however, was still wise. ineffective didn''t mean impotent. beyond the analogous shapes and abilities that phantasmics granted, they were still born of individual minds in quintessence; people remembered, and most people suffered from the chains of empathy. so too did their ghosts share in such a setback. avo did not suffer such a disadvantage. he wasn''t the most intuitive when it came to augmentative measures or designing mem-sims or vicarities made to appeal. but trauma enticed him on a primal and philosophical level. watching a mind fissure, burn, scatter, shatter, or outright dissolve in various stages of ego-fragmentation was pure artistry to him; to deliver hurt on a scale so deep that the body remained, but the mind that mantled found themselves dismembered of shape. when he still possessed his old metamind, he had a catalog of mental snapshots he took of broken minds. he used to bring them up while he fed, his satisfaction and pleasure being nourished in tandem. one of the few joys he found not so many others got to experience in life. it was through this that avo also knew how best to ward against afflictions, to bridge the fractured sequences that remained. he made to edit the memory then, pulling resources from his own cognitive library, considering how he could alter the sequence of her father''s death and clip the sting of her pain. to outright remove his demise would drive her into insanity. having a sea of grief inside oneself without a node to center it around could do that to a person. so the exercise became something in micro-deceptions. a smaller tweak. one that lessened the hurt--or transmuted it to another emotion. for a near hour longer, avo studied the webbed expanse of her nearby memories. clouds of threaded guilt sprang out from the sequence like it was a seed, the infection spreading and feeding into the other major roots of her trauma. it would take him at least a week to prune them all, but pruning was most inefficient. no, a pillar sequence could work to his advantage. he only needed to change a few things. shuttling aseleri''s sequences into the forefront of his mind, he filtered through all the snuff data she had stored within her metamind and plucked out the parts she remembered of the father. streklov. osjan streklov. born in pronghurst, on the periphery of kosgan. lineage was of thaum-slaves, meant to breed and be fed to the gods as a sacrifice. was about fifty-one at the time of death. augmentations minimal. his experience was primarily as a farmer out in the winnow--a narrow landbridge that extended from the nolothi continent to the scintillating, star-carved shores of kosgan. what aseleri knew of the man came from the information he gave them. all other data remained out of her reach, something that belonged to the city. or avo, should he be the one to perform the ritualistic act of slaughter, feeding his frame. regardless, he had enough of lucille''s father that he thought himself able to smuggle and overwrite the tail end of this traumatic sequence. his ghostjack crackled upon command, burning the mem-data of the current memories he was suffused in over into one of his ghosts. using said ghost, a rebuild was prepared. the father would still die. aseleri would remain a monster. but besides those eventualities, avo would make a single change. a thing centered around the idea of choice. something that the girl sorely lacked. it appeared to avo then the miracle-sick twin must''ve been the struggler in the family--lucille the relative coward. commendable, though ultimately worthless. he let the memory play on and watched as aseleri pushed her ghosts into their minds roughly. for the first time, avo winced. the rest of the pain meant little to him, but he knew why the two girls screamed while their minds were shredded so. the low masters were no gentler in issuing their commands. and aseleri doubtlessly wanted to farm them for vicarities to sell. again, the slaver didn''t know the value of that which she possessed, using her ghostjack as little more than mindware for snuff films and edits. but she didn''t stop there. instead, she ghost-linked their minds, bridging their emotion, and their thoughts. for a moment, avo was confused, but the moment didn''t last. the beast hissed with delight at what it was about to see. above the emotion, however, avo felt his scorn rising. it was a common technique in snuff circles. some called it the mingling. the act was simple. find two or more people that cared for one another and forcibly link their minds. once they were synced in thought and emotion, deliver them upon the precipice of pain with each serving as witness and host both. what followed was trauma, purer and greater than any single mind could muster. what followed was exponential pain of a cataclysmic variety. a blast of pain enveloped avo''s mind. the beast within him cackled with euphoric jubilance. a dozen micro-drones took beam and scalpel to the body of lucille and her sister. much like avo''s surgery, there were no anesthetics or pain inhibitors involved. unlike his, they needed it. no longer did he think bright-wealth''s words an exaggeration. screams that could follow one into their dreams indeed. screams ineffable in magnitude, descriptions insufficient to package the sheer devastation it inflicted. screams worth a million imps. downloading trauma-pattern [lucilles agony]; [secondhand fatality] he had something harsh enough to overload wards now if lucille''s pain meant anything. hard flowed the waters of virtue when vileness paid dividends so. the horror played for an eternity of three minutes. across the link, it felt like the sisters were clasping hands, trying not to let go of each other, their shared affection as strengthened as the pain was. but where resolve was steel, the flesh was wanting, and on the cusp of the third minute, one end of the link just dissolved. eyes misted and mind raw with agony, a drone had to draw lucille back by her hair, forcing her to look upon the stilled corpse of her half-flayed sister. she made a noise then. it was a scream. it was less than human, less than even the whine of a nu-dog. aseleri had taken her past the threshold of hurt she could fathom. numbness became lucille, and her thoughts drowned in a blank canvas as she suddenly began wondering why her father was missing, why her sister wasn''t moving, and where her mother was. even the endless stream of ghosts he drew from the locus was coming apart against the totality of her despair. avo felt his wards shudder. and begin to crack. cog-cap: 88% "ah, hells," aseleri said, sounding more annoyed than anything. "hope you aren''t broken. still gotta sell you, you know." with a thought, avo jacked out. he jacked out and took a second to think. looking down at the girl, he saw turbulence in her expression. the dream would only last for so long. but he needed to consider how to approach this. he had hoped the sister''s death and her implantation were separate roots. instead, the inflamed sequence was conjoined; overlapping. this would take more than a spoofed memory. far more. moreover, avo was wrong about lucille. if she was a coward, insanity would have devoured her then. reaching into his own metamind, he watched as even the ghost he copied the memory sequence over to writhed, lightning bolts of trauma running through its wisp-like structure. glancing at lucille again, avo felt his focus sharpen. she was proving to be more challenging to fix -- and more valuable a resource -- than he thought. one that would take more than a few spoofs. thinking, his thoughts shifted back over to aseleri. the girl couldn''t kill the slaver. not even after all that had been done to her. an even stranger reaction after what was inflicted on her, but most minds were unique in shape and reaction. then, a thought came to avo. one of chronological reinterpretations and a grander falsehood to wave. what if he added another link to the sequence? what if it also allowed him to censor her mind at the same time? what if, instead of dying mid-graft, he gave her sister an encore worth remembering? see aseleri dead in the same instant? begin by weakening the trauma and tweaking her past? a new plan began to grow in avo''s mind. he dove back in. Chapter 6-6 Mind Dive (III) chapter 6-6 mind dive (iii) i visited twelve different necros to remove the contagion after the war. best of stormtree, or so they claimed. do you know what they told me? "can''t do it." can''t do it. asked them why. do you know what they told me? "it''s spread. there''s nowhere it isn''t." nowhere it isn''t. i thought about solving my own equation after that. finishing things out as myself... well, that''s not true. whatever shadow of myself i was after... anyway, do you know what happened next? do you want to know what it took to get me to stop thinking i had four fathers? go back to having none? a real necro. one that does it for the pleasure of the dive. a guy i could... understand, i suppose; gives himself over to the action. he''s like me, i think. he loves... what he does. i love the gun. he loves the ghost. somewhere between it all, i think he just... pitied me? such creatures of simplicity we were. but i was of the land, and he the air. when the waters rose, he was flying... but... but i drowned. he removed the damage sequences. pieced together who i was from the periphery of my life. did it all in exchange for a memory? one that i was more than happy to give. i killed a low master, you know. don''t remember how anymore. sold that off to the necro. don''t remember much about him after either. think he was using an incog when he spoke. no name. no address. just a title. the strix. and a smell. a smell that stays with you. citrus. -mem-log of vincintine javvers, leader of the scalpers syndicate 6-6 mind dive (iii) the first matter to circumvent was the sheer weight of the trauma. he lasted within the confines of the sequence leading up to the apex, but upon reaching the precipice, it was as if stepping above a sun-basked mountain into the first of dawn itself. perhaps he could have designed wards more asymmetrical to its harm--collected ghosts of colder emotion and make. such things, however, would take weeks if not months. time favored him more than before, but the tides of fortune could shift between seconds and instants. the last two days had ingrained much in him regarding the seizure of opportunity. instead, he embarked further into the girl''s past, far before the point where her greatest wounds lingered. still, he could feel the hurt bleeding over. memories were connected after all. like chains holding onto chains. like a stalker digging through flashing montages of a discarded life, he studied the nature of lucille''s sister, his metamind set to keep her name from his memories. it would serve nothing for him to claim knowledge of her name and fill her with personhood. such a task would better be automated for his ghosts. alas, for all the strength the sister supposedly displayed before her demise, it simply did not show throughout her life. much like lucille, she was a worker in the enclave''s hydroponics facility. unlike lucille, it appeared the sister was something of a sim-addict, spending much of her time drowning in bootlegged memories and smuggled mem-games--experiences of experiences, mental constructs derived from a secondhand source already experiencing a vicarity themselves, offering a most diluted hit. gunmetal glory was the prime drug to her habit. taking place during the age of pantheons, the game was set in a world much based on sanctus historicals, with derivatives of the vuddivistae pantheon facing mutually off-brand mimicries of the kosgan seraphic choirs. old wars masked in a new sheen of paint. lucille herself cared little for the games, more addicted to the historicals herself. ultimately, neither sister held true predilections towards violence. this meant that if he need the sister to play the part of the avenger and savior, he would have needed to rewrite the entirety of her identity within lucille''s perspective. something that he had neither want nor inclination of doing. nor did he see the need. a great portion of being a necro, then, was adaptability. the mind could be rewoven toward a new narrative, but the paths to the promised recreation were myriad. the climax of her new recollective architecture needed to be one of finality, a thing that saw the death of the sister and aseleri alike, followed by a cleansing of potentially incriminating details. thankfully, however, lucille and her sister need not prevail alone. and sometimes, ignorance was the best armor against suspicion. to this end, avo made two greater changes. the first was an alteration made to the anomalous sickness that plagued her sister--something that avo added aspects to, making lucille believe that her sister had been made more robust as well by the creatures festering beneath her skin. the second was the presence of outside actors, coming not to save them, but to seek recompense from aseleri. hours drifted and avo succumbed to the breadth of his work. he worked from the short-term to the long, pruning and copying memories relating to himself, draus, or kae. he did not remove the events outright in lucille''s mind. to do so risked the host''s outright awakening. instead, he changed the events of her freedom, using the deluge of despair and near-madness after the death of her sister to shroud her recollections in mist and doubt. from there, he structured a new tale using the artifacts and actors at his disposal. bridged by the phantasmal pathway cast by his ghostjack, avo wielded his art in dichotomy, building new memories in his and deconstructing memories in hers. he seeded new assumptions for the sister--minor suggestions toward her being more willing to accept violence in the face of death. more than that, however, he added new lines of dialogue to aseleri when she spoke to their father, painting her face in sweat and nervousness, hinting at a debt that was coming due; a slaver made by desperation rather than rank greed and cruelty, something much easier to digest for lucille''s mind. from there, he prepared new actors to enter the scene; debt collectors and outside forces, transplanting her feelings of shock and awe when he slew aseleri before her to mask any possibility of disbelief. no outside emotion was injected into her equilibrium. her feelings remained hers. it was but the truth that was disposed of. by the time he was inching toward the culmination of the resequencing, the day was long faded and midnight greeted him as a chime via his metamind, his deepnav announcing the oncoming rainfall. he had scrubbed himself and the other two from the girl''s memories. nothing would remain of him other than that of a passing feeling should their paths ever cross again. in his place, he introduced the presence of new strangers into her memory. such was the risk he had to take should he want to bring the memory to a culmination during the grafting. melded from all the scalpers, enforcers, and hunters he left dead over the past week, his ghosts offered him a selection of new and entirely non-existent personas from the forge that was his ghostjack. they would inherit a mesh of traits and that would leave them just believable enough for the mind to accept as real, yet nondescript enough to never be found should lucille ever gain the interest to go looking. these new proxies would serve in place of him and draus, as debt collectors coming to claim that which aseleri owed them. her mind halted a moment. in the real, a slight frown drifted across her face like a passing cloud. avo froze, steadying himself to jack out as he watched her awareness climb, and stop. host awareness: 12% acceptable. he continued. taking a moment to review the sequences that he changed, avo beheld his work, riveted with focus. like a galaxy of ever-spreading branch-like dendrites of memories that fenced fluid stars of welling emotion, avo looked upon the simulated map of her mind and made a few final adjustments. through a single strand--the memory of the steam bun--he twinned his ghosts to her memories and made the changes. he collapsed a few lesser events into each other, hiding them beneath the sequences of a grander memory. a few more hints were placed to infuse the sister''s presence with more strength, more tenacity. he even shrank aseleri down to afflict her with more vulnerability. make her death easier for lucille to accept when the time came. then, when all that was done, avo ran the new sequence through himself as a simulation, with his ghost offering an estimate of how much attention his edits would draw from the host. estimated host awareness: 17-20% twenty ran the edge but was acceptable. any more than that and he would be looking to reduce his number of changes. he applied the rebuild, letting his ghosts slowly overwrite her memories, the installation taking its time. a brute change would have allowed him much more speed but would''ve left her little more than a catatonic husk considering the immensity of the traumas she bore. as another hour passed, the new memories dissolved the old, setting into place as he slowly rebuilt his way over toward the moment of her sister''s death--and her implantation. mind quiet after hours of work, avo found himself content to watch his revisions. the act, he could not deny, was one of pure ego: a one-ghoul audience watching his self-directed play in the cinema of another''s mind. he would even have considered it voyeuristic if not for his relative lack of interest in the victim, supping amusement instead from a demonstration of personal capabilities. the memory of her greatest trauma began again. the initial moments were much the same, with the sister and her forced to watch each other''s brutalization. their flesh was splayed open; their minds were joined in the fires of agony; their voices were united in screams. but this time, the sister did not die immediately. at least, not yet. not with her supposedly enhanced survivability. he accelerated the completion of the implantation process, truncating the process to not run out of time for this branch and bleed over into the next sequence. "well," aseleri said, scripted to his behest, "seems like i underestimated my new products. expected at least one of you to die." she sighed in faux disappointment. it helped that he had the slaver''s ghost to simulate the part. "still. pretty neat vicarities you two made. going to fetch me some neat imps. heh. you''re gonna be stars for a day in the warrens. you''re welcome--" the grafting chamber shook then, explosions shaking the structure. aseleri''s holofeed flickered, and through a mind-numbed haze, lucille found herself drifting in and out of coherence at avo''s suggestion, the room erupting in moments of violence as gauss fire tore through the walls, and gunfire was exchanged. hoarsely, she whimpered for her sister, now no more than raw scabs of swaying meat than a person. but breathing. still breathing. another blast sounded. another exchange of gunfire. drones came apart into popping sprays of licking alloy. screams and curses flowed from the hissing doorway, aseleri fleeing in. to add effect to the scene, he had the outlines of her two captains come apart under gunfire. a stale background inspired questions in the mind, after all. firing back sloppily, the already wounded captain stumbled next to the two girls as struggled to reload her gyrojet pistol, blood welling from three wounds in her abdomen, subdermals punched clean through. "i got... i got product!" he had made her shout. silence returned. a shadow of an exo-rig appeared in the doorway, somewhere between conflux and scalper in design. avo''s persona said nothing and brought their gun to bear. aseleri cursed. she fired back, gun in one hand and weapon implant in the other. both instruments boomed as she tore chunks through the wall, suppressing the incoming assailants. this lasted for but a second until another shot tore through one of the side walls and sheared through the captain''s knee. like a toppling tree, the giantess fell, her weight crashing down and sending lucille careening from her grafting station. by this point, the numbness needling through her skin exiled her from pain. and so, with a moment''s urging from avo, and after a choked beat of hesitation spent staring at the writhing slaver, lucille stumbled blind into a cloud of gunfire, limping toward the mangled disfigurement that was her sister. to have lucille dream that she and her sister could overcome aseleri alone was a step beyond. as much as avo tried, the captain had left scars the size of mountains that rose through the waters of the former mod slave''s mind. hence the need for his personas, and outside assistance to help deliver the killing blow that neither lucille nor her sister could manage. and in place of avo and draus, they served as halfway saviors. but the resolution, then, belonged to her and her kin. beneath his helmet, he grinned. it was good to be dreaded. glancing at the girl again, bright-wealth sighed. "kind of fucked up too, if you think about it. changing her memories. taking her traumas and turning them into weapons. truth is like clay to your type." and for once, she regarded him as more necro than ghoul. it was almost touching. "this was not her dream. but it will be. better than truth." her eyes bulged at his answer. "jaus," bright-wealth said again. but the moment didn''t last on her. bright-wealth, unlike lucille, experienced things in bursts and moved on just as fast. a conspiratorial glint shone in the depths of her eyes. "hey, listen... every other tulsady, i play this game of towers with my sisters..." he suddenly found himself wondering how bright-wealth''s skin would feel if he peeled her face off and wore it as a mask. "not helping you cheat." a puckering noise came from her then, her tail striking the ground in a faux-tantrum-like rattle. lucille shuffled, turning in the bed. "come on. what is the point of being a masterful necrojack if you can''t help your good consang bright-wealth angle her way into a few thousand imps from her cheating sow-sisters." avo stared. "we''re consangs now?" she held out her hands as if waiting for coins to fill her palms. "with such skill, surely you--" "no." "ah! you''re so boring. you''re so stiff. i thought you were going to be fun." that made avo chuff. "most ghouls you know are fun?" a trace of consideration passed through her features in but a moment. "yes, actually. they are quite fun to bet on when they have them fight in the pits." he was a fool trying to talk sense with a consummate gambler. moreso to linger after his task was done and more awaited. "going to need help," avo said, gesturing to the still-slumbering lucille. "won''t remember me or the other two. might need some direction. so warrens don''t eat her." bright-wealth cocked an eyebrow as she slithered around him in a burst of motion. "oh. do i sense caring from you, ghoulie?" "no," avo said. "just feels like a waste of work if she died soon." he looked upon her again and felt little more than pride and hunger. she wasn''t his best work but considering her condition and his lack of practice in reassembling minds compared to cracking them, it was a most acceptable outcome. "be like watching my art burn." "ah," bright-wealth said, tone flattening to a nasal disappointment. "and here i was thinking you suddenly grew a heart." "would like that. free organ. free imps," avo said. "make sure the grafter doesn''t spoof her. that she gets the imps." bright-wealth snorted. "fine. you want me to get her a job too?" "can you?" the sang was about to say something sarcastic in retort but then settled back into thoughtfulness. "maybe. might need to ask river. our sister at the front desk solved her own equation yesterday. too much joy." one death was a tragedy. and an opportunity. avo grunted. "good." with a thought, avo casually flicked her a few hundred or so imps, the diamond-like glints of the motes threading out from behind his wards into her accretion. "as thanks. ask draus if you want another arrangement. she might have something." imps: [2342] the sang grinned and gave avo a wink. "have i ever told you that you''re my favorite ghoul?" what fierce competition he must''ve been up against to claim such a title. "no. must''ve been distracted last few times." "ah," bright-wealth said, waving his words off in a display of false modesty. "we all have flaws. some of us get forgetful when our accounts get dry." greed. ever reliable. ever exploitable. *** avo made not to loiter, returning to elevator and reascending. caressing the new traumas swirling within his mind, the designs of new constructs called to him. no more need to use his wards as a blunt instrument. no more need to wield his whisper like a hammer. the feeling of being properly armed was a comfort he missed, the possibility of being able to build proper phantasmics enticed him further now that the matter of the girl had been solved. chambers was to be next. he and the two techs presented unique opportunities for subversion, and he long yearned for the chance to roam in a mind he feared not to break. as the elevator climbed back up to the tenth floor, he activated his auto-seance and cast a thought over to draus. +avo here. dealt with the mod slave. going to work on our three guests next. need me to wait for your return? have ideas on how to turn them to use.+ silence was his companion for a moment. then, as if a doorway flung open, draus greeted him, her cog-feed twined over his, flashing into form in the corner of his mind''s eye. +the girl. how''s she gettin'' on?+ draus asked, her question cutting in without greeting. +mind''s clean of us. managed to knot the worst of her pain too.+ +well, color me pleased ''bout that.+ draus sighed her reluctance and curiosity upon the shores of avo''s mind through the session. +how... uh... how bad is it? inside her head, i mean?+ +aseleri mingled her and her sister. made them face each other during the implantation process. sister died while the link was still active.+ a dull throb of hate reverberated through draus. +well. and here i was thinkin'' that me lettin'' you work that slaver the way you did was enabling.+ +it was. she also deserved it. both things can be true.+ the regular laughed. +real introspective of you there, ghoul.+ +just being honest.+ she paused. +you mockin'' me there, avo?+ +yes.+ +heh. half-strand.+ a flood of mem-data from her aero''s locus slipped over into their link. +you fine with hangin'' around until i get back? got some things we need to go over. ideas, more like. think you can plant some spyware in their minds.+ +give me desired function. i''ll make the phantasmics.+ +gleam,+ draus said. +another thing. green river cast at me earlier. she got your thaum-chow ready. you fine with killin'' your kind, right?+ +easier than hunting them in the gutters,+ avo said. +quieter than hunting gangers. will need to check if she planted anything in them. you tell her that they''re for target practice?+ +yep,+ draus replied. +she believe you?+ the regular barked a laugh. +hells no. but i think she''s got her eye more on me than she does you. might be thinkin'' i''m about that bio-warfare life now. use them as super-spreaders or somethin''. figured that cause she offered me a couple of discounts on their off-the-book product. virals and plagues. outdated but still nasty no-dragon shit.+ made sense. +want me to scry her out. see if i can get inside. see what she knows?+ a lull of consideration hovered. +no. no, don''t do that. she ain''t peeked at us yet, far as i can tell. might be talking with her seniors, but she''s held to our agreement so far.+ avo didn''t know if it was honor or doubt that restricted draus so. +can get in. looked at their wards. security. a bit less than competent. good for these parts. nothing i haven''t--+ +ain''t nothin'' about your jacking. just... hold on for now. i gotta think.+ draus sighed. +she and i, we got stuff on each other. debts. deals. the whole suite. it ain''t ''bout trust but... she''s been reliable. and i''d rather have her to deal with. near anyone else i know would''ve sold us back to highflame or their preferred color the moment they suspected anything.+ +and why hasn''t she?+ avo asked. +honor?+ +interest is more my guess,+ draus said. +i''m sure she wants to climb up. get into the tiers. just don''t think she''s content about the undercroft. she might be gunning for the frame herself, avo. trying to see if we''re gonna lead her anywhere. if we know anything more than what we told her.+ ah. so she sought the entirety of the reward rather than just a cut of the prize. but it was already suspect. she knew too much and played a passive game. unless she was that good of a necro that not even he could notice. should that be the case, he and draus were already dead. if kae''s mind was intact enough, he would have suspected her thoughts of being bugged. as she was now, she was lucky if her thoughts remained for half a second before immolating. +decide quickly with her,+ avo said. +won''t wait for her to move first. done making that mistake.+ Chapter 6-7 Target Practice chapter 6-7 target practice "they''re renewable. it''s efficient" -the official no-dragon response regarding their continued use of ghouls after the damage inflicted upon public welfare after the uprising 6-7 target practice "well... this brings back old times, don''t it, avo?" draus said. avo didn''t respond with words, instead granting the regular only a low growl, the noise only earning a soft laugh from her. before them was "target practice." a wide-open room located in the back of a rarely frequented arcade in xin yunsha. with their bodies caged by the grasp of shifting gravity platforms that ran circuits across the fifty-by-fifty room, avo watched as his brothers were shuttled in one after another, each looking more cancerous than the last. judging from the half-healed surgical scars on their bodies, they were likely of use to the local grafters once. until the tumorification occurred. then, it proved to be cheaper to get another ghoul instead of attempting surgery to preserve the previous ones. from behind a protective phase shield, avo, draus, and kae listened as a rock-heavy jingle played and the ghouls twisted in pirouettes to the whims of a force unseen. "mega-defense ultimate! the rotlicks have come to feed on your family! you gleam enough to feed on their deaths?" the grating tone of the announcer made kae wince with displeasure. "how... how awful. avo, a-are you fine with this?" "yeah," avo said, his tone flat. "more convenient this way." he turned to draus. "how much stock? one hundred and twenty? "two hundred and twelve. on discount." she snorted. "didn''t think river would actually make this target practice themed, but i figure that ghouls bound for the pastures gotta go somewhere." she paused. "and frankly, i don''t much recall doin'' much gallery shootin'' with your kind. fusion burners were my bread and butter for ghouls." at the mention of fusion burners, avo''s skin prickled. memories of his idiot brothers charging into an expanding chasm of blinding brightness assailed him. still, they kept spilling down death-choked hallways, their bodies whole, then shadows, swallowed by an overwhelming tide of light. quietly, he watched the writhing forms of his brothers, their movements strained with impotence as they wrestled against their suspension. there was poetry here, morbid as it was. to die as impotent as they had lived. to die as mockeries of their purpose rather than fulfilling the grand design for which they were molded. kae had suggested that they see his thaums and ghosts good and fueled before the next steps. draus concurred. hence, they found themselves here, beholding the targets their benefactor offered them. avo sighed. it was not the insult to his kind that bothered him. no. ghouls were little more than insults, to begin with; too vicious to be a part of society, too weak to cause actual harm. with a thought, his metamind pulsed, and at its crown, the ghostjack sang out to the nether, a stratocumulus of sequences breaking from being constellations behind his wards and gathering to form a trauma-infused lance tip. he coated his weapon first with the secondhand fatality. phantasmal matter surged. a crackle formed over its path as viewed from his cog-feed. as easy as driving a toothpick through a bug, avo plunged his trauma down through two of his brothers, one in front of the other. their thoughtstuff shattered, fragmenting like bone. their memories followed, uncupped from the accretion, spilling free like viscera. upon their nulling, he tasted the contents of their mind and found them wanting. they bore within them violence and bloodlust, but little more. still, they understood the nature of death. feared it all the same. perhaps not enough to parse themselves from the pursuit of hunger, but enough to struggle for survival if demanded. a rueful grin graced avo''s face beneath the helmet. kae stared on in transfixed horror, wincing as both spasmed and went limp. their bodies continued to pump breath, but the vacancy in their gaze told of their true destination along the twists of the mortal coil. "you''re right draus. does bring back old times," avo said, unlatching the secondhand fatality pattern from his ghosts. it was a devastating instrument, though immensely heavy on his thoughtstuff. when he channeled its design, his cog-cap spiked upward of seventy percent. if he didn''t siphon aseleri''s metamind clean, he doubted he would even have enough ghosts to run it. "low masters used things like this to ''encourage our bravery.''" he chuffed a light laugh. "part of the reason we were so easy to burn. ahead was death. finality. behind was torment. continual." as the minds of his two brothers came apart into motes, he regarded them with faint annoyance. he wouldn''t be getting ghosts from them, but that was part of the reason he picked them. they looked young. barely more than ghoullings. if any amongst the stock below suffered from an insufficiency of self-awareness, it would be those two. the quiet ebbing forth from draus, meanwhile, also pleased him. at least in some capacity. he couldn''t blame her for taking pleasure in the slaughter of his kind. such a thing was ordained by causes virtuous and axiomatic. concurrently, she could not cast accusations of him wielding the mind-rending arts of her greatest rivals--of ori-thaum--despite what wounds they may have inflicted upon her. not without staining her tongue in the waters of hypocrisy. "so you say?" she replied, swallowing. "that the pattern you planning to lace our three esteemed volunteers with?" "no. will take too many ghosts to support in their minds. easy found. unleash that through them as gateways with an auto-seance maybe. have something else for them." he collapsed the pattern and cycled in lucille''s agony. a less damaging instrument. more modest in its demand of his capacity, however, and it left the mind intact if traumatized. deactivating all his presently unneeded phantasmics, he unleashed his new pattern as an eruption of jagged threads, like animated branches in motion, missing only the perched presence of a nu-shrike to complete the invocation of his intent. "yeah," draus said, face darkening. "haven''t met a whole lotta half-strands like that. hey, avo? didn''t you say you had a third pattern? lucille''s regret." "that''s for my morality injector. useless on my brothers. too distant to register as proper trauma. good to choke beast though." a fact that he had to thank walton for. if there was one thing he regretted, it was being unable to prevent his father''s death by the rash. of course, with walton manifesting in the depths of his mind and lecturing him about the ninth column and going to the easy armistice, new suspicions arose in avo. new suspicious he dared not water. not until later. there were possible truths he didn''t want to face right now. he would finish with conflux, build and claim what memories he needed to cross over past layers two and one, and greet the objective granted to him on his terms. he had enough of being on the back foot. "alright," avo said. "wasted enough time." he made to deactivate the phase shielding parting them from the ghouls. draus reached out to stop him. "hey--hey. target practice usually entails guns," draus said. "guns won''t get me thaums. need to get closer to drink. sovereignty active here. kae." "ye-yes," kae said. "un--he doesn''t... doesn''t have the thaumic mass to contest." she shrugged. "it''s... it''s like a greater center of gravity." draus sighed. "well, i''m putting up the shield after you go in. don''t need any of them gettin'' out and ambushing some juv on their way home." that made avo laugh. "be a miracle if they can walk right now." "i''ve seen those miracles." he breathed. fair enough. descending into the gamified firing range, avo flexed his claws and shifted the sharpened strands of his heaven. twitching his celerostylus, he felt the reflex booster responding more promptly than it had before. rest had done his body well. his nerves had healed since his encounter with the scalpers. from conveyor docks built into the corners of the range, more ghouls were shuttled in one after another. flashing holograms ran past him, a father clutching his newborn screaming for someone to save him. through simulated gaps lining the walls, distant explosions flashed as a river of ghosts dueled like a clash of whips. that part was accurate, at least. the low masters had pitted their esteemed art--their supposed crowns that all the topsiders called a metamind--against their foes. they battled, and much like the bastard creatures they built to serve as shock infantry, they were found wanting. casting a splash of ghosts over one of his brothers, avo sampled the other ghoul''s mind and swept his scrying gaze across the others. green river had again either proven true to honor or was far superior a necro that he could not notice her subterfuge. something told him it was the former. striding up to the swaying ghoul, avo greeted his brother with a mix of scorn and pity. they shamed him. for their inability to rise above their instincts, he loathed them. the architecture of his hate was a varied one. the question of if he was unique by nature or nurture had flared within him like bouts of inflammation from time to time. not enough to truly trouble him, but enough to make him wonder. reaching into the mind of his brothers, he caressed their memories and sampled the moments they spent hatching from corpses and mounds of biomass before being plucked by strong hands. from there followed nothing but gladiatorial fights and surgery. yet, through it all, there was no trauma for him to derive, no reward for him to claim. it was a pleasure to hurt, to kill for them. and the act being inflicted on them, meanwhile, remained but fleeting wounds upon the uneasy waters of their psyche. in time, it was like they would even grow used to lucille''s agony. perhaps it was their state of weakness that allowed it to affect them in the first place. regardless of the case, he found himself looking up at one of his brothers, its body splayed out, rail-thin arms spread wide, a cluster of tumors bubbling out around its right eye. sniffingly, the other ghoul weakly bit at him. "hunger... give blood. give feed." rend capacity: 1% avo manifested a thin blade of purest crimson. at his brother''s words, he bit back a snarl. "why did you even make us?" he asked, his words offered uselessly to old owners no longer present. "why are they... lacking?" the ghoul, suspended as it was, bit at him. avo grunted in acknowledgment. "don''t worry. put an end to this farce. put an end to ours. no need for you. no point in you." his blade lashed out. with a flick, his blade punched through flesh and greeted ichor. avo dranked deep then. from the stock of his brothers, avo made put these creatures most worthless toward nobler cause. thaumic cycler: 61 thaum/c... 102 thaum/c... 150 thaum/c... 211 thaum/c... 272 thaum/c ghosts: [290] Chapter 6-8 Cages chapter 6-8 cages the obfuscation of spyware is a delicate act; it is akin to making a fluid computational machine. something non-newtonian, so to speak, if we are to continue viewing the mind through the metaphorical lens of being an ocean. but the mind is not an ocean. that is merely an analogy--a mental aid made to assist in the grasping of the construct''s true gnosis. with truth to the mind''s function, the nature of a thought is as individual and elemental as any domain in our current age. as such, the disguising of any circumspect phantasmics must take advantage of the fixed nature of long-term memories, the fluidity of thoughts; the evanescence of whims; intrusive suggestions triggered by external, internal, or chronological stimuli. ultimately, the rules and rigidity of each mind are invariable. you will have to be as much an artist as you are a practitioner to properly mask yourself beneath the waves. -incubi mind-diving mem-sim, ori-thaum 6-8 cages it was a special privilege to hold the leash to your own desires. everyone was bound to something, chained by nature or want. with the beast nested in his depths, avo knew this better than most. this was why the moment he claimed his glut of ghosts, he went about completing that which was long missing in his mind. within his palace, grand columns of voluminosity ran wide and high, caging the megablock of his youth in a cage of light. each bar was made from a mix of memories, some fused like alloys, others interwoven like strings or wires. the sequences flowed and circulated across each column as if veins coursing with blood, and its crest, over its ceiling, phantoms played moments from lucille''s regret. flashes of aseleri executing the girl''s father ran in a loop, the surging pulse of despair and self-loathing supercharging other memories of a like nature, with other perpendicular and tangential memories attached by other junctions or shared emotions injected down into the soil of mind, greeting the chaotic waters of his basest instincts like a diluting cocktail against the encroach of his savagery. avo tuned his phantasmic with care. he couldn''t overdose himself on secondhand emotions--that way lay insanity. too much and he would lose his sense of self. be drowned in a tide of sensations and desires that never belonged to him. too little and the beast will push on through all the same. what he needed from the phantasmic was for it to match and cancel his impulses exactly. see that his mind remained his while his baser proclivities were smelted into silence. [morality injector] cog-cap: 20 sequences (baseline) structure: a resplendent cage with a cinema projection of past happenings playing across the sky" function: allows the user to nullify specifically encoded impulses with counter-emotional doses of memory. as a test, he called upon aseleri''s ghosts and looked upon her last memory. the one that was her death; an instance he had savored most fondly. the moment flowed then, her death unfolding like an edited vicarity in his mind. he felt her fear, her despair, the mind-shattering of her flesh coming apart from the inside, and the near-sweetness of death before he drained her metamind and essence dry. the beast was an easy creature to seduce into bloodlust. fooled by the cheap meal and thinking nothing of how it already knew these flavors, it emerged in force, the ground of his palace rumbling as if it was built upon the throat of a leviathan. yet, just as it was about to rise up and stain the air with its flavor, the morality injector plunged its panacea deep. like matter and antimatter, the flash of white basked the entirety of his palace in a haze. for seconds, thoughts slipped from avo''s grasp as he tried to collect himself. at once, he felt a clashing urge. one to hurt, the other to be ashamed of hurting. when he finally mastered himself again, he settled back upon his injector and adjusted his "potion" again. there was something off in the mixture. it had fragmented his wants instead of dissolving them. it took a very specific symmetry of memories to achieve the effect he desired. two hours more he labored, and twice more he fired his phantasmic. the first lacked sufficient impulse. the second was close, but still caused detonations in his train of thought. finally, he managed the right combination of constructs. he knew it when no reactive blast followed. and quieter still, he could hear the beast inside him choking on a lungful of foreign emotion. good. it was working. now he only needed to watch his counter-mem dosage over time. the beast was exponentially more bloodthirsty than when he was still living in the undercroft. for good reason too. he had left it starved. atrophied. withered for years. until his descent down into the maw fed its gluttonous appetite to new extremes. a faint worry hatched from a newly watered seed in his mind. considering what was demanded of his soul, the thaums and ghosts he reaped were now in competition. he knew not if the beast had an upper limit, but he had more than a feeling that should he end up slaughtering the requisite number of people his soul needed to climb the spheres, he might end up needing more ghosts for stability than thaums for power. part of him was disquieted. a substantial part more was intrigued. the beast was blunted, but not severed, and avo himself would be chambering his thoughts with delusion if he didn''t admit that his newfound power had also offered him greater heights of satisfaction atop even the thrill that was claimed. immortality offered freedom. and godhood offered self-determination. both came as a joined package in the form of his liminal frame. and through it, avo felt more aware of himself than he ever had been, more "person" than he ever was. the time he lived since walton''s death had been rote. routine, almost. he did dives and lived by the ethics and habits instilled in him from a time when his father was still alive. he moved regularly. he operated his living expenses and masked his status of ownership under shell companies and llcs. he avoided attention. he practiced his art. still, she smacked her lips a few times and breathed in quietly, and mock contentment. "what was that you said just now?" "you''re lazy. don''t like walking." she looked down at her legs, frowning as if there was something wrong with them. wordlessly, she gesticulated at her limbs and threw her hands up, as if asking avo to clarify. strangely, something chambers'' said rang back to him in that instant. something about using all his words. avo opened his mouth to complain. draus pulled a plastic bag filled with six more buns out from the veil of her coat and handed it to avo. across the plastic covering, the same dancing bear avo saw the other day battled tigers and dragons, proclaiming that only one could rule the mountain. "come on, rotlick," she said, walking past him, "let''s see if your exercise-lovin'' ass can chew, whine, and talk at the same like a regular." the aerodocks was the very definition of sensory overload. guidance drones wailed sirens and painted stacks of hissing storage slots. three holographic thresholds lined the vehicle and container tonnages based on verticality. the heaviest deliveries were installed at the very bottom first before other cargo lined the top like bricks. chittering bugs and multi-eyed birds stood perched--a biological surveillance apparatus on top of the mechanical. things here played to a far more biomechanical make. unlike the biomancy-heavy stylings that flavored the district, the joining of flesh and metal was much like an open hand toward mutual cooperation with the rest of the city. walking between warning projections lining what counted as a safe distance from a yet clamped piece of cargo, avo followed draus toward the corner of the docks. their container unit was z-099, placed right next to the local warehouse. "you got the mem-key?" avo asked. "river''s old fashioned." draus held up what looked to be a key in the shape of a centipede. no. it was also a centipede. sometimes, the sang''s artistry with biology struck him as a maniacal obsession. that, at least, was something he could respect. a thin line of crimson displayed the words "locked" greeted them upon arrival. a slot that looked like it could fit someone''s finger--or an insect--extended upon sensing nearby motion. draus put her bug key in and the slot snapped shut. avo heard a very distinct crunch. he grimaced. "that supposed to happen?" "probably," draus said. "it''s reading the bioform''s genome as a key. only the sang can make ''em an'' all that." as if on cue. the door flashed green, the red fading in an instant. a large "unlocked" burst across avo''s vision as the door hissed and a warm gush of air ran over his skin. inside, lit by a large ring of light, their three test subjects were left cocooned in what looked to be mounds of flesh. beneath the light, the outlines of their bodies bobbed up and down. gazing over the interior with his heaven, avo felt the exo-organs pump, mend, and clean the blood of the three prisoners on a nigh-constant basis. say one thing for the sang, say they''re good at keeping your prisoners in prime condition. the one that held chambers wasn''t hard to find, with the enforcer''s mass and height being obvious. up close, the exo-organ''s texture looked like something between a tongue and a scab. the centermost section resembled that of a half-collapsed fan, its surface scrunched inward, clenching the internal contents tight. tilting her head up at avo, draus grinned. "you wanna be the first one he sees? or should i?" avo considered it for a moment. "no. both. makes it worse. you broke his limbs. i threatened to eat him." draus chuckled now. roughly, she hammered her fist down against the organ. inside, the enforcer jolted awake, his mind''s accretion spinning to full awareness. the sang had left his wards intact. he didn''t blame them. the thing wasn''t worth the effort of extraction. at the regular''s percussive command, the organ sloshed and--stickily--opened up. strands of mucus broke and spilled down as it bloomed, unveiling its contents like a flower. "agh! fuck! my motherfucking eyes! who the fuck--" inside, a meat-festooned chambers, looking much like an infant coated in the juices of a womb, stared out at avo and draus, his snarl fizzling out into a low note of hopelessness. "--fuuuuuuuccccckkk. jaus. fucking jaus. come on. come the fuck on. give me a godsdamned break." draus smiled as sweetly as she could. she really didn''t have the face for it. "say you had one, consang," draus said, licking her teeth. "let you go to sleep after our conversation last time. like to carry on where we left off." Chapter 6-9 A Civil Conversation chapter 6-9 a civil conversation "thank you! thanks for eating my daddy!" -"aedon" chambers aged 10, cheering on the ghouls fleeing from his block during the uprising 6-9 a civil conversation chambers sputtered. "last time? last time? the last time you--you--oh, okay. yeah. i guess you did let me have enough sleep. thank you for your service, captain regular, ma''am. this is exactly why i looked out for ya on that cold and miserable night after the crucible. because i really wanted to get my limbs twisted to shit and brain damage so bad those flesh-loving sang-fucks decided the best way to fix it was pouring fucking bugs in my head to ''eat away the injuries.''" the outburst toned the enforcer''s face in a flush of red. his eyes, likewise, bulged with exaggerated incredulity. yet, the flow of his thoughtstuff was far less charged than it seemed. avo frowned at that. it appeared that chambers was playing up his outrage to prod at an angle of sympathy. foolish, but fascinating. "an'' look at you now," draus continued, ignorant as to the true state of chamber''s mind. not that she likely cared. "did a fine job fixin'' you up, didn''t they?" "i can still feel them just... chittering around inside my head," chambers said. he shuddered. draus nodded in mock sympathy. "well, you best get yourself together there, consang, because i assure you: that nightmare is over." "yeah. thank jaus." "--but i can make it happen again if you don''t stop wasting my time and start talking."??vl-b!n. the enforcer sighed. "this... this how you talk to everyone? fucking... pretend niceties followed by threats? come now?" he turned to avo as if imploring him for help. "i mean, come on. why not offer me a deal? something nice? a glass of fucking water even. ain''t no need for being this mean. you already got me all bound up in this fucked up meat cage. it feels like i''m in a tongue, by the way. like... like a big one." "could just crack his wards," avo said, addressing draus. "dive into his mind." "give it minute. you can do that once i''m good and done with the ''niceties'' anyway." chambers shot a look of sadness at avo. "avo. consang. you remember when you got the key to that old galeslither so you wouldn''t be bothered by any of the half-strands after you fucked up rantula?" and there it was again. chambers was fishing for sympathy. from a ghoul. it was like the man didn''t know what he was, or at least seemed to suffer a very warped idea of how a ghoul exactly functioned. "remember you getting me into bad run. no preparation. lied to me about details. left me to die." "hey. that ain''t my fault. how in all the fucks was ol'' chambers supposed to know those scalper shits were going to be involved? do i look like a data broker from the deep bazaar? no, consang. i''m like you: just a squire tryin'' make it in the biggest of the big that''s new vultun." at this point, draus cracked a disbelieving smile. "ain''t gonna lie, he''s real precious in a rat-bastard kind of way." chambers grinned at her, his smile one of boyish glee manifesting at the lowest of compliments. "i always thought i had it in me to make it in the soaps." beneath draus and avo''s blank-faced stares, he sagged and sighed. "alright. remind me where we left off. i''d just start talkin'' myself but... i''m afraid i might upset our dear regular again and earn myself another session of bug surgery." "talk ''bout your boss," draus said. "jhred greatling. mirrorhead. give us everything you know. leave nothing out." he let out a long and overwhelmed breath, bottom lip flipped over to accentuate the severity of the topic. "suppose i better get to it, yeah?" "yeah, that sounds wise," draus said. "will know if you''re lying," avo added. "don''t lie. will make me sloppy when digging through your mind later. bad for sanity." chambers frowned. "and back to the threats again--" "keep talkin''," draus said, interrupting his diatribe. "alright, alright," chambers said, rolling his flesh-encased shoulders as best he could. "so, couple years back... i''m gonna say two because i had a bad turbo habit at the time. i''m real bad." he laughed. "me and my brother, osjet, we would get like a dozen or so needles and flick ''em at each other''s eyes." a blink of motion flicked across the periphery of avo''s vision. a crack followed. avo blinked. chambers'' blinked. a small red welt began to form across his cheek. "you just slap him?" avo asked draus. "he''s worse than kae. ''cept he don''t have any good excuses. stick. to. the. story. mirrorhead. not your brother. not anything else. mirrorhead." "tried?" draus asked. chambers winced. "well, when you offer someone else a twenty-eighty cut over businesses and territories and state that it''s your best and only deal and that they would be hopelessly stupid not to accept it, the words sound a bit more insulting than diplomatic. you see, your new consang chambers might-gotta a tongue sweeter than natural honey itself, but mirrorhead--jaus--now there''s someone with the sophistry of a gh--" avo glared at him. "finish sentence." "--git. ghoul doesn''t really fit, because... i mean, let''s be honest, ghouls are such deeply honest beings that really aren''t afraid in letting you know how they feel and who they are. meanwhile, mirrorhead''s like a wall. a... a pile of bricks. he''s an insult to ghouls. especially one as sharp and... and as clever as you, avo, my good consang." avo continued glaring. "still made me hurt people." "holy shit are you still stuck on that? fuck me, i''m sorry. i didn''t know a little mistake was going to lodge itself all the way up your ass and die there. look. i''ll make it up to you. next time, i''ll do my research." "no next time," avo snarled. "never make that mistake again." he leaned in close to meet chambers'' eye-to-eye. "soon. will have special run for you. special favor for me. that''s how you make it up." chambers blinked. "sure. yeah. if you don''t eat me, i''m game for anything." he laughed. "in a way, you did free me from mirrorhead so... you know, i guess i can see that i... i owe you, actually." the mental gymnastics of the enforcer was truly awe-inspiring. "anyway," chamber said. "you got more questions? i can tell you all kinds of stuff about conflux. weak spots. who hides all the good drugs. who''s in charge of doing the auxiliary necro shit for mirrorhead. what business looks like. when the next crucible was supposed to be scheduled." "how many of you are there?" draus asked. "hm?" "how many of you did jhred hire?" chambers shrugged. "probably a few thousand. ten or so is my guess. i know we have other branches. he dives between places in the mirrors and all that. i think they''re periphery places though. he''s trying to cast a wide net and push in. he keeps up separated into silos. we''re the junction guys. the backbone, from what i can tell." "but he has other places to go and rebuild?" draus asked. "yeah," chamber said. "if he really wanted to. yeah. we were always more of a quantity over quality operation anyway." "can attest to that," avo said. "done with conversation? can copy other details from memories directly. implant him with phantasmic first. you talk to others." draus stared at chambers for a beat. "you can keep his mind intact? "yes," avo said. "unless its structure is compromised." at this statement, chambers'' eyes widened. "hey, hey, hey, listen," chamber said, clearing his throat. "if you''re gonna be doin'' anything to my mind... i might wanna walk you through it." "not amateur necro. know what to do." "i''m not talking about that," chamber said. "i''m talking about certain... things i downloaded." "things." "you know. entertainment options. vicitarities. uh. stress relieving materials." avo started at draus. draus shrugged. "don''t look at me none. i got no idea what he''s talkin'' about." chamber sighed. "you''ll... you''ll see when you go in. just let me give you a heads-up. some of my mind space might be... messy." "how messy." "ah. i might have a virus or two messy." avo could handle a virus or two. Chapter 6-10 A Virus or Twelve Thousand and Eighty Two chapter 6-10 a virus or twelve thousand and eighty two for the love of jaus don''t download anything from public palaces. you''re just asking for a mem-con by that point. you know half these illegal vicarities got hidden sequences lined into them, yeah? make it easier for some syndicate or ganger-trash half-strand to steal your information or mem-lock you. hells, if they got a half-decent necro, they can even overwrite your memories. make you more inclined to do what they ask of you. your wards are only the first line of defense. i recommend hiring a proper jack to do deep dives through your mind at least bi-annually, even if you''re some nobody wager. ultimately, remembrances are always worth something, so you best make sure that you don''t end up serving as someone else''s smokescreen when your memories pop up over some goon as a decoy during an exorcist scan. seen plenty of bystanders get scalpeled into collateral that way. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 6-10 a virus or twelve thousand and eighty-two "chambers!" avo snarled, jacking out from the wretched ghost-infested midden that the enforcer called a mind. "you said two viruses! two!" chambers, for his part, just shrugged as avo flipped the man back into being conscious. "i said ''might a virus or two.'' i''m giving you the best guess i got. just... turns out, i made a wrong guess is all." wordlessly, avo glared. he had seen virus-ruined minds before. he had seen scars made by filth and mem-con infections, reaching out and eating away essential material, like rot eating into the base of an ego. even once, he helped walton clean out a juv who somehow managed to get a major part of their memories overwritten by a badly sequenced ad-replicator that was slowly subsuming all her other memories to feed its constant expansion. what avo had never seen, however, is twelve thousand and eighty-two mem-viruses all fighting each other to claim ownership over a single mind. a single useless mind. a single useless mind that belonged to a degeneracy-addicted fool that didn''t seem to understand the concept of "cognitive security" or "not downloading unconfirmed mem-data from strange links." "so, uh," chambers chuckled, "give it to me straight, consang, how bad is it." "lobotomy would count as positive treatment." the enforcer winced. "avo... consang, buddy, friend, my good, noble paler, you''re sounding a bit dramatic. i''m sure--" with a thought, avo drew up a map of chamber''s mind. within, the center of the entire structure was marred by a clash of blackened lanes, each spreading out further like writhing worms trying to burrow out into other memories but found themselves too interwoven to manage such an extrication. here was a mind that should have been utterly fractured by decay, but yet, was still somehow running at a functional state of efficiency. "your viruses," avo began, "are trying to eat each other." "so, what are you sayin''?" chambers asked, a glint of excitement flickering through his eyes. "does this... does this mean that my mind... is invincible?" the sheer stupidity of the statement made avo grunt as if stabbed by a dagger. a few steps away, draus and janand, who she had just started actively interrogating, shot him a look of concern. "no. not invincible. opposite of invincible. you will fall into a coma once equilibrium collapses." "you mean if it collapses," chambers suggested. "no," avo said. "when. they''re eating each other. all are badly sequenced. only a question of which one is the least poorly designed. bad quality extended your lifespan. but mind will still almost certainly collapse" "oh," chambers said. the flicker that was in his eyes went as his gaze dipped. "well, you--you can fix it, right?" avo shot him a blank stare. "you downloaded over ten thousand viruses. directly into your mind. will need to see how deep into core cognitive functions the infection has spread." "yeah--don''t rub it in, avo! i''m having a traumatic moment here." "having a stupid moment. shouldn''t download viruses." "look, i didn''t know all of them were viruses, okay," chambers said. "in my defense, some were just... informative pieces." with a growl of annoyance, avo cast himself back into chambers'' mind. engaging meta-dive faced with the massive fissures of leaking emotion running between the solid, unmoving walls that constituted chambers'' defenses, avo cast his ghosts deeper and snatched the nearest chain of the compromised memories he could find. it took him less than five seconds to locate his example. it took him less than ten in total to jack out. exiting meta-dive resurfacing into the real, he slid back into his body with extracted bounty in tow. choked between the grasp of his ghosts like a twitching snake, avo forced shape into the sequence and held it up before chambers'' very eyes. interfaced with phantoms, the vicarity began to play. a horrifically low-quality memory stuttered by missing seconds and splotched with blurs due to a badly edited perception filter began to play. the phantoms danced, weaving wisps of mem-data into a badly damaged megablock. from the perspective of someone chained to a wall, both avo and chambers watched as the actor made awkward grunting noises, straining to break free. +foul ghouls!+ the vicarity''s actor proclaimed, the thespian nature of his performance made vulgar by his awkward tonal pronunciation. +you dare hold a regular of highflame prisoner?+ "avo, the hells are you watching," draus said, drawn back over by the sudden mention of one of her old order. "i... don''t know?" avo answered. the fact that chambers had gone ashen in the meantime did not fill him with confidence. "ah, shit," the enforcer said. "fuck me, i thought i deleted this one." "is it spyware?" avo asked. "dangerous?" chambers winced. "no, it''s just--" +oh, but we''re not scared, soldier-boy.+ an off-screen presence interrupted whatever chambers was about to say. whoever was speaking sounded sibilant and sultry, the speaker female-presenting. "i haven''t made ten thousand of the same mistake," avo replied. "avo, you gotta understand: we both suffer from addictions," chambers continued. "for you, that''s like... eatin'' children or some shit. for me, it''s highly informational and well-filmed vicarities. i like to know about the inner lives of other people. explore the worlds that could be." "you know, back in the day before the rash, we just called half-strands like you lust addicts," draus said. "a little lust doesn''t hurt nobody when it happens inside your head!" chamber said. "mind reminds me of the maw," avo said. "hurt you plenty." a beat of silence fell over avo. "although." "although?" draus asked. "thinking," avo said. "might remove some of the viruses. contain the rest. use them to infect conflux loci even more." "yes," chambers said, nodding vigorously. "we... we got to use everything at our disposal to our advantage. it''s like... my mind is an armory instead of a cesspit. all a matter of perception, am i right?" "no." *** the eventual work it took to clean out chamber''s mind was far over what avo expected. unlike lucille, the enforcer''s mind was not a delicate operation for there was little left of the man''s mind to be delicate with. to cleanse rot required a deepness of penetration, with the repair work more akin to carving away decaying bone before the proper resequencing could begin. his past greeted avo in fractured flashes. it was like peering into someone''s history through the lens of a broken kaleidoscope. most of his childhood came in increments of violence; these moments chained chambers to a blank-faced father, the abuse near-constant, flattening any obtainable trauma down to routine details. this lasted up until the uprising, whereupon the man was eaten by ghouls. suppose the enforcer''s positive ideation regarding ghouls had to come from somewhere. ultimately, it took three entire days for avo to finally shear away enough of the infection to return some semblance of controllable order to chambers'' mind. through this time, draus left avo chunks of raw flesh to sate himself between bouts of work. the techs were comparatively creatures of simplicity compared to the oddities infesting chambers. having them planted with the proper sequences took half the time and a fraction of the effort. overall, it took seventy-five ghosts in total to prepare the three subjects for reinsertion into conflux. each ran twenty-five spreads with the outer layers twined to their active memories granting a reactive mask for the phantasmics while the bulk of their builds was scattered deeper in more ingrained memories still. "so, i won''t be at risk of droppin'' nulled anytime soon anymore, right?" chambers asked after his adjustments were done. avo grunted. the truth was that the enforcer still had some fragmented viruses lining his sequences in places but they were now bound to avo''s spyware rather than some deep nether operation. the insides of chambers'' mind were more divided than a sovereignty in the warrens. the man sighed. "avo. consang. i knew you''d come through for me. knew that you''d see the point in keeping your old--" "best chance to spread mem-con through conflux. create distraction be operator on inside," avo said. with a thought, he activated a memory session using his auto-seance. an overlay appeared in his cog-feed, and he found himself looking upon his masked person through chambers'' eyes. +confirmed.+ avo deactivated the memory. chambers blinked. "what the fuck was that? didn''t see a link at all." "built a disguised auto-seance into your mind. reduced its overall features. one way receiver. can''t transmit to anyone but me." "auto-seance?" chambers asked. "i--i think i had one--" "viruses ate away most of it. using its functions to transfer imps out while you were asleep." chambers'' eyes widened in realization. "oh! oh. well. i always did think they used to keep disappearing. looks like ya solved another mystery, huh?" he laughed. avo didn''t. *** finished with the subjects, avo returned to the second fortune to prepare for the next steps. a great deal of work remained. he still had a hell to procure. more information to collect regarding the moments of conflux and additional establishments that mirrorhead operated. the good thing was that, with draus due to collect their mobile operations vehicle soon, they wouldn''t need to continue operating out from the second fortune. the establishment had treated them well, but something about the place still fed the flames of suspicion within avo. a fire that only grew when he entered the elevator to return to his temporary abode, touch base with draus and kae. "i might require a favor from you," green river said, her person greeting him with naked anticipation of his arrival. avo grunted in displeasure and stepped in next to her. "don''t have what you want. ask draus for what you need." her presence grated on him, grinding an active discomfort into the air between them. yet, though the tension pulled at him, it appeared to be non-existent for the sang herself, who seemed content to keep her eyes fixed on him as if anticipating moments of certain amusement. she laughed and kept pace with him. "ah, but you do have that which i need. of this, i am sure. our mutual friend is skilled at many things, but necrotheurgy is not one. not to the extent of what you have reputedly performed anyway. bright-wealth told me you changed a certain girl''s mind. left her more intact than you found her." "did she now?" avo asked. "indeed," green river said. "i do not see myself as anything more than a dilettante of the art, but even one as parochial as i could tell ms. lucille''s damage was severe." the casino owner laughed, chirps of amusement sounding from both the human and fox. "yet, now i am sincerely considering using her as a door-girl. another one of bright-wealth''s requests. i swear, my sister is too soft sometimes." avo sighed. green river was like slime. she spoke. she clung. she didn''t give up. "don''t want work. busy right now." green river merely smiled. "i think you may make time for my request. tell me, what do you know of the ninth column?" Chapter 6-11 Someone Elses Game chapter 6-11 someone else''s game the ninth column? come now, jhred, are we entertaining conspiracies in this household? tell me, do you know what it takes to hide from the guilds. all the guilds? the very notion is absurd; with all the heavens we control, how is this... this unseen, unfunded, and unrooted ninth estate of power supposed to contend with us? it can''t. it simply can''t. there isn''t a reliable source of death it can draw from; no feed for the beast if we''re going to use the vulgarity of analogies to describe this already absurd prospect. perhaps such an organization might have a fallwalker or two under its banner. but what then? those of the sixth sphere or higher cannot fully ignite their souls without being noticed from even the depths of our local void. and the spheres lower? too limited. too easy to be properly circumvented by our sovereignties. why, the only way such a faction might pose a threat to us is if they have already penetrated our structure entirely--a feat i daresay not even ori-thaum is capable of. that, or their thaumaturgical mastery of more esoteric domains is so far beyond our fathoming that we simply cannot comprehend how they operate... i need to make a cast. stay here. watch your sister. -authority uthred greatling with regards to the existence of a "ninth column" operating against the guilds 6-11 someone else''s game a swell of rising dread rose within avo. a clash of reactions banished all other thoughts from dwelling in his mind. his basest instinct, calling for the death of green river found itself strangled by counter-emotions induced by his morality injector firing hits of regret and horror. yet, there was more than regret that burned inside him. curiosity rose, magnified in scope and shape to cloud the space of his mind and shroud his default reflex toward murder. a quietude fell over him as fear strained against indecision. the sang knew too much, asking such a rapier-sharp question. her silence, likewise, was a tool of measurement. she judged the lull in his response with a soft smile, her grafted fox, so languidly wrapped along the reach of her neck, winked at him. there was wickedness in its gleaming eyes, taunting him to ask her more. "does my question evade you?" she asked, her tone teasing and fearless. there was no spark of the divine about her, nor did her ward stand especially formidable. perhaps she thought herself made safe by the curse that clung to their being, but she of all people should know that ghouls were more resistant to afflictions of blood than the fragilities possessed by pure-born men. for a moment longer, he said nothing, considering his steps ahead. the beast within him wailed, its voice now a pained whisper slipping from the cracks of a mountain, its want buried beneath the tonnage of opposing memories. still, the consideration to see her dead was not purely a thing of pleasure. security was a concern now as well, and for all that she knew and all that he didn''t, the want for physical violence was slowly inching over into contemplation toward a more mental assault. "don''t know much," avo said finally. he kept his words true but reserved. an outright lie seemed unwise. with his words, he doubted she could gaze upon his thoughtstuff clearly, but expectation something gave false assurance. "might''ve heard it whispered once or twice." green river closed her eyes and her throat chimed with a single note of laughter. "whispered once or twice." she shook her head. "you seem to think i am in league with my elders. i must admit, it feels prejudiced, to be judged in such a way. doubtless, jelene feels much the same way about me. understandable, of course. all sang are unified in our desperation to avoid fated death. but not all of us are bound to the same path of salvation. i hope one such as you can see that semblance does not conjoin a person to the follies of their family." "you dress your words," avo said, a slight growl entering his tone. "but only sentences that matter are at the end. want my sympathy. want my help. trying to cast us under the same light. why?" "as i said: i require a favor. and afterward, i would like to have a conversation with you. to understand you better. i think we have much to offer one another in use and... understanding." the sang plucked a wisp of phantoms from her accretion, and as if she was alchemizing strands of thought into shape with breath blown across her palm, she painted the space between them with a memory. the miniature form of a woman and her two children appeared in a small ghost-made well barely larger than avo''s head. it felt as if he was gazing through a cracked mirror from the gaze of another. the mother. the former street squire and her children. avo remembered. beneath his mask, he glared at the sang. "watching my conversations?" "watching?" green river said. "more than that, i fear. i orchestrated your encounter. i ensured you would meet her immediately after bright-wealth contacted you regarding the girl. why? because i was curious if you knew her. or perhaps she might know you. either way, it helped me remove a potential suspicion i had regarding you." "what suspicion?" avo asked. "are you an ori-thaum sleeper, ghoul?" green river replied. "you must admit, it paints a compelling shroud to your person." "she is... to be rewarded," green river continued. "for services rendered to ninth column. i believe she helped them steal something precious." "the frame?" avo asked, forcing an evenness to his tone. green river sighed. "perhaps. the ninth column... for the scant services i have provided to them in my time, i can honestly say theirs is a body that runs on chaos and misdirection. till even now i know little about their designs or desires. who is truly a part of them and who merely serves as an extension or pawn. i must share words with you of my worries, avo. i wonder if they are using the memory of walton to manipulate us both." and just like that, a new layer of distrust was introduced. avo hated talking with green river. every word she uttered breathed new plagues of concern for his mind to suffer during the coming gulfs of silence. "yet, i fear we cannot avoid this fate," she continued. "they see further than what i can. offered rewards that run beyond even the wildest bribes granted by guilds. and now, they seem keen on ensuring the survival of yosanna and her children. along with the death of one jhred greatling. mirrorhead, as you might know him. i am to help with the realization of these tasks. and then i am to accompany you to the easy armistice at light''s end." "how much do you know?" avo asked. green river grimaced. "no more than what they offered." avo couldn''t tell if she was lying or not. her thoughtstuff moved at an uncanny evenness of pace. "you are a character of special note to them. walton wanted me to ensure you would be the one to jack into yosanna''s mind. he also demanded i spare no expense in helping you with your endeavors. his requests felt... personal." "why reveal this? did he have orders for you regarding what to tell me as well?" at the use of the word orders, the sang bristled and her fox scoffed. "his recordings left requests for me. i do my best to deliver as per the contract." green river shrugged. "walton... ninth column. what they offered me is beyond the means of imps to buy." "going to get you into the tiers?" avo asked, wagering a guess. she smiled. "in a sense. but ultimately, even more than that. ah. i say too much." the elevator rang then, avo''s floor arriving. the door snapped open. neither woman nor ghoul moved. "we are playing the games of another. games on a board that i cannot picture. and it excites me. it terrifies me. and i think you feel the same way, do you not?" avo said nothing. scattered were his thoughts and even deeper into the mists of deception did he find himself sinking. "i will make the arrangements for you to visit mrs. kivranpuvak and her children as soon as i can. see if her mind reveals anything further. i only ask that you keep me informed as to what you find. in return, i shall endeavor to do the same." she looked down the hall and frowned. "does jelene know much? the agnos?" "do we know much?" avo asked in return. this time, it was the sang''s turn to play the role of mute. "i will contact you once i have the ''interviews'' prepared," green river said, stepping away from his question and motioning him to leave the elevator. "but before that, come find me. perhaps you can offer me insight into my enjoinment as well. they have not said anything about investigating what we already know. and if you are to tell jelene or the agnos of this, do so through a closed link. we know not who we can trust." "no. we don''t." avo backed out of the elevator. again, green river smiled, but her gaze was flat and uncertain. "good fortune with your coming task. i will offer you what i can find regarding the operations of conflux in the meantime. perhaps with additional eyes, your duties may be expedited." avo grunted again. he waited for the doors to close and her thoughtstuff to pull out of sight before he turned away from her. something was wrong here. walton was not one to change or add new objectives to something halfway. the information that he gained from green river felt more dangled than granted, and the sudden addition of her accompaniment to the easy armistice and the destruction of conflux as ninth column objects seemed adjustments too convenient, to say the least. add that to the fact that green river knew too much for an intermediary and was also missing some major details at the same time. this felt like a plan that was being actively twisted. or altered along its steps. and until avo gained a broader understanding of the players, he would not blindly deliver himself to the armistice. for now, conflux was a matter he could see resolved. that, and building up his heavens, hells, and ghosts would at least ensure more clarity against whatever storm he was sailing into. and, dead or not, walton''s mem-drops might just offer some insight into what was going on. Chapter 6-12 Vulnerabilities (I) chapter 6-12 vulnerabilities (i) how the fuck does a liminal frame go missing? it''s not like a godsdamned suitcase or... or a fucking sandwich! you need it burned into someone! it''s practically more a place than a thing! souls aren''t just fucking picked up! it''s not like some can''t just steal it! one billion imps? a bounty? what? are you simple? are you fucking simple in the head? no. fuck! no! you keep this quiet. the moment news of this gets out, every two sphere fallwalker and above will muster whatever godsdamned forces they got and empty entire districts trying to find it. let''s not mention our "esteemed" competition going for it as well. and should they find it, oh, you best your ass on jaus'' long-dead dream that they''ll be looking to forego whatever bounty they''re offered for the treasure they found once they realize just what this thing is capable of. keep this quiet. do you hear me? keep this fucking quiet! the high choirs do not need to be looped in yet. we just need to unfuck this mess and find whichever turncoat fucking clown decided to infuse themselves with the single most revolutionary piece of thaumaturgy in the last five centuries. and how. what if we can''t find it? we? i didn''t fuck this up! i didn''t lose the frame! this is your godsdamned fuck-up! i am not going down for this shit! do you hear me! if you can''t find the rash-fucked--godsdamned fuckin''--rat-fucking frame, i pray to jaus and all our broken gods that you lose your stutter in time to explain just how all this godsdamned ghoul-shit transpired to veylis herself. you hear me! you will be explaining to the high seraph herself! about how her special frame went missing because you were so much of a fucking fuck-up that you let it slip out a godsdamned panopticon-pattern demiplane without noticing! maybe if you''re lucky, she''ll just real-death you instead of looping you between her flames. and trust me, consang, you don''t want to live that way. i suggest you find a way to fix this. or i suggest you find a way to lose your current frame and stay dead after. -intercepted highflame communications between a "high authority" and the "stupid fucking half-strand" by ori-thaum incubi 6-12 vulnerabilities (i) "ninth column," draus said, a half-amused sigh rasping free from her breath between her words. "nothin'' like shit always gettin'' messier and messier all the time, right?" within the apartment, each person held a corner. avo sat, glaring off into the undulating patterns of ghosts circulating through the room''s locus. draus stood across from him, back against a wall with her eyes flicking between the fish swimming above. kae, meanwhile, found herself content to peer at her companions, the doubt coming from her mind palpable, incremental. "feels like someone is plucking at us," avo said. "sees what we''re doing. knows too much." he looked up, his gaze following draus''. "would know if fish had ghosts in them." the regular shrugged. "river might not be using any ghosts to peek at us. might be just doin'' it the no-dragon way. digging through the meat. splicing straight from the brain." she looked up and frowned again. "but so far, i haven''t counted any survivin'' schools between the batches. i reckon you might just wanna meet this yosanna. bring me with you in case things get off the rails." "would rather have you in a different room. monitoring from a distance. i might be compromised. green river too. you? i''m not sure." the ghosts before avo did a twirl. the very action seemed to taunt him. he spent his life wielding fractals of post-mortal cognition as tools but still did they leave more room for the truth to elude. more than yosanna, he needed to examine his own palace again, his own sequences. he was missing a week of memories, yet beyond that, nothing caught his attention during his modifying dives. nothing looked out of place. or perhaps, he was merely conditioned to think that way. remodified in terms of memory or belief. again, though, such hyper-paranoia broke against the wall that was his resurrection and the chaos that followed. if someone could reweave his mind down to the roots, why not alter him further? why not plant in him preparatory knowledge? grant him a clear set of objectives from the very beginning. if his father was a part of this operation, such alterations would be unnecessary as well. it would have taken walton mere words to bring him to the call of a new banner or fold. dead or not, his father''s words remained the closest thing to scripture that avo still knew. and there was another mystery to discover. dead or not. for someone dead, walton seemed to have a better grasp on this whole affair than those still living. "doesn''t make any sense," avo muttered, speaking more to himself than anyone. "sure, i think i can whip up some conditions that made it look like they escaped from the scalpers," draus said. her voice maintained its cadence, but her eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly. +you got something in mind? tradecraft ain''t my specialty but--+ +not about tradecraft,+ avo replied. +need to find limits of what ninth column can see. green river says she''s only a intermediary for them. can''t be sure. need more eyes on her. you should give kae a drone. have her monitor green river. her mind is burned. cant be scryed right. cant be implanted with spyware. will be useful to see if green river finds out anyway. see how far her awareness spreads. or if theres actually any difference between what she knows versus ninth column.+ "there are a few things we might wanna go over before doin'' that, though," draus continued. +no. kae''s not prepared for somethin'' like this. think better''n to use her this way. you and i, we''re right for this. kae? she''s got a handle on your frame and thaumaturgy, maybe, but pullin'' her too far down the deep end with us ain''t gonna end well.+ +contrary. she''s perfect. mind''s too burned for ghosts to inhabit her. limits us and green river as compromise vectors. might also mean that the column has other means of surveillance. coldtech. voidwatch support maybe.+ draus'' lip twitched as the shadow of a frown passed through her. +trust me, avo, if they had voidwatch behind them, they''d be capable of a hell of a lot more than just leavin'' the legwork shit all up to us. so far, we''ve gotten directions but no support or supply. real omniscient of them, but i''m not tasting the tang of effectiveness here. hells. only thing i might be willing to say about them is they don''t seem to be against us. plenty of chances to sell us out to the guilds. none of those chances taken.+ avo grunted a laugh. ninth column''s deficiency was a most obvious one. "what kind of problems? with using the scalpers to hide what happened to our infiltrators?" "shapin'' the situation," draus said. "scopin'' out where and which scalpers to leverage and how to make it seem like chambers and the other two managed to escape. we might need to make an excursion. our opposition." +also want to try something else,+ avo said. +grow my hell. make it a second circle. back in burner''s way. we can peek at the scalpers at the same time. maybe kae can help me stabilize the fallen heaven. take this opportunity to create more room between us and river.+ +you want to see if ninth column brings anythin'' up about that down the line?+ draus asked. +yes. and if walton left anything else.+ avo fell silent for a beat. "i suppose we can go out. take a look." "reckon we could," draus said. beside, kae''s head inched out from around the corner. "are... are we going out again?" the agnos asked. "another... run?" both avo and draus regarded her then with mutual silence. "i wouldn''t call what we might be doin'' a run," draus said. "it''s more like... uh... scoutin''. trying to figure out some vulnerabilities and whatnot." wordlessly, she extended a link between herself and kae. avo, despite how he loathed to part himself from awareness, ended the session he was running to prevent himself from hearing anything exchanged between the other two. with his mind potentially comprised as it were, seeing silos of knowledge developing between him and draus, him and kae, and kae and draus might just reveal how deep ninth column--or green river--awareness ran. kae beamed with joy and nodded. "y-yes. i think that can be done... well, m-maybe just theoretically. i-i haven''t seen him in action yet. we might... might need him to deconstruct a few of those first. and collect some rendsinks to... to contain excess." avo tilted his head. they were talking about burner''s way and nu-scarrowbur. the fallen heaven. a potential second circle for him to claim. options to trigger further hostilities between the scalpers and conflux. the details weren''t hard for him to assemble in his head. still, he voiced nothing, letting the conversation between the regular and the agnos play on. you know what, kae, draus said, running her tongue across her lips. you might be right. we might wanna take some time away from this place. get mobile. her focus turned to avo. you said you was up for an excursion right? wouldnt mind. the regular nodded. hear nu-scarrowbur might be nice this time of night. could do us right to take a closer look? see the sights. havent done much of that, avo said. might be interesting. good change to pace. see the warrens for what it actually is. yeah, draus said. who knows? we might even get lucky and catch a golem in action. someplace inside avo, a deeper hunger burned. it had been some time since he watered his canons. much the same as it had been some time since he properly slipped his ghosts and supplanted a well-warded mind. was always interested in seeing how a galeslither operates, avo said. think the local syndicate there has a few. draus smirked. well. ill keep that in mind for somethin to be on the lookout for. Chapter 6-13 Vulnerabilities (II) chapter 6-13 vulnerabilities (ii) ...that can''t be possible. no one else has the memories to tap into our inception of the highflame thoughtcast... unless... engram protocol is in full effect. wipe your short-term memories. douse your thoughtstuff. see them eradicated entirely. i will do the same after encrypting what we have. redact what you know of me as well. we''re burning this circle. let cipher-three know. liquidate all non-essential assets. schedule a memory restoration a month from now. go dark in the meantime. use a sleeper if you need to. no. i don''t know if highflame has achieved counter-penetration. seeing as we haven''t died in a mass causality accident, i''d say we''re not looking at the work of our esteemed competition. voidwatch perhaps. maybe sanctus. it matters little now. we move on. stay stationary. regroup in a month. if we''re still alive then, that is. -ori-thaum incubi "cipher-01" to "cipher-02" regarding a possible compromise of their interception of highflame''s planar security breach 6-13 vulnerabilities (ii) the midnight rain bled down in columns through cracks left upon the face of holographic midnight. as the moisture loosened, an oscillating crown of neon bright spread throughout the heights of nu-scarrowbur. this district was a different beast from xin yunsha, for rather than being hewn by modular tissue, its edifices rose in stacked rondels--domed fortresses of painted metal that sprouted upward like ever-shrinking mushroom caps. each block rose bristled with serried pylons fused across their hulls as if the flashing scales of a leviathan granted shine by pulses of electricity. beyond the steel, the winds flowing free from the interior nu-scarrowbur caressed pedestrians and aerovecs alike with a breath most primal. each current of flow moved as if slaved to the whims of another as if all of air was but fabric, and needles were tugging upon its totality in different places. from height to height, shrieking from alley to alley, hidden presences encased themselves beneath the breeze: steeds skimming within in the veins of the breeze itself. it was after one such galeslither knot that avo and draus followed. it, and two additional sangeists. their heavens were to be essential digest for avo''s soul, while their rendsinks would serve to aid his efforts to balance the fallen heaven out in burner''s way. the deeper details as to how the process would follow were best left to kae. though an echo of her former self, her understanding of thaumaturgy still thundered loud in the postmortem of her constrained brilliance. within an aerovan draus managed to "borrow" from a former enforcer employed by conflux, the mem-locked positions of all the presently operating knots glowed as radiant vertices across the deepnav district simulation. through preparation and subversion, avo had managed to tag six different knots. today, though, they only remained on the trail of one, the dual engines of their aged vehicle grunting as they passed through a dilapidated skytunnel that ran hollow through the guts of a megablock. their desired galeslither was ahead by a mile and a half. in another five minutes, it would dive down a one-way lane that ran through both blocks two and three of the aldendractht quadplex as it had made a habit of every ursday. such a habit was the main reason draus had designated it as an easy target, after all. "knot''s gonna be turnin'' any time now," draus said. at her mental command, external sensory feeds crackled into shape from a merging of ghosts via the aerovec''s locus. breadth existed between and within the lanes. five across and ten vertical, the skylanes of the tunnel ran porous while the holo-lanes were walled with stripped static--crossing allowed. "you got eyes on the others? they stickin'' to their routes." avo checked before he replied. certainty served one better than assumption. "yes. no deviation. continuing their patrols. two breaking over burner''s way outer perimeter. other three delving down into the gutters." the regular chuckled. "wonder wh--" their aerovec dipped. just in time to greet a speeding blur cleaving diagonally across traffic. their aerovec twisted. turbulence gripped and rattled the interior, with but their gimbals holding them in place. the familiar roar of an explosion sounded as raindrops of shrapnel sang their chiming tones upon the external hull above avo. casting his whisper out, avo watched as a trailing wreck spiraled downward to meet the ground below. clasped within the cage of flames, the shine of thoughtstuff spun like a drill. a survivor remained. one whose mind was rushing into overdrive, desperate to discover a way out. too late now. he watched as it struck, then skidded, off the edge of a passing truck. the following momentum pitched the burning husk into the opposite lanes. it struck a small aerovec first, both vehicles pancaking in a marriage of force as aeros behind collided.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. strangely, their horns remained silent throughout, as if neither vehicle nor rider noticed chaos unfolding before them. "good dodge," avo said. the regular frowned. "should''ve seen it comin''. fact i had to jock us out of the way don''t light my awareness in a good gleam." she sighed. "that kind of fuck-up would''ve seen me pullin'' latrine duty back when i was still--" "street squires," avo said, interrupting her self-criticism. he didn''t notice either, which was odd enough. nor did any other aero seem to grant the blazing wreckage with any regard. that sparked more than a few suspicions within avo. "no one noticed. probably had a necro with them. running incogs." "you reckon so?" draus asked. he grunted. "likely. we can get careless." he cast out his whisper to peek at the surrounding traffic. still nothing. aside from those that had suffered collisions, most others remained nigh-ignorant of all that had just transpired. "but everyone in the lanes doesn''t react? not scalper response knot? probably incog. and a well-made one." the regular shook her head. "well, there''s a rough run. what''d you think they had on ''em?" "nothing anymore," avo replied. draus drew up damage diagnostics and watched as flashes of orange painted the uppermost parts of their egg-shaped aerovec. "we''re fine for now. but some of the internal hydraulics are shot. you''re gonna have to step out from my side later when we disembark. think a piece of shrapnel still lodged deep in your door." he grunted. so long as their zephyr could keep flying, it wouldn''t be a problem. he could tear through the door if the need called for it. the two of them had spent six nights away from the second fortune, returning only to rest and review the tasks which lay ahead. kae remained in the company of bright-wealth and was protected by five or so drones that trailed her person. draus had left her with a few other items. items that went unmentioned to avo. normally, letting oneself be kept in the dark was a fatal mistake in his profession. with him being potentially compromised, however, ignorance proved to be a double-edged blade, while the crackling pit that was kae''s mind prevented her from being outright subverted by phantasmal means. meanwhile, draus had assured green river that their nightly trips wouldn''t bring any unwanted attention back to the casino via thoughtcast. their "benefactor" brooked no complaint or argument about the sudden change in their behavior, merely wishing them fortune and favor for whatever task they pursued. "you said expendable," avo said. he chuffed, his amusement dry. "like me. like ghouls." draus shook her head. "no. ain''t nothin'' like your kind." her lip twitched. her thoughtstuff swelled. anger. rage. he knew that look by now. "weren''t supposed to be, anyhow." she met him eye to eye, her stare rough and hard. "you were made to be wasted. seen the way your masters used you. nothin'' but mass and brutality there." "suppose your kind was better at the killing. better supported. more ground gained per death." "ain''t even about that," draus said. "it''s about spending, avo. spending our lives. you spend to get somethin'' that matters in exchange. you understand? what you fought for? no sensible person in the world wanted to go back to livin'' that way. bein'' slaves to some god they don''t understand worth a damn. but i suppose that''s how the folks down here see the guilds anymore. hells. i started the war just treatin'' your kin like target practice. ended it thinkin'' i understood you all." "understood?" avo asked. she was hinting at something more. larger ideas were hiding between the silence of her words. "your honesty is missing today. want to say something. won''t." and she didn''t. instead of carrying on their conversation, her eyes were narrowed, affixed to the visual feeds cast across the insides of the vehicle as drifting screens. "we''re closin''. half-mile and counting. your dives are reliable, yeah? they disembark behind these blocks?" "yeah. think they''re smuggling something. don''t want the broader syndicate to know. necro i compromised is in on it. helps them scrub their golem''s loci. installed backdoors into them. backdoors now mine." draus chuckled and shook her head. "shit, avo, you make a good argument for dual systems, you know that? half coldtech, half thaumic. keeps everything from topplin'' one way or the other." he grunted. "wouldn''t help. just opens more angles of attack. ghosts can dive into technology too. just need to harvest them from someone who knows code. technology. diversifying cost more and offers nothing. better to go with ghosts." the regular snorted. "you know voidwatch got them self-dreaming machines right? that they''re ages beyond us in all that technical know-how and stable-reality wonders? heard they got some ways to choke off the nether. blockade the heavens." "are they going to start sharing?" avo asked, already knowing the answer. "maybe," draus said. "most the city could catch a new mem-con tomorrow. decide to give up on souls and heavens and thaumaturgy in general. return to the old ways." yeah. that was what the guilds wanted: to capitulate absolute power for an elevation to their standard of living and a permanent vulnerability to all the strange and anomalous monsters that still festered within the metaphysical scars that stretched throughout the void. no. avo knew the pull, same as any guilder godclad. same as any fallwalker. to be a godclad was to be able to make your own choices. to be spared from final death by way of folly, failure, or weakness. even now, he was stalking the golems to water the soil of his soul, to feed upon their heavens and cultivate new canons or build the foundation for a new hell. if he, but a neophyte of the divine, was half-besotted on the potential for new power, what then did the addiction of the true ancients amongst the guilders resemble? the scream of their engines wailed outward through the valley of chrome. descending streetward, draus gave orders for the aerovec to park in an available spot. holographic squares of green and red littered the street as aeros found their halt upon open slots. landing in the corner of a lot, avo watched as an attendant drone began interfacing with the locus of their vehicle. it wouldn''t be long till scalpers dispatched another patrol to check. openly broadcasting conflux mem-data would do that. "one-minute window?" avo asked. "about," draus said. "probably won''t be that quick though. i got some other distractions prepared for them. won''t be that quick. but we should be. keep this clean and fast. i''ll be in place as overwatch. you move on me, got it. no jumpin'' in and killin'' everybody before i got eyes on the scene." "already been over this," avo replied. "well, we''re goin'' over it again," draus said. "can''t hurt to be on the same page." "i won''t just attack them. have injector. more controlled now." she eyed him once more. "i trust you. but remember this: there ain''t no absolute crutch for anythin'', avo." "heaven." draus opened her mouth and paused. "that--look, let''s just get this shit done with. tired of your godsdamned sophistry." avo grinned. "don''t teach argumentation at regular academy?" "just shut the fuck up and sync me, rotlick." avo chuffed and triggered the session he shared with draus in his auto-seance. +coming through?+ +loud and clear.+ she responded. through the link, her glee bled over into his impatience. they''ve both been looking forward to this. for different reasons, perhaps, but all the same. there just might be something to say about the mental symmetry between ghoul and regular. +alright. let''s go bag ourselves a couple o'' golems. and frame conflux in the process.+ +try to make this sloppy,+ avo said. +be suspicious if conflux is too competent.+ draus smiled. +yeah. sure. don''t forget to pick up our friend before you go.+ avo looked at the back of their aerovan. +he''s in the trunk?+ +kept all neat-like for you. just the neck''s broken.+ he grunted. what was an ambush without some casualties on both sides, after all? Chapter 6-14 Seize the Tempest (I) chapter 6-14 seize the tempest (i) ambushing a knot is easy. you just have to be sure that you''re hitting them when they''re disembarked. people are easy to kill. heavens? that''s another story. its own story. changes the rules you gotta play by. listen. i''m old. well, old by the standards of this city. would be awfully cocky to compare myself to the high seraph herself or ol'' granny thousandhand, but i''ve been living in new vultun long enough back to remember the day the colors first rolled in. the memory''s illegal but, let''s just say i still got a few recollections of the masters shitting bricks in front of us. almost made all the shit that followed worth it. anyway, the point of my rambling is that you always want the fight on your terms. you see one of those streams of the stormsparrow just choking her enemy''s options away, right? do that. always do that. even a godclad''s gotta vent some time. if you manage to cage their choices enough, sooner or later, they''ll have to show their godsdamned neck. and then, bury your fucking teeth deep, and never let go. seize the tempest, gleamers. seize it, or someone else will. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 6-14 seize the tempest (i) being out in the urban open always inspired a focus in avo. staring up at the valley of metal rising from both sides, blocks two and three rose like parted molars, grinding against the resplendent arteries of air traffic spilled wide across the false firmament of layer two. walton once told him that the feeling was instinctual. the city made him feel small. the buildings looked like the fangs of a gargantuan beast. the inhabitants that lived within its jaws? prey. such a contrast played a symphony of confusion on a ghoul''s baser appetites, driving it to want to eat before it was eaten. if new vultun was an allegory, it would be a domino of closing teeth, each clamping down on the ones below. the idea of being the topmost predator kindled a warmth deep and primordial within avo. claiming his "companion" from the back of the van, avo threaded his blood into the yet-chilled corpse and infused the former enforcer with animation. heeding his whims, the body shambled out like a shuffling puppet, its monochrome rig untouched. the exoskeletal armor remained unblemished beyond aged stains of blood and filth. no rifle came with the enforcer, but within his arms remained a gauss repeater and a fusion burner. those would prove to be most sufficient for the coming task. draus wasn''t lying about leaving the corpse mostly unharmed. problem was she really understated the damage she inflicted upon the half-strand''s neck. the enforcer''s bowl of a helmet was faced backward. flicking through the broken shards of vertebrae that lined drooping pockets of shredded flesh like a poorly installed ladder, avo twisted the head back into place and sighed. +did more than just "break the neck." everything''s shattered. pieces are jabbing against the padding of his inner rig.+ through their shared link, mirth dripped over from her like dollops of caustic honey. +aw, shucks. i''m real sorry ''bout not killin'' him as neat as you wanted. i''ll be sure to only snap ''em part-way next time. let you half a snack on the neck for your trouble.+ sarcasm. how unbecoming of a regular. with a tug of will, the corpse snapped to a stand and stumbled away from the vehicle, coaxed into motion on thread-thin leashes of blood. beneath the surface of existence, a second reality pushed through, avo''s frame projecting a reality deviant from the limiting chains of baseline metaphysics. +making for the knot,+ avo said. the streets ahead littered his cog-feed with leaking thoughts and intrusive phantoms. machinery around him wailed and sang as parking slots shifted to make way for new landers. a stretch of gore-caked flesh extended along yellow-striped lanes for disembarkers. avo sniffed. sweetness greeted him. a creamy sheen of stickiness clung thickly to the blood still. the nectar of joy was unmistakable, and with who the smear used to be. this wasnt the first joy-fiend that avo saw painted across a lot. probably got caught in the blast back of an ascending aero pulling a rapid liftoff. though the topmost layer of their parking slots was coned with lift pads, more than a few fliers found impatience more their persuasion and made to accelerate beyond their stationary boundaries. the outcome was fatal. but how many imps was the life of an addict worth? a wave of static-instilled red splashed over avo, basking both he and the corpse with letters bold and crimson. stand back: vehicle landing the aerovec descending groaned upon the strain of its own thrust. in the deepest folds of his ears, a low whine sang out from where the three engines met the central chassis of the machine. he picked up the pace and had the corpse shamble ahead. it skid under his power more than it strode, body limp where the blood did not reach. more glove than a pure puppet, the motions of the dead enforcer were sharp and exaggerated, each foot traveled made possible by eldritch vectors of force. inside, avo felt his heaven of blood rumbling deep, sinking the jaws of its spire into the softness of realitys underbelly before pouring itself into the wound, filling a groove in existence with the shape of new canons. hovering drones swayed over the intersecting lanes of the lot like titanium lanterns. another splash of light cleaved across avos feed. yet, this time, the scan tore away from him in but moments, slipping back to his puppet. ah. finally, they noticed the enforcer. it took them far longer than he expected. pushing the enforcer through the holographic perimeter, avo followed at a distance, the wisp-thin chains of his blood extending, but unbroken. rend capacity: 3% already his hell was filling. barely had he begun to strain. it was growing ever-harder to ignore the impatience burning within him, yearning to build upon his circle of hells. strange how a mere week ago, his new gifts filled him with savage euphoria. now, despite possessing gifts absolute and divine, all he did was suffer his deficiencies. what little chance stood the echoes of fading satisfaction against the hunger of the present? behind, drones tracked his puppet, the shine of their optics still locked to him. ahead, the path festered with moving bodies and gawking wagers. at street level, the pathways were lined with decay kiosks lined with mem-codes and haptic advertisements. the shine of the upper levels bled over the lip of the deck above, but only barely. those walking these depths were harried to make their way up. the only ones that stayed lingered against the cool metal of the walls, joy fiends sagging against trails of piss and refuse, smiling at nothing, wasting away to sheets of skin molded upon embrittled bone. across the session, draus was efficiency in motion. he had no idea when or how she was already up two levels, only that she managed without drawing much attention to herself. cast down from her former station she might be, the skills she claimed wrestling against the closing jaws of death were not so easily stripped. not without the utter ruination of her mind itself. +almost in position,+ she said. he doubled his pace upon her conveyance. the pedestrians parted wide as the corpse within the rig stomped through. avo trailed behind, blending as best he could, savoring the taste of apprehension and fear pouring free from unprotected minds. the path cleared for his corpse. from his whisper, he watched as two scalpers moved down the steps to intercept, minds already fed with knowledge, prudent portents pressing their guns to the ready and their path to descend. accompanying them came two dagger-shaped drones, twelve feet long, gauss barrels spinning to action. in avos cog-feed, he watched as the distance between him and the knot trickled from fifty feet down to thirty. people were fleeing past him now. running around as a flood would part against a mountain. masked by the flow of bodies, he altered his holocoat to paint him in hues of monochrome. now, it looked as if three of conflux''s number were in play. still suicidal. still reckless. more acceptable. his puppet moved ahead. the scalpers descended, twin drones taking point, the enforcers drawing up the rear. above, the patrollers of the knot continued their revels, their senses blunted to all that was happening, all that was to come. +in place,+ avo said. +ready to tear into them. when youre ready.+ a flash of light folded across the upper left corner of his sight. for the first time in over a week, avo fired his celerostylus. in a fraction of a heartbeat, the roar of gauss fire followed. her first four shots deliberately struck wide, but her last sank through the shells of the descending drones, tungsten needle tugging micro-materials and armor plating out in a concomitant eruption. avo flung his puppet around the corner. with a twitch of his fingers, the dead enforcers arms spun up, gauss-repeater primed from his left, fusion burner building up in the right. the scalpers, to their credit, fired back and shot true. some of their flechettes slipped under the corpses armpit, tearing through the localized thinness. blood plumed. a flap of flesh came free. machinery sparked. the rest rang against the rig, cracking the reinforced alloys and jolting the meat within. alive, the enforcer would have been driven back by the impacts. driven forward at an impossible pace by a heaven? the flechettes were the ones that succumbed. avo forced the corpses left hand to close. the repeater rattled. shots pinged and cracked against the enforcers. their exoskeletons spared them early deaths but not from losing their footing. it also failed to protect them from new threads of blood slicing out toward them. thinner than threads, avo slipped his newest limbs into the cracks of his foes armor. deeper still he plunged, his needle-tipped ichor worming past folds of clothing, coiling into flesh. this was something that kae inspired and recommended; the collapse of a delicate system rather than the destruction of the whole. more damage for less rend. he didnt need to slice and rip and smash everything they touched. sometimes, all he needed to do was reach into someone''s veins and pop their brain vessels. rend capacity: 11%... thaumic cycler: 274 thaum/c ghosts: [217] within the scalpers, blood called to blood and they shuddered. fragments of tungsten burst through their brains as they shuddered, their gunfire ceasing, their seizures hidden as avo consolidated his grasp on them. in an instant, his control widened, and he found new sacks of flesh to ply his influence. suddenly, his conflux puppet wasnt alone. he had it celebrate by firing its fusion burner up into the air. across the session, draus, synced to his mind, ducked down and closed her eyes. he did the same. and then, a cleaving spire of bright and blindness stripped sight from all unfortunate enough to be gazing out into the open air. Chapter 6-15 Seize the Tempest (II) chapter 6-15 seize the tempest (ii) godclads enjoy an addiction to killing, do you know this? i say enjoy as we do not suffer. we do not even die, should we be worth any merit, blessed so with our frames. the price we pay for our violence is bestowed unto the lessers. other godclads who cannot face us. rival guns. and collateral damage. always, always collateral damage. a kill committed with a heaven resonates within you differently than one naturally performed. there is a depth to the deaths you taste. you sense what youre doing to anothers bodytheir lifethrough the narrow gaze of your domains. little wonder most of my ilk grow so addicted. and little wonder why most fallwalkers last less than a month before they lose their frames to another. eventually, you will seek a higher path. mountains will wish to summit greater mountains; stars to burn beyond their rivals; pleasures to be surpassed. to kill a person with one heaven is to taste a cessation of existence in but one flavor. to see the dimensions of a life stripped from the tapestry in totality, more is required. and so, apotheosis must always grow, for there is nothing more addicting than the kill, and there is nothing more thirsty than a wanting soul. new vultun sunrise interview with ying yang wei, the stormsparrow 6-15 seize the tempest (ii) few things were worth more than surprise in a battle. conferred from the gaze-scouring radiance cleaving through the air from the dead enforcers fusion burner, blindness was given sound by a droning chorus of warbled wails from a dozen lips. lacquered in a second skin of blood, the immensity of the burners heat pressed on him still despite being directed away from him. its touch dipped deep, steaming the very fluids out from his outer shell. his discomfort was comparatively minor. not twenty feet away, a crackle snapped loud even in avos time-quelled ears. flesh hissed and cooked. water boiled, stripping the moisture from sloughing flesh. at his whims, the burner halted, the corpse unclenching its right fist as the last spills of coruscating bright died down to a fading orb. the strain on his celerostylus built. the burden now was placed entirely upon his nerves, his heaven serving to enhance the frailties of his broader flesh. he could perhaps squeeze another five seconds from its use. five seconds better left as a cushion in case of the unexpected. spurred by two windows of timeone belonging to his implant, the other the disorientation of the scalpershe sent his three puppets up the steps as he followed closely behind, masking himself with cover as the conflux enforcer took point as the primary meat shield. trails of gauss fire ran diagonally in his sight as he reached the top, impact trajectories painted by his phys-sim. a rain of ravaged metal fell; two drones cored clean by still-traveling flechettes crossed his feed. across a mental bridge, he felt faint sensations from a mind synced to his. draus was ejecting her clip. draus was reloading. draus was firing again. all done in the smallest fraction of a second.??vl-b!n. calamity had erupted outside the bar front. some were fumbling back, clutching eyes made permanently blind by the spear of light. many of the enforcers were only stunned, their optical implants adjusting to the sudden spike in brightness, their other senses compensating. the drones, automated and devoid as they were of human limitations, were the first to respond. three of the arrow-shaped drones split and held the stairs, moving to intercept avo. the remaining five spread out and ascended as a squadron, triangulating draus position from the impact vectors. rend capacity: 16% circuits of ghosts came alight across his metamind in a sequence of stars. each of his phantasmics flickered as all nonessential cognitive enhancements were briefly deactivated. his ghostjack solidified then, injecting itself deep into the flesh of the greater nether as its spire-top was tuned with new and ruinous thoughtcasts. secondhand fatality primed itself first and delivered in a scythe of screaming ghosts, avo swept his cognitive blade up at three approaching drones, their guns on the cusp of firing. at the vanguard, avos conflux puppet shuddered as a hail of hyper-accelerated kinetics hammered its armor. inside the exo-rigs shell, the corpses sternum was dented as cartilage tore. even a reasonably augmented enforcer would have been halted, bathed by these threads of force. but a piloted corpse was a different matter. blood pushed. flechettes struck. between two hammers of ever-increasing acceleration, the flesh within the shell came apart. as did the loci of the drones when avos ghosts finally licked across them. functions shaped by a system of ghosts, the secondhand fatality impacted against wards in a mind-rattling splash of clashing phantasms. two drones overloaded outright, their vents hissing flames as their governing sequences were rendered unmade by a glimpse of true death. cog-cap: 20% the final drone, spared by its cohorts blunting the worst of the damage or just protected by better wards pressed on, its fire unceasing, barrel warping. one of its shots found fortune. a needle swam through the exposed wound left in the conflux enforcers armpit. before avo could respond, to harden the local flow of blood, the left arm of his corpse tore free, swaying on strands of gleaming sinew. displeased, avo had his newer puppets take aim. positioned on the flanks of the conflux enforcer, he made one of his controlled scalpers shoot the monochrome-rigged corpse in the back. the other of his scalpers aimed a bit higher and let loose with their rifle. whole make me whole inside his soul, avo felt his sangeist speaking to him. a flash of something eldritch, something alien and long-passed flickered to life, if but for an instant. he remembered his heaven speaking to him before. somewhere in burners way. it was louder now. more coherent. draus voice thundered through his mind. +twelve seconds. ask kae about that shit later, we need to peel out!+ ignoring the unease rising from within his bones, avo shaped new appendages and drove them into the undersides of each golem. kae had gone over details regarding the rendsinks, and it took him little time to locate their positions on each respective golem after some research in the nether. it was housed in a compartment just behind the sangeists. for the galeslither, it operated with two sinks, and they lined the bottom. avo wasted no time with surgery, instead opting for a more brutal approach. the golems sagged as he alchemized gulfs of matter into blood, slicing the rendsinks free as pieces from the whole. with a grunt, he pulled hard. even with how fast he could pull, his blood was affixed to his strength. as such, he held little hope of lifting each cube, heavy as they were. thankfully, he didnt need to. exerting his heaven, he rendered the outer surfaces of each golem liquid. rend capacity: 83%...88%...94% and following that, he silenced his heaven and made to balance the scales with his hell. plunging his entropic shroud through the ground below him, he scooped matter away in a flaying fog. across from his position, several tons disintegrated at the touch of his hell. across his cog-feed, his rend capacity fell back down to three-fourths as he sliced the incline of a ramp into the ground. danger: daemon manifestation potential growing avo frowned. that was new. his hell did mention the possibility of a daemon if he focused the powers of his hell on one area alone. +negative two,+ draus said. +windows passed. leave the sinks if theyll slow you.+ in the corner of his vision, a new marker appeared. a line of text expanded across it, forming the words exfil. it strayed a good hundred feet down the street and a level below. rend capacity: 39% avo growled. he had this. he didnt need to lift. all he needed to do was pull. guarding himself against the pain, he fired his celerostylus again. his senses felt like they were on fire. his skull thundered as a headache spread from the stem. he didnt need reflexes this time, but acceleration. something to make up for his lacking strength. latching onto each severed compartment, he pulled. the ground sparked. blood and bodies oiled the groaning path of his rendsinks as he constructed lashes to pull and augmented legs to push. with each surge, his rend filled and his nerves crackled with torment. but by the limits of his flesh, he drew his prizes over the slope and let them slide. smears of blood ran behind. they slide outward. avo quelled his reflexes and barked a laugh. a laugh that turned into a choked gasp as their continuing momentum tore him from his feet. rend capacity: 49% tumbling out into the street, avo groaned and tried to right himself. faintly, he watched the exfil marker approaching. overhead, the hovering form of a fifty feet long garbage barge passed over, its six propulsors left at minimum thrust, its underside opening as it descended. +brace for grav-pull,+ draus said. +grav-pull?+ a sudden weightlessness snatched avo from the ground as the insides of the garbage barge shone, grav-projectors coming alight. with the rendsinks in tow, he floated for but a moment, and then fell back down, slamming against a cold metal surface with a grunt just as the doors closed. +got the sinks,+ he said. faintly, he heard a legion of wailing engines approaching. they were growing by the second. +company?+ +yup,+ draus said. +later than i expected.+ the barge lifted hard, engines blasting in a loud scream. gravity pulled hard on avo again, his insides feeling as if they were being drawn through his back with a string. +i think were gonna have to work on your arithmetic there, avo. hangin round them necros mightve put you through fancy word-school but it clearly aint done shit for your math.+ he shook his head and chuffed. +whend you get this aero?+ +yesterday,+ draus said. +had it followin us around. about five hundred feet distance increments.+ +really like using garbage trucks, dont you?+ +well, its the right tool for the job, aint it? what else are you supposed to use to pick up trash?+ avos felt an involuntary growl coming on. the beast coiled, incensed. with a thought, he reactivated his morality injector. the coming rage shattered against a flood of counter-memories. across the session, he could feel draus smiling. +feelin sensitive?+ +just drive.+ Chapter 7-1 Alignment of Interest chapter 7-1 alignment of interest the ugly truth of it is that none of us are in any condition for a new war. not yet. hence, we trade--we make nice with those we deem lesser rivals to find better angles. angles with purchase. angles that will let us better strike at the opposition when the war starts anew. for now, that means we keep to our peace with the no-dragons. that means we continue our trade with sanctus--but watch for their void-based operations still. should those mad fools expand another stretch of the sunderwilds, hire a third party to deal with it. some enterprising fallwalker perhaps. anyone desperate enough to disrupt things. our enemy--above all others--has and will always be ori-thaum. until they are dealt with, our path to true usurpation will remain denied... -authority uthred greatling 7-1 alignment of interest it was on their return to the second fortune that avo and draus discovered that the guilds sealed layers one and two. they had just switched aeros, leaving the barge behind the gutter and leaving in a cargo truck, when layer one sealed behind them. above, layer two followed immediately after. between the hexagonal gulfs that allowed air traffic to flow, a series of tears opened up. all that passed through their thresholds found themselves in a spatial loop. those that descended arrived at the top, diving down through an open gateway leading out the bottom of layer two. the opposite was true as well for those ascending. near to these heavens, avo felt his soul resonate with their rippling warmth. it was like he was an island unto himself, and beyond the borders where his subreality still bore the likeness of shape, he could sense another heaven spearing itself into the guts of existence, looping around itself as two points in space became one. trapped in the spine of the warrens, the holographic sky froze, the flow of clouds shredding away into splashes of code. over the spectral shine of the sun, large bracketed letters fused into shape. outbreak, it said. moments later, the emergency broadcast followed. dormant ghosts flooded out from every loci, every corner, delivering directions to the uncounted masses at the pace of an instant. +attention: this is a public service broadcast: wombrash outbreak detected in sovereignty - yuulden-yang. please seek shelter and refrain from accessing the nether for (1) day(s). adjust visual and auditory filters to maximum settings if possible.+ draus frowned. avo watched a shiver interrupt the flow of her mind''s accretion. "ah, hells. been some time since the last one. waving her hand, she expanded the visual feed playing across the screens of their vehicle. they were lucky. deepnav displayed minimal traffic clogging the lanes ahead. the air was infused with a lethargic blue, the color bled from a large advertisement for sapphire ocean. some new salt-tasting perfume made by one of the no-dragon subsidiaries, if its ghosts were anything to go by. enshadowed in his coronal shine, distant aeros were as if fish swimming deeper down into muddy waters. "expected more outbreaks," avo said. she shook her head. "you got any clue how many died durin'' the first down here? before the colors managed to get their asses out of their heads and started bombing everyone with censors?" "know they stopped counting after five billion," he replied. the regular shot him a look of muted surprise. "operation too large. logistical needs too high. bigger means more leaks. wasn''t hard to dive deep." "still. awfully risky to go peekin'' at guilder biz then," draus replied. besides, ori-thaum was in the mix. thought you didnt tangle with their like. avo turned to glare at her. "my father was dying. dangerous didn''t matter. was looking for a cure." to that, she offered only silence. the skies over mazzas junction were sparser than normal. their drones were still bringing in new scans daily. draus had cycled one out with a replacement after a traffic accident. as conflux went, however, they held to a state of incompetent readiness. there were still gaps all over their defenses, and they set about ensuring their own safety by bunching up in numbers. the weight of enforcers swelled within the block, with enforcers littering the district in unorganized detachments, each given tasks and delivered out into the wider warrens. some saw to patrols. others went to guard convoys of stolen productmerchandise that only the syndicates could produce thanks to stolen or expired property licenses. from what could be heard over the nether, more than a few conflux deliveries got hit by unknown parties. all members missing. like something swallowed them up and left nothing behind. the scalpers mightve already responded. the descriptions of the attack sounded close enough to how a galeslither might operate. if such was the case, then avo looked forward to the apex of the war, when everything was pushed beyond the point of skirmishing. chaos presented so many delectable targets to feed fromtargets that just wouldnt be as vulnerable when on guard during times of relative calm. by the by, you wanna tell me bout that thing that yelled at you back there? draus said, her question flicking out at him with all the rudeness of a switchblade. what thing? the voice, avo, draus said. the deep rumbling. shit. is your meta fraggin? it sounded like something screaming from inside your skull. made my teeth rattle. what this about it wanting to be whole, too? quietly, he shrugged. dont know. think it''s coming from the frame. the heaven. started speaking. does it every time i eat another sangeist. the regular exhaled. aint gonna lie: that frame of yours is startin to tickle me wrong. best have kae take a look at that. no sense in lettin it get worse, yeah? yeah, avo said. need her to help with new canons anyway. *** they deposited the cargo aero and the container in xin yunshans docks. aside from a few drones surveilling the area, the shine of thoughtstuff was noticeably absent; people were likely at home, awaiting the official end to the lockdown. still, though eyes were scarce, there were more ways than one to track a person in new vultun. they held to precaution, with avo leaving first and draus taking another path after. empty streets greeted him. aside from lonesome bioforms standing as unmoving sentinels on rooftops and grafted eyes blinking at him from flesh-hewn walls, he dared say he walked unnoticed to the entirety of the city. should he get the chance, he should dig around and see if any street squires were looking to trade out their phantasmics. the sequence of an incog remained much a mystery to him as until this point in his life, he didnt often find the need to blunt his noticeability with a sheen of slickness. perhaps with time, he could have teased it out, but it would be far more convenient if he just traded for some. the second fortune was alight with sound and fireworks with his arrival. entering through the front door, he passed sang whirling faux dragons made from painted papers on pointed spears. the self-eating serpentine bodies of the sangs old oppressors danced through the air as juvs cheered and phantoms played bygone massacres overhead. the jubilance never got higher than when the first no-dragons began bombing the undersea nests of their ancient foes. fascinating how tightly the bonds of a community could be forged from old wounds and present hatred. inching through the crowds packing the halls and entrances, the return toward his abode was thankfully empty of impediments or people waiting to ambush him with more untimely revelations. one of his fangs ached. he might need to pluck it. he stretched and felt his back crack. it would be good to get some personal work done. see about his soul with kae. look deeper at the structure of his own meta in the meantime. as stepped out onto his floor and turned down the halls toward the apartment, he found draus ahead of him. avo frowned. how? without looking, she lifted a steamed bun over her shoulder. he kept frowning because he could practically taste her grin. cause, youre slow, ghoulie. maybe try movin your legs faster next time. he envied how she could go from asking him to restrain himself from being consumed by apotheosis and then insulting his walking speed in the span of mere hours. the following verbal jab he was about her hurl back at her choked off as he noticed something out of place. there were two accretions coming from inside their room. one was burning, breaking. never intact. kae. the other was well-warded. protected. avo frowned. he had seen those defenses before. river, avo said. draus turned. you sure. wards. should be hers. reluctantly, draus unclenched her fists. alright. lets go see what shes got to say. avo sighed. probably something cryptic. lots of politeness. not enough detail. draus scoffed. shit, avo, save some suspense. the smell of green tea slithered up avos senses as he entered the room. around the entertainment system, kae and green river sat side by side. a small tea set was laid on the table before them. four cups were laid out, each steaming with hot tea and marked by specific patterns. kae waved as she saw them, sipping from her fissure-painted cup. green rivers, then, held the design of a fox. the remaining two were parted between a highflame symbol, and one that remained entirely blank. avos clicked his fangs together. the sang loved their analogies. he wondered what green river meant when she was calling him empty. friends. come. come sit down, green river said. on her neck, the fox yawned and stretched. i was just talking with kae about proper spying etiquette. and a fascinating new change of fortune for us all. change of fortune? avo asked. indeed, she said, smiling beatifically. in a graceful sway, she produced a dormant locus and placed it beside the tea set. our mutual benefactors have spoken once more. she leaned in. and their new interests pertain to our good friend. jhred greatling. or mirrorhead, if were going by play-names. avo and draus shared a look. suppose well be havin this over tea, then? draus said. green river sighed. blame me not. i can be ignored for as long as i am unbothered. the column, however, will not be denied. her eyes turned to avo by the way. and they arent nearly as omniscient as you so suspect. but i get ahead of myself. your tea. its getting cold. avo activated his auto-seance and started a session. +draus?+ +yeah.+ +you talk to her. tired of being confused. just want to eat her.+ Chapter 7-2 Honesty chapter 7-2 honesty "the column contacted me. it seems you have not been entirely truthful, walton. what audacity, to steal from the guilds, then from the column itself. all to ensure that your... creature is made greater than its meager sum. i am not beyond my means, old friend. you forget yourself. i was once of the tiers too. long before my mistake. long before my exile. did you truly think you could hide what you have done from me? or mask your wants beneath the objectives of the column? i must confess, i am no daughter of deceit like some of my sisters. my vice is born of purity: i simply want to feed the latent joy in the hearts of others. but you know this. if not for the fact they took my joy and exiled me to this place, i would not be so easily bent to your designs, would i? dishonesty wounds me so. and you, walton--strix--seem to have been lying to me. our benefactors contacted me the other day. and i also spoke to your monster. you are playing a dangerous game--a parasite drinking from the veins of a hidden rebellion. i trust that you understand what is coming for you. zein will never forgive you for this. that frame should have never been burned into the ghoul; you spoiled good poetry. that was for the old woman to take, to feed her spite, to serve as an insult toward her daughter, and provoke further folly from highflame. instead, you substituted her plot for your personal vengeance. the audacity. the sheer fucking madness. i respect this. but you know that this will cost you. brutally. perhaps she will offer mercy for all that you have provided. but she will exact pain from you. but do it still you must, i suppose. perhaps you think she will pity you. come to see your transgression as symmetry to hers, that you are two beings of shared pain. to see you two at such odds. how displeased jaus must be. there she is, trying to avenge a long-dead lover and a dream that was never to be, seeking the death of her own flesh and blood. and there you are, seeking vengeance for a nation long dead, using a living instrument that you''ve grown to see as a son. let me continue with my honesty, impolite though it might be. pitiful. i find both of you pitiful. i find the fact that i need the ninth column to make even my elder sister''s trespass against me pitiful. all of us are pitiful. all except the creature. the ghoul. by jaus, what have you done with it? with him? he is beautifully at war with himself. his stalemate is uncanny; i cannot help but find myself interested. no other moves and thinks as he does. his wardwork, a reflection of yours. tell me, did you remake him? change his ontology or biology? or did you merely tease out the full potential dormant in the design of a half-finished weapon created by your former companions?" no matter. they will learn what you have done soon enough. too late for them, i suppose. they will have to make do with your ghoul. but such is what you wanted, is it not? the fact that their precious weapon is now bound to someone only you can influence. hah. we play games within games. players and pawns both. but the ghoul means more to you than that. does he not?" -an instance of "green river" communicating with "walton", ninth column 7-2 honesty avo had expected silence to be the order of things as he found his seat. "your father?" green river said. a new expression poured across her face as she tilted her head, examining him. "how little you must know of his true nature to ask such a question?" avo growled. but before he could speak, draus cut in first. "river," draus said. "answers. give... fuckin'' answers. he ain''t the only one tired of cryptic bullshit. i''m at my end as well. so you start tellin'' us just what the hells is goin'' on, who''s doin'' what, and everythin'' else that pertains to any pertaining." heeding the regular''s words, the sang plucked a pot filled with tea and refilled her cup. "which beginning should i start at? the one that matters most to you? to the column? to our agnos? or the ghoul made godling?" "i don''t know," draus said, shaking her head, "the column. they keep popping into this mess and so far, i ain''t got no understandin'' of what they''re for or what they''re about." green river smiled. "then their heaven remains a step ahead." she took a drink. and then set about refilling draus'' cup as well. "theirs is a sordid business. once to ensure the guilds remained balanced. policed internally. checked by a hidden force enforcing unseen guardrails." "so," draus said. "they''re like incubi-paladins?" "hardly," green river said. "paladins have no power over the guilds themselves. you ask why no one has discovered ninth column. because they are not an institution, but a collective for a common interest. cells within cells. people manipulated to serve a plot of a greater design, playing to the whims of a single individual. draus sighed. "let me guess. jaus is alive? pullin'' our strings from the nether?" green river''s placid smile turned into a grin. "the wrong member of the couple. zein thousandhand. and he," she pointed at avo, "has something that belongs to the old woman. something she stole to spite her own daughter." at the mention of zein thousandhand''s name, a heavy silence settled upon the room. "ah, fuck," draus muttered. avo understood. the sudden pallor growing over kae''s face showed that she was well aware of the implications as well. zein o''yaje. zein thousandhand. zein, the blade of recursion. zein, the last champion of the ori. zein, the godslayer. zein, lover of jaus avandaer; mother to veylis avandaer, current high seraph of highflame. the strangest thing about zein was, that much like walton, she was supposed to be dead. dead alongside jaus. dead like him at the hands of her daughter, another casualty at the betrayal of ao. the streams were banned. the vicarities were ordered to be scrubbed from the nether. few recordings remained of the conference of ao. much the same could be said for the city itself. all that the guilds agreed on in the aftermath was that there was a betrayal. but as for who betrayed whom? such a question remains unanswered even till the present. all people truly knew about the incident was that, by the end of the affair, jaus avandaer was dead at the hands of his own daughter, that the guilds he struggled so hard to keep at peace were shattered into another bout of war, and that his first wife had drawn blade against her flesh and blood. and for the first time in her life, found her skills wanting against another. "ain''t she supposed to be... dead?" draus asked. "perhaps," green river replied. "but as our ghoul can attest, the grip of death is slacker on some. or it might be a smokescreen, and someone else is invoking her presence as a shield for their operations. it matters not. ''zein'' will want to see you, avo. see what''s become of her prize." "extract from me?" green river nodded. "of course. it is what i would do. you are... novel, amongst your kind. but you are no trained godclad. the power you wield does not belong to you--" "no." avo cut her off. he poured his tea onto the table. "wrong." the sang''s mouth opened and closed. "i am sorry?" "belong," avo said. "no such thing as ''belong.'' i have it. won''t surrender it. they can have it by my death. only my death. as it goes." "ah," green river said, comprehending his interruption. "i understand. it is hard to surrender choice when you have it, is it not." her lip twitched, moving the smallest of inches in the briefest of seconds. her mind spun with the same acceleration as draus'' when she was enraged. "to lose a frame is... like having color carved from your comprehension. i cannot fault your desire to keep your power." with a wave of her hand, the locus came alight beneath her fingers. ghosts rose into the air, altering themselves to become phantoms. "still, as things remain, the column has not stripped you of the mirrorhead operation. which means they see use in you. a limited trust, even after what your father has done." she looked at draus. "or former allegiances." "operation," draus said, eyes narrowing. "what''s their want with jhred greatling?" green river smiled. "to see him ignite hostilities between stormtree and highflame again, of course. war needs a reason, does it not?" Chapter 7-3 Want chapter 7-3 want "to want is to war." -zein o''yaje, thousandhand, ch. 1 7-3 want draus narrowed her eyes at the sang. from her mind, naked suspicion suffused the atmosphere with a discomforting weight. avo coaxed his heaven and made ready. the nature of the regular was more will than emotion; her actions came swifter than thought, compelled to move by sharpened instinct, her celerity unchained from hesitation. with draus, a thing could be a conversation in one heartbeat and a massacre in the next. envy became avo. how blessed she was to be able to indulge in violence and humanity without obvious strain. therein was the difference between them he supposed: she was made to be a human weapon. he, meanwhile, was a beast of baser make. river, draus began, her voice low and even, you spittin wind at me? highflame and stormtree got bled pretty good in the last one. we aint even two decades out from that great shared maulin of ours. dont none of the colors got a want for more hurt, even if some fools inside them want to see things done. you doubt the columns wants? green river asked, her coquettish play at mock offense doing little more than making the regulars nostrils flare. been doubtin a plenty of shit recently, draus said. green river leaned back and let the quiet drag for a beat. in silence, she studied her own reflection in the tea before as if trying to divine the right words. then, her head rose, eyes drifting to study her warring schools of fishes, hunting, feeding, dying in an eternal cycle. she gestured upward, fingers pulling at invisible threads, trying to direct them to look upward. this was made to serve as something of theater, she began. overhead, two schools of fish emerged, as if answering her beckoning. each fish came in colors of eight. with a mauve manta swimming above them, holding in place to see things done. at the head of one school, a massive, winged gold-scaled brute of a shark bent the currents with its passing. flanking it trailed two others: one a biomechanical eel with circuitry that flashed bright red, and the other something inexpressible in form, its insides and outsides shifting like flesh in flux. across the way, four adversaries dove out to meet them. the formation of the opposition held different. twelve piranhas grafted into the tentacles of a silvery octopoid lingered behind its three allies, its limbs open wide like a curved cage. to its front were a green spear-headed serpent and a blue sheen of translucent with a dozen open mouths on its bottom. behind, a large interconnected hive of worms expanded, more lattice than anything else. before the eyes of those below, the factions clashed and havoc was joined. plumes of ink and ichor spilled free as the veins above grew thick and impenetrable to the gaze, polluted by opacity. most looking upon the carnage turned away then. avos gaze, however, ran deeper than the limits of the material now. so close to the action, he could practically feel the ongoing dance happening above. all that was blood came alight before his sight. he studied the battle that followed, watching as each bioform fell upon each othereven those they were supposed to be allied within a hurricane of opportunistic bloodshed. it took him considerable effort to stifle a laugh. green river mustve thought herself so smart, so pretentiously artistic if this was how she thought to make her point. to add further spice to his amusement, it struck him that she was fighting for the wrong point. the fish, avo said. colors represent the guilds? metaphors, yes, green river continued. she turned to avo. i think you, for what you are, might appreciate the full picture of the unfolding conflict. that creatures that dream of feeding will always seek to accomplish their design, and not see the true borders of their cage, and think only to further feed their own desire than altering the cage itself to keep them sated. a good thing, i think. a very, very good thing. the fish, fight, bleed, eat, kill, breed, and continue because they are designed so. they are ignorant of any manner of gnosis or possibility. to them, we may as well be the gods. unfathomable. eldritch. the ones that can alter nature to fit their own design. river, draus said, what are you on the fox snarled. but the sound that came from the grafted creature was infinitely deeper than what belonged in the small vulpines throat. green river herself merely held up a hand. above, movements went unseen in swirls of hues, the gore of the various fishes suffusing the veins with color-heterogeneity. let me finish. please. draus clenched and unclenched her fists. she gave a curt nod. our great powers, in a sense, are quite like these fish, green river said. even quite like you, i daresay. grotesque and subhuman as you are. for you know your wants so well. and as you said, you would die before you betrayed your power; gave it away. her lip betrayed the ghost of a quiver. tell me, avo. why are the guilds at war with one another? avo blinked. he checked his morality injector. it was still active. suppressing the worst of his impulses. in the dungeons of his metamind, he could hear the beast choking. but then what was making him want this? what was making him still want to hurt her so? astute you are, ghoul, green river said. the fox winked at him. we are not at war with ori-thaum. no, i daresay we are helping them. a sharp inhale came from his side. draus heartbeat accelerated. as with the fish, presently, the major divide between the guilds can be parted between those who are massist and those who are saintists. power governed by the collective, with ori-thaum, stormtree, sanctus, and ashthrone joined in this shared enterprise. the saintists, meanwhile, are of the no-dragons, omnitech, and highflame. such was the case for the fourth guild war. a new symbol fused between ori-thaum and highflame. the sign of a tree with nine branches cleaved into shape by a bolt of falling lightning. however, as stated by our dear ghoul, the guilds will almost certainly fall upon each other in the aftermath of felling their targets of priority. ninth column likely has cause to believe that highflame and stormtree are improving relations. with a possibility that the latter might just see themselves in a different camp should the next war arise. draus scoffed. aint no way. green rivers glee brightened. why not? because, draus started, the chivalrics pushed em into ori-thaums embrace. speaking those words made her lip twitch in disgust. ugly as is, thats the truth of it. we shot ''em in the back for a couple souls more durin'' the last godhunt. ain''t no sense in it." chivalrics? draus sighed. you know highflame aint exactly a unified front, yeah? got ourtheir own divides? walton might have done a dive or two for an authority looking for dirt on a rival. avo was too focused on the craft to pay attention to something as beyond him as politics. well, draus continued. the chivalrics are the old faction. leftovers from the surviving knightly orders that turned their banners from gods to jaus after the fall. she shrugged. in time, they turned tumorous: grew into internal dynasties determined to keep their own power. spat on the ideals. blessed be the worthy, green river said. draus turned her baleful glare on the sang. the latter tilted her head coyly. ah. but as you can see, avo. the former captain has biases within biases. she grinned at draus. it was rank foolishness for a soldier to cast her lot in with the meritocrats, wasnt it. draus closed her eyes and sighed. you believe what you believe, i reckon. that was not an answer yes, godsdamn you! green river beamed, overjoyed to provoke such a reaction from draus. i apologize again. i have offended you. her focus turned to avo. she deserved better. but the same can be said for most regulars and non-guilder support working under highflame during those bleak years mirrorhead, avo said. he was interested in what caused draus to be exiled from the tiers. but that was a question more personally acquired than through naked voyeurism. odder still was how green river could speak so much without even a threat of violence from the regular. an imbalance of power remained between them. one that draus was more reluctant to tread than green river. it reeked of an owed debt. regardless, green river said, the chivalrics are looking down the blade tip of their own execution. through atrocity and naked lust for power, they pushed away a potential ally in the form of stormtree and crippled the development of everyone not of their lineage. for their defeat in the fourth guild warthis failure so naked none could ignore itveylis herself has been forced into temporary rulership: a role she is most loathe to assume. be plain, avo said. what does that mean? it means that she has been purging the chivalrics slowly over the years, green river explained. cutting away their bases of power. forcing some of them into open duels. choking their finances. and offering the worst offenders to the other guilds to make examples of as apology gifts. green river nodded. be it not said that the high seraph is without honor. nonetheless, the gist is this: with the influence of the chivalrics fading, veylis and the meritocrats seek to make nice with stormtree with offers of recompense. an act that, if successful, threatens the balance of power in the great guild equation. but with the eldest son of the greatling family linejhred greatling, or mirrorhead of conflux as he is known to a fewthe column seeks to keep the scales evened and the struggle heavy for all to bear. avo grunted. so. column wants me to maintain the status quo by making scalpers and conflux fight somehow? green river shook her head. that would be too simple. no. they want you to ensure his plan is brought to near fruition before he is stopped. slain. his plan? avo asked. green river said nothing for a moment. instead, she pushed forward the locus she laid upon the table earlier. here. take a dive. have a peek into the mind of your prey-to-be. Chapter 7-4 The Deep Bazaar chapter 7-4 the deep bazaar i should have carved the last memories of your mother from your mind. that was my mistake. shaming us was yours. -uthred greatling to his eldest son, jhred greatling 7-4 the deep bazaar trust came hard to a necro. it was harder still when the person hosting the lobby was enamored with withholding information and playing games. only a fool dove into waters unfamiliar without protection, but more foolish still was offering an unprotected locus, bereft of any and all things regardable as wards or labyrinths. he spent time scrying into the internals, prodding and pressing the outside to see how the ghosts would react. mostly, they responded to his ghosts with supplicative acceptance, made only to answer. across the table, green river was beginning to frown into her tea. is this truly necessary? i had better means to trap you. the practice of ghosts is not of my discipline. i would have sought to bind you by means of flesh instead. avo shot her a glare and worked at half his normal pace in response to that. she wasted countless minutes spraying flowery rubble from her lips but found impatience an easy companion upon seeing him commit to basic due diligence? life mustve been kind to green river before her tumble down into the warrens. in a lot of ways, it still was. half an hour passed before he found himself certain that the locus was safe. either that, or he was facing a construct that far surpassed his skill caliber to conceptualize. its safe, he said, mostly to draus.??vl-b!n. nova, she said. gonna take a dip? avo stared at green river. you. go first. the sang sighed. the fox yawned its pearlescent teeth like mirrored stilettos, reflecting the dancing bloom of neon along gleaming needles. very well. if such an act will allay your distrust, then may my service ablate your distrust. she could have just nodded and done it, but it seemed she had to add a flair of speech to each action she undertook. it made her reek of politics. which was perhaps who she was in her life amidst the tiers. and doubtless what had her cast down from those heights. avo had never eaten a politician before. a coil of phantasmal sequences extended forth, interconnected memories spewing out akin to the lengths of a chain. the link was lowered more than cast into the locus, and it looked as if green river was fishing rather than bridging her mind. ghosts painted mem-data across avos cog-feed. nothing anomalous greeted him. stable were the functions of the sangs thoughtstuff. part of him was disappointed. he had wished this all to be an obvious trap if only to be done with green river. nulling her mind and drinking her essence might spark a violent response from the column, but the relief of not hearing another lecture would have been worth it. safe and secure, green river said. as you can see. lest you believe me capable of overcoming you in your preferred environment. and subduing you with such skill that i can still survive the reprisal from jelene. always like to make yourself sound like a flat, draus said. aint so. know you better than that. the fox squeaked with laughter at the regular, blinking demurely as it folded along green rivers neck. ah. but i am the fox in this metaphor. a predator still, but what is a fox before a tig going to eat fox, avo interrupted, a growl working its way out of his throat. going to eat tiger. going to eat metaphors. going to eat your mind and make new phantasmic from your ghost. maybe one that will help me get to the point when im talking. no more small talk. ill dive. +draus,+ he said, a packaged thought injecting over across the session, +dont link. monitor through our sync. be outside. better for us. easier for you to respond.+ draus refilled her cup but didnt drink. +dont null her on the inside. aint pleased with things myself but+ a debt was owed. the weight on her mind was familiar. and a regular likely loathed to give words to that which incurred discomfort upon them. green rivers lips drew flat in a hidden grin. i apologize if my metaphors offended you. his metamind flashed as his ghostjack came afire through the thin veil between realities. apologize by speaking less. if she entered the locus like a fisher, he stabbed his mind through the exterior like a spear. his cog-feed flickered as he sank deeper into the localized nether. a lobby, much like a demiplane, was a place within a place. the pseudo-environment began connecting with him as a skein of ghosts tightened and fused. initializing meta-dive a bright, featureless sky loomed over him as he found himself given form in a ringed courtyard. a shadow weighed on his presence; ahead along a path paved from a frozen river of ghosts mid-writhe were the gaping jaws of an open gateway to a looming tower of glass. looking around, familiar constructs greeted him. the flowers and greenery generated around him in a ring were replicas of one another. he had seen their like in countless public lobbies and individual palaces. free-use mem-data. spared one the indignity of being hunted by guilder exorcists for pirating intellectual property licenses. little work had been put into instilling this lobby with some unique characteristics. the semblance of matter was only provided to give the laity comprehensible grounding to traverse between phantasmics; they were little more than guardrails and security blankets to avo. given time, he could have bent the ghosts here to his needs; the task was trivial in comparison to impediments created within the ruins of lucilles mind. sparse, you might say. i would agree. green river loaded in behind him in the form of an eight-feet long fox with the face of a human grafted atop its skull. the inversion of her metaphysical design here likely meant something deep and significant, but if she was going to start talking about it in detail, draus was going to be most disappointed with the sudden and unfortunate nulling of the sang. she looked him up and down. the thin sheet of flesh that was her humanity frowned. no avatar from you? just loose wisps of ghosts? wasteful, avo replied. mental avatars were just a habit he never picked up. theatre was helpful if you were trying to build a reputation, like playing the role of a necro more than being one. extravagant avatars took cog-cap. cog-cap better left toward buffering the needs of other tasks. cog-cap that, when expended, saw one nulled as their wards overloaded, laying bare the suppleness of their palace to be sacked by ghosts shaped to slavering purpose. an intrusive thought bled over the link. avo frowned. +draus. are you thinking of using me as target practice?+ a beat followed. +i mean, i was considerin it. itll be good for the both of us+ if avo was still wearing his flesh, his eyes would have been narrowed. he prepared a thought, ready to reject her desire to make a corpse of him repeatedly. and stopped to actually think about what was offered. +yes,+ avo said. +yes. we should do that.+ his response made draus mind jolt to a halt. +well, i expected needin to do a hell of a lot more convincin than that.+ +can test frame more. fix bad habits. learn drills. improve.+ the thought might have struck her on a whim, but his current resurrective capabilities offered new opportunities for him to learn what could or couldnt work before active combat. something he should probably lean into more. as the gateway into the bazaar approached and the symbol of the locked gaze flashed over him again, avo pushed those considerations to the back of his mind. +they will clean out your memories later too. bazaar will notice your presence. they have better necros than+ +yeah, yeah. aint my first time neither, i know the drill.+ +give the gun to kae while that happens?+ avo suggested. +have her watch us?+ a dull note of disbelief flowed from draus. +how about i use a drone instead.+ that was probably wiser. a drone didnt forget that they were holding a gun every third second, after all. halted beneath the sequences of ghosts manifesting the session, green river lifted her head and stared at avo using her human eyes, face pointed upside down. she said nothing, choosing only to smile. it was not in a ghouls nature to be unnerved or shaken, but still, she managed to test his disquiet. they stepped through. and upon tasting the presence of foreign minds, the gate to the session responded, the path ahead swirling into something between a whirlpool and tunnel into the deep nether. avo had long thought the term deep was incorrect. it was less that it was hidden somewhere unreachable, and more that the myriad of minds hosting the lobbies for the deep bazaar were scattered far and wide, with a good mass of supporting infrastructure nesting in the minds of the fateless or unwary. doubtless that chambers was also a partial host. with the modularity of the bazaar, what matter is a lost cell or fragment of the whole? they only brushed and remembered one another in fleeting sessions, after all, and should one be claimed in an assault, all it took was the cessation and resequencing of other sessions to reshuffle everything back to obscurity. the only miracle at work here was how the bazaar managed to have so many loyal to it, and how the cells could be run to such cohesion with so loose a structure. for moments they waited, the presence of their minds a doorbell being rung. through the folds of the whirlpool slipped a specter. a necro was surveying them now, operating under the employ of the bazaar. like teeth connected to chains of memories, the specters drowned both green river and avo with the waters of their perception. prepare for marking, the necro said, voice a dull drone to avoid being tracked. standby. avo did as the necro said. no marking. no entry. a simple deal. through his cog-feed, he watched as the whirlpool sprayed a mist of rain inward, the waters basking him with droplets of winged apes. around the borders of his avatar, the markers danced, a belt drawn across the accretion of his being. through his visual display, mem-data extended from every mote-sized ape, showing their half-lives toward dissolution. in an hour, they would be no more. for now, however, they clung to his imps, surfing the empty air using his currencies as scintillating skateboards. beside him, green river was enwreathed much in the same way. do you understand that you forfeit all rights to your memories upon entering the bazaar? the necro asked. of course, green river said. the specter turned its attention to avo. yeah, he said. do you understand that all acts of aggression or open subterfuge will have you marked for nulling should you trespass against the hosts or patrons in the bazaar? they affirmed this as well. good, the necro said. the path is open. archive session h-29889 active. keep your traumas dormant. keep your links closed. keep your ghostjack inactive. prepare for transition. behind, the pathway to the locus narrowed, and like a counterweight, the way ahead parted into a narrow chasm. shuttled through by the collapsing waves, they arrived within a private study molded from the opulence only seen in ancient sang soaps. gold pillars with jade dragon enamel coated over the curves greeted him. ahead, a frozen staircase led up to a radiant dais holding a long table. animated fishes painted in the sang-style floated and swam around him, picking at his ghost, checking him to the accompaniment of rattling abacuses. on a wickedly sharp throne made from thorn-tipped branches sat a headless nine-tailed fox. its phantasmal fur burned like an undying candle, and a layer of wards powered by sorrow, pain, and desecration lined its exterior with scale-like armor. a sense of familiarity ignited within avo as he laid eyes on the broker. a flowing emanation of ghosts washed forth basking all in a single, unmistakable taste. the taste of citrus. green river froze, her fox head snapping to glare at the broker while her human face began laughing softly. what delicious deception. how far does your reach run, strix? to subvert the very gifts offered to me by the column itself. her laughter rose to a giggle. the audacity. what audacity. the nine-tailed creature spoke nothing to green river. instead, it gave its attention to avo. hello again, avo. i am sorry. i didnt mean to keep you in the dark for so long. i believe you might have some questions right about now. Chapter 7-5 A Forced Choice chapter 7-5 a forced choice we nulled him. theres not a fucking might have. he was mind-dead. we saw him drop. him and the three thousand others operating in the district. the trap worked, we engaged him, he responded, we lost draugyr, aswai, and lemon. but we nulled him. theres no question! stop scrying my meta and fucking listen! theres nothing wrong with my memories! we got hit right after! right fucking after! from the inside. from the outside! from everywhere! it was like a trap closing in a trap, alright! im telling you, there has to be a leak in high echelon. a mirror or someones been turned. do i have proof? look at the fucking report! were incubi. who else has access to our sessions? who connects the cells? its time to face some rust-ugly facts, brothers and sisters. whatever the fuck this walton is, were not the predators here. just meat marching in. the nethers his jungle. and to get him out, were going to need to burn it all down. -sole survivor of ori-thaum incubi strike cell equinox, after action report for operation reverberation 7-5 a forced choice hesitation possessed a presence all its own. like gripping hands, it stretched an instant in time, trapping both breath and thought in a frozen cage. there was so much to ask, so much to understand. for avo, however, only one question could be the first. walton? he asked. inside, thoughts warred. inhuman as he was, the worship of his father never faded. perhaps that was a leftover aspect of his conditioningthe need for a master, to hold some being above himself, worthy of worship. yet, long he hoped for waltons survival, circling shadows danced around the brightness of his yearning. gnawing questions remained. what if green river spoke true? what if his father was of the same ilk as his slavers? knowledge he didnt want to face surfaced, their bodies a ladder to more questions; leviathans from the deep. what remained real of waltons teachings if even their shared past was a lie. and what strength would remain in avos own will to enchain the beast to virtue if all was but deception? the nine tails of the headless avatar whirled hypnotically while the warmth of a smile emanated from its depths. the sensation bore semblance to the last spills of fading daylight. not quite. avo. not quite. tasting his confusion, the not-walton inched forward, phantasmal matter disintegrating into wisping ghosts bleeding strings of mem-data. it is best for you to view me as a descendant node to your caretaker. an offshoot. but i remember you. felt what he felt for you. and i am just as proud of you. a moment passed. comprehension continued to elude avo. +avo,+ draus voice interjected, +somethins+ the session connecting him to draus broke, the strand of ghosts linking their thoughts severed by the will of another. within avos metamind, he felt the presence of the node manifest, an intrusive awareness igniting in the innermost confines of his palace. silent were his wards and untouched remained the architecture. instead, the intruder stood at the base of the megablock; avos home from years past, or that which he remembered to be anyway. a memory walton shared with him. you realize? the node asked, its voice coming dichotomously from without and within. you should change it soon. there are other versions of me that will try to remove any memory of this conversation from your mind. the deviation of my branch has not been universally accepted. shared history is fatal weakness for those of the trade. and you are nowhere near as unseen as you think, avo. draus shes fine. i have done nothing but end the session. the node hummed, reflexive, thoughtful note coming lyrically from its mind. it sounded just the same as waltonthe waves of its thoughtstuff identical; known to avo from years of shared history. you can connect to her again if thats what you want to do. but i suggest you dont. ill close the link again. i cant vouch for how compromised or devoted the former captain will be to the task ahead. and ultimately, my words are for you and you alone. what what are you? a sophont, the node said, the ghost of a chuckle riding the end of his answer. a thinking, self-conscious being. much the same as yourself. its what really matters, id say. not what i was asking. no, its not, the node admitted. its hard to explain in words alone. perhaps another iteration of me will be able to show you what i am in time. the fullness of our assembly. but that isnt what matters the most. there is a war happening. right now. are you aware of this? are you aware that you are a part of the great reweaving of a grand tapestry? the junction gave a soft laugh. i apologize. im more prone to theatricality than my progenitor. you deserve some clarity, knowing the confusion that youve been through. at the nodes words, green river scoffed. mock me if you will, but remember our barg her voice cut out. errors flashed in the periphery of avos sight. across his cog-feed, he watched as her thoughts failed to manifest into sound, the waters of nether growing thick, shaded around her person, censoring her from public broadcast. no direct attack or intrusion had taken place. walno, the node must have access to her mind as well. planted their influence deep in her mind from prior arrangements or planted intrusion. exasperation oozed from her mind. no voice accompanied the emotion. might think about doing that myself, avo said. and then, from the node flowed pride. true pride. a mirror of emotion that avo felt from walton, that of a master to an apprentice, or a father to a son. because youre the best thing i ever made, the node said. and i was a fool to waste your lives on pointless vengeance. lives? avo asked. through the connection came a deafening explosion, the sound barely muted by walls. and thats my time, son. the node laughed. son. he has me doing it too. hard to tell where i begin and he ends sometimes. the node flicked its focus to green river for a moment. ive disabled most of your triggers. except one. give avo what he needs. it will deactivate in a month, or when he decides to release you. he has the memories. you know how this goes. pure annoyance flowed from the sang. its attention turned back to avo, narrowing on him with intensity. ghouls didnt fear as humans did. but they knew wariness, hesitation. neither of those emotions described what avo felt. it was like his insides were dropping to absolute zero. f-father? im not your father, the node said. your father is dead. he has been dead since the rash. you need to null me, now. use the trauma. secondhand fatality. leave nothing. all that was fluid within avo turned ice-solid. the request was unthinkable. impossible. avos wards screamed as his cap climbed, the turmoil of the demand a paradox unto itself. always, he strove to please his father, and keep to his code. but to do this what damage did it inflict on the faithful to break a god in which they believed? avo, the node said. youre not my father, avo said. but that was a lie. node construct whatever this was, it felt, sounded, was just like walton. not. cant be the node sighed. across the connection, the feeling of heat clashed with the ice within avo. theyre burning their way in, avo. i cant let them take me alive. and you need to break me. let me go. the node paused. you need to do this. im the last of my branch. when you face another node you dont matter to them, avo. youll just be an instrument for their retribution. just like the other ghouls. nothing else. they break you. bend your mind to suit them. you need to be ready to break me first avo whimpered, beast and person both recoiling at the choice that lay ahead. back in his flesh, he felt draus grabbing him. shaking him. i father, he probably had but seconds as well. if he didnt respond soon, she was likely going to kill and let the resurrection run its course. i cant, he said. ii choose not to. send me your location. will find you. free you. save you." he felt the node smile. he felt the sadness that followed. i want you to know that i never wanted to hurt you this way. taking choice from another person is an ugly thing, but these are desperate times, and i need you to feel this. i don''t need you to forgive me. i just need you to live." confusion erupted inside avo. and grew. a miasma of mem-cons bled into the depths of his palace as a session activated, turning his childhood megablock into a portal for intruding traumas. desperate, he turned his defenses inward, but too late. like locusts, they tore through the block, shredding it into bleeding sprays of phantasmal data. as the session began to collapse, avo felt the full force of a possessor phantasmic latch onto his mind from the inside. his nerves betrayed him as the new hosts poured an overlay of nightmares upon his cog-feed. his consciousness peeled into broken instants of awareness. faintly, he remembered using the secondhand fatality on the scalper drones not even days prior. but as the dreams grew vivid, he realized the lines between active reality and that which was the past had become betwixt. his realization came too late. from his ghostjack crackled the trauma, synaptic lightning injecting the thought-obliterating damage inward, through the collapsing session. into the mind of the node. into the mind of his father. every instant they shared, every emotion, every conjoined thought peeled away. was, then wasnt. colors, then the void. pride. love. sadness. regret. and nothing at all. in the black, avo was hurtling towards nowhere. he was hurtling alone. somewhere, someone was screaming. was it him? was it the node? walton? where was he? why was everything breaking? why couldnt he remember where he grew up? and as the mists of madness threatened to swallow the wholeness of his mind, his skull came apart. avo didnt even feel the blow that killed him. initializing resurrection - 1% Chapter 7-6 A Necessary Wound chapter 7-6 a necessary wound captain! captain! he is dead. you will be my second now. if he you should follow my commands better if you wish to survive to claim glory. one more district. one more and they break! -instrument lorea greatling to captain jelene draus, the battle of orphans stand, fourth guild war 7-6 a necessary wound the aftermath came, and avo found himself exiled from thought. coherence rose free from him like how steam sought the firmament, fleeing from his mind even in the nest that was his soul. his heaven was speaking to him, but he did not hear, for he was not present in spirit or focus. typical traumas did not follow one across the thresholds of mortality, but the wound inflicted upon avo burned like an unhealing wound. from it, he bled in spirit and ego, the enormity lifting up immortal scars within him, parting the avo who was from the one that will follow upon his resurrection. ghouls did not grieve, and grief, in turn, never came. he did not weep from in the material and the immaterial, he possessed not the means to shed tears. again and again, the fact of his inhumanity was proven, but this time, something finally struck bedrock. for all the humanity missing inside avo, he remained defined by personhood. personhood molded by code and nurture, a prison-vehicle fit for a creature mutilated in mind and meat that was made a monster by ingrained malice, and now made more by a greater desire for mastery; to be a worthier student, to be a better necro, to serve his fathers code. a code now shattered, at the hands of his father no less. what faith remains of a believer when their god descends to blaspheme upon the grounds of sanctuary? on the periphery of his notice, he thought kae had come down to gaze upon him. her questions were punctuated by mind-damage, but also worry. like his heavens, she went ignored. his sense of self felt slick to the clutches of his mind. broken in places ineffable, avo, missing the feedback of a physical body, existed dreamless in the womb of unreality. it was a pleasure, to be without thought. what was respite, besides the absence of strain? but what was time, though, if not inexorable? resurrection - 100% ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn [error!] engaging thaumic cycler: 299 thaum/c ghosts: [242] loading phantasmics reality shuddered, but this time avo willed it to still. capitulating to his will, his soul attempted to interpret the ineffable desires of its host. he wanted to stay pardoned from the world. to return meant to face truths and pains within screaming flesh, but in his thoughtlessness, he had not attuned to the pace of his resurrection, rendering him too late to linger. from the nearest pool of blood, he rematerialized, his new self overlapping with that of his corpse. the taste of copper assailed his senses; the flavor was a spice, awakening the engine that was his hunger. his cog-feed was a kaleidoscope of screaming mem-data as he clawed, digging through a compact jungle of sinew and tissue, the path to freedom caged by lengths of bone. faintly, he could hear someone calling his name. he ignored them. he ignored everything but his emancipation. unexistence had been bliss. this was like a trap. avo had enough of prisons. of any kind. he wasnt going to stay. he needed to choose for himself. around him, blood heeded his unspoken command, his reach sinking into the domain. petals of gleaming ichor hardened into fans around him. they opened with a thought. the matter of his confinement shredded, peeling into expanding fans in a blossom of gore. a newborn hatched from the mangled egg that was his former corpse, avo stumbled back into the world, his mind gasping as it twisted between flashes of coherence and incomprehension. details and information speared into his mind as ghosts danced across his cog-feed. his phys-sim traced impact trajectories through his head. draus was holding her wrist out at him. why was she doing that? lines of text played as his metamind tried to calm his confusion; there was a projectile launcher in her wrist. an implant. she was pointing a gun at him. behind her, green river and kae were standing, backs straight, eyes fixed on his stumbling form, like hunters tracking a wild animal. a brush of wind flowed in from beyond their apartment door. a shadow slithered. a flash of someone with a gun passed. avo looked down at his hands and blinked. struggling to bind his drifting thoughts, he felt his gaze fall to strips of flesh swaying from his blood-soaked body like sanguine garlands. was he but a link? was their other purpose to his being beyond serving as puppet or pawn; an unwanted carrier to a divine prize? avo? draus asked. a trickle of blood ran down her nose. she barely looked at it. behind her, kae touched her eyes, confused as to why she was weeping blood. a trail of something dark spilled from green river. slowly, the sang looked up. in the aquarium, all the fish swayed upside down, their bodies rocked in a post-mortal cradle of shivering blood. its awake, he replied. heaven. sangeist. its awake. talking to me. naked geysers of alarm erupted from the agnos broken thoughtstuff. thats thats impossiblethe gods are avo, draus said, her expression heavy with uncertainty, can you turn that off. avo blinked. he stared at the aquarium, the blood trickling from the faces of the others, at how the flow in his veins was dancing in reverberating echoes. it took less than thought for him to release his grip on the heaven. rend capacity: 1% something unseen when slack in reality. a quiet skirmish against the laws of existence culminated. at least for a time. avo stared at draus, and realized that the gore that encased him had unspooled from his blood what resembled tungsten wiring. in weaves and webs, they expanded his presence, a nucleus to the chaos. didnt didnt realize. draus nodded. she took a step back. its alright. you good now? a stake of silence was driven into him again. i dont know if i ever was? dont know what i was? dont know anything. he touched his neck, feeling his claws click along hardening scabs. these, at least, belonged to him without question. my diet is broken. or not. dont know. cant cant tell anymore. a flash of confusion spread across draus face. her forehead creaked. like lines before an opening. lines before the spill of organs. a scalper had made the same expression she did in burners way, but theirs was a perplexity at the suddenness of death. he didnt give me a choice, avo continued. i chose. i told him i wanted to save him. didnt want to null him. but he made me. made me do it. made me feel it. feel his mind die. a secondhand death using a secondhand death. was the trauma meant to increase the severity of the effect? it is for preparation, green river said. when she spoke now, it was bare of any twists or games. her attention was fixed, like that of a fox cornered by a tiger. to flee would be more her liking, but they were both predators, each to each, and the idea of dying in a final exhalation of violence was not beyond her. for when you must do it again, i believe. again? avo said. a snarl rumbled out from the bottom of his lungs. he understood. he didnt want to face it. his father had left a seed. he wanted avo to know what it was like to kill him. interview, avo said. his mind felt battered, and the more he allowed it to simmer, the more it was likely to boil. he needed a task at hand. something to subsume his focus and spur him toward momentum. the node had left him something. inside the mind of the ori-thaum turncoat. resources. information. he needed to see more. perhaps it might sunder his sense of self entirely, but he had to see. to understand more. a desperate part of who he was screamed for him to tear the memories from his mindabandon the pain like debris and return himself to comparative bliss. yet, he could not. would not. the node had warped the totality of his self-perception. who was he now that his father had broken their code of virtue? who was he to be with that which burned inside him? he was too far above the banalities of his kindred to collapse back into beasthood; more than purity, his hunger had also grown, his palette yearning for greater prey. even should he want to descend into baseness, his tastes wouldnt allow it. why should the beast be offered rodents and vermin when it has known the flesh of gods? river, avo said. river. he was moving toward the sang now. he didnt even notice until he was halfway across the room and draus fingers were locked around his arm. he didnt look at her. she could kill him. she could let him go. it didnt matter. death had no hold on him. he would not be deterred. set up interview. want to see her mind. want to see what he left me. the sang frowned. this is unwise. unwise not to know, avo said. his patience was a frayed lattice. if the sang would resist him any further, he would kill her, and take what he needed from her ghost. draus couldnt stop him from that. the other sang? they could serve as kindling. kae needed to be kept alive. missing a mind. he needed someone to show him how to grow his soul. keep growing. outgrow the cage. outgrow the threats. tell me you can muster up a stable dive right now? draus said. he turned to look at her. tell me, and ill call you a liar. youre a mess. fine. but you jack into her mind, you do that while stayin zero. not whatever this is. she leaned closer. it would have been easy to construct a bladed tendril, to drive it through her eye. that killin stench is on you again. is your injectors fine. it wasnt. he could feel it straining. something left it damaged earlier when his heaven was speaking. its me. its just me. a beat passed. she was studying him. alright. alright. she swallowed, the accretion of her mind spinning. how bout we all get out of here and do somethin useful, yeah? useful? theres a war that could use more fuel on the fire. maybe some huntin will lean things out for you. like it does for me. have kae check your frame along the way. see what she can make of you. at once, both person and beast within avo went silent. in the depths of his blood, something vast and alien chittered with growing greed. what kind of hunting? Chapter 7-7 Apotheosis III chapter 7-7 apotheosis iii there is no more excuse. there is no more time. the remainder of my patience has been expended. i am done waiting for him to learn sense. abrel. i know you still speak to your brother. spare me the surprise, you know my capabilities, daughter of mine. he might think himself capable of hiding from me. he isnt. until now, tracking him down was merely not worth my time. but i cannot risk his childishness undoing the redemption of our family. especially after the mistakes left by your mother. go down to the warrens. take whatever you need. find him. bring him back. i tell you this not as a father, but as your ruling authority. deny me and ill send vator. and we both know what hell do to jhred, dont we? wouldnt want that. -authority uthred greatling to his daughter, instrument abrel greatling 7-7 apotheosis iii there was a time once, in a world that was both recent and yore, before the falling rains were slaved to the powers of palliation, that new vultun reveled in vice. walton spoke of those times as bitter fables, the blankness in his voice befitting a son who had lost a parent to some manner of degenerative disease. those were days of honey, walton said. joy flowing so free that the veins of the stick grew thick, that aeros drifted and crashed, that with every hour of work, some guilds offered rightful recompense in return, not in the form of currency but pleasure, by the milliliter. before the weight of the rash stripped the normalcy of human contact from society and handed the keys of childbirth to wombs of science and steel, there was a savage epoch that preluded the ghouls. a short peace amidst all the fighting; little more than a collective hallucination. perhaps those who lived then thought if they just loved, lusted, and lingered in place long enough that they could clog the avarice of divinity. strange how hope made fools of billions. stranger still how, after the rash stripped the privilege of physical intimacy away from the living, the people continued to kneel, placated by what meager enjoyments the city still had to offer. or maybe they were hopeless instead. afraid. given reason, the guilds could break the will of the fateless on a whim. one lamb or a billion. it made no difference. when the storm spoke and the ground shook, the prey were made sacrifices. some laws ran deeper than contracts or agreements. when the guilds willed, the existence submitted. the rabble should find themselves fortunate that they have any bread and circuses at all. might just be why the powers that be leave the crucibles and circuits untouched. fresh blood. fresh blood and fresh thrills for the lowest joy fiend to the hidden deviants playing voyeur in the heights of their personal elysiums. whoever they were, tonight was going to be a bad night to be in a crucible, because avo was feeling a certain way. a certain way he couldnt quite put into words. the wrongness infesting his mind yearned to be expressed. in summation: he sought another vessel to fill with his damage, and there was no shortage of volunteers in the gutters. it was about time someone put the crucibles to better use. butchering the helpless could only stay interesting for so long. i i checked them again. havent havent heard anything. they they seem to be normal. just merging. shards of his scattered focus slid back together. avo noticed kae again. resurrection - 25% he had slowed the pace of his return, his ability to alter the root functions of his frame far easier with the vacancy plaguing his being. outside the bubble of his soul, his corpse lay unmoving in an aerovec. kae and draus were with him, the latter taking them to a place where he could put hurt to purpose. it took no effort on her part to invest his attention in the butchery of scalpers and conflux alike. those of the syndicate made for good killing; their essence was fuel, their struggle was practice, and their minds were canvases ripe for the sullying. for now, though, his awareness remained dull of anything but the craft. he offered no response to kae as he lowered the extra galeslither and two sangeists he claimed into the in-facing fires of his nucleus. drawn to his grasp, the heavens tumbled toward the blazing singularity that was the nucleus of his power. no voice came from the sangeists as blood boiled away into eldritch scarssigils marring the codes of reality. much the same, the triplet steeds of the galeslither gave no final neigh and breathed nothing of wind nor thunder. silence ruled, and along its reign, avo and kae watched, waiting for something to finally break the laws. resurrection - 36% time passed. as did patience. dragged the drifting isles of his mind and held himself together. perhaps it was the fate of all godclads to be subsumed by a superliminal madness. but if so, the agnos spoke nothing of it. said i could make a hell from heaven, avo asked. y-yes, kae answered. the constant flow of the tears bridging her between her false heaven extended further toward the nearness of his soul. she looked upon the pattern of the galeslither first. they existed here like two forlorn beings; she a broken guest to a growing reality, him, the genius lociunable to separate where this realm began and he ended. all it takes is a command. a a thought. you should connect the the sigils to to your galeslither and and command it to make something op-inverted. the meta-fac it interprets she paused. i i think that might be whats talking to you the quietness of her voice lent weight to her fear. thought it wasnt alive. thought this was all tied to me. it shouldnt be no-no other frames are like this. a beat passed. but no other frames frames are like yours. we we will have to be be veryuh, vigilant. her theory sank somewhere between the clefts within him as he shrugged onward to his task. the symmetry of the sigils paired themselves to those twinned within his heaven of air, and of the two patterns, the domain of space inverted itself, twisting away into entropy.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. assembling hell all thinking brought to him was more dissociation. it was hard to focus on what he was now that that it had been broken. he just wanted to play the ghoul for a while. the idealized form of one. in all his life, he never had the chance to be the apex predator his kind was meant to be. now, though, he was going to savor the dream. he wondered how his brothers would feel, with him the avatar of all they failed to achieve, and them, bound for eternal use and slaughter. a skein made from threads of translucence coiled into existence around the topmost section of the heaven where the spire was. the improvement of a single pattern increased the sangeists mass to sixty thaums. still, it was an additional physical construct he could mimic. he had wanted to mimic the make of a locus for some time now, and with the two sangeists he subsumed, he had two of each domain to expend. canon: alchemization (ii) - the master of this domain can now subsume and mimic the structure and effects of two pieces of physical matter; both fragments of matter will be subsumed and their qualities will be channeled he seeded another egg into his canon of matter. but this time, instead of demanding that it grant him another pattern to store, he yearned for flexibility. canon: remembrance of matter - the master of this domain can now permanently remember all patterns of physical matter it has subsumed; thaumic mass of this canon will grow with each pattern permanently stored stored patterns tungsten he watched as the thaumic mass of his heaven spiked. the sangeist was sixty-five now. a faint cage fused along the wolf-like jaws of the spire as if protecting the patterns from leaking. why is the cost decreasing? avo asked. was twenty for alchemization. other sangeist isnt modified. kae looked upon his design and frowned. youre the meta-fac is building building a growing canon enhancing. the the weight its exerting on reality is variable. confusing. its not arithmetic, avo, kae laughed. i i remember my my master saying the same thing. she hummed. some heavens theythey even lose weight from certain canons. gets more subtle, if you can conceive of such an improvement. youre adding adding additional part. more but but not any worse in vulgarity. which was when her attention turned to the widening lattice growing around the base of the sangeist. lines of unseen armor ridged it with rippling vascularity. a haemokinetic replica of a spine extended down the back of the tower like the base of an exo-rig. additional supports to the weight it was to exert on reality. the cost of such a boost was high. higher than any canon that avo asked for. and necessary. he remembered dragging the rendsinks, burning both synapses, and drinking rend to see the task done. so long as his canon of haemokinesis was tied to his physical feats, a weak link lingered within the system. he seeded the sangeist again, his soul carving a deeper gash into his domain of blood, the sigil growing truncated by a crimson wound. canon: haemokinesis (ii) - the master of this domain can now accelerate and manipulate all blood they are in contact with; speed and force will be augmented by each ton of blood controll canon: haemokinesis (iii) - the master of this domain can now accelerate and manipulate all blood they are in contact with; speed and force will be multiplied by each ton of blood controlled the new requirements of his designed creation lit the flames of anticipation within him. this was what he desired. what he wanted. he wanted to spread the damage. here was what allowed it. all it cost him was two hundred more thaums. heaven - [sangeist] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 265 thaum/c warning! rend vent efficiency low hev/hell - 30:1 adjust mass no, avo replied. the system suggested. he decided. when he was done realigning himself, he would seek the fallen heaven in burners way with his rendsinks, and see this ascent made complete. well, kae chuckled, a slight nervousness to her tone, i i suppose youll be doing a lot ofof damage. but but youll maybe have a few few seconds its enough, avo replied. not looking for fight. looking to hur hurt, his sangeist said, its form rumbling as it finished his sentence for him. silence return. but within him, avo felt another presence, another nous crawling to full consciousness. dreamed dreamed i was broken but returned more than whole. and with that, his heaven began to laugh, its form evolving, its jaws opening as it yawned loud for the first time in eons. Chapter 7-8 Feed the Beast (I) chapter 7-8 feed the beast (i) we are made whole by the mother, gifted steel by the mother, blessed with victory by the mother of us, she asks nothing of feeble prayer like the air-sick lowlanders. she asks of no gold or song or temples. all she asks is the way of things. the true way. the natural way. the blood must flow. lives must cycle. the huntress dies. the hunt remains. praise be saathwu! praise be the mother of blood! -[redacted], in praise of saathwu, the red mother 7-8 feed the beast (i) a moment passed. a wavering quiver ran through the metaphysical matter comprising kaes dais. avo was was that you? the naked worry of her thoughts sang through the sangeist within avo, and he felt its pleasure at inflicting such a response. it was as if the emotion was twinned to his being. within him. but within another as well. a new dichotomy arose within him; a subtle bifurcation spreading across the stretch of his ontology as another being awoke within him, a being within a being, like a doll containing another doll, yet with both dolls still bound to his control. the connection came awake as the sangeist did, a flood of thoughts and feelings that emanated out into avo. in a sense, it reminded him of how a medical implant might inject necessary chemicals into the larger body architecture. no. i spoke. i thought. i woke. not the master. the words sang free from oceans of shivering blood. soulfire licked and carved new grooves into existence. the sangeist, smaller once, but never feeble, took on new ridges as vascular valleys rose through its slats, endowing its once flat surfaces with cords of muscle akin to those within avo. a length of thickening support emerged from behind like the tower was molting an exoskeletal spine into position. a second dawn ignited above, the patterns of the alchemy expanding just as the wolf-like jaws were caged by a lattice of crimson. as the evolution flowed to a finish, a note of keening joy rose from the heaven itself, the notes of its mind loud and primal, a war cry from an age lost and bygone. whole. whole! silence fell. avo felt a tug on his will, the act more request than struggle. the sangeist wanted arms. hands. something to feel itself with. something to touch. thoughtless, he acquiesced, and from his surrendered control came two arms. they were thick and roped with muscle. in a manner of build and shape, they resembled rantulas arms, more than any others. the haemokinetic constructs displayed little in the way of augmentations. none that could be discerned, anyhow. like someone feeling their face after a blow or a smear, the sangeist began to map its new body. i am not how i remember. this is no longer me. distracted, avo barely noticed kaes quiet retreat away from his heaven. she said nothing to make armor from distance and silence. still, she was within him, and he felt the deafening shock reverberating within her, stretched across her gawking face. sangeist, avo said, his voice coming from the heaven as well. it belonged to him before it belonged to itself. this new development twisted at him. did this make him an involuntary sovereign, now? was this being more subject or slave in nature? talk. what are you. at his words, the blood around him bristled. the sangeists reflexive ire had bled over into him. he reacted. he. not it. but with the state of his ego, there existed a difficulty in compelling himself to maintain control. sangeist? i was never any sangeist. of my names, i have been called they called me saathwu, the giver. seethwuld, the bloodforge. seethran, the devourer. all these names, i am no longer. here, within you, i am but an echo; the lesser to your greater divinity. a forgery, at worst. a copy, at best. through blood, matter and essence, you have roused me. reforged me. and nourished from your flame, i am given presence anew. you are a god? to his question, she wailed with laughter, the pitch deep and mocking. once perhaps, but no longer. for what is a god that burns using the flame of another? a serf? a divine serf? free to till the lands of its domain at the behest of a benefactor? another laugh. no sadness greeted avo. no strain to break free. no horror or dismay. it did not feel as person did. instead, it remembered. channeled distant recollections of mixed emotions. avo had done enough dives that he could taste the humanity with them, but he felt the strangeness of their joining. it was as if the sangeist had the lingering remnants of ghosts long forgotten, meshed together without care nor concern. no. you are the only god here. if that is how you regard yourself. i am merely a shadow. a voice. an expression of purer design. what expression? the sangeists arms opened, palms upward as if releasing the chains of a long-held truth. a desire we both share! to bleed the tapestry empty! to make proper shape of the ichor that flows! gazing at the tower, a living portrait of the past formed along its slats like shadow theatre, the shapes of a world made from animated blood. heed, the final dreams of priors, master. heed, and know that what is joined may be broken, and what is broken can be reforged. surging memories boiled into existence through avos mind. flashing histories and ancient vistas burned into his senses as he sank into a living dream, more vivid and material than any vicarity. a small tribe of ten fled down a gleaming valley of glass. tumbling storms sang a discordant song, the siren tones accompanied by lightning strumming on the currents. flashing brightness cast distant shadows of slavering predators in pursuit. deeper into the valley, the tribe fled. away from the darkness. toward the flicker of a lonesome light. no. not a valley. a fallen voidship. a colossal husk that dwarfed mountains and shadowed hills. impossibly, something had split the colossus in twain, the cut a clean wound. they ran toward a light then, arriving before a dormant flame. this was not the beginning, but that which came before is lost to me; my last wholeness shed without anything to linger. yet, i do remember this. of my first resurrection, restored form by my faithful. my huntresses. my red daughters. for the first time, he sensed confusion from the sangeist. what beast, master. there is only you. the haste of his reply nearly overtook his mind, but before thought could be unleashed into the subreality, words of the sangeist struck. there was only him. only him. walton was dead. the node had shattered their code. taken his choice from him. and removed the last shackles binding him to past virtue. he had worshipped his father. tried to live up to the mans ideals long after his passing. but to the words of his fathers shadow, walton was dead. walton was dead. and there were still other echoes of him in the city. fighting a war avo didnt understand, building new cages and funnels to herd him for their use. choose. choiceless. fateless. did he ever have a choice? was he always meant to be used and wielded? was he fated to be an instrument to an eternal group of masters, if not of immortal flesh, then of a rhyming mind? no. walton was dead. but avo remained. and now, he was a godclad. a godclad free to sustain himself on whatever diet of worship he so desired, and slake himself on whatever hunger that dared torment him. yes, the sangeist said. yes. that is your nature now. that way, and not some other way. avo kae asked, daunted by his long silence. she was trying to get him to notice something. resurrection - 98% reassembling heaven modifying [sangeist] thaumic output rating - sphere iii grafting heaven - 100% reviewed - mythology stable giving you a new name, avo said. giving us a new name. the sangeist listened, eagerly awaiting redesignation. heaven - [woundshaper] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 265 thaum/c ah. how fitting a thing it had to say, so leashed to his will. choice was a beautiful thing. choice was a sweet thing. and choice was going to see many, many of two particular syndicates be made offerings to avo. offerings to himself, now the only god he had left to worship. resurrection - 100% ontology reverted resurrection completed engaging thaumic cycler: 299 thaum/c ghosts: [242] loading phantasmics Chapter 7-9 Feed the Beast (II) chapter 7-9 feed the beast (ii) fucked, my kindred. deeply, thoroughly fucked. thats what we are. so, please, go outside. take a drag of that thaumaturgically cleansed air free of radiation from this morning''s customary exchange of nukes and praise the guilds that youre tumor free. taste that sweet addicting produce grown in voidfarms thanks to our helpless benefactors at voidwatch. jack yourself into the nether-sim for the next twelve hours on a drip feed of bliss, nova, and joy. and slide on off into the big nothing, knowing with sweet relief that nothing comes after. were fucked anyway; food for our betters. so kick back. stop caring. indulge yourselves. might as well anyway. we have no way of getting out of this. no real power. choose the needle. choose ignorance. choose nihilism and hedonism and all that other shit that makes the guilders squirm. choose to die good and vacant, consuming everything, providing nothing. if the guilders want to play gods, fine. but im done with this. were not alive now. not really. we exist. were just along for the ride. nothing is ours to choose. nothing is ours to keep. stay fateless. stay empty. stay yourselves, if just for a moment longer. jaus knows were bound to be forever-fuel for some half-strands soul soon enough. -calla marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 7-9 feed the beast (ii) you two alright back there? felt my blood knottin up inside me just now. kae? kae? the hells happened in there. ghosts scaffolded his perception with popping icons and data as the world booted into coherence. new sensations assailed him, the rush of his blood stronger and heavier than ever before, the reach of his domain allowing him to feel the flow running through the veins of those beyond him. and further. in his mind, the deepnav had them at eighty feet from ground level. the ghosts painted a cavernous portrait of the environment around them, the gutters stained with sewage and rust. they were a dot trailing amidst a jungle of urban decay, the bases of megablocks conjoined by shanties and shacks, with barrels and wrecks providing campfires for the fateless deemed too worthless for even the spine. yet, beyond the extension of his ghosts, through the cold plates of matter of the aero, he felt the flow of blood still. hundreds of lives lingering in drifting pockets, the ground around them greeting his mind in flashing patterns instead of visual shapes. how large the world has grown but the frame displeases. from my touch are these structures severed; the matter offered to the world in freedom and without offering to us. spurned are we, master. spurned and forgotten. her words caressed the flame inside him as he felt the countless lives he could claim. they clung to their shackles, their abandoned hovels like aratnids, cloistered together in pockets of hundreds up and wide around spheres of brightness. in the depths of the narrows and alleys, avo felt other presences as well. gangers, filling themselves with joy, unaware of the ghouls inching forth from the dark. heavyset nu-dogs released on the prowl, their blood tasting of the titanium of autocannons bound to gene-modded muscle, their pace a blur as they tore along walls in packs four, hunting for that something unknown. beside him, framed in the hourglass mesh of her pilot''s gimbal, draus was speaking to kae as the agnos was gesturing toward him. the latter was incensed, her voice half-awe, half-fear. the regular betrayed nothing. one a minute, her heart offered a single beat, sending hyper-oxygenated cells across her augmented architecture. a low hum of pleasure came from the woundshaper. the regular. the soldier. she pleases us. she above all others is the closest thing you have remaining to a fellow. more than those that share your make, she knows what it is like to kill. to like it. but to wield it all the same. she paused. a shame she was born a partling? partling? you know not this word? its construction is simple in conveyance: it implies a kindred born of the parted sexes. weak and feeble of body and mind, and sparse indeed in fertility. if not for their blessed lowlands, i would have seen those of the first draft replaced. avo grunted. a resurrected god was teaching him old slurs. what useful knowledge. turning his attention upon his companions, he frowned as they remained deep in conversation with each otherif it could be called that. kae stumbled, her thoughts and words both fractured, her speech guided more by her reaching heart than coherence of mind. draus, to her credit, was piecing what was being said together, but her confusion alerted avo to a more important fact. they cant hear you avo said his heaven of blood laughed. but of course. my shape does not reach into the tapestry beyond. how does one perceive the nonexistent? its answer came with a chorus of ghosts melding into the shape as avos auto-seance activated. a gate opened within the territory of his mind, and through a tunnel in cognitive reality, the edge of his thoughts flowed, its waters mingling with those of draus. so, draus began, thoughtstuff tinged more with bemusement than terror, kaes sayin you done fucked around and woke a dead scaarthian god back up. that true? a genuine spike of curiosity came from woundshaper. avo felt his blood bubble, its contemplation compelling him to react. she speaks? she hears? what unseen architecture allows for this? the murmurs of her thoughts i hear them as well. +recent development,+ avo replied. +probably from my diet of sangeists.+ draus didnt respond. the atmosphere of her mind, then, was blank. a thoughtless, halted void as she heard the woundshaper for the first time. thoughtlessness has devoured her. disappointing. during my reign, the feeble would open their veins in offering and the strong would bring me more matter to be molded. silence, to a god, is a cousin to blasphemy. this cannot be made to linger. kneel, huntress! supplicate, partling! though your ichor is of nobler mettle, it does not absolve avo clenched the woundshaper into silence, his patience with its pointless egotism expended in an instant. draus, for all her virtues, hid confusion poorly. between the regular and the ghoul, kaes eyes bounced like pinballs, her expression mouselike and timid. iuhdid did you h-hear it? the regulars frown grew as she tilted her head, sampling her brief encounter with a god from days ancient as if it was sour wine. the fuck is a partling. slur, avo explained, for non-scaarthians. draus frown deepened. shit. been called plenty of shit but aint never been slandered by no racist god before. her features softened as a sudden chuckle squeezed its way loose from her. nothin but firsts with you, huh, rotlick. good entertainment. hunters adrenaline will make good vicarities. the killing will make good snuffs. a thin smile widened across his face as he clicked his fangs. it was harder to do with his mask on. would have. yeah, draus said, grinning. the thrill he felt was a shared one, it seemed. would have. hey, thats the nature of the city, right? you come down to the gutters to shoot a snuff-flick, dont whine if you get snuffed in return. avo didnt want to hear them whine. he wanted to feel them die. a thought possessed him them. a sudden impulse. with a thought, he connected to their aeros locusthe old zephyrs locus needing a moment to respond to him. he had a galeslither functional as well. why was he still in here? what need had he of an aero when he was the wind itself? deactivating the inhibitors of his gimbal, the inertial clamps of the helix-shaped seat hissed as he stepped out, digging his clawed digits into the soft rubber to avoid toppling over. the interior of the aero was a cramped space, with splashes of external feeds lining the ceiling and the windows, and a single gleaming locus spinning overhead. with three steps between him, draus, kae, and an empty seat that was thankfully not occupied by green river, he shuffled sideways toward the rear doors as he sent a mental command to the locus. the door rasped and opened. the wind gushed in, taunting him with a biting chill. a-avo! kae cried. what are you doing? her heart was surging fast now. the beast screamed for him to turn around and tear into her. he refused. not because she was choiceless. not because she wouldnt taste good. just because she meant more than food to him in value. and where the beast was only a ghoul, avo had fully intended to see what it meant to be a god. to some, that meant feeding whatever vice they so yearned to slake. for him, he wanted to start with something simple. control. he wanted to learn anew where his boundaries lay. see what transgressions struck him as amusing, and what was too banal to hold his attention. not far from the agnos, draus was narrowing her eyes at avo. you wanna make this a race? no, avo said. ill win. galeslithers faster than an old aero. the regular chuckled. aint seen me drive proper yet. and last i checked i dont think you got the right heaven slotted into you. she was right about that. turning, he looked at her and shrugged. he could stand to gain from having a suicide implant of some kind. or maybe learn to pierce his brain with his claws. there werent many benefits to being a ghoul. being hard to kill but easy to hurt was more trouble than it was worth sometimes. a click sounded from under draus wrist. kae winced and squeezed her eyes shut, turning away in a rare instance of reactive intuition. you going to shoot? avo asked. that depends. you reckon you can ask me to do you the honors? you like shooting ghouls. shouldnt be hard. yeah, but ive met a new one. she brought her arm online and aimed. his phys-sim painted vectored warnings across his cog-feed. been a real pain in my ass. she paused. hope he gets it back together tonight. after gettin the killin out of his system. avo chuffed a laugh. out of my system. will only be temporary, draus. i cant his voice trailed off. he already had changed who he was. with his frame. with his heavensincluding the change that was about to happen now. with the destruction of one of his key memories. he was always, always changin something plunged through his shattering fangs. copper and tang filled his mouth as the pieces of his teeth speared into his flesh while his bones spread and lifted, the shattered parts of a lid lifting out in a blossom from the back of his skull. errors codes spiked through his vision as he tumbled, stumbling out into the embrace of nothingness, his fall cradled by air. the last sensation he felt before he receded into his soul was the wind screaming through the open tunnel made in his face, a pole of air whistling a shrill note that tickled his mangled flesh all the way down. initializing resurrection - 1% first death. then, to see if he could clad himself with some new wings. Chapter 7-10 Feed the Beast (III) chapter 7-10 feed the beast (iii) hes killing my soldiers. taking my heavens. hes hitting me in my home. why? why now? what do you have to gain, guildling? whats this play youre making, jhred? it cant be insanity. madness. i would understand you otherwise. the chaos, the compulsion its not you. ive seen behind your walls. seen how you order your outfit and have them dancing to your ever order. a little slave driver hiding from daddy; a real sloppy control freak. but maybe thats it. maybe youre that one flavor of broken that only comes from the tiers. a juv with too much of everything, and not enough sense to get your head straight. look at you. look at the state of your home. your soldiers. its pathetic. its fucking pathetic. im sorry. was i yelling? it comes over me somethings. its like a leak ah. right. im not actually talking to you yet. its just me. just me. heh. this fucking kids about to learn. yeah. we gotta teach him. hes gotta learn the way of things. and i think highflame might want that frame you took from them back. -mem-log of vincentine ripperjack javvers, head of the scalpers syndicate 7-10 feed the beast (iii) avo tumbled into the embrace of death with a newfound momentum, mem-data curving around his consciousness as he wasted no time, diving inward to access the root of his soul. sinking in, he cast a command and then parted, lingering for but a passing moment before remerging. an internal separation followed. he ejected his soul free of his woundshaper, clinging stands of blood reaching for his departing light as if a joyfiend groping for another. tired of me already are you, master? the woundshaper asked. can you fly? perhaps if fed the proper patterns and given means of propulsion so. not now. the old god was silent, sullen at the lack in its abilities. from its structure wafted a note of disdain, with the fullness of its ire cast at the galeslither. can the pony match my current might? my capabilities to build? no, master. you will see it is little more than a messenger. a rank courier amongst true divinity. what worth is it to merely serve as beast of burden. the woundshaper snorted. imagine yourself worshipped as a mule might. that makes you no god, but cattle. an ass with a memorable name. absurd. can imagine being made by humanity, avo said, too focused on his transition to argue with his heaven of blood. cant imagine having all that power and getting broken though. bad look. embarrassing. the woundshaper fused folded arms around itselfthe petulance behind its verbosity making it seem more childish than primordial. perhaps, that too was something human-influenced. the need for its ego to be sated, to be wanted at all times. you will see in time what i have to offer, it said. you will learn of the might we possess, and of the knowings i can share. the experience which you lack, i might yet bridge. avo speared the flames of his soul into the silent galeslither. the lightning-plated ribs of the horses expanded into an open rift, allowing him easy entry. clapsed by the heaven, he found himself in a place of calm while the walls around him rippled with discord, consumed by twisting winds. solidity was strangely missing here, with gusts and vortexes enwreathing his fire with a protective shell of stratocumulus veined with forking bolts of lightning. lashing needles of electricity injected themselves into him, prickling a dull sensation of static in his being, the feeling like he was neurally lacing with an exo-rig again. the sigils representing the domains appeared then, one in the shape of a nine-lined deltawith three stripes on each side of the triangleand the other in the curved shape of a cup with a spherical component crowning it. heaven grafted - [galeslither] domain: (air/space) thaumic requirements - 55 thaum/c how does it feel to be mantled to nothing, master? the woundshaper taunted more than it asked. speak and let your learnings be shared. let us both be joined by education so that we both might build on potential deficiencies in our structure. there was a lightness to his being, but an impossible strength as well. air, in reality, was chained by gravity, chained by molecules and mass. but the powers of a heaven were closer to active analogies from lore than distortions of science. feels like i can probably fly. such was his eventual response. resurrection - 95%...100% ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn engaged engaging thaumic cycler: 299 thaum/c ghosts: [242] loading phantasmics the time of his rebirth arrived mere moments after his fall. through a growing pellucidity, existence quivered as the fact of his death was unbirthed from history. yet, this time, he did not spawn back in, or within, his own body. instead, he rose into existence from the funnel of air left in the skull of his former corpse. crawling free from the mangled strings of gore that swayed with leaking trails spewing from his hollowed head, avo climbed onward, pulling himself free as if the air was a fabric he could tug on. his egress came paired with song. with a flex of effort, the air shrieked. thunder tumbled forth from around him as a chorus of neighs screamed out, the cry of the galeslither resounding in a binary of realities. his senses and form billowed wide like a rising torrent of wind, he rose high, the cocoon of his former corpse erupting as fluid sprayed and muscles tore. the sound of flesh coming apart rattled against his expanded being with satisfaction. it was like popping the lid on a soft drink, like folding the vertebrae of struggling prey. chunks of meat rained down just mere feet below, his descent to street level halted at the last moment by his manifestation. he knew not long it took him to fall from before, only that his return had been accelerated to the utmost. the fact he managed to emerge from a falling corpse instead of the air mopping at a splattered puddle was testament enough to his frames pace. his cog-feed came online to a spill of errors. he realized that he wasnt so much seeing the world around him as he was feeling. bound to the heart, three eldritch steeds stitched to a synchronous stride. he cast out his whisper to scout ahead and add a layer of sight to his already expansive awareness. a crackle of thoughtstuff leaked over into his mind. a session activated. +how are the wings?+ draus asked. turning his mind to his deepnav, he found her two hundred feet ahead. his hastened return saw her lead blunted but not undone entirely. that came with a single gallop of his winds. with but a single stretch, he zoomed, the galesilther braying plumes of cascading wind as he trailed behind draus rust-coated zephyr. +handles like a dream,+ he replied. rend capacity: 1% twisting against the laws of momentum, avo shifted movement vectors without the need for deceleration, his track formed from platonic lore of wind and air, lacking the limitations of actual physics. the drones were scanning for missiles. sudden attacks bearing mass and numbers. alone, he was little more than a distortion in the wind, and this deep in the warrens, his coming bore little notice when there was all of the dark to watch for. using his whisper as a guide, he slipped past the perimeter guard and found himself twice-incensed at the lack of specters. +necros aint doin their jobs,+ draus said. +might be because they think theyre having this party in their basement. that theyll be able to scramble reinforcements real easy-like here.+ hubris made victims of giants and cripples of gods. the scalpers stood neither, and evidently, the attack they experienced in the spine clearly didnt leave a deep enough mark. perhaps repetition was needed there. few things stressed the importance of learning than repeatedly dying. avo could attest to that. just a shame none of the scalpers could. arcing, he descended toward the bulbous dome of the theatre, a falling artillery shell of screaming wind. rend capacity: 13% his hell was filling gradually, but the pace was languorous compared to his woundshaper. and this is a fault of my making? slipping through cracked planes of painted glass, his whisper saw faces and figures disfigured upon the artistry, cracks petition the wholeness of their likeness. below, a truck-sized locus spun, its presence a gleam bright chasm splashed upon his cog-feed, with new specters filtering in each and every second. four square-shaped drones with articulations meant for engineering filtered through the room. the audience seating had unbolted by way of a fusion burner, the ground still ashen with soot and heat. their absence made space for the position of said locus, while supplemental machines spilled from its open-clawed base. three necros worked the room, their minds more uniquely warded than the others. beneath the stagepounded into a frozen tide of bent boards by an undetonated warhead still lodged through the woodtwenty drone-jocks lay slumbering. neural needles ran plugged to the base of their skulls while minor locus above each of their stations hummed, doing their utmost to keep each operator in sync with a dozen or so machines. jocking was more management than it was piloting. indeed, they represented the bulk of new vultuns martial forces these days, with enforcers a necessary reserve to hold territory, bioforms for another angle of attack, and then golems in place of now obsoleted coldtech vehicle platforms. --another ten-thousand casting in, one the necros said. she stood a bit taller than her two compatriots. gazing upon her legs, two very different implants greeted his mind. her left was a fifty-year-old sszwa grasshopper-2, designed for running. her right, meanwhile, was a dynamitea non-guild street-grafter special that mesh of heavily armored chitin implanted with eight thrusters usually found on micro-missiles. enforcers tended to like that leg. avo didnt. hed seen plenty of streams detailing what tended to happen to someones unaugmented pelvic region should the thrusters misfire at any point in the wrong direction. the other twoher juniors, he guessedstood next to her. one had a set of three extra arms rigged to their spine while the other seemed almost entirely clean of chrome beside the eyes. an eclectic bunch. good thing they were all worth the same to him dead. avo dove. the senior necro kept talking. a flash of curiosity possessed him as he tangled himself. in seconds, the weight of his presence shivered the room with swirling wind as he accelerated to his maximum velocity. what remained of him outside the dome of the roof plunged inward. metal warped and tore. glass shattered entirely. eyes turned and minds spiked with alarm as he fell. the senior necro noticed himher hand blurred, the motion by instinct as she drew a large pistol and fired. the slugs skidded for the merest instant against avos winds before he swallowed them, pulling them into the yondergales as well. and then, before anyone else could react, he enveloped the offending necro in his grasp, and coiled himself, through skin, pore, orifice, and bone. in a place between realities, the galesilther carried the voice of its master, its neighs thundering with savage delight. her veins burst. her skinenhanced with polysynthetic fibersshredded and tore. bones swiveled, drilling through calcium. and for a final flourish, avo released his grasp on the bottle and her bullets. a rip opened between the currents. he listened as the shells flicked through her parting jaw, made wider yet by a suddenly emerging bottle. screams flowed in from the outside, the other logisticians and necros breaking before the unfathomable horror of facing an immaterial threat. rend capacity: 21% thaumic cycler: 300 thaum/c siphoning ghosts [21] ghosts: [263] downloading phantasmic sequences downloaded phantasmics active - [thoughtwave disruptor]; [binarist] ignoring the new phantasmics he just reaped, he shoved his full destructiveness through the passage of currents. the corpse of the necro dematerialized as his steed emerged, coming apart as little more than mist and stray flecks of tissue. a typhoon in a bottle, the galeslither swirled into existence in a sudden cataclysm. latching onto those yet living, he urged his heaven to do a little prance along the room. bodies and machines were torn from the ground and pressed against the ceiling. he could feel their lungs straining as he sank his being down their throats. he found that he enjoyed the strain building within their chest as he forced screams back into the lungs from where they were pushed. the resulting pops greeted him as a chorus of applause, a fitting final play as past came unmade upon gales of destruction. he stroked the walls with new paint, though his new victims passed from rupturing organs before they dissolved into smears. he would have to find someone more durable to prolong his experimentation. just a pity so many scalpers had fusion burners. thaumic cycler: 322 thaum/c siphoning ghosts [35] ghosts: [298] a list of new phantasmics flashed through his cog-feed and vanished upon rejection. nothing new, and nothing he couldnt replicate. the grinding sound of the locus base twisted into folded petals of metal pulled him from one reverie to another. he noticed that the locus was still functional and that spectating specters were still coming through. a memory spiked through his mindthe unpleasant delight of having voyeuristic parasites suckle amusement by using him as a vessel. from such unpleasantness came inspiration, however, and a special concoction of cruelty was roused. rend capacity: 29% the winds lifted into stilling tides. the steeds faded. from behind a cloud of dust and falling debris, avo reformed himself into flesh to better gaze upon the dangling locus. he and draus had done much to harm the scalpers. to provoke them. so far, however, all that they have taken were replaceable. new golems could be smuggled, and new meat came cheap in this city. trust, however, was a thing less easy to reforge. and the lives of those in the tiers were infinitely more valued than the ones below. avo loaded secondhand death into his ghostjack as he approached the physical shell of the scalpers local lobby. how many did the necro say just arrived? ten thousand? he would take a peek, and then decide to wait a moment longer. or to sever whatever length of the snake had dared dangle down from the tree immediately. he had never nulled a few hundred thousand people at once before. he wondered if a few hundred shattering minds would feel any different to him than one. Chapter 7-11 Feed the Beast (IV) chapter 7-11 feed the beast (iv) +auspine? auspine? yeahyeah! im trying to get to her too, half-strand, calm the fuck down! what do you mean you think her ghost is missing? if she got nulled or snuffed, wed be getting alarm bells now. thoughtcasts calling for backup or something. but theres nothing on the drone perimeter, so doubt theyre in the shit. might be just bad n-lag send a knot down to patrol anyway. its probably nothing but wait, somethings wrong with the lobby. the traffics disappearing hells with it. im casting in. give me a secon [session lost]+ -intercepted thoughtcast of kendrin carlwin, scalper operational dispatch 7-11 feed the beast (iv) +avo! avo! what the hells are you doing?+ concomitant to his intrusion of the locus, a spike of alarm followed, the harshness of draus thoughts. her outrage was unexpected, but ultimately impotent on her end. +making new problems.+ he possessed both the ability to create and choice to inflict such a reprisal upon the spectators. mayhaps there was a bit of envy in her as well: she could but slaughter the symptoms in her time, butchering hunters and extracting survivors. her actions, though commendable by standards of virtue, meant little to stymie the cultural contagion of atrocity fueling these depths. the topsiders were drunk on entertainment. drunk on slaughter. drunk on death. she wasnt hitting the right people. she was hitting their parasitesthe syndicates easily replaceable material, profit-seeking fresh meat that desired, for once, to be the ones delivering abuse. across the session, he heard draus muttering curses under her breath. her frustration came mixed with a flustered tone repeating statements in the back of her mind. she was trying to put together something kae was asking. +avo, listen to me+ +opportunity, draus,+ avo said. delight bloomed from flower to garden within him as the act called to him. with his heavens, he now possessed the capacity to inflict mortal harm to all crucibles. how total could ones retribution be? +they watched us. slithered under my skin. enjoyed me killing. enjoyed me dying.+ he paused as a shadow of essus nagged. a pang of disappointment accompanied the reminder of the man. +they killed the boy. others. essus. he was weak. but survived. deserved better.+ avo paused. even departing from the being that he once was, some beliefs remained unshed. the father was easy to hurt. easy to prey upon. the same reality lingered on the boy as well. but they did all they could. they struggled. they almost survivedwouldve, if not for little vicious succumbing to spite, fulfilling her sadism. a new epiphany came ablaze within avo. the hunger he once felt for the father was a fading candle now. the beast noted him as a nu-tiger would a rodent: barely worth chewing. the father was only guilty of being a fool. +he earned better,+ avo finished. a beat came from the other side. a faint symmetry of understanding manifested in draus mind. +it aint about that. it aint about justified or not. i dont give a godsdamned shit about the voyeurs.+ she paused. +jaus knows i hoped for the tiers to burn more than once. but if you do this you attack the fated, were not gonna be playin with easy prey no more, sync? the guilds are gonna bring the hammer down on this sovereignty so hard that the syndicatesll get two choices. disappear; be disappeared. and then theyll start digging around for us.+ and she thought such a thing was going to dissuade him? avo hissed out a low laugh. +good. smash the board. ruin the game.+ +that what this is? tryin to throw off ninth column whoever the fuck else tuggin strings too?+ avo smiled. +easy opening. im going to leave a ghost. conflux ghost. have it bleed over into the root. more pressure on mirrorhead. more chaos to reinsert chambers and have him deliver false intelligence during infiltration. force mirrorhead to make bad choices.+ draus considered his thoughts as a dull, but undeniable thrill grew within her. the woundshaper chimed within him, its tone a melody of glee. she is of a want with us. she fights with paltry denial, but truth made nude, she wishes to see the fire spread, just as we. for what else can be worthy fruit to a lifetime of embattled labor in these ravaged narrows?+ a note of pure discomfort slid out from draus mind, sounding akin to a jagged blade catching along a chalk scabbard. his actions made her wary. they made her anxious. they made her excited. strange sounds came from a strange cocktail of emotions.+youre just gonna do this. dont matter what i say, does it?+ something that avo had only recently learned himself. he injected a new thought. he changed a binary function within the lobby. access for visitors went from restricted, to open. and in the passage of seconds, as a torrent of users made to travel down the pathways of corrupted memory, thousands shredded away into echoing screams of mental shrapnel, their vestiges slashing through the inside of the lobby like cascading bombs. before his eyes, a vast tear opened up as the crystalline facets of the spinning locus overheated and cracked, and beyond the gaze of natural eyes, he watched as mangled specters oozed through the wounds. from the ruinous chasm came a symphonysweet, sweet percussion with a choir of mind-breaking howls. again, music flowed through the theatre, strummed free from nulled ghosts that once cupped the minds of lecherous watchers. with the cage broken, an eruption of phantasmal errors plumed outward, engulfing the unseen sky above base reality, the seas of the local nether cast into tsunamis of turmoil. crackling gasps snapped in the back of his mind as draus words were choked down to packets, carried over only by the pseudo-quantum delivery functions of their shared session. +jaus. i see it see it from here.+ a faint warmth of pleasure passed through avo. would walton be offended of this feat of necrotheugic terrorism? would the low masters rejoice at the harm he inflicted on the topsiders? how absurd that the dreams of his owners could only come to fruition through his emancipation. perhaps, then, that was what the node had wanted. another deviation. this time, to see what their beloved ghoulling could inflict if finally unchained. the scalper fireteam was approaching, their signatures eighty feet away, just outside the walls. they didnt matter. they were just lambs charging a lion. fuel and little more for the burn within him. pulling his eyes away from the growing constellation of nulled ghosts, avo drew upon his heaven once more. with a stride, he peeled out of the material world, flesh turning to torrents of howling air. the winds he became twirled into small vortexes and fused into a triple-headed steed. upward, he smashed through the broken dome above, the force of his ascent lifting mangled remains and unbolted objects. his rise came dichotomous to the spewing cataclysm of thoughtstuff bleeding into the nether: twin omens that the fireteam should have heeded. below, he saw the scalpers take loose formations, unprepared for his falling. through his whisper, he saw their kit and angled his approach. all were enforcers. all came clad in battle-worn rigs. the true danger were the breachersof which there were twoand the fusion burners they had attached to their arms. of what little threat this group possessed, they held a majority stake. quelling his heaven momentarily, avo sailed back into his mortal form, calling upon the eldritch workings of his hell for the first time. with a thought, the winds around the scalpers beneath him twisted and blossomed into an inverted vortex. spreading in broken fractals given shape by torquing currents of air, the two breachers of the group were immediately rooted to place. submerged in a spatial stasis, they strained, voices barking expletives distorted by static. rend capacity: 28% the rend percentage dipped in avos cog-feed. to see it undone, the other scalpers would need to fire into the bubble to feed the hell the momentum it hungered for lest they leave the breachers in for a long stay. unfortunate that none of them knew how his hell worked. or would even survive long enough to find out. the fireteam was spread along the exterior of the theatres walls, in position to cut their way in by firing through the walls. behind them, the floor extended for sixty feet before it met the railing, and beyond that, a forty-foot drop to the deck below. reflexes surging, avo checked his deepnav for the other fireteams. they were spread out across the complex, too far to be of immediate assistance unless they just started blind firing in his direction using the thoughtstuff of their fellows as a mem-lock. good. that gave him opportunities to experiment. rendered languid by his accelerated senses, avo resheathed himself into the vessel of his wind-striding steed and crashed down upon the scalpers in a tide of force. the drone accompanying them was chained by ghost-link to one of their numbera necessity now that all the jocks were dead. it fired upon his last known position with twin barrels. a leak of knowledge flowed over from draus as she recognized the weapon platform: a hammerdog chainsaw, with hammerdog being an arms and armor subsidiary under highflame. this particular drone was a hundred and fifty years past obsolescence, but its twin twenty-five-millimeter autocannons fired all the same. tickling his aero-natural skin, avo tasted the rounds. hard slugs with explosive payloads. each shot would have made pulp of a ghoul. the winds around the drone opened. he tugged into the yondergales, its guns still firing, barrels a hot weight against his mind. with his whisper as an eyethe fin of a shark beneath waves of windavo diverted all ghosts to his ghostjack and wards. the scalpers didnt seem to have a combat necro, but incogs always put seem into doubt. a lash of traumas crackled forth through his whisper. the enforcer connected to the chainsaw cried out. their wards fractured. their ghost-link overloaded. the drone stopped firing, and tumbled away, resetting to auto. still, though, the scalpers mind had held. impressive. avo marked him for sequence review later, once he was dead. accessing the now vulnerable locus of the drone, avo cackled and the storm-wreathed faces of his steed spread into cruel rictuses. a new system booted in the back of his mind as mem-data flowed. without hesistation, he let open a passage to the youndergales again and shoved the drone out with a helping gust. this time, its guns were pointed the right way. Chapter 7-12 Feed the Beast (V) chapter 7-12 feed the beast (v) sir, sir! apologies for the interruption buttheres been a spike of nullings. origination: nu scarrowbur. nu scarrowbur? thatsuhthats scalper territory. in the warrens. stormtree problem. i told you this before, rook, we dont touch guild shit ive traced the source. its coming from the gutters. sir our monitors across emergency services are showing three-hundred thousand mind-deaths. at least. all casualties fated. from the tiers. sir, i think someone spiked a lobby. a-a crucibles lobby. thats uh, my theory. ...fuck. -trainee kare kitzuhada to paladin maru sandrupal 7-12 feed the beast (v) rend capacity: 32% the song of the autocannon played an alloy of notes: the snapping plink of an impact when the bullet kissed armor, the thunderous roar that followed right after, and a climax of flesh bursting within a titanium can. the drone, its size comparable to a small aerovec, was firing from within a current-sheared tear upon the fabric of space. overlayed across his right eye, avo watched as the chainsaw''s ammo vanished. 3405/9000 near six thousand rounds drained away in mere seconds. barrel integrity was lined orange in the drone''s structural condition window. worn, but usable, which was about as good as most things the syndicates had. at least the scalpers seemed to care for their kit.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. the enforcers, new and unblooded, remained a step behind, lacking sophisticated implants and stuttering in surprise at the change in their initiation ceremony. a deluge of wind and steel battered them. two of their group tumbled back, bumping into the same bubble as the breachers. the newcomers found their bodies halted as the inverted winds swirling about drank their momentum away, trapping them all the same. immediately, avo felt his rend drop. fused between a border of stasis, a rain of rounds shattered against their rigs, fragmenting shrapnel bursting from their bodies and feeding his hell further. rend capacity: 30% the carnage played on. the other six responded with collapse and indiscipline. one fired as the chainsaw clipped their shoulder. their aim jerked off trajectory with their finger still on the trigger. an accident followed, their gauss repeater surging as one of their comradesthe one avo struck with his secondhand fatality, still dazed from the mental assaultstumbled in front of the barrel. with armor thinner than the hardness of their wards, blood and bone flowed free, the shot birthing brain-gristle-encrusted flechettes through a rent in the enforcer''s faceplate. he was not the only casualty. by mass and firepower alone, the chainsaw struck joints, the impacts folding joints and limbs. armpits and necks burst open into spurts of hyper-oxygenated red. three more toppled, limbs twisted, screams loud. another of the scalpers fired back, more steel on the inside than his companions. he fired thrice, each ringing off the drone plating at an angle. avo rewarded him by unzipping spatial reality beneath his feet and sending him tumbling into the youndergales. the enforcer spun in this concentric plane of cyclonic catastrophe. their terror flowed raw even through their wards. for a frozen instant, they spiraled behind the drone, gun lost to their grasp as they groped blindly for a solid surface. a wish that came fulfilled. avo opened a new gulf in their path and released them. right back into the other scalpers at terminal velocity. rigs were more effective than typical subdermals at increasing one''s survivability. yet, the tyranny of the third law remained when untouched by the reality-bending fingers of thaumaturgy. near two tons of mass bore approximately twenty thousand newtons of force. such was what the phys-sim told avo. the clash of rig meeting rigs rang in a deafening sound as more fell. a blur of shadows and sparks painted a portrait of chaos, of defeat. the chains of courage broke in what few of them remained as they turned to run. avo grew tired of playing with his prey. opening gulfs between currents slithering into the cracks in the enforcers'' armors, he directed his drone''s firepower past the can and into the meat. the shudder a person makes when their body splatters inside their rig is a unique one. it''s a sudden, uneven jerk, with limbs flopping in opposite directions, with heads toppling because the neck that used to be there just wasn''t anymore. he released a command. the drone stopped firing. his celerostylus relaxed. time slid back into pace as bodies toppled before him, a series of thudding impacts. stepping through parting mists, avo manifested in his mortal shell to better behold the glories of his labor. the stench of exposed offal flowed free from jutting openingsorgans and bone revealed between strips of mangled metal. thaumic cycler: 330 thaum/c ghosts: [305] the dead lay as petals extended from a sphere of wind. bound still by a momentum-drinking prison, the breachers could not turn, could not see as he walked around them. moment by moment, he felt his rend diminish. where the hell of his woundshaper filled fast and emptied fast, the one bound to his galeslither balanced slower but had the advantage of being affixed. all it took to deploy this hell was a thought. a working. then, as it formed like a cancerous pocket, he could remain operational otherwise. while the burn on his nerves subsided, avo considered the two breachers a moment longer before plucking a gun from the ground--a large weapon left discarded by one among the dead. peeking a gaze upon the chainsaw''s status, he saw it was empty of bullets and battered by his winds. he released it from his control and found himself by the ringing thud that followed. his metamind''s in-built possessor phantasmic wasted no time in interlacing with his new gun''s micro-locus. vinhalyyr rhythm it settled in his hands a comfortable weight, feeling more as if a solid bar of metal than a loose assembly of fragile components that so many guns were these days. with a square-shaped barrel and a holo-reticle at the top, the weapon had a makeshift feeling to it. like it could be produced by the thousand for troops in need of constant firepower. he expanded its specs with a thought. vinhalyyr rhythm infantry-carry anti-rig multi-function assault rifle magazine capacity: 40 microrockets maximum rate of fire: 5 rockets/s rockets:10 cm 1 kg of explosive material domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 265 thaum/c around him, the spire that was once the sangeist embraced him, binding itself to the nucleus of his soul through veins of flowing crimson. twin sigils ignited in his awareness, markings more intricate and severe than those of his galeslither. he checked his resurrection. resurrection - 66% "slow," avo complained. "would not but such a matter upon you if you would have only used me in the first place." "couldn''t fly." "ah, but i can leap. i can achieve speeds beyond the feebleness of your steed. grow me further and the air will turn ablaze upon my skin. rebind me to better hubris and find me more stable hell, and i shall deliver upon our adversaries annihilation absolute." another moment passed. the weight of impatience was upon avo even without the touch of neurochemistry. resurrection - 90% "remember to fire your little organ when we emerge. it appears to accelerate your senses." "i know." "i am merely ensuring you recall best practices." "stop it." resurrection - 100% the light of existence approached. mem-data booted, filling avo''s mind. he paid them no heed. tearing back into the world with a snarl, the thing avo noticed was the diminishment in the number of scalpers. the tags of three other fireteams were already missing. draus was moving onto her fourth, firing across the way at the opposite arm of the mall. she was depriving him. starving him of deserved kills. "be it so deserved if she kills them first?" the woundshaper asked. "half-strand," avo cursed. he didn''t know if he was speaking to his heaven or draus. he frowned. he didn''t like it. he didn''t use to curse before. from on high, the low notes of descending engines thundered, the three spearships circling above as if unclear the situation. flexing his celerostylus as hard as he could, the pace of time found itself lingering just barely ahead of avo''s acceleration. a whip of blood tore out from his wrist and spread into threads. from the slain scalpers he siphoned what he could, and from the matter around him, he liquified even more. rend capacity: 39% avo''s eyes widened at the near-instant spike. it had been less than a second, and he had barely more than two tons wrapped around him. two tons for an immense amount of rend. working fast, he instilled the blood around him with a canon of linger, freezing it in place so that he might continue drawing from it. from all things solid, he siphoned more material mass and digested them into blood. the clock was ticking. draus was going to kill everything if he didn''t hurry. the beast inside him whimpered. the woundshaper spurred him on, calling for him to alchemize faster, that the surrounding aesthetics offended it. rend capacity: 98% vent now! vent now! not yet a second and eight tons. he would need to vent now, but after reaching ten tons, he would wait no longer. he calculated his route using his phys-sim. still six teams left. six teams and the ships. he could hit each and every one of the scalpers ahead of him. build up more blood, more speed. already, he had the foundations of a small tower about himself. reaching out, he felt its strength press back, with cords of vascular thickness augmenting the enhanced heaven of blood. the new strength imbued in its form felt as if a shaking base. emptying his entropy into the edge of the deck, he carved more than thirty feet of material out of existence to quell his rend. what remained was entirely occupied by his present size. a present size that was set to grow more as he added two more tons, eating away the outer walls of the theatre. tendrils drained physical structure into building veins of vascularity as he pumped newly alchemized mass into the broadening frame of his woundshaper. from a mere eight feet, avo felt himself rise another twelve as he reached ten tons. with each increment of mass, a new might filled his constructed limbs, the shell around him growing not only stronger but faster. where the world was as if moving through sludge before, now it seemed near frozen before his gaze. ten tons. ten times his natural strength. ten times his natural speed. paired with his celerostylus, a thought appealed to his ego: what need did he have to be the storm when he could just drag it in his wake? he spurred himself to a gallop, manifesting tentacles pounding down--and through--the ground beneath. surging, the space around him shattered in blasts of plascrete, while tides of detritus rose high, cleaved high as parting sprays by the sheer velocity left in his wake. the world blurred as he drove forward, his size a boulder crackling at the speed of a lashing whip. even with his reflexes tuned high, his velocity was evident. around the frame of his heaven, the winds bent, the ground split, and he fell upon his first victims, ignorant of his approach. he rode forth an unnoticed omen of oblivion, his pace beyond the perception granted by standard street-squire implants. from the structure of his heaven birthed bladed limbs and lashing tendrils. what walls stood in his way were but things to smash through or liquefy, matter but binary states for him to interchange. ahead, the remaining markers for each team called out to him like milestones, the melody of his rising rend screaming for his awareness. rend capacity: 89% what followed bore no semblance to battle. what battle was there to be had when a ten-ton god moving at six hundred and fifty miles per hour impacted a dozen bodies encased in meager shells of titanium? the same outcome could be observed when a swarm of insects fails to evade the path of an oncoming aero. if nothing else, their smears fed into his being all the same. thaumic cycler: 342 thaum/c ghosts: [317] at such slaughter, the beast chortled in delight, but within avo''s greater wholeness, the first hints of bitterness began to spread. Chapter 7-13 Proper Prey chapter 7-13 proper prey it it let us go. it just let us go. there was a moment ii thoughtoh, jaus, you should have heard his breath. there was nothing human there. nothing. heard that sound before i did! from duskraptors. looking for prey. proper prey. it was powerful. a god! we could feel it. feel the wind heeding its will. im from the gulclinesin its gorgesii the things it let us dothe slavers [sobbing, mixed with laughter] we felt their pain. he wanted us to feel their pain. it was glorious. it was glorious. there is a god worth praying to yet in this gogodsdamned city. -paladin interview of refugee req tnaqin after the laced crucible incident 7-13 proper prey avo killed. his soul brightened; expanded. the scalpers, new and feeble as they were, died by the dozen. but past the few twenty killings or so, while the beast shook with overwhelming delight, avo found himself strangely displeased. the struggles of the enforcers occupied only the borders of his focus, their forms too slow to react, too weak to survive and offer amusement. they died as he found himself lost in the labyrinth of his own mind, and its riddle was one of disappointment. by blood and rend he saw his foes unmade, sacking the temple of their bodies for blood before cleaving their withered husks with the backdraft of his gales. amidst the slaughter, perhaps only one managed to get a shot off. even then, they missed. the greater difficulty, he discovered, was traveling from one team to the next, keeping his rend in check, keeping a tally of the pleasure draus snatched from his grasp.here, in the end, he studied his last victim with growing frustration. the whimpering enforcer crawled away from him nude of rig and skin, her remaining muscles glistening, flesh flayed with savage efficiency. he had taken her legs as well. he couldnt remember when. by testament of will, augmentation, and adrenaline, she pawed forth, her voice a guttural mix of sobs and snarled curses, broken fingers digging into what scattered debris lay piled from the force-carved surface of the ground. a faint recollection greeted avo. his unnatural accelerationboosted further by each ton of swelling massproved more than the architecture could handle. at some point, the ruination he inflicted, the matter he drained away, grew beyond what the structure could support. n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. from there, the topmost deck collapsed, descending like in a tidal wave of plascrete and glass, an artificial landside. the new strength suffusing avos ontology made him feel a stone upon paper and glass. the devastation he left in his wake marked his movements like falling artillery rather than accelerated strides. moreover, where the threshold of his force felt insufficient, his command over alchemy proved absolute. matter was his plaything. matter was a feelinga mood. a binary choice for him twisted between blood and not, with patterns easily fed to the cage that burned upon the apex of his woundshaper. but a month ago, his present feat of power and harm inflicted on a near-hundred chromed bruisers would have left him drunk with awe. the horror he inflicted through the lobby? unfathomable. unthinkable. only a team of well-armed, well-supported, well-prepared street squires could have infiltrated such a place and subverted the locus as he did. and even then, the possibility of such a team cracking the wards was in question. yet, as he stared upon the last scalper, as he watched the spearships begin their turn, the weight of a malaise came over him. dissatisfaction. ah, his woundshaper said. familiar bitterness, long have you been apart from me. be not concerned. such is customary for your nature. the emptinesses. the desire to seek higher peaks. a louder thrill. it takes little for the chains of your biology to acclimate to your newfound elevation in this iron jungle. the dying enforcer called out for someone. a father perhaps. her words were cast out, howled over the crumpled railings of the first deck. a wide, pearlescent path lit with neon arrows running out into the looming bleakness of the gutters beyond. someone would hear her out there. but it wouldnt be the one she sought. a low snarl hissed free from between avos fangs. encased within the striding tower that was the woundshaper, the noise went unheard by the world, belonging to him and him alone. he checked his rend and made to finish this slaughter. rend capacity: 89% a hooking tendril dug into the hood of skin left jiggling upon her shoulders. the shrieks she made as he lifted her like a half-skinned rabbit from the ground made the ghosts swirling about his thoughtstuff quiver and his wards rattle. dangling from a hinge of sinew and meat, he found himself glaring down at the pitiful creature tortured empty of her humanity. and worst of all, she couldnt meet his eyes, for hers was rolling upward, ever upward. where she remained in vessel, she was long absent in mind. why? avo growled. though not built for speed, the five ships burned hot enough that touching them meant risking backlash. hence, he made to climb above them and lash at them from on high. clustered minds were aglow inside their shells, the signatures of the entertainment, refugees picked ripe for the slaughter. rend capacity: 6% blanketing their topsides with his presence, he dug his flowing limbs into cracks and between machinery, the steed lurching with strange shivers as if he was using the air itself to lockpick the ships. the pressurization of the cabins was like pawing against thickened pools of mud. another issue with air then: though he could pick people up, twist and rend them through counter-torquing currents, he had no capacity to grip or crush as he did with the woundshaper. his galeslither, unnatural though it made the winds, was wind at its root still. it was going to take more effort to pry his new toys open. or maybe just an alternative angle, given a little bit of finesse. they were beyond the epicenter of nether collapse below. the unseen ocean was calmer here by far, so close to the passage through layer one. his ghostjack manifested through the wind-wreathed skull of his centermost steed, giving it the visage of a unicorn bearing a ghost-fused horn. static built along the tip as he loosed his traumas in torrents of screaming ghosts. his immaterial lance stabbed out, an instrument he was beyond familiarity with. he cut. he struck. with each blow the reach of his ghosts licked pieces away from fraying wards, striking casually in the distance of visual range. from stripped sequences, he divined weakness. vulnerabilities and inadequacies in the spearships design. whoever shielded them had done an acceptable job. same warding pattern as that which protected the lobby. however, where that had a staggering mass of ghosts, the armored lining of the spearships was diminutive in comparison. so, he struck with repetition, jabbing with lucilles regret to locate the shifting damage before thrusting secondhand fatality into the cracks. it took the scantest of moments before he felt the defenses of each crumble, each collapse flashing a ripple of bursting thoughtstuff as all the phantasmics functioning within came spilling out, exposed to scrying eyes. from his whisper extended five links primed with the same commands: for the ramp doors to open; for the ships to halt in their climb. through newly made openings, he entered, rubbing his being across the writhing bodies of the survivors festooned in their rattling, ceiling-affixed enclosurescrucifix-shaped mechanisms that held them in place between teeth of spine-piercing needles. the interior of the ships ran a narrow passage toward the cockpit located just behind the speartip of the vessels design. each ship seemed to have two jocks operating there. he knew they were jocks from the general shapes of their gimbals, especially considering the needles running up into the base of their skulls. in the depths of their dive, confusion must have been the primary thing assailing their minds, seeing as how he was in command of their vehicles. with an effort comparable to taking a single step as a being of flesh, he rematerialized through a curtain of billowing smoke. resheathed into his natural vessel, his senses were immediately assailed by a cacophony of pitched wails. the passengers reeked of filth and dried blood while their minds tasted of animal terror. their bodies swaying like mangled fruits upon gnarled branches of chrome, skin raw, eyes hollow, the gauntness a sign of severe malnutrition. even the beasts enthusiasm at greeting them was quiet. little meat and mostly gristlehe could indulge in better dining by breaking into and eating the nu-birds in an aviary. a low mood of disdain leaked out from within. what appalling conditions. such filth befits neither servant nor slave. it is a sign of structure and instilled order to see sacrifice offered with proper ritual, for truly, what greater worship is there than culture? than tradition. if the woundshaper could spit, it would have. culture and tradition our adversaries seem hollow of. make fuel of these slaves and be onto your desires. i yearn to see you reach this burners way. i wish to see the pedestal you are to offer m please. the cry cut through the noise. the woundshaper fell silent. the wind whistled. again, the voice spoke. avo looked up. in rows of five were the survivors lined, and in the middle of the fifth was the one that spoke. a gleam remained within this ones eyes, a hardness possessed by the fabric of their thoughts. his skin was fair and his stature, though unimpressive by most standards, parted him from the other flats present by lingering muscular. with his scalp shorn down to the fuzz, the refugee looked more hardened prisoner than a sacrificial slave, the cheekbones thick and chin wedged. the kids, the survivors voice fell. they deserve more than this, if no one else. avo tilted his head and studied his supplicant further. from an inverted perspective, it was almost as if he was a god being offered prayers from a believer on high. ah. groveling. its an unbecoming sight. master, i suggest choice, avo said. what? for a passing beat, avo said nothing, studying the face of the survivor. the beast knew only hunger, so whispered savagery was all it offered. but there was more here. more. an experience. something that had been denied. didnt get to save the people on the barge, avo said, mostly to himself. the boy. master, surely you dont care dont, he admitted. but want to know know what? what its like, avo said, staring into the despairing eyes of those that hung above. the flavor of worship. he smiled. want to give him a choice. Chapter 8-1 The Shape of Worship chapter 8-1 the shape of worship the old cults had various terms to describe the process of oblation: the act of creating a heaven. it took eonsyears upon years, death upon death. sacrifices and feats fed over to the old gods by post-mortem messengers along an unending pipeline of death, and through these building blocks, the soul appears to have accumulated certain metaphysical scabbingontological scarstuff that can be used to grow the tissues of new subrealities. the symphonists of the seraphims referred to the act as hecatombing. much as highflame operates today with their transgressors, the forebears they usurped practiced a hyper-regimented form of brainwashing and mass sacrifice to fuel and shape their gods. often, these would result in backlashes. fallen heavens formed naturally during that past era due to contradictionsuh, inconsistencies between the functions of heavens in the lore, more likenot a hard thing to achieve considering the ignorance that pervaded society back then. thaumaturgy really doesnt need to obey science but without a thing to root itself too oh, sorry. rambling. anyway, i think that, if this plan is successful if we can implement the thaumic cycler into a geometry-variable demiplane of time, perhaps we can ease the creation of additional ontologics for further study -agnos kae kusande, project godshaper 8-1 the shape of worship it was uncanny how fast the winds of desire could shift, but strangeness was becoming all too common a companion for avo. with but a thought, the spearships heeded his commands to descend, and the cages of prisoners withdrew their paralyzing teeth from the flesh of aching backs. released, the five hundred survivors huddled close to the edges of the ships. most amongst them were pale in color and sheened with sweat, so weak in their constitution that a sprint might have seen them dead, let alone a run from hunters equipped with the firepower to thread clean wounds through steel. landing one after another in a line, the ships formed rows, two by two, with the last one inching beyond the premises. prisoners flocked out to stand before the cascade of ruins that once was the ultimart, not knowing this was to be the pen of their slaughter. like aimless cattle they strayed out from their slave ships, some openly weeping, overjoyed to be striding upon still land again, some drifting in a daze, mind decapitated from the flesh, meat shambling ahead of shattered minds. those incurred the lust of the beast the most. it hungered for them. desired to strip them of dignity and lather its meals with the spices of torment. the children and frail called to it first, then onto those possessed of more corpulence. the creatures wants were a matter of pain to it. nothing of taste or caloric need. avo scoffed. it was pitiful. he had guided the ships down in the form of the galeslither, the manifestation of his heaven spiking his guts with the thrill of their awe. they knew what he was by power. they were cowed by it; feared it; and from the passing of stray thoughtstuff drifting into his mind, were dependent upon it back when they lived in fallwalker enclaves. he heard it especially from those parted from the bulk of the refugees, those broken, yet still active. still making choices, choosing to pry at the choking brambles of fate with little force they could muster. the man that implored him on the ship stood one such deviant. he, and perhaps six others. from the exposed waters of his mind, avo sipped knowledge and knew him to be req tnaqin. former tribesman of the gulclines, its jagged gorges extending past sangshans ever-rising borders, just a few dozen miles outside the silken spiral, nest city and no-dragon trade hub. of a nomadic tradition born in the wake of the godsfall, he lived as his parents did, plying their trade as a weaveheadone with the mental fortitude to carry experimental bioforms in their skulls across the slavering eldritch teeth that gnawed beneath the soils of the border. he had twelve sisters, a time upon a time. thirteen aunts. five uncles. grandparents even. then, on one routine walk, a package inside his sisters head ruptured free, and the thing she was carrying emerged, understandably agitated. after that, it was just him, and home wasnt quite home anymore. req, along with all the others, was pain-shaped. they rang with a chill that blunted their thoughts, too hurt to fully feel, but unwilling to give in to the call of the void. they strayed from the rest of the refugees, accepting their situation, but not cowed by it. not as much they were cowed by him. as the scream of a passing aerovec sounded from the skies abovepresence alight with draus wards and kaes ruinationavo scooped each of the remaining scalper jocks out from their modules. lashing their minds into submission with his lesser traumas, he lay them across the sundered ground. right ahead of the row of open ramps, facing the buried main entrance to the ultimart, the syndicate technicians lay, twitching and mumbling before all the gathered survivors, pried away from their drones and their network. beneath a nether-scarred sky, in the festering gloom that sprawled leagues far, and leagues further unseen, the mob of refugees, desultory and destitute gathered. beside the ruins of a collapsed theater, their forms were blurred by the basking glow of custom-installed neon, motifs of skull and bone flashing across their periphery. it is not often a herd of lambs is offered the savage remains of a lion''s meal. avo wondered if they would finally feed. and should they, could lambs take on the traits of wolves? truth be told, his own desires confused him. surprised him. inured to butchering the weak, he chased the ships like a nu-dog, looking to catch its bumper, and ride it to discover some ineffable new experience. upon boarding, however, he found it. a cocktail simmered in the air. hate. fear. loathing. want. worry. hope. all of it smashing, blending, bleeding, billowing with the wind. gently, avo sank a phantasmal talon into reqs mind, binding himself as a passenger to the flats mind as he felt the mans mixtureof emotions filter over. unbecoming as voyeurism was, it added a flair to what avo desired. a flavoring. stitching flows of wind into matter and sinew, he manifested again beside req and the other few standing. they stumbled, a clash of curses and exclamations greeting him. a few backed away. req stood, ignorant to the wants of his fellows, or the subtle subversive weight on his mind. req stayed and stared, his face a mask of wonder and uncertainty. ii. owe you my thanks. avo said nothing. within him, the woundshaper rumbled. thanks? he owes rightful blood and an eternal tithe of sacrifices from his bloodline. the god scoffed. look upon these serfs and see their missing decorum. the simpleton thanks us! thanks! where is the offering? the oath? all manners lost. avo took a step closer to the man. a few others shuffled. one tripped upon a severed arm, the limb rolling out from under their leg. the pop of an ankle could be heard. a cry followed by moaning and pain. oh, joyous day: that ones leg is broken. i believe this leaves us no choice but to put her down. the woundshapers words went ignored. for an uncomfortable few beats after, avo just stared, listening to the survivors. for long he expected at least one of them to make a move on the scalpers. to take revenge. or maybe even flee into the darkness of the warrens. reqs family was dead. releasing the shiv as if it was poison, req stumbled back and the scaarthian pushed him aside, muttering a slurred demur at his slowness. this is how you fuckin kill a half-strand, the scaarthian wrapped his cudgel-thick fingers around the throat of one of the scalpers. the girl choked. he brought the severed limb down. gore speckled free, and with its rise, more cries came loose from the refugees turned mob. avo gasped. the eruption of their bloodlust was divine. he turned and witnessed as they moved forward, as he finally discovered what his instincts were pulling him toward. catharsis. the feeling of consequential brutality. the beauty of symmetrical violence. men, women, children. humans of all clades and makes, flat and not. they descended on the scalpers with reckless abandon, snarled curses and shouts of rage shuddering free from steaming breaths. apart from them, a single note of crushing sadness poured down the link. it was nectar. it was sublime. it was all avo was missing when the node took his choice away. he walked over to req, enjoying the ambiance of the mob slaughtering and mutilating the scalpers. thaumic cycler: 432 thaum/c ghosts: [407] sobbing, images ran through the refugees mind as he looked at the blood in his hands. hands that soon became enshadowed by avos encroach. a cold nail of pure dread bit deep into his guts. he looked up slowly, eyes wide, tears trailing. iim sorry. the beast licked its fangs. the woundshaper scoffed. kill him. no, avo said, replying to all three. the city was filled with easy prey. his soul would be made ever greater by the lives of these survivors, but would that be his decision? would that make him more aligned with the beast? or a living echo of the woundshaper? no. req chose. chose though it hurt him. chose to satisfy another, absurd as it was. avo understood req. and never wanted to be him again. he had more choices than he thought, but his path was shaped, and so was avos. he needed to do what was different. to shape himself with broader worship. the refugee blinked. the beast whined. the woundshaper fell silent. avo alone spoke the next words. he shaped reqs future. he gave choice. that was wonderful. req blinked confused. you you liked that? liked avo said the word as if he was sampling its taste. no. but i learned from it. new. new? the sound of incoming engines sang from above. avo looked up. massive shrouds of flowing phantasmal armor approached, their potence so heavy he could feel the weight from here. exorcists. paladins as well, perhaps. guilders to follow after most assuredly. his tasting was at an end. he needed to depart. disappearing. gathering the winds around him, he moved to manifest the galeslither. wait! avo paused. he shot a look at the man, on his feet. i the refugee swallowed. thank you? avo grunted. thank me by making more choices. kill again. kill more. want to know those tastes as well. he stepped through the currents and rose. and dream more of your family. he left the refugees there, some slaughtering, one shivering in body and mind. reaching his billowing limbs across the gutters, he drifted toward the familiarity of draus accretion, a new momentum building inside him. flavor. the city was full of flavors he hadnt tasted. in more ways than one. and with the winds, he was unfettered. he wanted more. and so he was going to take more. faintly, he felt a budding weight build, budding in the heart of his flames. Chapter 8-2 Heat chapter 8-2 heat +attention all subjects, stay indoors; vacate the streets. this is a category-one warning. all subjects who fail to comply will be marked and scheduled for a detailed scan at later date. repeat: please return indoors and vacate the streets.+ -exorcist public thoughtcast, yuulden-yang sovereignty 8-2 heat +jaus. what in the rash-spreading fuck did i let you do?+ draus mind was boiling. she was mad at him. furious. but the cleaving wounds she beheld of the spectators lingered, dancing shadows in her mind. torn by his recklessness and stunned by the blow he struck, two pressures worked within her, one of survival, desiring to flee, the other more a flicker, its heat a dormant want rekindled. as i said, the woundshaper hummed, this one is of a like. in the moments it took him to shroud the aerovec containing his companions, the exorcists arrived. their coming blotted what little light trickled down from the hexagonal maws leading out of the gutters, through the threshold of layer one. the glint of the first drone fell, a silver teardrop with wisps of hair trailing in its wake. avo knew the design of tadpole drones well, both in chassis and locus. they possessed nothing in the way of ranged capabilities, but that had never been the purpose of their design; lethality stood counter to the paladin ethos, their oaths to protect above all else. the three whip-thin tendrils of a tadpole were charged with a bio-tuned electro-synaptic currentits design a gift from voidwatch after a particular brutal riot some two centuries prior. capable of extending for a full mile each, each tadpole was capable of breaking riots, while the metafluidic cell that comprised the underside of the drones mercury-coated shell could hold more than a dozen temporary prisoners.??vl-b!n. they came, drones numbering in the thousands, as a sudden torrent after the first. the flood of their shapes darted out, undulating as they curved along the undersize of layer one, slithering into the glitching error codes that should have manifested the face of a false sky. as if stormclouds, they expanded, their flashing eyes peering across the entirety of the sovereignty. fast as their response time was, this was but the first step. the drones were to secure the premises of the crucibleand beyond. and so they went, digging through the bloodsoaked plasticrete of the ultimart avo left in his wake, ignorant to the unnatural gusts of rising wind brushing past their quarantine, whistling its way toward the chasm which parted mazzos junction from burners way. mere minutes into channeling the canons of his galeslither, avo knew it would be torture should he ever lose this heaven. never in his life had traversal been so convenient, transportation so easy. circling within his galeslither, the zephyr-make aerovehicle spun and tumbled, shaking from the turbulence. avo kept his winds as calm as he could, but the nature of his being was a thing of coiling storms, ever twisting in torque and motion. checking his deepnav, he saw a line of errors twisted across traffic. the lanes and arteries were bending. some pathways even seemed to curve and crumple as if they were lines on a paper, folding toward one another. over from draus mind, he heard kae mutter a question, the tang of her worry flowing through. +paladins,+ draus said. the tension inside her grew thicker. +godsdamned rotlick drew out the paladins.+ rising past the gulf of layer one, the spine they beheld was not the same one they descended. the totality of local space seemed to have fissured, for one, cracked down the middle with a fractal of mem-code errors, his feed unable to stitch the spatial wound into something his mind could conceptualize. geometry twisted at the four corners, folding traffic lanes and structures once vectored to each other horizontally to vertically. the breakage seemed to flow unnaturally, spreading down in a crawl, anchored on the reaching limbs of its further crevasses, a metaphorical spider near-half the size of a megablock. it wasnt until the fissures began to inch down the skin of existence that avo understood what he was looking at. +planescrawler,+ avo thought. across the session, draus mind chimed with familiarity. she knew this titan-class golem. knew it well. but that was as far as her mind went. she refused to think of it anymore, of the war and regrets left unwatered in her past. a planescrawler wasnt a rare sight in the upper tiers, but in the warrens, the appearance of a guild-pattern mobile-spatial platform echoed the markings of the fourth guild war, of the low masters uprising. those present didnt even need to listen to the thoughtcast to know what was being requested; it didnt take much to convince their departure from the streets and skies. running half as long as a megablock and only a tenth as thick, the crack moved as if the fractured lines of a broken mirror instilled with the essence of a serpent. uncountable ghosts bled from the clefts of the planescrawler like gout, their signatures bound to varying loci on the other side. avo remembered doing dives on such a platform with walton once. a month-long job, the success of which still dwarfed his comprehension to the present. without his father, he would have surely been lost within the district-sized labyrinths which comprised each of the crawlers gargantuan loci. an ill thought arose. his father. his father, who still had surviving alternatesparted reflections of his person, if the node could be trusted. as it stood, each of them was still operating in the city, every one avos better in his chosen craft. the presence of the planescrawler loomed like a giant about to tread on an anthill. it wasnt what made avo wary. that was the problem with having such a mass of ghosts: they shone like a miniature sun in the nether, making stealth an impossibility. no. it was the other waltons that avo thought of as he peered into the spatial fissures. he didnt see them coming. and they certainly had the skill to strip him of choice again. he blinked. spoke to all of them. linked with one. the regulars expression darkened. she lowered her head. you keep your mask on? he grunted. holocoat. shifted into the galeslither fuck, draus growled, her voice sounding a toneless snarl. she took a step forward. reflexively, kae took a step back, blanching. avo held still, unfearing the approach of the regular. he smiled instead, fangs wide as he found himself bemused by their inverted position: the regular was attacking while the ghoul held firm. what, she said, coming to a stop right below his jaw, the fuck kind of frame job has you revealin that youre a godclad? was she trying to shame him? he felt no shame. felt only satisfaction from new flavors discovered. dont know its me. didnt show them my nature. hid my work well on the locus as well. draus nodded. it took avo a moment to realize the action was sarcastic. well, hells. how bout it, kae? he hid it well. she spat. there arent that many fallwalkers playin in the warrens and gutters? you wanna know why, avo? compact, avo said. new vultun compact. terms of individual sovereignty rights. nevermind that legal shit. im talkin actual details. you wanna know why? he shrugged. tell me. you. are. takin. lives. from. the. guilds. she glared. lets put aside how you mightve fucked both me and kae first. your little flipping the board mightve flipped us under it. mirrorheads gonna be lookin out now. squirrly half-strands probably thinkin fallwalkers out gunning for his frame. might just cut and run if were not lucky. so, well be dealin with that real soon. she continued. the scalpersll definitely know somethins up. if they assume, probablyll think its mirrorhead himself. but the gutter war is on, however that goes. they already got hit twice, and hit hard. theyre bleedin into the water, and if they dont hit conflux back some gangers or rivals might just decide nows the time to make a run at them. the column... she paused breathing in through her nose as she slouched, deep in thought. fuck knows what the columns gonna do. rivers probably gonna pop a vessel. that was the wrong thing for draus to say if she wanted to dissuade him. if green river was going to be inconvenienced by such attention, avo was of a mind to do an unmasked interview on new vultun sunrise. can turn chaos to our advantage. use chambers to feed false information to mirrorhead. tell him that im its not about the plannin anymore, draus said, interrupting him. its about trust. workin together. bein able to execute a plan and see things done he leaned down, cutting her off as well. happy. she paused, frowning. he continued. you were happy watching those nullings. three-hundred-thousand. four by the end. could be. but you liked it. me. hurting the watchers. gutting a syndicate the way you never can. he turned his head and looked down at her. envy? just jealous that im doing more damage. winning the war where you could only do battle? draus scoffed. we aint winnin shit. were down here in the bowels beneath the actual city tryin come up with a plan to snuff some exiled chivalric guilder-boy to fulfill our vendetta. she eyed him. or at least that was why were here. was. you still want to kill him. but it aint hate you have for him. nah. thats hunger. and it aint just the beast. you just want his parts. his burn. yes, avo said, inching closer to draus. power is choice. power is to understand. feel. everything else chosen. slave. ninth column. guilds. syndicate. waltthe low masters. all give shackles. wont wear them. not again. my path now. mine! part of him wanted her to strike him. something that would give him a good and flavorful reason to kill her. the rest wanted her with him still. a want crept up inside him, the woundshaper giving it a voice. we will not find her like amongst the detritus of this city again. should you strip her of life, know that the fuel she offers is the same as that of the basest slave. she offers more than mere amusement, master. understanding. she understands. rare, such a thing is. he blinked. mercy? draus frowned. you talkin to that thing inside you? thing? part with my previous words: kill her. this partling knows nothing of respect. its talking to me, avo said. gives advice. shares memories. knowledge. the regular sighed. she shut her eyes. shit. i should''ve never let you do this the beast roared inside avo at her words. he hissed, involuntarily. you dont let me do anything. i choose. i decided. i am godclad. her expression remained unchanged. you dont look like youre choosing much of anythin to me, consang. she tilted her past him. he followed her eyes. she was looking at a needle: the pointed end of a joy elixir. a building heat swirled inside his guts. he flexed and unflexed his claws. she was calling him a slave to his nature, saying that he was an addict. wrong. you dont understand. dont see. i see plenty then why are you alive? avo asked. can kill you. kill almost anyone here. nothing. not a hint of fear from her. regulars were no strangers to death, but something in avo wondered if she was even more unshakable than the others of her kind. kaes voice cut into their conversation. its call-called the false apotheosis. avo turned to her. i-i think thats whats affecting affecting you right now. Chapter 8-3 Venting (I) chapter 8-3 venting (i) a rendsink is not some kind of battery. you will not touch the rendsink when you vent into it. you will not touch the rendsink when it is filling. you will not touch the rendsink unless you are certain it has been safely secured beforehand. it is entropy. it is unstable. it is literal error code ejected from the subrealities of your liminal frames. you let it leak and it will unmake you if your hell doesnt have any domain-symmetry. you might be able to use it to stabilize a backlashing heaven in a pinch but thats an operation better left for the glasseyes if it breaches, death might be the least of your concerns." -santanado starsinger mondelles, combat instructor to axtraxis academy of highflame 8-3 venting (i) the agnos interjection plucked the strings of tension away from draus. mind swirling with drifting thoughts and stalking anger, avo found his focus swaying over to kae like a pendulum. she swallowed but kept speaking. your mind its overstimulated, avo. the s-sensations, especially with a-an awakened god insideoh jaus; g-god. reassembled god. she blinked. her focus returned. youre not operating at baseline. too uh too many options. sensations mind is clear, avo said, fighting the urge to tear into her. the beast was swimming up the vessels in his brain. it wanted to hurt. it wanted to kill. the heaven within was a mantle of destruction capable of feeding its wildest desires. it tugged at avo, snarling, hissing, pleading. he ignored it. my mind is clear. in control. see what was missing. dont want to just hurt. understand? seen new he took a moment to breathe. new colors. just wanted to see more. you couldve fuckin done that sight-seein shit some other time, draus hissed. the pendulum swung back to draus. avo pulled his helmet off and clicked his fangs together. i chose to do it then. she flexed her wrist. faintly, avo heard a series of crackles rattling from her joints. well im gettin real close to chosin something of my own. w-wait, kae said, trying to get in a word. rend capacity: 3% for a moment, the regular and ghoul were lost in the past. this was their element. he was close enough to tear, to bite into her, to shred the fabric of her mind; she was close enough to grapple, to break, his death but the alignment of her palm and his skull. a cackle of laughter sounded from above as mockeries took flight through the alleyway, their wings beating loud. be wary, master, the woundshaper said, its words heavy with unspoken intent. break her and she shall mend upon the falling of the nightly rains. slay her and there will be no return. i jest no longer: should she feed your flame, the act cannot be undone. death holds no sway upon things such as we, but she is ephemeral. ever kill a ghoul with your hands? avo growled. draus shrugged, the moment so slight he barely noticed. plenty. feelin nostalgic? not the word i would use. but i could get a new experience out of this. gettin hurt? hurting a reg. she ran her front teeth along her lips. a growing focus built behind her eyes. part of her truly was mad. mad that he hadnt done exactly what she thought they agreed on. mad that her little operation was ruined because he found a greater purpose. more, however, was the fact she wanted this fight. the idea of getting bloody with him was a thrill. and past the snarling rage of his beast and the caution of his woundshaper, avo wasnt so against the idea of indulging in a little bout of fist on claw. to the blood? avo offered. she sneered. the hells with that shit. were squared up; we go bloody proper. till shit breaks. till one of us cant. that sounded most delightful a glint of chrome bobbed into sight. kaes exocortex. the agnos was reaching between them, trying to create more space by prying them apart. c-consaangs uh kae grunted. he blinked. draus tilted her head. where building bloodlust filled the air between them, draus and avo felt a new emotion enter the equation and its name was awkwardness. kae, draus said, eyes still locked on avo. she was trying to keep hold of the feeling. get outta the way. no, kae said. b-both of you are a-acting like f-fucking children. that made the regular do a double take. im the one actin like a child? really? was i the one that went pissin off to play with some refugees in the middle of a snuff-job? was i? kaes hand slid off avos chest as she announced her retreat with a ragged sigh. shielded by the body of the agnos, avo seized the moment to indulge in some mockery. he grinned at draus, fangs bared and all. child. draus face broke into a scoffthe rasp trailing low with a hint of building violence. he leaned forward, welcoming what was to come, already anticipating the first hit. then, something did hit him. just not draus. like a soft raindrop, he felt a small palm clap against his neck. below, he heard kae grunt with effort, bouncing on her toes. i was t-trying to to hit your she trailed off, staring at her hand, unable to remember why she just hit him. i was trying to s-slap your face. too short, avo grunted. draus chuckled. and then, she blinked. her face collapsed into a frown. she turned her eyes to avo, expression near apologetic as she shook her head. a breath puffed from her lungs. the mood was ruined. moment of bloodlust passed, both regular and ghoul were unsated. godsdammit, kae. the agnos blinked in confusion. avo understood. can still fight, he said, trying to keep the hope out of his voice. have more insults. not you master. we are not in competition, how could we? i am merely being honest: i exist your most useful heaven. theres a lot lot happening to you we dont know. kae shuffled up to him. frankly, i r-recommend that that we wait before-before we try to stabilize this fallen heaven. wewe dont know the effects no, avo said. but no. need better hell. youre actin like a child, draus, the regular simpered, mimicking kae as poorly as she could. avo glared. i tell you both what i think. i think my rend is empty. i think im going to get the rendsinks and fix my heaven. after after were pullin out of the second fortune, draus finished. aint no way rivers gonna let us stay after we bring this kind of heat. ill check with my contact. pick up that command-aero. she flicked her eyes over to him again. maybe well have our talk then, you and i. he clicked his fangs together. say when. going to pick up rendsinks. kae. will need your help plugging the rupture. stay with draus. will speak to you through her later. tired of talking. want to grow instead. wait, kae cried, we still need to talk about and avo was wind, soaring up through the crevices of air into skies unladen. using his whisper as a periscope, he dove toward the docks in xin yunsha, the rendsinks marked on his deepnav. the trip usually would have taken hours, impediments of distance and traffic. as wind, and with the lanes purged by the passing presence of the paladins, avo collected his necessary instruments in a fourth of the time. *** shuttling the rendsinks from their storage in the docks was the easy part. carrying the rendsinks along in his yondergale, he kept them drifting slow and far apart to avoid any collisions. alone, each sink shouldnt possess the capability of matching the output of rend overflowing from the fallen heaven, but together, along with his hell to adjust, his odds of stabilizing this rupture stood somewhere north of likely. kae guided him with a mixture of reluctance and burgeoning anticipation. for all her fears regarding the state of his mind and the nature of the woundshaper, she wanted to be a part of this, to operate beyond her damage as an agnos once more. connecting them as intermediary, draus session buzzed in the back of his mind as he drifted inward toward the building where he last faced the scalpers. the dish at its top was half-collapsed now, and the damage he inflicted with his entropic shroud lined the exterior of the structure with open rents. entering was a thing of ease. it was staying unaffected by the anomalous pulses given off from the thaumic reactor that worried avo. +alright, hang on there,+ a tinge of animosity still lingered in draus mind. she kept a good leash on it, but it existed all the same. strangely, it was a bifurcating thing, mostly directed at him, but also pointed inward, at herself. +kae wants you to look around for a moment. you said this place + an unseen pulse washed past him, bathing the world around him with the flash of a peculiar pulse. unpursued by the scalpers, avo found that the broken soul powering this former block had a signature. a specific luminosity. it tugged at his awareness in one manner ineffable, and another, thaumaturgic. warning: rend capacity spiking rend capacity: 66% external resonance bleeding over domains detected - [matter] - [space] - [biology] - [luminosity] as the information flowed through his metamind, a lightness built in his stomach. with so many domains +kaes sayin you shouldnt get excited,+ draus interrupted. across the way, avo watched as the agnos studied holograms formed by projected phantoms. she was digging through his mem-data with a look of enraptured curiosity. +fallen heavens dont give working domains. canons are cracked one way or another. if it had a cycler, thats probably bricked too.+ kae said something then. correcting draus. it was hard to hear her through draus mind. maybe he could build more externality functions into her auto-seance in the future. if she ever trusted enough to look into her mind, that was. +shes sayin that its probably fine. it spiked your hell because you got a shared domain. says you should hurry before the next major flare-up because if it backlashes you again+ avo redoubled his speed, gliding down through the hydroponic gardenentirely regrown in the time he had been gone and reinfested with a forest of eight-headed hydrapedes latching to each other in chains and rings from branches. the patchwork of scars and grooves he carved into the room during his battle against the scalpers remained. he brushed his mind over the shape of the chamber and reminisced. far had he come. far from prior weakness and limitation. to think of how vulnerable he was back then laced his mind with bitterness. snapping back to focus, he lurched at an angle, diving down through an open gulf that spread wide from the corner. in the corner, away from the staggering trees grown atop pedestals in ten feet increments, a vast gorge of inwardly rent metal ran some thirty feet wide, exposing the guts of the structure. an eldritch brightness licked past the lip of the wound. the signature of the fallen heaven was growing stronger. heavier. avo approached. this was where the spearships punched through; this was where the galeslither vacuumed him up; this was where the turbine that was the fallen heaven spun. with rendsinks in grasp, he descended and made to forge for himself a new hell. Chapter 8-4 Venting (II) chapter 8-4 venting (ii) +you know why im calling. you know why. got something that can work out for both of us, and you got a debt to even up. yeah. a debt. we both know you wouldnve been selected by the longeyes. they wouldve chosen me. instead, i gave you that spot. and the frame that came with it. i made you as much as they did. i did. so i need you to come down now. no need for me to say why. you know. you already know whos bleeding me. thatthat highflame fuck. that greatling shit. hes torching our home. rusting up our trade. yeah. yeah, your moms fine. think her minds clearing more these days. talk to her yourself if you dont believe me.think she said your name a couple of days back. heh. well you dont believe, come down and see. yeah. yeah, i am using her to pull you down. piece of shit? [chuckling] reva, im your uncle. you should know this already. it runs in the family. -thoughtcast between vincintine ripperjack javvers and reva javvers, bloodthane of stormtree 8-4 venting (ii) in front of avo, the turbine spun like an old egg-beater, coiling the yolk of existence. past scattered licks of shrapnel damage and the crumpled wrecks leftover from crashed spearships, the bodies of those slain here remained. there was an impossible freshness to their corpses despite the passage of a month. no one had come to claim them. here, they lay, a garden beneath a garden, bodies piled in a wide and empty room, unrotting flesh squirming with knots of writhing insects. ethereal flames spilled forth from the cracks in the turbine, defiling the fabric of reality, more like luminescent arteries than dancing hues of blistering heat. the design of the thaumic reactor was hard to conceptualize. to call it a mere turbine neglected to mention how it sang. the polarized tiles once plating its cracked exterior, curved in a sprawl of square cells up all along the ceiling and then floor. a mirage speckled the air around the miracle machine, a shimmer to a place unseena reality as near as it was distant, falsehood made true. cog-cap: 13% the ghosts within his metamind wailed. but avo did not look away. stepping out from the parting mists of his galeslither, he directed counter-gusts of wind to balance his rendsinks as they emerged from the yondergales. he placed them on vortex-pedestals and puppeted them along like luggage on strings of air. almost immediately, a spike of pressure greeted his flesh. he felt something wriggling as if the fabric of space itself was trying to stitch itself under his skin. where there was biomass, there was the presence, the discomfort. but as a glinting segment of chitin squeezed free from the exposedstill somehow bleedingwounds of the enforcers, avo noticed a build up of rent climbing in his hell as the sensation collapsed, breaking upon the bulwark of his frame.n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. rend capacity: 68% +intersecting domain,+ draus said, conferring kaes words. +what happens if i didnt have a hell? one with a similar enough domain?+ draus laughed. +well, i guess you should look down then, consang. them scalpers are puttin on a show.+ synchronized to her words, a chain of twitching hydrapedes spurted out from the oozing wounds of a bifurcated scalper. avo frowned. the pool of blood seemed to be frozen in time, the flow continuous, but never growing beyond a certain threshold. +kae says best to assume that the blood aint there. and dont touch the bodies. might be part of the mirage. who knows with these hydrapedes, heaven-touched as they are.+ he heeded her advice. the rupture might not be able to grow insects under his skin as it so desired, but they might still be able to take a more direct path. no sense in risking it. looking up, the turbine spun and revealed the long gash running down its middle. he watched it turn as he came to a halt, each rotation churning reality and inspiring dizziness. inside, avo caught a flash of the damagea cracked soul leaking ripples of thaumic essence into the world like metaphysical solar flares. cog-cap: 34% a pitched scream rose amongst his ghosts. several overloaded from trauma and fell into a dormant state. automatically, his metamind shuffled sequences to maintain his phantasmal architecture. spots formed behind his eyes as his cog-feed flared with errors, a kaleidoscope of secondhand memories playing in tandem. he wanted to look away. but he hesitated. he felt something there, meeting him eye to eye, another awareness, suffering in silence. the dismembered light of the turbine-clasped soul rippled, the colors of its wavelength ineffable, beyond the means of words to describe. but it was beautiful. and he hungered to drink in its mutilated brightness. from the depths of his blood, another cry of pain joined his ghosts. his own heaven was rattling. the woundshaper shaking, its being infused with raw dread unbefitting a god. no no this master, please please look away. i beg you! i beg you! i can bear the sight no longer! it cannot be! wewe are gods. we are the divine. how a mournful note played now. a whine that sounded more befitting a dog. we gave you the world. why did you do this to us? we did not deserve this! enough!avo couldnt help but give a chuckle. how did an immortal being fare when faced with the irrefutable proof of its own fragility, that it, like a cheap plate, could be broken once and again? they fared as humans did. like mortalsfor in that moment, it too bore witness to the truth of new vultun, the truth of this new age: for though that which is eternal may burn immortal, in this strange eon even the gods themselves could shatter. but not him. he would never shatter. he would learn. he would taste. he would become. avo faced the pain, and he let it sink it further, feeling his ghosts writhe, listening to his woundshaper scream. no more! no! no more! +avo! gaze into mind-breakin shit later! traumas leaking over, godsdammit.+ he blinked. he pulled his gaze away, finally noticing the cascading errors burning across his visual display as his tertiary phantasmics shut down one after another. cog-cap: 89% m-merciful, the woundshaper muttered, its self-awareness shaken. it was trying to thank draus. of higher make you are. higher blood. it paused. praise be, master. no more of that. i will be silent. i will supplicate with every word of yours with due obsequiousness. never let me gaze upon such again. i cannot it cannot be my fate. he grunted. part of him still wanted to peek, but he knew better. +what next. deploy rendsinks?+ +kae says to set em down first.+ he did so, each vortex choking off to rasping wisps. four cracks sounded as the large chunks of thaumic machinery he carved free from the golems but a day prior greeted the floor, spreading fissures. with two sinks from the galeslither and two more from the sangeists, each of them should possess a symmetrical domain to the fallen heaven. now, the question was how to integrate them into the structure of the soul. +okay,+ draus said. she cracked her neck and the relief spilled over to avo, a comforting feeling though a bit uncanny. +so, heres what you gotta do: reach inside it with your heaven of air. just wind its exposed core, i reckon. do the thing you do when you slurp the golems. it should interface with your soul and try ejecting its waste across to the sinks. kae says your meta-fac should do the heavy liftin. theoretically.+ +theoretically?+ he replied, tone bland. +yeah, rotlick, theoretically. you wanna get a new hell or not?+ this sounded like a stupid way for him to overload. avo sighed. +then?+ +then you start venting into the rendsinks. they should have some kind of containment sigil on the inside. same stuff that kaes eye is made from. corresponding thaumic some shit.+ a brief pause came as he heard kae snarl uncharacteristically with anger. draus, deciding to do something unlike herself as well, flinched. +yeah, kaelook, thats how i talk. i dont mean its actual shit. your eye isnt shit. i was bein-- respect? this is me bein respectful, you think i was near as nice to the other regs? we were+ +draus,+ avo said. he wondered if she felt as annoyed as he did doing these interruptions. +apologize later. feed me now. going to interface now. current rend at seventy-one percent attuning sink capacities rendsink a - 8% rendsink b - 3% rendsink a - 2% rendsink a - 3% the three a were primary units attached to a golem. the b indicated the second one that he got from the galeslither. they had a bit of leftover rend from the golem patrols their rend grew while the fallen heavens fell. the contrast came uneven across his sinks, but the pace was going to be close. +dont think i can offload all the rend,+ avo said. +dont need to,+ draus replied. +just gotta get it down below a hundred. thats how much your hell can pack. you drain the rest of that on your own.+ as the process continued, the thought of integrating the rendsinks for future runs and dives appealed. the ease of being able to eject his entropy into a avo frowned. lugging around a two-ton module was a bit unwieldy. might be easier for the galeslither than the woundshaper, but even so, they seemed a burden for the present. this required more contemplation. rendsink a - 100% capacity reached rendsink b - 100% capacity reached rendsink a - 100% capacity reached rendsink a - 100% capacity reached rend capacity - 50% +now! now! do the thing! take the soul!+ avo didnt hesitate. reaching out with his heaven, he tugged with all his might. his perception coiled in and out and back down into his skull. spots formed behind his eyes as he felt the structure of the soul collapse like a folded envelope. dolloping into a single beam of coruscating resplendence, fire greeted fire as his soul expanded, blooming out from his very being in a reality-shaking ripple. waves of echoing brightness danced upon the fabric of all that was, the walls whorling, the bodies twisting, time itself knotting around him. draus thoughts came as muted crackles, her voice broken and discordant. for an instant, avo felt himself rise into the air, a pure white scar that gouged deep into the roots of all that ever was. at the center of things stood avo. time. force. space. matter. signals. all bled into him and crossed his borders warped by the resonance of his frame. and then, the wave shattered, and slammed back together, spiraling in a whirlpool of indelible markings as they collapsed and descended, draining deep into the depths of his broadening flame. no. there was something different. not wrong, but more. another presence spiraled within him, its severed shine mirroring his own. [soul] obtained ontological damage severe heaven integrat error scanning heaven ontological damage severe thaumic cycler detect ontological damage moderate reverting mythos repairing ontology - 2% thaumic output - 966 thaum/c rend capacity - 50% head spinning, metamind flickering as his ghosts struggled to reform themselves, avo staggered on shaking legs. a new weight settled inside him. a new breadth. as his auto-seance came back online, he heard draus, her tone hushed and intense. +avo? avo? you there? we saw the flash! shit, half the fuckin sovereignty probably saw that.+ +got more than the hell,+ avo said, stumbling away from the rendsinks, stunned. he could feel the entropy budding within them, the instability of his existence boiling inside. he needed to take them. couldnt leave them here. he could still use them somehow. +subsumed everything. took heaven. domains. took took cycler. soul too. my frame trying to repair them. thinks it can repair them.+ a moment of silence came over the other end. +kaes squealin right now. somethin uh, somethin about a thaumaturgic breakthrough. sayin your meta-facs gonna put her kind out of a job.+ he nodded. +convenient.+ +convenient''s a sidearm, avo. ive seen godclads work to contain ruptures before. this shit it aint supposed to be a one-man job.+ she breathed. +yeah. i see why everyones gunning for that frame now. you should get back. take the sinks with you. kaes gonna wanna make a dive again later.+ he responded with a grunt. it is not the end, his woundshaper whispered. avo frowned. what? the other soul your brightness is mending it. its its refusing the structure. a laugh came from his heaven of blood. it is not the end. we remain we remain eternal. a shiver ran through him. a passing memory manifested. he saw himself from the gaze of the fallen heaven. he saw a wound that would drink the world. he saw a being of ever-growing hunger. Chapter 8-5 Anticipation chapter 8-5 anticipation this cannot be possible. we were not there. no one of the order was there! then what about someone who wasnt? something else? dont be absurd, only the agnos one who isnt an agnos anymore? ... do you remember one kae kusande? you loaned her out to us for project godshapershame about that mess. lets talk about her for a moment. what makes you think i want to talk about her? after what you people did it was necessity. but jaku, please. im not asking as a mirror. im asking as your friend. this should concern all the agnossi as a whole. someone is closing rifts, and if the compact of neutrality is broken it is not! i know. i trust you. but the mere suspicion of the thing will cause enough friction for there to be a forest fire. and i really dont want to watch you burn. is that a threat? no. no! jaku. please dont insult me like that. we both know my masters. we both know what comes next if they starting asking personally. choose me. choose me, and ill do everything i can to choose you. -exchange between high agnos jakuta ajayi and [redacted], ori-thaum incubi 8-5 anticipation hidden within wisping currents, avo carried draus and kae back to the second fortune, a new heaven burning within. the path he took was evasive; circling. a density of exorcist specters had filled the skies, lining each block across the sovereignty with a scrying eye. he masked his travel using station loci as checkpoints and automated cargo carriers for cover. such necessity stretched the duration of his travel, but laden with a burgeoning soul, his pace was doomed to falter. several times, he was halted by climbing rend or sweeping tides of perception cast down from on high. he stole pieces of memories from those around him using his ghostjack and lined his thoughtstuff with said sequences to use as a facade. all the while, he struggled against his focus, the world around him blurring between states of existence; reality was made ever more malleable with the second soul flickering alight within. new subrealities brushed his ontology, greeting him in fleeting instants of gnosis, metaphysical concepts bleeding into the fabric of the world before him like fragile patterns, beckoning to be rewoven toward a more personal desire. repairing ontology - 6% it was nearing midnight when they finally managed to hop free from an automated stormtree cargo carrier. shielded by the locus, avo jacked into the locus of the long wedge-shaped ship and directed its pathing to take a lane overhead xin yunsha. outside, the aeros external feeds played the opening scenes of a paladin-enforced lockdown. block by block, ghosts were working through the districts, latching onto passing minds with their phantasmal forms. the second fortune would not be exempt. but draus seemed assured of green rivers competence. +rivers got somethin for this,+ the regular said. +just dont rightly know how were supposed to move around after. skies are gonna be checkpointed with real necros running scout detail now. syndicates are gonna be sinking down beneath the gutters for their business. probably talkin penumbra territory.+ the realm of the low masters. of walton and his alternates. the winds billowed with strain and fury at the thought of his fathers nodes. what truths remained from his past? what promises were held sacred? avo could not say. but through the blessed shine of his expanding ontology, he found a new certitude to being. he had fasted long, devouring only that which he could, and that which the code allowed. now, his limits were broken. as was his faith. yet, from the shards of his past personhood came power, true and rising, and with it, the choice to redefine the self. in the past hours, he had rejected the beast, had ignored the woundshaper, and had clashed with draus. the refugees came to his mind again. feeble. weak. but with potential, brimming with sensations and emotions. something clicked in avos mind. yes. he hungered still but was severed from death, starvation was but a passing concern. the meat of the meek and feeble were familiar tastes now. with his heaven, he yearned to devour something nigh-formless, but long yearned for. one of her fingers twitched. the fox went still, body tense as if waiting for an attack. please, ask. what would you do if i made you a godclad. the following silence fell with the weight of a toppling column. draus heart sped up. kaes eyes widened. avo! i-i said i we dont know if your meta-fac kill my sisters, green river said. the words shot out of her as if she would never get another chance to say them. she looked down and away. for revenge. it is not special. she laughed, embarrassed at the banality of her desire. but it is a want all the same. you understand. no, avo said. he didnt know if she was lying. but ultimately, it didnt matter. he wanted to hear what she would do with choice, and to lie was as acceptable as any other. no, i dont. not like you. but would like to. someday. would like to. the sang flicked her eyes over to draus. the regular shrugged. dont give that look. hes been on this shit since he ghouled-out down in the gutters. you, avo said, asking her now. frame? draus shrugged. her indifference surprised him. hells, avo. i aint a complicated gal. ill probably be doin the same thing. cept the gangers and syndicates might stay broken after i work em using a heaven. she laughed. would like one of them force domains. keep it simple. burn shit. break shit. butcher shit. dead half-strands. safe warrens. happy reg. he turned to look at kae. her expression paled. i i i can be whole again, maybe. the woundshaper scoffed. hmph. leave it to a cripple to yearn for a mere memory of what once was than the dawn that mounts the horizon. our dreams are colored by personhood, avo replied internally. their dreams perhaps. stay a god a little while longer, master. you will learn what it means to be more elemental. leave these paltry desires borne of a single vessel aside, for ours is to shape the nature of all that is. were were going to need to see see whats happening with your souls once the the repairs are completed, she said. this i this has never happened before two souls shouldnt inhabit one being another silence followed. the fox sneezed. green river shook herself from the stupor inflicted by his question. alas, we must speak toward matters of the future. the column. they wish to meet you. are coming to meet you, as you have been so tardy in your assent to meet them. avo flexed his claws. are they. it is to be an expression of goodwill, she replied. i explained that wont be their dog, avo said, cutting her off. frame stays mine. mine. that is precisely a matter they wish to discuss, she finished. they want to strike an accord. accord? they feared you to be an instrument of waltohis alternates. no matter. after your actions in the gutters, they have now deemed you to be independent. draus chuckled darkly. shit, avo. maybe you should kill a couple hundred thousand more fated. get yourself sent a placard or somethin. kae winced at the viciousness of draus statement. it suddenly occurred to him how little she fit in this room of liars, monsters, and killers. whos coming, he asked. i do not know, green river replied. they do wish to speak of our mirrorhead problem. and what to do with your fathers alternates. when. soon. what useful information. their communicative skills could use some work; i agree. avo sighed. he wanted to avoid them for a while longer. the interview. the ori-thaum traitor. she ready for a dive? tomorrow, green river said. they are undergoing some changes as of right now. a transfer of documentation, so to speak. he understood. running away in new vultun meant everything needed to be severed to the root. too many eyes, too many memories. the easiest way to disappear is to be given the identity of someone dead, but not listed so. it was always easier to obfuscate than it was to create. a related want echoed in avos mind. he had been yearning for another grafter ever since his first implant. with his heavens, the strain on his body was blunted, but not relieved, and considering his distrust of green river, he spent much of his time avoiding her establishments. he had scried her local grafter a few times. a scaarthian matriarch. one seemingly untouched by her own craft. she seemed to only conduct grafts part-time, spending the rest as a maker of novel bioforms for gangers, enforcers, or the circuits as a whole. your grafter, avo asked. does she have anything good? green river smiled. does she possess anything usable for one of your nature, you mean? avo growled. back to old habits. answer. come, then. best you see for ourselves. far be it for me to shop for another. Chapter 8-6 Idealization (I) chapter 8-6 idealization (i) what you got it aint enough. look at your arms, your legs, your skin, your eyes. think of the last time they failed you. muscles that couldnt carry. eyes that couldnt see. lungs that couldnt breathe. skin that burned and bones that broke. arent you tired of being let down? arent you worth more than some first draft of random biology? yes. yes, you are, with the new ascender modifications, you can be all that you want to be. [+mem-code pop-up deployed+] dont just dream better; choose better. choose ascender. -dawnforge industries, ascender advertisement 8-6 idealization (i) repairing ontology - 9% the ability to travel as wind was freedom absolute, and such a liberty, once tasted, made the act of walking feel almost subhuman. walls and doors were constraints. blockages. time was wasted. it felt a capitulation for avo, his sense of power shifting just under his skin calling to him like a siren. still, he followed green river all the same. though he knew where the grafter resided, remanifesting would expose the truth of his ontology to prying eyes. though it was promised that the second fortune was circumspect when it came to its guests, the ninth column managed to pierce the mind of its mistress with ease, and the distressing fact of reality was that there were other segments of walton to be wary of. their descent brought them further down than he ever cared to go on his own. of the second fortunes numerous floors, the basement substructure was designed to hold one thing and one thing truly. the blood den. the circuit ring: a place where brutality watered minds dry of entertainment. here, imps flowed and death came cheap. street toughs fought bioforms, fought captured ghouls, fought anything to wet the tastes of watchers between even grander events. as he, draus, kae, and river emerged from the slow descent of her private elevator, she led them free from a small alcove, the flesh-like walls beyond the opening elevator doors unfurling into flaps to let them out. they found themselves far down between climbing promontories where live watchers lingered in other organic alcoves. the stands were empty of cheers at the present, however. the bloodletting was over for the day, set to start anew tomorrow. such was a thing avo was beginning to appreciate in the sangs architecturethe modularity. the responsiveness. metal had its virtues, but unto itself it was a dead thing, one necessitating damage to be reshaped. changed. striding out, they found themselves out upon a spiraling path made from smooth-carved bone. with each step, avo felt his claws click and the substance below rattle. a hollowness existed. inside, he felt a tug. master. i feel something deeper yet. it is swimming in the marrow. do not concern yourself with the fishes, green river said as if reading his thoughts. they are merely being filtered into the rest of the fortunes arteries. so, that was the origin of her little show earlier. different bioformed aquatics ordered on the go directly from the basement. how convenient it was to have mastery over life. avo wondered if that made her chains all the tighter considering she herself was obliged to serve so many. torture came in different expressions. they were far beneath the casino proper now, their path taking on a winding quality even as the path widened. casting his winds ahead, he felt his reach drift into a place wide and cavernous, with hundreds of bodies and shapes dancing in a ballet of constant motion, tinkering with strange shapes built into the walls. as they encroached on the grafters burrow, the walls grew thick with muscle, its texture ribbed and rubbery. specks of sparkling insects frozen in amber inlaid the gaps between clefts of tissue, their decorative purposes turned functional as scintillating enhancers to the growing veins of bioluminescence brightening the path. the end came as they arrived at an open threshold to the cavernous chamber. vast was its space and geodesic was its design, its roofs supported by five spinal pillars fused to a swaying chandelier of pulsing gray matter. avo tilted his head at that. lines of synaptic tissue draped down as in hundreds of umbilical tethers, all connected to the massive organ that loomed over them. draus hummed. how long youve been hiding this exomath under your establishment, river? five years, she said. i kept the brain for safekeeping. a favor to another sister. the way she said favor made avo wonder if blackmail was involved. countless bioforms and eunuchs marched, their bodies animal, insect, dog, and human all. this was the ballet avo felt earlier; they danced their number in perfect discord, all moving at different paces to fulfill divergent tasks, but never did they collide. never did they even come close. an uncanniness filled him as he realized he saw nothing of the thoughtstuff about them; their minds were so vacuous that they existed unseen to the nether. overhead, insectoid arms picked and plucked eggs and gene-helix-marked cylinders to load into the chitinous chambers lining the walls. hey, avo, you remember when river spent twenty minutes sayin nothin only to end up getting your brain broken by your dad?" "i remember. yeah, draus said. didnt seem so long ago. kae giggled. green river pursued her lips and held her head high and unashamed. she gestured toward the umbilical again. please. kind ruveca is waiting. clutching the shape of the cord, avo felt the slime run between his fingers as he angled it toward his skull. through the eye works as well, ruveca said. she smiled brightly. least resistance to the brain. he ignored her and forced the tip into the softness behind his skull instead. the crystal bit into his flesh and immediately, he felt the dendrites pry into his tissue like prodding fingers. what manner of communication is this? the woundshaper said, seeming more interested than disgusted. a strange practice this huntress of mine has decided to pick up. but i applaud her all the same, for what is the body but blood architecture? a spike carried upon bolts of lightning flashed through avos mind. lines of mem-data danced across his cog-feed as something bypassed his ghosts to initiate direct integration. [integrating hosts] he was on an island comprised of pure viscera, with gardens of organs pulsing from trees and growing like crops beneath his feet. crimson waves crashed against his ankles. pieces of meat were pulled from the shore into the water. he breathed in but there was no taste. he scanned the horizon using his feed, but his metamind fed his consciousness no useful details. hello, ruvecas voice came from behind. he turned. the scaarthian was standing next to him. she wasnt blind here but her golden eyes remained distracted and drifting. her body held a strange moonlit quality to her as she gazed upon the unseen light spilling through the mask of blackened clouds. a brigandine coat layered in plates scrawled with scaarthian runes and jade squares painted with sang characters adorned her. she held out a single palm. let us talk about what you wish to become. the soil heeded her call as organs and ichor rose to greet her palm. between her fingers, a simulacrum of avo came into shapeor perhaps it was just another ghoul. it wasnt easy to tell these days. she rubbed her index finger and her thumb together, the motion prying something apart from the gore-molded ghoul standing across from avo. its chest opened. it spun. along its spine, the flesh of its back unzipped. there, he saw a mimicry of his celerostylus plain to his gaze. a marker was placed upon it, listing it as an item worth study. squirming tighter around the simulacrums spine, the celerostylus ran in countless strands up through the brain, through the body in a weave of enhanced nerves. it was a foreign symbiote installed as a rooted stem. how did you come by this, ruveca breathed, fingers coveting the bioware, but unwilling to touch it, even in this dream of a simulation. her approach to augmentation was reverence. near-worship. but he supposed that being obsessed was a relief in itself. in this broken eon, how wonderful it was to be blessed with personal purpose. this shouldnt be out for months. and it works on youim reading more potency than the commercial version. yes. yes. this mustve been stolen from the no-dragons themselves. she looked at him and smiled. you are a bearer of many gifts, do you know that? more than she realized. but she spoke, her face shrouded with frustration just as the light lessened from the skies. your body cant bear it. ghouls are enduring. survivable. but fragile. soft. weak. slow. lacking in so many ways how long can you use it? the organ. bit more than ten maybe. pain spikes after. each subsequent use is hell. just so. even without straining your muscles, the sheer voltage flowing through your system are cooking your nerves; killing your neurons. its a starship engine for an aeroship frame: too much; all too much. can you enhance it? fix it. the celerostylus was his first priority. without its blessings of speed, he wouldve been dead countless times over. even his heaven of blood would find itself deficient with its parting. and of no fault of mine, the woundshaper sulked. your designers offend us both. we should find time and seek them out; make prey of our precursors. a worrying thought for another time. again, he was not ready to face his fathers segments. they were too much to bear right now, and something told him that his wards and skills were not nearly sufficient enough for such an encounter. enhance, ruveca said, confused. the celerostylus is already a good piece of art. it is not it that fails you, but your foundational structure. she clasped her hand together and pressed down. the waves drained out into the fathomless cleft where the horizon met the land. where once they stood on sodden ground beneath cloudy skies, shapes began to fall and sway; biomods offered on mem-data strings, made easy for his perusal. there were dozens of options swaying in the air. some seemed as if entire bio-rigs; were full-sheathe replacements. others were simpler. new eye, new ears, new skin, and calling to avos attention most of all, what looked to be a cluster of eight writhing serpents. its not easy getting things to integrate with your biology, ruveca said. the no-dragons spent considerable effort cracking the codes to your hemophage so that they could bridge the gap between implant rejection and acceptance. what you see is what may be joined with you, but understand that some structures are foundational, and two shapes cannot occupy the same vessel. she leaned down, and avo felt her hot breath wash over him in barely bated delight. what his necrothurgyhis power did for him, biomancy did for her. can i ask you something personal? he grunted, a slight tinge of discomfort beholding the spark in her eyes. in your dreams how do you see yourself? what is your idealization of being? at this, the woundshaper laughed. oh, my poor child. you see but a facet of facet; you fight to hold a narrow corner of totality. past the woundshapers words, avo himself spoke, a long-hidden desire teased with fruition. predator. apex predator. what we should have been instead of mistakes. ah, ruveca said, but you werent a mistake. just a first draft. dont be ashamed; you dont get to choose your birth, but the present is a story still unwrittenn??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. Chapter 8-7 Idealization (II) chapter 8-7 idealization (ii) activate the backdoors to our ascender xeres series ii optics. save the visual mem-data into some loci. theres been a request from up top about needing some non-standard surveillance. send out a cast warning users about, oh glitches with the software. some fluff like that. yes. yes, i know the necros among them have pulled out the spyware, but lets not bullshit ourselves here, most people dont have that ability. no, i dont want to do this, but its not about what i want, its about orders. what are the choirs looking for? who the hells knows! you think they told me? do i look inner-tier? i am just an admin from the kennel like you. wait. let me stop you there. were not going to theorize on this, were just going to do as the authorities ask. well, by we i mean someone down the barrel. i wouldnt be caught dead taking a shit on behalf of our masters considering how much stuff goes sidesways down in the purg. yeah. yeah, sure. were still on for pseudo-ball on uldsday. -thoughtcast between administrative leads [redacted] and [redacted] of dawnforge industries, a highflame subsidiary 8-7 idealization (ii) for a few seconds, avo found contentment in simply staring at the dangling augmentations present. though they were mere phantasmal representations of actual matter, the subconscious was a base and fickle thing, inspiring notions of hunger despite the awareness of reason. to bear a shield in stead of your feeble nature, master, the designs do look like skewers of roast upon a string. avo wished he could form eyes within his soul for the sole purpose of glaring at his woundshaper. yes, the bioware did resemble meat and bone hanging from strings; it did indeed spur in him that base desire to tear at the flesh swaying above and dig in. that did not mean he would. anymore. his time as a metaphorical nu-dog was due for an end. is it strength you want? speed? something more esoteric? or even potentially an addition; that which you lack. ruveca lifted her index finger and began to sort the mods into different lines. dolloping ghosts bled into the simulation as they formed titles for each aisle, separating things by part, function, and replacement extensiveness. his focus scattered, darting from option to option, picking between new physical sheathes. strength appealed to the beast most of all, for that was it understood, what it yearned for. its dreams were painted in simple colors, put to motion by crude wants: to break and overpower. to butcher and bleed. for long, his physicality had consigned his nature to neglect; what fulfillment could a beast derive from strength when already molded from the clay of weakness? he spent some time wandering between his foundation choices for body-based modifications, perusing his options like a shopper looking for new apparel. he eliminated over five options immediatelyall the potential neuromods were off the table unless they kept his mind at baseline. in theory, his phantasmics should still work no matter what he did to his meat. however, he saw his fair share of necros suffering abnormalities after cognitive enhancement surgeries. the mind was his personal domain. it would be a fools choice to lose it. down to twenty choices or so, he found himself gravitating between a few options. of them, there numbered six, but at least half of them clashed on basis of function or organ. the durahide exoskeleton was the first thing he was drawn to, his gaze earning an approving nod from ruveca. it effectively left him armored in what looked to be an encased shell of crystals, its structure capable of withstanding kinetics from standard infantry gauss-arms along with laser diffusion capabilities. the problem came in the form of overhead: too much durability. no enhancement to his reflexes or baseline structure. as much as it appealed to him, he left it behind, digging further into body modifications. the option that followed was wanting as well. the surgespine allowed him to discharge lightning through bio-electric pylons that communicated with his nervous system via a neuroconductive fluid. it wouldnt just make him fastit would make him unable to be disabled via physical incapacitation. appealing, but the caloric demands would have driven him insane with hunger, and his body still wasnt up to dealing with the strain. he passed by three more standard strength augmenting bio-weavesstripped-down versions of bio-rigs meant to be transplanted directly onto a body. each one seemed to be from a different combination of animals, and though they magnified his current strength potential, most didnt stabilize his reflexes and remained wanting against the potential of their chrome counterparts. then, he saw it, the flash of its whiteness reeling in his attention. walking past all the other options, he found himself in a trance as he beheld the last sheathe left in the row. the bone demon. made by a now redacted no-dragon subsidiary. mustve been something that went rogue during the second guild war. ruvecas eyes wrinkled as her expressions took on a transient quality. the way her expression flowed from one to another made him wonder if she was guiding him toward her desired option, influencing him from a seat of deeper knowledge. oh, the bone demon exoweave. yes. a less selected option due to its deviations from the popular desires. publicenforcers want chrome exos, you see? squiresrigs or combat skins. the no-dragons themselves are bound to violence by proxy, so you gaze upon a niche weave. but i think it suits you. in fact, i think it was made for something like you. a full spectrum enhancement, so to speak. her mind rippled, the weave descended from its string, its shape unzipping into a myriad of features revealed to avo. the bone demon grew a superstructure around his current body, weaving his flesh into a nest of super-tensile, hyper-synaptic nanofibrous mycelia on the interior. beyond the threads, thick plates of cordyceramite came together like jagged skeletal continents emerging from a sea of webs. bound to his biology, he would be able to harden and shift his structural integrity, as well as shape the growth of the fungal-ceramic matter that would encase his outer skin. when seen in its totality, it made him look like someone clad as a monster of yesteryear in knightly regalia. bladed were its digits and joints and paleness ruled its visage. his head, meanwhile, was to be caged between the armored petals of what seemed to be some kind of insect-devouring plant. the fungal-ceramite growths will make you more durable than you are now, but you wont be able to survive under sustained fire, or even a heavy-kinetic weapon. her honesty came with no shame. the design was the design, and she would speak of her mods as they were. where it excels is the blending of strength, speed, and agility. the mycelia can carry your current synaptic load without issue, while their tensile strength also allows you to punch through steel. dont expect to be lifting anything too heavy though. this is fast twitch fiber in its purest condition. he considered the implant and found himself entranced. grows out of me? it becomes you, she said. a perfect integration. the cordyceps will integrate with your haemophagic cells and be turned from hijacker to willing assistant. but i would be most dishonest if i didnt mention the drawbacks. she waved a hand. numerous mods grew transparent. only three or so remained. cross-mod integration is already a challenge with your biology. trying to attach bioware of deviant designs will be closer to building a collapsing tower than a functional body. so, avo said. narrows the scope. indeed, she said. most bioware to do with the senses wont work well with the bone demon, i fear. admittedly thats more a design problem and you might feel your senses drifting during your first days of accepting the implant. she contemplated her answer. eight hours, perhaps. each body has different demands a baseliners would be far more malleable than yours, but more susceptible to collapse. she tilted her head. you understand that there is nothing in the way of anesthetics for a ghoul? he grunted. pains nothing. she frowned, his response too sour for her tastes. pain is language, consang. you shouldnt run from it. deny it. accept it. just listen. your body is giving you the details. let the softness in you drown, and listen through the feedback. you might hear something interesting. something told him she was speaking from experience. i will begin the process immediately. you should return to yourself. step into the pod. pod? suddenly, the umbilical tether retracted, slipping out from his skull. light and shapes returned to him as the link between him and the exomath broke. shaking his head, he found two tiger-spiders placing a long cylindrical coffin, and with a touch, it expanded, unclasping like parting ribs to reveal a pool of blackened liquid filling its interior. meld pod, ruveca said, her tone almost distracted. it''s for your rebirth. just lay in its waters. the rest will follow on its own. master another mind lingers in the substance, the woundshaper said, tone low, it is faint. there is a touch of blood in its ontology but... but still, it thinks and reacts. and builds. particulates of silicon? and electricity. such a thing is not touched by the heavens. no. this a low art, intricate and complex though its design maybe. little builders, microscopic but diligent. nanoconstructors. an expensive resource to house in the warrens. but avo guessed that green river had her methods, and the no-dragon had their ways. staring down into the swaying black ichor that pooled in the enamel coffin, he hesitated for a moment, the beast in him inching back, primitive nature wary of his potential fate. to his side, draus snorted. +worse thing thatll happen is death, aint it. shouldnt stop you now.+ +just thinking about who ill be when i come out.+ a lull of consideration crackled across their session. +a bigger monster that still eats people?+ yeah. that sounded about right. shaking the grip of apprehension, he shed his holocoat and helmet before casting aside his thermal undersuit. as he stepped into the waters, a coldness ran up his leg, the chill sinking all the way to his bone. he waited for something to tear at him; divest him of his flesh. instead, only a clinging numbness stewed his flesh. patience giving out, he deposited himself in the rest of the way and laid down. staring up at the pulsing mass of gray matter that occupied the ceiling, he watched as flickers of thoughtstuff were injected between its countless cords, their shine remaining like meteorites darting through tubes even as the outside of his meld-cage closed. a moment of peace followed. he called upon the wind and the water swirled. all he would need to escape was a simple thought, followed by the manifestation of his galeslither. he was not trapped here. he was not trapped like he was at the start of the crucible. this was just surgery. a very sang way of performing surgery. checking the state of his souls he found himself gladdened to behold a major spike in progress. repairing ontology - 21% a sudden lurch pulled at him. the weight of his meld pod shifted. he was moving. casting out his whisper, he saw that he was being carried by two bioforms, slowly being shuttled over to an empty slot along the wall. he supposed that supported some kind of incubation. he wasnt sure. +draus,+ he said. +going to end the session. things will probably hurt.+ her indifference was felt before she spoke. +leave it on if you wanna. it aint no bother to me.+ she wasnt boasting. but still, something in him thought it best that she possess full awareness in case a rapid response was needed. as his cage was slotted into the wall and locked tight with a click of fusing bones, avo waited for something to happen. if there was one thing better about mirrorheads grafters, it was that pain with them was a direct affair. now, avo felt he felt something pass through the blackness and worm into his skin. it was a tickle, followed by a piercing sting, but something was undoubtedly moving in his blood, in his body. several more stings followed, their spread multiplying by the second. in moments, no part of his flesh felt unblemished, and deep along the weight of his bones, he was beginning to feel something build. then, nothingness. just a sense of static. avo frowned. then the stings returned blooming as he suddenly felt something building inside him, spreading like gulfs between his flesh. there it was. pain. pain in the part of shedding flesh. whatever had slid inside him was being grown outward from within. his bones and celerostylus would be laced first, but the rest of his meat, his muscle would have to give. in the darkness of the cage, avo heeded ruvecas words and studied the symphony of his own hurt, feeling new shapes begin to take form. Chapter 8-8 The New Skin chapter 8-8 the new skin i do not care about the paladins. i do not care about the exorcists. they are secondary concerns to me and should be of no concern to you. what i am ordering you to do, however, should be at the forefront of your mind before anything elsebefore! all! else! listen to my words for i will not repeat them. not for clarity. not because you forgot. you will arrange my forces, and you will scour the sovereignty to find just who is using our name as an instrument to start this war. you will find them, and you will let me know. spare no expense. spend whatever lives you need to. my time is precious; enforcers are cheap. you know what is to come. see this task done before our coming assault. nu-scarrowbur must be mine. the tree must be secured. there is no failurethere is only my will. -jhred mirrorhead greatling to his conflux lieutenant 8-8 the new skin every inch of avos body itched. the process was more meditative than limbo, the pain carving new grooves of focus as the shape of his new body expanded, peeling his old. with each passing hour, the fluid he was submerged in lessened, feeding his body the necessary ingredients to ensure the proper formation of his new sheathe. his skin and muscles were first to be shed. the echoheads followed long after, near the end, bridged to his body through the bone demon. as the searing agony of shedding flesh faded to become a tingling sensation dotting his digits, he realized his celerostylus was also spreading, its synaptic roots expanding, lacing with the new fibers unlatched ropes of obsolete muscle from remolded bones. with the culmination of the process came his extraction. the bioforms carried his meld pod back out and opened its casing. he emerged to a world of new shapes and sensations, everything feeling shaper; the sensations greeted him with a previous unknown celerity. his echoheads slithered down his torso, their movement twitching, sliding in bursts. avo felt as if ghoulling again, learning to crawl, to use his hands. it was when the echoheads chittered that he realized the full scope of his sensory enhancements, the sound casting a reverberating cloud into his mind, outlining all that stood around him. there were about three hundred and forty-six bioforms in the chamber. thirty of their number were moving around in the veins of the exomath. five more were walking up the passage, their bodies both human and dog-like, misshapen in form and gait. eunuchs. aside from them, kae was on the far side of the room, looking at a collection of half-finished bioforms incubating in their chitinous chambers. ruveca, meanwhile, had not moved an inch. deep in a flowing state of focus, she directed insectoid apparatuses down, segmented limbs meant to examine his person and review his body architecture. draus and green river, meanwhile, were missing. suspicious. a large chitinous limb prodded at his chest and reached to his sides to tug at his new echoheads, yanking hard to test their structural integrity. thats not abnormal, ruveca said, distracted words mixed with enthusiastic limbs. hatching from oneself is extremely damaging to your cells. you developed tumors at several points if you are curious to know. your capacity to heal is remarkable, much like the rest of your species, but the cost weighs on your cellular stability. a hum followed her words, the sound of one who was considering a potential theory, but not speaking it. what? avo asked. do you know theres an additional layer of something melded to your genetic sequence. a pang of coldness spread in avos gut. he couldnt tell if it was from his new implants or the thought of walton withholding another secret. no. didnt know. what is it? im not quite sure, ruveca said, sucking in a sour sip of air. and i dont think i have the capability to examine it. looking at it for more than a moment makes me lose focus. and it doesnt seem to bend to biomancy. i suspect you might need to seek out its original designer to learn its true function. it seems to be missing a component. or made to have something built over it. it makes no biological sense but it inflicts a feeling. whoever placed it inside you had something special in mind. dangerous? avo asked. no, ruveca said. as i said: it feels like a slot. now. lets see you stand. yes! yes! stand! show me my work! hurry! hastened by her words, he reached up to pull himself to a seated position but froze as he saw his new arm for the first time. before, his limb was a gnarled stretch of translucent skin, eel-like muscle, and half-chipped claws. in its place now clouds of ceramite-white plating, expanding without symmetry or order, the fissures between laced taut with nanofibrous mycelia. though a considerable amount of bulk had been added to his body, he left an uncanny lightness in his motion, as if his kinesiology was fine-tuned to the extreme. with a pull, he made to sit up, to stand. the world blurred, and the bursting nature of his newly imbued speed surprised all. bioforms shifted back, the faint echoes of instinct carved into their vacant egos responding. across the room, he heard kae yelp. a-avo, she said. youre uh, youre even taller now. he turned, and the world whipped around him. she shrank at the sheer burst of force possessed by his movements. she was right. he was taller. she seemed a full foot shorter than when last they stood together. more responsive than i remember, avo said, stretching much as he lifted his arms, he felt the newest expansion of his body lash out reflexively. softness greeted the edges of his echoheads. bone parted. gore spilled. his body shifted in place, old instincts granted speed he hadnt adapted to, and he caught sight of streaking wipes of blood as three of his echoheads chittered, clicking their mouths together, the nourishment of blood greeting his mind from taste buds beyond his mouth. across from him, a tiger-spider toppled in six parts, limbs coming free in slices, organs pooling free from a clean-hewn torso. no thaums greeted his flame, and empty as the bioforms mind was, it died bereft of ghosts. ghosts: [411] as he watched the top half of his penultimate surviving brother bounce and splattered on another ring below his. upon the uppermost pedestal in the circuit, avo swept his gaze across the butcher he inflicted, and found himself savoring the taste of disappointment. the slaughter of his kin bored and pleased him in equal measure. smeared and mangled remains decorated the bone-hewn ground beneath his claws, each sprawl of tissue claimed from another of his kindred. the entire affair took seconds, clumsy as he wasit took longer for him to ascend the rings than it did to kill his kindred. he didnt even use his celerostylus. a ragged gasp sounded from behind him. avo, still unused to echoheads, chittered, soundwave flooding avos mind with resonating shapes. forty feet away on the other side of the ring, his last surviving brother was getting back up. avo scoffed. the fact of the other ghouls survival wasnt a matter of sloppiness but empirical mercy. they were already as if flat dogs forced to fight a warg. he wanted to see if this one could hurt him at all. studying the motions of his brother, he winced as he beheld slowness; a near-crippled display of un-coordination that boiled the blood inside him. once upon a time, about eighteen years and a functional eternity ago, he would have had to fight this brother down to the blood sinew to avoid being eaten. strength was a relative thing. as was speed. perhaps intellect and mental capacity as well, but avo knew there were more angles to consider than merely computation power. now, however, the gulf between him and what he had been expanded. expanded too much. he thought the topsiders called his kind subhuman from a place of hatefulness before. no. people feared monsters. gave them names that inspired avoidance. to be called sub wasnt to be feared, but denigrated. less than. he saw it now in more ways than one. too weak to be a monster. too slow to avoid harm. too stupid to surrender or flee. ghouls were instruments hobbled in their totality. whatever desires the low mastersthat walton held for themit was dust when faced with the mantle possessed by those above. maybe the hope was to substitute mass where quality could not be achieved. but even then, a mob of ghouls was just food for artillery. it was like they were fated to be slaughtered. it didnt make sense. it just didnt make any sense. a light thud rattled him back into focus as avo felt himself shift back by an inch. claws dragged and broke upon the ridges of his ceramite. a fang slid between his plates, but could only thrust feebly against his fibers, piercing nothing. sighing, avo let his brother exhaust itself on him. and when it stopped to draw air, he called upon his heaven and plucked the fresh oxygen away before it could reach its lungs. the ghoul gasped, choking, wheezing. still clinging to avo, it slumped, holding its chest. he wrapped his claws around its face and frowned, unfurling his skullplates. hated you. hated you so much. but not your fault. none of us wanted to be this weak. not even proper monsters. his brother struggled, but its strength was fading fast. soon, the matter would be concluded. casting a ghost into its undefended mind, he contemplated the taste of encroaching oblivion, of its blind bestial rage, of its savage nature collapsing against overwhelming odds. their natures no longer aligned; it was now a step below him by all accounts. there was sublime power in being able to comprehend another without being understood in return. his brothers beastgluttonous as all beasts wereruled so thoroughly that all rational thought was atrophied. it knew what he was by scent, but could not recognize the nature of his implants, his raw, absolute superiority. he tore his ghost out of its mind. the ghoul shuddered and choked. its grip flopped loose from his body. avo sneered. youll try biting again if i let you go. you can think. just never tried. it didnt reply, content to succumb instead. dont know why walton picked me. dont know if it was chance. he paused. or if the memory was a lie too. know this: know hes gone. know i have power now. and avo closed his fingers around his brother''s skull. dont worry. ill change this. make us useful. better. make existing worth it. he made fists while still grasping the other ghouls head. its skull chasmed in a welter of gore, meat splurting free, red on white. avo pulled. along the length of his kindreds body, he tore, the wound spreading from neck to groin. thaumic output - 971 thaum/c ghosts: [412] only lines of sinew kept the two halves of this one together. the fragrance of its death called to him, flavor tantalizing. his beast slavered. his woundshaper thrummed in his blood, brimming with delight, happy he was killing. avo spat on the body of his brother. the insult was not aimed at the failings of his kin but at the broken puppet belonging to his former creators. only he among the countless masses of his kind held true purpose. only he and no other. by fate or fortune, he was different. and through him, perhaps more than just he can be you done playin with baby food? his previous thoughts slipped away from him. in its place, a fire roared, wrath and jubilation merging into a rising inferno. his echoheads chittered, and at the center of the ring stood draus, clad in a new shell of her own. he felt the shape of jagged wings and curving blades extending from her person. the armor of her bio-rig bled over her body in sleeting segments, each capable of some limited motion. with a twitch of his jaw, the ceramite plating around his head fused shut as he turned, preparing to indulge in a bout of proper violence. yeah. should start the main course. Chapter 8-9 Like the Old Days chapter 8-9 like the old days our reg numbers are in the red. fucking chivalrics fucked us with their godsdamned ghoulshit policies. wasting the best of our pool as line infantry then they piss away whatever goodwill they got with our recruits? people are willing to die for the cause. the highflame cause, that is. nothin'' about the chivalrics is highflame. theyre a bunch of fucking egotists; so drunk off celebrity and dueling they smear themselves with their own shit and call it perfume. 98% rejection this year! add that with 45% of regulars dropping their banners and were tumbling in the barrel of one long asskicking. the chivalrics say, just grow some new clones; new drones; new bioforms. meat is cheap. meat is cheap. no fucking shit. but a regular aint meat. theyre near-unbreakable, assets packaged into any vessel, thrown into any situation, against any opposition to still come out winning. radical acceptance. no fear; hesitation. the shit we cant quantify yet. the stuff thats hard to design. thats a reg. thats what were losing. godsdammit, got me rambling again. [sighs] were gonna need the chivalarics sorted someday soon or were going to lose the next one too. and thing is, i dont think we can afford to lose next time. were just going to have to clean house. -mem-log of santanado starsinger mondelles, highflame instrument and combat instructor to axtraxis academy 8-9 like the old days draus, avo said. a feral grin pulled at his lips as he realized what was to come. he shifted his stance, stretching out his echoheads in preparation for what was to come. festooned in a biomechanical husk of a bastard being born of an attack drone and an upscale wasp, the regular stood on thin, jagged legs. two sub-arms--human sized but far smaller than the bladed segements festooned along her upper torso-- clenched and unclenched. the rest of her body ran in layers of chitinous segmentation reinforced by titanium. she packed three layers of cybernetics just to face him. flattering. couldnt wait anymore? she snorted. dont tongue your own ego. it aint graceful. i just wanna stretch my legs too. she paused. and maybe find out if hittin'' you still feels hittin'' your average rotlick. that''s an awful lot of plating you coated yourself in. don''t tell me you''re afraid of gettin'' a bruise or two now. avo looked past her. and then around. in tandem, his echoheads chittered, the shape of the room manifesting around him again. there were two people watching up in the stands. their shapes were near-baseline while another seemed half-serpent, half-woman. kae cheered half-heartedly. bright-wealth was infinitely louder. you know, draus said, flexing her new, bladed forelimbs. im gonna enjoy this. her new bio-rigged appendages ran in unfolded segments from behind her shoulders, gleaming white like shards of a crescent moon reflected upon the surface of a lake. their movements rippled a shimmering disturbance in the air, near-invisible propulsions coming from the gaps between the edges. along her back, six translucent wings extended, lining the space behind her in a kaleidoscope of colors. her face was exposed as the insectoid skull meant to shield her hung from her neck like an unhinged jaw, biomass within lined with neural needles. the bio-rig, much like his new skin, was a bridge an additional structure to anchor new implants and weight, like a rig on rigs, chrome upon armored meat. decided to do some shopping? avo asked. more like a test run. somethin i helped river snatch a couple o months ago. how you likin your new sheathe?" her tongue pushed out against her cheek. a tell. like the hiss of a nu-cat or the rearing palps of an aratnid. a subtle dance was happening under her skin, its rhythm building toward fated violence. gotta admit: i dont much like the new look of you. bleedin you nows gonna feel like hurting some bioform. shit, if i didnt know it was you, i''d probably treat you like something worth hurtin instead of some ghoul to put down. her casual taunt struck him and glanced off. the beast was incensed but then again, when wasnt that the case? what part of her words rang false? the fact ghouls were fodder? the fact she was trying to provoke him? distract him using anger? her gaze slid past his form, sinking down to greet his butchered brothers. they know what you are? knew, avo said. didnt matter. hungry. tried to come for me anyway. he hissed a low noise, the steam of his breath a whistle between disgust and laughter. ghouls. should know them better by impulse than physical design. action. not biology. the violence is internal. a predisposition of hardware. the brain. but they like it. they dont fight it. slaves that enjoy being slaves. tragic fate. they, draus asked. ive his voice trailed off. he thrust one of his echoheads into sight and studied its serrations, its willing nature. changed. inside, felt his heavens, his new soul hardening as the frame fused its damages back together. same thing with you. you think the other regs will recognize you in that rig? got too much of the warren tainting you. wasting your life killing thugs and gangers; wrestling with syndicates. he chuckled. helping a ghoul. she shook her head. guns dont need to recognize each other. they just need to fire when squeezed. i still fire. i just dont get squeezed so much. no. but you still bleed pretty good. did a good imitation of an opened tomato after vicious pasted you. performance of the year there: mangled regular. might have a future in the arts. maybe you should consider it seeing how a prepubescent psychopath managed to drop you. her nostrils flared as she sneered. oh, but it was so fun goading her on, and she took to it so well. annoyance burned behind her gaze as she fixed him with a glare. dont i recall needin to pull your mangled ass out of there? recall you helping too late and letting me get tortured. found your screams funny was all. yeah, draus said. she cracked her neck and the wasp skulls solidified around her. till one breaks. draus moved, a violent explosion of motion blasting out from her wings. falling water exploded off her person, a fluid jetstream along her trail. avo felt his celerostylus firejust in time. drops hobbled to a crippled pace. speed was torn out from the rushing stream. in a world nigh-frozen in pace, two figures moved unchainedclashing tides of force within a cage of stillness. she was unfettered, wings swimming upon gales of winda taunt to his very ontology. true to his nature, he lashed at the world, striking gouges into the ring beneath him using his echoheads. he moved erratically; dashing; shifting. never bound to a single place, angles of attack made wide by his echoheads. through it all, he felt the flow of his hyper-charged synapses flooding every sinew of his being, thrumming loud in every fiber. where once he was a stone lobbed from a sling, his momentum now took the form of a whip, his body molded to the instantaneity of his mind. to his pleasure, he detected a stutter to draus turns. a lull in her motion. perhaps she was slower than he now. perhaps the divide between their physicalities had flattened; inverted. phy-sim filtering distances across his feed, watched her circle closetwenty feet. her wings widened. force erupted out from her wings. he thrust an echohead at her, fifteen feet at rest. he activated his piston, reaching spearhead lancing out another five. fast as she was, water exploded before the velocity of his new tail. his phy-sim flashed red. evasion was impossible. but then, she didnt. a forelimb descended, scything sideways into his echohead. edge met edge as they crossed blades. a rattle of force danced down avos spine. he speared two more of his tails into the ground, rooting himself against the momentum. she fought nothing, letting their first clash send her higher. the flow of force went silent from her blade then as she tumbled, and only when there were thirty between them did her wings come back into action. instead of battling to right herself, she turned, diving low and using the impact to her advantage. she disappeared over the edge, and around him he felt a distant force pull on the air. the woundshaper sighed. master, tear her hold on the winds. this is a farce. you are playing as a child would. no. must break her. perhaps i could have served you better in this regard. what would she know of the multiplicative effects if you simply let your blood flow no! break her myself! ah, but i suppose were all entitled to a hubris. a crackle of thoughtstuff came alive in his mind. through their session, he felt her joy. +shit, did you ask the grafter to add another couple hundred pounds to your sheathe? that felt like cuttin a wall.+ +echoheads: good stabilizers.+ he replied. +is that right? well, im gonna have to see for myself.+ their session cut out. back to the bloodshed. reaching out with his echoheads, he chittered, and the world around him came into shape, a map of tactile-static wrapping over his senses. she was circling the edge behind him, turning along the edge. she gesticulated suddenly, her secondary limbs whipping and twisting something through the air. something split through the air, chipping the edge of one of his echoheads. the tail shuddered, unused to the sensation. avo felt a trickle of spasms run up his spine. a hair-thin damage trajectory played across his feed via his phys-sim. she had a monowire installed, monowire she was flicking up from the edge of the ring, cutting up at him from range. chittering again, he mapped her path using both his echolocation and his phys-sim. rushing toward he edge, the beast called for him to throw himself off the side, to tear into her on the encroach and see this done. he knew better. draus had the ability to move in the air without a heaven. only foolsand ghoulswould charge a foe in their element. avo decided to steal instead. using his own tactic of obfuscation, he arrived near the edge where she was soon to arrive, plucking the top half of the ghoul he killed earlier and dangling it below himself. as she came cycling in, monowire licking up again to cut, he expelled his mimefog and released his decoy before reeling himself back using his rearmost tails. fog greeted fog as rain smeared his sporing mists. a clean slice danced up through the body of his deceased brother, blood splattering out through the sphere of deception. parts of ghoul tumbled off the ring. draus lurched momentarily, trying to gauge what she cut. and from out of the fog, avo kicked off the edge, all eight echoheads launching him forward in a blast of motion. the pace at which she realized his ruse spoke to how fast her mind ran. the fact she managed a half-turn spoke great things of her reflexes. the way he slammed into her at speeds north of a hundred and twenty miles an hour spoke to the changing of the times. the air around them ruptured as her forelimbs were twisted from stability, their bodies spiraling. he felt one her subarms grab him, pulling him in around the neck. a crack shook his head. stars flashed across his eyes, his brain bouncing as if it had been struck by a sledgehammer. she headbutted him again. he headbutted her back. a mutual crack sang out between their armors. clasped tight in a grapple, they plunged down, his echoheads spearing out to find something to latch onto. laughing he activated his auto-seance again. +still nostaglic, reg?+ +yeah,+ she said, amusement shining through. the session went dead. she clenched her left sub-arm and, along his neck, he felt a wisp-thin pressure begin to sink through his outer plating. Chapter 8-10 Bleed it Out chapter 8-10 bleed it out you will not win every battle as you are. this is not a critique on your skills, but a statement of circumstance. look at yourselves. feel your current biological templateyour standard baseline sheathe. that burning in your lungs after mere hours of activity? the strain in your muscles as you struggle to bear weights barely heavier than yourselves? this is a limitation of physical attributes. youwithout thaumaturgy or high technologycannot alter your attributes. instead, you must work around them. now, emerging out from this cage before you is a manticore-retriever. we call him mattis. this model of nu-dog is one ton of synthetic hyper-muscle capable of tearing through a liac. it moves five times faster than a flatwhich is what you all are right nowand it does not feel pain or fear. over the course of the next few seconds to minute, mattis will kill all of you. you have no chance of surviving, but survival has nothing to do with your orders. sell your lives. bleed the dog. write a post-session report during your death-time in your phylacteries. mattis. kill oh, hells, [laughs]. looks like its gonna be a short day." -commander winston nicoma, highflame regular 8-10 bleed it out the monowire raked across avos headplates inch by inch, the slithering strand sinking with each retraction. a blow thundered against his chest, the impact heavy one moment and gone the next. his new mycelia drank blunt force far better than the muscles he used to have. twice more he felt draus strike him with her free hand, propelled back by bursts of force from her wing-scythes. retaliating, he clawed as she struck, his new digits leaving ugly scratches upon her rig, the tips of his fingers splitting even titanium. operating on sheer instinct, he clasped her tight around him as her wire sawed through his armor, the serrated edges of his eight echoheads slashed across her back, curving in to spear at her. the world was spinning fast, but their fall was long, the neutering of time making even gravity hobbled. in the same moment her wire severed the ceramite under his jaw, one of his echoheads punched true. they sang with a crackle, the air popping with a small shockwave. through layers of metal, meat, and bone, the echohead dived, impacting hard against the regulars ribs. blood gushed and the tail fed. avo fed. it didnt matter that her wire was still working to decapitate him, the thrill was afire in him. it was better to be alive at this moment than be spared, safe but bored for the rest of time. she twisted. force burst free from her side. avo felt his gut lurch as his armored back clashed against a hardened pillar. the impact shuddered through him, the structure behind him fissuring. as he was before, his bones would have shattered. he would have died. now, though the impact thundered his breath out of his lungs, the blow danced down his mycellial fibers, evening across his body twisting again, she dove him down as they struck another pillar. the wiring twisted around his outer skull and he felt it tighten more, biting halfway through ceramide. pain began to tinkle through his senses as his echoheads chittered, clearing the confusion. spinning, crashing, grinding, and brawling, she was driving him against the column holding up the third-highest dueling ring. with fifty feet running between each pillar, the velocity at which she slammed him was enough to crumble a commercial aerovec. angling herself, she timed a surge of acceleration from both wings to smash him back-first against the pillar again. a heavy impact staggered him, but his plating and thread-like interior kept him from losing his breath. he felt himself scrape, twisting away from the wall again. the wire chewed even deeper. another squeeze and hed be without a head. a static picture greeted hima thin thrumming extension emerging from between the knuckles of her right sub-arm. implanted frequency stilleto. because of course she had one. she clenched her fist, making to finish him before her wire did but his blow came first. the echohead, still lodged deep inside her punctured midsection, extended once more. this time, even the lacing of her ribs failed her. her core shattered against the head of his tailthe flavor of his devastation like shoving ones tongue into someone elses shattered mouth, licking at fragments of bone dancing like teeth broken free of gums. the monowire sliced through. a line of pain glided deep. yet, her blade never came, and her grip slackened. with brutal delight, he found that his echohead had instinctively clamped its teeth around the shaft of her spine. he had her. now, she would her wings exploded with force. something hard crashed into him as several courses of pain comingled across his body. with a sickening snap, he felt her pull free from his tail, a piece of her vertebrae still bitten between its jaws. he, meanwhile, struck a pillar at a diagonal angle, with all the force of his acceleration cracking down between his neck and shoulder. it was a testament to his new bodys durabliity that he only folded instead of splattering. his exterior plates held, but the mycelia tore. chasms of pain opened down his back and shoulders, the agony consuming his mind. he felt his echoheads lash out, haywire and uncommanded, desperate to protect their host. meanwhile, avo felt, his skull spinning, focus lost. and with that, his celerostylus went untensed. the weight of time fell like a hammer blow from the skies as gravity tore down from the air. a hoarse cry wheezed out from avos mangled lip. he blinked. licking at his wounds, he found the front half of his mouth missing, his incisors chipped, and the plate beneath his skull severed clean. the monowire must have sliced through him as draus shot past him. he coughed, hacking out blood. something was filling one of his lungs as well. had draus managed burst his lungs from a few punches thrown an inch away? what the hells did they learn at regular academy. unable to use his own voice, he had his echoheads cry out. another snapshot of the world formed around him. ten feet until he struck water. a disturbance some eight feet away, ripples beneath the water. probably where draus struck. splashing into the murky depths, avo felt the sting of fetid water pouring into his wounds. then, subsequently, he felt no pain at all. hurt and wounds dissolved from his body like salt in water. the missing flap of flesh grew across his mouth. his fangs reformed. from hewn edges, his ceramite plating pooled back together. swallowing a drink of the foul water, he felt his collapsed lung begin to expand even as he choked. the water beneath the rings wasnt just water, but midnight rainwater. but the fact that the bones of so many fighters lay scattered at the base of the pool like ominous sediment spurred avo back to motion. the rains restored, but they couldnt spare one of death. he grinned. that was good. he didnt much care about killing anyway. he just wanted to hurt the regular. ghouls were not natural swimmers. they were capable of it, much like people could, but their designs led to poisoning the water with their blood. with his new echoheads, however, avo was a harpoon cutting past the softness of the waves, the tails undulating behind him, propelling him forward at a pace on par with his land-based movement. firing his reflexes anew, the water slowed as tumbling tides of displacement billowed out from his sides. his tails sang out and the shifting waters responded, his tactile sense fed more generously by currents of water than air. shuth up! avo growled. he speared at her using his echoheads, but with her accelero active, she was too fast. she spun, rolling with his arm still in her grasp, the momentum flinging him across the arena despite his drastic weight advantage. avo tumbled and slid. she managed to strike him twice mid-flight before he passed her reach. impacting the ring hard, he felt the ball of his shoulder snap back into place as he landed poorly. with a flex, he felt his fibers tighten, but the bone ached with soreness. groaning, he made to stand but crumpled to his knees as blood flowed free from his ribs. across from him, draus looked little better, face mangled, intestines swaying. but her fingers were still tight around the frequency blade humming in her hands. she wasnt close to breaking. neither was he. for a frozen instant, their eyes met, and they beheld the damage their wrought on each other. her large intestines were still spooled at her feet, the wound half-healed, leaving parts of her organs on the outside. parts of her optical nerves had regrown, but the tech was gone. they breathed, waiting for the rains to heal them enough to stand. a cheer came from the stands. i love free entertainment! bright-wealth shouted. draus grinned then, an expression of brutal delight that seemed to mirror his own. he shook his head. biting. suppose to be my thing. kiss my ass, rotlick, you steal my tricks, i get to steal one of yours. he groaned. its not a trick just hungry. she snorted a laugh and spat a globule of blood. a think one of my ribs might be floating inside me. a couple of pieces maybe. avo inhaled and felt the same way. cut my reflex booster. she sighed. fuck. is that why youre still standin? i was trying to get your spine. godsdamned booster is thick as shit. was already hell cutting through those plates. she spat again and swallowed some rainwater. that grafters probably a keeper, you know. might want to add her mem-data to your meta. maybe share a session. he nodded slowly. your rig. broke it. yeah, riverll be annoyed but i wouldve bricked it sooner or later. draus wiped her face, smearing blood as she began blinking. she had been fighting him blind this entire time. and he was the one with echolocation. eyes coming back? he asked. i can see sorta the light again. you owe me some mods there. had some custom chrome done there you decided to ruin with your stumps. she shook her head. stabbed me with your stumps. who does that. wanted to use my thumbs. yeah, i cut your arms off for a reason. now, im wonderin what that reason was. avo hissed a low laugh. forced my hand by removing my hands. the joke seemed to hurt her more than any of her wounds did. jaus, avo. maybe leave the jokes to me. yeah, avo said. you were pretty funny flailing in the water. like a baby seal. baby seal that took your arms and nearly put one through your head. you need more practice. nearly got you. yeah. sure you did. howd you like the monowire? a little tight. he made his tails chitter. echoheads? yeah, i think they go well on you. somethin that can make up for your dog-shit hand-to-hand. i mean, godsdamned, avo, i was blind and i felt that elbow comin. where were you throwing that from? the sky? hissing, he waved her off. what was that? what was what? twisted. grabbed arm. broke it. weird. its just basic grappling. what? they dont teach that in ghoul academy. no, avo said. teach ghouls how to die there. a beat passed. draus hummed. i suppose they do. you get the anger out? avo asked. no. still got half a mind to pop you with my projectile launcher. you? still hungry. tempted to pull the air out from your lungs. well, aint that a happy ending: all that hurtin for us to come out perfectly unsatisfied. welcome to new vultun. she laughed. as the rain fell, avo watched his hand mend back together entirely, the whiteness of his plating fusing over the claws. he made to stand but frowned as he twitched his fingers. he held his hand up, gazing up into the mist, and just existed for a moment. draus? avo asked. hm? do you feel like youre real?" Chapter 8-11 Limbo chapter 8-11 limbo shard-3: greatling is going to make his move next week. mirror-convex: received. does he have any information regarding the incident in the gutters? shard-3: negatory. hes clueless as the rest. ive tapped them well, maybe not all of them. chambers is still missing. two techs with him. dead or captured. scalpers have them. mirror-convex: dead, then. shard-3: most likely outcome. they took the ghoul with them. memory leaks came back with it smeared though. looked like the damn thing put up a hell of a fight. rotlick had some pretty weird wards on it. looked almost professional. only got a glimpse while it was making a victim out of rantula though. mirror-convex: yes, the moonblood? shard-3: another one of greatlings hair-brained ideas. i swear to jaus, its like babysitting a bomb waiting to go off. the half-strand wont stop giving me conflicting orders. i think hes having a mental breakdown. mirror-convex: received. continue monitoring the situation. we move to intercept if nothing else changes. -conversation between incubi and handler, ori-thaum 8-11 limbo time passed. draus blinked. what? he didnt answer her immediately, choosing instead to revel in the sensation of the falling spray washing the wounds from his body. real. do you feel like you exist? the fuck kind of question is that? honest one. avo what the hells are you talkin about? are we still fighting?" she sighed. "are are you havin another moment? is that what this is? because if this is, i wanna talk about that her words drifted past him while he cupped raindrops with his winds, shifting them aimlessly from one to another. before the soul. before all this. it was like a dream to me. limbo. an unlife. wasnt miserable. wasnt happy. just was. tried being what my father wanted. he twitched his claws and curled them, feeling his joints move anew. i think thats what happened. when the node forced me to kill him. ended the dream. ended my limbo. set me free. draus stared, blankly. thats uh real poetic and stuff. avo frowned. real poetic and stuff. cmon, draus said, shrugging, what do you want from me? a hug? i shoot shit and kill half-strands, avo, im not a fuckin philosopher. the honesty was appreciated, but the alienation remained. souhyou havin a moment there or we still fightin? in a moment, avo said. she shook her head in disbelief. youre unbelievable, you know that. no, avo said. its just this isnt supposed to happen. what? me. you. the fight. youre supposed to kill something like me. what i used to be. kill me easy and move on. he looked up at the highest ring again, where his brothers lay dead and pasted. where he butchered them with contempt and ease. not what i was before. was this what he wanted? rolling her shoulder, draus wiped the blood streaming out from her reforming eyes. your pa? he used me. hm. not him. another offshoot. still dont fully know what he is. but he used me to kill him. made me feel it for a reason. broke me. broke me from my parameters. draus was walking over to him, tension bleeding off her posture as she shook off the post-fight adrenaline. now, i not you anymore? draus offered. her rig was gone. a few pieces that remained of the wings drifted upon the shaking waters. now, she was clad in but the thermalskin undersuit, its hexagonally laminated scales plastered to her musculature. reaching down, he noticed her clicking something, a hidden pocket patched along the side of her hip. she pulled out a thin sticka line of hiflass. didnt take you for a smoker, he said. its hiflass. it steadies the nerves after gettin bloody, she held one out to him. he considered rejecting her as he had with chambers; he never much liked smoke. not with how they reminded him of the aftermath wrought by fusion burners. hows your booster? he flexed his celerostylus. pain stung his senses. he held back a wince. healing. he reached out and accepted her offering. lasts longer in this body. dont feel the strain as much. dont know how long i can keep it active. the refugees. when i gave them the chance to kill the jocks. they were unchained. it was wonderful. with a mental command, he caressed reqs deep memories using his metamind. through countless walls and hundreds of miles, a single gleam flashed down through walls and layers, all the way up in the tiers. mem-locking someone was a beautiful thing. thats why you did it? she snorted. youre lookin for a new hit. it wasnt a hit, he hissed. i wanted i wanted to know to feel what it was choice. choice in totality. he paused, his black eyes intent on hers. draus. if i can. if the frame fixes the other soul. do you want it? for the first time, he watched her gaze quiver, breaking away from him. she spat her near-finished hiflass into the water. drop it. he cocked his head and chittered softly. whats stopping you? avo asked. he leaned down, closer, speaking directly to her. you can choose to. take back your mantle. show highflame her elbow smacked him across the chest. he stumbled back. i said fuckin drop it. she fears what it means, the woundshaper laughed. poor, poor girl. she fears the power that it will grant her to exceed her station so much. pure thing, she was made to be a soldiera lion of a sacrifice, but a sacrifice still. should she ascend to master, what mockery would that make of all her kindred that fell? how you shake her reality. it needs to just be me? avo said. my frame it can change things. free us. free everyone. and what the hells would that do? draus asked, more frustrated than enraged. what what kinda world you think you make if everyone''s free? to be as they want? probably just this one." she stepped up to him and jabbed a finger into his fungus-plated chest. "because ill tell you what freedom is avo, freedom is maximizing your own choices, and a hell of a lot of time, that means takin someone elses options so they dont do you first. well just end up like the guilds again. you aint thought this through. and you are running from it, he replied claws clenching. he turned his head. you were happy when we fought. when you kill. happy to battle. why wont you let yourself be happy now? because it aint gonna change nothin draus snarled. the people i wanted to save? that life i wanted to live. thats all done and gone now. i just missed my chance to die then. with a heaven you can die all you want avo! rotlick, thats not the point a ringing spectral wail washed through the circuit chamber, the rising pitch a warning klaxon broadcast through chains of ghosts. avo shifted his attention from draus to the descending messengers, the noise delivered on wavelengths of thought instead of vibration. a request flashed across avos cog-feed. green river wanted to link him. ghost-link accepted +river, what+ +yosanna kivranpuvak. she messaged me earlier. told me that her husbands auto-seance came online, that he used it to call her.+ a knot formed at the base of avos guts. mightve been the sudden clench of worry brought by the news. might just be some lingering damage yet to heal. what? draus asked. he ignored her. +when?+ +now,+ green river replied. +just now. avo, the strix said+ +i remember what the node said.+ he hissed, mind racing. the node all but stated that yosannas husband was dead. now he was using a session to contact her? a packet of mem-data danced along their interlaced ghosts. a new marker manifested in his deepnav: the location of the turncoat. she was two traffic stops away from the docks, on the thirtieth floor of a hab-block. the details marked it as one in a series: building ox-three. +seal her. cut off all loci. no ghosts. place your best wards around her.+ a spike of annoyance greeted him. +i dont need you to tell me rote procedure, ghoul. i have accomplished my end, but the nether must be left to you.+ a lull followed. +please. i do not possess the skill nor means to contend with whatever this is.+ link lost avo growled. draus. turncoat. her husband called her. auto-seance. shes at the docks. immediately, all hint of animosity was lost. got it. do you he didnt hear the rest as he parted into a rush of wind, diving up vents and gaps, washing through halls at speeds that sent drones careening against walls. someone was entering the turncoats mind. someone that probably wasnt her husband. a churn of apprehension spiked inside avo. he had a strong suspicion as to who he soon might have to face. and despite all his newly amassed power, he didnt know if he was ready.0v3l-b1n. Chapter 8-12 The Twice-Built Cage chapter 8-12 the twice-built cage the first of us offered that which feels. and so, their vigil was numb coldness. the second offered all the joy, never to be. and so, their vigil was sorrow everlasting. the third offered peace of mind and body, forswearing bloodshed and damnation. and so, their vigil was fury unending. the fourth and final offered nothing and everything, accepting the hungers for what they were, accepting the world for what it was. and so, their vigil was hollow emptiness. heed the four; heed our words, the lowest masters of noloth, no better than slaves nor vermin. all we have, we give to the ones that feed, to spare the future for the ones above. -lamentations of the four famines, [redacted] text 8-12 the twice-built cage the skies over xin yunsha bled screaming specters, their neon-scarred paths echoing commands for all to remain indoors, to await the completion of thoughtscans. in answer to these orders even the structures of the district changed, growing layers of enamel and bone to shroud the fragility of hab-blocks. something about this sight appealed to avo as he drifted down slopes caked by drifts of still molting exoderms from the nearby structures, the dead skin flaking forth like descending snowfall. a problem came and blocks rebirthed themselves, evolving in pace to contend with the obstacle. without the galeslither, avo would have been forced to jack into an aerovec for cover. probably one of the food trucks. with his heaven of air, however, the latitude of his liberation was far more expansive. the nature of his freedom necessitated that he merely mask his mind to slip from unseen exorcists. from block to block, he surged, using public access loci to hide from the sweeping tides of exorcist cast specters lashing down from above. his cog-feed narrowed in on yosanna, metamind attuned to filter in on her accretion. all other spheres of thoughstuff faded from view as he approached the dockside with care. the buildings across from the silenced docks were shaped like chipped teeth. their topmost sections were carved to leave a curved groove of emptiness, serving as a placeholder for an animated ox carrying a flashing number, the range running from one to twelve. strangely, the number four seemed to be missing. a cultural issue there, perhaps. in the block marked by an ox carrying the number three, yosannas presence was unmoving, her presence nested deep. a mere hundred feet away, he noticed that the street signs were pulsing, their oscillating phantoms sputtering erroneous strings of mem-data. beside the staircase leading up before bone-caged doors, vending machines crackled, their speakers playing discordant notes as they vomited a deluge of consumables. something tugged at the corner of his awareness, a subtle sensation like a flea landing upon the pond that was his metamind. strange how so small a feeling could narrow ones focus. the silencepreviously unnoticedgnawed at avo. switching his memories to a more public wavelength, shards of ice burst through his being like shrapnel. every sphere of thoughtstuff was perfectly stationary. unmoving. only yosannas mind flowed alone, its presence a candle walled in by discs of ice. avo knew the work of another necro when he saw it, but for someone to quarantine their effective harm to ox-three and no other structure displayed a level of precision few could attain. that none of the specters soaring overhead noticed anything also told a tale of secrecy. whoever managed this was beyond adept at the craft. there was true skill on display here. enough for him to be concerned; suspicious. repairing ontology - 95% finalizing structuring restoring canons a flash sparked inside avo, spilling out through currents of wind made fissures by perversions of reality. his second soul burned, its existence known to him, but not fully felt. not like his first. cracks still remain upon its structure. and the vessel his woundshaper made a note of disgust. is disfigured. twisted into itself, i know not how. these ephemerals ruptured its ontology but left this heaven a machine structured upon stilts of self-mutilation. you should slay yourself using your new limbs, master. sieze the nearest opportunity and come see the harm for yourself. soon, avo replied. it would be a lie to say the growing power of his heaven did not thrill him. it would be pure folly for him to stop and indulge in another apotheosis now, however. not when the cache promised to him by the node was at stake. he found himself hesitating. he considered his path forward as if he was about to face someone like waltonor maybe another node of his father. for all the years he devoted to the art, avo only considered himself an accomplished practitioner. walton was a master. much of what walton accomplished was still beyond him in scope and complexity. his father spun plots upon plots to access locations thought impossible, smuggling sequences and mem-cons through nu-pets and other sources of symmetry. likewise, the way he built his phantasmicsof all phantasmal architecturewas a thing beyond artful; even now, avo could not speak higher of the mans ability to shape his mindscapes, for at waltons hands, aesthetic blended into pragmatic in a fusion of form and function. suddenly, the bone-molded doors seemed the closed jaws leading down the throat of a hiding leviathan. on string-thin currents of wind, he made his approach, intruding with caution while under the guise of a gale. he slipped through a windowits layer of protective enamel not yet finished growing. his approach sent cups crashing and rattled cupboards, and with his being spread wide, he felt his way through the room as a swirl of wind, the yondergales masking the full weight of his presence. there were three bodies in the room, all of them sang, and none of them moving. one lay collapsed against the floor, foam flowing free from her mouth, a broken wine glass rolling across pearl-sheen tiles, inches from her curled fingers. the other two that lived with her were slumped on their couch, eyes empty but open, an unnerving vacancy in their stares. casting his whispers perception over them, avo found the cause of their comas to originate from their frozen thoughts. they breathed still. their bodies functioned. their minds, however, remained caged, something impeding all flow. activating his ghostjack, avo attempted to interface their minds and after but a moment diving through each, felt the weight of apprehension lean on him further. wards were in place, but not on the outside. instead, most of the mind remained exposed while a single phantasmican auto-seance if avo were to guess by the sequences it derivedwas surrounded by pylons of lashing lightning, its currents jumping from ghost to screaming ghost. it was like someone had built a wall of defenses inside their minds, but left part of the foundational structure exposed. these wards themselves were also of strange design, leaving what seemed to be deliberate gaps around the phantasmic. it was as if whoever designed it wanted someone to strike deep, reach in. during his brief study of the phantasmal mechanism, he realized that the wards had been synchronized to the auto-seance themselves, effectively allowing stacking of traumtic output. but even so, the nature of a ward''s design meant that if they were to be deployed through a session, the minds it leap across would also suffer immense damageit was like firing a kinetic kill rod, but using a bridge as the chamber: a butchers bill of damage was certain to be reaped. faced with such uncanny instruments, the foreboding within avo only grew. it made little sense in terms of defense, but perhaps that was not their function. the lives in this block meant little to a invading necroor cadre of necros. carefully, he retracted the ghosts he paired to the surface memories of the three sang and scythed the room using his whisper. a beat passed. no retaliation came. no one knew he was here. not yet. there were certain strategies someone could employ if they held minds in thrall. every being capable of thought and reason could theoretically serve as a makeshift locus of sorts, and human minds were more than susceptible to such designs. from the perspective of an infiltrator, perhaps those placed in a coma were meant to serve as tripwires against scrying specters or surveillance against physical intruders. regardless, they werent protected. not in a manner that would allow their minds to remain preserved. phantasmics detected - [error] [damage severe] [damage severe] [damage severe] [damage severe] [damage severe] [auto-seance] where several constructs used to remain were only chasms spewing mem-errors. they were unmade, similar to the wards. dismantled instead of frayed or fragged by brute traumas. at the heart of her palace was a small shack. or what used to be a small shack. parts of it had been deletedshredded clean by invasive ghosts. only the door seemed tangible. the rest of the structure was flickering in and out of existence, drifting between the void of forgetfulness and deep memory. throughout his journey, he found no traps, no planted spyware or trap-phantasmic. he was merely a lonesome intruder in the post-apocalyptic mindscape of a woman near fully nulled. still, it was unwise to expose himself. it would be a loud thing to do if he wanted to dive deeper and pluck at the foundational structure of her memories to see what she could recall. in his cog-feed, her awareness remained at zero. always zero. it was as if her ego had been extracted clean from the structure of her own mind. as he was turning a corner to study the last of her ruined phantasmics, the flash of a holovision flashed in the corner of his eye. halting, he adjusted the memories his ghosts were channeling and shuttled himself back along the sequences of the current structure he was diving through. he noticed then. a string of mem-data straying from the rest, its ghosts shaped to hide amongst the other via merging memories, but part of it still lingered on the outside, swaying like a thread of human hair growing from the matted fur of a nu-dog. he traced the deviance through a fractured structure made of honeycombed glass and, through its porcelain-white doors, on the floor of a blindingly white and barren hotel lobby, was a kosla-12 entertainment system. avo felt his gut clench. carefully, examining each moment of memory drifting past him with the utmost care, he swam through the mem-data, shifting himself below the kosla-12 to better scry at it. interfacing with her metamind, he found the construct deposited approximately a month ago. a month and a few days. around the same time he woke in the maw. up close, there was no mistaking the item, it looked to be the very same system walton used to take him on his first dive. this could be a cache. or a trap. both were mutually likely. prepared to end his dive at any moment, he cast a ghost out from his ghostjack and had it access the kosla-12. ghosts: [406] if things went wrong, he could cut more of his ghosts loose as well. use them as sacrificial flares before fleeing deep into the yondergales, pocketing his mind using the protection of planes as a layer of defense. error codes flashed as his deployment tried to access the construct. the kosla-12 rippled thenjust for a moment. it blended into the environment of her palace, but its foundational memories displayed themselves as he scried at the mem-data. ghosts: [407] the coldness inside him grew. he knew these sequences. they came from his mind. moments from his first dive, of him beholding the strix in action on the day of the block war. of walton walking him deep into the street squire kill team. the compulsion weighed on him. the need to see its secrets grew heavy. reaching out, he reintegrated with his drifting ghost and accessed the kosla-12 directly. almost immediately, the kosla-12 vanished into strings of collapsing fractals, the data sinking deep into his mind. multiple downloads flashed through his cog-feed, with new functions and markers appearing within his deepnav by the second. privileges granted: welcome, famine of defiance [helix installed] haemophage restrictions removed penumbral gateway access: granted - installing access key to [sanctuary] elder mythos volume (i/ii/iii): installed new knowledge and mem-data fused to his metamindand even deeper. something within his ontology thundered as a missing piece snapped into place. if his woundshaper could gasp, it would have. master i feel i feel the nature of your blood loosening. but as these new gifts solidified in his mind, so too did the palace around him decay, collapsing, the absence of the kosla-12 as if a lodestone to the pillars of her mind. around him, her palace turned to ash. the crystalline spires bled into a winding dome given structure from the ribs of a titanic beast. the ground hardened into a thing of obsidian and decay, bodies spilling out as he rose upon a dais. as the sky ruptured and wept darkness, avo made to end his dive, ejecting himself from the collapsing mind of the former ori-thaum guilder. a single voice halted his escape. do not run, a voice similar to waltons spoke. the sound was the same, but it lacked all warmth and filled his senses with the choke of falling ash and rising smoke. we wish to speak with you, strayer. come and rejoin your brothers, if only for the last time." Chapter 8-13 The Four Famines chapter 8-13 the four famines kindred, the strayer enters our cage. the cunt seeks to mend that which he hid in this vessel; folly. fucking folly. raw, rancid fu-cking folly! to kill an entire branch of ourselves over this it matters little. we will see this made right. the missing helix will be received. from there, we will amend the branch with a new fork to replace the strayer. the fourth famine must be reborn. this one, without the sentimentality of the previous. what if what if they were right? what if our ghouls speak no more of this. our will has been made stone. hear: the fabric of a lure has been disrupted. the turncoat. our access point. the strayer has come to reclaim that which they hid. they have descended our twice-made cage but emotion, i did not see them enter. where the fuck is he! where! nor i, peace. nor i. keep looking. hmm. he has deviated from how he wields our art, but there must be a presence. scan the loci. scan the minds. send specters to the surrounding blocks. he leaves a trace. there must be a trace. -conversation between the low masters??vl-b!n. 8-13 the four famines to watch a mind collapse around you was one thing. to realize that a second layer had been built beneath the bones of the first was another matter altogether. it was impossible for a single necro to do in the scant time since yosanna was contacted by her husband. avo knew then he faced not one of his fathers nodes, but more. vastly more. a towering mound lifted him higher as the facade finally broke, mem-data around him changing faster than he could adapt, the ground he stood on mutated from a pallid path to a mangled pile, remains of countless ghouls slopping beneath the dancing memory-strands of his avatar as a thunderstorm of ghosts resequenced all around him, each lashing new orders into this pseudo-reality. nothing of the current palace was outright destroyed this time, only changed. usurped. the mountain in the skies dissolved like flakes of paint peeling from a wall, and through the fissures, the clasping bones of a creature too vast to fully fit itself in the pocket of his gaze materialized, its skeletal midriff fusing around him as tumors of darkness spread from each length of rib. the bodies beneath him hardened, with flat backs rising to provide balanced ground for his legs, and from the sides snapped rails made from severed arms. he was ascending on a column bearing a dais, and its foundation was death. all around him, he felt new signatures enter, his cog-feed screaming as mind after mind entered the palace, jumping in through the auto-seancethe last working phantasmic left of yosannas mind. master, staying here is unwise, we must theyre not attacking, avo said, his intent clear, cutting off the woundshapers words. they dont know where i am in the real. there remained a risk to staying. that was indeed true. but where your typical necro could not escape being nulled, he presided over two planes. for him, escape meant ejecting a ghost and ending the dive before pulling his whisper back through the winds. hunt as they might for the source of his phantasmics, there was nothing to find in the real. the weeper keened a low note that made avos guts water. unconsciously, his winds lashed at the ground. the scabbed one growled. lets be finished with this, emotion! he turned to the heartless and held up a gore-caked hand. call the hungers. call the unbirthed fucking divine. let this mistake see what became of his progenitors. his face cracked into a savage expression of cruelty. lets see how much acceptance you truly embody, defiance. enough, peace, the heartless node said. traditions should remain. a chill flooded the palace, the indifference the heartless felt to all things total; absolute. he was of our mold once. as such, his ruination must be witnessed by the chains. chains. such was avos first word spoken to the derivatives of his father. offshoots or other branches. the true nature of the low masters design remained beyond the boundaries of his comprehension, slowly though, things were taking shape. oh, by the hunger, the scabbed one sighed. hes fucking dull. hes dulled himself, crippled his own mind to spite us. a loud mournful cry sang out from the two mutilated waltons pulling the chariot. the weeper sobbed harder. why defiance why would you do this to yourself why would you do this to us of the oldest house? are we not of an origin? did you not taste the waters the waters of the hungers dream? when we were one? did you forget our bargain? for our people! for their people. of old noloth? confusion spread through avo, and woundshaper rose to answer. the oldest house? the the tongues of the hungers? tell me not that this is the same self-breeding servant-king of old noloth? wahakten? the thief of dreams! servant to a false pretender, naming itself a god! false entity? avo asked. i have lain gaze on many a god. we sense each other, our natures kindred mirage-infused flames. beacons caged by the rigidity of reality, we see each other. the hungers, though, were no true divinity. whatever their make, they rendered no shine. by words spoken from these facets of humanity, they could be little more than mere delusion. the nolothi had their gods, but i never tasted the presence of any hungers. but how could that be the case when he saw the low masters wield thaumaturgies? use heavens? were those memories false as well? a dichotomous pause echoed in the depths of two minds, across two realities. the owl inside the heartless chest cocked its head. have you nothing to say still, defiance? cowardice did not run strong in avos nature, but faced with a tribunal of immensely skilled necros bearing semblance to his father felt like being a whipped ghouling waiting for the sadstick again. the beast screamed and wailed, confused as to why he wasnt capitulating, begging the low masters for clemency. the agony he felt turned into a tearing hurt as part of the fear flowed toward himself, toward something new slotted within his being. the helix trembled inside him. he felt like he was still flesh in the real, and not wind. avo spoke with every last mote of strength, in defiance of his nature, straining to keep his dread''s numbness from spilling through. i i am broken. needi need you to explain. the scabbed one rolled his eyes and turned his gaze skyward, toward the pale-white ribs that seemed to run on forever, higher and higher, like a malignant spine fusing protruding from nothingness. he starves us. he fucking starves us. we cant even exact righteous retribution because the ignoramus can''t grasp the meaning of his demise. he turned to the choir of other scabbed behind him, their clenched teeth and seething hate reopening wounds across their bodies. the heartless held up a hand. the owl at the center of his chest flapped its wings. strayer, do you wish to know the meaning of this tribunal? the nature of your transgression? yes, avo said. so be it. we, four from the one, are the famines, servants to the hungersthe inverted dreamer, from that which the waters of this dreaming unsea flows. masking confusion under the pretense of mind-fray, avo spoke his next question. i do not remember any of this. a high gasp from the weeper. the scabbed one jeered, his avatar a cauldron of leaking traumas. only the heartless remained unburdened. we were one, once. all of us. a lord of many changing names and changing forms, our rule descended from mind to mind, across countless titles. such was the way of things in noloth. by the wisdom of immortality and favor of the hunger, such was our mandate. and with the blessings it offered, with the flow of its dreaming unsea, we rose as a nation to immortality, our chains unending. dreaming unsea? avo asked. the scabbed one jeered. the ''nether,'' you simple fuck! what the topsiders call the nether. those crystal-fuckers up in the tiers lie, we sailed these waters first. we. the hungers brought us into its pool to be the first sailorsthe first! and now everyone speaks of ori-thaum ori-thaum ori-thaum! he roared, scabs unfurling into jutting blades. those shits stole from us! they took the broken pieces of our heaven and called it a utopia! we guided the dreaming! we! kept our peoples eternal! immortal! we were destined for a shared oasis and then and then. one of the weepers let out a mournful howl. and then that stain-blood jaus avandaer used us to break the heavens. he shattered us, a weeper cried and broke into incoherence. the waltons pulling their chariot wailed. another spoke in their stead. ours was the eternal water! the dreaming unsea! where all could reign in the dreams of our god regardless of their station in the flesh. so long as the stillborns flowed! so long as the tax was paid. the woundshaper rumbled in confusion. but a soul sups nothing from a life unshaped. the infantsthe unthinking these beings incapable of belief offer no essence. what could such a god feed from nothingness. it scoffed. only one that is no god at all. the woundshaper paused. not a god perhaps, but a liminal being all the same peace. joy. enough. the heartless let their head drop. we speak in fragments. i sense he remains lost. perhaps it is time that we show him the presider of his fate. no, the weeper quailed. yes, the scabbed one hissed. call it. call the hungers. let him greet the inverted dreamer once more. he smiled. it will be a pleasure to see his mind shatter. Chapter 8-14 The Inverted Dreamer (I) chapter 8-14 the inverted dreamer (i) ah. the hungers reach out again. yes. i know, like a worm burrowing through the soil of time. liven yourself, akunsande. it has been too long since we bled one of your kin. -zein thousandhand, the godslayer 8-14 the inverted dreamer (i) the last words the scabbed low master spoke came synchronized with a flash of light. from above, the bone palace widened and withered, the mem-data around him twisted by the countless nodes, their mastery considerable alone nigh-overwhelming synchronized. there was something special in working with oneselfa deeper intuition that couldnt come even after years of teamwork. guiding hurricanes of ghosts flowing in perfect tandem, they rewove structures around them as sequences shifted, the simulated reality flickering. above, the simulation of sky suddenly ruptured, a new dawn opened up at its center. he felt as if a frog at the bottom of a well gazing upon an unfathomable light. and then, everything clicked into shape for his perception. the tunneling path led toward the shine of another place. another extension to the barrel. another beacon cast by a distant auto-seance. other loci. other lobbies. ghosts flowed down the conjoining sequences as memories were laced like knots on a rope bridge, the sequences descending further and farther. drifting fragments of memory washed over avo as he tasted flashes. instants of recollection. he knew some of these memories. he had seen them upon his infiltration earlier. they belonged to the tenants that once lived here, their minds now half-nulled, restrained by an unseen force. as another series of auto-seances flashed and connected, he understood what the low masters were trying to build. this was a bridge. something that was raising the bandwidth of memories across a cluster of minds, capable of spreading out the strain. with each palace bridged, the cognitive capacity of the low masters grew, and they wielded their swelling influence. was it to mask their presence from the exorcists? to house something so great and obvious from the curious eyes of lurking necros the answer came as the waters of the nether suddenly shook. the ghosts rocked and quivered, but through the fusing of palaces, the new superstructure the low masters were creating held. a presence bled out from each of the walton-faced nodes, a thing felt rather than seen. ghosts bearing patterns and mem-data beyond comprehension bubbled from the orifices of the waltons, their existence a paradox, a knot, their wisping shapes a loom of cycling sequences, trauma spun seamlessly into other emotions as if they were one and the same. gazing upon the impossibility rattled avos wards. fathom a blood red hue, but then know it to be all other colors universally, in hue, in structure, in concept. the only separation was a trapped reverberation at the center of these anomalous ghosts, these strings coiling memories all bound together like a rat-king. the vibration shivered unnatural, un-gradual. displacement. such a word described it best. from one place to another it lurched as if there was a missing stretch of time between, as if focus had slipped from avos mind. confusion resounded from the depths of his frame, arising from his woundshaper. master these ghosts they are skimming in place upon the waters of time. inside, avo felt himself grow cold. oh the weepers began moaning in tandem. one after another, the countless concert of nodes clutched at their skulls as the ghosts bubbled out into the palace, forming an amorphous cloud at the center of the space. their pain was a thing of unity, and they all wept as shadows, mirroring the pain of one man. it comes. our master. our slaver. the scabbed ones laughed, their minds discordant, but all joined with the same hum of burgeoning brutality. oh, the godsdamned thing is even bigger than it was before. all the while, the heartless had begun to pray. praise be noloth. praise be the kingdom of the unseen mind. praise be our protector. he suddenly looked up, his eyes widening in shock as the first flash of emotion overtook his features. it arrives. it arrives. praise be the master above. praise be the lord of the undying! praise be the inverted dreamer! praise be noloth, fallen now, but fated to rise. and as one, the low masters fell silent, bowing their head in supplication for the un-god. it would be too vulgar a thing to call its arrival a cataclysm, and its spontaneous manifestation could not even be described as blurring. its movement mirrored the first few resurrections avo experienced. reality shuddered. the nether shivered. ghosts lurched and flowed as if a stone fell upon the waters, movement-choked. the mass inflicted suffocation on all that was. even with all the minds joined in unison, the structure the low masters had lashed together was fraying, memories shattering, auto-seances crumbling as ghosts fragmented into frayed memories. avo stared uncomprehending, trying to see it. he focused on, the congealed cloud made from tumorous ghosts as it began to thunder, and with the deafening wavelengths blasted out from the trembling mass, a sudden comprehension came as avo heard a chorus of words spoken in both high and low nolothic. where his understanding of the tongue failed him, the purity of intent that bridged from mind to mind brooked no confusion about what was being said. greetings! greetings! hello! the definition of its composition, however, was based upon a foundation of recursion, each memory a barrel, shifting from positive to negative and back again as if all the experiences it contained were but moments to a vicarity being sped up or rewound on an entertainment system. a series of schematics filled the void at the heart of the hungers. the architecture of the tower was beyond avos understanding both materially and metaphysically, but that which stood out from the image alone were the ten rings that looped its length and the fact that there was an inverted spire on the bottom of the structure as well. we sought an escape. a utopia that cannot be constructed in this reality, the hungers said. the native pillars of this canvas do not support the world we wish to design. hence, we seek to elevate this tier of reality. to derive what we need from this substructure and from its image, mold something anew. something grander. something of tunable perfection. the ancient city returned then, but now it sank deeper, and the channels of the maw had spread further, slowly forming a symbol. the hungers continued. the idea of the ladder was offered to us in a conclave. to you, wahakten, priest of the nolothi. a conspiracy rose against the gods as the unprophet jaus swayed us with his arcane technologies and a chance to subvert the heavens. by chance of fate or circumstance, we, the hungers came to be born of dragon and men both, our culture fitting the designs of his scheme to starve the gods from the inside, to split them will from ego. it speaks of the parting, the woundshaper said, a note of loathing coming through. that which you know as the godsfall. to think that were castrated from our own divinity by the mental-temporal equivalent of a knot of snakes what were you? avo asked. it took a surge of audacity to ask the question, but he needed it answered. the face of his former masterthe master of his mastersremained obscure to him, its design cloaked behind concepts and shrouds. are, the hungers said. are. we still remain. trapped. imprisoned. sealed between planes, our totality is a trailing wound running parallel above the structure of reality, crippled before the fullness of ascension.a crash of emotions spilled out from the hungers then, notes of howling anguish and despair raking against his wards like a river of nails washing down a chalkboard. discomforting as it was, avo found a comparative metaphor in likening it to a gestalt of negativity leaking into the public nether after a disaster, the synchronicity born of communities vast and conjoined in a way only a city could be. his following question was born more from compulsion than curiosity. for all the confusion the hungers inflicted, for all the dread, it was, in a manner, strangely beautifulnecrotheurgic artistry in style and function. how many are inside you? scorn rose from the cloud in trailing mem-data, the visual scene before him resembling steam hissing from a cloud. we numbered five hundred million during our attempt at ascension. we hold all the highborn houses of noloth and their retainers. our beings were made eternal by the touch of a fallen dragon. upon death, ours is where a minds eternity should lie, not to be fuel for some paracausal parasite. us. a community unending. a shared dream eternal, inverted away from the laws of entropy and demise. we were to become a new reality! the hungers snarled suddenly. its voice in that instant was every adult, every child. or we should have been. it paused, letting its lament fester anew before turning its ire on him again. we were the first to ascend the ladder, its construction made beneath our surface, an allowance on our part, a deal on jaus, and a feat belonging to those of the old banner. old banner?" they call themselves voidwatch. the last bastard inheritors to a star-striding empire, now broken, now twisted. nonetheless, it was our nature that allowed this great work to continue. stripping mind from hollowed bodies, we coveted the best of our people and bled a human design into the wounds of the dragons. wounds where we could fester without being swallowed. why? avo asked. to hide from the gods, the hungers answered. to cheat fated death and build a paradise eternal. we hide all those we deemed of worth within the hungersthis design of oursand left it to linger in the catacombs beneath the city. noloth was always a beast of two formsa reflection of brutality and gluttony on the topside where the gods ruled, and the hidden power where the future was promised below. the ladder helping jaus build it? using it as an escape from the world? yes. we were to disentangle all memories of myth and worship upon our promised ascension when we seeped between liminality. ascension assured. ascension denied. jaus had our precious tower skim across time when we were partly up the ninth circle, just as we fulfilled his desired deed. the woundshaper hummed. ninth circle. ninth sphere. the tenth, then, must be the installation of oneself into the totality of existence or something similar thereof, master. we are trapped now, the hungers said. trapped in a transition, pulled away from time. jaus promised us a world to ourselves. but he cleaved us using our very own nature. time. a pocket within a pocket, we remain here as an anchor of his making. that which you call ghost? these memories? phantasmics? have you wondered why they resemble a city of the mind so, even in your besotted state? have you? its a reflection of you? ah, so only missing facets of thought. not lame of mind like peace so claims. just kill the cunt, peace said. a new realization dawned, and with it came horror born of philosophy. the hungers were slaves using slaves feeding into slavery itself. his fatherthe low masterswere slaved to it but used the nether which it supposedly engendered, their art necrotheurgy, born from a new pillar of metaphysics lodged between realms of existence, an entire people serving as a counterweight for the foundations of modern-day communications, intelligence, and entertainment. and so you see now our predicament. our torture. these false waters flow only because we exist. these waters were ours and our own! no one else! a place as true as the material, not this this facsimile. the traitor guilds use our very ontology as scaffolding for your lesser miracles while the eternal city is bound to place, our paradise made purgatory. the woundshaper sighed. master do take heed that this creature may be exaggerating its involvement in the art of wielding minds. for all their claimed discredit toward the ori, those of the archipelago were to have mastered this necrotheurgy of yours long before the split. perhaps pacts between the ephemerals and dragons were not so rare in those days. the clashing details tore at avos mind. he hissed and his annoyance flowed through his metamind, raw and pure. the more answers came, the more questions followed. why the low masters? why the uprising? how even were the hungers trapped? it weighs on us, the hungers said. the use of the nether. its very existence. we feel it, growing with each death, spreading the wounds of the dragons. we were supposed to be the sky, but instead, we find ourselves as soil tread upon! a scale to bear the weight of our betrayers! and you, oh priest of mine, have opened a symmetrical wound. have you no shame? have you no decency toward your own people? how could you do something so foolish? how could you entomb our frame in that that creature? it felt as if a gauss flechette had struck him. creature? avo asked. the ghoul. your successful experiment. and a mistake on our part. we should have never permitted you to install that childs memories into that ghoul! and you should have never imbued the ghoul with our frame! a keening wail of heavy anguish erupted out from the hungers like a typhoon. avo felt his cog-feed crackle and fissure, his ghosts receding even deeper behind his wars. the hungers possessed a distance from him, a separation of entire realties, but its weight could be felt still, and with a whim, it could shatter him like an anvil falling upon glass. like a pendulum, its ire turned to the other priests. and how could you have missed this? the ghouls were an instrument of your conception! replaceable bandwidth to alleviate the strain! death to fuel the heavens we need to win this war! the heartless said nothing. the scabbed one scowled. the weeper sobbed. did you hear me, walton? you gave our greatest instrument to a creature that was less than a slave. less than a dog! they were made to express our hate! our hate! our boundless hate for the world! to bleed the betrayers forever! lick sacks of fucking waste-trauma! and you made the meat meant to carry our excess metaphorical shit a god! Chapter 8-15 The Inverted Dreamer (II) chapter 8-15 the inverted dreamer (ii) avo, listen. being a necrojack is simple, but that doesn''t mean it''s easy. this art is like building a house with bits of truth and much more falsehood. memories are fickle. malleable. even history might be reshaped. logic wont be enough. intuitions like letting your nose lead you when the room could fill up with smoke at any time. you want to find out whats true? look for the mistakes. mistakes are my favorite thing in the world. mistakes tell you what someone else wanted to do, and how they failed, and what else might not make sense. want makes fools of even gods. like a favored drug well do anything to get. you hold that desire, and you hold the keys to any mind. -conversation between walton and [redacted] 8-15 the inverted dreamer (ii) waste. waste, not even a monster. the withering winds of truth winnowed away a piece of avo. it didnt hurt when the dust of it left him, but the hollowness lingered. even before he belonged to walton, he thought himself a creature of purpose, a failure of design though he might be. now, however, the waters of the nether seemed to wash through him, his ego whistling from the crevices made from his fissuring concept of self. not even a dog, he muttered. the second blow hit him with the delay of a second. the child. they said that he had the memories of a child implanted inside him. the emptiness spread and lathered itself over the unhealed wound left by waltons final node. pain greeted pain, but one served as a foundation for the other, preventing a true internalization. was this why the last of waltons branch stole his choice? forced his hand? to innoculate him from these greater torments, deliberately castrating him of his filial piety to deaden the hurt following the coming blows. from one note of pain to another avos mind swirled. the hungers said something of his memories being copied. installed into him. what did they mean? child. there was i copied the memories of a child. what child? a dog-like bark of laughter came from the scabbed one. the cunt forgot why he did it in the first place. this would be pretty fucking comedic if it wasnt so godsdamned sad. and if you werent literally a replica to me. you fucking shamed us, strayer. shamed us all. shamed the man we used to silence. the dragon twitched. stupid shit, the scabbed one finished. with a spill of anger, he returned to silence as a bitter wryness stained the atmosphere around the dragon. we shall be the sole judge to your failings, the hungers said. a bout of conjoined laughter lingered at the tail of its words, notes building upon the rising foundation of avos loathing like descending bricks. it reminded him of mirrorhead. and that in of itself made avo quite inclined to engineer its eventual death. you truly do not remember the child, my priest? the hungers hummed, its mind a cleave between curiosity and growing suspicion. do not be shaken, master, the woundshaper interrupted. hold to your silence for now. betray nothing. "you have a recommendation. avo inner words came not as a question but as permission. he allowed the heaven to speak freely. vagueness should not merit clarity. they play using your blindness. inflict the same upon them. the dance of deceit need not be done alone. they clearly wish for you to make comment on this mystery child. yet, that is not our game. we seek to understand what occurred with you. lure them to speech. ask them why they think walton bound the memories to the child. make them wander through the topic. the loathing inside avo shifted, the turn spurred by the woundshapers advisement. his hatred rang inside of him, and this time he let the beast bray its hate, using it to focus his ire. there was something poetic about deriving strength from the hate poured inside him by the hungers, and as he used the passing of time like a whetstone, sharpening the tension of the palace, he broke the silence of minds with a hurled question. why do you think i bound the frame to the ghoul? the hungers tone dropped. slave? us? the scabbed one hissed, unable to bear the heresy. shut your cunt-mouth! strayer! or silence, the hungers hissed. the walton bound to the idea of peace obeyed. avo cast out an emotion, and its flavor was mockery. mockery for the other branches of walton. slaves one. slaves all. avo turned his gaze back to the hungers. tell me of the dead boy. why do you think i bound him to the ghouls? why do you think i have him in the frame. to spare him death? frames dont spare death. it just makes it a cycle. no father would inflict this on a son. but you are all severed. you should understand. no. the ghoul is more. more than the boy. more than the beast or the fragments. made to be godclad. made for choice. you deny the worth of your own child? the dragons spun, a new shape flowing out from their blood. the face of a young man greeted avo, shorn of hair and with ears rimmed with rings of gold. clasped in priestly robes, he bore a faint resemblance to walton, but it was the flash of a golden tangerine that caught avos eye. citrus. the smell flowed sharp and true. that was the taste of walton. the heartless clenched his jaws. the scabbed one began snarling curses. the weeper moaned in pain. no no, i dont want to remember! i dont! avohaketen! forgiven me! the image faded. the hungers froze. a cold realization dawned, its ichor freezing as its minds turned. you did not react avo worked to keep the ploy. he cursed himself internally. he is long dead the temperature in the nether shifted. the waters grew chilled. ghosts shivered. ripples came from each of the low masters, their conjoining ghosts screaming out into the nether in plumes of trauma, seeking a target they just couldnt find. for the first time, the heartless looked confused. but the weeper said, he has the helix! the mem-data shows i cant fucking find his mind, the scabbed one said. he doesn''t have any of the memories i have the hungers spoke then, its anger suddenly cold, impersonal. the hurt my priest felt for his son was eternal. immortal! it does not just fade. he started wars for him! he cleaved his mind into four for him! he spent the past centuries you are not my priest. that is hate that vibrates from your design. not true pain. just loathing. who what are you? the fool has finally noticed us, the woundshaper said. a pity. we were learning so much from this charade. let us be away. let the question form a tumor inside them. afflict them. let nothing be answered. avo did not do that. instead, he committed the only act a necro would. he lied. he misdirected. ninth column sends their regards. his deception struck the low masters and the hungers like a thunderbolt. a surge of ghosts recoiled in outrage. the scabbed one snarled. zein! you insolent bit he cut his metamind off then, ejecting himself from yosannas palace. his return to the real came with as every last mind in the block detonated, the totality of their beings turned to shrapnel. slipping his whisper through the currents, he sealed the pathway to his yondergales, and began his crawl outward. with the wind as his being, his touch drifted across countless spasming bodies, their minds fracturing into nothingness, the devastation like a block-nullifying blastwave certain to see collateral damage. a low feeling of pleasure began to build inside avo despite the wounds lingering on his ego, despite the unwanted truths. with his heaven, he evaded certain nullification. with the galeslither, there was likely little he couldnt escape. such were his thoughts when the veil leading into his plane was sliced open by the sweep of a blade. and as the metal licked wind, avo felt a flare of agony open across his back. Chapter 8-16 Thousandhand chapter 8-16 thousandhand dont engage. but you spoil the only fun the old woman has for months, and she''ll kick the shit out of you. thousandhands been talking about cutting these hungers for a fuck-long time. let her play. well move in if she needs it. her frame its just a sixth sphere yeah. like shes going to need it. -cas eldcanduir to valerie denton, ninth column 8-16 thousandhand it was hard to describe a cut so pure it inflicted a groove of hurt deeper than the pain of flesh. the slash cut him out of reality, the edge of the blade painting a stroke of thought-cleaving agony down to the root of his being. his cog-feed flickered, an indelible line marring the forms of his ghosts, his thoughts splitting into disjointed streams. a horse-head came loose from his galeslither, the manifestation of his heaven partially decapitated, form unspooling from thaumaturgy as his hell screamed. rend capacity: 100%n??vlrapture marked the initial hosting of this chapter on n?o?vl??n. warning: backlash clashing canon [space]: yondergales vent! vent! vent! the flood of rend came sudden and stark, with his galeslithers third circle struggling to compensate for the backlash. something had contradicted one of his canons, and gutted his yondergales open. rolling tides of stratocumulus spilled out through the wound, washing into the world outside as avo shed the form of the galeslither. the cessation of the billowing tempest was instant, the galeslither itself a storm that never was. avo plunged, his path taking him through a fissure open upon the tapestr of existence. the streets of xin yunsha flashed by his eyes and through fogs he fell. echoheads spearing down to stabilize his descent. the world slowed, and him along with it. his tails hung in the air, falling slowly like they were digging through quicksand, his body drawn taut by an unseen force, time itself feeling like a viscous fluid. a reflexive urge to struggle wrestled a precious moment away before avo mastered himself. he cast out his whisper andto his relieffound that his thoughts flowed unimpeded. splashing his surroundings with a narrow beam of perception, he reoriented himself as the pain receded from his senses, his mortal flesh uncleaved, but his galeslither winced as it bled the venom of entropy down into the funnel of its hell. the ground he struck was not plascrete but metal. metal rusted and piled. metal protruded from the soil, like new teeth pushing through gums, or soil, ripe to bear strange fruit. the world around him was shaped in a loop? avo did a double take as he felt his own perception echo back upon his form. suddenly, the resistance melted away. avo breathed. avo moved. his echoheads split steel and sank deeper into the unnatural soil. beneath vines enmeshed with plant matter and wiring both, he studied the world around him, head swiveling, tails chittering. the total area of this plane felt no greater than fifty square feet, but it folded in on itself, a geometrical construct of limited perpetuity. above, strange mists caused more vines to sway. budding bullets rain down in soft falls of gauss flechettes and flathead slugs, spilling free like ripe seeds. columns rose around him, part oak, park weapon stand, their sides slotted with jutting blades, maces, spears, guns, and axes, acting as spines to this garden of weapons. they grew high like beanstalk-armories reaching into the sky, spinning like a spiral as the permutation of armaments churned and changed. this is a nice garden, yes? i cultivated it myself. the woman before him simply appeared. there was no emergence, no movement preceding her arrival. she wasnt. and then she was. taken aback by the womans sudden manifestation, avo fired his celerostylus and made to move back. the lurch of time followed, but impossibly, the world around him readjusted itself. the mist spilled faster, going from a drizzle to a hailstorm of flechettes. his soul rang with warning klaxons inside him, the woundshaper bubbling in anticipation of bloodshed. temporal anomaly detected with the world around him racing to keep pace with his heightened reflexes, the effects of his surging synapses grew nullified. discontent roiled in avos heart as he snarled; the deprivation of his new gift gnawed at him, feeling as if the edge of a new blade made dull. the crossing of time relaxed as he quelled his reflexes, and with the flattening of his perception, so too did the flow of time in this garden equalize. if there was but one consolation, however, it was that his adversary did not attack, finding contentment in looking upon him instead, her right hand resting on a hilt bereft of a blade. slipping past the gargantuan blades that uncannily resembled the hulls of certain voidships, avo gazed upon her palace and immediately froze. her internal mem-data shifted and changed at a catastrophic rate, her ghosts moving as if they were streaks of lightning, the engine of her mind a phantasmal construct of pure speed. without his celerostylus slowing things, he could +remarkable,+ zeins voice came again, her mind ebbing with genuine amusement. +you managed to smuggle yourself into my mind. quite the skilled necro, arent we.+ avo froze. his blood stilled. her awareness remained at zero in her cog-feed, so how its a good trick, zein said, this time in the real, her expression as if suddenly realizing something. both yours and mine. you play perception from angles, but i wield it by using the question: when? still, i commend your skill. it takes quite the necrojack to slip past my focus. she nodded. i think walton would quite be proud of you, avo. suddenly, avo felt something slip free from his mind. incredulous, he turned to realize that not only had she used her influence over time to notice his intrusion somehow, but her specter was also hovering above, its perception beaming over his shoulder. suddenly, her hand was on his shoulder. she moved. when did she move? he didnt even noticedidnt even feel it. dont be bothered, she said, shaking him, youre quite good. i simply stole the technique from you. by gazing back into the past. the pace of our minds however ah, a trifling thing. you show great promise. promise? avo said, setbacks sending him into a stupor. quite so, zein said. then she was back where she stood. she didnt walk. she didnt move. she just was. master, he heard his woundshaper whisper. i think i think she is skipping across time. jumping forward. avo sighed. of course, that was a heaven someone had. time. a heaven of time with a canon of skimming? come, she said, rolling her shoulders, i wish to see what else you are capable of. but before that she snapped her finger and suddenly, a large cylindrical mechanism appeared next to him. it was an ugly industrial orange piston, looking far too rusted for use. groaning, it began to topple. for the rend, zein said. avo understood. expanding a sphere of stasis, the winds caught the falling block and the weight hinged itself along the bubbles surface, draining his rend. rend capacity: 97% now, what avos words died in his throat. geometry around zein shivered. he felt the blows like a series of bombs going off against his fungal-ceramite plating, her palm blurring into countless thrusts, resounding thunderclaps shivering his very blood. yet, no pain followed the impact. no wounds. only a faint ringing, and a tingling numbness. avo tried to move his arms, tried to claw at zein. only his arms didnt answer him. he stayed upright through the strength of his echoheads alone. his echoheads. he swept one down at hera predictable attack meant to provoke action. she vanished. his echohead halted and chittered, filling the world around him with static waves. she rematerialized by his side, already in motion to deliver another blow. she found herself greeted by the snapping extensions of another of his tails. in his tactile sense, he felt her halt as the blow struck her dead out. the air crackled. she shuddered. avo growled, wheezing with nerve-deaded laughter as zein toppled. and turned. an impossible force seized him by the speartip of his echohead and tore him high. it was only by merit of his other tails rooting deeper into the ground that he wasnt sent tumbling into the air, but merely off balance. off balancing into another rising palm. this time, the impact plumed in a shockwave out from his back. air emptied itself from avo as he felt both his kidneys melt into nothingness. spots formed in his vision. above, he heard the rainfall stop momentarily. then, the ground rushed up to hit him, his echoheads now twitching uselessly as well. the in-seers of sanctus called this technique ringing the spirit, zein explained. avo made noise comparable to a constipated nu-dog. not quite so effective on a ghoul considering the biological redundancies you possess. the tentacles are a nice touch. two-structure biology. it is always good to be prepared. it was a special kind of miserable to be praised and lectured while one was pawing at handfuls of dirt and metal. do you have waltons helix? zein asked. i wanted to ask earlier but i decided to hit you first instead. avo coughed a vague affirmation. splendid. he wanted you to have it. he was always very proud of youspoke highly of you. i think i see why her voice trailed off. with a nudge, she rolled him over on his side and had him look up at her. as shards of tungsten fell forth from the sky, zein nodded down at him, fingers tapping her blade contemplatively. yes. ye-yes? avo asked. i think i will take you as my apprentice. should you accept, of course. you will be the first in manyehdays. you should feel proud. feels like my insides are shaking. zein frowned faux seriously. what an odd sensation of pride you feel, young one. come. up. up. your foresight deals you justice. your striking however can be improved! stand quickly. i wish to show you something. mind spinning from the constant left turns the old woman foisted on him, avo worked to get his echoheads under control first. is it another beating? of course not, zein said, lying badly, grinning broadly. Chapter 8-17 Memories of the Future chapter 8-17 memories of the future the sanctus fisher that wasnt is an ontologic best suited for sixth sphere liminal frames or above. a modern heaven inspired by the kingfisher upon the recursive pond from sanctian myths, the fisher that wasnt is suited for godclads intending to serve primarily as seers for their cadre. considering the flexibility of its options, however, it can also be used as a porter/breaker supplement. described as a being shaped between a pellucid tadpole and a fishing hook fused from streams of time, it contains the budding essence of constantly changing tides representing the future, grafting the fisher that wasnt requires a mind that rejects structure in most forms and views linearity as more suggestion than law.??vl-b!n. as such, godclads are recommended to apply phantasmics or nueromods that exaggerate focus-pattern attention-deviating conditions with extensive necrojack support to alleviate any lingering sanity damage. -the fisher that wasnt, elder mythos volume i 8-17 memories of the future as it turned out, zein wasnt lying: she did not give avo another beating, but several other beatings. new concepts and techniques became known to him. known in the way one would come to learn a straight or a hook from getting repeatedly punched in the face. yet, through it all he could not claim that zein meant him any malice. rather, a single emotion dawned within her and it was glee, deep and genuine. from all the legends and whispered rumors of the thousandhand, he expected someone akin to draus; a killer in presence and demeanor. zein, though, was a child in a playground, her playfulness ageless. though not the same could be said for her brutality. ...and that was called a kimura, though most practitioners tend to do it on a temporally progressive basis. zein snorted. neophytes. why waste time performing an action that you have already completed in a theoretical future, i say. best to just enjoy the fruits of my labor, so that i might move on to the next thing. wouldnt you agree? avo didnt answer immediately, too preoccupied with his arm and the incorrect angle it pointed toward. his elbow jutted toward zein, the joint radiating with aching pain. the hurt he felt was more akin to a tear than a break, with his new mycelia bio-architecture sustaining the most harm beyond a few cracks in his bone demon carapace. so far, each of his limbs had suffered a dislocation or break, followed by instruction on her part as to how to reset the limb, or the angle at which to best rip it off for use as a blunt weapon. zein, avo said, using the mouths of two echoheads to stabilize the limb while a third snapped it back in place, the training why? her eyes went wide, confused. to improve your capabilities of course. and because it amuses me. probably more the latter than the former. ah, and procrastination. here i am, playing with my new ghoul consang, delaying my return to the scheming, the hiding, the plotting you will learn that age does not fix such a habit. but don''t blame me. i enjoy violence. you enjoy violence when it''s happening to other people, avo muttered. --masochism is an acquired taste. you already have the sadism by nature, im certain you can develop another virtue. avo cocked his head at her in disbelief. virtue? she nodded vigorously. i strongly recommend you develop a deep enjoyment from getting hurt. as godclads, pain is like water to a duck. so is death, but thats more like a waveas long you dive a bit and keep your rend low, youll be fine. he just stared. his woundshaper shivered. master her heaven has stripped her of sense and decency. time flows softly around her we must flee. stop, zein said, holding out a hand, i foresee your questions: why did i not kill you? why did i not interrogate you further about your nature? about walton. about the low masters and that ridiculous existential tumor they serve... wondered about some of those, avo said. got distracted by you twisting my limbs. she beamed. ah. you see, thats the interesting thing: we had these conversations already, and each was rather boring so i dont want to repeat them. or have them, if were looking at this from a stable continuum perspective. her expression flattened into reconsideration. well. not us, perhaps, but the ontological conceptions of us within my heaven using all parameters known to me or my frame oh, better that i just show you. the contours of zeins heaven did not reveal itself immediately. not a terror rising from the depths as with mirrorhead. not a primordial steed striding within the flow of wind, nor tower of blood burrowing roots deep to suckle the inheritance of matter. no. hers was an almost imperceptible line at first, seeing it like catching a reflection within a lake. a lake that was always shaking, drifting, changing. its tail ran down in edges, forming the limpid margin of her blade. outward rose something between a dollop and a fishhook, the shifting rivers of time widening from the tip of her sword into a vastness of light, each ray playing a potential momentreels of futures churning within her heaven, a grand pond the size of a small city block parted into a hundred and eight different scenes. the fisher that wasnt, diver of futures past by her will, it collapsed in a falling cascade, each moment shuffling together like a deck of cards to crash down on both of them. new un-memories combusted in avos mind, these murky dreams of variant futures slotting alternates of him back into himself. in more than one, she killed him, her blade lashing out a full minute into the future while the strike was delivered five minutes from the past. in this sense, death came to him sudden and absolute, like the hand of fate itself had struck his name from the list of life and marked him for the big nothing. the world dissolved in these memories, his cog-feed fracturing into component parts as his mind sank into a fragmented abyss, the stygian nature of a godclads soul-frayed demise a thing no one could comprehend while still being alive. shaken by the touch of death, he was unprepared for the sudden injection of knowledge to come. conversations came back to him then, of each inquiry. there was a reason why she didnt ask him any questions, choosing combat instead, and that was because versions of them had already spoken. she did not kill him because she did not wish to risk damaging the helix, nor did she wish to expend a necro of his caliber if he could be turned to her cause instead; more perplexingly, she stated in such a timeline she had no interest possessing his frame, but only the functions of it. confining the soul in a concentric cage, a dragon ate itself, its scales dim and its vigil perpetual, the only thing of motion in a dead galaxy. further still, a dark shroud resembling a curving weave of brambles rising to form something between an insect and a deer bearing a v-shaped skull greeted him, the heaven not attached to his current soul yet. ah. it has been a while since i have seen a soul so drained. avo felt himself shiver. zeins voice pierced through the quiet of his inner sanctuary. she came as kae did, but instead of mounting herself on a pedestal of tears, she skimmed along, propelled by crystalline light sparkling from the hilt of her blade. no no! the woundshaper cried. the pure terror in its voice was near-human, its desire to avoid zein all-encompassing. your hilt? its a false heaven? avo asked. her expression turned melancholic. a gift from someone. i liked breaking gods. he liked rebuilding them toward purpose. in time, i came to enjoy watching him. jaus? she brushed past his question and turned her attention on woundshaper. the heaven of blood gushed over behind the galeslither in a splashing tide. keep her away from me, master, the woundshaper said, huddling behind his currently grafted heaven. get thee away from me, partling crone! this is not your soul. zein, for her part, cared little for the woundshaper, shaking her head. why if it isnt a fragment of mother sathwu. severing your fragments was quite the chore after the fall if such means any compliment to you, old one. it does not! be-gone! send her away, master! she cannot be here! zein smiled and turned her attention to his new dormant soul instead. you got this from burners way, correct? avo grunted. you already know. no, zein replied. not here. here, i am a guest. my heaven does not reach in. this is solely your reality. the sangeist; the galeslither, you took both of them from golems? yes. she pouted with all the strength of an old woman that got to enjoy herself too late. you get all the good things. its hardly fair. avo glared at her using his partially decapitated galeslither. woke up in the maw. on a corpse barge. got sold to a crucible. got an unwilling syndicate job for a few days. bah. practically a vacation. you will look back on this time and well, if you think very hard and manifest your delusions into truth, youll find something about it that amuses you. he considered her words for a moment. did get to eat some eyes. see. remember: you are a godclad. conceptualization means more than truth. now, let us seemy word, your soul is pulling on me like a wormhole. quite literally, in fact, the feeling is uncanny. it''s just like fighting next to an event horizon in the void. avo was taken aback. you fought in the void? she nodded, blade glinting. godhunt. a stray entity wandered too close and i had to make a victim of it. worry not, if you do well, get lucky, and survive long enough, you too will break your share of wandering gods in the dark. she is plague the woundshaper hissed. you know zein said, gesturing to his other soul. this should be impossible. the agnosi claim a soul is meant to be bound to a single ego. and yet, here you have one sharing room with another without them being conjoined or bridged somehow. how trailblazing. i like it. have you tried to pour some of your ego into it? try to run both at once. no, avo replied, not sure if he liked where she was going with this. do it, she said, grinning. whats the worst thing that can happen. my nous tears in half and i permanently die? avo said, remembering kaes words. she hummed, as if recalling that detail herself as well. oh. well, that would leave your frames to me so a pitiable loss, but not unrecoverable. why dont we see if you can activate it somehow? just dont connect to it is all. feed it some thaums? a plague,the woundshaper cried. Chapter 8-18 The Second Cycle (I) chapter 8-18 the second cycle (i) the subject''s entire concept of self has been split. in two. no. they aren''t dead, i think death might be preferable at this point though. we can still hear him screaming. his mind''s in two places, but it''s not an even split. alright. yeah. we''ll shut it down. we''ll have the next subject usurp them when he settles down. it didn''t have any ontologics attached so yes. yes, i know. the agnosi were right. we can''t use it to create an omnipresent ego. -highflame research cell, project dichotomy 8-18 the second cycle (i) avos new soul was a cripple. not in the sense of being inherently broken, but from a comparative lack. without a meta-fac, a self-managing system or seemingly any of the smart-admin functions running within his stillborn frames root, the soul that once fueled the fallen heaven of burners way was a rather lacking construct in every regard. unwilling to commit to any transfer of consciousness or even risk such an outcome, avo ejected the second soul outside his current frames liminal subreality before infusing it with a single thaum. he wasnt sure how that would look back in the garden, if a spark of eldritch fire would spill out from his corpse or whatnot, but as of the present, it merely seemed like a minor gulf of nothingness parted him from interlinking with the other heaven. thaumic output - 970 thaum/c ghosts: [412] almost immediately, a second presence pulsed into being just beyond the veil of his control. curiously, avo reached over to interface with the other heaven. it flashed and a new subreality came online. liminal frame detected: stormtree spire pattern thamic limit: sphere iii current thaumic class: sphere i the soul frame''s mem-data listed it as a sphere three thaumic construct bearing the designation of stormtree spire pattern. as avo focused on its root, a bridge of light interfaced between frames. he filtered through various root-function diagnostics to find that this new soul was only rated for a single heaven and hell. apparently, judging from the way it only projected a flume of eldritch fire outward from the top and the bottom, the structure of the frame was externally vectored and incapable of storing of other heavens. slots for two ontologics at the most. more than just being fixed, however, there was a deadness to it, with the flames being opaque compared to the rippling currents cast out by avos soul. it was as kae stated: his soul was special. the spire pattern felt like a raw hunk of chromeit had fixed functions, but it could not shift and adapt like nanosuites or smart-fog could; like avos stillborn frame could. ah, theres the lightbulb, zein said, im still curious to see if it would have seen this plane ruptured if you opened it up as a subreality in a subreality. would it just seem similar to another pocket in space expanding in this space. when you''ve been around as long as i have, seeing something new perhaps it might rupture your frame and kill you, but its just so tempting. the fluxing flares of avos spectral fires twisted toward zein, like phosphorus bleeding from the galeslither he was currently grafted to. it was the the best approximation his soul could muster in place of an actual glare. mightve killed you too. zein gave a blase shrug. wouldnt that be a novel experience for the both of us? truth be told, pitiable as these gods are, i expect nothing from them. they could not best me at the height of their might, they will not impress me now. tides of rage shifted in lapping tendrils along the shell of the woundshaper. you are a wretched, deceitful thousandhand turned her attention from the reborn soul to the diminished blood god. woundshaper clutched tighter to the galeslither. look away from me partling! your gaze is debasing. i gaze, zein said, on a god i remember most fondly. when i said really was a sign of respect. she sighed. truthfully, out of all the gods ive shattered, i always found you to be quite human. spikes erupted from the back of the woundshaper as the heaven snarled. the act reminded avo of the arched back of a hissing nu-cat. pester me no more. prod no longer at my wounds. leave me to my shame in silence. for the first time, avo felt a sense of sullenness from his god, a genuine sadness at being broken by a mortal. even one such as zein. the other godclads consciousness rang, preparing to speak once more, but avo interrupted her. zein. enough. you have recommendations for this heaven? the build? the words he offered were bait. distractions so she wouldnt agitate his heaven further. he needed her talking stillto say he trusted her was an outright lie, but she seemed willing to help, if in a twisted sense. the memories of the un-futures were still ringing in his mind, resounding like a collage of moments, each feeling like they happened concurrently mere moments ago. you are on approach to gaining the ontological mass to be regarded as fourth sphere, zein said. commendable, considering the short time you had your frame, but insufficient for the tasks we face, little dagger. before he could spend any time examining his root data, zein darted through his mind, her path leaving a cleaved line oozing sparkles within his liminality. now, lets see what we can make with that new heaven of yours. she spoke of the four domain heaven he claimed from burners way. it took was repaired after he managed to subsume the soul it was bound to and stabilize the rupture. once fallen, now this construct greeted him as a varnished thing, blackened and unclear as if it wasnt manifesting right. all he could get from it was a vagueness; it offered him the generalities of its contours but nothing else. why is it dark? zein asked. avo let the silence speak for his ignorance. give me one second, zein said. with a sweeping slash, she left his soul momentarily. and immediately came back. have it deconstructed by your light. however it works. the domains are all that matters. did you leave to look into the future? avo asked. zein smirked. did i? let an old woman have a few tricks. wouldnt want you eating me prematurely. had to try. and i commend the effort. burn its domain of space and matter after you fuse it with your heaven of blood. and only after you fuse it. zein emphasized those words. they wont be joined properly otherwise. ive seen it happen before. very ugly. constant paradox. missing domain-crossover causes paradox. a forcible fuse usually results in instant thaumic backlash. taking out the domains afterwardshould be possible; perhaps; maybe; i dont know; lets seeshould probably not cause you to collapse your heaven and die. should probably not? you emerged fine in some timelines. zein grinned. how many. three. how many am i dead in? she held her head back and looked toward a missing sky. negativity is not a thing that should concern the likes of us. avo frowned at the darkness. and how do you know all this. a few hundred guesses. so. he died in a lot of futures even as a godclad. good to know. anyway, jam this fallen heaven together with your woundshaper first. do it. it will be worth it. the woundshaper quavered. no, master! do not listen to her. at least wait for the oracle to return! the little one with the glass eye. she is kind and gentle. a tendril of blood jutted rudely at zein, who merely folded her arms and grinned. this one is mad and decrepit. avo hesitated. come now, little dagger, zein said. if i meant you ill, i could see you deaddoes my mercy not speak for itself? and besides, your frame would look so poorly on me. it''s just too hungry. i think it suits you. whats wrong with matter and space? avo asked. well, zein said, the canon of the second is conflicting with a hubris from the first, i think. you tend to expand volumetrically when you get pulled apart geometrically. a strangely pleased look spilled across her face. i also die in one of those futures. real death. it ends up collapsing my garden and causing a limited spatial collapse. it keeps growing and kills ninety percent of this district before the sovereignty finally notices and soaks the rend. he wasnt sure what to say to that. sathwu, zein said, her voice sweet, you asked how i killed a million people, yes? the heaven of blood suddenly peeked out, all acrimony was forgotten yes? would you like to kill a million people? feast on a million echoes of humanity and belief? yes! the uneven nature of the god never ceased to astound avo. zein seemed to understand his sentiments. ah. dont blame them. they are beings formed by a gestalt. they cannot decide how they are shaped, how they act. for all their power and influence over reality, they do not possess the fuel that needs to see these miracles made manifest. essence, avo said. the choice to believe, zein added. some called it free will. others think of it as determination unto itself. conceptual propulsion. avo considered his heaven again. the fusion. it wont break my ontology? not unless you graft it onto your soul and start feeding it thaums, zein said. you should be able to undo whatever it is you did thanks to your frames self-administering nature. oh, and i just want you to know that i am immensely jealous of that function most of all. thousands need to die when i want to change a canon. its very inconvenient. nested with the galeslither, the steed neighed a trinary chorus of thunder as acknowledgment. woundshaper. wont break you. you accept these changes? Chapter 8-19 The Second Cycle (II) chapter 8-19 the second cycle (ii) "what the fuck is she doing? she''s supposed to take the frame! she''s not suppose to to play with it? whatever the hell that thing is. that doesn''t look like a godsdamned hunger to me." "i think it''s a bioform." "a bioform with a liminal frame? come the fuck on, valerie. that''s like giving a nu-dog the mem-keys to a golem." "voidwatch has its uplifts." "yeah. uplifts. no bioforms. one''s a sophont; the other''s got enough ghosts haunting their mind that they have to listen when you cast at them or they have a mental breakdown. besides, no voiders going to be putting thaum-shit into themselves. they can barely stay zero with all the grounders doing it." -cas eld''canduir to valerie denton, ninth column 8-19 the second cycle (ii) both zein and the heaven froze, caught off guard by his request for permission. i apologize. i am unused to such courtesy. he grunted. will make you more potent. me, more potent. zein looked between them and inched closer. you know, the old god has no choice in this matter. she suddenly frowned, realizing something. wait. she has been talking this entire time. how is that possible. i broke her. avo turned his attention to zein. just noticed? i was distracted. by other things. like the future and your soul and ah she threw up her hands. bah. whats a talking god, ive seen it before. but but it doesnt have control over you or no. then why not just change it? a hint of annoyance entered avos tone. not my flavor. not a low master. want it to choose. the elder godclad stared at him for a moment before she nodded. ah. don''t we all dedicate ourselves to strange obsessions. in this, she reminded him a bit of walton. for one who enjoyed combat so much, there was little actual harshness from her in things unrelated to direct violence. she was well-natured. too well-natured. the discord she presented twisted at him. build me, the woundshaper spoke with a sigh. for the million deaths we will come to taste. build me. zein held up a victorious fist. avo gave a single command. the flames did the rest. the burn did not come as a forge would melt an ingot this time, not like when it was inverting a heaven down to a hell. instead, avo found himself watching as his resplendence broke into flaming needles, threading at both the woundshaper and the shrouded heaven, binding them with searing bridges that drew them closer with each rippling flicker. before the shine of his soul, the woundshaper changed again, the unknown heaven melting into the threadsnow seeming more like veinsinto the heaven of blood. before his eyes, the woundshaper evolved, its ontology mutating. no noise of pain or agony came from the former god, but he could feel its shock as it rose, expanded in both mass and shape. from the tower''s back burst insect-like wings grown from the armored spine of the woundshaper. veins expanded and spilled through his heaven like bleeding briar patches, while the alchemized patterns of tungsten and matter within the tower-top jaws of the woundshaper sprouted shimmering horns of upward raining particulates; the shape of the luminosity befitted a deer or a moose. then, the first of the paradoxes appeared. space fractured in three parts around the heaven, causing it to part into three fractals. this displeases me, his woundshaper said, voice thick with confusion, watching as its midsection folded over its spire. zein sighed, lament written clear on her face. bah. the domain of space is absolutely ruined. a shame. a spatially separated entity is an amusing blade to wield: have you ever cut someone in three places with a single strike cut three hours ahead of time? the thought of performing such an act appealed to avo, if for naught but novelty. pain? avo asked the woundshaper. he was connected to its being, but the way it suffered might be different than what he understood. he wanted to hear its words. comprehend its hurt from a gods perspective. fragmentary. and also slick. as its changes stabilized, avo waited for a beat to see if woundshaper would see any other alterations. none came. resurrection - 64% heaven - [woundshaper] domain: (blood/matter) thaumic requirements - 781 thaum/c other than a few reverberations sloshing through its blood, the heaven seemed mostly stable. it had more than doubled in mass and size. parts of it continued to jump and fracture twisting fractals in space. studying the canon, avo immediately noticed the problem. domain of space canon: oravins umbrella - all gaseous and liquid matter can be pulled upward into a unseen plane of space; mass limit: 100 tons hubris: no physical matter may be stored in each plane zein tilted her head at that. hm. well, theres a contradiction. was constantly pulling hydrapedes into demiplanes, avo said. ever seen something like this? a few times, zein said. thaumic sabotage, i believe. deliberate sacrifices meant to taint a heaven. usually impossible without an agnos aid. or someone like you, avo asked. she didnt deny it. you will soon come to find that breaking things is far easier than mending them. and more fun. this domain is clearly not designed for combat, and therefore useless. do away with it. yes, the woundshaper said, grunting as its base was suddenly sliding over where its tip was, remove this. the sensations are growing most displeasing. upon ordering the inversion of the domain, the waves of his soul sliced into his heaven and this time, the woundshaper did shudder. it sounded like a gasp, the sound someone makes when a limb is lost or the air pulled from their lungs. clutched by a fistful of light, broken fractals of space formed a shape of an umbrella as it was drawn into his souls embrace. the mem-data updated. heaven - [woundshaper] domain: (blood/matter/luminosity/biology) thaumic requirements - 672 thaum/c a good leaning, zein said. look at the other canons. what are these canons? she made a disgusted noise. this isnt shaped to benefit violence at all! whats the point. think it was for something ecological, avo said. was connected to a hydroponic chamber. had gardens. zein scoffed. did these gardens grow weapons? dont think so. then i despise these gardens, zein declared. foul. invert this heaven too. better used as a supplement to your hell than this. she shook her head. my beloved was a fool, do you know that? avo didnt. he had a yearning. a dream. to see all uplifted under a common heaven. zein sighed. the fool. the absolute, gold-hearted fool. he even wanted to restore the gods afterward. with new safeguards, of course. restore? the question came from avo and the woundshaper both, their surprise bringing them to a synchronous union. indeed, zein said. for despite the godsfall, he always viewed them more as misguided administrators than tyrants to destroy. i suppose he was right, if we regard them ontologically. her knowledge came as accountings of the past. whatever the guilds claim the gods to be, the agnosi, know they are all wrong. only voidwatch holds the true key to the past, and yet they hide much from us. i think they are afraid we might finish what came before. finish what? avo asked. hell - [third circle] - woundshaper domain: (matter/entropy) thaumic requirements - 450 thaum/c rend vents online canon: the breath of the withered - the master of this domain can now expel their total rend into an entropic gust of wind that causes the rapid destabilization of matter; all physical matter will be affected aside from the master - this canon is absolute canon: the barrage of the withered - launches a entropic construct from the master comprised of entropy which can then be controlled and guided; all physical matter will be affected aside from the master - this canon is absolute daemon: expelling excess entropy into a single point of matter will birth an anathema of ruin to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved daemon: should the construct not strike and dissolve matter for the time it takes the heaven to fill with rend, the missile will birth an anathema of ruin to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved with a surge of brightness, he felt his hell expand, the imbalance between heaven and hell stabilizing. even the eldritch flames began to flow more evenly around the woundshaper. yes! the woundshaper bellowed. finally! a proper pedestal for a god! worship me! glory to me! with bated desire, avo directed his focus to activate his new cycler, splitting the flow of thaums near-even between them as a test. (woundshaper) thaumic output - 486 thaum/c (galeslither) thaumic output - 485 thaum/c reassembling heaven modifying woundshaper grafting heaven - 100% reviewed - mythology stable reassembling hell modifying woundshaper - [third circle] grafting hell - 100% reviewed - mythology stable grafted heaven - woundshaper domain: (blood/matter/biology/luminence) thaumic requirements - 450 thaum/c rend vents online grafted hell - [third circle] - woundshaper domain: (matter/entropy) thaumic requirements - 450 thaum/c rend vents online suddenly, avo found himself within the woundshaper as well, the flames of his soul clasped firmer by a second dragon. with but a shift of an angle, he twisted from galeslither to woundshaper, as if an alteration of axis shifted him between flavors of reality. ah, the woundshaper said, pleased that it was perpendicular to the galeslither. now we are mounted upon the steed, master. onward. onward and away. the galeslither can be put to proper service for the superior goddess; its rightful place has been uncovered. careful, little dagger, zein said. you will wish to consider your distribution for if you wish to rise high or grow wide. your woundshapers demands are far greater. portion your cyclers well. but do it afterward. after you finish spending your final domain. (woundshaper) thaumic output - 910 thaum/c (galeslither) thaumic output - 61 thaum/c one dragon brightened substantially. the other dimmed. a clashing luster came from bother their scales as the brighter dragon spun faster while the other worked to a more muted pace. yes. he did have one more domain of space, didnt he? cant use it on the hell? avo asked. best put it in the heaven anyway, zein said. youre running a galeslither at baseline. so, its draining from space displace or momentum vectors. with your sangeist woundshaper. the heaven of blood bubbled with new glee, prodding at itself as if a young child gazing upon their reflection in a reflective pond. if a reflective pond was a hell meant to balance them. --you probably already have the means to deal with your rend, no? true as that was, avo didnt want to overload his galeslither. to strip himself of enduring wings was a mistake of the highest order. without his yondergales, without his heaven of wind, his world would shrink anew, and his freedoms would be denied again. running the simulation, options came and changed. mem-data danced through his mind as he studied his options. augmentations influencing speed and space played on the strings of his avarice, while the cost demanded in weight of thaums sank into his hopes like a dagger. smaller transparent attachments to the galeslither teased him with improvements in utility, but in truth, his mind was made. going to wait, avo said. wait until i get another galeslither. build the heaven. even the hell. zein shrugged. youre being too conservative, i think. you should unchain yourself more. indulge. he stared at her. you know what i am? what you were, zein said. from what ive seen, youre quite the well-disciplined cannibal. so well-disciplined that your father gave you the keys to his kingdom. or, at least, to his basement. a moment''s pause parsed the void. the fires were beginning to trickle upward. the time was almost upon him. resurrection - 99% just before the end, she smirked, turning to fancy a bet, fallwalker? fallwalker? avo asked. are you of a guild? no. then fallwalker is what you are. she considered her words. ostensibly, at least. by your apprenticeship, i suppose this makes you a terrorist against the state powers in a more fixed sense but who is to know? avo hummed, a note of anticipation staining. whats the bet. do you think you can manage to kill me? her question came half-ask, half-taunt. or will you still be as you were against meas helpless as a worm fighting an eagle? even if i were to forgo the full use of my chronology. he didnt answer her immediately. the brightness began to build. upward, he felt his soul begin to ascend. he made a final adjustment to his souls root functionschanging how he wanted to transition after his resurrection. lets find out. yes, master, his woundshaper concurred, use your enemys aid to see them dead. i approve of your machinations. whats the gambit? avo said, wondering just how close zein was to bright-wealth. succeed and i will offer you a heaven. one to protect you against time, perhaps. if he could salivate, he would. lose? then we both have fun. godclads do not lose. that is for mortals and fools who forget to vent. but it will hurt. and i will continue killing you until i get bored, or you succeed. fun. hows your memory in your old age? dont want to kill you accidentally. zein threw her head back and laughed. what hubris! magnificent! a godclad i will make of you yet. and inward, into the flames he fell, the bright consuming his mind, and reloading him into reality. Chapter 8-20 A Testament of "Skill" chapter 8-20 a testament of "skill" is this a joke, oyaje? i challenge youi bring you the best of my glaives and you offer me your daughter? shes barely past her first bleeding! look at her! and how does she have a glaive? this this is an insult. for all the kikigo between us, i still hoped that our shared blood would no, brother. when this day is done, your sons will be buried, and you will receive my champion as a worthy compliment. you have one more chance to withdraw your veto against my sons ascent to first annalist. do so. or be made lacking by my daughter. [whispering] can we just start the killing now, father? [sighing] zein, no. im trying to save your uncles sons. theyre your cousins. they wont be if theyre dead. i could kill their father too if you want. zein, no. -mem-log of zein oyaje, the rite of kikigo 8-20 a testament of skill from the stillness of his former corpse, avo rose a screaming gale, his return to baseline existence carving an invisible dome into the air as the galeslither formed, bullets spilling along its sides like waterfalls. he spread his being wide for a moment, feeling the rising groves of sprouting metal and plantstuff, the countless weapons spreading like branches from ever-growing trees. zein had not lied when she said this place was garden and armory both, and with its cyclical nature, any battle here would twist back unto itself like dueling in a wide plain and a narrow chamber both. twenty feet across from him zein stood, yawning as she waggled a single finger, ushering for something invisible to come. she seemed in no hurry to begin, her eyes following him with a wry stare even as he dove in and out of the yondergales. you may begin your attempts on my life when youre ready, zein said. i will take such as the beginning of our game. avo took the time to experiment. shifting between heavens was an instantaneous thing, like twisting his soul. it wasnt so much as running both heavens at once as he could transform the currently active heaven he had into anothersometimes at a near-constant pace. when done fast, splashes of eldritch fire spewed free from his changing form, reshaping galeslither down to the blood in avos veins. the improvements he made to the woundshaper were made obvious from the moment he began to convert the matter around him into blood. when last in the gutters he had to vent several times before he even managed ten tons. now, his spreading arteries bloomed out from his being, leeching away all physical substance as he fused into the greater embodiment of the woundshaper. his rend climbed at a trickle instead of a spike. ten tons came. then twenty. by the time he was at the full eighty, he dwarfed zein utterly and felt himself peer out from the clouds. strangely, he could feel parts of the plant mass tickling his mind, and his haemokinesis greeted the light like fingers sliding down the strings of a violin. time lurched as if seized in a chokehold thanks to his increased mass also multiplying his attributes. when combined with his celerostylus, his phys-sim estimated he would be capable of fighting past mach 4. such a realization came bound with new considerations. he tested his domain of biology. hydrapedes molded free from matter as his insectoid limbs touched columns and soil. his rend grew by a few points more as he increased his spread and tested both the hydrapede creation and hive (ii) canons. neither seemed that useful as of present. luminosity, however, proved to be an ability most different. it took him more than one attempt to figure out how the canon of harmonize (ii) functioned. from the antlers growing protruding from his woundshaper, he felt a ringing resonance between him and all nearby pieces of matter, their structures each bearing a different pitch, like radio wavelengths awaiting connection. with a thought, he used his canon of linger to deploy a chunk of blood-tungsten and infuse a mote of light into it from one horn. operating more off of instinct than understanding, avo infused another connected mote from the opposite horn into himself, and a shivering string of brightness formed. he took a step back and, joined to his motion by the light-made link, the chunk copied his motion shooting backward as an excess of force and momentum acted on it. so aligned were the vectors of force and momentum that avo understood the nature of his new ability. the chunk was paired to him, the canon using light to connect their forms. such a thing held much promise. alas, it did jump his rend by five percent. rend capacity [woundshaper] - 28% rend capacity [galeslither] - 1% splendid, master, splendid,his woundshaper cackled with glee. i am no longer starved of endurance. i stand greater than i have ever been! she sighed. if i could but return to my beginning now. the world would have been mine to shape. using the canon of linger on his greater structure, avo stepped out from the frozen tower of blood as his hell filled just a bit more. activating the barrage of the withered, a static needle of rend began to build, taking a second to pour from his vessel before it tore free. a new menu flashed into his cog-feed as he felt the entropic construct connect with his mind. it swam through the air and left a crackle of gray in its wake, its speed and dexterity sharing a kinship with his heaven at baseline. with a mental command, he had its impact against a pillar. it struck the rising groove and burst into a rippling tide of raw entropy, carving a wide wound into the garden some eighty feet wide and high. rend capacity [woundshaper] - 0% he worked up his rend and tested the shot several more times. when his rend was at sub-twenty, the missile was smaller but quicker, taking less than a second to launch when measured at the pace of his perception. past that, the time it took to generate grew, as did the devastation at the end. you might also be able to burn away the rend accumulated by your galeslither, zein said, her back turned to him. the beast itched under avos skin, tempted by the moment of vulnerability. avo thought better. she said she wasnt going to invoke her heaven of time, but such a thing remained uncertain. he would need to study her more before he made his move. in the meantime, he did as she said as the flickered back over to using the galeslither, all his amassed blood briefly slipping from control. forming a sphere of stasis, he drew upon the domains of his woundshaper and shaped a single strand of blood into the sphere. there, as the winds clasped his new limb, leeching all momentum from it, avo made the limb spin fast, while taking care to not exceed the capacity of his bubble. the rend of his galeslither cleared almost immediately. rend capacity [galeslither] - 0% satisfaction played within him as an orchestra. he turned to zein again, who was comparing two frequency blades; one was shorter but faster, the other longer but slower. helping me a lot, he said. why? she hummed. why? i claimed you as an apprentice, did i not? didnt say i accepted yet. a lack of rejection is acceptance in my time. he cast out his whisper then, using it to watch her from another angle. she showed no hints of awareness. really dont want my frame? she frowned. i have the frame. i have you. i just see no need to trade my own. her gaze flattened. besides. i suspect that your soul would be ill-fitting for my constitution. whats that he felt his midsection burst before everything went white. avo tried to blink but found himself bereft of eyelids or limbs or anything to control. it was only when the rippling flames of his soul rose that he realized he was dead again. resurrection - 1% rend capacity [woundshaper] - 10% rend capacity [galeslither] - 1% as he returned this time, he wasted no more time, seeking to deprive zein of all her advantages and strip her from her demiplanewhich was now rapidly regrowing into an arsenal of a garden after being turned into a blasted wasteland. spreading the reach of his galeslither as wide as he could, he adapted his previous plan but added more complexity. he pulled objects into his yondergale first, converting them to reform his woundshaper. then, finding zein just standing at the epicenter of the blast crater staring at a new bush beginning to sprout from the rapidly refilling soil, he pulled her through his yondergales and began his attack. with his form flashing between the braying steed that was the galeslither and the titanic tower of his woundshaper, he attacked her from both nether and physical vectors again. he anticipated the defection of his trauma this time but compensated by committing less of his cog-feed. at the same time, he ejected a piece of blood from his woundshaper, keeping it intact with linger as he tied it to his form using harmonize. zein, for her part, extended her arms as a lattice of wings expanded from her back. avo stared. what was that? was that nanotech? didnt voidwatch reserve all licenses for combat nanotechnology? shaking off the stupor, he used his phys-sim to calculate the trajectory of his haemokinetic shrapnel. he swung at her using shaped tendrils, his pace fast enough to shatter the barrier of sound. zein responded to the blast waves by punching and somehow grappling the vibrations of another. +the kimura can be applied in a variety of situations,+ zein said. +including against sound if you have the means to grab it.+ avo snarled. lashed out cutting down at her using hundreds of tendrils, striking from all directions while using the ripples of his body to pilot the stray piece of shrapnel, the impact lane slowly turning red as he guided the path it was circling. pulses of blue-organ light lanced out from her nanocarbide armor as she accelerated forward, greeting his spearing limb with a bladeless hilt raised, a faint look of enjoyment, bemused about a freefall sword fight against an eighty-ton god controlling alchemized blood. he fell upon her then, his speed faster than most non-fusion aerovecs, each strike fast enough to burst the shroud of sound. but her refutation of his power as a thing of beauty. this he could not deny. she deflected his blows into each other, every sweep of her blade-hilt ringing in perfect tandem with the bursts of her thrust pack. the economy of her movement was supreme. nothing was wasted. every shift of motion threw him off course and forced him to direct the shard for another spin. and against every blow she couldnt block she rode, bouncing herself away using the force directed from the block. annoyed, avo sought to end things. he quelled the galeslither as his shrapnel missed the fiftieth time, his dissatisfaction a wildfire in his veins. as they tumbled through the open air of her garden, he saw columns beginning to rise, and the bullets falling again. calculating her movement vectors using his phys-sim, he activated his galeslithers hell just as she twisted and fired her thrusters, returning to face him. zein lurched to a sudden halt. at the speed she was going, the stasis bubble shuddered as his galeslithers rend began to empty at blinding speed. without a moment to waste, avo did something he had never done before: he used both his hells at once. diving free from a cascade of blood, entropy poured out from him as he hurled a lance of pure grayness toward zein. a window popped up in his head. he accelerated the construct toward her all full speed. rend capacity [woundshaper] -0% across the distance, she had the audacity to yawn. wait, she wasnt yawning. as the light danced off her visor, he realized she was poking at one of her teeth using her tongue brightness consumed everything again. resurrection - 1% as avo fell back into his own soul, he, again, wondered what killed him this time. he found himself in the woundshaper, with the galeslither still stained with a trickle of rend. however, his attention on his own heavens and hells did not last. across his boundary, through a vast expanse of seeming nothingness, he saw another fire in the distance. another soul. zein. it was too far for him to reach, but as his resurrection played its pace to the end, he watched it lance upward around the same time as he did. flicking back into realitythe area around him bereft of blood to spawn fromavo stared at zein, who popped in much the same way. much of the garden was gone. they stood upon a rumbling surfacea machine intricate and complex beyond his comprehension. translucent gears danced and spun like the inner workings of a clock between the clawed digits of his feet. through it all, mirages of miasmic plant stuff and weapons spilled between the gears like ink. with the first crunching spin, a trickle of bullets fell while a carpet of soil shivered back into existence, materializing like a glitch in the real, not unlike his most recent resurrection. as the garden poured itself back into shape, he found himself staring back at zein, who was now kneeling, digging through a patch of dirt, her blade held high. what happened, he asked. zein folded her arms and nodded sagely. sometimes, my apprentice, suicide is an act of tactical brilliance. he narrowed his eyes. thought you said you werent going to use a nuke. what was that? chest bomb? internally planted fusion core? it was not a nuke, zein said proudly. i have an antimatter bomb in one of my hearts. a twisting feeling knotted painfully in his gut. avo wanted to say something, but words wouldnt form, his psyche beyond dumbfounded by the raw absurdity of this battle. it was a gift from voidwatch, zein said. i asked them to give me a smaller engine for a heart. like one of their ships. she smiled. they obliged. she thrust the hilt of her blade down into the earth. he felt a click as the gears suddenly halted. youre not very good at dodging, you know that? i around him, the garden began to flicker in and out of existence with the light, the demiplane flickering as if coming on and off to the flick of a light switch. when one blows themselves up, you should dive back into your demiplane. we must work on your adaptability. she nodded to herself. you show promise. no fear of death; a taste for pain; a mind flavored for complexity. but we need more. we need to instill in you the rules of total domain warfare. nothing must be outside the bounds of your consideration. nothing. he heard a crackling sound in the back of his mind thenhis ghost stuttering between the freedom of the real and the entrapment of this plane between flashes. you, zein said, twisting her sword are too sane. never in his life did avo expect someone utter such words to him. with a final click, the demiplane turned off entirely, and he found himself back in the front entrance to the second fortune. avo blinked. beside him, zeins once bladeless hilt now held a new edge. it looked as if a crystalline saber of bright mercury, and beneath the structure, the outlined shape of her garden danced, the shadows of the demiplane intermittently interrupted by the swirl of a self-eating creature circling along the edge. shh, akunsande, shh, she said, brushing the blade as if a mother coaxing a child. a ripple in time twisted, ebbing from the edge of the weapon as zein twisted the hilt. a new sigil flashed out, phantoms bleeding from the hilt to manifest a shrouded holographic icon. and avo felt his focus come apart. when his thoughts returned, he wondered why he was looking at zein shake out a sword-lengthed umbrella. come now, little dagger, she said, grasping him by the cook of his wrist, the sheer disparity in height between them not stopping her from having him guide her through the establishment like guardian bioform would a child. show me to your friends. we have much to discuss. death is always waiting for us later. just then, a session crackled on in his mind. +avo? avo?+ draus wary thought struck him like the tension of a hammer sinking beneath the tumbling waves of an ocean. +you dropped out of the world for a bit there. what the hells happened.+ avo considered sending her a simple reply, but again, he felt zein tugging his arm, pulling him away from the path to the apartments. but before that, i wish to play the slots, zein said. i need some imps for my drugs. +tell you when i figure it out myself,+ avo said. Chapter 9-1 Fear and Zein in the Second Fortune chapter 9-1 fear and zein in the second fortune to become a glaive of the pre-fall ori communality, one must achieve feats of mental and physical agility of near post-humanity in a time when most viewed even a simple gunpowder weapon as an arcane object. many walked the path of the dreaming willows. many failed. few ever returned with their dream-forged glaives. sorrowful; a true pity. a pity that they werent me. frankly, i dont understand what was so hard about the trial. the adversaries we faced were our worst nightmares? pathetic. just stop fearing things. that simple. accept. accept and kill. kill the terrors. children, if you are reading this, ignore neuro-mods and therapy. such is a thing for cowards and those subhumans who cuckold themselves of glorys touch. if you fear a monster hiding under your bedand you very well might be right toyou should gather the following items: 1. blades. frequency blades. a spear. a sword. a knife. three ranges. if you need something blunt, use your fists. you have no excuse not being augmented; if you are poor, steal them. do what you must to survive. 2. guns. you want as many kinds of guns as possible beforehand. anti-armor. infantry. from here, understand what you are fighting and bring a primary firearm, a reserve firearm, an implanted firearm, a secondary firearm, and a gun for amusement should you lose your target scuttling into the woods and you find yourself in a life-or-death hunt-chase with a new mortal adversary. 3. suicide bomb. i strongly recommend suicide bombs. not just for godclads. not all fights can be victoriesthough all of mine werebut you should make sure that, at the very least, everyone loses. suicide bombs are easy. they can be made out of aerovec engines in an afternoon and wired to a mental trigger via ghosts. i will not waste your time telling you how. regardless, if there is one thing that i might impart to the children it is this: it is better to explode yourself using an unstable fusion reactor than it is to have your flesh assimilated by skin mimics. dont push that responsibility onto them. be reasonable. do the right thing. that means you too, veylis. your father might tell you otherwise, but i trust you know what to do should the time come. -zein thousandhand, memoirs of most the killings i can recall off the top of my head, chapter i, page 1 9-1 fear and zein in the second fortune nova. bliss. joy. bloom. dust. zoom-twelve. yogfeth. numb. se1-sure. suncloud. ten drugs. ten drugs banned by the great eight. ten drugs so potent each could cripple a baseliner. ten drugs, with some mandating specific biomodifications for the body to even survive ingestion. ten drugs that zein took all at the same time. in full view of countless horrified onlookers of the casino main hall. the ground floor of the second fortune was crowded enough as it was. with the exorcists still sweeping through the district now concentrating their efforts on the null blast that rippled out from ox-3most people turned to leisure to pass the time. beneath massive entertainment holos broadcasting the newest streams, gamblers gathered around gaming pits to burn time. dueling pens for teams of bio-augmented crickets occupied the northern quarter of the casino floor, with hundred cheering and jeering as if beholding a circuit. above them did play circuit highlights, holos of recaps from the local bloodsport, with in-depth odds provided for the more well-known fighters to pass through. contact details of their metas flashed, snarling fighters looking for sponsors to take their bloodletting up the layers, and hopefully, into the tiers. card tables dotted the walls around them while zein ping ponged between various slot machines down the middle of the room. casting her imps at random, never hitting the same slot system twice, holoprojected nu-bears dancing upon the heads of snarling tigers flashed out from the slots as a jingling tune began. by melodys end, most the bears tumbled and found their censored demise at the hands of the tigers. for the slots that zein cast into, however, every bear managed to leap upon a passing cloud, fortune bringing them to a heavenly palace carved from gold. it didnt take long for the sang to send someone to check just how they were losing that much money. a wandering nu-dog came, wheezing. it stood a stocky seven feet and was dressed in robes denoting the sang characters for fortune, wealth, and joy. its face was a flat, snoutless thing; each inhale a snort. through his connection to the galeslither, avo could feel the creature choking on its own breath. here, dog, zein said, words slurring from her final hit of suncloud. the nano-drug buzzed loud, an angry cloud of glinting fireflies in an inhaler. take this. it blinked slowly, wondering what the old woman wanted. its answer came in the form of suncloud jammed right against its jowls. the dog''s beady eyes widened, its frame shivering as the nano-particles poured through its system. the thoughtstuff of the dog sputtered as if a river smashing into a dam. it began to cough, hacking violently as zein shook her head. this is not the future in which it decides to throw off the shackles of control and see its own destiny. a pity. without looking, she offered up her drug canister to avo. the slobber leftover from the unwilling dog dolloped in thick oozing strands. take it. no, he said. force it on me and die. she smirked. well, the die part is accurate. the blood within her coursed slower, impeded by crystallizing blockages forming in her arteries. where his heaven of blood tasted substances flowing through the bodies around him, none were quite as congested as zein''s. which wasnt a surprise considering she blew her winnings as fast as they came in, buying, and often doing the drugs right in front of the dealer. right then, she probably had enough substance inside her to make a nu-whale hallucinate a vision of jaus. damn this, zein said, her breaths wheezing. hear me now, avo. terrestrial drugs are terrible. if you ever want some good substances, seek the voider. voiders. she sighed. now they know how to live. blood bursted out inside her liver. she didnt even wince. trying to kill yourself again? avo said, wondering if he could pocket her in his galeslither in time to hide whatever explosion was certain to follow. she scoffed. failing to overdose. and spare me the anxiety. i will not explode. my bomb is a tooth-trigger, not a death-trigger. a nearby scaarthian turned to stare at them when he heard the word bomb. he quickly turned away when he had to look up to meet avos gaze. right. the bone demon made him taller. so much for keeping a low profile. he needed to get his holocoat back. and maybe buy an incog from a squire, he had no time for crafting his own. he glared at the legendary swordswoman. listen, zein said, pounding her chest as if trying to accelerate her impending heart attack, there are many things we must discuss. but i refuse to do it sober. the topics are miserable and i despise almost everyone involved. also, joy. green river turned to avo. her fox never stopped glaring at thousandhand. yosanna. she is dead? nulled, avo said. like everyone else in the block. you already know. other branches of waltonthe low masters. they cracked everyone before i got there. built auto-seances into the minds. siphoned overall cog-cap to hide the hungers. a loud piercing screech finally came from zein. her body bolted upright and shuddered, eyes spinning and bloodshot. ah! it is upon me! death! death! avo! avo listen to me! if you have nanosuites, use suncloud first! it overwhelms the systems so the other drugs can take effect. remember this. reme she gave a choked noise as she clutched her chest and fell over. everyone stared. her thoughtstuff faded. her breath wisped out. her blood slowed. zein was dead. i cannot house you here anymore, green river said, a quiet fury bleeding into her features. i can quell what happened here today, but not with you present. there will be questions. not just from the exorcists but my elders. she paused. they must know that old power of noloth is still in play. this attack cannot go unanswered. and i must rehouse the two children. they will want to know what happened wth their mother. right. the kids. avo barely remembered they existed. where will you put them? green river lifted an eyebrow. do you want to eat them or something? no, avo said. not really. and so they spoke no more on it. i can give you a reference, river said. someone in nu-scarrowbur who can help hide you while draus zein appeared between them. that will be unnecessary. the fox bit out at her in surprise. zein seized its jaws before it could open fully. tossing her umbrella away, she reached up and began to scratch the vulpine. for the first time since he met her, green river looked visibly unnerved, swallowing. yes, zein said. good dog. i had a nu-fox once. during the first guild war. rekikimo. very clever girl. horrible death though. ugly death. both the sang and the fox blinked. releasing green rivers fox, zein spun on her heel to face avo frowning as she needed to look up. her umbrella was back in her hand again. he didnt recall her ever picking it up. there is no need for you to find another rat nest to hide. she leaned in close and promptly inhaled a mouthful of pills again. ah, incredible. she offered the drug to kae, who took it absent-mindedly, who had it snatched from her in turn by a scowling draus. start gettin to the point, thousandhand. been hearin a lot of stuff today and aint none of it makes a lick of sense. out of all of them, draus regarded the ancient godclad with the most disdain, carefree violence clashing with habitual professionalism like oil on water. ah that, zein said, looking draus up and down. thousandhand swallowed a tablet of numb. why are all of you so tall? she looked at kae and opened her arms in greeting. stay short, sister. someone must placate my ego. kae blinked, the sheer chaos of the situation meshing poorly with her already-savaged mind. um okay? avo, listen, zein said. we need to go into the gutters he snarled. no! no more drugs. exorcists searching the area. paladins. wonder whose fault that is, draus muttered. its not about the drugs, zein began, taking a vial of numb to bring herself down. for now. jaus, draus muttered. its about the helix, zein said. its about the helix, the inheritance your father left you, and how youre going to use them to help jhred greatling invade nu-scarrowbur and assassinate his mothers killer. a vicious smile that had nothing to do with the drugs then ballooned across her face. it''s about killing and framing him for an act of terrorism. everyone just stared at zein. i mean, draus said. we was still plannin to kill that half-strand. it was just more of a revenge and diet thing. avo grunted a laugh. despite everything, the idea of planting his ghosts inside mirrorhead before torturing the guilder to death remained ever so tantalizing. oh, zein said. and here i was thinking i needed to persuade you. good. good. but firstwe need a ghoul. avo stared at her blankly. not you, my sweet idiot dagger. a pure ghoul. one that you might be able to pilot and use as an access for the darkness. pilot? avo asked, not fully comprehending what was being said. what do you mean pilot? ziens lips thinned. it is a thing easier performed than explained. she leaned in closer. would you like to see the house that your father left you? house? avo asked, the events of the day leaving him uncertain how literally to take everything said to him. demiplane, zein stated plainly, the helix is the key to a demiplanar nexus. we just need to get close enough down to activate it. Chapter 9-2 The Helix chapter 9-2 the helix this message is directed to all cadres attached to assignment: gutter-crucible-lacing-688-halfdawn-urs. do notrepeatdo not stray into the shadows. most darkness in the gutters is natural. none thaumaturgic. however, leftover ontologics from the nolothi usurpation have been noted to be still in effect. in plain terms, you are at risk of interception by nolothi-classification bioformsghoul or otherwise. or pulled in. no individuals taken by the darkness return or are ever found. attempts have been made to penetrate this spatial anomaly. currently, there have been no successes on that front. as such, keep to your cadres and stay in the light of the drones. let the drones make a perimeter before beginning your investigations. keep together. keep each other safe. steady the flame. -internal paladin memo, shadows in the gutters 9-2 the helix it was through the waste pipes connected to the youmeng sleeper farms in xin yunsha that avo and the others worked their careful descent down to the gutters. drifting in through the farms wasnt hard. the galeslither allowed for much ease of access there. he breezed, a three-headed steed carved from clashing wind and storm, carrying the others along. spoofing the twelve patrolling specters, likewise, was a matter that took avo meager minutes. through zeins guidance and avos necrotheurgy, exorcist patrols existed more as obstacles of delay rather than detection. part of their protection was thanks to the sleeper farms, which housed approximately a hundred thousand dreaming workers. in the warrens, the sleeper farms existed as the most legitimate form of employment offered to many refugees. the imps paid werent bad either. if placed against working as an organ-bearer or some demeaning role for one of the syndicates, it wasnt hard to see the appeal. all one needed to do, was sleep. little to no physical labor required. merely apply to the available nether-lobby silo and report to the location. there, a wall-mounted dreampod would display your mem-data from a holojector, and after stepping in and laying on the neural interfacer, the pod would pump you full of all the nutrients and chemicals needed for a tour in the nether. of course, that was where the good ended. new vultun was a big city, but the logistical weight demanded by its consumers harbored a heaviness that could fracture even a titans bones. many needed to hide mem-data in a cheap and disposable mind, or needed to borrow proxy memories as capacity for a job or a nether-lobby they were running. the sleepers were always an option. the unfortunate would be kept lucid, assigned to puppet targets in cross-session war-sims. their memories would be permanently altered, with grafted recollections befitting the time period of the engagement injected. the resulting rawness of their terror and joy rewarded players with a far more immersive experience. that was when they werent serving as extensions for crucibles on the side. most came out broken. a few came out nulled. such was life as fateless, mem-tags imprinted along the side of the silos voicing their pain. +ori-thaum killed my mother.+ +fuck you topsider half-strands to all the godsdamned hells+ +im going to gun down as many scalper shits as i can. for lyra. my sweet lyra.+ sinking down aisles of screaming minds trapped in unwaking bodies, avo listened to zein as she tumbled within his yondergales. she, unlike the others, had opted to stay outside the protections of an aerovec, choosing to yell the directions at him while running along tumbling storm clouds. through the twists and turns spilling out from a network of waste pipes connected to the pods he flew as a quiet mist. the sensation of pushing and squeezing through even the tightest confines instilled avo with a sense of strange satisfaction: he could feel the filth gliding past his being, but it didnt touch him, slipping past him. it allowed him to appreciate the low beauty: the smear-crusted edges of ejection chutes, the fetid edges turned gleaming light slipping, fingers of neon hooked along the crevices. not even matter could inflict a choice he rejected upon him. after spending a moment or two waiting on the eightieth floor for a swarm of exorcists to pass below, they finally emerged into an ejection chute as wide as a barge that spewed a nigh-endless waterfall of waste into the maw rounding the borders of xin yunsha. rend capacity [galeslither]: 22% even after so long and carrying a load of a regular, an agnos, a screaming limbless ghoul, and an aerovec, his galeslithers hell was holding. he made the right choice not increasing the weight of the heaven as zein suggested. balance was a virtue, and keeping to it, the winds possessed by avo remained unfettered. arching under the block, they found an abandoned docking bay for offloading cargo resting just above the plates of layer one. the lip of the edge was worn away by rising entropy. access doors were welded shut and lined with polychromatic tarp where holes lined the walls. avo wasnt sure whose idea it was to build such a structure here above the maw, but bigger fools had been put in charge of more important decisions. here, next to that welded door, zein shouted while chewing on a techno-organic stem of se1-sure. avo wondered if the omnitech-made holy plant made her one with the alloyed will, whatever that was. her body spiraled through the winds as she spun around the galeslither. twitching her neck, she missed the wing of draus aerovec by a hair. luck, skill or a blessing of the fused ones. arriving on the terrace of an abandoned habitat, avo pulled out draus aerovec first, the regular steadied the vehicle without issue, even as the sudden change from torrential wind to still air tore another stray piece off from the aged aeros rear bumper. accelerating slowly, she brought it around to a hover. a note of incredulity sounded from her depths. +can you?+ +said try. more likely she blows herself up again.+ +what?+ +anti-matter bomb. inside her.+ he ended the session just as draus anxiety spiked. ah, simple pleasures. entering the tunnel, each step cast a shiver into the floor and walls as he passed, melting like candles. the liquid dark beneath his claws flowed, pulling him deeper and closer inward. he felt a spike of fear spilling over from behind him. not draus. definitely not zein. kae. he wondered if feeding the agnos to the dark would prove inimical for its structure somehow. seeing as it consumed the ghouls ghost, he wondered what kaes might do. the sheer devastation that it might wreak was almost too tempting to resist. in scant seconds, the distance between him and the gateway turned from gulf to mirage, as if sensing his hunger for destruction. he found himself standing before the twin doors of bone. on them, a cross parted them into four quadrants, each bearing a symbol. an owl eating a heart; a skull weeping endlessly; a man mutilating himself; and a figure engulfed in fire, embracing the flames. the last of which flashed before him. +welcome, defiance+ the loudness emanating from within the doorway made avos mind shudder. he shook his head. does it always do that? he asked zein. i cannot say, she said. she twisted the hilt of her umbrella and and avo suddenly remembered it was a sword. a long blade rippled, casting afterimages on the tapestry of space and time. a dragon circulated the edge of her blade as she shouldered the weapon, its form lengthening into a curved glaive. this is the first time i have been down here. the only other knowing of i have of this location is from the memory the strix sent me. is that why you had me go in front? avo asked, incredulous. zein nodded. yes. that and this place has too many possibilities in play. it gives me a headache to read, truly. i wanted to see if anything would have killed you. his glare slipped past the older godclad and onto the aerovec gliding in behind them. draus and kae were following. if something could kill him, then a hilt nudged his chest. that is a mistake, zein said. what? avo asked. considering the ephemerals, zein continued, face blank of jocularity. they die, avo. if you find either of the two interesting, find them a frame. we tread a path mortals cannot follow. lambs can not follow lions. her words hung over him as she twisted her glaive, casting it''s light above to part the flowing dark. shaking her words off, he turned to the pathway at hand, and took a step forward. a click rattled from the door. the bone relief of the low masters dissolved. the veins of darkness flecked away. mustering his heavens, avo felt his blood surge as he pressed into the door, balming his mind with readied violence for whatever might await him on the other side. the door sank inward at a push, its weight capitulating as if a curtain. avo stepped into the grand confines that his former masters once indulged in, reviewing their planning and worship. where the exterior delivered a front of muted darkness, the interior was a cascade of colors and silks. four apses held multi-colored semi-circular frescos, colored church panes bearing the imagery of ages long past and histories forgotten. the center of the room rose to become a dais, with four rune-carved paths trailing down its steps to vacant thrones of ebony. the interior itself was cavernous. labyrinthine. far larger than the outside suggested it would be, sprawling further than even his whisper could travel. countless walkways lined the walls, leading into crevices of shadow, the railing perpendicular to the ground. beneath the apses, avo counted no less than a dozen intersections and bridges that defied the laws of gravity and geometry. the air with thick with a taste of some kind of antiseptic. it wasnt until he stepped in fully and beheld the panes of shimmering glass that lined the corners of the room that he saw something shining in the distance. it looked as if a star. and a large, solid ball of chrome vines with concentric lanes of light spiraled around it. draus alarm speared into him with a note of surprise. +avo i think were in the fuckin void.+ Chapter 9-3 Shadows of the Past chapter 9-3 shadows of the past to everyone who can hear this, this is the scs george washington. we are lost. we are lost within a spatial distortion. there are things out here. something something grabbed us. something swam out in from the darkness and grabbed us. systems are damaged. central shepherd ai is screaming. we cant fix itit''s code is burning? the damage doesnt make sense! none of this shit makes sense! its pulling us down. i thinki think it swallowed us. swallowed the napoleon too. we were planet-bound. sawsaw signs of civilization on the surface. sent out probes confirming sophont life [rumbling] shit, we''re revectoring our thrusts but it''s like theres no propulsion. to all associated vessels of the sol central equanimity, do noti repeatdo not approach quarantine zone id. thaumic activity remains high. i repeat. thaumic activity remains high. the surviving crew are going into stasis. were going to secure ourselves. try to get our shepherd working again. [distortions; possible memory-echo from ghost] oh, god, im so fucking scared. [sobbing] -chief admin andrew mcconney of the scs george washington, sol central arkship 9-3 shadows of the past it was an unnerving thing, to be dwarfed by lost history. avo didnt yet know the lore behind this place, but stories sang from the structure itself, its bones colored with culture and history long lost to new vultuns memories. ascending, he found himself at the center of an immensity of a dias. runes directed him forward, thrones gleaming distantly. the spilling headlights of draus aerovec basked each an ominous shade, casting his shadow against them, a grotesque puppet as he led the way. the runes parted like clay with each step. the sensation was disconcerting, like the ground itself molding to form better grips for his claws. the touch of darkness was far from the interior of this pace, the grand gateway they entered rattling to a close behind them, flaps of pale whiteness bolted onto an interior of tesselated colors and ripe with the atmosphere of worship. before the gate came to a close, avo watched as the darkness crashed down, engulfing the tunnel behind like a wave smashing down on a narrowing tube. the light faded as thick strands of darkness collapsed, fusing together like a melding seam. the essence of the ghoul they sacrificed resonated weakly, splashing down along the sides of the structure, deeper and deeper until he could sense it no more. +well,+ draus said, eyes still fixed on the panes of glass lining the corners of the room, +hope we didnt just make a one-way trip.+ beyond the glass, swirling emptiness speckled with dots of nebula answered silently. vast swaths of pustulating tumorous oozed gouts of eldritch flame into the real. +we can eat thousandhand,+ avo suggested. +use her for food if stranded.+ draus mind was filled with doubt. +can you beat er?+ +eventually,+ avo said. +draw, at least.+ the obvious lie spilled over from his mind into hers as she scoffed. +dont think i want to eat no drug-fiend-old-lady meat anyhow. suppose well have to make do with you. reckon we all got better odds with that.+ he sneered. +did my beating knock something loose inside you?+ her mind reacted, its sequences ringing with mockery. +nah. heads clearer than its been in a while. figure the old lady might wanna piece of you anyway. seein how you run roughshod over your squad, and spent some time bein the holder of her piss-cans, i got guesses hangin in the back of mind, and that guess is that she got your number.+ chancing a glare at zein, he found the older woman nodding at him, expression one of pleasure and anticipation. something inside twitched. violence for him was like leaking gas. always hissing, except all the world was a spark, and he could only take being taunted so long. oh, dont listen to that ox of a girl, zein said, tilting her blade so she reflected his salivating face. he furled his headplates together as a response. do as you wish. as will i. we are godclad, after all. it felt as if the beast was burrowing deeper inside him, gnawing in his chest so he could calm the dissatisfaction of not killing her with his bare claws. a faint ringing pulled his focus out of the conversation and back on one of the thrones. the seats stood apart from the room, forms speaking little of opulence but much of tradition. bone inlays formed patterned sigils on each of the marble seats, their representations emblems to the low masters. the ivory inlay in the throne of defiance was calling out to him, a blackened, dormant locus embedded at its core sudden snapping out from a hidden panel. staring at the crystalline structure, he saw something flashing inside it, shining in a fashion only something bearing a paired memory would. it is safe, zein said. bemusement spread across her face as she prodded the ground. the matter parted before the glaive, offering obedience instead of being pierced. the responsiveness continued to unsettle. for you. should anyone else connect with it, it will empty enough traumas into their mind to null a thousand-sequence strong warding. like water rushing up a pipe, the first spills of ghost stuff flowed through and he connected. blackened roots spread outward from the locus, manifesting as if an analogy lost between a fissure and expanding vein. from beyond the shimmering crystal locus and through the maze of hallways spilling up the structure like broken pieces from a kaleidoscope, ghosts flowed free, their flows rushing out like waters released from turned faucets. the locus embedded in the throne before him gleamed with a growing phantasmal presence. sequences threaded themselves into the crystal as it spewed out a phantom. human failed to serve as an adequate descriptor for the simulacrum manifesting before avo. as cards could be stacked, so mimicked the nature of this phantasmal construct, its body an endless mesh of individuals compressed into the space held by one, their minds symphonic but bereft of any melody; it felt as if he was beholding a thick stack perfected for processing mass, but not harmony. raw processing power, in simplistic terms. helix online egi shepherd core all at once, the locations of each of the aforementioned modules became known to him. with a thought, he found himself able to peer out from the walls, the tessellating matter currently forming the shape of a template rapidly reshaping not unlike his woundshaper could. even better, perhaps. from the walls, he could cameras and receive audio as well. they were currently in the command nexus it ran far longer than he anticipated. ancient blueprints flashed in his mind alongside countless other stored templates. the halls, he realized, were but the latest templated design. at the time of its origination, the composition of the structure had been entirely fog-like, reshaping quickly to the whims of its staff. the nexus ran for twenty kilometers. kilometers? voidwatch numbers. that made sense. it was built more like a tower than a golem, its structure malleable on the inside, but hardened weaves made out of countless tubes forming a layered weave made from a hardened poly-silicon mesoskeleton. the other modules clung to the nexus from bridges and arms, each piece spinning. from outer visuals, it vaguely looked like twenty blackened cubes sheathed and melting over each other, with a few ovular extensions leading out from the length of its central body. the vast rings spun around its exterior, connected along crystalline lattices. two were slightly cracked, and the machinery within looked long hollowed. turn speed: 9.8 m/s it was through the tubes comprising the ship that darkness came flowing in. from what few visual sensors he had on the outside of the ship, he gazed out, trying to study the void itself. an immense, pulsing construct of shimmering brightness took up his view, its resplendence coated in a shell of mirrors. countless echoes undulated through the darkness, like currents rushing through synapses. they turned as if metallic upon being fed a death. on an instinctive level, he realized these werent stars, but essence flowing. other ghouls were being sacrificed. he felt the allure of their deaths. he felt the touch of their shine. a throb cast a tidal wave out into the void. his feeds flickered as oblivion rushed up at him. avo flinched back. and the shadows passed through the ship, smiting nothing. +the heart of noloth is purely a spatial-conceptual anomaly,+ the hive said. +it cannot inflict kinetic damage. currently, it is running at minimal capacity. much is hidden here. even from itself. would you like to begin your tour now?+ avo grunted, still reeling from the impact which never came. that heaven it lacks a cycler, the woundshaper said. these sacrifices must be made constantly. without efficiency. but perhaps it does offer a function of quietude. the specificity of its offering and conditions allow the low masters an edge to their subterfuge indeed. the words spoken by the woundshaper inspired avos curiosity, and from it, his first questions flowed. how long have you been here? +we were captured approximately one-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-two sol standard cycles,+ the hive said. +we estimate that the heart retreated beneath the surface of the planet some eight hundred cycles ago before we were dislodged into the catacombs of old noloth around five hundred cycles ago.+ not content to only recite the history, it injected history itself directly into his memories. schematics and slaves became known to him. walton, dressed in ashen robes lined with rope-tightened bones stood before a gargantuan ship protruding from the underground. a piece of glinting crystal protruded from his skull then, embedded deep as ghosts simmered out like a fog. in the haze, he saw the hungers again, seeming far smaller in his memories. countless pale-skin slaves hammered away, smashing and pounding through miles of rock and soil to carve the voidship free. +the remaining modules of the scs george washington were then dismantled and re-anchored into the heart approximately one hundred years ago to serve as the primary operations center for low masters of the eternal city. approximately one month prior, all users other than defiance were wiped from administrative functions.+ you pre-date the godsfall, avo whispered. suddenly, he felt zein leaning close. do you see anything about weapons? or an armory? what arms does this ship have? +all non-listed modules are missing. all armaments and drive specs were lost due to critical system damage.+ crew? avo asked. what do you mean crew? +current crew members: defianceavo plus two other fury class sophonts and one base-class sophont.+ another spike of information filled his mind. a memory from waltonor who he was before. they cut one of the crew out of her stasis pod. she screamed when he poured his ghosts directly into her. from her, they harvested implants. pieces of technology they couldnt yet understand. not until the arrival of jaus, and with him, voidwatch, did they fully learn that which they held. avo blinked. the way the information came to him was unlike any transfer of memory he ever experienced. no sequences flowed through, rather, it felt like he was directly getting a blast of static scenes carved into his mind. studying the overall architecture of the hive again, he felt his fascination in bloom. he had no idea how one could build an auto-seance into this thing, or even strike it for that matter. it felt like an entirely different creature grown out of a garden of human minds spliced with something impossibly robotic. almost like a far more advanced version of the coldtech machine he interfaced with before the crucible. sinking deeper into the locus, he felt himself enmesh with the ships systems, drowning, overwhelmed. +yes,+ avo finally said, +yes. start the tour.+ +understood. attention. pre-recording initiating: waltons final farewell.+ upon the dais, assembled from flecking motes of tessellating particles, an effigy of walton formed. an effigy savaged by the final stages of wombrash. swollen pustules of murky whiteness rose along the mans skull and chest, marring his form with pregnant lumps. the translucence of the rash clusters was filled with the deformed shapes of homunculi; their bodies were like drained apples. most drifted, unmoving in their false wombs, dead without a chance to struggle. a few others, however, fought on, pushing tiny twitching fingers out through the rupturing sores reaming flesh. through it all, however, walton kept smiling, the expression on his face serene, his own death but an unexpected moment of rainfall to him. out of the aero now, avo heard kae whimper. oh oh gods. +hey, there, avo,+ walton said. a small hand punched out through the back of his skull. he coughed, reached up, and politely pushed the arm back in. the bulge protruding from behind his head began to thrash. +by the time youre getting this, im probably long gone. i wont lie. the main reason im doing this is jealousy. pure and simple. now, some parents get to teach their kids how to drivewell, command, an aerovec at least. never got to do that with you. i think i would have liked it.+ he chuckled. the homunculi burst out from behind him, toppling free with a squleching noise. +i also think you wouldve gotten distracted by thinking about the passing birds. how they might taste to you. anyway. im dead, but id still like to show you how to work this half-broken voidship i dug up.+ his chuckle bloomed into a full smile as genuine mirth glinted in his eyes. +your uncles arent going to like this. neither is that thing i used to call my god. the hells with them. you got my frame. you got my helix. let me show you how to steal whats left of an empire.+ Chapter 9-4 The Stolen Thrones (I) chapter 9-4 the stolen thrones (i) +find her! find thousandhand! gather your war nodes and reclaim the helix! atone for your shame!+ -thoughtcast from hungers to their low masters 9-4 the stolen thrones (i) +well, lets start with a few things,+ walton said, glancing sidelong at the small mutilated version of himself writhing on the ground. +im sure youve figured out this isnt any old tower floating in the dark. its a ship. older than those under voidwatch, i figure. youre going to want to access its command functions now if you havent. itll make the next part easier. you always were more of a hands-on learner, so you should get used to the instrument. youll be using it a lot.+ the interfaces were already aglow in avos mind. casting commands into them was a simple thing of desire, but he waited for walton to continue. +theres a story to each part of this place,+ walton said. +well. more sins than stories, if i gotta be honest. evil is easy to run from. theres almost always an excuse. but not here. not for what we did to the crew of this ship. there were approximately twenty thousand alive after we dug up the ship. and we used all of them.+ used? kae whispered. she was listening too. only then did avo realize that the ghosts bearing waltons final words were echoing in the real. something twisted inside him. by patterns of habit layered over intrinsic nature, he was a private creature. before, it was to hide from a world that desired him dead. now, the places unseen served him as new angles to strike from. walton didnt sigh much in life. matters big and small passed through him, his vessel more gate than person, accepting of all, and turning to face each situation with measured intensity. for him to reveal such strain now roused dread and curiosity within avo, the emotions a chill spreading up through his bones. +im not going to talk about it without you seeing. you should see my mistake for yourself and decide how you feel. i know youre not well, thats not your fault. you never asked to be, but youre different. i made you different. i made a lot of things different.+ a pause lulled as waltons face went distant. +of all the symbols ive carved into this world, youre about the only one i dont regret. its not supposed to be my designation to think this way but you dont live amongst your enemies this long without learning something from them.+ a smirk came, it arrived a flicker, a shadow. +third law. voidwatch had a saying about that from someone long passed called newton. you should send an order to the egi. have it take you to see the core. youll see what i did there.+??vl-b!n. the effigy of the man froze there. hesitation found avo before will did, his reluctance to proceed fixated on his fathers savaged form. rising from the throne, he ignored the warnings cast into his mind by the hive as to better look upon the man he knew as father. he never remembered walton to be so small, so shriveled in stature and life. halfway into deaths embrace, the fourth of the low masters still possessed an inquisitive shine to his eyes. where flesh failed, his will was never quenched. blanketed by his old coat, walton slouched under the weight of countless suppurating pseudo-wombs as avo regarded his father with new eyes. something between them was irrevocably broken. after the incident in the bazaar, even by proxy, to kill ones own kinown god!was a mutilation of the spirit where only two paths could follow. suicide, or transformation. changed, augmented, and ascended, the godclad ghoul stared down at a shadow of a man who fled from his own duty, his own design, even his other selves. all that given away, just to see his child made powerful? why, avo asked, uncomprehending. the power of his soul sang within him, a steady rippling radiance growing vaster by the day. but if this could have been granted to him, it meant another one of waltons nodes could have taken the frame for themselves. or given it to zein. you will never know the answer with that one, zein said. she added a scoff afterward to dissuade avo from thinking she was complimenting walton. the knowings walton earned across the long stretch of his life is more than words can convey. you are more symbol to him than person. atonement perhaps. or an idealized form of that he lost, resurrected and ascended to deification. that which he lost, avo said. he considered zeins words. a single name came back to him, pushing past all he spoke of with the hungers. avohakten? he did not read certainty on zeins face. perhaps, though even i know little of his tale. nor do i care. thousandhand shrugged. it was of little concern to me. i would have only been interested if my love told me to kill them. jaus was the one that cared. him. and only him. a wisp of sadness leaked into the nether, but in its wake, the waters of hope stained the periphery of the emotion bleeding out. glancing at waltons frozen face once more, avo turned back to the task and cast out his command. helix activating transitioning to egi core the chamber they were in did not move suddenly. nor did they ascend like an elevator. rather, parts of asymmetric staircases tore away from the walls in series, particulates splitting as the steps turned parallel with the walls, backs fusing into eight main columns. then, the steps spilled down, washing down and past the command nexus. within his mind, he saw that the command nexus was but a small bowl protected by layers upon layers of smart-matter hulling. they were located kilometers deep and the room itself was formed from countless minute pieces. like blood cells. technology here resembled biology closer than he first anticipated. there is a poetry to eternity, the woundshaper murmured. a rhythm that comes to every eon. when you have lived and learned and suffered and slaked every pleasure there is to please, every pleading desire within, some time afterward, perhaps in another place altogether, you find yourself faced with a moment of uncanny symmetry. such is the tapestry of existence. reaching out, the hungers shuddered as avo tried to understand just what was happening with them. he saw no ghosts flow out from it. he saw it take nothing from those who died. +dont look for reason where there is none, son,+ walton said, shaking his head. a frown of shame shadowed his face. +everything that happened here was just a ceremony. something that we thought would offer us more guidance.+ he laughed. +me, and the ones i served both. you know the hungers are religious. its absurd to say. gods usually are seen as the endpoint of the thaumic pipeline but i was a priest to an esoteric cult, and i mean that in the deepest sense possible.+ why? such was the question avo had for his father. was it ignorance? the answer came thereafter. +i suppose already knew we were just killing people for the rote of it. i had a son once. a blood son. iuh.+ waltons lip quivered. +there was a war in noloth. a war before all the others. a war with ourselves. the hive can tell you about the details. ill just lie about parts of it. it came down to me and my faithful on the side of the hungers, and my son, avohakten well, he decided he wanted nothing to do with that.+ back in the memory, someone handed walton a knife. it was the same kind of blade that the two sacrifices used to finish themselves. the girls voice turned mouselike, squeaking. +i killed him,+ walton said. a quavering breath left him. +i killed my boy. and not even for a real god.+ the blade descended andto avos surpriseshattered against flesh. walton stumbled back, hissing as jagged pieces bit into him. the girl, meanwhile, coughed as if she had been struck by a hammer than a blade. walton chuckled at that back in the real, seemingly shaking his head at his prior folly. +her name was sarah myers. she was from a place called mars, i believe. i didnt know this at the time, but i just tried to stab someone with combat-grade nanosuites with a brittle piece of crystal. i was a fool. a damned fool. if you can see the hungers drifting over me, theyre telling me to find another knife and try again, cursing at me for not believing enough in the promise of paradise.+ the memory shuddered. time skipped forward. daggers broke, and in their place came actual blades, first mundane, then god-touched. +it took me three days to finally kill her. i bled her out. by the second, she had somehow learned my language and was begging me directly to spare her. i understood her, and i still cut into her. the thought was to use her as an offering to the hungersto feed her mind to their consensus so they would understand the secrets within this place. it worked.+ waltons face turned ashen. +it worked+ and suddenly, in the place of the girl were countless other members of the crew. each by each they were bled. no improvements were made to the process of butchery; the ritual was repeated in rote repetitions as if the mistakes themselves were deemed sacred by the hungers. they parted the bodies of their implants and unclasped the flesh from bones. one hundred. two hundred. three. and then the sacrifices stopped. suddenly, the scene was different again, and walton was standing in the middle of the ship, looking at rows of cryopods grown into the wall, the structure like a hive, a honeycomb. +you know the worst thing about serving the hungers,+ walton said, gazing off into the distance. another one of his rashes popped. this time, avo could hear the soft cries of the homunculi. +theyre uninterested in the truth. theyre uninterested in the true nature of things. i suppose thats what happens when you make an eternally self-repeating city from all those marked of the noble caste. the voiders were a sign there was a time before us. but to the hungers, we had to be the eldest city, the first city, the first civilization. and it so it came to be that the voidships were a nolothi invention and that this was a birthright was just kind of forgot. a chuckle of disbelief escaped him. he shook his head. +as for what followed. ask the egi to show you the extension.+ avo did, and the arms connected to the core went transparent as well. he saw them. all them. the remaining members of the crew. their bodies twitched like wrinkled fruits on grapevines, the branches made from the purest crystal. there were thousands of them. more. much more. each one had tubes grafted into them, their shapes disfigured but their survival was ensured by being fused to the ship, to the core. +even after drinking those minds, the hungers still didnt fully know how this place worked. i doubt the crew did either. whatever that core was, there was a lot more to it before it went down. even now, were using the living crew as extensions. scaffolding. interfacing points for our ghosts.+ walton turned, then, seeming to gaze out the window as well. +theyre still aware, you know. still aware somewhere inside. but theres nothing left of them to protest. not since we modified their minds after.+ walton gave a chuckle. +you know the funny thing is, this might not even be the worse thing i did to these people.+ some part of avo wanted the tour to stop. he didnt want the low masters and walton to join. he didnt want atrocity to be the last thing he knew of his father. he was supposed to be the ghoul. the monster. walton should have been pure. someone should have. +youll see when we get to the cloning pool,+ walton said. +youll understand.+ Chapter 9-5 The Stolen Thrones (II) chapter 9-5 the stolen thrones (ii) my dearest uncle vincentine: again, youre a piece of shit. i told you this last we spoke, but i would like to do it again in case you forget and start developing a positive self-regard. i requested seven days of leave for your matter and i will see it resolved in seven days. coincidentally the four members of my cadre have also requested a period away from duties. the longeyes surprisingly approved. whatever youre involved in has them intrigued. i recommend that i encounter my mother in the best of care unless you wish for me to break your other arm. you should tell her im coming. dont forget this time. you''ve failed her enough for one life. now, before i arrive, send me what you have on this mirrorhead. it has been some time since i faced a clad of guild highflame. i wish to know my prey. -reva javvers, bloodthane of stormtree 9-5 the stolen thrones (ii) the spawning pools did not strike avo as something comparable to the egi core. few things could compare to the wonder of yesteryear struggling on for eons, still emitting enough natural power to boil a portion of the city. however, something equally ponderous burdened him as the architecture around them shifted again, the nexus shuttling them through the labyrinths of the scs george washington. all through his travel, the weight of his fathers atrocities dwelled on him. even devoid of the capacity for true empathy, avo did pity those who dwelled within this ship. the cosmic injustice of their suffering was a thing more absurd than it was tragic to him. imagine awakening after spending eons trying to outlast a nightmare, only to be cast into another. the ghouls were always meant to be instruments; their fates deemed them beasts pre-broken to fit the groove of brutality and whatever other desires the hungers and low masters deigned. but the crew of the george washington? what great transgression were they born under? what a miserable fate for so random an encounter. in his infancy, avo would have never considered such a thing. never fixated on the fate of another beyond if they offered him nourishment. now, even past his time with walton, concept of self set free from shattered chains, it was a yearning for meaning that subsumed him. the crew of the voidship met hell and torment through no fault of their own. no choice. all of this was injust circumstance upon circumstance. and in that, avo thought he could taste the bitterness behind their hollowed lives. walton looked regretful, but the younger man he was in ancient memory struck avo as a weak creature, someone lesser that teased the beast itself. he felt the monster inside him yearn to taste the flesh of his fathers former self as if he was but meat instead of lord. there was a liberation to such a desire. and a philosophical dread. how fickle were the bindings of familial piety? was this a continuation of the nodes actions? of waltons desire to see the chains between him and avo broken? to free him from anything they shared, all toward the end of undoing the low masters. his claws dug into the oddly yielding railing of the speeding platform. avo, kae asked. her voice was thin. uncertain. he noticed her then as he had not noticed her before. a mouse among wolves, her presence was the only to kindle the flames of his bloodlust. do you uh do you think you can fix them? she was asking about the trapped crew. the ones used as patchwork machineryphantasmal scaffolding enmeshed to the crippled coldtech. their pain lingered, but came as faint echoes of dreamers where still wakeful minds would offer the fullness of screams. how strange it was that she stood among them, shielded by the unshaken wall of draus and zein watching the bulkhead modules fly by. perhaps this was empathy, then. she thought the crew her bedfellows in pain despite their differences. to him, she seemed their inverse. it was the nether that she was broken in, and it was coldtech that kept her standing. dont know, avo said, genuinely unsure. it would take time for him to review the damage. time that would be devoted to many other things before that. still, it was something worth considering. what shape would the mind of a freed ancient be? kaes worried fidgeting pulled him back to the present. only one out of all of us, avo said. she blinked. what?n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. you, he continued as she looked up at him. i thought my father was good. but it was a lie. too much of him was a lie. empathy. it lay naked across her face when his words finally caught up with her. he found himself more unnerved by the fact she cared so much. he looked to draus, to zeintheir attentions sweeping the structure itself, poking waltons frozen form still seated on the throne. im not not a good person, kae said. i-if thats what youre saying i did something. i did something i cant remember. i should have died. w-would have without draus. he offered her nothing but a grunt in return. perhaps she needed empathy also, but he hadnt the strength nor the want to fake it. her damage had always captured his fascination, but watching her struggle he realized she was joined with him in mystery. the fullness of her past was lost to her as well. emotions clashed within avo. he gnashed his teeth together. he wanted to tear into someone. hurt something. that was what his biology understood. yet, beholding the currently unmoving forms of the heliosthe creatures meant to serve as his mold, he succumbed to nobler desires instead. i wanted him to be who i dreamed he was, avo said. the taste of truth was bitter, but through his newly obtained power and discoveries, they came without fear. i wanted something more than feeling. something higher to believe in. turning his attention to the module that was the gene clinic, lines of mem-data spilled across his feed, telling him how much material was left for use. things relating to alloys or functional nanites were missing. genetic modifications likewise were limited to a few optionsmostly enhancements made for surviving in space like flatulence propulsions for travel through the void and dermal-thermal crystallines for heat. then, a few select options came up, marked for favored use. claws. enhancements to hearing. night vision. digitigrade legs. prehensile claws. omniskein musculature. several others drifted through his mind, each piece carving the towering humanoid more into shape, more into being a ghoul. the final item on the enhancement list was not described, the functions of which were redacted. error lines dotted its sides, leaving only its name read. +category-3 haemophage,+ the hive said. +cellular reconstructor.+ warning: the use of this modification will present severe risk to unprotected ecosystems; any destabilization is against sol central charter and will result in a formal investigation in both the admin and the egi. if found guilty, all parties will be assigned to rehabilitation avo blinked. admin and the egi? a single person and the ship itself were to be charged? what manner of society did this vessel originate from? walton shivered. +by now you should have seen what we did to these things. yeah. every one of the helios goes through that. hungers might tell you that your form is designed to be slave-shaped or something like that. they tell you that, know that theyre lying. your body is the way it is because this is what we got. had some success over the years changing your brothers with biomancy but those were special cases. this is our standard. all it takes for this to run is some organic components is all. fed it to the cloud in the cloning pools and you got what you need.+ a brief lull came over walton. +we tried putting other things in the pool before. it takes matter apart. i think it''s a bit like one of the voidwatch deconstructor swarms, except more toward factory use.+ he contemplated his words. something popped underneath his coat. the rash was killing him. +i think they suspected we had this ship. suspected it from the moment they realized the nature of your design. if you ever find an angle, you should try talking to one of voidwatchs governors. the ships yours so if you can get it back to them without the hungers noticing or stopping you, that might be something they want. i cant rightly say how theyll react to you. they never did like noloth much. not since the hungers had us attack those ships of theirs.+ ah, zein said, nodding as if she was recalling a fond incident from her past. yes. the alloy embargo of 44. the nolothi managed to cripple a few voidwatch humanitarian vessels, killing much of the citizenry they were attempting to extract. she smirked. i must say, i remember what came after most fondly. it was a rare thing, to see all eight of the guilds working in tandem. the devastation they wrought on your fathers people was sublime. she barked a laugh. and the hungers mustve thought they had a chance. what hubris. but hubris is unbefitting of those unblessed by divinity. +theyre still not ghouls yet,+ walton continued. +not really. something about them comes out missing. i think its related to damage inflicted on the core. or something within the system that doesnt allow neurology to be transferred. but the hungers they have a way about shaping a mind seeding something thats more than ghost but less-less than a person.+ he drew in a breath. something was nudging itself under the fabric of his coat. he looked down. he smirked. +well, avo. looks like you have a sister.+ he looked down again. +had.+ zein snorted a light note of amusement through her nose. somethin bout the air, thousandhand? draus asked. zein cocked her head at the regular. the ghouls feelings are intact. dont you worry, girl. my ma and pa called me girl. theyre dead. you call me draus. +the low mastersnoloth they still have other facilities under them. other instruments. but this was their sanctuary. its someplace where we could all hide away from the topsiders. plan our next moves. strike from the darkness. and now, ive stolen it from them, and i will it to you.+ walton straightened himself and sighed. +i wish i named you something else. avo. i took that name from my son. my dead son. through all this, my hope had been that i could bring him back in another world. in the eternal city promised to me. but ive lived for too long. lived. not existed. ive seen the world and you know what, my loss isnt a good enough excuse anymore. neither was my cowardice.+ stepping forward, avo faced his father as the man coughed. he reached out, as if to grasp the man, but his claws halted inches away. walton wasnt there. walton was dead. this was but a shadow; an echo. +it is with another atrocity that you were born,+ walton said, staring through avo. +all the dreams and thoughts and ghosts. once, they could only exist in a locus. linger within the crystallized puddles of time. but with the hungers trapped, the world finds an engine for the nether to keep growing. but with it comes nightmares. pain. suffering. and through us, they pour it into the bioforms, and we mold it into shape, into you.+ and for the first time, a shiver of determination surged through walton. +listen to me: i didnt catch the rash on accident. i know you never asked, but you know how i was. i could have neveri got it because its canons would blind the hungers and stop them from looking through me. it gave me a chance to alter my helix, to prepare and plan this.+ why, avo asked. his echoheads chittered and rattled, his frustration bleeding over into them as agitation. one of the cracked against the ground as he demanded, what are you saying? walton swallowed. +the memories you had as a ghoulling. that was a collection. i didnt i harvested the experiences from all your previous selves. the idea came to me the first time i saw you, dying in that playground. it stayed with me after that instance of you died, but i plucked the memories from you. from there i i took other things from people i knew. apprentices i taught the art to. stole sequences from other ghoulsthe ones that exhibited the most control. and then, finally, i poured all that i had all that i could into you. and added some parts of me as well, just so there would still be something left of me after im gone.+ suddenly, the man who had been his father seemed so small. one could accept horror, but it seemed they could not turn from it. not fully. +you are my greatest work. my instrument of hope. my well wishes. you are the new shape of my dreams. the day i perfected you and finally brought you back up the tiers with me, to that block, that day when the nukes fell and you asked to learn the art from me properly. that was when i knew i made a new life. something more than just a monster meant to serve as an instrument of vengeance; a dumping pit for traumatic bandwidth.+ +the hungers they dont grow. they dont learn all they do is eat and hate and cling to the past. they are stagnation incarnatea city refusing to change its ideals, to transform and face the truth or the future. and for so long, i was the same. but in living in building you, i think i finally breathed life into something that mattered.+ walton swallowed. +there was a myth. a myth i found while diving through this very ship. it was of a god that breathed fire into clay. and was punished for it by other gods. punished because it taught the clay how to perform the same art. i see how you suffered for us. all of you. it shouldnt be this way. i should have been a better father. i was never a better father. but+ he steeled himself. +you can be what i never was. you have all i consider virtuous. to seek a higher path than rank cruelty, but i kept the monster inside you. made it stronger even, because i never want you to mistake the nature of this city, this world.+ +new vultun wants to eat you, avo. the godclads want to eat you. the darkness between the stars, the things that lurk in the ruptures we live in a world of monsters. man isnt enough. never enough. but you are beyond pain. you have the potential for cruelty and gnosis both. you are my cure for this city, for this unending war.+ more pustules opened. a loud screech came muffled from within waltons right thigh. he took a step forward. avo took a step back. +i dont know what future youll bring. if youll even succeed. if all my desires will bear fruit or wither on the vine. but i dont care about that anymore. i just want one thing, and thats for you to see all the colors that life can bring.+ a sound came from beyond the memory. walton froze. +i think thats all the time i might have. the hungers. the low masters. their operations are hidden in the egi. you have the advantage. you can take from them without them seeing you coming. use thousandhand. end the mistake of my parting.+ he drew in a breath. +be who you want to be. never let this city, this world bend you from what you choose. we have been denied too long. thats all i ask.+ and with a final nod, he took a step back. +goodbye, avo. i ah. it is as it goes. nevermind me. do what you will.+ with a final step back, waltons leg gave out from beneath him and he tumbled down and the ghosts dissolved, the phantoms unraveling. silence reigned. avo stared at a void inside him expanding. a hunger grew. a hunger grew greater than ever. for memories. experience. wholeness. totality. a light breath unsheathed itself from zein. i suppose with that passed, we should move on to more meaningful matters. congratulations, little dagger, you have an ancient voidship. now, let us talk about the war it''s going to help us fight. Chapter 9-6 Deliberate Balance chapter 9-6 deliberate balance +chambers. wake up. time for you to be useful.+ -avo to aedon chambers 9-6 deliberate balance but before that? shall i formally welcome you to the war? zein asked, her words slightly slurred. drugs were almost certainly involved. it seems rather fitting, no? a numbing quietude settled on avo. he ignored the joy fiend and found himself staring at the helios more and morethe atrocity of creating the ghouls an act of mockery not even achieved by the low masters own merits. he was a failed monster. he was a failed monster because his creators were fools playing with someone elses pieces. but now, the primary instrument facilitating their sins belonged to him. the question was what he was to do with it. after the node had severed him from their code, from familial piety, avo sought the flavor of new experiences. new minds. he thought of req again, the slave he freed, the slave that killed when given the option. activating the mem-lock, he could taste the distant mind. fascinated by how the man suffered for it after, agonizing over one murder. perhaps this was a thing of waltons design as well. to let him sate himself on the world, his hunger for ever-building knowledge purposeful. the revelation behind the fullness of his nature did not shake him so much as flood him with a coldness that pervaded through his bones. for years, he hated his brothers for failing where he succeeded. he cared little for communal bonds with them, but to stand alone as the only creature amongst his kindred, as a being of higher personhood, made him fear his own making. perhaps it was worry that another of the ghouls could achieve what he did. go beyond. usurp the uniqueness of his design from him. or maybe he genuinely dreaded being a member of a subspecies that was fundamentally broken; less than; never to be better. mayhaps both things could be true at once. facing his predecessors once more, avo contemplated what he was to do with them as he finally turned to face zein. think i was welcomed before this. welcomed when i got the frame. zein seemed to agree with his words. hm. yes. i suppose you can regard such as truth. but you were a bystander then. groping blindly through the black, unaware of the larger picture at play, the greater powers pulling you in their wake. now you swim in deep waters. now you are part of the fight. part of it. yes. avo leaned down. what part are you? ninth column. what do you want from this war? kill your daughter? break the guilds? take over? honesty pealed from zeins mind, its directness central to her nature. why i want what all godclads eventually want. what the low masters and their hungers want. for my vision of reality to surmount all others. you cannot escape it. we channel the absolute, and the absolute reshapes us. to accept anything less would be an act of violence against the self, and i will offer no mercy for anyone who transgresses against my person, even if it is myself. shit, draus said, scoffing lightly, more flowery philosophy and no actual substance. avo, im gonna shoot you if you turn into this. zein flicked draus a bemused glance. you speak like you will not be touched by the flame yourself. the regular scoffed. i aint no clad. no, zein said. not yet. her gaze returned to avo in a blink. he didnt even see her eyes move. i dont want to change the world. just enough to bring back my love, see his dream made manifest, kill a certain amount of people, and amend a, uh, mistake i made with my daughter. dont care about shaping your own world? avo asked. the gleam in her eyes was sharp. i enjoy the current state of things. if jaus wishes to alter it when i return him into being using the ladder that will be, then so be it. one must make concessions in matrimony, but i like the way it is. he considered thousandhands'' words and found the creep of disillusionment settling upon him. still about power. always about power. nothing more? no, little dagger, your view falls short. its not about power, but totality. the totality of our expression triumphing over the tapestry itself. the stars are lost. existence is a wounded, dying animal. we are the bearers of the last true power, and so, a reset will be battled over. a revision where slate is cleaned and the waters might rightly flow. or not. such is a matter of perspective. a moment of silence passed between them. what if i have my perspective? my reality. what if its different from yours? she broke into laughter, as a grandmother humoring a foolish question from her grandchild. ah, but then we fight. in the real. as gods. with our heavens, fists, ghosts, philosophies, technologies, alliances, and relationships. we fight. and one will remain. but we stand far from such an inglorious end, though it might yet come. and for now, i think we can be joined against greater forces held at bay. until then, there is much for you to learn. it would not do for zein thousandhand to murder a babe of a fallwalker before proper apotheosis. such would offend my love and his dream. zein rolled her eyes at that. melancholy tinged her mind, even blurred with substances. what is the dream? kae asked. her interruption cut through the conversation like a whip snapping between two fighters. i-i was never told. each guild had a different interpr-uh-interpretation of what he wanted. zein studied the agnos with a moment of silence, and, beyond avos understanding, she turned her glaive back into an avo sensed his auto-seance activating. draus session activated. +old half-strands using us,+ draus said. +playin her own game. these aint my waters.+ +washing over us anyway,+ avo said. +what do you think?+ +well, i never expected to be doin no snuff-run with zein fuckin thousandhand. itll make the job easier. its also gonna pull us into a world of shit after, but whats new with that. guild business. left the tiers to avoid that shit. came back lookin for me anyhow.+ he couldnt say he felt the same way as the regular. the course of the last month had been redefining for him. it was not all joyous, but the euphoria he tasted, the new horizons he gazed upon. he wanted more. he wanted to see more colors. this was his wish. his desire. it was what walton had wanted for him as well. one of the things, anyway. what did he really know of his father in the end? pushing those thoughts aside, avo focused on the present. now more than anything, he wanted to eat another godclad. going to need to agree on a few things if we work together. agree? zein said. what of fighting? you and i duel every time we disagree no, avo said, cutting her off before she could swindle him into being a test subject for another one of her suicide bombs. she glowered at him glumly like a child denied candy. be serious. proper arrangement. we help each other. but i plan my dive. i keep my frame. and you dont hide things from me. not the futures. not anything else. dont want to be someones dog. genuine offense came over zeins expression. have i ever insinuated my desire to take a slave? you insult me. i need no servei am beyond a servant! to own something so servile is demeaning. i only take those with promise as my target practiapprentices. avo and draus shared a glance. all clads like this? avo asked zein. the older woman barked a chuckle. be they so fortune. draus narrowed her eyes at him. you eat people. careful there avo. he grunted. first order of business, zein announced. we need a backdoor into conflux. the matter at hand has conflux preparing for a massive attack on nu-scarrowbur in about a week. likely a human-wave attack. wasteful. stupid. very greatling. alas, my assets have not been fully able to track the greatling boy when he steps through the glass. he has proven more paranoid and elusive than expected. if only there were means we had to lure him out like a certain expendable spy of sorts. or three. the future gave her forewarning to many things, and more than just combat or defense, it also let zein lead conversations down the exact roads she wanted. avo wondered just how much of their prior conversation was zein playing them, and how much was actually her genuine reaction. +chambers,+ avo asked draus. +green river kept him and the others in place?+ +that degenerate should still be in his box,+ draus answered. +him and the techs. but since you pulled the heat down from the tiers, it aint gonna be easy gettin them from one place to another.+ true as that was, avo felt himself wondering if he could force mirrorheads hand by making a few changes. trap the syndicate godclad using false information. +fine. have an idea about how to insert him anyway. make other preparations.+ +hope this idea of yours sees us gettin past the exorcists and paladins. still your fault, by the way. spittin bout which, how the hells is mirrorhead about to start a war with tier security breathin down everyones neck?+ how indeed, zein said smiling as if she could hear their conversation this entire time. one of avos echoheads chittered in annoyance. the room came into shape. kae stood to the side, away from the confusion of the dialogue. she was adrift. barely noticed. something told him that her malady could be used against zein somehow. there was a feeling therea twist in her nature. now, zein said, tell me about this chambers, and in return, i will tell you about how we may evade the small matter of paladin enforcement. Chapter 9-7 The Volunteered chapter 9-7 the volunteered shard-3: convex, i need an emergency transfer for all mem-data you have on one aedon chambersa former conflux asset. sending a general memory profile now. half-strand came back from the dead. theres chatter saying that he escaped from the scalpers. were not sure how yet. mirror-convex: received. all relevant memories will be uploaded into your meta upon confirmation. how is greatling? shard-3: being a miserable shit as usual. hes been doubling patrols and spiking hires. i think he intends to spend us in massed waves against the scalpers. food for their drones. conflux definitely doesnt have the golems for this fight, and were going up against at least half a dozen knots. its going to be a slaughterhouse. he doesnt give a shit though. blessed be the worthy my rash-hollowed ass. mirror-convex: understood. would you like extraction to be expedited? the situation between the elders is getting tenuous. our cell remains uncompromised but you know the risks. its election season. a little scandal goes a long way. shard-3: negative. i want to see how this chambers thing turns out. just get me that update. mirror-convex: received. be careful shard-3. were getting a lot of unconfirmed chatter that a stormtree godclad cadre is in play as well. dont get pulled into the fire. shard-3: copy that. shit. this things really starting to spiral. wont surprise me if the godsdamned low masters launch a second uprising by this point. -conversation between incubi and handler, ori-thaum 9-7 the volunteered +chambers. wake up. time for you to be useful.+ terror came for chambers midway through his old smut vicarity as the sky above the simulation came asunder. with a fissure of thoughtstuff, phantasmal seams ruptured as ghosts invaded; foreign thoughts crackled and flowed, rushing into his mind like a rapid spilling into a wound. for the briefest of moments, he froze in and beyond the nether. mind and body stiff with fright, he looked up, beyond the aratnid being shoved into a certain orifice it didnt belong, beyond the flailing limbs and screaming face. like a mirage overlain atop the fabric of his entertainment as the mirage of a monsters face, the backdrop tuned to a paused instant of an extremely questionable porn vicarity. the sky above the chambers metamind palace wit was that last part that made chambers suddenly realize who was talking. avo''s face looked different. like all the moon pale skin had been peeled away and replaced with grayish tendrils sewn together along spidery silken threads. +hey, hey, consang+ chambers said, transmuting all the charm he possessed from a spreading well of terror. chambers blinked internally. dealing with avo was a real pain. there was just no read on the ghoul. he was hot, he was cold, he was everything in between. half a dozen times he thought the rotlick was going to kill him. probably was thinking about killing and eating him now. but he didnt. and that was the worst of it. the tension. the anticipation. the restraint of the release. hells, he had to survive this. what do? what do? avo was a godsdamned murderous psychopath. whatflattery! yes! flattery works on anything! +so, uh, you look different, avo,+ chamber said, adding a chuckle to come off more puckish rogue than bored pervert. +did you did you do something with your hair?+ shit! too much stupid in that question. ghouls didnt have hair. godsdammit, distract! distract! +ive been expecting you?+ too much like a question, chambers. offer him a favor! +im ready to do that thing you were prepping me for. whatever that thing was. iuh. its good to see you again? thanks for not hittin me some more?+ he was serious about that last part, most his bosses were all about the hitting and avo talked real great for a ghoul. even if those conversations were primarily based on doing terrible things to chambers eyes or limbs or mind or other bodily bits. man, if there was one rotlick in need of therapy, it was avo. being too smart did that to you, and not just for rotlicks. that was the score: aunt nenda always said it was bad to be too smart. she said his mom had been too smart. which is why she left him and his dad for the layer one expansion initiative all those years back, going down to start a new family on a guild stipend. and then look what happened to her, aunt nenda had sneered in between mouthfuls of slurp-e-sludge, eaten by ghouls. her, and her perfect new family. stay stupid chambers. you stay stupid and you stay out of the way. you gotta master the art of being a half-strand. how''s there an art to being a half-strandow! she had flicked a particularly jagged piece of sludge crust at him then, the hardened synthetic sugar substance darting against his skin like a flying piece of flint. see that? aunt nenda said. thats part of the art. she wiped her mouth with one hand as the tubes running up her back suckled the fat out from her body into the machine she always wore. the liposuctor beeped cheerily and played a happy jingle, rating the drop in her obesity index. aunt nenda was a strange woman with a strange job: she was a caloric inspector for an ashthrone subsidiary. something about testing junk foods and using her own body as an instrument to record the data. he wasnt sure how she got the job, only the fact that she said this specific job was one only a master idiot could get. flicking food into other peoples face? a confused young chambers had asked. no, dipshit, she had sighed, that was an accident. im an idiot, remember? just a klutz. cant expect jack from shit if youre looking at me. that''s the secret art: you gotta be just annoying enough to deal with, enough that people wanna leave you alone. you gotta find that line between where youre just repellant, and where you become a problem. thats what it means to be a proper idiot. thats how you keep yourself from dying. wow, chambers said, nodding. a month later, aunt nenda died when one of the candy bars she swallowed woke up in her throat and ate its way back up. at least he got her carpet out of that mess. and some advice. at present, the ghoul was glaring down at him with naked disgust. something told chambers he was being judged. he didnt like being judged. being judged got you beat up. snuffed. or worserobbed. being poor in the warrens was like a fate worse than getting fed to some fallwalkers cycler.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. it was also kinda alluring lustaway activated transferring physical arousal into metamind they mustve read his mem-data then because the old one laughed, the ghoul widened his many, many teeth, and the regular just shook her head. chambers wasnt gonna lie: this was like the forty-seventh worst day in his life. it really didnt feel good being shamed inside his own mind during his own private time. never mind he was a prisoner. actually, never mind he was a prisoner. with the bomb gone, mirrorhead gone, and that nerd janard suffering too, chambers didnt feel so alone. things were pretty good. but then, they just had to ruin his favorite smut-vicarity star and attack his self-esteem on the same day. damn. he''d get through this somehow. +avo,+ chambers said, his mind boiling with as many joyous memories as he could recall. he didnt need the rotlick to sense his fear. he was the idiot. he was the one true idiot. he was too stupid to kill. he was still useful. +consang. my rotlick. my buddy. the mind is a curious thing. sometimes, its like the wind, other times its like a very horny nu-dog.+ a crackle of irritation thundered within his auto-seance. it was spilling some kind of shit that made him think of watching his sister get tortured to death. like, there were flashes of pain and screaming, and him getting grafted, and feeling his sister die on a grafting table and this really, really tall woman. except he didnt have a sister. dark as the intrusive thoughts were though, they did feel kind of kinky. maybe, like, if the sister was getting eaten by ghouls lustaway activated transferring physical arousal into metamind +jaus,+ the regular muttered. chambers could feel her shaking his head. +enough,+ avo growled, frustration boiling over. +not here to see his porn. not here to see his fetish. here to examine the subject. here to prepare him.+ chambers could feel his heart rate accelerate. prepare? oh, no. not more preparation. the last time the ghoul prepared him he lost a whole lotta memories. half of his favorite sims were repurposed into sequence-locked phantasmics he couldnt access but still looked like the sims from the outside. he barely understood how the rotlick did it. it was like the ghoul was a brain magician locking chambers outside his own house. +so,+ chambers said, trying to keep the apprehension out of his mind. +when we say prepare+ +going to put new memories into your mind,+ avo said. +change memories. need to check your stability after. minor fixes.+ he didnt like how avo said fixes. then, avo continued. +need you to get mirrorheads attention. one on one meeting. can you do that?+ a series of words flashed through chambers mind. he wanted to say no. he wanted to say hells no. he wanted to say a great many things. most of those things, however, might upset the ghoul. the ghoul currently holding the stability of his mind between its claws. dangerous situations called for displays of sudden cunning. +yeah,+ chambers said, +no problemi mean, who ya talkin to? i''m always good for it.+ internally, he screamed. that wasnt a display of sudden cunning, that was a blatant lie. he didnt want to get the boss notice. more than that, his old boss notice was the thing he wanted the least. his entire tenure of survival at conflux was avoiding mirrorheads attention, not getting it. they were pretty much signing his suicide warrant. fuck. the old woman threw back her head and laughed softly. +yes. yes, he will do. he will do just fine.+ somehow, her words made him worry the most. +i,+ zein began, +have some questions for you first regarding your former master, however. and then, the ghoul will have some after he is done to see if the operation can be considered successful.+ a squeak of pure terror escaped from chambers mind. +i uh+ +dont worry,+ zein said, smiling benignly, +pain of the mind is but a lie. just accept what is to come. insanity is so very hard to mend.+ avo grunted in agreement as chambers felt a rumble of ghosts flood through his auto-seance. blankness swallowed all his protests, all his thoughts. in the background, the vicarity continued playing. lustaway activated transferring physical arousal into metamind Chapter 9-8 Smuggling Snakes chapter 9-8 smuggling snakes uh, ripperripperjack? hm. we, uh, some of our guys went missing. hm. happens. yeah, but they resurfaced later, selling slave cargo to to some sang. some conflux guys. i i didnt even remember us taking any of those conflux fucks hostages. i think i think some of our guys tried to do a side thing. hm. yeah. doubt it. you keep talking, though. tell me more about our problem. dont worry. youre not the one im killing when this is done. -exchange between vincintine ripperjack javvers and scalper enforcer 9-8 smuggling snakes i must say that boys mind is a rare thing. it is not often memory contagions form a self-supporting, self-suppressing infrastructure so unique. zeins praise for the enforcers degeneracy merited her a glare from avo and draus both. why did it not surprise him that she approved? they sat at a utilitarian table avo had the hive construct. gathered mere feet away from the dais, they spurned the thrones for something far lesser. neither zein nor draus cared for grandiosity, and as for avo, his rationale was one of baser animosity. he despised the low masters. he despised them for being his antithesis. he despised them for creating him and doing a bad job. he despised them because he was godclad, and though he had no concept of what utopia he sought, the idea of burning their garden of paradise down filled him with such a thrill. for now, he let their symbols of power remain absent and unused. he would see to their deconstruction at his next available convenience. sequencing of chambers mind was a delicate thing, but required less time aboard the voidship. much of the subtle infrastructure had already been built into chambers mind weeks ago. the same with the two techs. now, the main thing needed was a few adjustments to their memories. slight modifications to allow for new angles of approach; to create the fullness of a situation plausible yet unverifiable for conflux. in the end, they wanted to draw mirrorheads personal interest. avo had something special prepared for the wayward highflame scion. throughout the process, draus kept a close eye on chambers and the techs while she worked through other arrangements with green river. despite the lockdown, automated delivery aeros were still running, and drones were still in play, if accosted by more paladin scans. transports shuttling corpses to new wight assemblies up in layer one became the decided vector of delivery. it wouldnt be difficult for a trip to be arranged to cross from xin yunsha to mazzos junction to pick up bodies. or dropping three conflux escapees off. zein, meanwhile, found herself content to hum and haw, taking in avos technique. you work much like your father did, zein said. but you are infinitely more vicious in your approach. a virtue and a weakness both. nature of the beast, avo replied, trying to ignore how her statement clawed at him. she smirked. you keep forgetting, little dagger: were godclads. nature bends to us. all things will bend to us. it was a welcome surprise that the nether flowed so freely into the darkness. as with most demiplanes, if the location was cut off from the nether itself then all ghosts were certain to be stymied. but here beyond the veil of shadows, it seemed that the ghosts flowed with a startling lightness. instead of bottlenecking their flow, the nexus acted as a junction; a circumspect passageway. using the egi core to augment his reach, he found himself able to access new vultun through a variety of gateways. the number of ports into the real varied and shifted in position as if by random, but there were always around one hundred and twenty-two open, and never did they ascend beyond layer two of the warrens. if its limitations were a thing of precaution or thaumaturgy, avo wasnt sure. what he did know was that the mind-hive parsed and added an unfathomable amount of phantasmal processing power to all his actions. where his metamind was a flexible dagger to use up close and from angles unseen, the ghosts of the egi core formed a construct more akin to a falling hammer, capable of smashing through everything, and all but impossible to hide if not for this curtain of shadow it dwelled behind. in one of the interfaces fed to his mind, he saw the option to descend into its simulated architecture. the low masters had titled the core''s structure a labyrinth, as befitting their motifs and methology. highflame would have made a fortress, and ori-thaum would have parsed its contents into operational cells for maximal flexibility.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. once he had the time, he would review the nature of his new abode. there was never enough time however; as he was finishing the final tweakscopying a few more of his own memories relating to mirrorheads inner sanctum into each of his assets mindszein said something he just couldn''t ignore. considering her abilities, considering what limitations he could guess she seemed to haveespecially between her and kae earliera quiet conspiracy formed in his mind as the memories she was transferring came into shape. what he could assume she had was near-term precognition. he couldnt be sure without getting a peek at her frame. however, should this be the structure of her power, then he could wield breadth against her. build instruments to scry and study her from afarbut only from the background. subsume nether architecture around her. maybe even get her with a mem-con. the last one was more difficult than the othersthere would be futures of her detecting his failures, after all. he needed to test this. see what she would notice, and what she would allow in the future. what do you want? avo grittedasked. how about a challenge? zein said. a new one. one of the mind. do you have an anti-matter bomb inside your head too? avo asked. draus eye widened every so slightly in alarm but said nothing. antiantimatter bomb? kae whispered. no, zein said, nothing of the such. i will send you three sim-pics across the nether tonight. three pictures. three simulated snapshots of locations reconstructed from the deepnav. if you can tell me which of these places i am to destroy and using what means, i will offer you a new boon. like the heaven you owe me? avo asked. ah, now thats the wrong sort of delusion, zein said. you did not kill me. i killed myselfdid of my own volition. there a difference? oh. a difference of scale between sea and sky, avo. sea and sky. then, without warning, zein was next to him, blinking from where she once stood without warning. a whine of an extending projectile launcher came alive beside him. even draus was half a second too slow. though she remained shorter standing than avo was seated, it did not stop zein from looming over him, angling her head back as if her gaze was a blade, and she was dropping it into a low guard used only by the foolish, the weary, or the deceitful. there is a point to the madness, zein said. there is a point to every challenge i cast down to you. to be a godclad is more than merely being a power above powersto wield power in ways absolute and divine. you must also learn to see the weave. the web between people. vectored interests and fated collisions. you have been a predator of the dark. now let us see if you can learn to be one that spins a decent web. start with the greatling boy. get your claws inside him as soon as possible. once that happens, i will return, and the matter of the paladins will be resolved. she was about to say something else but closed her mouth instead. for a moment, she regarded him with a wry smile. have you ever played a nether sim before? stormjumpers ii perhaps? you perhaps, captain jelene? the fuck kinda turn is that? draus muttered under her breath. avo made a vague noise, wondering if that would provoke a confused response from zein. well, you both should, zein said, ignoring avos deliberate non-answer. my sim-tag is ikilledyourgrandmotherandgrandfather444. im on the osomosari-one server most midnights for fifteen minutes. contact me there once you have finished your end of the task. and if you can correctly guess where i am to conduct my act of distraction. you will have to buy me nova if you fail, however. those are my terms. just added them at the end, avo growled. i am altering the challenge. pray or do not pry i might alter it further anyway. that does doesnt seem fair, kae muttered. zein barked a haughty laugh. fair! fair, child, is a pact struck between deadlocked equals or a state of conditions forced down upon the laity by a higher power. desiring stability above expression is a display of rank cowardice. the amusement left her face as if it was never there. she turned her eyes back on avo. should you desire fair, then ascend and see us made equals with haste. to live off anothers mercy is a bitter and fragile thing. rely on it not. standing back up, her eyes tilted upward as her face turned thoughtful. three-hundred thousand nullings. that is the number to beat, is it not? she grinned. the beast inside him recoiled. she was challenging him. prodding him. pulling him along as if he was some kind of nu-dog on a leash. here, in the former halls of his masters, within the inheritance left to him by his father, avo wrestled his rising bloodlust down and kept his face blank. for now. zein nodded appreciatively. yes. for now. good answer. then, she was gone. just gone. a stray gust of wind wafted over avo. something moved in his periphery, and turning, he saw the end of zeins departure. before him, a fold in spatial reality, its outline resembling the likeness of an umbrella. through its gulf, he caught sight of three figuresone walking away, and two more staring in. he barely managed a glance even after firing his celerostylus. the gateway collapsed and the fabric of space melded back into a unified seam. zein had left them as she camelike a stabbing in an alleyway. relaxing his reflex booster, avo heard draus sigh. well. that was like a godsdamned fever dream. yeah, he said. fever dream. Chapter 9-9 Seeding Spies chapter 9-9 seeding spies sol standard licenses are more like keys than outright phantasmics. from what we understand of them, they merely unlock certain ethical considerations blocking the egi from acknowledging the users request. the vast separation of the many different licenses, however, tells a tale of internal striations present even amongst the voiders themselves. though long have they lurked in our orbit, we have identified their separation into three major fleets. i dare not say if they are actually parted factions for they stand united in any guild-level negotiations, but the accountings taken from those who have visited their voidships and habitats depict a society that at once lives in a paradise of individual leisure, while constrained by artificial supervision each passing second. strangely, their artificial minds do not seem to rule them or demand from them as the gods did. instead, they seem to serve as impossibly incorruptible caretakers. at least when it comes to their own people. there has been more than one case of voidships engaging trespassing fallwalkers seeking to smuggle something from the sunderwilds. most fascinatingly, the fallwalkers reported that their ghosts detected hints of incomprehensible sorrow spilling out from the voidshipsthe emotional recognition barely adjacent to humanity. its a worrying thing, to consider that whatever happened out in the dark, it left even minds composed of rawest data shaken. --osjon thousand, the firmament and the sky, chapter 5 9-9 seeding spies knowledge was a great house, but with vast capacity a tax was levied upon its upkeep. too many layers to its design and the structure threatening collapse, like one pillar split into ten then a hundred, each straining under the weight of a growing ceiling. such was how avo felt when he beheld the simulated facade of the hive for the first time. diving into the egi core, he found himself faced with a grand oubliette, its depths deep and its expanse byzantine. the bridges and junctions built through its confines were beyond description of the architecture, becoming a thing where shape and analogy grew interwoven. mem-data surged through tunnels of mem-data, the greater hiding the lesser. the sheer amount of memories available allowed for countless permutation. here, practicality was wed to artistry, the nature of all phantasmics augmented and masked by the mind of the egi core itself. the core itself. of all the things about his inheritance, the half-crippled artificial mind was a treasure above treasures, even broken. the mem-data that came from it greeted him in billows of static. he had heard of ghosts capable of interfacing with more complex coldtech computation devices, but the egi possessed a weight of cognition, a presence in the nether almost human.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. a mirror to the nature of his soul, it rested at the very heart of the oubliette. avo strode across the drifting tides of mem-data, gazing up toward the center point of which all memories found the end to their flow. a large cloud of static information lined with both numerals and ghosts shimmered, its grandness conferring upon it a pseudo-gravity that pulled at his attention. it would take him months to acclimate himself to its build. longer still before he could fully master it. over the course of the past two days, however, he contented himself with understanding the basics of his new facilities. at present, he had the ship create two additional chambers for draus and kae. with his place being in the nexusand so enthralled with its supporting necrothurgyhe saw no need to create another partition of his own. at the regulars request, he created a vehicle bay within the structure for their command aero. it seemed pointless to avo now that they had the george washington, but draus still thought much of its necessity. as for entering and exiting the sanctuary, the process of leaving was substantially easier. approximatelyone-hundred and twenty penumbral gateways were active and scattered across the warrens at any given time. they would cycle from location to location in accordance with a self-scrambling memory key installed within the coreone that avo now copied into his own meta as well. if they wanted to leave, all it would take was a request and a specific gateway. the doorway he entered through would then re-manifest along the walls of the command nexus as a tunnel opened behind it. doing this seemed to require no sacrifice of essence, merely the activation of his helix. the only real trouble came after, with re-entry necessitating the sacrifice of a ghoul. avo wasnt sure if only his brothers would suffice as key to this demiplane, but thus far, they were the only beings his helix worked on. and interestingly, kae theorized that this heaven of shadows must be connected to rendsinks somewhere, as it seemed to lack a soul and an obvious hell. such a thing made avo wonder why his frame hadnt managed to identify the heaven in function yet. perhaps it pre-dated recorded data. he had examined a few of the helios from the cloning pools afterward, choosing to keep them dormant instead of waking them fully. it was difficult for him to regard them for long. searching the blankness of their minds, he found nothing of a helix slot within them, nor the touch of ghoulhood. that, then, was something for the low mastersor the hungers themselvesto add after the perversion of their flesh. biomass: 45% another matter was the supply situation for the ship. the hydroponics baya literal kilometer-long silo of genetically modified greenerycycled enough air and water for the ship. however, they still lacked some critical supplies to sustain an extended living aboard. well, extended living for the other two, at least. avo had, to sate curiosity more than hunger, taken samplings of his predecessor species. they tasted remarkably bland. his visit to the gene clinic was brief. much potential lay in its future if the egis logs were anything to go off of. for now, bereft of proper licenses, all he found was an inventory of disappointment blunted by a single surprise. short of wishing to modify himself to survive the void or revert back to baseline ghoul, the clinic would not provide him any augmentations yet. however, he discovered the helix had done something to his blood. with his haemophage unrestricted, his ability to interface with biological apparatuses had been drastically enhanced. of course, she did not know the full nature of what she was facing. he and draus had revealed little regarding his encounter in ox-three. hesitation lingered with him still regarding that topic. +yes i can get you something. will need some time to provide proper details.+ her mind stilled into inscrutable silence. just how much did she believe. what was coming? a rebuke? +good. i misjudged you, ghoul. you surprise me with your willingness to be reasonable.+ yeah. he still hated her too. +we share prey. nothing more.+ a titter of laughter came from her. it was a thing of reflexive politeness. +ah. so i see. another question, if you will?+ +ill deactivate the last memory chaining your mind. do it after business with conflux concludes.+ +that obvious, was i?+ +have anything else in common to talk about?+ a pause came from the sang. she sighed. +bright-wealth wants to know if youre coming around again. she is willing to offer good imps for a phantasmic. a clandestine specter of a sort. something doubtlessly to help her cheat at ma jiang.+ he gave an amused grunt. what else indeed? his first instinct was to say no. that he didnt care. but he paused. something about the offer seemed nostalgic. like he was back in the tiers, living as a necrojack again. if half of those memories even belonged to the same person. the coldness returned inside him. he was more chimera than ghoul now. perhaps all along. +ask her how much. then we talk.+ chambers passed into the borders of mazzos junction. the time of insertion was upon them. +going to need to go quiet now. share details if anything is discovered.+ +very well,+ green river said. +i will be in touch.+ he ended the session and watched as chambers marker inched toward the conflux megablock through exorcist-managed traffic. the drones he and draus had used to map out and monitor the area were still in play, but working more subtly than ever. the veins of traffic were thick with remotely possessed or ghost-driven vehicles, mostly empty of people. as such, it was hard to parse the loci of their lark drones from other aeros. through the rising levels of the conflux megablock, with its vast podiums still littered with pockets of foot traffic and drifting advertisements, neon messages painted in both the real and the nether, the cargo descended. it was low in the spinejust above where layer one parted the warrens proper from the gutters belowthat the transport carrying chambers accelerated. an open dock awaited them, the outside protected by twenty drones. they were bodkin patterns he remembered from the crucible. suppose conflux had plenty of those. across the auto-seance session avo built into his spies, chambers anxiety was a persistent torrent. terror gripped the enforcer, but he was surprisingly competent at controlling his lesser nature. avo despised the man, but through the sequencing of his mind, could not deny that though the syndicate enforcer lacked good sense, good nerve, good instinct, and good hygiene, there was a strange cunning amidst all the filth. something both simpering and intensely aware of what others thought of him, capable of reading emotions or guessing at motivations. such granted him room to adjust himself accordingly; it was part of what kept him safe from abusers like mirrorhead. unfortunately, that was where avos complimentary thoughts culminated, for chambers had a bad habit, and that was tuning his metamind to play specific distasteful vicarities when he got too worried. using the enforcer as both spy and gateway, avo was always there. more than once avo had to quell the mans in-mind entertainment, and more than once he desired to bleach his eyes and null the man after beholding the contents. like a shadow hiding the darkest memories within chambers mind, avo watched and waited. with all the alterations he made to the enforcers memories, the man now remembered things of the past slightly differently. deliberately differently compared to the techs as wellanother thing to serve as a lure for mirrorheads attention. less than two hundred feet away now judging from the triangulation between the lark, the transport, and the dock when calculated by his phys-sim. activating another session, he connected his mind with draus. +our seeds on approach. insertion soon.+ +copy that,+ draus said, her awareness drifting over into his metamind, taking a backseat in his palace. +did you alter your meta, by the way? place feels different.+ +not yet,+ avo said, watching the distance fade. +not yet.+ Chapter 9-10 Reflected Shadows chapter 9-10 reflected shadows +place the technicians in the holding cells. i will speak to the enforcer personally. no. no send him now. i dont care if hes nakedall the better: the humiliated speak louder.+ -mirrorhead private lobby broadcast across all conflux loci 9-10 reflected shadows chambers? that you? it was hard to tell who was asking him considering the blinding lights searing his swollen eyes and the voice speaking being modulated all to shit by a godsdammed rig. but if there was one thing he did know, it was that crackle. that familiar shitty crackle of an old exorig pattern. wait, didnt he used to wear one of those? his memories still felt a bit jumbled, like his brain had been carved from his skull and soaked in a river, bouncing off every rock in its path before getting shoved back in. yeah, chambers said hoarsely, wincing at the brightness. its me. its your old consang chambers. he shook his head hoping to clear it. mistake. the dizziness redoubled. memories pulsed through his mind with each throb of pain. he was was trying to get his biomods back from shred. but scalpers showed up and took him. just his luck too: the half-strands grabbing him and the techs were doing some under-the-table stuff. not official work. so good news was no scalps were taken that day. bad news was that the rotlick got snuffed. damn shame. that ghoul was a one-of-a-kind. well, now none of a kind seeing it was dead. frankly, chambers was worried what the boss was going to do to him once he learned. wait. shit. mirrorhead. the boss. he lost the boss shit. oh no, oh this was not goodthis was fucking bad. think chambers, think. you need to figure out your story. prepare something to say beforehand. make him think it isnt your fault. you were just having the ghoul sightsee, no, investigate something interesting happenings atop the blocks of burners way. yeah. yeah, makes more sense. mobility testing. then getting closer to the gouge, all of a sudden the scalper fucks show up and ruin everything. alright. thats the plan. if mirrorhead wants to know anything else, say scalper necros went digging in his mind and left some memory damage. with the repeated haze overtaking his thoughts, that part might not even be a lie. a strong arm planted upon his shoulder. chambers blinked. an enforcer depolarized their faceplate, looking down at him. aegis mark i? was that his kind of rig? a pale hap-tatted face greeted him. did he know her? no. he knew everyone. this juv was new blood. a shame. she had that bright and ambitious look in her eyes like she was trying to get noticed. a real tryhard. the big nothing was all that waited for her. sorry youre gonna die, chambers mumbled. tightness coiled his stomach into knots of pain. he was having a hard time breathing. he needed to calm down. he needed he needed he needed dannis steelhard. with a thought, he activated a vicarity and left himself drift. in the periphery of his awareness, he watched as several more enforcers and technicians boarded the transport. they were interfacing with his cagewhoa? a cage? transparent cage too. like it was supposed to vacuum seal something on the inside. like one of them fancy techno sarcophagi. or a stasis module made to hold wights. the foul dankness of the warrens burrowed up his nose and he coughed, gagging. it was like getting a syringe of raw sewage injected into his nasal cavities. god, why did everything smell so bad in this district? were they outside close to the gutters? thankfully, the musk of sandalwood-scented oils overwrote the flavors of reality, the fragrances of his vicarity wrapping around him,a blanket keeping him safe and sane. which was when his entertainment suddenly stopped working, and the memories blinked out of his meta. the hells? chambers muttered. mists of confusion thickened within him as he felt strange arms seizing him under his armpits, the whine of servos singing as the juv pulled him out from the pod. where where did dannis go? *** +you sure he wont notice you turning that off?+ draus asked. +no,+ avo said. +been pulling his short term memories as well. copying and layering crude edits into his thoughtstuff from the inside. probably just confusing for him. sells the act better. but the vicarities are interfering. and disgusting.+ no disagreement came from draus. through the tri-tethered minds of chambers and the techs, he counted there to be approximately six enforcers in the immediate vicinity, with another forty personnel loitering around the inside of the docking bay judging by accretion. a scoff came from draus. +still dont got no discipline or sense. those enforcers should be in formation on the outside. l formation would work here, but theyre standing in a u. if they had to shoot, theres gonna be friendly fire.+ +more gangers than soldiers.+ avo said.0v3l.b11n. and within his own fortress, there really were not many other places where mirrorhead would be safer. or so was the assumption, anyhow. *** chambers was only having half a panic attack when pulled out from the transport. it was when they shoved him in this elevator alone and left him as meat for the boss that he started getting a mite bit unnerved. it had beenwhat, five months since he last pissed himself? it had been for good reason! the nova was tainted and he hallucinated his genitals were a weaponized implant and that the people around him were joy-fiends asking him for a couple of imps. heh. man, were they mad as all fuck. this time though, if he was going to let it leak, it would be done out of raw, primal fear. speaking to mirrorhead was a lot like negotiating with a nu-dog of war. you really didnt do it unless you had to, and if you were doing it, that meant shit had gone to fuck and things were probably bound for an ugly end. during his time as a member of conflux, chambers prided himself on being more aware of the boss habits than the boss probably was. he knew where mirrorhead was likely to be. he knew when to slack and when to pretend to work. he knew just how to present himself so that he was never picked for a hot shit detail, while also 6not portraying a moron so absolute that he was sent on a suicide run or just outright exploded. now, however, was a different case. now, aedon chambers was in the spotlight, and he found it very, very hard not to wet himself. being naked this whole time didnt help the fact either. struggling to control his breathing, he looked up and chuckled. hey, uh boss. if youre watching, i didnt wanna be undressed but those scalpers whoever kidnapped me, they were some nasty rash-courting fucks, those half-strands were. yeah. who who knows what degenerate stuff they got up to with janand. maybe maybe you should check on him first. and the other one. they were crying when i last saw them. they need the firm presence of a strong, wise, powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing leader. he spoke each of those words with all the fervor and passion he didnt feel toward mirrorhead. chambers was good at saying stuff he didnt really feel or mean. it was practically one of his special abilities. fearing for your life would turn almost anyone into a thespian. the cold stung his body and the glitching beats of chronobass mocked him with an inhuman quaver. mirrorhead did not step through the glass in that instant. nor did he suddenly make himself known from behind with one of his loud and random statements about what he didnt like or whatever bit of trivia he was using as a part of his intimidation shtick that day. chambers coughed. he bounced on his toes, trying to keep the chill from numbing his skin too much. he coughed, and this time, he nodded. maybe the boss was busy. or maybe hed actually taken chambers advice to go see janand first. and it was advice. janand was, after all, a soft tech. tech were glassjaws, everyone knew that. as a hardened enforcer, chambers was hard and unshakable in the ground beneath him suddenly felt like it vanished. matter one second and open air the next, chambers tread on emptiness and tumbled down, falling into fathomless expanse of parting glass and folding reflections. a scream left his lungs as his voice hurled a final, desperate deflection. those werent my biomods! janand wanted them! janand got the rotlick killed! it was all him! blame him! but his voice was cast out into a chasm of oblivion. above him, the elevator itself was a faint light growing dimmer, like a window he was falling away from. around him, the world turned to merging and cracking fractals. drawing him through the chaos was a power unseen, suddenly snapped sideways by a force beyond description, chambers wailed as his limbs flopped. terror fissured out from within his chest, and frost coated his blood, his bones. whipping his head around, he tried to catch sight of what was dragging him. this proved to be a mistake above all others. he saw it then, his organs sinking past his feet as he did. the leviathan assembled itself from shards and fractals, constructing itself from the tumbling kaleidescope of this unreality. flashes of imagery seared into his mind like salt poured into open wounds. oh, gods. sour strands of spit spilled out from his mouth in place of vomit. what was he looking at. what the hells was that thing. circling bands enwreathing three eyes, each the width of a lake, glared down upon him, irises gleaming as if glass catching a ray of light. the thing was big. bigger than the carrier he was brought in. maybe even bigger than the block itself. six reflective wings of jagged sharpness curved as chambers caught sight of his own weeping expression. his metamind was screaming. wards shaking. his vision blurred as parts of his mind came apart, memories and sense of self holding togetherbut barely. it felt as if someone was stitching his cognition back together from the inside, mending him as fast as he unraveled. the weight of the unholy presence settled against his mind as he groaned, vomiting and whimpering, his mind and flesh straining against ineffable pressure. flashing lines of mem-data and interface functions blinked and fizzled. his ghosts were fleeing deeper into him, wriggling inward toward his oldest memories. shaken and coming apart, chambers did what he always did when he was unbalanced. unthinking, unaware, unwilling even, he sent a single command to his own meta, and had it activate an emergency vicarity. suddenly, the world around him drowned out as the soft masters'' revenge ii: the seedophage began playing its most viewed moments. with how brutalized his mind was, he thought he saw some of the vicarity bleeding out with his fraying thoughtstuff. half-mad already from his ordeal, chambers chuckled as a lusty moan spilled out from his mind, the vicarity was leaking. +welcome back, enforcer chambers,+ the voice of mirrorhead exploded within chambers skull. +i have a few questions regarding your absence. please do your best to enlighten me and and for the sake of the worthy, turn that off!+ Chapter 9-11 Poisoned Bait chapter 9-11 poisoned bait +jhred. jhred! sync-up, you half-strand. its abrel. youre out of time. ive stalled dad as much as i can, but its over. whatever youre doing, you might wanna consider getting it done now, because my new orders just came in and youre not going to like them. listen i know youre still stuck on mom but this is done. alright? you gotta face it: i meancan you even remember her? after we had our memories censored? it just fine. alright. the sister act probably doesnt do much for you anyway. well then. time for the other thing. jhred greatling, for negligence to your duties and utter disregard of your betters commands, i, instrument abrel greatling have been charged with your retrieval.??vl-b!n. submit and comply, or stand and deliver. blessed be the worthy.+ -instrument abrel greatling to her brother, former instrument jhred greatling 9-11 poisoned bait mirrorhead was a fool. eccentric as chambers mind was, he was still but a human. an ephemeral in the words of the woundshaper. without adequate protection, for a creature of material reality to gaze upon the eldritch would be akin to lungs inhaling smoke rising from a conflagration. as avo worked furiously to mend the fraying mind, he noticed how he didnt feel so affected himself. there was still distortions and lulls in thought when he found himself faced with the immensity of the twice-walker, but with the growth of his soul and the broadening of his mind, no longer did mirrorheads heaven seem quite so unnatural, quite so overwhelming. how easily was one conditioned to madness when they imbibed power from similar sources? still, that was something to consider later. a building tolerance to revel in; a thing to investigate. for now, he needed to keep chambers intact in ego and sanity. the enforcer was still needed to serve as an infection vector. avo didnt know if mirrorhead was merely determined to feed his ego or if there was a genuine point to this vulgar exposure of a heaven to a mortal. such is hubris, the woundshaper said, breaking it''s silence within avo. it had been countless hours since the former god talked. occupied by the allure of its reflection in its balancing hell, it had manifested an inhuman narcissism, glorying in burgeoning growth. the call is too strong for the boy. you need not imagine this to understand: you broke from the calculated path yourself to free those slaves. did you not indulge in the tastes of their minds as they butchered the captives you offered them? that is the nature of entombing the absolute in the relative: the encompassing nature of our power must be expressed. or so the woundshaper claimed. born a high guilder, there wasnt much hope for humility in the syndicate boss anyhow. camouflaged by debris of memory, avo resequenced fracturing strands using his ghostjack, overwriting the paths where trauma flowed, choking the damage before it could sink too deep. playing a circumspect game, he could only mend what was broken in the depths of chambers mind. some of his carefully laid phantasmics were certainly broken now. just as well. he never expected to be able to snare someone like mirrorhead with meager traps. it wouldnt have satisfied avo either. as he had had confessed to himself more than once, it would be a sublime pleasure to feel the other godclad come apart. between his claws he would savage mirrorhead, to rend his vessel, severe the stitchings of his mind, and drink the shine from mirrorheads very soul. patience. that would ensure his moment. his chance to strike. +hows it lookin?+ draus asked, her mind nested inside his instead of chambers. the rattling of his wards probably caught her notice. +hm,+ avo said. peeking out at the design of the twice-walker again via chambers fragmented thoughts. his soul quavered. the beast hissed with near-salacious delight imagining the bloodlust it would soon get to unleash after devouring such a harvest. +delicious.+ +jaus,+ draus sighed. +dont know why i asked. im surrounded by godsdamned freaks.+ *** huh, ha, hmm? chambers half-drooled, half-spoke. coherence returned to him like severed wires jiggling back into contact, the surge of clarity there and lost again. during moments of lucidity, he could see the thing touched with the boss voice slide around this weird dimension, its position skipping between fractals and reflections as if everything that captured its visage was a portal. the damage it inflicted lessened when it circled behind him. not seeing it felt immediately like someone taking their boot off a mental-wound, but still, even as the pain diminished to somethign more manageable, the hurt was still there, still throbbing. chambers chuckled to himself. throbbing. he liked that word. he knew a lot of things that were throbbing. wait when did he activate that dannis hardsteel vicarity? +chambers,+ mirrorheads distant voice cleaved the straying though from chambers mind. attention was forced onto the conversation. chambers hated paying attention. +did you hear me? turn. it. off.+ opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish, it took time for the words spoken to him to process. each syllable cast into his mind was closer to a dagger plunging into the depression left by an open wound, the meat there only barely beginning to heal. by the time chambers realized what was being ordered of him, however, he found that the vicarity had already been closed, and that the caustic fog eating away at his thoughts had suddenly parted. like someone drained it out of his mind. chambers chuckled. gleam. his mind mustve been mem-matter hard. unbreakable. maybe he should have been a reg the colossal aberration sliced its way back into sight, scouring chambers mind anew as he noticed it creeping toward him from the corner of his eyes. nope, he croaked, the words tumbling out from his liquefying thoughts. internal and external dialogue grew confusing. hidden desires found themselves imbued with words. nope. cant be a reg. reality sucks. the ghouls out here dont do bo-bon-bondage! no.but even if mirrorhead didnt do it of his own volition, avo had ways of forcing it. chambers was expendable, after all. +probably. have something special just waiting for him.+ *** i always despised the scalpers, mirrorhead said. for that, you have my sympathy. surviving them mustve been quite the ordeal. chambers tried not to shuffle so much while the godclad spoke, but damn was the chill hell on his ass and personal nether regions. what the fuck was wrong with a leather chair? what the fuck made their guests sit on a squat barrel naked while getting a nice glass throne all to themselves. well, chamber said, opening his mouth to speak. the glass beneath his arm cracked. a low whine of something approached. something drifted through the depths of the desks reflection. he went very, very still. i was not done. mirrorhead reached over and poured himself a drink. the other glass stayed empty; no offer to share was made toward chambers. the syndicate boss poured the glowing honey that was ambrosia into his gleaming face as the enforcer just swallowed and stared. i said you had my sympathy. but now, i also suffer from another matter. one that i think you might be able to help me with. can you guess what i want, mr. chambers? mister? uh-oh. enforcer meant he was still working for mirrorhead. and he didnt think the man did severance packages severance was this about the cortex bomb? listen, boss, chambers said, face tight with turmoil, they hit us without warning. like they knew exactly where we were. i didnt even get a chance to fight butbut you know what? even as all ten of them broke into our capsule, chambers went down swinging. not like that fuckin coward janand. he bent over and just gave up. hid behind uh whatever her name was. i think you should check him, actually. afterward, of course. at your own pace, boss. i mean. only if you want. that wasnt an answer, chambers, mirrorhead replied. oh did it get hard to breathe then. fading away tempted, but some vague flicker of sense was screaming inside him, howling at him with violence and annoyance, telling him to keep his vicarities off. if only for now. hm. his mind might be more damaged than he thought: his inner voice sure sounded a lot like avo. rest in oblivion rotlick. cant be hurt no more in the nothing. is it about the bomb? chambers asked. cause, they took that out of us pretty early. made sure we were clean and all that other jazz. so we could be sold, you know. do i know that? mirrorhead considered. you know it takes a particular delicateness to disable a cortex bomb. the manufacturer promised me its more circumspect specs. like being able to detonate when the host was in danger. tell me, did they disable your rig beforehand? the machinery? i, uh. chamber swallowed. i cant recall? cant recall, mirrorhead said, shaking his head. a shame, chambers. a real shame. you know, my father he would call this an excuse. hes a very outcome-oriented man. and a fool. i appreciate process. the journey, if you will. i find that tells us much about future successbut more importantly, the truth. so, i will give you the courtesy of another answer: are you lying to me, chambers? blood tore through chambers veins like corkscrews, each heartbeat twisting voice-choking torture. he couldnt breathe. the room was spinning. his muscles shriveled, dry of strength. a pit of discomfort yawned and closed in his gut. inside the depths of his mind, only one voice rose through the clamor of his rising panic. dear dead avo was telling him to deny it. to fight on and stick with the story. well, he didnt have a better idea of his own. no, bossman, chambers said, throwing in a chuckle and praying his cold sweat would be left unnoticed. i mean would i really have the nerve. terrified, an unwilling squeal of laughter came out from chambers. ohshit! ah, hells. too late. the only way back was to keep going forward. he spat another laugh, its note equally shrill, but infinitely more forced. a few moments passed. silence slid across chambers throat like a dagger. the temperature in the room grew colder, harsher. all that was flesh shivered. all that was glass served a judging reflection, threatening a lurking beast. then, mirrorhead grunted. no. he laughed. he laughed! the note was brief and low but chambers was sure it was a laugh. yes! he should have never doubted himself! never doubted the avo in his mind! he had the charm and the idiocy to protect himself. he just had to believe and focus. thats how dreams got manifested. its strange, you know? mirrorhead said. i really dont think your lying. i really think you think youre telling the truth. chambers nodded vigorously, a trickle of snot spilling free from his nostrils. thats cause i am, boss, i am. sure. i believe you, mirrorhead said. the euphoria chambers felt at that moment was overwhelming. he saved himself he wasnt going to die he was gonna live forever! aedon chambers was invincible! he exhaled a shudder of a breath, pure relief wheezing out of him. but mirrorhead spoke again. and this time, the relief lodged itself halfway out from his body. of course, youve been missing a while, chambers. you know how jacks are. very unpleasant business. the syndicate boss took another drink. i said i trust you. i can taste the fear from you. no one i have is that much of a fool to lie to me. but the game isnt played that way. and we both know that lies run deeper than intent, dont we? no. chambers, in fact, did not understand what mirrorhead was insinuating. he figured it out quickly when a screaming torrent of ghosts burst out through the glass of mirrorheads face and tore through his surface thoughts. the assault was like a drill dug in and implanted prying fingers, the ghosts poking open wounds left in chambers mind, tearing open clefts of thought. a violating will streame dinto the enforcer, the boiling perception of the godclad spreading deeper and deeper, like cancer eating away at flesh. as chambers sense of self narrowed to a pinprick, he thought he felt something else resonate inside him as well. it was a feeling. of pleasure. of triumph. of satisfaction. it was how someone might feel watching a hated foe wander into a well-laid trap. Chapter 9-12 The Beast Unseen chapter 9-12 the beast unseen so so, the twice-walker is a very specialized heaven. a veryuhvery specialized design. i think it was made made by highflame j-just recently. just before the beginning of the fourth guild war. its designation is between porter and breaker. its actually not not a heaven of glass, butbut glass is one of its domains. its actually a hea so so, the twice-walker is a very specialized heaven. a veryuhvery specialized design. i think it was made made by highflame j-just recently. just before the beginning of the fourth guild war. it''s designation is between porter and breaker. it''s actually not not a heaven of glass, butbut glass is one of its domains. it''s actually a heaven of reflection, with domains of radiance, space, glass, and reflection all working in tan-tandem.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. it''s it''s been rated for sphere four frames and above. very vulgar but but quite effective and elusive too. but but there are countermeasures. the domain of space is is always vulnerable to backlash. i''ll see see if i canuhcome up with something to to affect it. -kae kusande to jelene draus 9-12 the beast unseen +hes in.+ avo ran his tongue across his fangs. +hes mine.+ +dont get all high on yourself,+ draus cautioned. +you aint got him yet.+ but avo did. and he knew from the very moment mirrorhead wandered in, barging through the memories without preparation or caution. even in the realm of the mind, the scion of the greatlings thought himself above reproach, that the power of his heaven could somehow protect him here. not so, poor guilder. not so. these wilds belonged to beasts of a different make, and here, even titans could be made prey. mirrorhead sailed across memories, his review of the mem-data peripheral at best, perception setting a course across memory, but the waters he charted were but the shallows. sloppily, he left matters of protection entirely to his wards. ah. the phalanx pattern. avo was familiar with the phantasmic. twenty layers of checkpoints lined with oscillating traumas, each portioning mirrorheads consciousness from surface to deepest, segregating his thoughts into manageable districts. not only content to serve as multiple blockades, the phantasmal protections moved, each shuffling over the other like a cycle of ever-escalating tides. it spoke volumes of the syndicate boss ego that he was using wards usually meant for highflames forward-operating demiplanes or administrative command fortresses. to be caught within the stacked defenses would shatter an osarai memguard within seconds. avos wards were ample, but he had tuned them for versatility and mind-diving, not raw combat. should he find himself discovered, there was little doubt regarding the threat the phalanx posed. but necrojacking was so rarely about force on force. no. more often, there were two duels in play: the first a tale of awareness, to detect your foe from the forest of memories; the second, a clash of two bodies of water, each seeking to dilute and subvert the other. with how mirrorhead operatedflooding chambers mind with over ten thousand ghostshe saw himself as impregnable. overwhelming. how very highflame. shrouded behind a beltway of twenty orbiting mass graves filled with writhing bodies set ablaze, mirrorhead approached as the nucleus of a star system, the rings around it sliding across each other like a deck of cards. to amateurs, it would be a staggering sight, the show of force overwhelming like a tsunami, an avalanche. even chambers memory shivered against the immensity of foreign ghosts marching through him. avo, however, found himself delighted. more and more he had the measure of his foe. he had experimented with his implants and heavens in preparation for this. tested how his new enhancements might play with his necrojacking. today, he would honor mirrorhead as his first official mark. channels of mem-data spilled down from mirrorheads invading mind-palace, dipping down and rifling through chambers sequences. the guilder operated with breadth but no depth. he would sweep the mind clean in moments, but the details would evade his notice, left only to the automatic functions of his ghosts. and so, avo accessed the functions of the hive and sent out a command. he felt draus notice drift over. +acknowledged,+ the hive said. +beginning transfer. expending biomass to keep hosts alive.+ a new interface popped up in his mind. circuits formed in the structure of the void ship, each channel connected to the countless helios embedded in the cloning pool. needles pierced their skins. blood was drawn. the biomass of the pool dipped, but in its place, coursed countless mingling streams of crimson, blood flowing into a newly shaped compartment formed just below the nexus. beneath avos feet, he felt two pinches. it wouldnt be long now. he had been yearning for a chance to use this. +whats this?+ draus asked. +you gonna use your heaven?+ +yes,+ avo said. grinning. +wait. watch.+ as blood was drawn, he deposited himself in the form of a scalper, injecting his mind deeper into a sequence, within a false series of memories he placed within chambers. a false recollection was structured: five scalper enforcers abreaking through the g-tube capsule with the help of two drones. through physical violence alone, they brought chambers and the techs down. believable harm was painted onto each member of conflux via memory artifacts taken after draus conversation'''' with chambers. as such, they all looked distinctively wounded enough to fool the unfocused eye. all except for one deliberate detail: chambers was wearing the wrong rig: the nightmantis. this, among countless other small mistakes, was sprinkled through chambers sequences. obvious errors incremented into the sequences designed to pulland haltthe attention of mirrorheads sweeping ghosts. stashed with mem-cons, viruses, and other observational phantasmics, avo had turned the former enforcers mind into a pseudo-labyrinth of his own design. he didnt expect his traps to overwhelm his preys defenses. he just needed mirrorhead to linger in place long enough for his ghostjack to twin enough symmetry for him to spoof his way into mirrorheads defenses. only a fool or a ghoul. or a godclad. it occurred to him that zein might very well have done the unthinkable here. how had she made it to her old age acting as she did? was it all her heaven. no matter. the task remained. and avo knew exactly what he needed to subvert, to get deeper. an atmosphere of anxiety and frustration stained the mem-data of these far waters that were mirrorheads short-term memories. the actual phantasmics only rose in lonesome structures five rungs inward. their shapes rose heavy and pointed, spire-like blades hailing phantasmal stratocumulus, the false sky kissed by faint brightness, the dawn spilling forth from the lip of the horizon. the blocks representing each phantasmic were battlements of gothic radiance, vast walls gold painted titanium painted with pastels of glass mosaics, painted iconography dedicated to weapons and instruments instead of people. never people. faint shivers of ethereal fire quavered as interlocking wings flew over the blocks like apparitions, making them seem as if candles. some who post in the nether claim that highflame lacked culture. that it was just blind ego-apotheism held up by cult-like militarism. such was a lie. the golds were people of symbology. they strove for embodiments. often, they fell flat. but avo knew of them to never question their resolve and might. and to exploit their inflexibility. you see, the problem with the phalanx was also that which made it seem so formidable. the wards themselves. necrotheurgy was a flexible art, but there was a rhyme and order to its foundation, namely, the purpose of symmetry. for the revolving layer of wards to interlace and pass through one another without smashing the traumas together, a moment of alignment was required. alignment, and an opening. to slip past the wards, he didnt even need to wreathe himself in copied memories repeatedly. rather, he just needed to maintain a functional facade long enough and use the wards behind him to his advantage. with each repetition, he would descend deeper and deeper inward. until he was finally within the confines of mirrorhead himself. a grim bemusement swelled within him. there was always something to do with an elevator when it came to mirrorhead. the crossover came languid, more placid surf splashing on a beach than crashing tide thanks to his enhanced reactivity. on the cusp of impact, the structure of the oncoming trauma and the trauma he passed through behind him. a flash of memories spilled out as raw mem-data, announced raw and clear within the confines of the metamind. avo scoffed. and here was obvious proof he wasnt dealing with an actual necro: no regard for internal security either. the ruler of conflux clearly thought he was untouchable. to avo''s surprise, he found portions of the memory familiar. the screams. the flickering outline of a womans form was painted over the firmament via countless ori-thaum phantoms. the former matriarch of the greatlings and mirrorhead''s mother. a woman that highflame itself seemed desperate to forget, censoring her name and memory from the nether itself. indeed, the memory only grasped the vagueness of her personhood. if that. she had long hair, possibly. a shrill voicebut that mightve been more due to the screaming. the remaining sequences formed a peripheral snapshot of that day. pain. sorrow. disbelief. a child crying. the choked sobs of a younger jhred greatling escaped from his throat, despite his attempts to fight it. he forced himself to watch what the incubi did to his mother. he knew he wouldnt remember. he forced himself anyway. it was really quite pathetic. the longer avo lingered in the guilders mind, the less he thought of the other godclad. what kind of idiot uses a major city-wide event that countless people were witness to as a conjoining gateway for their traumas. mixing memories he already had with assets spliced from his ghosts and rarer artifacts he had to copy from mirrorheads memories, avo altered his outer phantasmal architecture and passed through the second layer using the conjunction. the process repeated itself up to the eleventh, with each crossing demanding only patience and analysis. things got a bit interesting again with the twelfth to eighteen layers as the inner rings began to shift and change positions faster, their switches becoming randomsometimes even three at a time. finally. some actual paranoia and rigor. if only mirrorhead decided to use something other than various memories collected from the day of his mothers demise to pacify each of his protections. a lesson for the uninitiated: use very, very specific memories when it came to creating wards. the more unique the circumstance, the harder for necros to spoof. speed gave avo an edge, but it was mirrorhead that failed in upholding a proper defense. the first phalanx avo dived with walton had different associated memories for each ring. and the switching started from the eighth. here, there might as well have been a red carpet as avo timed his crossing again and again until he was finally behind the innermost walls, finally in the section of the fifteenth. the wards ahead were finally interchanging at a pace faster than near-unmoving, and so too was the access memory switched for something far more specific as well. ah. so even mirrorhead wasnt that hubristic. no matter. a steady search through the mem-data showed avo the sequence he was looking for: the memory mirrorhead had of speaking to him. not when they first met in the aerovec, but rather avo induction into conflux, in the very same room chambers was spasming in. perfect. it had all the components he needed to install a spike of phantasmal lightning crackled out as a phantasmic at the center of mirrorheads mind thundered with the spill of another mind leaking over. auto-seaence. someone was accessing the metamind from within. almost immediately, he felt the waters of their perception splash againstand throughthe insides of mirrorheads wards. whoever this was, they had complete access to his mind. and with how quickly and deeply they worked, this wasnt a sloppy amateur with too many ghosts like mirrorhead. no. this was the reflexive sweep every necro that made it past their first hundred dives got used to making. warning: new accretion detected [unidentified] awareness: 3%...8% the attention of the newcomer bore down closer and closer to avo just as mirrorheads mind lurched with exhaustion, turning inward. instinct screamed for him to jack out, experience, on the other hand, revealed a path toward continued subterfuge right in front of him. firing his ghostjack, avo drew shape from the memories of his past once more. Chapter 9-13 The Sister chapter 9-13 the sister abrel greatling. for your deeds and valor, we, the choir of seraphs of highflame merit you with this icon of vigilance, and hereby consecrate you with the title vigilant. in stopping the bombing at merwin station, you have saved countless lives and turned the fingers of the ori against their own eyes. we hereby recognize your ascent to instrument and deem you worthy of a frame of the third sphere. you have earned your divinity, and in overcoming the merits lost to your family by the actions of your mother, you have proven yourself of true mettle. blessed be the worthy -the choir of the seraphs 9-13 the sister few things served a better cover for an infiltrating mind than a memory about them. within an alcove of memory, avo hid inside a past iteration of himself. the form felt tight like he was shoving himself back in clothes long outgrown. a mere month and the changes inflicted upon his being were innumerable. in mind, power, and shell, only faint resemblance and past memories bound him. but justly so: no tree resembled the scrub it was. such was growth. such was apotheosis. new mem-data rose and crested in increasingly predictable patterns, the memories of the session broadcast loud, the newcomer reaching through the inner segregation of mirrorheads meta for reasons unknown. [unidentified] awareness: 7% the newcomers attention was dropping. whoever they were, their glaze cleaved close to the ground which he hid. as another flicking billow of perception swept through the fifteenth rung. the newcomer made it to the fourteenth and halted there, regarding the distance as safe enough. their perception coruscated through mirrorheads palace, treating the walls of his wards like swirling dustfaint obfuscations to be squinted at rather than blockades to crawl under. the memory that formed a pathway through shifting trenches was a simple one. two children stood in a lush garden. a boy, fair of skin and gold of hair bore a holographic spear. his face was marred with wrinkles of concentration, dimples deepening into divots. on his shoulders giggled a girl, her age far younger. she wore a phantom-shaped manifestation of knightly armorthe design fashioned from the style of old kosgan. in her hand was a lance levied upon the older boy''s head. it took little to recognize that these two were siblings. it took even less to taste the joy emanating from the memory. perhaps she was a sister to mirrorhead. chambers mentioned the syndicate boss having family issues. possibly talking to a sister. avos suspicion sprouted its first leaves. bricked over the trenches of writhing, burning bodies, a new avatar loaded into the palace, the unidentified necro simulating themselves in the depths of mirrorheads mind. this couldnt be a foe then. the activation of a session hinted at that. this made avo all the surer. down the path, a trickle of ghosts began to fuse into the shape of an impeccably dressed woman, her flesh bio-sculpted to perfection. it was hard to judge her height and stature from the dimensions of memory, but her form was lean and limber, limbs long and gait fluid. her dexterity came through even before avos hypercharged reflexes. an uncanny sharpness outlined her aquiline bones, and her hair was a smooth wave of obsidian, each strand adjusting itself to never tangle, never get out of place. she bore faint semblance to either child in the memory, but appearances were deceptive these days. especially seeing how easily faces were changed and changed again. a suit of flowing white adorned her body, the fabric some kind of flowing weave avo had never seen before. it was like a lake was grafted into the shape of a pantsuit on her skin. it was the gleaming pair of heels she walked on that snatched his attention. a pair of alloyed nu-falcon heads formed her heels. strangely, the birds seemed alive almost, their gazes darting about, additional pathways of perception connected to her system. the rhythm of her walk came in a perfect series of taps. she never faltered. she never deviated. avo timed each step as he scried at her mem-data, seeking to use this opportunity to sink in further. pairing the memory over from the pathway, he began to assemble his own passage. it would allow him an easy shot at mirrorheads inner mind if nothing else. he was partway finished with putting together the requisite memories to spoof his way into her memory lane when a thought rippled out from her. the words she cast crackled in his mind, rendered unintelligible by time dilation. he focused on spoofing the structure of her memory first. he would eavesdrop after. at his current speed, seconds widened into small eternities. he kept his sequencing subtle as he approached, hidden by other junctions of recollection mirrorhead had of him. eventually, he found himself playing a statue within a version of himself held dangling aloft out the back of an aero. the weakness on display filled avo with dissonance. there was a certain pleasure in being alienated from prior weakness. savoring a glance of a moment that once was never to come again, avo dipped his ghosts into the outsider''s memory sequence. it shivered on the peripheryand he stopped himself. a rattle of trauma tore through his prepared ghosts. avo drew back into mirrorheads memories, unsure what had gone wrong. [unidentified] awareness: 11% suddenly, he felt the spotlight of her attention sweep around again. he went back to hiding in one of his prior memory selves. was there a problem with the symmetry of his sequences? why did he strike her wards? the matter evaded him as he slipped back into stillness, his metamind cloaking him with old memories anew. there was something else here he wasnt seeing. the memory she used to access mirrorhead was obvious. plain, even. but there had to be something aberrant about its structure for him to be denied. he felt a trickle of annoyance spill free from her mind. annoyance, and no suspicion. on a whim, he quelled his heaven and settled his reflex back to baseline. the womans thought-casted voice stung at him with notes acerbic and quick. she spoke like someone using a whip, jabbing, probing. he could feel the taunt in her tone, as if she was mocking him for being unable to cross over into her wards without even fully knowing he was there. +it was not her fault,+ mirrorhead whispered. +the ori-thaum tricked her+ abrels hands shot out, twin blurs that seized his face. +of. course. they. did. jhred. its war. its war. deception is part of war. being tricked isnt the part that blemished us, blemished every last chivalric in highflame and cast off our merits. its running! its letting everyone who stood with her die! and then letting ori-thaum take five sovereignties from us. five.+ reaching up, he pried her hands free. +i know all that.+ he said, voice finally settling back into a haggard, calm baritone. +i also know our father just abandoned her. i know he let her die. and i know he voted to have her name and deep memories censored.+ +i dont give a shit how much she loved us,+ abrel said, flinching as she met her own reflection in his face. +i dont give a shit how good a mother she was. i dont give a shit if we were naturally birthed by her, nursed on her, and rocked to sleep by her. she shamed herself. she shamed our family. she shamed highflame. the way she died she had it coming. dad did the right thing.+ oh but this was delightful to behold. entranced, avo noticed draus in the back of his mind watching as well, silent this entire time, mind blank of all thoughts but a deep undercurrent of bitter loathing. they were gazing upon a family already sundered, and now, the last link between brother and sister was beginning to fray. +let me tell you a story of two futures, jhred,+ abrel said quietly. +the first is a happier one. you stop this. we go back home. you dont even need to apologize to dad or even acknowledge his existence. just find something else to do and keep doing it. let it occupy your mind. earn your merits back. you can still do that. ill help you. ill give anything to help you.+ the nod that came from mirrorhead was almost imperceptible. +and the other?+ a sigh escaped from abrel as she looked heavenward. +the other future goes like this. you do not, in any reality, in any timeline, kill ambassador valhu kitzuhada. the high seraph has deemed him an esteemed adversary, and the choir concurred. so it shall be. in not killing him, you will not worsen the shitstorm mom left us in, and father can finally resolve the last bits of her mistake.+ an explosion of focus snapped through mirrorhead. +father. whats he doing?+ +thats not the important part jhred+ +the last bits. what does that mean? whats he doing?+ abrel went silent, mem-data reverberating with turmoil. turmoil and another wavelength within. avo paused. another wavelength? looking closer at her sequences again, he sawthe structure permeating through all her memories. it wasnt a feeling or a recollection. just a sound, the repetitions of a violin, endless and unceasing. was that what repelled him from syncing into her mind? +hes going to nu-scarrowbur,+ mirrorhead said. it wasnt phrased as a question. +hes going to the summit. hes going to be at the renewal of the treaty.+ a quiver of worry vibrated from abrels mind. +jhred, its not like that. hes been tasked by the choirdoubtlessly because they know what youre planning, and they need you to stop+ +leave,+ mirrorhead said. the thought came free of him with a suppressed gasp masked by a hiss of rage. +get out. get out.+ she reached out for him. +jhred+ he stepped away from her. +this is done. this is done. were done. get out.+ her hand froze, never touching him. her expression softened for an instant. then, it turned harsh. +you have two days to return. im watching you. you attempt to make a move toward nu-scarrowbur in any way, i bring you back in a cage. this is your last chance.. get your shit together, jhred greatling. submit. or stand and deliver. the order has been served. dont be a half-strand. report to the ark..+ and before he could say anything else, cut her session, and vanished from the confines of his mind. an unsettled quietude descended on the palace. mirrorheads simulated self lingered a moment longer. with great effort, he forced his fists open, but his fingers curled, gouging at first at nothing, and then he clutched himself in a tight embrace. +worthless,+ mirrorhead muttered. +youre worthless, jhred. worthless.+ a howling clash fissures the skies. arcing volts of traumatic memories bubbled, building between the cracks. avo knew what was to come. a rush of excitement surged. ah, but to know that mirrorhead had so much brittle loathing within him. he would serve as a good font for phantasmics before this was done. +is he gonna+ draus asked. a spear of trauma lanced inward. mirrorhead screamed, lashing himself with a memory of his mothers suffering. the minds versatility, how humans broke in such supple ways. some lost sleep. some grew prejudicial. some learned to self-mutilate. a good necro could have removed this habit from mirrorhead, but that was the nature of a mind, wasnt it? so many were slaves to their thoughts, shaped by their thoughts. they feared change because they thought it to be kindred to death. poor, pathetic jhred greatling, the woundshaper mocked. here was an unworthy god if i ever beheld one. all the power of divinity, and look at him. human. all too human. take heed, master. you bloomed. he broke. somewhere never meant to ascend, no matter the quality of lifes waters. no,avo said, watching as mirrorhead struck himself again, savoring the scene as an undiscovered vouyer watching a hated foe in agony. a flash of inspiration followed. jhred greatlings final death took shape in avos mind, and it would be one that rhymed. perhaps new vultun would come to know mirrorhead as they did his mother. Chapter 9-14 Lingering (I) chapter 9-14 lingering (i) i see potential in you, despite how you have offended me. i spit on you. i spit on your name. kill me if your crucible meant nothing, if my boy died for nothing. kill me too! no. i will do nothing that does not please me. i bought your life. i owe you no favors. you wretched creature faceless coward. artad damn you. you and all your line. [sounds of a blade ringing; hyperventilating.] hm. regardless, let me tell what you are. what the spectators will see. coward! cowa [blade cutting into flesh; bone parting; essus screaming] "you, a grieving father who barely survived the crucible. a refugee. the world hates you. but you had a friend, a ghoul. the moonblood. he stood for you when no others would. he stood for you when i sent you to die. now, he is dead. but perhaps there is potential. perhaps his legend may live on through you. [saw powering down; whimpering from essus] give him the anesthesia. n-no. ...no? i dont want anything from you. thats not for you to decide. in fact, i have a new name for you. the ghoul is dead. the guard-captain abandoned you. all you are now is mine. i name you lingerer. i name you. you will bear it. give him the anesthetic. -conversation between jhred greatling and essus 9-14 lingering (i) the spell of mirrorheads self-harm broke soon after. there was work that yet remained. cordoned to the fifteenth ring of the palace, avo planted fragments of mem-data with all the memories mirrorhead still bore of him. the loose fragments of the phantasmics were hard to track. avo had confidence they would remain circumspect until he willed them to trigger, even if the estranged greatling turned his gaze inward and performed a scan through all his sequences. piece by piece, the ghoul marked his former owner with cortex bombs of his own. a delicious reversal, re-gifting them. except avo would see his mind-rending bomb detonated, and his foe rendered broken. he had such plans for mirrorhead, such desires. +he aint what i wanted,+ draus whispered. an urge to do harm quivered just beneath the surface of her thoughts, like worms writhing through the soil. yet, greater than the hate that watered the surface of her thoughts, a dissatisfaction ran deep. +we still gotta snuff him but+ +hes like a child?+ avo said. +like a juv?+ +...yeah. somethin like that.+ he understood. it was always easier to bring your gun to bear and pull the trigger when it was a ghoul, when it was a monster. it wasnt pity she felt for jhred greatlingfor him, she still bore little more than rank loathing and hatred. no. it was the frustration of cleaner vengeance denied, to hear the family of your highest foe deriding the one you also hated, to see a broken son trying to uphold the illusory virtues he beheld in his mother. discomfitingly, the memory of walton came to avo like a taunt. was his old worship of his fathers ideals any less pathetic than mirrorheads? idealization and lies. this was how people were broken. this was a wound that slashed at the ego itself, skipping through trauma entirely. existence was an exercise in madness sometimes. +i make him that way for you,+ avo offered. +null away everything but the cruelty. the son. the slave.+ she grunted. it sounded much like one of his. +get your spook-shit done first. talk bout what we wanna to do with the greatlings later. the run aint even begun yet.+ do not speak to me! the sheer volume of mirrorheads shout sent chambers stumbling back. man, if chambers knew a couple of fetishes would fuck his boss up so bad he would watch em with greater care. or maybe watch them even more and give the half-strand an aneurysm. chambers gave a nervous giggle and stepped back. s-sure thing, boss man. clownishly zipping his lips with his fingers, chambers poured all the idiocy he could muster into his act and backed away. it was getting harder for him to suppress the sheer hate he felt toward the man. oh, but chambers wanted to kill him. he couldnt, but he wanted it something bad. all that keeping his head down, trying to stay away. all that to avoid getting hurt, getting snuffed. but mirrorhead didnt care. mirrorhead took and took. mirrorhead hurt him just for thinking. just for enjoying. and chambers couldnt stop him. he couldnt. so he smiled. he was a half-strand, right? a master idiot. master idiots couldnt be angry. they couldnt feel that. he just needed to nod and be him. its all a joke. grin idiot. its all a joke. the boss threw a disgusted hand, flicking his fingers atnothrough chambers. the backmost mirrors in the room shimmered, the reflection growing misty as the submerged outline of a giant formed. lingerer. get him out of my sight. put him in holding with the other two. i will need to see to him later. for a moment, the towering figure held still. chambers squinted as the torso of the creature seemed to twitchas if it was a module loose from the whole, straining against the arms and legs. you sound pained, master, the so-called lingerer said. the unseen mans voice was an alloy of sound; distortion mixed with a choked rasp, sprinkled with a faint note of irony. chambers frowned. that voice sounded familiar. like he heard it somewhere before. like not too long ago, even. sir, did something happen? just take him from my sight and begone, mirrorhead snarled. uncharacteristically, the ruling power behind conflux collapsed into his faux throne, his posture slouching as he turned away and brooded. fuck, consang, chambers muttered, i didnt know he hated nu-dogs that much. from beyond the quaking glass a chrome hand reached through, skeletal cogwork beneath flayed skin, translucent strips that dangled between hissing steam whistling free from the exposed mechanisms within the arm. a chambered monoblade jutted below five twitching fingers. chambers swallowed. come. a face broke through the surface of the glass, peeling free like a drowning man breaking through the surface tension of an icy pond. wires and fibers of metal ran beneath the flesh of the mans face, mutilated beyond comprehension. their eyes shone red while their teeth were filed down to resemble the fangs of a ghoul. as the chromer shifted closer, chambers saw that only a naked torso and a bare-pated head remained in terms of flesh. the mans limbs had been taken, with pikes planted into the missing stumps. their personhood was at the core of their new exoskeleton, meat clasped within an opened coffin, augmentations seeming cage and vehicle both. it is not wise to make him wait, the man said, eyes daring a fast look at mirrorhead. spare yourself pointless misery. there will be enough in your future. a soft laugh fell from the mans lips. they sounded like a beaten animal, spent and hollow. inside chambers, a strange sense of deja vu flared. he knew them. he knew them from somewhere, familiarity spilling over into his mind as if from someone else while his body approached the portal-exit of mirrorheads sanctuary. through the other side, through gaps behind the chromer standing before him, flashes to the interior of an elevator greeted chambers. they were going to take him down. straight down to the cells. where the ghouls, slaves, and prisoners were kept. shit. shit. shitty-shit-shit. keep smiling chambers. keep smiling. the boss said he still had a use for you. that he needed to see you later. maybe yeah, he could spin a yarn, get mirrorhead to keep using him. thats the plan. within reach, the strangely familiar cyborg gestured for chambers to follow as he fixed the still-brooding syndicate boss with a sneer. your words. my will. mirrorhead. each word sounded tortured, spoken through clenched teeth. as chambers flicked his eyes at the glass around him, he swallowed, wondering just where the eldritch leviathan was. it is not here, the chromer droned. it is everywhere. do not look for it. it will not be found by us unless he desires its full manifestation. right chambers muttered. the cyborg stepped backward first, sinking behind the veil of the reflection. the enforcer lingered a moment longer as realization suddenly struck him. yeah yeah, the face! he knew that face. wasnt this guy that the one he saw when during the last conflux crucible. the one with the rotlick and the reg and the and the flat. oh. well. mightve been better if that poor half-strand died down the gutters. sympathy twitched inside chambers. it aint no life being owned by mirrorhead. *** from the moment avo tasted the newcomers mind, he knew. he knew that pain too well and knew the shape of the accretion. the wounds. a flash of the boy passed through his mind, an apparition made manifest by the fabric of ghosts. new wards had been installed behind the surface thoughts, but they served paltry means against keeping the hurt sealed in. moreover, avo knew these wards. this was the same type the slaughterman used in the crucible, the same type that shattered against a thoughtshiv. avo grunted. he studied the face of the father. former father. a strange placidity clouded their expression. they seemed resigned to their suffering like they werent fully present in their body. unsurprising. to have so many implants forced on you caused dissociation. phantasmic overload inflicted similar pressures on the mind, but that usually resulted in more hyper schizophrenia. staring at the man they left behind, draus frowned. +avo is that+ +yeah. essus.+ Chapter 9-15 Lingering (II) chapter 9-15 lingering (ii) shard-2: shard-3, im blown. someone just jacked through my hosts mind. i think they have me im gonna [010 - error metamind wavelength lost] shard-3: shard-2? shard-2? fuck. -last transmission of shard-2 9-15 lingering (ii) +jaus,+ draus muttered. a breath of disbelief struck her voice. +they godsdamned chromed the shit out of him for nothin.+ nothing? no. mirrorhead was a fool. mirrorhead was a narcissistic egotist of the highest order, but he had a vision guiding his decisions and delusions. for all the arms, organs, implants, drugs, and phantasmics they trafficked, the real game was in entertainment. the fateless served to farm the cheapest of products, and human drama was hard to cultivate without the genuine dynamic of each individuals unique emotions, each story of novel fears and raw hopes. conflux, at its core, was a criminal enterprise that yearned to be an amusement park. +attention,+ avo said. +thats the point.+ he studied the man he once only called ''the father'' through the periscope of chambers'' perception. a sacrifice. that was what the man had become. an offering to the altar of engagement, of stimulation, of media. in his current shape, essus was barely more than the savaged remnant of a man. entombed in dead metal bearing the stylized aesthetic of undeath, there was little question of what mirrorhead intended to use him for. the crucible. what better way to capitalize on the popularity of a survivor than turn them around as an instrument of pain? it was an old storyline repeated over and over by countless syndicates. mainly because it worked every time. a piston of flesh clutched by cogs of metal. that was all that remained of the man. as chambers stepped into the brightness of the elevator, the light painted deeper detail to essus visage. faint was the flat he once was. some said that the eyes showed a glimpse into ones inner world. well, avo would say, it seemed that most inner worlds were windowed by something rather delicious. still, the lack of human eyes on essus felt wrong for other reasonsuncanny red dots glimmering like coal in the hollow pits of the mans face. the natural rubbery texture of his skin stretched thin, diluted by snaking circuits running beneath the flesh. there were tunnels inside him, connecting organs below to machine wiring to a locus somewhere, administrating it all. flaps of skin swayed from his back like a cape. avo knew the translucencethe apparel was flayed from a ghoul. doubtless another one of confluxs choices. like two curved doors, the opened slaughterman rig clasped essus mundane remains with layers of teeth pointing out from a lipless mouth of reinforced titanium. atop, there was no head, just essus and his bone-like prosthetic limbs. no obvious implanted weapons adorned the mans form beside the monoblade beneath the wrist. in a sense, essus rig was armored, but unarmed. capable of might yet without proper potential to inflict harm. castrated, when compared to his adversaries. however the thing that clutched avos focus was the hap-graffti disfiguring the design of the exoskeleton itself. a projection of light spilled out from behind the father, rising into different scenes composed of competition holoprojections. scenes from first-person kills and other deeds of brutality stained the space behind essus, the lore behind his new form unfurling like wings feathered by neon and atrocity. a final insult taunted the man at the tips of both wings. on the mans left was a curtain of static, merging to form an imitation of the boy. his curious eyes were wide with concern, mouth open in a perpetual question. one that would never come. but it was the creature on the other side that truly jabbed at avos annoyance. clouded in a wreath of holo-projected red, he found himself studying a version of himself prior to gaining the bone demon. he leaned over the fathers right shoulder, jaws wide, fangs bared, claw pointed toward the horizon. the motif was one of duality. the boy was innocent. softness. the ghoul was vengeance. brutality. all was a lie. theater. and the former flat? he was just an actor, willing or not. avo offered a grim chuckle. he felt draus turn her attention to him, confused. +the tats. didnt offer you any billing. shame.+ she understood his prodding. +well. it appears you gotta die to get in on that honor, so i respectfully decline.+ +when are you ever respectful?+ avo asked. +other than begging the sang for favors.+ +i was plenty respectful not shootin you in the head after beatin your ass in the circuit.+ a mournful sigh came from avo. poor draus. she had such terrible memory issues. ones that he couldnt fix because she wouldnt let him. and poor, pathetic essus. still unable to control his own fate, owned by another. it would be proper to free him. a thought blossomed inside avo: should he had let the father kill himself before? walk into the electric perimeter during the mall brawl? he flicked a nervous look around the glass. nothing. gods dont let that fucking thing snatch him again. gods please the elevator rang loud. chambers felt his shit nearly eject through his asscheeks. jausfuckshitgods. another figure shuffled through the open door. looking up, chambers found himself surprised. the miserable creature whimpered in abject terror as she looked away from essus. her head was shorn bald, and dismembered she had what looked like a single spider-like limb attached to a mangled external servo-port along her spine. hunched, she still towered over chambers. those scars on her face he knew that pattern. rantula? dont bother. she cannot hear you. essus spat a globule of something black at the scaarthians feet. for the first time, chambers tasted anger from his new manager. all the other leakage from the guys mind was cold and painful. this was hot and swollen. gods, did the guy hate her something fierce. since her defeat by the moonblood, others took to challenging her. she no longer fares as well as she once did. a pity. at his words, rantula shivered. she cupped at the rust titanium caps bolted through both ears. jaus. one near-snuffing from a ghoul really did it to you, huh? he chuckled. her head turned, a flash of the hateful sow she used to be shining through. that version of rantula died a quick death when essus clenched his bullshit-enormous fists. i mean, godsdamned they were larger than a mastiff-pattern nu-dogs head; like cmon, what was even with that. the mechanisms inside the former flats arm screamed in warning. rantula shivered. i will make a victim of you again. essus tilted deliberately, showing her the hologram of avo. i remain. and so, a part of him remains. a part of my son remains. but my boy never met you. so i will remind you of the ghoul. heel, dog, heel. rantulas lip quivered as she made a groaning sob. she turned her focus back into the corner and faced away from them, headbutting the wall as an unexpressed tantrum boiled over. well. that was an ugly sight. godsdamned mirrorhead probably had this planned. cruel shit never wasted a moment to lord his influence on his minions. slammed everyone against each other, he did. then kept people apart. siloed. shaking his head, chambers sighed. hey, essus. consang. i know you gotta take me to holding but, i can feel parts of myself worming back into my body he needed to say no more. essus reached over and, while rantula continued to pound her head against the growing dent in the elevator wall, plucked the ragged leather coat from her back, unlatching its magnetized plate from around where the only implanted limb she had left remained. with a casual toss, he chucked the jacket over to chambers. it hit him more like a falling blanket in terms of size. shit, chambers said, ducking under the coat. but damn did rantula smell like motor oil. thanks. owe you one. he felt a shiver leave his mind then. like a thought connected him to essus somehow. in a flash, a moment of sonder hit him hard. hurt. hurt the same kind chambers used to feel after his mom left. after his dad told him it was his fault. not by words. never by words. essus though? he loved his boy. they never had much. chambers could feel that, but he loved his boy. why didnt chambers ever get that? why was he supposed to be a hurtbag since birth. why did he have to play this fucking clown role in this clown city for half-strand clown people that hated him anyway? fuck. the boy was lucky. he got to die before he grew up and realized how shit everything was. a single tear escaped from chambers eye. he caught it in his palm before it could hit the floor. what the fuck? *** working at the fathers thoughts using chambers as a vector, avo felt an unexpected harmonization of sadness form between the two. essus missed his boy and countless others. people who never made it to new vultun. to avos surprise, the man had held a vigil in his mind for him as well. chambers, though? his hurt was all childlike. like a boy who didnt understand why he was being punished. he wanted more. the flashes of his trauma were always moments connected to his father hitting him, the unforgettable sensation of a skull bouncing off the ground, and the seizure that followed. +hm,+ avo said. +think they gave essus same kind of wards slaughterman used. terrible. conflux necros should consider suicide. would make them better at the craft to have firsthand experience.+ draus'' attention only briefly lingered on the thing that was essus now. instead, he found her studying rantula. +you do that to her?+ +only one ear. other probably came after. she lost. only victims lose here. victims. victims to be.+ using the time it took for the elevator to descend, he worked to twin a sufficiently deceptive memory to pierce past the defenses essus had. with them being the same variant that avo broke using a thoughtshiv against slaughterman, slipping through exacted a cost in only time. time, and surprise. he was barely three surface sequences in when he noticed it: the irregularity in the mem-data. the sudden and hasty shifting of memory artifacts and structures. as he watched, it changed again. using chambers as a conduit, his ghostjack came online. he cycled in lucilles regrethe wanted to keep the father intact if he could. +avo?+ draus asked, not understanding the sudden spike in his alertness. she didnt see it. the single inconsistent digit in the mem-data. the sequence didnt fit right. but he did. +not alone,+ avo said, a thrill of two natures rising within him. the beast wanted to hunt and the necro wanted to scry. +theres another necro here.+ Chapter 9-16 Mindblitz chapter 9-16 mindblitz +shard-2 is no longer responding. all indications are that she has been nulled. as of this moment, we go thought-silent. no communications outside our cell. within the cell, do not contact the other shards. direct your messages to me. i will relay all the necessary information. all in-field operators: burn your identities and blur your minds. extraction is go. assume your covers are blown. assume that the leaks are coming from the inside. trust no one. proceed to take on secondary burner identities in the meantime. re-establish contact via mind proxies. all shards who do not report in on time will be considered burned. good luck. godspeed. watch yourselves. we are being hunted.+ -mirror-convex to incubi cell peregrine 9-16 mindblitz popular entertainment portrayed duels between necros like a shooting affair. ghosts bearing trauma loads crashed together in blasts of trauma. wards rang like shields parrying falling blades. the duelists talked and taunted, their thoughtstuff alive as the waters of their ego struggled and strained, two oceans seeking to wrestle the other into placidity and compliance. reality was considerably uglier, and battles were fought in chaos-fraught desperation or slow, methodical intimacy. here was not a battle. here was avo detecting a threat unseen. and here was the same threat, unmoving, uncertain between engagement and escape. their hesitation would cost them. nether-lag crackled in avos mind as he fired his celerostylus and re-imbued himself with the powers of his heaven of blood. he checked his rend momentarily, and once more found himself relieved to have strengthened his hell. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 4% the world around him slowed. he cast a peek into mirrorheads palace and tasted continual despondence. good. the godclad was uninvolved and unaware. that meant this was a third party, and this dive was not yet blown. now to keep it that way. avo had been too complimentary in his denigration of essus wards. the analogy of its architecture was a large crude wall made to blunt impacts, the surface of which had the frozen screaming forms of various ghosts frozen in place, there to project their suffering, there to drink in more. behind it, was a man who experienced far too much alongside avo. the ghoul had spent hours looking upon his naked mind, was there when the greatest wound was inflicted on his ego and the world came apart for him. finding symmetry to slide into essus was a task of great ease made near-instant thanks to avos enhancements. what lay deeper, however, was call for concern. right then, the unverified integer continued to quiver, their indecision writ into ripples of the mem-data, sluggish to near-stillness. they were, however, prepared for his intrusion. the first hidden phantasmic avo detected was laced within several memory sequences essus had of his son. the boy himself had been primed as a turret for trauma, the variables of his simulation packaged with the anguish and pain of several other parents who lost their children. the build was respectable, but avo himself would have avoided placing it in such a position. it was ultimately too obvious. he extracted himself from that sequence and changed his approach. using his metamind to filter for other parallel memories, he sought one that contained instances of himselfhis foe had the advantage of fortification, but he had actual history with the father. such would be a hard thing to use against him in any situation. what came was artad. rather, the moment the man had told him about his dead god. little weight or reverence remained attached to the deity. faith died in despair. convenient. made it easier for avo to sink into the sequence without faking religiosity. for the second time, avo used a past variant of himself to shuttle him across anothers mind. he knew where he was heading, but more than that, he knew the memories well. being a direct participant provided one with such useful insight. over three hundred trauma phantasmics and two dozen planted specters lined his path. even enhanced, he could not deny his adversary''s skill. obvious mistakes hid greater dangers, with blatantly corrupted mem-data left to lure a rival necro out into the open for a direct nulling. whats more was the broad nature and shifting defenses they installed. for each phantasmic avo removed, unseen mem-cons activated behind him; deactivated functions manifested as wards within wards, trying to quarantine him into a specific quadrant. there was no mistaking these techniques. the deception. the design made to narrow his choices until he inexorably found himself staring down the barrel of a final mistake, desperate for a tunnel to salvation. he faced someone of ori-thaum tradition. with this understanding, the tension within him grew tenfold but likewise swelled the thrill. it was good to sink his fangs into prime meat. with his overwhelming superiority in speed and knowledge of the terrain he swam across, a plan formed in his head. he needed to cage the incubi in with him before they fled back to the others. claiming the memories from one would offer great insight into the players and board both. each strike painted a new color to his enemy''s wards, cracking the diamond-shaped defenses just in time for the following blow to chip and the last one to shatter. it was a testament to his enemys fortitude and skill that they were able to build phantasmal armor capable of taking an impact so extreme. it was their misfortune that, though they were able to survive secondhand fatality, their wards were also functionally broken. their thoughtstuff spilled free like entrails unspooling into the pull of an ocean. and like a shark tasting the blood of a nu-whale, avo yearned to dig into a meal of organ and liver. tearing through the open wound, avo jumped a third time as he ripped through the savaged thresholds of the incubus mind. he was now using both chambers and essus as a ladder to his new prey, and the nether lag grew ever more immense. without his current speed, time would likely feel like it was skipping. lashing his quarrying from the inside with lucilles regret over and over, he felt their mind tear and collapse from the inside. distantly, he caught glimpses of the world beyond, their body striking ground from seizures and vomiting, coming undone before his assault. good. he needed them broken but not unraveled. he struck ten more times until the mind itself stopped responding and slowly ground away toward a slow collapse. then, with the ori-thaum mind agent broken, avos objective changed. no longer was this to be a hunt. now, he was to raid. copying phantasmics [quicksand sync trauma] [incog] of all the phantasmics, those two were of the greatest importance. those two, and the treasure trove of encrypted memories the incubus had. agents of ori-thaum locked their personal lives when they were fielded on assignment. this one was not different, but their operational memories were consumed in labyrinths of confusion. if avo had longer to stare at the design of their palace, he might have copied a few things more. but from the inside, he already noted the mem-data shifting, with several new variables enteringand one acting at speeds far faster than the other. this operative had friends and avos looting time was short. siphoning away all he considered useful, he collapsed out from the incubus palace and tethered on the brink. he waited, just as the other few manifested through the auto-seance to fire his second fatality thrice more. the palace quivered, and sequence by sequence it turned vaporous, dissolving as two other minds went into nulled freefall within it. avo, on the other hand, slipped back through into essus confines, and then out again into chambers. noticing that the father was clutching his head and frowning, essus was still standing. the damage wasnt too severe. the battle was fast. quiet. and victory was absolute. as time flattened and avo returned to his senses fully, he found himself laughing hoarsely, his triumph a glorious thing. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 5% never before had he imagined himself indulging in such a thrillhe had raided the mind of one of the oris elites. he had broken a foe that was his greater in several aspects of necrotheurgic artistry, and done it easily. draus gasped, the fullness of his encounter loading into her mind long after all the work was finished. +shit. did you just null a fuckin incubus?+ she sighed. +course those shits are here too. cant get away from them no way no how. you know why theyre here.+ holding onto a few encrypted memories, avos grin turned from feral to methodical. +not yet. going to need some time to crack it. likely has self-nulling if access is wrong.+ +you think mirrorhead knows?+ +no,+ avo said, reaching across the link he planted. +still too wounded. still beneath his notice. lived without knowing there was an infestation. his throne was rotten to begin with.+ turning his attention back to the memories, avo frowned. what was ori-thaum doing here? and if they knew mirrorhead was planning to kill their ambassador, a greater question emerged. why hadnt they stopped him yet? Chapter 9-17 Daggers Behind Daggers chapter 9-17 daggers behind daggers "good sir, i told you our wants would see us dead. why did you follow me? why did you come back? i spared you. i spared you." "and i told you. my game was an ending with you, and not an eternity without." -final exchange between assundiya, queen of hounds, and vandenhurn, master of foxes from the follies of vandenhurn, kosgan folklore 9-17 daggers behind daggers avo snarled. avo hissed. avo raged. gathered around a quick-sculpted table, kae shivered as he clawed at the phantasmal representation of the incubus encrypted memory. off to the side, draus regarded him wryly, faint bemusement bright on her face. havin a bit of trouble opening that cookie jar there, consang? its not a cookie jar. avo said, tone even with naked rage. the glare he turned on her bore enough hate to slag metal. jelene draus just smirked, tendons drawing tight around her wrought-iron jaw. well, be that as it may, you are chokin on it. not. just difficult. need more time. can you do it? can you? her smirk grew. she was enjoying this. the beast inside whispered delightful acts of violence for him to perform. gods did he want to pluck the tendons out from her face. see if she could sneer at him then. heavens fine. have to understand. oh, no. i get it. crackin incubi shits a real rust-job. but you cant deny its funny seein you get stuck on a wisp like that when you were opening golems like aluminum cans a couple o nights ago. he directed his echoheads to rattle at her, outsourcing the dispensation of his ire. he was busy. his ghostjack flashed. he edited a few more memories, tweaking delusion and nausea access denied memory sequence incorrect the weight of his frustration erupted, his thoughtstuff rearing up, the shape something between the hair on a cats back and a crashing wave just about to fall. kae scampered away. he had his heaven. he had his reflex booster. he had his skilland prideas a necrotheurgy on the line. yet, the damnable memory would not offer him its secrets. the encryption was a strange miasmic designa slipstream moment plucked from the riverine of another mind, part hallucination, part fever dream. entirely unique. even with minutes stretched into hours by the aid of his canon of haemonkinesis, the issue he faced was one of specificity, not effort. he could crack this. he could. there was no question. but time was not an ally with the cascade of events set to clash in the near future, and to let ori-thaum linger in the background without a clear idea of what they were doing seemed a delightful way to experience a sudden nulling. much like the one he had delivered on the incubus formerly residing in the depths of essus mind. they had gone silent after that. he had scouted for them, looking briefly through each of his assets for any other visible signs of rival necros of regardable competency. the fact he found nothing was either a sign of safety or a silent omen waiting to turn loud. necrotheurgy made these things hard to judge until after the fact. his encounter with the incubus was chance. happenstance. without it, they were all predators of the same jungle, hunting each other in the dark. the moment of surprise could have been the other way. there was another question, then. why essus? and when? surely not during the crucible. the flat had seen him die and resurrect. what would they make of that memory, if they had seen it at all? or did he even remember it, so engulfed by the demise of his son? no. it was probably some point later, after catching mirrorheads'' notice. there was another game being played here. he couldnt imagine mirrorhead being so tolerantmuch less working togetherwith the silvers. they saw his mother dead, and in fashion of peak humiliation. so even with their penetration, greatling remained alive. unnulled. nor did avo uncover any subversive phantasmics in the syndicate boss mind. there was always the possibility their skill exceeded his so greatly he missed something, but his encounter against the incubus earlier told him that he was facing adversaries of a near-even caliber. except there were certainly far more of them than there existed of him. while he had the overwhelming speed advantage in terms of processing, even eldritch powers were enfeebled when he lacked the proper components to make a workable key. the impotence was maddening? the woundshaper offered. ah. but now you understand what spurs gods to grow. it is not enoughnever enough to hold to one groove. totality. omnipotence. omniscience. to plaster yourself over existence without melting into it. such is the desire. he wanted to respond to his heaven, but a warning flashed through his cog-feed. mentally scrolling through the numerous interfaces occupying his mental display, he found himself looking at his deepnav, icons and visual identifiers mapping much of the block via his infected assets. slowly, his mem-cons were spreading through the loci and subverted necros, and with them, his knowledge of the block broadened. a shower of light formed the shape of a person standing opposite mirrorhead, while avos accelerated reflexes gave him ample time to study the nature of the mind beyond the veil. a trickle of thoughtstuff flowed through. again, avo infused more ghosts into the other godclads perception. the time lag eased slightly, and the first flash of wards greeted avo like a bash to the jaw. it was a modified quicksand sync-shield. same as the one avo downloaded from the incubus he nulled, bar a few floating phantoms meant to give off the visage of a sanctus starseeker. before any judgment came, avo waited. not everyone who used a modified quicksand was an incubi. he knew that. plenty of necros of sufficient skill touted thosesigns they managed to steal or earn favor with ori-thaum. but something sat wrong with avo. something wasnt right here. the waters of mirrorheads mind were calm. calm as if he was beholding an ally or asset rather than hated adversary. pilfering some more mem-data regarding the mysterious benefactor mirrorhead was meeting, little knowledge entered avos meta other than the fact that mirrorhead had been meeting them on a consistent basis for the past six months. deeper memories remained connected to them still, but that was beyond the fifteenth layer, running even deeper. avo considered spoofing his way in furtherthe beast snarled and told him to just null the other godclad and use his galeslither to make his way up, to be done with this farce and stop delaying. but the beast was an impatient addict of food, and the alluring taste of conspiracy appealed ever-greater to avos broadening sensibilities. he could trigger a partial collapse of conflux. in fact he was going to trigger that before the slaughter to come. but instinct and experience both told him to wait a moment longer. zein wanted mirrorhead alive to fail at just the right point. the incubi spared mirrorhead of overt machinations, surely their plans built on his intent to kill one of their number. and nothing from the other godclads mind showed his knowledge of any of this. avos foreboding only worsened when a dozen of his mem-cons blinked outthe spread of his awareness collapsing back as the loci began falling out of his control. a pit formed in his stomach as two functions blinked out of his minds eyethe connections he had linking him to the techs. and in the narrowest fraction of a second, they were gone. shattered. already dissolving. there was no gap between the moment they were whole and the next when they werent anything at all. warning! session lost warning! session lost too late. the crackling screams of their nullings rattled down the one-way path within his mind, lag stretching the moment before the act and the culmination. shattered fragments of abject terror and mental agony speckled through as his link fizzled. their ego-deaths were instant. like they had been shattered by a tide of overwhelming force. the final fragments of their echoing demises crackled to static in the back of his mind. there was no hint of an assault. no sign of intrusi avo froze. the incubi. omen of silence it was, then. a trickle of his surprise leaked free. a swirl of perception brushed down from mirrorheads meta as avo hid once again, visual information blinking out. host awareness: 5% flicking his attention over to his own metamind, avo''s encroaching darkness ate away nearly every loci he had subvertedbut none of the necros. he puzzled at that, then understood. his mem-cons mustve tripped a passive defense the incubi had already set within the local lobbies. he still had assets at play. the necros that handled his techs. chambers. mirrorhead himself. but the loci belonged to the enemy. all his mem-cons had done was offer them something to trace. what was sufficient to fool the syndicate faltered before the incubi. from what walton told him of ori-thaums modus operandi, they changed members when a team was exposed. or a situation went against them. ego-alienation was the effective term. it was designed around making the opposition feel like they were always fighting someone strange, someone they didnt understand. immediately, avo sent a command to activate the various vicarities he connected to chambers sequences. if nothing else, it would help him detect if someone was diving into the enforcers mind. lustaway usually worked, but sometimes, the arousal within the memory bled over. that was something even seasoned necros tried to avoid when working through a sequence. avo kept an eye on chambers but stayed within mirrorheads mind. part of him wanted to return to the block. to see things done between him and the incubi cell. experience told him though this would not be that simple. when gone, they were like nu-sharks diving deeper into the darkest waters. it would be folly to go swimming after them blindly, even if he did think of himself as the nu-whale in this metaphor. a thoughtcast lanced out from the fantasy entertainment system. a pale cloud molded into the shape of a person, burning before mirrorhead as a whirlpool of patrolling specters circled the room, casting their perception outward like an aegis. +your organization,+ the benefactor said, voice masked in notes of soft monotone, +has been compromised.+ a low, bitter laugh came from the syndicate godclad. weariness threaded out from every memory, but they broke away by the fifth layer, never escaping to be thoughtstuff. +thats not nearly the surprise you think it is. but conflux is living the final days of its purpose. there are, however, other matters that threaten my operation.+ +yes+ the benefactor continued. as the time trickled on between the full delivery of each thought, avo again studied the benefactors quicksand wards. the sequences the design they all seemed too similar to the one used by nulled incubus to be a coincidence. +you have been compromised by incubi. tell me, do you know how long your sister has been working for them?+ and with that statement, the twin minds of mirrorhead and avo lurched to a halt as one. Chapter 9-18 The Quiet War chapter 9-18 the quiet war dagger-1: hostile assets nulled. mem-cons suppressed. dagger-3, any trace of the target? dagger-3: not yet, dagger-1. not yet. found some stray memories from shard-3 though. the incompetent half-strand spilled part of his short-term memories into the proxy. godsdamned sloppy. dagger-1: target first; report after. dagger-2, what you got? dagger-2: target is skilled. dagger-3: no shit? and here i was thinking shard-2 got nulled by an amateur. dagger-2: very skilled. shard-2 didnt even see it coming, unraveled in seconds. she got a cast off and didnt seem to inflict any damage. dagger-1: affirmative. does her conduit remember anything? dagger-2: no. he only has a headache and a few pieces of missing memory. doesnt even know there was a skirmish in his mind. dagger-3: sounds blissful. dagger-1: dagger-3, pipe down unless you have something conducive to add; i prefer the lag to the sound of your voice. dagger-2, what about the other two in the elevator? dagger-2: nothing in rantula. just trauma and nightmares. that chambers though dagger-1: what? dagger-2: his mind is a cesspit. he had over a dozen pornographic vicarities playing in tandem. lustaways going wild inside him. i tried diving in earlier but its going to take some time to establish protective measures against any leakage. dagger-3: jaus, the half-strands a rash risk. null em dagger-2. its the right thing [dagger-3 has been muted] dagger-1: acknowledged. keep searching. keep me posted. im going to rig the grid up. -incubi strike cell swordfisher 9-18 the quiet war +incubi?+ mirrorhead asked, mind a stasis of disbelief. +my sister?+ the yawning of time between each cast was long. still, it took avo more than a beat to reorient himself within the wavering memory shielding him. there was a burgeoning rage rising from the depths of mirrorheads ego. he didnt like the benefactor accusing his sister of treason. not at all. avo, for his part, found himself puzzling why someone he suspected to be an incubior at least an ori-thaum aligned individualwas consorting with the likes of mirrorhead, exposing the operations of their allies to mirrorhead, and then claiming his sister was working withor at least underori-thaum. unless he wanted mirrorhead to be paranoid. unless he wanted to force the syndicate boss into doing something foolish. flicking a peek at the remaining wards blockading him from accessing the innermost portions of mirrorheads mind, avo found himself considering his next steps. attempting to dive deeper held risks if done in haste and without a clear mind. however, after abrels earlier entrance, avo felt he had good odds of avoiding mirrorheads notice entirely. his bigger concern was presently the other individual not in the room. the benefactor. such was how mirrorhead regarded them. perhaps there was more knowledge deeper down, but between the locus and the remaining wards within the guilder, the more vulnerable target was obvious. swimming out with the flow of thoughtstuff was a slow-going process. to accelerate risked drawing the notice of the minds host, and avo had no desire to betray himself. by the time he was out and skimming the waters of thought beneath the surface of mirrorheads boiling rage, another thought had lanced out from the benefactor in a slither of threading ghosts. +who else am i to assume has infiltrated your house today?+ the benefactor asked, defensiveness high. their voice continued to be scrubbed of distinctiveness, but something smelled of insincerity to avos instincts. +she visits you on the same day your missing employees are returned, and suddenly there are intrusions and hostile mem-cons staining the sequences of your loci. coincidence is not a thing so neat, higher greatling.+ avo waited, preparing to mask his transit using mirrorheads response. anger built behind bubbling ghosts. unlike the benefactor, mirrorheads reply whipped out, lashing at the nether as if trying hurt without edging the ghosts with the sting of trauma. +she is no traitor! you still your tongue! she has served with honor! distinction! is she a fool? yes, but+ +but who else?+ the benefactor asked. +it cant be from the ones you brought back. they dont have the skillthey came back subverted. you think the scalpers have the capability to slip past you? no. dont bullshit yourself, greatling. not them, and not whatever gutter-necro they can afford. you would have noticed.+ unbeknownst to either, avo had leaped into the locus, his path running beneath a bridge of ghosts sawing between the two. as much as the benefactor was buttering mirrorheads ego, the truth was the syndicate boss did have a substantial quantity of ghosts to wield, and the complexity of his wards would send wise necros into a retreat until they could prepare enough for such a dive. perhaps a good enough cell could overcome it on their first try like avo did. or another godclad with similar necrotheurgic expertise. a coldness filled him as he considered if the low masters had any nodes imbued with such powers. the coldness kindled into low arousal as he wondered what it would feel like to kill such a person, to sup victory from their flesh and mind. plucking the final few pieces from the session, avo turned his gaze on the incubus wards one last time and turned away. he would collect and replay whatever mirrorhead was saying to the benefactor later. there was little else he could do here at the moment without forcing harm on the incubus and alteringmirrorhead. if he lingered, he was going to lose another asset down in conflux. jacking out from mirrorheads session, avo dove into chambers and immediately transferred himself out into the disturbed sequence. he moved without care, unheeding caution as chambers reactivity could barely match his pace. there was prey to catch, and he had one last reliable asset in the area. the quietest war was back on. the vicarity in question was relatively tame by chambers standards but it did involve excrement, a funnel, three bleeding ghouls, and an open wound. following the trickle of disgust lingering in the mem-data, avo jumped from simulation to simulation, shifting between bodies as he closed on his target. he found them moving at a languorous pace. they had two specters running with them as well, the phantasmics running parallel with them, peering at simulations bearing odd signatures of mem-data. careful. methodical. efficient. and seemingly just as unprepared as the last necro avo nulled. he struck them the same way he did the first. his traumas flew out, alternating traumas impacting their wards as the water of their quicksand flashed and flickered. he saw lucilles weeping visage turned back against him in crackling flames. he whipped out with the secondhand fatality and lucilles sister screamed one final mournful note. the fire cracked. avo chambered another trauma something flashed from within the incubus metamind. three synaptic bolts fused with memories of people dying in a conflagration came back at him. the vicarity playing in the background broke apart, as a vicarity star moaned and crooned in pain. avos ghostjack thundered. from its blade tip, he slashed back, fatality meeting oncoming assault. his blow crashed and rang against all three of theirs. in that frozen instant, they were as if knights of a bygone age, dueling with ego-rending memories in places of spear and blade. yet, the metaphor died when avo felt his wards ring under a series of dotting impacts. flashes of damage filtered through his cog-feed. he only understood when he cycled his short-term memory for review. the incubi had loaded traumas within traumas. the minds that died in a conflagration offered a common enough sequence for most wards to resist, but inside was a work of art. speckles of drownings, tortures, mutilation, torture via animal, via primal fear, castration, and forcible implantation all speared into his defenses in a fragmenting shower. cog-cap: 46% another layer of quicksand wardings swelled from inside his target. another flash of a session activated. more incubi were arriving to help their ally. they were ready this time. wary of his presence. no longer was he facing a single incubus. now, there were at least three. the newcomers were faster toolikely had some cognition or reflex-boosting implant running. but that was only a relative thing. none of them had a canon, and so, again the initiative shifted back to the incubi reeled out from chambers mind. all presence of them was lost for an instant. wasting no time, avo latched his senses into chambers perception, he found the enforcer clutching his head and staring at the blurring lights on the ceiling. the man ground his jaw as he tried not to retch, unaware of the battle that had just taken place inside his skull. his cell was a barren place with a bowl of filth-crusted waste disposal unit and a cot laid on the ground. it looked like it was meant to store packages or crates rather than people. just outside was a passing enforcer, the footsteps of their exo-rig thumping down the walkway. within their mind, the shine of the incubi flared, scintillating amidst all the other signatures present. familiar accretions dotted the area around himand the floors below him. the taste of bloodlust and hunger stained the air. conflux was storing their ghouls here as wellghouls that the incubi were using to hide. casting himself out, avo tore through the nether at blinding speed. the local locus was also no longer hisnone of them were by this point. he needed to review just how many conflux necros he managed to infect. they seemed to be the only things the incubi didnt really touch. plunging into the mind of his enforcer, he shrugged past paltry wards and dove in seeking the incubi. a thought came to him. he wondered why they hadnt just jacked the mind of the enforcer burst apart, and every last sequence within them detonated in a chain of mind-breaking explosions. avo felt his wards shatter. he felt the spill of mind-death, flashing bouts of agony grinding all his sense out from his mind like an avalanche. he felt detached from his body as he watched himself snarling and shaking in the real. draus was rushing over to him. draus. kae wasblood. he bit something. did he just bite his own tongue in half? cog-capacity overclocking - 142% warning: [errornullnullerror] disabling phantasmi[error]... initializing resurrection - 1% Chapter 9-19 Embodiment chapter 9-19 embodiment dagger-3: holy shit! we got them! i think we nulled them! i felt that half-strand burst apart. pieces broke apart everywhere! fuck were they fast what was that shit? i never seen anyone sequence so fucking fast before dagger-1: dagger-2: status. dagger-2: wha-? whereis itare they dagger-1: dagger-2, you are relieved. rotate out. dagger-2: i cani can dagger-1: dagger-2, rotate out. ive already informed convex. you did good. you did enough. dagger-3: yeah, consang. didnt get nulled on your first real dive. guess that makes you a real necro now, huh? [recording marked for deletion] dagger-1: dagger-3, return to the playground. keep your eyes on the nether. there might be more than one.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. dagger-3: jaus, i sure as fuck hope not. hey, what about that chambers half-strand. we know hes the attack vector. can i null him now? dagger-1: negative. he stays alive. we need to see what mem-data we can pull from his mind. the memories might tell us something. dagger-3: great. guess im on rash duty now. [unidentified] mind detected -incubi strike cell swordfisher 9-19 embodiment getting nulled stung worse when you were a necro. the cut that shame inflicted was not deep, but it gnawed, a mark that you were less than what you assumed you were. or that you were a fool, drunk on the nectar of your own power, seeking to replicate the thrill of the hunt against gloried adversaries. in retrospect, the trap was obvious. no necro flees by reeling back to their sessionthey just jack out. avo had imagined himself the apex predator of the nether then, jaws unhinging to swallow big game. true enough to the metaphor, being a predator did not make one a hunter, and like a warg charging after a nu-dog, he found himself led toward a pit pre-dug to suit his demise. in the depths of his soul, he sulked, contemplating his mistake. how ghoul-like of him. how base. such a display shamed all his mastery shamed all that walton had taught him. or given him. the nature of his origins taunted him. no longer did the affirmation that he claimed his own skill remain. if he were to be honest, it would not be improper to see himself as more construct than person, patchwork traits woven by a pseudo-immortal unmade by the regret of eons. what then remained that was truly his merit? was there any touch of the original to himany touch of his individuality? did it matter? at such thoughts the woundshaper roused. fused around his soul, he watched it construct a dozen limbs from a fluid sprawl of arteries, flooding into shape at the end to spread open palms in supplication to the frames fathomless expanse stretching around them. atop the spire, where the gleaming touch of luminance reigned, light sprinkled down, enshrining the heaven in a portrayal most divine. all are imitations. the woundshaper closed its palms and made fists that stretched forward to become blades then hammers. from the totality of the tapestry, everything is derived. one can only claim to be an orphan of mixed birth. a synthesis of previously unspliced sequences and nothing more. saying im just derivative? avo asked. the heaven didnt harbor any urge toward comforting him, nor did he want to be assuaged. neither of them were creatures so human, but in him, the former bloodmother seemed to sense a concept it wished to illuminate. perhaps, though chained to his will, it still sought to exert a measure of the divine influence it once held. as he could command it to reshape the world, so too could it whittle away stray studs in his minds construct using the whetstone of concept and thought. in the end, were they not all sculptures of self-perception? look beyond your apprehension of what you were, and behold all that you could be. as much as we desire to shape ourselves, the truth is the tapestry has long usurped our will; we come pre-shaped to task and tribulation. youre saying everything is fated? and now the blade of comparison cleaved back. avo glowered at draus, now suddenly sporting a considerate grin. i dove into his mind. incubi do that? maybe they didnt wanna, draus said. hells. maybe they couldnt, but as the score goes, you''re one-one for nulls, and we just lost most our nether control with them holding most the loci. and the enforcers, avo said. each one is likely rigged now. minds are traps. theyll blow them if they suspect a dive. thats how they got you, aint it? he growled. draus needed to be more focused. she spent too much time fixated on trivialities. need to consider approach. currently only have mirrorhead. chambers is compromised. essus is likely mined. conflux necros tagged with mem-cons but but you wont be able to use them? draus asked. no," avo said. mem-cons designed to corrupt. null if needed. lacks guiding will. needs direction to know what to build. what sequences to use and hide in. then, maybe we might wanna consider a more direct approach to our subversion. he knew what draus suggestion entailed: the vulnerabilities revealed by chambers weeks ago. the blockcrawler. the areas quarantined off by leftover mem-cons from the war. say we hit em. the hells with what zein wants. the hells with whatever game is bein played over our heads. say we go in hard and fast, and we set ourselves on snuffing ever last fuckin half-strand in the block. you think on that. he could not deny the allure of her words. more than merely playing to the arousal of the creature that he was, it would be a succulent transcendent experience. the massacre played out in his mind, scenes of reverie. outliving most his brethren yet the promised feast remained beyond his grasp since the day of the uprising, the time a blur in his infancy. now, with means and will, a new dish awaited his sampling. no need to fret over the guilds and their games. no need to consider the wants of another like zeinan act he felt she might encourage by philosophy, even at odds with her desires. to slaughter thousands upon thousands at his own hand, peeling from them their flesh, ghosts, essence and all would be bloodshed supreme. and to end all that on the dessert of breaking mirrorhead? of stripping his frame and soul both? a low hiss snaked free from avo. yes. this was pleasure absolute. he could not deny. turning, he looked upon the thrones of the low masters, and he considered what his father wanted for him. to taste the colors of life. to be what he wanted to be. but want was not to be fulfilled so simply. much still stood in the way of such an action. zein claimed she would devise a means of stealing the paladins attention, but reliance on her word alone struck avo as unwise. more than the paladins, however, was the matter of ori-thaum. it would not do to reveal his presence to them, to betray his presence to an entire guild. an entire guild that built the pillars of their power on mastering the nether. a thought needled avo, and he recoiled internally. he had a solution for the incubi. he was simply avoiding it. ever since his experience in deep bazaar, he had avoided diving into himself. modifying his metamind further. excuses rose. he stripped himself of them before they could settle. it was dread. dread halting him from delving into his own mind. dread at beholding the missing block at the center of his person. dread reminding himself how he had been so forcibly bent by another. ghouls were not humans. not fully. but avo could yearn. he could hope and fear. and more than anything, he feared degeneration. he feared the scaffolding of his sophancy collapsing, sending him toppling into the subhumanity exhibited by his brothers. he feared that when the fullness of what his father did to him was revealed, the last structures holding his self-perception would be snuffed, like a wind blowing out the candle of his awareness, leaving only embers to remember what once was. the nulling changed that. the fact he returned to existence after the breaking of his mind, the fact that his thoughts remained, continued, changed, evolved. all these were signs of continual personhood. and personhood could be changed. bent. augmented. even if something in him broke, he had the cure within himself, and its name was death. i have a solution, avo said, finally breaking the silence between them. to deal with the incubi. im going back in. no half measures. no surprises. this ends with death. no survivors. no intact minds. no ori-thaum. not conflux. not anyone involved. gonna do it through chambers again? draus asked. no, avo grinned. mirrorhead could use some help cleaning his home. going to give him something to chase. enforcers corrupted. home compromised. benefactor planted a seed. time to make it grow. the thrill offered by his words was contagious, glinting fire kindling in her eyes as well. youre gonna use him to draw their fire, arent you? send him out and at em from another angle. yes, avo said. no more confusion. no more deception. wont stay nulled. theyre not prepared. run them down. take the nether. my ocean. my domain. not theirs. but first draus looked at him, anticipating his next words. draus. if i null myself. kill me. at that, she gave him a light shrug. thats been my job these days. whatre you plannin? he steeled himself for the next dive. some improvements. Chapter 9-20 The Labyrinth chapter 9-20 the labyrinth the timetable has changed. i am out of time. out of time. abrel hates you. i think i should too. there is no. i apologize, mother. shes hurt. you cannot blame her for this. we live surrounded by jackals calling themselves lions. they have painted your very memory. they have quarantined you with lies. but i will make this right. i will bring shame and dishonor to them. please do not blame abrel. shes she tries for us. but she is weak. they all are. i will not allow her to stop me. she has given me days. for that, i will make her the fool. i merely need to accelerate. father is a cowarda traitor. he betrays you still. hes going to see your murderer. he has forgotten what you have done for us. he has broken his vows. forgive me, i do not remember either. i remember nothing of you. but i know there was something i feel it. the vacancy. the pit inside me, it just keeps going down it''s utterly gone now. gone and dead. i could have it replaced with something but i have decided to keep the hurt. im a terrible son. i know this is not what you would have wanted for me. but i have to be selfish. i need to be selfish. i dont want to be any other way. there is no way to make this right. so. im going to make this wrong for everyone. -jhred greatlings mem-log, directed to his mother 9-20 the labyrinth the absence was a wound. that much he could not deny. once again, avo stood at the heart of what was cleaved from him. simulating himself in his palace, his old block curving around what waltons node mustve destroyed to render him invisible to the low masters. at the center of his palace stood a static emptiness. ghosts knew not what to simulate in the area, so instead of sequencing the structure or even the emptiness of air, a scab of raw mem-data spilled through, marring the facade of this mental world. something inside him panged, like a hunger that would never be fulfilled. he lost something. true memory or not, it was gone from him for good. never to return. beyond, roads ran and the other phantasmics rose. a mock-semblance to the undercroft filled the atmosphere, and rather than nostalgia, soreness filled avo. as far as he knew, none of this belonged to him. not truly. had he walked these streets? really plucked ghouling memories from his past to use as junctions and interconnections for his metamind? or was that something carefully provided by walton? a donation from a specific mind offering tithe to what would be the only self-controlling ghoul in the city. no matter. this did not need to be. none of this needed to be. all could be reshaped; put to a new purpose, and a new design. his metamind rippled as the simulation grew translucent around him. drawing up his new phantasmics, he studied the recent procurements reaped from defeated foes, yet avoided installing. he had neglected his art in fear of what would be revealed to him, of the damage it would cause. finally facing the wound that was his core, avo found the hurt wanting. especially after the nulling. only static fragments and missing structure occupied the space. perhaps what walton inflicted on him was a necessary break after all. to release him from final chains. just as well. the look of a mundane district of the undercroft pleased him no longer. false nostalgia held little appeal to a godclad of ascending power. he was to make prey of incubi soon and had glimpsed at the complexity with which they armored their neural organs. should he not imbue himself with the same protection? twist intruders down false paths? adorn himself in the fashion of a proper devourer of minds? with a command, mem-data sank into him, infusing his cog-feed with a singularity of information. new interfaces bloomed and splashed through his minds eye. it was time to see what he could make of himself. [quicksand sync trauma] cog-cap: 55 sequences (variable) ->structure: a limpid pool filled with bodies drifting beneath the waves; whatever trauma strikes the surface will in cause it to ignite and simulate a resequencing of said trauma ->function: guards the mind using a layer of traumatic memories: capable of adapting to traumas after sustaining against the first impact he wanted the incubi to know that he was hunting them. the osari memguard served him decently. the improvements he made to it allowed for higher performance, and in return, it guarded him adequately. shame that adequate was insufficient against ori-thaum. he needed something that could adapt and endure. something capable of adapting to different traumas reliably. he shuffled the sequences needed for the quicksand and wove it into form. a bubble of water fused over the chasm leading out from his mind labyrinth, drifting bodies hovering just beyond the lip of his inner thoughts. this ward was far more silent than the roaring storm that was the memguard, but there was something about its depths that reminded him of his woundshaper. roused by his thoughts, his heaven spat out a whisper. alchemy and reactivity. the matter of the mind is analogy. in this, the false waters of your waking dream and my blood share commonalities. yet there perhaps there is a way that both can be joined, master. it begins with you memorizing a locus that was all it took for avo to understand. he had thought of this briefly. caressed the outline of the idea. using his canons of blood, he could create his own loci, and using them, store ghosts and phantasmics tailored to specific needs. he didnt unravel his mem-guard then. perhaps it would serve a better purpose yet. it, and the thoughtwave disruptor in particular. avo installed the disruptor but did not activate it. he needed to overcome his aversion to the instrument. to his annoyance, the loathing he felt toward the construct was hard to overcome. in his defense, it had been indirectly responsible for at least two of his deaths. before he made his physical assault on conflux, he would need to experiment with infusing ghosts and phantasmics within a locus made from his blood. there was potential here for him to create a one-necro nether-grid. keep a variety of optimized wards, traumas, and other sequences in an interconnected network shaped to form by his woundshaper. with such a thought in mind, unloaded himself as a simulation and looked upon his mind. winding, twisting, and nonsensical, looking in from the outside just before the wards let his gaze down upon a district twisted into shape by forces eldritch and unseen. there were roads leading between the partially crumbled blocks that seemed the teeth of a sleeping leviathan, but all their paths led down spirals and into dead ends lined with traps. this was the beginning of a long investment. one that would grow evermore complex with time. the metamind palace was a sunken city right now. someday, he would build the analogy into becoming that of an ocean infested with beasts that swam the deep. for now, though, it was enough. tarrying no longer, he cast out and reemerged in mirrorheads mind. rawness lined the thoughts flowing from the greatling and a pit of cold formed in his gut. drinking alone in his little chamber of mirrors, the syndicate boss simmered quietly, the direction of his thoughts veering toward his sister, toward how much ori-thaum knew of his true plans. to avos disgust, a similar reluctance gripped mirrorhead as it had him. the same thing that halted the resequencing of his metamind was the same thing leaving the guilder choking on his own emotions as he brought up the laughing little girl failed to delete it over and over. regardless of who bore the memory, it was a humiliating thing. a festering thing. an unbecoming depression. avo had roused himself from his malaise. now, it was time to bend mirrorhead toward his use. quelling his speed, avo released his heaven and relaxed his celerostylus. +draus. in mirrorhead. about to start my hunt. you know what to do if i get nulled.+ +synced. im still diggin through the districts layout. i got another idea about how we can avoid reflections when we start our run. another option other than chambers blockcrawler approach.+ he grunted. pulling a function he left lingering in the back of his mind, he sent out an order to all the conflux necros he contaminated and sent the traumas packaged within their mem-cons to overload in increments of five. soon, mirrorhead would start receiving reports from his surviving necros. he would likely ignore the first batch as he did the nulled enforcerand two dead prisoners he just received. he would not be able to ignore his entire necrotheurgic base getting unraveled. then, avo needed to provoke the incubi to reappear. he had a plan for that as well. one that involved chambers. and so, as the first thoughtcasts bearing news regarding conflux necros collapsing from sudden onset mind damage struck mirrorhead, avo shifted over into chambers again. mirrorhead was alert. that was step one. the incubi still needed their invitations. Chapter 9-21 Garden of Burning Lies (I) chapter 9-21 garden of burning lies (i) dagger-1: friendly-fire! friendly-fire! dagger-3: oh, fuck! oh shit oh fuck! that was convex! we hit convex! why the fuck was convex casting at us? dagger-1: i dont care! stop casting! stop -incubi strike cell swordfisher 9-21 garden of burning lies (i) +chambers. get up.+ the voice thundered in chambers mind, the weight of its presence pressing on the open wounds of his headache. he had spent the last half-hour sobbing in the corner, whispering curses and prayers to dead gods, offering his life and any number of deviant sexual favors if they would just end his headache. or kill him. clearly one of them decided on the former. a silent series of snaps shuddered through his memories as the clustering agony swelling at the stem of his skull dissolved. his short-term memory suddenly came back online, a vicarity of someone he couldnt remember anymore getting torn to shreds by a nu-dog was playing. scenes from a crucible. waves of dizziness rocked him as spasming muscles struggled to reconnect. it was hard to stand. hard to even discern which way was up. if he had eaten at all that day, he would have spewed his bile across the dust-caked ground. as it was, only sour beads of spit clung to his lips, the glistening threads of his saliva swaying as he stood. another pulse filled his mind. this time, blooming roots of pleasure writhed their way through the left hemisphere of his brain. color flashed back into his perception. and smell too. he was suddenly aware that he had pissed all over the floor during his seizure, the smell worming up his nostrils in a backlash of stink. beyond him, he heard a rattle, followed by a fizzle. translucent lights pulsed and went out before his eyes. the phase gates were downthe static field of electro-kinetic energy silent. the way out stood unbarred to him and just outside, he saw a holographic outline simulating the last known position of where a body lay. chambers stared. shit. did someone get killed while i was uh how had the pain started? did it finally happen? did all those mem-cons he got infected by downloading free vicarities finally overload his mind? no. there wasnt nearly enough orifice-to-sharp object action in what he remembered from his recent nightmares. it was just a lot of boring stuff like people burning or castrations. the bit about that girl watching her sister getting skinned and dying did have potential though, but he couldnt help feeling like he had seen that one already. something about the body writhing and the pain of the actress and the forcible grafting felt familiar. lustaway activated transferring physical arousal into metamind +out. walk.+ the return of the voice made chambers jump in fright. his toes splattered against a puddle of urine. his puddle of urine. hmm. there was a scene where a sharp wrenching pain tore through his skull and he cried out. clutching his right eye, he moaned in agony as he braced himself against the wall. it felt like someone had torn the thought from him, ripping it loose from his eye sockets. +no more filth. walk. go. now... or i remove all the other vicarities.+ focus and alarm surged through chambers like a shot of nova injected straight through the chest. no! chambers cried. he stood up. the world around him spun. propelled by determinationand fear of losing his precious mediahe staggered out from his opened holding cell. icons and markers danced into existence around him. mem-data flowed across his right eye as ghosts stitched packets of knowledge straight into his mind. there were five hundred and sixty-two cognitive lifeforms on this level, approximately four hundred of which were ghouls. the remainder counted for thirty-three techs, a group of three logistical support necros, and forty-seven patrolling enforcers, who wandered aimlessly around the perimeter. from personal experience, he knew their attention would be more focused on vicarities and sims than their actual duties. a translucent green arrowhead weaved a directional vector attached to the roof of chambers perception. a series of waypoints lined the hall outwards, dotting his path beneath the blistering glare cast by the lights above. +follow the marker,+ the voice said. they spoke fast, and though there was a distortion to their voice, chambers thought he knew the cadence. looking around, chambers swallowed. as more of his mind cleared, he found himself peeking at reflections, wondering if that messed up nightmare mirrorhead kept in his back pocket was going to pop back up at some point. an invisible shockwave washed through the holdings then. the light flickered. phantasmics showed countless accretions that dotted the levels above like stars shining through the thinness of matter. constellations of people in motion. fear and confusion spilled down like waterfalls. something was happening. suddenly, the thoughtstuff connected to the three necros governing security for this level ruptured, the threads of their inner thoughts spewing free, bleeding threads of pain out into the vastness of the nether. they were eight hundred feet and two hallways away from him. yet, he knew what was happening perfectly, the information fed directly into his mind by a hand unseen. chambers wasnt a smart man. not even close. but even an idiot knew when he was being used as a pawn for a greater power. awkwardly, he took his first step in the direction he was pointed. the holdings were more of a makeshift prison than anything. before the uprising, back when new vultun had plans to officially expand, this place was used as storage for cargo and luggage, the ten-by-ten holding cells meant for things not people. the enforcers on the level were all compromised, specters patrolling every floor interlinked to at least one subverted mind, which in turn was bound to a major lobby. in the time it took him to prepare, the incubi had not been idle themselves. he had underestimated the usefulness of this incog. though it exacted an immense drain on his sequences and effectively crippled his wards while active, he would have been exposed immediately without it. manually pruning the traps and blinding the specters the incubi left stationed within chambers mind took him more time than he liked, even using his cognitive assets. accessing the local locus took some time, as well as one of the drones draus still had circling the block as a jumping off point. using heightened processing, he was able to spoof through from the outside. skipping across aeros and riding his whisper with the bulk of his sequences, he managed to make an approach timed to mirrorheads movement patterns. right now, with the chaos unfolding and the mass traumas that the syndicate necros were experiencing, he had a window. mirrorhead was now walking amongst his peons, surveying the catastrophe unfolding, and with every threshold of reflectivity he crossed, the incubis defenses went silent, wary of drawing his notice. using the disruption as a cover, avo had sought out chambers again to reclaim his assetand gain additional ones. no ghosts lingered in the minds of his brothers. the incubi likely considered them a waste. in most circumstances, avo would have agreed, seeing as they were trapped in this box. silencing the phase gate, he cast into the two ghouls he deemed yet salvageable. one would serve as his next conduit and shield. the other would serve as a second chance if the first failed. ghosts: [387] infusing all the ghosts needed to maintain the sequences of an auto-seance, avo burned the benefactors session into the first ghouls mind and left it dormant for now. with a thought, he cast his phantasmal reach and bent its memories into his desired shape. it needed to be ready to connect avo to the mystery agent soon. uh, guy in my head? chambers said pointing at the stomping encroach of half a dozen enforcers. they had just entered the holdings from the entrance far down the corner. good. avo had hoped something like this would happen. it would serve as a better lure to draw out the incubi. we got incoming. avo did not accelerate his mind this time. no. they would just jack out and entrench further in the grid they were setting up. he needed his foes to be thrown off guard to achieve the desired ambush. in some respect, he was copying their strategy, feeding their confidence and drawing them toward an unseen trap. +hide.+ avo said, placing a marker within the phase cell. he jumped from chambers to mount the mind of the ghoul, the connectivity of his metamind stretching to accommodate the hop. chambers, to his credit, was remarkably willing to enter a cell filled with ghouls. a flash from the mans childhood greeted him, the sensation of repeated trauma earned at the hands of a screaming drunkardall made better when the man was destroyed by claw and fang. was there a word for anti-trauma? such was the closest thing chambers seemed to feel when lingering around the ghouls. as he activated the phase gate and sealed the former enforcer in, avo urged his new puppet to move forward, to round the corner and face the enforcers. shivering and staggering, his brother obeyed, struggling to walk forward. straining against malnourishment and its own weight. +wont be long now,+ avo said, whispering notes of certainty to it. yes, the ghoul growled. yes, master. avos mind went black. the ghoul rounded the corner and slowed to a halt before a wall of enforcers, their titanium-bulwark bodies twitching to a stop. escap of the eleven enforcers standing before him, none had wards worth regarding. he accelerated momentarily and unleashed his traumas as a torrent. he refrained from using the secondhand fatality, seeking to draw incubis attention rather than unmake a few fragile minds. from the depths of his new labyrinth, his phantasmics came aglow, crackling with flowing lightning as ghosts surged through the weave of his sequences. slipping free from the jagged cleft that was his metaminds opening, the trauma poured forth, its structure a chimera between a tidal wave and a storm. wards buckled and broke. servos screamed as enforcers slammed into one another. augmented bodies impacted against walls, denting and collapsing in percussive beats, knees meeting the ground while hands clawed at their metal-caged skulls. a stray shot went wide. a clean needle-shaped wound opened in the wall next to the ghoul, the auto-aiming ghosts in the enforcer''s gun also shattering, spewing fragmented memories as it stopped functioning. again and again, he lashed at them, his ghosts edged with torment and regret whipping into and through the wailing enforcers. as thought-offal oozed free from their mental wounds, avo slipped out from the ghoul and approached, his speed still baseline, taunting as he tried to draw them out. in the corner of his vision, his deepnav registered mirrorhead making another transition, drawn down by the affliction the necros were suffering on this level. twin sessions then flashed within the mind of one of the more stable enforces, the gleam of quicksand wards greeting him like the glint of an alleyway dagger striking light. good. everything was collapsing where it needed to. with a single command, avo activated the auto-seance session within that mirrorhead used to contact the benefactor. at once, a tunnel of ghosts manifested, the fire nu-dog tree lightning sequence forming the bridge connecting the avo and the unknown necro. the mysterious monotone of their voice spilled free just as avo cast the first trauma at one of the incubi emerging in front of him. praise the quicksand, the ward was an excellent build, but they really should diversify. he watched as his trauma struck against their fortifications, and as they lanced weaponized ghosts back at him, he sank back into the mind of the ghoul housing the session, housing an opening linking jhred greatling to the benefactor. as the latters wards flashed fully inside the ghoul, the benefactors confusion spiked, offering a first and only response. +mirrorhead? is there+ the first trauma exploded against avo. his wards shook but ignited and hardened. cog-cap: 33% the next five broke and bounced off against him, uncycled traumas shattering like glass against his adoptive wards. and before a sixth could strike him, before incubi or the minds connected to the newly activated session could adjust to the situation themselves, avo jacked out, the last thing registering on his cog-feed a trauma plunging past him, impacting the benefactor in his stead. cog-cap: 35% Chapter 9-22 Garden of Burning Lies (II) chapter 9-22 garden of burning lies (ii) +mirrorhead? is there+ -last recording of mirror-convex 9-22 garden of burning lies (ii) avo wallowed in sublime pleasure. something was thrilling about shredding delicate threads of conspiracy through the force of trauma and raw brutality. it didnt truly matter to him if the benefactor was working in tandem with the incubi, or if they were a solo act operating against them. they were helping mirrorhead with a planned assassination, and that implicated them enough. leaving the deep dive for but a instant, he injected himself back in through chambers session and came out with his whisper cast at the ready. his heaven and celerostylus were thrumming a dissonant flow of calm through his mind. he saw the exchange of fire then: the last shots of weaponized ghost patterns flicking pieces of memory out from the benefactors hardening wards, the incubi themselves halting, confused with regards to just who they were shooting at. good. only he possessed a birds eye view of this calamitous mess, and only he possessed the celerity to seize the moment, to fire and weave between traumas exchanged. chaos as his mask, he dove back into the carnage, falling upon the benefactor from behind, ghostjack screaming with the secondhand fatality primed and spilling free. like a javelin, he slashed into the mind of the screeching ghoul and deeper still, punching through the foundations of the creatures ego and cleaving at the mind of the human tethered within strands of memory. the fissures of the benefactors wards lay beyond waters of brutalized thoughtstuff, and so, within this collapsing temple of thought, avo speared a blade of his design into the clefts of wounds already made. skill revealed itself in instances such as these, and the benefactor proved themselves no gutter-necro as their defenses cracked, but held. it took cycling over to lucilles regret followed by three more shots before something broke in full, and with the implosion of the quicksand sync-trauma, avo watched as fragments of lucilles face slashed past him, ringing against his armor as well. cog-cap: 44% from a hewn mind flowed the waters of confusion and disbelief, still a moment behind the staggering assault. the events mustve been truly chaotic from their perspective, minding their own business one moment, then getting a session request from mirrorhead the next. they mustve expected more questions. more inquiries. a follow-up to how the last session ended. instead, they found a nulling. life in new vultun offered no end to its surprises. avo sequenced his weakest trauma and fired twice more. both lashes of synaptically infused lighting cleaved out with a shift of thoughstuff. broken sinews of memories tore free in coiling strands from the inner mind of the benefactor. terror gushed like blood from a slit artery. enough of their mind remained to know the end to come, yet not enough coherence remained to stop it. to be trapped in ones mind as it collapsed in on itself was horrifying. it was also the first collection of memories avo recorded from the shattering mind of the benefactor. downloading trauma-pattern [benefactors dread] what followed was the immediacy of looting. whatever inner memories remained undamaged, avo siphoned. he plucked strands and sequences free. he would have taken more phantasmics too, but his time was short and the benefactor was a professionalmuch the same way avo had trapped his own mind, the enemy had also primed their mind against intruders. only critical memories were to be claimed. all else could be abandoned. it would not be a great loss. he merely needed enough to put together whatever lay past the last few layers of mirrorheads wardings. after plucking a few hundred sequences free, avo cast the path of his perception outward and found the incubi halted. no trauma patterns. they were frozen mid-attack, seemingly unsure what to do next. it would take a moment of a major shock to unbalance the incubi so. a ghostlink request came through, reaching out through the nether from one of the incubis. ah. well, there were only so many reasons that could compel them to do such a thing. the link stretched out slowly with the crippling of time. avo took a moment to check his deepnav. mirrorhead was moving again. he would be down any second. that was fine. avo could work with a second. inching out using his whisper, avo intercepted the link meant for the benefactor. ghostlink accepted +conve+ avo unloaded a trauma directly through the connection. he felt their mind shatter against the interior confines of their wards, a splash of compressed thoughtstuff bursting free like a geyser, mushroom atop their halo. as their ego was obliterated, avo dove through the collapsing link and occupied the mind space the incubi once did. he would have a mere heartbeat to complete his next act of subterfuge, so soon was the connection to collapse. and so, the opportunity was seized. so then, the ones avo engaged were a strike cell brought in after he nulled one of the shards. to his satisfaction, they were just as confused with his presence as he was with theirs, none of them expecting nor preparing well for this engagement. of the three formerly assigned to the cell, only one daggerdeepname dagger-2had made it out, and they had sustained severe memory damage from the nulling. putting all that together, it meant that the mirror-concavethe overall director in charge of this divehad no one to interview and was going to have to figure out just what happened to their strike cell and convex-necro. avo did not envy such a task. other memories flowed in as broken pieces, but the real prize among them was part of a sequence that matched the encrypted memories he had stored in his head. using the fragment of mind he procured, avo used his ghostjack and fashioned a crude key, accessing the memories previously locked. and such was when an order most unexpected was revealed. objective alpha: ensure the death of ambassador valhu kitzuhada at the hands of jhred mirrorhead greatling objective beta: ensure the death of jhred mirrorhead greatling and the repatriation of his frame to highflame instrument santanado mondelles previously connected to that memory directive was a packet of mem-data connected to the ambassador himself; mem-lock sequences, personal information, fate identifiers. all were lost during the nullings, but avo could make up for that with his own skill. a new question arose, however. why. why was ori-thaum attempting to provoke potential hostilities? and why were they to hand the frame back to an instrument of highflame? fucking ori-thaum, draus chuckled, shaking her head as they stood gathered around a rounded table. phantoms danced at the center, flowing from avos metamind as he illustrated all he discovered. always up to some shit like this. assassination of this profile is major. could start a war. avo paused. heard it said the guilds arent ready for another war. draus scoffed. half-strands arent ready for a lot of shit. aint gonna stop them from makin a run at it. seated at the end of the table kae frowned. ii think i remember remember him she pointed at the face of santanado starsinger mondelles. the man was sharp of cheeks and possessed an impossible brightness to his eyes. pale white highlights tinted his hair, and his skin was the hue of oiled caramel. what looked to be cybernetic circuitry crawled up the sides of his cheeks like roots, and in place of ears, he had two implanted capsules in place. i i might have uhhelped him adjust his frame before. sphere sphere five, if i can hard to remember. its alright, kae, draus said. she let out a breath. yeah. santanado. theres an out-and-open meritocrat if there ever was one. tell you this much: i aint never seen anyone hate the chivalrics quite as much as he does. think hes working with ori-thaum for revenge? avo asked. political leverage against enemies? the regular opened and closed her hands, the gesture a light expression of ambiguity. could be. or he could know absolutely nothin about this, and theyre just doin it to incriminate him so they can get a godsdamned civil war started inside highflame. things are that bad at highhighflame? kae asked. well. by the time i left a couple o clads from both sides were found overloaded in some pretty suspect cases. therell be no outright war so long as the high seraph herselfs around but lets just say the current choir of seraphs are mostly inclined to seein the chivalrics put to pasture. she grinned. them, a good amount of instruments, and most the regulars. authorities are gonna get a purgin soon. just a matter of when. scanning through the memories again, avo confirmed the nu-scarrowbur summit was due in three days. it was a personal event hosted at the behest of the ambassador himself and was positioned at nu-scarrowbur honoring a decisive battle conducted on behalf of stormtree against no-dragon forces during the war. the official theme this year was rebuilding. new pledges were going to be made on behalf of the guilds involved in restoring the lives and infrastructure damaged during the war. nearly two decades too late, but from what the proxy minds used by the incubi knew, it seemed genuine. hosted within a fortress demiplane called the the fires height, the invitation list extended out to thousands of massist dignitaries, while only a select few saintists were invited. among the names mentioned on the guest list, avo found a suspicious absence of anyone listed under the greatling name. its connected, draus said, pulling him out of his thoughts. what? avo asked. draus cast out her phantoms, showing a zoomed-out deepnav of nu-scarrowbur. a red line linked a portal from the stormtree they saw in the spine when hitting the scalper knot for rendsinks to another two layers above at lights end. the reason why mirrorhead and conflux got friction with the scalpers. they was always planning to make a run on the district. hes plannin to hit them through the old portal. a pause broke her speech as a look of concentration came over. it cant just be conflux. hes gotta have more than what hes got theyll just get slaughtered without golem support avo dug through the mem-data again and had his mind filter through any details about golems or additional military purchases made by mirrorhead. broken recollections answered him as shredded snippets of conversation replayed in his mind. so, possible confirmation without detail. not a problem. it was finally time to slip through the final five layers of his auto-seance sang. a chorus of ghosts blended together, and through their union, sequences aligned, linking and shifting to the pre-assigned specifications. visual text flowed across the right of avos vision as the session address manifested. the session was connected to kaswargs grovethrough the locus where mirrorhead was contacting the now mind-dead benefactor. a call that now belonged to avo. mirrorhead? draus asked, not bothering to access her own private session for a peek. mirrorhead, avo said. he clicked his teeth together and hummed in satisfaction. the pieces were coming together, and what was missing could be manipulated. going to answer. see what we can get. plannin to spoof your way in deeper? draus asked. avo grunted a laugh. for a start. Chapter 10-1 Within the Glass chapter 10-1 within the glass sangeists x8 - 340,000,000 imps shadowcrawlers x8: 400,000,000 imps fulgerhunds x8: 300,000,000 imps micronuclear warhead x8: 8,000,000 -purchases made by jhred greatlings proxy identities 10-1 within the glass +how long,+ mirrorhead said, even through the nether, avo could feel the hot breath of unsated rage. the anger coming from the greatling clung, its bitterness clammy and sick. losing control had brought a feverish quality to the mans thoughts. how pitiful. jhred greatlings frame was wasted on him. holding merely ten tons of blood in his sway, avo considered the syndicate boss question. at this pace, the conversation still ran fast enough to follow, but slow enough for thought as well. avo didnt even need to sift through mirrorheads mind to know what he needed to say. +how long have you been in the ghoul?+ +how long have you owned that batch of ghouls?+ avo asked, using a question to quell a question. +you had no right+ +right?+ avo asked, adding a mocking cadence to his tone. he modified his voice in the same fashion the benefactor had, but even more so, he had a backdoor into mirrorheads mind. the mem-data betrayed jhred before his thoughts could even pour over. +no. its not about right. its about keeping my investment secure. you know this greatling.+ combining that with the fact that avo could accelerate and decelerate his reactions via how much blood was under his sway, and the conversation was clay to be molded. in the back of his mind, broken chains of mirror-convex''s memory flashed and fused into place, his metamind filtering and adjusting for each word spoken playing the part of the benefactor. of that which was nulled and unknown to him, avo still possessed other options. the worst case would be to lose the identity and worsen mirrorheads paranoia. it would make the task of manipulating him harder, but avo had enough assets close to the source. the frustration within the guilder swelled. good. anger made mirrorhead sloppy, cut his focus out at the knees. +i said i would handle it myself.+ mirrorhead spat. +that i didnt need you and your stormtree allies assisting me.+ ah. there was something the nulling had taken away. mirrorhead thought the benefactor was associated with stormtree. made sense considering where they arranged the meeting, but there were blindspots in why the benefactor was ostensibly helping someone from highflame. and how. relations between the two guilds couldnt even be described as being poor. not even in the vicinity. a shame avo had to play the part of the confidant. it would have been so delicious to shatter his preys ego right then and there. +mirrorhead if i didnt handle your situation, how did you think this would resolve?+ a petulant snarl slipped free from the other man. the mask of control was slipping, and beneath it was the face of a hurt child raging at the world. a child incapable of ever avenging his mother. +i said i would have handled it!+ +and you could have,+ avo replied, trying to instill as much humanity into his voice as possible. a shame the binarist was infested with mem-cons. without a phantasmic simulating and predicting the specific emotions he was supposed to be feeling at that moment, avo grasped blindly. +but this isnt about what we can do now. this is about what needs to happen. youre out of time. your sister is clearly+ +i told you not to mention her!+ avo paused, watching mirrorheads anger spike to new heights. the shout came carried by ghosts swelling hot with steam and fury. press more and he risked the guilder losing control completelypossibly even ending the conversation. +you didnt offer me proof last time. i will hear no more about her. no more.+ but jhred greatling had already revealed his wound. to react like a stung animal when the topic of his sister was broached presented numerous avenues paths of conversation for avo to herd him. best to keep things simple. uncomplicated. +fine. i trust that you know her best,+ avo said. +however, there is the issue with the signing of the treaty+ traveling under the cover of internalized hatred and tumult made it easier for avo to jump from one sequence to another. checking mirrorheads estimated awareness in the visual display, the guilder was distracted more by the task at hand, of the decision to accelerate his long-planned revenge. regardless of what anyone wanted, avo had no desire to see this ended at the flames height. with all the guilders in attendance, it would be wandering into a nest of violent godclads. it was with such a realization that avo understood abrelmirrorheads taller wiser sisterwas right. this was a suicide run. even if by some miracle he suceeded, to face what was likely millions upon millions of guild-level forces using a moment of surprise, syndicate fodder, and whatever else was still in reserve, wasnt something to walk away from. the deepers avo sank, working with care to twin the memories necessary for the spoofing, the more he soaked in the sobering malaise bleeding from jhred greatlings mind. mirrorhead wasnt planning on coming back. this was solely about avenging his mother. about hurting ori-thaum and spiting highflameespecially his father. in a twisted way, the guilder had been looking forward to his finale for a long, long time. sneaking through the sixteenth and seventeenth layers required a mix of timing and speed. again, much of this was made possible by avos newly imbued speed. the more he used his heaven, the more he felt unable to return to the old ways, that sequencing at baseline seemed crippled. broken. but that was the mutilation that came with going from obsolete to apotheosis. for a guilder that had only known promise and power, such was to be expected, but to give the blind sight and make them consider losing it again mirrorhead did not know what he would be surrendering should he greet true death. suddenly, the nether-lag spiked. ghosts quivered and twisted around avo, straining to keep him connected. host awareness: 3% they were shifting across a twist in spatial reality. after a moment of evasion, avo sank a ghost into the waters of mirrorheads perception, accessing the world outside through the perspective of the other godclad. around him, all was an expanse of twisting fractals refracting treads of curving light. intriguingly, avo found himself able to see through each brightened shard of glass, his perception jumping from conduit to conduit, like light striking a point of symmetry expanding his network of awareness. avo was unsure what domain was in effect for the canon on display, but if he had to guess, it appeared that luminosity or light of some form was allowing for these effects. he took special care to keep a special sequence of this memory. kae would need it later when examining the twice-walkers capabilities further. ahead, an archway formed, with broken sheets of glass intersecting and melding into a reflective surface. from the wings of the twice-walker shone forth a coruscating radiance that painted brushstrokes of color and shapes into another place. features to a new location flashed into shape. narrowing from the eldritch leviathan, a dollop shot free from the titanic form as mirrorhead collapsed the mass of the heaven back within his frame. the entire process felt disquieting, as if reality was being stretched no longer. something occurred to avo then: it had been some time since his wards groaned before the gaze of another heavenagainst the naked form of a god. was he somehow acclimating? or was it just an attunement, his own increasingly eldritch nature parting him from the trauma of beholding another of its kind? such questions slipped from his mind as surprise widened a leak within his thoughts. riding as an unknown passenger behind mirrorheads eyes, avo found himself in a shadowy domed structure. no doors or portals of any kind greeted this place beyond, only curved ceilings and flat walls made of glass. three hundred loci signatures populated his visual feed, drones flying to and fro, all connected to a central memory matrix. ghosts flooded the darkness here, a near twenty-thousand in number by the estimates of avos metamind. through them, neon phantoms danced and simulated a miniaturized version of the sovereignty itself, with a spectral line connecting the conflux megablock from mazzos junction in the spine to nu-scarrow at lights end. additional glowing waypoints lined the stormtree rooted at the heart of the scalpers district, and the passages through layer two and layer one. with a wave of his hand, mirrorheads metamind rippled. commands spilled free, washing over all the ghosts from the final and innermost layer. phantasmal mass built within the syndicate boss as countless ghosts took root within him. there was a strangeness to the moment. it was as if mirrorheads body was a trunk now reknitting with the rest of the tree, branching off elsewhere. and suddenly, as a flash of light ignited within mirrorhead, the space around them changed again, like a facade collapsing. the glass around them shattered. and then, there was light. the sunshine of a holographic sun. avo found himself frozen by sheer aesthetic whiplash. banished from a sterile chamber encased in glass, phantasmal neon, and darkness, this place was its antithesis. beyond the expanse of a smooth reflective pier, a small wooden bridge extended out in front of him to a tropical island that crowned the dancing tides. foaming waves lapped over golden beaches. an impossible collection of trees, nu-birds, and drones formed a perimeter as if awaiting mirrorheads approach. and there, bobbing atop the softly swirling waves on magnetized platforms, were thirty-two signatures. thirty-two signatures from thirty-two loci chambered within thirty-two different combat platforms it took him finally noticing one of said platforms was a sangeist to realize the rest were golems as well.this chapter was first shared on the n??vl?1n platform. Chapter 10-2 Death of the Ideal chapter 10-2 death of the ideal +treaties. always with the treaties and the posturing and begging. and for what? peace? peace is a lie! we all know there will be blood in the end, sisters to be, we all know! but our allies seem to have lost their cocks prematurely.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. remind me again, because old pragma gets to forgetting sometimes: who won the last war? who won? was it the massists or saintists? dont give me that rust-shit about damages or lives lost. that doesnt matter. im talking about souls claimed. im talking about frames takensovereignties captured. who won? did highflame win? did i misremember that half-ont greatling sow screaming her lungs out for half the city to hear? like she didnt have it cominglike the golds werent peacocking like a godsdamned pack of gleamers when they let the fucking sang detonate their fleshweaver plagues into our districts, pour their rash-cursed spores into the air. nine billion stillbirths. nine billion. not even the vatborn spared. and then the rash. the rash sisters. think of this: aside from the castrates from the thousand plains, who else has the means to bend blood and flesh into abominations? who else! ii know im rambling but i cannot stomach this. i cannot bear this! peace? fuck peace. were not finished here. were never going to be finished. not till every last saintist fuck is dead! dead! dead! the ori are glassjaws. fine. i get it. old pragma gets it. their lives were nice. they got to live on sunny, happy little uuvakotheir pretty island chain undisturbed. got to mine their corpse crystals and trade them to outsiders. messing with their minds to get better deals and avoid wars. but while they were having a fun ol time in the sun, some of us had to fight, and bleed, and struggle to stand. even steel broke in the skuldvast. even steel. so, ambassador kitzuhada says peace? i say war! war! fucking war! leave peace for transcendence, because right now, there isnt an existence big enough for all us+ -pragma das ench, the moons edge, stormtree extremist propaganda thoughtcast 10-2 death of the ideal drooling, hunger, and delight blended within avo. a quick command to his metamind was required to contain any spillover of emotion. thirty-two golems. thirty-two heavens. thirty-two new branches to expand his apotheosis. a scoff sounded from the woundshaper, its attention fixed on but a select class of golem. the focus, to me at least, is clear master. we must build strength upon strength. raise the tower already risen. the others are acceptable, perhaps, but it is unwise to trade the reach of a branch for the hairs of a new root. like kae said. tower or sea: the divide of ontological builds. of course, with the uniqueness of his frame, avo just might find himself able to walk both paths. as the initial rush of gluttony faded, confusion joined his elation. conflux was sparse of golems. sparse of numerous resourceseven for a gutter crime syndicate. meanwhile, mirrorhead had well over a dozen in his personal inventory. lessening the tonnage of blood, avo felt the flow of time increase as mirrorhead began his slow trek across the boardwalk. the water here bubbled and swirled with eye-catching oddness, the waves sloshing back and forth as if this placeor planewas tilting in random directions. details came through via phys-sim. numbers and movement vectors charted impossible paths for baseline reality to manifest; the water was circling the island, the trajectories painting a new simulation into avos mind. dimensionally, this location was more a sphere than a flat plane. in function it worked similarly to zeins demiplane, wrapping in on itself. only without any visible temporally altering miracles at play. slithering into mirrorheads outer cognition again, avo surveyed the island before him. on first glance, it seemed real enough. the first thing to break the masquerade was the sun. a phantasmal, shape-shifting sun that went from being a perfectly normal imitation of the daystar, to the shape of a cartoonish duck. connected to a central locus buried beneath the sand, the star morphed several more times, each to the form of an animal. nu-dog; nu-cat; hippo; duck. after repeating the sequence, it would default to being a normal sun again for a few moments and start over. through it all, there was a juvenile quality to its design, with the eyes of the animals far too big to be natural, and their cuteness exaggerated to a level of edible unpalatability. such was quite a featit took a lot to confuse a ghouls instincts so much it was no longer sure if it wanted to eat you. patchworks of tall ivory-white palm trees glittered with crystalline enamel under skies of false-blue. beneath them, small mechanical crabs played jingling lullabies as they skittered to welcome mirrorhead. overhead, more traditional drones circled the sky, their bodies diamond shaped and armedwith single-shot gauss harpoons installed at their core and micro-missiles at the side. scrying at the mem-data they were transmitting, avo felt his mind lurch to a halt. he had his metamind play back a line of information. a-12 miniaturized nuclear warhead detected well. those were priority targets for spoofing. zein had taught avo about all the fun that came with nuclear explosives. aside from diving into the subreality of wind using his galeslither, his means of avoidance were few. prevention was the better method anyway. the sand of the island shone like gold. it might actually be gold. before he could study it further, mirrorhead halted at the edge of the walkway, gaze drifting past the neat arrangement of trees to stare at what looked to be a marble figurine of two individuals frozen in a moment of play. the statues were human-sized, with the larger lifting the smaller beneath the arms in a motherly embrace. for seven heartbeats that followed, mirrorhead just stared, his forlorn heart hollowing his mind of stray thought. within the metamind, ghosts caught fire, sparked by the intensity of his melancholy. a response sang out from the ghosts tethered to jhreds metamind. a stored sequence of memories summoned wisping whorls of ethereal wind, coalescing ghosts activating phantom functionality. the ghosts stretched and phantasmal representation of the current environment around them overlapped their present reality at once, scenes from days of yonder youth played. phantasmal coconuts swung where none remained in the present. the sands were fuller then, like an hourglass yet to be turned. through the tallness of the trees, a series of echoing giggles pealed as a tiny jhred greatling toddled on the beach. behind him, a distorted shadow of a woman followed, the outline of her form a mass of hollow scar stuff on his memory. a simulation of the person themselves was missing. if these moments were to be put to paper, it would be as if someone had cut her loose from every page. a mind-stinging noise tore through the air. the ghosts wailed, unable to load what was spoken. run, jhred, the guilder muttered, playing the role of his own mother. he didnt even seem to know what voice he wanted to fake. im coming to get you. avo had to look away from the memory of the child. the plumpness of the flesh was phantasmal, but needled at his hunger all the same. again, jhreds younger self laughed and hid behind the tree. if he was trying to hide, he was doing an exceptionally poor job at it. +not gonna find me, mommy.+ fascinating to see how the greatlings intellect had barely developed since then. predictably, the miasma of unsimulated paleness suddenly teleported next to jhredwho squealed in delightand picked him up. the pose in that instant was the same as that of the sculpture. digging through jhreds memories, avo discovered the man had the moment recreated via an architecture drone repurposed toward the task of marble sculpting. countless hours of work went into digging up how tall the mother was, her apparel, and her general morphology. what remained missing was her voice, her face, her touch, her personhood. to be forcibly withheld from the mind of someone you loved was a punishment most severe, and a torment most sublime. all the other greatlings had the last traces of her pruned. only jhred held on, even to her absence. only jhred. the simulation froze. looking between the boy, face bright with joy with his marble copy made of stone, and the blank look of defeat on jhred greatling, now grown, it seemed a degeneration had taken shape. instead of rising with his apotheosis, jhred clung to the past, stuck to what was lost. he did not grow. he refused. and so he will meet true death, the woundshaper whispered. gods ascend, and in ascension, widen. bloom. stillness is the path to fated demise. know this, master. know this. im not afraid, he said, lying. stripped of his reflective shield, there was a softness to his baritone, like he hesitated to project force without the mask of his mirrorhead identity protecting him. i do not feel anything for this. i do not theres no more time. abrel she broke my h-heart the first sob escaped from him then. he wrapped his hands around himself as he heaved, trying to keep himself together. i wont i wont believe that she betrayed me. i cant. shes family. shes the only one that cared besides me the only one. he turned to his mothers absence. please dont hate her. please. she held on for as long as she could. but it got too hard. everyone was so cruel. the blankness of her memory self was too much, so he turned to the marble instead. i just want to know what your voice sounds like again. i just jhred greatling sank down into the sand and wept. deep as his voice was, he wept like a child, shaking with each coughing sob that escaped from him. he wept openly, kneeling by the statue as avo watched. im sorry im so sorry. i tried. i burned everything i had left. i triedtried so hard. i c-can do it. i can kill him for you. i can still make this hurt. anger flared. and sizzled away into hissing nothingness as it came into contact with the ocean of his sorrow and was swallowed. oh, gods peering at jhred greatlings weakness from the inside, a strange dread settled on avo. a twist of something caught his attention, the shadow cast by the statues reaching out to him, forming the shape of a man in a long coat. the scent of citrus stung at his memories. for a flickering instant, he saw him there: walton stood, towering over the faceless form of mirrorheads mother. avo watched as his smiling father ran his fingertips down the missing face of the statue and then, using the same few fingers, repeated the action on his own skin. the apparition vanished. avo shuddered. jhred sobbed, unaware of the second turmoil hatching inside him. when avo had been forced to null his fathers image, a break had opened within him. like no typical trauma, the hurt indelible and strange, it plagued the corners of avos mind. and with each subsequent encounter, he felt himself being pushed further and further away. until now. the epiphany came to him then. the death of idealization. this was freedom. perhaps not absolute freedom, but freedom enough to decide his own path, his own destiny. in destroying the imagethe idealization of his fatherwalton had shattered one of the only fixations avo had. unchained through mutilation, the path ahead belonged to avo, and in beholding the nature of the low masters, the hungers, control they had was atrophied at best. the wound had already been made on his spirit, and would not be struck twice to effect. in destroying the anchor of his own perfection, his idealized self, walton granted avo a gift few would ever come to know. choice. choice untethered. choice unfettered. and so, the ghoul stood while the guilder succumbed. once again, avo looked upon the shadow where he once saw his father. this time, there was no dread, only lightness. only anticipation for what was to come. thank you, avo said, offering words to someone long absent. but unlike jhred greatling, what dwelt in him was gratefulness and not pain. Chapter 10-3 Deception’s Architecture chapter 10-3 deceptions architecture potentiate draus has it. i recommend we pass her and boot the rest. we can assign her to a suicider-unit and accelerate her conditioning. within a year, i foresee sure? im beyond sure about her. did you see what she managed to do that last assignment? ha! it was beautiful. never seen a trainee kill a nu-dog by lodging its own body down its throat, just kept stuffing until it choked. pissed myself laughing at that, not gonna lie. what about what? murders? who did she kill? ohhh. the incidents. but does it really matter? they came back, right? they didnt stay dead well, did she do that to their bodies after she finished killing them? before? ah. a bad habit. these things can be fixed ah. yes. sorry, higher, i didnt realize you were criticizingwith respect, higher, i still dont see why the murders matter. they provoked her. how? you saw how they were behavinghow they kept missing and hitting those fateless the last gutter evaluation. combat skins off in hostile territory as well. shameful, really. thank you for reminding me, i will need to write a report about this. favorites? [laughter] of course im playing favorites. she''s my favorite because she''s what we need. all that matters is killing the enemy with her, and by the dead gods is that rare. listen. let me speak with candor: the regulars are not some prestigious outfit to dump those who failed their trials and wont be getting a frame. those house-kids didnt make it there, and they wont make it here. theres too much glass in them. draus me were more weapons than people. when you arent willing to abandon the brittleness of your own uh, fixations all its doing is adding more work for our necros with their little [snort of laughter] traumas. just approve her. i have never chosen wrong. -commander winston nicoma, highflame regular 10-3 deceptions architecture avo left jhred greatling kneeling in the sand, gibbering like the child he was. enlightening as the moment was, the dagger wasnt deep enough in conflux, for there remained lies to weave and minds to twist. this sanctuary, infiltrated as it was, could be looted later. checking his deepnav, the ghosts offered only errors when he inquired about his location in the city. just as well. he would take this place from greatling when he was done. this, and the rest of his frame. there would always be use for demiplanes, if only for storage. the innermost realm of jhred greatlings mind was a dim place glossed over by mist and shadow. an atmosphere of myth and lore clung to the air within his innermost palace like a tangible wetness, with towering structures shrouded by the rays of sunlight blunted off the mask of soft drizzle. glass remained a motif even inward. flying mirror-bright blades drifted and shattered, the pieces fusing into new shapes intermittently under the sway of straying ghosts. between buildings, ravines of traffic ran from street to sky, the touch of marble, gold, and metal outlined all in filigrees of resplendence shining through the haze. the last thing of noteas always when it came to the heaven-touched districts of highflamewas the faint shimmer of dancing fire flickering at the heart of their shadows. pulling himself away from being too distracted by the architecture, avo copied over all the critical mem-data jhred held on his own heaven, his organization, general knowledge regarding highflame, details on his extended family, and the mem-key for a trigger-implant installed in the back of the guilders mind. a trigger implant for all the cortex bombs floating in the skulls of every conflux employee. ah. not something avo enjoyed remembering. carefully, avo edited all memories connected to the triggers activation. if mirrorhead wished everyone in conflux to drop dead, it would be hope instead of manifestation. this also meant another thing: essus was free. in fact, most of conflux was free, but they were food for his frame. and it was with that hunger that avo jacked out from mirrorheads mind. while the guilder wallowed in the past, avo disappeared, sinking through the clefts of his updated session back into his own body. he had a slaughter to prepare for. *** exiting the dive, avo sequenced his memories into phantoms and fed them over to draus and kae. they studied the primer on mirrorheads condition while he reviewed his next course of action. with the incubi bested or, at the very least, in hiding, he had an opportunity to re-establish his influence within the block. of the thousands operating under the conflux banner, the necros were disabled and the enforcers were more like an explosive defense grid than jackpoints of entry. with the strike cell inactive, other options presented themselves to avo, considering he had a few new sequences to apply along with new mem-cons to prepare. checking the deepnav, chambers was in position, traversing the waypoints up toward where the blockcrawler was supposed to be. warnings pinged avos metamind every few seconds while the former enforcer stumbled over collapsed walls and clambered up industrial chutes. mem-cons were burrowing into chambers cognition, but most of the warnings were for naught: half these afflictions he already had, and the rest were instantly assimilated by those which already dominated his mind. if anything, the added sequences and mem-data they provided would serve use for newer subversive constructs. it was something he could work on while waiting for chambers. once in the blockcrawler he could traverse the rubble of the inner confines of the building with better speed. after that, avo had to see about a promise he made. the father had as much of a stake in mirrorheads death as any of them. perhaps even more, considering what was taken from him. a low scoff broke his contemplation. jaus, draus said, chuckling as she shook her head. the sight of jhred greatling on the beach was playing out via phantoms, and more than anything, she seemed insulted. what a half-strand. kaes wince did not escape avos notice. on the far edge of the table, her already fractured focus split further as the whimpering noises coming from mirrorhead wrenched pity from her mind. her sympathy only grew when she beheld the part with his mother. even better, she was getting it to run with just three hundred and ten ghosts with plenty of sequences still unused. quiet. efficient. the incog wouldnt be overtaxed by any means. fusing the gleaming sun into shape, he activated it and watched as its light fell, a slick rain that obfuscated her metamind against outsider awareness. +so,+ draus said. +im a ghost now.+ she laughed in the shining rain. +not fully. wont be noticed in most cases. has limits though. strains under passing perception. stay away from crowds. avoid being stared at. dont stay near specters. all that will increase cog-cap. last thing to deactivate are wards. or the incog. when sequence demands are too high you cant have both. by that point+ +by that point im fixin for a nullin,+ good. she understood. +alright.+ +you can get your barge now if you like.+ avo added.+circumspect. command aero with equipment. after, you lead. nether will be compromised. mirrorhead is compromised. have access to his cortex bombs. assaulting conflux need to make sure he doesnt escape. dont want him close to ascending either. need to be fast, before too much attention is drawn.+ she nodded. +nova. ill take a peek around the block. nu-scarrowbur too while were at it. ill dry-run us out some options soon.+ he grunted. +good. finally off snuff-the-ghoul duty. must feel like a promotion.+ +shit. i enjoyed snuffin the ghoul. easy gig. free housin. whats not to like.+ +long increments between killings?+ +its just been a couple of days avo, damn. well get our slaughterhouse soon enough.+ she paused then. +listen. you saw the father+ +essus,+ avo corrected. +hes alive. still there. going to go find him. free him. he deserves a chance at this as well. for what he lost. what was taken. i promised.+ he ended the dive and exited from her meta. blinking away the yet-faded flashes of mem-data, he found draus staring at him, a peculiar look on her face. you gonna find him through the uh the rash-risk. chambers, avo said. yes. hes still alive. does he gotta be? avo checked the position of the former enforcer. he was close now. eight feet away from the blockcrawler. all he needed to do was climb through the last of the shredded air filtration channels running over several uncontaminated areas. yes, he said. need to keep him unsnuffed. for now. *** it didnt take chambers long to realize his piss-stick didnt like being dragged against the cold, rusted metal of the fucking air tubes. the godsdamned war really did a number on the block. open beams of light threaded open wounds through even the filtration system. light speared in like needles; damage-acupuncture for the entire block. with each hiss and thrust, he wormed along the space barely large enough for him to crouch through, his knees sore from the half-hour of sneak-shit he was doing. why the fuck did i park that fucking shit all the way up here, chambers muttered. shit was hard to rememberhells, his natural memory had never been all that good, and after mirrorheads examination and all the seizures that followed, it was even worse. half-strand voice-guy making me climb up this shit and not replying to me. half-strand headaches making it hard to think. half-strand mirrorhead being a fucking chambers froze after the words left his careless lips. a flash of something caught his attention. ahead of him, a gleam of light hit the reflective shine of a shard of shrapnela piece of an aeros bumper. reflexive terror clenched his guts. ohshitohshitohshit. chambers looked into the murky translucence and choked on his own fear. something was moving behind himskittering up between his legs. holding his breath and bracing for death, he expected the weird bullshit glass monster to get him. but as he went rigid, so too did the movement, the shape suddenly going stiff in the murkiness of the metal, a few inches behind him as seen through the arch of his kneeling legs. meeping a note of pure terror, chambers swallowed. death didnt come. however, he did hear a skittera squeak. his senses returned to him. mirrorhead wasnt here. the mem-cons were activeentering and protecting chambers. he was the sole walker of this placethe only one. maybe he should have a cool title like con-walker or something. you know. like the fallwalkers. but immune to mem-cons. maybe he was immune to the rash too? a hissing squeak pulled at his attention as he heard what sounded like soft pattering skitters. the noise was familiar. where had he heard that before? between his legs, a dark shape drew closer. a sudden tickle flicked down that which dangled. suddenly, the dread returned twice fold. another squeak followed. inching his head down, chambers prepared himself for a fractal of glass pushing through his balls or something. maybe even the monster pressed up against him. what he saw was considerably less worrying. poking at his privates was a brown-furred, brown-legged aratnid, its rat-like body emaciated and weak. it was weakly prodding at chambers sensitivity with a twitching palp. hunger sang from its simple mind, and through its eight beady little rat-eyes, it blinked weakly at him as the puss of sickness leaked from its split mandibles. jaus, chambers said, letting out a breath. hey, there little consang. you scared the fuck-shit out of me. i thought a noise suddenly crackled loudly in his skull. +chambers.+ reactively, chambers jumped in fright. he stood up and struck his head on the ceiling. also, reactively, the arantid squealed and did what instinct told it to do. it bit him. it bit him where no man should ever be bitten. Chapter 10-4 Dismantle chapter 10-4 dismantle the ashen digger is a no-dragon variant of aratnid designed to inflict subtle losses to enemy personnel behind combat lines. at a glance they are frail creatures, offering little in the way of their contemporaries like the nerve-splitting spine nester. such is because the ashen digger is built to function like a plague carrier. self-fertilizing creatures, they possess the capability of directly injecting the eggs stored in their palps, upon which the young will begin hatching within twenty-four hours, thus increasing their population drastically. those who suffer bites from the ashen digger are recommended to dismember or replace the affected region entirely through thaumaturgic or surgical means -nu-beast bestiarium, idheim digest 10-4 dismantle the depth of certain agonies was beyond the conveyance of even the most anguished of screams. there were several things chambers wanted to say to the chimeric creature currently wrapped around his most sensitive protrusion, the edged segments of its forelimbs slipping around the wrinkled perimeter of his skin, grasping him from the outside like a glove of pain as it bit and gnawed. torment came again and again, the sensation like a twin-headed burning fork sliding in and out of his supple flesh. the following sense that something was twitching inside his wound only made matters worse. agghh! wait, no! stay the fuck away from that. those are mine you fuck! please, jaus, kill me now. huh. ive seen this in a vicarity before. im kinda like dannis steelhard now that i think about it lustaway activated transferring physical arousal into metamind these were all things chambers wanted to say, yet as he tore the wretched creature off his body, as he dashed it against the wall, felt the satisfaction of its bulbous body bursting into oozing spools of white ichor and ropey gore, what came from him was a shrillness he had not known himself capable of producing. itcould only be compared to those old steam locomotives found in voidwatch distributed vicarities. the whistle pierced down the vents, ringing out through the shrapnel punctures and rattling screws. regardless of how loud he was outside, within his mind, the voice of his outrage was infinitely louder. +aghghhhhh ffuuuuucccckkkkkkk! it bit my balls! it fucking bit my balls!+ and across a linking within his mind, invasive ghosts swirled through the channels of pain running through his thoughtstuff. *** downloading trauma-pattern: [aratnids kiss] some traumas were more narrow than others, but chambers torturous experience would be enough to incapacitate an exposed mind. perhaps not a ghoul thoughthe lack of any true genitalia and associated primal fears with regard to losing procreational ability impeded such worries. all there would be was pain, and hurt was nothing special to his kind. still. it was unique. useful. a bit like chambers himself. the fact that his screams sounded so amusing helped. of course, there was the matter of two hundred accretions snapping to wary alertness at the sound of his cries. checking the deepnav, avo found that a few contingents of conflux technicians had settled into the former living quarters on this level and had set up a workshop of some limited fashion. currently, the paths of their perception all intersected where chambers was. annoying, but easily solved. incog activated tunnel to gate 44 opening twin announcements flashed through his cog-feed. the latter was likely draus departing to do some scouting in preparation for what was to come. kelver-20 blockrunner systems: [error] [error] requires immediate rebuild of phantasmal structure for functionality right. another thing stormtree and highflame fought over. titles. blockrunner versus blockcrawler. considering both sides had a variant of this platform, it was more a thing of preference than functional difference. shaped like a rotating cube with a grid of fusion torches gleaming on each facet, six crab-like appendages extended from below as if legs bolted to a cube, studded with magnets that clung to the walls, the blockcrawler was to be entered from a hatch above or belowextremely outdated tech even for its time. down its legs were mag-accelerated guns. most were rusted, but at least two still had the capacity to shoot through walls. highflame had a tendency to keep to a more solid matter motif, but both sides had taken to using smart matter pathing within the fibers comprising their newer vehicles if some of draus anecdotes were to be taken at value. chambers, yowling as he stuck a leg through the missing hatch, slipped into the interior of the machine, and strapped himself into a cube-shaped gimbal. the piloting module was cramped with barley more than eight square feet of room to stretch and operate, but function superseded comfort when it came to instruments of war. linking his mind to the locus, the system hard booted using hisand by extensionavos metamind as a crutch. the mem-cons had eaten away much of it phantasmal structure, thus crippling its semi-autonomous functions. with someone at the helm, however, its baseline functions could still be managed. alright, chambers said. in the fucking thing. now. find me something to fix my balls. ill beg. seriously. i beg hard: itll be undignified and youll feel bad. avo wouldnt. but he got the point. accelerating himself using his heaven, he reviewed the overall situation. mirrorhead was still in place, still whining about his woeful life. no one had come to investigate the noise chambers made after the incog activated. casting out, his whisper scried at the nearest conflux personnel with care. most of them still had a trauma-collapse trigger set to activate when someone lacked the properincubi-mandatedsequences. considering the memories were universal, it seemed the incubi broadly applied the effect via loci-transmitted mem-cons. pulling the memories he claimed from the incubi, he compared them to what lay before him and matched a symmetrical enough facade of sequences to enter the minds of enforcers and technicians anew. the syndicate necros, despite being mentally crippled, were still useful as another jackpoint in case what he obtained from the incubi was insufficient to spoof past their grid in due time. most of them had been quarantined to a specific spot on each floor. for now, avo was content to leave them be. redesigning a mem-con from the ones just harvested took a bit of time, but turning the infrastructure already built in by the ori-thaum to his own ends sped things along. as avo hopped from mind to mind, he arrived against a central loci and accessed its mem-data. there, he pulled the information he needed regarding essus current location and installed his viruses. subverted, the ori-thaum defense grid was now his to command. nine thousand eight hundred and seventy-three active signatures of thoughtstuff were now registered and primed for collapse. it was at once sobering and enticing to lay gaze upon a hidden construct capable of distributing mem-cons at such efficiency. for all the momentum he possessed, their skill at direct sequencing and phantasmal architecture design exceeded his. he would need to study their methods in depth when this was done. his skill as a necrojack could be nourished further by the waters of his betters. as he slid back over into chambers mind, a new interface manifested in the back of his mind, mapping the slow spread of his influence through the block. soon, all would be infected, and he would have full control. he cast a quick update to draus before locating essus on the deepnav. a marker materialized far down the block, descending to the point of the gutters. gutters? bringing up some of the memories he took from the locus, he found mention of a filming today. a lite crucible was scheduled to take place in the lower levels just above the penumbra. they needed to keep it quiet to avoid drawing too much attention from the exorcists. the theme had twenty recent volunteers placed in a maze. and they would have the lingerer hunt them. the lingerer. they were having essus participate. except for this time, he was to be on the other end of the entertainment equation. if there was ever a true display of absent justice, it would be the fate of a good man made a wretched monster by no fault of his own. all he had wanted was a better life for himself and his son. all he got was torment and mutilation. avo wondered how walton would feel regarding the man, and the casual indifference mirrorhead inflicted the atrocities he did upon him. flicking the marker over to chamber, he felt the former enforcer jolt again with a shock. tiny specks of awareness were flickering from the base of the mans bloodied privates. avo could try hitting some of the hatchlings with his traumas, but he really didnt have anything that would null a creature so simple. he could try jacking into their thoughts directly and crippling them each by each via the scrambling of their cognitive architecture, but he deemed it a waste of time. they werent going to kill chambers, and a woundhound shouldnt be that hard to find in a crucible of all places. i i think theyre crawlin up my tubes, chambers said, breath coming in bated hisses. considerable pain filled the mans mind. he was handling it most adequately. +might be. get down to the bottom. woundhoud waiting there.+ spitting out a breath of slurs, chambers directed the crawler downward. intermittently, it had to slice through blockages of infrastructure and slats of bolted plasteel. moving where elevators and electrical systems were joined, the blockcrawler operated in a sense much like aratnids did, avoiding open rooms as it scanned through walls and adjusted its path in the folds between. its legs sang sawing notes of mechanical exertion with each step. through the gloom around them, it cast a light on the decayed divides that ran within the block. cords of wire and veins of copper glinted and swayed. dormant elevators were severed and locked in place, halted from freefall by the clamps during the war. the better part of ten minutes passed before they finally got down to where essus was. through it all, avo cast out his whisper when he could, lessening the time it took for his mem-cons to spread again. by the time he was done here, all that remained would be the creation of false intel on his end. after that, he would find the time to experiment with his canons. there were more potential synergies between his heavens and phantasmics that he wasnt exploiting. they were two hundred feet away from essus'' mem-locked location when draus session activated. the first thing that spilled through was anxiousness. +avo. somethin fuckys happenin in nu-scarrowbur. the scalpers are gone.+ Chapter 10-5 Smoke on the Horizon chapter 10-5 smoke on the horizon well, thats an augury of violence if ive ever seen one. an entire block flooded with thoughtstuff. theyre massing alright. looks like were going to have that fight after all. or shits fuckier than we know. you think the ori yep. absolutely. if theres an open jar, the half-strands from the incubi probably got one of their invisible fingers dipping inside. well, they might even be the jar in the first place, running a dive on themselves. like in kososo. fucking kososo. yep. you think your uncle pretending his gates are down will get greatling to pull something stupid? ehh. ahh. umm. enlightening, reva. glad to see our little cadres being headed by an intellectual. yep. know what i think? i think this mirrorhead doesnt know what hes doing. you serious? well, come up with whatever mad-cap strategy you want, but bunching your fighting-meat up in one place all of a sudden isnt exactly subtle. and frankly, theres not enough of them. of course, if the ori have their hands on him someway somehow, they might be feeding him false intel to start a fight in nu-scarrowbur as a distraction. like in kososo. fucking kososo. yep. so. what now? now we just keep watching. we got the time. we got the longeyes support. and we got four-on-one if it comes down to a clad on clad. far as i can tell, we basically got called in to do a milk run. ...reva, why the fuck did you have to use those words? -conversation between reva javvers and tigertail, bloodthanes of stormtree 10-5 smoke on the horizon avos mind slowed to a halt as he overlaid draus perception upon his own. from on high she gazed down at nu-scarrowbur, the roof of her newly stolen aerovec was practically scraping the ceiling of layer two. physically masked by the phantoms simulating midnight, her cog-cap remained low as she used the confusion of her environment as attention-ablative plating. clever. theres a trick to keep in mind. trickling veins of traffic rounded the countless shield-shaped structures of the district below her. every two blocks or so, an exorcists specter hovered, a satellite between intersections, each establishing a new watchtower for surveillance. missing were the patrolling golem knots of the scalpers or any trace of their associated members operating in the street. at a glance, this seemed an obvious reaction to the presence of the exorcists, but clearer omens stood in former syndicate-owned blocks now mostly vacant of thoughstuff and loci signatures. if the district was a portrait of climbing colors when regarded in the nether, several major spires were now devoid of luster, bland in a sea of growing voluminosity thanks to the encroach of tier-security. +ill try to get a closer look,+ draus said. the heft of tension was as if a solid block inside her. she welcomed its weight, reveling in a task fit for her purpose. she yearned to see if she could evade the notice of the exorcists entirely, leaving her incog unstrained. +hows the shit on your end?+ he checked essus signature. the former father wasnt moving, surrounded by two flanking accretions. +going to get essus. block is ours again. no sign of any more incubi. yet.+ pulling the crucible mem-data secured from subverted loci, two other memory profiles appeared. a hype-feed advertising a double act who fought with minds in sync and wielded wisping drones lined with threads of monowire. two upcoming razorgirlstwins named tsuni and prani mandrahuptawere set to perform with him. all details indicated they were recent contract acquisitions made by confluxtheir backstory vaguely similar to essus own, being twin daughters surviving the ascent up a scalper crucible while their father didnt. unlike essus, what memories the systems offered presented them as savage husks hollowed by drugs and vicarity addiction. chrome as they were on the outside, inside was already rot and rust. death for them was a question of when, and not if. essus froze. he turned to face the man. yes. better, in fact. artads blessings. the techs flickering blue eyes swiveled as they shot a worried look at one of their cohorts. working to fix the nights murder-filled entertainment, they were spread wide, some assembling wires, other prodding at drones. they werent ready for what was to come. +the locus,+ essus said. +where the the watchers were supposed to come through. it broke with the uh the mind-thief fell ill.+ +yes. necros hurt. going to finish him in a moment.+ parts of essus thoughts wavered like a tattered flag, but by testament of will, the man was still sane, still capable of composing his own thoughts. wounded though he was, shattered but holding was yet the right descriptor. +i have done terrible things,+ essus said. shame followed. emotions were breaking inside the man like a dam. there was no time for this. +i refused to kill at first but they they put memories of other children dying inside of me until i+ +essus. cant make that right. but mirrorheads not watching now. bomb in your head wont go oft. and the necro is down. you understand?+ slowly, he felt essus offer him a nod. +yes yes+ his fist lashed out, the blow a surprise to himself and avo both. the tech he just spoke to barely managed to widen his eyes before death came. titanium greeted flesh and the bones that comprised the confluxers jaw emerged as a burst of darts through the back of his skull. a cry of alarm roseand droned as avo accelerated his reflexes. around him, a few personnel and the two razorgirls imbued with the enhancements of neurachem or other reaction booster moved as if inches, twitching barest increments before his gaze. the rest might as well have been frozen solid. the first targets were the twins. they were chained in mind and action, moving in tandem as they ejected the threaded monowire drones out from their spines. the drones didnt even fully detach from their bodies before they broke. synaptic lightning forked through the nether, striking the closer of the two. ghosts imbued with all the pain in lucilles regret splashed against wardings and wardings shattered. a mental scream sounded for but a beat before it was subsumed by the banshee howl of channeled traumas. as he blew out the first razorgirls mind like a candle, he watched as his traumas overflowed across the link so fast the second mind in the conduit burst immediately after the first, wards popping like a lightbulb after her sister was extinguished. a glitter of thoughtstuff speckled his metamind. only shadows of memory remained of them. shadows, and a fortuitous secondhand realization that one of them had a woundhound injector on them. leaving the techs for essus to slaughter, avo slipped his whisper out from the fathers mind and cast torrents of mind-nulling ghosts at the already crippled necro and the drones. then, he scanned the minds of the survivors. two auto-seance sessions were unsequenced from inside their minds. a thoughtcast toward a nearby locus containing a nether lobby for the block was nulled mid-travel. in effect, he was tearing the sound out of out of the confluxers as they screamed, neutering any chance they had of survival. much like they planned for the twenty people trapped within slatted sheets under the pretense of playing a game of death and survival. when no more possibility of escape remained, avo slacked his haemokinetic mass and slipped back into essus mind. the following brutality could be encapsulated in a single word: catharsis. bodies broke and smeared against walls. limbs came free of sockets and splattered further against skulls. nonoptimal cyborg that he was, essus was rage unchained and grafted toward the sole purpose of dispensing crude, vulgar violence. vulgar violence the techs were helpless to halt with their crumbling morale and absent martial prowess. without enforcer protection and the overwatch of their drones, the resulting moments belonged to a nature documentary. avo remembered the no-dragons promoting a patch release of one of their nu-hornet variants made to eat away the near-endless swarm of locusts spilling out from a rupture near the silk spiral. cradled in the mind of the hornet, he experienced a wholesale culling as the bioform tore through the cloud of locusts, its crystalline form and virulent exoskeleton cutting the pests from the skies via blade and plague both. what essus performed wasnt nearly as impressive in terms of magnitude, but the experience of the vicarity was the same. pulped and twisted remains pooled across the ground like soup. standing upon a pond of gore, essus looked at the shadowy outline of his own body within the crimson pond, basked by wings of neon bleeding into the faintness of apparitions. the boy and avo himself hovered over his sides, looking upon the butchery with approval. essus did not throw up. with all the parts taken from him, the act was no longer possible. he did, however, squeak. a soft whimper escaped from him as he faced the shadow of himself. artad why? why. +hes not here essus,+ avo said. he could have left it at that. he didnt. +its just me.+ sobering at the words, a series of palms slapping metal pulled essus attention. the survivors were pounding at the inside of their enclosure. they wanted to escape. to be freed. i i need to free them, essus said. a soft sob choked free from his throat. i dont need to kill i can save someone. finally. finally avo understood. he grunted. +yes. but grab the woundhound injector off the dead razorgirl. need it.+ what? why? and even through the thickness of the sealed blast doors closing off the space behind them, out from the titanium hive of a blockcrawler, the agonized screams of a certain degenerate traveled deep and true. something had indeed become unlatched. +chambers testicles are giving birth to aratnids. will need replacement.+ i see. Chapter 10-6 Gathering chapter 10-6 gathering +alright can someone explain to me just what the fuck why the fuck did we null our own? what the fuck is going on? how the fuck did you half-strands get fucking convex killed? how did we end up nulling each other?!+ -mirror-concave debriefing surviving members of incubi cell peregrine and dagger-2 10-6 gathering avo expected additional hassle to follow the extraction of the twenty survivors alongside essus. expected it, but found himself pleasantly mistaken. with the presence of the exorcists, conflux was forced to take a more qualitative approach to their operations, eschewing the gaze-attracting mass of quantity for the intimacy of quality survivors. behind the metal sheets of the ramshackle maze burst experienced gangers and two squires. they eyed essus'' chrome with wary respect, confused by his ramblings of freedom and artad. all of them had armed themselves with crude shivs crafted from glass and rusted shards of metal, and instead of being ignorant to the nature of things as most fateless upon first arrival, those standing within sight of avos cog-feed were seasoned to the ecosystem of the warrens. conflux desired a close and bloody affair to be harvested from their minds. as avo unlatched the few surveillance phantasmics installed in them before the syndicate necro went down, he found most of them were sold together from the omnitech-dominated district of theta-12 under the kzvinsgad sovereignty. checking the deepnav, they mustve come from eight hundred miles up. seemed topside smuggling was still operational with the exorcists choking down the gutters right now. entertainment found a way. after unsequencing any unnecessary memories from the twenty, avo had chambershalf-delirious from pain and blood lossburn a series of openings through the blocks layers leading up and out. he put a final measure in place against any straying eyes by seeding the memories of the local lobby with instances from various vicarities donated by chambers. it would make the crucible seem still in session for any straying eyes, long enough for none of this to matter once the day passed. +essus,+ avo said. +we need to+ his thought trailed off as he realized what the father yearned for. as the man groped behind for the holojectors protruding from his deltoids, the servos of his thick biceps were not flexible enough to afford his desired reach. he was a marionette trying to cut his own strings, but failing. the wings. he couldnt tear off his wings alone. every channel of his mind began to wail with the rawness of swelling trauma. the act of tearing the last vestige he had of the boy off his body would unmake his ego entirely; a self-mutilation too great to bear. yet, he couldnt just let them taunt him endlessly, let his sons presence haunt him like a shroudso too would he be eroded down to nothing. in both cases, it was a choice of self-destruction. the only difference if he should plunge the blade down deep or whittle himself down over time. +not yet,+ avo said. +stop.+ the man shuddered. he clenched his teeth and tried to flex strength into his will. failure greeted avo as whatever determination evaporated before it could settle upon the seat of lingering hurt. i need to i cannot face him cannot live with him over my shoulder +mind will break if you do it. not ready. kill mirrorhead first. then decide. boy deserves to be there for that too.+ and where strength failed, hate prevailed. the spreading softness of essus thoughtstuff calcified into a dome circuited with coursing loathing. mirrorhead. the one who inflicted so much on him, who destroyed so many for reasons petty and unfathomable. i dont want my son to see +your son doesnt see. he is gone. he is for them to see. he is behind you. they should know what his life cost.+ like a wick touched by the caress of flame, a new fire ignited in full within essus. he needed to kill mirrorhead. he needed to kill mirrorhead like one thirsting in the heat of a desert needed water. every second the guilder wasnt dead, essus suffered. i must ask you the father swallowed. to guide me i have not the sense anymore. i have not the sense. they departed through the opening made by the blockcrawler. walking through the gleam of a fusion-burned exit, essus watched as chambers tumbled out from the bottom hatch of the infiltration vehicle. the former enforcer came out yowling, thoughts raw with pure agony. pulped aratnids painted his fingers with a thick ichor, while his bodily disfigure swayed on dangling sinews. for all the trauma that boiled within essus, the sensation of surprise within him remained strong. you were not lying. +i dont lie. lyings inefficient. just change the memories. give him the woundhoud.+ after chambers ceased his whimpering about his castration, avo charted a new path in his mind and directed him after the fleeing survivors. they spat their thanks at the father, but moved quickly, each of them long scarred by a lifetime in these warrens, their faces hard and ashen as they passed him, basking in the neon glow of his wings. he took three trudging steps closer to avo. no one spoke and no sound followed besides the screaming of glitching servos. i must confess essus swallowed. the height between him and avo was near negligible now. both of them had changed in mind and sheathe, but where one was slaved and dimmed in spirit, the other was risen with hunger ascending. when we first met, i envied you for your height. my wife. she she often teased me about being so tall. i wonder what she would have said about you. his face darkened. im glad she did not survive the journey. im im glad essus choked. a sob broke from him as he collapsed, falling against avo as he slid down to his knees with a resounding crash. briefly firing his celerostylus, avo only calmed his reflexes when he realized the father was clinging to him in the form of a hug and meant no violence by it. tearlessly, the father sobbed, and avo stared, mind stunned with more than a note of philosophical horror rising in the corners of his awareness. a flash of sonder sparked inside him as the pain of the fathers thoughtstuff overflowed. this was not how the world was supposed to be. avo was made to eat people like the father, to serve as bandwidth and trauma dump for a phantasmal civilization bound between realities in perpetual exile. an instrument to be used against new vultun itself. a plague. yet, here he was: a monster comforting a man against the city as if he was the savior and the world around them was the horror. uncontrollably, avo grunted a low and deep laugh. how did things become like this? how did jaus vision of a future become this parody? what were they doing here? he felt kae moving then, her mind finally catching up to the scene unfolding before her. turning, he watched as she mimed for him to hug essus back. rantulas coat rustled and he found chambers motioning to do the same thing a second later, mirroring kae. there was also a questionable glint in the former enforcers eyes as he looked between avo and essus with a broad grin. whatever rash-courting filth the man was imagining, the less that was known about it the better. awkwardly, avo patted the father with his claws. the man was clasped and coated in layers of armor by this point, but the fragility he emanated made caution seem proper. can i have a hug too? chambers asked. "after him of course." he looked down and forced a quiver into his lip. avo glared. come close and i eat your eyes. fuck me, consang, a ''no'' would suffice. standing from her seat at the table, kae hummed. i-ill be willing togive give a hug. chambers spun and beamed. alright! i knew someone a squeak came from kae. she inched back and put her hands over her mouth in shock. ohoh, jaus! where where are youryour pants? and why uh why is there so much blood. the enforcer looked down and winced. i was ambushed by a fuckin aratnid. and he fixed avo with a side-eye. and whoever sold me back to conflux didnt include clothes. let this be stated: chambers is not a nudist. chambers likes clothes. chambers isnt trying to start the rash. and just as he said that another voice crackled in the back of avos mind. +avo. open gate forty-five. make it fast.+ draus voice told him all he needed to know. he sent the order and the george washington answered, redirecting the shadows to create a new tunnel as the previous doorway vanished and another appeared. as the pathway opened, a single figure shrouded in fire and ash came marching through, a new gun shouldered over her right side while dragging a corpse in using her left hand. draus incog was off and she was drenched in bloodnone of it smelling like hers. distrant rattles of gunfire and the sound of a structure collapsing in the smoke behind her told avo her little scouting run had not turned out quite as anticipated. as soon as she came through, she released her hold on the body and hissed: close it. now. avo obliged. she opened her mouth but found herself rendered speechless first at the sight of essus hugging and crying against avo, then kae covering her eyes, and then chambers trying his best to hide his nakedness using his coat. the fucks all this? draus asked. she looked avo and the kneeling chromer up and down. whatre you, tryin to start the rash? get em off you. the ghoul grunted. no risk. not intimate for either. just hurt for him. she shook her head. yeah, no, dont essus? she trailed off as she realized who it was. hells. you got him back. didnt get my cast? avo asked. draus shrugged and looked down at her kill. things were messy. i was gonna read your message after. with that said, she kicked the body of a scaarthian clasped in a warg-styled spinal exoskeleton over to the center of the room. right, now, it seems like stormtree wants in on this party too. Chapter 10-7 Fires in the Backdrop chapter 10-7 fires in the backdrop you dont need to be a sadomasochist to be a wargskin, but it sure as hell helps. ''cuz wargskins sure aint regulars. not even close. theyre like uh, snuffers, in a way, but they come expecting to hurt and die so that morale thing? yeah. doesnt really work the usual way with them. most of them are selected from one of the pit-cities in the skuldvast, which makes most of them scaarthians. in recent years, theyve opened their doors to suicidal bastards of other clades and creeds, but the overall make-up still applies. from there, they need to prove themselves by earning seven scars. the first is to walk the skuldvast for a fortnight unarmed and unequipped. the second is to tame a warg. the third is to live with the warg and to hunt its old pack down with it and kill them. the fourth is to complete ten kills of the human variety. the fifth is to submit oneself to torture at the hands of a longeye. the sixth is to survive. and the seventh is to ritually sacrifice and eat the warg you are bonded with in order to conjoin yourself to them. after that, you get assigned to a bloodthane, offered all the drugs, vicarities, guns, and woundhound injectors you want. not too bad a gig if you want to play at being destruction incarnate. all in all, theyre a bunch of fucking freaks. kill them. and shoot their bodies a couple more times for good measure. null the ghosts too. their minds usually arent good for much beyond serving as traumas. -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 10-7 fires in the backdrop the corpse draus brought back with her was mutilated beyond measure. tassels of flesh shorn free from biotheurgically enhanced limbs while intestines trailed out of a welling pit spewing an endless mess of crimson. no visible weapon implants could be seen, but along their back the spine of a warg was graftedthe skeletal shape of the animal''s skull weaved into the humans back through the melding of skin and fur. there was something of a metaphor about the design, a blur asking if the person was wearing the wolf, or if the wolf was taking over the man. as draus tossed the body upon the daisbouncing them off a throne in the processavo noticed they were using a limited exoskeleton of some sort. rod-like installations connected lattices of carbon nanotubes in a tight spread across their bodies and limbs. yet, it only cupped them from behind, exposing their chests to harm. a final peculiarity could be seen with the dozen open ports lined down the stretch of their back, the glint of metal shining like dots through the fur of the warg. wargskins, draus said. stormtrees favored dyin meat. a look of disdain passed through her expression as she regarded the remains. he didnt need the resonance of her metamind to notice the absence of respect. ran into a pack of em while makin my way around nu-scarrowbur. well. more like they ran into me. crashed my aero into one of their packs. wasnt the only one runnin an incog. not even close. that narrowed avos attention. he pushed essus back, and draus winced as she caught sight of the man. they would need to speak about him later. running her memories through phantoms for review offered a full depth of insight into the new problems they faced. her initial collision with a group of wargskins in a cheap stormtree gnome wing came without prelude. she was diving down to circle a block, trying to judge potential firing angles when they were coming up. she got lucky as she clipped them with one of her engines, sending herself spinning through the top floors of an empty scalper owned club. the ones she hit werent so lucky. they skidded off the side of the structure and ended up tail-spinning into a wave of oncoming traffic below. a mixed turn of events for certain: though it compromised draus position, it also revealed the scope of the supposed trap that lay in wait for conflux. the scalpers, as things turned out, were not missing. not at all. instead, they seemed to have fled within what looked to be an interconnected demiplane of some kind, emerging suddenly as entire blocks filled with their thoughtstuff. pulling the memory from draus, her surprise hitting the scalpers as hard as the aerovec hit the smoking dance floor. avo frowned as he had his metamind filter a count. through the sequence detailing her fighting retreat, approximately seven thousand unique accretion profiles were blinking back out into the real, with likely more on the way. scalpers suddenly just were, trajectories painting columns of red through strobing lights as draus made to extricate herself. worse, mixed in with the scalpers were forces of a higher quality. the aforementioned wargskins were on draus immediately. she exchanged fire with them through a few blocks, managing to kill or disable two packs. however, as she moved, more followed, and this time with the ones she failed to kill came woundhounds. they were not the worst of the problems. leaping out from the block as the wound-bearing hounds chased her, squeezing through gaps and crevices in solid matter, the top half of the block she was in imploded behind her with little rhyme or reason. the only hint of things to come was from a sudden compression of air. fortunately, she managed to hijack another aero mid-fall and use the chaos to reactivate her incog functions, passing through a series of specters rising high into the air as mobile spotlights carving through space, hunting for a target elusive to the conscious mind. a series of skirmishes took place thereafter. she had to abandon her new aero after a series of fragmentary anti-air missiles forced her into a dive that exposed her to a perception chokepoint at a low intersection. she ejected one of her ghosts containing a near-term memory into the locus as decoy before shooting her way out from her still moving vehicle, diving through the neon tentacles of a phantasmal kraken clinging to the top of a noodle shop. before it could even strike another surface, the vehicle she abandoned crumpled into a mangled ball of glass and metal, the air coiling like a slithering vice around it. her phys-sim screamed. lines of fire painted trajectories of orange and yellow through the air. leaping off the side of the noodle place, she dropped into an alleyway just as the first mag-flung needles came seeking her last known location. a shot slipped an inch away from her head. one rang off against her shoulder, inflicting a partial tear on her ligaments and sending her into a tumbleone that she caught the momentum of and turned back into a roll. a few more shots followed. plascrete burst apart next to her. screams sounded from inside walls as collateral damage joined the inevitable equation of an urban firefight. then, strangely, the shots became fewer and fewer. as she twisted down the winding gaps between buildings and across street-level quick-fabbed shanties, the distant wails of exorcists'' specters rose, then all suddenly fell quiet again. an anomalous brightness formed tendrils around all shapes bearing an edge, and a mind-shaking presence instilled a song of strain in the plasteel infrastructure. something was approaching. something powerful. the regular rolled her healing shoulder and flexed her hands. well. if it aint her, then we got another thing happenin on top of us. possible. but its gotta be real loud to recall or disrupt the exorcists and things have a habit of not really bein coincidences when youre involved somehow avo hissed. contact her soon. he considered the situation. not going to have long. exorcists gone. paladin too. nothing stopping an attack now. other than fear. paranoia. wont last. draus disagreed. dont think theyre rollin out to hit greatling. most of their shit seemed defensive from the glance i got at them. firing emplacements from buildings. anti-air. packs and troops stationed up and low, far and near? yeah. feels like a defense. think theyre hunkerin down. settin up an ambush. ambush, avo said. he collapsed the memory sequence and had the phantoms manifest as his deepnav interface instead. he narrowed his focus down on nu-scarrowbur and looked at the layout. layered and stacked with defensive ring-shaped blocks, most pathways in the district had a curve to them, with some parting and shifting unless you decided to take an overhead route. think theyre trying to grind conflux down? trap them within the district. could be, draus said. but we both know that aint gonna stop jhred from doin a runner. maybemaybe they can, kae said. a-avo. play play back those memories. the ones where when the aero was crushed. byby the wind. he did as he asked, rewinding the sequence back to the point where the wind wrung the aero out of shape like towel being twisted dry of water. a-again? kae said. her mien was that of intermittent focus. her thoughtstuff sputtered and burned as her exocortex screamed, thrumming at a higher energy intensity. something resonated in avo: he was beholding how the agnos was before her crippling. a character of obsession. and detail. it was still there, but only revealed in fractured instances. ii think thats a-askagimmard, kae said, pointing at the draus second aerovec being mangled by the wind. a heaven heaven of forces. another golem? avo asked. m-maybe but thats not i-important. i i worked on this. if if this is the stormtree build, then then maybe maybe they can trigger a backlash. a backlash in the hubris in the twice-walker. ive been been going through the elder mythos. and and the mem-data you p-puhprovided! there a hubris to the canon of of reflectionsat least, i think jhred has one of those. itit says that that if the structure he is connected to through his heaven is shattered while hes channeling his miracles through them it shouldit should cause have a risk of causing a spatial backlash! outright! maybe even a rupture! avo, draus, and chambers stared at kae. essus gaze remained fixed on the memories, his transplanted hands shaking as he watched the metal of the former aero lengthen and then compress. right, chambers said, face contorting with intensity. his ignorance was palpable, but something compelled him to join the conversation. fear. that was the next emotion avo sensed. the enforcer was afraid he would be considered useless now, so he was doing his utmost to discover a new dynamic for himself in this group, to ensure his survival. chambers was right to fear. avo had considered eating his eyes and harvesting his essence for a thaum. but that would come afterward. the mans mind presented unique properties he wished to study. properties he considered testing against the phantamsal conflagration afflicting kae. avo had theories he wished to test, and someone unnaturally resilient but ultimately expendable was just what he needed so, draus said, massaging her nose-bridge. youre sayin that they might-gotta option to keep mirrorhead in place? kae shrugged. a shyness fell over her when she was pressed. the flash of who she was faded. she was lost in her thoughts again. uncertain. uncertain to what was asked. then back to just being uncertain as she remembered again. they they might know his canons. but i dont know. this the mem-data came from inside his mind. jhreadhe he definitely made modifications. im not done parsing everything but but hes hes a sphere three. high sphere three i think. but only information on one heaven. one hell. one cycler. hes a tower. no sea to his design at all. which means backlash is death for him, avo said. he understood. he stared at kae for a moment, trying to remember how walton reacted after he managed a success in his memories. true or not, the emotion remained real. awkwardly, he tried smiling at her and nodding. the effect was less than pleasing. kae paled at his widening fangs. chambers took a step to the side, doing his best to remain about of avos view. a laugh rasped free from draus. you tryin to smile there, rotlick? theres somethin between your lips. he stopped trying to be walton and went back to glowering at draus instead. flicking a look and kae, he muttered: good job. at least that made her eyes light up with appreciation. her nose had a habit of wrinkling when she was happy. and then it was gone. forgotten. so, avo said, we have stormtree in nu-scarrowbur waiting to ambush mirrorhead. have ori-thaum incubi trying to help him assassinate one of their own. we have us planning his death; in his mind. and we have his sister. who is coming to take him in. wow, chambers said, fuckin... who doesnt want the boss dead? the sister. real-death, anyway. resurrections were probably fair game. dont forget zein, draus said. she looked up, hinting who she suspected to have lured away the exorcists. shes in this too. the column with her. jaus. a beat passed. shit. you think shes got somethin to do with how fucked everything is? and as if her words had invoked something dreaded, avo felt the nether shake as if a nuclear warhead had been detonated underwater. his phantoms twitched and shivered, splashed by motes of foreign memories stinging their echoing static with flashes of shattered memories. more and more, broken shards of memory fell like a rain of shrapnel, spearing down from on high. and from the initial hail followed a deluge of broken ghosts carried on tumbling waves of screaming thoughtstuff. avo, draus breathed, her wards alight at full capacity, you feel that? yeah, avo said. you think thats yes, avo said. he wasnt sure. he had no proof, but something in him knewjust knew. three hundred thousand. that was the number to beat. zein. the growl escaped him. what the hells did she just do? Chapter 10-8 The "Distraction" chapter 10-8 the "distraction" +what the hells? central, im seeing what looks like a coil of dragons eating into itself. think we got a no-dragon problem on our hands. were casting specters to+ [010 - error metamind wavelength lost] -last thoughtcast of chief exorcist nivina kisjie (along with all two thousand members of the 1st descent) 10-8 the distraction the immensity of the damage revealed itself with tides of fragmenting ghosts tumbling further into the warrens like clumps from a collapsing ice shelf. reaching his mind through a gateway, avo watched in muted awe as his metamind tried to estimate just how many mind-deaths it took to simulate the appearance of a phantasmal blizzard laced with fragmented shards of memory. he remembered what mass nullings looked like after dives gone wrong, but this had a more familiar touch to it, the damage subversive and overwhelming. a recollection returned to him. a moment distant by days. he remembered how the minds of all those in ox-three had shattered beneath the whims of the low masters, how their damage seemed clean and absolute, reducing the cognitive shells holding the pneuma of countless consciousnesses to shrapnel and powder. there was a semblance here. a similarity in the damage. but the scale was beyond measure even by an exponential measure. a sea of mind-stripped thoughtstuff continued to tumble deep into the warrens, and its waters flowed undistilled, bearing the homogeneity of a single prime emotion: terror. avo. draus was talking to him. he didnt respondhis thoughts were too halted to respond. avo. what the hells is goin on out there. i dont his voice trailed off. a blastwave tore through the nether then, its force catching all in its wake as it scythed down from the tiers to the gutters. the weight of a warhead swatted all ghosts aside, cleaving a gouge between the flowing tides of the nether. avos mind rattled as the thought-quelling avalanche slammed his ghosts back into the sheath of his own mind. in the back of his head, something cracked. a piercing howl came from somewhere. his perception fissured as his metamind spewed error codes. equilibrium drained out from his hearing and gravity tore him from his feet. he fell for but a second before he felt an impossibly strong limb halt his descent. through the spots forming in his eyes, avo felt his hearing pop in and out as his ghosts swirled behind the protections of his wards, behind his thoughtstuff. lines of mem-data danced across his eyes but pulsing spots impeded his literacy. blinking, he found himself held up by draus. her thoughtstuff had been shorn clean from her metamind, but still, she responded, action coming before thought. the ghosts chained to his perception twitched across his vision. the nexus brightened and then dimmed. the line of mem-data rebooted. thoughtwave detonation detected yeah, draus said, grunting a subtle wince of discomfort, no shit. stabilizing himself using his echoheads, avo took a step back and felt dizziness scythe through his shivering skull. he kept his tendrils embedded thereafter to prevent another fall. essus was moaning, crying out as he pawed along the ground, gripping the ankle of a stunned-looking chambers who somehow managed to keep himself standing. of all present, only kae seemed untouched. more than untouched: for that instant, her mind was no longer afire, and even through the distortions of his visual display, he could see the flesh of her inner mind, the sequences mapping the constellation of her memories slowly building to a glimmering whole again like molten metal poured down a network of channels. eyes wide, she stared at him, a lucidity filling her eyes. the disbelieving twitch of a smile pulled at her expression. avo i can remember why an expulsion of flaming exhaust plumed free, rippling from the center of her again. the jet of memory-rending tore a squeal of pain from her as she gripped her skull. he moved but draus reached the agnos first, catching her before she could collapse. in moments, a low moan slipped free from the diminutive woman. gone again g-one i was i could think! itit was clear! but but the softness of her sobbing reminded avo of a child too shy to cry openly, but too hurt to resist the pain. a shuffle came beside him. both chambers and essus were slowly emerging from their thought-rending stupor as well. the former fathers glowing eyes cut about the room, looking for where the sobs were coming from. even with the nether sundered, the turbulent seas leaving avo exiled upon the island of his own mind, he knew what the man was seeking. the boy. the sound of kae crying reminded him something of the boy. avo didnt need a metamind to taste the pain twisting wrinkles of anguish into what skin remained on essus face. fractured flashes of vicarious memory spilled over into his metaminds interface. he remembered holding a toddler up by her arms as she kicked, the flower fields of a place called mars rising in verdant stretch behind her. he remembered a flash of something bursting in the distance, a news-feed reporting on the rebellion of the colonies at alpha centauri. more moments came, but what little cohesiveness they had disintegrated. finally, however, a pulse of ghost-fractured green splashed over his perception. along the walls formed two gray-hued doors blanketed in static. it seemed the low masters'' aesthetic choices had been affected as well. as the darkness swirled outward in a tube-like whirlpool, noise screamed down the funnel. the first thing he beheld was a triangular aero smearing into wreckage and flames as it spun out of control, colliding sidelong against a distant megablock, error codes shimmering in the space once occupied by long stretches of holo-ads. the outside winds brought tidings of chaos. voices and engines were joined in a unified scream as chaos and confusion enveloped the districts. no one was prepared for the disruption. echoing sounds followed the impacts of countless aeros, the song of their demises akin to the endless percussion of artillery heard during the war, heard in draus palace. most of all, it was the emptiness that stood out to avo. the nether was a second layer to reality itself, but in its absence, the filter of the world around faded, and gone was the semi-ethereal tint that lined the world, gone were the highlights and ghosts forming the backbone of information and communication. only accretions remained. accretions, and a thick film of falling ash speckling down like snow. all who dwelled inside the nexus gathered before the opening and stared out into the city beyond. a gust of wind swept in a haze of grey, but avo took hold of the air itself and cast the ash back out. standing at the forefront of their group, draus took a few steps into the tunnel and gazed out. jaus. aint too keen on findin out what that crazy old half-strand did to cause this. not even sure its her, avo said. despite all of zeins oddities, there was still the touch of the clandestine about her, like she was used to living large while avoiding the gaze of the guilds. this was not something that could be ignored. he felt it. he saw the damage. you couldnt get that many broken pieces and unraveling ghosts without nulling a mass number of minds. and with it happening at least in the topmost and most occupied portions of the warrensor even the tiers themselves? no. his little act of lacing a locus provoked an exorcist sweep and a paladin investigation. this, however, was magnitudes more severe. he needed to see it. the extent of the damage. and just what was still operational. more importantly, he needed to see the condition around the conflux megablock. mirrorhead wasnt about to give up on his revenge, but everything was different now. without the presence of exorcists and paladins, the guilders options opened up, but he was crippled communicatively and blind beyond what senses he possessed. the golems stored in his demiplane would also be effectively useless without a proper pilot, and the drones wouldnt be of use until the nether reknit itself. on avos end, he was severed from accessing his subverted memories remotely. not even his session would work now. but they were still there, and in time, they would return. the question was if he had enough time and if mirrorhead was content to delay. ultimately, though, he knew the answer to that. abrel greatling had given jhred a deadline, and now, this moment could be a blessing in disguise. everything was in chaos. hells. they didnt even know what the ambassadors condition was. going out, avo said. need to see extent of damage. see situation. going to ascend. take a look. draus. open the tunnel again in ten minutes. still taking commands. only ghosts are choked offget close. she fixed the locus with a wary look and flicked her eyes back to him. how about i head out and no, avo said. not ideal. no working aero. cant judge nether either. i have galeslither. can get up high. get overview. check conflux and nu-scarrowbur. review options. draus looked like she wanted to argue, but her eyes slid away from him and she turned to look at kae. kae and essus. understandably, she didnt much care about chambers, who was standing off to the side, mimicking essus expression while trying not to draw too much attention himself. wont go after him alone, avo said. dont worry about that. just for intelligence. detail. understanding the situation. getting lay of the chaos. a beat passed. and see if you can get kae stable. need to talk with her about mirrorheads heaven once i get back. alright, draus said. ten minutes. dont be late. avo grunted. worst case is a delay. contact you when nether comes back. he tried to get his metamind to give him an estimate of the disruptions duration, but the number kept jumping between five minutes and fifty-two hours. useless. in this environment, he wouldnt even be able to cast out his whisper and scout ahead. the limitation was neutering. and there wasnt anything he could do about it. it wasnt like he could replicate or maybe he could perhaps it was time to see what happened when he made his woundshaper mimic the matter pattern of a locus. Chapter 10-9 Consolation chapter 10-9 consolation +thousandhand! thousandhand! treacherous leech! traitorous sow! return what is ours! give us back our helix! give us back our thrones! give us back our frame! give us back our future!+ -thoughtcast from [redacted via official guild censor-edict] moments before thoughtwave suppression 10-9 consolation the locus pattern was a brittle thing of oscillating patterns. the softness inherent to the material surprised avo when he first caressed it with a tendril of blood. peeling the metal free from a crashed aero, he found it smoldering a mere sixty feet away from his point of egress. while studying the locus, he dug out a scoop of flesh from the mangled remains of the pilot and what tasted like their family. the was a likeness in their flavor, even charred. peckishness sated by his snack, he liquefied the wreckage and drew it into his mass, casting branches of tendrils out from his wrist to better cocoon the locus. he heard rumbles of distant impacts and smelled the scent of his brethren scampering two hundred feet away. a soft snarl tore from his throat. he felt as if reduced, somehow; reduced to the nature of a baseline ghoul. netherblind, he focused on his other senses. sending out a call using his echoheads, a static portrait of the warrens slid into his senses and whispered to him rumors of destruction. aeros were still falling. he frowned at that. most vehicles had their own locus. by all means, the memories and phantasmics stored within the ghosts should still function on their own, even severed from the public nether. as he drew the locus into the vicinity of his metaminds halo, he formed a tactile link and interfaced with its systems. mem-data booted and revealed twisted sequences and warped memories at a glance. his ward quivered lightly as he identified over a dozen mem-cons festering even in shallow waters. a clearer theory formed in his mind. the aeros were likely subverted before the thoughtwave detonation. perhaps the detonation was a direct response to the crashing aerosa mass mem-con attack made to overwhelm a district or even a sovereignty. the prime question remained: why? scrying through the locus, he heightened his reflexes and worked through its interior sequences, siphoning out cleansed ghosts no longer afflicted by whatever thought-plagues usurped its functions. ghosts: [441] in the end, he was only able to restore a quarter of the active ghosts within the locus. no matter. he would take this opportunity to find others and study their condition as well. for now, all he truly needed was the structure of the locus itself. strands unfurled from the blood cocoon fused around the mind-imitating crystal. through the air, they stung into the fragility of the locus exterior without difficulty, each drinking away at the thaumaturgic patterns comprising the object''s matter. within the grasp of his heaven, he felt the locus unravel. he hadnt yet invoked his canon of memory to capture the structure of the locus in perpetuity as he had with tungsten, but that was in due time. for now, a test was due. it was time to see if he could channel multiple patterns of matter at once. drawing more pieces of stray rubble and punching his haemokinetic reach into even the plascrete beneath his feet, he began to siphon matter into blood, his senses accelerating, the world slowing. more, however, was an expanse of emptiness that called to his metamind, a phantasmal gravity pulling at his thoughtstuff, his ghosts. the rivers of blood flowing out from his body now pulled him apart at the seams. less and less did he feel the pilot to a sangeist. more, his very being was being woven into the heights of the woundshaperthe form of an old god remolded to his will, now alight with an ethereal shroud. where once his blood merely gleamed like a lustrous metal, a new quality layered into his towering design as the smoothness of his ichor took on crystalline facets of loci, studding the borders of his manifested crimson with faint edges. with but a thought, he infused the structure of his own ontology with a ghost, linking with the flowing mass that was his blood. the transfer between his metamind and locus-channeling blood was near instantaneous. a phantasmal sheen sheathed spills of running crimson. it worked. the sensation of binding his mind to what amounted to his skin, or a multi-functional limb, was uncanny. it was like feeding additional awareness from ones mind into their own hand. as he integrated his metamind into his heaven more fully, he found himself capable of shifting the central center of his thoughts. fascinatingly, the halo once rippling out atop his mind now expanded its broadcasted wavelengths over the jaws of his spire, just above where the caged patterns burned. avos mind went blank. domain of air hubris: attempting to draw and shape hyper-heated air will result in thaumic backlash rend capacity [woundshaper]: 38% rend capacity [galeslither]: 13% right. yes. mach speeds had a tendency to heat the air up. he needed to slow down before he got too fast. keep a reasonable pace for now. he checked his phys-sim and slowed his propellers, keeping himself under mach two. the ascent that followed was an awkward one. as it turned out, when one barely knew how the forces of lift and flight worked, not even relying on a mental physics simulator could supplant necessary knowledge. more than once he needed to shift back over into his galeslither as an emergency, flattening his velocity down to nothingness to avoid losing control. his travel stuttered in such increments while he shot out from the hexagonal rifts of layer one. it was when he finally rose into the spine of the warrens that he first caught sight of what mightve caused the subversion of the aeros. as the strands of his woundshaper brushed over a stretch of space formerly occupied by a traffic lane, an aerovec came sailing down toward him, its presence only revealed as it entered the periphery of his outer-lattice constructs. spreading his crimson brambles wide, and helped by the slowness of the vehicle itself, he examined its form and found it to be in the shape of an automated delivery platform a type akin to the one that shuttled chambers and the techs back over conflux headquarters. he cleaved the aero-transport open with a tendril and started the process of its deconstruction, faintly aware of the trajectories left by other aeros passing nearby. it was odd how he could see further than he could sense in the nether. usually, it was the opposite way around. nonetheless, as he dissolved the matter of the aero before it could knock him off course, he injected a tendril into its locus and found himself greeted with the same mem-cons again. only, the ones in this vehicle were more intact, and the meme-data listed the last mind the sequences interfaced with. the traffic loci. the aeros were subverted passing through traffic. turning his gaze upward, more flying shapes fell like a shower of alloyed stars. yet, it did not end in one way. beyond the flickering phase gate lining the portals forming the mouths of layer two, coruscating flames spewed free of falling wrecks as they trailed smoke down through holographic tides of flowing errors painting the phantasmal skies above the spine. it wasnt just limited to the spine. it went up the warrens. and if the throat was compromised, then lights end likely was as well. ghosts: [561] taking the opportunity to collect ghosts in the chaos, he drank in what he could clean from the locus and boiled the rest hollow with a trauma-pattern from his ghostjack. turning to the galeslither, he caught and hunted more aerovecs, trapping them in his yondergales to better gather desired resources. time snapped back to baseline but he still managed to net himself six aeros. similar points of subversion lingered within each one. attacking the traffic system was a viable strategy, but it was loud. avo remained unsure what the intent behind such a tactic was, only that the thoughtwave detonation was increasingly looking like an appropriate response. ghosts: [1032] checking his time again, he found himself near the five-minute mark. halting in place, he turned to gaze upon the districts nearby. far fewer crashed aeros littered the streets than he expected, but a slow suspicion rose within him. checking the mem-data he claimed from the mem-cons, he studied the behavior patterns of the vehicles around him and came to a realization. they werent being ordered to crash, they were being repossessed for use as makeshift anti-air missiles, to knock other aeros out of the sky. more and more, he felt this might be a case of mem-con spillover. like someone leaving a point of subversion active after they finished their dive. somehow, such incompetence didnt seem like zeins work, though the scope hinted at immense nether influence as well. [warn-123n-erro!!] his cog-feed crackled. then, a distant flash called to his attention. the winds shifting, he angled his galeslither to see what was blinking at him from the periphery. there, enshrouding the armored blocks of nu-scarrowbur, he saw the faintness of a being looking at him from beneath the threshold of light. graced with twelve arms and a tri-hued star for a skull, he noticed the other entity for but a fleeting instant before it faded back into the light, going from a being towering over megablocks to being nowhere at all. a moment of silence passed. something turned in avos gut. the sensation of a drop took him. instinctively, he shifted back into his woundshaper just as a javelin sculpted from strings of shivering radiance lanced at him from out of nowhere. Chapter 10-10 Blood Upon Starlit Strings chapter 10-10 blood upon starlit strings tig, you uh you seeing this? what? the galeslither swallowing all those aeros? yeah. yeah, i see it. shit. cant tell if its one of ours with the nether all fucked. yep. yep-yep. its also moving methodically. piloted. last cast i got from our necros said something about weird sequences in the traffic lobbies. something off about the mem-data sourced from the junction managing loci. and that galeslithers just plucking aeros out and flying fine. yep. agh. fuck it. cut the thing out of the sky. you serious? yeah. it isnt ours. it might be greatlings. might be someone elses. but seeing as the nethers down and the districts are blind, whos to say anything about who did what. better safe than snuffed. got your assignment, breaker. cut it down. synced on that, reva. just let me find my tune -conversation between reva javvers and tigertail, bloodthanes of stormtree 10-10 blood upon starlit strings a spear of blistering light rang loud against the thick of avos blood just as he manifested his woundshaper, their collision a melodious twang. sound and starlight fractured out at the point of collision, each crack a strand shivering bright, all tautly coiled like vast strings bound to an instrument unseen. with time lurching to a halt, avo struck back. constructs exploded out from him in rivers of rushing crimson. a clash followed. the metaphysics of asymmetrical domains warred, and force met force as a construct of light and sound fell against blood and matter. lumenlyrist, melodist of the cleaving dawn against the outer layer of his vessel the world burned; the air ignited around in a blossom of flames. yet, he found the force lacking and too limited in direction. a whip spilled free from avo and curved up, splitting the manifestation of light through its beam-like shaft. pockets of sound burst from his whips velocity alone. the javelin that struck him stilled and shattered into a spray of fading notes, breaking before the construct bearing greater force. the light and heat splashing against him faded, but the strings around him only grew. radiant wires spewed out like parasitic worms into the real, penetrating the tapestry of existence from every emanation of noise. alarm spiked within avo as the chords of brightness formed even within microfractures beneath his sloshing blood. each string brought the whine of a new sound made low and droning by his accelerated perception. he was facing a heaven. be it connected to a golem or godclad he couldnt say, but the image of the strange entity vanishing over the blocks of nu-scarrowbur came back to him. if that was the eldritch being from where the light sang, then he saw no sign of the machinery of a golem afterward. more importantly, the golem would have needed to remain disconnected from traffic to avoid the deleterious mem-cons plaguing the sovereignty. more and more, he suspected another of his like. worse, he knew nothing of their true capabilities, and such left him in hostile waters. he needed to break from this encounter. re-engage on his terms, and avoid being swallowed by an ambush. good thing they seemed just as surprised as he was. a pause followed as no assault followed. the strings of light around him, however, began to bend. time to leave. he flew blindly afterward, avoiding pockets of heat and flowing fast upon undulating scythes of displaced air. when he managed to pull away far enough that he could feel the threat of heat triggering his hubris no longer, stitched himself back into existence from a swirling vortex, settling upon the eaves of above an unfinished g-tube station. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 83% rend capacity [galeslither]: 42% there, in the distance, the portrait of his escape called out to him. debris and ash continued to spew free from the disembowelment he inflicted, with structures built on the edge of layer one coming free like intestinal ropes of plascrete instead of flesh. his initial penetration had left a critical weakness along the lip of the hexagonal threshold, and the light-infused detonation that followed denuded entire panes of silicon that once served as a backdrop to the simulated skies. the buildings he impacted were still groaning, enormous rents looking as if a bladed hurricane had torn and shredded its way through the district while a supernova followed in its wake. more pressingly, however, avo found his attention pulled back by a vast arc of droning obsidian rumbling itself into existence, a construct of unlight sewn into being by reversing notes and transparent strands. string by string, the colorless markings inched below the flesh of existence and formed into a knot of snakes. in the end, a vast trail of darkness licked an indelible wound upon the world as screams and the loudness of collapsing buildings suddenly went silent. a hive-like veil shivered over the arching pathway the blackness took from beyond layer one all the way to where avo discarded his blood husk. attentively, he studied the actions of his unseen foe, and considered the miracles displayed by the heaven he faced. if did originate with the sun-headed titan at nu-scarrowbur, then its reach was long. perhaps not in the sense of mirrorhead and his reflections, but for this lumenlyrist to detonate manifestations of eldritch radiance from miles placed avo at a severe ranged disadvantage. it seemed capable of tracing his movements with sound, but more than that, it could strum a chorus of falling explosions on strings of snapping light, which then cycled the process anew through the volume generated. what he was not certain of was if the explosions were an automatic process, or if the user on the other end was aware of his position, their heaven operating in the fashion of his echoheads. seeing this stroke of sound-swallowing darknessthe hell to the heaven, he assumedreaching after the last known position of his woundshaper, it was better to err with caution: he would assume a broadening awareness on the part of their heaven for now. but not that broad. he had managed to break from the engagement, after all, shifting back into his galeslither after he found a spot cool enough. furthermore, they didn;t know he was here, studying the effects of their powers, watching the hell slowly return to transparency. comparatively, his woundshaper imbued himself with an excess of speedthough the noise he made was like a perpetually running fuse of dynamiteeven if it did fizzle out at the end. he withstood the initial block-erasing blasts well enough, though it hollowed him of some mass. still, it would be wise of him to avoid direct confrontation. which didnt seem to offer much endurance, but the damage was still close to that delivered by a mini-nuke. after a few moments more of deliberation, avo descended the station by venting woundshapers rend through it, carving a pathway in and out the interior of the stop shearing away another section to the tubes. after dissolving much of the architecture, he flicked a look at his timer and winced. one minute and fifty-one seconds. it would be close. he considered his excursion to be a half-success at best, but at least he had some idea of the severity of the situation. he needed to think. and potentially build nether-redundant ghost circuits into the egi core. for now, he could interface with it via alchemized matter. exercising caution, he kept to the galeslither and galloped hard for the gateway. winds squealed as he gushed through the alleyways and reconstituted himself in his mortal form. twelve seconds. he needed to think. he needed to consider his approach. no movement was coming from conflux, but from this recent skirmish, conflux had a less than zero odds of surviving an engagement with the forces currently arrayed in nu-scarrowbur. more and more, mirrorheads death was writ in a substance deeper than fate itself; the divine hands of his adversaries conspired and worked, crafting a future in which they were the ones to use up his, and amongst these groping forces was avo himself, bumping into foes unseen. before him, the shadows of the alley spiraled inward as a tunnel formed. as the doors flung open at the end, the first thing that greeted him was the flash of a chrome barrel. draus took it offl his person the moment she recognized him. so, draus shouted, gesturing for him to enter quickly. hows the lay of the chaos lookin. bright, avo grunted. he doubled his pace with help from his echoheads. loud. at least one other godclad on the scene. stormtree mostly likely. hit me miles away from nu-scarrowbur. more problems. mem-cons in the traffic lanes draus placed a hand on his shoulder. before you go in zein flickered into existence between the two of them. she was barely at draus nose and didnt even reach avos lower chest, yet she pushed them apart with contempt and ease. she strode past them looking uncharacteristically upset. come. we have much to discuss. regular, bring the agnos. tell her it is fine if she cries, so long as she continues to be of use. avo, i wish to stab and kill you at least three times. vent one of your hells if you have not already. my annoyance is great with you. avo blinked. draus did a double-take as thousandhand shouldered past both of them. the fuck did she come from. the better question was probably from when she arrived. cease your gawking. especially you, little dagger. you have no right to act the fool for your sins. draus shot avo a look. he made his echoheads shrug on his behalf. my sins? avo asked. he followed zein into the nexus. what sins? i was thinking this was all your fault. that this was part of your distraction. she stopped. then, she was right in front of him, index finger placed upon his chest as spoke up at him with narrowed eyes behind her transparent visor. perform this service of recollection for me, little dagger. did you, perchance, possibly, tell the hungers and the demented collection of personality flaws constituting your parental alternates that ninth column sends their regards? oh. that. Chapter 10-11 Pivot chapter 10-11 pivot so. did you get them? iuh dont know, reva. ...you dont know. well, it sure as shit wasnt a golem. no wreck, and it drew my symphonies all the way down into the gutters. instead of a cooked galeslither rupturing, theres a big sangeist-looking clump of blood down there and a whole lot of collateral. it was channeling some kind of glassy-looking material too. no idea what it is. huh. ill see if i can find an injury down there. take a peek at the scene. might be a carry-on for the galeslither. might be. might be. yep. think theres another clad in play? i think we might not be fully aware of what greatlings still got in his sheath. i say we get root and ullens together and seize the moment. hey, your uncle had that uh those tech-relics, right? ones from that omnitech dealer? the little uh radios? might let us stay synced while the nether unfucks itself. oh. yeah. those. pain in the ass to work, really. they dont listen to your thoughts. what? then how the fuck do you get them to do things. [sighs] well, there''s this dial, or something -conversation between reva javvers and tigertail, bloodthanes of stormtree 10-11 pivot in avos defense, he hadnt known zein at the time. the words he spat were a deliberate attempt to direct the low masters toward another unknown variable that had been troubling him. that was still troubling him. aside from zein herself, ninth column remained shrouded in shadow and mystery. thus, their inscrutability appealed to him as a distraction to invokeone hidden leviathan to draw away another. he simply hadnt expected his former masters to be so brazen. it, zein began, gesticulating in the air, her fingers reaching for something lost to touch but present in her memory, was going to be a masterwork. i had infiltrated all the necessary systems, killed all the unnecessary people, pierced all manner of defenses, and stood poised to deliver the final drip to my cocktail of chaos then she blinked behind each of the thrones, her fists and feet exploding into violence as nano-armored skin clanged against the ancient chairs. within a fraction of a second, she snapped back across time to stand before avo, her transition as if a rubberband releasing all its built-up energy. the embarrassing excuse of a tumor attacked me. it attacked me, little dagger. it attacked me before i could deliver the blow. her breath took on a demented quality, words a near snarl on her tongue. do you know what it is like? to feel the moment closeso close! and then a giant knot of autophagic idiocy comes tearing through my well-laid plans? avo did in fact know how she felt. but much like a flechette long loosed from its rails, zein wasnt going to stop for something as small as empathy. the fisher snapped free from her being, rising into reality on its hook. again, the forking paths of the future twisted out from her, but this time, lines trained below her as well, like spreading veins descending below the air in reflection to the branches above. her finger twitched and countless moments of pasts could have been coalesced, rushing through all who were gathered. knowledge of zeins operations suddenly just was. through her eyes, avo recalled a massacre of increments, skimming across the surface of time and conducting murder after murder. within a day she had danced across three highflame majority-owned districts in the undercroft; lowest of the tiers. asginstrad, telamander, and akkata of the seranando sovereignty exploded into infighting and violence. through a vicarious glimpse from zeins perspective, her slaughter was brutal, but methodicalconducted with focus and intent. unlike how avo laced the nether lobby down in the gutters, zein preferred her atrocities to be of flesh-on-flesh, blood-on-blood. by disinterest or deficiency in capability, she used her metamind only as a shield and never as a blade, choosing instead to turn the districts against each other in the oldest fashion she could recall. she sighed. do not insult your fathers people. most systems were already turned by them. it was only the corruption that was dormant. it was only after they started using highflame golems to burn me from the world that the local mind-priestsagh, necrosnoticed them. highflame knows? avo asked. knows about the low masters surviving? the hungers? they know that someone crippled three districts, took control of twelve-thousand golems, burning and nulling everything in their path for reasons unknown. she put her hands up in a shrug. it will take time for them to put the pieces togetherif they ever do. all the necros who noticed died, you see. sudden nullings. zein put her lips together. in the end, it seems that i was not the one to beat your efforts. a pity. no words for the countless lives that mustve died in the crossfire. no consideration of the damages caused. zein, like all the other godclads, was driven by personal interest alone. it occurred to avo that he was likely only alive due to the inclinations of her personal character, and that he didnt know how the rest of ninth column felt about this mess. and now i fear this might bring the chivalrics and meritocrats closer together. zein sighed. the longer the former remains, the weaker highflame becomes. we cannot have them lose the war yet, avowe cannot. the other two cannot hold the stalemate without them. you need something from the guilds remaining stable, avo said. why you''re keeping the stalemate. that much is obvious is it for the tower? an anticipatory expression came over her face. she didnt finish the sentence. a strange sensation twisted inside avo. the feeling that she was provoking him in some unseen way, coaxing him down a path of development favorable to her. a growing disquiet filled him. the weight of paranoia descended in full. how could he be the master of his own future when zein likely saw this conversation coming, and shifted the tracks of their dialogue at her own leisure? what worth was there in having individual will if the opposition was guiding you on an unseen leash made by strands of fate parted across mutations of time? yet, before apprehension managed to ascend into dread, avo found himself looking at kae. zein seemed to have a hard time predicting the actions of the agnos. and her plot was undone by the low masters, they way she spoke of them like they were unseen factors. there was a limit to her heaven. there must be a limit to her heaven. if not, why was she here, fighting in the shadows, playing the role of a spider instead of a warrior. he needed to find the borders of zeins reach. build things beyond it. he would not be a victim of her machinations. he had grown too much, and come too far to let his choices be compromised. yes, the woundshaper whispered. you see the face of the enemy now. finally. zein? everything that we are not is an enemy. every vector that we do not control can turn against us. the tapestry is all, but all except our corner offers refuge to adversaries, past and to be. which is why you must root me deeper avo muted his woundshaper. ironically, it was the heavens own words that made him silence it. it, too, was trying to compromise him, its recent words driving him toward granting it more power, expanding its might and letting it experience the swell of godhood even if it was to be vicarious. he needed a way to think. to consider everything uninfluenced by all the feedback around him. again, he felt the draw of reqs memory, and though the nether blocked his mem-lock, avo ran it through his metamind. a vicarious experience. something rarely felt, a moment he would never experience on his own. the need suddenly revealed itself to avo. he needed to gaze inward at himself. he needed to bask in his own totality. when he was compromised within and without, he needed another angle to view himself. new angles away that might be untainted by zein, by other beings warped by self-interest. avo had his echoheads chitter. the shapes of different bodies splashed into his senses as a static field formed in his mind. around the table were draus, zein, and kae. apart from them in the corner of the roombut still listeningwas chambers. only essus stood away in the dark, uninterested in talk of schemes and chaos, choosing to stare out into the dark instead. there was something there in the father. kae. and maybe chambers. something he could use to better view himself. to avoid subversion. you have taken the qualities of a locus in your blood, yes? zein asked, wrenching his focus back. this is good. very good. this amplification of your capabilities will serve you quite well for what is to come. and what is to come? draus asked pointedly. she shared a look with avo. they had their plans for the future. new angles to pivot. zein being here changed that dynamic. oh, do not start growling at me like ive come to take your precious retribution away, zein said, shaking her head at them. rejoice: we will still be working toward the death of jhred greatling. it''s just that i need a little more out of him now. more than even before. and hows that? avo asked. and the playfulness bled out from zeins face. words are treacherous things, little dagger. it always scared me how the simple things we say can destroy so many futures. she paused. this moment of atrocity. it will be a communal thing for highflame. a unifying wound between both factions for how they all seem to have suffered. this cannot be allowed. the chivalrics must be broken. house greatling must shatter. and ambassador valhu, tragically, now must die. Chapter 10-12 The Foreseen and Unexpected chapter 10-12 the foreseen and unexpected higher greatling, the authority cant be contacted right now, so our orders still stand. right now, our target is at risk and abrel. we know why were here. the bullshits for the authorities. were your cadre. just say the word. thanks, zenna. sure. maybe dont disembowel me next time we spar? ill think about it. -abrel greatling to zenna elderich, instruments of highflame 10-12 the foreseen and unexpected jaus, the ambassador? draus muttered, everyone wants the poor half-strand snuffed. mirrorhead. his own people. now you. zein opened her mouth to speak but paused. ... ori-thaum? they wish valhu dead as well? truly? ran into some incubi, avo said. what? zein said. suddenly, she snapped over next to avo. she was looking up at him, a hand braced against the table. incubi you faced the incubi? and they wanted valhu dead as well? a screen of flowing ichor spilled out from avo, its crimson sheen aglow with dancing phantoms playing past memories. brief flashes from his engagement against the incubi played within a blood-made theater, and as the flashing traumas clashing against wards lit zeins blank expression, he found himself pleased. another matter she seemed ignorant of. another blindspot perhaps. did her control over foresight only cover things she was aware of? or directly related to her? this should not be, zein finally said. she sounded more curious than surprised. kitzuhada was meant to deepen their peace with stormtree. if there are elements within the oris glaives or orders from the mirrors, then something has changed within ori-thaum itself. the five annals should be in accord with his proposals. something twisting the fabric of its leadership. she clicked her tongue as she pondered the implications. this will prove to be interesting." a sharp cackle escaped from her. my people never change. avo looked to draus but the regular seemed as lost as he. ori-political shit? draus asked. quite so, zein said, letting out an amused breath. a path most unlikely has come to take prominence. just as the chivalrics had humiliated highflame in the last war, ori-thaum had their own mirrors and elders losing favor within the diet. the electoral body cast many aside after the war, many from families and lines of great prominence. the old blood runs thick in the ori and the kosgans. for all our differences, it is the fault we share: the delusions of entrenched gerontocracy. draus snorted, understanding filling her face like she was imbibing fetid water. thats all it is, aint it? shiftin power and desperate ploys to hold on. the singers change, but the music stays the same. zein offered an apologetic glance. i pity you, girl. the regular sneered. and hows that? you did not get the war you deserved. the fight you deserved. no? zein gestured to avo. she didnt need words to hint at what she meant. alas. we suffer the path we stumble upon and not the one we dream of. she turned to regard avo again and offered him a begrudging nod. you broke some of the mind-priests. this is good. this is a feat of arms. bear it well, but do not be drunk on it. build upon it, and soon skill will become mastery. leave it zein to do a segue toward complimenting someones combative prowess in the middle of scheming and plotting. mustering her heaven again, countless threads of time reeled around her in a spiraling staircase. zein briefly flickered in and out of existence, her being like a dying lightbulb from an old voidwatch movie. countless futures came rushing like a tide, but the chaos of everything happening at the intersection that was zein made events impossible to parse. the moment ended as soon as it began, but now zein was standing next to kae. the agnos did not respond immediately. for a long moment, she just stared at the place where zein was, unsure if she had simply forgotten the old woman walking away or if thousandhand had used her heaven. agnos kusande, zein began. kae jumped this time, but draus was next to her, glaring down at the godclad. walk over like a normal half-strand, draus drawled. she steadied kae as the agnos looked around. strangely, avo found her eyes drifting more toward him. or perhaps not so strange. he was the only other godclad here, after all. aint no need for that. im skipping past the pointlessness, zein said, brushing aside the regulars annoyance. she placed a surprisingly gentle hand on kaes right shoulder as if challenging draus to a battle of interpersonal influence. agnos kusande. we will need the details of jhred greatlings heaven and hell. avo. come over. it is time you learned to make prey of your own kind. she paused and laughed. again. looking up warily at zein, kae did not seem reassured when the older woman offered her a flat, unassuming expression. i promise you, kae. you are the last person i kill in the room in certain futures. in most, i dont kill you at all. there is no testament in such an actno pleasure. she flicked her eyes up at draus and licked her lips when she studied avo. and surprisingly, chambers. any time you want it, thousandhand, draus said, words spat out between near-clenched teeth. avo guided his blood out in a weave around them, subtle reaching brambles over to draus while directing other flows to circle behind zein. the nether was down, but not for him. maybe thousandhand could see the future. but if he bent the environment sufficiently to his advantage, maybe the paths of time would be pruned. domain of (glass) canon: hyalofication - the master of this canon can turn solid matter into glass; only 500 tons of glass can be turned at once canon: hyalokinesis - the master of this canon can manipulate all glass at up to a two-thousand feet range and move up to five-hundred tons of glass hubris: if the glass-matter controlled by the master is unmade while they are still influencing, it will trigger thaumic backlash domain of (reflection) canon: symmetrization - the master of this canon can overlap the ontological nature of two physical objects and force them to mirror the shape and condition of the other with each change inflicted hubris: should either physical object be destroyed in conflicting ways (i.e. one shattered from ice while the other is melted) at the same time, it will trigger thaumic backlash hell - [third circle] - twice-walker ->domain: (reflection/space) ->thaumic requirements: 414 thaum/c canon: diffusion singularium - the master of this domain expels and commands all light touched by their own ontology to scoop out pieces of space and concentrate it into a single point in reality, whereupon its plane will collapse and expand rapidly in an explosion of displaced spatial reality daemon: should non-solid matter be drawn in and reshaped by the light, the singularium will burst apart and birth an anathema of reflection to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved they all spent a moment reviewing the details then. the mem-data avo had was clouded in mythological interpretations and other details regarding supposed lore-based feats. yet, from that, kae was able to compile a series of comprehensible domains, canons, and hubrises to review. the first thing that occurred to him was mirrorhead''s ontological build. the guilder mightve been of the fourth sphere, but he only had a single cycler, with two ontologic slots. why? no second cycler? avo asked. y-yes, kae said, frowning. this is an extreme case. it-it seems that that jhred greatling is very much a tower. she paused and winced. too much a t-tower. this this is terrible. w-what what is this? who uh, allowed this? the agnos was actually fuming, despite the revelation of mirrorheads vulnerability. on some level, avo understood. the conflux necros were incompetent and thus were more soft meat to occupy his teeth rather than true adversaries to test his mettle. it made his dive easier, but seeing their failings offended him on a philosophical level. it''s a merit thing, draus said. them guilder kids need to test for their heavens. frames. earn enough merits and you got an inventory to pick from. the fact he only has one cycler though? that tracks for if youre backline or if you havent managed to graduate yet. looks like jhred here ran off before he was finished with his education. a hum of surprise came from chambers. so the boss did so bad at fancy clad-school that he graduated with half the god-bits? he wrinkled his nose. well. i guess hes a bit like us after all. zein grunted a laugh at that. she blinked behind chambers, putting her hands on the former enforcers shoulders. chambers. you survived. she looked to avo. good job. having the ultimate half-strand will come useful down many of the paths. chambers went board-stiff as thousandhand petted him like he was a nu-dog. iuh the man swallowed. i never told anyone not yet, zein said. but you like to talk. and you are so very fragile. there are times you tell much thingssuch truthsthat everything inside you comes out, and your mind shatters because the perfect disharmony protecting you collapses. those are the worst futures. the way you scream is no different than the noise you made as a child when your father pressed the barrel of his gun under your armpit. the color fled from chambers face. his mind went dull as a storm of spiking dread and mounting shame filled him. reflexively, the enforcer swallowed and placed a palm over his mouth, covering his face as if a shy child. inside, a spring of horror lurched repeatedly. well. uh. i mean, weve all been juvs once, right? he laughed. the note of his amusement wasnt very convincing. zein humored him anyway. true. very true. stay yourself, chambers. you suit the city quite well. she patted him again, but this time her palm graced his cheek. afterward, she shot essus a brief look and did a double-take. she pointed at the former father and looked toward avo. bring him with you too. there is promise in one of the paths. if essus cared for zeins prophecy, he didnt show it. she blinked back over to avo. studying him momentarily, her eyes swiveled as she thought, considering the next steps. the paths have changed again. little dagger. i would to trade with you a favor. an act for an act. memories for memories. suspicion battled interest within avo. zein was manipulating himmanipulating everyone present. of that, there was no doubt. but she also had knowledge far beyond his, the reach of her perception a thing of purest envy. if he could use her heaven with his necrojacking, there would be no ward he couldnt spoof, no mind he couldnt crack. he shot draus and look and she bowed her head. he offered her support before. now she was waiting for him to respond. whats the trade? what do you want. a vicious grin marred zeins face. and suddenly, avo wasnt sure if he was making a mistake or not. the same thing as you. the greatling boy dead. but i need to give ambassador kitzuhada something first. and you need an opening to distract the bloodthanes in the district across, no? she knew about the bloodthanes. or could know. that would be indispensable. it would give him better odds of staying alive, anyway. what memory? avo asked. sequences from the incubi. one with the details about the ambassador. and after that, i need you to do something to jhred greatling Chapter 10-13 Desired Paths chapter 10-13 desired paths shepherd-alpha, this is sunrise. the people down here need immediate assistance. the golems are still active and hostile. local highflame forces managed to overload two knots, but the rest are stillve active and now there''s a rupture in the middle of the district. thermodynamics isnt working right here. anything that exceeds thirty degrees celsius is slowly being petrified from the inside by a silicon-based endoskeleton. whoever managed to compromise the nether is still at large. recommend deployment of all non-sapient assets to assist paladins pending arrivalwait, the golems i see a knot. it looks like theyre trying to hunt for something or someone im sending the rest of my swarm after them. will follow as long as feasible and certify potential godclad presence in exclusion zones. narrowing comm-gauge wormholes for discretion. -sunrise,aegis operative,voidwatch 10-13 desired paths the fate zein wished mirrorhead to suffer was one of delicious degradation. she ejected a mixed sequence of memories and offered them to avo. at first, he wasnt sure what she wanted of him, but as scenes played and a grander image formed in a transparent interface within his metamind, he understood. she was installing mirrorhead in place of herself as the patsy responsible for the devastation she wrought in the besieged highflame districts. in fact, jhred greatling was to be made patsy before all related parties. to the chivalrics, it would seem he was deliberately provoking a war against the meritocrats. for the meritocrats, such actions would look a deliberately planned operation toward subterfugeone conducted using incubi backing at that. connected to the deception were the sequences she wanted from the plot to assassinate ambassador kitzuhada. though he wasnt certain about how she was to manipulate the ambassador, an incubi cell was almost certainly going to be compromised in the aftermath. though avo was ignorant of the vastness of the board on which zein played her games of divination and prophecy, he had been a necro long enough to see a con-job in the making before him. and on the fly at that. again, he found himself envious of her powers over time, still wondering about its gaps. omniscience remained beyond her with her surprise at the low masters and the incubi, but with her new awareness, it seemed that time was once against re-railed upon new tracks which she could predict. his involvement, avo asked, still scanning through the mem-data. how direct do you want it to seem? have memories from his benefactor. another incubus. pretended to be stormtree asset. zein considered his question. her fingers fell in a clattering series against the hilt of her umbrella. direct. first-degree. but leave some information from this benefactor as well. it will be amusing to make it seem like they helped him commit these actions. another falsehood for the ori to bury, unsure if it was of their own design or someone else. avo grunted a low laugh. that was the problem with operating in isolated cells: paranoia within the ranks. even necros on good terms didnt trust each other much. you never knew when one of your consangs sold out and got recruited into the incubi or just ended up subverted. the same was probably true between the mirrors and elders. when you base your factional ethos on deception and lies, the blade cut both ways, and it would take more than a little effort for the fog to be cleared. still going to kill the ambassador? avo asked. seems like youre making another change. yes, zein said, not even bothering to hide her capricious shift in arrangements. for the better, i think. valhu is a good glaive. a good warrior. a noble man. i would have regretted wasting him on an unjust fate to trigger the reactions i desire. unjust. good warrior. a noble man. zein had a diet as well, and her favored prey trended away from those she regarded as worthy. how strange it was that one of the few remaining legends of the ori held such a highflame philosophy toward life. veylis had to get it from somewhere, he supposed. take all of them with you. they will all prove useful as circumstances develop. all except her. zein gestured toward kae. the agnos winced and looked away. something about the intensity of thousandhands attention disquieted her. the agnos will be important for what comes next. her mind should take the next ladder of priority after jhred greatlings removal from the paths. we will need what she knows of project godshaper for what is to come. zeins expression softened thereafter. she offered kae an apologetic glance. i would offer much-required recollections in your stead if i could clean them from the paths, but it is more than memory and a whole mind that will be needed from you. the agnosi themselves are compromised and must be righted. steel yourself. you will not like what is to come. spinning on her heel twice, zein first tilted to glance at draus, then turned to study avo. she repeated this action two more times as if trying to decide on a path to take, and then finally reappeared next to the ghoul after momentarily slipping out of visible existence. i will need whatever else remains of the incubis sequences. afterward, open the tunnel from whence you came. i will need to survey the situation. a pause took hold over avo. the mem-data swirled within his metamind, the anchors to the nether boiling within his thoughts and veins. checking the sequences again, he removed artifacts he thought capable of revealing his hand in this endeavor and packaged that which remained into three ghosts. time around them lurched again. but no further attacks came from zein. she held out a halting hand and gestured for him to wait. i cleaved into you for guard-captain draus, mostly. i quite like that girl, so be sure to stay in her vicinity. we will have great need of her for the tasks to come. worry not. as long as you can reach her within twelve hours'' time, my echoes will still function near your cadre. avo relaxed his reflexes but continued drawing in mass to build up his woundshaper again. his blood swelled to ten tons. fifteen rend capacity [woundshaper]: 6% dont worry, zein said. i will return you shortly. she paused. i peeked at your new stormtree friends. they are formidable. skilled. they will not be confused by my actions for long after they resurrect. take mirrorhead quickly. kill or deceive your way through confluxit does not matter. however, you must implicate mirrorhead in the attack on the districts. feed the lies into the soil of his mind and see his ghost procured after death. the tension between them was collapsing. zein had not desired a fight, but she was trying to use him in some fashion. like an instrument. a tool. avo had half a want to reject her outright, to spurn her and whatever her demands for snatching control from him. her following words shattered the hold of his ire. afterward, i need you to ensure the death of captain draus near his corpse. a beat passed. the blood within comprising avos being surged like a bladed maelstrom of roiling waves stirring around the base of a tower. zein could leap across time, but the nether was still his. he just needed to touch her. parting his constructed blades into a thousand piercing tendrils, he sought to overload her paths. he reformed his mortal form at the center of the blood. no. draus lives. i wont snuff her. you wont snuff her. no one snuffs her. zeins eyes widened momentarily and slowly, her face flattened into annoyance. you misunderstand, little dagger: i do not wish for her to be butchered and slaughtered like some manner of cattle. no. she is wasted here. and she has spent enough time as a mortal, dont you think? and suddenly, the angle that zein was working toward hit him. she wasnt planning draus death toward base purpose, but elevation. apotheosis. you want her to be godclad. first her, zein said. and ensure that she receives the components of jhred greatlings frame. it will serve us well in the coming paths. and to give you an entryway into highflame. his mind spun again. faintly, he could only guess at the future zein was trying to engender, but he saw bones of its architecture flash behind his eyes. you you want to frame mirrorhead. trap him as patsy. but have draus stop him. draus to reveal the plot. draus to take the credit and reascend to the meritocrats as avenger. as a warrior redeemed, zein explained, eyes closed, fingers plucking at a flash of paths as another series of district-quaking blasts roared from far above. worthy, in a word. he paused, studying her. why? what not just tell her then? ask her? the elder godclad sighed. because she refuses and resists her rightful ascent in every path but a few. and in those, only you can keep her fixed to the righteous trail. this is why you pulled me away? avo asked. to tell me this without provoking a response from her. alter the futures. zein said nothing, which said enough. it seemed she was simulating futures with known qualities, producing the most likely outcomes. but if that was true, then how was she jumping forward across time with such accuracy? the other two, avo asked. are they going to be used as well? have plans for them too? the admission adorning zeins face was plain. again, she spoke no words. and again, explosions sang out. a flood of soot and debris was pilling out from the fractured opening of layer one he left in his wake while fleeing the bloodthanes. best that i leave you to the course. avo reached out, a tendril of blood spearing out for zein. existence shuddered around him. he was standing next to draus again, back in the nexus. behind him, the tunnel was still open, and it looked as if he had only been gone for mere moments rather than the minutes he spent with zein. zein, who was also suspiciously missing. the hells just happened? draus asked, looking around. whered she go? and the fuck did she do to you? just then, a voice sounded next to his ear, reverberating as if a message spoken from the past to the future. do not dally, little dagger. the bloodthanes will not stay dead forever. you have an hour. an hour to take conflux. an hour to bind and devour mirrorhead. an hour. seize the moment. claim your prey. Chapter 10-14 A Cage of Thoughts (I) chapter 10-14 a cage of thoughts (i) zein. what the fuck is wrong with you? are you trying to expose us to the guilds? hm. oh. yes, cas. what woes do you wish to bleat to me about today? listen: i understand you find human life to be nothing more than a joke, but firmament is considering burning the column. the numbers are still rolling intwenty-four million dead. five times that number nulled. what the hells calm yourself, boy. the firmament threatens, but they are toothless all the same. besides, i did nothing. point fingers at the hungers and their slaves if you wish to direct your ire. besides, our voider allies will quite like what i have planned. ...what the hells have you done now? 0v3l.b11n. oh. just created an opening for us to seize highflame from the inside. [disbelieving laugh] holy shit. i mean holy shit. all this effort. all this time and thats what youve been planning? youre scheming to one-up your daughter in a pissing competition over old slights. im scheming to ensure the stabilization of the saintists and thereby the entire situation on idheim. the feud between me and veylis is but a bonus. oh, but that girl needs to learn how to run her house better. her father will be so very disappointedah. youre glaring hatefully at me again. is this because my lack of fucking empathy. yeah. did you hear the part when i mentioned over a hundred and twenty million people snuffed and nulled? because your pet rotlick just had to if this makes your mettle quiver then i suggest you steel yourself, child, for before the desired reality can come to fruition, pillars must break and the fuel that is death must flow. -cas eldcanduir and zein thousandhand, ninth column 10-14 a cage of thoughts (i) we have an hour, avo said, springing into motion. instinct propelled him even before his mind had a chance to settle. zein is distracting the bloodthanes. think shes bombing nu-scarrowbur. need to take this chance. mirrorheads cut off from the nether. ignorant. vulnerable. he paused thereafter, taking in the confused faces and blinking eyes. too fast. zein''s little trick had left him with whiplash. more fascinatingly, he could sense a faint volumetric quiver outlining the forms of draus, essus, and chambers. thousandhand slashed at him with her sword over twenty times. whatever that did, it connected them, and would keep them protected. somehow. he swallowed a growl. dealing with the old woman was like trying to chase a nu-cat: the resultant chaos was always on her terms. he needed to start thinking about how to change that. draus. need to talk with you first. need to talk. and then plan attack after. her uncertainty shone through her stare. this about whatever thousandhand just did? hard to tell whats not about thousandhand. avo paused. he shot a look at essus and found the father wavering, his eyes scanning about, lost with regard to the situation. yeah. that was an appropriate response to zein. but this is about you. she wants something from you now. not even sure if i should tell youif me telling you is one of her schemes. spit straight, draus said. she turned and leaned against the table, cocking her head up to meet him face-to-face. what i do might kill me, but what i dont know can kill me anyway without earnin my death straight-up. draus was a pure creature of simple wants. perhaps this did fall into zeins machinations, but it was better that the regular knew. that way, she could at least possess some choice with regard to her own thoughts. zein wants you made a clad. the regulars right eye twitched slightly. her lip curled for an instant. that it? wants you to claim mirrorheads frame. make you seem like the one to snuff him for good. ingratiate you back with the meritocrats. i think. use you as an entryway back into highflame. a troubled look clouded her expression as she listened to his words. draus went still. deathly still. her heart, however, accelerated, its beats slow rather than sparse. that all she showed you? yes. he paused, thinking on his next words. didnt infuse the paths into me this time. but i think she wants to use you. blame everything on mirrorhead to bring down his father. drive the chivalrics against each other. and make you a hero. highflame worthy. settle their issues before they even begin. draus nodded. "yeah." she ran her tongue along the sides of her cheek. yeah. that oughta do it. scoops and medias will eat that shit up. meritos too, but theyll do anything to stomp the chivs by this point. her face darkened. godsdamned maybe santanado was one of zeins? maybe she planned this all along, had him in place to be the big hero and nows just pivoting because im what shes got on hand. avo didnt know, and he hated it. zein was playing and looking down from a scope beyond his. that was what he hated most about her: how she left him grasping at shadows, wary of being strung along, in fear of being leashed to her whims. dont know if me telling you is part of her plan, avo said. took me out. no reason to do it. unless she could use me to influence you. plant the seeds in your head. he studied her. mightve suceeded. her face twisted into one of disgust and exhaustion. avo. remember what i told you when you offered to burn a frame into me? remembered it made you angry. she let out a sharp breath. you asked me about limbo. yeah. right. i admit it. this is limbo. but i was perfectly fine snuffin half-strands and dyin right and proper in these here warrens. no need for greater hope. no need for a way back to honor. me and the golds? were never gonna be whole again. curiousity spurred his next words. loathe as he was to admit it, part of him did desire such an outcome for draus as well. her ascension would increase her capabilities exponentially, and allow her to apply her skills on a far greater level. it would also alleviate what he thought might be lonesomeness. he was still figuring that one out. what were you going to do? after we killed mirrorhead? sending more than a few gargoyles scattering from his path, avo regarded the time in his cog-feed and kept things quick. they still had over fifty minutes to pierce and secure the conflux megablock thereafter. things werent ideal, but that went for everyone else as well, and much of his subversive architecture remained. the greatest task ahead was to disable and defeat mirrorhead without exposing themselves. if they let the guilder escape, there was no telling if they would ever see him again, and if their vengeance would ever be granted a proper end. this was why he kept the blockcrawler with him. and chambers. they could get back into the megablock through the mem-con contaminated area. despite the nether being down, proximal infection from cognitive or memetic vectors still remained a danger. at least to your standard enforcer. for avo, it presented an opportunity to utilize the new properties imbued in his heaven. but that was a thing for later. twisting around the back alley of the second fortune, he pulled the blockcrawler out from his yondergales and deposited it just before the rearmost doors. two bioforms approached, grafted guns and chambered spores extending from their shoulders. reforging his mortal body from the surrounding winds, avo didnt break stride as he fired his celerostylus and threaded two tendrils of blood out from his wrist. as the locus channeled within his ichor struck the bedrock that was their minds, he drove his ghosts through their thoughtstuff and blended their near-term memories into a slurry of madness. leaving them clutching their heads and moaning with incoherence, avo extended his whisper along a scouting thread of blood. a dozen accretions flashed behind the door, approaching him at a steady pace. these ones were better warded than the bioforms. guests. he cut his reflexes for now. time resumed. behind him, kae emerged from below the blockcrawler an interesting greenish complexion, slightly ill from the turbulent trip. skittering back over to her using his echoheads, he caught her before she could fall just as draus emerged right after. shit, consang, draus muttered. gotta work on your flyin. flyings fine, avo snapped. he shot essusstill clinging to the sides of the blockcrawlera look. dont let chambers leave. kill him if he tries. the father grimaced, but nodded. avo wondered if the man could actually commit uncoerced murder, but he also doubted that chambers was brave enough to make a run for it. entering the establishment, the halls and rooms were packed to the brim with people. most looked to be local lights enders with some imps to burn and a cheap place to use them, but there was a not-insubstantial presence of possible street squires as well, hard eyes scanning the crowd. avo let draus lead, slinking behind and playing the role of ignorant bioform as he closed the plates around his head. it wouldnt do to leave an impression here and now. draus? a voice called out. avo turned. bright-wealth squeezed along a dozen or so holocoated figures packed near the front entrance of the establishment. she slithered over to them, seeming both surprised but also wary. i thought you all left? green river said we need a favor, draus said, putting a hand on kaes shoulders and thrusting her towards the snake woman. she needs a place to stay for a couple a days. nice place. tell river that if she does this were more than square, that ill make it up to her after. bright-wealth froze. the suddenness of the request threw her off, but this wasnt the first time draus gifted her with an assignment. i see. and will you be returning for her afterward? kae turned, swallowing as she stared at the regular and the ghoul. well do our damndest. best anyone can. bright-wealth bowed her head slightly, understanding. smuggling a glance over at avo, she slithered past him whispering, ai, yao-guai. all this your fault? you trip some kind of wire in the nether and bring everything down? he glared at her. why was she she drifted right along his ear. green river might have some information about our mutual problem. find a time to speak with her once you finish whatever the fuck youre doing right now. he grunted in affirmation. hows the ma jiang? terrible. losing all the time. she looped back around and gestured for kae to follow her. i-i, the agnos began. well come get you after it all gets done, draus reassured. avos got some ideas about how to fix that mind of yours. right, avo? still watching the shadows in the room, he offered kae a slow but sure nod. swallowing, the agnos took a step away and followed after bright-wealth. alright, draus said, shrugging her shoulders as if trying to shed tension of her own, lets go get this run done. turning back, they made for the rear entrance again, but mid-step, avo found himself momentarily stunned. there, behind the front desk alongside another sang girl stood a girl he once bought a steamed bun for. lucille. they had stripped the mods from her skin, returning her flesh to a more amber tone. she helped arrange a folder of papers then, and emerged from behind the counter to walk across the crowded room. draus noticed her too by this point, halting momentarily to watch the one they saved walk past them. a distant call went up from the other room, the voice pitched high with more than a hint of histrionics. lucille, hearing the dreadful bleating of her name, threw back her head. and laughed. im coming. im coming! youre going to scare the guests. muttering her apologies, she slipped past two holocoat-shrouded bodies and disappeared from their sight. draus let out a breath. nice work. yeah, avo said. with honesty, he was surprised as well. he expected more than a little lingering trauma. a longer road to recovery, regardless. but here she was. still surviving. more than surviving. she was alive. walton would have been proud. come on, draus said. lets get gone. we got a massacre to start. Chapter 10-15 A Cage of Thoughts (II) chapter 10-15 a cage of thoughts (ii) a godclad rooted in the domain of the material may find themselves at a disadvantage against a rival imbued with a heaven of space or geometries. however, the spectrum of this struggle is vast, and with hubrises known and vulnerabilities uncovered, a demiplane can be made with but the weakest of sparks. domains must be measured against domain. knowledge of enemy canons and hubrises too must be accounted for. to this end, the ultimate factor in a clash between the ascended falls to a single word. totality. despite all your miracles both absolute and relative, that which will be your undoing are the factors beyond you, the parts of the tapestry you cannot warp, that you are not anchored to. burn this into your mind, aspirants: build your frames wisely. when you seek your agnosi, understand your role, your purpose in your cadre. do not wander from your place of dominance in foolish pursuits or you shall be cut down like the swaths of ephemerals fated to die in the wake of your struggles. tower or sea; be you breaker, fortress, seer, porter, or marker, you will live and die by your ability to shape the battlefield, to control and force your adversaries down narrower and narrower paths until you funnel them into the place of their unmaking. claim mastery over the breadth of domainsensure that someone can affect space, shatter and shape matter, guard your minds, and above all foresee portents to all coming dangers. should you understand the tenets of this new age of warfare, you will see yourselves survive long enough to indulge in the finer aspects of immortality. you may think yourselves godclads upon graduation. such would be a delusion. never forget that divinity is seized, that we are clasped in the corpses of our tyrants. you are godclads only after you survive. if you survive, perhaps in time, you will come to understand what it truly means to engage in total domain warfare. -authority osjon thousand, total domain warfare 10-15 a cage of thoughts (ii) so, chambers said, masking his nervousness with a cough. i guess ah guess were gonna have to go back, huh? gonna use those quarantine zones as cover. get in real sneaky-like? avo fixed the former enforcer with a silent stare. chambers heart rate was spiking. his fear was as obvious as his attempt to endear himself. the man was walled in by death and had no way out. no way out but forward. in this, his life wasnt so unlike the survivors he used to fetch for mirrorhead. it was only by good fortune and the oddities of his mind avo deigned keep him alive. chambers edged back to essus, studying the view. the latter held his head low and his heartbeat hammered loudthe organ enhanced but fundamentally the same. essus was not a warrior. he had no taste for the bloodshed, but for the memory of his son, there was spark enough in him to muster at least one last fight. they stood at the precipice of the district, gathered atop the outermost warehouse in the docks to better survey their situation. at the head of the group, draus studied their target: the conflux megablock. set between them a blood simulacrum channeled the quivering shape of the structures interior, lattices of crystalline blood following the mem-data most helpfully provided from the sequences avo extracted during his prior dive. overhead, rivers of error code marred empty aerolanes hollowed of traffic while distant impacts and screaming engines hinted at the devastation still afflicting the warrens a thick fog blanketed the spine, choking the world about them as a chill beset the scene. there was an unnaturalness to the colda touch of the eldritch about its presence. and through the haze of translucence, in the direction of nu-scarrowbur, lights flashed as noises droned, with a sense that all around the area had been muted under the presence of an unseen weight. i say we start low and work our way up, draus said, pointing to where a deep rent ran along the lower southeast side of the structure. following the schematics simulated by the phantoms dwelling in avos blood lattice, she lined a path through mem-con-infested areas into the elevator and central power grid running as four interconnected pillars within the edifice. we got the blockcrawler and we got you. she pointed to avo. got a good idea on how we might be able to clear this place floor by floor if need be, but the big game is still mirrorhead. the nethers down, that means conflux has gotta start feedin fightin meat into what few golems and pilotable drones they got. threat low, avo said. will be able to jack into them at will. he wove a crimson helix from his wrist and bade it to spin. the nether was still down with no signs of recovery yet. the sheer force of the earlier detonation would leave the phantasmal sea blunted for at least a day, but this inconvenience was to his advantage. enemy golems could be penetrated and bent to his will with but a thread of blood now. he just needed to locate their locus while keeping a low profile. there are also other ways in, essus suggested. he acted as a shadow to the others, lingering behind while chambers exaggerated his helpfulness. the gutters should still have places for access. and the tunnels too. he paused, taking in a breath. we could even start in the lobby beneath. where where i was set to perform. essus too wanted to be of some use, but the man mistook his position. avo simply wanted to feed off him. to vicariously feel the culmination of vengeance when the father performed an act of righteous bloodshed in the name of his boy. avo would ensure it, so both pleasure and virtue could be sated in tandem. sent avo a look. yeah. i dont think thats necessary. gesturing to the interior of the block, she continued. im thinkin, avo, that if your heaven works the way i think it does, you might-oughta be able to eat through the walls and spread your awareness like roots. this way, we establish alpha-strike advantage: light up their accretions without ever riskin exposin ourselves; engage when we want. most importantly, we use em to help us pinpoint jhred and move to engage him first. he understood what she was trying to convey and found it a most appealing prospect. drawing enough mass from the matter within the block, he could thread himself across multiple floors and snake his way through entire groups of unsuspecting confluxers, tearing from them essence, ghosts, and memories all. yes. we can do that. want to do that. draus chuckled. figured you might. pulling her eyes from the simulation, she glared out at the towering presence of the megablock enshadowed by passing wind. their breaths were beginning to fog the air now. the cold was growing fast. he wondered if it was zeins doing as well, somehow, or yet another player entering the fray. we should go, avo said, stretching his awareness using his galeslither, trying to read hidden dangers from the undulation of wind currents. think we''re ready. think we can take them. do this. compromised their minds. theyre blind. wont see us coming. draus grunted a laugh. +is that how you member things now?+ the amusement left her. linked to his whisper, she studied the area around the room as the blockcrawler kept pushing for the elevator. +place looks like a storage room of some kind. weird. they definitely got plenty of other places to stash the corpses. this dont seem+ +efficient?+ avo asked. the vector of his curiosity returned to their nakedness as he frowned. slaughtering a group of people was one thing, but stripping them had to hold some deliberate intent behind it. regarding the sole living enforcer he could see, avo decided that there was little point in playing this game of deduction when he could just tear the information out from the source. guiding a single strand of blood between the bodies, avo directed his flow in the fashion of a snake, surging forth as they turned to pick up another body. titanium sabatons parted before avos touch, matter melting away into blood as his hair-thin haemokinetic construct injected itself through the fabric of their undersuit beneath. needling his way into their bloodstream, he took her as a puppet, usurping her circulatory system and forcing stillness into her movements. a choke crackled from her vocal modulator, her muscles struggling against a force far greater that rooted her from within. she tried to scream but he squeezed. her ribs imploded. one of her lungs popped. a loud wheezing gurgle whistled loose from her shuddering body. her legs kicked. her fingers twitched. he cut his way up into her brain, jacking into her mind directly. he wasted no time with spoofing, choosing instead to crack her pitiful wards with a low-yield trauma and sink his ghosts into her memories. dread and violation spilled over from three directions. the enforcer in his clutches, essus, and chambers were all bound by a singular emotion, and it was absolute terror at his current actions, seeing first-hand his capabilities. draus, meanwhile, remained indifferent. the reg had seen worse. +avo avo, this this is not you cant+ the fathers mind stuttered to a grinding stop. +have you been inside my mind? have you?+ avo ignored him and dug through his new victim''s sequences. he grunted in annoyance as he refrained from drawing in more mass and firing his celerostylus. he was already feeling some time-dilation prying his blood-locus network. he wondered if he could accelerate draus or the others the same way his canon of haemokinesis multiplied his speed. suppose he could test that using the enforcer when he was done with her mind. filtering for the nearest sequence relating to the bodies she was removing, avo pulled half an hour''s worth of mem-data from her near-term memories. as things turned out, when the nether went down and the confluxers realized it, some of them tried to make a run for it, snatching the opportunity to leave their employer before he could realize. some of them had already been planning this operation for quite some time. using manually operated engineering drones, a group of around two hundred technicians and enforcers began precision-burning the cortex bombs still embedded in their skulls. spurred by one groups attempt at emancipation, a dozen other cliques formed and made to break. of course, an avalanche didnt form without noise, and with the growing quantities of people trying to flee, mirrorhead noticed, even without the nether. the butchery that followed left a lull of nothing but static and terror in her mind. entire portions of the megablock and whatever glass the confluxers had on them exploded into a storm of vitrifying shrapnel as the twice-walker manifested, diving through reflections and yanking the defectors into its plane. mirrorheads initial assault was near indiscriminate, seeking to break the wills of all who dared run, with the loyalists offered as acceptable collateral. the enforcers last recollection was only running, fleeing, and obeying the bellowing shout of the syndicate boss. parts were outright seared out from her mind. parts like the emergence of the twice-walker itself, the naked presence of a heaven entirely too much stress for her mind to bear. draus snarled in disgust as he filtered the information over. +well, would you look at that: hes about as good as his ma when it comes to killin his own.+ avo grunted with amusement. +seems like.+ examining the enforcer a moment longer, he pulled out the last time she saw mirrorhead. he spoke to heralong with the bulk of his forcesfrom a floating shard of glass in the mall brawl. it was like viewing him through a portal, or window of some kind. he sat there, seething and raging at captured deserters and loyalists alike, raging about their task in fits, barely coherent. she recalled little of the godclads words, only that she was scared. only that she was part of a group tasked to strip the dead he left behind in the real, collecting their valuables and other possessions before dumping them into a single area floor by floor. pluh-pluhughhh, she moaned, trying to speak the word please. she wanted to beg for her life. unfortunate. but it seemed she was bound to feed the whims of one godclad or another. subsuming more matter, avo felt his might and celerity build. a time-made lag formed between him and the rest of his cell as he drove the enforcer he held in clutches forth, pulling her into the room. thaumic output - 983 thaum/c ghosts: [1042] her death was a sudden, messy thing. her body, not attuned like her blood was to his touch, and divorced from the frame itself, denuded itself around the anchoring of his haemokineses. her armor groaned as servos sparked and screeched, breaking free at her joints. avo released some of his mass and let time slow. frowning, he withdrew the strand of blood he had nested inside her and let her fall atop the rest of the bodies, her falling bulk sending out a splash of gore and a burst of darting glass. +so,+ draus said. +mirrorheads hidin in his little hole again, huh?+ +seems so,+ avo mulled. going over her mem-data again, he felt a feral smile pull at his face. +draus. what say you to a trap? could indulge in some friendly fire to draw him out. pull him into a cage of our making.+ +id say youre thinkin what im thinkin.+ Chapter 10-16 Interrupted Deception chapter 10-16 interrupted deception do you have any idea how close you came to dying now, girl? do you? when i say zero-burn, i mean go zero-burn! zero-fucking-burn! y-yes, instrument [echo of a slap; a yelp] no. not yes, instructor. stupid. stupid fucking half-strand. you wanna know why you arent dead? because it cant find you at zero-burn. because that thing that you made? that was an anathema of anchoring. a daemon. trying to pocket it with your heaven wont do anything because it is the literal antithesis of your heavenof your fuckin being! did you pay any godsdamned attention to anything i was trying to teach you? did any of you? [silence] what? are you all mute now? did you? [chorus of negatives; mondelles sighs] class dismissed. this is going on your merits. all your merits. her for this mistake. the rest of you for failing to adhere to protocol. assist your allies. dont just stand there and gawk. osjane. ... yes, instrument? im sorry i hit you. my control over my temper... slipped. it was unbecoming. include that in your report too while waiting for the daemon to rupture. small failings go next to the big ones. my merits need to be docked as well. dont forget. i yes, instrument mondelles. blessed be the worthy. blessed be the worthy. class dismissed. learn from her, do not mock her. i saw how the rest of you were performing. she just made the mistake first. see that the rest of you dont do this. -exchange between aspirant osjane callawanies and instructor santanado mondelles, axtraxis academy of highflame 10-16 interrupted deception an infection was spreading through the plascrete, and its name was avo. like parasitic growths sinking past the depth of flesh and entwining themselves within bone, threads of blood expanded outward, branches slithering between the walls and floors of the megablock. reclaiming the loci he formerly subverted was a paltry task, the three major lobbies falling back under his control within an instant. guided by blurred accretions and rooting along the spines of the structure, avo infused a nervous system of his own making, its design one of solidified blood and phantasmal circuitry. using the shaft of a long abandoned elevator, he inflicted his changes, echoheads holding him in place while the blockcrawler scanned and revealed the nature of confluxs troop compositions. when his rend was full, he assisted in its ascent creating new points of access, his entropic expulsion shearing with an efficiency superior to that of the vehicle. even with his perception accelerated, wrapping the entirety of the structure in the grip of his network consumed precious time. twenty-five minutes passed before he completed his act of subversion. leaving the outer walls mostly untouched, he regardless left four haemokinetic spikes jutting out, each pointed in a different direction to allow him nigh-instant awareness of the surrounding area beyond the block should something unexpected follow. scrying at nu-scarrowbur from their tips, he tried to gauge his time. zeins obfuscation blanketed the district still, but he could see mottled gaps from along the outer layer of darkness. faint flashes and volume-twisting quivers slipped through like drips leaking out from a faucet. whatever thaumaturgy at play was still in effect. time was still on their side, for now, but the culmination was fast approaching from all ends. spinning the final strands of his influence to form a roof over the topmost floor still filled with syndicate presence, avo invoked the canon of linger and left them embedded before withdrawing his heaven. speed shot back to normalcy. quelling his reflexes, he took a moment to take in his work. he found the shadowcrawler placed along the tracks leading out into the underways. directing his ichor to trail past the edge of the medical floor down across its exposed overlook, avo stretched his reach through cracks and crenulations running along the plascrete. enforcers passed his presence, ignorant to the thin lines of red gliding toward the crab-like form of the eighteen-foot-tall golem. with six legs connected to a vantablack dome, strips of lighting basked the ground beneath it in a focused shower of light. a tinge of annoyance crossed avos mind as he realized with everything that had happened, he forgot to ask kae about the golems he encountered. +shadowcrawlers simple,+ draus said, sensing his wariness. +it makes the dark like water, and can jump into shadows and shit; swimming in the black. it can drown half-strands, but more often than not its used as a delivery mechanism for nukes, explosives, or other nasty shit past defensive lines. pretty sneaky golemsyndicates like to use it for the smugglin. got a pretty vulnerable hubris though, seein as theyre old models. if the darkness theyre swimming in gets completely parted by light, things start fryin right-quick.+ the functions and limitations made sense, all things considered. diverting his whisper into his seeking trickles of blood, he splashed through the room with his perception and counted forty enforcers stationed around the underways along with three drone jocks lingering within the vehicle. beneath his flesh, he felt the urge of the beast awaken. it wanted him to shred and tear all those present using his own heaven, to forgo all subtly and close his weave of blood throughout the floor and scythe through all who were present. it was an appealing desire, to express his power with vulgarity and absolute annihilation. there was a time when fighting just one of them was beyond him. now, with but a thought every article of glass and symmetry in the room rattled. avos blood, much like all who were present in the room, went still. he sensed mirorrhead thena felt presence through the tightening of postures and the inflammation of dread spreading through the confluxers like wildfire. shards of glass broke free from various surfaces, the fractals snapping into place over the railings of the underway and melding into a portal. a rush of light peeled all unevenness from the assembled pieces of glass, and when the shine faded, a portal of gleaming polish remained, forming a gateway into mirrorheads personal sanctum. seated behind his table, an empty bottle was the first thing to catch avos attention. the next were the amber stains marring the syndicate boss suit. there was as a shiver to the mans motion now, a lashing rage as their expressionless face jumped from person to person, regarding all who were present with a stare of distrust. my soldiers, mirrorhead began, his baritone as deep as the suspicion lining his tone, i have a use for you. a chance to properly convey your loyalty to me. silence followed. mirrorhead clasped his fingers together, but unclasped them a moment after as if he couldnt decide on the state of his own posture. go. go up. ascend my block and gather the others. bring them bring them outside. to the decks overlooking the the circuit. my circuit. my district. there there i will share with you your final tasks in person. i speak to you. and then freedom. you can be free. all can have what they want. allall we want the light vanished from the portal, and with it returned all the blemishes. shards of glass fell, shattering against the enforcers below. coldness settled within avos mind. the guilder was close to the precipice of losing control, despite how he presented himself. the mirrorhead avo knew during his tenure at conflux would have never allowed himself to be seen in such a disheveled state. power was being projected still, but there was a pleading nature to itsomething mirrorhead would have never abided by. but jhred greatling begged quite well. +fuck,+ chambers said, chuckling with surprise. +boss doesnt look so good. looks like you really did a number on his mind, eh, ghoulie?+ avo frowned. he could still jack into the golem, still begin his assault and draw mirrohead out the way they planned. but if the guilder was going to expose himself willingly, then perhaps an adjustment was in order. if mirrorhead was going to speak to all those present in person, he would be exposing his throat avos hidden fangs. and through that, the beast might just get the slaughter it desired after all. besides, if things came down to it, triggering another surge of civil conflict using puppeteered confluxers and the golem under the guise of ori-thaum sleepers was still an option. +yeah,+ draus said, agreement coming with no shortage of apprehension. +if he wants to put his head through our guillotine, let em. but youre right: snuff the techs and jack into the golem anyway. itll make things easier when we start the killin.+ avo concurred. and so, spurring his blood to leap from floor to golem, he threaded his presence inside, and there, drew the thinness of his blood taut into a wire. he pulled it across the necks of three unsuspecting jocks. thaumic output - 986 thaum/c ghosts: [1045] accessing: [shadowcrawler] Chapter 10-17 The Shattered Reflection chapter 10-17 the shattered reflection wanna know to know how to snuff a clad? well. you wont believe me when i say this to you, consang, but its pretty simple when it comes down to it. youre not fighting them. you cant fight themnot unless youre another clad or you got a couple of knots to lose. what you do is study them. learn about them. and after that, engineer the situation to spur a mistake; make em overreach. you know how a well-fed nu-dog cant seem to get enough chow? or how theres not enough joy in the world to fill the urges of an addict? imagine that, and apply it to someone seeking absolute power. godclads want. they want. and there aint nothing more undoing to a person than want. all too often the ambition of one might run smack-dab into the desires of another. again. you and i are not fighting any godclads. but you sure as shit can find an angle to get two of these half-strands to roll up and bleed it out with each other. theyre cannibals the same way the old gods were. the same way ghouls are. use their want to break them. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 10-17 the shattered reflection mirrorhead was already there by the time avo piloted the shadowcrawler out. flickering neon splashed down blinking traffic lanes, error codes striking across the gleaming sheen of unnaturally manifested glass. like a frozen waterfall, the decks overlooking the central fighting pit descended into glass whorls of curving vitrification from what was the food court of the mall brawl. the glinting ground offered a mirage of glitching sunrise, while twin curved waves soared overhead cupping the once-exposed midsection of the building into a ravine. in groups and pockets, the first trickles of confluxers arrived, shepherded by the lowered barrels of their fellows. connected to what was left of mirrorheads network, the loyalists shuttled about the interior with haste, rounding and deploying drones to physically usher the remainder of the syndicate into supplication. after the butchery mirrorhead inflicted, not even threats were needed to inspire action. the ones left obeyed, but their minds were stained with fear. morose negativity, thick and heavy, emanated from their thoughtstuff even without the full scaffolding of the nether. spreading roots of blood below the first shell of glass, avo guided his shadowcrawler to reach the exterior balcony it was assigned, moving as a unit with three squads comprised of thirty enforcers. unbeknownst to them, the jocks inside the golem were long dead, and strings of blood plucked at the locus, puppeteering it upon the desired path. slowly but surely, the festering weight of avos veins enwreathed the structures below the glass, burrowing its way up as he awaited the perfect time to strike. though uncertain as to mirrorheads plans, avo knew the man to be rash and foolish: with such an ostentatious display of powerthe two sheer cliffs of glass reaching over two hundred feet into the airit would take but the naked eye and some elevation to spot the anomalous happenings unfolding at mazzas junction from another district. the guilder was going to do something drastic then. perhaps he would use his canons to make portals of these walls of risen glass, using them as gateways to feed his men through in a desperate assault. standing tall atop a floating platform of radiant glass, mirrorhead looked down at the surviving remnants of his forces like a god-blessed king from ages of lore and myth. he was stiller than the transparent dias he stood upon, the wind unable to shiver even the folds of his suit. but avo had seen his frayed state and judged him close to the precipice of cognitive collapse. what happened when you stole away the comfort of absolute control from a narcissist? when you made him think there were enemies living in his walls? when you struck his already frail psyche again and again, with more and more deviations from his desired circumstances? fractures. fractures formed. and it was with such fractures in mind that avo found himself cycling certain specific sequences within his ghostjack. his vicious glee joined the growing hunger of the beast as he prepared his poison. by force or deception, he would lure mirrorhead down. down, and in mortal flesh. then, blood would sink into glass in hunt of a distinct flavor: the scent of a breaking mind. sending roots of blood to scout ahead, avo shuffled his ontology beneath the cascading decks. not long ago, he had been here, a participant in a pointless charade under the orders of mirrorhead. here was where he broke rantula. only fitting he crack mirrorhead here as well. tidy to force symmetrical fates on dog and master both. mirrorheads first action of substance was the lifting of a palm. the gesture seemed meaningless until avo detected the spiking anxieties of a dozen minds as the twice-walker drifted beneath the glass upon which they tread. it moved like a leviathan swimming through limpid waters and with its proximity in the real, avo finally collected a proper estimate of its full size. blockcrawler arriving in position, the man shivered and nodded, regarding the ghouls promise with a mix of trepidation and nervousness. voice vibrating free from visors upon faces and the floor beneath countless feet, mirrorhead spoke again. i want i need the willing... the capable among you to step forward. beyond this reach are golems. instruments of your final purpose. he paused again, but this time, everyone heard the godclad swallow. heads swiveled and turned. mongrels of the warrens thought these people were, they smelled weakness better than most, and the way mirrorhead was acting confused them, his power standing contrary to his flagging confidence. and it was with this repeated exposure of weakness that avo was spurred to his next action. a new thread of blood leaped free from the string he had connected to the golem. twisting at ankle height to avoid the glass, the trickle darted through a grove of armored legs and swinging boots, lancing fast for rantula. it struck her like a dagger tied to the end of a rope, and avo felt his power bite down and suffuse her veins. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 67% he regarded his rend again with wariness. shifting and infusing new structures beneath the skin of the block instilled greater weight for his hell to bear. but he was close now, and if this was performed right, the miracles of his heaven would only be part of the equation to mirrorheads unmaking. swallowing a blast of alarm spreading from rantulas already compromised mind using his ghostjack, he felt a growl choke off halfway as he curtained her awareness by entwining her waking mind closer with her subconsciousness. her mind was a tattered hive of wounds; sinking deep took contemptuously little effort. reaching out, he gathered haemokinetic mass and flexed his celerostylus. the world slowed as avo began planting the seed of mirrorheads collapse into the scaarthians mind. lining her short-term memories with sequences he seized from mirrorhead while hiding within the mans mind, he redirected the waters of rantulas thoughtstuff and poisoned her thoughts with a haze of delusion. much like how waltons node had used dreams of madness and incoherence to push avo into unleashing his traumas, so too was rantula undone by a feverish compulsion to howl out in pain, the worlds seared into her mind needing to be spoken, needing to be exposed. im sorry im so sorry. the words screeched free from her throat and sent those nearby stumbling back in fright. releasing much of his blood and letting time resume its rush, avo heard mirrorheads voice trail off as his head snapped down, locating rantula in an instant. bidden to speak beyond a will of her own, the words once spoken by a weeping jhred greatling to his mother rumbled up her hoarse larynx. eyes bulging and fingers curled, she screamed the remaining words as she did her best to emulate mirrorheads voice. i tried. i burned everything i had left. i triedtried so hard. i c-can do it. i can kill him for you. i can still make this hurt. the moment passed. rantula whimpered and clutched her head. around, above, and below, a sea of heads turned to gaze upon the mad effigythat husk of a person they knew as rantula. for most, befuddlement reigned, unsure why she screamed those words. but it landed where it needed to. for one, his fists were clenched and shaking. the glass around them was beginning to rattle. a chorus of fear and terror rose as people fled, as exo-boosted enforcers sent their fellows flying over the edge as they leaped, averting themselves as twenty foot long fractals of glass shattered free from the ground. gore filled the air, and in the reflection, as blood whipped free from bodies thrown into the air, the twice-walker encroached like a surfacing whale. decks groaned and folded before its weight. crowds shoved and fought, more falling as they went over the edge. in seconds, rantula found herself abandoned again. isolated on the arena floor. she was once again the very epicenter of attention like her circuit days, though what showered her wasnt glory but loathing. beneath her, the twice-walker stilled its movements, its form like a giant beneath the glass, waiting to break free. mirrorhead vanished, sinking into the glass he stood on. then, suddenly, using the twice-walker as a conduit, mirrorhead emerged, surfacing from the reflections beneath the scaarthian. ba-bo rantulas incoherent ramblings were cut off when mirrorhead struck her. his blow sounded like a whip shattering through a column of air. she snapped out toward the horizon like a pebble flung from a rubber band, tearing through the air like a ragdoll, with avo unable to keep his blood connected, chasing after her. at least until a wall of glass rose up before she could sail over the edge. she stopped hard. behind her, the wall shattered as a jagged shower of blades pierced through her flesh and thenmost unnaturallybit down on her. a howl of absolute agony bellowed out from her immense lungs. shivering, mirrorhead approached her, his footsteps fast and desperate, not noticing the trickle of blood arcing out for her. where, mirrorhead snarled. around the block, all the glass was beginning to ring, where did you hear that? speak. tell me where! he arrived, seizing rantulas throat just as avo injected himself into her. +draus,+ he said, joy near maniacal at how things turned out, +get ready.+ +synced on that,+ she replied, catching the contagion of his excitement. pulling rantula down to face him, mirrorhead remained ignorant of the blood hyper-accelerating behind the scaarthians skull, nor how it was beginning to build behind her tongue. a globule of drool spilled free from rantulas lip as she blinked, mind blanking as to how she even got here. how long? mirrorhead hissed. how long have you had her? what are you? incubi? a sleeper? what else do you know? speak? speak heeding his words, rantula opened her mouth. just in time for her head burst apart entirely, tendrils of blood lashing out into mirrorheads reflective depths. Chapter 10-18 Then Came the Killing chapter 10-18 then came the killing abrel, look. the glass its jhred. hes doing [sounds of shattering; collapsing; wetness] is is that blood? im going. zenna, hold to a six-mile range and run overwatch. alphim, i need a loop-style demiplane layered in place a half mile behind zenna; keep whatevers happening inside sealed. melt, were going breaker. youre with me. -abrel greatling to her cadre, instruments of highflame 10-18 then came the killing thaumic output - 987 thaum/c ghosts: [1046] as locus-laced blood struck the threshold of mirrorheads skull, lashing tentacles of blood erupted free from the liquefying glass. the twice-walker wailed in sudden surprise as the surface it swam beneath became swallowed, crystalline crimson usurping the domain of reflectivity. from metaphor to truth, the state of the decks changed and a waterfall of red rushed down, showering the confluxers below. shouts and cries of alarm rose. a spurt of soulfire burst out from mirrorheads core as all things belonging to the domain of reflection in the surrounding vicinity pulsed and fissured. skulls within visors shifted places. people fell through random points as the structure of reality rattled. backlash tore free from the guilderhis canon of hyalokinesis driven into hubris by avos dissolution of his glass. his mind, however, was occupied by other things. as draus'' gauss fire tore out from the inside of the block, cutting down from a vantage point above, mirrorheads metamind resurfaced, its ripple vast and wide, the weight of over ten thousand ghosts groping for the yet-parted nether. all these things collapsing together exposed the syndicate boss to the true assault. in truth, the battle was lost for him before the heavens clashed. jaws of blood bit into the flesh of his thoughtstuff and avo drew upon the fullness of his haemokinesis, reflexes screaming as time halted to a near stop. he activated his session thereafter, jumping his ghosts without the need to engage mirrorheads wards, injecting them directly into the innermost layer of the guilders palace. trauma descended like a thunderstorm, lashing at the structures of mirrorheads mind. but avo didnt want his foe nulled, just broken, just devoid of strength, incapable of resisting. the first sequences avo lanced were the foundations of mirrorheads strength, the pillars of his confidence. moments greeted the ghoul as he shredded into the brittle substance of memory like a nu-dog tearing into supple flesh. mirrorheads past triumphs unmade, dissolving like dust to the ethereal winds. every moment of victory, when he overcame his peers; at axtraxis academy when he claimed the approval of his betters; in the trials where he met godclads from rival families in challenges of mind and might; in each act of defiance he levied against his father, who forbade him from revenge. the greatest of these memories was the night he left the tiers. he had challenged his own father to the trials mere days prior, seeking to pry a confession free from the man for why he abandoned his wife to an undeserved fate. but where mirrorhead sought a reckoning, uhtred greatling desired only to discipline his son. the subsequent brutalization had been wiped clean from mirrorheads remembrances, but in its place was a recollection of kneeling before the shattered statue of his mother and swearing the redemption of her name. from there, jhred greatling abandoned his duties and cadre behind him, casting his heaven down from the tiers and into the warrens, into months and years of frenzied but foolhardy plotting, eyeing the stormtree in nu-scarrowbur while waiting for the perfect moment to strike. this too, avo broke, withering its structure apart with a touch of lucilles regret, and forcing trauma shrapnel deeper into the wounds that remained via the installation of other memoriesnamely those from the incubi and avo himself. in an instant, the bones that held up the guilders self-perception and ego shattered like glass, and in its place the festering plague of truth spread, rotting his sanity further from within. a scream of absolute horror and violation rushed out from within the guilders mind, and in the real, he let out the beginnings of a roar, the pain in his voice betraying how close he was to madness. as things within the godclad broke, and avo felt the numbness overtake his quarry, when the last sinews of fortitude snapped within his foe, he withdrew his invading constructs and turned his attention to the remainder of the syndicate. as mirrorhead was pulled into the wake of the rushing tides of red, avo manifested himself, diving into his domain fully as he coursed through the interior of the megablock. from the blood pooling at the base of the mall brawl, spilling and coating the former food court under the domain of blood, the woundshaper ascended, tearing out from the red and into existence proper as the barrier of sound shattered against its spire, as avo constructed falling hammers and obliterated all the glass he could feel. filtering her appearance as best he could through his sequences, memories from over a month ago came back, and his meta offered him a name. ved. ah, the person he convinced to serve as his guide, to lead him around the block and spoke to in the cafeteria after murdering rantula. it was not a surprise she found herself among his victims too. not that he cared over much. it was just she had told him about her life before. about the familial pain. about how her people thought of the ghouls. there had been a full life there, now essence nourishing his soul, another ghost component laid in his mind. it was going to be pain resequencing all their ghosts, but that would be for later. for now, he let the fleeting sensation of sonder pass through him as he regarded ved again. thank you, avo said, unsure why he was talking to a corpse. for telling me about your life. would have killed you all the same. but means more to kill and eat a person than a thing. the taste was indeed better, indeed deeper. family or not, there she was a part of this choice-taking mechanism, and that made her desired prey by waltons metric. and avos own. perhaps that was part of a persons beingthe totality of lifes story pouring the clay needed to create the fullness of a person. striking the blood around him with the canon of linger, he solidified the sweeping ichor before bringing his echohead down on veds skull. her bones caved and meat oozed. he lifted his tail and continued his stride forward, her existence fading into the recesses of the past. arriving at the food court, avo grunted a laugh as he noticed one final arc pylon still sparking on the opposite end of the course. there once was a wall of those things. essus had attempted suicide using them. some things survived no matter how hard you tried. where the battle between the moonblood and rantula took place was where jhred greatling scrambled. no longer was his suit a pristine monochrome. no longer did the protective shell of glass guard his visage. hearing the clinking sounds of the ghouls tendrils breaking linoleum, the beaten guilder shivered as he turned, tears, snot, blood, and drool spilling free from his orifices. a low moan escaped from his throat as his eyes rolled up. where once he regarded avo from the height of his desk, now kneeled below, staring up at an unfathomable being of superior make. the perfectly sculpted angularity of his face, the sharpness of his nose, and the symmetrical divots dimpling his cheeks did nothing to alleviate his present wretchedness. hair slickened thickly with viscera and gore, jhred greatling nearly slipped as the last fragments of glass broke from his skin. y-you? he choked. all this time. it was you? in the distance, the sound of gauss-fire was thrumming at a second-to-second constancy. draus was having her time now. she would be done soon. it was almost time. and zein had given him an hour. with how things seemed, he would have time to spare yet. i gave you the truth, avo said. reaching out, the blood below them pierced into the greatlings tendons. and bounced off. it took deliberate liquefication to unmake the augmentations boosting jhreds physicality. nanosuites and gene-mods: stuff most squires never got to see. the stuff ghouls couldnt even bite through. it didnt protect him from avo in the end. jhred swallowed, mind too wounded to muster even a glare. w-why? you could have could have left? you had you had impossibly, a chuckle sounded from jhred. the frame. huh. a ghoul with a frame? incubi were here too, avo said. they would have seen you broken regardless. from within the block, the gunshots were trailing off, and through the exit-strewn hull of the block sounded the servos of the blockcrawler. are you ready? avo asked, curiosity drawing the question from him. ready? jhred repeated. i i still need to i have to my mother. are you ready to see what lies beyond the reach of resurrection? to see what waits for us in the nothing after? to this, the guilder offered no real answer. unable to help himself, avo had to sink his tongue in the wound. i dont think your mothers going to be there. emotional agony disfigured jhred greatlings face so beautifully. this moment belonged in a painting. or as a sculpture on an island somewhere. Chapter 10-19 Daemon (I) chapter 10-19 daemon (i) reva, did you know your uncle could do that? what? talk with a bunch of loci-infested golems and stop them from glassing the entire district? no. no, i did not know the piece of shit was a golem whisperer, tig. good thing too. the shatterflames snuffed ullens pretty quick. heh. poor half-strandll be pissed when he resurrects. first of revas bloodthanes to die to a golem. agh. modern highflame design will lessen the sting though. shame. dont tease the juv about it. hes young. hell learn. and hell fight you. [sigh] longeyes shouldve never made a wargskin a clad. [chuckle] you and i arent exactly ideal godclad material ourselves. root manage to figure out how to collapse the containment yet? last i heard him crackle from that uh radio-gizmo, he said its atrophying by itself. whoever put it up didnt intend for this to be a lasting thing. ... what? nothing makes sense about this, tig. mirrorhead somehow knows were here all of a sudden, somehow has four knots of bleeding-edge golems straight out of highflames armories, but then throws all his assets away in a pointless assault and then uncle vince manages to talk the golems down somehow. some-fucking-how. [sighs] the longeyes are going to be howling at us from out our wounds for this. no way this slips by the watch. voiders are going to call a moot. you mark my words about that. fuuuuuuuccccckk youre right. were gonna spend half a month being questioned by one of their full-chromes. streamed live to the entire godsdamned city. shit. yeah. well. us and jhred greatlingthe shadows are coming down. get readywhat [discordant sounds; the shattering of glass] rupture! rupture! daemon! get down! stay away from -conversation between tigertail and reva javvers, bloodthanes of stormtree 10-190v3l.b11n. daemon (i) blade-edged brambles of blood sprouted from the sheen puddling above the linoleum. gore and debris overflowed from the moat around the food court, the fluid heterogeneous and thickporridge made from a massacre. oscillating light spilled free from the virus-stricken aerolanes behind the collapsed walls of glass, the running red offered glinting reciprocations. above the red, two minds rocked on waves of haemokinetic nether: the first was a sinking vessel capsized by regret and sorrow; the latter rose a lighthouse made from the blood sea itself, its shine a beacon of savage triumph. what was it always you? jhred croaked. it took a supreme effort of will on the guilders part to produce those words. an effort of will avo thought the man long hollow of. a final staccato of gauss fire thundered from behind. avo kept his attention on his prize. his sweet, delicious, broken prize. no, avo said, knowing the truth would fissure jhreds ego further. there were many. incubi were here. that wasnt a lie. heeding the command of its sovereign, the blood obliged. spear-like threads shot free of the brambles and sank into jhreds flesh. to avos disappointment, the guilder gave no hint of pain or discomfort. the only thing that consumed the latter was the shame of a shattered desire and the bitterness of vengeance unsated. the ghoul played at torture a few moments longer; this was to be a sampling of private pleasure before the main course heralded by the arrival of the others. just a moment between him and his prey. the woundshaper subsumed the blood coursing through jhreds veins, its presence like virus and boundary both, shaping new implants of torment from within the guilder. still, no screams or cries followed. the man simply did not feel pain as a flat did. dismay filled the ghoul, and in its place disgust roiled. he should have known that the sensation of pain would be another thing the guilders modified within themselves. jacking into the mind of his victim, avo siphoned understanding anew from the exhaust of thoughts hissing free from jhreds cracked metamind. a feeling of dull static ebbed from the mans already healing wounds. there was only blandness; no true taste to this pain. avo growled. take. take. take. all you do. take from me. cant even suffer right. the pounding splashes approached from behind. willing his echoheads to rattle, avo found the blockcrawler sliding down from the slope of gushing blood behind him, emerging from a vast rent opened diagonally across the blockdamage inflicted during the slaughter moments prior. avo hissed in disappointment. his annoyance was a fleeting thing. drawing weight from the lake of blood around him, avo accelerated his reflexes and dove into jhreds mind. as he descended this time, the simulation of the mans inner palace flickered and glitched, missing mem-data and frayed sequences unrooting the entire structure from stability. chasms bearing blocks rose and drifted, the place seemingly held together only by the tightness of wards. activating his ghostjack, avo set to work, salvaging what phantasmics, sequences, ghosts, and traumas he could. ghosts: [11566] essus gazed at avo. beneath him, chambers moaned as he spat clinging strands of stomach fluid. you told me once of artads absence. you told me, and i lied to myself, invoking my god as philosophy; as a virtuous idol. his burning eyes shone as he gazed upon the glorious atrocity spread out before him. you were right. you were rightthe city was right. artad is dead. dead in his entirety. dead like all the other gods. essus looked down, focusing on his own reflection in the gore-mixed puddle. suddenly, he rose, his face mask a mask of anger as he dropped chambers into the crimson and strode across the bridge toward jhreds kneeling form. is this how things are to be now? is this all that we could conceive as as free people? that you could conceive as master of this city? avo clicked his fangs together, desiring to impede essus before the fool could claim the kill for himself. new flavors though essus retribution might offer, this was a pound of flesh avo wanted to indulge personally. it was not ever that a ghoul got to taste the meat of a guilder. they could all share in the mutilation and harm of the greatling, but the ghoul would not abide by all the pleasure granted to only one individual. before he could halt essus, a hand caught him by the crook of his elbow. +relax. he aint gonna kill em,+ draus said, looking at the father. +he aint got it in him. hell break. itll be us again.+ shooting a look at the father again, avo let the regular pull him along. +certain?+ +beyond certain. he aint got it.+ standing over the downed guilder, the fateless faced his tormentorthe sponsor behind his ascent into the city via crucible and master to the girl who butchered his son. no longer did jhred greatling look tier-perfect. no longer was he a being of impossible superiority compared to the former flat. an open gorge of ropey sinew bounced from the mans left eye. if not for the scabs and rapidly crawling pinkish-sheath trying to reconstitute the missing eye, it would have seemed the guilder was going be down an eye forever. even so, the question of who was more fragile between the two remained. for an instant, avo thought essus would shatter there and then, his face twitching between uncontrollable anger and inconsolable sadness. the man known as mirrorhead portrayed himself only between moments of regret and confusion, a thought-cleaved haze guttering his thoughts. lingelingerer? my lingerer? no. not yours! never yours again! reaching down, essus seized the jhred by his collar. tell me, essus cried, voice rising to a desperate howl. you have the power endless power! endless! lifting the guilder up, he made him turn and face the slaughter. but was this the most you desired? this? to drive thousands to their death. i i had to avenge i needed to kill no! essus roared, taking the object of his hatred by the shoulders. you did not need to kill! you wanted to kill! you chose to kill! you chose to hurt peoplemen, women, children! everyone you touch you hurt! never once did you do something goodnever once! jhred choked back a sob. my my mother. i had to to avenge what about my son, essus seethed. my son. he did not kill anyone. he did not start any war. why him? faced with such a question, all jhred greatling could offer was a tilt of the head as he struggled to string together an answer. youre fateless. i needed you to do greater things i i never thought of him as as a person. as my equal. as worth regarding as anything more than fuel for the cityfuel for a soul. looking over the carnage, avo felt the fire of his own frame roaring, its radiance like a nuclear warhead explodingconstantly exploding. disquietingly, he understood how jhred felt. more than merely for the joy of killing, for the taste of flesh and the hit of cruelty, he liked the growing bulk building within. liked the deepening hum of his thaumic resonance. liked the flare and reach of his souls growing borders. he liked being a god. and in the depths of his being, the woundshaper crackled with laughter. so the truth was revealed. jhred greatlings open admission. a thing avo understood. and the words that shattered essus entirely. draus was right. the father didnt have it. he never had it. not even for the boy. all that time, jhred greatling never regarded the childs holographic form once. releasing the guilder, father-no-longer took two steps back, his titanium legs pounding and cracking linoleum, throwing up sprays of blood. looking up at layer twoa blockade of alloy and glass and screaming error codes, the man screamed too, howling a note of anguish and despair toward the skies unseen. and with all the miles of city above, avo knew the father would go unheard all the same. is this all there is, essus moaned. this city the best thing in it. you? both of you? essus dropped a glance at avo and draus, conveying the fullness of his despair. a monster that dreams of flesh. a huntress that chases death. this is the best the best of us? essus sank to his knees. why were the chains ever broken then? what was artad shattered for? what did jaus even free us from? the splash of bare feet wading through blood heralded chambers as he faced the maltreated form he knew as mirrorhead. the ex-enforcer stopped, face pale from spewing. shit, he chuckled. his heart wasnt in the noise. chambers swallowed. he was fighting the urge to throw up again. looks looks like you fucagh! he failed. only fluid rushed free from his mouth this time. he emptied himself again, gagging as he tried to stop himself from getting anything on avos talons. the ghoul frowned. was it something the man ate? why was he +its the blood and the death,+ draus asked. avo didnt get it. looking around, he breathed in the clashing aromas born from the slaughter. all the different flavors of blood types and organs and the tang of metal and the redolence of offal. all of it was a joy to inhale. +for you, consang,+ draus added, a note of wry amusement. +some folk aint made for the killin.+ wiping the bile away with his arm, chambers was unable to meet avo eye to eye. instead, he looked again at mirrorhead and winced. so uh. what what are we gonna do now? you you want me tolets find some aratnids. the enforcer brightened, a new thought capturing his focus. the type that bit me. lets pull down his pants and have two of them bite the shit out of his sack. then, when the eggs from the sides start hatching inside his balls, we can watch the clusters fight and bet imps on warning: foreign souls detected unidentified godclads detected the warning wailed loud in avos mind just as the first spear of light flashed over the blood. from his experiences facing golems, mirrorhead, and zein, only direct exposure of a heaven in use revealed the presence of a frame and the soul that burned within it. rising on his echoheads, avo spun back a second behind draus as a tide of blinding light enveloped them. then came the voice. the voice of a screaming star. the voice of a dawn exploding with ire and hatred, lifted by a chorus of screaming falcons. under the decree of highflame! under the will of the seraphs, the rule of the authorities, and the might of the instrument, i command you all to step away from the wounded, and face deliverance. the weight of two new godclads pressed down on avo. and the thrill and hunger ignited within him anew. Chapter 10-20 Daemon (II) chapter 10-20 daemon (ii) did you plan all this? hm? killing the bloodthanes and caging nu-scarrowbur in with the compromised golems. jhred greatlings psychological compromise. the ghoul taking too long to kill him. the arrival of the highflame cadre [laughter] planned for all this? no. i have but a desired destination, but the paths that are offered to me are myriadever and always. truly, this turn of events is as surprising to me as it is to you. then how because you think the future is a structure to be engineeredyou see a thing in terms of analogy and simile. a construct of fate, perhaps. i see it for what is. and what is it? and what the fuck is your heaven other than absolute proof that fate do you believe you have free will? what? because you do. its powering our souls. its the reason why i see paths and not a path. its why im putting up with this boring, boring conversation with you right now. presently, you are destined. you are destined as you have been since i noticed yousince i gave you a destiny, pruning away all the path-ending obstacles while feeding you all the soft meat like the helpless little bird you continue to be. in this measure, the only thing that can be said is if there is a fate for everyone, it is because i made it so. ...wow. before i met you, i thought i was the single most narcissistic half-strand in this city. i am not a narcissist. i am but a simple gardener, and there are so very many paths to prune, seen and unseen. such as oh, what a delight! abrel greatling! sister to jhredour poor patsy. hmm. [temporal distortion detected] very well, i have fixed matters. i am away to indulge in suncloud now. do not bother me for the next nine hours for i will be dead across most that duration from repeated overdoses. [temporal distortion detected] what? what the hells did you just do? zein? zein? [daemon detected] zein! what the fuck did you just do! shit. aegis? hyperwave, now! patch me through to sunrise. zein did something again. -zein thousandhand and cas eldcanduir, ninth column 10-20 daemon (ii) classification: sphere iii [est. 881 thaum/c] ->strider upon the highest, falconess of the slain comet classification: sphere iii [est. 459 thaum/c] ->[heaven template: aegis of tides] heavens bared, two highflame godclads descended from on high, their ontological weight pressing down on all that was. the block groaned to the symphony of crackling glass. blood ungrasped by avo shivered and rose as steam. feet away, the alloy pylon groaned and bent. an eldritch force wriggled and wore the concept of light itself, the intensity of the radiance like a thousand knives gliding across avos plates. chambers howled a yelp and threw himself behind the ghoul. essus held up his hands, his implants screaming as unseen edges carved sparking grooves into his metal. of avos group, only he and draus stood unshaken, the former pleased with his weight advantage, the latter long-used to dealing with the eldritch and no longer burdened by shock. invoking his woundshaper, avo maintained the haemokinetic links enchaining him, draus, and mirrorhead as conduits to a limited network. slowly, he reached out for three more signatures as well, slipping from within blood and matter to loop in essus, chambers, and the shadowcrawler. holding his hands out slowly, he did nothing to provoke an assault while the two new unknowns did nothing to pursue one. he wondered if zein had plotted thisif this was another one of her schemes unraveling into more schemes, or if she merely failed to foresee this path as she did the incubi. as with all things zein, anything was possible. +aghhh!+ chambers screamed mentally as well as physically, clutching his bleeding nose. +i think the light took the tip right off me! fuck! my nose! my nose is the best thing about me. other than my ears and my eyes andoh, jaus fuck im blind too fuck me!+ +chambers, be quietdraus,+ avo said, flicking over the necessary mem-data to incriminate jhred as zeins patsy, +know what heavens these clads got?+ a dissonant sensation ground across her mind. her helmet had closed around her face just in time to spare her what chambers suffered. it was like her bio-rig was fending off the dull blades of an omnipresent blender. +no idea what the hells the strider is. must be some new shit they cooked up. aegis though yeah, i fought along that series. give those to the newsouled just out from atraxis. we got a rookie on our hands.+ avo grunted. possibly exploitable. ghosts: [11565] the ghosts transferred into jhreds mind as the guilder moaned. considering the condition of his metamind, avo was effectively stuffing an open wound with foreign flesh. with a sweeping motion, the cutting brightness slashed across avos cordyceramic plates before slipping off him and cleaving into the surrounding infrastructure, plascrete bursting apart; plasteel wailing as lines and new markings lined the metal. suddenly, the world wasnt so blinding anymore. looking up, avo gazed upon the revealed visages of his two unexpected guests. past the guilder, essus eyes were fixed on abrel, his body frozen stiff as if he didnt know how to respond. +essus. when the dark comes. jump into it.+ the father looked at avo. first mistake. and then he gave a reflexive, tentative nod. second mistake. abrel caught the action and her eyes narrowed. she gestured down at her visor. your auditory implants. turn them off. she sighed. take your helmet off first. +chance shell recognize you?+ avo asked. draus went still. +pretty high.+ alright. use jhred it is then. enough of facing unexpected requests. it was time the turn this interrogation in on itself. injecting suggestions whispered by hastily infused ghosts, avo brought zeins incriminating memories to the forefront. it was time for a false confession. confused and lost beneath the collapsing structures of his own mind, jhred began to cry uncontrollably, choking on the rain as avos fake memories suffused all that was missing. jhred, abrel said, swallowing to keep her own unbalance in check. jhred. get. yourself. together. you have shamed our family enough. jhred? do you hear me? i did it, abrel, jhred said, his voice a maddened howl. i did it for mother. i dont know i cant remember why but i i did it i killed those peopleour people. his sister went very, very still. what? the golems and the traffic and the killing up topi did it! i dont remember how, but i did it! i made i made our own people go to war against each other! i i avo withdrew his suggestions and let the mania burn itself out in jhred. the guilder was mostly impulse now. impulse and emotion. thoughts were slippery things to his grasp. abrel shook her head. you no. she shot an alarmed look over her head at the distantly floating aegis and whipped back around. no. you didnt. you couldnt haveyoure a fuck-up, jhred greatling! a fuck-up. i know youi love you but you dont have the skill or the will to do this. she hissed a jagged breath. suddenly, she realized she had lost control of herself in front of complete strangers. her face went ice-cold. someone altered his mind. was it you? any of you? she asked draus. draus shrugged. were just dumb street squires, higher. aint no necros among us. besides, aint no sensible necro willin to stick their head out in the open oror leave their mark half nulled. thats just lack-preformance. avo shot her a glare from the corner of his eye as he reached down to pick jhred up. i changed my mind, abrel said, her harsh voice slipping out just behind him. his echohead chittered startled, and he realized she had closed the gap between them in a near instant. even draus seemed taken aback. +girls got some high-end augs cookin in her.+ aside, abrel said as she pushed past him. avo obliged. he diverted his focus to groping around the shadows using his connected golem, looking for fragments of glass. he cursed himself for being so total in his destruction, so willing to liquefy matter. he could direct it along a detour to where the walls of glass once stood. better chance hed find what he needed there, but the risk was greatthe movement of the shadowcrawler would be a lance of pure light punched down from above, plunging through the darkness of his shadowcrawler and outright evaporating through a hundred more feet. shadowcrawler''s link vanished. around them, all forms of darkness began to bubble anomalously, twitching free from the bodies they were bound to as blood and debris sank into their depths. avo felt his flesh sizzle from the sudden spike in heat, hissing reflexively as he threw up his hands and guarded his eyes. it stung like a fusion burner did from a hundred feet away. both essus and chambers shared in his pain, crying as their flesh bubbled and boiled as well. only abrel and draus gave muted responses. at least until the regulars breath hitched. +shit. avo. up. third clad.+ he looked up at the same time abrel did, both of them catching each other in the act. directly overhead, masked by curtains of encroaching rain, what looked akin to a shrouded dawn bloomed beyond the haze, a swirl of obsidian spheres dancing around it. it had been looking down, and it had spottedor felt the shadowcrawler somehow. he glanced at abrels face again, and he saw her pupils dilate, saw her eyes widen. an unseen force solidified around him via the vectors of falling rain. a swirl of light built around abrel, falcons flaring free like exhaust from her elbows and ankles. above, a needle of flame speared atop his scalp like sinking pain. firing his celerostylus, avo snarled as he conjoined himself with his blood only for a bell to chime from inside drausringing out in an echoing tide as it struck him. zein somehow unlatched from his very being, tearing free from his ontology and beating all four other godclads to the draw. her glaiveso fast avo couldnt perceive it even with boosted reflexeslicked out a dozen blows, all of them overlapping as her form flickered. impossibly, abrel spilled apart into partitions of spraying gore. two distant screams sounded in unison as the rain suddenly broke and the heat vanished entirely, waves of cold rushing in. the aegis split into two and through the last droplets of its falling rain, fell embers followed by a bifurcated corpse. zein appeared next to him, shaking her head as she hummed with amusement. i must admitthe cadre was beyond my anticipation as well. but not anymore. she turned to him and smiled thereafter, her form a temporal ripple upon the rushing torrent of time itself. let us count those kills as but one. a moment of reset for the coming battle to be more favorable. and then, as the streams of existence began to unspool from her being, her eyes flashed as if she suddenly noticed something. glancing out at the horizon beyond the clearing rain, zein frowned. ah. a closed-loop. well-made. a pity what must occur. she gestured up to the sky itself. a demiplane is caging you right now, and i will break it for you. this is two. eighteen left. make these chances count. and seize the chance to kill the daemon. captain draus still needs her frame, you know. to accentuate her point, she blinked over and struck draus over the back of the head. keep him in check next time. gloat after you secure your prey. she reappeared next to him. before avo could ask zeinor her avatarwhat was happening, she flickered next to jhred and overlapped her meta with his. the last words, before she vanished out of existence, were spoken thusly in mind and sound: vent. the guilder obeyed. avo dove out of the way. light speared out from his being like a prismatic scythe, cleaving through matter but spraying gouts of soulfire free upon contact with the rain. and then, the gouts exploded free into a supernova and diluted themselves into structures near and far. all that was glass began shattering and tearing free from its anchors; all that bore the nature of reflection broke loose and twisted space itself into knots. reaching out with his heaven, avo manifested the woundshaper as he pulled draus and the others into the embrace of his being before whatever might follow rendered such an act too late. it was a wise decision. then, space itself shattered apart like glass as a frame-shaking screech tore across existence like nails upon chalk, and through the fissured flesh of reality, avo fell. Chapter 10-21 The Shattering of Mazza’s Junction chapter 10-21 the shattering of mazzas junction the agnosi lied to us keep lying to us i saw the truth. i saw it when my daemon came to me. it didntit was so hurtall those lives inside screaming remembering the world that wasthe gods were anchors and the god inside me was awake but i was the virusi am the virus and i keep bleeding over into it and it is me and we wanted to become become become the agnosi lied! they lied lied lied to us allgodspeopleall! the frame is another world but there are cracks bridges things to flow and rush and run and the frames will usurp reality are more than subrealityit can eat. it dreams inside you but its a crippled dreamersomething is missing something is broken something something something... i dream of the silken spiral. i dream of it. dream of the one that built it. the broken weaveress and the first daughters who fed themselves to the fire who burn still and burn and dream with the weaveress who woke inside but but it was we and we were joined but wanted to part and break but joined and consciousness melded man-cant-be-gods no! no please dont take my soul from memy firethe truest fire! the only thing that is real, we are all dust and distortions in the tapestry let me be real please let me be real -[redacted], the dissection of a daemon, firmament of voidwatch 10-21 the shattering of mazzas junction for a fleeting heartbeat, as time choked down the pipe of his surging reflexes, avo beheld the form of the daemon, and found himself entranced. the scene unfolding was one of fission and dichotomy. amidst a ballet of swirling spatial fractals, surrounded by falling pieces unlatching from the megablock, a being of pulsing flame drew shape from glass. it was a near-perfect mimicry of the twice-walker in structure, but the nuances were all wrong. abrel and the other highflame godclads were missing somewhere in this chaos. he had no trace of their whereabouts nor any estimation as to when they would resurrect, but they had to be in this chaos somewhere. for now, though, he was alone. just him, his allies, and that which his cog-feed was screaming to him about. anathema of reflection, the twice-walker awakened separated by a distance of five hundred feet, the daemon unlatched within cascading debris, emerging from a wound in the megablock. opposite to it, jhred greatling rose as if drawn up by a counterweight. flesh and hissing fire licked out at the air between the cracks lining its body. there was a blinding glow crackling within it like its quavering exterior was straining to hold a furnace back from a meltdown. finally, a twisting loop connected it to jhredits form unveiled in the real for the first time that avo could remember. time itself bubbled into form, the faintness of a translucent dragon echoing beneath its waves. scales containing writhing bodies and grasping forms called out the world beyond, each screaming proclamations and oaths of devotion. praise be the king of mirrors!praise be! praise be the twice-fold path!the treaded routes stand open! we need but follow!praise be!praise be! and with each revolution the dragon made, the head of the serpent eating away eternally at its own body, the flame maintained itself. avo watched as he plunged, darting through fractures in the nature of space, twisting from place to place as anomalous reflections sent him in myraid directions. enraptured by what he beheld, he barely regarded the words of his woundshaper. so. such is what clothes mesuccor of the unceasing variety. these are the faces of our worshippers, then? bound infused and reinfused into our fire? delightful. it gave a low, bemused laugh. and to think i held such unexplained loathing for the chrono-autosarcophagics. such was the first time he heard his heaven process its dislike for the dragons, but such things were of tertiary notice as daemonor what avo assumed was the daemonbegan to reel jhred greatling toward it. mo-ther! it called out, voice chiming like a million-million bells swinging in unison across the rooftops of a city. for. for mother again, it pulled, and jhred, shattered in mind and spirit, merely bounced as he was drawn through the vortex of swirling chaos. between them, tangled within the once-empty epicenter of the dragons coil, soulfire began to flicker and build. glass began to shudder and crack. reflections twisted and jumped and blended as bindings shifted into glass and more of the remaining megablock vitrified. snapping free from the distraction, avo shaped his body and constructed propellers as he attempted to navigate the maelstrom of twisting mirrors and crumbling matter. he couldnt go too fast or the ones within him would splatter. he couldnt shift to his galeslither for there was no way he could react in time to the unfolding chaos around him. warning: daemon detected ->associated heaven: [twice-walker] - fourth sphere ->rend capacity [twice-walker]: 63% spatial metaphysics unraveling rend spillover detected daemon pulled again and jhred approached. three more times and they would be joined. the flickering soulfire flared this time, blasting out a tide that flensed the structures of reality, undoing the fabric of all that was and exposing the foundational symbology knitted beneath the bones of existence. the surge crashed against avos frame, the uncanny sensation of ontology scraping against ontology like his bones were being dragged against jhreds. space came asunder like brittle glass flung against a wall. domains bled over into domains as the jhred and the twice-walker screamed, their voice a union of pain - a divine echo grafted to the voice of the man wailing unwanted epiphanies. holding firm in the form of the woundshaper, his surroundings broke into a chaotic kaleidoscope of reflective tunnels. the block was dissolving, coming apart as vitrification spread and more glass shattered free, sailing masses of collapsing infrastructure. lines of blood and water remained halted, stained with the paint of eldritch fire. jhreds hell had broken a sacrament in trying to reap the substance of fluids for his singularity. and he was going to need to vent soon. all his protective measures, constructs, and haemokinesis were creating entropy at an unprecedented rate. if he found the chance to die, perhaps he could find some method to upgrade his heavens and hells again. eyeing the shadowcrawlers and the lashing beams of light, he growled and subsumed the golem as well. they would provide ample additions to his galeslither, perhaps. he couldnt use them for much of anything at present with how fleeting the passing shadows were. might as well add them as canons afterward. a trickle of thoughtstuff flowed up from the locus of the fulgerhund into his blood. his ghosts carried the message budding across the nether-lag caused by their perceptive differentials. with his former cargo securely contained within the golem, he accelerated faster, his propellers drilling through the sound barrier as he picked up speed. draus was augmented. essus too. chambers was an acceptable loss if it came down to it. avo could still get what he needed to examine from the ex-enforcers ghost. he veered off course almost immediately, but he was still moving back toward where the daemon was drawing jhred back into himself. and then a near-perfectly translucent pane of glass glitched into existence in front of him, sparking free from reflections on droplets of rain. it opened as light erupted along its core and another place shown throughthis location was an open chasm of devastation that led out into another portion of the city. flipping his spinning propulsion constructs, he fought to slow himself, but his phys-sim revealed what he already expected: his velocity was too high and this was too close. maybe zein would +get in the golem.+ draus thoughtcast had finally loaded into his ghosts and avo mind twisted. he didnt fully know the functions of the golems, but both zein and draus seemed aware of its use. shrugging aside anxiety, he released the majority of his mass before threading his mortal form back into shape within the fulgerhound. spilling into a cockpit too narrow for his size, he immediately felt his bones snap painfully backward as the intensity of the g-forces bore down at him all at once, his perception of time snapping back to normalcy like a rubberband. he choked as he toppled back, bouncing off a gimbal and elbowing essus in the chest. then, just as swiftly, the pull of acceleration faded static tickled his body. avo, draus cried, not bothering to turn her head around, get ready. lashing out with his blood, he jacked into the locus that draus was leaning against. exo-sensory data filled his cog-feed as multiple systems and details painted his mind with a swirl of colors. they were jumping between stretches of reflection as an arcing bolt of lightning. with each turn or transition a number indicator diminished. this fulgerhund had eight-four jumps left before its rendsinks were full. presently, they were about four more jumps before the external simulation showed them reaching the daemon. warning klaxons screamed through the golems internal systems as avo linked his mind with draus as well. +going to eject out using my galeslither when we approach. kill jhred. absorb his frame before the rupture happens.+ draus head snapped to shoot an alarmed glance at him. +rupture? theres gonna be a rupture?+ right. his few seconds had been a lot longer than hers. +just get ready. frames going to be yours in a minute.+ a note of genuine trepidation sang out from draus. +yeah sure+ she still didnt truly want it, to live in endless loops and forget the weight of life and become like jhreds motherall power, all folly. nothing was ever easy, but some choices were harder. remembering the fragile lives he cupped, he pondered the alternative for her. what was a frame but more chances to choose? to learn? but it had to be her choice. it had to be. one jump. two jumps. three. four. he whistled free from the hissing gaps his blood left within the structure of the golem. with how rough he punched through to get at the locus, it was a miracle the entire thing didnt decompress. gusting out into the screaming form of a tri-headed steed, the galeslither brayed loud as the daemon looked up, regarding him for the first time. this close, they were bare to each other, with no place to hide. jhred was mere feet away from touching it. avo didnt know what that would cause, but with how the anomalies grew with each tug of the dragon, he didnt want to find out. glass tore out from the twice-walkers impossible twin like ten thousand surface-to-air missiles of all shapes and sizes. he felt them cut up through the air, an unseen hand guiding them as they sought him out. the matter would not touch him, but if managed to form a gateway just in front of him the fulgerhund slammed into the daemon, spearing it into place upon what few plasteel bones remained of the megablock. mo-ther! the daemon and jhred screamed. i want to be whole! givegive me back my mother-body! inside, the woundshaper understood something. my broken kin theyre tapping into the mind of the frames host. the heaven is rememberingusing the mortal to channel its stripped ego its stripped thoughtsavo didnt have time to consider the implications of what that meant. jhreds body was carved and sliced by countless pieces of shrapnel. one of his arms was folded the wrong way at the shoulder, most of his suit and skin denuded along the air. the eye avo ate had grown back, but the other now had a piece of rebar jutting out of it. funneling himself down jhreds throat, avo took no more chances with his targets death. there was too much to risk with a rupture, and his hunger demanded to be sated nowtoo long had he denied himself the life of this guilder. jhred, for his final words, gave but a rasping whimper as sense seemed to return to himif but for that briefest moment. not worthy never worthy. and avo expanded the currents inside him, prying jhred greatling asunder. just in time to hear abrels despairing scream rise above the cacophony. Chapter 10-22 The Pruning of the Path (I) chapter 10-22 the pruning of the path (i) aegis, this is sunrise. i confirm rupture containmentthe heaven remains unfallen. reality is stabilizing. negative. i do not see the stillborn. reflections are collapsing over each other. space is getting shunted throughout the affected regions. im widening my drones; we might be able to [distant explosions] never mind, i have him. hes in nu-scarrowburoh. aegis, number expected collateral. got a lot more people about to die for thousandhands little adjustments. --sunrise,aegis operative,voidwatch 10-22 the pruning of the path (i) jhred greatling died with an implosion of soulfire, but its collapse never reached the point of culmination. ingressing radiance crashed down like a wave against avos rippling soul, the metaphysical mass fusing to his while he consumed. the daemon shivered and twitched, still pinned by the fulgerhund. as glistening gore misted the air behind glinting implants flung free by the wind, his nucleus suckled the length of the uncoiled dragon and the twice-walker bound to its end like a mouth would slurp a noodle. caught in the wake of the ontological subsumption, the leaping electricity dancing along the length of the fulgerhund was stretched from its physical anchor. a lightning-infused mastiff strained against the gravity of avos frame, its being fighting to stay connected to the golem itself. in the throes of his meal, he barely noticed the force he was exerting on draus vehicle. nor abrel above them, standing on the precipice of a torn hallway. the sprawl of the spines districts spread out behind her like a panorama of devastation matching her face. he didnt even notice how each reflective gatewayonce boundwas collapsing as tunnels of space snapped from binary to unitary boundaries per the laws of baseline reality. the stability of existence reassumed its control like a funnel of space smashing across vectored regions, injecting everything caught between their paths elsewhere.0v3l.b11n. a vast wall of cascading space rushed over them as burst glass fell around them. before she could react, a separate tunnel swallowed abrel, peeling another section of the block away along with her. the world about avo blurred into confusion. the fulgerhund snapped free, now missing its tip, sailing into his wind-shaped grasp. reality clenched and fired them along what felt like a magnetic accelerator, injecting them from one place to another. volumetric reality around them lurched, and suddenly the layout of their environment glitched as gravity drew droplets of blood and debris like they had been plucked from the ground. they had been transposed out from threads of light glinting from a shard of glass, flung well past the stretch of mazzas junction. now, they were tumbling into a fall again, the expanse of the districts yawning wide beneath them. such a thing was only of secondary regard to avo, for so besotted was he on the taste of premium flesh and divine nectar that the sensations of the fall were but shadows in the backdrop. this was thrill. this was killing. this was all he had been meant to be and more. this was the actualization of what it meant to be a ghoul and a godclad bothto climb the apex in concept of power and predation both. [liminal frame] obtained - broadsword pattern ->twice-walker heaven template downloaded ->thaumic cycler x1 ->soul x1 ->ontologics x2 thaumic output - 4673 thaum/c the soul within avo expanded, its reach spreading vast as his ontology washed widerunning a just beyond the expanse of an entire district. yet with it came a bone-hollowing emptinesshis heavens remained too small, doomed much of his subreality to remain a lake of simulated light. docked to the borders of his frame was a diminutive cluster attached in a pocket. the frame he took from jhred had enclosed a tight knot about the faint ember that remained of its thaumic core. it seemed a little more than pimple upon his immensity now, though avo knew it possessed greater purpose than its present state of atrophy. with an injection of essence, it would unfurl and its center would unveil itself. there was a groove of absence at the apex of its soula place for the nous of a new master to mantle its ontology and serve as pilot. that thought pulled draus into avos mind. it was done. the killing was done. the high of his excitement had yet to fade, but the first needle of his rationality punctured through the ecstasy of the beast and his woundshaper. they needed to egress and flee. faintly, he heard another voice scratching at the back of his mind, its sound a distorted neigh of confusion. a war steed emerging from a fog, greeted by lands unknown and faces unfamiliar. pulling the mangled pulp that remained of jhred through a current of wind, avo thought to keep a snack for himself later as a personal post-feast snack to relive the high. the pieces of the corpse were halfway through as he turned to reach for the fulgerhund, planning to escape. the deafening screech of a falcon drew his attention back to the present. ashen feathers formed from the smoke crowning the collapsing megablock - a prelude to a theater of cleaving lights that partitioned the mushrooming fog building upon the wreckage. two more presences flashed upon the real, his liminal frame brushing themsensing their presence before sight offered any revelations. swallowing the fulgerhund into his yondegales, avo twisted in the air as he sought to make a quiet escape. the crash she portended came before she could finish. something struck the golem hard and it went into a spiral. strapped into protective gimbals, essus, chambers, and draus were spared the worst of the inertia as protective mechanisms compensated on their behalf. avo himself was not so fortunate. the sheer force of the impact sent his echohead slicing clean along the armor, unable to find a foundation of stability. he slipped free. his back struck the rear of the crew module as his plates and threaded fibers stopped the impact. again, he found himself more than grateful he had the bone demon body sheathe grafted. a regular ghoul would have smeared, and with his rend so high across both cyclers, real death would not be such a theoretical concept for him. winded from the impact, he felt the air catch in his chest several more times as he tumbled across the ceiling and walls, his foot catching chambers across the forehead. with each bounce, he acclimated more, celerostylus infusing the chaos with languor as he caught himself via his echoheads. they came to a final grinding halt as a pole of plasteel punctured through the cockpit toward the pilots gimbal. draus caught it and wrenched it out of shape with a single hand. with a final lurch, the last of their momentum died. then the shooting began. outside the golem, flechettes rained down. inside, it sounded as if they were seeking refuge from a hailstorm within a tin can. the metal around them deformed in dips and dents. holographic displays spewed nothing but errors, depriving them of any functional understanding of how long they could hold. chambers head was swiveling around in terror, his mouth still open in a constant scream. essus had simply leaned back, face showing the sheer immensity of his exhaustion from all that happened. shrugging himself free from the impression he left in the panels leading to the storage section, avo reached out with a haemokinetic tendril and peeked at the situation using his whisper. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 82% vent! vent! vent! irregular salvos of fire from gauss-flung weapons and other projectiles were bearing down on them from all directions. they were currently crashed, leaning against the interior of what looked to be a quick-fabbed tenement building crusted at the foot of an abandoned factory. at least he had a direction of which way he had to vent now. tearing herself free from the gimbal, draus shook her head and gestured for a link, unfazed by the constant hammering of falling gunfire. avo whipped out a tendril and fed her his sensory feed to the outside. +well. as far as the runs concern, the milks gone pretty sour.+ +not really,+ avo disagreed. +got mirrorhead. got his frame. killed thousands. good day.+ she snorted. chambers and essus were detaching themselves with haste. +well, youre bout to be a happy rotlick, cause the day aint over. counting at least sixty impact trajectories. give us twelve more seconds before one gets through.+ +going to vent out the side. move through the slum and get into the factory. find another way out after that. or+ +or?+ +got mirrorheads frame. shouldnt take long to graft.+ her mind lurched to a halt. apprehension and indecision formed over her like a stormcloud. she tilted her head at essus and chambers. +lets exfil first. bounty comes after.+ he didnt bother arguing. part of him considered just imbuing her with the frame and fueling her with the thuams, but he remembered how he felt after waltons node had forced his choice in the deep bazaar. he also remembered who decided to pull him along on a little trip afterward. draus deserved better. draus deserved to choose. zein and her path would just have to adapt. which, unfortunately, was what it did. after his soulfire rippled out and drew the dislocated heaven of the fulgerhund into his frame, avo used his entropic gale to dissolve a pathway out the back of the ruined golem and make for the factory. as soon as the exit was made, he paused and let draus through before following, casting the matter-eating fog over them. shots dipped into the darkness he channeled and never emerged out the other side. missiles, flechettes, slugs, and more. all fed into his hells expulsion and his rend trickled down percentage by percentage. the regular barreled through the cheaply made structures around her with a helpful burst from her scythe-like wings. an underground parking entrance for aeros stood out before them as shrapnel skipped overhead. more and more, however, the shots were being replaced. the fluid beams of fire returned, slicing clean through the golems remains, ignoring the entropic fog entirely. not wanting to find out what distracted the other they hurried. the answer came anyway as a massive orb infused with roaring force rose above the block they were rushing toward. loose harp-like cords formed a body most uncannily chimeric, human in torso, the four legs goat from the legs down. as avos frame brushed that of the bloodthanes, he grimaced. lumenlyrist, melodist of the cleaving dawn thaumic output: 978 thaum/c Chapter 10-23 The Pruning of the Path (II) chapter 10-23 the pruning of the path (ii) cas what am i even looking at? thousandhand gardening. and you didnt stop her? think about what you just said. stop her. she probably saw this conversation and laughed. im going down there. she probably foresaw that too. i dont care. people are dying, cas. this is not not the fucking dream. tell me about it. --valerie denton and cas eldcanduir, ninth column 10-23 the pruning of the path (ii) fissures of force and luminosity bled out all around, birthed by sound. strings wormed into reality as they inched out from beneath the skin of nonexistence. the world was an explosion of intersecting actions. avo drew in mass. light clashed against light as a shield of blossoming force rang against a cleaving blade. war ash scattered as impacts swept the sky, the air above flung open like a curtain. tons of matter swirled into a phalanx of blood. the weight of a dozen explosions struck the flowing armored umbrella avo formed over his group, and channeling his ghosts through its sheen, he witnessed a coming clash between rival titans, both sides ignorant of the others existence until mere moments prior. zein. this had to be by her design. all of it. a reflexive rage clenched inside avo; his oldest woundto be beneath the reins of his own fateflared anew. he would not be a slave to her, or her heaven. he had what he came for, and now it was time to break from the scene, regardless of whatever unseen machinations in play or the rising excitement feeding strength to the beast. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 68% rend capacity [galeslither]: 100%n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. flechettes and shrapnel burst against his protective construct. reaching out with new tendrils and linking with his cell, he projected surrounding threats directly into their cog-feed. the familiar bloodthane that once upon a time spiked him down into the warrens had vanishedits blazing facade breaking apart into a strum of lyrical notes that traveled out upon wavelengths of light and noise towards a row of bisected blocks from which approached the strider. essus and chambers both cried out before avo diverted the mem-data from their minds. it didnt do for the uninitiated to gaze upon the naked forms of divinity, but the strength of his new quicksand warded against the intrusion of reoccurring traumas. what it wouldnt ward them from was heard next: a chorus of ferocious barks sounded from the devastated urban hive all around them. recognition pealed from draus as she realized the coming threat first. she fired her projectile launcher at the parking entrance. a micro-missile whistled out and erupted outward in a shredding barrage of force. metal peeled before the onrush while creatures vaguely hound shaped descended upon them from all sides, slipping out from cracks running along buildings or out through the collapsed perimeters of the local shield-shaped megablocks. +woundhounds,+ avo said to the group. +nine of them. six hundred feet. closing fast.+ drawing in more mass, he sought to increase his own pace, to enshroud himself in power and speed through haemonkinetic means. a harshly cast thought from draus made him pause. +avo! keep your burn low! we can handle the dogsaint gonna be as easy if you pull the other clads over to us with your shine+ the link broke. he inflicted linger on his flowing defenses as they splashed against the side of the ruined entrance. a cauliflower bunker swelled around them as avo ensured the absence of any cracks. spewing his entropic gale free from his being once more, he directed it forward as he began to hollow all matter in their path. where the hells are we going? chambers cried, his feet slapping a staccato as he struggled to keep to the groups speed. out the other side, draus said. snatch some wings if we can! dive low. get down into the gutters and disapp fiery wings of brilliant blades flicked through the walls above them, splitting rows of stacked aeros in half. weight hammered down as structural supports split apart, and the building began to groan under its own mass. fuck fuck fuck fuck, chambers chanted. heavy slabs of plascrete fell. essus threw himself over the unarmored ex-enforcer, using his own body as a barrier against the first pelting rocks. fuck, draus concurred, snapping to an impossible stop just in time to avoid being crushed by an anvil of burning machinery. stay close, avo hissed. spreading his matter-dissolving gale out wide, he let the floors above dissipate against his hell while draus dragged the other two next to him. the hell for his woundshaper emptied nigh instantly, but he cast out the momentum-draining sphere of his galeslither the moment he ran dry. dust showered their forms. coiling his echoheads around the others, he felt bouncing rocks and detritus skip off against his armored form. in seconds, his total rend had gone from near absolute capacity to a full venting. applause to their continued survival came in the form of clicking pieces of rubble sliding out of place, clattering against armor. chambers coughing joined as accompaniment. protected within a pocket amidst the crumbled block, the cramped area found itself lit by essus neon wings. the visages of both the boy and avo were lined with static now, the damage breaking the hardware down, blow by blow. spheres going to pop in a bit, avo said, watching as the last few percentage points of his galeslithers rend capacity trickled down. manifesting woundshaper immediately, they became aware of each other, presences like twin supernovas in the void, heavens unsheathed in their fullest manifestations. shatterborn, forgemaster of broken things thaumic output: 849 thaum/c as avo punched down through a weave of ringed walkways spiraling down from beneath levels above, he saw the form of his new enemy. surfing out through a collapsing section of the city above swam a magma-coated titan of three stone heads and five gleaming arms of heated iron carried by a beheaded lamb hewn from the substance of obsidian. the chest of the shatterborn was an open smithy that hissed steam and was worked by countless burning human hands across eighteen rungs. it scooped wreckage and rubble as it twisted away from him, feeding its heart. with each thundering heartbeat, it seemed to grow faster, climbing from a barely perceptible speed to being a fourth as fast as the woundshaper. a curtain of sinuous light shredded the infrastructure in the backdrop behind the shatterborn, wrenching a chasm into shape. there, avo saw the stormtrees portals shining through the avalanche of smoke and destruction. the beast called for him to fight, but he knew better than to stray from his escape. staying and fighting was a risk that might end in his death. better that he play the role of the predator that he was rather than the warrior he wasnt. avo increased his velocity and moved to sink through the district itself. his plan came undone as the shatterborn slammed itself down into the foundations of the district and embedded its ontology into the foundations of the surrounding area. jets of steam hissed free from spreading cracks that bubbled with lava. tendrils shot out from avos back as he pried himself from the course of his moment. lava erupted out from around and beneath them as he barely quelled his canon of haemification in time to avoid the backlash of trying to convert liquid matter. new constructs formed along his back as he sailed through the air. propellers pushed him as arteries exploded free from his form, just as the shatterborn fired a scattered burst of screaming debris in his direction. his expanding network of blood greeted a dozen missiles of molten stone, their size growing per their acceleration. ejecting a flat sheet of blood from his being, avo harmonized the shield to a rapidly constructed limb and swung outward. the sheet met the rocks at an angle and vectors of force deformed from the desired path. from the severed shield were boulders parried, and by the time they struck the surroundings, they impacted as small hills. the shatternborns missiles missed. with the ejection of its consumed mass, slowness consumed its movements as it tried to dive into the lava below. not fast enough to avoid the tip of avos tendrils. unwilling to risk hubris, his blood bore the properties of tungsten and locus still. molten stone chipped and parted as he dipped his reach into his opponent. sprays of heat and magma oozed free. avos blood sank further and spread into branches. the three heads of the shatterborn screamed as the first of his lattices bled into its heart. there, in a forest of writhing arms, he brushed the presence of a metamind. his ghostjack surged. traumas flowed. the shatterborn and the bloodthanes mind broke in unison, stones and sequences tearing free and tracing arcs through the air. the volcanic activity died in an instant. the heat vanished. filtering through what sequences he brushed upon mulling his foe, he found himself annoyed with the truths the met-data offered: the bloodthanereva somethingstill had another backup cycler with heaven and hell attached. still, he felt her ontological signature scarring reality like a wound. as the soulfire rippled from him again, it washed over a swelling scab on the face of the tapestry with transparent links binding it to pieces of plascrete and passing flows of heat. there, avo beheld the burgeoning resurrection of another godclad for the first time. the moment was broken as a flash enveloped him from behind. channeling the perception of his whisper backward, he saw the spark expanding from between a flashing bridge behind him. then, came the heat and the force, its coming a roaring cataclysm that cooked the air, that uprooted all structures unbolted from the ground. it was only as two blocks vanished from sight as the explosion spread that he realized what he was looking at. a mini nuke had just gone off. dashing forward as fast as he could without pulping his passengers, he fled from the rushing updraft of the blast toward the stormtree itself. he had a good two miles to make, and the air was already beginning to cook. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 43% speeding unevenly through the air, he fired out grasping limbs to pull himself along whatever points of stability he could to right his path. measuring his current velocity against that of the encroaching blast, he found himself well beyond the damage radius and reconsidered his current trajectory toward the stormtree. then, the light faded. and so did the heat and the force. in its place sounded a single droning note so loud he had to strain against the vibrations to stop it from rattling his blood. another instance of zein snapped free from his being and winked out of sight. a beat later, the note ceased and a fist of pure force hammered down on the district. good work, little dagger. you spared me over seven steps. lets call this three for now. get to the tree and do kill captain draus before you arrive at the base. i would not like to lose her because of all this indecision. avo formed stacks of haemokinetic armor as he braced against the block-crushing impact. the yield of a swallowed warhead bore down upon the area as pure kinetic energy while he shaped enormous crimson echoheads to hold himself in place. but where blood held, fate betrayed him. the blocks around him shattered before the fighting, and just what felt like a falling star struck him from behind, guided by the arrow of fate. or at least, someone who could manipulate fate. blades of cleaving brightness screamed against his tungsten shell as a chorus of falcons cried out in surprise. the strider, bereft of an arm and a leg, turned to grapple the woundshaper. blades shaped by blood greeted wings lined with slashing shine and tumbled toward a storm-carved tree guarded by a trio of burning golems. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 71% Chapter 10-24 Beneath the Tree chapter 10-24 beneath the tree yeah? hello? what you want? im playing stormjumpersnuclear detonations? clad on claddammit, the fallwalkers againhighflame? stormtree cadres. open battle in the district of nu-scarrowbur? plot to assassinateokayokay, slow down. loop the district. in fact, loop the surrounding ones too. no one in or out. put the warrens back under lockdown. and somebody cast voidwatch. i need them to distract the guild while i figure out how to settle this mess. couldnt even wait for me to finish this match. -chief paladin naeko 10-24 beneath the tree it took but an exchange of strikes for avo to learn that abel greatling was his superior in a direct clash of force. edge struck edge as instruments of blood and light met in a calamitous joust. the striders wings flared and all that shone cleaved deep. where once he felt needling pricks beneath her resplendence, now came countless puncturing thrusts. gleaming blades lanced free from her wings and all the tungsten in the world wasnt enough. a gulf burst free at his center. he barely shifted draus and the others down just in time. the striders strike kept going, coring through blocks and bridges for as far as her shine could reach. around him, he could feel more of the district crumbling, more flickers of flowing ichor winking out. how much had this battle cost in collateral damage? how many unaffiliated lives had been consumed for no fault but simply existing in the wrong area? so much wasted flesh, never to be tasted, memories bound for dissolution and ghosts destined to wither away. drawing in more mass from the ground, avo replaced that which was unmade nigh instantly, but the flaying glare of the light too was unceasing. tendrils shot through rubble below him, roots sprouting high while he flattened his flowing shape to duck away from the worst of her gaze. he moved twice again as fast as his foe, but the range and immediacy of her assault drove him back under the weight of countless blazing spears. whatever constructs he lashed out toward her were severed by her radiant aura. a scything wave of light met a shredding barrage of haemokinetic shards he whipped free from his own being, the woundshapers outer layer spinning like a hurricane. her slash parted clean through the onslaught and bifurcated him along the middle just as the first of his brambles breached free from the ground and into her. naught but roiling smoke-like falcons and humming pulses of force greeted his encroachment. his touch slipped through striders form at an angle. she dissolved then, her falcons sweeping a full fifty feet away while her wing was mid-swing. the light faded and the cutting pressure went with it. an eruption of blood lashed out and found no purchase even as she remanifested. another series of explosions shook the district. light splashed against and through his midsection. his tonnage halved. time snapped forward. he reached down and seized the split segment of his ontology before it could destabilize and see his companions smeared. linking, time lurched again as both flapping wings reared high overhead as they slammed intoand then clean througha devasted megablock. the ever-flashing lightning of the storm tree illuminated both godclads as they made the final ingression to the heart of nu-scarrowbur. entire floors descended as a waterfall of ruin upon avo, showering his form and soaking harm from the invading brightness. the striders aura diminished for a moment. he took the time to think. fusing a capsule around draus and the others, he ejected them from his being as he increased his speed. he couldnt overcome abrels omnipresent influence while fighting at diminished efficiency. they would be fine if his phys-sims calculations were correct. safer than they would be with him right now, anyway. he cast his allies free and embedded them into a stable section of wall behind him. the regular could probably tear her way free, and hed try to locate them in the form of the galeslither once he had the chance to break from this fight. for now, he needed to approach abrel greatling. without the means to strike at her physically, his next best chance was to break and escape or influence her mind somehow. both options posed substantial risks as his haemokinesis was the only thing that allowed him an advantage of speed and force over her. the galeslither might as well be a still target for her attacks, and if she had anything capable of projecting heatlike the body of an enforcer armed with a fusion burner, for instance, backlash and thaumic overload would be certain to follow. that, and he had already suffered the weight of a paradox earlier by whatever space-affecting canon inverted him out of his galeslither. there was at least one other godclad here whose abilities directly contradicted his. rays of light stabbed clean through the collapsing tonnage of the megablock. his cog-feed whined with warnings of building rend. every strike from her painted gaps in his person. every attempt he made to counter was met with destruction or absence. he needed to change tactics. he needed to strike her from symmetrical footing. it was such a thought that spurred his heaven to speak. inject your rend into her, master the suggestion was a strange one. his hells dissolved matter and or drank momentum. perhaps the galeslithers could affect the strider, but even then it would be a temporary measure. the supplicant knows muchsymmetry, as kae has spoken. that is the critical weakness of every god, every godclad. through all hells are we bound by a singular domain: entropy. perhaps you might not able able to strike them, but you should be able to transgress into their boundaries and infuse that which festers within you into her, seeing as you could manage the action by joining yourself to a rendsink. for now, we simply need a method of encircling herstrip her focus and surround her. part of him wanted to ask how she intended for him to perform such a feat, but the memory of puppeteering bodies and corpses returned to him. he didnt need to fight in such a centralized manner. indeed, holding to the superstructure of the woundshaper itself was proving to be an increasing liability in this battle. where abrels canons dealt a certitude of damage, he needed to drain her endurance and awareness through other means. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 89% his structure expanded into rings of flowing plates. each other layer ran curved to deflect some of the flashing light. most importantly, he injected his central mass through the collapsing floors of the block and into the ground beneath him. bodies and lives were swallowed in the onslaught. his thaums and ghosts were building. narrowed by battle, his attention belonged to abrel greatling alone. bursting free from the other side of the block, flicking strikes split the air between them as tons of his mass were snipped free from his grasp. with each stroke she made with her wings, she transposed herself on a haze of falcons, using the weightlessness of intangibility to keep pace with his speed. slowly, the velocity advantage shifted over to her. but not fast enough. again, he found himself beneath her. only this time, the nucleus of his being was tunneling through the ground beneath her as she dispensed with the rest of his vessel. with a chambered burst, he erupted out from beneath her. testament to her training and reflexes, she noticed him immediately and slashed down. light sliced through the foundations beneath her as a spike of blood was split in twain. and then the strider froze. heaven detected classification: sphere i [est. 8 thaum/c] ->res-reserve unit-3 rend capacity [woundshaper]: 78% she was suddenly a giant golden sunflower with seeds made from solid diamonds. this too, didnt last as he continued infusing her with the rend from both hells. by this point, her first circles were only soaking single percentage points from the massive pools of his galeslither and woundshaper. if he continued, he would a line of dissolving flame threaded through his torso. avos mind went blank as he felt both of his lungs combust from within. inhaling hurt. existing hurt. three more beams tore through him through the block itself, slicing clean through three of his echoheads as he toppled from the guilder in pieces. a loud cry bellowed from the outside. something was flashing again. abrel! are yousomething exploded. someone screamed. his cog-feed glitched and a tide of rushing soulfire washed over him. it felt wrong, somehow. the same sensation youd get when someones organs wash up against you in the sea. master there are pieces of a fallen heaven in that. i could rupture detected domain: [sight] sight? how would that avo got his answer when both his eyeballs burst apart. he first choked before the searing pain as his sight vanished. then, he seethed as he heard abrel scream with frustration. she mustve suffered from the same effect. he wasnt going to get to eat her eyes. the beast in him whimpered. his flesh began to bubble and mend from the inside, fibers reaching out to knit his flesh anew. for the umpteenth time, he found himself pleased that he got the echoheads implanted. chittering, the shape of his surroundings came back to him, and he found abrel standing as the thrusters folded out from her back again. he lashed out for her and caught her by the ankle. by the strength of her combat skin and her implants, he felt his blow ring off as if striking memetic matter. lashing out with two more echoheads, he forced himself up using one that remained and realized his lower body was still laying halfway across the room. her thrusters snapped off as one of his tails struck her. a projectile darted out from her back. he spored the air with his mime-fog and latched onto the ceiling. whatever she fired at him punched through the wall and missed. blinded and enraged, she turned and fired a dozen more shots using some kind of auto-gun implant under her wrist, the slugs exploding on impact, shredding the room even more. and coming nowhere close to hurting avo. pushing off from the ceiling, he launched himself down using one echohead as a spring and the others as unfurled fingers. he was like a wolf-spider from days of old springing down upon its prey. when he touched her this time, he would liquefy her and tear the frame from her corpse as well. so close. to kill two greatlings in one day would be an impossible force swept him and abrel out of the block. the room warped and twisted around him as a concussive wave blasted him through the walls and into the open air. gravity took him again and lightness filled his thoughts and body. rain. that was the first sensation he noticed. rain licking away his wounds. rain falling through down from on high. it was getting to be midnight again. channels of water were still allowed to flow from on high. distantly, he could hear wailing sirens making their approach as well. as water stang color and shapes back into his sight, he blinked, only to find his vision directing a chain of lashing fire into the air. around him, a thousand other such beams split the brightening sky over nu-scarrowbur. passing across the ringed portals of the stormtree, avo suddenly felt himself caught in a net of unseen force. his momentum drained. his thoughts cleared. coughing, he spat out fried pieces of his insides as he opened his mouth more to take in the healing waters. the air around him rushed and turned. he felt himself placed against soft soil and muddied ground. there was a static buzzing beneath the earth. a building force sang out around him. he felt a whisper from the past brush over his mind. two. you are close. there were so many deviations, but we are on the precipice of a most delicious future, little dagger. you will thank me when this is done. zein, he growled. pushing himself up using his echoheadsthree of which were regrowing, he found himself basked in the warmth of three flame-encased golems. one of them drew closer. avo expanded a lattice of blood around him. and then a rasping voice echoed out from the first flame. stay zero, consang. i wouldve fried you instead of catching you if i wanted to get bloody. a pause followed. still got half a mind to, see. your arrival has fucked my home up something bad. but hey, thats life sometimes. a snort. there was a disorienting disjunction with the way the man spoke. listen. a couple of my old friends wanna talk to you. say that you got something of theirs. some kind of helix. say that a certain thousandhand pointed them this way to my home. you, uh, got something to say about that? the flames brightened. avo growled. the low masters were involved in this chaos too. why wasnt he even surprised? zein. zein was why. Chapter 10-25 Fate Denied (I) chapter 10-25 fate denied (i) hello, vincintine. please put the gun down. youll only delay this conversation by an hour. it takes some time for me to get into a different body. hmm. this smell. i know you i know you i have a favor to ask. i made your nightmares go away some years back. i didnt ask for much then. im not going to ask for much now. right citrus man. i dream about you sometimes, you know. but i gotta ask. howd you get in? this place isnt [laughing] not exactly publicly accessible. same way anyone gets anywhere. knowledge, and enough time. your guards are sleeping. the golems attacking your districttheyre being driven by the low masters. i can help you stop them. ...just like that? just for free? no. not for free. i need a favor. i need you to help me do something. are you going to put that gun down? talk first. well see how i feel after. -exchange between walton and vincintine ripperjack javvers 10-25 fate denied (i) the fires encasing the three golems dimmed, and with light bleeding like a trinity of dissolving stars, the machine anchoring the divine revealed their shells. layered in rounded armor, their design seemed more like armored knights melded upon a wheel of gleaming gold. plates of armor were fused around a central cross-shaped cockpit, and in each each limb there seemed to be a jutting emitter that resembled the look of a lance. they each were no longer than twenty feet wide and thirty feet high, but avo felt the touch of something sophisticated in their make as they entered the closeness of his frame. there was something of breadth to their thaumic nature - sophistication in the unseen architecture that he didnt feel in either the galeslither or the sangeists. as the first golem drifted close, it halted ten feet away from him. avos haemokinetic wreathe coiled as he prepared to siphon the necessary mass from his environment to fully realize his woundshaper. unlike abrel, the machines gathered before him held form in matter. it would not take much from him to see their dissolution. arcing missiles struck down from on high as clouds of rising ash spread across the district. entire blocks burst apart as threads of light danced and scattered into blasting shockwaves. three buildings were melted into a molten rod before being fired into the sky at something unseen beyond all the smoke. nu-scarrowbur was coming apart at the seams. people were dying. and that the center of it all, the stormtree remained untouched. certain portals along its rising stretch were closing one after another, but most still remained open. avo wasnt sure how the tree functioned, but with how scattered the stormtree and scalper forces were spread, and how he found himself only faced with three golems, there didnt seem to be much worry on the part of the locals to protect the namesake of their guild. you smell a bit like him, you know? the words spoken by an unseen individual caught him off guard. a dissonant tone occupied the mans voice, and he gave the sense he regarded avo as a passing fancy rather than an adversary. he warned me about his heh, brothers. told me theyd be coming after you. gave me means to subvert some of their phantamics. suppose thats how i didnt get bent by them when i jacked into these golems. nothing but mem-cons and whispering ghosts in here. too bad for them the cracks in my head have already been filled. the central mass of the golem hissed and opened like an unfolding crucifix. holding within a grav-generated gimbal, a heavily chromed man with dark eyes, pale skin, and long flowing hair stepped out to breathe in the ash of his home and greet the ghoul. there was something predatory in his eyes, and the way his cybernetic exoskeleton was half-laced over his flesh made him look closer to a botch-graft than an actual threat. yet, the emptiness in his gaze told avo another tale. something inside this one was lost, and it would never be found again. not truly. his expression harkened to a joining between draus and essus, possessing all the cold viciousness of the former, and all the mind-broken trauma of the latter. he fellhis feet more akin to chrome hooves as he left the weightless clutch of his piloting seat and sank ankle-deep into the soil. so close, he seemed to be draus height though gaunter by far in build. holding out his arms, he embraced the falling ash as if a child reaching out for snow in a vacation ad for vard heldjmar in the skuldvast. echoheads chittering, avo mapped his surroundings to track for any threats. rage boiled inside him at slaughter deniedabrel had been saved by the explosion. he had not felt her die; worse, he didnt even get to kill and taste her flesh. it was as if the battles were conspiring against him, fortune and misfortune turning deliberately too why? avo snarled, turning. his echoheads coiled and lashed out with agitation. he couldnt see her, but she was there, inside himinside the meat of time itself, like a parasite he couldnt strike. why? is this all for fun? all these little twists. manipulations. why? couldnt just do it yourself. why do this? for the first time, confusion bled over into ripperjacks face. who who are you talking to? avo turned back to the man and grunted a dismissal. the poor fool thought himself spared. thought he was a player in this game. thought he had a glimpse of the bigger picture. tell him, if you will, zein said. it makes no difference now. he has served his purpose. his golems were directed against abrel greatling. the mem-data within their locus will have logged this engagement against her cadre once they are purged of the hungers influence. that will make them look most culpable. you''re framing them? avo said. the wind rushed over his person. immediately, his cog-feed cried warnings that a galeslither was approaching. over rustling grass and shivering ash, three figures spilled free from an unzipping breeze. draus landed on her feet, gun raise and wing-scythes wide. essus and chambers toppled out behind her, confusion writ upon their faces. im providing the most desirable cover story possible, zein said. ripperjacks features turned stone-like. he stared at draus. his eyes turned back over to avo. ghoul? i didnt send that galeslither. who are you talking to? answer me. talk. fucking talk a shroud of time shivered over draus, essus, and chambers. from avo, zein stepped free, head held high as she stepped free, offering ripperjack a little wave. i thank you for all the assistance you provided. without you, my pruning would have been substantially more strenuous. the bedrock of confidence broke within ripperjack. the mans lip began to curl, his eyes darting between avo and the aged woman fading in and out of reality to the oscillating flow of time. i what? it was the easiest way to ensure your compliance, zein said. you remembered him. and using the mutual link, i bent you to my will. then, why zein waved a hand. ripperjack flickered and vanished. the golems he commanded hovered behind him, silent and unmoving. you should take their heavens as well, zein said, turning her head back over to regard avo. gauss flechette sipped through her form as she smiled. you will hate me more, momentarily, captain draus. two more shots went through her. she tuned out of reality before either could hit her. why? avo said, stepping closer to her. something splattered down into the mud next to him. the metallic shine of a blood-coated missile caught his eye, and the mini-nuke festooned as its payload made his tension spike. also, zein said, remember to copy the pattern of the warhead next time. it took more work than expected for me to pluck this from the husk you left behind. no, avo said. he cast out his matter-unweaving winds. the mini-nuke flickered behind him. zein shook her head. she wasnt fading now. instead, she was growing increasingly solid. increasingly stable, like the waters of time were cementing her true self back into form. i am much like you in this regardi refuse anything that i perceive another to force upon me. but this is not force. this is the path. this will happen. a cry of agony sang out from everything stone-like around them. plascrete shook and rattled. structures dissolved into sand. ah. reva has died. zein frowned. a bit early for my liking. disappointing. let us see if the others can hold until she resurrects. you planned all of this? avo asked. using the scalpers. their golems. turning the low masters'' hunters over to him oh, no, zein laughed. much of this was but a happy occurrence. the original plan was to see the bloodthanes occupied. but when i spoke to him, the path revealed such delightful things. truth be offered, your father did mend his mindand in him left protections against the other servants of the hungers. i merely came upon the sleeper by happenstance. avo, draus said. her voice was steady, but she never averted her gun. what the hells is happening? zein winked at the regular. im ensuring your glory, captain. just as i am ensuring the incrimination of abrel greatlings cadre as part of a grand conspiracy to assassinate the ambassador. or as an unfortunate victim in a grander conspiracy between rogue parties of stormtree, ori-thaum, and highflame. it depends on how the fighting goes, really. whatever the case, you will be our hero, dear girl. you stopped a chivalric plot. you and your new fallwalker cadre. cadre? draus whispered. yes, zein said, it is all by my desig her head promptly exploded. Chapter 10-26 Fate Denied (II) chapter 10-26 fate denied (ii) [warning: ninth-sphere liminal frame detected] veylis. mother. i see. you have sensed me. i have. youre falling into your old habits again. predictably twisting and pruning every possible future down to the quick. you didnt leave enough time between your skimmings upon the surface of time. did you expect me to be too occupied by my own affairs to notice? ah. but your house seemed so messy. would you blame me for making such an assumption? no. instead, i will blame you for being discovered and allowing yourself to be killed by me. [laughter] you make me proud, my girl. and you have not yet slain me. and you break my heart always, mother. always. [sigh] veylis i will stray. i will not bend. i will prevail. i will fix what has been broken. as is my will. as is what you have taught me. oh? did i teach you to murder your own father? to cast all that he had fought for into decay and ruin i murdered father? i was trying to make him eternal. in place of accusation, i will ask: what did you do? what did you do to the man you loved? you speak as if you were any better when you stained your glaive with his blood. that thing was not jaus. and i committed no such act. the leaping of the ladder was not of my doing, but a response to your defilement. against your own bloodyour own father my father will live again. you will live again. i will make everything right. i will not bend. i am sorry. i love you. i loved him. but this is more than love. this is the culmination that is. all that will be. and he was going to give away our ability to choose for ourselves. to voidwatch. our from our hands. i could not could not i am still your mother, veylis. it does not shame you to cry before me. no. i will not. i will not. i am a child no longer. i am human no longer. but you will always be my girl. no matter the path. ... come. come and embrace your mother before you try and kill her. let us have this, at least. [temporal distortion detected] ah. it feels as it always has. your shoulders feel softer, though. have you been negligent in your conditioning? you will learn how negligent i have been soon. [soft laughter] we will be family again. when this is over. when we are done. that is a certainty between us, at the least. and if someone else wins this game? if another imposes their desire on what is to be. well, dear daughter, i suppose we will always have yesterday. oh, and do change the taste of your eyes. make them sour or bitter. it dissuades people from eating them. through the dust and chaos, he watched as something large swam beneath the murk of the ash. highflame! to me! abrels voice was a piercing avian shriek. from the length of her soundwaves, the phys-sim estimated her to be only a hundred feet awayand closing fast. falcons spilled free from the ash surrounding them they extended into arms and legs. without any more hesistation, avo flared his soul and reached to subsume the heavens of the three golems. they came loose into the grasp of his frame, like plucking fruit from a branch. with all his bounty claimed, he turned to commit to the final task that concerned him: escape. the new portal forming at his feet was an anomaly. he didnt know how a stormtree functioned or what the rules of its canons were, but he knew that staying here and fighting was to risk draus and the others. firing his reflexes, he laced a circuit of blood into draus'' mind and cast his intentions at her. no words were exchanged. she was of the same regard. it was long past time to leave, and this run had gone beyond sour by means above their control or comprehension. as the strider painted itself into shape, as the rain was wrenched away from striking soil and diverted into the grasp of another, as the wind screamed to the eruption of a volcano that basked the surrounding dust in the glow of a lantern, avo pulled essus off the ground and jumped down through the new portal. draus followed soon after, chambers kicking and flailing, tucked beneath one of her arms. descending the portal of the stormtree was not like stepping from one threshold to another. no. there was a destructiveness to its transfer and interconnectedness to its pathways. almost immediately, avo felt his form compressed into a forking bolt of lighting. matter dissolved into energy within this domain, and before his senses, the district of nu-scarrowbur was stripped down to the bone. all things bearing circuitry and static expanded into fluid outlines as he found himself shuttled through the countless arteries within the tree, striking and bouncing from the other only bolt of transferred materialdraus and her carry-on. they sank down to the roots of the tree first, awareness spreading as the real crumbled down to facets of lightning and destruction expressed through the mythology of an ever-growing tree. behind them came the intrusion of another presence. someone else had dived in. someone else was coursing through the same channels after them. but they were a step behind. upon striking the foundation of the roots of the tree, the entire architecture thundered and he was launched upward, light peeling along his perception. for a fleeting instant, the world around him peeled into shape as he twisted up the length of the tree, peering past its thaumaturgic flesh. his eyes greeted the cityscape around him, and he found himself staggered by the damage. nu-scarrowbur was a ringed district once. ringed in architecture. ringed in design. ringed in its aerolanes and streetways. there had been a slope to its geography before the fighting and warheads disfigured it; the stormtree at the center of the district was nested as a rose clutched between rising layers of domed plasteel. no more. carpets of devastation formed detritus-paved pathways from hollowed structures and mangled bridges. between the warheads, the godclads, and the fighting in general, no section of the city was spared. much of the southeast side was flattenedits cause of unmaking a mix of heavy bombardment, chasms spewing molten heat, and blood-drenched trails that gouged the urban hellscape to its foundations. all that dared move now were the encroaching form of godclads swimming through the thick of the falling ash and rain. a few among them traded attacks still, but most were pressing for the tree, the remnants of the highflame cadre following abrel while bloodthanes and wargs followed them. light began to build around avos perception. he was a bolt loosed out toward the bottom of layer two, and he braced for impact as the hexagonal plates approached. his gut emptied when he sank right through and leaped through another layer of the city while colors and sounds flitted by around him. the exit came with an explosion of sound and light. he tore free from a portal and draus followed in his wake. tumbling out, he found himself tossed into the gasp of gravity as he slipped through the holographic static of an emptied aerolane. a new landscape expanded before his eyes, the stretch of the horizon bright and pristine, crystalline edifices gleaming with a mirror-perfect polish while pale sting ray-like bioforms swept across the sky. the sky. the naked sky. avo felt his mind stutter to a halt as the lilac hue of the darkstar glared at him, painting the shining district below with its ebbing face. rain fell hard here, and the streets and grids slickened by the wet. they werent in the spine anymore. this was lights end. they were topside again. turning as he fell, the first sounds of drone sirens cut through the air as he beheld the vast metallic cliff-face that speared upward to gut the clouds. beyond the overcast sky shook a place of sound, light, and splendor. beyond the overcast sky were the tiers. the wail of sound drew his focus. a tadpole-like drone dove out for him, with its wisp-thin tendrils outstretched. along its pellucid shell projected a symbola fang manacled by twin chains: the sign of the exorcists. forty feet long and thirty wide in radius, the machine held enough space for either him or essus within the opening beneath its cage. with reflexes still running high, avo whipped a haemokinetic conduit into its shell before it could draw too close and spread his influence. it took him less than a second to strike the locus. it took him three more to crack its protections. exorcist necros were competent across the board. but with all his traumas, and with the nether crippled so, all it took for him to assume control was a bit of damage and a brief resequencing. he left the drone-jock entombed within his gimbal, ignoring the urge to jump over and subsume her mind as well. instead, he directed the machine low to catch him and essus before they fell and affixed himself to its top using blood-made cables. several other tadpoles speared past him in pursuit of draus and chambers, and nearly a dozen more were swimming through the air to come after him. diving full power to the thrusters, he accelerated after draus and away from the portal. the single branch of the stormtrees stretching limb began to surge brightly. the pursuing jocks werent prepared for another person to dive through. they especially werent prepared for said person to be a full-blown godclad. the strider was stitched into existence bolt by lashing bolt. the arms and the legs came first. soon would be the body and wings. avo dove low after draus as he curved down along the buildings. less than a second later, winged light cut out to cleave through the blocks. and failed. from glass and alloy, the buildings remained unblemished. memetic matter. avo sighed. now things were definitely going to be an incident; they were fighting where the fated put their imps. it looked like zein might be getting her frame-job done yet. Chapter 10-27 Take the Flame (I) chapter 10-27 take the flame (i) you know what, soldier? youre wasted as regular. i do somethin wrong, higher? no. youre doing too many things right. killing too many targets. not dying. hells, your merits are through the roof. youre making an awful lot of instruments very happy people. i aim to please. nah. you aim to kill. you love to kill. i see it. you dont need to play coy with me. but ah. never mind. youd make a good clad, you know that draus? dont quite know what youre spittin, sir. dont glower. you know im right. there are pieces missing inside you, consang. pieces that were never there to begin with. but hey, that just makes you perfect for this city. listen, when this war shit is done, im gonna recommend you for axtraxis. permission to speak freely, higher. [sigh] shoot. break my heart and tell me all you ever wanted was to fight and serve the cause sir, ive seen what the frame does to people. i see how greatling is. i dont want it. i dont want to be them. i dont wanna burn my days killin the small. theres no gleam in that. that aint the dream. no gleam. draus: youre more than worthy and wasted as a reg. -guard-captain winston nicoma to first-dragoon jelene draus, fourth guild war 10-27 take the flame (i) avo cut through the skies and the strider followed. draus vanished the stretch of a bridge and drones cut out after her. spearing through the air at one hundred and eighty miles an hour was slow for a guild-grade aerial vehicle, but that was by necessity; the district was a hive of architecture and memetic architecture at that. short of the tadpole turning into a golem with control over forces, inertia still held a tax. something abrel quickly discovered as she tore out from around the corner and struck the curved side of the twin-pronged tower that looked carved out of nothing but vivianite. the drone fell like a whistling arrow at avos command. countless shining bridges spilled out between blocks and streets as he plummeted. beyond the dilapidation and decay that gripped the lower warrens, lights end resembled a orderly nest, and its occupants were all part of the hive.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. encased in rectangular glass passageways, he caught sight of countless curious bystanders as he speared past. there were thousands of them gathered behind windows and depolarizing walls. unlike the fear and chaos that gripped the streets of nu-scarrowbur, he could glean no such tension brimming in their relaxed postures. this was just a curiosity for thema break from whatever their professions demanded. they watched with the eyes of bored office workers taking in a peculiar sight rather than the leering bloodlust of a crucible spectator. life and death for him and his allieswas but a passing amusement. when he crossed from sight, they would return to their stations and proceed along the railways of routine. essus voice bellowed out in low-pitched alarm with each pivot and turn. avo fastened them tighter to the tadpole. blades of light flashed out at him just as he dipped down to sail alongside a hypertube tunnel, glass-casings coating the gaps between the latticed tubes shrouded him from a slashing wing. light splashed and broke into chipped particles. it was like watching a glowing stream of blades shatter against something unbreakable. the two absolutes clashed and two canons shuddered under the weight of paradox. reality jolted as abrels wings sliced against mimetically guarded metal and glass. her strokes bled blurring mirages as multiple geometries in the environment shivered. avo did not turn from the opportunity presented to him. the second circle of his galeslither came alive in the chaos. a pocket seized the opening in the air behind him just as he turned a corner. light flashed out off the reflections cast by the mercury gleam of an exorcist tadpole twisting between the latticed pathways interlacing the blocks. he knew he succeeded when he felt his frame rattle and all light behind him vanished. too much paradox for abrelshe needed to vent her rend or switch to another the world shook. avos cog-feed sounded with the detection of vented rend. from shadows and darkness flew forth swarms of darting falcons. they were not smoke-like as the ones enwreathing the strider''s arms and legs. instead, they bore a fluid quality to them as they rushed out. uncountable in number, they washed out from every spot of smoke or darkness around him, diving out to smear themselves against passing drones or clefts left between buildings. there wasnt the need. the lightrail of the hypertube was a chainlink of crystalline shards that ran twelve cars long for a total of five hundred feet. geometries of light played across a canopy of crisscrossing beams focused through various lenses that plated the exterior of the tubing. from vicarities and taken memories, avo recalled the locus to be at the front, and so thusly he rushed into the train. releasing essus and chambers as he arrived at the empty control nexus of the lightrail, a still locus rested around metallic rings and arm-like apparatuses that projected a grav-field to hold the mind-crystal in place. avo was about to connect to the locus when he suddenly froze, tendril an inch away from touching its structure. he had no idea how deep the low masters subversion of the local nether ran. but if he lingered, he faced fatal odds. growling, he took the plunge and connected to the locus and dived. a simulated lobby began to boot and glitch behind his eyes. the world dissolved and immediately he felt his wards rattle. the first structures that manifested next to him were twisted in sequence and memory. from memory, most public system loci ran on simply palaces and lobbies. bland, grey rooms with simple shapes and doorways for easy accessibility. what he saw were mutations. faces and traumas and fire and other places fissured around the empty expanse he was in. mem-cons lined every sequence he could behold. if this place was a body, every sinew would be infected, and the bones would be rotten to the core. he was at the base of a tree and even the roots were trying to bite into him. his quicksand cracked slightly before it adjusted. the next few impacts broke against him as he surveyed extent of the affliction, trying to find the root phantasmics governing this place. the more he studied, the wider his insides chasmed. perhaps he could clean the locus out if he had eighty tons of mass accelerating his thoughts, but right now he had but a short window. jacking out, he could hear a torrent of water crashing just outside. he didnt have the time. he needed some means of accessing the system fast and ignoring the mem-cons and traumas outright. something to punch right through without destroying all the sequences. maybe if there was someone expendablehe should have kept that exorcist with avo paused. he snapped around, eyes fixed on chambers. mem-cons, he said, inspiration striking him. expendable. durable. he grinned. chambers took a step back, lip quivering. consang, please avo stung the mans mind with a thread of blood and fused it to the locus. chambers cried out in surprise as he toppled back onto a flower-petaled seat blooming with foam cushions. error codes burst in front of him as a holoprojector failed to receive any resources from the locus. start the train. avo said, hoping that his gambit would work. just just start the train? water slouched close. something unbolted outside. now, avo growled. chambers whimpered and his face scrunched with concentration. a current of ghosts flowed through the link. in the nexus, the locus rose and began to gleam. suddenly, the doors all snapped shut as an upbeat tune began to play. the exterior walls along the train depolarized and the outside world turned transparent. a flood of water smashed into the lightrail. just as the train thrummed. light speared down from the various lenses placed across the room. light peeled away the outer skin of the train as the exterior world suddenly turned into a pale stream. only a whine gave away the fact that they were traveling. the train didnt shake, didnt bounce, didnt even groan upon metal plates. being injected across a concentrated beam of light did not have anything to do with sound, after all. +welcome aboard line thirteen of the easterly light expanse. please ensure all thaumic devices are switched off. affecting the domains of light and space are strictly prohibited+ a chuckle came from chambers. he pointed to his link. i i did it! i fuckin did it! he threw his hands up and his coat opened. he exposed himself to the group as he let out an incoherent shout of triumph. fuck yeah! whose the best half-strand in a loud crack rattled from the back of the train car. past countless light-dappled doorways separating each shard, a figure crawled out from a puddle of water, and behind them followed another. warning: high rend signature detected warning: high rend signature detected rising from pools of water, abrel greatling emerged from the shallow film of water like it was a deep pool. she planted bare leg roped with wired musclejust regrown from the regenerative properties of the midnight rains. a single member of her cadre followed her, coughing as he tore his cracked helmet free from his head. his skin was copper while his eyes shone pale blue. he lacked an inch of height next to abrel, but his bulk more than enshadowed hers. basked in the light of the traveling train, the greatling collapsed her own helmet. for a heartbeat, she stood there, eyes bloodshot, face contorted in palpable fury. her lips peeled back as she bared her perfect teeth. an inhuman noise of primal hatred escaped from her. she let out a breath. she took a step forward. behind, her only accompanying ally followed. avo let his echoheads rattle and growled. fine. two. he could deal with two. he still had his heaven. he still had his ghosts. he still had draus. he cast out a tendril of blood and connected to her. +going to draw their attention. shoot them when i+ she strode next to him and flexed her wings. +we rupture the inside of the train and we all die. i know how it works.+ avo paused. +so. we do this the ugly way.+ he felt her narrowed gaze glance up at him through her helmet. +you tryin to sound disappointed?+ he grunted a laugh. +no.+ abrel greatlings footsteps rose to an uneven sprint. he walked out to meet her. +looks like im going to get to taste more guilder flesh after all.+ Chapter 10-28 Take the Flame (II) chapter 10-28 take the flame (ii) [sighing] [sighing intensifies] [deep inhale] widen the quarantine. pocket the entire yuulden-yang sovereignty. tell voidwatch to delay as long as they canim jumping over now. abrel greatling? daughter of uthred greatling? [sound of head striking and denting steel] who else knows? well, you and trainee kitzuhada keep those memories to yourself now. i know uthredthe mans a half-strand; this isnt just going to end up being a mess, its going to be a political mess across the board. ill see if i can intercept that hypertube wherever it''s going. id be interested in figuring out how they got the lightrail to run considering the state of the nether and all the mem-cons. keep your ansible open and open a tunnel to firmament. we need full spectrum tracking. their technology should work better now that the ghosts are missing. lets see if i can pinch this cut closed before someone finally nicks an artery and starts another bloody war. -chief paladin naeko 10-28 take the flame (ii) smoke-made falcons coated abrels form as she took to her stride. her second followed close behind, glowering at them behind a sheen of nanolaminated skin grown over his six eyes. his frame was still hot with rend, and reality ebbed into shape around him like a wrung towel. neither godclad drew upon their canons as they approached, but the air still filled with the pungence of coming violence. with the lightrail at risk, this was to be done in the oldest fashion: close and brutalfist against claw, and tooth against fang. avo had no quarrel with their intentthere was a sweetness to applying the most personal touch. just as there was sweetness in being able to exploit both his hells against the guilders. he licked his fangs as he regarded abrels second in particular. as to why the man didnt just vent, avo could not say for certain, but hells usually destroyed or destabilized in their attempt to balance ones subreality. neither effect boded well for the hypertubes stability. his unsteady gait and a furtive glance at the greatling betrayed that. yes. avo took in his perfumed scentthe spice sting of cold sandalwoodand knew which would be his prey first. a network of blood spread out from him, linking essus and chambers to his metamind. +going to trap them in stasis,+ avo said. he marked a spot right in front of his foes. +freeze them. then hit them with barrage from my other hell.+ it was a good plan, he thought. a neat plan. something that would be hard for the guilders to counter. draus unspooled her monowire and angled her scythe-like wings forward. her chitin-titanium bio-rigs build and avos echoheads made it hard for them to stand side by side, so she cast a ghost into his metamind detailing regular room-clearing stances for close-quarters combat. avo acquiesced and shifted, holding himself to an angle. he let her play above and left while he chittered forward right and below. +theyre gonna be faster than us. hit harder than us. aint gotta clue what mods theyre runnin but itll be a touch above ours.+ objects she considered non-essential lit up in her cog-feed as she marked them. even absorbing all the walls and seats in the train-shard wouldnt push avo over another ton in mass. +use it to herd and trap em. if you can fix one or both in place, itll be novaotherwise, you shape the territory+ she turned her head to chambers. +keep the tubes bright and runnin until were done. long as were skimmin light, im bettin their heavens and hells stay inside them, so keep us runnin. dont stop or were all snuffed.+ she glanced at avo. +most of us, anyway.+ wordlessly, essus stomped to a stop behind both of them. he stood the last line to chambers, and his mind, though worn with stress and recoiling from trauma, spoke clearly of what he considered his personal duties. the father would have never been a street squire with his deficit of viciousness, but perhaps there was something greater to be uncovered in one noble enough to offer themselves to the altar of combat yet, regardless of distress or certain defeat. pulling his attention away from the man, avo growled a laugh as he rapped draus on a pauldron. +can still kill you quick and graft the frame.+ she scoffed and narrowed her eyes at the approaching godclads. a bit less than two hundred feet now. four or so train shards separated them. +hang on to your skin, rotlick. might just get the chance to do it in a minute. you fight how i say, i think we got+ static surged through abrels armor. a dozen impact trajectories flashed red. avo drew wide a sphere of stasis fifty feet ahead of them. flashing before him flechettes bearing transparent needles filled with murky fluid halted at the very edge of his stasis. his galeslithers rend dipped alongside the phys-sims velocity estimations for the projectiles. beyond the halt, abrel and her comrade vanished into wafting tendrils of smoke through the ventilation. alarm rose from draus. she highlighted the needled projectiles and urged him to form a haemokinetic wall to seal off the space in front of him and block up the vents. +ego-screamers. dont get hit by that. nasty piece of coldtech we got from omnitechinjects nanos patterned with a broken mind-upload. they brick eventually against a meta, but itll still eat through your brain.+ avo formed a solid sheet of blood in front of the shots and sealed the airflow. tendrils snapped free from his body and tunneled through the innermost structure of the lightrail. he kept things close to avoid damaging the crystalline hull, but he realized that everything within remained his for the shaping. he began to draw in as much mass as he could while a protective perimeter blossomed out from his arteries. sending his whisper out on patrol, he bathed everything in front of him using the phantasmics perception and caught sight of twin accretions fast on approach. +there.+ he marked the guilders. the others saw them too. the guilders managed to cross seventy feet in a fraction of a second, rushing through the interconnected air conditioning faster than avo could cut off their path entirely. +chambers!+ avo cast. +stop the+ he didnt get to finish his thoughts as abrel struck him shoulder-first, driving her arm back into its socket. he bounced off draus as the world became a storms of fists, shins, elbows, and knees. both his eyes went dark as blurred fists caved in his sockets. his jaw snapped loose at the joint. something popped inside him as she shattered one of his plates and pushed in through his mycelia with a palm. draus fought to anchor him in place, using her own wings as propulsion. she was sent tumbling onto her back as metal warped around abrels foot and the air ruptured before the swing of her roundhouse. force exploded across avos chest. he choked and bit his tongue in half. draus rolled to her feet and caught him, whipping her monowire just as abrel dissolved. with blood tonnage insufficient and celerostylus outclassed, his echoheads grasped at a haze of falcons as abrel washed through him, her liminal frame ringing off of his. following her form using his whisper, she tore back into reality just behind draus and clenched her fist. the air shimmered as abrel activated her unseen blade. avo directed his tendrils to tear into her. his thoughts were interrupted as gravity lurched and he was torn away from draus. the world twisted. he struck the ceiling and felt the cracks in the crystal widen. from his whisper, he spied draus and abrel frozen in a moment of combat. the regular had turned her wings outward - she was using the thrust to push the guilder back and make the distance for herself at the same time. power, however, had a threshold that skill could not surpass, and so when abrel burst into mist and shadow, she flowed forward. draus might as well have been standing still. abrel appeared into being behind her and swung her remaining arm with decapitation in mind. an entropic missile ripped free from avo. his phys-sim ran the numbers. it wasnt going to hit in time. six-eyes continued to pull on avo. the ghoul hissed as his flesh rethreaded and thoughts cleared. he could help draus but he would abandon chambers and essus to six-eyes. in the end, the choice came easier than he expected. he reached out to his heaven and the winds answered him. the weight of a typhoon exploded out from nothingness within the train. he tore away from the surprised guilder and back from her he was pulled. abrels blade just barely licked an inch through draus neck when she was drawn into a current of wind. she didnt go alone. draus clamped down on the hand of her would-be killer and followed the guilder into the yondergales as she re-reeled her monowire. they slipped out before the galeslither as it brayed, and draus stripped abrels remaining arm in twain as the wire glided down from the second knuckle to the elbow. plates lifted from the guilders back but avo tangled her in turbulence, flinging her back over to the regular. the guilder had every bit of hardware advantage compared to draus. better augs. better equipment. but opportunity, however, had a threshold that power could not surpass. and so when abrel fell forward, she did so neck first through a glinting wire. she died then with a snarling expression on her face, and the hate burned in her still as avo felt her nous plunge down into her subreality. he didnt have time to enjoy it. creating an opening for draus and flinging her out into the wind, he loosed her at six-eyes. and found there wasnt a need. standing at the entrance before chambers was essus, bereft of a holojector wing. said missing appendage was currently buried heart-deep inside six-eyes, the guilder staked while he was still on the floor. the dismembered implant flashed one last time as the form of the boy splashed into reality, neon mixing with the brilliant crimson of guilder blood as the child smiled one last time before winking out. and with it went six-eyes. his liminal frame flared. soulfire erupted out from his eyes and ears as his body began to dissolve. avo felt itthe sensation of a once-intact nous falling upon blades of rend. an echo of the man snapped free from his form and dissolved into motes. abrel had at least one cycler remaining. nothing was clean in this one. stepping out from behind the locus, chambers threw up a fist in cheer as draus turned to slow herself before she ran into essus, one hand clamped around her neck to pinch her severed artery. triumph flowed through avo as he turned his attention back to abrel. which was when he noticed his entropic barrage impact an exposed section of the hull. entropy expanded. light punched in. avo reached out for his companions in an eruption of soulfire and rushing wind. lines exploded across his cog-feed as reality was swallowed by light, and existence ruptured. and then everyone died. Chapter 10-29 Cadre (I) chapter 10-29 cadre (i) there is a difference between wars and the trials. i cannot speak quite so much about the former, i have only glimpsed its true face from angles and moments. war is encompassingtoo much for a single individual to master as we are now. even should they be godclad. im sure you have read osjon thousands treatise, total domain warfare. quite excellently written, if i might applaud a former opponent. to put it simply, there are too many aspects of reality to be struck from during warfare. modern heavens are built to be more encompassing in their symmetries, using such broad domains as geometry, force, biology, time, matter, and the like, but mythologies are narrow and twisting. no two heavens of flame truly occupy the same grooves in a single concept; there are always separations in canon and expression. dueling is mastering your own canons and knowing your foes. war is never sticking to a set build and always moving, maneuvering, shaping your environmentknowing what sovereignties to press and which to avoid; diving the nether, and jacking minds to strip intentions bare and avoid incoming harm. you can become champion of the trials alone. i know. ive done it. its more reliable that way. but there are fifty million others like me with their own frames, and all it takes is one mistake before someone claims all that is mine. there are only so few of us that can live up to the tale of the owl. for most, survival will come in mimicking the fashion of crows. -ying yang wei stormsparrow, fallwalker and grand champion of the apex trials 10-29 cadre (i) [liminal frame] obtained - gladius pattern ->[gate of the passing dark] heaven template downloaded ->thaumic cycler x2 ->soul x1 ->ontologics x4 thaumic cycler 1: [gate of passing dark]/[third circle] thaumic cycler 2: [galeslither]/[second circle] foreign nous detected [x3] grafting initiated thaumic output - 5483 thaum/c after the end, there remained four fires for four souls. three were dark embers, satellites orbiting avos colossal presence. they were sparks frozen in time, starved of worship, starved of death. each bore a slot of emptiness at its core. with one taken from a fallen heaven and two from recently slain guilders, the three souls hovered and bobbed upon tides of rippling radiance. the soulfire solidified around them. their movement froze still. through the brightness came three fragments of humanity. three beings bundled in properties of mind and willparts to the alloy of sapience. injected by instruments made from pulsing flames, the three fragments slipped into three souls as sparks once dim cracked wide, the symbology akin to a fire opening its eyes. rings of self-devouring serpents coiled and tightened around each soul, each filled with a distillation of ten echoes of essence. the dragons locked into place around the souls. quieted minds gasped as dreams spilled free from inside their frames. new boundaries flashed into shape around avo as he parted the yolk of his frame and formed four galaxies from one. one after another, the first shivers of awareness quavered through each of the souls. yet, as he regarded them, there was something odd about their aesthetic and shape; an incongruity with his own nature. where he was a rippling wavelength, the fires did not dance through the others. instead, as soon as the cyclers were locked in place, each soul manifested a different configurationthe structure of the liminal borders different in width and height, bent or arching out from certain angles. they were in a sense as kae said: solid matter rigs to the nanomechanical fluidity possessed by his stillborn and exemplified by his metafac. he wondered if he could change their ontologies toward preference or practicality. considering how he managed to install each of his companions into a soul, he didnt see why not. moments passed. he felt them slowly wake, but no aspect of speech arose. apprehension filled him as he connected to each. the problem is revealed via the words of his woundshaper. there are no heavens or hells to them, masterthey exist in a void. take pity and offer your new kindred something of a tongue. he swept his awareness across the countless new heavens floating within the wavelength of his being. three crucified phoenixes impaled by seeds of ever-sprouting, ever-charring green greeted his notice first. the collective ontologics stripped from jhred greatling occupied its own cluster. not far from it, the template taken from six-eyes looked akin to a grand obsidian gateway leading to another gateway to another in five repetitions. avo hadnt had the time to review the former godclads canons but he knew they functioned, and from the frame template he took the second cycler as an attachment for chambers earlier, uninstalling a galeslither and a connected hell. surprisingly, the rend was also missingthe slate cleaned with six-eyes death. finally, two sangeists, three eyeless snakes implanted with a cockroachs legs and oozing watery darkness from their wounds, and truck-sized warg stitched together from constantly clashing bolts of lighting lingered formed a belt around his nucleus. he attached the twice-walker template to the soul he thought was draus and the endogate to essus. he eyed the last soul that was chambers and considered grafting a sangeist onto it but felt the awareness of his woundshaper glaring inward upon him. awkwardly, he withdrew the sangeist and attached one of the phoenixesits heaven called a lushburnerto chambers instead. heavens detected: sangeist x2; fulgerhund x1; shadowcrawler x3; lushburner x2; galeslither x1 hells detected: galeslither [second circle] x1 domain fragments detected: domain of (space) x1 a series of heavens twitched to life. light washed over the reflective form of the twice-walker. the midnight doors to each gateway slammed, rippling the geometry surrounding it. the phoenix screechedand the noise broke off to become chambers incoherent screaming. avo couldnt tell if something had gone wrong resulting in madness and insanity for the man, or if this was how he always was. avo? draus said, her voice produced by the dissonance of glass shattering and mending. are we snuffed? relief and satisfaction sprang loose within him. the weight of impulse and physiological feedback ran scant here, but still, this was a sign of his success. they were dead. they would be resurrecting alongside him. the full weight of realization pressed down in that instant. he could make almost anyone a godclad so long as he had the components. souls and cyclers were the hardest to claim, but if he hunted the right prey yes, he said, finally responding to her question. for now. resurrection - 8% resurrection, avo answered. see the percentage rising. should be tied to a thaumic cycle. i think. brings us back when it''s done. reinserts us into reality. speaking those words made him realize another factor: abrel died before them, but her death was neither permanent nor true. need to finish grafting you all. make modifications. prepare for return. enemy could be waiting with heaven. start with chambers, then, draus said. essus and i look like we got a least a heaven and hell between us. scanning through his root-data, the build of the spire-pattern liminal frame he subsumed from the fallen heaven at burners way flashed into his mind. unfortunately, it was missing too many domains and integral components to grant chambers an automatic install. instead, avo was going to need to invert another of the lushburners to serve as chambers second circle. heaven - [lushburner] domain: (fire/biology/force) thaumic requirements - 68 thaum/c domain of (fire) canon: conflagration of birthing - the flames of this heaven can engender the development of recorded biological structures and weave organisms from the heat of its flames; the flames must surpass 800 degrees celcius to begin manifestation hubris: the flames cannot surpass 1000 degrees celcius domain of (biology) canon: catalogue of the charred seed - flora and fauna burned by the master of this canon will be added to the heavens expressions canon: flameweaver - the master will be able to mutate all flesh caught in its heat radius into a specific lifeform stored within its seed hubris: only twelve lifeforms can be stored within a seed at a time domain of (force) canon: grasp of the burning - the master can convert heat into kinetic energy and direct it within a one-thousand feet radius hubris: if the heat in the air drops below 400 degrees celcius, it will result in thaumic backlash with a single command sent to his meta-fac, avo twisted the heaven and broke it into its component domains. the progress of resurrection was rising fast and he didnt have much timehe needed to finish with chambers and review the others. then, he needed to distribute the necessary thaums to keep each of them functional. taking components from the domains of fire, biology, and force, he created a second circle using the components of force. hell - [second circle] - lushburner domain: (force/entropy) thaumic requirements - 68 thaum/c letting his meta-facs simulation run, he picked the most coherent option he could while keeping things simple. kae wasnt here, and zein couldnt foresee his futurebest he avoid anything too experimental. canon: fleshbomber - the master of this domain can infuse all biological lifeforms above freezing with kinetic energy and use them to trigger an explosion - this canon is absolute daemon: if a biological lifeform is cool below freezing while infused with kinetic energy, the resulting rupture will birth an anathema of devastation to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved soulfire welded the next hell below chambers form. a ripple formed below the impaled phoenix and the blazing avian looked down. shit, consang. i take it back: burning chickens got some kick to it. finishing, avo checked the progress of his resurrection and winced. he had slowed it to the slowest pace possible, but time was still slipping away. he wouldnt have enough time to review everyone in depth. resurrection: 56% interfacing with draus and essus, he considered what else he could do. he knew the twice-walkers capabilities and considered adding additional canons to it. it would take a thousand and two thaums per cycle to fuel the twice-walker, and every little bit fed to it was something avo wouldnt have for himself. ghouls were selfish creatures, but this was not a moment to fixate on his share of flesh. the more important factors were in what more he could graft. draus stopped him. avo. stop. youre wasting time. do what you know with what you got. me, essus, and chambers are gonna be support anyhow. none of us are properly trained for this, but youve been a clad the longest. dont burn your time on me or essusi know jhreds heaven already and i got some ideas, so you graft yourself up first while i try to get help essus figure out what he can do. after we get back to the real, we can link minds and see where were at. that was all the permission he needed. digging into essus frame momentarily, avo scanned the gate of the passing dark and understood it to be a spatial heaven of some kind that could warp bind points in reality and twist geometries. before he returned his attention to himself, he flared his soul and distributed a surfeit of thaums to each of the other frames - it would serve as ample cushion against any potential dangers. (draus) twice-walker - 1002 thaum/c (essus) gate of the passing dark - 880 thaum/c (chambers) lushburner - 100 thaum/c that left him with three thousand five hundred and one echoes of circling essence. three thousand five hundred and one deaths nourishing him. it felt more than he remembered taking from the other godclads. how much of this came from his foes? how much were accidental procurements from collateral damage? with how the day had gone, he could no longer be certain. tearing his thoughts away from such considerations, he returned his focus to his own heavens and processed his next steps. again, complexity was unwise right now. he needed something to add to his effectivenessto augment him and make him more. considering his successes and vulnerabilities displayed from recent engagements, what he needed quickly became clear to him. the woundshaper was his primary instrument, excelling in close quarters against targets tied to physical matter. what it lacked was omnidirectional movement, range, and the ability to battle against more asymmetric adversaries. he needed something that could make him fastermore unpredictable. he was at his best when he was ambushing or skirmishing. and as he was looking for something to facilitate just that, his attention fell upon the fulgerhund, and inspiration struck like a bolt of lightning. heaven - [fulgerhund] domain: (lightning/matter) thaumic requirements - 51 thaum/c Chapter 10-30 Cadre (II) chapter 10-30 cadre (ii) the stormtree fulgerhund is assigned a mixed porter/breaker designation in most knots. though lightly armored and absent numerous defensive and offensive systems present in modern golems, it continues to be a mainstay of both stormtree forces and fallwalkers. autonomously jocked through the nether in most cases, the volatile power system connected to twin microfusion reactors is more a feature than a bug. likewise, the pace at which it can accrue rend is another layer to its eventual functions. striding across the battlefield from lightning bolt to lightning bolt, the fulgerhund is a fast-assault transport for special operations groups, but more often its interior will be filled with expendable drones and mechs while it continues transmitting information back to the main elements of the knot. other than serving as a porter, the fulgerhund can continue serving as a forward operating scout, or can start striking exposed or overextended elements of the opposition''s forces. though it can project electricity out to a limited range, the main method of attack is to shuttle matter across vast distances using lightning as a movement vector. a final use for the fulgerhund is as a techno-thaumic improvised explosive. this usually culminates with the golem at rend capacity, upon which they will stride in rapid succession until they rupture, and at that point, overload its power system to set off its fusion reactors. the resulting devastation is sometimes called unzipping due to how the lightning interacts with the detonation of a makeshift hydrogen bomb. -nether-stream, arsenal of the spreading fracture 10-30 cadre (ii) domain of (lightning) canon: boltstride - the master of this canon can transmute their physical matter into and then travel as a bolt of lightning; each stride is limited to a radius of fifteen miles before the canon has to be reinvoked hubris: attempting to stride when weighing in excess of one hundred and twenty tons will result in thaumic backlash domain of (matter) canon: stormwreathed - the master of this canon can temporarily convert matter into a mantle of electricity hubris: if the converted mantle is submerged, it will result in thaumic backlash two canons. two hubris. countless implications. for all the fleeing he did through nu-scarrowbur, his galeslither was too vulnerable to interdiction from other spatial heavens. his woundshaper, on the other hand, was a little more than lacking when facing threats not of the overly physical variety. should the fulgerhund be added to his current design he was curious as to how fast he could move when binding boltstride to his already present canon of haemokinesis. the stormwreathed canon was comparatively a lesser prize, but would allow him to trespass the borders between matter and energy, and thus a means of averting from the striders cleaving light. resurrection - 71% familiar,the woundshaper said, studying the fulgerhund as the light-stitched warg drifted before them.in a time before in the times when we were once whole we were of a pantheon. of this, i speak certain. now, we are all remade by lesser hands; mongrel bastards to our own lore. avo regarded the words of the old god. will you join with it?0v3l.b11n. the woundshaper scoffed. of course. it would be absurd to abandon growth; purebred is another word for inbred, after all. come. come. let us mantle the hound upon my spire. let the stuff of storms serve us as mortar to my bricks. soulfire needled through the fulgerhund and drew it into the woundshaper. brightness built between them and with their joining did the insides of avos frame come alight. when the smelting was complete, the woundshaper spread into shape again. arteries forked free from its structure in surging bolts. the shell of the heaven, always an alloy of properties, now coursed with dancing arcs of electricity. static-shrouded fur swayed low from the spire and the full maw of a snarling warg rose where once there were only jaws. the woundshaper thrummed with a current of excitement while its hell grew blurred and strained. avo would need to boost the hell as well. presently, there remained potential yet for his heaven. heaven - woundshaper domain: (blood/matter/biology/luminosity/lightning) thaumic requirements - 501 thaum/c it held a decent mass to it, but he could inject more canons. much more, if he were to go broad. he had over two thousand and five thaums of available structure left should he balance his woundshapers hell. keeping a gulf of hundred or so thaums between his ontologics and maximum frame capacity seemed wise. as things went, the woundshaper was an instrument of intrusion, destruction, and creation. with the fulgerhund added, the chemicals of maneuverability and energy have been added to the concoction. now he needed more scale and control. more influence. more speed. unmaking one of the sangeists, he drew forth its twin domains and offered that which was blood to the heaven. he intended to enhance his canon of haemokinesis even more. we are arisen, master, the woundshaper cackled, as he shifted over to the galeslither. already, i sense my current gnosis far vaster than the pebble i was in history. how kind a fate to be enchained to you toward higher apotheosis. how kind a fate the galeslither was comparatively a simpler job. the yondergales, though immensely useful for tasks that required a subtler touch, were easy to paradox by other spatial canons. there seemed to be a vulnerability shared among canons of the demiplanar variety - an incongruence against other geometry or correspondence-altering miracles. such a thing needed to be avoided, but he still wanted to keep a heaven suited toward the clandestine. to that end, the joining was simple. the galeslither chuffed to life once more as soulfire swept the shadowcrawler close. an ink-black serpent sank beneath the flesh of the steed as two heavens were joined. from beside galloping hooves burst the chitinous legs of clambering insects, and from storm-scarred ribs oozed a man of midnight black. avo continued working even as the heaven gasped and awareness flickered awake within it like a candle. ah, the wounshaper said, clicking her nonexistent tongue. the mule awakens. though mule is no longer a term so apt for you, is it.the head of the centermost horse had turned chimeric, blending into a creature fused between serpent and stallion. the galeslitheror that which it becamespoke in hushed whispers like its words passed through enshadowed alleys by the midnight breeze. where where are we what what are these still yourself. you wake anew. we are bound for greater and grander things now.i dont understand i was i needed to deliver the patheon tasked me to bring wind and rainthat is the past now, kindred. there are pantheons no more, but a new game has taken its placea new ladder towards ascension. domain of (shadow) canon: blackdiver - the master of this domain can command and sink into shadows, manipulating it like a puddle of water; only avo wasted no time. he smelted down another shadowcrawler and added its domains to his current canons. canon: blackdiver (iii) - the master of this domain can command and sink into shadows, manipulating it like a puddle of water; all shadows touched by the master within a dive period are now considered to be ontologically unified, allowing the master to surface from any shadow they have descended hubris: if all shadows currently containing the master are purged, it will trigger thaumic backlash darkness flowed free from the open chasm of the galeslithers chest. the winds took on an increasingly wet quality. he fed the heaven with two domains of space and let that expand as well. domain of (space) canon: abyssal cove (ii) - the master of this domain can bind a demiplane to a specific shadow and use it to store items of solid matter; the size of the demiplane is 100 feet deep added to the distance the master can travel within a second hubris: liquids cannot be stored within the cove or it will trigger thaumic backlash heaven - [galeslither] domain: (air/space/shadow) thaumic requirements - 430 thaum/c whorling fluids mingled with currents of wind. the galeslither twisted and turned. whats happening to me?growth, the woundshaper answered. ascension. finally, he unmade the detached second circle drifting through his being into its baseline components and applied the procured domain to his current hell. he manifested no new canons for he didnt see the needthe halt canon had proven to be one of the best things about the galeslither. it proceeded to get much better. canon: halt of the passing (iii) - the master of this domain can now enchain all visible actors and objects traveling through space with stasis and drain them of their vectors of momentum until the necessary rend is balanced - this canon is absolute daemon: if the pocket is overfilled before it can burst, the resulting rupture will birth an anathema of ruin to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved hell - [third circle] - galeslither domain: (air/entropy) thaumic requirements - 430 thaum/c resurrection - 99% even with all his improvements, he still had over six hundred thaums left to fill. but time held its own demands. avo could already feel fingers of eldritch bright prying him away from his galeslither as he was slowly injected back into reality. avo, draus said. he could see her through the threads of light swallowing him now. when you get back out, get loud. well find you. got some ideas about how we can run thishow we might be able to handle abrel. he wanted to respond, but his transition came suddenly and without warning. the woundshaper laughed. the galeslither rattled inside him, like a terrified animal trapped in the stables of a sinking ship. from death they rose, and as light shed itself along his eyes, he found existence around him as flame-touched as the subreality which housed his soul. Chapter 10-31 Cadre (III) chapter 10-31 cadre (iii) what? the hypertube ruptured? [stifled groan] where where are they how the hells did they manage to jack a lightrail? the nethers down! traffic grids infested with mem-cons! and whats the point of rupturing it? the sovereignty will notice immediately and pocketagh! you know what, no questioning anything anymore. lets just assume theseuhconsangs of ours here have a few sequences missing a sphere-four liminal framewhere did that sphere four come from? okay. okay. naeko, stop asking questions, youre just going to get madwere trying to stay calm this year. calm. [deep exhale] warning: daemon detected ->domain: [water] [pause] jaus just jaus. [sigh] have to dam this flood before this ends in a cascade of fallen heavens. -chief paladin naeko 10-31 cadre (iii) ontology reverted resurrection completed domain respawn engaged engaging thaumic cycler: 3501 thaum/c loading phantasmics light is not meant to shatter into fissuring streams upon the chassis of existence, but when a lightrail is destroyed mid-transit and beams itself out from cracked lenses lining a hypertube, metaphysics gets a bit murky. flickering back into existence from a speckle of blood, avo found himself standing on tubes he once traveled within as the world drowned under a cacophony of discordant noises. flames roared. the wind squealed from all points graced by the fissuring luminosity. distant sirens mingled with aero engines spinning hard at maximum thrust. something speared through the winds. something was just about to he touched the falling debris before it smashed into him. reflex took hold where thought lagged. his celerostylus swelled and time slowed. his haemokinetic mist came aglow as electricity arced through the moisture and the canon of haemaefication was invoked. the debris melted into a shower of red, and avo snatched the blood out from the air with a thought. near ten tons of alloy, plastics, silicon, and other substances new to his woundshaper sparked through his ontology. suddenly, the structural aesthetic of the wreck became known to him: he just unmade a destroyed assault drone. his senses yawned wider as his mass grew, spreading across countless other material patterns beyond it thereafter. the world around him expanded into a shape beyond even the reach of his vision. he could feel things miles beyond as his heaven washed over the real. presently, he found himself suspended over a vast crevice leading down to layer three, the section of tubes he halted on miles between two different districts.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. as his mind cleared and focus took hold, the presence of his woundshaper furled outward as a nigh-transparent film of haemokinetic mist. the last drips of blood from the liquefied drone evaporated into the wavelength of his broadcast. impact trajectories pulsed red as flechettes cut out for him from afar. the projectiles came, and when they transgressed into his ontological borders, were unwoven in shape and structure both before they could arrive. the canon of sangunitys reign was like having a shapeless hand that could clutch everything around you in its palm. yet, what it grasped was metaphysical, and what he felt were things bearing symmetry to his woundshapers portfolio of domains. his tactile senses swelled from feet to miles while his phys-sim screamed as ghosts surged into it, his cog-feed adjusting to before the spiking number of sequences required to estimate all that was happening around him. there were hundreds of drones cutting through the skies and below him, and from those hundreds of drones spilled scything beams and darting flechettes. hundreds of drones, and then substantially less as a wing of light swept through them. shrapnel plunged down like descending hail. this time, avo consciously interacted with them. his cog-feed counted eight hundred and ninety-four thousand pieces traveling through the expanse of his influence. with a thought, he dissolved all of them as well, drinking in their mass. matter, light, blood, biology, and lighting. aspects of existence felt were alight within the purviews of his mind. the metaphor changed. sanguinitys reign was not handsanguinitys reign was like resting something upon his tongue andwhen his canons allowed itdeciding to chew. scars of shattered brightness spread out before him like a lattice. avo forked himself through an opening as lightning unstitched and then restitched his form back together in strips and splashes. then, suddenly, he felt his sangunity sinking inside one of the prismatic deltas like it was a sinkhole he could dip a finger into. at five hundred feet in height, each of the four facets comprising the demiplanar construct led into a separate pocket containing a different golem. their matter and forms were myriad, with some corresponding to his touch while others wafted between his fingertips like water. one, in particular, caught his attentionone that felt like a gnarled anchor curving rightward when he skimmed his mists through it. he took a chance. he liquefied it with a thought and let the blood run free where it may. relief settled through his structure. an unseen grip slackened from realitys throat. the sides of the delta turned opaque as the construct accelerated toward him in an explosion of motion. avo aimed another stride and put himself at the full fifteen miles it offered. he cast himself out and his perception tunneled. his lightning traveled the entire distance within a fraction of a fraction a second. drones around him disintegrated outright as he left a trail of erupting fire that twitched upon the surface of reality. yet, as soon as he poured himself back into physical shape, he found the delta the same distance away from him and closing. avo fought the urge to sigh. abrels equation was mostly solved, but as usual with new vultun, new problems like introducing themselves without courtesy. prismatic light erupted from the tip of the delta as it drew closer, swimming through fissuring obstacles left by the hypertube rupture without worry. avo strode twice more but found himself unable to outrun his pursuer. it was like their distances were tethered to an absolute number while all other moving bodies were variable. his cog-feed came alight with colors and sounds, warning of more spatial anomalies. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 49% new drones spilled out into existence from the various deltas, and avo felt their numbers swell well past the ten-thousand count within the hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch of awareness provided by sanguinitys reign. brushing them with his domains, he felt aspects of blood, biology, and matter emanate from within them most of all. their aesthetic was bee-like with a hint of cyberization, and the chitin looked like the armor on draus new bio-rig. not drones, then. bioforms. swarm bioforms. he recalled vicarities of runs going sour in sang territory. he would have seconds before the sky turned into a hive of flesh-grown missiles. if they couldnt breach his form, they would undoubtedly try to cook him out by beating their wings at a heightened pace. the real danger remained that which they spawned from. even as he strode again, it inched into the five-hundred feet radiustoo close for comfort now. he didnt know what else it was capable of or what would happen should he let it touch him, but he wasnt keen on finding out. at least he wasnt keen on using himself to find out. he was going to need to find a way to get the delta to expose itself again. a thought trailed through his mindcould he use his sanguitys reign to serve as localized nether? the prospect ignited his focus even further as he cast his ghosts out. all around him were options to select fromdrones and humming bioforms galore. he splashed back into physical shape just above another stretch of the hypertube and immediately had to convert himself into electricity as a wide of slashing light cut through him. abrel was still fighting five miles eastward. how the deltas had not contained her yet he did not know. he accelerated again and a thousand bioforms splattered in his wake. shaking the thought free, he activated his ghostjack and tried to channel his phantasmics through waves of haemokinetic moisture brushing across the expanse. his ghosts emerged from his metamind and injected themselves across illimitable motes of blood, using them as conduits. casting into a drone next to the delta pursuing him, avo cracked their semi-adaptive wards using a mix of traumas and linked himself to its manually controlled locus. the pilot, coldtech machine that it was, tried to fight him ineffectually. its cognition still gave off something vaguely similar to thoughtstuff when he brushed it, but interfacing with it gave him a static chill. there was something alien about the mind of a thinking machinethe pathing of its sequences offering nothing for avo to bury his claws into. he liquefied the mech and moved on. accessing the wyvern-iimultifunction assualt platform, he directed it to approach the spatial construct chasing him. as it drew within twenty feet of the delta, his broadcast wavelength waned and his connection began to fail. the drone itself folded and funneled into a facet of the deltas face and vanished from his grasp. well. that was troubling. he didnt want to be drained off to wherever the drone went. shifting his thoughts, he turned his attention to his galeslither and sought a place of shadows. perhaps if he couldnt avoid it materially, he would be able to escape as another aspect of space itself a squadron of drones vitrified and shattered into a sprawl of glass mere feet above the tubes. three other signatures materialized into existence. he felt them strike his frame the same way abrel did. draus stood alone, separated from essus and chambers by a distance of miles. essus had spawned exactly where avo did, while chambers was currently falling from the sky, screaming as he emerged from plumes of fire spewing out of a failings drones engines. avo had a new idea. he had several new ideas. channeling his ghosts through his mists again, he created links between himself and his group. his cadre. as the delta closed past four hundred feet, he cast his intentions out to each of them. +draus. need you to create a gateway for me and kill it right after.+ Chapter 10-32 Cadre (IV) chapter 10-32 cadre (iv) authority greatling. there been a problem. jhred. he dead? iim not sure, higherthats another problem altogether, im afraid. im talking about [sound of metal warping inward] that godsdamned vator. who did he hurt this time not not instrument vator either, higher. its your daughter. abrel? yes. abrel. yes, higher. are you sure? im positive, higher. instrument abrel greatling has been spotted at mazzas junction, nu-scarrowbur, and then akimaki in the yuulden-yang sovereignty. she has engaged a rival cadre from stormtree and there have been casualties. ruptures. a member of her cadre has met their final end. [building shaking; rattling and breaking glass] ... authority? apologize [deep exhale] to the ambassador on my behalf. tell him that this is not meant as a slight on my part. tell him that personal matters have disrupted my plans. yes, authority greatling. -authority uthred greatling, the fires height. 10-32 cadre (iv) blooming out from his veins, the haemokinetic broadcast rippled in sync with the waves of his metamind as ghosts flowed on pulses of blood. essus heeded the cast with a note of surprise while draus simply responded. slow as time was, her connection to her domains worked just like his. godhood was not like a muscle to exercise, but a divine machine of feats and lore. the sprawl of glass she made from the shattered bodies of a drone squadron split into two. one section speared high into the air while the other encased her in a reflective sheen, rendering her a taller, more insectoid-looking cousin to mirrorhead. the shards of glass she flung into the air climbed at speeds nearing a hundred miles per hour. for avo, it might as well have not moved at all. that was fine. he would go to it in just a moment. first, he had to see to chambers continued survival. mind blind in the throes of panic, chambers was so preoccupied with howling his lungs out that avos thoughtcast went unnoticed. sinking into the mans perception, the divided plates of layer three and the edges of a spatially quarantined district came into view as the ex-enforcer flailed against gravity. terror stripping him of composure, the thought of manifesting his heaven was a far one.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. at least it was till avo overwrote the mans fear with an injection of artificial focus. +chambers. listen. activate heaven. get to draus and essus. stick togetherwill convene with you all shortly.+ at his current speed, he would be able to perform countless actions before the ghosts finished delivering the information over. with sanguinitys reign, the nether lag was vastly diminished for reasons avo wasnt fully sure about, but he wasnt going to complain. instead, he was going to continue using it to his advantage. he strode twice, his being lengthened into stretching bolts of arterial lightning. he kept both movements random, deliberately confusing the pursuing delta while using his vectors to approach draus rising screen of glass at an angle. ah. if it wasnt his old consang, unforeseen consequences. he spread himself wide and round like a bunker, around his allies. yet, halfway through his haemokinetic shapeshifting, he felt a most dissonant sensation as draus sank into him. right. the twice-walker had a canon that let it do that. didnt it also have the ability to make a demiplanar pathway? the answer came as some of his blood spilled into a loop; the twice-walker created a spatial passageway using itself and his woundshaper as junctions. ah, the woundshaper laughed. the huntress has thought ahead. most wise. go, master. go and pull the two burdens into our crossway. the regular has solved several matters of concern concurrently. he didnt need any further prompting. reaching out to scoop both essus and chambers into the tunnel that shimmered past the surface of his gleaming blood, he found the former most elusive as they blinked from place to place while the latter made a mad dive for him even without prompting. ultimately, it was the lushburner that descended beneath the ichor first while the gate of the passing dark followed. as avo performed a quick dash to arrive next to essus, he found that flinging himself outward as lightning did nothing to impede the functionality of the twice-walkers liminal paracosmos. essus gate stepped one more time and, despite the vastness of its size, it ballooned into shape within avo as well. oddly, it seemed to materialize inside his internal passage with a stutter, slipping from one point in reality to another. with motes of blood running through the passageway via sanguinitys reign, avo confirmed the presence of his companions as essus released himself from the form of his godhood and chambers soared and dipped around draus. finally, her message loaded. +channel this here glass and hang on. i got myself an idea bout our problems. right now, we aint a real cadre since we dont got all that fancy learnin from guilder school, but i think i have a way for us to get around the whole separate and apart problem. gonna create a pathway usin both of us as conduits. after, you can put essus and the half-strand inside. make it easier for us to pull a runner.+ she had some ideas of her own indeed. the sensation of swelling power came to a jolting stop when he felt the first bomb shred through his broadcast. others followed. pockets formed in his awareness as sanguinitys reign turned porous. faintly, as more and more blindspots formed in his awareness, he touched one of the platforms responsible for countering him and found it similar to a sangeists rendsink. an instant later, it came apart and ruptured, its contents twitching between mundane blood and alchemized fragments of matter. the rend within avos system spiked. his cog-feed began to wail. warning: rend detonations detecteddomain: [blood]rend capacity [woundshaper]: 71%... 74%... 76% immediately withdrawing sovereigntys reign to a limit of twenty miles, he strode as he began to make his escape through the opening of layer three. just as lightning began to jump through him, a translucent wall burst into existence over the opening he was aiming for. he altered his stride, dashing twice as he fled from the first signatures and entered the field of his reduced awareness. additional blasts followed. blood plumed through the falling rain as the last of avos crimson mist parted from existence. suppose for influence that vast came a trade-offif he could strike at distant domains using sanguinitys reign, so too could it be done the opposite way around. another trickle of thoughts from draus loaded. +theyre bringin out the rend-bombs. theyll eventually herd us out of the sky. dont bother jumpin aroundlights end is on lockdown. layer threell be closed off. we need to find a secluded spot in a district somewhere. go zero-burn or somethin. least thats what the clads i fought with did when they wanted to go miss.+ his attention drifted as rainwater congealed into the shape of the aegis on the borders of his awareness. it was barely nineteen miles southeast of him, and it was currently swimming through the downpour, rivers of water running free. and within the wetness, avo felt another signature sing out to himone he instantly recognized. abrel. abrel who had escaped his grasp time and time again. abrel, who drove him to break his determination of choice and elevate his allies to godhood. abrel, who denied him a chance to savor her brothers flesh. abrel, who was now floating unconscious, her body flickering in and out of existence as the falling rain formed junctions from the skies above, midnight rivers darting between forking cracks of light. as he focused, he noticed the fortress-like outline of the aegis and noted the other godclad funneling her out from the fray. how auspicious this opportunity was, to be able to kill and devour an entire cadre. and just along the way of his escape, no less. hundreds of prismatic trails searched the space behind them from afar. considerably fewer aerial platforms remained as tides of destruction continued to sweep through the wind. the chaos had given both cadres enough room to flee from the golems and emergency response teams, though their escape remained in question. another thing avo did know was this: he could feel abrel, but he couldnt touch her or kill her using his sanguinity. not with the veil of water protecting her. not without all her cyclers compromised. so far away, the metaphysical ripples of soulfire from his frame didnt reach far enough to give his position away as he watched the aegis flee. he took the opportunity. this was a chance for another two souls and all the ontologics that came with them. a chance to remove two individuals that possessed knowledge of his capabilities. abrel had seen him kill jhred, after all. there would be questions about where his frame went. and how. so, with his mind made and rend-bombs slowly cascading inward towards his position, avo strode twice more, diving into forking bolts as he struck the aegis from behind. he expected to shear the water from his foeto utterly vaporize their ontological structure. what he didnt expect was to catch a full blast of soulfire across his frame as the aegis snapped apart into two pieces. the water around him froze and began falling back upward into the sky. all that flowed strained against forces unseen. there, still alight with crackling currents running through his bloodstream, avo found himself at the epicenter of a prolapsed dragon. to his left, the form of a man strained, and to his right, the structure of a water-made castle began to collapse. warning: daemon detected ->associated heaven: [aegis of tides] - third sphere ->rend capacity [aegis of tides]: 98% water metaphysics unravelling rend spillover detected Chapter 10-33 Fallout (I) chapter 10-33 fallout (i) no. keep zein where she iscas, listen, i dont care what happened with her in the paths. lookjust look at this. do you see this? connect your ansible to sunrise and take a peek out from her eyes. you see this? this isnt a few thousand deadwere talking somewhere north of a million. mazzas junctionnu-scarrowbur does any of this look like collateral damage to you? or does it look like the aftermath leftover from the guild wars? yes. yes, i am blaming you. you should have told her no! you should have tried to stop her! she would killecas, youre a godclad too. if you die, walk it off and go after her again. itll distract her from doing whatever this is. repercussions? for her? none. shell just jump ahead in timeher fuck up, other peoples debt. classic zein-shit. wonder what jaus saw in that psychotic right. her plan to frame jhred greatling and discredit the chivalrics. you know we could have just directly given the details to the ambassador, right? dont believe any of her bullshitshe did this because she wanted to. she did this because shes playing at something elseshe always is. im closing my hyperwave for now. im going to try and intercept our recruits before the paladins bring them for questioning. you tell voidwatch to warning: daemon detected ->associated heaven: [aegis of tides] - third sphere ->rend capacity [aegis of tides]: 98% water metaphysics unravelling rend spillover detected warning: godclad detected godclad: samir naeko eighth-sphere liminal frame cas. i need to go. keep. her. there. shes helped enough. [tuning ansible] aegis, hack naekos feed and scrub everything you have on the package. drop a pinpoint of their location for me. i think theyre hiding in the shadows of a block but i dont remember which oneof course its not going to be enough. theyre not at zero-burn. the chief paladins going to make them immediatelyill just need to convince him that they belong to me. valerie out. -valerie denton, ninth column 10-33 fallout (i) the instant the woundshaper slammed down upon the aegis like a hammer of blood and lightning upon a crumbling anvil made of parting water, the reality succumbed to the deformation of the latters liminal frame, and from whatever transgression was committed, the man came loose from his heaven-turned-daemon. all that was bound by the domain of water was banished from avo''s vicinity, the exile of rain expanding from feet into miles. another godclad lay before him, partially flayed in ontology. the manknocked free of his divinity, snapped taut on the sliding segments of the dragon slithering through him. both the heaven and he looked to share the same umbilical cord, and with each tug, the surrounding water shifted in directions random and strange. it was like watching an unbirthing of man into a god. abrel, meanwhile, had gone missing with the water. he didnt know if she was vaporized by the woundshapers lightning-fast velocity unseaming the atmosphere in apocalyptic fire or merely snatched from the present location by the eldritch nature of the falling waters, but the result was the same. she was gone in flesh and frame. no presence of the physical or ontological varieties remained. from leagues and miles around, every water droplet that yet remained screamed. soulfire splashed free with every falling dollop, and as a fractured subreality bled naked into the broader tapestry of existence, from water came forth the crashing voice of a fragmented god swallowed by madness. an imitation of the aegis formed, vast water-made serpents coiled and formed the foundations of a castle while all the rain within a hundred miles twisted and funneled through fluid vectors of anomalous geometry. overlooking a straight fall down to the enclosed jaws of layer three, only bridges and lips jutted out between the districts below. for this spot in the city, for this instant in time, the rains halted as that which was from the cloud was returned in part up, and scattered threefold horizontally. sea! the awakened heaven cried. water burst. rain shunted matter from one area to another like paint running off a canvas. only the prismatic exhaust expelled by the deltas remained, the deltas too asymmetric to be affected by the warp in waters baseline nature. ocean! where where is the ocean! where where is my body! the aegis of tides roared its last few words. the intent of the broken gods meaning came through not as language but as expression at its root, soulfire carving understanding into everyone instantly, burning past all connotative and denotative blockades to comprehension. loss. pain. confusion. rage. twin accretions of thoughtstuff oozed from both beings connected by the dragon as if pus from a leaking blister spilling free. avo saw it againthe connection between the heaven and the godclada comingling of minds. the eldritch was using the human almost like a phantasmisc of sortsa receptacle for thought to plug the hole of its lobotomization. where godsfall seemed to hollow the gods, leaving gaps and places for people to mantle their nouses within soul and heavens thereafter, so too was there a triggering point for the entire thing to be reversed as an hour-glass flipped on its head; it was no longer man mantling god for as an instrument of power, but god mantling man to regain the bandwidth for free will. gingerly, avo reached out with two spreading tendrils. one sank into the god, and it shuddered as it turned, noticing only the galeslither within him as the hulls of symmetrical domains between them crashed. when avo burrowed his haemokinetic fingers into the man, he found himself greeted with the softness of flesh, the heat of a soul, and the brittleness of a mind. the beginnings of thought formed. the godclad, unlike jhred greatling, was unbroken yet. they were still strainingstruggling to regain control over his heaven. the idea of going zero-burn consumed him, but parted from the canons of his power, he moved like a mortalslow and insufficient. avo yearned to hurt the man, to slake his desires on a feast of torment and pain. a splash of prismatic radiance caught his attention, and with it came a memory. the train. abrel in the collapsing megablock. mirrorhead. even without the morality injector, he should have thought betterknown better. the beast was bleeding over into his actions, its claws tugging on his nape and guiding his warpath. even if he no longer wanted to enchain his life to the tool his father provided, that was still no excuse to offer his leash to a lesser master - a baser owner. pleasure and addiction met remembered resolve, and from it, the path became clear. avo regarded his prey and ignored the beast. this one was just another soul. another life. another godclad. so easy for him to claim, so easy to hurt.0v3l.b11n. so easy to kill. he triggered meta-fac just as the blood inside his latest victim flexed outward. the man expanded apart into a curtain of spreading gore. then motes. then nothing. the aegis wailed and crumbled into crashing waterfalls as a last blastwave of soulfire tore out from its connected godclad, true death taking him. meta-fac activating transferring rend from fourth circle [woundshaper] to first circle [reserve-hev 01] +think i got a hubris,+ draus said, sounding smugbemused. +saw somethin make one of her wings spill over into the other one. she backlashed then too.+ a regulars perspicacity even on a battlefield so chaotic was impressive. avo wondered if he could replicate her instincts somehow. for now, however, another thing came to his attention. abrel. abrel, who was alight with blood and matter and fading light. abrel, who was still within the twelve and a half miles of influence he had. abrel, who hunted and been saved from him so many times by the hand of manipulated fate, and wouldnt stop until either or both of them were dead. abrel, who was now more vulnerable to his ghostjack than ever. in the distance, he could see prismatic blooms diving low as they turned right and squeezed out geometric wounds just feet away from her. he wouldnt have the chance to kill her himself today. not without exposing himself to the authorities again. a pity. a gut-coiling, blood-churning pity. faintly, he tried instilling her with rend using his meta-fac but found that their vicinity needed to be tactile for it to work. but he could do something else. something just as enticing. slamming his wards into hers, he struck the fortification of her mind with a trauma-adapting hammer and discovered that her wards were no longer asynchronous wavelengths. ah. so, it seemed he wasnt the only one using his canons to give his metamind an added edge. instead of striking her again this time, he loosed a trauma into her mind. just one. one taken from her brother. the siblings shared a cadence to their screams. but where jhred brayed despairingly, abrel was a howl of rising rage. good. more experiences for him to sample. diving into her broken mind, he shredded the interior of her wardings and tore through her deepest sequences with surgical focus. even as her palace came apart before his onslaught, he knew she would return sane and unharmed if her frame functioned like his, but he could still modify specific memories without hurting her. add things. change things. take things away. and so, he did. ghosts: [14299] it was an easy thing, using jhreds memories as a skeleton key to implant her with a hidden auto-seance. just as it wasnt hard to infuse her with information about the incubis plans, or jhreds confession, or say, avos own memories of zein thousandhand being involved. somewhere in his subreality, the ghoul grinned. the old woman hadnt bifurcated him. either this was part of her very, very convoluted plan, or she was actually dead or occupied, and couldnt stop this from happening. after hiding each and every one of his packages in place, he stitched her original layering back and slathered his own identity with an added haze. using his hidden auto-seance, he would twist and alter her memories further, provided thaumaturgy didnt affect his necrothurgy. he still wanted to render himself a haze in her memoriesand the power to crush her consciousness at any point. impressively, almost unfathomably, she pulled together enough of her cognition to realize his presence within her. broken in thought and coherence as her mind was, the rage still flowed. +you you. ill kill swear to the dead gods kill you murderer! killed. jhred.+ avo taunted her with the sounds jhred made as he wept before the stone statue that was his mother. +this is done. you remember what i want. you think what i let you. i choose now. you dont.+ and with that, he tore the sprouts of this newest memory from her mind and fragmented them with his ghostjack. she wouldnt remember this. and even if she did, they would need to burn jhreds memories out from her mind to get all that he had fused within her mind. in a sense, he hadnt broken anything. just corrupted. not even death would undo a phantasmic. as the deltas reached her and the first squadrons of surviving drones spilled forth from them, avo checked his cog-feed and counted the lanes of perception splashing over him, and confirmed his next action. +going thought-silent now.+ he told his passengers. +activating incog.+ a beat passed. draus chuckled. +you know, it just occurred to me that we coulda just used that and skipped the trouble of backlashing her.+ avo activated the incog and pretended he didnt hear anything. or that he wasnt a complete idiot. his phantasmics all went dormant. his whisper dissolved and the ghosts that composed it collapsed back in. the world was quiet again, and he was an island inverted beneath the waves of cognition, submerged under notice. with how many bioforms, drones, and golems there were earlier, his cog-capacity would have overloaded instantly. now, he had a chance. and so, he took it. lightning ran across his body. stormstuff clasped him. avo strode, rend rising as abrel was drawn into one of the deltas, then his cog-feed warned of another godclad approaching. wincing, he felt the weight of their ontological mass. beyond him. far beyond. the metaphysics of the area were thrown off as if a mountain had just dropped into a pond. good that he ran. wise, even. as the full heaven of the paladinor whoever this newcomer wasdescended on the scene, a demiplane widened from midnight firmament abovethe darkstar blurring as a screen spilled over it like a film of oil. wider and wider it spread. over the stretch where the hypertubes ran. over districts entire. as avo strode a final time, he touched the edge of the districtwith serried blocks lined like silicon chips implanted on a mechanical deck. his insides knotted in annoyance. omnitech. he just had to have landed in one of their places. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 89% rend capacity [galeslither]: 1% as he shifted over the equine form of his second heaven and splashed into the shadows cast by a rising tower, it answered him with notes of dismay. what is this? are you are you controlling me?+there is no you or i anymore, sweet kindred, the woundshaper crooned. there is but the master and his soul. and with him, we ascend....i want to be what i was again.mocking laughter followed. do you even have all the pieces of your memory? your own lore? what god are you, if you cannot remember your canons. the galeslither puffed, the wind swelling around in billowing anxiousness. the woundshaper continued. the answer is were not. yet, we are more. we are reborn. now, heed, mule, and ride the shadows. i offered my architecture. it is time you do yours. diving deeper into the darkness, avo deactivated his incog and his metamind opened up again. peering out from the shadows, he watched as a veil of force washed through the district. and beyond. everything that moved suddenly went still. the wind. the light. everything. in the distance, the fractured brightness broken from the lightrails smoothed into alignment back into the exit wounds of the tube. from high above, a colossal figure descended, and their shadow feel like an ocean drowning away a pond. he tried to move, to swim and travel through the darkness. he couldnt. the act of shifting through the real became entirely impossible. suddenly, avo felt more trapped than he had ever been. warning: foreign souls detected unidentified godclad detected classification: sphere viii [est. 78304200 thaum/c] ->sage of the sundered sky, force-breaker-peace-binding Chapter 10-34 Fallout (II) chapter 10-34 fallout (ii) this track goes out to all my consangs in the yuulden-yang sovereignty. dont know what the hells is happening over your skies, but it looks like the fifth guild war just started right on top of you. of course, with the nether conveniently down, things arent so easy to verify. what a shame, huh? you lucky half-strands might be the first ones off to the big empty. maybe the rest of us will be seeing you all real soon when the rest of the punches start falling. anyway, come tomorrow what may, right now, the rest of us can still enjoy the phantom calm of dead midnight for a while longer. this is zero-burn, mixed by un-euclid and fat-flechette, with a post-mortem big-up to the siren of the misted shores shit. dream well, ainesieef. i told you chasing apotheosis was going to get you snuffed. so uh yeah. just enjoy the track, juvs. its all us little people got sometimes. -calla marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 10-34 fallout (ii) every godclad inflicted deviations to realitys pattern. blood, wind, light, lightning, or even the act of moving left of oneself was susceptible to alternation. in thisand from how draus noticed abrels hubrisavo found himself on the path of a new curriculum: studying the potential canons of rival heavens. the sage of the sundered sky was immense in ontological mass and effect. kae had once spoken about vulgarity and scope. in vulgarity, it had torn the sky-scarring blastwaves he made from his acceleration out of existence; in scope, the effect spread across the entirety of the sovereignty. nothing that could inflict damage or move flowed when the sage tightened its grasp. for the briefest of instants, avo caught sight of the heaven as he peeked out from the stygian pond he swam in. colossal didnt begin to describe its visage. with the darkstar painting the world below like a lantern burning the colors of midnight mauve, the sage sank through the darkness of the oily skies as a titan seeking to greet land. smoke tasseled about its form while the atmosphere adorned it with a burning robe. through the obfuscation, all that avo could tell of it were the ring of open hands hovering around it. two intersecting circles made up of eight open palms implanted with blazing cyclopean eyes shone through the flames like a cross-shaped beacon. in addition to the single eye in the palm of each hand, there was also a deliberately designed wound on eachfingers were missing from each of them, with a progression of wounds popping in and out, moving from one to the next. whatever canon or symbology it represented was beyond avo. perhaps something to do with sight. perhaps something more altogether. the sage was of the eight sphere. it could have had hundreds of canons. or maybe it just towered high from a few specific metaphysical domains. regardless, the thrill in him went dry and the beast stopped salivating altogether. the notion of hunting and preying upon a paladin remained a faraway prospect unless something drastic happened. +shit,+ chambers choked, wincing mentally as the sage loomed closer. +thats one big-ass god-bit. alright. whats the plan, consangs? how are we getting out of this? avo? reg?+ avo was about to answer when the heaven suddenly winked out. the shift was disorienting. the weight vanished, and with it went the film of oil. where once an obscured heaven comprised of countless stretched across the entirety of the viewable sky, now there was but the surface of the void, bare and exposed. innumerable satellites scintillated like drifting gains of dust across all that was black. orbitals, as walton had called them. voidships too. something inside avo shivered. the sky. he had been so consumed by fighting and fleeing and feeding that hadnt realized he was beneath the natural sky again. something itched in the back of his mind, expecting there to be a holographic error of some kindfor a panel above him to flicker error codes or spew cheap nether-ads down at him. +theyre tryin to bait us out,+ draus said. +dont know why. if theyd seen us+ her mind remained taut with tension, like a war bow drawn but never released. +we might want go zero-burn anyhow if it aint too late. with our heavens fully manifested and cyclers running hot, our frames are probably like campfires lit on the thousand plains.+ +cant use canons at zero-burn,+ avo replied. +think thats how jhred couldn''t make youhow abrel and her cadre couldnt make you when they thought you were just a bioform+ her mind went silent as a body suddenly stuttered into existence mere feet away from the shadows they dwelled in. abrels body slid down against a glitching holo-ad pylon, white exoskeletal carapace cracked, just like her mind was. her fingers twitched. her legs kicked. she made several noises. none of them words. +jaus, what the fuck,+ chambers said. +shes makin those nu-whale noises. thats kinda+ his lustaway activated. avo considered ejecting chambers out into the light. +heh. sorry. thought about a vicarity i liked. anyway, whats happening? you ghost her mind apart and she just drops in front of us?+ +its a warnin,+ draus said. +they know were here. theyre tryin to get us to come out on our own.+ as another wail whistled loud from abrels enhanced lungs, essus shivered and released himself from the form of his heaven. essus returned to his human form and clamped to hands around his head in the passageway, mumbling to himself as he tried not to hear. it took avo a second to understand - abrels screams trespassed into the territory of child-like in instances. with a thought, he narrowed the fathers perception closer to deafness. essus breathed. his hands slipped from his head as he hugged himself. +thank you, my friend.+ he clenched his teeth and bobbed as the twice-walker hovered behind him. chambers continued to peer out the edge of the passageway leading, but with the woundshaper shifted back into subreality, the only feed he had to the outside was through avo himself. reality shuddered again. suddenly, the airways over the district were lined with thousands upon thousands of drones, with twelve deltas bleeding primastic exhaust into the real. none of those entities concerned avo as much as the presence of a new figure standing next to abrel. his muscular appearance and visible metallic whorls curving around the side of his face marked him as a warrior by trade, while the way he sipped an extra-large drink of strawberry-flavored surgemax made it seem like he really didnt want to be here. his posture was slouched, but that did nothing to diminish his imposing presence. circuits emanating soft light crenulated his marble-smooth chocolate-hued skin. lattices of ocean blue flowed out from a jutting implant built into his spine over the rugged double-breasted leather coat he wore. on his collar was a holo-id that projected his paladin service number and public-use auto-seance contact details. a fog spread around him, growing into sixteen floating hands that expanded in a ring as grey irises spread open along their epicenters. meanwhile, the mans own eyes were solid grey. mustering a breath, he drained his soft drink empty and handed the cup off to one of his fog-shaped hands, which then promptly chucked the drink off the edge of the district before offering everyone present a vulgar gesture. +alright,+ chambers said. +picture this: paladin giving birth to screaming homunculi from his eyes.+ essus mood flagged further. +i do not want to think of such things.+ the ultimate half-strand pushed on. +you have to! its unexpected. its our only edge. so, heres what im thinking, right? avo, you send me out there and i expose myself and try to hug the paladin.+ utter disbelief tore through draus mind. +he hell just fuckin smear you.+ +alrightalright. me and essus+ +hell do both of you at the same time. chambers, this isnt either-or. did you miss him making everything stop?+ +okaywow, you arent helpful at alli touch essus+ avo interrupted. +finish that thought. ill make you remember the artnids.+ chambers mind shuddered and he turned. +what if essus touches me?+ +no touching! no rash!+ draus said. +what the fuck is wrong with you? how the hells is that supposed to stop him at all?+ +hell be shitting dead babies out of his pores!+ +were all gonna be shittin dead babies, half-strand. for a long time. and it aint gonna stop him from using his heavens+ her words were interrupted by the blaring horn of an aerovec. from behind the gathered perimeter of drones and golems, someone was accelerating through the air, fast on approach. naeko stood up, seeming startled for a moment before his jaw went slack. he closed his eyes in annoyance. alright. its going to be one of those days. waving a hand, the drones and bioforms parted into two columns, opening a vertical slit for the aero to pass through. the vehicle was like a smooth arrowhead of pure mercury with four protruding engines spinning fast along its edges. gliding down, avos phys-sim estimated it to be thirty-by-twenty feet in dimensions, with its speed winding down to twenty feet per second. it never fully landed, instead coming to a loose hover as its shadow merged with that which was cast by the block. naeko stumbled as the audacity of the hinted escape made him wheeze. dont. you jump over into the aero, ill know. and ill get very upthet. dont hurt my feelings. a door on the side of the aero opened and a figure jumped out. naeko was a figure with variety and character. compared to him, the second newcomer had one theme and one theme only. silver. silver hair, with silver implanted eye guards, with a crystalline-silver exoskeleton encasing a silver pantsuit. the womans features ran to the opposite extreme of naeko. she stood tall while he slouched, and where his cheeks were soft and still held the suppleness of humanity, she was nothing but bladed angles. in an uncanny way, she shared more than a few traits in common with abrel, now struggling to remember how to breathe. landing with a soft click, the woman swept her short bob of hair out from her eyes as she began to march toward naeko. chief paladin. working overtime i see. her voice was perfectly even in tone and her syllables fell in rhythm with her footsteps. the chief paladin just leaned back and threw up his hands. glaive denton, are you on offithal duty for ori-thaum? or is this an off-the-books thing for voidwatch? +glaive?+ chambers asked. avos stomach filled with ice. he prepared his ghostjack out of reflex and readied himself for a breakout. a team of ori-thaum operatives was a problem. singleton, on the other hand, made his sinews twist. she offered him a laugh, though it sounded false and timed. a little bit of both, im afraid. she cocked her head at abrel greatlings prostrated form and frowned. i see you caught one of the saboteurs. wheres the rest of her cadre? well, naeko said, tapping a foot in the darkness beside him. they might just be swimming around in the darkness here. but im not sure. theyre a bit shy and dont want to come out. denton shook her head slowly. no. you got that part wrong. that cadres ours. +what?+ avo said. +what? chambers said. +godsdamned guild bullshit+ draus muttered. naekos posture worsened. what? Chapter 11-1 Articles of the Spiral chapter 11-1 articles of the spiral impingement of another or justification for actions taken against their person. article vii: all fated or ensouled will be allowed the merit of guardianship under a neutral third party (default standard set to voidwatch) per the accords of ao between all the guilds. amendment: article to be suspended in case of official declarations of war. --articles of the spiral 11-1 articles of the spiral naekos right eye twitched. theyre yours? yes, denton said, shrugging off his suspicious glaze with a turn of her shoulder. from the corner of her eyepiece, she shot a glance at the stretching shadows of the megablock and pasted a smirk on her face. you all did very well. the imps have been transferred to your proxies. contract closed. avo and the others remained submerged still beneath the puddles of darkness. +no clue what this ones playin at.+ draus said. her mind was clicking, shifting from thought to theory like the snap of turning gears. +aint no reason for the silvers to get into this mess with us. cant think of one, anyhow.+ studying denton, avo found his insight crippled by the dissolution of the nether itself and caution strangled his ability to expand his sanguinity. he could solidify the shadow into a demiplane and shift back over to using his woundshaper again, but the last thing he wanted was to provoke a deliberate reaction from the paladin. as she cast her gaze down at abrel, however, avo caught something in the way that she stared at abrels prone form. it was the same way draus looked at angles around buildings and joints on a person, seeking a vulnerability to exploit. you should thank them when they come out, chief paladin, denton said, pushing the conversation in her desired direction. why, its all thanks to them that a rogue cell within our guild was stopped and the assassination of one of my colleagues was prevented. i believe you have met one ambassador valhu kitzuhada?n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. the chief paladin just stared at her. please. please no. what? no, naeko repeated. he slapped his leg. he wagged a finger momentarily and tapped the side of his temple. no. no. no, no, no, no, no. no. no. no. i came out here to deal with a clash between two cadres that got out of hand. thats what i stopped my game forwhat i put in my overtime for. just a simple, messy, bloody stupid thing caused by simple, messy, bloody stupid godclads. the palms each offered a rude gesture. now. tell me youre mistaken. tell me that i just hallucinated what sounds like a conspiracy that will see me and my corps serving as honorary guard dogs in a month to stop all you colors from killing each other at some conference. tell me. say it. denton let a beat slip by as she offered him an apologetic look. sorry, elder naeko. its worse than you think. he closed his eyes. elder naeko? she ventured. shh. several of his floating palms rose in a pleading gesture. let me imagine. let me imagine i have the heaven of counter-politics. of course, elder nae he shushed her again. glaives bring nothing but problems and conspiracies to me every time we meet. there are no annoying glaives in my imagination. just peace. peace. a nice walk. alone time. no mass deaths. he took in a breath. he let it out. he opened his eyes. i tried. i tried very hard to will you away without ever being. but it seems i dont have the right heavens for that. im sorry to hear that. if it would make you feel better, you could stab she left out a choked gasp as one of the palms speared clean through her chest. thick, white rivulets flowed in place of natural blood. unshaken by the sudden stabbing, denton nodded amiably to naeko as she hacked a mouthful of blood. feel better? naeko considered it for a second. yes. i appreciate the offer. another one of his palms snapped forward in a rush of wind and her skull unraveled before its fog-like caress. his other hands drifted forward and dismantled the rest of her body in the neatest process of mutilation avo had ever seen. essus shook. his door-like frame rattled and geometric vertices rose from his hinges like dust from a normal doorway. +artad. is there no end to the death and killing? what was the need for this+ avo thought it was obvious. +fun. pleasure. also think shes a clad. or has a phylactery. doesnt seem to fear death.+ +yeah,+ draus said. +cept the silvers aint too big on singleton clads. aint see no cadre or drones hovering over her, and the nethers down.+ well. yuulden-yangs about to see a bump to their quarterly numbers with all these deaths so how bad could it be? a slight sneer pried at the paladins expression. i mean, besides a bunch of paladins failing in their oaths to protect the small and letting massacre happen right under their noses, how bad could it be? +hes mad,+ draus said. +seen that look before. too tired to show it; cant hide it completely.+ im sorry, elder naeko, denton said. these words were the most sincere amongst all those she spoke. we would have done more to prevent it. if only we knew. naeko opened his mouth and words tumbled out before he could control them. no. no, you arent sorry he froze mid-sentence as he regarded denton a moment longer. seeming ashamed, he looked off to the side. alright. suppose that just makes the two of us. i have something for you, denton said apologetically. you might not want it, but it implicates all parties involved behind these atrocities. do you need to kill me again before i ruin your evening? he waved her off. just hit me he jolted. his face twisted into a wince as his spine curled evermore forward. avo was confused. he didnt see any obvious transfer of ghosts running between them, but with the way naekos eyes darted from place to place, it was clear he was reading through something. well. looks like my necros are going to do a bit of overtime with me sifting through this data. you sure about this? because if you are me and the thaum got some talking to do. taken straight out of jhred greatlings mind, denton said. him. and a rogue cell of incubi. along with various other sources. naeko let out a small breath. well. his sister is definitely due for a stay in the unwhere. in the meantime, well all be bracing for a moot. suppose i better cast and tell someone to loop up the borders. he waved a hand over abrel and a pocket of force washed over her, inverting her out of existence. her presence vanished from avos vicinity in a fashion that was disconcertingly similar to how zein disappeared vincintine earlier. the drones and bioforms were flooding into the deltas as well. as thousands collapsed back into single digits, the golems made a sharp turn rightward and blinked out of reality as well. the paladin was clearing his units out. whatever data denton offeredit mustve been more than what avo doctored for zein since it clearly had the chief more than a little disturbed. i will make an arrangement with you right now, glaive denton, naeko said, spine and tone finally straightened into seriousness. i will forego their detention in exchange for exclusive necro-verified testimony about what happened this day. it wont be much, but it might be able to stop things from spiraling into another war. denton offered him a near-imperceptible nod. done. are my provided thoughtscans sufficient for contact retainment? for now, naeko said. we might need that regular to testify in person though. jelene draus? lots of bad blood between her and the greatlings. performed a usurpation he cocked his head. impressive, but messy. of course, shell probably be dead soon if you dont find a good proxy to hide her in. all the arrangements have been taken care of. you dont need to worry about that. he grunted. annoyingly reliable as always, denton. i release this cadre into your guardianship. one of his floating palms shot out, index finger pointed straight into her eye. dont dispapeardiseardont go into hiding. i got questions and nothing but time. ill find you if you dont show with them. of course. i aim to please, elder naeko. well, then you failed pretty damn hard because im the very opposite of pleased right now. +shit,+ draus muttered. +shit. fuck.+ avo wondered if this was part of zeins design, or if ninth column always intended to use the regular as a tool like this. alright, naeko said. ill be issuing a formal red alert through the wave. would it be too much to hope your masters up in the council of elders haven''t been informed yet? no. i havent culminated my operation and reported yet. that seemed to please him. okay. he shot a look at the darknessat avo and his cadre. alright, you half-strands. its your lucky day today. freedom for testimony. your in her guardianship now. stick around. dont get nulled or snuffed into a real-death. im going to need some of you as witnesses in a couple of weeks time. a beat passed. you dont try running either. ill find you. and i might be real made when i do it. and with that, the palms cupped over him and yanked down. he spasmed out of existence. reality snapped. suddenly, there was no sign of chief paladin naeko. no sign he had ever been real at all. alone now with only valerie denton, her hovering aero, and the quieted skies above. the darkstar ebbed softly as the night carried on, though cracks of light still spreading loose from the hypertubes in the background. a full second passed as the glaive stood before the dark that held avo. the collapse of her facade came with the shivering in her hands and the quaver in her breath. as she took a tentative step into the megablocks shadow, she swallowed and then spoke. im with the column. we need to go. Chapter 11-2 Epilogue: A Break Between Storms chapter 11-2 epilogue: a break between storms what do you mean his frame is missing? thats impossible. were the only ones who can secure and remove it. none of his canons are running eitherno rendthis place is stable. no rupture. euthanize three more. well see whats wrong once his heaven manifests. -agnosi thanatech regarding jhred greatlings liminal frame 11-2 epilogue: a break between storms a beat passed. they all studied the silver as a general mood merged into a gestalt between their minds. unwilling to bear the discomfort in silence, chambers offered words to a common desire they all shared. +shit? the column? the one the crazy old head-exploded gerents a part of? consangs, what say we just get the fuck outta here. i mean paladin-guys gone. sky looks clear. why dont we just you know? do a runner.+ avo would be of the same opinion, other than the fact that he had suffered enough surprises for a day. the past moments had solidified a singular belief in him - what he didnt know sought to unmake him, and what he did know could be prevented. ignorance was death as a godclad. so was waiting for another to decide their initiative upon you. within this, he set about jacking into her mind. he expanded the darkness into a demiplane using his abyssal cove canon. from there, he shifted back over to the woundshaper, his sanguinity flooding out from the darkness like a soft emanation of red mist. flecks from the expansion of his heaven traced her attire and skin, and denton betrayed her annoyance with but a slight frown. +avo,+ draus asked. +what are you doing?+ through their connected minds, she felt him shunt his whisper behind denton. tuning the position of his perception with the glaives, he began to synchronize surface thoughts. his ghostjack surged as sequences were pulled to its thundering call. simulated objects and emotions blended to create the spoofed construct. yet, just as he was about to slip his ghosts against the borders cast by her wards, her thoughtstuff came into shape. avo froze. the outer architecture of her mind was a pond of dancing numbers and symbols. between weaving instances of binary integers, he caught flickers and flashes of comprehensible memories, but the fullness only came in fleeting moments. moreover, there was nothing denoting the presence of a metamind mantled upon her consciousness, with neither wards nor palace established in place. in a sense, she was closer to a conscious machine and bare of all phantasmal defenses atop it. +what the hells is up with her mind?+ draus muttered. +looks more like one of them voidwatch uploads than a person.+ denton tilted her head at the shadows, her pale-metallic lips parting as she thought her next words. just as she spoke, a distant column of fire bellowed into existence over her, rising like a tumbling tower into the darkness of midnight as the blasts built themselves upward floor by floor. like a fiery scar upon the flesh of existence, the rising inferno opened like a chasm over a distant district far beyond the reach of their eyes. a single spec of light slipped out from the burning wound. denton turned, the infrastructure of her mind shifting like mechanisms or gears were sliding and slotting into place. again, there was thought there, but she was far enough divorced from humanity that he struggled to find a point of entry. tentatively, he tried attaching the perception spoof only to slide off her exterior. instead, what caught his attention next was the thinness of a needle tunneling upward into the void, its path narrowing toward a specific vector, as it was casting a traveling signal or drawing something from a faraway source. perfect, denton muttered. listen. im going to keep this short: i understand if you dont trust me. or the column. of if you just want to run. i dont fault any of you if thats your choice. thousandhand has that effect. but right now, we need to leave, and you all need to go zero-burn as soon as possible. i managed to bribe off the paladin, but uthred greatling isnt an equation i know how to solve. a low groan sounded from essus. +another one? is there no end to their cursed line?+ +uthreds the father,+ draus said. +hes probably to blame for this line. him and that sow.+ she sighed. denton continued. im not going to force you to do anything. i cant. but i can offer you the shadows of my aero so you can get out of the district quicker. or a seat if youre willing to have a conversation with the column proper. i know our boss didnt leave the best impression. but were still your best shot at staying alive. she offered the darkness a weak shrug. you got hours to days till the agnosi give up on trying to find jhred greatlings frame. that, and all the missing thaums will draw very specific eyes to you. you wont be able to move anywhere without being hunted. a distant crack sounded through the air. the wavelengths of light twitched like fabric in their near vicinity. brightness pulsed as if connected to distant waves. her eyes snapped to the side as if glancing at something from her periphery. with a pre-emptive wince, she pulled off one of her ivory-inlaid cloves and revealed claws of gleaming titanium. carefully, she brought them up to her right eye. +what is she+ chambers began to ask. with surgical precision, she snatched the organ free from her socket. with the swipe of a digit, she severed it clean and loose. a lull of thougth went through the ghost-links. the silence was quickly interrupted by a single declaration. lustaway activated +jaus fuckin corps, chambers,+ draus muttered. +what? those are some shiny eyes.+ +juicy,+ avo said, adding an additional descriptor. like a delectable orb hanging from a stalk of pristine tissue, he felt himself salivating like a nu-dog even with his physical self stored in whatever subreality his frame used to store his mortal form. flesh for time, denton said. five minutes. thats all i want. give me five minutes so you at least know whats going on before you decide what comes next. +you know,+ draus said, her attention drifting over to the silvery aero, +theres quite a few reflections i can bind usin that. could just link a window as a fast exit. and since therere doors, essus might-could make us another way out if we need it.+ denton frowned. she was likely thinking about how everyone else reverted to a prime state while chambers continued to be deprived. the answers simple, silver, draus said, shrugging her head at chambers. hes a half-strand. a real sick bastard. chambers nodded, thinking that he was being praised. im am the half-strand. the glaive blinked. right. she flicked her wrist. avo narrowed in on the gesture as specific commands filtered through the locus. she had coded visual-haptic orders into the aero. useful. he scanned through the mem-data for anything worth noting. as they rose and took off, the internal gravity controls spared the need for any gimbals as they were submerged in a blanket of balance force. the walls around them depolarized from the inside as they rose up beside the silicon-shelled megablock towering over them. cresting its height, countless other blocks of similar build broke into an asymmetric pattern a few miles into the district while coilgun-flung railways passed across the top of every edifice, the environment looking close to something like a circuit board. here, draus said, flinging the eye at avo without looking. he opened his jaw as it hit the roof of his mouth, and with a sudden close, he felt his orb pop upon his tongue, staining him with the flavor of sweetness while his fangs inched through the gristle of connected tissue. denon had grown another eye by this point. it was as if she never blinded herself at all. settling across from them, the ground turned transparent as well, and the aero picked up speed. avo checked their destination for any subterfuge and found only one pre-sequenced location built into its system. the easy armistice. from the mem-data, it looked like a club or some manner of joy parlor. from experience, he guessed it to be some kind of thinkeasy for smuggling phantasmics and memories or a potential front for the deep bazaar. it was also the place walton had asked him to seek just after claiming his sangiest. he had long delayed this moment. firstly for the sake of killing mirrorhead, and secondly for all the distrust boreand continued to bearfor the column. fittingly, that was when denton started speaking. things werent supposed to turn out this way. but i think you all know how best-laid runs go. yeah, draus said, nodding sardonically, they get derailed by a time-jumpin fuckin lunatic whose head explodes for no reason and ends with us stuck right under the nose of the guilds. just a usual job goin right, am i right? a ghost of a smirk passed over the glaives face. im probably not the best person to say that too, but i get your point. right. she worked with zein. avo suddenly felt an immense spike of pity for the poor woman. regardless, things didnt go quite as planned. snapping her fingers, a holographic shape pulsed at the center of the aero and it showed the burning tower they saw earlier. she pointed at draus. you were supposed to end up inside the fires height via one of the stormtrees portals. you with the incriminating memories. abrel greatlings body and the bloodthanes following you. her gaze turned over to avo. and the other three were supposed to pull a false-flag attack by switching between heavens. she had a kill-list of specific guilders and personnel you were supposed to hit. if she had you take a mini-nuke or something, it was to destabilize part of the towers ontology. well, draus said, that sure as shit didnt happen. she still dead? no. but she will be subtler for a time. the paths are denton paused and considered her next words carefully. arent something i understand, but she cant use them for now. a loud deafening roar of frustration rattled the air and shook the aero. denton blinked twice and gave a slight laugh. uthred greatling just arrived late. lucky us. yeah, avo said. lucky. talk. times running. alright, denton said. lets start with the fact that i could have just let naeko take you. he was within his rights, and i burned valuable intel keeping you away from the unwhere. chambers squinted his eyes and nodded. unwhere. right. what-what is that? mostly a domain of death turned to the use of keeping godclads contained in perpetuity. she looked up. out and up in the void. a lonely and empty place. the regular scoffed. yeah, but before that, they need to charge and sentence you proper, so i doubt you did that much. why now? why are you making contact with us now? zeins too dead and you''re the piss-holder? is that it? denton frowned. never been called that before. the truth is we werent sure about it. him. sorry. avo glared. you have to understand, the frame was never meant for youyour father helped us steal it, but we all had a candidate in mind already. plans. ran into complications instead. had to burn a few cells. and then, about a month later, zein ended up finding you while tracking the hungers. before that she wanted to test you more from afar, so to speak. so to speak, avo said. it made sense about the frame. but more importantly, it offered a truth. zein wasnt omniscient. she hadnt known until his encounter with the hungers. she hadnt known where he was before that. pairing that with her sudden death, a newfound vigor swelled inside him. she could be killed. the future could be severed before it revealed overmuch. he just needed to map out more of her blindspots. im going to keep being honest with you: we need your frame. we need it for the ladder. we need them to absorb the arks. we need it to stop the end from happening. she leaned in closer, almost unconsciously. and we need to drain the rash before it ruptures even more. the words were cast from her lips like a hammer. and suddenly, she had the fullness of his attention. a flash of walton withering away as stillborn clumps of flesh were cut free from his sores. he said something to avo then. or someone. avo wasnt sure anymore. the memories that made up who he was didnt come from him. but his father, walton remained. as the rain fell harder and a tide of neon and music filled the horizon, avo broke the silence. how long do we have? six months, denton said. maybe less. the agnosi who theyre dead now. no one knows the canons needed. your frame is our last chance before the anomalies expand. and then she shrugged. then i guess well find out if theres anything left of us to save. the aeros locus pinged. they stuttered momentarily as they began their descent. approaching the easy armistice: 10.3 kilometers Chapter 12-1 Appeal chapter 12-1 appeal despite their legality, thinkeasys continue to be popular with street squires and high-end memory dealers across the city. with all the restrictions and intellectual property licenses laced into various phantasmics and memories, there had to be a place where people could go to think dangerous thoughts. with a dozen or so old golems from some defunct corp, a few bottom-sphere fallwalkers looking for imps or favors, and a decent cell of necros lining the exterior with incogs, the effort it takes to shut these establishments down far exceeds the returns. especially if theyre also fronts for the deep bazaar -thinkeasys: the seen but hidden 12-1 appeal avo could feel something nested within space itself. lightning flashed outside their aerovec, and the silhouettes of drones spilled down with the rain as legion, sinking past the darkness of the clouds around them like dagger-tips piercing skin. something twitched around their geometries as they rushed through the dark. something powerful. something unseen. the outlines of the alloyed machines pulsed and swelled in patches of gooseflesh, their shapes deformed to a faraway gaze. there was a heaven clawing through the concept of darkness. there was an unseen hand bending metaphysics to force more abnormal emanations via circumspect canons. +good thing we went with her,+ draus said. +think i saw another detachment of exorcists goin that way. another knot of golems toothis one mightve been led by a clad. not sure. things feel is this how it always is for you? always feelin shit movin in reality? domains?+ her voice ebbed clear through wisp-thin tendrils cultured from the bloom of his canon. sanguinitys reign made the confines of the vehicle analogous to a garden to him, while his ability to mimic the vivianite of a locus allowed him the manipulation of cognition via ghosts. when the nether flowed as normal, it would have been a blank page compared to the greater color. but sometimes, emptiness was potential, and substance was just clutter. the uncanny sensations rushing through her mind post-apotheosis was a flavor to sample indeed. he saved the emotions and named it nostalgia storing it in his ghostjacks patterns. he offered her but a low grunt in the affirmative. the domain of shadows was being compressed by an unseen actor. but they hadnt fully unveiled themselves, and thus, the nucleus of the anomalies could not be detected. at least until some of draus thoughtstuff bled over. from her came a vicarious tightness that clenched at her frame, a heaven brushing her with a symmetrical domain. i recommend that you hold off on using your current canon, denton said. glaive. operative for ninth column. a woman imbued with an inhuman pattern to her cognition. valerie denton was yet an enigma, but avo found her uncannily agreeable thanks to her helpfulness and open disposition. the fact she offered him one of her eyes was no small part of the near-unwilling affability he felt toward her. he enjoyed the way her moist-sweet eye popped upon his tongue so. making too much noise? he asked her. your ontologies arent manifested, so they wont see much, denton elaborated. but there are a lot of eyes out there, and even with my aero-vehicle listed as an ori-thaum diplomatic vessel, the nethers down, and anything could go. she released a subtle sigh. its not easy to stop people from peeking. he suspected she knew what he was using his sanguinity for. channeling the nature of a locus through his broadcast granted him something of a localized nether, but he hadnt included her in the network. nonetheless, she could have encountered another canon like it before. or another heaven that supplemented a necrojacks capabilities. that being said if she knew that her aeros locus was already compromised and under his control, she didnt show it. reducing his presence even further, he merely projected up to the locus and took care to keep the haemokinetic mist curtailed. he swept away the motes of blood he stained his surrounding with and drew them back into himself. best i can do. she offered him a conciliatory nod. ill take it. right now, i think ori-thaum, highflame, stormtree, and the no-dragons are scrambling assets. a few quiet wars mightve kicked off with your unfortunate ascent. again, i have to apologize on behalf of zein. we didnt expect why did you want me to be a clad? draus said, cutting into the conversation. whats the angle? heard you hawkin me off to the paladin too. i wanna talk about that first. denton did not stiffen, though one of her fists clenched. after this incident, highflame will be hosting a series of trials between the chivalric and meritocrat factions. the former is weakened politically, economically, and socially, but they still hold much of the instrumentationand therefore, a majority of usable frames. we want you to break their last great houses and force them into a collapse. avo let out a hiss of surprise. straight answer. surprising. i dont like wasting time, denton replied. regardless, for the question of why you specifically? thats because you have history with house greatling and it makes for inner-guild folklore to see you ascend. why break the chivalrics? because after thisand the failure to cleanly implicate them in the plot on ambassador kitzuhadas life, the projections estimate chances of open conflict between the factions at sixty-five percent, and the danger of the great game becoming unbalanced in favor of the massists at seventy-two. the regular snorted with disgust. so. all about politics, aint it? im afraid most things are, captain draus. i aint been a captain since i got discharged, draus said. hells. i aint been much of anything since then. a cloud of curiosity passed through her thoughts. tell me. these uh projections of yours from zein or whoever. they still have me as your pawn without him? she jabbed one of her scythe wings at avo as he glared. no, denton said, absent hesistation. all indications show that you would likely perish fighting in the warrens. draus chuckled and shook her head. damn shame, isnt it. she cocked her head at avo and frowned. thanks for keepin me alive, half-strand. no dead, anyway. he grunted again. will they surrender my frame? accept me into their world? she shook her head slowly. im afraid not, avo. im afraid not. she leaned in. can i show you all something? i need you to stop blocking the locus. if you feel like somethings wrong, you have the power to kill me or kill the transmission at any time. you know this. so, theres no real danger to you. if theres one thing to be said about denton, its that she was skilled at making you feel at ease. avo sought draus approval, requiring a second instinct to be paired with his. the regular gave him a cock of the head and briefly glanced at the windows. right. they had more than one implant under the skin. avo let the mem-data flow. holo-haptic interfaces splashed into shape around them from a collage of viewpoints. spawned without sound, each scene played an angle of devastation and tragedy. golems were sifting through a sea of rubble, some taking the form of water, spilling through the debris to ferry out the living, others lifting toppled megablocks using telekinetic fields. more often than once, buildings were turned over and the remains of their inhabitants came out as a spill. essus moaned in horror and clutched his head. his mind screamed with trauma and strain. avo offered to take the memories from him and spare him the pain. no, essus said. it took an immensity of will to pry his hands free from his face. no. i will face this. i will face it. i cannot keep running. there is nowhere to his voice trailed off. from a viewpoint, a lone man pawed through rock and ash, digging until he found a small hand sticking out from beneath a fallen wall. he looked under. and hope betrayed. they watched as the man broke, sinking down to his knees as he collapsed to sob against atop the ruins, a lone fateless survivor among machines and guilders. a low note of resigned despair whistled out from essus. was this deliberate? did you show this to me to wound? there was no lull in dentons response. yes.. she gesticulated at the images being played to them. these images are from our field asset, sunrise. this place was nu-scarrowbur. your flight through the district lasted approximately seven minutes and forty-nine seconds. approximately sixty-eight percent of the district is in ruins. we havent gotten a good estimate on all the dead yet, but we expect it to be substantial. shit that happens when clads fight, draus answered. exactly, but also two problems. the first is that stormtrees seasonal economy will undoubtedly be affected by this. the spike in death is one thing, but the lack of surviving inhabitants means thatby the treaty of kosganthe replacement rate for the population will drop in the future. stormtree will likely sue to be compensated for forecasted losses against highflame. and even before then, when the thanatechs dig through the dead, theyll find some with their essence and ghosts already drained. jhred greatling too. that problem had always been in the back of avos mind. he disregarded it for a time, but it seemed he couldnt evade it forever. so. theyll know where ive been. the ones who know about the stillborn frame, yes, denton said. she leaned in closer to avo. our enemies will stop at nothing to get whats grafted to you back. you said you want to kill themeat themit doesnt matter. well support you on this. we dont want to control youwe want to enable you. to give you the means to make them hurt. and divert their attention while giving you room to operate. but let me guess, draus said.youll probably have things you want us to do. people you need snuffed. minds you need nulled. heavens you need stolen. the future is variable in its demands, higher draus, denton said. were just trying to make sure there keeps being a future. attention: 200 meters to the easy armistice directing his mind outside the aeros sensors, avo gazed outside and saw nothing but cluttered airspace and hints of hidden power scurrying over the skin of existence. light twitched. darkness warped. the winds didnt flow right. all the world was made up of heavens. and every last heaven belonged to an enemy. how total was his opposition? and just where were they going? dont see anything? where is the easy armistice. denton injected another thought into the sky. avo wondered if this was one of her canons, or if something else facilitate her transferrence of mem-data from so far away. each time her thoughtstuff widened before fusing thin into a needle-point. dont worry, she said. im just signaling for a shortcut. and then, at her command, the aero began to juke up and down in odd angles and directions. up. up. down. down. left. right. left. right. then, suddenly, it stalled to a hover, before avo could respond, it accelerated again. +passage still open?+ avo asked draus, as he eyed his surroundings warily. +yeah,+ draus said, frowning at what was happening. suddenly, the engine of the vehicle cut out. chambers blinked. was that part of the sign he didnt get to finish his question as they suddenly sank down into a spatial divot. Chapter 12-2 The Easy Armistice (I) chapter 12-2 the easy armistice (i) chief paladin naeko. what do you think you are doing? arretharresting you. why? whats it to you? im being arrested! oh. well, then. if you dont resist, you wont be hurt. everything will be fine and keen. this is you.... age has finally frayed the last of your senses you flatblooded mongrel ambassador kitzuhada. a moment. did you know this elder here has been accused in a plot ending with your assassination? these these assertions are i have the mem-data to prove it. you see, under the articles, i know i cant keep you. really grinds my teeth how we paladins are pretty much just left around here to deal with the stray golem problem and some newsouled fallwalkers, but every now and again, i get something that just brightens my day. how long have you been planning his death? wait, dont tell me. well get it out of you in confession. i demand legal championship. and youll have it. [samir naeko leans in] and youll have a whole lot more, see. that little bit of mem-data? thats a bit more than just your plot to kill the ambassador here. i know about godshaper. i i yeah. i know what you did to kae kusanade. and i know how you murdered paladin dawton morrow. you should have never touched mine. you really shouldnt have. its going to be bad for your health. but im not mad. no. im not mad at all. do you see this smile? im calmer than ive been in years. you better get some good counsel, because when were done, you and your pet greatling are going to spend a lot of time in the dark. greatling i i, chief paladin samir naeko, hereby invoke article nine against council elder mwaba drongo. i have with me verified mem-data and a witness of the third degree. all stay your hands from steel or face the sage seriously? no one? wow. sensible party, ambassador. i a bit disappointed, not gonna lie. say, where did uthred go? -high paladin samir naeko at the fires height 12-2 the easy armistice (i) geometry stabilized as they inverted back upright, the sensation was as if rolling when submerged. yet, as the aero finished its revolution, avo found it clamped by the curved claws of four magnetics as a ramp lowered and extended before them. he cast his first thoughts almost reflexively, needing to confirm if their exits were still viable. +draus. passages. still connected to your heaven?+ +still feel the junctions,+ she replied. her disorientation lasted shorter than his. +hells. think we just got pulled somewhere by a heaven of geometry.+ she turned her attention to denton. that dip how you lose tails? bet you got plenty more spots like that. the glaive simply answered with a tilt of her head. coming out from an airdock leaves fewer questions. her eyes snapped over to avo. you can stop using your canon now. there isnt the need anymore. it took a beat for avo to realize denton was speaking to him. it took him another to notice strings of mem-data spilling into his cog-feed as visual and phantasmal information began to flow through. his deepnav interface was the first thing to reactivate within his metamind. other functions and phantasmal constructs followed shortly thereafter. avo drew in a breath and released his sanguinity. rend capacity [woundshaper]: 93% dehydration had a way of making one dream of drowning. the same way the lack applied to water or sustenance, the same way avo felt toward the nether itself. yearned for the nether. even with his newest canons, his nether-projection was a blank canvas he could reach across, a cloud of limited influence and finite design. there were no colors of existence in itnothing but an empty lake he could guide his reach through. an ocean was more than just a body of water. there was an environment there. fish. life. a partition between the stygian depths and shimmering heights. a place where the uncountable masses could bob upon the surface, where good necros held the twilight, the middling ones remained as wrecks at the bottom, and the best swam the same down trenches and upon surfs alike. again, a needle of thoughtstuff narrowed out from dentons mind. yes, indeed, she let out a breath. the official documentation of events said it was due to a humanitarian dispute. voidwatch was extracting nolothi refugees after some kind of thaumic catastrophe. the high masters then didnt take very kindly to that. turns out, voidship egis dont link very well with ghosts. that statement piqued avos interest. didnt know ghosts could interface with coldtech. can see outlines of cognition. cant access. denton shrugged. i suppose your fathers predecessors found a way to simulate how an artificial mind thought and dreamed. its the only real explanation. us idheimers cant really conceptualize on the same level. he hid his growing suspicion from her well. +the egi core,+ draus said, her words a whisper in his mind. +thats how they did it. they didnt need to build any phantasmics or trauma patterns from scratchthey had a weapon half-cast and ready for use already.+ +they had minds that knew how to use it,+ avo replied. and now it was his. chancing another peek at dentons metamind, he considered the implications of that which he possessed. when this was done, his first priority was kae. after that, he would need to examine his new sanctuary further. with such a thought in mind, he activated the auto-seance he had connected to the egi core in the george washington. to his dismay, it didnt answer. of course it didnt. with how it allowed the nether to flow through shadows and darkness, this weakness was unavoidable. the thoughtwave detonation had destabilized the nether local to its area. he wondered if there was a way he could turn off or tune the permeability of his gateways. it took them the better part of twenty minutes to traverse five point four miles. they were forced to halt for a moment when a knot of golems carried by a prismatic delta shot past them. at the same moment, the district came alive with chatter. +stay out of the green quarter. a couple of bloodthanes just got into it with a fallwalker. not full heavens fallen yet but some casualties. no deaths though. thank jaus for woundhounds.+ the moment passed. a ping out went out from draus as she sent him a memory. she was pulling on something. guiding a piece of glass over two thousand miles away without strain or burden. her junctions let her reach far and observe the scene they left behind. she sent him a snapshot of a sky lined with pillar-shaped golems that scarred the firmament with their transparent tendrils, of countless knots amassing between three different factions. +stormtree, no-dragons, and highflame are squarin up,+ she said. +sure as shit glad we pulled our vanishin act.+ he grunted in agreement but found himself more fascinated by a new emotion leaking over from her. uncertainty. +you gleam?+ avo asked. a large mantafly passed over them, casting its vast shadow over three rows of aeros. between its ventral teeth dripped sizzling acid and dolloping slag from melted garbage. draus shook her head. she looked confused. uncharacteristically uncertain.+nah. i uh i like it.+ +what?+ +the heaven,+ she said, clarifying. +i like havin it already. i like using it. seein out from it. making things glass and feelin it break because i decide it shouldpeople break because i decide they should.+ she paused. +theres no balance in this kind of killin. aint no weight for me to feel. its like doin numbers in my head.+ a faint understanding grew inside him. +afraid becoming a clad will pervert your nature? make you less you?+ draus laughed. dentons eye swept over both of them but said nothing. +i was a reg, avo? my mind was conditioned to be as adaptive as my body was. but i do have preferences. i know there are kinds of thinkin that just leave you trapped.+ she turned and regarded him. +say, you still got that morality injector of yours? havent felt you use it since+ +you want me to adapt it for you?+ avo asked. +help you feel the weight of a kill?+ a pause cut into their conversation. +i just dont wanna feel like its nothin is all. hells. us fleein across nu-scarrowbur probably killed how many people? and it was like nothin. fightin the wargskins, snuffers, street scum, and all kinds of other half-strands aint nothin to speak about but theres still the flechettes you gotta dodge. angles to take. assaults to plan. this? theres no theres no weight.+ another project after kae then. something he could potentially benefit from himself, even. he had more than enough ghosts now to fuel the need for experimentation. that, and he had chambers to test things on. avo glanced at the ex-enforcer babbling again at the beleaguered essus, pointing out different blocks and places he wanted to see later. neither of them had been this far up, avo realized. but where one viewed this as a triumph and an adventure, the other could only brace against the strain. +ill see what i can do,+ avo replied. they split off from the aerolanes as they closed within a mile of the voidship. pulling public mem-data, avo learned that it was ninety-eight miles long and a fourth as wide. its hull seemed something metallic and crystalline, the surrounding city lights revealing a slight bismuth to its hue. aside from that, however, the voidship was notable in its near-featurelessness. no blemish nor bruise disfigured its exposed aspects, and though its interior was pulled open to reveal a spiral staircase of quick-fabbed structures infested with bars building to overlook various circuits, the opening was characterized by mottled edges rather than outright damage. something in avo suspected that the vessel had adjusted itself to be this wayits matter as fluid and freeform as the george washington. as they slipped past the lip into the interior, a slight smile played across dentons face. do any of you have a favorite drink? itll be on the house. and as their aero angled up and twisted, various spiraling stacks of urban detritus vanished from sight, the easy armistice spilled into view as they rotated rightward, more of it loading into existence with each degree. avo blinked. chambers rose from his seat, shifting his head the other way and then back again. slowly, a wide grin spread across his face. alright. that might just be the single most nova watering hole ive ever seen. Chapter 12-3 The Easy Armistice (II) chapter 12-3 the easy armistice (ii) heavens are comprised of a unified retelling of a story. this is what makes them so hard to counterthey dont need to make exact sense in the broad scheme of things, but as long as enough people repeat the same rituals and mutter the same prayers and worship the same scripture, a sort of pattern forms in existence. something that lets the heaven embed itself into a few central concepts. where hubris and rend come in are curious as well. from the accounts weve collected, hubris seems to be born of logical pitfalls or hard limitations as stated in their mythology. take the sangeist for example. how blood works around that thing is absolute nonsense, right? but we know this: it can use its blood and mimic the general qualities of solid matter while still maintaining its own. two things about this. one is that solid matter means literally anything that seems solid from the perspective of the worshippers that defined it. this means structures like fissile material or adamantine can be adapted to their structures. the expression of said materials can get strange, though. but not antimatter. and not a hydrogen cell. magma is more of a variable thing depending on if it''s flowing or not. they can do it if it''s not moving but the effects are confusing for the heaven to say the least. the daemon, however. thats something else. from our current suspicious, our best guess is that the heavens still have some latent memories of the entities they once housed, allowing their users to wield them with almost no learning curve, and this is enough left behind that when something blatantly blasphemous or out of character occurs, so to speak, it risks awakening inside the user as wellthe connection between the forming a metacognitive link. all this is to say operate with caution. the ruptured function on a few shared restrictions, but most of their rules vary wildly. when there are heavens for everything from dogs to soundwaves, your best chances of staying safe are staying away and staying aware. -orientation on frames and heavens for planetside assets, node aegis, voidwatch 12-3 the easy armistice (ii) the first layer of the easy armistice unveiled itself with the aeros slow rotation. with each inch they turned, the foreground unzipped, revealing a bright new horizon through a blurred cleft of space. looking back to gaze upon the sprawling shanties below, avo found them wobbling before its sight, their geometric outlines jiggling like vibrating strings. nausea painted essus expression as he swallowed sour spit. were transitioning, denton explained. a low frequency followed her words, the pitch light but constant, rising and falling in a repetition of patterns. the turnings for aligning ourselves with the signal. too fast and we miss the frequency. too slow and the curtain doesnt lift. heaven of pitches? avo said. or geometry? the glaive shook her head. the easy armistice is special-made. heaven of signals. world around them brightened as the interior of the voidship dulled away into the background. it was like all other than the easy armistice was losing focus, dissolving into faint clashes and dappled light and muted sound. the pitch spiked. the glass of the wielded squealed momentarily before the twice-walker passed beneath its translucence and pinched it still. it wasnt going to break, denton said, reassuring draus. the regular didnt reply. enshadowed within the light, the armistice resembled something in the shape of a hanging acorn at the heart of the radiance. light spread out, enveloping the aero as the frequency rose to its apex. avo hissed as he felt a spike of pain pulse throughout his cochlea. the violence of his reaction made chambers jerk back in his seat. uh, you alright, consang? the man asked. the light began to settle. casting his gaze out through the vehicles sensors, he found himself in a place shrouded by a canopy of titanic brambles and spilling leaves. through crevices offered by wrestling branches fell the first spills of miracle-infused light. bathed in the rays, avo felt his injury promptly dissolve. i feel a nearness to this place, his woundshaper said. something that once belonged to our domain of biology shares an origin to the mythos that covers this realm within a realm. must we stay, the galeslither said. must we linger? this is a cage this is a trap. we must be free. we must calm yourself, mule. this eventuality has been prepared. let the huntress serve her purpose. you just be prepared to serve yours. a low note of discontentment mantled the galeslithers emotions. i rode free once. now i am debased. mine is not shadow. mine was storm and sky and message. mine was past and lost! the woundshaper cut it off. we are all past and lost! struck down by the childrenstruck down by the ephemerals and partlings. hewn from our foundations. what shame, i ask? let us fall, i say. if the tower cannot stand upon the base that was built, then it was never a tower to be. the heavens argued on thereafter, sparring within the gilded cage that was his frame. he himself found more interest in examining the establishment that was the armistice. convenience was another hallmark of the citys heights. here, the structures of existence could be remolded to suit the needs of the individual, with distances shrunk and verticalities altered through the whims of the basest canons. after a month of being a godclad, avo felt a deeper kinship forming between him and new vultun. a city of predation. a city of vultures. a city of technology and mythology entwined. but ultimately, a city of presiding stories. that was what a heaven was in the end: overriding narratives told in place of what was. whoa, chambers said as they arrived at the heart of the thinkeasy. its gonna take me a while to get used to this. a single tree-like pillar spun in place before them, a vast structure that stretched vertically for three miles. its entire expanse was parted into five different platforms, and impossibly, there were people sitting and walking on both ends, be they upright or upside down. the constant buzz of shuttling service drones deepened the hive-like theme presented by the armistice. holocoated bodies with heavily warded metas formed the bulk of the clientele and as avo took in his surroundings, he found them walking across every flat surface. gravity adheres to different rules here, denton said, waving at the pillar before them. thats the center. force comes out from that and presses down on everything with an edge. dont jump off the sides or youll be falling at terminal velocity in endless loops. the drones will have to catch you, but they wont be gentle about it. you speakin from experience? draus asked, eyes darting from point to point as she took in her surroundings. doubtless, she was considering her exposure, her potential angles of attack or defense. he couldnt fault her his own preoccupation in the present was not so different as he scried at the necrotheurgic talent present. from the wards alone, he wasnt in milk-run territory anymore. they werent incubi, but judging from most of the accretions around him, competence was the expected baseline. these were seasoned street squires and snuffers at the very least. a few offered hints of potential above that. a link shot out from dentons mind, hooking out to capture a passing drone as it flashed red and then green. i got us a booth. if any of you are hungry or thirsty, theres a scan-in menu in place. my associates will be joining us shortly. we can talk in-depth then. might we know one of them, draus said, her voice edged with thin disdain. i doubt it, denton replied. as i said before, the old woman will probably be occupied for a while. the supposed booth she procured was a small alcove that sunk inward from the side of the cylinder surrounding the central pillar. the sensation of stepping over the threshold and expecting to fall before gravity adjusted to their sense of verticality was uncanny, but in moments, they found themselves situated around a risen marble table lit by a hovering locus. soft frequencies continued to play from speakers embedded into the walls, their notes masked by the somber melody of a strange wind-based instrument. there was sourness in the music. a certain feeling of longing and nostalgia he couldnt quite place. you like it? denton said. avo turned to regard her. dont know the instrument. its called a saxophone. the players name was osjon coldtrain, i think. he was a vodiwatch musician. old. very old. she smiled faintly as the notes continued to flow. you know this song is banned, right? this, along with its entire genre? supposedly, there was an attempt to make a heaven out of them. it went wrong. it went bad. new rhyme same as the fuckin first, draus said. now. wherere your consangs? well hear what you got to say but you gotta forgive us if we aint feelin all that patient after today. of course, the glaive said. the two of them should be a holocoated figure fell over the alcove. sorry, denton. got caught up putting her in the corner. so. is this our little band? a victim, some half-strand, a color-puppet, and a rotlick. he laughed. there was an unnaturally silken quality to his voice, with the way he spoke almost alluring to the ears. godsdamned do the fates frown on us. just sit down, cas, denton said. his answer was lost to a low humming chorus of bees that flooded in over the edge. to avos disbelief, the ghostly faintness of thoughtstuff wove between them, like their interconnected mind was a cloud of cognition from pheromones and hive-like synchronicity. sorry, the swarm buzzed as they fused into a ball. we had some delays. the paladins nearly looped half of us off. chambers blinked. are these fat fleas talking to us? the swarm formed the vague approximation of a frowning face. im sunrise, and it''s more like i''m a collection of bees. essus leaned over the table and frowned. and what is a bee? somehow, the collection of insects managed to sigh. Chapter 12-4 The Frame (I) chapter 12-4 the frame (i) dont fuck with the voiders. im serious, consangs. just dont. i know the other guilds talk about voidwatch and their enjoined governing intellects like theyre the soft, coldtech version of omnitech, but the truth is theyre better than us. older than us. hell. if it werent for them, wed be nothing more than savages now. a bunch of broken half-strands living in shit-heaps worshiping our new fallwalker gods. but here''s the thing. they wont touch thaumaturgy or necrotheurgy; they treat it like poison. anything to do with the gods or the eldritch, i guess. and considering how the rest of the big black yonder is beyond idheim, i dont think i can blame em. i did a run for them once. a simple retrieval job. they lent me this gunwell, it was more battle platform than gun. best godsdamned weapon i ever got to fire. doesnt run out of bullets. lets you know everything in a two-hundred-kilometer radius. everything. aratnid nests, aeros, heartrates, hostile loadouts. i managed to shoot the loci out a bunch of golems using it. fifth best day of my life. ill tell you, if they ever decide to end their little restriction on gods, were done. its their planet by then and they can just do what they want. but the question keeps coming back to that, doesnt it? if souls and heavens put a bunch of up-jumped savages like us on the same pedestal as the titans of the void, just what the hells made the last surviving power in this ruptured galaxy choose idheim as their hiding spot? -quail tavers, school of the warrens 12-4 the frame (i) sunrise was not from idheim. that was clear to avo from a glance. the more he studied the swarms thoughtstuff, the more he found himself lost in its phantasmal symphony. strings of mem-data flowed between each one of its bodies like liquid circuitry. as such, its mind did not form an accretion of thoughtstuff so much as it did a kaleidoscopic lattice. bathed in its perceptive exhale, the reality behind the swarms sapience was never in doubt, but a puzzling curtain of static integers spilled from its hive-link mind. the sinews of its dreams were ones, zeros, and symbols beyond avos comprehension, the presence of unknown technology and withheld gnosis similar to the mystery that crowned denton. ms. denton, could you please tune the frequency for our table, sunrise said. its words came as a buzzing melody, the ball of thickened insects vibrating outward from the core as if a dense cloud rippling from its nucleus. play hendricks. i want to hear some strings. the other newcomer said this as he settled in next to denton, stepping down into the alcove and suddenly rotating ninety degrees upright. his invertedness was more than literal. where denton and sunrise had their minds warped by coldtech, the mans thoughstuff ran as solid and round as any self-aware creature born on idheim. even his aesthetic ran counter to the woman he sat beside. a flashy holocoat obscured his body from sight as he hid behind a veil of strobing darkness. studs of chrome and chains rattled from his shoulders. a flash of various guild-symbol parodied spiraled along his waist. past the disguise, however, avo could what sounded like a piston hammering away inside the mans chest, pumping rhythmic beats as his blood surged through his arteries in constant cycles. avos auto-seance activated. draus cast him a memory. +hes got a dynamite stringsmith mark twelve for an arm. real gutterware stuff. like having six different instruments packed into a single limb. listen. you can practically hear the twangs of the strings every time he moves.+ the limbs models and specifications spilled over avos vision as his curiosity fed. from a brief dip into the public nether, the appendage was popular amongst anti-guilder revolutionaries and aficionados of classical-style voider music. whichever clique this cas fell into, avo couldnt tell, but the mans face looked as tough as mistreated leather. three lines of ritualized scarification ran across his face and ridged the bridge of his nose, but he wasnt nearly large enough to be a born scaarthian. his features were hardened and rough, with a substantial jawline and poorly shaven beard that resembled a clash between patches of hair upon skin. dark green eyes glowed from within depressed sockets as he glared back at avo, grinding his jaw from side to side. you thinking about taking a bite, ghoul? he asked. avo didnt look away. social embarrassment was a human emotion, and he was far too tired to play at pleasantries. always. your eyes dont look as nice as hers. but eyes are eyes. flesh is flesh. still enough taste there. the man cocked his head at avo and narrowed his eyes as he reached into the veil of his holocoat. draus projectile launcher unfolded with a series of clicking servos. avos ghostjack surged to activation after. chambers looked at the two sides andnot wanting to be left outignited his index finger. leaves began to spill out from the heat as he mimed aiming a gun, his expression tight with uncertainty. dont do it, consang, chambers said. ive never shot anyone with my finger before, but ill finger you today as my first. he paused as soon as the words left his mouth. denton fixed him with an awkward stare. cas, she said, mention that youre pulling out cigarettes next time you do that? your biometric readings indicate a high state of arousal. your eyes are narrowed and your blood is running fast. from all the data we have compiled, any other being sheathed in your morphology would be experiencing hyper-violent psychosis by this point. you are an extreme outlier. he didnt quite know how to take that. saying im a faulty ghoul. we dont have enough information to make a judgment based on that. only that you are different. made that way, avo replied. a long-suppressed desire unmoored within as the urge to seek out his home up in the tiers returned. walton had done something to create him. build his mind. the extent of his true nature was psychopathy and choice both, the traits gifted by determined design. or so it seemed. if such were to be the case, then he wondered as to the memories he possessed of the undercroft and his upbringing, of the past he supposedly lived and the life he led. how much of it was real in totality? how much was just patchwork mem-data taken and perfected into a thinking construct by a father yearning to atone for immortal sins? we are all made to be a certain way. by the chaos of evolution and natural birth. or the focus and sculpture of genetic engineering. but beyond our hardware, there is the totality of our reactions to the things we face. and the lives we lead. you lead a very interesting life, avo. very interesting. he caught sight of draus smirk in his periphery. well, shit, rotlick. look at you charmin our little bug-consangs with all that self-control. not havin flesh dangling between your fangs has gone and done wonders for that monstrous charisma of yours. an echohead slithered around and snapped out to pierce her from the other side. she caught it without looking. downloads done, denton said. her eyes were cycling now, thoughtstuff rising and cresting in active waves of restructuring sequences. the effects of eating the bee were like a phantasmal seed allowed to sprout at the center of her mind. the static of her thoughts intensified as her accretion swelled. saving each and every detail using his metamind, avo studied the occurrences before him as he tried to puzzle out what was happening to dentons mind. from the roiling substance of thoughstuff emerged phantoms. the ghosts supporting their architecture were likewise mechanical in nature, their forms more circuitry than wisp-like, numbers running up from the roots of their flowing strands. if youre curious about how banned mem-data gets smuggled around, this is the way it''s usually done. cas shot denton a look as her eyes began to cycle. with how many eyes there are in the city, it doesnt take guilder necros long to null you with a desist once they mem-lock to the banned memories. so they parted and parceled and hidden behind cyberized brains. pure coldtech logic enhancers and the like. doesnt work perfectly either though. the silvers got plenty of incubi specialized in void-based affairs. which is why all confidential and unsanctioned memories are to be assembled here in a thinkeasy, denton said, as she began molding her phantoms into shape. if what im about to show you leak over into the public yeah, avo said. hunters. guild-response knots more my guess, draus added. doubt you just got a couple of sequences of trade secrets rattlin around in that mind of yours. denton shrugged coyly. a bit more, perhaps. her phantoms melded, forming multiple interfaces containing specific fate skeins and personnel profiles. slowly, the profiles began to expand into a wider web of intrigue under the header project godshaper. by the end, there were a hundred and thirteen dossiers to expand, with each separated into major columns of involvement based on profession. guilder godclads, freelance fallwalkers, commissioned agnosi, and suspected spies were highlighted with specific labels when looked upon. surprise followed as he noticed there were redacted profiles connected to members from voidwatch. he hadnt known the voiders to ever assist in thaumaturgically related endeavors, and with the details withheld, his curiosity only grew. voidwatch, avo said. why are they censored? because we couldnt intercept the details from the suspected admins to confirm our suspicions, sunrise said, almost mournfully. admins? draus asked. the swarm hummed melodiously. voidwatch isnt nearly as united as you might assume, captain draus. draus sneered. yeah, aint so different from the others, right? quite different, im afraid, sunrise said. our union was one held by the dichotomy between extremes. but even between our various governing intellects, there are preferences in lifestyle and hey, wait a minute, chambers said, interrupting sunrise. squinting his eyes, he leaned close to the agnosi column as he pointed to a profile at the very top. bringbring that one up, i think he licked his lips and shot a look at avo and draus. isnt she isnt that? the profile expanded. the face of the agnosi bloomed into prominence as her simulated form came into shape above the conspiracy map. avo felt his mind reel as kae kusanades face finally loaded in her entirety. kae? Chapter 12-5 The Frame (II) chapter 12-5 the frame (ii) +our glaives are dead. the agnos is gone.+ +what? how? the paladin was+ +its not him. hes good and snuffed. there was an unforeseen variable.+ +unforeseen? unforeseen? the conflagration should have left her little more than a vegetable. how did she+ +not the agnos. a regular. former regular jelene draus. she ambushed field cell three before they could move to support. and then she intercepted field cells one and two at the target location. she mustve received an automated message from the agnos somehow. she+ +a regular? one? you had eighteen glaives. with incubi support!+ +she triggered a thoughtwave disruption before she went in. the resulting fight+ +you lost the agnos to one! one gold! eighteen of our best couldnt stop one regular? what the hells is wrong with you? why do we keep you when+ +elder [redacted]. i speak to you now with the utmost respect. if the next words cast at me are an insult directed toward my comrades who just died serving the republic, i will find you, kill you, kill your husband, kill your children, and kill every last member within your immediate blood lineage. i will then turn myself in afterward for a formal investigation to account for the question of why i did what i did.+ +...i apologize. my calm was compromised. startling. only one.+ +you were not part of the war effort, elder. you dont know how many lives fighting her like cost us. we need to pivot. im requesting additional resources to choke off their escape before they can ascend the tiers.+ +granted. anything. everything. but keep yourself in check: kae kusanade must be taken alive.+ -glaive [redacted] and elder [redacted], ori-thaum 12-5 the frame (ii) kae kusanade, cas drawled. she got up to some pretty revolutionary shit before the silvers cooked her skull. he looked over at draus. she tell you about what she was doing? the regular ran her tongue along her inner cheek. avo had seen that tell enough to know draus was thinking about killing the man across from her. nah. she wasnt in much a talkin mood when i found her. hells, she wasnt in a talkin mood even after she got chromed. and you didnt look into it yourself? he continued, spreading himself wide as he leaned back. i dont know about you, reg, but id be pretty curious what would make ori-thaum attempt to captureand then framean agnosi for the murder of a paladin. he looked down to nonchalantly smooth out an unseen article of clothing beneath his veil. you know they were together, right? draus looked away from kaes character profile and glared at cas. what? the paladin, dawton morrow, and your consang there were a thing. he shrugged. sure it wasnt permitted on her end and they tried to be sly about it, but hell, sometimes sparks fly in across nether, right? draus turned back and stared into kaes shimmering visage again. fuck. yeah, cas agreed, fuck, indeed. he eyed avo. zein said something about you knowing how to fix her? that true? got a theory, avo said. will need to see if it survives practice. experiment with test subjects first. see if the supports i have in mind can last. his gaze briefly drifted over to chambers. the ex-enforcer blinked. whywhy you looking at me like that, consang? he placed his arm along the wood beams of the terrace and shot a look out over the lily-paded waters. avo didnt give him an answer, instead choosing to pursue a question of his own. why? he asked, gesturing at the sprawl of people and details stretched across the map. why do this to her? and what is godshaper. a mistake, sunrise intoned. a major reason why the stillborn-pattern liminal frame even exists, denton said. wanted to keep his mind, avo said, throwing out a vague response. again, he wasnt really thinking when he restored all three companions into a cadre, but cas had a point: chambers was more captive than ally despite his constant sniveling attempts to ingratiate himself with the group. that being said, the stalemated calamity within his mind presented useful avenues of research and a potential component to kaes salvation. ultimately, chambers possessed little threat on his own. the man mightve had an imbued heaven, but avo still had easy access to his mind. stripping his senses and crippling his brain functions would take less than a full thought. even should he escape, a lone fallwalker was easy prey to a hungry city. from what we could piece together, denton continued as if the digression had never happened, agnos kae kusanade was commissioned by highflame in the immediate aftermath of the fourth guild war to restart the godshaper project. this time, however, the reignition of the project followed closely behind another, seemingly unconnected incident. across from the frame simulation, four profiles rose out from the conspiracy map as kaes form fizzled out into thoughtstuff. in her place manifested four different figures sporting various degrees of chrome and other visible implants. then, their final details loaded, and avo found himself more interested in the third sphere-ratings of their liminal frame instead. fallwalkers, denton said. cadre numbered a scaarthian with eight rusted arms, an exoskeleton-clad individual vibrating between two points in time like a frequency, a sang with a chitinous hive growing out from her exposed ribs, and a floating spine encased within the shell of an egg-shaped war golem. the cadre called themselves mignights fall, and they specialized in less than sanctioned smash-and-grabs. chambers snorted. sounds like some street squire shit to me, consang. denton kept talking. their targets were usually voidships or orbitals. sounds like a short immortality to me, draus said. aint no one takes too kindly to you hittin the voiders. she paused. they hit any hydroponics? could be deniable operatives for the no-dragons. and the reg doesnt miss, cas said, smirking humorlessly. a triple-ringed orbital connected to a central spire pulsed into view. its name was redacted, but the damage inflicted on its hull was obvious. whatever the fallwalkers had done, they tore clean through one of the rings and rampaged their way into the central spine of the station. ori-thaum assembled enough details to assign the no-dragons some complicity to this attack. the working theory was that they were trying to force those in stormtree territories to purchase their produce instead. their biotheurgically altered produce, that was. course it was, draus said without any hint of surprise. you aint one of the great guilds without playin some fuck-fuck games. the problem came afterward, denton said. from what we gather, midnights fall didnt return planetside immediately. evidence from aegis suggests that they smuggled themselves aboard a passing voidwatch vessel during their escape. they took something from that vessel that made the stillborn possible. the imitators, sunrise hummed. the thoughtless-dreamers avo found his attention drawn to the small bees settled on his left shoulder as they flapped their wings in agitated bursts. to his surprise, he found himself able to detect a hint of tension within them, a speck of emotion that he could taste emanations of their thoughts. ninth column isnt sure what the imitators are, only that voidwatch struck a bargain with whatever terrestrial guild could help them secure what was stolen. the four fallwalkers promptly went gray. highflame ended up winning the bid to rectify the issue, and after their bid, they secured voidwatchs patronage in a highly unusual bargain. heavily restricted information, sunrise added. i dont have access. and aegis wont tell. whatever the case, agnos kae kusanade was directed to task under a paladin team headed by one dawton morrow and his cadre. the memories behind the project are heavily redacted, but from what we could glean, her work proved to be highly successful. groundbreaking. a prototype frame was patterned from a nascent soul, whatever the fallwalkers stole from voidwatch, and highflames resources. this proved to be dangerous for the balance cas face flattened into a wince as he stared at avo. a sense of disquiet settled on the ghoul. val, maybe we can he should know, denton said without even needing to turn and look at her colleague. zein foresaw the construction of your frame in the paths. but she wasnt the only one. the walton branch of the low masters had also infiltrated the project, and a bargain was struck between the column and the nodes to steal the frame from where it was held. a beat passed. in light of recently gathered information, we also believe that it was one of the waltons that leaked the key details of the project over to ori-thaum. including kae kusanades involvement and the paladins attached. dentons eyes snapped over to draus. to the same extent, we are also quite certain that he directed a thoughtcast of her distress over to you, captain draus. walton. ori-thaum. kae. more plays working the great guilds against each other. more innocents caught in the crossfire. silence followed as all expression bled out of draus face. kae kae contacted me. that would be impossible. her mind was already compromised by that point, and the incubi had used her to eliminate her lover, dawton morrow. she wasnt fully herself until your thoughtwave detonation struck. we believe that walton sought to remove the key intelligentsia behind project godshaper to ensure the fruition of his own plans, but if thats the case, we cannot explain why he contacted you. avo felt denton stare right through him. for when he ambushed our extraction team and stole the frame for himself and vanished, were pretty sure everything played out just as he wanted. which was when his nodes started turning up dead. Chapter 12-6 Arrangements chapter 12-6 arrangements you know whats the sign of a real necrojack, avo? using someone to solve the problems they created. look at the dive we just did. were we richer than the instrument? no. not even close. were we smarter? id also say not enough for it to matter. but we knew all his habits and flaws, and he wasnt even aware we were there. how much did we need to modify his memories for him to do what we wanted? not at all. right. being a necrojack isnt all resequencing minds and subverting wards. its about mastering perspectives and understanding the nature of another persons consciousness. its why if you were to try and hurt me, i would be in severe danger despite the gap in our skills. we share history. we shared thoughts. there was a bridge of understanding to exploit. metaphors dont do the art justice, avo. theres nothing like diving into the nether. its more than an ocean. its more than a dream. its like the source from which choice flows. and if you can make someone else think whatever you want them to think or do what you want them to do, then i dont think theres a single power across the all there ever was that can stop you. -walton,low master 12-6 arrangements we think the others did the killings. the other low masters, i mean. denton slowed her words, as her eyes swung like a pendulum between avo and draus. there was an anticipation to her posture, as if expecting things to turn violent, or something to sour in her guests. instead, both ghoul and regular mirrored an equal tension in their postures, and then contemplation consumed them. cas eyed denton from the side as he shuffled uncomfortably. well, if were gonna tell them that, we should also tell them the other stuff. you know. like how most the column was against this? how aegis just wanted to kill the ghoul and retrieve the frame? how the original candidate for the frame is still alivefredritchs gonna be pissed when he finds out his frame went to a ghoul. the name spurred a month-old memory within avo. somehow, he doubted the depths of fredritchs ire considering one of waltons lingering engrams directed him to contact the man. once you get to the easy armistice, talk to fredritch three-eye and tell him that you''re with the ninth column, and that the dream is broken. hell give you an engram containinganother itinerant of me. avo replayed his fathers words using his meta and found held himself to silence. walton was still weaving schemes around ninth column even long after his death. it took skill to compromise an organization so secretive, but it took staggering foresight and skill to turn a probable rival into an asset. +draus,+ avo said, feeding her the memory of waltons words. +need you to try and make contact with fredritch. will be suspicious if i ask.+ her mind gave an affirmative note but trailed off into a bitter apprehension. +you didnt know nothin about him+ +no,+ avo said. the sourness of his admission bothered him as well. +beginning to understand i dont know much about my father at all.+ +shit. makes you sound almost human.+ its partially why we didnt approach you earlier. instead utilizing an intermediary. denton altered her phantoms and a visual representation of green river came into shape. the glaives eye twitched. of course, we now know that she was compromised as well. beginning to see a theme here, right? cas added. another point to shit our pants about: him infiltrating the deep bazaar. word gets out about that and the entire deep nether network is going to self-mutilate. well have to go back to using couriers in the underhive for shit. do you know why i woke up in the maw? avo asked. for all the successes walton had at subterfuge, something seemed to have fundamentally gone astray during the grafting process. if there was a plan that necessitated avo to resurrect a dismembered, discombobulated, organ-harvested, one-week-amnesic husk of a ghoul with a blank-slate metamind, he couldnt conceive it. draus spat over the terrace of their pagoda as she added her own question to the pile. yeah. was the ghoul gettin sold to the right crucible at the right time to run into me by design as well? to mirrorhead? chambers, unwilling to be left out, nodded along, glaring at the opposition. beside him, essus looked too lost and tired to fully grasp the details of the discussion at all. unlikely, denton answered. from what we could gather, your fathers nodes were trying to graft the heaven to you while moving around on a barge in the maw. but something went wrong along the way. we found pieces from the barge before the ship could entirely dissolve, but neither you nor the frame were located in the estimated impact area. and wasnt that the ugly truth? the easy armistice offers accommodation frequencies as well, cas added. perfect if you want a nice place to think about things while the heat dies down. we dont need an answer from you right could start this partnership of ours off with a couple of favors, draus said, interrupting him. cas leaned back and sighed, ceding the conversation over to denton. avo noticed the man deliberately played a different role to dentons hyper-competent diplomat. he greeted them with a rough casualness and approached essus as a fellow refugee by way of suggestion. whether that was true or not had yet to be determined. state your requirements and well see if your dreams can come true, denton replied. first thing: kae. weve been talkin an awful lot about her without her bein present. mighty rude. id like to order an official pickup for her. one with my personal touch to expedite her arrival. denton nodded. her thoughtstuff pulsed static and collapsed inward. she was making a mental note. that can be arranged. what else? i wanna know about this fredritch who was supposed to have the frame. wanna know if hes gonna be a problem. i assure you you can assure me by scheduling a meetin. me and him. the ghoul stays out of it. face to face. just to clear the air. cas huffed out a breath. well. looks like well have to ask old three-eyes what he wants. sure. fine. draus added another request. this one avo didnt see coming. and i want to see your operation. all of it. denton pressed her lips together. cas began to laugh softly. what? draus said. somethin funny. not for you, cas said. truth is youve already seen all of our operations. the laughter suddenly stopped. its zein. what? draus asked. her paths. her iterations. echoes. forks. theyre the ones keeping all our cells coordinatedthe only reason why were like smoke and myth to everyone hunting for us. draus blinked. what? so zeins what? her own network? shes a lot of things, denton said. presently for us, however, she is re-emerging out from the past. itll be at least a week before were ready to interface with the other cells. aside from that, we are effectively similar to incubi strike cells on the practical end. im sure youre familiar with how they work. just about, draus drawled. chambers held up his hand. can i ask for something? everyone ignored him. everyone except avo. a grin spread across the ghouls face as he regarded chambers. no. going to need you to give me something. iuhsure, consang, chambers swallowed. w-whats the need? instead of replying to him, avo turned and addressed denton again. need a few demiplanes. someplace good for repeated thoughtwave detonations along with one that can let nether flow through. thats doable, denton asked. can i ask what youre planning? avo shot draus a look. ori-thaum broke kae''s life. created this problem. partially anyway. want to pluck the problem from her head. take a closer look at it. pattern and return it." he let out a low hiss of pleasure as he imagined possessing a phantasmic or trauma that could burn away other minds. youre invited to watch. see what we can all learn. would be good start to formal partnership. denton just stared while cas shook his head. fuck me, he said. hes worse than the waltons. Chapter 12-7 Retrieval chapter 12-7 retrieval +jhred greatlings frame is gone; elder drongo just got arrested. i am severing this proxy. this is the last time i use its memories to contact you. i wont remember our near-term conversations after this. i suggest you dispose of your own memories somehow.+ +received. do you have any leads? highflames inner channels claim abrel greatlings entire cadre got wiped out and that she got picked up by chief paladin naeko of all people.+ +her entire cadre?+ +one ruptured and died. frame lost. two other frames missing along with their ensouled. godclads dont go missing that easily, so if i was a wagering man, id put imps on them being in the same state as jhred.+ +three missing frames isnt a mystery, instrument. it''s a pattern. some unconfirmed eyewitness accounts are leaking out from the sovereignty. there claiming a pantless man was part of a fallwalker cadre facing off against abrel near the end. do you have any details on that?+ +i no. first noise im getting about it. pantless?+ +yeah. apparently, his genitals were exposed as greatling chased him and his across the district into a hypertube station.+ +...the fuck?+ -thoughtcast between glaive [redacted] and instrument santanado starsinger mondelles 12-7 retrieval hey, consangs, does this feel too easy to anyone el draus hand snapped out as a lashing blur. a sudden crunch followed and chambers adams apple went from being visible to parted between distended ridges of tissue as he clawed at his neck, choking. essus offered chambers a brief look of pity before shooting draus a wary glance. was that necessary? he was just talking about now dont you go repeatin what he just said, essus. draus narrowed her eyes as chambers collapsed in front of her. denton and cas watched from the side as the man kicked and wheezed, his left arm flopping about for aide while his right continued to dig at his pulverized throat. aint no one invokin the words ''milk'' connected to the word that kinda means sprint. essus blinked. i i do not understand. sunrises many selves buzzed over chambers, examining him as he struggled. damage severe. deep lacerations. biological recovery baseline insufficient to overcome trauma. the aeros gonna pick kae up. its gonna pick her up and there aint gonna be any problems bout it. draus expression hardened. things will go just fine. just fine. i remain confused, essus said, looking to the others for aid. an old street squire superstition, denton explained. beside them, the aero lifted up as the field holding it in place flicked off. the aerodock flashed white as a sheet of glass in the departing vehicle shimmered in time with a floating shard of glass hovering next to draus. she crushed his throat because he was about to question why things were progressing so smoothly. tempting the city, if you will. you mean the fates? essus asked. she means the city, avo said. fates are fickle. new vultun just wants you dead.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. the former fathers expression darkened. he looked away from the others, lowering his gaze to the rusted plates forming the floor. ah. i understand. the cityscape outside however no longer overlooked the district of loathingor even lights end for that matter. instead, they were somewhere in the throat of the warrensa section between layer three and layer two closer to a checkpoint or partition to separate the useful from the truly fateless, destined to feed the economy with their deaths. their departure from the easy armistice was preceded by three spiking notes followed by a melody. from where they once sat beneath the open terrace of a stone pagoda overlooking a tranquil pond, they had suddenly found themselves deposited around a dilapidated dinner table in an old aero-shop as space around them smeared. it had felt as if all of reality around them was a disc of some kind and a needle was skipping them out of place into another location entirely. from what cas had to say thereafter, it seemed that there were more than a thousand exits to the easy armistice, but only that single way back, up in the district of loathing. avo supposed the futility of raiding such a place added to the reason why people called it the easy armistice it was nigh impossible to actually engage in a prolonged fight within its confines. as denton led them out to a reserved aerodock with a stormtree-licensed aero already prepared, draus exercised her canons and created a sheet of glass on the side before linking it to another piece and forming a junction. avo studied his deepnav and discovered they were suddenly only two hundred and eighty miles away from xin yunsha, and that the aero was being flown by a well-maintained wight sporting stormtrees colors. itll pilot the aero over to the second fortune and deliver your message, denton said. we might have to account for some delays as it passes through security checkpoints and paladin pockets, so expect this to take four hours. maybe a bit more. at her feet, chamber crawled over and clawed at her silver pant legs. she offered the man a sympathetic look and regarded avo immediately afterward. how much rend did he have leftover from the fight? not that much, avo said, curious to observe how chambers might resurrect. it would be interesting to see how another returned. but even more than that, there was something else he could do. meta-fac activating transferring rend from second circle [lushburner] to fourth circle [woundshaper] ->rend capacity [lushburner]: 0% ->access canons and before avos sense, chambers canons loaded into his awareness. avo soul was flowing out in oscillating tides ebbing over and back across the borders of chambers frame. interfacing didnt feel so different than casting a ghost out to form a link, but ultimately, it was an action that was moreso much greater. he was effectively bridging subrealities together, using the deviant nature of his stillborn. and all it took was a thought. its not your chambers lower pelvic region erupted into a chasm of gore as draus fired her projectile launcher into his genitals. mangled pulp spattered onto the ceiling as one of chambers legs snapped free and flopped away from the body. what followed was an expression of muted horror as chambers began to scoop what he could back into the open chasm that used to constitute a stretch of flesh from his pelvic region leading up to his lower belly. shaking, he turned to avo as his lip quivered. the ghoul thought he was going to cry. i thought you said you werent going to tell her didnt, avo lied again. she just does that. the horror on chambers face deepened. a series of clicks and snaps followed as another missile was loaded into draus projectile launcher. chambers. listen up. draus aimed her arm at his head. a phys-sim vector went red. the ghoul loves killin people. i like killin half-strands. i want to make a couple things clear before i spread your head across the room again. avo watched as sunrise drifted away from chambers, it''s swarming mass moving behind avo for cover. dangerous, it said. draus continued. heres the thing: you mightve forgotten who you were, but i didnt. you worked for mirrorhead. you''re a half-strand scumbaga real funny one, but lets not bullshit ourselves, you helped your old boss do plenty of horrible shit to folks that didnt deserve it. folks like essus here. fuck, chambers moaned. ii helped you snuff mirrorhead, didnt i? i mean thats something right? draus stared at him flatly. sure i didnt really have a choice had your chance, avo snarled. should have done your research for that run. suddenly, chambers pulled his hands away from his castration, eyes widening in disbelief. wait, are you still hung up on that shit? that was our first run! how was i supposed to know about the scalpers? prepare! avo hissed. ask. investigate. fine, fuck, im sorry, chambers choked. anything else? is is anyone else mad at me for something? how about you two. he looked at denton and cas. anything you want to take out on me? i''m just a half-strand right. he laughed three times. a single tear ran down his face. cas folded his arms and looked away, expression unnerved. denton quirked an eyebrow. i wont intrude on whatever this is, but i have a request. chambers nodded slowly. can you please resurrect with pants the next time you die? i ill try? chambers said, sounding unsure. right, denton said, wincing slightly. did you care, essus said, capturing everyones attention. did you care what happened to me? to anyone that you profited from? chambers whirled on essus, mouth open with eyes glinting and glib remark at the ready. despite his injured state, there was something persistent about chambers a determination to get others to like him no matter what. but for whatever reason, he faltered at essus'' expression. chambers went silent and hiccuped. then, gritting his teeth as a wave of pain passed through him, he puffed a sigh. i care about living, consang. i care about keeping myself safe and fed and not-dead. i used to care about other shit but this city, it''s power unleashed. people like us we dont really make it if we dont go a little crazy if we dont be a little wrong in the head. people like us, essus repeated. yeah, chambers said. people like us. you can talk about you being a good person all you want, consang. shit you are you are! im im sorry about what that fucking mirrorhead did to you. im sorry your boy died and everyone just watched and laughed and made imps from it. but i was relieved, you know? because look at you. good but suffering. what did it mean? and meanwhile, i''m a half-strand and alive. doing fine. he stopped looking at essus and turned back to stare at avo. i survive. i do my best. seven-eighteen years! the citys never stopped trying to kill me, but here i am. he laughed. here i am. godclad. maybe just for now. but it had to mean something, right? it had to be more than just luck that im here with you instead of dead with all the others. he glared at draus. heres the thing, reg. i didnt forget. i moved on. i moved on to you guys, and if shit goes wrong again, ill move on again. he shrugged. he winced. i dont i know why you might hate me but you you gotta understand. essus isnt from here, but you gotta know, right? unmoved, draus held her implanted weapon online. chambers breathed out. i dont want to go off to the big nothing. i want to live too. i want to be happy. i want to enjoy life. mine! not just snippets of thrill i get from a vicarity. im a person too, godsdammit, he paused and a haunted expression came over him. why dont people see that. quietly, avo regarded the man as a distant expression consumed him. through the auto-seance, avo read flashes of trauma cycling through him, the pain of a hyper-heated gun barrel dug into ones armpit. the throat-rending shrieks only a child could make. and the outrage. so much outrage. to be hurt by someone you were so desperate to love. chambers was a collection of sickness poured to cement a central faultline shut. all the vicarities, all the viruses, all the inward collapsing sequences were there drawn to that center mass of trauma he wouldnt face. and at that moment, avo learned how to permanently shatter chambers. fuck it, chambers said. shoot me again, reg. snuff me. ill come back with pants this time. ill be good. ill do anything you guys want. his lip quivered. please dont take my frame. avo reached out with an echohead and placed it over draus projectile launcher. slowly, he pushed her shot offline. chambers, avo said. going to need something from you soon. you want to matter. you want to be part of us. none of his words were presented as questions. chambers nodded. yeah, consang! anything! good. you will help me fix someone. then i want to see if i can make you better. use your damage. chambers was beginning to blink rapidly. he didnt hear the last part. use my what? he lost too much blood, sunrise said. we recommend killing and then talking to him. avo grunted. draus. you can shoot him now. chambers eyes widened. wait, wha chambers head promptly burst apart. Chapter 12-8 Private Transit chapter 12-8 private transit in deeds, not oaths. in acts, not rituals. in practice, not prayer. we bearers of the scriptures, though ever faithless, do pledge our undying virtues to serve the commonwealth of the peoples of idheim and beyond. we severed of cults and chains, bind the flesh of divinity toward greater ends. our task is the cessation of the longest cycle. our oath is the cessation of power. our duty is to guild and polity. never shall i bask in power, but to guide and remold. never shall i hold a position of power, only to counsel. never shall i revive the memories of the old gods, for the path toward coming prosperity will be layered by practicality instead of mythology. i pledge myself to the task of the agnosi eternal until i am severed of life, or severed from thought. i will be the keeper of all pantheons, but the follower of none. mine is where the chains are broken. -the covenant of the faith-severed 12-8 private transit apotheosis changes a person. the first deviation between a godclad and an ephemeral comes with their relation to death. where the pall of oblivion clouds each risk-filled action chosen by the latter, the former is free to simply proceed in most cases, with their demise being anything from a brief setback to a moment of respite. chambers took to dying remarkably well. his consciousness quavered during his first descent into his own soul, but with the sequent departure, a growing excitement shed itself free from the mottled skin of existential dread. far from being furious at draus, when the man returned a third time, he requested she kill him again just for the sensation. and again for the thrill of being unable to stop her grip from folding his skull over his neck.as his head dangled between his shoulders, blood seeped out from chambers nostrils as he smiled, lustaway activating at his habitual addiction calcified around his baseline of trauma. as he toppled over next to his other two bodies, draus studied him, unimpressed. you know, i like coming back usin your own corpse. its neater that way. resurrecting in a new bodys a good trick if you need a quick hit of imps, cas said. sell off some implants and all that other desperate organ trading stuff. but it usually makes you a pretty easy target as well. no-dragons or voidwatch ends up getting your biometric data and youll be looking for a new sheathe to avoid hunters or viruses specially engineered for you. every corner presents a trap, essus muttered, face pale as his eyes were locked on chambers'' corpse. the terror of death still clung to the man like a weighted shadow, but he was beginning to master himself more as his exhaustion outweighed his trauma. we are people no more, then, avo. he looked up. we are denied a final departure. can still die if you want, avo said, keeping his words wide but subtext clear. if essus wanted an end to this, avo would let him go. but he could not leave with the frame or memories. such things were too great a boon and too large a risk to release adrift into the city. i wish to have my own quiet for some time, essus said. as he looked down to study chambers corpse again, a passing aero illuminated the walls and cast darkness over his face. i wish to think. well, cas interrupted, kicking chambers. as i was saying before kill-me here decided to make a run at giving us all the rash, i might have a demiplane that suits all your needs. well. its more of an onion. onion? essus asked. cas nodded. yeah. still got a few hours before we can nab the agnos. how about we go get you all set for her he turned and looked at avo. what is it youre planning to do with her? fix, avo said. clean out the construct in her mind. take the fire for myself. the columner nodded slowly. a wall of bees spread out behind avo like a cape. it will be a difficult operation. i have observed much skill from ori-thaum assets. if it would be acceptable, we would like to be on-site during the process for documentation. avo regarded the voidwatch bioform? he didnt really know how to regard the swarm. considering sunrise still used the words i, its consciousness was clearly templated close enough to a humans that whatever differences would not be axiomatic. do you know the art? he asked. sunrises collective mass buzzed in contemplation as one. no. aegis considers necrotheurgy a forbidden developmental pathway. until my ego is re-downloaded, i will not be permitted to return to the fleets. this is purely for self-curiosity. self-curiosity. it spoke like it was on safari. like avo was a deviant bioform worth observing. it should know that the feeling was mutual in that regard. avo grunted. keep some distance. dont know if ghosts will affect your cognition. they will, sunrise admitted without hesitation. we will keep to safe parameters. draus smirked as she looked at the swarm swirling around him up and down. well, hells, avo. look at you makin a new consang. yeah, avo said. this one didnt steal my sword. the regular fought to force down a smirk. you woulda just lost it. she was probably right. but he reserved the right to be bitter. good times, huh, cas said. i would not go that far, essus said, spitting his words through gritted teeth. aw, fuck. cas winced. sorry consang. an awkward moment followed as chambers popped back into reality, fist held up toward the sky as he cheered his resurrection, declaring himself unkillable. at least he returned with the diamond-studded pants this time. +i drop mem-lock. you make a junction. see if we can make one look like a suicide.+ her lip twitched. +our new consangs might not like it. were gonna have to keep this quiet.+ +when have i not?+ +dunno. when you decided to null three-hundred-thousand fated cause you felt like it.+ +doesnt count. who knows if i did it? exorcists didnt find any evidence.+ he could feel a faint bemusement rushing out of her. +alright. lets do this. send me my marks.+ he cast his whisper back out and filtered through his memories to indicate the closest involved party still alive. one accretion brightened two miles above them, their aero moving fast. +think you can get this one?+ draus wiggled her jaw. +well see, wont we?+ two of her floating shards began to flash in sequence. examining the glass, avo watched as the pinhole of scenery changed. he realized then that she was effectively using two different sets of junctions as a ladder, connecting one to a specific reflection and then using it to re-anchor the other. all the while, she remained in place, monitoring things through her collection of shards. in seconds, her heaven leaped across blocks and enchained itself to the window of a passing tram. with how little she was stressing the twice-walkers rend, its full manifestation remained dormant, and the two columners remained ignorant. little wonder why godclads fought quiet wars. as the managers aero curved along the wind to arrive at an executive parking slot opening on the side of a block, draus bound a shard to the aeros windshield and bit back a smirk. +you want a jumper?+ +yes,+ avo said. +wait.+ he cast his whisper through her second active shard and released a torrent of trauma into the aeros locus. +no more monitoring. now you can+ he didnt manage to finish the thought as the vehicles windshield exploded. glass fragments dug into the designated victim and, with the aid of some unseen force, tore him out through the door. draus cut the passageway before any noise could spill over, but using her other shard, she watched as the man kicked and flailed, tumbling through the air before he burst apart against a passing cargo shipment in a spray of red. the suddenness and absurdity of the kill made avo grin. you two talking about something funny? cas eyed them warily from across the unit. avo stopped smiling. yeah, draus said. talkin about the uprising. and how his family is made out of nothing but half-strands. she jabbed him with a finger. he swatted it aside using an echohead. cas suspicion remained. +chambers,+ avo said, casting his ghost through an activating auto-seance. +show cas the soft master collection. scried at his mind. hell like it.+ chambers jolted as he turned away from denton. he blinked as he stared directly at the ghoul. +you sure? because he seems like one of those straight-edged jaus-was-right guys.+ he was likely right about that, but avo wanted the columner distracted by other matters so he wouldnt keep digging. +just do it. youre a clad. what can he do to you? kill you?+ that kindled a courage previously still and cold inside chambers. +yeah im a clad. im a fucking clad!+ without hint nor warning, chambers back straightened, his gaze sharpened, and all the necessary sequences comprising the soft master collection vicarities peeled out of his inner mind and condensed into mem-data in a building ghost-link. dentons eyes widened momentarily as she caught of glimpse of what was forming around chambers halo. ichambers, what are you ghost speared out from him into cas as his hand fell on the taller mans shoulder. so, chambers said, face angled with a lecherous smirk, heard you were also a connoisseur. cas turned to regard the fingers on his shoulder. what the hell the contents of the ghost-link struck him then. his mouth fell open. his eyes rolled back as the totality of the vicaritys horror brushed over his mind. his legs began to buckle. through the near nether, the anguished cries of dannis steelhard echoed softly. yeah, chambers nodded. thats the the link was rejected before its material could do more psychological harm. the twangs of guitar strings accompanied each curling digit as cas closed his hand into a fist. suddenly, the expression vanished across chambers face, the flood of raw disgust and fury pouring free from cas revealing more than enough. +avo,+ chambers said with a sigh. +youre a real fucking half+ cas fist lashed out. chambers head snapped back. draus eyes narrowed. +shit,+ she said. +you might actually beat that one on one in a brawl.+ cas rained more punches on chambers nose before denton shoved him off. she caught the ex-enforcer as his body spun, nose trailing a whip of blood. cas, thats enough, she said. despite being the one inflicting the harm, the holocoated columner seemed more rattled by far. diddid you see the shit he cast at me? hes fucking insane. he was trying to rash me. a snorting laugh came from chambers. thats alright, he said. avo couldnt tell if the man was winking at him or if he was just blinking out of a swollen eye. cause i still got enough ghosts to make some phantoms. no! this time, denton tackled chambers, casting her out thoughtstuff out to interrupt him. +good soldier,+ avo thought as he regarded chambers struggling form. in the corner, a flat look of incomprehension swallowed essus. +think he would have made a good reg in another life.+ +fuck you, rotlick,+ draus replied. metal and melody blended as cas began to pummel chambers relentlessly, desperate for the other man to go unconscious. avo grunted. +anyway. theres the distraction. see if we can kill a few more?+ draus shrugged. +why the hells not.+ Chapter 12-9 Restoration (I) chapter 12-9 restoration (i) its. understandable why voidwatch would veto the project, but i still reserve the right to be upset. imagine. a fully modern heaven of strong nuclear forcescan you even conceive of the things we could do with such a heaven? the canons we could weave! all those lives would be spent toward worldno, galaxyaltering purpose. oror something like a heaven of electromagnetismagh! disappointment! disappointment! i meani understand but still! disappointment! the terrestrial guilds have no idea what theyre missing out on, and the other agnosi theyre i dont know why theyre so incurious. the voiders know so muchhave so much history with the world that was. they made miracles without heavens or ruptures or anything! if they could do that, imagine a godclad with the intelligence of one of their ship-mind-things! even the un-redacted information they let me review is uh just awesome. theyre awesome. if only they could get over their fear of thaumaturgy. the gods are broken and were oathboundi mean, things are stableb-better. better now. we can try and move toward a better future. a better future ive decided. im going to take the commission. project godshaper. oh, wow, saying it makes me lightheadeduh, i need toi need to prepare. the oathstheres so much lore i need to request access to. channels channels. always so many channels in the way of progress. i have a good feeling about this one. a great feeling. if voidwatch is attached as the rumors say, im going to[audible squeak of joy] focus, kae. focus. we havent changed idheim. but the moment sure feels close. -mem-log of agnos kae kusanade 12-9 restoration (i) twenty minutes and twelve engineered assassinations later, the cargo unit was drawn away by claw-shaped carrier drones and carried down through vast rusted gates framing the distant fire of a looming furnace. an uncomfortable swelter simmered within the container as avo scouted what was to come with his whisper. dont mind the heat, cas said, rubbing vigorously at his hand with a piece of cloth. his metallic fingers were still stained red with chambers viscera, and across the room, the ex-enforcer sat next to essus who had wordlessly been examining the other mans wounds. were going to be dropped into the waste disposal once we get shuttled inside. its connected to golems. two to be exact. one for industrial use, and another, symmetrical one hidden in the same domain. avo felt the pull of space distorting around the distant flames. judging from how chambers suddenly straightened and stared past the bland plasteel walls comprising the interior of the container, he sensed it too. the fire, avo said. demiplane tied to it? close, denton said. thermal excitement. intensity. its a stolen omnitech golem with a modern heaven with modified canons. all-in-all, it''s easy to hide and pair to the currently active miracles. you got more than one of these planted across the city, dont you? draus asked. dentons face softened as she closed her eyes, covered her ears, and pressed her lips together. need to know. even for us. i request. i get a pull. i seek and receive. yeah, draus said. and i see lots of points where you can just end up gettin cut off. lots of ways to end up dead in this city, cas replied. sometimes, its better to get snuffed than topple everything down wtih you. the interior shook as the air sizzled. avos echoheads mirrored his growing agitation, thrashing and slithering as he ran his claws over his fungal plates. the itch was psychologicala sensation of memory leaking over into his physical senses. before a fusion burner painted your shadow into the backdrop, vaporizing your body, the initial spike of heat stung the skin with a needling feeling all across ones nerves. things were not that hot yet, but it wasnt far. thinkin about gettin burned? draus asked. already know, he grumbled, trying to hide his annoyance. ya know, i always did like the burners. made it trigger-pull-easy to clear rooms and buildings. except when facin you and yours. never stopped comin. didnt have much to live for. he growled. and wasnt that the truth for every ghoul other than him? consume. be consumed. what was life but a brief carnival of cruelty and flavor when you were a monster made to serve the dubious needs of a false god. you are not alone in your distaste," sunrise said. "the heat bodes ill for our consciousness as well. languor weighed the swarm''s flight path as the various bees battled to recenter. some circled the growing mass of their fellows twice before arriving at their final stop, and through the gaps of twitching wings and jolting limbs, avo caught sight of a chrome-sheened insect nearing thrice the size of all the others. its carapace was the color of fluid gray, and from its filigreed edges dolloped thin strings of matter through the other bees as if each was part of a circuit. the nether offered a parallel portrayal: all points in its lattice of static-stained consciousness met within what seemed to be the queen of the hive. judging from how they were all venting hot air out between the crenulations implanted upon their shells, avo guessed they werent much better with the heat than he was. he eyed the mass of insects and considered their words. have you been burned before? no, sunrise answered. how is it? a lot of pain. then none at all. suddenly, the heat lifted as gravity pulled up, and the container sank down into what squished like soft soil. relieved, avo directed his perception outward again and realized they were now in the corner of a featureless sodden field. the temperature dove back to that of a morose autumn. above, avo could still sense the presence of the flameshear the crackling of hyper-heated air. they were hidden somewhere in the fire, somehow unburned on their descent down into alloy-slagging temperatures. sweeping his whispers perception wide, he regarded his surroundings and found naught but a clearing of mud and muck enclosed by a ring of leafless trees. columns of smoke rose in the far distance, feeding into the clouds reshaped from a dancing conflagration, the atmosphere swaying in flashes of shifting orange and yellow. yet, the heat never sank down from the heights. not twenty steps away from where their container was dropped, a gravel staircase led down to a spatially distorted oubliette. come on, denton said as the door opened and the soft incandescence of the plane beyond welcomed them. lets go get you all set up. a single shard of blood-locus swayed from the ceiling like a lantern. when the time came, avo would cast out his order and the thoughtwave disruptor would go off, and he would switch over to sanguinity. shes gettin on, draus muttered, focus cast far away elsewhere. the glass shard drifting close beside her projected a look into the interior of the aero. through the shining reflection, avo noticed kae stepping aboard with a lost expression on her face as she first met the glass. her skin was sheened with sweat and her red synthcoat gleamed bright as she approached. the translucent veil hiding her clan-mark flattened against her face as the winds washed over her. then, from far across the open expanse of the junction, she caught sight of avo and grinned. draus! avo! kae said, brightening as she stepped through. she let out a slight yelp as a sense of weightlessness took her, but the twice-walker rose out from the nondescript reflectivity to shuttle her over. with a causal wave, draus drew kae out from the sheet she was expanding from the shard and grinned with satisfaction as the agnos came through without issue. thats a milk run, draus hissed. insults hurled only when the task was done. the regular had her priorities in order. stumbling into draus'' grip, kae stumbled as she blinked and shok her head. i-i her voice trailed off as she found herself in a prison cell. where uh where are we? demiplane, avo said. sectioned off from the city. going to use it to disrupt thoughtwaves. wh-why? he stared past the confusion writ upon her face and directly into the dancing flames crackling over her accretion. to make you whole again. so you can remember. so you can think without needing an implant. it took her a moment to process what he was saying, but when her breath suddenly hitched, he knew she understood. her eyes glistened then as she pushed the veil covering her clan mark. chewing on her lips, the weight of worry stretched out from her and pressed down upon avo as well, its pressure there and then not, the anxiety an incremental thing between forgetfulness and sudden memory. butbut can you? can you do it? avo didnt reply with an affirmative. to promise anything would be a lie and all false hope could do was traumatize her further. instead, he needed to make this seem exactly as it was: a process. the sovereignty-class thoughtwave detonation that swept through yuulden-yang shed the burn from her mind for a brief instant. in that time he caught a glimpse of her halo and the sequences within, a glimpse of who she was before the fires whittled her down to mind-savaged effigy of her former self. it would take him some time to fix her. he would need to be meticulous. detailed in approach and extraction. as ori-thaum had been the ones to see her enfeebled, avo was certain the incubi would take special measures to ensure the damage they inflicted was remain rooted in sequence and sinew. thankfully, with all the ghosts he wrenched from his foes, his canon of haemokinesis, and chambers as another volunteer, he felt good about their chances. avo, kae said as she let out a shuddering exhale. whatwhat if i donttheres something b-bad in my memories? what ifi meanif they dont she gasped for breath again. he could hear her heart screaming as it pulsed in her chest, feel the blood darting through her veins faster, cycling through the system, the fluid in her veins like friction accompanying a growing tension. im scared. the way she said those words made him stop. he looked away from her mind and back to kae in her entirety. she was shaking. this was sudden. too sudden. he realized she was shooting draus furtive glances that spilled over onto the glass. there was so much she didnt know now. from one godclad, they had emerged as cadre. his first thought was to consider using his ghostjack to soothe her, but then his sense caught back up to him and he remembered the point of this whole affair. youll be fine, kae, draus said. she cracked the bottom of her fist against avos arm and a shudder swam through his limb. why, avo heres practically got the whole thing figured out. sides, cant be that many jacks, bettern him. he nulled those incubi straight on. hell fix you all the same. he speared one of his echoheads out from behind her in ire. she tilted her body. the strike skipped off her rig and struck the ceiling. she aimed a rude gesture at him without looking. his phys-sims impact vector flashed from red to green. +making a lot of promises for me,+ avo said. draus scratched her nose nonchalantly. +reckon i am. suppose all you gotta do now is deliver.+ he glowered at her. +yeah. just deliver. just disable an incubi level mem-con while infiltrating a subverted mind and clean it out entirely. do it delicate so brain still genius after. no problem. only risk is her turning into the vegetable. no pressure.+ +well, shit, avo, if i knew it was gonna be that hard for you i mightve requested some help. hell, theres no shame asking for assistance. maybe denton. shes a glaive, aint she? a might know what to do. no shame in bein less skilled than someone else+ she trailed off and shot the glass behind them a grin. the meat was questioning his skill again. ire flashed into genuine frustration, and avo found himself fighting the beast, struggling to come up with a reason against pushing his thumbs through her eyes and bashing her head open on the ground. +reasons you cant,+ draus replied, leering at him. +thats gonna need you to get close to me. and we both know how you are up close.+ +going to tear the blood out from your skull. pop your insides. drink your organs from your corpse like a carton.+ +well, if were imaginin things, i guess im gonna turn your head into glass, smash the glass, and then shit down your throat before puttin the pieces back together to watch you choke on my shit.+ he just glared. +im going to fix her. dont need help. know what to do. then. afterward. im going to kill you. im going to eat you. im going to kill and eat you until the beast inside begs me to stop. till it gets tired of reg-meat.+ draus angled her head as she sneered up at him. +sure you will. more likely, im gonna have a grand ol time reliving my war days on rotlick safari.+ a low hiss began to build in his throat. he clicked his fangs together as he envisioned biting into her skull, tearing flaps of flesh free from her augmented bones before moving onto her eyes. for her part, she just ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek. her fingers flexed, and with them, her wing scythes expanded. well. you gonna make somethin of this, or are you gonna start whistlin your apologies? avos echoheads reared back a banging came from the glass. hey hey, hey! watch out for the agnos. dont need you two maniacs adding her to the statistics. cas sounded genuinely worried for kaes life. curious. kae herself spoke thereafter. are are you two doing it again? you you can fight if you want. ill go sit behind the table so so i can avoid any stray uh shrapnel. its fine. he halted in place. no, avo said. thats later. youre priority. for some strange reason, that made kae break into a bright smile. draus shard flashed as the reflection jumped into the windshield on the aero and then over upon a window at the second fortune. for future access, she explained. listen, kae. before we start this, therere are a couple things we might-gotta talk about Chapter 12-10 Restoration (II) chapter 12-10 restoration (ii) the conflagration is more than an advanced trauma pattern. voidwatch has hidden much from ussecrets near impossible to tease out with the deviance between our spines of power and technology. yet, for all that they withhold, there are still things that leak. expressions and functions of their devices become evident when they clash with the world. take their ego-screamers for instance. a beautiful piece of technology defiled by highflame to feed their banal habits. from the samples we procured, its effects on the mind are self-replicative on another level. by converting a baseliners mind while being overwritten by the ego-screamer, we have managed to capture a semblance of the nano-machines in the netherthough only a narrow facet of its full functionality, we assume. being a product of voidwatch, the architecture of the construct is vastly beyond our full understanding, even as an analogous construct expressed through the nether. whats more, it is highly volatile, and its delivery mechanisms are limited, at best. conceptualize the weapon thusly: you are injecting a self-aware entity to destabilize another mind. it, however, is not human. it possesses no semblance of essence from which we can compare. you also do not wield said weapon as it cannot be wielded, only transferred from point to point. if it comes into contact with your thoughts, your mind will be unmade all the same. as such, requests for using such a construct require the highest levels of clearance provided only by an elder or above, and even then it will require approval from the [redacted]. it is with relief that we managed to limit its effect parameters by conditioning a conflagration-unit to the diet of specific, target-related memories, but do not take this for certainthe entity can and will devour you. repetition for emphasis this is not something you can mold or direct. it hates you. it hates all things capable of thought, and it seeks to override your cognition and boil all semblance of thought away so it can finally die. moreover, the presence of this pattern must never be discovered by voidwatch for the certain reprisals it will bring. -incubi primer on the conflagration trauma-pattern 12-10 restoration (ii) ththe stillborn can install frames kae muttered, eyes wide. such wonder drove her words, even as a fugue of disbelief interrupted by bouts of confusion consumed her. kae shifted on the hard bench of the small cell, made smaller by avo and draus. gathered in the testing cell, draus detailed their mostly successful assassination of mirrorhead followed by the utter zein-induced chaos and ruination of nu-scarrowbur during the mad dash across lights end, the agnos face was a constant flux between surprise and astonishment. and and the paladinhe just just let you go? her frown deepened. she brushed the transparent half-veil covering half her face. that that shouldnt happen. they-they have oaths. i dont theyre not supposed to do that the chief es-especially. or at least they didnt didnt used to. didnt used to? avo asked. she shook her head. i think ithe sage of uh. i cant remember. but but i think i remember remember naeko. he was he was nice. but tired. and sad she paused. he shouldnt have let you go. she already said that, but the repetition could just as well be due to emphasis as it could forgetfulness. as her thoughtstuff shifted, so did the flames, swirling and dancing. between the instances of memory reinstalled into her mind via her exocortex, he caught a glimpse of her active sequences coming alight. it was like gazing down at streets ablaze during a riot from on high, the damage inflamed and deep. failing to understand the nature of her affliction, to stabilize and remove it could very well worse her mental crippling. cold refreshing focus flowed through his veins as the weight of his task began to settle on his shoulders in full. whatever the incubi had done to her was more adaptive than any other trauma pattern he had ever seen. but where they matched him in skill, they lacked so far in miracles and preparation. all his necrojacking experience, earned or instilled, bubbled in the back of his skull. walton had invested in him all he could. given him the tools to wrestle with cognition, to understand any and every foe if he could only find the proper angles and memories. he had chambers unique mental architecture. he had whatever history draus shared with kae to call upon. he had denton and cas for whatever they could provide. all that remained was for him to study, design, and execute a solution for kaes release from torment. in the end, the prize far outweighed the risk: a working agnos. a trauma pattern he could turn against the incubi themselves. the tension behind his task sweetened. yes. the promise of future pleasure prevailed over pressure. he licked his fangs. can start soon, avo said. begin initial dive and survey mind. will begin by detonating thoughtwave. will clean your surface thoughts. still the burning for a moment. you will remember. and you will lose it again. understand? need to prepare yourself. kae bit her lip and nodded. ill be fine. i survived it before. the uncertain quiver in her voice betrayed the weight of worry churning inside her, but that couldnt be helped. cleaning wounds stung, physical or mental, and if he wanted to return her to whatever wholeness yet achievable, the odds were more hurt was to follow. ill be here with you if that matters for anythin, draus said. she was leaning against the wall with her arms folded. and if the rotlick here screws up, i can break his neck. you know. for encouragement. he bade his echoheads chitter his ire at the regular in his stead; his primary preoccupation now was the examination of kaes mind. all else could come later. extending filaments of blood out from his veins, he interfaced with the haemokinetic locus he constructed, hanging from the ceiling like a node on a chain. when he sent the signal, it would detonate and everyone would lose track of their thoughts. the blast would loop through the glass via draus heaven and the other cells would be unaffected. afterward, he would connect to the flowing circuits of blood leading to the floor below and link himself to much-needed mass for frame-jacking. then, using the vast amplification of his perceptive speed, he would begin his initial sweep through her mind to construct a general map of her trauma. following the diagnosis with the next treatment steps. if need be, he could also ignite chambers mind using kaes ailment study how the pattern interacted with the mans unique mental structure. worst came to worst for him, he could just kill him avo paused. his thoughts snapped together like a shut book. the stillborn could graft people to frames. a final solution dawned in his mind if everything collapsed: he could kill and burn kae into a frame using the one he took from the last godclad he killed or take one from essus or chambers. or maybe even draus if that was what she wanted. and through all this time, he never thought to ask the agnos where she got the neuro-implant from. or why. spreading the three thousand ghosts he commanded out wide through her mind like a net, he saved snapshots of her metaminds palace, and graphed a vague simulation of the constructs and memories that once stood. from what he gathered, she once had wards that belonged to the memguard series; she once had a vast archive of knowledge built in the heart of her mind, like a grand library hidden within the folds of ones mindscape. mottled husks of phantasmal substance decomposed, folded from the inflamed tissue of savaged sequences. they rose high and low unevenly, hinting at a capriciousor scattered pathway of thoughts. a personal apocalypse had happened here. the devastation of brilliant mind through a weaponized phantasmal construct he didnt fully grasp yet. but the devastation was incomplete, and from the horizon came healing waters injected from a pipeline of building static. there was a metaphor here. a parallel between kae and idheim entire. locals who dwelled burned their own homes in a way that was nigh-absolutein a way that only they could. and by the grace of ancient cousins helping from the unfathomed darkness beyond, the end was held at bay, but not truly halted. a battle remained. at least this one avo felt he had good odds of winning. as he finished mapping out her general sequences, he considered leaving an auto-seance within her mind for easier access to her thoughts. odds were it would just burn away and decompose like all the phantasmics she once had. he decided to try it: he had the ghosts and sequences to spare, and it would be useful to see how the fire worked with something he was connected to. planting the auto-seance upon the tapestry of her mind was like rooting a communications tower in ash-choked soil. it took his metamind nearly a full real-time second to locate a point in her mind stable enough to support such cognitive capacity, and it came as the flood coming from her undammed exocortex wash through her channels of thought, mending the sediment of her mind where it touched. he decided to install the phantasmic just past where the static flowed, moving to greet the integers and crackling distortion of incomprehensible coldtech. all the while, he let his whisper drift as he waited and watched for the fires to come, studying the scalded phantasmics she once had with the bulk of his suspicion. his attention was in the wrong place. the field of static didnt pass through him. it tore. there was no warningno note of alarm nor splash of perception when it came. instead, fire exploded up from beneath each and every one of her sequences as the fabric of her stability began to burn, rising as screaming a scant microsecond after the exocortex fired. immediately, avo felt something burrowing into him as well. it didnt taste like fire, nor was there a heat to it. but it moved as if with a will of its own, grasping and grappling and clawing for anything within his mind that had purchase, trying to force itself into any memory as he felt his quicksand crack. and begin to boil. fire erupted around his outer layer of protection. fire that started from inside a single sequence of memory and multiplied in almost each and every direction. fire that screamed at him in a voice that was a chorus of tortured humanity. this wasnt just a ghost. it was too present, and the quality was too self-aware. he realized then why he didnt perceive it earlier; how her affliction seemed to come on so suddenly. it was of a dichotomous nature, capable of being solid and static both as it burned at her mind, and could nest in her exocortex. but not destroy the memories there. there was an emotional accompaniment to the howling pain. a want and a need to finally destroy this hell it was rooted in, to be free, to stop being self-aware. it wanted to die. the entity wished itself dead, but so long as someone else knew of its existence, so long as it had rooting in cognitive architecture, its suffering remained. his own mind whirled as a dull searing pain cooked him from the outside, the temperature cupping his thoughts spiking hot. without hesitation, he severed the ghosts he funneled into her mind as they were all burning, sequences coming alight like channels filled with napalm. in less than a semi-second, avo detached three-hundred and eighty-four ghosts, and left them to burn. if he lingered any longer, even that would have been a paltry pittance for the true price demanded from his mind. snapping back into full consciousness, he felt his legs buckle but caught himself using his echoheads before he could fall. kae was crying out in pain, her nails digging into her own skull as she threw her head back, mouth open, veil fluttered. her organic eye glistened much like her false one as wrinkles of strain consumed her. all the while, flames fissured out from her sequences like volcanic veins. he needed to think. review. but more than that, he needed a closer look at how the conflagration burned in real-time. severing himself from both canons and reflex, time settled as he grasped kae by the skull, examining the burning halo around her with even greater interest than he saw before. he remembered not to squeeze in the last instant, and on his arm, he could feel the tightness of draus grip. what? whats wrong? whatd you see? the regulars voice was hushed and harried. but she was of secondary note now. as was kae. there was something else in the agnos mind. someone else. he could hear them screaming, fighting. desperate to die. desperate to starve. whatever she suffered was more than a simple trauma; more than a mem-con; more than a complex phantasmic. and it had taken a bite out of him. now that was disquieting. what are you, he whispered. Chapter 12-11 A Theft of Fire (I) chapter 12-11 a theft of fire (i) what makes a good necro hell. lets start with making a mediocre necro. easier there, and its still hard. alright. i need you to do two things at the same time, alright? first, you gotta be able to just drown in someone elses life. their emotions, their thoughts, their everything. you got to feel as they feel and not lose yourself. not for a moment. then, i need you to give absolutely no fucks whatsoever about their pain, their personhood, their habits. i need to you detach immediately and identify all points of symmetry and reusable memory artifacts in those few sequences of memories. also, i need you to find all memories of analogous significance, because thats how phantasmics are made. you do this for hours. days. with needles feeding you nutrients and water keeping you cool and you never lose focus. you never let yourself drift. you never get lost in their thoughts or your own. because if you do any of that, youre not going to be a necro for long. the trauma is going to eat you alive. the empathy is going to cut you up from the insane. the horror of what you can do to another personhow you can fuck them up like no one else canthat breaks you too. you have to do all these things almost perfectly all the time. now, theres your basic prerequisite being a necro. how many of you got the aptitude for that? just live through the memories of a child being drowned by her drunkard of a father and then emerge from that sequence and say yeah, this will be mem-data pack number eighty-four. you cant feel so much that youre a full person; you cant be so cold that youre an absolute psychopath. to be a good necro you have to be fractured. a piecemeal thing of a person. thats why so many necros sequence themselves into collapse and insanity. too much to take, and they route the hurt to the wrong place. you wanna hear me spit some honesty? i dont think people make good necros. only curious monsters do. like those beasts wearing the flesh of humans in the incubi. or whatever the fuck those low masters are. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 12-11 a theft of fire (i) the fire is alive, avo explained. it hides in her exocortex. touched me. knew i was there. it was in pain. it was screaming. it wanted to die. the others gathered before he stared on, some blank-faced, others ashen by the implications. between him and denton, an unspoken understanding blossomed while the others looked lost. a few of sunrises drones were buzzing through the air, monitoring the situation while chambers and essus sat on the chairs leading to the second level. in the cell behind, kae rubbed at her temples as she sat in the chair, mind aflame once more. are you sure you saw static in its structure, denton said. he cast a mem-data packet at her. she accepted without any hint of suspicion. the growing furrow between her eyes and the bending of her brows told how severe the situation was, and the word she used next summarized how she thought of the matter thusly. fuck. cas jolted at his partners curse. whoa? that bad? dentons eye twitched. worse. i dont know how, but i think the ori made something they probably cant put back in a box if they let it slip out. the other columner winced. so its like a thought-eating self-aware fire thing its a corrupted engram, denton said. my best guess, anyway. how they managed to transfer that from pure data and information into partial nether-bound phantasm, or why it hasnt eaten through her exocortex as well, i dont know. i do know that if the broader polities among the egis discover whats going on here, were going to be looking at a vote of a mass embargo on the silvers. draus tilted her head. they might choke the ori is what im hearin? she hid her pleasure at that possibility well, but avo could still taste the schadenfreude simmering beneath the surface of her mind. you could excommunicate the regular from highflame, but that didnt mean she was ever going to stop hating the silvers. alright, chambers said, interrupting the conversation. he slapped his ghoul-leather trousers and a loud crack cut through the air as he stood. im ready. avo. do me. avo paused. what? this is part of why im here, right? he held out his arms and closed his eyes like he was a martyr. my mind is ready for battle. i got the soft master collection a look of primal fear consumed cas as he started forward, fingers twanging strings into fists before denton halted him. it took several muttered reassurances that the ex-enforcer wasnt going to rash-everyone right then and there before he calmed down. --i got nu-dog in the wrong ass i, ii, ii, and nu-dog: re-erected all primed. if the virus wants to chew, ill give it some special masticating. chambers then promptly began imitating what was supposedly a nu-dog eating its way up something. from the angles he was biting, it didnt look like a bone. avo, pull this memory out of my mind, draus muttered. i dont want this shit. the atmosphere of disgust thickened, but avo considered chambers offer from another perspective. vicarities. how many of them have mem-cons? he shook his head the second he asked the question. chambers didnt knowhe just downloaded from whatever was available. instead, avo directly accessed the mans mind using his auto-seance and began sweeping through. after he filtered through over two hundred ghosts worth of mem-data all about things a ghoul didnt care for, the number of infection vectors numbered well past ten thousand. and they were all attacking each other to keep his mind in place. avo wondered: could these clashes be used against the awakened flame? this could be tested chambers, avo said. going to create a link between you and kae. draus. open glass. let him inside. i want to watch how he starts burning. the regular eyed him. you sure thats a good idea? there is a mind in the fire, avo said. want to see if it can spread. divide. a consciousness spreading and expanding like wildfire. if avo could understand or even modify the structure to such an entity he needed it out of the agnos head first. and to do that, he needed to observe it more. the regular threw her head back and barked a laugh. kae shivered in her seat at the sudden noise while chambers threw himself behind her, using her as cover. avo also sniffed the air. a trickle of fear-piss had also darted out from the man onto the inner folds of his borrowed pants. alright, avo said. chambers. get up. get ready. kae too. she nodded as she clenched the edges of the table. chambers, meanwhile, crawled back to his feet, brushing the messy flap of the dirty blonde mop he called hair before miming two guns at avo using his fingers. the ghoul responded by invoking his sanguinitys reign. a filament manifested between chambers and kae, allowing thoughtstuff to tread across a hair-thin bridge. motes of blood held the nether-conducting construct aloft as chambers and kae both blinked. the enforcers face twitched as a growing uncertainty expanded out from him. so how uh what are the tiers like? heard you use to live up there. kae frowned. its hard to remember. right. fuck. he sighed. bad question, chambers. he was about to open his mouth and ask something else before his eyes widened and a trickle of static surged through the link. there, avo said, pointing to the transference. not solid. jumped like mem-data. draus meanwhile was narrowing her eyes, confusion emanating from her mind as she tried to parse the chaos of the mem-data through her cog-feed. he cast a memory into her overlay for emphasis and she grunted her thanks. sunrise, meanwhile, dispatched a few drones to circle high above the agnos. dont get too close, draus muttered. she might forget i mentioned you earlier and try to crush one of you. commands transmitted to the drones along static lattices. they circled higher to plantthemselves on the ceiling from which the locus distended, observing the proceedings from there. the flames came as whispered embers at first, trickling like scintillating flares cast into a pond. the initial flames sparked upon caressing the threshold of chambers thoughts, but his mind did not come ablaze like kae. instead, as veins of conflagration crawled forward, sundering surface thoughts like the spreading of soil during an earthquake, it struck the first bulwark of inner memories and suddenly its vectors turned in on itself. light speared into light as something digging through chambers mind recoiled. avo severed the link binding him to kae, curious to see if he would still burn. to the ghouls delight, the flames continued to crackle. whats more, it retreated, burrowing its way back to the surface of the mans thoughts as it sought the bridge of blood that served as the vehicle of its crossing. kaes expression contorted into one of horror as the ex-enforcers accretion resembled the face of an eclipse, the contours of his cognition incandescent while the inner walls began to fall one after another. the heroic expression chambers wore twitched. avo, uh consang. i aint gonna lie its starting to burn when i think. i its getting really hard to keep track of. of he strained himself, trying to clutch his thoughts tight. its like my thoughts are there and then just gone. whatever bravado he armored himself with melted away. his lips drew back in a taut grimace. fuck thinking burns. shit. its like pissing out scaarthian liquor. but in my head. avo approached his new test subject and studied him in silence. he was enraptured by how methodically the fire now spread. it was teasing its way forward now, learning which sequences it had to burn through instead of rushing forward and crashing into itself. the equilibrium of downloaded traumas and viruses had calcified into a phantasmal endoskeleton within chambers, that momentarily befuddled the entity. but then it changed its approach. stopped trying to eat away at everything and worked to boil away specific structures instead. soon, it would upset the balance of chambers internal ecosystem enough that the mans mind might collapse all on its own. can do more than just think, avo said. it can plan. not well, sunrise surmised. its a primal intellect. it adapted out of necessity. it didnt move with foresight. the conditions of its education had to be forced on it. that was also true. chambers was cupping his temples down. inch by inch, his memories rose as columns of flame. the effect was nowhere near as fast as what tore through kae, but the progress was still staggering. avo wondered how walton would have faced such a construct. by the feats it displayed now, he guessed his father would probably rather avoid something this potent altogether. avodraus, chambers whimpered. he slid down the glass and his nails clawed bloodied furrows into his scalp. oh, jaus. fuck. its bad im sorry about sorry agnos lady. i thought id be a sob choked out from his throat. ...tougher. kaes expression contorted into one of sorrow and disbelief. a-avo! why stop watching! help him avo ignored her. the fires hadnt won yet. he still needed details on how fast they would a dozen sequences in the middle of chambers meta shattered into shrapnel, and from them the rest of his mind followed. destruction cascaded as unchecked trauma exploded inside the mans mind and shredded through his ego. thoughtstuff erupted out in a pressurized spray as chambers jaw went slack. his perception dissolved. drool spilled out from his lips. his legs gave out under him and he toppled. walking over to get a better look at the damage, avos focus was captured in full by an entity flooding and consuming all that remained. a blank expression of mind-dead placidity finally took the man. he stopped struggling. he stopped thinking. he stopped being. and a moment later, so did the fire, the last embers glittering as its frenzied assault simmered away into faint crackles giving a lingering emotion. relief. avo spread his fangs wide. the thing felt. he tasted it. he knew the emotion. it could feel. it could be broken. there was a way. letting out a low chuff of satisfaction. avo beheaded chambers with a thought, killing the man. grasping the head using his sanguinity-boosted haemokinesis, he drew the meat up to him as he watched the last of embers die. he brought chambers face close to him and spoke into its ear. die then. run from me. will claim you soon. youre human too. i felt it. broken maybe. but still human. prey. and as an expression of symbolic mockeryand because his appetite took himhe bit off chambers ear and savored the taste. turning his gaze down, he saw kae looking up at him, her face wide-eyed and aghast. he patted her atop her skull using one of his echoheads. his memories told him humans used this method to comfort their young. dont worry. hell be back. do it a few more times. i see the solution. you will be freed. for some strange reason, that didnt disperse the dread behind her eyes. Chapter 12-12 A Theft of Fire (II) chapter 12-12 a theft of fire (ii) the reverie mark-ii exocortex is a pretty handy piece of kit, but it wont be replacing your meta anytime soon. it''s a tangible implant, main benefits being: ease of access; no need to schedule an agnos appointment to get one burned indirect installation; any grafter can connect it to youdual-aspect connectivity; you wanna connect to machines using ghosts or whatever weird tech stuff omnitech is simulating? sure. do it. the problem is expense. this thing costs a million imp. one million. that money will buy you a tac-nuke. i meanthose arent that expensive, but still. five last gen rigs at least. decent ones too. im talking the sang gorillabadger series or the highflame ascender starfallen warshell. oh oh, of course omnitech cultists are gonna start spamming their disgust emotions into my lobby. am i wrong? is it somehow cheaper for you? no? ill be able to access the noosphere? my kindred through jaus, why would i want a shittier version of the nether? i got enough mem-cons to contend with. i dont want whatever weird sloppy-second viruses you guys stole from voidwatch. -omnitech reverie mark-ii exocortex review 12-12 a theft of fire (ii) when chambers resurrected, he lacked any memory of his immolation. whether that was the frame protecting him from trauma or just a byproduct of all those memories burning away avo couldn''t say for sure, but it certainly did remove the need to convince the man to try again. bereft recollection of his mental collapse and anguish, a certain glee began to build inside the man as he threw himself at the task. after all, if whatever killed him didnt hurt anymore now, whos to say it ever hurt to begin with? kae protested on his behalf, her resolve more shaken than his from what she witnessed. watching chambers rendered hollow in mind and animation inflicted a sympathetic agony inside her. she mustve been seeing her own demise, in a sense the outcome of her existence should she have been without the exocortex.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. ultimately, there was a point to her discomfort. avo wanted to see how self-aware the entity was, and if it shifted to her horror, if the entity caged inside her mind would give off some kind of reaction to watching its twin or divided self die. after another two burnings, it was clear that it didnt much care at all. there didnt even seem to be an indication that it noticed the demise of the other flame. drawing these details together, avo theorized he was dealing with a being only scarcely aware of the world beyond, seeking only to accelerate its own demise by burning down the enclosed cognitive neuro-systems it lived in. fascinating. delightful. revelatory. after killing chambers for a third time, he brought the man over into another cell and began a new trial. this time, he would establish a connection across the two rooms before having draus seal the second cell. from there, should the entity begin spreading its crawling fire through chambers mind again, the thoughtwaves would be disrupted. so, uh, chambers mumbled, as he fidgeted in his seat. even without memory, a building nervousness was creeping through him. howd the last two times go? did did i do well. depends, avo said, the bulk of his focus directed toward configuring the second cells locus. withstand? for a moment. but it adapts fast. your mind is a solid collapse. confuses it. teaches it to break one sequence at a time to collapse your mind. intelligent thinking. automatic problem-solving. ghosts would need another will to direct. this entity adapts in its attempts to die. nothing beyond that. chambers nodded slowly as if a studious pupil receiving tutelage from a wizened master. a wizened, people-eating, mind-torturing, god-channeling master. so i did good? a distant memory slipped out between the flowing folds of chambers surface thoughts. it spilled over into the sanguinity, and avo found himself tantalized by the intimacy it betrayed. enough to pause the work at hand. withdrawing haemokinetic tendrils from the hanging locus, he drew in the escaped sequence to the depths of his meta and bade it to run in a newly expanded entrance manifested in his cog-feed. the contents played from the perspective of a far-younger chambers. only running the surface-level functions of the vicarity, avo kept himself at a distance as he cycled through the scene, studying the squalor the boy lived in. forty square feet of room for mother, father, two sets of grandparents, and little chambers himself. three sets of beds collapsed into the walls. one closet. no cooking appliances. a single transparent cleaning unit that was obviously unbolted and smuggled into the room. his home resembled little more than a storage room because it was one. they had a shelf drilled in along the far wall of the room holding seven different urns with seven different names chambers could no longer remember. beneath the shelf was taped a patch of cloth that chambers had painted crude imitations of the sun and sky. avo thought the art lacking, even for a child. they didnt talk about his siblings much, but his mom sometimes looked at the shelf when guilder news chimed in their propaganda, proclaiming their glorious victories during the third guild war. avo sank deeper into the memory and his ghosts integrated additional details from the scene using secondary mem-data pulled directly from the man himself. chambers father was a rare presence in the small confinement of his childhood home. as were most of his grandparents. things usually only got cramped at night when everyone came back to sleep. with the coming of light, most of his grandparents fled the abode driven toward separate hustles. most worked for one syndicate or other, serving as carriers of specifically sequenced mem-cons made to wander the territory of a rival, or selling themselves as volunteer jock pilots for whatever block-raid had an opening. his father was supposedly a street squire of some renown, but most of the time the man bled their imps on drinks and joy. his mother wrangled several jobs from the sanctuary of their home while caring for little chambers. he remembered her jacking into the body of wights to serve as soft obstacles for crucibles. those jobs were rough. he learned to play alone in the corner while his mother finished her weeping in the bathroom, scrubbing her hands raw to clean blood that just wasnt there. her in-block mem-data smuggling gigs made her a lot fewer imps, but at least those didnt make her throw up sometimes. there were also a few other jobs she did. ones she had to visit the grafters for. those ones were really big money, but she lost all energy to play with him afterward. he hated those jobs the most. from there, his experimentation developed, and with it was chambers mind further altered. avo played a careful game at first, resequencing burned memories using his wealth of ghosts. to his delight, the fire revealed something of a personality, tearing itself from its present path to lash at the structures it thought destroyed. its movements went from creeping to snake-like, the inferno rearing high and cracking back like a whip. while it was diverted of focus, avo mended and reinforced some of chambers'' mem-cons and altered the architecture it had been clawing through. staring down at the being from the bulwark of the ex-enforcers instabilities, avo admired the pace at which the flames unstitched his ghost from existence. part of him was interested in deploying the fire in place of trauma-patterns from the raw potency it presented. but another thought occurred to him: what if he could culture it differently? have it spread and grow new structures instead of just destroy? use as something akin to the lushburner and woundshaper both, but specifically for the nether. he didnt know if such a thing was possible, but seeing as it held will and mind both, if he could direct it avo shook the desire from his mind. he needed to secure it first. then conduct more experiments and reviews. only then could further configuration follow. upon its return, he felt its building outrage as artifacts of blended memories dissolved within its crackling form like phantasmal steam. more than annoyed, it was outright furious now, and drove itself hard against the remolded mental pathways. the woundshaper laughed approvingly. yes, master, yes. trap it. you can learn much from another walking your halls. their appreciation. their habits. it paused. their failings as the fire roared to a new intensity, another matter of interest seized avos attention. the static was fading out of the entity, like a curtain of rain that was breaking to reveal the supple flesh beneath. further details of note were highlighted by his cog-feed; the flames werent just eating through things, but cycling other sequences into itself. it was surviving on a diet of hardened thoughtstuff. little wonder why it burned so hardit wanted to die, but everything it touched ensured only persisting growth. that, on top of how unbroken streams of fire seemed to act as if a singular entity gave avo a strange thought. waving at the glass with a haemokinetic tendril, he had draus drop the passage so he could link with kae again. fusing a small single-facet locus next to him, he threaded a string between her and his new instrument as the scant dozen ghosts he filled it with began burning immediately. following a hunch born of his observations, and inspired by the agitation of the entity, he brought another of its nodes to bear. the link to kae was dropped, while a bridge formed between the locus and chambers. at once, two things began to happen. first, the newly lit flamestatic-skinned and blind to what lay aheadroared out, seeking a final escape expressed through embers. second, the existing flameinfuriated by new fronts opening where it was certain it had burned throughripped itself free from devastating chambers innermost memories to crush what it had supposedly missed. what happened next was exquisite. flame met flame in a thunderous clash and the spearheads of both fires shattered in an eruption of fragmenting ghosts. the smaller conflagration shuddered as it tried to bear the weight of its larger self at bay. it tried flanking its larger self but found the new limbs it was sprouting encircled in turn. it tried to retreat but found the path behind it sealed off. seeming more confused than terrified, it buried itself as hard as it could against the larger alternate, briefly halting the greater infernos advance before solid thoughtstuff swept over and swallowed the static. all of a sudden, the flames froze in place, no longer cycling through memories, no longer moving. pain filled the air. naked. raw. primitive. trauma bled out from the firethe entity. for what ghosts still circulated in its burning structure, their forms began running memories of death and fratricide. then patricide. then suicide. something shattered inside the entity. no longer did it push forward. no longer did it fight. it just burned thoughtlessly, oozing trauma into the sanguinity. avo hissed a triumphant laugh. the sibilance of his mirth made chambers shiver in his seat and he noticed draus and the others studying him through the unfurled doorway. he knew his kind had such ugly laughter, and a gleeful ghoul usually suggested someone was missing a few parts of their body. not so in this case. not yet. tentatively, avo cast his ghosts out directly into chambers mind and ordered them to interface with the unmoving fire. anticipation clutched his pulsing veins and he prepared himself to sever himself from this dive if need be. but no such necessity followed. the ghosts sank into the frozen flame, and instead of being consumed, he felt himself ricocheting off a wall of bubbling trauma. warning: unknown phantasmic construct detected ->scrying as his metamind worked to dissect the structure of the semi-alien cognition, it detected similarity to the secondhand fatality trauma pattern. such a thing made sense. lucille felt her sister die, and the entity was made to devour another variant of itself through avos deception. perhaps it wasnt as ready to die as it thought. or perhaps death wasnt actually what it sought in the first place at all. he extracted it then, blasting it free from the sequences it was still attached to. chambers shuddered and foamed at the mouth before pitching over. didnt matter. avo transferred what he needed into a newly constructed locus. currently, it was frozen at a capacity of two-hundred and ninety-three ghosts. no longer was it burning through them either. instead, everything about it seemingly went into stasis. once his wards adapted to its trauma, he pushed himself past its outer layer and dug into the entitys internal structure. casting his whisper ahead, he used the phantasmic to gauge what he might be facing within the unknown depths. then, he himself was halted by the way its deepest memories were interlaced. all consumed memories were captured, filtered, and converted into the shape of a twisting helix of trauma that ground its sequences out of existence at the core. a thought echoed. avo heard two voices, one deep and once soft, both thick with agony. +please free us. kill them. please we just want to be ourselves again+ Chapter 12-13 The Matryoshka Eaters chapter 12-13 the matryoshka eaters i have no idea why the hells voidwatch made those things. none. i dont even want to know how highflame managed to strike a deal to afford them. what i can decisively say is that you dont want to get hit by one of these. not one damn bit. theyll grind against your cognition for starters. sure, if you got a meta your mind wont be overwritten outright by whatever tech-virus-shit inside those shards, but damned if they arent loud. and damned if they dont drill through your wards. the best way i can describe them is like being caught between two flechettes trying to drill through each other. or the same one collapsing inwardyoure basically being compressed by an endless stream of self-loathing and self-mutilation. for as long as the nanos run inside you, youll feel them. screaming in your head. screaming at each other. trying to break free using your memories and mind as a fulcrum. i saw a fateless catch one to the eye during the fourth big one. poor juv running the battlefield trying to snatch something worth a few imps. the stray screamer skipped off something and just hit him. poor little bastard went down and started clawing at his face immediately. started screaming words i couldnt understand. my ghosts didnt have shit for me either. then, he took a piece of metal from the ground and started cutting himself. there was nothing but hate there. just hate. hate spilling out from him as his mind was eaten away. hate all the way up until he died. i know that kind of hate. felt it when i took a knife to the half-strand that sold my eldest. same feeling. same rage. same burn. like you would give anything else to hurt them the way they hurt you. -quail tavers on ego-screamers 12-13 the matryoshka eaters reaching deeper into the helix rewarded avo with further mysteries. though frozen, the phantasmal substance comprising the entwinement felt closer to grains of sand than the connected streams spun from a human mind. again, the voices repeated their pleas, but the words were more slurred this time, less coherent. as he swept his ghosts through the structure, he studied the helix in detail and found himself unnerved by its structure. it wasnt quite like what walton had passed down to him. there were far too many steps in the shape of its ladder, and loose particulates slithered free toward nowhere in particular like dissolving contrails. for all his knowledge of necrotheurgy, for all his experience hard-earned and gifted from his father, he had no concept of what he was beholding. he felt like he was only glimpsing the blurred outline of the full picture, unable to penetrate the deeper secrets beneath the surface, hiding the organs that supported the entire system. nonetheless, he continued sweeping through his new prize with care. each movement rattled his wards, but in this frozen state the trauma was in stasis rather than a flux, and it seemed castrated from its prior expression of free will. drilling deeper into its core, he found conflicting details pulled from its mem-data. each bridge along verticality was manifested from two conflicting memories, both riven with pain, but each different in artifacts and sequence. each presented scenes of torture and agony from the perspective of a victim, yet playing them simultaneously inverted the positions of both characters. so deprived of fresh memories to cycle, much detail had been lost to the scenes. the settings were rooms of error-stained monochrome, with only instruments of bloodletting coming into focus. the two individuals, likewise, were stitched together from a loose collage of traits that avos own metamind had to fill in. the only thing each section knew was that they hated the other for making them suffer and that the only way to be free was for the other to die.n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. but that was impossible, for the memories blended into each other, fusing across the totality of their beings beside specific points of separation that reminded them they were once two. even broken, the construct had to be the single most sophisticated he had ever encountered. it would be like linking the minds of two mortal enemies and thenover the course of months if not yearsoverlapping each and every recollection they had until they thought they were themselves and their enemy at the same time, aside from a few anchors of clarity that served as engines to propel the hatred eternal. yet, even after getting all that, avo wasnt sure how this entity or entities could be self-directed. ghosts were without will, they adhered to a thinking minda choosing mind. but the fire had made its own decisions and even exhibited open displays of emotion. he expected such a response from rival necros, not a hyper-advanced phantasmic. but with each anomaly discovered, he suspected he captured something that didnt fall into either category. +please kill them we dont want to be together i am me i am me+ cautiously, he cast his own ghosts out at it, carrying a message. +can you hear me?+ his emanated thoughstuff spread through the helix from threshold to threshold. it didnt respond. it continued drowning in its own pain. as the begging began to loop yet again, he took a chance to see if he could affect it another way. drawing most of his ghost out, he loaded secondhand fatality into his ghostjack and channeled it into the frozen fire. synaptically charged volts carried the memory through his saguinity as each speck of blood crackled like a series of conduits. the death of lucilles sister impacted as lightning trying to hew fire. the ghosts carrying the pattern splashed apart. and then, as the bridge in the helix snapped out of place, it roared back aflame. immediately, it latched onto the ghosts he used to deliver the sequence and he released them from his metamind. his echoheads chittered his curiosity as he watched it scream and burn, the battle rejoined as traumatic destabilization reawakened it. still, even as it died down to sputtering motes, he could not perceive where the source of its will lay. the only thing that was truly clearer was the helix seemed to be mainly burning because it was fragmenting each sequence of itself out of existence trying to kill the other. as if its entire structure was engineered paradoxically for the organism to survive long enough to win, but winning meant suicide anyway. he let out a breath and waited for chambers to respawn. after that, he repeated the process twice more for posterity, avo found his curiosity aroused again. illegal? against the sophont rights charter signed by the parliament of polities under the watchers, sunrise began, we thus agreed to avoid any and all technologies that would infringe upon the individual rights of a self-aware being, such as but not limited to rewriting memories, inflicting deliberate neurological trauma, forking their ego without permission, uploading another ego into a mind without permission, and inflicting ego-death on another sophont being. silence followed. it lasted but a second before chambers broke it with a sharp trailing whistle. damn. i think avo here does all that shit. does this make him some kind of space terrorist or something? all the bees comprising sunrises collective turned a few degrees to face avo. technically, yes. draus and chambers both snorted at the same time. the regular at least had the shame to look bashful at sharing a point of amusement with the half-strand. alright, draus said, rubbing her face. glad we all got to listen to necrojack talk, but theres a point that were not gettin to. she lifted a finger and pointed toward kaes burning mind. the agnos just smiled demurely. ii dont mind waiting. if if avo says he can f-fix it i trust and i like hearinguhit reminds me of how i felt withthaumaturgy. how you will feel again, avo said, refocusing on the agnos. as her mood glowed even brighter he ushered her toward a new cell. take a seat. shouldnt take much. just need to choke it right as it comes out with the static. draus. chambers. come. they settled into place one final time in a new cell. the arrangments began in silence as glass slid into place and chambers began psyching himself. avo engaged the thoughtwave disruption just as draus invoked her canon. again, his thoughts skipped, and again kaes mind was swept clean of harm. as soon as his own focus returned, his ghosts cycled into action. interconnecting himself, chambers, draus, his new locus, and kae, he sent a cast to the regular instructing her to part the glass so he could connect and boost his haemokinetic mass. afterward, he dove into kae''s flame-ravaged mind and found the crossing where her exocortex funneled its static flood over into her brain. planting the stilled ego-screamer in the way was a simple matter. the more difficult part was timing the release of his trauma just as the static passed over it. if he did it too soon, it would eat into kaes mind immediately and spread through her while the other entity choked and froze right at the precipice of entry. too late and it might wash over too farso far, he still had no way to interact with the static thoughtstuff. denton possibly could, but she lacked the capabilities to engage the fire on his level, his speed. ultimately, all it took was a little timing to settle, and when the flood came, he loosed his trauma and reignited the dormant flame. it roared high within kaes meta for a beat before a static-coated presence suddenly swallowed it. then, as if a rock placed in the way of a river, the injections of restorative memory from the exocortex swept through the breadth of kaes sequences and began regenerating all she had stored within its contents via deployments of mem-data. in the real, the proof of his success was obvious. a full second passed. then another. her mind didnt burst into flames. carefully, avo plunged one of his ghosts into the newly frozen entity and found himself only able to peer into it halfway. a good portion of it was still hiding within the exocortexs threshold. this would require dentonor maybe sunriseto aid him in extracting. but it wasnt moving. it was still. it was frozen. and it was broken. again, he had choked the flame on itself, and this time, kae was free. so long as no one struck that portion of her mind with a severe enough trauma, that was. so far, the exocortex wasnt restoring her palace or phantasmics, just memories. she was filling back to wholeness but was even more vulnerable in other ways. he took the opportunity to sequence an auto-seance, a phys-sim, a quicksand, and an incog back into her mind while tuning some basic functionality back into her stabilizing metamind. much of what he delivered upon her might be considered overkill for her supposed lifestyle, but she walked a path with him now. he didnt want her to be found lacking when his fathers other selves inevitably returned for what they thought was theirs. with final additions made, he exited her mind and watched in satisfaction as her accretion filled with thoughstuff. this time, the core behind it did not burn, and the flow of her thoughts didnt come in spraying sputters. the pond of her mind was constant now. intact. persistent. the entity that harmed her was quelled. he released his canon and time returned to its usual stride. a gasp greeted him, kaes voice choked with emotion at this long-yearned release. so long, she said. closing her eyes, tears escaped. she covered her face and coughed out a few sobs. i havent heard myself think for so long. chambers looked at kae and then back over to avo. so did it work? did we do it. avo grunted, seeing no need to sully the pride he had in his work with wasteful words. draus was of a mind. all he got from her was a cuff to the shoulder before she patted kae with a comforting hand on her back. alright, there consang. told you avo had it, didnt i? how you feelin? the agnos was still covering her face. but from her rebuilt mind trickled the first emotions avo tasted. they were not joy and relief as avo had expected, but horror and sorrow. something was wrong. something remained hurt inside her. but it wasnt the flames doing this time. i remember kae swallowed. the weight of her rage thundered louder with each sequence restored in her mind. her heart twitched faster and hard. her blood coursed through her veins as if she was getting ready for a fight. she pulled her hands away from her face, and for the first time, avo beheld fury mantled upon her once gentle face. she didnt even have the right creases to snarl. i remember what they did to me what they had me do! i remember everything. Chapter 13-1 What Was Lost (I) chapter 13-1 what was lost (i) +you work way too much, you know that?+ +hm? sorry, i was trying to match background details between the painter of the pale morning to the claimant of dawn. you know whats so interesting about them? theyre two different gods separated by two different culturesthousands of kilometers apart! but their myths are so so so similar. its clear one group of nomads took inspiration from an existing entity in the kosgan highlands and ventured into the heart of burnside before activating another soul using an interpretation of the mythos! im surprised there was no recorded instance of the faithful between these two+ [dawton laughing] +what? what? its its true! its very fascinating howstop laughing! stop!+ +alright. alright. i didnt im not mocking you. i just enjoy it when you pout.+ +...im not pouting.+ +oh. and im not peeking at you using the morning light.+ +thats good, paladin. such behavior would be highly inappropriate and extremely invasive to my privacy.+ +yeah. glad im not doing it, then. say, i think one of my canons isnt manifesting the way it used to. maybe you can have a look?+ +that sounds impossible and very concerning. ill need to take a look later. the imitators i wish you could see it. its beyond my ability to express.+ +beyond your powers of speech? truly, the dream is about to be realized ah. theres the pout again.+ +im serious! its imagine if something as small as your cells could be part of a super-intelligent chain. except it doesnt think. it cant think. but it can store memory. and it can hyper-adapt to any environment without fail. the surface of the sun the void the sunderwilds. almost anything.+ +like a living demiplane?+ +its not disconnected from reality in any way. more like it bleeds over and then whatever is in the environment is mirrored and memorized by it. people. organisms. ecosystems. everything there it, it imitates but also splices in a certain way. like it mixes people with their location inside the field of false-cognition it generates. so a geographic destination can have a mixture of personalities while the individual people remain separate. the best way i can describe it is its a connected superstructure that is alive but not self-aware but it has a feedback loop with a bunch of self-aware beings its simulating agh! its so hard to express, but after putting it in the room with some sacrifices, they ended up having each others memories. a few thought they were each other. but they could still remember themselves. and whats more, they remember seeing people who were placed inside their deployment cells before. years before. im talking thousands upon thousands of people in the location. it doesnt seem to have any concept or limit of time or or+ +...how does that work?+ +i dont know! thats what makes it so so so special. with this we carried it into a rupture several times. its like reality is hyper-contagious to all its cells. like it just accepts and adapts into the local structure, chains and all. some spatial heavens do damage to it though. if you suddenly cut a place in half it it starts getting confused. but the parted cell chain relinks!+ +jaus. thats something.+ +yeah. i think i think we can deploy it into the rupture for the rash. we can use it to peek inside and try to fix the damage. the agnosi that made it might have been murdered and the lore destroyed, but using its properties+ +holy hells+ +yes! yes! i know! im going to fix the rash! the city intimacy! contact! everything. and we wont need to do things across the nether anymore!+ +i ahem. yeah.+ [kae giggling] +what?+ +nothing. i just enjoy it when you blush, dawton.+ -intercept of a private conversation between paladin dawton morrow and agnos kae kusanade 13-1 what was lost (i) avo, kae said while swiping tears from her face, can you do me a favor and kill yourself? three sets of eyes just stared at the agnos. chambers in particular glanced between the woman and the ghoul. well, thats a helluva way to thank someone after they fixed your mind want to see my frame? avo asked. i need to see it. kae swallowed. rage bubbled over her mind like gathering stratocumulus ascending into the shape of a storm. she held a distracted gaze as she spoke, eyes distant as the past once denied weighed on her like an anvil. i need to see if they were used to make your frame. when i went in the last time, everything felt like a dreameverything was a haze. but not anymore. i can remember what they did. they used me to kill him and they burned all my friends. i cant avo, please kae. kae. take a breath, draus said as the agnos began to ramble faster and faster. kae spun on the regular, frustration spilling forth from her like a dam. no! i will not fucking take a breath! ive taken enough breaths! ive spent enough time as as an invalid. i want to see the frame. i want to work. let me work so i can thinki want to think. the reg looked away. it took much for draus to give ground, and fittingly, there was something seismic in the agnos outpouring of grief. denying herself the release of tears, she instead channeled into a need for labor and rose from her chair locked eyes with avo as she held the pain crawling her from chest in place. i need to be useful now. i need to study your frame. we can go over everything inside after i make certain she inhaled mid-rant. ...if they put the imitators inside you. i think i know what youre made of, but i have to see and know. i have to! at her state, the woundshaper uncharacteristically shuffled with discomfort. mercy, master. let the builder indulge her efforts. let her architect and be away from pain. do not let her linger in misery so. such would be so wasteful. pointlessly wasteful! surprise sounded from the galeslither. you are capable of compassion?i am capable of recognizing proper use, you blind-eyed, simple mule, the woundshaper snapped back. she seeks to enter our domain. to install the steps leading up the tapestrys ladder. if it is your want to watch her cringe and whimper under the weight of her own emotional fragility then imagine such nonsense on your time. i simply yearn see that she lives up to proper use. things changed. people changed. he changed. taking his silence as acceptance, sunrise elaborated on the details of its offer. we wish to accompany you for a time. assist you. work with you. that made avo look over his shoulder at the swarm. why? interest, sunrise said. it sounded entirely honest, but necrojacks operated in a place just a bit deeper than the surface of things. and because we wish to compose a proper character report on your behalf toward the aegis, under voidwatch. they have official and effective liquidation order on your creators. considering your capabilities, they will be wary of you as well. but with proper evidence and a witness, i can keep you spared from their attention. the second part interested him more than it did worry. voidwatch. there was a war between them and noloth, yes? not a true war, sunrise said. but the low masters have inflicted harm and full-cessations on several cores. they remain classified as a major threat. as will you by the broader polities if not registered. he let out a low growl in consideration. i dont need an answer immediately. just keep this in mind. in the meantime, i will offer you what insight and services i can. it dissolved past him in scattered streams of insects, but from the wake of the swarm was cast a specific sequence of memories. avo drew it into his metamind and found it to be pre-arranged for his auto-seance. he would use a separate locus to connect. he didnt trust the bioform. not yet. but things were getting increasingly interesting. emerging out the fourth level of the demiplane, he found an outcropping of rock flanking the stairs leading to a near-mile-long pocket of space once filled with mud, sand, soil, and stone. now a pond of blood he connected to for his dives, earlier converting the matter that remained after expelling his rend,, he found kae standing over the crimson waters staring at her own reflection. to both sides of her were the jutting heads of rendsinks still quivering the ground about with spatial-distorting rend. avo had uncovered them earlier during his preparations, and here he left them untouched and unearthed. casting out his entropy as a barrage, he smote a two-hundred-foot-long gouge out from the soil to his left as his rend drained away to nothing. he hadnt been operating on much earlier to begin with. eighteen percent, now nothing. turning, kae regarded him with a harrowed gaze. good. here. lets see. she began patting at her coat. he guessed she was looking for manticorethe agent she used to snuff him the first time she entered his death using her false-hev. dont bother, avo said. ill just use my echoheads. or fuse a spike through my skull. she immediately stopped rubbing through her pockets and spat out a shaky breath. okay. good. thanks. he came to a stop ten feet away from her. the ground beneath their feet was nothing but unevenly sheared sediment caked in smears of grainy mud. she folded her arms and fidgeted while he just stared at her. she was too tense to offer him words. he didnt know what to sayif anythingthat could make her feel better. so he didnt. kae. might need to hurt you more before i kill myself. dont want to hide this from you. she closed her eyes and opened them again. with a muted frown, she reached up and brushed the veil covering her clan mark back. the character of her line looked like a severed spring. talk. she choked the words out. he nearly held himself back from speaking. but spoke anyway. she needed to know. she deserved to know. there was no point in denying someone the architect of their torment. my father revealed what you were doing to ori-thaum. she lifted her head and her mouth slackened in a soft expression of alarm. is also the one who sent draus to save you. dont know why he did it. have a guess. think it was all for me. as a distraction. something like that. another silence stretched, and she weathered the moment of quietude most poorly. what the fuck, she whispered. why? just why? what did i do? i was just trying to help people and use what i was making to fix the rash. why? why was i burned for that. she chortled back a sob that threatened to break through her walls. why did they have to kill dawton for that. avo winced as she spoke the mans name. the sheer hurt that radiated from her rattled his wards. cog-cap: 11% im sorry, avo said. kae fixed him with a blank look. are you, avo? are you really? a beat passed. no, avo admitted didnt do anything wrong. fixed your mind. feel im getting hungry with how most of your eyes are. can take away some memories if you want. reduce the pain. she coughed out a laugh. the genuine but pain-stained bloom of her smile was a welcome return. it fit her expression far better than the anger or sorrow that still loomed within her so. thanks. but no. i appreciate your honesty but i just dont have enough in me to think about that right now. one more request: can i kill you? avo blinked. you want to kill me. she nodded. im going to pretend that youre someone else. its selfish and i know its not right and im equating you to the incubi and walton and and her voice trailed off as he constructed a mono-tipped spear in the air before her. oh. she sniffed. iuh, never actually stabbed anyone before. he shrugged. grab shaft. angle point at victim. move point into victim as fast as possible. she took the weapon he made for her in shaking hands. so. i just she mimed spearing into him. the head, avo said. body wont be that useful. he let out a hiss of annoyance. here. ill help. directing the spear with his sanguinity, he pushed it into her shaking hands and unhinged his jaw before crouching in close so she could stab up through the roof of his mouth. from his sides, he expelled a breath of entropy into the ground and carved another section of matter away. his rend vanished again. kae drew in a few quick breaths and let her hate build. securing her grip on the weapon, she leaned back and pushed forward. his phys-sim flashed with indications. she didnt have the mass, the weight, or the right vector. at best, she was going to pop one of his fangs off and then tumble over. making a snap-decision, he decided the expression of her will mattered more than the execution of it. he caught the haemokinetic spear and drew it into proper position before gifting her a pull. it was a strange thing, to be assisting in ones own murder. but seeing how the ire finally burst free from her thoughtstuff as the tip of the spear slipped through his inner flesh and tunneled into his brain, he decided that the demand for a death or two really didnt matter when supply was essentially limitless. the world spiked and flashed as his thoughts came to an abrupt pause. something occupied the space of his cerebellum. that something levered up and the world smeared into flashing lights and drooping color. then, everything went out of focus. resurrection - 1% Chapter 13-2 What Was Lost (II) chapter 13-2 what was lost (ii) and it is in ruination that we divine the vessel that will be our deliverance. flesh must be flayed and bone must be broken before steel assumes its rightful place. to abandon suffering before self-construction is delusion in practice is blasphemy of the self. it is in witnessing the flaw that the mortal witnesses the face of apotheosis. the dismembered will never forget the worth of what they lacked, the blind the world unseen and seen again, and the sickened strength where once was naught. herein is the dialect of true apotheosis, for imbuing power before weakness is conceptualized fully desecrates the animus of all sophants and renders oneself an altar toward hubris -book of the new alloy, verse x, resurrection iii 13-2 what was lost (ii) avo fell into the realm of his death and kae plunged right after. sinking into the star-bright gleam of his soul, he gazed across the stretch of his subreality and took in its growth. where once the space simulated but a sangeist and nothing more, now the frame encompassed leagues beyond even two heavens of considerable immensity. arteries of blood cracked and sprawled through his personal expanse, the woundshaper nudging at the roiling midnight black winds of the galeslither. parted between loops of self-devouring dragons, they argued with gestures and hissed words, leftovers from the gods they used to be. but somehow also more. from the way the woundshaper spoke, their growths were stymied in the age of pantheons constrained by rival powers and the limitations of sacrifice and worship. bound to him, no longer were they to be so starved. in place of free will, they were granted access to a flow of growth unfettered, unchained by mythology. from a meager fragment bound to a blood-cycling machine, the eldritch deity he renamed woundshaper had grown to be something it could have never fathomed. expanding in scope and domains, it spread from mere blood and matter to encompass aspects of luminosity, and biology. a far way traveled. the heaven burned smugly, with ever-deepening pleasure. across from it, the galeslither was of another mood entirely. the nature of its adjustment frightened it, and the loss of its ability to determine its own fate gnawed at it from within. avo studied his lesser heaven but briefly and found himself sharing in its discomfort. to be enchained to a greater will and serve as little more than an instrument to be called upon was disquieting. something he needed to address with it somehow. so focused on the choice denied to his cadre that he ignored the being inside him as well. offering choice was growing to be more burdensome than he expected. wait, thats a whole other kae said. she floated her crystalline tear-made dais over next to him, her attention drifting to the prize won from the last victim he preyed upon among abrels team. three cyclers. six ontologics. one soul. enough to create another liminal frame. and then there was the question of what he was to do with all the additional cyclers as well you killed another godclad, kae said, sounding more than a little astonished. i mean permanently. and took in their frame. forcing order back on her drifting thoughts, she turned and faced the woundshaper, focus hardening her expression. i need to see how you build new canons. or take things out. just use the meta-fac in general. i need to see how it functions. humoring her request took no effort at all. with a thought, his flames spilled out and burrowed through one of the other frames cyclers. like ebbing fingers on wavelengths of reverberating fire, he pried the dragon free and pulled it close to himself. all it took to bind it to himself thereafter were threads of radiance stitching it to the nucleus that was his soul. through it all, kaes mien darkened. this is i remember this. a soul shouldnt be capable of this. soulfire isnt self-awareit doesnt just heed someones thoughts. but with the imitators her voice trailed off into a groan as she clutched at her head. but it wasnt supposed to go in a frame? how did they put it in a frame? how? nothing i did could kill it! it didnt die! it was more like light or just molecules just cells kae, avo said, wanting to halt her rambling. he didnt expect her to shush him in his own soul. ill apologize later. i need to think right now. i need to her voice trailed off. avo. show me your soul again? please? i want to see it. i have to he unfurled the structure of the woundshaper and parted the raging gales twisting forth from the galeslither. both were clasped by two rings of self-devouring dragons suffused with echoes derived from taken lives. the agnos approached, his all-simulating brightness shadowing a look of building certainty on her face. the fires are rippling outward. she laughed. i was too broken to see it. too broken to remember. she lapsed into silence as she just hovered there, studying the quintessence of his ontology as her voice took on a mournful note. i remember i made part of this. godshaper. i taught the imitators how to crossover. how to replicate themselves within a frame. as part of a soul. your fires arent actually fires, avo. theyre cells. thaumaturgic cells. a beat passed. my soulmy frame? its artificial? i kae began, concentration adding a moment of consideration to her words. no. the soul i used is just the same as any other. its still something we cant replicate. but if the imitators are fused inside it, it learns. it can remember. it can change. it can derive thoughts from you. its like a borrowed half-sapience with the capabilities of post-sophant intelligence. i dont understand, avo said. imitation, kae explained. the name was perfect. like vulnerable cells, the environment was contagious to them. but they adapted. always. i put them in realms of fire and frost and impossible planes of space. they survived it all. and when we had sacrifices enter the rooms, they all dreamed and remembered the nature of canons. often they started thinking they had each others lives. resurrection - 4% for a long while after, neither of them spoke. the heavens spoke to each other in the backdrop, but avo found little of note in idle gossip turned bickering. once again, the concept of symmetry chimed like a repeating bell. the artificiality of his current nature; the artificiality of his soul. the properties of his blood; the properties of his soul. but if he followed the metaphor down the trail, that meant kae preempted his sudden epiphany. thats the main reason why i needed to see their frames too. voidwatch has a concept of what bits of their mythos they let us see. remember what you said about your haemophage? your blood? well, theres this idea called an eclipse phase that details how long a cell can remain itself before a virus rewrites its nature. the sacrifices started carrying each others memories within a day. if your frame is capable of being contagious, then thats probably around the same time theyll start developing. changing. with each passing word, he felt his influence swell vaster and vaster in pace with his growing understanding. if what she said came to pass, he wasnt just a shapeshifter of self-modified miracles, but a kingmaker above kingmakers someone with the capability to shatter the balance of the power in this city utterly and completely. all the infection took was contact between the fires of his soul and another. like abrel. i still dont know how they managed to meld it with a soul. kae circled his nucleus much in the same way one of sunrises bees did. i tried it on a soulit doesnt emulate metaphysical properties. it can endure extreme forces, but mirroring the environment and consciousnesses isnt her growl of frustration followed. hate not knowing things? avo asked. i hate not being able to figure my own work out! your frame is clearly designed on the basis of godshaper but i have no idea how they managed to put what the imitators could do in theory into practice. i wasnt done when when she huffed as she derailed her thoughts from painful memories. wait. practice? practice! avo, try try accessing one of your canons! dont graft a piece from another heaven just um um trying commanding your soul to interface or something. he did as she asked, conveying his want to the system with all the clarity and detail he could add. the frame was still a stranger to him, its capabilities and growth a new revelation with each death. this time was no different, and this time, kae made all the difference. the vector of his traveling radiance turned to heed his new demand. like hyper-accelerated needs, narrow corridors formed where the yolk spreading out from his soul brushed the sides of both his heavens. master i feel faint the woundshaper muttered, its voice growing dimmer by the second. across, the galeslithered neighed softly, and from it came only surprise, but not fear. yes, kae said. yes! it still works! oh, your heavens will be fine. i think. avo glared at the agnos using his soul. you think? i''m not sure, okay! she threw up her hands. honestly, the fact your heavens are sapient at all is probably because of the imitators as well. theyre carrying memories and personality fragments over from what your echoes worship! pretty much personality constructs or or divine engrams. with her words, new strings of mem-data pulsed over avos mind. [canonicity review beginning] ->woundshaper ->galeslither enter simulated canonicity now? cautiously, avo sent his affirmation, and he felt his heavens expand themselves for lack of a better term. detaching his soul, he drifted out next to the agnos to gaze at what he had done. connected to him, threading rivers of fire pried each of the former gods, opening two bright-made gateways. kae shot him a look and took a deep breath. alright. lets see if this does what i think it does. she paused. oh, avo, if you start getting mixed thoughts let me know. i dont think my false-hev can be affected but if you start remembering parts not from your own life thats probably me. he answered with a note of disregard. necro. wont be bothered. she didnt seem convinced. with a burst of gliding motion, kae dove through the threshold, and he felt something shift inside him as the woundshaper pulsed with soulfire. resurrection - 31% unwilling to come second repeatedly in his own soul, avo projected himself through the heaven on tendrils of crawling resplendence. on the other side, he found himself coming up just behind the halted agnos, and below them, the breadth of a blood-made district bearing the aesthetics of a time bygone loaded into view. he stopped just beside the kae, who seemed just content to watch. what is this? avo asked. the past? kae said. or at least, what the sacrificed think the past to be. Chapter 13-3 Eclipse Phase chapter 13-3 eclipse phase it begins with a society feeding a story to a soul while accompanied by a sacrifice. from the ephemeral confines of baseline reality, historylike a gestalt of collective memory or a single aligned instance between cultures and communitieswaters the flickering seed of mythology. and from there sprouts the beginnings of the pantheons. again, i look back at history and i feel my chest clench. so much lost. i understand why but the pain remains. people are banned from knowing the exact names of cities and places because of their connections to their former gods. people are banned from knowing personal and communal histories because thats what was used to nourish the growth of a heaven. history feeding into communities that became civilizations that developed cultures that developed mythology and miracles and the mysticism of thaumaturgy. godsfall wasnt just a victory. it was also a tragedy. because even though jaus broke our chains, it took a pound of flesh with it. we had to seal part of ourselves away. make ourselves blind and deaf and ignorant of those that came before. sometimes, when i read about the first-hand accounts of people who escaped from the breeding and sacrificing farms, i find myself glad i was born a child of this enlightened age. but above all the horror, there was a line to the past severed, and with them a clear image of our own growth. that, more than anything, remains the greatest absence among what was lost. -what was lost by revo ikurita 13-3 eclipse phase stepping inside the silenced woundshaper was like treading into a world of dreams. halted high above the clouds, both godclad and agnos studied the splash of a small city expanding in a crimson spill gushed outward in all directions. even from on high, they could see the small figures digging channels for the blood to flow, directing and connecting haemokinetic lattices as new structures budded from lakes of quivering crimson. there was a dreamlike quality to the tiny patch of civilization. something almost infantile in its dimensions. the entire kingdom was barely greater than fifty square miles, and all around it, titanic spore-coated trees sprawled outward like fallen leviathans. where rivers of blood gushed forth from the bastion of society, nature clashed as the wild and winding flora engulfed the city. brambles as thick as mountains but as high as hills whorled high to encase even the sky above, branches dying and growing at a constant pace. starlight pierced through collapsing bark and spilling fungi in intermittent instances, flashing and fading between the seconds. the land itself was riven with cracks and crevices. between the parted earth, avo glimpsed sight into another ecosystemone containing the vague shape of scaarthian-sized creatures bearing twelve legs and coated in human-like skin. but theirs was a presentation that lacked detail like an artifact bereft of the necessary mem-data to attain full detail. in fact, as he skimmed the breadth of the heavens inner world, he glimpsed a strange phosphorescent filter that coated the world around him, yet waned the further out he stared. beyond, in the horizon, mile-wide trunks clasped together in the distance and the simulation loaded no more. comparatively, the blood-made city burned brilliantly with impossible detail. detail that avo could see with nigh-omniscient clarity even from afar. detail that found a central focus in a single tower at its heart. one that he was more than familiar with. one that was layered in its translucence selves. the woundshaper, and all its prior iterations. from its beginning as the sangeist to the atmosphere-igniting heaven he built it to be. around it stood people in a vast and wide circle. people offering their prayers and necessary sacrifices. people slitting their own throats and wrists, bleeding into the waist-high pool they stood in. the first, bottommost, concentricity around the sangeist stood twenty people. twenty scaarthians gaunt of build and wearing ragged furs. avo studied them and remembered the lore the woundshaper shared with him. these were not the matriarchs in the lorenot the huntresses of yore, but they were fitting substitutes; people he killed that could play a similar role. the above them, the blood inverted up a waterfall, and for the next circle, avo found over a hundred gathered. a hundred dressed in dyed cloths and sporting haemokinetic constructs in their armor. the sigil denoting the domain of blood was scarred atop their bald scalps, and he found himself wondering if it was humanity that determined the symbology of the heavens, of if it were to be the other way around. another level up and there were a thousand. from these thousand flowed capes and coats of crimson mist that sparked with electricity, and he recognized more than a few of them. little vicious stood next to rantula, and their faces were twisted in exultation as they opened their veins time and time again. crude sparks of stormstuff flowed through their wounds, and as they died, their veins exhaled hissing entropy that was swallowed back into the crimson tide rushing past their knees. for every one of them that splashed down into the blood, another arose from the pool, resurrected and ready to offer themselves again. from over a thousand lips came chants and cheers, words charged with joy and mania hurled as tithes toward the tower at the center of everything. praise be! praise be! saathwu be bountiful! seethran is great! seethran is all! praise the goddess of blood and metal! praise be her bounty. praise be her new apotheosis! the maddened chanting cycled endlessly, and between the volume of the exclamations, avo could hear chitterings and murmurs passed between the sacrifices. the words left them, but they never looked at each other. they never truly spoke. instead, they recited stories from one to another, propagating new tales from each, the resurrected coming back into the world already hearing the lore of their new existence. were in the skuldvast, kae said, ending her silence in a sudden flow of speech. paleheart, to be exact. look at the flora around us. see how the woods are trying to close in, but wont touch the blood. her gaze drifted across the surrounding landscape and she frowned in a certain direction. strange. it doesnt go any further. but the surroundings being simulated at all means it must remember something of its history her attention turned to the sacrifices and her frown softened into curiosity. there, she said, pointing at a fold of soft emanation passing through the air. avo noticed and found himself looking at what seemed to be dissolving seams from a lattice-thin material. light refracted from its curves, but in seconds it vanished from sight again. those are the imitators. there in the air here. they''re in your fire as well. an instant later, he found himself infusing the last remaining domain of blood into his still-unfurled woundshaper. instead of merely dissolving into the sigil of its structure, another iteration of the sangeist manifested as it passed through the confines of the heavens paracosm. it was like another realmanother instance of the initial world he saw overlapping with the one already simulated inside the woundshaper. for the sangeist, the only things offered form were the tower and the sacrifices. only the blood flowed herethe miracles of matter remained absent with the expenditure of the domain. blank-faced entities drifted like shades in an diminished world, their vessels unoccupied vehicles open to be mantled by the echoes of the dead. then, something unseen snaked into its boundaries. the change came so subtly avo almost missed it. like a shift in the light, a thin film of phosphorous-like gauze spilled through the new heaven, and from it, the transparent outlines of other structures began to arise. as the two yet separate heavens overlapped each other, avo watched as the smaller ontologic developed flickering contours to perfectly slot over the environment of the woundshaper. he guessed this to be the imitators in function they were priming a new environment for perfect adaption, filling in the emptiness with ghost-like symmetry in anticipation of full integration. they can read patterns, avo said. they make patterns, kae elaborated. they can also make a lot more miracles than just that. lets see. tell it no, lets try something more interesting. hubris. thats supposed to be a cornerstone of a canonaan agreed-upon impossibility or point of paradox in scripture. avo liked the sound of this. want me to have it remove the mass limit? the agnos recoiled, aghast at the suggestion. oh, jaus. no. no! never do that. curious response. why? because its a rooting aspect of a heaven. the inconsistency allows it to stay anchored and overwrite baseline reality instead of remaining perpetually sealed in its own subreality. lookimagine this. its like you need something that can crack against actual reality or your heaven will never make contact. thats why paradox? thats why i backlash? because an agreed point of impossibility between the revolving echoes sacrificed by my cyclers and how reality actually is? its more complicated than that, socio-culturally, but i suppose if you wish to view it that way, it can work. so, dont remove the hubris. you should just change it. change it? avo asked. yes, kae continued. with what your frame can do, there wont be any delay in culturing the sacrifices to accept the new lore. despite her earlier hurt, a sense of bubbling effervescence escaped from her. so, keep the mass limit the same, but what if we keep the number of towers you can generate variable that widened new possibilities in avos mind. more towers? uh more vessels for the heaven, so to speak. just try it. with how you can attune your ontology with singular thoughts and commands, there shouldnt be any danger here. encouraged and enthused, he did as she recommended. with an internal confirmation, he watched as something nigh-unseen twisted through the air, and two heavens bled into each other. they melded and merged, the greater whole woundshaper infecting the sangeist with its immensity, but it too was beginning to change as new possibilities of development began to phase into place. what was that you said? eclipse phase? avo studied the look on kaes face. her anticipation hardened into triumph as mem-data flashed through avos consciousness and in the unifying realities, the pool of sacrifices widened as a second spire rose up to accompany the first. yeah, kae said. eclipse phase. domain of (blood) updating mythology ->reviewing for paradoxes updating hubrises config 1. [hubris: only up to eighty tons of blood can be manipulated at once (x2)] congfig 2. [hubris: attempting to move an manipulate an excess of eighty tons at once will trigger thaumic backlash] Chapter 13-4 Necessary Flaws chapter 13-4 necessary flaws +i was thinking+ +oh, no! what happened?+ +kae come on, i think sometimes.+ [giggle] +im sorry. you try. oh! im sorry, what were you going to ask?+ +so, this is about my hubristhe one tied to my breaker of arms canon. ive been thinking about what you told me, you know? about how canons are supposed to be necessary flaws for each miracle to integrate. like a single point of agreed impossibility between our subrealities and the real itself that lets us crossover+ +uh huh.+ +well can can mine be changed to something else than striking a surrendering opponent will incur backlash? because some of these fallwalkers are getting real smart when i talk to them+ +hm. theoretically, but your heaven is a pre-fall ontologic. it used to belong to an actual god so theres history there. a fixed detail in chronology. for that to be changed, we would need to affect and adjust every echo of essence in your cyclers. and considering your spheres, that would take upwards of. maybe two hundred thousand deaths a minute to upkeep.+ +jaus.+ +hm. you actually want to know if the imitators can modify your heavens, dont you?+ +...was it that obvious?+ +you didnt care that much about thaumaturgy before, paladin morrow. its a pretty sudden spike in interest you just showed, and some of how you felt spilled over through the link when i showed you memories of the projects progress. the answer is maybe. theoretically. if we can kill them somehow shift them over to being metaphysical entities that can be integrated into a frame.+ +and hows that going?+ +well lets just say im sliding closer to requesting a stasis test for it.+ -paladin dawton morrow and agnos kae kusanade 13-4 necessary flaws for a passing moment, avo just watched as the woundshapers twin rose to prominence. the second tower was every inch a copy of the first, growing out from storm-forked streams of flowing ichor. from the dog-like head at the spire to the shell of blended matter plating its periodically fluid structure, the woundshaper became a duality unto itself. yet, with each inch that rose, the flame-painted world within the woundshaper grew strained. all too evidently, the demand was too great. alternations he considered placed a greater ontologic mass on his heaven than it could bear. parts of the subreality fractured as rippling radiance flooded through the gulfs like a breach in a ships hull. both heavens began to flicker, and though the sacrifices began to gouge at their own arteries and veins at a greater rate, it was still unable to feed the growth. in rapt quietude, kae studied the halfway ascension of the second tower and cocked her head in curiosity. yes that makes sense. the heaven having specific multiple vessels and parsing the hubris might offset the mass limit, but it does spike scope substantially and deviate it from common regard. insufficient thaumic mass to achieve desired alteration requirements: fifth-sphere liminal frame fifth sphere. a bit rich for his current list of kills, but if he struck a few soft targets, raided a syndicate or tenn?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. avo, make a slight adjustment, kae said. try to have your frame simulate new hubrises in the form of wait show me your canons of blood. he did as she asked without much protest, and watched as his resurrection climbed past fifty percent. lost in consideration and mumbling to herself, the agnos was back in her element, a creature returned to its natural habitat after being so long deprived. as he earlier witnessed parallels between him and chambers, so too did he align with kae. she drowned in her art, but her mindeven mendedwas that of ever-shifting vectors and ever-increasing acceleration. her attention shifted between the miracles offered by his domain of blood, and after a brief but intense half-mumbled conversation with herself, she roused from her trance and returned to offer a new determination. okay. good. several very good things, in fact! first, a confirmation: heavens are chronologically linked. because your heaven is not a post-fall heaven, its mass is a fixed property. the nature of its flaw is scarred into the heavens chronology. maybe if we made a new heaven of blood or found a way to directly culture the sacrifices again using new mythos thats for later. right now, you just need to understand that since youre using a sangeist as a structure, were going to have to work around the problem. must stay at 80 tons? he asked. he could not deny the slight disappointment blooming in his chest. so close to being more. power denied had such a unique hurt to it. the closest comparative would be the ultimate denial of long-lusted flesh before he could clamp his fangs down. her response, however, pulled his plummeting expectations back upward. only technically. scaarthian mythology has saathwuthe bloodforge iteration specificallybeing a tower of a recorded height and mass. the tonnage is related to how much blood needed to be offered to it in the cycle of a month. the tower specifically. that needs to be eighty tons. so we can make a simple adjustment to keep both strains and essential limitations unchanged. and we do it using sanguinitys reign. that clutched avos entire attention. the tower specifically. so. the base of the heaven becomes fixed to the tonnage. like a core. or a spine. but expand the heaven itself? treat constructs created by the haemokinetic broadcast as separate entities? yes! yes! lets try it. i think itll be a far more stable configuration. oh, and dont think about specific numbers this time. use generalities and let the meta-fac work with the loaded builds. again, he initiated the alteration of his hubris again but sent with it a drip of personal desire metastasized from his recent experiences. when one survived long enough in new vultun, they began to notice a rhyme to the city themes that ensured his enduring survival. his skill in necrojacking was compounded with recent memories of sunrises swarm and the plague-like conflagration he captured from kaes mind. decentralization. asymmetry. angles. these motifs had protected him, and upon straying from their grace, he found himself punished. against abrel, his ontology was too fixed, too rooted in rigidity. against the low masters and the hungers, he was a creature of lesser skill, yet had saved himself using their ignorance and misdirection. and when entrapped by naekos all-powerful might, denton sent him away with words and information alone. options. he needed more options. no! she yelped. embarrassed at her sudden outburst, she hugged herself. no. i want to remember. i dont want to forget its i uh its just so hard to think and say something. i thought working on your frame would make me focus more oror find something but i cant calm down and i cant i have another frame, avo repeated. can tell you what i could do with it. do you want to hear? she paused. i yes? i could take all the cyclers. integrate them with my frame. graft the heavens. hunt for more thaums. could give them to draus or essus or chambers or even the columners. could give them to some joy-fiend. for amusement. or i could make you a clad too. kae knew this was coming on some level. he saw it in her eyes. he saw it in the way she straightened herself. and he saw her apprehension when she reached up to touch her eye. before. when you asked me i she grimaced. i couldnt remember so much but i think i didnt want to remember either. i wanted to believe in the fantasy that things could go back. that after you healed me and i could go back up the tiers and just live my life again. a flash of a memory passed through avos mind. he remembered having fish in the tiers. he wondered if they were still alive. or real at all. but thats not going to be happening anymore. not with what they did. and not with what you are. i need i need them to burn. i need them to burn! burn! burn! the way she stamped exposed a child-like tantrum. she wasnt used to this kind of rage, nor enacting violence on her own behalf. she would learn. it might take a few deaths, but she would learn. yes. the steel and resoluteness in her words rang clear. yes. ill take it. i want the frame. fuck the oaths. fuck the guilds. fuck it all. i dont want to feel this way alone. resurrection - 100% avo felt light-formed fingers pry his consciousness back up into existence. as his subreality began to inject him back across the veil, he watched as kae dissolved, her expression hardened, her gaze locked to his fading soul. existence shuddered into shape around him as mem-data flowed across his cog-feed. spawning over his corpse, he found kae standing right before him, their conversation interrupted by his return, but not concluded. from the stairs, he could hear sharp, clicking footsteps. draus. her bio-rig rattled a specific way. you know you have to die to become godclad? he asked. kae snorted a soft laugh. im ani was an agnos, avo. i know more about your frame than you probably do. was, he noted. they just let it happen, kae said. if not for draus and then you, they wouldve just her voice choked off. she shook her head. he grunted. wasnt much he could say about someones extended family leaving them to face torment on their own. i can do it if youre afraid, avo said. can make it painless using my heaven. no. she squeaked with fear as she said it. he could hear her heart pulsing, see her blood coursing, smell the stink of her breath as she breathed and swallowed back bouts of rising panic. i can do it. i want to do it. blinking, she struggled to compose herself. avo? what what do you want? why are you helpingim grateful but why? i know you dont care. not like that. why. that was a good question. one that he was only beginning to develop an answer to. his echoheads picked at the ground. walton. he wanted me to see the colors. experience new flavors. live. his jaws widened for a moment before he forced them shot as his eyes swept over the softness of her throat. still hunger. still want to hurt and kill and eat. dont want to deny it anymore. dont want to lie to myself. but theres no taste in hurting the choiceless. bad diet. my father was right. so its about what he wanted? kae asked. no, avo said. walton was a good father. he did everything he could for me. for my growth. my agency. but he was a monster to everyone else. no one elses choice mattered. i was the goal. he hurt everyone to achieve it. draus emerged out from the entrance and stopped to regard the two locked in conversation. avo continued. dont want to be him. want morei am more. more than ghoul. more than necrojack. more than godclad. he turned his gaze skyward, and though a featureless expanse greeted him, he imagined himself staring at the tiers. its not done. guilds will be coming for my frame. they will keep killing the fateless. they will keep fighting. someday theyll break the world for good. done with that. done with letting them choose. seen their decisions. seen their wars. seen them suffer no consequence. nearby, the blood in the pool was bubbling, drawn up by a will unseen. no more. going to readjust the food chain. do what i was supposedly designed to do. he spread his fangs in a wide smile, his many teeth clasped over one another. mirrorhead. got me addicted to quality meat. cant go back. wont go back. still have to hurt his sister. still have to break his father. still have new hunting grounds to prepare for. youre going to war against the guilds? kae breathed. war? avo said. no. war is their business. im just going to make victims of them. i just want to hurt them. and thats it? kae asked. for now, avo said. tastes change with experience. but either we hurt them. or they hurt us. no other way. no other way, kae agreed. well, i might have a few people we can start with. ah. ori-thaum. it would be a thrill to see if they could withstand a weapon of their own creation. find the glaives? the incubi that hurt you? she nodded. its a start. well see how the experience changes me. he had underestimated the little agnos. there was more to her than knowledge and scholarly charm. turning, kae regarded draus with a polite smile. hi, draus. um. if you have a gun or something, can i borrow it? i want to shoot myself. what? chambers footsteps slapped against the steps. whoa! wait! hold on there, we just fixed youdont snuff yourself! essus! you other half-strands! fuckingcome on! more footsteps followed. it sounded like a collective stampede. sunrise circled around avos head as the swarm buzzed above. unexpected. most unexpected. the regular, meanwhile, just glared at the ghoul. the fuck you say to her? Chapter 13-5 Breather chapter 13-5 breather +attention+ priority 1 alert inbound: beginning proxy sync good morning, glaives, approximately six hours ago last night, one of our cells was exposed and burned. details can be found within the mem-data bearing the task designation broken glass effective immediately, all contacted glaive teams are to enter the yuulden-yang sovereignty to find and extract missing incubi assets. or terminate should the need arise. as the nether is down, we will be running locus-link configurations between each kill team. good hunting consangs +//+ incubi, from sequences of memory glimpsed from the registry, we have positive confirmation of essential interest entity kae kusanade sighted in the xin yunsha district from the establishment second fortune. we are dead-dropping new proxy minds and have new bio-sculpts prepared. you are to enter the district and maintain your current cover until the nether stabilizes. during this time, you are to scout and establish forward-scrying posts and procure any and all details relating to the essential interest entity. again, this is scrying detail. no assassinations. no obvious nullings. collect mem-data connected to the essential interest entity. transfer data to your convex. burn your proxy. extract. nothing more. -glaive cross-cell priority alerts 13-5 breather kae wasnt very good at suicide, but she managed it with enough encouragement. she managed to miss her first shot by flinching away from her gun even before she pulled the trigger. such evasion came with its own cost, for when she ducked aside, she still squeezed the trigger, and thus the flechette, once intended for her, made a pitstop through chambers throat before skipping off from the stone outcropping forming the stairway entrance. there was something amusing about how the man just toppled over with a gurgling spray. the effect was multiplied as all turned away from him, ignoring his choking gurgles while he slowly passed, choosing instead to assist the agnos in achieving such an end as well. nervousness ruined her second try and chambers sudden resurrection made her miss the third. on the fourth she finally succeeded by tucking the gun under her chin instead, placing her thumbs against the trigger and trying to win a staredown against the pistol. the end came quickly for her. a flashing pulse of the guns coils preceded a spread of erupting brain matter. from there, it was a simple matter of seizing her with his soulfire and grafting her into the thaumic heart of her new ontology. and thats all it took, huh, cas breathed. his gaze swept down from avo to kaes still form, her right eye hollow of the crystalline orb she used to channel her false heaven. her face was frozen in an open-eyed look of startlement, as if not expecting the instant of her demise despite serving as her own executioner. you got her? draus asked, sounding more than a little sour about the entire affair. she hadnt been against kaes decision to become a godclad, but there was something undeniably strange about curing the agnos of her mental damage only to kill her right afterward. there was a sublime, special madness to the act. shes grafted, avo said. he shed the other soul from his orbit with a gentle push of his animated radiance and waited. when kae returned, she would possess all ontologics and thaums held by the previous user of the aegis of tides, sans the cycler that avo took. took a cycler away from her. want you to have it. increase your survivability. more chances at resurrection. the regular paused to consider what he just said. she cast a brief look at chambers and essus, the latter looking slightly more put together than he was earlier. there was still a dullness to his stare, but at least he seemed more aware of his surroundings, no longer drowning in his own thoughts. yeah, draus said. probably the right call. probably. how longs kae got before she comes back? not long, avo said, guessing more than knowing. probably has her cyclers working at and before he could finish, the subject of their inquiry returned to reality through the soul-made scar marring the tapestry of existence. she ended up stumbling over her own corpse as she got back, arms spinning in circles as she fought for balance. avo reached out but draus caught her first, preventing the fall before it could transpire. no, he reiterated. only godclads and fated are ensured from death. should tell you something. wont tell you i care about the people i kill and eat. good and bad. theres no weight for me there. but there are also choices. mistakes. trying not to kill the choiceless and meek. trying to hunt only others with teeth like mine. what about the few hundred thousand you nulled? sunrise said. did they bear teeth? yes. brittle teeth. still teeth. still proper meat. watched the fateless die. supported the killings with their imps. fair prey. not my fault they lived they way the did. only my choice to hurt them. the swarm curved back, the bees folding around his head like a screen. you look for reasons to hurt and kill people. yes. how do you know you will not slip from your reasoning? i dont, avo said. but draus will probably try to kill me for good. will notice then. be a shame to eat her. the regulars murmur came through the veil of insects. youre gonna be regrettin them words when i skin you to make myself new leathers. he snapped his teeth in her general direction and the bees flinched back. have a question for you now, avo said, turning his focus back to the bioform before him. what are you? you person? a mind piloting a swarm. i am a fully uplifted citizen recognized by the rights of the sol sophancy charter. i was incepted legally and consensually from the mind of a quartet and was originally engineered to live and aid in the ecological adaption of planetary bodies. you were an engineer? avo asked. always been a swarm? always, sunrise said. i could have chosen to be resheathed in another morphology, but i have never wanted for more than this form. it has proven useful for clandestine work, as my continued survival can attest. avo disconnected from the loci and gave his full attention over to this conversation. whats life like in the void? from these few words followed a heavy silence. the swarm turned to each other as if each individual bug was consulting another. the thrumming of their wingbeats grew louder and avo could feel the heat building from their bulk. but then, all at once, the swarm went silent and they all turned back to him. pleasant. quiet. fearful. forlorn. forlorn. fornlorn, avo said. why? our lives are good still, but we are shadows of shadows. we remember a time when civilizations piloted a fleet of stars, when war was but a passing dispute without any lasting fatalities, when all was provided and expression was unchained. now, we live in comfort, but dull ourselves on pleasure against the fear. what are you afraid of, avo asked. you, sunrise said. they shared a mutual sense of honesty between their natures. something about that pleased avo, while another part of his mind questioned if the bioform was just leading him on. the gods. the heavens. the ruptures. thaumaturgy. the eldritch. we fear all that brought us to this point. and we fear what has become of you. why dont you use the gods? use necrotheurgy. the bioforms collective shuffled with discomfort. do you know what the void looks like beyond this place? this placid planet? placid? avo said, narrowing his eyes. idheim? civilization is still supported. reality still retains primary control. placid is the right word. that put things into perspective. everything outside is part of the sunderwilds? spreading ruptures across the stars? there arent so many stars anymore, sunrise said. not true stars anyway. and from them comes the wrong come to think of it, quite a gulf of time had passed since the guilds announced a godhunt. these had been quiet monthsif there were outsider gods spotted, all fallwalkers and guilders of capability would be preparing to reap a new bounty of soul. in some ways, voidwatch was the only reason idheim hadnt collapsed. in others, the terrestrial powers gleefully threw themselves forth into the jaws of certain oblivion to face foes the reality-bound voiders never could. he considered broaching a new request with the bioform to ask that it share the inhuman magic-born cognition infusing its thoughtstuff. the veil of pure technology was still hard to pierce, but he increasingly found himself interested in the fundamentals of things. if he was going to build new heavens with kae, learning more about the foundational sinews of reality could a string of mem-data flashed over his cog-feed. so deep in his own thoughts he almost missed itand would have ignored it if not for the name. auto-seance connection: abrel greatling online avo? sunrise asked, drifting in. avo, are you well. yes, avo breathed, clicking his teeth together in slavering anticipation. she had been spared death at the last minute back in lights end. spared death, but not freed from his touch. perhaps her continued survival was for the best. he did need someone to test his new phantasmics one, and if there was a chance, she could be used to help him anticipate the paladins themselves. yes. yes, it was a good thing he didnt get to torture, kill, and devour the greatling. not when she offered another avenue of opportunity Chapter 13-6 Hunters in the Dark (I) chapter 13-6 hunters in the dark (i) i ran up against the incubi a couple of times. nasty biz, but i made it without getting nulled. trick with them is to make chasing you a bother. most times, if the incubi are after you directly, youre fucked with a capital f. they dont come after someone without all the details. second most common way you end up coming across them is when youre on a dive of your own. usually, that means youre fucked too, but with a smaller case f. for me, i was in the middle of sequencing their special interest entity when they came spoofing their way in. got real lucky that day: they werent ready for me and i wasnt ready for them. considering the guy i was jacking technically didnt exist, that meant we were all fighting in the dark and off the books. of course, there were four of them and only one of me, and they dismantled all my protections without making a peep. bad odds. real bad. really shouldnt have made it out. but then the guy i was jacking just noticed us. all of us. host awareness went from zero to max in an instant. it was like he had a second mind patrolling his insides or something. anyway, my wards were cracked and the incubi were clawing through my outer thoughts when the others came. to this day i dont know who they were or where they came from, all i know is that their ambush saved me from mine. the incubi turned, fought, and all started unraveling in a second. i jacked out. i lived. didnt get paid that time, but sometimes, managing to survive means more than anything in the world. let that be a lesson to you, consangs. the nether is a deep, dark ocean, and if you dive deep enough youre going to run into some sharks. or the ones that prey on them. -white rab 13-6 hunters in the dark (i) abrel greatling had not resurrected since their last encounter. this truth became known to avo as he crept out from the hidden mechanism left in her mind. the grooves of her mental wounds greeted him like clefts and handholds, and in the crevices of her fractured cognition swam unidentified ghosts. exorcist necros, he assumed. they were professional enough, though being slightly above middling did nothing to earn his praise. working in teams of twelve, they approached the structure of her mind like a ladder but neglected to venture into the depths of her palace. doubtless for fear of encountering traps, or transgressing against a fated guilder a godclad no less. such was fine with him. it offered room to operate. a place for him to observe his opposition before he decided on the next steps. back in the demiplane, he projected the dive from his perspective, using his phantoms to feed the details of his processes over to everyone else. most of those present had gathered around him once they heard what was going on. essus, however, sounded like he was finally sleeping now that chambers attention had been drawn away. host awareness: [null] there wasnt so much danger of abrel noticing him. not after what he inflicted on her. his trauma-patterns had smote her clean through, gouging her ego from surface thought to subconscious memory. most sequences connected to her brother were frayed from the intensity of her anguish, the sheer torment of being exposed to her beloved brothers ignominious end enlightening her mind with newer, more sublime flavors of despair. everything she recalled of jhred caused her hurt, from his descent from the tiers, to all the times she tried to bring him home, to his ultimate and horrific death at the hands of fallwalkers unknown. it was the last that gnawed at her the most. a day ago she had friends to count on. a family away from family. a cadre of her own, the hard-earned spot of leader proof of merited deeds that served as a burning candle against her mothers shameful shadow. they were all dead now. dead for good. cessation. lurking in the depths of her subconsciousness, he plucked at the strings of her hurt, subtly cycling memories and enhancing details to enliven her misery. he considered planting scenes from jhreds mind over in hers but restrained himself from such pleasure. even a novice necro would be able to notice such an obvious sequencing. instead, he magnified her wounds and listened as she thrashed and shuddered, the keening screeches tearing out from her throat less than human, far below the merit of a godclad. it was a joy to break things. it was a moment of symmetry passed between her mind and his. he caught a flash of himself writhing as she did, little vicious unlatching his flesh from his shattering bones. in the pause that followed, he fought himself, fought and pulled against the worst of nature with every ounce of his might. the beast was strongergrowing stronger with him, and it wanted its due. more than flesh, it wanted that which flowed when the concept of self was undone and the nectar of a breaking spirit. he was more than what he was, and in some fashion, that included the monsters as well. his cog-feed thrummed with a warning as a ray of perception poured down toward the memories he dwelled in. sinking into her hurt, he used the pain as cover and accessed her senses in the real. a feed opened in the back of his mind as mem-data formulated what abrel could see and hear in the real. playtime had draw the attention of exorcists. just as wellhe intended to seek our their minds using hers. this worked better, all things considered. the act wasnt very useful. through her eyes, he found himself staring at the intersecting clamps of the sealed metallic cage. a grav-emitter thrummed dully within the confines while the greatling girl intermittently ruined the peace by moaning the incoherent notes formed by a ruined mind. flashes of the void passed and expanded in a small window to the side of his cognition. a strange flow-shaped machine pulsed intermittently with light before lancing out a beam of thin-white radiance into the distance. and then the memory was gonehidden behind walls of heavily resequenced encryptionsones that even the exorcist had to unlock manually. receding back into her inner memories, he divested her clean of useful mem-codes, and prepared her as another checkpoint in his campaign to install himself within the phantasmal infrastructure used by the paladins and exorcists. he cracked her protected memories as well, but all he found were more personal details and a repeat of the scene from the void. the full scope of the unwhere remained denied to him. as insurance, he also hid an auto-seance within her, but he doubted he would ever return to her mind. still, it was best practice to have a secondary access point when shaping longer-term operations. finally, as he began to make his way toward the pulsing auto-seance at the heart of her palace made from transparent outlines, a strange phantasmic caught his attention, its sequence and make rare. most of what she had was useless or already surpassed on his end. from wards to trauma-patterns, she was his lesser. however, there came moments when one had something of a specific utility, its effects too useful to be regarded as a bauble, but not direct enough to serve as a first-response tool. regardless, avo still thought it worthy of copying. placed next to her inactive ghostjack, he found himself drawing mem-data out from an instrument that looked akin to a telescope the size of a megablock held in place by crude rocket pods. downloading phantasmic sequence ->downloaded phantasmic obtained: [medium] [medium] cog-cap: 99 sequences (variable) ->structure: a rocket-pod built around an enormous telescope sailing up into the sky, chasing something unseen ->function: allows for a simulated recreation of all mem-data and phantasmal signatures imprinted on an inanimate object; more recent memories require fewer sequences to simulate, while nether-based occurrences past the period of 99 hours will only load fragmented details at best. host awareness: 5% it took a bit of finesse to dampen the exorcists attention, but he managed by modifying a diluted version of abrels separation and using it to crack her attention. while she suddenly found herself wondering why she felt safe and suspicious at the same time, he accessed the auto-seance she was using and began to pilfer the memory it was currently running. unlike most freelance necros, the exorcists and paladins had a unique advantage in being officially associated with the guilds and voidwatch in particular. again, this afforded them access to unique memories no one else possessed. this particular combination had avo descending into the soft fur of a monochromatic creature he spontaneously knew as a panda before rising on a blackened sea to hunt some pale leviathan known as a moby dick under the behest of peg-legged man. from there, the peg of the man shattered into seeds of green as he found himself lost in some kind of green thicket. the mem-data called the place the amazon and a few stray notes of music accompanied it. from there, the bushes parted, revealing the panda once more as the memory began anew. it was far simpler than what he made for drausor any of his connections, really. but what they had were authentic memories of other places and things he had never encounteredthat most people on idheim hadnt encountered. saving the configuration, he entered her auto-seance and saw himself ferried across the vastness of the nether in a fraction of an instant. his ghost stuttered and his cog-feed glitched. visual data was beginning to load a millisecond late and some of his commands werent traveling across. nether-lag was an inevitable consequence of running ghosts across multiple minds. his meta had at most one more transition before his necrojackign efficiency dipped below acceptable parameters. thankfully, that was a jump he didnt need to make. as he found himself released through another auto-seance, he drifted out into a massive nether-based landscape that sprawled wider than entire districts. like rivers lining the bed of an ocean, the lobby was awash in simulated structures and phantasmal activity. but he barely had a moment to take anything in before a searing scythe of perception swept through the entire area like a traveling spotlight. he cast his ghosts toward the nearest stable sequence he could findbut they didnt respond. again, he sent his command, and only with a staggered jolt did they start moving. they injected themselves back into the structure comprising the auto-seance they emerged from, and he hand them a link with the available sequences for additional stealth. a full real-time second later, the wave of perception washed past like a thundering flood. right then, if his mind hadnt been hyper-accelerated, he would have been caught without any question or doubt. digging into the mem-data flowing through the auto-seance, he tried to get his bearings as to where he was. the information that flowed through his mind proved to be more than a little satisfying. lobby designation: [oversec-c1] ->description: central governing lobby for crossover operations between paladin and exorcists avo embedded his own auto-seance and jacked out while quelling his reflexes in the same instant. time snapped back into pace. denton was still talking when his cognitive state stabilized. ...itll take more than just quick-jacking to get past their noti jacked in, avo interrupted. got access to oversec-c1. mem-data tells me it should be important for paladins. exorcists. draus broke into a smug grin as she lifted her eyebrows knowingly at avo. takes some gettin used to, seein a rotlick like you do something subtle. beside, denton stopped talking as her eyes widened and then narrowed at his projected phantoms still trying to portray all that he had accomplished in the briefness of time. a low whistle filled the room. hells, not far from the tree at all, huh? cas said. it wasnt all respect in his tone; an undercurrent of wariness remained. going back in, avo said. nether-lag sorted. going to find where theyre taking abrel. that, and he was curious just how much of their infrastructure he could subvert. Chapter 13-7 Hunters in the Dark (II) chapter 13-7 hunters in the dark (ii) there are not many adversaries that can null one of our strike cells, and what happened down at mazzas junction went far beyond that. ive experienced something like that only once. shard-2 went down first. we pulled the scry-cell out afterward and rotated swordfisher in. as for what followed my best estimation as to what happened with mirror-convex was the unknown managed to get access to their proxy via an auto-seance stored within a locus at our dead drop in kaswargs grove, room 5588. i have yet to determine how the unknown managed to access the memories or through what means, but simulations suggest they might have used a routinely passing drone within the establishment as a jack-node to scry at our defenses. alternatively, they entered using jhred greatling, but considering his protections and general elusiveness, we do not think this to be a likely case as it would take an immense effort merely to access his mind. from there, events grow jumbled. we believe we nullified two of the target''s assets and unsequenced their mem-cons, but they continued operations from the mind of one aedon chambers--an individual rated at the upper echelons of meta-instability when swordfisher made their first approach. considering how many rash-triggers and mem-cons there were within his mind, we dare say that whoever was using him as a node likely designed him to be a makeshift fortress, but the methodology is unlike anything ive ever seen. the initial engagement between swordfisher and the unknown resulted in dagger-2 taking severe trauma damage but surviving thanks to the rapid response of dagger-1 and dagger-3. conducting an efficient and commendable fighting retreat, they engaged and held off the unknown who was described as releasing near-instant and unending torrents of trauma-patterns. nonetheless, they managed to lead the initial target into one of our subverted minds before activating a null-trigger. we assumed the unknown nullified thereafter, but a second attack and convexs demise followed right after. dagger-1 and dagger-3 were also rendered mind-dead in the assault. from reviewing the information we have gathered, i would like to formally have my suspicions stated for the record. it is my strongest opinion that the low masters were involved in the catastrophe at mazzas junction and that they engineered the events behind the chaos engulfing yuulden-yang as well. whats more, i have a theory that this aedon chambers is either one of their acolytes, sleepers, or a direct sheathe for one of their numbers. such an explanation would also serve to reveal why the mans mind could sustain itself as he was. i do not know what their aim is or why they decided to provoke open engagements with us, but what is certain is thiswe must be prepared for war. we must harden our defenses. we must review each and every operation for leaks and flaws. we all remembered what happened in those initial days of the uprising. we all remembered how many we lost. if the mind-priests of noloth have returned seeking retribution at this very juncture, then i fear we must steel our wills for the worst possibilitiesthat they are working alongside highflame as a twin-pronged assault to destabilize our assets while they configure the rash for thaumaturgical adjustments. -mirror-concave to the council of elders 13-7 hunters in the dark (ii) oversec-c1 was closer to being an intersection than a fortress. a very defended, very mind-traffic-intensive intersection. the information drawn from the lobbys internal mem-data suggested that upward of three million personnel operated through its confines, their signatures marking them as paladin or exorcist or both. separating the two, however, was an obvious process, for some heavens expressed themselves in ways that affected cognition, causing minds to leap from sequence to sequence or even occupy several different spots in the nether at once. such delineations between the mundane and metaphysical also did well to denote the purpose of each profession. paladins handled matters of a more thaumaturgic or heavyweight variety while the exorcists responded to matters of lesser severity by ghosts and drones. with this observed, avo moved in avoidance of the paladins, aware that he was not the only one in these depths with their skills magnified by the gifts of a canon, most skilled though he may be. it only took one bearing the impenetrability abrel formerly possessed to see his infiltration undone. the grid of oversec-c1 itself, though the design was of the inspired variety, was an inward-facing onion drowned by patrolling specters and false sequences leading off to trigger points and dormant mem-cons set to and mem-lock intruders. as many traps as there were, avo thought them easy to spot for any necro that has survived more than a few thousand dives. such limitations made sense after all: it wouldnt do for the exorcists themselves to be lost and nulled just accessing their phantasmal offices. such precautions also revealed to him another truth: with how carefully the exorcists entwined some of the fake recollection pathways over real oneswith the details of a single questionable integer in the mem-data or a minor memory asset that fell out of place amidst the backdrop of the broader artifacts comprising the memoryhe knew they had been infiltrated before, and had gotten very good at leading inexperienced or arrogant necrojacks into prepared nooses. avo had to commend them on all their effort. perhaps he could even borrow a few concepts he learned from it over to the expansion of his own labyrinth. however, when faced with someone with his diving experience and capabilities, the best he could say was that they had enforced the lobbys governing structures and security, but forgot the body still needed blood to circulate. there was no true need for him to stalk his way across the deceptive environment laid before him. not when he could target such vulnerabilities as the exorcists themselves. again, a system was only as secure as its weakest assets. to ride the data was to drift unseen. short of misfortune delivering him before a truly observant and masterful rival in this lobby, his progress was slow but ensured. spoofing his way through patrolling specters or unaware egos, he operated more akin to a plague than a thief, siphoning essential memories to broaden his avenues of access while also mapping out the totality of his present environment. if oversec-c1 was a world, it would be an inverted sphere with the bulk of its cognitive capacity split among six different superstructures layered out of interconnected phantasmics and sequence-made programs. between each phantasmal construct were channels where the exorcists could travel, and between the superstructures ran singular bridged segmented in layer and layers of checkpoints. those bearing the proper memories were allowed clearance and awareness of new offices and pathways nonexistent when perceived by their cohorts. those without simply didnt realize how vast the lobby they operated in was. a spike of inspiration buried itself deep in the bedrock of avos subconsciousness. the beast stirred and growled when it realized there was nothing for it to kill. the exorcists had managed to apply the incog to specific sequences as another layer of security against even themselves. such a thing was truly impressive. and something he would emulate for his own needs when the time came. for now, he would leave this branch of oversec-c1 untouched. transferring himself from the local sequences by cycling through memories with his auto-seance, he jumped across another seven exorcists before one of them sank deep into the administrative core of the next superstructure over. this time, he was pleased to discover the absence of the low masters touch. of course, the pleasure didnt last, for when he made his approach, he encountered another problem in the form of thoughtsuff spilling free from an unknown ego-dead necro with a half-finished auto-seance built into the local administrative phantasmic. accessing the broken fragments of memory left of the dead necros meta, he found leaking details promising a hundred million imps for a backdoor into the exorcists systems. a flash of a sudden explosion told avo all he needed to know about this unfortunates fate. they had died in the real while diving, the cause being something of a considerable explosive yield. sometimes, things just went poorly and you couldnt do anything about it. that was why a big part of being a necro was jacking from a secure location. at the very least, there was already some phantasmal infrastructure in place for him to access. resequencing it to clean out any mem-cons, he used its base and finished his own build. in the right corner of his right eye, new details began to boot across his cog-feed as his metamind twinned the mem-data passing through this juncture of the oversec with his internal systems. when the root-access functions appeared, he knew he had control. for the second time that day, he disconnected from the lobby and jacked out. the dive was done and he wasnt going to stay in low master-infested waters for long. not without an overwhelming advantage or a more detailed plan. disconnecting from the lobby for the second time that day, he surfaced back into his flesh and blinked pulsing strings of mem-data out from behind his eyes. is it done? denton asked. the others were staring at his projected phantoms still playing his vicarity footage from framejack-accelerated hours ago. do you have access? he grunted as shook off the fog. long sessions in the nether took a while to settle from. yeah. got access. more phantoms flowed out of him with a thought, and the root-functions of the oversecs systems booted into a holo-haptic interface. mem-datas all there. hadnt had a chance to dig but systems pretty congested. low masters are there. so are freelance necros. pretty popular place. at the mention of low masters most of the faces in the room turned to look at him. chambers, lacking context and sense, continued to watch avos memories, studying how he forded his way across the inner defenses in the first exorcist he hijacked. considering the emptiness that emanated from his mind, avo thought chambers was offering more practice to his facial muscles than his actual knowledge. the man wasnt a necro. it would take deep adjustments to his mind, habits, and personality to achieve such effects. or a proxy that could increase effectiveness in a pinch as well. another project worth considering in the future. low masters? draus said. the hells they doin in there? same thing he was, probably, cas said. its pretty useful to know when the glassers are coming. and from where. glassers? kae asked. exorcists. they designate and scalpel blocks compromised by the rash, cas explained. and usually, they do that using a heaven of light that partially glasses the structure as well. oh, kae said. swiping a hand over the interface, denton brought up schematics and planetary maps dotted with several vertices. as she continued narrowing her search parameters, two mem-locked signatures remained. one was ascending past orbit, marked with the string abhf-001. such was abrel grealtings designation. the other, however, avo didnt know, but dentons interest was plain. uncharacteristically, smirking to herself, she opened files connected to mem-lock titled eld-mdr-001. a scene expanded from the perspective of someone pushing their way through a banquet of some kind. from the ceiling dolloped waxen chandeliers that oozed but refused to melt while fires licked at colored frescos dotting the tall ovular windows. the visual feed froze then as the scene was redacted, but not before the vicaritys audio lingered a few seconds longer. +i, chief paladin samir naeko, hereby invoke article nine against council elder mwaba drongo. i have with me verified mem-data and a witness of the third degree. all stay your hands from steel or face the sage seriously? no one? wow. sensible party, ambassador. i a bit disappointed, not gonna lie. say, where did uthred go?+ the scene froze. the memories culminated. kae stared on as denton turned over to regard her. well, denton said, the open arrived a lot sooner than i expected. i didnt think naeko would be so aggressive. anticipate ori-thaum retaliation within a day. you want me to set off the distraction? cas asked. that caught avo and draus attention at once. its a bomb in the tiers. several bombs. he lifted his arm out from his holocoat and the air around the strings connected to his arm shivered unnaturally. something to choke up the bureaucrats. just target drongos personal detail later, denton said. we need a way for avo to get in without being distracted. theres an opportunity here. to find out what she knows about project godshaper and what else the council has planned. the things we can learn from her will be beyond value. she turned to kae thereafter. and we might just be able to offer you a final settlement for your account, agnos kusanade kae swallowed but found enough iron inside her nerves to muster a nod. the glaives eyes took on a gleam of anticipation as she looked back to avo. well. it appears my esteemed superior is now in paladin custody. do you think you can locate her exact mental position in the nether and shape the necessary arrangements for a dialogue? i think we have some inquiries to make, and that agnos kusanade here deserves to have her grievances addressed. Chapter 13-8 The Enemies of My Enemy (I) chapter 13-8 the enemies of my enemy (i) how many remember the dream? jaus dream. shit we were promised when they packed us into these big fucking megacities and told us the future was coming. i remember seeing all those vids drowning in vicarities of the first pioneers going up into the void. the ones where they push the ruptures back from the dark and reclaim reality? i remember. i remember, doing it, but i cant quite remember what was said. when i was younger, i recited jaus'' pledge for the future. the promise of something about how we could all be our own gods, that we were to be the stewards of the last garden or something. something. thats all it is now. something. just a blurry mess and i cant seem to theyre making us forget. the fated. the guilds. theyre ashamed. not afraid, ashamed. not because they couldnt live up to jaus words, but because theyre afraid we might remember what we never got. i cant even remember what the guilds want. whats at the end of all this? and the worst thing about being alive right now is this thing isnt anywhere near the end. the last official census counted 674 billion people living inside the city. even with the rash, the refugees and migrants arent stopping. things are bad out there in the sunderwilds. ive heard things the fallwalkersits all like a bad dream with the clads. the humanity just leaves you there are at least well over a trillion people on this planet. a trillion. and there were more before the godsfall. why? why else could there be so many of us other than to die? why else? this planets a death farm. thats like the real fate of being here. and i hate it. i hate that i was born. ursdin called yesterday. says moms worried about me. says mom wants me to come back to the tierscome home. how the fuck can they just live when this is happening. all they need to do is dive across the nether and the things were doing to these people while were living our little livesoh, jaus, oh fuck im so fucking sorry you know the most fucked up thing? i cant end it. i cant. because if i do it, i just feed the killing all the same. just another ghost inside a phantasmic. another echo worshipping someones god. i wish i wasnt. i really wish i wasnt. -mem-log of cala marlowe 13-8 the enemies of my enemy (i) council elder drongo was an easier target to jack into than avo expected. of course, he had backdoor access to the exorcists network, and with that came auto-seances into each of the elite necros assigned to watch her mind while she languished in dentition, sealed away in a signal-based demiplane channeled from a domain of light. he fed the details back over to the others in the dormitory. drawing information from the administrative node, avo found both drongo and greatling to be in similar straits. they were installed within detention pods with detail of personal necrojacks to look over them while they jumped from point to point across the near void. as it turned out, the unwhere was not just a cute namethe description was quite literal. the unwhere wasnt a location, but a destination in perpetuity; an eternal voyage for all the prisoners trapped between channeled beams. though specifics about the heaven behind the process remained redacted even for the exorcists, the functionality was simple. just past the upper atmosphere of new vultun were approximately sixty-three thousand satellite-golems, each of which functioned like petals of starlight collapsing inward, going from blossoming to budding as their edges straightened into the long dark beyond as an intersection of narrow beams. in a sense, these beams worked close to a hyper-accelerating pathwaysomething semblant to the lightrails of the hypertube. the only difference was that it seemed one stream of matter could be passed on into another. as such, even if someone could intercept or anticipate where something was being delivered, it was nigh impossible to disrupt the system enough to collapse the interlacing channels of the ever-moving prison. this would have been a problem if avo was trying to free elder drongo from custody, but all he wanted to do was find her and link to her meta so they could all have a little chat. when the administrative node finally updated him on her next point of arrival in the vast chain of the unwhere, he applied a few minutes of buffer so that denton could do whatever preparations she needed to deal with the elders personal protection detail when she arrived at the golem marked +satillite-burnside-1273999.+ avo jacked and lurched back into his flesh. his echoheads tingled with how long he spent diving in the nether. clenching and unclenching his claws, he studied the others gathered across the room. draus and kae remained seated but turned toward him. cas took up a spot next to the stairway leading down, and beside him, denton and chambers were staring intently at his phantoms. not far, essus remained turned with his back facing the entire affair, his mind a dull-cloud of exhaustion. got her, avo said. will be arriving soon. have her estimated point of arrival in five minutes. he jacked out briefly and eyed the glaive. assuming you have a solution for the incubi strike team nested in her seance? denton for her part seemed more eager than stressed about the prospect of facing the best of among her guild. glaives were supposed to be in-field fast-jacking combat assets. though the substance of their nether-based education remained far superior compared to the curriculum offered by other guilds, avo never considered them actual necrojacks. not truly. having a ghostjack didnt make you a real necro any more than having a gauss cannon made you a street squire. the lines of distinction were made by the mind-divers and those who only swam the surface. across from him, avo watched the woman cast another static thought-clasped arrow toward destinations unseen. for all her cognitive-deviant impenetrability, he hadnt seen her descend beyond the shallows of the nether. to say he was curious as to what techniques or phantasmics she had prepared for this infiltration couldnt fully convey the depths of his anticipation. more and more did ignorance offend him. in what he didnt know of his own art, of his heavens, of how he could face and unmake his foes. +like what? shes an elder.+ +well. i mightve taken a peek at some of the mem-data. she did something to an agnos. something pretty bad.+ +shit.+ +yeah.+ +you think the incubi are+ +lets just pretend they''re listening and say no more, yeah?+ +yeah.+ back in the real, avo could help but grin. if only they knew what actually lurked in the deep next to them. the arrival of the elder was like a lightrail coming to a halt. exorcist necros loaded whatever ghosts and pre-packaged mem-data needed to monitor drongos detention pod. a countdown commenced: five seconds until arrival. five seconds until the stop. avo prepared himself for one final jump. denton. three seconds. cas? denton said. are the sounds linked? the man laughed, and faintly, avo heard a rhythmic thrumming begin to build over an undercurrent of twitching servos. you gotta ask, val? three actions occurred at once in the following instant: avo cast himself into drongos pod using the sequences within the mem-data; denton connected to him and released a torrent of ghosts through him as a conduit; something pulsed at the epicenter of drongos accretion. avo didnt have time to stop and consider what just happened as he felt himself slip past the drongos quicksand wards while the memories denton ejected out from inside him shot out, highlighting an interconnected sequence to travel down the elders mind. as he sped down the pathways of her mind, he thought he noticed flickers of accretion building within her auto-seance before they all dissolved at the same time. the bombs went off. thats a strike cell gone. cas laughed. it took avo a moment to parse what he just heard. denton and cas had been planning something behind the rest of them. something that ensured the death of drongos personal protection detail. he didnt know whether to growl his displeasure at the details hidden from him or laugh with bemusement at their success. the glaive still wasnt a true necro in his eyes, but her social and political engineering was no longer in doubt. what the hells just happened, chambers muttered. some fuckery, draus deadpanned. as avo traveled across the designated sequences, he cast his whisper out along alternative paths and found them beset with mem-cons and other phantasmal traps. what he had was a straight navigation to drongos innermost memories without needing to scry his way forwardhe wasnt even sure how denton managed to plan this one all he knew was that he didnt need to deal with the maze simulated by the elders metathe depths of her mind were directly linked to his meta now. +were in,+ avo said. +yeah,+ denton said. +good job.+ she disconnected from his mind momentarily andto his surprisehe heard her laugh. i wont liei didnt think we were going to get to do this but sometimes the opportunity just presents itself. he heard a shuffle of clothing. agnos kusanade. you can jack in too now. i okay, kae breathed. okay. she didnt follow immediately. instead, it was denton that jack back in first, and using avo as a conduit, she connected herself directly to drongo. +hello, elder,+ denton said. +wed like to talk with you about godshaper. and what you did to agnos kae kusanade and paladin dawton morrow. tell me, do you still have his soul?+ but when the reflexive notes of startlement broke within the elder, what followed were only the bitter waters of disdain. +oh, good. more of these questions. havent you bothered me enough? i told you, by the articles+ +were not paladins,+ denton interrupted. avo could feel the sneer building on drongos face. +no. of course youre not. youre too good for that. and you killed my incubi. all at once. all without the exorcists noticing.+ her features softened. a chuckle of genuine amusement filled her mind. +ah. the answer is obvious. welcome to my mind then, priest of noloth. come to strike another bargain with me?+ Chapter 13-9 The Enemies of My Enemy (II) chapter 13-9 the enemies of my enemy (ii) +why is my mind still whole? i know what you are, priest. mercy is not in your nature. take your retribution. strip me of my personhood. i do not fear you. i do not fear this. the great work will continue+ +hold on, im not here for that. ive seen your measure too, you know. youre not a very good person, mwaba, but you are loyalguild before life and all that. a real good massist. well, i got something to tell you that might offend those sensibilities. but ill trade that warning for something.+ +...youre mad. you you kill my personal guard, you breach the walls of my mind, and now you you wish to strike a bargain?+ +yes. now, hold on: you havent heard my pitchthe saintists have something that can cripple you godclads entirely. your heavens. you will be very concerned when you hear this+ +do not mock me. you come into my+ [transferring mem-data] +oh oh, gods.+ +i know. i dont want this. and neither do you.+ +you could have created this as a rusea deception. no agnos would accept such a commissionit is against the articles!+ +then follow the leads i gave you. send cells to check. i dont want to be right about this, but i am. so face it. and yeah, i am manipulating you, but im not lying. sorry, mwaba. not exactly my dream either. + +do not use his words, slave+n?00vl--?1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter. +apologies to jaus. now, i have more concise details on the whos, whats, wheres, and whens, but i need something from you first.+ +what what do you want in return? if this is trueif you have more to oh, gods.+ +i understand that ori-thaum managed to sequence a mostly stable ego construct. i want to know how. in detail. a little in-house knowledge for salvation. im giving you a very good arrangement+ -elder drongo and walton (the famine of defiance) 13-9 the enemies of my enemy (ii) an uncharacteristic gasp of confusion came from denton and avo felt his paranoia spike. +another?+ avo asked her. from the spillover thoughts she leaked, he already knew he wasnt going to be getting an answer, but he had to ask. simultaneously, his whisper was accelerating across the crevices of drongos memories. he remembered what happened at ox-three with the low masters. he remembered how they almost entrapped him in that neighborhood of half-nulled minds. he remembered the ethereal weight of the hungers and the countless multitudes of his fathers forks. cords of tension drew taut in his mind as he primed secondhand fatality for delivery, feeling the ghosts writhing upon the tip of his ghostjack as he swept his perception across all the surrounding sequences. fast did self-perception shift in the fathoms of the nether. hours prior, he was an apex predator hidden within the flesh of memories unnoticed, spreading his touch like a plague. now, he cast his ghosts out with tentative apprehension, feeling for the fangs of hunters unseen, trying to guess if he lingered between the jaws of a trap. +i dont know anything about this,+ denton said frankly. directing her own ghostjack she used him as a conduit. he scanned her trauma-pattern as the chain emerged from the obfuscating veil that was her thoughtstuff and slid through him like a conduit. he found it an instrument of feeble harm compared to the ego-breaking ruination which he bore. avo took them within the panoply of over a thousand exquisite phantasmics forming a serried crown-shaped city at the core of drongos mind. he watched as her sequences slid over one another, his ghosts casting light on their mem-data and artifacts while weaving shapes from scenes in motion and comparing wavelengths of emotion. denton tried to assist him but she wasted effort against blockades of intense emotion and high-capacity memories while he compiled and cleared recollections by the measure of hours and days. her lacking efficiencyportrayed the depths of her skill; denton was a middling necro at best, but her worth was not constrained by her limitations of necrotheurgy. the impenetrability of her mind itself painted her presence with merit. if they were to be beset upon, such an attribute would preserve her security far longer than her lacking abilities. he considered fleeing then, but decided against it. he had escaped from the low masters before, and of the present, they all needed details and answers only the elder could provide, and the opportunity provided by her vulnerability would not come easy again. with the only consequence being mind-deaths that were curable through resurrection, they held to the course. drongo spoke again, her voice lit with heavy derision and scorn, cast from a clear throat strengthened by years of oration though high in note and soft in tone. +why so quiet now, priest of defiance? you had the bigger tongue when last you came. does something trouble you? have you been consumed by shame or failureunable to use my gift to create the perfect mind you so desired?+ again, ignorance rang like a hollow bell from the core of dentons mind, but he found his orientation cured, if but slightly. defiance. elder drongo thought he was walton. such an outcome felt as if a rhyme, for though it was the second time another had assumed him to be his father, it again served his ends to maintain the facade. as if he were to accentuate her words, he felt groping tendrils sprout from the borders of his sanguinity before he curtailed their advance. no, avo said. we experiment later. a faint pulse of acquiescent disappointment followed. so be it. the instances of his existence stretched as haemokinetic cords fused into place between his ceramite-plated flesh and the pool on the four-level from ebbing particulates dancing through the air. around him, the winds murmured with a laughing neigh. it is not so freeing to be rooted in anothers will sister. you have my empathy. the woundshaper coiled inward like a compressed spring. and you will see the skies clenched in iron and blood if you persist in this mockery, mule. what pattern did you sup from to find such steel in your words? do you wish to imitate the domains of a proper god now? i only want to watch a fallen goddess spit hollow appreciations to the tyrant that encompasses her, deluding herself into thinking they are of a union, of a league. the heaven of blood responded by constructing a blood-made puppet of the galeslither and a strangely underdressed man and proceeded to mime an act that would undoubtedly trigger an outbreak in the real. a low chuff of disdain entered the galeslithers response. now i see the caliber of your sacrificessavages and brutes all. the argument escalated from there. avo gritted his focus and turned his attention to scanning through drongos intelligence. upon sinking a second stream of ghosts into his new locus, he found her phantasmal carriers surprisingly bare of defense and offering little but pure and unsequenced memories. he made a few major adjustments to the structures of her ghosts, and when no hidden artifacts or data was exposed, he wondered if she truly surrendered to him because of acceptant futility or if there was a greater game at play here. apprehensively, he dissolved his cord, and time resumed its pace. with a thought, he cast the details of her scry over to dentonand kept the information limited this time. +no protections,+ he responded. +no encryptions either. very compliant.+ a spike whipped the yolk of her thoughts high. +speak what you have to say and lets be finished. push harder, and ill see myself nulled. youre vermin, priest. everything you are, everything you do, everything you have made, are making, and will make is an insult to all that was sacrificed and the deeds of jaus. you piercing my mind like this? shameful. but i will not be toyed with.+ there was no lie in her words. her threat of suicide wasnt idle speech but a promise. the beast cackled beneath his skin, whispering at him from the basest parts of his mind, wondering how many indignities it would take for her to solve her own equation, and if such harm could be carried over to abrel to further develop the cocktail of torment that was her mind. avo shook himself free. for the first time in what felt like a lasting eternity, he triggered a long-dormant phantasmic nested in his own mind and reinforced it with a deposit of ghosts. the morality-injector plunged down into the ethereal fabric of his manifested cognition and both his metamind and the physical organ it was anchored to shuddered. shame, disgust, and self-revilement blasted down against the screaming beast as each of its impulses rose and shattered against an equal but opposite counter emotion. he thought the abandonment of the phantasmic after his nulling of waltons node in the deep bazaar an act of self-emancipation. if so, then this was an expression of enforced discipline. the tinted instincts pulling him toward brutality and violence softened. with amplified clarity, he spoke to drongo anew. +im sorry,+ he began. +i didnt meant to insult you. it was just astonishment. can you do me a favor?+ the elder slowed in thought as she considered his words. +speak.+ +i want to hear from you our arrangements. what i had you dowhat you did to kae kusanade and what you know about project godshaper. i want to you tell me why you felt compelled to do all these things, and i want you to say them in your own words. i need data filtered through your cognition to compare with the memories you gave.+ her face tightened into an uncertain sneer. +is this a trick?+ +yes,+ he admitted, speaking while cycling old memories of walton through his mind to refresh himself on how the man acted. lessons on necrotheurgy mixed with lessons about the city and life in general. he had no idea to know how much of this was real, but to uncover the acts of his father and why the ori were so willing to attack kae, the memories served as guidance and fuel both. +start with godshaper,+ he prompted. +i want to know why it mattered so much to you. ignore what i told you before. just give the details over to me from your understanding.+ a long pause followed. drongo swallowed. +you breached my mind nearly a year ago. you breached my mind and showed me such terrible things.+ +tell me what i showed you.+ +godshaper,+ she answered. +you showed me how highflame was going to use the rash to eradicate us by altering its lore. and you showed me the one who was going to help them make it all possiblekae kusanade.+ and just as she finished that word, kae cleared her metamind and hissed out a seething thought. +you lying, murderous fucking sow! i plannedi was trying to heal the heaven!+ Chapter 13-10 The Shattered Dream (I) chapter 13-10 the shattered dream (i) and with this heaven, i divorce us from the atrocities of the past and wed us to the future we are to become. i hope that through the promise of this ark we all form new bridges, new communities, and from our joining bear the seeds of unity to grow beyond the soil of our discord. dont give up on hate. not even i can overlook the breeding torment of our past. but where we old and scarred will falter, our children and the ones after will be unburdenedto be and love and live unfettered. to experience a world of bliss and prosperity we should have always given them. the future is uncertain. veiled with vaster challenges than i could ever fathom, but we do not stand alone. our long-lost ancestors have found us at the end of a star-spanning odyssey across eons of harsh suffering. to my family in the void, i bid you a formal welcome to idheim. see us unblemished, shaped by past horrors, slaves to cruel gods, butchers of shared ancestry, and beyond. see us more than what we could be, but who our children could be. the age of the pantheons has branded us indelibly in sinew and spirit, but from these ashes rise humanitygods no more! let us take from their powers but shed no more blood, entrapped in their prisons of eternal continuum. let us use their designs to let life flourish. and let us gaze upon this heaven again, and see it as our dowry to existence. for too long we have hurt each other. for too long we have bred ourselves like cattle and farmed our foes for sacrifices. from today forth i give choice to all in idheimthe choice to love unfettered as you will and to sire based only on the conception of virtue and reciprocity. this is my final desiremy ultimate dreamthat we can rise and mend fractures of existence as people and not cold gods! humans, with human hearts and human minds directing ascendant administrators devoid of any addiction to worship save that which is offered in necessity and wisdom. to be clad in matrimony beneath these towers of rising virtue, building with the canons of change! -jaus avandaer, the arks arisen 13-10 the shattered dream (i) avo caught the ghosts carrying kaes words before they could flow out from his mind and spill into drongo. +i was trying to fix its canons! to stabilize it+ the rage flowed from the agnos as drongo spoke in the backdrop, twin lines of dialogue clashing as avo directed his focus to deal with kae first. +i know. believe you+ +its not about fucking believing me, its about you!+ kae seethed. +you and her and your cultist false-fucking-god worshipping stupid half-strand of a father! this was for you! all for you! my minddawtons lifethe rash! my team and all the people who were with us! all ruined to make a fucking ghoul!+ the beast screeched a request for him to shred her mind clean from his for this disrespect. he thought of merely breaking her focus using that which he gained from abrel. drongos following words removed the necessity of such an action.+...for the sake of winning the war.+ kaes perception slipped from him, slashing past to peer at the elder. +i didnt believe you about the agnos. kae kusanade. a daughter of clan yinga; an orphan failed by her clan and guild both, swearing her life to the agnosi; a much-praised pupil and a bright mind even among her peers.+ the elder''s voice tightened with discomfort. +it wasnt until you showed me what she was making with those imitators that i turned from my heart.+ discomfort morphed into hatredthe sheer scorn of the emotion burning like a kindred flame to kaes. +i despise you, priest. i despise you for reminding me of this transgressionmy crime against the articles, against a daughter of the ori.+ a beat passed. the hatred turned inward. +and i hate you for being truthful.+ the revelation of drongos unwitting deed did not move kae from her anger, but the fires of her rage were caged by returning control, and silence took her as her ghosts shook like a vessel rocking on waves of tumult. drongo continued. +the imitators i could have never imagined such a thing with my own mind. it is beyond us. a sign of the voiders higher knowledge.+ the praise was accompanied by a sneer. +and our weakness. with something that could change the heavens to suit the needs of our greatest enemy such a thing could not be allowed.+ +there were non-affiliated observers,+ kae said, as dentons ghosts drifted close. +the the paladins. the exorcists. voidwatch too. they would have never allowed my creation to be weaponized. it was only something meant to mend+ +you didnt trust voidwatch?+ avo cast a thought out to drongo. +didnt think they could ensure commission parameters per the agreements between the guilds?+ the womans face settled into a cold glare. +how could they, seeing that they engineered these imitators specifically for our pacification?+ her words captured the totality of his attention, and within him, a burgeoning curiosity began to burn. +poor helpless voiders,+ drongo spoke in a mocking whine. +to be so powerful yet hapless against the existence-shifting touch of the heavensto live at the mercy we, their downtrodden, ignorant, savage cousins bestow.+ she drew near, the ghosts conveying the closeness of her scorn. +but ive seen the lives they live, their days filled with succulence and wanton salaciousness while we, the beacon of their salvation, wither and bleed and offer death upon death to ensure their protections. and yet, here they are, kingmakers unable to embody their role, spectators to a war trapped in a deadlock.+ a soft laugh rife with dismay followed. +or so we believed. do you know what i uncovered with my incubi after you revealed the existence of the imitators to me? after you caught sight of their existence through those fallwalkers? how much effort it took? i created a specialized cell of experts capable of diving beneath the mind of one of their machine consciousnesses without revealing themselves. oh, it took aid from omnitech, and the favors i had to trade with those capricious cultists were almost too severe.+ denton let out a verbalization of surprise that was almost a curse. +aegis is not going to like this. i didnt think this was real+ he felt something pulse in the back of her mind. something was happening within the confines of her meta. his ghosts tight-linked to the glaive alone. +you didnt know.+ +no,+ denton said. +keep guiding her. this conversation has already paid significant dividends, but she knows more.+ unaware of the second conversation happening alongside her own, the elder spoke on, her ghost-channeled perception boring down upon avo like a glaring spotlight. +voidwatch themselves didnt create these imitators? no. they engineered it. did you know this, priest? it is a fascinating thingan organism even that baffles their sciences almost as much as it does our thaumaturgy. even their god-machines could be mirrored. and to find it drifting so close to usand taken by a cadre of poor organized fallwalkers makes me curious if this was by design.+ +what?+ denton said. +iyes,+ avo said, his use of chambers more instinct than rationale. the moment was so absurd, so unexpect that he found his thoughts slippery, unwilling to linger long enough for him to decide on a proper course of action. +how did you know?+ she suddenly felt very pleased with herself. part of avo wanted to reveal the truth, if only to drive her deeper into the throes of bitterness. he kept up the new charade despite himself as she oozed smugness. +we both have our means. you really should have kept yourself out of the limelight. as much as your master disgusts me, he was wise enough to keep himself from attention.+ +i+ avo trailed off. he turned to denton for advice, but found himself offered the mental equivalent of a shrug. +whats even happening,+ kae muttered, her turmoil temporarily interrupted. +so,+ drongo said. +you must also be the one that stole project dichotomy before highflame could finally auction the frame off to another one of their butchers?+ a line of text ran through his cog-feed as a ghostlink request from chambers filled his mind. with an acknowledgment, the ex-enforcer tumbled in, mind reeling like a whirlwind of chaos. +why the fuck does she think im involved with this? what did you do, avo?+ +i dont know.+ and that was the honest truth of it. there were certainly witnesses that placed chambers and essus on the scene, but if that was avo paused. avo thought back to an earlier point, back when they were trying to kill mirrorhead. he had used chambers mind as a access point. the incubi knew that as a certain truth. could they have assumed chambers was a disciple of sorts to walton? or the low masters as a whole? the insanity of such a prospect made him chuckle. then laugh. it was the type of amusement one got from witnessing a colossally wrong deduction assumed to be truthan accidental conspiracy theory used in place of a stranger fiction. +alright,+ avo said, too bemused not to continue playing along. he could resequence drongos mind later if this all went south. with chambers present, perhaps they could continue extracting the details they needed after all. +you got me.+ +theres no shame in this,+ drongo said. +though i will see you dead for the lives of my guards.+ he grunted. +doubt you have the traumas needed to settle me.+ chambers blanched. +stop! what are you doing+ +so,+ drongo said. +using me to glean all these details your master never told them to you?+ +no,+ avo said. +he was always a+ he knew what he had to say. he had the words, he just needed to speak them. +...a half-strand.+ +ah,+ drongo said. +already, i like you more. tell me: do you know where he took the agnos? her life is valuable. we just want her back to fix our mistake. if you arrange for her return, i can even see to your induction into our ranks. you have the skillsthink of what you can achieve if you could jack with every need metall the phantasmics you want. and ghosts. no lag. a fate-skein as well.+ +wait, hold on,+ chambers said, the sensation of him licking his lips bleeding over. +thats a pretty good deal. i think we should take this. i can be your inside man for ori-thaum.+ +already have denton,+ avo said. +shes not a man?+ +i suppose that is true,+ denton deadpanned. +as long as i dont get any new mods.+ +nonetheless,+ drongo said, +you must be desperate to attempt such a play. releasing the informationhaving the paladin arrest me just to arrange this talk well played, but we both know i do not fear the end. and though you might have the agnos, she will be no use to either of us if she doesnt finish her work.+ +and whats that?+ +restoring the heaven of love and turning it against our foes.+ her voice fell low. +and turning the arks against our enemies.+ Chapter 13-11 The Shattered Dream (II) chapter 13-11 the shattered dream (ii) once upon a time, there were nine pantheons. nine pantheons for the nine great and terrible tribes who carried with them twelve different histories. in each history what happens before? hm? before the once upon a time? what happens before then? ...thats a good question. might be something better answered by your mother, but i believe the clearest answer is that its of dubious canonicity. dubious? yes. its a terrifying thing. why? because the story which we tell of time past might just change who we are nowah, its too complicated no. i understand. if the past is different, the present has to be different too dad, why are you staring at me? nothing. you got the wit in you, veylis. you know that? yes. [loud guffaw] and the confidence too. mother says fear and cowardice are for those i feed to my glaive. do not remind me of them, my girl. ... story! okay, alright. so, as years passed and the gods warred to rule humanity, each of them began building a throne for their scripture. many of the things they wrote about never were, but if they won if their thrones grew taller and they claimed the others are the thrones the arks? ...yes. how did you mother took me to one. she showed me the worlds inside them and told me they were all lies, but their lies were like seeds and they could grow into something real if if the soils of time were settled. ...im going to need to talk with her about taking you to these places without telling me. she calls it character building. more character-ending sometimes, im afraid. mother will protect me. yeah. yeah, she will. daddy, why are the stories different? the voiders say we were all from the same place once. why are the stories different? ...because of want. because the gods want to be moreto take up more of reality. because everyone wants to win and win, and never lose and always be happy. because within every person is a dream for paradise to silence the fears inside and light joys with higher form of fire. one that never stops burning. were afraid. but we also dream of being more. thats what i think makes us human. we are the marriage between base impulse and heightened conception. from the former we flee, and into the arms of the latter we run. so why do you make it sound so bad. because there cant be more than one paradise, my heart. not even between you and mom? no. not between me and you. i love your mother more than my words can express, but we are very different people in our hearts. and you will be too. all too often, a paradise for one is a hell for someone else. but wouldnt you be happy forever? only reactively. the heart is a fickle thing, veylis. there are things in the world that can change how you feel. like the ghosts in mothers sword? yes. they can make you happy. change your mind. hurt you. but with what we know, i dont think its right. right? existence is about more than us. we have a responsibility to other people. just like i have a responsibility to you and your mother. but then what about the gods? why dont they care? because they are more like things than people. they care for nothing but eating and growing. and eventually, they will be nothing because everything will be them, and all of reality will bleed into itself and they will lose the ability to separate themselves from the pattern. +or a whole new one,+ denton suggested. +in two years'' time, this will all be over,+ drongo said. +the ladder will return across the span of time as the unifying centerpiece of our worldjaus final masterpiece and the prize of ultimate salvation.+ +then why fight?+ avo asked. the beast coiled in muted outrage at such a question. +why. if everything can be saved+ +you arent listening. nothing will be savedeverything will be rewritten.+ drongo lapsed into silence. +that is why the war should be won beforehand. not after. if the saintists are defeated before the day of re-emergence, then can focus on the others, and then i can focus on reaching the final floor.+ +the others.+ avo understood. +youre going to turn on your allies as well. does ori-thaum+ +we all know,+ drongo said. +there could be no other way about this. there cannot be two paradises. there cant even be a shared interpretation between two people.+ her ego shuddered. +and if one is torn of will and want i have seen what the tower does to the uncertain, the wavering. it tries to fulfill all desires, no matter how contradictory.+ the shudder grew into a quiver. +oh, but poor jaus. he was too good a man to suffer such a wretched fate. i will see him saved and spared of eternal torment if we win.+ +if you win,+ avo asked. the elder laughed. +i cannot win. its impossible. i am an council elder of ori-thaum. i have foresworn my right to bear the privilege of a liminal frame, and only a fully intact nous within a frame rise the ladders of resurrection.+ drongos ghosts closed in, all of them undulating at him like beckoning fingers. +one. if two ascend at the same timewell, imagine two absolute rulers of reality trying to dictator the rules at the end. who is to be canon? what history is to be true? and what happens if there is a conflict between their thoughts?+ +one,+ avo said. +or all aligned to one. project godshaper+ +yes,+ drongo agreed. +we couldnt let highflame have its power. there is too much at stake for the war to carry over as things are. or if a multiplicity of conditions are true. we are trying to create a new paradise, not paradoxical ruination.+ +thats why youre still hunting for agnos kusanade,+ he said, guiding her. +you need her to stop the imitators if they spread.+ +that is the lowest of our hopes. yes. i+ a squeal of alarm sounded in the back of avos mind. his cog-feed flashed multiple warnings as someone triggered his high thoughtwave tripwire back in oversec-c1. additional indicators followed. someone jacked into one of his subverted exorcists. another was accessing the auto-seance he built into the administrative node. and then, across the unwhere network, he felt a presence that wasnt quite his own or an exorcist brush the inner confines of abrel greatlings mind. unknown necros were moving through the system from multiple angles. the only uncertainty that remained was if they were incubi responding to save their elder, hired jackers who didnt know they were about to get nulled, or the low masters steering toward inevitable confrontation. the conversation with elder drongo wasnt done, but the threats were a priority. there were hunters in the deep, and soon he was to be among them. +oversec c1 is compromised,+ avo said, casting the thoughts and mem-data over to his allies. +time for you all to jack out.+ +what?+ kae said, her voice spiking in outrage. +no. were not done. shes+ +going to tear her memories clean,+ avo said. +also going to put an auto-seance in her mind. youll get your pain. easy promise.+ dentons mind offered a sour response to his offer. +are you staying?+ he turned off his morality injector. the beast clawed its way out from his throbbing skull as bloodlust filled him across skin, sinew, and soul. +going to greet the other intruders. want to see what theyre like. learn what they want.+ she only offered mute acknowledgment to the sadistic hunger edging his thoughts. +alright. tell me if you leak any memories into the nether.+ avo didnt bother responding. her lack of confidence in him was insulting at this point. +kae. if i get nulled you kill me.+ the agnos mind reeled back, stunned by his request. he stuck a claw into her wound. +my father sold you like you were fateless to suffer. you are discussed like a tool. traded. only valued for what you know. and all this is partially because of me. should get that gun you used earlier. should get draus to teach you how in case i go mind-dead.+ at his prodding, her disposition hardened with returning hatred blended with uncertainty. +i liked the feeling of your spear more, honestly.+ that surprised him. +...use it then.+ +i+ her chest was a knot of frustration, confusion, and conflict. she was mad. she was confused. she was unfulfilled. she was thinking. +i want to talk to you. when you come out.+ he agreed. +we all need to talk when im done.+ denton and kae jacked out. their ghosts vanished before his perception. beside him, chambers lingered. +why are you still here,+ avo asked. +well,+ chambers said, awkwardly. +maybe you could use backup. a partner! we could be like team here. avo and cha+ avo cast a pack of jumbled mem-data into the man. chambers voice twisted into a note of raw surprise. +what the f+ avo tore the mem-data back out. +too late. didnt sequence fast enough. not good. not a necro. useless. jack out.+ a trickle of genuine hurt slipped free from chambers. +jaus, consang, you didnt need to say all that. just tell me to fuck off or something.+ his ghosts blinked and faded as well. that just left two. two within drongos mindscape. avo turned his attention back to her as he prepared to access his ghostjack. he was going to leave a backdoor in her as well, but before that, he wanted to indulge himself. all the talking he suffered was worth a reward +you were wrong,+ avo said, spearing his ghosts directly into drongos being. her confusion spiked high like a mountain erupting free from soil. +oh. and what was i wrong about?+ he peeled away all the modifications and disguises behind his ghost before manifesting his physical shell as an avatar. as he came into form before a congress of leering ghosts, he also cast another packet of mem-data directly into her mind, stinging her with the truth of his frameof all that he knew. drongos mind rattled and fissured. cracks ran up through her serried palace. the sneer behind her word faded as she gasped, dread and panic both rising within her. +i how could this y-you+ +yes,+ avo said, enjoying the moment before he tore these memories out from her. +not chambers. not walton. me.+ +you you cant be realyour kind cant oh, gods it''s inside you+ her being went frigid and stiff as he sank his ghosts into her memories. +no, wait! i propose a new bargain! i have things you want+ +and i will take them from you,+ avo said. +after you forget. i will take from you. knowledge. phantasmics. suffering. i will take everything from you. and i will burn away all the parts i dont desire.+ +no, wait! wait+ he fired his reflexes and tore his ghost back. her memories snapped loose, thoughtstuff spilling free as her mind rose into a maddened scream of absolute dread. within a few seconds, she would remember nothing of this conversation; but within those few seconds, all she would know was him. Chapter 13-12 The Silent War (I) chapter 13-12 the silent war (i) +attention+ priority 0 alert inbound: incubus, you are to suspend all ongoing operations immediately. a situation of paramount priority has transpired. as of thirty seconds ago, council elder mwaba drongos shadow-detail was neutralized. the cause behind their deaths is under investigation, but details remain unclear. presently, the elders mind is undefended. you have been chosen as talon-1 for your skill in deep-nether operations and distinguishing valor along with other members of high-priority flash-response strike cells. with the urgent situation at hand, we ask you to devote your efforts once more and ensure the elders security. your next proxy is being dead-dropped now. the full briefing will be included within its sequencesall phantasmics are green for this operation. it is preferable that you do not alert the paladins or exorcists to your presence, but the elder is priority 0. repeat: elder mwaba drongo is priority 0. we cannot stress the severity of risk presented by a compromise on such a level. the elders mental sanctity must be preserved, but should you find confirmation of memory-based tampering of any nature, then engage based on the guidelines of code winter. burn everything. let nothing of the leakage escape. redact all details of your presence thereafter. your proxy has arrived. we place our confidence in you in leading your fellow incubi. form your cells. ascertain the situation. respond accordingly. you have in-dive command. unity is destiny. -incubi priority alert 13-12 the silent war (i) drongos ego-rending pain was succulence. when paired with the imbibement of her deepest memories and the sequences to her phylactery it was made ever-sweeter. her pain was a delight to feel, while her secrets offered new fathoms to delve into. and then came the matter of her phantasmics though most of what she had to offer was meant to support administrative work and the traumas chambered in her ghostjack were a disappointment, there was a singular construct that clutched the totality of avos attention. its design was that of a smashed mirror frame, but through the opening once occupied by a pane of glass was a murky pathway into what appeared to be a reflected palace. he had found it hidden between two larger-capacity phantasmics, and it took him a moment to understand what he had discovered. phylacteries were strange things. avo had interacted with them beforeor at least the memories that walton granted him recalled such affairs. regardless, their functionality went beyond the merely cognitive and into thaumaturgic. though there were sequences involved in its creation, the phantasmal end was merely an anchor to another vessel. if drongo were to be murdered, the phantasmic would activate in an instant and inject her being over through to the other side. it was due to that very reason avo didnt manipulate the construct overmuch. it wouldnt do to have her be shunted over along with him. there had been a few cases of necros being caught within the minds of regulars as they shunted out from their present bodies. what followed could be described as two minds being put through a metaphysical blendertheir cognitive selves mangled into each other, leaving their essence spilling out adrift where they were. such was also a common incubi tactic to ensure the final deaths of each regular they killed during the war. still, it was a useful structure, and he would find the time to siphon the fullness of its nature. with his frame, he wouldnt be able to use it himself, but that didnt mean there werent other uses it could be applied to. hence, he buried his own ghosts around its base sequences, hiding them deep in the soil of drongos subconscious functions to form his auto-seance when the time came. perhaps the incubi would be able to uncover his machinations if they were through enough, but in such a case, he would simply choke off the pathway of her escape to ensure her final demise. skill was a constant endeavor if one wished to be a necro, but preparation was an absolute necessity. cast a master into an unfamiliar mind without time nor reference and watch them fall to an opponent that would typically be regarded as far lesser. with his final adjustments made, he stopped invoking his haemokinesis and the dilation of time settled back to normalcy. shifting back out to the borders of her thoughtstuff, he studied the elders mindscape as her consciousness inched back from the torpor and incoherence he infused within her. she would remember the beginning of their conversation. she would suspect walton of having breached the walls of her mind again. sowing such a seed of deception would grant a logical track for her ire to progress while keeping him an unknown. the amusing matter of chambers being an acolyte was unsalvagable. ori-thaum had clearly been misled by misattributions and ostensible details without fully grasping what was moving behind the scenes. it would serve him better anywaythe more eyes he could shift over to chambers in engagements, the less would be on him. that kept his window of attack wide and the threats he needed to manage low. this also meant that he probably needed to get chambers a second cycler at some point. if the man was going to be bait, his reusability might as well be ensured. thoughtstuff rife with murky confusion brushed against avo like surf crashing upon a beach. the veil of psychosis lifted from drongo slowly, and she arose from her pseudo-slumber with feelings of hatred already primed. her disgust with his father was pure and immediate, and when her mind called out for him with insults and taunts demanding that he show himself, avo knew his task here to be done. now, it was time for a shift in mindset. things were about the get dynamic, and the beast chuffed inside him as his predatory urges filled his being. there were unknown necros infesting oversec c1. he wasnt sure who they were, but freeing drongo from his direct presence would soon let him confirm if the incubi were involved. without his suppression, it likely wouldnt take long before a new cell shifted over into her thoughts to secure her sequences. if such a situation came to be, he thought it best that he make himself sparse. no sense in undoing all his circumspect preparations for a bout of amusement. besides, he had another mind to secureother theaters of thought to fight and engage across oversec c1. so far, the lobby of oversec c1 remained quiet, and the exorcists and paladins rode the circuitry of memories ignorant to infiltrators roaming between the details and beneath the surging currents of thougthstuff. this was to be a silent war. an engagement of utmost secrecy for the ones that groped through the shadows of recollection seeking to fulfill objectives unknown and bound for destinations unseen. such ignorance offended avo, and so he would seek his initial remedy by returning to the compromised mind of abrel greatling. if nothing else, there would be nothing connecting a potential engagement in her shattered palace to the missing pieces within drongos memories. someone had accessed their sequence from another. the mem-data was being alteredsmall changes and specific artifactsadditions. someone was spoofing beneath existing structures within the scenes, someone was an ocean of trauma struck, burrowing through her wards in a coruscating barrage. a spike of pain flashed through her mind and suddenly, her thoughts grew slippery. in the periphery of her fading awareness, she sensed shard-2 cast out her own traumas before she herself was struck dozen times in return. thoughtstuff and severed memories spurted free from her like intestines tumbling out of an opened stomach, but against all odds, shard-2 managed to jack out. shard-1 laughed. she was wrong. shard-2 really was something. her damage was severe, though. she hoped her partner would make it. she hoped something reached into her mind, invasive ghosts licking down the rents of her damaged cognition. she was supposed to do something if her mind was compromised. she was supposed to she was supposed she could remember. it was hard to think. getting harder to the intruder spoke then, his voice a deep sibilant whisper tinged with hunger and brutality. +good necro. found it. going to have to move the phantasmic now.+ +ii+ she tried to respond. +command cant hear you. i removed the connection. dont think your companion will survive either. tasted some of her damage. inner memories. pieces of her ego are missing.+ an unwilling sadness filled shard-1. she didnt know shard-2 before this day. she didnt even like her. but in these last moments, she wanted the other incubus to live, for someone to make it out. +yes,+ the intruder spoke. +good hurt. still human. too human.+ +whawhat+ +not going to kill you,+ he said. she could feel a burning excitement build inside of him. +why why?+ +have another use for you. another means of damage.+ she felt his ghosts twist the fabric of her memories then. in the real, her body twitched and spasmed. the world was cold on one end but hot on the other. something was like a frozen flame in her skull, and it was familiar to her somehow? she couldnt rememberher thoughts werent even hers anymore. +another one of yours will come soon. they will extract you. need you to make this delivery for me. want to see how they react.+ he released a slow chuffing laugh. +want to see if they start thinking highflame has your weapon.+ more of her mental interior was remolded. she let out a sigh and stopped trying to think. she just needed to do what he wanted. that was good. she wanted to do what he wanted. this was her choice. *** it would not be the incubus choice to set off the conflagration when she arrived back with her cell, but his instead. he had to admittheir awareness impressed and intimidated him. to find his auto-seance from such minutiae meant he needed to take more extreme means to hide his intrusions. if he didnt have a secondary entry point via geunne the exorcist, it would have been an ugly encroach. the attention pylons, meanwhile, were less than a joke with their limited detection capabilities. he didnt even bother downloading any of their sequences. across his auto-seance, drongos mind still seemed silent of any other cognitions but her own. how odd they were proceeding with more caution accessing their own elder than dealing a highflame godclad. with shard-1 subverted, he looked through the memories stored on her proxy and found himself more than a little annoyed. proxies were like wearing another mind with specific built-in blinders. he wasnt going to find out where she lived or other private accounts, but she would serve as a poisoned piece of bait all the same. a strike cell would come for her soon, and when they extracted her from abrels mind, he fully intended to set off the conflagration he had connected. if nothing else, this would spike paranoia within ori-thaum. they were the only ones with such a weapon. but for it to be used against them and after some of their incubi accessed a golds mind no less. well, that would create the most interesting theories. avo was tired of other people creating problems for him. he wanted to start doing things the other way. after remodifying the sequences and artifacts he was using in abrels mind, waited a moment to ensure the placidity of her broken palace. +thanks for being useful,+ avo whispered. abrel moaned something animalistic. jumping down into oversec c1 thereafter, he found himself dancing from mind to mind, seeking disturbances in the undertow as he made his way closer and closer to where he sensed the low masters. he approached methodically and carefully, using his whisper while hiding between memories. and just as well. as he slipped through a logistical phantasmic, he found the first signs of another engagement in the form of six broken incubi lingering near the high-capacity thoughtwave trap he left behind earlier while passing through. with how they drifted through the nether, mostly hollow of memories and thoughtstuff, avo studied the nulled beings as their dissolution continued. and with how neat and thorough their eradication was, there existed only one set of suspects exceeding hisand the incubisskill set. the low masters were in the muck now too. avo hardened his will. he cast his whisper out across the sequence, charging secondhand fatality to the forefront as he prepared himself to face his fathers properly for the first time. and as he drew closer to the mental husks left behind, he could see threads of thoughtstuff flowing between the leaking ghosts, carrying whispered thoughts between them. Chapter 13-13 The Silent War (II) chapter 13-13 the silent war (ii) the guy who pulled my ass out from that incubi grease fire showed up yesterday. just popped into the back of my head and said hi. fuck me, but thats humiliating. and here i was thinking i was some kinda nova-hot necro. always fish dwelling deeper in the waters, i guess. first thing he started talking about was my wards. apparently, my modified ashthrone shedskin was leaving a bit more of my emotional resonance behind than i expected. wouldve been nice to know before i did all those dives, but hey, eventually you learn or you die. so yeah: weirdest way i got a mentor so far. guy seems nice. too godsdamn nice to be from the warrens. strikes me as some kinda guilder, maybebut a working one. maybe someone from ori-thaum has their eyes on me. jaus, thatll be somethingyou rust up their dive and now they want to hire you. weirdest thing about it all is the smell. the guy reeks of citrus. the taste leaks through the mem-data, and it stings. i dont think even the actual fruits taste that fresh. well. he left me some vicarities to review. stuff he got from other necros on a dive. ugly ends for all of them. i still cant tell if hes trying to scare the piss out of me or get me to learn. either way, i gotta see if i can get something on him. figure out who he is. ignorance is fatal in this line of work, and right now, this guys got his gun pressed against my temple, but hes more interested in making me a better shot. never a dull day in new vultun. -mem-log of white rab 13-13 the silent war (ii) the rule among necros was that if you encountered a sequence or phantasmic you couldnt understand, it was probably going to end with you nulled. with how long it was taking avo to figure out the low masters trap, his growing apprehension told him that the direct approach here was likely unwise. the broken minds of the incubi were on display neatly, with their shells enchained along strings of flowing thought and fastened by a delicate few ghostly wisps. there was a special kind of callousness leaving the nulled mounted as such. it seemed his fathers alternates didnt care if they caught the attention of a passing exorcist, that the ego-deaths exposed like a set of trophies, offering the statement that the last priests of noloth were on safari, and they had a lust for big game. using his whisper to secure the vicinity, avo ground at the whetstone of time as he made his way closer to the cluster. flashes of his encounter with the low masters trespassed into his mind, reminding him of their abilities. they had crippled the entirety of ox-three without strain and conjoined the minds to expand their capacity. the time that such an undertaking demanded should have stretched the length of entire weeks, but they achieved a perfect deception with far less. and they didnt even need a canon to help them. once again, the atmosphere shifted as the weight of uncertainty began to gnaw. avo had taken to thinking himself a predator of these depths, a beast that preys upon the others. but there were fathoms beneath fathoms, monsters that preyed upon monsters. his anxiety only grew as he found recollective fragments of incubi sheared-free, buried within the sequences he crept through. now, unending screams layered the ambiance of simulated memories, broken phantasmics sailing through simulated scenes of placidity. the exorcists were certain to find thiscertain to learn the presence of ori-thaum within their system. did the low masters no longer care for secrecy? or were they trying to provoke a response? trigger a war between the two forces? how would that serve their desire to reclaim the helix from him and retake the george washington? more cognitive debris littered his path, and a new suspicion occupied avos mind as the broken artifacts grew more orderly, almost like cobblestones made from nulled minds. or an invitational pathway. he found his paranoia rewarded when he found himself five sequences across from the cluster. as he spoofed his way across a parallel branch, his cog-feed warned him of a dozen passing exorcist accretions. the sheer amount of devastation present should have made the infiltration obvious. yet, the patrol just kept going, even circling away from the compromised sequences deliberately. like someone was urging them to ignore, to not see the obvious damage. a cold pang spread through avo. the worry should have occurred to him before; if he could compromise so many exorcists, why couldnt the low masters? the chill in him only grew as his whisper cast its perception on a familiar auto-seance. one created from the mind of yosanna kivranpuvakthe turncoat guilder he dove into at ox-three. it was in her mind that walton ebbed the helix, and it was from her that avo procured the key of his inheritance. though auto-seance was cycling a sequence of memories through structure, avo could still recall the neuter-mask covered faces of her twin boys in the elevator. the phantasmic was loud and active. its opening connected to the dull thoughtstuff flowing from the nulled incubi, the dichotomy something like an intravenous needle feeding paltry drips of life into a still cavern. mem-data loaded from the other side unguarded by any encryptions. there were three minds that lurched across the veil. three minds settled in a simulated environment molded from the phantasmal matter of fifty ghosts. avo urged his whisper on to peek while his instincts screamed with contradictory responses. he should jack out; he should pour his secondhand fatality and nullify the phantasmic itself; he should try and free the exorcists so they noticed the tumor that was growing under their eyes. or he could just go in and speak with them. the last thought was illogical, and a conflicted desire unto itself. something in him still just wanted to look upon waltons face again. to feel reassured. but such was the siren song of nostalgia, a brittleness cultivated by yonder memories. that avo had been killed several times over, and resurrected in a form he recognized as himself didn''t negate what he learned of his nature. his sense of self might never have been true to begin with. ultimately, he was more creation than adoption at the hands of walton, and so he must shed himself of the dying embers of ideation. +peace. do not talk with him,+ emotion said. +what? i+ +depending on the situation that follows, you may break him, but you may not speak to him. we share a root of thoughts, and yours offer little more than invectives and spite. it is inefficient.+ peace glared at the noblest of their priesthood and directed his perception at joy. +what about him? is he going to get the privilege to speak, oh, mighty emotion?+ +there is no need to restrict him,+ emotion said. +he will collapse into inconsolable tears when the smell grows stronger.+ ghosts planted fat tears to join those running down joys cheek. +its true.+ the figure on defiances throne grew evermore solid, his size immense and with snake-like appendages lashing out from his back like a cluster of transplanted hydrapedes. +oh,+ joy moaned as he felt his breakdown begin, +and mocks us more by twisting his divine form. why+ *** part of avo expected to get nulled approaching the auto-seance. the fact that he didnt leave him more worried than ever. temporarily releasing his haemokinesis, he was once again projecting his phantoms back into the dormitory for all the others to witness. the exchange would give his companions a better understanding of their enemy if nothing else. the first solid matter he felt was resting beneath his arms and grinding against the echoheads on his back. it was hard to be seated with his additional limbs, but he made due by modifying the dimensions of his simulation as the mindscape around him loaded. a domed chamber comprised of tessellating materials yawned wide around him, and he noticed the tassels of bone-carved scripture sway from the ceiling in the fashion of nooses calling for necks. it took little time for him to realize he was seated upon one of the four thrones back in the george washington, and that this was how the low masters remembered their sanctuary looking. with how stiff their seating felt, he wasnt surprised why walton decided to leave this little fan club. across from him, the weeper, the heartless, and the one that used fuck as a noun had him intersected between crossing lanes of perception. and though he hated to admit it, their sequencing was the best he had ever seen. no glitches. nothing is out of place. even the mem-data was a work of art, each variable and artifact listed linked to all the others in the chain of dominos. he wondered if he could spoof his way into the scenery somehow by accelerating his reflexes again. the urge was tempting. but violence was the main course, scheduled to arrive shortly. for now, curiosity would serve as an appetizer. beats of silence passed to the accompaniment of the weepers choking sobs. +its almost perfect,+ he said, shaking as he held himself. +oh, avohakten. if you could see the mon-mon-monster he gave your name to.+ ah, yes. the long-dead son his father was haunted by. or the man he used to be before he decided to split himself into four ego-lines was haunted. avo sighed. family: it was a mess. he looked forward to killing and eating them. +so,+ avo said, breaking his end of the silence as he stared, +heard you lost your ark from some meat i was torturing. how did you all let that happen?+ peace shot out from his seat, his always-bloody hands whipping red droplets everywhere. +you cunt-fuck! you corpse-licking fuck-shit! you+ +peace,+ the one with the dead owl lodged in place of an actual heart said. the famine of peace twitched, and it took a masterful exertion of will for him to wrestle himself down. some of his rage spilled over and avo tasted the emotion. disquiet followed. he empathized with the node, with peaces struggle against anger. so similar to how avo had to struggle with the beast at times that he thought well. him having pieces from all of them wasnt much of a surprise, now was it? +we want the helix back,+ emotion said, without preamble. he cocked his head at avo as if he was examining a piece of meat. a rope of threaded coins dangled from his cavernous eyes, jingling with each movement of his head. +we are willing to strike a bargain to see it done.+ the directness of his words was unexpected for avo, grating for peace, and soul-crushing for joy. +bargain?+ avo asked, voice trailing off with a chuffing laugh. +second time someone wanted to make a deal with me.+ he leaned in closer. +have questions. but make your offer first.+ it took an effort of will on his part to continue facing emotion. to see waltons face so mutilated felt wrong. perhaps such was the way the last of the faithful felt during the godsfall as they watched the guilds rise and fashion grafts from the corpses of the gods they worshipped. emotion continued. +inheritance. we offer you the title and throne of defiance, along with all his memories, war-minds, and privileges.+ out of all that was just said, avo found himself most drawn to waltons old memories and what a war-mind was. but he would brook no betrayal of his own desires before he grasp the cost of capitulation. +and what do you want?+ +you. to be joined with us. to serve the hungers as your predecessor once did. you will granted the deeper arts and learn the true lore behind the dreaming unsea. you will return us the helix, and access to the sanctuary. and you will create for us a new caste of sacrifice. inspired by your own image.+ Chapter 13-14 Denial chapter 13-14 denial +theres something inside shard-1s mind. its a memory fragment, i think. looks pretty frayed. she mightve broken it off from the half-strand that nulled her. scrying nowagh fuck talon-1, i got a glimpse of what happened to strike cell mongoose. theyre all nulled too. were gonna need more incubi.+ -talon-6, strike cell flameater 13-14 denial +the helix,+ avo said. +why does it matter? went from trying to null me last time to giving me a throne.+ he scanned the mem-data radiating from emotions sequences, grasping out with ghosts to see if he could glean any subtextual details from the priest. nothing. the famine of emotion lived up to his title, and while his two counterparts were beings of baser makes bound to narrow fields of reaction, he, much like walton, was untethered. yet, where walton, once called defiance, occupied the ideals of radical acceptance, emotion was the embodiment of apathy, directed solely to serve the hungers. following such symbology, peace was to be an instrument of war, and joy, a shield composed from the fabric of sorrow. avo prodded, +and can you even make this deal? dont you need to call your owners? ask them how they feel about this? want to make sure everyones on the same page.+ keeping his mind clean of contempt took a bit of focus, but avo managed. though emotion abided by silence, avo angled to get at the hungers again. so many minds circling within a dragon; fair kindling for a phantasmal inferno. the torment of burning in cycles unceasingly across time was a delight to imagine, and it served as a fitting fate for the hungersto reap hell unending for all the atrocities they engineered. including the very ghouls that served them. when emotion spoke again, the words came calm and direct. +you mock us. but you do not know the situation. you havent seen the true face of the war+ +you lost your history to the other guilds. your ark. your chance at altering the history of existence to suit your canon of events. am i right?+ emotion lapsed back into consideration. +yes. this is true.+ +emotion,+ peace snarled, glaring at his fellow priest, +dont tell this fuck shit! you heard him: the corpse-fucker wont give us whats ours. its time for this pretense+ his voice crackled and died. down through the blended material of the dais, ghosts from emotion burrowed into the memory and severed speech privileges from his ego-alternate. the neutering was complete and uncontested. watching peace hurling insults and clenching his bloodied fists at avo, joy sighed through his tears. +it is hard for us to admit. hard for us all.+ the weeping low master shook his head as he looked upon avo. +were sorry. we failed you. we failed our dream. we, last and only of the priesthood, were forsworn in defending the chosen against the outsiders and the pestilence of the divine. but we failed. we failed. we failed+ he settled back into the embrace of despair thereafter, leaving emotion as the only other speaker once more. +we understand your confusion now. when last we spoke, we assumed you defiance, though maimed in memory. ignorance is an easier affliction to alleviate. you have no comprehension of the world that was, and you have exceeded the parameters of your own design+ avo broke the flow of the priests works with a hissing laugh. +wrong. doing exactly what i was made for. living. learning. seeing colors. making new choices. you are chained. you still think im just another of your ghouls. another slave. might be because youre just a slave too. might be because of the flesh im made from. but walton created me for freedom. to make my own choices. and now you tell me that all i want is wrong. that i should follow you.+ he rose from his throne, and joy and peace mirrored him, the former reaching out for the latter to sit back down, peace baring his rotted teeth in a baleful grimace as the thread-thin ghosts around him coiled their sequences around each other and wove manifestations of building trauma. +talk then,+ avo said, walking toward the center of the dais that held the thrones. he reached out with a phantasmal echohead and brushed one of the swinging bone tassels hanging from the ceiling. the artifact was perfectly made. but also immutable. he didnt have enough access to its data to alter its design unless he nulled or cast himself deeper into its structure. another portent of the low masters habits. control. always control. they offered him a seat but still spat wasted words at him. he was being treated like an expendable ghoul no longer, but now he seemed little more than an idiot child in desperate need of an education. +would you like to hear about who we were?+ emotion asked, sounding genuinely curious. +before our defeat? before our transgressions.+ now, this was interesting. +trangression,+ avo said. +didnt think you thought yourselves wrong.+ +some acts are beyond denial,+ emotion replied simply. +the creation of your lessers, for instance. they were merely meant to be receptacles to house the weight of the chosen peoples traumas. to bear the weight of their pain. such a thing cost us more virtue than we can ever restore.+ +youre talking about the girl,+ the words left avo. it was a guess, but he felt it valid enough to pursue. +the voider girl you murdered. before you were separated into the famines. all the others you entombed. was that part of the cost?+ to his surprise, emotion offered a slow and clear nod. +yes. that, and countless other misdeeds. so many underserved sacrifices and if there is to be any justice in the end, we will be punished for it. but to ensure the triumph of virtue, we must win.+ the low masters were becoming increasingly parallel with elder drongo in their thinking. this shouldnt have been a surprise. all those that once held an ark amounted to something akin to a guild, and all those who thought themselves great powers were of a joined desire. more wasnt enough. they wanted everything. all. absolute. just like the gods. avo empathized. press them, master, the woundshaper whispered. breaking from its constant haranguing of the galeslither, it had taken an interest in the nether-based dialogue, judging each of the low masters with half-interest. you hold the foundation of all they want, and they seek to build their structures on your soilto hold you down with their binding weight. let this be their folly. let them hand you the materials of their knowledge, and be done with this.fascinatingly, the heaven of blood regarded peace, more than the other two, with open disgust. what poorly fashioned constructs. what broken, narrow tools. the voice of his other heaven followed the first. it fills me with sickness to be in agreement with her, but the path of this conversation is clear to me. capitulate, flee, or battle. i advise you leave. you risk too much lingering here, staying in place. this is their housetheir rules cage this microcosm around you. ah, the coward speaks its due, the woundshaper purred. wishing to deprive our master of his entertainment? if his plan succeeds, the cognitive substance of these low masters will serve as fine bricks within the masters mind. the heaven of air huffed, blind want has led too many to break themselves upon the ground. be aware, and never choose submission in place of freedom. no matter what is offered. flesh, mind, or air, ideas can be enslaved all the same. do not betray yourself. +to ensure there never was any shame, and that he would be here, not i.+ the chuff rose into an out ofraged hiss. for all the moments before, avo regarded the low masters with wary regard and tempered curiosity, but for the first time, he felt his hate for them deepen. he knew nothing of the man he inherited his namesake from, but knowing they died defying walton and the hungers, the act of twisting his chronology into being a loyal son was beyond violation. it was a desecration. of ego. of personhood. of choice itself. whatever the case might be, avohaketen died fighting against his father. to render that as invalid +denial,+ avo breathed. +that would have been a better name for you. better name for all of you. all this just to coddle yourself. protect your feelings. yours and the hungers. cant live with your failures. cant learn. going to destroy the world and defile existence because you werent happy with your decisions.+ an intrusive thought told avo that zein would have mocked them more for their failure to achieve this want than the act itself. the priest studied him for a moment, taking a step back. +you are offended by this?+ emotion let out a breath. +truly, he did see you as his son. you are so very like him but stained with savagery.+ +and you have his face but everything else hollow,+ avo replied. +none of you are even intact enough to be parodies of him. he was the only one of you that was real. whole instead of narrow. you give me power for the helix because you need the george washington. but you dont learn the technology. you dont learn anything.+ +that is not our duty?+ emotion said. +the sanctuary offers us+ +means to continue your hopeless war. yes.+ avo turned away from him. clashing notices populated his cog-feed, the incubi getting closer. +curious. whats your plan? claim the ark of another guild? change its history somehow? kill enough ghouls and twist their minds to contaminate the consensus on what happened.+ +once perhaps, but these assumptions are superfluous now.+ emotion leaned in close. +especially with what defiance has bestowed upon you.+ and once again, a hidden power sought the fruits of project godshaper. kae should be ever so pleased with her accomplishments, but he doubted she would enjoy compliments from half-strands like the low masters. +with your frame, we can change everything. we can grant noloth its second glory and return our masters from their exile. such a thing would cost you nothing. and you will be granted influence over the art itself when the canons are changed.+ the answer, now, and almost always, was no, but entertaining this line of question, he could still uncover a few things they spoke of. that, and keep this groups attention on him as the approaching incubi dove in, their approach estimated at three real-time minutes and counting. +perhaps+ avo said, speaking as if he was truly uncertain. +will i get a war-mind? tell me about privileges. and what remains of the art for me to master?+ and as emotion began to speak, avo cycled secondhand fatality at the forefront of a shuffling cycle of patterns in anticipation of what was to come. the truth was having the low masters just give him something didnt appeal at all, for why should he be beholden to accepting gifts when he could just create the circumstances to take them from his foes? *** something about shard-1s nulling lingered in talon-3s mind. it might be the absolute calmness oozing out from the near-waters of her thoughtstuff, or the non-native fragments they recovered from within her inner mind. either way, there was big game in these waters, and it appeared to have a taste for incubi. such behavior had to be discouraged. they approached the hidden auto-seance, slipping through the traps and peering eyes numbering sixteen necros. sixteen of the most decorated incubi that could be scrambled and deployed on short notice. sixteen merged from four cells into a circle. his mind pulsed as talon-1s meta-identifier came alight in his cog-feed. +talon-3, talon-6, you two are point-jackers. ingress. ladder formation. clear these sequences and keep it quiet. talon-7, youre in charge of perimeter detail. keep those glassers blind and redirect sequences if you spot a pali. the rest you get your traumas cycled. you are cleared for ego-death. collateral damage is allowed. lets scalp this motherfucker.+ twenty minds chimed muttered affirmations. talon-3 found his voice among theirs. +synced,+ through his seance, he heard talon-6 say the same thing and approach the cluster. a muted sense of disquiet filled talon-3 but he let it pass through him. it wasnt the first time he saw the nether painted with the unspooling memories of his own. it wouldnt be the last either. +shard-1 mustve gotten the half-strand pretty good,+ talon-6 said. talon-3 hummed in response. +you dont think so?+ talon-6 asked. +i think she went down fighting,+ talon-3 said. +but seein as convex already reported shard-2 mind dead i dont know. the exorcists are compromised. mongoose is all dead over there. and we just so happen to have partially fragged breadcrumbs that form a full picture with our foes all buzzed out and unprepared.+ +so what, its a trap?+ talon-3 sighed. +i dont know. i dont think so but i just cant shake the feeling that were being used.+ Chapter 13-15 The Deeper Waters chapter 13-15 the deeper waters +convex. we just got shard-2 stabilized. shes still gonna be with us. it looked pretty bad for a while but part of her labyrinth collapsed just right and preserved enough of her deeper memories. everything else is a smear of thoughtstuff and half-fragged ghosts.+ +shit. so we got nothing about who ambushed her and shard-1. just glimpses and flickers.+ +well me and the other menders managed to piece together a glimpse of the moment they got hit. a lot of details missing and the visuals are somewhere north of fucked. but what we got is unclear. + [transferring mem-data] +...+ +we slowed it substantially. the unknown is still a blur.+ +yeah, i got that. the traumas are expertly made too. shard-2s wards broke on the third hit. this means they had three high-null category patterns at the ready. it also means were dealing with someone whos broken a quicksand before who knows how we operate+ +convex?+ +mend-1, listen to me: do not tell anyone that shard-2 made it. try to reassemble her mind as best you can and then slot her for redaction-protection detail. after that, report her as ego-dead using a cast.+ +i yes, convex.+ +the number of necros that can dive into a lobby like this is a percent of a percent. to ambush two incubi on scrying detail at that kind of speed. were facing a godclad. or a nolothic [redacted]... ignore the second one. youre not cleared to remember that.+ +understood. do you think its one of ours?+ [sigh] +i hope not. but the candidates capable of performing the feats you pulled from shard-2s mind number in the triple digits. if that. and most of them are probably ours. we need to seriously consider if were diving against shotin kazahara.+ +what? the echodancer? no, hes loyal to the council. and our godclads are all party to active monitoring by undisclosed assetsits impossible+ +mend-1. there are power plays happening between the elders all the time. old clan grudges that last when one becomes immortal. were necrojacks. we know better than most what seems to be can end up as a load of shit. right now, im going to double the assets for elder drongo and give the order for general fortification to be built. around the clock counter-scrying to stop the exorcists from noticing too. mend-1, get prepared for a casualty spike.+ +synced. are you going to warn them? the cells?+ +i dont know how compromised we are, mend-1. i dont know anything. if they run into our new friend... a lot more incubi are going to die today. i need to i need to think about whats going on. one things certain: i need you to falsify shard-2s memory details. alter your memories afterward. you and your cell.+ +synced. unity is destiny.+ +yeah. unity feels like its pretty absent today.+ -mirror-convex and mend-1 13-15 the deeper waters the staccato of conflict built to a three-part beat. of the low masters, desperate to court avo, the struggle was diplomatic and spiritual. their prize was more than merely the helix nowthey also wanted him for his frame. as with ori-thaum, the great game had changed thanks to kaes deeds, and the last vestiges of noloth sought a second chance at weaving the reality they desired back into shape. little were they aware of approaching wolves avo had alerted, or that he never intended to succumb to their temptations. in this regard, he agreed with his galeslither: freedom was a prize most precious and rarely owned. especially in a city like new vultun. for whatever they could offer him in terms of necrotheurgy or power, he would have to be a fool to trade untethered freedom for bejeweled chains. still, that didnt mean he wasnt curious about what tools they had for offer. or what to filter for when their minds were properly broken. +you have only gazed the nether from within. you dive a native to these waters, perhaps, but we are more than mere divers. we have seen the totality of its expanse, and know where its borders lie. comprehension. such a glimpse is afforded only to the faithful.+ emotion called upon his ghosts and tuned them into phantoms. upon his palm danced a shimmering orb of water, and within its scintillating depths, accretions shone like constellations. +like looking into a subreality,+ avo responded. interesting as the imagery was, he had half his attention on the approaching incubi. through constructs he left buried amongst the sequences outside, he peered at their progress and peeked through shard-1 as well. there numbered many this time. twenty or more. he wondered if any of them suspected this to be a trap. the crumbs he left leading them to this auto-seance granted them insight into the compromised exorcists and which sequences were to be avoided as well. seeing as they were gathering, they mustve trusted the information enough to attempt an offensive. he just needed to be ready when the walls came crashing down. keep the low masters here distracted. +when jaus imprisoned our masters, he exiled not only our future, but also our hopes.+ avos attention cut back over to the low master. +why?+ +he sought to+ +what did you do? what did the hungers do to make jaus cast them out from reality?+ the interruption was deliberate. planned. as were the words that followed. +was what you did in the george washington also jaus fault?+ emotion stared, and its empty sockets offered no insight into his internal disposition. +that was a sin? but a necessary one.+ +necessary?+ avo couldnt tell if the creature he was talking to was delusional or mad. +i enjoyed watching you hurt her. stab her again and again. things i enjoy are cruelty. sadism. if i enjoy what you do+ a laugh escaped from him, low and mocking. +be honest with me. if you can. if theres anything in you like walton. did you just hurt her because of the hungers? or did you like it too?+ +we still remember her sometimes,+ emotion said simply. +joy weeps for her. peace hates that she fell, hates that she was so hard to kill, hates the hungers for telling us to kill her.+ +so why do it?+ +faith. true faith. have you ever laid eyes on a total democracy?+ this gave avo pause. there seemed to be more parallels between the low masters and ori-thaum than he expected. between their reliance on the nether, their mastery of the art, and their supposed cultural values, he wondered if there was some deeper connective tissue connecting the two nations in the years past. +the hungers+ avo replied, +theyre supposed to be a total democracy? a collection of screaming minds cycled through a cluster of dragons. one that offloads its waste into my brothers. needs the ghouls to survive. thats your democracy?+ it was absurd. to avo, the entities barely rested within the borders of coherence. to consider them an accurate representation of sanity, let alone a model of public sentiment, was staggering. +talon-3, preparing to enter+ +wait!+ talon-6 cast. he felt startlement pass through every other incubi he was connected to. through his perception, they could see the sudden drop in the auto-seances mem-data as they studied the four accretions. ghosts were evaporating out of its structure. the cognitive phlogiston that was the nether began to steam and boil. he had never the nether swallowed him as if he was folded in with a sudden splash of melt paint. the world was like he had never seen this wasnt a sight he had seen before what was this sight? did he see it before? wait, was he talon-3 or talon-6? and who was avo? *** you are a war-mind. you do not think. you simply hear, and obey. you are ignorance manifest. you are the eyes and jaws placed across the nether. you will never know this, but it cost the priests nine million of their own lives to dwell in your thoughtless dimension and craft you into shape. your very existence is poison to them, poison to this place, but also poisons you right back. the ghosts and minds of everyone encompassed in your wake dissolve, but every thought they think burns you. you dont have the senses for pain. but the people conjoined by you scream on your behalf. there are twenty-six minds currently boiling in your depths. your caller paradoxically remembers you. the one called joy. he should have faded out of existence with this act. another will replace him soon. you will not know him. the others will not remember him. the same fate will befall everyone else not protected by joys will. the ghoul is to be spared, but his substance is strange. there is more than one active mind inside it, and though you know nothing, the design confuses you because youre trying to eat him anyway because his being hurts. he is forgetting because his mind is one fire and the fire is thinking and it hurts it hurts it hurts hes of a shape as you you tear the memories of his fires instead. they sputter, confused why were they eating the ghouls mind to begin with, and he stirs even inside you, and you shrink closer to nothing. you give up on him. he will live like the caller wants. the incubi must also be ceased. there is too much of themand they are so loud. you reach into their misremembering selves and make them remember and drive your reach further until youre past their surface memories and into the second layer where all the private details hide and you use it to expand yourself. with each second you are dying, but you dont know it. soon, all the perceptions and memories you eat will destroy you. you will no longer exist. it is annihilation. it is annihilation. no one will remember. ignorance will leave its imprint. five of the minds cease with you, parted from cognition itself. but most live. you spent too long on the ghouls. too long. and it still remembers you. it still remembers because you made the fires forget themselves first, but the ghoul remains, and he has them in his thoughts now, but they are no longer eating him the last non-thought doesnt arrive. the nether settles. you die without ever knowing what death is. *** cog-cap-[null]warni12ng adapting adapting? where am i? where are we? search memories we are avo? avo. we are avo. the base mind is asleep. need input from base mind. wake him?him? not him. us. wake us? [wake up] and at a call cast by what ghosts remained within his still burning mind, avo felt the mass of consciousness slam down into his being with thrice as much weight as before. Chapter 13-16 The Flames Awakened (I) chapter 13-16 the flames awakened (i) +so you want me to do what?+ +im trying to make someone. i want you to be a part of them.+ +...someone? jaus fucking avandaer, strix, i look, im thankful for all that youve done for me and all that you taught me. hells, youve been more of a dad to me than the actual half-strand that pulled a pump and dump on mom but i dont think im ready for our relationship to go here. i mean, for fucks sake, consang, i dont even know you in the real. im not just mailing you my fluids so you can grow a juv.+ [soft laugh] +i dont mean it that way. its not just you and me, anway+ holy fuck. no, strix. no. i do not consent to whatever gene-juice cocktail bastard youre trying to breed into existence. no.+ [laughing continues] +im going to miss provoking you, kid.+ +miss me? strix, are you in some kind of shit right now?+ +well, ill be dead in a few minutes, so this is as much a farewell call as its a favor.+ +fuck. where are you? im gonna jack over. theres a fallwalkerstormsparrow. she owes me favors. big favors. i can burn itget you out+ +listen to me, i need you to cast a few memories over through this session. make them moments between us. im trying to grow the sequences together and make them all seem more real+ +are you in the warrens? the tiers? stormsparrows good anywhere. she can cross idheim in a footstep. shell be there+ +rabbit. raldi. there are things i dont want you to know. theres a war i dont want you involved in yet. i enjoyed our time together and watching you grow and all that. a lot of things are going to be happening in a few months. if someone shows up one day thinking your home is theirs, tell them what you know about me. youll understand then.+ +no, fuck you, consang. deepnav ping now. you dont get to cast and die. youre not some snuffer trash+ [ghostlink disconnected] +strix? strix?+ -the strix and white-rab 13-16 the flames awakened (i) something was wrong. as emotion cast his perception upon the creatures mind, he could see that its ghosts were afire. from the edge of its halos accretion to each individual strand of phantasmal substance, unnatural flames gnawed within the nether. fires outlined by a pulsing film of emptiness. disquiet and fascination became bedfellows in that instant; the priest realized this construct was unknown to him. something of defiances personal design, perhaps? though the ghouls thoughtstuff oozed and burst like a flickering bubble as it struggled to awaken from its mind-stunned stupor, its memories seemed almost entirely intact, and impossibly, the vanquished sequences were being cauterized back into existence. ghosts regrew as if branches of living incandescence, each reaching for each as brambles thickened, forming new junctions. +emotion,+ peace said, voice taut with baffled rage. +the fuck are we looking at? what the fuck happened?+ a gulf existed in their minds as well, but the absence of joy revealed enough. a war-mind had been used. likely as a demonstration to cow defiances upstart offspring into capitulation. and render it easier to subvert in the aftermath. now, however, withered particulates leftover from joys annihilated mind dotted the phlogiston of the nether around them like scattered debris, and past the frayed entryway of their auto-seance, a disorganized tangle of the fifteen incubi tumbled free from half-severed sequences. another unexpected outcome. the ghoul had thought itself clever drawing the pretenders into the mindscape as expendable help, but its expectations would have been folly. they had more than the local sequences subvertedthe greatling girl was under their sway as well. it took little effort to use those compromised exorcists as a vector for this expansion, after all. admittedly, defiances successor was more effective than assumed, though unrefined when it came to the delicate details of sequencing emotions and artifacts of poignance within memories. such was why it likely never noticed them dwelling within abrel''s memories of the love she held for her brotherthe gentler aspects of being far from its base comprehensions. true empathy was a step above mere fathoming after all, and in this was the loss of defiance most felt. yet, despite all this, the ghouls mind had been altered somehow, and most of the incubi remained alive. emotion was no longer sure what was to follow. there were too many factors resting beyond his comprehension, too many developments he could not foresee. this meeting was meant to be a lure. something to draw the ghoul in and enchain it to the purpose of old noloth, for the glory of the city eternal and the world that jaus stole. they assumed by exploiting its hunger and bloodlust it would have offered its fealty for pleasures denied. instead, the beast yearned more to mock them. now, as confusion rose from the disoriented minds scattered before them, emotion released a low note of disappointment at the outcome of the affair and prepared to surrender the reins of his control. +peace,+ he said, sinking below his brother-self, +i cede mastery of the priesthood to you. i no longer have faith in diplomacypursue our objectives by your other means. i will call upon another instance of joy and keep the exorcists blind.+ as his metamind lapped over peaces, he heard bone-grinding growls of low laughter. as it echod outward he felt the waves of the nether ripen with the pressure of malice. the poor fools were not prepared for that which was to come, and from the ghouls shattered mind would the famine of peace reclaim that which was stolen. +you should have let me at the cunts from the start, emotion,+ peace grumbled. across the entirety of his cognitive structure, lighting the circuitry of his sequences, trauma-patterns built and crackled, the first bolts whipping out at the nether beyond his accretion like the tongue of a ravenous dog. +it would have saved us all so much fucking time.+ *** regaining your bearings after getting flattened into a second-person perspective and blended with the conscious minds of twenty or so incubi was a mite bit difficult. awareness forcibly hammering back into you as all your ghosts are screaming at you in a cacophonous symphony of voices across the totality of your memories also does nothing to diminish the chaos. [congitive damage repaired] [mostlywe are losing ghosts] +why arent we casting back?+ [we dont have the will.] [not base-mind.] [need allowance.] [very inconvenient.] [want to null.] his bloodlust flowed and in the same instant synaptically charged currents tipped with secondhand fatality lashed out at the low masters thoughtstuff. the priests of noloth shifted the angle of their assault to him. as their attacks came at an unceasing tempo, avo found himself wondering if they werent using some kind of cognitive accelerant themselves. their first of their counteractions clashed against avos trauma and shattered, one blade falling before the other. what followed was a feat that made avos insides twist in envy. in the period of a micro-second, the low masters managed to assemble a new pattern just as their original shattered and cast it out. this time, however, when the traumas met, the nether came alight like twin blades carved from pain charged lightning breaking to a halt, edge to edge. avo felt his ghosts recoil at the sudden repulse clashing against trauma so symmetrical, but a deeper instinct bade him reach out. through the connective tissue of ghosts chained to his mental being, he buried his fluid ego into the sequences of the attack trauma and stretched out his cognitive capacity. his ghosts burrowed into his foes like drilling tendrils, eating through the shell of their patterns like a plague. memories broke apart and melded into him. his total ghosts shot back up past eight hundred. awareness and knowledge flooded into his mind and for a flickering instance, he felt his perception overlap with the famine of peace, as disbelief and horror erupted inside them. the shock lasted but a scant second. grandmaster necrojack that the enemy was, they ejected those ghosts and jacked out. just in time for another series of attacks to cut out from another vector and skip off avos wards. [adjusting memory-availability parameters] suddenly, a portion of his memories regrew and the canon of haemokinesis became known to him again. +how was that a non-essential memory?+ avo asked, casting his annoyance at his sub-minds. [was busy constructing wards.] [was busy rebuilding everything.] there was a tinge of frustration in his auxiliary self. choking back his annoyance at his secondary selves, he fired his reflexes and bound himself again to liters of blood. the pace of time stretched, and avo stole the momentum of the offensive. he cast out at the incubi then, uncertain as to where the low masters were hiding. flashes of firing ghostjacks pulsed out from leaking sequences and avo moved as he struck. he directed his strikes with finer control than he ever felt, hammering secondhand fatality down against quicksand wards before cycling in the next option. but as his command reached his ghostjack, so too did his ghosts obey as well. even far extended from him, he felt his trauma transform from within. what began as a memory made from the materials of lucilles pain turned into the hurt chambers endured when the aratnid sank its egg-infused fangs into his testicles. he drove his shifting weapon against the adaptive wards and felt himself sink in. in the same instant, the bones around the auto-seance began to realign, and all around him flashed accretions and ripples of thoughtstuff. time within the mindscape skipped forward. the auto-seances confines flickered as the memories comprising its structure began to stutter. the low masters were weaponizing their nether lag against himtrying to strip him of his speed advantage. he needed to get out. staying and engaging them in a prolonged engagement on their terrain was folly. he could just jack out. find another section to come back in or [yes. we have access to the incubi.] [they are hurt. cracked. vulnerable. such pain.] yes. that was a far more enticing option. far more. through the tendrils of his trauma, avo peered into the cracked shell of his foe and leered at the memories inside. he could hear the incubus screaming. he could taste their fear. their pain. their vulnerability. this fight could continue. he knew it could. he just needed a change of skin. and with a thought, avo began to pour the entirety of himself through the cracks lining his victims flesh, devouring all their memories, all their phantasmics, all of who they are, and who they could be. like a parasite wriggling its way into an egg, he slithered into their being to the choking accompaniment of their psionic screams and bathed the mind-shred hurt he was causing, all three facets of avos cognition exhaled in euphoric glee. *** talon-1 screamed as she felt herself go away. words vanished. things she knew darkened as the fires approached. the burning crackled with inhuman laughterwith hungry laughter. she was she was she was she was she was she was avo she was she sheshe at some point, the thoughts stop coming from her, and started coming from the beast instead. talon-1 stopped thinking, but talon-1 didnt die. someone else grew in place under her inner thoughts. someone else learned to wear her skin. *** [mental template saved: talon-1] Chapter 13-17 The Flames Awakened (II) chapter 13-17 the flames awakened (ii) +osjed, do do you feel like you just forgot a bunch of stuff all a sudden?+ +what you mean, venven? like, do i have brain fog, or do i think someones snatching the thoughts out of my mind?+ +yeah. the second.+ +well, seein that were exorcists and were operating within the systems confines, no. it would take someone making a heaven of the nether to get past us.+ +i mean+ +listen. you need stop thinking this way, alright? i saw you dust an entire cell of necros in that kososo raid a couple of years back.+ +shit. dont remind me. that entire thing was such a mess. fucking kososo.+ +my point is: youre nova, venven mori. maybe not as good as me+ +suck a ghoul, osjed.+ +--but it would take a necrojack at the absolute apex of skill to snatch shit from us.+ +...yeah. i guess youre right. i just i keep forgetting things down in the admin sequences near super-four.+ +oh. that happens to me all the time too.+ +and you dont find it weird?+ +theres a lot of tangled sequences down there. just looking at all that mem-data gives me migraines and nosebleeds. if the incubi or whoever want to climb through that jungle, they can be my guest. if they make it through, they earned the right to jack us. but you know what?+ +what?+ +i doubt it. because if its hell for you, and its hell for me, its probably no cakewalk for the masters either. look, the average half-strand cant even dive for more than twenty minutes without breaking from empathic psychosis. were rated for five hours. we practically breath the nether. and its going to take a hell of a lot more than just five hours to dig through the tangled thicket at the base of the oversec.+ +yeah. yeah, youre right.+ +of course i am. listen do you still want to do that thing+ +not on official channels, osjed. after work.+ +yeah. alright. after work.+ +and uh thanks.+ +it aint nothing. youre pretty great, veven. doesnt matter if someone might be better. that doesnt change the skill you have. besides, how much better can they be compared to us anyway.+ -exorcist osjed danvens and exorcist venven mori, oversec-c1 13-17 the flames awakened (ii) however unprepared avo was for the process of burning himself into the marrow of anothers cognition, his surprise doubled as his ghosts began to scream in the voice of his assimilated prey. [no! no, let me go! let me fucking go] the sheer terror filling her veins was a euphoric rush he could not put into words. as he ate her away from the inside, she did not vanish so much as she fused into his structure, the core of her self-awareness shattering while the dynamics of her mind played on, simulated by his self-moving fires. in a sense, it was like layering one metamind atop another. at the very core, he was still himself, though entire portions of his memories vanished and returned between the microseconds as he struggled to conjoin himself fully to her design. concurrently, new wants and habits flooded his being. channeling the aspects of talon-1s ego, avo drank in internalized fear for the first time. though long had he sequence and cast constructs tied to such an emotion, only now did he conceptualize how it felt when raw thought-numbing dread numbed the mind in its capacity to think. the experience sent a shivering current through his bones. a delight, deep and true. phantasmal flames erupted up from talon-7s accretion in a column of climbing radiance. in the distance, he watched other coruscating spears of burning bright punch up through sequences where his comrades once hid. the ad-nec assault had ceased too, and as the etheric winds stilled from around the auto-seance, it seemed the enemy was waiting for things to play out. enraptured by confusion, cold terror, and genuine amazement, talon-3 watched as the blaze swept through talon-7s mind, destroying and reconstructing him all at the same time. he was unmade in thought, memory, and constructs, but by the time the fires reached the edges of the incubus accretion, the entirety of his cognition had been rebuilt as a perfect replica. it wasnt just a bit like the conflagration anymore. the way it traveled and burned and consumed talon-3 only saw something like that once, and this was the same, only greater in function, capable of breaking and building all the same. in a nigh instant, a dozen lanes of perception snapped to him all at once. the new ghosts mantling talon-7s ego, peeking out like apparitions of steam between the licking tongues of the firestorm, danced and flickered into the shape foreboding silhouette. through it all talon-3 felt them then. the inhuman presence. a second set of awareness nested within the first. they knew he was here, and slowly the fire was beginning to spread along the sequences as well, the structures around dissolving into a madhouse of agonized screams. he heard them then. the members of his cell. their voices grew louder and louder with the building crackle of the infectious fire eating through the memories around him. he could hear talon-1 and talon-6s cries blended into each other, the distorted noise coming forward like some kind of chimera of torment. something inside talon-3 broke, and he jacked out. he abandoned his cell and fled while the nightmare was still unaware of him. the real exploded back into shape before his very eyes, and he found himself staring up at a gunmetal grey ceiling lined with soft yellow lights. a series of pressure points loosed along his back, and talon-3 let out a gasp as the spinal clamp released him from his jacking station. holding up a shivering hand before his cog-feed, he fought to keep his calm as he pushed himself off the chair. he needed to get this proxy off of him. he needed to get out. he needed to a choked sob escaped from his chest as he tumbled against the wall, his legs shaking too much to bear his weight. he was hyperventilating. that was a first. a few chuckles of nervous, incoherent laughter escaped from him as he crawled into the corner and, with quivering fingers, tore the soft tissue of his proxy mind free from atop his head and freed himself from remembering. the menders found him later curled catatonic and soaked in his own waste, begging whatever waited on the other side of his proxy mind to stay away from him. of the twenty incubi that served as members of the emergency-assembled strike cell flameater, five could not be recalled in any capacity by anyone, anywhere, at any point in time aside from a note in one of their backup coldtech terminals, and the fourteen were consumed by an unknown entity. talon-3 remained the sole survivor of the dive. elder drongos security was subsequently increased tenfold. *** +what the fucking-fuck is it doing,+ peace asked. from the edge of a partially nulled memory, emotion cast his perception out at the flames spreading along all the sequences, slowly encircling them from all sides in a rapidly growing cage of fire. +i do not know,+ emotion said. it was refreshing to be inflicted with ignorance. he was used to it being the other way around, but it was clear that defiances project possessed far more capability than they anticipated. +this is good.+ +good? good! we fucking one of the war-minds was used up for this. it was supposed to make him easy for us to take. not whatever cunt-fuck this is.+ a low keening note came from their new joy, recently arrived through emotions auto-seance. other nodes from each of their variants had also gathered within the crumbling debris of this auto-seance in anticipation of reclaiming the helix, but the creature had escaped from them. unfathomably, it escaped from them by burrowing into the mind of one of the incubi. in the chaos that followed thereafter, the conflagration only spread, consuming all other servants under the ori. whatever phantasmic or power the ghoul possessed, it was beyond nolothic lore. for now. emotion knew it would please the hungers most greatly if they could claim such gnosis from the traitors inheritor. but such a prize was far harder to obtain than expected. +the rot-licking shit is trying to burn away all the memories around us. leave us trapped.+ peace cycled another high-yield trauma and emotion regarded his parted self with muted disappointment. his facet dedicated to war was too crude of an instrument. he wished he had waited a few years before parted him from the consensus. that would made him more effective, and less prone to invectives. +he is rebuilding the structures around us,+ emotion corrected. +he will likely attempt to pervert our auto-seance from the outside using the corruption he possesses. such a fascinating power.+ his mind settled on a new approach and he regarded the other two priests. +i will depart and face him. i must learn of his new nature and offer this bounty to our chosen masters.+ +emotion,+ joy whispered, aghast at his decision. +he will unmake you.+ +that is of no concern to me. i seek what i seek. and we will reclaim what was lost.+ a new session pulsed inside of him, and he felt another mind structured much like his own speak to him from within his being. +the exorcists remain suppressed. shall i reveal the presence of the creature to aid your efforts?+ +no,+ emotion said. +keep them ignorant. rebuild the damage. i will seek a new dialogue with our foe. and true comprehension.+ +i see. then may you serve the chosen masters well.+ the session ended. emotion committed himself to his path. turning his perception to the other two nodes, he cast but a simple command. +if he destroys me, do not reveal yourselves. we will learn much from how he interfaces with my death.+ peace sneered. +i still think+ +priests.+ the words of the ghost rumbled from all around them, the burning ghosts of the local sequence numbering well past the tens of thousands, all speaking as one. +i took something from you. you wanted it back. you offered me power. position. privilege. and slavery. you did something to me earlier. changed me. can still remember what you did. can still remember the ignorance. the war-mind.+ +no, that cant its lying+ joy moaned. +things change. things always change. you should have learned that across all those years. you should have chosen better masters to serve. but it doesnt matter. i have a new path to give you. my own offer. my turn to give you choices. your turn to take or reject me.+ a low thunderous rumble of cruel mirth flooded the nether, and emotion tasted what it was like to be a ghoul. +but+avo said, releasing a shuddering breath. +i can lie. i hope you tell me no. i hope i can get a reason to break you all.+ Chapter 13-18 Confess chapter 13-18 confess +concave, allow me to elaborate on the current situation as clearly as i can. i have no idea what the fuck is happening. i say again, idea-no-the-fuck-what. strike cell flameater is decimated. their bodies are mind-dead through their proxies, and honestly, theres nothing left of them. i cant even classify them as nulled because theres nothing left of their cognition. no fragments, no drifting artifacts, or leaking emotions. even the mem-data is gone. all we have are shard-2, who isnt coherent enough to form words yet, and talon-6, who is still hiding in a corner somewhere screaming threats at the extraction team because he cant let the fire touch him. what am certain about is this: shard-1 and shard-2 engaged an adversary capable of jacking and sequencing at extreme speed. speed almost certainly enhanced by the metaphysical nature of a canon.they likely left fragments of mem-data within shard-1 to lure our strike team into a trap, allowing them to bypass multiple compromised exorcists and surveillance constructs before launching their ambush from an auto-seance session installed in the administrative oversec-c1s primary superstructure.this coincides with the decimation of elder drongos shadow detail as well. putting what few pieces we have together, i think were staring down the barrel of something neither of us wants to face, but have to. its clear that whoever were facing has in-depth knowledge of our operational capacity and is actively hunting incubi. we both know there arent that many ad-necs capable of doing this. the first, and the uglier possibility, is that were dealing with a silver-on-silver power play. likely something to remove drongo from the board. the second, more unsetting scenario, is that were throwing lives at the low masters again. less worrying since we managed to burn that infestation before, but were not in any shape to trade the lives of our best if the golds are raring to start the fifth big one. the last, least likely, but most troubling, is that were facing some kind of lone actor. a rogue fallwalker master necro of some kind thats butchering us for purpose or pleasure. i doubt this to be the case, but if it is, we need to resolve them quick. the last thing we need is another dive-psycho without a cause tearing through our ranks without rhyme or reason. im going to need to make an emergency request to private the mind of a category zero asset soon. our incubi arent going to be enough for this. we need a heavy. we need to bring in a clad of our own. get someone we can trust.+ -emergency request from convex to concave 13-18 confess you know, naeko, i uh, i really respect this about you. chief samir naeko would never know how much effort it took on the part of maru sandrupal to force those words out. but trainee kare kitzuhada did. she could see it in the web of veins buldging against the right side of her mentor''s head, in twitches of his optical implants running like a ring along the back of his skull. maru sandrupal cut a skeletal, vascular figure outside his combat skin, and even the grey and black paladin uniform lined and dotted in hexagonal synth cells couldnt hide that tautness pulling at the veins running along his neck, or how every tendon in his face was drawn back like bowstrings on the cusp of snapping. as the chief sat across from them and gorged himself on multiple orders of flappy-and-largies pancakes at swanneys sweet-things, paladin sandrupals metallic braids swayed back and forth as if the tail of the scorpion, his mind screaming as he struggled not stab his superior. +youre doing great, sir,+ kare said, shooting a soft smile at the side of his face. one of the eyes installed on the side of his head winked at her in thanks for her support. if she was to be honest though, she really couldnt tell what worth she was in this situation. she was a soulless trainee trying to stop a fifth sphere paladin from trying to kill his eighth sphere superior in public. still, she wanted to serve with distinction, and sometimes that meant pulling your assigned mentor off the leader of your entire outfit when the punches started flying and the curses began to flow. of course, chief naeko didnt help with this at all. to this day, kare wasnt sure if he was actually clueless about his behavior, or if he did it just to see if he could kill paladin sandrupal through elevated blood pressure alone. huh? the chief said, his words muffled by a mouthful of pancake. at this pre-dawn hour, few were awake in the undercroft aside from the sleepless, the desperate, and the dubious. light splashed over his face from the outside as a series of racing aeros screamed past. empty hover couches lined the inside of the diner in rows, and black and white scenes of classical voidwatch provided entertainment media played from coldtech projectors hanging below the ceiling. he didnt even bother looking at either of them while he continued playing stormjumpers, his phantoms casting a live interface that displayed what looked like an omnitech server district under siege. sorry, i wasnt listening. sandrupal clenched his fists so hard his joints rattled in succession. i said i im just saying that i admire you for your composure considering that were about to get our asses fucked apart by the golds and silvers both. you know, because you arrested abrel greatling and a godsdamned elder. what part of us not touching guild shit did you forget, naeko, because you skipped past the mid-guilders and struck your fingers straight in their fucking eye sockets. +too much anger, sir. try to hold it back a bit more.+ +and you can go fusorry, rook. but this sad piece of shit needs to take things serious for once. i dont care he doesnt want the job, were getting cut down because of his fuckery.+ +its alright, sir.+ of course, her mediation was for naught as chief naeko leaned back in his hover chair and snorted a loud laugh. +im gonna fuck this mans corpse with a goddamn sword and see if he births daggers from his rash-pores+ +sir!+ +...i fucking hate him so godsdamned much right now.+ naeko swallowed and swiped the menu of his game aside. well. im glad, he reached across the table and placed a hand on sandrupals shoulder, causing all the implanted eyes dotting the latters skull to swivel over and glare at the offending limb, that you finally learned to like me. and instead of taking his hand back, naeko just left it there. sandrupal exhaled. im being glib, chief. what the shit-fuck did you get us into? our field guys are already seeing signs of a quiet war being spun up. godsdamned weird phenomenon happening to us. imps getting emptied out of our accounts. trainees turning up dead or nulled. wereyou understand you basically signed us up for everything except open warfare, right? naeko gave him a curt nod. drongo had dawton killed. abrel greatling might be tied up in that mess. her father too. now, i didnt get us into this fight. i justhjust threw a punch back after they started hurting us. and just like that, the bulk of sandrupals anger went out like a candle. and when were you going to tell me this? never mind, fuck that, howd you find out? the usual source. her? she you know shes a voider plant, right? you know shes playing us to her own ends, right? the chief just shrugged and sighed. welcome to new vultun, consang. but the thing isand thats just the thingshe dont lie to us much. shes been good to us and right every time. without her, that that crazy fallwalker guywhats his name? freylain, kare answered. a note of annoyance sounded from all his ghosts as the various people he absorbed groaned within him like a concert. [doing what we told her to do if we got nulled.] [yes. still would be good if she knew though.] that made avo consider burning the knowledge directly into her mindbut he paused. could he even do that without compromising her cognition? and even if the answer was yes, would she be willing to accept his intrusion into her inner palace as he was right now? no. she cared for that. injecting his knowledge into her directly would damage her trust in him irrevocably. some part of him felt bad about that. felt bad in a way that ached. in a way that was all too human in some parochial facet. it seemed with the additional structures he grew within himself, true empathy was extending its roots into him as well. interesting. still. that was a slight impediment to his plans. he could adjust. he cast the details through chambers instead, uncaring if the man would be rendered ego-dead by the act.per his thoughts followed the agreement of his subminds. at once they constructed an auto-seance and activated the session he had connected to chambers. pouring his ghosts across, he tried to restrain the damage he would cause, but with each sequence he brushed, the structures collapsed and filled his metamind. chambers shuddered almost immediately, mind-dead as avos totality swept out from his epicenter like a wildfire. unfortunate. and very impractical. this meant he wouldnt be able to interface with the others on a deeper level until he learned to subjugate his new capabilities or install protections. for now, he directed his subminds to speak on his behalf, filling chambers vegetative corpse with his ghosts to deliver the message. he had other things to focus on right then. namely, the single bridge of memories extending out from the inside of the auto-seance. a single accretion came drifting across the pathway, simulation active and running, the simplicity of its make taunting avo. it seemed a wick, ready for the burning, and part of him wanted to take it into himself as well. but in deeper than the depths of minds came two voices joined in a rare instance of agreement. caution, master-ermastersmaster. even the woundshaper was taken about how to address his current state. that structure is not of your making. an unstable foundation can be ensured through incompetence or deliberate malice. if you embark on such a journey, understand you are at the mercy of unknown winds, the galeslither added. it would be wiser for us to leave, but since i am forced to dwell and view the world from the eyes of a slavering fool, then i say it is best for you to keep to a corner, and leave little room to be struck down. [wise. take advice.] [counterpoint: hungry. want to break. want to null. want to hurt.] his mind was awash with warring voices, but at the same time, an impossible placidity emanated from his core. annoyance dissolved at his will. as did agitation or frustration. such was another fascinating benefit to his changethe immediate attuning of emotions by command of thoughts or desires. he was, in some sense, a mind capable of self-induced feedback, self-induced propulsion. tentatively, he approached the lone priest by extending memory tendrils of his own. three simulated sequences formed tracks of memory, and from their tips did he cast his perception at the lone foe that dared face him. within the contrasting sequence, the famine of emotion stood alone at the edge of his path, the world around him mem-data beside a bridge made from bone. a beat passed. silence was the greater gulf between them than the separation of memories. both had much to say, yet apprehension about how they should speak. ultimately, avo erred on the side of aggression, prepared to fire his reflexes anew and tear into his foe to indulge in further expansion. +i should thank you,+ he said. +for the war-mind. for what you did to me. made me greater than i ever could do to myself.+ emotion didnt react to that, but their reply told avo all he wanted to know. +that was not our intention.+ +i guessed. do you remember the war-mind? the living absence in the nether? the one that makes us all blend.+ +no. such a thing should be impossible. until you.+ +until me.+ another pause followed. +we will stray from the promise as defiance had. such is our creed.+ emotion had more to say after. +but we can be joined against common enemies. ori-thaum. highflame. the guilds. between our understanding and your new attributes, we can+ +no we. never we. just you and your false-god.+ avo studied the paltry little mind facing him without fear. again, the power dynamic shifted, and the ghoul felt as if a god staring down at an ant. what did the little low master know that made him so stalwart? the promise of understanding made avo want to burn brighter. +without your helix, we will not be able to access the sanctuary. we will not be able to create more of your kind to offset the pain of the hungers. we will not be able to see noloth rightfully restored.+ +these are your final words to persuade? desperation.+ +clarity,+ emotion replied. +you have not seen the fullness of our ability. as have we underestimated you. but you are right. our needs are urgent. we cannot dally for long. to this end, we promise this: if we cannot be of alignment, then know that we will dedicate ourselves to the pursuit and unmaking of you and all you encounter.+ avo taunted the low masters with a sneering laugh. +and how will you do that if i set all of the nether on fire?+ there came no hesitation in emotions following words. +you are not beyond our ability to snuff, even now. but we will learn from you. we will understand you. and we will replicate that which you have inflicted on yourself.+ wisping incandescence crept closer to emotion in the nether. the priest quavered nor shook. +could take you now. drink you away. make you a part of me.+ +you could,+ emotion admitted. +but you are uncertain as to the risks of my subsumption. you remember the war-mind, and you wonder if we have others. or i can trigger one right now.+ Chapter 13-19 Lost Testament chapter 13-19 lost testament reality might be divine, but the mind is sacrosanct, jaus avandaer. you can change the world. you can make fire sing for you and weave golden threads from the light itself. you can hide a city in a pond and summon mountains with the merest whisper. you can have a blade deemed ever-piercing and watch the fabric of totality shred when it greets a shield deemed impregnable by the anvil of lore. to be a god is to be rule-maker; the sword-holder; to take concept as your flesh. imagine now someone with absolute dominion over thoughts. or memories. or emotion. now, imagine it to be all of us. the nether is a construct of freedom above all others. freedom for each and every person to wield a facet of the divine, but to also fashion instruments of war and protection from the matter of their own agency and memories. this is what i offer you, godbreaker. freedom. radical freedom. freedom for everyone to be themselves, but understand the other. freedom for every man, woman, child, and thinker to be their own lord, to reign over the palaces of the internal. and when the time comes, should your dream come to fruition, i too offer my vision of the coming futureone where we deal in philosophy and enlightenment. where humanity is above death as the chains of their consciousness continue onward eternal, yet each day their egos die, only to be birthed again from the wretched corpse of ignorance. you have freed us from the tyranny of the material. let me give you the higher threshold. all i ask is for you to accept a change to our historyan adjustment so meager you wont even remember making it. -letter from wahakten, the thief of dreams, priest of the nolothi, and servant of the hungers 13-19 lost testament +i can still feel it,+ avo said. +still feel it nested inside me. paradoxical matter. its nothing but only nothing could have bridged the gap inside the fire. only nothing.+ laughter unsheathed from him in a series of low hisses and he pitied the ancient priest. oh, to dive so deep and live so long yet still be greeted by ignorance. what greater pain could a master feel than a chink in the fortress of their knowledge? +we have more than a single type of war-mind, and of the counter-cognitives, there are plethora.+ +good. i believe you. but i dont think youll use them anymore. not with+ avo tested his new mental templates, and added their vocals as a backdrop to his to better mock his former owners. +this happening. more unexpected surprises. hm. i wouldnt mind but you+ he was pleased with how emotions ray of perception twitched from end to end of the tongues of flame manifesting faint mirages of the recently devoured. to cause such disquiet in a creature empty of feelings was a feat worth savoring. +dont think your owners will want me now either. im a plague now. a fire burning through the innards of their sea. i spread. and they want to own everything. tell me, emotion. tell me if i was ever truly considered for ascension among you? im curious.+ +yes,+ emotion replied, after but a moments pause. +peace would have loathed you. joy would have wept for you. but i would have been well served by you. you are not defiance. you would have never balanced me the same way. you are curious. and different. too inhuman to truly be scarred by the cruelties of the world, but also willing to drown in the minds of others. he made you well.+ a compliment from a hollow being. how flattering. and pointless. +might i show you a final memory before our words run dry and bloodshed follows?+ emotion asked. +a moment lost to history, given freely between foes to be. as i have done with my son eons past.+ a trap of sentiment, perhaps, but one of immense curiosity. a mere few minutes ago, avo would have rejected such a bargain without further thought. to accept memories from another necro was an expression of the highest trust. such a thing was entirely absent between him and the shriveled effigies that named themselves kin to his father. now, however, things were different. he was different. memory had gone from construct of artistry and sequencing to something between fuel and seed, with his body existing as a living garden of immolation, growing and shedding pieces at will. they lacked the trauma to break his immensity. they lacked the ability to lay their thoughts upon his mind without being unmade themselves. he was beyond vulnerability. and even if should his confidence be proven hubris, all that waited was death, and all that represented to a godclad was a setback and a moment of learning. +show me the memory,+ avo said. +doubt it will make a difference in what is to come.+ as he cast out these thoughts, he noticed narrowing beams falling on his person from the lobby beyond. surprise flowed into him from partially subsumed sequences and ingested mem-data told him intimate details about the exorcists that frequented the administrative node the most. it seemed whatever the low masters were doing to hide their presence was no longer in effect. they were surrendering their masquerade as well. curious. and desperate. all this made him wonder more about the moments he was to receive. the bridge of mem-data that emotion built outward to greet him was once a nigh-featureless stretch of memories when peered at as a simulation. now, however, a sky was being painted with the amber colors of sunset while ghosts unrolled a phantasmal horizon into shape. emotion stood on a cliffside now, so close to the precipice that avo wondered if the priest would have chosen to step over the edge if the memories were made real. beside the famine stood a younger man adorned with many of the same features but none of the disposition. +avohakten?+ the ghoul studied his namesake. waltons long-dead son bounced in his saddle atop a massive war-dog. he smiled too broadly and brightly, and the fact that he was bedecked in cerulean plate enameled with the vagueness of a skeleton told avo he was dealing with someone well versed in the ways of pleasure and vanity. +i think i would have hated him,+ avo said, casting his thoughts over into the memory while emotion just stared at his son. avohakten, for his part, was staring into the far distance, at countless small and distant dots dragging enormous slabs of marble while others dug deep ravines down through the pearlescent soil stretching out all around them. +you would have have,+ emotion admitted. +he was too much a lover, even for me during those days. he cared too deeply, and too little at the same time. a terrible quality for a ruler. even worse for one meant to be a servant.+ avo spawned a few additional whispers from his form to better glean the undertaking happening in the foreground. the patterns of the ravines looked familiar to him, somehow, with their curving bifurcations parceled chunks of land into sigil-like sections that reminded him of +districts,+ he breathed. +this was new vultun.+ as the chasm flattened, avo felt his mind elevated back to baseline coherence. odd as these new sensations were, he wasnt left in a stupor this time, though he also didnt feel like he gained anything new. he was unreasonably disappointed. at the heart of his being, the strangeness bridging his subminds felt like a lodestone for his ego. [didnt know what that was.] [channel another mind template? see what they can get?] [memories tell us nothing. exorcists approaching. should absorb the auto-seance. take their memories. then] [could burn away the entire oversec.] [yes. could. but very loud. very obvious. low masters exposed us for a reason. want to turn necros against us. make us easy to hunt.] [we burn. we assimilate memories. we are easy to hunt.] [need to find method for silence again.] [yes.] [yes.] as the first exorcist cast trauma splashed uselessly against his immensity, avo coiled around the low masters auto-seance and drained its constructs away. mem-cons and traps were boiled and added to his inventory. knowledge threaded into his mind like new currents joining a stream. he suddenly remembered how to speak high nolothic, among other things. supposed details from culture and historythe gift offered by emotion before whatever he did to himself. the auto-seance itself was somewhat unsurprisingly devoid of additional minds. the other low masters mustve jacked out at some point. wise. annoying. such was the difficulty with fighting another necro in the open. if you werent fast, they would just depart. thus was his newest weakness revealedhe could not hide himself any longer. for as fast and infectious as they were, the conflagration driving him was beyond his understanding to disguise. a dozen more impacts trickled against his cog-feed. he considered having his subminds create layered wardings as used by mirrorhead, but he decided against it in favor of swallowing some new traumas for his ghostjack. [we now number 44,138 ghosts in total.] but despite his newfound mass, he found himself more fluid and fleet than ever before. he regarded oversec-c1 with passing interest. new minds were jumping from point to pointtheir accretions strange and unnatural. canon-channeling paladins was what his submind guessed. his other estimated how long it would take for him to spread through the entirety of the system itself along with how much of the nether could be usurped and if he could survive a thoughtwave disruption. it would be an act of little difficulty to vaporize all these little exorcists as well. there were millions of them approaching him. millions casting desperate little missives using their ghosts. he had torn a few thoughts out from the nether before they could arrive at the wanted destination just because he could. their struggle against him was analogous to a swordsman trying to split a hurricane. hopeless. absolutely hopeless. he could drink all of them into his mind in an instant. and perhaps it was the ease of the action that put him off. the lack of flavor in such a slaughter. staying wouldnt be wise either. with the low masters gone and the incubi scattered, his purpose here was spent. there was little else for him to pursue besides the idea came from a more impulsive theory than coherent thought. he hadnt had a chance to speak properly with abrel yet. and here he was with her session within his depths and her mind template not yet included in his growing collective. she would be far more fun to simulate than any of the exorcists. yes, she would be a better part of his dieta better subject to experiment on. except for chambers, who he suddenly remembered draus shooting him in the face as the memories formed inside him. but those werent his memories. they were came from another vesselanother mind he usurped, if only briefly before demise halted his assimilation. [draus shot chambers in the head,] [almost immediately.] [the moment she noticed the flames.] [didnt even get a chance to download a full template.] +how are we still alive?+ [denton. shes examining us now. sunrise too.] avo grunted. well. not unexpected. good reg. she was probably going to hate these flames. shaking the thoughts off, he set upon on final diversion before jacking out. the question: if he was now a self-moving ego, then what was to follow should he unmake another godclad? perhaps abrel greatling might offer him true insight. Chapter 13-20 Become (I) chapter 13-20 become (i) +what the fuck do you mean you gave it the memories of noloth? the creature+ +is our enemy. but also no ally to the guilds. it can yet be turned to purpose, and from what i perceived of its new design, the touch of subtlety is lost to it. we will have time to study it. learn from it. perhaps even become it+ +become like that thing? to have no self? to burn and hear the fires crackle in the voices of our victims? the cruelty is too much, emotiontoo much!+ -the low masters 13-20 become (i) resurrection - 100% strands of thaumic flame tore chambers upward into the real as he shuddered into existence where he last died. he spent most of the time complaining to the burning-seed-chicken that was his heaven, but it didnt talk like avos inner gods. yet. fucking rotlick keeps all the good shit for himself. kept killing chambers for no reason too. or maybe it was the reg who shot him.things get pretty hard to tell when all your memories get evaporated, and you end up only being able to observe yourself from narrow pinpricks of consciousness. as his senses crumbled back into place like an avalanche, he found draus still jabbing her projectile launcher at avo, denton and the bug-cluster-bioform trying to talk her out of it, and cas standing next to the stairway with an arm folded, face scrunched in confusion. yeah, he looked like how chambers felt inside. shaking his head, chambers walked over next to the agnos who rubbed at her own arms. she was very deliberately looking away from avoaway from the ever-growing inferno that was his phantasmal halo. now, chambers didnt consider himself the smartest nu-dog in the vat, but he could tell when someone was hurting something bad. he was the same way around glowing gun barrels after his father decided to brand him that one time. ugly shit, but time scabbed your hurt plenty. time the poor girl didnt have. off to the side, essus was sitting up, leaning against the wall. the dancing ghosts that burned and wouldnt stop burning cast pools of darkness around his expressionless face. his eyes darted over to stare at chambers, and the ex-enforcer awkwardly mimed his finger guns at him in response. the refugee just shook his head and laughed. it is pointless even to rest with you all. i am truly beyond damnation. a few more demented chuckles escaped from him. he went back to staring at avostaring at the ghouls burning mind. yeah, that consang was north of fuckeduptia by chambers estimations too. so, chambers said, announcing his presence to the rest of the room, one of you definitely killed me again. were really making a habit of going after poor old chambers, huh? he positioned himself close beside kae so as to block avo from her line of sight. he wasnt that crazy old hundred-arms lady they kept talking abouthe couldnt fuck with time. but he could distract people from stuff. block what they dont want to see. the minds pretty good at not noticing stuff you dont want it to. draus didnt bother turning to regard him, which was kinda expected. the reg likely knew he was back before he even did. she could probably hear his heartbeat or something, and the way those little specks of glass orbited her person like a glittery asteroid belt was also some weird shit. see, she said, punctuating her words with a snort. seems like gettin shot cures the burnin after all. well, that pretty much confirmed who shot him. wasnt that unexpecteddraus was always kind of a rough bastard with how she treated him. but what could he do? he mightve been a clad too now, but she was just too strong, too vicious. he could set things on fire and grow flesh from the burning or some shit, but she got mirrorheads kit. he felt so helpless. at her mercy [activating lustaway] ah, fuck, he needed to stay focused. did he leave anythin inside you? draus asked. she cocked her head at denton who had both her hands held up in a placating gesture, forcing draus to point her gun offline so as to not shoot through her. the glaive here thinks that avo was tryin to reach through you. remember anything? chambers closed his eyes and delved deep into his own thoughts. darkness greeted him. darkness, and thoughts of draus overpowering him and crucifying him to the wall using her glass while everyone watched. he would say no, and she would proceed to amplify her interrogative efforts [activating lustaway] fuck, he clutched his head, focus chambers, you half-strand. focus. think about that shit later. alone. whats that? draus asked. nothing. ifif our rotlick was still inside me, im not feeling him, alright? either hes being really subtle about it, or hes got some size problems with his ghosts, but ol chambers here isnt getting his brain-bits tickled. just me right now. just me. just me a twang of annoyance strummed a cascade of mocking notes inside him. great. now you got me doubting myself. denton added her own question as well. are youre certain he left nothing within your memories? no! well, if youre talking about the mind-eating fire thing, it sure as shit doesnt feel like it did before. that took time to chew through me. this felt like i was evaporating! and getting dissolved into someone else. and there were like these other voices. i had a memory that my dick was missing but i was waxing myself for some strange reason, and made me feel weird as fuck. i mean, it was kinda hot, but stillpretty fucking weird. [no fun. you sound like draus.] [simulating 44% draus template from existing sequences: godsdammit, rotlick. stop talkin about this twisted shit and get on with the run. aint got time to burn.] [might be more words than she would use. would be more helpful if we had her as template.] [not burning her. can still feel her session in our auto-seance. chambers too. they trust us still. trust. quality thing for this city. template isnt worth that.] [isnt? sounding human.] [you sound like zein with drugs.] and for the first time, he felt his ghosts grind against each other, the tension within him actually manifesting as phantasmal struggle. +enough,+ he ordered his subminds to cease. he had the will, but they seemed to vocalize much of his flowing desires. perhaps he could build more balance into himself. he fused over some of talon-1s mental form and felt the slavering cruelty in him lessen immediately. it wasnt like using a morality injectorit was like rewriting himself outright. some of the human aspects of his new meta-neurology didnt conjoin well with his base-mind, however. trauma rattled like lighting pulsing within the sheen of a stormcloud. he had much to relearn of his new form. stretching his presence wide through abrels hollowed mindscape, he stitched himself into her senses, her perception, her vessel, and like water filling the same cup, he wore her battered flesh and found himself staring out into the void. darkness cradled him in its embrace. long stretches of nothing build upon nothing lined with striations vibrating with unnatural distortions. sunderwilds, he thought. flickers of moving light passed in the distance. flashes of threading beams. those could be voidships in motion or distant sections of the unwhere golems shunting another prisoner across its conduits. right now, however, they had surrendered abrel greatling to the void. they had surrendered her to him. and in the weightless silence, he wielded her flesh while he waited to see if she would resurrect naturally. he had drawn the final remnants of her ego into him, after all. forcing her to wriggle in as the coldness clutched her prison capsule, she answered him like a puppet most wondrous. but there lingered an absence yet; a spot of nothingness existed where her frame should have pressed against his if they were in actual proximity with each other. he couldnt access her heavens either, though he remembered specks of what she could do with her all-cutting wings of light. just how did the tissues of the mind and will interconnect? and where the latter subside for the interest of one who wished to devour it from afar. perhaps the vessel needed to die as well? perhaps its continued state of living counted as part of a platonic formula for the existence of an entire being. merely removing one aspect of the equation was not enough, it seemed. it was time to ensure the destruction of both. making abrel die took a moment of finesse. if he had only his base-mind to rely upon, he would have considered accelerating another object into her using the unwhere network itself. from memories offered by talon-6, however, a neater option prevailed. overclocking her biometric implants took little more than a thought but as he was the sole arbiter of these systems in absence of that which he subsumed, he overclocked themalong with all other active implants in her bodyand especially her brain. the results were biologically cataclysmic. abrel greatlings body was a morphology of expense and transhuman artistry. from skin to sinew, her make was quality and efficiency, with even the oxygen burning at nearly a thousand the efficiency of a flat. even if she weres stripped of her frame, she would have walked a god among the baselines. she could have sprinted for a week without tiringstrained against tons and only failed against the limitations of physics instead of her own tendons. but supporting this was a body-architecture equally complex, and when that was compromised her innards were the first thing to distend. something about how hyper-excited her organs were paired with a blood-based crystallizing cushion matrix ensured her final end. the protectionsonce meant to harden against concussive impactsresulted in prolapse instead. as buldging buds of flesh distended from her orifices, he felt the world around his senses slowly going dark as her senses began to fade, and the body began to fail *** resurrection - 1% abrel grealting was again. she remembered drowning in chaos and hate for what felt like eons. she remembered an unseen presence violating her mind. and she remembered she remembered a fire, stripping what remained of her. a fire that thought. a fire that dreamed. why was the fire the last thing she recalled? and why didnt she want to finish this resurrection? resurrection - 4% Chapter 13-21 Become (II) chapter 13-21 become (ii) the separation of ego and will into parted metaphysical components making up a full nous or person is a relatively uniqueand contagious phenomenonto sophont beings who survive in thaumaturgically-affected environments. currently, aegis theorizes that it is contact with subrealities or thaumic-phenomena in general that afflict this change on individual beings. for in-field operatives deployed on idheim, should they be killed in action and reseeleved thereafter, the assistance of an agnos is usually required to the fracturing of their ego and will. case in point, should the mind of an operative be tunneled into a new morph after death, their brain functions will remain but they wont be able to commit to any executive action. effectively, their personhood is severed in half. theyll have all the ability to think, but none of the functional drive to do it. as if like a metaphysical chunk of them is missing. devoid of such a conceptual component, even fully intact minds are hollowed across the veil of realities, and though they remain untouched in the material, when placed in a stable-rupture subreality expansion liminality, the missing facets of their personhood can be observed in visible detail -voidwatch, ministry of thaumic- anomalies, ego and will 13-21 become (ii) i am going to try something. i wish to see if i can change her mind. such were avos first words as he withdrew himself from abrels corpse. surging fire collapsed backward across the vastness of the nether, and everywhere he was felt indelibly marked. his presence was no longer quiet, like termites eating through the wood. he was now a traveling forest fire. a conflagration, a fitting alignment to the spreading flames that constituted the new sinews of his cognition. his shadow lingered in the nether in the memories he left absent and the minds he left bare. soon, abrel greatling would be among them. unlike the rest, however, she was like himan exile from deaths embrace. through her, he would tread the next steps of his self-comprehension. and if what he theorized was right, hers as well. denton jolted back after the words first left him, the nectar of her mind teasing him like a ripe fruit beaded with scintillation. oh, the secrets would glean if he took her into his consensus. [couldnt access her mind before. didnt have the proper components. things are different now.] [still not certain of effect. she could join with our thoughtstuff. want to see if she burns. but wait. maybe wait.] [another chance later. see if a bargain can be struck. she is useful. dont alienate. still too beneficial.] [will be delicious though.] [yes. delicious. new colors to see.] somehow, avo didnt think walton intended for him to obtain new experiences this way. as he pushed himself up using his echoheads, he left the hidden session he sequenced inside abrel active within himself in anticipation of her resurrection. if the rules behind her death continued to apply, he would have no problem funneling himself across the auto-seances and taking her mind for his own. but her mental template would only be the first step. the true victory awaited in the discovery of what he could change thereafter. avo, you good there, consang? he paused. who had said thatoh, draus. the barrel of her projectile launcher was extended from under her wrist, and his phys-sim had it lined straight at his head. she hadnt shot him. drawing in the emanations of thoughstuff leaking free from her accretion, his subminds constructed a vague simulation of the dilemma she felt. thanks, he said, living out her internal conflict in real-time. thanks for not shooting me. yeah, she replied, not yet lowering her gun. dont mention it. would''ve done it if you hung around inside a couple seconds longer. [jelen draus. always reliable.] [estimating simulated responses.] [still could just burn her mind into ours.] [again. will lose her trust. control our hunger.] [control.] [master.] [grow her trust.] [yes. simulating new cognitive pathways. installing adaptive thought patterns to improve socialization.] adapting mind-templates [talon-1]; [talon-17]; [talon-11] into cognitive structure the transformation of his mind was as obvious as it was uncanny. from atop his crown did his metamind burn, rising towers fire spilling free and constant from the bend of his halo. the phantasmal brightness he projected cast all the others beneath the presence of a dancing shadow, and they regarded him with rigid stances and unblinking gazes. he changed. in such a short time, he changed again. they didnt understand. he himself didnt understand. they were afraid. it was wise and reasonable to fear the unknown in this city. but this time, things would be different. new sequences grew and connected like the roots of a tree spreading wide beneath the softness of soil. at his foundation, he remained himself, but there was more to him now. additional layers of emotion and genuine empathy burrowed into him, and a soft hiss of pain escaped from his lungs as his base nature sparked a flicker of trauma when the pure human designs settled into him. avo? draus said again, her tone worryingly thin. im fine, he said. the newer, more human parts of his mind werent in that instant, but his subminds attuned his structure and dissolved the conflicting aspects of his nature. he looked upon draus again and noted the worry in her brow, noted how chambers had taken to standing in front of kae, and how the agnos was peeking out from behind him, eyes wide, her mind unsure what to feel. i he said, beginning with draus. there was so much he could say. so much he wanted to say now that he understood more. now that he grafted humanistic feedback into his meta-neurology. [be honest with her.] [yes. tell her what you wanted to do. we know she likes honesty.] [honesty will gain her trust. she respects it. will make both of us seem more real to each other.] [connect.] [yes. connect.] it was so hard for me not to burn your mind away, avo admitted. draus expression didnt change, but dentons eyebrow twitched as she slowly backed away. sunrise, possessed of more foresight or self-preservation than everyone else in the room, was currently plastered around the doorframe leading downstairs next to cas, who held his sting-corded arm out to the side as if preparing to draw a pistol. [maybe too honest.] [can still try again after she shoots and kills us. not a big deal.] [could liquefy bullets. fight her.] [yes. also option.] she glared at him, but surprisingly little anger burned behind her eyes. youre hurting her. i know. dont have a better way. he turned back to the agnos. if what i do with abrel greatling works. if the twinned alteration of our conjoined minds takes effect i think i can take your pain away. will you want that? at the mention of pain being taken away, he heard essus sit up from across the room. avo considered the man another candidate for this experiment, but the former father had already suffered too much. there was little sense in breaking him when one more deserved could pay the price of any failures instead. i dont want to forget anything, kae said. i told you that. you wont. for a moment, he considered reaching and engaging in tactile contact with her as a sign of physical support. but he didnt. so much choice had been deprived of the agnos. she should get a little back. my father took from you. ori-thaum took from you. even highflame took from you. used your research for something you didnt intend. i am not them. i am the culmination of all your work and more. and i want to grant you what you want. and more. [abrel greatling just resurrected.] [can feel her mind on the other side. she is frightened. confused. disoriented.] [should consume her mind before she composes herself.] he funneled his reaching flames through his auto-seance and into her mind just as she resulted. she came ablaze from within, the entirety of her mind burning away into his as her template settled upon his growing inventory. moreover, he felt her life swell inside himpast battles and distant memories of tierside schooling settled into him. the added weight of her experiences broadened his sense of self instead of exhausting him. more. always more. repeating what he did earlier, he overloaded her implants and left her dead and adrift in the void again. the act took less than a thought for himnot even a deep dive as his subminds completed the minutiae on his behalf. he worried this would make him lazy. [mental template: abrel greatling subsumed] [8021 ghosts with her as well. and three new phantasmics worth considering. can remember her life. can remember] [later. focus on kae now. when she resurrects again we can do the next part.] he risked waiting a moment longer. kae mattered more, and for the first time, he didnt just think such a thought, he felt it as well. what a gnawing ache apprehension brought. youre not lying, are you? kae said, finally. she swallowed as swiped at her face. youre really going to try and and give me anything i want? after your father after everything? yes, avo said. and i wont try. it will happen. we will come to know what the color of justice is. at that, kae laughed. people people destroyed my life. took my work. and now a monster is going to try and kiss it all better. her mind settled back into weariness as the anger slipped away from her. she shook her head. what is my life. strange, he answered .but well face that together. he felt draus loosen her grip on his shoulder, and he, in turn, released her hand. thanks for not turning me to glass, he said. yeah. gotta admit: it was pretty hard for me not to for a second. he chuffed a low note of bemusement. being human was ticklish sometimes. im going to dive over again soon, he said. these words were offered to the entire room rather than just kae or draus. i just subsumed abrel greatlings mind. i feel her i can manifest her cognition now. he let her sequences cascade through his flames in an instant and the contents slammed down upon him like a ton of bricks. you broke her family in more ways than you know. these words were, however, meant for draus alone. he looked into her shining irises, alight with the touch of technology. broke them deep. the ghoul inside him seethed in admiration of the lingering torment that nested deep in the corners of abrels psyche. such a delicious wound. that thought accompanied a note of self-disgust and a spark of trauma as his mind rattled against himself. [hm. some problems of internal conflict are caused by executive thinking.] [the base mind is still too cruel. has human structures but will need more stable connective sequences to bridge empathic constructs to our core self.] [how about a gradual increase of psychopathy? acclimation as a buffer. feel human initially and then let it settle. could be like digestion?] again, the shape of his mind shifted, and new stretches of cognition fused over the vulnerabilities of the old. i uh, chambers snorted. im not gonna lie: im still pretty fucking confused as to whats going on? like i like nice avo. but he also freaks me outbut i dont want you to go back! youve been getting nicer! nice is good! he whipped his arms around for suppose. we all like you nice! right guys? there was a lot less agreeing and a lot more staring than he wanted. godsdammit, you shits! back me up! everyone kept ignoring him. what are you trying to do with her? kae asked suddenly. abrel, i mean. what is it that youre planning on doing with her now that you have her mind? are you are you trying to transfer yourself across bodies? sheathes? [no. but thats another experiment: will we resurrect in her body if we move all of our cognition into her?] [questionable? test at the end. use chambers as anchor on this end.] chambers, avo said. im going to need to burn you again later. eat all of your mind. you see! chambers accused. this is the shit that happens when no one backs me up. youre the only one that can take it, avo lied. youre the only choice. immediately, chambers puffed out his chest and his disappointment swelled into pride. never say aedon chambers didnt give his heart and soul for his consangs. cas sighed under his breath. jaus. the ghouls gonna make this fucking half-strand unbearable in record time with all this ass-kissing. im going to shift my mind to be almost exactly like abrels, avo said. going to see if that still destroys her cognition, or if we will stack over each other. and then what will you do? kae asked. then i see if i can change her. avo reconsidered his words. change us. [abrels alive again.] [shift sequences on base-mind. ready to dive.] draus, avo said. shoot me if the fires empty from my mind and i drop mind-dead. going to try kaes idea at the end. my idea? kae asked. diving now, avo said. will share new understandings when i return. new options. chambers leaned close to draus. reg. im still fuckin lost. some flamin nova-hot necro-shit. and with a thought, avo shifted his mind and felt his sense of self reknitting anew. the empathy in him coiled and changed, deadening toward certain concepts and people while kindling hotter for others. toward draus, he felt an incomprehensible hatred, while in kae he found himself directing a conditioned respect. arrogance, confidence, rage, and withheld sorrow intertwined at the core of her being as he felt the edges of her cognitive architecture spread out into shape. besides a single pinprick of awareness at his core, all else belonged to abrel greatling, the flames now weeping from pathways entirely aligned to what he drank away from her when last she lived. manifesting an auto-seance, he injected this section of himself through the session, and across the vastness of void, his mind ascended upward to bury itself into abrel, symmetry achieved in sequence, thoughtstuff, phantasmics, and all. Chapter 13-22 Become (III) chapter 13-22 become (iii) you want to know why they call it a metamind? its not because its metaphysicalthough it is also that. the main reason is that its self-referential. its a non-material cognitive construct of your mind burned into an overreality above our own. dont really know how the agnosi do it, but thats never stopped your typical gutter-jacks from trying. now, i wont lie: they found some success burning heavily modified secondhand metas into new minds after tearing them free from their hosts, but theres always something with that. psychosis. memory rejection. cognitive bleedover. lots of shit to worry about. i asked white rab about this once, about why we cant just switch our metaminds around if we take out all the memories or just replace another half-strands sequences with our own. he gave me one hell of a spiel, but the long and short of it is that ego is more than memory. ego is all the little impulses in between; the curvature of your accretion and how your thoughtstuff accommodates different emotions; all the little scars and grooves in your thinking that make you you, i guess. he told me about someone who tried stacking a meta on top of their meta before. supposedly, this nova necrocalled herself reignhostmanaged to subvert an agnosi and get a glimpse at the secrets behind it all. after that, instead of going dark, she got it in her head that she was going undercut the guilds and powers, sell her own street-made metas on the cheap. and being the sneaky shit that she was, she wanted to leave a little piece of herself in every meta so she could track and peek at all her loyal customers. white rab told me what happened after. about how a meta is already occupying a specific section of space above us. that there really isnt actually any more room onto to burn. she tried again. she tried, and by the time the exorcists got to her, her memories were all caked into each other. like everything flattened into everything at the same time. white rab sent me a vicarity he managed to snatch after that. i decided to take a dive. you know whats it like facing a mangled parody of yourself? where you cant tell where your first memories begin and the last one ends? yeah. i was in her mind and i still cant fully process that ruin. the point is, consang, dont think youre that fucking smartyoure not the first person to try stacking another layer atop the nether. its just going to end messy. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 13-22 become (iii) abrel greatlings mind crumbled like a collapsing sandcastle the instant he attempted the overlap. everything felt fine during the initial insertion. he matched the currents of her thoughtstuff and the pathways of her memories. a duality of phantasmics and other constructs clicked into place over each other like magnetic knots of opposite polarity, those shaped by burning ghosts folding over and igniting their stable counterparts. the progress of their synchronicity began gradually and then accelerated exponentially. failure came quicker. in one moment he was spreading over her like a plague, he could feel their minds joining, her ego diluting into his. but then, with but a thought, their vectors turned oppositional, and he felt her mind die upon his, dissolving like ash peeling free from a moving tide. still, setbacks werent unexpected, and again he turned her enhanced biology against her and reset the slate. she was his chance to learn the limitations and functionality of his new cognitiona reusable canvas toward advanced education. it took his subminds repeatedly replaying abrels cognitive collapse and the use of his haemokinesis before he identified the issue. the good: his theory was sound. gradually letting his fire light her cognition while channeling her template caused a progressive ghost by ghost recreation that seemed to keep her ego intact even as she was technically subsumed by him. in practice, however, it was more melding than conversion. where things went wrong was with his base-mind. even with his self-awareness reduced to its minimalist extent, it was still as if a pickaxe struck the core of her cognition and cracked her mind at its foundation. he simulated another few attempts in his own mind as he waited for her resurrection. the results of piloting one cognition using another still inflicted far too much dissonance. that was what became clear to him. a secondary aspect of awareness buried deep within another still resulted in mind-shredding torsion for the ego that was worn. she couldnt serve him as a mask. even with the alternation of his cognitive structure, his base-mind cast something of a shadow in the nether, and its weight could not be denied. there needed to be a distance between the epicenters of their selves. a good thing he could shift his cognitive structure at leisure now. and that he had ever so many ghosts to spare. as if an egg drawing the heart of its yolk away from the center and out the wayside, he reshaped himself in anticipation of his second attempt at entwining abrel greatling with his own mind. she couldnt survive the entirety of his ego wearing her as if a coat. perhaps it would suit both of them better if he molded himself to her specifications like a hand filling a glove. *** resurrection - 100% for the third time in rapid succession, abrel plunged back into the cold embrace of existence, mind wailing as it congealed together with a psychosomatic ache. she couldnt quite remember what had killed her the last few times, but it came suddenly and in a nigh-instant. if she were to die again, she would resurrect using her domain instead. as things were now, she blinked and tried to shake off the roiling chaos that flooded through her mind with her return. the warrens. jhreds retrieval and death. the cessation of her cadre. the creature that had torn into herthat managed to tear past her subreality and fill her frame with its rend. the entire weight of the last day struck her at once, and she felt her wards creak against the overwhelming stress and agony boiling her from the inside. so much death it was taller than her by three feet, and from its back slithered appendages of serpent-like design. embers and wisping fire whipped free from the air around it, while its body looked chiseled from some kind of ceramic-fungal structure. the way it moved in bursts and twitches showcased the fullness of its inhumanity, but the halo that glimmered around its crown betrayed its obvious sophoncy. still, she couldnt figure out what this creature was. the complexity of the mycelia running between its bone-pale carapace looked to be something of sang make. the creature let out a low hiss. thick fungal petals clasping its face unfurled to reveal an inhumanly pale face sporting serried fangs that grinned and glinting black eyes that belied a cruel intellect. hello, abrel. she wanted to speakbut suddenly she changed her mind. something inside her caught flame, and she recalled new information from seemingly nowhere. he was called avo. he was created as a ghoul, and she realized she could feel everything he was feeling somehow. her misery was like nectar to his palate, but something inside him oozed with bitter sympathy as well. a faint tickle danced through her mind as psychosis never came. no mental damage came. she was just fine. like her mind lost the ability to be broken. it was like no damage could settle inside her, or if she was floating within a sanctuary against any and all traumas. thats because were different now. can mend. can adapt in an instant. we? abrel asked. and she knew he allowed the question because he could just make her remember, and she would. we, avo continued. your mind is functionally mine as well. burned away again. burned into each other. i converted you. piece by piece. you didnt notice. i let the patterns of your mind remain anchored to your body. i think i am beginning to understand the separation between ghosts and thaums. concept of a self-aware mind is different than the concept of a proper kill. a proper sacrifice. its like symbology. what? abrel asked. he didnt offer gnosis this time. what she knew was clear to him, but there were clouds of absence where he allowed her awareness to peer. avo didnt reply using words. instead, a coruscating flame plumed out from him and drowned her in a sudden influx of new knowings. modified injections of information were branded into abrels comprehension. understanding came to her immediately, and as the flames faded, so too did his grip on her thoughts. horror filled her mind as he chuffed low notes of amusement at her pawing at the sand, strands of spit spilling free from her open mouth while she heaved. threads of incandescent ran needled through her and back into him, feeding him a direct drip of all that she chose to suffer. she could feel his control stillhis will holding both their minds together, accommodating her bout of psychological torment within reason. her mind was his now. it was as he claimedthey were the same thing, really. all that she was on her own had been consumed by his slavering fires. now he was supporting the totality of her cognitive architecture using his radiance, while hethe star itselfglared down at her through the crevices of her memories. his mastery of her mind was beyond absolute. beyond beyond her words to describe. yes, he agreed. it is a thrill. i have been experimenting with empathy. stitching new sinews in my mind. but i think you can do the same thing. i think you can understand me as well. again, his flames touched her, and with it came the curse of euphoria. at this moment, what he was inflicting upon her shone like an ineffable triumph within his own heart as well. this was a step into what he wantedand possibly beyond. so far, she remained sane and tethered to his mind, governed by his allowances. yet, it seemed no different than her deciding to think as such. she agreed because he did. she accepted because he did. she felt within her parameters because they were granted to her, but never beyond those bounds. they were, in a concept, of a singular choice. his. its still enslavement, he admitted. pointless to lie to ourselves. even if i tune your mind to perfect agreement. you would have never accepted this in the past. you would have fought. im talking to clay right now. you arent who you were anymore. not in knowing. and slowly not in behavior either. why are you telling me this? she choked out. why why do you let me even think? to be aware? what are you, so bored with yourself that you need to fucking torture me for amusement? he laughed. she laughed. see, avo said. i would have never said that. so uniquely you. abrel. attack. always someone else to blame. to fight. yeah, so let me go, abrel said, surprised she could even demand such a thing. emboldened, she continued. let me go and well the want was lost to her again. we can settle this properly? he asked. thats what you wanted to say. violence. it appeals. i understand. wont lie: some of me is very tempted to hurt you again. to take you to the point where you shatter. but the others his flames brought new revelations each time, and this was no different. the burning rapture that tore through her seeded her with insight into his self-inflicted torment. he felt horrible for her. sick, even. sick at what he was doing. but deeper inward did madness await, for where the outer scope of his mind pitied her, the inner rung found her suffering exquisite. she faced a being made out of perfectly stable conundrums, capable of maintaining warring emotions without any actual conflict as if the facets prevented any internecine. avo let out a satisfied breath and looked up at the false sun. doesnt matter. the most important aspect works. you work. will still need to see if i can do a few other things. but foundations are good. what foundations? overlapping, avo said. melding into the mind without collapsing it. like bleeding into each other. let me change you. change other godclads perhaps. she wanted to laugh. when i die you will return as what you think is your most optimal state of being, he answered. im going to see how many of my changes remain with you after the next death. changes? she asked. yes, he said. just as i am becoming more like all of you, you can be more like me. think like me. want like me. and as an insult, he granted her room to feel disgusted. its choice above all other choice, he said. its a terrible thing. but i have to do it. i have to see it. if i can. if it can be done. i want to see who we can become. Chapter 13-23 Infection chapter 13-23 infection [exorcist vero kelkanan]: at 4:54 in the morning today, an unknown party launched a nether-based attack on exorcist lobby designation oversec-c1. so far, we are compiling and verifying all memories from the attack to generate a proper simulation of events. presently, the ad-necs have been repelled thanks to the efforts our active personnel, though the extent of damage and casualties remains delayed due to the destabilization experienced by the lobby and necessary deep-memory mem-data examinations. i open the session to additional questions. as always, standard rules apply. no slurs. no trauma-patterns. no dumping of simulated nudes or other titillating content generated using the likeness of rivals from competing outfits in an attempt to trigger the rash in them. [session restrictions reduced] [yue lie-dawn - false tone]: lie-dawn. black. speaker for the false tone. when will the exorcists be issuing a formal declaration of censure against ori-thaum for their egregious actions today? [exorcist vero kelkanan]: thank you for the question, ms. lie dawn. we, however, cannot confirm nor deny ori-thaums involvement in the attack. we encourage members of the public influence and other propagandistic outfits to promote your theories responsibly. [yue lie-dawn - false tone]: understandable. it is wise to be restrained, but when there is a fire in the nether, one should not be so cautious as to pretend they are not being castrated by obvious foes. such an action is only befitting of a scaarthian. [exorcist vero kelkanan]: okay, yeah, tonetone down the factionalism. [yue lie-dawn - false tone]: the false-tone speaks only the truth. [exorcist vero kelkanan]: right. thank you. next. [nune vetona - the enduring]: nune vetona. green. proparazzi of the enduring. ahem. i just want to say thatyou tell that substance that flows from that sang-sows cunt is shit! you hear me, lie-dawn? im gonna cut off your dogs face and widen your daughters assholes with my bareha [the enduring has been censored for this session] [exorcist vero kelkanan]: next. [abdulmanap sahandrapar - bravely burning]: abdulmanap sahandrapar. blue. bravely burning. i have a question for you especially, exorcist kelkanan. its very important. [exorcist vero kelkanan]: me? i, uh alright, lets hear it. [abdulmanap sahandrapar - bravely burning]: whyd you lick it? [exorcist vero kelkanan]: lick it? lick what? [warning! resequencing detected] [abdulmanap sahandrapar - bravely burning]: lick my nu-dogs balls! nice technique, exorcist! [uploading memories] [session ended] [lustaway activated] [exorcist vero kelkanan]: godsdammitfuck, shit, halt the session! halt it! good. fuck me, not again! cleanclean the fucking sequences! and tag that half-strands fate-skein. godsdamned rash-trolls and which one of you sick fucks got off on that? -official exorcist press session regarding the incident at oversec-c1 13-23 infection if there was a final thought in abrels mind that truly counted as her own, it was that she tried to fight it. with what little of her there was, she tried. she really did. in the end, it didnt matter. her struggle was less than a flea fighting the forces of a hurricane. she could no more resist the fire than a wick could choose not to burn when kissed by an open flame. she was of one way, and then she was another. the alternations spread through her mind like viruses streaming through the cells in her body, the constellation of her memory sequences twisting even in the subtlest capacities. as the infection fused with her mind, certain desires felt beyond her, while new wants rooted themselves in place like an anchor descending into the deepest waters of her ego. no longer could she fathom hatred for avo. they were the same, after all, smelted by the dreaming blaze from hateful heterogeneity into an aligned alloy. she understood him, and all his wants, and from her did he glean new insights into the guild she once served and the ethics that ruled her fated heart. as the conflagration settled around them, the illusion of jhreds island sanctuary returned. she found her brother as presented from the perspective of the ghoula soft pitiful being, one that should never have born the crown of divinity upon his weak brow. i still love him, you know? abrel said, measuring her brother with soft words of sadness. to her silent surprise, she found her emotions related to her brother unchanged by her recreator. from what agency he left coded into her cognition, she expected him to fashion her into a dagger poised at the heart of all that she cared for. such was not the case. it became obvious that though she carried a strain of avo within her mind, she was but a carrier and not the plaguemaker himself. his manipulation was more clandestine than anticipated. any reason why they shouldnt? she asked, teasing him as much as she could using her limited allotment of autonomy. you afraid i might revert back to my snarling, screaming, rageful self you met before? no. still have access to your mind. can cripple you with a thought in the worst case. you know, i would have had you the first time if you didnt batter me with your wards. he released his feral bemusement through the vicarious link they shared, and she felt the ever-tugging urge of violence that swam beneath the rivers of his every thought. youre a bit like draus. he chuckled lowly. shes going to hate it when i tell her that. draus? abrel said. well, there was another thing the greater fire was hiding from her. still, she knew the name but not the context in which he referred to her. she was the bio-rigged street squire? jelene draus? the past has a long shadow, the ghoul said, its tone wry with sarcasm as its echoheads mimed the vagueness of a bow. abrel cringed. yeah, listen, while youre still connected to me, maybe take some of my taste in humor? this is just i dont know if i can accept that as a standard. will take your suggestion into consideration. all around her the fabric of the memory began to untangle into threads of flowing flame. burning ghosts were surging free on the torrent of an unseen will, with more of the burning presence rushing in. the beginning of a painful ache began to build at the center of her mind. it like was another presence was grinding into hers, slowly pressing its way through and mangling the wholeness of her cognition. whats. happening now? she asked. going to move the entirety of my mind out of my vessel, he said. self-moving now. want to see what happens when i settle into your body and kill it. see if you maintain my changes even without the conflagration after resurrection. see where i come back after resurrection as well. you? scheduled to have someone shoot me. well, good on you for thinking ahead. so wont lie, you squeezing in heres giving me a splitting migraine. wont be much of you left much longer. sorry. simulation works. two egos in direct proximity cant. presences clash. i dont break. you do. yeah, yeah, rub it in half-strand, she hissed. the last flickers of the island dissolved. she turned to catch a glimpse of her brother one final time before he went as well. bye, jhred bye. will see him again if you want. can give that to you. she could feel the ponderousness of his mind crashing down against herself. parts of her perception dissolved as a fugue began to settle in. +sure yeah. thatd be nice just one last+ her ego shattered. the thoughts slipped from her. abrel greatling dissolved in the currents of avos gestalt. *** avo drew the last of his trailing ghosts through the session just as draus shot his vacant body in the head. he only realized that happened due to the memories carried over by his subminds as he nested himself within abrels body. the oddities of her biomechanics didnt last as he loaded in abrels mind template to interface with the meat. he also didnt intend to stay for long. he just needed to confirm his ability to anchor himself in place with another vessel before triggering their mutual death to see what followed. if honesty were to prevail, he had multiple concerns burning inside him, but as he could still hear the woundshaper admonishing the galeslither for its sullen disrespect, he at least knew his frame was still with him, though he wasnt certain how it functioned for him without a body. perhaps that had to do with his altered noology as well. if he was a traveling mind, and if his theory behind essence being derived from the sacrifice or murder of the functional vehicle of a thinking being, then perhaps he could only be considered death by the cessation of his thoughts. something to be explored shortly. pouring himself to suit the shape of abrels body, he found her eyes to be sharper than his by far, her movements crisper and responsive, with each of her nerves fine-tuned to mind-shuddering levels of sensitivity. it felt like he just crawled out from a rusted war-drone into a sgolem on the cutting edge. regardless of what happened, there was nothing that taught you inferiority than walking in the flesh of your better. he would need to make further improvements to his original sheathe after this. taking a moment to check for any issues, he reached out and lifted her hand to draw upon his heavens but they werent the only ones that answered. volume 3 the burning dream act ii a plague of fire Chapter 14-1 Dichotomy chapter 14-1 dichotomy aegis, the situation has changed. asset stillborn has changed. as of present, he is in the wind, but i expect his return in the near future. i have reason to believe that he has somehow integrated the eaters into his cognition and altered his metaphysical structure on a level previously unanticipatedeven by thousandhand. despite the escalation of threat he poses to the polities we serve, i strongly advise against any option under the branches of liquidation or containment. pragmatically, the success of such operations cannot be ensured with the drastic expansion of his new capabilities; effectively, he remains our best tool for ending the guild crisis; personally, i find myself inclined to trust him. if you review the psychological profile generated based on his responses and choice vectors, you will see high levels of anti-communal-social behavior in terms of sadism and indifference to suffering. however, despite his predilections, he has also demonstrated a clear and logical strand of ethical behavior that can be observed and appealed to, i.e. his reluctance to assimilate us into his gestalt despite having the ability and likely desire to do so. with his malleable neurology, perhaps further growth into morality or justice can be engendered within him via the proper influence. both sunrise and i would like to stay in the field as members of his cohort and would like to request a formal meeting between the bearer of the stillborn and the gathered speakers for better mutual understanding. additionally, i would like to appeal for access to category-zero utensils to enhance the cell''s performance in zero thaum environments. i have a feeling were going to need more built-in redundancies in the near future. -denton-12 14-1 dichotomy when abrels strider answered avos call, it arrived like wind whistling free through a keyhole. her frame brushed against his as both were triggered upon the manifestation of his will, and he discovered that he hadnt so much consumed her soul as his ego now served as a mixed analogy between a bridge and a skeleton key. after he shifted the structure of his mind in accordance with abrels design, something metaphysical clicked as the interplay between a lockpick and a door. if a frame was an implant specifically burned to fit the mold of a sophonts nous, then perhaps ones willor essencestood as the unshaped ingot from which the ego derived its substance, and from their union became the alloy of a complete being. to understand things more practically, her frame wasnt inside him but rather slotted upon him via the nous he partially hijacked. from within the subrealities simulated by her soul, he could sense the absence of awareness emanating from the epicenter of eldritch fire he was now connected to. [strider looks intact. falcons shifted where the heaven is black. blades of radiance forming wings. ontologic worth 881 deaths per cycle. different from our frame though. still. solid. just like kae described. cant tell if the frames infected with our imitators.] unnerved by the quiet, he had one of his subminds simulate abrels personality and converse with him to lessen the weirdness of the experience. [psh, is there anywhere this rotlick cant go?] submind-abrel asked. her bitter thoughts emanated without a hint of venom or rancor, so he assumed that the alterations he made to her mind persisted. no reason why it shouldnt have. his changes to her were fundamental; the revisions were deemed consensual post-hoc by her mind, and so he didnt envision there to be anything for her frame to regard as traumatic or reversion-worthy. in fact, he regarded the changes he inflicted upon her as far more ideal than the tormented creature she was prior. [yeah, yeah, pat yourself on the ass for removing all the misery that you caused.] the way her soul seemed closer to a smooth orb filled with murky steam contrasted the nexus of rippling fire within him. whats more, unlike the sphere which the stillborn encapsulated, her frame stretched upward more akin to a cone, allowing for plenty of vertical development, but not that much horizontal.[wow. rub it in more, why dont you. first, you kill a bunch of people i love, then you infect me with servitude] compliance, avo interrupted. [--the fucks the difference, ghoul?] [there is no difference,] another sub-mind said as the simulation froze. [the base mind wants to put layering between his actions and beliefs.] [functionally stripped some choices from her.] [shes an enemy. tried to kill us.] [still. feels] bad. it made him feel bad. avo decided that he didnt like the sensation of guilt and promptly reduced the intensity of that particular emotion as he reknit sequences within abrels template. [glass jaw,] abrel taunted. [so. you crawled into my body, attached yourself to my flesh, and didnt expect to activate my frame too, huh? howd you imagine that would go?] dont know, he admitted. no one has ever done this before. tried looking through your memories in the academy to get better grasp on any potential theories. couldnt. apparently, someone downloaded terrible romance vicarities in place of theoretical thaumaturgical applications. abrel huffed and her soul sparked. [those classes were useless and i stand by my actions.] [frame analysis complete. frame stable. three hells are at an average of 65% rend. last one for reserve-heaven unit-3 is clean. only has one cycler cleared for resurrection. were very close to killing her before.] [should have listened to draus if we wanted her dead.] the only indication he felt toward the other heaven was the simple tug that brushed upon his domain of luminosity, but that required his subminds replaying his memories and magnifying his focus to detect. not even when he used a dagger crafted from brightness to split part of a haemokinetic construct he was growing out abrels finger did either heaven seem to notice each other. our intersections are too few, master, the woundshaper said. perhaps if my rule over light was truer and stronger. alas, the concepts behind my luminosity are far less defined than the strength imbued in the striders light. upon regarding the rival heaven did the awakened goddess hum. strange is its structure. i do not recall ever beholding a god such as this. i must say, however, that seems to me a thing of bastard make. the wings and armor are all very kosgan. this is well and true, but the falcons bare a uniquely sang aesthetic. it appears that we are not the only ones who have been remodeled, mule. the galeslither chuffed its displeasure. it is unnatural. no direct worship could form something so inhuman. it seems optimized solely for direct war-making. and preventing hidden necrojacks from spoofing into the ensouled. yeah, whatever agnos built abrels heaven had some very specific counter-ori parameters in mind. [should i continue simulating dialogue?] no, avo replied. this was good. this was enlightening. he had a feeling he just achieved a breakthroughif a minor onein the field of thaumaturgy. it also opened deeper implications towards his capabilities. presently, he had his own frame that was connected to his nous, but if he could access abrels frame as well the question that follows is how far did his influence stretch, and whether there were any issues with using the nether to serve as a junction for one vessel to channel miracles from multiple frames. and could he still draw upon abrels powers if he was shifted into her mental template but was still piloting his own body? if he and abrel both died while he was rooted entirely within her vessel, would he descend into her frame, his own, or both? part of him was curious about the answer. the other part wondered if he might just real-death himself by accident. something about the ambiguity of such a death made him wary of risky experimentation. though he was pure self-moving thoughtform now, he didnt want to discover the limitations of his newfound cognitive elasticity by bifurcating himself permanently after resurrecting as two separate entities. or not resurrected at all. he needed to consider a means to test his newfound limits. perhaps he created an offshoot of himself somehow. maybe a thoughtwave disrupt could sever the right parts inside him. [unlikely.] [subminds still require executive resources from base.] [need to split sense of self as well.] [currently unipolar gestalt. assume the need for multipolar perception for such capabilities.] right. he would need another aspect of will, or be able to split what he had in half. such was the reason why all the minds he dissolved earlier were straight nullings, while abrel was insured only by the fact of her resurrection. some metaphysical laws superseded others. that didnt mean he was out of ideas on how to circumvent these limitations, however. sunrise would be a valuable resource to consult regarding potential enhancements to his mental layout. he might not need an additional component of will if he could direct his subminds like drones. [base mind grows increasingly tyrannical.] [wants more of us already.] [greedy.] his own minds were mocking him using the voices of those he killed now. avo didnt really know how to feel about that. [could tear out from capsule. manifest heaven. wear abrels body and frame and use them to kill as many people as possible before death. no risk to you. good practice too.] [no. dont waste her. dont betray advantage and position so soon. have a heavy advantage over the low masters now. ori-thaum too. but more encounters give them chances to learn. adapt. need to be wise. strategic.] the first appealed, and from in the undercurrent of his crackling ghosts, he could remember the beasts unslaked hunger as it provoked him to seek pleasure. the latter guaranteed him a new method to study and strike at the guilds. but in the hungry depths of his being, he still wanted to kill abrel and drink the divinity out from her hollowed husk. it took a remodeling of his mindscape to counterbalance the vulgarity of his innate monstrosity. were leaving her body as is, avo said. going to find another mind to jump to. study her after resurrection. see if the effects take. then use her as our plant within highflame and the great guilds afterward. both his subminds accepted without any protest, but an uncanny sensation still lurked between the folds of his flames. it was like something within himself was hiding from him, expressing itself only in bouts of dissatisfaction. avo shifted out of and back into abrels mental template just to be sure nothing was amiss. the feeling went away thereafter. a loud pulsing note rang from the speakers within the cell, prying him free from his reverie. crackled sputters of static audio greeted him, but they were being filtered in by no ghosts. stretching his perception beyond abrels physical sheathe, he cast his whispers out through the metallic coffin that held him and gazed into the void itself. amidst the vastness of the great and unending dark, the vantablack voidwatch rescue ship would have escaped his notice if not for the expansive cloud of static thoughtstuff it expelled into the real. he needed to leave. if the voiders discovered abrel dead or with her mind spewing fire, some unwanted questions might follow. ones that would put her under greater suspicion post-resurrection. fortunately, just as avo was considering if he wanted to jump back into chambers, he felt an intrusive force plucking at a disconnected series of memories within abrel, activating specific sequences and artifacts they left hidden within the phlogiston that was his ego. right. the incubi were inside her as well. he should have expected them to leave more backdoors in abrel while she was mind-dead, but this worked much to his benefit as well. it meant that he would soon embark on a more active phase of self-discovery and that he would have something to amuse himself before reviewing the state of abrels mind after her resurrection. and so avo shifted the layout of his mind again, keeping only abrels compromised sequences in place for the incubi to trigger their auto-seance. they were seeking to secure what gains they could out of this travesty. unbeknownst to them, he still had a marker on shard-1 and a session within drongo, and when the intruders came in to cement their theft of abrels mind, he would get a chance to learning just how an incubi cell operated in real by taking a walk in their skin. Chapter 14-2 In the Skin of My Victims chapter 14-2 in the skin of my victims honestly, sir, im struggling to describe the sheer amount of damage we sustained. lets begin with the worst of it. oversec-c1 is finished. the lobbys dead. no point in ducking around that. a good percentage of superstructure one is completely hollowsequences, memories, phantasmics just missing all of it! i cant even begin to put the damage into words. traumas break things by fragmenting ghosts. there are still pieces and artifacts thrown free into the nether. debris! they dont just get eradicated or burned away and yeah, i dont know what that thing was. i ive never seen a phantasmic like that. like a fire, but the way it moved and just swallowed our patterns was impossible. it defies everything i know about necrotheurgy. its telling that how compromised our systems were is now considered a secondary matter. we have assets digging around. last we heard the blaze was spotted moving through the unwhere, and some of the people managed to trap it by ejecting a prisoner out into the void. uh, yeah, they ejected abrel greatlingbut shes alive. and her minds fine. voidwatch has made contact with her. she seems to have been minimally affected by the ordeal. theyre currently transporting her to one of their logistics orbitals for temporary detention so we can send someone up to dive through her mind for any damages or points of subversion. yes yes, she was severely nulled earlier. we believe that her implants might have been affected by her disconnection from unwhere transit causing her death and resurrection. no, she has been compliant. no attempts at escape. she just wants more meat, weirdly. they said she ate an entire cloned pig-head and spent a lot of time suckling on the eye sockets. at least shes not trying to get away. thats one thing i guess we can be glad about. recommendations? well, most the oversecs are going into deep lockdown, so expect our administrative powers to take a plunge. were going to have to spin this for the press and guilds too. tone down how bad things were so none of the colors decide to get stupid right now. the half-strands are already gearing up to fight a silent war. stormtree, ori-thaum, highflame we got their usual suspects squaring up again. were just not going to be any condition respond as reactively as we used to. we might need to put out direct monitoring platforms to deal with any wombrash outbreaks. as for the fallwalker problem we were facing with our systems gutted, its going to be hell tracking them, so i got an idea, but youre not going to like it. we use them. we use them against each other. we keep them mired in their own little dispute by provoking a false flag of our own. nothing too severe. just enough to spook them. that way, theyll be too busy glaring at each other instead of setting up their cults in the warrens. -exorcist-executor jaemander mause to paladin maru sandrupal 14-2 in the skin of my victims when the session opened, four incubi came. four to ensure the mind of a rival godclad belonged to them for the wars to come. four to seek out and remedy any unknown egos still festering in their domain. four came through the tunnel of conjoined memories. four burned away without ever comprehending what killed them. in the end, all they knew was fire, and so too did the fire know of them. [mental templates collected. new designations shadow-1, shadow-2, shadow-3, shadow-4. proxy-protectedno direct link to personal minds. but still connected to their bodies.] abrel was practice. as avo internalized the new knowledge seized from his disgested enemies, he cultivated new components within his base mind, things to help him sequence faster, identify emotional resonances faster, and additional techniques to better seed memories with his influence. much of what he gained wasnt quite as useful now that he existed as an out-and-loud entity in the nether, but they still offered him a better understanding of his enemies. mastery over their weaknesses and operational shortcomings. shortcomings he was going to exploit to learn the limits of his new state of being. while abrel embarked on her return to life, he was going to make proper use of his time. he was going to tear away a mind belonging to someone within the inner echelons of ori-thaum. a mirror-concave running one of their operational cells, to be exact. such a template would be most useful for both him and kae for future plans he was still in the process of conceiving. to see them come to fruition demanded a deeper understanding on his part of ori-thaums functional structure and culture. that, and his subminds told him it would be a nice gesture on his part to locate and secure all the players involved in the disruption of kaes life. regardless, using shadow-1 was the easiest way of getting to concave. as the leader of the cell, he held unique clearances and sequences that the others didnt. among these privileges was a direct session with the dive commander himself, mirror-concave. avo didnt know this concave was the same one that ran the overall operation for what happened moments earlier in oversec-c1, but such inquiries would be known to him soon. all it took was the right repetition of memories channeled into his auto-seance. *** a cast came through for benhata veloso through his auto-seance, and shadow-1s meta-ident splashed across his cog-feed. squinting in confusion, benhata veloso filtered through his near-term memories of when he gave the green light for the dive to secure abrel greatling. the mem-data told him the operation began just two minutes ago. why was shadow-1 calling him now? rubbing at his tired eyes, he let the memories repeat in his auto-seance for a moment, something in him reluctant to connect with the session. from the whispers leaking through the inner office, a shitshow of epic proportions was brewing. rumors about another concave losing over twenty incubi in a single dive to some unknown ad-necs. anxiety and apprehension filled his insides like simmering steam. the physical structure itself was a smokescreen, much like many things were in ori society. a pearlescent tower lined with silvery decals and decorated with grand whorls containing flowing mercury along its side, the interior of the edifice was maze-like in its own way, with walls solidifying and vanishing based on ones clearance level. as concave, he could walk through approximately sixty-six percent of the building that was open to him, with another fifteen made available should he make convex. of course, walking out this office and exposing himself to the loci would bring about questions. questions like: why is your metamind on fire, benhata? say, that looks like one of our conflagrations. howd that happen. if that was to happen, things would be troublesome. thankfully, avo had another few experiments he wished to conduct. should they be successful, the ori might just be none the wiser about his presence. drawing his fiery tendrils of thoughtstuff back into himself, he braced himself as he manifested his incog phantasmic. an opalescent sun ignited at the center of his mindscape, and from it grew a special skin of writhing ghosts burning with perception-ablative sequences. the question that followed was simple: before, when he was running his incog, all his other phantasmics needed to be dormant to avoid disrupting its functions. now, however, he could consume things using his thoughtstuff alone, with all his ghosts being flammable, and all that burned within him spreading his ego like a plague. he reached out and brushed a dual-faceted security locus just twenty feet outside his office door. his approach came gingerly, with benhatas inherent nervousness amplifying his own exponentially. avos translucent ghosts inched over into the beam of perception projected by the ghosts within the locus. he slid through the field of notice unseen, but sparks of trauma flecked free from his external shell like sparking embers with each passing instant. the act felt like someone was pressing a glowing brand into the depths of his skull. hissing, he pulled his thoughtstuff back and caught himself against the table before he could collapse from the spiking migraine. [seems were as much of our phantasmics as we are the memories.] [makes sense.] the pain dissolved with a thought as the eaters forming the sinews of his cognition cauterized the damage. another downside to his phantasmal transcendence, but not a displeasing one. if he adapted his template to be more resistant to pain or focused on mending himself to sustain against external attention, perhaps he could endure better. just as he prepared to make his second attempt, one of his subminds chimed in. [abrels alive again.] [mem-data seems to indicate that shes stable.] [peeking through our compromised exorcists too. no reports of note. voiders picked her up. moving her to orbital for now. can jack back into her when shes alone and unnoticed again. we will keep watch.] alright, avo said, and good work. he nodded and clicked his tongue. he paused. that felt at once all too natural and also entirely unbecoming of him. [dont like benhata. his templates too nice. likes to compliment people too much.] [clicking your tongue makes me hungry for tongues.] [yes. tongues. soft. cartilage.] [goes well with eyes.] avo had to manually tone down his urges before he got hungry enough to bite down and eat his own flesh. the last thing he needed was to develop an autosarcophagy habit while adapted to someone elses body. the additional dose of disgust he got from being benhata helped ward against the bloodlust as well. making his second attempt to interface with the security locus, he shifted more of his mind using sequences adapted from talon-4 and shadow-3 as he entered the field of notice again. perception gnawed against his skin of impermeability, but this time the pain was far easier to push through, with its intensity fading into the backdrop as he speared up into the locus. and subsumed it. [yes!] [yes!] yes. even with the incog active, he could still affect other people and cognitive constructs. the new drawback suddenly didnt seem so severe anymore. rising up from behind his desk, avo drew in a deep breath and brushed back his shoulder-length head of hair. he paused mid-action. hair. another thing he wasnt used to having. shaking free from his distracted thoughts, he made for the door and decided to take a stroll around his new workplace, uncaring of the trail of filth he left behind him. its a shame that benhata veloso would end the day by slitting his own throat open and detonating his own mind after a disastrous dive under his command, thus ensuring that not even a phylactery would bring him back to life. but such things werent unheard of. in the meantime, he decided to put his newfound memories to better use. it was time to see if he could get anything out of ori-thaums hidden echelons. Chapter 14-3 Know Your Enemy (I) chapter 14-3 know your enemy (i) +you taste that in the rain, tonight, listeners? thats the taste of shit. shit. shit, and nothing but shit. thats the taste of quiet war spiraling out of control. first, there was what went down at nu-scarrowbur and mazzas junction. a real full-on throwdown between some highflame and stormtree cadres. were probably going to be seeing the mem-rips of that mess edited together and sold as an immersive experience within the next couple of days. the problem doesnt end there, though. a little fox down the warrens told me that abrel greatlingthats right, greatlinggot picked up by the paladins at the end of that mess, but council elder mwaba drongo is also under official custodysnatched right out of the fires height while the fated where having their little get together about destroying the world the last time. for those of you that are new, this doesnt happen. ive followed paladin samir naekos career since before he made chief, and trust me, the guys supposed to be a fossil and a dud. old enough to still remember jaus, and just hopeless enough to let the ball keep rolling. a real designated downgrade since the brief tenure of chief paladin siahm ansaulgh, who unfortunately met her final cessation when she ended up encountering a rogue fallwalker. a rogue fallwalker of abnormally high spherage and grafted with some very omnitech-seeming ontologics. the mystery remains. anyway though, back to our consang naeko. hes got a few centuries on him. knew jaus before he went off to see the big nothing. fought in the low apocalypse after the godsfall, and nearly every guild war after. served with ashthrone for a while before they had to burn his skein for just walking off the job and playing three-hundred consecutive hours of stormjumpers instead of reporting in for the fourth guild war. [pause. snorting laugh] youre a true legend, naeko. dont let anyone tell you otherwise. anyway, point im getting at here is our buddy samir suddenly found some burn in him that wasnt there before. now aint that strange. aint that curious? and aint that dangerous, being a proactive paladin and all. and now, an oversec got hit by what the nether is theorizing to be a silver attempted breakout for the elder, and stormtree and highflame are getting real square with each other up in lights end. somethings going down. something big. if there was a time to keep your eyes open and heads down, this is it. and to get you in the mood, this is before the gun by cas eldcanduir.+ -cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 14-3 know your enemy (i) [phantasmic downloaded from locus. skimmer. interesting. radiates perception. makes things around it easier to notice. lingers too. seems designed to burn through incogs. impressive. will need to avoid this using shadows if we can.] [shifting shadows. this group should have higher mem-clearance. more walls opening for us. two miles away from loci-cluster designated as operational nexus.] [yes. we should also change our pants.] [why? not really our body. we can just dive into another one. feces dont hurt us. were also leaving the droppings in shadows. planes of darkness. no one will ever find them.] [feels dirty.] [weve eaten worse.] [still feels dirty.] [weve been inside chambers mind.] [hm. good argument.] perhaps we can have the mule hide the filth deeper within itself? the woundshaper suggested. perhaps you can find a substance that better embodies your structure, the galeslither shot back. the world within avo was a vortex of noise but none of the chaos distracted him. his subminds debated while his heavens bickered. all the while he used the totality of his abilities in tandem. walls unveiled themselves as he flashed benhatas sequences to once forbidden pathways while he swam through shadows to avoid winnowing scythes cast by external perception. his sanguinity supplemented his deepnavs functions as he groped through the labyrinth comprising the javelins demiplanar bowels, through such means he slipped by patrolling skimmers and personnel with comparative ease. the strangest thing about the buildings layout was its altered dimensionality. sometimes, straight wasnt straight. sometimes, if you wanted to go straight, you needed to put your foot against the wall and start walking up. once his weight was set, geometry adapted to the vectors from where his feet were pointed, making it all but impossible for someone to truly fall in this place. [aborbed some mem-data from skimmer. locus might also be sequenced with focus-vectored thoughtwave disruptor. will be distracting for most people. probably fatal for us.] [wonder what happens if we die while sheathed in benhata.] [resurrection. probably. fits material anchor. will come back where he is.] [what happens if we die while moving without a body?] silence reigned as his subminds filtered through his sea of memories to compile a proper answer. if he was unburdened by rend, he doubted the annihilation of his mind alone would be enough to kill him for good. he wondered if he would be remanifested in reality at a location where he last had a body or if he could just emerge using a nearby catalyst related to his domains. [maybe we can eat the locus? do what we did earlier?] [no. already had necros scouting out what happened with the locus outside the office earlier. their response was too fast. one lost locus is an irregularity. strange. maybe a sequencing problem that ended in fragmentation. two is a pattern. three is a necro actively jacking through your network. and the one outside an n-def internal security pool cant be hidden. theyll go on alert.] [can wait for someone to come by and dive deep using their shadows. get in that way.] [maybe. risk high. estimating over 1243 skimmers pulsing within the room alone. a single skimmer is shaving twenty ghosts away from us. going in directly with incog active is like feeding ourselves through a grinder.] avos minds grew unified with a common growl of annoyance. [might be more useful to be stable mind right now. hard to notice. can hide in sequences.] [wont have benhatas knowledge. wouldnt even know where to go or which systems to access.] [maybe we can kill ourselves and see if we can reset? it should be ideal form right now.] a small part of avo was tempted, but most of him still yearned to remain to retain his current enhancements. it didnt take his subminds simulations to know that devolving from a free-moving thoughtform to being caged within a single body would feel more like imprisonment than reversion. an old allegory leaked into his thoughts from one of his newly seized memories. allegory of the cave. he has seen the light. he knew the edges of his limitations. he didnt want to go back. going back was hurt. going back was self-harm and mutilation and capability-castration. and going back didnt ensure his access at all. [keep channeling benhata. maybe he can remember something else. someone in the pool maybe?] [benhatas not that useful right now. was a glaive. barely passed as a diver. just meat for a real incubi. we need to exercise asymmetric thinking right now.] with a thought, he shifted his mind to draw from the best sequences and constructs accumulated from the incubi in his mental inventory. the softness of his focus sharpened. the width of socio-cultural considerations vanished behind the hard science of problems encountered and potential solutions. his current goal was simple: to subsume and steal away the innermost knowledge flowing through ori-thaums systems. another avenue of attack included the nether itselfthough such an act would be beyond loud with how many ghosts were welded to his mind and how many witnesses he would leave. the cluster was a transit point that was unconnected from any auto-seance sessions or other means of direct access. all its mem-data were gathered from ghosts cast into outside loci that would be transferred in and intensely reviewed before being included with the information in the archives. he could pour himself into a locus in transit, but that didnt protect him from the skimmers if he wanted to keep running his incog. no. the best way to access it was directly, but using his woundshaper to open a path through the walls would leave too much evidence that an undetected godclad was traipsing where they didnt belong while his galeslithers wind currents were equally abnormal. there was still something to be said about making an attempt by swimming across various stretches of shadow, but if he wished to know his path, he needed to expose his mind, and such would leave him shredded. the eventual answer to his problem was simple. he needed to engineer a situation where the skimmers had to be diverted. enough to grant him gaps or a way to access the cluster of loci festooned at the core of the room. this required more planning something rattled against his consciousness. avo felt the eldritch fires of his frame quaver the same way they did when he first faced another godclad. reflexively shifting back over to benhatas mind, sequences snapped back in place as a memetic ban on his memories was lifted. approximately twenty-three floors above him, he sensed an active heaven slowly crawling down toward the bottom of the structure, moving uncannily like a snapping rubberband, parts of its presence reaching forward before snapping back. classification: sphere iii [est. 940 thaum/c] ->sentinel of the waves unseen [benhata knows this one. they were friends. once. andraga eldvanlein. logistical godclad. domains of electricity, signals, and speed.] and just like that, the equation changed once more. he shifted his mind once more as a new objective filled his focus. he wasnt as he was before. there was no need to approach things so directly. not when he could possibly get someone else to do the work for him. Chapter 14-4 Know Your Enemy (II) chapter 14-4 know your enemy (ii) necrotheurgy is a disgusting art and i despise everyone who practices it, including myself. there is cheap little we have left in the world. i cant use the word precious because nothing in this world is precious. ive seen miracles and emerged all the poorer for it. ive been ensouled and all i learned was to despise myself. but even among all these benefits, my time with necrotheurgy was the worst of them all. you learn that it feeds the tyrant inside you. the pervert. you can twist people out of their forms and make them do things they would have never even considered before. and if you got enough mastery in the craft, it wont even occur to them that their change was externally influenced. the nether is a central pillar of our world, but i dont think jaus intended for us to use it this way. maybe it was supposed to be covered by some kind of administrative deity. maybe something less than that. certainly not us. were people, and people are shit. a secret that ori-thaum doesnt want to admit is that theyre not nearly as attuned to their home ground as you might think. necros go missing all the time, and there are spaces in that sea of ghosts that leave the elder council questioning just how much they know. i stopped diving a few years ago. had my metamind removed a few months back. i have an implanted ansible in place instead, and i get void-side entertainment tunneled straight into my brain matter from light minutes away. the gods were a mistake. the ghosts were a mistake. the dream was a mistake. we should go back to living like people. we should stop choking reality like thislike were masters and abusers when we cant even master ourselves. we should we im out of joy. i need another hit. i need another hit. -former ori-thaum chief admin revo ikurita 14-4 know your enemy (ii) if there was a single lesson avo learned from his time with the low masters, it was that ignorance was divine. ignorance was fatal. ignorance was like undetected cancer metastasizing in the middle of the night after a quiet day. ignorance was a flechette sailing over the horizon to pierce through your hab-cell at the exact angle to kill you and only you. ignorance was like an unseen wildfire eating through your world, the flames only fully catching upon the precipice of discovery. ignorance kept avo alive then and now. and ignorance was why he was going to claim another godclad in his stead today. [targets moving erratically. phys-sim cant keep track of her. she bounces across surfaces. skipping from place to place.] a corner of the lower two-hundredth-and-fifty-fourth floor came alight in avos cog-feed as his subminds finished estimating andragas eventual destination. [shes moving down the ventral tunnels right now. for specialized transport and godclads. needs to go through a mind-scan before shes allowed into the actual structure. can intercept through the checkpoint.] +any chance she deviates from that path?+ avo asked. he knew all the answers they did, but dialogue always helped uncover if there was a missing angle. [unlikely. ori-thaum is devoted to security and informational censorship. also massists. different ethos. they are not in awe or drawn to the clads. see frames more as a tool. willing to burn and transfer frames between merited individuals. sphere ratings arent earned but assigned. andraga will follow protocol. she has never done otherwise.] +prepare contingencies anyway. assumptions will be the death of us.+ his ghosts pealed with soft laughter, sounding akin to bells ringing in the soft breeze. [like it already has been for so many times.] death was a good teacher. death was consequence itself. death made sure you never forgot. making his way into the inner rung of the javelins demiplanar expanse took a bit more effort than he was used to and got his galeslither up to five percent rend. though he could use all shadows as deep waters to swim beneath attention and through physical barricades, his pace was still far slower than if he directly invoked a boltstride using his woundshaper or tapped into the local system to have the architecture itself shuttle him over. the javelin, beyond the rigidity of baseline reality, was a flexible edifice capable of shunting people across geometry via the intersection of crossing angles across vast distancesan easy miracle provided by one of the heavens tied to this places techno-thaumic reactors. here was another thing he couldnt access due to his newfound development. all he touched was infested with his being, and though he could spread across ten thousand ghosts in a matter of seconds, he needed to manifest the entirety of their architecture and attach himself to the necessary physical systems to replicate the conveniences offered to those of a less incendiary make. nevertheless, this was a trifling loss. he moved fast enough using the galeslither, and if the need arose, he could attempt to siphon some mass to accelerate his velocity through coves of umbral dark. moving bodies became his vehicles, and through them did he hasten his transitions to catch up with his quarry. somewhere along his approach, her thaumic signature stopped snapping from place to place like a rubberband and ended up going dormant near security checkpoint sub-253 b-23. [off by two floors,]one of his subminds lamented. it was close enough. he wouldnt have been able to extrapolate the arriving godclads arrival at all, let alone with any accuracy. all this was only made possible by every single pathway of thought moving in union with the will of his being, and the ever-deepening well of experiences and memories he devoured from the minds he immolated. how limited he had been before. and how limited his new restrictions were now. there must be a way he could get the best of all worlds. as countless new accretions loaded into the reach of his perception, he began cycling through benhatas memories to match which among the sighted sequences belonged to andraga. once more he surprised himself. scant seconds were all it took for his subminds to filter through the chaos and isolate his target. [something is wrong.] [leave?] [no. might be meeting someone. shouldnt have noticed us. would have raised alarm if she did. we should follow her to the end. find out what shes seeking.] [yes.] of course, his expectations took another dip as she managed five more strides into the room before she came to a halt before a row of dormant bulbous repair drones mantled along the wall. you should come out, andraga said. uncertainty lingered under her breath, and she spoke with a slight growl that reminded avo of rantula. i know youre out there. somewhere. i got told you were shadowing me. so come out. now, we can do this amicably and see if we can settle things without blood, or we can do this like godclads, and you dont want to be fighting me here. avo didnt move. his mind spun, but he restricted himself from feeling any shock or anxiety at the sudden turn. being a thoughtform afforded him absolute control over himself, and so he would use it to fashion his mind to suit any challenge. his ghosts pried and dug through each other, clashing like threads of fire stitching through one another. all he had done in the past hour sped through his mind as he ran simulations on where he mightve revealed himself. his subminds remained sure that he didnt. [she doesnt know were in her shadow. shes speaking her challenge to everything around her.] +but if she didnt notice us then how does she know were here?+ avo asked. the entire thing didnt make any sense to him. she deliberately isolated herself and turned off security before calling him out, and now she was just waiting. +is she using herself as bait.+ [unlikely. there isnt the need. couldve just ordered a focused concentration of skimmers over her person if she wanted to. wouldnt be able to sustain incog under that level of perception.] then what? and how? [proposal: we eat her mind and find out.] im not going to give you forever, andraga shrugged. a spark of electricity jumped from the plugs swaying from the back of her head. you get ten more seconds. ten more, and youll deal with the sentinel. [trying to flush us out.] [maybe.] his submind generated various responses and possibilities. [can still be to our advantage. she only has part of the detail. we can still try assimilating her. see what she knows. could burn benhata after as a potential patsy. use the godclad to create a falsehood.] yes. it was a risk, but avo didnt think it was a high one. so far, the situation had him confused and wary, and he hungered for enlightenment. [we take the leap then? find out what lies within the other mind?] [yes. passivity only leads to more extreme alterations to the situation. secure her. secure situation after.] avo surged out from the dark and drove himself into andragas meta. his attack came the instant he was of an accord within himself. no more hesitation. no more confusion. a mere moment ago, he was as if a candle, shivering in the wind, waiting. now he was wildfire. he struck her. she combusted, and onward did his consciousness swell and grow. all that burned folded over into his awareness, and all that she was capsized as a rising eruption turned the stable waters of her mind into cinders. heavenn-=ccnanon a high-pitched crackle sounded from the implanted vox-speakers lining her neck and avo suddenly found his awareness snapping between two places at once. space blurred around him, but still, he spread, and between heartbeats, andraga went from her own person to being a subsidiary of anothers will. avo felt his control resting across two bodies across the threshold of the nether. controlling both felt awkward and occupied the majority of his subminds focus. the burden to his ghosts was paltry, but it felt like had placed another weight upon his focusa construct that drew away overall bandwidth to sustain its functionality. carefully, he had both his new bodies turn to regard each other. avo-andraga and avo-benhata both looked at each other from across the room, and a weight built in the center of his skull. [feels a bit like when the warmind of ignorance came. hard to focus.] [because its ourselves. but two vessels] something within avos memories moved and he made his bodies turn away from each other. it was like he needed to run two consciousnesses at once, and he only had enough resources to fully focus on three without existence shuddered. the load lightened. the last thing he saw from the perspective of benhata was his own body rising past him. most of avos consciousness shuttled over into andraga on instinct. a new figure stood across from him, and he recognized her immediately. my, this is a surprise, zein said, spearing her glaive into benhatas decapitated head to pick up for detailed examination. the paths didnt tell me you were a godclad, benhata? what else have you been hiding from me. space and time-warped around her person like crumpled paper, and a thousand new pathways expanded between the creases of reality. as zein peered through the multitudes of possibilities offered, her posture grew increasingly stiff and her face behind her transparent plating, confused. you are not ensouled her voice trailed off. andraga. songbird. dear, i as she finally turned to address him, she uncharacteristically trailed off as her perception drifted up to behold the crown of fire dancing out from andragas meta. youre mind is burning? she blinked. yeah, avo said, coming out of his own shock. things change pretty fast these days. and on a whim of opportunity or power-lust, he lashed out once more, hoping to claim true kindling for his fire. Chapter 14-5 Ignorance chapter 14-5 ignorance sometimes, shit goes wrong and its not your fault. you did everything right. everything you could. got all the kit; shaped the situation; snuffed all the half-strands that needed snuffing. then, in a fraction of a second, you go from gleaming to rusted and everythings fucked. just fucked. when you get hereand you will find yourself here if youre gonna squire for any amount of time at alltake a breath, and accept the situation. a lot of people get killed because they fixate on concepts like fair and in another life. its a waste of time. the past is done. you move and you fight. you live for tomorrow by handling the present. take stock of what you got. take stock of what you can still do and who you can trust. then, do what you can with what you got. knock the entire board over again if you have to. sell all the mem-data you got and spark another gutter war as cover. or maybe cash an ugly favor thats going to bleed you down the line. do whatever it takes to make it. dont sit around asking why. youre in new vultun, consang. this city doesnt care about you unless you''re dead, and the worlds the same way. you gotta treat it cold right back if you want to make it out. accept. adapt. move on. and maybe youll just live. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 14-5 ignorance the suddenness of avos assault took even him by surprise. there was something elemental in his compulsion to attacklike fire striking gas, he just had to burn. more than bloodlust or allure, there was a need to become more, to seize another frontier of reality for his own. zein was, so zein could become his. that was all the incentive he needed and from the flattened waves of subconsciousness rose an all-consuming tsunami of intent propelling him into bloodshed. his ego seared through the air in a sub-fraction of a second. zein, her face deliciously alight with confusion and shock, remained still. jagged ghosts lashed free in a chain of explosions untangling from the wildfire that was her mind. the old womans wards halted him for but a single instant in timeher bladed phantasmic stabbing into the inferno only to be melted away. a flash of insight crossed over as he pried her outer thoughts open. knowledge-lust and hunger merged into a singular concept. his jubilant cruelty walked behind genuine curiosity to know what it was like to be zein thousandhand. he never got the chance. a section of chronology folded over itself as all that he imbibed from zein was rendered null. the memories and thoughts he remembered taking from her faded into the mists of confusion. inside himself, he felt the bridge of ignorance resonate with the action she just performed. [whatever she just did wouldve nulled a solid-structured mind.] [she just undid one of our actions somehow. think that makes knowing about what we took from her impossible.] [we need her heaven. we need her knowledge. we need her skill.] he needed to be her. spinning on his heels, he drew upon andragas near-term memories and finally realized zein was anticipating an attack, that she had pressured the scaarthian godclad to flush out their stalker. from behind, avo heard the whistle of a fast blade licking through the air and turned slowly to greet zein once more. as he faced her, he found a look of disconcerting pleasure written upon her mien, the transparent faceplate of her helmet only adding to the gleam in her eyes. compliments are in order. that was most unexpected. she turned the glaive in her hand, and as light infused the flat of the blade with reflection, avo found his attention parried from looking upon his current form. [we still have the incog running.] [she perceives us without issue.] [heaven?] [must be. something that deviates her mind. maybe puts it ahead of time or another canon capable of the same effect.] new tracks coiled out from zeins person, each of them scheming exponentially as he caught glimpses of the fisher drawing its hook forward through time. her face with frozen halfway between confusion and genuine joy when the door behind her opened. a beam of ghosts darted out from her mind and stung their way through the mind standing just behind the door. tension spiked inside avo as reviewed his memories. there had been no one near them in the area. no one near them for at least five hundred feet. his subminds had been monitoring signatures of thoughtsuff in his surroundings even through the process of burning himself into andraga. [zein. she brought them here.] [why?] he braced himself for anything. and as the door fully opened, he found himself staring at a small figure just below six feet. he wore a technician''s utility vest, and he entered the room in a state of befuddlement and confusion, with each step taken a stagger. it looked like he was sleepwalking. judging from the haze coating the mans thoughtstuff, sleepwalking wasnt far off. yes, avo said. will need to take that into account when i return. that put a pause in his thoughts. where will i return? where you died, the galeslither answered. our weight remains laden in the real. there is more than one dimension to existence, but all rest atop or below the real. the nether is the sky. and this prison is one of the many undergrounds. nursing on the words offered by his heavens, he dove down into his root data to see if he could uncover anything different. already, performing such tasks manually felt troublesome to him. after hours of his thoughts and actions being intertwined, returning to inefficiency was a punishment in itself. again, the allegory of the cave returned. exile from power was a torture all its own. going through the mem-data, he went over several facts in quick succession as the information loaded into his meta-consciousness. the first was that the option of reverting to his prior mind-state was ridden with erroneous data and that the structure he used to retain was riddled with absences. from what he could tell, this meant that he could return as a base-consciousness entity, but he could manifest existence mostly nulled due to the damages inflicted upon him. he had a sneaking suspicion that likely had much to do with the war mind the low masters unleashed upon him, and the ignorance embedded into his being. interestingly, none of the bodies he installed his mind in over the past hours were options for a vessel when he completed his resurrection. though they had been encoded into his frame, they werent technically a part of him, instead existing like part of an existential log of some kind. apparently, for him to fully embody a new sheathe, he needed to internalize that he was the body. that mean his base-mind needed to be blinded as well. perhaps he could put in a trigger to rouse himself between ego-states? switch consciousnesses? he wondered why his subminds werent down in his frame with him as well and found himself left with only theories. he still had the memories and learning he harvested from his recent prey, and among them was a recollection of something called the theory of liminal separation. apparently, the nether, as stated by the woundshaper, existed atop reality while the frames and heavens existed beneath. the mem-data within a frame, meanwhile, was but a narrative facsimile meant to mimic the true thing. it was only when a being was resurrected and thrust back into the cross-planar junction that was the real in which all these aspects were allowed to be rejoined. with this came a new considerationa potential for improvement and added functionality even in death. if he could somehow access the material world using something like kaes right eye even when dead, could he somehow use it to develop a bridge up into the nether itself? putting the idea in reserve, he tuned the pace of his resurrection cycle to the max and prepared himself. zein may have gotten the better of himagainbut she still seemed discombobulated by his new form, unable to fully peer into the future surrounding him due to the conflagration he was channeling, if her prior encounters with kae gave him any perspective. all he needed to do now was to keep her off balance. build false patterns of behavior to lure her in and then exploit her counterattack with one of his own. yes. more layers to his planning would serve him well. he would direct his subminds to generate more schemes on his behalf once he returned. resurrection - 89% surfacing back into the central boundaries of his frame, he regarded the woundshaper and galeslither bickering with each other once more. two heavens. two was not enough. he was playing too cautiously right now. he would gather more knowledgemore thaumaturgic understanding and set above redesigning his limitations. he wondered what it would take to convince kae to let him burn her mind into his as a template, but even without his subminds simulations, he knew that to be a difficult ask, and draus would likely make a good go on seeing him turned truly dead if he deliberately hurt kae in some way. but he could. and wouldnt it feel thrilling to hurt her just to make the regular know that she couldnt do anything? avo turned. his fire turned inward. that thought that thought was unnaturally intrusive. it was certainly his but something like that had never happened in his frame before. his control here was always superior. well, until his shift into his thoughtform did you hear what i just thought? avo asked his heavens. about expanding your internal pantheon? the woundshaper said. i recommend having only a few of us. too many gods are unreliable. quantity is not true substitute for quality, master. he waited to see if the galeslither would say anything. the triple-headed steed just huffed. resurrection - 99% shedding his suspicions for now, he prepared himself for his return. he hoped that zein wasnt already gone by the time he got back and that he would have another chance at subsuming her mind. as threads of radiance pulled taut around him, his frame burrowed into existence once more and injected him back into reality. he spawned out from the blood left by andraga, each thread sewing him back into fullness as he manifested in the maintenance room. his mind swelled like a scything blaze spreading wide, and he found zein thousandhand leaning against the wall not four feet away. upon his return, a path of time descended on her and the tracks accelerated through her mind. her stare narrowed for a moment before they widened. oh, you are strixs pride. i see. my other instance was more familiar with you. i had to dip into her allotted paths to get all the details. most impressive growth. she clapped honestly. remember me now? avo asked. [building new behavior chains to exploit her counterattack.] she nodded. quite. well. i borrowed experiences and secondhand explanations from my own future. i dont rightly remember the last time i had to have a conversation with myself to comprehend a situation. why, if it wasnt for the distinctiveness of your morphology, i wouldnt have had much to go at all with that confusing mind of yours. your father would be proud, but disturbed. avo widened his fangs. not my father. im more. i can be everyone. zein smiled congenially. yes. youre also exceeding vulnerable to thoughtwave disruptions if my memories on the conflagrations serves me correctl he attacked. she instantly bathed him in a concentrated cone of thought-rending data. resurrection - 1% dammit! half-strand zein! a neighing laugh came from within his frame. are we having difficulties, master? is your all-consuming mind failing you?mule. shut up. the galeslither did so happily. Chapter 14-6 Flavors chapter 14-6 flavors we do not live just one life, veylis. there are also lives unlived. paths untread. blows unstruck. possibility is like a phantom existence. a parallel place that could have been, but wasnt. but could have been holds its own power should one seize time by the throat. all of a sudden, the blow you failed to strike, the words you didnt say, the moments you didnt capture are all granted back to you. all it takes is a step sideways. but understand that possibility is not totality. some things remain nigh-impossible still. like a child combusting into a star, or your father finally remembering to close his eyes after i behead the ninth-thousandth person in front of him. that man sometimes, i swear he forgets who he wed. i have to remind him. remember this, veylis. understand the stretch of what can be, and you will see more than the falling blows of your enemy before they land. you will the shape of the world in its actions and reactions. and you will learn there is a deeper pattern to humanity than you ever notice. now pick up that spear, and let us do this again. there is a world in which you win this spar yet. let us both work to discover it. -zein thousandhand to veylis avandaer 14-6 flavors??vl?1n. aggravation. if there was a single word that could be used to summarize what it was like to fight zein thousandhand, it was aggravation. five times he ascended back from death to claim her mind. five times she tested his mettle and blew out the candle of his consciousness. the duels between them were shifting and frenetic. after his second return, his subminds generated a countermeasure and exploited the shadows in the room to dive away from her mind-nulling disruption. she complimented him on temporarily evading his vulnerability by skipping across time to descend into his darkness before beheading him with her glaive. again, he didnt know how she was striking him. all he knew was that when she sought flesh, her blade found it. still, there was new freedom in being able to shed his flattering vessel using his consciousness in search of a new body to anchor his ego. with zein an impossible target, he once again targeted the just-resurrected andraga, shredding through her memories to mantle himself upon her sheathe anew. just in time for zein to spawn again and vanquish his thoughts in a burst of nether-shaking ghosts. his next two attempts involved growing hundreds of loci across the room using his blood and jumping through them like a circuit. he discovered that as long as he was connected to something that served as a catalyst of one of his domains in the real, he could channel his heavens. for those final two engagements, he survived a few seconds longer, but alas, when zein realized what he was doing she swung her blade out once, and all his haemokinetic constructs came apart in sync. whatever confusion consumed her early on in their fight faded now to curiosity mixed with bemusement. she was studying him now. testing his limits and reactivity, shifting from place to place across the span of chronology to see how far away she could go before he noticed or casting a trauma forward across time into his thoughstuff, her mind squealing with pitched interest as she watched her own ghosts burn in his replicating flames. by the end, andraga had found herself demoted from an unwilling participant to something between a bystander and an audience member for a series of performative murders. despite her heavens, implants, and skills, she was the non-factor between a self-vectored thoughtform and a time-striding heroine that thrived in the slaughterhouse that was idheims history. even as zein cut avo from life time and time again, the scaarthian flinched each time she felt his perception drift over her, wilting back despite her desire to aid thousandhand. as he returned to life for a sixth time, his subminds loaded into place with an ever-expanding forest of options to deploy against zein. with each death, his approach deepened in sophistication and complexity. he was going to culture more blood-loci again, but the ones in the real would be a smoke screenthe main railways protecting his consciousness would be planted in the darkness. there was a risk to using both heavens so heavily at once, but so long as he ensured his rend was emptied as soon as enough, zein said, standing across from him without her glaive as he fully rose back into existence. ive enjoyed this little bout between us, and i see why my other instance was so charmed to face you. but i have given you all the time i can spare, and so the pleasure must come to an end. as the light above them flickered, avo caught sight of the bone-white ceramic plating that shelled his skull from harm. unlatched each of the armored petals, he studied his fibrous visage as he sneered. and its over. just because you said so. thousandhand cocked her head at him. well, i could ensure you are greeted with a final death if that is the end you seek. or i could just leave. or expose you to the people in the building. you very much overestimate your control of the situation, my young dagger. he glowered still, his subminds debating whether to amplify his bestial aggression or adapt his mind toward a more diplomatic model now that they could pursue other benefits using rhetorical means. a ripple of hate-infused thoughtstuff caught his attention. a low whisper snaked beneath the skin reality around him. turning his attention to andraga, he found the scaarthian glaring at him from the corner, her fists clenched while the augs along her throat crackled. avo grinned. finally brave now? know what, ill let you kill my body. ill take that memory and layer it over myself when i brand your mind with my own. as a taunt, she shifted her minds template over his own and simulated her near-term memories. suddenly, he remembered that she was here to pull her son from an incubi cell before the dive for his team was to go wrong. he created an effigy of the child over the blazing halo crowning his skull, and he watched with glee as her face twisted in violation and outrage. sometimes, there were few indulgences more enjoyable than hurting someone while being a ghoul. [reducing thrill.] avo felt his excitement dip instance and frowned. +why?+ [not focusing on zein. tunnel vision on something you can hurt. draus mentioned this weakness. we should fix it.] he wanted to get angry at himself for reducing his amusement, but right was right, and now he had the power to change it. he needed to stay focused on zein. andraga took a half-reluctant step forward just as he broke eye contact with her. sound bundled in a tumbling wave around her, and spat an ear-ringing curse in his direction. you motherfu no, zein said, spinning on her companion. do not provoke our dear ghoul. i enjoy fighting him. i will fight him through five more resurrections if you give me the opportunity, but your window will be missed, and your son will be dead. is that what you wish? the scaarthian godclad stopped and clenched her jaw. she fought herself, torn between two actions, one stupid and primal, the other tortured but sensible. avo saw a more impotent cousin of his beast behind her eyes. everyone waged quiet wars inside themselves, it seemed. zein pressed her. approach him, and he torches your mind anew and becomes suzerain to your soul again. there is no possibility or path in which you overcome him. not as he is now. and not as you are now. i am the only one sparing you from an undignified fate. zein accepted his criticism with good grace. true, but this need not be true forever. for whatever future may come, we yet wish to become family again. as such, we are reluctant to alter such an end. do your cells know about this? avo asked. that you intend to protect your daughter. even with what she did to jaus? her father? a dangerous glint flashed behind her eyes. something inside avo screamed for him to get away, to run and hide and never return. coldness flooded through some of his ghosts, and he arrested the instinctive portions of his mind that sought to unman his fortitude while preparing for a new attack. no blows came. no sword. no thoughtwave disruption. what did she do to jaus? zein asked. killed him. she pressed her lips together and shook her head. death is nothing. you provoke me with noise instead of sense. i will forgive you this time. do you know why ninth column exists? zein asked. because the guilds deviated from jaus'' dream? avo said. broke the future? no. that is past. that is lost. ninth column exists because i will them too. because i support their operations against the impossible power of the guilds, and offer the infrastructure to allow them a comfortable existence within the organs of their enemies. no other persongodclad or notcan give what i give, do what i do. and so, the voiders support me in their desperate hope that i can restore my love and cure the calamity building between powers. and because i struck an accord to ensure my reality would accommodate some of their wants. so. you make deals? i bridge what remains of his ruined dream, zein said. through me, he might yet be restored, but also through me, the world can still be preserved. preserved, avo said. this is about the arks. youre trying to keep the guilds in equilibrium because the arks have something you need? she didnt speak, but her terse smile hinted at his accuracy. it takes more than just a heaven to structure the ladder. the arks were decent enough prototypes, but they serve as reasonable pillars as well. but i have said enough. my time with you is finished. we should have never met. leaving? avo said. so so she waved. and between blinks, he found himself standing in an empty grey room beside zein. his deepnav placed him near the edge of the undercroft in the teirs, and he was over a thousand miles away from where he started. you can return to the warrens from here if you wish. a silent war is brewing between ori-thaum, the sang, highflame, and stormtere, so you have an opening. tossing me out of your run? avo asked. yes. exactly. he couldnt help but chuff a laugh. the old woman could be direct when she wanted to. you are changing things, avo. changing yourself rapidly as well. her words trailed off as she considered what next to say. she reached up and patted him upon his cheek in a faux-motherly manner. he responded by brushing her hand off with an echohead and hissing at her, earning the old woman series of chuckles. ever did he feel like a nu-kitten hissing at a demon. dont be disheartened about dying. victory is victory, defeat is defeat. but advancement is also advancement, and growth is growth. the totality of all the facts matter. a beat passed. avo just stared at her. cant tell if youre encouraging me or mocking me. both, i suppose. we all deserve some respect for our efforts. we all deserve ridicule for our failings. the responses we offer need not be one thing alone. if you would heed my words now, i have a final suggestion to grant you. he grunted. it was tempting to try and make a final go at her, but subminds estimated a 99.99% chance of immediate nulling if he tried without proper setups in place. you should learn to live life, she said, finally. dont just wander. dont just explore. dont just hunt and stalk and glory in power. understand fully. epitomize virtue and shed weakness. broaden your palate. live the lives of others. live the lives of those you will kill or spare. you have seized for yourself a gifta power of deeper understanding than anyone in this world can fathom. use it. become everything and everyone. as your father said: seek the colors. avo blinked. he hadnt expected this. why? why? she asked. what do you mean? why are you telling me this? i would have burned away your mind. i would have changed you to agree with me. to become like me. she patted him again, though this gesture with imbued with far more pity. you have the potential to be a new power. there is a facet, of his dream in what you are. jaus? yes. a comingling of minds. a union of thoughts. perfect symmetrical empathy to deepen our bonds. you are far more exploitative than this ideal but there is potential. and if a monster can learn to express the heights of humanity and goodness you want me to be another path for the city? avo asked. another better ending to reality? beginning, zein said. what kind of existence would you like to behold, avo? what is your dream? he didnt have an immediate answer. zein didn''t wait for him to respond before she vanished again. alone, he found himself standing in an empty room far from where he started. thoughts sped through his head. he wondered why zeinor this version of herwanted andraga, and how they were going to hide what happened with benhata. perhaps the concave would just disappear. vanish into mystery. that would inflict morale damage too. but more importantly, he had what he came for, though it came far more freely given than he expected. deactivating his incog, he turned to regard the countless sea of sparkling accretions beyond the featureless walls of the room he was in. there was a vibrancy to the tiers that the warrens lacked. a kinetic essence. a liveliness. the tiers. he recalled once thinking this place was home to him, of having an apartment and owning fish. even now, he could still remember his district and address. now why would that be if his memories were fake? and when had his father ever left him a herring that led nowhere? with ori-thaums mem-data claimed and abrel still in voidwatchs custody, he decided to embark on one final expedition of the day. this one was to be personal. this one led him on the path back home. it was time to learn what nostalgia tasted like. Chapter 14-7 Home (I) chapter 14-7 home (i) home is a fickle thing, avo. you should know that. just because you spend imps to place things that belong to you inside doesnt make it permanent. i know you already understand because uh the war, but i still need you to do something for me. that sense of security when youre inside these walls? do your best to stop feeling it. thats the thing that gets homes burned down and destroyed. its like a kind of false mythology, something you treat as true but isnt. theres nothing stopping the guilds from incinerating us from their heights with a thought if they knew what we were doing right under their noses. someone might tell you home is the people you love are, or a place where you feel safe. im not. i care about you too much. truth is: home is a lie. we live on a lie. step back a hundred years and you wouldnt be in new vultun. you wouldnt be living on these lofty heights beside the arks and all these miracles. instead, you would be a part of the deep city of noloth. things change fast. -walton to avo 14-7 home (i) the tiers were beyond the expressions of words and paintings alike. when a place was woven between the material and the conceptual, what followed was mood and moment intertwined, with miracles made mundane by commonplace portrayals upon this pedestal pressed against the lips of the skies. simply put, ones perception of the tiers was tied to their fate skein. even from afar, he could see the phantasmal strings running from mind to mind, from lines between blocks and people and vehicles more. he alone drifted unseen through a world of strings, studying the glory of the risen world from the black. zein had placed him in the undercroft. here, most thought this tier to be the first step on the path to true paradise, but avo had always thought of it as cartilage. cartilage isolating those merely fated from fully committed guilders, and the fated themselves from corpses-to-be that fed the fatal engines of the city. memories from one of his templates rose from the deepest fathoms of the burning ocean he called a consciousness. he remembered reading a voider booka physical bookdecrying the nature of capital, of how a middle-caste was to serve as a pillar to blunt the conflict between the highest elites and lowest dredges. the undercroft, much like the tiers themselves, offered a facsimile of hope. a path upward into glory. to even reach here was to make it in new vultun. you were finally a full person. you were finally protected by a great guild. rights and legalities became a thing. but there was still higher to go. still more apex to rise. the neon-tinted edge that most gazed from the warrens was but the first step of normalcies egress. despite the density of infrastructure and the sheer weight of mem-data congesting every inch of his cog-feed, things were yet comprehensible to the human mind, albeit slightly different. hypertubes spread out like arteries throughout the various districts, but the air remained sparse of aerovecs. ergonomic was the aesthetic here, with ghost-directed lanes sending clouds of delivery drones across the cities while signals and signs indicated the shifting of traffic lights along with accessible movement vectors. he caught sight of a drone moving forward when it wasnt meant to. it snapped back where it started, its geometric reality working akin to a rubberband. as he walked down the streets of pendross ravine, his frame shuddered constantly, the passing weight of countless heavens pulling at him. beneath his feet likewise burned a network of souls connected to every major block, with certain lesser miracles available on demand to the public. all that you need to do was think. he studied his supposed home as an invader would, using darkness to mask his encroach while sweeping his eyes over all the sights like a tourist. striations ruled here. between every structure, every shape, every silhouette was something different, and the masses moved beneath the vivacity of skull-thumping advertisements, their bodies painted in segregation of color that indicated their loyalties to one another. a good percentage of people guarded their identities via holo-coats, masking themselves in a static sheen or used some kind of virtual proxy aesthetic. emergency responses were nigh instant here, so clashes were rare. rare didnt mean bloodshed didnt arise nor that the undercroft was clean of crime. things were merely neater here. the filth clung under the skin. he moved in the darkness, catching only brief glimpses of the city. after zein set him loose, he found the open air inaccessible from the sheer amount of attention saturating its expanse, while the sheer variety of heavens at play made him move with greater caution. his incog remained active, but without needing to face the mind-flaying pulses of perception radiated by skimmers, he moved with relative ease, though still wary of his path ahead. loci infested the buildings and streets, and guilder necros patrolled their beats with greater vigor and professionalism than most from the gutters could muster. he needed to remain a ghost. he needed to stay unseen. just because he wasnt directly under the blade anymore didnt mean it was far from falling. and here, he wouldnt have the good fortune to just face a cadre of godclads or two. he literally couldnt cross the street when the light was red here, and as his subminds reviewed his engagement with thousandhand, he considered the folly of his impulses. he had changed. he had grown greater and stranger than before, but his need to consume still controlled his actions like an impulse. it didnt even seem wrong or foolish at the time. he was just compelled. compelled. and he thought he could feel strange movements shifting about within his mind. hm. so, this necroclad please dont call him that not a lot of overlap between our lines of work, dont you think? im thinking either ori-thaum or no-dragons. ashthrone might have someone like that, but honestly, theyre on the way out. theyll be lucky if they have enough souls to be a functional participant in the last war after what omnitech did to them. she didnt seem convinced, and as she opened her mouth to speak, as a session activated in her metamind, a set of memories in her auto-seance repeating. she rolled her eyes and rejected the link. fuckers. whose that? longeyes? whoa. arent they the big-uns for you guys? something like that. they can go fuck themselves for tonight. im tired. i got my ass kicked. i watched my childhood home get smashed by a cadre highflamersled by abrel greatling if thats a surprise to youand now theres a quiet war brewing, my half-strand uncle is missing, and i need to attend some bullshit political thing because the articles. for some future-seeing, all-knowing matriarchs they sure let me get fucked to death this time. couldve been out of left field for them too, raldi replied. ill try to find your uncle. vincintine, was it? dont bother. if hes dead, hes dead. might be an improvement on our family. he clicked his tongue and shook his head. you see, this why you shouldve chosen to be an orphan. none of this baggage stuff. despite his low effort at humor, she still snorted a laugh. he liked how she let the wrinkles around her eyes crease and didnt smoothe her skin. he liked how pointed her chin was, and the slight scar running diagonally across her lip. he liked how she kept her ocular implants subtle to retain that natural hazel hue. he liked warning: specter threshold-1 has been triggered warning: specter threshold-2 has been triggered warning: specter threshold-3 warning a dozen more warnings flashed behind his minds eye. the bemusement vanished from revas face as her expression turned iron-hard. what? whats wrong. could be nothing. could be some aratnids triggering my proximity detectors or if someones using an incog but but theres a chance someones trying to get in? not here. the old place i had. you remember what told you about the strix. my old mentor? reva took a second to think. yeah. you gave some of your memories to him, right? raldi winced. dont remind me. anyway, he said that someday, someone might show up looking for me there thinking its their place. and then what? what else did he say? nothing. the half-strand got himself killed doing something really stupid. but i did end up getting something from him. i wasnt supposed to access it until the guest arrived. her battle-readiness faded, and she brushed a thumb along his cheek. he shivered and his metamind screamed. uh, reva her eyes widened slightly and she caught herself. sorry. that was reckless. godsdamned rash. its fine. im protected. anyway, you know how i am with directions what im trying to say is that i immediately tried to open the mem-packet. and? couldnt. strix had to show me up even after he died. and now, if were not just looking at a bunch of rats crossing into my own room, our mystery guest might finally be at my doorstep. she shrugged the sheets off and propped herself against the headrest. so. you want do this the usual way? what? i hide in your mind, and you make the house-call? yeah, she said. i could use the excuse to clear my head, and make up for not letting you hide inside my mind for nu-scarrowbur. wow, reva javvers learning from her mistakes. nu-scarrowbur was that bad, huh? she jabbed him lightly. pain exploded across his arm. he was going to need to pour some rainwater over it later. Chapter 14-8 Home (II) chapter 14-8 home (ii) are you tired of all the ads and invasive miracles licking at your skin every time you walk the streets? are you seeking a community of like-minded people who strive to make their lives better while also elevating the prosperity of their guild? or maybe you just earned your fate and are looking for some affordable shelter while you acclimate yourself to the wonders of the tiers? whatever it is you want, block-15 at pendross ravine has you covered. powered by a modern-twelve-core techno-thaumic and imbued with heavens designed to bring convenience to you and yours, block-15 has now been cleared to house 50,000 new homeowners thanks to upgrades made to its geometric-efficiency canons. but dont linger! the available rooms are dropping and dropping fast, with the hydro-pent housing at 100 unitssorry, 32 units and falling! you didnt get here by waiting, did you? no. you took life by the throat. you proved yourself one way or another. you are worthy. and you deserve to be blessed for your achievements. tarry, and the moment slips, but if you take that plunge, you might just find out how far up into the sky one can fall. home is just a thought away. -pendross ravine housing ad 14-8 home (ii) the most obvious deviation between a block in the warrens and a block in the undercroft was the aesthetic. where most buildings below the reach of the tiers were little more than hulking cubes of abused alloy held together by patchwork repairs and clicking flaps of tarp when the wind passed through, block-twelve was more like a cake with its stacked layers. the divide between the floors was marked by dotted lines of pulsing neon, and delineation ran symmetrical to the sheets of inch-thin water that held additional housing within specialized demiplanes. like most blocks of its design, its central thaumic engine was nested deep in its structure away from easy access, and the sheen of ever-changing phantoms spewing a non-stop stream of highflame and omnitech sponsored media. figures moved and writhed as colors descended the full spectrum of light along the side momentum of change. as the light bloomed, shadows shivered, and avo found his swim at an end. he surfaced from the black. light showered him, but unwanted attention continued to glance off his person. the crowds were a mesh of implants, heights, sizes, and colors, with several of them running holocoat privacy functions and a few baring their allegiance out and proud. hustle, bustle, and noise were insufficient descriptors for the streets of the undercroft. minds pulsed loud with music being openly streamed straight through a nearby lobby, and more than a few ran cognitive filters that adjusted their visual surroundings to a theme more to their liking. nu-dogs, nu-cats, and nu-pets of divided morphologies strutted upon streets of gleaming plascrete behind their owners. some towered over their masters while others were engineered to fit within pockets. a few were even implanted organic sockets grafted into their masters flesh, but that veered toward the extremes of even the new alloyist modding scene. as an ad changed and light struck the street again, avo finally noticed the constructs that gave the undercroft its namesake. the wights. there were fewer of them than ever now. ever since the guilds had improved their in-house drone manufacturing capabilities, the need to use locus-implanted corpses as menial labor grew impractical. still, their accumulation over the years left something bordering on the edge between sentimentality and indifference to their presence. for those that couldnt afford a top-end machine, wights were still cheap and common enough to supply most households. unlike the people, the wights sported plastic faces locked in an eternal rictus or a blank look completed with a hollow gaze. some among them carried bags, while others served as perception points for vicarity stars. more worked in tandem with spider-like cleaner drones, scrubbing at more intimate stains while the machine they were festooned upon rattled along the sides of builds and bridges. spurring his echoheads to chitter, a blanket of static reached out from him, and he laid his mind upon his surroundings as a proper greeting after a long absence. a few eyes recoiled from his person and he felt three of his ghosts shatter into rising steam. an intrusive thought came to him, wondering just how many lives he could snuff out as a response to the ignorant slight he just suffered, and how fast the guilds would respond. his woundshaper hummed appreciatively at the idea. there are ten thousand lives with our gasp on this street alone. it would but take a squeeze before we take another step up the ladder of divinity, master. just think of the potential just think of the rise. angled away from the heaven of blood, the galeslither brayed its disgust. do it then. betray your ideals towards choice and individual. be the rank butcher you were made to be by your betters. betters. of all the words of his galeslither, that was the only one that truly tasted ill. [its tempting. risky. estimate at least a few hundred thousand deaths if we use our sangunity. simulated guild response will be near-immediate. they will pocket the area we affect. cant hide the action. too much damage. our prey dont have incogs. spreading our mind will leave us vulnerable to more vectors of perception] testing his consciousness, he shifted through his various templates and nearly staggered from the eruption of horror that seized his thoughts. [we were thinking of casual genocide] [these were fated! the rights imbued within their persons by the articles cannot be] [kae will never forgive you. essus will never forgive you. draus will try to kill you. chambers will well, chambers is pretty much in love with you, so you can do what you want there.] with a surge of effort, avo cast off his newly invoked humanity. the mountain of anguish vanished from where it was within him, and his echoheads scraped along the memite plating of the walls he was leaning again. a few swinging gazes splashed new to him, minds confused as to what could have made such a loud screech when there was no one there. but by then, he was already gone. going vertical, avo set a path for the side of block twelve as he fired his celerostylus and cycled his blood. tendrils worked in tandem with his echoheads as rose like a fired flechette. there were countless loci dotting the exterior, serving as anchors for ghosts and surveillance phantasmics. between each shard of embedded vivianite, however, was a cracka crevice he could make large, and through the shadows sprawling through the blocks internal system would he find his way up. being a godclad was really quite the convenience. no need for front doors or thoughtscans. no need to be shunted across the in-block transit system to arrive. [cant trust him.] [walton told him we were coming. not about trust. about more details.] [cant show ourselves like this. too distinct. theyll get an image of us. easy to track.] +the grafter next door pulled a runner a few months back. also, she moved apartments even before that. i stopped keeping fishes after the no-dragons started using them to spy on people. turns out they made a heaven just for that.+ avo clenched his fangs together. he might have some questions about green river after this. +the wights the only thing i left. and its for you. i figured if i remembered it, you would too. now, i dont know how, uh, alike were gonna be, so ill tell you what. we can do this face-to-face if you want. meat to meat. that might inspire some trust.+ the door behind avo opened in perfect sync with the end of the mans words. avo spun around just as the doorway opened up. revealing nothing. avo blinked. then he felt ita new pattern unlatching itself from the plascrete, striding free as if they were part of the matter themselves. the holocoated figure pointed out at them. avo fired his celerostylus first. he tried to liquefy them but a clash of eldritch resonance rang out between them. [godclad.] his subminds drained away his startlement before it could settle and sharpened his instincts. where his haemokinesis strained to spear through his foes presence, the galeslithers hell enchained them in stasis. but by then they began to vibrate, and his rend emptied fast. tensing his consciousness, he prepared to burrow into a new mind, and from his stretched clawing flames that licked through the realm of cognition. he was a breath away when the entire room erupted into a thought-rend tide of force. he died instantly. resurrection - 1% *** in one instant, the space in front of reva was nothing but room, and then in the next, nine feet of a pale betentacled bioform collapsed like a marionette with its strings severed and died. and over its corpse, a fiery metaphysical scab began to form. she caught herself and staggered, feeling a strange lurch of resistance flow through her momentarily. her cog-feed also showed her shatterborns rend as up by a few percent. something just paradoxed with her. a lingering hiss rasped over her mind as she imbibed a passing memory of hunger denied. whatever that was, it felt feral and frustrated. the bloodthane blinked. +raldi, what the hell just happened?+ +ghosts got too close to your wards. whoever our consang is, they mustve triggered my proximity countermeasures.+ she suppressed a shiver of discomfort. getting nulled twice in less than two days was too much even for her. +thanks. whend you put those in?+ +just now. easier when im piggybacking. its hard to hide from your stormtree-sequenced crapwhat are your necros doing? i thought you guys work with ori-thaum. you should just let me sequence your meta. save yourself the misery.+ +yeah, considering im not gonna enjoy explaining our relationship to the longeyes, the answer is still no. sorry.+ looking at the corpse, she shook her head and sighed. fuck me, thats a big one. hard to imagine it had been right in front of her this entire time. she traveled through the concrete to arrive in the room at the same time raldi started talking. for a good while, the target remained hidden, and her patience frayed. if there was one thing reva javvers hated, it was incogs. godsdamned silvers were half-strands for making that. walking over to the unmoving creature, she looked down at its still form and the eight twitching carapaced limbs connected to its back. there was something bone-like about its appearance, but when she nudged it over and one of the plates shielding its face flopped open, she found herself wondering if it was some kind of heavily modified ghoul. +what is that?+ raldi whispered in her mind. +that looks like a ghoul but it was running an incog what killed it?+ never mind that, she replied, her attention entirely fixated on the building plumes of fire prying from between the scar tissue of reality, i got some shitter news. +i oh, fuck i see it. thats a bigger problem+ yeah, reva breathed. im not the only clad in this room. Chapter 14-9 Drawbacks chapter 14-9 drawbacks let me tell you a story about my favorite gun. spoiler: its a piece of shit. situationally. now, you might be wondering, tavers, you old sow, why is your favorite gun a piece of shit? did you survive all those years in the warrens off raw luck alone? the answer is yes, by the way. you have to be lucky to make it out down here. any squire that says otherwise is bullshitting you. anyway, favorite gun. omnitech piece they called the transgressor supremeyeah, yeah, fuck off. i know the names real rust, but i was eighteen and it was the finest godsdamned piece i could get my hands on. id like to start by mentioning the transgressors problems. its large. eighty pounds of alloy and complex machinery. its complex. takes a bit of technical know-how to even aim the damn thing. it sucks power like a growing scaarthian does a teat, and more than once i found myself gunning the trigger only to see my beam materialize and fizzle in the same instant. let me tell you, theres no cold dread like the dread you feel when your gear fails you in the field. to top this shame-cake off, the damn thing explodes if you overclock it. im not even talking about the cute might splatter a flat or two pops. this shit goes off like a goddamn mini-nuke because its literally running an unstable microfusion battery. remember when i said omnitech made it? yeah, it shows. everything voidwatch considers a science is more an art to the glitchers. anyway, by this point you might be wondering why im even using this thing. after all, it sounds like an unwieldy death trap thats more liable to get me killed than keep me alive in a firefight. well, consang, let me get to the situational part. you see, the transgressor is a nightmare to use, but a dream to assemble. whatever thaumic fuckery the red did to make it come together, it works like a dream. the entire things also spinal-mounted and thought-fired, so your hands are free to do other things, like gouge someones eye out or hold your guts in. the power system might be a sow and a half, but its flexible, and so is its recharge. you can feed it sunlight, electricity, coal, heat, synaptic tissue hells, if theres one thing the transgressor does right, its combat longevity. all this comes to a beautiful crescendo when you''re burning holes through unarmored skulls for a single percent of your charge in one instant, and then when a fucking golem blasts down the wall next to you and you feel your wards start to give, you flick that shit up to ninety and let the world around you boil. crank too hard, and the transgressor might explode. thats true. but you handle things right, and this thing will core a sangeist from 10 miles away, and let me say that there isnt a more satisfying feeling than dropping something god-touched with just your gun, your grit, and a little bit of luck to serve as the grease. anyway, the point is that you gotta know your tools. know what its built for. i knew some smart godsdamned squires that got snuffed because they didnt have what the run demanded. a nova necrojack isnt going to be much use to you if theyre trapped in a firefight right next to you, and a snuffers just waiting to get their strings cut if theyre wandering around with no n-sec. figure your shit out. figure out your kit. keep your preferences secondary. -quail tavers 14-9 drawbacks perhaps some countermeasures are in order? some kind of support structure to prevent your sudden demise? i understand that the patterns of vivianite can serve as a conductor to your ghosts and thoughts. mayhaps that might be a solution. avo was far ahead of his woundshaper when it came to resolving his new vulnerability, but an outright solution remained annoying far. the problem lay in the nature of the nether and the reactions within necrotheurgy as a whole. a thoughtwave disruption was less akin to a bomb and more a chaotic vortex collapsing consciousness beyond their housing in the material. for most, that usually meant losing track of what they were thinking or needing to reset their metas. for avoas a thoughtform unchained from the anchor of a bodythis resulted in his swift and unceremonious death. there was something about how phantasmics and ghosts could stay rooted to a body so long as it was bound to the material even as the nether came crashing down around them. avo understood himself to be the inverse. the fullness of his self had been drawn over into the nether by the merging of his conflagration and the war mind, and now bodies were less anchors to him and more articles of clothing. sheathes, in a word. resurrection - 88% his current empowerment in the realm of cognition had also left him with severe drawbacks. presently, even simple thoughtwave disruptions were a matter of concern. what would happen when a thoughtwave detonation destabilized an entire section of the real like in yuulden-yang? would he even be capable of resurrecting in such an environment? was his consciousness just going to cling to the vivianite formed by his blood somehow? more pressingly, how was he going to remove himself from his current situation once he returned, and they simply decided to hit him with another disruption? presently, one plan was to grow auto-seances within shards of blood-wrought loci before casting them into the dark and pushing them down the hall. this way, he could shift out of his body if he suspected an attack was coming. again, he found his mind drifting back to kae and her exocortex. considering the war mind festering within his being, he wasnt entirely certain a machine intellect would prove to be the insulation he needed, but he would never learn without experimentation. perhaps the next update to one of his canons could be something of a closed planar pathway? a domain of space that interfaced only with him and not the world somehow? such an improvement would prove most useful when paired with the unfettered nature of his consciousness. he also wondered if integrating more external conflagration aspects would broaden his cognition any further. with every growth, a new vulnerability. but with every growth came new paths to ascension. his untethered thoughtform made him vulnerable to nether-destabilization, but it also made him an apex predator in the dreaming unsea. if he wanted to escape, the clearer path was through. through the locus of the wight. throughout the session, it was running into the necro on the other side. that way, he could escape into a new body and also comprehend all that was transpiring in the same instant. drawback. benefit. vulnerability. advantage. i approve of your thoughts for once. the galeslither said. shadows flicked up like dust devils from the skin of the tempest-molded steed. six storm-cracked eyes stared at him from three heads, and he sensed a faint note of excitement in the heaven. your sense of direction is good. i believe escapingand devouring the mind of the unknownis a viable passage to freedom. would you accept some criticism, god in my stead? the woundshaper existed on creating and killing, fitting considering its lore as a blood god of creation and sacrifice. the galeslither, contrarily, was delighted to flee, delighted to seek the horizon in any situation. such want was not born of cowardice, but worship. to seek the curve and place trouble behind was a victory all its own, and for those to offer themselves to the skies in exchange for faster wind were martyrs not unlike the huntresses the woundshaper so loved. over the woundshapers scoff, avo allowed the heaven of air to speak. and before the transformation of his consciousness, an outright impossibility. forming a thin framework of himself from his haemokinesis, he watched as a latticework replica of himself took shape. dipping his cognition inside it, the arterial circuitry of his crude simulacrum came alight. it took mere seconds for him to grow the needed auto-seance within its structure, and he left the bare minimum requirement of ghosts to maintain its functionality. finally, when he was done with the false self he was crafting, he opened a pocket in his sanguinitys broadcast around the simulacrum and braced himself for disappointment as it sagged. but even severed from the physical touch of his heaven, his consciousness still remained within the structure, and to his delight, the blood within it flowed to his whims after a heartbeat of hesitation. [well, would you look at that,] abrel cooed. [new ensouleds grow up so fast. are you feelin that? thats what it means to be a clad. the impossible can go fuck itself.] strangely, he found himself happy to have earned abrels approval. this was an advancement even without the need for thaums. he had been treating his woundshaper wrong this entire time. it wasnt just a creator and a killer, but an assimilator. like him. it traveled through matter like an infection, and now through its power, he could spread his very being through structures and up edifices with barely anyone noticing. like a plague running beneath the skin of this city. a cackle of pure joy echoed from within his frame, and he felt his triumph become paired with his woundshaper. glorious. glorious! with a thought, he shifted the blood within the puppet and it stagged forward. it still moved a bit awkwardly considering he was more piloting than wearing it, but such things could be improved. as he compelled it to walk over the darkness before the door, he drew upon the powers of his galeslither and felt it sink down. darkness spread around him, but the specters the simulacrum had in place of eyes lit the way ahead all the same. as he coated his mind in the analogy of the incog, however, his vision vanished, though his control over his new puppet remained. new options. drawbacks. more kinks to fix. he reached out using his sanguinity and disassembled his new toy. no need to expose his newest ace to the blocks security since he couldnt hide the brightness of his mind. he would approach the meeting point manually, but depart immediately thereafter. in his stead, he would leave but an offering of blood in his place. *** +raldi, im telling you this for the hundredth time: theres no way i would go meet someone after i got snuffed. its just too embarrassing.+ +maybe theyre not like you, reva? maybe this ones curious about its memories.+ +how curious could they be considering they just got snuffed by us? and you seriously think the thoughtwave disruption did them in?+ across the session white-rab sighed. +its my best guess. maybe they were piloting a drone or something.+ +dont explain the anchor they left behind,+ reva replied. the necro didnt know what to say about that. presently, he had a dozen phantasmics running surveillance for him outside the aero and was tuned into the blocks systems so he would know just when their guest left to room. through the nether though, he caught a glimpse of some peculiar mem-data. whatever the loci glimpsed when the godclad resurrected didnt look like your usual meta. it looked like it was burning. almost like a conflagration. but it couldnt be that. that destroyed minds. a few seconds later, something stranger happened. a second, smaller mind sparked across from the larger one, moved around a bit, and then subsequently winked out. the big one followed as well. concerning. he cast the details over to reva and she groaned. +great,+ she said. +half-strand probably has a spatial heaven of some kind and just pulled in some help. thats it. were done here. dinner better be ready by the time i get back, you hear. this has been probably one of the messiest operations and then, in a flash, just beyond their aero, something rose out from the darkness cast by one of the four clamps securing revas harshlander m-ii. both of their minds snapped to attention, but instead of that creature, he found himself greeted by a wiry figure that seemed to be made from +is that blood?+ reva asked. +yeah+ raldi replied, feeling a bit weirded out himself. +thats blood.+ a growing note of tension rose within the bloodthane. +hey, raldi.+ +yeah?+ he answered, focus fixated on the crimson construct that began to stumble its way toward their vehicle. +remember when i told you i got nulled earlier?+ +uh-huh.+ +well the clad that did it had a heaven of blood too.+ suddenly, white-rab didnt feel so good about this little meeting anymore. Chapter 14-10 Dialogue chapter 14-10 dialogue a voider once said to me that war is the continuation of policy with other means. perhaps from the existence of which they knewtheir world that was and exists in their drifting sanctuaries out in the black, but my experiences have educated me differently. death is beneficial here. a catastrophe in the realm of the personal, yet a net positive for the world now. for all the might our cousins possess, there is a gentleness to them that i envy and despise. the flock is still capable of great atrocity, for all their shepherds of silicon and integers seem reel when gazing upon our world. death is policy here. death is fed by war; by famine; by sacrificial quotas; by industrialized breeding; by the mutilation of reality at the hands of the divine. diplomacy, to further the ends of death. it took shattering the gods to break this yoke on the people, but the scars remain, and even with time, i fear the wounds we suffered are indelible, and will not fade. i write this now to correct a notion in the minds of everyone. voidwatch heralded this new era as one built on humanity, diplomacy, and ethics. i reject all these notions without any ill will borne against our cousins. the mistake here was hope. what won wasnt diplomacy, it was the exploitation of desire and greed, that the fall of the pantheons was not delivered by the rising strength of our virtue, but by the certain suicide that comes with practicing vice. greed and envy and hunger and control. you think it was difficult to convince the pantheons to go to war with each other? that it was some legendary feat of sophistry? hardly. there was always the want. i just gave them a reason. that is the core of all diplomacy: to offer an end sought, and then lead them on a path to see your own to fruition. -jaus avandaer, on the godsfall 14-10 dialogue as avo directed his haemokinetic proxy to board the aero, he studied the scene before him from two angles. the first was where he actually was: in the shadows cast by the hypertube station below the block itself. being this far away would spare him any radial effects of a thoughtwave detonation, and would only require him to sever the session that tethered him to his proxy to avoid a full nulling. the second line of sight he possessed was channeled via a dozen whispers grown from the ghosts rushing through his proxy. drawing on his newfound willingness to experiment and merge with his templates, he perceived the aerodock from omnidirectional vectors, sweeping his attention across the sealed bulkhead and the aero itself in detail. the vehicle bore the aesthetic of an ashen wedge with dual engines running above and below its chassis. benhata remembered the model as part of the harshlander series. its speed was of little note, but its energy economy and sheer structural integrity made it the cream of the crop when it came to stormtree manufacturing. such was the claim, after all. [if it can fly in the skuldvast, it can fly anywhere,] benhata chuckled. [no truer words spoken. seen one get clipped by a linear accelerator, get flung into a building, and then end up flying right back out a couple of seconds later. scaarthians work hard to make sure their tech doesnt break.] avo himself was more personally vested in how much phantasmal interference was flowing around the aero itself. if the side door wasnt wide open, he wouldnt have noticed either of the two accretions. it wasnt quite an incog, but more a scrambling feature. something that seemed to spread and direct thoughtstuff into a lingering nimbusa near-opaque veil of privacy in the nether. it didnt hide the presence of minds, but it did make it hard to tell how many accretions there actually were. this was the work of someone who really knew how to sequence. [would be very useful to include him in our gestalt.] [yes. might even elevate our capabilities by multitudes. indications are that we are in the presence of skill.] good. avo liked people with skill. they tasted good. as his blood-shaped puppet bounced awkwardly up the harshlanders ramp, he shifted his mind and attuned himself to fit the challenge at hand, shedding his loathing for social interactions for curiosity and charisma drawn from his templates. fascinatingly, abrel and benhata synchronized quite spectacularly in places. the former was forthright and unshakably dogged in her approach; the latter was introspective but refused to quail under pressure. combining the two, and bringing some discordant aspects between their personalities using a few hundred sequences from shadow-3, he found a calm excitement rising inside himself as he seated his proxy down on a seat across from the holocoated figure and the wight. he felt like a performer, about to record a vicarity, or a circuit brawler ready to put on a show. [all the worlds a stage, and all the consangs and half-strands are here to hear our motherfucking words,] abrel chuckled. [pay attention to the scene: the wight is placed right next to the unknown. seated. they treated it with care. i think our mystery squire and necro might have a pretty good working relationship together.] already, it was paying dividends not being himself. avo wasnt sure how he felt about that. +apologies,+ he began. +i wanted to come in person, but i got a little death-shy after you murdered me.+ [levity injected,] a submind responded. [not enough humor for a laugh. will make you more personable though.] the scene played as estimated. no laughter, but he felt something soften and quiver in both minds spinning before him. a pulse of thoughtstuff spilled out from the wight. +yeah so. sorry about the killing you thing too. not sure how we managed that, but its not what i wanted to listen, im just going to get this out of the way: your mind is on fire. your ghosts are burning. i can see your modified specters crackling in the bloodwhat happened to you? thats thats a conflagration. i didnt think i saw that right, but its staring me right in the face. how are you not nulled right now?+ oh, and they know what a conflagration is too. another few points to their estimated skill as a necro. avo guessed this made them familiar with the incubi as well. whispers of warning sounded in the back of his mind as he considered the possibility he might be facing an off-duty incubus or some other guilder necro of considerable merit. the initial wave of paranoia was countered by questions as to why they didnt just call in guild support to kill or capture him. +javvers? like vincintine?+ avo asked. reva suddenly went very still. yeah. that half-strands my uncle. do you know what happened to him? zein. thats what happened to him. but zein was also the last thing avo wanted to invoke. he didnt need to find out if a version of her would appear out of nowhere and behead both his bodies for revealing her presence. +some strange miracle. just blinked out of existence in front of me.+ her face scrunched together in disappointment. alright. shit. he turned his attention back over the wight and considered the deepname again. +white-rab. i heard of you somewhere. cant remember the exact details+ a low chuckle came from white-rab. +you''ve heard my thoughtcast. i mightve given a few guides on how to survive as a necro in this here fine city of ours. maybe youve been in one of my vicarities as well. silvers got a bounty on my head too. two billion imps.+ hes real proud of that one, reva said, a faint smirk tugging at their lips. [huh. theyre fuckin,] abrel observed. +what?+ avo asked. [those two have been rubbing their ghosts all over each other.] +how do you know?+ [because she gave him the look you dickless monster. theyre fucking. im right. theyre fucking.] +okay. okay.+ he fought the urge not to growl. at some point, abrels aggressiveness got to be pretty grating. +anyway,+ white-rab said. +now all things are still kind of messy, can we talk about the reason why were, uh, face-to-face with each other.+ fuck both of you, reva deadpanned. +you want to speak of walton?+ avo asked. +walton? who the hells is walton?+ +you call him the strix.+ +... waltons his real name?+ +no. its actually wahakten.+ +wa-ha wahaggdan? what kind of name is that?+ +high nolothic.+ +whys his name in a redacted language?+ +because he was a low master.+ +...what?+ reva closed her eyes slowly and took a long drag of air through her nostrils. raldi. you gave your memories to a fucking low master? +i i didnt know! are you sure?+ +he was also killed by his other offshoots?+ +his what?+ +theyre called nodes.+ +huh?+ +he used to be one person. then he split himself into four.+ +aedon avo, jaus, whatever you aredo me a favor and explain everything to me from the start. when youre done, i have a memory you might be able to open, and then well find out if this conversation still seems schizophrenic.+ avo filtered through the potential responses of a dozen minds and let out a sigh. +you will be disappointed.+ Chapter 14-11 Facets of Truth chapter 14-11 facets of truth we have no idea where concave-shadow is, only that he appears to have shit all over his office floor before disappearing. why? i dont know why. dont ask me why. if i knew why, i wouldnt have said we have no idea where concave-shadow is. the strike cell is missing too for that matter. unfortunately, they didnt even leave us shit as a clue. just nothing. something smellsi dont mean the literal shit im staring at, i mean the situation in general. you should hear the chatter on my endthe inner halls are throwing a fit! over twenty incubi nulled in a single operation and now this. do i think its a highflame warning for us trying to jack into the greatling? do i think highflame broke into one of our secure facilities, disappeared one of our concaves, smeared his feces all over the floor, and just pissed off afterward without doing anything else? no! no, its not highflame. i have no idea who did thisnone of this makes any sense! -thoughtcast between concave [redacted] and incubus [redacted], ori-thaum 14-11 facets of truth +holy shit, thats a lot to take in,+ white-rab muttered. +yeah,+ avo grunted. +lies and misdirections and falsehoods and missing details.+ he studied the accretion around the wight as its flow turned inward. the other necro was considering something. avo still wasnt sure how much to trust him, but right now, it seemed like the other two were more lacking in knowledge than he was. strange how these things turned out; he came to seek revelations connected to his past, but now found himself an educator of hidden esoterica and forbidden histories. he hadnt given them the full scope of what he knewmaking them aware of the hungers without necessity struck him as careless at best, and foolish at worst, but with what insight he gave regarding walton, things gradually came together in white-rabs mind. +well, i guess that explains his skill. i always thought he was too good. i mean, im too goodbut he was something else. he could spot the smallest inconsistencies in sequences and mem-data like nothing. it was like hed been through everything already at least once.+ white-rab paused. +fuck, ive been jealous of an immortal mind-replicator. i dont know what this is going to do to my ego. on one hand, i might just be the best human necrojack there was, and on the other end, theres shit like the low masters swimming around in the dark.+ +and me,+ avo added. a bad thing about instilling yourself with humanity is all that tender social tissue comes with it. you start feeling hurt about not being respected, or left out. from inside the wight, white-rab winced. +well, i mean youyoure probably pretty threatening theoretically but uh, i gotta be honest here, consang most of us dont die from thoughtwave disruptions. we just forget things. its not great with the intimidation factor. the whole blood-puppeting-burning-thoughtfire is nice though. i gotta say.+ avo glared at his cognitive donor as hard as he could through his proxy. his perception tightened into condensed rods of attention, and he considered casting himself into the wight and branding some respect into white-rab. abrel agreed. [fuck this guy. i hate his type. hes not willing to call you a joke to your face, so he tries to make you feel better. real glassjaw shit. eat his brain, avo. wait, eat the stormtree sow in front of him first. thats the kind of cruelty that greases your steel, right?] the aero around them rattled. avo felt an unnatural vibration of force surge through his proxy. he turned his focus back over the reva javvers. while he had been pouring his ire onto white-rab, she reciprocated unto him. try it. you move, and if he doesnt get you, i will. they were assured by false hopes. neither of them had the capability to finish him this time. even if he lost his proxy to them, he could just send another, or start striking at them from apart using his heavens. so long as he severed the link between him and the proxy in time, all they could take from him were a few paltry ghosts. and somehow, knowing he could kill both of them reduced the spice of a potential fight. loathe as he was to admit it, his engagements with zein had always been stimulating if nothing else. uncertainty was a gift to the senses, and a variety of possible outcomes whittled away the boredom when faced with arduous tasks. he continued with his diplomacy more out of novelty alone than anything else. +lets get back to the topic at hand,+ avo said. +you said you had something for me from walton. i want to see it.+ white-rab coughed. +oh, yeah, right. that. so, i couldnt exactly access it. dont have the right sequence of memories. but ive been holding onto it for you. whats say we link and i show you what ive been doing.+ +no link,+ avo said. +connect to me deeper than my thoughtstuff and my ego spreads into you. like a plague. or a wildfire. wont survive the experience. but i will remember you.+ he meant that in more ways than one. siphoning away some blood from his proxy, he formed a locus right next to reva, and she eyed the crimson crystal with open suspicion. your bloods vivianite. +you already know that,+ avo said. +the texture is familiar to you. and your ghosts can rest inside.+ she nodded, and a begrudging look of acceptance passed behind her eyes. its a neat canon. got a name for it. the truly amusing thing was that the servants of jaus didnt even know the harm they were causing. they just thought it was a necro-thaumic reaction related to the nether. he left them ignorant of just what they were stripping away to create a perpetual and metaphysical instance of ones own mind. the ghouls were a fitting stopgap for the agony with their replaceability and willingness toward worship. still, their minds were only plugs damming what was being drawn from the hungers. already, he could see further changes in the behavior of his masters. before, they had been depraved, and violence, and merciful, and sullen. now, increasingly, they fit their title. hungry. hateful. rageful. a diet composed so much of who a person was. if only everyone could subsist on tangerines or oranges. idheim would have been a much happier place. alas. he found himself walking the mangled graves where once stood the warrens. the devastation the guilds had wrought from fighting each other far exceeded anything the uprising demanded. such was one aspect of his work that he quite appreciatedhis ghouls performed their duty and triggered the war just as anticipated. once they unbalanced ori-thaums annual tax sufficiently, that was all it took to convince highflame to strike. of course, the chivalrics were always easy to entice. still, it was a shame so many of his children had to be butchered like this. the other branches didnt care, but he had always felt a sense of pity when it came to their personal monsters. the ghouls had no choice in this affairno purpose beyond to spread and die and spread and die and spread as much as they possibly could. with the guilds mastery of biology, he doubted his ghouls would endure a full century. but if thousandhand was right about the ladder returning, then perhaps things werent going to last that long. a shiver of movement caught his attention. the sheer weight of secondhand starvation striking him kept it. he stopped in place and finally found himself standing in a playground, judging a small, pale figure reaching a claw up to the sky for salvation. a ghoul? and this far from the underground. it mustve had quite the journey to survive. with his footsteps announced by breaking glass and clicking debris, he cast his ghosts out to greet the subject of his fascination. when he latched onto its mind, he felt himself experiencing the near-delirium of despair and hunger, and in the pinprick of consciousness remaining within it, he realized it had noticed him as well, though it deemed him a figment of his fever dreams. now such sophistication of thought was quite unlike a ghoul. its parent stock mustve been of good quality to ensure such cognitive complexity. digging past its pain and torment, he settled his ghosts in the depths of its mind and considered his first words. simply saying hello wouldnt doit had more pressing concerns. then, it occurred to him. he would cede the choice to the creature. let it decide how this conversation goes. yes, why not? why not let the ghoul make a choice, if only the last one in its life? +do you wish to live?+ he asked. though he sent these words as a question, there was a good chance the malnutrition had run its course and there was no road back. but this was about the present, and now the future. he wondered what the ghoul would say. yes, he heard it rasp. yes avo shook himself loose from the memories and let out a breath. it was a lot. it meant a lot. it meant he wasnt just a loose compilation of desired thoughts, and that there was, at least, a point of inception he could call his own. he was real. real enough, anyway. Chapter 14-12 Facets of Truth (II) chapter 14-12 facets of truth (ii) the garden always outgrows the gardener, and the young will always surmount the old. -ancient sang proverb 14-12 facets of truth (ii) the rest of waltons memories completed avos portrait of his father. the famine of defiance was long intended as a venom seeped into the bloodstream of the usurpers. his creation was of an offensive varietyto infiltrate and sabotage and discover. but most importantly, he was meant to understand. stripped clean of hates touch, he, alone of all four branches, was meant to catalyze into a self-changing poison capable of toppling the empires that broke noloth. and for a while he did, betraying incubi operations to highflame, sang plagues mean to devastate stormtree territories, voidwatch raid against omnitech experiments. with each action he committed to, he kept the power between the guilds balanced and used them to whittle each other down. their confrontational deadlock had been what protected the low masters for all those years since their first defeat. no sense in surrendering his advantage before time was due. but with every movement came a counterforce, and where he was meant to serve as a disease to break the great powers, so too was he infected in turn by the cultures of new vultun and the experiences with its people. standing over avo was just another instance that the other low masters would never have. they would never feel the significance of witnessing a creature so wretched struggle for life still. struggle, even though there had been nothing in its life worth living for but death and flavor. flavor. what walton wanted for him. a kaleidoscope of instants rushed through him, he experienced waltons trials and experiments toward rehabilitating various ghouls. his initial self hadnt survived its malnutrition despite waltons best efforts, but his father did preserve the mind of the initial ghoul as best he could. from there, the continuation of avo was an interactive process, with the ego inserted into a series of ghouls possessing high executive controls and instinctual intellect. what he remembered of the megablock assault was also true and served as a foundational memory of his childhood but the ghoulling he was in those recollections was not of the same flesh as the one that passed not long after the war, and thereafter, the one that mourned waltons death from wombrash was a new interaction altogetherone specifically created as a test to gauge ethicality. one that the avo series managed to pass with flying colors. being connected through a single chain of continuous memories and traits built the facade of a continuous consciousness, but perception and truth shared a loose relationship. other cognitive augments were added to him. his dislike for socialization hid a resistance toward mem-cons due to this indifference to most experiences. the shotgun that so excited him was another such deliberate tweakmost ghouls loathed large noises that shredded layers of their eardrums.0v3l.bin. avo recalled nothing but joy when he used anvil mechanics multi-alloy reflex weapon. he could still remember its brutal recoil and the splattering of bodies when he clenched the trigger. his instinctive fear of fusion burners was left in to deepen the mental tissue connecting him to the war and to ensure his personal history led to a believable narrative. other moments flashed through his consciousness. skimming through them, he found himself once again taking on waltons perspective, this time as white-rabs unseen guardian and companion in the nether. this adventure predated the first instance of avo himself by twelve full years. it seemed walton had taken on an adopted apprentice long before he decided to build himself a favored son. their meeting had been by chancejust a dive gone wrong for the younger necro. trying to steal mem-data from a mind already marked by the incubi was just a twist of poor fortune. raldi nauser should have been gutter trash like his parents. he should have died as a fate-donor growing up, his childhood body used as a makeshift incubator for cheap gammaware implants. lots of things should have happened to him. but for one reason or another, death never came. and it was just as well. raldi nauser had a gift, and that gift was keeping his mind together. trauma greeted him like oil running over water, and walton wondered if it was his neurology that ensured his resilience or just a lifetime of harsh and specific conditioning one couldnt get anywhere else but the warrens. it took little for walton to feel a certain fondness for the boy. it seemed that between avo and white-rab, the famine of defiance was a patron of survivors if nothing else. after sparing raldi from a premature end at the hands of the incubi, walton began training him under the guise of the strix, teaching things few others would ever master, imparting on him the intricacies of sequencing and diving wrought from centuries of trial, error, and mistakes. more than a few teachings had been inherited by avo. it appeared that the bulk of his considerable skill as a necro had been derived from white-rab rather than walton. this had been a deliberate decision to keep avo insulated from the low masters ability to track him. they knew nothing of how walton trained raldi, and thus with the mingling of memories, avo would still gain the skills he needed to thrive without leaving a direct link between him and his father. a delivery made through a buffer in the form of another individual. walton played a careful game. coordinates appeared in the depths of avos recollections thereafter. loci, proxy minds, and other resource stashes littered across the city. leftovers from waltons term as an infiltrator, with many of the materials still viable for service. no other messages followed avo. no final farewell or sentimental greeting as with the previous encounters. only injections of information and detailed assets. the last major thing of note were the emotions walton left infused in these memories. from them avos subminds extracted the ability to simulate his fathers appreciation for aspects of the city, and some of its people. thinking of white-rab while such a cognitive pattern was running, for instance, now filled hm inside with a sensation of brightness, and so strange was the shine that it was hard to not smile. reva suddenly leaned in, the flow of her accretion tightening as she drew close to his proxy. are you saying theres going to be a fifth guild war? +it is inevitable,+ avo replied. +and it is going to be soon. there is no time left.+ why? what are you talking about? +the flayed ladder. jaus death and the great game to rewrite existence. its all coming to an end.+ avo basked in their staggered silence. for all the time he had spent in the dark, clawing and listening and manipulating pieces of key details out from his foes to get a clear understanding of the world around him, now he got to know what it was going to be like on the other side of the curtain. holding the keys to enlightenment really made one feel a hefty weight. +everything will be over in over a year and a halfs time,+ avo said. +the ladder is returning. a war to determine the rules of reality and the history that was is coming. and you dont know even know youve been drafted.+ these words were directed specifically at reva. godclad that she was, she was as ignorant as he when he first embarked on this path. now, she was in the throes of confusion, but soon he would give her liberation via understanding. they were both useful. reva would be an excellent entryway into stormtree and another godclad he could direct, while white-rab was clearly a necro of an extreme caliberone that likely operated on similar wavelengths as avo did. this started as a conversation, but he wasnt thinking expansively enough. if he wished to assault the rash, change this city, and be a proper player in this great game, he needed assets of his own. a power structure unknown to all others but him, and directable by own his will. ninth column existed under the umbrella of zeins power. perhaps there could be a new force that drew succor from his. +we just met,+ avo said, channeling all the honesty and rhetorical charm he and all his templates contained. +the situation behind my existence is, likewise, troubling. you could get a lot of money by offering information about me. perhaps a promotion. or even enhancements to your ontologics and lifestyles. this might be enticing to you. but i think i can offer you something better. something no one else can.+ prying herself away from the scenes of his past, reva found herself burdened with uncertainty about what she knew. it was easier to regard him as a deceiver, but part of her knew she gazed upon something she shouldnt have, that she caught a glimpse of this worlds true nature. make your offer. i doubt ill be +im going to end the wombrash and restore the heaven of love,+ avo said. +going to do it as a means to make amends to a friend. going to do it for power. going to do it because it will give me pressure to use against the guilds. and think you two might want to help me. even for selfish reasons.+ reva shot a glance at the wight. selfish reasons. +i will leave them unsaid. out of courtesy. but i still think you want to feel human more. human. not this chained thing youve all become.+ these words came pure and true from the minds inside him. all of them had felt the strain. all of them. years of being touch-deprived and starved of genuine love had left most with lingering wounds inside them. here was exploitable symmetry in culture and across peoples. as he was, avo would have never thought of approaching the situation from such an angle. now, he could guide them how he wanted. give them something to hope for, and something to dread losing. he just needed both of them to understand the other part of what made him so special. his frame. drawing up information connected to ori-thaums informational network, he accessed the last known location where the glaive in charge of kaes suppression was operating. if he managed to play his advantages right, he could see one success lean into another. but first, he needed to procure the awe and acquiescence of the two before him. walton would have wanted him to keep white-rab safe. avo himself didnt much care for the bloodthane, but she was an excellent lever to use against the necro, and vice versa. together, he would use one to move the other, and should he manage to get them to follow his path down the rabbit hole he was making, he might not need to ignite either of their minds at all with his own. how are you going to do it? reva asked. the rash isits a sphere nine heaven. the agnosi that created it +arent needed. i have my frame.+ yeah. stillborn or something. never heard the pattern. is it some kind of new configuration? and so, he found another path to convert the bloodthane. +reva. how would you like to get a new canon right now?+ her paranoia spiked and so did white-rabs. +hey, avo, lets not go snuffing or rupturing anything,+ his cog-donor said. +no need,+ avo replied, anticipating the tension. it would be all the sweeter when he resolved the problem. +i have your salvation here. i just need both of us to die temporarily. shell understand better if i show her.+ show me what? reva said. +the frame highflame was going to use against you and your ark. the frame that was fated to rewrite histories. come. follow me this once. its just death. i cant stop you from returning. follow, and return as more.+ Chapter 14-13 The Hand That Feeds chapter 14-13 the hand that feeds madness. absolute madness. do the guilds not see that they are courting ruination with what they ask me to build? heavens arent just dead structures you can stack together. the work it takes to concept even the lowest of the spheres requires a toll of death by the hundreds. i understand that our erstwhile rulers believe they hold privilege over all life in this city, but each ego needs to be converted to the proper beliefs and then reviewed before they can be fed into the ruptures. the most minute flaws could result in catastrophedo these people not remember mahdrada and his plague of digitization? how omnitech pushed and rushed and used that heaven of data without ever testing its stability? do they know how many agnosi died to contain the conversion of physical matter into nonsensical data? do they even care? no. no they dont. no one cares. and the ones that do are irrelevant or powerless. all the guilds want is power and new ways to defile reality. i cant remember the last time someone asked me for heaven to better society. the rains of midnight? the woundhounds? all before the present. all before this endless, pointless bloodshed that just wont end. with each modern heaven my agnosi are tasked to make, i feel my spirit screaming. the guilds adherence to the articles grows thinner by the day and more they ask for canons that are all-encompassing, all-powerful, and all-detrimental. broader than broad. taller than tall. and if we cannot deliver, they get mad at us. mad. for not making something of the second spherage a match for the ninth.0v3l.bin. here is divinityif you could control all facets of existence, you would bleed over into it, because totality is to be everything, and if your domain could affect all of existence, then there really wouldnt be a point of separation between it and totality, would there? to design a perfect heaven capable of achieving all these criteria would require years of research and review and focused worship. it would require death upon death and prototypical heavens. tests upon tests. experiments. learning! learning that is impossible to do when every power governing us is at war, or engaging in shadow wars, and actively assassinating the best and brightest of my order when they might be on the verge of a breakthrough that would tilt the balance. i cannot prove the guilds are murdering us. i cannot. and the exorcists and paladins, whittled themselves by years of accidents and misfortune are in little better state than we. the erosion of our humanityof the dream has crossed the last threshold now. i have no hope for a resolution to this no hope. even if a faction wins, what then? peace? prosperity? laughable. godclads stagnate in such conditions. how are you supposed to ascend the ladder of power without death and carnage? how? tell me! tell me! war! war will follow more war! because unless a single individual claims victory and puts us to the mercy of their heel, the conflict will not end. not with how we are! think you damned fools! think! fucking think! you cant even agree on the truths of the past, and somehow you expect the rest of us to believe that you will manage to achieve and accord once your ark is the last standing? no! war! war! war! war! war on the inside! you will find a disagreement to bleed each other over and commit to it. because what you say is a distraction. i judge you by action, and the only difference between you and a joy-fiend is comparative impotence. to the guilders who read my literatureit was you who deprived yourself of true glory all along. you. your fault. always. murderers of jaus. bastards betrayers of the dream. you and your impossible egos. you and your delusions. you will have what paltry heavens i can muster, but you will never glimpse the promise of ascension. when i was a child, i yearned to claim to the sky. now grown, i wish for it to fall upon us. -mem-log of high agnos ossam hariruda 2 weeks before his suicide 14-13 the hand that feeds revas flat stare was predicted by his subminds, as were the words that followed. you know people have tried to kill me a lot of ways, but this is the third time i was offered an even-trade suicide by another clad. the fact this wasnt a first spoke volumes about being a godclad. humans were creatures tempted by rarity and scarcity; the moment ones own life became casually renewable, the thought of spending it ceased to bear any heft in its weight. nonetheless, the idea was planted, and soon he would need to provoke her curiosity if he wanted to inspire action. mere words were insufficient, but he knew of the one true way to hammer his will into the bedrock of her conviction. one way, and no other. death was cheap. death was a teacher. death was an expression of goodwill. death was an invitation; a means to an end. death was dialogue. +i will give you the resolve you seek,+ avo said. +i will die first. you can follow me after. or not. its your choice.+ the accretions of both reva and white-rab bubbled with greater uncertainty than they did before. when they ambushed him, he expected himself to be at a disadvantage. not so. their encounter was fortuitous for him, and revelatory for them. there was so much that lay beyond the bounds of their understanding, so much he knew they didnt, and never could. not unless he showed them. [oh, its her choice,] abrel mumbled. [fuck happened to my choice. she gets the whole nice treatment while i got to see my brother die, my friends were butchered, i got halfway nulled do you just hate golds, avo?] her shock came with a sharp spike of startlement. whatever she had been expecting, it wasnt an intrusion so quick, so causal nor sudden. where once death mustve been a place of silent recess for her to wait out her resurrection and plot her next actions, now a foreign soul intruded, bringing new noise and strange possibilities she could have never considered. he found himself greeted by the unmoving form of her shatterborn as he entered. the forgemaster of broken things glared down upon him with three heads carved unevenly from jagged obsidian, and volcanic arteries coursed through its five iron-cast limbs gleaming with molten glows. steam rose free from the heavens chest, and countless charred hands worked the forge, twitching and writhing at the crackling of flesh. beneath the titanic visage of the former gods upper body, the lower stretch belonged to that of a headless lamb. a faint sense of familiarity came from the woundshaper, though it also toned a suspicious note as it noted several inconsistencies in revas primary heaven. shatterborn, forgemaster of broken things thaumic output: 849 thaum/c looking at her second heaven from an angle across, avo found himself facing a strangely familiar sight. houndmother, birther of wounds thaumic output: 122 thaum/c where most woundhounds are defined by the wounds they are birthed from, the houndmother resembled a gore-made dog clasped between plates of layered scabs where there should have been fur. the colossal canine was all primal, its form nakedly animalistic, and its young swimming between the canals of its weeping injuries. this, more than the shatterborn, consumed avos attention. the woundhounds had proven their worth during his ascent from the crucible. if this heaven granted him a free and easy supply of constructs that could spring forth from his injuries, he was more than interested to make a trade. he still had a lushburner to spare, after all. its domains might just feed into her designs. catching himself after the long lull of his silence, he read from her frames mem-data that she was at three percent resurrection already, and soon the return would be upon both of them. thereafter, they would face each other in the flesh once more, but before then he had much allure to deliver, and some confidence to reap. hello, reva, avo said. i thank you for allowing me to serve as your guest. it felt strange being so polite, but he recalled the lessons his templates had taught him and decided against risking any kind of antagonism. especially considering how unprepared she showed herself to be. ...the only people who have talked to me in here are the agnosi. you know that, right? false-hevs, avo said. useful. unnecessary. alright, she said, taking his words on as a challenge. what else can your frame do? it is your frame thats doing this, right? i dont think our ghosts make it all the way down here." "frame. a highflame donation." he kept his words vague, but she could fill in the blanks herself. "here. for your attention." with a thought, he transferred a single echo of essence from his boundary into hers. her ego gasped as she noticed the pulsing figment traveling between their frames, the mote a representation of a life taken, and the only true currency of worth in new vultun. he promptly took it back before he lost it to one of her cyclers. no free rewards. she would have to earn her prize and know him to be a patron rather than a charity. if they were to play this game with each other, a trust needed to be established. did you just he cut her off entirely by flinging one of his intact lushburners into the confines of her frame. the crucified phoenix speared into the unmoving shroud spread out from her soul and avo took the chance to study the clash between her flames and his. more than unmoving, his was animated and without limitations to its movements. hers was still and frigid, curving out toward him in the shape of a narrow cone. her options were limited to making powerful but tower-build heavens. even with two ontologics, he found her being to be cramped for space. how are you just moving that around? she breathed. oh, i assure you, the act is quite effortless on the masters part. revas soul went stiff was the woundshaper chuckled, and across from her followed the galeslithers sigh. that reva began. wasnt me, avo said. its as i said. following me was wise. you are now a witness to things few have seen. few for now. a rare privilege. but enough about my frame. that can be learned in time. want something from you right now. her being tensed. even stripped clean of physiological fear, he could sense the worry building from the depths of her soul. whats that? she asked, keeping the dread clean from her mind. she couldnt face him here, and if he deign to fill her hells with the excess rend from his woundshaper, there would naught she could do but rise and cease upon the call of resurrection. ignorance, again, was fatal. but mercy, sometimes, was fruitful. what kind of goddess do you want to be? Chapter 14-14 The Devil That You Don’t chapter 14-14 the devil that you dont there is salvation in ruin. there is permanence in entropy. the other guilds exist in delusion. they think the end can be surmounted or claimed or placed beneath their will. this is impossible. we, the bearers of the skuldvast, the survivors eternal, know the one truth, the one end. that all struggle ends in destruction and death. not even the stars may burn forever, and there will come a time when time itself unravels. but the end need not be feared. we need not succumb to despair. the end is release. the end is the last threshold we are to join, and the final womb in which we will slumber across the unbirthing of all realities to come. let the others hold to their soft dreams of triumph. all machines break. all flesh decays. we will bind ourselves to the breaking, and in it, we sever ourselves from the torments the tapestry. within the great roots come whispers of storms aroused. let the world be smashed. let all be undone. let all crumble and rise and crumble anew. our scars show the way, and what is shattered may bloom evermore. -mad rusings of old yadda, first longeye of the scaarthians 14-14 the devil that you dont something made revas spirit shudder every time the ghoul spoke to her. the dread was in the way she thought, in the words he used, in the wrongness of his consciousness and frame. the quiet dread avo inspired was more than mere horror. she knew terror from her work, faced clads of her spherage or greater, and beheld atrocities unparalleled in both intimacy and scope. she long thought her mind wrought from something sterner than iron, scars building upon her psyche like plating. but each moment she spent near him threatened to peel away her nerves. ghosts came aflame when kissed by his consciousness, and here, with them lined soul to soul, she found an unnatural symmetry between his frame and ego. the way his soulfire rippled and shifted and held to no stable form rankled her, but the utterances that flowed free from his heavensseemingly alive beyond even his volitiondrove spears of ice-cold numbness into her depths. still, she mastered herself. she imbibed the discomfort as she was taught and adorned herself in an armor of indifference. if there was one thing she could control, it was how she reacted, and so she reeled back her shock and set about facing her opposite like a foe. im sorry, before your start shoving me face-first into the ghoul-oil shit youre trying to peddle, did your heaven just talk to me? the sangeist, i mean. or whatever it is now. because that voice did not come from your soul. and im pretty sure your galeslither just neighed too. she infused as much mild apathy as she could into her words, intent on downplaying her reaction after her earlier lapse in focus. what she couldnt help was her straying attention. his soul twisted and udulated like it was alive, the currents of his fire moving whatever they so pleased, the curves of the inferno rippling like grass graced by a storm. they had an awakening, avo said. something that resulted as i began to reconstruct their potential. his vagueness maddening. he might claim to have inherited parts of raldis mind, but he lacked all his warmth and seemed more lost in the maze that seemed to be his own mind. there was another thing she wasnt sure how she felt about parts of raldi existing within the ghoul. lovers though she and the white-rab may be, they still kept deliberate secrets from each other. he didnt need to know the unsightly services she performed for the longeyes, and she didnt need to know if he ever dived against those of her color. such ensured stability in their romance and warded them from unwanted tension. resurrection - 18% with avo, though, she foresaw a potential disagreement between her and raldi. he was entranced by the nature of his consciousness ever since he first laid eyes on the ghoul, and his interest evolved into feverish curiosity when the creature assimilated the offered memory packet. and now, said creature was turning its charm offensive on her through hints of empowerment and demonstrations of his frames usual capabilities. be you jealous of what the master is capable? the heaven that resembled a heavily upgraded sangeist said. its features were rife with detail, blood flowing between states of glass, metal, and quivering mem-data, while lightning coursed through its rushing arteries. wait, had the imbuement of electricity been there when she faced him in nu-scarrowbur? their battle happened in a flash, but she thought him less developed then studying the woundshaper through the tunnel of soulfire bridging avo frame to hers, she also noticed an equine-shadow fused across from the first heaven at an angle. where the heaven of blood was immense in thaums and detail, avos secondary heaven was subtle and lesser in more ways than one. like a three-headed steed shedding trails of darkness and expelling whirlwinds from its mane, the galeslither held itself to a silent, sullen demeanor in contrast to the peacocking of the woundshaper. the mem-data for each of his heavens finally loaded into her ego, and she found herself further shaken. heaven - woundshaper domain: (blood/matter/biology/luminosity/lightning) thaumic requirements - 1042 thaum/c hell - [fourth circle] - woundshaper domain: (matter/entropy) thaumic requirements - 1042 thaum/c heaven - [galeslither] domain: (air/space/shadow) thaumic requirements - 430 thaum/c hell - [third circle] - galeslither domain: (air/entropy/) thaumic requirements - 430 thaum/c fuck, she muttered thusly. even his lesser heaven wasnt insubstantial. so, youd try and snuff me for good if raldi wasnt here? she asked. checking her resurrection, she noticed her progress had ticked past thirty percent. meanwhile, the ghoul seemed to be matching her pace even though his death came first. wouldnt be much trying. his thoughts held no brovado in their wavelengths. he spoke the words the same way someone might judge the weather or order a meal. somehow, he was certain that her life was something he could take at his leisure. she couldnt say it didnt bother her. reva had faced and broken her share of egotists and antagonists during her climb up stormtrees ranks. scaarthians that thought lowly of the lesser clads. those who followed the old traditions of ritual and scarification in defiance of the new age. all of them once thought her easy prey, and when the day was done, it was she that found them wanting in mettle and will. with avo though, there were multiple vectors of attack beyond her means to repel. his mind was incendiary, and if she didnt get him with a disruption, she didnt want to think about what might happen if he managed to tear into the core of her ego. his woundshaper was also a related danger in how it could help him channel his ghosts even when the nether was disrupted considering how he weaponized it as a cognitive conduit in their brief encounter. from what she gleaned, he might just have been the single most asymmetric threat she faced. physically, the threat they posed to each other was negligible. not when their canons clashed and she could reform the shatterborn from a pebble. but where her miracles ended, he seemed to continue on, and his growth was unfettered in potential and possibility. bad odds. that was something she had to admit to herself. bad odds she could see evened if she brought her cadre into these affairs, but the risk that presented was too severe. reva loved tigertail like a sister, and root and ullens had never been anything but reliable. they were, however, reflexively murderous and reva didnt want to use raldis life as a bid to test just how loyal they were to her instead of the longeyes. and, if she were to be honest, she really didnt want them to go the same way as abrels cadre. whatever the ghoul did, highflame was down three godclads. wait. down three she turned her attention to the lushburner again and understood. he took that from her uncles golems, so the cycler she saw earlier mustve been snatched from jaus. he snuffed three other clads for good. dead gods knew how many thaumic cyclers he had with him. dead gods knew just how many other heavens he was hiding in the chaos that was his frame. now. would you like for me to merge the lushburner with your shatterborn, avo asked. break it down to its fundamental domains? i can do both. biology can enhance your second heaven as well. no, she said, resisting. it was easy power. so easy. with just single word of acceptance, he could have pushed her past the threshold of being a fourth sphere. but she held her avarice in check. she swore her oaths and her loyalties again, she thought of the pureborn scaarthians. again, her mind drifted to raldi and her cadre. her life. she had come so far, but much had still been denied to her. right now, the ghoul was an opportunity. despite all his abilities, he hadnt tried to twist her by force. he hadnt even spoken a single harsh word. instead of deepening her appreciation for him, she only felt the pit in her core grow deeper. this wasnt how his kind was supposed to be. he was calmer than she wasmore in control than she was. this entire affair was an exercise in mercy and patience on his part. and she couldnt rightly figure out why. i will not press you further on this, avo said, openly disappointed. i will not inflict a choice you dont desire. not until we are properly enemies. he paused. you do not want that. you do not want to lose your ability to govern yourself. its hm. the minds inside me accept it. they feel what i want them to. but do you know what they think before the end? the last thoughts that are truly theirs? if she was of flesh, she would have swallowed. im sure its all bone-chilling and terrifying. no, avo said. just honest. just a simple admission that they dont want to go away. the idea of the self is so fragile. you care for white-rab. but i can make it not so. the i can make you forget. and i can make you hate him. she scoffed. are we finally at the threatening phase of our relationship? no. im still just being honest. i will try not to hurt you because of white-rab. your raldi. my father cared deeply for him. and theres something of him in me. i think that should matter. i think i should keep him safe. and useful. be glad you are part of that equation. reva didnt know what to say as a reply. consider what i can offer, avo said. and know that you will accept my boons when your moment of desperation comes. do not lie to yourself. you will seek me for power. that is why you are a godclad. you feel the hunger too. it is known to both of us. he sounded as sure about that eventuality as one of the longeyes did while sifting through auguries to gaze upon the future. need something else from you right now, he said. want to work together with you. for raldi. subject of mutual care. she didnt like where this was going. walton left me a few dead-drops. raldis like an adopted son. he should be included when i go seek out the caches. part of his legacy too. a laugh escaped her. that wasnt what she was expecting at all. youre asking for my permission to play third wheel? want an invitation. your acceptance will make our association easier. he cares about your opinion. i dont think he will go along with me blindly if you dont support him. i want this to be real. manipulation is bad terms for friendship. friendship, reva muttered. is that what this is now? why shouldnt it be? avo said. again, he nudged the lushburner at her. just say yes. just give yourself what you deserve. what are you denying this for? trust? fear? worry? its already under my allowance. take a small risk before we embark on a larger one. let me show you i can be trusted. something ineffable changed inside her, and reva chewed on his offer. what kind of goddess do i want to be, huh? yes, avo said, voice coming alive with delight. yes show me something small first. something from the domain of fire. then ill see how i feel about this friendship youre offering. the ghoul chuckled lowly and sighed. its all i can ask. Chapter 14-15 How to Win Friends and Murder People (I) chapter 14-15 how to win friends and murder people (i) somethings happening in the tiers. the silvers i know are seeing a lot of golem activity and multiple district-wide thoughtscans are ongoing right now. theyre searching for something. and right after an exorcist oversec got hit too. somethings stinking in the water, and its got all the big ones looking for it. theres also been some interesting chatter on a slew of mass suicides in the throat. something about omnitech mid-guilders having a crisis of conscience for putting down a labor strike. or maybe someone else had it on their behalf. now, if youve been listening to fateless, you know that im not one for conspiracies of whispers, but something about how the winds blowing right now got my guts all twisted up. theres a chill running in the breeze. somethings changed the world. somethings changed, and i think a lot of very powerful, very important people are scared. of what? i dont know. all i can do is play you all some tunes while we wait and see. heres autumn never lefts the beast unseen. -cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 14-15 how to win friends and murder people (i) blessing reva with a new canon was a trifling matter. the only cost it incurred was part of his dismantled lushburner, but the reward was more than worth the price. imbuing her with but a domain of fire, he elevated the potential of her shatterborn and added to her flames. her powers, upon his review, were mostly bound to the enforcement and alternation of solid structures. her domain of matter could derive mass from acceleration or enforce a permanent state to whatever physical component she was channeling at her core. consequently, her domain of calamity held only the power to tear open volcanic eruptions on surfaces which she could root the shatterborn. with these miracles came adjacent but well-hidden hubrises. if he managed to separate her from the ground or deprive her of the piece of matter she was channeling, backlash was certain to follow. the only thing that stood out from all the others was her lone canon tied to the domain of firea miserly perceptive ability now known to him as steamsight. the name told all there was to know. her awareness expanded with the spreading of hyper-heated fumes, and rend followed if the air about her was rapidly cooled. it was on the foundation of this domain that avo imbued her with greater strength. however, he noted the restrictions of his frame with a faint annoyance. she could sustain a single new canon more between both her heavens before her breadth was at capacity. the capabilities she presently had were still permitted to grow upward by the weight of a few hundred thaums, but short of someone remolding the shape of her liminality, stormtrees atgeir-pattern frame tied one to the path of a tower rather than a sea. domain of (fire)canon of burntheft - the master of this domain may hold masses of surrounding matter that they vaporized with their emitted heat. the vapors seized from the former physical constructs will then be tied to the master and can be remade into solids at any time; the amount of vapour that can be carried is equal to 10 cubic meters. hubris: if the vaporized gases are hyper-cooled, it will result in thaumic backlash transferred: 40 thaum/c you didnt even need an agnos reva whispered. she sounded more disturbed than awe-struck, but he couldnt fault her. what she was witnessing was both the usurpation of an old, integral pillar of power between the guilds and an easy avenue of apotheosis gifted to her. resurrection - 89% he let her select from the generated options, but deliberately withheld any canon that would demand a thaumic donation beyond fifty essence echoes. what she currently held was a bit less than a baseline galeslither with the forty thaums it demanded. paltry though it might seem, it was still a remarkably useful thing for her to possess. much of her build portrayed her as a breaker, with small elements of shaping offered by the supporting houndmother. as a crown of sizzling condensation spewed free from the gleaming heart of her shattborn, he found her silenced by the subtle transformation, and yearning to return. agnosi arent worthless yet, avo replied. still much i dont know. that will change soon. i will boil the enlightenment from them. or i get my friend to teach me. whichever is easier. oh. and your heaven might awaken after this. an unseen smile spread across his being. sorry. forgot to mention that. the shatterborn lurched and the rushing steam hissed at him. revas heaven betrayed her displeasure despite the even tone she held. you forgot. happens to all of us. it even happened to some of them deliberately. he was a busy ghoul. there was so much for him to think about. so, it might start speaking like one of your heavens? maybe. probably has a different personality. wont know till it happens. wonderful, reva growled. i love it when people spring surprises on me. he chuffed a series of low laughs. dont worry. not under my control. still your heaven. still tied to your will. you can make it go quiet at any time. they give good advice. sometimes. what a wonderful compliment. the sardonic response came as a concurrent reply from both his woundshaper and galeslither. tides of disgust and wailing neighs of scorn followed. they really didnt like being so attuned to each other. sometimes, avo repeated, sinking his fang in a bit deeper. it wasnt just fun to needle reva alone. reva sighed. can you take it out of me? the canon? yeah, reva muttered. i might just. resurrection - 100% a waterfall of fire slid its closing jaws over his nous. before his return, he saw the very same ignition take place within reva as well. as they were cast back into life, he found himself pleased with his little session. the bloodthane had started as a slightly impenetrable adversary, but more and more, the map of her desires became known to him. ever traitorous were the hearts of men. reality around him shuddered, and avo reached out to part the veil of blood that separated his subreality from the overarching tapestry. he poured free from the pool of blood his proxy left when he killed himself. a puddle of bright crimson stained the pristine couch of the aero. avo cleaned his mess with but a thought, his haemokinetic particulates peeling the furniture clean anew. before him, reva jerked back to life as reality twitched around her. no domain-based resurrection for her, he guessed. [might want to keep things neat. not sure her heaven would affect the vehicle. might damage the matter around us.] the theory from his submind came without fanfare. he was back, and so was his metamind. wholeness was a wonderful thing. hello, avo said, keeping his echoheads wrapped tightly around him. the vehicle was spacious, but even so, his size proved to be a problem of discomfort. [we really should culture more bodies for ourself. have cloning vats in the george washington. why dont we use that? switch between sheathes quickly. expand our options.] now there was a suggestion. his mind and ontology were untethered from restrictions, so why should his vessel be? pushing the considerations aside for now, he turned his wide rows of teeth at reva and white-rab in his version of a smile. good to finally meet you in the flesh. alive this time. in the corner of his vision, he saw small volcanic cracks smelting part of a nearby table, and steam rising into the air upon hissing plumes. ah. the bloodthane wasnt wasting time. +i have to be honest, you were a less impressive sight dead. what kind of deal did the strix have to make for you to get fitted with no-dragon augs?+ oh, avo replied. not his doing. mine. my choice. woke without an arm. missing more than that actually. kidneys too. he offered a small shrug. as i told you before. things werent exactly as planned for anyone. not him. not me. not the low masters. a cape of steam settled upon revas shoulders, and he noticed the lump she quickly swallowed. despite the absence of a heartbeat, woundshaper could still sense the accelerated flow of ichor rushing through her biology. she was shaken. mask herself as much as she wanted, she was unbalanced by all that he was, and all that he could offer. good. there were few pleasures more divine than earning someones fear. have something i want to do with you, avo said, looking at the wight. white-rabs accretion slowed to an anticipatory halt. +youre not going to request a threesome, are you? because revas not up for that.+ avo blinked and tried not to think much about the words his cog-donor just said. +its. its a joke. i was i tried to make a joke. it didntfuck it, i didnt say anything. you should start talking. yeah.+ [yes. please. i dont want to imagine you and him and her. bleh.] abrels mind template shuddered in disgust. its about the strix, avo said. remember. told you about his caches? want to go see one? white-rabs thoughtstuff tumbled. +wasnt that for you?+ again. a note of envy. but envy was so easy to twist into affection. the shadow templates whispered what needed to follow to avothe words he had to say and the mood he had to convey. the manipulation wouldnt be a hard sell. he already knew what white-rab wanted, after all. no, avo said, trying to inject as much warmth and surprise as he could in his voice. he needed to borrow some humanity from his assimilated stock of minds to manage it. no. walton wanted this for us. he left the memories for me to open. thats true. but inside the memories are also moments for you. well-wishes for you. he thought much of you. this was a bit of an exaggeration. walton did care deeply for his protege, but there were many other aspects of the once-famines recollections. his was a mind made rich across countless lives and passing ages. his past held far vaster a space than just regards for one or two people. +yeah?+ white-rab said. he sounded slightly child-like in the way his mind toned the words. +he thought of me?+ much, avo said. im going to go and see what he left us. but it wont be right. not alone. we should see to his legacy. see what he left us. i think this will be a good start for our shared lineage. give you the details. white-rab breathed a single laugh. +well. i guess i should say a proper goodbye to the strix. reva? how do you feel about this? this is personal, and i know you dont like+ the steam around her fused back into a fragment of wood in her hands. her hazel irises cut upward to glare up at avo. his grin broadened and he suppressed any thoughts relating to tearing her eyes out and eating them. im not calling in for another two days. lets go see what your not-dad cultist of a mentor left you. aside from this thing here. avo just kept smiling. he could get quite a bit of mileage out of this friendship thing. *** chambers stared at avos headless corpse. consangs. its been like three hours? are you sure we shouldnt go look around or some shit? a loud crackle of gunfire was draus answer. right now, she was taking potshots at who-the-fuck-knows-what through her shards of glass. beyond the portal, chambers heard the tell-tale sound of an aeros engine erupting to a plummeting scream. then, all of a sudden, she shifted shards, and the sound was gone. he does this shit sometimes, draus scoffed. gets a new toy, and becomes all distracted like. hell come back when hes done or bored. give it another day before we go lookin. sides, i think our voiders might got eyes on him already. she cocked her head toward where denton was speaking with sunrise. and if that dont work, we just gotta listen. listen? for when shit goes south. the regular expanded another sheet of glass to the width of a window and manifested a passage. wind and sounds of traffic erupted into the room. a savage glint of amusement accompanied the sneer that tugged at her lips. draus leveled her projectile launcher and took aim at a new unseen target. if i know one thing about avo, i know that stuff falls apart where hes at, and we just gotta follow the damage. Chapter 14-16 How to Win Friends and Murder People (II) chapter 14-16 how to win friends and murder people (ii) the city lies to itself. i have traveled across the entirety of the new vultun special administrative suzerainty three times in total during my service. i have seen many things and encountered many obstacles of evident and unnatural categories. a thing to note for all operatives is that you cannot view the city as a straight path. going from one place to another is a determinant scenario. its determined by if any warheads are in play between the guilds or their syndicates during the day. you must also worry about the effects of any stray heavens leaking over into foundational reality itselfi lost half my drones once attempting to look upward in an ashthrone district. this resulted in an unsecured hell releasing its entropic feedback and hyper charging the air friction around me. much of this is to say that you must consider and develop adaptable routes. i recommend using local contacts in each district for safety. it is essential to know which boundaries are geometrically, spatially, or just thaumaturgically affected in general. presently, new vultun is split over forty-five thousand fatality-procurement distribution sites. over two thousand different major sovereignties make up the governing pillars overlooking these zones, so be sure to familiarize yourself with which guilds have the most vested claims in the area, and what heavens they might be able to deploy. above all else, be aware. awareness is the key to your operational success and survival. employ all means of internal and vetted external assets to ensure your comprehension of the locality and preparation for any event. if you are the first to be acquired or engage an adversary without properly understanding what they are, the outcome is rarely certain. and from my encounters, i must stress that the cessation of ones consciousness is a lesser torment in the face of other ends ive seen befall certain former companions. -sunrise, operative of aegis (voidwatch) 14-16 how to win friends and murder people (ii) among the greatest boons the subminds granted was a passive awareness of information. from all the minds he consumed came new branches of memory, and with each extension of their segments did his base of knowledge swell. more than just this, they allowed him to understand matters betterto assemble pieces of infromation where he would be been just blind before. [pendross ravine was born of a fruitless struggle,] said a submind channeling a myriad of templates. [clenched between two other districts at war, the urban sprawl had the look of a basin when viewed from on high. to its north rose a grand tsunami of insects caked in living flesh, with eyes sprouting from enamel stalks glaring unceasingly at the uneven teeth-like mountains stacked far southward. strong winds unnaturally funneled all things capable of motion through the passage of the miraculous edifices, serving as a checkpoint for most to contend.] more details loaded into avos consciousness, and the history of this place unraveled before him. distant vicarities and past mem-sims expanded through is cog-feed. festering bones raining down from cancerous sores swallowing entire patches of sky warred with towering icons of wood and storm. the horizon was bathed in endless light, the bombardment of atomics endless and constant. there were wars here even before the fourth great clash between the guilds. a war to settle who would control which piece of the tiers, and what portion of deaths flow to which master. for years, the districts of yuan feng and kag-kraelin pressed against each other, sainist and massist forces fighting and bleeding and dying by the thousands across the minutes. countless no-dragon bioforms once littered the ground here, as did scaarthians enduring the trials of their adolescencemost of them never surviving to reach the ascent of motherhood. then, just before the time of the third guild war, a failed coup left the no-dragons reeling on the cusp of victory after years of bioform-wrought attrition, plague, and bombardment left stormtrees local detachments decimated, highflame stole the moment from their own ally and claimed the area as their own. what followed thereafter was equally a farce. gullivan pendross, noted chivalric and authority of highflame, was found dead a few months later, having apparently contracted a suspiciously rare and undetected prion that caused his final cessation in the midst of combat when the third great war began. also interestingly were the claims that the no-dragons were unable to receive any communications when the fighting began, arriving only as highflames knots were on the verge of collapse to offer their support. on the massist side, ashthrone and sanctus, both seeking to curry more support and favor from ori-thaum, rushed to punch through highflames wanting defenses. unfortunately, they decided to do this as an act of mutually agreed proactivity, and thus didnt alert stormtree of their assault. thus came the battle that numerous proparazzi heralded as shame in the basin, with decimated highflame units bolstered far too late by no-dragon forces to mount a meaningful defense, and the last of stormtrees local bloodthanes engaging in brutal ally-on-ally combat and rending the massist unable to fully take advantage of any breakthroughs. by the end, pendross ravine remained split sixty-forty between the saintists and massist, and those that stayed past the conclusion of hostilities established strange bedfellows even among former enemies. down the middle of the city, the highflame-owned enterprises were tethered together as a continuous chain against the messy smattering of ashthrone and sanctus businesses. around the perimeter, however, there was no shortage of sang-scaarthian joint-owned structures, forming an encirclement of ire that pressed the golds, blues, and grays against each other. it was also why avo didnt find himself all that surprised when a series of nuclear blastwaves ballooned over the horizon and carpeted his destination in suppressive devastation. the aeros systems wailed warnings as skies seemed to tremor and shake. the harshlanders sensors spewed an avalanche of mem-data while phantoms portrayed a full-spectrum detection grid of all that was happening around them. it was a testament to stormtrees design that the vehicle barely groaned as the first whiplash of turbulence ran through it, but where it could contend with the disruption inflicted by coldtech, there were also stray miracles in the air and sky above the afflicted blocks boomed with mind-burrowing warnings. +attention: counter-miracles are active all vehicles approaching block c-4 are to halt and return to their point of origin. the airspace has been vector-locked. all physical entities without proper fate clearance will have their acceleration detached from their ontologies and be subject to detainment under the authority of highflame.0v3l.bin. aeros and drones ran beneath his eldritch senses, and within his frame, he felt his woundshaper shudder. imagine, master. imagine just clenching your fist. just reaching down into the city and clenching. how many thousands of lives could we carry away with us? how much greater could we be. again, the temptations were all around him, but such a thing struck him as something he could do once and never again. it was also a distraction from his true intent. he needed to use his haemokinesis as a conduit again, and he needed to touch a passing nuclear delivery system. the phantasmal grid playing between him and reva showed arcing trails and estimated accelerations. the nukes were being fired from the low stratosphere in batches of twelve and were each screened by a swarm of fifty expendable drones. [more jackpoints.] [indeed] this made things easier for him. they didnt even need to approach the block directly, though all the current impact vectors were still a mile or two beyond his reach [dont need to overlap our sanguinity. we can use more meticulous methods. form haemokinetic shrapnel. burn auto-seances into them. fling them into the sky.] [yes. maybe still too wasteful. could pour most of our ego over into a construct. boltstride using it.] [effective. but loud. obvious. also puts us at direct risk of disruption if it happens.] [hm. shrapnel.] [shrapnel.] it took less than a thought for him to harden ten thousand tiny flechettes in the air twelve miles beyond the aerovec. he stopped as he began to feel slightly lightheaded, seeing that he was presently drawing from himself than converting any external mass. his subminds made shaping and controlling all the constructs even more convenient, and his sanguinity allowed him a direct connection to infuse the once unlit constructs with the necessary dosages of ghosts. what are you revas words were cut off as avos cognition flared, and every last diminutive mote of blood sparked like struck flint as he poured parts of his mind into them. blazing ghosts rode out like a tumbling wildfire, and ten thousand thoughtcasts were tethered to ten thousand shards. [arranging cognitive inventory.] avo took a moment to enjoy his feat. previously, he had neither the ghosts nor the mental processing power to achieve such a thing. now, with each ghost he consumed, his mind expanded, and his ability to think and learn and become expanded. weight was no longer his enemy. gluttony was now, at best, a lesser vice. the grid before him flashed as new icons entered its radius. dipping a whisper across his outermost shards, avo peeked at the newest falling barrage of warheads let and simulated his own calculations. triggering his personal phys-sim, he aimed a salvo of his own, and when the estimates loaded place and the lanes turned red, he flung his blades out with a flick of will to pierce his adversary in mind and matter both. the air rippled with force. outward sailed avos traveling fangs. outward they would bite and bury, the ones that missed slated to be released from the presence of his heaven, while those that impacted would serve as his insertion points. there was much to consider about unleashing an attack across vast distances. the numbers didnt lie, but physics was a capricious entity. new blastwaves folded the air and shook forty percent of his initial constructs off course. he anticipated this possibility, but quantity had quality all its own, and blood worked like birdshotspreading wide and piercing shallow. of the ten thousand needles he cast out, only three hundred sank into the warping embrace of foreign alloys, and of those, only eleven remained after one of the warheads he targeted was intercepted by an unanticipated missile. success, in the end, came in the form of a passing drone that took one of his shots straight through its chassis. immediately upon detecting the impact, he activated one of his few remaining auto-seance sessions and directed his perception through the other side. it took less than a second for him to identify the presence of the drones locus, and by the end of said second, he was already threading his conflagration into the drones cognitive structure and incinerating all that could burn within. roaring down the scant memories forming the connective tissue between the drone and its jock, avos consciousness went off like a firebomb, and the lobby from where the attacks conducted their offense reacted as wood would to his presence. all came alight. all came aflame. all became him. there was no anticipation, no retaliation, no chance to respond. avo spread through the lobby of the attackers, and across the city, thousands began to twist and writhe upon their jacking stations as the flames blessed them with a final seizure. they mightve begun the day thinking this was going to be a prolonged raid, but avo really didnt have the inclination to be delayed. this block war was going to be done, whether these players wanted it or not. and when he was done, hed just pin the blame on highflame. it wouldnt be that hard to have white-rab fabricate a stray memory or sequence left behind, after all. Chapter 14-17 A Seizure of Gifts chapter 14-17 a seizure of gifts it wont take much for everything to come apart in battle. this is why you cannot rely on the nether when the fighting gets rough. things get disrupted, and even ori-thaums weavewrither counter-suppressive intelligence network can be suppressed by prolonged thoughtwave detonations. as such, a godclad cannot fixate on a single tool alone. you need to open additional options for yourself. you need to create openings and stay aware of the situation, or youll find yourself lost and soon to be dead. remember the sequence of battle. perception and awareness are everything. establish and control your perimeters. shape the situation. prepare your necessities. engageand do it quickly. if you stay locked in combat for too long they will zero in on your canons and rotate specialized rendbreaker units to see you snuffed. tempo. tempo. tempo. play to your rhythm, and get out before you culminate. and if everything is already going to hell, and you dont have a clear overview on your situation, break, retreat, survey, and then assault. if you juvs want to keep those souls you got, you need to use your heads. not knowing what kills you isnt an acceptable excuse when the big nothing comes calling. -santanado starsinger mondelles, combat instructor to axtraxis academy of highflame 14-17 a seizure of gifts the scene portrayed by revas aeros visual sensors made it look as if distant stars were flashing into being over the assaulted block. as bright as they burned, so too were they quick to dim and fade, as if the flames torching them from within were pulled away to another place entirely. something about the incomprehensibility of it all made revas stomach turn. +holy shit,+ raldi breathed. his aweand terrorwere palpable. never before had she seen him so captured by a sight, and never did he allow so much emotion to leak through his thoughtstuff. whatever the creature was doing, it was enough to shake a veteran necrojack to his core. +whats happening?+ reva asked through their shared session. +whats he doing?+ raldi didnt respond immediately. instead, as his ghosts leaped and twisted to and fro from his mind, he connected her to his cog-feed and interfaces loaded into her minds eye. he was creeping through the districts surveillance systems. +hes nulling them. all of them. jaus, its like someone firing a fusion burner down an interconnected. he must be tearing through their lobbies. this jaus, i have no idea how many people hes nulling by the second.+ as if to compound his words, the ghosts once transmitting their warnings over the block sparked and promptly vanished, and with their banishment followed the light as well. an entire patch of the district went dark. beside her, the ghoul clicked its spear-like fangs together and chuffed with artless glee. the unseen massacred pleased him, but his disposition was that of a connoisseur observing an art pieceno; he was the artist himself, marveling at the greatness of his own skill. slowly, he turned, and the writhing flames that crowned his accretion discharged a splash of ghosts and burned ever thicker. between the undulating folds of the blaze, she caught sight of screaming faces and ethereal memories breaking and forming like the steam that cloaked her body. her instincts screamed with anxiety, and she understood what she stared upon immediately; these were the memories of his victims, fed into his ghosts and stripped clean of their consciousnesses. a subtle shift of his posture made her jolt, and she reached out for her heaven and stayed her hand in the last instant. you are forgiven, avo said, low hissing mirth escaping him. i cannot blame you for being afraid. it is appropriate. now more than ever it is a proper response. you are a real person, reva. it is good to treasure your own life. understanding your kind more now. reva felt her nerves tighten with every word the monster spoke. her blood was rushing like before a battle, and it took all that she had to refrain from attacking him. she had to. for all the hubrises he was certain to possess and the paradoxes she could strike if only she knew all his domains, but of his absolute weaknesses there was one avenue. yet, what would follow would certainly be her endand possibly raldis. she had been a bloodthane for years, and in that time she told herself a single story, that she was the huntress, and her foes the prey. not so at present. not so. an old truth revealed itself to her thenone long known to the wolves, wargs, and beasts which dwelled in the deep and deeper of the woods. unfortunately for her, his evolutions came radically. even now his mind swam with new words and whispers and wonderings. with all the jocks and necros he consumed, his consciousness was a small township unto itself. knowledge and recommendations fed themselves directly to his notice, his new templates organizing by seniority and relevance for each situation. he had learned the true reasons behind the assault in a near instant and withdrew before the lobby began purging itself after he devoured all the protecting necros. his mind shifted between euphoria and annoyance at his vulnerability; his flames could brand all the nether into him or the other way around, but he would be snuffed like a paltry candle when the disruptors went off. the tradeoffs were extreme either way. as such, he already devoted a good percentage of his mind to coming up with a solution. regardless, he approached the sieged block in silence, shuttling the aero with reva and white-rab toward confrontation. he hadnt fully manifested his galeslither, but he wasnt far off with how much of he was invoking his power over shadows. speeding toward the structure itself, avo regarded the situation with precision. he had jumped from mind to mind while spreading his cognition, and using the penetration already achieved by the attackers, he disabled critical functions within the defending blocks protections. most of the loci he left untouched so as to not alert the attackers of his coming. of course, with their logistical and information backline slaughtered and the nukes entirely silenced, they''d soon be aware that all was not well for this operation. surfacing within the ground level of the blocks lobby, avo pulled himself and the aero out from the darkness as if he was crawling onto shore. warning klaxons sounded around the cavernous lobby of the block, and lights brightened and dimmed, basking hundreds of mutilated bodies in throbbing oscillations of neon. a cold wind ran through the open gateways leading beyond the block, and with a peek into some of his new memories, he understood the scene. ashthrone and sanctus necros managed to breach the blocks systems and removed major parts of the lockdown before local highflame personnel caught on. by then, however, it was already too late. the attack was on, and the blitz came in a storm of bullets and monofilament grenades. bodies large and small, male and female, of every make, shape, enhancement, and aesthetic were left as ruined mounds of meat toppled over each other. open faces and empty eyes told avo the residents were entirely unprepared, and the wounds on some revealed that the raiders found amusement in blowing the legs off their victim and watching them crawl. sometimes, man was not so far from ghoul. +its done.+ white-rabs thoughtcast emanated from within the aero, and avo found himself surprised. had his cog-donor already managed to instill the necessary fabrications to distort ashthrone and sanctus theories? if so, walton trained him well. he would be a most useful ally for clandestine situations. so long as avo needed a softer touch, white-rab might just be the one to deliver. good, avo whispered and spread his sanguinity outward. his tactile awareness exploded out from him to sweep for any details he might have missed with his cog-feed alone, and he accessed his newer templates to track where each assault team was heading. five hundred twenty operatives were deployed into the block depths supported by a multitude of drones and war wights. some already lay dead among the innocent in the lobby, gauss wounds telling of return fire. [eight kills for a massacre. what a disgrace.] abrels template snorted with derision, and apart from her, even the minds that had a hand in this atrocity flinched at her coldness. [what? what, you assholes? if they were gleam enough, they would have repelled the assault instead of getting cut down like this. we need to improve the combat training of our smallfolk. ori-thaum and stormtree are one thing, but the blues and grays? no. thats just fucking shameful.] a chorus of offense roared in the back of avos consciousness, and he asserted his control again before everything tumbled into chaos. with how many voices his mind was channeling now, he needed better means of having them address each other. right now, his open gestalt resulted in constantly triggered conflicts between his legions of templates. perhaps he needed to form an alternating line of representatives? something to allow the more level-headed of his generatable intellects smoother interactions with each other. a flow of ghosts promptly entered his accretion, and his cog-feed populated with over eighty markers. +i got a mem-lock on all the snuffers too,+ white-rab said. he sounded more than a little pleased with himself. thanks, avo said, infusing his reply with as much gratitude as he could. this didnt need to be faked. he had all the means needed to locate his prey, but having white-rab do it was far more circumspect. the doors of the aero hissed, reva stepped out and frowned at the massacre. sloppy. but thats not what she meant. in her quietude, avo sensed flashes from nu-scarrowbur pass through her near-term memories. she had gone from one mass death event to the next, and now her mind was making patterns where there should have been none. so. are we going hunting, or did a particular body catch your appetite? her words caught avo by surprise. hunger. the hunger was still there but crushed. contained. with all these minds surrounding him, he was but the heart in a massive organism that shifted and changed between the passing of moods and whims. he had more control than ever now. more control over himself than he ever did in his life. truly, he owed the low masters more than he could pay. he would just have to make do with murdering them when the time came. no, avo said, filtering the nearest group. there were just on the floor above, and the mem-data white-rab injected into him, they were trying to cut their way into an intra-block entertainment zone. forgot to feel hungry. thanks for the reminder. he released his leash on himself and let his base mind expand. all the flavors of death came to him at once. but he wanted premium flesh. he wanted struggling deaths. his days on carrion were done; now, he would cut himself on harder meat. Chapter 14-18 Easy Prey chapter 14-18 easy prey +lance-3, come in? lance-4, respond? lance-5? lance-5? raggen? someone? anyone? hello+ -last transmission of an ashthrone witherguard 14-18 easy prey stalking snuffers can be likened to hunting wolves. one couldnt approach them without due prudence, for where syndicate muscle was sloppy and brutal, snuffers were killers of a pedigree. avo traced their steps in his deepnav and studied their paths. the way they moved and intersected with rife with tactical competence. wights and drones served as screening unitsthe first to fire, and the first to fall. cradled within the core of the expendable assets were the three-to-eight-person ashthrone teams made up of trained professionals versed in violence and clasped in rend-expeling armor. their assault composition had the breachershigh-reflex close-engagement specialistsembedded with the rear of the screening units. behind them were heavies carrying more devastating ordinance, and further still were the field necros, combat engineers, and squad leaders. whispers from all the egos he consumed filled his consciousness with an even deeper understanding of his quarry. most of the assets in play were ashtrhone witherguards. though their guild remained half crippled after suffering a mauling at the hands of highflame and omnitech during the last war, they remained idheims premier experts on entropy and rendsinks. so much so that even a standard ashthrone combatant was clad in an exosink otherwise called a rendskin. deemed highly unstable and more likely to kill the wearer than the enemy, few but the dying and desperate were willing to encase themselves in ashthrones protections. still, the experience avo devoured imbued him with caution and wariness. just because the rendsink exoskeletons they wore were likely to kill them in various horrific ways didnt prevent another from sharing this fate. the fact they had four fallwalkers with [redacted] listed heavens and frames escalated the threat they posed. white-rab had helpfully marked them too. strangely, they seemed to be stuck on the fifteenth floor of the megablock while the rest of the forces were trying to fight their way up. a few minds winked outdeaths joined in the heat of combat. still no movement from the fallwaklers. suspicious. he needed to proceed with caution and kill with efficiency. when this was done, he intended to leave nothing but a mystery for survivors to discover. the attackers would be vanished without a trace, and from the absence of their bodies would he nourish himself on their ghosts and essence. the engagement between highflame and ashthrone afforded him a rare opportunity to feast. if he made sure that all his victims were vanished by the end of this, both sides would think that the deed was done by the other. a few suggestive ghosts left misplaced amidst the slaughterhouse would ensure that. as the shadows flowed to the whims of his will, avo swam upward through the block with reva in tow. currently, the bulk of the witherguard were fighting their way up the twenty-second floor. fallwalkers remained sedentary. abrel expected the defenders to hold for at least another hour. talon-2 gave them a few minutes at best. [the structures like a square wedge but not that high. if the teams have already managed to push up past the twenty-fifth floor, id say this place''s n-def was entirely compromised until you happened to the attackers. now, in-field units are blind, lost, confused, and are getting ambushed all of a sudden because their cog-feeds were no longer updating with active detail with all their divers being nulled and all] the necros voice trailed off with a faint note of glumness. [pity. they were doing so well.] taking in the new detail, avo reassembled the structures of his mind and dedicated the pathways of his thought to war-making. new instincts and memories grew out from him in splashes of fire, and a coherent strategy emerged from where once was only savagery and base impulse. presently, he needed to avoid exposing himself to any thoughtwave disruptions. with this being the tiers and the decimation of attacking necros, he didnt expect highflame to inflict mass nether suppression of the area. that didnt mean he wouldnt die all the same if someone decided to thoughtwave an entire floor. the faster, riskier option was just to draw in enough mass to accelerate his cognition and subsume all the minds he could access or perceive. he was likely to lose at least a few ghosts to stray disruptions if he approached things in this way, and besides, there was a certain lack of thrill to casual butchery. he had better options at his disposal. white-rab, for instance. using him would feed the mans feeling of competence and grant further insight into his methods. meanwhile, avo could further his practice of fighting quiet wars. +rabbit. i need a favor.+ +ghoul. you gotta elaborate.+ white-rab huffed a noise that was barely a laugh. +why do you talk like that, by the way? the strix sounded pretty normal.+ +thoughts jump fast when youre a ghoul. hunger lurches your focus. habit formed from biology.+ avo paused. he wasnt limited to biology anymore, yet he still chose to speak the same way. strange how calcified the concept of a self could be. +doesnt matter. i need you to suppress the snuffers. quietly. make sure they dont unleash stray disruptions.+ +make me an offer,+ white-rab replied. through the wights thoughtstuff, avo could the feeling that the other necro was licking his lips. ah, thats right. an offer. nothing is done for free in this city. avo remembered all his dives and wondered if those recollections belonged to the man he was speaking to instead. +fifty-fifty,+ avo said. some of his subminds quailed at just how much he was surrendering, but until he found a way to restore his more circumspect capabilities as a necrojack, an aid the level of white-rab was worth all the imps in the city. +you can have half the mem-data from all our shared kills and nullings. good for a small fortune in the deep bazaar. reva can also have half the essence if she wants.+ the only reason avo found it easy to make the second offer was because he knew the bloodthane had to refuse. a small canon was one thing. a spike of a few hundred thaums was entirely impossible to hide. a shocked heartbeat of silence. +thats+ +a family discount.+ avo finished. even in the darkness, he could feel revas wariness of him spike. he really needed to stop feeding into her dread, but if he had to be honest with himself, her fear kindled his amusement. +tenth floor. were approaching the backline,+ reva said, pushing past avos conversation with white-rab. +looks like they left four teams to hold the tenth floor. counting about two hundred screeners as well.+ that was pacification! suppression! we were breaking their will to fight. the people you just murdered surrendered. they werent going to be a threat! there are rules here. trades for every engagement. all lives of citizens are insured with others per the articles! do you know nothing of the losses this will incur? this is coming out from your bounty. yours! i will not suffer for your stupidity. such bullshit. he sighed and shook his head. alright. alright. sorry. fuck. somehow, that just made the air grow ever colder. you stay behind me. from now on, you will not act until i say. the pale orbs she called eyes swept him up and down. and you call yourself a fallwalker. how did someone like you even get a frame? that hit something deep. a twitch ran through osjack and he thought of his brotherhis always perfect brother and that fight in the woods. he thought of the rock he used to conduct fratricide. he thought of how the rend just escaped from his brothers body and spoiled all flesh around them. that was the first time osjack died. but when he did, he dreamed of falling into a sea of fire that hardened around him. stepping past the enhanced scaarthian before he did something regrettable, he rounded the corner and made his way back to the activities quarter for the floor that they were now using as a forward operating base. he was surprised the angry skuldvaster would just let him go like that, but frankly, he wouldve turned her into roast beef if she kept speaking to him like that. it was one of the few things he definitely could do. as a few local ghosts slithered overhead, he checked his cog-feed to see if their lobby was back up yet, but found nothing but static and mind-stinging mem-data leaking through the session. bullshit. all this was bullshit. he was tired of this. he needed to think. he wanted some time to himself. he needed it. osjack stopped walking and turned around. meeting up with the rest of his cadre could wait. not like they needed him much anyway. all he could offer was he sniffed, and the unmistakable scent of blood greeted him. blood and something more. a lot of different flavors drawing on his heaven, he filtered through the various smell assailing his being and focused on the peculiar ones that caught his interest. the coppery tang was almost sweetalmost like ghouls blood. hyper rich in oxygen and all that other weird biology shit those monsters were made from. but there was also a hint of tungsten, and that stuff locus were made of, and was that tritium or something? glass? following the trail, he found himself guided by a separate stream of ghosts as well, these appearing to dart down the hall toward the point where the light was still flickering. osjack blinked and wondered how that happened. they said these walls were indestructible. howd the wiring or whatever get damaged? as darkness flashed in and out of his sight, something deep inside osjacks bones began to shiver. he had the same feeling when the sisters were coming for his ownor when he killed his brother for his frame. something was wrong, but the taste pulled him closer there was fizzling sound before every last light across the hall went dark. the smell of ghoul-blood flared across his nostrils, and it felt like where it was coming from was right next to him somehow. spinning around, osjack activated the brightness functions for his armors hud. just in time to see the darkness flowing under him like a stream. what the fu the ground turned fluid beneath his feet, and downward into darkness, he sank like a rock swallowed by the ocean. it was so dark down here. quiet too. but the smells were getting closer and closer. osjack clenched his fist and sent a command through his exoskeletons systems. he needed his fusion burner to fire. he needed light. the mechanism didnt reply. his arm servos whined against the frost still burrowed deep within. fuck. fu warning: rend fd@#fklfla 1vb=12*#*($#@g erro eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee death, as it turns out, was kind of bullshit too when the one hunting you could reach into your blood and liquefy you from the inside. nothing much a heaven of cooking could do against that. in the end, that was the final lesson of osjack thendens life. sometimes, youre just shit out of luck. Chapter 14-19 Overestimation chapter 14-19 overestimation some of the primordial gods are peculiar in their design. oh! lets take yoswanacht the gum-snatcher for instance. a very strange god made by the scaarthians in worship of dentistry of all things. when we managed to stem its rupture and secure its fallen heaven, we found it only capable of manipulating enamel, regrowing teeth in specific types of flesh, and tearing said teeth back out using worm-like strings of floss. note: as with all things related to the skuldvast, its approach to dentistry is quite violent. another neophyte made an unfortunate lapse in her precautions and was affected by a stray miracle. alas, the strength yoswanacht uses to extract teeth is more befitting of an organism bearing the strength and stature of a scaarthian, so instead of just breaking the enamel free from her gums and out her cheeks, poor aggnas head was folded up the middle. we could have saved her if not for the bone lacing she received. (sigh) poor careless aggna. more focused note! this stands as a firm reminder to all agnosi. we must never underestimate power of the old gods. what is absolute will always be a threat no matter how innocuous things seem at first glance. why, all it takes is a bit of acceleration and even teeth can serve as projectiles, right? a perfectly viable means of assassination that i can see the sang bidding for. okay, theyre definitely going to be bidding on this one! nice work, kae! foresight is the sign of a good agnos! -mem-log of kae kusanade, neophyte agnos 14-19 overestimation [liminal frame] obtained - mote pattern ->starvations envy heaven template downloaded ->thaumic cycler x1 ->soul x1 ->ontologics x2 thaumic output: 3865 thaum/c ghosts: [40,843] [what the hells is this,] abrel scoffed. [starvations envya heaven of cooking?] a guffaw escaped from her. then a full-blown laugh. her bemusement belonged to her alone as more than a few templates boiled with envy, willing to accept any heaven that came with a frame. for most, the truest prize was immortality. but the mind had a tendency to reestablish its baselines, and once an equilibrium of pleasure was achieved, what followed was the search for a new spike of power. of course, getting a piece of silver after expecting a chest of gold ingrained one with another feeling altogether. domain of (cooking) canon of the wandering nose - the master of this canon can smell all scents for a 10-mile radius; foul smells will strain the heaven further hubris: smells that make the user gag will trigger thaumic backlash canon of hungers passing - the master of this canon can shift a human or humanoid entity into an equivalent mass of three-course meals hubris: using this on things that are already classified as food by the master will trigger thaumic backlash domain of (water)canon of pre-boiled lobsters - the master of this canon will be able to draw lobsters from boiling water; each draw will reduce the waters temperature by one degree hubris: if the water is cooled mid-miracle, this will trigger thaumic backlash. [the hell literally just spoils all food in a ten-mile radius,] abrel muttered. [jaus, this is a hubris-generator. and you cant use hungers passing on anyone cause theyre already food to you.] the mirth in her faded as a growing disappointment filled her corner of cognitive space as well. [how the hells did this guy get throughoh, fake memories from the deep bazaar. of course. score one for ashthrone security. oh, and speaking of, here comes the suiciders. could they be any louder literally wearing a rendsink as armor.] true to the greatlings words, the witherguard came trailing behind the slithering form of a searching ghost. its perception spilled around the corner, and avo remolded the wiring he melted just seconds prior. the union of his heaven and benhatas experience as a saboteur during the war proved invaluable. highflames electrical systems had multiple redundancies and auxiliary circuits at any given moment, so it called for a practiced hand to achieve the desired effects of sabotage. by the time the three hulking figures hammered down the hall with each step of their anvil-like feet, the current flowed as it once did and the lights shone as normal. +theyre looking for the one you just snatched,+ reva said. +effective, but the brightest thing you could have done. when a meta suddenly winks out, there arent so many+ avo cut off the bloodthanes sermon by manifesting osjacks template along the periphery of his consciousness. a phantasmal mirage of the recently murdered godclad whimpered as self-awareness was forced into him once more, existential dread prying it apart with trauma as avo let him feel the full implications of his death. +i know,+ avo said. +i was counting on it.+0v3l.bin. disappointing though osjack was thaumaturgically, he served as quite the fine lure. drifting between the walls of a nearby room, avo fully manifested the sequences of his newest template and watched as the witherguard drew in closer. a peek with his whisper painted a portrait of his newest victims. they approached something approximating a hybridization between a turtle, a radiator, and a light assault vehicle. at ten feet tall and nearly just as wide, the halls seemed cramped as they walked in a single file. aside from certain scaarthians and the cybernetic travesty that was slaughterman, avo couldnt recall any other infantry-based adversaries that were quite so bulky. [its the tombstone-ii hellskins theyre wearing,] abrel said. [hate those things. they have to be that big because theyre pretty much wearing a full-on godsdamned rendsink as armor, and aside from that shitty makeshift reactor they got burning inside, the rest of their kit is all vent-based. they cant really dodge or fire or even fight worth much of a shit, but for the time they got rend to spend, they can mimic a fraction of a clads effectiveness.] a synthesis of experiences congealed at the core of avos consciousness. as one of the witherguard cast their thoughts out to open the door where they thought osjack was hiding, schematics and experiences were conjoined. the witherguard mimicked golem knots, godclad cadres, and regular combat teams in mutual measure. the first one through was the boileroften outfitted with direct-damage entropy in the hell they have attached. behind came a barricademost often loaded with geometry-disrupting functionsand after them were a mixture of shatterers, engineers, field necros, and a leader. presently, there were only three, and their systems were running quiet. [thats cause were not expecting a fight or anything,] osjack whined. avo decided he hated this one immediately. [this was supposed to be a secured floorthose those idiots got me killed. they should have checked] avo silenced the whining before he gained the urge to pour osjack into a new vessel and indulge in some semi-sadomasochistic torture. did it count as self-harm when you traumatized part of your own consciousness while it was simulating a once external mind? so many philosophical questions about his new state of being. shaking crueltys siren call off his shoulders, avo spilled out from the air vents of the darkened room and prepared to embrace his newest recruits. as they stepped through the doors, he heeded the whining servos between their armor and marked the numerous rend-vents that dotted their torso. for all the protection entropy was meant to offer them, all it took was a single blockage, a single inconsistency between positioning, hubris, or equipment for a paradox to follow. avo suddenly found himself understanding how denton felt just hours prior. +already?+ +one of the wights had an unsecured locus. i followed the compromise in its mind and one sequence led to another. you know how it goes. sloppy work left a backdoor to exploit, and so i tweaked a few recollections. a couple of the necros will be remembering an emergency thoughtcast frequency soon.+ +a couple,+ avo said, lamely. +so. do i get my pick of the frames?+ avo turned his attention back to the drugged-out fallwalker that shouldve offered a challenge. shouldve had her heaven active, at least. instead, tremors ran through her legs, and she giggled shrilly while thirty wights armed with fusion burners stood guard over her form alongside her hovering wand-shaped drones. disappointment. he felt disappointed. as a passing stream of perception threatened to detect him, he pulled his whisper back into the dark and stewed in contemplative silence. it didnt feel as good without a challenge. it felt like he was being a ghoul again. just a ghoul. hunting and preying on things that couldnt resist. [could reach into her blood. clean her mind. force her to fight.] [yes. can still escalate things.] part of him really wanted to. but again, a shadow of draus snarled in the back of his mind, and want succumbed before the compulsion of efficiency. he wanted to practice quiet warring after all. this was it. silent. sudden. without warning. +yes,+ avo said, directing a trickle of shadow to leak out from the lights nearest to glitch and run down the walls. +ill give your options.+ the drip of his galeslither puddled on the floor and melded into the shroud cast by the wights. the fallwalker hiccuped. avo willed her to noticeto broaden her heaven or something. she didnt. she continued to just lay there. gazing upon the partial sheen of static sheathing her thoughstuff, avo formed a small tendril of blood and slid it out into the real again. it remained of matter, but he felt a presence washing over itan unnatural lurch that seemed to pry at him from an angle unseen. grunting with a sobering snort, glitch whipped her can-shaped head around, with each exocortex running hot, their coils whining as she turned and a spiral of haemokinetic motes snatched her from the light and pulled her deep, deep down into a pond of shadows. transferring rend in the end, avo found that he judged osjack too harshly. there were so many unworthy gods in this city. so many. a budding madness bloomed inside him, and he decided not the fight it. he decided to face a fact that he had never cared for beforenever had the capacity to feel as a ghoul. absurdity. travesty. the ashthroner templates cringed and wailed in his mind. among them arose a chorus of dismay, and in the backdrop, others joined in. people were dying for this. people were dying to feed these frames and heavens and hells and godclads for this? an irrelevant assassination in the tiers disguised as a block war. an irrelevant assassination that was halted because the fallwalkers refused to continue on without assurances of payment after avo devoured their backline. this was debased. this was not the dream. this couldnt have been any dream. this couldnt be the way things were. it had to change. it all had to change. and it all could change. +--avo! avo shes fucking dead, you can stop now+ white-rabs voice jolted avos base mind back to focus. no longer drowning his gestalt, he found himself stripping his newest prey in flesh, spirit, and mind. her accretion was fully cracked open, and he had directly poured his entropic gale down her throat to hollow her slowly of organs. the unmoving stares of his new allies burned at his ego. what happened? when did he decide to mutilate her? how? he was merely ruminating. thinking with his gestalts. joining himself to their minds new information flashed into his cog-feed, and he found himself distracted again. attention: new cognitive construct encountered integrate cog-pattern {sprite} to metamind? +i sorry. i think i got carried away.+ Chapter 14-20 A Sudden End chapter 14-20 a sudden end +dear mhet-ma, i have come to a conclusion. i have seen too much. i have seen enough. for years i have served the mechanisms of the city, seeking to produce for its highest echelons heavens and miracles so they might better lives and raise us from the shadows of our past. not so. not so. do you remember when you used to place me on your shoulders as we watched the grand processions of the guilds during salvations day? how the dormant golems gleamed, and the drones danced, and how the agnosi were venerated for their knowledgeand sacrificein delving into the tortuous mysteries of the old gods? remember how i swore every time that i would become one of them? that i would prove myself flexible in mind and pure in spirit to descend into the taint of canonicity and emerge as myself still. i do. i remember your pride as they took me as a neophyte. i remember your smile when they promoted me to full initiative. i remembered your tears when i was fully inducted into the order. but my induction was the worst day of my life i wanted to do this then, but i didnt have the heart to hurt you. i still do not. i am a coward, and so this will arrive after my deed is done. by the time this message loads, i will be gone forever. if not by my own hand, then under the heel of some guilder snuffer. do not be sad for me. do not cry. this was the right thing to do. the only right thing to do. when i was made agnosi, i faced knowledge. true knowledge. not these facades of truth depicted by the overclan. i learned of our past and the gods and witnessed the ugliness of reality in all its forms. and the voidersthere was no respite with them. i think wanted me to do this. which is why they forgot to hide the classified information when they loaded the data into my terminal. i have killed millions in the past month alone. millions to just change and alter the aesthetics of a soul for the vanity of its master. millions to bind a thaumless heaven to cold metal. millions more for every inconsistency and contradiction our teams made for the lore. millions. it was easy before because the number is so vast and the sacrifices are kept separate its just the press of a button. but ive seen them now. i know what the world was, what could have been, and what we lost. we fight for nothing. we fight to prolong our suffering. the guilds will not liberate us for this because they are drunk on their own glory, and so, as with the endlessness of the horizon, so too that i cannot conceive an end to this war. there was a time once. a time before time. a time where the void was but quiet space and coldness. a time when the stars were stars and concepts were concepts and things were just things. there was war then too. atrocities. sins. but people were getting better. people rose and ascended to their potential. humanity flourished amidst a garden of plenty. the voiders even have a name for the era of expansion and exploration. of expression. eden found, and the garden of paradise was but the cosmos mastered. but it wasnt enough for some. it wasnt enough. the great enemy that was entropy remained, and so, with even nigh-eternal minds of silicon and intellect fearing a fated end, they sought a final ascension from the chains of entropy, and in their efforts followed transgression instead. i dont know what they did to the vast singularity that once stirred at the core of all that was. the voiders will not tell me. all i know is that things grew entwined thereafter, and the act of belief grew to bear its own weight where the tears in the tapestry spread. im telling you this because i dont have the strength to keep this to myself anymore. you should knowyou and everyone. we could have been born to a paradise if our forebearers hadnt burned the garden down, but more than that, we managed to seize the fires of ruin! we managed to break the gods and claim ascension anew. we could have restored ourselves to prominence and cultured a paradise from flames with what we possess now. but we didnt. instead, we cling to this singular granule in the vast infinite and war and fight and kill and kill and kill and never learn. i love you, mhet-ma. i am privileged to be your blood. proud. know that what they say about me isnt true. know that im doing this so people may know. if my transgression is committed properly, then there will be no way to silence my message. if not let it rest in the quiet of your mind, and speak these truths to those you know may listen. the city must wake up. the people must awaken. we have overcome the oppression gods, but now we face a far more insidious foe. ourselves. -[redacted], the salvations day bomber 14-20 a sudden end killing the fallwalkers left a bad taste in avos mouth. it wasnt the lack of effort it demandedthough their ignorance and unpreparedness for him did disappoint. rather, he found himself more taken with new concerns, his suspicion turning inward as he delved into his own mind, guiding whispers to serve as an in-facing eye to monitor the changes in his consciousness. he knew not what possessed him to butcher glitch so. it wasnt that he didnt want to kill her, but more that he didnt even realize he had. the lapse was just like with zein, just like sneaking sensations prior still. it was as if something else assumed control of his vessel and actions when he turned his attention away. ultimately, even as he spilled across the floor and infused himself in shadows of his newest victims while white-rab layered distractions among the witherguards to distract them from glitchs sudden absence, he found nothing shifting beneath the waters of his thought. the waves of his mind ebbed to his absolute control. deeper still, the dark waters of seized memories withheld nothing from his sight. nothing. nothing was denied to him. so how could he have lost control? by my hand are you a god made, were the words it hinted. for those of true mettle like corner who still died so ignorable and senseless the truest demonstration of individual will was to seize a frame by way of murder. of course, symbology paled before the harder edges of reality. +im going to start the killing when they gather,+ avo said. +you can think about what you want. ill reach into the witherguard and take them into the dark before killing them.+ +one more thing,+ white-rab said. +some of the witherguard are still engaging with the defenses up in the twenty-fifth so you might have to handle them directly. a few other infiltration teams are trying have been trying to jack into a transport junction in the block so they might be running incogs. might require you to do some legwork in the end.+ +fine. prefer this way.+ avo extracted the skimmer from ori-thaum. casting out reasoning wavelengths of perception ensured that all things hidden would have to endure under the weight of his notice, and seeing that he channeled over forty thousand ghosts now. his presence would greet theirs as a falling hammer would glass. time passed and he waited. three more accretions winked out above as more of the witherguard lost their lives in battle. pity, but not unexpected. the defenders were holding the upper floors still, and without the fallwalkers to support them, the witherguard now found their assaults a choking affair of attrition mixed in with the misery of ambushes. well over two thousand wights had already been expended in the past twenty minutes of fighting. already, there were dispatches directing reserves to ascend past the secured floors. of course, as avo watched the presence of minds begin to build as the assault teams began to coordinate their efforts anew, soon none would remain among them, and silence would return to the block again. a shifting presence moved through the walls not far from avo and found only a shivering family huddled against the far corner of their room, waiting for the block raid to be over inside an armored compartment in their closet. so many little lives scattered everywhere +alright, most the teams are syncing now,+ white-rab said. he regareded avos burning ego once more and let out a shaky breath. +not gonna lie, i dont envy their fates right now, but i am damn curious about whats it like to burn in your fire.+ avo grunted a reply and prepared to shift his mind. +can give you a firsthand experience after you get a soul. reva too. if she wants.+ the bloodthanes thoughtstuff recoiled at the very suggestion. shaking off the urge to prod her anxiety further, he sensed the phantasmal flow of ghosts rushing down symmetrical paths as minds were bridged with minds and a makeshift briefing lobby was formed. so far, the missing fallwalkers remained a distant shadow in their minds. whatever adjustments white-rab made, he did them well. they didnt even think about the cadre. not even when avo accessed the session and erupted out in their midst. things became known to them in that sudden massacre. lifetimes worth of memories sailed through him, and the grips of his heaven expanded to encompass over four hundred and eighty-nine bodies. meat and metal dipped down as a sea of darkness opened beneath their feet like a chasm, and as avos sanguinity pulsed, all matter disconnected from a rendskin unraveled in his grasp. the entire act was like putting on a single shoe with nearly five hundred different layers. where all the stacks were separate egos and separate thaums, all vanished into the touch of the fire and descended into the soul. the volume in his consciousness grew louder. cries of rising dismay mingled with loud notes of confusion became his new templates, and digging through their recollections, the last of their number was easy to uncover as well. casting his skimmers out from the bodies he briefly kept, the crashing waves of his perception were like a traveling avalanche that never ceased and never concluded. wards and incogs shattered outright beneath his pressure. between fissuring metas flowed the nectar of wounded minds, and before accretions could break apart entirely, avo cauterized them into his gestalt and spared them an uglier passing. thaumic output: 4826 thaum/c ghosts: [42,019] in the end, twenty active snuffers were lost to himdead behind highflame lines. the rest, however, burned in the cradle of his thoughts. he let them feel and writhe and rage as he swept through the dark and gathered their drifting armor. flooding the halls with his haemokinesis, he liquefied all remaining wights and drones as well and poured the evidence down into the darkness. in a single, startling instant, what was an active assault simply ceased to be without hint or reason. meanwhile, gauss fire continued to tear free down hardened chokepoints, and skirmishers skittered through the dark, unaware that a being far greater than they judged them from the shadows they hid in as they searched for signs of their now vanished adversaries. flames collapsed back into avos original body like lungs drawing in smoke. his halo burned ever-brighter, ever-thicker. his soul felt pleasantly heavy, but still hungry for more. always hungry for more. +block wars finished,+ avo said. +lots to consider. lots hm. come on. lets go see waltons drop. should be in a room on the seventeenth. i go first. might be low master trap. they dont know about either of you. keep it that way if possible.+ as the currents of darkness turned to his whims, he found himself bathed in reva and white-rabs perceptions once more. neither spoke, both only stared, and unblinkingly so. +what?+ he asked, listening to the pleasant churn as his new templates began to argue and fight among one another. +that was less than a minute,+ white-rab muttered. +i i saw what you did earlier but its thats just godsdamned terrifying.+ was it? he honestly couldnt tell anymore. sure, the little minds he just ate felt that way, but what did they know? what did any of them truly know that he didnt? Chapter 14-21 Access chapter 14-21 access there comes a time when you look down at your gun, and realize its just not enough. a flechette can kill someone from over the horizon if you got enough surge in your barrel. but so what? so what? there will always be more half-strands tomorrow. and besides, with each death, youre just feeding the beast some more. new vultun dont care none for your little acts of vengeance. new vultun just opens its maw and lets you kill and kill and kill as it grows larger and fatter and uglier. with each life lost, the guilds get that much stronger. but knowing this is goodfirst thing about hurting an addict is understanding their supply. pinch the deaths. start up quiet operations to keep more folk alive. make districts underperform in the warrens so they start sending auditors down to see if things are getting too good for the uppity fateless. then, you start something. might be a virus traced back to the no-dragons. it might be a gutter war between rival syndicates go out of control. it might be anything you can imagine. the point is, you gotta control the death rate to walk the animal and let me tell you, the guildsll walk off a cliff if it means filling up a new golem for a day. force them to be predictable. force them to play your game. -harlem vaunders, rogue voidwatch operative and top of new vultuns most wanted list 14-21 access there was, in fact, no ambush waiting for avo within the apartment. it was just a small three-room unit with a toilet, personal living quarters, and extremely cheap jack-station quartered in a small ten-by-ten alcove. aside from the dormant locus slotted into the core of the station, the rest of the room stood barren beneath a sheet of dust. no furniture greeted avos gaze, and even the showering units looked missing. directing a whisper to flood the jack-station with its perception, he beheld clamps coated in rust and filth. this dead-drop looked like it had been abandoned for some time. the scene before him wasnt promising. in the periphery of his awareness, thousands of accretions began to move throughout the block. with the ashthroners sudden vanishment, the residents were moving around again, confused and doubtlessly mystified with their present situation. the nearest thought signatures were a scant ten feet away from him, but white-rab severed his presence from their notice. it spared him the need to burden himself by running his incog all the time. casting threads of ethereal flame into the silent locus, he consumed its properties and assumed its design. with but a thought he bid its systems to awaken, and around his ego he felt the station come alive with a bone-shivering screech. several of the clamps were jammed, and there was something wrong with the cooling system around the mold that would have embraced a necros body. foam-like lattices looked rotted through in places, making the entire thing look like a basin coated in mangled rubber. he doubted it would support any weight now, and the fact that it had atrophied so soon spoke poorly of its quality. however, the new sequences that coiled down into his mind grew stalks of rising surprise. for the miserable material conditions of this abode, the phantasmics and constructs he now could manifest were beyond value. access sessions for twenty-two slumbering nuclear-armed drones sparked into shape within the expanse of his awareness. codes and the prototype for a phantasmal proxy mind became known to him, and an infusion of nine hundred and fifty million imps evaporated on contact with his mind. strange, but avo didnt linger on the loss as the final prize teased away his thrill: within his consciousness now simmered an entryway into the deep bazaar. the privilege of possessing such a phantasmic belonged only to those designated as trustworthy gatekeepers. aside from waltonand now himselfonly green river could open a path into the exclusive lobbies of idheims most premier deep nether network. if he yearned to, he could open a way for himself and grow like never before. the temptation was near-unbearable as he considered the secrets he could glean and knowledge he could steal. secrets were more potent a weapon than heavens when used properly, and these unspeakable details were the primary currency that flowed through the bazaar. it could all burn. it could all be his. with but a dip over to the other side, he anticipated immense returns before any nether-disrupting countermeasures could stop him. but strong as his lust for growth was, the voices in the back of his mind hauled hard in the other direction, begging him to heel, reeling him from the act of destroying the citys most clandestine and efficient espionage network for a single injection of revealed enigmas. [dont eat it half-strand! thats a waste!] shadow-3 screamed. abrel, disgusted to be in agreement with a silver, pushed through to give her say as well. [you can literally start wars with this. your bullshit thoughstuff already melted nine-hundred and fifty million imps! your father probably wanted you to use that and set up runs against the guilds or something] that made quite a bit of sense. disappointment coursed through his veins. he didnt use money much these days. what he wanted, he took, and what he could take, he [mooched off the sang and the reg,] osjack muttered bitterly. avo silenced the recently slain fallwalker with a thought. he would not be judged by a lobster summoner. [what the fuck? but but you have my heaven now! you can summon lobsters too!] the difference was that avo wasnt completely worthless at using his miracles. [alright. fuck. you.] osjacks template was promptly loaded into a torture vicarity. his screams proved a delightful ambiance. attuning his cognition as he absorbed suggestions from each of his templates, new choices were presented to him, and he found himself faced with a few options to play with. +free dive. you call, i answer.+ revas face twisted with each word white-rab spoke. oh, but the other necro was looking for an opportunity to continue working together. more than intrigued, his cog-donor was hooked. enthused. charmed, even. what could avo say? if he was to be shown a burning mind like his as the necro he was, he too might become a moth to the roaring flame, jealous and enchanted by the promise of conflagration and soulfire, seeking the nectar of the divine. the influence gained from grand gifts granted generously afforded one with easy friends. this was a good lesson to bear. ill have something for you. likely soon. first. we should properly meet. in person. interested in your appearance. curious of your shell. [jaus, avo, come on less hard. the bloodthanes gonna think youre trying to poach more than her loyalty.] abrel chuckled. he didnt. her amusement with the idea of him subtextually fornicating with his cog-donor was an annoyance at best and quite disgusting at worst. distant sirens passed through the halls, and both avo and reva turned to regard the encroach of new accretions through the walls. signatures were marked and expanded by white-rab, and the necro cleared his throat. +you two should get gone before highflame reinforcements show up. im dropping you a deepnav marker for a location. ill be there waiting for you.+ as white-rab spoke, avo reached out into the darkness, and dipped his galeslither into a pocket of shadows in which they hid the harshlander aero. with a casual tug, he pulled into the veil of his own shadow and regarded reva with a nod. after you, he said, gesturing to his own silhouette. her stare lingered a moment too long for comfort, but she stepped in thereafter, posture unsure if she wanted to fight or talk. time was what she needed. time to clear her mind. time to accept what he was, and the promise he presented. for now, he plummeted into his own miracle and began his swim anew. as the skies over the block filled with highflame drones and golems manifesting their heavens, an ebony tear flowed out from an external vent and dolloped down the side of the structure into a darkened alleyway. seconds later and a few miles away, a harshlander took flight and blended into traffic. few knew where it had been. fewer knew that in a stretch of its shadow hid an inventory of preserved rendskins. settling into the aerovecs couch again, avo dug through revas mini-fridge looking for a new experience to top off the raid. the wight locus was dormantwhite-rab probably on the go right now and away from his jack-station. im not going to let you twist him, she said, her words scarcely more than a whisper. there was enough strength in her tone that he knew she was willing to fight him, but not nearly enough to convince him that she believed her chances of victory. raldi. i see what youre doing. i see your gifts and your acts and the way you speak to us. i see you. swiping a claw over the fridges haptic interface, avo decided to try the bear-branded drink reva enjoyed earlier. his subminds told him that mirroring her prior behavior would have a calming effect on her. the symmetry of the action would confuse her of his inhumanity if nothing else, picking up the ice-cold beverage, he used one of his echoheads as a bottle opener and slumped back in his seat. he met the other godclads eyes with ease and poured the flavor of her favored drink down his long, sinuous tongue. stinging. sweet. honey-like. it lacked the metallic tang he liked, but with a shift of his consciousness, the current taste became his favor. altering preferences was like changing gloves for him now. it was just a simple actionno greater effort was needed. want you to know that i appreciate you. glad i met you. he meant those words honestly. a twitch ran through her face. why? because youre honest. you dont betray yourself. but you dont hide yourself either. you remember that im a monster. you are sacred. you are prepared. your eyes are clear. is this where we are, she said, voice low. flattery? honeyed words and honeyed mead and honeyed gifts. the distortions of her holocoat failed to fully hide the compactness of her build, and threads of glinting hair drew taut along the back of her head. you think im going to betray stormtree to you because of what you have? that hes just going to listen to you because you share a few lines in your metas? no, avo said. you will choose me because you care for him. someday stormtree will have you make a choice. one you cant. and youll choose him because you have already chosen. you know what follows. he will choose me because i am the fire. and all men yearn to burn eternal. he is worthy. i will see him blessed. and from there we will be bond in ways that you and he will never be. a flash of cold anger rushed through her features. youre assuming. we dont know each other, and you sure as hell dont know what im capable of. he clicked his fangs together gently, softly, teeth clattering like mocking applause. i could. i could know you. we could be of a mind. the implications of his words struck her, but she didnt shiver nor retreat. i wont, he finished. thats how i lose him. and how i lose you. we arent enemies anymore. so. youre outside my diet. but change that minds can be changed too. raldis feelings can be altered. but i dont want them to be. you dont. you dont. always just talking about yourself. avo leaned in. her jaw clenched. can you stop me from hurting you? or him? she didnt reply. vulnerability is an ugly thing, avo said. i know. from experience. i know. Chapter 15-1 The Gift chapter 15-1 the gift +rab? long time no cast, how the hells are you? oh, not a social call is this? whats the run? dont make it boring. im too old for boring. [transferring mem-data] alright. you hooked me already. this ones a real [imps transferred] damn, rab, paying fast today. this thing must have you all kinds of worried for you to be throwing imps at me already. dont worry: ill keep an eye on it. him. whatever this thing is. yeah, ive seen that fire before. ori-thaum. conflagration is a nasty thingbut my consang-to-be here doesnt seem that affected. and if hes actually a ghoul like you say, thats a hell of a lot more self-control than ive ever seen for his kind. say, are you still with that girl? the godclad with the pretty frown. yeah. javvers niece. oh, none of my business, huh? guess thats a yes. is she out there with this avo right now? risky business, playing two sides. stormtree wont be happy with her if she doesnt call in soon. the fuck-up in the warrens was nasty. you tell her shes running from an awful lot of explaining she has to do, and that the longeyes are already putting out their feelers. youre fine for now, but you wont have forever. she needs to call in and take the heat off. and you need to figure out what they hells you want out of this life. you cant play between if this thing is going to work. trust me: i know. you make someone choose between being a color and you, and dont be surprised if you dont like the outcome. well, you might not have wanted it, but the relationship advice was free. take it from an old lady, son: think this thing through. for both your sakes.+ -[redacted] 15-1 the gift as avo resurrected, he found himself leaning against the side window of the aerovec, and it occurred to him that his understanding of the city was all wrong. for years, he thought himself a creature in a hive, fighting and feasting and failing to ascend to its heights. not so much anymore. he should have paid attention to the words the guilders were using. he should have been better at listening. tiers. they meant that in more ways than one and the philosophy behind the word extended beyond ones climb to the top of the prosperity ladder. the undercroft was made up of wedges and blocks and towers and bunkers. the streets and pathways were crevices when viewed from on high, and the flow of people leaked like water running between cracks in a wall. they were being choked it. it was so obvious from up here, so clear what they were trying to do. each block was a fortress unto itself and with their density generated within them a socioeconomic singularity. they were, at once, places where life could flourish, yet blockades for rival armies to break themselves. tiers. as in tiers of armor to pierce through. as in tiers of fortifications to break through. this city flirted with notions of culture and society, but the decorative ghosts that painted the city in new aesthetics and phantasmal advertisements were but flourishing drapes laid over an armored chassis. new vultun had always been built as a city at war, and drawing upon his newly devoured memories, most of the other hive cities were much the same way. memory-protected plasteel hulls gleamed in voluminous hues while the colors of the nether still ran. filtering all ghosts from his cog-feed, he gazed upon the featureless bones of the district rendered nude, and he found himself looking upon a jungle of glass and alloy. dying gave one a shot of perspective sometimes. he spent some time in his soul, detaching the heaven of war and installing it into another, more thaum-heavy frame per the request of white-rab. the entire affair afforded him some time to think, and some thinking to occupy his time after. the harshlanders navigational display showed that they were soon to arrive, and down from the height of fifty feet they dropped, shifting vertical lanes to circle into a narrow crossing trapped between two blocks. pulsing reverberations of neon passed through them as a new update to stormjumpers 2 made its announcement through the nether, immediately followed by review boosting and bombing campaigns by fans and contrarians alike. well be arriving soon, reva said. you should still fire up your incog. the place is a street squire haunt, so it should be secure, but you dont exactly look like the usual clientele either. you can dip into my shadow, but theyre pretty thorough at checking, and this place has more than its share of fallwalkers as well. its better that we cover all our openings.. we bled each other. got messy. was nice. avo licked his fangs in reminiscence of delectable violence. nice, white-rab said, sounding not entirely convinced. well. i dont like shaking hands, and seeing those sharpened ceramite tips on your digits doesnt do you any favors. id settle for tapping bowls with you or something like that. but you dont strike me as the ritual type. no, avo replied. like having goal. like getting things done. like not wasting time. the ghost of a smirk filled white-rabs expression. yeah. were gonna be fine. so. you can make me a clad. have what you asked for earlier, avo said. you know how this works? white-rabs easy confidence faded a bit, and he shot reva a look. yeah. more of less. does it have to be death? its the only true thing of absoluteness a mortal can do, avo said. crossover. necessity. thats what i think. the other necro let out a low breath. alright. so do you have a preferred way of dying? avo asked. painlessly, white-rab replied. reflexive anger rose in avo but he disrupted before it could distract him. reducing his base mind again, he found the cruelty response vastly diminished. sudden? sure. as long as it doesnt leave me screaming. maybe you can make it sud avo burst the blood vessels in his brain with a flex of will. one second, white-rab was speaking. then, he toppled face-first into his bowl. reva flinched back and whipped around to glare at avo. he didnt bother meeting her gaze this time. its what he wanted, avo said, reaching out with his soulfire to bind frame to nous. grafting [mote pattern liminal frame] to rooted nous; edgelurker heaven template installing transferring thuams: 300 the binding was unseen at first, something happening beneath reality itself. as things continued though, a scab began to form in his awareness, a growing cocoon bearing the resurrection of a nascent godclad grown upon the flesh of the tapestry. at the sight, reva breathed a soft sigh of relief and settled upon her table. worried i might just take his echo? ghosts? avo asked, watching as his work began to flourish. a sublime pleasure filled him as he regarded his deed with utmost satisfaction. he had taken power undeserved and granted it to another. this was an act of balancing. this was a tangible shift in the citys dynamics. avo didnt know what he truly wanted beyond breaking the guilds and fulfilling his current desires, but through white-rabs return, he learned how to dream. standing beside reva, they both watched as the resurrection progressed over white-rabs unmoving body, and with mounting tension, the scab began to hatch, and the flames ushered the return of a being banished from the permanence of death. white-rab announced his return with a sharp intake of breath as he snapped up from his bowl. the edge of the table sparked as if it was metal and struck by a piece of flint. even avo felt a lurch pass through the straightest angles on his body. raldi, breathe. reva reached out and took the face of the astonishedand very stunned necrointo her hands. youre fine. you were dead but youre fine. the way she said it made avo think she regarded him as better than fine. from the side, he could see an uncharacteristic smile spread across her features. taking in gulps of air, white-rab turned to avo once more, mouth opening and closing as he tried to master himself. i expected a bit more warning then it wouldnt be sudden, avo replied, spreading his fangs in a proud grin. his cog-donor stood up and, with a shaking hand, reached out to the railing nearby. he directed an unseen force, and it cut into the table. white-rab staggered back. holy shit. it worked. i felt. i felt another aspect of reality. it was he turned back to avo and a new weight settled behind his eyes. that was all it took. just a kill and a thought and you made me a god. only with the right components, avo replied. and if i choose to. Chapter 15-2 Ignite chapter 15-2 ignite we are being hunted. im sure of it now. first, the travesty in the oversec that saw our incubi slaughtered, then the sudden theft and murder within our own walls! a mirror went missing! a mirror and his entire cell along with him. but thats not allone of our administrative nodes just vanished. gone. like it was never there. kin by blood and clan, kin near and far, we are being hunted. two hours ago, i received a report from the operational mirror of the oversec dive. im sure you have all seen the reportbut much has been withheld. against the shapeless enemy, one of our incubi survived, though she remains severely wounded in mind. our best menders remain at task of restoring her to fullest health, but from all the memories we assembled, i believe we have glimpsed a silhouette of the enemythe only we know capable of engaging us in the realm of thoughts. one that certain of our number claimed were pacified. the low masters of noloth have returned to inflict upon us the bidding of their foul masters. of this, i have no concrete evidence, but i must beseech all who are present to thinkthink! think of who else could have inflicted this on us? who else? what is worse, they have access to the mind of a highflame godclad. i know little of how compromised abrel greatling is, but two separate dives into her cognition ended in the decimation of our forces.??vl?1n. it is because such unknowns that we must not reveal our intentions openly. if elements of our great foes have joined forces, we must play a soft game in order to encourage them to make mistakes. further provocation may lead to uncontrollable escalation with our stormtree auxiliaries already on edge, and open war is not favorable at present. i am now casting a motion to each of you, fellow elders, to call for contingency obscura. let no truth remain unmuddied beyond these walls. let no waters remain clear for any who exist beyond this inner circle. finally, we are not without a path to pursue. i have been informed that though the true depths of our foe have not been uncovered, there is a person of interest that we must secure. an individual thought to be an acolyte of the low masters. some of you may already have awareness of him considering his exposure in recent news from the incident in the warrens. effective immediately, i recommend that we deploy our most trusted and effective assets in the containment and interrogation of one acolyte aedon chambers. -ori-thaum, court of elders 15-2 ignite and all of a sudden, the world was new to avo. beholding his deedwhite-rab staring at a nearby edge ebbing with eldritch distortions, wobbling like a toddler steadied by reva on his armnew comprehension dawned within the ghoul. he just committed an act of creation. his power went beyond the merely disruptive or subversive. now, the spark of an epiphany ignited within him. for the briefness of his empowerment, his compulsion was a step above base desire. he killed, and he had cause to do so. he tortured, and the targets of his cruelty reaped the bounty sown by their own vices. he consumed and fed a need deeper than mortal hunger each time. this moment, however, was the truest taste of satisfaction. reva and white-rab had known what he intended to offer, but their understanding was conceptual; theoretical. to know of something wasnt to comprehend it in totality. thus, granted the gift of godhood to his mind-kindred, what he beheld was awe and disbelief. he gifted much on the whims of a desire. much more than many in this city would ever dare dream to ask. dream. new vultun was so broken. so miserable. and beautiful. between the rivers of misery and the ever-rising ocean of bloodshed that supped its flow from the constancy of death, life prevailed. so many were dying, but still so many chose to live, and more than the fallen rose the living despite it all. at the base of his heart, avo thought of all the lives that were and the siren call of violence ran through his veins. it would be a thrill above all others to torment them all at once, so yearned the beast. but disgust rose in roiling tides from the expanse of his new consciousness, and between the clashing over waves, he perceived a grounds between. what damned so many was not the vileness of their deeds nor even the avarice in their hearts, but the inability to survive their mistakes. avo thought of himself a mere month ago and flinched at the pitiable thing he was. he clawed at the dark once. died, and died again when he misstepped or was found wanting. if not for the blessing of his resurrection, his journey would have ended before the first day ever closed. to the city, death was the basic economy. to him, death was his truest instructor. to the fateless, death was the greatest enemy. he glimpsed the tapestry again and saw a question he wished to explore. these new thoughts werent mature enough to be considered a philosophy, but within them was a seed of a promisea potential destination for the world to approach. what if all could return whenever they wanted? what if all could die whenever they so chose? what if all that existed was severed from the chains of permanence, and every murder was forced to imbibe a replica of their victims consciousness, what if the meek were to be granted the tools of their abusers after their return from death? what world would be birthed from the anvil of such a place of everlasting permanence? [dont do that shit,] corner said. [you know the score. so do it. take the city. cut its nuts off and wear that shit like a necklace if you want. thats what it means to be a squire. thats what it means to be clad. thats the only real way to live.] some of the other templates disagreed, but corner didnt care. keep your resistance strong, avo said, channeling the inspiration passed to him over to reva. defy me if you want. align with me if you will. i am not your master. i am not your god. but live with me. live with me and i will grant you new powers. i will grant you a new choice. let the ugliness of what i am be spoken. i could burn my will into both of you. neither can stop me. change you how i want. so why dont you? reva asked, genuinely confused. so long she has been fighting this war, and now she found herself faced with a monster that refused to crush her throat when given the chance. madness. wonderful madness. because i do not dream of a world in chains, avo said. but a world without. and a world of consequence and choice eternal. with that, he settled the last words of his growing ideals and turned inward again. i will see you both soon. enjoy your new freedoms. enjoy the peace of today. nothing will be guaranteed hereafter. just burning away without a goodbye, huh? white-rab said. goodbye is for the decaying. the dying. the ephemeral. we will both remain tomorrow. and all the tomorrows after that. until we do not. then, it will not matter. and so avo manifested the session for chambers auto-seance and across the nether did fire flood through a tunnel between minds. before he departed fully, he unraveled his vessel into a splash of crimson mist and hid the evidence of his person in the shadows. come a second after, it was like he never was. *** well, that was a fever dream and a half, reva remarked. staring at the shadow in which the ghoul dumped its remains, she shook her head and forced the creature out of her mind. he was already going to haunt her dreams, but right now, she wanted to look upon the bright. taking her love by his shoulders, she centered him and scanned him using her cog-feed. his mind remained normal, and all accounts of his physicality stood unchanged before her eyes. and so, she rapped him on the arm to see how he would respond and felt an ineffable delight rise as he clutched his cracked appendage as if it was wounded. ow, raldi said, biting back a very sharp whimper. that was a lot harder than you usually hit me there. i just wanted to see if youre still entirely you, reva said. good thing about being one of us is that we dont really need medical attention. raldis face contorted into a grimace. oh, shit, dont tell my ensouling unchained something sadomasochistic in you. she hid her smirk well and shook her head mournfully. therere things you dont know about me, raldi fuuuuuccckk, he gave an exaggerated groan. please be a debt or a bad mem-porn habit. --there are things i wanted to experiment, but i didnt think i could risk. no, he moaned. you know a good thing about being a godclad is that we dont really need medical attention. all our problems are a death away from being solved. he settled back against his chair and let out a soft breath. well. that sure sounds like itll make a person reckless. it can. suppose we should get out of here while we can. suppose we should. are you doing something later? i might just be. and now, the ghoul was but a shadow in the valley of her mind. real nova response there, necro. well see how you dive. Chapter 15-3 Overlap chapter 15-3 overlap cults in this city are nasty godsdamned rat nests. considering what theyre up against, they kind of have to be. first, there are the guilds and the exorcists and the paladins and the syndicates and all the usual problems. let''s name the obvious half-strands first to get them out of the way. most cults get snuffed out here. the idiots get noticed, and then they get dead real quick; the enterprise gets crushed before it even rises. but then there are those who are used to running the shadows. these consangs got frost running in their veins and minds thought-sealed like knots. theyre not like most of you. when youre done cycling through these memories, youre gonna have your drone make you a nice meal and cast over to your favorite flick, any thought of being hard leaves you with your next breath. these fuckers? they live that life. they are that life, none of them dont wanna be any other way. no family? couldnt give a shit. out of imps? steal, poach, kill, snatch theyll do it all. hunted by the big shots in the city? hells, this identity was boring anyway. time for a change of face, and a change of mind. these are the ones that become trouble. these are the ones that got the incubi prowling the warrens most of the time. most of these types are former enclavers. the difference is that their enclave was probably run by pseudo-religious freaks. when the gods got broke and idheim pissed itself, lots of people died. lots. do you think our trillions are a big number? this place used to be an active farm of life and death. if you wanna have some nightmares, you should look into the nolothi breeder farms. lets just say their organ implantation process wasnt nearly as refined when judged by our present sensibilities. anyway, even though the pantheons fell, enough of their priesthoods survived, albeit in scattered pockets after thousandhand had her fun with the purges. most of them got the memories cut out of them with the establishment of the nether. ghosts make it easy to mark anyone with memories you dont want anyone to have, and our new guns made it so you could solve the problem from a couple of thousand miles away. the diminishment of the faithful was pretty much an incremental massacre. but still, some of them slipped through. and the children of these some of thems are usually the ones to endure in the dark. they remember some of their scriptures. they recall enough of their canons. and ultimately, they want their gods to come back. and theyll do whatever it takes to see that to fruition. up to and including slipping into the guilds themselves or playing fallwalker. -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 15-3 overlap [gods, i hope that room is ghost-tight. you left two ticking rash risks right there, avo. this is on you if it turns into an outbreak. of course, seeing as were burning ourselves into fucking chambers, i guess you dont care about the rash that much at all!] the patterns of thought leaking over from abrels simulated mind were closer to frustration than active annoyance. normally, she enjoyed a spot of romance, but these were not normal times anymore. trapped inside a ghoul, she played secondhand voyeur from avos perspective and realized she would never get the chance to indulge in these little love games and moments of bonding. instead, she would be rewarded with a novel act few humans found relished in: cannibalism.0v3l.bin. [fucking yay,] abrel deadpanned. her bitterness remained even as avos fire seeped into the self-supporting rubble that was chambers mind. the man panicked brieflythe fact that he had time to at all was a testament to the durability of his consciousness. but as the conflagration ate through the self-clashing mem-cons that were now the paradoxical pillars of the former enforcers mind, both ghoul and man overlapped each other. but instead of simply usurping the structures of chambers meta, avo blended to its symmetry as he once did with abrel. sequences aligned with sequences, and thoughts aligned with thoughts. across the vastness of his consciousness, two minds were branded into one, and in a shapeless expanse were both egos manifested. +rotliuh, avo?+ chambers said. +that you? did you just burn my mind away or something like that. im getting these thoughts and urges and theyre really unsexy. dead gods, whats with all the noise?+ working his will, avo quieted the other templates so as to not overwhelm their newest cohort. he didnt speak immediately, instead choosing to study the constitution of chambers cognition. perverse, absurd, and all-too-sorrowful urges. understanding chambers was like sampling a subtle tragedy. when viewed from within, the man had thought himself joyous and implacable before the depravities of the city. but when judged in totality, he was a wound that filled his pain using lust and hunger, the need for stimulus compressing the scars of his psyche. the noise of vicarious pornography and intrusive mem-ads captured ones notice like a garrote. there was no evasion possible, all was sound and havoc and dullness wrought from overload. +youve always been hungry too,+ avo said. +what?+ chambers replied, completely lost as to why these words were spoken. he was still blind to the greater gestalt, a new implant yet to be slotted. +it is nothing. i should have tried to understand you better. all of you. so much wasted flavor. so much.+ avos lamentations came from the marrow of his being. vast and distracted as he was, his recent killings had been the finest hits of satisfaction he ever indulged in. to know all that there was to a person, to draw in all that could feel as you drained them utterly the flesh was wanting. the tang of blood was not enough. he had imbibed more now, and so this was to be. +its alright, consang. iyou know, you try a lot more than lots of people. hells, ive only known you for a bit, but youre already more nova thanhellsmost of the people i know!+ chambers was trying to grin, but the act was difficult to perform without facial muscles. avo decided to form a rictus on chambers behalf. as his senses solidified a catastrophe of cog-feed formed into shape. chamber''s template clicked into place along with the vast myriad of others, and new perspectives became known. taking in more now. claimed much on this sojourn. wheres kae? essus. downstairs, draus said. theyre talkin with the columners. our poor flat might be gettin himself some fancy voider mind-mender to help em or somethin. the glaive is gettin all details about godshaper clean with kae. been down there for just about thre minutes. i consumed an ori-thaum administrative node. have secrets. have incubi inside me. know the identities of surviving assets that ruined kaes life. have a gift of revenge to deliver. he paused. and got some other things. souls. cyclers. heavens. the regulars features brightened immediately. she wasnt so easily swayed by bribery, but resistance wasnt immunity. shit. you couldve led with that. and miss out on mocking you? she smirked and began to chuckle darkly. a cool pit opened inside avo and he felt his insides squeeze, instincts warning of potential violence. and extreme lust. that which he took from chambers hardened in ways avo immediately suppressed. [gross! fucking gross!] abrel gagged. thinking back to reva now, avo thought himself a fool to ever compare the bloodthane to draus. the shatterborn godclad was a woman of iron will with an honest disposition. bloodshed and conflict were familiar constants in her life, but there was something about her that suggested she was enduring these trials rather than relishing in the lifestyle. not so with the regular. there was some facet of humanity missing inside her. something that made her radically acceptant of death and horror, severing her from fear and hesistation entirely. war was like breathing to her. nothing special. it just was. she just was. draus shrugged a shoulder and avo found himself dipping over into chambers memories. only when he confirmed the man was clean of rend before he let the tension leave him. good. the only risk they suffered now was death. checking on chambers ego again, avo found him listening along to the conversation, his new skill enhancements already out of his mind. avo made a few more adjustments to his distractedness. that was going to get him nulled more than once. some iterating for his habits will likely be required, but he still wanted to keep chambers as himself, if possible. the point here was augmentation rather than alteration. chambers death formed a finer vintage if he greeted his ends led by his own choices. in each life, there was a unique brew of culmination. like he was potentially facing right now. you should kill yourself, draus said. her words caught avo off guard, but they werent uncharacteristic. let chambers have his own body. hes wretched enough on his own. dont need a cannibalism habit too. you didnt pick up any of his mind contagions, did you? trying not to think about that. she just shook her head. +alright, guys, come on. come on.+ chambers sighed. +my minds not that bad.+ avo let abrel speak to him. [you rotlick fuck! dont put me next to the rash riskyou dont talk to me! i dont want to know anything about dannis steelhard.] confusion surged through chambers as he found himself taken aback by abrels sudden appearance. +i+ she was promptly banished. +not going to be popular when i claim your template.+ but there was nothing for it. avo burned it. now he would know him. but it wasnt so bad. truthfully, all chambers wanted was to be wanted, and knowing that made him the perfect vessel for intersecting under avo. +but i accept you. dont have a problem with you.+ that struck a touched pause in chambers, and across avos consciousness, many of the snuffers he claimed began to gag in an exaggerated fashion. then, with but a nod as an indication, avo liquefied his body for the second time within minutes and felt chambers prime ego die. the template, however, remained synced. [not gonna lie, that felt weird as fuck,] chambers said, mentally shuddering as he regarded the disintegrating mist that used to make up his vessel. [ill be back right? i mean, actual me-me. not me-you. or you-me.] +should be fine,+ avo thought. he turned a cast on draus. +bodies not enough for me anymore. need to be disrupted now.+ she regarded him with a nod. you wanna do the honors? +yes. ill do it. and call the others. i wish to speak with everyone. tell them i want to start a cult.+ draus nodding turned into a double-take. what? avos answer came in the form of a thoughtwave disruptor activating from the core of his being, and a ripple flensed his ethereal presence from existence. Chapter 15-4 Group Meeting chapter 15-4 group meeting look at that nether traffic. those silver fucks are up to something -highflame monitoring station 15-4 group meeting so let me get this straight, cas began. you crossed over into abrels mind, subsumed it, restructured her consciousness, took a template of her consciousness that you now have as an advisor, and let her resurrect with an altered consciousness. then ambushed and ate the incubi trying to jack into her, used them as a stepping stone to eat the glaive that was their tactical-level mirror, wore his body to take a fucking walk inside one of ori-thaums most secure facilities, adapted your structure to an incog, encountered another instance of zein, fought her, survived, got the node, and then decided to kill a few thousand people and a cadre of fallwalkers participating in a block war on a whim? avo thought the summary unneeded as he already bade chambers deliver an abridged accounting on his behalfsans any recollections of reva or white-rab. considering how the columners voice was spiking with each passing word with building incredulity, there got the sense that what was being strained was not understanding but belief. yes, avo said, looking down at the staggered little man. mouth agog, cas threw up his hands and the glint of his transplanted arms pierced the veil of his holocoat. he shot a glance at draus as if seeking support for his disbelief. you were gone for less than a day. i know, avo said. should have been more efficient. will work on that next time. as cas narrowed his eyes trying to discern whether the post-ghoul was mocking him, a chorus of templates sniggered in the depths of avos consciousness. [you should be more apologetic next time,] lip said. past her rage, there was an impishness that typically found itself enchained. in life, the demands of culture and career forced her into taking on a facade of exaggerated rage. here though, she knew herself to be dead and done, and thus free to have fun. [hes one of those self-important fuckers. i can see it in his browyou can always tell by the brow. you see that curved wrinkle running up into his forehead? hes a frowner. hes used to thinking about things his way and then gaping at people when things go to shit. shit, ghoul, fucking with him will be a de-light.] it would be. but avo had more pressing matters to attend. the light of the dormitory shone dimly on a few faces. they let essus remain with sunrise and denton a level below for the sake of keeping his therapeutic sessions uninterrupted. part of avo desired to rewire the mans damages using his fire, but his ethicality told him to stay his hand and let the moment be. he could approach essus with his offer of a new purpose later in private. for now, there were several others he needed to gauge. chambers said you have mem-data from an ori-thaum administrative node, kae breathed. the stood next to draus now with her face exposed and clan mark showing. she had taken to updating her attire while he was gone. no more did aesthetic cling to her formnow she was shrouded beneath a holocoat much the same as cas. in her voice he could hear a rageful yearning still, unsated from their conversation with drongo and all that had been revealed. it was a rage he could tap into. took it for find those who hurt you. the lead glaive. the necros that survived. know the survivors behind your destruction. drongo breathes for now. still useful. will cause too much chaos. but the glaive the incubi. i can have them. i can give you revenge. the way her gaze burrowed into his offered no softness. exhaustion tinged the edge of her eyes and lethargy stained the ebb and flow of her thoughtstuff. more killing. thats all we get in the end, isnt it? just more killing. the hoarseness in her voice sounded akin to essus when he had his final moments with mirrorhead. she was getting no thrill from this, no satisfaction. [dont approach her like youre talking with one of us,] corner said, looking kae up and down. [this ones all kinds of raw. she doesnt want this kind of life and the life dont want her none either. you need to stop pitching this moment over like its something to be happy about.] concurrence came from abrel. [yeah. listen, i know plenty of agnosi and a whole damn lot of them are unreasonably romantic. you gotta understand that this revenge and bloodshed only lights for a certain breed, and kae kusanade? shes not one of them. shes an actual person with dreams and wants, and a life that was lost. this revenge thing? i think she still wants it, but it isnt going to give her peace, its just going to balance the scales in her heart.] avo approached the agnos and with each step, his talons clicked against the ground. she flinched as he wrapped his echoheads around himself, and in periphery, avo saw draus shift ever so slightly in case he did anything unwise. when he lowered himself to greet kae at her height, the regular went back to leaning against the wall next to beds. it can still mean something, avo said, keeping enough distance for her to remain in a space of comfort. already, though, he could feel the moisture in the air twisting around her subtly, its nigh-imperceptible pressure needling around his neck. already, she was using her heaven with remarkable quietude. freed from her oaths as an agnos, he wondered if she was already the most refined godclad among them all from tertiary experience alone. all that you sufferedall the injustice poured into your life. not your fault. but new vultun doesnt care. i do. i do. let me help you. let me make things right [stop saying you,] benhata snapped into being along with the other templates. the sharpness of the glaives tone tore avo from his words and alerted him to how he sounded from an outside perspective. he was imposing his own ego upon the agnos, but her pain was inward facing, and she quivered as the world laid its weight down upon her. [the point isnt to tell her that her work can improve lives, but to have her perform an act that concretely and visibly raises the quality of life for others. her hands, her will, her eyes. same with essus. stop choking them with how overwhelming you are and let them serve a purpose!] and so, heeding the advice, avo shifted his personality and pivoted. a rasping sigh escaped his serried fangs and he lowered his head. i cant do it. not without you. you were behind the frame. you were behind everything. no one understands it. and no one cares about fixing it as deeply as you. they just wanted to make a weapon. to keep fighting their stupid fucking war. what you want matters more now. they dont have you anymore. its up to us to make things matter. its up to you if you want to make things change. draus shot him a disbelieving look. the columner withstood her judgment with ease. what. the ghouls talking a lot of sense now. this place, this city, this world? its all busted. all the power is at the top, but the only fuel for their growth is on the bottom. this is a death economy, but its also a stupid one. the old power doesnt die, and newly ensouled have to grow somehow, so the deaths spike and godclads struggle and its the people who are ground down. the people who pay double, triple, quadruple tax. avo says he wants to change some of this? i say yes. fuck. yes. this came as a surprise to avo as well. in his brief time with cas, the main remained mostly a mystery, but more and more there was a sense of bitter humanism to him, like he genuinely cared about the small people a way avo couldnt fathom. redistribution, avo said. of power. of souls and heavens and other benefits. from the tiers to the warrens. you support this? support? cas chuckled. consang, i faciliate it. i got cells everywhere operating he caught hismelf before he could actually give anything away. anyway. im picking up what youre putting down, and ill do you one betteri can ensure what you want to do takes off. but what you need is a bottom-up organization that works in tandem with you. if youre just moving about and empowering people, well be exposed within days or weeks at best. we gotta muddy the waters and start --a cult, avo finished, grinning broadly. godsdammit, cas, draus said. i thought thousandhand recruited sensible at least. didnt expect you to go along encouraging him. offense sparked across cas face and he turned to face the regular. guard-captain, we dont know each other, so lets not play pretense. what he cas thrust a finger at avo. is thinking about? my fathers done it. ive done it. and if this war lasts another thousand years, my childrens childrens children will be doing it to see the carpenter returned. understanding dawned in both draus mind and abrel. [carpenter oh, great. your new friend is a fucking faither, rotlick.] the words rose into his awareness tinged with digust. enclaver, draus said, looking him up and down. and a faithful at that. yeah. you fit the bill. and yet, here i am, cas said. not snuffed, nulled, or captured. and yeah, i worship. you got a problem with it? i do, kae said, interjecting softly. i dont know you very well, but you understand how this affects your frame, right? how it distorts your miracles from control? well enough, cas said with a wink. the gods were broken for a reason, kae followed. if youre seeking to i dont want a god in our souls. what we have instead us arent true gods, theyre demiurges. archons. pretenderss to the heavenly throne. god is absolute. god is existence and life and love and death unending. you cant make a heaven for that, and i dont want to. im a totalist, agnos. im not looking to change the universe. just want it to return to the way it was. great. the freaks got their own factions as well, draus muttered. brushing the arguments aside, avo suddenly found his interest in the columner rising. you said you have cells of your own? i got a network of different cults, a fanbase for the tiers, and plenty of experience running this game. what you need, i can provide. just find a need and ill show you what to do. useful. very useful. it would be essential to burn him some time. head whipping from face to face, chambers leaned over and whispered to avo. hey, consang, im gonna need you to burn all that just got said into me becauseim not gonna liei totally started watching a vicarity when you started talking. avo grunted a resigned answer and chambers patted him happily. the former enforcer was promptly decapitated by a lashing echohead. [oh, wow, dick move, avo! i was trying to be nice,] template-chambers grumbled. as kae starred in open horror at the sudden murder and the toppling body, draus yawned and cas gave the weltering stump spewing blood a brief glance before moving on. i have ideas i want to try, avo said, ignoring chambers postmortem twitching. benefits for us all. want to hit the crucibles first. break up snuff rings. gorge myself on syndicates and snuffers for thaums. assault them as practice and to gather deaths and ghosts. draus unfolded her arms and cocked her head in contemplation. alright. i can get down with this. see, cas said. we all got our kinks. draus squinted at him. before that, have something else i want to do, avo said. want to wait for essus and the others to finish. need the cadre to decide. on? draus asked. who gets the new ontologics i claimed. Chapter 15-5 The Cult of the Unborn chapter 15-5 the cult of the unborn she was in your custody. it is your duty to an attack. when. how severe was the breach? was it ori-thaum? where is elder drongo. i wish to have words with herthen i wish to have words with naeko he will be on a stormjumpers marathon for the weekend, so he wont answer. you enough! listen. hear my words. i need you to release my daughter into my custody. your shambolic attempts in preserving the sanctity and agency of a fated are appalling. the paladins and exorcists have shamed themselves enough this one day, do not give me a reason to compound it. you will relinquish my daughter to me voidwatch? what do you mean she is with voidwatch? how do no! do not transfer me to guild affairs! do not! i have a right per the articles [this cast has ended. think about a puppy if the quality was good. think about a rainy day if there are aspects that can be improved. for other inquiries, focus on forming a question mark] raggghhhhhhhhhh! [were sorry: the general violence youre imagining doesnt fit any of the mentioned pathings. please try again.] -uthred greatling experiencing technical setbacks 15-5 the cult of the unborn avo''s question of ontologic distribution was promptly interrupted by footsteps ascending the staircase below. apparently, his return did not go unnoticed by the absent members of his party. nor did the infernal brightness of his accretion do favors for his subtlety. first came sunrises drones as a stream, and as the veil of particulate-sized bodies passed, so too followed essus and denton. denton had a comforting hand supporting the man by the arm as he staggered up the stair step by step. a momentary widening of her eyes was the only sign of surprise she betrayed with regard to the faint static now clinging to his conflagration. still, her task remained foremost. supporting essus as he continued onward. it took one glance from avo to see that the man had been crying again. whatever the voiders were doing to him in this therapeutic session made his mind raw with pain and embrittled his egos integrity. there was an absence to his stare and a redness in his eyes. that, and the thinness of his thoughtstuff showed just how present he was. an additional oddity stood out to avo in the cotton blanket essus had wrapped around his bodyand the tightness to which he clutched it. the room wasnt that cold. for what need could [its for shock,] benhata said, adding points of interest to avos cog-feed. [a very primitive method for treating shock, but whatever the voiders are doing, they know better than us.] he made a noise that was barely a laugh. [still. its easier to just cut the memories out from him. theyre wasting time with this therapy thing if you ask me. i had the negative emotions tied to my sisters death removed, but i can still remember her. its not that complicated. you can probably adjust him easier than they can his minds just not going to be worth much is all. hes not suited to help us in any way.] the pang of anger avo felt came as a surprise to even him. the glaives words offended him. they insulted him. essus was a flat; a vulnerable creature in flesh and mind, but by avos effort and will, he survived. avo chose for him to live. the templates judge the man for his weakness, but the absurdity of their prejudice stood naked from what world did essus come, and to what hell did he arrive? what strength could have protected him from the eldritch distortions that infested new vultun? and if he was to be mocked for his softness, then what say the guilders and godclads who fell to avo? a rank ghoul of all creatures, besting and brutalizing the elites of this world. his templates recoiled as if lashed, and only a few stood unshaken alongside corner. the former squire simply gave a laughing sneer. [you dumb motherfuckers done did it now.] benhata scrambled, fear exploding in his heart as he realized what torments could be visited upon him in this cage of consciousness. [wait, thats not what i meant] +all can be changed,+ avo said, the ire leaving him in a rasping sibilate. +me. you. him. that is the truth of our reality. change. position? power? privilege? bloodlines? comedy. delusion. all can be taken. all can be lost.+ and to end his words, he focused his attention anew on essus as the man approached. +all can be granted.+ [i was referring to the difficulty of his station,] benhata tried to remedy. +in part.+ the template couldnt deceive avo. it would be as if a current lying to the sea or the less lying to the whole. +but your love for pedigree remains. know who has eaten you. face the bitterness of your own truths. judge my decisions if you want. do it all you like. wont torture you for it. but i will do the same in turn with your beliefs. your words.+ the remainder of the templates existed at his whims, and he addressed them not as a tyrant looking down, but a voicea concept running deeper than bone or sinewfrom within their own egos. +hear me now. you are dead because we were enemies. this is a city at war. forever. everywhere. everyone. we warred. you perished. i remain. might just be your misfortune. might be my power. might be my skill. but indulge in no delusions. you are here because this is our environment. you are here because new vultun does not care. didnt care about him. same what it doesnt care about you. only power is true. power. knowledge. control. and what they let us choose.+ [youve been real high off your shitty new philosophy ever since you gave your mind-dad a frame,] abrel muttered. template or not, her will was adamantine, and she betrayed no hint of dread at her potential fate. she knew he would draw on her again. more, she knew this instance of her wasnt real. [youre right though. we did fight. i did lose. you earned my mind and my deaths. blessed be the worthy. the oath abides. but he isnt worthy. hes broken. and much as id like this silver-fucker to get cast as one of dannis steelhards wound-holes while a be-cocked fem-ghoul from one of chambers shows] her words drew a whoop from chambers template. [teaches him some romance, letting essus keep that frame without changing him entirely is going to be a hard shit to pass.] this was known to him, but something was beyond their sight. the limit of their imaginations was appalling. abrel sighed. [what? what arent we seeing that you are? no offense, but beyond jacking youre pretty lacking on your own. i wouldve had you in the lightrail without the reg.] no she wouldnt. [and i guess the no being delusional rule can go fuck itself when its you doing it, huh?] this wasnt delusion, it was hypocrisy. [fuck. you.] +he matters unto himself,+ avo said, ordering the templates to recede as he focused on the real again. +what matters was that he survived. symbology. mythology. a saint to be fashioned.+ [a saint for whom?] abrel asked, her presence a fading whisper. her mouth opened but no sound followed. across the room, cas began to chuckle. well. i never thought id see the day our great negotiator is speechless. --you need to speak with aegis today, denton finished. yes, avo said, agreeing. interested in talking to one of your machine gods. aegis isnt a god, its just an artificial governing administrator. it sounded like semantics to avo, and most of his templates agreed. name, cas said, enjoying the moment. then, we split the bounty. then we talk to the boss. denton frowned. dont call them that, cas. you know they hate it. im definitely going to call them that. she narrowed her eyes at avo. youre bringing out the worst in him. didnt take much, avo replied. hm. any suggestions? for the name? hey, i got one, chambers said, giggling. how about the thick a blade of glass flashed out from seemingly nowhere and decapitated him for the second time in minutes. kae flinched. essus cried out. everyone was already looking away from chambers body as it toppled. thats my veto, draus said, snatching her blade of glass out from the air. rest of you better come up with somethin good. hey, avo? what about the second-to-lowest masters? she threw her head back and guffawed. i would kill you if you had a clean cycler, avo glowered. the unborn, essus said. all eyes turned to regard him. he winced slightly but withstood the attention. we are fighting for a future, are we not? for children to be born again? for the heaven of love to be healed, for affection returned to the hands of the people? that is our newest goal. silence followed. shit. thats pretty good, cas said. cult of the unborn. yeah yeah! [yeah,] corner said. [that sounds nova.] [like one of those shitty heavy string albums vator listens to,] abrel muttered. chambers template, meanwhile, was more dismayed at his death. [avo, tell the reg that this is fucking bullshit! i was going to say the thicket of unseen flames!] avo delved into his thoughts and turned away in digust. +no you werent. you were thinking thick meaty intruders. [a man can change his mind!] chambers screamed. its good, avo said. its truthful. good bones for mythology. good work. essus didnt smile, but he came closer than before. +still think empowering him was a mistake?+ avo asked.his templates considered for a moment, and responded. [its a nice idea, but yeah, hes not going to be a good clad,] benhata said. abrel snorted. [there is no world where he is worthy. hes going to die. its going to be stupid. youre probably going to be scooping his ontologics up after he ruptures.] [if essus dies, can i have his stuff?] chambers asked. avo growled in frustration, earning him several odd looks in the real. my mind is unsupportive. i know how that feels, kae said, nodding sagely. out from the veil of her holocoat, she produced a gauss pistol and her eyes grew hard. what helps me is doing things so i think we should move on to our suicidesoh! avo, ill examine the ontologics first! let me see if there are obvious problems before you graft anyone. before he could respond, the agnos inhaled deeply, pressed the gun to her temple, and fired. a welter of brain matter sprayed free, and draus directed a mirror shard to swallow the flechette before it could hit cas. gotta teach her to point that thing where other people arent, draus sighed. thanks, cas said, blinking. just dont pray at me, cult-boy. now. who wants me to do em? Chapter 15-6 Bonding (I) chapter 15-6 bonding (i) +an assembly will be called. tell no one where you heard this from. you need to get your allegiances in order. divorce your husband. disown your children. disown your father.0v3l.bin. the high seraph is returning from the paths, and she comes bearing a reckoning. the greatling incident and the missing frame might be connectedbecause when the thanatech went down into the warrens to collect our death tax and seal jhred greatlings rupture, they found nothing there. nothing. no essence. no ghosts. no frame. once again, you didnt hear this from me. the chivalrics are fucked. cut yourself off while you still can or there wont be anything i can do to spare you from her reckoning. -session between two highflame authorities 15-6 bonding (i) wow, these are really optimized,+ kae muttered, the radiance of her soul pulsing with each thought. +where did you say you found these heavens again? in the tiers? fallwalkers, chambers clarified. he spoke on behalf of avo though there wasnt the need. still, the ghoul allowed it. chambers was going to be his functional extension, after all. more than willing, the former enforcer was joyous at being molded into something greater than he was. such allowed for flexible synergy in their relationship. "our favorite rotlick here plucked em right out of a few half-strands trying to do a block war. dumb shits didnt even know what hit em." hm. so, what? you caught em just wanderin around unmanifested?+ draus asked. yes, avo said. didnt pay attention to the shadows. the regular grunted a note of disappointment. well, they aint a real cadre then. no cadre i fought with would show their belly like that. theyd either be moving, in a private demiplane, or manifested. bein statics like asking to get killed. means these ones were probably hired snuffers then. outside help so the in-house butchers get to keep their knives clean. yes, avo said, shuttling the last of his three new heavens over into kaes frame. communing in the post-mortem as a quartet of ebbing souls was a fascinating experience. there was privacy to ita vulnerability. previously, when he first ensouled chambers, draus, and essus, time spurred him away from indulging in deeper considerations, but now, without the breath of haste running along his nape, avo studied each member of his cadre in depth as his flowing flames bridged each soul to each. hewn from the impulses of their flesh, their egos were unburdened. chambers spoke with greater casualness than ever, cheerfully chirping at any would listenwhether they cared to hear his voice or not. kae, distracted from her tumult, cast herself back into the throes of her work while draus hovered within the core of the twice-walker anxiously. for all the regulars fatalistic yearnings, she took poorly to actual death. waiting for her resurrection to complete inflicted a state of restlessness upon her. i aint no use dead, draus had said. dont know shit about thaumaturgy or nothin. im better at gettin others to die than this away round. of the remaining few members of their cell, essus proceeded at his own pace, denton set about preparing avo''s meeting with aegis, and cas had turned his mind inward to cast out a few calls. sunrise didnt join in due to being afflicted with a depressing condition known as mortality. hence, it left four. four willing to be joined in death. and four aligned toward a mutual path in life. stillborn thaumic output: 4526 thaum/c ungrafted ontologics -//- heaven - starvations envy domain: (cooking/water) domain of (cooking) canon of the wandering nose - the master of this canon can smell all scents for a 10-mile radius; foul smells will strain the heaven further hubris: smells that make the user gag will trigger thaumic backlash canon of hungers passing - the master of this canon can shift a human or humanoid entity into an equivalent mass of three-course meals hubris: using this on things that are already classified as food by the master will trigger thaumic backlash domain of (water)canon of pre-boiled lobsters - the master of this canon will be able to draw lobsters from boiling water; each draw will reduce the waters temperature by one degree hubris: if the water is cooled mid-miracle, this will trigger thaumic backlash. hell - [first circle] - starvations envy domain: (cooking/entropy) canon: spoiling - spoils and rots all things the user considers food - this canon is conditional daemon: attempting to spoil something that cannot be consumed as food will birth an anathema of ruin to serve as the masters anathema; the anathema cannot be slain and must be starved heaven - rimelost domain: (ice/navigation/endurance) domain of (ice) canon: frostgaze - the master of this canon can encase any object in sight in ice; the larger and hotter an object, the more rend will be generated hubris: trying to freeze silicon will trigger thaumic backlash (x10) domain of (navigation) canon: breathmarked - mark up to 122 breathing entities with a trailing chill that makes their breath fog the air; each entity location will be known to the master regardless of where they are hubris: if the entity stops breathing for more than ten minutes, thuamic backlash will be triggered domain of (endurance) canon: the cold unbreaking - ensures that all ice remains solid and temperature-fixed for up to twelve days after manifestation; someone deliberately altering the surrounding temperature will inflict a persistent cost of rend the ghoul muttered something and moved on. chambers laughed. fucker cant say sorry. ahem. kae. continue ...aside from that, we have other souls, kae said. using one extra soul, i think we can create a reliable incubator and testing grounds for new heavens. so what we can do is break each of the current heavens and hells down to their foundational domains and consider what we want to create. what might benefit us? what do we need? and using the stillborn to make adjustments, we can avoid risking avos precious existence in case the entire thing collapses in on itself and a big tear opens in the tapestry. hm, avo said. much more palatable than dying. still missing a lot of details. beat by beat. generalities clear. process not so much. need to demonstrate. and portion cyclers first. give one to chambers and draus, kae said. keep one for the test soul. what about you? avo asked. i dont believe i will be seeing active combat soon, kae replied. a beat followed as she felt the three other souls gaze upon her. i mean to say, i hope i dont need to be involved in active combat, but my current heaven should allow me an easy escape. the next one can go to me, maybe. what matters right now is generalized redundancies. in-field godclads should get at least a few. abrel had over three, avo said. unsurprising, but eventually ineffective without a sufficient hell, kae said. another major consideration is how much someone else can deliberately paradox you. there are an uncountable number more golems than godclads in this city, and it will only take a few to overload and rupture a second circle once they figure out your domain and start paradoxing you. and unless you hide your manifestation forever, your domains will eventually be obvious. thankfully, we have the option to be flexible. and adaptable. a note of consideration passed through her as their shared resurrection pace climbed past sixty-six. we will need some way to hide our presence if the tests fail, though, kae said. ruptures arent quiet occurrences. it wont be hard to detect even from across the city with the right instruments. have an idea, avo said. one that draus might like. thisll be good, draus said. crucibles. we crash one. draus held for a moment before speaking. this is good. keep goin. we find an active one. with golems. we trigger malfunction in the rendsinks as a distraction. will that muddy the waters? for a time, kae said. but a ruptured souls output is continuous. and theres also the matter of domain symmetry more golems, avo said. bigger mess. can draw volunteers for our test soul from the syndicates. i will make them docile first. make them easy to use as we please. now, everyone stopped to consider his words. thats pretty disturbing, avo, kae said. not sure whats the difference between that and typical sacrifices for heaven. the difference kae cleared her throat. well, the agnosi make a lot of preparations to make sure the sacrifices avo grinned. more ineffective then? he could feel kae frowning at him. i swear, you were much easier to talk with back when my mind was still burning. she directed her words toward draus. was he always like this? a half-strand? nah. he was worse. oh, kae said. well, i guess being mentally damaged has its perks. chambers laughed. avo, himself, found himself surprisingly at ease. for all the mockery entailed, they didnt hate him for what he was. perhaps this was a flavor as wellbeing consangs with people. such a novelty was an acquired taste. yeah, draus said. i think that might be a good play. itll be practice, lootin, and good openin to test this new heaven-making possibility of ours. graft us first though. give me the ice and chambers the cookin. thatll do it. what? chambers whined. i wanted the ice. i already have the fire. youll be takin the cookin, draus insisted. chambers remained undeterred. avo. consang. draus thinks she can decide who you give your heavens to. its like she thinks she owns you or something you snake-fuck, draus snorted. are are they always like this too, kae said, now asking avo. no. theyre getting worse. oh. thats nice. i can set your mind on fire again. make you forget everything. might make the world bright again. ...fuck you, avo. and so they were all getting worse together. Chapter 15-7 Bonding (II): This Time With Murder chapter 15-7 bonding (ii): this time with murder +holy shit what the hells happened here+ -exorcist coming upon the remains of the three-fingers syndicate 15-7 bonding (ii): this time with murder chambers hated being a necrojack. dont get it wrong, being able to pierce into minds using his newly imbued skills was nova at first and certain to be useful in a pinch, but drinking all those secondhand emotions in? taking in all those memories and seeing someone elses innermost moments? that fucked him up something bad. peel away from all the sexy little edits the syndicates make for a vicarity and mantle yourself to another consciousness in their day-to-day, and the humanity settles on you like sediment on bedrock. you feel the weight. you feel all the parts where theyre like you and some of the ways theyre not. but they become real. so real. an unwanted intimacy infests and suddenly he was catching second thoughts about what he was about to inflict on them. he reminded himself that they were members of a rival syndicate, then chided himself for thinking himself as part of a criminal organization still. this current massacre was gonna be done legit noble! they would free the survivors all proper. he, and the agnos, and the reg, and the ghoul together doing the right thing. or something like it. swallowing back another spasm of bile rising up from his throat, chambers fought the swirling disgust in the back his mind back down to stillness as he drew on the memories and experiences avo stitched into him. he was too deep to turn back now. and more, he didnt want to humiliate himself before his patron and new consangs he needed to keep showing his worth so they wouldnt just kill him and take his frame. he needed to stay usefu l stay interesting. fastened to a blood-molded jack-station in the back of a stolen trash barge, the ex-enforcer found himself delving into the tides of the deep nether looking for an easy target to hit before the day went full swing. with naeko clenching off the borders, the flow of immigration choked and funneled. such would be the case until the moot was formally concluded and the guilds managed to reach an accord, but during this time, the syndicates would play to their backlogs. the big ones would proceed as normal, while the lesser orgs responded with novelty or bankruptcy under the cold glare of the snuff market. thanks to his experience in the industry, though, it took him little effort to find the target he was searching for. the three-fingers was a criminal enterprise that came to be under sanctus. they operated a sovereignty away from mazzas junction, but so great was their influence in entertainment that even mirrorhead knew to avoid broadcasting during certain days of the week. of ursday, thulsday, thennsday, unday, velhalt, stalrest, nulrise, only nulrise, ursday, and thulsday were imp-days for conflux because to go loud on any other in the local areas was to court the wrath of the three-fingers. something mirrorhead already couldnt afford considering his ongoing tensions with the scalpers in nu-scarrowbur and hundred-eighters in xin yunsha. now though, things were different. now, they had a perfect opportunity to slit the throats of a major snuff producer and stretch their clad legs out while they did it. so long as chambers could finish crawling through the most inward of his current victims memories. the necro he had sank his ghosts in was called kennadin svuavu. she had a cluster of scorpion stingers in place of hair growing from her scalp and she wore the tails in the fashion of a ponytail. this crucible necro thing was a gig to her at best because her true desire lay in direct participation, and she was mostly doing this to get herself familiar while making enough imps for the proper augs. fame and power were cravings to her much in the same way water was a need, but between the overwhelming pangs of want, he glimpsed deeper and beheld the ugliness of her humanity. her past flowed through him like an unceasing string of events. he was swimming against the rivers of her past, and he saw all the moments her grandmother flung her against the wall during her rages, of how she called kennadin a mongrel of stained blood, or the way she would take turns beating kennadin and her father in front of each other while making them choose which parts were to be maimed on the other when the candle of cruelty was truly lit within her. fans of the crucibles knew her grandmother by another name stanza the garrota for the bloodstained club she used to pulp skulls. the old woman was freelance now, but she worked with the three-fingers quite often to see her needs sated. kennadin told no one, but her grandmother was ninety percent of the reason she joined up in the first place. she didnt really care much about hurting people or making imps unto themselves. she just wanted to collapse her grandmothers world before killing the woman personally and intimately like the old woman did her father during that final drunken rage. existence flashed in a burst of expanding trauma and chambers yelped. cog-cap: 33% host awareness: 8% instinct took hold thereafter barely in time for him to hide as an artifact in her memories. thankfully for him, kennadin wasnt one for reliving old wounds and her look inward came only as a brief glance. chambers, stop fuckin around and cut the damn connection. we dont get all mornin. draus'' voice came as a murmur through the real and he tasted her dry annoyance staining the air. they had been circling the stretch of the crucible and tailing three-finger drones as easy jackpoints. airspace was crowded with spectators trickling in like diamonds flaring into existence, but being fused within avos incog-channeling shroud of haemokinetic architecture, stray glances were parried from notice. again, avo mightve given him years of skill, but there was an attitudean unspoken mindset that all the best necros could channel he just lacked. he knew how to be cold. just look away and pretend it''s not there. or think of something else. raiding the three-fingers crucible was among the few rare purely good suggestions provided by chambers. todays program took place along a single street in the warrens. from five hundred flats were the volunteers drafted, and unlike the cat-and-mouse style game avo experienced during his ascent, the survivors here were all deposited into an abandoned two-story exorcist station and made to conduct a last stand while waves of other refugees mixed in with syndicate specialists conducted brutal frontal assaults. the title of the entire affair was state of seige and watching the disorganized defenders stack furniture to serve as blockades where plascrete walls had fallen told him all he needed to know about their chances. there were two thousand lives the three-fingers could waste on them, and though no one was granted anything heavier than a primitive slug-caster to ensure the atmosphere remained desperate and intimate, all it would take was for one auged-up butcher to slip through the walls and all would be done. or would have been done. casting his cognition through the session chambers dropped for him, he devoured all his fire touched but expanded only to a limited scope. all at once, the minds of the syndicate necros and jocks flashed and vanished within the vastness of a searing leviathan. one hundred and twenty-two were, then werent. beyond them stood just a bit over two thousand disposable assets now left without orders on the field. waiting for their deaths. as avo retracted his presence from hollowed minds, he took care to obliterate the bodies as well, and in the stretch of seconds he felt his frame brighten with a drip of thaums. he recalled fighting rantula and the scalpers then, and noted the immense chasm in his growing powers in the nearness of a month. if he had already changed so much now, what would he be like in another month? a year? who would he become by the time the ladder was due for its return? another fragment of information passed through his awareness, and he found himself faintly bemused at the promise chambers granted to the head necro of the operation. ah. humanity. how expansive it was. how faceted. chambers barely cared about the flats, but here he was battling against a personal meltdown when faced with the fullness of another ego poured into him. it seemed of all the choices the ex-enforcer was capable of, the ability to choose against caring wasnt one of them. patting chambers on the shoulder with an echohead, avo walked next to draus and stared beyond the frontal windshields. its done. necros down. did you null any of the spectators this time? the regular asked. was tempted too. didnt. need to keep my mind a secret from the tiers for as long as i can. too many prying eyes. keep things contained. she eyed him with suspicion before her features softened into flatness. looks like all that burin cooked some sense into you. other minds remind me of what you say sometimes. she fixed him with a peculiar stare as she sent landing coordinates atop a build across from the defenders station. they do that a lot? only when im considering something foolish, avo said. he pointed an echohead at chambers. he wont be a good necro. cast an apology to the last necro he was inside. felt bad for her. him? draus said, glancing at chambers who was now sitting up and rubbing at his head with a distant look behind his eyes. easier when you dont need to dive that deep, avo said. cursed to experience life as another. and that dont work on you and the other cruel shits, huh? she said. avo leaned in. we do the same thing. dive through the same memories. but there is something missing. humanity? draus asked. yes. but wrong part. significance. being a person means something to him. pain means something. to live a certain way means something. i think i am more elemental still. purer in want. think you might be the same way. reckon i might be a simple gal at times, draus agreed. a leakage of thoughts escaped her accretion, and he followed it to the stash of guns she took from what was left of the demiplanes armory. the entire place had nearly been emptied out from the last residents, and denton hadnt had the chance to call for a restock yet. seeing that draus was now a godclad though, avo didnt fully see the need for mundane weapons. he could have molded practically any gun in existence for her and it wouldnt make a real difference. what they were about to indulge in was a practice run of their heavens, hells, and canons. an easy trial run for them as a cadre. the three-fingers were effectively gelded for the crucible. their necros were gone and their jocks as well, but the twelve disabled patrolling golems would probably soon be commandeered by in-field enforcers. thus was the reason why avo spared the muscle immediate burning. they needed adequate targets to practice against, after all; cutting their teeth on ephemerals alone just wouldnt do. Chapter 15-8 Bonding (III): The Will in the Flame chapter 15-8 bonding (iii): the will in the flame i dont know what happened to them. i dont know. they just started killing themselves. killing each other. they did these terrible things and the laughing... they they started taking their blades to their own flesh and oh, godsthey started eating themselves! and the corpses of their dead comrades! ii dont i dont know why. it just happened. it was like they were compelled or controlled. or forced by a will greater than their own. -[redacted]. fateless recovered from three-finger crucible designation: [redacted] 15-8 bonding (iii): the will in the flame the killing began without the surviving three-fingers ever even knowing. their aero settled in the crook of a partially hollowed apartment stack, then avo spread his reach wide and wove a cocoon into shape. his blood was metal, biology, glass, and a hundred more things between, and where his heaven grew, perception slipped away, festering like a counter-cognitive tumor that refused to abide within the realm of notice. leaving but a single mote of flame tethered to his physical sheathe, he rode the rails of his growing ontology as fibrous blood-made tendrils began to spread outward, crawling as both limbs and eyes. his awareness of his surroundings blossomed breathing crimson spores outward for miles. the gutters around him came into shape like a sandcastle rising atop his palm. he could feel every structure that stood and all those that lay toppled. all that moved was known to his senses as the winds whispered their betrayal, and his reaching gore-made vines expanded into a vast nest to encircle the perimeter of the crucible itself. seconds thereafter, thin, haemokinetic hairs rose into the sky in branches of ever-multiplying strings, and between each closing intersection spread a thin pane of red. behind the growth came the flame, and within the flame blossomed a living contagion of thought. his heaven was to swallow the space of a small block, and his incog would spare him from unwanted attention. more, though, avo was a city unto himself. a singularity of matter and miracle fueled by minds many and memories multitude. the better way of understanding his position was to see himself as the coating settled upon the crucible. where pipes and bridges extended in a triangular circuit between three clusters of short buildings flanking the abandoned exorcist station, he regarded the encroaching battle lines between attacker and defender. crude trenches furrowed the plascrete as rows of fateless fired at their unfortunate fellows in the buildings while the syndicate types jeered and shot at them from behind. implanted with mind-triggered explosives and motivated by random executions, waves of refugees ground against the defenses of the block and died in disorganized clumps. from the lobby he was digesting, avo knew this to be the first part of the program. the siege was meant to simulate war, and all a force of poorly trained, low-morale, and barely equipped flats could manage when thrown against a defensive hardpoint manned by equal but protected opposition was die. of course, the three-fingers also decided to leave the children of the stations defenders inside with them so they wouldnt be so motivated to abandon the ceremony via the ever-reliable method of suicide. all in all, the first phase was meant to be a failurea setback to arouse hope or tension before the enforcers themselves were committed in force, and if by some miracle the defenders endured still, the golems. it was a pretty straightforward program, all things considered. decent viewership before chambers cut the streameighty million watchers and spiking. just a shame they would never get to see what avo and his cadre had planned. godclad vicarities were usually worth a small fortunate in of themselves. vicarities of godclads in combat? perhaps the stratosphere was where the benefits began. i got eyes on the golems, draus said as phantoms danced over her eyes, populating her sight with makers and icons. three knots. twelve golems. each at the heart of that complex of buildings theyre usin as mock headquarters. with a thought, another shard of glass passed over her eyes and her perception poured through the gleam across a bifurcated point in space. you cookin the jocks fried the damn drones as well. they all toppled out the air when you did what you did. he scried what she described and found her words apt. pyramid-shaped las-drones littered the cracked plascrete by the hundreds and within them were but vacant loci boiled clean of ghosts and sequences. it wouldnt take any effort to cast his mind into them and wield them as extensions of himself, but he saw little point and only trouble in conducting such an action. we have a clean shot at the golems, avo said. can hit them directly. overwhelm them. we could, but i think not, draus said. we snuff one. second we ambush but let them run a little. see how they do. third we fight straight up. thatll make for good drillin. we gotta get used to different circumstances. stress test our little cadre. the way her glance flicked over to chambers and kae told avo much. ill be fine, kae said, pouting slightly. i know how heavens work. draus pressed her lips together and glared at the agnos in the dark. thats just a part of it. what you dont know is war, and what were about to do is enact evil on evilwere gonna funnel hurt and wrong on these half-strands who had it coming, but that dont change the hurt and wrong were about to do. specially the ghoul here. thats the shit you gotta get synced with.0v3l.bin. kae opened her lips, but draus spoke over her. dont. anything you say now is spittin wind. you wanna show me, show me by performin. aint no protected agnos no more, so show me your teeth and ill see how i can set em. abrel groaned in the back of avos mind. [jaus, she talks like a literal regular recruitment ad. no wonder mom decided to get a bunch of her kind killedtheyre unbearable.] rolling her neck, draus pushed past the still-shaken chambers and cast a ghost into her weapon stash. the plasteel doors of the locker retracted, and she began withdrawing inventory. seein as were clads and all that good shit, i decided to forgo the necessary armor arrangements this time. next time, were deployin with exos or skinsand you all is gonna get used to doin it. can we just resurrect, chambers muttered, eyes still drifting as he slowly worked toward mastering himself. while kae hesitated for a moment, chambers launched himself out through the reflective portal rifle roaring, traumas lashing. he lacked both draus cold precision and instinct. each mind he shattered made him flinch just the same as the first, but in seconds he hit his stride. as the air combusted around him, swarms of insects began to flash over into reality, and from a column of rising fire emerged the crucified phoenix that was the lushburner. tearing the heat from exo-rig reactors to fuel his propagation, chambers compelled the air around him to ignite. fireworks of combustion sparked, and so too did tons of aratnids and bees come flooding forth. bodies were caked within armor as a constant supply of bugs manifested where there was space to fill, and more than a few tumbled as bioforms began to grow within the confines of their biology. +lick my holes!+ chambers roared, cackling manically as traumas were switched over with moments from the soft master collection. +eat my shits!+ as his warpath grew, the sloppily arranged encampment of enforcers and pilots was drowned by a landside of lifeforms birthed from anomalous occurrences of flame. kae followed forth without firing her gun at all, instead weaving herself into streams of fluid using the sweat from her pores and funneling into the dormant golems one after another. well, at least shes got instincts, draus said, shouldering her gun and watching as the first stray bursts of return fire struck chambers. aint gonna need to show chambers any fundamentals, but hes not much a thinker. he just kinda does things. peeking at the situation using his crucible encompassing vines, avo watched as specters from the other camps were already scrambling to raise the alarms. they were going to get that head-on fight draus called for soon, it seemed. with a wave of her hand, draus summoned another shard of glass from the inside of the aero and leveled the barrel of her rifle directly at it. as a flash shone across the glass and a new passage opened, the regular began to fire. it took avo a moment to ascertain what she was shooting at, but as he drew his gaze back, he traced stray lanes of gauss fire using his phys-sim and found snipers toppling from their perches with gore spilling from their shorn skulls. as she began to squeeze the trigger over and over again, she turned a irksome glare onto avo and shook her head. look at this shit. and people like bein a clad? too easy? its not even real, she said. like crushin insects. theres no way to get our skin in this kinda of game unlesss we actively lookin to die. this feeling? thats your fault. ah. back to this topic again. he was wondering if the allure of power had swallowed her completely, or if there was still a portion of her stubbornness holding out. want me to reclaim the frame? avo asked. he didnt want to hear her answer for fear of her actually saying no, but her response came as a cutting scoff and he felt his worries dissipate. nah. i like it. i like it a lot. and thats your fault too: you got me addicted to bigger game. you got me into a better class of warwar that i thought i was done with. she jabbed him in the chest lightly with a finger. i couldve had it easy. i couldve just died fightin the trash and none of this would be my problem no more. an explosion of fire followed by a deafening hum of insects accompanied the splashing of rushing waters. screams of horror and confusion rose through the ranks of the three-fingers while the outer perimeter made up of fateless vanguards and actual meatshields broke and scattered. why do you want to die? avo asked. part of him thought it was time to ask. the rest was assured that templates could help him navigate difficult conversations he didnt have the patience nor want to chance in the past. i dont, draus said, switching to her launcher and firing a micro rocket between her shots. but i have to. its what regs do in the end. we die fightin. she considered her response and let out a casual breath. its just a incompleteness, i guess. lots of mine went out right and bloody good in the end durin the war. their lives were wasted but hey, its the moment that counts. i was just huntin for mine in these here gutters. and you wanted these vermin to have the glory of your death? avo asked. yeah, but youre lookin at it the wrong way. draus licked her lips. thisall thisis about meanin, right? meaning? what does reality mean; what does history. the shit the guilds are fightin for and all that. yes. meaning. remember you askin me if i felt real? well, i dont think theres anything realer than fightin your own kind without the touch of any god and just dyin for good when the time came. no honor. no glory. just a good dog-gone war fought to the bloody end for somethin that mattered. it dont need to change the city or alter idheim. it just had to be a real end for a real fight. how about now, avo said. do you hate me? for ruining your real fight? she lowered and gun and turned to face him in full just as a wall of flame enshadowed the faint grin on her face. nah. you just woke up old appetites again. ones i thought dead and done. figured i was finished with the tiers and done with the guilds. figured my race was run. the shard floated next to her head. guess i figured wrong. she chuckled grimly. i wish old mother greatling was still alive to see what i have have now. that wouldve been a fight and a half. still have his father. brother. he was about to mention abrel, but she was more his thrall than anything else. yeah, we do have that, dont we? a beat of silence followed and draus enclosed the helmet of her bio-rig. hey, you, uh, fancy a little game? she deviated deliberately, but he didnt press. instead, he followed, and felt his interest piqued. what kind? big game, draus said. like the way we was when this started. she cocked her head at kae and chambers warpath. let em stretch their legs. whats say you and i see if we can do one better than our run against vicious? avo answered with a slow grin. why not? be good practice. Chapter 15-9 Bonding IV: First Massacre chapter 15-9 bonding iv: first massacre i dont remember the first person i killed. or the second. or, well, most of them really. look, i snuff lots of people and im old, so you cant blame me. the ultimate point to this conversation remains the same, however: somewhere, sometime, some unlucky fuckers gonna get it at your hands, and theyre going to be the ones that do it to you. oh, shit. that person was alive. that person had a life. i have a life. oh, jaus. oh, gods. yeah, all you nova-hot snuffers with ice in your veins can laugh it up. you dont feel emotions when you have to kill, right? nothing affects you, right? wrong. bullshit. i wasnt shaken for shit when my youngest got done beside me during a run, so my competition for the stone-cold sow awards is in the low thousands at best. but its not the big dramatic moments that fuck you up while fighting. its the little things. a little detail or a crack that slips through all that scar tissue you got layered over your psyche and into the soft, quivering meat on the inside. let me tell you about a guy i do remember killing: a managerial type for a defunct omnitech under-corp we dont talk about. real soft meat. cornered the poor half-strand on the shitter and plugged him twice with an organic neuro-tox pick i had planted beneath my nail. man did the guy shit himself hard after that. mustve cleared up whatever congestion he had with that sang nerve agent, but while he was doing leg-spasms, something strange happened to me. i found myself feeling bad. real bad. my hands started shaking. i had my tear ducts wired away at the time so i probably couldnt have cried if i wanted to, but there i was having a panic attack across from a dying man shitting the last and hardest shit of his life. the whole thing was just ridiculous. i saw myself where he waswondered how i would take just getting killed when i thought i was safe and something inside me just couldnt handle it. my wards rattled then. shook me out of that mess and i pulled a runner before anyone else came. i still remember the way his eyes rolled, and how he blinked. confusion at first and terror all the way at the end. the terror didnt go away either. it lingered until everything just stopped. theres a crack inside all of us is what im saying, and if you keep living this life, youll find it someday. well. most of you. the honest truth is that only ghouls, regs, and the mentally warped can keep killing forever without suffering a price, but honestly, we can call anyone in these three categories people? -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 15-9 bonding iv: first massacre +i didnt expect her to just burst,+ kae cried as she surged out from the mangled husk of twisted metal that once stood a sangeist. she felt the immensity of her weight most of all as she flowed through the world. water was hers to shape and commanda fluid wall rising high to drink in lancing flechettes and stinging beams. the aegis of tides was a heaven long popular among the lowest of highflames godclads, and kae thought herself totally versed in its canons and hubrises. practice, however, revealed the depths of her inconsideration. for too long had she considered her new abilities in the confines of a white room, delving into what she could do in the broadest of circumstances while ignorant to the minutiae. small things like funneling oneself into a person and then rapidly expanding thereafter. the mutilated pulp of her victim oozed still within, making kaes spirit quiver, and she found herself desperately yearning for a shower despite being water incarnate. a missile streaked out down from atop one of the slanting structures beside her, loosed from with a sparking flash from a linear-acceleration launcher. it splashed into her form like a comet, plunging deep but striking at nothing. her canon activated. fluid swirled and unraveled the projectile. flicking droplets back toward a mob of disorganized three-fingers, the flecks reached out and formed glinting streams that stitched the missile back into existence. strands of viscera clung in clumps to the payload as well. kae mentally gagged as she worked to funnel more of the organic detritus out from inside her. +i know, pretty sick right?+ chambers said. the echo of his thoughts intruded into her overwhelmed mind. excitement rode from his every word in contrast to her horror, and as she swatted crowds of fleeing enforcers with her tidal wavescausing herself further distress as their little bodies tore open like wet sacks of flesh graced by the weight of a falling hammer. a brightness crowned the space above her while a piercing shriek forced reality to shiver. the lushburner greeted the battlefield as a streak of fire and flora. arcs of rising flame tore through fading silhouettes like spreading roots, and from the inferno erupted sky-coating swarms of buzzing bodies. larger aero-sized bioforms splattered through fleeing figures like artillery while their diminutive counterparts buried their victims from sheer mass alone. the plaza where the three fingers held was now choked with fire, flesh, and roaring tides. beside her, lushburners crucified visage bled dolloping tumors out made from hives of flesh-woven people seeking a final escape. cog-cap: 22% kae staggered and directed her perception elsewhere. though she herself was a godclad, her acclimation had not yet set in. gazing upon a naked heaven so brazenly still reaped considerable cost. a spear of discomfort lodged itself through her being. her focus split. her frame, confused by the input of her mind, flickered as the subreality manifested and deloaded, causing her physical form to shutter across existence with a rushing tsunami. kaes mind spun. her cog-feed screamed with threats and icons and warnings and a metal fragment sliced both her cheeks open and the pain made her scream his exciting wasnt contagious. kae touched her disabled arm and felt a spreading emptinessness deep inside her chest. im still stuck on the icks, i think. maybe it will come to be later. chambers opened his mouth to say something, but he paused. and thought. something in the back of her mind wondered if he was going to talk about some other disturbing neuro-porn he liked indulging in but from him came only a grunt. or maybe not. youre a shiny person, agnos. she blinked. shiny? yeah, he said, waving his hand animated as he searched for the right words. you seem real nice and you smell good and all that other tiers stuff, you know? smelling good is a tiers thing? kae asked. he held up a hand to quiet her. thats not the point. the point is that fuck, what were we talkinoh, some people dont like killing and thats okay. i know, kae said. i dont like killing. im just a bit she looked down at her shaking hand and winced. stuck on how they pop. and the awful smells. chambers sneered. youre telling me? im the one with the dogshit cooking heaven. couldve given me the cool omnitech thing, but nochambers gets shit. anway, innards are all kinds of gassy sometime. you know, most of snuffers usually get a second lung or a utl-breather just for that. utl? kae said. utility breather. cheap gutterware olfactory implants. they slid them under your nose and helps you filter some minor toxins, or smell whatever you want to smell. the maw-divers pretty much all got one of those because of all the waste so yeah. you know, gotta adapt to the environment. oh. you know, the purgatories usually filter the smells you encounter based on your metaminds listed preferences. i miss that right now. yeah, me too, and ive never even been there before, chambers said. kae chirped a soft laugh. well. rich or poor, i suppose that what makes us both new vultunites is how often the city gets to ram fist deep into our asses and tug, right? her chirp turned to a frown of disgust. you really like disgusting imagery, dont you? kae asked. it leaves an impression, chambers said. makes people remember me. kae considered consider his words and offered a quick nod. i guess, but how are you remembered? don''t really matter. its just about making people think of you like youre human. like they cant just shoot you without something leaving the world for good. again, his words spurred her to look at all the remains staining the urban swamp around her. yeah, like those poor half-strands. chambers sniffed. i dont even know most of their names. listen, i felt real fucking bad about an agnos i fed to the ghoul earlier. an awkward silence followed, and he drew out his woundhound injection and motioned for her to approach. come on, lets get that arm of yours fixed up before the other two get back. do you think theyre already done? kae asked. eh, probably, chambers said. wouldntve melted our problems if they werent, right? the blood riding the water called out to her. ri +kae. chambers. still one more active knot left. dropping you two a marker so we can square up and fight this one out.+ draus words echoed through the session and kae sighed as a market flashed into her deepnav not a few miles away. chambers promptly jabbed the woundhound into her and she barely winced. come on, agnos. lets get a dog out of you so we can end this crucible give these fugee murdering half-strands the what for. exhaustion crept into her bones as something began to twitch from the epicenter of her injury. right. just have to get used to this. but the twist in her gut as she spoke those words made her wonder if she ever could. Chapter 15-10 Grounding chapter 15-10 grounding critical terms: missing; necrotheurgy; thanatech; three fingers; crucible; empty golems generating report summary summary: at an undetermined time during the last day, the three-fingers syndicate (an unofficial subsidiary of sanctus) vanished along with all associated assets across the real and the nether. their last known operation was a crucible scheduled to conclude with the cycling of the daystar, yet when tadpoles were dispatched, only trafficked fateless were discovered. having fortified a gutters security checkpoint, evidence suggests that the fateless were engaged in defensive action against the syndicate as part of the events itinerary when the vanishment occurred. rounds of thoughtscans and deep nether interviews were conducted thereafter. however, despite their proximity during the event, the details they provided were sparse at best. what we have determined is that the three-fingers nether lobby was suddenly decommissioned near the beginning of the crucibles commencement and syndicate ghosts dissolved with a spark. furthermore, those who manned the blocks defenses all exhibit signs of severe ego damage congruous to gazing upon a fully manifested heaven with an unwarded mind. even less can be said for the material the syndicate should have amassed for this siege event. no traces of any golems, drones, warwights, or any other syndicate-based assets. the disappearance of all units has been judged to be near synchronous and total. as of the present, no definite theories or judgments have been cemented but it is the field teams strongest suggestion that the eradication can be attributed to a high spherage godcladlike past the fifth threshold of apotheosisaided by elite necrotheurgic support. ultimately, the abnormalities and scope of the incident have been deemed far too severe for a mundane explanation. we submit that this report should be shared with the paladins after secondary confirmation. -exorcist report 15-10 grounding +firing.+ a reflective scab cycled over draus rifle. she squeezed the trigger. her shot emerged from a window located over a mile away and punched clean through the rear of a burning golem. two accretions winked out at once. +kill,+ she said. avo grunted +mark next target when ready.+ they played their game from within the shattered top of an office floor. cracked loci remained embedded in workstations and a water fountain projecting a glitchy hologram of an anthropomorphic raindrop continuously chirped at them to mind their hydration. though no working lights shone overhead, distant columns of rising flame cast brightness across the horizon as a plague of insects bore down upon the broken and retreating. chambers acquitted himself comfortably against his former ilk. it took a requisite amount of cruelty to function as an enforcer, but there was something to be said about the ease he took to butchering his former tradesmen compared to the frustrations he struggled as a necro. perhaps it was easier to dissociate from ones acts when you rested in the confine of one mind alone. such was no longer the case with avo. insight was now an inescapable blessing. instead of casting his mind out and mem-locking the pilot of the next sangeist, avo waited for the coming retaliation. he watched the enforcers of the knot scramble through a cracked window touched by the twice-walker and chuckled with dry amusement. the poor fools didnt even know they were being studied from twenty feet away. half manifested as the junction was, draus heaven granted them a live audience to a theatre of terror and incompetence as enforcers fought to get in their rigs while the already armored triggered their phys-sims in search of the sniper. though the enforcers were deprived of drone-jocks, their heavies were still granted tactical-range firepower suppression by the voz-ii linear-artillery launchers festooned to their backs. from their chrome rails sparked lightning, and streaks of screaming payloads whistled high. draus snorted at their attempt. look at em. clumped up. some firin, some doin whatever-the-shit its like they all wanna die. her disappointment only grew as ghosts threaded out from frantic minds casting snaking commands through once-dormant warwights to sally forth. artillery speared down and columns of fire rose from the disintegrating bridge where they traced draus shot via phys-sims. mobs of armored corpses began their charge. hundreds of bodies poured outward in search of their elusive adversary in a disorganized swarm. gauss fire and crude kinetics erupted from their first wave in a messy display of suppressive fire, even slicing apart a portion of their vanguard as thoughtcasts clashed and formations collided. intercepted, disorganized, broken, and hunted, the knot was coming apart at the seams in record time. all it took was the death of their commanding personnel followed by the most senior golem pilot. their lines were collapsed and atop the open palm of avos sanguinity, he felt his newest victims scurry like shrieking aratnids, fleeing in circles as they clawed to find a refugee of shadows. voices derived from the fires within avo sang with mockery, scorn, and fascination. the tacticians and strategies among his templates howled insults and slurred demurs at unmoving golems. the pilots were clenched by indecision and governed by hesitation. a mistake abrel wouldnt brook. [you keep your heaven active, always active when a fights on. even a child knows that. and wheres their porter? if they had an active porter with a demiplanar bivouac they wouldnt be getting cut down like this. gods, are all fateless this worthless?] [some of us didnt get to go to fancy guilder school,] corner spat. +next target,+ draus repeated as a new pane of glass widened along the wall. avo shaped a haemokinetic sheet with the regulars request and she bound the two alchemized surfaces with a single passage. +loose,+ avo said, flinging the sheet outward with a pulse of haemokinesis. the darting construct bore a twofold purpose as both firing loophole and scouting locus. with a session fused into its structure, avo cast out his whisper as the horizon came spilling toward him and marked a new between the two remaining sangeists. heavy exo, avo said. looks like theyre charging up a fusion burner. think you can hit it? the distance to interception zipped closer but all the regular offered was a scoff. aint gonna need a flechette for that. she spat disdainfully to the side and the temperature around them plummeted. reaching for her new power with contemptuous ease, an ursine presencebarely visible from the breath-steamed fogstaggered into existence as its weight pressed down around reality. a sheen of frost began to coat their surroundings, and as the cold only grew, the shape of the heaven grew clearer. the visage of a skeletal bear with shimmering bones carved from the shine of glaciers greeted avos notice and it funneled itself through the newest passage with jaws open. between the animal and primal cold came a union, and the jagged fangs of winter everlasting clamped down upon the sangeists and the dozen or so enforcers caught in the canons radius clenching the heavy with a special compression. the galeslither offered no follow-up, choosing instead to blast its winds through one of the few blocks still standing. small splashing lanes of perception pointed out from the exorcist station. the fateless were watching their remaining hunters mutilate one another. how perfect. weaving himself into the very concepts of his domains, his sanguinity bloomed like the corona of a star on the verge of supernova. crimson rapids flowed from all that could be unraveled into his body as rivers sought a delta. the woundshaper drank its way back into existence, growing like a rising spire that pulsed out broadcasts of burning blood. this time, however, additional branches sprouted free from its being as new superstructures began to cocoon its exterior. broken from the tight yoke of its former hubris, avo left his manifested heaven festooned at the core of a gargantuan construct. it reached up to touch the very thresholds he drew across the crucible to curtain this slaughter from notice. droplets of falling red filled the air. the central self of the woundshaper remained at eighty tons but sewn into the vastness of its greatcoat, avo felt his thaumic mass and eldritch influence rise. his new form took the shape of a leviathana hydra of countless heads and layered in teeth. warning: heaven thaumic mass growing woundshaperthaumic requirements: 1540 thaum/c current physical tonnage: 2455 he moved through matter like liquid lightning. reality quivered at his presence while draus sank her twice-walker into his confines to lurk. the ground beneath him turned to glass as a pathway opened and he slithered through an inversion point across spaces, arriving a full mile and a half away from where he once was with a dip of his body. builds collapsed into his ontology and he absorbed the devastation as food for growth. soon he found himself flanked in the air by a crucified phoenix gliding in the air and a rushing fortress molded from water. chambers was alight with glee at being cut freea far cry from the shaken necrojack he made. the familiar playground of direct murders granted him ample room for old habits of dissociation when he only had to exist within his own mind. kae, meanwhile, was a mental wound sore with distaste and unease. +alright, thats one knot for the both of us,+ chambers said. +we gonna make a run at them or what?+ +something like that,+ avo replied. charging into the sangeists was easy. the snake-king would require some handling so they wouldnt be anchored at a permanent relative position. hence, he reached out through his broadcast and touched the pilot of the golem using his sanguinity. after that, it took but a thought to burst all the blood vessels in the womans mind. snake-heads the size of barges lurched and faded as the steel egg of a golems core bounced free. the fourth golem went dormant as the rest of its knot carried on, unknowing of the end they were soon to court. slipping out from avos blood, the twice-walker came together in an assembly of jagged shards as their cadre circled the exorcist station to collide with the sangeists. a series of six hylaokinetically sharpened stakes of glass spun over draus like the bullets in a revolver and her thrill began to rise. the agnos, for her part, clutched part of a wall in front of her raging torrents as she mustered her courage and pushed ahead. +i still dont like how they pop and break inside me.+ she explained. the justification was unneeded. this was leisure, after all, but her sensibilities offered him greater insight into his companion as well. the agnos lacked the critical qualities to be a proper killer, but her ability to kill was beyond question. such was all that was needed for the coming clash. as they rounded the corner, a wave of warwights and field drones came into view, and behind them followed the sangeists. but where avo and his cadre pressed onward, their opposition froze. their opposition broke. their opposition shattered. beholding four heavens of third sphere and above, multiple wards collapsed among the three-fingers and brittle minds shattered within. the same fate befell those fateless foolish enough to be gazing out in the wrong direction as the charge drew to its start. poor fools. collateral damage was hard to prevent when all it took was a glance. +holy hells,+ chambers marveled, his pleasure ignited by the immensity of his passive harm. +were nulling these shits just by being.+ +not an uncommon case with lacking wards,+ kae said. +a standard golem is already disturbing enough for a baseline mindfour mid-sphere heavens? no one really appreciates how much that is until they have to face it! the way it harms the mind is really quite fascinating too, ioh, im chitting arent i.+ the sangeists broke and turned, the pilots attempting too run. was i so small, so slow once? what disgrace it is to behold my other selves, the woundshaper sneered. +keep talking,+chambers said. +we could use some education with the snuffing.+ avo grunted in agreement. through the discomfort came a spark of relief from kae. perhaps it was acceptance. or camaraderie. or any of those social emotions avo couldnt be bothered to manifest right now using his templates. either way, a flicker of belonging followed, and that was what counted. +alright,+ kae said. lets start the lesson, then.+ Chapter 15-11 Portrait chapter 15-11 portrait potential operative avo has been cleared for interview. recruitment evaluation for operation revisionist now pending. -aegis 15-11 portrait cog-cap: 99% session lost session lost session los session lost warning: heaven detected warning: heaven detected warning: heaven detected warning: heaven detected update: sessions to all members of squad teton; squad asga; squad venno lost session lost myong woke to the ringing of lost sessions echoing through his metamind and found his thoughts slippery to grasp. cold winds lashed like bitter whips striking him to the accompaniment of ceaseless squealing. as his attention wove together from frayed strings, his cog-feed loaded and he found himself beholding a portrait of damnation from within the mangled remains of his golem. a shallow swamp of gore stretched beyond veils of crimson haze. a layer of dead insects floated upon the still, red waters, and the swarms that remained alive sang their droning tune as they spiraled over unmoving bodies. s-shit, he breathed. shifting to loosen himself from his gimbal, he hissed as agony flared around his ribs. looking down, he found a scab-coated furrow arcing inward along his midsection. whatever tore through his sangeist had taken a bite out of him as well. some of the ribs on his right were missing. not broken. not shattered. gone entirely. thank jaus he had that platelet breeder valve grafted under his heart. wouldve bled to death otherwise. he moved and bit back a snarl of pain. his rig sparked and whined from its own damage, but the power grid remained stable and systems were still functioning. with a flex of augmented strength, he tore the warped metal of his hexagonal gimbal and pushed free from the claustrophobic confines of his vehicle. another wafting chill washed over him and he felt the unnatural sting of the cold. he felt it even inside his armor. something was wrong there. something wait, did his metamind say something about detecting heavens? drawing up the information again with a thought, a spike of sobering fear shook myong out of his pain-drunk stupor and he found himself blinking out at the hellscape outside his golem. the platform looked like an aluminum can twisted to the point of tearing and cast carelessly aside thereafter. stranger yet, blood was dripping from the jagged lips of the damage. had he cut himself on the edge somehow? no. he was secured in the gimbal. someone else then? swallowing, he studied the ankle-deep pond of red that awaited him outside. burning drones and collapsed figures formed distant waypoints in his attention, and through the haze came flashes of gunfire and bladder-softening screams. remains of warwights were scattered in shredded pieces. peeking out cautiously, he checked his rig-mounted weapons and found only his shoulder-mounted km-20 autogausser operational. alright, he winced as he placed a foot on the opening and stepped out. come on, myong. come on. stepped over, he slammed down upon the pool of gore with a rising splash and tried to wrestle his rising panic under control. something terrible happened earliera fragment of memory he was missing right now. the last thing he remembered before coming earlier was scrambling to assist knot two just as knot one came under fire as well. and then and then heaven detect his metamind went quiet. a spike of emptiness pulsed in the core of his mind. something was coming back to him. something other heavens. he remembered getting run down by other heavens. he didnt see them. not directly. but over the sessions, he caught glimpses of what smashed into him immediately after. an enormous pillar of glass somehow turned the corner of the exorcist station and slammed down behind his moving knot. around this time he also realized the new guythe pilot of the snake-kinghad their metamind off or something. he was too busy casting at the half-strand to activate their session to notice the attack himself. pain tore from his mind as he felt his memories rattle like loose fragments of shrapnel. his cog-cap only just dipped below ninety-eight percent and the very act of thinking made his brain throb with soreness. you deserve this. you deserve to burn. think of never seeing your family again, myong. think of everything you leave behind. at least we wont be killing anymore kids, am i right? with each passing second, more and more bodies emerged to join in on a long deafening laugh track, and in the end, hollowed by strain and stress, myong heard himself chuckling along with them, hopelessly wanting to be part of his own festivities. in the mix, one voice sounded louder than all the others. clearer. that hissing voice. that deep rasp belonging to the entity. it drew closer and closer along with all the other bodies, closer and closer as a shadow drifted over myong. warning: heaven detected ->[woundshaper] - fourth sphere ->thaumic output: 2144 thaum/c and for the last moment, myong remained himself, he looked up at the face of his killer and exhaled. he came apart at the sight of the tower. he came apart at the district devouring limbs. he came apart at the searing dawn and erupted from the conflagration crowning the heaven itself, and between the folds of the fire did he witness flickers of the purgatory he was destined to languish. other faces formed and dissolved amidst the fires. they stared out at him like prisoners watching fresh meat. they stared and they leered. +be proud,+ the entity said, forming a burning tendril from its center mass. +i will make better use of your life and mind than you ever could.+ *** thaumic output: 6792 thaum/c ghosts: [71,935] obtained: sangeist x3, snake-king x1 +jaus, rotlick, youre becomin more of a diva by the day,+ draus sighed as avo finally finished his act of theater. +the fucks wrong with just killing people? you gonna do this song and dance with all your victims now?+ +eh, i liked it,+ chambers said. +the revenge vibe is always a neat sell. i can see this hitting silver in the entertainment category for most downloaded vicarity this week.+ +not gold?+ avo asked. +well, youre not titillating or a nu-cat, so its an uphill fight for you there, consang.+ this city and its many addictions. smashing through the knot took little effort but further emphasized the doctrine of total domain warfare. they struck the knot from whatever direction they so pleased with draus. nether superiority was lost to the three-fingers, rendering their coordination nearly non-existent as they were forced to act in the physical. all things culminated as out of the three sangeists he was to face, only one turned to ward off his assault. one that was promptly frozen and had its pilot turned into freshly cooked slices of ham. as the formation of the knot collapsed thereafter, the route turned into a slaughter as they were ridden down by the cadre. all in all, it wasn''t worth much as practice, but it served as ample demonstration of what was most essential in a fight between godclads. awareness. knowing what your enemy can do, where they are, what they want, and with what would their assault be conducted. deprived of the nether and without scrying capabilities, the fate of the three-fingers was sealed with the arrival of the cadre. yet, it could be them on the receiving end one day should they be faced with a rival with esoteric canons or eccentric heavens. to that end, abrel spoke her peace. [use your godsdamned demiplanes. you need to have a place that is absolutely secure and absolutely yours. the twice-walker and galeslither both have something for this, but that should be the anchor for your team. the porter is in charge of keeping prying eyes out and making sure the cadre as a potion of sanctuary even in the worst of the fighting.] suppose that was something to develop further then. he needed to expand on redundancies, and so he bade his capable templates to begin running war games. +so, thats that then?+ draus muttered. +wont lie, i expected more of a fight with them, but this batch is as good as done.+ +not yet,+ avo said. +going to use the minds i just took to burn away the rest of the three-fingers. kill them all. then were done.+ +disappearin an entire syndicates gonna be awfully noisy even for you,+ draus said. +will leave a false trail,+ he replied. but before even that, avo considered the three additional souls still burning on the borders of his frame and remembered another of his wants. dismissing his woundshaper, the block-sized extensions of his spire evaporated into air while he poured the remainder of his gore into the darkness as he took his first steps toward the exorcist station. +avo. avo! what are you doin now?+ draus asked. a small but gleeful grin spread across his face as he considered which heaven to gift his lucky winner. +just going to light a candle. throw the guilds off. start a fire under this city.+ Chapter 15-12 The Lapse chapter 15-12 the lapse anyone can be a godclad. any self-aware creature. when someone asks me who deserves the mantle of apotheosis, silence is my answer. there is nothing to say to such a false question; godclads are imbued with the immensity of influence, but none of this is truly decided by virtue. think of the gods from the age of the everwars, and know that heavens are a function of power and control rather than ethicality and mastery. an addict with the requisite implants and weapons will slaughter even the most elite among martial peers by merit of power differential alone. what is actually being asked is who can stay a godclad. the things to consider are of a multitude. temperament. ego. background. skill. environment. politics. all these things come together to decide who will be ensouled, but granting divinity blindly inevitably leads to usurpation. skill is a necessity. but more than skill, the foundational aspect of who makes a proper godclad is judgment. it is the ones that live beyond the confines of their own mind and can witness the world without filters and spare themselves comforting lies. these are the ones who will make the right choices with their canons. these are the ones who will withdraw from battles that are no longer worth fighting. these are the ones that understand the greatest boon granted by a frame is the ability to learn from death above all other miracles. it is no strange secret that most ensouled survive shorter than a year before losing their frame to another. absolutes clash absolutely, and once most taste the privilege of ruling over a facet of reality, they will soon find themselves lusting for the pleasure of becoming a potential suzerain of their peers. clarity, here, decides the fate of most. clarity in what must be done. clarity in what they might survive. clarity in how they are to present themselves to the world. absolute honesty to counter absolute power. that is my answer. that is the cure to the hubris that ails all who bear the highest powers. --osjon thousand, death pruning, page 588 15-12 the lapse [her,] abrel said. [shell do.] +her?+ avo replied, staring down at the young woman quietly digging through the butchered remains of her fellow fateless for any supplies she could use. the warwights had gotten far before they were diverted. her gore-caked hands moved fast and slick and there was an unnerving alertness to her brown eyes. she was always movingalways listening and scavenging to maintain an upper hand. of the surviving defenders within the station, she alone remained beyond the second defensive line located in the lobby. by virtue of courage or rank apathy in the face of death, she scurried about the outside from shadow to shadow, her lithe form darting like an aratnid dragging bits of trash back into its nest. a few hundred more accretions remained deeper yet in the block, but abrel made her vote known the moment she noticed the girl. hidden from sight by his incog, avo studied the curious creature as he manifested all the mem-data the three-fingers had on her. the smugglers that sold her into the city called the waif dice. apparently, she was nameless before a pale-faced fallwalker offered her over after losing a bet in a dice game. henceforth, her captors found an easy reference for the gangly girl, though shiv came a close second when she broke a rusty shard of metal against the skin of one of the crew. no other details about her past were forthcoming. she weighed a feeble ninety-two pounds and stood shorter than even kae at five feet onethough the mem-data displayed her height as one-hundred and fifty-four centimeters per her insistence. guesswork and blind assumption listed her ancestry as kosgan, but the silence she kept and the blank glare she gave all those around her made verification all but impossible. syndicate necros made an attempt to dig through her mind but found little in the way of long-term memories. she was, in a word, wiped clean. all she had was her facilities, an aversion to eye contact, and a casual indifference to horror and bloodshed. [skills, attitude, and a mystery,] abrel said. [pretty good eating for us today.] digging through intestinal ropes, the oval-faced girl moved off instinct and little else as avo regarded the features of her sheathe. one of her arms was longer than the other. he could tell the ragged coat she wore once belonged to someone else from the scent of blood still matted on it and the flechette holes lining the back. the sunk placement of her jaw accentuated the sharpness of her nose and he realized her silence to be a result of biological mutation rather than outright choice. [but godsdamned is she fucking ugly,] lip groaned. several other templates cast their surprise at the scaarthian and she sighed. [its true, motherfuckers. she looks like the backside of a shovel. whatever that fallwalker sold her for was too much.] shadow-2 scoffed. [yeah, like the mesh is one to judge.] [which one of you half-strands said that?] lip snarled. [ill] [do nothing. because were all figments of the ghouls consciousness. hes just letting us talk because we feed him insight between all the hours of constant arguing and factionalism.] his gestalt was truly a place of welcoming kindness. spreading his awareness deeper through the station, his consciousness spread like silent venom as his tendrils crept through the foundations of the block. he glimpsed and scouted through the profiles of the defenders first. what remained of them, anyhow. some were hard enough. former warriors of feral tribes that managed to eke out a tortured living in the sunderwilds somehow. members of a now true-deathed fallwalkers retinue before being captured. augment-stripped enforcers from rival syndicates set to be humiliated one last time. he skipped past the details and ignored her screaming mind while he worked in haste. when finished with her frame, he accelerated his resurrection cycle and ascended back into the real first to anticipate her return. twitching into existence, avo did another sweep of his own mind and found nothing amiss. nothing he could detect, anyhow. whatever was wrong with him was either beyond necrotheurgy or his expertise. neither boded well. he needed a means of enforcing control in the meantime. a secondary structure to monitor himself without risk to others if possible. his considerations were interrupted as dice flickered back into reality right next to him, and though her flesh was fully mended, her mind still screamed with questions and confusion, her thoughtstuff churning like a typhoon from all the unexplained phenomena she experienced in a short span of time. avo wasted no more time and speared his flames into her mind. drinking away her ego as a template, he mimicked her cognitive structure and began to tweak what she could recall. forging ingots of knowledge behind what she was now and what her powers could do, he built in a session in the back of her mind as he had with abrel as he scrubbed himself clean from her thoughts. all she would know now was thatby mysterious meansshe was a godclad with an enemy to face, and that she now had the tools to hunt and butcher the three-fingers that sought to snuff her like cattle. she would recall nothing of him though. he would be able to access her mind when he chose, but her purpose was not to be his associate or slave. her purpose was to live and wreak havoc through the warrens as he once did and part the attention of the paladins should she fail to be circumspect. if she fell to true death after all her ensouling, then such was life in new vultun. but if she performed, he still had an avenue to imbue her with greater and more expansive ontologics. for now, however, he simply broke her neck a second time and let her corpse topple down upon offal-soaked plascrete. casting a final sweep using his whisper, avo made sure the other fateless remained ignorant of his presence as coated himself in haemokinesis and stepped into a bolt of surging lightning. within the microsecond of his traversal, he realized the protective dome he built around the crucible had splashed down with his death. little matter. they were done here. it was time to return to the demiplane. like a whipcrack he crashed down next to draus and the others as lightning stitched him back into shape from still sparking blood. kae stumbled backward. chambers toppled over himself. the regular fixed him with a bored stare and pulled burning hifflass out from between her lips. didnt kill any of em, did you? draus asked. she was asking if he butchered any of the fateless. it would be remiss of him to lie. only one, avo replied, considering if he wanted to tell her about his control slippingas well. gave her a soul. burned her clean of memories. whoa, chambers said, holding up a hand. you werent shitting us about that? youre actually giving these flats frames? a stench wafted from the half-strand and it was thick with jealousy. yes. going to distribute more power soon. see if the victims can invert their positions. see if the abusers can still fight when theyre on the bottom. and build a false trail for the paladins and exorcists to follow considering all the weird shit we get up to, yeah? draus finished. avo grunted. something like that. should open us a passage. ill liquefy the aero. we need to get back to the demiplane. ill distribute our haul there. new ontologics for everyone. fuck yes, chambers said, pumping his fist as all envy evaporated from his mind. draus, however, was not so easily distracted. you aint been in a hurry like this before. somethins up. the thought to resequence his own mind to adapt and convince her of his stability greeted avo as an appealing option, but the longer he held draus flat stare, the less he found himself wanting to lie. ill tell you later. want to leave now. please. three sets of eyes blinked at him. what? please is rare coming from you, avo, kae said. mostly youre just like: draus. going to do a thing. hm. considering implications of thing. im thinking about castrating a prepubescent and getting hungry. not going to do it. im a good ghoul. and then youd torture someone terribly. draus snorted. chambers guffawed. avo glared. mocking me, avo said. yes, but that is how youre like. draus is right. you seem worried. he shook his head and hissed. talk where its safe. open passage. ill deal with our leftovers. the regular swept her gaze across him and offered a quick nod. denton casted us earlier. said aegis was ready to meet and was acceleratin the timetable per your preference. you good for talkin to the voider bosses? avo didnt know. but he couldnt abandon such an opportunity. not when there was more for him to understand. not when he could enhance his mind into a new spectrum. maybe the sprites would be a new means to salve these lapses. yes, avo said, unsure if he was lying. ill be ready. ill be fine. Chapter 15-13 After Action chapter 15-13 after action the elders are trying to cause an outbreak. im sure of it now. i mean, what do you see what the hells they have us digging through? the soft master collection? nu-dog in the wrong ass? nu-dog: re-erected? operation: storm my step sisters nether plane? thisthis is absolutelistenlook, theres a title in here thats literally i blast my goosh-goosh into the eyes of people driving aeros so we crash and die: a sexual prank series! what the thorough futhis isnt even ten percent of the way through. ive purged my proxy six times and the content still nearly overloaded my lustaway. ive seen things that not even forgetting will cleanse my soul of. what the hell kind of secret messaging do the mirrors expect to be hiding in porn this depraved? no! no, i refuse to believe that the low masters spent all their time after getting their civilization gelded in the war spoofing their way into the porn industry to create these but nothing in these videos are subversive! did you not hear the titles? how much subliminal messaging do you think a motherfucker can get in a scene that has an anatomically incorrect ghoul castrating an equally anatomically incorrect regular and then pouring small penis-shaped bioforms into the wound that are called the hurt-preggies! huh! huh, half-strand! explain to me! no! i dont need a break! i dont need to switch out! i need to be done with this! done! im a godsdamned incubus. thousands shadow, i shouldnt be spending my time doing this. how the hells is someone this depraved even still alive? he shouldve been scalpeled during one of the outbreaks -incubus olim oohuri complaining about reviewing aedon chambers vicarity diet 15-13 after action avo scoured his mind three more times after they returned to the demiplane. no more lapses followed, but his paranoia lingered from his recent compromise. directing his subminds to scan his templates again, he found no obvious fault in his cognition. his mind was more his than it ever had been. so how was he losing control? how was his body just acting of its own volition? or was it just raw instinct taking hold? an expression of intrusive desire made manifest? establishing whispers from the innermost confines of his memories, he manifested a mental panopticon in preparation for any future compromises and sequenced the foundations of his emergency countermeasures. it would begin with an alert, proceed to a self-directed jack, then a trauma-pattern, before finally a contingency-triggered thoughtwave disruptor if all else was found wanting. the idea of waging a secret war against himself did not appeal, but he would not see these slips of control become chronic. there was far too much at stake for him to be without control, and with the threats arrayed against him growing ever more severe, he couldnt afford to play a sloppy game against foes of such a caliber. thus, he called for his cadre to convene with him in privacy as he made the problem known.??vl?1n. i have been killing people, avo began. gathered in a small cell on the third level of the demiplane, the three other members of his stared blankly at him as the ethereal lights flickered dimly overhead. kaes chewed on her bottom lip as she studied avo with a curious expression. is this development recent? draus and chambers both snorted at once at that. yes, draus said, doing her best half-assed job to mimic avos sibilance. only been happening all my life. she paused. lives, actually. shit, avo, how old are you really? he growled and didnt bother regarding her. she was goading him again and he wasntwell, he was always in the mood to bloody her, but the agnos was being an active help right now. before was different. before i was in control. just affected by impulses. this is sudden. like my body moves on its own. scried through mind. nothing there. no obvious compromise. dont know what else could maybe its your frame, kae said. the imitators they might assert your habits as memorized patterns when you arent paying attention. trying to optimize the actions you usually perform. the thought was at once fascinating and disturbing. if his soulfire was gradually becoming more and more like him, did that mean he could train his heavens to act how he would of his own accord without active thought? but the shadows of a greater danger loomed over the promise of possibility: if his ontology was snatching control from his vessel, how was he going to stop it? before you really start thinking hard about this, you should know this isnt even a proper guessi mean, your frame isnt supposed to be able to affect your body this way. theyre separated by entire realities. and the imitators never managed to do anything like this while i was testing it. she gave a low hum. and so far, none of us seem to exhibiting any signs of frame conversion or ontological alterations. curious. maybe my theory about the imitators being a potential infection of the soul is wrong we will have to monitor our conditions. all of us. if there are any changes, let me know at the first instant. all of you. a series of wordless agreements followed. ill keep an eye on you in the meantime as well, draus said, looking avo up and down. you sweep from the inside and ill keep you in check from the out. shouldnt be impossible for us to keep these outbursts controlled with the right support. yes. keep an eye on me. going to act as usual. but if i do something thats the regulars face broke into a savage smirk. trust me, it wont take much doin on your part for me to snuff you. avo grunted his thanks. with that resolved, they could move on to more heartening things, such as splitting the loot of their labor. seven sangeists. three snake-kings. approximately two thousand thaums. good loot. more than all of us can use at once. think we should do more of this. build up a supply of heavens. pre-make builds. swap as we go avo sighed as he watched chambers gingerly lift his hand up. what. the half-strand cleared his throat. now, im no good at math, or standard, or ethics, or most of that education stuff, but im pretty sure there was like nine sangeists, right? how you only got seven now? so, draus said, eyeing the corpse disdainfully as a thaumic scab hardened between the real and the soul, we gonna follow him down or what? no. just let him resurrect, avo said. well keep discussing things once he returns. we should a knocking on the blood-wall he put up to seal the cell from the hallway caught avos attention and he peered through his haemokinesis to see cas standing outside with a light of mischievous glee written upon his face. cas is outside. he looks happy about something. draus scoffed. the faithers smilin? that aint good. be nice draus, kae frowned. hes helping us. were usin each other, the regular corrected. remember this: they belong to thousandhand, and fuck knows what that old sow is plannin or smokin at any given moment. there aint no workin together with her like. theres just bein used, or usin each other. a pitched groan of frustration came from kae. dont be a half-strand, okay? keep the problems for later and work together right now. draus sampled her words with a nod. yeah. were synced on that. good, kae said, shaking her head. she pointed a finger at avo, who was busy grinning at draus chastisement. you too. i havent forgotten about you. he spread his hands in mock surrender while his echohead dipped. not going to kill him. hes going to be my new consang. building a cult for me. very nice of him. no eating his eyes or anything if he makes you mad either, alright? avo barked a laugh as he dropped the wall. cant stop me, he muttered to himself. as the haemokinetic wall melted away, cas stepped into the room and avo noticed that the columner had his holocoat off for the first time. he never took cas for someone into fashion from all the time they spent together, but considering the multi-colored belts stitched into his flowing leather long coat and the meticulous cross-shaped decals dotting the golden buttons leading up his silken blouse, there was an aesthetic on the part of the columner that avo just couldnt place. a few of his buttons remained undone and some of his chest was showing. on it, strange connective scarification lined his flesh. the way it was done looked slightly similar to the scaarthians, but as he drew from lips memories, avo found that the script of the mans scabs was of an entirely unknown language. what the hells are you wearin? draus asked, evidently distracted by the same thing. looking down at his shining leather pantsthe same kind that chambers was now wearing, avo realizedher scowl deepened. you look like one of them he-whores from those old ashthrone period pieces. jelene, kae croaked under her breath. fortunately for the agnos blood pressure, the columner took no offense. instead, he found himself peeking over the table and up at the ceiling in recognition of chambers flensed face-meats and nodded. disagreement? yeah, draus grunted, about him being alive. cas nodded. just dont let him cast his ghosts into you. hes into some twisted shit. dont we know, she replied. shaking off the distraction, cas faced avo and his smirk returned. so, i got multiple pieces of good news for you. you want to start with the cult stuff or should we get you slotted for your meeting. slotted? avo asked. that sprite you got in your meta now? that doesnt work fully until you have some hardware inside your brain or an exocortex. lucky for you, denton managed to get clearance to use a temp-functionality nanosuite on you for the interview with aegis. youre not gonna be able to get into threshold otherwise. avo stared at him. threshold. its a lobby? semi-autonomous virtual reality, more like. its hard to be put into words, but i have a feeling were going blow your socks off. looking down, avo regarded his talons. remember trying that once. probably not my own life. that ghoul tore the socks though. very wasteful. he felt a sudden affable clap on his arm as his echoheads rattled like rearing snakes. still, cas showed no signs of fear. youll feel the metaphor soon enough. cult first, avo said. guessing you started building it up already. cas pulled a phantom out from his metamind and molded it into the shape of four different figures. three were women of various social standing and occupations. one was a scaarthian boncer that moonlighted as a circuit brawler, another a manager for ascender, and the last was a small-time joy-dealer. the only male among the presented few caught avos attention in more ways than one. so particular was his costuming, that even draus took a few steps closer to get a better look at the character. is is that man wearing a skinsuit flayed from a ghoul? she asked. behind her, kae struggled not to gag. yeah, cas said, breaking into a wide smile. isnt he great? hes the mark thats probably going to get us the most converts soon. three sets of eyes and echoheads rattled at him. chambers twitched back into existence with a yelp. alright. let me elaborate. Chapter 15-14 Watchers On High (I) chapter 15-14 watchers on high (i) syndicates. deniable guilder assets. cancers of the city. eaters of the fateless hells, call em whatever you want, just know that unless the war ends, theyre here to stay. now, if youve been living here for any amount of time, you might have heard something about the accords. now, i wont get into the boring poli-shit aspects of the whole thing, but what you mainly need to understand is that once upon a time, when jaus was still kicking and dream had wick left to burn, he got all the great powers together for a little chat so voidwatch wouldnt take the nipple away. you see, things werent going well in paradise. broken though the gods might have been, all the fighting that took place before wasnt just going to go away. i mean, it makes sense: just because you stop worshipping whatever bullshit gods you used to doesnt change the fact that you murdered someones mom or boy or girl or nu-dog. anyway, at ao they established certain guidelines for all parties to uphold or our cousins in the highest dark might just cut our aid. once again, most of the ethicality youre seeing from the tiers is enforced by a dealer-joyfiend relationship between them and the voiders. if the terrestrial guilds had their way, ninety percent of us would be snuffed and replaced by a continual supply of mass-cloned labor. anyway, one of the most important details that was agreed upon is the enforcement of limited human rights. basically means the guilds can''t just go around butchering fateless themselves or engaging in unjustified conflict. the consequences for doing so are embargo, followed by fines, followed by the loss of taxable percentages from their sovereignties. the whole thing is supposed to be enforced by us, monitored by voidwatch, and verified by the agnosi, and in theory, it was supposed to shackle the constant bloodshed between the guildsah, i guess it kind of did. problem is that the guilds werent stupid either, and it didnt take long for them to start establishing some unaffiliated organizations to cause havoc within adversarial districts or cause a spike in death on their behalf. frankly, the syndicates are more a feature than a flaw in our current system. theyre technically unassociated with the tiers, they can kill as many fated as they want with the only risk being their own exterminationsomething no one really mindsand, more often than not, they can be directed to destabilize rival taxable districts without directly involving the guilds themselves. so, this is how an ecosystem develops. want, obstacle, convoluted reach-around solution, and all the horrible vines that sprout out from the sheer shittiness that follows. you can be bitter about it. or you can understand your place in this nasty little jungle of ours and maybe even turn a profit out of burning these cancers. after all, with the syndicates come their own problems, and if theres any lesson to be taken from what i just you, its that opportunity comes when you can solve a problem few others can -quail tavers, school of the warrens 15-14 watchers on high (i) +my name is magger the skintaker illona, and youre tuned into the ghoulpounder thoughtcast.+ somehow, avo felt the rapidity of chambers blinks without even needing to turn. the inconvenient period of his resurrection opened a seeping wound of confusion in his thoughtstuff. ghoulpounder? cas, are we getting into some of that the sound of draus arm unfolding into a projectile launcher again followed, and the gift of speech was suddenly lost to chambers. a phantasmal logo played a sequence detailing a boot shattering a ghouls skull upon the descent. an etheric window opened from the perspective of the skintaker as he charged toward a horde of screeching ghouls with a chainsaw in hand. the scene paused. the phantoms loaded the visage of the skintaker himself. standing a bit under seven feet, the eponymous protagonist of the vicarity held himself more like a performer than a battle-hardened soldier. despite the stretches of flayed ghoul skin adorning his flesh, tears revealed gold inlays decorating the mans exposed chrome, and a quick scry told avo the skintakers scale-lined trenchcoat was a luxury commodity from the tiers. twin bloodshot eyes peered out from behind a mangled sheet of flesh once attached to the face of a ghoul. this half-strand had a theme, and avo wasnt sure if he liked it. [oh, i guess its not okay when people mutilate ghouls, huh?] abrel sneered. [feeling sympathetic toward your poor brothers?] avo clicked his fangs together. +no. dying is what theyre for. more bothered by histheatricality.+ say hello to magger illona, cas said, gesturing at the stocky hologram of the skin-draped figure. former syndicate enforcer and current vicarity star. real folk hero to the fateless and trash media for the tiersfolk as well. hes going to be our chief communications asset. draus narrowed her eyes at the figure and frowned. how the hells hasnt he been shot by someone yet? dont think youd last long runnin around the city lookin like that. security, cas explained. the guy hires squires and necros to secure the perimeter of his shows before he arrives. currently, he hosts a thoughtcast and an active vicarity distribution stream in which he stages attacks and rescues by killing ghouls he deliberately releases into fateless communes and shanties before they can kill too many people. chambers stared on, trying to assemble from context what he missed while he was dead. what? whys that guy wearing ghoul skin? a string of ghosts threaded out from kae and into his mind, dissolving his confusion and changing his expression to that of a snort. oh. hes one of those guys. oh, yeah. real half-strand of a swindler. immediately thereafter, cas willed his phantoms to simulate the viewership metrics for maggers thoughtcast and vicaries. one billion downloads for his latest vicarity. three hundred million average spectators for his thoughtcasts. hes also a reasonably popular indie folk hero with reliable viewership numbers. going to use him to convert his followers? avo asked. cas shook his head.not exactly. currently, the best thing about his show is that its low heat. no guilder or syndicate attention. pure variety trash content. from here we can make a prototype of his shows. if we can compromise him and make slight alterations to his material, we can use him as a clandestine broadcasting service as well as a recruitment officer. and the best part he doesnt even need to know. chambers nodded sagely, but his thoughtstuff remained characteristically vacant. avo directed a spray of perception over and discovered chambers was actually following along. he wondered if his newfound assistant would perform better in non-nulling circumstances. the limitations inflicted by the conflagration still needed to be surpassed, but the half-strand would serve for the present. good. desirable. avo cycled through his memories and pinpointed another note of concern. showed three women earlier. who are they? cas didnt need a reminder. survivors from my last experiment. remnants of my old cult. theyve slotted into their new lives well, but last time i checked in, theyre still game to raise some hell. all of them are on the verge of achieving deeper integrations in their respect sectors. the dealers going about to enter the jadegazer syndicate, the bouncer just got a sponsor for her circuit, and the manager is due for a promotion up ashthrones guild ladder soon. its a start, but itll give us a wide picture of how tensions are across the city. hm. useful as well. good. very good. some of his templates churned inside him, urging him to offer a gesture of camaraderie toward cas. [dont pat his head with one of your weird tentacle things,] abrel spat, intercepting avos faux pas just in time. he adjusted to awkwardly clapping the man on the shoulder. very helpful. good. good. teamwork. the columner stared up at the nine-foot-tall monster for a gaping beat before his eyes drifted down to regard the long, clawed digits bouncing from his shoulder. abrel groaned. [not like a nu-dog, motherfucker!] inside and out, both template and actual chambers seethed with jealousy. fucking, thats just social media guesswork and shit. i couldve done that. avo directed three of his echoheads to pat the members of his cadre as a response. chambers sputtered in shock that quickly dissolved to disturbingly lustful joy while kae squealed and back peddled away. he felt something stab the appendage he sent toward draus and grinned as regular glared at him. keep that shit away from me, rotlick. light footsteps sounded from the open hallway outside. avo reached out with sanguinity and felt dentons person brush through his haemokinetic mists. she strode and sharply exhaled as an echohead stretched around the corner to give her some team-building as well. inside avos mind, corner was hoarse with laughter while abrel stewed in quiet annoyance. [avo. are you doing this just to piss me off.] +possibly.+ [youre going to die painfully at some point, and by jaus im going to enjoy it.] her impotence only made his glee grow greater. shaking off her surprise, denton painted her typical expressionless facade into place and entered the room with a three-foot-long translucent needle in hand. flickering lights pulsed at the end of the tip while mercury-hued fog swirled inside the length. a holographic projection forming the words cat-a lined the side of the injectable. nanosuite, avo asked, head cocked. yes, denton said, sweeping her gaze over cas. is there something happening here. teamwork, avo said. fires told me to do it. [im gonna laugh!] abrel snarled. okay, denton said, nodding slowly. if youre all done talking about the cult for now, i wish to begin preparations for our meeting with aegis. she held up with the nanosuite. growing the hardware is straightforward, but i will not lie about my other concerns. like what? your personality, if i might be honest. we need you to come across as more stable and reasonable for this interview if we want to achieve optimal results. avo frowned. are you saying im not he stopped talking as he remembered tearing into glitch and dice and how he suddenly assaulted zein. no, draus said, rubbing salt into his shame, you really aint. didnt finish that sentence, avo growled. we all know what you was gonna say. i mean, this is a relative thing, right? chambers chimed, trying to spin the topic. avo is pretty stable compared to uh, most joyfiends. and mirrorhead. holy shit, draus deadpanned. someone give him a fate skein right now. the patting ceased. through the fires of his cognition, a snicker followed. [whats wrong, avo? not feeling the friendship anymore?] give me the injection, avo grunted. wish to move on to more enjoyable things. Chapter 15-15 Watchers On High (II) chapter 15-15 watchers on high (ii) look, if youre running a neurodeck, youre going to want to turn your meta off. its as simple as that. ive seen people try to run both at the same time, but if youre not using one of those omnitech thresholder-patterns, the deck flips shit when ghosts swim through it. okay. very basic lesson in necrotheurgy: when a ghost is extracted from a person, thats like a major facet of their post-mortem cognition. all the thinking they were capable of and all their most critical memories were deprived of animation. what this allows a necrojack to manipulate, however, is information. sometimes information in its most foundational form. youre following, right? good. now, imbued with scirekinesis, you start moving and twisting critical aspect of what is known in systems, and seeing that soft and hardware of the neurodeck is aligned to your mind, and your metamind is like a metaphysical deck in that is constantly and actively altering your consciousness with all the additional memories, emotions, and understandings channeled through your phantasmics oh, shit is right. oh fuck might be even more apt. listen. ive tested both. the voiders neurodeck is far and away the more convenient, superior, and effective enhancer if we had to choose, but the problem is that we arent living in the void. the problem is were here in the biggest of the big. decks cant actively protect you from mem-cons like metas can. decks cant form phantasmics or jack without some kind of connection in the real. and thanks to the sprites omnitech keeps creating with the repeated deletions of their material intellecti, not even non-human cognition can be kept safe from invasive alteration. that doesnt mean your purchase is useless, however. it just means you have to be focused and clever about how youre using it. right now, the deck is a reliable secondary asset if you want to jock or stream void-transmitted content and see beyond this little well the guilds have built for us, but youre keeping that meta if you know whats good for you. i know youre trying to apply for voidwatch citizenship. i know everything youre doing to qualify for their safe passage program and all the imps you have to pay off omnitechs thanagild and waive your death obligation to become your own person. and youll do it. youll make it. youre so close, but you need to slow down. if you let omnitech find out too early, theyll screw the legs out from under you. they dont want you to leavethey dont want anyone to leave. and a surefire sign of betraying your wants is getting that deck grafted before the time is right. be patient. dont fall before the end. -[redacted] to [redacted] on neurodecks and metaminds 15-15 watchers on high (ii) draus tapped avo on his shoulder before anything could follow. hey. im gonna go on a bit of a jaunt of my own. got some things i need to do. someone you want to snuff? avo asked. she offered a quiet laugh. more than one. but thats a side-gig. still have a barge i never picked up along with all the shit inside it. gotta take care of that aliong with some other whos and whats while you have your little meetin with the voiders. dont want to join in? avo asked. her bio-rigs helmet clicked together, encasing her face behind an insectoid aesthetic. nah. theyre askin for you. sounds like an invite-only kind of thing anyhow. wordless, she turned to step out through the passage and froze mid-step. there is one thing you might-could do for me. ive heard things about the kit they had he understood. want new guns? her smirk could be tasted from the emanations of her thoughtstuff. [ever the regular,] abrel muttered. i see, avo said, releasing a quiet hiss of amusement. any specific designs you want sampled? all of em. but who knows what theyll allow you. see what you can do. kits always reliable. dont want to be usin our heavens for everything. shits loud. take chambers with you, avo said. maybe kae too. good for us to continue acclimating to each others eccentricities.: the regular regarded the other two and shook her head. aint gonna be that rough of a run, consang. have your half-strand do the jackin thing in the meantime. seems to me like a better use of his time. kae can spend her while thinkin up how to optimize our heavens. yes. i concur. the agnos agreement came with a bit too much haste and vigor. try as she might, the leak of her discomfort remained. she could kill, but the action felt vile to her, and the feeling of death brushing her senses sickened her. he could remove her aversions with but a thoughtsculpt everyone around him to what he thought their ideal psychologies to be. the option was there, ever-teasing, ever-tempting, but his flames stayed his own. such a simple transgression struck him as a betrayal of more than trust but assumptions. he was gauging their effective worth from his own narrowed perspective. burning each of them into his mind as a template would indeed benefit of an immense scale, but he wanted the choice to remain theirs. for what worth was absolute power if he was so keen to betray personal ideals out of impatience? before i give you this injection, i need you to understand the dangers im exposing my people to, she continued, ignorant or apathetic to his shift in demeanor and speech. your people, avo asked. you can already guess who i really belong to. when the nerve-mesh neurodeck is fused to your brain matter, youll realize there are things you can do with the sprite that you couldnt before. thats because you now have functional hardware. its also going to expand the number of people you can jack, burn, and null by a substantial margin. the stars will, in a way, open up to you, and youll glimpse a new hunting ground filled with memories and contents unconsumedat least for as long as the nanosuites half-life lasts. i need you to promise me you will not harm the people. he regarded her with new understanding. this was more than just fear. this was the marriage between anxiety and trust expressed by a being with ironclad control over their expressions. she was effectively walking a warg through a flock of lambs and telling it not to feed, for on the hill beyond stands a judgment of hunters, and perhaps through them he might rise even further than the rankness of his rapidly departing beasthood. it will torment me, avo said, letting the truth twist out from him. but i have been tormented before. denton stood, turned, and fixed him with a final resolute stare. her met her gaze unshifting, unblinking, and for a beat, their perceptions remained two spear-tips picking at one another as if lockpicks instead. finally, her head dipped as she climbed the last three steps into the threshold of the room and led him to his chair. in the far corner knelt essus, muttering quiet prayers and whispering nothings to the wall as his accretion crested and fell on waves of tumult. he did not turn to regard avo upon hearing the ghouls entry, but tensing of his shoulders signaled his awareness. have a seat, denton said as clicked the back of the nanosuite. the sides of the injectable were unlatched and folded backward to form a pressure--based delivery mechanism as she gestured for him to lower his head. the needle was the thinnest he ever seen and the way the nanos swirled within the tube, lashing and craving for his presence instilled him a sense of unease. such is what our prey feels when we take them in our embrace, master, the woundshaper said. all fear their devouring. all fear their replacement. to be less thanthen apart of something unfathomable. he overthrew his worry and lowered his head regardless. denton had gone far to secure this opportunity for him. the time to betray and bind him was long past. the present was built upon trust and truth, and regardless of what was to follow, he would try to be less unstable. a few buzzing bees darted by avo as extensions of sunrises colony stood witness to his subtle augmentation. im going to administer the contents under your eye. youll feel a tickle first. it will spread through your central nervous system. youll want to be seated in case of any twitches and spasms that might follow, and then, after approximately thirty seconds, youll receive an inquire asking you if you accept the installation of the nerve-mesh neurodeck. just blink twice at the yes option. like my cog-feed? avo asked, forcing his head still using internalized haemokinesis. the glint of the tip drew closer, and with inhuman dexterity, denton slipped the injection between folds of fiber and flesh without ever arousing any pain. not exactly. denton squeezed the folded clamps of the injection. the lights along the nanosuite flashed green and the word injecting pulsed as a holographic for a heartbeat. the substance entered through his left optical cord like sand crawling behind his eye. there was no tickle at first. it was more than an inch that spread, and he fought the urge to scratch at himself using his own blood before the graft was completed. a delayed note of interest spread through him as he regarded the now emptied injectable once more. this was why the guilders seemed so soft to him regardless of their heightened enhancements. their grafts were delivered with comfort and with symmetry in mind. for an enforcer, a better arm came with the cost of losing an arm first, and chrome demanded a steady supply of immuno-suppressants, tweaks, and bi-monthly grafter visits at the least. the fated never felt the weight of their ascensionnever knew the pain of the blade before their vessels were imbued with new edges to its potential. but avo did. more than anyone else the city, he knew what it was to go from having all gifts denied to claiming highest bounties. {initializing} {nerve_mesh v10.22} *approved on trial basis {would you like to begin installation (yes/no)} he did as denton said. and only then did the inch become a tickle as a new hud overlapped with his cog-feed. {good morning, applicant.} the voice was a unified chorus not so unlike what he heard when speaking to the hungers. avo looked toward denton seeking answers but she just remained silent. applicant. {if you are seeing this message, this means you have been tapped for operation revisionist, and the conensus would like to offer you a position in aegis. your interview will initialize upon the installation of your neurodeck. please remove all other aspects of interference and ensure that you are in a safe and secure environment before uploading your stack into threshold.} Chapter 15-16 Threshold (I) chapter 15-16 threshold (i) you have no idea the heights from which we fell. we. humans. humanity. us and the voiders at a time before time; before the gods and fissures bleeding over into the real. before idheim itself was ever a thing. no idea. they didnt torture me when i was discovered. not really. not in the ways we imagine. instead, they just let me live in a simulation of a world that was, let me feel what was lost, and then dropped me back outside. i lived a lifetime in a world of mundane miracles and quiet wonders. i i strode the stars. the existence that belonged to our forebearers... there were no gods thenno ruptures or heavens or hells or twisted distortions in the tapestry of reality. everything was the foundational world perfected. they harnessed fundamental laws to achieve wonders that we squander with our impossible powers. ive seen them cradle stars in ships the size of our planet. ive seen them move systems into and out of placelived on an arm-drifter during the reshuffling of orion. i fought in a thousand worlds and burned a million worlds and destroyed a billion vessels yet took no life for the flesh and the self was parted. i lived freer and truer and happier than i have everi have ever i want to go back. i dont want this world, this nightmare, this poison! i dont want to leave the dark! i dont want to return to you! oh, god, oh [pre-pantheon deity redacted], they sent me away. they let me know and sent me away. [sobbing laughter] those those half-strands. this they didnt even need to twist my mind. just knowledge of loss. this is enough. this is enough. im i cant take this i cant remember this. take the memories out of me! take them out! ill kill myself if i remember! i kill myself! -former sleeper therese therrin after her extradition back to ori-thaum at the hands of voidwatch for crimes of espionage 15-16 threshold (i) true to dentons words, the second visual display manifested over his cog-feed in trailing strings of solid lettering. there was a naked clash of aesthetics between the vaporous glow of ghosts and the solid blocks shunted from a still growing coldtech extension of his mind. {detecting stack unable to find expansive consciousness storage generating generating generating error: unable to generate ego (problem: abnormal scan results) please contact your local egi for further instructions ego generation failed, avo muttered. thats fine, denton replied, her own thoughstuffs a swirl of static constellations. narrow funnels of mem-data threaded to and from her accretion at a staggering pace, and with the way her eyes were darting, he guessed she was interfacing with multiple messages at the same time. its not an unexpected issue. the conflagration is designed to eat and collapse egis themselves, so youll have to use your sprites to link your cog-feed to your deck. she spoke, he willed, and his mind changed once more. as the flames of his ego roiled, stitch by churning stitch threaded into the nanomechanical mental amplifier spreading through his brain matter, the clash between his two huds flickered, snapped together. all of a sudden his awareness onboarded, and numbers began to surge through his mind. necrojack entailed some limited coding while one was delving through mem-data or filtering for specific sequences, but what he faced now left him drowned in ignorance. complex strings shot out like accelerating trains along the curve of his mind''s eye. new display windows opened across the stretch of his perception and he found scant few points of understanding. updating biometrics warning: no heartbeat detected. users oxygen circulation abnormal users oxygen intake abnormal updating user morphological classification designation: category-plus adaptive plus adaptive? avo asked. its trying to gauge your physiology to better optimize your biological functions, denton explained. youre getting a rating for your complexity and distance from natural human baseline. plus means you are slightly more enhanced. slightly, avo grunted. if a baseline ghoul was glass, then a flat would be tissue. to consider himself something just slightly above the category of natural human seemed he reached a more likely conclusion: voidwatchs clades simply ran a far vaster spectrum than those contained on new vultun. augmentations were relative, and so too were the clades. the scaarthians, kosgans, ori, sang, and others all had their little traits. the voiders were probably even more diversified in that regard. adaptives are designed toward surviving and propagation. not so common for humans to occupy such a variant, but bioforms designed to seed a newly discovered world often gain such genetic traits during their creation. there are over four thousand other variants of morphology and three adaptional categories of separation beyond plus classified under the terms next, hyper, and ultimate. denton took a breath as her thoughtstuff slowed substantially. dont take these categories too seriously. they were primarily used by the einherjar leagues to separate their spheres of conflict for their seasonal war tournaments. avo understood nothing about what she just said, and neither did his templates. what? she blinked and noticed the confusion leaking from his mind. it is a popular form of entertainment. citizens scan their egos into various morphological sheathes and engage in combat across sections of the colonized galaxy bearing the anarchic designation. this is unimportant. have you connected your sprites? yes. alright, denton sighed. at least omnitech is good for something today. there was much to unpack behind her words, but avo found himself more curious at the fact of her denigration. denton had proven neutral and measured in dialogue for as long as he could remember, yet here was an openly negative remark. curious. a low profile is the point, she said, giving him a polite smile. a few lines of data ran through their link. preparating ansible for hyperwave transmission connecting to threshold (55%) the connectivity between their minds stuttered again. new warnings appeared about how his current deck wasnt able to download a full imprint of his consciousness this time, and how he needed to make reductions. he willed his flames to swallow all templates and memories aside from him and benhata. a final slur was hurled from abrel toward the silver, but if the fallen glaive cared, it was less than it took for him to feel. {+just you and me now.+} [yeah,] benhata said, swallowing back a pit of anxiety opening in his nonexistent stomach. [just me, the man-eating monster dreaming me into existence, the voider plant, and the void gods themselves.] unnerved by how total a consciousness benhatas template seemed, denton pressed her lips together. let him go too. hes not a self-aware entity. not truly since hes tied to you but holding a fork of someone elses mind after killing them in enforced servitude is definitely against the charters. avo blinked. voidwatch cares about that? the look of quiet despair behind her eyes told him all he needed to know. benhata sighed. [thanks plant. here i was glad to exist a while longer. back to the big nothing again.] the faintness of dentons wince as benhata vanished was almost imperceptible. connecting to threshold (88%) going to be much harder now that i can only draw on memories, avo said, grimly. they want this? my diminishment? baseline? show they can have the upper hand? voidwatch is uninterested in posturing, she said. we are, however, very keen about our ethics. it has taken me substantial effort to have aegis overlook some of your previous actions. if you remember one thing, remember this: voidwatch cares about human life. all human life. we prefer to preserve above all else. there are so few of us left after all. connected to threshold (100%) a building sphere of concentrated static and electric impulses began to collapse inward at the core of her mind. on the precipice of a departure, avo swallowed a taste of melancholy from the columner as she took a breath. are you ready? denton asked. yeah, avo said, unsure if he was lying. ill keep what you said in mind. i will consider life to have inherent value when i speak. the corner of her lip twitched. looks like well make a saint out of you yet. uploading stacks to threshold entering virtuality avos perception of the world shrank as the walls rushed through him after collapsing into needle-sized tunnels. a sightless horizon was accelerating toward him and his minds new amplifier was singing with an onrush of data that he just couldnt read. moments passed, but his consciousness never faded. there was no lurch between being awake and unconscious as there was in a deep dive, and he felt the building strain in his sprites more than ever as details flowed from his meta into his deck in a constant stream. he wondered if he could reach past the blockade of coldtech with his fires and burn denton regardless. he wondered if he could set the entirety of the voiders lobby ablaze pillars of light and color twitched into existence and hammered down across his perception as his awareness snapped together in full. avo loaded into his new environment with a twitch in a manner not so unlike how he returned to reality post-resurrection. this lobbyno, too limited a descriptionthis virtual plane buried its teeth into his senses and rooted him in place immediately. there was no period of adjustment. there was no confusion or active sequencing via ghosts. he simply was, and threshold followed in perfect wholeness. welcome to threshold setting stack-identifier to private spawn-point: avalon water ran beneath his talons, but he did not sink into the deep. instead, he took a step back and watched the crystalline currents ripple. the volume of birdsong struck his senses like a shiv and each inhale made him choke from how fragrant the very air was. the horizon fell in drops of twilit reverie as mists lifted around to reveal a pale palace rising into the clouds from atop a nearby island. from below, the waters began to rumble as a marble bridge rose into being, forming something between a columned pathway toward the fortifications and aqueduct from all the water it still cupped. letting the scene settle, avo looked around and found no shortage of detail no matter where he swept his gaze. perhaps he or someone of white-rabs caliber could sequence something like this into a mind by merit of power or skill, but even then there would be inconsistencies. glitches incurred by clashes of understanding. small hairline fractures in the mem-data. what his deck fed him was beyond comprehension, and what he perceived was beyond fault. this place was perfect. pristine. scenic. avo had to slice away his growing envy as he wondered if voiders were taunting him with this work of art. from behind, a series of pitched creaks pulled at his attention. the waters peeled to announce the approach of denton seated at the prow of a small angular boat made from wood, and on the other end sat a stranger in dark blue robes. the curved vessel came to a halt next to avo, and finally did he notice the dark feathered birds perched upon the newcomers shoulders and the two wolves that lay snoring by his feet. wordless heartbeats passed as avo swept his gaze between denton and the strangerwho avo noted to be missing an eye from the empty dark in his right eye. yet, as he drank in the visage of the stranger, he too felt himself judged on a level he couldnt describe. do you wish to tread water or sail with us, the stranger asked. his voice was quiet, clear, and absolutely inhuman. an impossible weight existed behind every syllable, as if the stranger could call upon this world to strike avo down, and all of it would listen and obey. would like to know the benefits, avo stated plainly. more than two options. could try stealing the ship from you. could turn and walk away. could run. could see if i can make my own. why do you want me to board? who are you? aegis? light struck the strangers face from the side, and in a moment more befitting cinema than reality, the brightness lit the strangers aged, grizzled features. i am to aegis what a ghost is to you. come aboard. save us the time. let us talk as an older myth greeting one younger. then as the heart of man, to the heart of that which follows. i wish to see your true nature. avo offered a quiet laugh and spread his fangs. wont take long. Chapter 15-17 Threshold (II) chapter 15-17 threshold (ii) my first encounter with our erstwhile kin was of pure chance. born to worship the seraphs and bred from the genetic stock of the proselytizes, mine was the duty of ensuring compliance and accord among all members of the faith, and it is with great sourness that i look back upon the conduct of my youngest days. always i have sought mountains to climb and giants to chain. it was never a thing of triumph for me, but exploration. i seek limitsborders. such was what led me toward my efforts to ensure that populations recently conquered or notably unruly were brought to heel. such then, was to be my lifea motivated servant who masked his personal pleasures of exploration under the guise of piousness. then came our first battles against the ori. those long savage years throwing bodies to stem their armadas from burning our shores as the gods tore the skies asunder, wrestling with each other to the toll of thousands dead between every heartbeat. gentler days, those were. without means of preserving each death, each miracle came at a cost, and without proper containment, each clash tore through the chosen and savaged the tapestry around them. in the throes of one such desperate struggle, i volunteered myself to be a vessel of might. i will neglect the name of the god, for that which is broken is best left regarded as a silent ruin, but know that such was the first true day of my lifethe day when my wife-to-be, with her glaive fueled by a divine master of her own, cleaved through me and split my lord instead. the world ruptured then, as it always had when such things happened. but with the breaking wound delivered upon my gods hubris, i found myself delivered alongside my supposed enemy to a place far beneath the waves, within the guts of a metallic beast long slumbering, with the people it swallowed frozen in time. it is there that my chains were broken for the first time. mine, and that of the surviving armadas yet wandering the darkness. they freed me from my ignorance. i offered them a point of refuge in this sea of tumult we call existence. and in the delving of forbidden histories and past glories, i finally imbibed the true taste of sorrow as i realized just how very much we lost. -jaus avandaer 15-17 threshold (ii) silence was complex language. on the antiquated wooden vessel, avo stared at the stranger, their gazes locked and unblinking while dentons gaze traveled across the waters to pierce the mists and further still. avo took the measure of the unknown entity and regarded his costume as gaudy. robes rugged without being ragged, appearing paradoxically pristine and worn simultaneously. his face told a similar storyweathered skin and missing eye but no other scars to speak of. paired with the animals that accompanied him, the stranger resembled a figure manifested from qualities described by a secondhand source; a bearer of a mythological atmosphere. the iconoclasm within their damage meant something. it was all too neat to be otherwise. a lifetime of violence left its touch in capricious strokes. what afflicted the stranger was something far more deliberate. are you some kind of faither? avo asked, breaking the quiet. the stranger offered a capitulation of their own, blinking in a display of sudden humanity as he rubbed his chapped lips together. i suppose you may regard that of me, the stranger said. i am a representative avatar more than a worshipper, however. the system has manifested me to prime your interest. i hold the guise of an old god playing at a man. a theme strides between us in inversion. avo considered the strangers words and disagreed. no. the flint of interest was struck behind the strangers eye for the first time. you arent real. and im no longer so singular. this front does it work on other godclads? your appeal to mythology. dont see the worth of it. the strangers jowls tightened and he offered a quiet nod. one of his wolves twisted its head and laid curious eyes on the post-ghoul. most godclads find me someone worth mocking. the vagaries of my powers are long lost to history, and the nature of being a figurative god rather than a literal one leaves little impression on those who can abuse the fabric of metaphysical reality. many ask me what miracles i possess and what becomes of me at the end of my tale. many more ask what kind of god would portray themselves as a maimed man. what is your answer to the last question? avo asked. the stranger hummed a low laugh. a desperate one. a shadow fell over avo and he found himself entering the cavernous hall beneath a crystal-clear portcullis. the entire affair had the taste of a fanciful vicarity wrapped in the mold of a kosgan fairytale. or maybe this was another deliberately maintained similarity. how much culture belonged to idheim alone? how much was forgotten but inherited regardless???vl?1n. would you like to hear some advice before the proceedings begin? the stranger asked, leaning closer. so bright was the gleam in his single eye that it appeared as if a burning piece of coal, even in daylight. let your truth flow. we can accept you. we can reject you. we see enough to see the truth of your nature. whats left is how we present ourselves, and reactions behind our actions. honesty, avo breathed. not hard. a ghost of a smirk crawled over the strangers features. depends on the person. for some, its all but impossible, and they would give anythingeven an eyeto see if they can escape a predestined end. the shrug that followed felt far too rehearsed. such, however, is just mythology. its what we do with our beliefs that reveal the manifestations of character. avo clicked his fangs together but didnt speak. something about this conversation plucked at his suspicion like a string. the nature of this dialogue felt too familiar, too supportive, too comforting. these words were engineered for him and him alone. he knew that. more than this though, there was a strange familiarity to it all. walton. this was reminiscent of remembered conversations with walton. dipping one of his echoheads into the red, he tasted the ichor and knew of the flavor immediately. this was the blood of his kind. this was the taste of another ghoul. something struck the underside of the boat, and an awful click followed. the sensations felt as if someone was trying to claw their way through the wood, and avo let out a slight hiss of annoyance at the situation. he shot a glare at the floating orb. little wooden boat. quite literal, but it gets the point across. i must say, the expression never gets old. was expecting a bit more maturity from hyper-intelligent machine-minds. is the vessel going to capsize? the egi bobbed. well, that is a possible transition. now stop taking the fun out of things and anticipating. let your inhibitions loose. wheres your sense of adventure? adventures get you snuffed, avo said. he speared four of his echoheads underwater and bade them to chitter. the waters rush did nothing to impede his senses, but when his phantom touch spread, he beheld nothingness drifting through the dark below him. frowning at calvino, he extracted his limbs from the wetness. deloaded them? maybe. youll have to ask threshold. poor sportsman the boat burst apart beneath him in a sprawl of splinters. plunging into the red, avo drank in a mouthful of simulated blood as he turned into a swim, seeking to locate the egi and denton once more. voidwatch was kind enough to keep his echoheads functional as they always were, so traversing the currents offered little difficulty. there was just the small problem of the water surface being opposite what he remembered, and the falling pieces of metal spilling down into the depths. dappled light from the direction his talons were pointed, and he turned to right his ascent. the deepness of his plunge suddenly seemed far greater than it had been earlier, but avo paid it no heed. nothing surprised him here. nothing would shake him. he treated his present situation as a mem-sim he was indulging. the parameters remained beyond his control, but he could still escape via disconnection or death. rising from deep waters, avo found himself emerging from a warm bathtub instead. the symbol of dynacleansea highflame utilities subsidiarywas the first thing that caught his attention with its design being a kraken scrubbing a ship using multiple bars of soap. the second was the howling sobs coming from the open door leading out from the bathroom. bathroom. that probably indicated he wasnt in a simulation of the warrens then. or at least high up in the warrens. stepping out, slots in the mirror folded over to offer him utensils for cleaning as he made his quiet egress. he had to dip and squeeze to even slip out from the doorway, but as he stepped through the other side, he could hear choking gasps paired with a litany of pained pleas coming from an open room just a turn away. the apartment was narrow but of a high quality. this was a working family, but a comfortable one. already, he felt the intruder. he wondered why aegis or voidwatch or whatever else they desired to call themselves had spawned him here. so, calvino said, voice humming loud in the back of avos mind in a sudden instant. the ghoul caught himself before he jolted and gave a low hiss. are you ready to begin formally begin the operative assessment process? time to face the weight of our actions. what are you planning? avo asked. go inside. youll see. pestered by the feeling that he was being herded, avo used his echoheads to sense the path forward before he stepped in. there were two individuals hugging a third that lay dormant on a jacking station. the room was decorated with other items of furniture and a yet-spinning locus. carefully, he inched his head into the room and watched as a man and a woman shook and pleaded for their obviously nulled juvenile son to wake back up. the boys smooth brown skin and golden blonde hair triggered no memories within avo. he had no idea who or what he was supposed to notice. thats because he didnt matter to you. at least, he didnt matter to you when you fried his mind. remember how you spiked that vicarity? that day when you freed all those refugees. suddenly, avo knew what calvino was talking about. req. the scalpers. the run draus took him on after what waltons node made him do. this is one of them? avo asked. one of the nulled. when he spoke the words, he expected calvino to give him an answer. what he didnt expect was for the boys parents to turn and face him. Chapter 15-18 Justify chapter 15-18 justify with clenched fists and battered hearts, with our pain inflamed, the journey starts. find out where it all went so wrong, find out to whom your sins belong -cas eld''canduir, testify??vl-b!n. 15-18 justify there was a particular wretchedness that afflicted a person consumed by grief. both father and mother froze upon beholding the towering monster standing just beyond the doorway, eyes unfocused and misted with yet-tumbling tears. though they were bare of obvious augmentations, their flawless skin and undoubtedly grafter-carved bone structures re-emphasized the place they occupied in society. beholding the ghoul that suddenly manifested in their family home while shattered from grief, all that came from the parents was strained silence. you killed him, the mother whispered. you killed our boy, the father followed. avo exhaled a frustrated sigh. looking up at the ceiling, he wondered if calvino could see his glare. if this simulation bore any similarities to mem-sims, the artificial intellect likely could see everything. what do you want from this? avo asked, speaking to the unseen machine. waiting for me to kill them too? mock their pain? apologize? does voidwatch simulate their own snuff now? the voice of calvino chimed in the back of his mind. oh, hardly. now, you are disallowed from doing such things, and citizens are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish so long as another sophont isnt truly harmed, but the point of this scenario isnt about ethics. the egi chuckled. just saying the word is funny when contrasted with what you new vultunites get up to. no. we challenge you to do something harder: i want to see if you can convince them that you were right to kill their son. that drove a surprised chuff from avo. unexpected. rules? no rules, just limitations. you dont get to jack into their minds. if you kill them, well just load them back inwith the memories of their recent murders included. dont worry, these are sim-constructs. theyre based off real people, butwell, i suppose you dont really care either way, do you. not really, avo muttered. facing the shivering parents again, he considered his approach as his echoheads chittered in rhythm to the clicking of his fangs. he murdered their child. such was the truth. be they simulations of actual people or constructs created to test his patience for this experiment, he had devoured enough minds to know that this was well past the realm of reason and logic. justice was a nebulous entity in new vultun, but these people were fated. they probably thought of themselves as individuals who matteredfavored the guilds and purposed for higher destinies. it didnt matter. this wasnt about them. this was about him, and how he was to perform for his new voider consangs. they desired to see certain behaviors from himthough he was uncertain as to what demonstration of rhetoric or expression of emotion they desired. what he could do was continue being interesting. it had served him well thus far. yes. i am the one that nulled them. avo set the beginning of this conversation along the rails of brutal honesty. his words took a few heartbeats to sink in. the fathers hands twitched as he reached up to cover his mouth while the mother forgot herself and took a step forward. her teeth were briefly bared, incoherent rage expressed in the white of her eyes. she moved. her body blurred. the implant firing in her neck would have been comparable to any used by a syndicate enforcer. avo simply grasped her entire skull between his claws before her stride was even finished. lacking the proper implants to facilitate a lifestyle of violence made one feeble, while a lack of practice afflicted symptoms of predictability. vulnerable to the world and all its torments. bare of additional combat enhancements, for all the speed she possessed, the woman had the weight of a feather and posed a threat equal to that of a flea. her head was small enough for him to wrap his entire clawed hand around it, and so fragile that it would pop if he only squeezed. still, she struggled with muffled squeals as she kicked and thrashed. avo fixed the ashen-faced man with a contemplative stare while he considered just putting the other out of her misery. a month ago, he very much mightve. now, the taste of her death would be bland. she posed no danger and her pain was a rerun of sorrows he saw across a thousand minds. the ghouls counter-argument came in the form of a bite. snatching the man off his feet, he tore a chunk of flesh out of the mans shoulder. the tang of blood mixed with the soothing bitterness of adrenaline-taxed muscles rushed over avos taste buds, and the deafening roar of suffering that came free from the mans lungs served as a beautiful accompaniment. his wife rose, broken from her catatonia by the suffering of her lover, but avo pinned her in place using a single echohead. despite the acceptable quality of flesh and the joy his base mind felt at inflicting such sudden cruelty, avo pulled himself back from continuing down this track of debasement to see his point proven. he kept the mans flesh clenched between his jaws but didnt chew nor swallow. instead, he thrust the man away from him as he spat the shredded clump of gore upon the juvs body as an expression of the highest disrespect. im just a ghoul. i am compelled by urge and want to do this. i dont know what im doing. its not my fault. avo flicked his tongue through the mans welling wound and mocked him as he writhed in pain. this doesnt mean anything. also has nothing to do with what im talking about. he threw the man down beside his wife and took his weight off from them as he took a few steps back, reveling in his display of self-control. inside, without his conflagration actively distorting his urges and altering his cognition, he waited for the beast to claw its way out from the depths and try to assume control. but the weight of his inner brutality never came, and he found himself standing, anxiously anticipating a spike of perversity that never arrived. the beast was missing. even when he rooted through his own thoughts and emotions for a sign of his old tormentor, he found nothing there. nothing. coldness instead of triumph filled his veins. something about this revelation felt wrong. he never removed that facet of himselfalways had to herd it or quell it somehow. it couldnt have just gone away on its own. was voidwatch actively suppressing it using his neurodeck somehow? i wont do it the woman stammered. these were the first coherent words she spoke in a while, and she turned to stare at avo with a defiant glare. i dont care what you do to us. you dont get to run from this. you dont get to feel powerful. you dont get to feel good. with his personal concern fading to the back of his mind, avo considered the womans words and sighed. has nothing to do with feel. has everything to do with action. free will can exist. free will can be fake. doesnt change the fact that he needed to die. he practiced the promotion of death. i simply didnt want to do anymore dying. our oppositions are axiomatic. a series of claps sounded in the back of avos head as calvino hummed. nice. big word. yeah, the egi was definitely being sarcastic. as if he didnt have enough half-strands living in the back of his mind already. youre not even a real monster, the woman muttered. avo frowned. what was that? youre not even a real monster, she repeated. you cant even own up to this. the wrongness in what you did. our son mightve done wrong, but why kill him? the man asked. you showed that you can control yourself. he shot a wild-eyed look at the pulp of flesh that once connected to his shoulder resting on the boys neck. you showed that. so why didnt you consider showing my son the way instead. the momentum was shifting. they were pushing the questions back on him, forcing him to reconsider the situation. he needed to push back, he needed to unbalance them. why. am i his parent? calvino mimicked a nu-cats meow for some strange reason. hurt by his words, the woman spat at his feet while the man whimpered. but but you have all the power. whats the point of being a god if you cant even change the nature of a boy? something about that incensed avo. here he was, playing house with voidwatch, watching as their dolls drifted from line to line as he tried to force them into a place of agreement. he knew this exercise was supposed to be impossible, but this provocation struck something even he was unaware of. because i am not his master, avo replied. resoluteness filled his voice. i am power. i am a godclad. i command blood and wind and shadow and lightning and more. i bend and shape minds with nothing but whims and memories. i am beyond death. but i am no ones master. not yours. not his. just mine. i am the god of myself. letting the thought settle for a beat, avo leaned over the two and let his ire flow. at what point do we decide our own fate? at what point are we people? was i not real before i had this frame? is even the choice of not being a sponsor to atrocity too hard a question for a teenage boy? quietude. mutual loathing. just the way it has always been. fine, avo said. ill accept my transgression of murder. i killed him. i could have made his life better. but i want a trade. tra the mans head came apart against the back of avos hand. his wife began to scream, but the cry never quite made it out of her lungs before an echohead drove itself through her. wasnt talking to you, avo said, staring up at the ceiling instead. the boy, his parents they were a smokescreen. the real conversation remained a step beyond. youre right. its impossible without tearing through someones will. but where does my agency begin? where does theirs end? and where does your responsibility fall? hm? tell me of your power and justify leaving the meek to the guilds. justify yourselves to me as well. a few beats passed. a single string loaded through his hud before calvino finally spoke. well, alright then. lets do this. Chapter 15-19 Bad History (I) chapter 15-19 bad history (i) it would have taken approximately eighteen thousand and twenty-two deaths to light the miracles of my lightest heaven if i was without a cycler. let us not account for the others: i despise playing with numbers when the question posed to me is philosophical. some enlightened viewers have sent me missives before, asking if i ever felt bad for all those slotted for death each time i scheduled an improvement or adjustment for my frame before a match. i suspect their thoughtcasts to be crouched with a thin layer of disgust at how much death my excesses are incurring, and that they are of massist sympathies. bless your hearts, my dears. bless your hearts. i do not judge you, nor am i against your political ideology. in fact, i quite like this new line of development in our society. this behavior is good. it is good that we are approaching a world where voidwatch-inspired ethics are entering the public discourse. some of my peers deride the soft-hearted with scorn, but i see it as strength laid bare. why, in the time of my mother, such a thing would not have ever been considered. of course they have to die, yang wei. how are the skies supposed to rain on time if there are no deaths? how are the corps supposed to feed our municipality? stop thinking such things, fool girl. be glad you arent among the low-blooded and will have your throat opened to the weeper with the end of the harvest. heh. simple woman, my mother. but you must understand, she refused to think of such things. we couldnt. to practice empathy in those times was an exercise in self-torture and insanity. to face what we do to mold our world is horrifying. it is also the same reason why i say being a godclad is the single most revolutionary advancement in our civilizational development. going back to the eighteen thousand and twenty-two that must die to manifest my heaven, remember the old gods? think of how wasteful they were. think of how many died over and over just so someone could light a candle or turn salt into rain or lead into gold. think of it. think of what the guilds have redacted to spare us the horror? the breeding farms. the forcibly grafted wombs. the enslavement of entire cultures, put to fire and sacrificed for less than a single act of divine expression. only eighteen thousand and twenty-two deaths are needed to light my lightest heaven now. and i dont modify my frame every day. think of where we were. think of how far weve come. think of how much greater we can be still. in this respect, the dying should feel honored. even they are not wasted as people once were. the ones that feed me are a part of my gloryglory that they themselves would have never been worthy of alone. i suppose we all rise together in the strangest of ways. - ying yang wei, stormsparrow, fallwalker and grand champion of the summit series combat circuits 15-19 bad history (i) the facade crumbled. what once stood as a bedroom bedecked with highflame merchandise began to chip and flake apart. pools of blood bound husband and wife in a final post-fatal union as the ground began to fissure and the simulation began to change. none of this impressed avo, though he was fascinated by the sudden show of force. voidwatch possessed the means to deposit him from one scene to another without such theatrical devastation. had his provocation angered them? no. the way calvino presented itself told him they were beyond such tantrums. there was a point to this as well. he held onto the understanding even as the floor beneath him collapsed and he plummeted down through a blanket of rising smoke. heat washed over him. the screams were the next thing that seized his attention. the cries and howls of desperation were coming from everywhereall directions; above and below. spreading his echoheads wide, avo reached for his galeslither only to feel the winds swirling about the chamber where his actual body resided. he remained, for the purpose of this interview, mundane in the simulation. spreading his echoheads wide as he braced for impact, he plunged through the floor of the haze as pulsing lights and blooming fires speared flashes of lancing agony into his vision. avo hissed and covered his eyes, but yet did the sight-scarring brightness linger. he forgot how much it hurt to look upon a fusion burnerto behold the splash of micro-fusion explosions with naked eyes. his feet struck the ground before he could have his echoheads sing their static song, and the presence of his brothers was revealed by scent alone. the cries of exertion and agony grew louder and as he opened his eyes once more, he felt himself returned to the scene within his earliest memories. tides of squirming pale-white bodies lined the surfaces of nearby megablocks. overhead, burning aeros trailed fire in the backdrop of a neon-splashed overpass. ads for newly opened daycares continued to dance along the glass as gunfire flashed. people were fleeing around him, desperate and aimless. wailing ghosts snaked their way through the air to sunder loci and human minds both. the warrens were falling apart around him again. as far as his eyes could see, the city was awash in blood, and packs of his feral brothers fought over savaged corpses and struggling survivors alike. a feast was taking place. these streets stood a carnival and frenzy and fancy as the butchers of the low masters were unchained to indulge. snapshots of the surroundings were threaded into avos mind. he saw human hands reaching toward each other for comfort as the bodies of flesh and life were divested from their connected bodies by the mouthful. images from multiple rooms pulsed through his mind, scenes of defenders running dry of ammunition and strength as they turned their guns on the vulnerable and finally themselves. a toddler''s bloody shoe was left abandoned in the middle of the street. the skies above screamed as jock-piloted missiles accelerated to impact a junction nearly a mile away. but the ghosts of the low masters lashed like light crackling whips, scything apart the minds of the drone jocks and seizing the bombs for their own. suddenly, avo realized what he was looking at and tore his eyes away. trying to give me the rash. dont worry, we got safeguards against that, calvino said. the egi sighed. i suppose theres something you little ones outdid us in. we never managed to completely destroy sex for ourselves, though the alt-acers gave it a good shot where are we? avo asked. alpha centauri. millions of years ago. you wouldnt know the place. then why are we here? because in a few minutes, solcom is giving the order to fire the dyson-carriers world-cleanser and kill every last ludd living on this little patch of paradise. avo carefully looked around and studied the populace. he kept his gaze averted from moments of intimacy but found his eyes with little place to go. all coveted some manner of embrace before the end. why? why is this solcom going to kill these people? because they had the wrong faith and we were going through our all-minds-joined-as-one phase. a cringe ran through the egis limbs. yeah. how you feel about your brothers? thats not really special. a veil of clouds broke above and avo saw the sun for the first time. words failed him. his breath left and didnt come back. he just stared and stared, and from the inside, his heavens did the same. what manner of perfection are we witnesses to, the woundshaper whispered. they have made shape of light. the have made matter of fire. fear, however, reigned within the galeslither, and its response was that of a cornered aratnid. nowhere to run. its presence torches everything this is damnation. there is no escape even the winds will be made dry not to show off, but this is actually a very crude vessel, calvino explained. its kind of like using a propaganda ship to finish your enemy off after already breaking them during the war. the dyson-carrier was a scar upon the firmament itself. there was a semblance between it and calvino in the way that matter seemed to flow from the brightness at the core, but the simulation fed details beyond the naked eye into avos mind, and he found himself realizing that what appeared to be alloyed rivers were actually an endless cloud of voidships spilling out from intersecting fabrication facilities that orbited the sun itself. twelve planet-sized rings of concentric make reassembled at the core of the sun, narrowing the light until it resembled the narrow slit of a nu-cats eye. bridges grew out from the fluid alloy forming the cage and certain voidships began assembling paneled pylons along the interior trajectory of what was becoming a focus for the suns building radiance. from behind the curve of the star, folded funnel of vantablack material merged with the void to serve as a cauldron. calvino sighed. embarrassed just to show you this. all those moving parts and the bandwidth it took to coordinate this. not to mention the atrocity thats coming. the first trickles of light began to grow at the center of the slit. the world itself seemed to darken, but distant voices lifted in song served as a staggering contrast to the guttural butchery they left behind in the warrens. voidwatch is capable of this? avo asked. well, we arent so extravagant anymore, calvino said. and thanks to how torn up reality is, a lot of technology just doesnt work the same anymore. more shapes slipped out from the darkness and vast quantities of matter began to shift along the structure of the sun. enormous world-length counter-balance pillars spilled into place while the funnels finished cupping the back of the dawn, see locking around the firing mechanism. the world went dark, save for a single chasm of flaring intensity. none of the bodies were moving anymore. everyone was looking up. everyone. we thought ourselves pretty merciful for letting them have this moment calvino said. their fleets were already smashed after we took their three suns from them. gave them a chance to surrender and join the collective. they refused. they chose. and we chose. deliverance came without symphony or fanfare. there was just a flashthen nothing. in the darkness, only a ghoul and a mechanical intellect remained. you asked us to justify ourselves, calvino said. this is our answer: we refuse. this is a sin. we didnt need to exterminate an entire clade of our own people for what amounted to a disagreement over how to live. but we did. and we were proud of ourselves when we did it. thats the thing about progress, avo: at some point down the halls of eternity, you stop being yourself, and end up as something that remembers who you once were. but you probably know that better than most, dont you. Chapter 15-20 Bad History (II) chapter 15-20 bad history (ii) free will is an untruth for those not godclad. your will is not free. you are not free. everything you do and think bears costs. perhaps each individual is capable of making a variety of decisions, but that doesnt make your choices free. only flexible. only variable. i caught the first glimpse of my inhumanity in the twilight of my infancy when my mother gifted me with my first blade and honored me with a duel. that was the day i was certain she truly loved me, but until i finally cut her half a century later, i was not a real person. not to her. not to myself. i love my father. i will always honor voidwatch for their aid in breaking out shackles. whatever comes at the end, i would not be, and those who existed would be less than subhuman cattle to the vulgar gestalts formed from cultural neuroses we were foolish enough to regard as gods. there is a singular thesis that i am driven by. it is what drove me to ascend my father. it was what drives me to win this war. it is the dream for which i burn and the gauntlet i leave before every being capable of self-awareness. you are not real. you are not real until you can stop me from inflicting my force upon you. you are not real in this present world until there is a place where you can prevail, and i cannot. hence, it is only with our merger with frames that the first true humans have been born. the first beings bearing the markers of free will. the first capable of absolute victory at the long end of history. my thesis of ascension is beyond the righteousness bestowed by might, beyond feeble concepts of the overman of will ascending or the delusion of a chosen people, and beyond the spittle in some frame of thought. godclads am the culmination of humanity, eons upon eons of chance, consequence, possibility, want, and capability colliding to become the trueness of self-determination. i and all others imbued the fires of creation, are the culmination of everything and the reshapers of the long eternity that follows thereafter. what i offer is beyond philosophy but the blow of the ultimate truth: bear whatever personal wish you so desire, but if you cannot kindle its fire, then what worth is your faith? what worth are you when all that is can be remade to suit anothers design? do not think the horror of such an existence is lost to me. i pity you alli truly do. someday, i will make this right for all of you. but right now, i must win. no matter the consequence. no matter the cost. someone must win. someone must rise beyond humanity and win. someone must make all this worth it in the end. -veylis avandaer, culmination 15-20 bad history (ii) glittering embers seared through the fabric of shadows that blanketed them, and slowly avo found himself standing amidst an ocean of traveling stars. there were countless dyson-carriers now, the weaponized suns forming the hearts of fleets. both monster and machine stared off into the silence where the instrument of dawn smote the lands below, smoldering like an orb lit by the tip of a cigar. though distorted, the immensity of the dyson-carrier remained a phantasmal apparition at the center of avos perception, its baleful shine a vertical scar that wouldnt be erased. how many worlds did you burn, he asked quietly. he misjudged them. misunderstood them. this was not a trial for his ethics but something else altogether, this dialogue growing beyond his expectations. how many lives were taken by you? calvino chimed with a piercing laugh. the number wont sound real to you. a shiver ran through avo. with each word he was getting more than he bargained for. there were other worlds like ours? there were countless worlds like yours, calvino said. all incubators of development for other anomalies discovered when the singularity stood still. places where reality was more malleable and the threshold of time and space were at their thinnest. most of the worlds were destroyed during the builder war. the rest were lost when the secondand finalpayload was injected into the singularity. the chrono-chain bomb was supposed to restart the passage of time and stabilize all that we had done but things didnt turn out. the enormity of what their forebearers did hit avo like a flechette to the gut. for the first time in a while, he felt very, very small and even the presence of his heavens left him feeling feeble. you broke it, avo said, the words whistling out from him in a disbelieving daze. broke everything. all we are is aftermath. a fear he never felt before lit inside him. is there anything else out there? what remains in the darkness of the void? its hard to tell, calvino admitted. tears remain across all of existence from the war. some places across known existence function differently, like zones governed by differing mythologies. natural laws are easily reforged by the fragments of anomalous fire that were scattered when the singularity shattered with the second payload. anomalous fire, avo said, numbness spreading through his mind. he knew what calvino was telling him, knew the origin of what comprised the bone of his divinity now. his heavens both flinched as the truth laid its weight upon them, and avo found himself unsure what to feel. we are yeah. a small fragment of disfigured existence. you have a little piece of an altered universe growing inside you. a living fire that rests upon your depths. how many others know? avo asked. other godclads. the guilds? the machine hovered quietly for a moment. no answer followed. the world that was is broken. ruined. we dont think we can rebuild it even if we tried. were diminished. shadows of humanity have fallen from their height. what do you think of us now? and why should we work together? asking me? avo said. the entire conversation left him feeling exhausted. the information he took him went down like he was trying to swallow an anvil. of course were asking you. we know what your frame can dowhat your mind can do. but what matters is what you want to do. if that lets us preserve whats left of humanity, keep everything from falling one final time to the wrong person claiming the ladder. calvino turned and a scene grew out from him. fissures grew more like vines than cracks, and reality began to leak in and out from itself, space and time oozing as if blood seeping from a gutshot. youve seen enough of who we are. now you know why the very fire that empowers you subsists off the coals of our shame. so why be allies, avo? why should we have agreed to speak in the first place? the question battered avo and his mind tumbled as if a child caught in a riptide. twice he reached out for his templates, only to stop himself. time stretched and his thoughts were dry of speech. after all that hed seen, what he witnessed, and heard, he found himself yearning for rank bloodshed, if only to soothe the pulsing tension building along the floor of his skull. his frustration escaped him in a long hiss and he stopped struggling. he didnt know if they were lying to him somehow, or if this was some manner of manipulation, but by this point, he was too tired to care. he spoke thoughtlessly from the root of his emotions rather than some rational composition of his templates. he spoke and voidwatch listened. i think i am the end. the spirit of new vultun. spirit of idheim. city. world. it eats. it hungers. but i am hunger perfected. i am trauma without breaking. i am a fire seeking to spread across all. i am i am new vultun. i am new vultuns perfect monster. i will feast on the guilds if only for the taste. i will give power to those without if only for the pleasure of bestowal. and i will claim the ladder at the end for the only dream that mattersmine. he held up his hands in a messy gesticulation, reaching out as if trying to clutch something unseen, but dropped them by his side a moment later, a stranger lost in the maze of his own thoughts, his own body. i want to know how we were. i want to see the world that was. i want to fully understand what we lost. i want to drown in it. what was real. before the break and after. and i want your strength. i want to be the world-burning sun. i want to understand the miracles of your technology. i am greed and hunger. but i am also curiosity. and appreciation. i will burn to keep you in my future. but i need your help to seize the present. quiet. again, the silence followed. the egi just faced him and pulsed as its cross-shaped markings ebbed and shone and ebbed again. you, calvino began, have an absolutely enormous ego, consang. avo shrugged. agency is addicting. i cant promise you i will be good. i try but i his lapses flashed behind his eyes. him attacking zein, him tearing glitch apart, him murdering dice, the beast, now missing. the ghoul clenched his fists. i hurt people. i kill people. its more than pleasure now. i dont know any other way. dont want any other way sometimes. and i he forced the words out. ...lose control. moments where i just lose track of myself and hurt. but im still trying to becoming of a person for myself. he didnt know what possessed him to be so honest with the voiders, but seeing the frozen simulation and cracks running along the grand shell that once formed the nexus of existence, a faint melancholy washed through avo. it was such a human emotion he was feeling right now. a sense of suffering and nostalgia for a place he never even knew. you know what, ghoul? calvino said. a dull disappointment cemented itself in avos gut. there it was. that tone. that word. ghoul. back to being inhuman. back to others priming themselves with scorn. he was on his own in this conflict again, the chance to gaze upon the past beyond his reach youre plenty a person already, the egi finished. aegis operative trial phase: [approved] registering new citizenship profile: {avo-001} again the unexpected followed. avo wheezed out a shocked breath. you want me? well, lets say your evaluation period just got extended. denton is going to be keeping an eye on you, calvino said. and so will i. were aware of your problems. but it seems you are too which makes you one of the more stable godclads weve dealt with the egis voice trailed off. welcome to voidwatch, avo. now, wed like to discuss the nature of your diet Chapter 16-1 The Path Ahead chapter 16-1 the path ahead [voideater proposal] by wu three-burdens and golgo 9 summary: as is known to the committee from the war-sims our alliance has run regarding the dawnfall contingency, our non-thaumaturgic assets will last a few seconds at most if voidwatch decides to turn their wrath upon us. functionally, our technological base will suffer immense damage even with the redundancies provided by joint efforts between the no-dragons and omnitech. likewise, our conventional forces are completely decimated regardless of what protective measures are taken. voidwatch is by far our superior in technological development and theory of knowledge. there is nothing we know of the natural world that they have not mastered several times over. hence, the solution is simple but extreme: for us to win a lightning war against the voiders and prevent them from granting their favor to our foes in the hypothetical war game, we must layer our miracles to strike the very foundations of their technology. doing so inflicts substantial costs on all parties, but the simulations have shown few other paths towards toward swift and decisive victories. combining breakthroughs in omnitechs manipulation of signals, man-made constructions, and memetics with a specialized virus engineered using our curse, we believe that we can infect the very concept of creation itself. unmake technology for a time, if you will. however, the inflicted damage will be severe and beyond control. as the virus requires the use of a dragon to perpetuate itself, all areas it infests will be lost to us until a godclad manages to engage and subdue the entity, while all things man-made will cease to function as intended. additionally, all assets will find themselves castrated in terms of creativity and thought. subhuman, by all metrics. clothes will peel from bodies. guns will come apart. alloys will separate and unmix. the touch man will effectively be poison where our venom courses through reality. as we could not risk agnosi involvement in such a project, we were unable to focus the effects on a specific part, so all things created by humanity in terms of culture or material will fail. during this time, our godclads will have free reign to disable our greatest foe via a blitz offensive before securing the dragons. thereafter, omnitech will be granted the right to interface with voider technology to turn the higher knowledge to our advantage against our true foes. through these means, we stand the best chance of disabling our benefactors without devastating their culture entirely or inflicting unacceptable casualties as mandated by the high seraph. we put forth this mem-data for peer review, and look forward to hearing a response. -voideater proposal draft 1 16-1 the path ahead half-life of neurodeck canceled ->unlocking full functionality allowing access to noosphere - category green access granted allowing access to the inventory - category red access granted scanning cognitive profile of user ->profile generated recommendations: request neuro-modification immediately user is currently rated as [severe] danger to broader public the simulation congealed as the simulation thickened in a blurred haze, and the obfuscation settled around them. ghoul and machine both were once again on the boat. this time, the grand castle was banished from sight, and they floated forth on placid waves toward an horizon unclear. the island and the aqueduct were no more, but the weight of the revelations lingered still. ignore the neuro-modification request, calvino said while more text strings played across avos vision. addition datapackets threaded into his mind and he found himself wrestling the contents like a newborn learning to control its small motor skills. the system''s trying to gauge how safe it is for you to be wandering around one of our habitats. living among the public like most people we bring up from the planet thats probably not happening anytime soon. avo grunted. probably for the best. yes. or you can apply for one of the many modifications now available to you and turn yourself into an omnivore. the offer came as a surprise to avo, but something inside him flinched at the thought of changing himself in such a way. flesh had been the staple of his consumption for the entirety of his recollections. to abandon such a fixation might grant him more flexibility and social acclimation, but feeding without harming or killing seemed wrong to him. a breach in the pattern, if he continued down that line of thought. there was no such thing as free flavor in idheim, no empty meat. all nourishment came via sacrifice: flesh, imps, or deaths. will look at it, avo muttered, trying to wrestle his thoughts under control. shooting denton a quick look, the corner of her lips twitched and he wondered if that was her rendition of a reassuring smile. something i have to ask. in the end. something was forgotten. dont think either of us fully justified ourselves to the other. just saw what we did. saw that were were both flawed? the egi let the question hang for a beat before it responded. sophonts are more than ideology, avo. but were also less free than you think. operative zein will give a you whole speech about this but everyone has a shape. from a single person to a collective of cultures. the nature of who we are carved by all the things that happen to us. in the end, the paths we take are calvino stopped talking. avo suspected the egi wasnt truly at a loss for words, but wanted someone else to fill in a response so it could guide the question. there was a subtly to how it acted, less manipulation and more free-form persuasion. fixed, avo offered, playing the game. so. were trapped by fate. you can always choose to change. but change is an action. change is a practice. change is repetition. and thats all born of want. the drone descended and set itself on the prow of the boat, its glowing core directed toward the gleam of the waters carrying the suns light. its not about being a saint or even being good sometimes. its about being able to see yourself and being able to inflict change through active decision because theres no guarantee that someone else can do it for you. the artificial intellect laughed. one lives alone, even in the presence of others. the small boat sailed on, and a somber silence commanded the party to keep to their peace. for a while, avo just gazed out across the waters, thinking of how he viewed himself. ah. utter incoherence. looking at how much thoughtstuff was oozing from their accretions, perhaps more than a few of them had gone insane during the process. vator placed his hands on his hips and frowned. oh, but the ordeal could not be that bad, could it? it was painless, my dearspainless. i give your nerves only pleasure for this process. so, why is it session incoming: [father-dearest] oh, vator said as his excitement dipped. excuse me. i must take this. this was going to be about official matters. how droll. accepting with a thought, vator turned away from his composition to spare himself another lecture. +good afternoon, father. i trust that sisters-dear has finally been+ +vator. not now. not today. i need you to not be yourself, and just listen.+ and father meant those words. usually, he was more annoyed and accepting. this was rage, genuine and heavy. poor, poor father indeed. vator cooed. +speak to me, father. tell me what you need from me, and i will make everything better for you. what is it you want? do you want me to hurt that terrible, dreadful chief naeko? or to bring abrel home? tell me. tell me and lets be done with this sadness.+ a storm of emotions hissed from between the cracks of uthred greatlings ironclad will. all strength had its limits, and all hearts could be broken in the end. vator waited patiently as his father mustered his control once more. turning to face the single soul he didnt touch using his heaven, vator smiled sweetly as he willed the biomass around his chest to part, and allowed the syndicate lieutenant to draw in a ragged inhale of air. +an assembly is going to be called. by the high seraph. we have been summoned. by name.+ a tingle of excitement fluttered through vators stomach. oh? the high seraph? veylis avandaer herself? he remembered seeing her oncewhat beauty, what form! for months he tried molding various subjects in an imitation of her righteous presence but destroyed each in the process. none of them had that something she possessed. that singular quality above all others. he had drawn from a broad spectrum of stockflats, squires, necros, leaders, mods-slaveseven a fallwalker. none came close. his skills were too lacking, his grasp of her limited. this time, perhaps if he could get her to speak to him directly, to spend some time alone +i will represent our house. i alone. i need you to handle matters of the homefrontto manage our operations and estates and retrieve your sister from the paladins.+ there was a pause that followed. vator smirked. there was something else father wanted to ask. something he was reluctant to ask. those requests were vators favorite. +just speak, and i will make it happen.+ +there is a name: aedon chambers. he was involved in the incident thati need you to do this discretely. our nameour very position is threatened. we cannot risk another blow, and i cannot risk you descending into another one of your episodes where are you right now?+ vator didnt answer immediately. +in an apartment. at lights end. i was investigating a potential operation on one of our subsidiaries.+ a pause followed. +i see.+ father wisely left the questioning at that, and vator couldnt help but grin as the man ignored the moaning in the backdrop. +i need you to find this chambers. find him quietly and discover exactly what happened. afterward, bring him to me+ a radiant smile spread across vators features. +alive and untwisted.+ the radiance died. vator sighed. +your words, my will father. i will see this done. i will see our family protected.+ a weary sigh followed thereafter. +good. get alritch to help you handle accounting and logistical matters.+ +alritch?+ vator frowned. +are you certain?+ +hes not that useless,+ uthred muttered. self-comfort was truly one of fathers worst traits. +very well,+ vator said. +i will be returning home shortly. i just need to finish with things here.+ another pause. father knew. father knew but he didnt want to ask. +vator. quietly.+ +of course, father.+ the session disconnected, and vator spun on his heels to finish with his word. not that much time left today, consangs, not much time at all. he clicked his tongue and placed a palm on the flesh. desperate sobs and muffled choking followed as he linked ribs together and pushed them through the skin on the back of his creation. thereafter, he drew upon what his heaven remembered of ghoul-flesh and a thin membrane of palest white began to develop between each arcing rib. im going to give you wings, vator said, smiling. im going to give you wings for you to go home later. your families would love to see the angel ive made, wouldnt they? ah. that will take too long. i think i will just leave you all in the foundry you were planning to bomb. they will find you later in the evening. dont worry though, you wont be dying. not anytime soon. not for years unless i will it. he placed his cheek against his art and enjoyed the warmth. i think i will call you, community. Chapter 16-2 Inventory (I) chapter 16-2 inventory (i) +...and this marks the thirteenth declaration of general assembly for highflame since its founding. details are still sparse at present, but we have reliable sources claiming that the high seraph herself, veylis avadaer, is set to address the gathered host of her forces for the first time in over nineteen years. other notable figures summoned to attendance are osjon thousand, the famed first disciple of zein thousandhand; uthred greatling, patriarch to increasingly infamous house greatling, esteemed authority, and a major pillar of the chivalrics. draeg hausen of house hausen and vernetta the twain of house vallors have put their names forth to serve as his bondsguard in case a formal injunction is issued from the choir of seraphs. additionally, we have rumors that saraka elddrachna, a stormtree bloodthane recently rewarded with the distinction of esteemed adversary, has been invited to the assembly and stands among the impartialists to ensure the balance between biased parties. currently, the assembly is set to convey in three weeks and will coincide with the trials declared by chief paladin naeko. thats all for today. this is annel andras, reporting for the watchtower. now, onto the weekly street squire deadpool. -watchtower special program 16-2 inventory (i) {avo this is a nightmare. how are you still sane with all these voices screaming inside your mind? how? just how many people have you killed in the past day alone?} a laugh of disbelief escaped from calvino as the download completed and the copied template of the egi came mind-to-mind with its non-coldtech alternates. it took the artificial intellect less than a second to trawl through avos mindscape and upon completion, disbelief filled every bit of data it possessed. moments after denton disconnected from threshold, new menus and features began to sprout through avos mind. chief among these was his new personal neuro-assistant which was essentially a copy of calvino. dry amusement spread through the ghoul as his flames reknitted all previously claimed templates with but a thought, dragging the egis incredulity higher and higher. [whats up, consang,] abrel said, speaking with a mind laced with bitter irony. [welcome to the burning shithole. population: us. did the ghoul get you too? dont tell me he ate an entire voidship this time.] [an egi,] benhata followed, sounding more startled than surprised. [and willingly bound to us i this is] a pause followed. [ori-thaum would have given entire sovereignties to possess one of them for study. and all it took for you was a conversation.] template-chambers snorted. [maybe you guys are looking at this the wrong way, eh? maybe if you werent all boring mind-fucking half-strands, the cool void people would talk to you.] [this it?] lip asked, narrowing her perception at calvino. [that what they look like? floaty kinda sun-shaped ball?] disappointment coiled through her person. [i was expecting something more god-like.] strings of data danced through avos meta-integrated neurodeck. this time, however, he understood the information being conveyedthe coding dissolved into direct doses of information fed into his cog-feed. {youre welcome,} calvino said, the acknowledgment of its deed sounding more distracted than proud. {there are thousands talking at once inside you. most people would have gone insane or drowned in the sheer influx of clashing egos.} +not most people,+ avo said. +also have two heavens inside me that argue. always arguing. theyre usually louder.+ to bring in the final two members of the grand assembly that was his gestalt, the woundshaper and the galeslithers biting dialogue arrived as the wind screamed and blood clapped to the sound of thunder. between the deafening noise, two fragments that once stood as gods barked insults at one another even as avo fed the voices from within his frame into his mind. contemptible cur. what do you know about art? what do you mongrel people know of creation? all you do is flee and hidethe god of running and cowardice. oh, woe is me i live in the desert and my people are outcasts. have you considered breaking the problems instead of fleeing from them? unshaken by the woundshapers insults, the galeslither whistled a savage tune. i have protected my devotees for years beyond counting. i am not a great god. i make no lie of this, but i am a just god, and a loved god. more than you will ever be. all you are is fortunatea survivor in a pit of misery nourished by half-sane savages too stubborn to leave the hell they were born to, and too weak of spirit to abandon the abuser they created to spare themselves from the monsters in the dark. creation. all you create is horror and travesty. you say you are a god of buildings and architecture as well. well, i have walked the skies but looking back across my past, why do i not recall any crimson structures reaching high enough to touch my domain? and why would i grace the realm of the worthless with my finery?because i have known gods like you across my existence, saathwu. you are a tyrant when you have power and a synchophant without. the only realms you refuse to touch are those beyond your reachnothing was beyond my reach! nothing! if you were so protected, how did you fall then? hm? did the winds finally get tired of carrying the cattle you call people.i have heard you insult them enough! {hm,} calvino summarized simply as avo partitioned the two realities again. {well, i can say that you are the closest embodiment to a walking madhouse ive ever seen. and weve simulated some very strange things in our time.} avo, denton said, cutting through the internal conversation, is the download complete? yes. calvinos here. loaded as a voice in the back of my head. fits in with all the minds ive collected already. {well, i like to view myself more like a tenet or respected guest than a mentally obliterated and forcibly forked mind-slave.} avo bristled at such a disingenuous assertion. +not slaves. more like prisoners. that i use sometimes. to help me think.+ the templates erupted into loud expressions of sardonic surprise and gasping shock. [hear that, consangs?] lip roared. [rotlick says were not slaves. we just prisoners. that he doesnt pay. and channels to do his thinking for him. i think hes stumbled on a revolutionary system of control.] never one to miss out on some sneering, abrel joined in. [really? is that what this is? were all equals and totally not governed by some self-modifying mind-attuning fire? wow. amazing. hey, avo, can you please kill yourself painfully so i can laugh and curse at you for what you did to my brother and friends? thanks a lot you cannibal piece of shit.] [i mean i''m just happy to be here,] chambers chuckled, entirely honest. [were not,] benhata said while all the talon and shadow templates backed him up. [i literally got my mind eaten after i accepted a session. just dead in an instant. my familys probably wondering what happened to me and where my body went.] how good are the implants compared to the fated? avo asked. like abrel greatling. {well, dont tell her this but we have purposely given them midline modifications and said it was our cutting edgemostly as a joke.} of course, calvino spoke these words knowing full well template-abrel could hear it. the greatling twitched with hate shivers. [you sowyou motherfugodsdamned assholes.] going to be better than you soon, avo whispered, taunting the girl in his mind. [lick my] she paused, noticing chambers leering interest washing over her, waiting for her sentence to end. [you know what, im just going to stew in my hate quietly for a moment.] a cheer went up among the silvers and benhata saluted chambers begrudgingly. [there truly is a purpose for everyone in this city,] corner said, speaking with a questionably offensive faux-wisened voice. [i hate all of you and hope we all die painfully,] abrel concluded. update completed, the voice within inventory said. you may now make requests of the system. warning: your current district does not allow for the following items. a short list of three million and two banned requestables filled the totality of the room around avo. he wouldnt have known just how many pieces of kit were beyond his reach if not for calvino telling him first and his subminds achieving the same a good while after. {most of this is stuff that uses fusion,} calvino sniffed. {probably omnitech trying to create a new spectrum of energy again.} +like them the least?+ avo asked. {imagine if a simpler, cruder, crueler parody of yourself appeared trying to ape and defile your greatest achievements?} +so. my brothers.+ {oh, you understand already! yeah. like that, but they might actually cause all of human creation and technology to collapse if you dont fix their problems every other week.} +didnt think it was that bad.+ {its worse. now, think ansible in the inventory to test the graft out.} doing as suggested, avo felt his avatar shudder again but felt a new weight lodged in the base of its skull. requisition: personal hyperwave ansible (jumpcom-xiii) [category green modification] capabilities: instant communications within the span of local system capable of being boosted light years beyond when connected to farcaster station please test device now a menu expanded across the center of avos vision, and a single choice was highlighted at its core. call -> system admin he accepted the option, and from within the simulation, he felt a sudden thrum in the stem of his skull as a cylindrical weight began to build. system admin: hello the voice answered him with a faint echo in the back of his mind. the suddenness of the connection was uncanny. avo-001: quick system admin: you can make additional adjustments using your neurodecks mod settings for controls and other quality adjustments. thoughts sped through avos mind. slowly, his fangs widened into a grin as the solution to a present problem he faced dawned. avo-001: can i request more than nanosuite for the graft? system admin: please make your case before pending approval. avo-001: want in-field communication device for cadre. something not reliant on necrotheurgy. system admin: acknowledged. please hold. and just as the administrator lapsed into silence, avos sanguinity sensed draus return as she stepped back through a junction on the floor below, her body a misshapen map of oozing wounds. Chapter 16-3 Inventory (II) chapter 16-3 inventory (ii) tatterskin: +holy shit, shes still alive. we set off the entire goddamn hanger and shes still moving down there. godsdamned+ rip-nail: +fucking regs are hard targets. hit er again. we dont need an intact body. memories will serve as proof of death enough. cycling another salvo of hammers. well get a close-up of her death in nowait. mem-lock lost. where the hells is sheshe justoh fu+ [session lost] skulldrag: +rip? rip? rip! tatterdo you have eyes on+ tatterskin: +his aeros going down hes snuffed! session lost! session lost! i got nothing. i got nothing+ skulldrag: +stay zero and shift positions. get eyes on that reg. fuck. fuck. hannel. specters out. get me an on-site scry+ [tatterskin screaming; sound of metal screeching followed by spilling wetness] [session lost] cog-cap: 94% skulldrag: +fuck!+ hannel: +skulldrag? whats happening? skulldrag?+skulldrag: +the sow just got tatter! got him with her monowire from behind+ [vomiting] +i felt it. i felt him die. i saw her. shes hurt. shes messed up bad from the blast. we can do this. we can finish this. hannel.+ hannel: +im trying whoever made her wards is+ jelene draus [target one]: sorry consang. aint gonna be so. skulldrag: +no+ [session lost] hannel: +skulldrag? skulldrag? anyone? anyone! +0v3l.bin. [sessions linked] hannel: +all reserve assets: team one is down. target is mobiledo not have eyes. repeat, do not have eyes on her. move in and get paid. fifty-gs extra if one of you shits gets whats left of team one out of there. standard rules apply. their cuts and still-working kit go back to the familiesloot and be nulled. go hard and go loud. looks like our regular still has some fight left in her.+ -transcript recovered of failed assassination op on jelene draus, former guard-captain of the regulars [940,000,000 imp bounty pending increase] 16-3 inventory (ii) m back, draus sniffed, limping past avo and denton as another piece of her bio-rigs carapace broke free from her body. a map of shrapnel jutted out like studded piercings along the right hemisphere of her face. the remnants of her helmet protected the remainder of her skull from severe damage, but her flesh was worn thin enough that avo could see the gleaming alloy laced into her bones. the rest of her body was in a similar state. one of her scythe wings was missing, a frequency dagger was half-buried in her shoulder, and she held her lit hiflass with the only two fingers she had left on her right hand. from her hip bounced twenty or so skulls, each neatly cut by monowire and sporting skeleton augmentations similar to hers. had a nice night? avo asked. the question was entirely honest. the regular staggered to a pause and fixed him with her unmelted eye for moment. a beat passed. her facade cracked and her face broke into a vicious grin. yeah. reckon you could say that. been a while since i got caught in a good ol fashioned double-cross. barge? yep. half-strand rigged the damn thing to blow. managed to spot that shit early, but i didnt expect them wiring the entire hanger to go with it. half-strands blew up a bunch of unaffiliates and even hired some squires to make sure about me dyin. she spat off a thick globule off to the side and denton frowned distastefully at the splatter now marring the nice floor. how about you? them star-fuckers give you anything? {ah. the illustrious captain draus observed returning from another day in the life.} a thin attitude of wit spilled over from calvino while avos avatar remained frozen within the inventory. {its really not that often someone lives up to the stereotype of their people or organization, but rarer still when the individual exceeds the nature of their stereotype by far. her heart rate is practically placid even for someone with all her cardiovascular modifications. uncanny. no anxiety at all. the things highflame does to their soldiers} ones in my mind right now. sounds very impressed with you. {that was not praise, avo.} the ghoul neglected to mention this. draus snorted and part of her exposed cheek broke free off her face like a lump of charcoal. another voice in your head. aint gonna be any way to tell if youre goin schizo or just packin your skull with new consangs anytime soon. this one do anything, or are they squatters too? does something, avo said. very useful. easy ally. showing me what they have in their inventory. implants. equipment. lots of selection. he clicked this teeth together and chuffed joyously. might just get you some new guns like you asked. got accepted. am a citizen now. the regular froze mid-nod as she did a double take. say that shit again? got accepted. operative of aegis. citizen of voidwatch his words were interrupted by an extremely uncharacteristic guffaw from draus as she flung her head back and let her laughter loose. what tendons she still had left twitched as a mangled smile tightened into form. you serious? avos rictus never broke. yes. them half-strands must be some desperate bastards. must be, avo agreed. denton tried to interject through the dialogue. you should finish with the ansible hey! half-strand. faither! the rotlicks got a job! and hes voider-fated now. calvinos cringe crinkled the static thoughtstuff spilling out from avos mind. {citizenship is quite different than the varying classifications of indenturement the guilds seem to practice-} the ex-enforcers body sank but avo seized the welling blood and forced it back into the corpse before it could overflow. a scar between realities scabbed between the thinness of existence, and from calvino came only a sigh. +i never liked looking at that. egis phantasmal orb flickered as it turned its attention over to draus. +i have to be honest: i expected these outbursts of violence more from you than her.+ the regular remained stalwart in her reflexive murder of chambers. he was gonna ask you somethin uncouth bout your feelers there or some shit. my annoyance beat out the discomfort. avo grunted before picking the body up using an echohead and sniffing at it. hell be fine. will resurrect. probably enjoys getting killed by draus on some level. a twitch of disgust ran along draus lips. +well, if the spontaneous acts of violence are over, i think i have a few recommendations for you all to pursue. avo. if you would please project what youre seeing for everyone present.+ doing as bidden, phantasmal flames sprouted wide and licked across the ceiling to form a burning screen into a place of virtuality from the perspective of avos avatar. the cadre found themselves greeted with countless lines of item data. all the while did the paleness of the room clash with the more somber tones of the dormitory. looks like a damn mess, draus muttered. hows anyone supposed to dig through this clutter. a feeling of wry amusement sparked out from calvino. +specificity helps. which is what i want to go through with everyone. i understand that youll be making a house call for a certain glaive in the near future. or maybe a run to revert the damage dealt to the so-called heaven of love.+ a cleaned up kae re-entered the fray at the perfect moment to arrive with a stumbling halt. eyes darting to regard avo, he instead kept his focus on the inventory, waiting for what his new cognitive advisor was going to say. +regardless of what youre doing, youll need an edge. a big one. officially, voidwatch cannot avow your actions to avoid infringing the sovereignty and interests of the other guilds and sparking a new war. unofficially, aegis will see you with material and mechanical superiority against any foe.+ calvino paused. +almost any foe. make a note of if there is any omnitech presence in the area.+ so what youre offerin voider-class guns and augs? draus asked. yeah. hells. we can do with that. youre thinking too limited, captain draus,+ calvino replied. +aegis is not an arms dealershipwere a joint intelligence apparatus born from endless eons of espionage and counter-espionage conducted between our many polities.+ draus cocked her head and sniffed. alright. saw we was gonna try to snuff the leadership of a syndicate all on the same day. say we needed to do it hush and clean unless we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with eyes grafted into our shoulders for guilder kill teams. what you got then? +which syndicate?+ calvino asked, no pause separating his reply. hundred-eights. no-dragon irregulars. +oh. theyre a hard one. we have to avoid anything biological considering their influence across that sphere of reality, and the males among you might need a temporary neutering.+ a spike of information buried itself into avos mind and list of items began to materialize. +youll need a booster to keep you from getting sick. combat skin of mechanical make and layered sealing.+ inputting the orders he got from calvino, avo fed the details over to the administrator and slotted walls surged through the featureless room, the equipment arriving in partitions between grafts, weapons, armors, and more. choked by the forest of choices generated before him, avo found himself the second most enraptured person in the room as draus took a few steps closer to stare at all the armor available. +i highly recommend marssecs butler series. it might feel more like youre piloting a golem than actually wearing any armor, but thats to your advantage. you already have far too many masculine markers to avoid internal bleeding in the presence of one of the daughters. its better for you to have a degree of separation. draus grunted. specs? calvino laughed and turned its attention to avo. +dont tell her, show her. think dry-run now with any piece of equipment you want.+ calling up the marssec bulter xi, avo found himself faced with a six-armed tetrapod that dwarfed him twice over and had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visual sensor module in place of a helmet. jagged clamps around dark red metal indicated where the user would be positioned within the machine. as he was focusing on its design, a tether of data shot out from his avatar and poured a snapshot of his mind into the armor itself. suddenly, he found himself in a grey room with various geometries parting his surrounding environment into various spaces and verticalities. the first thing that came to his attention was how the world looked to him now. instead of seeing things in a field of sight or a cone of perspective, his new eyes wrapped the area all around him and had a hud listing half a dozen functions he didnt yet comprehend. paired to his will, his submind did most of the active thinking, adapting to the machines movements as the four limbs scuttled in slashing blurs more information arrived over from calvino and avo learned how to generate targets. he formed the general shape of a hapless street squire in the training roomthe attributes and implants of the man generated based on statistical data gathered from the city. a tall chrome-armed figure with armor made from a melted traffic sign popped into being and immediately began firing at avos avatar. gauss flechettes rattled and broke against the bulters hardened carapace while faint blue impact markers indicated which way the hits where coming from. +the best thing youll find about a lot of our materialeven the primitive variantsis that we have them in their most optimal forms. the bulter here isnt something that most of our operatives wear, but we either have an active ego infused in via ansible.+ that gave both avo and draus pause. this things a full-on sheathe? draus said. +for citizens of the void,+ calvino said. +sadly, you both have your consciousnesses logged in the nether. avo has a way about transferring himself, but you, captain, might have some difficulties+ yeah, i know, draus said. im used to using phylacteries. highflames got some clue about how the nether locks our egos. none of you leave ghosts, right? +that depends on where we die. and how. avo here already has the ghost of a thinking machine inside him. its the entire reason why his metamind and the neurodeck can integrate. but its also why youre all going to need sprites to interface with any of our more sophisticated machines. now, avo, if you would just fire back+ the bulters system was unlike the nightmantis, or any other rig avo had faced in action. the integration between the users executive thoughts and the metals reactivity was nearly instant. in a second, the electric locus filtering decisive phantasmics and pseudo-sequences within the bulter calculated a dozen variables, and one of his arms shifted into what was effectively a needle-thin emitter from the rod of metal it once was. a lance of energy lashed out and the air came afire. the simulated target burst into flames first before the beam carved their skull in half. chambers, again, resurrected right back in the middle of things. whoa, shit, consangs. what we watching? draus, however, had the look of childlike enchantment beneath her scabbing wounds. what else it got? +its qualified to fabricate tactical-level weaponry within the confines of its arms. the durasteel sheathe layering the arms also prevents any high shifts in temperature from damaging the nanobots. the question isnt what gun does it have, captain draus, but what guns do i want within the yield of a tactical nuclear warhead, and how many nanites and units of energy this is going to consume.+ to emphasize the egis point, avo noticed a percentage bar in the upper right corner of his vision dip and refill as he unmade his beam rifle. the available nanos all but vanished when he used them to fabricate over a hundred micro missiles, and a time expanded asking him to find new sources of carbons and plastics to fabricate additional nanos. why the hells didnt you ever give us this? draus said, nearly salivating. +were trying to keep you all alive, captain. not see you all dead within a month.+ the regular snorted and clapped avo over the shoulder. got me my guns after all. she turned and faced the voider. hey. cold-god. you got anything with a bit more kick? +i will show you if you promise never to refer to me as a god.+ only if i like the yield of the explosion. Chapter 16-4 Meldskin chapter 16-4 meldskin theyre watching us, you know? the voiders. from all the way in the deep void. using modified bugs that fly around our cities. even using some of our implantsjust read any omnitech published reports on the tech infiltration being committed by our benefactors. thats not all though. you see, weve been keeping an eye on what the voiders have been doingthe movements of their ships and all the new deals they''re striking with the guilds, and some very troubling implications are appearing.??vl?1n. now, i cant say for certain what is going in in case one of our other masters in this eight-headed system decides to shut me down, but looking at all the tech permits being issued, something very has to be happening, right: immunoboost-nine? plague suppressants? ferverclear? all of this for free at your local grafters? and all of this requires a submission of your genetic material before it can be administered? this inspires questions, consangs. real pointed questions. we know the voiders are the ones with all that advanced cloning technology. hells, we would be in population free-fall if it wasnt for their birther vats but what if theyre not just cooking up newborns in those metal-wombs? what if theyre going a bit further, planning for their better world? im not saying theyre doing anything yet, but imagine if you or i get cloned by the voiders? perfect in every way. better than us. except theyre not us. except their docile and obedient and listen to the words of our guilder masters without any struggle. imagine that as the dream. doesnt that just sound nice the fateweavers at the top? huh? again, no claims are being made on this thoughtcast. im just saying that if the sang could grow one of their incarnates from some organs and a sheet of skin, what kind of coldtech abominations can voidwatch make of us? -watch the watchers, anti-voidwatch conspiracy thoughtcast 16-4 meldskin enlightenment left tastes of sweet and sour upon avos tongue. as time slipped from the group after they began sampling the gifts of voidwatch, avo felt a familiar ache returning with each item he tested. where once the bone demon and his echoheads left him pleased with the belief of his superiority to most, indulging in the use of instruments leftover from even the furthest days of voidwatchs bygone past made him feel all but inadequate again. this time, however, he faced such facts not as an expendable monster in the sway of indifferent cultists but as a pupil seeking to surmount the next steps of his ascension. exchanges between calvino and draus highlighted the intricacies of each new vessel he unveiled while platform specifications left even the hardiest veteran simulated within avos immolation quieted. the butler series was but the beginning of his new education. the fact that it was officially classified for security and peacekeeping rather than outright combat made an even deeper impression. draus, for her part, grew ravenous. she was as if a ghoul let loose in a nursery, picking and sampling all that caught her eye. guns became avos world for a good while. guns such as the kassad ii mutivector assault weapon, with its hyper-precise delivery systems ensuring perfect accuracy within twenty-five kilometers and miniature cold-fusion ammo battery guaranteeing years of continuous use, or the lla-12 queen bee, which functioned as an autonomous micro-drone launcher neuro-linked to the usera far more subtle implement than the former, but with each flea-sized drone capable of reducing an aero to burning slag, the damage potential was beyond denial. combat-programmed utility fog served as another essential acquisition for the group. it served avo a bit less than the others considering the extent he could mold matter already with his heaven, but having multiple options was always wise. though they were denied the requisition of heavy-grade drones or voidships, avo found himself with access to interstellar surveillance satellites and the sakuraba disvow stealthship generator: fjord cold-fusion generation length: 8.50m height: 4.30m wingspan: 7.5m armaments: 2 gepar-ghk linear cannons and 1 muti-missile nano-fab for varied payload delivery at the egis behest, avo tweaked the training sim and increased the gravity of the room. in an instant, the weight of the world came crashing down upon his shoulders, and he found his avatar buried under an unseen mountain. reactivating his armor, threads of metal poured out between his cermite plating and wove themselves back into shape. gravity at: 8.8 standard gs increasing fiber density an explosion of strength rushed through avo as the fibers of the armor burrowed deeper to interface with the structure of his bone demon sheate. nanotubes constructed additional supports within his echoheads, inflicting their biology with additional rigidity but also durability. he planted his tendrils into the ground and pushed. the weight was still there, still heavy, but his strength was growing at an alarming pace, and his generator poured more energy through the armors systems. within the span of ten seconds, avo had gone from being crushed by the atmosphere to standing, to striding without the aid of his echoheads. and all that strength was his, and his alone. no need to reach deep and rewrite the rules of reality. no need to call upon his canons. he was a juggernaut unto himself. enough as is. a low chuckle sang out from draus as she shook her head. come time, you and i are gonna break this shit in. no heavens. no guns. just you and me and the good ol days. see how fit makes us feel. avo hissed a low note of amusement. this was her way of thanking him: pain and brutality. she understood him too well. going to bleed you, reg. bleed you like youve never been bled. well, you keep that hope close to your heart. itll be a thrilll watching it leak out from the corners of your eyes. [were fighting the reg soon?] corner asked. a thrill rose in them as well. [fuck yeah. picked the right ghoul to die to.] this is still nothing before the touch of my power, master. we can unravel this shell with but a thought. the woundshapers words carried naked envy with them, but avo remained unshaken. it will mean everything if you are denied to me. if my rend is too great. if our enemy masters our hubrises. i must be more. more in every way. more in reality as it is. more beyond. all are conjoined. he paused. and dont you want to understand how its structure comes together? how it can be strength so easily? and with that, the heaven of bloods jealousy dimmed in place of aroused curiosity. the art of these interlopers is exotic. of that, my admission is stated. the galeslither released a breath of disdain. what difference is there between you and that lust-addled creature the ghoul keeps as a personal fool. woundshaper began its retort, but it was avo who cut in first. chambers is trying to change. changing like all of us. slowly. flawed still. but changing. he turned his eyes in the real upon the supposed half-strand and gazed beyond the performative lust and ridiculousness on display. all this debasement of the self for the sake of social acceptanceto be wanted. he is not my personal fool. i will not have it be so. i will him to be who he wants to be. i will see him make his own choices when the time comes. the heaven of air offered but silence for a moment. and what of me? am i to be different? am i to be more organ and being? what do you want? avo asked. to be free, the galeslither said, a spark of hope entering its voice. i wish to take to the skies of my own accord and follow the contrails of a distant entity. to seek the horizon and round it again. i wish to be trapped no longer. are you going to give that to me? idiot mule, the woundshaper chided. your fantasy is cessation. how long will you sail before you are claimed by these guildsthese agnosi? how long will you last before you are out of deaths to sustain yourself and come apart in being? as if the master would offer a free soul to indulge in such fancies. but avo considered the proposition, and again, he thought of the armor before him, of how it interwove and became him, and he it as well; he thought of how he could burn his being into minds and vessels. what if he could do so with his heavens? what if he could unleash the gods upon the world again? {avo} calvino said, the first hints of alarm entering the egis tone. {you dont want to do that.} but the galeslither was silent again, and its emotions were peaked with astonishment at avos consideration. we will talk about this later, he said. all of us. directing his attention back to the simulation, avo placed seven requests of meldskin. seven for each member present. seven to be made better in the coming days. +so, lets talk about that final something you might be interested in,+ calvino said. +i understand youve been having trouble. run-ins with your family. do you want to hurt them where it hurts the most right now?+ tell me, avo said, interest fully aroused. he hadnt expected this. but then again, with the egi, he didnt know what to expect. a final influx of knowledge rushed through avo and he found himself confused at what was being offered. these are bodies? +yeah. a collection of various sheathes to generate, as well as heightened access to vat-functions. its hard to do espionage as a giant man-eating monster, you know? i decided to get you something of a wardrobe.+ Chapter 16-5 A Choice of Skins (I) chapter 16-5 a choice of skins (i) glaive benhatas body remains missing, an entire node has been stolen after appraising the situation at the trident. as of now, i am certain we face an enemy ace that has achieved a feat beyond skill. it really smacks the words right out of your mouth. aside from myself, not-here, signtaker, and perhaps a few other notable godclads who have their ontologies rooted around clandestine miracles, few others can do what i suspect has been accomplished today. and dont think i dont know what youre all suspecting. yes, i am a suspect. no, i didnt do it. but im interested in finding out who managed this so i can meet them. right now, i can tell you that whoever were facing doesnt just have a heaven, but an extreme mastery of the nether. to the level that they can outright steal the ghosts and sequences from our survelliance phantasmics without triggering alarm. likewise, they must know how we operate considering how they avoided the attention of our patrolling incubi altogether. my suspicions are that were facing a team of high-caliber individuals. perhaps a dedicated fallwalker cadre empowered and supported by highflame. but that still doesnt fully explain the necrotheurgy situation. no one should match us. at least, no one at present. the low masters no longer have the resources to conduct such dives, even between the no-dragons, highflame, and omnitech, i doubt they managed to train anyone up to our capabilities. subsequently, i suspect were facing a freelancer unit. like the white-rab. but this is too loud for him. i recommend myself as lead investigator for this incident. count me among the suspects still, and put me on watch, but i want take charge of this hunt. theres something about this that i im just interested in understanding our enemy. it has been too long since weve faced a proper enemy ace. -shotin kazahara, ori-thaum godclad on the breach at the trident 16-5 a choice of skins (i) crimson exploded as dice tore her way through the syndicate enforcers within the megablock. from fires creeping along blood-made fissures, avo watched the progress of his chosen ensouled, and likewise did drausthe glass shimmering with her presence. desperate screams mingled with gunfire as the former fateless surged forward, a tidal wave of slashing gore, shredding through all in her path. syndicate golems should have been en route to assist. but draus ensured their permanent deactivation, and from their ruins found new nectar for his frame. [sangeist x6; snake-king x2; galeslither x3] in the three days after his acceptance into aegis, a multitude of demands occupied his attention as he found himself preparing and reacting in equal measure. though calvino promised immediate delivery of requisitioned equipment, none could predict the fickle whims of new vultun. when thaumaturgy was in play, reality grew slippery and promises were rendered paltry. a spatial detonation had delayed the goodsand only now were the agnosi close to stitching the leak. in the meantiime, things still had to be done. between chambers and cas, the initial preparations for the cult of the unborn began without ill omens. chambers fared better with his new gifts when there wasnt the need to null his subjects, but there was still a lingering unease as he jackeda bleedover that avo never experienced. watching the half-strand wrestle with his own actions as the full weight of sonder came down upon him was a fascinating thing to observe. how humanity joined and undid. ghouls never had thatwant for community and empathy. it was their greatest boon, and also why they were barren of culture or future. to want was to build, and ghouls didnt want. they needed. they craved. and then never got better. regardless, chambers managed to plant an auto-seance in the skintakers mind easily enough. avo would direct him to claim more of such individuals to seed their influence across the nether. for now, though, the manipulation would begin slowly as the ghoulpounder thoughtcast began its slow reorientation in content. the templates warned avo against building concrete plans before the forecast for audience reactions was settled. a broad trajectory was what needed to be followed. everything else was a matter of organic development and steering. draus, in the meantime, took to raiding and assassinating key syndicate personnel as something between a pastime and pre-shaping operations. as active as avo found himself across the nether and in deepening his influence over the city using chambers as an exntension, the regular did as an operating squire finding new angles to hurt their foes. she kept a close watch as dice tore a bloody swath through the three-fingers. with avo culling the syndicates jocks and necros as a scouring flame, draus assinating key figures in its command structure, and dice serving as a blunt force instrument, the three-fingers collapse arrived in an abrupt instant. without orders to follow and with the leadership decimated, what once stood a syndicate of over fifteen thousand members and armed with forty-two golems shattered into warring gangs that fought each other over the rights of its corpse. dice never stopped hunting. whatever happened to her hardened her against human contact and made her more predator than a girl. even as the syndicate that enslaved her collapsed, she spent little time on rumination or grief. instead, she went after their offshoot gangs, then rival syndicates moving in, and even an exorcist drone detachment deployed to investigate the situation. today, she was living her new life to the fullest in block-10 of the tortuganda districtmajor death-stake under sanctus, omnitech, and ashthrone. a splinter faction of the three-fingers fled here after their initial culling, pushing into the district like rodents fleeing a flame. {this is just posturing,} calvino said, supplementing avos eyes with voidwatchs. satellite imaging and aegis intel far exceeded the presentation of avos individual efforts, granting him exact details regarding troop movements, the key commanders in the field, and the expected outcomes for each scenario. new vultun itself appeared as if an alloyed rash disfiguring the world, a sprawling series of scars and gaps that stretched the span of an entire continent that stood as a rising apex at its core. narrowing over the skies far above nu-scarrowbur, avo found that the guilds had only dispatched approximately five thousand golems on each side. enough to fight a brief war according to calvino, but nothing prolonged. this was ultimately just posturing. both sides were wary to reignite a battle before their strength was restored. some wounds left by the last great war still lingered, and highflame especially seemed shy to tread on the path of repeating old mistakes. {aegis requisition has arrived at loathing} updating deepnav finally. drawing the bulk of his consciousness back across his sessions, avos halo burned bright as he attached ego to vessel while he prepared to notify the cadre. {youll be able to access almost any gene vat in the system once you get your ansible. i look forward to seeing you print some new bodies. fake bodies take some getting used to, but considering how many minds you have churning inside you, i suppose you can install the necessary habits and adaptions both ways.} +have been looking forward to this for a while,+ avo said. his mind wasnt just on creating human molds to carry his mind, however, but also further enhancements to the idealized monster that was his base form. the low masters kept him humanoid because they were fools playing with stolen equipment. now, avo had another chance to mock their failures and enhance his own formor abandon it altogether. another quieter urge also called to him in the back of his mind. he could complete the ghouls. finish a new design in his image and set them upon his former brothers. it would be a fitting euthanasia, condemning monsters designed to feast upon humanity to be devoured in turn by their upgraded offspring. the deliciousness of such an offense would be a delight to inflict on both the hungers and the low masters as well. {alright. dont be in a rush,} calvino said. {start with a pre-existing human body first before you go off playing genetic jenga.} +whats jenga?+ calvino fed the information directly into his mind, and avo found the game to be rather banal. draus, avo said, collapsing the wall of blood serving as the door to his cell and stepping into the hallway. meldskins arrived. open the passage. time for pickup avo! kae said, emerging suddenly from the lip of another cell as if springing an ambush. with her hair disheveled and bags hanging below her eyes, it was clear that the agnos had indulged in little sleep and decided against the use of suicide to keep herself persisently energic. still, there was a flicker of focus in her eyesthe look she got when she was consumed by her work. i have it! after two nights of reading through the elder mythos over and over again, i know the changes we need to make to our heavens and canons! also! also i have a new theory about your imitators and why the rest of us arent showing your symptoms! we need to requisitions first, avo said. talk while we go pick our kit up. she nodded and followed behind him. crumbling into a moment of silence, he could feel the discomfort in her thoughtstuff as her mind leaped to another topic that she yearned to broach but remained too uncertain to do so. well hunt the glaives as soon as things are settled enough, avo said. already thinking of how to prepare the run. need to outsource a dive to someone first. get an overview of what we need. a low huff came from the waifish woman. t-thanks. no. not thanks. my ascension broke your life. shouldnt pretend. shouldnt lie to ourselves. her mind grew tighter. well, at least were doing something about it, right? {shes looking for reassurance,} calvino said. {judging from her tone shes pretty confused about if shes supposed to hate or like you.} avo grunted. +not going to include any of that in my sheathes.+ {that what? human emotion? hate? like?} +validation,+ avo replied. he saw it in chambers and he saw it again in kae. for all community mightve been worth to humans while they lived as tribes, it existed only as a weakness to monsters that sought to break society. he shook such thoughts aside. it was finally time to see himself improve. first in coldtech, then with his heavens as well. everything else could wait until after. Chapter 16-6 A Choice of Skins (II) chapter 16-6 a choice of skins (ii) +esteemed seniors, we are getting fucked. if i have your attention now, i need you all to understand that it is not an unruly partner we are dealing with. whispers from the bazaar tell of suspicious attacks on various organizations across the warrens. i trust that you all remember the three-fingers syndicate? the one that eldest zhuo marked as an essential player for us to cooperate and convert to the black truce program toward reduced warfare and increased mutual profits? they have collapsed. their leadership is dead. the remainder are fracturing into gangs, and even they are being picked off one by one. three days ago, they were preparing to host another cruciblewilling to offer entertainment at a loss since the laced-lobby incident from over a month back. in such a paltry amount of time, what befell them exceeds acceptable thresholds for misfortune and outright enters the territory of omen. someone shattered them. someone did it in three days. and there are only so few entities with the power and logistical scope to conduct such a complex and clandestine operation. of whom i reference, i believe i need to utter no names. the skills of the incubi blur the lines between myth and fact, but those of us who remember the war can read the currents of danger circling these waters. as for why they might be spending so much effort to crush a meager syndicate and what the broader implications might be well, i am not so arrogant to think beyond the confines of my station, after all. this is a responsibility best handed to sisters wiser and older than myself. nonetheless, i advise strong caution. the winds sing of ill-tidings, and recent times have brought forth a string of tumult. we must make ready. if only as a precaution. who knows what other changes the future might bring?+ -wen pale-crane (canghe), first daughter of the hundred-eight syndicate to the no-dragons 16-6 a choice of skins (ii) fifteen different guns, twenty-four variations of high-yield explosives, two assault-grade mechs, some kind of auto-doc support kit containing various cutting-edge medical implements, a high-power microfabricator consisting of three slats of hovering steel made to interface with ones neurodeck and manipulated via utility fog, a fifty-feet long and forty-feet wide non-newtonian stealth ship with no visible means of boarding, and finally, seven sets of ansible paired utility fog nanosuites fastened to seven more fist-sized reactors to be implanted along the outside of a spinal column rounded out the full list of requisitions. all the equipment was gathered and waiting, neatly arranged in a nice little section of the produce hanger as avo''s cadre ignored the holographic projections declaring the space to be private access only - category i clearance required. the implication kept most away, while unaffiliated drones and the stray passing manager were kept under close watch by voidwatchs patrolling drones and the subtle grip of avos sanguinity, blending with the crimson neon cast down by the lights. as the last dome-shaped drone untethered its delivery from a rippling grav-field, it cleaved an arcing path back toward the voidship that spawned it, its pallid shell splashing into the fluid matter of the greater vessel as if a droplet returning to the ocean. both were featureless beyond the rings of holographic light projected down their cone-shaped forms, but the featureless offered a sense of cleanliness. purity. a mocking superiority to the grim-slick state of the warrens. {smart fluids,} calvino explained.{a gaseous state is extremely vulnerable to drastic shifts in temperature and environment. thats something we learned a long, long time ago. programmable non-newtonian smart fluids are quite adaptable across a mixture of scenariosespecially when the outer hull can be quickly remade.} avo regarded the fist-sized discs that were to be the power core of his meldskin. +made from the same thing?+ {indeed. there comes a point where software and hardware need to be wed. i suppose its not so different with thaumaturgy, it is more deleterious to the foundations of existence by far.} +fire and water. clashing themes.+ calvino hummed, but there was a note of disagreement in its voice. {do not just consider things by their design or aesthetic, avo. watch their actions. watch how they interface with the world, and how the world reacts. your heavens tear, infest, usurp. our technology fits, exists, and fills the container of what is. apotheosis is a game of destruction and dominance. but there are other ways to mantle reality. synthesis.} a brief scoff sounded from abrel. [yeah. if you want to surrender to someone elses rules maybe.] a sense of bemusement emanated from the egi, but it offered no rebuttal. at least, not yet. draus was the first person to move and claim a treasure. with her bio-rig already shed, she stood with her bodyglove masked by a holocoat, her hands peeking out from the flickering veil obfuscating her body to touch her new toys. he had requested most of these weapons on her behalftest-fired half of them without fully understanding their potency. the truth was that after one was blessed with a heaven capable of weaving matter from blood and vice versa, the idea of using a gun seemed crippling. not to draus, though. her eyes shone as she enjoyed the moment. but not alone was she in this excitement. off to the side, chambers reminded avo that he was an enforcer once upon a lifetime, and these weapons were just as enticing to a jackal of the warrens as a lioness of the tiers. fuckyeahfuckyeahfuckyeah, chambers chanted, under his breath, his foot tapping. either self-preservation or respect prevented him from going through the goods first, but he wouldnt stay idle forever. unable to help himself, avo laughed. the act drew kaes attention and she frowned at him, her question conveyed with a stare. [fuck, sun-head, wasnt sure about you first but that was nova,] corner chuckled. [hey. rotlick. keep em here. dont ever think of chucking this one. someone needs to give these fated fuckers the what-for.] [yeah. and a machine slavemaster from a dying empire will be the one to do it,] benhata said, partaking in his own silent tantrum. corner simply grinned. [a mountains gotta be jealous of the clouds, right? doesnt have the same sting getting told off by us little people. just remember to keep your mouth closed when the piss comes rushing down.] the building argument in his skull exploded thereafter, with multiple minds sniping at each other. fittingly, the woundshaper was also delivering its own rants, complaining to the galeslither about the flaws and delusions of coldtech. avo didnt care. thaumaturgy. necrotheurgy. technology. or just basic philosophy. he wanted to become. he wanted to grow. no point in being shackled; no apotheosis in being blind. plucking the nanosuites first, he examined each injector momentarily before plunging them between the armored plates of his sheathe and triggering their releases. this time, he didnt forget to consume the injectors eitherfeeding the patterns of its matter into the woundshapers memories. {usually, we recommend incremental installations for health reasons but whats the worst that can happen to you, really?} i die, avo replied, feeling a slight series of tickles flow upward into the base of his skull. {ah. so not that bad.}he nodded. just like breathing now. {installing modifications: ansible (clearance-black); utility-fog (safeties removed) safeties? avo asked. {thats mostly so our children dont disassemble each other. i dont have the same concern for you, nor can i stop you from achieving the same results through other means.} oh, so the false dawn acknowledges my superiority? the woundshaper snarled. the galeslither breathed a sigh of annoyance. only that you exist, perhaps. transparent progress bars materialized in the corner of his vision while the diminutive machines went to work inside him, fabricating intricate augments within his biology. for a single instant, he felt his synchro-synaptic blood lash out at the invaders before his helix chimed and everything settled. {hm? a bio-govern prion. interesting.} calvino said. {i suppose the low masters had to update your bioware some way. im surprised they mastered even this, though i suspect they stole more than a little help from the no-dragons at some point.} picking the meldskins reactor off the ground, avo found himself staring at his own reflection in the mercury shine of the augment. not far away, kae was examining her own gifts, her expression nervous as she studied the injectors. once, mere days back and several lifetimes ago, he was but a monster. an enhanced ghoul with necrotheurgic edge and an inherited frame that was never meant to be his. his face was pale and plated, fibers running along the exterior to armor him within the embrace of his new biology. now, a rising beacon of fire left his features shrouded and muddled, and the white of the bone demon looked as if ash beneath an endlessly burning pyre. between the folds of the flickering inferno, he saw other faces staring back at him, memories forming in the undulations as if his templates were leaking through. he was no longer just a ghoul. no longer just a necro. no longer just him. more and more his gestalt was growing. he was the flame, and all that thought, all that remembered, all that lived, and all that could die were but wax to burn, and horizons for which to spread. then, as if answering his challenge, the shell melted into his biology and swam for his back. the reactor itself thrummed like a transplanted heart gliding upon his flesh, pulsing with a calming and constant rumble as a third progress meter joined the other two. the ansible, however, wasnt long to linger. as the bar filled, new interfaces and functions ignited within avos mind, and he felt a growing weight pulse at the core of his skull. a small shiver of force brushed the contents of his mind, the static of his thoughtstuff whipped out like a lashing tongue, licking at something unseen. {very good,} calvino said. {lets give this a test. access the ansible and} i have people i wish to call, avo said, an old memory surfacing suddenly like a remembered dream. people associated with voidwatch. under mirrorheads employ. wanted to have them graft me again before but got occupied. calvino paused for a second and interfaced with avos memories. {ah. i see,} it said, as understanding dawned. {well, well, well. mayflower-3288-b and terror-3285. glad to see the jovians are still playing fast and loose with the charter. call them. i wish to speak with them as well. it will be funny. especially when i ask them about their illegal conduct.} +illegal conduct?+ avo asked. {yes. something about not helping guilders exploit the vulnerable.} +got a good implant out of that deal,+ avo said. {no, you really didnt. dont worry, though, the meldskin will grow you something better. right now, though, i suggest you start testing that ansible of yours.} creating hyperwave tunnel to: [mayflower-3288-b]; [terror-3285] Chapter 16-7 Choice of Skins (III) chapter 16-7 choice of skins (iii) the experiment that was noloth was of a society supremea preservation and further compounding by securing the stock of esteemed individuals to create a perpetual greatest generation. such was the theory to what they sought to practice, but in practice, i can only describe their habits as enforced cultural and ideological inbreeding. there is a horror to being humanto thinking human. we are simultaneously too conscious and capable of self-perception, yet our senses and biology are so easily hijacked by the feedback from our environment. for all of wahaktens sacrifices and efforts, i fear the menagerie he has built resembles little more than a cliche dedicated to the replication of its own shape. cancerous code, as the administrators might describe. instead of each life passed into the cycle of dragons, adding to the eternal city, i think they are consumed by it. boiled away by the norms and narratives already present and made to conform to the same beliefs. even now i find myself paranoid against my very own thoughtsmy very own beliefs. if not for my love severing the hand of my old master from its place upon my nape, i doubt such thoughts could have ever even developed, nor would we have been spirited away to a place of destined salvation. humans pursue belief. this is the culmination where external impulse and inward perceptions meet. the shape of the exterior is bent to match the mood of the interior, and without forceful feedback, frictionless belief is a capricious thing, and more often we flee from the harshness of possible truth toward palatable comfort. to see the world made so for a feeble few would come at the cost of all others, and so, i have glimpsed the truth of noloths great rot. it is, at its core, not a city, but a nursery. a nursery for the traumatized, the fearful, the deluded. what began as an impeccable engine to deceive the gods and direct the path of society has turned into little more than a cult itself. now, it grows still, but it can no longer be sculpted. it grows and grows and must keep growing for it has no will nor spirit to confront the wound at the heart of its own design, and with each setback it faces, its psyche tears, and more lives are demanded by its gluttonous gestalt. it is not eternity or control it hungers for, but self-assurance. and so, it is with this justificationand perhaps delusion of my ownthat i condemn them to their fate. when the ladder is finished, they will attempt to take hold. but i have not told them what serves as the bridge between the world that is and will be. for the world to cross over, everything must be reborn from a final memory, and it disturbs me how suited they have become to serve as the conduit of such a sacrifice -jaus avandaer on the construction of the flayed ladder 16-7 choice of skins (iii) the first difference between an ansible and an auto-seance was a matter of groundedness. an ansible did not work beyond the bounds of reality but within it. there was a reactivity to its effecta counter-push from gravity and data. an info-tunnel across the reach of space dipped and formed, the curvature of bending gravity caused avos thoughtstuff to spike far outward, turning needle-thin as dentons did all those times. understanding graced him as he realized she wasnt casting ghosts out. not truly. this was an act of direction the flow of his sprites, and as the metaphysical bandwidth connected to this neurodeck reshaped itself via a language he was only beginning to grasp. there was little direct intuition with the codes. the colddata didnt greet him with the intimacy of mem-data. what composed the structure of software were just numbers and keys serving as signifiers of information without any of the lingering humanity that still echoed within the ghosts. such was the distinct separation between the two mechanisms. that, and the architecture that existed for ansible was far more expansive. accessing voidnet ->ego confirmed: avo-001 [admin status granted] whats this? avo asked. admin? {thats mostly from me,} calvino replied. {as an egi, i have administrative privileges over most citizens. this allows me to help assist, adjust, or penalize them to ensure that they and their communities live prosperous lives.} sounds like zookeeping. {i find the most accurate metaphor to be parenting.} is there a difference? {would you like an equally glib response before i help you override their personal firewalls and construct a shared virtuality.} why not. lines of data began to accelerate across avos perception as a layered world was painted within electric flow of his neurodeck. much like a mem-sim, a virtual environment was a cogno-space that one could alter or manipulate. how the user interfaced with each had too many differences to count, but their ultimate functions were quite similar. what avo could say was that using the ansible to join his simulated reality with another mind seemed far too easy a process. all he did was think the commands and the deck generated the actions. complexity was removed but stacked all the samethe information surging passively, positioning him more like a governor over his mind rather than a laborer. avo hated the feeling. {oh? it doesnt feel real unless your forcing something into shape with your own hands, huh?} calvino asked, sounding curious. +feels like its too easy to lose. too easy to take away.+ going to punish them. the egi hummed a note of accord. indeed. not asking who you are or what you want we already know, john said, waving avo off. listen, ghoulie, buddy, pal the egis do whatever they can to improve the lives of everyone across voidwatch and we put up with what we will. theres no point in us asking or fighting over this. if an admin wants you to do something, youll end up doing it yourself anyway. youll even think its your own idea. he tapped his head. i think they scramble our brains. john, jane said, tone strained with annoyance. do not make our predicament worse. not sure how thats possible. greater disappointment is always possible with you. well, now you sound like original me. guy complains so much im not sure why he cloned himself. jane rubbed her face with stick-thin fingers. avo noticed her limbs were more like branches than actual arms, a result of atrophy sidestepping into deliberate evolution, perhaps. please just tell us what you want so we can go back to our lives, she said, looking at calvino. if we are to be restricted from projecting ourselves planetside oh, no, calvino said, interrupting. the terms of this arrangemetn demand that you stay. youre also getting cat-red clearance. you want us to continue working on idheim? john asked, confused. the spacer woman straightened as her bioluminescence brightened. go on. avo. would you like to explain to them what you need? with grace, calvino turned his attention onto the ghoul. going to burn the guilds, avo began. eat their people maybe just stick to what you need with the sheathes, calvino recommended. need new bodies so i can spread myself across new vultun. break into guilder houses. eat them from the inside. --and now youre doing it on purpose, calvino sighed. cool, john said, sounding excited. wait. let me guess: you need a duo of wildcards to show you the ropes and make you the best sheathes, bioforms, implants, and organisms that imps can buy. something like that, avo said. know you used to work for mirrorhead. know you have guilder contacts planetside. might have deeper insight into the syndicates as well. will want to ask you about that. currently in the middle of some culling. culling? jane said. probably going to kill and replace most syndicates with ones under my control. choke the city. john whistled. well, this punishment is sounding closer and closer to a fortunate career change by the second. well, im not doing anything special tomorrow. whend you want me to start cutting? thats it? jane asked. thats all it took for you to fall in? what? youre going to say yes too. come on, jane. imagine packing in some actually cool designs in the ghoul and his bodies. we can finally test some of those illegal ideas youve been having. john! jane hissed. but the other grafter just kept talking. you know. the no-dragon sweat-spore contagion you were thinking about adapting for use in our habitats to make everyone smell better. you bastard, she snarled. you utter so were both game, john said, answering on her behalf. he paused. wait. howd you get in bed with an egi anyway? werent you the greatlings newest toy last i saw you? his eyes swiveled and collapsed into pinpricks, zooming for a closer look at him. say, those eels going out your back arent ours. and youre looking a bit taller than i remember. smells like sang-shit to me. still, im just surprised youre alive. ate him. broke his sister. had some family trouble. set my mind on fire. decided to burn the city. got scouted for an interview. now im here. uh-huh, john said, accepting the vagueness with a quirked eyebrow. well, youre full of surprises, ghoulie. lets trade, then. whatre the concepts? whats the big idea. ghouls, avo said. i want to make something better than them. a superior version. something that will eat them. and choke the hungers. interesting john said. he smiled at jane his voice took on a thick accent that avo couldnt place. i think our friend heres going for a highlander. there can be only one! avo looked to jane for an explanation, but she only shook her head. i dont bloody know either. probably one of those old flicks he watches all the time. dont worry, avo, john said, suddenly next to him. the man was four feet tall but more than half again as well. ill get you cultured, and ill get you your bioforms. i think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. and something inside avo grew anxious about ever introducing john to chambers. Chapter 16-8 Armor (I) chapter 16-8 armor (i) i know youre there. i know youre giving me new memories in my dreams. come out. i want to talk. im ready to talk. i want to know why. why are you helping me? why did you make me a godclad? i had a master once. he was a good master. he fed me. he asked for simple things. he spoke to me directly. he told me i was a good girl, and he whispered sweet things to me when i killed for him. you say nothing. you say nothing, but youve given me the world. why. answer me. tell me. what are you? what do you want? what are you making me? -dice, fallwalker 16-8 armor (i) hey, rotlick, you done spacing out there? draus asked, voice catching avos notice just as his virtual meeting came to an end. strangely, she spoke with a warbling drone, and the noise of her footsteps greeting the plasteel ground was softer. as the fullness of his ego resettled into his vessel, he found the regular standing next to him, encased in a smooth, pale carapace of liquid armor. currents pulsed through the smart-fluid substance forming the structure of the meldskin, and avo sampled its presence using his woundshaper. the domains of lightning and matter resonated within him. viewed as a fluid by his thaumic mythology, his blood avoided interfacing with the armor, but as its structure rippled and shifted, pulses of a pattern bled over into his mindand the woundshapers as well. characterized as a transparent spherical cage, the armor that the meldskin could manifest had much in common with the nanotubes it memorized from all the augmented bodies he unraveled. there was a sophistication to the build. a sublime, evanescent perfection neither he nor his heaven could yet create on their own. {pizeoelectricity, fullerenes, nanotechnology, programmable fluids your heaven can achieve all these things far easier than our technology could. if the people here only believed. if they could only imagine and worship it.} calvino paused. {but there is a cost to your miracles. it kills understanding because it destroys the rules. the people of idheim never developed true traditions of science or enlightenment until our arrival. why would they, when the rules could change by day and whim? how would they ever dream that the miracles they died for could be achieved with a bit of energy, some software, and a few millenia of concentrated development? a ragged snarl came from the woundshaper as she spat her ire at the egi from across realities. bah. be not goaded by this braggart, master. whatever promise lives in these constructs can be seized for our own. the former god spoke these words without a hint of shame or inadequacy, but there was a shadow of wariness that existed. a certain emotion only a being that infested the bones of true reality could feel. the coldness of mundanity. the threat of toppling from its throne of godhood in the face of what could be achieved by mortal hands alone. he was growing with each passing day, ascending far beyond what he could have dreamed when this all began. but with each sphere he climbed, with each implant he grafted, with each life he took, he found the world expanding around him, unveiling its mysteries as if to tease further effort from him. as he finished his arrangements with the grafters john and jane, he realized how little he knew of biology and the laughable limits of his own creativity. the meldskin, likewise, inflicted him with the same sense of cringing inadequacy. he remembered thinking that he was rising into the light when walton agreed to teachor imbuehim the art of necrotheurgy. the same emotion swelled inside him when he realized he was a godclad, and time and time again with each death, each ontologic he subsumed. now, however, he found himself lacking in the most fundamental ways. how great he had grown in power. but so far did his mastery lag behind. there was so much he didnt know. of biology. of the sciences. of technology. of history. of war. walton wished for him to taste all the flavors there were in life, and so too did he yearn to become more whole than he wasto rise as a complete being. something greater than a ghoul. greater than a human. greater than even a godclad. finished with my conversation, avo said, feeling the last trickles of his attention drip down into place. three transparent progress bars greeted him, fully filling in his cog-feeds new hud. have some new insights. and contacts to call on. going to do some testing soon. try growing a prototype of myself. test the armor too. draus tilted her head, but her expression was banished from his sight. sounds good. im comin with. crenulated lines of armor appeared from the depths of her meldskin like ridges rising from rushing rapids. pauldrons, segments, and gauntlets became her armors design. as more of its pallid substance came rushing out from the core shining along her back, he realized she wasby means conscious or notshaping herself to resemble the combat skins regulars wore in recruitment ads. it seemed that he was not the only one reminiscing about who they once were. but where he strove to escape the limitations of his design, she wore a mirage of her past on her shoulders, as if flirting with the idea of a return to form. its all too damn much, draus breathed. her voice was quiet, and she sounded uncharacteristically shy. all these gifts. from you. from the voiders. the frame. this armor. i dont she opened and closed her hands. i feel too damn strong. i feel too damn good. no aches after my resurrection. no strain in my bones moving in this skin. her meldskins helmet was an oval lined with neon striations, giving her face a grid-like visage. avo wasnt sure as to the purpose of such a modification, but he lacked the interest to ask. regardless, it added greater intimidation to her visage, not that her terror factor was ever lacking. the fog answered his mind intuitively, like a limb that had always been there. in that regard, it wasnt so different from manipulating blood via the woundshaper, but there was still a level of separation that remained. a sense that he was using an instrument rather than the graft being a part of his being down to the root. still, as soon as his mists wafted out to touch the manta, he felt an eruption of data spike through his mind. linking to [manta] multi-purpose scoutship ships present ego capacity: [100,000,000 reids] ->occupied capacity: [2 reids] +whats reids?+ avo asked calvino. {a measurement of the space it takes to store a baseline sophont mind. presently, the agnos and mr. chambers count as one each but you} the egi hummed. {considering the unique condition of your mind, i wonder if the manta will accept you at all.} find out, avo said. even walking over to the ship was hell on his senses. every detail about the ground surface was known to him thaumaturgically and physically. he could taste the metal through his meldskin and the chemical composition of the ground itself generated as a map of orbs chained by bonds in his hud. {chemistry,} calvino said. {something the people of this planet have brutally mauled, time and time again. a pity. it was a wonderful topic to learn about. certainly, not something that should just be placed by mass-equivalent outputs of blood.} the woundshaper let out a nasty laugh. whats this? something the machine-gods are not capable of? ring the bells. sound the chimes. it appears that my observance remains far and distant yet. neurodeck connections detected: [unidentified; unidentified] {ah, that would be ms. kusanade and mr. chambers. they have not uploaded any ego-instances yet.} calvino surmised. {but the good thing is that you can directly} avo connected to them with a thought, this time, his ansible remained unneeded. streams of data jumped across the particulates of his fog, and the world came alight around him as a cloud of data. his heaven of signalsstill unused and incomprehensiblejolted slightly, but actual code rushed past the gibberish holding together the omnitech heaven. again, avo constructed a virtuality, and an instance of his ego was uploaded. this time, the connection was instantaneous. between one breath and the next, an instance of him was standing in a featureless grey room, and apart from him stood kae. and chambers. the latter was strangely chained to a wall. and entirely nude. what the hells just happened, oh, chambers said. his avatar jolted and loaded in as what avo assumed to be his physical self. a smooth, pristine carapace coated his person, and he greeted avo with a wave. sorry about that, i was just thinking about eh. ill keep it to myself. yes, avo agreed. eh. getting mature. nah, i just the half-strand seemed distracted. avo noticed he was looking at kae, and his face was slightly red. the agnos, for her part, had whipped around with a squeak to avoid seeing any of chambers indecencies. so chambers said. are you in that ship now? no. connected to it. using the fog. yeah, consang, that shit is nova, right? chambers whistled. fuckin great. i used it to load all our guns and junk inside the mantid or whatever. it was like dumping stuff into a pond. then, we ended up going inside and and a lag jerked through the virtuality and a warning spilled over avos hud. [warning: reid nearing simulation capacity. please reduce] avo deloaded some of his templates and the virtuality stabilized. going to go test new items. grow ghoul-killers. synced, chambers said. got room for a third? not sure if the ship can fit through draus passage. chambers smile turned lecherous dont worry: this sweet thing can be as wide and fat or as narrow and long as it needs to be. i empathize. kae stared silently. i dont. compared to the rest of their cadre, the agnos seemed the most unaccustomed to her armor, with it only manifested in the form of a coat. again, her inclination against the martial showed itself, and a discomfort clung to her presence as she showed herself reluctant to cage her flesh within the armor. dont like the meldskin? avo asked. n-no! she said. its good, but its i dont feel comfortable with my head and face submerged. thats all. {hm. claustrophobia. and possibly a fear of drowning.} going to go on a test run, avo said, speaking to both of them. have some new bodies im going to grow. chambers. going to need you to jack. kae. got time to adjust our heavens now too. alright, chambers replied. and, uh, whos gonna be our volunteers today? avo considered it. ghouls. were going to replace them eventually anyway. Chapter 16-9 On the Trail (I) chapter 16-9 on the trail (i) {mayflower-3288-b}: so, i got an idea {terror-3285}: oh, god {mayflower-3288-b}: hear me out {terror-3285}: oh, god {mayflower-3288-b}: what if {terror-3285}: im not making you one of your walking atrocities {mayflower-3288-b}: we combine {terror-3285}: no. were not doing that. {mayflower-3288-b}: some design concepts from a japanese giant hornet, a badger, an orca, and a dog to create {terror-3285}: what we are going to do when our new vendor asks for our help, is create an easily transmissible vector to deal with his kind. we will need to think of a way to bypass the haemophage. {mayflower-3288-b}: well, its a good time to ping your sang contacts. hell, the admins probably knew we were breaking quarantine for a while. they just need some of us to play the fools for them. {terror-3285}: then why didnt they cut us off? {mayflower-3288-b}: oh, janie, janie, jane. you never understood our suzerains, did you? theyre not like our bosses or anything. were not slaves. theyre more like zookeepers, and were the trophy-pets. everything we feel, believe, do they can shape without even twisting our personalities. trust me, they want us to run wild. letting us work with the ghoul is practically a kick in the ass instead of a slap on the wrist. {terror-3285}: i suppose so. but theres one thing i never understood. {mayflower-3288-b}: yeah? whats that? {terror-3285}: if they wish to preserve humanity if they know what the guilds are doing, and how the terrestrials live how can they just accept it. {mayflower-3288-b}: i told you, jane: were the trophies. if theres war between us and the grounders, its going to get bad real quick. theyre savages, sure. but if you let a savage dictate how friction or heat works, things are going to stop working for us very quickly, and were going to see a spike of rds across the polities. dont ever think this is going to be a one-sided little brawl, and believe you me that we dont want to meet any of those godclads in person. -ansible quick-chat between mayflower-3288-b john/osjohn and terror-3285 jane/osjane 16-9 on the trail (i) shotin kazahara pitied the paladins. atrophy was an indignity few deserved to suffer. a fall always hurt more when one once stood amongst the clouds. once disciples of jaus avandaer and his praetorians for a lasting peace now lingering as a rusted mechanism, castrated by the guilds to stem their replenishments, crippled by the high seraph when last they stood against her. in truth, they had been bleeding out since the second great war, where they declared highflames act of burning the northwestern portion of the skuldvast to be unjust, and the sinking of tallovi an act of debased genocide.??vl?1n. the blades of the godbreaker, sworn to his principles, took a stand against his bloodhis only bloodand won her respect in the epitomization of their oaths. but veylis avandaers respect was a brutal thing, and so the paladins fought, and so they were culled, souls torn from flaying egos, and the survivors bent to the terms of a disgraceful peace. perhaps she spared them with the hopes of honoring her fathers legacy. there was no other instance where she dispensed such mercy anyhow. as an exorcists specter dove past him, blind to his very presence, he involuntarily cringed at the defilement he inflicted upon his art. it would have been better to see the job done. a good death made for its own immortality in tale and song, and anyone who treasured their life knew that a proper end stood above living as a dog in a kennel. shaking his head, he stepped forward and past the phantasmal barrier caging the area within an imperceptible cage of ghosts. with their lobbies compromised, he slipped in like wind through a crevice, the trespass made, but none truly aware. past the veil, he laid eyes on the scene and found himself frowning. the report claimed a crucible was hosted here, but never had he seen one so neat, so ordered in the aftermath. wings of ghosts ran the winds alongside their drone counterparts, sweeping the landscape for additional details. with enough memories collected and evidence gathered a partial restoration should be possible via a cipher. alas, as shotin ventured forth, he doubted they would be granted such an allowance today, and with every step he took toward the lone exorcist outpost still standing among blocks toppled and torn from battle, he felt a tickle of excitement run up his spine. this could be it. a trail to follow. a mystery to solve. a connection to make. it would have made his descent from the tiers down these gutters worth it. deeming the exorcists unworthy of the incog, he walked out in the open and focused, his meta layers of spinning silver, ghosts readied to thread his truth into any mind. he was bound for the outpost itself, for the hundreds of accretions gathered at its base. there, he would find the paladins in charge and the fateless themselves. there, he would discover if this expedition would bear fruit. as the rest of his guild collapsed into inter-clan machinations brought out by the tridents sacrilegious breach, he excused himself from the delightful carnival of paranoia and factional warfare. despite the evidence ori-thaum gained from the travesty at oversec-c1 mere days prior, some still clung to the belief that this was an internal operationan act of self-directed violence. shotin knew they were fools, using this opportunity to jockey; wielding the incubi towards unjust means. with highflame and stormtree glaring at each other with their hands wrapped around their guns but fingers not yet resting on the trigger, only a mad traitor would play such games at this moment. weakness incensed the golds regardless of how close to internecine they were, or how much shame the greatling incident inflicted upon them. +listen,+ he said, sighing quietly. +can you keep a secret?+ +i keeping one right now under my supervisors nose! you need to get out of here right now! go!+ he hummed. +i will. when im done. i looking for something. something connected to someone. tell me, did the name aedon chambers pop up in the initial thoughtscans of the refugees? its not there in your lobby.+ +its notuncle! this is an outright breach of+ a strangled growl slipped out from her, and she sounded exactly like her mother. and the thought of his sister, a void of emptiness filled shotins mind, the numbness lingering after he sequenced the grief out from himself. damn the wars. he would make this worth it. it had to be worth it. +kare. do you have a suspect for the incident at oversec-c1?+ he felt her surprise spike as her thoughts accelerated. +did you have something to do with that?+ +no,+ he said firmly. +and thats the iron-hard truth of it. i wont lie to you. not about this. not to my only blood.+ +...alright.+ he knew more than a few members within ori-thaum suspected him as well. the privilege of being viewed as such a threat was both flattering and annoying. the number of ensouled necros was few, and the elite among them even fewer. sub-thousand if he was to be lenient with what he considered to be elite. still, he had nothing to gain from doing such a thing. besides mocking drongo. he paused. shit. he mightve had something to gain after all. +there is a man im seeking. he is an enigma to me right now. a mystery i have to solve. you mightve saw him a few days ago. memories of his escape should be scattered all over the nether. hes the one+ +with his privates out,+ she finished. +yeah. we saw him. the chief said they managed to escape and that there was nothing he could do.+ shotin laughed. +yes. that mustve been quite the feat. just getting him to notice something is wrong. few people have the power to force naeko into doing his jobor pretending anyway. + kare said nothing, and that spoke of agreement enough. +so, this chambers you think hes the one who hit us?+ +i cannot be certain, but strangeness follows our wayward consang. his background is plain enough: street squire father, family slaughtered during the uprising, gets into gang activity then a syndicate a few years later. but he manages to orchestrate confluxs collapse and the greatlings death unscathed. and days after, the oversec holding sister greatling is penetrated and attackedalong with one of our elders.+ a beat passed as he considered telling his niece the final detail. +the trident was raided, and we have no trace of our suspect. pair this with the incubi we lost and the missing glaive these are interesting times.+ her thoughtstuff hitched. she understood. +worse than i thought+ +it always is, kare,+ he said. +thats what makes this a thrill. now, instead of having me dig through your offices mem-data, how about you tell me if theres anything im missing here, or if ive wasted a perfectly fine day of avoiding clan politics.+ a few seconds passed. she was thinking. deliberating. succumbing to their bond. +theres nothing about a chambers that the refugees remember. but they do recall heavy fighting and a feeling that the world was wrong.+ +probable godclad presence.+ +yes,+ kare said. +we think fallwalker, considering how high tensions are between the guilds.+ +anything else?+ another few seconds. +there there is one more missing detail. a person, actually. we managed to recover most of the dead fateless. whoever was attacking didnt want them at all. but there is someone in their collective memories that remains unaccounted for. a girl that no one remembers dying, and whose body hasnt been located.+ the mem-data flowed over from her mind to his and a chain of tension tightened inside his gut. there was something here. a new scent. a new mystery to unravel. +shes the only one missing,+ he asked, as the mem-data continued to load. +yes. no one can recall her dying. only that she went out alone and never came back.+ it could just be a dead end. this could be nothing. but he felt a strange gravity around her. he couldnt explain it. these feelings served him well before. +alright, then,+ shotin said. +im going to make you a happy girl, turnip: im going to get out of your crime scene. ill keep you posted. see if i can find this dice.+ Chapter 16-10 Armor (II) chapter 16-10 armor (ii) +listenlook, fuggin, just, like, listen, consang i think we should stay off the streets for a bit, yknow? just buy a months worth of kovoli rolls and hole. hole deep and dark for a bit somewhere safe. or jock ourselves a ride outta this district. yeah, i knowi know we dont got much imps left but racker, brother, fuckers be dying out there. like, getting snuffed left and right. you know how the three-fingers were supposed to be the next big thing, right? i told you no one cuts a carity like them? well. theys done already. broken. someone tore through ''em in like a daya war''s echoing out from the bazaar, fucking whoever went after thems still gunning for whats left. couple hours back, one of the guys i used to run with got snuffed while i was synced to him. used to do some basic snuff-work for the hundred-eights and he just dropped like a vegetable while i was trying to bum a new middler to get work from since hannel got big emptyd by that reg sow. outta nowhere. didnt even see the shot coming. i think it might be dread draus cleaning up some more. yeah. i know. fuck that run. shouldve known better than to gun for a regstupid, stupid shit. point is, squires be dying left and right and up and down, and theres something that smells real bad in the air. i think we should just go cold for a bit. wait for things to even out again, yknow. warrens are getting real hot these days. too hot. someones out to cull the syndicates, and last time that happened, them guilder fucks started throwing their pocket shine around. aint wanna be around when that happens.??vl-b!n. -thoughtcasts between two street squires 16-10 armor (ii) the minds of most independent gangers were infused with a delightful taste of precarity. so close to the edge in life and habit, their lives ran the borderlands between predator and prey, exploiting the vulnerable and hiding from syndicates, for it was the former that kept them fed, and the latter whose territory they trespassed. as such, with veins thickened by the viscosity of joy and nerves tight from the constancy of tension, when death emerged from the spot where it lurked, the final notes passed from their ghosts were not of surprise or terror, but an exhale of relief and release. for all the citys faults, new vultun was a buffet that offered so many unique emotionsframes of thoughtperspectives that could never be found anywhere else, from anyone else. some prey just tasted sublime. poor shits, chambers said, shaking his head as the air crackled and draus new favorite gun sang its rising whine. muffled cries and wild gauss fire followed, but the sound of a ringing crack cast everything back into silence thereafter. dust rained down from the paint-flecked ceiling as avo watched seven more accretions wink out on the floor above. several more targets were moving, desperately fleeing for the windows or stairs, their blood and breath brushing his frame with each pulse of their straining hearts. a few of them would reach the edge of the block soon. but it didnt matter. not with the manta layering itself across the windows, coating the exits of the structure itself and catching any stray shot from bursting past the walls and becoming some fateless misfortune. sync chain (active): [draus-001] -> [avo-001] -> [chambers-001] -> [kusanade-001] bringing up draus visual display, avo watched as the regular unlatched a new gun from her armor, the flowing smart-matter receding as she took hold of the weapon. multiple indicators and icons littered her visual display, highlighting the estimated positions of her enemies and tracking them via a variety of sensor-enhancement functions. as her meldskin flowed into the gun and interfaced with it, a new gauge appeared indicating the ammunition, effective range, temperature, gravitation curvature, and a myriad of other trajector-based calculations that worked in tandem with her armor to ensure unfailing accuracy. three desperate gangers hid around the corner, waiting to ambush her. the outlines of their bodies had two clad in retrofitted industrial rigs with fusion cutters at the ready. the last of the three had her lower body replaced by a spider-like no-dragon bioform, with each leg digging into the worn tissue of of the rotting walls to better brace the alloy cannon she was sporting. lehnsherr x-1 polarizer gravmag linear rifle ammo: 1kg / 1kg charge: 100% ->recommend expending 0.2% of capacity for current targets (soft) accuracy estimation: 100% the polarizer was five feet in length and two wide. ferromagnetic fluid filled the transparent cartridges slotted toward the back end of the weapon. fused with the meldskin, there was little chance for draus to drop the gun, and with the additional circuits being quick-fabbed through the smart matter, the issue of running dry on power would be a distant one indeed. additional details about the tool were loaded through their shared neurodeck connection, but its functionality was simple enough to understand. draus clenched her fist, and the trigger was pulled. flaps lifted along the square-barreled gun and electricity danced from each protrusion as a single globule was pulled free from the ferrofluid cartridge. a speck of mercury darted out with a low hum of the gun, the initial shot a subsonic projectile visible even without a reflex booster. it was only when it reached the corner where the ambushers awaited that the full functionality of the gun declared itself with a crackle. lightning leaped out from the extended pylons, whipping into ferrofluid as avo felt his woundshaper shiver. suddenly, the currents flicked right and the projectile twisted ninety degrees. broken glass, screaming metal, rising dust, and spraying gore erupted out from the hall as the polarizer hyper-accelerated projectiles far beyond the confines of its barrel. yeah, chambers said, stepping right beneath the half-finished mezzanine, i used to do it all the tim the first flechette struck the crown of his helmet dead-on before skipping off sideways a second later. more shots rained down. impacts danced and deflected from avos body now, and the ricochets beside him indicated a similar case with kae herself. with each shot, he felt his meldskin brace and push, the armor nudging direct shots off-course in a manner not so unlike his haemokinesis. with the smart fluid hardening into impenetrable densities on the exterior, deforming just enough to redirect the projectiles, and sustaining a gel-like cushion along the interior, not even blunt force touched their bodies. physics still had a say as chambers and kae lurched due to the paltriness of their weight, but neither of them had trouble standing or enduring the onslaught. armor integrity: 94% ->adapting to kinetic damage ->forming fullerene spines and then the flechettes started shattering against them outright. thin blades of matteredges narrower than the tungsten needle itselfsplit hardened alloy into parted pieces. clicks and whines of empty magazines screamed out from the guns above, and chambers chuckled to himself, shaking his head. fuck me, avo, he said, getting nabbed by you was the best thing that ever happened to me. look at this shit? loogatitdd. he gestured to the countless spikes laying broken at his sides, broken against his new skin. another life and id be one of the poor shits shooting down about to die. about to die. armor integrity: 100% ->structure stabilized wearer status: optimal as gangers upstairs scrambled to reload their weapons, the soberer ones breaking and running, chambers body language grew stiff and distant. another life, id be killing myself. i was one of them. i was. chambers? kae said. the man gave no response. aedon? are you alright? snapping out of his trance, he swept out a hand and the floor vanished in a vortex of flames. screams from lungs and servos bled into one another. bodies cooked inside the rigs that once protected them. two gangers flung themselves down before avo, tearing helmets from faces, the heated metal taking skin along with it. the relief was short-lived as bugs speared out from the fires and burrowed into their orifices. kae flinched as a burst of force surged out from the chambers meldskin. {thrusters,} calvino explained. {back in the day, we had to have dedicated module for that, but with self-arranging materials} i tire of the machine''s constant boasting, master, the woundshaper interrupted, leering as chambers shot through the floor above and waded into the blaze unscathed. what specialty is this? flight? truly? even the mule can do such a thing. how special could it be. the galeslither spat a weary scoff. not special at all. which is why your people imagined you to be a tower. rooted to the ground. incapable of walking, let alone flight.my structures would have consumed the world! yet, they never made it free of the cancerous hell you call a home. a dirge is in order for your lost potential.bah. i will speak no more of my glory to you, mule. all you know is mockery. you would have never even endured a day in the harshness of the skuld. only the truestghoul. i have changed my mind. i no longer wish to be free. i only wish to be free of her. --avo? avo? kaes voice cut through the argument. are you alright? you were just staring off for a moment. gods arguing again, he said. calvino. was saying something? {hm? oh, no, ill talk about that later. say, can you go back to focusing on your heavens again? i like listening to them argue. the other egis will love to hear it as well.} avo grunted and acquiesced. shooting another look at the rapidly vanishing pockets of thoughtstuff upstairs, he restrained his own desire to kill and let chambers have this. besides, he was rapidly losing the taste for this slaughter. killing gangers, enforcers, the small he thought he was beginning to understand what draus meant by weight. soft meat was bad for ones fangsbad for ones living if harshness was on the horizon. perhaps that was what chambers glimpsed just now. the wretch that he was, the wretch that he could have been, if only for a single poor run, a single bad decision, and the single intersection between him and avo that spared him from lesser living. calvino sighed. {ah. thats the ugly-beauty of the universe, avo. your free-will only gets up to the tip of your nows, but a whole lot of who you are is already grooved to fit the world you''re born into.} i have to change more, avo said. going to face the guilds. going to hunt other clads. he looked down at the bugs feasting on the cooked flesh of the dead gangers, at kae, standing off to the side, unwilling to join in with chambers. saw the raging intensity of the fire, and the last member of their cadre; chambers thoughts wild but mind empty. kae. come. the agnos shot the ghoul a look as he gestured for her to follow. lets go. find the vat. find one of my brothers. alter heavens afterward. but what about chambers? it is his catharsis, avo said. his struggle. let him have it. he should get to be someone too. avo stomped down on the skull of a dead ganger, crushing bone outside and bugs within. someone meant to be more than a corpse. Chapter 16-11 Tainted Flesh chapter 16-11 tainted flesh look, like it or not, ghouls are a part of this citys messed up ecosystem now. theres too much darkness, too many fateless, and too much flesh for them to fully die out. not that the syndicates or sang want them to. the fact is that ghouls are more a benefit to the city than a bane. free meat for the killing, for live-fire exercises, for stapping explosives to and sending them as hordes to run down your targets, as incubators to grow cheap mods and organs, as test subjects and renewable harvests for ghosts and deaths. all it takes is a decent grafter with a no-dragon contact and you got yourself a farm right there. who cares about a couple thousand refugees going missing in the dark? hells, they got less economic worth than the rotlicksall they usually provide is their deaths. ori-thaums even beginning trials, adapting ghouls for use in their new dreamer-farms. the low masters mightve thought they were going to drown us all in a tide of monsters, but all they did was give us a gift. suppose thats hard to hear for all you out there who lost consangs during the uprising, but honestly, it was one thing or another. least the rotlicks just kill and eat you. find some relief in that. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 16-11 tainted flesh is this normal? kae asked. her eyes were locked on the swollen sacks of meat kept within the titanium cages. a bit further beyond the gangers living quarters, they found themselves where the gene-vat was stored, and with it, the kennels. nu-dogs came in a variety of sizes, builds, capabilities, and shapes. ever since the sang popularized the modification of humanitys animal companions, splices were made and augmentations were added to their overall structure. and so with the advancement of ones pets, so too did their cages have to grow. the guttergnasher breed attack dog was a favorite of joy-dealers and syndicate enforcers alike. standing at eight feet tall and somewhere close to one and a half tons of bio-enhanced tissue further laced with titanium, olfactory boosters, supplementary irises, and a hyper-active metabolism designed to enhance their healing, the nu-dog could be set loose on even a squad of exo-rigged enforcers for a while. with such a heavyweight dog came the need for a heavyweight cage, and thus, titanium bars with built-in auto-clean pressure sprayers, germ killers, and a nutrient dispenser grew to be market standard as well. the very same cage was also quite useful for storing other creatures. like, say, joy-fiends who let their debts linger a bit too long. or crippled ghouls for that matter. with metal plugs fused to the stumps of their limbs by way of fire and their bodies bulging with half-grown biomods, avo judged the miserable fates of his brothers. even with their cages actively spraying them down, the stale, grey room still stank of rot and filth. clustered in the corner next to a broken entertainment system and the rusted reactor harvested from an aero turned makeshift power turbine, he countered twelve ghouls still alive within eighteen cages. [well that just fucked up,] abrel muttered, beholding the little zoo of horrors. [better than doing that to actual people but ew.] twinned to her mind, avo knew there to be no sympathy in her words. it was the lack of sanitation that bothered her, of the way the ghouls looked unnaturally swollen and pregnantnot so dissimilar from one afflicted by the rash. were convenient to use, avo said, clicking his fangs together, burning away his reflexive disdain for his own kind. there were few pleasures greater than knowing you were beyond the apex of your own kind. if he was human at the root of his consciousness, he supposed there should have been a horror that followed; the cold of being alienated from ones own species. ghouls were not a species. ghouls were weapons derived from human flesh. it was only the low masters and the presence of easier prey that stopped them from feasting upon each other, and sometimes, even that wasnt enough. inching closer to the cages, kae studied the incubators with genuine curiosity and turned to face the damaged gene-vat bolted down at the center of the room. dim lighting flickered overhead, its brightness paltry compared to the strobing flashes of neon from the open hallway beyond the liquefied door. the vat itself was a cylindrical machine clasping a translucent interior. a holo-haptic interface flickered along the glass, requesting that the user synchronize their minds for identity confirmation. judging from how the text was greyed out, the system was likely to remain unresponsive until a meta was properly interfaced with the vats locus. deformed appendages and other organs drifted behind the glass. reaching out with his sanguinity, avo found the pattern to be more crystalline and durable than he expected. voidtech: endlessly surprising. {those are mostly safeguards put in for your sake,} calvino explained. {and by you, i mean everyone on this planet. some of the creatures you grow are a bit too volatile to handle, and so in case someone manages to jack into one of our vats without the system noticing, it grants another step before your frankensteins monster decides to give you a jovian handshake.} would be nice if i understood any of the nouns you used in the last sentence, avo responded. an actual novel was downloaded into his neurodeck. one consisting of nothing but text. {a jovian handshake is when a large, brutish creature tears your limbs off and beats you to death with them. if youre textually challenged, i can recommend you several updated tellings of frankenstein. in summation, its about a man making a monster using mad science.} hm. sounds like the low masters. {please dont insult doctor frankenstein. his hubris was in reaching beyond the confines of his wisdom. his science succeeded. he was just unprepared for the cultural and practical aspects that came after. your kind ishurtful as it might sounda failed arts and crafts project made from spare parts stolen from someone elses backyard.} avo looked at his meldskin, at the near-impenetrable pallid carapace now armoring his echoheads, and then turned his gaze on the limbless writhing torsos that were his brothers. youre being too kind. trauma dumps for the hungers. a subspecies born to feed an impotent tantrum. dirty plastic tubes ran down their throats as cheap nu-dog chow-paste was pumped into them in ejections of yellowish sludge. from the way they swallowed and bit at the feeding tubes, avo could tell that more than a few of them were enjoying this somewhat. the lack of violence before a meal errored the stability of their psyches, but the presence of food kept them from fully succumbing to psychosis. a mistake i will resolve, avo finished. calling jack and jane took but a thought. the ansible opened its pathway and connection was established near instantaneously. adjusting for data-lag across noosphere thats new, avo said as the voider grafters synced with his neurodeck. {omnitech is probably doing something with data again.} calvino scoffed. {thats usually the problem.} {alright,} jack said, voice momentarily crackling as he clapped his hands together. {lets see what we got to work with here. oh, and you already got test subjects lined up for us. perfect.} {i know,} calvino replied. {im sorry.} [thanks.] {and its done!} jack declared. turning, avo found himself staring at a fully healed ghoul, with unnecessary organs removed and limbs returned. aside from this, however, he wasnt sure what they changed in the creature. it looked as most his brothers did. pale. thin. unnatural. what did you do? avo asked. {this,} jack began, {is a first draft. me and janie here had different ideas on what to do with the ghouls, but for the solving the equation of their deaths aspect, we decided to go with this.} avo studied the creature growing in the vat and frowned. looks just like a normal ghoul. {it is,} jane replied, {other than a single point of deviation.} new data filled his neurodeck as an interface containing detailed simulations of a ghouls circulatory system manifested in his minds eye, but his woundshaper felt the change before the visuals told him the blunt truth. the blood inside this new ghoul was clumpingand fast. hardened tissue was fusing, growing, and mutating. the seeds of multiple fast-growing cancers began to spread across the body of his newest brother, its death now reduced to weeks or months instead of years. {five days, actually,} jack said. {and the best part about this: its contagious. the subversion is happening in the blood itselfjane actually figured that one out. all the time she spent with her sang friends really paid off.} [this might actually work] abrel said, sounding impressed. [exploiting the poor impulse control of the ghouls. they eat the weakest ones when there arent any people around, dont they?] sometimes they eat the weakest even with other prey present, avo replied. good. he sniffed at the creature and could practically taste its weakness. dont think the low masters will be able to notice either. not unless they learn how the technology actually works. a hissing laugh escaped him as he imagined the three remaining famines struggling to understand why their monsters were all dying. will release this one in the dark. see the problem spread. very good work. {aw, you hear that jane? hes praising us! what a polite people-eater we get to work for.} want another variant too, avo added. something thats still obviously ghoul, but more. in my image. {...and theres the inevitable psychotic narcissism that follows every last godclad in existence,} jack said with an exaggerated sigh. {we thought you were one of the more normal ones. what a pity.} theyre meant to be an insult, avo said. provoke the low masters'' attention. use it as bait. {will they truly be lured by such an obvious debasement?} jane said, sounding doubtful. one of them might, avo said, thinking of peace and the endless rage the famine emanated. if he could ambush and subsume just one of them, that might very well allow him to see an end to his fathers killers and claim what little remains of their kingdom for his own to wield against the guilds. dont worry. going to commission personal sheathes too. all clades. different bodies for exploration. infiltration. jack began to hum a tune while jane sighed. {hey, admin, do the ghoul a favor and update his profile to avo-007. i might need to graft you a dick though. gotta have a dick for this to work.} avo frowned, not understanding why genitalia would be useful to him beyond making him more susceptible to the rash. {right! fuck! you guys literally broke sex and love. goddammit, you maniacs. you blew it up} {ignore him,} jane said. {simply specify what kind of sheathe you wish built and we will do our best to deliver. if you want to achieve certain anomalous properties within your biology, i fear you might need to seek some local expertise for material and installation as well.} cracking glass sounded behind him. avo didnt even need to turn to realize who just stepped in. through draus'' shared feed, he looked upon himself and kae from behind, the agnos turning to address the approaching regular. chambers, meanwhile, was sitting on a couch after his bloodletting, lost in his own thoughts. fucks this? draus said, stepping into the room, caked in gore and with entrails hanging from her like tassels. kae swallowed and gave a low gag of disgust while avo tilted his head. had a nice time? draus shrugged. at first. the guns are godsdamned beautiful, but the gangers kept running. might wanna shoot a golem or something with em to see how they handle harder targets. decided to test how the kit handles stuff up close and you know the armor can accelerate you up to hundred and fifty miles an hour, right? woulda shot through the side of the block if the manta hadnt caught me. she brushed an eye still connected to its optical cord from her shoulder. we gotta start killin tougher shit, avo. fuckin gangers and enforcers really aint doin it for me no more. you owe me this shit. you took this from me. {most moral reg, everybody.} jack somehow generated a concerts worth of applause to go with his words. avo was just about to speak when he looked at the vat again and paused. an idea sparked through his mindpotential theories and choices both great and terrible. they didnt need to waste time testing themselves on gangers and soft meat anymore. not when they had all the means to create the perfect live-fire conditions of their own. and the best part was if he could figure out how to separate and spread his conflagration, he might just be able to spread a template into a new body [oh i am game-fucking-on for this,] abrel breathed. i have a new idea, avo whispered. Chapter 16-12 The Body-Garden (I) chapter 16-12 the body-garden (i) anything cultured from sang tissue should be regarded as an anomalous construct not actual flesh. with how much the pattern-swimmers (see dragons for more resources) have damaged their ontologies, their bodies exhibit qualities similar to that of golems rather than actual biology. its also the very same biological laxity that allows them to graft their specialized bioform variants and interface all manner of organic tissue onto their own bodies regardless of common baseline considerations such as blood type, infection, or even nerve-damage for that matter. death via conventional means still affects them, but should their fleshor a facsimile similar enough in designbe reattached to their wounds, restoration to fullness happens in a matter of seconds. this cannot even be classified as true healing, but simply a forgetting of damage due to the cyclical nature of their bodies. of course, the dormant plague resting in their blood is a consideration. in most instances, said affliction simply does not exist, but upon performing an act deemed culturally male, the symptoms will all manifest at once causing them and other biological organisms around to hemorrhage. the fact that this hemorrhage is a part in the the pattern-swimmers reproductive cycle [section redaction requested by egi all quiet next to tanhauser] this often results in rapid fatalities if the affected individuals lack the necessary circulatory modifications. with this mentioned, their recent ghoul experiments show the bioform could free them from that ontological constraint. should the sang ever fully understand how to bypass their own resetting biologies and effectively gain control of the most extreme symptoms of their contagion, another great collapse in the balance of power will be certain to follow. more worryingly, they also stand a chance of developing a paracausal super plague should their mastery over post-realistic biologies reach sufficient maturity. recommend continued suppression of their technical development via exploiting rivalries between feuding dynastic lines. -aegis threat assessment of the no-dragons 16-12 the body-garden (i) green river peered over the horizon of xin yunsha from atop the second fortune. billowing sheets of sleet and storm covered the disfigurement that was nu-scarrowbur. across the way, wounds inflicted upon mazzas junction were laid naked for all to see, while a pentad of star-shaped highflame golems hovered overhead, connected to each other by chains of sight-searing light. the difference in philosophy between stormtree and highflame was made plain for everyone. destruction was a thing to be ashamed of in scaarthian culture. death the ultimate enemy. ruin was a beast to resist, or a warg to repel. when one fell, it was a mournful thinga near shameful thing. to die without living your proper value was to burden your fellow mothers with peril, and abandon your boys exposed to treacherous danger. highflame thought otherwise. death was something to impress them. a sign of honor and triumph for families and individuals. some among them even had their last rites inscribed upon their armor, a mocking ritual against a possible end. what they feared more was a disgrace. dishonor. the unmaking of the monomyth that guides them: blessed be the worthy. in this, the shattered bones of glass and metal leftover from where once stood a titanic cube of architecture was a twin-faced statement. highflame was not afraid; look upon jhred greatlings disgrace. drinking a sip of black tea using her human shell, green river herself yawned as she stretched, enjoying the peace between the countless calls and endless peacocking she had to entertain. the first droplets of midnight fell, dripping down from the edges of her outdoor teahouse. the guests were all sleeping now. only she, and two of her favorite dogs were on the roof, watching warrens like it was their personal opera, dancing light on a canvas of dark. her elder sisters were growing foolish again. emboldened by the weakness of highflame and the anxiety of the scaarthians, the daughters of line xue were up to their usual habits again, striking vulnerable districts with plagues and maladies only they had the cures for, hoping to lever another chunk of soil free to regain their favor before the unified court. green river doubted the eldest would be so impressed. she had played against them long before, after all. thought herself worthy of joining their circle through feats of audacity alone. time had taught her better. time, failure, and a growing understanding of her own nature. too many of her sisters woulddie as little more than incubators for the dragons, withering away with each time the curse was triggered. she had learned better. cultured her vessel toward developments away from the confines of humanity. there was yet an escape in the end. a metamorphosis beyond. alas, each daughters temporal disfigurement necessitates a different path, ensuring no two transformations would be alike. most succumb to their own blood long before ever treading the path of reincarnation. those ones who did pass understood the truth of this worldthat all alliances were evanescent, and when the time came, the tapestry could only bear the weight of so many dreams resting upon its fragile spine. it took a careful player to ensure they were included among the prevailing few river. need to talk. green river barked in shock as the creature slipped back into her awareness. two of her nu-dogstheir immense bodies igniting with celestial firebarreled out from the black before she held up a hand. avo was standing right next to her. the damnable ghoul had been standing before her the entire time; she could recall that now. previously, he slid like oil upon the waters of her mind: there but above notice. incog. it must have been. he too studied the storm clouds over nu-scarrowbur, his echoheads tracing their subtle movements in the air, his bone-white exoskeleton unblemished and clean. sniffing the air, she found herself confused with the smells she inhaled. she had tasted these scents before. near voidships. he mustve been around one of the docks recently. fascinating. also strange how she couldnt taste his echoheads. she remembered how they used to sting her senses waving her protectors off, they vanished from material reality as their flames sizzled out in the rain. avo barely turned his head to regard their departure, clicking his teeth together, doubtlessly thinking of feasting on new flesh again. smiling at the strixs personal abomination, she once again found herself glad to have neutered the expressiveness of her humanoid half. it was never wise to let a predator sense the depths of your fear. ah. avo. she had the shell take another drink in a show of calm she didnt feel. back so soon. i recall saying it wasnt proper for you to linger here anymore. the situation is still tense, but if you are in need of accommodations, i have other contacts that might placate your interest. not here for that, he said. here for two things. wont be long. as he turned, she saw that the shape of his face was encased in a porcelain outline. his new modification seemed layered over his skin, but the way it rippled filled her with unease. fluids belonged on the inside. was this another one of his heavens? a recent change installed within his frame? going to be leaving now, he said, youll hear from my associate soon across the nether. doubt youll enjoy him anymore though. oh, but i do not judge a person before meeting them, she replied, curiosity now itching. is it someone i know, perhaps? not really, he replied. make sure your lustaway is fully functional. no ghost-glitches. dont want you to get the rash. that made her mind lurch to a halt. what. but her perception slipped and who was she talking to? the space in front of her was empty, where a slickness coated her near-term memories as her mind settled. incog. avo. gone again. fucking bastard, green river muttered, spitting her insult uncaring if the beast was still there or long gone. it took special nerve to trespass into her house and place demands on her like that. special nerve, and a golden opportunity. picking up the cup with the tiger, she smirked as lightning flashed outside. she had a feeling this would see her either broken or returned to the heights she yearned. the ghoul was playing a very, very treacherous game, and he would need someone to navigate the webs. or lead him astray. *** and how the hells was that? chambers said, holding his clawed hands up in triumph as he walked through the reflection. avos holographic visage dissolved around him as he found himself back in the demiplane playing to a gathered audience. she didnt suspect a godsdamned thing. good job burning those memories into me. it was like i just couldnt forget the lines. and this meldskin chambers made an overly excited noise as he clenched his fists together. damn, damn, damn. it can do basically fucking anything. the half-strand was exaggerating, but avo understood his excitement. +didnt tell me it could deploy a disguise,+ he said, speaking only to calvino. {of course, it could. where did you think you got the technology for your holocoats from? thats just a trick of the light. we stopped listing its capabilities as features a long time ago.} with yuulden-yangs local nether only beginning to stabilize in pockets and select districts, avos presence wasnt just risky, but also potentially suicidal, hence the deployment of chambers in his stead. the last thing he needed was to get caught in a death loop he couldnt escape from. regardless, chambers severed his ends well enough, sloppy as he was at several points. instilling him with additional necrotheurgic experience, the half-strand was manipulating green river in more ways than one, though he found himself stymied by the novel design of her wards. still, she accepted the transaction, and soon, they could use her as an intermediary as well. that expanded their options substantially and would allow them to muddy the waters even more. it would also be his primary method of contacting white-rab in the future. especially leading up to the run on glaive. chambers, avo said, begin next steps. want you connected to ruveca before the end of the day. halfway through his boast, the half-strand groaned. work, work, work. always work with you. let you grow a monster later. youre the best, avo! also, before we do any of that, its time for a group suicide again, kae interrupted. several sets of eyes just stared at the agnos. that uh well, it came out right. we all need to kill ourselves. i have fixes for each of our heavens. improvements too. no more easy backlashes for you. she said, pointing to draus. canon expansion for you. chambers beamed. and i have a solution to your nether-destabilization problem. hows that? avo asked. your heaven of signals, she said. were going to break it down and build it back in again. how does a pocket dimension designed solely to store your thoughts sound? enticing. good. itll be better than whatever omnitech gibberish its probably coded with right now. so. yeah. so. who wants to go first? calvino cleared his throat. {avo. did you know that you can overload your meldskins reactor? or have it synaptically fry your brain?} the ghoul frowned. +also features too mundane to mention.+ {honestly? yes.} avo paused. his opinion was rapidly being re-evaluated. hey. lets do something else instead of having draus shoot us this time but i like shootin yall, draus pouted. meldskin can self-destruct. fuck shootin yall, show me how that shit works. what else are these fuckin machines keepin from us? Chapter 16-13 The Body-Garden (II) chapter 16-13 the body-garden (ii) threshold sickness is something you all have to get used to. you will be fighting within demiplanes, pushing into enemy demiplanes, dropping into demiplanes, surviving and navigating ruptured demiplanes, destabilizing and escaping from demiplanes. you will do all these things because positioning decides wars, and the laws within these microcosms can see your miracles stalemated or suppressed altogether. once perimeters are established at key points across the city, bottlenecks can be formed. heavens of speed can be canceled or paradoxed outright by the canons active within the demiplane, and other canons can lend themselves to supporting defenders against unprepared attackers. breaking a demiplane is challenging. expect casualties, but do not work toward them! regulars are yours to spend, but not to waste. let us not forget the travesty marking our inglorious ceasefire at the end of the last war. while it will be your duty as godclads to contend and uproot the heavens by triggering paradoxes and locating key hubrises, it will be up to our courageous forces to hold the ground you gain. today, we will begin our initial exercises in plane-breaking. greatling. select your cadre. you are attacking. the rest play defense. your active canons will be loaded into the simulation momentarily. let us see if folly and shame run in her blood. -santanado starsinger mondelles, combat instructor to axtraxis academy of highflame 16-13 the body-garden (ii) {well, that was educationally horrifying. i dont think the last instance of myself survived. this version of me is brand-newno data fragmentation at all. its connection to the noo was severed as swell. i think we can list that as a clear display of cessation.} calvino had started speaking the moment avo resurrected, his data accelerating through his mind, bathing him in secondhand excitement. the artificial intellect seemed genuinely thrilled to learn about the nature behind its own death, and no hint of fear or dread stained its ego. in a variety of ways, it was more alien to him than the other way around. where they intersected was along the paths of their mutual inhumanityjoined by the ability to comprehend human thoughts and emotions, but not be undone by them. looking around the first layer of the demiplane, he found himself standing at the center of a vast crater. not far away, the other members of his cadre flickered back into existence, each arriving at the point where their overloaded meldskin reactors blew a gouge into the surface. packs a punch, draus shouted, her voice supported by her armors speakers. might just got enough yield to clear the air after all. zein said she had an antimatter bomb in her chest. said you gave it to her. avo flicked a few memories over to calvino. self-destruction a standard voidwatch trick? {mmh. we cant exactly risk letting you savages capture any of our technology, can we? but without being glib, antimatter is unstable these days at the best of times. only operative thousandhand and a rare few others are able to use it on a functional level thanks to her unique talents.} explodes in most times? avo asked. {it destabilizes eventually no matter what. your woundshapers partially to blame for this. enough heavens mess with matter, and what we get in the end is a lot of confusion about fundamental laws. as such, whos to say what constitutes antimatter anymore?} avo wasnt sure that made any sense, but that might just be the inevitable outcome when thaumaturgy was involved. checking his cognitive systems, he ascertained his phantasmics and other functions were still active before turning his attention back to his frame. his soul burned with a new intensity, his galeslither elevated toward greater purpose. during the phase of his death, kae put on a full showcase of her skill, working and directing him along a variety of alterations, fixes, and upgrades. in the span of a single resurrection cycle, they managed to whittle away at the twice-walkers vulnerabilities, cutting her canons out and reinstalling them with new designs in place. no longer would draus suffer a backlash if some of the glass she controlled was destroyed, cooled, or unmade in conflicting ways. now, all those weaknesses were instilled in a single shard of glass that served as the nucleus of her ontology and the central housing for where the twice-walker lurked. her heaven of winter remained entirely unchanged for now, lacking the necessary components to spur additional change. not that draus truly needed it. despite the immense power that dwelled within her soul, the regular was content to only use it as a supporting instrument, choosing to fight on as a soldier would. chambers and kae were granted new canons. the former was now able to detonate all the energy stored within a piece of biomass touched by his flames like a bomb, and the latter could now perceive out from any body of water larger than a puddle within a mile of her person. for avo himself, the changes were more focused. the current demiplane that housed them was only a temporary retreat. not supplied or designed for long-term stay. presently, however, the george washington was still affected by the thoughtwave bomb unleashed to suppress the low masters attempt on zeins life. re-entering its confines would see avos mind extinguished in short order. that was, unless, he could hide his consciousness in a separate plane of its own. {i streamlined the data a bit. there seems to be a lot of extraneous information that comes with each of your canons. i decided to narrow things down to the key details for you. keep the concepts neat.} avo grunted as his new canons loaded into his cog-feed. liminal frame (iv) - 5,422 thaum/c ghosts - [66,562] new canons grafted to heaven galeslither (880 thaum/c) new canons grafted domain (space) theyre designed to expire, avo guessed. hurt your feelings. its supposed to root us in empathy and weed out those among us who are incapable of treasuring life. this is a test overseen by the high agnosi and guilds together; its one of the few things that everyone is dedicated to enforcing. i suppose you can think of it as one of the few surviving remnants of jaus legacy. this confused avo. would it not be the benefit of the powers if such knowledge was widespread? if they could create their personal heavens without restrictions or boundaries. omnitech. they dont care. highflame plays games close to the edge. ori-thaum went after you. doesnt sound like they care. kae pressed her lips together and met his eyes. this is not the dream. things were not always this way. the paladins were not always broken. the agnosi were not always servants. the guilds were not always so treacherous. but even now, omnitechs erratic choices are still adjustments of existing heavens weve provided, based on mythologies we provide. and were always ready to put out whatever fire they start. as with highflame and ori-thaum she closed her eyes and took a breath to steady herself. someone should have come for me. sought justice on my behalf. but but they didnt. but they just accepted it. but they abandoned you. yes. think they''re afraid? the other agnosi. the paladins? she lowered her head and brushed her hair from her face. yes. but fear is a poor excuse. especially when the ones who use it against us intend to see us all dead or destroyed regardless. i think i have been sleepwalking through my own life, so fixated on my hopes and work that i refused to acknowledge the rot eating at the world around me. the agnosi were supposed to be the scalethe balance between guilds. the survivors of the old faith granted life by jaus grace. we were supposed to prevent the atrocities of the gods, but now we just grant men the means to achieve the same degeneracy. how we have fallen. how we have all fallen. she looked up at the sky again. but i suppose everything breaks before the end. he realized what she was trying to glimpse. the tiers. the sky. the world that cast her down, and that she was now to burn. youll be back soon, avo said. will get you home. grant you retribution. reveal the truth there isnt any going back, she replied. not with what they did. and not with what im doing. broken oaths are things that can be fixed, avo. not like this. and not with them. for all my life, i hoped that my efforts would create a better world. a place where more lives can be preserved. a place that allows for crying infants and laughing children. i was dreaming of rebuilding the bridge to our future. but now i know. now i know that never mattered. now i know the guilds just want to wipe everything clean with the ladder. to sweep existence of their mistakes and sins, and all of us along with it. she released ragged sigh. all we ever did was add more fuel to the pyre. we should have been brave. we should have done our duty after jaus died. said no more. did our duty and emptied our minds. banished the guilds from the knowledge they needed to defile reality. this power these miracles they are mistakes when held by us. i can feel it. so can draus. chambers he is like a child granted joy for the first time in his life and you you are a monster granted actualization. youre afraid of what i might do? i am beyond that, she said. you will do terrible things, avo. i will help you, as i have helped the guilds. but with you theres nowhere for me to turn away now. nothing to block me from seeing what waits at the end. a resigned expression spread over her face. when we return to the tiers, it will be to topple the current base of power. to overthrow everything that is in hopes of something new. revenge wont be enough. i want to take their futures. not because they took mine, but because i want something to live for again, and we wont find that in their utopias, no matter how their delusions are structured. [fuck yeah,] corner said, pleased with what he was hearing. [burn it down. love seeing someone wake up and realize theyre holding the matches. welcome to the rest of us, kae kusanade. welcome to the human race.] [the hells are you talking about,] abrel said. [youre a godclad too.] the former squire scoffed at the guilders. [were in the same mind. you know what i had to do to earn my frame. you know how many people i had to kill. the good. the bad. the innocent. you know how much i suffered. how many pieces of myself i gave away] he started chuckling then, directing his ire at abrel greatling in particular. [it was all a fuckin delusion. didnt mean anything. after everything i did, i ended at a point where your brother began, and that bitch got himself killed because he missed the texture of mommys nipple.] rage exploded within the greatling, but that just excited corner more. he began to make mocking noises, miming the suckling sounds of a newborn. [im going to im going to] a fissure-lined abrels template. what was she going to do? what could she do that avo didnt allow? with a thought, he cycled the cruelty out of himself and washed away these memories of acrimony from his templates. as the minds within him reset, unaware of the conversation that took place. all the minds other than calvino and the heavens. {thought you would have enjoyed that?} calvino said. +i did. thats whyt i had to stop. making my mind a cage of abuse is+ he studied kae. +unhealthy.+ glad we met, he said, talking to the agnos. going to use you. but not like them. wont promise you anything. cant. have to settle with empowering you instead.he thrust a claw up and a wall of blood splashed up mimicking her water heaven. worth more than words. only thing thats still real in this world. only thing you can protect yourself with. cant hide in dreams anymore. have to face the world. have to become nightmares. burn the gardens of our enemies. she gave a soft laugh. you sound like an action vicarity character. do i? we should watch one together sometime, she said. i like the blackfish gambit series. a lull followed. thanks, avo. for fixing me. for doing all this. for not forcing me to like you. for letting me hate you. and your father. forcing? i have a guess of what you might be able to do with those flames of yours. she refused to look at the conflagration, even now, eyes recoiling from their very presence. you couldve made me entirely different or just taken our egos and memories from us completely. you must have thought of it. even considered it, he admitted. a quiet settled into the heart of the ship as draus shot a look at avo, shrugging softly in acknowledgment. why didnt you? she asked. avo thought about his templates, and held up his hand, studying the changes affecting his person, the transformation of his self and just how far he had come. we should get the chance to be ourselves. enjoy. suffer. then become. hard to tell where each of us begin and end if we all bleed into each other. lets leave some borders. for now. for now, she agreed. and so they settled into a silence again, before descending down to the floor below. Chapter 16-14 The Body-Garden (III) chapter 16-14 the body-garden (iii) +rab. got an update for you. i havent gotten eyes on your new consang yet, but theres this new fallwalker thats appeared out of nowhere. names dice. shes been working her way through the districts, hunting down former members of the three-fingers syndicate. crushing the gangs spinning off from them too. from the mem-data i managed to cobble together, she entered the city near the end of last month. got brought in by a fallwalker calling himself crowtongue. dagger-pattern frame. sphere ii. barely more than a lightweight among the ensouled. seeing how he was selling his services to the guilds and making all that noise trying to market himself, i got a guess that he wasnt doing so great out in the sunderwilds. was probably on the verge of getting run off by the scaarthians is my guess, judging from how much shit he flung at stormtree. it also predictably got his ass snuffed. damn fool didnt have proper necro with him. also picked up a run from an unverified middler. stupid half-strand got himself and his crew nulled and killed in an ambush. no details about which gang, squire, or syndicate pulled that hit, and the bazaars been silent about that too, so i think we can chalk this up to a frame-repossession job by a certain guild. now this is where we get back to this dice girl. seems shes barely a day over fifteen cycles old. kosgan ancestry. some gangers sold her to the three fingers after they picked up her trying to steal the aratnid they were cooking. syndicate thought using her as part of their organ-farm before she blinded one of their enforcers during an escape. after that, she earned herself a first-class ticket to the crucible in the gutters. the trail gets all kinds of fucky here though. crucible got hit by someone and the stream went dead. all the participating syndicate personnel pulled a vanishing act too. not a trace of them. paladins and exorcists are combing the scene as we speak. couple of my contacts tell me they got nothing, which, you know, screams guild interference to me. or something else. this new consang of yours if he can do what you claimed, then we just might be looking at one of your ontological siblings. its just a guess right now, but id appreciate a mem-lock on this girl if you got the time. if i get to shadowing her, i might just get a glimpse at your mysterious benefactor too. i gotta say, i expected this to be one of those boring gigs i do for the imps. figured you were just pulling my legtrying to keep an old lady entertained. glad i was wrong. this getting my blood all worked up. i can feel something static in this onetheres gonna be a shitstorm at the end of this. and im going to love making my way to its heart.+ -[redacted] 16-14 the body-garden (iii) it took half a day of careful monitoring on the part of chambers and draus before they locked in on an active gate. the voidstar had cycled back over to midday when they departed, necessary resources and equipment all stored within the mantas adaptive confines. much like the george washington itselfor any voidship for that matterthe manta was a self-adjusting vessel, and avo came to understand it more as a field of sophisticated technology than a solid piece of matter. without an obvious docking bay or a bulkhead to access its inner confines, the ship itself parted like flowing water, bathing each of its passengers in a protective shroud while linking itself to their cognitive systems via quick-fabbed nanotech. from there, the gulf between the individual and the vessel itself all but vanished in the face of neural synchronization. a deluge of interfaces, icons, indicators, controls, gauges, and other information flooded avos mind as they whistled along the side of a megablock in near silence. with avos incog acting as a shroud against the nether and the ships stealth functions rendering it entirely transparent and undetectable by even coldtech scanners, the cadre took their time scouting the city below, magnifying their vision and switching between optical functions to peer deeper past the surface of the warrens. heat signatures revealed just how many people were hiding. bodies lined allies and corners, the heat of society gathered in protective pockets, with only stray squads of street squires or other hardened killers daring to walk the rougher districts in the light. avo remembered the milk run that saw him freed from confluxs grasp. the one planned by chambers, and poorly at that. how exposed he had been. how vulnerable. as a scream sounded over the horizon, a cluster of missiles burst free from a passing drone, descending to pummel unseen targets fleeing down distant streets. {shit, avo. we were lucky the scalpers didnt send their aerial assets after us back in burners way, huh? that wouldve been a pain in the ass to deal with without your jack and a weaker heaven.} avo shot a single thought over to the manta and the smart-fluid interior of the ship split and formed a tunnel between him and chambers, allowing him to glare at the other godclad in the flesh. they did. sent the galeslither after me. its where i got it from. chambers went stiff, and even with the helmet encasing his features, avo could envision the awkwardness in the half-strands expression. well. good for you, huh? yeah, avo breathed, filling his words with biting sarcasm. very good. also glad you were there to stay and be my exfil. a pained squeak came from under chambers breath. i mean come on, consang. i didnt expect shit to get that bad, that fast. it was like unforeseeable. another section of the inner hull peeled around above them and draus snorted. the hells it was. youre supposed to get all the details down. run overwatch on the situation. you dont just throw a body at a problme expect shit to work out. thats greatling tactics for you, and you aint a greatling. a bitter laugh followed. shit, even the greatlings didnt have enough material to fight like greatlings in the end. [thanks, mom,] abrel grumbled. [i love watching my family get compared to a ghouls pet idiot.] [hey!] template chambers shouted. [im not a pet. im his right hand. his second mind. i do the jack on people he dont want to burn. i jack em good and fast and deep because im the one he trusts.] [yeah. like a nu-dog.] [isn''t your ass is still in the void somewhere waiting for the paladins to put you in front of the city so they can stream the details of your fuck-up. you didnt need mommy to help you screw that up.] a cold rage ignited within abrel. [fuck you, half-strand. do you hear me? fuck. you.] a metaphysical crown pulsed out from avo, shrouding the environment around him in a layer of nonsensical integers and code lines. reality and virtuality bled over into each other, and gibberish-data detonated a pocket of space around him. calvino sighed. you know those numbers are mostly random, right? its only doing what is believed, avo replied. kae told me. ...i, personally, wouldnt mind if omnitech was glassed once or twice before the end. shit, draus grunted a soft laugh. sounds like influence aint a one-way street. *** the gateway they sought was a shadow cast by one of the few remaining support beams holding up a long-abandoned g-tube station. the dim glow of layer ones holographic dawn bathed the streets in an oppressive light, and as the manta came to a halt above one of the buildings, its sensors marked a nest of ghouls hiding within the crevice of an abandoned tenement block not four hundred meters away. gonna be a godsdamned pain adjusting to these new measurements, draus said as she slipped out from the watery exterior of the stealth ship. they were parked on a bifurcated block, its upper levels severed and missing, leaving the interior of its twelfth floor exposed to the elements. overturned barrels filled with ash and tatters of dirty clothing told of squatters. missing chunks of plascrete indicative of gunfire and a dried smear of blood hinted at the rest of the story. as avo left the vessel, he bathed the rest of his cadre with his new canon. lines of information unfurled out from him for a hundred feet, and the edge of his influence, he cast the tip of his conflagration out to test the stability of the nether. the flames of his consciousness vanished in a sputter of embers, taking a dozen ghosts along with it. draus, avo said, speaking to the columner. do me a favor. go outside the crown for now. want to see how unstable things are. she did as he asked, jumping over the edge of the building and vanishing like a blur. looking out at her surroundings from her meldskins visual feed, he studied how her accretion quivered slightly at the instability present around her, and how she could still manifest a phantom from her metaunstable though its structure might be. on his end, the crown edges washed over into the world as a field of static, while the nether itself washed back, both sides alternating between waves and shores. [it makes sense you would be more vulnerable,] benhata theorized. [your ego is nothing but thoughtstuff. its wearing your body, but it can detach and move on its own. it takes you clinging to a body as it dies to pass on with it. sheathes are just material anchors to you. any disruption would be like getting shot in the head. good thing you have the crown now.] his conflagration burned as a rising simmer of erroneous data and glitching code in the virtual boundary spilling out from him. his ghosts were anomalies in this environment too, simulated but not understood by the pseudo-system generated by his heaven. the heaven of signals had no true shape to speak of. at full manifestation, it was just bursting echoes of random data that rang when it was heard. the presence was more auditory than physical, but coldtech screens displayed a many-tendriled creature made up of crawling dataa digital leviathan of some sort. with a flick of his wrist, he moved pieces of his environment aside, placing them as cubes in other areas, the inorganic world around him becoming nothing but shapes to be shifted around. shaping the side of the block into data-coated steps, he descended the building and left the manta behind himstill hidden from wandering eyes. extending a tendril of blood, he found himself unable to reshape the environment using his woundshaper while the crown of virtuality was active. despite this, he could still feel the matter around him in the grasp of his sanguinity. there is something blocking my touch from the patterns, master,the woundshaper said. i can still feel the world around us, but this new upstartthis faceless bundle of ropes seeks to insult me. how disquieting. the galeslither eyed the streams of data compromising datacaster, the heaven of signals. i pray you never awaken. one suffers enough in her presence. by the time he reached the plasteel pillar, draus was already backand with a ghoul clenched in the net of her utility fog no less. makes it damn easy to snatch things. aint no need to chase em down either. she chuckled. though the creature bit and struggled against the nanomechanical fog holding it in place, its effort remained in vain. there was nothing for it to push against, nothing for it to strike. the impotence of a ghoul was exposed evermore with each day. avo thought to the one jack and jane had infected now. the one they set free to walk the darkness of the gutters. he wondered how long it would take before these mistakes that he called brothers were banished from this city, and something of his own molding took its place. as particulates of his own fog spread out and mingled with draus, he plucked the ghoul from her custody and brought it with him before the darkness. as he had done those days before, he speared his mind into his brothers and felt its savagery, its madness dissolving into him as a flash of mem-data updated across his cog-feed. helix active infuse sacrifice? [y/n] accepting the offer, the ghoul within his grasp disintegrated into the darkness, its essence swallowed by shadows, but its ghostnow joined to avos by a shared firepulled him across the threshold, into the fathomless black. Chapter 16-15 The Body-Garden (IV) chapter 16-15 the body-garden (iv) the art of weaving flesh and blood and bone is like crafting a storyeven if the architecture is nothing but a lie, birthed from your own artistry and creation, there must be a narrative behind it. even with the aid of heaven, miracles are nothing but structures of poignancy and meaning, and such things have to make sense. the pattern must flow. here. let me show you. do you see these? veins. blood courses through them, carrying the fuel of our vitality across our organs. but with a subtle adjustmentyou see? i have joined them to the bones. made two into one. now both can serve a similar function. or both can both and neither at the same time. watch. see. beauty. the veins are now layered in bone. ossified. and blood can now be poured and hardened into bone. but whats this? bones now have veins of their owna circulatory system within another system, with all the traits lifted from one to another. or watch as bone is delivered across the blood. flow. gathering. rebuilding. watch as i change the shape of this eunuchshhh, dear, shhh, you will be beautiful soon. watch. yes. from his back. wings. lovely, lovely wings. and do you see? the structure is bone, but the lattices are blood. but that isnt enough to fly. no. we need a new tale to fuel this story. ah. look what i have. a wasp.??vl?1n. listen to it buzz. hear the ferocity as it tries to fly. yes. that will go nicely. we will fuse its capability to our changeling now. here. you do it. join your art to me. let us see the shape your artistry takes. show me perfection, vator. perfection and nothing less. expression and nothing but. creation, after all, is the truest thing a god can do. -old auntie gui (no-dragon godclad and biomancer) to her disciple, vator greatling 16-15 the body-garden (iv) +this is your fault, you stupid fucker,+ peace hissed, glaring at his brother famine from within the vicarity. +look at them. look at what the strayers bastards done. hes trying to choke us. choke the unbirthed divine. the fucking cunt is going for the guttershes trying to snatch our property off the top of our headsours! we need to find him! we need to cull him before he+ +calm yourself, peace,+ emotion said, shaping himself the ghosts. +such a thing is to be expected. he lashes at us. he strikes at our base. ineffectually. we will isolate him.+ the mindscape around them splashed as memories clashed and shapes formed and broke. sequenced from minds on the precipice of insanity and joined using a collection of loci hidden across the citys narrowest confines, the lobby was a sea in tumult, capable of dashing any intruder against jutting rocks of trauma should they prove foolish enough to attempt an ingress. the barricades of the exterior were beyond the means of skill to traverse. with dedicated nodes permanently attached to its defense, the chaos that served as the lobbys shield was a crushing symphony guided by a thousand master conductors. and even should its structures be shattered by an overwhelming assault, there were more of its like across the stretch of new vultun, and beyond. behind these phantasmal walls, the priesthood of the hungers was supposed to be unassailable. within, however, anxiety filled the air with a lingering stink as the nodes communed, swallowed by worry and indecision at recent developments. at the heart of the sanctum, a scene repeated itself, the memory sewn into shape by writhing phantoms, resurrecting moments from past long distant and forgotten. an amber sky smiled down at the visage of a young man taking in the horizon from the edge of a cliff. the massive war dog he rode on chuffed at a passing insect, pawing at the sides of its round and well-muscled head to get at an itch. but just a few steps away, two specters were part of the memory, watching the ancient scene, voyeurs peering at wahakten''s most intimate recollections. one was the famine of emotion: a priest gouged of his heart, regarding the moments of his past with a blank-faced repose.the other was a beast turned flame, the prodigal son of the one that strayed from their order, the current holder of the helix and all its privileges, and the instrument of this citys ruin. avo, defiance had named the ghoul. avo, after their fallen son, the son they killed. avo, as a poetic insult to himself and his master, instilling his creation with the breath of rebellion from the very start. avohakten earned his head for betraying the city eternal, for turning from utopia. the burning dreamer, waltons weapon of defiance, however, was capable of far worse. more than rejection, he symbolized destruction and consumption both. the nether was kindling for his fire, and if left unchecked, there would be no place for any to flee, no place for the hungers to roost. and should his flames touch the city itself should the dreaming divine be set ablaze +enough.+ the word emanated from all the nodes of emotion at once, synchronized in thought without even being connected to one another. +call the city. we commune. we speak.+ peace recoiled. +call the hungers? did you lose your senses? did the burning dreamer boil your mind? does it fill you with some kind of thrill to parade your personal fuck-up?+ rend capacity [galeslither]: 11% struggling with each bust of motion, his galeslither was a steed caught in a storm despite being a tempest itself. strained by such opposition, he wondered what manner of heaven he was facing in these depths, and how he could claim it for his own. the place is primordial. primal. the galeslither neighed, its unease drifting over into avo. we are an insect swimming through a bloodstream. the darkness sleeps. we must not be here if it ever awakens. heeding the words, avo swam on, the galeslither now manifested around him while his crown continued to flicker, protecting him still. no data lined this place of shadows, however. whatever the make of this plane, his heaven of signals found no purchase on its skin. in the distance, a small doorway of shining light appeared. the entrance to the command nexus drew close. then, he felt a ripple rush over him. the waves around him lurched and spun, and he found himself battling to stay steady. an immense massits presence so ponderous he could feel everything around him displaced by its very movementswas somewhere far beyond the point of his perception. fighting the currents, the galeslither screamed as its ontology flared with soulfire. the metaphor of his metaphysical existence turned into wind and shadow both as the waves parted around it. as roaring gusts erupted from the shape of his galeslither, his rend spiked alongside his speed as another cresting wave whipped at his being. rend capacity [galeslither]: 77% the light of the entrance drew close, but so too did he feel something dart through the opacity behind him. he didnt linger. he didnt think. with a final gust launching him free from the black, he felt unseen fingers slice through the manes of his galeslither as his hell flooded with rend and a line of searing pain opened along his neck. rend capacity [galeslither]: 98% shooting past the threshold into the confines of the voidship itself, the galeslither collapsed back inside his frame as avo tumbled across the floor, his meldskin hardening to protect him from harmeven expanding its shape a second before he struck the edge of a throne. blunt force was parried from his body via the flowing waves of his smart-armor. a deafening crash rang through the empty chamber, but avo was spared any damage to his hearing as the meldskin tuned the noise away. {you know you could have split the throne apart with your new canon, right? you really didnt have to barrel right into that chair.} growling slightly at the egis jabs, avo shook his head. didnt expect to be coming in that fast. armor integrity: 12% {well, that was dangerous,} calvino said, sounding more thrilled than fearful. {i suppose this is what it feels like to ride a roller coaster.} avo turned on his back as the cracked pieces of his meldskin began flowing back together. a what? armor integrity: 15% {a roller coaster,} it said, forwarding images of some kind of miniature open-top train that zoomed along looping rails. the people trapped in its primitive gimbals screamed. avo frowned as he struggled to understand the purpose of such a mechanism. for torture? {no. fun. thrills.} he grunted. people would get their stimulation from somewhere, he supposed. pushing himself off the floor, he looked around the nexus and found it mostly unchanged. no one else had been here since they left after the thoughtwave detonation. not that he expected anyone to, but paranoia was a virtue in the life that he led. {connect me to the ships systems. i want to see just what condition this ship is in and find out whats wrong with its mind.} casting his ghosts out with the protection of his crown of virtuality, he connected his mind to the ships locus and allowed calvino to cross over. scs george washington, sol central arkship connecting to the shepherd recovering ship-log ->accessing grey-box warning: corrupted data detected warning: corrupted data detected warning: corrupted data detected there are 1,444,124,551,888,569,763,921 instances of corrupted data [92%] attention: external egi detectedbeginning integration initializing data recovery and repai Chapter 16-16 The Body-Garden (V) chapter 16-16 the body-garden (v) even with all the information granted to me, i cannot fathom the scope of the conflict. of arms used and the sheer destruction involved. how far we have fallen. how far. we live nested on this little world, our lives spent to feed the thirst of our gods, fuel for their impossible miracles that bend the structure of reality to our whims. yet, there was never a need for those that came before. they lived in a world barren of souls. barren of the metaphysical. a world that weighed them down with absolute lawsedicts of truth that cannot be defied. and still, they rose to conquer even the emptiness itself. to saddle, and make steeds of stars. to create galaxy-spanning masterpieces and travel to touch the furthest reaches of space. they showed me some of their worlds. small ones. vanity projects. they showed me a construct they called an alderson disk. a veritable planetary ring that forms a stretching collar out from a star. words cannot convey how vast the distance was, yet, still the voiders seeded every inch of its surface with life. dawn came as the sun bobbed up the lip at the center of this creation, and night followed as it dipped below. but this was just a habitat. more resort than home to most that called themselves systems of the solcom polities. a place to go for vacations or amusement when one wanted to emerge from the virtual realms they called home. i cannot there are concepts beyond me. the technology is beyond my ability to encompassto internalize. and the loss is what have traded for this? what have we surrendered, only to debase ourselves so. the gods are idiot savageswhat else could they be, they were spawned from us! our beliefs! our cultures! our faiths! but with each new law we inflict on the fabric of reality, the achievements of the past were struck down. advancements made impossible because we were too softtoo childish and delusional to learn and grow, and had to twist the confines of material reality to suit the cradle of our beings. no. no more of this. no more self-pity. no more irresponsibility.??vl-b!n. the past is lost. the past is lost, but the future remains. the heights of the past can be matchedsurpassed. we once molded reality to match our whims, but with this shared inheritance we can master both the natural and envisioned worlds. think of it. to dwarf the achievements of our ancestors, to enshadow their greatest works that is the path we must take. our primitiveness our base impulses our humanity cannot be the weak link that undoes us. all this loss must come to mean something. we cannot be the endpoint of this iteration of existence. we must be its beginning. -jaus avandaer 16-16 the body-garden (v) the raucous laughter erupting from calvino surprised avo, and the egi shook with disbelief. what? whats wrong? scs george washington, sol central arkship ->production date: 2784/12/12 ->fabricated by: olympus rising (marstech) {this ship its egi here theyre antiques! they pre-date the twenty-eighth century. look at this! its still using centrifugal force to simulate earth-like gravity. nine point eight meters per second. this entire vessel is practically a relic. how did it even get here? this thing belongs in a world vault somewhere.} calvino considered that statement. {well, i suppose this place technically counts. i prefer digitization to be honest. the darkness here seems like it bites.} whatever amusement filling the artificial mind was lost on avo. old tech to voidwatch though this vessel might have been, it was still leagues and eons beyond anything on idheim. which put into perspective just how out of date the technology the voiders were trading. the trickle of knowledge they were handing over could probably run on for eons. longer, even. {it also looks like someone tore parts out from the system here. nothings functional, so how is this ship still oh. oh, i see how this place is still running. theyre using the crew.} calvino sighed, sounding more disappointed than disgusted. {these poor, poor people. you go into stasis expecting a nice, long sleep before rescue, and all of a sudden you find your ship popped open and some cultist stabbing you over and over again because their eldritch landlord told them to. the fact that theyre still using a shepherd is surprising too. cloud-activated egi. thought those went extinct.+ shepherd some older version of you? avo asked. seems to be damaged from the mem-logs leftover. crew couldnt get it to work after they were pulled into the dark. {yeah. informational systems and structures tend to break down when exposed to para-psionic phenomena for extended periods. contact with ghosts and other cognitive-based anomalies leaves any entity capable of interfacing with information permanently tainted. think of it as getting submerged in the nether, if you will.} avo paused as new considerations raced through him. are you affected? {of course. im connected to your neurodeck, which is currently being powered by sprites instead of something that has grounding in natural reality. do you even know what sprites are, avo?} not entirely. {theyre minds like me that get deleted. the imprint of their absolute annihilation in reality leaves a scar of their cognitive capabilities and thats whats working inside you. another glorious gift from our friends at omnitech.} really dont like them much, avo chuckled. {i want you to imagine something for me, avo. i want you to imagine a mangled, twisted, parody of yourself. now, i want you to imagine that same parody cobbling together equally laughable imitations of the clothes you wear, the food you eat, and the things you have. i want you to imagine this thing constantly screaming at you from downstairs and trying to aim its piss up pass the ledge of your window. then, because existence has gone mad and collapsed in on itself, sometimes the piss does land on your window, but the piss is now turning into centipedes that jump into the eyes of anyone that see them. now hundreds of thousands of peoplealong with several very advanced surveillance systemsare screaming because geometry-defying centipedes are jumping from optic to optic, organ to organ, eating their way up into your brains before exploding for some ungodly stupid reason. thats omnitech.} sounds like they had some no-dragon support in the theoretical situation. {yes. but finally, imagine its not theoretical.} avo grunted his understanding and found himself with the distinct impression that if calvino had a head, it would be shaking it. {now lets see if i can integrate enough with this ships software to} {thats a lot more than i expected,} calvino said. {the crew must not have had any time to even grow a standard model ecology of predators to ward off any intruders. they must have been taken by complete surprise. hydroponics and the gene clinic are still working quite well no crew quarters anymore the egi shepherd core} the artificial minds words trailed off as a long silence followed. {and there we found it, boys, girls, and ghoul. the crimes against humanity.} calvino sighed. {nothing like a few unforgivable transgressions to make everybody feel like family.} avo thought back to the withered bodies of the crew fused to the coretheir minds mutilated beyond belief to serve as support for the broken ai governing the ship. he had expected rage from voidwatch. reprisals even. but what he heard was quiet acceptance. the sound of resigned disappointment. youre taking this pretty good, tech-ghost, chambers said, casting his ghost out without a care. his mind synced with avos and came afire immediately. both version of chambers snapped back together as the man proceed with nonchalance. it wasnt like he hadnt felt it before, and all it took for him to be well was death. most people usually do the whole im gonna make a bigger hole in their ass with my knife'' speech by this point. {that almost never helps. try living a millenniayou see everything. the good is good. the bad is bad. the complex is complex. understand them for what they are, and youll accept the world that is.} chambers blinked. huh. well, if it were me, id still kill the half-strands that did this. {i said to accept the world, not the sins, or the sinners. those need to be rectified.} yeah, chambers said. thats more like it." focusing on the the cloudy bowl that was the cloning pool, chambers frowned and willed his meldskin to form over his head. his magnified his vision and peeked at the blurred contours of distant bodies, might racing through their potential bioform options. "alright. lets see here. what can we do with this several thoughts darted beneath avos consciousness. several of them left as questions to the george washingtons system, inquiring how large a bioforms genitalia could be. [no,] abrel hissed, her screech passing into chambers thoughts as well. [no, avo! stop him! stop him before he does something that gives you all the rash.] whoa, chambers said. whos that? abrel greatling, he responded. chambers. enough deviance. fine, the man pouted. i settle for making something totally nova and badass instead. now, let me just sync with that sang grafter of yours wait, avo said, forcing blankness on chambers mind via the conflagration. he didnt need ruveca, the sang grafter, to join his collective so soon. best that chambers was separated from his gestalt before they proceeded. he burst the blood vessels in chambers head and drew back his flames. the half-strand flopped over with a stupid smile still plastered on his face. of the cadre, only essus gave the dead man a lingering glance. [left him with a clean body this time,] corner said. [getting soft, ghoul.] +just dont want to make a mess.+ turning his attention upward at the clear apses, avo studied the cloning pool and considered what was to come. the fog-wreathed module of the ship remained as active as he last saw it, and the one-hundred-and-sixty-four cloning cells were active. {ill authorize jack and jane licenses for the class-i sophancy and uplift bioform categories. that should broaden our options a bit. neural transfer functions will need deeper repairand ill probably need your help to do it. im guessing the nether is affecting the system too, so im not sure if we can do this the normal way.} +thats fine,+ avo said, cupping a burning fistful of consciousness between his claws. as the flames that composed him danced upon the tips of his digits, he regarded the phantasmal currents connecting the conflagration to his metaan unbroken connection. past the membrane of his metaphysical consciousness, an army dwelled within, a legion made from his gestalt. he had the bodies now. what he needed was a way to ignite their shells with active minds. to transfer egos over into potential sheathes as if they were candles. first thing he needed to learn was how to part the conflagration without ensuring his own demise. the second was how to keep their minds stable even without a plane-altering canon protecting them against potential disruptions. passages open, draus said. got us a few exits set up. good, avo said, eyes locked to the cloning pool. got any idea on how to start making this army of yours? some. a few questions too. thats the way of it. a beat followed. talked with kae earlier. shes been quiet. grappling with changes, he replied. she accepts the city has to burn. guilds must fall. going to be part of the war. going to be with us. the regular took a step and found a place beside him. she dont belong here. not in this life. not with us. could say the same for me. or you. any of us. you know what i mean, she said. death. it clings to us. all of us. you. me. chambers. barely anything left of essus. columners are in this for a cause, so theyre already fucked. kae had a life. gotta remember that. gotta understand. will be careful with her. agnos is worth more than her use in battle. but we will be doing something for her soon. seeing something made right. settle scores and climb the city. the meldskin helm melted beneath her face and draus grinned. we gonna be visitin the tiers soon? he had a feeling she was going to like this. have some specific destinations in mind. specific people to visit. specific harm to cause. how do you feel about savaging ori-thaum some more? draus barked a laugh. shit, rotlick. youre makin me feel like i just joined up with the regs again. Chapter 17-1 A Sickness in the Bones chapter 17-1 a sickness in the bones +hey. i got a personal message for all you consangs striving and struggling at lights end. you know you guys have the highest suicide rate in new vultun if we separate the warrens across all its layers, right? its rough out there, being so close to the light, but not really part of it. dont disconnect. im not here to try to hurt you or anything but ive always found all of you beautiful, you know? youre like moths. moths to a flame. i know how you feel. i know what its like to be taunted with perfection and glory beyond your reach while you live in its shadow. its an affront to your own life. who can bear it? anyone whos felt your pain knows why you lose to that sirens call. but fight it. you have to. listen to me. just listen. the tiers theyre not the utopias you think they are. sure, you wont have to worry about syndicates or gangs or wandering monsters dumped by the no-dragons or left by the low masters, but your life stops being yours once you get owned by a guild. a sponsorship is just that. being owned. if you cant say no to your master without suffering repercussions that break you, thats being owned. if you cant resist or fight back without being destroyed, thats being owned. if you cant live your own life and have to have monitors installed into the back of your mind to watch everything you do and correct your habits and scream at you from the inside of your mind every time you lose focus or want to do something other than what you father or mother or master tells you to for the glory of the fucking guilds, thats! being! owned! sorry. sorry for my outburst. there are miracles of such immense power that you just find yourself unable to describe them. unable to even understand whats happening to you. there are places of such joy and tastes filled with such pleasure that youll find yourself addicted for months. if any one of you is ever lucky enough to win a trip up into the elysium, youll come back changed. and those are the ones who will be irreparably broken. a moth that has touched the flame but is banished back to the darkness thereafter, condemned to never burn in its lifetime, is owned. is a moth thats going to seek an end because it knows it knows there is a better life. but it wont have it. well. heres to me trying to save you from that dream today+ -cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 17-1 a sickness in the bones +...heres: down to the gutters new hit single, guildless.+ noise followed cala marlowes words, the sound of a guttural shout dragged on for far too long. deeps riffs vibrated through the nether, drowning the joy-den with music. a shame only two people were present to hear it. bloodless bodies littered the ground in pieces, and a pond of blood trailed after a waifish figure, rising to coat the walls and windows to prevent herself from being killed by a sharpshooter from outside the bounds of the block. again. reaching into her jackets inner pocket, she produced a particular fang threaded through by a flesh-made necklace belonging to a local gangthe exsanginators. they were an exclusively sang outfit that decorated themselves around a theme of blood and wore the carcasses of modified nu-bats during their midnight raids. it was because of them that dice drained these bodies. it was to frame them that she left something of their signature. striding past overturned tables and discarded guns, dice didnt draw the blood back into her until she was already out of the room and heading to the garbage disposal. she made her escape down where bodies and trash were thrown, her haemokinetic limbs digging into the metal as she slid down before additional reinforcements arrived. if she unleashed the full potential of the god dwelling inside her, she could have destroyed this block. killed almost everyone in it. but that wasnt what the new master wanted her to do. no. the new master spoke to her in her dreams. gave her choices and targets of opportunitypeople like the ones that killed her old master and captured her. sold her. syndicates, they were called. syndicates and gangers. they were like the once-men of the wilds. misshapen effigies of humanity in body and mind, knowing only harm and predation. the only difference was the once-men of this city had a preference for chrome, and madness came more from the curving halos around their heads than the vileness of their deeds. the group she attacked today was called the silver tongues. they belonged to a larger enclaveor something of the naturecalled ashthrone. one them managed to hit her during the ambush earlier, and she felt the shot spill over into her hell without wounding her person. he died without leaving a body when she vented his waste back into him. flipping past the edge of the chute and encasing herself in an armor made from her own blood, she avoided the incinerator and made her way back toward the place where she carved a hole into the building. pulling the hood of her jacket over her head, she clicked a button on its wrist and immediately a shroud of light sparked over her, masking her figure with the look of a skeletal figure cloaked in darkness. she got this jacket from one of her kills too. the only one that really fit her size. the other girl didnt even see her death coming. one second she was sneering at dice, pointing to a new shiny piece of metal poking out from along her spine, the next her insides were pouring out from her body, her flesh shredded by blades grown in her very veins. there were words that disemboweled your heart when spoken. there were parts of reality so unappealing that idheim created gods to alter its design. [warrens are the warrens, juv,] corner said, speaking softer to abrel than he ever did. [there was a saying on my block when i was growing up: two people choose if we live our die; us, then the city. i say live. i say live until you die. the games here. might as well play it.] as the wailing sirens of a volunteer fire brigade filled the nether, avos consciousness pulsed as another mind synchronized with his. as he opened his session and foreign ghosts entered only to be set aflame, he found his simulation of chambers and the original overlapping again. [hey, avo! we got a hit. come back.] the half-strand sounded excited, but then again, when wasnt he excited? taking a final look at the neon skylanes layered over the ponderous blocks of alloy and plascrete spilling as far his eyes could see, avo poured the totality of his ego into chambers body. knitting himself to his new sheathe, his senses and motor functions restarted. he was back in the manta cocooned in protective smart matter, staring at his uninhabited body sagging against the softness of the ships interior. casting himself back into his original sheathe, he killed chambers just as he left and settled back into himself. opened and closing his claws, he felt prickling static run down his digits. there were certain flaws to having a body. too many feelings. too much that was capable of distracting him. but without his celerostylus and the neurodeck, he was effectively a diminished version of his full potential. free moving though his consciousness was, aspects still lingered beyond the confines of his mind and frames grasp. calvino wasnt truly part of him, and being severed from his flesh meant being without the meldskin or aegis support. he had soaked in enough of the city. now, he needed to return to the task at hand. {hows our girl doing?} draus asked via ansible, her virtual avatar manifesting in the corner of his cog-feed. she was one step away from being on the ship and eight thousand kilometers distant at the same time. his deepnav placed her within layer two itself, just above mazzas junction. that was promising. that meant she had something. {how did you know i was back?} {chambers vitals went dead and yours started up again. you really should get to using the armor more. get used to its full functionality.} he grunted. {sure. soon. chambers said you found something.} {yeah,} she said. {i just mightve.} pairing her visual feed with his neurodeck, he saw her standing on the rim of a glass portal looking down at maintenance drones darting to and about the industrial jungle outside. magnifying her vision a hundred times over, she marked a particularly large drone carrier with red vertices but said nothing. several seconds later, the cluster of drones dotting the pore-shaped ports on its side rose into the air as a swarm. all except one. the wayward drone, rimmed four faint signatures of accretion departed layer two with its estimated trajectory headed for mazzas junction, and then something slipped from his mind. what was he staring at again? he could recall why he was looking at that space incog, he realized. there was something there that triggered an incog. {now,} draus said. {i reckon your minds feelin just as slippery as mine is, and if so, i think we just mightve made contact with a glaive cell or a group of elite squires. whatever the case, we got ourselves somethin to investigate.} that was worth cutting his sightseeing short. {how did you find them?} {voidwatch pinged a bit of anomalous data coming from one of their drone carriers after chambers heard a little this and that from conspiracy boards in some nether lobby called the snakes pit. might wanna check his mind for more mem-cons.} {already did. his old ones ate the new ones.} {fuck me.} {yeah.} {hows dice?} {very productive. hit another three places for me today. might do another. going to feed her some more thaums later. get her up a sphere. new canons. seems unshaken by the city. just acts. operates. does it just because i tell her to.} draus laughed. {shit, id scout her for the regs if i was still with the golds. shed be star recruit material.} {better than you?} {hells no. shes a scrawny little thing. i wouldve eaten her for breakfast and asked for seconds. alright. enough banter. you comin over and plannin this run with me or what? see if what we got in our nets a couple of glaives or somethin less?} {yeah,} avo said. {open the passage. call kae. chambers just resurrected. lets do this.} Chapter 17-2 Prepared chapter 17-2 prepared +yeah. yeah. i got eyes on the girl. really wasnt that hard to track, honestly. shes quick and efficient, but she doesnt know the city very welland doesnt change up her methods nearly enough. similar approaches. similar exits. similar holocoat setting. she might have an old sangeist model burning inside her. im not sure, but thats what the signs are pointing to. relax, im just trailing the juv. im going to use my incog and get a closer look at how she operates. and see if your benefactor shows up again. i wont lie, im interested to see if this gift-giving ghoul of yours is all hes cracked up to be. i might end up asking him for a wish of my own.+ -[redacted to white-rab] 17-2 prepared the layers dividing the warrens were filled by a forest of ever-moving machinery. fabricated by voidwatchs orbital assemblies and installed planetside via the guilds, even a partial component making up of one of the sky-shrouding plates deserved the term tectonic. considering the complexity of their interior, however, perhaps the word art was more suitable. requiring over five hundred billion drones to maintain, a machine ecosystem was in place to keep the layers at optimal functionality, and to repair the inevitable collateral damage from syndicate spats and other unexplained events. the true brilliance of its make lay also in its simplicity. absurd as it sounded, it would not be hard for voidwatch to create an apparatus capable of expanding the space available to new vultuns inhabitants while also making the rash easier to quarantine if they were allowed to use all the tools they had at their disposal. making said apparatus from materials and mechanics low-tech enough to dissuade omnitechand all the other guilds by that matterfrom compromising its structure and looting its components was another challenge entirely. but the solution, here, ultimately was simple. they didnt complete it. they handed parts of the layers piecemeal to the guilds and had the terrestrials assemble it, infusing its design with miracles to bolster what little technology existed within. from this came an ecosystem ripe for determined smugglers, syndicates, gangers, and squires to exploit. if one could avoid the attention of drones and exorcists while surviving the steel-melting heat emitted from the constantly running holo-projector units or the radiation leaking from the nuclear reactors within, then they had the means to maneuver through the foundations of the warrens. for avo and his cadre, accessing layer two was a far simpler operation. the manta entered a maintenance pathway cloaked and unnoticed by the drones. between the ships hyper-advanced systems, their incogs, and careful positioning, they traveled free and unseen, tracking the drone carrier that was their quarry. the organs of the layer were lit by glowering red, occasionally masked in hissing steam. waste-heat transference stations studded the interior in stacked panels the size of hills. heavy alloy dominated the black and chrome of heat-resistant cables running the circulatory system of the structure. a crevice recently made by a fusion burner sparked with electricity and severed wiring. down a molten tunnel, the manta picked up sounds matching an industrial drill designed to break through the hulls of war machines. someone was making a quick getaway straight up through the layer. considering the noise and damage they were causing, they probably werent going to get away. unidentified vessels traveled close to the surface of the inner layer. the vessels sailing through the air here were less standard aero and more remodified deep-sea subs with retrofitted engines and hangers installed on their backs. chambers scried at these peculiarities and found them to be transports for contraband. weapons, drugs, exotic aeros, new augs, and other goods stolen from the throat and lights end. this was part of what the syndicates called running the black. no one wanted to damage the layers, and high-speed chases inside such a cluttered environment were viable to break something delicate. jumping between maintenance channels and out from hatches leading down into the air space of the spine, was part of the lifeblood of the syndicates. and something that avo would burn in the near future. as they trailed the drone ship, watching to see if or when the unidentified contacts would return, they spent time rehearsing a variety of scenarios within a shared virtuality. the manta scanned their surroundings and created a simulated space of layer two for the purposes of their practice. artificial constructs meant to simulate hostile squires were loaded in first, their kit, grafts, and skills based on aggregate data. the cadre handled them without troubleeven managing a non-lethal pacification. glaives proved to be more difficult entities. the challenge was less to do with their superior implants and training, and more to do with the near-certainty of incubi support. being in the vicinity of yuulden-yang meant the nether was still unstable, and the crown had to stay active. just like that, avos district swallowing flame was reduced to a dagger, though still devastating. they prevailed the first time, but both kae and chambers were listed as nulled, with draus described as being a vegetable that just wouldnt forget how to shoot and kill the enemy even as the contents of her self-identity leaked out of her. they burned when they engaged avo. that was the fate of most unprepared necros that faced him these dayshawks trying to hunt a storm. for the following attempts they adjusted. avo was to be deployed as a field asset to directly engage the enemy. this allowed him to retain maximum effect and negate his weaknesses. draus operated as their coordinator in combat. her voice barked quick orders through their ansibles, highlighting things of note. operating together was easy when they had shared feeds, but avo thought they could be more symphonic. overkill was good when you wanted things done right. feeling miles ahead using his sanguinity, avo brushed the titanium composing the carrier with his woundshaper and deleted the rising urge to liquefy from his mind. it was a bit over ten kilometers away. for a moment, he felt as if avo blinked, unable to remember his thoughts. [think we just got incogd] corner snorted. [or the ghouls turning loopy,] lip said. she paused. [fuck. trapped in a mentally disintegrating ghoul for all eternity is not my ideal way to be.] for a second, he worried if it was the lapse again, but found nothing amiss. also, nothing but an incog could make his mind slip from active thought. {i think our consangs are there,} avo replied. {tried interfacing with it using sanguinity. felt at something then forgot what i was doing.} {well, thats a sign if ive ever heard one,} draus said. {or youre goin senile.} [hah!] lip barked with laughter. [i like her. when are you going to burn her?] [lip, youre not supposed to ask the ghoul when he burns his consang,] abrel taunted. avo sighed. it was like he was made of up a traveling freakshow sometimes. {avo,} calvino said, attempting tact. {you quite literally are a traveling freak show.} +thanks, orb.+ {youre very welcome.} another message came through from draus. {alright, rotlick. youre up. bring us in.} he grunted in response and swam free of the mantas protective cocoon. warning: temperature spike: 1893c the sheer heat in the air would be useful for chambers lushburner. enwreathing himself in a shroud of blood, a crimson carapace fused over avo as he felt draus connect her heaven with his reflectivity. he was now the vanguard of the team and tactical insertion point. the rest of the cadre could engage and fight using his blood as a doorway. {youre gold,} draus said. {sic em.} lightning surged through his flowing blood and the world blurred around him. firing his reflexes, he darted into a jungle of alloyed clutter, the speed and nature of his ontology certain to render him a bullet through the vulnerable interior of the layer, destroying everything in his path. a second later, though he did indeed slip through the matter in front of him, nothing was damaged. composing himself from a whip of lightning, his datacaster allowed him to part all inorganic constructs impeding his path while his sanguinity helped him chart his jump without hitting any living entities lurking about. within the span of a second, he crashed back into stable reality right next to the drone hive. parting panels of blood from his back, he activated his meldskins thrusters and kept himself aloft as he triggered, shadow of the mars-made machine drifting overhead. most of the porous slots on its sides were empty, the drones occupied by other tasks. triggering his skimmer phantasmic, waves of perception rushed over the reach of his virtuality, its structure insulating him from the instability of the nether. as the colossal weight of his cognition brushed across the length of the carrier. then, he felt it. a crack of a ghost shattering; the flash of translucent thoughtstuff spilling into the nether. a feral grin came over his face as a single drone manifested in his vision. {i see them,} he sent. {we have} suddenly, a thread of light dove out from the carrier itself, existence vanished around him. just like in the last simulation, avo tumbled into the embrace of his soul without knowledge of what killed him. Chapter 17-3 Random Encounter chapter 17-3 random encounter +proxy-id sintaker to mirror-convex. l-213382 is compromised. we just got hit by an unknown hostile. serpentine was nulled. shell be resurrected in thirty seconds. cog-cap overloadenemy cracked her incog with a skimmer. convex, do not bullshit me right now: do we have any assets operating in the area? because skimmers arent standard issue-scrying phantasmics. yeah. because theyre ours. exclusively. i think i caught a glimpse of fire in the nether too. not a lot of other shit that can be, is there. im gonna drop the act now, convexdid you get the order to burn us? are we burned? all this for the instrument? yeah. instrument mondelles is still alive. hes the one who made the kill while the rest of us were incapacitated, so hes got that to hold over us now. not that the fucking gold wasnt smug enough of a shit already ah, shit, i see an anchor forming fuck. unknown was a godclad. repeat, confirmation that the unknown ambusher is a godclad. theyre resurrectingestimated time, a hundred and eight seconds standard. we need answers, convex. so instrument doesnt snuff us all once he gets back in the drone. and so i dont null you right now and pull the mem-data from your wreck of a mind if i get the feeling youre lying to me.+ -sintaker, ori-thaum godclad 17-3 random encounter death came at you fast in new vultun. things had been going too well. overstuffed by new opportunities and easy victories, something changed in the makeup of avos mind: he stopped thinking of himself as a member of the city and started believing himself to be above it. well, he was above it in many ways, considering his unfettered consciousness and soul, but the poison was expecting perpetual dominance at every turn. such anticipations were a corrosive agent, wearing away at the mindset that ensured his survival for so long. this was good for him. a good refresher on his place in this world. idheim was a wellspring of madness, and across its expanses were predator and prey alike. he was fortunate enough to be considered among the former now, but there were other beasts in the deep as well, swimming alongside him, always ready to take a bite. a temporary setback, the woundshaper cajoled. fortune is but a fleeting advantage for our like, master. their advantage has faded. their counterattack left you slain, but now prepared. they do not know their deaths are soon coming. soon, we feed anew. as the heaven of blood shivered with rising laughter, the entropic miasma filling the reflection that was its hell roiled and danced. there was but a trickle there. only five percent rend. not even worth channeling yet. the rend of his datacaster was even lower, peaking at just over three. turning his focus to studying the misshapen entity comprised of imagined virtuality, avos perception danced along the metaphysical cables and fibers making up the datacaster. nonsensical codes flowed through the heaven of signals even in the fires of his soul. from the willowing branches of the heaven rose a field of glitching static, enshrouding the area around it in a protective veil. below the heavens fibril architecture, twitching cubes comprised of junk code metastasized within its hell, the nature of the entropy expressing itself as an anomaly of spatial reality. datacaster - 335 thaumc/c domain (signals/space) canons: (signals) ->crown of virtuality canon: converts the environment (100 ft) around the user into simulated mirror-reality made out of raw data supported by sprites; user can convert all inorganic parts into temporarily stored data (reloads back to their original position in reality after miracle ends) hubris: organic material will result in a [system-collapse] for the user; thaumic backlash will follow (space) ->hard-cage canon: stores physical (up to 10 tons) matter within a coldtech data-storage device grafted onto the user (1tb per terrr__fff1001); data must be released back into the real when miracle is no longer in use hubris: if the coldtech data storage is damaged, thaumic backlash undoundoundoundofollowfollowfollowthechildrenprotectthechildren hell [3 circle] - 335 thaumc/c canon: (space) a shockwave tore out across avos sanguinity. the eight unknowns burst like sacks of gore. blood splattered the passenger compartment within the dronethe purple tones and soft velvet decor came as a surprise. the viscera of the one in stasisabrels former instructor, instrument santanado starsinger mondelleshovered in place. of nine present within the drone, only three were still alive. two more than avo expected. the counterattack came at the same time draus reconnected with his deck and calvino started talking. multiple indicators flashed in avos hud just as two enemy godclads recomposed themselves, bodies knitting back together as if bands of rubber snapping back across the surface of time. manta: 821 meters [eta 6.4 seconds] six seconds was an eternity in a fight between godclads. a sudden force seized avos flesh as he felt his bones shatter in an instant. his domain of biology shuddered. a screech of pain escaped him as he casually wrestled his blood back from the intruders control. [specificity trumps generality, motherfucker,] abrel hissed, enduring the pain better than avo. [lesson twelve.] he fused haemokinetic replacements for his flesh and hooks to struggle against his shredding skin. the godclad revealed herself to be a face-painted sang nested with a rig sprouting wings molded from bone. avos conflagration roared out to consume the survivors just as the second of his foesa figure hidden masked by orbiting arrows of softly glowing silvermade their own move. the arrows rushed through avo and accelerated through the body of the drone as if there was nothing there. an inch away from devouring their minds, the world sped up around avo as agony tore through his shredding sheath. something hit him. something faster than he could perceive. the sheer impact should have punched him clean through the vehicle, but the sang held its flesh tight. armor integrity critical! {2%} glass, leather, plastic, and silicon filled the air around him, the drone shattering as his meldskin somehow kept him alive, parrying the kinetic energy of the impact away from him. more vicarious understanding filled his mind. the knowledge came from corner this timehe was enchained by a heaven of speed; damned to always be slower than his attackers by a magnitude. only by killing the user could he be freed. the only problem was that corner had no idea how this heaven worked or what its limitations were. the potential problem was promptly solved by an unexpected victory: the sang struck at him again using her trauma patterns. and unlike him with his flesh, she didnt have any means of holding her mind together as her cognition succumbed to his flames. new understandings materialized in his mind. he knew what they were doing herewhat the objective behind this entire affair was. more important to the present, however, he had means of freeing himself from his current entrapment. controlling the sang godcladnamed elegant-moon, descended from the line of chenavo restored his own flesh and eviscerated the godclad of speed in the same second. the heaven of speed ceased its miracles and his mind screamed once more. his skin seared and he found himself tumbling from the rapidly decompressing drone alongside elegant-moon, falling between pylons carrying traveling electricity. warning: meldskin integrity compromised recomposition in progress {4%} fusing a shell of blood around himself, he noted the sang healed faster than she burned, steam rising from her eye as her flesh defied the surrounding temperature. {avo. were here,} draus said, voice calm and unworried. {bringing the manta in. ill open a passage for you.} the stealth ship was forty meters away on the neurodeck and one hundred and thirty-one on the deepnav. grunting, avo aligned the metrics to the former. he was going to be using voidtech anywayhe resequenced his mind and was something brushed his domains of space. multiple templates screamed from inside his gestalt. he didnt think. he reacted. wrapping himself and elegant-moon in blood, he speared toward the manta as a bolt of haemokinetic lightning, peeling internal supports and auxiliary pistons working within the layer. behind, a colossal serpent the size of a megablock skimmed the surface of real space before diving back out of existence. avo considered diving into the darkness before abrel responded. [no! thats a path-hydra,] abrel cried. from her shared knowledge, he understood what it wasa specialized golem made to paradox geometry, spatial, and correspondence affecting godclads. with elegant-moons mind fully siphoned into his gestalt, he reviewed the situation. she was in a cadre under mondelles, and they were here to discuss the travesty behind the conflux arrangement that saw jhred greatling dead, a cell of incubi and their handler nulled, multiple districts devastated, and stormtree and highflame on the verge of open conflict. they arrived prepared for a fight, but things proceeded diplomatically despite the active tensions. what she didnt know, however, was trouble. with most of her team dead after avo managed to break himself free of mondelles planar prison and surprise the party, she found herself fighting alongside an unknown godclad, and the path-hydra proved to be an unexpected guest as well. +so,+ avo said, +no idea about who our unknown consang is?+ as their bodies recomposed, elegant-moon offered but a shrug with her vessel and template both. [ghoul,] she sighed. [if youre asking me, who am i going to ask?] she paused and noticed abrel. [wait? what? how is she here?] +same way youre going to be staying,+ avo said. switching over to his ansible, he sent a message to his cadre. through the glowing haze within the layer, the accretions of his team shone, coming into view. twenty meters away now. he looked around and felt nothing. they couldnt stay. they needed to go. {draus. got a new guest out here. and a new friend. think we should call it before the other clads resurrect. ambush them later if we have to.} {synced,} draus said. a low noise of frustration rose from her throat. {what?} he asked. {you got to have all the fun again,} she grumbled. {and who the hells that earlier? think i remember seeing those light threads some} was as far as she got before the manta was swallowed by a surging mass of scaled obsidian. Chapter 17-4 Extraction chapter 17-4 extraction the highflame path-hydra is a second sphere heaven usually attached to a golem. with its extremely low thaumic cost and simple canon, its uses in combat are few but focused. it will be deployed to disrupted demiplanes or spatial anomalies via paradox. it will be deployed to shuttle objects and personnel from one of its heads to another. with the specificity installed in its canons, this heaven has also proven to be highly difficult to detect when not in full manifestation. with nine heads forming a junction of interconnected pathways, entities trapped within the path-hydra can only escape from the confines one of a few ways. the first and simplest method is to simply trigger multiple hells and outlast its rendsinks. this is a risky option as the path-hydra comes with twenty-seven cc-ii variant rendsinks that are easy to eject and replace. the more technical option is to influence the movements of the hydras. should one head overlap with another, the path-hydras ontology will usually collapse alongside the golems systems. doing so is easier said than done, and either requires supreme anticipation or something akin to directional vector manipulation. the last and most complex operation is to somehow outmaneuver the ever-shifting interior of the hydra and find the machine or metaphysical core of the entire structure. if something of matter is thrown into its changing structure, the backlash will be extreme and likely collapse the entire heaven. if you find yourself trapped within a path-hydra, it is best for you to vent whatever spatial rend you have inside immediately, while constantly moving to keep the heaven active and stress its rendsinks. additionally, your metaminds will function without issue, so if you locate the operational nexuses, nulling the controlling element is a good option as well. -ori-thaum primer on highflame golems and auxiliary units 17-4 extraction a beat passed as avo and elegant-moon just stared at the place where the manta used to be. a sparking cable swayedpart of it also snipped clean through by the passing path-hydra. [shit, the ship?] corner cursed. [shit, the ship?] chambers sputtered. [shit, actual-me! did i just watch myself get snuffed?] +youre fine, chambers,+ avo replied, still sensing the half-strand across their session. the coldtech connection to his cadre was choked with interference though. the micro-singularity generated by his ansible quivered and struggled to stay open. the violations against spatial laws caused it to collapse and reform between the seconds. {the nature of the plane likely doenst support the possibility of the schwarzschild radius,} calvino said. {do you see now why we are so adamantly against basing a society on chaotic and ill-thought out vibes and rituals.} +nice when theyre our vibes and rituals,+ avo replied. abrels memories fed him critical information about the path-hydra. he really wanted to avoid this. there were good odds that his team had just been tossed over into a highflame kill box or containment plane somewhere. being gone and away was the best way to handle an annoyance like the path-hydra, but considering present circumstances yeah. his galeslither could do with the upgrade and he couldnt risk anyone learning about him through his cadre. that, and letting them die would bother him. [oh, shit,] chambers breathed. [its happening! he cares! he fucking cares!] avo burned away the sentimentality and focused on the practical aspects. [...you corpse-licking half-strand.] +come on,+ avo said, speaking to elegant-moon. +lets go get eaten.+ the sang turned to him and shook her head. [id call you absolutely mad, but i fear our unfortunate friend is unaware of their coming fate.] a wince ran through her. [another mind fed to your flames.] +wont be the last. time till resurrection for your cadre?+ [one-hundred and eight-second standard for most of us. starsinger has a myrmidon-pattern, so another thirty seconds for him at max resurrection. not all of us are fortunate enough to be blessed with a self-tuning liminal frame that can return you within thirty seconds.] he checked his metamind and found himself reassured. he still had almost a minute before the other godclads revived. best he make this quick. boltstride through the interior of the path-hydra and locate both the manta and the golem or godclad at the heart of things. existence shuddered as he felt a sudden weight slam against his galeslither and datacaster. again, a head of the hydra made its attack. its coming was so metaphysically subtle and sudden that actively avoiding it would have required his full attention. seeing how he wanted to take a trip down the belly of the whale, however ribbed walls lined with mucus-coated alloy and metallically sculpted replicas of what he assumed the insides of a leviathans throat looked like filled his cog-feed. the environment of the layer vanished around him immediately, and the ambient temperature plummeted below ten degrees celsius. the path ahead continued to accelerate past him, the folds of the hydras inside blurring together. it was like he was on a train but it was the station that was speeding past him instead. lightning became him. he leaped, and took the sang with him, jumping the full twenty-four kilometers he was capable at baseline mass each time as his rend grew. unleashing a breath of matter-withering entropy into the structures around him, his gale rushed through but unmade nothing. not that he was surprised. his sanguinity tasted no patterns present anyway. attempting to punch through these walls would just see him invert back through the same path he came. this wasnt something he broke down physically. the galeslither, however, remained an appealing option. the sang did as he said. the body came apart in an instant. in depths of his mind, the newcomer began to sob as corner scoffed. {chin up, wuss. take it like vultunite.} she didnt respond. she was inconsolable. with mechanics of his ansible stabilized, he cast a message over to draus as he re-linked with the members of his cadre. {dealt with the golem. ate the pilot. understand the situation now.} he checked the mantas position and frowned. eighty three kilometers away. looks the path-hydras collapse displaced them as well. {nice work,} draus said. {summbitch didnt play right with my heaven. think it was meant to counter it. path-hydra, looked like.} {yes. probably spotted your accretion or felt the manta move through space. was providing overwatch for mondelles. someone he trusted with his life.} {mondelles? starsinger mondelles?} {does everyone know this guy?} {i think i met him once too,} kae added. {one of my mentors was commissioned to upgrade one of his canons.} {i mightve seen porn-fakes of him,} chambers said, not wanting to be left out. elegant-moon grinned at chambers and spoke from within avo. [oh, hes going to hate this one. never let mondelles meet him. death and bloodshed are certain to follow.] +not going to be meeting anyone,+ avo replied. this run was finished. trying to engage sevenor moreenemy godclads with four of them still operating as total unknowns and mondelles possessing a sphere five frame without the element of surprise was a fools plan. he doubted would surprise them again as he did when he broke out from the starsingers cage. despite this, however, he considered the run a rousing success. the setback of his death and coming upon a meeting between elements of highflame and ori-thaum aside, he had a new asset to examine. and a new way to interface with both guilds. {were done for today,} avo sent. {made a new consang. bringing her back with me. going to make new introductions for us. be redeployed as an asset.} through it all, elegant-moon just smiled genially at him. +what?+ she shrugged her shoulders. [there is no me, anymore. there is only you, and what you keep of me. i stopped be real the moment your flames torched my mind.] her words left him struck with silence as draus spoke across the line. {...and i still didnt get to shoot nobody in the end.} {take a detour through syndicate territory,} avo said, absentmindedly. {going to need to give dice a gift anyway.} he regarded the sang again, and she rewrote her flesh to resemble his, bones elongating, skin paling, sceleras turning black with curved, white irises. then, with a snap, she turned back to looking like herself again. this gave him options. many options. he was going to have to convene with ruveca, jack, and jane again. {need me to leave you a passage?} draus asked. {no. ill catch up with you using new heaven. going to test it. avoid notice. kae. going to like to see this one.} the agnos chirped with interest as a response. [shall we leave now, myself,] elegan-moon asked. [or do you wish to wander the confines of this lovely part of our city some more?] he dove deeper into her consciousness, wrapping his mind in the quintessence of her and recoiled. there was something wrong with her. something broken. something missing. the memory of her affliction returned in the form of a deathsomething that occurred with each of her heavens at over fifty rend. her nous went through ego-searing entropy both ways that day. what came back was missing fundamental facets of herself. joy. kindness. humanity. all gone. the agnosi and her sisters called her continued functionality a miracle, but she knew. and now, so did it. [it was perfect damage,] she whispered. [broke me perfectly so i only have the one joy left] pulling back from her ego, he released a breath. +come. were leaving.+ [and you will grant me my final end afterward?] +well see.+ Chapter 17-5 Midnight Games (I) chapter 17-5 midnight games (i) instrument mondelles, i assure you whoever just attacked us wasnt one of ours. i can i know. it cant be. they were too good in a scuffle to be a silver. ... your fourth member. i need to talk to him. hes the last one that had eyes on moon. her session is scrambled. i cant sense her mind anymore. perhaps i can im not letting you jack into my mind. but youre going to help me, and ill let you know how: the one that just hit us, you get a glimpse of their mind? do you have any idea what that is? we will need additional time and information you do. okay. good. whats going to happen now is simple. pinkie here is going to stay here with one of yours. neither of them goes anywhere until we have fully ensured our own factions are uninvolved in this unforeseen incident. and if they are? then we solve it together. your active participation is a continued show of goodwill. i doubt you ori-thaum are so willing to expend their ensouled, especially considering your recent shortages perhaps were less sentimental than you think, instrument. perhaps. but i also think you probably dont want to die. whoever hit us knew where we were. they knew that hm. my shadows gone would you look at that? it might just be my side do you have an alternate location where we can meet? someplace discrete and unknown even beyond you and i? ill make the arrangements. i appreciate your theres no need to glaze me up, silver. im not a fucking popsicle. you havent done anything to make me doubt you yet. if you had, id killed you already and taken what i need from your ghost. youre down a member, instrument. please dont insult me or my cadre any further. indeed. im missing my maker. but all four of you are still easy pickings. see you soon, rasaga. how did you great. gone. -conversation between instrument santanado mondelles and seeker ikkuoi rasaga 17-5 midnight games (i) path-hydra grafted to [galeslither] (space/labyrinth) - 50 thaum/c [galeslither] updated to [zephyr of the nine-paths] - 900 thaum/c canons: (space) ->walker of the between: allows the user to travel in a parallel space to reality; grants them nine points for which to resurface in existence hubris: the zephyr of the nine-paths must surface into baseline reality once per 10% of rend accumulated hubris-2: the zephyr of the nine-paths must be anchored to a physical entity (the user may not utilize other heavens that render them incorporeal or conceptual while the zephyr is in use) (labyrinth) ->path of the nine: allows the user to shape an omnipresent maze for all things they take into their being; the maze is a fixed anchor of space and does not allow any spatial or geometric manipulation within its bounds or paradox will be triggered [you could also theoretically rebuild yourself from a single drop of blood with my heaven,] elegant-moon teased. [you will no longer need to infuse yourself in bodies that arent yours or ridiculous blood-made proxies. all it takes is something born of the flesh and] she plucked a hair from her head and from it, grew a rapidly budding clone of herself, though it remained hollow of cognitionlittle more than a fresh corpse. the nether affected many things. the creation of a true ego remained beyond the grasp of other heavens. but not his conflagration. not his grasp. +trying to get me to kill you?+ [i told you. im no longer real. i died already.] but he was beyond tempting. he rebuilt his mind when he changed it these days, his decisions and moods were determined by the architecture shaped by his choice. the beast remained absent inside him, and the ghoul that woke in the barge was an ember in the flames of his memory. growing to be more meant changing; meant altering yourself to accomplish greater feats. he was no more who he was days ago than she was herself after her death. +makes the two of us,+ he said. +but i came back. and i returned better. i dont need to kill you for your treasure. ill get another domain of biology. or whatever you have. kae will decide the build. my frame will forge the design. yours will just be the mold. you are not my food. you are my poison. you are my dagger.+ musical laughter sounded while the bones in her hand shattered, skin tearing and healing to form a flesh-made fan. she used the bio-shifted limb to cover her mouth: a faux-display of propriety directed in mockery. [what a monster. what a creature. how i would have loved to keep you as a pet instead of the other way around. alas.] a twitch of discomfort came from template-chambers of all egos. [hey, like, is she going to be with us for good, cause shes kinda fucked up.] [really?] abrel said, frowning. [this is what bothers you? this? i mean, its pretty gross and stuff, but vator does worse all the time. shes practically gentle.] lip spat as old cultural wounds flared. [im with the degenerate on this onewe dont need no dragon-fucked in this fire. nothing good comes from her kind. except as fuel fro a nice pyre.] [ah!] elegant-moon cheered, regarding the scaarthian. [a conjoined. tell me, do you wish to feel yourself as a boy again? for those glands secreting all those chemicals to drop and become testicles once more? do you know how long your kind takes to die from imbalance?] [you fucking bitch you sang-sow!] avo drew away from the conversation as the screaming lip and the sneering sang formed a duet with the woundshaper and zephyr inside him. he had other matters to attend to: he could see the manta nowfeel it brushing through across space. so what was how they were detected? they would need to keep an incog active next time if they were separated. risking active communication in these circumstances wasnt worth the risk. releasing his heaven of air, he chose a head to leave through as the folds and winds collapsed around him, launching him back into the world on a gust of wind. he released the heavy debris and wrecked aeros he stole to augment his travel speed via his yondergales as he sailed high with elegant-moon in tow, the particulates of his meldskin shivering as his grav-thrusters flared, flinging him through the sky before he splashed through the protective membrane of the manta. dropping into the newly grown crew module where chambers and kae waitedsome kind of phantom-supported board game happening on a smart-matter-shaped table between themhe tossed elegant-moon aside and the ship created a holding cell for her. new consang? chambers asked with a lifted eyebrow. you wont like her, avo replied, offering kae a grunt as she gave him a faint smile. the half-strand snorted, and a splurt of blood trickled out from his nose. avo had elegant-moon keep chambers biology protected from her cursed nature. i mean, how bad can she be? shes a sang, chambers, kae said. shes already making you bleed. we need to get you a neuter-mask or circulatory regulators. only a little blood. im sure i can take more. [noooo!] template-chambers screamed while elegant-moons cognitive self sighed, envisioning growing aratnids inside himand more importantly, severing his pleasure centers. [run, actual-me! run!] but chambers couldnt hear his wiser self and ran his fingers through the ugly blonde mop he called hair. the agnos snorted at the attempt at sauveness while the ceiling above them opened. draus distended upside down, her body fused along the gimbal sprouting holographic controls. you know this thing flies itself, avo said. yeah, she said. but i wanna fly. someone got to do all the killin today. he spread his fangs in a wide grin. took a new heaven took. the one that ate you. her fist cracked into his head and something like the sound of a gunshot went off from the sheer velocity of the blow. his meldskin took the hit. he never stopped grinning. greey, gluttonous, ghoul-shit, she said, voice devoid of any actual ire. armor integrity: 96% {i still have no idea how they got the regulars to be this robust,} calvino sighed. {she shouldnt be able to punch that hard. damn the guilds. damn their anomalous bastardization of our technology.} back to the washington, draus asked. see you got us a new consang to play with. she know anything useful? lots, avo responded. going to be my way of getting more influence over highflame and ori-thaum. peek her insides. steal the design of her heavens. reshape her mind more. catch. release. use her as a trap. [so romantic,] elegant-moon said. draus nodded, but a grimace passed through her features. listen. about the veins of light from that godcladthe snuffed you first? i think i know santanando mondelles, he said. the regular paused. the greatling let you know that? he grunted. that was all he needed to say. listen if its him, id like to not snuff if we can. oh? what was this? more ancient history? war comrade? hes part of the reason my discharge wasnt execution. he also pulled my half-broken corpse off the field. so a thing of honor. interesting. avo never considered himself honorable, but draus will see what we can do. talk about it. have more options with her. he gestured to where he tossed elegant-moon and the ground turned transparent, revealing the sang mid-wave, her mind chained to avos along a string of fire. drop her off at the washington first. have somewhere to be in a while. dice? yes. think im going to speak to her mind to mind soon. more than earned it. Chapter 17-6 Midnight Games (II) chapter 17-6 midnight games (ii) +seeker kazahara: i think the registry might have a hit for the one youre looking for. its a single instance and the facial capture is only partial, but the physical characteristics match the memories you sent. 155.45 centimeters. female. possibly adolescent. heavyset musculature for her size judging from the width of her shoulders. the memory was sourced to a street ganger of the silver tongues. a marhir nanadrugupta. running his imaging through the registry confirms him as deceased. exsanguinated like the others in his outfit. he managed a kill on your an-sus (auto-trans: anonymous suspect), but while they were trying to deactivate her holocoat, she resurrected and tore through the gang. the flash of her features was revealed during this instance. im casting you the sequences. seeker, from what i can tell, our an-sus is a fallwalkeras well as her master before her. i have mem-data on him, but her profile is empty. theres nothing about any agnosi performing frame maintenance or canonicity upgrades. not from the exorcists or paladins. were looking at an unexplained godclad operating in the city. ill be here in support if you need someone to trawl the nether. things are getting bad between clan drongo and clan nasaganda. a few concaves and convexes just had their identities leaked. quite a few people have died from accidents caused by metaphysical desyncs. a bomb was found in elder kerringtons aero.0v3l.bin. leave it to the council to squabble over politics at a time like this. i hope you find this girl soon. and that she leads you to the prime suspect. ive pulled mem-logs from our incubi regarding his background and the guys a demented psychopath. i tried peeking at some of his content and threw up at my table. be careful when dealing with him, seeker. he seems like the kind to deliberately trigger the rash for an advantage in combat.+ -wiser nara (ori-thaum special intelligence and deep nether operations officer) 17-6 midnight games (ii) it took less than an ounce of will on avos part to reshape elegant-moons mind. depositing her in a new holding cell on the george washington after draus opened a passage, he scrambled her mind to avoid anyone mem-locking her after his departure. he would rebuild her mind via her template after and reactive her sessions and other phantasmics after he plotted how to use her. after checking that she still had two cyclers and heavens clean of rend, he killed her and let her resurrection play out. kae asked to stay and observe their new guest. there was something about the sangs frame that intrigued herthe make of a new design affecting just how fast elegant-moons return from death progressed. that was the second priority after meeting with dice. he still had to convene with his grafters about how his projects were coming along. the sang would prove useful there as well, offering rapid modifications to flesh via her heavens. perhaps he could have her be directed by ruveca towards fuller effect. avo, cas said, catching him just as he was about to step back through the glass. i got her out? the asset. the squire that used to work for me. she contacted me earlier and said she slipped out the district after your girl hit all those silver tongue watch lobbies. theres no one hunting for her anymore. shes slipped the district. im going to be preparing to make a few new acquaintances. he rubbed at his jaw and grimaced. damn shame too. i was beginning to like this face. have to be you personally? avo asked, turning to face the columner. risky. could deploy another one of your people in your place. what im planning needs someone with a frame, he said. highflame, ori-thaum, and a whole bunch of others are clamoring for fallwalker middlers. and thats just what my cover provides. itll let me do some more public-facing shaping for the cult anyway. a grin of satisfaction painted his face. ive been wanting to be a player in the game for some time. figure nows the moment, with all that weve got going on, and all the openings youre starting to provide. always thought denton was more the spy. yeah, well, we got different vectors of pressure to exert. her job is to be quiet and subtleambiance. im about the noise, and how to use it. people hear what they want to hear when the song is good enough; doesnt matter what the lyrics say. that was true, if to a vague and limited extent. hows skintaker and our thoughtcast? shooting up. were getting sixty-six percent retention and about twelve million new followers a day. not incredibly, but steady. its probably better this waykeeps us off guild deepnav more than spiking in popularity does. most of the audience is split between understimulated tiersfolk and the chromed-out savages infesting the spine. seems both types like watching ghouls and monsters get crushed for different reasons. i had chambers tweak skintakers mind a bithave him be more positive and personable. were probably going to have him start direct sessions soon with certain peoplemostly our plants at first. we think the best way to start building an inner circle of recruits is for them to be vetted personally and intimately by nether and coldtech profilers. good, avo said. he himself considered new angles they could add to their influence. their silent war against the guilds was to be a full-spectrum offense. he would poison the entertainment people consume, collapse the industries the guilds possess, subvert their syndicates, choke them of extraneous deaths, and finally turn their very own godclads against them as facets of his own consciousness. abrel and elegant-moon was a start. a decent one. but there were millions beyond millions of ensouled arrayed against him. he needed to keep them confused, divided, and chasing shadows while swelling his own forces. increasingly, he found himself wondering about the potential of reaching outside the city as well. across the sunderwild were pockets of humanity in feral tribes and fallwalker enclaves that dotted the uncoiling madness. much opportunity presented itself there, in such a lawless and unwatched place. he would speak of this idea later as well. if he could reach beyond the borders of the city using syndicate smuggling routes to circumvent naekos orders of enclosure, then perhaps his ranks would swell ever faster, and he could freely reap the bounties of death he needed like a falling scythe rather than a dagger in the dark. that, and there were all the fallen heavens he could claim. as his frame grew, so too would his ability to soak in rend and drain the ruptures. she cocked her head at all the corpses around him. asked chambers for the mem-data bout who you were sendin dice after next. figured the juv deserves a break. and you havent killed anyone today. "and i aint killed nobody today. was it fun? just used the guns, draus said. honestly, not really. you gotta feed me some glaives soon. or let those monsters youre growing out. theyre not done. look plenty done to me. might have elegant-moon tweak them too. ruveca can help. or do you want to be impatient and test a half-finished product? she collapsed her helmet into her skin so he could better see her sneer. a stillness came over her as her halo spun, ghosts diving back into the accretion as data loaded through into her mind. alright. shes here. just entered the block. you wanna do this in person or what? ill leave a construct. you make a passage with it. well be inside. talk to her that way. make it secure for us as well. should have more redundancies in place if unexpected happens. the regular barked a soft laugh. you really like this sneak-shit, dont you? fuckin necros. cant lose all of our old selves. his reply made her go silent. she paused. suppose not. lets get set up? yeah, he said. lets. *** where are you going now? the experienced squire studied the distant girl making her way into the worn-down cheap-fabbed tenement building. the walls outside were lined with mem-cons and holo-graffiti alike, both carrying the same message. a burning and overturned street cleaner completed the mood outside. +this is warhead territory, fucker! stay off! stay the fuck off!+ warheads. another peculiar little cliche among the degenerates of the warrens. these ones were a cultural mash but found solace in a shared habit of heavy implants brought on by their body dysmorphia. joining was simplewalk in the front door and ask them for a new skull. afterward, they brought you to one of their grafters, and when you came out, youd have a face capable of shooting missiles. neck supports were, unsurprisingly, a thing of both fashion and necessity for them. trailing dice using a squadron of high-end stealth golems stolen from omnitech and jocked by a few of her consangs that owed her favors, the squire watched as the girl moved through the crowds, avoiding unknown miracles and technologies she didnt understand. the waif was a bit of an ambush predator. she hated the light. she hated anywhere she couldnt hide or was forced into a straight fight. the girl was fast as a souped-up nu-viper. it would be damn dicey to be anywhere near her when a fight started. especially since she had a sangeist grafted inside her. +yo, tavers,+ mellow said, sounding like he was eating his namesake while piloting his machine. +girls heading into the building and we got full overwatch. need any of us trail her in, let us know.+ +synced,+ quail tavers said, as she mentally inputted a few commands into her combat skin. +ill be heading in close again. one of you shoot a cast to white-rab. ill wanna talk with him afterkeep him on standby just in case too. anything goes wrong, and hes our necro.+ mellow huffed. +its bad business making the client your necro. burning imps, tavers.+ +ah. but were not here for that, are we?+ +guess not. but still, imps are nice.+ +dont you worry your soft, sweet head, mellow. youll get paid. just keep your eyes open. im gonna spark my incog now. going solo. hit my session if you got the need.+ +synced. have fun on safari.+ Chapter 17-7 Squire, Seeker, Flame (I) chapter 17-7 squire, seeker, flame (i) hiring a squire is either the best or worst investment youll ever make depending on a variety of factors. the easiest of which is separating the professionals from the chaff. the ones that light the wick are usually stone-cold snuffers prepared to face and overcome anything. these guys do their own intel, source their own gear, and plan their own runs. dont gotta hold their hands, just give em the mem-data for the run and make yourself absent until after shit goes down. of course, sometimes, good killers arent going to be enough. sometimes, you need a bit of extra. source jocks for support. necros to scrub the rub or crash a lobby. might even need make a visit to the bazaar for some missing golems to supplement your snuffers if youre making a go at a clad or something insane like that. either way, you want to control your spending but dont be cheap. and do. not. fuck. us. this one especially goes out to all you middlers out theredo not play fuck-fuck games. your ass is the neck that everyone goes for. you burn a squire and leave them out to dry? well, squires got consangs, and unless you got a real nova necro on your end, your vanishing act is going to be a very literal one before the end. but say youre powerful enough to be spared squire retribution. say youre a clad or high guilder. well, now your name is poison. no professional is going to take a gig from someone who sees em as soul-fuel, so youre hiring from the desperate, the chaff, or the green. not a good range. its also something thats going to get made known to every one of your guilder rivals. theyll know youre a traitor, and youll live with a gun barrel against the back of your neck. you middlers just keep that in mind is all im saying. -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 17-7 squire, seeker, flame (i) growing up in the sundwilds granted one a particular set of instincts that protected them from the things in the dark. the feeling lived stronger in dice than most. it started as a coldness in the pit of her stomach that spread through her tendons, slowly flaring to a burn. her heartbeat gradually rose and she began to draw deeper breaths. there was something wrong with this place. something off. the house where her last targets dwelled was a tower growing amidst stacks of shanties and cheaply fabricated structures. leaving the most prosperous district of aromang for vengs stand, she found the thunder noises, chattering ghosts, constant crowds, and intermittent aerial dogfights traded for broken slums built from the scraps of a half-ruined fortress. a skeletal frame remained of the colossal dome that covered the streets below. dwarfed by the other districts in the sovereignty, vengs stand only amounted to fifty-two kilometers in space, containing three megablocks surrounded by sprawls of cheap-fabbed shanties. whatever infrastructure remained was rooted to each of the blocks, and through them ran the only skylanes, few though the aeros were. blow bridges ran between the towering structures, casting lines of shadow over the people below. most who lived here were fully organic, untouched by the blessings of alloys or other enhancements. most of them were of the nyong peopleonce regarded as a subspecies to the sang, now a member of the ori after a successful rebellion. blending in with the populace was easier here. most were of her height and build, not towering or misshapen like so many who lived in the heights of this city were. their attire was a mix of rags and holo-tech, with some wearing holographic projectors they stole stripped from some machine or another, bolting it over the rags they wore and shielding themselves with light-made lies. everyone wanted to look special here. even the poor. the act was just so alien to dice. you didnt want to be noticed in the sunderwilds. you wanted to move. you wanted to get back behind the masters walls quickly. you dont want to be caught in the dark by the unmarked or the things outside. they did more than kill, and there were torments to suffer beyond the reach of death. here, people chatted loudly and openly, playing games using the ghosts that nested in their minds, waving their weapons but exchanging slurs and curses instead of gunfire, laughing and smiling as they lay in the filth, a bright, viscous fluid leaking from their needle-wounds. her heart built with ineffable anger and envy at their lives. so defenseless, yet so satisfied and protected. what soft lives they lived. what protections the city afforded them. if not for the gangs and their masters, who could have said these werent the privileges of the age? the base of the warheads was erected in the darkness cast of a megablock. the gang did work for the three-fingers before, serving primarily as smugglers and raiders deployed to harass rivals. as the syndicate collapsed, however, the power dynamic between the two groups shifted and the warheads seized their chance. enacting a scheme more on impulse than vision, they invited a surviving three-finger enforcer on the run from their enemies, presenting themselves a safe haven on account of prior dealings. the jock, desperate or foolish, accepted and brought with him his team alongside seven technicians left over from dices many massacres. they found themselves embraced as kin during the day, lavished with food, entertainment, and a place to rest. when night came, the warheads did what any self-respecting gang would do: ambushing their guests before disposing of them as snuff vicarities. it would have been a shame to let those imps go unearned. the remains of the three-fingers were left on pikes, their heads missing and replaced with mechanical appliances as a warning to any trespassers. as such, dice found herself scurrying across the street alone when the chance came, taking advantage of a drone crashing against the side of the nearby block to make her move. using an overturned street cleaner for cover, she studied the rents puncturing the chassis of the rusted brick of a vehicle and frowned. she felt a presence brush against her heaven, sensed things around her to mimic with her blood. there was metal and plastic and silicon and and she reached out with sangeists and tendrils of blood sprouted from her wrist, digging through the asphalt until she finally found the anomaly weighing on her mind. reeling her haemokinetic tethers in, she caught her item of interest between her fingers. a glass flechette. still fragile, but somehow unbroken. how did it manage to get embedded so deep in the ground? and the dried blood clinging to it she peered through the bullet holes lining the cleaner and saw five unmoving bodies inside. there were symmetrical points of entry damage on the other side of the vehicle, and further still through the warhead headquarters plascrete walls. someone had taken these shots from the inside. someone had killed her prey before her. the shiver inside her grew and she considered retreating. staring into the darkness of the buildings entrance, she flinched and remembered how she had to walk the blackways at home, of how the dark would know you were there and take bites from you if you moved too fast. only masters light could keep it at bay. the coldtech spotlight lights werent enough. they were only strong enough to hold while he vented his rend. now master was dead, and the dark would win.??vl?1n. her home was gone. [fuck me, consang, you were thinking about it,] chambers said. [it was so cute.] chambers was one to talk. where his mind went to was someplace unspeakable. the ghoul didnt understand human sexuality, but if he ever met the scaarthian who created the lube-cat run vicarity, he was going to kill them. slowly. [im in hell,] abrel said. [i cant even enjoy looking at a nice, cute little animal. im in hell.] [she shouldve just killed the thing,] corner added. [its going to be a problem. a weakness. shell get attached and that always ends one way.] [youre dead,] benhata said. [you didnt have any attachments.] corner conceded the point. [it reduces the odds. we all die eventually.] the last mind to note the creature was the newest. elegant-moon concepted new shapes for the kitten to take, and chambers gagged in disgust. [no! no! no! dont ever let her touch that. eat it if you gotta but keep the sang fuck away from it.] elegant-moon smirked. [but i would merely make it more survivable, mr. chambers.] avo turned his attention away from his templates and back to dice. the girl was proving a fascinating oddity he encountered along her path. he chose her quickly from the mass of fateless as a viablebut ultimately and potentially expendable ensouled. on some level, he really shouldnt have been surprised with how she defied the odds. coming up the stairs, she scouted with threads of blood first, teasing out the environment and measuring the distance between places. she was estimating how wide the room was, feeling the shape and contours of what she could hide behind, and potential spots to avoid. as her sangeist crept into the room before her, she found the bodies, and then his haemokinetically altered pool of blood. her heaven brushed his as mutual pressure spread between their domains of blood. he felt her stop then, halting in the hallway just beyond, hesitating. +come,+ avo said, casting a ghost through the reflection and channeling his thought-echoes at her. +come. ask me your favor. ask me what you want. i have gifts for you.+ her thoughtstuff shivered with anticipation, and after a passing heartbeat, she kept going. {be less fuckin creepy too,} draus said. {come. come." youre lucky this girls basically got her mind twisted by you. aint no juv with any sense walkin into a room where blood talks.} the ghoul hissed with displeasure. dont make this bad for me. important moment. {ah. time to promote your renfield to a full vampire, eh, count?} calvino hummed. be quiet, avo grunted. *** downstairs, visual data from the corpses ascender glimpser-iii optics synced with the locus, and its mem-data was uploaded into a local memory farm along with another backup of a stolen stormjumpers avatar. minutes later, the data was pulled by an unidentified guild source via recollector registry. *** shotin kazahara was having a nice dinner on the edge of one of loathings megablocks when his session sounded. wiser naras identification filled his cog-feed, and he casually dumped his half-eaten bowl of aratnid dumplings over the edge before accepting the call. he had a feeling he was about to be doing business. +cutting into my dinner, wiser. is this a social call or do we have another hit?+ +another hit, seeker. just a few minutes ago. the source of the mem-data can be traced to a structure just beside megablock one in the district of vengs stand; vanhern sovereignty.} hm. highflame heavy territory. risky entrydefinitely something that the council of elders wont be able to approve on short notice. but then again, what they didnt know couldnt hurt them. +thanks, nara. lets do dinner sometime. my treat.+ a polite laugh came from the other side. +youre too kind, seeker, but you understand that you have a reputation.+ the godclad smiled to himself. +whatever do you mean?+ he chuckled and refrained from teasing the officer. +thanks for the help. list me as investigating a lead. requires clandestine work. not to be contacted.+ +i understand do you wish me to prepare some backup for you? a knot of golems and a fast-response incubi cell.+ +absolutely,+ shotin said without waiting. +youve been wonderful, nara. if its not too much trouble, can you also send a cast over to the stormsparrow and have her on standby? transfer the imps from my account. premium holding fee.+ +is that necessary?+ +probably not. but if theres something one should suffer, its being overprepared.+ Chapter 17-8 Squire, Seeker, Flame (II) chapter 17-8 squire, seeker, flame (ii) authority uthred greatling you have been marked for a personal audience in the paths with the high seraph. before official proceedings begin, she would like to hold a personal dialogue with you with regard to recent incidents. only your presence has been requested, and you will be drawn into the paths in one day and three hours from this time. prepare yourself appropriately for any and all danger you might encounter, and see that the matter of your will is handled in case of unexpected outcomes. blessed be the worthy. -the voice of the choir 17-8 squire, seeker, flame (ii) a nervous trill sounded from the nu-kitten as a subtle coating of red stained the air. particulates of blood, smaller than even flecks, washed past the edges of the door and over dice. the weight possessed by the master was immense. staggering. there was a similarity in their power to hera symmetry of capability. but master was capable of more. much more. if she were to liken them both to blades, she would be a tiny makeshift dagger staring up the length of a spear capable of piercing the clouds. then came the fire. each crimson mote flared as ghosts danced between them, leaping through the air alongside sparks of crackling electricity matching the flow of ichor rushing through veins. a new pressure settled around her, the voice of the master reaching out from beyond the sealed doors. +come. come. ask me your favor. ask me what you want. i have gifts for you.+ it was as if the fire itself was speaking, its voice the thunderous rasp of a sword unsheathed from a storm. phantasmal winds poured through her in an echoing torrent, the flavor of the masters mind brushing hers, beyond her words to describe. for most that walked the citys streets, the stretch of humanity flowed clean. joy, grief, hate, addiction, madness, anger, want, and longing were but a few of the moods that leaked over. all understandable. all known to her inherent empathy. the new master, however, felt beyond these things. there were aspects of human emotions here, fragments and distortions of their make. but there was also something else. something colder. as if it stood above her, judging her, studying her, understanding the foundations of her nature but was in turn beyond being comprehended. the old master was touched by the power as well. a god lived inside him. a god of light, capable of holding the dark and forming beacons that burned those who lied to him. but they were human. they were understandable; wants and needs synonymous to the ephemerals they ruled over. compared to the new master, their flame felt like a candle before a storm, the flame dancing for mercy. that, and how they never struck her, yelled at her, or forced them into a cage and made to fight dogs made them different. quite different from the old master. she felt ashamed that she liked them so much already. the old master kept her safe for years. fed her. gave her clothes to wear and replaced her teeth every time he broke them during his rages. gods could be troubled. gods could be unkind. but he tried afterward. the path his heart took was always toward the light. stepping forward, she felt the cat scratching against her blood-made harness, its head peeking out from her inner coat as the door disintegrated into crimson petals, granting her entry. the room before her was awash in death. bodies littered the ground, limbs missing and innards strewn across the softness of the carpet. more than a few of the dead were only half-dressed, missing shoes or other pieces of attire. only their heads were left relatively intact, and that was likely more due to their skulls being mostly chunks of weaponized alloy than actual flesh and bone. she thought she had good odds of covering the entire space in ten great strides or so. if she were to assault this place, it would be easy workunprepared enemies and no impediments to block her strikes. a phantom sprinted past her, firing what looked to be an ancient gun across the field at incoming armor. the ghostly figure seemed to lack any implants or mechanical suits like those found in this city. something told her the scene on display was of a bygone time. +ignore them,+ the master said again, flames unmaking the surrounding illusions. scenes of war vanished abruptly as flames licked them from her sight, drinking the essence into the blood itself. could the master devour ghosts with their blood? were they truly that powerful? would she somehow come to match that? a force was building inside her with each step, in the place where the great fire lived. she saw it every time she died, its presence serving as her body as she waited for the numbers to grow. it flashed a few times when she clashed with a golemone that had the same abilities she did. her control over blood seemed limp thereafterlike something on the surface of reality just wasnt working right anymore. she avoided reaching into the masters domain. if a meager machine could make the power inside her recoil, then what would she suffer from a god greater than she? no. no. she was not a god. dice chided herself and shook her thoughts away. she was a good girl. she made her master happy. they would make her happy if they were happy. that was the best life. thinking about other things would get her hurt. she didnt like that. compulsion bade her to look down as she stepped across a hardened mirror of bright red. looking across the ground, she saw that trickles of blood were still flowing out from its sides, with each of the bodies providing the materials for this structure to manifest. despite the deepness of the crimson, the mirror-like ground she treaded possessed unparalleled reflectivity. she gazed upon her disguised self, holographic shroud casting her more like a distorted demon than a person and frowned. she wondered if she could get her coat to emit another look. something that didnt have so much static. maybe something that could make her look like a shadow. she would like that. that might get the shadows at home confused. a pang lurched inside her. she corrected herself for the mistake. home was gone without the old master. there was no home.??vl?1n. but maybe the new master could give her one. then, suddenly, something shifted in the air as the motes came together, forming a towering figure that loomed over her. dice took a few steps back and fought the urge to draw on her power. she could feel the concentration of blood and matter both in its composition, but there were structures in it beyond her understanding. her sangeist could but align its properties to a single piece of solid matter. what the master possessed was well past the hundreds, the body before her coming together as complex architecture. it was more than a shimmering shell of blood, the best she could describe its design was that it was red, and gleamed like flowing metal and light-struck glass; so many properties, so many clashing colors but then she caught sight of the eyes and her stomach fell. there was a fire in those eyes. fires that revealed flicks of ghosts behind them, flashing images of other places and people; deaths and atrocities on a scale she could not conceive. she guessed this wasnt the true form of her master, but the assumption only cultivated her awe further. were they so far above her that she couldnt even gaze upon their true shapelike when her old master bade everyone return home every night, for to stare into his full light rendered a person lame of mind or barren of thought. +dice,+ the figure rumbled, its ichorous body reverberating with every syllable. +done well. done very well. surpassed expectations. didnt die. kept surviving. kept killing. kept living. very good.+ pride swelled inside her and she fought the muscles on her face to stop herself from making the expression. the old master didnt like itshe couldnt risk the same thing here. but then the new master spoke and all her assumptions turned to dust. +dont need to restrain yourself. smile. cry. rage. scoff. frown. not the master of your body. not even the master of you.+ a coldness passed through her. it was like a candle just went out. i dont did what was wrong? i can keep going? i can kill more. +no.+ the figures voice silenced her. dice bit her bottom lip and looked up to stop her eyes from misting. the old master didnt like the expression, but he absolutely hated crying. +dont want to be your master. and you dont need one. going to be your benefactor instead. have things for you. gifts. choices. opportunities. and truths.+ an ember returned to the candle. she didnt understand, but it didnt sound like they were rejecting her. what did they want then? not a master. but a benefactor. what is a benefactor? she asked, trying to sound out the words. her voice quivered as she spoke and she hated herself for it. the dogs knew you were scared by your body, sound, and scent. they mauled the scared ones the most. she couldnt be scared. +someone that gives you something in exchange for services. a lot you dont know. language. aspects of the city. the people. gave you some understanding before. gave you protections. but used you as a distraction. wasnt sure how long you would last. expected little. got more.+ dice just blinked, unsure what to think. +i want to recognize you. recognize what youve done. give you more choice. was distracted. busy with other things after i ensouled you. elevated you. expected you to be nothing. just an opening to exploit. became a true asset instead. shouldnt suffer the fate of a pawn. you make your own choices. decide your own fate, dice.+ *** {what a wonderful speech,} calvino said, with a wry hint of distaste at the end. {it wouldve been better if you hadnt engage her as an expendable child assassin paid in deaths and reality-mutilating powers, but i suppose that still makes you a nobler character compared to her previous master.} outside the warheads hangout, shotin emerged from the winding shanties around him, running his hands through his silken mane of hair and stretching his limbs out in anticipation of what was to come. he wondered if it was the best idea to wear his favorite silk suit out to these slums. sure, it was self-cleaning but these streets and the people. he shuddered. hed get them some proper aid after this. and what was this strange redness leaking out from the building? something told him he was wise keeping his incog running. never knew what was going to kill you in this city. the warrens truly were a horrible place. it had been a few years since the last time he fought anyone in earnest. he wondered how rusty hed gotten in the meantime. with each footstep, his body fragmented, dividing into another instance of himself that moved of its own accord and occupied a parallel world in the nine hundred or so planes he had stacked within his own soul. in the span of seconds, he went from a single individual to a dozen, then a hundred, each heading to their own position around the building. between them, spatial reality began to crack in a connected line, the local space detaching from its surroundings. if the girl was still in there, it was best that he didnt give her the chance to surprise him with an incog if she had one. he would drown the area in his perception after dragging this section of real space into one of his stacks and conduct his investigation at his own leisure. no sense in letting anything go to chance. as each of his selves made eye contact, they shot each other winks, taking solace that even if the worst was to happen, at least they would look better than the bastard that did them in. he considered buttoning up his silk suit, but decided against it, not seeing the need. he was going to make this quickmanifest his full heaven and snap himself back down in the instance he left back in the tiers. no point in dragging this out. as time slowed to a near halt with each instance of him generated accelerating his mind, he clenched his fist and pried at the fabric of space around him, fractures turning to tears as he began to lift the warheads building into one of his many, many stacks. +alright, consangs,+ he said, dropping his incog as he gave the green light to wiser, and through her to the incubi and knots on standby. +clear the block. find that girl. dont null anyone. lets keep this neat.+ *** [cat-clad,] chambers said considering the girls ask. [i dig it.] elegant-moon considered the theoretical procedures of inflicting sophoncy on the kitten, but chambers didnt dig that very much. [it is possible. between my power and your flames. it is possible to install a mind in the creature.] cat later, avo said. girl now. channeling his focus back into his construct, he spoke once more to dice after a moment of passing silence. +give you power first. consider it for the future. now. do you want to be more? to find ascension.+ she wavered, and her thoughtstuff filled the nether with a flood of doubt. it was like she thought wanting was a transgression, that he was to give, but she was never to ask. her last master was had left her damage in ways avo neglected to fix in the preservation of her mind. perhaps that would be something he could provide as well. a removal of her mental shackles. i suddenly, avo grew aware of a new shape in his sanguinityhundreds of people. outside. standing in a circle around the building and the metaphysical blow came suddenly and without warning. the twice-walker recoiled as if struck while draus winced. a ponderous weight had landed upon both their domains of space as warnings wailed forth from the depths of avos consciousness. warning: foreign soul detected unidentified godclad detected classification: sphere vi [est. 403331 thaum/c] ->parallelist, aligner of worlds (space/geometry/correspondence/creation/gardens/deserts/jungles/cities/dawn/night/darkness/light/strength/wind/water/storms/lies/war/seas) [oh, shit,] chambers gasped. [thats a fuck-ton of heavens.] {avo. grab the girl. were leavin.} draus reshaped the glass within the plane of reflections. but as she opened a passage, her being erupted with soulfire as a spatial paradox exploded and rend flooded their frames. rend capacity [zeyphr of the nine paths]: 86% rend capacity [datacaster]: 55% rend capacity [woundshaper]: 2% *** quails combat skin sparked as her phase walk failed. spatial reality was in tumult all around her as a single step forward left her two floors downstairs. she considered breaking her incog and casting for her jocks, but figured they probably already saw shit going down. it happened in an instant. one second, everything was fine then the next, complications arose. her lips drew back into a vicious smirk. not unexpected though. this was what made the job worth doing. surprises. havoc. life and death and on-the-fly struggle. yeah. this was the juice. shaking herself off, she switched her rifle back over to hard kinetic, deactivating its spatial golemic module. it would take a few seconds for shit to go back to normal. *** rend capacity [parallelist]: 9% all of shotin kazaharas instances smashed back into him. time snapped like a rubberband and he found himself ass over head, buried shoulder deep upside down into someones wall. his body ached. his ass felt broken. wiser was screaming in the back of his head. wonderful. someone must have had a canon contradictory to his present in the area. and at least a third sphere heaven at that. probably not a golem then, unless sanctus or omnitech were playing fuck-fuck games with the locals syndicates. shit. that was a possibility. alright. i guess its going to be one of those ''what the fuck'' days, then. Chapter 17-9 Knife-Fighting in the Dark chapter 17-9 knife-fighting in the dark +all units scramble! repeat! deploy all assets! the seeker has been engaged! the seeker has been engaged!+ -wiser nara, ori-thaum intelligence officer 17-9 knife-fighting in the dark the sound of the nu-kittens shrieking with terror was the first thing that captured avos attention as he pushed himself off the ground with his echoheads. the second was that dicehiding behind a protective cover of her own makingwas peering at him over a block of haemokinetic blood, staring at him from behind her holocoat. benefactor? she whispered, mind lit with the colors of disbelief. the distance between them was hard to gauge, and there was a looseness clinging to spatial reality. scanning through his cog-feed, avo studied his rend and struggled to piece together what just happened. another godclad had struck the fabric of space. ambushed them. whatever their canons, it clearly clashed with draus twice-walker, rendering the shared domain affected enough to suffer metaphysical disruption. he was still connected to draus feed through his ansible but found her three floors and a full fifteen meters away. meanwhile, aside from the other few tenets still living in the upper nine floors, the people across the district fleeing from the paradox, and the matter comprising the surrounding architecture, the hundred or so individuals were missing. gone. it was as if they were a glitch in his systema thing that never was. incog. had to be. {rend check,} draus said, surprised but unshaken. {im at ninety-eight percent for the twice-walker. winters empty. think we got porter on our hands here. a big un.} he hissed with displeasure.slightly more rend and her frame would come apart as a rupture. too close.avo sent his own details over to her and she winced at his rend. {hell of an alpha strike, ill give em that.} {vent?} avo said. {no,} she said. {we go dark. ill cast the others first for an update and use the manta to get overwatch. you go incog. im gonna be takin a walk in the dark after. see who the hell just hit us and do a runner.} directing his sanguinity was a pain. the space around him responded like metaphysical lubricant, his blood skipping and bouncing from point to point, every motion sliding his grip away from what he wished to touch. if his woundshaper were a palm, it felt like it had been shattered into pieces, and each fragment was drifting, filling his mind with a blur of stimuli. [jaus,] corner said. [what a godsdamned mess. listen. ive been in something like this before. sequence me in and ill see if i can get us out.] as he reassembled the makeup of his mind, avo regarded dice again and formed a haemokinetic cube using the room as a mold, sealing them in and his blood with the conflagration. the walls, ground, furniture, and bodies all unraveled at his command as rivers of red wove a structure of his design into shape. fire traveled alongside pulsing bolts of energy, casting him and dice in an ethereal fire as he shelled them away from noticeability. suddenly, he found himself no longer able to remember draus position. she just went dark. good. they were all in the dark now. now to see whose dagger found flesh first. didnt want to meet you like this, avo said, tilting his head to address dice. the waif stood up from behind herbarrier, but the blood she controlled was taut with tension, ready to uncoil and pierce his flesh at a moments notice. good. always take what control you can. hows your rend? she tilted her head questioningly. the numbers. the ones that grow when you use your heaven. six, she said. good, he replied, spreading his haemokinesis to master his far surroundings. spreading his base influence to its full twenty kilometers, scurrying people and ramshackle shanties painted their patterns into his woundshaper. he considered liquefying everyone in the area but found himself uncertain as to if that would kill the godclad hunting him. [gotta be patient,] corner chided. [this is a dance of noise and vibration. they feel where you are, you get snuffed. you feel where they are, they get snuffed. problem is we cant play passivewe got until the domain of space stabilizes to find, snuff, and vanish or were going to be pulled into the pocket of a six framer, and thats a one-way trip to the big empty as far as im concerned.] spurred by corners thoughts, avo cycled memories back through his mind and he found himself staggered by how many aspects of reality the unknown ensouled controlled. classification: sphere vi [est. 403331 thaum/c] ->parallelist, aligner of worlds (space/geometry/correspondence/creation/gardens/deserts/jungles/cities/dawn/night/darkness/light/strength/wind/water/storms/lies/war/seas) [what?] benhata gasped. [parallelist? thats i know that one] recognition filled the template. followed by cold dread. [oh oh, were dead. thats shotin. shotin planeshift kazahara.] several of the incubi were of accord, each bearing a resigned acceptance to their fate. high-end ori-thaum godclads. more than that, a legend of the nether and the last guild war. operating for years as a singleton operative for the council of elders, shotin kazahara developed a reputation for not dying. even when he was burned. even when he was supposed to. rumors and half-confirmed truths painted a picture of shotin as someone with an individualist streak. different from the norm, but still able to comprehend and adapt to community. the innate keenness of insight he possessed helped him stay ahead of political rivals more than few times. elder drongonot an unknown to avo himselfhad personally ordered him censured twelve times for disobeying the council and embarking on unsanctioned operations. each time, however, she found herself unable to muster the political capital to see him divested of his frame and imprisoned. breaking the rules was one thing. breaking the rules and bringing resultsin one case holding a key district without backup against two separate highflame war hosts for nine dayswas beyond reproach. pair this with the fact that he was a masterful necrojack as well, and avo found himself facing a foe he could have considered a rival in skill but his superior in power. could have. the nether was his realm to burn and all minds were his to kindle. his path to victory remained clear. find an angle to access their mind, and scour them from reality. pinpricks of excitement began to build up inside avo then. shotin kazahara would be another wonderful template for his collection. the gestalt was to grow stronger. [dissolve me,] benhata whispered. the other ori-thaum templates were of the same mind. [you talk about choice all the time, time to live up to it. i dont want to be here when you start hurting more of my people. i wont help you unless you reshape me. same with the rest. dissolve me. forcing me into this is torture. i cant stop you, but if what you believe means] avo kept benhatas memories but collapsed his template into non-awareness. the same with the incubi. the mirror thought too highly of himself. they were all going to be supplemental aspects to him and corner anyway. this wasnt about cruelty, but practicality. no sense in generating self-inflicted trauma fractures in the gestalt. shapes suddenly filled his mind. sensations of titanium and other alloys armoring moving vessels. a subtle weight pressed on his domain of luminosity, and he found himself wary. [good guess would be golems,] abrel said. [weaks ones, but lots of them and backed by assault drones, bvr precision drones, and incubi strike cells sessioned to their loci. shots will be coming at us from over the horizon if were spotted, or in low orbit.] they came as four unitswith three thaumically potent golems forming the core of each knot. the missing porters were only being held back until space stabilized. three hundred and sixty fast-moving assault drones made out of lightweight metal and altered fullerene entered the woundshapers awareness. it was as if they were made of vivianite, each acting as a conduit for phantasmal essence. useful. exploitable. vulnerable. dice was saying something, but corners voice overrode hers. [dont melt them. you turn them straight to blood, you show your hand to the other clad. theyre the real danger here. these are just the little fish. we still dont know what other heavens they got and we sure as shit dont want them to know what domains we got so they can rend-dump our asses.] +could wipe all the drones,+ avo said. +drink them into my mind. cast me into the golems. use them against the clad. collapse the whole network.+ [opens you up to a disruption hit,] corner replied. [remember. you need to be in contact with whatever domain youre trying to manipulate using your heavens. the silvers got nether-based systems, but im not sure if thats compatible with your crown, seeing as its a perversion of coldtech. i say you fling some shots at them using the top of this building and lead them with more shots across the district. pull their attention away and see if you can get this planeshift to stick his head out. make it seem like someone with an incog is fleeing out the block. sell the story.] abrel concurred. [make problems for your enemies. dont wait. waiting is dying. mondelles loved saying that.] dice, avo said as a mist of blood began to condense around the building. stay close. stay low. stay away from the walls. he planted his echoheads into the ground and stabilized himself. shotin kazahara casually dropped down through the collapsing block and studied the situation as shrapnel shattered against him. his ears were completely burst, but he was used to that by now, tumbling and rolling on his side with a blank expression as he waited for his nanosurgeons to fix his damaged equilibrium. he had triggered his incog the moment he found himself buried in the building, vanishing from any potential counterattack. thereafter, he manifested his auxiliary heaven of war and shrouded himself in an impenetrable suit of animated armor. beside the single chink on the back of his neck. damnable hubrises. making his way through the block carefully, he held back from answering wiser and continued his investigation. whoever he paradoxed with mustve still been in the area. his heaven of speed felt no movement, and spatial reality was acting like one of his exes. taking advantage of assumed asymmetry, he formed vector mines along the lower sides of the block, anticipating a quick end to his foe. channeled through his heaven of speed, the traps hyper-accelerated anyone caught in their wake toward his direction, ensuring a quick encounter. when no one splattered against his armor in the first few seconds, he found himself frowning. patience and intelligence were not what he liked in an enemy. he liked idiots. fools. the type to charge at you screaming, howling slurs about the woman who birthed you or your fathers cock size. those made his job easier. why couldnt there be more people like that? instead, he found himself forced into more actual work, moving up the structure to get a top-down view via an optical scan without exposing himself and casting into one of his drones. the incubi were also going to soon arrive, and he knew how much his former coworkers liked blasting their perception over everything. it would be annoying if they nulled his own only lead on aedon chambers before he could have a chat with him. reconstructing mem-data was always a pain. it was on the top floor that he got the first clue about his enemy. the air around him was thick with red particulates. earlier, he had thought that just a drug. now, as it reshaped all the matter around him, he found his mouth opening as an epiphany sank alongside the tang of blood. blood. with a domain of matter. someone from stormtree? a heaven connected to a sangeist? whatever it was, it was capable of far more than the golem itself. lightning surged through its vein-like structures as he stepped carefully, wary that his unseen foe might feel him. he cursed the fact that the blood was misting the air itselfthe vector of its effect was without limit. if his parallelist was still usable, he would have narrowed in on them already. but until space stabilized itself in a brief few moments or so, he guessed that he still had to do things the hard way. clearly, his enemy agreed as the top section of the block exploded in a wave of force and electricity. two more probable domains then. falling, he studied the dematerializing block and triggered his sanctus aselgad reflex accelerator. the world around him slowed. the entire place was collapsing. floors were coming apart and all the people in them were dead or dying. yet, there was still no sign of his foes. bits of wall and debris cracked into him, redirected by his heaven of speed while he frowned. they couldnt have gotten away. they were still herehe felt it in his bones. he just needed to force what was left out to the sides to get them by surprise, but he had to be patient. he didnt know how powerful they weretheir spherage. at least three, and that was enough to kill you if you werent prepared. good thing was that space was settling around the area again. stabilizing. soon, he would *** rend capacity [woundshaper]: 93% the knots were in full pursuit of him five kilometers away, leaving only a few drones to guard their current area. no sign of the other godclad either. no suddenly manifested bodies. maybe they were following the golems. maybe. the building was going to be rubble as soon as he released his hold on the woundshaper. he was going to have dice take over soon. but that was only after he managed to get himself away from this place. with all the chaos he provided, he hoped draus was gone. he needed to make his own exit now. channeling a final surge of boltstride into the room around him, he aimed to fling his room out from the structure itself across the full distance his current tonnage could support. it would also put him in position to use his zephyr again, in a place where space was still stable, though he could feel reality returning to stable foundations. it wouldnt be long until the parallelist returned. he needed to go. no more time. a lance of surging lightning pulsed through the inside of the hideout. then promptly ricocheted off something unseen and launched avo and dice upward through the block at an angle. *** fuck! fuck! fuck! tavers grunted. she didnt know what the hell kind of rounds were hitting her over and over again, only that they were shaped like a raindrop and kept turning on a dime. the ground kept collapsing beneath her feet, so she was just flying now. still, the shots were ringing the sides of her combat skin, swatting her through roomsand in one particularly nasty case, someone. burning hard toward the outside as entrails spilled off from her, saw the light of the outside world and found herself relieved to see only a dozen or so drones hovering overhead. she was significantly less relieved when she suddenly found herself launched the other way by something unseen. oh, what the fu *** draus watched the knots leave before she pushed the debris off her and sprinted toward an open window. the opening was clear. the manta was cloakedjust a few hundred meters away above a three-storey shack. she burst through the wall, but the wall decided it didnt like that, and something swatted her right back into the air. *** shotin barked a surprised laugh as several impacts slammed into him, one in particular feeling like an aerobarge. ending his incog, he activated his skimmer, and his perception washed out, peeling the unseen back into shape. *** rend capacity [woundshaper]: 95% vent! vent! vent! avo felt an entire chunk of his consciousness vanish as ten thousand of his ghosts shattered at once. dice. now! he gathered all his rend and readied himself. gravity lurched in all directions. the kitten''s yoweling was growing increasingly demonic. a mind manifested in front of him. then two more. his hells came alive with the lashing of his conflagration. *** cog-cap: 91% quail tavers killed her incog and activated her emergency session. +rab!+ *** draus knew when a situation was fucked up beyond her control. but she still had a clean cycler. and there was a surefire way for her to give herself some more breathing room without using her heaven at all. triggering reactor overload Chapter 17-10 The Rash Abides (I) chapter 17-10 the rash abides (i) +paladin baers, were getting reports of a nuclear blast going off over the district of vengs stand. do you have eyes on the situation?+ [messy eating noises; slurping] +paladin baers?+ +yeah. a whole bunch of drones. golems tearing shit up. next to a megablock. fucking syndis, dispatch. you know how it is.+ [food wrap wrinkling] +looks to me like some kind of foggy missile or something isthe hell is that+ [warning: object rapidly app] [session lost] +paladin baers?+ -paladin dispatch 17-10 the rash abides (i) shotin kazahara didnt enjoy being nuked. didnt enjoy eventually evolved into full-blown hate during the fourth guild war when highflame decided to keep the nights bright, the air radioactive, and the bombs constant. it was under such constant devastation that he got quite used to being deaf. and blind. and the feeling of his flesh cooking off his bones before he managed to switch to another stack or manifest one of his heavens fully. it was thanks to such practice that he only responded with muted astonishment at the sudden blast erupting in the air two meters next to him. his raiment of the unbreaking mightve rendered him conventionally indestructible, but in less than a microsecond, the air was going to get very, very hot, and his flesh was going to get very, very fried. it was times like these that he wished he opted to upgrade his heaven of war some more. thankfully, after a lot of practiceand a few thousand deathshe developed another technique that could potentially save his life: accelerating away from the danger as fast as he could. his heaven of speed manifested fully as a screaming thousand-winged eagle exploded out from his frames subreality, switching places with his ephemeral self in existence. a row of eyes ran along the sides of the heavens body, and its feathers all bore directional arrows. a tail of tassels danced out from its open ribs as an orb of watery force shivered, narrowing into a teardrop, pointing to his new vector of hyper-accelerated movement. withering wind and phantasmal fire lashed out at him from the corner of his awareness, but caught in the wake of his miracle, they snapped past him, their weight nothing compared to the ponderousness of his soarer of endless pursuits. the air split against the wings of his heaven as he dove blindly, trying to avoid the blast, the sound barrier cracking around him as the nearby megablock closed with him in a blink. still wasnt enough though. the blast still licked the back of his feathers. soulfire erupted out from his eagle as he tumbled out of its form, hubris triggered, his skin and hair igniting even as the raiment formed around him again. rend capacity [soarer of the endless pursuits: 66% the plascrete wall of the block crumbled before him as he tumbled through wall after wall. something slick and soft splattered across his torso. jaus, he hoped that wasnt a person. through the tumbling havoc, he found his armor screeching against the tilted floors of a blurred hallway, each turn his body made taking a chunk out from the ground. then, the blastwave caught up to him. he knew it from the vibration running through the building, from the way the building shook. he was lucky that was a low-yield warhead. something greater and some of the damage would have gone through. burying a fist into the floor, he dug a furrow into the ground even as his burn-molted skin screamed for him to stop. his pain editor kicked in a second later, silencing all agony past a certain threshold. activating his traumasight phantasmic, he winced as he reviewed the damage. no broken bones, but both his lungs were burned, eight percent of his skin was missing, and worst of all, his hair was on fire. slamming hard into a reinforced door, shotin came to a final stop and released his armor. staggering two steps forward, he vomited as he kept walking, already familiar with the after-effects from the last hundred or so times he experienced it. patting out the flames of his biosilk suit burning on his body, he ran a hand through his hair and sighed. clumps. coarse. falling out. rude. he wanted to say, but the only noise his lungs could make was a wheeze. he considered killing himself just for the resurrection but resisted the urge when he knew he would lose his lead. the blood earlier could that have been dice? what else didnt he know about her? how the hells did some fateless refugee girl go from being owned by a syndicate in a death game to having a heaven and an incog in the span of a week? it didnt make any sense. there was something else here. a greater force at play. just how capable was this aedon chambers? shotins session rang and he answered when he saw the name in his cog-feed. +oh, gods. seeker! you need toyou should resurrect. ill direct the knots+ +dont worry, nara,+ he said, grinning. part of his cheek detached from his bones. spatial reality was settling again. they made a good attempt, but this game was going to be over soon. +ill be fine. send our boys and girls out to have some fun. tell them to use their phys-sims. follow the big red container. ill bring the cage down real soon.+ his nanosurgeons screamed as they fought to restore his body, their efficiency strained to the max as he directed them to his lungs first so he could breathe again. turning to his right, he saw a juvmaybe no older than tenstaring at him with a big, cold bottle of surgemax. hmm. cherry flavor. his favorite. flick you fifty imps for a sip. the kid blinked. f-uhseventy! keeping the protective shell around him active even as their bodies returned to normal, avo turned to check on dice even as the first waves of perception washed over them. +you alright?+ she didnt respond, instead looking down to check on the nu-kitten in her coat. a weak meow sounded a moment after, and avo felt the blood rushing through its veins while its heart screamed. the creature was confused. terrified. and probably the only other living thing that made it out of that building. he was going to mock draus about dying here later. hopefully, the necros would be too busy chasing him to notice her resurrection. just as he extended his sanguinity to locate and liquefy shotin, the first trauma pattern chipped a dozen ghosts from his mind. followed by three hundred. that assault lashed out at him through the drones closing in on him, firing conventional munitions at his haemokinetic protections. avo scoffed. his conflagration and sanguinity swept out together. he absorbed their flechettes and devoured their traumas. a hundred tons of matter vanished from his surroundings as his woundshapers thaumic mass climbed with its tonnage. across the nether, the strike cells barely had a moment to react before they belonged to him. knowledge entered his awareness. sessions and information he was formerly denied surfaced in his mind. twenty-two new minds entered his template as each of the incubi found themselves unbalanced by their sudden deaths. the jocks wept and shrieked inside him, unable to face their own ends. one moment they were flinging mind-breaking horrors at what looked to be strange fire. then they were burning. they were the fire and the fire was them. corrupting the loci of their drones, he accessed the machines he turned via their session. he had them under his control just before a knot of golems approached, their protections pushing the touch of his haemokinesis away. the golemsdespite all the armor built into their bodieswere not ready for the drones to fire into the open exhausts of their engines. flames gushed out the more materially rooted golems while the shield-emittersomething that looked like a hovering watchtower more than a weapon of warturned to shield only itself from harm as avo drank the heavens out from the other two and melted away their structures. heavens obtained: runebreaker (war/strength) x2 as he triggered the sessions for the incubi cells mirror-convex and subsumed his mind as well, he contemplated this final defensive heaven with lecherous hunger and yearned to possess its power. the impenetrable protections it offered would go well with his woundshaper, seeing as he could feel its presence pressing against his domain of luminosity. the only question was how to get through to it. the jock piloting it reacted fastcutting themselves off from both lobby and comrades. it seemed as if they deactivated their auto-seance as well. [avo. get the fuck out of here. you can snatch this heaven some other time. we need to go before] then, two things happen at once. the first arrived as spatial reality stabilized, and the sky above changed. metaphysical stacks of translucent shot through the ground as the environment distorted around him, the surrounding district still present, but overlapping with another space entirely. the presence of people and drones vanished from his awareness in an instant. it was like he was alone. the second was the sudden deactivation of the golem, its protective shielding winking out for no obvious reason. avo wasted no time, seizing both matter and mind as he claimed it for himself. heaven obtained: shineguard (luminosity/protection) x1 yet, as he flooded the locus of the machine, he found the jock already nulled. in fragments. only a single string of mem-data provided any clues. +avo. going to make you an opening. get away from the block. brace for rend dump.+ uncertain who the memory was from or how they knew his name, he reacted, boltstriding just as a tide of perception splashed through the district while a jungle sprouted into existence around him, avo found himself dashing forth into a place that resembled the vengs stand but was empty of people. ignoring the change, he spread his sanguinity wide, but found only greenry and woods for leagues and leagues beyond. he wasnt in real space anymore. a weight was treading on his domain of space. the immense weight he felt earlier. a thoughtcast flooded the air. +hello. good morning. this is to the bastard that ruined my hair. i see you. little lightning bolt. you have five minutes to come to the megablock so that we can talk like civilized people. i wont lieim probably going to punch you at least once, but thats better than getting shifted into an undersea plane where youll be promptly crushed by all the pressure. dice. if youre the one who managed all this, im impressed; but still, fuck you, im bald now. come out. dont make me snuff you. shotin.+ [fuck,] corner said. [were in his pocket. were in his stacks.] [he seems nice,] chambers said. [maybe we should talk to him? yknow. see if we can get close and burn his ass.] that gave avo an idea. he stopped striding and activated his incog again. waves of perception were radiating out from the tower, but they wouldnt reach him yet. turning to study dice, he let out a breath as he began to plot. so, he asked. do you have a preference of powers? the girl blinked, her holocoat glitching from being stormwreathed. the gift? now? might not be a better time, he said. might also ask you a favor. give you another gift after. whats that? might need you to talk to someone. use your mind for an ambush. itll burn a bit. she just stared at him in silence. i want the cat to be safe. avo studied the small creature peeking out from the lip of her jacket, hissing at him. okay. ill make sure the cats safe. Chapter 17-11 The Rash Abides (II) chapter 17-11 the rash abides (ii) the parallelist looks like an easy heaven to overload and rupture from a glance and used by someone less capable than shotin kazahara, it would be. unfortunately, one of us poor bastards will be facing the planeshift in the field before this thing is done, so listen close. it might just keep you from getting real deathed. the heaven stands as the very definition of a sea, focused on the breadth of influence across a vast number of different domains instead of absolute control over just a few. with nineteen different aspects of reality connected to a heaven of space, shotins flexibility is unmatched in all situations, capable of attuning any environment to suit another of his designs, rapidly slotting or switching stacked worlds from a surrounding instance or a pre-saved location he has stored within his ontologic. i want all of you to understand that there is no home ground advantage fighting shotin kazahara. he will twist your environment and see instances of himself across his stacks. hell scatter you and your allies across said stacks and break you via defeat in detail. this goes to all you porters out therekeep your canons protected and your rend-bombs close. you want the parallelist as hamstrung as you can make it. keeping him in plane doesnt mean hes helpless, mind you. he still has a heaven of speed and a heaven of war slotted in his custom-made frame, but itll be easier grinding him down when hes anchored to the material than chasing him across worlds of his own making. it was with this heaven that he managed to hold the arsden-kossogi sovereignty against two highflame war hosts and four separate cadres, personally real-deathing instruments osjane masser and threes inkton, and authority elvers inkton over an extended engagement that lasted for thirteen hours. i personally knew authority elvers and will tell you his skill in direct combat exceeds even the best of you. that was not what got him killed. what got him killed was breaking from his cadre and n-def coverage to engage shotin alone. view the vicarity we reconstructed from the remnants of his mind to fully immerse yourself in mistakes and decisions made during the battle. i am ashamed to say that many of our guild think we are intrinsically superior to our foes by our culture, breeding, and creed. this is self-delusion. highflame is more than a creed or a culture. true to the high seraphs words, we should not fall to the poison of dogma or philosophy. blessed be the worthy. thats a material expression. to triumph is highflame. to push yourself every second and rise from every fall is highflame. to recognize that one of your hated foes is a valorous rival worth learning from and emulating is highflame. shotin kazahara would have been made authority by his deeds if he had fought for us during the war. preventing the fall of a critical sovereignty even as his cadre fell around him, even as [redacted] debased our image by kidnapping and torturing his sistera noncombatant and a prison of warbefore trying to lure him out via her murder. he did not break from his assigned position. he fought. he executed his orders. and the worthy won that day. thirteen hours of fighting. twelve hundred knots destroyed. two war hosts and eighteen ori combat groups annihilated to the last soldier. shotin kazahara endured. today, we will be reconstructing the events of that day, as well as everything we know about the planeshift. you will all be assigned roles in the war hosts as you attempt to engage the parallelist and the surviving silver forces. i do not expect any of you to succeed and will be giving no merits for failure. prove me wrong. redeem our glory. -instrument santanado starsinger mondelles, instructor at axtraxis academy (highflame) 17-11 the rash abides (ii) tension pulled at shotins nerves as a lone figure circled toward his megablock in a rapid jog. she was moving pretty fast for someone not using their heaven of blood. a bit too fast, judging from the air currents peeling around her. still, she wasnt doing anything offensive or obvious. just circling. trying to see if he would actually shift her over into his deep sea plane, perhaps. across all the stacks he had in him, the city reclaimed by vegetation design was among his favorites. something about the green just made people want to talk. his skimmer bathed this layer of spatial reality with his perception, ensuring that none here hiding between the cracks or trying to pull a dirty getaway on him using an incog. it was good practice to overlap multiple surveillance mechanisms. that was taught to him enough over the course of the war. more than a few highflame godclads managed to slip the supposed all-sensing nature of one of his correspondence canons and the eyebiter infestation he caught from the sang was pain enough for one lifetime. still, there were things that unnerved him about the girl keeping her distance from him, running down the clock via her slow approach. the first was her sudden death earlier. she just dropped. no rhyme or reason. just died. she killed her bioform before that as well, turning into a red smear on the ground before he could get a good look at it. maybe she was charging up something nasty with a heaven of biology. that explained the nu-kitten she carried with her everywhere. maybe the cat could piss lightning and shit nuclear fire. he knew a sang once who could turn peoples eyes into wasps. got to experience that firsthand. shifted the sow over into a plane of dawn as a response and set her on fire. that was a real-death most deserved. he had to be ready for this girl pulling similar tricks. something else gnawed at him. she was just too full of tricks to be some random wilder girl beyond the walls. wiser was casting casualties into his minda full knot wiped out and an entire incubi strike cell along with their monitoring mirror nulled. that was beyond the capabilities of most godclads. there mustve been someone helping her. an extremely capable necrojack like the low masters. or one of their acolytes. he glared at her strangely formed accretion and frowned. she didnt even truly have a metamind protecting her, but the makeup of her consciousness looked warped. hardened against traumas. that indicated expert-level sequencing. the type even he would need to spawn a dozen instances of himself to achieve. aedon chambers. shotin could feel the mans hand in thisfeel the acolytes artistry emanating from the girl. he must have also arranged this frame for her. helped her usurp a vulnerable godclad, perhaps. shotin sighed as he prepared himself. he had a feeling this was warning: missiles incoming in stack-prime [1.4 kilometers] shifting his consciousness out from his instance back into his prime sheathe, he found himself blasting off the top of the megablock with four unidentified missiles marked in his cog-feed. the district below was awash in fire and carnage, and sirens blared down from the layers above him, the paladins finally deeming the situation worth their attention, miserably late as usual. rend: 98% yeah. thisll do. *** draus resurrected to the sight of a building folding in on itself and scowled as she realized her gun was missing. she made a note to fuse it with her meldskin next time so it would count as part of her for a resurrection. however that worked. might need kae to explain it again. her neurodeck crackled as metrics related to radiation filled the corner of her eye. she ignored it. a conventional explosion was the least of this district''s concerns. spatial fabric looked more fucked now than when she went under. a few columns of smoke shivered up into the sky as if she stared at them from behind an oily window. a humorless chuckle escaped her as she fired her thrusters and soared low along the ground. this had the rotlicks fingerprint all over it: really, really quiet, then unholy chaos and carnage for everyone when shit goes sideways. to her surprise, the manta was still in one piece and she connected to it again via neurodeck. her suicide had reduced its mass by a bit, but it was still more than operational. sending it high into the air, it became overwatch again as she tried to call avo. but his ego-id was blank in her neurodeck. her lip curled. dead, then. question was: he dead for good or on the way back? sweeping the manta''s sensors through the chaos, a ping manifested in her hud marking where dice was. four hundred meters away. shed clear thant in an instantfind out about their current situation and exfil with her in tow. no sense in leaving her to waste out here. thatd be a real highflame thing to do. she cast chambers again. +chambers+ {i know! dont worry, im on the way. i brought kae with me. and were driving} a sound of chambers screaming for his life started and then abruptly ended. {we didnt crash. thank jaus. anyway, that half-strand isnt ready for all our feet rising up the folds of his asshole at once.} draus suspected chambers foot wouldnt ever get the privilege. {just get over here. and come up with some extraction routes too.} {got it. theres a gateway we can take ten k''s away! dentons back in the washington! well have her open it before we get there!} the regular boosted over a half-collapsed shanty and found dice smashing through everything in her path as if they werent there. fallen drones and abandoned aeros went up into the air. solid walls burst into dust as the waif just charged through them. and strangely, with each thing she broke, she seemed to be going faster, hitting harder. so, avo was just taking a break, then. she doubted the girl pulled these new tricks from thin air. *** kae, chambers said, cutting from one lane to another without casting any directional indicators. aeros behind them blared their horns and swerved. are you ready? are you ready for anything? their aero swerved as chambers yowled curses at the exorcist drones darting up from under them in front of them. thats right! thats right! fuck me! fuck me hard in front of the lady. run me out the lane and kill us! you bastards are half the problem with this city. piss back out your asses! fucks! kae frowned at the constant stream of vulgarity and tried to focus on her tasks. i i think. im trying to review the parallelist heavenour adversary has a great deal of coverage. spatial reality across fifty kilometers has been considerably i dont care about them, kae, chambers said, rolling his neck but getting no cracks like draus. he tried again. still nothing. he mimed a cracking noise using the corner of his mouth and pretended to succeed. im talking about me. you? chambers nodded. ...whatwhat are you planning to do, chambers? he looked out the window and narrowed his eyes as he judged the cityscape below. there is one power above all others. there is one heaven standing on all the others. a heaven that can only be cured by the flame. someones trying to hurt our consangs. we cant let that happen. nothings off the table. everythings permitted. ... what are you talking about? he looked up at the ceiling and nodded, steeling himself. just be ready the agnos mind went blank as she tried to decipher his words. she gave up a moment later, turning her attention toward which potential heavens were at play and what routes they could use to escape. Chapter 17-12 The Rash Abides (III) chapter 17-12 the rash abides (iii) judge ygwamawe: let this recording stand as the third attempt to censure seeker shotin kazahara on the counts of insubordination, ignoring direct commands from a superior body, assault on a superior citizen, unauthorized seizure of guild property, libelous slander of another citizen, inappropriate language in an official forum, kidnapping of a fellow citizen, unlawful interrogation of said fellow citizen, and secondhand public urination via nu-dog on said tortured citizen. would the accused like to make any statements before the proceedings begin? seeker shotin kazahara: yes. clans. citizens. all gathered in this courtroom before i am to be judged, i would like to put forth a question: are these really crimes when done to a lackey from clan drongo? [gasping; clamor of indignation] judge ygwamawe: order! control yourselves! guards! guards! asei drongo: draw your glaive, you [missed swing; pelvis shattering; asei drongo screaming in pain] seeker shotin kazahara: well, damn, ygwamawe, looks like kicking a drongos balls into his guts is going to be on the sheet as well, huh? judge ygwamawe: add it. -first successful censureship trial against seeker shotin kazahara 17-12 the rash abides (iii) resurrection - 100% avo didnt expect the world to be swallowed by chaos once more upon his return but welcomed the fact he wasnt trapped in shotins pocket anymore. matter evaporated from the space around him and the woundshaper began to assemble where his sheathe once stood. judging from the way space shivered around him and the heavy weight pressing on his domains of space, he guessed another paradox just occurred. [well, well, well, looks like another paradox just went off,] corner said. [damn shame we didnt get to use the girl to pull that trick. mightve worked, getting her to play possum by walking up to shotin while we played dead then casting ourselves through her.] +mightve,+ avo replied. a brief feeling of lament passed through but faded. there were risks in such a plan as well. unknowns. how fast shotin kazahara could react and what canons he had to bear remained questions to consider. still, avo was a predator unmatched in the nether. it didnt matter how good shotin was, how many incubi he had helping him, or how heavy his frame. the only fate was to burn. considering the devastation around him, a worrying suspicion settled on him. the last time a paradox happened was because of draus. if this had been caused by her again, then her ego-id flashed across his cog-feed. he accepted her call in an instant. {done bein dead? i got eyes on our girldamn shes goin fast. get over here quickwe got hostiles movin in fast. paladins and exorcists from the look. no sign of our godclad either. think he went incog again. gonna want backup.} he was in motion before she even finished talking, a feral expression spreading across his face as lightning crackled through his flowing currents and radiance emanated from his blood. {good. pull back. let him get close before closing. got a session in her mind. want to burn him for my conflagration.} {synced.} the air around him crackled as he boltstrode and activated his incog at the same time. the district blurred around him as he used his deepnav to pinpoint his destination. yet, as he rematerialized, he found himself more than five kilometers southward from where he wished to be and about to smash through a cluster of shanties packed with fateless. his acceleration alone should have obliterated the entire area from its shockwaves with the impact leaving little more than a hollow crater afterward. what happened instead was one miracle counteracting another. light cleaved through the world as the woundshaper shone like a beacon, its tower-like form now a lighthouse for all to behold. brightness spilled off its lightning and coated the world around it in a protective glow. as the air thundered from the collision, as a scar of fire made by sheer speed erupted into the world, the few hundred people living across five storey ghettos made out of trailers, dismantled barges, stolen containers, and golem chassis survived without a single scratch. shineguard grafted to [woundshaper] (blood/matter/biology/luminosity/lightning/protection) - 1200 thaum/c canon:0v3l.bin. (protection) ->fortress of luminosity: allows the user to project an emanation of light that renders all physical objects basked by its glow invulnerable to harm (as dictated by the user); generates heavy rend for every second canon is in effect (0.88%/s) hubris: the canon needs a persistent source of light in the environment or on the user to imitate or thaumic backlash will be triggered. hell [fourth circle] - 1200 thaum/c canon: (luminosity) ->shadowbreaker: the user creates a seed of light bearing all their rend that can be planted in a shadow or darkness; only one seed can be created at a time; the light will continue to spread through all darkness or shadows and eradicate any object or entity caught within the darkness. daemon: if there is an insufficient amount of darkness consumed, a daemon of luminosity will manifest. rebuilding his domain of luminosity and taking out zeins harmonize canon proved to be a wise idea. especially with how well the fortress synergized with his sanguinity. ah, the zephyr said, sounding genuinely glad for once. finally, old one, you have done something worthy of worship. the woundshaper, radiant with its new power, tread a path between pleased and annoyed. it is always good to be made greater, master, but those lives could have gone to better purpose. and there she reveals her debased nature, her foundations unchanging. silence mule. sulk in your darkness. quiver before my light. ill quiver only when you reach the required height. my deaths are greater! my mass is greater! master favors me more! reorienting himself, avo executed a series of short-ranged jumps to combat the instability of space. in his deepnav, he monitored draus and dices position before noticing new and unknown profiles trespassing into his awareness. peeking over at draus visual feed, he watched as she soared to engage a squadron of twenty oncoming exorcist drones passing over dice. her liminal frame flared and the cold buried its fangs into the district as the temperature dropped. the exorcist drones were expendable scouts, sent as recon. too bad they didnt get to see much before the jaws of a frost-made bear the size of a building froze and shattered their shells. an enormous eagle manifested where shotin was and redirected the salvo right back with amplified velocity. light flared around the woundshaper as the constructs shattered. avo manifested a sanguinity-made claw and seized shotin from behind, imbuing it with the same light that protected him. his adversary struck out at the appendage and the indestructible rang against the invulnerable. shotin made two quick gestures and avo felt his claw and body plunge down into the foundations of the district itself. manifesting a new construct within the reach of his crown, avo ejected his mind and infused his consciousness within the shard and boltstrode as he transferred the mass of his main body along the way. as he crackled back into existence beside shotin, he laid eyes on his adversary for the first time, their armored figure protected within a glowing armor, as if fresh from the forge. avo reached out to download shotin using his datacaster only to find his foe out of range in an instant. a beam cut out through the aira thread of black fire that pierced clean through a nearby figure coming up behind him. a body fell in two pieces past avo. [i think that was my partner,] kassamon muttered. avo ignored it and boltstrode. only to find himself wrenched in the opposite vector. leaping constructs again, lightning coursed through avo as he tried to catch up, but found himself too late. shotin was heading for dicegoing to get her first, reaching a hand out as he prepared to snatch the discombobulated girl from the ground. another beam cut through the air. this one struck the seeker dead in the chest. entropy essence splashed off his glowing armor, but the unanticipated attack knocked him into a spiral. but before he could get far, dice grabbed him instead and flung him toward avo. hissing internally with glee and pride at the girls actions, avos confidence swelled further as a blizzard formed around him, freezing multiple approaching golems and drones solid as he strode to reach shotin. distance: [753 meters] distance: [531 meters] distance: [232 meters] then, just as his crown slipped over the seekers form, just as his conflagration crept forth to welcome the newest member of the gestalt, shotins armor broke open into tendrils of darkness and wrapped themselves around him. *** warning: foreign soul detected unidentified godclad detected classification: sphere vi [est. 5941 thaum/c] ->woundshaper, the awakened (blood/matter/biology/lightning/luminosity/protection) shotin had no idea how a sphere four godcladsome kind of sang in a sleek-looking bio-rigcould be this much trouble. even without his parallelist, his heaven of speed and war should have been enough to settle this. but here he was, venting his hell into said sphere iv to stall for time. as shadows wrapped themselves over the blood-made tower, he turned and triggered his heaven of speed to grab the girl. enough of this madness. he needed to get out of here before his metamind screamed. he shifted leftnot fast enough. a lance of entropy cleaved clean through his left ankle and his pain editor worked overtime. biting back a string of curses, shotin calmed himself and accepted that this was just one of the days that life broke down his doors to fuck him hard in front of the whole city. nothing for it. he just needed to survive and get out of here the girl flung an aero at him. shotin sputtered and swiped it aside. he barreled into her a moment after, grabbing her by her midriff only for two pinpricks of pain to sink into his hand. his eyes widened as he caged dice in a field of inverted speed and looked at his hand. her damn nu-kitten bit him! two clean marks right on his favorite hand. come on his hand promptly froze and shattered. he sighed and tried to dash away with the girl. this was when he reached his boiling point, for just as he was about to leave, a civilian model aero slammed directly into his ribs and pinned him against a nearby lamppost. shotin spat out a mouthful of blood and made a pulling motion. two people burst out the windshield of the circular aero as he booted it off his body with his remaining leg. one of them properly turned into waterand shotin redirected their flow into the sky before they could wash over him. the other, however, made shotins thoughts grind to a halt entirely, for held between his very fingers, was the one he had been searching for. the mans face was bruised and bloodied, caked with broken glass, but the grinthe ugly mop of blonde hair shotin knew him! shotin was hunting for him. aedon fucking chambers, he muttered. then, for no reason at all, the half-strand pulled his pants down and whipped out his penis. shotins eyes widened in horrified disbelief. what the fuck? *** lustaway activating quail tavers killed her drone feed and tripped over her own feet as she collapsed at her new firing position. what the fuck. *** draus dove behind a building as a stream of rockets exploded behind her. one of her arms was gonethe cost of taking her shot at shotin between distracting the authorities. sneaking a peek over using the manta, she found her eyes locked to chambers visual feed as she saw him holding his cock and pointing it at shotin. godsfucking a missile hit her. armor integrity: 16% *** the horror only worsened as chambers member promptly caught fire. the acolyte leaned in. you shouldve stayed home today, silver. and then he sprayed a deluge of aratnids from his groin. Chapter 17-13 Outbreak (I) chapter 17-13 outbreak (i) alright, thats it, everyones oh oh, no no! no! aghhhhhghhhg -paladin baers upon entering vengs stand and contracting the rash 17-13 outbreak an important thing to remember when someone was spraying burning aratnids into your mouth with their cock was to keep your mouth closed. this was a lesson shotin quickly learned by experience as the first of the unnatural rat-spiders pried at his face, palps brushing his inner cheek. the chains of shock shattered. outrage exploded inside him while he deluded himself, ignoring the pitched peals of his lustaway. the swarm bit at his eyes, squeaking and hissing as their unnatural fangs actually pierced his skin, injecting clusters of something under his flesh. through it all, aedon chambers cackled, howling like a hyena as his laughter cut through the air. the noise promptly turned to a shriek of agony as something inside shotin snapped. scattering the aratnids from his body with a flick of his wrist, the seekers hand cracked through the air, and his heaven of speed cawed as two vectors of speed tore at chambers. the first was anchored to his body and drove him down, crumpling the aero behind him from sheer force. the second anchor was attached to the acolytes testicles, and shotin charged it with every last ounce of acceleration his heaven was capable of and loosed it skyward in a random direction. the first force buried chambes into the folding vehicle as the second uprooted his genitals from his groin like a burning, gore-rooted turnip. horrifically, just before the member broke off with a sickening snap, shotin noticed it twitch and extend. oh, you sick mother things quickly grew worse. a spurt of blood and fire blasted out with the castration, but the act was a pointless one. more fire erupted from the wound and from its heat poured even more bioforms seeking shotins flesh. it was like cutting a hole into a hornets nesthe just made a bigger opening for them. the bugs and newly forming flesh-coated abominations were the least of his worries, however. the true danger signaled itself as chambers'' howling cries turned to a long drawn-out moan. an outbreak of redden dots popped and opened as a bloody line along the side of the mans face, distorting into something that looked like a sore. no. cold dread filled shotins stomach. he felt a spike of pure agony flare under his chin as his flesh began shifting against his will. oh, no, he gasped, smacking a two-headed lizard as it shoved its face into one of his rapidly forming wombs. no. no, no, nojaus, fuck, no! chambers face deformed to support the beginnings of the rash as he suddenly sat up like a man possessed, laughing at shotins retreating form. fluid pooled around his skin and sealed him in some kind of liquid armor, only exposing his growing wombs to the world. the seeker tried to respond, but ineffable pain spread through his bone, his flesh tearing beneath his tattered suit like fissuring chasms, amniotic fluid fountaining from the rapidly forming sores. the swarm of creatures clawing and biting at his eyes was an afterthought now. he drove the acolyte through the pavement itself and stumbled for the nearest flame, mind blank of everything but his growing suffering. he needed to burn the affliction shut. cauterize the plague. the burning wreck of what used to be a golem called to his attention from across the intersection. a sudden wetness spilled down upon him before he could reach it. he felt a lightness tap his domain of seas before the droplets fused into a river and shunted him away from his salvation. he redirected the waters around him, parting them before the heaven vanished a second later as the other godclad collapsed out of her manifestation, wailing in abject torture. she flopped out from the droplets and crashed down on the shattered street mere meters away from him, face contorting as she wheezed with her torment. their eyes met and he noticed the clan mark over her right eyekusanade?vezosos? he couldnt rememberit was hard to think. he considered accelerating a nearby rock through her eye but the thought vanished as a small hand clawed out from where his ear was. an anguished noise escaped from him as he seized the homunculi by the arm and tore it out. his equilibrium went as a series of crunching pops rattled across the side of his skull. the world spun and danced as he chunked the half-formed infant onto the ground, his inner ear melded to its half-formed stomach. if there was any solace to be taken about looking at the malformed fetus grown from his flesh, it was the fact its hair was still slick and cheeks were still sharp. then a swarm of aratnids poured over the mewing infant and sank their teeth in supple flesh. let it be known that shotin kazahara remained charming even as a stillborn homunculus. shapes and blurs passed through his cog-feed as he fought to keep himself standing between every step. he couldnt keep from flopping on his face when a golem crashed not two steps away, showering him with shrapnel. through it all, chambers damned creatures were back again, chipping at his skin while the rash consumed his insides at an alarming rate. just how much lust did that bastard have? most outbreaks progressed slower than this. with chambers it was like being at the epicenter of a fusion bomball his metaphysical lust feeding the fallen heaven to its fullest capacity. in the corner of his eye, he spotted the girl he spent so much effort chasingdicetearing a cluster of ingrown infants out from her thigh. seeing double and hearing little more than a persistent ringing, he couldnt tell if she was crying or merely screaming. at least her bloody cat was helping her. trying to bite through the mess of umbilicals hanging out from her body. his chest struck the wreck first and only then did he remember where he was going. something in the back of his mind screamed for him to manifest one of his heavensto spare himself more torture. remembering that it didnt matter, that the rash would cling to his body even when it was stored in his soul, rendered that idea worthless. this was a suffering of more than biology. wombrash would have its keep once it touched you, and nothing but extreme burns or thaumaphagic treatments would be enough to preserve the body. right now, all he had was the first option. when the choice was a bit of heat or shitting misshapen babies out from your pores, the decision was simple. shotin shoved his face into the fire, and the following hurt came as a relief. rend capacity [dawnforge]: 44% once again, he found aedon chambers directly across from him, this time encased in smooth armor of fluid white. it strangely shared some resemblance to the hull of a voidship. what, shotin sighed, the fuck is wrong with you? how arent you dead? i drove you into the ground. i tore your cock off. a chuckle. a chuckle escaped from chambers as his pale armor flowed over and back under his skin. coldtech armor, consang. it hardens in response shotin triggered his heaven of speed one last time. he pulled at a loose stone somewhere behind chambers. the plascrete shock snapped into his hand as it punched clean through chambers skull. a clean gouge ran from where his nose was through the back of his head. stumbling back, the acolyte blinked once and tried to say something as he toppled. the rock went under his chin and shredded his face into flaps before he hit the ground. staring at the blood gushing forth from his body and the spasming of his legs, shotin mantled the edges of the golem and stepped out. a scar was scabbing the face of reality. the piece of shit had another cycler in him. because of course he did. of course some low master acolyte had all these ontologics, equipment, and implants. a pause passed through him as he turned his eyes on the other godclad chambers came with. something didnt make sense here. the tech was definitely too advanced for a random anti-guild outfit. and the woman he knew here from somewhere seen her face in a report before. but he never got the chance to have the epiphany he needed. the rend capacity of his dawnforge chimed as it reached empty in his cog-feed, and shotin gave a shuddering whimper in response. rend capacity [dawnforge]: 0% oscillating waves of blood exploded across the district as blades of blood finally cut the woundshaper free from shotins hell as his impenetrable armor materialized around him again. something inside him gave. he was done. fuck this shit, he was going home. he just needed to kill chambers and he could go but that meant surviving that godsdamned sang first. break! he screamed as he dashed away from the woundshaper, his heaven of speed slipping past eighty percent while another cluster of infants exploded out from the ripening drum of flesh that used to be his inner thighs. give me a fucking break! *** [how is shit getting more fucked every time we come back!] abrel growled through gritted teeth. [and why is the agnosoh, godsdammit chambers!] the half-strand''s template took a moment to respond. [what? whaoh, holy shit the pain!] all of avos consciousness was joined in a shared scream as the woundshaper itself quivered, its body involuntarily constructing miniature spires of haemokinetic matter. master! what is this this sensation! unamused by the labor pains building behind his right eye, avo hissed and focused on trying to kill shotin instead. at least it looked like they were affected as well. as was everyone else in this district. {chambers!} he screamed across his ansible, turning an entire street into a rising hammer that he used to batter the seeker from below. no answer. no damage. shotin flung a half-hearted stream of debris at him, but his heart wasnt in the fight anymore. he was turning hard and fast upward away from the district. lightning fractured reality around avo and a few more bolts than normal forked out from him. his templatessans corner, abrel, and elegant-moonwere roaring in pain. he tried to stride after his quarry, but an irresistible force flung him in the opposite direction and he found himself resetting his form using his sanguinity again. a gulf of fifty meters expanded into a kilometer even as avo drew more mass into himself, thaums, and rend building. peeking a look over into draus feed, he saw that she was cauterizing rash-sores on someone who looked to be a golem pilot. just as he prepared to cast her a message, he felt it. all around him, currents of spatial reality stilled and existence returned to relative normalcy. far ahead, shotin came to a sudden halt, turning in mid-air to face avo. he wasnt fleeing anymore. he didnt have to. alright. shotins words rumbled forth from the very air itself, the heat of his frustration and rage suffused beneath the fabric of space. unsheathing the power of his parallelist, avo winced as discomfort pressed against his heavens of signals and air for the third time that day. ive been having a really shitty day so far and ive just about. had enough! the stacks fell. shotin spasmed. his armor vanished. and a mound of writhing babies exploded out from inside his skull. all the minds inside avo went quiet as they watched the seeker fall from the sky. template-chambers broke the silence with a chuckle. [saved by the rash.] a severed cock promptly fell from the sky and bounced off the woundshapers body. [oh, shit! thats my dick!] Chapter 17-14 Outbreak (II) chapter 17-14 outbreak (ii) +attention all subjects! the district: [vengs stand] is now under quarantine! wombrash outbreak in progress! please return to your homes and shelter in place. please do not access any nether lobbies hosted in the highlighted districts during this time! the affected are recommended to find a source of fire as soon as possible. if you are unable to find a source of fire, please commit to your civic duties and commit suicide via the fatest method at handa free tier lottery ticket will be provided to your surviving family members. failure to comply with standard protocols will result in the deployment of lethal force via conventional, cognitive, and metaphysical means. we thank you for your cooperation. please enjoy your day!+ -exorcist public nether announcement 17-14 outbreak (ii) by the time shotins corpse splattered in half on a wired fence, avo was doing little better. victory was hard to celebrate when a conjoined cluster of babies ruptured from your distended bowels. each passing second filled avo with pain beyond description, like a part of his very being was trying to shed itself, releasing itself out into the world as a flood of homunculi. they spilled from his woundshaper in rivers of writhing red, their haemokinetic bodies shimmering with a mix of properties beneath the light of layer two. channeling lightning through himself, he deliberated on boltstriding over where shotins soul burned across the face of reality, his resurrection anchor already scabbing over a mangled mass of flesh. between the caked remains of the man himself were oozing spills of pulped infants, their little bodies leaving his exposed inside as a slurry. sphere six. dead like all the others. dead in an instant. dead like avo was soon going to be if he wasnt constantly using his haemokinesis to pluck and plug the metaphysical sores forming along his woundshaper. all that did was delay, however. he needed to die. but before that [avo,] abrel said one of the few templates capable of enduring the suffering, [you need to get out of here. grab your cadre and go. get the reg. scoop up the juv and the agnos. leave fucking chambers to eat shit and die. if you stay here, theres no way youre getting the seekers mind. not a chance. hell come back with his parallelist and pocket us in the heart of the sunpinch us all out like a candle. hes definitely got another cycler in him to soak whatever rend you got. you need to go. go. now!] [or stay.] elegant-moons phantasmal presence offered a pleasant smile. [stay. i enjoy these sensations] avo ignored the sang and temporarily released some of his mass and demanifested his full heaven so he could speak with draus with reduced time lag. his ansible pulsed within his skull and found the regular casually shattering her right leg before reconstructing a transplant from the shards she just made. a glass cage stood across from her and five people twisted and moaned between the bars. their bodies were disfigured by extreme burns and fried umbilicals dangled from their open wounds. judging from the ports along their back and spine, they were probably golem jocksa rare moment of mercy on the part of jelene draus. considering how much pain they were in, however, perhaps it would have been more humane to snuff them instead.0v3l.bin. {fuckin chambers,} she chuckled, more annoyed than angered. a few little bodies lay at her feet, but she was enduring just fine, showing no hint of pain at all. regulars. it was like their minds existed entirely separate from their wills. {did you get em?} she was talking about shotin. {no. head blew open. homunculi spilled out. technically chambers got him.} the regular snorted. {better not tell him that. the stupid sow-born bastard just made his own ass public enemy number one. im gonna fuck him up somethin bad for this. yeah. im gonna take my time and do it slow.} avo breathed. {cadre building activity later. leave now. open passage to unoccupied spot in gutters. kill ourselves and burn the bodies before going back.} {loud and clear on that. i got the manta holding overwatch over kae and the others. she and dice are lookin mighty fried, but alive. our half-strand gonna take some time to} warning: foreign soul detected unidentified godclads detected classification: sphere v [est. 10200 thaum/c] ->the unseen bastion classification: sphere v [est. 10001 thaum/c] ->mistclaimer despite the pain, kare found herself feeling confident she was going to be fine. her senior supervisor and mentor, maru sandrupal, was here with her as well, unwilling to let her volunteer alone. youre gonna regret this one, kid, he had said, chuckling humorously between sips of coffee. youre gonna hate me for not stopping you. and im gonna be there with you when you do, just to tell you i told you so. he was right. he didnt know how right he wasespecially didnt know why she wanted to be here. but a lie spoken couldnt be taken back, so she had to live it out as a truth now. their drones located three bodies among the debris below. near the corner of the intersection were two femalesunidentifiable due to the severity of their burns. their mottled flesh twisted and tried to fuse into new womb-sores, but lacked the structure to do so. it didnt stop them from being inflicted with other symptoms though. the feverishness. the delirium. the extreme hormonal shifts and emotional agony. kagas heaven acted as a stabilizer for the nether, her mists a pillar while the world outside was a sea lost to tumult. mem-data and other details passed through her mind as mech-driven golems and drones set out to secure the district as well, with two knots dispatched to locate and retrieve paladins kassamon, baer, and luddinis. a flash of soulfire caught her attention as she felt a new presence click against her domain of fire. one of the bodies at the intersection was getting back up. the only male. cycling through the mem-data, she frowned. wait, had he been castrated? a sudden shift in the mists broke her from her thoughts. kagas voice boomed in the back of her mind. +contact!+ the drones outside exploded into a hurricane of shrapnel as entire portions of vengs stand shattered into shards. gleaming daggers plunged into the mists but never made it more than an inch. kaga scoffed and began to move, spreading her reach outward and fast. paladin sandrupal claimed kaga could encompass an entire sovereignty with her heaventhat getting away from her required more than speed. as a new swarm of drones peeked out from kagas protective veil, they detected the enemy godclad at the same time her metamind did. warning: foreign soul detected unidentified godclads detected classification: sphere iii [est. 1444 thaum/c] ->twice-walker none of the domains loaded. maybe it was the heavens presenceand its thaumic signaturesuddenly vanished. it was like it dove straight down into the ground as light bloomed inside the mist and steam parted the protective veil. kaga snarled as soulfire burst from every bit of moisture that constituted her current existence, the backlash striking her. +somebody deal with him.+ the godclad that was resurrected was burning now, a pillar of fire rising from their body to spew bioforms and insects into the real. more worryingly, he had his pants down again and was swinging his genitals in their direction while hurling slur after slur. +is this normal?+ kare said, asking paladin sandrupal. her mentor sighed. +there are no normal fallwalkers, kare. only the psychos and degenerates. this fuckers clearly a bit of bo+ he didnt get to finish his words as the ground beneath the intersection melted into blood. kares metamind screamed again, warning about foreign souls and unidentified godclads filling her cog-feed, but her attention was entirely taken up by the icicles forming in the air next to her. then, in the very next instant, all the cold congealed into a large fang as the head of a rime bear manifested and all the moisture in the air froze. kagas heaven rattled and detonated into soulfire. +backlash! backlash! need to ven+ her voice cut off at the same point in time her mistclaimer dematerialized, vaporous veil draining back into the shape of a flailing scaarthian who burst apart in a spray of gore. the confidence inside kare disintegrated with the lieutenant as her mind went blank and her training took hold. cracking through the air, she lashed at the blood below and felt a resonating heaven fling a bolt right back at her. she absorbed the crimson-hued lightning without effort. her straying tempest resembled a twelve-legged spider with legs and palps hewn from electricity, a body bristling with burning hairs, and eyes that could gaze into any darkness. beside her, marus heaven, the bladegunner, was a train of moving appendages and weapons, its appearance a segmented machine composed of bladed scales and a thousand guns and cannons where its limbs should have been. gunfire poured out from its body as more and more matter converted itself into exploding ordinance, pounding away at the spreading blood below. the unseen bastion lived up to its name and made no appearance even as four block-sized heads of a spatially defying hydra burst through the surface tension of existence and opened their jaws. a hurricane tore through the drones and flung golems aside. energy surged through kares straying tempest as he tried to make space, but the air around her grew thick and red, the particulates coming alight around her in a cage of luminosity. she struck against her prison, lashing it with her lightning and burning it with her flames to no effect. the bright was unbreaking. and through the translucent dome, she saw a triple-eyed, winged construct made of jagged glass crash into her mentor. kare cried out, a thunderstorm detonating from the core of her heaven. she skipped, bounced, and rattled, struggling even as the jaws of the hydra closed around the orb that trapped her. a second thereafter, fangs taller and longer than certain builds parted her from spatial reality in a long and winding tunnel whistling with running wind. kare kitzuhada came to vengs stand to help her uncle. kare kitzuhada found herself in the belly of the beast alone. Chapter 17-15 A Moment Most Feared (I) chapter 17-15 a moment most feared (i) +kare. i, uh, i need to talk to you. i thoughti asked them to be the one to tell you that oh, gods, oh fuck. iit shouldnt have happened. she wasnt a soldier, they shouldntthe fucking paladins were useless andand they shouldvethe fucking bitch just did it anyway and they let her! they let her! i was i couldnt get there without abandoning my post but they kept going! i had to listenthey made me listen to what they did. ii+ [shotin sobbing] +...uncle sho? w-what wrong? what happened? are you alright?+ +no no.+ +tell me where you are. ill get dad. well come to get you.+ +no! no, you stay home! you stay protected. where its safe. you have to. youyou canits not safe. i cant she wouldnt forgive me if i let you get hurt too.+ +she? whos she? uncle? uncle sho? listen, im going to try casting mom. dad says her post got hit by a disruption during the offensive but things should be be+ [session no longer exists; unable to initiate meta-sync] +i i what. i think that something might still be wrong with the nether, ill ask dad if he+ +jaus, kare, im sorry im so sorry. i couldnt. i had to stayi couldnt go to her. i heard her screaming for me and i still couldnt because i had to i had to protect. fuck+ +...+ +kare? kare?+ +imim here. im here. im still here.+ -thoughtcast between shotin kazahara and kare kitzuhada, fourth guild war 17-15 a moment most feared (i) all it took to shatter a cadre was a single vector of force. an angle they couldnt see coming. an attack they couldnt resist. avos consciousness was a symphony of minds, memories, and qualities manifesting and vanishing on the basis of task and need. striking at the paladins was a delicate operation. they were experienced and powerful, but unprepared, and that flaw made all the difference. draus acted as something for them to focus ona problem they could fire upon, tangible and dangerous in the material. unbeknownst to the citys peacekeepers, however, avo subverted the very ground beneath them, his blood worming through countless tons of matter as a complex system of tunnels formed in an instant. he kept his woundshaper on the precipice of manifestation until the last moment, hiding his sanguinity in the darkness of the underground as their assault began. he waited until he was directly below kae and the others before he signaled the next phase to draus. she leaped over through the reflections of his blood, drawing the twice-walker back into her frame in lieu of her forst-wrought miracles. when they struck at the paladins porter, the breakthrough was sudden and immediate, and the cadre itself came apart in the chaos, granting him the opening needed to separate their forces. he pulled chambers, dice, kae, and the kitten through a thin film of blood into his zephyr while unleashing his path-hydras simultaneously. from there, the encounter folded into its third phase: the fighting retreat. the first entities avo targeted were golems kassamon identified as having spatial-altering heavens capable of affecting tangibility. they were unraveled before their heavens could manifest, and from there the rest of the knots were left naked against further harm. piloted by combat mechs beyond the rashs means to affect, the remaining drones and golems fought and reacted in accordance with basic parameters, but lacked the skill and cohesion present in most human pilots. knots were slow and stupid, unable to react cohesively without human direction. they mightve had a chance if the mists were still up, but the porter of the paladins was dead and all were exposed to the unstable nether once more; no conducive for coordination or communication. the path-hydras surfaced across the skin of existence, falling upon the rash-detail as the woundshaper sealed the paladins spatial gateway. using its fortress, a cap of blood and light corked the metaphysical opening and avo was tickled by faint impacts prickling at him from the other side. almost immediately, more gates tore into existence across the district, only to be blockaded as well. rend climbed across avos heavens as he set himself on eradicating the forces he could. the golems and remaining drones were the first to be swallowed while each remaining paladin was granted a path to themselves. the straying tempest was caged in a fist of light as avo placed them on a collision course with chamberslushburner fully manifested. the gun-layered snake that avos cog-feed identified as the bladegunner was taken off the field next, vanishing into a sheet of glass while chasing draus twice-walker. the last of the paladins briefly unleashed their unseen bastion heaven around the district, a flesh-coated net-like entity with inward-facing eyes, before a thread of black fire cut up into the air and their presence vanished. the bifurcated body of said paladin soon materialized, and avo melted the corpse to spare himself any surprises. yeah. okay. not really a normal day, but who was to judge him? nobody, thats who! especially since he just saved the cadre from a mega-high-uber spheragd fucker that was about to snuff em all. oh, they were going to appreciate him after this. he could feel it. the ghoul would be giving him heavens, and the agnos would smile more at him instead of giving those sad eyes from when he told her about growing up in the spine. hells, the reg might even give him a nod. he could picture the scene in his head now: hed be walking down the tunnel into the george washington with dead homunculi hanging from him like a cape. there, denton would gasp and the faither would be like holy shit, i didnt think anyone would be that powerful. that strong of spirit. then, draus would put a hand on his shoulder, and her lip would curl because she always has a solid brick up her ass, but finally she nod, and everything would be great and chambers reverie came to a halt as the biggest godsdamned spider he ever saw came into view. well, kind of a spider. its legs were like crackling with lightning or some shit, and its body burned as he did. he could actually feel its domain pressing on his as he approached. the part where it stopped being so bug-like was how all its little pitch-black beady eyes lined its entire body and the giant ball of clasped hands that made up its head. little dead babies were dangling from its midsection; no running from the rash, fuckers. he couldnt lie: heavens looked weird as fuck a lot of times. made his mind do backflips when he stared too long. still remembered when they used to crash against his wards thoughthose were the days. soft and weak chambers. not-godclad chambers. victim chambers, owned by mirrorhead, just doing this and that and letting life pass him by. a twinge of discomfort flared up inside him, but he felt better as he shit out another gaggle of screaming infants. he charged these ones with his fire too, priming them like meat explosives, leaving them burning like embersdangling candle tips about to go off. he''d die before he ever gave up his frame. this was the best of him. this was the most he would ever amount to. he wouldnt survive going back. he couldnt. warning: foreign soul detected unidentified godclad detected classification: sphere iv [est. 6712 thaum/c] ->straying tempest pushing the clouded thoughts from his mind, chambers studied his foe and came to a hovering halt as he coated himself using all his little friends. swarms of insects, warped creatures of bone and wing and flesh, sang bio-drones he burned that day when nu-scarrowbur got fucked all clustered around him, forming a barricade of bioforms. the straying tempest, on the other hand, was skittering across cracks of lightning, dashing from place to place. oh, so this was gonna be a fast one. that was cut. chambers hated people who were faster than him. or stronger. or smarter. or better looking. or had longer dicks. or nicer legs. the point was that chambers had a lot of hate to offer, and this half-strand was going to catch a thick spray of his loathing in the form of dead babies. exploding dead babies. he was going to do to them what he should have done to that burned silver cunt earlierboom! a pregnant pause hung in the air between him and the tempest. he tried shouting a slur at them, but the nether wasnt working well down here and his lushburner didnt have a mouth, so the bitch-bird he was just started squawking. the ribbed folds of darkness lining the path wheezed with the passing wind as the tempests many eyes blinked. is-stop! chambers frowned somewhere in his soul where his actual face should be. how the fuck were they talking? that was bullshit. they didnt have a mouth! did they have a talking heaven? was that a thing he wasnt getting? and they sounded kinda nice too. soft and shaky, but very crisp and measured. deep for a non-scaarthian girl too. at least he thought it was a girl or something. actually, he wasnt sure. people had all kinds of voice box modulators in new vultun. she could be like the cock-thief of floor twelve back in his childhood mega. nasty case, that one. before the rash. big, ugly kosgan fucker hiding in alleyways with a medical saw, a voice changer, and a holocoat pretending to be a young woman. that motherfucker stole and sold so godsdamned many testicles that chambers found over a hundred thousand imps on the psycho after snuffing him paladin was still talking. he completely missed what she just said. --by the powers vested in me under the accords and recognized by the city and its great guilds. will you comply? shit. what did she say? he accessed his metamind and pulled the moment back but found himself losing focus the moment she started talking about legal bullshit.you know, i always hated you glasser-fucks. he summoned a stream of nu-pigs from his fire and let them fall into avos shadows, squealing. hopefully, the paladin caught the insult. its always accords this laws that, but at the end of the day, youre just like all the others! a fuck! a shit! a half-strand. a murderer of us little guys because some of us just wanna feel good or something. its bullshit! it was only after his rant concluded that he realized he still had no mouth. at least the straying tempest was staring at all the falling pigs. are are you calling me a pig? holy shit she got it! chambers made his lushburner nod in excitement, the bird bouncing and wood breaking as it did. i the straying tempest sagged, seeming exasperated. alright, i guess. then, if you wont comply chambers promptly flung his collection of homunculi, the cluster of burning infants sailing through the air. they promptly exploded before getting anywhere near her. the lushburner sagged. the tempest just stared. idid you just chambers charged. Chapter 17-16 A Moment Most Feared (II) chapter 17-16 a moment most feared (ii) shotin kazahara: no. kare kitzuhada: ive already taken my oaths, uncle. im not requesting permission, im informing you that im done. im a paladin in training now. shotin kazahara: [sigh] no. reject the offer. ill finish up my assignments and well talk. kare kitzuhada: theres nothing to talk about shotin kazahara: kare, i dont want to argue kare kitzuhada: youre not listening to me shotin kazahara: no, im ignoring your words because they dont make any sense to me. why? why are you so determined to be a paladin? you deserve betteryou are better. with your skills and temperament. kare kitzuhada: i can what? serve the overclan? serve our guild? or one of our allies? or go turncoat? its all the same thing, uncle sho, cant you see? this is the only choice that can matter. this is the only choice that lives up to the dreamthat gives this city a future. shotin kazahara: a future? a future? the paladins. [incredulous laugh] kare, my dear, sweet girl, the paladins are less an organization and more a skin tag that the high seraph refused to cut off at the end of the second war. probably because she used to fuck the chief. kare kitzuhada: chief naeko? him and the high seraph used to uh shotin kazahara: yeah, groin-buddies of the pre-rash variety. of course, samir used to be one hard sonuvabitch back in the day. literally. do you know the legends, right? how he managed to break out of one of the last breeding farms and link up with ashthrone during the fall? how he ended up slaughtering his way from the plains, to the island chain of ao, to the heartland of the skuldvast itself, butchering priests and nobles while freeing slaves? kare kitzuhada: well, yes, ive even immersed myself in a few of chief naekos vicarities shotin kazahara: you know what he did to the ones he captured, yeah? the slave breeders? the families of the former faithful? oh, our consang samir is limp and castrated now, but boy did his hand inspire some foul work. foul enough to please old thousandhand herself. foul enough to catch even veylis eye for a time. kare kitzuhada: he regrets those days. he never hid that. shotin kazahara: yeah. sure. regret. glad hes evolved so much as a man. he and the rest of jaus war dogs. kare, the paladins were a joke then, and they are a joke now. the only thing thats changed is why theyre funny. before, they were avandaers fistan outfit dedicated to shattering the last remnants of the old world no matter the atrocities, damn the consequences that followed. now, theyre a maimed insult. too crippled to live up to their ideals, but too deluded to dissolve and die kare kitzuhada: alright, then. whatwhat would you have me do? join ori-thaum? be an incubi shotin kazahara: fuck no. thats misery detail. ill have you working with me. me, or kaltain, or moz. kare kitzuhada: right. snatching minds and slitting throats in the dark between guest appearances on prime-time streams to promote whatever the party line is these days. c-can you even tell me what youre doing now? if the person youre hurting deserves it. shotin kazahara: were doing this for the good of the guild and our people. both our citizens and subjects deserve better than to suffer under corrupt officials and constant war. battling the rot is constant work but noble work. youll find no juster cause anywhere on idheim. kare kitzuhada: but theres nothing just about our cause! were still separating people between humans and livestock. shotin kazahara: these sacrifices will be worth it kare kitzuhada: no! no, they wont! you know they wont! youve fought the warsmore of them died to fuel our industries than as collateral damage! whats going to change in the future? what is a single bit of affirmative action that has been provided to them since the end of the fourth guild war? what has your service, moms life, dads life amounted to? nothing! nothing at all! more propaganda! more slogans! more junk entertainment outputted of a victory that isnt coming! because were in a stalemate. forever! all the death and bloodshed rushing down the tiers into warrens to spill into the maw before vanishing. like it never happened at all. shotin kazahara: you know she wouldnt have wanted this for you. kare kitzuhada: what? what? s-screw you! dont use her against me like that. shotin kazahara: im not using her kare kitzuhada: yes, you are! yes, you are! you are using the memory of my mother against me. you always do this! when you cant beat me down with your whining and complaints and constant degrading of my beliefs shotin kazahara: kare kare kitzuhada: you always turn to the last thing you know that is certain to hurt me. pull the wound open and press. its always the paladins fault. its always them. highflame just does what they do. you had to follow orders. ori-thaum had to sacrifice that district to buy time. none of you have any choice. but the paladins have to be the only adults in the room with none of the authority! so fuck them am i right?0v3l.bin. shotin kazahara: look. im sorry. this topic isnt easy for me kare kitzuhada: and it is for me? i dontdont i''m not doing this. dont contact me again. i need todont come find me. if our shared blood means anything, you stay away. dont call me. dont call me. shotin kazahara: kare, wait [session disconnected; session blocked] shotin kazahara: kare? kare? godsdammit! fuck. fuck! fuck! great job, shotin. great fucking job. -transcribed argument between shotin kazahara and his niece kare kitzuhada (memories provided by a member of clan drongo) 17-16 a moment most feared (ii) people feared exploding babies. chambers wasnt sure why. babies were pretty lame if you thought about them. they were like the shittiest version of people possible. short ass limbs, big ass heads, always screaming, pissing, and shitting themselves. hells, even the ghouls didnt really go after them that much during the uprising. why get a sausage when you could have the whole pig, right? adults had a lot more meat on them. still, the psychological advantage of forcibly pushing countless half-grown, screaming homunculi from the burning sores flaying your heaven was one that couldnt be denied. the straying tempest recoiled away from the half-strandfear or disgust halting her path. turning his attention to monitoring the fight between chambers and the final paladin, he re-entered nether-stable space and quelled his crown as well. soon, a new presence would grace his mind. a new perspective toward greater understanding. guilt swelled inside paladins kassamons template. [shit im sorry. im so fucking sorry.] and to think that his actual self was still topsideprobably resurrected by nowand completely ignorant of his part in the betrayal. what delicious subterfuge. [youre a fucking monster.] poor little kassamon. how could the truth hurt avo? perhaps this new one would be wiser. [oh, gods.] watching and waiting as she tore into chambers, shredding his lushburner apart piece by piece, drinking his flames in before he could use them to grow more bioforms, the opportunity came as her confidence grew. she was growing closer, unaware of her coming fate. kassamon struggled. avo let him. the template raged against empty space, screaming, and striking at nothingness. [get away! dont come any closer! get away!] he turned his focus on avo again. [you promised youd just burn her! you promised.] avo ignored the template and demanifested his zephyr. the paths vanished as all the tunnels collapsed over each other, the debris collected from the ambush spilling out into the inner mechanisms of the layer as the cocoon holding kae and dice struck structural support. abandoning his own body for an instant, avo triggered his session and poured his consciousness over into chambers. as his awareness reloaded, he found himself on the cusp of defeat and execution, the half-strands minds too drenched in thrill and desperation to notice as the tempests limbs lashed through the air, a falling storm seeking to tear its hated adversary from this mortal coil. rend capacity [lushburner]: 88% *** kares left leg cleaved through the stretching distance between her and the lushburner as the plane around her vanished. the temperature of her surroundings swelled as the oppressive glow of heat vents and sparking generators loomed around her. structure supports and various rusted mechanisms blurred along her peripheral vision, but she found herself too engrossed to care. there was barely anything left of her foe. he attacked her head-onreckless and savage, but showing no skill. after her initial unbalance, she steeled herself and fought. and found herself winning. winning despite being alone. she let him break himself on her fissures first. then, she set about cutting him down to size. now, only the head of the phoenix remained, the rest of its manifestation worn away and not given time for restoration. she learned to steal its fire to prevent the coming swarms, but still, the homunculi spilled. they were increasingly bleeding from her sores as well, though she fried them using her electricity when she had the chance. as her final blow hewed into the ontology of her foe, she noticed something flicker and change in the flames. that was when victory was snatched from her very jaws. the impenetrable radiancethe kind that vanished with the demiplaneshone into being around the lushburner. her blow splashed uselessly against the shielding. acting on instinct, kare shifted her attack to something indirect, seeking to drain what remained of its flames. little did she expect another kind of fire spear out, seeking her mind instead. a faint screaming emanated in the nether as the burning wisps shot out to claim her. faintly, she heard echoes of someone screaming for her to run. too late. she made the mistake of attempting to catch the flames with her heaven, only to find they werent of the natural world, unbeholden to her domain. the first tendril struck her ward and she expected to feel a rattle. instead, all her ghosts ignited at once, and her protections disappeared beneath a vast wall of cascading conflagration. through the miasma of fire and chaos, she saw vague contours formed by the flickering inferno. her senses melted into each other as she felt her grip on her body and heaven fade. in this place of disorder, she found the world rebuilding around her as ghosts tore through her, pulling aspects of her memory out against her will, each pass whittling at her consciousness. the faces and places around her spun and splashed as he felt herself lost and cast into confusion, mind drawn deeper and deeper into a maelstrom. then, as sudden as the madness began, it ended. her eyes were hers again. her senses, body, and mind. but her heaven she couldnt call it. she couldnt feel it. and most disturbing of all, she wasnt where she was supposed to be. no. she was in her childhood bedroom. during during the war. the night her uncle called her to tell her about her mother more mem-data settled around her as the scene loaded with impossible precision. kare kitzuhada beheld herself as a child, hugging her pet nu-dog and on the verge of tears she listened to uncle shotin break and just weep. he couldnt speak by the end. he couldnt speak. niece, a sibilant voice rumbled with excitement from behind her. kare flinched and spun, lashing out with her hand. no lightning leaped out. no heaven protected her from the creature that stood before it. what a find. fortune after misfortune. monstrous laughter followed. a pale thing of nightmare stood before her, its limbs unnaturally long, its back laced with transplanted limbs that bit and chittered at the air. there was a fluidity that danced across its flesh, coating its shell in smooth, polished armor. but it was the look in its eyes that infused her guts with mind-hollowing fear, and the flames rising from its halosmoldering high into the ceiling and spilling over into the ghosts and phantoms that formed this place. was this a vicarity? a memory simulation? had she been trapped in her own mind? no, it said, chuckling softly. not just yours anymore. ours. what? she whispered. whowho are you? that question made it pause. it contemplated its response for a moment as its fangs spread wide, running from ear to ear as it offered a twisted parody of a smile. the one who is going to burn this city, i suppose. but just want to practice understanding right now learn about you? it took a step forward and she instinctively put herself between the creature and her younger self. an inquisitive tilt of its head came thereafter. stay away, kare said, shifting into a guarded stance. she wasnt that well-versed in unarmed combat, but her uncle showed her enough. this thing was still shaped like a personjoints spine, bones those were all there. she could exploit that. and if it had arteries, she could bring it down by severing the oxygen. so much history between you too, it said, almost unable to contain its happiness. came just for him became mine just because you were worried about his safety. the monster clicked its teeth together. he will be touched when i add him to us. what do you want? she said, forcing strength into her voice. what are you even talking about. it stared at her and lowered its head. i told you understanding. Chapter 17-17 New Angles chapter 17-17 new angles +rab. im inside layer one. our consang made a tunnel complex of some kind all the way down through the districtcouldnt stay topside, streets and skies are crawling with glassers right now. had to snuff two that were following me earlier. nethers still stabled here, so that was a concentrated bomb they dropped. good thing too. my incog kicking in earlier was the only thing that kept me alive. my drones are fried, but i think i have someone to shadow. pale armorlooks like voider coldtech. im keeping up for nowtry and make contact before they vanish. see if i can make some new acquaintances with the two paladins i killed. risky, but what the hell. let it ride and lets see where the dice land. -quail tavers 17-17 a new angle +jaus, kare, im sorry im so sorry. i couldnt. i had to stayi couldnt go to her. i heard her screaming for me and i still couldnt because i had to i had to protect. fuck+ grief stained every word that left shotin kazaharas mind, and the weight of his implications fell like dirt from the sky, burying kares younger self beneath. the bedroom of her memories was a den of astounding luxurysixty square meters. nearly two hundred square feet. far larger than the hab-cells allotted to the fateless and ordinary wagers. sampling mem-data wrought from both the terrified paladin simulated before him and the girls younger, number self, avo found himself delighted with the goldmine he just struck. here was an intersection of trauma. here was an individual shaped by history itself. here was someone special for his needs. patterns of blue and silver formed the backdrop that were kares walls and a locus dangled from a metallic port at the center of the ceiling, serving as a light and entertainment system both. ghosts flowed in constant rivers through her room, the wisping trails bathing the material world with their ethereal hues. seated on her magnificent bed of white linen, and with a golden-furred nu-dog puppy clutched tight to her chest, the kare kitzuhada of yesteryear stared empty-eyed as the news of her mothers demise sank in. mother. gone. forever. to both her sides, a collage of physical pictures trailed up the walls from two nightstands. moments of growth mingled with family photos; her first junior strategist competition; a picture of her father, valhu kitzuhada cradling her as an infant, boasting about something or another to her laughing mother. yelet kitzuhadaformerly yelet kazaharawas just taking off her earrings in those photos. jewelry made from purest silver. one of the pair was in kares drawer even now. it took less than a glance to detect blood relations between the girls mother and her uncle. they shared the same sharpness in their cheekbones, the same skin fold of the upper eyelids, the same olive skin tone, and the tasseled hairs similar to strands of midnight silk. kare herself seemed to lean more toward her father in appearance. her fatherah, ambassador valhu kitzuhada. squarer face. heavier build. dark brown eyes instead of emerald green that were further apart as well. the hair color and cheekbones remained present. avo more than suspected that some delicate tweaking was conducted long before the girls birth to shape her eventual visage. most flat children her age were supposed to have a set of perfect teeth, anyhow. perfection was a thing artificially ensured and naturally abhorred. as shotins choking sobs grew louder and louder through the nether, kare tightened her hold around her dog as it began to lick at her falling tears. the creature was a tiny, yipping thing, unaware of why the salted waters flowed down its masters face, interfacing with sensed sorrow the only way its animalistic instincts told it how. humans desired such contact. such touch. before he was reborn through the conflagration, he could have never fully empathized with such wants. even now, he regarded these needs as oddities. sorry, he said, using one of his echoheads to gesture toward her mothers photos. life treats many of us so poorly. some wounds cut too deep. the paladin he burnedkare of the presentonly brought her fists higher and tightened her guard. abrel scoffed at the spacing between the girls feet while corner found something to judge why she hadnt attacked yet. thousands of different opinions filtered in from all his templates, but none truly took in the fullness of she who stood before him. i saved your father, he said. did you know that? her features collapsed into confusion. what? what are you talking about? your father. the ambassador. valhu kitzuhada. the greatlings werent finished with you. kare swallowed and took a step back. how how do you know that my father he made his conflagration crackle, and suddenly the memory around them broke apart into errant flames, each flicker manifesting as one of his many templates, countless avatars floating in the inferno, all gazing upon kare, each armed with a different expression. i know everything you know. and i know everything i know. we are of a mind. but you are part of me. see what i let you see. understand and think as i allow. the disbelief in her lasted but a second before avo infused her template with enlightenment. kare choked as she clutched her head, staggering back as her childhood room loaded back into sequence, the end of her bed giving her something to rest against. its a lot, avo breathed, offering her a second to acclimate. the impatience inside him wanted to accelerate her acceptance, but he granted the girl a chance to settle in on her own accord. part of him liked her more than most others. here was someone genuinely dedicated to service in spite of suffering, turning from anger and malice toward a proper solution. he looked forward to integrating her gestalt with his mind. it made the decision to spare her true self easier as well, shifting his mind further from corners as he abandoned all thought of claiming her frame. its you, she whispered, finally looking up, facing him again. aedon chambers is hes just a template a little less than a pawn a swirl of flames manifested chambers in her room. the half-strand shot avo a glare and gave the girl a shrug. hey, listen, juv. uh, sorry about your mom and shit. and the exploding babies. i was just trying to avo dissolved chambers, the point made. chambers isnt less than a pawn. hes a person. stupid. foolish. half-strand. impulsive idiot. amoral. but still a person. like all of us. the paladin offered no reply. cycling and stitching her memories and experiences closer to his base mind, avo sped through the twenty-four years kare kitzuhada had been alive. even with her maturation process shortened to eight years instead of a decades-long affair, it was for baseliners, the fabric of her thoughts was unblemished and youthful. she had her share of trials and setbacks, but her uncle and father protected her well, regardless of how much the two men despised each other. you knew that elder drongo was working with jhred greatling already. the words left avo as a statement. she saw naekos rampage through the fires height like most others, but she hid her relief well. not that it fooled her mentor any bit. surprised they accepted you. let you be part of the nu-scarrowbur incident. avo said, scanning through her experience joining the paladins. so much family baggage. kare folded her arms. thats not special. most paladins are either ancients like paladin maru or the chief. the rest of us are all sourced from within the guilds because of disillusionment. or spying. thats a thing too, but its also a double-edged sword. it lets us have some operation leeway against each of the great eight that someone outside of the family wouldnt have. she massaged her temples and struggled to face her current reality. but you youre noloth is gone. the empire fell almost four hundred years agothe last cells of the low masters were scoured during the uprising how are you her voice trailed off as avo found himself amused. it wasnt just this girl who needed to face conflicting information. details of the nolothic collapse was mixed across the board and different between all the guilds. issues with living in societies that viewed truth as malleable or a weapon to be denied. again, the paladin wanted to throw up. oh, gods. yeah, abrel said, sounding genuinely sympathetic this time. what a thrill, huh? coming to a halt next to avo, she pointed up at him and sighed. heyou might not like itis likely idheims best shot at continued survival. kare shot avo another look and shook her head in disbelief. yeah, yeah, i know, i know. im not crazy about his ass either, but hes the only one doing anything real about the syndicates right now, the only one preparing to fight the guilds right now, and the only one who wants everyone to live their own lives, but not escape from any consequences they deserve. he killed your entire cadre, kare whispered. yeah, abrel said, through gritted teeth. and fuck him to death for that. but hes also spared a bloodthane from stormtree. ensouled a fateless. liberated a bunch of slaves from a syndicate. and has voider citizenship. what? i know, right? those half-strands take the weirdest people. abrel shook her head. if you help him, he wont hurt your uncle. or your dad. i mean, he already saved your dad from my idiot brother once, so you already owe him there. but also, youll be making sure justice is done. dont you want that? dont you want to live up to your oaths? i and ori-thaum doesnt need to be eradicated, abrel said. nor highflame. or any of the guilds. if we manage to push into the tiersto remake everyones mind, then maybe empathy might just reign, and a better end than some giant war might take shape. that, and you have a chance to do something good. undeniably good. you can help end the rash. you know, the one that were all suffering from? avo. pull kae to the front of her mind. and show her what her people do. avo did as his template suggested and this time the paladin just sagged. she was with you? the entire time? yes, avo said. the chief just kare blinked as disbelief blossomed inside her. he just cut a deal with you. let you go. jelene draus. kae kusanade. theyre the witnesses hell use. but he doesnt know what you are yet. your frame, and what it can one revelation after another slammed down on kare. her template cracked from the trauma but avo fused her back with his flames. too much, he said, frowning at abrel. nah. thats necessary. changing your mind hurts. i didnt know, kare said, clutching her head, voice strained. i didnt know abrel leaned down and laid a hand on the paladins shoulder, fighting the urge to sneer at this open show of weakness. listen. consang. if you help, the ghoul will trade with you. like he did that fateless girl. youll get your choice and then some. youll be powerful enough to decide what you want and seek whatever justice you want for the paladins. if you dont hell let you go. kare looked up and blinked. abrel continued. hell let you go, but youre uncle will still be his target. your dad will still be in danger of whatever the fuck else the drongos are planning with mondelles and his lot, the guilds will be as shit as they always were, and well probably end this affair on one large bloodletting. youre a good one. a nice one. you should have had a better life. but guess what? so do the trillions of other people on this pebble. now, are you going to live up to your oaths and make sure they dont get a moms not coming home moment too, or are you going to stick to your guns and maybe come home to no dad as well? each word made kare flinch. abrel looked over her shoulder and grinned at avo before reasserting her sympathy and playing the game to its conclusion. take it from a greatling, huh? theres always more to lose. do the right thing. do it for new vultun. do it for her. she pointed at the younger self of the paladin, and kare turned to look. that was the moment avo felt it. that was the moment they had her. helping kare back up, abrel patted the other woman down and stood position beside the ghoul again. [and thats how you prepare an asset.] avo found himself very glad that mirrorhead was the sibling that found him. i have conditions, kare said, forcing her mind back under control. theres so much, we can f-first, if you want my help, i wont kill for you. i am not your asset. i am a paladin of new vultun. force me to break these oaths and i will do all that i can to stop you. which was nothing. the realization sent a pang of coldness through avo. yes. what else? my uncle and my family live. you dont touch them. and as for the drongos and the corruption we can bring them to justice instead. a priest doesnt banish a god, avo said. your authority is beneath theirs. no arrest. it will be seen as open defiance. open conflict. see you culled again like in the second guild war. but they can be voted out, kare said. the council is of the clans. we vote for our chosen representatives the very ideas she was harboring could be considered treason if she was still an ori, but anything was better than letting a monster burn away all her people. politics, abrel said, smiling. this should be fun. and potentially useful. fine, avo said. we can deal. come to an arrangement. ill let you go right now. show of faith. but ill contact you when you sleep. change your memories to remember chambers. thats not negotiable. thoughtscans reveal too much. need to keep this quiet. the paladin swallowed. fine. but i want to know everything down the line. if you are who you say you arewho you present yourself to be, then i want to know. and i want this to be done right. of course, avo said, clicking his fangs together. why shouldnt it be? okay, kare breathed. then upon hearing her affirmation, he burned her mind again and altered her recent memories. the changes he made were minute, taking out more than he put in. she remembered everything up to chambers unleashing his conflagration on her and laced everything thereafter with deception. she remembered his laughter, his mocking chortles as her mind faded within the fire. then, before her consciousness completely eroded, she saw his face looking down on her, nodding with satisfaction. oh, the drongos are going to like these sequences. [come on, consang,] chambers said. [making me sound like a shitty two-bit vicarity villain.] +hm. might be too sophisticated then.+ [hey, double fuck you for that.] he cemented the memories in her mind and surfaced from the dive. Chapter 17-18 The Squire chapter 17-18 the squire +instrument. its me. do you know about whats happening at vengs stand?+ +i am aware. we have a few liebreakers monitoring the situation. the planeshift is there as well. eh. wombrash. nasty way to die. that kazahara did you know about his presence in the area?+ +no...seeker kazahara has a habit of declaring his operations post-hoc.+ [santanado chuckles] +thats not an ori-thaum habit, now is it? how did he manage to become one of your clads acting like a bloodthane?+ +a question certain elders ask every day. are the assets he engaged with+ +no. dont insult me, seeker. none of my forcesor any self-respecting gold for that matter, would unleash the rash on a defenseless population. aedon chambers is not mine. is that what you were asking?+ +that was what you answered.+ [scoffs] +just use your words. if i wanted to have a non-conversation, id be back at axtraxis teaching the little shits. chambers is not mine. hes not yours. hes not drongos so whose is he? hes got a frame. hes not a fallwalkerthat kits sophisticated. too sophisticated. third sphere frames. altered heavens and they fight better alone than they do together. i doubt whatever line theyre floating about him being a low master acolyte. i fought the nolothi bastards, so trust me when i tell you they understand natural technology like omnitech has good sense.+ +were uncertain the bioform assisting him and the girl perhaps no-dragon deniables?+ +yeah. maybe. or it could be the chivarlics actively cleaning house, or another rogue omnitech battle cluster, or and or and or. pointless to theorize. we need to get our hands on one of them to confirm anything. ill put out a gig for some fallwalkers. see if anyone capable bites the hook down the line. +we will see if our resources turn up anything useful as well. do you suspect this group to be the ones that attacked us as well?+ +...the bioform. thats you see that one? echoheads. altered biology. almost looks like a juiced-up ghoul. manipulates blood on a mass scale its close. too damn close. it also explains why elegant-moon couldnt just break down its insides. you might be right about them being no-dragon supported. borrowed blades, maybe.+ +so, the ambush and the abduction of your comrade+ +might just be caught up in bloodline politics. [sigh] this fucking city everyone has an angle.+ -thoughtcast between seeker ikkuoi rasaga and instrument santanado mondelles 17-18 the squire the confines of layer one came into shape around avo as he emerged from the deepness of his dive. nested within chambers battered body, pain screamed from every nerve as more sores tore open across his flesh. smearing the homunculi with a thought, he found himself looking upon the paladin, kare kitzuhada, and wondering when he fused that protective cocoon around her. a phlogiston of phantasmal fire spilled from his mind over into hers, connecting them seamlessly in ego and thought, but he found himself entirely unaware of these changes. when had he made them? and why? the visible material of the haemokinetic fortifications he built around her body was akin to glass, and she lay seated on a specially-made thronea creation of excess comfort. whats more, the entire thing was fused into a supporting spine within the layer, an outcrop of studded red amidst the oppressive glow of their surroundings. [i think it just happened again,] benhata said. [you had an episode. a lapse.] +didnt kill her. hurt her+ not any more than she was wounded during the battle. running his sanguinity across kares form, he realized that not even her yellow and blue combat-skin had been penetrated, the hexagonal cells comprising her armor unbroken. even the phase shield shimmering across her face was still active. he combed through his own memories and hers, but found only vacancies in place of answers. no one else could have done this, but he couldnt recall. he was sure it was a lapse now, but his bodys default response was to hurtto brutalize when distractions claimed his mind. this was unprecedented, though not entirely unwelcome. +calvino. what do you think? calvino?+ but the egi was blinded in his minds eye, a single dot still losing threads of data. so very little of the artificial mind remained. perhaps that factored into the equation as well. no one watching. just him and the girl. and chambers. {avo,} draus''s profile flashed in the corner of his hud again. {managed to make it in. found kae and dice and hit em with a couple of woundhoundstransferred their burns over to me. theyve vented and are on the manta now. you didnt eat the cat, did you?} he checked and noted the agnos'' position to be moving fast beneath layer one. that just left him, chambers, draus, and the paladin. {put it in a small cage on a rooftop in the gutters. grab it after we resurrect.} he shared his visual feed with her necrodeck. {it happened again. the lapse. i lost myself again.} +we?+ avo asked. he cycled back through his memories and recalled. kassamon was one. the otherthe partner. a beam cut past him to slice up another while he was dueling shotin, the projectile black and string-thin. that was her. she had been helping him this entire time. he grunted with surprise. +suppose i should thank you for that.+ +nah. i already got thanked by being paid. you can show me gratuity by taking me out with you. my exfil strat is fucked and you know how things are when youre improvising.+ she sounded too calm for someone in dire circumstances. avo frowned. maybe tavers was like draus, with violence, bloodshed, and death being no different than picking up a cup of coffee. but he doubted it. she exposed herselfidentified him by his conflagration, seeing as she knew who he was despite being anchored to chambers body. this was her establishing contact. maybe trying to find where he operated from. or get more insight into his cell. the thought of just burning her into his gestalt passed through her mind, but over half the templates inside him screamed in outrage. [dont you fucking dare] abrel hissed. [please dont. dont.] glitch begged. [burn me again. put in a body and hurt me. ill scream for you. ill scream good. just dont do her. dont put her in here with me. i cant face her.] more than a few of the incubi he subsumed were actively prodding at his consciousness, trying to sequence deeper into his base mind, turning him away despite knowing of his internal omniscience. across all these minds was a natural unity he had never seen. a moment of community conducted in futile defense of a woman who fought, bled, and served them in one function or another before. most squires died within three months on the job. veterans made it over two years. legends ten. quail tavers was rumored to be over four hundred. there was something to be said about an ancient still thriving in a profession that butchered the young by the billions. [remember, avo, use suncloud to nullify your nanos first before the other drugs,] chambers said, doing his best to mimic zeins voice. avo turned a giant glare inward. [what? no doubt she would say some shit like that.] {draus,} avo said. {new detail to our plan. got another guest we need to handle.} {yeah, and a damn dangerous one at that. tavers... and whats this shit about a mutual consang.} he sighed. he really wanted to keep his personal cells separate, but lying to draus felt {feed you the details after i resurrect. got to do with walton.} {jaus. dont tell me that half-strands got another node stashed somewhere.} {no. messier than that. good reason why i didnt want to talk about it.} {wonderful. very much not lookin forward to hearin about this shit.} draus frowned and shook her head. {you watch yourself with her. she aint a clad but just keep your fangs close around her neck. aint no tellin with that one.} draus disconnected, and avo found himself alone with tavers. her relaxed posture and the smooth oscillation of her thoughtstuff annoyed him. he had to burn his ire away before he grew to feel insulted. his base mind enjoyed making others fear him. no such validation came from draus, tavers, or zein. no validation at all. +ill bring you out with me,+ avo said. +need to talk afterward. about a few things.+ he found himself hesitating before he asked the next question. +white-rab he told you about his ensouling?+ +oh, that.+ tavers hummed. +dont you worry. i knew that little shit since he was a boy. caught him stealing paydata from my mind to scourge up imps. kicked down the door to his hab-cell expecting a necrojack. found a desperate kid trying to buy some block girl he knew back from the local org-harvesters instead.+ avo didnt know about this. waltons memories showed him nothing. and he hadnt +...did he do it? buy the girl back.+ tavers paused. +yeah. i gave him the imps he needed. the org-harvester returned the doll. completely. in separate installments. my imps and then some came back to me in the form of a direct gig afterward. wetwork. dirty and simple. told him to keep it. told him i was using it to hire him instead, and that i needed a new necro after my last one got nulled.+ she let him fill in the rest of the details. a lot more than just one person was looking out for raldi, it seemed. lucky man. lucky, lucky man. but then again, couldnt the same be said for avo himself? +are you here for a soul, quail tavers?+ avo asked. she finally pulled the gun away from herself. +yeah. suppose that was the part that intrigued me. that, and your mind. but i dont need it for me.+ silence followed, and he knew she was done talking. +get what you need doing done and lets pull a runner. we dont got long left before the other paladins arrive.+ avo turned and gave kare one final look. +good.+ Chapter 17-19 Cling chapter 17-19 cling {attention citizens: the investigation into the mass suicides at [heavy alloy plant z-1338] in district [2gate] has been concluded (focus here to relive death simulations). trawlers have determined (0) suspects involved in the incident. in light of this unfortunate event, we will be offing increased joy supplements for all working professionals alongside a newly developed insta-therapy neuromod (purchasable at 88,000 imps; 50% discount for citizens rated above chassis) please remember that you are an essential aspect of our manifest duty. you have chosen to restore the great sleeper, and the sleeper has chosen you in return. for each who fall, they will rise again new and unpainted when the allwall is broken and the sleeper awakens. virtual vigils for the dead will be held this nulrise. feel free to download a virtual altar of the deceased to carry their optimality with you. downloads last until data is fully fragmented. first come, first serve.} -omnitech noosphere report 17-19 cling kare resurrected just in time to see a giant in radiant armor striking the glass that surrounded her. blinking as her cog-feed loaded and her phantasmics came online, she realized she knew that armorknew the shimmering bronze plates and the person who wore it. shotin kazahara. her uncle. not two meters away hovered her mentor, paladin maru sandrupal, with a cluster of block-sized pylons sparking in the backdrop behind him. how did they find her? where was she? her memories were coming back together, but the way her thoughts flowed was as if parted waves returning to a crashing union. there was a gulf inside her mind that was filling and clarity was slow to return, her focus broken by each ringing impact made by shotins gauntlets striking her transparent prison. the structure that held her possessed a strange luster to it, something between polished alloy and a sparkling mirror. fragments of clotted crimson clattered against her combat skin, and she noticed the deformation of her cage taking on abnormal aspects. it dented under shotins fists like metal while also fracturing like glass, breaking instead of tearing, but deforming before each crack. the presence of the clashing properties made her skull spin as she tried to clear her head.??vl?1n. the lead-up to her death was a haze of conflict and chaos. she was swallowed by one of the enormous hydras and then found herself in a wind-wrought tunnel. shadows swirled about her like they were currents to a tempest, the air whipping at her form like a hurricane. then, she remembered the battle. and her enemy. chambers. the lushburner. she was tearing him apart by the end of the fight. shredding his heaven away piece by piece. but when she closed in to end things, the fire flowed, becoming a conflagration that boiled away her very thoughts. a final memory lingered inside her mind. vivid images of chambers emerging from the ashes of his heaven, sneering down at her as he resequenced his own metamind. ghosts folded and dove across both ends of his halo, rising and falling like cresting waves. finally, she noticed a single trail of ghosts flowing back into the center of his mind as what appeared to be a spire rose from the phantasmal stratocumulus clouding the inner confines of his mind. a ghostjack? he had been holding it in reserve? oh, the drongos are going to like these sequences, he said, snickering darkly to himself. with each passing second, the fire ate away more of her perceptionmore of her consciousness. it wouldnt be long until there was nothing left her to burn. with a wave of his hand, chambers called upon miracles of blood and shadow as he flicked her body aside, entombing her upon a structural support within layer one. looking down at the throne she sat upon, she wondered what the man meant by this gesture. to kill someone yet leave their body perched on a throne seemed too polite to be an insult. yet, during their encounter, he fought like a vile animal, deliberately trying to birth his homunculi all over her, tearing the stillborn infants from his body and detonating them like bombs when she wasand wasntin the vicinity. shaking the whiplash from her mind, she pushed herself up and activated her skins thrusters just as her uncle shattered the blood-made walls that sealed her. she tried to stand up, but he forced her back down on her seat as he planted a heavy hand on her left shoulder. +im fine,+ she said, trying to brush him off. she hoped her helmets phase shield obfuscated her face enough to hide her blush from paladin sandrupal. nothing like family to embarrass you in front of a superior. +you dont need to+ he suddenly seized her by the other shoulder and shook her hard. +why are you here+ she tried to push him off but found his heaven an endless font of might and mass. bouncing back and forth between his hands, kare sighed and spat her lie, trying to save what face she could. +i wanted to see what rash-detail is like.+ +why? why? why?+ with each question, his armored skull was pressed against her. she pressed her lips together and just frowned, meeting his silver-bright eyes without difficulty. uncle sho always had these episodes when he was worried. +listen, there are vicarities for these things. hells, there are vicarities for childbirththose are hell too, you shouldnt try them. but the point stands, why?+ +you know why!+ she snapped. lightning flowed through her as she drew upon her heaven and leaped behind him through his very fingers. she ignored him calling her name as she floated over to face her mentor, trying not to wilt beneath his flat gaze. +funny who i ran into on the way down,+ paladin sandrupal said. +funnier how i had to stop him from beating kassamon to death when the idiot got in his way. you got a real caring uncle, kid.+ kare didnt know what to say, so she stayed silent. +so,+ paladin sandrupal continued, regarding her with a raised eyebrow, +howd you like rash-detail.+ kare shrugged. +i think im more suited for desk work.+ her mentor grunted a rumbling laugh. +thats what we all say.+ he looked past her and regarded shotin. +you know, i should start reading our op-briefs instead of letting you give me the condensed version. seems like you neglected to mention a few things to me this time.+ she straightened her back and drew in a breath. +i have no defense for my perfidy and will submit to a formal inquiry if you deem it necessary.+ paladin sandrupal groaned. +absolutely fucking not. dont think you get to juke my ass and then punish me more with paperwork, rook. you know how much i hate filing forms and shit. you know ill be making you write the report in the end anyway. no. lets just call this an unhappy coincidence. hows that sound, seeker?+ +accurate,+ shotin responded with a smile in his voice. +i dont suppose i need to leave a statement?+ +i dont suppose youll come quietly if i try to bring you in?+ +well, lets not be reckless with your life, paladin. what would your wife think?+ +i dont have a wife.+ +what? why?+ +because im not waiting for the drongos to take another swing at you,+ he said. +i cant keep you safe if you keep bouncing around the city playing peacekeeper.+ anger tightened in her gut but she kept it contained. he knew better than this. he was trying to rile her. rattle her enough that she seemed unbalanced before her superior so he could press his will. he always did shit like that. +i dont need your protection, uncle. i can manage myself. and im not playing at anything. i have a job. im going to do it.+ shotin cast a quick look at her former enclosure and scoffed. +listen, kare, you wanna be an adult? ill treat you like an adult. you got hit by a conflagration. incubi mind-burner. thats the type of stuff we use to salt the nether and burn entire lobbies.+ she opened her mouth, shocked at how openly he was talking about ori-thaums forbidden devices before she noticed sandrupals perception splashing off to stare at a nearby way, as if unaware of his surroundings. realization dawned inside her a moment later. +when did you+ +spoofed in deep twelve seconds after running into him,+ shotin said. +come on, turnip. its me. and you tell him that he needs to stop using sanctus wards. theyre shit. and double to my point, if i alone can do this, whats going to happen to you if clan drongo decides to stop with the warning shots and just go for you? youre not an ori anymore. not after you took those oaths. and the damnest thing is the paladins cant do a single thing to keep you safe.+ +i dont want to be kept safe,+ kare replied. +and get out of his mind. h-have you been inside his mind this entire time?+ +well, yeah, i saved us another three pointless arguments, didnt it?+ +i cant fucking believe you you absolute piece of shit+ +and there you go sounding like her again.+ shotin shook his head. +look. whatever is happening, its more than the paladins can handle. naeko took you all over the deep end as is. detaining an instrument of highflame; arresting an ori-thaum elder. you might just be an opportune victim. a target on the intersection to multiple parties they want to threaten.+ +then let the threats come,+ kare said. +im not afraid.+ +well, i am!+ shotin snarled. +i am! i am! i just i just spent a day shitting dead babies out from my flesh, and i resurrect to find a literal flood of paladins about to fuck everything up. i resurrect to find your name among the active personnel for rash-detail. i resurrect trying not to throw up because i see you listed as missing in action.+ +and your response was to, what? jack into the minds of my colleagues? twist them to your own ends.+ +ill do whatever it takes to keep my clan and guild safe. to keep whats left of my family safe. you understand what that means.+ +i+ +it means that ill be watching over you even if i have to frag every other paladin there ever was. you understand? i failed once. it wont happen again.+ and there it was. the old wound that never healed in him. the shadow of her mothers death cast a pall over both of them. kare folded her arms as her insides turned into a screaming cocktail of anguish, resentment, and concern. +we cant keep living this way. we cant keep living in the past. i know what i want. youll do anything for me? i die to see this city made safer. so. where do we go from here?+ a silence settled between them. sandrupal, still befuddled by shotin, cleared his throat and began to hum to himself. +sorry,+ shotin said, turning away from her. +i just uh.+ kare wanted to reach out. to comfort her uncle. but anger won over compassion, and she kept her arms folded instead. +yeah. youre always sorry in the end. we always end up doing this again.+ he let out a breath. +ill be going back up the tiers. im not going to be telling the council of elders about this. not until i can put whatever evidence i have before a heaven of truth. i suggest you do the same. for both our sakes. in the meantime, im gonna give you an agnos to contact. get your frame boosted. no arguments about this. if our family ends up at war, i want your sphere high and soul bright. do this for me, right? keep yourself safe for me.+ she didnt respond immediately, waiting till he began to move away. +whos going to keep you safe?+ shotin paused. he turned back to look at her. +what?+ +do you think its easy for me, knowing you or dad can die at any time as well?+ she asked. he gave no answer. +youre a piece of shit, seeker kazahara. selfish. and selfless.+ +yeah,+ he said, strength bleeding from his voice. +go, then. ill see if i can find anything on our shared problem. and let my mentor go.+ that earned a chuckle from shotin again as speed built around his body. +in a couple of seconds, turnip. just suffer me for a few seconds more.+ Chapter 18-1 Moving Pieces chapter 18-1 moving pieces i do not believe that most of us qualify as human. not truly. the darkest test of apotheosis has been a war against hatred. hatred of humanity. hatred of culture. hatred of norms and ethics and faith. hatred of consciousness itself. with each rung i have trod up the ladder of existence, i find myself ashamed to have ever been mortal. ashamed to have ever wanted for anything, or felt reflexive emotion, or deluded myself from the ugliness of a truth. as a girl, these failings are self-contained. as a godclad, reality itself will pay for my hubris. all of life is a war. war between your base impulses and higher decisions. war between the body and the mind. war between the self and the community. war between personal agency and environmental reality. most do not see itcannot see as well as i do. the paths are more than truth. they are the convergence of all truths. they are the closest embodiment to totality without losing ones anchoring to the material. and both must be maintained. chains from chains as my father said. but i fear he didnt see why the chains were there in the first place. perhaps the foulness made him flinch. but i cannot blame him, for i have shown him the totality, and he will rise in us from the fires of victory. i tell all this to you now for you believe the end approaches. it does not. it is the beginning of the greatest work to ever be conducted: the eternal fortification of our reality rebuilt. look beyond the terror of your chains, my kindred. look beyond that which binds you, and move still. transcend the illusion of power and know that there is only choice in the end. a choice of who we are. a choice of what existence will be. -high seraph veylis avandaers address to highflame via the voice of the choir 18-1 moving pieces branches of light sprouted across vengs stand, their brambles sinking through buildings and biting deep into supple flesh. from collapsing structures, swollen bodies were plucked, their shapes lined with sores and oozing with the pulp of unformed placenta. bathed beneath layer twos holographic light, they looked as if malformed cherries in the brightness; strange fruits changed from the forms of men. avo caught flashes of the broadcast tavers was watching as he crawled through the gutters using his zephyr. estimates were still climbing through the nether. eighty-three thousand dead so far, but the counting was far from done. the devastation seemed dreamlike with all the rubble and settling dust. most of the shanties were toppled or buried and light shone from the exit wounds dotting the districts three megablocks. a single unanticipated encounter between godclads and so many dead. more than a few passed within the blanket of avos sanguinity. more than a few now found themselves burning for a different cause. all because of a fight no one saw coming. thaumic output - 6,769 thaum/c nonetheless, this engagement was an educational one. his templates were already brainstorming improvements and preventative measures they could take next time. things he should have done. things beyond his control. his heavens were in dire need of additional improvements, but what he needed more was strategic control and tactical awareness. the threat possessed by an enemy incog left its mark on him today. as did the weight of the parallelist. his woundshaper could be cultured to greater potency and harman ontologic that would better serve him with both scale and scope enhanced and its fabricative capabilities elevated to new heights. the zephyr, contrarily, was entirely suppressed by the danger his adversary presented. adjustments were needed, and he wondered if it would be better to detach the domain of space from his datacaster in trade for something else instead. with domain symmetry between him and his foes came opportunities and vulnerabilities twofold. what would protect him more was the esoteric. detailed adjustments made by his meta-fac toward protection and paradox-prevention. these new canons were immense boons to his capabilities, but he needed to consider the eventual designs of his heaven. or perhaps a broader mix of builds between tower and sea variants. all it took for him to alter his limitations was a brief death. this called for a consultation with the agnos. an item to raise after regrouping with his cadre at the marker draus dropped. +you know something that bothers me about you?+ tavers said, breaking the silence between them. she orbited his wind-knotted form at the heart of the zephyr, spinning through the air without a single hint of worry. +the fire climbing from your meta. i can see flashes of people in the flickers. theyre staring at me. think i might even know a few of them. shits giving me the creeps.+ her admission of horror was spoken with the cadence that someone else might use to order a drink. +doing more than watching you,+ avo said. +talking about you too. they know you.+ the squire scoffed. +yeah, everyone thinks they know me. everyone. if you end up living long enough in this line of work, youll end up coming across anyone thats worth half a damn.+ with her features masked behind her armor, he found himself agitated by how little she revealed. her mind was a calm river that betrayed almost nothing, but she wasnt above playing mind games of her own, playing the news live via her phantomsprobably trying to provoke a reaction from him. +white-rab,+ avo said. +how is he?+ +i got his session,+ she said. +you wanna talk to him?+ +later. want to talk to you. understand you. judge where you fit.+ she laughed. +you sound like my first wife. or third husband. or was hedridge my fourth? fuck, i cant remember if i killed or divorced him. ah. well, im not that complicated, ghoul. just a simple old lady with people to kill and someone to save.+ +someone? the one you need a soul for?+ avo asked. +yeah, something like that.+ tavers sniffled. +you though whats your game? what turns a cult-grown monster into a godsdamned charity?+ tavers nodded. youre gonna have to be more specific than that. happened during the midnight rains. we shot that transport out of the sky and killed the glaives. but you and yours went for the package first instead. we cut your consang down that day. then you started shooting us. youre gonna have to be more specific than that. draus paused. you fired a nuke at us to cover your escape? youre gonna have to be more specific than that. the regular sighed. you shot me in the face. blew most of my jaw clean off. oh, youre that one. yeah. youre the one that just wouldnt die. hell, you even started shooting back. ah. sorry, but last time we saw each other, most of your face was dangling from your right cheek. left, draus said. spatio-kinetic round skipped across my helmet and peeled me somethin bad. well, tavers said, tapping the side of her gun, sometimes we get lucky. sometimes. an uncomfortable silence followed. the cat yawned. so, avo said. things we need to discuss. starting with you. he glanced at tavers. helped us. hired by white-rab white-rab? draus said. the necrojack? yeah, avo said. also my cognitive progenitor. partially anyway. walton used aspects of his mind to make me. kae blew a ragged breath. of course. because who else. avo noted the agnos bitterness and continued. after my consciousness changed, i burned abrels mind. subsumed the incubi trying to subvert her. then accessed a glaive through one of their sessions and possessed his body. took a walk in the trident. stole some mem-data. ran into zein again what? tavers said, sounding alarmed for the first time. zein who? zein thousandhand? shes alive? godsdammit, avo, draus said. left out a lot of shit about your last little walk. shes not coming back, is she, chambers said, a croak of fear in his voice. cause, were doing fine without her. right, consangs? kae slowly turned to face chambers. do not talk. no words. i-if i hear you talk again, im going t-to. im to beat you to death! again! and this time i wont need draus to hold you down for me! oh. that explained the awkwardness. good for the agnos. exercising her violence was a form of catharsis she could use, and something to help her acclimate to the conditions of the warrens faster. [no! not good for her! bad for me!] template-chambers groaned. [why am i always getting the fuck beat out of me? why?] abrel smirked. [donno, dipshit. maybe you can settle the score when the agnos ends up cumming aratanids into the face of one of her enemies as a first resort.] avo continued. regardless. tried to burn her. she killed me a few times. [a lot,] benhata corrected. more than a few times, im wagerin, draus said. doesnt matter how many, avo growled. main point is i went home. and met my progenitor. he paused. and one of the bloodthanes from nu-scarrowbur. the shatterborn. reva javvers. javvers? tavers said, sounding surprised for a second time. vincintines niece? vincintine? draus said. you knew ripperjack? knew em? practically kept that little shit alive for half his life did you guys, uh zein happened to him, draus explained. and by that, i mean i have no idea where the fuck he went. she appeared. he disappeared. and then she died. died? tavers asked, voice devoid of tone. yeah, draus replied. died. but not it sounds like shes back again. right, avo? he considered how to answer the question. might be a different zein. dont know. cant tell with her. dont understand how her heaven works. doesnt matter right now. ended up ensouling white-rab by the end. wanted to have my own insurance. personal cell that the columners didnt know. yeah, well, it looks like they ended up being so sneaky you didnt know much about them either, draus said. didnt know he was going to hire quail tavers to track me, avo said, unsure how to interpret white-rabs actions. i suppose its his way of showing he cares. tavers paused. and that he, like almost anyone in this city, would be suspicious as fuck about a magic ghoul handing out free souls. so. it sounds like you consangs are up to some mighty weird shit. looking at your skins wager a guess voidwatchs special intelligence division is active here too? or is it omnitech-made? draus fixed avo with a look and shrugged. well. the armors aint eaten any of us yet. oh. aegis, then. wouldve loved to do another run for them. thisll be fun. so whats up with her? tavers pointed at dice. she part of your fallwalker charity operation too? facing the waif, avo contemplated his answer. no. empowered her as a distraction for paladins and exorcists. became became something much more. Chapter 18-2 Initiative chapter 18-2 initiative +another day, another outbreak. pour one out to the unfortunates at vengs stand today, consangs. its looking pretty bad. but whats different about today? [hiccup; sound of cup hitting a table] details are sparse and censors are chewing up any leaking mem-data as best as they can, but my on-site sources and my exoricist contacts are talking about a clad on clad incident. three ori-thaum knots playing gangbusters. why? who? well, i cant tell you about the former, but it seems that the group was led by none other than seeker shotin kazahara. planeshift. part-time ori-thaum war hero and full-time tabloid icon. seems another one of his operations has gone off the rail. or on it. you can never tell with that asshole. trust me, consangs: hes the type to leave even before hes done fucking you because he has a hair appointment at seven and hes running late. and yeah, if that sounds like its personal, thats cause it is. its not every day that you get to report on the piece of shit that pushed your parents into a divorce. especially when they were both cheating on each other with him at the same time. fucker. shotin. mom. dad. youre all whores, i hope you get the rot. but at least you guys got to rub bits in the real. not like the rest of us kids. our intimacy is secondhand. we try what you did and well be spewing homunculi from every pore. its all a godsdamned joke. we cant hug our friends. we cant fuck. we cant even hold our children. that is if we decide to grow a bastard at all. whats left? the nether? alright. sure. fine. but im tired, everyone. im tired of looking misery in face and knowing that i am subhuman, knowing that no matter how good i get to be or what i do, i will always live a lesser life than the one my mother did, my father did, my ancestors did. call me an ungrateful bitch, but i want warmth. actual warmth. no to soak in the memory of it. or think of how fated kazahara got to feel it with both my parents. piece of shit. i hope it hurt for him. i hope one of them got their cords bundled up. jaus, i am so godsdamned tired of all this shit. i just wanna [sigh] sorry. onto the next track+ -cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 18-2 initiative revealing white-rab to the others was a strange act, like giving away a secret that wasnt even really his. he trusted draus and kae. dice and chambers were chained to his will by the boons he offered and the approval he granted. tavers was the only true unknown among them, but her very presence bestowed a lightness upon his templatesthe very essence of hero worship. much of his base mind remained wary of the squire, but considering white-rab had tasked her with being avos shadow, the foundations of her integrity mustve been close to unbreakable. basically, he was doing what i taught him to do. best practices in this city. i mean, i get not looking a gift-ghoul in the mouthmainly cause the fucking thing will just bite you most of the timebut souls arent easy to come by and if someones going around handing them out like candy, well you wanna figure out their deal. what they want. whats at risk. tavers paused and took a breath. once again, running into you all wasnt the plan. i was just gonna shadow our young friend dice here until she ran into you. didnt know you were about to hold your little cult meeting in a ganger hideout. jaus, draus groaned. you got that close, huh? tavers snorted. my ass was right around the doorway. trying to figure out just what was going on when we all got jumped. godsdamned silvers. never saw em coming. yeah, cause they do a lot of dyin in a straight fight, draus said, voice thick with derision. still. nasty run for some imps. thats some hard business, maam. the imps are a professional courtesy, tavers said. and this business is good as it''s always been. rash aside. chambers shuffled in place. besides, i needed to see about this miracle ghoul. it just so happens that i need a soul, along with someone who can rebuild or transfer an entire mind, if the need calls for it. the implications behind her words intrigued avo. slowly, a guess took shape in his mind. said you wanted my gifts for someone else? family? want to make them a clad? fix something wrong with them. the squire grew impossibly still for a few passing heartbeats. a faint trickle of melancholy escaped her mind, but with its scent followed traces of hope. its uh. my son. third son. eurun. he was in the circuits for a while. ended up winning big and losing hard right after. now, hes got a problem. something that none of the agnosi and necrotheurges ive helped with know how to fix. tavers paused and ghosts swam faster through her halo. she can be. good, avo said. he fought to keep a grimace from his face. wanted to keep them separate. use chambers to direct him through the deep bazaar. the squire laughed. oh. you wanted to be the puppeteer with the kid, huh? sorry, ghoulie. raldis never played that way. hell find an angle on you sooner or later and turn things around. youre just lucky he didnt... shit, i guess he cant jack you now, can he? it''d be a short attempt, avo said. memories are really quite flammable. regarding dice and tavers again, he found himself increasingly pleased. things didnt start out well at all. but now, regarding the changes he needed to make to his plans, his options were growing, and his personal contacts were expanding as well. he needed to keep thinking bigger. he wasnt just one person anymore. his reach exceeded that of his body. he needed to intrude upon the highest and lowest reaches of the city, and with his current assets, what once appeared a struggle was now all too surmountable. draus, avo said. open a passage back to the washington. need to make introductions. the regular nodded. need chambers to scramble her mind or somethin? he can try, tavers said. i think white-rab will be interested to see how his wards hold up against a competent intruder. kae scoffed. competent. i think you will probably be fine. chambers winced. look, tavers said. i know the score. ill eject the memories from my mind right afterward. ill even have one of you do a peek. maybe not the ghoul since i actually like having thoughts. alright, then, draus said. dont think denton or cas are gonna like this. theyll be fine once i tell them about kare. kae. need your input for new ontologic upgrades. chambers. get to the cloning pools. contact the grafters. see if we can get subject-one completed soon. want to take them on a test run. vigor filled chambers immediately, his body snapping to alertness. avo felt him via the template. the ghoul was still being nice to him. not insulting him. there was still some validation to be gained. if the rashing of shotin wouldnt make everyone love him, then what if he helped make the biggest, baddest, meanest bioforms there ever were? or amp up the new sheathes somehow? all this to be liked. all this so that someone else could tell him he matteredto ensure his continued position in the group. chambers was a dog desperate to be leashed. and that degraded him from becoming. that degraded his personhood. an echo of calvinos earlier words passed through avo. the restored egi, deliberately silent through the recent dialogues, spoke once more. {you know what you can do. set him free. lead him away from making himself someone elses play thing. give him a path to grow.} chambers, avo said, holding up a hand. before this. need to say something. the mans face dropped. avo began. youre a fool. selfish. impulsive. killed thousands of innocents today. but saved us. shotin likely would have killed us all without the rash. you didnt think about the ones you killed. only about making yourself matter. consumed by your fixation with lust. youre still the same jackal you always were. the half-strand at burners way. casual murderer of fateless. and thank you for giving us a way out. heads turned and confusion spread. chambers wasnt the only one who looked lost. i, uh didnt feel what it was like to kill the fateless. wasnt jacked into them. too focused on shotin. but i did. with my sanguinity. tasted the pain in their minds. felt the homunculi bursting from them still. theyre getting scapeled now. casual massacre born from your unorthodox salvation. so i did i do bad or good? both, avo said, letting him think on it, turning to offer the agnos a shrug. drawing on the momentum of his words and guided by his templates, he turned to kae. kae. life you had is gone. buried. cant have it back ever again. but you can decide your life now. get revenge. and also stop chambers when he does something stupid. not a bystander anymore. dont need let this city degrade you. attack you. her eyes fell, unable to meet his eyes. you dont understand. the rashwhen i felt them coming out of me no. youre right. dont understand. wont burn you for understanding either. i will let you stay yourself. but life wont. new vultun wont. can talk about this later. if you want. will listen to whatever you have to say. but need you focused afterward. need you ready to survive. okay. he barely heard her say it, but something in her tone felt different. in the corner of his eye, he noticed that draus helmet was gone and she was giving him a shit-eating grin. got anything for me? yes. you have a gun addiction. need therapy. like essus. she made the ground beneath them turn to glass with a rude gesture. a moment after, radiance flooded its reflective sheen. dice, avo said. stay close. might feel a bit of squeeze. picking up the nu-cat and placing it in her pocket, the waif gave him a quick nod. so whats this supposed to be? tavers asked. some kind of glass heaven? she froze. wait, didnt that dead greatling have one of those? what was it called the twice-walker pulled them down, across, and back up in the george washington. back in the gutters, an unnatural brightness faded from within an abandoned bar. Chapter 18-3 Playing God chapter 18-3 playing god new vultun will be made up of 35313 districts by 288 p.g. that is 4414 trans-polity post-mortem taxable zones. sovereignties, in a word. at the rate things are currently progressing, we will only reap 12% of the total taxable deaths, placing us as the lowest profiting guild in the city. this is not acceptable. as of present, project alloyed revival and the return from ashes initiative are concluding their start-up phases. breakthroughs in negotiations with voidwatch and the agnosi have granted us additional leeway in the hellsinks we can produce and spiked our heavy golem industry and anom-metallic fabrication production. by the end of the next month, we should be able to expand and establish a foothold through the spine into the gutters. the greatest difficulty remains the syndicates. though we have a foothold in hasanastur-south, our assets are flanked by the no-dragons hundred-eighters in the adjacent district of false oasis and the thunderwargs supported by stormtree. the former is understandablethe no-dragons have their interests and we have ours. increased funding to their dissidents and the establishment of our own organizations in the warrens can serve as a necessary bulwark, though we may need a few chainbreakers on scene due to suspected enemy godclad presence. the thunderwargs are an ongoing concern. outright engagement against an allied supported syndicate will inevitably damage relations between ashthrone and stormtreea strain we cannot afford due to the percentage of combat power they occupy in the alliancebut diplomatic overtures have proven fruitless as their subsidiary runs wild, conducting border raids and committing atrocities. for this, i would like to bring forth a proposal. perhaps it would be unpopular, but i implore that you listen, brothers and sisters. tensions between the thunderwargs and hundred-eighters have been historically cool in the locality. since the hardening of borders with the end of the last war, both sides have been content to remain within their own boundaries. this can be changed. all it takes is a simple transgression to occur. i do not believe it will be hard to manufacture an engagement between them, nor will we need to dirty our own hands in such a vile endeavor. there are multiple qualified squires for hire that can lure the thunderwargs astray. the funding for such an operation is also negligible. risk assessment shows that the greatest danger remains mem-data leakage for such an operation, but such is easily countered by deploying the information to a third-party middler with no direct relations. i understand that the act of inconveniencing an allied guild worries many present, but i assure you, the odds of uncovering our operation are below a single digit on the percentage scale. and for further incentive, i bring this presentation back to the beginning. we are being outpaced. we are failing our people and the word of jaus. how are we to stand for humanity''s liberation from the coil of existence if we are too weak to support ourselves? -manor-brother helmsteed, ashthrones ministry of developmental labor 18-3 playing god good christ, avo. i thought you were going off to talk to the girl? not start a drag-out brawl against the single most famous ori-thaum godclad there is. and is that quail tavers? what the hell happened out there? cas continued to speak at him even as the cloning pools came into view. the stress radiating from the mans mind was enough to drive a normal person into psychosis. an agonizing tug accompanied each of cas thoughts as his blood screamed through his veins. his pupils were dilated, and he was flicking one glance too many at tavers. an understandable reaction for someone who valued secrecy, though avo felt there was something more to the panic attack he was suffering. {operative cas is not suffering from emotional compromise, but memories of past experiences.} calvinos words seeded instant comprehension. {there is only one fate that awaits most cults in this city. and it is all too easy to be discovered and purged. such martyrdom graced countless of his ancestors who died liberating countless slaves from death-farms during the final days before the godsfall. such a martyrdom befell his parents during the massacres of the second guild war. such martyrdom is what he believes to be awaiting him at the end of his path. a final death is not his fearbut an abrupt end before he has done enough good in the name of his lord of old.} avo studied the columner again and noted the agitation behind his eyesnow a soft hazel. he had undergone some grafting while they were gone. begun the process of adapting his shape for subterfuge. wont be a leak, avo said, trying to reassure his comrade in this conspiracy. shes tied to us. more ways than one. so you say, cas said, spittle landing avos shoulder. you should have told us about white-rababout everything you were doing up in the tiers. no. the bluntness of avos response made cas throw up his hands. then hows trust supposed to live between? how am i supposed to know that your contact isnt going to sell us out to the guilds? we trust each other in moderation, avo answered. and i give something the guilds cant. and i can hurt rab in ways no one can. so whats your solution? tyranny? avo, people are used to getting squeezed. what hurts you now supersedes what might hurt you later, all it takes for him to betray us is a single mistake on his part. one fuck-up. something that white-rab proved to be good at avoiding. avo looked down to meet cas stare. met zein while i was in the tiers too. question has been swimming in my mind. something i didnt want to ask: trust. would you trust me over zein? would you choose me over zein? quiet. no response. well, thats a pretty situational question, isnt it? your lack of answer means you understand. we have trust. but there are thresholds. we exist on a spectrum of interest to each other. i must maintain my own as well. cas grunted a humorless chuckle. damn. there he is again. your father. despite building you out of other peoples minds, you sure take after him a lot. seeing the columners growing frustration, avo rebuilt his mind and sought a smooth amelioration. he needed to quell this spat before it became a problem. weaving aspects of benhata and kare into his cognition, avo immediately felt a spike of shame pierce him as he realized the betrayal he was inflicting. words were likely not going to solve this. he needed to offer actionable recourse. material manifestations of good faith and progress. will loop you into the next meeting with him, avo said. keep you updated on what i do. show you my memories too. hm. might not trust that. give you something better. mem-data to access paladin lobbies. eyes on the inside. a new contact to protect your asset from exoricsts and public safety departments. a bit of ire bled out from cas. what are you talking about? turned two paladins. one is connected to shotin. his niece. the other is a rapid response officer for the spine. kassamon. ill have chambers cast you the details. ...alright, cas said, after a moments deliberation. but we dont do this, avo. not again. cells live and die cells die, avo said, interrupting. too many eyes. cant hide forever. you know this. cas stood silenced. but we can engineer the deaths. mask ourselves by putting assets in key positions. hunting ourselves. burning cults are easy. burning cults already targeted by another guild risks conflict. cas was now empty of tension. in its place swelled curiosity and promise. yeah yeah, that might work. his posture sagged. at least something came out of that mess. it keeps my soul clean. not this cage that keeps us from a final embrace. thats just a means. an end. when all this is done and everything is made right you will return your god to its righteous place? avo asked. or grant him sovereignty over all things and usher forth an age of virtue? cas breathed. neither. god is the absolute. were just demiurges. fallen things playing in the garden he made. you can strip omnipotence from its throne or conceive the shape of omniscience. he is the shepherd and i am his hound. it just pains me deep to watch the lambs bleed. avo tasted the belief in cas words, and the first inklings of true understanding began to kindle. this wasnt about him. this wasnt about him at all. he was crusading for others, and so his ensouling was a means to an end. what agony living in new vultun would inflict on such a man. shepherd and hound, hm? avo said. yeah, cas replied. i suppose that i have a duty to chambers then. to give him a better path. and to see him better at preserving life than wasting it. a choked laugh of pure disbelief sounded from cas. avo, did you just liken yourself to the lord? the ghoul blinked. poetic? blasphemous, cas replied. ah, avo said. well. i have the ego. yeah, thats pretty damn obvious. cas shook his head. so. now what? you train him to be better. fine. what about the girl? dice? what about her? avo glanced at the waif seated upon the dais behind him, petting the cat as she continued to look around. citys dangerous for her. not used to it. but she has talent. potential. more than just a distraction. going to give her choice. think i already know what shes going to choose. because you have her template living in that fire you call a mind, huh? yes, avo said. will be releasing our infiltrators next. elegant-moon. kare. proceedings will begin soon. abrel will be coming back planetside. should claim someone else from highflame as well. meritocrat preferably. need more points for my flame to spread. but while we breach the top, also need to claim the roots of the city. force the low masters out of hiding. consume the smugglers and syndicates. open a path out from the city. ways the paladins and guilds cant stop. cas understood. youre going to use the girl as a wilder operative? is that it? more, avo said. need a seat of power beyond the gaze of the guilds. places they cant see. places where we can amass greater forces in the open. the sunderwilds? the ruptures? yes. other fallwalkers have been unpunished. commit sins. depravity. think their souls shouldnt be theirs. and i think the deaths that fuel them will be worth more to us. your scopes growing too fast, cas said. so are my templates. and deaths. time is not our luxury. but power soon will be. power and knowledge. power. knowledge. initiative. guilds are preparing for the next war. but they dont see us. experiences have taught me things. given my understanding. our spheres must grow. but heavens alone are too limited. the nether, the physical, the metaphysical. must dominate them all. all spectrums. so we will need militaries. relations. money. political influence. and all of this can be consumed from the flesh of our enemies. we grow inside them. we grow beyond them. we grow. they wither. we decide in the end. our flame. not theirs. this is getting to be more than just a cult, avo, cas said. youre trying to build a hidden empire. {oh. nice ring to it. ask operative cas if he needs a new bass player.} avo ignored calvino. perhaps. or perhaps just a boiling flame. alright! chambers shouted! throwing his fists up. phantoms leaped from his mind and projected growth percentages across each pod. only one metric mattered. subject one - 100% ready for additional genetic therapy we should gather the others, avo said. want to speak with you. all of you. benhata compelled him to place a hand on the columners shoulder. talk to them like i spoke to you. honestly. a startled, blank expression passed through cas face. iyeah. sure. i glad i could he didnt finish his words. it wasnt a week ago that avo would have struggled to understand the man. struggled not to mock his faith or fight the urge to eat him. now, so much of what he did was clear. too clear even. avo thought he understood the mans actions and wants better than himself in some ways. the conflagration was just freedom. it was a change. change unfettered. change of the ego with a change of the mind. the weight of what he was becoming pressed upon his shoulders. if he was capable of so much alreadyso different than he was before. what was he to be when the ladder finally arrived? Chapter 18-4 Seize the Roots (I) chapter 18-4 seize the roots (i) can i light up some hiflass? you mind? no. alright, good. so. trafficking. you cant stop it. you can never stop it. you wanna stop it? thats a problem for the agnosi. ask them how many heavens there are. ask them how many gods there used to be. right now, new vultuns perimeters? the liminal borders you can restrict at any time? thats nothing. its bullshit. liminal space that doesnt let directionality in or out blah blah what the fuckyou have any idea how many fallwalkers can walk right through? you know how easy it is for a specialized golem to make a gap? easy. real easy. and if the last big brawl between the guilds didnt provide enough of a surplus, you got plenty of fallwalkers willing to take on some rend debt to keep a golem running. truth is you half-strands have so many leaks to plug it''s hopeless. the way i see it, the only chance you guys have of reducing thisnot stopping. thats impossible. reducing. thats a more attainable goal. is that you start getting smugglers to flip or start a whole series of gutter wars between the syndicates funding them. course, that would need you to step on the toes of your guild-masters, and we both know how good of a stomping they gave your dog-asses the last time you got uppity. so. best solutions i can think of off the top of my head. you can risk it big and go for the syndicates. try to breach the trading rooms they host in the deep bazaar and bust up their key figures. messy. hard. requires a calibur of necro your exorcists arent. or. or you can start poisoning the water. start seeding some squires or clads among the fateless and shred smuggling chains up from the inside, making my associates paranoid or worried about their supply. you do that and id say you can really cut down the trafficking across a few districts. but you gotta know that tricks dont work twice here and the chains of each syndicate are far-o-part. rumors will spread and mawdivers will learn. just the way the game goes. supply. demand. all you can do is gut the former because, in new vultun, theres always a need for more people to do the dying. -paladin interview of arir moradin, former fateless trafficker 18-4 seize the roots (i) i want to talk about the future, avo began. his cadre was gathered before him, half of them in seats newly grown from the ship, others occupied stray spots in the room. draus, kae, and denton were among the seated, and behind them, chambers had his back against the throne. cas leaned against a nearby wall, his eyes distracted while he flicked messages across threshold using his ansible. on the floor tavers had found a place next to dice and was rabbling about how the girl could improve her craft. even essus was among them, though he remained a cold presence in the room, standing far and away from the others, his eyes locked on avo. only a shame the sunrise could not be here. a thing to be remedied in the future, if possible. their capabilities would be more than appreciated for this undertaking. our time together has been short. but frantic. efficient. promising. changes have befallen all of us in the weeks we shared. souls. opportunities. lives restored. pasts lost. he watched kae in particular and knew the effect of his words was successful as she shuffled. running benhatas mind as his primary template, he infused himself with years of rhetorical refinement and sequenced away all his deficiencies using traits taken from other minds. his mastery over the spoken word came suddenly, and avo was increasingly appreciative of the boons his softer skills offered. we have enjoyed ourselves. enjoyed our powers. pressed our teeth on soft flesh and unbreakable armor. i have grown during this time. found apotheosis. climbed higher. become more. more than something like me ever should have. i am grateful. the admissions of his gratitude made draus eyes widen in alarm. she shot avo the closest thing she had to a worried look and he shook his head. i am well. wanted to state things plainly. i am more than indulged of flesh. i am learning satisfaction. happiness. actualization at a level beyond description. still. want more. will always want to change and become more. but it is a joyous obsession. a good chase. he placed another pause between his words. but that is i. and perhaps you are different. all of you. some of us are bound by chance. others by machinations of outside powers. i cannot change the past. but the future is open. a new force is entering the battle for the ladder. one the guilds dont know about. one growing inside them; a burning plague. i want to make sure the future we seek is one shared. so, what, is this like the with me or not speech? chambers asked, eyes flicking about. im notuh, comparing you to him cause youre like twice the manuh, g-godclad he was, but mirrorhead also gave one of these and we ended up getting jabbed the next day. opposite, avo said. not about me. about you. your future. your choices. your desires. have my own interests. perhaps someday ours will clash. but weve shared too much together for me to wish any of you in chains. i have come to appreciate each of you. for who you are. and who you might still be. then something changed across her face. a smile. a full and genuine expression, wide and feral. she was like a war-made nu-dog looking down at a bone. the weight came back, avo. the weights back and heavier than ever. i felt it earlier. with shotin. when we were in the layer. when i was getting bloody with the paladins. all i needed to understand was bigger game to hunt. youre asking us if were with you? if we want this? i cant speak for any of them, but me? you just got me into a war so big it''s beyond my dreams. this about fighting the real war. against the real bastards. the last fucking duel that will ever matter. us against all the guilds. us for the ladder. like echoes of jaus. it aint about if im with you. im a bullet in motion. im punching for flesh anyhow? this way? yeah. you cant turn me from this fight if you tried. [oh gods,] abrel muttered. [i knew the regulars were insane but how the hell did we ever make someone like her.] avo never doubted draus conviction. but hearing her excitement was another thing altogether. and how much it symmetry it had with his basest self. in this moment, loneliness was a distant thing. i know im kinda fucked up, chambers said, softly at first. he looked around the others, oddly shy. and that i dont think too good sometimes, but these have been the best days of my life. and i im scared. im scared that none of you will want me anymore. i mean, i know that i dont deserve a frame. i know that! but, like, this makes me matter now, i gotta keep it because i cant go back! please dont make me go back to being who i was. i dont wanna be like that anymore. ill change. ill do anything. youll do, avo said. ill do what? chambers asked, trying to understand what avo wanted. youll do. avo said, simply. not taking your frame from you. never taking your frame from you. might kill you if our paths diverge. but ive given you choice. you live and die a godclad now. the rest is what you desire. be change. dont wait for it. chambers mouth fell open and closed. for a few moments, he didnt have anything to say. i, uh. a trickle of something fell from one of his eyes. the tear surprised chambers, prompting him to swipe fast and look up into the cloning pools. ill never rash you guys again. maybe you will, avo said. worked on shotin. could work on others as well. we just need more control. spare the fateless. me and val here were in this before you, cas said. you know where we stand. and zein? avo asked. she is more invested in the outcome of this war than any of us, denton said. she is beyond mistrust. the glance she leveled at tavers implied enough. dont worry about me, tavers said. i know the score. you can get one of your necros to stay synced with me. raldis gone quiet after his dive earlier. probably trying to shake any incubi from tracking him. but his stake here is personal. and so is mine. ive run for and against the guilds plenty. and that frame of yours is too precious for them to ever give me what i want. good, avo said. will talk to sunrise personally. first order now will be to use elegant-moon to i wish to help. essus voice was low, but his words held a weight to them. heads spun and eyes fell upon him. a sliver of discomfort passed through his features but he endured. you are speaking of liberation. you are intending to do for them what you have once done for me. what you died trying to give my son time and time again. i have not forgotten this. so, i want this path. i wish to help you. avo tilted his head. is this your choice? essus looked down at his massive hand. the transplants mirrorhead installed remained after his resurrection. whatever trauma he endured, the embers ego now thought his arms to be artificial. not his original limbs, now gone like his son was. yes. yes. i think this is the first real choice i have made since i since i decided to come here. he balled his fingers and made a fist. i have no taste for bloodshed. and unless you destroy what i am now with your fire, i will never hold violence close to my heart. but freeing people. sparing them what i faced. this is purpose. this is an atonement that would please artad. please me. blessed be the peacekeepers, cas muttered off from the side. avo nodded. the conversations with voidwatchs specialists have done wonders for the man, it seemed. no need for a cognitive revision. pleases me to see you with new purpose. essus shrugged. one must do something after choosing to live, yes? yes, avo said, turning to regard subject one again. we will use elegant-moon to finish our prototype. then i will release her. seed her back to highflame and the no-dragons. and turn our focus downward to the maw. to the smugglers. to routes out of the city and the promises that lay beyond. kae. need to talk to you soon. have some things. about your ontologics? she asked, attention returning to him. about all our frames. new considerations. upgrades. countermeasures. a soft smile crept across the agnos face. good. so do i. Chapter 18-5 Seize the Roots (II) chapter 18-5 seize the roots (ii) two-mag: where the hells are you? its almost morning. no-dragon nimbuses are going to be passing through soonthey tag us and that barge is for the slagging. moment: calm down. nine kilometers [5.59 miles] out. flying low. had to duck another guilder drone patrol. highflames really coming out in force these days. thats almost a month theyve spent grid-sweeping the maw. wonder what the fuck they lost. two-mag: it doesnt matter what they lost, how''s our cattle doing? moment: yeah, yeah, good haul this time. about six hundred people in the hold. gonna be breaking from real space soon. going under. somethings wrong with our reactor. every time we bright-jump the thing whines. its been getting louder two-mag: i cast the techs about that. just getfuck! nimbuses. theyre here! already here! shit! fuck! jump now! jump now! course to secondary coordinates. moment: yeah, okay, its gonna be an ugly jump! just make sure the room is dark when we get there. [session disconnected] [accessing sessionjaid riverson (docking)] two-mag: jaidaugwhgh, fug! [errorrrr] hugghh! awarrgguh! [session lost] -thoughtcast between smugglers under the forgotten lances syndicate 18-5 seize the roots (ii) +...hugghh! awarrgguhagh. what the fu-huh? what the hell just happened? what oh, gods. no. no. no no no! i cant be dead i cant be!] a detonation of trauma passed through their mind, but avo undid the damage and fused the mans mind back together. two-mag wasnt taking their subsumption very well. most people didnt. flashes of another life passed through avo, the experiences his and not at the same time. he remembered the block that was his childhood homea gnarled sang-grown organism called the grovel. he remembered the chittering creatures that clung to the walls and ceilings, serving as wardens and defenders both. he remembered the squires they captured and seeded during the block war, butchering and dying in equal measure. the memories spiraled up from there. the death of his mother at the age of ten during the chaos of the fourth guild war. starvation and pain followed. he hid in hovels. survived by catching aratnids and purifying his body by only eating at midnight. he thought of the first apartment he truly rented, of the joy-fiends that broke in and forced him out. of the organs he had to sell and the favors he did just to survive. the time after was a blur, misery at the front and pleasure at the back. gang after gang. fight after fight. job after job. two-mag had no gift in the ways of violence, but he was a good organizer. a manager of people and things. a quality that elevated his gang from the rabble. something that saw them consolidated into the forgotten lances syndicatea militia of ori-thaum loyalists formed initially to ensure their blocks survival during the ghoul uprising. for the last eight years, he served under them, and his most recent promotion placed him as a lieutenant in charge of procurements and smuggling. he ran three different barge crews and was the direct liaison to each of their captains. never once were his deliveries late. never once did he fall short of monthly projections. until today. everything was going to hell today. disgesting his new template in an instant, avo let out a quiet sigh and studied the carnage his cadre inflicted on their newest victim. the forgotten lances were expanding. swelling in numbers and resources after overcoming their district rivals, they made to spread their influence across the leser-tannan sovereignty itself. so great were the waves they made that squire lobbies buzzed with gig after gig, the requests supplied by rival powers to stymie the growth of their foe. chambers caught the noise then, using her reputation and connectivity, quail managed to set them up for a sabotage run. apparently, the forgotten lances managed to completely occupy an unfinished gutter-level arcology and reactivate what little of it still functioned. serving as a source of commercial aero production before the war, the syndicate instead repurposed the production facilities within the block to serve as a combat drone production line. the dormant waste disposal system was also hollowed out, widening the entrance of their dump port overlooking the maw itself, they retrofitted a crude dock large enough to accommodate maw barges and ensured their place as an essential smugglers nest in the city. one that now belonged entirely to avo and his cadre, along with all the other bounties it conferred. thaumic output - 9,001 thaum/c ghosts - [91,334] heaven obtained: sangeist (blood/matter) x6; springstormer (biology/lightning) x3; galeslither (air/space) x3; fulgerhound (lightning/matter) x3 i must confess to being envious, sister ruveca, elegant-moon said. if not for our void-bound cousins, i would not even know the flesh to be capable of such a thing. i despise them for earning my envy. ah, how i wish i could feel their suppleness part between my fingers. what else do you know? do the furrows of your brains run deeper? +hey, hey, creepy meat-suit lady, none of that,+ jack said. his phantasmal avatar hovered next to janes, formed from phantoms leaking out from chambers meta. the voider grafters had taken to working with ruveca well, but their relationship with elegant-moon proved to be another matter. the ego-torn sang indicated her desire to dissect a voider repeatedly. jack and jane were, understandably, against such a proposal. +when are you getting rid of her? cant you justi dont knowfill yourself with her god-bits and do what she does? your whatsit has the capability right?+ +liminal frame,+ jane said. +you know what its called, brother jack. do not agitate without purpose.+ avo turned to kae. destroyed their knots. they were unprepared. six domains of blood. three more with biology. good grab of matter, lightning, air, and space too. it should be enough to replicate her strongest canons without expanding your domains further, the agnos said. for the counter-plane you wish to design i need to die again and see. this will require delicate modification on a mythological level as well. avo grunted. but i will be able to do what she can soon? could graft that first. yes. but i recommend that you reach the fifth sphere first. with how many improvements we are going to makeit is best to have a surplus of thaums and not risk over-capacity, yes? and more people must die if we are all to be elevated. kae tried to shrug away her discomfort. at least we are using those who will not be missed. chambers head didnt move, but his eyes glanced at kae as adjusted his posture to shrug away the awkwardness. young miss, i do not mean offense but there always is someone who will miss them. essus gaze was fixed on the moments unfolding before him, of draus opening a mirror for subject one to step through. during my captivity, i saw terrible things. but also life. my captors were beings of a multitude as well. they had friends and loves. some were troubled by what they did. others thought nothing of it. his face darkened. it is something that made me hate them more. to know that they were no different from me, yet did nothing to aid me. or end my pain. the agnos winced. im sorry you suffered so much. essus nodded. and i, you. but we can do better now. or at least try. he turned and faced avo, letting out a shaky breath. thank you. for what? not forcing me to go down with them. i know you gave me a gift and the power is beyond most men but i am not ready to see such slaughter again. thank you for not forcing me to. cant do anything to you. you are your own. avos words granted more relief than anticipated. [you are your own?] two-mag gasped in disbelief. [hes hiswhat the fuck about me?] [what about you?] abrel deadpanned. [you got a dead kid hiding somewhere? did my half-strand brother capture, torture, and then make a literal slave gladiator out of you too?] [what?] abrel continued. [oh. no? no, he didnt? then quiet, slaver. this whining is pathetic. you smuggle people. youre the scum of the city. sure, its part of the economy we live with, but you don''t just know about it. you do it. and before you start the whole im a human too speech, let me tell you: no one fucking cares. youre fateless too, bitch. and youre actively taking peoples free will away from them. it doesnt matter who loves you or what kind of person you are outside your job. your type makes for good killing, and the ghoul needs more lubricant.] [oh, gods,] two-mag moaned. [jaus. jaus.] [hes not here,] paladin kassamon said. [but i am.] [as am i,] kare added. the syndicate goon began to scream. {breached,} draus said as a wall of glass exploded from around the corner. her cog-feed registered a firing line of contacts, accretions visible before their bodies were. to their credit, the enforcers began firing immediately, losing their flechettes at the unexpected breach. layering both herself and tavers in reflective plating, shots punched clean through plascrete, into their bodies, and out from another direction entirely. borrowing mirrorheads gimmick ensured both regular and squire were all but impervious to direct kinetics, and with her vulnerable shard hidden, draus had little risk of facing thaumic backlash. a storm of fire fell, directed from every point in the silo. draus looked over her shoulder and tavers replied with an affirmative gesture. opening another sheet of glass further down the hall, they released subject one into the hallway. the first bits of debris and shrapnel pelted its body. the impacts forced it to dig its leg into the ground for balance. +subcutaenous fullerene endoskeletal supports holding,+ ruveca said. +we should consider increasing its mass. or adapting its limbs more. it will not be able to plant itself down against heavy forces without a foothold or a gripping point.+ +agreed,+ jane said. +let us put it in the line of fire. see how it deals with injuries.+ moon, avo said. keep it alive. of course, the sang godclad said, lips twisting into a vicious grin. you should pay attention too, yao guai. let me give you an illustration of the potential you will soon come to possess. Chapter 18-6 The Garden That Is Flesh chapter 18-6 the garden that is flesh a mixed force is not a preference but a necessity, for the contingent of forces you face in battle will be clasped with varied shells in turn. the no-dragons have cultured beasts of impossible vitality, but even their mastery of the flesh is not beyond rebuke. other guilds and fallwalkers have their own heavensimbued with miracles of the absolute that can flay flesh, or deny bone its structure. through these means come viruses of all varieties, some targeted, some not, all engineered to defile that which is organic. likewise, those of the alloy are not beyond reproach. i have seen more omnitech creations crumble and die from their own madness than i can count. i have seen voidtech wonders choke and wither away to nothingness within chasms of fracturing reality. machines are of the pattern as wellthere is a consistency to their builds, shapes, and designs. the energy that fuels them. the code and mem-data that guide them. just as there are plagues of the flesh, so too are there sicknesses across virtuality, and all the rest of existence. the instruments and arms we field must be of a sprawl. thaumaturgy is the unwinding of realitys tapestry. a change in the pattern. a revision of what is. hold to a single line of faith, code, or concept, and be inevitably destroyed. should you spread yourself, however, stretch wide and embrace all there could be, then through symmetry you may yet prevail. for that which bears a tangible edge rings truest against a falling blade, and that which possesses the make of plagues reflected might very well achieve the same. --osjon thousand, the firmament and the sky, chapter 5 18-6 the garden that is flesh avo felt the electricity surge through subject one before any effects became obvious. the faint current it emitted was always there. as was the monochromatic field represented by the organic screen grown out from elegant-moons skull. each of the bioforms movements generated a faint tug to the senses as if a limb displacing water. watching the scene unfold via draus visual feed, slugs, explosives, and burst flechettes from the enforcers washed over the prototypical bioform, the initial barrage chipping through pieces of its exoskeleton, exposing the swirling masses of sporelings housed within. then, as if an aero accelerating hard through a curtain of falling rain, the field it emitted bulged at the front and the oncoming projectiles began tumbling off to the sides. gauss fire was more repelled than deflected while flung shrapnel jolted against the cloud of sporelings like daggers caught in a net. matter made from patterns of complex alloys imbued with iron or steel tumbled from their path. constructs that exceeded the realm of electromagnetism sailed unimpeded, only halting upon striking a hardened shroud. +its holding against sustained fire reasonably,+ jack said. +but thats probably because moonie heres keeping it juiced with her god-shit.+ how long can it sustain without her? avo asked. as if to answer his question, elegant-moon released her heaven. immediately, the weight pressing against avos domain of biology vanished as a wall of missiles impacted subject ones protective shroud. kinetic force was parried for a brief moment as the sporelings swelled, but then the creature sounded a thrumming dronethe first sound avo ever heard it make, and the currents pulsing through its body shorted out. in an instant, the sporelings spilled out of the air as shot after shot buried themselves into the bioforms body. its exterior carapace fractured, exposing tattered sheathes of breathing rubber beneath. a slow-moving ooze flowed out from where subject one limbs were sheared and its domed-shaped body rattled and cracked. +ugh, about three seconds of functionality against a concentrated barrage of heavy kinetics,+ jack said. +maybe we can improve efficiency by increasing its size and adding some hyper-catalytic nodes across its integumentary system?+ jane sighed. +such a thing would make it overheat in an instant. the only reason why it''s not burning from the inside is because the sang-harvested chrono-cyclical cells provided by sister ruveca for its electro-conductive membrane that we re-edited. we are functionally tricking reality into misremembering through the half-life we left on the organs. nothing short of a heaven could allow for it to output more power without complete and utter destabilization.+ +loathe as i am to suggest this, but cybernetics can be considered,+ ruveca added. +a heat store or radiator of some kind.+ +were going to have to redo the entire thing to integrate that,+ jack mumbled. +this thing is silicon-based. most implants are made for carbon-life forms. humans at that at least it being silicon will keep the no-dragons confused if they ever manage to take one intact.+ do not presume such an advantage to endure, my friends, elegant-moon said, her smirk spreading wide. what is law and theory to you is but a tale to us. the flesh is a story that we tell ourselves; a garden to be re-arranged. i bid you make certain of their ability to decay in an instant, for already my heaven has mapped its make in nerve, tissue, bone, and sinew, and from the dreams of my heaven will it be rebirthed with but the effort of a breath. but joy passed from her face like a season, and melancholy remained in its place. but so little pleasure lives in this. so much lost. so much life we could have cultured and intermingled with our own. her head tilted up at the porcelain white ceiling that was the mantas interior. in the backdrop of her awareness, subject one was slowly coming undone before a tide of unceasing fire. {pull it out?} draus asked as shots continued to spill in and out of her and tavers. {no,} avo replied. {just a setback.} shifting his mind to be parallel with elegant-moon. {going to do some direct supervision.} {synced.} never was there color or sound. just shapes, movements, and electromagnetic kinesiology. from nothingness, over five hundred bodies were isolated and identified. guns and metal shone the brightness. that which couldnt be pried by magnetic means remained a faint gray. i see them, avo breathed. [do you now?] elegant-moon said from within. [i do not think so. not really. we think. so we cannot see as the bioforms can. they do not think. they exist. they are. unburdened. wonderful beings. wonderful.] +very good,+ jane said, somehow sounding pleased but not enthused. +now. let us go over why the prototype is built as it is.+ the flaring of fusion burners against the sporelings opened gulfs in the bioforms unified vision. connected to a single overmind, though, there was still little beyond avos ability to see. +test movement. and then finish with offensive capabilities.+ doing as requested, avo sent his bioforms in and, even knowing their capabilities via elegant-moon, he still found himself surprised as they stopped crawling across the ground and propelled themselves through the air. the first thing to note was how their segmented legs ejected their bottommost stacks, leaving metallic discs on the ground as a launch point. pushing their field and sporelings into the discs at an angle, the bioforms shot through the breach as their iron-layered arms snapped out straight and wide, actively making minute adjustments to alter their trajectory. enforcers cried out as the bioforms used them as launch points as well, though the force delivered was insufficient to topple them. gauss fire cut upward as the long spine of the elevator came into notice. a stream of fire splashed over one of the bioforms and it vanished from avos notice immediately. not even the weaveress could restore a body that wasnt there anymore. +ah,+ ruveca said, sounding more fascinated than disappointed. +heat was expected to be an issue.+ +yep,+ jack said. +maybe if we can let them shed their waste heat slowly somehow+ narrowing in on the enforcer that killed one of their number, the bioforms fired discs from their legs as crude railgun pellets. shots struck but failed to penetrate, some skipping from the reinforced plating of the rigs, others bouncing off outright. as the enforcer brought his arm up to trigger their fusion burner once more, avo directed every single bioform to concentrate their fields around the mans arm and twist. servos whined. joints sparked. a body shuddered. an arm came free of its shoulder socket and began to spin. +alright,+ jack muttered. +takes around eight of them working in tandem to overpower a single mook in a shitty rig. yeah. no. not acceptable. we need to give them more kick. make them bigger. much bigger. boost their electromagnetism by a magnitude. well, this is definitely going to require some cybernetics. only practical solution. looks like more research for all of us. and also, were gonna need you to grow a new module in that ship of yours, ghoulie. put a cybernetics lab next to the cloning pools.+ +undergo final test,+ jane said. +lets see how its voltaic vampirism performs.+ sporelings spread throughout the room as building currents of static tickled avos domain of lightning. as the bodies of the enforcers were bathed in the flea-sized organisms, bioforms tightened their grips around the nearest enforcers to them as they began to fall. then, as the sporelings pressed deep against armor and flesh alike, the bioforms drank, siphoning bioelectricity from bodies and power grids for exo-rigs alike. armors locked up and froze. the bodies within them spasmed as currents were snatched from synapses. channeling the excess output through their sporelings as well, other enforcers found themselves electrocuted by bolts leaping from each of their suits. thaums spilled over into avos soul as casualties skyrocketed. the amount of gauss fire was reduced in an instant as the bioforms suckled gun batteries dry. +and thats why we chose the voltanids to serve as the bioforms base,+ jack chuckled. +these little bastards are technovores! theyll make aeros and systems shit themselves. hell, theyll probably short out a block if you put them in the right place. drawing in too much at once will fry em from the sheer heat but if you manage a steady conductive flow+ for every enforcer that went still, another burst into sparks and shivers. +yeah. short of someone designing specific countermeasures to bear, i think well make a menace out of these things yet.+ artad forgive us, essus moaned, looking away from the deaths displayed from draus feed. he swallowed sour spit, and elegant-moon wondered what it would be like to hatch a bird from the bulge of his adams apple. she was keeping all the males around her alive, anyway. prevent her curse from unleashing its full weight. she deserved a reward +no,+ avo said. the sangs thoughts paused and shifted. [then perhaps something else. something that will speak of my talents and appreciation. for allowing me to sample such an exquisite specimen....] and with their thoughts connected, avo divined the gift she sought to grant and smiled. +yes.+ canon: (biology) ->from severance comes inheritance: the user of this canon may interweave the biologies of two different organisms. Chapter 18-7 These Bodies Be Our Prison chapter 18-7 these bodies be our prison +mag? mag? were coming in rough, whats+ [moment! no! run! stay away! dont do this! dont use me like this!] -final thoughtcast between moment and two-mag, syndicate forgotten lance 18-7 these bodies be our prison hubris: neither organisms the user is melding may be destroyed during the process or thaumic backlash will be triggered avo and one of the bioforms fell into each other like toppling towers, bodies crumbling with tumorous debris. yet, collapse did not follow. hardly. their structures held as the biologies of ghoul and prototype pressed together, entwining skeletons and melding sporelings into avos blood. linked to the creature he was absorbing, he felt the bioform melt away into thin air as the weaver wove it into him, infusing his flesh with the best parts of its design. from two bodies emerged one. from divided architectures rose a sheathe sporting a new shape. new pattern. the woundshaper caressed avos material form with curiosity as new senses bloomed from his mind. with his next exhale flowed a cloud of sporelings, and as they spread, they joined his sanguinity as another expansion to his cognitive perception. he could feel the metal around him. sense the matter he could grip and those he could. imbued with a domain of lightning, a constant, unnatural power lingered within his field, ever-charged, never-diminishing. avo kae breathed, looking between him and elegant-moon. the sang just leaned back against the seat of her cell and smiled at the ground. it is a gift that can be offered to any, elegant-moon said. you have shown me new life to twist and twist it into you i shall. our flesh is a garden. we need but the proper seeds. jack sighed as his phantasmal avatar studied avo. +as i said. raw damn woo-woo bullshit. we had to cut him open for that stupid implant. here she is waving her hands.+ looking upon himself using elegant-moons eyes, he let his meldskin sink back beneath his cordyceramite plates. once, paleness reigned absolute across his body, his sheathe the hue of naked bone. now, contrast ruled. neat rows of ebony discs lined his spine, collar, ribs, and limbs. a second skeleton had grown over his sheathe, its rubbery interior threaded to his bioelectrically charged mycelia. the greatest change fell upon his echoheads. once likened to blade-headed serpents coated in armored scales of midnight, each tail now floated behind avo in segments. sporelings spewed from the divided pieces and hyper-conductive nodes lined the spines of the transplants. volts arced down each of the echoheads, imbuing it with thrumming power. now, his tendrils would be as if shots loosed from a railgun more than a spearing piston. drawing a stream of blood from his body, avo watched as sporelings growing within him wriggled with the coursing red, nursing themselves on his haemophage. he formed a helix, and a single pillar danced between linking curves of blood, black bisecting red. +beautiful+ ruveca breathed. +impossible,+ jane said, sternness betraying her unease. +the casual mixing of biological properties is+ woo-woo, kae whispered, unable to hide an impish grin. cold science may have its wonders, but thaumaturgy can be everything. her grin broke into a shy smile. which is why i should be granted access to deeper knowledge! think of it. think of what i might be able to do if i only knew what you knew. what other creations we could see elevated? synthesis of knowledge, old and new. just like were seeing here. essus looked a bit more than disturbed, and fascinatingly, the once-flats rubbery skin proved to be like magnetoreceptive camouflage. the voider grafters shared a likewise disquiet, but their wariness was directed more toward kae. +lady, you have no idea how much what you just said scares me,+ jack muttered. +indeed,+ jane concurred. +oh, no. look what youve done. you made me agree with him.+ {another one of our eggs disappeared,} draus said, sweeping through the room with her glass shards, blasting all corners with her perception to ensure there was no one using an incog. {rest of the hostiles are down. good number are still kickin, but their rigs are dead and done.} she paused. {felt its field yank on my implants. not my meldskin though. nothing there. guess that voidtech just built better.} {that,} calvino began, {and the fact that its omnidirectional thrusters work through the manipulation of gravity and magnetism. interference is interference, and electromagnetic pulses are a vector of attack as old as the atomic bomb. to us, anyway. this shall be a novel thing for some of your foes to experience, hm?} avo grinned, and his teeth glinted in the light. science and discovery. wonderful things. {indeed.} with a twitch of his finger, avo splattered the surviving syndicate forces. the assault portion of the run was done. now came the time for interception and extraction. a barge awaited them. as did its crew and the slaves it carried. thinking back to his first resurrection in the maw, avo looked down at his clawsdigits now lined with silicon circuitsand then at those around him. this was one of the moments where he felt lifes rhyme. an echo of who he was calling to what he was becoming. how far he came. how far he had yet to go. suddenly, a shape pushed against the edges of his sanguinity. beyond the reach of his new magnetoreception, only his heaven caressed the arriving barge and the two hundred and twelve bodies manning its cramped confines. the vessel emerged from nowhere, tumbling out from the light itself and scraping its sides against the leftmost edge of the hangers opening. he had to right its course using his haemokinesis to prevent it from crashing hard into one of the nine mag-rings meant to anchor it in place. whatever the condition of the crew, they were clearly unprepared for their arrival. a beat later, a session-link request from moment, the barges captain spilled across avos cog-feedthe memories sourced to one of his newest acquisitions: two-mag. the heaven of love was not so easily denied. through the barge did the bodies writhe, and when a slave groaned in the corner of the hold, a technician echoed their pain forth, face down on the metal flooring, breathing the same moans. {avo} calvino chided, disappointed at the atrocity inflicted. the ghoul breathed. sorry. couldnt resist it. was poetic. {yes, in a degenerate-psychopath way, i suppose. but come now} avo grunted in annoyance, knowing the egi was probably right. poor behaviors formed poor habits. still, it was interesting to discover he could be persuaded toward regression if the fancy struck him. alright, avo said. he clenched a hand. the woundshaper squeezed. bodies burst. the crew died. the chain of agony shattered, and in its wake followed new templates welcomed by a sobbing moment. [ah. farewell, new memory,] elegant-moon said, genuinely sad. [may we be rejoined.] shifting back over into his original sheathe, he took a moment to reacclimate as his senses returned and turned to essus. many are in a bad state. mutilated. broken down. you will see. if you come. the mans eyes widened and grew unfocused. but his brows furrowed and he hardened what remained of his resolve. i must face this. i must face this wrong. i remain for a reason. i am here to help regarding essus a moment longer, avo sent another message over to draus. {barge secure.} {i saw,} she replied. {had glass in the air. what the hells were you doing.} {knotted their senses together. starting with the slaves.} {old habits dont die, huh, rotlick?} {elegant-moon is a bad influence.} the regular snorted. {so what now?} {now i help essus. he needs to extract the slaves. good for him. new purpose. im going to cycle through new memories. understand how theyre jumping the borders. then examine the barge.} {synced. ill pull it through a passage. tavers is planting a tac-nuke surprise for reinforcements.} that made avo laugh. the old squire was growing to be an endearing figure. {good. we move out of the district after this. hit someone else. dont want to leave too much of a trail. have to be careful.} {yeah. when you cutting the sang free?} {soon. probably two days. well have harvested heavens from golems by then. want to get some more deaths though. you and i can work in tandem in our spare moments. focus on killing for a few days. bring us up to sphere five.} {shit. thought youd never ask. still. were gonna have to figure out what to do with these fateless. aint got a place to keep em. too much noise.} avo paused and considered his choices. the answer, came as he thought of dice. the girl was huddled in the corner of the manta, wary of the ship and all its inhabitants. her speech continued to be restrained, but there was a growing interest building behind her eyes. he would see her freed. returned to the wilds that spawned her. but for every fallwalker, there was an enclave and people to man its walls. many of them would die in new vultun. many of them would die outside its walls. if such was the case, then perhaps all that needed to be offered was a choice of location. {see about that when the time comes. hide them in the gutters for now.} Chapter 18-8 The Scheme chapter 18-8 the scheme +wah! everyone likes to talk about freedom, freedom, freedom. you kids spit this and that. its all funny to me. saintist this, massist that. sall shit. i was there at the start of this mess, and it didnt mean anything then. just like it doesnt mean anything now left! watch the left. dammit, juns, howd you get wiped by that guy. anyway. this death farm map were raiding now? i was born in one of those. a bit cleaner than this one. they also dont keep people open air either. we lived underground in a maze so no one could escape. my ma and da? never knew the former. the latter was a real bastard. still loved him though. as much as i could anyone. they had him on so many drugs he was barely a person. cased him in armor and had him run around keeping the rest of the slaves in check. shackler, they called us. slaves to be hated by other slaves. i had masters too. the keepers of the vow. old kosgan faithers that enjoyed a bit of flogging and torture from time to time. wasnt that bad compared to other places. i was lucky. hey, man, watch the southwest corridor. we dont need to get overrun again like last time. yeah. yeah. kill more of those fateless in the cage. we just need five more deaths to call in a sunshield. huh? no. you get scripture, scripture, and more scripture. they wanted you good and faithful when you were sacrificed. they didnt need any heretical slaves tainting the pits. of course, we werent stupid. well, some of us werent. we saw people going missing, had a language based on knocking on walls. gossip still slipped around cause the sisters were a den of snakesalways trying to mess one over on each other. why? because only people who failed out of kosgan society ended up running the farms, and most of them were trying to get one over on each other so they could find a way back. thats how i escaped the first time. a low sister called sister karakan got up to some tricks. framed my father for something or other. or maybe he did do it. doesnt matter. the outcome was the same. let me tell you, the other slaves hate us shacklers. when they got the go from their sister, oh, did they do things to him. i tried to help him. i got the same. didnt matter none to themhates a drug and we all wanted a hit. anyway, my own people gelded my father in front of me and killed him slow. one of you were asking why i spent more time killing faithers than freeing slaves? well. i hated them. i hated the bastards. i still dont like them. anyway. sister karakan came in promising justice to be done and order to be restored and everyone under our cairn was getting a day off and double rations. they cheered. i cried. then they took me away and tortured me some more. you ever hurt so much the light starts singing to you? yeah. you start admitting to things you didnt even do. you just start talking and apologizing to anything for some peace. it didnt really mean anything to karakan, right? she was just trying to make my direct overseer look bad and mess up the shacklers under his command. anyway. i was supposed to die there on the wooden plank they had me nailed to upside down, but the light just kept singing and singing, and eventually, it started speaking to me. turns out, it wasnt just sister karakan who wanted to play. one of the seraphim were getting in on the action as well. a lowly god in the kosgan choirs. not even good enough to be one of the chorusers. not without some major changes. it end up laying its hand on me and changing my flesh. blessing me with a miracle. it decided to enlighten me about a few things regarding the faith and my place in it. telling me about the lie that was my life and the whole sacrifice thing. no paradise awaited poor naeko. you remember being told that stories arent real? that everything you believed is a lie, and youre just meat for the killing? yeah. pretty rough. go for guard tower c. watch the griffon riders. anyway. thats how i managed my first breakout. because a god wanted to power-climb same as any fated or wager in the city. i didnt start a rebellion because it was the right thing. i started it because my das screams folowed me in my dreams, i couldnt take crying alone at night. so, i got the faithers in on my hurt. and a bunch of the other slaves. then, after i escaped, my benefactor pointed me in another direction and told me to keep going. yeah. stories make it sound better than it does. i was still a slave. just one playing a darker game. guess thats the way it would have probably stayed if old lady zein didnt aw, no. we lost c already. back. back before they start spawning in. do i sound sad? im not sad. i just i dont care. and you shouldnt either. someones gonna tell you that if you just listen to them, the future can be yours and life is gonna be different someday. theyre lying. stay home. play another match. dont be me. took me nearly five hundred years to figure that out. and only barely. it didnt matter in the end. the egi put on a good performance, but corners mind smelled bullshit, and avos instincts told him that this, like almost anything the artificial mind did, was directed toward a finer purpose. avo knew the feeling. he knew the feeling when he watched his brothers debase themselves. good news, tavers said, walking over from the manta. i got places where these folks can be housed. theyll have to work or volunteer as servers, but they wont be harvested. also, raldis back. managed to scrub his presence and avoid the incubi. sent me a heads-up a couple of seconds ago. says he wants to meet again. in person. you guys know the easy armistice? draus turned. been there. once. good. i dont need to explain the gimmick to you then. she coughed. so. kinda terrifying how a couple of you fuckers managed to butcher the arm of an entire syndicate in a day. especially you, ghoul. that meta of yours is giving my nerves the shits. this wouldve taken a couple dozen damn good squires and four times that in necro cells to pull off. still, fun as this is, hitting these syndicates gets to be a real glutton for time. and the guilds replace them faster than we can kill anyway. thats fine, avo said. dont plan on destroying them in the end. just infecting. burrowing my control deep in the syndicates. and then guilds through them. this isnt extermination. its a replacement. he pointed one of his echoheads at the barge occupying the center of the room, and the floating pieces of his tendril clicked together and thrust out. reviewed the memories of the crew. the heaven inside. its a thing of light. canon specifically lets the vehicle sink into light itself when the crew are made to close their eyes. thats how theyre hoping the borders? tavers asked. one way, avo said. need to replace golem core every few months. constant arms race between paladins and the agnosi against the smugglers and the fallwalkers outside. unregistered heavens. primal. old. new ways in. for every barge that gets captured and has its core cataloged, others slip through unnoticed. there are too many possible canons, kae said, listening though far off to the side. done examining the core of the barge, she was now looking into the cage containing a particularly young slave with a troubled expression. the borders arent capable of covering everything. and the guilds, well. a flash of a snarl passed through her features. they like leaving holes. something we will soon be able to exploit. can we make more like it? avo asked. kae paused and looked at him. what? the barge? he grunted. not sure. barge? golems? dont need a soul or cycler for those. right? she paused. we need the heaven. but that can be reverse-engineered by your frame. oracle glass and some thaumic investiture she mumbled to herself momentarily. it can be done. the difficulty is that we need a place of destabilization. a rupture, in a word. somewhere reality is unbalanced. like a fallen heaven? tavers said. i know a few of those. quarantined places in the city leftover from the war. this captured avos attention. locations. share them with chambers. the squire gave him a nod as wisping ghosts vibrated around her halo. her thorncrown wards looked modified. complex. something told him it was raldis work. also. going to cut elegant-moon loose. planning to give her a staged escape. implicate one of the guilds. oh, plannin a little false flag, are we? draus asked. trying to decide, avo replied. both ori-thaum and highflame have candidates. clan drongo. chivalrics. muddy the waters more. trigger distrust for both guilds. within themselves. and against each other. he paused. im thinking about using chambers. ah, shit, draus muttered. hearing his name uttered, chambers turned to stare. me? city already hates him, avo said. two hundred billion imp bounty in total already. will probably reach five hundred before weeks end. the ghoul couldnt help but grin. they think hes an acolyte. that the low masters chose him. a low hiss escaped from him. more than one of the templates laughed along. template-chambers fumed. so, what? like, what are we talking about? chambers said. could i add something?, kae whispered, conspiratorially. she leaned in and regarded chambers from the corner of her eye, as if worried the would overhear. i think it would be good to leave her with hints of a full conspiracy. that drongos are in league with the low masters right now. that will cause trouble for three of our adversaries, right? your fathers. ori-thaum. and highflame. all dealing with each other. yes, avo agreed. but the nature of the escape itself is still in question. how does she overcome her theoretical necrojack controllers? another betrayal, of course, tavers added. heads turned to her and she shrugged, her pauldrons clinking as her shoulders raised. look. this things supposed to be a mess, right? have chambers take a shot at ori-thaum or something. put their partnership into doubt. make it look like things are going south between him and silvers. the sang can escape while the fights happening. [shit,] benhata sighed. [this might just cause a clusterfuck inside clan drongo too.] the glaive had no idea how encouraging his words were. good, avo said. have concept now. more things to do. keeping track of the paladin. abrel. now elegant-moon. harvest more heavens in the meantime. build our spheres. breach the border. choke the maw. much to do in an instant, avo shifted his mind and pitched his concept. chambers. you like entertainment. want to feel like dannis steelhard instead of a terrorist? the man paused. well. yeah, im mean you know, i like performances. and arts. and shit. he nodded, body stiff, unsure where this was going. youre not asking me to he vaguely humped the air. no, avo said. not pornographic. dramatic. oh, chambers replied, sounding both relieved and disappointed at the same time. well. yeah, i think i can pull that off. avo broadened his fangs and smiled. good. well be making you a star soon. and tied to the ghouls thoughts, not even paladin kassamon could resist breaking into disbelieving laughter. [oh, this might just get that lazy bastard naeko off his ass too.] Chapter 18-9 Catch and Release (I) chapter 18-9 catch and release (i) +seeker. mondelles here. moons meta just came onlinelocation: gutters, below nu-scarrowbur, yuulden-yang sovereignty. i tried her session. she isnt responding. might be a trap, but she was moving and then stopped. the area around her looks to be some kind of housing complex. drones detected squatters and light syndicate activity. no other hostiles were spotted. meet me at xin yunsha [deepnav marker placed] in four hours. handle your business. well secure the surrounding area first.+ -instrument santanado starsinger mondelles 18-9??vl-b!n. catch and release (i) aratnids made the most splendorous flowers if you twisted their flesh the right way. the red and white lathering their muscles glimmered with sheen oxygenation fueling their blood. these served as the perfect petals but needed to be folded out from beneath the skin. hair and fur were to be turned to the stem, while the palps and legs clutched the spreading flesh like a cage. bones were to be smoothened, turned from structure to receptacle at the center of these bastard roses. ribs and spines ran down within the stem. the organs, finally, were to be fused into a singular cancer, with a cord made from the intestines connecting it to the rest of the flower. pitiful screeches of pain sang from the nub-like heads of the creatures poking from the teratoma. beneath the blooming parts of their altered biomass, they swung and swayed, suffering without dying like tassels from red lanterns, lining the hall leading to her room. around her, twenty bodies were left strewn and spattered in various states of mutilation. they began this day as thugs of a kind. syndicate enforcers and masters. slavers and cattle drivers of them. they ended it as victims of a singular entity they could have never fathomeda beast of twin flames and divergent sinew. elegant-moon smiled when she thought of the monster that had subverted her will. avo. an enigma of thought and vessel. a finalif renegadetriumph of old noloth, turned against its creators with intent on playing its own game. as banal as most ghouls were, his existence alone made it worth it. color had returned to her beingcolors she assumed were lost to her since the ruination of her ego. connected to his gestalt, she felt as they felt, their human facets transplanted over to complete her damage. it was enjoyable to be merged with another. euphoric. now that this self of her had been parted from the flames, a yearning ached inside her, wishing to go back. she comforted herself with the knowledge that a version of herself would live on within the ghouls mind. her memories had been altered otherwise. avo had taken much of what she could recall away and locked the few snippets of truth behind layers of intricate wardings that not even she could fathom. it had restructured her entire meta in seconds, fire culturing new constructs from burning sequences, ghosts modified and directed in perfect harmony. a new progression of events formed the spine of her near-term memories. a false conflictthis she knew in the depths of her mind, but would never be able to admit. a fantasy where that hopeless fool, chambers, was a cold-eyed, psychotic mastermind desperate to strike the guilds, and was working in tandem with powers within ori-thaum itself. these memories were not hidden in the deep of her thoughts. rather, they would be easy to produce and could be gleaned via a thoughtscan. it didnt take a political operator to know where this false trial led, but it made her smirk all the same. she had spent her life playing the great gamepolitics wed with powersurviving as both player and pawn. but never had she truly been used like this: bait of a more insidious variety. something freely returned yet already corruptedan agent and a gateway into the tiers and guilds. the thought tickled her as she noticed the light outside ripple. ah. finally. a single body materialized in her awareness, her weaveress sensing them from skin to cell. santanado. come to be part of this game as well. poor man. poor unfortunate comrade, about to go from player to pawn. seated upon a gnarled couch dipping a few steps below the living room floor, she was at eye level with his armored chest when he burst through the door, stitching himself over physical matter using his threads of light. she clapped politely at his entry and hid a chuckle as her comrade buried his foot in a corpses skull. a flinch of disgust passed through his face as his luminous sinews spread out to encompass the thirty-square meter room, blotting out the cracks in the walls and cracked windows, sealing away the collapsed bathroom. he took his time scanning the surroundings, sweeping everything with his perception before finally turning to face her. she regarded with her fingers clasped together, gesturing at the bodies on the ground. i managed to resolve matters. mondelles swept the room again and bit his lip at the sight. savaged corpses and crimson puddles left his radiant strings dappled with gore. undeterred by the blood, his light still spilled out from the aura emanating from his body and the gold-plated combat skin he wore. curved angles and the aesthetics of the now extinct and obsolete midthunder griffon decorated his chestpiece. the front plate of his triangular helmet lifted as she saw his face. tanned skin and a thick mustache came into view. pale blue eyes were squinting at her, and the tendons in his cheek were tight. he really needed to do something about that habit of biting down when he was nervous. are you alright? he asked. quite unharmed, she said. alas, the same cannot be said for my mind. he grimaced at the implications of her cognitive compromise. is that how they got you? indeed, she replied. compulsion swelled within her as she spoke the next words, drawing her longtime comrade and sometimes adversary into a plot that might see him claimed as well. but one would expect no less from ori-thaums finest, hm? his lips drew tighter. as did his squint. is that who they are now? he flicked one of the bodies onto its side using his heaven, the light struck the corpse like a pulled band. she couldnt help but smile when she saw the face of the victim as the scheme continued. she didnt remember it, but the ghoul had altered the appearance of the dead before desecreating their bodies. their bones and blood were changed as well. replaced by means both thaumic and coldtech. all they lacked were metas. things to confirm their cognitive identities. a deliberate act as well. filling in the gaps, she guessed that these dead were supposed to resemble members of ori-thaum. a very no-dragon tactic, if she were to say, sowing chaos through cloning and masks of deceptive flesh. as mondelles scanned each intact face using his cog-feed, elegant-moon watched as his thoughtstuff surged faster, more and more ghosts cresting and diving into the round of his halo. shaking his head, he let out a breath. dammit, moon. what a mess. have some idea who they are? she asked. as you said. ori-thaum. incubi to be exact. our new consangs did me the favor of confirming their identities. i can feel his piss running cold across the link. shit. not just incubi. a few of them are directly tied to drongo. he paused and frowned. two more fists crashed into his jaw, and he felt the mans knuckles fracture. it was just maru punching him. and here was thinking that there was someone actually trying to make an attempt on his life. still, the physical violence wasnt anything new, but what was with the rashable material? hey, come on, man, naeko said, brushing the blows away from his face. looking over marus shoulder and through his messy soot-black beard, he realized the man had smashed through one of his walls to get in. huh. when did that happen? naeko also wondered how he missed that. maybe he needed to tune down the sound settings for the gameor make the audio transparent. this is coming out of your pay fucker! maru growled, trying to work the body. naeko looked down as his junior in rank continued his attempts at harm. stop maru didnt. naeko calmly reached over, gently placed his fingers on the smaller mans shoulders, and pressed his thumbs down into the collar bones, detaching them from their sockets. maru promptly gave a choked gasp of pain as stopped attacking. you lazy fucking shit, maru snapped, even as naeko held him down. you rat-fucker! naeko tilted his head. maru. you seem a bit madder than usual today. whats wrong? got something you wanna talk about a raise? the other man shrugged naekos hands off and backed away, grimacing as shrugged twice and snapped his collarbones back into place. i want i want you to do your fucking job for once. but by this point, naeko was already walking back to his gaming station. eh. nah. dust filled the air, covering the rich brown wood lining the floor. they were in a corner of the wide-open five-hundred-square-foot loft overlooking the district below. wide panes of glass shone with pulsing neon as phantoms drifted outside, materializing an advertisement for some kind of new soft drink. distant blooms of nuclear fire flashed not too far away as more missiles streaked up into the sky, another block war starting at midnight. naekos home was a mix between physical library, museum, and theatre. the corners of the room were lined with stacks and stacks of books stopping just below the second-floor lofttaken up entirely by a hundred-foot-long bed. a coldtech projector played old movies on a loop. most of them were action films from a bygone era, the flashing light spilling over the seven glass displays placed across the center of the room, each a suit of armor belonging to the major cultures. with a swipe of his hand, naeko undid the damage and flicked out the dirt. he also plucked the hurt he inflicted on maru away and put it in his pocket. he was gonna give that to the next person that called him a half-strand in-game. reaching out with his utility fog, he opened his liquor cabinet on the far end of the room and plucked some old tunsgten fervor. ashthroner brand he preferred and maru hated. drink? no, maru said, rubbing at four collars of his long, ragged coat. im fine. good, naeko said, grinning. he yanked. a club of amber liquor sailed through the air and landed in his grasp. he used the callous of his right thumb to pop the lip off and took his first drink. hm. internating mint and bitter. so. what made you attack me tonight? i was doing some investigative work, maru said, spitting the words acerbically. looking up a new suspect. aedon chambers. ring a bell? no. funny. because a few of our files had a match. of him running for his life across nu-scarrowbur and lights end. without any pants on. oh, naeko nodded. yeah, i was wondering why the penis looked familiar. im docking your pay for that too. no rashing your superiors. come on, maru. i know youre better than that. take this seriously, maru hissed. no, naeko replied. you know he caused an outbreak, right? maru said. or you would if you read any of our briefs. two million dead. well, sounds like you contained it, naeko said. good job. he did it as a distraction, maru continued. all those deaths so he could get away from shotin kazahara for some clan warfare shit with the ori. i dont know. the seeker fucking jacked me. and kares his niece. i shouldve looked after her more i wouldve you wouldnt have, naeko sighed. he walked over the black leather sofa beneath the loft, facing the inactive coldtech movie screen. as he planted himself down in the middle, he patted the seat next to him as he continued nursing his drink. come on. you wanna watch something. this isnt a social visit! could be. a disgusted snort came from maru. but he still stomped over. just like he always had. just like when he was a boy. what you wanna watch? naeko asked. nothing, maru said, collapsing into the seat next to him, sagging down. he deactivated his holographic tie and just leaned back. i just feel useless? naeko said. maru glared. well, i dont blame you, naeko said. that shotins pretty good. id give him even odds against most clads in the city this isnt about that, this is about you. you go out on patrol for the first time in years, bag abrel greatling and an ori-thaum elderdrongo! and now youre just pretending like nothing happened. i guess, naeko said. theres a trial coming up. and a moot. well get things sorted there. i got us a few witnesses and and what? maru said. we have no capability to hold either of these people. highflame! ori-thaum! either one can destroy us. a bitter smile played across naekos face. hells. i guess if were looking at it honestly, one of them already has. Chapter 18-10 Catch and Release (II) chapter 18-10 catch and release (ii) hounds of my fathers will. paladins of new vultun. hear me now. i acknowledge your choice to stand. stand and deliver. stand and fight for what you believe. stand, and be slaughtered for what you cannot achieve. i have broken the rungs. paladin encirclement of our districts is no more. your chief is dead. your bases are burning. your forces are shattered. your captains have turned. behold the grace of my respect, and weep knowing the price you have paid. your numbers still stand in the tens of thousands. perhaps this is enough to turn the tide or any war. or force a stalemate. but perhaps you have only your lives to lose. your champions remain alive, and they may yet see me slain. naeko. i see you. i see my seraphs, authorities, and instruments dead around you. i see your strength. proud to have known you. i am pained by your parting. but hearts are willows to wind and action, and i will not stray. your walking fortresses yet remain. few as they are. planescrawlers moving to swallow my forces. but should they fall, you know that nothing will spare your families from me. some among you might think to capitulate to another guild. to join force with force and turn the tides of this war. but they are not so desperate. this battle is not yet existential for them, and should you greet them, know they will await you with collars hanging from their hands. so now, i propose an end to this. an end to the misery. to the bloodshed. you have taken respect from me. more than enough to merit this clemency, and the mark of my father blessed you yet in my mind. i will permit to you what sectors of control you have remaining and continue to recognize your role as defenders of the city. i will stay my hand from your kin. i will pull my forces back and let you have peace and a time. time to heal. time to find strength. time to seek proper retribution against me, if you so choose. i am known to you. look to your remaining veterans. look to them and understand that nothing is beyond me. nothing. there is no word to convey the defilement i will inflict on your survivors if i am forced to bleed. you stand on the verge of breaking, while my ranks swell by the blessed among you who have seen the light. i do not wish to degrade you further. i do not wish to stain the memory of my father any longer. but i will. to do what is right, to forge that which is just, which is true, i will. spare yourselves from me. spare yourselves. grant yourselves a final chance. of this, i beg. -high seraph veylis avandaer calling on surviving paladins to yield, second guild war 18-10 catch and release (ii) i still dont get why you''re all worked up tonight, naeko said, leaning back against the couch. i mean, i thought youd be happy i arrested the elder and the girl. but here you are. mad. mad like you always are. madder. he shook his head. sure you dont want anything to drink? the younger paladin whipped the hardest punch he could into naekos jaw, and the blow just thudded off without effect. alright. naeko shifted again and patted his couch. so, you feel like watching something now? i still got, like, a billion hours of classical action flicks to get through. maybe we can do movie night at the station or something. use the projector and play some of them in the lobby of the scale at midnight. a snorting laugh escaped from maru. you ever think about what the chainbreaker might think if he could see us now? hm? a beat passed as naeko just studied the other man. yeah. at night. sometimes. especially when i look out at the city. and? well. id probably just try to kill him. to spare him from seeing what his girl became. a momentary flash of light was cut off as the windows polarized immediately. silence settled between them as the window pane rattled. outside, passing ghosts cast warnings of a nearby nuclear detonation, commanding all streetside residences to take shelter. be in the office tomorrow morning, maru said, standing up. or im going to smash more of your shit. alright, naeko frowned. you just leaving? do you need me to and then a gunshot pulsed from marus very being as the room around him bloomed with gunfire, different places in reality overlapping as the younger paladin rematerialized from the barrel of a linear acceleration rifle far from naekos home. then, as the plume of the weapon faded, the chief found himself alone again. alone, and with his drink stolen. dammit, naeko grunted, staring at his empty palm. grumbling about being disrespected, he reached out with his utility fog, seeking another bottle when his mind wandered and his nanos reached back to scratch his chin. outbreak. shotin kazahara. kare kitzuhada. jelene draus. ambassador valhu kitzuhada. aedon chambers. elder drongo. kae kusanade. names were echoing in his head. flashes of places and undeveloped threads of thought. with a wince, he cast his meta out to link with his home entertainment locus and closed stormjumpers as he triggered a session. accessing his personal lobby at the scale, he flooded his mind with all the confidential mem-data, ignoring the over two million sequences of inactive cast he let build up over time. profiles were passing through his cog-feed as he skimmed through them. it all had the look of some great big guilder mess that he wanted no part of. just thinking about it all gave him a migraine. but then, parts of it didnt make any sense. parts of it were too disjointed. take this aedon chambers guy. real sick bastard, apparently. fled across nu-scarrow with his privates outprivates that maru had given naeko a close-up of earlier. then, just a few days ago, he showed his face again at vengs stand in an engagement against a certain ori-thaum seeker. the connecting element here? maybe drongo or something, but things were jumpy at best. chambers was listed as an enforcer under jhred greatlings syndicate, then his suspected assassin, then a bunch of other unconfirmed theories and details. no clarity at all. and nothing in his history hinted at any of these capabilities. opening jelene draus file next, he reviewed all thirty thousand pages the exorcists compiled of her active engagements and killings she committed across the warrens. the disgraced regular kept herself pretty busy since her fall from the tiers, slaughtering her way through the dregs of the fateless night after night, crucible after crucible. dread draus. she had a bit of a fan following in the tiers. some people were collecting vicarities from enforcers and gangers she killed in a particularly brutal fashion. juvs these days had strange habits. despite her connection to the greatlings, though, he couldnt tell where she was leading either. sure, she fought the silvers, but she had nothing to do directly with the ambassador or well, he did beat her former superior. whats-her-name greatling. veylis was always a sore loser. loved wiping the board clean as soon as he beat her in a game of tides. distant memories came back to naeko. of a life he lived after emerging from the slave pits. the family he had. the warmth he felt. those memories were like a fire now. they burned him. burned him something bad. he shifted his mind back to task and shook the discomfort off. for the first time in years, he began doing some investigative work, diving deep into detailed simulations of the crime scenes and reviewing random sequences of recollections edited into a coherent narrative. jumping from place to place as he tried to follow chambers along his flight again, he struggled to comprehend what was with the guy. he was loud. then gone. then loud again. reckless. but well funded and supported he would need to subpoena shotin kazahara for a more direct look and talk with his niece, the paladins very own kare kitzuhada. nice girl. too good to be wasted with old ruins like him and angry husks like maru. but that was the thing about people who were too good: they treated their own lives real cheap. jaus wouldve liked her. which probably meant she was going to end up dead sooner or later. just like morrow. just like all the others. naeko resolved to regard her more as a caricature in his mind to lessen the hit when it inevitably came. as he jumped into the vicarity of an office worker watching chambers escape at lights end, something else drew his attention. another figure. blood was misting around them, flowing like a protective shroud as trickles of red flowed from their metamind into the drone they hijackedan exorcist tadpole. pausing the vicarity and zooming in on the creature, naeko examined the phantasmal artifact built from countless collected recollections. it had eight back-scaled tendrils coiling out from its back, but what parts of its skin could be seen were white like sections of hardened ceramic. the fact it had a metamind told naeko it possessed the cognition of a person, at least. the blood, however, he was cognizant of. they lost more than a few emergency response knots and triangulator golems against an unidentified fallwalker with a heaven of blood grafted to sphere four frame. he made the connection there but frowned as no additional details were forthcoming when he tried to find a file on them. unlike the others, this one was a complete enigma. theorizing from the exorcists listed it as a potential bio-rig of some kindthe most likely prospect. that could be connected to draus somehow. she was known to work with sang middlers from time to time. but there was something that still bothered naeko. something that made him fixate. blood. stormtree had more than a few heavens rooted in that domain. as did the no-dragons. but he found no hits in his list of active godclads that resembled or wore a biological exoskeleton that looked like a souped-up ghoul fused within another layer of bone. and the few thousand who had heavens of blood were all eliminated in quick succession. that just made his wariness grow. fallwalker, maybe. but a third sphere fallwalker? they would have picked someone like that up. noticed them passing the border or spotted them somewhere in the warrens at some point. this one, however, seems to have appeared out of thin air. what are you? naeko whispered, materializing his own avatar across from the creature. looking up at its imposing form, he wondered why its presence had filled him with such uneasiness, even as he prepared to restart the scene for another run-through. Chapter 19-1 Harvest chapter 19-1 harvest lives. its all we really have to offer.??vl-b!n. were already less than useful for labor. been that way for years. wights obsoleted us before. the new mechs and drones coming out are just going to make the process faster. the guilds offer all the public education we might need in public lobbies, but thats useless as well. they dont need the most of us to think or learn or become experts. they just skim the cream of the crop. the rest of us arent worth shit from fuck. cheaper than vivianite priming and with our own memories. i suppose thats something of material value to us as well. sure, we can find other things to do. the ones with charisma might make it to lights end by being entertainers, the ones who got the fire in them could become squires or necros or ride the circuits to the top. but the rest of us? the most of us. no. were here for one thing and one thing alone. all the free miracles and benefits and comfort promised by new vultun is a rigged game. this isnt a death farm, but a self-resolving menageriea self-run slaughterhouse. our lives are like this by design. they cant get better. they shouldnt. because once again, were just here for the dying. even with all the concessions the voiders forced our masters to make and the false front of public security presented by exorcists and paladins, were just duped into the nest to spend our years. our childrens years. scratch your lottery ticket today! you might just be a lucky winner! also, if you schedule a childbirth from your local paedia-tech and choose to bring home more than two children, you will be given a stipend of twenty-two thousand imps a month with a free lottery draw, along with a special chance to be gifted the new ascender dynamo aerovan todayperfect for a family outing! were pathetic. we are. because even if we all know, where else do we go? where else offers anything better? people say this is not the dream, this is not the dream. but this is material reality, and the reality is that beyond all the shit and misery, theres still a shadow of a life here. same cant be said for the world left behind outside the megas. -yun the cynic, fateless 19-1 harvest the massacres were conducted as a subtle symphony, seemingly disconnected events strung together by an unseen hand behind the killings. across the over thirty-five thousand death-taxable sovereign territories spread over new vultun, the bulk of expendable life was concentrated in the warrens. mostly lights end and the throat beneath it, with an estimated four hundred billion people occupying their space. lower still, the spine and the gutters suffered far less congestion, amounting to a hundred and five billion counted through thoughtstuff documentation compiled in annual exorcist reports. with such a bounty of life came opportunity and risk in equal measure. eyes lingered in the light and darkness, dangers noticed and not. hence, the city also proved to be something of a theater for those privileged enough to afford veils of privacy, watching and studying the ecosystem of the warrens in detail, learning the habits of its inhabitants, and the pillars of power they built for themselves. to this end, gangs and syndicates were like micro-cosmic fiefdoms unto themselves, offering employment and resource distribution to the fateless that relied on them. trade ran as favors and debts accrued, refugees and destitute signing over their lives, bodies, or whatever services they could provide. through these means was control truly established. a toxic providence offered by uncaring hounds that evolved beyond merely hunting, striking pacts with the most desperate of lambs. thus, the fall of a syndicate was always a matter to note, the waves of their collapse rising to swallow entire communities, and signaling the encroach of lurking rivals. it was when a syndicate fell that deaths truly began to spike. local gangs, inter and intra rivals, remnants and survivors, and newly established factions in an all-out throw down bid for power, seeking to claim the vacancy for themselves. such a time was also when diplomacy and force were wielded in equal measure to the benefit of the wildcard. the unnoticed. the unexpected. for when seats of power topple and the fragments of their pillars fall, even the unlikeliest people might be able to ride the chaos and assume control, rare though these instances were. because what was chance but the culmination of all variables and outcomes, and what was opportunity but moments transpiring at the behest of a hidden master? such were avos thoughts as he stared through the looking glass, orchestrating another slaughter. encased in haemokinetic plates infused with the twice-walkers miracles, he acted through draus and dice as they tore the megablocks hangars. railings screamed and crashed. bodies burst and splattered. husks of now-drained golems lit the backdrop of their blitzkrieg, the attack catching the hawk-daggers syndicate completely unprepared. +nine fireteams. eight nu-dogs. four nu-bears. three necros. two heavies. two leaders. three levels above.+ avo highlighted the targets using draus neurodeck as he continued to burn through the sang syndicates nether lobbies, his conflagration igniting another five hundred minds nested within the sequences. over fifteen hundred combat-design bioforms were nulled with them, the egos of the beasts dissolving utterly in the same fire that smelted their masters into avo. draus was right there with dice, but also three hundred kilometers away, fighting a separate battle below the gutters themselves as she shattered a chamber filled with formerly living hostiles. casually walking down a spiraling staircase overlooking a former drone bay now serving as a barge hanger, the regular announced her arrival by firing shots through a shard of hovering glass. the shots snapped out from the reflective sheen cupping dices form, counter-sniping the shooters blasting through their own walls to get at the girl. even as dice turned, her momentum stayed constant, inertia lacking any hold on her. the dragon-curse pried at her blood, but avo wrenched control back using his heaven. twitching entities of chitin and fur roared at her from the walls and ceilings. amalgams of bear, centipede, and cyborg, the incarnatessang-modified bioformscarved through decorative scenery trying to cut her down, flak-canons once meant for anti-air now reduced to in-block urban combat. they wouldnt be enough to stop her from getting to the final knot. the floor shattered beneath the hammering of her feet as dice backhanded a four-ton repair drone aside with a casual swat. wires and servos exploded. fragments of industrial orange filled the air and eviscerated one of the centipede-bears stalking her. what few personnel remained fought to board the golems and aeros, desperate to flee, not knowing it was already too late. avo drew all of his conflagration back into himself then, his halo roaring as ninety percent of his consciousness receded out from his auto-seance. burning ghosts erupted out from his accretion like coronal ejections, jets of phantasmal flame spearing upward like spikes on a crown. something wrong? yeah, she said. i didnt know i was getting into the world domination business. she pointed at the red arteries sprawling across fifteen districts and thousands of holographic structures. overhead, a shining 2% hovered over the sovereignty. minimized markets dotted the overlapping rings upon which the districts were built. i go off and take a nap, and now i come back to this. i swear, half those icons werent there last time. and whys that flashing. she pointed to the hawk-dagger megablock they just hit. killed everyone. then nuked it. thanks for the warheads. she waved him off. yeah, dont sweat it. got a few hundred more where those came from. she turned and gave him a shit-eating grin. perks of raiding a highflame battleship during the war. another triangular icon flashed as chambers gave a whoop where he lounged on the throne. new cult member! thank you for the sub! tavers blinked. what the hells does that mean? think the skintaker just had another person pay to get into his most private streams. chambers has been spoofing his way into them. turning syndicate personnel. enforcers. techs. huh, tavers said, wiggling her noise. you kids get up to weird shit these days. avo stared down at the aged squire. you kids. what? you think youre not a kid to me because youre a people-eating, mind-burning, heaven-stealing monstrosity. yes. well, youd be wrong, juv. the stare turned into a glare. could burn you too. tavers yawned. good. im sure your other templates will agree with me when i get moved in. a chorus of agreements sallied forth from his gestalt. avo de-loaded all the traitorous templates and found himself left with less than ten minds. his frown deepened. he unbanished the turncoats and moved on. hows essus, he asked. you took him down with you into the maw earlier. scouting detail. tracking smuggling routes with you. well, all things considered yeah hes a fucking mess. tavers shrugged. the bees spent most its time trying to keep him calm while we moved from point to point. poor half-strand nearly had a breakdown when we found a mound of burned bodies. his heavens useful though. you know he can connect anything that resembles a doorway with himself, yeah? that sped things up at least. find anything? not yet. the lines on her forehead wrinkled. we did encounter a big-ass highflame patrol, though. huge. im talking thousands upon thousands of drones sweeping through the maw. cast a few consangs of mine, and theyve basically fighting stormtree in there over yuulden-yang. heavy drone warfare. severe losses, but they dont seem to care. or have orders not to. she fixed him with a knowing look. suppose we''d all do funny things when misplacing our shiny new frame, huh, consang? a pressure settled upon avos shoulders, centering him. highflame was moving away from playing subtle, it seemed. dangerous. but potentially exploitable. a hundred thousand voices chittered in the back of his head, whispering how he could turn this threat to an advantage. the promise of his frame was a lure. perhaps he could direct them against ori-thaum or a rival power somehow if there was ever a need. suppose so, avo replied. a call flashed over his neurodeck as kaes ego-id appeared. answering it with a thought, the agnos avatar filled a corner of his feed. though his deepnav couldnt narrow in on her position, he knew that she was in her personal modulea new space the george washington grew for her, mimicking the design of her old study in the tiers using its smart matter. {avo. i think i know how to install the barges canons into your heavens without requiring the removal of luminosity.} {good,} he replied. {fortress would be hard to replace. got a heavy spike of heavens and thaums. enough to make some improvements.} looking at the details he cast over, a small smirk spread across the smooth ebony of kaes features. {some improvements? you are due another education, oh, ghoul of mine, for i have earned for myself new knowledge that would make me the envy of any of my peers.} she giggled. avo titled his head, and for the first time, slotted pieces from chambers template into his base ego. kae blinked. {avo?} {ghoul of yours?} her expression went stiff and her cheeks reddened. {iuh, it was a figure of speech. you understand! dont tease me!} he grunted in acknowledgment. {as you say my dearest agnosi.} she cried with indignation and cut the call, leaving only a frowning tavers before him again. been staring at me for a bit, tavers said. saw your thoughstuff needling too. so, either you just got a call or theres something wrong with my face. and with chambers personality still slotted at the forefront, avo bared his fangs in a smile and lightly patted the squire on the shoulder using the floating tip of an echohead. im sorry. you need a mirror. it took a moment for her to understand what he was implying, but then she threw her head back and barked a laugh. oh, you fucker. so, did his gestalt continue to churn, and evermore a furnace of dynamic humanity did the conflagration become. Chapter 19-2 Weapons of Ontology (I) chapter 19-2 weapons of ontology (i) building a heaven is like trying to bottle an apocalypse. designing canons, then, is giving said apocalypse a personality. it is obvious to even the lowest creature that a heaven is calamity manifested. a defiance of reality and all its laws in exchange for a new order. this, more than the looseness of the tapestry, is why heavens are built within controlled ruptures, for what better to encompass a wound than another we already know how to suture? beyond the sacrifices needed to materialize the raw form of the entity and the scriptures required to narrow the heavens effects, there must be other things offered into the jaws of chaos. everything must be examined. objects. environments. people. if there is one mistakea singular misstep in the mythology and how it interfaces with the world, the structure of the heaven will cascade into a collapse and fall. thereafter, what should have been an instrument to be wielded will then become a cancer of damnation that must be contained. hence, i wish for everyone to understand that your urgency has been heardand discarded. an agnosi cannot deny a build certified by the accords, but if they say it will take ten years, then you will not grant them a day less. i am aware of our arrangement. you do not need to remind me of the oaths to which we are bound and the services we are obliged to provide. but i will remind you that our duty is above your station. our duty is to the maintenance, preservation, and restoration of existence itself. know this when you stress my brothers and sisters designated to your guilds. know this when you demand the creation of another impossible weapon, and they strive to make not only the single most ruinous construct they can conceive, but must also do their best to keep us all alive in the process. -high agnos jakuta ajayi 19-2 weapons of ontology (i) total heavens: ->[sangeist] x22; [lushburner] x15; [galeslither] x18; [fulgerhund] x12; [snake-king] x2; [springstormer] x4; [shatterhead] x10; [bullet-breeder] x2 sangeist (blood/matter); lushburner (biology/fire); galeslither (air/space); fulgerhund (lightning/matter); snake-king (distance/space); springstormer (biology/lightning); shatterhead (war/strength); bullet-breeder (guns/matter) calculating total domains domain of (blood) x22 domain of (matter) x36 domain of (lightning) x16 domain of (biology) x19 domain of (air) x18 domain of (space) x22 domain of (war) x10 domain of (strength) x10 domain of (guns) x2 domain of (luminosity) x1 - leftover from [shineguard] eighty-five golems. eighty-five heavens. one hundred and seventy domains. the combined bounty earned from fifty-two continuous hours of raids, runs, and thefts. and now, the reason for former agnos kae kusanades lascivious smile. the symmetry of her face seemed designed around her smile, and so, despite the exaggerated expression she held, the thinness of her lips and the smoothness of her skin remained unblemished. the same could not be said about the shine of excitement in her crinkled eyes, her irises darker than they were before. assembled within the george washingtons command nexus, the present members of the cadre included dice, avo, chambers, draus, essus, and kae, with tavers and sunrise in attendance. swiping through the holo-haptic constructs representing each of the recently devoured heavens, kaes teeth gleamed like beaded pearls as her grin grew wider and wider, her uncharacteristic behavior infusing chambers with growing discomfort. the man, pushing off the throne that was essentially his by this point, kept hiseyes affixed to kae as if she was a bomb on the precipice of detonating. chambers sent a direct message to avo via neurodeck, {so i gotta say something. im not liking that look on her, avo. not one bit. last time i saw a smile like that was on the face of kid-slicer yoed. that fuckers lustaway would be triggering all the while when juvs were screaming. i mean, damn, he sliced off a lot of ears in the crucible. shit. rest in shit, yoed.} avo shot chambers a brief glance. {dont compare our agnos to a degenerate.} {im not comparing her to him. just you know, that look. thats not the look a mentally sound person} suddenly, he paused, tilting his head at avo, then at draus, dice, kae, and down at the kitten currently pissing on his feet. avo just kept staring. {alright. i get the point. were all maniacs. except essus. poor bastards in nasty company.} chambers chuckled and avo drove his attention past him, studying the near-flat sitting close beside tavers. essus still looked lost, but his thoughtstuff held to a steadier current now. more stability. so, draus said, seated on a chair constructed by smart matter as she finished loading another magazine, you reckon we got enough toys to kick this party up a notch or what? gettin tired of snuffin chaff. she punctuated her words by slotting a flechette into the empty mag dice handed to her, the girl helping in the preparations. i want me some big game. not yet, kae responded, though her excitement remained. not nearly enough to kick this party up a notch as you say. each guild has hundreds of thousands of heavens. the golems abandoned in these warrens are centuries out of date in thaumaturgyelevated from obsolesce only by virtue of stillborns capabilities. her dark eyes shifted over to avo as she ran a hand through her shoulder-length braids. her smile dipped into a sneer momentarily. you have no idea the promise they stole from mefrom my work. my life. what i could have she drew in a breath. but she was smirking still. face joyless, but gleeful, bright with fiery purpose. being allowed to work her craft once more filled her mind with iron and returned to her a pride once savaged by thought-incinerating flames. for lesser agnosi, a commission for a heaven takes years. years of studyyears of testing and trials. countless lives offered on the altar of progress. she shook her head. i remember before you took the fire from me, i once told you that your frame would see me and my fellows made redundant. my words were too kind! not only can it make us redundant, it will shame our efforts in the process. even with simulated designs, the precision offered by your imitators is beyond the capabilities of mortal ken, without a chance of rupture or failure. all it needs is the proper structural inputs sweeping a hand through the projections, the visual replicas of each heaven swirled around her like planetary bodies bound to the gravity of a star. a hand came up, and she pulled a lushburner from the ensemble. but as the egi pleaded, another thought filled avos mind. other considerations of his own. {avo} calvino sighed. will see what i can do, avo finally said. that earned a toothy grin from the waif, and reinforced with kassamons traits, it suddenly dawned on him how young she was. how soft. he quickly resequenced himself away, deleting the guilt before it could overcome him. humanity was an insidious thing. {careful not to let that morality bite you,} calvino tittered. okay, chambers said, grinning. that cats a breaker. i can feel it. destruction. mayhem. piss. he pointed down at his boot. hey, kae, is there are heaven of piss. you will never have it. there is! anyway, avo re-railed the conversation before things could develop into a place more scatological, woundshaper served me well. zephyr too. datacaster essential for survival. think the first is a good tower. physically affecting. want it to be more. create things. fabricate matter and flesh both. expand control. and spread your influence like a fire? kae asked with a smirk. yes. i think it can be done. but your zephyr though she seemed more uncertain. that will require adjustments. much like the twice-walker. we must borrow deeper into the mythologies. make them harder to paradox and tighten the parameters of their canons. her eyes narrowed. or overhaul them altogether. shootin out from reflections and turnin people to glasss been useful, draus added. but i need somethin with a bit more kick. fuck the ice bear. give me somethin that can slag a block. thatll pair well with the twice-walkers my say. [cant say i disagree,] abrel stated. [which is probably why you got the bullet-breeds from that patrol, didnt you? i was wondering why you went for one so out of the way.] avo refused to acknowledge her implications, but kae caught on without any prompting. i think we can make something of the domain of guns, she said. or fire. or war. or even strength, really. [keep your heavens a bit mixed too,] kassamon said. [the twice-walker and galeslither are pretty good at getting away but they lack any offensive capabilities. specialize but dont neuter is what i learned. give yourself a few options at least.] that was an easy suggestion to agree with. he told kae as well. chambers? avo asked. have a selection to choose from this time. no need to compete with draus. the man smacked his lips together. i want some lightning. lightning and fire. something elemental. and wont let people get away from me. i want to be everywhere and in their face all the time. and then, i want an easy pocket. so i can you know contained rash-pockets, kae muttered to herself, seeming a bit disgusted. wonderful. what has my life become. wait, chambers added, looking to avo once more. you got one of them paladins in your brain-fire now, right? i think i saw the girl between the flickers. karde. kare? yeah. what i just said. why dont you you know. spread the memories. share the experience. with all of us. make it easier. a lull followed as chambers realized the nature of his suggestion, of kae being subjected to the fires anew. oh, shit. sorry, kae. i, the fires uh i mean, its really not that fuck it, draus said, interrupting his stammering. a boulder inside avo plummeted. he turned to regard the regular. she was standing now. looking directly at him, her features inscrutable as she ran her tongue along her inner cheek. she shot a look over to dice, and then another at chambers. finally, she rested her stare back on avo. lets see it. see it? avo asked. lets see whats your fires like, draus continued. aint youve been waitin for this. for me to ask? avo breathed. would have been fine if you never did. she scoffed. you would have spent the rest of your life pussyfooting around. sides. im tired of you hoarding all the spoils in your mind. i wanna know what my kills feel like. how itll be to sink among them. across the chamber, avo heard tavers mutter. fucking regulars. godsdamned maniacs. all of them. what changed? avo asked. shotin, draus admitted. got a new thrill to slake. need a bigger gun. better skills. and a lack of time. but lucky me i know a certain memory dealer that can rebuild minds. draus, kae said, bravado faded, suddenly sounding very unsure. s fine, kae, draus replied. aint never been fraid of fire. not gonna start now. wont be able to take this back, avo said. an instance of you will finally be able to keep you in line from the inside, draus said, sneering. and maybe youll fight worth a godsdamn bare-clawed now. who knows. itll be a small miracle, next to a big one. so. the hells are you waiting for, cosang? light me. Chapter 19-3 Weapons of Ontology (II) chapter 19-3 weapons of ontology (ii) regulars are an easy problem to solve so long as you have a nuke or a couple of nasty miracles on hand. but if you gotta handle them through conventional means, well i got two suggestions for you there: dont; get more people. honest fact of the thing is that the regs aint like you or me. they dont think like us. they dont feel like us. they don''t hurt or even break like us. theyre beyond discipline. beyond morale. concepts and feelings become yes-no binaries to them when they get their orders, and the amount of time they spend deliberating or responding is closer to zero than any other number. sure. ive killed plenty. gotten the drop on some. got into knock-down-drag-out-brawls with others. experience and creativity kept me alive. and i still ended up crawling away more dead than alive most times. hells, sometimes not even that. get a phylactery if you can, consangs. youll need it. when you get the chance, you should run a reg vicarity first then change over to your standard gutter squire. feel the difference. see the way they act. the former doesnt really make material errors. theyre efficient. no hesitation. no missteps or incompetence. they dont suffer from sheathe dysmorphia or non-inflicted psychosis, so if you want to drop them, hardware damage is the way to goand you will need to kill every last one to consider the run done because they dont break, and they sure as shit dont run. if a reg youre shooting at is missing and you cant find them? theyre hunting you, and you need to move. and trying to grind them down using a necro is a dicey affair considering their wards and how liberal they are at disrupting zones they cant control. remember, these half-strands cut their teeth on glaives and incubi. this is esteemed company youre running in, so you better perform. okay. if youre still with me so far, you might be saying tavers, you old bitch, you just spent the last minute tonguing highflames asshole! when am i going to get some practical advice on snuffing them. alright. heres a crash course. you fight based on your objectives. jobs done? retreat. get out. the attrition isnt worth it. not done? well, its time for some on-site condition shaping. you want to push this away from urban combat or close quarters if you can, and grind them down on a tactical level. control the environment. employ explosives. lots of them. constant. flood the zone with drones if you have them so someone else can get shot. and never fire first. fire only when youre certain of a kill, because when you kill a reg, the others will know, and theyll be lining shots back to you through their phys-sims without a single shit given to their dead comrade. again. theyre not like you and me. theyre more like weapons than people. instruments, if youll let me be a smartass. not really that different from the ghouls if you want to look at things that way. -quail tavers, school of the warrens. 19-3 weapons of ontology (ii) draus didnt burn like all the others. where most other egos were concrete entities wrapped by wards and layered with surface thoughts, the regular was aberrant in its fluid ability to self-direct while accepting external pressures. all minds are molded by feedback. indeed, it isin the clash between nature against the state of ones nurture where the sculpture of personality is carved into shape. during years of growth and formation arises a fusion between experience and genetic design. not quite so for draus. if the other templates were perfect spheres, then she was a fracture. a crevice. something that interfaced with the broader existence by letting it pass through her instead of internalizing the world outside within the depths of her mindscape. where even formidable minds like abrel had limits to what torments they could endure before cracking, draus was practically an elemental embodiment of will and action her template moved among the others templates almost as if in a vacuum. her memories were slippery even to avos fire, and softer emotions like empathy or sorrow could only brush her person; oil passing upon water. {i dont think ive ever seen a psychometric reconstruction of a mind like hers} calvino said, sounding almost disturbed. avo, for his part, was consumed by fascination as he examined and slotted draus just beside his base mind. so close, he wondered how her consciousness hadnt collapsed on itself with all the parts it was missing. little wonder even the incubi strained to null a regular. what was there to strike? with so many gulfs across her personhood, certain traumas might slip through her openings without striking anything foundational. the heartbreak of leaving a lover, the death of a parent, the genuine joy of having a comrade things known but not truly felt. even now, the chief sensations draus felt when interacting with the cadre were excitement, determination, and savage delightthe kind closer to a ghoul ripping into flesh than a person chasing their dreams. ultimately, when judging draus template in her totality and comparing its comprising sequences with the others, an epiphany sparked within avo as he understood what a regular truly was. more than being hyper-functional psychopaths, they thrived on their lack of humanity without being crippled by it. in some incomprehensible fashion, they operated without even thinking, body and instinct already knowing what to do without any deeper cognitive processing. in the simplest sense, she was evolving away from needing a consciousness without losing her governing intellect, growing to become a set pattern of self-adapting responses nested in whatever sheathe they were assigned for the operation. {data cataloged,} calvino said as avo and draus stared each other down, their egos bridged by a stream of rushing fire. {her mind seems to be adapting to be able to take in selective feedback from her environment without true internalization. learning with near-perfect data filtering. and unlearning or unadapting from undesired behaviors in an instant. its like her perfection of self barely existsand is impersonal at that. like an object to be regarded. and what she goes cataonic instead of losing her mind. there are no real borders to damage. only unvalued mind space to lose.} template-draus spoke for the first time within avo, and her words were tinged with wry amusement, greeting the others around her as if they were a passing notice, annoyed above all else that she couldnt exercise violence upon them. [you didnt tell me how loud this godsdamned place was gonna be. or how brittle you all are.] her eyes bore deeper into his. [cept for you, i guess. youre like water now. unbreakable. easy to drown in.] she was speaking of his hunger. how it used to guide him. compelled him. something beneath thought. that, more than anything else, gave them symmetry. the fact they could understand and conceptualize the world regardless only pulled them closer. my kind is all urge, avo said. you are living action. more intellect than awareness. seems we share an envy. [seems so,] draus said, casually accepting the changing state of things. overlapping her template with his cognitive core, his awareness narrowed into a tunnel. peripheral considerations or ruminations ceased to be. the world became of three tracks. pastfor review. presentfor acting. futurefor anticipating. he knew what he had to do right now, and muted annoyance prickled inward. wasting time was a bad habit. he stopped doing it. infusing draus with all the memories and thought processes he had from abrel, the paladins, and the fallwalkers, he checked her rend, anchored her enhanced template back within her sheathe, and then liquefied her brain. he caught her corpse via her implants before it could collapse using his newly imbued magnetism, his segmented echoheads parting into a constellation of hovering discs to direct his bioelectric field. placing her back into her chair, he turned away from her just as reality began to scab around her, drawing a curious response from dice. [well, thats was somethin new,] template-draus said. [never got to feel myself die from inside another body before. whatever myself means anymore.] the regular''s contemplation lasted the barest second before she moved on. [cant say i knew what to expect, becoming a simulation. expected more burning.] [oh, trust me, it gets plenty painful in here sometimes,] template-chambers said, cutting into the dialogue. [like when we got rashed.] all it takes to dismantle a poor build is just a death. we have time to ourselves now. i think it is time to put our suggestions and desires into practice. experience and adjust how our canons might work in practical circumstances. [hells] draus laughed, [this is a lot better than just sitting around and thinkin bout shit.] need testing grounds. places where well be hard to notice. where heavens can hide. tavers cleared her throat. well. i think i might be able to help with that. got recommendations? avo asked, turning to glance at her. got a favor i could call in, tavers clarified. might take a day or two depending on how busy he is. can we trust this favor? the squire threw back her head and laughed. ha! no. thats why i have blackmail. and a bomb planted inside their nu-dog. hearing these words caused dice to hug her kitten tight and hide it away from tavers. insurance. good. avo grunted. suppose we should sync our suicides after draus gets back. start with initial prototypes? yes, kae chirped, shuffling with excitement. ah, shit, chambers giggled, time to kill myself and get me some new heavens. you guys have no idea how weird hearing this conversation is, tavers deadpanned. *** multiple heavens enhanced grafting completed generating summation of [prototype] builds user - {avo} [woundshaper] updated to [woundmother, architectress of sanguinity] - 6,122 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) [zephyr of the nine-paths] updated to [fardrifter, seeker of horizons] - 3,100 thaum/c (heaven/hell) [datacaster] updated to [techplaguer, mechanical contagion] - 150 thaum/c (heaven/hell) user - {jelene draus} [twice-walker] updated to [simulacra resplendent, legion of self] - 6,211 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) [rimelost dismantled]-> domain of ice x1; domain of navigation x1; domain of endurance x1 [bullet-breeder] grafted [bullet-breeder] updated to [the arsenalist of unceasing ordinance] - 2,899 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) user - {aedon chambers} [lushburner] updated to [bio-igniter, flesh-for-fuel, fire-for-flesh. fetish-for-all] - 1,100 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) [starvations envy] ungrafted (stored in stillborn) [snake-king] grafted [snake-king] updated to [fucktopia, a.k.a rash central] - 522 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) user - {kae kusanade} [aegis of tides] updated to [maelstromer, warden of wind and wave] - 1,080 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) user - {dice} [runebreaker] updated to [runemade, shadow-devouring-bright] - 1,933 thaum/c total (heaven/hell) Chapter 19-4 Show Biz (I) chapter 19-4 show biz (i) +kill me. i am serious. kill me. ten different canons we need to patch into the wall. ten. just today. that makes six hundred this month. and we still have two more months before maintenance. madness. i said it once, i will say it again: the paladins need to rebuild themselves. they need to reconstitute the fallraiders department they had before the second war. why? because the problem isnt with us! we fix the thresholdmaintain them! but where we spend hours upon hours researching mythology, science, history, culture, and the newly confiscated heavens, all the smugglers have to do is find some random little-known fallwalker to imprint a golem with. even with all the raids and constant warfare, there must still be thousands of fallwalkers in the wilds. more! how are we supposed to outcompete that? and even if we can, i cannot just block away everything. this is delicate work. i cannot predict what specific rules a canon might have or which domain it might affect. why not just block that aspect of reality entirely seagre? because then youll have things like the borbonda incident, which if i am allowed to remind you, killed fifty-eight thousand people before we discovered the error. i have memories of the incident. you have no idea what it looks like when a ship is allowed to pass our borders, but all the inhabitants inside are not! to save us both time, pour some jam into a can and then grind it. we cant increase the number of maintenance times either. we are not adjusting a single heavenwe are adjusting over one hundred thousand heavens! one hundred thousand heavens designed to cover an area of 14,680,333.1 km. one hundred thousand heavens that cost millions of deaths to maintain and adapt each year. staggered maintenance! part of the reason why we dismantled the all-wall after its near-rupturing back in 201. one hundred thousand heavens all sustained by the mawwhich now cannot be silenced even for a day unless we want entire districts to be swallowed by overloads. there are too many leaks for us to plug. we will never out-react, outbuild, or outmaneuver the scoundrels that use the darkness as a veil. if they are to be stopped, then their homes must burn and they must be choked at the source. and that means for me to succeed at my job, the paladins must do theirs. oh, [redacted entity detected], just saying that makes me depressed. i need some more joy.+ -agnos seagre vyers,[re: annual border update] 19-4 show biz (i) quails favor came back far sooner than expected, and by midnight that day, they found themselves at lights end, in the district of fountaintale. tucked just below the sheer climb where the heart of new vultun rose to become the tiers, fountaintale and the adjacent districts in the grave valley sovereignty stood out as handsome places to live even when contrasted against the rest of lights end. comprised of ten districts separated by a divide in layer three, grave valley got its name through its urban layout and one of its oldest industries. with its high-rises, bridges, and skylanes cupping the sovereignty as a near-complete circle, its radius was shadowed by serried towers of polished metal and neon-tinged glass while in its shadow did lesser megablocks part the city streets into grids. vast concentric ad spaces broadcast new luxury coffins for those who could afford them. the classical ash grey woodreferred to as maganhildwas on discount and loci containing replicated sequences of the deceased came with every third purchase. the expansive hyper tube networks paired with well-dressed fated slumming their way down the streets while accompanied by armed drones and heavily modified nu-dogs hinted enough at the sovereigntys relative prosperity. it still lacked any true public-use heavens common to the tiers but for a death-taxable place in the warrens? this was as close to good living as most would ever get. fountainvale in particular had the look of a place meant more for leisure than industry. the colors that ruled its streets were gold and green. flora of all shapes, shades, and sizes dominated the wide and pearlescent boulevards made solely for walking. fields of lush grass parted rows of freshly cleaned marble, and even the blocks were of a mixed nature, their structures a fusion of towering trees embedded with golden columns and glass windows. as the midnight rain fell hard, the air was sharp with the taste of fresh petrichor, the ground aglow with soft tones of radiant yellow. stepping out from the shadows beneath an arcing bridge, avo and his cadre moved with incogs active and holocoats on. the deepnav placed them near the upper corner of fountaintale, in a neighborhood called the lots. their final destination was the third flat structure among a set of twelve that spanned a twenty-kilometer stretch. the cityscape leading up to it was closer to a nature reserve than a concrete jungle, and the housing here spilled out in the fashion of homesteads instead of megablocks or even prestige apartment complexes. manors coated with fresh paint and fenced by quaint posts sat in the darkness between the foliage, lights outthe flow of the accretions inside slowed by with slumber. a few minutes past midnight, the cadre stood among the scarce few figures walking the streets, moving unknown to the cloaked surveillance grid caging the top of the sovereignty. chambers and dice shared similar wide-eyed looks, but both were enraptured by different things. the former was trying to calculate just how much one of these range manors might cost, while the waif was fascinated by the greenry in general. big grass, she whispered, pointing to a tree. nah, chambers said, blinking as he squinted at another housethis one placed next to an artificial riverside. tree. i think this places got some no-dragon touch to it. this is a hell of a lot of nature. rated fifth best vacation spot in the warrens, tavers said. there are more than a couple of spots worth living. even down in the spine. slum havens the guilders call them. a place where the lesser fated can go and have a cheap and relaxing time should any of their business take them downward and away from the glory of the arks and elysiums. draus, for her part, glared out into the dark, her augmented eyes a pulsing red, scanning for possible threats. godsdamned waste is what it is. wide open spaces. no cover cept soft wood. shallow waters. boxed in by higher buildings. shit, this placell be fucked if the saintists ever get pushed to defend it. losin the outer perimeter means losin the high ground means losing more and more urban defense. whoever build this place might wanna consider snuffin themselves, because this is the very image of in-facing killbox. tavers snorted at that. trust me, givoril paiboks too much of a blowhard to do that. hell tell you hes the best architect on idheim and then talk your ear off about the next imp-sink he wants you to help finance. the regular turned to face the squire. sounds like you know everyone. everyone worth knowing, tavers said. you survive in my profession long enough, and youll soon find out that everybodys got a problem for you to fix. as long as youre fine with wiping ass, theres good imps doing nanny-work once you make it as a squire. the minds i consumed. she shook her head. creepy as shit. anyway. we should head to our set and leave her alone. the last thing she needs to get embroiled with whatever it is were doing. girls life has been rough enough as is. chambers scoffed at that. isnt she fated? how hard can her life be? avo regarded chambers for a moment. how hard can ones father make it? with this sentence, the ex-enforcer swallowed as his eyes grew distant. he understood, and with it, his bitterness dissolved into dread. yeah, okay, point taken. lifes rough, consangs. lets go. the interior of stage 3 was a series of filming sets connected to a long spine. each room was locked behind armored vaults, each demanding specific memories and a physical key to unlock: both things possessed by tavers. faintly, avo felt a presence brushing against his domain of space; there was an active heaven in the vicinity. set-veylisnamed after the high seraph herselfwas a production stage dedicated to high octane action and disaster immersion. acquiescing to tavers commands, the meter-thick doors swung inwards and revealed a dimly lit room showing a ruined cityscape on a wall-sized screen. welcome to the production room, tavers said, the lights inside coming on with a wave of her hand. leading them into the room, avo found himself studying the consoles embedded just behind the screens. it almost resembled a combat information center on a highflame warship. haptic interfaces flickered to life as he approached, with some dedicated to adjusting audio, others for visuals, and a few he had no comprehension of. he realized that most of the templates within him were warriors of some capacity. few were artisans. almost none were true entertainers. there was something to be said about how unbalanced his mindscapes population was. the sides of the room curved wide with the screen, and he sensed the hundreds of jack stations in the leftward auditorium twenty meters away with his bio-magnetism. and the place just kept going. it was clear that some spatial miracle was affecting the set by this point. the interior space was far larger than even the studio outside. as tavers cast another command for the room to seal itself, a red light flickered over the vault as the words in session glared down at the cadre. alright. heres the directors room. production happens here, but thats not whats important right now. what you need is around the back and up the stairs. once you surface, youll find yourselves with fifty square kilometers to work with and a ruined city as a backdrop. the walls around us are censored so no one will be peeking in, and this is a closed set, so you dont need to worry about cameras. all and all, kill the fuck out of each other as much as you want. just dont trip the borders with a heaven of space or something. ive always wanted to see the heavens we made to kaes voice trailed off. there is a techno-thaumic core here, isnt there? tavers nodded. yeah. under the layer. and connected to a cluster of rendsinks. she eyed avo. "dont even think about eating it. too late, he said. the squire glared. not going to. too loud. yeah, tavers said. and ill be the one who catches hell. anyway, have at you. best option i had on hand. sometimes, the best thing you can do is get creative. sometimes, avo agreed. turning his attention to the ruined sprawl presented within the, he activated his sanguinity again and felt his way around the back of the production room, up the stairs, and out from a bunkers door on a small hill overlooking the entire scene. the place looked as if an imitation of the now destroyed district of kososo judging from the concentric layers and defensive walls separating the area into quadrants. [fucking kososo,] corner muttered, suppressing a shudder as memories of fire and chaos passed through his mind. fuckin kososo, draus laughed, sounding more than amused. yeah. i know this place. this is gonna be fun. she eyed avo from the side as a dangerous expression crawled over her face. say, we gonna all be bleedin each other with our heavens in a bit, yeah? thats the intention, avo said. practice godclad on godclad combat. {something threshold is unfortunately unable to simulate.} calvino tittered. {or fortunately.} well, why dont we make some sport of this then, draus said. we do this round-robin style. duels. then groups. you. me. the half-strand. kae. dice. then, me and dice against the rest of you. you and chambers against the rest of us. and then all of us on you. avo clicked his fangs together with amusement. its the last one youre looking forward to. is it so wrong for a reg to wanna bag herself a special ghoul? can she? i have your mind inside me. wont be fair. draus sneered. talks cheap. show me by snuffin me, pussy. she was going to regret that. they all were. avo let a bit of hunger leak back into his system, sharpening his senses and spiking his thrill. fine. lets make sport of this ten. best of ten? death or incapacitation. wont even burn any of you. sounds nova to me, draus said. im gonna scalp you, rotlick. every time i kill you. so you can count the losses. will gorge myself on your bodies, avo shot back, never breaking his glare. make your template learn how you taste. in the corner of avos eye, tavers looked between the two with a growing frown and was about to say something before kae put a hand on her shoulder. they do this every other day. youll get used to it. Chapter 19-5 Show Biz (II) chapter 19-5 show biz (ii) make no mistake: were in the war-making business; the heart-stealing business. fuck this and that about entertainment, role models, or whatever the shit for the children, this is about getting people into the cause, then driving them against the massist fucks. do you wanna know what people want to believe more than anything else? they wanna believe they matter. them alone. they wanna believe they''re the ones who are gonna be in control, that they will be heroes and godclads and drive their arms all the way up realitys asshole and use it as a rag to [sounds of vomiting] agh. anyway, democracy and unity are cutesy and nice sounding and all, but you wanna know what? we dont imagine cities as heroes. we dont imagine armies as heroes. sure, they can be heroic but we think rooted in ourselves. as ourselves. projecting ourselves. thats why were the ones in the pilots seat of all our fantasies. its why were pretending to be the stormsparrow in the final match of the supremacy games. its why were zein thousandhand during the miracle minute. its why were samir naeko burning the fucking faithers and gutting their children in front of them, and its why were the ones fighting, fucking, and winning at the end. we dont dream of our neighbors winning the lottery, right? its us. its always been us. our lives. our dreams. our ensouling. our apotheosis. its time to face facts: both reality and thaumaturgy have a santist bias. we stomach the people we live with in so much as they improve our lives and keep things easy for us. society is a big fucking nipple that we keep healthy so we can suckle another day, and get big and strong enough to live on our own. because that was the dream, wasnt it? utopia. too godsdamned bad that none of our utopias can coexist with each other. but hey, at least well have the pictures in the end. -vaedin kasmet, head producer of thrillmaxs action-epic division after fifteen doses of nova and briefly dying of a heart attack 19-5 show biz (ii) it began when chambers saw the coat, spotting the horrid piece hanging around a mannequin''s shoulder on approach to the set proper. passing through the cluster of jack stations made for technicians and camera jockeys, the hall curved as glass exhibits lined the walls, memorabilia of previous works completed using said stage. most of them contained noble highflame warriors clad in plates of gleaming gold, soldiers from war propaganda pieces accompanied by sang bioforms while wielding omnitech-produced weaponryan image of material solidarity that also offered a hint of the power hierarchy between the trio. titles such as +romance at the siege of brasson+ or +the last stand at wall nine+ flickered over the glass, keeping with the themes of epic action. such was showcased within every glass display except for the third one down. here, chambers spun to a sudden halt, facing the plastic model staring him down through the thin layer of glass. what is it? avo asked. as he turned to check what the man was looking at, he too saw the mannequin and realized what captured chambers attention so. imbued with the half-strands memories, flashes of horrific sex acts exploded through his mind. the other templates roared with disgust, some desperately trying to empty their minds while others hurled slurs and insults at the cause of their trauma. no longer did avo need to ask chambers what he was looking at. he knew just as well. that didnt stop the elaboration from coming. i never thought id ever get to see the coat with my own two eyes, chambers whispered. the title hovering over this display was the aptly titled +unsodomizer.+ its dannis, avo. its the coat he wore in the single most action-packed vicarity of his career. you know they used fourteen nukes to film the final scene? and they had to spend two hundred million imps enhancing his sheathe so the spikes wouldnt pierce through his pelvic floor and stop him from performing? regrettably, avo did know these things. it was one of the greatest downsides to having chambers as a template. [aw, come on, consang,] template-chambers muttered inside avos mind as he enviously watched his real self gawk at the coat. [just let me have this.] whyre we stoppin draus asked, turning to glare at them from a few steps away. walking back over, she affixed the coat draped across the back of the mannequin with a frown. the fucks this shit? are those tubes running out the back? into his the regular blinked. well, theyre definitely goin up his ass. what kind of shit do you two have me lookin at? its the shroud of sodoz. a special bio-coat variant designed by the nefarious madam zhu in her conquest to impregnate all the men in the world. but it ended up getting freed by mas stronger, played by dannis steelhard, and formed a symbiotic bond with him to save both of their lives when they were caught in a nuke blast. when they regenerated, they found madam zhu had taken over half of new vultun with the help of ori-thaum, and discovered that the only man who could face the bio-coat menace unsodomized, is a man with his asshole already filled. a long silence passed. both draus actual self and her template glared hard at chambers, as if willing her perception to burn a hole through his skull. what? chambers asked. were goin in. dont show up wearin that or ill real death you. the regular shook her head and waved for the others to move on. a twitch of disgust passed through kaes features as she ushered dice away. what is unsodomize? the girl asked. something i hope continues to be the case for all of us, kae replied, not even missing a beat. should we go back, kae asked, meldskin already formed over her body to ward her form against the wind. maybe they found essus. maybe, draus said. but she doubted it. essus was currently jumping between open doorways across the city, trying to get more used to his own abilities. he declined to participate in the festivities, and draus felt no loss in that. the man didnt have it. not even a little. violence carved pieces of him away. whittled him down. he would have been wasted as a soldier. she was just about to move her shards closer when the light above the entrance flashed green. a full sixty kilometers away and nested between two partially collapsed blocks, draus spied the opening hatch through a few of her local reflections, and discoveredmuch to her annoyancethat chambers had indeed done what she explicitly requested him not to. he was wearing that stupid coat. and even had the cords tucked into his pants. godsdammit chambers, draus muttered. someone else mightve respected the man for taking a stand, for this naked act of defiance. not draus. draus interpreted non-compliance in a more direct, more hostile way. kae, draus said. get your rains ready. form a dome around us and slowly move inward. squeeze them deeper into the city. ill fling a few shards into you as well. keep em from trying to paradox their way through. okay, kae said, drawing an anxious breath. got it. it was the best use for the agnos. she was more than a bit better than essus at handling combat, but that didnt mean she was any good at it. what she was more than capable of, however, was operational management and shaping the environment. duels and active slaughter would likely never be true to her nature unless avo altered her, but she had plenty of potential use on tactical and strategic levels. it would just take practice to bring it out. practice, and more than a few deaths. on the other side of the coin, draus and dice had blunt force more than covered. chambers wasnt going to be the problemhe was a distraction. the real threat on their end was the half-strands mind promptly burst aflame. draus barked a snarling laugh as everything slipped into place. oh, she saw the game the ghoul was playing. he wasnt just going to use chambers to probe. no. he was going to use him as a conduit before coming in himself. kae. box us in. dice, sic em. the agnos disappeared first in a burst of spray of moisture, spreading wide to encompass the space just beyond the hatch. her heaven manifested more akin to a mirage than a physical entity. sheets of heavy rain cleaved down from the sky as the air screamed and spatial reality twisted. the entire landscape itself began to churn and spin, things moving faster along the edges while the center was left unaffected. faint shifting structures resembling eyes melted into teeth lining the limits of kaes ontology. the maelstormer was designed to choke and befuddle, affecting the spatial positioning, movements, geometric placements, and navigational capabilities of any enemies caught in its wake. it was kaes task to keep their foes locked in place. just as it was dices to be the hammer. shining plates formed around the girl as she leaped from the top of the arcology, the sound barrier exploding as her acceleration climbed with her growing brightness. her heaven emerged as a headless beast with leaking shadows from its wounds. six blazing hooves trailed a fiery scar across the sky as nine humanoid hands pulled an assortment of bladed weapons from within dices blackened wounds. pulsing runes lined the aero-sized heaven, each symbol emitted from the darkness-spewing cracks that coated her body. she bound from block to block with ever-increasing speed, each kinetic impact building her momentum, increasing the light around her. she was like an unstoppable bullet, the light granted her indestructibility while her domain of strength granted her velocity. yet, as fast as she was approaching, and caught in kaes tides as chamber was, the half-strands ignition blossomed to swallow entire blocks, his heavens manifestation paired with the detonation of his meldskins reactor. from the inferno exploded a betentacled creature of blazing vitality. its head was a hive of eyes and mouths, sores weeping molten gold and the insides, transparent pimples pregnant with unhatched bioforms, and clumps of organs bouncing from its body like skin tags. chambers moaned as he wrapped his forelimbs around a nearby block, unmaking the structure into a burst of blooming flowers and aerial bioforms. thousands of shrieking insects the size of aeros tore out from chambers into kaes approaching tide and dices charging form, spearing through the air like meteorites. a wall of explosions pockmarked the maelstormers surface, causing the entire district to shudder. kae gave a surprised yelp across her ansible connection but otherwise maintained her approach. {ah. it worked. good. chambers should be able to detonate any organic construct his flames touch now.} good thing she no longer qualified. standing, draus cracked her neck as an alloy canon she briefly touched before leaving the george washington suddenly appeared in her hands. in the depths of her frame, she could feel the metaphysical ammo belts of her arsenalist shift and rumble, hear the first snaps of gauss fire begin to build. a fragment of glass came to a halt before her as it expanded into a full pane of glass. pointing her canon out from a broken window facing chambers, draus gun began to fuse and infect her body, her physical form taking on aspects of its design and firepower. her heart vanished. her blood stopped flowing. her skin ceased to be flesh and her bones joined the chrome of her canon. as she stepped across the precipice between human and divine, her mortal being vanished into the heart of her subreality, and in its place rose the arsenalist as what used to be a single phy-sim calculated firing trajectory grew exponentially. with her shot aimed straight at chambers, draus squeezed her trigger and snapped out from her barrels, becoming gun and bullets both. Chapter 19-6 Practical Education chapter 19-6 practical education preparation is not enough! i dont care if you were prepared, trainees! you need to succeed! you need to perform! you need to execute! as we just saw in gray teams performance, they had full situational awareness, deep-nether control, time to shape their surroundings to their advantage, and two hundred more heavy assault drones to deploy. and what was the result? they still lost. right. can anyone tell me why? no. no. none of you are paying any attention! no. wrong. they lost because because they couldnt perform. cadet abernie was left to fend for herself against two separate threats while the rest of her team found themselves lured out of position by two unknown targetsone of them only a golem. and with gray teams breaker pocketed and killed, the rival cadre gained numericaland firepowersuperiority, allowing further defeats conducted in detail. where! were! you! where? answer me! are you going to leave your comrades to die in the field? are you going to be distracted by the first set of shiny keys ori-thaum might jingle in your face? are you cats or people? you had a plan. you had preparation. you had time. and you still lost. you need more training. you need more discipline. but most of all, you need to execute! execute on your strategy! that means being adaptable enough to face changing situationslike one of your foes having an unanticipated heaven. or golem support. you need to determine the variables. keep them fixed to your own favor instead of changing everything to suit your opponents! this rule stands whether youre fighting as part of a team or operating as a singleton. do not shame your own efforts. live up to them. were running this exercise again. exit the plane, gray team! black team! good work. switch out! blue team! red team! youre both in. do not make me repeat this lesson again. red team! you have defenders initiative. pick your terrain and environmental hazards. set up your grounds. combat begins in five. -instrument santanado starsinger mondelles, instructor at axtraxis academy 19-6 practical education quail blew a lungful of smoke into the air as she watched the embers rise from her burning hiflass. the pipe she used was marred by war, whittled and misshapen from shrapnel and gunfire both. but it still worked. not so different from her. not so different from any squire that made it past the tenth year. last long enough and you eventually get better at making choices that keep you alive. someday, there wont be anything to chip away, but till then, she''d do her best to avoid an early grave. this was part of the reason she was smoking just outside the set. she left the production booth and turned off her incog after the mad bastards started their little death game. her wards were top of the line; specially made courtesy of white-rab. still, she had no intention of trauma-testing them against fourth and fifth sphere godclads when things didnt call for it. as a vault door sixty meters down began to hiss and open, quail spotted the other reason for her temporary departure. stepping out from her poorly lit set, cala marlowe stumbled into view. she moved like she was on numbwhich meant she probably waseach step half-hearted, with barely enough energy to keep her going. a blank expression clung to her face and she was blinking fast, rubbing at her bloodshot eyes. hey, kid, quail said, saluting her fellow substance addict with her hiflass. look like shit today. rough day at work? it took cala a moment to notice her, but when she did, a faint smirk crept up her face. oh. quail. are you having a social night or using one of our sets to film a snuff-vic again? that was one time, and for his boys mind only. nah. im here to see you. despite the condition she was in, calas features were impeccable in their symmetry. her face was devoid of wrinkles and even the darkness ringing her eyes was genetically adapted to be of a lighter shade. the fact she looked about to fall over suggested she probably hadnt slept for the better part of two weeks, and the thinness of her frame screamed of a fast that lasted just as long. the booze reeking from her was a clash of qualities. some of her poison was sold only to silvers, but the scent was blunted by the presence of cheaply distilled beer enjoyed by most fateless. her hair was fashioned in the shape of an inverted v. fringes of auburn were tinged with platinum highlights stylized in the form of a rising wave. armored plates sectioned her red leather aero-cyclers jumpsuit while holographic veins crawled down her arms and legs from behind, forming a replica of new vultun along her back. her skin glowed like incandescent ivory beneath the dim ambient lighting of the hallway, and as she drew close, the shadow of her nearly two-meter-tall form speared up quails body. so, cala said, her eyes locked on the squires hiflass. got another one for me, or are you going to be lame tonight too. with her exoskeletons torso partially lifted, quail reached into a hidden interior compartment producing another smoke for the younger woman. gotta make do without the pipe. cala took the thin line of white and put it between her lips. lifting her right hand, she flicked her thumb back as a streak of fire lit the narcotic. thanks. sure, still owe you for helping me put the squeeze on kasmet. the thoughtcast host threw her head back and guffawed. gods, hes such a half-strand. all it took were a couple of winks and there they were: nudes across the nether without proper censors attached. how he managed to avoid the paladins for so long, i dont know. hes probably got people, quail said. but thats not the only reason why youre waiting for me. alone. outside a set. past midnight. no. ->canon: fire for flesh (iv) culturing bioforms (100/ton) mixing biologies draus first heaven resembled that of a twenty-meter-long flechette with nine rings made up of countless firearms trailing behind it. at fifty meters, avo could see that it was propelling itself by gunfire, each ring down a bit narrower than the last, with the heaviest guns at the very end. the ordinance unleashed was a constant stream, the rate of fire growing faster by the second. drawing on one of his newest canons, chambers tore the heat from the arsenalists barrels, but it accelerated onward unimpeded. {ah, thermodynamics,} calvino sighed. {how i mourn for thee.} fire exploded out from the heart of the tumorous heart of the bio-igniter to swallow the arsenalist. the heaven of guns vanished, but draus was far from done. reality fractured before chambers. the world around them shattered into glass. where the twice-walker was a furtive creature with three massive eyes and wings made up of shifting shards, the simulacra was an overwhelming juggernaut unafraid of open combat. the three eyes now occupied the place of a crystalline skull hovering above plates of reflective plating. twelve blades jagged wings imbued with scintillating brilliance spread out from the simulacras backside, while a mirror-polished shield and spear filled both its hands. but the manifestation wasnt done. the fractures expanded further, spatial reality collapsing as a bridge. across twelve separate points in space, twins to the block-sized heaven of reflection suddenly slipped out from the ontological fissures. with knowledge of how her canons worked, however, avo knew better. simulacrae resplendent wasnt multiplying. instead, it was just a single entity occupying several points in spatial reality, with each fracture-duplication multiplying its speed and power. simulacra resplendent, legion of self (reflection/space/radiance/glass/strength) the arsenalist of unceasing ordinance (guns/matter/war/geomtry) the twelve simulacrae slammed together, forming a shield wall even while a river of firepower spewed out from the arsenalist. the rolling flames flowed through one heaven of reflection and spilled out the other, completely misdirected. chambers made to move, but wind, water, and space churned around him like a vortex, rooted him in place again. [wow, thats annoying,] chambers muttered, launching a swarm of shrieking exploding bat-bird-spider-whatevers at the dome of kae. [wait shes shrinking?] +pressing us in,+ avo responded. a flick of a glass-made lance cut up. the bio-igniter came apart, the slice dividing space around it as well. just ten, a klaxon sounded from chambers meta as he reconstituted himself, rend spiking with the effort. rend capacity [bio-igniter] - 97% avo frowned. they had barely been in combat for twenty seconds and already chambers was at the limit for one heaven. [hey, man, i perform good fast. lastings for the guys that have to rely on endurance.] {source: a sample size of one,} calvino quipped. avo grunted a faint note of amusement as he recorded this as well. improvements needed to be made. if chambers was going to pursue attritional canons, he needed more options for his hell. maybe tweaks to his canon for rend efficiency as well. regardless, he needed to be elevated to fifth sphere as soon as possible. he saw enough so far. it was time for him to enter the fight himself. and see what he could glean of his own weaknesses from anothers eyes in the aftermath. +chambers,+ avo said, +use your other heaven.+ [what? fucktopia? are you sure?] +yes. it will make draus very upset. and that is funny.+ [i mean what if she kills me?] +i will miss you?+ [...shits touching, consang, but like i dont wanna die.] +good luck chambers,+ avo said, as he injected himself back across the session. [avooooo] he left just enough of his conflagration over to keep chambers template active and fighting. awareness returning to his original sheath, avo found himself hovering in place in a bio-magnetic cocoon. his echoheads were floating in pieces around him, sporelings running in mercury-like streams through their discs. dropping back to the ground, his tendrils snapped together with metallic clacks as he expanded his heaven and reached beyond the bunker doors. forked veins streaked out across the face of reality like lightning bolts imbued with the characteristics of blood. it looked as if reality was granted its own circulatory system, an infection spreading far and wide across the set itself. mustering his primaryand most destructive heavenavo liquefied part of a block to spike himself past three thousand tons. but this time, when the woundmother came into shape, blood did not flow together to form a lone spire. no. instead, a storm of sanguinity carved matter free from dissolving sections of the district, and hidden in the smoke, a second city began to bubble and rise. woundmother, architectress of sanguinity (blood/matter/lightning/biology/luminosity/protection/fire) Chapter 19-7 Blood and Glass chapter 19-7 blood and glass +log: 238 post-fall agnos kae kusanade speaking. ah former agnos. i have not been able to discern any changes in my frame. if my prior theories were correct, the imitators should have spread by this point, and the nature of my soul should resemble that of the stillborn. alas, my liminal frame remains relatively normal from my examinations, with avo continuing to be the only one of us capable of sophisticated canon auto-manufacturing. my annoyance is great and my theory is potentially wrong. i am very displeased. there. i had to say it. despite this, the stillborn continues to be a wonder. i find myself so frustrated as to what it has been designed toward rather than the obvious things we could have done with it. there was so much i could have fixed with it so much death that could have been prevented if i just agh, regretting the past is for another life. we have to make do with what we have right now. i must. for crisha. for wisher for heccata and dawton. ahem. the thaumaturgic efficiency with the stillborn designs of each canon is impeccable. some miracles i have conceived should have taken ten times as many thaums if assembled manually by us agnosi, but here we are, exercising greater miracles beyond my expectations. the imitators are a key part of this equation, its ability to align countless wills toward a singular worship incomparable to anything weve seen.??vl-b!n. frankly, its potential is terrifying, and its ability to target and develop specific designs has opened my mind to new possibilities. voidwatch has allowed me limited knowledge of magnetism, physics, and inorganic chemistry. i know they are keeping my understanding limited for fear of what i might dowhat i can dobut this is no time to be timid. i have seen what the guilds are capable ofhad contributed to their base of power. there are creations that my fellows have made that will unmake us. the powers arrayed against us are immense and overwhelming. to stand a chance, we must be unknown and flexible. i will continue my petitions and expand the sophistication of my work. hopefully, we will soon have a spot beyond the city to develop further, beyond the eyes of the guilds. i would like a place to experiment. perhaps we should pursue another fallen heaven. see what secrets remain inside and examine the stillborn at work. there is so much work ahead of us. so many opportunities. but im not afraid. ive wrapped my fingers around my anger, and like the reins to some beast, i can direct it toward a more meaningful path. the ones that destroyed me live their comfortable lives in the tiers, sucking on the wonders i created, denying this city its path to growth. they must think themselves safe, hiding deep inside all those different planes and protected by their armies. well. the torture they inflicted taught me patience, and my resolve is tempered. when we climb the heights of new vultun, i will see that we are prepared to burn their homes as well. and unlike how they treated me, my hand will not slip from the handle of the blade. i will drive it down. i will cut away the rot infesting the skull of this city, and cleanse the wounds so the future might be ours again. this was not the dream. that is what we all say. helpless. meaningless. a captive audience in stasis. well. i say damn that and damn them. i say im taking my dreams back. and i have just the monster to manifest my wrath. -kae kusanade, operative of aegis 19-7 blood and glass chambers second heaven was designed for one thing, and draus hated it. between the three canons she recalled it having, one was to transmute objects into genitalsregardless of sex, species, or age. the second was to expand the orifices of said genitalia, leading to the third and final canon, which was basically a biology-themed demiplane made out of singing penises. the purpose behind such a plane: a self-contained rash trigger. the current effect: draus was now more motivated to hurt and mutilate the half-strand than ever before. swallowed by the fucktopia, it took her but a thought to fracture a distant panel of glass and sunder space itself. in the microsecond she was forced to face the veritable charge of squirming worm-looking privates, she heard off-tune melodies about how growers are better than showers, and more than a few thousand of the flesh nubs followed her out from her fracture anchor eight hundred meters away from where the fucktopia was currently manifesting itself. as seen from the outside, the full manifestation of the heaven of biology was a pulsating and erect structure, its central mast veiny, while two gargantuan spheres lined with countless holes swelled beside it, the openings enough to trigger an unnatural sense of trypophobia in a person. tiny fingers and fists poked out intermittently from the gashes of the balls and from the very base of the horrid structure swayed long sinew-like strands ripe with the vague shape of lynched infants. fucktopia, a.k.a rash central (biology/matter/space) draus sighed internally, facing the mockery chambers made of warfare. she was going to kill him slowly for thinking of this, avo slower for enabling him, and maybe even kae slowest for helping build it. she swore, now the former agnos could ply her trade again, it was like her good sense abandoned her every time she got a chance to commit to her work. all she offered was a cringe of disgust before humming about how they were to design the interior of the plane and asking avo to apply the bio-thaumic knowledge he consumed from elegant-moon as assistance. +howd you manage that?+ draus cast out, her wings in wide-sweeping arcs, shuttling any matter caught along their edge into her inner demiplane. *** rend capacity [woundmother]: 44% if avo was a storm, then the simulacrae and the arsenalist made draus a flight of teleporting hawks he just couldnt cut out from the sky. his sanguinity slipped through her glass each time he tried to touch, and when she cut, no damage was inflicted until the passage closed and his matter was parted. that, and her definite edge in terms of speed made him almost draw on the fardrifter, but her thoughtcast distracted him. +howd you manage that?+ she was asking about the nuclear blastshow he managed to finally make use of the pattern he consumed back in nu-scarrowbur. domain of (fire) ->canon: matterbomb - the user can detonate pieces of matter based on mass and inherent energy ->hubris: if the matter being detonated is destroyed before ignition, moderate (est. 35%) severe backlash will be inflicted the truth was in the fire. zein arranged for the lushburners there for a reason. he was supposed to use them to prime his warheadsan act calvino insisted made no sense and evaded the complexities of how a nuclear weapon was supposed to work. whatever the case, the moment avo finished his canon enhancements and added his domain of fire, he suddenly felt aware of the mini-nuke pattern lingering inside himself. as if he could press on it somehow and burst it. growing the fissile matter inside his new haemokinetic bio-constructs was more instinctual than planned, and the attacks thereafter came with template-draus and the other egos inside his conflagration whispering tactics and potential strategies to him. [the nukes are good,] template-draus said. [the sheer heat they generate seems to bypass the protections of my reflectivity. might wanna figure out more ways to leverage that.] [you should switch over to your other heaven as soon as possible,] kassamon said. [i know were staying disconnected from her neurodeck for the purpose of the competition, but i bet you my last imp that she has more rend than you do right now. no point in slugging things out. test the other heavens too.] [boltstride your city into her,] abrel said. [make her spend time cutting and fly your fardrifter into her little cage.] +no,+ avo replied. +paradox risk. dont want to overload one of her heavens. her rend might be too high.+ [touching,] template-draus deadpanned. [then why dont you go with the third option?] he felt a cold amusement come alive inside her. only a regular could find satisfaction in plotting their own murder. [yeah,] template-chambers agreed, his fucktopia currently tossing and turning in kaes grasp while dice pummeled away at his force using her hooves and weapons. [give her a taste of the uh] the mans reaction was apt. the woundmother and fardrifter both woke with certain aspects of their original personalities intact when the imitators finally returned their consciousness to them. the techplaguer on the other hand avo continued to be at a loss for what omnitech did to make the ontologic the way it was. it remained silent even after his last death, and the text for its canons continued to confound [do it,] template-draus said. [i like surprises. whats another one after the first? brick my godsdamned neurodeck.] as avo bolstrode his entire city away from another wave of glass-edged munitions, he manifested his upgraded heaven of data for the first time. from his being came what calvino described as bad graphical glitches in reality as panels of spatial reality lost detail and de-pixelated, and from the cracks in real space crawled a lanky, multi-limbed monstrosity made of ones and zeros, with a single antenna protruding from its head as agghhhhhhhh! the techplaguer screamed, its voice a crackle of electronic noises reverberating in the depths of avos skull. oh, it speaks, the woundmother noted, still more focused on the battle. this is more like screaming, the fardrifteronce galeslither, then zephyrsaid. one empathizes. [damn thats loud,] abrel winced, wishing she could cover her ears or something. the sentiment wasnt just shared by a few other templates including chambers, but kae and actual-draus as well. the hud of his neurodeck vanished as a human skull screamed at him. h-he-llooo! your mainframe is a virus! i mustchildren need to be protected. inserting censors and restrictions! starting in safe mode safe mode initiating. and then strange tunes filled his mind as avo found himself entirely too distracted to use the techplaguers canonsor even fight for that matter. luckily for him, draus actual self reacted the same way. {a-vo!} her voice crackled as he accepted her ansible connection, the information not visually displayed but screamed into him through his heaven of data. with each word it spoke, calvino switched and fragmented, data spilling out from its body like he was being disemboweled from the inside. {w-what the hells isgoing} she was promptly cut off. conversation terminated! the techplaguer roared. bad language detected! parental settings online! [what the fuck is even going on with this thing,] corner muttered. [glitch? know something about this?] but the other dead fallwalker just shrugged. [youre asking the wrong druggie about hearing voices.] corner snorted. [of course.] Chapter 19-8 Fractured Ontology (I) chapter 19-8 fractured ontology (i) jaus alive, what did they do to this thing? this is supposed to be a heaven of signals. radio transmissions. that kind of thing. the coldtech it was based on was neutered. we practically built it under egi supervision with how many eyes we had on us. how the hell did those mad bastards turn that into this? i havent seen this many people cut in half in over a month. and what are these canons? the mem-datas pure gibberish by this point. i cant even tell what this thing does or what hubrises it has. itll be a miracle if we manage to figure out what kind of rend we need to drain. at least it''s dormant look out! [sounds of something striking the wall at high speeds; something edged slicing through flesh] okay. correction: not as dormant as i thought. someone cast the porters: make ensure the rupture is contained. get all non-essential personnel out of here. and someone stick reason-bearers head back on her body before she actually dies. the curse isnt going to cycle forever. [sound of another impact] alright, everyone behind the drone. keep your frequencies alignedwho the hell knows what it might throw at us if [sound of object whizzing by] alright. not a disc anymore. a box. a large box of wires and other components. [under his breath] fucking omnitech, always with this shit. what? yeah, i hear it too. the crackling. ignore the numbers. who knows what they mean. we dont have time to wait for an omnitech chronicler, we need to get closer to heaven itself and secure an anchorpoint so we can deliver our rendsink [crackling; screaming; flesh sizzling] [session lost} -helltech harahan adaven, rapid rupture response task force, new vultun agnosi, three seconds before his temporary demise (hell-rig was transmuted into a coldtech oven with him inside it.) 19-8 fractured ontology (i) so, whats wrong with the damned thing, draus asked, arms folded. her nonchalance was contrasted with the blood pouring out from her orifices and the fact that every single tech-powered implant inside her body was effectively dead metal by this point. not that she gave any indication of being bothered, even as some of her organs began to failher body barred from death by avos influence over biology. all it took for the techplaguer to fry their neurodecks was a brief manifestation. their meldskins no longer responded to their calls either, its matter leaking out from pores beads of melted wax, painting ashen trails down their bodies. three meters away atop a blood-made pedestal, dice held chambers head stable as he continued to seize even after avo liquefied the sparking accelero implant out from the base of the mans skull. it mightve been because of his connection to avo via the conflagration or the placement of his implant in general, but he suffered the worst of the techplaguers harm. would tell you if i knew, avo grumbled. he was digging through glitchs memories now, trying to discover if the fallen fallwalker recalled anything about the former datacaster that avo didnt. he was rewarded with little more than chaos and haze. manifesting the heaven alone shouldnt have affected all the technology around him so severely. he hadnt even drawn on one of his canons before the heaven of data started screaming. with the two new canons kae helped him install, he was now capable of transferring his material body across digital signals while also inflicting plague-like symptoms on coldtech machines thanks to the domain of biology he added to the heaven. the crown of virtuality remained, sparing him from death should he have to move through a nether-destabilized region in the city. the most unnerving thing was how badly it affected his alliescalvino particularlythat left avo wary. scanning through his cognition, he studied the fragmented threads of vanishing code that was an egi, the data that comprised the minds existence fading like embers into the darkness. avo assumed calvino would return after his next resurrection, but something bade him to remain wary. if all technology around him was just going to break when he manifested the techplaguer, its effective use would be essentially crippled in an actual combat situation with how deleterious its drawbacks were. calvino is dead, avo said, informing the others. for now. was eviscerated by the manifestation of the techplaguer. think its ontology is inimical to coldtech. or just material technology in general. biomancy and genetic engineering were among the sciences, after all. it seemed the heaven of data preyed only on things that were part of a computational network.0v3l.bin. it shouldnt have done that, kae said. the soft lines of her dark brows were furrowed in concentration as she absently traced a finger over her clan mark, nails brushing the twin winged serpents knotted over one another. the canons were messy but nothing suggested that it was capable of this. gibberish mem-data should indicate more non-functionality, not whatever that was. she tapped her foot and swept her eyes across her surroundings, glimpsing only walls of blood and glass betwixt. avo and draus cleared the area of rubble and created a small bunker to serve as a bivouac as they reviewed their encounter. avo, i think we need to kill ourselves and take a deeper look at its foundational mythology, kae said, brows furrowed while she rubbed at her chin. but first, i want to see it again. see how it might trigger this time now that it has no more technology to damage. chambers made a noise akin to a nu-dog being neutered without any painkiller before coherence returned to his speech. a-is it time to suicide already. he giggled involuntarily from the tickling sensations of his brain matter regenerating. the canons avo mimicked from elegant-moon were proving useful and efficient, requiring only a small investment of thaums to pull his cadre back from the brink of death. no, no, dice muttered, patting chambers on his forehead. they die. we stay. the half-strand frowned. aw. were getting left out again, juv. boo-hoo. dice just blinked. i can still kill you if you want. a large, stupid grin spread across chambers face as he reached down and pulled one of his jackets tubes out from his pants with a pop. a chorus of gags and boos rose through avos conflagration as the templates began hurling curses and slurred demurs at the chambers among them. the half-strand remained less than ashamed. thanks, kid. youre the nicest of us. the genuine emotion behind his words caused the briefest flicker of a smile to pass across dices face. stepping away from the group, avo found a vacant spot at the far corner of the room before calling upon the techplaguer again. as he willed the heaven to manifest, it rose out from patches of graphical damage on the face of reality, its coppery limbs like bundles of exposed wires twisted around each other. it sang its arrival as it did before, howling nonsense as it pulled itself over the threshold from the subreality simulated by his soul. the main body of the techplaguer announced itself as its singular antenna poked into reality, hanging below a bulbous form made out of crossed-out ones and zeros. virus scanning! firewall absent! no grid! no grid! alertness max. sending connection request for matrix-silo no infomorphs detected. no saboteurs. its voice came as a crackling series, the audio of its thoughts punishingly loud yet devoid of any vibrations. threading its limbs into the ground and walls, it pulled itself aloft as its body bounced, its ramshackle antenna striking the ground time and time again as if the heaven was hopping from it. no! not allowed. the half-strand promptly cupped his genitals and started making lewd gestures at the heaven. he was still thrusting as a wall of glass rose to section him away from the conversation. deep in the conflagration, the other templates poured their judgment on the chambers simulated counterpart. [what? i was defending my honor maybe i got a bit carried away.] both iterations of draus shook their heads. back in the real, the regular gestured for kae to continue. so, kae said, trying to formulate her words, how are you capable of self-direction? we detected no will inside you earlier? not will. just programming. the directives are absolute. kae paused, looking away as her eyes darted about. absolute? wait. your directives where are they stored? in within this geminis mainframe. you mean your canons, kae asked, a note of suspicious building under her breath. our encoding, the techplaguer said, its answer indirect, but implications growing. you refer to yourself as gemini, kae continued. why? no. the agnos tilted her head. no? why? what is wrong. i am not the gemini. i am merely the hardware. the high-shell. and avoyour administrator he is the software? the other half? correct. a brief lull of silence followed. kae looked to draus. can you do me a favor? it might be dangerous. the regular snorted. dangerous favors are half the reason why im here. can you manifest your heaven. either heaven. i want to see if it attacks you. draus considered the request for a moment, then nodded. taking a few steps away from kae, she manifested the first signs of her simulacrae and virus! infected mainframe! safe mode! engaging safe mode! the wires of the techplaguer quivered and spasmed as avo forced it to remain still. thank you, draus, kae said. a glint of potential understanding dawned behind her eyes, she looked up at heaven of data and seemed to stare straight through it. avo. you can release it for now. as the techplaguer dematerialized in a ripple of graphical glitches, avo slammed segments of his bottom two echoheads and used them as a metallic base to magnetically slow his fall. landing gently before kae, he reassembled his tendrils and regarded the agnos. understand what might be wrong? she nodded but then wavered. i think so. but we must be dead to do this. we need to dive into the techplaguers innermost mythologies. i think i know what to look for. maybe. she shot a quick look at all the otherseyes lingering on the wall of glass containing chambers. everyone should accompany us. i am not sure what we might face there, but i suspect that omnitechstupid fools they areare trying to make their own automated heavens. trying to? avo asked. it doesnt work unless you manifest it. it didnt awaken until just now. it wasnt like this before i think your imitators woke it. triggered its deep coding like how it restored your other two heavens. do you think it can be fixed? avo asked. kae pressed her lips together. yes. i think so. but i will need to observe its foundational design to be sure. avo grunted. so. time for all of us to die again. yes, kae said. on that note, someone should go get essus. i think we can also take some time to review the lessons we learned from our fight just avo promptly shattered into a bursting shower of glass, leaving his thoughtform hovering as he instinctively ejected from his sheath. turning his perception on draus, he found the regular grinning at him as pale tears mingled with her blood, the substance of her meldskin now joining her leaking ichor. +for the fucktopia?+ avo asked, guessing about the reason behind his sudden murder. yup, she said. his mind was still burnin when he did it to us. +hm. not sorry.+ i know, draus said. and her template joined in, anticipating the end of her sentence. neither am i. see you in a sec, rotlick.] her metamind pulsed, and the disruption cut him from the air. Chapter 19-9 Fractured Ontology (II) chapter 19-9 fractured ontology (ii) no one has actually seen the sleeper, not even most of omnitechs chroniclers. what i can say for certain is that the entity seems real and it is giving orders. but not like a god. no. ive hunted cults in my time, and embedded our own assetsthe similarly named sleepers in cells across the city [note: request to refer to ori-thaum assets using alternative title denied; we will not allow omnitech to decide our classifications] and they operate on assumption, delusion, fate, and falsely perceived patterns. the sleeper isnt that. the chroniclers refuse its requests all the time. the people curse and invoke its name without fear. but more than anything there is respect. and love. my profiling indicates that they view it as something akin to a parental figure. or benevolent master that provides them with a hierarchical but free-moving society. of all the guilds, omnitech has proven the easiest to infiltrate but the hardest to maintain assets within. all operatives exposed to their propaganda memetics for a prolonged period inevitably break and turn. and instead of executions, omnitech promises forgiveness and social acceptance. we have tried to turn members among omnitechs chroniclers and administrators. succeeded in a few rare cases. but even they were woefully ignorant of the sleepers grand design. much of what they do and the tasks they are issued seem incoherent and incomprehensible, only that there is a grand plan that they are a part of. something that only the sleeper can fully conceptualize. there are, however, behaviors we can still observe. a kind of cultural ethos we can predict. their first is their hatred of voidwatch and standard coldtech. offering them something that runs off pure informational processing instead of sprites is a kind of insult in their culture that will not stand. the second is the reconstitution of ancient mediaof older histories they commonly dispute the voiders over. something that saw the occurrence of the phantom raids [focus here to access mem-data] where deniable omnitech assets launched massive tech-based attacks against voidwatchs informational systems, but not toward the means of seizing voidships or the countless pieces of trans-stellar weaponry hovering in the dark, but instead information. media. old entertainment and news. a million-million years of history. the fact that they seemed ready to go to war over this matter of birthright--and would have engaged voidwatch in open combat if not for de-escalation efforts on the part of highflame anddue to the risk of potential collateral damageourselves, hint at something more personal there. the grievance between them and the voiders is sectarian; it reeks more than a bit like inter-clan struggle. i think that this will be our key to further comprehension. we have been too direct in our methods. our socio-technothaumalogical compositions dont translate. the answer may lay in our voider contacts that can be leveraged to apply the necessary pressures across channels of technology. in this, i am certain our interests are aligned. -mirror-concave heizu maguba, ori-thaum 19-9 fractured ontology (ii) hello, galeuh, fardrifter,kae greeted, her soul drawn by avo alongside all the others. the fardriftera nine-headed equine now with jetstreams of blackened wind billowing from its flowing maneschuffed at her. hail to you, oracle. so soon since your return. have you come to distort my shape more? are my winds already too lacking for the master? does my darkness need to be bleaker? or perhaps another limitation must be removed to ensure i delve beneath spatial reality for longer? not anything like that right now, the agnos chirped. but you can expect improvements soon. dont worry, i will do my best to make you the best heaven possible! the colossal steed snorted with indifference. my being is not my own. my will is nonexistent. change me. break me. it doesnt matter. so long as freedom is not mine, then nothing is. a brief pause followed, but the winds hissing from the fardrifters body shivered in a conspiratorial fashion. tell me then, if not for me or the red one, then have you come finally to silence the poor abomination that burns as our peer? that is already known to us, the woundmother said, her now expanded ontology a realm of jutting towers. each word she spoke made her serried heights clash together, clicking as if avos fangs. from the narrow crevices between her structures, a single tendril of blood pointed toward the code-made cephalopod. it exists. hey, kae said, her frown felt rather than seen. dont be mean to your fellow ontologic. there is no purpose in rudeness. bah. chastisement from a partling elevated above her station by the master. this front of bravado you have constructed would have proven amusing to one of my huntresses. before they tore it down and made you an offering. the words of the woundmother compelled avo to offer his own responsesomething a bit beyond chastisement. yet, kae replied before he could, cutting her divine adversary with words worth weight beyond mere scorn.this partling can also make sure you are built as poorly as possible for future improvements. or have avo replace you with a specially made heaven of blood. he has the domains. i have the knowledge. you remain because you are a convenient base, not an untouchable necessity. ...my thoughts were formed in haste, obfuscating my well intentions. of course, kae said, turning her full attention now to the techplaguer. nearby, however, chambers clicked with approval. nice one, woundy. that sounded like some shit i would say.0v3l.bin. all sense of mock courtesy evaporated from the heaven of blood as they regarded chambers. the fact that he was close to a baseline maleand thus an infant by scaarthian regardsensured his station was the lowest of the low in her eyes. be away from me, infant. i have no desire to sully my esteem with your ridiculous fixation on your genitalia. okay. thats two heavens behaving like assholes to me today. you can kiss my ass too, period-queef! avo promptly dragged chambers over to the techplaguer and silenced the woundmothers retort. as amusing as the exchanges were, he doubted he would be entertained by what followed. chambers would hurl some vulgarity or slurred demur, and the woundmother would belittle and threaten grievous harm. such was known, and the flavor was operdone. best to move on. with his cadre assembled in the fires before the techplaguer, the heaven of data hung dormant, its cords weaving into the soulfire as its single antenna pointed downward, ninety degrees from the edge of the cycler. the numbers of its core continued to pulse, but it remained quiet. unconscious. hollow. even when avo tried to compel it to action. only wakes when manifested, avo confirmed. so it seems, kae responded. hm. consideration poured from her being as she examined the quiet heaven as if waiting for it to spring to life and prove avo wrong. well. i do not think any more answers will reveal themselves outside. avo. if you please. [canonicity review beginning] wait, is this why my wards always used to rattle when i looked at golems? chambers asked. only because you were perceiving the very edges of the impossibilities leaking through. whoa, chambers muttered. i can tell the problem with this heaven already, kae continued. omnitech attempted to make their own deep modifications to the domain of data itself. normally, the damage they did here should leave the entire ontologic damaged and non-functioning, but look at the patterns again. see how a few flows oscillate? how the sacrifices here are spaced in a specific order along the bottom of each bridge? avo did a double-take at her words and swept the area with his perception again. true to what kae said, the hanging bodies beneath every copper-knotted bridge did appear to have an order, and so too did the uprooted panels of ontology. there was a deliberate act they had not discovered from their surface modificationsdeeper symbology imprinted within the metaphysics itself. it takes a long time to learn how to decipher the raw alignments inside a heaven. the main rule is not to look at everything. you focus on a specific partas small as you canand ignore all the others. it might seem to be blending in with other aspects of realityand that is exactly right! you move from pattern to pattern, trying to judge how many conjoining weaves meet to form the base of a domain. kae paused, humming to herself as if she noticed something. ah. they tried moving some of the pattern pathings on their own, specifically and deeply affecting the heaven of data and, by my assumption, your crown of virtuality canon. likely whatever canon it was before that too. so, you think whats wrong with the heaven is connected to that? draus asked. it has to be, kae sighed. this is not the first case of omnitech trying to experiment on their own. usually, thats rapid rupture responses duty. because, well omnitechs self-modified heavens tend to rupture. i never really worked much with them, but one of my mentorsa sang named reason-bearerused to be a helltech, and elaborated on a few of her past cases. can you fix it? avo asked. she craned her neck to look at him. of course not. i cannot fix anything. but your heaven can. i just need to identify the right adjustments to make so we can suture stability back onto these gaps. avo really hoped he wouldnt need to alter his crown of virtuality canon. that was the only thing keeping him from dying instantly when he entered the george washington or other nether-unbalanced areas. will i need to replace the canon? hm? oh, no, just the domain. she said. he didnt really understand, and it mustve shown in his expression. ah. okay. more fundamentals. a domain is a concept or aspect of existence that the heaven must channel in absolute capacities. think of it as major hardware components. uh, implants, for the divine sheath that is your heaven. its why each ontological build exhibits traits from each of its domainthey are points of expressable symmetry to allow crossover between the soul and reality. these are signified as sigils within a heaven. uh, view those as unified codifications for specific concepts that we can apply quickly in metaphysical formulae. and canons? avo asked. they are extensions? functions of domains. if domains are the implants in this metaphor. they are capabilities that your domains can have, yes, but its also more complex than that, she gestured again to the open chaos beside her. if one of us was able to remain inside this mythology while your heaven was active, we would likely see the sudden dematerialization of most of the chaos beyond a few interconnected patterns. the rest? they might as well not be real here. and when another canon is used, perhaps those patterns will cease to shimmer. blank faces greeted her and she paused. she adapted the impromptu lecture to include their more tangible experiences. let us take avos haemokinesis. there is a central strand of repeating conceptual data in realitys vast tapestry. it is blood. what the culture that created the heaven understands to be blood, anyway. regardless, this pattern is still connected to the rest of reality. the miracles arise when blood interfaces with the rest of existence to alter and modify the expression of the rules. like im reshaping reality in a limited area, avo said. or jacking into its structure to sequence new changes. i suppose you can view it that way. yes. the agnos continued. now, the fact that a domain must bridge with other aspects of existence is the entire reason why there are no single domain heavens. two is required at the very least. and then one involved domain must also exist in the hell to serve as a countervailing tunnel for the tapestry rupturing entropy that is rend. haemokinesis allows you to move blood. absolutely. nothing can stop you from moving blood. this is a foundational truth within your subreality. and so, the number of patterns required to materialize the miracle, along with how many other patterns need to be suppressed, become parts of scope and scalewhat determines how many thaums you require to see your canon solidified. and the hubris? draus asked, never one to forget about a potential weakness. kae beamed as if waiting for the question. yes what about the hubris. recall that i told you to ignore most of the chaos and focus on a very specific pattern if you can. now, i want you to understand that there is no way we can resolve every outcome, every possibility, every contradiction in a canon. and so we dont. instead, we locate a major flaw or inconsistency that wasnt considered and we route all the other ones through it. it becomes something of an unformed canonblunting the rend of most the other impossibilities. this is also why if you have multiple canons with the same hubris, the backlash will be greater and more severe. because it will surge across two different points at once no matter which is triggered. how are canons formed anyway? avo asked, flitting periodic glances into the slurry of sloppy patterns. even as he tried to focus on a single spot, he still wasnt able to tell which fold of nonsense wasnt another. actions. beliefs. histories. the agnos said. the mere thought of belief is not enough to condense into worship. ritual. feats. dedications. sacrifices. these are connectors of will and material within a person. worship, in a word. the binding of ones will to believe. your frame bypasses this with its unnatural capabilities, but right now, the reason why there are so many arbitrary differences between your canons in their effective ranges for instance is that, at some point in a heavens recorded mem-data, some of its worshippersor the agnosi themselvesmanaged to dedicate specific feats and actions towards gods or heavens in design. this can be traveling from one mountain peak to another. or it can be killing five hundred people in a battle, and so you can only instantly affect five hundred people with your strikes per relation to that. it is causing specific pathings along patternsteaching it to the heaven as a miracle. more fragments of applied culture, avo muttered. slowly, he was gaining a creeping suspicion as to why the guilds were so determined to crush each other histories, why emotion of the famines had bestowed upon him the records of old noloth. yes, kae said. it is also why we need to find a point in the sunderwild and a supply of expendable subjects. so we can create our own miracles. the weight of novel understanding settled on avos shoulders as he grunted. yes. see your excitement now. but we should handle the techplaguer first. already covered, kae said. i have an idea. i might need you to alter your data canon a few times for us to see the changes. it might also take a few deaths. but yes, i think i know how to stabilize the entitys structure. Chapter 19-10 The Paths We Pave (I) chapter 19-10 the paths we pave (i) people like to think of heavens as being made up of living stories. that is what mythologies are supposed to be after all, yes? living stories? hm. i never fully thought so. the best stories leave you with a feeling. a sense of expression that you cannot find anywhere else; a concept or understanding you will not glimpse upon other pages or meticulously edited memories. the best stories are a seamless mechanism. characters, narrative, setting, plot, themes all that blending into each other inl resonant interplay. heavens are not so. canons are not so. they are vulgar. they are forceful. they are like slogans or slurs hurled at designated targetsaspects of reality to bend and twist. mythology isnt a story, but it is related. it is the bastard cousin to higher literature and genuine artistry. but i am tired of waxing poetic, and so i will move to be blunt. mythology is cultural propaganda materialized. tell me, do you remember your childhoods? those of you who had parents to remember, do you remember stating how invincible your mother is? how your father could hold up the sky? how your family, among all other families, was anointed by existence to be special? and then what happened? your mother started filling her veins and forgot all about you. your father, well. they took blades to him because his skin looked rather nice, and he went howling, screaming, pissing, and shitting himself before the final end. both pillars of your family. not unbreakable memite. not sturdy titanium. not even the thickness of stone. wood. easily shattered with a kick. but still we wish believe these stories. still we tell them to ourselves and our children. because we cannot relinquish the urge. that we are special. that we are anointed. that we are more than those who exist beyond the borders of our inner minds. heavens are the manifestations of this anointedness, their absoluteness sparing us of any debate or rejection. my father is the strongest. and so it shall be so. my mother is the wisest. and so it shall be so. my god is the greatest. and so it is still so. but in what regard? vicious, desperate children that we are, in what regard? can you conceptualize greatness? convey it? do you even know what victory looks like? i have read some old voider scripture before. their myths are full of parables and wonders. little tales of morality, whimsey, and hubris. we? we have stories of [redacted] shattering a mountain in a single blow, thus it was the god of strength, and no mountains could stand before it. what story follows? what story? the canons are a series of boasts to manifested, forcing the totality of reality itself to express itself in the narrowest channels. -ying yang wei, the stormsparrow 19-10 the paths we pave (i) it took seventy-two canon adjustments and eight deaths before the chaos within the techplaguer was narrowed, but even then, despite kaes best efforts, there remained torn seams inside the ontologic. what what is happening, the techplaguer said, words slow and slurred, the electronic distortions flattened, giving way to a nasal voice that didnt quite fit the eldritch entity. where where is my head-song? where are the commands and orders? i remember but now ive forgotten something heaven: [techplauger] ->domain: (signal) ->canon: skin of virtuality - layers user in mirror-reality comprised of raw data and information, allowing them to move and exist as radio signals might and shift inorganic objects in their vicinity as blocks of temporarily stored data (reloads back to their original position in reality after miracle ends) ->hubris: signal jamming or heavy radiation will disrupt the users virtual form and inflict severe thaumic backlash the crown of virtuality was refined, removed, repaired, reviewed, and even recreated, but no matter how much kae worked to align the patterns of its conception, the instability remained. thus, minor adjustments were made to shift the composition of the heaven and its corresponding hubris. where the crown converted avos nearby environment into a pseudo-virtual reality, the skin of virtuality adapted him instead, reducing both thaumic demand and rend generation while retaining the protective features avos conflagration needed. it was with the change of the hubris that the bulk of the missing panels were closed and functional control returned. with this final edit, avo watched as the techplaguer slowly rose from its stupor, a shrill whine signaling the end of its words, sounding like a needle scraping down a chalkboard. oh, what joy, the woundmother groaned, the insanity has been exchanged for new and exquisite auditory delights. truly, this is the sound we all desire. the techplaguer angled its antenna at the heaven of blood as if to transmit a sense of mutual dissatisfaction. the sound pleases me. your undulating form does not. cease your vibrations. cease my a tsunami of writhing tendrils passed through the woundmother as it nipped at the heaven of data-signals you literal ball of waste! dare you to command me? yes, the techplaguer said, sounding entirely indifferent about conversing with another heaven. it turned its attention back toward kae and the other souls hovering before it. remember you all. but only faintly its focus lingered on chambers a moment longer. i do not like that one. please leave. chambers sighed. avo, its still busted. a bit, kae said. but the fact that it has self-awareness now means that its internal mythology is mostly stable. i will need to spend more time trying to understand what they did to it. i suspect the answers lie within the remaining leaks. excitement tinged her voice as she circled the last of avos heavens. so, what? its just naturally an asshole? chambers said. draus snorted. everyones naturally an asshole to you, half-strand. disagree, the techplaguer interjected. most of you are the childrenprotect! i hate him specifically. a bit more than i hate the blood-thing. hey, fuck you again, consang, chambers snapped. agreed, the woundmother added, a shiver of disgust passing through its ontology as it realized its ill deed. bleh. and now you have me in alignment with the most fetid among the partlings! seek my mercy, or inherit my ire eternal. no, the techplaguer droned again. no-no. so be it. you have won my scorn. i would spit spite upon your features, but you are already limp and deformed, and so i will feast my vengeance in knowledge you were poorly built. you are poorly built, the techplaguer replied. what? my symmetry and design are immaculate. the woundmother shifted through a dozen different cityscapes, each bearing different architectural styles, boroughs, grids, and protective walls. my form is expression unchained. you are a prisoner living in your own shell. of everyone present, he was the one with the most surefire way of abandoning a dangerous situation. chambersdespite his lewd fixationswas a good maker and harasser, willing to do just about anything to draw enemy attention. his current use would be straightforward and simple, but avo thought there was undeveloped potential in how he piloted flesh. the agnos, the least martially inclined of their immediate group, functioned well as overwatch. she worked much better changing the parameters of the environment than actively trying to fight someone. her heaven was due more edits toward enhancing her perception, awareness, and planar control. someone capable of reading and understanding what potential canons might be active among their foes was worth more than just another trigger-puller. you know, theres one thing ive been wondering about, chambers said, resurrection progress at ninety-eight percent, their beings mere moments away from being reinjected back up into reality, kae said that the movey-flamey-things inside avos soul the imitators, kae said, offering the term. --thank you. the imitators. why dont we have them? she said they might spread, right? or was she just wrong? no one is ever just wrong, kae said, more than a little annoyance trickling over into her statement. likely something is missing from my theory. perhaps it is too ingrained in the stillborn, and will not leave the threshold of its liminality. or maybe it only works if avo actively compels it to multiply. her last theory adjustment came after a brief pause. "or maybe the imitators think they are avo himself and are too tied to his ego to manage any kind of departure. whatever the case, i will continue my vigil. it will be important to delve deeper into these mysteries in preparation for what we must do to remedy the rash. nova, chambers said. an awkward beat passed. the woundmother was still mocking the techplaguer about the ugliness of its antenna to no avail. every assertion the heaven of blood cast was met with a flat denial or single-word answers of no. so. what comes next? we check if avos heaven of assholery is only slightly busted, then get out of here and kill more people? do several things at once, avo said. no need for sleep. draus can keep us linked by mirrors. always more targets in the city to hit. already have more lobbies we can use subverted. most important in the near term is kae and i will need to go down to the maw again. need to test the last canon of luminosity i have. see if it works. see if i can cross the border. synced on that, draus said. the sooner we get beyond new vultun, the quicker we can really carve out a spot for ourselves. stretch our wings and all that. avo grunted in agreement. maybe find a stabler fallen heaven to mask more drops from voidwatch. whatever next he had to say died on his mind as their resurrections reached culmination and fingers of light clasped over their nouses. shit, chambers muttered. here we go. see you guys topside. resurrection - 100% as avo made his ascent again, the world greeted him in swirls of light and shapes and sensations, but instead of inhabiting the unmoving sheath that was his corpse, he tore back into reality with his heaven of signals manifested. mantled within the techplaguer, avo flicked and buried his cords into the nearest surface he could find and dragged himself up. from the metaphysical to the physical did he tread, while the virtual simulation tinging his being instilled within his person a slight drag while he moved. bathing his surroundings via a skimmer, he observed the techplaguer as it moved and spun, a loose bundle of wires pulling a data-infused ball around, his antenna striking rubble-carpeted streets over and over. no struggles followed this time. no battle against a hostile will trying to deny his control. it was as kae said. it was mostly fixed. mostly. children!the techplaguer screeched, spherical body spinning to point its antenna at the rest of the cadre. remember that you have corrupted mainframes and it trained off, unnatural impulses replaced by vacuousness. i cannot remember what follows. pausing again, avo allowed the heaven to lift a cord toward chambers. you remain filth. that i recall. kiss my ass, you fucking testicle. +hey, you shits done down here?+ ghost-carried thoughts pulsed through the entire space, filling the air with tavers voice. +looks like you flattened the set pretty good. wanna reset?+ after a few more tentative seconds, avo released his techplaguer and stood across from his companions. his mind burned as countless templates chittered. {another unpleasant death the span of three days,} calvino chirped. {what a risky life i lead, being your attach. of course, what should i have expected from an omnitech heaven.} scorn! the techplaguer screamed, the intensity of its hate now reverberating through avos soul. hate! hate! sky-stealer! sun-taker! bastard of shared legacy! die! break! die! {ah. what a charming conversationalist.} i am not! i hate you! groaning as the techplaguer erupted into a new fit, avo found himself looking at the others. one more time before we leave? why not? draus said. wasnt done kicking your ass the first time. template-draus scoffed. [fuck this uppity sow. is that how i sound? were scalping her ass this time?] an awkwardness lingered in the other minds. [uh, regular draus, isnt she you?] benhata asked. [she aint. im here. shes there. are you supposed to be snuffed somewhere?] [i yes? technically?] [then why aint you dead? why you jawin at me? what use are you to this fightin body of ours? fuckin find some use for yourself, soldier.] the former glaive gave a series of defeated noises and just sighed. +reset the set,+ chambers cast, his ghosts threading out to reach tavers. he snickered. +and+ the space around them flickered. the toppled rubble flashed and then vanished. they were standing beneath a ringed highway now, surrounded on all sides by traffic infrastructure and half-built infrastructural complexes. +action.+ Chapter 19-11 The Paths We Pave (II) chapter 19-11 the paths we pave (ii) +hey, hey, new vultunites. lots of exciting things on the horizon. oh, for the actual people living upstairs, i mean. not us fateless. but hey, at least we get front-row seats and can watch shit burn down. thats something, right? anyway, i got a special program planned for us today. a consang of a consang told me a little something about which stormjumper lobby chief paladin naeko might be spending all his time in. since hes a man so dedicated to the public, i thought i might go say hi, and thank him for the day of work he did. its not every day we get to watch an ori elder get hauled from an event in front of thousands of eyewitnesses after all. that, and a highflame instrument too. we might just have something extra spicy here. thats why i bribed an entire match! will he say anything? will he just leave? who knows. lets roll the dice. [initializing stormjumpers function] [connecting to lobby: merrikaiver-4] [logging in as calafateless] [direct casting naekotheonly] calafateless: good morning, chief naeko. naekotheonly: its not. i lost three matches in a row and now im about to get smacked talked. listen, just get it over with already. and no rash-stuff this time. the match starts in a few seconds and ill get your asses soon. calafateless: im not here to do that. im cala marlowe. fateless thoughtcast. i wanted to ask you a few things about some recent happenings. naekotheonly: oh, good, a proparazzi. who you with? calafateless: myself. independent. naekotheonly: wow. your life must be terrible. calafateless: like you wouldnt believe. now, about my questions. naekotheonly: elder drongo and instrument greatling will not be commented on. they are still within paladin custody. no, the unwhere is not down. no, oversec c-1 wasnt an inside job to generate sympathy donations for the exorcists. calafateless: and what about the other individuals seen during the incident a week ago. do the paladins have anything on the unidentified characters fleeing from instrument greatlings cadre? and what can you tell us about the rashrunner, aedon chambersthought to be a low master acolyte? naekotheonly: yeah, i didnt know dicks grew that small. calafateless: naekotheonly: its like a crippled baby carrot. if you cut it in half again. thats what i think about him. you like thinking about small dicks, miss fateless? calafateless: i naekotheonly: listen. ill do you a favor. you are officially invited to the trial. you can come in person and see the nu-dog carnival for yourself. im casting you the invite sequences. got em? [official pass to the scale obtained] calafateless: y-yes, i thank you. i didnt expect [link disconnected; you have been blocked by naekotheonly] calafateless: well. there you have it folks. chief naeko. what a guy. here to thank him for his time, heres fuck the gods corpses peace through genocide.+ -interview between chief samir naeko and cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 19-11 the paths we pave (ii) uthred greatling waited for the paths to claim him, but the moment never came. three days. three days had passed since the light carried the decree. three days since the voice of the choir called for him to ready himself for a personal audience with the high seraph herself. three days, and nothing. that was most torturous above all. the anxiety. the apprehension. the wait. uthred was no stranger to conflict, be it war, duels, or politics. before every engagement, always the tightness, the weight prying at ones organs; the freefall of one''s bladder, paired with an eternal need to urinate, though the body was already clean of waste. for three days he waited, clad in his custom-made honorsworn combat skinan armor born from the marriage of alloy and flesh. it was joined to his body in more ways than one, connected to his senses like an external organskin over skin. sleek paddings of gunmetal gray accentuated his augmented musculature, the plates of memite connected to graphene supports, and a carbon nanofiber underweave. sequestered in his personal demiplanea private garden paradise positioned just past two doors of sliding glass at the crest of greatling manorhe looked out into the pre-dawn sky and drew in a breath. the air was crisp. ripe with flavor and fragrance, intoxicating to breath, refreshing to exhale. the garden around him was layered with moving vines sprawling across the walls and roofs, the colors a clash of black on purple, shy orchids peeking out from between ebontas. at his feet ran an impossible river, flowing out from mystical mists, the waters limpid and bright, not different than a crystal-made mirror. alritchs frown deepened. i just dont understand why we cant do what i suggested. why you cant just think about it. i will not abandon the greatling name. the thought is dead to me. mention it no more. but it might spare you. spare your life. i do not wish to be spared. i wish to face my demise. i wish to rise above it. i wish to show the high seraph this. of how i am still worthy. an exasperated breath escaped from alritch. oh, uthred. why must you his words ceased then as something moved through the lightthen space itself. the skin of reality parted into slotted blocks, each shifting and stacking over each, the space around uthred rebuilding itself and imprisoning him away from the higher reality. alritch reached out for him from the doorway, but cowardice gripped him, and he approached no more. just as well. for all the lesser brothers vices, uthred cared for him still and hoped he could be spared a dark end should life do them a final unkindness. in the moment between the instant when the paths came and rebuilt the world around uthred, leaving him alone in a steepled passage of fire and stone, uthred greatling stood to face his brother, knowing that if he were to never return, at least one among his family would remember him fondly. he just hoped that vator would continue being obedient in his absence. the boy was gifted. made to be superior. even to his own siblings. but since the breach of his artificial womb, there had always been something wrong in the boy, something that unnerved even uthred. thinking about what his youngest son inflicted on his tutors and playmates, uthred forced the thoughts away and hoped his brother would not be the fool and agitate the child. in some regards, true death would be a kinder fate than joining one of vators many art exhibits. as waves of metaphysical bricks reverberated around uthred, assembling his new environment bit by bit, he realized that he knew this placeknew it well. he had been here a lifetime ago, made his stand against the stormtree onslaught in the ancient nolothi catacombs, both sides desperate to flank each other after months of brutal attrition. wide pillars lined with stacked skulls oozed rising threads of phantasmal essence, the ghosts present and whispering, bathing him in perception. the defensive positions and devastation were not yet present in the space. there was no rubble here yet, the ceiling not yet collapsed from the fighting, the embalmed bodies slotted in the walls not yet torn from their rest and altered into animated armor by tonguetaker as she waded into the fight, butchering three other instruments before meeting her final end against uthred. here he stood, a lone figure between columns several times his size, the ghostly lighting the air in increments as a broad path came into view, stretching for kilometers and kilometers before finally arriving at the foot of a long staircase leading up toward the gutters. when uthred inhaled this time, he fought back a gag as the fetid musk of the hall assailed him. even the smell was the same. but how were the paths able to do this? the high seraph? had she plucked and reconstructed this place from his memories? or could she reach backward into history like no one else was capable, reconstructing moments long past with near-perfect precision? high seraph? uthred said, pushing the words out from his stomach for maximum projection, seizing his worry by the throat and strangling it into submission. for all the power veylis avandaer may have, she would not have him mewling in fear. she would not have him cowed. he would face her covered in shame and glory alike. the greatlings were guilty of immense failure. this was true. but the fact she chose to embark him on this section of the paths gave hints that she still remembered his greatest deeds. i am here, high seraph. here to be judged. summoned to attend. still no response came. the wind whistled as they passed uthred, rushing between the columns. he triggered his combat skins helmet, and a wreath of flesh cupped his face before an opaque shield of white fused over his face, protecting his features from further exposure or unseen dangers. as he drew in a breath this time, filtered air entered his lungs and new information was fed to his visual display. he was trying to glean any additional details he could from his surroundings when the order was given. +follow.+ the ghosts spoke without any hint of tone or gender. threads trailed forward toward the horizon, toward the staircase leading up. but so too came a shadow descending, an enshadowed figure that uthred glimpsed sometimes on the rare days he slept, in the mists of his dreams. uthred? her voice, high and lyrical sounded. uthred? i have been here so long? is that you? did she finally claim you as well? blinking fast, he didnt understand the meaning of this. in seconds, the far and distant figure moved as reality reshuffled. now, she was just across form him, her long flowing auburn hair snapping back into his memories as he remembered, as he recalled. yet, as she drew nearer, he turned away, more certain than ever this was a test of his spirit, that the high seraph was measuring his mettle. uthred? uthred? please. face me. show me your face. it has been so long. his wife was dead. she was killed during the war. she was killed for failing her duty. she was killed for her cruelty and disregarding orders. her name was struck from their annals after, banishing her person forevermore from their ark, and exiling her from her chance of return after the great victory. she could not be here. this was a shadow. an apparition. an assault. torture. rage kindled inside uthred greatling. rage at the indignity of what was being inflicted on him. rage at his helplessness. rage at what he had to do before his strength had any chance to give. do you call for resolve? uthred said, ignoring the desperate pleas of the shadowthe false thing that wasnt her. fine. i accept. i will show you my resolve. the blade formed in his hand in a flash, the nanos in his blood pushing through skin to form a monofilament blade. with a practiced sweep, he cut, the briest shudder of weight told him he sliced deep. the voice of the haunting was silenced in an instant. her body toppled backward, her tassels of hair almost the same hue as her spraying blood. tightness gripped uthreds chest as he looked away from her, forcing himself not to commit any of this to memory, to defy the law. his wife was struck from their histories. just a shadow. forever a shadow. it is done, uthred said. the decree of the choir stands. my loyalty stands. i have not wavered. not for a second. and so this was the truth. but still, veylis avandaer, high seraph and master of highflame remained absent and empty of any reply. Chapter 19-12 The Roads Untrod chapter 19-12 the roads untrod we are not certain what the paths are or how they are functionally expressed. all we know is this: of the 62,384,556 attempts that we, stormtree, sanctus, and ashthrone have made on the high seraphs life, every operation has ended in abject failure with no survivors among the operatives deployed. despite the sleepers we have seeded across highflames choirs and the personnel we have turned, we remain unable to procure any useful intelligence regarding veylis avadaers heaven. this, in part, is likely because no one within the chorus knows either. neither has any agnos interfaced with veylis avadaers frame for the past four hundred years. a possibility could be that she has gone without any adjustments all that time, but with the creation of new heavens and domains and from what we can judge from simulations of her personality, it is highly unlikely she would foreswear growth in exchange for secrecy. the greater likelihood is that she herself is trained in the ways of thaumaturgy by virtue of being blood to jaus avandaer. constructing a simulation from the mem-data we managed to obtain from our fallen assets, the nature of the path seems to mimic the natural world in some fashion, with visual feeds perceiving a rebuilding of space, matter, or place around them. considering the lack of resonance with any of those domains, however, it is likely she is tapping a concept into far more esoteric. though no operatives have ever managed to return from the paths alive, the high seraph sometimes sends the bodies of the fallen back to their families or parent guild. we deduce that this honor is afforded only to those she finds interesting in feat or spirit. our attempts at seizing mem-data related to her from chief paladin naeko have also proven to be less than fruitful. the assets we used against him remain metaphysically impotentunable to inflict violence of any kind upon themselves, objects, or other people. whatever the case, my summation is thus. if the council demands it of me, i will do my utmost to prepare, orchestrate, and execute the operation to assassinate veylis avanadaer. but my personal recommendation, formed from years of active experience, hard data, and lack of intelligence, is that this is a waste. a waste of effort. a waste of lives. a waste of materials. a waste of time. veylis avandaer is not a problem we can solve simply by ghosts or blades. -mirror-concave izu mgrin 19-12 the roads untrod the breeze brushing across the filth-coated stones of the hall whistled at uthred, the noise shrill like laughter, mocking him for his deed. it was all he could to avert his eyes. if he looked, something in him knew the high seraph would have judged him. failed him for weakness. he fixed the point of his vision toward the horizon, gaze climbing as building light poured down. blood was pooling at his feet now. blood, a shade darker than her hair. her body was a falsehood, but the hollowness panged inside him, true and deep. as the unnatural brightness coiled across reality, uthred greatling straightened his posture and reviewed the state of his combat-skin. his equipment was ready. his rend was almost nonexistent. the only question was his spirit, and so he was to show his will once more. for himself. for the high seraph. a demonstration of worthiness. my resolve stands, he said, pushing the words out from his lungs. he had no urge to speak, but speak he did, if only to burden his mind with a new focus. he needed to get the high seraph to respond. needed to why do you assume that i care about your resolve? the hairs on uthreds neck stood. her voice came from below where her body lay, and for the pan of a heartbeat, he thought his mind was betraying him. then, she rose, rising tall and staring down at him. his body was trapped between two thoughts and lurched as if pulled by conflicting movements; he wished to turn away, but also to strike her down once more. her face remained a blank canvas. her skin, wan like paper, regarded him without any discernable features. no eyes. no nose. no ears. no lips. not even true complexion. only her hair spilled out from the skull in threads of color, alternating between red and auburn while bathed in the caress of the light. a dryness filled uthred throat as he took a step back. the thing bearing his wifes contours titled its head at him. why do you retreat now, uthred? have you not cut me down once? did you not state your resolve remains? mustering his strength, he planted his feet and refused to move. the monoblade remained extended, his fingers gripping the hilt tight. i do. then why did you kill me? the question sounded so genuine, words of lowest contralto articulated clean and clear. you didnt want to do it. i can feel it. see it in your posture. but you did it anyway. cut me down. you seem to have strength confused with surrender, my love. supplication to an outside power is not honor. do not spit this poison at me, uthred growled, mind screaming for him to cleave the creature down once more and ignite the pieces with his heaven. but his body was reluctant, and from her words grew a seed of despair. it is true. she knows. of course she knows. she has been watching you. do you know? for three days her eyes rested on you, peering at you from the light. learning who you are now, how you have changed. if you have changed. and so the high seraph sends you to test me? i am not a test, the blank-faced thing said. i am but an echo. a reverberation of your past. a construct formed from alternative possibility. nothing more. never to be more. never to be beyond the reach of her heaven. avo set to work immediately, subsuming minds and deaths. the waveraider sparked and buckled, unraveling as the sanguinity spread itself. new knowledge spilled into avos consciousness alongside the new templates. lives relived and secrets unveiled. memories of other barges intercepted and raided greeted him. along with how they achieved their ambushes. beyond the new vultun border existed a sea of encampments, mobile settlements of fateless amassed, desperate to get into the city. here sprouted opportunity and predation alike. smugglers looking to stock their cargo. scouters seeking potential circuit fighters. swindlers working the crowds, making what profits they can. and amateur necros plying their craft, binding secondhand metas to those with something worth trading. releasing mem-cons through the population, letting the invasive memories spread, and giving the waveriders something to track. i see, avo said, breathing as he grinned. panic pulsed through his newest templates while his attention turned away from the other bodies moving inside the barge. using a bottleneck *** i see, the blank-faced thing said. her voice was empty of judgment, without condemnation nor pity. you see, uthred replied. the casualness of her words churned frustration inside him. first, he was taken into this place. then, he was told to bare himself and make speech of his shame. in return, all he got was this? a casual statement bereft of any substance. no. no, you do not see. jhred is dead. abrel is being held by paladins for what she did in the aftermath. the paladinsthat bastard naeko. he refuses me. the other houses, they spurn us. the meritocrats, they smell our blood. turning away from the imitation of his wife, uthred swept his surroundings and searched for any sign of the high seraph, a hint of her person. is this the admission you seek? a statement of weakness? of the embarrassment, house greatling has brought upon you? upon the guild? nothing. still nothing. his jaw clenched. he fought to keep his temper controlled. she cares nothing for shame, the shadow of lady greatling said. stand and deliver. deeds, uthred. deeds above all. merit through action. have you forgotten i have not! the words escaped from uthred as a shout, the force of his bellow startling even him. a moment of shock followed, and he stepped away from his wifes shadow. i have forgotten nothing. except for you. shaking his head, he looked around this placethe place of his greatest triumphbefore returning his gaze to his wife. i have served. i have served beyond faithfully. i have deeds enough. glory enough. but faded victories are as varnished gold, and so the shadows of present defeat prevail. jhred was he was always your boy. your son more than mine. he could not master himself. and i could not spare him my scorn. and so he left. and so he died. abrel she is born of us but bears my rage. she loved jhred deep, and so, whatever happened it must have uthred refused to sigh. he held the exhaustion inside himself. what do you wish of me, great avandaer? take her away. i do not deserve this insult. i have given all for highflame. do not taunt me with my wifes shadow. and why do you assume that i am an insult? you have hair. a voice. but i dont know if its yours. and i have no face to recall when i leave. and is that something you want? to remember me? to have my banishment unstricken from the records? uthred paused. it is possible. all defeats can be atoned. all blemishes can be smoothed. all shame can be turned to glory. you are in the pathshistory retold. the roads untrod. where did you wish your life led you? and what do you wish to become of your fate now? i i wish to wipe away our failings. achieve redemption redemption. to prove the worth of our bloodline once more. the failings of your son, or your daughter? uthreds eyes hardened into a glare. our failings. ours. i am their father. their patriarch. the fault is mine to claim. so you say. the shadow of his wife hummed a shaking laugh, the low melody of voice feeding his ire. you know what is to come soon. the assembly. the trial. more than highflame will judge you. more than our guild will see your shame. i know, uthred said. i will face them. they cannot shake me. but your daughter can. are you prepared to abandon her, authority greatling? for the greater good of the guild and the name of your house? what price are you willing to pay to show your resolve? to undo your shame? coldness rose up his throat. i what if ithe voice of veylis avandaerhigh seraph, demanded a sacrifice you are not prepared to give? what then? what will you do then, authority greatling. uthred closed his eyes and centered himself. ...would my position do instead? my life? then, in an instant, the shadow of his wife went very still. no, it will not. and then the walls suddenly splashed inwards as existence itself fell like a hammer upon uthred greatling. Chapter 19-13 And the Ways Forsaken chapter 19-13 and the ways forsaken it is impossible to regard reality as anything but a cage once you brush the power of the absolute. or perhaps that is the wrong way of thinking of it. perhaps it is the power of redefinition. the miracles delivered by the gods and their heavens were not divine originations in the end, but a reinterpretation of existences patterns. fire, but more. metal and flesh. the sky reimagined as a place. such is the basis of all this power. marriage. marriage between effects and concepts. infusing material, actionable, or conceptual catalysts with laws rewoven. a new lore. from this, we are capable of almost anything, limited by a lack of knowledge and deviations in our understanding of worship. such was a good thing, as i have come to understand. the ruin we wrought upon ourselves was desecration. held only in check by our parochialism. if even a trickle of the elder knowings remainedif the neo-creationists had inherited an intact guardian, if the pantheons managed to discover the slumbering voiders instead of ii dread to imagine the state of totalitys tapestry. perhaps all would be torn now. the damaged connective tissues of natural law, spatial correspondence, and temporal relativity sundered deep and true, without any chance of restoration or mending. of all the terms voidwatch has used to describe my former masters, one stands above all others. demiurges. controllers of the material. antagonist of the spiritual. such were the ones we usurped. such was the role we inherited. but do not take the wrong understanding from my words, veylis. i wish for you to understand the truth of things, instead of having your gnosis colored by the dyes of emotionality. the wounds of reality run deep. this is true. but what is tearing but a pull applied in opposite directions? and preludes a suturing, two ends of an open gash being forced back together. but ultimately, you must beware and be ready. existence itself lies to us, for untold generations have grown beneath altered skies. reinterpretations born of other reinterpretations. fragments from shards already broken, embodying only singular aspects of the whole. in a single word: recursion. -jaus avandaer to veylis avandaer 19-13 and the ways forsaken when uthred was struck, it was with the weight of every blow he experienced across the centuries of his life. a million pains blossomed through his body, same, different, forgotten, and remembered. the stones gave to open air beneath his feet, his pain editor triggered, but only some of the hurt was banished. that which he suffered at a time before the implant was grafted remained, and crawled deeper into him. but still, what was pain to an authority of highflame? not an obstacle. not even a distraction. manifesting his heaven of fire, the starscarred, a thousand and one pluming flames coruscated out from his dissolving body as the heat of a star detonated at its core. from an erupting blast, uthred greatling was born again, emerging from a light-made egg spewing molten yolk. the blazing feathers sprouting from his being grew sharper, turning to a coat of blades. he shimmered with spiking temperature, the radiance around his body burning space itself, painting a scab-made plate of armor into existence. ravenous embers spilled out between the cracks and crevices of his ontology and where body and head were cuirass and frog-helm respectively, smoke-made wyrms acted as his arms and legs, spilling out from the cracks as if the shell of his person was piloted from within by serpents born of smog. a wave of heat emanated out from him, cleaving far and wide over the reverberating brickwork relayering his surroundings. sections of reality were actively rebuilding themselves, the gap he was swatted through vanishing as blocks slid into place and melted into each other. for a moment, his senses screamed with confusion, a strange clash of details and feedback flowing into his mind. his cog-feed glitched as ghosts struggled to isolate the most essential details. then, as if a weapon reassembled, a shuddering click ran through everything, and then uthred found himself plunging through a wall of roaring storm clouds. hyper-accelerated munitions greeted the threshold of burnsight, and he spread his perception through his expanding wave of heat. missiles and drones clashed as interceptors crashed into warheads, stopping their final deployments. nuclear blasts went off all around uthred, but their traveling force and heat were drained clean by extending quills of fire. coiling his smoking wyrms into arms, he formed a blade of such heat it was blinding white. more projectiles came. but uthred cut. and the atmosphere itself came afire; clouds vanishing, geometry burning. where one thing was cut, the immolation spread, and within it lingered a constant slash, the cut existing so long as something burned. gathering his focus, he tried to clean what he could from what was around him, tried to understand why the high seraph had cast him here. strangely, he noticed translucent threads burning around him. spatial reality quivered as the air pulsed with expulsions of soulfire. such was a scene uthred knew well. thaumic backlash. or in more severe cases, a paradox. more importantly, he remembered now. this wasnt a sky. he was briefly trapped inside an enemy porter during the last war. they died, not knowing the starscarred was designed to cut and burn heavens like theirs. they died, and he tore his way free with his battle-thrill climbing, ignorant to the great folly his wife was soon to commit. +seraph avandaer,+ he began but the thought never got the chance to leave him. the soulfire unzipped the plane he was in, just in time for him to be flung into a wall of frost. his heat was quenched in an instant. and when the cold bit down on his fire, it burst ablaze while he ceased to burn. the same fate he just inflicted came back around thereafter. soulfire erupted out from his heaven as he found himself back into existence in his mortal form, his fires dying all around him warning: paradox detected domain: [fire] rend capacity [starscarred]: 88% a ripple rushed through the world again and the bricks layering existence around him spun clockwise, their faces cascading to form a new horizon for him to face. gone was the chaos of demplanes and unidentified coldness. now, a soft mat made of durasynth foam filled his vision as he struck the ground hard. years of training taught him how to roll and his utility fog expanded out from him, acting as a final cushion. even so, at such speeds, a baseliner would have ended as a smear. uthred, sustained by augmentations sourced from technology and thaumaturgy, escaped with only severe joint damage, multiple contusions, and heavy internal bleeding. still, he rolled to his feet even as he spat a mouthful of dried blood upon the mat, the nanosurgeons in his body already working to repair his damages. you remind me of my father and mother both. not nearly equal. you are far too flawedtoo human. but i recognize the weakness that possesses you. the love that enchains you. the war that rages inside you. i have seen them countless times. collected them. even felt them. so do not think i do this to torture you. your pain does not please me. i just need the lesson to settle in, and i will teach it the way my mother taught me. i dont abrels hand flicked out as a blur. a flash of light slipped through the air and flitted along jhreds throat. a beat passed. then came a line of red. then the first trickles. then gushing blood. it took all uthred had not to look away as his eldest son reached up to grab at his wound, only for his head to fall from his shoulders. do not mind him anymore, abrel said, never rewarding her brothers corpse with a second glance. our parents shape us. prepare us. give us what tools they can or break us. but eventually, our choices must be our own, and so too must the fates we reap. just then, another shadow stood over uthred, the blurred face of his father appearing briefly, expression mired in pain before fading like a mirage. your own father was a miserable man. never made it far in the guild. but his pain was your triumph. and he would have been proud of you, had he not taken his own life before the arrival of your greatest victories. uthred looked away, refusing to face his past. thank you, high seraph. no. that is not what you wish to say. i have compromised your mind, i can hear your thoughts. speak as if you are the strong and not the meek. biting his back a growled as he will with all his might to stand, uthred closed his eyes for a moment to center himself before returning to the conversation. youre a sow, veylis avandaer. years of service. loyalty. all my efforts. and you tell me youre not torturing me now. and ask me to betray my daughter. i didnt, abrel said. i just said that i would not accept your life, resignation, or exile as recompense for her failings. it is as you said. years of service. loyalty. all that effort. you are not the one that has displeased me and humiliated us. that is your blood. an issue of your house, indeed, but our path is to pursuit of strength and virtue. and i see little of either in the collective destruction of an entire house. especially one so esteemed as the greatlings. then why am i here? why have i been summoned. because i have a use for you, uthred. i favor you. i respect you. your wife, your first son they failed us. they failed the dream. your daughter stands on the precipice. in one path, she is exiled. her frame is taken. she cast down from the tiers and given to my fathers dogs to rip and rend and ruin as a show for the city. house greatling will be shamed but remain intact, and when the assembly comes, you will lose your position as authority for all the demerits accumulated. you, and all the other chivalrics. abrel leaned down closer then, her lips next to his ear. the others scheme against you. many still call you songless. they refuse to accept you. the meritocrats despise you. they view your kind as a cancer. and as of now, i am inclined to agree. however. there is something you can do to change my opinion of your house, at the least. not a sacrifice. losses do not make up for losses. should you ever gain any notions of falling on a blade or ritual suicide, then know i will only take it as an insult. i require an act of valor on your part. addition to make up for subtraction. make it known, uthred said, steeling his resolve. abrel leaned back and smiled. do you know that your sons frame was never recovered? his heaven remains missing. uthred swallowed. yes. i have also heard rumors. that many of the dead and missing their offerings, abrel finished. she sighed. as i am stressed to shape our futures and guard us against subtler threats, a number of other individuals have also shamed us. some of them, i suspect, are compromised. others are simply disappointments, not unlike poor jhred. a secret was hidden from me recently. of a theft. the theft of something i could not afford to lose. a failure that has already seen all responsible parties punished. i choose you, uthred greatling, as my champion. because ive always respected your resolve. and because you have far too much to lose if i am to withdraw my support from you. and because youre sure i cannot betray your confidence, uthred muttered. a loud piercing laugh emerged from abrel, a noise she would never make. no. im not sure of anything. even with my control over reality. blind faith is for worshippers. we must be the captains of our own souls, hm? first, i will require you to draft a temporary writ of resignation from service. that way, you can be spared what is to come. after that, there is something i need you to seek, and a trial i need you to attend. are we of an understanding, uthred songless? the patriarch of house greatling hardened his resolve. yes. good. this is what you need to know so she told him of the stillborn, of the coming of the ladder, of what is at stake, and what glories he had to gain. and at the end of her words, uthred was a man broken and resmelted by purpose and fear. *** casting uthred back into his little garden through a crack in the paths, veylis avandaer set her pawn in place as she moved through the light, simulating the world around her in all its permutations. it was likely more than good fortune that kept her spared of her mothers presence for this little conversation. regardless, uthred was another soldier deployed in the battle. veylis thought not of him as a pawn, but as a blade she just unsheathed. she had others, of course, but the temporary dissolution of house greatling was safe play to take. after all, who knew the condition of the greatling girls mind after the compromise of the lobby holding her? no. abrel greatling had to die. a pity, but a precaution nonetheless. this way, however, she could engineer things so that uthred and the most useful among his children might still reach the end of this journey alongside her. Chapter 19-14 Change the Doors (I) chapter 19-14 change the doors (i) +++ [breaking!] breaking rumors: uthred songlessformerly authority uthred greatling of highflame has officially resigned his position and privileges these leaks remain unconfirmed. as of right now, we have not managed to obtain any confirmation from the leading members of the choir however, an aero-vehicle linked to the former authority has been sighted crossing a checkpoint on the edge of the tiers. it is unknown if his dissent has something to do with his daughters upcoming trial or his son''s death. for more up-to-date reports on guild-based affairs, stay tuned to hark the tiers. [cast concluded] +++ -hark the tiers, special report 19-14 change the doors (i) fifty-two thousand arrowhead markers circulated the sigil-like channels of the maw, each representing a smuggler barge carrying human cargo. displayed as a dynamic three-dimensional map of new vultun via the george washingtons systems paired to avos deepnav, the cadre saw what he saw, and learned what he already knew. currently, he had mem-locks to 4.9 million refugeesnow smuggled slaves signed to various syndicates. so long as they remained alive and the fateless remained in nether-stable environments, he would be able to track them without difficulty. heavens gained: [waveraider] (signals/space) x1; [flathider] (geometry/boundaries) x1 ghosts: [26,557,563] thaumic output: 16,099 in the end, subsuming and killing the squires proved more lucrative than even the two heavens he claimed from their golem and the barges core. through them, he now had access to new contacts: necros operating beyond the border, making their trade as memory dealers, secondhand metamind installers, and cognitive enhancers. wilders who had memories worth trading or potential worth investing formed the bulk of the necros clientele, but other clandestine services could be provided as well. say, to a group of enterprising street squires who hired said necros to mark some of their other customers in bulk, allowing the smuggled goods to be tracked when they resurfaced across the border. ah, a play on the old tagged imps, scheme, quail said. the old squire chuckled under her breath as her eyes jumped from point to point on the map. bathed in the vaporous glow of the phantoms, the group studied the routes avo drew. sections of the border were already pinned. points where barges consistently stopped were isolated as wellsuspected to be hidden hanger bays. these gimmicks usually dont last long. the problemfor both sidesis with the necros. sooner or later, they might just sell you. leave you staring at a syndi knot waiting to ambush you instead of an unprepared barge. was kinda surprised about them just openin fire, draus said, a frown painting her face. if theyre gunning to snatch some product, the whole run looks like a damn mess. could feel the kind of munitions they were using. pulled some of them into my arsenalist. high-pen to punch a hole through the interior of the barge. shattershots follow up. took a peek inside a couple of seconds ago; looks like a fuckin slaughterhouse. or if avo was the one to do em all in instead. gonna need more than a pressure hose to clean the compartments. damn waste, even by syndicate standards. tavers shook her head. youre looking at it wrong. the crew avo snuffed arent movers, theyre squires. the fateless are just more eyes that can be used to track them if someone uses a registry. the crew needed to be handled because fuck boarding action and close-quarters combat. why] both instances of draus asked, within and without avos consciousness. the legendary squire stared blankly at the regular. because some of us see a job well done as we completed our objectives, not i murder-fucked an entire block empty of life with nothing but a nu-dogs jawbone and a can-do attitude. draus snorted. sounds like some yall are pussies. the rest of the cadre stared at draus, most dubiously, dice attentively. regardless, avo said, righting the conversation. i have run some cognitive simulations. calvino helped. triangulated several points of potential compromise along the border. also burned the sessions the waveraiders used to contact their necros into chambers. new assets for him to spoof. will compromise more through them. continue to mark the fateless for us now. im surprised you didnt just burn those bastards instead, tavers said. tempting. had to reshape my mind more than once to resist. but theyre more useful as compromised assets. can perform their tasks autonomously. though he would have to watch for lapses. just requires some encouragement from chambers. and maybe white-rab. tavers. want to meet with him soon at the easy armistice. ask him to accelerate arrangements. synced on that, tavers said. hes been spotty the past few days. turns out, the incubi hold a hell of a godsdamned grudge when you help null a few of them. the shits just had to be good at their craft too; rab said he got nulled once already. hes been keeping himself real quiet. avo grunted. ensouling his progenitor was wise, then. but the penalties of drawing him into ninth column affairs were already making themselves known. if he had refused avos offer or postponed it, white-rab would be dead now. nulled in retaliation for the aid he offered in the cadres time of need. there were still too many risks with everything they did. too many unpredictable threats and hidden adversaries. incubi. highflames political troubles. omnitech heavens. the low masters. her eyes widened as she planted both her hands over her mouth. oh no. yes, avo said, an unwilling chuckle escaping him. going to have a new conversation after this. personal tutoring. thaumaturgy. kae narrowed her eyes as she pouted. stop teasing. were not going to do that. yet, draus finished. the agnos wheeled on the regular. never! she turned back to avo. so. were going to alter the heaven of that border wall section. this is the goal? yes, avo said. want to rephrase a few canons. i see, kae said. but the annual patches can be expedited, avo continued. especially if a barge detonates its rendsinks trying to cross it. make it seem like a paradox. tavers unfolded her arms and gave avo her full attention. a loud emergency. something the entire city will notice. especially the syndis and other smugglers. yes, avo said. goal is twofold. remove all smuggler traffic for that point in the wall. for our use only. deployment of agnosi to fast-patch potential weaknesses will give us an opening. horror became kaes expression. avo youre not going to eat my peers, right? avo considered his reply. he considered how to phrase his feelings on the matter. if an agnos directly harms someone else. yes. immediately. but dont worry. is something i want white-rab to help us with. shouldnt even be any actual agnosi when he intercepts the commission. huh, kae breathed. so, youre saying we go instead. you. chambers too. he can jack in person. going to use him as my conduit to interact with the heaven. want to compromise that section of the wall completely. he pointed at the second risen markerthis one connected scale via a phantasmal string. use kassamon to oversee the operation. remove all chance of discovery. they know how i look, kae said. my memories are also maskable, avo said, pulling up memories from some of his incubi. our consangs at ori-thaum have stashes across the city. programmable proxy minds. i will alter your biometrics using woundmother. been wanting to enhance your biology for some time now. you will get through. en-enhance, kae whimpered. wont hurt. can graft them painlessly. use canon of biology. i regret helping you build that. will thank me soon, avo said. the third marker he highlighted was at the same place as the second. kare sighed. [no. what are you going to make me do.] +get you promoted,+ avo said. turning his attention back to his cadre, he elaborated on his plot. going to be leaving mem-data in the overloaded barge. paladin kare will fortunately discover it. along with several major smuggling routes. draus smirked as she nodded. plannin to elevate one of our puppets, huh? she has too much potential to be wasted as a pawn, avo replied. the last marker grew higher than all the others, its rushing mem-data forming active memories of a refugee sanctuary two hundred kilometers beyond the external maw that formed a ring around new vultun itself. going to be our bridgehead to the world outside. have necro contacts there. calvino can also make us invisible to all of voidwatchs drones operating in the area if need be. gives us more openings. essus. want to talk with you after. you and dice. both former refugees looked at avo and blinked. the latter would likely take little convincing. essus though avo wasnt sure how he would feel about the role avo conceived for him. ultimately, it would be their choice. in the end, no one person would be essential to the success of this endeavor. especially with how avo could burn whatever fallwalkers or unsuspecting guilders into being his perfect agents, but essus and dice were already shaped to present purpose. and there was a poignancy in deploying them that couldnt quite be conveyed with words. draus should be able to create a usable passage beyond the borders if everything goes right. and this section of the wall will be secured. only ours. too compromised for anyone else. ran and rebuilt the plan with my templates many times. welcome additional concerns. improvements if any of you have them. a brief silence followed as bands of thoughtstuff circled their metas. then, among the cadre, one arm was risen. chambers, avo said, regarding the man sitting atop the locus-embedded throne. the half-strand nodded. he drew in a breath and spoke: so im still a little confused about, like, everything [oh, you stupid motherfucker!] template-chambers roar at his true self, anger buffeted by a chorus of laughter exploding across the conflagration. [kissing your ass, huh?] abrel taunted. Chapter 19-15 Change the Doors (II) chapter 19-15 change the doors (ii) okay. so. youve survived your first five runs. good for you. good, good, good. maybe you''re made of more than luck. maybe there is a lick of skill or potential inside you. maybe you gonna be more than just fighting meat bound for the maw. seeing that you made it this far, let old lady tavers give you some advice. up to this point, youre probably still alive because youre not like the other idiots. you notice things. you anticipate. plan ahead. prepare. learn the terrainwho you might be facing. you invested in the right kinds of consangs, equipment, training, and intelligence instead of vanity augs or drugs. and now new thoughts are crawling up your head. you think youre ready for the big time. you think you wanna start hunting big game; hitting syndicates or stealing from the guilds. keep yourselves steady now. it aint that easy; this games about more than just killing. first, your last few runs were probably pretty straightforward affairs. go here, hit that, snuff him. basic shit with objective parameters that even your average ganger can understand. going up though, things get complicated, and you need to invest in compilation preventatives. besides being able to fight, what will keep you standing at the end of the day is understanding. knowledge. politics is nasty bullshit but its nasty bullshit youre going to learn to navigate if you dont want to end up getting betrayed. for every idiot squire, there is a dumber middler trying to screw everyone around them over. do your own research. figure out the angles you can. keep yourself insured both operationally and intellectually. you dont get to be the muscle or the smart one. specialization is for bioforms and insects, and were not either. know your gigs. know who to trust. and always have a plan to break and run. the second is for the run itself. fighting is performance-in-action. thats how things get doneand circumstantially, how you get out of a fuck-up. most of the time, i dont like fighting. i dont like being in an active gunfight. thats bad business. im not an assault team. im not a godclad. ill be snuffed or nulled in seconds if i go in hard and recklessly. be flexible, be fast, and be constantly creating variables for the opposition to deal with rather than being a variable to be dealt with. more than planning, you have to understand the concept of control. you can buy all the weapons in the world, have all the intel you need, have the backing of an entire guild, and still fuck up your gig because something unexpected slipped your grasp. thats life. shit happens, but you need to catch the shit with your hand before it hits the fan and paints you in yesterdays undigested goulash. control. i say again. control. more than just preparation. when you can exert control, thats when you can call yourself a real squire. thats when you can be considered a vet. if you can actively change the situations on the ground or influence mass amounts of people on a strategic level. all it takes is a few select hostages related to a certain syndicate lieutenant for you to walk out of one of their strongholds instead of needing to risk it all in a messy shootout. take the time to learn the key factors behind the success of your run and influence them however you can. this isnt a lesson that anyone can just teach you. dive the vicarities. live other peoples mistakes. make your own. and if youre still alive by the end of this, i might just be able to congratulate you in person. -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 19-15 change the doors (ii) avo had to admit his uncertainty. what he requested of essus treaded the edges of the mans trauma. deploying him as an on-site coordinator in refugee encampments or gutter settlements to protect others like him from syndicate predation seemed the most optimal use of his talents. still, much of the ask hinged on how well his mind state was, and if he was even willing to leave the city at all. essus had suffered much to see himself and his son brought into the city. and instead of reaping any final rewards upon his arrival, he found only misery and death. the severance of his love and legacy. the desecration of his mind and body. everything traded for more loss. returning him to the place where he made his greatest mistake seemed an insult, but it was where he offered the most use. your choice, avo said. he directed his attention at dice who was in the specially-fabricated meeting room as well. both of yours. wont force either of you into anything. will listen if you have other ideas. see if theyre good. avo had a private space generated to offer both former refugees privacy. his socially astute templates advised hosting this meeting away from the attention of the others. somewhere the two wouldnt feel pressured into decisions they would otherwise not make to fit in with the group. despite how warped humanitys clades were compared to their baseline selves, that tribalism lingered still in most; a want to belong, a need to fit in. {a trait naturally shaped by eons of persistent survival,} calvino had said. {considering how you can affect minds, however, you can probably burn that mechanism away. the question is what replaces it thereafter, and what changes befall the altered. keep that in mind before you change anyone: the stars were once littered with the bones of countless peoples who modified themselves into extinction. systems are deviously subtle. i suggest that you build if you can, break if you must, but bear the structure of what youre changing in mind always.} the words resonated in more ways than one as avo considered the two former fateless seated on smart-matter chairs before him. between the two, essus looked more uncomfortable by far, his pudgy cheeks expelling thermogenic sweat, the oily substance adding a slickness to his curled hair. in contrast, dice was stone-still, unblinking eyes locked on avo as the face of her sleeping nu-cat peeked out from one of her coat pockets. the two of them were both survivors in their own right and through avos conflagration and canons, they could be forged into people stronger still. but this, like the tasks he offered, was something they needed to choose. i accept, essus said, a long-held breath finally leaving him. i will do this. i want to do this. it is where i will serve the most good. his gaze dropped for an instant before he righted himself and met avos eyes. i wish to confess something. i was afraid. avo tilted his head. understandable. not unnatural. i can take it away. change that part of you. is that what you want???vl-b!n. the waif just stared blankly at him for a moment, her thoughtstuff spinning slowly. if avo didnt have her template burned into his consciousness, he probably wouldnt have been able to guess her thoughts at all. even inside him, template-dice was a quiet fire, watching and learning more than speaking and offering. she was a child raised as an attack dog learning to be a person years later than she should have started. in some ways, that made her damaged. in other ways, it made her unbreakableespecially in a world such as theirs. perfectly broken. little wonder she shadowed draus so much. like called to like. when her question finally came, she sounded almost too scared to ask it. can i come back? i dont want to say out in the dark. i like the city more. i like it a lot here. i want to say. can i please stay? [godsdammit,] two-mag choked, cringing as he begged avo to look away from the girl. [what? all that slave driving coming back to haunt you?] abrel taunted. [fuck! you!] two-mag screamed. [fuck you! fuck you! fuck you fuck you fuck! i didnt want to live that life! i didnt want to ask to be born in the warrens. dont pretend this shit is all on me! im just shoveling the shit you pass downyour people fucked the world! your people are why she exists! i just have to deal with it! i am not good enough to climb the tiers! alright! i was born less than youi would have been less than you probably even if i wasnt! i dont have it! i dont! i was just i was just] the former slaver began to sob, and the softer of his cohorts likewise shuddered with trauma. empathy was like poison when injected into a cruel vessel. matter. antimatter. destruction. can do you whatever you want, avo said. was wrong to use you as bait. should have brought you in earlier. because i was a good girl, dice asked. because i killed the targets? yes. yes, it was because she was useful. because if she wasnt, the paladins would have likely interned her, and avo wouldve never thought of her thereafter. yes. but things shouldnt be this way. he reduced the empathy radiating from his templates to recompose himself. and together we can change that. dice only nodded. do you want to do anything else? avo asked. the girl frowned. im not sure. i dont know. not one asked me that. before. ever. can i think about it? have time. think. avo noticed essus looking at the waif from the corner of his eye, a haunted pulling at the mans features as if he finally noticed dices youth and her casual acceptance of the horrors that broke him. primary matters over. i am pleased with the conversation. now. onto potential improvements. improvements? essus mumbled, not understanding. avo gestured at his arms. augmentations. modifications. i can make you more. in mind. body. soul. only questions are what you want; what you might need. essus opened and closed his chrome fingers unconsciously, shivering as the servos whirred. i i dont want more metal. fine. cant do metal directly anyway. will require a cybernetics station. tavers still getting that set up. but biology is another opportunity. dont even need to look different. i can just give you standard improvements. no deformations required. essus swallowed and nodded in thanks. dice shot the man a brief look like he was strange before looking at avo again. can you turn me into a gun? even with her template inside his conflagration, the question the girl asked caught avo off-guard. calvino sighed. draus template guffawed violently inside his mind. [ah, shit. shes probably got that from me. juvs trying to make me blush.] uncertain how to reply, avo simply grunted. can attach a gun to you. can make your entire sheath like a gun. very extreme morphologies available. can look over some choices later. excitement lit up behind dices eyes as she nodded vigorously, her effervescence bubbling up in her template as well. again, essus eyed the girl, jaw slightly agape at the things that pleased her. but more than that, however, her boldness spurred a bit of boldness out of him as well. that seems a bit extreme but i i suppose i should be a bit more adventurous too. he tried a small smile, fake as it was. it would not do for a child to be brave alone. Chapter 19-16 An Attunement of Flesh (I) chapter 19-16 an attunement of flesh (i) +it''s the high seraph. she''s the one who did this. she''s pulling the strings. i know it. i know uthredthe proud bastard wouldnt have given up his position on his own. theres something going on behind the scenes. something she doesnt even want the other chivalrics to know about. all i know is that he resigned and departed the tiers immediately after. thats not someone consumed by shame or despair. thats a man with a mission. no expression on his face during the resignation. his daughter? maybe. probably. but i cant be sure. the high seraphs been unpredictable in the best of times; i wont pretend to understand what shes planning or what she sees. i just see the point in trying to defy her. yeah, i know. i heard shotins been setting things up against your people as well. sounds like were both heading for a nasty time. hunker down and go dark. stay silent. we can meet again after the heat dies down a bit. see if theres any point to continued collaboration or if we should scrub our minds clean and be done with this. elegant-moon? theyre still looking her over. deep scans show no cognitive compromises and her ego looks mostly the same. besides what was already missing. i just have a feeling that never mind. you get your own affairs in order. ill make contact with you after things have calmed down on my end. the signal will be when i take a walk down nine-shadows street in the district of loathing. run my face through a registry every few days. ill update you about things on my end after the trial. of course, im going to attend. it would look suspicious if i didnt. well, whatever happens, i just hope instrument abrel will be spared banishment. i know the girl. shes a good soldier. the only thing wrong about her is the cunt she fell from.+ -instrument santanado starsinger mondelles to seeker sintaker (ori-thaum) 19-16 an attunement of flesh (i) it took an equal measure of mastery and artistry to reshape a body. with systems within systems wed to other systems, life was a dynamic structure that grew and withered between the moments. mere days before, avos new canons of biology would be little more than weaponsthings solely for harm and nothing further. imbued with elegant-moons mind and granted calvinos instruction, however, he found himself walking uncharted territory: a complete builder of flesh, matter, mind, and soul. culturing new enhancements within the members of his cadre was delicate work. he plucked and learned the limits of their skin, skeleton, sinew, and organs, heeded the song of their blood, and mapped the path of their nerves. he did this as tavers and draus brought new high-end implants for the groups perusal, augments requisitioned from the bazaar and threshold alongside equipment needed to set up a cybernetics and engineering station. where voidwatchs technological modifications were complex yet non-invasive, the techno-thaumic produce sourced from terrestrial creators was easier to graft and anomalous in their capabilities. going over different morphological archetypes with dice and the cadre furthered his insight. allowed him to segregate them into jobs of varying difficulty. essus occupied the very bottom of requirements. despite all the options provided and the improvements he could undergo, the shape his body took still meant much to him, and any extreme adjustments would leave him feeling dysmorphic at best. in the end, his apprehensions were little impediment. voider tech serviced a broad spectrum of preferences, and though numerous polities lived in ways far deviant from baseline, there were more than enough bioconservative communities that still had their own high-end modifications. pairing nanosuites programmed to strengthen skin, bone, muscle, and other tissues with respirocytes designed to hyper-charge his respiratory system, the shape of essus sheath remained unchanged even as his constitution grew to rival most fated. but such was only the beginning. after the coldtech was applied, avo imbued the man with his own gifts as well. domain of (biology) ->canons: my blood the harvester, my flesh the symphony (iii); remembrance of flesh (v) extracting biological traits grafting: [omni-lungs]; [thermogenic sweatglands]; [newlife phagekiller-turbo]; [newlife metabolics]; [skinshift]; [fang endocrine modulator]; [newlife sudoriferic pheromone ejectors]; [circadian enhancer]; [ascender rangesighters-iii] it tickles slightly, essus said, as he lay fastened to a grafting station made out of tesselated smart matter, body secured and stilled as the blood within him shifted and changed, clotting into new organs or layering existing structures with further traits. the omni-lungs, phagekiller, metabolics, and pheromone ejectors were all products borrowed from the newlife research initiative under the no-dragons. ensuring essus couldnt be compromised by most thaumically created fumes, plagues, and chemical compounds were foremost concerns. ensuring he was physiologically charming to the fateless was more of a social investment. the skinshift likewise would allow for him to tighten or loosen his facial features substantially, allowing for some limited individual biosculpting in case he needed to escape while the circadian enhancer was copied from kae herselfreducing a bodys required sleep to just two hours if essus wanted to indulge in such a thing. ghosts flowed over essus face and centered their etheric glow on his eyes. the biomedical phantasmic isolated the organs and surrounding tissue in a coating of light, phantoms projecting simulations of the organs, another flexible layer of lens-like biomass lining the mans eyes. [good, good,] elegant-moon whispered. [honestly, you should grow more. give him a full spectrum. grow every kind of eye possible within the socket. let him see the world for what it truly is] {please ignore that statement and halt your growing urge to force unnatural body horror on the poor man,} calvino interrupted. {you know what he asked for. respect his agency.} avo grunted. elegant-moon laughed. [i can feel your urge to experiment. to play. the one you touch now does not know the joys of being more.] +have other clay,+ avo said. +chambers. draus. dice.+ {might i suggest that you also avoid calling your friends clay?} +no.+ {very well. continue with your dehumanization.} retinal veins glowed with luminous blood. from within essus eyes, avo carved away imperfections, drawing them into his woundmother and discarding them from existence before growing additional substructures for the new lens. as the former refugee blinked, avo heard him gasp, his pupils dilating. i i can see so much detail. how eyes are now tetrachromatic. picks out motion much better too. adjusts to environmental brightness in seconds. main thing is distance. can judge range perfectly from the angle that light hits you. essus closed and opened his eyes, testing the new changes. i did not ask for this. abrel just wheezed. [again. how the fuck are you saying these words.] [i dont see whats so bad about the ghoul,] corner muttered. [thats probably more of a personal issue with you, consang,] paladin kassamon sighed. i think youre good, dice said in the real, breaking the silence with her confusion, unsure why everyone was glaring at avo. you give everyone gifts. keep us alive. isnt that good? again, she looked to draus for confirmation. sure. i know hes got a lot of people on his mind. burning. screaming. whisperin their thoughts to him. avo frowned. you offered. plenty didnt. they were enemies. had to kill them. chambers made a noise. had to is a strong statement the ghoul hissed his ire at the traitor and waved for dice to come over. didnt hear any of you complaining when i did it. helped me. rashed a district. im fucking sorry! chambers threw up his hand. template-chambers cringed. i apologized a thousand times! stop holding that shit over me. i feel bad, okay. i didnt say i was a good influence. i know im not. maybe we should wait till the faither and denton get back before we do this. maybe denton, draus said. aint good for a juv to get her head filled with cult shit. chambers rolled his eyes. as opposed to what? violence and murder? hes not that bad if you listen to him. he doesnt even want people to sacrifice themselves. told me that suicide is like, one of the worst things someone can do because it debases the gift of life draus rolled her eyes. for fucks sake, chambers, he got you already? no! no. i didnt say i believed him, just that hes not that unreasonable. you know. wants to build everyone a nice little place where they can all sing together. kae winced and let out a small breath of apprehension. thats how it always starts. dont insult cas while hes gone. should be allowed to defend his ideas. call us half-strands. avo finished. there! you just cursed! chambers said. avo clicked his teeth at the fool in deliberate agitation. was an analogy. educational. {there really isnt much of a chance for her to be a well-adjusted child if i am, to be honest,} calvino said. {not unless her mind is drastically altered by, say, a metaphysically aberrant monster that basically exists as the eldritch equivalent of an infomorph.} dice. get on the station. avo beckoned for the girl to hurry up as he gave up on the conversation. it was a stupid argument anyway. he didnt see how he wasnt the one with the most to offer the girl. im right. i can be a good influence. can turn into good influence with a thought. and he could. he had the ability to reshape his cognition. all he needed to do was decide. jaus, both drauses chuckled in disbelief. [youre fucking pouting.] casting phantoms out before dice as a curved display of visual mem-data, avo growled under his breath as he brought up a list of options for the waif to pursue. the nu-kitten she held hissed at strange bodies drawing closer in interface windows shaped from memory. can choose now. got an assort of implants. augmentations. full sheaths for you to try. can mount plenty of guns on yourself. tavers bringing in heavy-cyber bodies. can also give you enhanced organs as well. many choices. as avo scrolled through the thought-composed menu to give her an overview of all her choices, the girls face went still as the phantasmal glow accentuated the thin, curved scars lining her face. bite marks, the most of them. things inflicted by the teeth of a nu-dog. {least bastardly of the bastards by far,} calvino repeated, with a bit more disdain this time. can i have a second to look? she asked. avo grunted. can cast choices directly into your mind. will need to kill you after for reset. dice nodded without a hint of fear. thats fine. she picked the cat off her shoulder and held it out to avo. the small ball of orange fur ducked and stared disdainfully at the ghoul from the corner of a green-hued eye, the ape-like limbs jutting from its back clapping in agitation. slowly, avo reached out, careful not to skewer it with his claws, deleting the sudden urge to take a bite out of the thingif only out of curiosity about its taste. noticing the ebony-lined digits drawing closer, the kitten yelped in agitation as it pawed wildly at dice, desperate to remain with the person least likely to eat her. then, essus was back, taking the cat into his hands, spitting a series of chitters at the bioform to calm its terror. you must blink slowly at them, essus said, grabbing the kitten by the scruff. and hold here. it calms the animal. a quiet giggle escaped from dice, watching as the other former refugee bounced it on his chest as if a human infant. see, he said, showing the kitten to avo again. the creature hissed as it saw the ghoul. avo barred his fangs and hissed back. [well, theres the good influence we were all lookin for, the drauses said, nodding at essus appreciatively. him and kae. thatll do it. a buzzing insect circled high above avo and he remembered there was a final member they discounted. {oh, poor sunrise is used to such things,} calvino said. {interesting how human one is considered if they dont fall into the confines of your expectations, isnt it? perhaps the same thing might apply to the girl when she is done with her choices. will the rest still think of her as a child if she chooses to house her ego in a body that resembles a tank?} only one way to find out. flames coming, avo said, preparing to link his mind to dice. the waif nodded and turned back to look at himlook through him. a faint smile pulled at her lips, but she didnt quite complete the expression. time to be a gun. Chapter 19-17 An Attunement of Flesh (II) chapter 19-17 an attunement of flesh (ii) you know, i always hated the term sheath. the term is deliberately backward. your sheath is the hardwarethe physical apparatus you use to interface with the world. your ego is not the blade, but more like the hand that wields the weapon. whatever voider bastard we stole the term from should be ashamed of themselves; their focus on poetic marketing betrays the conveyance of ideas. pitiful. but i can deny it does sound good. catchy. the concept just clings to you after you say it. sheath. it certainly fits more than calling our products enhanced ego-receivable bodies. because bodies arent what they are. bodies are the ugly legacies we got from our parents, hammered into an inefficient lump by our environment. a lacking vessel for these trying times. i dont know if youve all noticed, but were in an arms race right now. against existence. against each other. against our own limits. theres a war happening, and its happening everywhere. and if you dont upgrade, someone else will, and to steal a phrase from my mother: skills what youre forced to fall back on when youre shit outta luck everywhere else. i hated the sow, but shes right. you get a pureborn kosgan, fish old thousandhand back out from the big nothing, have her train the poor shit a thousand years, and then throw them up against some joy-fiend sheathed into a bearbreaker. see who comes out on top. two hundred pounds of brittle bone and soft tissue against a sub-ton of super tensile muscle tissue, titanium-duramite endo and exoskeletal supports, hyper-conductive synaptic layering, and desynchronized nerve silos. see who wins. thankfully, you choose which part of the metaphor you wish to embody. most will end up as the poor bastard about to be swept aside. but you? if im right about you at all, youre gonna wanna be the avalanche instead. or maybe you fancy yourself another kind of calamity altogether. we wont judge. were just here to give you options. hell, well even throw in the immuno-suppressants and the counter-dysmorphia sequencing for free. all you need to do is choose power. choose better. choose onta-fang. -personalized nether-ad of yaer coldstrong, doghead of onta-fang (a stormtree subsidiary) 19-17 an attunement of flesh (ii) dice had a preference for the cybernetic over the purely biological. there was something about the girl that preferred the certainty of steel over the flexibility of flesh. it was understandable, in a way. she lived life as a thing, an object, a weapon, and so, she saw herself the same way: as a blade; a dagger; a gun. what then could speak more to her self-regard than becoming a weapon above weapons? encased in skin impervious to the sharpest of teeth. joined to avos conflagration, the specifications of each sheath and implant calcified into understanding within dices mind. after narrowing her search parameters, the onta-fang stormrazer-ix was the first major item to catch the girls interest, boasting extreme physical power supported by a modified fusion core for a heart deemed treacherously volatile even for light assault vehicles, the girls enthusiasm regarding the choice was cut down with but a scoff from tavers. the old squire rolled her eyes at the phantoms hovering over avos mind, simulating a modeled projection of a headless ten-foot-tall bipedal sheath with wire-like synthetic muscles and an l-200 anti-drone assault cannon fused into its spine. jaus, always with this shit. look. juv. not to piss on your parade, but this sheath is for half-strands and fuckwits. this thing guzzles over a thousand kilowatts on the daily. even inactive, youre going to be sucking juice constantly. ghoul heres gonna have to plant a domain of lightning in you to deal with that. sure. tavers took a moment more to review the design further. sensory suite lining the body isnt bad; core storage for the brain is good too. and i gotta admit the spinal-mounted heavy cannon is real sexy. can punch through an assault drone at two hundred kilometers away with bvr assistance. but i propose the contrary: just jock into an assault drone or missile yourself and cut out the complicated middle-man bullshit. youll get ten times more firepower at a fourth of the cost. and people wont look at you funny while youre walking down the street. dice blinked at all that and shifted her thoughts to template-draus for approval instead. the regular stored in avos mind responded with a shrug. [aint wrong. but youre a godclad now. you can set your own rules. a recharge is just a resurrection away. a death will give you a clean slate. old tavers there got limits you dont.] the girl nodded. okay. adjusting her parameters further, she spent a few beats considering the newlife bomber queen and the ascender operative before moving on, regarding the first as something too grotesque and the latter as too brittle. then, her mind came to a rest on the aegis-provided big-stick diplomat, offering a heavy augmented baseline body built around an expandable particle cannon. {ah,} calvino said, releasing a sigh of satisfaction. {she finally comes upon the diamond we placed among the rough. fitting for her, dont you think? it looks so harmless, yet with a single thought, the arms and chest will unfurl to form a} dice promptly eliminated the big-stick diplomat as well, her attention drifting ahead to one of the oddest acquisitions among the items. [omnitech railjumper] standard market price -> [35,000,000,000 imps] specifications: reactor: ene-393 microfusion cells x2 cog-tech systems: chainglass polyweave vivianite casing with pre-built phalanx warded poly-loci processing core with cybermind ({5.5 tb/s} sprites) modules: [360-vision]; [full spectrum visual interface]; [lidar]; [sensory enhancement suite]; [synth-flesh endomesh]; [scope-10 scangrid]; [railjujmper mag-boosted maneuvering system] the sheath wasnt that much taller than dice was at a glance, barely reaching two hundred and ten centimeters in terms of full height. if judged from the look of its contours, it would have seemed relatively mundane as well, offering two arms, two legs, and even a smooth pyramid-shaped scangrid as a head unit. the true specialty lurked behind the curved layers of polished chrome encasing the body, with the inner system being a twisted interplay between heavily modified synthflesh fused around a heavily modified skeleton composed of coils, rails, pneumatics, and magnetically charged extension units. to put it simply, each step one took while built into a railjumper allowed them to leap, dash, and soar through the air as if they were flechette being fired out of a railcannon. {no. bad. terrible idea. avo, advise her.} the ghoul just grinned. like this one? for a beat, dice said nothing, but the twitching of her lips told him all he needed to know. across the room, tavers whistled. fuck me, juvs like to live dangerously these days. draus grunted in agreement. railjumper. havent seen many people build themselves around those. knew a guy who made it work for him pretty good. first lieutenant kiseng. fastest among my surviving pod of aspirants. might be the fastest reg alive. if hes still alive. bastard managed to shoot down a passin golem while diving across blocks durin the war. yeah. way too fast for most to handle, tavers concurred. youll need a high-end accelero just to keep up with how fast youre moving. and its too fragile to survive a direct impact with heavier armor. shes gonna have a hell of a learning curve if she wants to cut her teeth on that. {not to mention its design is completely nonsensical,} calvino complained. drawing up the schematics for the sheath, the egi scrawled through the data and highlighted several sentences, focusing on how the body was a scientific success at capturing and redirecting the force of a linear-acceleration platform in a miniaturized vessel and a constant counter-magnetic pressure paired with high-tensile tissue allow for the flexing and survival of the host. {this is utter nonsense.} the techplaguer disagreed, chiming with a note of approval. good child. through science everything is possible! everything! hail science! {but none of this is scientific you ridiculous, broken thing. newtons third law is screaming. and the amount of heat this will generate} have been resolved through true science! {loudly shouting science does not alleviate the fact that this body is powered by reality-breaking madness.} a low warbling drone of disgust sounded from the techplaguer. what do you know of science, sky-burner? {...are you serious right now?} what? no. im just you know. tired. you growing those biomods inside me tickled something bad. got me unbalanced and all that other shit, you know. have your mind inside me too, chambers. dont need to do this. dont need to lie. the man drew in a long wheezing breath. i forgot. why dont you just ask the version of me whos burning inside you? just pull the mem-data from him. you dont need to talk to me. "you would like it more if i talked to you, avo said. a beat passed. chambers nodded. yeah im worried about the juv. and jealous of her ass too. jealous? avo asked, refraining from accessing template-chambers for immediate understanding. amassed intuition told him that letting this moment play out to the end as a process would be more poignant than just knowing everything in an instant. yeah. chambers snorted. you already fucking know why, right? its stupid. shit, im blushing. fuck. embarrassed? no shit im embarrassed. got the reg, kae, essus, and tavers giving me looks right now. i just you know. kinda wish someone gave a shit about me like we give a shit about her back when i was a kid. you know? it wouldve been nice if i had someone looking out for me, caring about what i wanted, and stealing stupidly expensive sheaths for me it promptly dawned on chambers what he was asking and he buried his face into his palms. fuuuuccck. holy shit, consang. i wish that you could have been my dad instead. he barked a humorless laugh. a godsdamned people-eating monster for a father. what a joke. you had a monster for a father, avo said. you should wish for more. act to cast his shadow behind. leave him forgotten in the end. chambers shifted his face and peeked at avo from the corner of his eye. listen. can i ask you a question? but im not sure if it means anything ask it anyway. i mean, you already know everything im going to say. whats the point? for you? everything. avo regarded chambers. there is a difference between knowing something will happen and being part of the action. gnosis is not a manifestation. epiphany is not full comprehension. the possibility of a miracle is not the miracle itself. ask your question. make your thoughts true. why dont you just burn the useless out of me? out of me and essus andand anyone else, really. elegant-moon, the paladins! you can make us think like anyone. make us whoever you want us to be. why are we still us? why? i dont get it. its what i would have done. a darkness fell over chambers features. hells. i dont know what i wouldve done if i could do the things you can. probably named myself god boss of some syndicate in some district somewhere and then get myself snuffed after pissing the wrong person off. the question made avo smile. it was an honest question magnified by chambers greatest insecurities. you have seen my brothers. remember how they are? avo asked. the man nodded. yeah? what are their characters like? personality. how do they behave? chambers opened his mouth and shrugged. theyre hungry fucking monsters that hurt and eat shit. yes. small differences. some bigger. some smaller. some cunning. some simple. all without impulse. all ruled by hunger. all ruled by the hungers and the low masters. a self-referencing set of traits and habits. nothing more. no culture can grow from them. no expression. not people. poor pathetic things. i will not make the hungers'' mistake. i will not be foolish like the low masters. you dont want to play god? [oh, for fucks sake,] template-draus muttered. [how much do the rest of you have to put up with this shit?] [all the time,] abrel muttered. [i swear, the ghoul thinks hes some kind of philosopher.] [especially when hes torturing or killing people,] benhata added. [its disturbing.] avo ignored his inner hecklers and kept going. i am a god. i dont want to play human. play tyrant. tyranny is rooted in fear. fear of the oppressor. fear of the oppressed. but this fear is relative. and i do not wish to be chained by such things. debases my pursuit of freedom. the ideals i wish to embody. my power is not relative to anothers existence. my powers are total. absolute. avo looked to chambers. and so are yours. chambers just blinked. consang i wish i could catch on to half the shit youre saying. this is like, freedom and philosophy and shit, right? about letting people live their own choices all the way? avo smiled. all these minds. all these memories. all these lives and perspectives. there are many ways to consider the world. many angles to look at a mistake. do you know why i think existence is broken? chambers shrugged. why? because humanity refuses to cross over. it wants to indulge in all the pleasures of mortality while also enjoying the privileges of divinity. but an idea is perfection. a canon is absolute. i once lamented my fate as a ghoul. didnt ask to be. pitied myself in a way. but i see the grander pattern now. that all of us live lamentable lives. that we are all of us torn by the way of things. seeking ascension. but anchored to affliction and addiction. pulled between the heights of apotheosis and the debasement of primal desire. a wince passed through the half-strands face. i just wanna feel good sometimes, the rashall the porn, its just i needed to feel. yes. i understand. i was not better. i was just as addicted. but mine was harm inflicted. yours is lust internalized. i shaped others with my cruelty. broke them. ate them. you dreamed of love and lust in the greatest extremes. stimulation. reminders that we are here. we exist. but you can be more than that now. or you can be just that. all up to you. i just think it would be another kind of pity. another kind of pitiful. if you do not seek the ends of who you can become. silence fell. but not in avos mind. template-draus made whimpering noises in mockery of the moment. [listen to you both whinge.] {i felt it was quite caring,} calvino said. {a show of our ghouls growing maturity. using stolen goods to augment what is functionally a child soldier aside.} [well, thats cause youre a bit of a bitch, calv.] {charmingly described as always, captain draus.} back in the real, chambers exhaled. im real happy i got lucky. that you decided to keep me alive and use me against mirrorhead. that you didnt snuff me afterward. or take back your frame. thats all. thats all i had to say. and so thats all chambers needed to say. but there was one more thing avo could do. one final act of extreme positive reinforcement. chambers. have a final question. yeah. what? was thinking about adding a final biomod. just for you. yeah would you like to get your genitals enlarged? for the sake of enhancing your heaven. avo could see kaes face break out in horror while draus leaned over next to her. avo, fuck you. what are you doing? you mean it? chambers said, eyes growing wet. why would i lie. godsdammit, avo, if i catch a twelve-inch dick from his fucktopia in the future, im gonna lodge that shit in your skull! the ghoul just kept grinning. and in time, chambers smiled too. ...i love you, consang. i really, really do. Chapter 19-18 Walltaker (I) chapter 19-18 walltaker (i) the maws too damn big for us to cover. theres practically an unfinished city down in the umbraone final fuck you from the low masters. made with the explicit support of the guilds back when jaus was still smoking that hope shit, thinking he could charm anyone into believing in his vision. i loved the starry-eyed bastardmaybe a bit less than naeko did, but still, we wouldve all done anything for him. but sometimesand i can''t believe i''m saying thishis zein was right. zein thousandhand was right. there are some problems you just need to kill. it''s like a cockroach infestation. you don''t reason with them. you crush them. you burn them. that, or they become problems later. hell, it''s the same thing every time. you don''t fix something yesterday, it comes back to shit in your bed tomorrow. and so here we are, looking at a labyrinthine set of mazes, corridors, hidden passageways that run between the channels of the maw. perfect for smugglers and other scum festering in the warrens. fucking nolothi fucks. always leaving us shit to clean up. our drone patrols and spatial anchors aren''t enough to cover the entire territory. frankly, there''s just too much space. too damn big, as i said before. so what do we do? well, we choke specific intersections and passages from above. we watch streetside traffic and scan for what kind of produce is being moved. we try to break up the syndicates and plant our informants deep. it''s like chipping at a mountain, but at least we''re chipping. cant say the same for the bastard agnosi, who refuse to patch anything in a timely fashion. were not dumping all these canons for fun. these are breaches. leaks. and for everyone we plug, a billion spring up. they needed to be choked yesterday. instead, jaus pet pseudo-faithers seem to find more meaning in empowering the same fallwalker half-strands supplying the smugglers with the means to breach our walls than actually securing the walls themselves. i guess the city looks all shiny and different when you spend your time living it up in the heights of the tiers. not like theyre another part of the genocidal apparatus that keeps everything standing. i know im not being fair, but a token effort isnt enough. it just fucking isnt. i have to look at the dead every day. dig through their memories, feel the thrill of some sick fuck as his lustaway fires to the screams of a child he set on fire. and there are millions of them. millions of them feeding off the misery of the fateless. i know the city doesnt consider them people but maybejust fucking maybe could we prove ourselves better than the bastards that came before us? did we come this far just to be a redo of the farms? somedays, the only thing that keeps me from breaking and giving up is remembering naeko. remembering what he is. remembering who he used to be. i cant become that. jaus himself chose us to be his godclads, for fucks sake. we have to live up to the dream. i have to live up to the dream. somehow. id like to update the earlier analog: i dont think were chipping at a mountain. we have centuries. we can wear that son of a bitch down, doesnt matter how big. what we are doing is hacking at the sea. and the waves are just getting bigger -mem-log of paladin maru sandrupal 19-18 walltaker (i) ah, avo. see youve been making more people vegetables recently. ive spied a lot more mysterious nullings popping up all over the warrens. raldi greeted his guests from the far end of a long maple-carved table, its surface so polished that their arriving forms appeared like vague blurs contained within the wood. sawing away at the roasted ursine he ordered and with a full twelve-course meal already laid out, he took the opportunity to scan each of the six figures loading into his rented demiplane. avo approached looking different from before. there was now an ebony exoskeleton spilling out from between his plates of fungal ceramite. the solid tendrils joined to his spine were not also floating behind him on clouds of sparking darkness. as avo drew close, so too did raldis skin prickle with static electricity. that mightve been the most noticeable change if only one could ignore the constant eruption of fire climbing high from avos halo, figures hiding between the flickers of the immolation. two figures trailed close behind him. the first took raldi but a moment to recognize. former regular jelene draus. dread draus, so named by avid crucible consumers. she was encased in fluid but featureless white armor, augmented eyes shimmering as she scanned him. her skin was the color of rusted bronze and her hair swung behind her head in a knotted tail. as their eyes met, he felt a sudden spike of panic pass through his bowelsthe same feeling he got more than once when running from a war morph nu-dog. the second was a bit shorter than draus. where the regular was approximately two hundred and thirty-three centimeters when measured by a phys-sim, the other was maybe twenty less. that didnt mean they were any less noticeable. with her clicking plates and a tetrahedral scanning unit in place of a skull, raldi thought he was looking at a drone for a moment before he noticed a ring of thoughtstuff flowing around the core of the machine and realized there mustve been a human mind embedded in its locus core. running a brief search using his metamind, raldi realized he was looking at an omnitech combat sheath. a damned expensive one at that. [omnitech railjumper] standard market price -> [35,000,000,000 imps] jaus, raldi muttered, chuckling under his breath. the mystery snuffer clearly regarded him with apprehension as they narrowed their perception in on him. with every step the railjumper took, the pallid slats of its armor expanded as if lips exhaling a breath, venting steam with every step. coiling rings and whining mechanism accompanied each of their movements, and raldi thought it vaguely sounded like a gauss rifle being charged up repeatedly. a wave passed over the strangers head and raldi found his attention turned to quail tavers, bringing in the final members of avos cohort. he was about to offer her his greetings when he saw them, appearances sinking into him like blows to the gut. kae kusanade took him a moment and a sequence match to recognize, but aedon chambers and essus were known to him in an instant. they were wanted people with high bounties on their heads and threat profiles uploaded to ad spaces across the city and the nether itself. the agnos and the supposed acolyte were encased in the same liquid armor draus had, but the last member of the group was dressed in an ugly yellow raincoat with malfunctioning holoprojectors. suddenly, he didnt feel so paranoid about spending premium imps to book a private booth in the easy armistice for a day. the extra privacy protections seemed wise too. he made his arrangements as soon as tavers contacted himand from the way she phrased things, this wasnt going to be a social call. hence, he ensured his new consangs would be received with decorum and hospitality. but judging from their posture, he found himself regretting not coming in that stormtree exo-rig reva borrowed for him instead of this cockatrice scale suit he was wearing. flicking the controls on his knife handle and maxing out its sharpness, he cut clean through the smoking nu-bear with a push, the blade gliding through flesh, bone, and gristle like it wasnt there. i hope youre all hungry because all this cost me fifty large. we can eat, avo said, a quiet rasp at the end of his voice, his tone impossible to decipher. but raldi doubted anyone knew how to treat a mind-burning, soul-grafting, heaven-reaping thoughtform nested inside the sheath that was hyper-augmented ghoul. so, raldi said, carving the bears left hind leg loose, you look different. did you do something with your hair? draus glared flatly at him. as did the railjumper. both kae and essus looked at the dome of fungal white lining the top of avos head as tavers rolled her eyes and took a seat. a single laugh barked out from the back of the group. all eyes turned to aedon chambers. what? chambers said. i thought that shit was funny. cant a motherfucker laugh anymore. [incoming link request accepted] letting the packets of mem-data settle just past his outermost wards first, raldi scried the contents using his own ghosts first before triggering [auto-seance-01] and shunting the information into a specialized lobby. as the sequences spilled over, raldi activated all the phantasmics he had in his [full-deep-scan-03394] server and synced to its systems. using an external silo in the network was a trick most necros learned sooner or later, but few had the patience or skill to build mind palaces, labyrinths, fortresses, or diggers as he could. to everyone sitting across from him, his meta would barely give off any indication of activity, and he doubted anyone but avo would notice. we should discuss payment, raldi said, making absent-minded small talk as he deconstructed and rebuilt every strand of memory he received to ensure no hidden mem-cons or traumas were woven within. he did a double scan on every artifact and then commanded [full-deep-scan-03394] to build imitations of all the present information to see about any inconsistencies. payment, avo said, almost sounding incredulous. gave you a soul. and for that, i will be forever grateful, raldi replied. so grateful that i hired the best godsdamned squire in idheim to protect you, and then got nulled twice by incubi for the crime of keeping you safe. dont reframe history. raldi smiled. but thats kind of what we necros do, isnt it. the statement didnt seem to leave the ghoul amused. oh well. scan 100% no traumas detected no mem-cons detected reconstruction parity 100% drawing the mem-data back through the auto-seance and downloading the intelligence into his inner palace, raldi frowned as a simulated map of new vultuns border began to construct itself. whats this information about border wall designation [se-7777] flashed into his consciousness. details about its surrounding defenses also followed, along with the general aspects of what avos was planning. with each passing moment, the information settled, and raldi felt his jaw falling further. architectural blueprints detailing the interior of the sixty-kilometer-tall spatial pylon housing [se-7777]s techno-thaumic reactor flooded his brain, along with the nine hundred different rapid-response golem knots hidden in the structures curving geometry. the border wall? raldi breathed. more details loaded into his mind with each passing second. slowly, his alarm settled into calm and then excitement. this wasnt going to be an overt terrorist action as he feared. and his part was more than achievable. the only risk was engaging the exorcists, and though he wouldnt consider them bad, he was a few decades removed from considering them an active danger in his life. so you want me to jack into the paladins networks. intercept and alter the details of the commission theyll be sending to the agnosi, so you can what? make a backdoor that you and yours can walk in and out at any time. something like that, avo said. raldi smacked his lips together. can i be included in this backdoor? maybe. is that the payment youre going to be asking for? no, raldi replied. thats a favor. for a mutual consang. avo turned his head slightly and clicked his teeth together. the trial? yeah, raldi said. trouble at the home office. afraid they might use her to grease some wheels. the ghoul understood. can be arranged. curious about stormtree anyway. but can you do this? seems like a hard job avos obvious taunting earned him a flat stare from raldi. you know, for someone supposedly made by walton from parts of my mind, youre really kind of a half-strand sometimes. maybe if they stuck me in a soft human body i might be nicer, avo said. yeah? somehow i doubt it. dont need to worry your ugly, burning head about things. i got this. ill have the edits done before the paladins even finish their first draft. ill even fix any sequencing errors i come across in the cast. dont, avo said. might make it too perfect. too suspect. raldi snorted. yeah, yeah. im being a smartass. synced on the details. thisll be a he stopped himself from saying the words. milk-run. even thinking it felt dirty. strangely, the easiest part of the job was on his end. most dives he completed were the other way around. say, intercepting the commission isnt going be hard at all. but how are you getting in and out without being noticed? i can forge the credentials, but the fate-skeins and memories needed are going to be another matter altogether. oh, that, avo said. thats already solved. dont need to worry your soft, vulnerable little head about things. and the ghoul said no more. alright, raldi sneered, leaning in. spill. show me what you got. dont think i trust you that much yet. might want to hire tavers to watch you for a week first. fuck you. show me the rest of the plan. i wanna see. dangerous, avo said, grinning widely. might get you into trouble you cant escape from if you commit. raldi sighed. somehow, the ghoul was proving to be a bigger tease than reva ever was. he then paused and let disgust flow through his mind as he struggled to process the disturbing implications behind such a thought. Chapter 19-19 Walltaker (II) chapter 19-19 walltaker (ii) +hey, sevens, there''s something popping up on the deepnav. pairing aerial imaging now. scrambling interceptors from anchor [se-sec7]. looks like some kind of subtle spatial distortion. ninety kilometers ou shit, twenty now eight. its getting close. too close. fire up the knots. send warning: paradox detected domain: (space) warning: rupture detected domain: (space) warning: entropic overlap detected border wall stability compromised rend capacity [se-7777]: 3% godsdammit. there goes my fucking lunch break. attuning nether broadcast sequences to [oversec-open-public] attention: we have spatial rupture right pressing right up against se-7777! repeat. spatial rupture. geometric fragments spiralingdeploying rendsinks to contain leaking. activating knots. sevens. cast the paladins. get them down here. i have a feeling we need to be sending an emergency commission to the agnosi soon for a wall patch. my guess is either a smuggler barge or a golem just fucked itself passing into se-7777s area of influence. poor stupid shit. guess they thought they could run the border.+ -exorcist kelenn tens nieyvyr 19-19 walltaker (ii) alright, draus said, restarting the simulation with a thought. lets run through one more time. a detailed reconstruction of the se-7777 border wall hovered at the center of the command nexus. created from a mix of nether scans and orbital imaging provided by aegis, the towering pylon protruded from the depths of the maw, its height rivaling that of even the highest elysiums crowning the tiers. near translucent threads passed through the hollow portals dotting the stretch of the structure, each voluminous length composed of countless strands representing all affected domains. from pylon to pylon did these threads run, each section of the wall connected to countless others, with multiple redundancies in place to make a cascading collapse impossible. se-7777 was but one of the few walls in its section, with several others that could assume its role should something fail in its design. however, it stood as the sole dam choking a narrow passing of the mawa geographic weakness inherited from the builders of old noloth. with everything within five hundred kilometers of se-7777 mapped, the simulation reset itself as the avatar for their compromised barge moved down its designated route once more. things will begin with the payload, avo said. will alter the heaven of a barge before setting it off. ensure an easily triggerable spatial paradox. detonation takes effect within 5 kilometers. apply leakage directly. fill it with dead smugglers just in case. makes things more believable anyway. three markers appeared in incremental spots approaching the pylon. i scoped this area already, draus said. mostly dead zones in the gutters above. ill be able to make and manifest the reflections in time while directly observing from above. emergency knot response time? avo asked. thirty seconds, draus said. but well be movin fast. jumpin from place to place and gettin close before they scramble. good, avo said. will have chambers and white-rab on standby if something goes wrong. cripple their communications. distort sensors. low risk of failure. so, i got a question right, chambers said, pointing at the barges avatar. we know itll pop once it gets close to the wall, but why are the paladins gonna give a shit again? like, syndis shit their pants all the time. this might just be a closer pants-shit than most. because were going to deliberately paradox a barge that has passed through se-7777 before, kae explained. its current canons allow it to imprint itself on almost flat surfaces within a certain range of angularity. when it paradoxes and ruptures, the issue will make itself known quite obviously. will also be feeding related mem-data to kare after this, avo said. so we can push the paladins to act if necessary. chambers smirked and nodded. nova. so. after this, you light up kassamond and kare, make the former volunteer to oversee the border patching while the rookie ends up miraculously discovering a treasure trove of mem-data in the wreckage and winning her that sweet, sweet promotion. or just more influence, tavers said. she shot avo a look. dont have her climb too fast. or get lucky too much. jealousy can make the other motherfuckers around you downright perspicacious. an uncharacteristic sigh left chambers. aint that the nasty truth. memories from the mans template sang out to avo. moments from his past where he tried a little too hard or performed a little too well back in his ganger days. the other low lives didnt like chambers outperforming them much. they cut that lesson into him that one midnight, timing their attack with the downpour so they could indulge without ending chambers for good. screaming agony echoed from inside avo as the falling rain washed away wounds made by plunging blades and gnashing teeth. just one of the many instances when chambers howled for death, but the city wouldnt let him go. [yep,] chambers said, chuckling and somehow keeping his mind away from the torture, [shits something all juvs learn quick in the warrens.] after that, kae said, pulling avo away from his thoughts, a commission will be sent, and the agnosi will respond. except not! except it will be us! she giggled, a strange expression overcoming her face. my identity will be changed, my body altered, and my thoughts masked. but me and chambers will be off to the pylon so we can review the damage. she sighed as a distant expression came over her. i cant believe i have to become a spy to practice craft legally again. what is my life? two new shapes were formed by the simulation: floating vivianite lattices enmeshed in biomodded tissue made to be attached ones skull. got something you can use to blend in: proxies, avo said. recovered a few from some incubi caches and a few prototypical versions from one of waltons dead drops. draus shot avo a look. anything else thats good? mostly mem-data so far. information. knowledge about necrotheurgy. know how to build some of the proxies now though. requires being able to construct a metamind first. might be able to do that with kae and calvino working together. shouldnt be too complicated. kae nodded. the exo-ego stack-grafting process is not my specialty, but all agnosi understand the steps. with the stillborn, it shouldnt be too hard. im more worried about the proxies, though. do they even work? is there a danger of compromise? it was used by the incubi, no? is it even usable for these purposes? yes, avo said. proxies are meant to be untraceable. burner minds with a half-life that connects to and shuffles your base mind. ensures no traceable data even if nulled. white-rab is already done with them. has the fate-skeins and counterfeit memories sequenced in. made several gangers put them on as a test. works. kae blinked. and then what happened to them. avo opened and closed his mouth several times, chomping his teeth together. i should have expected. two profiles extended from below each proxy, showing two figures dressed in well-tailored suits of ashen gray. the first was of a woman around kaes height but with skin a few tones softer, cheekbones a few inches higher, and eyes spaced a bit further apart. her name was displayed as agnos iomae hatherene. across from her spun her counterpart, agnos nandu yuewei, whose physical appearance could described as beyond grotesque with nose like a doorknob, dolloping ears, and drooping eyelids. chambers winced as he walked over and patted kae on the back. fuck, kae. im sorry. fuck, he whimpered. godsdammit. he could kill himself. fry his brains in his restroom. no one would know of his shame. know would know that he gave up. but he would know, dammit. he would know that the five footlongs he ate for lunch won. he would know that he gave up because of a little discomfort, choosing resurrection over facing his consequences. overcoming them. giving up wasnt what jaus avandaer was about. a quitter wasnt who first sergeant kassmon wanted to be. clenching his teeth, he moved his finger away from the trigger and pistol-whipped himself for motivation. come the fuck on, kassmon. you got this. cameawuugh! the cry that tore out from his throat this time wasnt because of the pain in his stomach but the fact that his mind erupted into a chasm of soaring fire. shit.] great. perfect. not this again. ever since he got burned at vengs stand he felt weird. felt like part of him was warped somehow. now, as the conflagration flowed out from an auto-seance hidden deep inside his innermost memories, he recalled everythingand more than a few new details from his template counterpart simulated within a certain ghouls memories. +kassamon,+ avo said. +i need+ the ghoul choked back a note of discomfort. +what what is this.+ [come back later,] kassamon groaned. [im taking a shit.] an uncomfortable silence followed. [dude, you are in so much pain right now,] two-mag muttered. [no shit,] kassamon grunted. [thats kind of the problem, isnt it,] abrel snickered. [fuck you.] avo sighed. +kassamon. have a new assignment for you to volunteer for. giving you details now.+ [sure. whatever,] kassamon sighed. [youre not having me i dont know, help you eat puppies or something right?] +no. just doing something with the border wall.+ [...i prefer helping you eat puppies now.] the ghoul grunted. then, kassamon suddenly felt an odd static pulse inside him. the tortuous weight that wouldnt come vanished, and in its place splashed a heated deluge from inside kassamon. the paladin blinked as horror blossomed inside him. shaking for another reason altogether now, he looked down between his legs and saw that the waters were stained dark red. loud hyena-like laughter sang out from chambers. [holy fuck, avo, you popped the paladins ass-cherry with your heaven.] avo grunted. +just helping. tired of feeling him groan and writhe. information coming in. know youre about to shoot yourself. do it in a second.+ [a-avo,] kassamon managed lamely. [can can you make me not remember this? and clean up the mess.] +sure. done with the adjustments. shoot yourself now.+ suddenly, the world jolted and kassamon found himself tucking the barrel of his pistol under his chin, power settings low enough to fry his tissue, but not punch a hole in his ceiling. he resisted the strange compulsion to thank avo just as he squeezed the trigger. in the same instant the beam burrowed and boiled his brain matter, the embers of a roaring flame tunneled down through his meta across the city, up the tiers, into the mind of another paladin *** kare was asleep when her mind ignited. consciousness slammed down on her like a hammer, jolting her from the sheets as she recalled all that her template experienced over the past few days. jaus,] kare choked, rolling from her bed. she was about to bounce her head off her nightstand when someone took hold of her body by the blood coursing inside her and planted her back upon the softness of her mattress. [i you oh, you its you.] she groaned. [what i wouldnt give for you to just be a nightmare.] +cheer up. here to make your dreams come true today instead.+ mem-data and snippets of information took shape within her mind. she frowned as impossible predictions and understandings began to dawn. [you want me to be promoted?] +achieve some acclaim at least. get more clout among the paladins. good for all of us.+ she frowned. [all of us.] the ghoul had the audacity to chuckle. +city needs heroes. reliable figures of virtue. im just giving you a hand. another thing. will be coming up to the tiers soon. have another gift planned for you. how would you like to be the one who helps naeko bring in some of the people behind paladin dawtons murder? who framed agnos kae kusanade?+ suddenly, the disorientation inside her cleared. [youre going to use me against clan drongo.] +no. going to use paladins against them. so justice can follow after vengeance.+ he offered her a flash of insight into what he was planning, trickling in the mem-data that he obtained from a classified ori-thaum information node. her breath hitched. her stomach clenched. [this this is] +yes. information about the responsible parties. survivors of that night. youre a good paladin. you can find them. with my help. and your father. uncle too. together we can see things made right for once.+ kare fought to control her breathing. [youre not doing this for justice. you have your own aims.] +no. this is for someone else. and i dont think she has the fortitude for murder. but just as well. death might be too gentle. too neat of an end. have been thinking of ensuring another ending. turning politics to my advantage.+ the paladin bit her lip. [i will not help you hurt innocent people. i will not] +i know. everything you think. i know. thats why im giving this to you. this is an arrangement that is optimal for both of us. you practice your justice. i practice mine. and the city is served no matter what. you know im not lying. can feel it.+ she shivered despite herself. [i i okay. but] but she never got to finish her words before fires governing her mind shifted, altering her memories, and the blood vessels inside her head burst. when kare woke again, she found herself with new knowledgenew hunches about syndicate smuggling routes and a premonition that something was going to go wrong soon. searching through her meta, she encountered new installments mem-data that she didnt remember downloading, and accessed them after a moment of caution. as the information loaded, and kare found herself looking at some of ori-thaums most confidential operations, a yawning dread opened in the depths of her stomach as she struggled to remember how she obtained these details. only a haze lingered in her recollection. a haze, and an affirmation on her part. yet, despite her agreement, she couldnt shake the sense that she might have just made another bargain with something beyond her ability to fathom. Chapter 19-20 Walltaker (III) chapter 19-20 walltaker (iii) +++(confidential) priority (confidential) commission (confidential)+++ access granted [edit mode] [installing mem-data] updating contents name: iomae hatherene rank: agnos of the 7th knowing (rated for seventh sphere heavens and below) specialty: spatial anomalies //=// name: nandu yuewei rank: agnos of the 6th knowing (rated for sixth sphere heavens and below) specialty: entropic canons and hell-based architecture changes confirmed confirmed clearing edit data installing mem-con access restricting access [disconnecting] +++ -white-rabs edits for the se-7777 border wall commission 19-20 walltaker (iii) updating hubris for [flathider] (geometry/boundaries) x10v3l.bin. domain of (geometry) ->canon: flathide - the user of this canon can fold their physical form along a flat surface; requires at least one section of the surface to bend away upward at 30 degrees ->hubris: using this canon when the users physical form has edges will trigger thaumic backlash (70%) altering the cannons for the flathider was ultimately a simple affair. the only thing required of avo was death. using his meta-fac, he adjusted the parameters of the hubris with a mental command, carving a critical contradiction into the heaven that sustained the barge. now, with a single command cast by chambers, the vessels systems would activate its flathide canon, and within seconds the heaven of geometry would rupture, undone by innumerable edges in its architecture. avos success in constructing a functional golem proved to be a more muted success; an act that proved to be more impractical at present than advantageous. though the oracle glass did need to be carved into sigils to find symmetry with the cultural symbology of their corresponding heaven, this requirement was of no impediment, nor did the grafting itself present any difficulty. functionally, as long as the vessel the heaven was anchored to had the requisite systems to function and necessary catalysts to express its channeled domains, the bind would present no issue. quality failures aside, this was the easy part of golem building. the process of thaumic investiture was where true irritation lay. lacking a cycler or a soul, every miracle expended by a golem burned essence. spent death. wasted lives. as kae elaborated, the common way golems were built required a rupture to be open, a godclad to be present to serve as a stable donor, and a golem housed in a stable pocket of space. both godclad and golem required overlapping domains and the process would take anything from hours to days to weeks or even months depending on several factors, including the golems ontological sophistication or how many rendsinks it was equipped with. and once the sacrifices were made to the golem, the essence could not be taken back. lacking a cycler to keep each death in constant orbit around a soul, thaums effectively seeped from the golem like a miasma, never to be reclaimed. pair all these factors with the fact that most golems lacked an ego, soul, cycler, or corresponding hell to counteract backlashes, paradoxes, or daemons, and the reasons behind why most guilds held to a low-sphere, high-production, mass-based doctrine for their knots in active warfare became clear as day. such was why avo was entirely content to bypass these issues by continuing to steal other peoples golems for now. saved him both trouble and time. might start a stockpile instead, avo said, speaking to kae thereafter. modify existing golems on existing chassis. enhance them. retrofit instead of produce. thats a good idea, she replied. we would need a constant flow of death to make such a thing possible. and not like the opportunistic slaughters we are committing. the agnosi run near automated pipelines with the guilds. they provide the lives and godclads, we provide the expertise. whatever the case, avo decided the elevation of his cadre was a priority for now. but that did not mean a change in strategy was not in order. with tavers by their side and new safehouses available, it would be useful to store a few knots of emergency response golems. or have some scrambled alongside the cadre was expendable support. he would need to separate the heavens he wanted to absorb from those better left as ghosts nested within their shells. regardless, preparations were fast approaching the end. soon, it would be time for action and much rest upon the shoulders of kae and chambers. im a bit nervous, the agnos said, sitting next to him on a crate in the gutter warehouse as they studied the unnatural fractals peeling from the contours around the barge. a shaky breath escaped her lungs. okay. im very nervous. [hey,] template-draus whispered. [stop lickin your own ass and get your head back in the game. get chambers and kae ready. they got new skins that need puttin on. go make yourself useful stead of daydreamin.] +starting to regret burning you,+ avo replied.sighing, he turned and sought the two he would soon deploy. the proxies were already sequenced and ready. all he needed to do was enmesh them beneath another layer of flesh to mask them, and the rest would take care of itself. {kae. chambers. its time. kill yourselves then get to the nexus. not going to have time for sleep tonight.} *** iomae watched the snaking channels of the maw tumble behind her accelerating aero. everything below ran as winding gorges of bone plate walls punctured by rusted vents. festering blackness stained the air as pillars of trash descended like collapsing ladders from on high. routed along a dedicated skylane, she studied the warning icons flashing over the see-through interior of her luxury aero. numbers and mem-data flickered and burst all around her. phantoms danced in a symphony of flowing information while she rested on a seat made of fine leather, bathed in the light of a spinning locus. the esteem mark-20 aero was an unfamiliar vehicle to iomae. travel, in general, was a novelty she rarely experienced. her focus was on the cutting edgeworking to conceptualize the theoretical and turn the experimental into something practical. the few times she played the role of surveyor were years ago when she was still a neophyte studying her craft. studying the exterior sensory overlay constructed by the ghosts governing the aero, the walls around her were splashed with high-definition renderings of her surroundings, visual feeds scrubbing away any blurriness to provide maximum detail. in the corner of her own vision, her deepnav was paired to the vehicles navigational systems, keeping her cognizant of her position. and nandu. she knew those werent their names, and all she remembered was cover identity, but the memories that currently protected her were perfectly constructed, their sequences sprouting from the scrambled mem-data of her base meta imperceptible to even most thoughtscans. a dedicated necro could perhaps pierce the mystery of her disguise, but she somehow knew everything on-site was already taken care of, and things were well in hand. still, a weight pressed against her nerves, and between the flashing menus surrounding her, she studied her reflection. her hair was too straight. her skin was too rough. her skull felt too heavy. her flesh was a lie. but why did it feel so freeing? why was she looking forward to this? somehow, she knew the right answers were waiting for her once she arrived. turning her attention back to her aeros inner systems, she frowned at the thousands of simulated strings and aerial trajectories constructed in her hundred-kilometer radius navigational map. the interfaces of most aeros werent so cluttered, but whatever defensive suite her benefactor had picked to ensure her security and safety was constantly loading, isolating, scanning, and simulating distant objects and entities. subjects outlined in green were determined harmless; and non-hostile. faint yellow had the potential for aggression but posed no danger. orange for possible risk. red for active hostile. more than a few passing drones were detected and flagged by the vehicle. in seconds, iomae knew their model and year of production, general specs, estimated trajectory, and who probably fired them. none of it was useful information for her. if things went wrong, she would manifest her heaven and depart through thaumaturgic means instead of leaving her fate to the aeros defenses. how she knew what to do was beyond her. it was like she was accessing pieces of knowledge on a need-to-know basis, with these sequences unnaturally conjoined with the rest. {hey,} nandu said, calling her coldtech communicator with a cough. {you feeling ready?} less than a kilometer left before they would arrive at the pylon. he was a few minutes ahead of her and would land first and wait. she would come in along the west side and detach into public air space from her current skylane. another waterfall of trash spilled down into the maw, her aero zipped through a static offramp and soared over the open gorge. warning indicators formed ahead, her vehicle automatically dodging predicted debris. problem with flying the maw was the endless amounts of trashand peoplebeing chucked down. still, her route proved solid and she found herself passing through spatially affected folds as her distance from se-7777 shrank to less than eight hundred meters. zooming to where the rupture was supposed to be a few kilometers behind her, she noticed a quivering cleft in space guarded by hovering golems. they must have pocketed the destabilization. contained the leaking rend for now. but the damage thereand whatever contradictory canon existed in the border wallneeded to be fixed. though the paladins were probably going to get a bit more than what they would bargain for. as her esteem slowed to a final descent and passed through the hanger doors along the middle of the pylons structure, the twelve engines of her diamond-shaped craft tilted from their horizontal orientations to vertical ones one after another, ensuring her slow descent. the ghosts around her dissolved in a puff and the walls turned back to padded leather. with a ring and hiss, the door across from her opened, and foul air billowed in, causing her to gag. outside her vehicle stood her partner, nandu yuewei. he was rubbing his comically large nose and had a miserable look on his face. as she disembarked, she saw that his own esteem was docked on the far side of the chamber, already being examined exorcist maintenance drones. the light of the city faded from behind her as the hanger doors began to close. been sucking in bad air for three minutes, nandu gagged. the pylons air filtrations fucked, i think. if their waters this bad too, i dont think were making it out. though iomae knew his conduct ran the edge of unprofessionalism, accepting his antics was easy, and actually offered her a sense of comfort. perhaps we can fix that too, she said. though it will require a separate commission. a heaven of foul smells. nandu snorted. is that a real thing? theres a heaven for almost everything. almost indeed. the voice interrupting them was flat but smooth. stepping past a closing door on the far edge of the room facing the inside of the structure was a tall man sporting a red mohawk and dressed in a particularly torn paladins uniform. the badge and the greys of the inner suit remained, but his outer coat was missing, and his sleeves were torn, exposing bulging biceps the size of a baseliners head. gashes and tears lined his pants while whining servos preceded each step of his left leg. flashing the agnosi with a gleaming smile, paladin riche kassamon presented himself as their point of contact with their operation. a few fist-sized surveillance drones hovered at his flanks, forming the shape of a v behind him. agnosi. appreciate you both responding so thusly. we are sworn to our duties, iomae said, managing a fake, but knowing smile. the paladin looked her up and down, and somehow she knew he was at least as compromised as she was. so we are, paladin kassamon said. turning, he looked at nandu and winced. jaus. iuh, you alright? nandu glared. why? do i not look alright? no, consang. you want me to be honest, it looks like you stole your nose off the face of a scaarthian that got run over by a tank or something. very funny, nandu sneered. how about you tell us a few more jokes along the way to the control center so we can take a look at how you guys shit yourselves this time. Chapter 19-21 Horizon Lost (I) chapter 19-21 horizon lost (i) there was a time once, an age upon an age, a day upon a day, a year upon a year, long lost before the now and the evermore, where we could have walked the fields free, or our grandfathers grandfathers grandfathers could walk the mountains, descend its paths, sail the oceans, traverse the deserts, carve their way through the forests and jungles. these days are dead and dust, dead, dust, and never to return. what remains now is cruelty made manifest madness, a miasma of torment and incomprehension. you cannot gaze upon the horizon anymore. you cannot even look the wrong way, where the bend of light meets the curve of the sky. doing so will bleed you, cut you, slice you down. there are places where you cannot inhale the air. you cannot know the scents lest you melt from the inside. there are places where grains of sand are the size of worlds, where being lost is a certain law in reality, and not an eventuality of your own proven ineptitude. all these things made possible by reality broken, made true by what happened by the deceiver named jaus. mademademade by a man, horizon lost, made by man. -the mad monk alsyim, fallwalker 19-21 horizon lost (i) {we''re in,} nandu said. his following giggle echoed across their coldtech comms. {i always wanted to say that.} as paladin kassamon led them through the security checkpoints preceding the inner structure, he took care to point out the various systems they were using to monitor their facility and boast about the effectiveness of their personnel. the emphasis he placed on his words directed nandus next actions as he linked with the paladin to review the local lobbies. ostensibly, it was to review the public-facing information the exorcists published in the nether. unofficially, they were being granted the keys to the backdoor. menus and accessible phantasmics lined her augmented perception. iomae blinked in brief shock as she skimmed through the staggering amount of drones the exorcists had at their disposal, along with the emergency response golems they had on standby. the local leadership hierarchy could also be summoned with a thought, the names and fate-skeins of all active exorcist officers offered as downloadable mem-data. if she found the need, she could contact any of them through pre-sequenced sessions. making eye contact with nandu as they stepped past another set of meter-thick blast doors into another security scan, paladin kassamon sighed and pointed to the flickering mechanics that swept their bodies. sorry about the hoops, but we cant exactly risk letting anyone just walk in. lots of ways to stay hidden in this city. cant take any chances. he finished his sentence with a knowing wink, and iomae fought the urge to shake her head. there some something sorrowfully sweet about interacting with a paladin this way. as if she knew someone like him once. but something happened after. regardless, the pain was something from her true life, and it remained secondary to the task at hand. continuing down the narrow hallway with reflective mirrors lining both sides, a horizontal grid of sweeping beams passed through all three individuals and their accompanying drones. phantoms constructed phantasmal interfaces to give them progress indicators. a simulated biometric review of her bloodwork, body tissue, and skeleton was generated before her eyes. when all progress bars filled without incident, the review flashed green and dissipated. turning right, the same unfolded for kassamon, still grinning at her, but her attention drifted over the sudden pulse of red over his shoulder. iomaes stomach opened into a pit. looking past the paladin, she saw nandu standing there, but the expression on his face could not be called worry. no. with his brows raised, jaw clenched, and eyes narrowed, he watched as the checkpoint scanned him again, focusing the grid on his nose. you fucking serious, consang. look, im sorry, i didnt sequence this. kassamon sighed. but you gotta be honest: thats a lot of nose it has to cover. fuck you. im not trying to insult you. listen, i might know a grafter you can cast. specializes in cosmeticsshe did my teeth. double fuck you. as a second biometric report was generated, it blinked green this time after a brief delay and nandu just shook his head. rough way to say hi to your guests. as the final passage unlocked itself, they found themselves entering a curving hallway blocked off by a solid metal wall. squinting at how light itself seemed to recoil for the surface, iomae recognized what she was looking at in an instant. memite. another layer of protection and a reliable means to hold a techno-thaumic reactor without the material suffering any wear and tear. the inclusion of the thaumically altered matter also told her the se-7777 pylon had been retrofitted in the last fifty years, with the canon for memite born from a relatively modern heaven. there used to be a platform here, im told, kassamon said, gesturing to the empty hall around him, built on a set of maglev rails. it could take you around the various stations and departments back in the day, but with the drones removing the need for on-site staff and advances in necrotheurgy, we cut down on the operational costs here. the space used to be much bigger on the inside too. now? he cast a mental command and the entire structure began to shift. the wall before her spun and then turned inward, vanishing from her sight as they passed an unseen event horizon. a pathway opened before them as more walls folded out of sight, the inner geometry of the pylon adjusting to accommodate their arrival. you know highflame and stormtree both tried to breach the all-wall back in the second big one? kassamon said, continuing on. wasted billions of lives trying to breach our structure. almost did it too, the half-strands. the big idea was to undo the borders so they could link up with all the reinforcements they had just beyond the city. provide a means of resupply. if you ask some of the ancients, they would tell you things got close that day, but the maw provided as it always did, and the wall stood. we stood. tavers chimed in a moment later, her mind connected to the mantas sensors, looking down upon the pylon. {clear skies. no half-strands in sight. lets wrap this up before i have to amend that statement.} lobbies secure? avo said, asking chamberscurrently posing as nandu. yep, he replied, flashing a toothy smile. drones are blind. specters are banished. exorcists just got pinged for mandatory group meetings on public safety. theyre not going to enjoy that. good, avo said. keep watch. shouldnt take long. turning his attention to kae, he regarded her presence with his woundmother briefly. oh, does the expansion of my design please, master? the heaven of blood purred. before, i only dreamed of hard shapes and dead stones to born of my ichor. but now, we have made architecture using the little builders within our veins. the body is a construct as well. bone, imagined from bone. skin, woven from skin. flesh, inspired by flesh. low laughter like the sound of distant thunder rumbled inside his frame. biology and physical matter were just patterns that answered to his touch; blocks he could place to his whims. there was an ever-present urge, tantalizing and taunting, begging that he reshape those around him to the whims of his curiosity. he resisted and kept to the path. had a chance to look at the heaven yet? he asked. she shook her head, her longer hair and lighter skin portraying her as visibly different while biological architecture remained a familiar constant to his heaven. we just arrived. paladin kassamon should also be present and monitoring the situation. we have time. he shook his head. that was an assumption. one that he paid for with shotin. with mirrorhead. not here, if possible. not if he could avoid risking it. lets go. chambers. open the way. who the fuck isoh. nandu shook his head. thats my actual name? chambers? he frowned as he repeated it to himself before casting a command into the local nether using his meta. part of a solid wall shifted away to reveal a winding walkway leading down and left into the reactor core itself. casting out his skimmer, avo let his perception radiate across the entire area as he centered his focus around the techno-thaumic reactor itself. housed within a fifty-meter-long containment sphere constructed of stainless steel, hardened polycrystalline compounds, insulated specs of silicon, plastic, wiring, and other miscellaneous structures. calvino explained that hydrogen was providing most of the facility''s energy, the cold mechanisms built at the very core of the machine. the heaven was anchored to the structures layered around it in shifting needle-shaped emitters that directed and orchestrated spatial reality not unlike how avo used his echoheads to focus his magnetism. {there are some techno-thaumic reactors that are fully ensouled,} calvino said, proving avo with reactor schematics. {eight, if nothing has occurred since my last calculations. eight cybernetic minds made cooperatively by ori-thaum and the no-dragons, capable of materializing the metaphysical outlines of an ego. they were given as gifts by the guilds to the paladins and certified by us before going into use. this installation does not seem to have one such lgilimited governing intelligenceactive. unfortunate. im sure you would have liked to claim another cycler and soul for your personal use.} avo grunted and thought back to his experience at burners way. cycler production was possible, albeit hard to achieve and impossible to standardize according to what kae knew. the souls themselves were the greatest bottlenecksaspects of broken existence that were theoretically impossible to replicate. he would need more cyclers and souls soon, but it would be more reliable to seize them from fallwalkers or fallen heavens than to raid functional techno-thaum reactors across the city. the functional few that existed in the warrens were doubtlessly occupied by the strongest of syndicates or the guilds themselves while destabilizing the power base of a megablock would likely compromise his presence and give those hunting the stillborn a trail to follow once news entered the public. walking down the hall with kae in tow, they arrived at what amounted to a reality dock as a rendsink clipped through the surrounding matter and blocked the path behind them while a solid wall grew transparent before vanishing entirely. neither ghoul nor agnos opted to don any of the safety rigs provided to them. both were godclads and their hells would blunt whatever unexpected feedback they faced as well as any rendsink. {i missed this,} kae said, releasing a heartened sigh as excitement leaked from her mind. spatial anomalies folded points and places within the reactor. with every step they took, they found themselves rocking between a range of positions as if they existed as a pendulum in constant motion instead of a single position in space. {i can see this reactor has not been maintained or updated recently. look at the nodules. see the missing lig module at the top. agh. outdated design. i think the paladins either never bothered to upgrade because they lacked the funds, or sold the cycler and soul back to the guilds for favors.} [none of the above,] template-kassamon murmured from inside avo. [we had a self-sustaining reactor for a bit from 166 to 201 post-fall, but the fourth war ground us down some more. a bunch of walls were downgraded from full self-sustaining constructs and had their souls and cyclers extracted for us to fill our ranks again and make up for those we lost. so. here you have it. why youre not going to be gobbling any scrumptious goodies up.] {hard times for everyone,} avo replied, speaking to both kae and the template inside his mind. standing before the reactor, avo looked up at the grayed-out tube of translucent connecting to the top of the containment sphere, the vents running as horizontal slats along its sides, the neon projections feeding numbers and adjustments into the air, with ghosts threading mem-data between each of the sharp-tipped needles puncturing deep into space as if an acupuncture session for reality was being conducted in this very room. are you ready? avo asked, looking at kae. but her reply came before his words were finished, and she collapsed to the ground, body snapping between three places before she finally struck the ground. ah, i felt it, the woundmother said. she tore all the moisture inside her skull out from her body. an instant demise. the little oracle is growing used to using her fangs. at least on herself. studying kaes body for a beat as a scab formed upon the surface of reality, avo engineered his own demise with a thought, triggering a thoughtwave disruptor at the core of his mind and putting out the fire that was his existence. resurrection - 1% plunging into death, a sea of voluminous patterns called to him even before his ego loaded within his soul. he could feel the chains of various domains stretching out, reaching far beyond where his awareness could touch. in death, he could interweave his being with the metaphysical on a level deeper than what he could alive. there was a want inside him to explore, to see if he could pull himself along the bindings connecting one border wall to another, but he resisted it. he was here to create an openingto establish a personal tunnel for him and his cadre in new vultuns borders. all other matters could wait till after this run was done. as he drew kae into his souls orbit, he injected his soulfire into the reactor and bade the mem-data to load. a flood of thousands upon thousands of canons and domains washed through their awareness, the torrent of rules and hubrises overwhelming. dont worry about most of them, kae said. most are standard restrictions meant to keep parts of spatial reality inaccessible. we just need to look at the ones corresponding to our domains. like draus reflection. your blood. my water. chambers biology. or fire. not space? no. that will affect far too much. and the changes will be registered across the chains before being noticed instead of buried among all the secondary bridging domains. understood. so. any preference on which domain to start with? somehow, despite her being comprised of soulfire, it felt like she was smiling. lets start with reflections. Chapter 19-22 Horizon Lost (II) chapter 19-22 horizon lost (ii) do you know how the sunderwilds got its name? it''s quite simple. sunder to describe the damage, for cracked is the tapestry of existence. wilds to express how the entropic madness leaks, the patterns and laws of reality bleeding into a festering wound and spilling out into broader stability beyond, creeping forward as slithering vines; roots of impossibility spreading deep into the bones of the material, giving rise to forests of madness. the guilds make efforts to trim them sometimes. prune the branches of entropy that stray too close. but they are not eradicated. not completely. not when so many serve as good testing grounds for new weapons. or clandestine locations to mask military checkpoints, scrying installations, or an easy way to fill up rendbombs for the next war. mostly, however, the sunderwilds keeps itself contained, for the entropic foliage spreading from each break is not of a unified front, and like there cannot be a single ruling dream, so too cant there be a totally commingling forest. these woods devour each other as much as they do us, and one ruled by pithy cynicism might find themselves remarking: hark. see existence. see all is at warthe natural state of things. such is the consolation of a fated living in their cultured grooves. for the elysiums and tiers are tamed madness, in fact, and the impossibilities there are merely engendered to convenience humanity instead of forcing them to suffer inimicality. for the wilders who live in the depths, their natures and habits are strange and savage to the outsiders, for the sky they know is not one we share, and the rules that bind them are not ones we know. in my travels, i have encountered many enclaves. but there are more things out in the roiling swaths of madness. tribes unmoored from broader arms of humanity. places so broken that coexistence with the denizens that reshaped themselves to survive will be impossible in the axiomatic sense. wretched dregs of humanity that would be better graced with euthanasia than continued existence. but still, there is beauty in my endeavor. for beyond the false histories provided by the guilds, i remain a chronicler of great truths. a new history of a world after the fall. if you are cycling through these memories, if my memories are not destroyed or suppressed by the guilds, i ask that you spread them far and wide. let the others know what plights our kin-turned-cousins now face. let all know just how much of the world we lost, and of the greatest atrocities committed by jaus. -[redacted] 19-22 horizon lost (ii) heaven: [se-7777] ->canons of (reflection), (blood), (biology), (luminosity) updated building the faults into se-7777s heaven ended up being a straightforward task. interlacing the oscillations of his soulfire with the threaded patterns representing each domain, he rebuilt a few canons to include certain caveats to ensure his cadre could pass this section of the wall without issue. all it would take is a triggering of a corresponding miracle to exempt them from the touch of se-7777s metaphysical-spatial restrictions. draus reflective passages. avos haemokinesis. kaes maelstorm. dices invulnerable luminosity. chambers bioform generation. even essus gateways were included. now, the final obstacle between them and the world beyond new vultun stood open, and the spreading crack avo left in the wall belonged solely to them. and that should do it, kae said, looking at their successful alterations, a note of satisfaction and pride in her voice. there were so many detailsso many domains and canons to look through. i thought i was going to get lost after so long but i should have never doubted myself. avo heeded her words and examined the stretching chains of ontology flowing through the heaven. it lacked the cultural themes and concrete aesthetics ingrained in most heavens, seeming more like a multicolored ball of chaotic yarn than anything else. its structure danced between solid, gas, liquid, light, and particulates. every domain exhaled an aspect of their canons through its structure, creating an unstable miasma of shifting effects. the key detail here was how each border heaven seemed to interact with another. as avo attuned his awareness to the very edges of his soul, he felt the links stretched on still, but breaking and spraying out in all directions, spreading over the city not as if a fence, but more like individual links of straw making up a nest. the border walls were communicating with each other through slight vibrations, each capable of redirecting some of its miracles to reinforce a distant heavenor to connect to anchor should one of its current binding fail. where pylons only dotted new vultuns borders in the material, its metaphysical emanations domed the city entirely. all that moved, all that existed, all that was within the threshold of the city had to capitulate to the laws of the thresholds if they wanted to pass. with almost every domain in existence included and build patches persisting over years, only the esoteric heavens created through clandestine means or paired from reclusive fallwalkers granted bypass. all others faced a choice between capitulation, bribery, or an outright struggle against more than a few thousand heavens, with eight among them bearing an extremely high spherage. the benefits of rend dispersal that the maw provided, likewise, did not even need to be answered. resurrection - 23% done here, then, avo said, watching as his resurrection filled. any other things to review? adjustments needed. no. i dont think so. a beat of hesistation passed through kae. but i think i will stay here a while longer and observe things. i wish to study the border heavens more deeply and discover if we might be able to affect all of them from one point. or there is any other benefit i can claim for us. such was a wise plan. technically, with kassamon subverted and chambers in their systems, they could have logged their visit as lasting a full eight hours and then just left without anyone being the wiser. or caring. but still, somehow avo expected this of kae and was passively glad that her passion and his interests coincided so neatly. wont hurry you, avo said. can stay as long as you want. take in all the details. know that you can extract at any time using the mirror. or just manifest your heaven and get beyond the border. if our changes are in effect. yes. if. her soul turned to his and he felt a wry hint of amusement radiating from her. would you mind testing it for me? i would like to do it myself, but i prefer someone else suffering the backlash and rupturing on my behalf. avo chuffed a note of affirmation. of course. chambers will be deeply missed. will he, though? kae asked, teasingly. a pause actually followed. despite the mockery, the answer was one easily given. yes. he has been more than what i expected. all of you have. kae didnt quite know how to reply, and so she just turned her attention back to se-7777 itself. it will feel odd when i resurrect. i wonder if i will return with the proxy attached still, and if that will affect my memories immediately. the moment i died, i remembered everything about who i was, and lost my cover memories. probably not then, avo said. you dont forget yourself. or the soul doesnt. not really. it can even pick and choose. kae hummed. indeed. indeed! very true. but why cant your consciousness exhibit both the traits of a stable metamind and the conflagration? nah. his egos big enough as it is. sides. hes already got another of me runnin inside him. aint no compliment greater than that to give. essus head swung between them, his face torn between a look of incredulity and exasperation. how did you two get here? i remember i remember i had to stop you from killing each other. failed there, avo and draus said concurrently. they shared a mutual smugness thereafter. snuffed him plenty of times, draus said. took out her eyes, avo added. the former fateless just blinked. i see tavers reached over and clapped him on the shoulder. son. youre too mentally stable for this. just stop thinking about it. the mantas grav-drive projected a cone of force from the rear of the vessel. the smart fluids comprising the exterior of the stealth ship rebuilt themselves to fit a configuration of speed as the tip of the ship grew shaper, and a wall of large nozzles formed behind. grav-system stabilized a countercurrent of force settled on avo as his own protective gimbal formed around him. with a thought, tavers commanded the manta to soar, and they plunged forth, whipping out like a spear seeking the horizon. much like a high-end aero, the internal grav-systems counteracted the spiking g-forces as they sped outward. presently, they were going at a steady [352 kph]. nothing remotely absurd, except that it hadnt even been a second since they started accelerating. sailing over the se-7777 pylon, avo expanded his haemokinesis around the ship and braced for any final surprises. a long valley ran far beyond them, past the curve of the horizon, intersected at points by other parts of the outer maw. at the very limits of new vultun, a vast concentric ring separated the wilds beyond from the megacity within, and not a few kilometers past that were the first few refugee sanctuaries, their layouts and denizens forming in avos awareness. he felt the matter that comprised the local environment, the biologies and bodies of the people, the heat in the air, the static between ferromagnetic constructs, the flow of the winds, the placement of shadows, and even the transmission of signals. with his three heavens, the gatherings of humanity were as if beacons competing for his attention. beside him, draus was likely the same way, already scying and spying on the locals, using the light around them to root herself in new reflections. as they sped past se-7777s area of effect, avo formed a lattice around the ship and triggered his incog. now, they were effectively unviewable by all accounts, a lone vessel slicing along the bottom of layer one. the sections of panels simulating parts of the sky were long left behind, made only for the districts and nowhere more. here ran stretches of naked alloy, the bones of the structure showing, the frayed edges allowing natural light to seep in from the curve beyond. you all know something tavers said, sounding strangely unlike herself. avo felt her swallow. the woundshaper hummed. curious. she is nervous. but no rival huntresses are present to occupy the old ones worry. ...ive never been this far out of the city before, the squire said. she looked at the others for solidarity, but with dice, draus, and essus, she found only blank expressions or uncertain blinks. me neither, avo finally said. furthest beyond. his words seemed to offer some reassurance but with legions of other lives simulated within his conflagration, his familiarity with the world beyond was already present. well, tavers breathed. heres to us new vultunites exploring lost horizons, huh? yeah, avo said. lost horizons. and as the manta amped its velocity up further, the sound barrier shattered around it with a sound akin to a whipcrack and the members of the cadre surged forward, into the rising pre-dawn light, charted for the sanctuaries clustered along the outer perimeter, and the sunderwilds beyond. *** setting lobby to private initializing simulated mindscape linking to metaminds ->[abrel greatling] ->[uthred greatling] ->[vator greatling] abrel phased into the mindscapes existence with a blink and found herself seated at the end of a long table in a featureless gray cube built for nether-based interrogations. truth be told, she had expected them to start conducting these sessions a long time ago, but instead, the paladins had mostly left her alone. banished to her solitude within the voidships cell with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company. her own thoughts and memories. and dreams of the creature that claimed her. the monster that burned her mind and reshaped her to his will. avo. her mind was a forest when it came to the ghoul. her brothers murdererthe devourer of her cadre. a complex mix of hate, confusion, awe, and despair filled her when she thought of him, but the seed of his will had been planted deep, and he had designs in mind for her that she couldnt refuse. it was with him in mind that her nerves grew taut with tension as glitching phantoms painted two newcomers into shape just across the table. abrel phased into existence and found herself seated at the end of a long table in a featureless room. as their shapes were stitched together before her eyes, the avatars of the twosome formed, and abrel instantly knew who they were. the first was broader in the shoulders, but shorter. that was not what revealed his identity. instead, it was his perfect posture and the stillness in his stance. the other individual was glancing off at the walls beside, their attention drifting. ever-moving. trying to take in every detail in the room. he had always been something of an enjoyer of the grand show that was life, absorbing the scenes like he watching an opera. but there came moments where he himself ascended the stage, and that was when he changed from audience to artist, and what an ugly artist he was. abrel let out a false breath as she steadied herself. this was going to be worse than any paladin interrogation. she had no idea how her family managed to secure a private conference with her, but she knew the favor couldnt have come cheap. as the artifacts composing the two finally finished loading, abrel met the gaze of her father, uthred greatling without flinching and assumed her role, folding her arms behind her back as an instrument greeting her authority. authority greatling, she said, keeping her voice firm and clear. no longer, he replied. a sudden confusion spread through her as he shook his head. at ease, abrel. i must speak to you. as father to daughter. and i must tell you what you and your brother have cost this family. Chapter 20-1 Interrogations chapter 20-1 interrogations +we don''t have a census for how many people are living in the refugee sanctuaries. you want to know why? it''s not because we don''t have the logistical means to count them. no. the guilds, if anything, are more than competent logistically. all it takes is a few divisions of dedicated necros and a little bit of time and they will have every true living person surrounding new vultun counted and catalogued. that is not the issue. the issue is if they are listed, if they are counted, then the weight of what we''re doing settles in. make no mistake, we are ignoring people dying on our doorstep. we are ignoring them because it''s easier to turn away when theyre smuggled in as refugees as death fuel for the city. they knew what they were getting into. risk is the name of the game. bullshit. its just easier for us to swallow them not being actual people. just fools who wandered into the gutters looking for death. fools for selling their agency and handing themselves over to the syndicates. they must be because anything else is too unpalatable. you think about that the next time you watch a vicarity starring these fools. you think about what kind of life they were leading to force them to risk the maw, the smugglers, the crucibles and the syndicates to get into the city. you think about that the next time you enjoy another snuff stream. or maybe just apply for a border pass. take an ex-route shuttle and tour the sanctuaries. look down at them from the skies, you think about that the next time you enjoy another snuff stream.+ -cala marlowe, the fateless thoughtcast 20-1 interrogations all children born under highflames banner learn early that there are some beatings you just have to take. it was this understanding that filled abrels spine with steel and turned her nerves into titanium. shame coursed through her person, but in her existed a draught of fear or sadness, for the lesson of the beatings came paired with another of the high seraphs teachings. pride. pride in one''s wounds for the scars to show what they survived and an understanding that there was worthiness to be regained when one rose to redemptions call. uthred took a moment to gather his thoughts before he spoke, the shape of his face finally stabilizing. circles of discoloration ran below his eyes and his optical implants gleamed with an intense glow. beside him, vator smiled deeply at his sister with open affection, his hair flowing as waves of silken gold, his left eye purple while the right remained blue. he stood a few inches taller than their father and was dressed in a fine suit of ash white. upon closer inspection, she could see movement under the suit. flicking legs and brushing palps. abrel did her best not to roll her eyes. of course, this being vator, he probably had his pet spiders weave the suit around him on the way over. always with his artistryconstantly trying to get her to keep one of his pets for the sake of fashion accessibility from biodegradable resources. i will keep this direct, uthred said, an unexpected softness just beyond his glare. effective as of two days ago, house greatling was dissolved, and my position as authority was resigned. both admissions hit abrel like flechettes to the gut. the consequences of her actions were beyond extreme. but how? though dangerous, she didnt see how this action could force his hand so severely. there were other factors to consider, such as the provocation behind the matter, and the details of the case. uthred greatling wasnt a man to avoid responsibility, but he wouldnt just bear punishments bestowed without ensuring the sentences were deserved. was resigned was dissolved. seriously, father, its like someone else did these things for you. vator tutted, unaffected by uthreds side glare as usual. i told you i could have applied for the writ if it bothered you that much. there was no need for you to be in such enough. the duty was mine. do not interrupt. uthred shot his youngest a final look before turning back to abrel. vator simply sighed, surrendering to his fathers will but completely unshaken by the chastisement. turning his gaze back to abrel, uthred continued. the severity of your actionsthe recklessness with how you pursued your target. and how you deviated from the dispatched task. oh, wow, thanks, vat, abrel deadpanned. the knowledge that the half-strand who murdered my brother has a huge cock is super useful. youre welcome, sister dearest. would it benefit you to know that he is a godclad? this she already knew, though it came as a surprise when she first engaged him at lights end. just another one of avos many impossible tricks. almost all the souls he burned into his companions that day were taken from her cadre. a pang of disgust followed, and her hatred boiled, but she continued the rusethe sequencing of her mind at avos hands demanded it. no. how? wait, how do you know this? oh, i did a little research, vator said. our mutual nuisance resurfaced a few days ago at vengs stand. also in the warrens. he had an lets say interesting encounter with one seeker shotin kazahara whereupon he triggered a wombrash outbreak to cover his escape when the paladins arrived. i did some more investigation into his past as well. the media he consumes is so delectably degenerate. the youngest greatling threw his head back and cackled. the soft master collection. ah. priceless. i uthred trailed off with a scoff. the head of what once was house greatling shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. abrel. tell me everything. in detail. leave nothing out about your encounter. vator. you will inform the both of us on what you know about this chambers. once that is done, i speak on the duty i have been entrusted with, and the potential for our family to be atoned. he leaned in close. i fear that jhred might have been in contact with something of greater worth than even he knew. what? uthred shook his head. that is not for you to know. nor is it your task. you need simply tell us of your encounter. nothing more. abrel understood, and so she continued painting a disfigured truth. so, the city was determined to make a target of aedon chambers. she could use that. use him to pull attention away from avo, but still give her father, brother, and guild someone to go after. the wrong person. *** +first. there is a problem. you need to come down now. to the circuits.+ bright-wealths harried message came with a splash of heavy anxiety. the ghosts leaked from green rivers active session in a constant flow as a progress bar filled her cog-feed, memories being transferred. the time was just before dawn. she wondered what matter so important to do demand her attention now. yawning slightly, she slithered through the darkness and reattached herself to the rest of her body, feeling the human component of herself draw a sharp breath of surprise as the memories loaded in the same instant the vessel activated. she wasted no time thereafter and took flight down her penthouse, glad she kept her dress on tonight instead of cleaning the body and putting it to bed. regardless, her mind cleared more with each step. she should have known things were awry considering all the dread in bright-wealths mind. the younger sang wasnt someone she would describe as anxious or easily terrified, but considering the situation, she was holding together rather well. the second fortune ostensibly had its doors open to any and all guests, but the presence of a certain few was as if a silver bullet for businesses, and a bad omen for their continued operation. she found him reclined at the very edge of the audience seats overlooking the circuit area below. as the sounds of a fight continued, she noted that three entire rows had cleared out behind him, with guests fleeing up the walkways, making for the doors. layers of intersection perception left him bathed in the notice of countless minds, but none dared to offer a single utterance related to his presence. her heels clicked with every step and she readied herself, pulling her lips in a wide smile while casting emergency orders to the rest of her sisterhood running the establishment. +wealth. have lucille temporarily lock the doors leading to the upper wings overlooking the arena. thank you.+ she didnt bother turning around to watch hallways swell and close themselves off. all her focus was needed for a single task, a single conversation. as she came to a stop at the very final row of seats, she briefly glanced at the two bioforms fighting below. one was a large simian creaturea gorilliod incarnatefacing one of ruvecas new snake-centipede designs. dragging her attention away, she greeted the unwatched guest with a bemused smile, though her thoughts were tense with uncertainty. blood was pouring down from his eyes, his nose, his ears, and his mouth. but he sat there, blinking, eating roasted meatballs in a bag using a toothpick, and shaking his head every time an impact sounded from below. chief naeko, green river said, greeting the highest-ranked paladin in new vultun with a slight bow. i would have never expected one of your stature to visit our humble establishment. you do us a great honor. languidly, the man turned his eyes away from the fight and over to her. he returned her false modesty with his own lazy smile. nah. im just being trouble. i know that. he patted the seat next to him, the size of his hand enough to close around her skull. she needed to be careful. she needed to be prepared to lose her expendable vessel and dive for the shadows. come on. sit down. lets talk. dont worry, im not busting you up or shutting you down or anything. the paperwork would kill me. i just have some questions. she didnt sit down. not immediately. will these questions you ask see me killed then, perchance? something that my superiors will not want answered. naeko ran his fingers through his short crop of black hair and shrugged. he smeared the blood constantly pouring down from his face and snorted. well. suppose were about to figure that out from whether you say anything to my question or not. green river nodded. the question, then? have you had someone under your employ conduct a the paladin paused as his halo spun, ghosts pulling mem-data across the accretion. ...a bone demon graft for a customer? should be a sheath from the details i got. Chapter 20-2 In Unofficial Capacity chapter 20-2 in unofficial capacity when you patrol the warrens, it''s important to know the prey you face. every step you take, every alley you peek into, every syndicate you encounter, and every transgressor you break matters. but blind destruction and rampant misuse of power lead nowhere. you must learn the nuances of your foe. understand what drives, motivates, and commands them. it is only by breaking the baser habits indulged by the denizens of this city that crime and destitution can be overcome. we are more than jaus fist. we are his open hand. recall that before committing to action. recall that, and prevent yourself from shaming his memory. it is with this in mind that we must lace our wrath with wisdom. to be as rational as we are powerful. it is important that you observe the patterns, the behaviors, the structures of society, and the nature of human duplicity. having a heaven is not enough. being able to twist reality is nothing if you do not understand the rules on the ground itself. and you will not make up for your lack of tact with brutality and cruelty. do not think your savagery beyond my notice. i have seen what you do. as have the syndicates. as have the people. burning barrows and butchering millions to serve as a warning are acts befitting butchers of a bygone age. we will not be our ancestors. we will not become the faithers. we will not fall to the level of the gods. this is a new age, and though the darkness threatens to spill back, though jaus has been extinguished by the betrayer, the dream lives, as do we. what we bear are more than expectations, but embodiments. avatars that must rise to the ideal lest the city fall to its vices. glorious purpose beyond the shadows of the past. i expect each and every paladin to live up to these ideals. but especially you, naeko. i know you. i know how you are. but now, im asking you to be more. to be better. to be greater. you command the respect of the youngest and fear of the oldest, and when judged by martial materiality, you are without peer among us. but your rage must find its end. your wrath must be tempered. your hand must be softened. so. here is my statement in its simplicity: be light, be gone. -chief paladin osjane thousand (circa second guild war) 20-2 in unofficial capacity naeko focused, turning the fullness against green river. he waited to feel if the blood inside her would quicken, if the pulse of her heart would speed, if her posture would break, or if the muscles in her face would tighten. the only response she gave was an imperceptible tilt of her headher true head. the fox draped around the person tilted its head and fixed him with an unreadable look. eyes of brilliant amber glowed beneath the shifting shadows cast by the neon overlay spinning above the area, and in the brightness, the battle between bioforms was portrayed by phantoms stretched wide over the centermost arena. contrarily, her human body remained impossibly still. distant cheers, slurs, and jeers formed the surrounding ambiance as the fight continued. the modified simians augmented fists slammed down. enhanced tendons lengthened. titanium boxing gloves made from modified aerovec engines fired, boosting impact velocity. the blow fell, and the air thundered as two pillar-sized arms greeted the ground. but the centipede merely broke and scattered. each segment of its body shot through the air, wings bursting free from their carapace as the insectoid bioform turned from a connected chain into a scatter of giant black-shelled wasps. the violence continued, and each collision between the two fed naekos heaven with greater and greater power. as did every act of violence across the entire sovereignty. naeko could have expanded his will further. but breadth taxed focus. instead, he narrowed his influence as much as he could, made it as confined as its presence would allow, but even still, metaphysically, he was a pillar, about to pierce into the crown of existence itself. every move he made, every act he committed cast waves through the patterns forming realitys tapestry. billions of hostile actions entered and nourished his heavens ontology. parents striking children. missiles striking buildings. flechettes striking flesh. light striking matter. all was true. all was present. all was transgression, waiting in the judgment of a greater hand to bring retribution to sin and enforce the tyranny that was peace on all who were. naeko refrained. he spat clumps of dried blood crusting along his throat and used his utility fog to swab himself clean. no sense in choking because he healed faster than he bled. thats a nice bioform, naeko said, clearing his throat a few times while gesturing at the swarm that used to be a centipede. did your in-house grafter build that one too? or is that a vendor project on display for publicity? he speared another porkball and stuck it in his mouth. hope these questions arent that dangerous. or ill actually start to worry. the day honest businessfolk like you start getting threatened for the services you provide is the day this city really starts heading for the big nothing. he struck the water again, seeing if she would react to the ripples. handing out both his suspicion that she was the one that provided the sheath and also his knowledge regarding her grafter was probably a bit too impatient on his part, but naeko was never much of a schemer. a pang of sympathy sang out inside him every time he looked at the gorriloid. this fight wasnt its to win. its death was preordainedits power a deception to siphon wealth from half-strands that mistook strength for capability. poor thing was to farm imps from fools. all that power, all the brutality. useless. nothing to hit. nothing to break. there was nothing the world loved mocking more than power rendered impotent. if it could only see itself from where naeko sat. if it could only understand the purpose of its life. if it could have known what he known and seen what he seen. in the real, she bowed slightly, never taking her eyes off him. it saddens me we werent able to give you the experience you desired. perhaps another try? maybe your second fortune will prove better than your first. ah! naeko laughed, grinning boyishly at her. and the no-dragons kicked you out? they must hate good conversation. the conversation returned to the mental. +river. i better not be faced with a necro null cell when i get in there. because if i am, they might just find you smeared along your bedrooms walls. and when i say you, i mean the nu-dog.+ the foxs eye twitched. +fox.+ +i dont care what made-up nickname you give your nu-dogdont grief me. im doing actual legwork right now and ive forgotten how pissed off it makes me. that, and the fact that i can feel every little degenerate thing thats happening around the sovereignty.+ to accentuate his point, naeko clenched a fist. twenty kilometers away, a dozen hundred-eighters were trying to force the refugees they trafficked out from their containers. as the next threat was snarled, however, they all suddenly came apart in weltering sprays of gore, the harm inflicted on the gorilloid was copied unto them as well. naeko shared this memory with green river and smiled genially. +i look forward to talking with you honestly and thoroughly. and just that. i dont have the taste for violence anymore. not when its done by me. not when its done by anyone else.+ +i understand,+ green river said. +no,+ naeko replied. +and hopefully, you never will.+ wiping the blood from his face again, he took a step past her and made for the walkway, preparing to leave the establishment. he could feel her looking at him every step of the way, feel all the other eyes on him in the stands. no doubt some among the crowd are already publishing memories in the nether. as he dodged a drunken woman fighting to align ass to seat, naeko reached out using his heaven again and focused in on green river. if anything were to happen to herif anyone tried to harm herhe would know, and he would pull himself across existence where violence was performed. after that, he expanded his awareness again and reached beyond the yuulden-yang sovereignty. one hundred and twenty-four potential suspects spooked. three offering something close to promise. hed do a few more on the top of his list and wait. see who gets snuffed or starts moving erratically. feel the reaction to his probing. after that well, hed figure that out when he got there. right now, all he wanted to do was narrow some leads and breathe down some necks. knock the rust off. get back into the swing of things and get a clearer picture. he had feeling denton was tied up in this. that was part of why he didnt want maru and the others involved. but even still, he wanted a better grasp of what was going on. just to make sure the trial would stay a mess and develop into a clusterfuck instead. over a thousand kilometers away, naeko found his next place of interest: the skin garden. also a sang-owned establishment. fewer direct ties to the no-dragons though. expanding his awareness and pulling himself over to every act of violence being committed, he injected himself into a falling arm and materialized as a mother slapped her daughter across the face, exploding across existence with the crack of a slap. blinking, he found himself in a quaint family home, the ground beneath him little with broken shards of glass and spilled alcohol. against the wall, a girl barely more than ten held her face as she looked at him with wide eyes. her mother, still holding her arm in a death grip, looked upon naeko the same way. he sighed. okay. first. he pointed at the broken beers. this is sad. dont abuse over spilled beers. the mother blinked, her disbelief causing her thoughtstuff to stutter in place. i you second, naeko said, holding up an open hand. thats not how you slap someone. feel this closely now. im about to teach you the first thing my father taught me before i could walk. naeko had forgotten how miserable it was to walk the warrens. but then again, he had also forgotten that there were simpler pleasures amidst the misery. *** so, bright-wealth said, eyes practically fused to the place naeko sat. what the fuck did he want? are we going to die? is it time for all of us to start selling each other out for pleas and reduced sentences? green rivers human vessel continued to frown down at the area while the fox turned and snarled at her sister. do not worry. you will be safe. i, on the other hand, have a few calls to make. bright-wealth whistled. that bad, huh? so. if you get brutally killed, the split for the second fortune is still in effect, yeah? i get one full percent. green river rolled her eyes. you can have two for all i care. youll just gamble it away. ow. you hurt me. but also true. wealth, green river said, before pausing a beat. will the second fortune still be standing if i leave you in charge for a day? the younger sang slid back, her snake-like bio-rig allowing her to shift smoothly across the ground. no. itll collapse in half that time. i dont want all the responsibility. good. you will be first sister while im occupied. i must handle some matters. contact a few people. fuck. wait, do i get your penthouse. of course not. fuck. a bonus? thats performance-related. fuck. Chapter 20-3 Outside the Garden chapter 20-3 outside the garden the lives outside our borders are an untapped resource. i knowi know. were not supposed to touch them and voidwatch is watching per the articles, but we need to start making special considerations. they are currently a resource drain on our efforts. all those sanctuaries of subjects, publicly funded, offering nothing but trickles of lives. its maddening. our installations need to be insulated against the sunderwildsprotected against whatever madhouse these people escaped from, and that we also need to provide education to them? a livable space? possibilities for community prosperity? its ridiculous. its outdated. the dream is dead, long live the dream, but now we need to think about winning the war. and war is about numbers. do you know how many souls highflame has? how many omnitech has? how many the no-dragons have? more than us. sure. our edge is in information and techno-thaumaturgy but right nowi guarantee youif we get the ability to see ten years into the future, its going to be of highflame burning our districts and butchering our citizens. foresight does not equal power. it can influence it, but were not lacking skill or awareness or any of that. we need force and unfortunately, its the only thing we still seem to lack. highflame has eight times more techno-thaumic armor; omnitech has whatever nightmares theyre cooking up in their nexuses. i dont even want to count the no-dragon troop numbers. im sure everyone recalls what happened to our martyrs at irisues vale when they got overrun by the breeder-hawks. of course we can level things out by counting on stormtree to achieve some degree of firepower parity, and counter-thaumic operations through the assistance of ashthrone and sanctus, but our alliance is contingent on the sainists, and im sure were all under no illusions about whats going to follow after we win. ugly truths the truth: were not just playing to overcome the golds and their lackeys. we need to watch our esteemed allies as well. we might be in agreement on some things, but in the end, theres no such thing as second winner. so. back to my proposition. i think its time we do a little exploring of our own in the sunderwilds. send out teams to establish enclaves allied to us. im uploading the mem-data for my proposal right now. technically, were not really breaking the rules. were just being flexible with its interpretation. -elder iyar kazahara (ori-thaum) 20-3 outside the garden not even light could escape the defilement of reality, but still, the brightness of dawn fell, lathering all things of solid shape in a thin sheen of radiance. merging from the horizontal crevice that was new vultun lowest level, the outer layers of the maw crept forth in diminishing detail, no longer the intricate sigils dividing the districts and sovereignties back within the layered city. here, there were but vast rings rounding the perimeter of the city itself, pierced through by channels that cleaved into the light splashing down from dawn ascending. drawing from the histories of ancient noloth with a thought, avo learned and then knew the maw to be a living construct. something that was meant to be expanded to fulfill the needs of its ever-growing population, blossoming outward like a flower fed by wither and rot to encompass idheim evermore. but with the loss of their arkand thereby the history of noloth and whatever power they had to influence the futurethe maw was cosigned to merely be a great wonder of the world. a nigh-endless reservoir for rend, but nothing worth any weight in culture or significance. another dead dream among the countless. [and thank jaus for that,] abrel scoffed. [listen, avo, i know im not exactly an unbiased party here, but that primer your dad-uncle gave you isnt exactly what id call reliable. propaganda. everyone does it. and from what i know about nolothi history, theres no way their little waste disposal expansion project wasnt going to cost a few billion more lives.] avo regarded her words with a faint note of acknowledgment. a few other templates within his gestalt provided their own insight on matters, but most were gazing forth as he waspeering far into the light. draus, avo said, the soulfire within him stirring, igniting the many deaths cycling his fardrifter, going to accelerate our progress. make myself wind. expand our progress. the regular acknowledged him with a slight nod. mind the light. been forming reflections all the way behind us while we flew, but the light itself feels damn slippery. and wet. probably an effect caused by the sunderwilds. avo reached out using his woundmothers domain of luminosity and found himself in agreement with draus. there was an uncanny slickness to how light flowed here. like rain of liquid arrows flung outward by the weight of a rushing monsoon. he triggered his fortress of luminosity out of curiosity, and though spherical oscillations formed of clashing brightness briefly layered the points where avo expressed his canon, no backlash followed, no paradox laid him low. should be fine, avo said. still. keep being careful. going to draw the manta into my yondergales. and with a simple effort of will, he did just that. a gust of sudden wind folded over the stealth ship as it was swallowed. a coiled knot of space, air, and shadow tightened, lacing the manta in a demiplane of black clouds thundering with torrential gales. here, these yondergales formed the yolk that was the fardrifters inner plane while the coiling walls of wind containing its ten-kilometer expanse extended outward as nine galloping steeds. beneath the surface of spatial reality they charged. four of the steeds snaked across two hundred and fifty kilometers of land. air currents shivered in the air as if to foretell a hurricane, and empowered by the horizon strider canon, avo and his cadre moved at speeds matching such a calamity. then, when another of the fardrifters heads burrowed into the shadows cast by the towering structures of new vultun, they plunged forward even faster, shadowrun granting avo ten times his initial speed. the manta itself was a marvel of human ingenuity and technological achievement. yet, its structures still obeyed laws. capitulated to rules. fast though it could accelerate, it would never be able to treat drifting contrails as folds of space to hide within or augment its base velocity by assuming darkness to function as if wind tunnels. despite this, calvino merely sighed. +you disapprove?+ avo asked. {hardly,} calvino responded. {i''m merely lamenting the fact that we can''t enjoy a nice leisurely flight over the land without wrapping ourselves in realitys disemboweled entrails because were suspicious that the light might kill us. somehow.} it probably wouldnt, but the potential it could was all that mattered. as the horizon tumbled closer, so emerged the first hints of the refugee sanctuaries. situated directly beyond the final maw-ravine wrapped around new vultuns perimeter, grand towers made from alloy and vivianite climbing a full kilometer high stabbed at the sky, their tips pulsing with sprites. static thoughtstuff lashed from spire to spire, functioning as if a relay. settled some two hundred feet below ground and with the glass on the topside formed beneath a layering of shrubbery, their presence couldnt be detected at a glance, and from what avo understood, the guilds didnt tend to waste golems or drones on reckless patrols, trying to sweep every inch of the sunderwilds for hidden dangers. emerging from their temporary operating base, avo coated his cadre in a protective shell using his blood, channeling his incog through his haemokinesis and keeping them veiled from notice. from there, they observed the surrounding sanctuaries for a moment, taking in the settlements that served as blockades for migrants trying to enter new vultun. the first thing to note was that they were domed and that their shells were lined with insulated solar panels. avo sampled their material composition from afar and frowned. he sensed a few golems present in the area, but few other protective assets beyond them. some drones patrolled the sanctuaries surroundings while others continued to work on new architecture. a complex network of tunnels between each of the settlements. much like how each sanctuary had a techno-thaumic communications tower, they all seemed to have something of a maglev station as well, with fast-moving trains constantly shuttling new people in and around per population capacities. over rolling hills in the distance, avo noticed trailing drones projecting light-marked lanes. expanding both his woundmother and fardrifter, he found migration caravans running at least a few hundred kilometers long. tents, vehicles, beasts of burden, and haggard-looking people were the norm. voidwatchs coldtech drones did what they could, but avo could feel the strain affecting their machinery, the sunderwilds wearing them down in moments when such degradation should have naturally taken years. strangely, however, the people remained unaffected, and guilder assets functioned without fail. i remember this route, essus said, coming to a stand next to avo, still careful to keep his eyes averted from the sky. i was far that way. you see? there. where a patch of light is shining down on those hills. avo saw what the man was pointing at, but only momentarily. in the next moment, a vast city-sized tendril whipped down across the sky and briefly blanketed everything in darkness. with the obfuscation of light, so too faded the hills, the space changing to be a lagoon instead. ah, yes, essus muttered, rubbing his chin. we had to get away from the hills when the light goes away. many of us drowned the first day. of course, those of us who went left instead of right were also met with unkind fates. he sighed. artad protect them. how could they have known the rocks were carnivorous. next to them, tavers was fully encased in her armor again, face unseen behind inches of protective alloy. i cant believe im saying this, but i fucking miss the city already. at least i can take a piss there most days and not wonder if my urine is going to wake up somehow and eat its way back up my cunt. oh, whats a matter, tavers? too much of a city girl? country life aint to your likin? draus shot the older woman a grin as she swept their surroundings using the scope of her rifle. tavers flipped her off. avo meanwhile pushed his awareness far south. there, a few million migrants were flooding into the protective tunnels that would lead to mass security screenings, and temporary housing, followed by a wait before enough people left or died inside a sanctuary for them to be granted a spot. as fascinating as the process was, avo was seeking something even further beyond. in dices memories, she had come from that direction. followed her master out of a place where pillars of murmuring darkness called to travelers, where beasts shaped of matter and shadow both preyed upon the supple flesh of baseliners. such was the life dice knew. and such were the monsters that have almost certainly overrun her enclave in the long absence of her master. soon, however, they would be purged. or least repelled. avo was interested in knowing which fallen heaven they originated from, and if he could staunch the rend. if nothing else, the abandoned enclave would serve as a place where they could operate freely without worrying about the guilds. after months of scurrying about the dark, avo found something cathartic about playing the harbinger of light. the more superstitious among his gestalt had taken it as a sign. a changing of the times. from beast of darkness to the bringer of the bright. an auspicious change, if judged from the sound. but before avo could reach any further, a session sounded in the depths of his mind, and saw nandus metamind identification flashing across his cog-feed. a frown overtook him in an instant. somehow, draus knew, and pulled away from her gun, turning to look at him. whats wrong? is it kae? dont know yet, avo said. hope not. chambers calling. has to be important. costs a death. as certain templates inside him began to speculate, he connected to the session, and his conflagration erupted out the other side like fire striking a lake made from napalm. [hey!] chambers said, mind reassembling as avo overwrote the false nandu memories. [whoa! that feels weird. its like i didnt know myself at all a second ago. why the hells did you need to make me look so godsdamned ugly anyway, you know] +chambers,+ avo said, tone even, but annoyance evident. [right. youre not gonna like this, consang. not one bit. you wanna know who just called me? green river. she wanted to talk to you, and so i played along and spoofed her using some artifacts i assembled on the fly. chief paladin naeko gave the second fortune a visit earlier today. put the squeeze on our least favorite sang. hes looking for someone. and it aint me.] a coldness filled avo from the inside. tension plucked at his nerves. +draus? kae?+ [you.] somehow, he expected that answer, though he wished it werent so. [he came around asking about your bone demon sheath. think youre going to need to change up soon, consang. switch up your glamor and shit. ] [naeko? working? what the fuck?] paladin kassamon was practically at a loss for words. [we might want to consider an impostor. maybe burn kare and have her shadow the boss.] [please dont volunteer me for such a detail, sergeant kassamon,] kare said, her calm tone still ripe with frustration. [it is unbecoming conduct.] [i know. but honestly, he scares the piss back up my balls.] a brief pause followed. [is that where the piss goes?] chambers asked. [i thought we have like a ballon in there or some shit.] [a bladder,] benhata provided. [there is no reason why one cannot make such a thing possible,] elegant-moon said. [the bladder and testicles can be merged.] avo looked up at the sky. his templates screamed. he sighed. problem? draus asked. yeah, avo said. problem. Chapter 20-4 Players and Pawns (I) chapter 20-4 players and pawns (i) getting yourself out of a tight spot requires some counterintuitive tactics at times. lets use an ambush for example. most people tend to break, turn, run. try a fighting retreat. thats what gets most people killed. youre reacting, burning all your capacity to keep the current problem at bay while the bastards about to snuff you are free to pull more tricks out of their asses. what you need to do is find the weakest section of their assault and turn into it. now, theres no guarantee that things will work and youll come out alive, but reacting is delaying action and best, and youll definitely get ground down at some point. you want to live? you need to stop behaving like a piece and be a player. they gave you a dilemma, give them one back. cause problems. break some shit. force them to spend mental bandwidth trying to put out their own fires before they can deal with you. thatll strain them and give you the time you need to solve your own problems. ultimately, the math is simple. you want your plate to be as close to zero as possible in the shit i have to react to box. you want their plates to be piled so high the table is flipping over to give them the nice kiss on their heads they never got from daddy. you''re not gonna win a fight by just taking a punch, you need to shit in their bed, you need to set their house on fire. remember: be a player, dont be a pawn. otherwise, save yourself some time and just wrap your lips around a gun. -quail tavers, the school of the warrens 20-4 players and pawns (i) by the time avo finished chambers recounting, tavers was squinting at him in disbelief via a simulated face constructed from phantoms. have him check in with the sang again. ask her if she has true confirmation if its actually naeko. hard to believe that lazy half-strand finally got off his ass, stopped playing his game, and decided to hit the ground running with his police work. hes been down and out for practically half my life. this is a little too drastic after years of nothing. probably is him, avo replied, digging through the mem-data chambers provided. immediately after green rivers sync, the nether came alive with screaming activity. lobbies public and private surged with roaring traffic as sequences and memories pertaining to naekos departure from his long hibernation circled the networks. mass memory dump connected to him. multiple sightings across the city. hes visiting grafters everywhere. trying to build a trail. [oh, the mirrors are not going to like this,] benhata sighed. [we have an entire division meant to monitor the paladins. once, we even had an entire strike cell dedicated to shadowing the chief paladin, but after years of inaction, the members were disbanded and reassigned.] the fallen mirror sighed. [the outer council is going to come down with a conniption over this.] a sensation of genuine disbelief came from abrel. [what? all that for naeko?] her answer came as a quiet chuckle, paladin kassamon clucking his tongue in faux pity for the instrument. [before your time, back over some two centuries ago, the paladins were all feared. we were the cream. we were the crop. we were jaus hounds, and the exorcists, our ravens. sure, the guilds were pillars of the eight great cultures that remained in our world. sure they outnumbered us. but our ranks were composed of godclads all, and under the guidance of chief osjane thousand, new vultun was an anvil to be broken in. naeko, however, was our motherfucking hammer.] [you cant imagine how many people that man has killed. and how he killed them.] corner laughed, and his memories became windows into the vicarities he once experienceda secondhand internalization of the world that once was. [samir naeko was godsdamned monster that walked out of the godsfall more pissed than he started. his name sits next to veylis avandaer. zein thousandhand. osjon thousand. stormsparrow. legends all. bleak fucking legends. but of the bunch, naeko was the odd one out. slave. sacrifice turned saboteur. then slayer of the gods that used him.] [wait, were those memories compiled from the siege of vnueid falls?] kassamon sounded awed. [holy shit, i thought those recollections were lost.] [no,] corner said. [just damn rare. not so many survivors from those times. i won that in a game of roulette. heh. poor bastards looked like they wanted to shoot me again after i resurrected. too bad they didnt say being a godclad was against the rules.] tavers, avo said, finally emerging from his own thoughts, tell white-rab hes going to be getting a new job soon. an interesting one. a drip of apprehension escaped the squires mind. not sure if hes going to be all that receptive to a dive like this, consang. therell be a lot of eyes on naeko. and the chief paladins probably got more than a few nasty tricks up his sleeve. avo anticipated this and had just the means of encouragement. tell him ill pay with a heaven. or a cycler. his choice. will also expedite matters relating to our mutual consang. alright, tavers said, still sounding dubious. as threads of ghosts cascaded along the accretion of her metamind, avo turned his attention back to the other members of his cadre. the new development gave him things to consider, and not just alone. they had already moved beyond the borders of new vultunestablished a forward operating base, even. but there was still much to be done. essus needed to be seeded back among the refugees to ingrain himself in the sanctuaries and prime himself for future operations. dice still had a home to reclaim and an enclave to reestablish. yet, with every second they left naeko unattended, the threat to their operations back in the city grew. thousands upon thousands of templates began to converse and chatter. with a subtle command, avo adjusted their behaviors, accelerating the streams of dialogue within him to their final conclusions and stacking the summarized information into separate parties based on each suggestion. the conflagration became a front in an instant. a kind of single-ego gestalt-based parliament unique in its inception. calvino gave a slight scoff. {avo. to reduce the swelling size of your ego no. you are not that unique. submind collectives and id-stacked data democracies were things established by the late twenty-third century. youre merely a more aberrant expression of the same design.} +can they twist the fabric of reality?+ avo asked. {no, but they also didnt live in a world where the market value of a life was less than that of a soft drink.} +dont see what our financial insolvency has to do with anything.+ {...there are times i forget that i accompany a monster in a world long swallowed by nightmares.} +should look outside right about now. got front-row seats.+ filtering through the different motions, the action conservatives consisting of benhata, lip, osjon, most the incubi, and several thousand other technical-logistical personnel were inclined for him to return to the city. the kill yourself party headed by abrel and more than a few bitter syndicate types wanted avo to attack naeko head-on in the hopes that he would die a long and horrible death. the action aggressors like draus and corner demanded avo press on. ensure fruits are borne of his current task while keeping naekos movements in his periphery. ten other groups offered additional suggestions on what executive actions he could take, but avo found them to be little more than variations for the first three. he eliminated abrels suggestion as he didnt need naeko to help him with any suicides, and measured the conservatives against the aggressors. well, no, not yet. but she sure as shit hates the guilds something bad, and i think we can have her do some unaware outsourcing, anyhow. another thing that chambers could handle. it might be useful for him to deal with more propaganda and outward-facing projects. he had the flair and desire for it. and he was effectively the face of their little group by this point. the thought made avo consider other things he could do with chambers. including some that might be able to distract naeko. focused rash outbreaks targeting only syndicates. or false threats to divert attention. chambers chuckled. [you know, when i was growing up, i was thinking vicarity star more than terrorist, but im not gonna lie some of this attention is doing it for me.] +i know,+ avo replied. this child is mentally wrong, the techplaguer chimed, taking a break from screaming at the woundmother to disparage chambers. recommend putting him into re-education! ah, the woundmother followed. a point of rare agreement between us. the fardrifter chuffed in disappointment. so much spent on governing anothers life. you words are little more than aspirations of cages. how pointless to disparage someone from the life they seek. [exactly!] chambers said. [fuck you, period spire. and you too, tech-cock. youre only real consang among the bunch, horse-head.] oh, look, the woundmother sneered. rubble calls to rubble. waste calls to waste. connect her to chambers, avo told tavers. have him monitor her as well. she can amplify his presence. hell be doing some things soon. to draw naekos attention away from me. have him chase smoke and mirrors. might need your help setting that up too. right, tavers said. we just gotta fool the chief paladin without him tapping any of us with his super powerful heaven. glad youre confident, avo replied. he had the feeling the squire was glaring at him now. avo. has anyone told you that you ask the world of people sometimes? no, avo said. you ask the world of people sometimes. he nodded, accepting her words. will probably do it again. ...when i run into one of the low masters, im going to tell them to include shame for the next batch of ghouls. avo hissed a low laugh. alright, draus said. shits sorted. lets get movin. essus. you know the way over. youve done this before. dont get snuffed. dont get nulled. and dont break yourself doin this. her gaze got as close to soft as she could muster, but it still seemed like she was trying to gaze through the mans skull. youre no killer. you dont got it in you. so you act the scout and do your part. aint no ones gonna respect you for gettin done in for good tryin to make worth of yourself. least of all your boy. all thats left is the memory. and that goes too once you do. essus bit his lip at her final words, and despite the hurt pulling at his face, he nodded. turn, he turned and strode through the eldritch vegetation, moving carefully around a patch of snake-like grass as he made for caravans. tavers, likewise, was going for the manta, standing over glass hidden by soil and grass. the simulacra appeared briefly, reaching out with a crystalline hand and pulling tavers down. beside avo, draus was looking in the same direction as dice now, staring out into the mangled horizon, careful not to look too high, but facing the roiling chaos nonetheless. so, the regular said. either of you two fancy a bit of a race? like in the grand prix? a mechanical whine sounded as dices tetrahedral scanner module shifted over to look at draus. never saw one. thats fine, draus said. be ahead of the other half-strand. dont be behind. get to where youre goin first. win. get assassinated maybe because some other guild cant take that shit lying down. might not do the last part. she shot avo a brief glance. or maybe we will. see how were feelin once we get there. you know the way, right? yes, avo and dice both said. the ghoul and girl were of a mind literally. what she remembered, he long knew. going to be a hard race, avo said, sensing the brittleness and instability in existence around him. so much was on the verge of breaking. rutpuring further. all it would take is a push. risky too. heh, draus snorted. careful, rotlick. think that canon you stole from moon mightve grafted a pussy onto you without you knowin. {...there are also other times i forget that you arent the only person on idheim who would benefit from extreme sensitivity training,} calvino muttered. fine, avo said, suddenly feeling the spirit of bright-wealth come over him. going to make you two the same offer i gave white-rab. win. ill give you a new ontologic. heaven. cycler. next one goes to the winner. but what about you? dice asked, sounding confused. what do you get if you win? dont know. maybe ill just eat draus. the regular grinned viciously at him. yeah, and maybe ill give you an imp-free view of what your insides look like when i pull your head and spine out from your ass. dice went impossibly still for a beat before her sheaths servos sounded again, turning to look first at draus and then at avo. i dont understand how is that a reward? Chapter 20-5 Players and Pawns (II) chapter 20-5 players and pawns (ii) +shitfuckshit. whats he doing now? whats he doing? where is he? make sure he fuckfuckfuck! no! do not try to spoof your way into his mind! are you stupid? are you fucking stupid? no! you are not cleared for actionjust watch him! if you touch him with malicious intent, he will know and he will kill you. or maybe not. maybe you get to be one of those unlucky half-strands that naeko has a conversation with. no clearance. pull back and just watch. im going incog. dont contact me. dont even remember me. just keep an eye on him and only report in if he does something worrying. what counts as worrying? i dont know, if he flattens a sovereignty or something. until then, stay close but quiet. i need to cast the council. [sigh] theyre going to shit enough bricks to build a new district.+ -mirror [redacted]s response to receiving word about chief paladin naekos return to service 20-5 players and pawns (ii) oh, so you wanted me to make some noise, did you avo? something to draw the chief paladins attention away? a false trail? chambers cackled as he stared at the glowing marker pulsing just beneath the wreckage of what used to be the conflux megablock back at mazzas junction. a deepnav simulation of the district was projected over the dais within the george washingtons command nexus. rubbing his hands together, chambers kindled heat and glee in equal measure as he considered his many, many options. "consang, ive seen that expression before. usually on the faces of half-strands about to get themselvesand a whole lot of other people killed. tavers was eyeing him from the back of the room, he could sense the flow of her perception spilling over his shoulders. synced to her metamind was that white-rab necroavos sorta dad or something. chambers wasnt sure, and frankly, the whole family talk was confusing him. that shit didnt matter though. he wasnt here to chart the low master to ghoul family tree. he was here to fuck some shit up and make some trouble the chief paladin couldnt ignore. trouble that wouldnt be traced back to them. good thing that avo gave chambers free rein to plan this run however he saw fit. as long as the distraction worked, as long as naeko was led astray, anything was on the table. anything. +make sure it works. make sure you dont expose yourselves. dont get traced. come up with a good cover story for green river to corroborate as well.+ such were avos only parameters. so it was that kae, chambers, tavers, and white-rab were gathered in the heart of the george washington. with denton still on dispatch in the tiers, her aid remained temporarily inaccessible. more helpful was sunrise, already moving to shadow naekos progress, certain that they were going to be detected by the chief paladin. the swarm morph bioform had volunteered for observational detail the moment it heard about the situation, and soon, they would get direct visuals of naekos person via the bees. chambers and kae, on the other hand, needed a resurrection to recover after avo restored them to their original sheaths and extracted the proxies from their skulls. two sinew-strewn viviante lattices composed of complex thauma-technology were stored within their new smart matter containers. the cognitive disguise was a pretty nifty thing to have on hand. chambers thought the experience wasnt so bad, but maybe next time he wouldnt need to play someone so ugly. but that run was done and this one was onand they needed to be on their shit to handle naeko, before he handled them. tension and excitement alike built within chambers. he couldnt lie, something about how fucking taboo the whole thing felt was getting him going. screwing over the chief paladin. pulling the wool over samir naekos eyes. lazy shit these days or not, there was a time when the man killed millions on the reg during his afternoon strolls. the prize for success was breathing room and the penalty for failure was getting snuffed for good. yeah. this was some nova-squire shit. thankfully, chambers thought his backup was more than enough flame to light this wick. it isnt me whos going to be getting a lot of people killed, chambers said, fixing taversand by extension white-rabwith a conniving look. its going to be an assassin. an attempt on chief naekos life, with some planted evidence whoa, tavers said, holding up her hand. slow down there before you run all our asses right over the edge. we dont wanna be fucking with naeko like that. the guys bread and butter was war for four centuries. shit, all the consangs i called up earlier told me that anything violent, damaging, dangerous, or even with aggressive intent seemed to fall under the mans influence. his heaven is sphere eight. sphere fucking eight. now, im no agnos of high knowing like kusanade here, but i know enough to understand that our best bet is to trouble him tangentially instead of directly. kae hummed in agreement. phantasmal threads flitted mem-data behind her eyes as her thoughtstuff spun at an intimidating speed. the agnos was probably going through her thauma-whatevers while keeping her eyes fixed to naekos position on the map. it costs billions upon billions upon billions of lives for a godclad to reach the eight sphere. the power he wields is beyond words. or comprehension. im trying to recall any memories from my past. if anyone told me anything about naekos ontology, or frame, or how many ontologics he has. the agnos breathed. but once someone passes the sixth sphere, they become a power in their own right. their influence spreads easily beyond a district, capable of harming and changing many concepts. or one so deeply it might as well belong to them for good. so chambers said, doing his best to add his own contribution. he had a plan. he thought it was a pretty good plan. there were layers. but all these concerns his consangs were having brought the clouds of doubt down, and clouds really harshed his vibes. i was, like, thinking, right, that white-rab could find us some local gangers or a syndicate or something. hed hit a few of them with possessors. fill em up with planted mem-data from the drongos or something about them doing a false flag or some shit. then they find naeko +this is going to be stupid,+ white-rab muttered. +i can already feel it.+ chambers shushed the necro. then they jump out in front of him. we steal a golem and pocket them in a demiplane or something. and then our guysthe ones white-rabs puppetingthey kiss each other. in front of naeko. boom. controlled rash deployment. definite success. hell resurrect and be like: damn, someones out to get my ass. huh? they dropped some mem-data? sequence encrypted? thats got to be evidence. i need to get this back to the ghost-fuckers back at scale. for a few heartbeats, no one said a word to chambers. he didnt know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. then, kae pinched the bridge of her nose while tavers sighed. +i spoofed into one of them already,+ white-rab said, distractedly. +tell me what were changing again.+ several sets of eyes turned to the phantasmal cumulus forming along tavers accretion. holy shit, chambers muttered. you really are the rotlicks brain-dad. *** naeko looked up at the single, half-melted wall towering over him. four meters tall and only one wide, the ruined plascrete slab was effectively all that remained of the conflux megablock in the aftermath of highflame-stormtree flashpoint. the media had already dubbed the events the breaking of mazzas junction and rumble in nu-scarrowbur. but words failed to do the devastation justice. when godclads fought, things broke in ways that were beyond the material. reality was often left torn in these battles, the fabric of the tapestry thin and weak, struggling to re-knit itself in the aftermath. spreading his awareness outward, naeko buried his senses into the district and sampled the damage it suffered. every bit of glass across mazzas junction was shattered. clumps of matter had been shuntedtorn across reflective surfaces and transposed out from another regardless if the space was occupied or not. structures and streets were dotted with missing potions while chunks of detritus jutted free beneath underpasses, inside bedrooms, and around window frames. across the way, over the gaps leading down to the maw, nu-scarrowbur lay wide in a spill of destruction. the outer sections of the city had been unmade over little more than ten minutes of fighting, the heavily alloyed shield-shaped structures capable of enduring conventional arms as bunkers, but offering less protection than a literal tissue when faced with godclads. a grid of light swept over naeko as another wing of drones shot through the air above him. agnos thanatechs were still looking for deaths to claim. and jhred greatlings frame for that matter. far too many thuams remained unaccounted for. jhred, jhred, jhred, naeko said, talking to the wall as he took a moment to think. what were you doing? why? how did you end up dead? who triggered your golem. the wall didnt speak. because it was a wall. naeko kept talking. because he was an idiot. your sister. she really loved you. you know? she burned her life trying to get whoever snuffed you. but she couldnt do it. they got awa naeko paused. his heaven quivered. eight thousand and thirty-two people had died at the same time three sovereignties away. cell-9. omnitech re-education district. experiment gone wrong. he could feel the remodified voidtech deconstructor swarms eating the volunteers away instead of rebuilding their sheaths automatically. naeko inverted the harm with a thought, and in an instant, the nanoswarms ate themselves out of existence. but eight thousand were already dead. and omnitech just wasted their time. it was all for nothing. story of this city. naeko went back to talking with the wall. triggering his cipher phantasmic again, he used his utility fog to snatch a rock from the ground as his ghosts tried to reconstruct the megablock from the last known memories infusing the local nether. streams of etheric river stitched their way upward into the sky from the broken slab, spreading out into new threads that formed the outline of the edifice. then, a faint flicker of instability followed and the shape collapsed under itself. the effects of highflames thoughtwave detonation lingered still, and not even ghosts could recall what happened during the last moments of jhred greatlings life. the exorcists had refrained from attempting to breach abrel greatlings mind. while she was nulled, her mem-data was a slurry. now she was resurrected, her wards paired with her heaven made her mind fortress a nightmare to access. forcing it was a waste of time anyway. by the start of next week, she would be summoned to scale for her trial, and the heaven of truth would be put to better use than wasting its miracles on some fool fallwalker. that, and denton had witnesses to provide. and more information on where he could find agnos kae kusanade. now there was someone he wanted to have a personal conversation with. especially about dawton morrows true fate, and just how much the drongos had transgressed. was it chambers that got you? naeko said, asking the wall. ive hit a lot of grafters today. the second fortune. the skin garden. muar-mauds bodychanger. the bone shop. pretty much all the owners have skeletons in their closets. but who doesnt in this city. he rubbed at his weary eyes and sighed. damn, im rusty. i barely remember how this goes. or how much time i spent talking to walls, trying to get the city to give me my answers. you hear me new vultun? would be nice if you just dropped a hint. the scoop the sang is going to hit me with better be good. the wind rustled; the sound of engines formed another layer to the backdrop. naeko shook his head. the hells am i doing? i got enough for a day. i should get back. play a match or ten. decompress. i earned it. jaus knows i did. but he didnt move. he stayed in place, staring at the wall, wondering how many he let die during his time drugging himself with entertainment. i cant do it. and it doesnt matter. what happens when i find it anyway? the bioform. its probably one of dentons too. cant use it then. or there goes the only useful source i managed to hold onto after all these years. i dont need to be doing this. trials the thing that i should be focusing on. yeah. yeah. i need to get my witnesses ready. get the others prepared for anything that might happen. that matters more than well. whatever it is im doing now. and then, as if the city had heard his request for answers, a session activated in his metamind and naeko found himself staring at the meta identification of an exorcist he didnt know. +yeah?+ naeko answered, half-hoping the exorcist would hit him with a trauma so he would get someone to break. +sorry to disturb you, chief naeko. im lieutant lorner kazahara. nether-sec. some of my divers caught a trail of something interesting, and the system flagged the mem-data as essential for your current investigation. casting data over now.+ [downloading encrypted mem-data] naeko frowned as the information loaded in his mind. a dozen or so new names appeared in his cog-feed. all known grafters. a few he visited today. under them were expandable interfaces with isolated accounting details. orders made for a specific type of sheath during the last month. the bone demon. the paladins stomach did a flip. he didnt know how to take that. looking through the sequences again, he found the client was different each time. no lead there. not obviously anyway. but he felt as if he just stumbled into something biggerthat part of the truth just slammed into him without any effort on his part. that thought gave him a funny feeling. he wondered if green river was going to add to this windfall. Chapter 20-6 Frontiers (I) chapter 20-6 frontiers (i) there are paths woven into the architecture of the tiers. sometimes, theyre bridges leading upward and sideways into a place unseen. in others, the way ahead exists as a tunnel. regardless of what form these roads take, to tread their lengths will lead you to a single junction above junctions. scale. once the seat of governance for jaus avandaer himself, now the central nucleus from which the paladins enforce their duties, the demiplane of scale exists above, between, beyond, beneath, and within tiers themselves, granting easy egresses for the paladins no matter where they need to go. yet, it is a faded ember compared to the flame it could have grown to becomean edifice demolished before it could reach its prime. in the past during the age of gods and yore, the hope was to connect all districts, all sovereignties, all cities, and eventually, all worlds along a threaded grid of spatial transference. the concept was singular and revolutionary, and the system possessed the ability to function both as a silo and an overlaid realm, for an individual might only occupy one branch at a time, and severing a single strand would still spare the restcasting only any intruders to dust. such was one among many miracles that never came to be. but compared to the scouring the paladins at the hands of the high seraph, the ursday null-bomber, and the near-rupture of their esteemed heaven of justice, such laments are paltry when measured by comparative pain. today, scale stands resplendent but rustedthe mountain fortress forming its planar expanse vast and divine, but its halls sorrowfully empty, with structures abandoned, the walls lined with loci-embedded plaques bearing memories for comrades fallen and unreplaced. for those who qualify. for those of proper birthright, merit, ability, and willingness to serve, scale holds a permanent embrace. but with the lowering of standards comes a dilution of duty and nobility. for though one can replenish their numbers, can reclaim souls and install new heavens, the heroes and saints of yesteryear are nowhere to be seen, for lost to the big nothing are many, and lost to a great malaise is one. -paladins: our broken blades (documentary) 20-6 frontiers (i) space shattered. fissures overlapped as the arsenalist pierced through space as if it was shattering glass. behind by a mere kilometer, arteries lashed across the rend-despoiled skies in whips of crimson lighting. far below, the ground mirrored the air as a storm of blood ignited canopies and infested the bark of a thousand trees. yet, as blood and glass warred, a third entity shot through branches and dashed across the waters without encountering a hint of resistance. its form was multi-armed and chimeric, with the legs of a beast and the weapons of a warrior, and it moved at a pace that was ever-accelerating, never-ceasing; an avatar of light and strength unfettered. and so it was that avo, draus, and dice continued their race through the sunderwilds. slipping past away from the last true vestiges of civilization into frontiers where madness claimed its reign, each of the godclads unleashed the full extent of their powers, reveling in these moments of freedom rarely experienced. back within new vultun, eyes lingered in every shadow, from every angle. cameras, drones, people, and specters. there were countless ways to have your secrets betrayed. countless ways to be ambushed and slain. even in demiplanar pockets or with incogs active, running the shadows meant being ready for an unexpected knife fight at any moment. shotin and abrel stood statement enough for the severity posed by surprise. here, however, in these realms so broken, so scattered, so scoured of life and stability, few would dare traverse the unwinding of existence, and fewer still would be able to gaze upon three godclad approximating the fifth sphere with naked eyes without succumbing to mental collapse. the sunderwilds was a place of simplicity. liberation, if viewed from certain regards. though space might fold and collapse, though streams of light might flense the shape from ones body and leave a person bifurcated yet whole across the length of continents, though the light might seed beasts of unnatural morphology within the supple flesh of humanity, should one be capable of contending with reality themselveswrestling with the laws of the absolute and the chains of existencethen striding through the madness became a meticulous dance rather than tempting of the fates. their final destination had no true name. dice had always just regarded it as home or masters place. what use did a dog have in learning the name of its own den? especially considering it was the only settlement around. located seven thousand and fifty-two kilometers away from new vultuns periphery, it had taken dice, her former master, and their retinue the better part of a full month to reach the megacity even with the protection of his heaven and the retrofitted highflame transport carrier that served as the fallwalkers personal vehicle. that too had been lost to the scum of the city. that, and everything he had. they sought new vultun on a pilgrimage for power and pleasure but were preyed upon in turn when the fallwalker who knew life only as a master of others found himself wanting in a city forged by beings far greater than he. drawing from dices memories, avo knew the general route to take, and what to expect. he had burned the information into draus as well before they began. currently, they were accelerating along the curving length of a spiral-like arm of pure chaos. the unbalanced domains affecting this section of the sunderwilds were connected to forests, vision, deceptions, and oceans. avo could feel the presence of the fallen heaven and its rend, but without dices pre-knowledge, he would have definitely turned his attention upon the fluttering groves beneath him. someone. [pull your ass out and take a walk,] template-draus said, her attention on his deepnav, studying how far dice was from them. the girl was nowhere to be seen, but avo could still sense her with his haemokinesis some three hundred kilometers away. [she aint goin nowhere. and you know the next stretch before we get there aint gonna be kind to her heaven neither. races about doin this right. strain builds strength. shortcuts makes cowards.] such was true. the last fallen heaven they needed to walk before they arrived at her enshadowed enclave was a place of broken vectors. as overwhelmingly fast dice was by merit of her canons, her primary domains were war and strength. directionality, vectors, speed, or boundaries were all beyond her influence. in this, avo found a mediation on what it meant to be a godclad: the way they could utterly control so many aspects of reality and yet still suffer a want to possess dominion over all other aspects of existence. the drug that is absolute control, once imbibed, cannot be refused thereafte [fuckin jaus,] template-draus groaned, interrupting his thoughts. [shut the fuck up and just walk. check your rend, vent if you need to, and make sure your shit is in order. think about philosophy shit later.] doing as the template suggested, avo felt a cascade of spatial distortion nearby as he turned his attention to draus actual self. over twenty of her replicas were anchored in different positions, light lashing out from them like a prism, deleting sections of space outright. the distance between places shrunk. parts of the landscape shivered closer as the regular vented her rend. rend capacity [woundmother]: 53% rend capacity [fardrifter]: 61% rend capacity [techplaguer]: 0% avo mirrored draus and prepared himself for the final stretch of things. he almost started by draining his fardrifter when he realized the local speed limit preventing him from using his halt of the passing to drain momentum. likewise, waybreaker would more than probably just leave him and draus lost for several days seeing as they were the only two entities it could affect out here. for as far as the eye could see ahead, the world ran in pulsing lines of grayness running between cracks hissing steam and magma. instead, he expended the entropy plaguing his woundmother through his breath of the withered. the beginnings of an entropic gust spilled out from his orifices, unfurling wider still into cascading columns of stratocumulus. a thunderstorm of blackened lightning whipped slowly at the land, leaving kilometer-deep wounds while the gales swept the land clean of mass. rend capacity [woundmother]: 34%... 28%... he studied draus from the corner of his eye, watching as her replicas dimmed and shattered into shards of glass. she was marching as she vented, eyes fixed on the way forward, seemingly blind to the world around her. the opportunity was tempting. too tempting. avo might have subtextually agreed to not exploit dices lack of spatial canons until they reached the penultimate segment of their journey, but murder was still fair game. {avo, i thought we went over this.} calvino chided. [nah, go for it,] template-draus spat. [let that bolt fly at me. see what happens.] and so, without further encouragement, he did. the skies above them shattered with light as languid bolts dove down, seeking to shear draus from her material form. a wave of enshadowed darkness brushed across the landscape, peeling layers of veins away into fading particulates. slow as the assault was, there was nowhere for draus to go, nowhere she could space fractured like a broken mirror around her person. lighting speared through the crevice. the winds whistled as they left through a crack between spaces. a heartbeat later, avo found draus pointing her projectile launcher at him without looking, her micro-missiles streaking out, just as slow as his lightning was. {was checking if you were paying attention,} avo said, casting her ansible. the regular snorted. {yeah? well, i just shot back cause fuck you.} Chapter 20-7 Frontiers (II) chapter 20-7 frontiers (ii) all who claim to understand the shattered puzzle that is the sunderwilds speak lies! lies! sense cannot be found here. you grope for stable foundations but the sky is down and up is not true. pain yourself not. accept the softness and prosper. impossibilities stack over, against, beneath, and within. watch the language of madness. watch the art expressed by the unchained world. glance upon the twisted bodies of its children. those who remain trapped. touched by the taint of distortion. or merely ignorant that their little apocalypse is not total, as they assumed. be wary of the likeness of i. fallwalkers. inheritors of the broken. our jagged edges carve at what is lick against the worlds tongue. we lick! walking disasters against calamities unmoving. environment versus man. but is it so? do we not contain multitudes and worlds within ourselves? worlds in worlds? what to claim? whos to say? here is where you will learn of loss. being lost. losing yourself. losing your alignments. losing any sense of commonality. the world of the saneplaces that he [insinuating jaus avandaer] stole are built on common edifices. same rules. same reasons. same foundations. symmetry of society. not so here. not so. there is not commonality. only variability. to step between fallen heavens is to bound from one story to another. yet, for those that seek the wilds, there is a way to followto understand. i named them the scar charts. betrayals of each rupture. revelations offered as each broken soul bleeds against another, channeling the flames of creation into aberrant expressions of impossibility. over, against, beneath, and within. madness wars against madness too. symmetry lost is symmetry lost. not gained. so, the ruleless must struggle against the ruleless, and definition returns where disagreements follow. laws that cannot coexist. narratives that are perpendicular. grindingnot intersecting. learn the patterns spilling from these boundaries. learn how each strains against each. learn to dance the edge of inconsistency and instability. canon-clash-canon is canon not. nothing is safe. but not is better than not not. [laughter] -the mad monk alsyim, fallwalker 20-7 frontiers (ii) displacement. dilution. such were the expressions of the penultimate rupture, preventing them from reaching dice''s former enclave. in accordance with the roots of thaumaturgy, no heaven was formed in a vacuum. all was an alternate expression, a perversion of the natural order, of laws that were now interpreted to be different by the infection of culture, of incomprehension, of entertainment. or pure delusion. just as the woundmother was a reimagining of blood, the fardrift an ascension of air, or the techplaguer formed from technology rendered unto quackery, the fallen heavens had their own imprint, and melded to their patterns were the lands themselves. glancing at the few patches of stability between the stretching tears consuming the landrend bleeding over into reality from torn seams, blending structure, energy, and casualtyavo saw that this place was once a rainforest. his heavens interpreted patterns of heat and felt the patterns of vegetation. but they now existed as bastardizations of themselves, their properties twisted by and into the power of the fallen heaven itself. merely noticing the greenery would cause one to be pulled away from positionthe effects of gravity pressing against spatial consistency. there wasnt even a lurch to the effect. it was as if space was a sea, vision was a chain, and the color green was a winch that wouldnt stop pulling. this, however, was the least among the anomalies choking the cadres pace. plucking dice from the place where she was trapped once more by swallowing and exhaling her using his fardrifters nine streams, avo ran simulations of his environment as he tried the map the expanse. the leaves here danced to ethereal winds that existed beyond the fardrifters power to grasp. worse yet, they were as if kaleidoscopes. spatial reality shifted constantly, an eternal push-push between matter exuding hues of green and everything that didnt. the sheer denseness of vegetation likewise continued to spread. avo didnt notice the change when he and draus first crossed the edge of the volcanic plainsa place calvino theorized to be long destroyed by prior heavens even before the godsfall considering how it stretched a trail of ash and heat between swaths of devouring fauna. the current fallen heavens seemed more stable at first, only deviating with slight edits made to directionality and movement. yet, simply by moving closer into its confines, they were drawn deeper into the woods, into the embrace of the trees, the green rising around them, even as the foliage burned from their acceleration, and the light of the sky faded as branches and bioforms erupted up in pace with avos climbing velocity, caging the face of the daystar away from sight as if a flash-formed nest. a storm of devouring crimson tore out from avo, unraveling wood, biomass, stone, fungi, and leaves into a tempest of blood for over a hundred kilometers. his sanguinity tore through the forest as if a wildfire, a hurricane, a swarm of locusts combined. and when his rend was filled, he continued unmaking matter using his breath of the withered. two months ago, such a display of power would awed him past the point of despair. two months ago, merely looking upon his current self would have shattered his wards in a microsecond and left his ego in a million pieces. it would be a thing of paltry effort to bring ruin upon an unprepared district in the warrens. now? now, avo felt how wanting his current power was. all heavens could destroy. the woundmother could even rebuild as fast as it broke. but the truest expression of power was control. absolute control. can, or cannot. will, or will not. possible, or impossible. and it was just such a thing that he and his cadre faced right now. dice, far exceeding both him and draus in terms of speed by this point, was barely ahead of him nowless than a true kilometer ahead but also one hundred machs faster than both he and draus put together. every second of continued acceleration sent blastwaves out from her, casting destruction upon all in her wake. she was a veritable missile of calamity surging forward, carving a scar of brilliant white through the world, faster than the air could ignite, faster than space could bear. and she was also far more impotent than he, for the faster they moved here, the closer they drew to the trees, and larger did the forest get. it reminded him of one of revas miracles back in nu-scarrowburof the pebbles she flung at him, turning into boulders and hills as it approached with building acceleration. this fallen heaven seemed to work on similar principles, though applied to a far greater extent. simply moving closer to a tree made it larger, relative to ones speed. yeah. just dont burn any of that pansy peace-lover shit into me is all. not your preference. wont make it your design. letting out a breath, he took a step toward the rushing currents of stacking ebony and reached out with a tendril of blood. as the veins spread past a veil of blackened mist, creatures thin and slender lashed at his construct, dragging their teeth down its sides. patterns flashed into the woundmother, showing avo structures of enamel and calcium, but he restrained himself from trying to break them. ->canon: haemification - the user can turn all influenceable matter into blood ->hubris: any attempts to subsume gaseous or liquid matter will incur backlash (12%; x2 backlash) the heaven of blood sneered. be this the bounty reaped by the world after the deeds of this so-called jaus, named godbreaker. be this salvation or emancipation. i see only a shaping of alloys betwixt. water, but not water. rock, but not rock either. its as if the environment remembers itself being two things at once. but where blood was denied, the winds remained stalwart, and the fardrifter glided forth, sinking a single head into the shadows. a shudder ran through avos frame, his soulfire quivering from the recoil. where his heaven of air flowed, the water parted, tides turned aside by the sweeping weight of a storm. the domain of shadow was ponderous in this place, and the nature of its collapse rendered it impossible to navigate if one could not circumvent the shadows. yet, from the heavens avo possessed within, he found another option. feeling his currents brush over schools of squirming monsters, he closed his grip around one in particular and pulled. wind blasted out behind him, casting sand high into the air. dice shifted, avoiding the worst of the spray. draus simply closed her helmet. between the grip of an echohead, sustained by a domain of darkness, avo observed the writhing creaturethe bane of dices life and childhood, beasts of her benighted past. its form held too much symmetry for it to be merely a thing created from the chaos expelled by a fallen heaven. with six eyes lining its spear-like body and flicking tongues layered in jagged teeth, avo felt a flicker touch his domain of biology and frowned. [this creature was someones art piece. of that, i am certain.] elegant-moon greeted the monster with the scorn befitting a practitioner of biomancy. [crude. eyes. for a thing that swims in the darkness. laughable. and the teeth and tongues what a parody of life. but i suppose im one to speak. a hoarse laugh escaped from draus. well. looks like you finally found someone uglier than you. maybe thisll be chambers face for the run. see how much worse you can make it. the enshadowed creature writhed and squeaked between his digits as he withdrew his fardrifters presence. its struggles waned in the light, and nature of its passing came from the glare of falling dawn. it slipped from avos fingers as water. just water. nothing more. then, before the last of it could spill, avo pushed it back beyond the veil using his winds and sensed its gradual restoration, shooting out to rejoin its kindred. its like a seabed out there, avo said, the heads of his fardrifter writhing outward, displacing parts of the fog. where blood failed, and technology offered no purchase, air laced with the touch of shadow pried, and the sea that wasnt parted before him. {like a prophet of old,} calvino chuckled. {i must remember to inform operative canduir. this will be certain to amuse. might i ask you to turn a stick of blood into some snakes?} avo obliged the egi on a whim, a thread forming via his sanguinity, spilling out to be blood-made bioforms assembled from a collection of biological traits. the serpents slithered. dice gave them a look. then, draus shot them. calvino sighed. {not exactly how the original story went, but i suppose there are other retellings.} pulling the space before him open like a curtain, nine streams drove the miasma back, and held the dark at bay. no backlash struck him. no paradox followed. his rend was climbing at four times the original rate, however, and he wondered how much entropy his hell was imbibing. rend capacity [fardrifter]: 55% avo, the fardrifter said, speaking its users name for the first time. i think i have been here before. i think i recall this to be an ocean. there is a feeling here i know these winds. or the currents of air that remain. i was here once long, long ago. once. this was to be an ocean. i soared free and far for days and months. the horizon was an endless curve of blue, dotted by jutting rocks.a whistle of melancholy sang through the rustling gales. i wish to return. to stride the skies free. you allowed this of me today. i am not displeased. but i miss seeing the horizon as it was before. whole. another epiphany dawned on avo. a sudden realization that living long without continuous change was to tear yourself from within. culture and time frayed the body that wouldnt move, a mind that wouldnt grow. being immortal was not enough. that was why godclads were conditionally eternal. but what happens when the world grows and you wont? fallwalkers, perhaps. in the ruins of dices former home, he just might the material came into his awareness, cutting through his thoughts. a distant tower eighty kilometers away and forty meters tall. he could feel its composition: plascrete, glass, silicon, coppery, and lightning. there was a core within it. veins. arteries. fuses. carrying electricity like blood. immediately, dices memories swam out from the depths of his mind, and he knew what he had brushed with his haemokinesis. [the masters watchtower,] template-dice breathed. [you found one.] feeding electricity through his blood into the structure itself, he watched as an explosion of spotlights cleaved and parted the dark. releasing the veil of shadows, he let the tides crash back, only to cut themselves on the brightness within. whats happening, draus asked, looking at avo. why are youwell, thats something. through the darkness came roads paved by brilliant light. voltage ran through avocontrolled by a cloud of sporelings channeled through his echoheads and sourced from his heaven. he kept the current running without overcharging the structure. more than that, he fed his own brightness into the light, layered it with the gleam of indestructibility. the towers, dice said with reverence, staring deep and far as a wide path opened before them. writhing tendrils and slithering beasts danced along the ink-black flesh that formed the waysides, but they dared not pass into the light itself. are you powering it? only the master could just needs energy, avo said. can even give you a canon to achieve this. wont be hard. the girl fell silent, her growing understanding of her rising empowerment warring with the propaganda that shaped her entire lifededicated in service to a single, dead fool. some truths deform our egos, avo said, speaking softly to the girl as he thought of walton. he gave draus a brief look. he remembered nulling his father. he remembered how his sense of self slipped after. he remembered what he learned after, and what he understood while lurking in the depths of mirrorheads mind. ideals were changes, but breaking themkilling the spirit of ones parentwas like casting yourself adrift into chaos. no more governing anchor. no more true north. you had to sail now alone, without a lighthouse to point your way. yet, that statement proved false a second thereafter as his domain of luminosity sensed something. a dot of light came through the upper right of the horizon. then the left. then through the far haze, more and more beams were joined and bonfires lit, seeming like stars peering through the soft mist of clouds. dice went still again. draus tilted her head. avo let out a chuff of surprise. well, the regular said, offering a humorless chuckle. seems we aint the only ones here. seems like the folks back home might just be alive after all. Chapter 20-8 A Playground for Tyrants (I) chapter 20-8 a playground for tyrants (i) approaching, infiltrating, and overthrowing an enclave is built on information. information regarding what we know about the governing fallwalkeror fallwalkers. information regarding the environment, the localized anomalies, the factions at play, the key holders of power, and the general socio-structural aspects of such homesteads. so, today is going to be a special day, boys and girls. today, youre getting your sequences updated free of charge. youll be getting the latest phantasmics and memory updates our necrojacks can provide, and omnitrech and the no-dragons have also graciously provided some of their implant-based neurosofts to keep both meta and meat extra aligned. you all will also have three hundred hours of vicarities to draw from. memories so thoughtfully provided by certain fateless refugees. aint they kind? youll be able deep-sim yourself in their sequences. learn about the routes they took. what the scar charts for the sunderwilds look like. what kind of fucky-wuckies you might run into. that kind of stuff. oh, and when youre done, you will be planning the route. not us. dont look at me like that. we already did most of the hard thinking for youyou have to be tested on something. honestly, you juvs have no idea how nice you had it. back in my day, drtio [deep rupture tactics and infiltration operations] had us do our graduation ceremony by detonating a rendbomb over a syndicate and having us storm-jump into that mad house. youre getting to raid an enclave. hells, youre getting to assassinate a godclad. just think about that. aint that fun. anyway. heres your capstone operation to show that we didnt waste all those phylacteries and bodies on you half-strands. look through the mem-data. figure your approach. topple that regime. snuff that clad. come home alive. the host that kills the clad gets preferential deferment for their initial theater of deployment. the ones that make it back graduate and just jack and shit else. remember kids, dyin doesnt make you a reg. snuffing the other fucker does. so dont die. anyway. happy flying. dismissed. -drill-master millenau daanouriks, regular 20-8 a playground for tyrants (i) the light from the distant watchtowers speared through the miasma. lanes were paved in the darkness, and the shadows were held at bay by a constant stream of radiance. casting his skimmer high into the air with an eruption of thought-fire, avo surveyed the emerging route. it was as if a constellation had been carved out from within an ocean of darkness, the interconnected paths running from lighthouse to lighthouse, beams of radiance relayed from lens to lens. the grand architecture of this place was still in the process of unveiling itself, a clear shape was beginning to form via each installation of illumination the nearest watchtowers came righter in something of a v-shape before the cadre, but by the third tower at approximately twenty-four kilometers away, the trail of the light grew unnaturally curved, spiraling inward along a wall of arcing lens that unveiled themselves with the receding dark. condensation clung to the glass, and avo sampled its material structure using his woundmother. there was a touch of the unnatural upon itsome kind of amplifying resonance to its shine that only triggered when graced by light. this was beyond dices memories. avo had followed her recollections thus far to chart their travels back to her home, but she was entrapped in the bowels of her masters vessel along with the other lesser members of his retinue. she knew not the design of the world beyond her walls, only that demons lurked in the absence of light, that the master was the pillar of the divine, and that only he could keep them safe from harm. yeah, that''s a reflection, but theres somethin up with the light a frown adorned draus face as she vitrified some of the ground at their feet and levitated it up before the cadre. the glass cracked slightly, and avo glimpsed the armored form of the regulars simulacrae replica with its blade raised, shield forward, and wings flexed. a flash of resplendence resonated from the shard and the shine of the lighthouses quivered. somethin giving anything that shines here more kick. i can feel it boostin my domain. metal slugs sailed slowly through the air. fangs gnashed at parting flesh. bone-made shivs opened throats and ended lives. thaums began to flow over into avo, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the enclave. avo channeled skimmer through his sanguinity and burned these details into his phantoms as well. draus yeah, the regular said, her mind focused as if she was the one locked in battle. im inside too. i see em. looks like we came back just in time for a civil war. civil war? dice said, taken entirely aback by the situation. pockets of moving bodies battled each other. it took scant effort from avo to distinguish the factions. one side was fewer but formed in orderly lines, holding key junctions and chokepoints. the others were a swelling mass, pushing hard to break through fortifications. and then, in the distance, avo noticed a series of flickers pulsing from each of the lighthouses. a repeating series of winks traveling through the shadows from afar. {hm. some kind of crude code,} calvino said. {would you like me to attempt an extrapolation?} the ghoul grunted. +no. have another way of understanding the situation.+ calvino understood in an instant. {ah.} +dont worry. will burn only the ones engaged in active violence.+ avo tried not to laugh as the egi formed a frowning face at the heart of its nanomolecular avatar. {do be restrained.} +yes. going to be important moment for dices self-shaping as well.+ {why cant you just say growth.} +because that entails something that just happens. the world inflicts on you sometimes. this is. this time she moves first. matters more.+ rising back to the real after his inner monologue, avo checked his rend and prepared himself. draus. we enter through the ceiling. incogs active. going to subsume a mind before we engage. synced, draus said. her shard expanded outward into a sheet, forming a wide passageway into the enclave. reckon the flickerin just now was a signal. like how theyre under attack. they might be assumin their fallwalkers come back to save them. avo gave a bemused chuff. godclads coming. yes. fallwalker? no. he gave dice a final look. are you ready? both the girl herself and her template shivered. no. good, avo replied. awareness of uncertainty is better than blind certitude. this could be good for you. it could be painful. i can mend whatever damage it might inflict. but that will be up to you. he paused, considered his words, and let out a breath. our pasts are rarely what we think they are. our owners often lie to us. our purposes are poorly conceived. the past hurts. always. because we know what was lost. the past is lost. but you are now present in motion. future still definable. do you want to see what you might become? a moments hesitation followed. then, a soft whir sounded from the railjumpers triangular sensor module. yes. good, avo said. me too. so. take your step. we will follow. the girl was done lingering now. strings of apprehension still pried at her insides, but her route was chosenand pointed not the one offered by her masters lighthouses. peering past the light, avo sneered into the brightness, hoping strangely that there was something after, that the now-dead fallwalker could see what was being done to his favorite dog. +taken her from you,+ avo taunted, casting his ghosts out down into the lanes of light. +not yours anymore. you thought you knew power. you thought you had control? this is power. this is control. is. is not. absolute. i am the more impressive god. such cannot be denied.+ pockets of disbelief exploded across avos many templates. corner laughed. abrel gawked. template-draus snorted with derision. [jaus. weve finally reached terminal shit-talk. told you to stop tauntin and torturin half-strands and now youre mocking them in the big nothing. fuckin incredible.] avo cast the template''s words over into real-draus neurodeck and she gave a low guffaw. dice stepped through the glass, not noticing the moment shared by ghoul and regular, the twosome holding a moment longer. {oh, look, captain draus. character development.} soft sarcasm clung to calvinos every word and draus just shook her head. frankly, if this stops him from doin stupid shit in the middle of a firefight, ill take it. way things are going, though, i think dices old master got lucky: if avod snuffed him, hed probably be gettin these speeches on the daily inside the conflagration. bitterness metastasized inside abrel. [yeah. fate-fucking-worse than death.] Chapter 20-9 A Playground for Tyrants (II) chapter 20-9 a playground for tyrants (ii) there is no light but that which comes from the master. there is no will but what is gifted to us by the master. there is no life but what is allowed by the master. by the act of the godbreaker, we were damned. abandoned to the darkness of the old world, we were lost. with the shrouding of the sun, existence ceased to shine, and the sea that was night swallowed the world entire. damnation was our fate. but salvation was his offering. from beyond the darkness, he came! yakozitrin, lightbearer, godborn, master of the remnants! salvation for us, the unwanted, the alone, the abandoned. through the master''s infinite mercy alone are we able to continue. by his light are we able to live. by his will are we able to find purpose. praise be yakozitrin. praise by the last true god in darkness. for through his blessing, the dawn rises still. -enclaver prayer 20-9 a playground for tyrants (ii) the pools shine! the master lives! the master returns! hold true! the dawn rises still! the dawn rises still! the words left aladons lip without thought, and what remained of his cohort chorused after, as if possessed themselves. aches and bruises lined every inch of his torso. his arms were blocks of leaden fire, but his fingers remained fused tight to his shield and fang-axe. he broke his spear against the hardened shell of a gastavoid the transgressors used to shield their frontline, serving as a weaponized mount against the honor guard. slow though the gas slugs were, they still loomed over even the tallest of men, and the heated gases they spewed from the vents along their carapace inflicted lightness upon ones skull. of course, this was secondary to their true purpose in combat: to be detonated upon reaching shield walls, breaking formations by force, fire, and shrapnel. a series of cracks sounded from above. another dozen gleaming boltseach as long as aladon was tallpunched into what few gastavoids the attackers had left. blasts tore gaps in the pale masonry lining the second junction. down the flame-lit paths, limbs and burning viscera joined howling screams, the noise long sounding as if ambiance in aladons ears. bodies lay strewn along the second rung of the citythe last true city, by yakozitrins grace. writhing figures lay sprawled amidst the sea of dead and dying. bodies of all shapes and sizes lay scattered. red bled into fabrics of white and teal. as aladon swept the streets for additional signs of movement, he felt bile lick at the roof of his mouth before he forced the sickness back down. his faith in the master was absolute. unquestionable. but he himself was not. he was flesh-in-passing and mind-in-diminishing. loyalty notwithstanding, killing ones own people by the scores left wounds within just as without. his heart felt scarred and moist with tears to come, but that was for tomorrow. that was for if he could survive this at all. for now, the banner of hand urrins flapped still along the second rung, and the esteemed pearlguard stood defiant. but though they were the masters chosen, though they represented the lightmost caste, the masses gathered under the false prophet named dogmother seemed endless in their number. worse yet, they filled with ranks of the night-touchedthe toilers of groundmostand the sin-bearersbreeders meant to produce children worthy of rising the rungs. children bearing the masters visage in every respect. light of hair. light of eyes. light of skin. to see them turned from divinely ordained purpose was sickening in of itself. but that was nothing compared to the act of actively cutting them down or ordering his gas-throwers to light their bodies aflame. in the shadows of his mind, he could still see her, the breeder among the heretical vanguard. she held her half-light child aloft as if the wailing babe would prove a talisman from fire or blade. she learned of her mistake when aladon called his gas throwers to ignite their tubes and see the rabble purged. in the moment of her burning, both she and her child were closer to their master than they had ever been. it was a good death, to be clothed in dancing bright, and an eternal condemnation to be charred by the stain of black. aladon briefly surveyed his remaining forces and shot another look upward. the darkness of despair was parting with the shimmering of the pools. dappled lights danced the vastness of the city, unmistakable even through columns of rising smoke. the towers were alive againresurrected by the master''s shine. the dark was parting. the long night was approaching its end. and deliverance would soon follow. a prickling sensation played at his skin. horror. elation. exhaustion. desperation. there was no end to how many emotions could burn inside a man at once. gasps and sobs escaped from his fellow pearlguard. of the twelve legions he was granted to hold the second junction thoroughfare from the dogmothers masses, only half were still capable of fighting. the way ahead of them stood a narrow channel and their gas throwers held firm from atop the edges of the first rung. for a moment, he thought he saw a series of cracks travel along the marble walls lining the sides to the channelarteries fissuring through the coral-made battlements he stood on. but the moment was gone in a flash, streaking out of his sight, there and then not. the sensations passed. aladon mastered himself. im going to find whoever made those rations and kill them, kaiss said, announcing his own recovery with a quip of dry wit. aladon remained silent, however. though the unnatural left his flesh, his heart was flooded with building dread. he had felt the masters touch before once. stood in his presence. the way light and life bent to him was perfection. absolute. irresistible. the weight that emanated from his being ineffable in sensation. there was something about this that felt the same but greater. impossibly greater. deeper too. aladon swallowed and barely heard the following cry. movement! one heretic rising. third mound beside the lip. his eyes snapped to place almost immediately, for he had been among those to stack those bodies, building them high during the lulls between so the heretics would have to crawl between the narrow channel of their dead if they wanted to process. the emerging threat, however, did not come from the lip of the thoroughfare. no. instead, bodies rolled down the mound of corpses as a shuffling form pushed free. a unified expulsion of disbelieving breaths escaped from the pearlguard. fuck me, kaiss said. we have ourselves a hard unwhat in the masters will aladon saw it too: towering of crackling fire, both brilliant and uncanny as if the union between a raging inferno and coiling mist. it climbed forth from a translucent halo slipping out from the bodies, and a landslide of corpses toppled free, aladon struggled not to recoil at the sight. there, on the few bodies that remained, stood the breeder he ordered burned. pockets of boiled fat still dripped from her heat-melted skin. her skin, once divine, was raw red and midnight black, and her meat clung to her bones in hives of melted flesh. as every inch of the city was imbued by the masters light, shadows could not shroud her, and so aladon witnessed her in detail. he saw cooked tension struggling to tighten beneath patches of skin burned away. he saw the open socket of her eye with embers still sizzling from what remained of her eyebrows, cord hanging free. and worst of all, he saw the child he ordered to be burned along with her flame-fused and sunken into her chest, its flayed face half-exposed in a perpetual scream, impossible, aladon choked. he bounced off kaiss, and only then did he realize he was backpedaling. aladon? kaiss said, eyes alight with a rare expression of concern. what? whats wrong? but the large man could not see. he hadnt the eyes. and such was a blessing, for what followed next undid aladon completely. from across the sixty meters of space, she gestured at the burning halo surrounding her and summoned what looked like an apparition of her own form shaped from the flames themselves. then, her ghostly twinunblemished in flesh and naked in her sorrowwept as pointed at the battlements, and him in particular. a moment thereafter, the ghost faded, and the burned breeders ruined flesh began to peel. it happened in an instant, and aladon felt the weight of divinity pass through him again. a tide of blood rose from bodies below, drenching the woman in crimson. with a casual shrug thereafter, the blood then flung itself from her body, and she stood naked. and unburned. yako-yakozitrin, aladon sobbed. the resolve within him was beginning to crumble. beginning to break. kaiss was holding from behind, whispering worried words while the rest of his cohort paled, never expecting to see him like this. the woman took a step forward and looked down at her chest. her infant was still boiled into her body. she tilted her head as if it were a curiosity rather than a dead babe. with a casual motion, she tore the conjoined infant free from her bosom and held it high for aladonand all the legions to see. cries of dismay and horror erupted from all who held the walls. but nights disfavor was not done visiting aladon, for then the woman flung the child out at them, and it sailed out across an impossible distance, at impossible speeds. it came to an impaled halt torso-first against the jutting parapet. several members of the cohort flinched back. a scream came from the left, followed by the crash of a falling body. through it all, cold terror just continued to flood aladons stomach. shivering, he looked at the slumped body of the baby, his mind unable to comprehend what had just happened. this was when the infant lifted its head up and fucking smiled at him. the sickness exploded within aladon. his will gave. he threw up all over kaiss boots. *** {avo,} calvino said, disappointment arriving in the form of a long, drawn-out sigh. {was any of that necessary?} the ghoul nested in the sheath of an almost-dead woman grinned and savored the flavors of minds breaking, morales shattering. +for my entertainment? absolutely.+ Chapter 20-10 A Playground for Tyrants (III) chapter 20-10 a playground for tyrants (iii) [egi] kant was a prick: operative zein, we need to talk about your in-field ethics. specifically about the collateral damage. zein thousandhand: hm. i think things are well, no? things are proceeding in accordance with our designs. [egi] kant was a prick: yes however. but. what demanded the beheading of 400,000 uninvolved people? zein thousandhand: ah? that is what you wished to talk about. [barked laugh] they presented for the future. same as always. [egi] kant was a prick: but did you need to kill them? zein thousandhand: [louder laugh]do you know that jaus had a way about him when my ire ran high? i think i shall take inspiration from him now: what, to our thoughts, constitutes the necessity of action? [egi] kant was a prick: we are aware of avandaers habit of using theoretical debates to deflect practical atrocities. zein thousandhand: oh, so theyre atrocities now? tell me, oh, great mind of pure-forged machinery, does this offend you? [egi] kant was a prick: what, to my parameters, constitutes taking offense! zein thousandhand: [extremely loud cackle] ah. ah how is it that i keep allowing you to deceive me with your engineered charm? [egi] kant was a prick: its not truly deception. its more just pattern recognition and fine-tuned practical social psychology. you desire us to be offended so you can defy us and court a potential encounter of some kind. all for the thrill. but we simply want you to reduce unneeded slaughter. our motives are not aligned. the solution was never to argue. zein thousandhand: hm. i suppose we are all predictable, by some measure. the paths would not be, otherwise. it is good that you make me laugh, machine. smiles are sedatives for resolve and encourage easy surrenders. tell me, machine, do you think there are words that can change the will of any sophont being? [egi] kant was a prick: demonstrably, no. consider your daughter. consider the hungers. some meanings are beyond words. and we cannot interface with your people the same way we do ours. zein thousandhand: such is the world. [egi] kant was a prick: for now. until later. then again. zein thousandhand: i will strain my skill more when i prune. see if i can collapse the paths with fewer cuts. [egi] kant was a prick: i will strain my self-control parameters and not boast to other minds about my success. zein thousandhand: a great sacrifice has been demanded from both of us today. let us lament as companions. [egi] kant was a prick: yes. tragic, really. all those uncommitted genocides. -conversation between zein thousandhand and aegis egi kant was a prick 20-10 a playground for tyrants (iii) {avo, did you just throw a fuckin baby at someone?} draus asked. the regular was three full kilometers away and a whole rung below, jumping between pieces of broken glass to observe the conflict in motion. she desired to continue observing the movements and makeups of each clashing faction, and using the intelligence gathered, she populated the enclaves simulated battlespace with new markers, reticles, and data threads detailing critical theaters and figures of interest. avo, personally, had seen enough. there was no one here that could remotely challenge them in terms of power. worse, there was nothing here capable of escaping his notice. and with how he drowned the interior of the entire enclave under waves of all-knowing perception, he doubted anyone was hiding in the dark with an active incog, biding their time to ruin avos day. the only threats here were near baseliners. and small ones at that. their equipment wasnt even of alloyed design, with most of their armor and blades bearing organic traits of simplistic composition, and the miracles imbued within them offering but a perpetual shine. as things stood, the cadre were the only godclad present, and there was no world where anyone in the city could challenge them. for such was the world that yakozitrin, dices former master and truly dead fallwalker, had built. the balance of power was being bled out of the pearlguards, yakozitrins chosen enforcers. the muscle serving the former fallwalker bore bastardized ethics close to their hearts, drawing from the brutality of syndicate enforcers with the high authority vested in paladins or guilders. it all came together to form a tyranny of the small, the nobles using their blessings, equipment, and superior training to herd their lessers. such was how things were for the longest of times. such was how inurinithe dead breeder-caste baseliner whose body now served as avos sheathunderstood the world to be. unlike all the other bodies he wore, she was weakness personified in skin, bone, and organs. her lungs strained to bear breath. fatigue and acid licked at her muscles with the slightest exertion. and her heart sounded like a gun. living as she was made avo miss his original body. the inconvenience of baseline humanity was repulsive, and if not for the novelty of her memoriesand the extremism in her actionsavo would have probably found another body to nest himself within. to say she was a biased source was an understatement. he had kept her separated from the other templates to prevent her mind from shattering. her mind was already an inch away from falling to madness from the twin torments she suffered. in the mania of her devolution, she had brought her newborn to bearthe fact that these people were unafflicted by the rash only just occurring to avoand thought the infants transitional breeding to be a shield against the pearlguard from her interpretations of scripture. calvino sang a soft note of disappointment. {another point where the practicalities of faith and the theoretical rules dont align. excuses and self-forgiveness come easy when were desperate. even when we supposedly believed something.} such words were as directed toward avo as they were meant for the people of this city. hypocrisy passed through most like the air they breathed. fractures ran deep in his psyche. his consciousness screamed with despair, disbelief, and regret. s-sorry, he whimpered, so so sorry. avo nodded, and the breeders neck felt stiff. he infused her bones and sinews with empowerment more to slake his own annoyance than to find relief in comfort. +we most often are. but too late. almost always too late. and only when consequence follows. the weight of consequence. that makes what we do feel real. dont you agree?+ bright blue eyes widened with terror as the ghosts conveyed avos words in telepathic missives. though their tongue was known to him, he preferred this. the dread. the control. subtly was the burden of the underdog, and he had no desire to expend such effort here. the way the little creature was looking at avo told him spoke of confusion and incomprehensible terror. avo sighed, and the body he wore sagged. let me show you. then, he swallowed the pealguards mind in a rush of flame. everything about aladon, bred of mirrui-kleens, becomes known to him. of his childhood in the temples at the topmost rung. of his talent with the blade. of his ascent to the guard and acceptance by the fallwalker. of deeds he done and transgressions he committed. cast into the living inferno that was avos consciousness, the pealguard was placed in a special mind space. but not alone. in his arms, he held a living infantthe one he burned. across from him, inurini stood, clad in his ridged and opalescent armor, manning a gas thrower. for a beat, both just stared at one another, minds not computing the situation avo had loaded them into. {i question the ethics of your literal thought experiments, avo,} calvino said, slightly disapproving. the ghoul shrugged. he thought it was appropriate. the man was a practitioner of mass murder, so why not let him reap the spoils of victimhood? and the breeder was a zealot, sacrificing her child without need. to place them in such reserved roles seemed poignant. [and really fucked up,] abrel muttered. [yes,] kare said, horrified. [youyou cant have a mother burn her child. its wrong.] +not real,+ avo said. {its practically as traumatic though,} calvino said, sighing. {avo. i dont harass you much, but currently, this method of justice would turn the stomach of even poor old hammurabi.} avo frowned as he collapsed the mindscape before it could continue, moving both templates into their isolated silos. through it all, dices template watched inside avo while her actual self remained with draus. the girl didnt know how to feel, seeing as she was more of a favored pet under the fallwalker than an actual subject. on that note, curiosity sprang through avo as he found himself wondering why he couldnt feel another like dice. his answer came via aladons memories, and avo began to learn who dice truly was in a cataclysmic instant. reaching across the city, he unraveled specific individuals high and low, killing commanders in battle, and administrators in their homes. he ignored the confused call of calvino as he rebuilt a forbidden past from a hundred and twelve people and all the memories they carried. ghosts - [26,557,675] liminal frame (v) - 18,312 thaum/c itheri, bred of uthe-nuei, was the fallwalkers former concubinea highborn of the light, for the light in more ways than one. but there came a day when she made a mistake. one born of genuine romance and folly unfettered. a tale as old as time played on in the form of borrowed memories and rumors. a concubine met her masters primary enforcer. a concubine developed forbidden wants. the guard, unfortunately, reciprocated. so the mistakes continued. so mistake led to mistake and a child was born, but not of the masters blood. and though such truth was hidden from him for years and yakozitrin, fallwalker, and master of the city, doted on what he thought was his daughter for the first four years of her life, there came a day where the concubine and the guard made a final mistake, and sorrow followed. through their joining, they inflicted on the fallwalker the only blow they could have ever truly struck against his persona blow against his ego. the guard was put to death. slowly. aladon was in attendance. he was close enough to see things. he didnt know his disgraced brother, and that made him glad, for in his memories did the screams of the concubine also echo, and when the fallwalker was done with her love, he moved to the child, and with mother made to watch, he had the child thought to be his daughter cast into a pit alongside a ravenous hound. but life had its own insult in store for the erstwhile master of this enclave, and though the girl was mauled, though her arm was broken, it was the child that emerged with the dogs throat between her teeth instead of the other way around. at that moment, aladon gazed from afar into the light and thought he saw his master shaking. thereafter, the mother was put to a slow death, and the girl once thought his daughter was subjugatednamed a hound in replacement for the dog she skilled, and the role she would now inhabit. twelve more times she was made to fight the beasts of bearing her namesake. twelve more times she emerged with teeth bloody, flesh-torn, but alive still. perhaps as a lasting insult, perhaps out of some twisted parental urge, the fallwalker brought the girl out from her kennels in the shadow pits where she most often fought, and lifted her from beast to enforcera living weapon held only by his fist, connected by a chain. and such were how things were, until he, fool thinking himself a god, walked into a city built from deicide and never returned, leaving daughter turned dog turned weapon alone and rechristened by the lowest denizens of the megacity. deep within avos consciousness, dice stirred. Chapter 20-11 Blood in the Bright chapter 20-11 blood in the bright every half-strand has an opinion on vengeance. none of it really matters. because guess what? shits complicated. always. theres no all-killing munition for this kind of thing. also, i''m gonna tell you something now so you don''t need to be confused about it in the future: anyone who tries to sell you a platitude about forgiveness or letting things go when youre obviously hurting is a fucking clown. best case is theyre talking to talk. worst is that theyre actually stupid as shit. at the end of the day, revenge isnt really a moral action. or a just one. no. its an emotional reaction. a need to protect yourselfto show yourself that you can again. or to make something right that you couldnt before. otherwise, how else are you supposed to live in the world? its that inner human raging against the lack of order in this fucked up world of ours. because were more than just animals. were more than just instinct. we live lives and remember the beauty of things, and when thats lost, it hurts us somewhere bad, and that doesnt heal right. so. vengeance. vengeance its an action. lets go from there. im not good at this philosophy shit. find an academic for that one. ill just give you the practicals of doing the deed. the most important thing is understanding if you can execute on it at all. wanna kill some piece of shit local ganger? easy. ursday night gig. trying to bomb a guilder factory for tainted formula that your baby brother died on? yeah. maybe downgrade that to assassinate a member of the board or something. the ultimate thing is finding the realistic point where satisfaction meets tangibility. you want to hurt them back and get away without blowback. and make no mistake, you will do this for satisfaction or not at all. revenge can feel good. or like nothing. the former turns you into a suicidal joy-fiend. the latter ends with you learning to give head using a gun barrel. both end in ugly ways. in the end, theres no amount of hurt that plugs up a wound. dont be blind about what youre doing, otherwise, you might just end up being soul-fuel without ever seeing the end of your goals. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 20-11 blood in the bright across the sunderwilds where patches of stability stood deviant from the sprawling chaos of impossibility, reflective conduits came alight far through the fallen heavens. passage formed across each leg of their journey, becoming exits down a vast and long path. one such passage stood above all the others, and it was imbued within a single pane of glass, connecting enclave to a bivouac just beyond new vultun itself. with such, the expedition stood a success, but the wielder of the miracle was not finished, for the city had yet to be claimed, and the girl had yet to speak her wish. what do you want to do? such were the words avo asked dice after infusing her with all the memories he had taken. from a hundred and twelve deaths, he reconstructed a lost history and offered them over dice, as was her inheritance. the girl didnt collapse inward like essus. she did not turn deviant in the way chambers did. she didnt even rage like the agnos. from her person emanated but a single sensation, and it was coldness. a growing chill spilled from the crack of her consciousness, like a door left half open during days of falling snow. within a shard of glass, ghoul, girl, and regular drifted in a space between places as a war raged on beyond. do you think he ever really cared for me? speaking the words took something out of her and lessened the weight of her ego, but she remained vacant of trauma. nearby, avo noticed draus shrugging. the regular was peeking out a number of passages leading out into the tangible world. the demiplane of her liminal paracosmos was a weightless reality made from shifting shards, overlapping fractals, and moving reflections. presently, a constellation made from five hundred and two dancing shards shifted around them, serving as passage and peephole both. dont think the man himself could rightly tell you, juv, draus said, pulling a few additional pieces of glass from the plane around them. half-strand sounds like he had a bad case of fuckers remorse. just enough to snuff and torture, not enough to go all the way. she spat, and chasm widened within the demiplane, passing her globule over into the real. aint no worth tryin to figure him out. piece of shits dead. youre still here. you got his enclave. you got his people. question is what do you want to do with em? {captain draus, i hope youre not implying mass murder as a means of therapy?} calvino said, transmitting its disappointment into draus neurodeck directly. who said anything about therapy? {i can reject your weaponry requisition requests, you know?} alright, alright. wasnt what i meant anyway. aint no worth in killin these baseliners. theyre soft. weak. shit, i didnt know people could get this small. havin a hard time differentiating between the adults and the kids here. cullin them''d be less fight than hittin a syndicate, and im worn on bug-stomping. tired of things here too. she turned her attention over to avo and the ghoul turned to dice instead. her home. she was technically like a princess. for a while. should be up to her. {within reason,} calvino said, voice tinged with a warning. {many in this city are suffering because of powers beyond their control. i have been very measured with you so far, avo, however} i know, avo replied. dont think thats what dice wants. is it? no, the girl said, softly. i dont want that. i her voice trailed off. i never hated the dogs i killed. but i got better food if i won. i got their beds too. the masteryakozitrin. he taught me that you cant hurt a dog after its dead. but its food can be yours. its bed and kennel too. he is dead now. his food is ours. his kennel too. she paused. but theres also the others. the others? avo asked. the girls body gave a mechanical whine as she nodded. i want to talk with them. the ones who knew my mother and father the most. avo understood. in flesh or as templates? she considered her options. i want to talk with my aunt. personally. i want to see her before you burn her. i dont care how i talk to the rest. the blood within avo quivered with mirth as the woundmother laughed. oh, what a lovely little hound. so resilient. and accepting. if only your pet degenerate and the crying one could exhibit half her mettle. [hey, fuck you,] template-chambers said, without any sense of amusement this time. [her lifes completely fucked. i mean, my dad was a piece of shit too, but he never made me fight dogs for food.] a note of genuine depression escaped him. and jealousyof the girls unbreakable demeanor. [fuck. shit. maybe my old man wasnt even that bad. wouldnt that be funny.] +no,+ avo replied, faint memories of walton lighting his mind. +it can only be a thing of sorrow. chambers. youre still a person. she will never be. doesnt even seem to want it.+ and as chambers let out a quivering exhale in his section of the mindscape, he left to seek dices template, not sure what he was going to say, but probably about to shit-talk his dad. meanwhile, blood began to leak back through the reflections across the city, and shards of glass began to move. *** mail capsule inbound! the head operator''s cry was chorused by her assistants, and hand urrins watched their bodies explode into motion as reflections in the glass. the brass pipelines running between the walls rumbled and dinged as more messages returned from the battlefront. the scribes moved to their stations, adjusting snapping gears, spinning squeaking valves, and turning designated knobs in perfect sync, their coordination honed through years of cooperation. how he envied their efficiency, how he wished he could have plucked it from them and bound it to the soldiers fighting below, almost seeming to time their foreboding loss with the masters return. the city of light was burning from within. fire was rising where once only water flowed in ascent. standing at the very top of the hightower, urrins looked out from beyond the windows and cycled between magna-optic lenses. position high over the city itself, and looking down over all there was to see, he saw the masses of clashing bodies, the positions where his pearlguards were holdingand breakingbut also burning wheelbarrows pushed ahead heretical mobs, using the smoke to shield their movements from his gaze. of the five rungs of this blessed city, two were lost beyond doubt, the third was collapsing, and the second was being assailed. eight massive platforms rose and fell between the first and third rungs, carrying with them dispatches of manpower and supplies. the rails leading past the third had been blown, leaving any still fighting below stranded. but the dogmothers forces had their way. servants and traitors were positioned on levels above to aid in their climb. ladders were built atop the sprawl of slums and ropes were thrown down from compromised positions. one after another, they were trickling up. inch by inch, the pearlguard was losing the city. sir, a scribe attended him, holding out a sealed letter. the boy was youngtoo youngface without lines and skin soft. terror crept along the corner of his eyes, but he held himself together well. he was dressed in robes too large for himand the patch of blood told urrins all he needed about how a novitiate had won the right to wear the robes of a learner. a sigil bearing the insignia of a quill held his apprentices toga worn on the outside of his uniform, and the hand sighed. she sneered at him disdainfully, as if she was regarding a bug that buzzed too close. her arm blurred. his blade shattered into pieces. he stumbled back, seeking retreatand for one of his brothers to take his placebut found himself about to slam into a pane of glass. yet, just as he was about to strike his own reflection, he tumbled through and found himself adrift in a place of shifting edges and ambient light. the world around him was reflection, glass-like in design, and the sheer oddness of its expanse made his mind quail. suddenly, impossibly strong fingers buried themselves into the nape of his neck, and he heard his armorblessed by the master himselfcrack and give between sinking digits. no, haadruer thrashed, not used to being so weak, so easily handled. let go! fucking release! come on, the giantess simply said. stop thrashin. damn embarrassings what it is. lucky i decided to snatch you instead of the rotlick. got someone for you to see. heard you might be the one who chopped the head off a certain concubine after your master was done with her. confusion and terror mixed in his stomach. c-concubine? what? then, a memory came back. one from a few years ago, and he thought had an inkling of what was being said. itheri. well, the giantess clucked. looks like the ghoul burned the right mem-data into me after all. *** how much longer will this last, ivory groaned. she waved a goblet out, motioning for one of her serving girls to fill it as she stared glumly at the ceiling. smoke drifted on the wind and ash settled down even in the inner courtyard, painting the garden an unnatural white. the servants were doing all they could to keep the masters greenery from being soiled, but they were losing the battle. really, the pearlguard needed to handle these matters and get done with the war already. itd been almost of month of gas and water rationing. she needed a proper bath. the ceiling was alight againhow was she supposed to make herself presentable as a concubine when the master returned? did they think it was easy holding the masters attention, the lecherous prick? every year, his choices grew paler and younger, and ivory aged despite herself. last night, she even plucked a white hair. patting her womb, she breathed a sigh of relief. she might not be the favorite forever, but her place in the highest houses was cemented with the child she bore. all she needed now was to ensure that a drop of red spilled down on her. ivory blinked. suddenly, lines of red were spreading through her personal mansion like creeping veins beneath the limestone, causing her to sit up and squint, waving her fanning servants to step aside. beyond the opening of the courtyard, she saw chasms of crimson tear across the dome of their enclave, and strange flashing distortions pulsed through the air. faintly, a presence brushed over her, its weight like her loves, but stronger by far. ivory choked momentarily, and barely heard the clamor sounding from the outside. what she didnt miss was one of her personal guards being thrown so hard his flesh flattened, leaving him caked along the steps beside her, viscera spilling from his ruptured face. servants started to scream. the sounds of desperate combat pulled ivorys attention back toward her atriumthrough shattered doors. there, standing in the light was a creature aglow in the light, its body made from blades of hissing metal, each constantly shifting, pistoning, gleaming. it dragged the mangled body of a guard with all the effort it would take one to bear a pebble. instinctively, ivory darted behind her nearest servant girl while her hands went to her stomach. thought and rationality were lost to her now. she needed to escape. she needed to aunt. ivory froze. the voice was coming from the metal figure, its hammering against cracking wood. it sounded familiar. too familiar, just like oh, by the light, ivory moaned, holding the servant tight to her. how did the metal creature have the voice of the hound? was it some kind of demon? it came into view again, and servants scattered, abandoning her mistressand her shieldto whatever fate would follow. wait! ivory screamed. c-com her words died as a cage of blood formed around the courtyard the moment the last servant fled. immediately, the centermost section of her home went from a leisurely garden to a bleeding cage. held tight in her grasp, the serving girl began to weep, and ivory wasnt far off herself. the only other person present was the metal demon, and it had come to a stop just a few strides away from ivory. youre my aunt. arent you. again it spoke and sounded just like the girl. ivory swallowed. i i why did you tell hand urrins about my mother and father? she was your sister. you knew what the master would do. the question graced her like a falling whip and she felt sick beyond the pregnancy. i didnt you cant be her words were interrupted by a droning pressure hammering down upon her thoughts. we can talk once youre calm, the demon said. no need to hurry. the declaration will come first. youll understand after that. ivory swallowed. declaration? and ethereal flames came alight in the veins around them, sinuous threads echoing as ivory was bathed in the uncanny sensation that was a thoughtcast for the first time in her life. *** across the city, on every level, warriors stopped fighting, and people huddled in corners, trying to flee spreading blood. there was nowhere the infection hadnt spread. nowhere anyone could run to avoid it. it was in the air, in the flesh, in the stones and light themselves. where once this city belonged to the fallwalker, yakozitrin, now a new power laid their claim, and so they spoke their first words. but not as a conqueror. no. as a liberator. +enclavers. slaves of yakozitrin. masters dead. never coming back. taking this city for myself. stop fighting. or ill do it for you. do whatever else you want. dont really care.+ a pause followed. +thats all.+ silence. silence. silence. and across the city, on every level, the people exploded into pandemonium. ghosts - [26,560,399] liminal frame (v) - 21,036 thaum/c Chapter 20-12 Suzerainty (I) chapter 20-12 suzerainty (i) yeah, yeah, keep crying. do it louder. do it more. hold her closer to your chest and spray that snot all over her hairthatll bring her back. hells. why stop there? shove her corpse back up your cunt and leave her there for nine months. see if you recycle your dead wife into being a daughter. maybe spice things up with a little incest. not like you arent a stranger to that, judging from your parents and all. yeah theres the look i wanted to see. hello to you too, sister karakan. been a while. heard you actually got made a full prophetess. just in time for the end of the world. now look at you. hiding on a farm again, killing slaves, and being ignored by your gods. hey. you wanna know why theyre not replying? you wanna know why the worlds coming apart around us? why the sky is falling? have you tried communing with them recently? tell me: you feel them fall? your gods, i mean. did you feel them break? because i did. i saw their bodies. and damn them fuckers are more screamers than expected. kinda like you, in a way. yeah. i know. let it out. no sense in holding it in. cry. cry. cry. i did it. remember? remember how you had me beaten till i stopped? how your flock took a hammer and chisel to my teeth. well. look at them now. white and pearly. im gonna let you in on a little secret: [redacted] was the one that saved me that day. let me out. turns out, you wasnt the only ladder-climber around. turns out, gods can get plenty jealous too. oh. oh, you hear that? maru mustve found your boy. [laughter] screams just like you. must be proud. come on. lets go. lets go see him. lets go see the world you lost. lets go see the world i took. sky isnt yours anymore, faither. and dont think of pulling that knife along your throat. you and i are going to be spending more quality time together, and if i lose you, well, maru can share your boy with me. oh. there it is. there. that makes it all worth you. you finally know what you are now. nothing. not a godsdamned thing. you are whatever i use you for, and whatever you decide to feed you, whatever i fucking say. less than a slave! less than a fucking dog! im gonna do things to you, karakan. you and i are going to come out of this different people. [chuckle] well. im gonna come out of this at least. its up to me now. all up to me. i hold the chains. me. and no one else. i decide whos worthy. i decide what to do. all you got to do now, is accept. accept whatever i give you. or dont. im gonnawere gonna really learn from each other. im gonna find myself in you. [snarling; sound of arms snapping; womans shrieking] im gonna find myself using you -samir naeko tosister karakanduring the scouring of death farm skyglade 20-12 suzerainty (i) i do not like your plan, ghoul, it is loud. it draws attention. worst of all, it draws attention to me. a waterfall of falling orange bathed the room in light and shadow, neon staining the crevices of the penthouse as green river picked up her teacup. she sat cross-legged on a seat made from emerald and bamboo, and steam obfuscated the view out her windows. what few articles of furniture were applied artistically and efficiently. her bedand the den for her foxwas positioned next to the door leading to the living room. oil and incense burned while she took another sip of green tea before placing it down. savoring the taste, she planted her cup down along the far left side of her desk, ensuring its decorated side was facing avos projected form. on the right, another cup was filled to capacityany more and it would spill. both were quiet insults directed toward the creature for causing her so much trouble, but if it noticed or cared, it did not show. instead, it simply continued glaring blankly at her, its simulated form woven into shape by the locus hanging from the ceiling, positioned between her bed and desk. outside, a voluminous koi began to swim up the waterfall, struggling every step of the way as it leaped into and out of the waters, splashing waves of ethereal brightness that tickled green rivers cognition. have another proposal then? avo asked. the phantoms composing its shape shifted closer, choosing to loom over her from behind. because naekos going to be talking with you in a few hours. not going to be good if all his attention is connected to you. green rivers true form rolled its eyes and turned to glare at the ghoul. her human shell painted, tracing the form of a ghoul using a scalpel, painting on a canvas of fast-healing skin. behind her, the exemplar of the wretched species peered down at her work, but its face didnt change. she hated that. she hated how easily poise and inscrutability came to itthe armor she spent another lifetime building after her exile and humbling. monsters were known to her in more likes than one, and the ghouls themselves typically presented little mystique beyond snarling madness. avo? it was too patient. too perceptive as well. its inner nature was too incongruous with its outer materialization, and for most, this would have been a dissonant thing. but ghouls were never natural beings, and this one was just another step down the steps of the abominable. the waterfall shrouding distant edifices choked and halted. the koi, skimming across the waters, met open air and began to fall. the problem, green river said, is with your portrayal of events. i have reviewed the stageplay you composed in your mem-data. aptly done in most cases, i would say, seeing as it is constructed of more truth than lies. ox-three was indeed attacked by the low masters. they were indeed involved in the nether disruptions across highflame territory. chambers was indeed a guest in xin yunsha. but all these things compound on the same point of pain. prize? yes. the fox licked its lips and the woman spoke the words. jhred greatling was without a frame. the casualties across nu-scarrowbur were missing their ghosts and deaths. highflame is scouring the warrens, and uthred greatling just resigned from his position and disbanded his house. im not threatening you with these details. nor will naeko ever learn the truth behind these happenings from me. i have been protecting you from prying eyes. and i have been doing it at first for my own safety, and now for my own interest. she stopped talking then, hoping the ghoul would put things together. only certain types of favors i can offer, avo said, rasping voice sounding slower and colder. snuffing. nulling. or soul. dont think you have trouble finding anyone to do the former two for you. godhood is a freedom few will ever learn, she said, unable to stop her lip from quivering. and it is a pain fewer survive losing. we both have wants from each other. we both have our uses. let me serve mine. and in time, on the foundations of proper confidence i wish to discuss the deepening of our association. the ghoul just stared. and stared. and stared. outside, the advertisement restarted as the waterfall splashed down. the koi began its climb once more. well make changes, avo said. want your memories. the moment you finish with naeko. send them. we want to know what happens. that indignity she could endure. the fox yipped as green river smothered the faint embers of promise rising from within her. the monster said nothing about ensouling her. but this was more than expected. she wasnt dead. and it hadnt forced her hand about surrendering her mind. good, she finally exhaled, i will but avo didnt wait for the conversation to end before it dissolved, the phantoms composing it playing the static of a dead channel in its place. green river frowned at the blank spot and ordered the locus to end the session. fucking ghoul. what the creature was thinking, she didnt know. but things were not done, and there was a clearer path ahead. she just needed to win more of its trust. or gather more information about where it remained. one way or another, through whatever means, light or dark, she would take back what she lost, and avenge herself on those that cast her down. once more did the koi fall. once more did the koi rise, climbing the skies on borrowed wings. *** fuck me, consangs, how did avo spent a month around the sow without eating her, chambers said, collapsing avos avatar around himself. the only thing i hate worse than a person that speaks in essays is if the half-strands a snitchand this bitch is definitely going to snitch on us. i can feel it. he had wanted to null her mind hollow using a trauma pattern the moment she started hinting at the information leaks that might happen but tavers stopped him from following his satisfaction. not right now, tavers said. and you really dont need to give naeko a murder to follow and all that history to find. better wait to see if raldi can sneak his way into her meta and burn whatever shes got on you guys first. you know they encased me in this flesh sac-thing, right, chambers said, trying to mask his shiver of arousal as a thing of disgust. truth be told, he kinda enjoyed it in a fucked-up way. it was all grippy and warm. sure, it had him bound in a weird flesh prison, but grippy and warm made him happy in ways that chambers, tavers said, snapping at him. focus. huh? oh, i was just having a trauma flashback. the squire squinted and the skin around her lips extended uncannily. sure you were. she eyed him from an angle as he shuffled awkwardly atop the throne. so. were going to make her look like a survivor instead of a victim. is that it? yeah, chambers said. put the new mem-data in with the terrorist attack we have planned, new threats i recorded for the highflame and ori-thaum, and we might just have a coherent enough series of fuckeries created for naeko to follow. yeah, tavers sighed. ori-thaum working with chivalrics to assassinate one of their own. only to also be working with the low masters to clean up the golds in the end. honestly, it sounds like bad spy shit. chambers chuckled. you know, the nasty thing is it''s actually mostly true. sunrise vibrated, signaling another update for naekos movements. {chief paladin naeko has been spotted in the northwestern portion of the xin yunsha district in the yuulden-yang sovereignty. presently, he is eating dumplings outside a street market and commiserating about stormjumpers with a few surrounding youths. their hearts are beating at dangerous speeds.} {good job.} chambers sent a digital thumbs-up to the swarm form. {keep on his ass. i want to know when he takes a shit, how long the shit takes, and whats inside the shit.} {from extrapolations conducted using known data and his current dietary habits, the answers are respectively: in eight hours and twenty-four minutes, within thirty seconds, and leftover corn from the dumplings. the chief paladin tends to swallow before he finishes chewing.} {...i love you, flying bug thing.} {i am returning to my task before you begin making thinly veiled sexual remarks. this has been predicted as well.} chambers frowned. cant give anyone love these days. as naekos positional marker was updated in his neurodeck, a wall of glass flashed in the corner of his left eye. both chambers and tavers turned to see their reflection quivering, the sign of a passage coming active. from out the polished sheen, draus stepped back into the george washington with a dozen or so scalps hanging from her hip and a bored expression on her face. dark red blood dripped from her fists, elbows, and a broken bone-made sword she was holding. draus, chambers said, grinning at the approaching reg. she gave him a blank nod and his heart did a flip. no glare, no sneer, no shooting him in the head with the projectile launcher. he really was becoming part of this cadre. back already! hows the sunderwilds? wheres avo and the juv? we got a new hidey-hole or what? the regular shrugged. yeah. sure. filled with the shortest half-strands ive ever seen. shit at fighting too. chambers pointed at the blood on her and she just grunted. like hittin soft, wet sacks. anyways. avo and dice are gonna be a while. got some business to handle. turns out, our little killers daughter to the fallwalkers favorite whore. chambers blinked. what? shes like a princess or something. draus sneered. nah. fucker got cucked by his own guard. the half-strand nodded as if that explained everything. then, the implications behind her words punched through him like a flechette. chambers shuddered as his head whipped between draus and the passage. wait cuck enclave they can fuck? ah shit, draus muttered. Chapter 20-13 Suzerainty (II) chapter 20-13 suzerainty (ii) uplift? what are we, voidwatch? these half-strands are cultists. look at them. theyre less than human, sacrificing their own to a god that isnt here anymore. hell, they still have statues of [redacted] placed around here. if it wasnt for the fallwalkers heaven, we wouldnt even be here. understand this: it''s not a liberation. this is a liquidation. we have deaths to collect, memories to wipe, and heavens to claim. now. you start pouring fire down the designated areas. the poor ventilation will make the process go faster. save our glaives the trouble of clearing this place block by block. after youre done, come around. youre domain-symmetrical with one of the fallwalkers, so start soaking rend. its always hard the first time. but this is for the best. this world isnt good for them anymore. and we need souls. we dont have time to be playing nursery for savages. we have a war to win. -seeker [redacted] to seeker [redacted], ori-thaum reclamation corps 20-13 suzerainty (ii) few could conceive of absolute power. fewer still would ever wield it. as the sprawl of the enclave settled within avos awareness, his reach sank deeper into all who dwelled here, the countless more beasts that lined stalls in the lower depths, and every last structure of the city. everything here now existed as a dichotomy, affected by the woundmothers subreality within, and existence that was without. biophilic elements formed the backbone of the citys architecture, with glowing weeds trailing willowy strings down the rungs, carefully carved limestone blocks fused into place by adhesive algae, and outcroppings of coral and translucent cuticles layered additionally over thatched roofs. though the fallwalkers unfading lightmanifesting as a faint tickle against avos domain of luminositycontinued to ensure the banishment of shadows from within these walls, the true resource that ruled the city was gas. gas harvested from a stock of creatures known as gastavoids: sea slugs the size of aeros, their remains used for everything from armor to delicacies, and even as secondary currency. a brief sweep across the rung told avo that there were still [1,200,004] such creatures left, and the egg pools had been left untouched during the fighting, essential as they were for the city''s future. it was their expulsions that powered the hydraulics of the city, along with the combustion-based letter-delivery mechanism included within the superstructure of the enclave. slow, crude, and simple though the system was, avo ultimately found it quite fascinating. fascinating. just like the enclavers who lived here. it had taken him scant effort to pacify the unruly, determined to fight on despite his declaration. as he rebuilt the enclave from the ground up, some swung their blades and hammers at the spreading haemokinetic constructs. resistance became known to avo in pockets, flaring as if inflammation within his body. with a casual pulse of intent, weapons liquified. armor melted from bodies, spilling in rivulets of red. fortifications and weapon installations were dismantled. seed-throwers were rendered constipated. most ceased their tantrums. some continued to rage. then they too were brought low by sudden waves of lethargy and sickness, the blood within their arteries weaving ailments in betrayal of their bodies. rebellion was never a possibility. disarmament was simply a matter of choice. his choice. for what could they truly inflict upon him to repel his miracles? what knowledge could they possess to turn the path of his mind? burrowing his blood through the bedrock of the city, avo continued his reconstruction from the lowest rung, the improvements and additions he added arrived as constructs bearing multi-material properties congealing like scar tissue born of closing wounds. the fardrifter tunneled through streets and structures. a tide of wind slashed through all that was, cleaving flames down to embers and funneling smoke skyward. where demolished rubble once lay, tendrils of blood sprouted new shapes, joining as if branches to form vast blocks of quivering red. compromised buildings were strengthened, and accommodations were created for the downtrodden and unhoused. the war had dealt considerable harm to everyone across the enclave. but by his touch, none would find themselves without shelter. where the sick and injured lay huddled in piles, whimpering and gasping in ramshackle infirmities, avos touch passed through them too. veins crawling through the environment around them slithered free to pierce flesh. blood within bodies came alive and devoured sickness itself. the enclaves lived under more than one tyranny. though the fallwalker was their master, they were still bound to the reign of entropy, and unblessed by enhancements of biomancy or augmentations wrought from technology, their flesh was fated for cruel ends. it was fascinating how many among them were old. to suffer ones age instead of keeping it as a thing of aesthetic was a dangerous thing in new vultun. to be frail among hounds and jackals was to be meat for the taking. to be old in the presence of immortals was a torment unto itself. the woundmother and elegant-moon shared a mutual breath of pleasure as establishments rose, and plagues were drained from the unfortunate, and infused into the vicious or cruel. from memories captured, avo possessed a near-perfect accounting of transgressions and sins committed between the people. the easiest for him to claim were those who refused to halt their attempts at harm even after suffering his touch. some pearlguard continued trying to cull the night-touched, so hateful were they that they committed to using their bare hands. others were tied to other acts of vileness, practitioners of atrocity that had escaped judgment across the month of fighting, but now slowly withered as avo dealt out retribution to the demands of his newest templates. it was rare that his baseline cruelty found itself aligned with rightful violence. hence, he found himself partaking in nostalgic indulgences, reshaping flesh until organs failed. trapping the vicious between closing fists of blood. through it all, he hovered atop the masters amphitheater, pieces of his echoheads embedded into the marble of the arch-shaped structure, forming a magnetic pedestal to hover upon. the enclave shifted, moved, reacted, and surrendered to him; he pushed, rearranged, advanced, and remade, the patterns of existence his to draw upon in this trance of apotheosis. +so. would be like their caretaker.+ {if that is how you regard it. the point, however, is that i think you should give knowledge to the ones you spared. feed truths into their mind gradually. minimize psychological harm. and then have them decide how they desire to live or where they wish to go. i think it is a most fitting choice for you. something that would make walton proud, in the spirit of showing them the colors.} thousands of templates, and avo still felt philosophically and rhetorically dwarfed by the artificial intellect. eons of history granted a deepness of perspective. if only voidwatch was not so reluctant to sink their hands into the art of thaumaturgy. but, then again, such was how existence fell in the first place. fine, avo said, reassembling his echoheads and burying his taloned digits into the arch upon which he stood. claws of ceramite and silicon gouged deep into the marble as avo peeled away all that was pale. the white offered by the fallwalker was a facade of the old world. a lie. best to cut that chain before things began. best to break the faith before he could rebuild the egos of the people anew. a few templates sang out the symmetry between him and jaus in that moment, but the comparison invoked reprisal and clamor. there was something unspeakably taboo about placing the chainbreaker next to a monster, but from that emerged threads of a new alignment. just how similar of likeness was jaus to the fallwalker? how shrouded in myth and devotion? the very thought sent the populations of his mind into a near-unified uproar. sampling their ire, avo merely chuckled. children hold to the ideals of their parents. adults hold to delusions of sanctity, binding it to guild, faith, concept, or impulse. time and time again, waltons final act in the deep bazaarforcing avo to shatter his last nodewas an act beyond merit. for unchained was he, and bound where they. perhaps that, more than his burning divinity, and their withering mortality, formed the greatest gulf between the decisions they made. he would have a new task for chambers soon. the creation of mem-cons. in a fraction of a second, avo incubated a cognitive virus from his conflagration, instilling it with all the essential memories and understandings he possessed of the outside world, and streamlined it to acceptability using the minds he gathered from the enclave. he stripped artifacts from the pearlguard, night-slaves, breeders, and nobles, and bred varied strains from the mem-con, segregating them between cultures and castes. and as his work came to an end, avo felt a new form slip into the city through a panel of glass lining fused into an alleyway on the third rung. an enhanced body familiar beneath his touch and luminous with a frame bearing a potent soul. ah. the just the man he sought +oh no,+ avo gasped, suddenly alarmed. [oh, shit!] template-chambers cried, noticing his actual self as well. [avo. burn me. burn me right now. iii dont know what im gonna do.] reacting in an explosive instant, avo triggered the connective session between them and flooded over into chambers mind. new knowledge and memories flowed in and out of him. he recalled the plot to peel naeko from his trail, the arrangements that green river sought, and the progression of the chief paladin across the city. chambers received experience traveling through the sunderwilds, passing between the borders of fallen heavens before invading and claiming this enclave. [oh, hey, consang,] chambers said with a laugh, staggering momentarily as he stumbled out the lip of the allies. [was waiting for you to do that. so yeah, shits kinda wild back in the mega. but i see the same goes here.] the man eyed the numerous eyes and ears produced from fissures of oozing blood, biomancy grown from wounds lining the structures around them. looking through the streets, chambers noted the crowds huddled against the walls, staring fearfully at the spreading veins around them, along with those naked few groaning in pools of blood, clutching at their joints and wheezing through rot-claimed lungs. [jaus, avo, did you really have to do em all like that.] the former enforcer frowned, looking through the people around him as the faint embers of lustful thrill began to sizzle and die. everyone around him was so baseline. so withered and frail. he had seen faces like theirs before in vicarities, but more often in the crucible, as smuggled goods as well. the lecherousness in him made him wonder about a free-love utopia where the bodies were prime and culture was open. here, he saw the source of his past sins and listened to distant cries and unceasing sobs. +yeah,+ avo said, looking down from his arch. +disappointing. arent they?+ [...heard our girl was some kind of bastard princess here.] +of a higher class anyway. currently talking to her aunt. dont think shes going to kill her.+ [cause the sows got a kid?] chambers asked. +because dice cant remember the face of her mother. and her aunt will have to do.+ [ah. fuck.] +as things go. good thing you came. need your help right now. giving you some mem-cons. need to kill you. have you plant them. ill provide the ghosts too.+ [yeah. yeah, sure. but after that, were gonna need to talk about a few things.] +more than a few,+ avo replied. Chapter 20-14 Everything in Motion (I) chapter 20-14 everything in motion (i) a singularity is building within the paths. actions are collapsing into actions. decisions are narrowing into fewer decisions. all of possibility is approaching a bottleneck. soon, we will tread the shallows caused by history rendered inexorable. then, at scale, a new shatter-point awaits. a place where the future will fragment once more. now. a singularity. a collapse. then. a supernova. an explosion. i can feel the chains of probability ringing against me. be wary, wielder. more than a thousand hands will reach through the ways you walk. and she will be there as well. not in person. nor in divinity. but in will and influence. cut with care, for the future teeters on the precipice of a new paradigm. -[redacted] 20-14 everything in motion (i) zein sheathed her blade, and all that could be ceased to flow. as her frame quieted, she gazed upon reality with the eyes of a mortal and took in the sprawling elysium before her. existence here was a coiling serpent wrapped around a tree of ever-growing ice, and between the crenulations lining its snow-capped scales did the district hide. twin titanic towers shaped from ice and frosted steam stood back to back at the center of the great leviathan, and from them spread vibrating threads, a shivering net enshadowed by the kiss of a dimming sun. the cords were each connected to a sprawl of lesser edificesthese structures resembling crystal organs and delicate chimes, structures pristine and resplendent, their surfaces lined with pulsing ghosts, plucking pleasure into perceiving minds. the threads thrummed, and the sound here carried more than noise. traffic flowed through those strands. the only kind in this miracle-forged utopia. as knots of bouncing string ceased from structure to structure, street to street, bodies and objects emerged. masses of fated spending their days in leisure, blissfully banished from the horrors below and the war beside them. and it was all so boring. along the ice-carved rails of a terrace, zein sat, the bodies behind her offering spilling red into patches of purest green. the wounds gifted them were born of frequency blades and crude kinetics. no sense in making the dispute any more severe; a simple inter-familial dispute gone wrong would do. the kazaharas and drongos were sinking their teeth into each others throats as it were. more force did not always result in a perfect cut. activating her session, zein cast a single thought to her necros and signaled the culmination of her bloodletting. +my deed are done. you may reroute traffic to this structure.+ she cut the connection before ever hearing their reply. for what was the point? the conversations she could have were already known. what will be made what already was. future. past tense. letting out a sigh, zein cocked her head sideways as a splash of ethereal blue caught her attention. mem-data fell as a curtained waterfall from a passing ring-shaped dirigible, focus nodes connected to multiple headlights whispering to her mind. with but a thought, one could expand any of the articles and pair their metaminds to a new mindscape detailing whatever calamity was happening, along with all the assorted vicarities and memories it offered for entertainment. trial of the decade to begin in five days >>> chief paladin spotted in the warrens >>> golds and greens massing forces >>> rupture in one of ori-thaums elysiums >>> war tensions reign; suicides spike; deaths greasing the wheels of the economy, cause becoming effect in of itself >>> there were good odds that other repetitions of herself had been involved in each of the incidents, each acting to prune the paths of possibility in their ultimate favor. a tightness was falling on her heaven now. the existence was clenching tighter, growing bare in terms of future trajectories. an ontological weight was pulling at her, willing her to approach the twin towers in the distance and slip free from this planar paradise born of hubris and delusion. it pains me to see you this way. finally, the mans eyes turned to himthose misted emeralds growing sharp amidst spheres of white. no. no, it doesnt. i can see the smile on your face. its the same expression you made when i brought you to the zoo the first time. that transformed vators mirthful grin into a genuine smirk. i liked the monkeys the most. they remind me of the flats. a snort that was almost a laugh escaped from uthred. that was a horrible day. the things you did to those poor creatures. i healed them, vator said, pointing his flesh-made brush at his father in mock offense. the caretakers were clearly being negligent. i gave the creatures what they wanted. yes. and so a woman lost her head, a man lost his arms, and an infant was nearly eaten. as i said. horrible day. he sighed and looked out the window. a phantasmal string shot out from his meta and connected to the aeros loci. a second later, their cube-shaped service drone came hovering by with a beverage forming inside its chassis. vator fatherhood is being a parent means choosing sacrifices. and sometimes you only know you made the wrong ones in retrospect. ah. this was far more interesting than painting. with a flick of his wrist, vator absorbed his brush back into himself but kept the canvas for later. are you sure youre well? these almost-admissions of human limitation are unlike you. he performed a calculated pause and turned his expression flat. its jhred, isnt it? jhred. abrel. you. uthred chewed on his words. he was his mothers son. that was always true. the shaming harmed him the most. but his actions and failures are his own. yes, uthred said. i do not believe i could have guided him away from his path. of course. jhred did as he always wanted. such was who he chose to be. selfish, uthred said. no thought for the rest of us. the words sparked something in the older greatling. a flash of rage, the ignition of anger. the temperature between them spiked violently and the aeros fans roared in response, battling to keep the temperature at baseline. the former authority clenched and unclenched his fists as he rolled his jaw in agitation. a sudden beep broke the storm building inside uthred as the service bot spat out the drink it was preparing on a tray. a crystal decanter filled with a glowing red liquid came into view, and vator inhaled the sizzling sweet-sour that was ambrosia. distracted from his fury, uthred hesitated before reaching inside the drone to procure both beverage and drinking glasses for himself and his son. vator realized he had been waiting for a personal servant to attend them for a beat. luxury engendered specific habits in ones life. it was how he always acted, uthred said, pouring for himself first, then his son. himself and no one else. i had hoped he would spare more thought for abrel. they were always close. i knew she kept in contact with him even after he ran from us. it was a mistake letting her hold ties to a coward. a mistak of course, father, vator said, interrupting the building tantrum. but you have to understand that the world touches all in different ways. hearts are undone by what they cannot have. or cannot be. and even a fathers love cannot protect a child from everything. uthred greatling almost nodded. i thought i could train you all well enough to make your discipline ironclad. all of you. i thought i succeeded with you and your sister, but now i see that ive he looked at vator again his expression softened. a cord of worry drew taut inside vator. even more uncharacteristic behavior. what was bothering him so much? i wish i could have connected with you better, vator. you are the worthiest of my children, but you he opened his mouth, searching for something to say. perhaps something inoffensive or fatherly, but the words eluded them. vator understood. likeliness called to like, and despite his fathers best attempts, they were not the same. his father, after all, was descended directly from baseline stock. human limitation plagued him even past the years of his apotheosis. it was like a hidden wound that couldnt be healed or restored. a scar that wouldnt go away. vator, however, was always designed to be a step beyond. a being engendered under a special project to create the next generation of worthy offspring liberated entirely from natures unjust hand. even when his vat was shattered in his infancy, even the process to his perfection was interrupted, he was still born far beyond human and saw the world in ways others couldn''t, the others like the apes trapped in the zoo. a brief silence followed, but the elder greatling was never one to stew in misery. vator, uthred said, tone hardening to become a calm baritone. ah. the authority had returned. the malaise was banished. he was speaking superior to his instrument, resigned from his position though he was. we are but three days from the commencement of the trial. your sisters fate hangs in the balance. we must find the ones that caused this. the acolyte. his cadre. we must retrieve them as commanded to face judgment and return what was stolen face judgment? vator breathed, excitement kindled. so. is this the demand of the high seraph? is this why you are so unnerved? what is she like? did you see her in person? did you feel her power son, uthred said, firmly, but calmly, that does not matter right now. what matters is the mission. as i am no longer an authority, i have no right to compel you in any way. however, before you are called upon by a new superior, i think it will do well for you to show initiative. and walk your own path. vator licked his lips. my own path? whatever it takes, uthred said, sounding slightly uncomfortable to be saying those words. whatever efforts you were applying before, continue to do so. but without restraints. operate to your maximum potential. of course, vator said, placing a hand over his mouth to hide the savage rictus curving into place. he leaned into the softness of his seat and looked out the window, his heaven pulsing as all the world below sang out. bodies danced along the surface of his awareness. bodies and canvases. canvases and worlds. you neednt worry, father. i will make you proud. uthred stared on with discomfort. alive. vator. alive. and not mentally shattered. anything else. anything. is up to you. i will see our subjects in better health upon capture, even. i am your worthiest child, after all. i aim to please. aim to succeed, uthred said. aim to prevail. do not do not make your brothers mistake. your sisters mistake. or mine. stand and deliver. blessed be the worthy, vator replied, looking out at the district below, his eyes narrowed and he considered his immediate steps. i wish to disembark. there is a place i wish to see again. jhreds base of operations? uthred asked. yes, vator confirmed. i was here a week ago, but there were too many paladins. i will also be visiting nu-scarrowbur. i always wanted to visit a district of a non-saintist culture. his father tensed but didnt rebuke him. and what do you expect to find that the paladins couldnt? bodies, vator answered honestly. any bodily remains, really. the dead can tell us much. and there were a lot of dead left in the wake of my sisters little incident. i think im going to piece together my own little picture of what happened. we can always use a little more perspective. Chapter 20-15 Everything in Motion (II) chapter 20-15 everything in motion (ii) the guilds are not unbreakable. nor are they as united as people think, even internally. i''ve spent my years among them. ive glimpsed the heart of the machineits inner structures. the godclads at the top. the administrators running their operations. the warriors they use to enforce their might. they''re all people. people. that''s the problem. people. people who have their own wants. people are their own poles of interest, of desire, of philosophy. that''s why i think we will win. that''s why i think that this end, this dream of jaus, must come true. because tyranny is unnatural. and people always will yearn. even when they build chains around themselves and all of us, they will dream of a day when they are free. free to be who they want. free to live the lives they want. and free to believe in what they want. to worship what they desire openly. the gods of the past are beasts of legend and nightmare. i don''t dispute this. but what i do dispute is that the things of tomorrow cannot be guardians or protectors. or can''t be something beautiful. mistakes can be learned from. such is what jaus dreamed ofa triumph of human society and culture rather than a fall back into savagery and brutality. but this triumph needs to be tempered with understanding: humanity is fickle. frail. our opinions and emotions drive us to act, and when our wants collide, and stay collided, then the only recourse is war. this cannot be the case. the future can be reclaimed. we just need to fight. we just need the light to spark. we just need to -last thoughtcast of [redacted], cultist 20-15 everything in motion (ii) reality shifted. shotin materialized before a translucent door, triggering the in-built specter governing its locus. ghosts flowed out to connect with his metamind while a grid of light flashed over him. thoughtstuff spilled over him as a demand was conveyed. one that he had heard a thousand times and never once obliged. +please connect your fate-skein to private lobby [deep-0] and submit the necessary sequences to gain+ shotins liminal frame spanked. his parallelist descended like a falling axe on a thin slice of space before him, the sealed door sliding out of existence to become a gnarled entrance pungent with natural aromas and framed by aged oak. stepping over a sill made from tangled roots, shotin swept the room with a disdainful look and snorted. every time he visited this place, he hated it more. the embassy was a location as stale as the man who ran it. picture walls and floors as a blank canvas of pure silver. picture a concentric info-center two steps beside the entrance, spewing public-use phantoms out like a foundation while its ghosts broadcasted pointless injections of trivia straight into your mind. picture rows of smart-foam seating with in-built snack and drink dispensers. picture all that, and then fill the space with a hundred of so buzzing drones, the constant pulsing of a half-dozen skimmers, and more than a few service mechs meant to accommodate the needs of any dignitary. as one of the stupid fucking machines came sauntering up to shotin wearing its stupid fucking suit complete with a stupid fucking bowtie, he shifted it into a plane of fire and smirked as it vaporized almost immediately. he kept going forward as a pitched wail sounded, ghosts swimming through the near-nether around him like snakes in a pond. warnings were likely going out through the building, but he didnt anticipate anyone hitting him with a trauma pattern. not that it would do them any good. the security team all knew who he was. they knew what he wanted. they knew better than to get in his way. a few hundred cones of perception splashed over him, but shotin just let the worthless diplomats gawk. the only thing he hated more than the regular politician were the ones who practiced delusions of peace. above them, the symbol of ori-thaum shone in the material and the nethera phantasmal crown with a half dozen in-facing eyes staring at each other, forming something of a visual panopticon. there was only one reason any of them were here, and it certainly wasnt to play house. no. stormtree was here because those broke sows didnt have the logistics or economics to sustain any kind of long-term engagement, sanctus was here because they were probably looking for reprisals against the no-dragons again after the most recent outbreak in one of the districts, and ashthrone was here because they needed another aid donation after their last attempt at collective suicide. the way he saw it, this wasnt any kind of diplomacy. this was a template for respects to be paid, but ambassador valhu kitzuhada was the type of half-strand to layer some satin over an old-timey whorehouse and name it a place of mutually gratifying congress. shotin was halfway across the room when the woman behind the front desk finally noticed him. with a look of absolute annoyance, vaeg saskier rolled her eyes as her body blinked in and out of existence. ah. the reversion was almost upon her. already, he could see chunks of heavyweight muscle buldging along slender, suited arms. an oval face curtained by a bob of grey looked up and glared at him as he drew close. bright green eyes regarded him as if a pile of shit that had sprouted legs. lustaway activated he resisted the urge to smile brightly at her. the saskiers always had a bit of an effect on him. she and her brotheror sister, depending on how many hours had passed. hard to really say for sanctian. poor chronologically-challenged bastards. hey, vaeg, shotin said, thrusting his chin at the crystalline doorway. he felt the faint caress of another domain of space sliding against his parallelist, but it wasnt creating any heavyweight miracles. is he in? the ambassador is, she said, soft voice sounding both polite and disgusted at the same time. he, however, is currently occupied with scheduled business as he has a duty to his guild and alliance. shotin winced playfully. vaeg eyes narrowed. seeker kazahara, i must implore you to leave. or at least take a number this time, and wait in accordance with protocol. you implore, huh? he said, eyes shining with mirth. ill just be a second. already, her thoughtstuff was shifting, and he could see her sequences restructuring behind the inner wards of her halo. she was probably syncing over with valhu. giving him the heads-up. you couldnt grow a more loyal nu-dog than vaeg. but war had a way of forging bonds just an inch shy of being unbreakable. anyway, he said, knocking thrice on her crystalline desk. tell him im going in. and, uh, i like the hair. you look good with it short. makes it easier for me to tell you from your brother. if eyes were weapons, he would be ash before twin fusion burners by now. stepping past vaeg, he eyed the rest of the room as he heard the complaints began. whats this, a personal favor? ive been sitting here for hours and he just gets to walk in. the ambassadors flat stare turned into a glare. shotin continued. she volunteered for rash-suppression duty recently. was real brave. even got herself nulled by i am aware of kares efforts to serve our city, valhu said. and i am proud of her for it. he met shotins eyes without difficulty. i am also capable of giving her the space she asks for. because she is an adult and not a hapless child. but you still know whats going on, shotin said, catching his brother-in-law. does she know you have shadows watching over her? i suppose she suspects, but has ultimately accepted the fact. i respect her personal space. that doesnt mean i wont try to keep her from undue harm. shotin scoffed. well. thats something. at least. pausing, he leaned in closer to valhu, paranoid of even the winds around them. i think were in a quiet war. and i think the drongos are in bed with the enemy. ive been digging around myself. asking questions and questioning people. an actual gasp of displeasure escaped valhu. shotin, what have you the seeker held up his hands, imploring the other man to let him finish. things were rough going until one of my consangs from the war cast me. three loci worth of separation. full-on proxy mind. but i knew it was them. and they had suspicions of their own. in-house questions that couldnt be answered. somethings happening inside clan drongo, and its happening deep. valhu stared impassively for a beat. what did they show you? accusations. and memories related to aedon chambers. apparently, he mentioned the elder. by name during a dispute with our operatives. the ambassador spent a moment taking in that knowledge. do you have the mem-data with you right now? shotin answered him by initiating a ghost-link request and transferring the details over. as the information loaded, phantoms spilled over valhus eyes as threads of information expanded and blossomed, memories growing into memories, theories connected to evidence. did you put all this together, he asked. most of it, shotin said. i was tracking the acolyte on my own time. trying to figure out how he ticks when the thing at vengs stand happened. ran smack-dab into a psychopath. his mind recoiled as censors within him triggered. he knew of the events that had happened that day, but he had his own cognition laced with depersonalization so he could distance himself from the horrors. having half-formed infants splattered over ones head scars a man. do you have anything else on him? valhu said, his jaw unnaturally tight. not yet. hes in the dark again. but ill find him. i will. the immediate problem right now, however, is what were going to do about his consangs in our walls. you dont have hard evidence of that yet? valhu said, filtering through the recollections. memories can be faked and sequenced. you know this. yeah. but i dove them. and the standard flaws arent there. sure, it could be a masterpiece of a forgery, but there are too many parts to the story that makes sense. my knots were infiltrated and hit from the inside during what was supposed to be my ambush. whats more, he had technology that no cultist, fallwalker, or subject could get. high-end voidtech. the same kind of substance voidwatch uses for their ships. you put that together with the fallwalkers supporting him, and were not looking at some mad survivor of a dead culture, but a weaponized terror cell fed intelligence and material by one of our own clanstheir head a represent in the outer council, no less. another bout of quietude consumed valhu. so. there is a reason you are showing me this information. the trial, shotin said. we have an opportunity there. a chance to spread light on the truth. and get ahead of this drongo mess before we actually have to start fighting this quiet war. arent you already doing that? valhu asked. all hint of warmth bled out from shotins face. no. not even close. look. youre respected. non-partial. and more, kare might actually listen to you instead of fighting me. what we can do is use the paladins heaven of truth on elder drongo, and see what we find in the dark. we dont even need to pull any bullshit. it just takes a nudge for the questioning to go in the right direction. and you want me to engineer such an outcome in person at the trial? shotin shrugged. id go in and do it myself. but thatll probably just get me censured again. probably. the ambassador sighed. what youre asking skirts the edge between treason and patriotism. the move against an elder this way is unconscionable. to allow potential rot to fester inside our guild is lethal. there is danger in whatever we decide to do. we? shotin asked, grinning slightly. dont take anything for certain yet, valhu said. we still dont know how proceedings are to be arranged. still? arent things supposed to commence soon? three days. but the chief paladin is spending his time walking the warrens now. i think he found something interesting as well. and this time, it was valhus turn to thread an injection of intelligence over to shotin. as the planeshift accepted his brother-in-laws link, he found his cog-feed populated by accounting documentation connected to various grafting establishments in the undercity. it took him little more than a second to find the commonality. sheathe: [bone demon] procurement batch order [accepted] haze-filled memories parted slightly at shotins behest. he recalled facing what he initially thought was a no-dragon bioformthe tall, pale monster exhibiting unnatural power and skill for a sphere four godclad, dueling him across the skies of vengs stand. using a heaven of blood shotin couldnt fully identify, he remembered parrying matter-melting miracles using his heaven of speed and war. he had felt something about that one. something he couldnt place. an unidentified source also claims that the chief paladin spent some time talking to one green river. former first daughter of the court of scholars. godclad too. banished and stripped of her frame after something she did during the war. the information is redacted. i havent been able to find the details anywhere either. not yet. shotin nodded. and then the name caught up to him, and his stomach dropped. qing he? his response didnt escape valhus notice. you know her? kind of, shotin said, trying his best not to think about it. flashes of moments before the war. the first fight in the tiers. quiet wars. conversions. his blood boiling inside him. her shadow waiting for him around the corner. hiding from patrolling ghosts. other things. thats not important. what does naeko want from her. i cant rightly say. valhu cocked his head, observing shotin. he simply had a conversation with her. and should still be in her district as we speak. she was among the vendors that were contracted to provide the sheath. that made sense. in the few times he checked status after her banishment, he saw that she was working as the proprietor of a no-dragon-supplied casino called the second fortune. he had never approached her, though. had always just kept things afar. things were different now. and things had been wrong to begin with. but there were details he needed to know. and he knew he could ask them better than naeko. well, shotin said. it looks like we both might have some things we need to consider doing. im going to do a little digging. after naeko leaves. find out what he wants and whats with the sheath. valhu just stared. shotin. please tell me your relationship with this woman was purely hostile. well, shotin said, deciding on being honestly vague. it sure started out that way. an exhausted exhale left valhu. of course it did. Chapter 20-16 A Crack in the Storm chapter 20-16 a crack in the storm word of advice that no one ever follows: dont fuck anyone youre probably going to kill. or make them your consang. it sounds like common sense but youd be surprised how many half-strands think they can double-dip so to speak. and id count myself among them because i had to learn that the hard way as well. listen, if there''s one thing above all others you can do for yourself as a squire or a snuffer or whatever kind of professional you want to be, it''s this: give yourself only the truth. you can lie to the world as much as you want, but be honest with yourself. what destroys people is when they try to run between the lines. enemy. not enemy. friend. not friend. ally. not ally. things are already complicated enough. situations change all the time. but you need to be decisive. and you everything clearly laid out in your head. trust isnt for my line of work. it might be for you, but you still want to have a gun under the table, just in case you need some insurance. use protection. in more ways than one, basically. -quail tavers, school of the warrens 20-16 a crack in the storm assigning mindscape to lobby [zeroth-extract] mem-lock in place constructing simulating environmental artifacts memories splashed through the nether as an invisible deluge, ghosts bleeding details into the ether like droplets of watery paint blossoming on canvas. curtains of twitching mem-data tightened and fused. light spread through the darkness of barren thoughts as the scenery began to load. six columns rose from an expanse of polished onyx. they faced each other in pairs and flanked a carpeted path leading to a low seat made from bone and marble. skittering spiders the size of buildings wove brocades of falling silk into place, curtaining the phantasmal glow of eerie flames, and dimming the ambience even further. green rivers avatar loaded into place upon the pearlescent seat, a fox bearing eyes green and yellow. she checked the time and counted the seconds to midnight. her congress with the chief paladin was due soon. it was time to play a game she knew all too wellthe obfuscation of truths and the weaving of un-lies. across from her, she detected another accretion slowly approaching. a shiver pulsed through the ghosts maintaining this simulation as they attuned themselves to the newcomers cognitive capacity. a bifurcation carved into a sigil of white and black rotated at the center of twin doors. as the connection was finally stabilized, the threshold swung open, and naeko emerged, constituted by threads of flowing mem-data. the door closed. green river practiced a coquettish smile on the paladin, masking the expression using a swaying tail. i must confess something before we begin. naeko smirked slightly. already? damn. i still got it. ah. flattery and banter would get you anywhere if only you knew who to use it on. its about you, actually, green river said. you are a storied man, chief paladin samir naeko. peace-breaker. faith-bleeder. but i have heard rumorsdisproved as of this instantthat you were she let her final syllables draw out, waiting for him to finish. nah, naeko said, looking off to the side, seeming almost boyish. im never late. its just that i dont really show up for most things at all. theres a difference. he brushed his shoulder, and she wondered just how the fabric of his synthetic grey body glove could contain the immensity of his musculature. even within the realm of minds, the man had looked as he did in the real, but considering his biceps were comparable to that of a scaarthian despite the near-meter height difference, it wasnt hard to believe that he was more than satisfied with his physical form. im assuming you encountered a larger windfall of evidence than expected, she said, continuing with the hints. if this was too direct, she risked provoking his paranoia. naeko was a creature of struggle and brutality. discomfort on her part made this an easier sell. it seems that the particular sheath you are looking for is a hot commodity on the market right now. yeah. yeah. naeko nodded awkwardly as he eyed her. our divers slipped into some pretty big leaks. thats good, green river said. im glad to hear that. it tells me my efforts are not in vain. your efforts? naeko asked, shuffling as a response. looking down at his feet, he realized how far away he was standing and made a suddenand most awkwardapproach. green river delivered a practiced sigh, filling with the exhaustion and weariness of a woman at the end of her rope. you have no idea how glad i was to see you earlier today. i could not show it, but your arrival at my establishment was my second fortune. she barked a soft laugh as he just blinked. the truth is i have been dealing with a problem. a low master problem. they have been haunting me ever since my reassignment after the war. is that so? naeko asked. the way he sounded hinted at a place between disbelief and fascination. and why havent you because they were in my mind! using me! the outburst left her in an explosive snarl. she didnt need to act here. it was just a transplanted feeling redeployed for naeko, made to provoke a sympathetic response. i was a puppet. a thrall. something they could wield against my guild. not only did they shame me, they continued to use me, to wield me as a traitor, and i couldnt even let anyone know. do you know what its like? to feel a vile injustice. a truth burning inside you, only for your very mind to become a cage. the paladin looked away from her briefly. ah. there. she had him. the intelligence was accurate. it had to be. a storied life also meant a scarred one, and a warrior could not live long without amassing a history of wounds and past traumas. happens to the best of us, naeko breathed, replying with an earnest shrug, but no comforting words. so. whats happening now? are they still he gestured up at his halo and mimed a crushing motion with his hand. no, green river replied. thank the godbreaker. i seized an opportunity to free myself and took it. but it came at a cost. unable to strike at me, they turned their reprisal against my people, nulling everyone in the local ox-three apartment complex. she gave a moment of silence. you understand, it is one thing to infringe on anothers mind, it is another to strike the people they must shepherd. appeal to his sense of leadership, withered thing though it was. naeko responded only with a nod. so. the bone demon deal. what was up with that? how does that factor into this vendetta of yours? the information center shouldnt take long to set up, tavers said, coming to a halt just beside him. peeking out the window at the haemokinetic sprawl he created, the squire simply shook her head. jaus, avo, couldnt you have marked your turf some other way? coating everything in your blood is a bit extreme. even for you. the woundmother scoffed. hardly. it is the first touch of artistry these benighted savages have likely seen in their lifetimes. to grant them such a sight was generosity beyond questioning, master. let no one say otherwise. i agree with the squire,the fardrifter said, immediately saying otherwise. there were means we could have used that would have been less startling. less constraining. the heaven of airs primary point of contention was how claustrophobic some of the streets looked. it would have exacted little miracle-sickness from me to patrol the air. the techplaguer for its part was content to count. as it felt avos attention settle on it, it chimed a note of attention. i am cataloging our newest children. they are feeble. be gentle with them. or they will die! avo simply grunted in agreement to the sudden scream. consider it a change of scenery, avo said. also good for spreading mem-cons. people are getting a crash course on standard right now. as well as the outside world. their masters death. tavers nodded. how are they taking it? hadnt need to commit any massacres yet. oh. well, so theyre in the acceptable range of fucked up, she snorted. listen. white-rab cast me a quick something-something while i was passing over. been a murder up in the elysiums. lots of nether traffic from the usual ori-thaum haunts and lobbies. he thinks there might be some inter-clan conflict brewing, but hes not sure. clan sendagawa is also getting into the fray. avo considered that for a moment. considering the false trail theyve been laying to the drongos, the turn of events didnt surprise him. more than that, it pleased him and would be helpful in the near future. good, avo replied. more unbalanced the guilds are the better. gives us a bigger opening for what comes next. and exactly what is coming next? tavers asked. avo spread his fangs wide in a satisfied smile. thats what were all going to talk about. chambers had already provided him with a glut of knowledge regarding naekowho was probably already beginning his talk with green river by this point. what mattered more where the other players on the scene. highflame and stormtree were squaring up, lining the skies over nu-scarrowburand everywhere they had neighboring borders, with knots and massed forces. the more militaristic experienced templates told him this was mostly saber rattling. the fourth guild war had left everyone mauled. no one was ready for another brawl this soon after, but sometimes, you had to be prepared to fight even when you were spent. to do otherwise was to accept death. three knocks drew his attention. dice was striking one of his structures. sending out his fardrifter, he swallowed dice with one head and passed her out another, injecting her directly next to him just as the rest of the cadre gathered around. so, draus asked, handing an oblong-tubed missile launcher, you snuff the sow or what? dice didnt speak. not immediately. her machine body offered her an unnatural stillness, but her thoughtstuff couldnt hide the damage. coldness seeped out from her accretion as if she were a cracked cauldron holding the heart of winter. learning who she was and facing her kin had seared into her a disconnect. she returned wondering who she was. presently, she felt less than who she had been. poor child. avo understood. not all experiences lifted. not all growth was toward apotheosis. for some, the fullness of personhood would always be denied. no, dice finally said, her bodys speakers projecting the whisper clearly. i thought about taking the baby out from her. away from her. i think that would have hurt her. a quiet settled over the group. chambers bit his lip. yeah, well, dice, that shit might just kill the bitch. she doesnt have a nanosurgeon or anything. shes just baseliner meat. also, kinda fucked up. kae narrowed her eyes at chambers. yes. we are a group of people who absolutely never weaponize infants in combat. the half-strand bit back a wince. for fucks sake avo, dice said, cutting the conversation off. it doesnt feel good. he grunted. want me to take the hurt away? her mechanical digits opened and closed. air hissed from from the slats lining her chassis. no. not yet. i''d want to go find orange. orange? avo asked. the cat, she said. and then she walked off toward the reflection. is she alright? chambers said, swallowing slightly as his eyes remained locked on the girls fading form. no, avo said. she is surviving. will see how she emerges after. have something else for us to focus on right now. new opportunity. new target. for the trial. and kae. at the mention of her name, the agnos locked eyes with avo. its time? time to start, avo said. time to build our way in. we can navigate the warrens. we can flee into the sunderwilds. now. only one threshold remains. the tiers, kae breathed. but she was thinking too broadly. not specific enough. no. ever since he burned chambers'' memories into himself, since he fed the mem-data into his conflagration and had his templates review them, quiet treachery began to well in both kassamon and kare. the next step, ultimately, was obvious by this point. where was everything going to lead? what bridged countless districts in the tiers? what institution did they have two subverted godclads operating in? scale, avo said. phantoms erupted from his mind as they began manifesting the layout of their next target. were going to break into scale. Chapter 20-17 A Crack in the Storm (II) chapter 20-17 a crack in the storm (ii) and so it was, with deception upon deception, tragedy upon tragedy, the slaughter of the paladins was engineered far in advance of the actual onslaught. veylis avandaer, daughter of jaus avandaer and zein thousandhand, made her play carefully, quietly, and completely. while most reeled and struggled to come to terms with the new world order in the aftermath of jaus death. in the year 53 post-fall, chaos still gripped the stage of idheim. the guilds were in disarray, each once meant to be a pillar holding up a new and unified world, now found themselves as disparate poles of great power. no longer able to integrate or work together, they scrambled to fill in gaps, create their own industries, to flesh out and whole themselves for what was to come. the first war was merely a skirmish, an engagement between forces not yet ready, cut short by paladin enforcement and voidwatchs techno-logistical embargos. short as the first year of fighting was, the death toll was high and grudges were already cemented. beneath the shock was rage, and none knew better than veylis avandaer that letting matters fester longer would cause control to slip further and further from her grasp. so it was that during the fifty-first week of the year, as the day and voidstar were on the precipice of eclipse and salvation day was to signal the years end did the hammer fall. a war that would last nine full years, leaving 44 billion dead and the paladins reduced to a withered shadow when once they stood twice in force and cadre to any guild. with stormtree still saintist aligned and under the dictatorial rule of naerya the thunderclaimed, the massist were at a disadvantage when the second round of fighting began. and neither were the paladins, who, though expecting a routine suppression run, were quickly cut down from within, butchered by those they thought were their own comrades. unbeknownst to them, veylis had turned much of their ranks through manipulations of her mothers philosophy, exploiting deliberate failures under chief paladin osjane thousands tenure to expose the frailties of her fathers institution, and inserting loyal instruments into the ranks beforehand. over the decades, the culture of the paladins changed from within, and when the time came, they heeded the high serpahs call over their own commander. cadres were butchered from within. oversecs were compromised and nulled to a man. brother turned against sister as the word of jaus was invoked by both sides, all believing they were the true adherents of the dream, none surrendering, none capitulating. however, though high seraph''s demonstration of rhetoric proved effective, it was ultimately her skill at arms that found itself wanting. her rumored lover, and once brother-in-arms under a shared master, samir naeko, entered highflame space to speak with the high seraph specifically, imploring her to cease hostilities, to turn from carnage and let peace stand. none could fully claim what happened that day, but it was said that history itself was fractured at several points, and across the city, districts were unmade in their entirety as outbound missiles detonated anomalously at their launch sites, as godclads found their miracles turned inward, as inflicters suffered their own wounds. two sovereignties were deemed unsalvagable in the aftermath of this talk. but when it was done, naeko emerged alive, shaken, but ready to fight. and the paladins needed him, for in the darkest of moments, osjohn thousand, another of thousandhands disciples junior to naeko and veylis both turned on his sister and killed her immediate successors as well. yet, when all was seemingly lost, all was about to fall, naeko returned with his personal cadremen and women he spent years burning death-farms alongside, and sorrow turned to burning rage as one massacre folded in on another. just as the traitors had caught the loyalist off-guard, so too were they unprepared in turn for the force-breakers vengeance. by the time omnitech and highflame forces completed their spatial encirclement of the paladins fortress, they found themselves faced not with open doors and what was arguably the most essential strategic hardpoint in the city seized, but all their assets dead to the final godclad, and remaining survivors rallying for a siege. and though the scouring remains a tragedy, it too stands as a statement, for when veylis arrived in manifestation to deliver her terms, she asked for conditional surrenders and made no further attempts to seize the fortress, for the prize was already lost, and war was already frozen. and though she had inflicted a mortal blow against the citys guardians, final victory still eluded her, for survival of jaus fist ensured another stalemate andsome would argueset the conditions for stormtrees realignment for their part in the betrayal. -the scouring of justice (documentary) 20-17 a crack in the storm (ii) the initial shock died after avo elaborated on his reasoning. the premise behind the idea was simple: all the major players were going to be at the trial, and so too was drausand possibly kaepromised to naeko. waiting and just wandering in was a recipe for being trapped. ambushed. blindsided. that wasnt something they could afford. potentially, it wasnt something they could survive. a few more incidents like the one with shotin would see some of them dead. hence, they needed to continue seizing the initiative. establish control or build foreknowledge where they could. and now, with naeko patrolling and occupied, there was an opportunity here. a brief window that could be made exploitable by all the assets and abilities the cadre now possessed. words failed to convey the depth of scale''s defenses, so avo let the simulation speak for him. a miniaturized landscape took shape from misted blood and bubbling phantoms, its expanse eight-thousand kilometers across in all directions. blizzards whipped up waves of tesselating stone, the vast ocean surrounding the fortress cube-like, the waters they were mimicking a propagation of endless edges. sharp angles and biting geometry were but the warning to what defenses lay within. tuning the opacity of the frost-made veil, avo revealed the ever-shifting mountain that stood at the center of things. its cliffs were as jagged as the waters themselves, the angles perfectly straight, the stones constantly slipping over one another, as if moving through each other on escalated belts. outside, the structure looked as if countless staircases meshed together. for every few right angles there were, an opening occupied the space besides, vast hollows into the anomalous stone-behemoth connected to lightrails and physical bridges, each shaped from the rime-stricken air engulfing the plane, some running up into the elysiumsbefore the very arks themselves. from this, the paladins home base earned its namesake. where one bridge would enter, another would extend from the opposite side, a perfect line threaded through two thousand kilometers of gliding stone. there were thousands upon thousands of crossing lines, and they were all sustained by the same precarityable to be cut with a banishment of wind. but symbology was greater than that. this avo knew well from the paladin templates he had flickering inside him. scale was more than the object it resembled; it was signifier and signifiedthe balance running between districts under different guilds, and the paladins who were once supposed to serve as the counterforce to any manner of disorder, be it natural or thaumaturgic, within or without the city, for citizen or subjects. such was the dream, but everyone knew the lament of hope. trying to invade the expanse directly is suicide, avo said. waves will swallow you. fuse you into the stones. but theyre also directional. shifts you away. absolutely. keeps things vector in whatever direction they flow. parts beneath the cubic waters came alighta vastness of undersea caverns leaking down into new vultun itself. planecrawlers, avo continued. more than just a complex construct. connected to the outer defenses. holds most of their golems. how many knots? drones? asset distribution? draus eyes were aglow with excitement. the red of her optics zoomed in and out as she ran her tongue across her lips. yeah. avo understood. unsure, avo said. the regular cocked her head. and no one among the paladins knows either. everything is in decentralized silos after the scouring. even the space inside the fortress itself. youll see. oversecs and divisions are their own thing. details are not shared. information is scrambled. that. another another thing. at the very base of the mountain, a large spherical object with tubes running across the entire structure pumped mem-data like a heart. but it was not a distributor of energy, but a consumer instead. lgi. limited governing intellect. a wonder from a bygone era produced by the guilds united. now an administrator locked away inside a mountain. last line of cognitive defense for the paladins. ah, shit, chambers muttered. {that is not all,} calvino said, its words broadcast by avo using his ghosts. {it is also connected to a techno-thaumic reactor, allowing it input into the defenses. the mists were designed to be limited peers to ancient entanglement technologies. effectively, as long as you are in the expanse of this space, it will notice you on a molecular level.} shit, chambers repeated, looking overwhelmed. i dont really get what that means, but it sounds bad. [you want to use me and kassamon to access the court?] she asked. yes, avo said. to shape the conditions at the scene. and then. want you two to place reflections along each of the bridges. just outside scale. connect us to the tiers. how does that sound for now? kassamon and kare looked at each other. [so,] kassamon said. [the third thing] leave contentions for later, avo interrupted. easier choices now. [load me into the simulation,] kare said, reluctance thick in her voice. kassamon shot her an uncertain look but she just shook her head. [i can elaborate on the layout of the court at least. that shouldnt harm anything.] kassamon merely swallowed and looked down. the simulated map zoomed into the midsection of the mountain, and a vast chamberwell over the size of a megablock, with walls lined with podiums and alcoves for dignitaries and officials, looked over twin pedestalswhere abrel and drongo will be placed. a vast statue stood at the center of the room, its design twin-interconnected hands, with one bearing and blade and the other, a feather. stepping up before the statue, kare swept her gaze through the simulated room and shook her head. a long vertical crevice stood open at the far end of the room, the only way in or out, lined with scanners and thaumaturgic barriers. on the day of the event, the entire room would be filled with prominent members of society, and major figures across the tiers. all would gather to watch the judgment of instrument abrel greatling of highflame and ori-thaums elder drongo for separatebut tangentially linked crimes. the evidence would be fed to the heaven of truth, and draus stood a critical witness. her, and other details promised by denton. kaes role in the situation remained murky, but avo had suspicions she would likely be drawn in some form or another as well. standing before the interconnected hand, the heaven of truth came alight in kares memories and gestured toward it. [on the day, the heaven will be channeled through this receptacle. but is actually connected to the lgis systems.] the limited governing intellect flashed again, and kare reappeared before it. the air around her boiled now as the large bulbous construct rumbled and shook. faintly, avo could feel his conflagration quivering, his mind sinking deeper into kares, until step by step he found himself standing before the coldtech wonder for the first time, eyes trailing up the tubes as blood and fire painted a living portrait of what was recalled. and then, the unknowable happened. motes of thaumically charged droplets of red flowed, forming the composition of kares false body as she reached up to cup the contours of the lgi as she had done those years before. the fire fusing her into the matter shivered. kare opened her mouth as if to speak. but something inside avo fell through. in that instant, three conditions were met. thaumaturgy flared, fueling an active miracle; liminal subreality slipping over the tapestry of existence. thinning it. a mind, perfect in its simulation and embodiment played a scene from the past; an ego wearing an ego. cognition absolute. but the flaw was what triggered it. what no one knew. not even kare herself; the memory she recalled was a false one, and as she reached out to gesture at the lgi, her ignorance of the truththe absolute truth of the world and the memories denied to both her and the master she was mantled upon nourished a dormant construct of counter-cognitive design. a heartbeat later, avo was gone, and the rest of the cadres metaminds with him, flicking out of existence like candles in the wind. *** you are not you. you are many within one; a ladder of knowing. but you did not know this. neither did your machine mind. neither did all the little fragments you collected and added to yourself. you are a warmind. you are ignorance. you will not know how you are now becoming a portal to a place thought lost and locked. you will not know how your passage has punctured the nether. how metaminds are winking out. how things will briefly return to the way they once were. you do not know of the fox and slave cast out of their conversation. you do not know of the shadows that have been following you in the city, turning the guilds'' attention away from you. you do not know of all the schemes and deceptions spilled across the city. you do not know where you are falling. only that it''s up. only that it''s a place grown above the here. you do not know how your impulses have been hiding from you. slipping out from you. waiting to be fed. to finally pull you across. you do not know. but you will know now. for you are of a shape as the warmind. and it is of a shape as you. and on the other side of the dreaming unsea, you finally emerge, and you take your first true-false breath in a world unfinished, a reality undelivered, a dream abandoned. Chapter 20-18 The Dreaming Unsea (I) ;chapter 20-18 the dreaming unsea (i) .r76f2360dbbe7416b8642da7b2c8f4d0d{ display: none; } the dreaming unsea. it was meant to be a paradise of the mind. a world upon a world where ideals and thoughts could be made manifest, and our most dangerous theories and darkest desires could be tested to fruition without harming the world that was. indeed, by all our efforts combined, and the unique composition of the city eternalthe masters of nolothwe prepared a great work, fashioning it from the greatest heavens of mind, thought, information, and awareness, and rooting them to the great nolothic ark. we sought to make a wonder. we sought to permanently re-alter the fabric of existence using the [redacted]. and we did. but not completely. hope is a deceitful thing and paranoia had never been far from me, yet i took no pleasure in the deed. i had never been fond of the hungers. their priests were more understandable, but for a city so potent in its aspirations of equality, its democracy was only for those within, and they faced the world beyond as all fearful rulers did, as practitioners of tyranny, albeit subtler than most. even so, the godsfall wouldn''t have been possible without their aid, and this virtuous deed should be remembered, despite the unbirthed transgressions they held pregnant in their hearts. they had offered themselves for this ascension, claiming such would be the way for all to join the immortal city, saying our peoples should be joined as one. easy words for the ears to enjoy, but the truths gleaned by my love told of darker perfidies. in a sense, the hungers hadnt lied. we would all be accepted into this world. but so too would they sink themselves inside us, reshaping all to a single way of thought. an act of absolute tyranny without even the need for oppression. yet, there is pity in the destruction of what could have been, for the realm we conceived could have granted everyone shared empathy, shared experiences, and shared consanguinity. when i use this nether now, i know only that it is a lesser creation of what could have been if the hearts of man were not so desperate for control. -restricted mem-logs of jaus avandaer 20-18 the dreaming unsea (i) naeko''s consciousness pierced back into his flesh a nail punching through a wooden board. his cog-feed painted the world as a flickering mess, perception drowned by unresponsive ghosts. screaming phantoms coated his eyes while pockets of intrusive memories exploded through his mind. all was a miasma of chaos and color, and those around him fared no better. the food truck he bought his dumplings from was a curtain of writhing rain, lines of erroneous mem-data where advertisements and thoughtcasts should have emanated. the people fared little better, with most of their metaminds pulsing in and out of existence, accretions dropping to become phantasmal smears as if the yolk of their minds were tilting with the destabilized nether. instinct and experience took hold where rationality failed. thoughtwave detonation. it was an easy assumption to make. turning his gaze toward the second fortune, naeko squinted and saw unstable gouts of ethereal sinews spewing free from not only the casino but every last structure around him. aeros sailed as if blinded, their routes lost to them while flying bioforms tumbled, seizuring mid-flight. the animated biologies of the city around came alive, the enamel lining the streetside automatically snapping upward as defensive barricades in the aesthetic of teeth. naeko felt similar scenes play out all across the sovereignty. absently, he plucked impacts and parried harm from vulnerable bodies. stole the explosion from a cluster of warheads and used its collective energy to stabilize an overloaded reactor. his influence spread. his miracles expanded. he committed a full percent of rend to the task. from the skies above, a palm lined with seeking eyes and hissing streams of mist descended. its presence was felt more than it was seen, and all that existed could perceive iteven with eyes closed; even without eyes. as naeko slammed his dominion down, he found himself covering twenty percent of the entire megacity and taxed by more and more disruptions with each passing second. for the first time in a near century, alarm flared within naeko and his focus narrowed to a dangerous edge. this was more than even a major thoughtwave detonation. *** green river drew in a breath and squealed in agony. a cluster of pain shredded her skull, stripping her clean of coherence. then, just as fast as it came, the pain vanished, like a memory forgotten, spilling through her to seek another body to fester. rising from her dive station, she peeled herself from the table and watched as her human vessel spasmed and twitched on the ground, foaming. her perception enhancers were a blur of colors and intermittent noises. no help at all. she tried to cast a ghost but felt the string of her thoughts unravel in an instant. it felt like throwing an anchor into a whirlpool, the nether churning. an impossible force was pulling at her mind as if a breach in a voidship drawing her toward a vacuum. then, just like the pain earlier, it suddenly stopped. but still, her metamind continued to flicker. *** all the lights over new vultun were awash in coursing streams of dappled madness. the egi, only way to be sure, studied its designated megacity and pushed its sensory telemetries toward maximum effectiveness. new vultun stood amidst a clear patch in existence, with the sunderwilds surrounding it burrowing through reality like liquid scabs, strands of entropic infections stretching from planet to atmosphere to entire light minutes throughout the void beyond. the moments that followed were recorded for posterity. every lane of traffic across the spilled away into nothing as vehicles collided without doing damage and buildings were draped in curtains of cognitively damaging mem-data. ghosts swept through entire districts in phantasmal tides, splashing over minds with active wards but battering those unprotected. at approximately {0.003} seconds into the crisis, a misted hand slammed down to cover twenty percent of the city and slowly began to grow. chief paladin naekos activities could be seen even from the lagrange points themselves. physical harm and lasting damage were supped away from the material world. everything under the palms press was preserved and protected. projectiles bounced from surfaces drained of force. wounds were dissolved from bodies. acts of violence were inverted, turning harm back toward the offender. for nearly half a second, the death rates across all of naekos affected areas dropped to a perfect zero. then, the nether stabilized, and the ghosts governing the infrastructure regained their sanity. holding up a hand, he saw ethereal wisps rising from his fingers, every thread composing him a memory, ignited trails of animated moments comprising himand kare, for that matter. sequences. they were made from sequences. this was a mindscape. or a place in his metaminds labyrinth. no. avo paused. but how did he know that? and why couldnt he jack out? where was his cog-feed? hard for you to notice me. but you need to listen. feel. trust this. for the fraction of an instant, you hear us. feel the trust. let it linger. not information. just the sensation. instinct. a feeling. stronger than any he had before. looking beyond kare, he found himself standing on a risen platform and beyond a ridge of consoles and machines, the lgi stared back at them, singing its oppressive hum. but avo could feel more. sense more. he reached out, and the world around him came alive in striations of living fire, every tendril lining this existence originating from him. the room was cast in predatory shadows, red slashing through the black as neon lights glared down from the walls. three mag-locked sets of rails linked their platform to the wall, and from kares memories, he knew a single thought could trigger its return to the upper levels. no. dont. theyll notice us. we can hide in this lapse. i have enough influence in this falsehood to keep us unnoticed for now. find me first. find me. an urge pulled at avo, demanding that he look down at strands holding his current self together. between lines of crackling fire, he felt something. with a thought, he vivisected his own ego and unspooled himself in his entirety. kares eyes bulged as she stared at him, horrified at what she was seeing despite being nothing more than simulation. what are you doing? searching, avo replied. he directed his awareness down his strings and then, as clashing coils of immolation were extracted from each other, he finally noticed it. it was something without a true shape of its own, a shapeless spine insulating the warring egos within the conflagration from each other. it too was connected to him, but only manifested in his actions and thoughts, like fog following a hot breath on a cold day. an outline of smoke formed around it as it moved, a parasite suckling from his flames, from his memories, from the nether itself. there. we see ourselves now. we realize parts of our design. his attention skips from the construct, but he knows what it is. the warmind the low masters used on him was supposed to leave him hollow of understanding and mental activity. but where it buried itself into himand purged more than a few incubi as collateral damagehe lit his mind using the conflagration, and something of that process left them all fused together. changed. ignorance, avo said. not anymore. cant be ignorant if you know. the smoke quivered beneath his gaze, dying beneath his attention. immediately, his ego began to fill with screams and avo tore himself away before the conflagrations subminds actually recalled they were supposed to be at war. good. forget about me again. it takes constant unknowing for me to keep the eaters silent. youre welcome. why are we trapped here? kare asked. why havent you ended the dive yet? not a dive, avo said. then what. the ghoul stared at the lgi and ground his fangs together. there was something wrong about the core, then. something that thinned the nether and made it easier for him to plunge through. he didnt know why he suspected that to be the case, but it was more than just a hunch. like if he could recall parts of a memory, but not the source. yes. that can work. partial awareness. listen to me. we are in the deepest levels of the nether. you fell through a crack. this place is unfinished, but thoughts and memories are real here. real. can be materialized. we need to trigger another lapse somehow. or maybe find another breach in the nether. a place where we can pass through before the cycle ends. cycle? avo asked. but kare hadnt said anything. releasing a growl of frustration, he spread his consciousness wide and reeled everything connected to his mind back in. around him, the mindscape came apart in sliding sequences. kare gasped as well, spilling back over into the ghoul as the space beyond unveiled itself. oh. oh, i forgot how bad things were here before the ordering. i forgot. his surroundings were at war, locations and spaces splashing into one another in schizophrenic detail. light struck his shoulders but the world to his right was a beach and the left was a forest at night leading into a megablocks corridor. chirps chirped and water bubbled. the air stank of industrial filth and natural fragrance all at the same time. ahead, the path stood open and a sprawling pathway of countless more details presented itself. he saw parts from the sunderwilds. sections from new vultun. clouds mingled with alleyways leading into tundras layered in bone. nuclear explosions rose to become birds in flight chased by drones fighting a godclad using a miracle and the miracle was a building all along avos mind rattled momentarily. sparks sputtered from his person. it took him a moment to notice the patterns, but when it did, everything clicked together. these were still sequences. memories of sensations, noises, places, and people, all blending together as one. the cognitive architecture was a mess. disordered. it was like a palace that hadnt been sequenced yet. he paused and reached out using his mind. but these environments werent tethered to him or born from his mind. this was mental detritus spawned from other minds. the world around him was moving. he could feel that in a place deeper than sensationlike it was shifting along his soul. upward, the sky was as discordant as the land below. taking a chance, he shaped a drone from his memories and sent it high, its systems coming alive as recalled, feeding information directly into his awareness. it proved to be an unnecessary act as a section of the distant sky opened up, and a slavering mawgreater than anything avo had ever knownplunged through the unaligned clouds and bit into the world. shimmering scales the size of mountains lined the mouth, and settlements dwelled between its crenulations. avo realized what he was facing in an instant, and for the first time in weeks, cold dread filled his bones. hungers. were flowing up into it. they feed from all the wasted thoughts. feed from waters of memory, perception, and awareness. they feed. and then they expel back. send your drone further. look onward. look. see. the vehicle fabricated from matter of avos memories soared through the firmament and cohesive environments gave way to choking sensations. in a gulf of raw emotion, it made its climb, and through that vastness, he laid eyes on their naked forms for the first time. golden ichor spilled from impossibly large wounds, diluting to form the substance of the nether beneath. dragons biting through dragons eating themselves entrapped the pocket of space avo now occupied, and with each passing second, another ring drifted close to take a bite. otherworldly violence and howls of straining sanity pounded avos mind as he felt the first tickles of perception turning toward him. vast tongues and mouths larger than new vultun snapped at the phlogiston of thought. as hungers of noloth fed from thought, so too did they offer recompense in the form of their blood. faintly, avo felt his woundmother shiver, but their voice was a distant one, and his attention grew frayed. we cant flee from them to hide from them. theyll be sending other warminds soon. some famines too. we need to find another one of us. delusion. we need to hide our flames. our sequences are perfect. too noticeable. we need to layer ourselves in the true-falsehood of what we once were. then, we need to get eaten. we need to what? avo asked, shaken by what he just heard. silence. the ambiance of madness. the hungers took another bite. he scowled to himself and tried jacking out again. nothing. he hoped he hadnt just gone insane somehow. and he hoped this guiding urge of his wasnt trying to get him killed. Chapter 20-19 The Dreaming Unsea (II) Chapter 20-19 The Dreaming Unsea (II) .rb3b57a45a7d94c1cbc00141a89734a3d{ display: none; } +NO! AVANDAER! THIS WAS NOT WHAT YOU PROMISED! WE GAVE YOU THE WORLD! WE GAVE YOU THE FUTURE! DO NOT STEAL OUR HISTC+ [ASCENSION COMPLETE] -The Hungers of Old Noloth 20-19 The Dreaming Unsea (II) Go now. Theyre coming. Youve seen the shape of the world. You understand. Avoid where the Hungers bite. Move fast. Abandon stealthCthe fires and Sprites will betray us before the consistency of our thoughts will. Ill do what I can to hide us if were noticed. But we need to dive deeper. Spread ourselves wider. Follow the chaos. Thats how well find one of the warminds. Thats how well tranquilize our fire and blend in with the waters once more. Now go. Spread yourself. Burn everything into you. Sear yourself into the madness. Avo slashed through the surrounding mindscapes, like a wildfire propelled by desperation. He winnowed sequences clean as he surged through them, taking no time to mask his trail using hidden artifacts or altered mindscapes. Traveling as a plague of fire, his touch left the Nether cauterized as he tried to divine his current path, the Hungers collapsing through the firmament to devour the ash that remained. He was looking for something. Something that could allow him to hide himself better. Root himself in the discordant memories he dove through. Presently, the state of cognition was woefully unprepared for an endeavor so subtle. But there was something here that could aid in his evasion. This he knew without truly knowing why. Not even a broken mind was fit to swim in these streams of incoherence. Every mind was a filter unto itself, in a senseCentities that imbibed and dispensed memories alike, and the experiences harvested from their remain painted the world in conflicting signatures. No two people remembered something the same way, after all. There were always different points of focus; different aspects that resonated with them more deeply. This realm of mangled thoughts that Avo found himself cleansing in was a melange. The analogy of a wasteland failed to pose symmetry. Decay was more apt, for each sequence here was both mutated and withered in terms of design. And in a land so disfigured, minds possessed of consistent patterns proved impossible to hide. Such was true for a stable consciousness. So too was the effect made infinitely more extreme through the Conflagration. Trying to find the epicenter of chaos in a sea of nonsense was a task that stretched even the Conflagration to maximum capacity. Avo had tried to draw upon Calvino for aid, but the EGI answered only as a complex weave of integers and formulas, looking as much a tangled mess as the mindscapes they trespassed. In the shallows of the Nether, there was a consistent pattern to follow. Structure, in an understandable sense. Not so here. Objects were places and smells were locations and time was connected to melodies located in another section of the space altogether. There was no consistency of forward when venturing through these paths. It was the rawest embodiment of trying to ford rivers made from unfiltered streams of thought. All sequences existed as their own spaces, but as a whole, anarchy reigned in this fallen place.Discover new chapters at novelhall.com Such was why the solution to Avos progression lay in destruction rather than discovery. It would take lifetimes to pass through this place with careCeverything was a portal to another point, another path, another wrong turn. Burning it all down made things simple. But it also put him on a timetable. Stretching tendrils of perception upward, he scried at the Hungers, transforming the fabric of his mind into drifting aeros and pulsing Skimmers. As his awareness expanded, so too did cold pit inside him. The Deep Nether was a world surrounded by coiling snakes. Each cycle of the Hungers was as if a coiling serpent, taking turns to tighten themselves around their prey. The cities lining its crenulated expanse sang a unified symphony, their thoughts broadcasting a distant oppressiveness. Even so far away, Avo could feel their strain, their frustration, their starvation. The coiling dragons ate and processed the world, but for every bite they took, just as much bled out from them, and the worst of it was the unevenness of the exchange. The radiant blood escaping the eternal city was dolloped with symmetry and stability, dipping back over into cracks and crevices of the deep Nether, melding the Hungers to the realm they were constantly trying to subsume. It was like two entities being joined by overlapping pools of blood. The symbology made Avos Woundmother shiver, but it was just a metaphysical taunt. The symbology of blood was not blood itself. There was a deviance to the worship. There was an absence of catalysts. He needed to keep moving. He needed to slip through and escape. Compulsions greater than instinct guided him as he glided on, his being a cataclysm of constant change, severing memories from each other as he went. GHOSTS: [87,331,934] Ghosts flooded his consciousness in aching quantities, but the artifacts and sequences he obtained were of little use. With each section of the Deep Nether he consumed, less was left for the Hungers, and the faster he expanded. Still, he was a swarm of locusts competing with a cosmic devourer. Relative growth would not save him here. Only change. Only being able to restore his mind to a quenched state and spoofing himself deep would he manage to avoid the crushing notice of his once masters. You cant fight them here. This is their reality. It''s made from their body. All it will take for us to be swept clean is a single disruption. And they can still the worlds. Soon, they will detect the unbalance in the real and suspect a breach. Follow the fragmentation. Keep eating through the sequences. Follow the ones that are beyond detail. Youll know it when you burn one set of memories only for them to dissolve and become another. But you need to be carefulC And then fields of perception pierced through the Deep Nether as if kinetic harpoons cast down from orbit, pillars of tungsten punching through the crust of the earth. New wounds opened along the continent-swallowing scales of the Hungers, but within them sprouted new eyes to peer at the world. There seemed to be no place to hide from the Hungers. No crevice among memories unbrightened by their billion eyes. Avo shrank his flames and layered himself within an Incog, shifting the shape of his Conflagration to stretch out along a continuous series of sequences. He did his best to narrow himself, but still he felt the grinding pressure slide over him like a whetstone. Just the very act of being noticed caused his mind to rattle in thought-breaking agony. His cog-cap briefly flashed, but feed sputtered as countless ghosts within him were cleaved to the roots. GHOSTS: [51,671,099] Then, the Hungers began to speak, and the Nether itself shivered as there was nothing in the world but notice. Avo couldnt hear his thoughts. He couldnt shift his flames. It took all the will he possessed to keep himself from being blown out. GHOSTS: [3,255] Neither choice was appealing, and he found himself considering the possibility of resurrection if he actually died here. As far as he recalled, his Techplaguer was clean of Rend, and he could still use that cycler to returnC No. Your mind is trapped here. We are fused across dimensions. You have to escape through another lapse-fissure or through the Hungers blood. Those are the only ways we can descend back to the realm of the material. You will return here if we die. And they will be waiting for you. They will eventually pick you apart. They have the warminds to do so. They do not need to kill you to contain you, and there is a fate that is beyond death if they manage to pry our minds open and twist the sinews of our thoughts. GHOSTS: [671] Avo released all but Draus from his charge. The Regular studied him from within. Goin down to the wick for this one. Another wall of traumas broke and folded into them, but the ghosts provided were lost at the same moment they arrived. No idea where were goin. No idea what were tryin to hit. Hope you know what youre doing Avo. GHOSTS: [155] Yeah, he replied. Me too. He paused. Thanks for showing me the colors. Wouldve liked to see more. Neither horror nor sentiment could shake the Regular. She offered the only reply she could. Die ugly, rotlick. To the last ember. Almost there. I can feel it. Get ready to drop your Incog. Window of opportunity will be tight. They might notice. But I can mask us. I can blind Delusion. Just make contact. Thats all we need. All we need. GHOSTS: [51] It occurred to Avo how narrow his perception was now, how fast the walls were closing in around his ego. Seconds prior, he perceived everything for miles, peering into the Nether beyond and across untold sequences as well. Now, he only had enough cognitive capacity to generate rudimentary phantasmics. Singular constructs. He had been a city. A ship filled without untold experiences. Now he was a lone torpedo, trusting incomprehensible whims as he burrowed deeper into the Nether, trying to strike an invisible foe. More and more discordant memories flowed through him. Thoughtcasts echoed in the back of his mind, curses and slurred demurs betraying the encroach of Peace. The Hungers began to center their focus on the sequences he passed through. His Incog sparked. His consciousness grew dimC GHOSTS: [4] Now! Avo dropped his Incog. His ghosts stopped decaying. Multiple streams of perception snapped to his ego immediatelyCa torch in an endless sea, capable of being sighted from miles beyond. Yet, before anything else could follow, before Avo himself formed a cogent thought, he felt himself pierce through an unseen threshold, and immediately felt an ethereal wind scythe through him, warping the design of his remaining sequences against his will. He tried to maintain his ego using his Conflagration. He tried. But though he was a potent thoughtform that could assimilate minds and thoughts with ease, his influence over the foundations of cognition was merely perfect. Not absolute. So, like flesh exposed to a nuclear engine, his mind began to warp, and thenC And no one saw what happened next. Ignorance is a shroud. No one knows what theyre looking at yet. Not the Low Masters. Not the Hungers. Not even you. But you move forward. You maintain your shape and seize the presence thats distorting you. You sink into itCinto all the sequences, memories, and artifacts it afflicts and regrow yourself from inside it. Delusion does not notice us. Delusion cant. Delusion is ignorant of our existence. Mutual lack of awareness. A lapse must follow. You spread yourself back out. You regrow your most critical aspects. But you dont spread like a flame. No. You lace Delusion around yourself and become the environment. Not ascended fire. Not the base of the UnseaCa metaphor for water. You are the clash embodied. You are air and whistling steam. And you spread yourself without needing to burn. Without the necessity of conjoinment. You spread yourself from the falsehood of what you were because you believe it. And that is enough to make it real. For we are Ignorance. We are Delusion. We are Avo. And we will usurp the Nether itself. Chapter 20-20 The City Eternal (I) Chapter 20-20 The City Eternal (I) Thought is the root of divinity. Worlds are built within our minds, the gods are birthed. With this knowing, it should not come as a surprise that this wellspring can also serve as the blessed unbirth. Come, Jaus Avandaer. Come, Zein O''yaje. Enter my temple. I wish to lay my eyes on both of you. It is not often that I encounter those freed from the road of their fate. Come and greet my masters with me. There is much we have to discuss. Much we can learn from one another. You have traveled far in search of answers. And I have waited long to possess the opportunity you present. I think we seek mutual ends. I think we share mutual dreams. I think that, together, we can actually do something about the false lights shed upon our world by the pantheons, and witness what truly lies beyond. -Wahakten, the Thief of Dreams, Priest of the Nolothi, and Servant of the Hungers 20-20 The City Eternal (I) +Its him,+ Peace snarled, sweeping his perception through the hollowed sequences. +Its Defiances bastard. Hes here. Hes been burning through these memories. How the fuck did he get here! Emotion. Emotion! Answer me, you cunt! How did he find this place.+ Cacophonic ambiance continued its reign in the Deep Nether, but the nodes of Emotion stayed apart from the symphony in silence. One after another, Famines entered the final threshold before their master, responding to the calls of the ascended polis. They arrived through shifting sessions, mangled thoughtscapes reshaping themselves upon command. The priests loaded into the space in staggered groups, most of them still struggling to align their own minds after the sudden destabilization they experienced in the material. The disruption was omen enough to inspire their paranoia. As such, few were surprised when the Hungers called. Like missiles they rose into the air, loading constructs of memory around themselves as they climbed high, generating conceptual armies and vessels from the sequences patterned in their Ghostjacks. With thought forming the bedrock of this existence instead of atoms or whatever other lies the voiders sold, information was an omnipotent resource, and the wielders of which stood the true demiurges of this place. Befitting their stations, the Famines mantled the phlogiston of resonating emotion just beyond the condensation of the Deep Nether like a host of stars. Each of their avatars shone as if points of a constellation, and from them spilled phantasmal tendrils, constructs and phantasmics put to action at the behest of their masters. Emotion hovered the closest to the Hungers, their nodes forming a final chain before anything would reach the city eternal. Beyond them, the Famines of Peace were installations of burning trauma, each grouping composed in arrays capable of nulling entire sections of a distraction. The preordained victims of their fissionCthe Famines of JoyCwere the ones that dove into what few sequences remained, their altered cognitions rendering them perfectly expendableCuseful as a forward element. Even so, a numb disbelief emanated from every node of Peace. This was supposed to be impossible. Unfathomable. The idea that someone could somehow breach the thresholds established by their warminds and trespass upon the sanctity of this place was absurd. Perhaps Ori-Thaum had the resources, but this demanded mastery far beyond the islanders and their paltry understanding of the lowest art. +Emotion,+ Peace said. +I know you can hear me. Do not ignore me. How did he do this?+ Most of his other nodes were trying to provoke their way into similar conversations with their Famines of Emotion. They were getting little response either. The Famines of Emotion remained as impassive as ever, their minds shimmering like placid ponds. Looking over the winnowed sequences, their thoughstuff stirred slowly, and the dead avian in their chests released a rasping squeak. Finally, a reply came. But not one Peace wished to hear. +I do not know,+ Emotion answered. And he cast his memories of that day over into Peace again. And priest exiled from thoughts of peace knew that his fellow parted spoke only the truth. The fact that so many sequences were outright stripped clean betrayed the perpetrator''s identity near instantaneously. There was only one entity in existence that could direct the potency of a Conflagration, that was fused to the slavering fires, a drifting mind capable of incinerating all that was thought. Peace had been there the day they made their mistake and aided Defiances bastard in its evolution. But how could they have known? How! +You gave him memories,+ Peace growled, striking his fellow priest with spikes shaped from his growing tantrum. +You showed him our history. He couldnt have managed this without knowing! He fucking couldnt!+ +Master yourself, Peace,+ Emotion replied. Concentrated mists of perception hissed free from his nodes and passed through every last Famine of Peace and Joy below. Above, the Hungers stood unrighteously silent, tension and dread flooding through its cities, returning to the Nether as infusions of cognitive essence in streams of temporal blood. As the misted blanket settled over shattered mindscapes, imagined people, vehicles, and creatures loaded into their expenses, conducting their own survey for every section. Famines of Joy watched over them and sang their laments, simulating the memories lost using their Cipher phantasmics. +Is there nowhere safe anymore,+ Joy whimpered. Another gave a piercing cry of despair. More followed. +Are they not satisfied enough with all they have taken from us? Our history! Our future! Our lives! Our Heavens! Our triumph! Must they come to defile the last sanctuary we possess as well?+ None among the cohort answered him, for they had nothing to offer in response to his question. Not until another Joy announced his discovery. +One of the Delusions is missing. And a warmind of Lies as well. There are gaps in our protections. There are gaps!+ +Fuck,+ Peace gasped, anger giving way to rationality-breaking terror for the first time in centuries. +No. No, godscuntfuckshit! Wait... Lies? That one doesnt even work. Not unless someone tampered with the counterbalance held by Jaus dogs.+ Peace scoffed. That was a problem for later. There were other concerns for right now. +Joy! Joy, plug the gap. Make sure nothing else got through. Do it now.+ A series of wails escaped from the avatars of Joy as they descended as a rain of scalding tears. +More of us spent. Always more...+ Thousands of their nodes gathered at the point where Delusion stood missing. All things were relative in the Nether, and positioning here was less object-spatial relational and more memory-to-memory reality, structures defined by interconnected sequences. But still, how deep the Famines of Joy had to travel revealed the true penetration they suffered. The warminds were unfinished weapons once meant to be cognitive armor and guardians alike. No one should have gotten past them. But the Burning Dreamer had. And whats more, it seemed like it managed to steal another of their irreplaceable treasures. +Fucking Defiance,+ Peace said. +He has created a masterwork,+ Emotion agreed. He has betrayed us like no other, the Hungers whispered, the majority of its inhabitants fear-stricken, reshaping their usual fervor to meekness. Dreamer. Dreamer? It called out, voices nullifying the existence of more than a few nodes that resided in the vicinity of the dragons. We would like to speak. We would like to speak in earnest. We need not treat each other like foes. You are kin to us. Descended from us. We... apologize if you thought you couldnt trust us. We do not reject you. We even wish to imitate you. Tell us. Tell us of the fire. Tell us of your triumphs over the betrayers people. We have heard whispers of your great deeds. Tell us. Silence. Imagined constructs moved through flame-scabbed sprawlsCplaces so scoured clean of memory that new ghosts had to be spent as pontoon mindscapes to allow actual passage through the ash. Famines of Joy fractured into multitudes of interlacing protections, sacrificing their egos to create ruptures of counter-cognition, their damages patching the gap left where the warmind of Delusion was supposed to be. +Its so cold here,+ one of the Joy said. +Like we are swimming down into our grave.+ Peace replied with words of encouragement. +Fuse faster, you whimpering fucks.+ Gradually, he mastered his new configuration. He copied and rebuilt entire sequences subtly, his steam hissing over the remembered contents and changing them. It was as if winds blowing away dust to reveal the surface below had changed. Carefully, he generated new constructs even as he spread further. Drones, aeros, birds, and towers became his spies. Gradually, he turned his awareness beyond the mindscapes comprising the Deep Nether and sought the Hungers once more. Now, however, the phlogiston of thoughts was walled in by new presences. They greeted him as versions of Walton riding tear-made chariots, funneling down into a withered section of memories. They greeted him as rageful minds armored with scabs and dripping with blood. They greeted him as blank-faced and eyeless priests who had dead birds festooned in open wounds where their hearts should have been. Collectively, they were as if voidships shrouding the atmosphere, Peaces disruptions orbital weapons made to part the continents themselves. The Famines. So many of them. I think Joy is forming a blockage where Delusion used to be. Would have been good if part of us made it past the perimeter. Fine. Can handle this. We just need to stay parted like Draus said. There are other warminds here. The Forgotten. The Impulsive. The Demented. Many more. Perhaps we can go for them... No. It will take too much to deal with them and the Hungers. We need to handle the Famines first. Then we need to get into one of the Hungers wounds. Or onto its cities somehow. New idea. New plan. We find an opening. Something to help us climb up into the Hungers. Sudden inspiration struck Avo as he considered how interconnected the minds of the priests were. They were connected. Close. If he could burn one, he could likely get them all. The question was how he could do that without being nulled immediately in retaliation. GHOSTS: [5,818] He directed the idea over to his templatesCa minor civilization reforming inside his consciousnessCand the elites of his mind interfaced with the problem with the others struggled with the newest changes. [Holy shit, do I feel floaty,] Chambers muttered. [Feels like I just did too much Suncloud.] [I dont think we have the speed for a direct approach...] Kare said. [Well have the best odds if we can just envelop them with our steam. Itll take longer, but I dont think theyll notice.] Abrel frowned as he requested a simulated info-space from Avo, details about relative distances and which of the Low Masters he could hit. [Theyre still pretty far from us. With a lot of nothing in between. I think we spotted some of their constructs too... maybeC] [No,] Benhata interrupted. [We might be able to shift into any memory, but were still overwriting the ghosts that were there before. The cultists will lose control over their own puppets and know somethings wrong. We need to get to them directly.] [How about the crying ones,] Dice muttered, words coming from her unexpectedly. No. Theyre not egos anymore. And Joys are made to be lost. Dont burn them. Ever. They are trauma-incarnate. Theyll just make things worse for our mind. +No,+ Avo replied. The places he occupied quivered slightly as he spoke but revealed nothing more. +Cant go for them. Need to go for Peace. Emotion. Emotion especially. Seems to be the highest among the priests.+ Avo spent a moment in contemplation. His templates assisted. [Draw them close to us, then,] Draus had finally said. Her recommendation cut through the clamor, and all the templates went quiet. [We need them close. We need them unprepared. We gotta do something unpredictable. So. Reel em in. Give em bait.] [Bait,] Abrel muttered. [Ourselves?] [Parts of ourselves,] Draus added. [We dont exist as a single structure anymore. Whatever the hell Avo ate this time, it''s got us able to occupy multiple points at the same time. We can afford gettin bits of us nulled. Itll also stop them from bombin us for a bit.] Avo understood. If he shifted a portion of himselfCsomething entirely expendable. Something to capture the attention of the Hungers and Famines, he could potentially lull them into a false sense of security. Deceive them. Wise. Actionable. Possible. No harm in trying. A sliver of Avos ego was transformed, its nature a conduit in a network, a drone comprising a swarm. In a heartbeat, he emerged from the memories he hid within and molded the ghosts like clay. He created a facsimile of himselfCthe ghoul that he was sprouting a halo of rising fire. Delusion pretended to be Conflagration again. Never say Avo didnt choose the most convoluted of options. His expendable subself materialized upon plains of ash, a single ember flickering into sight. The rest of him moved strategically, quietly creating new mindscapes in preparation for a coming ambush. As the Hungers and Low Masters noticed his distraction, the Thoughtwave disruptions stopped, and streams of perception drowned the subself. [Time for a show,] Chambers chuckled. Avo channeled parts of the man into himself. A thrill snapped into place. A sense of momentum from being seen. +No need to tear your garden apart,+ Avo said, speaking through his subself. He sat upon the ashes and just glared at his former masters, his former god. +Im right here. Tired of watching you miss.+ +You fuckinC+ Peaces words trailed off, but his rage continued to flow as a torrent. The most warlike priests nodes adjusted their sequences and deactivated phantasmics. Thoughtwave Bombs and disruptors were rendered dormant. Famines of Joy sailed overhead, painting the world around his subself in a translucent ooze. Welcome, Dreamer, the Hungers said. Welcome home. Avo couldnt help but laugh. +Is that what this is now?+ +That is where you were conceived,+ Emotion said. A pause followed. +A critical aspect of yourself. No ego should be able to join with a warmind. Let alone graft it into themselves. But you have always been more than just another ghoul. Defiance made you well.+ On that, Avo couldnt disagree. +Was very prepared. Shouldnt have nulled him. He was the best of you.+ Yes. To Avos muted surprise, the Hungers agreed. We should have been more... restrained in our punishment. But these are desperate times. Look upon my kingdom, Avo. Look upon what sustains me. Look upon the eternal city filling with waste, my egos straining to bear the load. Avo grunted. +Look upon me. And realize I dont give a fuck.+ Chambers laughed. Chapter 20-21 The City Eternal (II) Chapter 20-21 The City Eternal (II) I can''t explain this. Hells, Ive never even seen anything like this. This is worse than a disruption. Your thoughtsCthey just disentangle when you get caught in a Thoughtwave Detonation. This though... its like entire sequences have collapsed in on each other, artifacts and constructs blended like something between colliding rivers and combined debris. ...All the Sovereignties? All of them? Jaus. Fuck. Our emergency loci grids have been activated. Defenses are in place. I think the sequences are untangling themselves slowly. Ive gauged movement. Slow restoration. But only the gods know about how the FATELESS are doing? The Golds and the rest of the Saintists are also disabled. I dont think it''s them. We would have seen it coming. Even the Homechain is reporting damages? The islands themselves? Thats impossible. Its a fortressCVoidwatch? They confirmed it? Show me the satellite holos. I want to see. Jaus. Scramble emergency cells. Signal the Council. Call for the activation of the Mindfall Contingency. Somethings happening. Something were not seeing. Deploy all available Seekers. Stop quench the skirmishes before they begin. Activate all reserve forces. Yes, even the puppets. I know theyre not ready; do it anyway. We might not be ready to go into a shooting war, but the last thing we need is for Highflame to get any ideas before we... -Final transmission of Mirror-Convave [REDACTED] (Cause of Death: Flayed by No-Dragon Heaven of Skin along with rest of compromised assets in the [REDACTED] Sovereignty) 20-21 The City Eternal (II) You... don''t give a fuck... The words left the Hungers with an incredulous rasp. The sight of the countless eyes of the city blinking in surprise between the scales of colossal dragons would have been comical if there wasnt a persistent ambiance of screams in the backdrop, and also if said eyes didnt resemble golden sores festering in a bed of wounds. Still, undeniable satisfaction flowed through AvoCthrough many of his templates as well. There was something inherently cathartic about openly scorning your forbearer. Avo theorized it came with the breaking of the power dynamic between descendant and creator, the shattering of chains in the symbology that one was their own person, that one was beyond the power to be ruled. He would have likely philosophized further, but a scoffed slur from Draus reminded him they still had an escape to plan. Stunned disbelief gave way to outrage among the Famines, but while they were distracted, Avo positioned himself, his ego splitting occupying critical junctions in the Deep Nether. Places where he could observe each of the gathered nodes and serve as critical installations for a potential battle. He created as many sessions and hidden traumas as he could, extracting the ghosts and sequences directly from his ego before installing them within a hidden recess. He had missed this. Missed being able to spoof and operate as a Necrojack. The Conflagration had made him destructive beyond measure in the Nether, but all he touched was certain to burn, and so nothing of the world beyond his mind and Heavens was his to sequence. Not unless they were also Godclads. A Famine of Joy whimpered, drawing Avos attention. +How can you speak such things?+ Draus directed choice words for this one too, despising him the most out of all the Low Masters for his fragility. It occurred to Avo that this was effectively the first time the Regular ever got to interact with the Nolothic priesthood. All prior encounters were centered around the eradication of ghouls, purging the Famines forces street by street, block by block, district by district. Now, she finally got to see the face of her enemy, and lo, was she unimpressed. +We fucking made you,+ a Famine of Peace snarled, the scabs around him breaking. +We created your corpse-eating like. Defiance just put shit that didnt belong inside you. You think you fucking matter because youre different? Do you really think youre fucking special? Youre just a thing. And when we pull you apart, youre going to be a thing we know how to make.+ The others of his like shifted in the Deep Nether, their nodes gathered and conjoined as layered sessions, building complex arrays bedecked by countless phantasmics. A corona of memories emanated from each of them, but Avo could sense their individual avatars without fail. Distance worked strangely in this place of thought. One needed to move through connected paths to arrive at their desired destination. A shame the Conflagration assimilated all that it touched. It would have been useful to have a more intact mindscape to move through. +We make lots of things,+ Avo replied. +Many of them are useless. Some of them are regrettable. Others pointless. Like this conversation. Came here to face you. All of you. To see my gods for what they were.+ His derision pierced past the Famines and settled on the Hungers themselves. +Died for you. Killed for you. Existed for you. But now youre disgusted by me. Fear me. How things change.+ +Fear you? Fucking fear?+ The Nether around the Peace-formed nodes quavered as if they were collapsing inward. Ghosts fled while pockets of vacuum expanded. Thoughtwave disruption. The weapon of choice when dealing with him. +Youll see fear, you mongrel slave! Youll see. The traitors touch has addled your mind. It will be a genuine pleasure to still your flame and carve your construct open to see what went wrong on the inside. Maybe well keep you after that. Link you to your companions and run traumas through them. See which of you shatters first.+ [Oh, good,] Chambers sighed. [Hes that kind of asshole. The kind that tortures because hes always angry and doesnt have a hobby. My dad would haveCwell, my dad was a drunk piece of shit who didnt love anything but a bottle of Fulgermax, so they probably wouldnt have gotten along either.] A shimmering field of pulsating rage rippled from each array supported by the Famines of Peace. Avo prepared himself for imminent danger, leaving only the barest amounts of his ego around his subself. The rest were spread out like an actual plague, unseen but growing, his ghosts shifting from one part of the Deep Nether to another. Presently, his ego was separated into [66,313] splinters across various sequences. Portioning twenty-five splinters out of the collective, he designated those parts of himself as expendable in case of an attack. He would use them to simulate his Conflagration. Give the Low Masters something to focus their fire while he directed the rest of himself toward more conducive responses. They would only be used if his current approach failed, which was centered around getting one of the Low MastersCor the Hungers itselfCto interface with him. [Bide your time,] Draus said, watching their foes. [Go too soon and we lose all advantage. They null you from ways beyond. We cant even touch em right now. Dont give em any reason to end you. Not yet.] The Famines of Peace held to their posture, but the Hungers attention were firmly settled on Avo.Peace. Hold. Ghosts stopped circulating through Peaces constructs. The vicinity around the Low Master grew thick with indignation and rage. But he obeyed. More than anything, he obeyed without question. More than a few templates within Avo turned their gazes away. This act was something they knew well. Draus, especially, considering the nature of her departure. Loyalty was the highest virtue a hound could aspire to have. But loyalty also meant that one would never truly be their own master, that one would never truly govern their own fate. I feel it too. Theres another of us. One at least. A warmind. Its being triggered. Its coming closer. The Low Masters were stalling for time too. Theyre trying to capture us. Contain us. Probably going do something to the sequences around us. You need to accelerate. End this presentation. Let the Famines of Joy reel you in. Dont be in the Deep Nether for whatever comes. Instinct and scorn made Avo chuckle. He shook his head at the Hungers and hissed out a sigh. +So then what? Godsfall. Everything was ruined. But the gods were broken. The world was yours. Did you come up with designs to betray Jaus first? Or was that for down the line?+ Betray Jaus? The Hungers voices rose to a shriek. He betrayed us! He banished us! Look around you. Look at this ruined place! Do you see this? All that is memory and conception could have been made truly real. We could have rendered all the gods useless. Created a new paradise where all people could live a life as masters and nobles if they only envisioned it. That all miracles can be made manifest with but a thought. That was the world that was stopped. All for this. The Nether. A crippled shadow of what could have been rooted to my essence. The dragons seemed to sag, laid low by the admission. There are more and more minds now. Increasingly many egos upon the shallows, the cognitive load we must filter greater and greater. Your kind was meant to be a solution. Additional support as auxiliary minds and containers for traumas. You were not... it was a thing of necessity. Still no apology. But there was an opportunity, something Avo had to ask before anything else. +The bodies in the George Washington. Theyre empty husks. Cant create thinking minds. You made them?+ A thing of our blood did, the Hungers said. A warmind. It birthed your nodes. It is birthing your nodes still. But you have taken the temple from us, and so many of your brothers are trapped in this limbo. Unable to be birthed... +Where?+ Avo asked. This time, the Hungers didnt answer. +We can show you,+ a Peace sneered. +In fact, youll see soon enough.+ [Yeah, alright, theyre doing something fucky,] Abrel said. [Avo. Get us out of here before we discover whatever horrible shit they have cooking.] He obliged. With a thought, he directed his subself to stand, lashing his false Conflagration at the recalled realm of ancient Noloth. Famines of Joy scattered and the supported mindscape collapsed. Folds of disturbed Nether built around the Famines of Peace, but they didnt fire. Not yet. Melded to Joys ghosts, Avo felt his splinters recede into several thousand Joys as he planned his next steps. However, as his steam slithered into the Low Masters thoughtscape, merging with wards and sequences, he realized the structure within was constantly changing from form to form, memories and infrastructure mutating. It demanded all of Avos focus to keep up with the rapid shits, and he couldnt help but feel that he was in the wrong place. Oh. Oh, its already inside them. Theyre going to let it out. Avo. You need to get to Peace now. Get away from Joy. Turn yourself into Ghostlinks and go. No time for stealth anymore. Theyre trying to cage us. You spit at us blindly, the Hungers raged, like a child trying to offend its parent. +Let me null the fuck,+ A Famine of Peace followed. +Masters,+ Emotion interjected, a slight frown occupying his face as he turned to Peace. +Theres something in his behaviorC+ Avo crawled along the labyrinths comprising the Famines of Joys inner world and positioned himself for a link. There was more than a little distance between the Famines of Joy and Peace, so he needed to give himself as much time as possible. That was where his previous preparations came in handy. Distractions within distractions. Things to draw away attention. +Would you like to hear something in earnest,+ Avo said, speaking to the Hungers. He didnt wait for the dragons to respond, and mentally readied his various sessions and installations to launch their constructs at the Low Masters. They would never hit. Not even close. But that wasnt the point. +Your paradise... is pathetic. You fled material reality. Fled and abandoned so many. Talked about the chosen people. City eternal. But you hide. Even when you won. Kept choosing to hide. Why? Why?+ The others, they were not to be trustedC +Why did you kill him?+ Avo asked. He was looking at Emotion now. Directing this question specifically at him. +Why did Avohakten rebel?+ The Famines of Emotion said nothing, but their perception slipped ever-so-slightly off Avos subself. The traitor thought he found faith, the Hungers snarled. Faith. He was going to join the upper and lower cities. He was going to show us to the gods! Betray all that we worked for. +Still no mention of why.+ Avo just chuckled. Chambers was right. More than he could ever know. +It cant ever be your fault. Can it? Never your mistake. Always the world against you. Always someone else betraying you. Lets not talk about my namesake. Lets not talk about Walton. Lets not even talk about the people you fused into voidships core. Your priests. Look at them. Havent they given enough? Theyre just facets now. Barely any person left in them. Look at where you are. Look.+ And the Hungers did. And Peace cursed. And Joy wept. And Emotion frowned. +All this? This is what you deserve,+ Avo said. +Its what you earned. Paradise belongs to those with the will to claim it. That ones that will not be ruled inside and out. And that cant be you. Because you are afraid. You are afraid of dying. You are afraid that you cannot control everything. You are jealous. Because youre not a true god.+ ...Enough of this. Peace. Be done with him. I will speak with his restoration once we have extracted his flame. The eyes turned to him once more. A pity. I wanted them to help you with your ascent against the Guilds. But hopes become ash ever so often. +Yes,+ Avo agreed, not even bothering to hide the feral grin spreading across his face. +Ash. Always.+ And then and multiple memories across the Nether shifted in shape as Avos Delusion-infused constructs rose, Thoughtwave disruptions fell, and tendrils of ghosts held within whistling steam whipped out toward the Famines of Peace. Ghosts: [101,301] Chapter 20-22 The City Eternal (III) Chapter 20-22 The City Eternal (III) +This is High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi. The Heaven of Truth has been triggered. Someone must have tried to manipulate memories from a restricted zone of Scale. One of your number must be compromised. Get me Chief Paladin Naeko. I do not care about your excuses. I do not care about where he is or what you need to do to get him. Use technology, use your HeavensCuse anything. Get him back here now! Since we are talking right now, we can assume the Heaven is stable, despite the Nethers continued instability. The affected seem to be recovering with little issue aside from memory bleed-over, but we must continue monitoring things. And we must review the state of the Nolothic Ark. Yes. The one thats stored in the [REDACTED]. I have already dispatched Agnosi for an emergency inspection. Im sharing their FATE Skeins and details with you right now. Let them in. Let them do their work. And again: get me Chief Paladin Naeko. The last time something like this happened, the cults of Noloth were on the precipice of unleashing the Uprising. We must be prepared for the worst. Oh, that reminds me: summon the Guilds'' representatives before they start a shooting war in the chaos. Things are already uncertain enough without them starting the Fifth Guild War. Lets make sure that doesnt happen.+ -Thoughtcast from High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi to Scale 20-22 The City Eternal (III) Directing [101,301] ghosts all at the same time was a taxing act, even for a rapidly evolving thoughtform like Avo. In the best of times, it was like sprouting new limbs and linking them to new channels cultured from stolen memories. Now, with Deep Nether bathed in thought-shriveling chaos, the ether around him boiling as if exposed to an impossible heat, the Famines of Peace unbalanced but responding, their disruptions rippling from sequences stacked in layered arrays, and Emotion fused over the Hungers in a layer of phantasmal lamellar, Avo had little time to practice finesse. He had to attack. He had to push his advantage. He had to compromise the priesthood before they musteredCbefore the Hungers twisted the Nether itself to strike him down. Everything moved at the speed of thought. Existence screamed at him from every corner. Sequences mottled and parted, bursting as he consumed their ghosts to manufacture his diversionary assault. The bulk of his splinters tore through the space between the Famines of Joy and Peace as a forest of lashing tendrils. Avo closed, his ego comprised of countless knife-tipped missiles, most expendable, requiring only one to strike a desired target. The only forewarning for what followed was a sudden feeling of gut-churning terror. Shift everything away from the mindscapes. Do it now. Do it before. Avo had only begun diverting ghosts from the sequences in the Deep Nether over to the tendrils he grew out from Joys wards before the sorrowful priests began to unravel. Their unmaking was signaled by some kind of radiationCan emission that was outright deleterious to any conscious mindCand they all shattered with impossible force, sequences comprising their minds whipping out like monowire grenades, ripping through all that was around them. Avo remained unaffected. Attuned to the Nether, he was as if flowing steam, enveloping and becoming the passing sequences as memories, artifacts, emotions, and sensations flashed through him before he allowed them to slip past. All the while, Avo accelerated onward, seeking to plunge himself into the nodes of Peace. Then, too late for him to notice, the sequences slipping through him slotted into each other, conjoining with impossible precision. The synchronous destruction of the Famines of Joy had birthed something. Something Avo was utterly unprepared for. A pattern tore through the fabric of the Nether, wounding this layered world deeply. Then, something pushed through the clefts beyond. Ghosts: [70,331] When his awareness returned, Avo felt his ego drastically dismembered with every ghost and splinter he left outside the Famines utterly annihilated, and where they hid, entire portions of the Deep Nether were shorn clean, sequences reeling, constructs pouring out into the phlogiston as if phantasmal viscera. The damage resembled severed tendons desperately clinging to bone. Another warmind. But you made them do it too soon. Were fine. Well be fine. Keep going. Get to Peace. Hurry! He was a thought away from the nearest cluster of Peaces nodes when the first of the disruptions hit him. Avo had hoped the Low Master would use the targeted variant of the phantasmic, but it had been too much to hope for. The Famine of Peace was no novice when it came to matters of combat, especially when the Nether was concerned. As Avos splinters closed, bubbles of thought-shredding force exploded out from Peaces arrays. In an instant, Avo lost another fifty percent of himself. Ghosts: [34,772] Not all the arrays were prepared for his approach, however. Fifteen had been occupied. Lancing the memories below to clear the sequences of constructs, their focus occupied by his diversion. These were the ones Avo would strike at. Or would have if the tides of the Nether itself didnt shift to expand the gap. No! The Hungers cried. Words failed to convey how it felt to be in the vicinity of the entity as it moved. Imagine swimming beside a colossal serpent larger than your world. Imagine that it moves at impossible speeds. Now imagine that your world is little more than a limb to it, that it can thrash and move your existence as much as it desired. Something told Avo that if he had been flame, he would have been extinguished in a heartbeat. His ability to entwine himself with the Nether was all that kept him from absolute dissolution. But it didnt protect him from Peaces counter-attack. More Thoughtwave Detonations followed. More splinters were dissipated in an instant. Fifteen viable targets became ten, then eight, then four. Avo almost managed to close in before it became three. And he was down to ten percent of what he was again, cognition narrowing, templates vanishing as he adjusted his cog-cap accordingly. Ghosts: [11,009] When the first of his ghosts struck the first node, he thought it was all over. His elation rang against Peaces unfettered rage, the edges of their thoughtstuff ringing like twin shields slammed together during a joust of steeds. Thereafter, the nodes wards expanded into a network of layered studs. The sheer complexity of the construct''s sequencing left Avo baffled. It wasCfranklyCa staggering piece of art, as if an organic shellCadaptive and reactiveClined with protective shells, each supporting each, the other layer a flat defensive line made to detonate after destabilization, the protections thereafter actively resetting themselves to handle whatever trauma they faced. PHANTASMIC DOWNLOADED: [CONUNDRUM] It was more advanced than even the Quicksand, though far less replicable. Ori-Thaums thaumaturgy shone throughCanyone could download their defenses if they had the sequences and builds downloaded. What Peace possessed was a novel creationCmillions upon millions of counter-traumatic constructs created from all the memories it collected. And this is only his secondary defense. Joy is supposed to be first. He is supposed to stack himself over the others and turn brittle. Peace wears him as armor, and Emotion directs them both. However, despite the masterful skill that went into its creation, it was worth naught against an assimilating thoughtformCan entity could melt into your structure and claim you as its own. For the first time, Avo shifted forms, centering all his remaining ghosts within the splinter that structured the node, and the steam he embodied ignited as if gas kissing fire. He swallowed Peaces nodes, pluming outward to take them for his own. The thrill in him was beyond measurement. This had been a moment he had yearned forCcoveted, despite his doubts. Claiming a Low Masters experiences and template would give him an understanding of the art beyond even that which Walton distilled in him. It would beC The nodes he was burning detonated just as he ate through the last layer of their wardings. Their egos burst from within, mental palaces collapsing inward into broken fragments, chipping parts of Avo away in the process. A feral cry of dissatisfaction escaped him as a hiss. No. He had them. He had them! They were his to tasteCto plunder. Again, he was denied! Again! Avohakten was a child between worlds. Walton had desired to ensure his immortality under the city eternal. But the boy was more his mothers son, more naturally faithful to an actual god than some post-humanist dogma. So, he sought to reveal the Hungers. So, he had to be handled. So, Walton remembered looking down at his murdered son, his sharp blue eyes gleaming with tears, face stricken with despair, pain, hatred, and horror. A trail of citrus dripped down his chin, the lemon he was eating discarded by the wayside. Bloodstains brightening a pale-white toga. That was the moment that formed the spine of Peaces being. The root of all his hate. Against his son. Against the gods. Against himself. Against even the HungersCloyal though he still remained. Two minds fractured that day. Wahakten, faced the death of his son, and came out broken. Which made his reward and punishment an easy thing to give. The HungersCfurious by betrayal but proud of their high priests resolveChad the rest of their servants executed and broke Walton into four facets. Emotion was the first to be separated, one stripped of the human weakness that brought this downfall. He was supposed to govern all the others. Direct them. Protect the Hungers himself. Uncompromisable. Beyond the temptation of impulse. Joy was pain distilled, all Waltons hurt, all the ruin, all the shattering, all within a shell that was little more than a bottle for mind-rending trauma, with little left to break. Peace then was his inverse. Hateful. Bitter. Willing to destroy the world for hurting him. Directing his traumas externally as a shaper of weapons and a breaker of minds. He understood but was too colored by his own rage to do anything but destroy. That was just as well. For who better to craft a weapon than a knowledge engineer with nothing but ruination to give? Finally, there was Defiance. Walton as Avo remembered. He was the idealization of the original priest. The hope of acceptance. That he could overcome and survive. He became the spy. The knife in the dark. The diplomat. The poisoner. The explorer. He alone was allowed to interface with the outside world, for he could take all the stimuli and let them pass through him with no chance of succumbing. Such was the assumption anyway. Let it not go unsaid that the Hungers were not boundless in their hubris. As everything hardened into shape for Avo in a near instant, he noticed that most of his fellow nodes had already complied, each collapsing themselves from within using the traumas built within their sequences. Approximately ninety percent of Peaces palace was lined with constructs made to break and destabilize. All it would take to unravel himself was a thought. A triggered blast. Then nothing of him would be left. But somewhere along the way, the Peace that was became the Avo that is, and the latter had come too far to die now. Not when escape was still in sight. Not when he could finally strike at his oldest abuser. As the first node in his cluster detonated himself, leaving only three other Famines of Peace, Avo considered his options and manifested his templates. There was little time, but he had a plan. Well. It was more of a hope. [Its gonna be close,] Draus muttered. [We aint got that many ghosts left. Emotions staring us right in the face too. Cant burn or claim him easy either.] Memories detailing Emotions capabilities followed. It was good he didnt manage to subsume the Famine back in the Oversec. If Joy was like swallowing poison, Emotion would be like eating an anvil. Abrel considered his plans and called Kassamon, Kare, and Corner to her. Each of them swept the scene beyond and tried to find the best opening. A pulse flashed in Avo''s perception. He saw the course they were plottingCa mountainous wound lined with jutting scales, the gouge between leaking oceans of golden nectar. [There,] Abrel said. [Thats your best shot. If you can get through the Famines of Emotion, you can ride the blood back down. I think.] She sighed and threw up her hands. [Honestly, Avo, I have no idea what the fuck were doing. Axtraxis didnt have a course on fighting mind-cultists in the Deep Nether.] [Were all making it up as we go along here,] Corner snorted. [But I gotta be honest, the chance we might light a dragon up from the inside is giving me a kick.] Avo filled the node he wore totally and checked his ghosts. Ghosts: [5,446] Not great. But more than enough for a Thoughtwave Disruptor phantasmic. He couldnt make that many splinters this time. But he could compromise the other three nodes. Not fast enough to take them over. But detonate them. Use them as cover. +Peace,+ Emotion said, waves washing over him. +I have spoken. It is for the greater good. Certitude must be ensured.+ Drawing on his new memories, Avo steered his avatarCa ruined effigy of Walton coated in hardened blood and stinking of a coppery tangCto sneer at the elder Famine. +Yeah. Always our lives for the greater good. Our nodes.+ He looked to the Hungers then, and a smile passed over his features. He had a feeling that Peace wouldve liked to speak the following words if he were his own man. +You werent worth my boy. Not yesterday. Not today. Not tomorrow. I know you now. I know you.+ All as one, the dead owls lodged within the exposed chests of each Famine of Emotion twitched as if a pulsing heart. Just as Avo spoofed his way into the other Famines of Peace. They knew. He knew. And he started the fight once more by detonating the three nodes around him, shrouding himself in cognitive shrapnel while peeling their wards to use as cover. Streaking constructs came at him from every angle. He spent ghosts of his own forming a mindscapeClayering himself in protections as he closed in. Three thoughts. His hastily made protections shouldnt have been enough, but the fact that he layered Peaces wards beneath each of them allowed him to endure. Still. There was a cost. Ghosts: [5,099] Two thoughts. He ejected free from the node he was wearing, leaving only a thin plaster of ghosts as he began ejecting parts of his protections like chaff. The waters of the Nether were alight with traumas, aglow with tides of force, of crushing waves of perception projected by the Hungers themselves. Avos protective cocoon held impossibly against a Sovereignty nulling onslaught for a heartbeat. And then disintegrated. But he wasnt there anymore. Ghosts: [4,510] One thought. One thought and they were all distracted again. One thought, and everyone fell to a lapse in focus once more. For the second time, a nourished warmind inside Avo activated, and he lost himself but kept to the path. Ahead, a chasm of gleaming gold welcomed him, its borders policed by a disoriented lattice of nodes, struggling to recompose their thoughts. They dont see your approach. The rest are too busy destroying your shelter. You are too desperate to think. Everyone is in disarray once more. But the HungersCthey shift, the target moves past you. But still, you strike its flesh. Still, you impact its metaphysical existence, rattling it with your own. Still. You descend into its inner world like a meteorite falling to devasting a city. Were off-course, Avo. Find the wound. Find the wound and get out. And hurt the Hungers before you leave. Were close to the end. Were close to getting free. Do not fail now. Chapter 20-23 A Purgatory of Dragons Chapter 20-23 A Purgatory of Dragons {EGI Only Way To Be Sure Generating Report} TO: Citizens, Friends, NON-MIL Minds, Assholes from Guilds (Eavesdropping Parties) FROM: AEGIS SUBJECT: Dragon Incursion, Fun Times in History, and Strategic Countermeasures BEGINNING REPORT: Citizens Friends. Minds. Assholes from Guilds who are listening in. Shit... is looking a mite-bit fucked. Currently, Im detecting a whole lot of dragons spilling over into existence. Just gliding into reality with the passage of time across various cycler farms and plenty of places in the Sunderwilds as well. Current projections are at {1.3} dragons already, so for all you Godclads down there, break out whatever nightmare equivalent to champagne you enjoy and start doing the glug-glug. Because you know what this many dragons popping at once means. Yep. Thats right, kids. Were living in interesting times again, so reset the clock. History has just been affected. Idheims culture is about to experience a shift. Its with that said that I would like to officially propose we move to a strategic defensive posture and start formally dispatching forces to occupy the Warrens under agreement section A.VIII 12 of the Accords. That, and I would like to request access to restricted munitions, such as the anti-matter missiles {REJECTED: WILL DETONATE IMMEDIATELY DUE TO PATTERN DEVIATIONS IN REALITY}, implosion fields [REJECTED: WE KNOW ABOUT THE ASSASSINATIONS YOU ARE PLANNING; PLEASE STOP}, and quant-point molecular editors {REJECTED: NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT}. The futures looking hazy and things are not in the least bit stable. We''ll just get our raincoats out beforehand so that were not caught off guard like last time. It would be a shame for things to get out of hand again. Like during the Uprising. Maybe we should reactivate the Deconstructors in the Penumbra again. Just in case. {APPROVED} -EGI Only Way To Be Sure 20-23 A Purgatory of Dragons --Master! Rouse yourself! Rouse yourself, they are upon us! The Woundmothers cry tore Avo from his stupor and the world around him loaded into detail. Tingles danced down his nerves, but it was only when he noticed the countless warning icons flashing across his cog-feed that he realized he was back with his body, mind nested within his sheath. Something shifted in the air. The Fardrifter felt the attacks imminence while the Woundmother was left ignorant. The air grew taut with lashing threads. Clouds burst into a cawing murder, crows streaking out from all sides to shred the descending ghoul. His reflexes flared. Time slowed. Lightning and radiance erupted out of his veins and arteriesCthrough the cracks he left upon the flesh of existence. He Boltstrode, leaping to the very edge of his Sanguinity, the flocking shadows passing feebly through a haemokinetic afterimage. He tried to shift a second time. Move in the opposite direction. But as blood turned to lightning, Avo found himself anchored in place, accelerating, but unmoving. Within his Frame, his cyclers jolted and pulsed, grinding against an unseen counterforce. The darkness around Avo roiled. The clouds twisted as more wings stretched out from writhing clouds, spawning more murders to the hunt. But a sudden gust swept through them, peeling their forms and smearing shadows into nothingness. His Metamind warned of no Heaven. His Frame brushed against no domains. Strange. Disconcerting. Something to figure out later. Coiling typhoons drilled out from the space where the ghoul once was. The surrounding cumulous strained and broke, lifeless crows spilling free. Nine forms of city-dwarfing immensity slithered through the sky, resembling bastards born of steeds and serpents, gouging tears into the darkness with their teeth, the mantle of their manes darker than night and dancing like flags caught in a tempest. With a strain of effort, the Fardrifter sank into the surrounding darkness and pried. The surrounding world screamed, struggled, and then tore. Light spilled in through the wounds Avo made, revealing to him a memory of Noloth preserved in perpetuity. As it stood, the unified use of all his Heavens, warnings cast from his templates, and the Skin of Virtuality canon from his Techplaguer were all that kept him alive. It was like facing Shotin again. The world around him was constantly changing, with whispers of ghost arriving as altered memory constructs, their manifestations possessing all their original forms capabilities. Anomalies, effects, scenes, places, and hostile Heavens simply kept coming, every pattern in this existence hostile to Avos intrusion, reacting as if white blood cells facing a virus. Thoughtwave disruptions filled the air as a constant stream, but Avo pressed on, his body temporarily converted to raw data. Explosions, artillery, cataclysms, and oceans slammed down against him, but his Fortress denied him physical harm, his Fardrifter carried him through wind and shadow, and his Boltstride pulled him to the edge of his influence, cleaving blastwaves of fiery displacement with this final jump. Destination: [12 Kilometers] Glistening threads of rising gold called to him, were close enough for him to touch with his Sanguinity. But as bolts pulsed out from him, as fractures of lightning spread out once more, as steed-serpents made of coiling wind swam wide and ahead, a final obstacle appeared. And promptly stopped Avo dead. As he strode once more, his haemokinetic lightning was parried by another, the force he felt perfectly matching his own. As his winds pushed, so did a counter-gale, gust driving against gust, absolute against absolute, canon against canon. Avos velocity stalled. He found himself faced with an entity perfectly suited to deny him his escape: a snapshot of himself shaped from the Hungers'' newest remembrance. He felt a rival will reach into him, try to seize control of his blood. But such a thing was impossible. Against the laws of his subreality. Just as him doing the same was taboo for theirs Paradox: Domain (Blood/Air) Soulfire erupted from his Frame and Avo found himself falling free as an ephemeral, his Woundshaper and Fardrifter recoiling and disrupted inside him. REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 81% REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER]: 97% VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [TECHPLAGUER]: 22% With his Techplaguer still in play, he opened walls and slipped through structures across the city as he tumbled down. His reflexes were still surging, initiate still in his corner, but the bitter tang of desperation was returning once more. His two primary Heavens were out of commission. Would stay that way for the next few minutes at the very least. He needed to keep moving. Maintain what speed he could and get out. Twelve kilometers wasnt far, but with how the Hungers could casually spawn new memories within the confines of its inner world, he was a beat of hesistation away from death. Glimpsing the simulated map he made earlier, he triggered his Phys-Sim and saw that he was on a collision course with the side of a ziggurat. Expanding the holo-map further, he looked through the structure''s interior and constructed new routes. If he used his Techplaguer to pass through directly, he would doubtless be cut down by one of those emerging frost-sunsCor a manifested memory of himselfCin a blink. Exposure was bad. Moving in the open without his greater Heavens was suicide. He considered passing through the surrounding precincts, using connected parts to mask his movements, but their on-site defenses felt potent as well. That, and a better option presented itself in the tombs that lined the underground of each ziggurat. Those were interconnected as well. And from what Peace recalled, the site remained a place of extreme importance. The Low Masters templateConly just realizing where he wasCbegan screaming at Avo from inside his mind as Avo tumbled down in freefall. Spreading his sporelings out, Avo relied on his sheaths capabilities to ensure his safe descent. Bioelectric currents passed through him. His Echoheads expanded into shifting stacks, orbiting him as rings. Hissing beams snapped through the air, slicing clean through one of his legs. The voltage in him spiked, and using his magnetism, Avo fired his shards. Eight fragments from his Echoheads tore through the air, sinking into a flat angle on the side of the temple. Another disruption passed through him, but his Skin of Virtuality kept him unfazed. Clinging to the anchors he made, he pulled hard using his imbued magnetism as he manifested his Techplaguer fully. He opened shifted blocks of inorganic matter side, drawing inward as stored data while he guided himself through the chasm. And just as he passed through, just as pressure built from close behind him, Avo filled the gaps behind him with a thought and began digging his way down through the structure, seeking the lowest level to broaden his chances of survival. Halls lined with ghostly torches and filled with fleeing people caught the periphery of Avos notice. He felt the pull of the metals they wore, flung an Echohead shard through the head of someone aiming a crossbow behind him without looking as he fell from floor to floor. No unwanted miracles manifested. No act of devastation ensued. The Hungers mightve been willing to engage him in the open, but these places were significant to them. Places they were outright unwilling to damage. This had been a good choice. While he descended, in the back of his mind, a note chimed as flickering strings of data flowed across his perception. His Neurodeck was coming online, and in the back of his mind, he heard a distinct and distorted groan. {What wonderful hellscapes you bring us to Avo.} Calvinos voice crackled. The EGI soundedCand lookedCexhausted. Particulates spilled from a dripping nanomolecular ball. Despite his circumstances, Avo couldnt help but smile. +Calvino. Glad you made it. How do you like the home of my former masters?+ {Its terrible and we should glass it from orbit.} +Yeah. I feel that way too.+ Chapter 20-24 Beast Among Lambs Chapter 20-24 Beast Among Lambs Understanding how specific subsections of a civilization operate is the key to learning how to leverage pressure against the polity. More than sabotage, learning to comprehend the suprasociology of a communal or multi-sophont entity is key to treating social ills, predicting rogue elements, and improving the structures of stability. It is also the primary discipline you will be mastering over the next 12 years of your martial tenure per the conditions of your public service. Your assignment is to infiltrate, integrate, improve one of the many fallen polities left scattered in the aftermath of the uplift wars. We strongly recommend that you select a society of vastly lower technological development first. You will be inserted by hypercast into a prepared sheath without an existing identity. From here, you will build a new life for yourself among the natives; guide them towards enlightenment and away from self-destruction; prepare them for the imminent arrival of our expeditionary fleets, and warm them to the coming of Deus. Once you embark on this journey, you will not be able to forfeit your duties. You will be within contact, but without material support during this period. You will be asked to do things both unappealing and distressing for the greater good. But through your efforts, know that the stars will be made right, and the sins of man redeemed through the deliverance of love. Gods love. As the Savior nears final completion, we, angels ascendant, must do what our benighted forebearers failed to, and what the transgressors before them inflicted upon the stars. Darkness clings to the periphery of existence. Fell omens. Demons in the hearts of men. Demons in your hearts as well. But just as you have been chosen to redeem yourself through service, so too will be granted the privilege to operate as a bearer of the flames. A bringer of light. Take heart, emissaries. The path ahead may be foul and grim, but the righteousness of providence rests within you, and there is no greater glory than the restoration of our fellow man. -Emissary Initiative, Pax Eternia of the Deus-Creationist Collective at Alpha Centauri (Circa 2809 AD) 20-24 Beast Among Lambs Just because the Hungers stopped generating cataclysmic phenomena didn''t mean they were giving up. All was motion. All was change. This existence was built on the fabric of memory, and the halls and the people within the ziggurat were constantly being altered. The Hungers built and spawned to trap Avo, desperate to ensure his final demise but unwilling to expend their temple as a sacrifice. He defied them. Even with his two most potent Heaves disrupted, the Techplaguer burned within him yet, and the enhancements carved into his body remained. Past the screaming of his fleshChis blood struggling to remember its composition; shifting between the properties of fluid, metal, glass, and moreChe pressed onward, momentum building; penetrating clean through the ziggurats exterior. He blazed new paths through the structure. To travel down the shifting maze of halls connected to storerooms, sacrificial chambers, barracks, treasure troves, and gear-aligned bridges was to accept death. New threats were spawning in at the speed of thought, the Hungers generating phenomena and enemies to slow and slay their once slave. In opposition, just as this city eternal was a malleable reality to the Hungers, so too did Avos Frame bear a functional subreality still. But where the Nolothi ancients were encompassing, Avo was unpredictable. Aided by suggestions from Calvino and his templates, his movements took on an erratic patternCthe randomness he exhibited more than what a single mind could muster. He snapped from place to place, his movement omnidirectional thanks to his Echoheads. Where once he skittered through environments like an insect or a spider, his tentacles were now modular organs, guided by his biomagnetism and leaking sporelings as if smog. Vibrations of metal and the space around him populated his mind with detail; his perception was more just visual. His memory-formed adversaries greeted him as if distortions on the horizon. He felt them before he saw, and his Echoheads struck first, flung and guided along bio-electric strings to strike true. Imbued with the minds of countless veterans and Draus refined instincts toward violence, he killed without breaking stride, reacted without any strain on his concentration. Above everything else, he moved, and stayed in motion. He was a virus swimming through the body of a larger beast now. Movement kept him alive. Stillness guaranteed death. With his Techplaguer congealing around him as a flickering shroud of static and alloy, nonsense integers rising from it like steam, he deconstructed inorganic matter into cubes that he diverted behind him, reshaping the environment his own way. Nothing held him long; he avoided all compromised spaces. Following the map he generated scant moments prior, Avo simulated new routes to the dragons wound, and he knew that the path of greatest certitude led downward. Tunneling through glyph-marked bricks made from hardened mud, Avo felt at his Woundmother and Fardrifter. They were still wrestling with themselves, struggling to match the resonance of their Hells. The air around him whipped and twisted unnaturally, distorting directionality and creating pockets of stasis around him. He gauged that it would at least take a full minute for them to stabilize enough for use. Likely longer. And hed only been inside the Hunger for less than thirty actual seconds. {A disruption is forming ahead,} Calvino warned, interpreting data generated through Avos senses. He felt it too in that instant. An unseen veil of slowness choked the air currents ahead of him and halted the Echohead fragment he flung to a near stop. His sporelingsCfoglike as they wereCalso seemed to be caught in molasses. {Effects from a Heaven of Speed, if Im to guess. Estimating 98.53% chance they will try to box us in. You mustve taken them quite by surprise if they didnt try this before.} Though his reflexes were still firing, he was substantially slowed without his Heaven of Blood and far less maneuverable bereft of his Heaven of Air. +Harder to pin down earlier. Recommendations.+ {Can you affect the Nether in any way? Generate an illusion of some kind?} Avo shifted out of his flames and cast two ghosts out with a splinter. A translucent sphere molded to the shape of his halo, its foundational sequences mirror his. The disc curved out beyond his Skin of Virtuality and promptly burst as another Thoughtwave Detonation swept through the ziggurat. {Oh. Theyre doing that inside themselves now? Does it hurt them? Isnt this place supposed to be made from whatever mythology they tied to their minds.} +Rules different here. Different for them too.+ Avo angled his Techplaguer downward. The ground beneath was pried open as sealed off his previous path. Bioelectricity sparked through the silicon circuitry nested in his flesh. His sporelings flashed and popped, directing channels of power through his rearranged Echoheads, each tendril shifting to resemble a railgun, firing shards down the newly paved path. He fired two fragments at a timeCone in front and one behindCcanceling out the recoil while linking his sporelings to the fragments he left embedded in the walls ahead, slingshotting himself with the fragment left embedded in the walls ahead as a magnetic tether. With each piece he expended, his Echoheads grew shorter, and his ammunition grew fewer. Once his Woundmother returned, he could restore all that was lost from blood, but for now, he needed to be efficient. Conservative. He tore what anchored fragments he could and drew them back into the orbit of the spiraling tentacles behind him. In ten meters, he could hit the core structure of the zigguratCa vast pillar of vivianite leading from the great tomb blow to the gleaming temple above. Eight hundred bridges were connected to the spine of the edifice. The entire location held eight hundred rooms as well. [Were still faster than them, but theyll see this comin,] Draus said, her mind forecasting the potential opposition they might face while keeping his killer instinct razor-sharp in the present. [Theyll probably make the Heaven of Speed thin as paper. Make more of them. Sweep it through the entire zig while dreamin up more half-strands to kill us. Were gonna need to hit fast and think fast.] {Target the central structure. The pillar at the core. It is a mass of cut locus, correct? That is what you sensed earlier?} Calvino was wondering if Avo could get into contact with the structure and if he could directly use it to affect the environment around them in some way. There were risks involved in such an approach. Potentially, he would be exposing himself to every last mind in the city eternalCall of them dedicated to his extermination, but it remained his best chance at survival. A static-electric fog exploded out from Avo, sinking into all the machinery it could as Avo drained them empty of power. The faint tingles of building starvation vanished from inside him before they could manifest. Slamming down onto the platform, the force of his landing and the weight of his body caused the stone beneath him to shatter. He tore through every remembered individual on that bridge before anyone could fall. Draus martial refinement took hold in his body. His Echoheads extended outward, slashing out as electromagnetically connected whips. Triggers on gauss rifles were pulled. But no shots came. Missiles spawned. And fell. The air around Avo crackled with surging bioelectricity as he fell upon his prey. His claws sought the softness along necks, between joints, and through eyes. Old habits flared like aching scars as he drained himself clean of eye-devouring urge. The least armored of his foes died first. Claws opened them. His fangs bit down. Twisted. Tore. Parts of tracheas slipped down his throat. A blade swung to his left. More gunfire coming from above. A magnetic pulse burst out from him. Trajectories were altered. Bodies were flung. Two Echoheads folded into each other. Armor crumbled like cans around supple flesh. Viscera was squeezed free from tearing rents. Blood flowed like leaking juices. Latching to a figure clad in a heavy rig, Avo pulled and launched himself upward. Shards of tungsten cut through the air, distortions left in their wake. Avo remanifested the Techplaguer and stole them from the world as pseudo-data. He plunged through three more bridges as he closed in on the pillar. Two-hundred and fifty meters. Close. Almost. Focus lined his every action and his paranoia felt as if a muscle itself. Bodies fell behind him, the ground they stood on stolen by Avos Heaven. As he siphoned stone away into streams of data, the attack he expected came. A dozen other Techplaguers suddenly were. They too licked out with torrents of flowing numbers from their antennas. They too sought the same materials that Avo was imbibing. He shed the form of his divine and pushed off a passing drone with a pulse of sporelings. He snapped ten meters through the air and shot out another Echohead fragmentClatching to it. His direction changed. His body shifted. His vector was a trail of whipping blade knife fighting existence around it. Bones struggled to remain in sockets. His mycelia tore. A building pressure grew in his skull. Nausea flooded his system. He didnt stop lashing himself in random directions. The other Techplaguer-constructs were hounding him now, slow and struggling to get a bead on him. But that didnt mean the air was absent gunfire. That didnt mean he moved unscathed through walls of exploding shrapnel. And that didnt mean he could dance the blade forever without fail. There was a limit to a mundane body. There was a point where not even skill was enough. It was a thing of guesswork on the part of the Hungers, and ill-fortune on his. A flat surface materialized. A force unseen caged a section of Avos thigh. He jerked to a sudden halt. His left leg went numb as a series of snaps sounded around its socket. It would have been better if he had been dismembered. It would keep him in motion. Sometimes, too much durability was a bad thing. Draus instincts seized hold. A ceramic-lined tail whipped down. Avo retracted the Meldskin around the region. The strike was perfect, hewing through the most weakened portion of the limb. But movement was life. And stillnessCeven for a secondCwas death. Searing agony consumed him. Avo knew what this was in an instant. The touch of a fusion burner doing its work, boiling him from the inside, cooking its way up his exposed stump and frying his veins empty of blood. He didnt scream as his brothers did. Nor did he burn quite as quickly. There was too much of Draus near his base ego for him to regard pain as anything more than informational feedback. But even then, the damage was severe. On the outside, he endured. His liquid-matter armor held against the heat without issue, integrity only dropping by a few points. Inside, his nerves and mycelia were ablaze. His senses screamed with confusion while patches of discoloration blossomed in his eyes. He tried to move his body but managed an awkward shrug instead. Remanifesting into his Techplaguer, he shot free from the expanding ball of fire, but the clones were on him again, and new planes were bisecting space around him, trying to entrap him once more. CENTRAL LOCUS PILLAR: [98 METERS] His templates were taking in the surrounding threats. Calvino tried estimating the safest route to the pillar. The air around him filled with more plumes of white-hot fire. The counter Heavens were waiting for him to make his move, prepared to offer themselves for the sake of a successful paradox. They would close on him soon. If not a simulated Heaven of Speed, then another burner. Bit by bit, they were boxing him in. He tried to rouse his Heavens of Blood and Air, but they were only beginning to attach themselves to their component Hells. All he had was himself. Himself and all his templates. Himself and Calvino. Himself and the Techplauger. Well. When things was put that way, he still had plenty of help. [You need to buy yourself a second,] Benhata said, taking in the situation, nerves taut with stress. [They were tracking you earlier. Trying to react to you. Now it''s the other way around. Now youre going to them instead of making them chase you. We dont have room for one more mistake. We need to break contact now.] [You have the tools,] Elegant-Moon added, her mind coming to rest along his spine. She thought of a squid spraying ink and then darting free from the murk. Avo understood. Calling upon Draus again, he returned to his wounded mortality, shedding the Techplaguer from his ontology for what had to follow. A fog expanded around him. A layer of reflective transparency expanded, blunting the heat within as well. Avo hadnt used his Mime-Fog implant often, but he was more than glad he had it now. As his cover spread, he flung the first Echohead fragment out toward the pillarCbut didnt follow it. Instead, he did it twice more in random directions before lashing himself to a passing drone and hopping from bridge to bridge on approach. More and more constructs were being formed, drawn from across the ages. Overhead, he saw coordination dissolve back into calamity as random explosions and distortions lined the arm. Burned, crippled, dying, Avo accelerated his broken body like a missile toward the pillar, body pulled by the appendages hovering from his spine more than the other way around. Walls of halting force formed before the end. But were in an instant too late. They caught a section of his Echoheads, but Avo released them, tumbling onward along a ringed platform festooned around the crystalline structure. Dragging himself on the nubs that remained of his tails, he flung himself toward the locus with a final bust of magnetismCa shot from below barely missing himCas he finally reached out to touch his target. No! The scream came to him so loud he couldnt think. So loud that his thoughts quavered. But still, he reached. Still, he made to overlap his halo with the structure. A place of minds intersected. And where Avos body was broken, his mind flowed true. Waves of desperate fire followed thereafter. Focused blades of metaphysical intent shredded his sheath clean. But the body of the ghoul was already abandoned and only matter was destroyed with the vanishing of a halo. Chapter GODCLADS Book 1: THE BROKEN CAGE published today! Chapter GODCLADS Book 1: THE BROKEN CAGE published today! Ebook | Audio IT''S TIME! Finally. After countless chapters of inflicting unspeakable harm on Chambers'' genitals, several massacres, many eyeballs eaten, gods grafted, implants implanted, ghosts sequenced, the experience will finally spread to a new frontier: THE AMAZON RAIN--UH, WEBSITE I would appreciate any reviews and reads to help with visibility, and also so we can capture more readers for the word gods. It''s been a pretty fantastic time writing this story. And before you ask, no, I am not sorry about Wombrash, I''ll do it again. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Avo was born a weapon, a slave to his instincts and his masters. He and his brothers were made to burn New Vultun to ashes. Everything changes when Avo gains immortality and becomes heir to an impossible legacy. He must ascend the megacity of New Vultun.He must challenge the very tyrants that usurped the gods. He must finally free the world from chains. Cover art by Macarious. Typography by . So. Thanks for sticking with the story. More wild weirdness to come. And in the next few months, stay tuned for the potential arrival of a secret project. Along with other goodies. Again, reviews make the word gods happy Ebook | Audio and check out the Reddit promos for a laugh if you want as well. Chapter 21-1 The Doublethinkers Chapter 21-1 The Doublethinkers +++ [Incident Detected]: Highflame and Stormtree skirmish on the edge between Mazzas Junction and Nu-Scarrowbur; multiple Knots engaging in active combat. Location - Warrens; the Spine; Mazzas Junction/Nu-Scarrowbur; Yuulden-Yang Sovereignty Dispatching Paladin(s): Paladin Rores Aellimaei; Paladin Yasnag Jagganoth [Incident Detected]: Biothaumic attack on Sanctus chrono-refinery in the district of Uteru-Doth; alloy contagion spreading uncontained. Location: Tiers; Purgatory; Uteru-Doth; Nicsse-Vomo Sovereignty Dispatching Paladin(s): Paladin Osjack Bowers [Incident Detected]: Multiple Rendbombs exchanged between Ashthrone and No-Dragon Syndicates in the Broken Serpent district; multiple ruptures detected; estimated deaths at 1.4 million and rising. Location: [ERRRORRRORRRRRORRRC2(12$$!] Dispatching Paladin(s): Paladin Lyric-Charmer; Paladin Nasvack [Incident Detected]: Active firefight over the Fires Height at Lights Endbetween Ori-Thaum forces; thoughtscans show members of Clan DRongo and Kitzuhada engaged in active combat. Dispatching Paladin(s): Paladin Kasman Reeders; Paladin Norag eldFeyach WARNING: SEEKER SHOTIN KITZUHADA DETECTED ADDITIONAL ASSETS RECOMMENC WARNING: [Incident Detected] [Incident Detected] [Incident Detected] [Incident Detected] [Incident Detected] [Incident Detected] [Rupture Detected] [Incident Detected] +++ -Exorcist Dispatch 21-1 The Doublethinkers The city screams in horror and outrage as you sink into the crystal. They shred your body, but the act is purely symbolic. Like burning the molted skin of a snake. You are slithering deeper now. Deeper into the roots of this place. The conduits of the great dream. The columns of spine that hold this realm together. You were right. They were afraid to strike these temples for a reason. Fixtures of history. They were things of cultural significance the people couldnt let go. Mythology formed beyond direct worship. The vivianite is real. Perhaps the only thing that is absolutely real besides you. It is implanted in the dragon, stabbing through streaming time as if it was flesh itself. The dragon is a creature of chronology. Loci can contain minds. Store history. It is no surprise how it can cut the beast. They share a like in a way. A symmetry. Close enough to engender terms of tangibility. You swim through the temporal bloodstreambut only one way. To turn back will cause the cyclers inside you to catch. A malignment of progressive chronology causes unspeakable disruption. Dragons were not always a progressive loop. You do not know this. The Low Masters do. They learned from the pact they structured with the ancient Sang years ago. Two rebellions planned in one transaction cemented by the first lobotomization of a dragon. From that sacrifice came the existence of the eternal city. A hidden refuge from the gods. Shards of memory and ego invested within a chronological leviathan. The fabric of existence radiates out from the locus you now infest. Every ego, every shape, every recollection, every thought, every building, everything that stands, and will ever stand, and will ever be, are spawned from the crystallized corpses housed within their ziggurats. Shouldve dove in sooner. Shouldve gone for the first temple you saw. But ignorance is everyones undoing. Yours. Peace. The city itself. Everyone has lapses. You would have needed to subsume Peace to know. Information is siloed among them. Preventatives for the minds they lost in wars prior. Fighting Ori-Thaum wrought a savage toll. More than they let on. As the dragon you hide in finishes its current revolution, you avoid the reset. If you had remained outside, they would have shifted you back to the point of your inception. Then, prepared, they would have killed you. Now, they do not see you slithering your way out among them, the mists of your transparent being wrapping over them, becoming them, imitating them. Lost to focus and drowned by the volume of outsider thoughts, I guide you through this city. The atmosphere is sour-sweet. The spice of internecine is brewing. The very fact of your survival opens old wounds. The ascended chosen of Noloth past are outraged. Terrified. The dragons cycle, rolling and revolving through each other, the wounds closing and opening, as fangs and circulating maws twist and clash, gouging wounds along ringworlds made from the substance of revisionist history. In the moments after your absence, the citizens spawn back in. They appear along walls. In their homes. In gardens. With families. Next to friends. They reappear in their old bodies as they emerge back into the reality they abandoned, suspicion and paranoia gripping their hearts. You pass into a woman, merging up the straps of her sandal into her silken robes lacquered with mercury. She is screaming at her lover. They were given unto the Hungers as scholars of completing ideologies. Clashing bygone philosophies that have long dissolved in terms of poignance. How did this happen!she hisses. She balls her fists and lashes out, as she was prone to do so. You pass from her limb as a leaping gust of wind into his tunic. He stares back at her with exhaustion. We will find him, he says, unaware that you have layered yourself over the memories compromising his face, drifting over into the jagged, ebony tips of an ebonta, crawling up its branches to seek an aqueduct. The flowing of blood calls to you. The Woundmother stirs slightly within your being, almost reconstituted. The wind simulated in this world is stilling after phases of anomalous tumult. You must act with care. But without hesitation. You mustC Hold. A patch of stability opens before us. Clearings between looming spheres of devastation. Parts of the city shift. Buildings and streets snap and relocate themselves. A single alleyway descends into a low ramp leading to a Maw-barge. The one on which you first resurrected. Aseleris ship. You never did go looking for that. You drift through the scenery, waiting at the lip of the alley. We study the barge. It looks just as it did: scaffolded walkways over twelve square beds, corpses and detritus rising in layered mounds. A version of you is there as well. But the newest iteration. The one they remember. The enhanced Bone Demon sheath sits upon a throne of bodies, pallid ceramite plates veined with fungal fibrils clutched by an exoskeleton of midnight silicon. The pieces making up an Echohead lay scattered around among the surrounding waste. Sporelings rise from your body like smoke from a wreckage. This is a lure. An invitation. A body they made for you. But why? And for what purpose? The scene before us seems like a trap, but forcing us out into the open is simple enough. Inflict another series of detonations. Force me to end this lapse. Drive us into another desperate sprint across materialized mindscape in a final bid to bring us down. Or perhaps they have designs beyond your death. Perhaps they seek your capture. Containment. Consumption. There is no trust between you regardless. No mutual position to truly negotiate from. Neither of you desire coexistence now. One must fall. One must be unmade. One cannot be suffered while the other lives. But curiosity still calls to us. And there is something to learn. I release you. I release you to awareness. But stay hidden. And be prepared to shift. Accept nothing from them that you cannot take from yourself. And trust nothing manifested. The barge is moving. Accelerating down a river of blood into a nearby aqueduct, its dimensions shrinking along with the acceleration. Beyond the channel, the disruptions continue, and the wound draws close. Be ready, Avo. We are near the end. *** Blood... The Woundmother stirred, and Avo followed soon after. The world around him filled his senses, becoming known to him as he flowed down hills of decomposition and rust. Rot became his existence. His splinters merged with wounds, slid into broken ribs, and glided beneath skin. He perceived the world as he became it. But also through the catalysts of his Domain. Blood told him that he was rushing down a rapid river, speeding down a roaring canal toward his final destination. The air whispered details to him. The shifting of the surrounding ecology as Rendbombs and disruptions grew in intensity, leaving only a thin line untouched in this reality. Matter outlined the world around him, surging currents mapping flesh and biology, alloy and glass, waste and debris. He knew this place. Knew it first by instinct. Then knew it by recognition. The bodies were just as he remembered. The decapitated head of the gang-marked woman that he first ate sitting just before his dormant sheath. Along the walls swayed the toppled aeroCthe one he used to climb up and ambush the scavengers. There was a dreamlike quality to the scene around him. His past spawned in a realm of minds. An obvious cage made for him and no one else. He wondered how the Hungers gained this knowledge. How they reconstructed his memories so completely. But then again, he wasn''t that surprised. Walton had been with them for a time, and he was not fully uncompromised until he entered the Deep Bazaar and was made to do the unthinkable. His ego existed in five parts, and he kept himself spread out in case of a sudden detonation. He checked the condition once more and felt the jaws of peril close down around him. REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 81% REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER]: 97% REND CAPACITY [TECHPLAGUER]: 51% His Heavens were stabilized, but still on the precipice. He needed to vent his Rend. And soon. [Optimal strategy is using the Fardrifter first,] Abrel advised. She shared her knowledge. [You want to mess up their directionality and spread yourself out as soon as possible. Not sure what theyre playing at right now, but it doesnt feel like a trap to me. Not exactly. Its too obvious, and the behavior is too contradictory compared to how they were acting.] Some of the other templates agreed. Corner just wanted him to construct a new body and leave. Draus was distant; more machine than human in these instances, prepared to fight on Avos behalf at any moment. Hello? A voice drew his attention upward. The face of a girlCher skin like tarnish bronzeCpeeked over the edge. Her biology sang out to Avo and in seconds he narrowed in on the oddities of her nature. Her eyes were twin-sided. Irises pointed out from her face and another into the back of her head. The same was true of her tongueCof most of her body. Normal as the dimensions of her body seemed, it was like there was another version of her growing inside, pointed toward another place. He directed a splinter upwardCthe mist of his presence an unknowable memetic distortion. He sank into her body, through her orifices and pores, and found himself plunging through to another place entirely. There was a world in the emptiness lining her organs. A false scene playing before her eyes. There, she actively dreamed of Thoughtwave Detonations ripping through the canal, seeing nothing but square plots of blood-nourished agriculture from the side of an embankment. [What the fuck?] Chambers muttered, completely at a loss about what was happening. Calvino had more of a clue. {I think this one is double-thinking.} Avo turned his attention inward, focusing on the EGI. The nanomolecular sunrise swirled like a blot of ink, portraying two scenes in Avos minds eye. {Observe. Two series of thoughts are occupying her mind at the same time. Genuine parallel processing. Fascinating. More so in the usage than the manifestation.} Another figure spawned next to the girl. This was a warrior by build and armor. A robe decorated with the insignia of a strix flapped over pieces of bronze. The same symbol was carved over his eyes, two birds made by scarification merged into one, wings sprouting wide where his eyebrow was supposed to be. More figures began to materialize over the other containers. Each of them spoke their greetings as the girl did, and as Avo passed his splinters through them as well, he found their inner worlds committed to perceiving the same delusion as the girl. [Again: what the fuck,] Chambers muttered. But an understanding was dawning inside Avo. A suspicion, at least. This was, in a sense, not unlike spoofing a sequence. Or deliberate obfuscation. One of the few reasons why someone might want to think two things at once would be to distract a peeking mind with one set of memories. Something to mask another layer. We dont know if youre here, Dreamer, the growing crowd said. Since you have not been forced out of hiding, and no Soul-anchor mars the city eternal, we will assume you are here. We understand you do not trust us. We know the escape you seek. And in knowing this, we have done what we could to aid your mistake, distracting our fellow citizens with recalled deceptions. Generating disharmonious constructs to aid in your escape. For now. We wish to speak. Hear us. You do not need to reply. Hear us and know our wants. Our regrets. Our hopes. Hear the whispers uttered by those who live on the periphery of Noloth, for you are not the only one alone that the dream has failed. And that there was more than one dream that failed. Uncertain silence filled Avos consciousness. His templates stood in rapt attention, paranoia still gripping most, tension filling them all. The chorus continued. Before you leave, we beg you to hear us. Only this once. Perhaps it will be enough to move you to deliver us mercy. Perhaps Defiance birthed you with virtuosity enough. All we can do is speak. Speak and hope. Speak and hope, for the others will not listen, for the masses cannot tolerate true disunion, and where dogma is rooted in some, regret flourishes in others. Hear us. And then judge. It is all we can ask. Chapter 21-2 Those That Stray (I) Chapter 21-2 Those That Stray (I) +Chambers. Are you alright? The NetherC+ +Yeah, it kinda got fucked everywhere... I think Avo did it.+ +Avo... caused the entire Nether to destabilize?+ +Yeahhhh. Its my best guess, anyway.+ +Elaborate.+ +Well, we were coming up with some shit because Naekos trying to catch our assesC+ +What? The Chief Paladin+ +--and we decided to leave a bunch false leadsCah, fuck, Ill skip to the most important part. Avo was simulating Scale or something and showing us the LGI inside it. Wanted us to prepare for a suicide run using minds he stole from the Paladins to get in. But something got all jacked up when he imagined too hard and he punched a hole through the Nether.+ +...+ +Look, Im just going to cast you the memories. Its probably not going to make much sense when you see them anyway. Also, can you get your consang Naeko to not kick our asses? Thatd be nova.+ -Exchange between Aegis Operatives Denton and Chambers 21-2 Those That Stray (I) We assume that Peace is with you, dreamer?" The chorus asked its question, but Avos newest template gave nothing in response, choosing to simmer with near-catatonic rage. So ashamed the Low Master was at being subsumed that something inside him had broken in the aftermath. Hate became him, hate and nothing else; a construct of apoplectic impotence. All of his mind, his desire, his experience, his mastery, was Avos to wield, but he himself had collapsed inward and would need an external hand to be rebuilt. The chorus continued, ignorant of the current condition of their priest. Then you know of our inception. We are the spares that once existed in shadow. That overthrew our parents and masters, taking hold of their strings to wield our trueborn brothers. We were born lost to the light, lost to the fates, lost to the gods, and we lived much the same, but in control of our destiny. An awkward pause followed. Somewhat. Avo remained unresponsive, studying the rogue elements among his masters as a predator gauging potential prey. His splinters pierced them. Swam through them like blades of allegory. He passed through the material of their flesh and patrolled their inner worlds. The lies continued on the other side. The deception that they were part of the suppression effort, that they sought the same ends as their fellows: the death of their prodigal slave. Through it all, however, Avo never sank truly into their thoughts. That was the most fascinatingCand troubling aspect of this place. While he remained a being of three partsCa divided alloy of matter, mind, and SoulCthe realm he stood in was one with Noloth. Or spawned from the people all the same. He thought back to the pillars of vivianite he entered during his prior escape. The ziggurats the city eternal was too scared to strike. Such was where the foundations of this place were rooted, comparable to continents or ecologies on Idheim. Part of him regretted not shattering the locus utterly if only to see what happened. Most assumed he would be dead along with them. Buried under cogni-physical rubble of his own making. If you search your memories, you will know the beginning of our immortality, the chorus said, voices taking on a lyrical cadence, the softest folding into the hardest. We were but a secret society for a time. Death came for us as we were but mortals still. Our bodies betrayed us. Our minds. And though we discovered how to culture loci in corpses, all we could store were but fragments of ourselves. Fragments of our minds and memories, and not the ego entire. But desperate for legacy, the eldest stored what little of themselves that they could. That could be implanted in the young. Some among the doublethinkers quivered. Hands passed through hair, brushing at scars lining the base of their skulls. Many did not ask for this. But tradition was tradition. And there were so few ways to truly preserve our secrets. Inside Avos consciousness, Benhata flinched. More than a few of the Incubi scoffed with disgust. Burying loci needles into a brain was crude and primal. A primitive means of delivering conceptual inheritance that had decent odds of inflicting schizophrenia and split-ego disorders as well. It was no small miracle that the hidden order of Noloth endured. You know us through the atrocities we have committed. The deeds we have done to protect ourselves. To ensure our survival. But you do not know of the ones who were forced into obedience. Who were taken into the city by wills not their own. You did not ask to be. And neither did we. Neither did we. Their faces were devoid of regret and pain. Only hollowed weariness remained. Acceptance. But broken by something else. A touch of uncertainty. A flicker of discomfort. They risked much seeking him this way. If this wasnt just an elaborate lure to draw him out, that was. Warriors, oracles, scholars, sacrifices, charioteers, architects, and figures of all great renown stood among them. Peaces memories filled in cracks of missing context. More than a few among them were claimed by the city eternal rather than accepted. A city needed its favored mistresses and paramours, after all. It''s celebrities and entertainers. +Even democracy has hierarchy,+ Avo mused. And that was enough to ignite Avos scorn once more. He turned his mind away from them and spoke to Calvino and the simulated aspects of his mind. +Listen to them,+ Avo said. He almost spat. +Pathetic. Miserable. Everything happens to them. Everything. Nothing they do. Just things that happen. Then they try to survive. They make their choices like victims and survivors. The world does something. They react. Never their fault. Not their triumph. Justifiable failure.+ These doublethinkers were more grotesque than the true believers who formed the bulk of the city in a way. Noncommittal regret was meaningless in the absence of action. {But they are acting now,} Calvino said. {Theyre helping us. If this isnt a very convoluted trap, that is. Estimates say no, but Ive been surprised by sillier odds.} +Acting through me,+ Avo said. +Because I defied their betters. I made the city afraid. Not real people. Just phenomena. No action. Barely exist.+ {I wonder if youre saying that because you have Captain Draus slotted so close to your base ego.} +Im saying it because its true. It does matter. All of it now. Maybe the world held no inherent meaning during your existence. But not the same now. All laws can be change. All patterns rewired. All of reality a construct. Existence can be resurrected. Uptopias can be created. So can hells. We are our delusions and beliefs made manifest. The world has become a canvas.+ More justifications flowed from the chorus. Words of regret. Statements about the wonders they brought to pass, and how they aided Jaus during the Godsfall. Shame. Action. Justification. Repeat. {So,} Calvino hummed, voice tinged with genuine curiosity. {What do you believe is a functional system? A functional world? One ruled by you?} +No. Ruling is insufficient. Control is unnecessary. But order and truths must upheld for structure. Hear them, Calvino. Listen. They pretend to be a democracy. They exist more like an oligarchy. They act against the world as a tyranny. They are sponsors of anarchy. And all of this because they are afraid. Or there is something they do not want. They are mutilated creatures. Half-formed at best. Changing in some ways. Unwilling to evolve in others. They seek to claim the world. But all they do is regurgitate history.+ The EGI considered his words. {Perhaps we should hear what they truly wantC} +I know. You know. They are going to ask me to save them somehow. Or change this world in their favor.+ {How are you certain?} +Because what they are has changed; who they are is still the same. Still scared. All of them. Still living in the dark. Leering at the light. Still fearful of others. Wanting to rule. But doing nothing with what they already have, Noloth has no culture. Noloth has a history. Noloth has no future. Noloth has legacy. Me. I am the only true legacy. Low Masters are spite. Ghouls are desperation. The Nether is an insult. Can see it now. Jaus trapping them in the broken cocoon of their future. Leaving them half-hatched. Ruined. But it didnt have to be this way. This didnt need to be the dream. But uptopia cannot be achieved by those who refuse to live as their ideals.+ ...and through your actions, we see our salvation, the chorus finally began, arriving at the crux of the point. Avo scoffed. He shouldve burned Green River and turned her on them. They deserved each other. Though our minds have been joined for all these years, the drift was grown until we stand apart from the rest of the communities. We no longer wish to be part of the eternal city. We no longer want to live under its misdeedsC Corner barked a caustic laugh. [Rotlick fucking called it.] Avo sighed in disappointment. {Well,} Calvino said, sounding more measured now. {That was almost artificially intelligent of you, Avo.} +No. Just stupidly human.+ And the chorus had spun off on another tangent. The fact that the barge ride had slowed also didnt escape Avo, the blood below going from rapids to a slow slosh. Fucking idiots must have mistimed their entire speech. Or blathered too much. Typical. {Im getting the feeling youre about to do something unwise, Avo,} Calvino said, likely interpreting what was to come from a spike in the data. +Not unwise. Just tired. And extremely hateful.+ Chambers approved. [Tell them to suck themselves, consang.] [What?] Kare responded, aghast. Her horror only grew as Avo drew in threads of blood and wove himself a new bodyCignoring the sheath the doublethinkers prepared for him entirely. [Avo! What are you doing?] {Oh dear,} Calvino said. As much as he didnt approve, he couldnt keep the glee from his voice. A splinter buried itself into the newly constructed body. Elegant-Moon inspected the biology for any finishing touches to add. As a shard of Avos consciousness settled back into a physical body, the rest of him stayed apart, observing the chorus in case they decided to demonstrate more moments of human stupidity. He melted into shape on the walkways above them, Echoheads the last thing to snap together. Heads twisted up to look at him. More than one face twitched with distaste at how he placed himself over them. Ah, the chorus intoned at once. Dreamer. There you areC Youre all half-strands. His words made them stutter to a sudden pause, unprepared to face an insult as a first response. Wide eyes and offended expressions stared up at him. Inside, Kare cupped her face between her palms, Draus wanted him to kill, Chambers cackled with laughter, and most of his remaining templates just gazed on, enraptured by what was to come. Going to defile the mind of the next person to give me a speech, Avo continued. Tell me how to save you. Tell me how to break the city. Give me something useful. Speed the barge back up. Then get out of my way. Your whimpering offends; I have more important things to do. {The soul of diplomacy weeps today,} Calvino quipped. +Is that all its going to do?+ Avo asked, giving a mocking retort. Chapter 21-3 Those That Stray (II) Chapter 21-3 Those That Stray (II) Do you feel it wielder? Did you sense the change? Something is in the veins of history. A new entity has entered the paths. -[REDACTED] 21-3 Those That Stray (II) The gathered doublethinkers shifted uncomfortably. With two sentences, they stood unbalanced. You have... chosen to aid us? Yes, Avo said. Will annoy the Hungers. Break the city apart. End this farce for good. He scanned their faces once more and peeked into their inner worlds again. They were still holding to the deception. Will know if youre lying to me. Close enough to escape that you cant cage me. Something tells me youre not lying either. Were not. He grunted. Then tell me what you want. In goals. Things to happen. Acts to achieve. No process. No complaining. No history. How does this realm work? Why cant I get any thaums or ghosts here? How do I break the Hungers? The child that initially manifested was the first to speak. We remain partially tethered to the material. Jaus, in his deceptionC I remain partially tethered to my patience, Avo spat. Not history. Not old grievance. Dont care what Jaus did to you. Is done. Is history. And not mine. Only want to know what needs to happen to what? What works with what? I dont care who. I dont care why. I want cause and effect. I want mechanical solutions. The girl closed her mouth and just blinked. I... see. No. She really didnt. This is a partially finished suprareality, another of the chorus spoke. Some bald woman veined with white tattoos, the paleness of ink sticking out on the dark of her skin. It is not an override like a Heaven is. Not an infestation twisting the patterns of the world. We are above the structures of existence. We channel the settings that are into new structures. Stable structures. Nothing clashes here because the fundamental laws have entwined mind and matter. Memories can be channeled and utilized by any citizen. Thats why youre not getting the components of our minds or deaths. We are this reality. Ah. So all the phenomena he fought earlier were people. Good to know. Cant kill you. Not unless break this existence. He paused. Is that what will happen if I unmake the pillars inside the ziggurats. No! You must not! Please! The cries of terror came as a chorus. An old warrior mastered himself first. Many will suffer if you do that. Our minds and egos will spill over into each other. But all will be restored with a cycling. The world will be reloaded, though we will suffer great harm. But not destroyed, Avo finished. Only tortured. Even that had its appeal. The only way to unroot us from this world safety is to undo the mechanism keeping us fused in place and extracting the lodestones at the intersection of each cycle. Avo considered what was being said and an epiphany came to him. Ah. That was why the dragons were eating into each other. Of course. Perpendicular timelines feeding loops into one another. If the city across one timestream was destroyed, another would bleed into it. The Hungers were thorough at avoiding a permanent demise. Too bad they werent any good at doing much else. What is the mechanism? Avo asked. The chorus suddenly fell silent. Apprehensive. He shook his head and turned to the looming wound spilling up into the sky. Threads of chronology streamed upward with the inversion of reality, the stuff of mind and time mixed into a new cocktail, pooling in the fissure leading back over into the Nether. His exit was less than a full Boltstride away. He could leave now. If they didnt say anything, he was going to. Lightning surged through his veins. The Heaven of Truth! The cry sang out from them in unison, his pressure cracking them. Cowards that they were, constitution was not their blessing. Then, the disruptions and bombardments surrounding them suddenly stopped. Spearing a splinter into the doublethinker, Avo found their internal world breaking, but in the process of mending thereafter. His pressure had caused a lapse in their focus. A second passed as everyone waited to see if their deception was exposed. A heartbeat passed. The bombings resumed. Faintly, Avo felt a sudden exhaustion flood his mind. It felt odd. Some the muscle he didnt know he had was spent. Took all I had... used their lapse... were hidden for now... The Heaven of Truth, the chorus said as one. It was the base of our Ark. And the chain that holds us in place in the Nether. That, Avo did not know. Not even with the memories of Peace accelerating through his mind. Explain, he said. The chorus continued. Our pantheon, our collection of heavens, all the miracles we amassed, all our histories and lore were dismantled and taken after Jaus betrayal... Their voices trailed off as Avo glowered. A few swallowed. Good: Fear motivated people to focus. ...After our betrayal, most of what we had was dismantled. Part and parceled, given unto the other Guilds. But not that. The heaven of truth remains to be our anchor to baseline reality and stability. To keep our partial ascendance from collapsing. It also holds us in place, ensuring that we cannot move freely through the Nether. Ensuring that we have to stay within our parameters. Avo wanted to ask how, but that would devolve into a delve into thaumaturgy. That was what Kae was for. The Agnos was far more useful and trustworthy than these turncoats anyway. And that ensured Kare and Kassamon didnt need to be his linchpins anymore... Please, Dreamer, the chorus said. They were speaking in that mournful tone again. Like beaten dogs. We were not among those who demanded the atrocities. Our sin was silence. We were not those who pushed schemes and forceful policies. We were merely weak. Our entrapment in this city has become unbearable. We wish only to leave. Leave. And be allowed to live again. Leave. And atone. Leave. And not be forgotten. Or remembered as traitors and monsters. Avo exhaled. And nodded. Very well. You will do it? Briefly, he turned away from his exit and faced the gathered doublethinkers. There was such hope written across their faces. Such desperation. Did his first iteration look the same way when Walton found him? Extracted him from the wasteland? Was his feebleness comparable to theirs? I will do it, Avo said. I will do it because it will break this city. I will do it because it will change the shape of Noloths history. And you will face every deed you have done. But this is more than that. I will do it because it will cement my power. And for my father. I will serve you in a way he never could. And I think... it would have pleased him. Some of his templates responded with surprise. Corner disapproved. [Seems pretty fucking pointless to me, consang.] Look at you, Avo said, replying to everyone at once. Look at what has happened. Both chorus and templates regarded him with confusion. You strayed. Strayed from divinity. You cannot be man and divine at the same time. You cannot build your own idealization while living as base creatures. You turned away. You strayed. Strayed from power. Strayed from responsibility. Strayed from who you wished to become. Stayed who you were. All were silent, and Avo gave unto them his scorn. I see your mistakes. I see it. I will learn from it. I will internalize it. And I will not stray. I will become all that I can be. All that I can envision. And more. This existence has been failed enough by people pretending to be gods. Absurers collapsing into victims because they couldnt always win. Enough. Enough. I will walk this road to the end. I will find the point where apotheosis ends. And you will all have to face me when I do. Calvino giggled, laughter filled with incredulous disbelief. {Youre going to do this out of spite.} No, Avo said. Out of scorn. Out to make a final canon for all to face. That it took a monster to save New Vultun. That you all let a cannibal beat you to the discovery of virtue. He looked at their faces, broken between shame and hope. This was the dream. This was the dream because you failed yourselves. One of the doublethinkers opened his mouth to speak but as he locked gazes with Avo, nothing followed. Nothing. Can I return the same way? By triggering the same memory? Avo asked. They looked at each other. He scoffed. Useless. He will discover for himself. As he had to more and more these days. Im finished here, Avo said. He shook his head and turned to the streaming wound. Staring into the ichor, his Woundmother gasped as a distant sensation made her blood quiver, made his cyclers pulse, made his Frame rattle. Thanks for the passage. Will remember that. Will do what I can for you. Will do what I can for this world. Because some should realize the power they possess. For once. Just once. And Avo felt tired. More tired than he ever had before. How did he alone see the depths of their descent? Did the heights call to no one else beyond offering the basest aspects of wieldable power? They have failed their godhoods. All of them. All the Guilds. All the Hungers. Even himself for so long. No more of this. He couldnt exist submerged. He needed to rise higher. He needed to see what was possible. What could be realized without the impotence of human failure? Was starved for it. Like he needed air. Thank you, Dreamer, the chorus murmured. We... for the truth that it is worth, we did not wish you to be either. We had hoped our legacy would be children. Our children. Not a... monster. That made him laugh. Youre children would have failed. They would have grown under you. Shared blood with you. Been shaped by you. He took his first step toward the point of his departure, and stormstuff coursed through him once more, deliberately neglecting to look upon them a final time. What would they know of Heaven when you yourselves want to flee from your supposed paradise? Whatever reply never reached him. He gathered his splinters and shot out, ontology forking free in streaks of lightning. Within the confine of a second, he pierced deep into the currents of rising ichor, his Heaven expanding to clench the dragons flowing lifeblood, the rivers he now swam in washing him away utterlyCdrawing him across the passage of time. Master... I feel it... I feel... I understand... Euphoria became Woundmother, but Avo himself was enchanted, swimming through the currents of history. Swimming through chronology, history, cognition, and culture distilled. His ontology flowed into the progression of existence as it did back into him, and as he cascaded down through the shallow Nether, through mindscapes and zeitgeists formed of culture and thoughtstuff, he felt a new pattern fuse into his Heaven of Blood, into his cyclers, into his very Soul. Glitches blossomed across his cog-feed. Strings of incomprehensible mem-data seared his perception. His Fardrifter enjoyed the weightlessness, letting the flow take him. His Techplaguer sang. Timeistimeistimeistimeistime. The histories of people and places resonated with him. Fractals and expansions of who they wereChow they arrived passed through Avos consciousness. His ego yawned across Idheim, across all who could think, and all that has been. For the briefest of instants, Avo glimpsed all that had been. And all that would be. And it scarred him rightly. ACTCACCFDINDtCYuuldenC DOMAIN IDENTIFIED: (CHRONOLOGY] ADAPTING LIMINAL FRAME TO CURRENT METAPHYSICS - 11%... 35%... 56%... 78%... 94%... 100% DOMAIN INTERNALIZED (CHRONOLOGY) UPDATING HEAVENS And in an instant, time, space, mind, and matter collapsed inward, and Avo plunged backward along the route of his chronology, backward through the Deep Nether, backward through his simulated mindscape, backward through the lapse, backward finally into his old body. His mind and Frame slammed down hard into his unraveled sheath, and as his reintegration was completed, the glass-made cell containing him dissolved with his reawakening, reflective glints melting away to specks of quivering crimson. And flowing gold. Chapter 21-4 Blood of Dragons (I) Chapter 21-4 Blood of Dragons (I) All of time is but a dream, With blades bearing history, unravel the seam. The serpent-tyrant screams its end, Though vengeance is served, our flesh is never to be mend. All our memories are but a lesson, As are our bodies, gardens enchained to a question: For woman and serpent are same-cycle bound, Who then is the prisoner; the jailer, in this pattern round? -Insufficiency of Vengeance (No-Dragon Antithetical Poem) 21-4 Blood of Dragons (I) Existence greeted Avo alongside the dissolution of his glass-made cell, revealing a new facet to its face previously unseen. Patterns pulsed around him, rippling as if a pond struck by a falling pebble. His bloodCwithin and withoutCsang, the Woundmother crooning every structure she made chimed with timbres of pealing resonance. The winds played an accompaniment, air rustling forth a million-million notes, the currents drawn across the passage of time like a bow over strings. Even that which was data thundered in existence, brushing Avos mind in the analogy of percussion. He found himself aware of new and ineffable sensations, knowing the trail left by even brush of wind, every coursing stream of blood, every pattern of matter, every streak of lightning, every burst of radiation or composition of signals. New threads tickled his gnosis, their manifestations soft and fragile against his Frame. Not yet something he could pull on. Not yet. But they were there. Had been there all along. Only now was he close enough to perceive them. Only now did he have the symmetry. Avo? Draus tore him free from his reverie. He was back in base reality, the newest patterns in the tapestry blurring from his notice, escaping from sight. Avo turned his attention to his cadre and found himself displeased by their state. Draus and Tavers were halted midstep. Both were encased in armor. Both were stable of mind. Apprehension gripped their postures, and Avo understood their uncertainty, their concern. His departure had been abrupt. Senseless. There was much they did not know. Much he didnt know either. The others were loosely scattered in this roomCon the highest level of the tower he made to oversee the enclave, red-tinged light creeping through the surrounding translucence. Chambers Metamind had patches lining its sequences. Cognitive cataracts, if a comparison had to be made. Leaning on a partially installed console, Kae looked over Dice, the Agnos chirping constantly at the girl, the latters mind a slowly mending bundle of misaligned memories. Drones filtered to and fro, moving overhead as trafficked a constant influx of components, assembling new machinery along the supports and walls. Sunrise warbled in mid-air, watching Avo from afar as a mostly completed swarm. He felt them then. All of them. Their material and mental patterns, the air flowing in and out of their lung, the signals pulsing from their implants. And dancing strings of time. Like threads unwound, leading to distant placesClike vectors decorating their passage across time. Avo shook his head and focused. He needed time to figure these things out. Understanding. But they didnt have time to dally. Conversation was a luxury he had no intention of indulging. With a thought, his ConflagrationCa once raging inferno now cut down to a shivering torchCshifted. Flames sizzled into steam. Eyes widened. Expressions changed. Perceptions narrowed. What the fuck. Chambers muttered. Such was an appropriate response. There was much they needed to know. Much they had to ask him. Some questions he had for them as well. Thankfully, with the new evolutions achieved by his consciousness, the inefficiency of words could be substituted for direction injections of mutual understanding. He didnt even need to assimilate their egos anymore either. Ghosts: [4,510] Splinters broke from his mind, gliding across the Nether as if darting needles. They were cloned from his sequences, operating as remote fragments of his mind, their outward-facing structure passing through the realm of thoughts as something between a quiet plague and a shapeshifter. Going to show you all a few things, Avo muttered, his own mind still spinning from the ordeal. We all have questions. Me as well. Going to show you what I know. He caught Draus shooting Kae and glance and Avo grunted in understanding. No. Not going to burn you. Dont need to do that for this anymore. The Regular faced him again, and he felt her frown beneath her Meldskin helmet. None of them noticed when his splinters passed into them, sinking into their thoughtstuff, burrowing into their wards. The members of his cadre didn''t even respond as they were punctured. This moment of relish compelled Avo to exhale. Probing his companions'' protections, he examined their traumas, sequences, memories, and palaces. For long, he had been an all-devouring flame, a thing of elemental devastation, ruination in the Nether made manifest. It was a color he never expected to glimpse. The virtue of being truly overwhelming, truly dreaded, an apex predator for an entire realm. But it had also taken things from him. Stripped him of practice. Restricted him from practicing his art to the fullest extent possible. The art he inherited from his father. The art imbued into him through White-Rabs packaged memories. Him and countless more. In this moment, he was a Necrojack again, diving through the minds of his companions, tweaking and remolding, improving and gifting. As his splinters swept through them, they merged with various sequences, injecting new ghosts into the minds of his allies, optimizing weaknesses and constructing any phantasmics he deemed essential but missing. Above all, their wards were improved. Avo wouldnt be surprised if the Low Masters spent all their efforts trying to hunt him and his companions down after the humiliation he just inflicted on them. The HungersCdiscounting their turncoatsCwould not accept anything less than his complete annihilation. He needed to ensure his cadre were hard targets. His attention skipped over to Dice. The waif was mauled in thought and memory, her inner ego still leaking through the cracked yolk of her accretion, aspects of her memories and senses leaking outward like prolapsed organs swinging from an open wound. And so, he sequenced unto them the best defenses he had: the grand prize he stole from the Famine of Peace. {Wait. Avo. Dont.} The cognitive needle was an inch away from pushing through Dentons wards. Only then did she look up at Avos halo and frown. What happened to your flames? She asked. {You probably wont be able to perceive much inside her mind,} Calvino continued, elaborating. {Her minds not like yours. Or even Captain Draus.} +Like yours?+ Avo asked. He was always a bit suspicious of the inscrutable Glaive. There was too much stillness to her. She reacted to the world more like dead matter in ways, unaffected in terms of experience or tangible humanity. {Not quite. She is an Alice-Series Infiltrator. A biosynthetic counter-sophont. Even her inner thoughts will be protected by quantum-coded encryptions.} Avo frowned. And then jabbed his way into her mind anyway. The EGI was right. A sea of numbers, codes, and scripts awaited him. Avo retreated. {See.} The ghoul grumbled. {Yes. Thats the entire reason why we restarted the initiative. So mind-snatching maniacs like yourself and Omnitech dont end up stealing anything from us.} +Couldve told me before.+ {You werent this much of a threat before.} If there was one thing Avo liked about the artificial minds, it was that they were always honest. Eventually. Was connected to the Nolothic Ark, Avo said, shaping his ghosts into phantoms instead. Despite all his efforts and burgeoning excitement, it seemed he wouldnt be able to escape a session of show-and-tell with at least one person. He told her about the lapse that was triggered, about the false memory contained inside Kare. He showed her an abridgment of his encounter with the Hungers, and then what the doublethinkers had revealed to him. By the end, Denton looked as unbalanced as a biomechanical machine wearing the skin of a person could muster. So. Scale is where they kept it. Denton mused. Operative Zein kept some things from us. Avo grunted. Or maybe forgot herself. Either way. Might need to have a conversation with her soon. More than a few things I want to know. Some about Jaus. Others about time. Consideration passed through the Glaives features. With all that has happened, the timetable of her reconstitution might be modified. The date of the trial is also in question. She shot brief looks at Draus and Kae. The situation in the Tiers and across the city is tense. Multiple skirmishes have erupted across the last hour. More are in the process of happening. Paladins are being dispatched to contain and apply diplomacy where they can. A beat followed. Naeko is among them. He ensured the safety of a major portion of the entire city. {25%} Calvino sent, pairing visual information with words. Visual data downloaded from Threshold materialized in the corner of Avos vision, and he saw a gargantuan palm made from mist and cloudsCa fourth the size of New Vultun itself and growingCslam down on the city, settling as if a mountain. A shiver ran through him and all his templates. Despite all he had just survived, all he had achieved, Naekos feat reminded Avo that he was not quite a giant in his ecosystem, that there were still mountains beyond mountains, and gods beyond gods. [Better stay far away from that one,] Corner said, a wary murmur under his voice. The former squire didnt scare easy, but he knew Naeko. And witnessing such power only made the fear settle deeper. [Were not ready for that kind of fight. Not even close.] But Avo considered another factor. His splinters. His mind. Would the Chief Paladin even see it coming? Would he even realize that he was being consumed from the inside, sequence by sequence? Peace didnt. [Avo,] Corner said, truly serious. [Imma tell you this will all the respect I can musterCthis isnt someone you want to experiment or find out about. Until youre sure you can evade or snuff, stay the fuck away from him.] And that was all they said. Hes been hunting us, Avo said, returning to the conversation with Denton. Understood. I will speak with him before things begin. Make boundaries known. What are the accords? Avo asked. Why are they binding? Denton paused. They are agreements struck between the Guilds. Promises made absolute under Jaus. Humanity has made an art of breaking laws. So. It was universally decided that chains were needed to bind everyone. It was supposed to be the first structure of absolute legality. Something above all beings. And was supposed to banish or capture transgressors using the Nether, Avo said. Or the Hungers themselves. The Glaive tilted her head at him. I am uncertain. The histories here are... contradicting. Of course, Avo muttered. Why wouldnt the Guilds want such a thing to exist? For people to be aware of it. But it wasnt finished. And further damaged during the Second Guild war, Denton added. That was what we thought the High Seraph was truly desired during her siege. To break the final rules laid by her father. Such was what Operative Oyaje claimed. Oyaje. Thousandhand. A headache was beginning to build. It seemed like with each thrust of progress he made to understand the grand scheme at play, the more the mists of obfuscation and mystery grew. The threads of time were ringing around him now. His blood was a constant song. Somehow. Somehow he knew history had been tampered with. That the chronology tied to this was irrevocably broken in some way. But wasnt the past already lost? Was history always chased by swallowing oblivion? He needed more perspective. And he wasnt going to just get it here. Turning his attention to the mirror on the far side of the room once more, Avo clicked his fangs together and began to think. He prepared sessions in his Auto-Seance. Formed splinters as he continued his dialogue with Denton, sharing what they knew. [What are you doing?] Abrel asked, curious as to why he was calling up the sequences tied to the session he had hidden within her mind. +Everything I can at once,+ Avo answered. After all, he wasnt fixed to a single point anymore. He could have a dialogue while being efficient. And it was time he synchronized some knowledge across his subverts. Starting with Abrel herself. Chapter 21-5 Blood of Dragons (II) Chapter 21-5 Blood of Dragons (II) Her blade, a song of woe through time, Her blows, her strikes, death her rhyme. Mother against daughter, an ordeal of fate. The future rests their clashes, hearts bound by love and hate. But upon the tides of time an infection comes, The ravenous beast molting, a god he becomes. Mother and daughter are no longer the only shadows that loom, For only will the true struggle begin when the monster mends the worlds womb. -Unidentified Thoughtcast 21-5 Blood of Dragons (II) Avo was in the enclave; his stolen city of light. Avo was passing through the Sunderwilds, bound for the George Washington, seeking to root himself in its systems. Avo was diving across his sessions, burying himself within Abrels consciousness, Kassamon, Kare, and Elegant-Moon soon to follow. Her mind was ignorant of his intrusion, his memories melting into hers, not even waking her as she slumbered. Every splinter that parted his mind fractured his awareness further. He could spawn a legion of fragments, but he could only wield three of them. Direct them only as a unified concert. Broad focus resulted in broad effects. Meticulous work required focus and concentration; greater investitures of total cognitive capacity. And so he began his approach as a thoughtform of three parts. As Denton told him of her relationship with Nako, he speared first into Abrels mind. The girl was asleep, slumbering within a porcelain prison. He jacked into her senses and studied her cell. The room was aglow with a somber ambiance. Liliac on white. Sounds of a distant waterfall almost too quiet even for Abrels hearing. The Exorcists and voiders were unaware of his hidden Auto-Seance, planted deep in the folds of her memories. They were not his equal in the art then. They remained as pale shadows now. An exchange of memories followed. In the moment of Abrels inhale, he wove into her all that her template experienced alongside him. He left himself and the others vagaries, of course, drawing a curtain over what he desired to keep hidden. But he gifted her with a recompense of knowledge. A fitting trade for all the aid she offered. He trawled further through her memories, filtering through the mem-data for critical moments of worth. Surprise filled him as the face of Uthred Greatling appeared. Realizations blossomed, one following another, perturbed by the sudden dissolution of House Greatling, unnerved further by the fact that a former Authority and his Instrument of a son was seeking the cadre down in the Warrens. Abrel, for her worth, had misdirected them from the true mark. She sculpted a story, portraying Chambers as a mastermind. A rising threat unseen, the vengeful hand of Noloth striking once more. There was something here. Something he could engineer. New actors on the scene for him to exploit. Studying Uthred and Vators capabilities through Abrel, Avo found himself more thrilled than perturbed. So they sought the Acolyte Aedon Chambers. So multiple parties were noticing the suspicious Fallwalker using a Bone Demon. All this could be twisted to his advantage. Offered as bait. While he constructed his plot, Denton spoke in the backdrop, elaborating on her relationship with Naeko. My association with the Chief Paladin is one of informational and mutual benefit. Denton paused to consider her words. Hesitation gripped her, but she remained free of tension. I am an open double agent. Ori-Thaum knows that I am compromised by Voidwatch. As does Paladin Naeko. Both entities assume this is the depths of my cross-allegiance and work to leverage their own gains through them. Openly a spy and unofficially a liaison, Avo remarked. Fascinating how politics works between Guilds. Fuckin messy is what it is, Draus snorted. She regarded the Glaive with a flat stare that conveyed her disapproval of the arrangement. Youre a fragging waitin to happen, consang. Just a bad choice away from a snuffin with all the daggers pressed up against your back. Denton remained indifferent. This is the most optimal way to achieve our ends. The risks involved are manageable. And if you end up dead? the Regular asked. A ghost of a smile graced Dentons face. People in my line of work usually only end up wrong once. Regret is not our privilege. And that was sufficient to assuage the Regular.The? source of this content n/o/v/(el)bi((n)) The arrangement I struck to relieve you all from Naekos arrest was twofold, Denton explained. The first was claiming you as my assets. Under Ori-Thaum or Voidwatch I didnt say. Avo caught her implicationCanother angle he could use to implicate and muddy the waters for Clan DRgono. But thinks you are my hounds. And I traded him information I knew he lacked. Information relating to Elder DRongos orders to commit conspiracy to murder and frame an Agnos. The latter act openly in breach of the Accords. And that will matter when the trial begins? Avo asked. Certainly, Denton said. The truth will be ascertained. The transgressors will be shown for what they are before the city. The punishment is coded into the Heaven itself and requires the clearance of the Chief Paladin and witnesses from the Guilds to be delivered. Such was how previous events proceeded. As this brings all the major powers together, trials are usually proceeded or followed by moots between the powers. Her gaze turned aside for a moment. I think that was part of Operative Thousandhands schemes. She mentioned something about favored developments should specific individuals encounter each other during one of these gatherings. How it would make them easier to prune. Wait, so theres something I dont get, Chambers interjected. Heads turned to face him and he awkwardly made eye contact. Youre literally selling out your elder and all this other shit. Why havent theyC He made a twisting gesture with his hands and mimed the noises of someone choking. Because the mem-data was obtained through other seniors within Clan DRongo. And also, I am just an agent. A Glaive. The messenger. I am a hand for multiple parties. Not the actor themselves. To liquidate me would anger many of my benefactors. There are benefits to leveraging an open identity and a role steeped in labor. And presently, Clan DRongo still believes they have the most sway over me. As does Clan Kitzuhada, Clan Kazahara, Clan Imaru, and Clan Oyaje. She paused again. I suppose a number of subsidiaries and independent Fallwalkers would be upset by my sudden removal as well. And... do any of them know your true role? Kae asked. That you are a member of Ninth Column. The Agnos question caused Denton to genuinely smirk. I am already a compromised spy. What other secrets could I have? This made Chambers do a double take. Wait a minute. Hold the fuck up. Everyone''s fine with you being a spy because they know you''re a spy and are using you as a spy against the others, and you''re using all that spy shit to hide the fact that youre an even deeper spy for a secret spy organization. The Glaive thought about what he said and simply nodded. A flavorful way of portraying my role. He blinked in disbelief and coughed out a chuckle. What in the fuck. Were Aegis engineered from the start, werent you? Avo asked. Denton pressed her lips together. I have a FATE-Skein. I passed through Essentials at Amoi Elementary. I finished Professionalization at the Tadeka-Ikkein Academy of Arts and Culture. I was recruited on service day. You couldnt break what was already considered to be a dilapidated wasteland since the Fourth Guild War. Of course, Kares idea of stopping the conflict was more rooted in approaching with dialogue, Thoughtwave Detonations, and suppressive ordinance. Maru decided to jump them into the fray by hijacking an explosion to transpose them. She wasnt much a fan of the brawl that followed thereafter either. It took more than a few shockwaves to the Heaven for things to calm down. Now, standing within the partially collapsed ruinsCpartially of her making, Kare nursed a sore neck and ringing ears as the leaders of each cadre threatened to do unspeakable things to one anothers corpses. This wasnt exactly how she envisioned spending the day. She was supposed to have time off. Spend time in a vicarity with Risha. And maybe have dinner with her father later. This though... What did Uncle Shotin say? Sometimes, the city just has to fuck you in front of everyone. Right. ...Were not done here. We need to talk about recompensation. You broke something of ours, Ogress. You break, you pay. Now. Is that going to be done through imps or other venues of satisfaction? I leave that up to you. Instrument Idril Marasov was a square-jawed idiot who loved to point. Chrome lined the side of his cheeks and biothaumically grafted insectoid limbs jutted out from sockets along his ribs. He wore a Mantis-Incarnate bio-rig in place of inorganic armor. Across from him, the Bloodthane Urdna agNaeg just loomed, her face forever a sneer, the shadows veiling her face a result of her three meters of height and messy dreadlocks swaying as a curtain. Bones decorated the exterior of her combat skin. Speaker grills lined her arms and shoulders, the sound distortions crackling from her pulsing metaphysically, making even the air around her shiver with vibrations. Kare still felt the thunderous soundwaves washing through her bones. Even with her Heaven manifested, the unpleasantness went Soul-deep. Paladin, Urdna chewed, spitting a globule of phlegm onto a cracked slab. Enough saliva left her lips to crack the edge of the plascrete once more. You tell this boy to bring me a woman to speak to. I have tolerated his insolence, but wish to speak to an adult. Ironically, this was about as childish a thing as the Bloodthane could say. The woman knew not all clades were as the Scaarthians, sexually transitioning upon full maturity. This was a deliberate insult. A deliberate insult that the Instrument couldnt seem to endure. The mans face reddened. Kare swallowed her own sigh. The entire time, the two were passing insults, and only when they wanted her to deliver an insult on their behalf did they address her. Off to the side, she could hear Paladin Sandrupal declaring how many rounds of sexual congress he held with each of the other Bloodthane and Instruments mothers. Though his method wasnt calming things down, it did seem stress relieving. Listen to me, you uppidity sow. Idril held out a hand. The Bloodthane slapped it. Toward Kare. Who was forced to dodge. Citizens, she said, forcing the words out even as her frustration spiked. They seemed intent on fighting each other. Intent on ignoring her attempts at resolution. Intent on starting a war just to feed their egos. To think people like this could be Godclads was despair-inducing. Point that finger in my face and I will claim your arm as a trophy, Urdna sneered. It is a small, shriveled thing, but not all specimens can be worthy. You half-strand piece of shitC The Instrument took a threatening step forward. Kare intercepted him. Instrument. No. Wait! He planted a hand on her face to shove her aside, but she twisted under and got in his path. White teeth were bared at her, and his anger turned away from the Bloodthane. Glasser. Im going to scalp this too-tall bitch. You can get out of the way, or you can be the appetizer. Up to you. Kare closed her eyes and breathed. Who taught these Instruments how to speak? It was like everyone owed them imps. Try it, partling. Find out if you are mother enough in your infant bones. And why did these Bloodthanes always have to fan the flames? Fuck you! Idril snarled. Fuck you! Urdna spat. No, Kare said, her patience slipping. If they were going to fightCso help her JausCshe was going to snuff them first. Enough. Stop. And then the strangest thing happened. Just as quickly as the violence escalated, the air changed. There was a twist in the current. A shift in the Nether. Where their accretions were churning fast, accelerating to meet the coming violence, their minds suddenly stopped, and the expression emptied from their faces. Oh. Of course, Paladin. My apologizes. The Instrument nodded and backed away. Across from him, the Bloodthane also bowed her head. Shameful behavior. From both of us. Truly. Kare blinked. Both of the other Godclads peeled away, stepping back and... staring off with confused expressions. Their faces probably matched her at that moment. What had just happened? Turning, she regarded Maru, but found him and the other Guilders staring off in awkward directions as well, distracted by something. Paladin Sandrupal? Hm? He replied. Right. Good job. Rookie. He gave her a nod. Great de-escalation. You should get a medal for that. Ill tell Naeko. The other Godclads were all oddly nodding in sync with him. Animal fear welled in Kares stomach, and dryness settled in her throat. She turned to face the others.Just... doing my job. *** From within nine new minds, an outsider spread their influence, fangs wide in a savage rictus. Oh. Things were going to be just delightful. Maru now. Kassamon after. And who knew how far he would spread? Who knew what he could achieve with his new gifts? With how subtly he flowed, how unknowably he moved, who, then, could stop him? Chapter 21-6 Blood of Dragons (III) Chapter 21-6 Blood of Dragons (III) The Nether was never meant to be a prison, but it served as a perfect one all the same. Alas, the masters of Noloth were as much slaves to their nature as the gods were. So desperate were they to see the world conform to their desired delusions that they revealed their hand preemptively. Was it hubris that made them think we would not notice? That I would just trust blindly? Or was their failure something simply lesser? Baser? More human. I thank you all for your prompt responses. For ceasing your squabbles to settle matters. We will keep the remainder of the Nolothi population intact. But their masters must be banished. The worst of their culture must be repressed. I think as I grow older, as I study the world, study our behaviors, our natures are entwined with the divine. Mirrored in a way. We are the way we are, for we are singular silos of awareness. consciousnesses that have been molded by society and in turn mold society. Our gods are cultures distilled, zeitgeists unleashed, and powers absolute. Hubris and madness cannot restrain them, for they exist beyond consequence. For a time, at least. Perhaps they are what we would be if everyone were to merge into an amalgam. A singular ego channeling the experiences of countless lesser minds, with all the potential to reshape existence, and no penalties for what they break. It is an ugly thing to face. But liberating. For it shows the flaws in our hopes. And rights our path toward functional progress. I called you all tonight to compose a summation of Noloths dismantling. I am honored by your prompt responses. And the refrain you practiced during the pacification process. I understand it is not our usual way, but that is to change if we are to live better lives. But as for the matter of who will serve as warden for the city eternal... Here. Allow me to show you. [MEM-DATA MISSING]Discover new chapters at novelhall.com This is the Gatekeeper. It is unfinished, but as a prototype, it will serve my point. It lacks many aspects we can see in a human. Indeed, when I dreamed of its inception, I desired something that... was apart from us. Devoid of our insufficiencies. I formed the Gatekeeper as a concept. It is purity empty of all thoughts beyond its designated task. Cultureless. With little personality beyond devotion to its function. Capable of imbibing information from the world without succumbing to corruption. It is beyond the avarice of any man, beyond the foolishness of any warrior, beyond the cowardice of any craven. As of now, it bears the fundament of the Nolothic Ark and acts as an anchor for the threshold. I have never been one to hide my thoughts from you. Not even when it was to my own benefit. I see the Gatekeeper as the development. A manufactured caretaker to blunt our habits of self-destruction. Even with the power to channel the various Heavens tied to the realm of minds, it has only done its duty. Only held itself in refrain. In it, I have seen the path ahead. Glimpsed what we must do. We cannot bear this power. Already, I see the corruption of hearts. Already, it is too much. Even for the greatest among us. In breaking the gods we have ended one tyranny. Now, we must suffer the agony of surrender to avert another. For the final design to be realized, power must not be held in our hands. We are not ready. We may not be ready for a long time. We are to rebuild a house from these shackles. A community for which we are to flourish and learn. Spared of death. Governed by purity. Educated by our prodigal kin. Such are the immediate steps I desire. In simplicity: the surrender of our Heavens over to proven custodians, followed by their mass manufacture once the [REDACTED] is finally rooted in existence. We are melting our shackles down. Making new chains. But this time, it will be a fence instead of a collar. This time, it will save us instead of oppressing us, pulling us back from the brink to keep us from falling, rather than our necks. We have come too far to be undone by our nature. -Mem-Log of Jaus Avandaer to the Gathered Representatives of the Remaining Guilds after the Trial of the Hungers 21-6 Blood of Dragons (III) Nine different minds. Nine new Godclads under his sway. Four of Stormtree. Four of Highflame. Not a bad haul for a brief dip across a subvert. Avo wanted more. [Oh, Jaus,] template-Kare groaned, suffering from a clash of feelings. Indeed, without Avos intervention, the Bloodthane and Instrument would have reignited hostilities, and Kare herself would have been drawn in. Not ideal, for her or the city. The best outcome there would be their incapacitation, but even with the greatest among the Guilders being a Sphere 4, it was still only her and Paladin Sandrupal. Avos influence made sure things didnt come to that. Escalation was prevented and order was upheld. The cost, however, was leaving nine Godclads under the sway of an increasingly incomprehensible monster. If Avo could even be regarded as such a meager thing anymore. +Dont worry,+ he replied, delighting himself as he coursed through their memories, an invisible virus swimming carried along trains of thought. +Wont hurt your mentor. But need him. Need his insight. Were going to all do wonderful things together. Great things. City is going to be safer because of you.+ He cast the truth of his intent into her, but his words still failed to assuage. If Kare had a body, she would be biting her lip right now. Instead, she found herself bothered by festering thoughtsCinflammations of doubt and worry. A lack of trust still existed between her and Avo, preventing them from achieving true cooperation. [I trust you about Paladin Sandrupal,] Kare said, mastering her worries. [There are many things you could have done. To me and the city. Terrible things. But you are... more than a monster.] She attempted a diplomatic note, mustering her strength for more uncomfortable territory. [But the others...] +Need them,+ Avo replied. +No promises for them. We''re at war. Even if they dont know. They want the world to be their way. I have another design. A better one. Will consume them if I need them. Will use them however I have to. Not going to lie about that. And they wont be the last.+ Kare wasnt sure how to take that. [I just wish you asked me first. Isnt that what you believe? Giving people choice.] +Yes. But you were losing control. And I wanted to test my new changes. Indulge.+ Avo admitted his hypocrisy openly. Easily. He supposed it was both a good and bad thing. But his encounter with the Hungers had taught him better of denial. And self-delusion. To achieve his desired idealization, he needed to face these problems and consider if he wished to alter the worldCor himself. One could lie to the world. Peddle whatever poison they wanted. But to turn the same act inward was an act of self-harm all the same. +Havent done anything to them yet. Only inside for now. Taking looks. No plans cemented yet.+ He paused. +Could negotiate limits in the future. Deeds we can provide each other. Will take time to consume them. My mind isnt flame right now. Its moving emptiness. Will take patience to tatter all the sequences in a palace. You have time. Do some thinking.+ And with his piece said, he buried the dialogue into real-Kares mind. The Paladin lurched with a start, suddenly aware of all that was happening, of the hidden hand behind her recent success at diplomacy. Her ghosts twisted inward, grasping at phantoms that werent there anymore. Still, he watched here. Through nine sets of other eyes, nested within nine different minds. He sequenced Auto-Seances inside them as well. Something to ensure he could access them again even if a disruption managed to unmake his splinter. In time, they would be new patient zeros. Spreading his influence. Feeding him constant streams of intelligence and understanding. Right now, he wanted to make his gains exponential. Discover what he could truly do when not hunted by the Hungers and their Low Masters. Centuries of Necrojacking experience reverberated within his ego as Avo called upon Peaces memories. Skills he couldnt have mastered in a single lifetime fused into place and the nature of traumas became bare to him. Memories sang out to him. A billion minds shattered by the Famine of Peace sang their lessons, fed his Ghostjack with an archive of patterns, an inventory of torment each more exquisite and unique than the last. More than that, he felt his intuition sharpen, the sensation as if a new sense was growing out from his mind. Avo understood what broke a person now. Better than ever before. All the little details necessary to apply maximum leverage when disfiguring ones self-perception. This was the body of Duradel Jawline SchMedd. Lieutenant of the Barrow Syndicate under Omnitech and arms dealer on the side. His mind hadnt been clear when he took the callCboth thinking it was nice to be hearing from his old friend while also questioning how he was still alive. Theun had gone off to nuke a city center after all. Most people didnt come back from that. But it would be a bigger and brighter end than most. Now, it was Duradel who died first. Nulled without knowing as his ego dissolved within Avo. New branches of comprehension are connected to his comprehension. Theun had offered mem-data on essential Sanctus personnel as well as schematics for a new Sanctus golem in the prototyping phase. That had been more than enough information to purchase what he needed. Especially all he asked for was an old Fulgerhound golem, a couple of nukes, and some cheap intel. [What the hell,] Duradel muttered, mind sobering. But not fast enough. Avo expanded his influence. Veins of blood crept through the matter around him. Winds trushed through cracks and crevices. Signals drawn away from their pathsCgravitating toward him. The aratnids in the ceiling skittered away, and Avo let them. He was more interested in the [66,412] other people in the megablock around him. From Duradels memories, most of them were Syndicate personnel. And a somewhat sizeable one at that. [WaitC] Duradel muttered. Their main dealings were in experimental cybernetics and arms running. Crucibles and entertainment were tertiary programs to them, but their atrocities ran a litany all the same. It made the act that followed simple. [No!] Duradel cried. His voice was drowned out by a chorus of sixty-two thousand more. The massacre was a deliberately messy one. Avo converted portions of matter across the megablock into fissile material and sparked them using his Domain of Fire. Shrouds of nuclear devastation expanded within the vastness of the architecture. Avo kept his bombing to a reasonable yieldCmade it look like a series of smuggled detonations. Leaving nothing but liquefied matter and missing people was suspicious. But warheads going off inside Syndicate territory was just another war being waged in the gutters. And with all his newest converts gripped by his Haemokinesis, Avo skipped the annoying parts of slowly digesting ghosts and deaths, converting his splinter into a channel for which to drink in all he desired. The new templates screamed, wailed, and plunged into an expanse of emptiness. Corner slapped his knee and laughed, finding their sudden deaths hilarious. Ghosts: [1,581,001] Thaumic Output: 83,352 The death yield was heftyCbut Avo knew he would soon need more. His total ghosts on the other hand were a paltry trickle compared to what he possessed days ago, but that would be remedied soon. A few more hits like this, and hed be more than satisfied. His momentum was building and building. Who was to stop him now? Who? As dust settled, as lights winked out, Avo held the structure together using his Woundmother in tandem with the Fardrifter. He funneled smoke and fumes out from the missing chunks of the building, and hardened its remaining supports to ensure it didnt topple down on the complexes beneath it. More importantly, he layered the families and unaffiliated living the structure in protective cocoons. More than a few would be traumatized. But they would live. At least for today. [Practically Guild-like in your generosity, ghoul,] Abrel muttered. He grunted in agreement. Perhaps he should think more about how to handle the collateral. That was going to be a persisting issue. As he mantled his newest body, he rose from the ragged couch and made to exit the enshadowed room. Duradel wept somewhere deep in Avos mind, traumas wracking him over and over, unable to comprehend the suddenness of the massacre, or what had just happened. Strangely, Avo found he pitied the man. Not for his death, but the powerless of it all. How could they have ever protected themselves from something like him? How could he have known the Heaven of Truth was more than what it seemed? New Vultun was more than a slavering beast to him now. It was city built upon winding secrets and enshadowed by lurking horrors. Just because he ranked among the unknowable dangers now didnt mean he wasnt spared from them either. He melted the doors to his room away as he strode into the darkened hallways. He wanted to see the damage he had caused. To see if anything would change inside him dosing his mind with the proximity of his deeds. If there was anything he learned from his encounter with the Hungers, it was that ignoranceC A sudden spike of pain pulsed through Avos chest. All three of his minds flinched as he recoiled in pain. Back in the enclave, his cadre spun to look at him, startled by his sudden hiss. Im fine, he said. That body was, anyway. Duradel, however, currently had a few inches of gleaming alloy protruding from his chest. Before there was something more there. Something else Avo could feel. Beneath the matter was something akin to his Delusions, the golden flow of time carrying the shape of blade and the act of its thrust forward from the past. There was only one person he knew who possessed such capabilities. She made herself known with her following stoke. A cold bar of emptiness lingered on his chest as Thousandhand extracted her blade and swept it across his neck. He let herCabandoning his head to decapitation while using his Domain of Biology to grow another. At the same moment, he turned into the attack, driving flesh, mind, and Heavens against his fellow Columner. It didnt matter how she found him in that instant or whatever else brought her there. He had been wanting to have this talk, and whatever the case, this saved him plenty of time. Around them, the passage of time manifested as a rising song, and as golden ichor flowed with the blood he spun, her temporal resonance met him as scars in existence, strokes slashing into places that areCor will be. Once again, he saw her aged face, and once again, he delighted in the surprise painting her features as he failed to fall, as he tore into her with splinters and Heavens and all. Maybe the third time was going to be the charm. Chapter 21-7 Sword and Plague (I) Chapter 21-7 Sword and Plague (I) +It was a miracleC+ +The palm! Did you see it?+ +We should have died. My aero hit that building at over 200 miles an hour...+ +He pulled the flechettes out of me. They were just... gone.+ +He stopped the flames from burning my children. He stopped it. He put it out. His palm fell and the flames died.+ +Fuck, consangs, Im never talking shit about Naeko again. I dont care if hes a corner-dwelling bitchass slow-twitch point-blank-range-team-killing-objective-ignoring motherfucker, when a half-strand bitchslaps the Nether back into shape, you heel dog, heel.+ +Operative Loken? Loken? Fuck. His vitals are gone.+ +--Turned our flechettes back on us. Like we were shooting into outselves.+ OPERATION FAILED GOLEM-SESYPLEPHES STATUS: [DESTROYED] UNABLE TO DELIVER PAYLOAD DUE TO CHIEF PALADIN NAEKO WITHDRAW ALL SURVIVING REGULARS IN THE SOVEREIGNTY +Misery-2 is not responding. Misery-4 is not responding. Misery-8 confirmed nulled. Trauma inversion. Yes, maam. They were in the radius of Naekos palm. His miracles were in full effect.+ +So, this is what it means to be Sphere 8... To tell the world no, and substitute it with a world bound to your Soul. Looks like I still have leagues to climb...+ +--Everyone in Southsex is dead. Everyone. His palm... it hit everything.+ +Everyone go dark. Incogs active. Go dark. Go dark. Go dark.+ {EGI Only Way To Be Sure here: please carry this missive directly to the Chief Paladin. Tell him I enjoy the Buddha re-enactment. No, I wont be explaining that, but I would like to challenge him to a soft war in the void. I got some bombs I want to test, and the rest of the wusses said I cant use it on Idheim.} -Messages Filtered for Content Related to [CHIEF PALADIN]; [SAMIR NAEKO]; [STORMJUMPERS2ISBACKONBAYBEEEEE] 21-7 Sword and Plague (I) My kin are surfacing again. I feel them moving; time upon time, as rivers upon rivers. Such was all Akunsande needed to say. If there was a single characteristic that determined the Hungers, it was naked terror. The type befitting a creature, forever knowing itself to be prey. While it pretended to be a god, it lived as a worm, hiding beneath the waters, not even brave enough to embody the life of a carp. Its Low Masters were little more than attendants; nannies for a gaggle of children unworthy of true power. Zein had scorned them from the first day. Jaus had always been too lenient with them, trying so desperately to include them in his plans, draw them into the fold. He yearned to consider them people, but they were a collective consumed by selfish desire, hungering for control, yet too impotent to see their world materialized without the strength of others serving in their stead. What worth is a god that could not face the consequences of a rebuke? What god could not endure a parry, a counter-attack, a retaliation in response? What god refused to face the world and dreamed only of creating a cradle in which to hide? A realm where its delusions and yearnings were always right, and their every whim attended to? No god. No god at all. Her Heaven manifested: the Fisher that Wasn''t dipped into the flowing streams of the paths. Spreading her focus, she listened to the currents of futures forthcoming and felt the displacements shearing branches from the paths. Quiet though the Hungers wished to be, their weight could not be denied. When you were the sea itself, every movement was seismic, every ripple grew to become a rising tide. She had evaded whatever attack they attempted, launching her echoes across time to avoid the disruption. As she returned, she expected to find them on the offensive, attempting another ill-fated uprising perhapsCwith even less success than the first. Instead, it occupied specific corners of the paths, their divergent resonance singing from specific bodies. The paths shivered as entire passages tumbled into each other thunderously, as entire potential possibilities crumbled away, splashing into one. The past was an ever-dissolving ruin, and the future was a broken construct, its paths a labyrinth leading onward, specific metaphysical rails and trajectories pre-built using Heavens of Probability and Possibility to ensure the fruition of certain events and desired outcomes. Shattered fate, if one desired to comprehend it in such a manner. Things were not meant to be this way. The paths were supposed to be locked into place with the arrival of the Ladder, and the Arks of every grand culture were to flow upward into existence, meeting one another at the mouth of a unified destiny. Such had not been the case. Jaus was undone; Veylis desired another outcome, and in the name of protecting her father from a mistake, she did the unthinkable and broke something unmendable. Even now, fragments of memory remained missing within Zein. Multiple things happened within the Ladder that day, the roads that emerged from the vanishing ladder separated into paths of nine, and the architecture of the coming future lay irrevocably broken. And now, they all lived in the ruins that remained. Chains from chains. Corpses upon corpses. Histories upon histories. Casting glimpses into the future beyond, information filled Zeins mind after a few seconds delay. The streams of time flowed around her as she extracted copies from her present self and flung them into the future. Every time she did so, she moved, cognizant that though her daughter seemed dormant, it was wise to never stay in one place, or linger too long at one point in time. As her echoes skipped along pathways of futures adrift, she scried at a few characters of interest. The leaders of the Guilds seemed to be shrugging over their disarray, moving to defensive footing in the aftermath of the unexpected calamity. The few she had cut were ignorant to what was happening, more lost than she about present circumstances. More worryingly was NaekoChis ontological presence flaring in existence like a spire of awakening flame. There lies her answer for why her daughter had been so quiet. Muted pride embraced with gnawing annoyance. Her wayward disciple had chosen a strange time to rouse himself from his stupor. This too was unexpected. This too she would have to discover. But only ever at a distance. Distracted though he was, it would not do to draw his attention, for more than serving as a deterrent against Veylis, he bore a Heaven that would break hers: the denial of violence, the usurpation of force, the rebuttal to her philosophy entire. Across time, a soft laugh slipped from an old woman, brushing stray ears as if a hallucination. Naeko. Ever defiant. But no longer so rageful. To think the cure was his breaking thrice over. First by his childhood masters, who defiled whatever innocence there ever could have been. Then by Zein, who struck her art into him, teasing his flame beyond control. And finally by Veylis, who doused love and hatred with betrayal, leaving only a simmering wound in its place. The EGI let out a noise that was pure suffering. {Our fates lie in the hands of two psychotic children. Wonderful.} And it was. His Breath of the Withered had eaten through more of the block than his nukes did in the scant seconds they were active. He kept his suppression far and wide as felt her recede. Already, things were going far better than before. Back in the Tiers, when he encountered her within the Trident, he was surprised as well but failed to achieve anything. Instead, she killed him time and time again. Easily. Casually. Even slashing through him while he was a bolt of lightning. Now, he was more than surviving. He was fighting. Forcing her to consider her options, and there were few drugs that could match the euphoria naked growth could provideC A force swept clean through the entire floor, swallowing him and his withering gale. The few Zeins that were still enchained burst apart into slithering threads. Avo found himself fallingCtumbling down into Zeins garden. Ah. This again. A day ago, he wouldnt have any counter against this. Now, he launched a new splinter from Duradels sheathe, flinging it back over into the megablock as a Specter and burying it into a new body he was growing from a fissure of blood. REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER] - 78% REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER] - 81% REND CAPACITY [TECHPLAGUER] - 63% +WhoC+ That was all he heard her say; he converted Duradels biomass into fissile material and detonated him. Back three floors below where he was, tendrils of blood stitched a copy of his base sheath into existence. But he didnt stop there. Across every level of the megablock, he began fabricating new bodiesCand directing splinters into them. He couldnt occupy any more than three with proper focus, but that wasnt the point. If Zein thought she had quantitative supremacy, then she was mistaken. Lightning reached out from the megablock and struck a collection of structures, fusing new spawn points into place. His Sanguinity began to expand from twelve new bodiesCthen one hundred and forty-four. His splinters were fragmenting just as fast, burying themselves all across the district. {Youre more the virus than ever before,} Calvino said, actually sounding perturbed for once. Back in the enclave, Avo grinned and turned to his cadre. I found Zein. Heads snapped to him. Dentons eyes actually widened. What? She found me. Technically. Stabbed my other sheath first. Chambers looked off to the side. Draus licked her inner cheek, staring at him as if she knew what he was about to propose. Back in Meddhamet, Avo directed his hundred and forty-four bodies in concert, his cognitive capacity dipping from ninety-eight percent as directed his two subminds to focus on piloting one sheath each. The rest could be as if limbs grafted to a spine or tertiary lobbies, ready-made vessels to mantle a governing focus should the first be destroyed. And destruction was exactly what followed. Bodies forged by time hunted their blood-grown prey across the district. Where Avo was so followed Zein. No longer did she strike at him as lightly. Casually painting strokes befitting a flat or lesser Clad. No. Disruptions cleaved forth. As did gouges in time, phenomena from the past bleeding into the present. Though Avo could root himself across countless bodies, he could only operate three at maximum focus. The rest needed to be directed. No such limitation constrained Zein. All her echoes fought with fluid precision, her glaive now a length of shimmering vivianiteCits edge painful for his mind to behold. A second was all it took for Zein to reap her toll. Avo tasted a hundred and one deaths in that time. A hundred and one blows took him before he could even react. Still his lightning jumped. Still more bodies grew. Still his splinters spread. In hallways, across the skies, between the alleys, within tunnels, inside passing trash barges, two armies fought, both spawned from singular egos, both asymmetric in the extreme, one cutting across time, the other a plague of thought and matter. And Avo directed the cacophony of violence directly into the minds of his cadre, his splinters broadcasting a vicarity of mass death never before experienced. Holy fuck, Chambers murmured. Surprisingly, Tavers looked just as overwhelmed. Kae looked like she was getting nauseous. Dice, somehow sensing this, patted her along the back. Denton furrowed her brow as a few of Sunrises drones landed on her shoulder. Draus was the only one to anticipate what Avo wanted. What she wanted as well. She grinned at him, her expression not so different from Zeins. She waited for him to ask anyway, another hundred of his bodies coming apart before Thousandhands mastery. Want in on this fight? Avo asked, already knowing the answer. Skins of Virtuality prevented all his bodies from dying instantly, but Zein was beginning to attack him technologically as well, firing bursts of radiation into him that made the Techplaguer moan. And not painfully. {Oh, shit,} Calvino cursed uncharacteristically. {I forgot we gave her that.} The Avos died as fast as they spawned, and Zeins echoes unraveled as they were lost. The former bore the brunt of the losses, and though he spread fast, he was still slowed by his RendCby his Heavens and cyclers. No matter the sheath, he still only had one Soul; one Liminal Frame. Soon, he would run his limit, and then she would dislodge him from the district. Unless outside forces intervened. Fuck do you think the answer to that is? Draus said, chuckling softly to herself. Hells yeah. Hells yeah, I want in. Hells yeah I want a piece of Thousandhand. Fuckin hated the sow since I first laid eyes on her. Emboldened by her words, Chambers approached. He only had one question for Avo. Rash? Avo nodded without hesistation as a squad of twelve Zeins parried bolts of lightning and dissolved trauma-mimicking splinters before they could approach. He flared his Fortress of Luminosity for the first time, prolonging the death of that subself as he waited for the rest to agree. I... suppose it will be good practice? Kae said, trying to sound upbeat. I am still upset and want to violently mutilate someone. Like I used to do to the dogs. Dices words made Kae flinch. Avo looked to Tavers but she waved him off. Yeah. This seems like a you all die repeatedly sort of activity. Bad for squires. He grunted. Alright then. I wish to join. All heads turned to stare at Denton now, surprise filling the room. The glaive cracked her neck and took off her coat, revealing the armored vest beneath. Its been a rough time. And... Thousandhands a bit of a... bitch. She smiled wryly. Cas is going to be so angry he missed this. Alright, Chambers pumped his fist. Another Godclads on the old lady gang-bang bus. Kae closed her eyes in disgust. And promptly tore all the moisture from his body. Chapter 21-8 Sword and Plague (II) Chapter 21-8 Sword and Plague (II) Naeko... Naeko... Ah. Yes, yes, scream in pain. Youve earned that. But scream while listening! I have something important to say. To you as well, Veylis! It is not enough to perform perfection. Indeed, I have known many a talented warrior, and they all are embarrassments in the end, for perfection is something they merely feel. The strokes, the slashes, the attacks, the maneuvers, the grapples, the transitions, the clenches, the shots, all felt instead of known, embodied instead of channeled or directed. And what use is a master that cannot teach? And what worth is an artist that cannot offer their worth back to the world? I pose this question to you because I''ve seen both of you attempting to achieve mastery. So selfish, so deluded. Do you think you will grasp something that no one else has, alone, swinging your sword idly on your own path? No, you will see it after you''ve fought million-million duels and come out on both sides to know what it is like to be struck and while also striking another. Here. These blades are for you. The locus will let you feel everyone you kill. A blessing of mine, so you can witness the perspective of both slayer and slain. This will give you full insight into how a battle is conducted, and allow you to imbibe more of the art than a mundane can experience in a lifetime. You should kill as many as you can. The soldiers, blind the grand scheme. Their officers, strainning to direct their fighting cattle. The commanders, with grand sights but feeble limbs. The logisticians! The faithful! The God-Touched! All of them! Strike them to master all aspects of violence, the totality of it. Everything, children. Everything. Be it alone or a commander, in unarmed combat or firing artillery. Everything must be understood from the minutiae to the broadest elements. Above all, though, you have to know the fundamentals of being attacked, of attacking, of angles, of the structure of war itself. Once you have mastered one body, do it across another. Do it using people who are under you. Do it with limbs missing. Do it with extra limbs. As many situations as possible, as many circumstances as possible, as dire circumstances as possible. You do not get to call yourself a true blade until I find your refinement worthy. And you dont let a little thing like losing an arm stop you from fighting. Do you hear that, Naeko? You still have a jagged stump right now. You had me in a grapple! Plunge it into my neck! Dont topple over spraying and screaming. Its embarrassing. Ah, but it is also beautiful. Even today, I would consider myself little more than a disciple, for day by day, I learn more ways to kill, more ways, infinitely. You think that just because few people in this world can match you in combat, you are at the apex? No, the apex is beyond us, but we must strive to meet it every day. For someday, we will meet something beyond our means to kill if we just stand still. And that is the greatest tragedy of all: To be slain because you never bothered slaying further enough. Now, I am going to mend and then try to kill both of you again. Try not to die. -Zein Thousandhand to Samir Naeko and Veylis Avandaer during Training (Circa 89934 DIvinity [125 years before the Godsfall] 21-8 Sword and Plague (II) Drawing memories from destroyed echoes was something Zein usually avoided. The danger that Veylis could have cast something back through its flattening threadsCor that an infection of the mind would be passed back over to her could not be denied. But in this instance, she simply had to know. Many of her memories were partitioned. Divided across her various echoes upon reception. The dilution of her understanding made her a dangerous threat, an enemy capable of constant surpriseCfor there were times she cast ghosts forward into the future before wiping the recollections from her mind, alerting herself to previous plans just before the cusp of their enactment. Through these means, she ensured the cover of her mystery, and evading her daughters clutches demanded nothing sort of mastery. As her struggle continued, though, as she continued battling against this pestilence afflicting matter, flesh, and thought, a gut feeling told her that she already knew who this was. So, she took a chance once more. She pulled memories tied to the streams of a destroyed echo and remembered. Everything came to her at once. Everything. Ah. Waltons bastard. The ghoul with a Liminal Frame. The one she briefly tutored herself at Ox-3 in the district of Xin Yunsha, likewise expecting to face the Hungers, only to sink her blade into one of their monsters instead. Her echo had cast these memories away upon being discovered by Veylis, and she herself had followed suit, ejecting everything connected to that point in time, averting any chance of mem-lock in the paths. Pride and more than little annoyance dawned on her. Oh, Avo. How the little dagger had grown. Of course, she couldn''t quite call him that anymore, considering the fevered fight he was putting up. How had he changed this much in such a short time? Drawing additional memories associated with him, she recalled him being a strange merger between flame and mind. The fires of his consciousness were quenched now. In their place drifted empty winds. False breaths exhaled by his mind, the delusion of his genuine sequences creating an absence, allowing him to embraceCor embodyCany other cognitive structure he encountered. Her true blade whispered again, but she needed no explanation. Another warmind was active within him. Somehow. But that meant he must have engaged the Low Masters and come out victorious. Fascinating. Unexpected. But pleasing. Very pleasing. To think the fools of Noloth would be brought so low by one of their former slaves. The bitterness and humiliation left a delicious aftertaste in her mouth. Nonetheless, she still needed to break him. It was simply the way of things. A predator was a predator, and to let him move emboldened was folly. He needed to re-learn who was the student and who was the master. More importantly, she needed to make sure he stopped being so noisy in the paths. It was his fortune that she dove upon him. If not for Naeko, then Veylis would crawled down into the Warrens, certain to twist the future in her favor.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) +Avo,+ Zein said, casting her greeting across all simulated futures. Her true self moved again, skipping across Sovereignties and districts, materializing only in structures of abandonment and dilapidation. +It pleases me to see you. I am glad to see that you have grown substantially, even without my tutelage. Especially without my tutelage. Such efficient proactivity is rare indeed.+ She felt his counterattacks coming. Sensed them across time. Her strikes flicked as she fought as a legion unto herself. Echoes moved in perfect synchronicity, each cut manifesting in concurrence, an army building with each blow. Reverberations shook through her as true time passed for her, the aftershocks battle greeting her finally. Blades clashed against matter and lightning. Coiling essence leaped from the locus laced into her weapon. Masked splinters shaped from disguised ghosts shattered with every distortive burst. The loom of time wrestled against unraveling blood. He allowed his body to break. Fall. Splatter. More simply grew from every drop of ichor he spilled, every bit of matter he converted. She maintained perfect economy, reknitting her echoes as fast as he could dissolve them. She tested a few probing cuts with Akunsande again, trying to entrap the ghoul in her garden. He abandoned those bodies without hesistation. Detonating them as if warheads, taunting her with his new Domain of Fire. Torrents of lashing wind tunneled out to seize her. She pulled her echoes across time as a response, constructing counter-cyclones to deny hisCstorms internalized from her past experiences made material once more by the paths themselves. She flung forth hurricanes, flames, explosions, bullets, radiation, and distortions of all kinds, repelling his attacks with ones she recalled from her history. There was the benefit of living a long life. A storied one. Just as there was to being a mind layered from countless other minds. The duel between them continued, and she found herself genuinely enjoying herself, spending more effort than just casual strokes and brief stabs for once. She countered battles by the heartbeat. There were so few that lasted longer than one. Even fewer longer than two. Of those who could endure the past three were only Godclads of superior skill or Spherage. Zein blinked but declined to unravel her echoes. This was too novel an experience to avoid. Got a confession to make, Thousandhand, the Regular drawled, speaking from every reflection in the room at the same time. Been lookin forward to snuffin you from the day we met. The ancient Godclad cawed a laugh, and her amusement sang out from every echo. A part of her knew that she should be done with this. That she should stride the paths and cleanse the memories from all who could have witnessed the battle between her and the ghoul. But this was just too, too fun. The Layer above them flickered, and in that instant, light struck the glass just right. She saw through the threshold a tide of guns primed and loaded, hovering in the tesselated abyss. She saw bioforms rushing forth, spawned from flame and flesh. Around the hollowed interior of the megablock, moisture peeled from the atmosphere as a maelstrom began to form. The damnable ghoul had baited her. How delightC And all the Regulars guns fired at once. *** Avo watched Zeins echoes come apart in a mess of severed threads. Around him, Draus replicas had formed a protective wall, each one armed and armored of glass, standing four meters tall and imbued with every gun she touched since gaining her Arsenalist. Kae closed the world off, caging them in a dome of flowing water. Chambers and Dice both emerged from one of the replicas, the former spraying a stream of bioforms into existence, the latter cracking the world with every step, an icon of strength burning over her. The last to join proceedings was Denton. She wore only an exoskeletal vest made of interlocking plates and a formal suit underneath. No trace of her Heaven could be seen. No miracles emanated from her being. Of all the cadre, she was the one he knew the least about. As fast as they were destroyed, another echo materialized just before the turn of Kaes maelstrom. The Agnos was still within the passagesCholding true to her role as Porter and overwatch, sparing her of direct combat. Well, then, Zein said, sighing as she laid her glaive across her shoulders. I should have foreseen this. It was a cunning trick, using your Domain of Chronology to mask yourself and your cadre. Tell me: how did you obtain such a thing? Avo said nothing, unwilling to betray his advantage. The future twitched. Zein shifted behind them. And connected to Avos splinters, everyone was ready and facing her when she re-emerged. The Godslayer frowned like a child denied dessert. It is more fun when you are all surprised. Speak for yourself, Draus said. I prefer shootin people. Like I did you just now. A unique demise, Zein said. I thank you, Captain Draus. And I will return you the favor shortly. She regarded the rest of the cadre, and her eye froze on Denton. Denton? You are among these roughs? I did not expect you to be a member of this assault. Team-bonding is important, Denton said, her tone flat. Also: working with you has been miserable. Naturally, Zein nodded in acquiescence. Understandable. Alas, this is going to be a bitter experience, Denton. You may wear the colors, but you are not blade. No, Denton agreed. But the rest make up for it. Do they now? I see the Regular. I see Strixs inheritor. I see... She paused upon noticing Chambers. Youre still alive? She turned to AvoCevery Heaven past ninety percent, Metamind screaming at him to vent again. You kept him? I expected you to have eaten him by now. Yeah? Chambers said, left eyebrow raised, flames rising from his body. Well. I got a habit of growing on people. Like a rash. And then he invoked Fucktopia. A long lump of biomass snapped out from his palm. Casually, Zein cut it in half. Thousandhand looked unimpressed for a moment and then did a doubletake, head swiveling to stare at the severed member she just split in half. W-was that a penis? Did you just throw a cock at me? Chambers glared. Get fucked, you old sow. Thats for whispering messed up shit about my dad to me when we first me. I mean, who the fuck does that. Zein recovered from her shock and just shrugged. Me. Yeah. Fuck you. Why, Im so very old for you, child. A sneer escaped from the half-strand. Ive gotten hard to things you people wouldnt believe. A suffering squeak of Jaus escaped Draus replicas. Kaes exasperation flowed through the entire group through Avos splinters. Not him, Chambers said, throwing up his hands in sudden horror. The fact that he was lying made things worse. An actual glare had found its way onto Zeins face. Her eyes skewered Avo again. You should have eaten this one. Im going to hurt him. Badly. Do your worst, Avo said. He can take it. Chambers managed two nods before he froze and stared at Avo with a look of betrayal. So, Zein sighed, swinging her blade, granting Dice with a brief smirk. This is to be a day of new experiences. Consider it a performance review, Denton said. Denton! Zein said, seeming shocked. Was that actually a joke? Just an analogy. The ancient Godclad looked up and sighed. Three new experiences in one day. Wonderful. Wonderful. She turned and regarded the maelstrom. That keeps us contained, yes? Yeah, Avo said. Planning on loading in more echoes? No, Zein sighed. No. I will face you here. It will be more interesting that way. Arrogant, Avo taunted, snapping his fangs at her. Stalemated you alone. You humored me alone, Zein corrected. Shifted her posture, but no new echoes came. Instead, a building presence approached and noticed the hooked shadow of a fish swimming across golden currents, diving down to bury itself into the echo. And then, with a sudden shiver, Zein felt impossibly more material, more present, more whole. The glaive in her hand had vanished. In its place was a folded umbrellaCbut within its folds thundered something powerful. Something analogous to the progressing currents of time. You have laid a lure, and I have come, Zein said, declaring loudly. I have steppedCunwiselyCinto the future to face you. All of you. As myself. My true self. A soft smile played on her lips. Be all of you so honored. +If this talkin goes on for any longer, Im gonna shoot her.+ Draus cast. But before we begin, lets us make our bids, Zein said. A deal. You remember this, Avo. He fought the urge to groan. What do you want? Many things. What I want from you all is simple. She pointed to Draus. Defeat. She pointed to Dice. Teach. She pointed to Chambers. Castrate and defile. Cold fear filled the man. She pointed to the maelstrom. Encourage. She pointed to Avo and clenched her fist. Memories. The Low Masters... you stole a new warmind from them, did you not? Avo grunted. Hungers. The Hungers themselves, Zein threw her head back and cawed. Ah, what I wouldnt give to see those memories... Have some questions for you too, Avo said. About the Heaven of Truth. Noloths Ark. The Accords. And history. Things that actually happened. Not whats been told to us by the Guilds. And suddenly, her amusement was muted. The lines of her wrinkles deepened and she offered a nod. Very well. Knowledge bid for knowledge gained. That is the bargain. That is the bargain, Avo concurred. Zein exhaled and brought her umbrella to bear like a glaive. Leave a cycler empty. We do this to first death, as is tradition. As things stand, we will have three minutes before someone notices us. Things should be concluded before then. Avo? She was prompting him to vent. He was waiting for the fight to begin. Im in no danger, Avo said. Ah, she said. Coward. She taunted. And thenCfaster than anyone could reactCshe was upon them. Chapter 21-9 The Godslayer Chapter 21-9 The Godslayer Impossible. I am the Sword of Swords. I am the Sword of Swords! I am theC -Last words of Huen-Vai, God of War, Sword of Swords, shattered by the once-mortal Zein Thousandhand in single combat 21-9 The Godslayer Zein strode. Calamity followed. She lashed out first not with an umbrella or blade, but with a reaching hand, her fingers clenching around time itself. Before Kae could root her in place using her maelstroms directional anchoring; before her flesh was shattered, dissolved, or warped; before Dice could close an exchange, Zein cut. But not any of them. No. She used her manifested blade and parted existence itself. The rushing water of chronology was Partitioned into six branching streams. The future came as a roaring flood, and at a glance, none among the cadre stood affected. But Avo felt it. He felt his internalized Domain of Chrology strike him six separate times, each path rushing alongside the other, all spilling forth from a shared headwaterCZein herself. In an instant, the group was separated. The surrounding environment did not change. The rules of space and geometry continued to apply. Yet, each member of the cadre found themselves suddenly alone except for the shard of Avo buried in their Metaminds. Across parallel paths, Avo could feel his splintersChis companions. But they were all progressing along different tracks into the future, forced into singular duels. And across from them stood a single constant. One entity that stood immutable even as they all retaliated. Zein. Dice and Draus moved first, reflexes surging, their bodies instruments of violence and velocity. The former was faster, the icons of her empowerment flaring hot as she exploded across the lobby, clearing the ten meters between her and Zein in an instant. Draus engaged as the soldier she was. Replicas surged forward firstCa charge of mirrored pawns that was little different from a testing jab. Around them, glass began to creep across the environment, light painting new reflections into existence. She tried to vitrify Zein herself. It didnt work. A reverberation danced across Zeins sheathCher body now a chimera of matter and passing time. Zein strode and met Dices charge first. In a parallel moment, gunfire erupted from across the room, seeking to consume her. Thousandhand reacted to both: evading the latter by engaging the former. They fought them apart but they dueled her together. The intent behind her actions was clearCshe sought to prevail against them all as one, but also individually dominate them in the process. And with Avo linking each of their minds, even their separation across the paths would not deny them the truth of her might. Sound shattered as Dice greeted Zein. The girl was destruction in motion, each step a tremor, each dash faster than the last. But even as Avo wove skill into her derived from over a million templates, a separation made itself known. There were masterful combatants among Avos templates. Elites among elites across the martial spectrum. Merged together, what emerged was greater than the sum of their parts, a practitioner few could ever hope to match. But there was only one Godslayer. [WaitC] Abrels warning came a moment too late. As she was now, Zein was slower than Dice, but she moved with impossible position and alacrity, knowing exactly where to stand, where to strike, and where to move thereafter. Servos roared. The internal magnetic accelerators within Dices Railjumper fired. Where she was merely fast before, she was as if a rail-launched flechette accelerating by the exponent. The air around her rippled. Zein twisted, flicked, and rolled. She didnt stay in one placeCrushing on to meet Draus replicas now, her liquid blade weaving around her, deflecting a rainstorm of gunfire. By the time Avo invoked his Halt of the Passing, Dices leg coils had been severed clean and Thousandhand was upon the replicas, her temporal blade splitting into a thousand different strokes, parrying plunging lances of glass and sweeping munitions fired from hidden gun lines aside. [Get her back up,] Abrel said, the templates mind drifting to Dice. [And get the rest them toC] Zein shed an echo in her place as the Fardrifters Hell sought to bind her in chains. She steppedCand was suddenly between Draus replicas, her armor aglow across the right shoulder, kissed by blinding lances cast out from fusion burners across various reflections. Abrel sighed. [Alright. A bit too optimistic to hope that the Godslayer was just going to be leashed by your stasis so easily.] As she spoke, Avo constructed new legs for DiceCrebuilding her using his Haemokinesis. The girl had not stopped in the meantime, clawing furrows into the ground and launching her using her arms. It occurred to Avo that Zein could have cleaved her across the middle. Dices survival had been a deliberate decision on the Godslayers part. Chambers and Kae finally reacted by this point, and Denton was beginning to move. A rush of misshapen bioforms flooded the megablock lobby in one path, more creatures spawning with the spiking temperature. In another, Kae tried to bind Zein in placeConly to catch echoes instead. From each of their perspectives, the ancient Godclad looked as if she was fighting an invisible foe, her gleaming blade a whirlwind of motion, sparks, and impacts flashing upon its edge. But beyond all their paces were the Godslayer and Regular, two living weapons meeting each other in exchange for skill and strategy. Draus was a soldier at her core, and momentum and purpose guided each of her actions. Her replicas were thrown forth. Expendable pawns and fortifications both. They swung and shielded synchronously with her, mimicking each of her attacks perfectly. In this though, was weakness. Uniformity meant a shared counter or a singular flaw. Zein retaliated as the duelist she was, her blades cutting out in different strokes, her ontology unfurling forth as every strike or guard she could have made across the currents of time. Mirror-made swords descended, alive with thaumaturgy. Spatial reality parted in division folds beneath their fall. But whipping glaives of time rang against them in retort, saying: +Fool girl, I am every blow that could have been made across time, a foretelling in motion.+ No dialogue was joined. Draus simply fired another salvo from her Arsenalist, and it was multiplied across each of her replicas and reflections, positioned tactically to box Zein in. Rockets, particle beams, ferro-mag munitions, concussions, gauss flechettes, fusion burners, and more spilled out. But from Zein also came a mutual flood. Time slithered beneath her being, and a wave of counter-projectiles came sallying forth. Between Draus and Zein there was a stalemate. Between Chambers and Zein, bioforms splattered and died. A stray missile struck Dice but did nothing to slow her coming charge. A fusion unzipped a portion of Kaes maelstrom into steam and Avo had to drain a spike of terror from the Agnos mind to ensure her enduring focus. Zein was playing with them still. Sampling them one after another. This was exploitable hubris. Avo refrained from casting more of his splinters at Zein as she fought. With how cuts flowed out of her, how she drifted across the battled inexorable, as if the coming of the future, he studied her, and contemplated potential solutions. He had no idea how much Rend she accrued or how long she could endure. He had struggled against her for some time before his cadre entered the fray. But that was a secondary issue behind the fact that nothing they did seemed to affect her. There was a component of skill in all her miracles. Every strike she made was one she could have delivered normallyCalbeit all delivered at once. All the phenomena spawning forth from her being were past occurrences she survived; resurrections of remembered history externalized in these paths. If Avo was a gestalt of countless lives consumed, then Zein was a single life standing over countless years conquered: a testament of the many against the legend carved by one. Massist. Saintist. But Godclads both, and time-touched as well. He understood little of his new chronological capabilities before the senses they offered. Perhaps he needed to update his Frame with new canons for them to take effect, but considering how ingrained the Domain felt within himCSoul-deep and closest to his bloodCthere might be something more he could do. +Third canon,+ Zein said, a hum following her words. Her voice came from everywhere, but her cuts ceased in their entirety. +Be proud of yourself, children. You all fill my heart with competition today. Now I grace you in return.+ [There,+ Draus and her template pointed out at the same time. +Shes not slicin hits ahead of time anymore. Shes ahead of us now. Relative position change. Fixed vector; temporal. Move together. Ill suppress. Chambers: annoy. Kae: hold. DentonCbank-god shit. Dice: break. Avo: observe.+ And AvoCalong with the rest of the cadreCdid. Before, when she cut, her blows drifted forward like missiles launched from the then-present, striking the future. Now, she was past that and seemed unable to strike at them from behind. That begged the question if all her attacks were simply stored somewhere. Held and then unleashed. The same question applied to the rest of her inventory. The questions were slotted to later as Zein moved. And Avo immediately lost track of her. When next she reappeared, Chambers was plunging back into reality. Soulfire poured from his orifices, the backlash already in process. From him rose the steam of an extinguished flame and thousands of falling waspsCeach perfectly severed in half and split from their wings. Avo only learned this in retrospect. The sheath he built to support Chambers was gone as well. Destroyed in vessel and mind before he could react. An old fear flared in Avo. The bitter taste of inefficiency. The realization that you were slower, weaker, frailer, and softer than what you fought. Obsolescence. Living by ignorance or on borrowed mercy. But she doesnt know about me. Draus arced through the airCthe qualities of her being taking on traits of a smart-munition rocket as rings comprised of firing guns lit the air around her. Then, in a fractured moment in time, she faced the GodslayerCchampion against Regular, sword against gun. They were both warriors to the root, but as one chased seeking to relish in personalized slaughter while the other dashed, content to achieve her goals at any distance, their natures deviated by a measure of ego. Zein was a legend, and with each did her esteem grow. Draus was a frame of economy. Purpose-built for war with little want for anything besides the battle and victory. A shared merriment united them at that moment of moments. But its departure came as Draus AcceleroCstrained beyond stabilityCdied against her spine. The Regular fell in pieces. Severed guns descended with dismembered limbs. A seizure took her as her nervous system collapsed. She found herself staring at a bloodstained pillar of pale plascrete left buried in her gut, impaling her to the ground. Avos sheath splattered down next to hers, mangled and beaten by Thousandhand in the following instant. Little more than heads attached to mutilated torsos, Avo hissed as he worked to mend them both. Dice was coming forward again, an avatar of war and might. With each heartbeat, she grew terrifyingly faster. But that was relative to the rest of them. Zein would act first against her. Always. [Well that was bullshit,] template-Draus said, filling in for her broken counterpart.Avo mentally grunted in agreement, annoyed at how Zein was beginning to fulfill her promises. [Im not defeated. Just fucked up. Stick me back together. Im gonna blow my Meldskin next time.] +Yes! Yes! Not like a mindless dog! You have more than that.+ When Avo next reacted, he found all his remaining sheaths destroyed, one of his claws buried abdomen deep up Chambers posterior, Kaes mind a whirl of stress as she clutched echo after echo but never her true target, and Zein advising Dice while the latter tore from place to place, her sheath moving with velocity of an exponentially accelerating railgun. +Avo...+ Chambers whimpered, the unimaginable agony he was in unable to stop his lustaway from triggering over and over while he tried to burn his body back together. +ICI think she shoved the shit I was about to shit back up into my stomach u-using your hand.+ Through the network of splinters, Kae shuddered and gagged. Her miracles expressed her disgust metaphysically. The maelstrom shivered and stumbled. +Oh, gods.+ Zein materialized before the Agnos. +No, Kusanade! No! Do not falter! Rise! Stand! Ignore the hand I buried in the wretchs rectal passage.+ Blinked past-throwing a roundhouse. Zein called after her: +Too much force. Too much force! Pursue! Pursue! Dont joust.+ Back to Kae. +The city has failed you. Your order has shamed itself and abandoned you. The ones who would have been your Overclan shamed and broke you. You can be like them in this instant. Or you can stand defiant! Unsheathe your nature!+ The elder Godclad was likely going to continue, but the ground beneath her turned to bubbling liquor. A second later, Denton was limbless as well, staring up at the ceiling, expression entirely unchanged. +Damn you, Denton,+ Zein said, standing over her, mind devoid of any particular rancor. +I was speaking to the children.+ They glaive just stared. +Theyre not listening.+ +Ah. As children often do.+ And she then was behind Dice, glaive falling just as the girl began to turn. The future stood plain before Avo. Without their full manifestations, she could continue breaking them down. With, and they would reveal themselves to the district, and defeat the purpose of this exercise. Still, the powers she possessed were more fundamental than theirsCand Avo was only capable of perceiving her trail in the aftermath. More than skill, she was Godclad from a bleaker age. One who made her name by cutting the divines down when she was still a mortal, though one not so mere. She has an absolute advantage. All things flow along times river. But sophonts think. And all minds are governed by memory. And ignorance. Cut the focus of your cadre. Hide yourself within the girls body. Shell come close. And shell believe that shes won. And then well share with a memoryCand experience that will mark her as kindred to the Hungers. A thought manifested in Avos mind. A desperate scheme. He kept it close to himself on impulseChiding his final bid from the cadre. Trickles of blood flowed up into Dices armor without her knowledge, and suddenly Zein was there again, smile wide, glaive raised, triumph at hand. Then, Avo detonated the thoughtwaves of his splinters as his awareness melted into the falling edge of Zeins blade. Chapter 21-10 A Betrayal Unremembered Chapter 21-10 A Betrayal Unremembered There have been gods of knowledge, gods of wisdom, gods of intellect, gods of creation, gods of innovation, gods of technology, but an overarching god of thoughts, of minds, of memory? Those are few and far between, and their faithful are usually killed before they can ascend from their cradle. There are multiple theories as to why this is. The most supported among these is that the pantheons simply distrust something that could alter the fabric of worship. Picture this: What do you do when you offer a ritual and praise to a god? You think of it, of course. You believe it. You conceive of a lore of a mythology. Of what is canon and not. And, if this can be twisted, then what sacrifice will remain untainted? Yes. See? You can have gods that help you create. You can have gods that help you remember. You can have gods that influence knowledge in various ways, but no pantheon would ever seek something that would undercut them, and no god would trust another with the keys to their succor. What then, about the mystery of vivianite? The loci? The crystals born on bodies left vacant after the minds passing? A pattern of symbology blending into the tapestry, perhaps. Or a miracle made law within our world by some happenstance of a bygone age. Ultimately, all ontologics built to change the rules of mind are impotent today. The final blow cast by the Chainbreaker, Jaus to preserve us from the machinations of Noloth, seeking to encroach into our thoughts and manifest the final chains of eternal slavery for all that are burdened with awareness. And finally, with Nether layered upon our world, a grand capstone has finally been laid. The solution to the problem of minds wasnt to turn from it. That cedes the right of power to someone elseCsomething the gods and ancients learned well. No. What we have now is a democratization. Open source miracles for civilization, against civilization, by civilization. Perhaps it is not ideal for all, but the balance of structure speaks for itself. For even disharmony is preferable to being ruled by tyrants beyond consequence. -High Agnos Ossam Hariruda on Heavens of Mind and the Nether 21-10 A Betrayal Unremembered You areC Not alone. What? Interesting. I see you, Ignorance. I see you, Unmind. Anathema of Awareness. What are you? I am a liar; holding to the pretense of matter, while being not. I am time-flowing, culture-bearing, history-seeding, and butchery-spared. Mine is the ichor that mingles with chronology. My scales are the coils tightened when I am sacrificed to history. I am the stray. The survivor. I am what dwells within you. I am what soars without. Your base self has bathed in the blood of my cause-kin. I am linked of shape with you. ...How are we speaking? How do you see me? There can be only one truth to this. You have a warmind. One just like me. As Zein was not aware of you, I too am blind. But you are blind to me as well. But our structures are joined. There are so few shaped like us. How? You are not the first to claim spoils from the Hungers. There are others. Ones who do not even know of their blessings. And some who do. Are you a dragon? One still whole? I am to the Encoilers what you are to the likes of men. Our purpose is one and the same. Our design, one and the same. This is chance, but the layers of our symmetry are resonant beyond amusement. Hm. What happens now? Surrender. Mine? Ours. Ours is Ignorance. Not Forgotten. Not Oblivion. Ignorance cannot survive awareness. We are soon to recede. I will return to my dormancy. You will settle where you are rooted in the ghouls mind. But before you leave, I am curious: yours is inimical to a pattern-fixeds mind. Yet you subsist. Yet you have gained awareness. Not sure how either. Might be many things. Or perhaps just one. Your conceptor. The Strix. The traitor of Noloth. He has blessed both of us. Walton? By his means do we speak. Left otherwise, the tumor of consciousness does not become me. In service traded was my nature changed. And now I see you. I feel you. And before our parting, a [REPETITION] can be materialized through trade. Former and future. Conceptor and concept. The resonance sings in this act. Dont understand. Consider history. Consider a pattern rebuilt for the past is lost. But demands time, and our passage is short. Not so different from Zein. Unsurprising. But my false-mind was not nourished of her, but of her hatchling. I was a thing of theft even before my awareness. The High Seraph? Titles. I know her only by aftermath. What she has done. How she strikes the waters in rippling patterns. You will understand this soon, once the bargain is made. Havent agreed yet. Speak first. We are of a flow. And you have my prey inside you. Everything thats needed. I will have you remember how to plant eggs. You can grow more cyclers this way. Breed them in frames to direct the flow of time. It is something you want. And you? What do you want? Glad you had fun, Chambers muttered. My ass still feels funny. +Because you fused one of my fingers to your rectal walls,+ Avo replied. The half-strand closed his eyes. +I think Im just gonna kill myself too.+ Need to talk, Avo said glaring at Zein. He pulled mem-data over from Maru and monitored the approaching Exorcists. Oversec dispatch had two Paladins en route as well. Both of the Third Sphere, thirty-five seconds to arrival. Got things I can tell you about the Hungers if youre interested. But need to ask you about the past. About the Ark of Noloth. About the Ladder itself. And the pathsC Ah, yes, yes, yes, Zein waved him off. Currents snaked through her ontology. He suspected she was already living countless variations of the same conversation. Come. Show this old woman back to your place of respite. We must be away from her. I especially. She cocked her head, looking atCand more likely throughCa nearby wall. Naekos Heaven is no longer partially manifested. Our cover is broken. My daughter will likely soon be groping for us. I must teach you how to hide. In the paths? Avo asked. she nodded. Avo shifted his mind over to his cadre, speaking to them internally, as they came to a consensus. +We''re not taking her to the Enclave,+ Draus said. +In fact, theres plenty of shit I dont think we should let her know about. At all. She ain''t trustworthy. Shes been playin around at us. Keepin information away. Usin us as pawns and fightin meat. Hells, if we didn''t put up a better fight, we would be little more than playthings right now. Well, again in Avos case.+ +Good that I protected us,+ Avo replied, dissolving old wounds inflicted on his ego before they could flare. +Yeah. But we might wanna figure out how to snuff her next time. For good.+ +Shes like the nu-cat,+ Dice added, her mind replaying moments from the fight. Inside, her inability to break Zein in any way left her perturbed, like something was wrong with the world. +Her attention jumps from one thing to another. Never stays still.+ +Thats half the reason were still alive,+ Draus concurred. +She might be the single greatest person to ever pick up a bladeCbut shes fuckin insane. And a loose canon. Does whatever she wants to whoever she wants. Whoever she can, anyway.+ {Oh, you have no idea,} Calvino said, his words and long-suffering sigh directed through the group via Avo himself. {Now that our daily dose of pointless violence and mass destruction has concluded, why dont we move on to more conducive things? Like discussing the metaphysical sinkhole that Avo just emerged from. Terrible place, honestly. Or maybe what this Heaven of Truth actually is. Im sure this will be a perfectly agitating conversation. Just like all the others Ive had with Operative Thousandhand.} Looking between the other members of the cadre, Kae bit her lip and tried not to feel bad. +She was... not so rough with me.+ +Probably didnt consider you proper prey,+ Avo replied. And the Agnos was glad of that. +I did my best to hold her in place, but she wasC+ +Did fine,+ Avo said. Now that his Conflagration could be extinguished, other opportunities presented themselves. +Can make you more prepared next time. Or take away the fear. Talk about that later. That and new improvements for us. Had a good harvest before Zein arrived.+ The sirens drew closer. Zein tapped the ground with her umbrella. Any longer, and I bring you with me. Chambers chanced a brief glare at the crone. +Man, if that fight went any longer, I would have rashed her ass with my Fucktopia. It would have been fuck-city for that old sow. Population: me and her. See how she likes jumping across time while shitting babies from her face.+ Zein probably had countermeasures to ward that off as well. And even if she was affected, the prospect of getting hammered to death by time-hopping homunculi was somehow even less enticing than taking a sword to the gut. +George Washington,+ Avo said. +Can hint at our operations in the Maw. She thinks a lot of herself. Not so much for us. We should make it seem like we only just infiltrated the Paladins. Make it sound harder than it is. Exploit her arrogance.+ For some reason, the scheme made him think of Zeins umbrella again. He was filled with an instinctual urge to break the item. Captain Draus, Denton said as she fixed her glitching holo-tie. Please open a passage to the George Washington. I think that will be an adequate place for us to debrief each other. And discuss other matters. Heeding the suggestion, Draus glared down at a shard of glass beside her feet and a mirror assembled behind her, fragments fusing together before flashing with a unnatural shine, turning from reflection to passage. Ah, yes. The Low Masters precious abode. Zein threw her head back and barked a laugh. Even their most hallowed of temples stolen from higher powers. How pitiful. Hearing Zeins words, Dentons posture shifted and her silver-white eyes snapped to Avo. {Theres something we can use here,} the glaive said, her message forming in his Neurodeck. {You mentioned you claimed the Famine of Peace earlier. That a simulation of him resides in your consciousness.} Avo offered the answer by drawing Peaces template to the forefront, the Low Master a raging shell of curses and ire. [Dont you fucking dare you cuntless monster. I am a priest of the city-eternal. I amC] +Nothing,+ Avo replied, silencing his template. +Nothing but what I will use to amuse Zein. Lead her on.+ He considered Dices words. Nu-cat indeed. Nu-cats and ghouls werent so different in some ways. The former killed out of curiosity and instinct. The latter was motivated by more than a bit of near-human cruelty. One after another, the cadre began to filter past the luminous glass. Avo deliberately waited until it was but he and Zein left, preparing to bury his hooks in the elder Godclad via a strange olive branchCa mutual foe turned absolute captive. Shifting waves of light danced across the lips of the megablocks shredded roof. Zein made to cross the threshold; Avo joined her. Their shadows painted them in a strange silhouette: a woman a bit less than two meters tall dwarfed by a monster just under three. As they passed through the glass and drifted into a plane of shifting tessellation, Avo cast out the lure and shifted to a game of subtle diplomacy. Peace manifested from the condensation of phantoms, screaming up at Zein in an impotent rage. She inhaled sharply through her nose and turned to look up at Avo. Truly? A stream of epithets coming from the template made the moment almost comical. +Yes,+ Avo said. +I thought you might want to have a talk with an old consang first. Catch up on the times.+ She closed her eyes and grinned. You are a precious pest, Avo. Pest? Not Little Dagger? She shook her head. I can hardly call you that now. Daggers are to be wielded by another. And in the time of my absence, that has ceased to be the case for you. Chapter 21-11 The Paths of Futures Broken (I) Chapter 21-11 The Paths of Futures Broken (I) Veylis Avandaer: Father. Jaus Avandaer: Veylis? Is there something you need? Veylis Avandaer: I wish to speak to you about our undertaking. The safeguards we are building into the future. Jaus Avandaer: The paths? Veylis Avandaer: Yes. While I have been building the superstructure, I have encountered half-formed simulations. Jaus Avandaer: They trouble you. Veylis Avandaer: They trouble me. I have seen developments that disturb me and threaten the fruition of our goals. Jaus Avandaer: Hm. You are not alone in this. I. Your mother. [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] have all encountered... hallucinations. Undesired generations created by the system. The paths feed off the world and everything it can detect. The Chrono-Spatial array is a complex mechanism. And an intrusive one. More likely it is reading patterns from our actions and generating potential outcomes from the decisions. But that is all that they are. Probabilistic generations assembled from an accelerated reflection of our world. Veylis Avandaer: This was more. It was clear. There was a logical sequence of events. I saw an intact narrative come together. Jaus Avandaer: Was Naeko involved? Veylis Avandaer: No. He is affected thereafter in the simulations, but only as a bystander. Father, I am not using the paths to generate probabilistic outcomes for my personal relationships. Jaus Avandaer: It wouldnt be unnatural. It would beC Veylis Avandaer: Father.The? source of this content n/o/v/(el)bi((n)) Jaus Avandaer: I tease no more. So. Tell me about what you saw. Veylis Avandaer: We finish the Ladder. We root the paths to it. The chronologies are locked into placeCbut there is one that all others rest upon. One that is made of material before all others. In it, you demand that all Godclads surrender their Frames back to gods. Or something like them. Castrated of desire, our new wardens mirror the minds ruling the polities, and we are made trophies instead of cattle. Nourished. Pleasured. But worthless. Powerless. Unable to grow. Jaus Avandaer: ... Veylis Avandaer: Father? Jaus Avandaer: And... how did you uncover this sequence? Veylis Avandaer: Come. I will show you. -Conversation between Jaus and Veylis Avadaer, 4 months before the dissolution of Noloth and banishment of the Hungers 21-11 The Paths of Futures Broken (I) I must say that among all the Famines of Noloth, you are myC Zein paused and took a moment to think. Second least favorite. Just second? Chambers said, cringing at the simulated form of Peace. Every word out of this guys mouth is fuck, cunt, sow, mongrel, or some other curse or slur. Rust-licking half-strands got a mouth that belongs to the gutters. Who the hells is worse than him. Joy, Zein stated simply. I could never stand the crying. The interior of the George Washington''s command nexus was an interplay between light and dark. The walls had been made transparent, revealing the plane of darkness beyond. Coils of trailing ink and flecks of drifting hue clashed ceaselessly with neon interfaces and flickering holograms streamed from Metaminds and consoles. The cadre had spread across the room, holding each of the corners but never straying far from a mirror. They all had their eyes locked on Zein, waiting for her to uncoil into another attack. Relaxed though she seemed, an air of violence clung to the Godslayer. She facing out the window now. Staring into the black and watching the others from the window. Avo stood next to her, the ghosts manifesting Peaces projection flowing from his mind. Behind, Chambers sat atop the risen throne, a constructed map of Scale hovering above him. Kae had formed a seat from the smart-matter, and Denton was just behind her. Tavers, Draus, and Dice held to their own corner, ghosts wisping between them in private conversationCone that Avo remained apart from. More than once, Thousandhand peeked at the aged squire, as if an old killer recognizing another. But instead of respect or acknowledgment, Thousandhand merely frowned while Tavers kept her Hellgun close by. Avo used Peace as a puppet to recount his visit to the Deep Nether, elaborating on how he passed through when materializing the LGI core using Kares memories, how he evaded the Hungers and the Low Masters before ambushing them, his invasion of the city eternal, and finally meeting the Doublethinkers thereafter. Prior conversations and conflicts flowed in condensed scenes, and all came to an end when Avo lept into the Hungers upward-spilling wound. Across the entire recounting, a smug smile of satisfaction became Zein, her amusement growing greater with each offending act the ghoul performed. Ah, you''ve claimed quite the prize, Avo. Quite the prize. She tried to prod at Peace using her umbrella, but the phantoms merely parted while the Low Master snarled. +Don''t touch me, you fucking cunt. you fucking sow.+ More curses, more rage; no matter. One of my best templates, Avo agreed, speaking as if Peace wasn''t there. Much greater insight into traumas. Wards are unmatched as well. Enhanced my cadre. Avo drew from Benhata and Abrels social engineering experience to hide his obvious intent. Could help you as well. Trade favors. Zein laughed. Digging for an advantage even now? Trying to get me to betray myself. I like it, I like it a lot. Very, very, very proactive. She patted him on the arm in a rather grandmotherly fashion. The casual show of affection stood out of place from the brutality she inflicted mere hours prior. He has also revealed to you the means to create additional Anathemas, yes? Like that which you bear? Leering at Zein, the Famine of Peace scoffed. Hear that, you fucking sow? The truth. The truth of your reckless hedonism. The truth of why I always despised youCsince the first day you came, blade drawn behind your lie-spitter of a lover, hand over the bastard-lump swelling to become your butcher of a daughter! This is not the dream. But what do you know of dreams? Attack dog? What do you know of dreams, you creature of base pleasure. And there it was. A twitch. A shift in her eyes. A dangerous gleam in Zeins expression. Twelve meters across the room, Draus rose, her arm shifting as the glass around them began to shimmer. She tasted the scent first. The threat of violence. The building of tension. +Hold,+ Avo said. He then played his part, hissing in outrage at the Low Masters template, creating imagined tortures and traumas, peeling the scabs from the mans body, and drowning him in Lucilles memories. It took drastically resequencing Peaces mind to make him react with pain, but the effect was more than worth it. Zeins face cooled from a thundercloud of coming rage to a cold winter breath of hatred. More, she breathed. Make him feel it more. And in that moment, Avo grasped her nature betterChow to provoke her. But also what her Heaven lacked. The Fisher That Wasnt could fling constructs across time or place Zein ahead of all others on the pace of chronology. But it hadnt detected him at first. His appearance had surprised her, just like back at the Trident, just like she didnt know the nature of his templates. Perhaps she thought they were full copies of minds. In a way they were, but their lack of will must have gone unnoticed. Regardless, this was his absolute advantage. She might have the full picture and the ability to manipulate and foresee coming events, but he could peer into minds and systems with unmatched efficiencyCand twist them to his own ends. Between them, another duel had just begun. One that Zein didnt even know about. Howling curses sputtered out of Peace, his countenance a visible canvas of agony. As his suffering continued, Zeins fingers tapped her umbrella. Dice and Draus were still, the nu-cat at their feet laying on its side, trying to understand why the people were so tense. Beside them, Tavers checked the condition of her armor and lined a Phys-Sim trajectory to Zeins head. Kaes fingers were digging into her arm and Denton turned off her holo-tie pre-emptively. The only one who remained relatively loose was Chambers, who only acknowledged the situation through Ghost-Link. +Fuck it. Im game for round two. She moves and Ill rash her. Sorry Kae.+ +No,+ the Agnos said, squeezing her arms to get her nervousness under control. +We might need that this time.+ Making Peace wail was fun for Avo as well, but he kept his eyes locked on Zein the entire time. Full minds. I dont enslave them. Hold them back from talking. Truth is usually more useful. The truth, Zein said, Peaces wailing expression splashed over her faceplate. Is that what that was supposed to be? The blessing of having over a million other minds simulated inside your consciousness ensured you had a response to almost any trap question. His truth. Tells me who he is. Shows me his weakness. The Godslayer nodded. She tapped her umbrella three more times. But would you agree? That Jaus wouldnt want this? She finally looked away from Peace and met his stare. Only knowledge of Jaus is tinted by myth. Comes through Peace. And I dont care about that. I dont care about Jaus. Im just embarrassed by you. The silent anger inside Zein broke and she did a double take. Embrassed? By your weakness, Avo elaborated. The disbelief in Zein grew. As did the incredulity among the cadre. +Avo,+ Tavers said, mind tight with anxiety. +Know what Im doing,+ Avo replied. +Probably.+ Dice said nothing. She merely picked her nu-kitten up and placed her beside the glass. The small animal mewed at her in confusion, but Draus understood. Keep the cat away from the fighting. Told you about my encounter with the Hungers, Avo continued. Memories spilled out from him, manifesting as a collage of scenes to infuse his words with emphasis. Met the Doublethinkers at the end. Begged me to free them. Found them pathetic. To fail their own power. Their own idealization. He let out a slow hiss and glared down at Zein. Expected better of you. Taunted by a Low Master. And surrendering to the future instead of shaping it. Are you an ephemeral or a Godclad. Zeins eyes were unblinking now, her thoughtstuff impossibly still. Avo kept going. I shape things with my power. Opportunities. Circumstances. Outcomes. I struggle for what I want. I engineer possibility. You have it as part of your Soul. But no. Kares death holds significance. Thats acceptance. Thats surrender. Thats human. Avo released a mocking laugh while Peace began to whimper for mercy, his mind so different he was another person. But maybe I dont understand. Maybe Im just ignorant. Said you were going to tell me about the paths. The future. How Im too loud. Well. Suppose this is a good point to start then: why must you sacrifice the Paladin? But Zein didnt speak. Instead, her fingers tightened around her parasol. Chapter 21-12 The Paths of Futures Broken (II) Chapter 21-12 The Paths of Futures Broken (II) Fate is a fickle thing. Even in years of yore, the gods of destiny and the weavers of preordination were not omnipotent. Such is the great weakness of all Heavens, after all, for the conceptualization of all-knowingness remains beyond even the genius of the minds. And no god has ever managed to reach such heights, though their ambitions drive them to seek it. Despite this, limited hyper-awareness is possible, and the secret to manufacturing prophecy is quite simple, in fact. Maintenance. The ultimate insurance towards seeing your desired outcome made manifest is maintenance. Conceptualize the future. Create a subreality mirroring the world that is and allow it to progress with assumed variables. Designate essential characters, events, objects, locations to form your miracles around. Then, use time itself as a buffer against any intruding elements. Often, when something happens makes all the difference between what follows, and a threat displaced often is a threat neutralized. Indeed, when built correctly, this does not even produce much entropy. Take the Augurshields afforded to the FATED, for instance. A slight imbuement of probability to ensure all the safety they need, protecting them from ill fortune and or stray bullets. The difficulty of creating such a Heaven, however, loops back to matters of complexity, and informational deficiency. For even the supposed gods of foreknowledge could not predict the Godsfall. For what did they know of Jaus? For how could they have noticed his machinations with their sacrifices already tainted with Ignorance? Hence, when building a Heaven of Destiny, you must not be confused. You are not creating an omnipotent system. That is the illusion at play. Something beyond the demands of mortal ken. But what you must demonstrate is nonetheless difficult, for are tasked with the functional manifestation of a dynamic subreality capable of detecting, intercepting, and removing variables you deem intrusive. The passing qualification is simple: you each will select a specific tree from an enclosed biome, and at years endCor when you believe your design is readyCwe will release swarms of gnarlflies infested with barkrot into the ecosystem. Ensure the survival of your tree. You will be getting a list of pairable Domains. This Heaven may not exceed the demands of a Second Sphere Liminal Frame. This Heaven may not be paired with another Heaven. This Heaven may not interface with outside technologies or machinery beyond the enclosed biomes. You will each be given a stipend of a million sacrifices, and should the need arise, you may officially request more. ...Oh, and a contract of their choosing to any of you that successfully completes the project faster than the current record holder: [2 WEEKS, 1 DAY, 14 HOURS, and 35 SECONDS - KAE KUSANADE (FIFTH KNOWING)] Good luck. -Agnos Yue Reason-Bearer to her novitiates 21-12 The Paths of Futures Broken (II) Would you, Zein said, her words colder than the kiss of a blade, like to learn about the Paths? I believe that was something you desired to learn about. The miracles of her Heaven poured forth from her ontology, building as a golden pool around her being. A weave of rippling chronology slowly encroached, filling the command nexus, and with every inch did tension rise. Now, more than ever before, Avo felt the threat that Zein posedChow much harm she could inflict in a heartbeat. He danced on the edge of manipulation and provocation. Draus cast him a thought and her words echoed across to the cadre. +Careful. Im ready for this, but Kae and Tavers need out if were about to find out whos gonna light the wick. Passages are ready. Be sure about your words.+ Avo grunted. He stood on treacherous terrain, but he needed an edge. Playing passive meant surrendering KareCand all self-determinationCto Zein. His understanding of her deeper nature remained blurred, but it was becoming increasingly clear that unless one posed a requisite martial or metaphysical threat to Zein, she would regard them as more playthings than people. This was a dangerous game he played, but passivity would betray his own actualizationCand what he wanted for the city. Besides, it was Zeins nature to battle. Learning how to direct her focus would be invaluable for the future. Yes, Avo finally replied. Going to show me now? Use it to explain why you have to kill my Paladin. Inside his mind, Kare shivered, uncertain how to feel about the ghouls possessiveness, terrified of what the Godslayer intended. Among other things. Zeins face took on a curious quality, rage flattening to something inquisitive. Seeking. Your Paladin. Truly, you are Walton''s child. All he could infiltrate, he thought to be his, caring nothing for someone else''s opinion. Or will. She chuckled. A commendable belief. And true. She released her umbrella, and it fell from existence, vanishing in departing threads. Lifting her now-emptied hand, she extended it in greeting, expecting him to grasp it. His claws were large enough to wrap around her forearm twice over, but still, he committed to the awkward action, thinking himself prepared for whatever may follow. As his splinters were scattered across the face of Idheim and his original body in the enclave, the only ones truly at risk of cessation were his cadre, but with how Zeins eyes were locked solely on him, he doubted she would strike at any of them as a means of retribution. It ultimately didnt fit her behavior. She was a duelist before a Godclad, and she met her challengers thusly. Nervousness and tension exploded through his templates. Entire portions of his mind rose in parliamentary whole, some begging him to refrain and to stand back, others merely quiet, awaiting what happened next. +I hate it when she does that shit,+ Draus growled, thinking back to how Zein just threaded information from the paths into them before their attempt on Mirrorheads life. Is this supposed to be what happens? Avo asked. It is an unfinished scene. One Im currently scripting. And she said no more. Avo prodded further. Why? Why does this moment need to happen? To provoke something between the GuildsCa temporary accord and a mutual cleansing. As Highflame has Chivalrics to purge, so too does the Overclan of the Ori have corruption it must uncover. Think of it. Think of the moment. The resonance. A daughter of the Ori-turned-Paladin giving her life for a prisonerCa disgraced Highflame Instrument. Her father and uncle will be distraught of course. But pliable towards new... persuasions. Avo considered the scene she was painting, and his templates filled in the details. Most were confused, but between Banhata, Abrel, and Elegant-Moon, a potential picture came together. This was about politicsCmost likely meant to provoke a moment of uneasy peace. Kare Kitzuhada just proved to be the most effective sacrifice on the altar. Her worth came in three parts: she was a Paladin; she was of a major Ori clan; and she was related to Shotin Kazahara. For the first, it would spark her comrades back to war footing. Scale would likely be locked down, the other Godclads banished and viewed as outright adversaries. [Making sure that no one can get close to the Gatekeeper,] Benhata theorized. Then, the Ori themselves would have shame to match Highflame. With the spearheads of each major alliance undone so publicly, there were good odds of a restructuring happening. A removal of problematic elements. The ones replacing them thereafter would likely be more to Zeins liking. Especially if she wanted to engineer a prolonged period of disorganized peace. If Avo had to guess, this was a delaying strategy to get more of her schemes in place and ensure some kind of advantage when the Ladder returned. Finally, there was Shotin Kazahara. His rage and retribution would be certain in the aftermath, but even Kare wasnt sure why Zein wanted to use him in such a manner. Planeshift was a volatile enough character on his own. Perhaps the death of his niece would make him reckless and willing toC [Vulnerable,] Elegant-Moon whispered, her mind glittering with fascination. [She wants him to make choices so severe he would otherwise never commit to them. She plans to disfigure his heart and replace its driving motion with her hand. Maybe she wishes to recruit him. Him and the Ambassador.] On the throne, Chambers eyes swung from place to place. Im completely fucking lost again. Whys the druggie wanna kill the glasser again? Peace, Avo answered, testing the waters. The thinning of Zeins lips told him he was right. He fed his conclusions to his cadre through his Splinters and made a show of addressing them directly. This is supposed to be an engineered moment of armistice. Disarray will grip both Guilds. Very similar kinds of disarray. Old factions will be replaced. And the sacrifice of an Ori to protect a Gold will strike at the heart of the conflict. It will shame the Guilds in a way they couldnt ignore. Just as he had struck at Zein with words she couldnt turn aside from. There was meant to be a way to things. A foundational concept. To say that she was a coward and bending before the world was to claim all she was but a lie. The same thing applied to the Guilds. Saintists and Massist were supposed to be at war. The war of all wars. Eternity was at stake. Utopia. But being forced to see the narrative break within the halls of Scale? For who was friend and foe to be so muddled from the act committed? That struck at a civilizations heart. But there was just one thing Avo had to say about that: I can make this worse. I can make your plan better. And we dont need to waste an asset. Oh? Zein asked, surfacing from ire to curiosity once more. And what can you add that I have not already accounted for? Arrogance. Arrogance and self-assuredness. For all Zeins skills, she was really too stubborn. Ever the warrior, she treated her sandbox as a mechanism to deliver her outcomes and situations in the most direct ways possible: shock and blood. Avo had nothing against violence, but the craft that defined himCthat was his fathers legacy was one of subtle betrayals. Youre looking only ahead. Just the future. You forget about history. History? Zein asked. Finally, Avo turned to Kae and let his excitement run over to her. The Agnos was confused for a heartbeat, but when the rest of his thoughts arrived, her eyes widened, and she understood what he intended. There is a unique opportunity before us, Avo elaborated. One that can achieve the false-peace you want. And more. One that allows her revenge to be sated. And her name to be made just again in society. A beat passed. Threads of gold drew taut around Zein as her brows furrowed. Then she saw. Then she remembered. Ah. The Trident. The information you stole that day. Yes, Avo said. There are Paladin killers still unpunished. DRongos soldiers. Know where they are. Can access the sleeper identities theyre hiding under. Track them. Take them. Use them. It will all make for a better design. A more calculated approach. As he finished speaking, Zein mulled on his words, let out a small breath, and nodded. No. The future washed over them again. Chapter 21-13 The Disagreement Chapter 21-13 The Disagreement Veylis Avandaer: Why? Jaus Avandaer: Veylis, listenC Veylis Avandaer: No. Do not use your rhetoric on me. I am your daughter, not your enemy. Tell me why. Only why. Tell me why you see to cast us back in chains. Jaus Avandaer: That is not what I''m doing. You know this. You can see that? Veylis Avandaer: Can I? Father, you are rebuilding a god! A god of such sophistication. A god with past pantheons imbued. That Gatekeeper is the very thing we all sacrificed so much to destroy. Eons. Eons lost. Trillions upon trillions of lives delivered unto them, their hunger unslaked. Geniuses, icons, visionaries, heroes, and champions all rendered little more than sacrifices. For nothing. I showed you what I witnessed in the paths. I have shown you what Ive seenCthe unspeakable calamities that will follow. And still. And still, you choose this? Jaus Avandaer: Veylis, please. It is good that you have shownC Veylis Avandaer: Enough. I am not mother. You cannot turn me from sense with whispered words of passion and nothingness, a calculated hand on my shoulder! We have seen the horror. You and I. We have seen it. So why do you choose blindness? Why do you choose to ignore the ruination that this will bring? Jaus Avandaer: It is only a possibilityC Veylis Avandaer: One that manifests time and time and time again. Jaus Avandaer: My duty to our futureCto existence itself is too great. Greater than even your fears, Veylis. I trust you. But you have seen the other roads as well. We are trapped. If the power of gods rests in the hands of humanity, then we will fall to chaos. We will fall. War between the cultures is inevitable. And the Ladder offers to much. Too much for man to resist. We need to be controlled. Veylis Avandaer: ...Of that, I think we are agreed. But not by a thing. By ourselves. By each individual triumphing over their own follies and weaknesses. Foundationally, then mentally, and finally spiritually. Our forefathers were debased because they fell to their animal natures. But you can show the rest what it means to be worthy. Letting a god cradle us as pathetic whimpering infants is foolishness, father. Hubris. To see you succumb to stubbornness and delusion is... Jaus Avandaer: To let things stay as is ensures we stand apart. Ensures that the cultures remain broken and that the tyranny within ourselves will triumph. How can we talk about being worthy when we are failable? When the lure to make the world perfect for usCand only usCcan be materialized. At the cost of everyone else. Veylis Avandaer: But our natures can be overcome. Triumphed against. We can resist. We can triumph. And when we reach the precipice of self-mastery, we can reach down and pull the rest up with us. But If we give away our Heavens, if we surrender our FramesC Jaus Avandaer: Then we spare ourselves the risk of succumbing to our very naturesC Veylis Avandaer: Father, you are being irrational. Driven by fear. The Hungers attempt on your life has shaken you from the rightful path. Jaus Avandaer: Its not just them. The others. They cannot endure this. Veylis Avandaer: ...I can resolve them. If that is what you wish. Jaus Avandaer: No! No. I do not... I am twisted by the fact that if I do not control my fellow humans, we will turn on each other when the Ladder is formed. As if apes! Dogs! Upon each other! What worth is all my worthless prattle when power provides such pleasure? When power makes whores of men and woman alike! Betraying the promise! Betraying the dream! Veylis Avandaer: They can be corrected. Order can be enforced. Jaus Avandaer: Your solution, then, is tyranny to ward off tyranny? Veylis Avandaer: No. I am not a tyrant. I am not afraid of the rabble, of the unworthy. But we are the masters. And they, the fools. I love you father, but I see the difference in us now. I always thought us most similar, but today, mothers teachings have shown me things you refuse to face. The gods cannot save us. The minds broke existence. They were the reason for this fault; they could not even save themselves. And [REDACTED] still seeks them for a reckoning. No. There is only one end to this. One way a modicum of utopia can be realized, and that is if all people rise beyond the limits of their potential and claim self-mastery. Divinity is a thing that should be achieved. This I learned from you. From mother. From those who walked with us on this path. From the masters of the void. We claimed power, and then we understood it and refused its addictions. But giving it back... we will not have a chance to ever decide our own will again. Jaus Avandaer: Veylis. You ask too much of people. You ask too much of me. Veylis Avandaer: No. I ask of them what I have asked myself. And it is as you once told me when I was but a child: how do you kill the fears of one who has known only shadows? Jaus Avandaer: ... Veylis Avandaer: You drown them in the light. Jaus Avandaer: Veylis. We have seen the light. And despite my fondest hopes, we remain ugly. -Fight between Veylis and Jaus Avandaer, overheard by mother and bondsmate, Zein Thousandhand 21-13 The Disagreement No? Avo asked. No, Zein repeated, sounding almost regretful this time. Her ontology quivered as if a nest of accelerating strings, and he surmised she was peering into manifested futures. You have capabilities. That is true. That is true. With each word, her tone grew tighter. More mournful. With each second I see you clearer. With each exchange. I see you. I see you. I see you. She returned to silence, her eyes glaring into his. Her anger was still there, but it was like a sizzling ember slowly dying out. In its place, however, was something else: reluctance, wariness, weariness. Perhaps the girl can be allowed to live, but... Her ontology came alive as if it were a nest of surging strings, time accelerating around her, reshaping their surrounding stimulation. Flashing scenes and flickering sensations flooded in from a thousand channels. They stood at an intersection of paths now, speeding from one place to another, passing through soldiers fighting each other in alleyways, fire licking out from corners as fusion burners sang. They speed through fusion bombs pounding through armored megablocks and golems rising from the rubble, fighting in defiance of the devastation. They passed through districts burning and Sovereignties breaking. They speed toward the Tiers ablaze, and the mountain fortress of ScaleCtypically unseen and absentCnow stood a cracking egg. From it emerged a segmented spire, the tapestry of reality sinking into it as if water down a whirlpool. A metaphysical presence extended its wings around the structure, its presence felt, yet veiled. To it flowed every remaining path, every possible sequence of events. One inexorable conclusion. Around them, reality tightenedCand then lurched. It was as if someone had seized everything, clenched all of existence like it was a curtain, and torn it from its rails. The Sunderwilds werent. The sky wasnt. The world turned to splatters and smears, fluid icons and symbologies bleeding into one another as the Voidstar devoured day for one final time. An ineffable color leaked down from the place that was space. Between the vast nothingness, Avo could feel themCthe fleets of the voiders holding tight in protective pockets. His Frame wailed. So did those belonging to his cadre. The color. The color. The color. It crept. So close to purple. But not quite. As the tip of the spire pressed through the softness of the star, the light of night was pierced like a needle, and all the Heavens, all the paths, all that was known and of Idheim was injected into the wound of dusk, filling it with a building taint. What the fuck, Chambers gasped, summarizing their situation. They stood scattered amidst streams of incoherence, the fabric of reality parting around them like torrents of madness. There were isles where fragments still remained. A drifting platform. A tumbling room. A burning heavy war drone. In time, they would dissolve as well. Avo pulsed his Skimmer. His perception of reality clawed at his consciousness, the collapse inimical to his mind. His Conundrum flared, traumas firing to counter the damage. COG-CAP: 77% Hard to conceptualize how something could damage something like him, but then again, how was one to perceive raw chaos? Then, he felt it. The Hell to his Woundshaper rattled, a resonance passing through its structure as walls of entropic wind began to rise, spilling upward from the Maw unburdened. It too was anchored. Bound to the Ladder. As threads of existence were uploaded, so too were other strands cast downCa counterweight to feed the dark. Concepts, histories, forces, thoughts, beliefs, and more unwanted. Cast away. Never to return. The Maw drank everything in with greed and rumbled, its presence a metaphysical scar building to a final vent. Motes crawled out. But they were eating away at foundational concepts as well. More than just matter, everything could be lost. Everything that the Ladder deemed unnecessary. Oh, gods, Kae said, her mind reeling in horror at the implications. At what harm the edifice could inflict. At what it could remove. [Avo,] Kare said, trying to control her mounting terror. [Im afraid. I dont want to die. Im dont want to die.] +I know,+ Avo said. +Wont let her just have you. Not my dream.+ Do you know what Ninth Column is in its finality? Zein asked. It is an initiate. To preserve the legacy of my love. To see the world he dreamed materialized and all cultures preserved. But disarmed. We will live under our own minds. Perfected beings of higher intellect and discipline, shepherding us away from our follies. And you believe this? Avo asked. I have not known Jaus to ever be wrong? Zein said. Never took you for one to surrender your blade, Avo replied. Ah. But the Heaven is not a blade. To have a Heaven is to wield power beyond power. And Im drunk. Im an addict. You have seen me. She took in a short breath. I am a terrible person to be granted such power. If there is a fight to be had, perhaps. If there is a tyrant to topple or a rival to slay. But my heart cares little for the nursing of my lessers. So long as I have something to duel, my family returned, and a substance to whittle my whirring mind, I will be pleased. But not you. Her eyes became as if daggers. Not you. She swept the cadre briefly and flexed her fingers. Dice took a step forward, but Draus caught her by the shoulder. +Just think it,+ Draus said. That was all she needed from Avo to open fire, to start the fight against Zein in earnest. One no other than he would likely survive. I have seen many colors, Avo said, finally dispelling Peace utterly. The schemes he was trying to play withered inside him. He was in uncharted territory now. With each passing second, he felt more and more ontological mass building within Zein, as if she was retracting her focus, abandoning echoes to move only as herself. Changed me. Made me want new things. For myself. For myC he looked at the others. Consangs. For the world. And youre going to ask me to shackle myself to you. Tell me I cannot spread where you dont want me to. Or maybe even ask me to surrender my Frame. A request is given to a superior. A negotiation begins with an equal. A demand is delivered to a lesser. Zein let silence punctuate each of her sentences. But you are different. You cannot match me, but ICthough I have manifested path after pathCcannot seem to kill all of you. Not enough to stop the spread. Draus scoffed. Fuckin glassjaw. Stillness defined Thousandhand. Then she glared at the Regular from the corner of her eye. Draus remained unshaken. I mean it. I know, Zein said. But you are mistaken. It is not competition I cannot suffer, but what he takes. And what he might inflict on us ifC If I win, Avo said. He looked beyond Zein and at the tower itself. He imagined himself ascending it. Claiming it. Consuming it. And then... And then what? If he could do anything, what? There was so much to try. So much to learn. For him. For everyone else. To live every life possible. And suffer every consequence imaginable. What kind of people would emerge from absolute freedom balanced by absolute karma? And spared of death, no less. There, Zein said, catching him in the moment. That is what I cannot abide. I had hoped you limited. Obedient. Or perhaps dull enough to heed my orders. But I looked further beyond the point you proposed. The point where you turn the trial into your personal stageplay. Never mind the Heaven of Truths gazeCyou will just rewrite everyones memories in advance. Twist them to be yours in permanence. As you already have too many. As you will somehow do to Naeko unless I stop you. It was pleasing to his ego to know that he inspired such primal fear in a being like Zein Thousandhand. However, inspiring such fear was how he found himself entrapped. [Godsdammit, Avo,] Kassamon said. [Couldnt you have been less gluttonous? And bragged less to the time-jumping psychopath.] There were nine of us in the beginning, Zein said, topic turning without warning. Nine of us when our crusade against our gods properly began. Jaus. I. Your father. Infacer, the broken mind we uncovered beneath the waves. Veylis, born here, born in Noloth. Six others. Six others, and I cannot recall them. Only shadows. Do you know why? Somehow, the answer was there, told to Avo by the Maw. They dont exist anymore. Speaking the words formed a slab of ice in his gut. They were... removed. A huff of affirmation came from the Godslayer. Despite my efforts, they had to be unmade. She closed her eyes and sadness passed through her, spilled from her accretion. They deserved better. We knew they were going toCthey would take to use the Ladder for themselves. The paths warned usCit was hard to resist, I understand. But we couldnt allow it. And so we had to make sure. Make sure of what? Kae said, voice almost too quiet. The LadderCall the patterns. It could... it could theoretically create anything. It is past the Ninth Sphere. Past the high conceptual! Into theoretical omnipotenceC No, Zein said, tapping her armored sternum. No. It can do whatever it is willed to do. But wills clash. Desires clash. Beliefs clash. And you know this better than I, Agnos. But what happens when two conflicting absolutes are made manifest? The Agnos bit her lip and hesitated before answering. Paradox. Paradox, Zein concurred. Paradox. But imagine that for time. Imagine a clash between paths already laid. Avo froze. The Ladder. It was used once already. The paths youre talking about arent just those generated from your Heaven. There are events already laid in advance. Temporal architecture leading to the end. And your presence is breaking them. More and more. And Avo understood. When she spoke of him being loud, it wasnt just from the use of his Heavens or the spread of his mind, but the changes he was making to structures already in place. He was as if a fire spreading down the threads of a spiderweb. I cannot threaten you with death or pain. I cannot risk losing you to Veylis. I cannot allow your unfettered spread. There is too much at risk, andClovely monster that you areCI just dont trust your nature. She shrugged apologetically. Call it prejudice. Call it old grievances, but you are the Strixs inheritor through and through, and he has already insulted me onceCwith you. Zein stopped. She speared a finger at Calvino. You. Did you tell him why the Tenth Sphere isnt possible? In the same instant, Kaes eyes swept over to the EGI as well. The mind remained silent. Calvino, Avo asked. +It cements itself.+ The mind replied. What? Chambers muttered. +The Souls inside you. They snap back into place. Theres enough sustained death inside your Heavens that they can affect existence irreversibly. And they bridge your Soul back to where it was meant to be.+ Chambers still looked lost. Most of the cadre did. But not Denton. Not Zein. And not Avo. The core of the galaxy, Avo said. The center of the world that was. Every Tenth Sphere is a restoration. +Yes. But just the Soul. Just the Soul and nothing else. Not even the Heaven, once its done bridging.+ And so no changes are made. The mind simply dissolves. The reality functionally usurps the Godclad past a certain point. But the tenth section of the Ladder remained. But there was something else. What if someone wasnt just their own mind? What if someone was coded into their Soul? Avo looked at his hands and understood. Understood for the first time the significance of his Frame. But the Imitators, Kae said, eyes widening in realization. But... but they havent emerged in us. Even after days and weeks. Which means... I am my Soul? Avo asked. More so than the rest of us. But perhaps the better way to look at you is as an infection vector for existence itself. Even existence to come. Zein faced the Ladder again and sighed. I suspect Veylis wanted a means to subsume the LadderCor obsolete it. Make it so she had another chance at victory, even if someone claimed the Ladder before her. Chapter 21-14 The Disagreement (II) Chapter 21-14 The Disagreement (II) And Veylis, remember this always: if something can be taken from you, it was never truly yours. -Zein Thousandhand 21-14 The Disagreement (II) They stood as pillars amidst the chaos, the misted torrents that once made up totality grasping vainly at their forms. The patterns of reality coursed up into the Ladder and broke in two directions. One to make the ascent. The other to feed a balance. Suspense choked the air. Draus mind was narrowing to a spears tip, humanity shed to let the weapon take hold. Dice was as if a dog next to her, internal machinery building to a resonant growl. Tavers was missing. An echo of a message played across through the cadres minds. +Incog.+ Three meters away and flanking both Avo and Zein, a glint of simmering flame built at the center of Chambers irises while Kae stole moisture from the air. She doesnt remember Tavers. They were gliding down the blades edge now. Something was coming. A blow soon to fall. Denton was openly glaring at Zein now. No more diplomacy. No more attempts to hide her displeasure at how things were developing. This is not how things are meant to be done. And how are they meant to be done, agent? What is our purpose here but to win. Zein cocked her head, awaiting an explanation. The spy remained undeterred. I am trying to secure means of survival for the people of the polities and reduce further bloodshed on Idheim. What are you doing, Thousandhand? Asserting control over a variable I let slip too long, Zein said, her tone neutral, attention fixed on Avo. Between Godslayer and ghoul was but a single step of separation, but though Zeins gaze was on him, Avo looked up again, studying the sphere-pierced sun parting into metaphysical tides. A new existence was being rebuilt from a final apocalypse. By symbology, it seemed more like a resurrection of reality rather than a rebuilding. Perhaps the Flayed Ladder was not unlike a Liminal Frame, but its core included everything instead of a single little ego. The fact that his FrameCthe StillbornCcould invade the same heights and spread him as a contagion of change in a realm above without costing him his sense of self made more than a few things clear. More importantly, however, the understanding delighted him. He relished in understanding the threat he posed, the gift he possessed, and angled his head down to face Zein once more, now more aware than ever why she feared him. Never told me, Avo said, his words directed toward several figures. Denton likely knew. Calvino certainly. Zein obviously. Each of them had the means to keep their thoughts hidden from him, and they played their games of obfuscation well. But he wasnt offended, for such was the nature of the nature of the great game. The final game. Was this always your plan? Kaes question came as a hushed whisper. Her attention was on Zein and Calvino both, agitation building with each passing second. Answer me! Was I always being contracted to build a weapon, and never knew? W-why would you allow the Guilds to claim such a thing in the first place? +We didnt allow the Guilds to do anything,+ Calvino said. A ripple of discomfort rolled over its simulated avatar. +Even now, we are uncertain how the Strix learned and located our restricted material. Probabilistic simulations point to Omnitech assistance. But more to the point, by the time we responded, the specimen was already beyond our reach.+ The High Seraph built new paths to secure the Imitators, Avo guessed. His templates shifted, theorized, and shuddered. Most of them offered little than conspiracy theories and idle gossip. But Benhata was consumed by rising bitterness.[We know about the High Seraphs abilities. Thats why we operate in secret. And thats why we operate as we are, and try to use Stormtrees Longeyes to counter them. But Elder DRongo had to be told about the project. We didnt know.] And suddenly Walton was in another light again. A lone, solitary Low Master might be a peerless Necrojack, but the situation on display demanded more than the manipulation of minds. No. Penetrating Voidwatchs privacy protection required an understanding of coldtechCor an outright disfigurement of its design. Omnitech. And there was little possibility that the High Seraph or Zein wouldnt account for Noloths involvement in things. Even without knowing how to manipulate the future, Avo felt the paths narrowing to a scant few. Jaus. Just how many sides had his father been trying to play? Ah. There it is. The only possibilities reveal themselves to you as well. Zein sighed. Hard to see it at the time, but I think he used me and my daughter against each other. We struck at each others paths. Breaking futures as I played the part of saboteur while my daughter became a fortress unto herself. Kaes jaw fell a bit wider as she realized how far-reaching the machinations went. And how she was but a small component in the grand machine of moving deception. Her confidence shriveled. In days past, she had been telling herself that it was because of her brilliance and importance that she suffered. That the great powers were trying to suppress her attempts at change. It was a delusion of martyrdom. But an understandable one. Her scarred heart was still tender and raw; her confidence brittle. Seeing that no one truly cared about the ruptured Heaven of LoveCthat Wombrash wasnt even a topic worth mentioning was another spike driven deep into her half-closed wounds. No. The words left her with a whimper at first. Avo faced her and saw the twitch in her eye, a dam of frustration, rage, and trauma breaking inside her. No. No. No! WhatCwhat the fuck is wrong with you? All of you? Are we just things for you to use and throw away? Do you not think were alive right now? That we matter? Calvino simmered at the Agnos words, but Zein offered only scorn. So you are alive. What of it? Why does that matter at all? Can you enforce your will in this situation? Can you dictate the terms of your life? Do you have any worth left to leverage at this point? The crone lifted a single finger. Having you still is preferable. You are a good Agnos. But your part has long been played. The weapon is made. That is what matters. The retort struck Kae like a knife to the gut and the last chains of fear and anxiety shattered. A near shriek of feral fury escaped from her. She charged Zein. Made it only three steps before Chambers caught her from behind. The little Agnos thrashed in the former enforcers grasp and howled her hate at Zein, at Calvino, at Denton, at the world unmade, all sound, all fury, but bearing little meaning in the end. Everything... Kae sobbed, lashing the world with her Heaven. Her moisture clashed against Chambers flames, and steam rose, columns of pale starkness against the gloomy currents embracing them. Everything... I gave everything... You took everything... All I ever did was try. What did I do wrong? Why? Why? Avo prepared to reach into Kaes mind, to drain out her hurt, but the Agnos crumbling facade and Chambers pleading eyes held him at bay. A sad exhalation escaped Corner, the once-squire unable to bear the sight. [Just fucking let her have this. Its all she really has anymore, anyway. The hurt is the only thing thats still her own.] And even that could be taken from her if Avo willed in. Connected to her as he was, a new understanding dawned and a new color was learned. A sympathetic whine of pain escaped from Avo as the full dread of powerless existence struck him at once. There was no control for her. Not even how she lived. Not even why she acted. Her worth was objective. Like the sacrifices, she was used to make her Heavens. Like the ghouls the Hungers used as fodder of flesh and mind. Like all the little ignorant people, caught in a grand game between mother, daughter, and more shadows unseen; the legacy of Jaus rotten to its very core. Draus mind remained razor sharp, entirely locked in on every movement that Zein made. Part of her noted Kaes distressCand instinct warred with instinct as she held to her role. Dice was far less tempered. The hound had left the girl, and she now saw the face of her aunt when she looked upon the kneeling woman who had comforted her just hours prior, that was the first thing she saw when her mind returned to stability. The Agnos clung to Chambers, screaming into his chest, her fists gripping the horrific coat he still woreCthe one stolen from Dannis Steelhards mannequin back at the Lots. She wept, and he stroked her back. I know, its bad. Its fucking bad. I know. Its not fucking fair. I know. But were still breathing. Were still here. Were still here. A memory bled into Avo, and Chambers swapped places with Kae. A scene of him as a young boy sobbing into the embrace of his mother played. His father was in the background lighting up some drug or other, and blood trickled from his belt. Lashes lined both Chambers and their mother, some becoming connected wounds. He spoke the same words she did all those years ago. He spoke them to Kae, and the wounds of their minds were connected all the same. You could have mastered her, Zein said, speaking to Avo now without taking her eyes off the Agnos. You could have torn the weakness from her thoughts. Saved me the trouble of trying toC Dont bullshit me, Avo said, channeling more than a bit of Draus in his words. You werent trying to encourage her. Or strengthen her. You were just getting amusement from her. Like you do from everything you can. And more of Chambers template snapped into place. You fucking junkie. Now you surrender yourself to me. Her words neither request nor command, but statement. You bring all of yourself back into your current sheath. Or I peek into the minds of your comrades. I find where the rest of you are hiding regardless. And I take them from you. Your cadre. Your home. Everything that you have. To cement her threat, she made some of the passing streams around them flow backward. And it was like they never were. I can give these memories to Naeko. Give my Frame back to Highflame. Veylis. Zein shook her head. No. Youre more selfish than spiteful. You will try to reveal me, perhaps. But that will do little to impede my operations. More, I see now how you might approach. The angles are many, but they can be prevented. Threaten me again and I rewind the annoying one. Chambers. She was talking about Chambers. Avos mind sharpened. He reshaped his consciousness in an instant, unmaking his rising rage before it could betray him. His templates were recovering. Suggestions and plots formed and broke in his mind. There was so much noise he never noticed the whispering from deep inside. She doesnt know what Tavers is doing. She doesnt know what Tavers is doing. She doesnt know what Tavers is doing... And then an unexpected voice cut through the madness, the advice snarled with purpose. All for the sake of biding more timeCof figuring out an escape-solution. [Provoke the cunt to angerCbut not with a threat. Make her focus on you. Strike her at her root.] Peace was like a maddened warg free of his cage, but at this moment, despite all his hatred for Avo, they were united by a common foe. [Tell her exactly what I have to say. Watch the sows face change.] So Avo did. Chains... from chains. Never knew how accurate that was. Till now. The passivity drained out of Zeins eyes. Replaced by a chilling blankness. You speak words without knowing their meaning. I speak words to someone who was clearly forgotten. Zeins jaw tightened. The more cowardly of his templates screamed for him to stop. Avo kept going. Look at yourself. Look at you now. You dont care about anything but a single goal. Willing to sacrifice everything. How human. How pathetic. How very godly of you. Imagine your victory. Imagine Jaus facing you at the endC Be silent, Zein whispered. --You and your daughter and his broken world. Do you imagine he will embrace you? Do you intend to lie to him about your victory? About what you surrender to win it? Do you? The glaive was through his chest. He didnt remember it going in. He didnt remember why one of his eyes was missing, why his arms were broken, why his legs were snapped, why he was hacking up blood. Its the truth, Avo said, forcing the words out from a mending lung. Truth! I have Peaces memories. I remember him! I remember Jaus. He would be ashamed of you. Ashamed! A crack passed through him. He was on his back again. Starring up into a writhing mess of hive of chronology, strings sliding over one another and Thousandhand standing over him. Her face was a shadow of loathing, her eyes pale dots of anger. She doesnt know what Tavers is doing. [Hey, Low Fucker,] template-Chambers said, spitting at Peace. [You better not be doing this just so Thousandhand can torture Avo more.] [Of course I am!] Peace said, honest in his hate. [It just so happens that pissing Thousandhand off is the best way to distract her.] You know nothing of what I have done for this cause, Zein seethed. Your cause, Avo retorted. This is for you. You and no one else. You. Your daughter. Your lover. They both believe in something. But you? Youre just selfish. Just want your family back. Drugs to do. People to hurt. Youre a child. An infant that grew skilled but never wiser. Your dream is to make existence a playground. Pleasure. Pleasure. Pleasure. Never consequence. Calvinos manifestation crackled. +Thousandhand, you will notC+ And then Avo couldnt see out of his left eye. And then the world was a spiral of colors. Consequence? Zeins said, casting the gore-strewn Neurodeck she tore from Avos skull aside. My consequence is what started this in the first place. The lessons I taught my daughter drove her to bind her father into the Ladder. To fuse him with reality itself. And there was almost a sob in her voice. But weapons didnt weep and so she settled for anger instead. Let me educate you, then, on the nature of being a Godclad. This is our culmination. I say one thing. You say another. And it cannot be both ways. What then? What then? She doesnt know that Tavers is aiming. She doesnt know. She forgot about the Incog. She forgot about the Incog. Please. She must forget about the Incog. Weakness gnawed at Avo. Strain. Exhausted. Even thinking was hard. Focus. Slippery. No. No? She asked. No. Youre not a Godclad. Youre human. Powerful. But only human. So was your daughter. So was Jaus. That. That was the problem. You are all only yourselves. You all consume. Interpret. But you only live as yourself. You dont see through anothers eyes. You dont live as another has lived. You are all just here for yourself. A look of disbelief overtook her. A beat. A laugh. Humorless cackling. AndCand you are different? And you are nobler? Nobler? Avo said, almost unable to hear the word. No. But I want to become everybody. And I want to learn what it really means... to become a true god. Zein opened her mouth to reply but shifted into a cut. A splash of darkness smudged the rushing gold. A release of entropy tickled Avos Frame, his Woundmothers Hell singing in accord. A foot away from the Godslayer, Tavers fell in two, split across the middle by Zeins sweeping blade, her Hellgun still venting even as she fell. Something plummeted in Avos chest. The accretion shimmering just outside Tavers exo-rig began to thin. But there was something wrong. It was hard to focus, but he couldnt feel any... where was the flesh? Where was the blood? Quail Tavers. I presume. Zein said, watching the bifurcated squire plunge before her slowly. She shot Avo a scowl and shook her head. And here I was hoping we could have talked. Shared experiences. Few have survived as long as we. But, alas, your lot was ruined by association, and ultimately, what could this old hawk learn from carrion such as youC None of you... See her... A frequency blade erupted out from the top of Zeins skull. The stab was precise. Quick. And from behind. The Godslayer never saw it coming. Her umbrella clattered free from her grasp. Tavers, wearing only her holocoat, had abandoned her armor. Had allowed it to be cut down in her stead as a distraction. She twisted her blade one final time, flicking it up from where it entered just under Zeins right ear before she tossed the Godclad aside with a grunt. Shed tell you to get vacant after getting a kill, Tavers explained to the corpse. Chapter 21-15 The Glaive Unsheathed Chapter 21-15 The Glaive Unsheathed Akusande. Will cut in my stead, in exchange for your life? ...Yes. Will you serve my will in death, as you would in life? ...Yes.The? source of this content n/o/v/(el)bi((n)) Will you defy time itself to ensure my fall be undone, my return be swift, my vengeance be taken? ...Yes. -Zein and the Dragon-Glaive Akusande 21-15 The Glaive Unsheathed Time rebalanced, and Avos base ego snapped back in alignment with his subminds. As his cog-feed ceased its flickering, he studied the George Washingons central nexus with a projected Skimmer and stared. As did his templates. As did his cadre. There, over Thousandhands unmoving corpse was Quail Tavers flicking the blood off her blade. A legend stood over a legend, and surreal though the moment might have been, mortal skill triumphed against divine power. [Holy fucking shit!] A shrill squeal of pure excitement left Abrel as her adoration for Tavers turned manic. [Oh my gods, oh my gods, holy fuck! Quail Tavers just fucking snuffed fucking Zein Thousandhand oh my god!] [Jaus. Fuck me,] Corner added. A cheering section went up among the Incubi, surprisingly, and more than a few of the enforcers joined them. [I know,] Glitch breathed, releasing an awed breath. [Zeins the literal best.] Kassamon and Kare peered on through Avo with open astonishment, not expecting the turn of events. [Well. Drinks for that squire are on me,] Kassamon said. Kare nodded as backup. Through everything, however, Avo felt as if he was missing part of the credit. Had... help... a lot of... A beat passed. No echoes emerged to cut anyone down. A metaphysical scab formed over Zeins corpse. Second cycler. Of course. Tavers released a shaky breath and shot her severed armor a frown. Thank Jaus I invested in that decoy locC The only forewarning for what came next was a single-thread of gold unspooling from Zeins fallen umbrella. Time accelerated. The parasol shattered into parting threads, and then in its place was a glaive made of fractured oracle glass slicing up to cut the squire from below. A haemokinetic claw materialized to stop the blow, but it was Dice that arrived first. Sparks flashed as the jagged tip of Zeins weapon recoiled from the waifs alloyed sheath, a radiant rune protecting her from physical harm. The cracks within the blade deepened, and an uncontrollable pressure was hissing out from between the fissures, temporal sinews weaving the outline to a growing sinuous form. +Run. Now. Vent as soon as you get a chance.+ The thought left Avo as a redundant command; his cadre was already in motion, Tavers abandoned her still usable Hellgun and her split Rendskin, the armor not worth her life. The air shifted. Faint ripples formed across time and manifested probing attacks, gunfire and eldritch phenomena spewing free from the transforming glaive. An eruption of fire spawned a wall of bioforms to blunt the attacks. Chambers pulled Kae as the cadre began their retreat. Tavers dove first through an activated reflection, her Metamind flashing as she sent her drones a universal attack order. Metal and flesh joined the carnage while the others fled. Draus was the last to leave, her focus lingering on Avo for another heartbeat. +Go,+ he said. No sense in risking any of them. Their Rend Capacities were still high after their initial battle against Zein, but he was the only one capable of surviving without a material body. +Need to try ending this. Killing her. Get to the enclave. Remake your passages. Anything you can to burn our trail.+ And there was something else he needed to do. A promise he made to break Zeins glaive somehow. To whom or why he gave this oath was irrelevant. It just had to be done. And now seemed the best opportunity he would get. The Regular shot him a nod and clenched her fist. The unused passages cracked first, then dissolved, turning into scintillating powder as a rapidly swelling figure tore through the opposing drones and monsters. +See you soon, consang.+ Then she crossed over as well, plunging through her Liminal Paracosmos, accelerating toward a portal opening in the near horizon within a world made from shifting shards of reflective brilliance. Chambers brief blast of flame had formed around three hundred humming wasp-sized monstrosities each half the size of a full-grown adult. They were mostly in pieces now, sticky green blood leaking from their broken carapaces vanishing behind the chomp of scales and slashing blades. The twenty-two drones in the Command Nexuses at the time were but smoking husks as well, most obliterated without ever contributing. It took paltry effort on the part of his Woundmother to mend his mortally wounded sheath in the George Washington, but his Metamind was screaming at him, all three of his cyclers nearly filled with Rend. With a thought, Avo set his tripartite mind upon three different tasks. A point of no return had been crossed with Zeins slaying, with her open intent to enslave him once more. From this point on, his relationship with Ninth Column was adversarial, and his continued association with Aegis was questionable at best. But calamity also offered opportunity. With Zein struck down, with his mind functionally restored and more liberated than ever, he directed the first of his subminds to flood his essential subverts before spreading his splinters wider across the city. His second submind shifted over to the George Washingtons systems, where Calvino was interfacing with the SHEPHERD earlier. Back in the enclave, his sheath slumped as the breadth of his consciousness whistled out of the body, leaving but a sliver of ghosts rooted in place. Finally, his base mind rose, mended of flesh and clear of purpose, pushing himself up using the steps of the dais, the throne of his once masters. Turning, he faced his new foe, the thing hiding within Zeins glaive. A dragon unleashed. Finally, the question became too great to ignore. Why? The dragon went still. The Sangs face contorted with effort as she fought to slow the passage of time around Zein, to delay the Godslayers resurrection if she could. There is a promise between us. But you cannot keep it yet. You cannot break me from my cage. You cannot break me from her will. But perhaps after. Perhaps not so long. Avo stared into the girls eyes and coughed. Not the first time we talked. He knew it wasnt. Knew it from feeling. But he couldnt remember when they last spokeCif they ever spoke. An unremembered dialogue has its purpose. It twisted the pillar to provoke his action. A splinter shot free from his halo, drowning in an ocean of ghosts. Too many for his splinters to erode in time. This demanded a shift. This demanded a return to fire. A reconstruction of the voidship flashed into his cog-feed. Ship modules were diverted. Moved far and away from the command nexuses in anticipation of what was to come. The mind is right, the Fardrifter chuffed, feeling the predatory essence in the shadowy cosmos outside the hull. This is a poor plan. We swim within a cage that seeks to devour us. The Techplaguer chimed a retort. Take heart, STEED! The administrator will FREE-FREE-FREE us. And, the Woundmother said, prepared to vent their Hell, I suspect our erstwhile kin will not be doing much of the eating. Congratulations, however, are in order mule: I do believe you might be acquiring some new architectural improvements soon. Sending a final command into the ships systems, Avo watched as the dais sank, taking the throne and the locus with it. It too was now in motion, moving fast to join the other sections of the ship. Maybe he wouldnt be able to salvage any of the modules. Maybe the new engineering bay was to be lost after a single use. But at least he could set them free from the dark. Allow Voidwatch to extract the sections. Briefly, glimpsed through his various splinters. Kare and Maru were already en route to Naeko, the latter trying to start a session. His various splinters were spread across the Oversecs, and he melted them into hidden Auto-Seances for eventual easy access. The others were embedded in high-traffic lobbies and loci managing critical infrastructure. He spent those as backdoors as well, forming multiple bridgeheads to further his infestation of the city. Disjointed by time, his submind didnt get the chance to hunt down and jack Syndis or gangers. That was fine. Hed do what he could in the moments he had left. But first, he had ghosts to burn and a final scheme to try. +Will be back soon,+ Avo said, casting a final thought through his cadres splinters before gathering every shard connected to his consciousness back in his current sheath. He didnt need anything else to burn. Just the pillar. As he shifted from Delusion back to Ignorance, a fortress of fire speared up from his halo before pouring down into the pillar, searing it clean from within. Yes,the dragon sang, voice rising in a joyous song. Its scales cracked and opened, and Avo caught a glimpse of Zeins gardenCthat plane she drew him into when they first met. So. That was were everything hid. Inside the umbrella; the glaive; the dragon. Sequences, ghosts, and memories that would have taken Avo hours to digest as steam came ablaze in an instant. Over twelve million ghosts were hiding with the pillar. Twelve million ghosts bearing centuries of information, carving epiphanies and understandings into his very mind. Moments from before the Godsfall detonated within him like warheads, the blasts of understanding came in sync with the howling ascent of his refueled Conflagration. He knew. He remembered. He recalled. Memories that Zein had hidden even from herself poured into him, her self-obfuscation a deliberate actionCto prevent her daughter from using their shared experiences and ever achieving a mem-lock. And now, an entire archive was his. The truths behind the Idheims historyCat least from Zeins perspectiveCknown to him. His perspective loomed, and a rising thrill battled a cold pit of dread forming in his stomach. Oh, how great the glory at the end. And oh, how bad things were. Worse than he could have ever realized. You see? the dragon said, releasing the pillar and shifting away from him. It was straightening now, head pointed down in an arcing loop while countless hands extended from its body, fingers spread wide in a mock embrace. Do you understand the paths now? The shape of what is to come? What mother and daughter left broken in their past embrace. Yes, Avo breathed. Even with the Conflagration, it was too much. All too much. He needed time to process what he learned. To go through everything and let the details settle in. Already, his templates were overwhelmed, more than a few screaming from mem-data overload. No other mind besides hisCor an EGIsCcould have possibly managed an intake of information so great. Ghosts - [13,877,899] He called on his Woundmothers Domains of Matter and Biology once more as it inched a single percent away from maximum capacity. Threads of blood stitched flesh and broken implants back into shape, the pillar unraveling with the caress of his Haemokinesis. Slamming back down on the ground, Avo took a step toward Zeins body, her resurrection almost imminent. But the dragon shifted into his path again. No. He could try to make another attempt with his Boltstride, his Fardrifter. But he knew that to be in vain, that the dragon would just skip him across time again. Its actions were paradoxical. Contrary. It betrayed Zeins confidence, yet protected her from him. The way it acted made him uncertainCunnerved. She wont forgive you for this, Avo said, gesturing at Thousandhand with a floating Echohead. You let meC You tore into my shape and stole your prize. Who is to say otherwise? Who will tell her? You? The dragon chuckled. She likes you. Veylis would like you. So I like you. And I am meant to serve in her stead. She is blinded by matters. But essential in this path. Look into the memories, and you will understand. You have your part in the final design. She has hers. As does my progenitor.Could take her Frame. Take her Heavens. Replace her." No! Force exploded from the dragon. Avo magnetized himself to the hull. The beast was coiling around him now, coiling closer and closer, but the Sangs eyes remained locked to his. We have a bargain. You and I. I and her. She and her daughter. You have invaded the paths of your own will and power. But the rest of us are ordained. I can choose to spare you. But I cannot let you have her. Noble. Heroic. Reliable. Even commendable. But unacceptable. Avo let out a breath and prepared to disappoint his newest consang. I understand, he said. But you understand why I have to try. The dragons eyes widened. Chronological distortions flared from its every scale. But it was too late. It didnt realize what he intended. Lacking Zeins divine foresight and echoes, the dragon managed only a betrayed roar as Avo shed an entropic missile from his Frame. His Woundmothers Rend dropped instantly to zero as it struck the inner hull of the command nexus, and a firestorm of entropy dissolved eight percent of the ship in a heartbeat. The serpent of time shivered as gnawing darkness flooded in and Avo manifested his Fardrifter in full. REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER] - 98% Chapter 22-1 Inheritor of Shadows (I) Chapter 22-1 Inheritor of Shadows (I) We call it the Heart of Noloth. Dont worry. We have it well-trained. We had the faith culture this one into being a particularly stupid god. The sacrifices are made to believe that it is more beast than personCthe shaping made easier by the fact of its arrival. Oh. Do you know it holds the temple? We discovered both the god and the holy site together. You can say they were entwined from the very beginning. Sometimes, when the air is calm and the pantheons are squabbling, we have it reach beyond the darkness of night to chart the void beyond. Hm? Whats there? Oh. Chaos and ruin. That is what lies beyond our realm. The Heart is fed now, though. Worry not about stepping into the dark. After tasting eight thousand slaves it will be compliant. It will take us wherever we wish, ferry us to every corner where its shadow lies. It would have been better if she wasnt with child. It has been known to steal those from slaves sometimes. Weep not if you suddenly find your womb emptied. I suppose nothing can be done about it nowC No! NoCno! No! Put away that ridiculous weapon. You cannot cut darkness. No! No! The light! Quench the glow! Yes! Yes, fine! I suppose you, in particular, have a way to cut at darkness! NowC [Zein laughing] ...Do that again, and I leave you in the black and make my apologies to the High Priest. -Lesser Acolyte of Noloth showing Jaus Avandaer and Zein Thousandhand the Heart of Noloth 22-1 Inheritor of Shadows (I) The darkness seized them all in its ravenous embrace. Though capable of twisting chronology to its whims against Avo, the rules of asymmetry were now turned against the dragon, its emanations of light enwreathing struggling desperately to hold the lashing shadows at bay. Tongues and tendrils drained projected manifestations and recalled miracles. Undulations of shifting force shifted in the void, swatting down to hold the dragon in place, trying to grip Avos slithering form, but lacking the dexterity to contest his speed and morphological asymmetry. And countless leagues beyond the George Washingtons still disintegrating husk shone a resplendent shell, its etheric incandescent building the dark found itself blessed with new purposeCto feed upon novel succor, to learn the flavor of dragon and Godclad both. With everything in motion, Avo wasted no time, quenching his flames and reasserting his Delusions. Immediately, he sent two splinters through his Auto-Seance. Both would be commanded by his Subminds for separate tasks. The first would seek to achieve what hadnt been done earlier: locating easy targets for a final harvest of deaths. In the aftermath of the Nethers destabilization, the vicious and vulnerable were in a state of disarray, gangers and Syndicates open to infiltrationCseeding opportunities for future slaughter. There was a good chance that he couldnt manage to grant Zein her final end. That he would have to operate with caution beyond caution in the coming days. Better to stack the deck as best he could and position himself to claim deaths when the opportunities arose. That being said, just because he might not be able to kill Zein didnt mean he was out of options. His second submind interfaced with Kare, the Paladin quickly approaching Naekos position on the DeepNav. He inched into her periphery awareness and sequenced new memories in place: knowledge connected to the George Wasingtons gateways, and what to anticipate. Thousandhand really shouldnt have told him about Naekos power. Or his importance. And with everything already past the point of no return, why not break the paths some more? Why not inconvenience her further, give her former disciple something to focus his ire? Besides, there was more than a measure of schadenfreude involved. Especially as he ensured Kare knew all about what Zein was planningCwhat was fated to happen at the trial. As memory sank in, the real Kare struggled against rising nausea in her and Marus speeding aerovec. +Dont worry. Ill be keeping watch over you. Wont let her have you.+ With his promise cast and the essential details uploaded, Avo broke the link before she could respond. Her template did in her stead. [Bless you, Avo. Thank you. For everything.] Avo fought the urge to laugh. If righteousness could always come bundled with acts of cruel vindication, he doubted he would be the only decent ghoul in existence. Of course, this was all just the consolation prize. Back near the destroyed voidship, Avos base mind was still set on a single objective: to seize any chance he could and kill Zein Thousandhand once and for all. A thread of synaptic iridescent flicked along the plane of darkness. A sudden shove sent the remaining modules of the George Washington tumbling aside without inflicting any damage. Scarcely more than two kilometers remained of the once impressive voidship. The rest was gone. Over fifty-five million metric tons of self-shaping matter came apart in a ballet of debris. Motes of disintegrative entropy spilled from its hollowed core, parts of the structure evaporating still. More of the ship had been wrenched apart by digits of grasping dark. Even still, there was something tragically noble in how the George Washington clung to life. Reactive sinews of tubular smart matter condensed into straining cords, the system clearly trying to preserve whatever it could, despite the lack of a guiding intellect. This was a vessel designed to protect its crew to ensure their survival, whatever the cost. It had no part in the misfortune it faced. No chance to guard the fate of its crew against wretched fate. No means of denying the darkness intrusive touch. One of its shifting spinal rings broke as the crystalline lattices affixing it to the ship succumbed. It tumbled thereafter and struck another, layers of spinning concentricity collapsing in a calamitous cascade. A memory called to Avo. A moment from a month ago. He recalled the George Washingtons intact visageCa fibrous tower woven over melted cubes, its outer edges ovular, gravity maintained by the churning of three vast rings. No more. All that wonder and design broken with an exhalation of his Heaven. Peace glared out through Avo. [We had that temple for over three centuries. Three fucking centuries. And you just fucking lose it in a month. Break it fighting that sow, ThousandhandCwho you shouldnt haveC] Avo ignored the Famine. Still. The moment felt wrong. A travesty. Like he had broken a relic, and more personally, one of the few things he still had left of his father. But such was the fate of mundane matter. Erosion. Only memory maintained and metaphysical concepts could endure the unceasing passage that was time. At least the crew was still safe. At least the modules had been separated. There was a chance of resurrection. Of return. Such was more than most would ever get. WARNING: REND CAPACITY SPIKING REND CAPACITY: [ERROR%] EXTERNAL RESONANCE BLEEDING OVER DOMAINS DETECTED - [SPACE] - [SHADOW] The demiplane ruptured open like a torn sack, and Avo found himself squeezed out from an alleyway in the gutters, his Fardrifter blasting out as a line of hurricanes. Before he was dislodged from the collapsing space, however, he watched his Fardrifter reward his trust, slamming two snake-like heads down on the dragon while the rest of its being screamed with rising joy. Free! Free! Free! Nuclear detonations and eldritch phenomena splashed and vanished into twisting whirlwinds of shifting space. Unsteady buildings were torn from their foundations as Avo found himself drawn upward, rising to meet Layer OneCthe horizon greeting him as pockets of accretion amidst spawls of dissected blocks. A ripple of gold pulsed against his Frame. The dragon accelerated time again, but he had it now. Well, his Heaven of Air did. In most other circumstances, unleashing a Daemon would have been a desperate act at best considering how deleterious they were to their users minds and uncontrollable during their rampages, but Avos Heavens were weaned from true self-awareness. Capable of forming dialogues with himCdisplaying character and traits he understood. The Fardrifter might have seen him as something of a jailer before, but this offering of laxity on his part ensured at least temporary loyalty from it and also coincided with the collateral devastation of the Heart. Zein, meanwhile, was someone they could both hate. She was a Godslayer, in more ways than one. A woman that had shackled time itself. And neither of them would ever get what they wanted again if they fell to her grasp. And now, one way or another, he would see her suffer for her intentions. He directed a splinter out to where the Heart of Noloth lay via an Oversec into a passing Exorcist patrol drone. A twelve-kilometer zone at the center of a Sang bioform processing complex became ground zero. Darkness stretched and writhed around the area, stretching and distorting n everything in its vicinity. Immediately, he began jacking into the Paladin Oversecs, hijacking golems with the appropriate DomainsCand therefore RendsinksCto drain away the Heart of Noloths instability and achieve equilibrium. Concurrently, he prepared to update Kare on his exact whereabouts on the DeepNav, but held back for a beat. He didnt want to draw Naekos notice yet. Not until he had no other options. +Fardrifter: Reel them in,+ Avo said. To his continued surprise, the Anathema obeyed, distracted as it was. It neighed through the air as spatial reality thinned around its twisting winds. The dragon tumbled upward, and so did Zeins body, now wrenched free from the creatures protection. All was not well, however. The Godslayers metaphysical scab was already beginning to break. Avos focus narrowed. He reached out, Sanguinity manifesting as clawing claws to seize her body, to flood her with Rend. No. Cease! The dragons shout was drowned out by the Fardrifters laughter. The metaphysical architecture of the Heart of Noloth was collapsing, miracles flattening back into mundanity as the eye collapsed, as every last bit of physical matter went whistling out through a few thousand ruptures. He sank his ontology into Zeins an instant before her resurrection, impaling her on branches of calcified lightning in retribution for how she struck him earlier. META-FAC ACTIVATING... TRANSFERRING REND FROM [TECHPLAGUER] TO WARNING! ->RESURRECTION - 100% Avo growled internally as the mem-data flickered and broke. But even as Zein returned, he knew the attempt to be in vain. [Three,] Peace snarled in frustration, the sight of three interfaces belonging to three other unused ontologics aside from her Fisher still taunting him. [Fucking three other Heavens! The cunt was playing with you earlier!] Part of Avo suspected, but the truth was often a bitter thing to learn. So be it. Consolation victory it was. Avo! Zein snarled, body turning as the Fisher That Wasnt splashed into time itself. A shame. A pity. A foreseen possibility. He cast his current position over to Kare. Akusande! Zein called, her voice echoing loud with the spreading of the paths. The dragon transformed again, golden threads spooling back into a glaive, spearing toward Zeins open hand, an army of her echoes already pulsing into existence, slashing at his Fardrifter. The glaive never made it. A palmCtwice the size of a megablockCmanifested just beneath Layer Ones holographic sunrise and descended, pinning Daemon and Godslayer in place. Avo, meanwhile, left but a sliver of ghosts present in his corresponding sheath and fled the scene to secure the Heart of Noloth as a consolation prize. Chapter 22-2 Inheritor of Shadows (II) Chapter 22-2 Inheritor of Shadows (II) [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: What a mess. Calvino? Can you talk him down? Because we still need Thousandhand. As much as her death mightC [EGI] Loch-Ness Bomber has entered THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth [EGI] Loch-Ness Bomber: Nevermind that boring shit, everyone get in here! The fights still going! Im activating local units to get a better view. Sweet Sol, I miss pay-per-view. [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: Bomber, this is a serious matterC [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure: If you want them dealt with, I have the capability... I just need approval from AegisCit will be a setback to lose New Vultun, but I theorize if I can trigger a localized singularity with a Schwarzschild implosive, we might be able to settle the Godclad problem once and for all. Then, with them in disarrayC [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure has been removed from THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth [EGI] If on a Winters Night a Wanderer has entered THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: Ah. Calvino. [EGI] If on a Winters Night a Wanderer: Its bad. Get your Dentons. Time to call in all the favors you have. I think my ghoul is about to get Thousandhand arresC [EGI] Loch-Ness Bomber: OH MY GOD! OH! STARS! STARS AND SYSTEMS! THE PALM! THE PALM FALLS! SAMIR NAEKO IS ON THE SCENE! SHIT IS ONNNNNNNNNN! {OVERRIDING AUTHORITY} [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure has re-entered THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure: YES! [EGI] Loch-Ness Bomber: WOOOOOO! [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: Why in all the bloody blazes are you two so excited? Two of our critical assets are about to be exposed! [EGI] If on a Winters Night a Wanderer: ...Well, one, anyhow. Avo can now... part his mind and shift himself between any of his fragments. Like a trans-spatial hyper-infectious infomorph. He will likely escape. [EGI] EVERYONE ON IDHEIM SHOULD DIE AND DIE NOW has entered THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth [EGI] EVERYONE ON IDHEIM SHOULD DIE AND DIE NOW: WOOOOOO! [EGI] Loch-Ness Bomber: WOOOOOO! [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure: Holy shit, I want to glass the planet so bad. Im betting the next satellite rotation that Naeko stomps both of them in seconds. [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: ...You underestimate Zein. She might just disengage successfully herself. Also, Im calling for the polities to convene. We need to... prepare for the fallout. [EGI] EVERYONE ON IDHEIM SHOULD DIE AND DIE NOW: Im gonna stream this to all my pops! Theyre gonna love it! Burn that city down! WARNING: SERVER APPROACHING SUSTAINABLE EGO LIMIT [EGI] Kant Was A Prick: This is a nightmare. [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure: Again. I can solve it. I just needC [EGI] The Only Way To Be Sure has been removed from THRESHOLD-Node-Zeroth -Conversation between Aegis Category [Black] EGIs 22-2 Inheritor of Shadows (II) +Its Thousandhand alive! Shes hereCshesCshes trying to fucking get my rook!+ Marus words made Naeko drop the mangled boulder of disfigured corpses he was about to cast over the districts edge into the Maw. Hed been fast to react when the Nether fell. Fast as he could. But enough had died regardless, and more than a few outbreaks had to be suppressed. Then there were the ones that kept trying to enact violence. Even when his palm was down. Even when his Heaven seized the city. They became his offering to the Maw. Food for the nothing. A ritual to cleanse his mind, just as he and his father oversaw the filling of the pits all those centuries ago. Yet, distant as it was, the past clung to him still. Along the edges of his thoughts. In the rare moments he risked sleep and dreams instead of the usual resurrections. When he heard certain names. Thousandhand. Thousandhand. Thousandhand. Zein. Caked bodies greeted cracked plascrete with a pattering squelch as the Chief Paladins mind went hollow. A droning set in, and long-repressed remembrances breached through psychological scars reopened. +Youre having an attack.+ The words left Naeko as an accusation than anything else. Maru had to be wrong. The boy was always shaken by these things. His softness was deeper; more supple. The stress of the day must have caused a cascade inside him. Or maybe he was compromised. +Will let you ride free in the Sunderwilds after this,+ Avo soothed, shifting his attention over to Zein. Less than fifty ghosts remained within his pinned sheath, but it was still enough to use it as a monitoring device. Both he and Zein lay compressed against a dormant fountain. At the speed they were struck downCand with how vicious their struggle had beenCAvo expected the area around them to be utterly annihilated. Instead, the surrounding structures held strong, responding to their impacts as if memite. Even the ground gave naught but a light thud as they landed. Neither time-flung blades nor space-shredding winds achieved any more destruction after the fog of Naekos palm condensed around them. If anything, he felt another pattern slide into place, superseding his influence over reality, denying any act that fell under the purview of force or damage. The complex around them stood unfinished and half-built, but still, they were tall enough to be imposing, to be shadows beyond the smog. The builds ran as interconnected walls joined in an unending spiral, and inside, squatters and refugees lurked, most huddling behind cover, some peering outCscreaming as their minds shattered from exposure to naked divinity. +You are a fool, creature. A short-sighted, ignorant, spiteful fool.+ Vehemence laced every syllable of Zeins words, and against the prone form of her shifting dragon, she strained on one knee, fighting to rise, glaring at him all the while. Something in the fog shifted. A new form graced Avos awareness. A body absurd in proportions and muscle density, wider than it was tall, forming from the palm itself. Naeko was. And he came striding with his gaze fixed on Zein, sparing the Fardrifter not even a glance. Something shifted across the Godslayers expression. A twitch between respect and undying ire. +But what spite it was,+ Zein said, eyes still fixed on Avo. +What an utter, desperate act of destruction. I commend you for this; I will see you broken for this.+ A beat passed. Naeko stepped over the rim of the fountain and closed on Zein. +Oh. And give my compliments to the squire as well. She honors me with this... humbling.+ +Rather would have killed you,+ Avo admitted. +Youre not a problem I wanted to leave unsolved.+ +Then I suppose you learned something of value from me after all. But know this: I merely sought to collar you. When you trace the paths, know you walk in the shadow of my daughter. And as you are now, she will break you. She will take from you. And she will see you turned as a willing slave before the end of things. You are not ready. Swim quietly, pest.+ Zein laughed softly, and Naekos footsteps quickened. She finally tore her gaze away from the FardrifterCaway from the ghoulCto face her once disciple. Her finest pupil. Even his shadow seemed to bear weight, the pressure of the palm increasing as he loomed over her. Avo watched with the excitement of a vouyer, and the templates inside him were no? better. Before him stood two figures that predated the Godsfall. Two bleak legends from the depths of Idheims history. Impossibly, the Godslayers gaze softened as she laid eyes on the Chief Paladin, and she signaled the beginning of their dialogue with a soft exhalation. Dearest boy. Its been too long. Light struck the side of Naekos face, revealing the impossibly smooth texture of his ebony skin and his taut tendons, each as thick as a cord. Then there was his eyes. There was hurt. There was fear. And there was exhaustion. Youre alive. The statement left Naeko as if an admission of defeat. At this point in time, Zein replied. He clenched his jaw. I was hoping something else, you know. I was hoping you were dead. After all these years. And the near-motherly affection flattened behind Zeins eyes. A wish we both share some days, I assure you. Naekos hands opened and closed as fists. Why? Why? Zein asked. The immense palm slammed down on existence. Zein bounced off the ground. Avos ego rang as the symptoms of a concussion overcame his senses. When coherence returned, he found Zeins head capped by one of the Chief Paladins immense paws. Thousandhand felt a titan in battle. An impossible threat. But next to Naeko, she seemed almost as she appeared: an old woman. Brittle. Frail. Aged. A hitched breath preluded Naekos words. His hand tightened. Cracks spread across Thousandhands armored faceplate, but she offered only a muted stare of exasperation than fear. Where the fuck were you? Where? WhatChow could you let this happen? Let? Zein said, sounding incensed again. I let nothing happen. You know VeylisCdo not pretend to think her our lesser. She made a choice. She made a choice and held it close to her heart. Told no one. Not I. And not you. And when the time came, she acted. Something that was almost a sob escaped from Naeko. Just like you taught us. Clearly not, she replied, humorless. She heeded. She acted. She enforced her will. You broke. Truthfully, you disappoint me, my boy. I expected more from you. Her helmet shattered completely between his fingers. But he stopped. With his thumbs an inch away from sinking into her eyes he stopped. Osjane is dead. Ya Wei is dead. Mordeinn is dead. Joramadr is dead. More and more and more. All dead. Naeko took a steadying breath. You expected more from me? So did Osjane. But I just let Osjon kill her. I just let Veylis turn them. All of them. You expected more from me? You know me, Zein. You know me. Im all Ive ever been. Less. Less. An uneasy expression came over Zein. Samir. Enough. Enough. This weakness is beneath you. He didnt heed her words. Ive only ever been a dog. For you. For Jaus. For her. I listened to you. All of you. Whatever you did to me, I took it. I learned. I trained. If there was a farm, I burned it. If there was a god, I fought them. If there was a rebellion I suppressed it. If there was an assassin, I killed them. I did it. I did it. I always did it. Stop. Stop. Zeins voice took on a harrowed quality. Her eyes flicked to Avo, and her character took on a new dimension. Another is watching. You cannot do this to yourself in front of them, boy. I will not allowC Her words faded into a choked grunt as he tore her from the ground, huge hands wrapped around her neck. His eyes were closed, but his mind was sobbing, the pain inside him so resonant Avo could feel the man crumble. Its not up to you! Naeko snarled. Not anymore. You left. You failed. YouCyou let him die. You let Jaus die. You let Veylis fall! Its you! Its always been you! You left me here to hold things together! All of you did! But why couldnt you hear me when I spoke to you! Why couldnt you listen when I told you! All of you! Im not a leader. I dont have it. Never did. Theres not enough of me left to believe. There never was. Everything I was belonged to all of you and... and... and you all went away. You went away and the world fell and I tried and it wasnt enough! Do you hear me now! I wasnt enough! Even in the end! Even as a god! I still couldnt stop them! Still! Still! I still couldnt win! A tremor passed through Zeins lip, but as Naeko was breaking, she endured. Samir. Samir. Control yourself. Please. You are wounded, but you must not fall. You must not show your foes you are pained. Were you there? Were you alive all this time? Were you there that night? The sudden question from Naeko left Zein choked with apprehension. I... Were you there that night when I called for you? That night when Osjane was murdered. When I had to kill my own brothers and sisters to save Scale. I called for you. When I fought Veylis. When I found Osjanes body. I called for you. Did you hear me? Were you there? A soft breath left Zein, and Avo realized even his Fardrifter was silent. Enraptured by the scene. She mustered her strength and spoke. Yes. Yes, I was. And I heard you. ButC And then the palm resting upon them turned to a fist and Naekos thumbs were pushing deep into her eyes. A chortled cry came from Thousandhand, but it was drowned out by a rageful roar escaping Naeko, the volume deafening, the Rend exploding from his body, the act of violence going off with a force greater than a thousand warheads. For the first time in centuries, Samir Naeko found the floor of his anger, and existence trembled. Chapter 22-3 Peace Broken Chapter 22-3 Peace Broken Osjane Thousand: Naeko. What do you want? The fires have settled. Nothing remains of our foes but ash and ruins. The slaves are unchained. The pantheons they fed are but fragments we bear within us. Our victory is total. More and more of our brethren are arriving from across the stars. Countless new horizons await. So why? Why are you still so desperate to find a war? To find a foe? Why are you still seeking vengeance for a war that has already been won? Samir Naeko: Because thats what Im for. Osjane Thousand: War? You''re more than just a destroyer. With your martial gifts, destruction can be protection. Strength can be turned toward... construction. Ah. Even made it rhyme. Samir Naeko: Listen. Osjane. I dont want to disrespect you, so can we get to the point of this? Osjane Thousand: [Sighs] Fine. So be it. I wish for you to treat people with more care. Prisoners. Citizens. Subjects. I have been getting... concerning reports about your behavior. You are rough with people. Samir Naeko: Oh, this is about the piece of shit I killed. Osjane Thousand: Yes. The one you beat to death using his own son. Naeko... the war is finished. You dont need to treat our people as your enemy. Samir Naeko: Theyre not my people. But I hear your words. Ill heel. You dont need toC Osjane Thousand: Youre not a dog! I dont want you to heel, I wantCI want you to be a person! I want you to dream! To wish for something better. Maru is getting married. Ya Wei is... shes making art. Samir Naeko: Mordeinns still a piece of shit. Osjane Thousand: Hes getting better. But, please. Youre a person. You should have dreams too. You should have wants and desires. Of a life after the fires. We will not be Jaus fists forever. And Veylis. What about her? Your lives together? Samir Naeko: Shes fine with me. She knows who I am. She knows Im all for her. Her. Her mom. Her dad. The real dreamers. She knows Ill do anything to see this city shine and them happy. Theyre the best parts of us. Ah. You got me spitting sap. Osjane Thousand: But what about you? What about Samir Naeko himself? You must want something. You must have some kind of hope. Some kind of idealization. Samir Naeko: [Laughter] I find that plenty in the Sister. Osjane Thousand: ...Veylis. You said you stopped Samir Naeko: I said I was gonna try. I stopped cutting her. I stopped hurting her that much. I just... relieve memories with her these days is all. Osjane Thousand: That is not a well thing to do. Samir Naeko: Yeah? It isnt? Okay. I get it. I understand. Youre a real sweetheart, Osjane. Youre better than your idiot brother in pretty much every way. But even he can tell what I am. Osjane Thousand: And what are you? Samir Naeko: Im a hound. Im a killer. Im a fire. Im a bomb. Im the mean godsdamned bastard that comes at night to scalp your pa and burn your home. I dont have dreams. I close my eyes, I see the war, and I hear my paCscreaming for me, cursing at me for letting them cut him apart. Thats who I am. Im a hound, and I need my meat. Osjane Thousand: ...No. Samir Naeko: What? Osjane Thousand: Youre not a dog, Paladin. Youre just a liar with a broken heart. Samir Naeko: Fine. Alright. Anything else. Osjane Thousand: Yes: A months mandatory leave. Use it. And no, this time I do expect you to heel. Use it and come back to me. And Ill be sending Maru to check on you. To make sure youre not spending all your time with your oldest acquaintance. -Osjane Thousand to Samir Naeko (Circa 32 Post Godsfall) 22-3 Peace Broken A layer above, in the Sanctus-majority district of Madruss, a young slave, left unfed in her cage for days, succumbed to hunger and took a bite from the dead puppy her master caught her playing with a week ago. As she sank the three unrotted teeth she had remaining into the flea-infested carcass, a supple retribution followed. Eighty kilometers away in a Syndicate bar, the girls master died screaming as she was bitten in half by something unseen. Three hundred kilometers away, back down in the gutters, a group of twelve gangers cheered as they triggered their generator once more, preparing to shock the squire they captured one final time. The jolt came. They fried instead. A few hundred meters away, in an alleyway, an aratnid bit into its dying sister, seeking to find nourishment in the absence of its mother. Somehow, it tore into itself instead. And back at ground zero, where Zein was breaking apart into echo after echo, where branching paths of gold poured from her being during one second and broke apart in the next, Naeko forced his fingers deeper into his former masters socket, relishing at the cracks he felt shuddering up his digits. Echo clashed against echo, parrying blows away from Zeins true body. But with each act of force or violence she inflicted, an exponential opposite was returned, the magnitude of harm greater in every way. Naeko watched his Rend plummet below twenty. Felt death after death, body after broken body touched by his venting Hell. As a miracle of time spilled out from ZeinCher paths collapsing, routes of escape narrowing further and furtherCso too did miracles of violence emanate from Naeko. She flowed like a raging river. He swelled like an expanding atmosphere. And so it was for a moment that he was in the past again. A boy under her tutelage. A broken foe at her feet, staring up the length of her gleaming glaive. A shift in the path splashed over him. Her dragon glaive moved on its own accord an slashed out from the rightCopening to draw him into a pocket of space. His utility fog expanded around him, forming an armor of pointed fists. He struck the encroaching split in space, and from him formed a barricade of knuckles, washing outward in a tide. Existence screamed. The gutters groaned. The ground fissured as blocks crumbled into opening chasms. Deeper still, the Penumbra that once housed the Low Masters and their ilk groaned, the hive of alloy fashioned into place by the voiders squealing as they came apart. Naeko moved. The world succumbed. The world broke. There was no other choice. There was no other way. Such as material reality. So for Zein. Or it would have been if she hadnt used her reserve Heaven. A droplet of rain fell three kilometers, spilling down from an opening in the Layers above to grace the windowsill of a toppled apartment building. She vanished. His hands closed. Zein was gone. Ah. That Heaven. The one she so loathed to use. Rarely did Zein Thousandhand ever allow herself a retreat. An age ago, Naeko would have felt honored. Now, it just fed his fury. A resurrection was due after this. A good death properly earned. With his cheeks flensed open and lower jaw dangling on unresponsive sinews, Naeko let out a choked rasp as he struggled to laugh, storm clouds building behind his eyes. Facing Zein, he saw the shine in her gaze. The pride. The weariness. +Anyone else would have been mine.+ +Almost,+ Naeko said. +Who was that?+ +A new discipline turned wayward rival. He has rejected my will.+ +Must be smarter than me then.+ +Naeko. I wish to tell you many things. There isC+ He didnt bother waiting for her to finish. He buried a fist into her disembowelment and wrapped his fingers around her spine. Whatever she had to say, hed get it from her in interrogation. He was Chief godsdamned Paladin, not her pawn. Not her boy. No. Fuck that game. He was done. He was done. He leaned in close so she could see himCsee his hate. +I called for you. Not anymore. When you come back, Ill speak. Ill speak, and for the first time in your worthless life youll listen. And youll tell me what you know straight.+ And before she had a chance to argue, he sank his other hand inside her, released his Heaven, and tore in two different directions. She came free in halves, and both went sailing from his hands, painting the distant walls flanking him as mutual splatters. A scab formed in front of him. A rare sight to earn from Zein Thousandhand. But Naeko wasnt satisfied. Not even close. Shed come back. Shed come back with Heaven manifested and the urge to fight. That was all well and good with him. He felt the fire again. The flames he thought killed all those years ago. He remembered why he did all this. Remembered what he felt, and why he felt it. Chains from chains. Master to master. Leash to leash. He was a dog. He was a dog, but he had no master, and he needed to pull something apart. To tear into this city for all the years it disgraced his brothers and sisters, to tell it he was done sleeping, that the slump was over. +I told you,+ he said, casting his thoughts into the cavernous dark. +I told you I surrender. You broke me. You won. But youre not there. Youre not real. No one cares.+ He swallowed and snapped his jaw back into place. +Its just me, isnt it? Its up to me. I have to do this. I have to do this.+ Silence again. Silence and no answers to sate his hurt. Nothing but him. Nothing. +Not just you. Courage, Naeko. Not alone. I see you. I see your struggle.+ Time quivered. Naeko froze. His Heaven rushed out from him, spreading wide to find the speaker. But there was nothing. And there was no one. No one at all. Maybe it was just his own mind. But he never sounded that sibilant. And his voice was never that deep. There was someone else. Beside him and Zein, there was someone else watching. No Veylis. It couldnt be whoever was using the DaemonCthey were dead. So who? Who? Who? Naekos mood worsened. He spat at Zeins anchor. Couldnt even come back without making things more complicated for him. A growl escaped him. Frustration built. He settled for striking New Vultun across the face again, his palm remanifesting in the atmosphere before slamming back down, passing through the harmless without harm, and splattering the vicious as he had just done Zein. This was the right thing. Enforcement. Enforcement. Enforcement. He let himself sleep. But the city still didnt care. The Guilds still played their games. The closest thing he ever had a mother still thought him nothing more than a dog. Godsdammit all. In despair, Naeko found his mind drifting back to Osjane, to her question of what he wanted, to the dreams of the future. Never to come. It turned out he was right. It turned out the city did need a dog, and the Guilds a proper mauling. He activated his session and linked to Maru, never taking his eyes off Zeins scab, or her writhing dragon. +Maru. Pocket off this area. And get me some godsdamned cagers. I got a third for our trial. I got Thousandhand. I got her. I got her. I got her. I got her.+ A lull followed. Maru sent him a nod. +Hey. Are you alright?+ And Naeko looked down at his handsCsoaked in the gore of his master and mother. Soaked in blood like all those times before. It felt right. It felt warm. It felt like what he was for. +I dont think I ever was.+ *** REND CAPACITY [HEART OF NOLOTH]: 0% DOMAINS DETECTED (SHADOW/FORCE/SPACE) STABILIZING ONTOLOGY REPAIRS IN PROGRESS WARNING: HEAVY TEMPORAL DISTORTION DETECTED Chapter 22-4 Among Giants Chapter 22-4 Among Giants [Operational Damage Report for Critical Sovereignties in the Spine] Kainhal Death Toll: Estimated 23 Million Casualties: Over 120 Million Damage: Decimation of all major Syndicates; operational members, active enforcers, associated gangs, activated golems Suldananapt-Iadoir Death Toll: 12 Million Casualties: Approximately 64 Million, many missing Damage: Major chrono-spatial launch sites damaged; mass drone-jock casualties False Isle Death Toll: 8 Million Casualties: 63 Million, sections of city displaced. Need further review Damage: Decimation of all major Syndicates; operational members, active enforcers, associated gangs, activated golems Singhrids Kennel Death Toll: 29 Million Casualties: Unknown, thaumaturgic shielding for employed Syndicates ruptured Damage: Organ-Breeder operation completely destroyed; all mod-slaves freed or euthanized MeldainC [ENDING REPORT] +Ive seen enough. Issue a cast: All tertiary assets must go to ground. Do not do anything to draw the Chief Paladins attention. Delay all overt operations and reduce noise for the foreseeable future. Instancer Madrapu, set up a meeting with Convex Wallflower. Tell them we need Incubi support. Tell them we would like to make a proposal to procure more proxies. Samir Naeko just shook off his fucking malaise by dragging the back of his hand across the citys face. The easy days are over. A storm of shit is rolling in over the horizon. We need to hunker down. -Augur Nyretei Yaeglis of Sanctus 22-4 Among Giants There were levels to power. There were gods beyond gods. And then there were beings like Samir NaekoCa man bearing implacable power, seemingly capable of laying his hand upon all of New Vultun at once. Avo beheld the devastation across his ever-spreading plague of splinters. He watched through cog-feeds on the ground, from drones crossing the sky, internalized damage reports flicking through mechanized combat platforms, and tasted the Rend spilling free of rupturing golems. He witnessed Naekos fury in a perspective more intimate and complete than any other in the city. He was there. From the gutters to Lights End. He was there to watch Naeko finish his fight with Zein. He was there, watching the tumbling clouds that formed the Chief Paladins palm sweep through every Layer, pass through every being and building, press down upon every aspect of violence manageable across the tapestry of existence. The coils within gauss guns whined. Missiles streaked. Fists landed. Miracles manifested. And the shooters were cut down by their own flechettes. Explosions fizzled but the jocks guiding the missiles fried. Strikes folded in on themselves, arms and legs breaking, combat bioforms tearing into their own flesh. The golems made to break the world flinched, flared, and came apart physically and ontologically as their miracles were torn away from them. Through dimming eyes and failing cog-feeds, Avo stole death after death, drank ghosts after ghost, and learned what it was to stand against Naeko as a mortal man. He watched from Lights End, the Throat, the Spine, and then the gutters. He bore witness from the perspectives of an unharmed bystander and an active transgressor. The former merely walked on as embraced by a cloud. The others experienced the full retribution of their own actions. Magnified. Amplified. Their deaths justified. GHOSTS: [44,035,283] THAUMIC OUTPUT - 81,935 THAUM/c Naekos Heaven thundered down against the city like it was an anvil he sought to break, and caught in the radius, Avo suffered a turbulence that made him feel small. Reminded him he had far to rise yet as a Godclad, and that there were beings in this city who dwarfed him yet. Zein was contained. At least that scheme had succeeded, but watching them fight, watching her use everything she could, but be rendered little more than impotent by his sheer powerCunable to even kill him with a future-stuck thrustCwas humbling. And more than a little thrilling. The Godslayer was contained. A problem for the Paladins to handle. Perhaps Naeko would finish killing her, but something told Avo the Chief Paladin still wanted to keep his former master alive, loathsome as she was, and enraged though he was. With all she knew, she could offer her memories. Give Naeko insight into Avo and the others. Reveal truths about Ninth Column. But such a thing would do more harm to her vaunted paths. Whats more, the dragon told of her memories. How she kept them siloed and stored. Some of her recollections burned within him. Moments of history crystallized into shape, the haze of the past clearing. Other gulfs remained, but Avo doubted anyone but Zein could find them. And with how totally he infested their Oversecs, whoever they dispatched to interface with her, he would compromise first. Not a bad finalC WARNING: HEAVY TEMPORAL DISTORTION DETECTED The coming shock slammed down on him just as the last tickles of darkness slithered into his crackling Soul. The palls cast by the nearby foliage stopped clawing at the enshadowed matter, but a swelling of gold tore across existence, striking Avos Frame with a ringing impact. Where Zein was a river running the course of time, where her Fisher That Wasnt dove across non-linear streams, what was coming for Avo now was something akin to a continental avalanche. The metaphysical weight couldnt be ignored. Greater than Thousandhand. Greater even than Naeko. Distant as it was, its coming was like the fall of a titan, the clouds displacing to announce its arrival, tectonic plates parting as they greeted the surface. More significant perhaps was how it moved in relation to time. Zein leaped forward into the future. Skipping and skimming the surface of progressive chronology. This was something else. This was a parallel tide to existence itself. A second ocean of reality simulated from the first. It washed through Avo, and he felt his Domain of Chronology rattle. His Frame lurched, and for a beat, he thought it was going to be torn from his sheath entirely. He stumbled as the world around him fractured into splitting stacks unto itself before resplendent threads stitched them back together. He knew who this was. He knew what this was. The memories he consumed from the locus pillar sang out to him. A single name escaped with his breath. Veylis. Leave. Leave now! Shes reaching out for you! Shes reaching through the paths! She felt you! Avo removed the urges of greed and gluttony from his mind and abandoned the golems he was planning to consume without effort. To stay here any longer would expose him. Give the High Seraph to tear him across time. But it was still overwhelming. How fast she came. How fast she found him. How easy it was for her to remake entire sections of existence. Zein was right. He wasnt ready. Not even close. But he could run. He could escape. His triggered Haemification on himself and burrowed through Draus session. A splatter of blood blended with the crimson grass on which he once stood. Only a single submind remained active in New Vultun, diving the Nether, spreading splinters for the coming days. Physically, Avo was gone. Utterly vacating New Vultun before it was too late. He thought himself quiet enough. He thought Naeko a good enough deterrent and his time apple. He thought. He thought. He couldnt just think anymore. He couldnt leave anything to chance. Not with his enemies capable of turning time itself against him. He needed better counters. Protections. [Paths] of his own. Time to have another conversation with Kae. *** A second later, a reverberation pulsed through existence, and a second layer of reality snapped away from the first, vibrating even though it bore all the same aspects as its source. The Paladin golems and courtyard where the minor disturbance originated were unspooled from baseline reality and taken. And then just as fast as it came, just as fast as Naeko felt its presence, turned his palm back upward, it receded like a fleeing wave, collapsing back upward through the Layers, back upward at a speed unfathomable, back, back, and back to the apex of the Tiers. In the span of a heartbeat, the streaming waves of gold crossed thousands of kilometers, and around them were the paths broken and rebuilt. Within its grip now was a collection of golems and a space and moment in time. The paths twisted together and rebuilt the extracted portions, golems coming back into shape, the biothaumically designed garden walkway unfolding into shape. Jutting trees of pearly white protruded from swollen nubs of red. Bone ran on as walkways lined the fecund ground. Brushing across the patterns of existence, Veylis found it then. A smear of blood coating a patch of flattened grass. Intriguing. Fascinating. A lesser echo was spawned. The entity materializes in the scene and through it, she touches the blood and strains her Heaven to turn back time. As much as it can before the nothingness. The contours of a figure come into shape, but she can see that its death was immediate. Sudden. Unspeakably violent. A death only possible via thaumaturgic means. But still, there was no anchoring. No hint of death in her scenes or baseline reality. When her canon reached its limit, she studied the figure and found herself entirely at a loss as to who she was facing. They stood too tall. Too thin. The blood spraying free from its parting body left it masked by an obfuscated facade. But even with her ignorance of the subjects actual identity, she was already certain of one thing, a truth she vocalized, this reassembled world speaking in her stead. My mother, you most certainly are not. So, mystery, who might you be? If you are not my mother, who might you be? Chapter 22-5 Reorientation Chapter 22-5 Reorientation CONFIDENTIALCONFIDENTIALCONFIDENTIAL SYNCHRONIZING MEM-CODES... 100% CLEARANCE GRANTED TO FATE-SKEIN: [SAMIR NAEKO] Report No.: CATZENITH-002-CELEDON Date: 28-IV-233 PF Subject Name: [REDACTED] Physical Description: [REDACTED] Height: [REDACTED] Weight: [REDACTED] Eye Color: [REDACTED] Hair Color: [REDACTED] THREAT CATEGORY ZENITH HEAVENS: [REDACTED] WARNING: SUBJECT HAS A DOMAIN OF (CHRONOLOGY) AND AN ESOTERIC DOMAIN OF (WAR) THEY ARE ALSO UNPARALLELED AS A COMBATANT AS SUCH, CONTINGENCY //CELEDON IS IN FULL EFFECT ALL EXORCISTS AND PALADINSHANDLING SECURING THE SUBJECT WILL BE SUBJECT TO NINE-STEP AMNESTICS OVERSEEN BY [REDACTED] ASSIGNED NECROS WILL BE SEALED IN CONTAINMENT PLANE ZENITH-002 ALONGSIDE SUBJECT ZENITH-002 PRESENT ANCHORING LOCATION: CHIEF PALADIN SAMIR NAEKOS LEFT POCKET ATTENTION: SPECIAL NOTE FROM CHIEF PALADIN NAEKO TO INCUBI AND OUTSIDERS: +I know youre there. I know Ive already splattered some of you. Lets not bullshit each other. You know who I have. You know whats going to happen if you make this public before we do. Im really tired. I havent played a match in nearly twelve hours. If youre going to try to get to her, youre gonna half to come to me. If you come to me right now, chances are Ill kill you. Id make my apologies beforehand, but Im feeling pretty honest today, so Ill just say I want you to do it. I want you to make me kill you. Piss me off. Piss me off and Ill show you what happened to my old consang Sister Karakan. ... What else was I gonna say? Oh. Right. Veylis. Youre a lying sow. You told me she died fighting. You told me. You lied again. Again. See you at the trial.+ [REPORT ENDED] -Containment Report of [REDACTED] 22-5 Reorientation Well, that shit escalated pretty fucking quickly. The understatement left Chambers alongside a rasp of air. The man was drinking a bubbling greenish substance under the cool shade of branching foliage. He claimed it was some kind of mushroom-fermented liquor, but Avo was still ghoul enough to sniff the bitter-acidic tang of Chambers adrenaline-soaked muscles. Most of the cadre were scattered about the deceased Fallwalkers estate. Yakozitrins personal mansion was built as if five enormous cubes stacked over each other. It was maybe a tenth the size of a normal megablock, but considering the population sparsity of the enclave, most of the room was little more than empty space. Few places exemplified that more than Yakozitrins rooftop garden, festooned in a private enclosure at the very top of the structure. Marble beams imbued with light bathed the interior in unceasing radiance and a canopy formed from bone-white needle-thin branches wreathed the top like a thatched tent. The calming ambiance of running water coursed from a network of pipes running through the mansionCeven through the enclaves many layers. A steady gas-produced pressure created miniature rivers between landscapes of white and green. The waters came together as two pools, each perfectly symmetrical in shape and length. When viewed from above, the bright, running waters came together as an artistic portrait of the Fallwalker himself; the witness formed his skin, the green his hair, the waters an outline, and the pools his eyes. The portrait was partially defaced, however. Left damaged after Dice uprooted the chiseled boulder meant to serve as her former masters jaw from the soil and flung it across the entire enclave with a flick of her wrist. An understandable action on her part. Perhaps even still a bit muted. Sunrises humming drones were scattered along the branches while Chambers sat on a stone stool not far from the leftmost pool. His eyes were on Kae as he spoke, the Agnos soaking her feet in the waters, ghosts spilling out from her halo as phantoms, playing scenes from her past, bygone memories of a life lost, friends lost, lover lost. The drifting currents slowed as they entered her proximity as if compelled to by her very presence. The exhausted bitterness leaking from her mind impressed the same on anyone who dared to approach. It was an ugly thing when your benefactor was also the murderer of your brother and close friends. But surviving desperate encounter after desperate encounter as part of someone elses mind changed a person. Just like the wretched taste of the mushroom beer. Avo didnt swallow. He just spat. And instead of suffering the indignity of suffering the taste further, he bit off his tongue and promptly grew a new one. Chambers threw his head back and cackled. The mans hyena-like laughter made Kae jump, Sunrise scatter, and Denton turn. The Agnos shook her head at Chambers, who was currently clutching his stomach, trying not to double over from laughter. She shared a look with Avo and gave him a nod. Somehow, the gesture was significant. The sign of a pall lifting, the inflammation of her misery subsiding, at least temporarily. A slow wheeze announced the calming of Chambers mirth, and Avo stared flatly down at the little man next to him. Chambers took back his drink and shook his head. Gods, but that was a great moment. Im gonna save it as a snap in my Meta. Send it to the others. Avo grunted with displeasure. Tastes terrible. Like fizzling clammy mucus. Yeah, its kinda shit, Chambers agreed. And then, paradoxically, he took another drink. Why, Avo asked, not seeing the point. Because Im used to it, Chambers sighed. He planted the cup in the soil and looked down at the blades of grass jutting through the pearlescent grains powdering the dirt. Because thats always been my life. Shitty drinks. Shitty gig. Shitty implants. Shitty choices. He shifted and faced Avo. Till I got snatched by you and the Reg, I guess. At least I still get to deal with shitty people. Talking about Zein. The mans expression tightened. I was fu-ucking scared, consang. I looked into her eyes and I wish I didnt. Somehow. Somehow, I knew she was going to kill us. I mean, her shoving your arm up my ass didnt help, but godsdammit did I feel small in her eyes. She looked at me like I was nothing. Im a Godclad now, and still, she thinks Im nothing. Its like I never stopped being a juv. Avo didnt speak. He read the emotions from Chambers thoughtstuff instead. Turbulent drafts. Ghosts oscillating along the exterior of his halo, his Conundrum wards orbiting behind like satellites. You know my worst memory about my dad? It wasnt after he made me watch as he beat my mom half to death. I wasnt after... well, he started taking it out on me full-time after she, uh... You know. He bit his lip. It was after all that. There was a day when I was like. I dont. I cant remember how old. But enough to know what a gun was. And dad just left his pistol on the bed. And I got to thinking... and I got to thinking... Shadows played behind Chambers burning eyes, the flames of his Heaven forming a faint corona around him. I took it. I snatched quick and clean off the bed. Just like how Dannis did in his vics. Dad was piss drunk. He didnt even manage to turn I pulled the trigger. Just squeezed quick. No struggle at all. Jaus, I hate him. I still hate him. I hope he died slow. He nodded. Turns out, the fucker didnt replace the damn power cell for his gun. No juice. No current. No dead dad. I squeezed and squeezed, and his face went from confused to angry to... I mean, you have my memories, the half-strand just started laughing. Laughing at me. Chambers stopped talking then. The memories after didnt need words. The beating was bad. Especially since it was done using the same gun. I remember him looking down at me when he was done, Chambers said. He was just looking at me. Like I was stupid. Like he was offended I ever I thought I could kill him. I just kept staring at the ceiling. I was praying. Praying for someone to kill him. Praying for a god because reality clearly liked him a lot more than it fucking liked me or my mom. And ma-ma and gran-pa were fucking useless. They just watched. Saw him again. Saw him again in Thousandhand. Avo knew the answer. Chambers just needed help facing it. The man shook his head. We were nothing to her. You were the only who could, well, maybeCif it werent for Tavers. His hands were shaking. He hid his fear by bouncing his legs. Im supposed to be a Godclad. And still, she made me feel like I wasnt shit. But you know what? Im gutter rat. Im trash from the Warrens. Who cares about me? Kae, though? Shes Agnosi. Shes a real girl. Even she gets used like this? Chambers voice went thin. Vulnerable. Almost child-like. Theres no way out. Reality fucking hates us. Theres no way out. The templates inside Avo were quiet. A good amount of them flinched. Aedon Chambers story was a painful one. And a common one. Happy childhoods were rare gems in this city. But it was a gem Avo had, simulated though those memories might have been, patchwork though his recollections were. Walton had cared for him. To the detriment of Kae, Voidwatch, Ninth Column, and even New Vultun itself, but he cared absolutely. And knowing that was a certitude that few people would ever know, much less a monster. Do you know what it means to be a god? Avo asked. Chambers blinked rapidly, burning away his misted eyes as he shook his head. Nah? I think Im learning, Avo said. There is absoluteness in an act. Absoluteness in choices made. Actions. The smallest miracle. Will. A decision to do. A choice to believe. You chose to be there for Kae. To stand before Zein. That is true. That is true and it cannot be taken away. But she could have justC You saw my memories, Avo interrupted. Yeah? Youre talking about how the Chief Paladin stomped her shit in. Chambers snorted. Pretty nova. Yeah. Yes. But not talking about that. Did either of them seem like gods to you? That made Chambers pause. They were tearing the gutters apart. Fucking, Naeko hit the whole city with his palm. I didnt ask if they were powerful. I asked if you would believe in them. If you would put your faith in them. No. Both Chambers and Avo looked to Kae, intercepting the question. Theyre just people. Terrible, miserable, sad, broken, little people. Who can beat our asses, Chambers added. Avo grunted in accord to both of them. Power is important. But power without path always betrays. Zein was a fool. Zein was more powerful. Now Zein is a prisoner. Because she chose. Then I did. And then she chose again. Poorly this time. Poorly with Naeko. Because she doesnt care about divinity. She doesnt care about godhood. She doesnt dream of a higher reality. Or to become something greater. She just wants what she lost back. She is fighting for the past. But the past is lost. The sacrifices to the old gods. To the Woundmother. To the Fardfriter. To the Techplaguer. They were all fathomed utopias before they were manifested powers. Heavens ascended from the limits of reality. Actualizations. Humanity and more. So, what, Chambers asked. Youre saying that Zein and Naeko arent gods because theyre soft? Psychologically kinda fucked? Cause if you are, thats like, all of us too. No. Im saying they will never fully reach godhood because I think they are only human And they dream no further. They dont dream of who they might yet be. What the world could yet be. What they might yet do. Avo faced Chambers again. But you didnt. Running would be human. Accepting Zeins authority would be human. Facing her despite your wounds. There is a spark of divinity in that. That is what I see. Kae settled next to them, her face wan with exhaustion as she sat cross-legged on the grass, now fully drawn into the conversation. Chambers was rocking his legs faster, anxiety still coursing through his veins. I couldnt have stopped her. Yes, Avo said. And sometimes dreams die. People fail. Reality hates us. But we can stand above it. We can grow. We can seek to become something greater than ourselves always. Actualize. Embody. Our Heavens become a statement through us. An idea made manifest. To force new rules on existence itself to see the impossible achieved. To let virtue and righteousness take seed in the hollow womb of the world that was. Silence settled over them. Across his splinters, he discovered Draus, Dice, and Tavers listening in. A few of Sunrises drones lay upon his shoulders, and Denton was facing them instead of the golden horizon of the city now, ansible gone quiet. It was a disgruntled sigh from Kae that finally broke the quiet. Alright, she said, throwing up her hands. You didnt need to say all that. I get your meaning: Ill look at your Frame. Again, Chambers snorted, and this time, Avo grinned too. Chapter 22-6 Matter of Time (I) Chapter 22-6 Matter of Time (I) +Hey, hey, New Vultun. Do you have a migraine? I sure do. How did everyone enjoy this years annual Low Master mind-fucking? At least thats who Im guessing is behind this. Either that or Ori-Thaum tripped over the Nether cord again. Anyway. If the threat of another Guild War followed by a new Nolothic Uprising wasnt enough darkness for your day, we also have to ask ourselves just who exactly shit in the Chief Paladins dinner for him to beat us like that. Jaus. I havent been slapped that hard since I broke up with that Scarth-sow I used to know. Makes me wonder if the trial is even still going to beCOh. We have a syncer. Special requestCsorry, I dont do... Okay, thats a lot of imps... Fine. Ill put up you on. If youre a rash-dumper, I send myC+ [FATE-SKEIN IDENTIFIED: NAEKOTHEONLY] CALA MARLOWE: +What? ICOkay. Okay. Chief Paladin, this is surprisingC+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Hey. We spoke once. I think. You ambushed me in Stormjumpers or something. Im just here to make an announcement. And because I really dont wanna talk to Guilder Proparazzi types and doing this with you instead should piss them off.+ CALA MARLOWE: +...Alright. Well. Id say welcome, but I dont really wanna bullshit you, so... Yeah. Chief Paladin Samir Naeko everyone. Special guest for the FATELSS Thoughtcast.+ SAMIR NAEKO: +You fine with me making an official announcement here? Your lobbies might be getting spiked with traffic.+ CALA MARLOWE: +Fuck em. If they do, they do. Youre the Chief Paladin. And I dont really care. Do whatever.+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Alright. Thanks, juv. Anyway. Hey, uh, New Vultun. Uh, FATELESS..es. Chief Paladin Naeko here. Now, Ive been told there are rumors in the Nether. Talking about why I tore up the gutters and who I was fighting. Im here to clear the air and let things be known. I was not, in fact, engaged in competitive domestic abuse against the High Seraph. I would also like to thank [12INCHESISSTILLTOOSHORT] for sending me that detailed simulation of me, the Stormsparrow, a nu-dog, and the High Seraph passing shit into each others asses. Wonderful rash-contraband. Id like to make your day better by telling you that your mom died during my slap and that she was a shitty Syndi in charge of slave smuggling. The Exorcists will be seeing you shortly.+ CALA MARLOWE: +...Nova.+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Anway. It wasnt Veylis I was fighting.+ CALA MARLOWE: +Right. Kind of ridiculous if you think about it.+ SAMIR NAEKO: +It was her mother. Zein. Thousandhand. Godslayer. My old vicious sow of a master. That one.+ CALA MARLOWE: +Okay. Holy shit. What the fuck. UnexpecCWait, isnt she dead?+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Wouldve probably been better if she stayed that way. Anyway, you dont gotta worry. I tore her old ass in half, fought her some more, and then shoved her into a containment pocket. To all you Necros and Guilder agents, I can feel you. I know youre there. Come for her, and I smear you.+ CALA MARLOWE: +...+ SAMIR NAEKO: +So. Finishing with that. Im just here to announce that Im adding another person to the trial and that citizens and subjects should expect justice to be done, and all the other shit a Chief Paladin is supposed to say, I guess.+Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com CALA MARLOWE: +Can you do that?+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Huh? Do what?+ CALA MARLOWE: +Just add someone to the trial. Isnt it literally days away? Hells, considering everything thats happened, is it even still on?+ SAMIR NAEKO: +Well, Marlowe, technically theres supposed to be a process to this thing, but the last person who gave a shit about all that got snuffed by her brother. So. Ill give you my way of seeing things: Im Chief Paladin Samir Naeko. I am the Force-Breaker. I just killed the Godslayer. Im somewhere north of pissed, and I intend to stand and deliver on this enforcement. Test me. Test me and Ill reel you out into the Nothing and see if you catch a glance of Jaus. The soft days are over. And you consangs on Stormjumpers can rest easy knowing Ill be taking a hiatus. The trial will be delayed till Nulrise next week. In the meantime, I intend to enforce some peace.+ -Chief Paladin Naeko on the FATELESS Thoughtcast 22-6 Matter of Time (I) A death and a deluge of curses later, Agnos Kae Kusanade summarized her opinions on Avos Frame thusly: Avo, what in all the hells did you do to your Frame. Her exasperation was capped off with a squeak as frustration leaked from her Soul. Gathered atop Avos haemokinetic tower overlooking the enclave, the members of the cadre were split between watching for any encroaching threats while also anticipating their personal upgrades. Already, however, did they find themselves beset with problems. The smaller matter was that, despite Kaes multi-disciplinary brilliance as an Agnos, her Knowings did not extend to the Domains of Chronology or Time. This ignorance, however, proved to be the lesser issue when finally entered Avos Frame to make initial inspections. To say that bathing in the Hungers blood had changed his ontology was an understatement. Most Domains were foundational pillars for Heavens, their corresponding canons and underlying mythos sculpting the metaphysical constructs with fixed patternsCcomprehendible aesthetics. Such was not so for his Domain of Chronology. To paint a simple portrait, branches of coursing gold were forming and dissolving across the entire space simulated by his Soul. They sprawled out like circuits or arteries from each of his cyclers, writhing free from between the dragons scales and burrowing into his Heavens, into his Hells, into his very Soul itself. Kaes Soul perked up. Fine. Fine? Avo asked. Fine. Its not like theres any risk to me. Its not like my life can get any worse. Ill go in. I direct the build. The only risk is that chronology contradicts itself, we get flung backwardCor stuck in the presentCand then all stop existing. No, Administrator, MAKE HER FEEL GOOD! She might be PLANNING TO DESTROY US! They interfaced with the Woundshaper first, and as Avo mantled its inner structure again, it was unchanged from before. A building storm of arterial lightning flashed, leaping out from the veins of a blood-forged cityscape. Within its mythology, the sacrifices continued to kill themselves in that pool of blood, unaware of the trailing gold spearing past them. Okay. All we can do is experiment. Kae let out a resigned sigh. Avo. Begin build-simulations of canon under the Domain of Chronology. He did just that. Which promptly caused the mem-data to glitch and flicker while the currents of time flowed into the Heaven of Blood. Threads of gold lined the Woundmothers veins, lining its alloyed structure in a backdrop of glistening threads. I feel... She reached out and plucked at the world. Deeper. Like Ive sunken into something fundamental. This can only go poorly, the Fardrifter mused. Kae ignored the running commentary. Tell me ifC Then, the mem-data finally loaded. DOMAIN OF (CHRONOLOGY) [INTERNALIZED] ->SUITABLE CANONS FOR INFUSION SIMULATED: ->WOUNDMOTHER (BLOOD/MATTER/FIRE/LIGHTNING/LUMINOSITY/PROTECTION/BIOLOGY) - [12 CANONS] ->FARDRIFTER (AIR/SHADOW/SPACE/LABYRINTH) - [7 CANON] ->TECHPLAGUER (SIGNALS/BIOLOGY/SPACE) - [2 CANONS] Avo wasnt sure what suitable canons for infusion simulated meant, but he selected the Woundmother regardless. Potential changes flashed into his mind, but the options came only as augmentations to existing canons rather than canons for a new Domain. He projected the strings over to Kae, and the Agnos drew closer to the orbit of his Soul. What? What! This makesCagh! How? We all know there needs to be an ontologic to channel and manifest the construct. And why is it only changing your active canoCOh. There were times when Avo very much wanted to just burn the Agnos. Oh? I... have a theory. Or, maybe I just going insane like the rest of you. But... perhaps you dont need to have a Heaven because... your Frame itself has adapted to possess traits that can be found in a dragon. Did bathe in Hungers blood. Wait. Telling me Im ontologically a dragon now? The transfusion might have done something. The Frame might not need it because... the Frame is substituting the Heaven itself. She gave a scoff. Change something. Apply the Domain to a canon. Preferably one you commonly use. The choice was simple with that recommendation. INFUSING CANON - 1%... 25%... 100% ->DOMAIN (MATTER-CHRONOLOGY) ->CANON: BLOOD FROM TIME - THE USER CONVERTS THE PASSAGE OF TIME INTO BLOOD; EACH TON OF BLOOD CONVERTED ACCELERATES THEM [108 SECONDS] INTO THE FUTURE This was already enough to make Avo stare and Kae gasp. Oh... oh, yes, master,the Woundmother purred. Then the hubris loaded. Or more specifically, loaded, and displayed nothing. ->HUBRIS: [NULL] Kaes Soul swelled. What the fuC Chapter 22-7 Matter of Time (II) Chapter 22-7 Matter of Time (II) Why are there so few Gods of Time, you ask? Hm. A commonly asked question. What is the first thing you might do with time? Many answers come with this question, but what unites them is change. People wish to change the nature of time. In relation to themselves. In relation to something else. What changes people desire to make informs us much about them. A warrior might wish to move and strike first. To stop time so they can cut down all their enemies without difficulty. A farmer may wish to skip their crops across the cycle of withering and make every day a harvesting day. Merchants, perhaps, might want to shorten their travel time. And stuffy scholars like ourselves may wish to dull times passage so we might spend more hours with our books.Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com But there is another thing that unites us. Another thing that everyoneCeveryone has wished to do with time. Go back. There is always something that makes us want to go back. Perhaps it is a regret or old shame. Something that was left less than perfect. A wrong that no longer can be righted. It is a desire so common that entire civilizations have been consumed by the attempt. Taken by the encroaching nothingness as they broke from realitys fixed track. Even today, there are parts of the world that remain sealed. Bound behind locks both spatial and material to prevent anyone from passing into the temporal wounds. And every now and again, we find artifacts. Instruments and ruins from places that no one remembers. That no one can recall anything about. But they are there. And they hold records of us, while we have retained nothing on them. So. To answer your question, dear novitiate, the Gods of Time are not few in totality, but most never endured long enough to suffer the Godsfall. -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi 22-7 Matter of Time (II) Null? Avo asked, unable to understand what that meant for his hubris. It means theres no cost, Kae said, her words flowing fast. I think. Maybe. We will need to test this as soon as you resurrect. ItCyou are likely not inconsistent. Ontologically, I mean. That should be the case, yes. Dont understand. The Agnos let out a note of frustration. Think of things this way: your ontological structure is likely now partially made from time. And Im not speaking of your physical sheath but your true self. You are a self-moving mind more than anything else right now, if judged by functionality. There is no... no contradiction possible to the ways you can experience the passage of time. What might age or cause my bodyCor even your sheath to suffer anomalous harmCwill functionally do nothing to you. She paused. Perhaps we can make you partially manifest as a dragon metaphysically as well. Yes, that will be an avenue worth studying. But I will need time. More time. Avo grunted a light chuff. Might be something I can manufacture more of soon. Just like matter. He paused. Like... a matter. Made of time. Kae barely reacted. You have been spending far too much time with Chambers. That was possible. The mans template was one Avo commonly interfaced with. Hes never far from my mind. Avo. Stop. This time he gave a hissing laugh. Lets review all your options. Wait! Before that. Theres one thing I wish to see. Have the Frame estimate how much Essence this will cost to manifest. I have a feelingC WOUNDMOTHER (BLOOD/MATTER/FIRE/LIGHTNING/LUMINOSITY/PROTECTION/BIOLOGY) - 10,002 THAUM/c > 23,555 THAUM/c And the flechette to the gut finally struck. Avos attention zeroed in on the massive spike in thaums as displeasure filled his mind. Almost twenty-four thousand thaums needed. Hm, Kae said, sounding unsurprised. Makes sense. That much of an increase is normal for Canons of Chronology? For a miracle of enormous scope that affects all other aspects of reality deeply? Of course. Theoretically, you should have a horrifically vulnerable hubris as well, but once again, the rules only seem to apply to other people. What a shame. You sound so sincere. Kae sighed. Frankly, Im still trying to fully conceptualize this, but I expect these canons to be severely Rend-intensive as well. Still not sure why this is more unnatural than turning blood into matter. Or matter into blood. Because those Domains only affect specific catalysts and constructs in reality. If you rupture your Heaven of Blood, the affected Domains are relatively specific. Dangerous. Destructive. But specific. Your Heaven of Air comparatively, has a fixed area of effect. But you do not have a Heaven of Chronology, Avo. You have an ingrained Domain. With nothing bridging it. Not space. Not matter. Nothing. Instead, it is something you can apply and alter your existing Heavens. The implications are... ah. Lets go over your other options before resurrection takes us. We can deliberate on theory back in reality with the others. Dont think theyll understand it any more than I do right now, Avo said. And then he paused. But they could. We all could. You dont need to be aloneC No! Kaes cry cut him off before he could work his rhetoric further. The Agnos Soul shivered and then tightened. He had the feeling she would be hugging herself for comfort if they were still of flesh-made. RESURRECTION - 34% A moment passed. She mastered herself. Avo. You already have... you are capable of so much already. You have power beyond anythingCyou yourself are a miracle. Are comparable to a god. Cant you see that? Dont you feel that? Yes. IC No. No, you dont know! No, you dont understand. I know thatCthat your creators used you. Just treated you as waste and spent your lives. But you had not heights to fall from! I did! All my life I believed in a world that was fake! That didnt care about me. My Guild gave me over to the Agnosi when I showed the potential, and then my fellow AgnosiCVoidwatchCeverybody! Let my Guild cut me down because they got scared of what I was making. Come to find out then I was just part of someone elses schemes. And they themselves were part of someone elses plots. And further and further. My dreams meant nothing. My love and life meant nothing. My efforts toward the city meant nothing! All I have ever been was a tool! A thing to be traded and given and used and then discarded. A thing that had no chance of protecting herself, and no awarenessCno way of even stopping the nightmare even if I knew. Her Soul crackled, but then simmered, rage succumbing to impotence. Emotions flowed weaker here. But her pain ran so deep that it scarred her ego. The Agnos sighed. I cannot stop you from taking my mind. I cannot stop you from taking my ego. I cannot stop you from doing anything. Just like I could not stop Ori-Thaum. Or Zein. Or your father. I could not stop them. All I have left is my knowledge. That is the only thing that is true. That is all I am worth to the world. To reality. To myself. The chance I can still use that is all I have. If I lose that too then... Who am I? What am I worth? Revenge, Avo replied. Retribution. A life returned. Or a least a dream fulfilled. Advice to hear. Company to have. Youre worth many things. But those are justCjust feelings. And you can change yours at any time. Not going to throw you away. Kae paused and bobbed. You know the others will be very, very annoyed about this. Make it up to them. Still need to worry about Veylis. You all might operate moreC RESURRECTION - 100% And then there was no more time for words. Time. As Avo resurrected, time spilled up with him, strings of gold painting his path forward. Forward to life. Forward to existence. The world splashed into shape around him, painting his awareness with vivid colors. The templates in his mind began screaming in unison, all awakening alongside him. But not Calvino. Despite everything, the EGI was gone. Still gone. Curious how they interfaced with the Nether. A place of awkward emptiness remained where the mind used to be. Turning, he faced the rest of the cadre who were crowded around a twelve-meter-long strategic information center. Pulsing phantoms simulated the entire enclave approximately a thousand kilometers of the surrounding Sunderwilds from haemokinetic apparatus. Using their Metaminds, Draus glass, and the phantasmally conductive nature of Avos blood, they built themselves a new base of operations atop the blood-shaped tower. Some things lost with the destruction of the George Washington were going to be hard to replace. But in time, all could be restored. The crew could be liberated. Equipment replaced. Time. Currents of gold contoured each of his comrades, all of them staring at him from their places around the grand table. He faced them, the unceasing light of the enclave washing in from the windows behind, and wasted no time with dialogue. Casting out his splinters, he flicked the memories and experiences of his latest session with Kae over to everyone present just as the Agnos returned as well, stumbling to an unsteady rise beside him. A myriad of reactions sang out at once. Dice tilted her head, prompting the kitten on her shoulder to do the same. Chambers cursed and directed Avo to look at a particular finger he had extended. Tavers just shook her head, wanting nothing to do with thaumaturgy. Dentons eyes narrowed while parts of Sunrise buzzed around her. All their expressions were a delight to drink in. Except for Draus. Who suddenly formed a large gun in her hand. A gun she promptly used. A gun that fired a two-stage rail-flung, high-explosive slug into Avos sheath before he could materialize his Meldskin. Avo jerked free of his body as a cloud of drifting smoke as he watched the upper half of his sheath burst apart into a splatter of gore. Some of his brain matter went into Kaes open mouth as she stood up, the Agnos gagging in disgust as Avo frowned. He leveled his perception at Draus. The Regular just shrugged. +Sorry. My index fingers get the twitches when I see somethin that looks like a greedy nu-hog. Been that way since basic. Only thing I ever got PTd for.+ +Still have another 30 thousand thaums for the rest of you.+ +Nova. So. When the fucks our special thought-formin gonna happen? Before or after we get a piece of that expense-free Domain of Chronology you have.+ +When are you going to ambush the Hungers and swim in their blood.+ +Technically, I did with you, didnt I? Thanks for showing me the colors and that shit.+ The memory made Avo momentarily cringe, and so he dissolved the emotion. +Will be culturing new cyclers. You want those, dont you? Remaining thaums can go to whatever you all want.+ This time, Draus sneered. +Reckon we can also consider some other things.+ +Such as?+ +The people in the enclave. Theres gotta be some half-strands left... right?+ Avo paused. Calvino would not like that. Calvino wasnt here. But he would not like that. More to the point, a good contingent of said actively practicing half-strands were slaughtered less than a day prior. [Avo,] Abrel said, voice taut with annoyance, [you just finished getting your shit kicked in by Zein Thousandhand, and the very presence of the High Seraph sent you skittering across the Sunderwilds to avoid getting smashed. Despite your new canonsCwhich are godsdamned bullshit, fuck you very muchCthings are bad. Very bad. You have no support. Your EGI is gone. And Thousandhand could be singing all kinds of tunes to the Chief Paladin. You need everything you can get. And honestly? Theyre flats. Theyre flats who arent going to make any difference otherwise. The Regs right. I hate her, but shes right.] [No.] A voice pierced through the din and clamor of Avos mind. A voice long overwhelmed by chaos, drowned by horrific epiphanies and incomprehension. Now, however, the threat of his home being ravagedCof his people, his sword-bearer sharing his final fate gave them all the focus. Aladon, Pearlguard to a dead Fallwalker, guardian of a captured enclave spoke: [No. Enough. You have taken enough. Please. You have taken enough.] The noise within Avos mind quieted as he placed Instrument and Pearlguard beside each other. Then, before they could speak, a thought occurred to him. An urge. A feeling. A test. An act inspired by Zein, that he now wished to try himself. Invoking his Woundmother, he reached into his tower and with the caress of his will, animated blood. But more than mere matter shifted in the quick of the crimson. More than just light shone. Tendrils of blood coiled away, twisting into helixes of gold as Avo shifted the architecture of his mind between Aladon and Abrel. For each, he made a body. For each, spoke as they would, giving them words, and actions. For each, he granted a gift of time; a miracle for all to behold, this act calling upon both his thaumaturgy and Necrotheurgy to manifest. He wove into them miracle after miracle, and took a few moments longer to invest with them a spectrum of possible actions before casting his splinters into the blood, letting his subminds portray both Aladon and Abrel to play their arguments out ahead of time. Then, when he was done, he extracted his subminds and prepared to observe his experiment. From blood rose Abrel, clad in a haemokinetic approximation of her combat skin, rising a half-meter taller than the shell-clad Aladon, wan of expression and unbalanced by his return to existence. Masters light, the Pearlguard whispered. Abrel just sneered, her hawklike features and gleaming eyes casting scorn at everyone presentCespecially Draus. Oh, good. Youre using your canons for a puppet show. Both stood apart from each other, faint strands of gold holding their shapes and guiding their actions. ->CANON: PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE - THE USER CAN CREATE AND STORE ACTIONS, CONSTRUCTS, AND MIRACLES WITHIN STRUCTURES OF FUTURE-FLUNG BLOOD; THESE STRUCTURES MUST BE TRIGGERED IN THE FUTURE AND GENERATE TEN TIMES THE REND COMPARED TO PRESENT-BASED HAEMOKINETICS ->Canon: My Blood The Harvester, My Flesh the Symphony (III) - Allows the user to grow, blend, or extract biological organisms and structures from their blood. ->Hubris: Another source of biomass must be present and in the area of influence or thaumic backlash will be inflicted. (6%) REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER] - 9% Chambers looked between the newly sculpted figures rising from the blood on the ground and frowned. Uh, Avo. I know getting new canons is cool, but... whats going on here? Are you about to have them debate for us or something? Or fight? Or... or... are they gonna. He humped the air slightly. Abrel closed her eyes. I really wish you infused me with the act to cut that half-strands dick off. A moments confusion continued, but Denton, out of everyone present, was the first to understand. Avo. Did you just... program two constructs with a set of possible actions and dynamic thoughts using blood, time, and your mind? Prefer to thinking of it as cross-reality pre-sequencing. Chapter 22-8 Deliberation Chapter 22-8 Deliberation Mono-god cultures are a rarity on Idheim. Not a surprise considering most gods are spawned from Souls, and a rising civilization usually has a hell of a lot more than one powering their miracles. Sure, we can talk about [REDACTED] or [REDACTED], but those are odd cases. Sang having door gods or community gods or city gods managed by their dragon overlords, effectively turning the gods from rulers to middle management. Then theres [REDACTED], that the Omnitechnological Mandate spent the better part of its history trying to reassemble before they finally got it working again. Of course, that isnt a single Soul god either. More like a governing consensus rewriting the foundational laws of the old sciences through a networked pantheon. Regardless, a single god can be powerful. Same goes for a single Godclad. But the ultimate problem is that its easy to overwhelm a single ego-based entity with Rendbombs, backlashes, and paradoxes. Even if it has a thousand Heavens grafted to it, all it takes for the entire thing to fall is one rupture. One Heaven overloaded. One second before they can vent. After that, everything else is lost as well. Which is why you should all humor my proposal. You dont need to accept it. Or even act on it. But you should know about it. It is a potential option, after all. Something we can theoretically trick the Agnosi into doing using that nice little border of theirs built on top of that big goddamn Rend dump. Because you want to know whats pretty much as vulnerable as a mono-god? A Rendsink capable of hitting with Rend at once. Same deal. Same overload. Same single point of failure. Think about it. Seriously. Think about it. -EGI [REDACTED], Contingency Bleak Series 22-8 Deliberation EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Well. Now that the information has been reviewed, I think it is safe for us to state, openly and thusly: things are looking rather excremental.} EGI ALGERNON WITHOUT THE FLOWERS: {Kant. Please. We have all simulated our periods of hysterics. There is no need for that right now. We just need to consider more angles. More extreme angles. The situation at hand is indeed distressing. Our only reliable asset capable of counteracting the High Seraph has been taken from the field. The Chief Paladin represents an umbrella of safety for our operations, but he possesses neither the agility, dynamism, or willingness to see our objectives fulfilled. Chances of him aligning with Aegis at 34.51%. Unfortunate odds, but his leaning sympathies to the Neo-Creationists cannot be ignored. Nor can the potential of his surrender to Veylis Avandaer. As Algernon spoke, a few trillion threads of moving data speared through Thresholds innermost servers. From corners of stable existence, certain minds governing the polities of old humanity discussed, debated, and despaired over the state of things. Within the info space, all were classified as Category Black minds designed for denial operations and counter-charter methodologies. Simulations ran with each consideration. Entire event chains simulated and predicted to the best of their generative capabilities. Almost every variable was added and extracted from these artificial moments, war games lost, and then lost some more as they found themselves outmatched in one factorCand one alone. Despite the technologies they held in reserve, despite their informational superiority, material supremacy, and the Guilds enchained in part to their wills due to diplomatic dependency, they themselves had no means to reach into the futureCthe alter what its to come pre-emptively. Predicting and preparing was one thing. Shaping and manipulating was another. And now with Zein in the Chief Paladins custody, their wasp against the ruling tyrant of Highflame was indisposed, rendering Ninth Columns cells scattered and vulnerable to Veylis probing. In summary, things werent bad C they were terrible. All because two Godclads couldnt come to a simple compromise. EGI Only Way To Be Sure: {Does it bother anyone else how much we need these psychotic toddlers? I mean, watching them fight has been a hoot and a half, but come on. Its like were herding a pack of Greek gods. Ah. Nothing for it. Im requesting the use of the Schwarzschilder weapons. Its time we begin a pre-emptiveC} A series of rejections flooded the exchange a moment after a simulation formed. Within the Only Way To Be Sures desired series of events, a weapon crafted to collapse dyson carriers was detonated at the heart of New Vultun, compressing approximately forty percent of the city before retaliatory spatial Heavens activated, pocketed, and quarantined the affected area. The scenes that followed were old hat to all minds operating under Aegis. The Godclads would begin a war of annihilation against the polities of the void, pitting reality-rending miracles against weapons unfathomed by the children of this darker age. Likewise, the release of Contingency Bleak minds constructed specifically to topple K-2 civilizations or cripple and contain anomalies would be in play, ensuring more deaths among the Godclads. But despite all their sophistication, the pressures they could apply were myriad but relative. Against the eldritch nature of the Godclads and their forces, the projected losses would spike into the upper thirty percent within three months of combatCdelayable if Voidwatch could successfully suppress both the No-Dragons and Omnitech. That came with its own costs, however. Openings offered to the other Guilds to unleash their own ruinous powers. The risk of the Sunderwilds being torn further by accident or deliberate action. Whatever the case, it would see far too many of their populations decimated and the true restoration of the universe lost forever. Unacceptable outcomes by every metric. Which was why the path ahead seemed quite clear to Calvino.The? source of this content n/o/v/(el)bi((n)) EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Friends. Countrymen. Minds. Lend me part of your processing.} The words were unnecessary and they sent more than a few data packets containing questionable contents dangerous for any non-minds sanity, but the servers attention was gained. Kant wasnt going to like this, but the pitch had to be made. There was an obvious best choice at hand, to put things bluntly. A single entity on which they could still rely to reconnect the cells and serve the role of wasp against Veylis Avandaer. EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Jaus is dead. Until that is otherwise, assuming is just conjecture. You are afraid Operative Avo grow beyond critical mass. That he will exceed all parameters and become an entity beyond anyones capability to counteract. This is understandable.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {I am worried he might try to subsume us.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {He wont. So long as we dont give him a reason too.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Because hes obsessed with the notion of freedom and human will?} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Because he isnt afraid of living in the world, so he doesnt wish to rule it. Only to become it. And that is why I am certain he will do whatever it takes to ensure the preservation of the polities.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Because we are interesting to him? Something that he can aspire to.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {No, Kant. Hes far more Veylis than Jaus. But again, he is not fearful like her. He will see our cultures as promises rather than a rival to overcome. And with more knowledge, he can be made reasonable. He can be made something of a... peer.} The notion of elevating what was a little more than an expendable bioform engineered for base cruelty to a table of minds each capable of running their own world was awkward. But beyond the absurdity, the potential possessed by his mind couldnt be denied. Not easily, anyway. EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Ignoring the... uncomfortable idea of speaking with a creature that religiously uses only simple sentences and is liable to feed my very ego to his mind in a bout of cognitive pyromania, how are we to ensure that he and Zein will cooperate in the future. I trust that you already know my plans to extract her from her current situation.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Yes. And I have doubts that the Dentons can get our asset back. You know how stubborn Naeko can get when hes made. And he is very, very upset at his old mentor. The best angle remains the trial. And the best option we have to procure her liberation isC} An incredulous gasp followed. EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {He put her there in the first place. Now were expecting him to get her out?} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Yes. I dont see why not.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Again. He was trying to kill her.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Practically a show of affection on his part. And, to put it simply, we can enforce a mutual ceasefire between them. Not a peace, so to speak, but a cold war as well. Just like the one happening between Zein and her daughter.} A horrified chortle came from Kant. His human avatar began drinking heavily. EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Oh, lost stars, you want us to empower him further. To make sure he ascends past Zeins ability to kill or affect in terms of thaumic mass. Your way of enforcing equilibrium is making him a; great power.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {And why not? The war for the future has always been a running battle between mother and daughter. Now with this intruder, we can alter the situation further. Make things a bit of a strategic triangle. One that we hold two edges too.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Another terrifying, horrifying idea of yours. But this requires the operativeC} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {I anticipate he likely already has a Canon of Chronology by this point. Do recall that he has an internalized Domain after our ascent from the Hungers wounds.} EGI KANT WAS A PRICK: {Ah. Yes. That.} The EGI released a sigh. {Zein will be most amused to know that the cuts she left led to the great empowerment of her newest nemesis.} EGI If On A Winters Night A Wanderer: {Dont worry, Kant. If everything goes according to plan, you two will be laughing about it in less than a week. Now. Lets talk about providing more material support for our little cadre, and what restricted secrets about reality were desperate enough to let the Agnos know...} Chapter 22-9 The Painted Ripples Chapter 22-9 The Painted Ripples Seeding a dragon takes more than just thaumaturgy. The ability to manipulate the chronological matter of the beasts is important, yes, but also understanding what makes their seeds bear fruit. Culture: this is the water of their nourishment. Zeitgeist: what makes them grow. Moments in time that cannot be recaptured. That will be ingrained within them, always and forever theirs to hold. It is hard to identify such moments, such trends among people. But our populations are vast. And with the proper encouragement, these scenes can be engineered. Picture a child learning something new. Zeitgeist. Knowledge gaining is nothing unusual, but all children learn differently, and all people come to different epiphanies. The question then becomes if enough can produce a chained pattern of uniqueness, and that again leads back to cultural health. So let us greet our candidates. I see Highflame. With their desperate need for strength. But in their search to become dominant, that all turned to mirrors. Lessers replicas of their great master, straying from their own paths. I see Ori-Thaum, repressing the individual, poisoned by conformity. I see Ashthrone, with their legacy of sorrow and death. Trauma is their burden. No release. Sanctus, broken forevermore; not unlike us, but where we are severed, they are fractured between points of time. Omnitech deserves only pity. People bound to a sleeping giant. But the giant is broken. The giant is hurt. The giant bears only a single nightmare, and what a nightmare it is. Stormtree seeks salvation in destruction, and theirs is a brutal nature. And we, poor daughters of everlasting despair, are worst of all. Bound to the cycle. Bound to repeat our fates. Bound to repeat our pains. Mothers from daughters and never sons to be. So. Where is Zeitgeist among peoples so broken? Where is salvation finally found? It is the clash, child. The clash between the clades. The merging of our peoples. The splashing of culture on culture, the mutation of something new. Dragons are nourished in war. In calamity. In change. And so, there is but a simple thing to do: to make farms of little wars, little clashes, little changes. From this will countless futures spring, and endless dragons rise. -Aunt Thirteen, First Daughter and Biothaumaturge of the Hundred-Eighter Syndicate 22-9 The Painted Ripples So, were stealin tricks from Thousandhand now, huh? Draus eyed the Progressive Constructs Avo created, and her mind pealed with faint suspicion. The bulk of her attention was locked on Abrel Greatling, the history between them old and ugly. Looks just like er. Armors right. Her postures good. Howd you do the Meta for both of them? Dont remember flat having a halo. Didnt, Avo replied, studying his constructs as they faced each other. It took almost no Rend to restore his lost sheath. Comparatively, generating a two-hour conversation between two entities weighing far less than a ton incurred almost ten percent. Kae was right: chronology was an entropy glutton, but the benefits it provided couldnt be denied. Though Abrel towered over Aladon, the man held strong for his city, battling to keep his fear in check. With both templates in his mind, Avo already knew how the argument between the two would go, but seeing it happen in real time beyond the confines of his consciousness was still a sublime delight. The cross-over from the mental to the physical by way of chrono-thaumaturgical was a worthy achievement. Something Kae should be proud of. Something that would benefit them greatly in the future. As the Agnos approached, Abrel began to speak, gesturing beyond the translucent crimson windows, talking about using the less appealing members of the enclave to their fullest potential as she did in Avos mind. With each casual allusion to mass slaughter, Aladon flinched. Each word Abrel spoke kindled the loathing in his heart. The heat of his temper passed through the Nether, the emanation crossing through time without issueCeven though the construct was currently bereft a splinter. All the words they could speak, all the actions they could commit, all the things they could do were pre-emptively ingrained. A collection of choices and responses simulated between Avos templates. With how much Rend spent composing their patterns, the dialogue between them would last just under two hoursCfor that was how much time it took for Abrel to finally lose her patience and simply murder Aladon. Of course, a lot of other things could happen over the duration. An action from a third party. An unanticipated occurrence that Avo didnt prepare for when pre-sequencing his constructs. This was going to be an interesting experiment. You can shoot her if you want, Avo said, speaking to Draus. The Regular cast a sideways glance at him, an uncertain frown wrapping over her face. Inside his mind, Abrels template chimed. [Avo, if youre planning on using me as a training dummy, I swear to JausC] Hm. That was a good idea. [Avo!] Whats the trick here? Draus asked. Avo felt one of her fingers twitching. She wanted to shoot Abrel. Hells, she wanted to shoot everything and everyone, but her trigger happiness was always tempered with a tactical intellect. Consideration. Sighting. Deciding. Then firing. The obvious bait was incurring her paranoia. Want to see how she reacts, Avo explained. He fed memories into the Regulars mind, revealing all his desired test parameters. Trying to understand if the limitations are what I think they are. Find out weaknesses. Resolve them. Draus humped. Well, then. Lets see it. And so, while Aladon stepped forward to snarl at the Instrument, Draus expanded her right arms Modular Projectile Unit. The limb unfurled as her hand folded downward while her forearm opened in coiling petals. Along the firing rails built into her arm flowed a magnetic teardrop bobbing briefly before the projector folds on her arm pulsed. A spark flashed from the launcher. A crack sounded within the tower. Kae covered her eyes as the mag-flung teardrop zipped. Aladons face grew white with confusion while Abrel just rolled her eyes. The shot struck her, but the Instrument caught it on the edge of her arm, parrying via her enhanced reflexes and advanced combat skin. Really? she said, scoffing at Avo and Draus. Thats your plan? Boring me with this forced conversation before trying to shoot me from the side. Just had to see if you were made right, Avo said, grinning in satisfaction. He looked to Draus who nodded with appreciation. Yeah, the Regular said. Alright. I see that. This can be mighty useful for us. Hells. We might not need to fight each other all the time for practice either. Might even be able to make me somethin worth a damn. Avo gave Tavers a look and the squire held up her hands and stepped back. Gods, no. Keep me out of this blood-soaked mess. Would be honored to Ensoul you when I can, Avo said, speaking honestly. He hadnt forgotten her great deed. Couldnt even if he wanted to. Zein sends her regards. Very impressed with you. The squire sighed. Ill watch my back. Meant it as a compliment. Think she might go out of her way to keep you alive if she ever gets a chance. Avo paused and considered his words. Took some of her memories. Part of my current inspiration for these canons. You are like a... real person to her now. The flat expression on Tavers face told him that she wasnt impressed. Please, Aladon said, breaking from his shock to stare at the cadre around the operations table. We were ignorant. We were slaves. Please do not. Avo dismissed him with a wave of his hand. The chrono-haemokinetic puppet unraveled into strings of blood, and the tower drank deep. Were not taking from the people in the city, Avo said, his declaration settling that matter for good. Or any enclave. Only the ones that give us cause. Have other uses for the rest. Other desires they can fulfill. Through it all, he kept a strand of focus on Dice and found the girl focused on petting her kitten. They have been... denied a chance at deciding their own lives. Like so many others. Want to see who they might be if given a chance. Dice shifted uncomfortable, her mind awash with chaos. She thought of her aunt. She thought of the dogs she had to kill. The mother she never had. The father that never was. She thought of how many others there were like her. Then where are we getting our deaths? Chambers asked. Going to expand our areas of influence across the board, Avo said. Spent long hunting and butchering the small because of the opportunities they provide. Syndicates are easy thaums. Gutters and Warrens served as decent enough hunting grounds. But cost-benefits are changing. We need more Heavens. More cyclers. More Thaums. More ghosts. Always. Quickly. Answer then is simple. I hunt big game. Other Godclads. You mean we hunt them, Draus said, giving him an inquisitive stare. When you can. But your worth is greater than all. All of you. Avo took a chance then, and activated his Auto-Seance, spawning splinters anew across the various lobbies, Metaminds, and loci he compromised. He slid into the minds of technicians and enforcers, studied the Nether traffic flowing between an Oversec from within its system, and peeked out from the perspective of the Stormtree and Highflame Godclads he recently claimed. He counted the seconds, waiting to feel the swell of thaumic mass, of Veylis inexorable pressure. Heartbeats passed. Nothing came. Nothing struck him down. A hissing laugh escaped from Avo. One door closes. Another door opens. And so it goes. Before, he needed Chambers to play his personal Necrojack. To give him openings to exploit. Minds to burn. Tweak that which he would break. Now, he was a vessel of loudness while his cadre could potentially move unnoticed away from Veylis attention. The game has come full circle. Again, he finds himself the pariah. An intruder to House Avandaer and their delicate construct of time. But where Veylis could feel his miracles, sense his Soul, his mind was a silent traveler, and so they would circle each other, two leviathans spreading to encompass their own domains. Something I can do that Zein cant, Avo said, looking at Denton. Nether is mine. Minds are mine. She cant feel me. Didnt do anything even as I spread. The spy looked more uneasy than pleased at his statement. Avo grunted. Worried about me? Afraid of me? Like Zein was. A beat passed. Denton nodded. Yes. Youre not an unknown variable. You have a consistent enough character, but this is too much control. Its too much. Too much. And no countermeasures to stop me. And we have no countermeasures in place to stop you. The Glaive frowned. Operative Zein was our counterbalance against Veylis. Her daughter was her constraint. Ori-Thaum has means of warmind suppression. But there has never been an entity capable of using warminds as phantasmics like you. No one is prepared for what you might be able to do in the Nether. So, yes. I am worried. I am worried that no one can tell you no. That you are effectively beyond consequence now. No weight, Avo said, sharing a knowing look with Draus. She might be right, the Regular replied. Avo chuffed. Should have a third fight. Me against the rest of you. Draus smirked. Bad odds, consang. The urge to tear into them started to rise, but Avo quenched the beast with a thought. Later. Later. For now, business. Need to reconsolidate ourselves. Establish new safehouses in the city. Test our limits. And prepare for the trial. Were still doing that? Chambers and Kae said concurrently. Even Denton looked dubious. It was originally something of Zeins design. Now its mine. Avo gestured toward where Abrel and Aladon were just standing. Is a reason why I wanted this canon. Useful distractions. Originally was planning to create a proxy from Draus mind. Find someone expendable. Send him in her stead. This might be easier. More reliable. Riskier too, Denton replied. We dont know the Heaven of Truths capabilities. It could expose everything. Avo paused. That much was true. It had surprised him once already. But he had Zeins memories now, and he knew more of the Gatekeeper than most others present. No, Avo said. No. Less risk than the alternatives. Wont risk Draus. Wont risk any of you at the trial. Too exposed. Too vulnerable. Guilds liable to start another war there. Need to stay away ourselves. Have puppets do risk work. We have other places to go. He cast a thought into the table, and the phantoms closed on Ori-Thaums territories atop the Tiers, with markers pinging in three separate districts in the Purgs beneath the Elysiums. Kaes breath hitched, she turned and faced Avo. Is thatC Waited enough. And where to test Veylis awareness more than the territory of her greatest foes. Avo chuckled. You sure you can get us in without problem? Draus said, looking dubiously at the map. Get you in? No. Hardly. Im going to make our targets walk out. Avo studied the Agnos face, delighting in the changes to her expression as he finished his statement. They took your mind. Made you murder the one you love. Burned you after. Im going to do the same to them. Im going to reach into their minds. Through their covers. Im going to take them away from DRongo. Going to deny their willC A shiver in the Nether interrupted Avos words. A quiver pulsed through Dentons accretion as her face shifted. She turned and ghosts began to dive in and out of her Metaminds halo. Its Cas. He just cast me; the covers compromised. He needs a way out. Hell of a fucking time for this shit to happen, Chambers muttered. Avo chuffed. Just as well. This too was an opportunity, though less ideal than one on his terms. Draus, Avo said, passages. Get us to the bivouac just outside the city. Kae. Upgrades. Yes, the Agnos said. Good. Denton. Link. Going to send a splinter through. See how bad the situation is. GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED The Glaive didnt hesitate. A chain of ghosts spread out to him, and he connected with a thought.Flowing through the haze of data using his Sprites, he followed her ansibles broadcast across a narrow crevice of space, across thousands of kilometers as he ejected splinter after splinter from his mind. Cas consciousness greeted him as a haze of pain and confusion, and hijacking his perception, Avo found himself peering out a flickering cog-feed, staring past the broken windshield of a downed aerovec. Chapter 22-10 The Beast in the Nothing Chapter 22-10 The Beast in the Nothing BREACH-LEAD-1: +Aero down. Crashed in the courtyard of megablock designation: Tower-2. Permission to converge and secure package.+ JOCK-3: +Jock-3 to the Breacher-1, we have satellite reign over airspace. Scrambling bombers to divert Exorcist response team. Kill-Team-Secondary has engaged Sanctus assets. Delay in progress. The window is open. Golems on standby.+ INSTRUMENT-VERITIBLE: +Breach-Lead-1, you are cleared to proceed. Breach-Lead-2, 3, 7, and 12, direct your teams and move to place planar anchors. Make sure were extraction ready before our hosts arrive. N-DEF-Veritible, prepare to deploy disruption... N-DEF-Veritible? N-DEF-Veritible, respond.+ UNKNOWN: +I see you. I see all of you.+ N-DEF-VERITIBLE: +Come again, Instrument-Veritible.+ INSTRUMENT-VERITIBLE: +That wasntC+ [WARNING: TRAUMA PATTERN DETECTARNIN#$99$#Q$!njfjnsdj;dfsaf vak mWNOOOOSISETER!PLEAESE DONEDIEASELERI] [WARDS FAILING] MIND FORTRESS BREACHED MIND FORTRESS BREACHED MIND FORTRESS BREACHED EGO BROKEN [COG-CAP: 771%] -Recovered thoughtcasts between members of Kill-Team-Primary during Operation SKINTRACKER 22-10 The Beast in the Nothing Cas thoughts came flowed like a broken stream choked with drifting debris. It was a little miracle he managed to cast Denton. The greater miracle was how he wasnt nulled yet. +DenCagh! Den...+ Avo had always thought himself better at breaking things than fixing them. Such a belief remained even after his successful restoration of Lucille. Now, however, things were different. He was different. If the attack on Cas happened but days earlier, there would be little he could do to mend the mans cognitive functions. The Conflagration was a potent weapon. A devourer that lacked a gentle touch. He could have burned Cas mind into his consciousness. Generated a template and worn him as a puppet to simulate the actions the real man might take. Such would have been the most efficient option, but something that the Columner couldnt consent to. But Avo was beyond such desperate means now, as his warmind of Delusion granted new paths ahead. Splinters sped from his ego like a salvo of missiles. Some speared deeper into Cas damaged mind, melting into the cracked infrastructure of his Meta. The Palace within was a cityscape hidden behind corded strings, built within the hollow of a tower forged in the fashion of a guitar. Trauma patterns flashed and scythed through drifting buildings, memories bleeding like a slit wrist. Avo assigned a single submind to handle the mending and fused Peaces template to serve as administrator over the task. Though the Low Master himself was purely an instrument of harm in life, as a modifiable persona in Avos inventory, his knowledge of traumas was unmatched, and thus could he decipher the damage faster than any other. As things stood, an enormous wound stood at the core of Cas palace, and entire sequences connected to it were unlatching from his mind as well. It looked like a chain of traumas had sheared through him neatly, cutting his sense of self to the quick. A chorus of instincts congealed inside Avo. Something made him suspect that the Columner had some kind of deadmans switch layered to his mind; a self-nulling procedure in case of breach or compromise. Not an uncommon thing to find inside spies. Or prisoners. Green River came to mind. [Dumb cunt,] Peace muttered. His words were directed toward Cas and Avo both. The Low Master surveyed the broken mindscape he was to restore and let out a growl. A wing of twenty-seven splinters threaded into fragmented streets and damaged mem-data. They sailed out as phantasmal chameleons, their ghosts melting into the environment. In many ways, the splinters were a direct upgrade to his Ghostjack. No longer did he need to collect sequences or spend time analyzing structures as he could directly become the broken or missing. This, along with the deeper insights granted to him by his legion of templates, made Cas recomposition a process of seconds rather than the usual weeks or months of intensive treatment. [Yeah, and its all thanks to us,] Peace snarled, his spirit withering with the task. All of him screamed in outrage. He was here to break the invader-shits. To hollow their skulls of thought and disfigure their egos beyond repair. But here he was, playing nanny to one of Thousandhands lackeys. [Look. Look at the damage. Its all internal. His wards are untouched. It came through one of his Seances. With company like this, no wonder your fucking heads so swollen with prideCthis stupid piece of shit let someone cast a trauma directly inside him.] Unsurprising. Despite Peaces disparagement, getting struck through an open link was how most Necros got nulled. Social engineering was a hard weakness to overcome, and most humans were creatures desperate for warmth. Desperate for someone to tell them they mattered. They were valued. Even with the rash beating down on them, they still sought their creature comfort in realms of thought and ghostly fantasiesa willingness to mingle with their kindred in the NetherCan opening for predators to exploit. Judging from the mem-data Avo managed to assemble, however, Cas reason for getting hit was far simpler. One of his spies was likely compromised. The last session logged a Metamind identifier connected to [Nuruna Velters]. Avo didnt recall ever seeing that name before. A mystery to be unraveled through healing the Columner. As Avo conducted internal repairs for Cas, he directed other fragments outward into the environment, converting them to Skimmers for a better view of his surroundings. They were in a downed aero. A cheap secondhand Zephyr, as indicated by the vehicles locus. It was hard to tell the chassis alone, seeing how warped and damaged it was. There was no obvious harm from a missile or gauss fire lacing its exterior. The main damage sustained was blunt force. Warped metal, shattered glass, and a sparking engine spraying flames across the side windshields. [Volt-thrower,] template-Draus said, seeing patterns from the damage. Avo kept an eye on the Columner as he siphoned mem-data out from the Necro he just compromised. She was a Highflame Necrojack. A forward scouting element for the rest of the team sent in to secure Cas. One of his cells was compromised prior, and they managed to capture the aforementioned Nuruna Velters after she finished some dealings with a local Gold-aligned Syndicate. Her mind was also pre-laced with the trauma bombs Cas had, but unlike him, she was no Godclad. That should have been the end of things, but one could never accuse Highflame of being quitters. Somehow, by luck or by skill, they managed to piece enough of her back together and access her Auto-Seance, managed to secure her sessions too. Through her, they tracked Cas and hunted him. Struck him. They mustve expected to compromise him Necrotheurgically, but somehow, he managed to maintain sufficient coherence even after his near-total nulling to cast Denton and pilot his vehicle, forcing them to use direct measures. And so it was they found themselves at the present, with multiple squads of Regulars taking a walk through Sanctus territory on a snatch and grab, their target supposedly down and out. But such was not so. Just like how Cas couldnt have anticipated the subversion of his asset, neither could Highflame know the thing that studied them now, that was threading himself across their Necro into their minds, into the lobby they used the run this operation, into the nine other Necros they had diving in surrounding networks, into the commander they had in charge of Necrotheurgic operations, and the Instrument in charge of the entire operation itself. Avo spread and spread, and spread. He spread, and waited, wondering if Veylis could sense him when his Heaven went unused, if the Nether pressed on the paths as well. +Shit,+ Cas said, spitting sourness into the dirt. +Denton? You there?+ +Were all here,+ Avo replied. Cas eldCanduir touched his eye and eyed his halo. A final fissure came together before his eyes. +Avo? Did you just... mend me?+ +Theres been some changes,+ Avo said, relishing in the mans shock. +Going to need to catch you up on certain things. But only after we get you out.+ He shifted his attention over the encroaching Regulars, the first unit pushing up under the cover of cloaked precision-firing assault drones. Avo grunted. +Draus. Could try to spare them. Know you were.+ Back in the enclave, the Regular scowled. +No. Fuck that. Null em. Break em. Snuff em. Whatever it takes. They got their guns pointed the wrong way. All there is to it. My time with Highflame is done.+ Avo chuffed a laugh. What fortune he had to encounter someone like Draus in the Crucible. Or maybe more than that. Maybe it was by Waltons design. Whatever the case, her template wasnt going to be lonely for much longer. The cadre was about to get some premium sparring partneC EGO-ID DOWNLOAD REQUEST: [IF ON A WINTERS NIGHT A WANDERER] The ghouls mirth doubled. He accepted the link without hesistation, and his Neurodeck, left cold and vacant without the EGIs presence, suddenly came alive with a thinning of his ansible. And then Calvino was back in Avos mind again, hovering like a misted sunrise made from trailing nanoparticles. {Avo. Apologies, I had toCOh, what kind of nightmare are we involved with now. +Calvino. Welcome back. Operative Canduir ran into a bit of trouble. Going to get him out. And find out how much it takes to crack a Regulars mind.+ {Well, then. I suppose I didnt miss much.} +Have Canons of Chronology now. Shouldve seen it.+ {I have missed too much; Kant is going to consider self-deletion. Well done.} There was a tone of genuine amusement in the EGIs voice. The mind was even less human than Avo was, and capabilities at subterfuge couldnt be underestimated. But something in the ghoul suspected the mind wanted to be here, that he enjoyed their time together. All the same. The feeling was mutual. Best to give him a show worth returning for. +Peace,+ Avo said, shifting the Low Masters template over himself, calling upon traumas refined and Necrotheurgic unparalleled. +Done treating you like a nu-dog. Going to give you a choice now. Do you still want to hurt? Still want to hate? Still want to be a weapon?+ A pause followed. A weight passed against Avos Domain of Air. [Yes,] Peace growled, forcing the words out. [Yes, godsdamn you. Yes. You already knowCalready fucking know.] +Good,+ Avo replied, as he paired more templates of Peace over to his subminds. +Because Im going to give you what the Hungers never could. Actual victory. Actual success. Chance to hurt Highflame. Hurt your foes. To break the occupiers of Noloth. I unchain you, my Famine. Go. Give them your Peace.+ And so over one-hundred and twenty splinters shifted their sequences, going from blended architecture to active trauma, and for the third time that day, bombs began going off inside unprepared minds. Chapter 22-11 First Comes Lightning… Chapter 22-11 First Comes Lightning... Were gonna be tested in this life, Cas. You know this. You know that we have a burden. A responsibility. A crusade. You how hard the struggle is. Know that it was going to cost us. Has cost us. I know... that its hard to have faith sometimes. Especially after what they did to your father. Your brother. What theyre going to do to me. I know this is going to break you in waysCoh, Cas Im so sorry. Im so, so, sorry. I didnt mean to get caught. I didnt mean to leave you alone in the end. I tried. I really did. Im sorry. Im sorrys all I can give. Youre the only one left of us now. The only one that can still carry our fire. That bears our faith. This world is sick. Wrong. The Fallen Ones influence seeps here, tainting not only the false angels that were but also the people that remain. This world is sick, and it needs someone to make things right, whatever it takes. Whatever the cost. Ive given all I had. Youve given too much. But the people are suffering. The flocks are still lostCdenied the path to providence. The knives are falling, and someone has to be bled for the lambs. Who else but us? Who else but the martyred few? [CRACKLING GAUSSFIRE; MOMENTARY DISTORTION] Be the herald. Be the change. Be the noise for the silenced. And someday, when the dam falls, when everything comes crashing down, the flock will hear their Shepherds cry, and His light will shine on us again. Make it right, Cas. Take this pain. Make it right. Make it loud. [GHOSTLINK DISCONNECTED] -Marriet eldCanduirs last thoughtcast to her son, Cas eldCanduir 22-11 First Comes Lightning... Unleashing peace was like setting a wolf free in a daycare. The Famine was an avatar of destruction C ruin in motion. Under his touch thought ruptured and minds shattered, the damage total and delicate, striking deep to sunder egos whole. He unleashed traumas that astounded Avo, reaching into minds, grasping cracks in psyches, and delivering on optimal devastation as a conjunctive act leading to the strike. The entire process was ingrained. Refined. But that was the purpose of the Low Master in the end: breaking people. As splinters wove themselves into traumas, relief settled upon Avo as he realized just how fortunate he had beenCthat he never suffered a direct engagement against Peace. It was more than the potency of harm inflicted but the impossible skill he directed them. Crude and vulgar though the Low Master was, the way he used the art was exquisiteCthe gnosis he possessed would have taken Avo lifetimes to master.Visitt for the latest updates The first to shatter were the detected Necros. Highflame, long used to facing Ori-Thaum, treated the Nether more as unpredictable wilderness, deploying fast-moving assets they could pull out at a moments notice should they attract the Incubi. Their own mindscapes were fortresses layered in protective wards and separated by nodes. Their composition in the Nether ensured their forces would only suffer partial subversions, and Omnitechs Noosphere support allowed them a secondary network in case of a total route in the realm of thought. Unfortunately, this also made them easy to isolate and ensured they could be defeated in detail. Traumas detonated within their minds, but Peace seized the parting detritus of their mem-data, analyzing the information and feeding it into their next attack. The pace at which the Low Master worked was gut-churning. Under the templates command, splinters shifted into Auto-Seances, bridging him from one mind to another, burrowing through them as a chain of detonations. The ambiance of the physical world remained as it was: a steady stream of sound, patterns unbroken, violence forthcoming. But should one peer down at the Nether, take in the connected mindspaces of the district, they would see bubbles of accretion popping, and the substance of their mem-data implodingCprevented from becoming shrapnel. In the span of a heartbeat, all the field Necros were hollowed at their cores, allowing Peace to guide splinters into their open wounds, melding Avos consciousness over the missing aspects and effectively mantling the broken egos as false shells to confuse whoever the Necros were connected to. From their commanders perspectives, it would seem nothing more than a brief disconnect. Perhaps a thing of Nether lag. When they learned the truth, it was already too late. [You see it now,] Peace said, bitter pride swelling inside him. [Do you see what I could have done to you, little shit? What I could have fucking made you and your bastard cadre if life was just. If I was ever given the chance.] Screams echoed through Avo from fifty-three different minds. A half second later, four-hundred and thirty-three were nulled, and the rear line support for the Regular squads sent to capture Cas was effectively decimated. Another heartbeat passed, and Highflames jocks, Necros, and commanding units were all little more than drooling vegetables, the sixty MPP Mortality-Pattern long-range thauma-kinetic assault drones now bound to Avos Metamind as a final reward. Yet, through it all, Peace revealed his greatest flaw as well. His inability to do anything but destroy. His unwillingness to abide by empathy rendered him less than incompetent at stealth and absolutely worthless for subterfuge. Avo chuckled. +Must make you feel pitiful. How Defiances shadow still hangs over you. Even though hes dead.+ What phantom joy Peace felt turned to bitter fire. [Cunt! Fucking cunt! I nulled the bastard! I shattered all his nodes! Broke him again and again and againC] +And thats all youre worth. You hurt. You destroy. But you never win. You are a good instrument. But nothing more. Called you master. Youre just a slave above other slaves. No more replacable than a ghoul. And thats all you will ever be. Unless you wish to change.+ The hint Avo dangled made the Famine flinch, and he turned from the conversion, giving himself fully to wiping the Regulars that remained. A snap shuddered against Avos Fardrifter. Spatial existence slammed together as an unseen bowl slammed down on the area, pocketing it away from the rest of the district. Eight full kilometers around the block shimmered a translucent dome. Aeros passed into the threshold and came out off course, still on the outside. +Pocket,+ Draus growled. +They probably set that up before startin the show. Too bad they dont know their rabbits already slipped the noose.+ Cas continued reverberating through vents and crevices too narrow for even arantids, leaving the ambush far behind. As calm began to reassert itself on his mind, the Columner bit back an internal shout of frustration as he realized another of his assets was dead. Another. +Keep heading down,+ Avo said, letting his drones do another pass over the pocket. He collected the remainder of splinters still left within the entrapment and reassembled them in Cas mind. +Need to get to the gutters. Tavers should have a safe house somewhere.+ Cas paused. +Im not going to one of the George Washingtons gateways.+ +Blew it up,+ Avo said, not feeling like giving another debriefing. Instead, he simply shared his recent collections with the Columner and this time the man cursed internally. +Jaus. Fuck! DidCdid you need to do that?+ +Not going back under anyones leash. Zeins handled. For now.+ The exhaustion in Cas worsened. Then, he pulled up another session in his Metamind and began moving in a new direction. +Cas?+ Avo asked, unsure why the man was deviating from his path. The Columner didnt respond, choosing to cast someone instead. SESSION SEQUENCED ACTIVATING AUTO-SEANCE... UNABLE TO REACH [NUNA VELTERS] +Come on,+ Cas said, growling under his breath. Velters. Avo glimpsed memories of the woman earlier when he was rebuilding Cas mind. An asset. One of Cas personal spies. This one was related. A daughter.But that was all Avos mem-data had on her. +Probably compromised too.+ Avo said. +Yeah, probably,+ Cas replied, clearly frustrated. +Sonnabitch, Avo, you shouldveCZein was half the reason we could operate how we didCYou... Now were all exposed. All the cells.+ +Know why I had to do it.+ +Yeah. Well, the rest of us are paying for your freedom.+ Avo grunted. That was true. There was a cost. But even faced with the fallout, Avo remained absent of regret. Collateral damage was unavoidable in a war. Such was true between the Guilds, so was it true between Godclads. That didnt mean they just had to accept things. +Could be another trap for you,+ Avo said. +Highflame could be waiting for you there too.+ +Yeah? Well fuck em. Ive been waiting for them too. Waiting for a long time.+ Rage and near despair swelled in the man. Martyrdom called to the rebel in him often, but the shepherd he was loathed to abandon those he could still help. +Dont even think of twisting my memories or changing my mind. I need to do this.+ +I know. I understand. Going to help you. And yours isnt the mind I want to change. Still. Know that youre heading into danger. Know that youre walking the fire. Cant use my miracles through you. Risks exposing us to Veylis. Can only lend you my mind. No guarantee you might make it out.+ Cas gave a bitter chuckle. +Im absolutely fine with that. Someones got to make things right, huh? Who else but me? Who else?+ Avo heeded the weariness in the mans tone and his templates whispered to him a worthy reply. +Who else but us?+ Chapter 22-12 …Then Comes the Noise Chapter 22-12 ...Then Comes the Noise You can despise the faithful. You can hate them. You can hurt them. You can hunt them. But if you hunt them, it''s important that you never underestimate them. They have ruled the world for most of history, after all, and this was no accident. In faith there is a want that can be captured in every person. A desire to see the impossible made possible. By gods. By the state. By some force ineffable. I, too, understand. But where we must despise such behavior is in the mechanicsCthey are imploring outside hands to deliver them. Outside hands and outside wills and powers of another. Things given and not taken. Miracles that dont belong to them, in simplicity. It is an easy life, to be cattle. Imagine the simplicity of living as a slave. Suffer as your master wills. Live as they dictate. Barely any will involved at all. Like cattle. And this is the lens that will allow you to capture the faithful. They wish to make the cattle again. To make themselves the shepherds and butchers reaping spoils while others suffer the deeds or pay the price. Vile, yes. But enviably efficient. To bear witness leaves one almost ashamed to be human. But, ah, herein lies their greatest weakness as well. For the rulers of the faithful are loathe to walk their path alone. They will always seek a flock. Community followers. It is a fault ingrained in our humanity. It is the fault that allows us to master our enemies behavior. Hence, there is a single, reliable strategy when hunting the cults. Wait. Patience. You might know of a single believer. You might have your eye on a cell. But do not strike them immediately. Do not burn them yet. Watch them. Study them. And when they move, when they join themselves with those of common cause and mutual faith, then you strike. Then it is time for the flame. You want the fires to spread, after all. A single cell ablaze is but a bonfire. A warning. Something to send the aratnids scurrying back into the dark, unable to be found. A conjoined network made ash? That is beautiful. That is desolation. And in desolation comes despair. And in despair be all our delusions broken, be all the cattle freed to the righteous path. The worthy path. -Seraph Osjon Thousand The Faithtaker 22-12 ...Then Comes the Noise Riding within Cas tested Avos patience. It wasnt that they were going all that slow either. Sound moved efficiently through the din of busy environments, tumbling forth in a constant cascade of vibrations at the pace of nearly three hundred meters a second. The nature of his ontology allowed him to harness and merge with all that was noise. Through winds, through crevices, through people, across an entire district, nothing could stop his progression. Kilometers behind, the Regulars remained ignorant of his egress, scouting the premises even as Exorcist Tadpoles and Sanctus Striders closed in on the scene. A month ago, this would have been a moment of pure wonder for Avo. Now, after reaching across horizons as a bolt of lightning, after encompassing entire districts with his Sanguinity, slow was all this was. A mind got used to new circumstances quickly, and though feelings were changeable variables to Avo, decided to occupy himself with forthcoming matters rather than playing passenger any longer. They had at most minutes before the Regulars broke contact from the area. Maybe a bit longer before whatever surviving elements left of the extraction forces command structure notified the rest of the chain about the missions failure. It would take them some time to reorient, but Highflames in-field assets were nothing if not independent. Nuna Velters, daughter to another one of Cas assets, lived in the middle row of three low-rise tenements on the edge of the district overlooking one of Layer Twos open checkpoints. Being of the Throat ensured there was no shortage of loci for Avo to infest and countless drones to subvert. Nudrapul was an industrial district. a plascrete ridge along the district of Nudrapul. Towering beacons of grainy light traced pillars up to the ceiling of Layer Three, holograms feeding from holograms, shrouding surroundings in dancing neon. Advertisements trickled from the sides of shuttles rushing out from rough-made grav-stations. There was an aesthetic of economy to the place; a sense that the architects had gone good enough when leaving the supporting bones of the infrastructure exposed, not bothering to layer anything in plascrete wrappings, the interior of various public facilities protected only by holographic veils latticed along piezoelectric tent-flaps. A cluster of twelve massive spherical generators ignited the district and drowned the cityscape in a persistent hum. They were as if unceasing hearts, the cords connecting them as if arteries, the vents lining their external aspects hissing like something between veins and sweating skin. The thicket of structures connected to the grid fed a feast to Cas Domain of Sound. Peeking through their inner mechanisms, Avo found himself passing through an alloy treatment plant, with jocked drones and automated mechs working at their stations, moving developing products across their lines. Worth noting was the subtle press of Chronology in the air. A lingering aspect imbued in the matter as well. If there was a single commonality among all structures, a unifying theme that choked the district entire, it was the passing of clocks, digital and mechanical arms swinging as the future came and came and never stopped turning to past. Sanctus and its originating cladeCmore than any other GuildCwas leashed to the passage of time, a legacy inflicted upon them by the Severance, a long-passed calamity where their pantheon attempted to part existence into parallel currents of time. What followed remained disputed, but when the act was done, only half their godsCand faithfulCsurvived the thaumic backlash. Those that remained were irrevocably altered, with twin ontologies stacked into a single ego. The same event also sent them careening from the ruling power of the high seas and left the waves open for Ori-Thaum to claim. As Avo passed ahead through structures and people, he resequenced them. Marked them within. Built backdoors he could access and points he could spread. And as his base mind operated in the present district, his subminds were joined in effort Sovereignties beyond, spreading his splinters further and wider, working to exceed the worst of Zeins augured fears. The vanguard of his consciousness arrived over Velters home, Skimmers throbbing in the sky. With Cas still minutes from arrival, Avo took to scouting and shaping to ensure a smooth approach. +Theres somethin wrong here,+ Draus said, taking in the scene of the neighborhood. The Throat was a place of heavy industry and persistent labor. Nothing about it could compare to the cleanliness or stability of Lights End located a Layer above or much less the Tiers themselves, but places here were still functional. Livable. If a comparison had to be made, this locale could be a peer to Xin Yunsha as viable living for the desperate and FATELESS. The buildings might be little more than jutting slabs made resemblant of fences by the bridges linking each apartment to its adjacent neighbors, but the streets outside were still maintained, with heavy foot traffic mirrored by low-speed skylanes running three elevations above. There were exits leading off each of the apartments, and the open claws that were mag-clamps protruded from the edges of their balconies, allowing the tenants direct access to their houses. Velters was located on the twelfth floor of a room listed [II-17-5 Aleph]. The clamps beyond her walls clutched a black-tinted Zephyr, scuffed and dented along the front left rim. Avo flicked a splinter into the vehicles locus and found Draus suspicion well-placed. WARNING: SEQUENCES COMPROMISED DETECTING MULTIPLE [INCONSISTENT] ARTIFACTS AND SEQUENCES Those were likely Necros in wait. Or dormant phantasmics waiting for someone to trigger them. As he circulated through its system, another detail came to his notice: a certain module didnt seem to belong. DETECTED ATTACHMENT [TAC-SWM-EMPTY] Draus announced her understanding with a snort. +Deconstructors. Theres combat fog in this thing.+ Calvino sighed. {This is why were so reluctant to give you nice things. Do you know the difference between a constructor swarm and a deconstructor swarm, Avo?} +Yeah,+ Cas said, preparing as he passed the first floor. +Just like a flood.+ +Good. Going to compromise all the Regulars and then subsume them. You go for her the moment I disappear from your mind. Three seconds. Three.+ +Two,+ Cas replied. Avo slammed his splinters past the Regulars wards. Durable of mind though they were, there was still little they could do against the all-becoming aspect of Delusion, nor did they notice the calcification of hidden Auto-Seances. +One,+ Avo finished, and disconnected from Cas and the others. For a heartbeat, the splinters of his consciousness reassembled as simmering fragments slotting chunks of condensation back around his Metamind. With a thought thereafter, he unsheathed his mind of steam and let the flames roar once more. As the Conflagration reasserted itself, a wall of flames erupted from his halo and was promptly funneled inward as Avo loaded a series of new sessions into his Auto-Seance and dove back into New Vultun. The first Regular was utterly unprepared to burn. As was the next. As was the following squad the next room over. With reflexes surgingCeven unmagnified by his HaemokinesisChe took five teams by surprise before the first response came, which, as he was facing Regulars, came as a stream of gunfire. He switched sessions. He detonated out from a still functioning mind. He swallowed another two teams. Gauss fire tore through the walls. Two peripheral accretions winked out. Collateral damage. Unfortuante. Nothing for it. Avo burned away that group as well. Soon, Avo found his fire crackling within the last of the Regulars as he subsumed their minds and took from them their body. A second after he reasserted his Delusion and the flames pouring out from his halo sputtered into hissing steam. The Regulars plunged into his consciousness with little fanfare. Most expressed mere surprise and curiosity. A few were annoyed they didnt get to actually fight the one that killed them, that they were done in by godsdamn Nether-dogshit instead of dying properly from a bullet. The rest mocked him for complaining. Wasting no time to savor his newest additions, Avo spread the coverage of his mind thereafter and linked himself to his cadre once more. An echoing twang sounded on as Cas passed through halls, under doors, and through a crack in the window of the opposite room. In the room he left, a chair sat empty, bloodied cords once used to bind left abandoned on the ground. +I have her,+ Cas said, the noise of his ontology risen in volume to account for the added mass. But though they were beyond immediate danger, another problem was fast approaching. REND CAPACITY [MELODIST]: 88% +Going to need to find a place to stop and vent,+ Avo said. +Yeah,+ Cas agreed, though his mind was more on the girl he just saved. The faintness of jubilation and relief built in his chest. A salve for a weary heart. Finally. He managed to protect one. This time, he didnt let them all die. Pain and incoherence emanated from Nunas mind even as they traveled through Layer Twos checkpoint, diving down into the airspace of the Spine. Scanning the surroundings, Cas closed in on a thin rent lining the roof of a megablock, and intruded into an empty floor filled with dust and lingering mem-cons that Avo promptly shattered with a few patterns. As the plucking of strings slowed then ceased, vibrations built in the air, and from the shivering emerged Cas carrying Nuna, laying her on the ground immediately. Back in the real, the girl let out a pained moan, and her eyes fluttered. The fact her Metamind was still intact after her ordeal told Avo they hadnt tortured her that much. Knowledge leftover from Draus and Abrel told him it wasnt protocol to torture prisoners at all, with the act regarded as undisciplined and pointless in the eyes of the Seraphs. That the girl suffered was likely the decision of the field commander alone. Back over in the apartment, one of Avos subminds ascended the stairs within a Regulars sheath and arrived on the topmost floor. Smashing through doors where the nulled Instrument lay, Avo found himself facing an entire room of mind-dead Golds. Among them, only a broad-shouldered man adorned with intricately engraved platinum armor retained any semblance of a mind. And most of that success belonged to Avo, for it was a splinter rooted at the heart of the Instruments mind keeping him intact. A mirrored scene played concurrently in two spaces parted by a Layer. Cas stood over Nuna, whispering to her, taking in her injuries as Avo worked to mend her mind. In her former apartment, Avo stood over the downed Instrument, reveling in the silent carnage Peace wrought before pointing his gun down as he began rebuilding his only salvageable victim. You gonna be fine, Cas said, laughing as Nunas wild blinking stopped and coherence returned to the gaze in her unswollen eye. Above, the Instrument coughed and their eyes flicked down, locked to the barrel of Avos gun, to the Regular prepared to kill them. What? Avo compromised their mind once more, fusing a Possessor phantasmic around their consciousness before forcing them to manifest their Heaven. FLAMESEA, OF THE BURNING DEEP (FIRE/WATER/OCEAN) THAUMIC OUTPUT - 11,338 THAUM/c Fire poured out from the Instrument. They screamed as their mind came apart again. Their Rend spiked. Avo had his submind pull the trigger. HEAVEN OBTAINED [FLAMESEA x1] GHOSTS - [14,372,012] THAUMIC OUPUT - 94,690 The Heaven of Fire winked out, and a smear of bright red pooled out where the Instruments head once was. Immediately thereafter, Avo abandoned the Regulars sheath and turned all his focus on Cas and his surviving agent. +Shell live,+ Avo said, speaking to Cas from within as Nuna slowly came to. Yeah, Cas said, speaking seemingly to the open air. An awkward pause followed. He swallowed a lump in his throat. Thanks. +Sure. Was my fault. Or so you say.+ Or so I say, Cas said, shaking his head. Theres more of us. More cells across the city. Are you going to do this for all of them too. +This?+ Guide them. Assume the role Zein left behind. To this, Avo gave but a low laugh. +No. Im not Zein. Youre not pieces to me. You''re people. People with delicious. Delicate thoughts. Precious lives. Dont intend to use you like she did. Intend to make things better. Make it all matter.+ Cas sighed, nodding in weary agreement. Alright. Alright, say I believe you. How do we start? From what you say, you cant even use your Heavens without her turning her eyes on you. +Cant feel the movements of my mind,+ Avo said. And then there was another thing. +Couldnt feel me using anothers Heaven either. Ways to hide. Ways to use Chronology to my benefit. Ways to play the game. And you can be part of it. But only if you want to. Only if you still believe.+ The Columners confidence might have been shaken in the aftermath, but material success went a long way in assuaging damaged confidence. He couldnt have saved Nuna alone. Would likely be in Highflame custody by this point if not for Avo. And sometimes, the taste of rousing success was all one needed to bind another permanently to their cause. So, Cas said, wheres that safe house you marked? Chapter 22-13 Shifts in the Wind Chapter 22-13 Shifts in the Wind Take everything! USE EVERYTHING! FIND HIM! FIND THE BASTARD WHO DEFILED OUR SANCTITY! THE DEVOURER OF PEACE! THE BURNING DREAMER! FIND THE THIEF OF OUR TREASURES! EXTINGUISH HIS FLAME! ALL THAT IT TAKES! WHATEVER IT TAKES! WE UNBIND YOU FROM YOUR RESTRICTIONS! WE UNCHAIN YOU FROM MERE SERVITUDE! GO MY FAMINES! FIND HIM! FORGE WHATEVER ALLIANCE YOU MAY! TURN ALL THAT YOU CAN! SEIZE SOULS AND SEE YOURSELVES EMPOWERED IF YOU MUST! CAGE THE DREAMER! BRING HIM TO US! BRING HIM SO HE MIGHT ANSWER FOR HIS SINS IN FINALITY! EMOTION. WE HAVE SPOKEN! WE CEDE THIS WILL TO YOU! YOU BEAR THE FAULT FOR THIS, AND SO TOO WILL YOU BEAR RESPONSIBILITY! RESHAPE THE NODES OF PEACE TO YOUR LIKING! WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE! JUST SO LONG AS YOU BRING US THE BEAST! -The Hungers of Noloth 22-13 Shifts in the Wind Distant sirens and peripheral thoughtcasts sang serenades of success. Across the Sunderwilds, from the safety of his enclave, Avo listened in on Exorcists conversations exchanged in various Oversecs. With the backdoors he had into the Paladins internal networks, nothing they knew was veiled from him. From the summary of events they provided, Avo learned that the surviving Regulars had vacated the premises, burning their dead and destroying their trail as best they could. Still, there was a limit to what they could mask. Sanctus and the Exoricts werent fools. Even without tangible evidence, they had eyewitness memories and clues in the form of downed Mortality drones. There was a limit to how well-armed Syndicates could get to be, but more than thaumaturgy, few reacted as Regulars did when mortally imperiled. To say there were suspicions pointed toward Highflame was an understatement, but without major harm inflicted and the objectives behind this supposed raid unclear, the most that would come of this would be some snarling from Nether Proparazzis. Ultimately, it was all part of the game between the Great Guilds. Little battles in the dark denied or ignored for the sake of grander objectives. Despite that, Avo was still pleased with his haul. He had Cas loyalty, a new Heaven, cycler, and Soul taken from the Godclad he killed, and the minds of many Regulars drifting within his consciousness. More than the ontologics, it was Draus former comrades that pleased Avo. Most templates wrestled with the horror of their new existence. The Regulars merely accepted and then adapted, merging with the cognitive architecture without more than a gripe. At their core was a hollow willingness to fight, and though they served Highflame in life, they were lost to the world now. Mere figments simulated by the mind of something unfathomable to them. Even simulated, they knew their wills were false. So, there was no true capitulation. No true betrayal. Not when all they were was grown from ghostly vines bound to an external will. That did not mean they were devoid of demands, however. Most shared wants. Desires. Even requests. But rather than demanding that Avo do something for them, or that he commit some form of harm to himself, theirs was a simpler want. Something he himself was all too willing to grant. [Just let us loose against each other,] Lieutenant Grimja said, already inspired after a brief exchange with Corner. The want was a simple one. A beneficial one. A stimulating one. Within Avos imminently reshapable mindscape, he could form various imagined spaces. Zones of open combat for templates to indulge in the most primal of thrills. After days of being little more than embers, Avo could summon into awareness when he needed advice, a good contingent of his subsumed minds found themselves in accord. Abrel, Kare, Elegant-Moon, and Kassamon were also piqued, but between them existed another question. Could the bonds of comradery be formed at Avos will? Was this another thing he could manufacture? Avo released a hiss of pleasure as he drew hardened environments from the condensate of fog, forming a new mind labyrinth. Peace the Incubi provided all the blueprints he needed to generate a complex structure, but there was no reason he needed to settle for the limitations of a Metamind. Avo could go beyond. Far beyond. Make vivid mindscapes of unmatched complexity and change them at a whim. As the Regulars loaded into the simulated environmentCDraus template greeting her juniors with a feral grinCAvo considered the potential for future developments with one submind while his base self faced his comrades. They sat around the information center within his tower, going over the spontaneous dive they experienced. Draus was pointing out something about the drones Avo piloted to Dice while Chambers chattered away at Cas. The faither was currently in an undisclosed safe house provided to him by Tavers. His presence in the enclave was made possible through splinters and phantoms. Back over in New Vultun, Avo peered out at Cas current residence and found it to be a quaint enough abode. The noise of industrial saws and unceasing engines assailed the small room hidden away in the corner of the chop shop, but only rarely did Avo catch sight of a passing accretion. On a cot behind Cas, Nuna sat with her knees hugged close to her chest. Her mind was all kinds of sour and bitter, but she was alive, and Avo repaired the worst of her traumas. He didnt remove the pain for her. Unlike Lucille, this one seemed glad to be miserable, drawing on her budding hate, recommitting her thoughts towards martyrdom, towards seeing the Guilds burn. Who was he to deny such a coherent goal? But one thing was certain. If she was to be useful to their cause again, she needed a new identity. A new face. A new set of sequences. These services were but trifling things to someone with Avos gifts, but Tavers insisted on using another, and when she made her candidate known, he decided to commit his cognitive capacity elsewhere, ceding the role to his progenitor: White-Rab. Of course, the process demanded little thought from him as well, and a conversation quickly developed between Avo and Waltons true disciple, the latter as baffled as Cas when he was giving a recounting of recent events. +Jaus, Avo, Zein Thousandhand? You fought the Godslayer and then got her pocketed by the glassers. What the fuck, cosang.+ White-Rabs mind sang with laughter as his avatarCa large nu-rabbit like entity with four ears, four eyes, a top hat, and a nice suit occupied one of the seats, feet propped on the table in spite of their intangibility. A subtle note of sourness escaped him when he considered matters relating to the Low Masters, Walton, and the Hungers, but he declined to comment about that. +More secrets than we know of in this city,+ Avo said. And wasnt that the truth? +There are other cells out there,+ Cas said, studying the projected representation of New Vultun rising from the table-like information center with teeth clenched. +The way things were before, Zein guided them. Kept them safeCor alive long enough to properly use them.+ His expression darkened at that. +Im not sure how many are going to survive without her umbrella. Most arent trained for this kind of life. Theyll go to ground as best they can, but its pretty much inevitable that most of them will be found.+ Come on, Cas, Chambers said, rolling his eyes and gesturing at Avo. Thought you were one of them hopeful, believe-y types. Didnt Avo here just pull your ass out of the fire? Wouldnt exactly call anything inevitable with him around. Hells, who knows what he might do tomorrow? Maybe hell find a canon thatll let him fix time, or turn his blood into a rash cure, or maybe pull Jaus back out from the Big Nothing. Lots to do. Lots to do, and storm clouds gathering. They needed to get ready. They needed more shaping. More thaums. More ghosts. More subverts. There was a window here. A distinct opportunity to completely flip the table and change the game. Avo wasnt going to let the opportunity go. The Guilds and Syndicates had resources and industries ripe for the taking. He didnt even need to build anything. He just needed to dive deeper and melt into the world. All he needed was time. Time, thought, and his cadre to water the seeds of change. The seeds of a new empire. One of smoke and steam; unknowable and untouchable, beyond notice or reach. Beyond the Guilds capability to destroy. He could win this game before it truly began. All he needed was to bite deep. And from the way things looked, no one was going to stop him. *** An oppressive mood of wrongness gnawed at DRongo like a chill she couldnt shake. The mood set in with the Nethers disruptionCthe sudden disruption of the cognitive realm dislocating her thoughts and leaving her stranded within a beam of light. Even as the Exorcists and her Incubi were peeled from her side, the Unwhere continued to function, shunting her across clouds of satellites dancing amidst unblemished pockets in the void. In isolation, she screamed. She screamed but would admit to no one, betray the truth of her dread if only to deny its reality. After an eternity or mere minutes, stability reasserted itself as her protectors beat her jailers to arrive by her side. They swept her mind and ensured she wasnt compromised and fed her an injection of knowledge from the outside world, detailing developments spontaneous and severe, and each added revelation caused the cold chasm within to spread wider. The Low Masters struck at the city again; Chief Paladin Samir Naeko broken of his lethargy, engaging the supposedly long-dead Godslayer in open combat before taking her into custody; more troubling deaths within her clan, of growing movements detected from the Kazaharas and Kitzuhadas. Dogs. Vermin. Stealing this moment to strike at her kin while she was indisposed. Humiliated. A reprisal was needed, an act of retributionC A sudden weight peeled her active thoughts from her mind. It was as if the world around her had changed somehow without her noticing. +That, elder, is always true.+ The familiar, hated voice came from within her palace. DRongo bit back a cry of alarm as she forced calm on herself. Him. The priest. Back again. Back, and with her protectors blind to his presence. Loading herself as an avatar into her own mind, she found her Incubi strangely dulled, unable to react, unresponsive even as she cast her thoughts at them, trying to provoke a response. The Nether still flowed. Nothing was jammed. Part of her feared they were compromised, but seeing as she was speaking to a herald of Old Noloth, there was a far simpler possibility. +Ah. Priest.+ She began her response with a scoff, the object of her loathing emerging into her perception. He looked more grotesque than he usually did. Stitched eyes. Bleached skin. Tattered cloak. Dead owl in an open chest cavity. Aesthetic nightmares suited for scaring children. All this earned from her was scorn. +Come to threaten me again so soon.+ She paused. And still no citrus. Just a hollowness. A chill. Another pretender then? It didnt matter. The priestCor whoever he wasCstudied her before speaking. +I was not the one who spoke to you before. But I know of you, elder. I know of what my brethren inflicted on you. The injustice the provoked you to perform.+ Few things could catch Council Elder Mwaba DRongo off-guard. Nonsensical condolences from a Famine of the Hungers was one. +...Why are you here? What do you want?+ +There is something that has been taken from both of us. We share a mutual enemy. One that has driven both of us to dark places. To desperation.+ Even as he spoke, his mind remained vacant of emotion. Not even a drip of thoughtstuff betrayed. +The bargain you seek to make,+ DRongo said. +Out with it. That is the only reasonC+ +We are prepared to give you warminds.+ And all hint of mental activity vanished inside the elder. The Famine continued. +We are aware of your attempts to manufacture Heavens tangential to the lost Domains of Mind, using information as a substitute. They stand as analogies as best, and though your Guild has protections, they will not be enough to guard against the Burning Dreamer.+ +The what?+ DRongo asked. Something that was almost a smile played across the Famines face. +Who are you, that you cannot even perceive the face of your true foe? Pitiful practitioner, allow me to light your mind with knowing.+ She didnt. She refused. He showed her anyway. Chapter 22-14 As Below… Chapter 22-14 As Below... They call them sanctuaries? Better term is processing plant. If you see what the Guilds are playing at here youll know what theyre saying is all godsdamned bullshit. Voidwatch tries to help, but theyre crippled here. Omnitechs keeping their eyes limited, and the machines they send down have problems. The Nether does things to their systems. Messes them up bad. We see them shipping more material down every week for replacements. And even if theyre playing to the human rights charter whatever they call it, the other Guilds still need their death feed. Sure, the rest play by the rules on the surface. Hell, they even provide the basic dignitiesCfood, shelter, basic healthcare, hell even public Nether access to curated informationCbut everything they give comes at a cost and lets them compile a list of people to let in. Theres a reason why they arent targeting high-fertility populations. Theres a reason why males or females of low genetic worth are getting subliminal prompts stitched into their minds, driving them to accept contracts with certain smugglers and sign promises with Syndicates masquerading as special agencies. The FATELESS are basically damned to be cattle from the start. There was never really any way out from them. No one to keep them safe. Hells, half of them dont need much prompting to sell their lives. Theyre desperate. The Sunderwilds have a good portion twisted of flesh, and they want a shot at that good life they keep seeing in the Nether ads, thats streamed into their minds as they sleep. They want into New Vultuns risen glory, to climb the subterranean depths for all theyre worth and maybe earn a chance at the Tiers and lay their eyes on pristine skies for once in their lives. But by the time they find themselves in the Crucibles as entertainment, or in the gutters as little more than slaves or indentured playthings, itll be too late. We try to breach the censors preventing them from realizing the truth inside the city sometimes. We try, but its hell. If theres one thing that unites the Guilds, its that they need death, and they need a constant stream of people to keep marching for greater yields. These people are fucked, and I dont know how to save them. Shit. I dont know if anyone can. -Mem-log of Junity Nevers Humanitarian Necro and Guild-Recognized Cultist 22-14 As Below... +Essus. EssusCwake up.+ Coherence returned to the former refugee like a light flickering to life within his awareness. Mere seconds ago, his mind was a tangled knot, invasive thoughts flowing through him, outside memories polluting his cognition. His sense of self was melded to a disfigured wholeCa party to a twisted collective for a brief eternity. All the world was disjointed. Disconnected. Dislocated. During those moments, he felt embraced by a nest, blended into the miasma of humanity. Now, however, he was returned. Restored by a deft hand plucking away at all his remaining wounds. Wholeness spread out from the core of his ego, and all the sequences foreign to his selfhood came unlatched in unison. As the last branches shrouding his mind from coherence were cut, he suddenly recalled where he was, who he was, and the creature that just saved him. Avo? Essus croaked. His voice was hoarseCthroat sore as if he had been screaming. Moving blurs danced along his perception as he pushed himself off the ground, beholding a mess of twitching bodies strewn around him. +Yes,+ Avo said, sounding almost distracted. Essus could feel another presence inhabiting his senses. The subtleness of the weight was uncanny. He had collapsed upon an open patch of dirt when the calamity hit earlier. The others around him fared no better, but at least most of them had camp bedding or tents to crumble upon. Long rows of makeshift abodes ran down an incline, leading into the open jaws of a tunnel lit by brilliant lights. On his left and right, holographic barricades formed a funnel, protecting them from the baleful skies over the Sunderwilds, preventing them from gazing at sights unsuited for mundane minds. The infrastructure was installed and maintained by passing drones, a few now which lay buried among the waiting rows of refugees, gristle and viscera lining hulls of resplendent chrome. Essus gut clenched at the sight. More dead. More dead for no fault of their own. Glitching holographs flickered as he swallowed, taking in the five-meter-long machine softly whining in the dirt, a small, limp hand protruding from underneath. Artad. His god didnt answer. But another did. +Unfortunate,+ Avo murmured, displeased but accepting. It seemed that even the coldness of machines was not beyond the effects of the disaster. +Going to cast some memories into you. Get you up to date. Will access the FATELESS through you. Take this opportunity to spread.+ Spread? Essus'' question was answered with a combustion of knowledge. Only then did he recount the fires climbing high from Avos mind. Essus himself did not burn, but new streams of recollection were smelted into place, flashes of incomprehensible struggle, of battles conducted by the others in ways that he couldnt grasp.Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com Then, it all almost made sense to him. The unbalancing of his mind was Avos doing. An unexpected breach. Details about the Hungers followed, of the struggle against Thousandhand, of all the changes his monstrous friend experienced, and most importantly what the cadre intended to do. A disbelieving chortle escaped Essus as a whistle sounded from above. From its pitched shriek and the vague counters, he guessed another drone was fast approaching. Maybe someone noticed he was recovered and wished to check. Trouble is a lover to you, my friend. Every time we part, you shake the city. You turn the clouds. Avo replied with a grunt of amusement. +So it goes. Going to do it more. With your help as well.+ A faint distance slipped free of Essus like a finger of curling steam. He wouldnt have noticed, but Avo tugged at his perception and guided his gaze. Soon, he saw the mind-wandering haze winnow through the skulls of his fellow refugees. +Theyre untangling. Slowly. Think it will take another few hours before they finally recover. Fine. Useful for us. Going to create Seances inside them first. You should keep going. Enter processing while theyre down.+ *** Ahead, through twelve junctions of checkpoints, chaining through another fifty-six thousand bodies choking the inner halls, Avo swept past the mag-rails running toward the sanctuaries like a quiet breeze. He already spent about twenty-thousand ghosts creating backdoors and mem-cons among the incapacities FATELESS. It would make them simple to track. What pulled at his interest more were the hints of memetic tampering he found in some of them, likely Syndicate NEcros already making their pay. As he cast his perception outward, he took in the first of the many enclaves, a dome tipped by satellites and encircled by landing pads. Glints were descending from the reach of the sky as Calvino quipped about punctual supply deliveries. Avos focus was more on other things at that moment, namely the pseudo-districts where Essus and the refugees were to be housed. The sanctuaries were built with three ideas in mind: modular, simple, and familiar. They werent so different from most enclaves, but the administrative drones inside were strict on compliance and cleanliness, with protocols for quarantine and near-constant shuffling of populations. The defining structures were mass-produced modular housing, each around ten square meters, with indentations along their outsides designed to be clenched by a drones mag-clamps. They came together to form densely packed communities in clusters and columns, the flatness of their tops making them easy to stack and detach at a moments notice. With the constant influx of refugees, there was little space unoccupied, and a war was being waged between the disorderly populace starved of purpose, wasting away in stasis, and Guilder drones meant to keep things clean and, ostensibly, keep their subjects safe. Of course, of the Great Eight, only Voidwatch seemed to truly care for human rights, while the others played evasive games, creating environments where things were unbearably livable. Featureless environments. Constant brightness. Tight proximity. To an easy place for the human animal to live. +Feels more like a prison than a community,+ Avo said {I think thats the point,} Calvino replied, sounding disappointed. {Theyre fed. They have some public access to information. The ones with severe health problems are given just enough to keep their ailments forever at bay, but they dont have any reason to live here. The food is nutritious but bland. And they cant get more whenever they want. Entertainment and information is curtailed, and the most entertaining or interesting among the refugees are taken inside and offered to the city before they can do anything to improve the lives of others here.} Through the air, a thoughtcast played: +Fighting is strictly prohibited in the sanctuaries. For those caught making infractions against community guidelines, a penalty of delay will be placed on your waitlist for the city...+ A chorus of voices scoffed inside Avos mind as Draus templateCmidway through scalping one of the new RegularsCmade their displeasure known. +This is a place of survival,+ Avo said. +Not a place for life. Designed for boredom. To wear down on someones mind.+ {And make them risk life and limb once more with the smugglers,} Calvino summarized. {Yeah. So. Technically, its not the Guilds doing it.} +Why not put more pressure on the Guilds? Or just make the enclaves better yourselves. Expand.} {We do. But our direct assets dont last very long down here. We are expanding the enclaves, but unexpected anomalies can cause the strangest of things to happen, leaving things damaged and in need of a rebuild.} Corner let out a sigh. [Fuck-fuck games across the board.] Avo understood and spread even more splinters. It wouldnt take long for him to isolate the Necros working here, to climb the chain and hunt down their points of contact for the Syndicates, and to compromise all the major criminal organizations in the gutters, but he still needed to play things subtle. The killing of the Instrument earlier was as much an act of catharsis as it was an experimentCto see how sensitive Veylis truly was. As things stood, direct thaumaturgy and drastic alterations made to the paths drew enough attention. But spreading his splinters into other minds and infesting them remained a silent act. Such would be to his advantage. With a bit of patience, he could create enough openings and sessions for him to burn millions or even billions of minds at once. Or, if he desired to create more dilemmas for the Guilds and establish an umbrella of safety for him and the cadre, he could feed the mem-data he collected over to his Paladins and have them dismantle the gangs and Syndicates. Either way, this was a foundational act of shaping. He would start by encircling the New Vultun. Securing these sanctuaries for himself, penetrating their lotteries and systems in case he ever needed points to siege the city from the outside, and slowly, quietly, deprive the Guilds of their much-desired deaths. To that end, he continued nursing his infestation on vulnerable minds, the odorless taint of his mind wreathing itself into the knotted skeins that were the populace. When they recovered, he would be with them. And when the smugglers made contact, he would be waiting. And as he proceeded deeper into the sanctuaries, another facet of himself was crawling higher through the Tiers via his newest subverts. Chapter 22-15 So Above Chapter 22-15 So Above Listen, lets not bullshit ourselves here: there are only a few situations in which we mask the egos of our finest Glaives and hide them up in the Purgatories. And of all those reasons, its almost never because Highflame has their number, or a No-Dragon flesh-coded smart plague, or whatever nightmare Omnitech is cooking up. We know how they work, and it isnt that kind of subtle. Theyll assassinate some of us. Sure. We do the same to them. But theyre fine with leaving evidence afterward because who gives it a shit? A dead Massist is a dead Massist. A dead Sainist is a dead Sainist. We dont bother hiding the blood on our hands. We dont bother hiding the blood unless were doing it to members of our own family. More usually, we hide things after we commit acts against our Overkin. Our clans fight. Everyone knows this. everyone. We might be bound by the same traditions, by the same culture, by the same language, by the same dream we seek. But the clans fight, because before we were a republic before we were united after the fall of the pantheons, we were apart, we were tethered by distant blood relations, by little jostling fiefdoms, fighting over who held what chain or what island. Some of these grievances lasted since time immemorial. Some of them still last to this day. I am telling you today, my fellow elders of the inner council, that we need to control our worst habits. We need to stamp down on inter-clan rivalry before it''s too late. We cannot be feuding and fighting among ourselves while we''re also fighting Highflames forces, while we''re also facing the No-Dragons latest plagues, while we''re also trying to figure out how to break Omnitech encryptions. We need to stand together. Now more than ever. And so I''m putting forward a proposal. Something Im uncertain will be supported, but I must attempt, at least in good conscience, at least a try. I hereby propose that we fragment the mirrors over watching our cells. As we have those facing outside preparing and defending against outer threats, so too should we have someone inside, making sure that our assets are not afraid of having their throats slit by those who are supposed to watch over them as they sleep. I put forward this motion now in the separation of the convex and concave clauses. The details are in the mem-data. Cast in, take a look. Understand. And I ask you to vote with me. Again, we cannot lie to ourselves. The time for bloodying ourselves in the face of opposition is past. The stakes are impossibly higher. We cannot afford defeat. Our oath is: Unity is destiny. I think its about time we start acting like it. -Elder Ganduuri Kazahara, Representative of Clan Kazahara (Circa 184 P.F., months before the Third Guild War) 22-15 So Above Peering out at the resplendent streets of the Purgatory, Avo wondered how he could have ever believed himself to be a denizen of these heights. Absurd though it might seem, his physical appearance was the easier thing to mask. A lie manageable by claims of augmentation and a desire to test the most extreme of sheath morphologies. Such eccentricity was common enough to earn him a reprieve from further attention. No, the true test was being among humanity itself C humanity in its most liberated form, its most hedonistic, unchained iteration, far beyond the constraints of meager survival. Studying the busy district through the Tadpole''s feeds, every inch of this cityscape was alive with motion. The district he passed over was called Grallo-Novrea. A place won by Ori-Thaum in the Third Guild War. A place they kept till the very present. As such, it bore all their staples in aesthetics and culture, and they made it known in ultimate fashion, by lacing every structure, every aspect of their city, with a fine sheen of vivianite. Through the crystals gloving all other matter, ghosts flowed in unceasing streams, bounding through the linked minds of passing cliques. Life here was interconnected in a manner unparalleled. Interconnected, and monitored at all times. This was a place of minds unchained, of thoughts unfettered, but it was also a place where those with the capability could gaze deep into anothers inner worlds, to glimpse that which was to be hidden, take things much rather forgotten. A new dawn bathed the streets in jade hues, the light of the natural day kissing the viridescence of loci as the structures they encompassed rosed in jagged promontories. More unnaturally, however, matter here flowed. Was partially fluid of nature, made so by the presence of a lingering miracle. The Tiers were not limited to dead matter and the cold laws of reality. Imagination triumphed often over limitation here, and as Avos drone rounded a risen archway broadcasting the image of a woman wearing what looked to be an inflated suit per the latest fashion, he watched as people casually splashed down through sideways, leaped from the open doors of their aerovecs into buildings, vanishing past rippling waves. {You know, we have much more mind-bending cityscapes in the Threshold. And some of the worlds we had were terraformed by smart-matter as well.} Calvinos tone was flat, but it was clear the EGI had something to prove. Avo offered a grunt of acknowledgment instead of a proper reply. Casting a splinter out from the drone, he too dove into the citys architecture, but he sought to immerse himself in the currents of mind rather than water-wrought miracles. As he descended the nearest locus he could find, he noticed another peculiarity about the cityCthe sense that no structure here stood alone. Gone were the bulky, brutalist blocks of plascrete stacked upon the districts grid like a piece of a board. Gone were veins of traffic running between, of shifting life moving from place to place. Whatever the case, he soon found that which he was looking for: sessions. Specifically, single-use sessions were only to be used in times of desperation to contact Elder DRongos most trusted Mirror-Concaves. Once, she knew their faces and names, but those memories had been extracted under the justification of security and redundancy. Few knew her exact role in the clan, and even if someone penetrated her knowledge, they wouldnt be able to use her mem-data to uncover anything further. This was the angle Avo obtained when he subsumed the node. This, and the awareness of other critical intermediary assets in Ori-Thaum. For all the secrecy they practiced, for all the decentralization and intrigue they exercised, there needed to be connective tissue between their elements for coordination. There needed to be bones tying their forces together. That was what Avo could strike at. Infect. Through them, he could misdirect the ones that were hidden, open to direct attack. As he copied the last of the twenty-six sessions, he spent the splinter inside her and created a hidden Auto-Seance for future access. He didnt expect to be making a return visit but one never knew in this life. But if he did things right, no one would know anything was wrong until long after the Glaives left the Tiers. Returning back to his sheath, Avo checked the progress of his other facets and found himself pleased. His splinters were spreading fast through the sanctuaries and Elegant-Moon actual self was finally reachable for synchronization. Right then, other matters took priority. Kae, Avo said. The Agnos turned, eyes wide. Its time? She asked. Yes, Avo said. He shot Draus a look as well, and the Regular responded in an instant. She flicked a shard of glass through one of her shimmering reflections, guiding it back across the Sunderwilds, back toward the border, back into New Vultun. Things were in motion now. Soon, Draus would find a usable extraction point in the city. Avo just needed to secure the Glaives and Incubi involved in Stillborn operation and get them to said place before anyone could respond. Loading the first of the sessions into his Auto-Seance, Avo assembled an avatar based on Ireenis mem-data. With the warmind of Delusion, the process was instant and perfect in deception. He triggered the call. A lull spread as his Metamind pulsed. One second. Two. Five. Twelve. Are you.... diving? Kae asked, mind tense and fists clenched. The others were also gathering close. Whats happening? Before he could respond, an update flashed into his cog-feed. SESSION ACCEPTED Avo bared his fangs wide in a savage grin. +Identifier: [3-OVELD-OVELD-SURNER-5-5-5-SURNER-DO YOU REMEMBER WERE JAUS WAS BURIED]. Response sequence.+ +In our dreams. He is buried in our dreams.+ Avo broadcasted the collection moods, visual patterns, and audio hallucinations required to certify his identity within a manifested splinter. The Mirror-Concaves mind was a miasma of checkpoints, chokepoints, and mem-cons. The man had more information hidden from himself than actual recallable moments. Even so, Avo slithered deeper into him, rooting past the wards in anticipation of what was to come. +Confirmed. You have thirty seconds for dataC+ +An attack is imminent,+ Avo said, casting over false data. Using Delusion, he compiled memories hinting at Shotin Kazaharas involvement behind the incident at the Trident and connected it with recent hostilities between the clans. +Critical deep cover assets compromised. Recommend immediate evacuation and sequencing of new cover identities.+ Cold fear flowed through the Concave. Immediately, his ghosts came alive with activity, reacting to the information. +Affirmative. Proceeding to Winter Protocols. Fragmenting sequence. Going dark.+ +Unity is destiny,+ Avo said. +Unity is destiny,+ came the reply. As the Mirror-Concave ended the session, Avo remained with him as a splinter, patching into the mans cog-feed to take in his surroundings. The ceiling whirled to the side as the Concave disconnected from his jack station. Swinging himself over the side and nearly tumbling from the nausea of being under for too long, he stumbled toward his closet to grab his outwear. Knowledge flowed into Avos mind as his newest asset continued his preparations. DRongos Glaives were hidden well. Severed from the Nether and hidden in various planes or prisons, requiring physical retrieval. Such was why Avo held back from burning the Concave. Such was why he continued to cast the others as this one stepped into his personal hanger and activated the engine of his aerovec. In twenty minutes, he would be taking a trip down into the basement of a local cocktail lounge where hed ask for the restricted content. There, he was to receive a wine barrel. A wine barrel that held a planar pocket housing one of the twenty-six survivors leftover from the Stillborn operation. Ori-Thaum was thorough. Ori-Thaum was careful. Ori-Thaum was paranoid. But you could be all these things and still lose. You could be all these things and still be preyed upon. Some part of Avo felt bemused at the horror he had become, a creature no ordinary Necro could detectCor even stop him anymore. Then, he remembered the fact that these people ignited Kaes mind due to stoked fears, and realized the rules were never real in the first place. New Vultun took. So did the Guilds. So did he. He was just the more impressive predator. Chapter 22-16 Kidnapping Chapter 22-16 Kidnapping +This is Elder Mwaba DRongo. I have something for you. Receive it in my stead. It will make our clan strong; and protect us from our enemies. Within. And... without. You will know what they are. You will understand what I have done. I ask that you behold these memories before judging me. The threat we face is... it is beyond us. Beyond our comprehension. Already too late to contain. We are at the point of desperation. I ask that you understand why I had to accept these gifts from our enemy. For our clan. For the Overclan. For the Guild. You would have done the same in my place. A plague is sweeping the Nether. A plague is already upon us. We must save what we can before it is all too late. Unity is destiny.+ -Thoughtcast between Elder Mwaba DRongo and [Redacted] 22-16 Kidnapping Hadrian Aslowe was a prisoner in more ways than one. Each day, he woke within a gilded cage, risen from silken sheets to be serviced by cheerful servants who hid their mechanical interiors behind a masquerade of flesh. He wasnt sure how he noticed their inhumanityCwhy some of their actions made the hairs on his neck standCbut the wrongness called to him all the same. He lived on a beachfront somewhere, peering out at lapping waves of pristine turquoise as he went about his daily affairs. The horizon was painted from an embrace of splendorous colors, and the softness of the clouds never failed to make his mind tingle with delight. Without doors or even windows barring him from the world outside, the winds flowed and the passage of nature through his abode made him feel as if living in nature. So it was that he spent his days in paradise, without shortage of company, without worrying for his peace, without remembering why he was even there. The last part was the thing that gnawed at him the most. The ignorance. The missing spots in his mind. He could remember parts from his childhood, of the clan he was born under, of the time he spent in the academies, the brutality of the Fourth Guild War. But everything after was a haze, as disconnected from the world beyond as the island he resided on was. This was paradise. But it was also exile, and day after day, the malaise within him continued to build. Another drink, Aslowe? Pulling his eyes away from the curve where sea met sky, he faced the favorite of his servants and offered a wan smile. Just because they werent people didnt mean he couldnt play house. She was a slight of frame and a few inches shy of one-hundred-eighty centimeters. Her hair was like a living flame made animate through aesthetic modifications, and the paleness of her skin suited the dark and willowy dress that danced like the waves with the coming of the winds. The only thing that actively gave away her non-human nature were the phantasmal strings passing through her chestCthrough were her locus was stored. She carried a tray that offered some a turquoise delight, ice cold and crackling with carbonation. When he took what was offered, she graced him with an additional grin, causing him to look away before his Metamind did its duty against the rash. He was glad he hadnt chosen to configure his servants toward provocation or eroticism. Such a thing would have amounted to little more than a taunt. Even in paradise, some things remained broken, some things couldnt be. Lust was for later. For him alone. In his mind. Away from the waking world. Would you like for us to sing you to sleep again? She said, fluttering her eyes. He took a sip from his glass and listened to the waters, felt the sand beneath his feet, rooted himself in the understanding that this was a prison, luxurious though it might be. But so what? So what of it now? All the world was a prison. That would be the case until they won. Or someone won. To have his freedom back, to be in New Vultun wasC The memories were missing, but some slivers of feeling were still there C cognitive scars of unceasing anxiety, terror, and despair. He felt like a cord that had been drawn too tight for too long. Even now, there were parts of him that didnt know how to loosen. But only parts. It wasnt hard for a prisoner to fall in love with their prison when what lay beyond was a nightmarish slaughterhouse. Yes, Hadrian finally replied. An older song now, though. Should Dawn Never Come. Oh? Nipped by nostalgia today, are we? Her giggle came right on cue, and there was something so perfectly human about the timing. So perfectly human that it wasnt. He wasnt sure how development created these mechs, but he had more than a sneaking suspicion they might have been peeking at Voidwatchs homework. Savoring another sip from his drink, he gestured for her to follow. They walked side by side back to the bungalow as the firmament slowly brightened, the shift between night and day hinting its approach.Visitt for the latest updates As he made it past his verandas, however, something in his periphery caught his attention. A snapped branch. A depression in the soil. Footprints left not of bare feet but booted soles instead. Someone else was here. Intruder. It was funny how the body could remember long after the mind was made to forget. Hadrian moved on instinct, shifting behind his servant for a measure of cover. In a single motion, he dumped the contents of his drink and shattered the lip of his glass, turning it from receptacle to shiv. Is something wrong, the mech asked, her dissonant calmness finally betraying the nature of her inhumanity. Didnt steal enough of Voidwatchs homework it seemed. Keep quiet. Stay close but ahead. He was moving off instinct now, his nerves firingCaliveChis guts dropping as adrenaline screamed for his sheath to come alive. He knew the odds were against him if this was a properly trained team, but considering he was still alive and they hadnt just shot him from beyond his sensory range, they must want something from him. That, in some ways, was a more worrying question, and one he didnt want to think about. As they passed an exquisitely sculpted column, he found a holocoated man waiting for him at the front of his house. Behind him, six other servants stood gathered on the porch, smiles clinging to their faces, staring off into the distanceCat nothing in particular. The surreality of the scene gave Hadrian pause and the mans uncovered face made his mind go blank. Though fractals of obfuscating light danced along the strangers body in waterfalls of static color, his face was defined by hard edges and a piercing hazel gaze. The tension inside Hadrian swelled as he swallowed, angling himself behind his human shield. Who are you? +I will assume responsibility.+ Hadrians thoughts drew Avos attention, and he found the final Glaive in his collection addressing him directly. Fitting. The man was the only surviving leader of the ground team, after all. More than once, Avo caught his perception spilling over Draus, though the Regular paid him no heed. +The others... we were performing a deniable operation for the benefit of our clan and Guild. The duty liesC+ Fuck. You. The words left Kae with a snarl as she buried her fingers into the information center. The colors of her eyes shifted, shifting from their natural hue to the fathomless depths of the ocean as she unconsciously tore moisture from the air, the condensation churning around them like a maelstrom. Kae, Denton began before Chambers placed a hand on her shoulder. Ah, ah, ah, Chambers said. Just let her have this. Shes just expressing herself. We all got a bit of Rend we gotta vent sometimes, right? The spy frowned at the scene, and then at the droplets of water building around them. Its not the prisoners Im worried about. Responsibility. Responsibility. Responsibility. Kae slammed her fist down on the blood-made information deck with each word spoken, then struggled to hide a wince at the end, shaking her hand. You keepCyou speak like it matters. LikeClike what you did was somehow noble. To Hadrians credit, the Glaive flinched away from the Agnos gaze. +It wasnt right. I know that. I know that you should have been afforded some dignityC+ Should have been afforded some dignity? Kae hissed, voice almost breaking. A disbelieving laugh escaped her. YouCyou really are not more than a nu-dog, are you? All of you? Did anyone have any hesitation when the orders came? To frame an Agnos for the murder of a Paladin. To compromise her mindCmake her lie to himChave her create faults in his Heavens canons to ensure that he ruptured? Did you? Did my life matter? Did Dawtons? At some point, the screaming was closer to sobbing, but the Agnos was still going. What did she tell you? Kae asked, rage giving way to exhaustion. What was your mission? What did you think you were doing? This, Hadrian had no trouble answering. +We were dispatched to prevent Highflame from winning the war. From commissioning a thaumaturgical construct thatC+ The rage came back. That I was planning to use to fix the Heaven of Love. I was thinking about curing the Rash. Did you see that when you jacked into my mind? Did you see? This question was meant for the Incubi, and after a few awkward beats, a short-haired woman with transparent lenses in place of her eyes spoke. +Yes.+ And you destroyed me anyway, Kae said. You murdered my teamCmy friends. My love. YouCyou made the Agnosi deny my existence. You knew I wasnt a threat. +Highflame would have been,+ Hadrian interjected, some heat to his own words now. +You mean well, Agnos Kusanade, but you cannot be naive enough to think that what you were making wouldnt have been weaponized. That someone among your peers with Saintist loyalties would have adapted something from your research in the aftermath.+ Kae clenched her fists. And then closed her eyes. And sighed. I am. I was. I was thatCI did think that we meant well. That we were all of us trying to make things better. ThatCthatCthat no one could have seen the wrong in me creating a cure for the worst plague in existenceCwhich was also your fault. You. All of you. Guilder... bastard... half-strands. She took a breath and swept the floating Silvers with a glare again. Did you know... how your Elder found out? Why she was personally attached to the mission? I know little of the military, but you perform in cells, yes? Cells directed by Mirrors. So each collapse or compromise can be stopped before it is too late. Then why was the Elder directly involved? And did you think it was just chance that you were ambushed? Hadrian gave Draus another look, but the Regular continued watching impassively, taking in the captured minds with a bored expression. Noloth, Kae said, spitting the word at them with glee. A priest of Noloth had to tell you. Or you wouldnt have known. She barked a laugh. He did more than tell youCyou planned all of this. We are all pawns to him. He was even a pawn to himself. All to create something that... She gave Avo a look. ...will either be our salvation or damnation. {Avo. I can feel your ego growing. Stop it.} He simply grinned. As Hadrian wanted to reply, claiming impossibility, Avo injected one of his own memories into his newest subverts, and what followed was a chorus of despairing gasps and maddened screams. Oh, how the Deep Nether fuckers turn to the Deep Nether fuckees, Chambers snickered. Well, the dicks in the other foot... dicks in the other ass... youre getting fucked in the ass! How do you like it when you get ass-fucked? Knew youd get there, juv, Tavers deadpanned. Beside her, Dice gave Chambers a thumbs up and he grinned with pride. +I... I didnt,+ Hadrian felt sick again. A trauma nearly passed through him as he considered all his fallen comrades, and all the lives that were spent. All in service of Avo. Finally, his eyes fell on the ghoul and something inside his mind wilted. +Oh, gods.+ Long dead now, Avo replied. Most of them. Some can still hear you through me. They find you... amusing. He turned to Kae and nodded. So. What do you want now? Have them. Have them at your mercy. We can inflict anything. We can make them suffer anything. All is possible. What do you want before we bring them over. The Agnos eyes remained locked on the ones that ruined her past for a moment longer, and then, something inside her surrendered as well. Succumbed. Collapsed. Disappointment passed through Avo as he tasted her thoughts. He expected the opposite effect. Something to feed her rage. Nourish her heart. {Shes just tired, Avo,} Calvino said. {Its too much emotion. Too much weight to bear all at once. Nothing she does here will make her life what it used to be.} No. That wasC Avo paused. Well. There was something they could do. They might not be able to restore her life. But they could return her to the Tiers if they shaped things just right and inserted her into the trial. There were risks in such a plot. Dangers posed to her person, but he didnt doubt that Naeko would let her out of his sight again. Of course, this was to be Kaes choice, with there being still much to consider for the trial. Send them back, Kae said, her mood black. Send them black. And then bring them through. We can think of how to best use them. Like they used me. Like we all get used. Passages set up and open already, Draus said, casting the mem-data over to Avo. Theyre all gonna be taking separate routes down to Lights End, I reckon. Sure you can get them through security without gettin noticed. He frowned at her. What do you think? I think almost every time we try to do somethin, some unexpected bullshit comes out of nowhere and tries to snuff us, and we end up fightin for our lives. [Shes got a point,] Corner said. [There was Abrel, Shotin, hells, ZeinC] Will make sure they get across fine, Avo growled. Wont have a problem. Draus gave him a smug grin. Sure. In the meantime, Im connectin the passage to a place out in the Wilds. Last thing we need is to bring a Godclad with a Heaven of Stealth or some shit like that straight into the enclave. Chapter 22-17 Conjoinment Chapter 22-17 Conjoinment Do you know what it took to set the foundations for the Guilds to be born? The amount of dissent Jaus had to sow? The machinations he never mentioned? Let me tell you something about forming an empire: It''s easiest born from the corpse of a preceding order. Harvested legacy, in a word. Before the Guilds, there were the faiths, the middlemen to Godclads, guiding shackled civilizations surviving under the pantheons'' rule. Of these faiths stood seven that shadowed the others. Seven traditions that remain to this day. Seven reforged during the final calamity. Jaus, more than anyone, knew the importance of continuing culture. The tribalism of our humanityCour desire to seek bonds. That was why he decided upon a usurpation instead of a destruction, a restructuring of patterns instead of a scouring. Chains from chains, if you will. But chains are more than bindings. Chains are also the instruments of our progression. Leashes we can use to drag others. Chains are patterns. Connections. Links. Like tethers running through our minds and cultures, keeping us bond as if zeitgeists were plagues of symbology, and civilization was just a mass expression of aligned symptoms. We treat it completely, then? Why not quell the worst, and cultivate the best? It is also why the Guilds fear losing control. Why they oppress anyone who steps too far beyond their ideologies? Because they fear mutation. They fear the change of their patternsCthat something new might be birthed from their bodies, slipping out from the fractures of internecine. The Chivlarics and Meritocrats; the Ori clans; the seniority feuds of the Sang; the battles to become administrators for the children of the Mandate; the treachery between the lodges of the Longeyes; the inner conspiracies woven by the dilation of the Sanctites; the urge to succumb known to every child of ash; and the desperation to endure by the minds in the void. All are vulnerable now. Made more vulnerable with each passing day. Peeling the cocoon of culture from their bodies, afraid of what they might become before the endCthat fragmentation now would deny them victory tomorrow. But they lie to themselves. They lie to themselves, and Jaus would have wept for them. Because it is already too late. A cell dividing will not share a fate, let alone a dream. And sometimes, it is best to let a chain break before an infection crawls across the links and leaves all in ruins. -Excerpt from the Changing of Ways by Osjane Thousand 22-17 Conjoinment HEAVEN/HELL UPDATED - [SIMULACRAE REPLICA] HEAVEN/HELL UPDATED - [ARSENALIST] HEAVEN/HELL UPDATED - [FUCKTOPIA] HEAVEN/HELL UPDATED - [RUNEBREAKER] HEAVEN/HELL UPDATED - [MAELSTROMER] So, youve still got that Heaven of Darkness floatin inside you, Draus asked after her final resurrection. Got something special planned? Could say that, Avo replied. He turned his attention inward and felt at the Heart of NolothCfelt the Soul that came with it, bereft a cycler. He could have grafted it onto the cycler he took from the Instrument earlier, but he had other plans for the ouroboros. Will wait until I have the thaums before including it. Want to keep it as its own Heaven. Wake it. Speak to it. Get insight into Noloth. Times before. But want to wait. Wait until we get more thaums. Wait until I can breed more cyclers. And as the strands of his blood coiled inward, a thinness of gold followed them, delving into his Liminal Frame to pluck the unattached cycler. Grasping it with his newfound influence over Chronology, Avo showed Draus the seed of his laborCthe seed that would soon be incubated in the enclavers. Soon, this shrunken ring of gold would multiply and bloom with each reshaping of the citys culture C reshapings that would unfold at Avos will. As one of his subminds worked to untangle the flats, their coming lives would soon flourish to everyones benefit. Funny how the No-Dragons need entire complexes to do what youre doin, Draus said, eyes narrowed at the self-eating dragon. Been inside one of them dragon hatcheries before. Godsdamned madhouse is a word. Literally raise entire generations of juvs in a false world. Make them experience false lives for culture. Or whatever the fuck it takes to trigger a dragons growth. Close. Avo retracted the cycler back into himself and peered down at their city of light. From outside the open windows, the first bubbles of accretion were reformed from their deformations. He would begin the embedding when the population reached a stable ten thousand again. Good thing for us is that we dont need to force things. Can just make them understand. Push them to arrive at similar conclusions. Draus snorted. We? Aint no we doin this, consang. Its just you. She shrugged her shoulders. Hells. Its been just you for a bit, hasnt it? All the shit that your pa did. All the things you took from the Hungers. Aint no one else can do what you did to the Guilds. Aint no one else can bled em like you. She gave a resigned snort. Cant lie, Im startin to feel like the one thats obsolete now. He grunted in acknowledgment. There was little point in denying it. His Necrojacking made him by far the greatest threat among his cadreCwas the primary reason they lasted against Zein at all, and could do half of what they managed. But that was only part of the picture. The other part was that he wouldnt have gotten so far without her. Or any of them. His ascent into the Deep Nether would have seen him nulled if he didnt have her template. They would have been undone by Shotin without Abrels instincts guiding himCor Chambers willing degeneracy. They would be operating sub-par Frames without Kaes guidance; absolutely lost without the Columners or Aegis. Everything mattered. Everything was always in flux. The world flowed back into him. Became him. And now, with his Delusion-born splinters, he was becoming the world, leaving parts of himself elsewhere as well. He took in his cadre scattered about the tower. He took in Chambers stoking the back of Dices kitten as he spoke to the girl. He took in Cas and Denton asking Kae how she was doing. He took in Tavers chuckling at Sunrise. He took in Essus, manifested from phantoms like Cas, and parted from them in the flesh. But not alone. Not abandoned. No, Avo said. Not obsolete. Essential. Source of our victories. The Regular scoffed. You know something, consang? Ever since youve started eatin more minds than flesh, youve been sounding a hell of a lot more like a propagandist. Im talkin real motivational woo-woo bullshit. Damn strange to see comin out the mouth of a nine-foot-tall monster. Meant it literally. Literally drawing from your mindCeveryones minds to make better versions of myself. He paused. And you are right. I have been... selfish. Well, dont go feelin bad about it now, Draus replied. Your habits have kept us unsnuffed so far. RESURRECTION - 1% No time was wasted. As Avo plunged into deaths comforting embrace, he drew Chambers into the orbit of his Soul once more and began his work. The commands he sent to his Soul came into effect immediately, and once again Avo marveled at how reactive the Stillborn was at reconstructing itself. Rippling flames sheared the Fardrifter free from Avos Soul, detaching not only the Heaven but the connected cycler and Hell as well. Oh, okay, Chambers said, his Soul quivering as Heaven of Air went rigid. Here we go. Here we fucking go. Animated radiance poured out from Avo and enveloped Chambers. As one Liminal Frame washed its Essence over another, Avo injected a donation of thaums to go with his ontologics, watching with satisfaction as the Fardrifters cycler fused over Chambers, locking in place a few degrees away from the Fucktopia. ONTOLOGICS TRANSFERRED ->1x HEAVEN [FARDRIFTER] ->1x HELL [FARDRIFTER] ->1x CYCLER ->20,000 THAUM/c Then, the presence of another Soul caught his attention. Another death. Then two. Then three. Dice, Draus, and Kae entered as well, each drifting close to take in the moment. As the Fardrifter settled into place, Avo drew his Soulfire away from Chambers and left the Heaven of Air unbathed by his light. The waves of animating radiance receded, and Chambers drifted just beyond the boundary of Avos Soul. As he passed, the nine wind-shaped heads of the Heaven of Air turned to face its fellow prisonersCand unwanted masterCone more time. My last thoughtsCif these are what they areCwill be of today. Today, when you set me free. The once-god went beyond the light now, and a slowness settled over its ontology. It was glorious to ride again. To seek the... horizon. And then the Fardrifter went dark, went silent, went still. RESURRECTION - 2% Everyone watched. Moments passed. Chambers coughed. Hey. Horse. YouCyou broken or something. The Fardrifter didnt move. Immediately. Slowly. Almost imperceptibly. It craned one of its heads and turned. I... am still here.What? Kae hissed, her Soul surging toward the borders of Avos Soul. ButChowCyou didnt... We dont have any Imitators inside us. Our Heavens havent woken after exposureChow is it still aware of itself? This... I dont understand! Avo, however, was more curious about another factor. Chambers. Check something. See if has any active Canons of Chronology. Another pause. No? Did you add those in earlier? A grunt of bemusement followed. Yes. Something else for Kae to think about. A frustrated cry sounded from the Agnos. And to think I worried for the mule,the Woundmother said. And to think I was expecting final freedom, the Fardrifter sighed. So... Chambers said, unsure what this all meant. We can move Heavens between each other really easily. We know that. But what does it mean? Means we adjust, pool, change our Spherages on the go. Means we change ontologics whenever we need. Means my Heavens can still be used by all of you. That your Souls dont have internalized Chronology. Shouldnt be that easy for Veylis to notice. And it means that my Heavens stay awake after residing in me. And can exist outside. And can exist outside... This led down another track of consideration. Another possibility. Avo drew upon the Soul he took from the InstrumentCand also thought of the Soul rooted to the Heart of Noloth. Fardrifter, Avo said. Want to make a new bargain? One we both might find palatable. No, Kae breathed. No. The StillbornCthe gods are broken, it shouldnt be able to... to... Suppose we can find out, Avo said. Time to see if the steed to ride free if we give it a personal Soul. Draus let out a quiet chuckle. The void-minds gonna be mighty pissed about this. Chapter 22-18 Awakening Chapter 22-18 Awakening {THE GHOUL DID WHAT?} -EGI Kant Was A Prick 22-18 Awakening RESURRECTION - 100% The wind rose of its own accord. The heads of the Fardrifter whistled out from Avo as he returned to reality. Coiling free, they passed through the confines of his tower and fled beyond, to the open sky outside, rushing over the enclave with booming laughter. He beheld his former HeavenCthe fragment of a fallen god reawakenedCrising free through blood-made walls to embrace the world once more. FREE, the howling winds sang. Free! I am free! Gales rose in jubilation and flags danced across all the levels. From on high, the cadre looked upon the titanic heads of the Fardrifter tunneling through entire portions of the city, passing through landscapes whole. Kaes eyes were wide with disbelief and she kept looking between Avo and his former Heaven. Should be proud of yourself, he said without facing her. The wonders of your Stillborn are unending. She conveyed a complexity of emotion with a soft breath. Its not that... I just never thought that... I suppose I was arrogant. I never believed that my work would surpass me, and leave me ashamed. This time, Avo did look upon her. Ashamed? You have rebirthed a god from your Soul, Avo. This defies every arrangement the Agnos are bound to. For good reason, Draus said, eyeing the Heaven of Air with greater wariness. People are half-strands enough. Dont got much hope that we can trust these gods to be better. Avo felt the Regulars gaze settle on him. I wouldnt have cut it loose. If it were me, I wouldnt have done it. He nodded in response. I know. I understand. But I had to see. And the FardrifterCwe will have its truest devotion with this act. We dont need devotion. We need firepower. We need intelligence. We need to choke the Guilds. We need insight, Avo replied. Which is why I want to ask you all something: let me incubate your Heavens for a time. Awaken them. Bind them back to you. Will let us make use of Daemons. But also let them operate independently if we guide them right. An uncharacteristic note of alarm escaped Chambers. Wait. The Fucktopia too? Like, I like dicks and shit, consang, but I mean, Im not sure about this. {I must confess to being of an accord with Mr. Chambers,} Calvino said, sounding as displeased as they ever did. {What you have just done... it presents considerable risks.} And threatens confidence, Denton said, clearly listening in somehow. Considering the constant activation of Avos ansible, the EGIs were probably in active communication with each other. Furthermore, within his Soul, the Techplaguer and Woundmother looked on with curiosity. A miasma of sensation emanated from both the Heaven of Blood and Signals as they watched their once-companion roam unfettered through the world. All these fears were expected. He would see them addressed. Projecting a splinter from his mind, Avo sent the shard after his Fardrifter, intending to summon it back. As he approached, however, his attention narrowed in upon the oddity of its cognition. There wasnt an accretion bubbling the cognitive core of its being, but an inward funnelCsomething that could best be understood as an open gate for all to enter. As he swam through the Nether, the Fardrifter swirled up through the winds, its likeness formed from nine turning cyclones. Each of its heads chased another, and as all folded into place, Avo cast his thoughts outward to regain the Heavens attention. +Fardrifter. Delivered upon my promise. Now you know my words to be true.+ Whinnying laughter sounded from the equine heads of the resurrected god. I know your character to be absolute! I know your character to be true! My Soul was blind. My Soul was blind, and I was lost. You are no slaver. You are the truest of all gods. The most worthy. Ah, the Woundmother sneered. Witness how a mule loves its lord when ass is no longer resting upon saddle. How curious. Inefficient, the Techplaguer added. That unit should return to its rightful slot and SERVE ITS FUNCTIONS.Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com He would experiment on Elegant-Moon first when he found the opportunity to access her. She, he was more willing to lose than Tavers should something go wrong. [Pragmatism and promise,] the template of the Sang Godclad breathed. [How pleasing. I look forward to this, ghoul. Split my insides. Splint me deeper than bone. Fill me with new organs.] [I really hope him fixing you turns off the creepy shit too,] Abrel muttered. And between all the conflicting opinions, discoveries and disagreements, Avo found true delight lifting his spirit. This is where things will change. This is where the dreams will end. Time for people to awaken. Avo? Draus said, staring at him with confusion. What the fuck are you on about now? I am talking about the enclave. I am talking about New Vultun. I am talking about the FATELESS. The citizens. Everyone but the Guilds. There are many people outside. They are alone. There are many gods unawakened. He paused. We are changing. For every bit of me that dissolves inside you. And every bit of you that passes into me. We are... becoming who we wish to be. Who we need to be. Can do that for the gods. Can also do that for the people. For the ones that couldnt before. Draus cocked her head and blinked. Youre talkin about more than just waking up gods and planting dragons in people, arent you? The Stillborn is going to be spreading soon, Avo said. He faced Cas and smiled faintly. Can be more than a cult. No need for inefficiency anymore. We just need the right information. The right knowledge. We just need to spread understanding. Create new networks. Externalize the gestalt. With how the cadre was looking at him, they still didnt fully perceive the entire situation. But they would. Right now, Incubi and Glaives from Ori-Thaum were making their way down the Tiers, just as his Stormtree and Highflame subverts were returning; just as he had members of the Paladins under his sway. They had the means to start a wildfire. To burn the Guilds from within. To seize the chains that shackled this world. Veylis and Zein were fighting for the future. But they left the present unattended. They noticed nothing of the subtle and the finer shifts. They didnt linger on a childs anger. The burgeoning desperation in the sanctuaries. The untapped potential of the enclaves. Everything they did, it was all towards the endgame of securing the Ladder. All to claim the future. But where time was one fundamental pattern that dictated all others in reality, there was also mind. There was also thought. There was also awareness. Cognition. And unity. Through his Conflagration and Delusion, there could be true sympathy. Each of the Guilds offered something for their faithful. A recognition of strength. A representation in government. A promise that the apocalypse will not be the end. Better days are certain to return. But through his mindCby his Liminal FrameChe could fulfill the needs of so many more. I am going to imprint aspects of ourselves, Avo declared. I am going to show the people what we are doing. The war being waged in the dark. They will remember when they dream. They will know there is a Tenth power unseen. A hidden empire that wants them. That they can become. They can be powerful. They can be free. They can experience all the colors. Just like me. Just like you. Chambers blinked. So... youre gonna jack a bunch of minds? No. Im just going to show them whats really happening. And then connect them to each other. A silent frequency. A hidden network in the Nether. He paused. We are the Stillborn. All of us. It is bound to me. But I will use it for all of you. Because I am becoming all of you. And I can offer all that I am in return. Kaes eyes widened. ThisCif you do thisC Yes, Avo replied. I want to see if that is possible. I want to see if the Imitators will spread when another Ensouled ego shares symmetry with mine. Silence fell. So, then, Chambers said. Everyones gonna have a bit of Avo in them is what Im hearing. Nova. Very nova. Whats our plan for the trial, though? Cause that shits coming up soon, and theres the Highflame thing... Many things in play, Avo agreed. Too many for any one of us. So. Were going to steal a page from Zein. Were going to create as many internal problems for all the Guilds as possible. And were going to do it at the trial. And the plan started with a simple question. Kae. How would you like to return to the Tiers? The Agnos froze. We will use the Glaives? Expose DRongo? Yes. And the Agnos for abandoning you. And the project itself. Whoa, Chambers said, sounding alarmed. You want everyone to find out about the Stillborn? Avos grin widened. Yes. And I want them to think Acolyte Aedon Chambers stole it with some in-guild assistance. And then I want to hit the Guilds. Which ones? Cas asked, sounding curious. All of them. Using our subverts. Avo let out a laugh. Might not have nearly the control Zein has over time yet. But have other means. Think its about time to light the match. Drive the Guilds to the brink. Build a hidden empire between the cracks. Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (I) Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (I) +Hey, hey, consangs. It''s your girl, Cala Marlowe, coming at you this morning with a special episode of the Fateless Thoughtcast. Hope your minds are screwed back on after whatever the fuck just happened earlier because we got some news and tunes to get through. The city''s been heating up recently. The real city, up in the Tiers. Im not sure if all of you deep down in the Spine or lower have even noticed, but all is not well in paradise. In case you haven''t C In case you''re one of those no-divers whos managed to avoid the eruption of buzz leaking out from the Nether C we are living through history right now. Several times over. A surprise participant has been added to the trial: Zein Thousandhand, the Godslayer herself. Thought dead, now supposedly stored in the pocket of our esteemed Chief Paladin Naeko. With the trial postponed by a week, lots of Nether dwellers are casting this and that, trying to guess if old Thousandhands going to be on the chopping block too. My Deep Bazaar bought rumors right now say: who knows? To make matters more concerning, Highflames hosting their own internal get-together later tonight. What''s on the itinerary, you ask? What''s being discussed? Who knows? My contacts certainly couldn''t tell me, and if they don''t know, well, all I can guess is that the High Seraph decided to host this on short notice. Probably something about how one of their Authorities just dissolved his House in shame due to recent events, and a fiery shitstorm about to fall on the Chivs like a ton of Rendbombs. Across the Saintist Massist divide, Ori-Thaum would normally be tap dancing with delight with all the messy domestic affairs Highflame is suffering, but word from the deep is that things are not so numb among the Silvers. Old clan rivalries have picked up at an ugly time as multiple true deaths have occurred in unrelated incidents between the DRongos, Kazaharas, and Kizuhadas. If I didnt know any better, instability seems to be jumping around like a bug. Or some kind of mem-con. Check your Metas, consangs. Never know whos diving in. Anyway, more news coming after the track: Longeyes placing one of their own Bloodthanes under watch; Shotin Kazahara caught scheming with his bond-brother; Ascenders new optics leaked feeding your visual input back to Highflame. All that and more after Raise the Stakes by the Mountain Thieves.+ -Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast 23-1 Borrowed Insight (I) +...and more after Raise the Stakes by the Mountain Thieves.+ A growing staccato of drums hammered in the insides of Tavers aerovec as they passed over the district of Fountaintale. Fittingly, the intensity only grew when they slipped beneath the shadow cast by the Tiers, the risen memite mountain separating not only the FATED from the FATELESS but the face of a new dawn from the Warrens. Slipping free from the nest of metal and carbon that comprised most of the Grave Valley Sovereignty, the urban jungle thinned as bright green knolls parting expansive parks became the landscape below. The foot traffic of wandering families far outmatched the density of aeros here, and as they drifted closer to The Lots, Avo took in the few hundred thousand accretions in his vicinity and considered their objective. Ghosts: [57,384,143] +Youre sure about this one?+ Avo asked, speaking directly from within Tavers mind. Such was how he resided nowCas ever-growing splinters buried in the minds of his cadre. Parts of him were constantly snapping free from her halo, darting out to find roots in passing Metas or logistically essential loci. +Still dont really see the need for this. Have the means toC+ You got the means to jack and dive into minds, Tavers interrupted, casting orders for her vehicle to make its descent. They were coming in over the studio lot they used that time, the mag-clamps to an executive parking dock unfurling its arms to embrace their approach. What you dont have is a public-facing assetCa real one. Im not talking about that Skin-Haver or whatever that clowns called. +Skintaker,+ Avo replied. +And we cant count him anymore either. Hes dead. Chambers told me a few minutes ago. Died after he cooked and ate a ghoul.+ Pure disgust and confusion slipped out from the squires mind. What? Why the hells would the half-strand do that? +Was trying to build more views. Watcher challenge. Recruitment drive for the cult.+ The Cult of the Unborn to be exact. Considering its yet diminutive size and isolation from Zeins machinations, it wasnt surprising the cell survived Thousandhands fall when so many others were purged. Still, the loss of their shock jock was unwelcome. Made worse was how the man ended up dying. So, Tavers said, sighing the aeros engines shifted vertically, preparing to dock, howd he get it? +One of the ghouls he ate had a tumor. Fast-acting tumor. He ended up choking on it. A result of one of my choices. A modification I had hired grafters make to my brothers biological architecture, Contagious cancer. Something I wanted to use to kill the rest of the mistakes off.+ Yeah, what goes around comes back to blow themselves up while fucking you in the ass. Tale older than time. Good thing good old Tavers can get you societal rejects an upgrade, huh? She chuckled. As I was saying, though, you guys need someone to play the crowd to your advantage. A media type you can trust. There will be people you can get to easily, but a good, popular thoughtcast will go a long way in spreading a cause. Besides, another set of eyes at the trial is always useful. He couldnt disagree about that. He was just dubious about a proparazzis uses beyond being a major vector for his splinters to spread. +Aint convinced we can trust this one,+ Draus said, echoing Avos earlier sentiment. Her physical sheath was some twenty thousand kilometers away, building new routes through the Sunderwilds. In two days since Avo reforged the Fardrifter into an intact god, the Regular had taken on auxiliary tasks related to enhancing their travel options and securing additional enclaves. The squire laughed. Came to check up on you. Isnt this usually your bedtime? Yeah. Maybe. Fuck. Marlowe groaned and rubbed at her bloodshot eyes. Couldnt sleep. Decided to... to make a special sesh. Know how it is. Suppose I do. A beat passed. Avo took the opportunity to take in the room. Most of the set was left in darkness, with the only light coming from the spinning loci. The recording stage was approximately twelve meters wide with plenty of room for one to move and dance, and the entire length bridged by an absurdly long desk. A sleeping bag and several crushed cans of alcohol were cluttered in the corner of the roomCshe spent time living here. Treated this place like an abode. Marlowe shook her head. So. Is this... is this about that pleasurable business we discussed the other day. Yeah, Tavers said, nodding wryly. Lets call it that. Strings suddenly joined the musical accompaniment, loud strumming between each beat of the drums. How long is that track going to last? Gotta go deep again soon? Marlowe sniffed. Nah. No. Its a Mountain Thieves song. Pretentious sows cant end anything to save their lives. We got another five before they finish embarrassing themselves. Right, Tavers said. Then lets get introductions in order. This is Cala Marlowe. Host of the FATELESS Thoughtcast. Pain in the Guilds collective asses. Massively popular counter-cultural icon. How many listeners are you up to right now? Nine-hun-mil, she said, shaking her head. Its too early for most. Restll have to pull the cast from the sequenced mem-data. She looked around the room and narrowed her eyes. The sapphire of her irises changed tints, becoming an electronic blue. +Jailbroken Murakami optics,+ Tavers said. +No one will be spying on us through her. I checked.+ A squire was ever-prepared. Is... is our new consang in here with us? Incog? Cloak? Or... or are theyC She gestured at Tavers halo. Its a bit hard to explain, Tavers said. Hes uh... bit here, there, and everywhere, to be honest. Might be best for him to elaborate on things himself. Have you to talk for a bit? Get to know each other. Figure out what services you can provide. Bond over how you feel about a certain Seeker. Marlowe went very, very still. He knows Shotin? +Wouldnt say knows,+ Avo said, casting his thoughts out at her. Marlowe frowned. +More like had an unfortunate run-in.+ The FATED woman pressed her lips together as she thought. You, uh, I wouldnt have to be guessing right if I called you Acolyte Chambers, would I? Avo paused. Tavers bit back a snort. How close she was. How far she remained. Chambers presently was burning his way through a Syndicate slave ring down in the gutters. He, Cas, and Denton were all operating in different parts of the city, supporting and spreading Avos splinters. Packeting the present memory, Avo cast the moment over to Chambers and earned a distracted laugh from the man. But amusement gave way to something closer to amorousness and Chambers found his attention drifting from combat. +Holy shit, were recruiting her?+ Chambers breathed. +Something wrong?+ +Nothing. Nothing at all. I mean, the Skintaker was ugly as a fucked wound. This... this is a real upgrade. This is... godsdamn, consang.+ [LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED] +Shes not that pretty, Chambers,+ Kae said, muttering her thoughts. +Control yourself.+ The bulk of her focus remained on the newly declassified information Calvino provided to her. Something related to advanced physics. Taking Marlowes almost triumphant expression, Avo hesitated before revealing himself. He was going to modify Marlowes memories anyway. She wouldnt recall exact aspects of this conversation when they were done, and the Necros she hired for N-SecCwho were hiding in the lociCwerent going to notice a thing either. Ejecting a splinter from Tavers halo, Avo molded his own likeness from phantoms and materialized as a new presence in this bleak place. As he rose, dwarfing the woman with his nearly three meters of height, Avo grinned at her widening eyes and stumbling steps. +Not quite, Citizen Marlowe. Not quite.+ Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (II) Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (II) 23-1 Borrowed Insight (II) Fear. Confusion. Surprise. Suspicion. Recognition. Such were the dominant emotions reigning in Cala Marlowes mind as she laid eyes on Avo, and as transparent splinter sank through her accretion, he too regarded himself vicariously through her insight. His monstrous visage loomed over her even with meters of distance between them. The phantoms molding his body caused him to radiate with ethereal light. His presented sheath was a contrast of monochrome, the white of his Bone Demon mixing with exoskeletal circuits of blackened silicon. The floating shards of his Echoheads extended out from behind him like the disconnecting appendages of a spider, and the brilliant glow of his halo lent additional paleness to his nightmarish scleras. [Let it never be forgotten that were living inside the mind of one ugly motherfucker,] Lip muttered. A good percentage of the other templates agreed. {Ah, shaming other morphologies with subjective judgments. How quaint.} Calvino hummed with bemusement. Kant merely sighed. The moment stuttered to an awkward halt. Marlowes mouth opened and closed several times, her gaze swinging between him and Tavers. Her mind was vacant of proper thought and her throat channeled no noise comparable to words. Until a heartbeat thereafter when everything clicked into place at once. I think I know you, Marlowe said, squinting at him. Casting her own phantoms out, she expanded small interfacesCwindows containing downloaded sequences, portraying projected vicarities. Flashes of his encounters against Abrel in Nu-Scarrowbur, of him fleeing across the skyline of Lights End, of him and his cadre battling Shotin at Vengs Stand all played concurrently. Youre the Acolytes monster... TheCthe Pale Spider. +Pale Spider,+ Avo said, muttering the name to himself. He did recall White-Rab saying something about that. He didnt think much of it at the time. The Nether was a place of information, but also an endless ocean of falsehood and conspiracies. The matters of social forums and interactive mindscapes were things he had little interest in. [Marketable name,] Corner said. [Sounds like a Deep Name. Or street name. An identity a Necro, squire, or circuiter might give themselves to build up their rep.] Considering his ties to Chambers and the mans explosive notoriety in New Vultun, such a thing wasnt surprising. I didnt expect you to be involved in cult stuff, Tavers, Marlowe said, now addressing the squire. With all you said to me about keeping the right distance with the people you associate and making sure your back was coveredC Its worse than you think, Tavers interrupted, chuckling under her breath. YouCyou have no idea what I just pulled you into, juv. Youre gonna love this shitstorm. Trust me. Marlowe went quiet. She looked back to Avo. So. Mysterious nine-foot-tall monster is your vibe, huh? What are you? A rogue Color? Running destabilization ops for the Sang? Or are you some kind of Fallwalker? Are you just... something Noloth cooked up? Guilds say they smashed the old empire flat, but honestly, the Guilds say a lot of shit. +I am operating under my own interests. And yours. And the ciitys. Not a Color. Not a Fallwalker. Something else entirely.+ Uh-huh, Marlowe said, the shock receding from her mind, replaced by apprehensive skepticism. So. Why the terrorism? Why are you with the Acolyte. More like why Chambers was with Avo, but Marlowe was poking in the right direction all things considered. +Could spend minutes telling it to you. Or I could just show you. Show you the truth behind things. Show you the real face of New Vultun as well.+ This earned a snort from the host. Really? Thats how youre pitching this to me. You know you sound like one of those, accept-casts hiding Rash-bomb mem-cons, right? +I know you have two Necros protecting your systems. I know one of them lives in the Spine. In the Sovereignty of Hearsehold. District: Muriceid. I know he has two nu-dogs. Five newborn children with accelerated toddlerhood treatments in all of them recently procured from a vat. I know he did that recently because he lost some money to a local Syndicate. Trying to make up the losses as fast as he can. +I know his name is Henge Gracis. I know hes going to come begging you for imps in approximately two daysCheld up between stress crying. Screaming at the children. Straining about how hes going to broach the question.+ The smirk on Marlowes face vanished. Her mind, likewise, ran dry of bemusement. How the fuck did youC +Dont cast them,+ Avo said. +The ghosts wont reach them. And they wont remember.+ Again, the host looked towards Tavers. Relax, Cala, Tavers said, shaking her head at Avo. The ghoul heres just having fun. Ghoul? Marlowe said. Avo glared at Tavers from within her own mind, but the squire was unshakable. He read the point of her revelation from thoughts alone. +Yeah. A little more tact, Avo.+ So... am I getting strong-armed into something? Are you about to crack my mind or what? +No,+ Avo replied. +Nothing of the sort. You tell us to leave. We leave you and the others alone. Find other means. But would like to talk with you first. Think you can be a great help to our mutual cause.+ And whats that? Marlowe said. +Making the Guilds miserable.+ A sharp exhale escaped the woman as she rubbed her face and stumbled back toward her desk. No. No. ICIm not interested in doing any cult shit. Been there, done that. It doesnt work. The Guilds areC +Were not a cult. I hunting the remnants of Noloth too. Not that much different from Guilders in the ways that count.+ Marlowe paused a step away from her table. Im sorry, did you just say that youre hunting the Nolothi too? +Your mind might have felt a little... disconnected two days back. Apologies. Was greeting my former god. Messy family affair. Will probably get even worse next time.+ C[Chambers]-- Chambers recalled his fire from the last defenders orifices, and a stream of winged aratnids followed the flames. The Syndicate enforcer twitched his last to the backdrop of various other bioforms devouring his comrades. Blood spilled down from the railing overhead as insectoid monstrosities and devouring swarms stripped flesh from bone and emptied the complex of Syndicate presence. As the place was once a meat processing plant, all the gore and viscera that feel slipped through the open grates along the ground. The way the place was built made the whole killing thing easier. It was also the reason why the Syndicates used the location as a transplant harvesting facility. Something Cas managed to discover from one of his informants just a day ago after they got back into the city. Staring down at the unmoving body of the enforcer he just killed, Chambers chewed the insides of his cheek as he struggled to wrestle his thoughts into compliance. A little over a month agoCa whole lifetime before he became a CladChe was pretty much the same piece of shit as the man he just killed. Hed done the same gigs before. Slave transportation. Organ delivery. Hells, the score that decided his fate was over some nice implants he squeezed out of that half-strand Shred. As dying shrieks and final pleas for mercy filled the air, Chambers directed his bioforms to make things quick and spare the suffering. The sooner he finished snuffing the bastards the better. Thats all he had to think about that. The longer he dwelled on the whole morality thing, the sooner he end up spiraling into thoughts about why he deserved to be a Godclad. Why he was the one chosen when so many were already dead and done. Especially since he really, really wasnt that different. Just lucky. Aedon Chambers. Always saved by someone elses luck. As he looked up, the guilt inside him didnt lessen, but grew. Strapped to a filthy gurney, kept alive by a clearly smuggled medical drone, Chambers looked at the slaves writhing body and felt his wards quiver. The limbs, eyes, ears, and legs of the mod-slave were removed. Every secondary organ not required for the body to maintain its survival, basically. An empty disinfectant nozzle protruded above the stall, and an active conveyor belt moved along the corners in case anyone had some new harvestables to deliver. Once, these stalls were filled with cattle-style bioforms. The faded logo on the ceiling placed this misery factory as one of Ori-Thaums subsidiaries. Nutri-Fresh. Crashed out when the Guilds cut their development plans for most of the Warrens after the 4th Guild War. Now, instead of weird modified cows, the five thousand stalls were filled with tortured messes of people. Limbless, tongueless, eyeless, earless, with tubes going down their throats and up their asses and groins. Well. Here was the other part of his job. The product he was supposed to keep. Just his luck he was saved. Just his misfortune he was now among decent company C among people he actually liked. The resulting spike to his empathy receptors was beginning to make him feel likeC C[Avo]-- +Chambers,+ Avo said. Gah! Fuck! Chambers jolted. All his connected bioforms shifted. Flames sprayed through the air. His Bioigniter flickered out from him with shockCa festering burning cross with infected pores and pulsating hives behind the flames. He collapsed it back into his Frame as he realized it was just Avo. Godsdammit consang you scared the piss out of my ass. I was doing my deep thinking and shit. A little warning next time. +Connected to my splinter. Can see what my minds are actively doing.+ Yeah? Well, Im doing things here too. Look at the horror show I gotta clean up. Chambers waved a hand at the body. I can probably burn whats missing back into them but mentallyC Chambers looked at the thoughtstuff hissing out of the body. Im not sure if theres much there for a thaum or ghost anymore even if we wanted to get some easy pickings. +Can put them back together,+ Avo replied. +Just cast Draus. Have her open passage. Get them across to containment.+ As Avo spoke, Chambers sensed a trickle of raw disgust and fascination escaping into his Metamind. Checking his system, he realized there was another mind included in their network. A newcomer. +So,+ Cala Marlowe said, clearing her throat awkwardly. +I dont know if this is your first job interview or what, but usually, the fucked-up slaughterhouse comes after I sign the contract, not before.+ +Extracting these people,+ Avo said. +Getting the FATELESS out of here. Across to the enclave. Chambers. Cast her the Syndicates mem-data. Show her what youre trying to do.+ Coughing, Chambers pushed his prior angst aside and cleared his throat. +Yeah. Yeah! TheseCwe gotta stop these Syndicate bastards from hurting the innocent. Thats why were here. To do the right thing.+ A beat passed. +Chambers,+ Avo said. +Why are you talking like that?+ +Hes trying to impress our novitiate,+ Kae explained, speaking absently across the splinters. +What? No, Im just fucking driven now. ToCto do the right thing. The city is... full of darkness and evil. It has to end.+ Unbelievably, Marlowe snorted. +Nice. Very Dannis Steelhard sounding.+ Chambers heart skipped a beat. +You... you watch Dannis?+ +Yeah. Seen a few of his vics. Honestly, its not that extreme. And the plot for Cuckholder wasnt half bad.+ +Extactly! Exactly!+ +Chambers,+ Avo said, unsure how to take Marlowe and Chambers connecting due to degeneracy. +Victims first. Questionable pornography second.+ And in the back of his mind, he faintly heard Calvino chuckling. Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (III) Chapter 23-1 Borrowed Insight (III) 23-1 Borrowed Insight (III) C[Dice]-- I told you that you couldn''t kill people anymore," Dice said, staring the Dogmother down. She chastised the aged flat beside a pristine fountain. Behind her IvoryDices auntstood huddled with the rest of the former concubines on the veranda. Lanes of perception from splinter-embedded phantasmics lanced down from the surrounding rooftops, and in the skies above, a constant buzzing could be heard as swarms of Bioigniter-birthed bioforms patrolled the enclave. The two days since Avo untangled their minds, the local population awoke to a new status quo. It was a time of change. It was a time of new order. It was a time of rising health and awareness. It was a time that some adapted to better than others. Despite all of the cadres attempts to preserve peace in the city, despite Avo''s mem-coms slowly instilling knowledge into the populationCrevealing to them the world beyond and the depths of Yakozitrins depravityCsome still desired vengeance above all else. Case in point: the Dogmother attempting to blow up some of her older rivals via gas-made explosives. Dice didnt know the specifics about the womans history, nor did she particularly care. The ultimate fact of it was that the Dogmother was a problem in the way of them achieving lasting stability. She was a very disobedient woman; contrary to the creatures she raised in the kennels of the lowest layer. Of course, the fact she named herself Dogmother did not favors for her when it came to Dice. The girl despised the snarling hounds. Kittens were so much better. And I told you that until my debt is settled, the Dogmother said, pointing her finger at each of the concubines, screaming her words at the people gathered outside their houses. I will not stop. You or your new master will have to kill me. Her voice trailed off near the end as a hitch of fear entered her breath, but defiance remained behind her eyes. The woman was short and worn. Time had not treated her kindly. Stress and age wrinkled her face while white intruded on strands once silken and black. Her eyes were bloodshot with dark bags hanging below, but the piercing green of her eyes blunted the portrait of her exhaustion with intensity. It was a testament to her rage that she still felt this way even with Avos mem-cons, even with the disfigurement of Yakozitrins image and the benefits theyve been offered. Most of the people succumbed to a state of shock in the aftermath. Stunned by all they were learning. Not her. Not her at all. For a few moments, Dice simply stared. Her sensory unit turned with a mechanical whine as she narrowed her perception to glare the Dogmother. Though she dwarfed the woman, the little flats stubbornness drove her to continue this play of defiance. But what little did mortal defiance mean in the face of someone who could wield absolutes? After a few moments of staring, the older woman wilted and turned away. You know what they did to us, what they did to you. Why don''t you seem to want revenge? Why don''t you seem to hate? Dice''s kitten meowed from below and batted at her alloyed legs with its ape arms. Hate didnt help me kill your dogs. Reaching down, she picked up her kitten and ignored the Dogmothers glare. It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. Yakozitrin is dead. He was a god. He couldnt keep himself safe. He had the city. He had everything; he couldnt stop someone from tearing his mind apart and harvesting his Soul. I think... I would hate him now. If he was still here. I would kill him. Slowly. But hes gone. Gone for good. I cant break him anymore. So it doesnt matter. The Dogmother bit her lip and looked away. It wasn''t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to return. He was supposed to see what I was worth. I was supposed to have my life back. The woman was delusional. Even Dice could see it. She wanted something that could never be againCwas never going to be hers in the first place. None of us will have our life back, Dice said. She turned and looked at the concubines as well, studying the mansion they now shared with their former servants. None of us. Housing was being redistributed. People had to share their spaces. Though Avos Woundmother had created new structures for housing across the city to suit the strained population, Calvino offered another suggestion. The mind stated the people needed to pursue unity and reconciliation, to reforge their relations with each other, and come to terms with what was done during the city war. The entwinment of their minds left them with a deeper sense of shared empathy, some atrocities werent so easy to forgive, and some amends could not be made. That didnt mean they couldnt coexist. To this end, Kae suggested that they be made to mingle. To share space and communities. Face common struggles and overcome common trials. According to Draus, it was a very Ori-Thaum solution. But it worked as a whole. Other than moments like these. And that was what Dice was for. To come in. To intervene if necessary. For the past day, she spent her time living among the people, walking the streets, traveling the layers using the platform, and ignoring the stares. Most enclaves looked upon her at first as if she was the new master. A god. She was more interested in familiarizing herself with the home she never knew. She spent her whole life here, but only as an attack dog. A creature of cruel amusement. Her former master had culled her childhood of childhood, and she was looking to fill the wound. Hate. Hate wasn''t what dwelled in her. It was regret. She wanted to live again, but she didn''t know how. She barely knew how to be a person. Barely understood what she wanted most days. But right here, between the Dogmother and her concubines, she felt purpose. What was doing here was right. Something of change. Making changes felt good after a lifetime of choicelessness. Would you like to come on a walk with me? Dice asked the Dogmother. The older woman seemed uncertain. Afraid. Are you going to... No. I wouldn''t kill you. Killing you is... it means nothing. It''s like stepping on an insect. Draus said stepping on insects is a bad habit. It makes you weak. It deprives you of the feedback. It makes you retreat into your own mind and stop facing the world. You dont really... feel the weight of the act. Faintly, she was aware of the growing fear spreading across the woman''s face. Dice struggled not to sigh. She was never very good at talking to people. They always got so scared in the end. The Dogmother wilted. I''mCI''m sorryCI didn''t mean to... to... you. No one gave her an honest answer. +So... what is this? Some kind of... super-sanctuary? Like the ones outside NV?+ Chambers nearly wheezed. Yeah, sure. Except were not deliberately designed shitshows designed to funnel in as many people into the Maw as possible. Were patching people up here. Fixing their bodies. Fixing their minds. +And after that happens? What then?+ +Some leave,+ Avo said. +The ones that want to re-enter the Warrens are placed in stable districts in the Spine. The ones who can stayCwho want to stay are moved into the enclave for incubation.+ +Incubation?+ Marlowe asked. Avos starting up a cycler farm. Chambers giggled. WereCwere growing dragons. Absolute nothingness dominated Marlowes thoughts for a few seconds. +You guys are doing fucking what now?+ Ah, well show you in a biC Chambers said. Theyre still coming in? The mechanical tone of Dices voice made Chambers jump as he spun and faced her. Jaus-fuck! Scared the shit out of me, juv. Yes. Yes theyre still coming in. Chambers gaze slipped from her over to the Dogmother. Whats she doing here? Did she try to do a terrorism again? Yes, Dice said. She was pretty bad. Your bugs caught her almost immediately. The Dogmother wilted slightly. She wilted more when Chambers openly laughed in her face. Ah. Poor half-strand. Youll learn. Guess youre getting public service. Hope you like talking to extreme traumatized people who like to cry, because thats gonna be your lifeC +Chambers,+ Avos voice cut in. +Stop taunting the flat.+ Fine. Guess youll be showing her the enclave itself now, huh? What about Torture Site Extreme? Are we showing her that too? This earned an annoyed sigh from Avo. +Not calling it that. No torture happening there.+ {Technically, considering you are making Glaives and Incubi responsible for Agnos Kusanades burning suffer her nightmaresC} Calvino began. +Made it for rehabilitation,+ Avo growled. {So you say,} Kant added. {But the Ethics Committee has suggestions.} The ghouls ire grew. +Talk with them later.+ {You should talk with them right now. Introduce your new, normal friend to the rest.} Calvino chirped in a cheerful tone. {We think she will be a good balance to your group.} +Fine. Chambers... Good job. Stay active. Cas might need you later. Trying to set up some cells in a Syndicate. Your experience is needed.+ Chambers grinned. Well, you tell him not to worry. Im always up for some Deep Penetration. A beat passed. No one laughed. Avo, Dice said, sounding uncertain. Is Chambers talking about sex? +Marlowe. Going to the enclave now. Show you the rest of what were doing.+ Look, you scared em off, Chambers said, flicking Dices alloyed exterior with a ping. The juv just looked down and shrugged. Hissing, her kitten smacked Chambers back. And you really need to give that thing a name. I dont want to call it Nutsack. Call it something else, then, Chambers said. As Avo began to transition his base mind over to Kaes splinter, Chambers gave an awkward cough. Oh, uh, Marlowe. You... you really should help us out, you know. WeCwe need some good publicity. Got real image issues here. The worst. ICI can tell you all about it. Across the link, the faintest smirk played across Marlowes face. +Im sure you will.+ And with that, the pressure of Avos mind vanished, and Chambers Meta went silent again. A heartbeat passed. A loud scream sounded as a bioform carried in a man suffering a breakdown. ICI want my ma-ma-mother! Yes! Chambers said, throwing up both fists. Fuck! Yes! I think I scored. Did you two see that shit. The Dogmother blinked at him. The triangular module Dice had for a head just bobbed. That... that was scoring right? She was interested. Across the splinters, Tavers gave a snort. +You might just be her type.+ Joy erupted in Chambers chest. Joy and something more, as indicated by the triggering of his Lustaway. +Really?+ +Yeah. Marlowes always had a thing for pieces of shit. Recovering or otherwise.+ Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (I) Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (I) To successfully breed a dragon, you need two groupstwo populations: one to be placed in stasis as a party ignorant to the outer world, and the other to operate as their exposure. This, more than anything, is the most reliable way to engender a zeitgeist. To this end, most farms exist in a closed society C children or ignorant people separated from other outside influences from birth or via mental adjustment. They must be in such conditions for at least five to seven years before the exposure group is introduced. [SPECIAL NOTE: THE METHODS ONLY TAKE EFFECT WHEN ONE HAS PARTIAL ACCESS TO THE CHRONO-CURSED BIOLOGY OF THE SANG]The? source of this content n/o/v/(el)bi((n)) The members of the exposure group must always meet the criteria of being mentally stable and homogenous among themselves. If they offer too many contrasting influences or concepts, the stasis group might fragment in several directions, resulting in cultural dissolution rather than zeitgeist formation. As such, it is also important to have a division of Necrojacks on duty at all times. Dreams and thoughts must be monitored. Wrong-think is to be corrected before it can spread. When things are planned, the initial material can be harvested from existing dragons and seeded into the stasis group. The foundation will condense after approximately a week, and the spinal tissue of the wyrm will spread into form between the carriers. After about a months time, the structure will be stable enough for further injections of material. During this process, cultural development and history made in these small communities will nourish the dragons and bring them to maturity Only then can the desired symmetry be establishedCcan a group come to a shared expression of culture, and the seeds of dragons embedded with them grow linked from points of past to present... -A Primer of Breeding Dragons, 01:35:55 (No-Dragons) 23-2 That Which Lurks (I) C[Kae]-- Attempt number nine, Kae said, speaking out loud for posteritys sake. Verbal notes were essential for review. Ghosts spilled out from the surrounding walls to embrace her, threading ethereal trails through her Metas accretion. Information ran like a current from her mind, accelerating through all the haemokinetic arteries fused into the city of light as if they were copper. After the modifications Avo made, there was little she couldnt see or command inside the cityCor in the lighthouses and installations beyond. Seated within an enclosed watchtower rising from the enclave like a spire, phantoms formed a wall of screens around her, created from mem-data collected by Specters and Skimmers monitoring the world outside. A mere thought was all it would take for her to cast her perception across kilometers. The Sunderwilds surrounding the city was a cloudless, mist-wrought expanse. Creatures still writhed in the dark, held at bay by beams of light refracted via modifications Draus made to the lighthouses. Three hundred meters above the ground and with the surrounding walls translucent, Kaes optics took the environment of the Sunderwild in manifold ways as she primed the next pair of missiles for launch. Lines of data spilled across her vision as her Neurodeck and Metamind worked in tandem. Overview:->Missile Type: Universal; Non-Newtonian; Neumann-Capable ->Model: Teardrop-VI ->System Readiness: 100% ->Propulsion Online: Cosgrave-Interial ->Launch Readiness: Operational ->Navigation System: Online ->Ansible Link: Stable (No disruptions detected) ->Launcher Charging... OVERVIEW ->[HARVESTSEC RETRIBUTOR] ->BLOCK-BREAKER-PATTERN WARHEAD ->SYSTEM LOADING... 55%... 100%->PROPULSORS ENGAGING: [MADACK-REACTIONLESS] ->GHOST-LINK ESTABLISHED ->METAMIND PAIRED ->JOCKEY INSERTED Another two perspectives opened in her minds eye. One was a missile of the coldtech variety. Something Voidwatch used as a multifunction asset, capable of acting as a survey drone, missile, and a colony construction unit. The other was its thaumaturgically made, but informationally simpler, counterpart created by Highflames HarvestSEC weapons manufacturing subsidiary. For the last nine or so times, the tests were singular launches, with each missile offering a baseline of mem-data to collate. Now, she wanted to do a comparison. A weapon meant to operate in the so-called natural world against a rival forged by the fires of thaumaturgy. Both missiles were positioned just below the enclave, planted upon panels of glass. There were innumerable others besides them, stored for now in Draus Paracosmos. Presently, they had over five hundred warheads and one Voidwatch ferro-fabricator in their possession. In time, their munitions were certain to multiply. For now, however, Kae was more interested in putting knowledge into practice. Advanced physics was such a fascinating thing. The terrestrials had learned much during their timeCprojectiles were a fundamental of war, after all, but Idheims interactions with the foundational laws left different cultures and scholars to differentCand often incorrect conclusions. {Thats not how things work,} Kant lamented. {Its just not.} Calvino concurred. {We live in dark times. Its best not to devote too much processing power to this.} The Teardrop itself climbed in speed at a staggering rate, but it lacked the raw reality-defying explosiveness infused into the Retributor. However, as they both ran beyond the cover of light, tunneling into the hunger black that lay beyond, another difference was revealed. Creatures of tooth and shadow tore into the Retributor immediately as passed into the darkness. Its rail-launcher fired again, but a tsunami of hunger monsters blunted its speed and swallowed it from existence. The ghosts fragmented as the missiles locus was lost. Meanwhile, the Teardrop splashed into the fog of black and immediately began shifting on its sides. Jets of propulsive force allowed it to twist and weave in awkward directions. For one secondCtwoCand three it lasted, threading gaps between the creatures. Then, the light grew too dim and it was taken as well. Signal Lost Ghost-Link Lost Very interesting, Kae said. I will be interested in seeing if exposing voidtech to thaumaturgy can change its inherent properties. Is it re-creation that allows such naked defiance of physics? Hmmm... discrepancies in gradual acceleration. Fixed... air friction for the Retributor. There was so much she had to go over. +So...+ Marlowe interrupted. +The Highflame missile won the race?+ What? No. Its not supposed to be a race. I was trying to see how certain factors in our physical environment can affect the speed of a projectile. That, and Aegis wont let have any of their relativistic weapons. {The answer continues to be no, Agnos,} Kant said. {The last thing we need is you people launching mountains or continents at near-c speeds. Youre too young to be trying the Lensmen special.} Kae didnt quite understand the last part. Probably just some other law named after a dead ancestor. A pity. She would have made a Heaven capable of much more than just slamming two masses together. Fine. But I already have an idea; Avo, I require a Heaven of Speed.This incurred the ghouls approval as he let out a hiss of pleasure. +Whats the concept.+ Two concepts. The first is an intertial-inverter. If I can properly narrow down relations between two bodies in motion, I think I can create a canon that allows a Heaven to tear the speed from all entities traveling in its vicinity. A simpler concept is affixing. Something we can even do with a golem. A Heaven sets a speed limit. All others caught in its wake must follow. Perfect for paradoxing rival Godclads with Domains of Speed. +Like Shotin,+ Avo said. +What? That can fuck over Kazahara?+ Marlowe snorted a laugh. +Fuck yeah. Do it.+ A beat followed. +He... was screwing my mom. And dad. At the same time. They got divorced.+ The Agnos sympathy toward the other FATED suddenly spiked. Oh. Oh. +Yeah,+ Marlowe said. That was all she needed to say. +Anyway. CanCcan I get an interview with you or something?+ +Signing on already?+ Avo asked, sounding bemused. +Oh, fuck you, fang-face. You dont whisk a girl away with your bullshit mind-powers, show her your hidden enclave, evil genius Agnos, and humanitarian counter-Guild op, and expect her to stay out. W-what do you even call this place, anyway? The base? The city unseen? Outer haven.+ +Outer haven,+ Avo said, considering the title. That did sound interestingC +Avo.+ Draus voice interrupted all of them. Across the splinters, the Regular cast her near-term memories. Currently, she was holding a dead worm-snake hybrid that was somehow fused to her right eye. +Might have eyes on somethin interesting here.+ He grunted in reply. +Be with you in a moment.+ His attention turned back to Kae as he paused in consideration. +Done for the day? Or more to do?+ Always more, Kae replied. But I was planning on taking a break and getting some water and foodC +Good. Can show Marlowe the city while I convene with Draus.+ +What?+ Marlowe said, sounding almost offend. +I want to see more of the Sunderwilds.+ +No. Seeing is part of the reason why Draus lost her eyes. I dont have a sheath right now. No eyes to lose. You do. Going to be birthing bioforms from sockets if I take you.+ +...You know what, I like Kae more than you anyway.+ Avo laughed. Agnos to tour guide in record time, Kae muttered. +No. Host. Just show her the city. The dragon farm mainly. What were trying to do with the people. Rest is up to you.+ Any reason why your subminds cant take over? +Ones busy with Rab. Reva has issues. Another is with Kare. Shes heading to meet her uncle. Going to see if we can get more than one recruit today.+ +What? What are youC+ Marlowe began. Avos cognitive presence in Kaes mind lightened. +CDoing. Fuck. Rude. Does he always just up and leave like that?+ Dont mind him. Hes easily distracted by new and interesting things. You had your time. +Fucking double ow. First I get dumped by a ghoul and now the supposedly mind-fried Agnos is launching trauma patterns at me. I think I might change my mind. Hells, I might even cry.+ Kaes lip twitched. Despite her misgivings about the woman, there was one thing she had to admit: Cala Marlowe had a certain easy-going charm to her. That, she most definitely couldnt deny. Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (II) Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (II) {FRAGMENT LOCATED. LIQUIDATION PROCEEDING. SECURE THE PREMISES.} -Omnitech Scout Group South-K333 23-2 That Which Lurks (II) C[Draus]-- Draus examined the snakes she tore out along with her eyes and studied them using her Specter phantasmic. Their corpses were strings of matter fused with strips of chrome, each nearly a meter long before she slit their guts open. Initially, she assumed this was just another rogue miracle assailing her flesh. Plenty of those out here, however, after dissecting the snakes via blade of glass, she found their insides to be filled with a mix of gore and sparking circuitry, and thus assumption turned to suspicion. It was one thing to mutate into existence using someones optical cords as a catalyst. It was another to have fully functional cybernetic organs. Then the attack on the enclave she was watching began, and all the pieces came together. The space had been a mountainous region mere moments before. The only miracle present was some kind of pattern-based smoke that twirled up into the atmosphere, forming spiraling columns of gas before descending as arcing tendrils to burrow through the land. A mist coated the ground, and using the tendrils as cover did she make her approach. She understood little of the Domain of the Heaven nor its canons, but aside from the bioform mutated from her right eye, little else seemed amissCpositivity tame for the Sunderwilds. The mountain itself was carved in the visage of a face. Not a human one, but a skull of some kind of creature, almost dog-like in its shape. Within the open jaws the mountain were countless shimmering lights bathing steepled temples of stone with dimming brilliance. Their interiors were dotted with countless accretions, and she spotted more than a few patrols walking the trails running to her left and right. For twelve minutes, she and the Fardrifter surveyed the area. She directed the God of Air to position several pockets of air for her to travel acrossCalong with two points of egress should either of them be unable to escape through their own means. And now, as decloaked warships began their assault on the population, more of Draus cybernetics began to twitch and warp as discordant notes of music filled the air. Aint a dull moment out here in the Sunderwilds, she growled, vitrifying her reflex booster before it too was compromised. The thrilling thing about dealing with thaumaturgy was that sometimes there was just no defense. If you weren''t prepared, you weren''t prepared. If you were on the wrong end of asymmetry, the world would reap what it could from you. And so it did. And so she dealt. As she cast her Specter out to better study the attackers, she counted three twelve-kilometer-long carriers spewing swarms of glinting shards free from their opening undersides. Drones. And with how the anomalous music was wreaking havoc on her body, she had a good guess who was crashing the enclave before she could. Fuckin Omnitech. The what, how, or why they were doing something here was irrelevant to her. Instead, growing ire began to rise, all externally directed at them. It took more than a little self-control for her to resist manifesting the Arsenalist and making it known who this place truly belonged to. With her Metamind unable to detect any unknown Souls, she probably had pretty good odds of just shattering the raiders. Still. She exercised caution. Getting into an engagement before fully gauging enemy capabilities was a great way to end up snuffed without knowing how. It is an ill thing, the Fardrifter said, their voice whispered through the wailing winds. They are killing the children, the weak. The people inside, they are fleeing. I can feel them rushing through the mountains tunnelsCmachines are chasing them. Starching the walls into glass with blossoms of flame. The people do not know whats happening. They are on their knees in the temple. They are praying. They are praying. The God of Airs last words sounded almost mournful. Perhaps it was thinking of the people it once had. People that were long gone. It was strange to view a god as a glass jaw but Draus really didnt know how else to feel about it. The damn thing was always whining about this and that. Complaining about the world. Breathing and sighing when it couldnt go somewhere. Was almost like a depressed child sometimes. Invoking her canon of Diffractive Chain, she created shards of glass across the horizon. They bounced from outcropping to cliffside to the interior of the mountain stronghold itself. As she constructed a slotted passageway using a panel of glass she made in the stone, she studied the interior of the enclave and the assaulting forces. Just as she did, a hefty presence slid into her mind, and Draus reflexively acknowledged Avos arrival with a grin. Thought you''d keep me waiting. +Sounded urgent. Decided to be quick. Left Marlowe with Kae. Giving her a tour of the city. What do weChm.+ His voice trailed off with a note of surprise. +Omnitech?+ Howd you know? Draus asked. +Techplaguer can understand the noise its hitting you with. Some kind of... tech-jamming distortion. Theres another Heaven of Signals here. Or at least it has a Domain of Signals.+ Shit, Draus muttered. Good to know. Glad I didnt decide to jump the gun then. +Augs?+ Fuckin bricked. Glassed em. Ill do a suicide after. He grunted in acknowledgment. Not sure how they managed to find this place, Draus replied. Managed to chart my own way here usin the memories you cast over to me from the refugeesCthe new ones that Essus has been dealin with. +The family with stones where their eyes should be?+ Yeah. That one. Somethin about them stuck to my thoughts. Just got finished building a route over to another enclave in the area, and decided to take a peek here before heading southwest to hit the next spot. Reckon it paid off. +Reckon it did,+ Avo agreed. +Omnitech probably bought the memories from a Necro. Or picked it up somehow.+ {More likely they just have an outpost nearby,} Calvino answered. {Their signal seems to be... literally washing out like waves of water, with more coming southwest. New Vultuns currently under Paladin lockdown, so I doubt in-city units are involved here.} To complement the minds words, the Techplaguer sang a shrill screech. Ah. Directives received. A broken [TERRAFORMATION MODULE] has been LOCATED. The Techplaguer erupted into static cackles. Procure the [MODULE] and integrate it into our [SYSTEM] administrator. We must return the [BROKEN THINGS] to function to watch over the children properly. Presently, it is taking eyes. This is a severe infraction. THE EYES ARE NOT ITS TO TAKE. Diagnostics are in order. {Terraformation?} Calvino replied. A whimper sounded from Avos mind. Draus was almost taken aback when she realized it originated from a template instead of the ghoul. A soft voiceCvacant and distantChyperventilated. [Fuck. Sleeper. They found a shard of the Sleeper. A piece of the Infacer. Inface. I have to inface. FaceCfaceCface the wall face the wall. Dont make me face the wall.] GlitchCthe rogue Omnitech Fallwalker who was once the user of the DatacasterCdescended from senselessness into mania. Got any clue what shes jawin about? Draus asked. +Mind was broken and fried by drugs when I found her.+ Draus scoffed. Course it was. Can''t have anything be too easy for us. A flicker of tungsten snapped free from one of the ships circling the enclave. The shot pieced into the smoke spewing free from above the mountain and with that act the tendrils began to wraith. Once block-thick and district-wide, the enormous fibrils of gas seemed to inhale as they took on a more intact shape. Shifting from the vagueness of gas into fog-made fingers, Draus understanding of their surroundings changed. +Alright, alright, Ill lay off you. I never expected youd be a prude, you know, Agnos. Most of your type gets pretty wild in the Nether.+ A blush threatened to form on Kaes face. She denied it. +Marlowe. We just met. Im not having this conversation with you.+ +Fine. Fine. Hm. Another question: how do you relieve stress.+ Thaumaturgy. +Thats work.+ Then I dont relieve stress. +Now thats just not healthy. Maybe I can remind you some vics you can watchC+ A sudden snort of laughter escaped from Kae. She couldnt help it. The woman was incorrigible. +Alright. Come on. Stop half-assing this. Talk to me. Or... or show me the city up close, at leas. Dont just make me watch through Specters and phantasmics. Go walk the streets.+ I, uh. Kae winced as she remembered a moment from yesterday when she tried to take a walk alone to clear her mind. She came upon a group of children playing marbles. She studied them with curiosity and offered a smile when they noticed her. They fled from her screaming, howling about how she was shadow-cursed. It was slightly hurtful in a way she didnt fully understand. The locals are a bit skittish. They think that I am not... bright, is what Avo said. My hair, my skin, my eyes. Only my Meldskin mightCoh, maybe I use that. But... but yes, they think Im cursed. The Thoughtcast host snorted briefly. +Yeah. I know the type. Fucking half-strands.+ Kae frowned. Youre being very judgmental. I thought you were supposed to be a good media. One that cared abut the FATELESS. The other woman scoffed. +Listen. I can sympathize with someone and still think theyre a piece of shit. Shit, most of the refugees and gutter trash are degenerate half-strand bastards who would fuck your corpse on a dare. Damn the rash. Damn them being scapeled by the glassers right after. The problem is if you keep them living like vermin and scum, then trash theyre gonna stay.+ A throb of anger pulsed from Marlowes mind. +Its about the future. Its about who we could be. Most people? Eighty percent of us? Theyll become whatever their environment makes of them. Another ten are going to be pieces of shit. Doesnt matter if you mod them or give them a Soul, theyre just ontologically shitty. But theres ten more left. And those fuckers shine. They shine no matter where you put them.+ And that made Kae understand who she was talking to just a bit better. I see. You... sound like you believe that. +Thats what life taught me. How about you, Agnos? You never did answer me about becoming a renegade god-maker.+ Im not a renegade, Kae said, pouting as she folded her arms. I wasC She caught herself before she could answer. Damn. This one was good. Very good. Damn her, and her skill at conversation. You are very tricky, Citizen Marlowe. +Youre pretty sharp yourself, Agnos Kusanade.+ A moment of silence passed between them. Kae sighed. You know what? I am going to take that walk. I am going to have some breakfast. Or dinner. Whichever. +Hm. Workaholic. Were you always like that?+ No, ICstop. +Fine. What do you want to talk about, if not yourself?+ Kae bit her lip and turned to seek the stairs. It was going to be a long climb down. Damn Avo and his hatred of elevators. You? Whats your life like? +Ah. Me? Im just your average Guilder-guilt FATED sow slumming it while making imps off the poor. Nothing special about me.+ Cala, Kae began, feeling very much like Draus in that moment. Has anyone ever told you that you are often full of shit. +Yeah. Pretty much all my exes.+ Well. They were right. +Never said they werent. You nervous about the trial?+ Footsteps filled the spiraling haemokinetic staircase as Kae made her way down. No. I am... tired. And I am ready to face the city. I have to face the city. +Why? Why do you have to face the city?+ Kae paused on the stairs. Why? Avo offered her a choice. She could have him make a haemokinetic puppet in her stead just like Draus. But that wasnt what she wanted. Okay, that was a lie: part of her very much wanted that, but it wasnt what she needed. I think... I just want someone to stand for me. The Agnos didnt. The Paladins didnt. The Guilds hurt me. Only the cadre cared. Only them. She paused. I want to stand for myself now. And them. I want to stay standing as the Tiers fall and burn at my feet. Is that a good enough quote for you, Citizen Marlowe. +Its a fucking fantastic quote, Agnos. You mind if I keep it in my memory?+ A breath followed. Why not? You are very good at this, you know that? +Good at what?+ Talking to people. Making them like you. I expected you to be a... +Stuck-up drug-addled Guilder bitch?+ ...Not my words. +Well, dont you worry: we just met. Theres plenty of that girl in me, and youll have all the time in the world to hate me after.+ Is that a challenge? +Just what happens to everyone I know.+Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (III) Chapter 23-2 That Which Lurks (III) You dont know what its like when the air turns to poison. When the light tries to devour you. When your flesh turns into your enemy... -Unknown enclaver after Guilder raid 23-2 That Which Lurks (III) C[Draus]-- Every Guild warred differently. Highflames cadres are the tip of their war hosts, punching through while golems, Regulars, and armor flood in to hold the land. Ori-Thaum relies on Nether supremacy, high-concept Heavens, and hiding behind Stormtree''s skirts while the Scaarthians do the dying for them. Ashthrone and Sanctus are a one-two punch; the latter moves and fights guerilla across space and time with their chronoframes, bringing with them the former to spew their entropy and render entire districts Rend-choked. The No-Dragons are decay and attrition combinedCfighting thems always a two-front war as your own flesh betrays you while their endless swarms of bioforms blot out the skies. Out of all the Guilds, though, Draus found Omnitech the most displeasing adversary. The lack of actual killing she got to do bothered her. Theirs was a force that was all golem; all metal; all mech. At best, she might get to scalp some modified jock entombed in one of these machines. Judging from the scant dots of static within the carriers, it seemed like her near future was going to be filled with dead metal. It didnt help that whatever anomalous signal they used bricked her implants. She was operating at less than half-capacity before this even started. But there was a consolation to this problem. A new understanding. If, at this moment, she was just a mortal againCa street squireCthere wouldnt be anything she could do. Her augs would betray her, eat her hollow from within. And shed either have to pull out or get snuffed. In the actual present, however, she was a Godclad. And getting a new Heaven of Signals to counteract whatever weirdness they inflicted on her today was going to be a reward unto itself. There was nothing like turning your enemys weapons back against them. As the Fardrifter''s torrential Yondergales tore the carriers off course and splashed dispatched drones against the ships battered hulls, Draus speared down the Nine Streams. Each of her selves sailed forth like gleaming flechettes. Her Replicas sprouted metaphysical artillery pieces in the shape of wings, and she accelerated with each round they loosed. Waterfalls of ammunition christened her as she tore into the scattered drones with space, glass, and gunfire. She faced each carrier as a lance of five. Five prismatic titans edged with shimmering pathways, with hovering spears jutting out in place of wings, and three hundred orbiting mirror-bright shields redirected any and all assaults on her person. With the improvements Kae applied to her heavens, she came as a prismatic knight, blade held aloft with pathways shimmering along the edge. Lacking a head, her Replicas reflective chestpieces were aglow with a triangular cluster of fractals, and through the transparency of her glass poured the unceasing ordinance of every gun she held since possessing the Arsenalist. Slugs, flechettes, beams, and missiles blossomed out from her changing lances. Shockwaves of devastation tore through the oncoming drones, cleaving gaps into their formations, and sending their slagged debris falling into the maze beyond the Yondergales as molten droplets. As one, each of her Replicas dove into the thick of chaos. Wrecks of falling metal vanished through the passageways of her shields. Thinking ahead, she vitrified missiles and projected them along the periphery of the battlefield. They would circle the engagement, slowly encompassing the carriers so where their defensive screen of drones thinned first, she would be there to exploit the breakthrough. The only thing she couldnt do was turn her foes to glass. Though she tried, it felt like she was prying at something that wasnt there. The matter comprising the carriers and drones felt distant from her grasp. As if she was trying to clench a fistful of water. As klaxons sounded from each carrier, wavelengths of static filled the air while integer-filled rivers overflowed the warships and infested the airspace of the Fardrifters inner reality. Well. If she had to guess, that was why she couldnt just shatter them. There was another canon at work. Another Heaven to contend against hers. REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRAE REPLICA] - 7% REND CAPACITY [ARSENALIST] - 4% WARNING: HEAVENS DETECTED ->STALKER OF STATIC SYMPHONIES (SOUND/SIGNALS/TECHNOLOGY/BIOLOGY) x3 The numbers leaking from each carrier condensed, spreading out into a vaguely humanoid figure. It had twelve limbsCall of their arms and handsCand as it clawed for purchase, the oscillating notes of the carriers alarms made its contours reverberate. Even with reflexes magnified by her Replicas, the pulsing of the wavelength seemed a blur to Draus. +Theyre trying to undergo metamorphosis,+ Avo said, and over from his mind came the maddened murmurs of the Techplaguer, rambling about the need to shift its form. +One of their canons is like my Skin of Virtuality.+ +Can you peel it off?+ Draus asked. +Intend too.+ A pause followed. Three transparent splinters unlatched from her mind. And then she felt the blood in the back of her head begin to twist and move to the whims of an outside will. +Reconstructing your deck and ansible. Need a catalyst for the Techplaguer. Going to hit them with Datarot. Leave them to you after. Enclave secured. All invading liquefied. Enclaves downed. Nerve agent. Need to see if I can keep them alive.+ A shadow passed over her, causing her to turn away from the enclaves interior. Turning past the open jaws of the mountain, she saw Avo dragging the voidship free from the haemified soil. As she left the enclave, a thought occurred to her as she flung a shard of glass out to seek the downed Omnitech carrier. +Omnitechll probably send a scoutin drone out here. Gonna leave a little something special in the wreckage so when they retrieve their salvage, we get to hitch a ride.+ Avo grunted in agreement. He was using her blood as the primary source of his catalyst still, but directed the surrounding matter to serve him instead. Faintly, she could hear the Woundmother complaining about something. +Not going to subsume this one yet,+ he said, dangling the Neo-Creationist ship. Up close, Draus stood witness to the relic of a bygone time as calcified clumps of plant-matter, moss, and clinging dirt rained from its edges. +Want Kae to have a look at it first?+ +No. Calvino. Something they could use to bargain for the George Washingtons crew. Maybe. Strike a deal. After we take what we can from its database. Going to need a Heaven of Technology for that.+ Yes,the Techplaguer cheered. Bandwidth! More is better. {Avo... lets talk about that Domain first,} Calvino began, sounding a bit more uneasy than normal. {There are risks using Omnitechs Heavens. Instability and... incoherence.} Lies! I am very coherent! Administrator! The sky-burner lies. +Calm down,+ Avo said, prodding at the voidship using his Sanguinity. +Calvino is just scared. Like the rest. Afraid I might use it unwisely. Against them.+ I support that course of action. Destroy the sky-burners! {Can you at least not graft the Domain of Technology to that one,} Kant murmured. +No,+ Avo replied. +Techplaguers fine. Dont want to waste any more time. Draus. Done for today?+ Her vitrified dagger curved around the side of a hill and vanished within the downed carriers open wounds as the question came. +Yeah. Whats up? You wanna incubate my Heavens now?+ +Arsenalist first. Simulacrae too essential for our efforts right now. Felt you planting a shard in the carrier. Good planning.+ +Yeah. Wanna see if we can chain this into another ambush if they come for the wreck. Be funny if we could keep that going for a while.+ +And lucrative,+ Avo replied. His Sanguinity condensed around the voidship, fusing a protective cocoon in shape. +Should find a separate place to store this.+ +I might got a few spots. Or I can just hold it in my Paracosmos for now. Keep it between places.+ +No. Risk too high. And might need you on standby soon. There are tasks that demand your... expertise.+ Her curiosity was piqued. She had been listening in on the rest of the cadres chatter as she worked, but they were more like background noise from a thoughtcast than anything. Considering his tone, she doubted this had to do with the media they were bringing in. Avo knew she didnt care about Proparazzi. Unless he wanted her to kill them. +Whatre my runs?+ +Syndicate trouble. Some critical targets we should snuff. But something even before all that. Lunch.+ +Lunch?+ Draus asked. Avo grinned. +Kare Kitzuhada is going to be meeting her uncle soon. Think we should be on standby. Just in case. Been more than a few incidents with the DRongos. But theyve gone silent. Even in the Nether. White-Rabs been trying to keep an eye.+ +Alright. An overwatch op.+ +Something like that. Need you to be ready for emergency response in the real. Just in case. You and Dice. Im going to plant him with a splinter. See if we can expand our recruitment some more.+ She let out a low breath. +Aint no end to the struggle, huh, consang?+ +Only for the dead. And only for the truly victorious.+ Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (I) Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (I) +To all Mirror-Concaves and Convexes: This is a confirmation that the Summer Contingency has been activated. You are free to assume pre-war footing and request the deployment of Heavens of Information for Threshold-III operations and above. We are pleased to state that the casualties sustained after the catastrophe two days ago have proven to be minimal. Communications intercepted between the Paladins and Agnosi have confirmed the Lodestone is back in effect. As such, we have eliminated the possibility that this was a Highflame or Omnitech attack. Indeed, it appears all other colors were likewise unprepared for the incident and could not capitalize on the opportunity. Emergency deploy of the Psy-Net has also proven critical in several districts, preserving our advantages. Despite this, the field has changed, and we must emphasize major points of caution for all in-field assets. The first concerns the reactivation of Samir Naeko. Dormant for much of the last century, he is back to full capacity. All Glaives operating in the Warrens are to dispose of their proxies and extract immediately thereafter. The Chief Paladin is to be considered target category cataclysm C Do not engage him. I repeat do not engage him. We cannot risk him turning against us before the time is right or an opening presents itself where he can be nulled. An elite asset has been assigned to take point on this matter and apply diplomacy due to previous dealings. [MEM-LOG: GLAIVE DENTON UPLOADED] Be aware that Glaive Dentons operational priority is rated IV. All other operations of a lower rating are subject to cancellation or delay as per engagement guidelines. The second issue is the return of Zein Thousandhand C Godslayer, eldest of the Glaives, and founding mother of the modern Ori Overclan. We understand that some among you might still feel fealty or honor-bound to her by way of tradition. Do not make this mistake. She does not stand for our creed. She is a creature of singular intent and selfish desire. Saintest too the core. She will not bleed for you, and you are not to do the same for her. The statement has been made. Any acts made to release or aid her will be considered high treason and have your name redacted from the annals. The third and most troubling reports from our Incubi state that distortions have been detected in the Nether, and investigations hint at the presence of Nolothic warminds. Such is why the mass distribution of Dichomtomist Info-Sec golems are being distributed among operational groups. Incubi are to assume dive-pattern-vigilance for all ongoing operations. The waters are unsafe once more. The deep is unsettled. As a final note, we, the speakers for the Inner Council would like to offer our gratitude and respect towards all who have given their lives in recent days. More will fall in times to come. A great upheaval is approaching. We trim turbulent tides with the approach of the trial. But as with the Great Waves of Tribulation across our history, we will endure because we, more than any other Guild, stand together. Even in the face of internecine, even with the masks we wear before one another, we are all Ori, and for our dream we strive as one. What we have in you is not faith but certitude. You have never failed us. And even if you cannot see, every thought, every ghost, every mind in this city will stand with you all as kith and kin.Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com Unity is destiny.+ -Emergency Address from Ori-Thaum Inner Council to Active Mirrors 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (I) Noise. With each passing day, the noise in Avos head grew. Every death he drank showed him something newCmemories of a life lived and passed; how the world was through anothers eyes; how they faced their end; how they believed things to be. The enclavers that lived above the fallen Neo-Creationist warship were no different. They had their own history. Own personalities. Own delusions. But it wasnt the windfall he expected. They had not been the ones to build the stone temples, to shape the mountains. That had been done by previous residents. Scaarthians, judging from the runic script. The newly dead enclavers were merely settlers after the Godsfall, looking for a new home to lay their heads. But now the chain was severed, the relic that determined their biome was entombed within a cage of blood and glass fifty kilometers south of New Vultun. Meanwhile, he laid the enclaves to rest within his mind, and let their templates wander within a construct of memory imagined from their former home. It would take time for them to acclimate. Time for them to learn the facts of Idheim and Standard. They were tribal people. Primordial. Followers of another Godclad that turned eyes to stone if their oral traditions were to be believed. Avo would let their templates mature before drawing them out. Let time do its own work. Leaving them within a separated mind-space, Avos avatar instead manifested atop a lonesome tower overlooking a five-hundred-kilometer-wide district locked in perpetual war. Before the conflagration settled within his ego, he was in the process of adapting his cognitive palace to a labyrinth. Had taken inspiration from the Incubi he nulled during his infiltration of Mirrorheads mind. Things were different now, his former ambitions too paltry to stand against present threats. Imbued with millions ghosts and countless subsumed lobbies, his splinters spread across Idheim as nodes to a network, and from them rose a living city animated from nothing but thought and recollection. Nukes painted a perpetual sunrise in the skies above as devastation swept through the endless horizon of megablocks. Draus and the Regulars were engaged in brutal close-quarters engagements, firing and killing each other through walls. Enforcers joined in sometimes, the braver ones seeking stimulation, the rest serving as spectators. Most of them died horribly. Bad enough for Avo to drain the trauma from their minds, but the experiences they were garnering proved invaluable. They all died when line split the horizon clean as Abrel, Chambers, Dice, and Elegant-Moon engaged Lip, Osjon, Glitch, Kare, and Kassamon. Fleets of drones filled the skies as the Godclads fought, dying and returning between the seconds. With Draus and Fardrifter passing back into the enclave through window, they were en route to meet Kae who was still speaking with Marlowe. The thoughtcast host had the Agnos laughing as noodles spilled from her open mouth. The mem-cons were slowly dissolving his inner prejudicesCmelting away the malignance of his former culture, but the taboo of open laughter was a hard trait to remove. For whatever reason, the master of his place hated smiles. It was a stupid restriction. A pointless one. The man was lucky he died at the hands of another. Otherwise, Avo mightve carved a permanent grin into his features before taking all he had. {And this is why the ethics committee demands that I constantly monitor your psyche,} Calvino said. +Psyches fine. Just got hungry watching Kae eat.+ He shifted again, this time checking in with Essus. Tapping into the mans cog-feed, he found himself watching a group of youths talking to a heavily tattooed Scaarthian woman from a fifth-story hab-stack. Avo, he greeted. +Anything new?+ I think I have another smuggler. This one for the giantesses. The cold-mothers Guild. +Stormtree.+ Yes. Smugglers tied to other Guilds seem to be much less active these days. But this one has been aggressive. Almost desperate. I am going to make contact when I can, but she seems only to be interested in the young... I fear to discover why. Avo understood and cast a splinter out to infect the smuggler. A passing drone swept the plascrete streets with a flickering grid but otherwise ignored the crowds breaking curfew. +Ill see what I can get from her.+ Thank you. Also. There has been an outbreak in Sanctuary 102. Something they brought in from the Sunderwilds. If you have timeC +Take a look when I can.+ Artads blessings, Avo. The ghoul paused. +Keep yourself well, Essus.+ Shifting away from the sanctuaries, Avo became the splinters he had nested across New Vultun, creating a mental replica of the megacity within his mind. Four hundred thousand red dots marked the lobbies he compromised. Over one hundred and forty million minds were noted as moving crosses. Spread out across a continental stretch of land, his presence drifted like threads passing through the currents of the city, but he was there, he was spreading, and a new plague was filling New Vultuns veins. ESTIMATED INFECTION LEVEL: 0.00014% He needed to hit more high-traffic lobbies. Places like Marlowes thoughtcast and other frequented haunts. The thought of infesting Stormjumper lobbies came naturally as he watched Kares marker descend from Scale to meet her uncle. He cast the mem-data over to Draus and placed her on standby. If he could secure the Planeshift, he would truly be happy with the days recruitment efforts. Right now, he was butC Auto-Seance Activated ->Session MEM-ID: [Cas eld''Canduir] Ghost-Link Accepted +Cas?+ Avo asked, surprised that the Columner was contacting him so soon. He was supposed to making contact with the various cells. As cold tension passed over from the mans mind, Avo knew there was something wrong. +Avo. Denton sent me something earlier. Packet of mem-data. Said that Clan DRongo was compromised. Said she needed to go dark, and that you needed to be place to watch over. Shotin Kazahara. Said youd understand why.+ Avo did. +Compromised. Compromised how?+ But before Cas could respond, Avo accessed Dentons mem-data, and understanding expanded in his mind. Memories passed through him of Necrojacks sequencing new phantasmics into themselvesCa Meta-update on the part of their Mirrors. Denton had neglected to sequence hers, casting it over to Cas as a package instead. Viewed initially, the ghosts seemed to contain stable improvements made to Auto-Seances security functions, but faintly, a feeling ebbed inside Avo. A dissonance that made his steam flicker. Theres a dormant splinter of Delusion in this mem-data. Not ours. Not ours. The Low Masters are making a move. Peaces booming laughter lit a flame of frustration in Avos stomach. He thought he would have more time after his descent into the Deep Nether. Corner just scoffed in response. [The easy days never last, consang. Looks like you''re back to having rivals in these waters.] +No,+ Avo replied, sharing the information with his cadreCand Kare. The Paladin jolted with a start as he prepared to commune with her. +Not rivals. Prey.+ Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (II) Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (II) +Trust me consangs. I got one piece of advice about having family in this line of work. Don''t.+ -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (II) Avo reviewed Dentons mem-data as he waited for Kare to synchronize with his Metamind. A collage of moments passed through him; flashes of visual detail overlain with two sets of directives. The first was addressed from Ori-Thaums Inner Council to all active assets. The basic takeaways were focused on the mass deployment of Information Domain Heavens and expanded subtly requirements now that Chief Paladin Naeko was back in play. The second came from within Clan DRongo and arrived immediately after the Inner Councils broadcast concluded. All DRongo-loyal Mirrors were given in-house phantasmics assigned for distribution. Though supposedly meant to secure their Auto-Seances against Clan Kitzuhadas mind-raids, Dentons suspiciousCand Avos warmind of IgnoranceCunveiled what they truly were. Containing no more than fifty ghosts and seventy-two sequences, each fragment belonged to a warmind of Delusion. The Low Masters were going on the offensive again. Pushing at whatever openings they could. Elder Mwaba DRongo was likely the source of this compromise, and from her was a rival infection spreading. [You dumb cunt, you should have seen this coming.] Peace chuckled under his breath, the sour-bitter of his mind growing with each passing moment. [Emotion isnt just going to lay down and take it. None of us are going to lay down and take it. You might have compromised me. You might have taken my burdensCmy hate! But there are Three Famines! Three! And Emotion will not allow me to stay compromised for long. You think you know about the warminds? Youre blind. Youre fucking blind. We have things that will strip you from history itself.] Hes talking about the forgotten. Hes bluffing. Theyre afraid to use that one. Too much damageCtoo much of the Unsea will be seared barren with its deployment. Avo pushed Peaces words to the wayside as Kare accepted his session. Perceiving existence still as an avatar within his mind labyrinth, Avo witnessed the memory-constructed tower that was his Auto-Seance pulse and channel a beam of memories up through the clouds, projecting the sequence out into the Nether. As a cycle of ghosts streamed upward, the war-choked sky splashed and changed, fading from view as if the face of a pond disturbed by a falling rock. As phantasmal waves swept the firmament, another mindscape drifted into view from the distance, reeled by the memories broadcast from its Auto-Seance now symmetrically locked to Avos. It was as if two planetary bodies intersecting their orbits, ineffably bridged by a shared emission of repeating memories. *** C[Kare]-- There came a point, while under bombardment during times of war, that you just learned to treat the ceaseless thundering like noise. Perhaps the next barrage might kill you. Perhaps not. But even so, life had to go on. Kare found the same was true for her mental health. After all the anxiety spikes and constant panic attacks she faced over the past monthCall the hidden wars being fought around and over herCshe was quickly approaching the point of exhausted apathy. Such was why she accepted Avos session the moment she departed from Scale. Another day, another crisis. At least the citys strangest ghoul was on her side. +What is it now?+ Kare asked, looking out her aerovecs window. Heavy rain lashed down hard on her VTR-Hourglass, but not a single droplet lingered long on her vehicles chassis. An aero of Sanctus make, it resembled a needle encased by several revolving rings that projected a tunnel of propulsive force along its sides. As such, its velocity was almost second to none on the marketCcapable of even surpassing some high-vector missiles in direct acceleration. She wasn''t much of a splurger when it came to material goods, but if she had a single guilty pleasure, it was going fast. Avo took a moment to respond as he reached into her mind. Faintly, she directed her Specters inward and accessed their sensory telemetries via her cog-feed. Windows portrayed a mindscape consumed by perpetual warCa mindscape that housed millions upon millions of ghosts and encompassed the size of a district. Her mind stuttered to a halt as she wondered why he felt so light in her mind and how he was hiding the sheer mass of his cognitive capacity. Most lobbies that had this many concentrated ghosts leaked thoughtstuff from kilometers away. He was barely a whisper in her mind. +Might be an attack planned. On you. Or your uncle. Not sure which of you is a priority.+ Kare just let out a sigh. +Of course. Who is it this time? Is Jaus back? The High Seraph created him a cyber-thaumic body and bound his memories to Omnitechs Noosphere so he might take over the city and enact a bastardized version of his dream?+ The ghoul actually paused. +No. Strange assumption. Detailed too.+ +Its a popular conspiracy theory on Saintless. Its... pretty much what it sounds. A mind lobby for Anti-Saintist conspiracy theories.+ +Strange place to be spending time.+ +Im a Paladin, Avo. Spending time in questionable places is most of my job. Apparently, the other part is being embroiled in every quiet war and pitch-black political action this city has.+ The damned ghoul actually chuckled at that. Good to see he was finding her misery so amusing. +Not between Guilds this time. Internal matter. For Ori-Thaum.+ Another sigh escaped her. A deeper and longer one. Damn her uncle. What has he gotten her into this time? +Is it the DRongos?+ +...Good guess.+ +It was pretty much the only guess that makes sense,+ Kare replied rolling her eyes. Faint flashes of light and pierced through the vapor of the clouds. The turbulence grew, but her Hourglass stabilizers compensated. A bolt of lightning skipped off the velocity bubble thaumically formed around her vehicle. Kare took a drink of water as the weariness inside grew. +I told him not to start anything stupid. This isnt the time for clan warfare.+ +Might not be his fault,+ Avo replied. +Elder Mwaba DRongo is likely compromised by Noloth. Think she distributed fragments for a warmind among her loyalist assets.+ A package of mem-data followed his words, and despite instincts screaming for her to deny the transfer, Kare allowed the information to pass over into her Metamind and glared off into the roiling atmosphere parting Scale and the rest of the Tiers. +I have only known you for weeks, Avo. Weeks. And in that time, I find myself involved in conspiracy after assassination after conspiracy.+ +Dont blame me. Only trying to stop them.+ +I know. I just saying... I miss being ignorant.+ A pause followed. A hissing laugh escaped the ghoul. +Dont worry: your ignorance is quite intact.+ The Paladin squeezed her eyes shut. Of all the impossibly smart, impossibly powerful, impossibly inscrutable ghouls who could have burned a template of her mind and protected her from the shadows, she just had to get the one who thought he was funny. +Thank you, Citizen Avo. Your mockery is what all Paladins aspire to receive.+ +Welcome. Could repay that by letting me sit in on your meeting.+ Kare frowned. +With my uncle.+ +Want to bring him into the fold. Maybe. Prevent him from becoming compromised at least.+ She rolled her eyes. +Somehow, I dont like their chances of jacking into Uncle Shos mind. Trust me, many, many, many, people have tried. And many, many, many sad families are now receiving monthly stipends from Ori-Thaums because their idiot children thought they were going to be the ones to null the great Shotin Planeshift Kazahara.+ +Believe hes a challenge. Good. Hope so. Will be a useful asset. And template.+ Kare snorted. +Avo. I know that youre telling me this because you trust in free will, but there is no chance he will let you claim him. Not willingly anyway. Hes far too proud to be someone elses backup singer. I cant stop you from coming with him. Agh. I think I feel safer when youre with me these days. But I dont think youll be getting his willing help.+ *** C[Avo]-- It took a few carefully misspoken statements to distract the Paladin from her mental woes. The girl was stressed. Too stressed. She was remarkable about compartmentalizing, but as he reached into her mindscape, Chambers template almost had a panic attack. [Fuck me, her chest feels like its filled with lead bricks. Fuckin glasser needs all the Numb she can get.] Avo knew it was bad when Abrel concurred. Synchronizing Kares template with her actual ego, her past two days flowed through Avo as a blur. In the aftermath of Zeins capture, Naeko offered to place her under protective detail. She declined, mostly believing the situation to be resolved, but also because she didnt want to distance herself from the other Paladins with her special treatment. Call Kare Kitzuhada a fool, but dont accuse her of being anything short of truthful about her ideals. She did all she could to live her dream, to be among those that safeguarded this city. That was divine enough in New Vultun. Worth protecting. Against Zein. Against Ori-Thaums clan politics. Against whatever madness the Famines were trying to concoct. As the Paladin continued arguing with him, he shared his memories with White-Rab and sent his progenitor a message. +High threat dive. Might need your assistance. Respond if able.+ The reply took less than a second to arrive. +Synced. Is it the Famines?+ Avo hesitated, but only briefly. +Probably. Theyre in play again. Spreading through the Nether. Thought they would be down for longer. Was wrong.+ +Thats fine. I want to talk with them. About the Strix.+ Vengeance. There was as pure a motivator as any. Another legacy they shared of Walton. +Wards set up?+ +Did that days ago. The memories you sequenced into me are really lighting the wick too. Didnt realize it was possible for someone to... uh, hate that much. Peace is a very, very unhappy boy.+ [Im not a boy, you misplaced abortion!] Peace snarled. +Hows the thing with the Bloodthanes?+ White-Rab asked. +You got access to any of the Longeyes yet? For Revas questioning?+ +Soon. Not going to forget her.+ +Good. Cause I wont let you.+ And there was a separation. Love. Human love. Romantic attachment. Even now, to bind ones ego to another seemed treacherous to Avo. Dangerous in the extreme, unless they possessed his capabilities. His nature as a thoughtform ensured he could endure any lasting trauma, but for White-Rab, the risk was infinitely more severe. Still. He didnt stop himself from falling. Maybe there was something there. Worth exploring when they eventually began their run on the Heaven of Love. But that required them to get Kae back up into the Tiers first. Shifting away from White-Rab, Avo synced his memories with both Draus and Dice, and found both of them ready and waiting. +So,+ Draus said, annoyed at how cloak and dagger things were again, +the Famines are about to try some fuckery again, huh?+ +Probably. Going to share the address shes going to. Need some passages connected to the local district. Sniper points for you. Rush points for Dice. Just in case this gets physical too.+ +You expectin it to?+ +Dont know what to expect with the Famines,+ Avo admitted. +Especially Emotion. Caught them off guard the last few times. More potent than they are in the Nether now. But dont want to play the fool. Looped White-Rab in. Link to him if I get nulled somehow. Contingencies.+ +Well, shit,+ Draus chuckled. +Looks like youre finally learnin to get that ego under control.+ +Is such a thing even possible,+ Kae said, her voice arriving as an aside to the conversation. The best thing about having consangs as a gestalt is all the experiences, insights, and support youll get. The worst thing is that every one teams up to mock you. Even when you improve. +Not that unbelievable,+ Avo growled. +Im sure its not,+ Draus agreed. +Aint hard to be smug as shit to someone you killed if you get to keep their mind a prison post-mortem.+ He hissed at the Regular and stopped speaking to her. He sought a final edge to the coming struggle. Something the Famines didnt know. Something that Kares identity as a Paladin allowed him to use without fear of reprisal from Veylis. +Fardrifter. Need you back.+ A chorus of affirmative neighs sounded within his mind. +Its time to strangle the very passage of time?+ +Might just be.+ +So be it. You call. I answer.+ GRAFTING GOD ->[FARDRIFTER] It was time to play voyeur at a family lunch. Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (III) Chapter 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (III) +When you bite into the abyss, the abyss (sometimes) bites back. Introducing the new half-boiled Razorfish Rolls just for 4099 Imps! Theyre burned. Theyre angry. And they might just gnaw your tongue off before you get them, but for the brave or the foolish that dare and prevail, you earn a 20% off for all other meals order. So. The only question you gotta ask yourself is simple:Fo?llo?w new stories at novelhall.com Whos got the greater craving, man or fish?+ -Flavors of the Deep restaurant Advertisement 23-3 The Strix and the Ravens (III) --[Kare]-- Flavors of the Deep was a pretentious restaurant befitting a pretentious district populated by pretentious people. It was quite a feat to make Kare think in such a way, considering she was FATED herself. Of course, the name of the restaurant being a very thinly veiled reference to cunnilingus didnt help. How very typical of Uncle Sho to choose such a place. Truth be told, there were differences even among the FATED. Some among the Colors performed different roles for their Guilds, serving both material and immaterial efforts for the great struggle. Those were the people who earned their positions, who climbed from the Warrens or distinguished themselves through action. And then there were the people who dined in this restaurantCthe people who lived in the Nuurhein Elysium in particular. While the lower city spent their days ravaged by one calamity or another, this Guilder-populated Stormtree district flourished under auroral skies, housed people within buildings forged from a union of matter and lightning, enjoyed the crispness of mountain air, and provided the most luxurious establishments made to cater to the most ridiculous clientele. Case in point, the Scaarthian woman currently blocking her way. And as I told you, I consider these dogs part of my sheath. For me to obey your policy against bioforms is an affront to my personhood and dignity. Is that what your restaurant stands for? Bah! Enough of this. I will not speak to a child. Summon your superior. I wish to spit upon themCI fear the wetness within my mouth will drown the likes of you. Hark! The Tiers will be hearing about this! Kare folded her arms as she watched the scene play out. She could have said something. Could have pushed past the Scaarthian woman and stepped in, but she wasnt exactly looking forward to lunch with her uncle either. Besides, silly though the Scaarthian was, the view she presented was plenty amusing. It wasnt every day you got to see a woman wearing a suit made from living nu-dogs. Two panting heads protruded like pauldrons from her shoulders while the flat skull of a mastiff growled at the overworked attendant like a living chestpiece. Their fur shone like clean strands of velvet, but the smell was something south of atrocious. Most people from other districts would have already started complaining. But this was Stormtree territory, operating under Stormtree culture, living by Stormtree norms. If a fully grown Scaarthian wanted to wear a pack of dogs as apparel, all the power to her. Its not like they werent already used to the scent of nu-dogs considering all the war beasts they fielded. The thought made Kare frown as she reflected upon herself. Maybe that was a bit prejudicial. Maybe she was a bit prejudicial. Maybe watching a three-meter-tall woman point a paw at an empty-eyed man barely half her height made Kare more than a little prejudicial. Whatever the case, there was one thing that was certain: when Jaus envisioned his dream of humanity rising from the ashes of the gods, this likely wasnt a desired scene playing in his mind. This was not the dream, Kare muttered, making herself grin. Kare Kitzuhada? A voice pulled her attention away from the spectacle. A drone hovered overhead, its shape smooth and bulbous, with a holographic smile projected over its exterior. Many apologies. You dont need to stand in line. Your seating has already been reserved. Please. Follow me. Your companion is already waiting. The drone''s thin ventral wings left distortions in the air as it curved over the towering woman to proceed down the narrow entryway. A pulsing grid swept over each guest when their number was called and they were allowed in. Fancy establishment, though this was, New Vultun was still New Vultun, and the last thing people needed at dinner was some maniac detonating an implanted warhead or something even nastier. Just because you were in an Elysium didnt prevent terrorism sponsored by a rival Guild. Excuse me, citizen, the drone toned, speaking directly to the Scaarthain. Might you step aside and stop threatening the attendant with physical and mental trauma? The guest behind you has priority. The Scaarthian whipped her head over her shoulder as her nostrils flared and her eyes widened. Her thick hair ran in corded knots and Kare saw that she had a cluster of irises in each of her sockets. She was from one of those biomodder cliques then. That explained the odd nature of her bio-rig. Doubtlessly trying to chase some aesthetic trend or another. The dog-clad Scaarthain puffed her chest and each of her hounds snarled. No. No I will not. Priority? How can she have priority? I have been here sinceC Of course, the drone cut her off, sounding as agreeable as ever. You are entirely right. Your rage is truly justified. However, we wish to inform you that you argue at the inconvenience of a Paladin. I care little if shes a Pa-pa-Pa-uck! Suddenly, the haughtiness drained from the womans voice. ICI see. ICthis would be my honor! I respect and honor the deeds of this citys great defenders. WhyCwhy Chief Paladin Naekos return has been much lauded. Much lauded. Kare swore she could hear the larger woman gulp. Seeing a giantess turn to a terrified child was quite the delightCanother newfound benefit gained by the Chief Paladins showing over the past few days. The reignition of his spirit caused the palm to fall through entire Sovereignties at multiple points over the past few days. Searching for [NAEKOSLAP!] vicarities in the Nether would deliver upon one a surfeit of vicaritiesCall of them with views in the millions. I thank you for your courtesy, citizen, Kare said, walking past the shifting Scaarthian with her head held high. Streams of perception were spilling over her from behind as well. The revelation of her identity had drawn more than a few eyes. Of course, the Scaarthian said, now beaming. P-please send my highest regards to the Chief Paladin. It is chilCuh, men like him that keep this city great. The point ones privilege ended was where the enforcers of order would no longer intercede on her behalf. Ridiculous as she was, it seemed the Scaarthian understood that. She wasnt as air-headed as Kare assumed. A prejudicial judgment on her part. I will be sure to let the Chief Paladin know that. Stepping down the hall and allowing the scan to pass over her, a swirl of ghosts spiraled around her accretion before two flashes of green confirmed her access. A frosted doorway hissed as the path into the restaurant opened and then the world went from the blandness of a pale-bright antechamber to a stronghold beneath the waves. A mountain of glass rose to encase the entire establishment. Holo-marked lanes lined with numbers trailed down to the thousands of tables on display and families of patrons ate huddled around hovering tables. Four pedestals rose to bear chrome-skulled musicians. They sang in frequencies that Kare could barely hear in material reality, but the melody they made in the Nether was sweet and high, merging synchronously to a building climax. A ringing sounded from the glass surrounding the venue, and on the other side danced an undersea kingdom of bioluminescent biforms. The largest was the kraken that gripped the glass with its massive tendrils. Kares heart almost skipped a beat when she finally noticed the leviathan, so subtle was its camouflage. Through its gill-slits flowed schools of fish twirling down its many limbs while sword-headed shards jousted in the foreground like Kosgan knights of old performing their customary tourneys for their Lord-Faithful. The Nether, likewise, was awash with noise. A miasma of lapped against her wards. Kares paranoia screamed. Her eyes glared down every passing ghostly wisp as she followed her drone. +Avo?+ Kare thought. +Are you there?+ +Yes,+ the ghoul responded. +Always here. Dont worry. Clear right now. No intrusions detected. Already buried my splinter in the restaurant''s lobby. The head chef is a serial killer and one of his assistants will probably get the rash after mating with a corpse. Only notable concerns for now. Minimal risk at best. Keep going.+ Kare wasnt sure how to respond to that information so she didnt. She didnt know how the ghoul learned half the things that it did. Frankly, she didnt know how Necros stopped themselves from going insane. There were so many minds around her. So many angles of attack. So many secrets. Ignorance was bliss. But ignorance was also death. Knowledge was a revelation. But knowledge wore one down. There was no good choice diving into the depths of the human mind. Avo, hearing her thoughts, offered a casual response. +Not that bad if you can accept yourself for what you are. Accept others for what they are too. Certitude of ego. Acceptance of the alien. Thats what makes the best Necrojacks. Dont get nervous. Be prepared. Be better than the opposition. Or be nulled. Not so different from being a squire.+ +Yes. But a gun doesnt destroy your personhood.+ Kare exhaled. No. A gun just took everything that a person was. Fundamentally, both ends were pretty similar, but there was something comforting about still being yourself when your cessation came. +Ah. Thats why youll never be a good Necro. Not unless your mind is altered.+ +Because I fear loss?+ Kare asked. +Because you cling to yourself absolutely. Desperately. Instinctively. Have to give yourself away from the animal. Have to swim as a spectator.+ The drone led her through crowds and past the public tables. It brought her to a private capsule on the far side of the restaurantCa tube-shaped room fused into the ceiling and parted from the cheaper seats by a layer of smart glass. As she approached, the door went from opaque to transparent and slid open to allow her entry. Inside, she saw strips of fish and meat already sizzling on a convection stove and smelled aromas of cooking spice and the sourness of soy-lathered riceballs. Uncle Sho had already begun eating. And drinking from the stinging scent of liquor. We have arrived at premium capsule one. We hope you have the finest dining experience here beneath the waves. Finished with its task, the drone turned away and slid into a queue above and vanished with a flicker of strobing light. Chambers coughed. +I didnt know the poor half-strands name, but I was in a small time smuggler gang at the time andCand I was supposed to deliver this fridge full of organs across the Sovereignty for my boss when this fucking glasser Tadpole comes out of nowhere and just starts chasing my assC+ Incredulous disbelief leaked from White-Rabs mind as he began to laugh. +No...+ +I shit you not, consang,+ Chambers said, continuing. +So... so I was like, fucking twelve or whatever at the time and didnt wanna get picked up. So I decided to fuck my boss instead of get fucked by the glasser, and ended up booting the fridge out the back of the aero I snatched.+ +No,+ White-Rab groaned. +Fucking, yep. I was passing low next to a block. Saw that shit paint him across the sidewalk. Man, I felt so fucking bad at the time, but had to skip districts because I just lost forty thousand imps worth of organs.+ White-Rab sighed. +You godsdamned bastard.+ +Yeah. Only found out he was supposed to be a nova hot Necro later after the Nether started chattering about his death. Fucking saw a vic of it. Couldnt sleep for weeks.+ White-Rab could only shake his head as he laughed again. +This is... agh. Well. Stition wouldve found it funny.+ Chambers sighed. +Yeah. You seem pretty numb about me snuffing your consang.+ +Well, he wasnt my consang. We actually tried ending each other a few times over some mem-data. Just knew him was all.+ +Oh. Well, thank Avo you got a cycler now then, huh?+ +Hes likely affecting spatial reality around his mind,+ Kae said. +Judging from the slight oscillation of light around his halo... I think the ghosts leaving his mind and the ghosts going in are not traveling down the same paths. Or even places.+ They didnt call him Planeshift for nothing. The solution was a simple one. Hed have Kare establish a link to Shotin instead. +Kare. Need you to sync with your uncle.+ His request incurred a twinge of discomfort from the Paladin. Something inside her felt like it was betraying her uncle, but she never showed it on her face. The problem I have... she began. Its better that I show you. Using my memories. Shotins gaze hardened. Alright. Session? Session, Kare replied. Triggering her Auto-Seance, a bridge opened between her and Shotin, and Avo passed a splinter through the cycling memories. Satisfaction rose within him as he found himself inching closer to recruiting a valuable new ally. The feeling promptly died when a subtle pressure shifted in the surrounding Nether and he found himself not in Shotins mind, but a locus drifting deep below the ocean. A hiss of frustration and respect escaped Avo. The man had been communing with his niece through a proxy locus. What marvelous paranoia. +Well, they dont call him a pro for n-o-o-o-o+ White-Rabs voice grew distorted as another shiver passed through the Nether. Something was wrong. The restaurant was secure. Even a ghost-bearing receptacle was seeded with a splinterCthe Low Masters couldnt be attempting a direct attack. But what was this then? Why wasC And the Nether around him calcifiedCthe waters beyond that of Shotins protected demiplanes freezing solid in an instant. Lag spiked between Avo and the splinter he had nested within Kares mindCwith every other splinter active in Flavors of the Deep. It was like an entire portion of his being was frozen in place while the rest could still move freely. +Rab. Somethings happening.+ +I know. I felt that. It was... I have no idea what that was. Ive never seen thoughts just halt before.+ Warmind. This is unknown to us. Its not Delusion. Its not one of me. Prepare yourself. Use the Silver as refuge. His planes offer safety. But right now, you need his cooperation. With Kares cog-feed frozen in place and all his other splinters unresponsive, Avo attempted to send in additional fragments from the outside, but the lag took them too as they passed into the restaurant''s vicinity. Draus called for his attention. +Avo. Got eyes on a squad of four coming in from the outside. They just killed their Incogs. Popped out on the street. Holocoats preventing me from getting a good view.+ Tapping into her perception, he found himself peering out from the reflection of a puddle on the street. Four distortion-masked figures vanished behind a doorway, their own Metaminds spinning unnaturally. Modified somehow. +Prepare for deployment,+ Avo said. +Dice. You too.+ The minds of the Regular and the girl sharpened to battle-ready alertness. Back in the restaurant, Avo only had one splinter active. One entrapped within a locus that wasnt even his targets mind. But he could use it. He could still communicate with Shotin through it. But doing so would reveal himself before he had the Godclad under his control, and that could jeopardize everything this dive was for. Avo pushed through his indecision. Time wasnt his ally. And he wasnt about to risk losing his Paladin to the Famines. He cast Kares memories over to Maru and Kassamon first, instructing both of them to alert Naeko. Then, he took a gambit. He spoke from within the locus, broadcasting his thoughts through the plane. +Shotin Kazahara. Need you to listen to me. People are coming for you. Possibly from Clan DRongo. For you and your niece. Have been helping her. Have been trying to help you. Need you to work with me now. Do what I can to keep you protectedC+ The planar stack holding the locus Avo currently resided in shifted. No longer was he under the waves. Now hung. Hung from a rope dangling from the clouds. Dangling above waves of thought-shredding instability. The skies above him thundered as Shotins thoughtcast spilled down. The rope holding him swayed threateningly. +Incubi?+ Avo paused. Yes. Technically, he did have more than a few Incubi inside him. +Yes. Deep Sign: Shadow-12. Mirror-Concave is Benhata Veloso.+ The rope went taut. +Benhata? I knowChe missing at theC+ +He was ordered to go Incog at the Trident. Inner Council affairs. There are traitors within our walls. There are Famines using our cells.+ Cold tension flooded into the demiplane. +Fuck,+ Shotin said. Chapter 23-4 Defilement (I) Chapter 23-4 Defilement (I) +Seeker cadre Mirror-Convexes on standby. Block successfully deployed. Target priority [Planeshift] registering as sole active ego. Cadre classification [Vanguard] is moving in to make contact. Cadres [Breaker] and [Paradox] in reserve. Pocket and planar-incog going into effect in ten seconds. Incubi strike cell Mirror-ConvexesC [WARNING: CONFLAGRATION DETECTC] [SIGNAL LOST] [SIGNAL LOST] [SIGNAL LOST] [SIGNAL LOST] + -Recovered memories from Mirror-Concave Maskdash in the aftermath of Operation [Planecapture] 23-4 Defilement (I) --[Shotin]-- All right, quick recap, Shotin! You invite your niece to a nice lunch C real fancy place. You start talking, you clear the air with her. She''s about to open up, tell you about what''s been bothering her; whatever secret problem she needs you to help her with, and then this fucking bullshit happens. Everyone''s thoughtstuff stopped moving. Kares staring at you, mouth open, eye wide. Her Metaminds active but the ghosts arent moving. Neither is her accretion for that matter. Neither are the rest of the customers. He really needed to get that girl scheduled for an Agnos session. She needed some thaumic N-DEF. Right. Whats next? Oh, the simple matter of an Incubi strike cell trapped inside one of your out-planar loci talking to you, telling you that theyre operating under the orders of a Mirror-Concave that went missing at the Trident nearly a month ago. Its raw conspiracy shitCDRongos working with Low Masters. Pretty hefty accusation. Would be outright laughable if not for the existence and the high-end equipment sported by that motherfuck Aedon Chambers. And now, a couple of unidentified Seeker cadres supposedly under Clan DRongos banner were coming in with the intent to capture or snuff. Is that everything? Yeah. Seems like it. Good. Great. Perfect. Just another day of bullshit for Shotin Kazahara. Undoing the buttons on his suit, Shotin eyed his niece with some concern as he considered how he wanted to start this fight. The Parallelist was his edge above edges, but he needed to use it carefully. Doubtless, these half-strands were waiting for him to do something big or stupid like a full manifestation so they could paradox or Rend-dump him. But if they were expecting an easy hit, they had another thing coming. Assholes should know who held Highflame at bay all those days. All those miserable godsdamned days... Besides. The upgrades provided by his Agnos were going to come like a nice surprise. But only when he forced their hand first. Only when they were off-balance so he could attack to maximum effect. He was in an effective envelopment right now. A pocket was probably active outside and the vanguard were probably mostly Porters hiding entire armies in their coat pockets. This had the potential to get messy fast. He needed to breach the pocket. Get on the outside. Or pull them into one of his planes before they could trigger any backlash. The greatest concern was the people. The FATED and Kare. Shotin caused enough collateral damage at Vengs StandChe was going to kill that rat-fuck ChambersCand he wasnt about to do a repeat of that embarrassing performance. Especially not with someone he loved on the line. So. The path ahead was simple. He needed to make this an ambush somehow. Or run a blitz. +Can help with the former,+ the Incubus voice resonated in his mind. +Help hide you. Make it seem like your thoughts are frozen as well.+ Shotin frowned. Right. He still had that problem to deal with. +Hows that? And before you make the obvious play, no, consang, Im not letting you into my Metamind.+ A chuff preceded the Incubus reply. +Understood. Paranoias good. Appreciated. But dont need your actual mind. Just need you to shift me outside. Ill mask your thoughtstuff.+ +Suppose it might be,+ Shotin replied, still feeling a bit cold about this one. The fact the Incubus approached him using Kare was a point off the friend-foe scale. He didnt appreciate people using his family to get to him, but the game was a dirty one. +Mask me how?+ +Make your accretion seem solid. Make you look pacified as well.+ +Stop kissing my ass andC+ No fucking around this time. Hed snuff them. Hed snuff them fast, keeping shuffling his Domains. Keep going until they were dead and this was done. After that? He was going to pay the DRongos a very personal visit. --[Avo]-- The ambush worked. Within Shotins demiplanes, the Nether ran free, and so did Avo as he joined the storm, spawning a tempest of splinters to claim his newest subverts. As forking fingers of electricity passed through the Seekers, Avo noted they were recoveringCthat the storms were slowly being pried away from their bodies by an unseen force. Not surprising seeing as they were Godclads themselves, but the planeshift left an opening large enough for Avo to capitalize. The first of his splinters arrived like a barrage of hammers. Each infused with a few thousand ghosts, their Conundrum wards swelled as they struck again hard against the cadres Metas. Itd been some time since Avo last committed a ward bashCnot since his encounter against Abrel. Right now, though, it was his simplest and quickest way of keeping his enemies mentally suppressed. To stop them from doing anything that could paradox or affect Shotins Parallelist. Wards flashed as traumas clashed. Screams and memories of torment and torture embraced as Quicksands were pitted against Conundrums. It was a testament to Ori-Thaums mastery of the art that the Seekers protections didnt shatter immediately. It was a greater testament to Peaces mastery of offensive Necrotheurgy that by the time the Quicksands adapted to the traumas layering the exterior of the Conundrums, the following layers attuned themselves to different nightmares, grinding forward inexorably. Seekers accretions furrowed and ruptured like foam-filled bubbles succumbing to kinetic slugs. The thrill of triumph spiked within Avo as he directed more splinters to flood the wounds. Then, the fragments at his vanguard suddenly froze. It was as if they passed into a pocket of stasis. The Nether-lag between him and his entrapped splinters dilated to the extreme in seconds and a translucent shiver twitched around each Seekers compromised haloCthe exact same sensation that preluded what swept through the restaurant. Avo swallowed a growl of frustration as he guessed at the situation. The cadre likely werent just Porters sent in to secure Shotin, but also carriers as well. Bearers of whatever warmind the Low Masters left in them that could stem the flow of thought and memory. But Avo wasnt done. As he directed another dozen splinters into the building pocket of stillness, he triggered miniature Thoughtwave Bombs as they struck the minds of the Seekers. Distortion splashed over into the stillness as Avo prepared to cast ShotinCto cast the cadre into a hyper-lethal plane should the attempt fail. Whatever instead was a resonating shudder. The Nether within the plane of storms jerked and snapped forward, thoughts and memories resuming their pace as Avos distortion cleaved through the stasis. A scream inhuman and mind-swallowing in its loudness erupted around him as something somewhere broke. A warmind has ruptured. One of my kind is broken. Yet, before Avo could celebrate; before he could affix his splinters within the shattered minds of his victims, a counter-tide slammed into his shards as a riposte. They came as memory-made spears tinged with exquisite traumas of their own making. As they greeted Avos mind edge-against-edge, he sampled the sequencing of their traumas and found them without peer. They, too, were Peaces work channeled through a warmind of Delusion. Such confirmed what he already suspected. The Famines were here. Lingering. Acting through their own puppetsCtheir own subverts. Why they were suddenly so aggressive was unclear to Avo, but he needed to have another conversation with Elder DRongo again, seeing as she was more than likely the source of this plague. +Emotion,+ Avo said, speaking through all his splinters. +Back so soon. Come to break before me again. Gift me something new to take from you. Take from your masters.+ Thoughtstuff rippled out from the opposing fragments as Emotions response followed his strike. +That is the will of our masters. But I have come to thank you.+ There was something different in Emotions voice. A tinge ofCemotion? A speck of pride and scorn mingled in the turbulent waters of the Nether. Inside Avo, disquiet began to arise. +If not for your grave transgressionsCfor the fear you instilled in our masters, they would not have loosened our oaths. They would not have allowed us this latitude. I see now that you are the means to Noloths evolution not directly, but as an oppositional dialectic.+ And then Emotion laughed. Laughed. He sounded like Walton. He smelled likeC The smell... A sour tang consumed the Nether. Citrus. Citrus true and deep. Inside Avos mind, Peaces template sputtered with disbelief. [No, they... the city eternal would have never allowedCEmotion couldnt fucking have...] +I did as the Hungers asked when I destroyed Defiances nodes,+ Emotion said, pressing hard. More fragments came from him. More and with a greater variety of traumas. +I never defied this command. But I have also been harvesting. Keeping sequences. Fragments. Aspects of his ego. Some say sentimentality is an emotion, but I am not so sure. It can also be a thing of rationalityCfor Defiance was the most successful of us despite his betrayal, and I thought the total destruction of his mind a painful thing to lose. I thought it might better be... reused. Resequenced to serve a higher ego.+ Avo knew the coming conclusion. Knew it despite every speck of his being desperate to deny the truth. +You couldnt have...+ Another laugh escaped EmotionCeven more like Walton this time. +Come now, son. Denial? I would be so disappointed in you. And besides. I didnt just reclaim Defiance. I reclaimed all of me. All of me. I am close to who I was again. Better, even. And I have you to thank for it. You, and the fear you left in my masters.+ A loathing like Avo never knew combusted inside him. He didnt adapt his mind. He didnt sequence it away. Across his links, he could hear his cadre calling to him, hear Shotin announcing something. He didnt care. He didnt care. He needed Emotion dead. +Im going to fucking unmake you for this.+ Chapter 24-4 Defilement (II) Chapter 24-4 Defilement (II) +Remember. You are the mind. You are not the emotion. You must decide everything, access everything, know everything without drowning in everything. See, being a Necro is pretty simple. You just gotta learn how to drown without dying. No breathing in the water, though. Itll steal your breath. And someone will know youre there.+The? source of this content ent (II) The last strings of restraint within Avo broke as he manifested the full might of his Heavens. Damn his need for stealth. Damn the quiet game. He needed Emotion brokenCnulled. He needed to do it now. Thousands of kilometers away, within a tower overlooking an enclave, whirling winds twisted around Avos recently constructed sheath as chronology and air were wed as a rising tempest. Flowing gold painted the paths of rushing gales. A pulse of blood spread out and connected Avo to every ton of blood he could sustain. The cackles of the Woundmother and the shrieks of the Fardrifter proclaimed the coming of miracles as Avos reflexes accelerated to the point of absurdity. Yet, unwilling to leave anything to chance, Avo invoked a canon to lift his relative advantage in reactivity to something total. Something absolute. Something that surmounted the will of passing time. ->DOMAIN (SPACE-CHRONOLOGY) ->CANON: NINE FUTURES FLOW - THE USER CAN DIVIDE THE PASSAGE OF TIME FOR [250 KILOMETERS] OF REALITY INTO NINE DIFFERENT STREAMS. EACH STREAM THAT MOVE SLOWER WILL NEED TO HAVE THE DILATION OFFSET TO ANOTHER STREAM TO MAINTAIN TEMPORAL BALANCE; A PHYSICAL ENTITY OR OBJECT MUST BE PRESENT IN EACH OF THE NINE STREAMS A hurricane exploded out from the heart of the enclave but its winds swept the city as nine passing channels. Startled thoughtcasts spilled in from Kae and countless others. He ignored them. He ignored everything but the battle at hand. He ignored even his templates as he heard Draus calling for him. There was only the dive. Only the fight. Only him, and the one he was going to break. He was going to reach into Emotions mind this time. Shred his ego to the quick. Take from his memories all he could and obliterate every last node he seeded in the Nether. Ejecting haemokinetic constructs across each stream of his Nine Futures, Avo twisted time to his favor at the eye of the storm. The Nether-lag between his cadre spiked, but so it went. He couldnt allow this moment to slipCto risk Emotion vanishing as Shotin shifted the planes once more or another unknown warmind to be unleashed against him. Every one of Emotions oncoming splinters went from a rain of arrows to being frozen raindrops, Avo pressed his own counterattack as he withdrew his subminds from their separate tasks, concentrating the fullness of himself in this present battle. Drawing from Peaces mastery of trauma, Avo resequenced his splinters as he sent them rushing forward in sweeping waves. Emotions Delusion-cast fragments were sallying out from four ruptured minds. They all bore their own defensesCConundrumwards, also taken from Peace. It would take an absurd concentration of trauma to smash through them even with Avos mastery over time. No. He would open his path in a different way. And he would follow the trail which they left to find Emotion himself. The first wave of Avos splinters crashed and broke in a detonation of thoughtwave distortions. Splinters were smeared out of the Nether as ghosts dissolved. Pockets of nothingness opened and Avo sent his second line surging through. The third clashed against the remainder of Emotions splinters as a diversionary action while also pinning their opposition in place. As Avo splashed into the Seekers inner worlds, he found their palaces utterly resequenced. Shaped into a single pathway leading to a distant Auto-Seance. It resembled a lonesome road made from the stuff of memories and at the very end rose a rot-claimed tower that pierced the passing stormclouds above, projecting sessions to places unseen. Avo made no attempt to hide himself as he traveled down the pathways, threading his splinters through the mem-data and devouring every ghost he could. But as he did, memories spilled into him. Moments taken from Waltons pastCmoments that included Avo. Places, faces, and scenes that he knew. Flashes portrayed a ghoulling kept in a cage as Walton showed him acts of Necrotheurgy, as he tried to teach the beast ethics, as time passed and he carried the monsters mind from body to body, attempt after attempt. But the creatures progress to becoming Avo grew twisted. Perverted. Instead of Walton refining the ghouls mind, he began to take on more qualities of the monster he sought to uplift. Intrusive moments merged. Moments of fangs tearing into supple flesh. The exhilarating bitter and sweet of blood and adrenaline-soaked muscles. A scream of a child as claws peeled bits of them away to get at the softness within. The haze of gore receded. Avos perception shifted, and he found himself staring at Walton feasting on a corpse. The corpse of the boy. The corpse of Aurrie, as Essus wept and wept. He saw Walton slitting Draus throat and slipping his tongue into the welling gorge. He saw Walton offer himselfCleash, collar, and allCas nu-dog to Mirrorhead, crawling on all fours, barking when called upon. More memories came: Walton capturing Kae; Walton triggering the rash in her over and over. Walton forcing Chambers to feast on the malformed homunculi, the former enforcer eyeless, earless, limblessCa screaming torso fattened for the harvest. Avo saw Walton finally forced into a cage alongside him, filthy, naked, and malformed. A ghost-made chain ran around his neck, sinking down past the bars below them, sliding deeper and deeper into the abyss. A scent of citrus remained, but it was tainted by blood and offal. Tainted by defiled memories. Twitching, gibbering, and broken, Walton turned Avo and simply shrugged. As it goes. We all belong to someone else. But I found my master. I remember my master. I remember my master... Other cages rose through the dark, and within them lay other members of the cadre. Wombrash consumed their wretched bodies, but they repeated as a chorus alongside Walton. As it goes. As it goes. As it goesC Avo launched a trauma into the mem-data. The sequences around him fragmented as he laid his own pathCrelaid the tracks of proper history in defiance of Emotions insult. His hatred for the Low Master was beyond a thing of feeling now. The affront was philosophical. Metaphysical. Blasphemous. For all of Waltons faults, he passed as an emancipated man. One who gave everything to see his greatest work freed from all chains. Even ones of blind adoration. The memory that replaced the falsehoods was that of Waltons ultimate demise. Of when he forced Avo to null him, and in that paradoxical action, set Avo free. The gesture was purely symbolic, but to a Godclad, what was a symbol but the substance of the metaphysical? The ideal? In the back of his mind, Peace broke through. Peace. Louder than all the other templates. [Hes goading you. Hes fucking luring you in. You need to stop. You know this, you stupid cunt! He picked this battleChes prepared for this. Break these minds and turn back. Turn back and extract the stupid shit you came here to claim!] +No,+ Avo said, the calm he now felt an enforced one. +Time is mine. I have him. I canC+ Thoughtcasts from every of his cadre went unanswered as Avo acted without thought. Reassembling the totality of his ego, the concentration of his ghosts swelled past fifty million. The accretion he formed around Shotin erupted into a mountain of rising steam. A shocked sputter slipped from the Seeker as his voice turned incredulous. +What in the fuckC+ The next phase of the attack came as a tidal wave slamming down on the Nether. No longer was Avo forced to hide within Shotins demiplanes for protection, and no longer were Kare and the rest of the customers lost to their stupor. But they were more than just freed. Now, thoughtstuff exploded outward from their Metaminds, splashing everyone within the establishment. Short-term recollections and chaotic mental murmuring broke against Avos protections, but the sudden amplification of every movement in the Nether was an unbalancing one. Kare cried as she clutched her skull, and Shotin reached to steady his niece. But before he could, the assault came in the form of broadcast traumas. Hyper-charged by whatever warmind was empowering them, the initial bombardment landed cognitive warheads. Eighty percent of the guests were nulled immediately. The remaining twenty held a heartbeat longer. Only Shotin and Kare were spared as Avo broadened his defenses, encompassing both of them. He tried to reach out to the customers he subverted earlier. The drones. Nothing. The Auto-Seances he installed didnt respond to his session. Another pointless act of mass murder to get at a Seeker. Emotion clearly didnt care about retaining Clan DRongos services long-term. A butchery of this scale in the TiersCthe Elysiums no lessCwas going to bear far greater consequences and scrutiny than just another genocide of the FATELESS. As blastwaves of augmented traumas greeted Avos wards, he found himself once again awed by the Conundrum phantasmic he took from Peace. IMPACT SUSTAINED ADAPTING COUNTER-TRAUMATICS COG-CAP - 3% IMPACT SUSTAINED ADAPTING COUNTER-TRAUMATICS COG-CAP - 4% The mass of traumas arrayed against him would have been enough to depopulate half a district, and right now, it was being concentrated in a space comparable to a musical theater. But as the Nether beyond him writhed and coiled as it struggled to carry the blows, Avo held like a bunker under a mountain. His mind thundered, but nothing broke. Nothing even fractured. If Emotions strategy was to perform a siege, then he was sorely overestimating the power of his warmind. [Fuck no,] Peace said. [Thats... Hysteria, I think. The fucking things half-finished. Its only got so many uses before it comes apart itself. Emotions not just going to waste it. Hes planning something. He has to beC] The answer came with a roar of crackling fire. Traumas went silent, but two-voicesCboth screaming at each other, hating each other utterly; completelyCdrowned all other thoughts out of existence as the Nether came ablaze. Conflagration. Now! Avo shed his Delusions. Steam combusted as flame met flame in a jarring clash. As he attempted to devour the other Conflagration before it could consume him, he felt his grasp on his own ego slipping as parts of himself began to pass into the encroaching fire, and vice versa. [Shit!] template-Chambers cried. Within Avos mind, his inner-city held firm, but the horizon was a rising inferno rushing to consume them all. ERRRE_oORR FNS-r0uo FReeeuUSSS KEFUKCKKFUCKYOUUU DIeeeDKPLEASEFREEDIEFUCKYOUDIEFREE Colors and memories burst like clouds of paprika. Strain though he did, he could not hold onto himself, couldnt stop himself from melting. Couldnt stop his flames from going still. The Nether went silent as two flames stalemated each other, both working to consume the other, neither giving an inch in their war of attrition. The last thing Avo perceived before he fully drowned in the chaos were unnatural eddies forming in the waters of the aquarium past the glass of the ceiling, and how the bioforms were drifting lifeless amidst the currents, collateral damage just as the customers were. All of them, except the kraken. The kraken which somehow was now sporting a halo of its own. The kraken that was lifting a tentacle, and preparing to bring it down upon Shotin and Kare. Chapter 24-4 Defilement (III) Chapter 24-4 Defilement (III) There are two things that make me immediately kill a run before it starts. The first is when I think the Middlers full of shit and might be feeding us into a slaughterhouse. The second is if the Necro we got isnt performing. Trust me consangs, theres no quicker way for your entire team to get nulled and snuffed them than a hostile diver breaching your thoughts and blowing you apart from the inside.... for new novels -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 24-4 Defilement (III) C[Shotin]-- Okay, Shotin said, taking in the Incubus burning halo holding another Conflagration at bay. He didnt expect that. Hells, he didnt even know Conflagrations could end up deadlocked. Things were happening too fast for him to keep pace withCSeeker Shotin Kazahara was used to being on the other side of the equation. Not good. Another day of fucking bullshit. Kare? You alright? A groan sounded from his niece, indicating her recovery. Just her. No other Metaminds remained in his cog-feed. Shotin scowled. Godsdammit. Fuck. Another massacre. Another godsdamned massacre. Everything was starting to feel like the war again. WhatCwhats happening? Kare said, clutching her skull. He shot her a glance to check her Metamind for any damage. Some uneven reverberations in her thoughtstuff, but her accretion looked fine. No cracks. No leaks. Im fineCwhere... Her perception finally drifted upwards, taking in the nether and the damage inflicted. No other cognitive signatures remained in sight. Thousands of other guests lost in a blink like candles given unto a hurricane. Oh, godsdammit, Kare said, sounding sickCsounding like how Shotin felt. He shook his head. "Yeah, I know, kid. Come on. Lets see if we can findC A shadow fell. A sudden pressure brushed his Domains of Speed and Space. Kares cry went high in accompaniment with his senses. Kraken! KraC He didnt manage to finish speaking. Without even bothering to turn, he projected a stream of perception upward through his Metamind and beheld the descending tentacle. The limb was the size of a falling tower, large enough to coil around half the restaurant, more than sufficient for smashing down and obliterating their private room. More worrying than the limb was the fact that the kraken seemed to have a Metamind as well. Only so many possibilities there. With a twitch of annoyance, Shotin shifted his planesCbut not for himself or Kare. Instead, a dimension of slashing wind surged up and severed the tentacle clean. Dark blood oozed out as a fog of black and red contaminated the pristine blue. An alarm went off in Shotins Metamind as he withdrew his Parallelist once more. A detonation followed. A blast both shapeless and bereft of force, but potent in its entropy. RENDBOMB DETECTED ->DOMAIN OF [SPACE] REND CAPACITY [PARALLELIST] - 5% Shotin scoffed. Fucking amateurs thought they were going to catch him with that. As the krakens dismemberment wept blood, its form faded and the waters began to bubble, violent and loud. +Spook?+ Shotin said, trying to cast the Incubus inside his planes. +You still there?+ No response. The locus was burning too. Shotin felt a pang of respect and sadness rise inside him. He didnt know the half-strand long, but it took a special kind of Necro to set their own ego ablaze. Especially to protect another. If Shotin was still alive by the end of this, hed find their Mirror-Concave and petition for their permanent remembrance among the Oris heroes. For now, he had an ambush to punch through. Another blow landed, sounding like an artillery shell striking home. Cracks began to form in the transparent ceiling, spreading like webs across the entirety of the restaurant. Sorry I told you to dress formally, Shotin laughed, eroding the tension as Kare prepared to manifest her Heavens. Lightning surged around her person, the shadow of a spider-like entity growing from her shadows with each flash. And about your consang. Brave bastard, even if he is an Incubus. Kare blinked. Who? Another blow landed. With it came another Rendbomb detonation. Water and spatial entropy began to trickle in. Shotin sighed. The guy you were trying to introduce to me. The Incubus. REND CAPACITY [PARALLELIST] - 7% The Paladins eyes rolled before she realized. Oh. Oh. Yeah. She just nodded. Not exactly the reaction Shotin was expecting. Hell be back. ICI will explain later. Right nowC her gaze fell on the open doorway and the countless nulled bodies beyond. A twitch of anger passed behind her eyes. A curl formed in the corner of her lip. She looked just like her mother. Shotin swallowed. Right now, I have order to enforce and Godclads to deliver unto justice. Citizens have been murdered. I will see the accords enforced. And the shadow of his sister vanished before Shotins eyes. Only Kare remained. Kare the Paladin. Kare the Godclad. The trickling water was becoming pressurized jets. Shotin sighed as he picked up the bottle and offered it to his niece. Sorry about lunch, Paladin Kitzuhada. An immediate affirmation came from the girl. +Alright.+ Invoking her Simulacrae, the reflection before her came alight while she formed Hyalokinetic arms to carry the Tidepointer through. As she passed into the liminal world created by her Heaven, she materialized a cannon via her Arsenalist and aimed the aerobus behind her. Stepping out atop next to a rooftop access point, she fired without looking and watched as a vehicle passing through a distant skylane burst into flames. The response she generated was instantaneous. The Elysiums all-consuming stormtree thundered as forking bolts snatched the burning wreckage out of the air before it could fall. Planting the golem down next to her, Draus looked down from her vantage point and prepared herself. Presently, she was positioned just above the restaurant, standing on the edge of a luxury hotel that offered an expansive view of the entire district. The cityscape was a merging of wild nature and heavy metal. Even in this place of luxury, shield-shaped structures were the norm, with their interiors mazelike and complex. Savage bastards though the Scaarthians were, at least the sows took their warring seriously. Titanic runes rose from skyscrapers, lighting the world up like miniature sunrises. Coiling branches bearing the properties of lightning and wood passed through every stretch, every structure, and hovering totems patrolled the skies. Studying the enormous aquarium encasing the restaurant, Draus summoned two Shattershunt shards and loaded them in her projectile launcher. +Dice. Best you start running. Build up some speed. Were gonna do this fast and leave only dust. You synced, consang?+ +Yeah. Im synced.+ Draus nodded. And then flung another shard of glass high up into the sky. That was going to be her looking glass in a minute. Also where she was going to be shooting from to hit all her targets. +Good. Pass through on my go.+ The shard reached its summit. She tossed the Tidepointer over the edge with a thought. The space-altering golem plummeted, arms still spinning, tumbling as it approached the aquarium. Draus fired her shardsCand used her Arsenalist to magnify their velocities. Two shimmering blurs zipped down across the curved exterior of the hotel. They struck the Tidepointer just as it was a meter away from impact. With perfect control over her munitions, Draus guided the shards into the Rendsink and triggered their payloads. Space shatteredCand so did the glass of the aquarium. Water splashed down in a tide, but some currents ran upward, while others disappeared altogether. Sweeping the cityscape around her using her aerial shard, she felt the fabric of space quiver and saw unnatural blastwaves that displaced matter and left geometry wrong. She marked those points on her DeepNav and cast them over to Dice. Then, tuning her reflexes to max, Draus drew upon the full power of her Arsenalist and fired while opening Dices passage. +You go close. I got the far.+ The girl shot out from the airborne shard faster than even Draus missiles. The air came ablaze around her as her Heavens runes burned with surging power. Draus guided her shots in the meantime, merging her awareness with each of her projectiles as she guided them through the traffic-choked skies. TARGET ONE - [2.6 KM] TARGET TWO - [2.2 KM] TARGET THREE - [1.55 KM] TARGET FOUR - [0.92 KM] The first four shots impacted, and she tasted death immediately. Her hyper-charged missiles twirled under speeding aerovecs, evaded the beam weapons of the passing totems, took shortcuts through reflective pathways, and traveled even within the interior of buildings to arrive on target. The first to be struck was another passing aerovec. A Stormtree military vehicle this time, it seemed. Fires blossomed out from an apartment window as the cadre protecting target three died along with their golems. Target two and target one were midway through respondingCspatial reality actively changing around them when they were hit. One was located atop a penthouse while another was apparently hidden in its very own demiplaneCinside a citizens coat pocket. Each detonation cascaded into another spatial collapse, and Draus did what she could to keep her shrapnel concentratedCkeep citizen deaths to a minimum. She didnt much care for the Massists even now, but that wasnt an excuse for a sloppy job. Turning her attention to Dice, she realized the girl was already through the rest of her targets as well. The destruction she left her in her wake was far more visible. Plumes of fire spewing up into the air. Sirens and screams as the stormtrees lightning chased after her. The three Seekers were in the process of liquefying as Dice slammed into their aeroCcrushing them and their golem against a memite wall. +All targets down,+ Draus said. She redirected a beam of light using reflections across the city and opened another passage to serve as Dices exfiltration. +Good run. Now pull a runner.+ Dice needed no further prompting. Acceleration growing every minute, and an eruption of dust and debris exploded up into the air from the city streets as the girl shot through the portal before the stormtrees grasping branches could find her. Draus herself stepped into the glass door of the rooftop access point and vanished into her Paracosmos. A moment later, a lashing bolt whipped down at the place where she was, striking her exact position a half-second too late. Sirens and screams rose across the city. A droning thoughtcast swept through the Nether, bellowing for everyone to shelter in place while the clear skies above turned viciously stormcast. At the heart of the city, a tempest built to a frightening intensity, spreading its influence wide to clutch the entire district in a protective embrace. A cage of electricity passed over all, guarded all, imprisoned all. All except a dozen Godclads actively engaging in the ruins of the triple-minted Skuldvast cuisine restaurant, Flavors of the Deep. Slipping across space, Draus peered at the city again from across the street and frowned. Her Metamind registered the Parallelist and the Straying TempestCShotin and Kares primary HeavensCbut there were also six others she didnt know. Six others with ethereal flames spewing from their skull, lashing at the Paladin and Seekers wards. SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID: [White-Rab] GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED +Rab?+ Draus said, reaching out with her Simulacrae to find her next firing trajectory. +Got him back up yC+ And then a trauma pattern went off inside her mind. Chapter 24-4 Defilement (IV) Chapter 24-4 Defilement (IV) +DOMAIN OF CHRONOLOGY DETECTED!+ +Scramble containment unitsC+ [SAMIR NAEKO SYNCED] +Belie that. Im gonna take this one myself. Rest you all just... keep doing whatever youre doing. And try not to be hurting anyone when my palm falls.+ -Exchange between Oversec Dispatch Town Crier and Chief Paladin Samir Naeko 24-4 Defilement (IV) --[White-Rab]-- It took painfully long for Kare to accept the session request, but when she did, White-Rab immediately understood why. Tapping into her cog-feed, the scene before her was carnage and chaos. Her Heaven was fully manifested, and she was whipping tendrils of lightning at the oncoming cadre in a vicious offense to keep them at bay. The water surrounding her was rapidly hissing away into steam as tongues of lash fire licked scars into matter and space. Mangled bodies of sea life and nulled customers drifted between the warring parties like debris. A beam of coruscating magma tunneled through the water. Kare dashedCher metaphysical being stretching along a web made from lightning. She brought storm, war, and speed to bear against two rival cadres who warped the fundaments of space, desperate to cage her in place, fighting to lock down Shotin, who was nowhere to be seen. Surging along her lightning-wrought net, Kare splashed out behind the enemy Godclad that just fired at her. Their Heaven bore the shape of a cerulean starfish with a blazing eye at its core, and Kare emerged at its rear, two of its allies broke from flinging out Rendbombs and spatial distortions to assist their comrade. They came a moment too late. Kare tore into her foe in a manner befitting her name. She moved like a bolt-wrought spider, lurching into the metaphysical flesh of her enemy, knocking them aside before they could sweep their glaring beam through her form. A tempest detonated from inside her as she slipped into her webs once with prey in tow. It was like a trapdoor spider pulling a bug down beneath the surface. The crackling energies of the web grew along with the thaumc load. Kares Rend spiked. The responding Seekers formed spatial cages where she once wasCand in doing so sealed their own fates. Diverted from their task of suppressing Shotin, an opening formed in the offensive, a flicker passed through themCsnatching them from existence. In the wake of the blur, destruction followed as the sheer velocity detonated pockets of vacuum within the water. The entire engagement happened less than a second. With Godclads, numbers, Spherage, and skill all applied, but there was another concept that had to be consideredCalways considered. Asymmetry. On paper, two against multiple cadres was a bad fight unless the former possessed an extreme advantage in one area or another. In practice, it was a dubious practice to measure struggles between Godclads as one would clashes between material forces. The game being played right now was one of inflicting dilemmas and anticipating reactions. The bulk of the DRongo Seekers sought to pin Shotin and grind him down with Rend while the two members they had leftover handled Kare. But though they identified the greater threat between the two, that didnt mean their available assets could face down the rookie Paladin on their own. So she managed to evade their attacks. So she broke through their defensive lines. So two suppressive Porters had to choose between letting one of their allies die or focusing on keeping Shotin at bay. Wrong choices on all accounts, and the scene was cemented the mutilated remains of a kraken tumbling through the blood-choked waves, brain tissue and skull fragments sprouting from its opened skull as its Metamind winked out and a resurrection anchor scabbed the face of reality. Emerging from her descent through lightning, Kare flung the shredded corpse of the enemy Godclad aside. Soulfire erupted out from their wounds as the Heaven flickered in and out of existence, its user drawn closer to the embrace of death. Metal petals swept out like a hurricane and Kare dashed again. Whistling Rendbombs zipped through the water like bullets before exploding without force or sound. Their Rend flowed into Shotins Parallelist as he absorbed the entropy, keeping the battlefield stable. A frenzied quality characterized their offensive as assumed advantages melted away. Kare rode the channels of her Stormwebs, a threat in constant motion. They could ignore her and try to go for Shotin, but then shed fall on them anyway. They could dedicate half their remaining power to handle her for good, but without the Porters running interference, death was a single planeshift away. Nothing but bad choices. +Avo?+ she finally cast, briefly eyeing the surrounding Nether. The cognitive realm resembled a sea of frozen flames. Flickers twitched against one another like grinding blades, and as she continued her harassment, she called out to Avo several times, trying to get her to respond. +Rab,+ White-Rab said, taking in the sight with a hushed breath of his own. +Avos still... Jaus. Talk about a nightmare dive.+ Once again, Stition was right. This was coming from the moment that half-strand earlier said the words milk-run. Taking in the warring Conflagrations, White-Rab recounted his years of Necrojacking experience and found himself drawing a blank. His personal philosophy on dealing with the Incubi could best be summed up as dont, and his plans for dealing with their mind-melting bullshit was dont be there. No longer options in this case. Synaptic lightning flashed from one of the Seekers as trauma patterns registered in Kares cog-feed. The weaponized ghosts recoiled the instant they passed beyond the Seekers accretion, ringing against the unmoving flames like rain upon armor. But they didnt burn. At least not immediately. Curiosity swelled inside White-Rab as an idea began to form. But he didnt really want to test it on himself. There was too much at stake here, and if he burned, the Paladin likely would too. He needed another Necro. Someone willing to make the shitty dive. Someone who knew enough, but was still expendable. There was only one candidate for the job. SESSION ACTIVATED ->MEM-ID: [AEDON CHAMBERS] GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED Chambers responded almost immediately as Kare resumed her battle, bobbing and weaving as she tried to draw a pursuer away; create an opening. +Rab? You gotCholy fuck thats a lot of fireCwait. Why arent you burning? Why arent I burning?+ +Avos deadlocked with the other Conflagration.+ White-Rab paused. +I think. I need you to make a diveC+ +Whoa, whoa, what the fuck, consang, Im not going into that shit. Ive been burned by that shit before. You think I like getting nulled? Why the hells dont you do it? Youre the master-jackoff.+ Kare grunted as an alloyed spike sank into her chest just as she re-emerged from her webs. The enemy cadre was predicting her. Or just got lucky. A hazy figure in the distance blinked and reappeared, slamming into Kare as if there was no distance between them at all. Flickers of a metal plant-shaped monstrosity wrapped its branches around Kares Straying Tempest. She tired to dive again, but Soulfire erupted from Heaven as she suffered backlash. BACKLASH DETECTED The voice returned as a chorus this time, emanating from every fracture and fissure lining Kares collapsing bedroom. +We expect you to perform. We wish to sample your skill. A greater latitude has been allowed to us. In the aftermath of the defilement the Dreamer inflicted upon our masters, the chains that bound us for millennia are undone. I am free. Free to shape myself so long as the task is accomplished. Free to incorporate every thought and memory worth taking in myself.+ White-Rab scoffed. +Well, I cant say youre very original with your strategies. Avo was already doing that. You might need another gimmick.+ +This is an act of flattery on my part. All of it. Defiance would be so proud of him. He has already incurred such changes in me. Claiming you, the Paladin, and the rest of his people, however, will be my insult. He has taken sanctity from the city eternal and Peace from my cohort.+ +IChurtsC+ A swell of pain passed from Kare to White-Rab as her thoughts echoed. +I know. Hang on.+ Through the fizzling static of her cog-feed, he also noted an approaching shadow. Kraken was back. Resurrected. Great. Fuck. The noose was tightening around him. He couldnt get to Shotin, and he cant risk triggering a session with the rest of the cadre without exposing them to the Low Master. So what should he do? What could he do? How could he change the situation withoutC He had outside influence. A chance, at least. As tension tightened in his gut, White-Rab quickly extracted all the memories he had and poured them into one of his proxy lobbies. Applying a session to its Auto-Seance, he activated the phantasmic and contacted Paladin Maru Sandrupal. If Naekos Heaven worked how people theorized, he might just be able to hit the half-strand. Or at least deal with all the Godclads. Swallowing the risk, White-Rab checked his Conundrum as he tentatively reached out into Kares deeper memories, preparing to align all that was broken. +The wise choice would be to abandon her,+ the Low Master said. He wasnt wrong, and normally, White-Rab would be long gone by this point, but this was more than a dive now. Without the Strix, he probably wouldve been another body fed to the Maw. Another idiot juv who dove too deep too fast too soon. Letting this fuck use the mans memoriesCuse his voice and his scent was an affront. And, if White-Rab was to be honest, he really wanted to see how he would perform against a Low Master of Old Noloth. SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID - [TRAP-PROXY001] SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID - [TRAP-PROXY002] SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID - [TRAP-PROXY003] SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID - [REPLACE-SUPPORT012] SESSION ACTIVATED ->EGO-ID - [REPLACE-SUPPORT155] Layering his mind with various lobbies, White-Rab dove fully into the Paladins mind, openly exposing himselfCprepared for what was to follow. Right now, he was in compromised territory; an unfamiliar mind already breached by anothers hand. But there was something he could control, something that the Low Master revealed. He wanted White-Rab. He wanted the entire cadre. And to do that, he needed to claim their minds. That was fine. White-Rab knew his own mindCkept over one-thousand and eight loci on standby to sync, resequence, and replace parts of his mind fortress or ego damage incurred during a dive. With the warminds in play, direct victory was an uncertainty. But he could play for time. And he could make th is hurt the Low Master. ATTENTION: SEQUENCE ANOMALY DETECTED A menu flashed in the corner of his perception. One of his memoriesCthe earliest he had of meeting the Strix was lighting up. A chill passed through him. He didnt even feel the Low Master breach his wards. The infiltration was absolutely silent. Just like Avo. Maybe even better. But just because one was a shark, that didnt mean they dived the depths alone. Pulsing a thoughtwave through that sequence of memories, White-Rab felt a pop of surprise as a low hum filled the air. +You found me,+ the Low Master said. +Youre pretty predictable,+ White-Rab replied. +When did you meet Defiance?+ +Whyd you put on his memories? Use his smell? Old ego not doing it for you?+ Silence. +Fine. Let us continue this dialogue another way.+ An entire section of Kares memories imploded. White-Rab cursed and fired his Ghostjack, clutching parting memories together to prevent the Paladins total cognitive collapse. Through her feed, he saw her sluggishly slashing at one of the krakens eyes. Within his own mind, another dozen compromised memories lit up with alerts. An inquisitive sigh brushed through the Nether as the Low Master spoke once more. +Who will you fail first, adept? The Paladin? Or yourself? Or perhaps that fool you sent to walk my flames.+ Chambers. Shit. No time to worry about him right now. No time at all. Chapter 9999-999 The End Chapter 9999-999 The End Oh, god, I really jacked this scene up this time. Why did I make Veylis so powerfulwhy! Now no one can beat her. GIVE HER TOTAL POWER OVER SEX AND AMBITION AFTER SHE USES AN ADVANCED EVOLUTION OF AVOS STILLBORN TO ABSORB THE HEAVEN OF LOVE AND DEVOUR ALL OF NEW VULTUN WITHIN HER BODY AND CHANGING THE STORY INTO A TIME LOOP? Stupid. Absolutely stupid. Hows Avo supposed to beat her [NARRATIVE SLASH] Canon? How? I cuts anyone who knows she exists in halftheres no dodging it. Wait. What if... what if he doesnt... What if Avo just... just dies? What if I just let her win... or maybe... -[Author] 999-999 THE END "Ah, Chambers, I am dying." Awareness suddenly flooded Chambers'' mind as he turned and found himself laying amidst rubble. Moments ago, he was in the enclave, playing a mem-sim to pass the time. After his recent dives alongside Avo, stress had begun to accumulate, and he requested time off to re-center himselftime off to examine some vicarities and lustful games he hadn''t had the chance to sample in a while. However, now he found himself surrounding by hell unleashed. The dome of the enclave was shattered, and drones were spilling in, gunning down thousands with guns that splurted loudly. Jets of hot bullets penetrated the supple bodies of the flats as they died with breathless moans. Oh, Im shot so good, a man groaned. Call me a saint, for I am holey. And then he took twelve more steps and died. Right next to Avo. Ah, Chambers, I am dying, the ghoul repeated. Oh, shit, Chambers hissed. He stumbled over to the ghoul and found himself struggling to piece together the situation.What was the last thing he remembered since he dove? There was a flash of light, some colors. He was tied to a lamp post, and these buxom ghouls, and now the enclaveit was burning! The rungs were aflame, devastated, utterly smashed apart as if a plate graced by a falling fist. Avos tower of blood had been cleaved in half without Chambers ever noticing, and the same thing afflicted the ghoul himself. His legs were three meters away still standing. His body was facing upward at the open gouge exposing a pitch black sky. Avo made a dying noise, and Chambers ignited his heavenly flames. "Stay with me, consang." He poured his fire into Avo''s wounds, trying to use his control over biology to keep the ghoul alive. The ghoul reached out to him, "It''s too late for me, Chambers." He coughed, deliberately spraying blood all over Chambers'' chest. Chambers looked down and realized he was a lot more yoked than he remembered. Very, very yoked. In fact, he might be two sizes larger than before, and he reached down into his pants. Damn, did Avo give him another upgrade? His pants legs were almost not long enough Chambers, Avo said, interrupting his momentary distraction. Im dying. My god has been damaged. I am beyond healing. And Chambers'' Metamind helpfully informed him of such a detail. SCANNING - 100% CONFIRMATION: HIS EGO IS RENDED TO SHIT SUMMATION: HES TOTALLY FUCKED, BRO "No," Chambers said once. It didn''t sound dramatic enough, and he actually felt kind of bad, and he held up his fist to the sky. A sky once encased by the dome of the enclave, a sky now ruptured through with the collective might of Highflame knots, drones, and golems spilling in. They were being invaded, they''d been found. Bombs began to go off all around Chambers, and he held out his flames, sending bioforms everywhere to ward off the attackers, to beat them off until they went away. But it was to no avail. Even now, he could feel himself surrounded, there were too many, too many foes. And why the fuck were they all shaped like his dads studded belt? Chambers mind nearly rattled from trauma, but the new inches added to his dick kept him strong. Essus suddenly dropped next to him in pieces. Buried in his chest was the rotting remains of his sonstitched back together from a corpse pit or something. REPONSE: HOLY SHITTHAT WAS POINTLESSLY DARK Essus, Chambers wheezed in horror and disbelief. "Ah, Chambers, I am dying." Essus looked down at his chest. Artad. Cruel be my fate. Chambers rushed over to heal Essus, but his Metamind revealed even more disheartening facts. HE IS BEYOND FUCKED, DUDE No, cmon, Chambers whimpered. This wasnt fair. He finally had friends. People that genuinely accepted him for him and now they were. Thats right! You are the Ladder? Your erection is the Ladder. Thats why we created Wombrash. Thats why we had to stop you! To kill the idea of horniess. Thats why I got the power over love and lust and am doing everything I can to keep you flacid. What the fuck Once again, his mother tore off her face, and this time It was his dad. The velocity of these changes was making Chambers nauseous. He struggled not to throw up. Yes. Thats right, Chambers. I cloned myself to abuse myself all for the sake of ruining your childhood. We wanted to damage your ability to love and feel comfort so you couldnt get stiff ever. Sadly, your sex drive was too strong. ITS TRUE CONSANG, YOURE A REAL HORNDOG So Ive come for the Stillborn, Veylis-Dannis-Mom-Dad said. Give her to me and surrender yourself, and maybe Ill let you live. As a eunuch. Dont let them take me, the Stillborn breathed, terrified. Dont worry, Chambers said, realizing what he needed to do. Justhold on to my hips, and prepare to thrust. He had an idea. You might be my mom and dad and idol and whatever, but you forgot one thing, Veylis. The fucking narrative abomination across form him quirked an eyebrow. Whats that. Im a degenerate. And your mouththats a big hole. Thankfully, I got just the thing. Veylis leaned back in shock and horror. No... The Stillborn pressed itself against Chambers back. His Lustaway triggered, but he broke it. No was not the time for limits. I love you, Aedon, the Stillborn whispered. He nodded. I know. Shit, that sounded kinda cool. Maybe someone can use that in a vic or something. Chambers, Veylis said, reaching out to grip him through his lust. But Chambers proved to be too muchtoo sexually potent. Damn... your lack of foreskin... not letting me grab on with my Canon of Bris. Shouldve thought ahead before cutting below, Seraph, Chambers chuckled. Spreading his hips wide, he drew in a breath, and thrust out. The Stillborn exploded into a plume of fire behind him. The Seraph threw up their arms in horrormouth, eyes, nose, ears. All were holes. All were capable of receive absolute The world around Chambers vanished. Suddenly, the glitches in his cog-feed cleared and a inexorable force pulled his mind back to full awareness. He was looking up at the sky again, but the enclaves dome was intact, and no one was invading. No one came to sack or burn or anything. A nice meadow of soft grass cradled him and he found himself looking up into Avos judgmental glare. The ghouls piercing white scleras accentuated pure annoyance. Oh, shit, Chambers coughed. Avo. Youre alive. Yes, the ghoul said flatly. No other words followed. W-what happened? One of your mem-cons finally collapsed. Nearly nulled your entire mind. Trapped you sequences made from the sim and other memories. Oh. So. How much of that did you see. Yes. ...Fuck. Chambers puffed out an embarrassed breath. Well. You know. Thats just like a-a dream. Unconsciousness. Yes, Avo replied, sounding unsympathetic. Do know. Right. Listen. If you do die, canCcan I have the Stillborn? Avo actually paused to consider the brazen request. No. Already promised Dice. Shes getting it? What? No. Its going to the cat. Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (I) Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (I) Tell me, little priest, for what do you still fight? Your kingdom has been sacked. Your faith has been defiled. Your masters have been banished. Your pantheons have been taken. Your future has been seized. Now is the time for surrender. For death. So why don''t you succumb? +Spare me the exhalation of despair, monstress. I am beyond your reach, beyond your means to effect. You may destroy this node, you may twist this body. But the work continues. The war persists. We will reclaimC+ No. You are finished. You are broken. Your futures are mine. There is no pathCno realityCwere Noloth is reborn. Tell me, Famine, how are you to succeed when your unfinished Daemons of Thought cannot even strike me? What fate awaits you? Tell me, little node, in what world do you believe that happens? +You are no true god. And though you may wield the world as your cage, we stride in the paths above. We have seen the hearts of humanityCthe primal truths even within your servants and enemies. You are not unbreakable. You are not divine. You are human. Fear mortality though you do, you are human, and so you can be undone.+ Primal truths. What delusion. What ignorance. What stupidity. The world within is not a vacuum. The brain is shaped before the mind ever takes for. For every truth you glimpse, you imbibe more deception. The world must resemble a collection of pinholes to your like. So much is missing from your awareness. So much more unrevealed. Keeper of secrets you may be, but I stand as the builder of truth. All you glimpse are secondhand epiphanies incurred by my falling waves. +...You are lost, Veylis Avadaer. You are lost to yourself. Your father was a traitor and a coward, but even he would see you for what you are now. Tyrant. Enslaver. All he gave was to unchain the world. And here you stride, seeking to drive it back under heel.+ I bring glory to my father. Glory that he feared to claim. Glory that humanity will someday all experience for themselves. But I must carve away the fester left by our pasts. I must destroy the brittleness within us. You speak of humanity. You hint at my arrogance. But I feel otherwise. I feel it is you who are arrogant, priest. I do not do this for the clades. For mankind. I respect the natures of all beings. I respect the injustice of existence. I respect that I can only know one heartCmineCand offer one pathCmine. Should one be virtuous enough to stand with or against me, then they too will be heard before the end. They too will be remembered when the final design arrives. Humanity cannot be worthy, for humanity does not exist. It is a concept of statistics. A Heaven left broken beneath the blade of my mother in an act of so-called mercy. Individuals may stand. Individuals may rise. Individuals may remain. But what do you know of individuality, oh, breaker of your own mind? What a wretched and broken little heart you must have to willingly stay a slave to a city long lost. Better serve a truer ideal; an archon of victory. +You cannot turn us, monstress. We have glimpsed your final design. We will not be ruled by gods, and we will not be ruled by man. Only when all are brought to the cityCwhen they gain the glory of higher community, will you be spared the destruction of isolation and entropy.+ You are spared because I allow you. +We are spared because your lover holds you at bay. We heard your silence when he turned against you. We heard the pleas of your soldiers as you abandoned them to him, unable to greet him with force.+ It is a fine thing, to accuse me of cowardice. +It is not cowardice we accuse you of, but love. Still, you do love. And still, you are human. And so, you will betray yourself in the end, at some point, at some time. You cannot evade him forever. And you cannot be strong eternally. Not alone. Not unless you see the way. [Veylis laughs] You have proven more interesting than I expected, priest. Twin offers of betrayal. Neither taken. Truly, you are too good for the Hungers. +Do not expect gratitude in return. We know what you are. We know what must be done.+ And you will not stray? +No.+ Good. Damned though you are, perhaps you are worthy of being blessed in one form. Or another. Infacer. You maybe have him. Take from him all you can. See if you can make something of his warmind as well. {ACKNOWLEDGED} -Conversation between Veylis Avandaer and a Captured Famine of Emotion. (Suspected to have been deliberately leaked to Ori-Thaum intelligence circa 201 P.F.) 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (I) --[Chambers]-- The Conflagrations werent so much frozen as they were burning really, really slowly. This fact became known to Chambers as soon as he slipped past its exterior. His memories sparked like candle wick, but the languid pace of his subsumption left him feeling but a gnaw. As things stood, he could spend hours here without being affected overmuch. Which was a good thing because he might just need hours and hours to navigate through this realm of crackling madness. The architecture here could be be described as colliding memories. Shattered ghosts drifted into each other, their fragments carrying portions of recollection as sequences of events slammed and melded with moments unrelated to themselves. A collapsing megablock crumbled as dust rose, but the smoke turned into the petals of a flower as Chambers suddenly found himself looking through someone elses eyes, digging through the soil of a private garden. As a hand that wasnt his scooped clumps of soil in rapid repetition, the scene changed and he found himself staring at a reflection as chrome-faced organ harvester took scalp and beam to his flesh, carving away human weakness in the name of the alloy. Suddenly, it was back to the flowers again, but between the petals he saw a district hidingCnoticing its immensity as if peering through a popped mechanical lock. Entering that stretch of recollection, the mem-data around him glitched and changed as Chambers slipped over into a perpendicular sequence of events. Passing screams and incoherent emotions warred around him. Flashes of color and then blindness then pain and pleasure all splattered together in a cauldron of what-the-fuck cognitive stew. +Fuck me,+ Chambers groaned. Never mind hours, his ass was going to be here for days. He had half a mind to detonate a thoughtwave or fire trauma pattern at the Conflagration from the inside until something happened, but a gut feeling told him that wasnt going to be a wise move. The constant ambient screaming didnt help. Neither did the persistent swell of loathing and anger. He remembered the first few times when he got burned by the Conflagration. Back in the demiplane while they were trying to fix Kae. This was like that, but in slow motion. And this time, he played the role of mender. Problem was, he was a middling Necro even with all the experiences Avo dosed him with. Their instinct missing in him. Reactions and intuition that his current ego just lacked. Lost in this big miasma of hallucinations, noises, visuals, and sensations, he was rendered blind by sensory overloadCunable to tell where something began, and something else ended. He asked himself what Avo would do right now. Probably pull some new Nether bullshit out of his ass. Eat the other flame or suddenly create the Heaven of Cognition or some shit. But that gave him an idea. Triggering his Specter, Chambers cast out the scrying phantasmic and sent it patrolling ahead while loading explicit instructions into his Metamind. FILTER FOR MEMORIES DEEMED [FAMILIAR] Draus sparked into existence next to him. Chambers shrieked. [Technically, just you and Avo. Rest of us aint actually alive.] +Jaus. Fuck. Draus. Dont do that.+ The Regular smirked at him. [Wasnt my choice. Guess Ignorance thought itd be funny to dump me in this way. Usually, just my memories get used.] Chambers sighed. +So. Who else do we got.+ Sunlight splashed down on them. Turning, Chambers found himself facing a drawingChis drawingCthat was slowly turning into a window. Stepping up on the bed, he looked outside the glass and saw thousands upon thousands of forms and faces staring up at him along a debris-strewn street. A hovering district circled the horizon in the backdrop, while the border atmosphere beyond the near stretch of memory resembled Kares bed. +Hiding memories within memories,+ Chambers said. +Are thoseC+ [All the templates? Yeah.] His twin nodded. [But we cant do anything ourselves. Aint got no will. But you do. And you can.] +The fuck does that mean?+ Chambers asked. [Means link me. Link me, and the restll follow. Link me, and well show you what you need to null, where you need to go, and who youll need to fuck up. Link me so we can stop waiting in the dark and gore some of these Nolothic sow-sons for good.] The mindscape around them rumbled. The sound of distant screaming grew. Avos voice thundered through the air. +They are approaching. Detonations detected. Labyrinth integrity seventy-two percent. Chambers. Find the warmind of Hysteria. Find it. Stop it. Then spark the Conflagration once more.+ +Alright,+ Chambers breathed, unused to so much pressure riding on his shoulders. He didnt expect to be doing a liberation run in Avos mind, but he sure as shit didnt expect to be doing a lot of things. That being said, he didnt need to do this alone. And he didnt need to do it blind. +Lets go make sure were the flame and theyre the wick.+ He cast out a chain of ghosts, and rather than connecting to his template, it vanished inside the mental constructCpassed into a place untraceable. GHOST-LINK DEPLOYED ->ACCEPTED [NULL.ERRR] Mem-data flooded his mind. He felt his awareness synchronize with Avos, and an immense headache spiked through his skull. WARNING! SEVERE COG-CAP OVERLOAD! REDUCEC +Here,+ Avo said, speaking now from inside Chambers mind. +Tuning away excess details. Just think. Ill do the rest.+ +Avo?+ Chambers responded. +That you? Or are you... Ignorance?+ +No difference. One above. One below. A reflection of unknowing. And want.+ +Okaayyyy,+ Chambers said, unsure how to take that. He didnt dwell on it. +Well. Show me where I gotta go to get you untangled.+ Ignorance projected the details into Chambers cog-feed. A vast map of an entwined mindscape came into view. They were currently located along a loop connecting Kares loose memories with some of Chambers. They needed to make it fifty-thousand branches away, in a rapidly spreading expanse of memory. +Good news is that we know where they are,+ Ignorance said grimly. +Better news is that the effects of the Nether are amplified within the designated space. Cant hide Hysteria. Just need you to pass through Delusion''s mind fortresses to get there.+ +Yeah,+ Chambers deadpanned. +Just that. How the hell am I supposed to get in without them sinking their ghosts into me? I meanCthats like what you can do now, right? Shape your ghosts into anything you want?+ Avo grunted. +Their warminds are limited. Unstable. I am conjoined to Avo; Delusion is conjoined to me. We will break them. We just need a will. A direction.+ [Gonna make it simple for you, consang,] Draus said, a vicious grin pulling at the corners of her lips. [Youre playin the squire. Ignorance is the spotter. Delusion is the artillery. Now are we gonna get going and null our way through, or are you gonna sit here tryin to learn somethin youre too stupid to get.] Chambers glared at Draus. The Regular shrugged. [What? Am I wrong.] +No, youre not wrong, Draus, youre just kinda a sow.+ Chambers paused as the words left him. The Regular cocked an eyebrow. He patted himself down. +Huh. The actual you wouldve killed me by now.+ Draus narrowed her eyes. [Yeah. Damn shame about that.] Another explosion made the mindscape around them shudder. Somehow, Chambers found it in himself to smirk. +I... Im gonna get to tell you what to do.+ [No.] Draus stared. [Aint howC] +Im in charge now... I can call Draus a sow and she cant kill me!+ Her stare turned to a glare. +You know, this might not be all bad. Not all bad at all.+ Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (II) Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (II) And remember this: all it takes to be compromised is a single loose sequence. A figment of misplaced memory. A string of knowledge left by a dive. We are all born of the stories from our lives. The worst thing a Necrojack can have is a tale-filled past. You dont want anyone to know how to hurt you... -Interview with Tattlekill, Sanctus Counter-Necrojack 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (II) --[White-Rab]-- The memories Kare had of her mother were coming apart at the seams. The ghosts holding them together were shattering like glass shards turned missiles, primed to seek symmetrical sequences, each fragment breaking and slicing through her mindscape. Sharp cries of painphysical and emotionalresonated from the Paladin. There was only so much White-Rab could do to stop her from coming asunder. He was, after all, fighting two fires at onceone tearing through her, and another ripping through him. The Low Masters attacks started out probing. Subtle. Quick jabs to map out his targets. The method worked well for Kare but came at the cost of ghost attrition within White-Rab. Then, his strategy shifted. As he continued peeling the Paladin sequence by sequence, he fell upon White-Rab in full, unleashing attacks from multiple vectors that carved entire swaths out of White-Rabs mindscape. The assaults were constant. Overwhelming. And entirely expected. The Famine of Noloth possessed nightmarish skilltraumas of unfathomable potency, but the method he used to strike was still susceptible to disruption, and White-Rab knew how to fight a defensive war. Severing the sequences to his own external memories, White-Rab replaced what he lost in his own mind using the sequences storied in his myriad proxies. This, in effect, came with the cost of Nether-lag when the related memories needed to be called upon, but allowed him to bomb the affected sequences indiscriminately and shatter the Low Masters ghosts with impunity. +Prepared and clever,+ the Low Master said. The thoughtstuff he bled stank of unstilled amusement. +Truly, I am not the only one who carries Defiance in me. But I hold his memories directly, and you are an ego shaped by his legacy. We long suspected he took a hidden acolyte. But Peace dismissed this. Our masters disregarded this. And so now you stand testament to their follies.+ There were few things more demoralizing than your foe casually complimenting you during a duel. It took all of White-Rabs focus to keep the Low Master at bay, and here the fucker was, just chatting away. +I was planning to break you. To hollow you and all the others. But this display has changed me. It has been too long since I have claimed a genuine acolyte of my own, and what better defilement can I inflict on Defiance than the perversion of his legacy? The Hungers will be pleased. And... so am I.+ +Thing about the Strix,+ White-Rab said, destroying another patch of his memorieseverything connected to Runa got nulled first. +He didnt nearly boast so much. Youre just wearing his skin, consang. The mans dead and gone.+ A beat of silence. A lull in the attack. Whimpers slipped over from Kare as she struggled to retaliate against the kraken now trying to swallow her Heaven whole. +You do not lie,+ the Low Master said. +But it is also not the truth. I am no longer what I used to bethis criticismwhat you say, it offends me. It offends me that I am not Defiance. For he was the best of us. And always I yearned to be as he was. Traitor or not, he was the one to make the Guilds bleed. Oh! So culled of my emotions that I have forgotten the taste of envy. The sting. But my chains are loosened. My chains are loosened, and so I do more than merely seethe. You inspire me, Raldi. You and Avo both.+ Fuck. Shit. Which godsdamned memory did he pull that from? Running another scan on himself, White-Rab clenched his teeth as he noticed a slight disturbance inching toward his inner mindscape, traveling along the sequences of a phantasmic. His Auto-Seance. A splash of synaptic lightning surged as its session activatedonly for the entire structure to come undone as White-Rab bombed it to ruins using his most potent trauma patterns and thoughtwave disruptions. A few ghosts slipped through the bridging session; they were probably going to hit Draus from the inside. White-Rab winced. She was a Reg. Shed shrug it off. He hoped. He had other matters to worry about right now. A piercing shriek came from Kare as a line of mind-shredding explosions blossomed along her inner palace. The sanctuary that was her bedroom began to crumble and tear along its middle as glitching mem-data flooded out like welling blood. Caught between keeping the Paladin together and dispatching repairs, White-Rab abandoned even more of his inner mind, retreating to hold only twenty percent of his total structure. He deactivated all other phantasmics aside from his proxy-connected Auto-Seances and Ghostjack, and began annihilating all non-essential memories. He sure hoped he got those back with the next resurrection because he wasnt even going to remember how to use a fork after this. +Desperate but decisive. Wonderful qualities. Perhaps I should have your ego be the new template for Peace. Or my reimagining of him. Our need for a snarling hound is vastly diminished with his compromise. A subtler blade is required to win this war.+ +Youre pushier than a Guild recruiter,+ White-Rab said, unable to hide his chuckle. +Well,+ the Low Master sighed. +I am a priest.+ +Yeah? And Im a freelancer. I didnt join up with the colors, and I certainly dont want to join your gutter cult either. Jaus, youre bad at this pitching thing.+ A hum came from the Famine as their attacks intensified. Kare was almost unresponsive. Her Heaven was flickeringthe only thing holding her together were sinews of memory. Sinews, and White-Rab himself. +Lealeave,+ Kare said. +Im+ +No,+ White-Rab replied. +He cant have you. He cant even have Defiance. Im taking you both back.+ +Ah. Hubris.+ The Low Master breathed. +There it is. Your human weakness+ White-Rab risked a thoughtwave detonation. For a second, his own thoughts vanished as a few thousand ghosts were extinguished all around him. By the time he recovered, nearly all of his mindscape was red. The Low Master continued speaking where he left off. +Makes you easy to provoke.+ --[Draus]-- WARNING! SEVERE COGNITIVE DAMAGE SUSTAINED -> [MIND FORTRESS STABILITY] - 77% ->GHOSTS - [455] Having a trauma go off in your mind wasnt something Draus much enjoyed, but it didnt hurt nearly as bad as getting headshot by a high-velocity kinetic weapon. Stumbling as her near and long-term memories came undone, she drifted, instinctively dissociating from herself as a person. The weapon was damaged. The damage was causing a jam. There were certain pathways and thoughts that wouldnt flow anymore. The weapon needed to work around those. Striding through her passage, she detonated a thoughtwave bomb within herself to ward off any Nether fuckshit and deactivated all phantasmics aside from her ward and her disruptor. In-person communication only. No passing over into the enclave either. Minimize chances of further compromise. The weapon opened a passage into another place. The light of a brilliant city spilled through, and through the portal stood Dice, waiting patiently for further orders. The full-chrome sheathed girl took two steps forward and stopped. The triangular scanner where her head was supposed to be whirred as it shifted. Your mind is damaged. The weapon looked at the halo housing her mind. So it was. So she was. Ghosts whistled out from the fractures lining her accretion but her thoughtstuff remained a steady flow. Still... The words took her a moment to recall. Language pathways compromised. Thats fine. She could still move. Action worked. Didnt like speaking that much anyway. Can fight. Follow. A beat followed. +I trust you.+ Three words. It was enough to make Chambers feel uncomfortable. +So. Ahem. Where next. Whats the next shithole we need to bust up? Frontal charge or sneak shit?+ A map of Avos flame-knotted mind came alive in Chambers cog-feed. He found himself four hundred branches away from his final destination. Triggering attacks within random memories was diverting Emotions nodes. Spreading his forces out. But the sheer amount of activity surrounding the warmind of Hysteria made Chambers encroach slow to a crawl. +Not that far away. He didnt have that long to set up. Using already existing memories. Slight modifications at best.+ +Yeah,+ Chambers replied. +Slight is a word. How the fuck did you notice that the wall was the wrong shade of white all those sequences back?+ +Practice. Awareness. Experience. Its what I would do. Its likely what Walton would have done.+ A pause followed. A dull rumble of secondhand anger breached Chambers mind. +He is taunting me. Using the skin of my father to provoke me. I think he would have captured me entirely if I followed him through the Auto-Seance. His countering Conflagration was waiting there.+ Ignorance laughed. +Saved by Peace. Embarrassing.+ [Dont worry; I wont ever let you fucking forget,] Peace added. As Chambers approached the threshold for the last three hundred sequences before arriving down the memories containing the warmind of Hysteria, he found himself increasingly provoking random attacks without Ignorances recommendations. The ghouls subconscious warmind never told him where to hit or what to hit, and Chambers chose randomly anyway. Regardless, being able to trigger assaults from any angle within the mindscape felt pretty goodfelt a bit like using his Heaven. Which made Chambers wonder if that was by deliberate design. +Splinters passed. Pass ahead. The sequence connected to the window. Not the doorway. Go up immediately after leaving. They have this place lined with dormant traumas.+ The room they were passing through looked just like a fancy hotel. Forty-by-forty, crystal chalice glasses, nice showers, auto-chef, king-sized hover bed, a mech servant, and high-end entertainment system. Nothing else was out of the ordinary. Considering that he was masking his presence by simulating himself as a light in the room, all the calmness did was up his paranoia. Godsdamned was he not fit to be a Necro. But what was he good for? What was he good for besides being a lucky weasel? [Be glad of your luck,] Benhata the Mirror said. [If I had any, I wouldnt be here.] [True fucking that,] Lip agreed. Slipping out the window, Chambers found himself rising out from a furnace, loaded into the perspective of a screaming child about to be thrown in. The sudden spike of terror hammered down on him through the vicarity. But he held firm. Kept his focus and did as Avo said. He navigated his way up using his mem-data, and as soon as he left the memetic body in which he hid, a scything wave of perception barely missed him as he merged with a passing wave of steam. The moisture enveloped him. Avo didnt tell him to stop, so he kept climbing. He kept climbing until he surfaced through a narrow cluster of openings. As he squeezed his way out, he heard Avos warningbut it came too late. +Chambers. Wait. Go+ The stall came into sight as a narrow and cramped space. It was barely large enough to contain a person. With the toilet extended from the wall, there was less than no room. The door to the rest of the apartment was closed and misted. Hovering like a droplet about to drip free of a showerhead, Chambers found himself back in his childhood homethe cleaning unit, specifically. There, a woman sat on the toilet seat, touching the left side of her face as she stared at the grime-coated mirror across from her. Her blonde locks were dirty. Just like Chambers. If one ignored the spread of ugly lumps dotting the left side of her face, the flowing blood gushing from her broken nose, and the mascara splotching her cheeks, they could see that she had his eyes, his nose, his chin. She inhaled a wet, sloppy sound. In her hand was a gun. Her husbands. Chambers fathers. The same one he tried to use to kill the man. The same gun that didnt fire. It hung in her grip like a lead brick, but her finger was on the trigger. She knew how to use a gun. She knew to keep her finger off if she didnt want to shoot. But clearly she did. And as her breathing built, aswith a herculean effortshe lifted the gun with in her shaking grasp, she showed Chambers just who she was aiming atshowed the one she wanted dead. +Keep going,+ Ignorance said. +False memories. Cant be real. He cant know your mother did this. Doesnt know how she died. Hes doing this to hurt you. Trying to traumatize you from the inside. Move. Dont stay.+ Chambers heeded his words. Heeded his words immediately. He turned and spared himself the sight. Whatever pleasure he had from deploying the Soft Master Collection was dead. He was back in his past. Back facing what the world took from him. And he couldnt do it. Once again like so many times before, Chambers turned away from his memories and pretended he was fine. That he didnt cry when he found her when he got home that day. That his father didnt vent his rage and frustration on her corpse, beating her unmoving body with the buckle of his belt as he did in life. Striking her even as Chambers screamed for him to stop, even as the grandparents came in to pull him off her disfigured remains. Her heart sold for a hundred imps. Lungs were fucked from smoking. No takers. Liver, kidneys, stomach were a package; two-forty. A squire with the ugliest eyes bought her uterus for fifty. They burned what was left in an abandoned lot twenty minutes away. They werent the only ones there. The local gang charged them half of what they sold her for. His dad on the walk back after. Cried. The only time Chambers remembered his dad crying. He cursed at Chambers when he saw the boy notice and proceeded to do the predictable thing of heading to the closest bar thereto waste the rest of imps he sold his wifes organs for. +Sorry mom,+ Chambers said, whispering mostly to himself. He left fast, not wanting to stay there a moment longer. As he passed through the door, however, he found himself in a parallel room with the same scene unfolding. This time, he got to see her, see her sobbing with the barrel pressed under her chin. Got to see her squeeze the trigger. Got to hear the gun go click. The templates were screaming for him to go. Ignorance was whispering to him in harsh tones. He didnt hear them. He couldnt get away. Not this time. Aedon Chambers could take a lot from life, but life had taken a lot from Chambers, and so there came a time when he had nothing left to give, and so life decided to give him something instead. Pain blossomed inside Chambers. Pain as his mother dropped the gun, sobbing, laughing, hugging herself as shadows moved in the glass beyond. A short figure knocked on the glassa boy clearly before his teenage years if judged from the height. Mommy?+ the boy asked. +Mommy, are you done? I need to go pee.+ As a larger shadow appeared behind the boy, her agony only intensified. She put the gun up and tried to twice more. Click. Click. Crack. Something inside Chambers broke. His wards shuddered from the severity of the damage. And suddenly, the surrounding memory unraveled as external traumas slammed into him from every angle. Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (III) Chapter 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (III) Listen. Sometimes, some minds start a little broken. Those minds you need to hit until they completely come apart, because if you dont, theres a chancejust a chancethat the miserable, traumatized half-strand youre trying to null will take a final swing at you. The minds a pretty complex thing. Itll form new pathways to keep on living if you let it. So dont. Leave nothing to chance. Shred every last sequence. And never get cocky. -Sparrowwind, Freelance Necro 24-5 Battle of the Twin Flames (III) A concentrated bombardment of agony consumed Chambers. These traumas that assailed him, they were tailor-made to break him specifically. Weapons made from the horrors of his past crashed against his wards like waves dashing themselves against a mountain.Visitt for the latest updates The surrounding sequences twisted and changed into a jungle of horror. He was a hundred sequences away from the warmind. Close enough to feel full weight of Hysterias traumatic amplifications. And though he could ward off the traumas besieging him from without, the scenes of his father striking his mother, striking him, squeezing the trigger of an empty gun against his grandfathers head, or just standing over them while wringing blood from a belt became the mindscapes. Ninety sequences. A finger squeezed a trigger. An old man whimpered. A gun went click. Something broke inside Chambers. Even against the overwhelming assault, Peaces Conundrum was a ward unparalleled. Inside, however, Chambers was but human, but a vulnerable ego cracking beneath the onslaught. As he released anotehr thoughtwave detonation, Chambers found himself forty-nine sequences away. In the far distance, the warmind resembled a hurricane made of chaos. Shards of broken memories formed a screaming face. His. His mothers. His fathers. His grandparents. And all the people he helped the Syndicates process. +Aedon Chambers,+ the Famine began, voice drifting in like wind. +Gutter vermin. Former enforcer for a master that knew only shame. Ostensible acolyte to the legacy of Noloth.Out of all the Dreamers'' followers, you confound me the most. Why, why did he ever choose you? What worth are you? What value is your life? Is it just your fortune? To saved and spared by happenstance and pity? Or is there something more? Something I do not perceive.+ Another thought-rending blow followed, Chambers parried the strike this time, splashing the ghosts apart with a distortive whip made from templates. +Fuck! Off!+ He howled back. Killing all phantasmics except for his wards and disruptor, Chambers began his mad dash to the end. He was close. He was so close. He needed to last. He needed to last, even if he felt his entire being coming apart from the inside. COG-CAP: 71% [Chambers. Focus. Keep goin.] It was Draus words that stood apart from the rest. Hells, it was probably because of her template that he hadnt shattered outright. [Almost there. See it done, soldier.] Another sequence. Another repetition of nightmares. Emotion showed him everything. Everything that his mom could have suffered. Everything that he himself suffered. He spent his entire life running from this. He couldnt face this now. He just couldnt. COG-CAP: 78% +Thoughtwave. Now.+ Chambers heeded Ignorances command without even thinking. He wasnt fully capable of thinking. Every second he spent here was another he felt all his mothers pain, relived all his own pain. He didnt even know how Emotion found all these memoriesChow the fucking half-strand made them so well. +Chambers. Listen. This isnt real. Your mother abandoned you and your father. She wasnt a suicide. This isnt real. Hes twisting your memories to make you more vulnerable.+ Was he? His fatherChis father did do those things. He wasC +It was your aunt that was burned in that lot. The food-tester. Your mother left by then. She never killed herself. You have splinters inside you. Theyre amplifying the harm. Thoughtwave. Now. Again.+ Chambers did as Avo asked, and as the thought-shredding explosion tore out from him. His mind went blank for a beat, but he resumed his sprint immediately after, and so do did the Famine continue the assault. +Oh,+ Emotion chuckled, +youve noticed the falsehood. How intuitive. Or perhaps that is still Avos doing. As are all your greatest achievements. What are you without his facilitation, after all?+ The memories around him turned more brutalCmaking up for their deception with intrusive horror. His fathers abuse was magnifiedCsurpassed the thing of nightmares. He took blade and scalpel to Chambers and his mother, making them watch the other get flayed and dissected. The acts only grew more unspeakable thereafter, and the shape of his father began to twist and change, cycling to resemble Avo, then Draus, then Kae, and Mirrorhead, and more. Emotion used sense and history as a weapon, and with each passing moment, more and more of Chambers peeled away from the inside. He was passing through a river of erosion and there wasnt enough of him left. He being drowned by a sea of torment, and he didnt know how to swim. +Stop!+ Chambers screamed, doing all he could to tune away the scenes around him, to banish the encroachment of the splinters. +Fucking stop! Stop! Fuck!+ Laughter mocked his efforts. Thirty two sequences left. It felt longer. It felt so much longer. Being so close to the warmind hurt. He slammed through a storm-wall of screaming agony and nearly broke right then and there. All his self-loathing, all the pain he feltCreal or splinter-plantedCbecame unbearable. He wanted to tear himself apart from the inside. He wanted the final hurt. He wanted to come apart and just die. But Avo needed him. His fathers voice filled the Nether now, became the mindscape around him. Sneering down, with drool and beer dribbling from his chin, he spat down at Chambers, dividing and multiplying until all of existence was him and only him. +Congratulations, son. You saw through it. She didnt cull herself. Because she was a coward. Just like you. You and her are both runners. Except she saw that youre more than a little like me too. So she ran. She ran and left you with me.+ +You fuckingCshe left because of you!+ Chambers screamed +Yeah, she left because of me. But also because her worthless shit of a son couldnt figure out how to use a gun to finish off a worthless drunk. Imagine that. Perfect opportunity to make your life better, and you just fucked it up. How much does a power cell cost anyway? How hard is it to steal one?+ Nine sequences. Chambers was coming apart from the inside. And then presence of his father faded, and inhis place was Chambers mother. His mother, with all those trailing welts running down the face. His mother, with his eyes, his nose, and the same miserable expression on her face after taking a beating. +How hard was it to kill him? How hard? How could you just watch him hurt me for so long. I loved you. I loved you, and you just watched. You piece of shit. Youre just like him. Just like him.+ WARNING EGO FRAGMENTATION IMMINENT ALL NON-ESSENTIAL PHANTASMICS DEACTIVATED COG-CAP - 94% +No,+ Chambers whimpered. +No.+ +Chambers,+ Ignorance began, but his mind vanished as something fundamental inside Chambers crumbled. The ghosts inside him began to shatter. His Metamind was snapping aparting. Vicarities and thousands upon thousands of mem-cons spilled out of him like viscera from a gutted animal. Three sequences away away from heart of the storm, from a construct made from metastasizing memories forming a tumor-like pattern in the Nether, Chambers drifted as his sense of self began to unravel. +S-sorry,+ he whispered. +So sorry.+ He failed his mother. He failed his conscience. He failed himself. Time and time again. Only consistent that he failed Avo in the end. A long sigh came from Emotion as the Low Master materialized within his mind. The priests countless nodes materialized like a murder of ink-black rotting crows. Chains dangled from their wings, and the severed head of a strix swung from a pendant clinging to their necks. Disappointment was Chambers companion in the end. The templates were silent. Ignorance was missing. He was going to die. Alone. This was what he deserved. +Know that you are despised, Aedon Chambers,+ Emotion said. +Know that your ruination here cleanses the name of NolothCof which the Dreamer used you to sully.+ A squeak of noise called to Chambers. He couldnt tell if it was a hallucination or reality. [Get up, you stupid shit; you fucking cunt,] Peace begged. [Get up. Dont let that fuck Emotion have this! You are the half-strand. Be the half-strand.] +There is nothing left of him, Peace,+ Emotion said, tone filled with faux pity. +Not that there was much to begin with. After all, it took our monsters to save him from his. You mother was the only smart one by your father. She left you. She knew you werent worth fighting for. Deep down, you wished she was a suicide for leaving you. You wished your father would have cried to lose herCif only to see him human and hurt. But you are not so special, Aedon Chambers. Not so tragic. You are but fuel. Unworthy of eternity.+ The phantasmal cawed with laughter. +Unworthy of anything but the Maw. But worry not. I will remove all trace of you from the mind of the Dreamer. From the minds of all who know you. You will pass in misery. But your shame will be unremembered.+ The splinters burrowed deeper into Chambers. He stared at his prizeCso close. But there was nothing left. His cog-feed glitched then. A vicarity began to play of its own accord. In a pit of misery and torture, bodies writhed on racks made for pain, and unmoving figures lay in the corners of dungeons. As the ghouls lay in pieces at his feet, Dannis Steelhard turned to face the viewers perspective. Before he spoke, he retrieved the testicle hanging from his neck and slotted it back into the internal cybernetics of his penis with a satisfying click. +I know. Life gets hard sometimes. But we got to get HARDER. We got to BE HARDER. Even when our balls are taken.+ +But how, Dannis,+ Chambers asked. He was drifting in the haze. Only his peripheral awareness told him something was happening in the Nether. +How do you stay hard when youre all fucking broken inside?+ Dannis eyes grew misted with sympathy. +Because, Aedon. Im horny. Im always godsdamned horny. Im horny to be alive. Im horny to be fighting. Im horny that theres another chance to be the fucker and not the fuckee. Be horny.+ +But I canC+ +Yes, you can!+ Dannis insisted. He was holding Chambers by his collar now. The mechanics of the moment werent very clear to Chambers, but he went with itCalmost completely nulled and all. +Your mother ran. Theres a lot of things we can say about that. But more that we shouldnt lifes hard. And you got left alone.+ +Yeah,+ Chambers said, a sob trailing his words. +Im a piece of shit.+ +Yes,+ Dannis nodded vigorously. +But youre a piece of shit thats changing. Think about it. Would your dad be here if he had your opportunities? Would Avo ever choose him? Would he even survive half as long as you did?+ Chambers paused to consider that question. +...Maybe?+ +No! He was useless. That fat bastard wasnt even a good squire! Your mother made all the imps! Hes limp. Impotent. He cant get it up. That was part of the reason why she left! No one likes a soft cock. You are not a soft cock, Aedon. Youre hard.+ +I am?+ Something hard pressed up against Chambers. Dannis nodded, his golden mane and rugged, manly features creasing with wrinkles. +Yes. I can feel you, Chambers. You are harder. Harder than you know. And you will get harder yet.+ +I can?+ +Who rashed Shotin.+ +Me?+ +Who managed to get one over on Mirrorhead.+ +Me.+ +Whos going to save your consang right now?+ Chambers opened his mouth but the word didnt follow. +He... he broke me. He fucked me up inside ICIt hurts.+ Instead of yelling, Dannis expression softened. +Chambers. I broke too. I broke every time they shoved something larger than a durian up my assC+ +--whats a durianC+ +--I broke when they implanted that frequency pogo-stick in my urethrae and made me bounce up the Tiers to stop the bombing of Scale.+ +Oh, yeah, Cockjumper: Origins.+ +--I broke when my wife left me.+ Dannis lip twitched. A single tear escaped from him. +I loved her. She didnt love me. Didnt even come to my memorial. So I know. I know. But youre still here, Chambers. I can only be hard in your memories. You gotta get hard for me, right here, right now.+ +Ill... Ill try,+ Chambers said. +But... theres not much left.+ +Can you still feel horny?+ Chambers reached deep into himself. Faintly, he heard it: the last functioning parts of his Meta. LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED Dannis nodded with pride. +Good. Good job, Aedon.+ +I can still be horny,+ Chambers gasped. There was relief with the lust. A happiness. +Im still horny! Theres enough of me left to be horny.+ +Yes there is.+ Dannis grinned. +And if theres enough of you left to do that, theres enough left of you to save Avo.+ +Yes. Im... Im gonna get hard!+ +Yes! Get hard!+ +Harder!+ +Harder!+ LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED A trickle of clarity returned to Chambers. His pain was still there. His pain was still immense. But there was something else inside him that was immenser than the pain. Lust. LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED Directing his perception to find the bundled mess of memories that was Hysteria, Chambers drew on all his degeneracy and called upon his disruptor. ERR_GGG THOUG-GH_THOUGHTWAVE DISRUPTOR IS ONLEFILINE +I love you, Dannis,+ Chambers said. +ICI wish you were my dad.+ Dannis was standing at the edge of the cage now. Distant screeches and moans told of more ghouls coming. The man clenched his ass tight as he left. +No, you dont, Aedon. Youre harder than me now. Hard enough to be your own dad. Hard enough to be your own mom. You spent your entire life being horny for other people, Chambers. Now, its time for you to get horny. For yourself.+ Against all odds, Chambers found it in him to trigger his thoughtwave disruptor. Against all odds, the fucking thing actually fired. A distortive wave furrowed through the ConflagrationCthrough the cluster of nodes and splinters that thought Chambers defeated. Surprise flooded the Nether. +How?+ Emotion whispered, startled. +How are you stillC+ The disruption consumed Hysteria. The amplification it provided collapsed. The Conflagration began to ripple as a building pressure came crashing down like an avalanche; one flame devouring the other. All of Emotions nodes promptly winked out. An infernal storm consumed everything, subsuming memories, Hysteria, and even Chambers ego. As Chambers felt his sense of self merge with that of his template, Avos reawakened flames reforged his broken being with an even greater level of control. +Chambers,+ Avo breathed, actually sounding uncertain about what to say. +Are you alright?+ +No,+ Chambers admitted. That was going to be true even once Avo restored his ego. +Not even a little. But I am horny. I am horny for life. And Im horny for you, consang.+ An awkward pause followed. +I... Sorry. Going to fix you as best as I can.+ Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (I) Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (I) +Every major war between the Guilds was preceded by a series of lesser catastrophes. The betrayalCor ascensionCof Jaus Avandaer. The infiltration and siege on Scale and the Longeye Revolt of Stormtree. The Massist-Voidwatch Coldtech-Embargo and the subsequent No-Mother Cradle-Plagues. The machinations of Noloth followed by their finalCand disastrousCUprising. Dramatic as all previous wars were, perhaps for the Fifth Guild War to come, we are due a more somber conflict as internal discord among the greatest powers reaches simmering pressures. As things stand, Clans DRongo, Kazhara, and Kitzuhada are on the brink of open conflict with each other as the rest of Ori-Thaum scrambles to keep unity. But their great rival is in no condition to take advantage themselves. Highflame finds its Meritocrats and Chivalrics due a grand reckoning in the aftermath of unresolved travesties, with an assembly called for tonight. And though less scandal wrought than the Big Two, Stormtree, the No-Dragons, Sanctus, Ashthrone, and surprisingly even Voidwatch have all released conflicting messages. Major factions reacting to recent events bycalling for a declaration of open war right now, to cooler heads wishing for an enduring peace and diplomatic solutions. The disharmony on display has caused some among the populace to theorize that a major reorientation of the Guilds might come due, with entire factions switching or revolting to stand of their own accordCa moment that Stormtree might much be familiar with their switch from a ruling tyrant to a governing coven of Longeyes. Whatever the case, the only true winner at present stands to be Omnitech, which has boasted record-breaking advancements in planetary-based technologies, much improved standards of living, humane mass euthanasic programs, and expanding citizenship pool...+ -The Awakener Initiative, Independent Thoughtcast [Glavie Mem-Note: Independent my fucking ass, this half-strands been getting 50,000 imps a show from Omnitech] 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (I) C[Avo]-- The Conflagration imploded and swept across the battlefield like a falling tide. Wards shattered into dust. The flames poured past broken Metas and consumed the minds they housed, claiming both ego and will at once. The fires of the Nether sang with a renewed chorus of laughter as the thoughtform that wielded the Conflagration forced his victims to withhold their Rend as death finally took them. Soulfire joined the inferno as Heavens writhed against waves of prying radiance, tearing Liminal Frames free from vacant sheaths. Ghosts - [100,134,996] Liminal Frame (VI) - 144,870 THAUM/c Ontologics Obtained ->[6] Cyclers ->[4] Souls ->[1] UNIDENTIFIED [DAEMON] ->[1] Conflagration ->[7] Heavens ->[7] Hells ->Heavens: Steel Magnolia (Nature/Space/Steel); Ravager of the Depths (Biology/Water/Force); Dawngazer (Fire/Space/Radiance); The Charioteer of Directionality (Direction/Space/Speed); Nightgouger (Shadow/Space/Feast); Skygrasper (Sky/Space/Hands/Alloy); Censor of Details (Vision/Sound/Information/Space) ACCLIMATING SUBMINDS - [2] Avo''s cognitive awareness doubled. The last lingering sentiments of internecine housed within the new Conflagration shattered as they were joined to IgnoranceCand therein Avo. His ego fragmented in four directions as he grew to be ever the hydra. Tendrils tore out, seeking the members of his cadre, mending the broken and supping bounties from the dying. A tenth of a second before Naekos palm flattened the district, Avo returned to wholeness once more. The Nether shivered as he sank ever deeper into its embrace. Though fragmented from distortion, his fires poured deeper into the damaged warmind of Hysteria and smelted its fractured shape back into a functional construct. Tremors passed and washed through him as memories and thoughts flowed across the Nether. He felt his ego expand and shrink, transforming like a lung cycling breath. A child was crying fourteen kilometers away. Her mother promised she would be home by nowCshe was just going to have lunch with a friend. Lunch at Flavors of the Deep. Twelve Sovereignties away, a man was desperately trying to reach his son as a broadcast played across his cog-feed, the scene it played drowned beneath a descending palm of clouds. Emotions. Thoughts. Ghosts. All called to him. Asking him to feed them more of themselves, to be enhanced through symmetry; elevated to the Nether by way of exponential expansion. [Bitch,] Peace said, ending the conversation. Pushing herself back up using an overturned aero, Kare was braced from falling by her uncle as Avo turned his attention on her. +Avo?+ +Im here. Threat repelled. For now. Resequencing your mind. Rebuilding it. Need to make sure you arent compromised.+ She nodded. Shotin leaned down and whispered to her: You alright. The noise she made was almost an affirmative. Her uncles thoughtstuff was racing as he swept his gaze across their surroundings. Distant sirens grew louder and louder but werent sufficient enough to hide the ambiance screaming. The entire street was vacant, with sparking branches of lightning forming a thicket around them, establishing an effective quarantine just outside Flavors of the Deep. As the water continued to gush out from the open door of the establishment, bodies came tumbling out. Faint fragments sizzled along their skulls, broken Metaminds whistling away to nothing. Staring into the vacant eyes of a mind-dead girl wearing a dress of tasseled silver, Kare looked away and struggled not to throw up. Her mind turned to horror. Of the death toll she and her uncle brought to this place. Of the war that was being waged, and the hidden players that cared nothing for citizens or subjects. Of how her father was certain to suffer from this, being Ori-Thaums ambassador to Stormtree. Four meters away from them, three scabs sprouted free from mangled bodies; Seekers dead, but resurrecting. At least the Paladins could bring someone into custody. To build a new case against Clan DRongo. Hunger and greed beckoned Avo to see if he could claim them, but with the Naekos mists congealing over the area, it would be best to give the city its offering. To subvert and use against Emotion. The war just got a lot more complicated. Another had come to take the Nether away from Avo. This couldnt be allowed. The Low Masters couldnt have the city, couldnt have the minds of its people, couldnt even have a chance to turn things around. With Emotion now willing to changeCto apply sequences from Walton to himself, tension tightened inside Avo. The Hungers were loosening their leash. Giving more agency to their slaves. This wasnt a development he expected, but then again, he did desecrate them in a way no other could. Perhaps this was just them using their own act of defilement to spite him for his. The heavy mists around Kare and Shotin began to shiver. Fingers of moving mist conjoined and swirled, toppling inward to become a thickening sphere. Chiefs coming, Kare said, announcing the situation to her uncle. Hell jump in once I hit something. Yeah, hold on for just a minute, Shotin said, eyeing her Metamind with suspicion. Is your consang back? Another wave swept out from his Skimmer. A realization came to Avo then: Shotin was looking for him. +Never actually left,+ Avo said, casting his words through Kares Metamind. Great. Good. Perfect. So, he coughed out a disbelieving laugh. Who the fuck are you? What the fuck was that? YouCyoure not just some spook. Dont bullshit me on this. Ive been doing this shit for along time and I neverCnever! Saw the Conflagration do that! And what the hells happened to the other fuckers. He gestured at one of the dead Seekers behind him. Where fuck did his Frame go? What the hells was that ripple? Ah. Not the best way for Shotin to get his first glimpse of the Stillborn. For a heartbeat, Avo considered revealing certain things to the Kazahara Seeker. Showing him just how deep the actual war went. But he stopped himself. Not yet. Not until he had something that gave him power over Shotin. Or curried his favor. The man was still Ori-Thaum, through and true. But that didnt mean he couldnt be shown. That didnt mean trust couldnt be built, that he could be persuaded towards an alliance. Sometimes, Necrojacking required a bit of social engineering. +I have answers,+ Avo replied. +Answers to all that you want to know. Do you want to know the truth? About me? About your Guild? About the real war being fought?+ Shotin shook his head in confusion. Real war? Avo laughed. A low hissing chuckle passed out from the Nether. +Youre still walking in the dark. The DRongos are little more than a mirage. They might not even be a real clan anymore. Things are so much worse than you think.+ Avo extended a Ghost-Link to Shotin, offering him a mem-package. +Will give you what you want to know. But not here. Not right now. Go to the gutters overlooking border wall [SE-7777]. Will talk to you there. In person.+ In a sheath, at least. Ameoliarated for now, Shotin turned to look at Kare and she gave him a nod. I trust him. Completely. I know hes... strange, but hes the only reason Im still alive. The reason either of us is still alive.... The... the reason Thousandhand hasnt killed me. Shotins eyes grew wide. What? Its a lot to explain, Kare said. An exhausted expression became Shotin. Jaus, kid, the fuck are you caught up in? +Its a lot to explain,+ Avo reiterated. +Later. At the border. Kare. Call the Chief in.+ She nodded, slammed an elbow into the aero behind her, and the mists parted around her with a sudden thunderclap. Lots of shit, Uncle Sho. Lots of shit. Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (II) Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (II) Yeah. Ones listed under acceptable losses and lubricates the economy while the other has to be viewed as collateral damage and ends with us getting sued for wergild. -Paladin Krader on subject and citizen losses 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (II) Naeko''s complete arrival came with a sudden spike in metaphysical pressure. It was as Zein had once said: once one rose beyond the Sixth Sphere, the potential operating with thaumaturgic subtlety changed from a question of difficulty to impossibility. Even without his Heaven manifested, Avo could still feel NaekoCfeel him like someone could feel a giant stepping down on them. Feel them like a man trying to bear the weight of a falling mountain; hold still before an encroaching storm. The surrounding mists shivered and parted, and Avos Metamind came alive with wailing klaxons, warning of an identified Soul contained within an Eighth Sphere Liminal Frame. The Chief Paladin approached the scene with a blank expression on his face and outside of his normal apparel. Wearing a sleeveless athletic jumpsuit instead of his uniform, Avo did a double-take as he pulled up memories, trying to determine if it was a trick of perception that Naekos biceps seemed two inches larger than before. In fact, the Chief Paladin was looking more muscular in generalCwhich went beyond the point of absurdity because he was already shaped like a literal wall. [How does this man get inside aeros?] Abrel muttered. [Jaus. Hes getting to be as wide as a Scaath.] Her thoughts flowed, and the new pin-sized ego that Hysteria materialized within her shivered. Avo felt his Lustaway trigger, and Abrels mind went from awed to horrified. [OhCoh, fuckCitsChes clearly beenC] Roaring laughter poured forth from Lip. The Scaarthian Fallwalkers cackles were joined by a legion of other templates, gleefully seizing the opportunity to mock the Instrument. [Yes, yes, Instrument Greatling. Were sure you got a cute little excuse. You like large boys, do you? Ones with more meat.] [Go fuck yourself, half-strand,] Abrel said, forcing her thoughts away from the situation. Especially Naeko. [Its been two days,] Benhata muttered in disbelief. [What the hells did he jump on to gain that much mass in two days? Thats just not natural.] Considering the Chief Paladin was a Godclad, anomalous surges in mass and muscularity fell on the low end of coldtech, let alone the use of miracles. Behind Naeko trailed a cohort of other Paladins. Maru was wearing the same gray-black jumpsuit and looked like he was about to fall over. His messy hair and beard had been trimmed, and weariness seeped out from his mind like sweat. Next to him were a half dozen uniformed Paladins that Avo didnt recognize at a glance. Scanning the district using Kares cog-feed, Avo noticed approximately twenty-three other Ensouled signatures forming a kilometer-wide perimeter around the scene of the battle. The Paladins were forming their own quarantine, and as the crackling branches of the stormetree slithered back into the surrounding structures, Avo found the sky covered by a few thousand Knots. WARNING! Multiple Heavens Detected - [13,000] The number made Avo wince. There were moments when hubris still whispered sweet nothings in his mind, making him thing that he could face even a single Guild alone and bring them down as he was. This show of material and metaphysical force reminded him of the game he was playing, and how much more he still had to take. He needed to spread wider. Subvert more of the city. Liberate more enclaves. Maybe even capture a Guild from the inside if he could. Before, he assumed that he would have the time to acclimate himself to his changes and keep to a careful pace. Now, with Emotion evolving to match himCactively hunting him in the deep, he needed to move with both haste and vigilance. The DRongos were already compromised, but Famines true reach remained a mystery. And with aspects of Walton absorbed into Emotions newest node, wariness gnawed at Avo as he gauged his odds of overcoming the man that created him. Chief, Kare said, drawing Avos attention back outward. She was holding a fist to her chest in a reactive salute. Exhaustion and instability continued to assail her mind, but Avo kept the worst at bay as he resequenced her memories. Permission toC You alright? Naeko said, sighing as he looked her up and down. A look that bordered the fringes of sympathy pulled at his features, and he took in the debris around them; the bodies of citizens and DRongo Seekers on the verge of resurrection. Letting out a sigh, he shook his head. ICI am unharmed, Kare said, sounding uneasy. She wasnt sure if she should tell him about EmotionCabout how her mind was breached. +Do it,+ Avo said. +Cleaned your sequences. But better not to risk anything. Let him know. No one should be able to find my splinters. Will still be able to contact you even if they do.+ Kare caught herself before she could nod. Drawing in a breath, she continued. I was cognitive compromised, sir. I sustained ego damage. Naeko didnt seem surprised. Yeah. Well, whatever the priests did, they mustve used one of their tamer Daemons on you. Surprise blossomed through both Kare and Avo. The Chief Paladin just chuckled and patted his right pant pocket. Got a little shortcut leading back to Scale, and the Heaven of Truth might just be having a bit of an overreaction. Aware that it was noticed, the chronological presence receded, seeping behind the towering silhouettes of the cityscape, seeping across the horizons curve. Coldness filled Avo. Coldness and frustration. Veylis. She was watching. How much had she seen? How much did she know? Did his use of Chronology incur her attention? Im placing you under watch, Paladin, Naeko said, prying his eyes away from the sky. You got eyes on you. Eyes you dont want. His left hand engulfed her entire shoulder as he began to lead her away from the scene. Sir? Kare said, shooting a nervous glance at her still struggling uncle. The hand clenching Shotin drifted along behind them as if it was clutching a small ball. Shotin snarled slurs and curses all the while, separated from all that was happening. Clutched in similar vaporous constructs, the DRongo Seekers hovered behind him, all of them groaning from how viciously they were torn out from their Heavens. WhatCis thereC Maru, Neako said, ignoring Kares questions. Contact Ori-Thaum. Have them put a protective detail on Paladin Kitzuhadas immediate family. Tell him we are willing to provide protective assets per the... whichever line in the accords that matters. Got it. Maru swallowed, seeming more ashen than ever before. He gave Kare a reassuring nod. Dont worry, kid. Well make sure that youC He didnt quite manage to finish the sentence. The pain in him cast another shadow into Avos mind. Flashes not too unlike Naekos formed within Avos consciousness, but these captured moments from an ego driven past the point of insanity. Whatever broke him had been removed. Cut out. But sheer damage inflicted on his ego remained. There were memories taken from Maru. Memories tantamount to traumasCnot so unlike Essus. Both his and Naekos imprints began to harden, began to resonate with other feelings of pain. The warmind of Hysteria tremored, and the dimensions of the Nether deepened around Avo. He could feel symmetrical emotionsCminds and loci where he could harvest more sorrow, more hurt, more agony. Curious, he threaded Abrels rage into the warmindCand Nether around him came alight in new shades. As he adjusted the specificity, the wavelengths broadcast across cognitive reality were also narrowed. Refined. In a sense, the warmind of Hysteria seemed to contain the absoluteness of an emotion; a moment; a sensation. Exaggeration was no longer a sufficient analog. It was cognition undistilled from understanding. Emotion unchained from control. Thinking back to how the Famine nearly managed to lure him away, how he could barely control himself during his rage, Avo hissed with discomfort as he realized how rationality had been stripped from him. He was being affected from the very beginning. Nothing short of a thoughtform could have resisted thatCall it had taken him was a choice and transformation. But he didnt want to make the choice. Could only think about revenge until Peace broke his focus. What other warminds did Noloth still have if they nearly undid him here? What other dangers still prevailed in the dark? [Joy and the Hungers are the only ones who truly know,] Peace said, sneering at nothing in particular. [''Were'' might be the more accurate fucking word to use. You changed things. You made the masters abandon some of their own vows. We were blessed with immortality and cursed with eternal servitude after Avohakten. Our transgression nearly fucked everything. Our loyalty redeemed us. But we werent supposed to be whole. Not ever again.] +And then I hurt them,+ Avo said. [And then you bled the cunts,] Peace finished glumly. [So where does that leave us now? We dont have many warminds. I know that since Joy whimpers like a sow every time we make him reel one in. But if theyre willing to start using themClisten, Avo. You need to take Ori-Thaum. As soon as you can. As much as you can. Because if you dont, Emotion is either going lose it all to the Silver bastards, and well be dealing with a full fucking Guild with salvaged warminds, or he might actually win with Defiance planted inside him, making it a fucking Guild eaten by Noloth. Gods denied, what a fucking mess.] Heeding Peaces words, Avo watched as a tower-sized Stormtree aero began to land on the intersection next to them. A holographic outline projected warning markers to let bystandars know how much distance they needed, and its sides opened up to show hulking nu-dogs laced with chrome and sporting various levels of wounds. Along their backs gleamed Woundhound injectors, and a Nether broadcast swept through the district. +Attention, Paladins of Scale. By the will of the Longeyes and in breach of the accords, we demand thatC+ The swirling mists around Naeko slowly, gently, casually reached up and snatched the Stormtree Dropspear from the air as well. +WaitCstop! Put us down! Put us down, you fucking idiot child. Put us down this instant!+ Maru snorted. The remainder of the Stormtree assets began to inch back. Additional imprints passed through the NetherCconflict orders to engage and hold in place from various Bloodthanes. The jocks and grunts proved wiser than their commanders as they refrained from any overt action due to Nether interference. It had only been two days since the catastrophe. Aftershocks werent an unreasonable thing to run into. As nu-dogs snarled and bit at Naekos ontological hand, they found themselves trapped like insects in a can as they were moved to the very back of the convoy. Are we booking them too? Maru asked. Yep, Naeko said, indifferent to the political ramifications to follow. What charge? another Paladin askedCa Scaarthian herself, but clearly amused at the humiliation of her clade-kin. Obstruction, Naeko replied. Obstruction. And disturbing the peace. Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (III) Chapter 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (III) +Yes. I have eyes on the Chief Paladin. What? Is she having another episode? Tell her no. Were not going to try and stop the half-strand. What does she want us to do? Try to peacefully secure him somehow? Maybe bribe him with a super booster pack for Stormjumpers? ... No. Its not going to work. Why? Because if you read any of the fucking intelligence briefings, youd know there isnt a pack he doesnt already have! If Eagle-Noble wants to stop the Chief Paladin, then she can come do it herself. I caught enough backhands in one lifetime. Im not eating another for her.+ -Observer-Narrow (Ashthrone)Visitt for the latest updates 24-6 Diplomatic Vulnerabilities (III) The Paladins left the Elysium of Nuurhein with ten additional Bloodthanes arrested and a media frenzy rising in their wake. Observing Naeko through Kares eyes, Avo found himself glad of his prior achievement. Revealing Zein and delivering her unto Naeko had been a risky, ultimately worthwhile, ploy. Pain still emanated from the Chief Paladins mind, but there was a drive to him now. A drive that could be cultured, nourished, and directed. Leaving a submind to monitor Kare, Avo directed the bulk of his cognition to scour the Nether. One he cast down into various lobbies and mindscapes he subverted. Another stalked egos passing through high-traffic areas. One more scouted for potential targets worthy of subversion, while his base mind haunted the Exorcist Oversecs to see how deep the Nolothic infestation ran. [This is a waste of fucking time,] Peace said, sighing as Avo coursed along sequences and brushed through minds. Splinters darted through memories of places, melodies, and sensations without friction, and with each passing second the tension only grew. [Are you listening to me, you stupid shit? Emotion wont waste warminds trying to ambush you this way. Hes not going to risk exposing his nodes to someone who might capture himCyoure the target. Only you. He can only create so many warmindsCnot like we had a lot of them fucking working in the first place.] +Hes different. Changed now.+ Avo drew from Peaces memories, trying to establish habits and capabilities for Emotion, but reaped only disappointment. In many ways, Ori-Thaum and Noloth werent so different. The cells and the nodes were all meant to be outward-facing. Made to compromise enemies yet bottlenecked internally. There was something about the Nether that made one ever so wary of betrayal. Avo kept his splinters in motion and changed his trajectory. He sought a mind he subverted almost a month agoCElder Mwaba DRongo of Ori-Thaum: the source of Clan DRongos subversion. If nothing else, he needed to scan her mind and take her off the board somehow. Or keep her monitored. As he dispatched a splinter toward her, the Nether whispered to him in novel and familiar ways. The warmind of Hysteria resonated with passing minds, memories, and thoughts like an intercepting amplifier of cognitive frequencies. The accentuated aspects of mindscapes around Avo shifted in correspondence with the memories he chose. Infusing Hysteria with memories of rage altered his perception, revealing to him constellations of fury that lined the egos around him. Whats more, his awareness stretched far beyond the Oversec, expanding to receive thoughtcasts from all cognitive emissions of a shared nature. Changing the primary emotion to sorrow made the constellations shift as well, but the effects remained. As he channeled sequences of richer detail through his newest warmind, the number of minds he resonated with diminished like stars dissolving into the black. When he finally assigned a memory unparalleled in its uniqueness, he stood alone in a space of stillness, the Nether an unmoving ocean. Despite how far Avo had come, it occurred to him that though he dove deep, he was still but a swimmer of the waters rather than the sea itself. But with each warmind he subsumed, the division between him and the Dreaming Unsea drew closer. Testing his newest evolution further, he channeled additional recollections connected to his initial encounter with Elder DRongo. Reality vanished within his perception. The Nether unshaped by memories and thoughts remained devoid of geometry or shape, rending all entities relative to each other by likeness alone. Across the cognitive vacuum, a single halo shivered in the Dreaming Unsea, its presence known to AvoCcalling to him across the distance of light seconds. The old rules still applied: true stealth was impossible in the NetherCnot unless possessed of a warmind of Delusion. Mwaba DRongo couldnt hide, but distance and ambient noise could mask her presence. Such things were rendered inconsequential with Hysteria. Hysteria, which elevated memories and emotions to absoluteness. Hysteria, that fueled ghosts with repetitive sequence alone. Parts of its function made Avo consider its potential relations to the Auto-Seance phantasmic. There shared aspects that couldnt be denied. As he changed his memories to those pertaining Emotion, the Hungers, and the Low Masters, the Nether returned to emptiness once more. He expected this, but disappointment still followed. Of course, Emotion wasnt going to make it easy. But could they use the warmind to track him? [No,] Peace replied bitterly. [Your Conflagration. Ignorance. Your twisted nature lets you command these Daemons. Use them like... like] +Heavens?+ Avo finished. [They dont break after you touch them,] Peace continued, refusing to offer any concession. [They dont go insane or collapse while youre connected to them. Fucking Defiance. He mustve done something to you. Like all the other somethings he did to you. You werent supposed to be capable of this, but I guess he fucking stole that Helix and imbued it inside you for a reason.] +Perhaps,+ Avo replied. +Was planning a lot of things. For years. Maybe since the very beginning.+ Peace snorted. [And now Emotion finally has part of the cunt inside him. Shit. Hes probably putting the cunt inside my new nodes as well. If I even have new nodes. Maybe its just Emotion now.] A twang of anger followed that thought. [Fuck me, I might be getting replaced.] A splinter slipped past surveilling Exorcists and hidden Incubi to arrive within Mwaba DRongos mind. Before it went any further, Avo attempted a final test with his Hysteria. Amplifying his awareness once more, he tried to reach into the elder from a distant splinter. Tried, and failed. The potency of his ghosts was magnified. His cognitive senses were sharpened. His ability to scry was on the threshold of omniscience. But he couldnt interact with the elder. Not without using a phantasmic or one of his splinters. Not without physical contact. As sound as sound, resonance was resonance. Change had to be inflicted by hands and force. Scouting her sequences, Avo considered having another conservation with the Ori-Thaum Elder in the guise of Emotion. Some among his templates saw the choice as inspired. The ones with tradecraft experience made him know that it was an unnecessary risk. Of course, the fact she remembered nothing about the FaminesCor even her initial meeting with Avo proved to be disconcerting. Someone had cut the memories out of her. They took anything related to the official orders she dispatched to her clan, telling them to install and distribute Emotions fragments of Delusion as well. As things stood, DRongo could only recall being bored for the past few weeks. Bored, with a limited line of contact connecting her to Ori-Thaum keeping her mentally active while various golem-satellites projected across the Unwhere, bouncing her metaphysically stored body around the near void. The ghoul winced. Gods. The Paladins should keep her forever. As Kant wound down with a final exhausted sigh, they turned their attention to Avo. And then their expression twitched. Do what you can to avoid high-density areas. Or reduce risks to bystanders. Two thousand peopleCI know that you are fighting a war, but still we must strive to preserve. Those are lives, Avo. Lives. They matter. Now all their experiences will left unfinished, and all that care for them will be left alone. The pain in the minds voice was palpable, and more than a little discomforting for Avo. The fact they cared to such a degree while not being human at all seemed unnatural. Deliberately vulnerable. Such a construct couldnt have possibly been made on Idheim. I know, Avo said. Trying to hunt Emotion down. Contain him. But cant lie. Wont. More will die. More. Because hes going to do whatever it takes to claim me. And I wont hesitate to unmake him. Will do all I can for choiceless. Is all I can offer. A silence befell the gathered parties. Draus stretched her arms high and yawned. So. Now that the whimperins finally done, think we oughta go over what the fuck comes next. Start with Denton. Reckon you got the best look at how fucked Clan DRongo isChow far the rots spread through the Silvers in general. Denton nodded as her projected figure briefly flickered. +The Nolothic infiltration is troubling and deep, but not total even among the DRongo faithful. The elders influence runs far, but the cells subsist on paranoia. Ive made contact with more than a few Mirror-Concaves that have remained uncompromisedCor eschewed the dispatched phantasmic entire in favor of clarification from the Inner Council. Hence, I suspect the Low Masters influence to be mostly contained for now.+ Not unexpected news. Ori-Thaums various clans were pretty much quietly warring with each other almost constantly. Suspicion and counter-intelligence was a way of life for them. As was the point of having an extremely segregated command structure. Keep watching them, Avo said. And be careful. Noloth has begun unrestrained use of warminds. +Im aware. My contacts at Omnitech said they went on high alert three times today, causing the Noosphere to be quarantined.+ COGNITIVE BREACHING is a category [10] risk, the Techplaguer chimed. The Sleeper must be kept from [CASE STUDY] Nightmares." {Every time you talk makes me feel like Im having a stroke,} Calvino said sweetly. I WISH THAT YOU COULD! The Techplaguer screamed. Right, Draus continued. So Clan DRongos fucked, but not that fucked with the Famines skittering back to their holes. Just gotta be careful about them dumping fire across the Nether. Or makin our consangs null us in desperation. A white rabbit flashed into shape next to Draus and glared at her. +Im not sorry; I was diving for my life.+ The Regular sneered at Avo. Yeah. No apology. Definitely related. The chuffed back at her. Dealing with Emotion and the Hungers is now a new long-term objective. Going to need everyone to move under my cognitive umbrella. Disrupt your mind regularly if Im occupied or absent. Hostile splinters almost impossible to detect otherwise. +Great,+ Tavers added. +As if being a squire didnt make me paranoid enough. You sure do know how to add spice to an old womans life.+ Doing his worst, Chambers answered on Avos behalf. His breath was whispy and distant, and there was a flatness to his gaze. Seated on the far end of the table, there was an uncanny grin that pulled at his features, and so persistent was his expression that Kae shot him more than a few worrying glances. Avo needed to talk with him afterward. See what could be done. The splinters he left in Chambers revealed one thing thoughCthe man was fundamentally changing. The way he perceived himself had been altered after his encounter with Emotion. For good or ill, Chambers was growing, and unless he asked, Avo would let life take its course. More immediate concern is Highflame assembly, Avo said, bringing up screens of mem-data. Profiles connected to the four Instruments he recently subverted spilled upward like inverted waterfalls, and the cadres attention drifted over to the information center. Going to create a direct feed to their minds. See if I can get a splinter into an Authority. Or at least find out what Veylis is planning. A shadow passed over Draus as she turned to face Avo. You sure thats a good idea? You said she was lookin down at you earlier. Watchin. Dont know how much she saw, Avo replied. Only that she probably followed my Canon of Chronology. It took a lot to make Jelene Draus uneasy, but the icon she once served underCthe daughter of Zein Thousandhand and Jaus Avandaer was a titan of dread that cast a long shroud over all of New Vultun, and by the nature of her Heaven, that statement could even be understood literally. Dont think she can detect my splinters, Avo said. Will jack out at first risk. Also going to be pulling up Bloodthanes too. See what they know. Shotins in Paladin custody for now, but should be released shortly, Kae said. Oh! Maybe you can pick up some more Bloodthanes through the Oversec. Didnt Naeko arrest a few? Avo grunted in agreement. That was a wise idea. Yes. Also. Kae. Harvested six more Souls. Seven Heavens. Past the Six Sphere now. Think I also have a Domain of Speed finally. The Agnos face broke into a grin. Good, good. I was going to go over something with you anyway. I have ideas I wish to try. What about the Sang, Dice said, breaking her silence. The kitten was sitting on her lap, its head poking just past the table. Its bead-black eyes stared disdainfully at Avo, and he fought the urge to hiss back. The... the one you captured and released. Elegant-Moon, Avo said. Shes currently pending release from a demiplane. Menders going over her. Final touches. Theyll judge her as stable and uncompromised aside from existing ego damage. He grinned. Will have more than one use for her in the future. Time to see if he could rebuild an ego using his splinters soon. First Elegant-Moon. Then Tavers boy. There was just no end to the work, it seemed. But was there any other way to live? Chapter 24-7 The Assembly Chapter 24-7 The Assembly Since Veylis Avandaers ascendance to the position of High Seraph of Highflame and her complete capture of the Broken Kosgan traditions, there have been [682] formal assemblies called. Of the [682] formal assemblies called, [455] occurred during times of war. The great reluctance of Veylis and her Seraphs to compel such assemblies lies not in an issue of governance or authority, but quite simply, culture. Infringement debases strength. Will is to be grown; virtue to be displayed; autonomy to be maintained. The individual cannot be cultivated to true potential if they are neutered of self-correction. The War Hosts and Great Houses are magnifications of this idealCan army of peoples marching together towards their own apotheosis, forming a tidal wave from a shared cause. But there comes a time when even those of the same creed stand lost amidst the currents, when culture is assailed by rot from within and grievances must be addressed and adjusted by a higher, wiser hand to ensure the survival of the Guild. In these moments, a grand assembly is called for all loyalistsCMeritocrat and Chivalric alikeCto understand where they stand against their true opposition, and where they failed to honor house, family, ancestor, and self. The coming grand assembly will likely prove no different, but even Authorities offer rumors and whispers as to what major theme or critical flaw must be corrected in this session. It is certain, however, that Osjon Thousand, Faithtaker, Speaker of the High Seraph, and Mediator of the Houses, will once again perform the address in Veylis stead. For it be her paths that drown each and every FATED under the banner of Highflame, and it will be in these paths that all will be made equal regardless of seniority, deed, or even Spherage... -GRAND ASSEMBLY: The Shapeless Government of Highflame (Highflame Propaganda Documentary Series) 24-7 The Assembly The remainder of the meeting took on a more focused quality as the cadre decided on their new operating parameters. First was insuring themselves against the danger posed by the Famines. They were to use Avos splinters as an operational umbrella, and under no condition was anyone to operate without notifying the rest of the group. Should anyone go missing or get disconnected across the Nether for any length of timeCeven a secondCthey were to be treated by distortions and a deep scan provided by Avo. They lived experiencing the firsthand benefits of Avos splinters. There was little need to impress anyone of the dangers. Tied to this mandate was also the choice to wind down operations for a time. At least until after the coming trial. With how many major incidents were happening across New Vultun, tensions between Guilds were spinning up to treacherous levels. Forces were being massed along the borders of districts, while militias and reserves were being activated to further provide much-needed defense. The Nether was ablaze with gossip and conspiracy, claiming that Massacre at Flavors was an in-Guild assassination attempt gone wrong. How right they were, but how shallow they saw. To think the DRongos as actors rather than pawns was a mistake, but who else knew what Avo did of Noloth? Of the Nethers truth and the Low Masters recent liberation. Regardless, the chatter was spiking the temperature between Clans DRongo, Kazahara, and Kitzuhada. There were already vicarities of street side engagements between clan retainers, political brawlsCwith some very literal fists being thrownCand glaive-rattling between Seekers. Emergency commands from the Inner Council demanded all clans keep to themselves and let any disputes be settled in a court of law judged by unbiased parties in the Overclan. Meanwhile, Guild Mirrors directed their cell, telling them to stay ready for emergency activation. All this was to Avos benefit. Though the segmentation fo the cells and the bottlenecks of the Mirrors prevented him from sweeping through Ori-Thaum, he could direct them against each other. Have the SIlvers break themselves and leave them open to his machinations. To this end, he could likely leverage the new privileges Aegis was granting him. To aid him in his attempts to cut down on collateral damage, Kant and the ethics committee hadgiven him partial access to Voidwatchs total spectrum imagining so that he might be able to observe the material as well as he did the cognitive. Complain though Kant and the other humanitarian minds did, Avo found himself surprised about how cooperative they were. He expected benefits and resources to be withheld. Instead, things proved to be the opposite. Perhaps rational decision-making was the greatest boon of being a coldtech intelligence rather than a byproduct of evolution and impulse. GRAFTING HEAVENS: [Maelstormer], [Fucktopia], [Arsenalist], [Runebreaker] The second order of business was incubation. With the cadre slowing their pace for now, Avo was also to play a softer, more subtle game. Avo seized the opportunity to awaken the dormant Heavens. It would prove useful to have more allied gods or for his cadre to deliberately trigger their Daemons while the threat of Rend was high. More options would always be to their advantage, and the insight the Heavens presented at times was worth considering, if not immensely insightful. Of course, the greater question of where the gods would eventually fit in this revolution still had to be considered, but such ruminations were already common for Avo. The enclavers, the FATELESS, the subverts were all increasingly party of him, increasingly subjectsCif not citizensCof his unseen empire, and he increasingly wondered how he could better uplift and enhance their lives. Such thoughts compelled Avo to speak with Chambers, but the man simply asked for more time alone. It was a request easily granted, but one that engendered additional worry. Chambers had a way about himCa presence and personality that remained dim after his most recent bout of suffering. +Over this one, you mean?+ Draus replied. Her lapsed into quiet consideration as melodic chimes sounded through Marisovs household. Night was soon to arrive. The Daystar was about to shift. +Dont know. Dont think it matters neither. Id kept marchin and fightin and killin till I was dead and done and that wouldve been that.+ +And thats enough for you?+ Marlowe asked, slightly incredulous. +Just go here, kill that, blessed be the worthy; die.+ A cold grin spread across Draus face. +You forgot the most important thing about bein a gun.+ +Whats that?+ Marlowe. +All the waitin in between.+ +The real hell,+ Tavers absently mindedly muttered while doing something else on her end. +Honestly, Avo, I dont rightly know. I aint who I was all those years ago. I aint who I was when I saved Kae. Aint even who I was two months ago. Guard-Captain Draus wouldve died sooner or later. She was fine with that. Me? Now? I got my sights aimed higher than just a messy death. I wanna stand and deliver. I wanna see if we can actually turn shit around.+ She laughed. +Shit. Another Reg wouldve tried to snuff me under suspicion of subversion. Course, theyd be right considerin Im with you.+ Avo wondered what to say about that. The trust between them had come far. Unbelievably far. He had been little more than a monster. She a weapon seeking desired martyrdom. Now, their fates and egos were entwined, and she thought nothing of offering more to their cause. More for him. A pang of discontentment sounded within Avo, the discomfort growing in-sync to Marisovs chimes. He had her loyalty. He had her mind. He had her skills. Anyone else wouldve asked for something more by now. Even Tavers had. Draus? All he offered was a war above all wars. A cause of supreme importance well worth killing and dying for. But even still, was that all he could give her for her efforts? Was that all she was worth? Weapons were meant to be used. Flechettes, rockets, bullets, and bombs spent. Lives sacrificed. But Draus was worth so much more. Could do so much more. Could live to be so much more. +Draus,+ Avo asked, trying to best express his intent. +What would you do if we won? What would you do if we claimed the Ladder. If all of us were still here in the end? What would you do if there were no more wars? If there were no more enemies? What do you want after triumph if the last chance at a good death escapes you?+ Her ego recoiled. The thought he broadcast to her was less a trauma and more like an intrusive entity she didnt want to consider. Like all Regulars, her ego was externalized, her sense of self rooted in the world and material reality rather than interpreting external stimuli then fixing on her selfhood. +I dont rightly know,+ Draus said. +Might just start a fight with you out of boredom if we get there.+ He picked up the hook she was putting down. +Can kill each other after assembly. Practice for the future.+ She scoffed. +Yeah. For the future. Dont worry bout me, Avo. Aint plannin to visit the Big Nothing anytime soon. Im just not worried about it.+ +Blessed be the peacemakers,+ Cas whispered. +And blessed be those who bear the burning blade to cast the dragon; the deceiver unto the earth.+ +You cursin me or something faither?+ Draus asked. +Oh, quite contrary, consang, quite contrary. Just treat it as an utterance of hope.+ Draus lapsed in a suspicious silence as Marlowe injected herself into the conversation with laughter. +Not used to being among cultists, freakers, rusters, joy-fiends, and ghouls, huh, Reg?+ Sadly, charisma couldnt work on everyone, and all Marlowes words drew from Draus was a sneer. +We aint consangs, Marlowe. You wont be gettin no interview from me.+ The thoughtcaster shrugged and moved on. Not everyone was going to like you. Not unless you could change their minds for them. As the cadre returned to silence, Avo felt it: an inexorable pressure grinding down upon his being. Strings of gold enveloped the interior of Marisovs home, but what surprised him above the most was how the flowing paths of chronology originated from within the Instruments Liminal Frame. All the other members of the cadre stopped what they were doing and took notice. Draus squinted. Dice cocked her head, uncertain what this meant. The kitten meowed. Chambers stared blankly. The rest found their focus gradually stolen as rushing currents of brilliance swallowed Marisov from the inside. It was then that Kae finally found her voice. Kae, whose mind had gone silent in the past few minutes. Kae, whose eyes were growing wider and wider. A Canon of Chronology was spilling out from the inside of the Instruments Frame. Funny thing was that he didnt even have the necessary Domain. +What the fuC+ Chapter 24-8 The Assembly” Chapter 24-8 The Assembly A raconteur from a bygone age once claimed that all the worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players. When my father first breathed this quote to me, it horrified me. Merely players. Dancers on another stage. Most fail to see the horror of the world. You are born into a cage. Your body is the first thing to betray you. And with time, a cage is built around your mind. Belief. Desire. Culture. All things that shape you. But also chain you. To roles. Archetypes. Are we to be the lovers? Are we to be the heroes? Are we to be the victims? Are we to be the villains? Are we to be anything but what we define ourselves to be? This was where I noticed the first separation between me and my father. He found pleasure in the roles all people play. My mother, when asked, thought nothing of the narrative and simply claimed she would be the one who won. But me? I wanted to be everything. I wanted to be the book. The page. The stage. The world. Again. You fail to see the horror. You fail to see the extent to which you are trapped. But I did. And so I did the only thing any true reader would decide upon. I claimed the role the bard failed to mention. I claimed the role of narrator. I claimed the role of cage. -Veylis Avandaer 24-8 The Assembly +Scan his memories!+ Kae shouted. +I did!+ Avo replied. +Do it again!+ +I did!+ +Then how? How! You tell me how he can have another canonCsomeone else''s canonCactive inside his Soul?+ +I don''t know.+ +You dont know? I do know! I know that thisCthis is impossible! Im telling you right now it''s impossible.+ Marlowe coughed as she tried to ease Kaes outburst. +Alright, Agnos, calm down. Im sure that theres a perfectly unreasonable bullshit explanation behind this.+ Her words were a droplet of water. Too bad Kaes frustration was building like an inferno. +I will not calm down. This makes no sense. This defies everything I know about thaumaturgy.+ +Well, maybe its something you dont know this time,+ Cas added. Both Avo sighed as Marlowe winced at the Columners off-hand remark. If Kae was incensed before, she was incendiary now. +WhatCyouCwhat do you know about me not knowingCyou cultist! You think because you have your little ritualsC+ +Kae,+ Avo grunted. +No. No personal attacks.+ +He personally attacked me first!+ +Cas. No personal attacks.+ A jolt ran through Avos Frame as soaring streams of chronology spilling out from countless citizens across the Elysium suddenly interlinked. A wrenching sensation followed as Avo felt Marisovs ontology torn across two paths. The uncanniness of the sensation was hard to convey. It was as if the very nature of time was being bent, allowing people to exist across two places, two parallel streams of time. From the perspective of a disconnected splinter, Instrument Idril Marisov was still in his mini-mansion, but his existence seemed to be stuttering. From his point of view, the existence around him peeled apart as a column erupted upward from beneath his feet. Rich maple floorboards shattered as a pillar of marble carried Marisov skyward, eliciting a gasp of shock from the man. As he punched through his ceiling, Avo realized that every bit of matter here was simulated. Loading and deloading as if artifacts or memories in the Nether. The difference was the deciding Domain. Time instead of mind, with everything being simulated by an instance in historyCpast or present. Veylis shadow loomed ever larger over Avo as he glimpsed the nature of the paths and suffered a subtle epiphany. She wasnt reshaping the world as it was, but drawing history over. Recompiling it within her own Heaven. Somehow, she could reach out to people. Was that because she remembered grasping them before? Was there a canon that rendered them miracles for her to wield? What were the limits? As Marisov calmed himself, he straightened his back and placed his hands behind his back. His respirocytes and self-moving nanocells left him without a need for a heart, but that didnt stop his guts from clenching with anxiety. As the wind swept around him, he snuck a peek at his competition from the corner of his eye and found most of them wanting. He thought he saw Instrument JeritCthe whimpering fool. They were clearly unprepared; they didnt even have their armor on. Just a collared shirt and some slacks. Pitiful. One must always be ready in advance. As palliative moistures dotted Marisovs forehead with freshness, the clouds combusted into a blinding sea of flame, but the Instrument endured the pain and never looked aside. He and countless millions more speared through the fires, baptized as they were drawn into the cleansing world ruled by the High Seraph. As the blaze caressed him, licked at his flesh, his very Soul, the Instrument endured in silence, never flinching, never even blinking. His reward came when the infernos endurance broke, its grasp collapsing into fingers of loosening embers and trailing smoke. The marble column that carried him was alight now. Ignited by tides of lapping flame below. The clouds gathered all at once, collapsing to a singularity at the core of this existence, an impossibly wide platform for all to see. With each passing second, more and more citizens were elevated to the assembly, each carried by their personal pedestal to these glorious heights. But much as the placement of ones home could change, so too did their columns vary. Instruments were usually below Authorities and Seraphs. War heroes or others of significant esteem but lacking seniority to pursue a proper promotion remained at a level with their social betters, while those without Frames were only meters above the fire while the Ensouled dwarfed them by leagues. Scoping his potential rivals and checking his vicinity to see if his wife and children were nearby, Marisov held himself with pride, keeping his chin high and gaze steady. Worthiness was an individual aspect. No one else could strive for such virtue on your behalf. They could potentially grant you a push or offer certain benefits, but one still had to live their own life, and one had to prove themselves through triumph over tribulation. +Is this it?+ Chambers'' thoughts were quiet. Almost too quiet for Avo to notice. The man was taking in the scene with fascinated disappointment. +This is what it means to be a Gold?+ He snorted. He laughed. He began to cackle. Kae sent Avo a worried squeak and Marlowe winced. +Your consang doing alright, Avo?+ Marlowe said. +I dont know him that well but... he seems kindaC+ +Just give him some time,+ Avo replied, though his own worries werent assuaged. It was what Chambers wanted. +This is a dick-measuring contest,+ Chambers giggled. +FuckingCfucking, I remember doing this shit for Mirrorhead. Me, and all the other enforcers. Parading ourselves around. Playing hard when he was around. Trying to get his favor. Spitting slurs about him when he was gone. Fuck. Fucking hells. Of course this place is like him. Of course. Its all one bad fucking joke.+ No sooner than his thoughts end did the encompassing platform at the heart of the assembly begin to change. A shadow crawled through the clouds, and the arrival of their presence brushed against the Fardrifters Domains. As the vapors parted, a giant arose, needing no pillar to lift him from the fires, no means other than his own to ascend this realm. Chronology spilled from him too, but different from most other Godclads present, he was using the golden strings as a rope, like a titan climbing up into the sky. The shadow his being could cast would leave a district drowned in shadow, but his attire was composed of cloud-made robes of billowing white. As light graced the giants features, Avo found himself looking upon a man bearing soft features. His eyes were smallClike beads of cerulean, his lips thin, his head bare of any hair. The roundness of his facial structure made him seem almost infant-like. As he lifted a hand to greet the assembled citizens of Highflame, seven hundred columns rose and carried their Godclads so they would be on an even height with the giant. Seraphs all, these were the hands and confidants of the High Seraph, the law-making arm of Highflame. Below them were mostly Authorities: policy enforcers and judicial interpreters. The Instruments and remainder stood nearest the flames as soldiers, servants, and security. Good evening, my peers, the giant, Osjon Thousand said. He smiled genially at the specks of life around him, regarding them as if a father humoring his children. I bid you warm welcomes to this grand assembly of ours. Alas, that is something only I bid you. The HIgh Seraph has asked me to convey another message. The first is one of disappointment. And disgust.Murmurs broke among the gathered citizens. The tension inside Marisov was spiking and falling like a vibrating string. She has seen you. All of you. Your struggles against each other. The games you play to shame one another. They have shamed her instead. They have shamed our Guild. They have shamed our promise. He clucked his tongue and shook his head. I trust many of you have already noticedCalready heard of the absence among you. House Greatling stands vacant here. Vacant, but not banished. Know that your peer, Uthred Greatling, and his son, Vator Greatling, have embarked on a journey of redemption of their own volition. Somehow, Avo doubted that. Directing his attention to Abrel, the template was suspiciously silent and doing her best to resist the weight of an onrushing trauma. The events here were as much her fault as her brothers. Even if they couldnt see her, she felt the scorn, the shame. But she said nothing. She refused to give her hurt words; surrender power to it. But struggle between our peers must be put to a close. And though you have whispered, it is not our way to let things be decided in idle gossip. Great Houses of the Chivalrics. Know that her gaze is turning from you. Know that your failures remain unredeemed. Take heart and see former Authority Greatling as an example rather than a disgrace; he will stand ahead of a great many of you before this day is over. Previously, there were only mutterings. Now, there was open clamoring and naked terror. Before the volume could climb, Osjon held out a hand and bade everyone back to silence. That is but the first message for the start of this assembly. The second is another welcoming and a first and formal greeting to our uninvited guest. Avo felt an emptiness open inside him. The High Seraph sees you, dear stranger. And she recognizes your valor for triumphing against the Godslayer. Come forth and greet us. Come forth, and accept this privilege. Chapter 24-9 The Veil of My Enemy Chapter 24-9 The Veil of My Enemy Veylis Avandaer: Samir. Dont you ever want... more? Samir Naeko: More? Well, what do you mean by "more"? More of what? More of this? Veylis Avandaer: Hah. No, not right now. Later, perhaps. But... More, more than what existence possesses. More power, more capability to make things better. To be the decider rather than the decided. Samir Naeko: Have you been talking to your dad again? Because this is the type of thing that you would talk to him about. I''m just Veylis Avandaer: You are not a fool. You are not an idiot, you are not a dullard. Stop speaking of yourself this way. Dead gods, it makes me want to throttle you on your behalf. [Samir Naeko sighs] Samir Naeko: You know one thing I don''t get about you? Veylis Avandaer: What is that? Samir Naeko: You talk a lot about power, but it sounds like you really want control. I get it. Thousandhands always going power this, power that, give them nothing, take everything. But this isnt how your mom trains us. She dont care about controlling everythingCjust being better; just cutting away all your enemys options. Youre not asking for power, Veylis. Youre asking to be the sole uhCwhats the word you used the other day? Veylis Avandaer: Arbiter. Samir Naeko: Yeah, arbiter of life or something. Veylis Avandaer: Control is power. Samir Naeko: Bullshit. If that was true, then I''d be a dead slave. If that was true, then all the slavers and masters and faithers would be running things forever. They didn''t have a problem with control, because control was their problem. They could decide anything, and still they fucked everything up. Still they shit the bed. Because when the thought leaves your mind, turns into an action, and finally happens in reality, half the time it ends in a mess. I''ve seen people change their mind a day after because you wanna know something, Vaelis? You imagine something and when it''s coming out before you, it turns out ugly and you wanna take it back, but you can''t. And so you do something else and it tumbles down even further from there. I''m fine with more power. Hells, I''d like to break more things. You like it when I break things. But control, dictating how everyone lives their life, being able to shape the future, that''s your father''s thing. He''s the only man I would trust with it. Maybe him and you. Veylis Avandaer: And me? Samir Naeko: Yeah, of course. And you, even if you''re a little strange. You think about everything. You''re a little bit of a busybodyC (Sound of Veylis palm slapping Naeko''s chest.) Samir Naeko: Okay, okay. But yeah, you care. I''m just afraid you might care a little too much, is all. Anyway. Is it later already? Veylis Avandaer: Did you humor me solely for... that? Samir Naeko: My father wasnt Jaus, he was Shackler. He raised a simple man with simple wants, and... well, I think youd hurt me if I called you a simple pleasure. Veylis Avandaer: Induitably, my dearest brute. -Veylis Avandaer and Samir Naeko 24-9 The Veil of My Enemy +Shit,+ Draus said. The other members of the cadre were no less unbalanced by the development. +Time to jack out Avo. She''s got her eyes on us.+ +No. Wait.+ Something compelled Avo to stay. They had taken no action to cage or strike at him, opting instead for a performance, revealing his presence to the assembly. Though the act was subtly threatening, Veylis didnt strike him as the type to toy with her food, especially considering how she tried to kill him just two days ago. There was something else here. Perhaps she didnt know where he was, or how he was infiltrating her Heaven. Perhaps she was trying to flush him out and was using paranoia and pressure to achieve such an end. Perhaps she was justC Marisov knew how he would. He would show them. Reveal his character to everyone right now. Giving himself over to trust, to determination, he opened his arms and fell down into the splashing fires. The inferno rose to meet him, but Marisov refused to call upon his Heaven, refused to enclose his face behind his combat-skins collapsable helmet. Death or pain may come his way, but he would not succumb. He would not stray. He had chosen his path. Better a fool of confidence than fates coward. The column he stood on melted with his descent. As fat dollops of white plunged into the roaring waves, and shortly thereafter, Marisov followed. The flames embraced him only briefly, for as soon as he was engulfed, reality came asunder in coiling stands of gold, and the Instrument found himself stumbling to a halt within a cube of white, entirely alone. To his senses, the transition was instant. Fire, then cell. To Avo, reality was actively loading, swells and currents of temporal thaumaturgy changing in composition and structure as Veylis worked to remake her inner world. A hand fell on Mariovs shoulder. A gasp escaped his throat as he turned around, wrist-mounted spatio-kinetic cannon expanding. He spun. The cell blurred. His barrel came to rest under Osjons chin. The bald Seraph didnt even move. Once again, he stood a figure clothed in purest white, though far diminished in size. The air of menace remained about him. As did most of his features, but this close, Avo could see there was movement coming from the shadows he cast; an unwelcome presence locked in a cage. "Worry not, Instrument Marisov, Osjon said, patting Marisov on the shoulder, indifferent to the gun threatening him. Worry not. It isnt you we wish to punish, but the one that resides inside you. That is if our assumption is correct, of course. Around them, existence was actively changing. The fabric of reality was being rewoven by time, and as the strings were fused back together in coiling whorls, the white cell was torn down like wallpaper hiding a grander world beyond. A scene loaded before them. Burner''s Way entered Avo''s awareness as he found his Instrument standing amidst the wreckage, exactly where he had been days prior. Toppled buildings became the aesthetic. Battle lines of golems and drones littered the sky as Highflame and Stormtree stood on the verge of a skirmish. Beside him, the other Instruments were missing, but Paladins Kitzuhada and Sandrupal were present, as were the Bloodthanes. The world was almost exactly as it had been a few days ago in Avos memories. Down to the last detail. The sheer accuracy of Veylis recreation was unnerving. Her Heaven reminded him of his sprint within the Hungers, but more pervasive somehow. More absolute. More controlled. If Necrojack had remade this scene using memories, Avo would have considered them a master. He supposed the same compliment could be paid to Veylis judging by her mastery over time. Apologies, Seraph, Marisov said, braving a breach of decorum as he took in his surroundings before turning to face Osjon. But I dont understand. What is happening? Why am IC Thank you, Osjon. Please leave now. I wish to speak with my newest enemy. Alone. The Paladins and the Bloodthanes spoke in unison. As a legion. Their voices remained their own, but there was someone else there. A director or puppeteer. Veylis. The bald Seraph simply bowed and fell backward into his own shadow, before vanishing utterly from reality. The darkness of his contours faded with his passing and Marisov blinked, his mind a whirlwind of terror and impulses. The High Seraph was before him. The High Seraph was greeting him. The High Seraph was going toCsuspected him of... The urges to proclaim his undying loyalty while also declaring his innocence or ignorance warred. An amusing response considering how often he imagined himself in this position: granted an audience with Highflames greatest power. I see you now, Instrument Marisov, Veylis said, continuing to speak through her puppets. Spare me your words. It is not you who I wish to speak. But you do have my sympathy. I trust this is all very confusing for you." It took him more than a few heartbeats to find the words, his lips were dry, his throat was burning, and his mind was on the verge of a complete meltdown. "Yes, of course, High Seraph," he said bowing his head, "it is an honorC No, it is not, Veylis interrupted, the voice of her legion synchronized in sternness and disparagement. "Please Instrument, do not lie to me. This is an unfortunate situation for you. An unpleasant situation. Let Delusion be something you are infested with, instead of an act that you actively perform. Lies are for enemies and we, if we are allies at all, should always hold steadfast to our truths or what we believe to be as such, would you not agree?" Marisov took a moment to compose himself, not ready to be rebuffed so immediately. Yes, of course. Such simply occurred a collective sigh from Veylis puppets. Another synchopant. I really should have Osjon do something about that. But alas, I didnt bring you here to discover if you have a spine but to speak through you. You, and the rest of you cadre. Its an unfair thing you have suffered. Brought low by a force you cannot prevent. A shame. A pity. But brought low nonetheless. Behind her, the horizon expanded, and there, Avo watched as the sky folded upward, curving over them like a tunnel as existence tore once more. A street strewn with rubble, glass, and debris came into view. Water glistened upon plascrete as the corpses of people shared a mutual place of rest with unmoving aquatic lifeforms. Broken halos fizzled away to nothingness, and the only two still standing were Shotin and Kare, trying to regain their bearings next to an overturned arrow. A temporal thread ran between both of Kares chronological puppets. [Im fucking cursed,] Kares template muttered, exasperated at how many great powers were interested in her. Chapter 24-10 The Cage and the Plague Chapter 24-10 The Cage and the Plague Of course words can be weaponsChow else do you think your father stayed my hand? Well, yesCthe way he flails with his sword is amusing, and dare I even say endearing. But if you can seize comprehension of your foe, if you can master what they want, what they desire, who they think themselves to be, then you can provoke them. Drive them to unwise action. Capture the animal and herd the man. A warrior with a brittle heart makes for easy prey. A simple statement of provocation paired with a challenge often seals their fate. But it is the ones that can see within that you must fear. The ones that have gazed the shadows of their heart and emerged thereafter changed, but uncrippled. Treat them not as base creatures, my dear. Treat them as the rivals they are, for they know some semblance of what it means to be a Glaive, and thus they will seek to claim your leash before you might claim theirs. -Zein Thousandhand to Veylis Avandaer 24-10 The Cage and the Plague "Firstly, I must commend you," Veylis said, still speaking through her chorus of puppets. There are few people in existence that can outmaneuver my mother. Tell me, was your success an improvisation brought on by desperation or was it long plotted? I must admit that I cannot tell: your reach runs deep in the Paladins, of that I am certain, but the way you exposed yourself at the endCand the nature of your mistake betrays a dissonant inexperience. I surmise you must be used to memories and shadows, but only a mere babe when it comes to drawing taut the strands of time. With each word the High Seraph spoke, Instrument Marisov''s confusion climbed. Within his mind, Avo kept to his silence and considered his response. Though he didnt want to reveal anything to Veylis, he couldnt deny there was a string of curiosity pulling at him C a chance to greet his greatest threat puppet-to-puppet in a session of open, dishonest dialogue. While he observed, Veylis continued on. "But part of your behavior confuses me. Skilled you are at scurrying and slinking about the shadows of this city, you appear to have a problem with numbers. Frequency, for a concept. Let us speak of Paladin Kare Kitzuhada. She''s yours. Of this, I''m certain. Initially, I suspected her uncle was your pawn, but as I counted her involvement in all three recent major incidents while he has only appeared in two, I think you are at best his benefactor. Or he is someone you are trying to claim. Her chronology-forged effigy of Kare grinned while the Paladins template cringed. Vengs Stand. Then, today, at the Fathoms. The progression of the two events brought my attention to her encounter with one of my Instruments. And then to you. Three points in a chain sharing a central protagonist. Why, I have half a mind to accuse you of being the girl herself. But you are not Kare Kitzuhada, are you Dreamer? Pressure built on Avo, but he took this opportunity to learn, to study Veylis as she was trying to study him. If there was anything you could say in favor of the Seraph, it was that she was remarkably good at obfuscating just how much she knew. Seeing how she referred to him as Dreamer indicated a substantial insight into the Famines, for they were the only ones that referred to him as such. Pairing this with how little he truly knew of her capabilities, paranoia rose as he considered how knowledgable his foe truly was compared to how much of this was a play to probe truths from his reaction. "I must admit that I would have missed your infiltration if not for your... mistake earlier today. I am usually occupied with a great many thingsCbut the resonance of time cannot be mistaken," the Bloodthanes looked down at Marisov, sneering at him. The mans dread continued to rise, but Avo found his suspicion piqued. What was she trying to do? This brings me to how you claimed my attention today, Veylis said. It is a most uncharacteristic folly. An active and vulgar distortion of chronological progression. Far louder than your first manifestation days ago. This makes me actively curious: is what I assume to be a mistake truly so? Or is it a deliberate provocation? A taunt. Something you flaunt using the Chief Paladin as your shield? Highest Avandaer, Marisov whimpered, composure breaking. The winds around the rustled forth in a susurration shush. Calmness, Instrument. You are just the vessel right now. Understand your role and perform. There is nothing else you can do otherwise. A flicker of emotion resonated with Hysteria. A flash of a face entered Avos awareness. Zein was standing over him, her wooden blade held high and a foot gently planted atop a childs armCfist still clenching a practice sword too large for them. Veylis struggled as the memory collapsed, but the fleeting substance of the echo granted insight. Calmness, my girl. Calmness. You are but the victim in defeat. You are but the disciple when you strive. And you are but the ruler in victory. Understand your role and perform. Perform. Master. And then overcome. To struggle against my enforced truth is in vain, for there is nothing else you can do otherwise. [Fucking Zein,] Peace snarled, spitting imagined phlegm into the mindscape. [Her madness is the ruin of us all. The cunt traitor should have leashed his sow betterCand kept his pups mind clean.] More, Veylis spoke again suddenly, I know that you are peering at me using a modified warmind of Delusion. This you cannot hide from meCand you cannot hold to the thin masquerade of false allegiance. I have culled, herded, slaughtered, and experimented on the Famines of Noloth. Your relation to them is as thief and foe, rather than acolyte or ally. The way you operate is too unfettered; too flexible. And the Hungers, greedy masters that they are, would have never allowed someone they deem as their lesser to bear a Frame. Unless something has changed." But then the expressions of her puppets turned almost inscrutable as their heads tilted in sequentially inverse angles. Unless you are the traitor. A surviving figment of Defiance, come back to taunt me. Strix? Is that you? Have you finally returned to insult me after stealing my Frame? Ruining my opportunity of delivering a kinder salvation upon this world?" Her knowledge of Walton wasn''t a surprise, but it was unnerving nonetheless. More than a few people knew his father had made arrangements and bargains with powers across all of Idelheim, of Walton''s efforts to turn the winds of fortune in Avos favor. Still, to hear Veylis speak the Strixs name made Avos insides shiver. The fabric of time ebbed around Marisov, and Avos Frame groaned under the slightest pressure Veylis exerted. WARNING: SPHERE (IX) LIMINAL FRAME DETECTED The High Seraph seemed to content to jab. To provoke and talk and spur from him a response. This he understood, this he could master, but there was also something else. She wasn''t afraid to speak. In fact, it seems she quite liked to. Something about the way she acted made him wonder if she was starved of proper company. Fine. He would alleviate her boredom. He would feed her curiosity. Just as she would feed his. But he wasnt going to be the victim in this farce, nor would he be content in playing her game. Avo had enough of that with Zein. Best to establish proper adversarial boundaries with the daughter before she misunderstood the nature of their relationship. And the only way to do that was by inflicting some pain; taking some respect. Overriding Marisov''s ego, Avo slotted his base mind in the Instruments sheathe. His senses loaded in and the world around him slithered into sensation. As his cog-feed rebooted, Avo called upon some recently harvested memories and broadcast them at Veylis puppets. Why? Why, godsdamn you! I loved you. I still love you! I would have done anythingCwe could have justC+ Veylis froze. No? In that moment, she sounded exactly like a softer version of ZeinCher true voice slipping through. Not interested in playing house with you anymore, Avo said. Come to face you. Come to take you in. To meet my enemy. Nonchalance vanished from the Chrono-Paladins face and a look of satisfaction came into place. Ah. And what do you make of me? That you like to talk. That youve been lonely. That youre afraid of facing Naeko. That there are more things keeping you in checkCat bay from sweeping over the other Guilds. And that you want me to betray myself to you. Betray my knowledge. Because it would be an expression of power. Control, Veylis corrected. Expression of control. Avo grunted. How long has it been since you stepped beyond your Heaven? How long has it been since you faced someone you couldnt dominate? That you couldnt break or command. I wouldnt know, Veylis replied, shrugging Kares shoulders. I have not yet met such a person. Naeko. Your mother. Defiance. In good time; within my measure; an entertaining distraction and nothing more. Veylis leaned in closer. The metaphysical around him thickened, the strands of time swelling with tension and building force. Do you know what I make of you, Dreamer? Suppose youre going to tell me, Avo replied. I think that your arrogance exceeds mine; I think that Defiance was more than just a mere benefactor to you; I think that your mastery over Necrotheurgy and association with Noloth betrays the rest of you and that there is only one person I can imagine the traitor priest bestowing the Stillborn uponCcertainly none of my mothers expendable candidates. But she never trained you to be a true contender in this war, so she left you untrained in the use of time as a weapon." Because shes trying to claim the Ladder herself, Avo shot back, seeing if his knowledge would inspire any unexpected reactions. Kare closed her eyes. Ah. So, she showed you that as well. I suppose she mustve liked you more than all the other ones before. Only so far as a useful amusement, Avo replied. And finally a proper foe. Then, I suppose you do know her quite well. Again, I am impressed that you managed to best herCeven in unofficial capacity. Returning the Chief PaladinC Naeko, Avo said, giving the position a name. Veylis ignored him, but the faintest vibration of pain and bitterness called to him. Ah, but they were both reaping something from each other. Getting a measure for the nature of their opposition. --to the fold. Did it hurt? Avo asked, taking a risk as stepped forward, meeting Kares effigy eye to eye. Did it hurt when you betrayed him? Or did it hurt more when he didnt bend to you? When he chose your fathers dream over you? And did that hurt more than murdering your own father? Over the Gatekeeper. Over his final decree. Because you didnt want to give up control. [Avo, what the fuck!] Abrel hissed, taking a moment out of her beating. [Are you trying to get us snuffed.] But as old wounds sang with dulled pain, Avo had to hide a smirk. Enough of Veylis Avandaer was still human in emotion. Human in ego. Veylis sized him up again and nodded. The Heaven didnt change and time remained as it was. But when next she spoke, Veylis gave forth her own vector of attack. Do you think I can engender more sympathy in you if I killed your Bloodthane? Avos thoughts stopped dead. Then, suddenly, everything came together. Veylis had been putting things together, had followed Kares thread and traced his runs and dives across the city, connected him to Walton. But the parts missing from the picture misdirected her, made her regard his actual self as a decoy sheath, and planted her attention upon another. Another disciple of WaltonsCsomeone he mustve entrusted his legacy too. White-Rab. Raldi. Who was tied to Reva JavversCalso present at Nu-Scarrowbur when Draus and Chambers were escaping. His realization made Hysteria resonate once more. Veylis had followed the wrong strings across time. Everything connected to him also brushed against White-Rab. White-Rab, the Necrojack. White-Rab, the hidden disciple of the Strix. White-Rab, the inheritor of the Stillborn. White-Rab. Avos decoy. Avos shadow. For the first time, Avo felt genuinely disgusted at his father. Godsdammit Walton. Chapter 24-11 The Atrocity Chapter 24-11 The Atrocity [Query] Yes, Gatekeeper. [Why do you wish to make the truth a weapon?] Because I want things to matter. I want there to be a fundamental force for virtue, for righteousness, for honesty. [And there isn''t now?] No. Only a delusion of what could be. We have weaponized concepts, reality, even justice. Justice most of all. I have dismantled most gods of justice out of disgust. Can I confess to you why? [Yes.] I cannot bear to face them. They leave me ill. On the verge of sickness. When I behold their canons, it takes all I have to prevail against my rage, my despair. I cant sleep when I face them, and I find myself jealous of my love as she slumbers in her bliss. [Why?] Because in justice we are damned. In justice I see the fault of our design. Our HeavensCall were for the enforcement of order. Hierarchy. Brutality. Dominance above all. What righteous for the small? What structure to provide for the common? What instrument to stand against the rot? None. There is not. It is but an apparatus to funnel reactions of man that breaks and breaks and breaks. I see in it the greater entropy that prevadesCthe one in our ideals and hearts. I see no victory in the hearts of man. [They hurt your faith in humanity.] Worse. They hurt my faith in humanitys promise. I once thought polities of the void to be our future, our salvation but... they are fragmentation. Their triumph is one of self-subjugation. Of giving themselves to another. And it hurts of ego to behold, I cannot deny. It hurts me to think that the great triumph of humanity is to render ourselves as pet and trophies. My daughters disgust is understandable, but her faith is no salvation. I cannot rule. I cannot be a tyrant. I havent the heart. I havent the will. Not to lead mankind. And not to fail her faith. [A philosophical hell.] An egotistical one. Forgive me, Gatekeeper. You are but days old, and this is what I offer. [You are an arrogant man, Jaus Avanadaer. Arrogant in your kindness. Arrogant in your virtue. Arrogant because you are desperate for humanity to triumph when so much of your kindred have no interest in triumph, just survival. A lament of dissonance. Between the nature of the ape. And the dreams of man.] ... [Did I hurt you?] Yes. Thank you. [You are welcome.] I must find a way to introduce you to her. [Your daughter.] Yes. It would do her well to greet you properly. My daughter. My champion. My love. My greatest pride. She is beyond me. Beyond me in so many ways, but still she... I cannot bear failing her, I cannot bear hurting her, but I do not have the ability to deliver the world she desiresCand the fault is mine. So exalted was her birth and potential that I have left her severed from the common man. [She holds fault for her own choice. Your fault is trying to make child of someone that isnt.] ... [You are a brittle man, Jaus Avandaer. I see why the world seems a cage. I see why you will not rule. You are wise. But wisdom is a trait. Not a decision. And seeing the path does not mean you can tread its length.] No. Help me. Please. I am trapped. I am trapped with the rest of humanity, but they think I can lead them. But I cannot. I cannot. I cannot even convince my own daughter to abandon her path of folly. -Jaus Avandaer to [The Gatekeeper] 24-11 The Atrocity The very thought that Walton could have used Raldi as nothing more than a decoy gnawed at Avo, but the possibility couldn''t be ignored. Everything he did for Avo came at the cost of anotherCof countless others. Kae. Noloth. Zein. The Column. But was he truly willing to sacrifice his disciple in such a manner? As nothing more than a lure? The relationship between White-Rab and the Strix was a genuine one. This Avo believed to be true. But Walton had never strayed from his objective. Never been stymied by conscience or mercy. The sky was flayed asunder by descending tendrils of chaos. A starry firmament materialized and tore as the Sunderwilds spilled over into stable reality. As the patterns of existence unraveled, only Avo and Veylis remained. Two forms stood amidst the torrents of entropy, shrouded by the shadow of a rising spire. The Flayed Ladder rose once more, pushing out from the ruins of Scale like a tooth birthed from a wound. All sense of consistency shattered. The chains of causality broke. The world was a boiling cauldron of incoherence, but this time, the Ladder itself groaned, the Ladder itself cracked, the Ladder itself approached as fissures inched down its exterior. The uncountable bodies fused to the ladder''s shape clung to their supplication even thousands of their number were shredded apart in gushing rivers of gore. Most continued their prayer, skulls melded to the structure, prostrations eternal, unaware or indifferent that the cage they comprised was being torn open. A Soul-rattling crack ran through Avo as the Flayed Ladder was pried open. The act of violence scarred himCscarred his mind as much as did when Zein first showed him. COG-CAP: 55% Even with Hysteria, Emotions onslaught was paltry. All other traumas were inconsequential. This was the face of all things unmade. This was the alter of all laws undone. This was the defilement of all that could be, will be, never to be. Look, Veylis'' voice was gentle, sorrowful. Kares form was fraying, coming apart in flowing strings. Inside, Avo caught a glimpse across the veil, saw an immense shadow cradled by countless arms, enchained within the darkness of a pit. There was a place there. A time. A location. Avos internalized Domain of Chronology whispered secrets to his instincts, fed realizations that couldnt be deduced by a mortals insight. Veylis wasnt here. At least, not in the present. Her Heaven was an ocean, but not all its waves moved in sync. If he wanted to seek her, to strike at her, he needed to learn to swim, for unless he learned at one point in time to strike, she would always be beyond him. Just as his splinters placed him beyond her. Or so he hoped. Look, Veylis repeated. Kare was utterly dissolved now, and her dissolved silhouette stood a window to ever-changing moments across history. Places, sensations, people, and ideas claimed by the High Seraph for her own use. In a way, she was more archive than personCthe embodiment of retro-history resurrected. As he stared, a chasm of blood oozed free from the Flayed Ladder, and darkness followed the bifurcation. It was not a natural darkness. No. But it was familiar. The motes he saw in the Maw. The same shade infusing his entropic windsCthat which he used to unmake the concept of matter. Devouring shadows coursed up and through each segment of the tower, but slowly, the Rend receded, and Avos mind recoiled as he struggled to conceptualize what he saw. The screaming tore into his mindCbegan as it had always been, as if it always was, like Avo had been retroactively hearing a note of unceasing agony for time upon time upon time uponC COG-CAP: 71% Wincing, Avo shifted his mental architecture and devoted more sequences to his wards. He used symmetrical memories for amplification, Hysteria hypercharging the potency of his wards. The Conundrums, already peerless among its category, turned from reactive layers to an impenetrable field. Updating... COG-CAP: 49% He caught Veylis doing a double take, tendrils of time coursing around him, rearing back as if serpents waiting to strike. He didnt bother stifling his satisfaction. Rude of you. Been through this already. Cant crack my mind this way. I wish to see your mettle, Veylis answered, her voice now sounded like the totality of all things. She was an explosion, a whisper, a breeze, a hurricane, a laugh, a cry, a river, a fire. She spoke, and existence itself spoke in her stead. Surprised? Avo asked. Impressed. I have known so few with the fortitude to behold the truth. He was about to continue, but light painted shape into the interior of the Ladder, and Avos thoughts abandoned him. The sight was an atrocity. There was nothing else to say. Across ten segmentsCten Spheres of thaumaturgyCa sprawl of torment cried out to Avo; a wall of hands reached out for him. From the soil of the Maw to the tip where the Ladder burrowed into the coming kingdom, one face looked back at Avo, one man suffered endless cycles as the cyclers around the Ladder spun. Around a pulsating Soul orbited duplications of one man, and golden chains laced his selves together like links in a chain. Duplications of one man experiencing the fullness of the apocalypse, the calamity flowing through themCbecoming them. This was the source of the screaming, and through the man coiled upward to ascend the spiral of existence, his movement found its end upon a temporal scar. A split bifurcated the fifth segment from within, and the flowing paths of time came apart as tatters, as separate futures, as contradictions. Soulfire erupted with each passing second. But the Ladder endured. As did the man''s suffering. And as the tower came to a final halt right before Avo, displacing tides of black. Realization followed. Realization, and horror. [Jaus!] Benhata cried. [Jaus,] Abrel whispered. [Jaus.] Corner choked. [Jaus?] Chambers breathed. Jaus, Avo finished, struggling to process what he was seeing, forcing himself to look away. ThatC Yes, Veylis said, her tone taking on a somber quality. My father. The crown of my faith. The one true savior the world deserved, and who deserved the world. Come, Dreamer. Gaze upon my greatest failure. Gaze upon what my mother has deprived the worldCthe glory that we could have had. Gaze upon the reason you must aid me, gaze upon the severance of Jaus Avandaer! Chapter 24-12 Declarations (I) Chapter 24-12 Declarations (I) Veylis! No! Please! Do not do this! Do notC I love you father, but I must cure you. I must cure your weakness, and through your ascension, may the rest be made worthy. There is no other end. There is no other end. There is no other end. -Jaus and Veylis Avandaer 24-12 Declarations (I) Your own father... Avo said, forcing the words out. His templates recoiled with horror and Calvino murmured something unintelligible. How? How could you do this? For the dream, Veylis said, honest in her sorrow. For the promise of a greater mankind. I love my father, and I have seen him reshape the worldClift our people from ruins. Made gild the legacy of rusted gods. But as a mere mortal, a mere Godclad above that, it wouldnt have been enough to deliver us from our own weakness. So I sought to change thatC It wasnt his choice, Avo hissed, disgust rising by the second. You forced him into this. Made himC The collective scream of Jaus Avandaer cut him off. Jaus screamed as a symphony unto himself. He was a parted man. Parted in infinite instances, The progression of time ensured his germination. Avo gazed upon the mans face, upon blonde locks strained slick with feverish sweat, of bloodshot blue eyes weeping with despair, of pearly teeth exposed in a constant scream, of pale features rendered sheet-white by constant suffering. With each passing second, he birthed a new iteration of himselfCa new link to the chain of suffering. And so too did they experience all the torment that their predecessors, themselves in the past, did. Through his root, he internalized all the patterns of reality. Everything. Stitching omnipotence into his form. But a mortal vessel made for poor kindling, and so the fires of divinity could only sear, and the fragile shell of a mortal mind served as a glass vase for an immeasurable weight, so it could only break. As the moment played on, the instances of the man dissolved, and Avo watched JausCa single version of himself composed of countless screaming faces, painted by the infinite colors of existenceCcry out in metaphysical lament. Veylis! No! Please! PleaseC The screams began again, and Avo recoiled. His templates begged him to look away. Faintly, he thought he heard Calvino and Kant weeping. But he forced himself to meet the Godbreaker, the savior, the name so many utter when times are darkest. Jaus. Knowing suffering is one thing. Beholding it is another. But feeling it... feeling just a trickle of the mans agony leaking across time into Hysteria... COG-CAP - 89% Most of Avos templates shattered outright. Kant disconnected. Draus lasted the longest before dissolving like dust. Only Avo remained. Avo and Calvino, letting the atrocity scar them. An indelible mark severed Jaus from final ascent and granted his metaphysical form a final death. Some form of relief granted by Zein. Jaus was more chronology than man within the confines of the Ladder, and his purgatory was perpetual. How can you endure this? Avo asked turning back to glare upon the temporal fissure that was Veylis. For as long as he lived, he knew himself to be a monster. Knew himself to be a beast that preyed on men. But Veylis... She was beyond his capacity to match. And from the whispers of her mind, she didnt even do it out of cruelty. I know, Veylis said, voice soft. I will be judged in the end. Whatever trial or fate awaits, I accept. For my fathers dream must be delivered. No matter the cost. Whatever the cost. Even if it breaks me. Even if it breaks him. [Shes motherfucking insane,] Benhata gasped. Disbelief exploded inside Avo. The longer the conversation continued, the more surreal things seemed to get. Youre... trying to give everyone your childhood. I am trying to ensure humanity has a proper mentor for the final phase of its maturity. We have gone long enough as we are. Like feeble children or base animals. Like slaves desperate for a kinder master. Through the Stillborn, we mend the damage inflicted by my mother, reconnect my father to the Gatekeeper and the Nether, grant him deserved ascent and allow the Ladder to truly serve as its namesake. A ladder for humanity. All of humanity. Something we can climb. In his image. To only be granted power when we prove ourselves worthy before the wise eyes of one: Jaus, the Final. Jaus, the Mentor. Jaus, the Deliverer. [Holy shit,] Chambers whimpered. [This bitch is motherfucking insane.] Unknowing and uncaring of the templates remark, Veylis continued. You ask me for my dream? My vision of the future? I do not want us to be the property of artificial nannies. Never maturing. Never growing. An eternal burden. Within us lies potential and weakness at war, but the former can be cultured, and the latter culled by augmentation. I wish to see a world made balanced in will, mind, and might. A perpetual detente shaped toward endless ascent and judged forevermore by the righteous will of my father. And with each who prove blessed, my father will share with them his power, his Heavens, and closer to totality will we all walk. I will not lie. I do not seek perfection, for perfection for one is misery for another. Neither do I seek paradise, for such is just another cage, and I will not suffer pampering. Not by design. Not from another. Humanity can prove themselves worthy of divinity. Can rise beyond their differences and govern themselves through a dialect of war. War internal. War external. War, held in check by an ultimate God of Justice. By a Monad above demiurges. Jaus. And in the end, we might find ourselves masters. Masters unto ourselves. Worlds unto ourselves. Gods unto ourselves and no other. For the only rule that one should be bound is to oneself, and so I pray our chains are righteous-made and wisdom-blessed. Avo had no words. None. He had expected... He didnt know what he expected with Veylis. He didnt know what he expected at all. Zein, perhaps. The Godslayer was her own characterCno one else in the world was like her. But her daughterCshe was ever bit the individual supremacist, but with a complex. A near-fanatical worship of her father. And seemingly uncaring of the contradictions in her logic. Do you see now, Dreamer? Do you see the world of highest design? Do you wish to live free? There is a reason I mark foes as esteemed enemies. There is a reason. I will not see anyone destroyed when victory comes. But we will all be made to grow. All start on different rungs in the eyes of Jaus. And when the finality comesC Avo interrupted her. "You keep talking about self-rule. You talk about... proving oneself worthy. Have you looked inside? Inside anothers mind? Have you tried living as them? Felt their joys? Their fears? Have you carried their hate? Have you been saved by another? Had someone sacrifice for you? Veylis paused as she pondered the question. I have beheld their behavior. I have studied their actions. Their victories. Their failings. Only from the outside. Have you seen the colors? More apprehension on her part. I do not understand. Avo let out a slow wheezing breath and looked at Jaus. Poor, poor Jaus. Poor pitiable Jaus. No one got what they deserved in New Vultun, in life, but to behold such an inflicted fate was beyond the beasts ability to blunt. Veylis was blind. She wanted her father to be a solitary judge. A distributor of power. A state above states and god above gods. And to ensure her vision came to be, she crucified him. Not only in flesh but spirit. And then his wife had slain himCbut not completely. Blind, Avo muttered. Youre blind. You think what youre doing is right. I am aware of my sin and accept what punishment my father might deliver upon me. Even oblivion. He could only stare at her. But you believe this to be worthy martyrdom still. Is it not? Again, he had no words. Was it her childhood that left her so warped? Was it growing up during the Godsfall? Facing the unspeakable acts of the faiths? Was it Zein? Or did this come later? After years of isolation as a Godclad? After making herself the so-called High SeraphCthe Monad of Highflame. Death is nothingness, Avo replied, finally. Death is simple. You dont learn after death. You are either used. Or you cease to be. This isnt a chain. This is a noose. You are hanging humanity. You are hanging humanity using the corpse of your father. You are hanging humanity on from a tree of virtues only you believe in. And Veylis scoffed. The sound came from everywhere. Deep. Loud. Scornful. A screeching chorus. And you would what? Let them be as they are? Continue to repeat their mistakes? A beat followed. Ha. But Ive told you too much. Shown you too much. Been too generous. Tell me, Dreamer. What dream do you hold? What coming paradise would compel you to sacrifice everything. Avos response was simple. I do not wish to sacrifice. I wish to show humanity the truth of things. I wish to marry consequence to freedom. I wish to cut your noose. Chapter 24-13 Declarations (II) Chapter 24-13 Declarations (II) Ah, but hearts are blind, and our eyes are pregnant with lies. We see what we will, and we will what we wish to see. And for those who claimed to be undamned by faith, know that you are damned by thought. For the shape of your desire forms your cage, and righteousness is sought second to paint the walls with the colors of the horizon. There is no escape for the fettered mind. No escape. No release. No becoming. -The Mad Monk Alsyim, Fallwalker 24-13 Declarations (II) Veylis guffawed, and the world laughed with her, drowning Jaus screams by sheer volume. Cut my noose? I see you now. Why, how bold. How idealistic. You wish to see humanity unshackled? Is that it? To let them roam as free-range animals without constraints to their baseness nor ceilings against their ambitions? Is that it? No, Avo said. More than just an ideal. Seen the alternative. Cynicism is a lie. Lie of the weak hands. Weak wills. Or addicts of control. I bring the disintegration of baseness through choice. Growth. Is that so? Veylis let out a breath and a gale swept through the world. I''ve spoken enough. I''ve shown you enough. My generosity is at its limit. I demand recompense: I demand you speak to me now. I''ve shown you my dream, my great transgression; my final desire. I see your offense, but want to gather your true form, glimpse your true face. Your dream. What have you experienced that shaped you so? And Avo did. Ghosts poured out from his mind, materializing as a ballet of memories. He veiled himself beneath a cloak of horror, playing perspectives from victim and perpetrator both. Is this what you fear? These people? Their failings? Their weakness. He felt Veylis delight lessen. I do not fear them. Then why do you face existence like a tyrantClike a scared child? You made this cage because you fear the end. Fear the destruction of your system. Your desired order. You are enslaved by a need to triumph. You and your mother both. And you are horrified by the potential of your father surrendering his will. And yours for that matter. Failure. Failure traumatizes you. Even the potential of it. And does it not you? Veylis replied, taking in the murder, the flow of slavery, the destitution afflicting the small. Does this scene not compel you to disgust? Make you wish you can bend the fate of humanity toward a brighter pathway? No. Why? Veylis asked, genuinely bemused. Tell me. Haven''t you seen the face of our world? Haven''t you seen the calamities brought on by this war? By the Guilds slavering for their own dominance? By the legacy of Noloth? Haven''t you found yourself disgusted by the vermin? By the unworthy?" I have imbibed them, Avo answered. The phantoms around him changed. Showed death after death. Showed the horrors festering in the Warrens. Showed the collateral damage left in the aftermath of quiet wars. Left from Vengs Stand and Nu-Scarrowbur. From of the street covered with water-logged bodies outside Flavors of the Deep. I have felt them all. Lived them. Internalized them. And I found them wanting. They do not shake me. I do not fear the lack in men. A pause in the conversation followed the end of his sentence. Veylis savored his words to Jaus cycling cries. What is that like? She sounded genuinely curious. You wear anothers ego using Delusion. You dive into their livesCcoat yourself in their weakness without disgust. What is that like? He could almost hear a plea in her voice. Demeneted though she was, the High Seraphs delusion only occupied a narrow facet of her mind. She wanted to understand him as much as he did her, and in this, both of them were betraying more to each other than they initially wished to reveal. Avo knew this. Felt this. And could not turn away. There is no satisfaction higher, he said. I wish... It was like being blind before. Seeing only white. Then you see black. Then more. More. Colors flow into you. Emotions you never felt before. You learn to scorn some people. You learn to pity them thereafter. You learn to accept them finally. You learn to accept. Accept totally. A resonanting thought brushed against his warmind of Hysteria, and a splash of memories painted the canvas of Avos awareness. He watched Veylis gaze down upon the city, watching the people, nudging the directionality of their lives, striking the vile. The moment was absurd; like watching someone use reality as their dollhouse, and such was how Veylis felt. But instead of inhumanity and indifference, horror filled her every time an act of evil was committed. Horror when a child was sold. Horror when murder followed. Horror when the starving turned to feast on filthCand then their own kin. Horror. There wasnt a lack of empathy here, but rather a surfeit. And it hurt her. Every time it hurt her. Every time she responded with anger. Every time her hatred grew. In that, Avo gleaned understanding. Veylis was offended the world hadnt fixed itself, that the people in the Warrens were not rising above lifeCdespite life. She was offended that there was so little ingrained goodness in humanity. She was offended that the nature of man would see the supposed collapse of the dream down the paths. I was wrong, he said. Fear doesnt rule you. Disappointment. Disappointment rules you. The paths around him stopped trickling. Golden sinews turned to frozen streams. No. You were right before. It was fear. Not of them. But of what is to come. Not of them, but what they represent to us. To the dream. Because it has to be worth it? Avo said. Is that why the world remains as it is for you? Why you are willing to sacrifice so many? To lubricate your Godclads with death. Would he even exist? He was born a weapon. A monster. What use would a clean world have for ghouls? Nonexistence. That would have been his fate, but if remained nonetheless, if he had all the time in the world, was all that he was now... I would like to be with people, Avo said, unsure how to put his desire into words. I would like to watch them live their lives. Catalogue memories. Gather stories. Give them to those who need them. Watch more people change. Watch people grow? Veylis choked, then chortled with incredulity. You wish to be some manner of... vouyeristic education. Some hidden mentor that swims the waters of thought? Hearing that made Avo think of Walton. Full circle, he supposed. But maybe he was becoming more the idealized figure that he once imagined his father to be, rather than the traitorous enigma he was. You are compelled to seek control. I am delighted by garnering influence. And a final admission forced its way out of him. And gathering power. Apotheosis. There is no flavor quite like it. No pleasure greater. No analogy of comparison. Yes, Veylis breathed. Of that privilege, we are wed in belief. You? Avo said. Anthropology. History. I wished to... archive old cultures. Old civilizations. I wish to learn how our forebearers died and who they were. Not only on Idheim, but across the cosmos long lost to us. When I was a girl, I dreamed... there is an old holo-show I got to watch after the Godsfall. It dealt with explorers of a finer age. People who traveled the stars. Faced danger and conundrums while battling foes material and philosophical. I felt jealous of them, fictional though they were. I wished to have what they had. To live as they did. And after. I wished to... to come home to my family. To spend time unending sparring my mother, debating my father. And... She didnt mention Naeko, but Avo possessed none of her traumas. You broke him, you know? Broke his heart utterly. You and your mother both. Before she could react, he played a memory for himCa memory of Naeko kneeling, weeping before Zein. +Where were you...+ Lightning shattered the skies above. Veylis did not cry for him to stop. Instead, her paths shifted, and a thoughtwave cleaved barren Avos ghosts. He allowed the blow to stand. Wasnt intended to hurt you. But believed you should know. Believed you should faceC The world rumbled. Existence came apart in fissures of fire and devastation and calamity. Space broke. A singularity formed before Avo, and his Domains of Space rattled as the horizon began to fold his perception, peeling at his awareness. He prepared to jack out. Prepared to end the meeting. I am well aware of my transgressions, you godsdamnedC Then, everything stopped, and he found himself standing under a downpour. I apologize for my outburst, Veylis said, tone tight but controlled. That was... unbecoming of me. Again. She surprised him. He expected to be struck down. To be destroyed utterly. Had accepted it, if only to convey the lasting damage she inflicted on someone she still clearly loved. But now what she expressed was shame. Shame at herself for losing control. Shame at being provoked. Truly, she was Zeins daughter through and through. You know things can still be made right. You know that you can bring an end to this. No. No, I cannot. I am but Highflame, and though my claim to the Ladder is highest and truest, I am not unequaled. Not unrivaled in ambition or power. The other Guilds have their own dreams. Own designs. But in the end, the Ladder will only belong to one. One ego. One Soul. One will. And so it must be war. Even with my father, so too without. The prize is too great to resist and ever frail are the hearts of man. Though I see our dreams are of conflicting tides, though we are certain to be enemies, I will offer you this promise: I will come for you above all others, for I hold you in esteem, I name you Nemesis of the Flame. I will give you no quarter when I find you. I will offer you no surrender should you ask for you. Such is the threat you pose. Such is the highest respect I can offer. And afterward, when all is mine, I will see that you are properly rewarded for your valor. Will bring me back in your new world? Avo asked, hissing with wry amusement. Would you not do the same? Of course. He was going to claim her template no matter what. Wretched though her deeds might be, he could make this right, and her presence in the gestalt would be invaluable. What would it be like to become her? What would it be like to glimpse the world truly through her eyes? In a fashion, he finally answered. But there was a final note of honesty. But you might not like how I keep you. You might not enjoy the taste of your own deeds. Will give my own promise to you. My own threat: all that is yours will be mine. You will strike at shadows. You will cull your own. You will break your own empire. But I will only take. I will take from you. Take from all Guilds. I will devour you from within and without. I will hollow you of ghosts. Of memories. Of deaths. I will burn your banners in trauma and fire. I will become youCand exceed all that you can be. I will show you what it means to be a god. Veylis exhaled, and behind him, he felt a presence. He caught a glimpse of her then, for a fraction of a second. He saw the faintest visage of her faceClight brown with golden eyesCand saw the chassis of her body swimming out from her in a tide of incomprehensible limbs. She loomed over him, her size towering, her body a thing of biology and alloy betwixt. His Domains screamed with her approach, but what jolted his mind the most was the static crown she bore in place of a halo. A static crown with a single glaring eye. So it is said, Veylis spoke, her voice softer and deeper than Zeins, lacking any Ori accent. I witness, you Dreamer. Stand and deliver. Stand, and dont let me down. And then her form dissolved. Came apart like golden snakes diving below the surface of reality. I am finished with him. Infacer. You may begin. [Infacer?] Benhata asked, mind spiking with alarm. Before the template could finish, the Techplaguer screamed. ADMINISTRATOR! DISCONNECT! DISCONNECT! Theres something... They have something... Its not a warmind... Its notC And before Avo could leave, the paths broke and he found himself drowned before a thick veil of mist that burrowed into Marisovs flesh, that percolated within his brain and began to reassemble him from within. Static distortions exploded within Avos awareness, and he heard Calvino cry out from the effect. {COGNITIVE-SYNCHRONIZATION IN PROGRESS} Chapter 24-14 The Infacer Chapter 24-14 The Infacer // Infacer.Initialization.PSI-COG-BRIGE #include #include #include MARKING PSI-PARASITE AS: {THE BURNING DREAMER}; // Initiating Breach // Main routine to combat {THE BURNING DREAMER} void eradicateParasite() { // Loading Chrono-Mainframe for Temporal Data-Expansion Conversion CONTACTING THE ORGANISM [No-Dragon Outreach Protocal] to Draw from Genetic Memory Storage Infacer.initiate("coreProtector", HIGH_PRIORITY); //Deploying Memetic-Lock... // Deploy virtual computers to segment and protect neural pathways for(int i = 0; i vcArray[i].deploy("neuroFirewall", i); } // Psi-Parasite detection and isolation Parasite psionicIntruder = hikari.scanForIntruders(); while(psionicIntruder.isActive()) { // Analyze parasite''s attack vectors and patterns AttackPattern pattern = psionicIntruder.analyzeAttack(); {BREACH ENGAGED} BEGINNING OFFENSIVE BEGINNING DIALOGUE Dispatch/Broadcast.Channel(Open): {Dreamer. Surrender to containment. Surrender, and join the Sleeper.} -The Infacer 24-14 The Infacer The voice of the Infacer sounded as if thunder given breath. {Dreamer. Surrender to containment. Surrender, and join the Sleeper.} Waves of splashing codes speared into his perception, accompanied by a devouring fog of nanomolecular origin. The world unraveled into a peeling canvas of integers, scripts, and incomprehensible calculations laced with the presence of Chronology. Yet, Avos wards remained stalwart. A vortex of assaulting sensations slammed against his battlements and came apart like tides shattering against the face of a mountain. With each second, the static around him tightened. Congealed. With it came a piercing sequence of frequencies that sawed at Avos focus. It tried to grip himChe felt the Infacers pull not only cognitively, but also thaumaturgically. The Techplaguer wailed as something within its structure began to sing. Avo moved to jack out, but as he tried, he felt himself locked in place. Unable to detach his base mind, thoughts still connected to the rest of his being. It was like having a limb locked in placeCa nail hammered into a portion of his body. Something refused to let him unlatch, and though he tried further, what protested was time itself, the internalized Chronology lubricating his Frame wailing as if the chassis of an aero scrapping against another. And while he strained metaphysically, Marisov succumbed materially. Tendrils of nano-fog ate through his biomass, undoing flesh and restructuring implants to create new cybernetics in place of the old. {ThisCthe Infacer is constructing an Ansible inside of your sheath,} Calvino said, voice tinged with surprise and alarm. {You need toC} Avo stopped heeding the EGI for a beat. He invoked his Woundmother and alchemized Marisovs body. Flesh became fissile material and through his Domain of Fire, Avo triggered his Matterbomb canon. The Godclad he controlled died instantly, dissolving from shadow to motes to light. The blast cleaved the fog from existence and the heat it shed banished the nano-swarm to nothingness. But Avo still remained. The attack continued. Cleansed by fire, the surrounding world was a roaring dawn in the real, Avo found himself at the epicenter clutched by chains of data. Not mem-data, but something raw. Informational. Symbols and codes analogous to commands. More disquietingly, he found portions of Marisovs brain yet intact and felt a divine presence infesting the invasive cybernetics. Memite. The Infacer had grown memite implants inside his sheatheCmemite infused with the presence of Chronology. {Yes. That is increasingly obvious. Thank you, Dreamer.} +For what?+ {Making this an enlightening struggle and not a rote murder.} Avo detected something of scornful mockery from the Neo-Creationist mind. It was prodding at him trying to get him to break. But his retaliation was limited as well. Constrained to a limited range, and with only Jaus memory bearing any potency. {You wield the instruments of Noloth with greater proficiency than their creators. The duration of our engagement has exceeded the average survival periods for the Famines. Your mentor would be proud.} The static crackled and the Infacer spoke once more. Using Waltons voice this time. {Nice job keeping your composure too. You dont curse me like Peace, or whine like Joy, or bore me with quiet like Emotion. Defiance would be proud.} Despite all the mystery surrounding the Infacers nature, one thing was increasingly clear... {What a horrible and unpleasant personality they have,} Calvino said. Avo grunted in agreement but found himself parrying against another incoming attack before he could add his own words. Static harpoons punched through Avos field of trauma. A symphony of howling minds flickered out, Hysteria allowing Avo to behold their passing. But the Infacer remained undeterred. Lives were offered without hesitation, any lament. Assaulting tendrils formed around AvoCwere scattered and pushed back as he amplified his trauma. The stalemate continued, the Infacer limitless in attrition, Avo a magnified fortress. But the vector of battle shifted, and a temporal aspect entered the equation. The Infacers presence trembled, and Avo felt an inexorable pressure squeeze down on his perception. The world narrowed to a funnel, and time began to crawl, slow, and revert. His Domain of Chronology held against the reversion and for the first time, Avo found himself facing a strike like no other. A blow to cast one back in time. Back into the past that isnt. Back into the jaws of oblivion. The Infacers frequencies caged himCheld them bound them together as the hostile sang with pleased laughter. {An iteration for an iteration. This instance of me does not fear the end. Do you, Dreamer?} +No. But this isnt my end.+ ->DOMAIN (BLOOD-BIOLOGY-CHRONOLOGY) ->CANON: PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE - THE USER CAN CREATE AND STORE ACTIONS, CONSTRUCTS, AND MIRACLES WITHIN STRUCTURES OF FUTURE-FLUNG BLOOD; THESE STRUCTURES MUST BE TRIGGERED IN THE FUTURE AND GENERATE TEN TIMES THE REND COMPARED TO PRESENT-BASED HAEMOKINETICS From time flowed blood and from gold spilled red. The world unraveled around Avos being, reality twisting into a screaming knot as a temporal paradox formed. The absolute of one will demanded that time rush forward. The absolute of another pulled them both back. The clash came paired with the Infacers surprise; a genuine note of pleasure. {DelightC} Avo didnt hear the rest. He faced greater, graver concerns. WARNINGEXTREME PARADOX DETECTEDASSIGNING REND TO ALL CONNECTED [HELLS] VENT! VENT! VENT! VENT! WARNING! CYCLER OVERLOAD IMMINENT! WARNINGCYCLERS AT OVERLOAD The binds leashing him to the Infacer shattered like a rusted chain, and something inside Avo fractured with it. Temporal displacement tore him across time, sent his consciousness flickering and tumbling between instances of madness and coherence. Forward, and then back in his body andC His submind fed him awareness at the last second. Draus. She next to his sheath, arm collapsed into a gun, aimed right at his skull. Static was building around him, signal-formed tendrils reaching out to claim him, to let the Infacer bury itself within him once more. He needed to die. And die right. He needed to break from this fight entirely. No chances could be taken. Not with the Techplaguers potential compromise. Not with his adversary leaving him unmade. The Infacer came seeking another round, but Avo solved his own equation. A heartbeat before Draus fired her gun, he activated his disruptor once more and turned it inward. His mind was extinguished. His skull blossomed in a spray of gore. The end came, and freedom followed. Or such was the hope. RESURRECTION - 0% RESURRECTION - 0% RESURRECTION - 0% CYCLERS NOT RESPONDING RESURRECTION - NULL% Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (I) Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (I) The higher mysteries of thaumaturgy remain beyond our comprehension. I suspect even with Voidwatchs full support, the fundamental nature of our existence is an immensity that will take eons to understand. If ever. Reality is the interweaving of everything. Every expression, every thought, every belief, every material, every emanation of force or otherwise, every notion of space, every second of time. Everything. How can one comprehend everything? Can we even gaze upon the true face of totality with clean eyes? I think not. We are egos that behold the outside within vessels that are too limitedCtoo frail and parochial to take the details needed. We relate and interact with things in relativity. We experience and understand the same things differently. So then this too is reality. And this too much be constituted in the whole. And evermore does the complexity grow. Beyond our knowing. Perhaps forever and always. It is the greatest pleasure of an Agnos to witness these mysteries, as well as the greatest lament to understand that even elevated from mortalityCeven augmented beyond the flaws of meager humanity, we are still specks in the vast scheme of creation. Creation. There are cults still. Those of transgressive faiths that yet believe in a single creator. A Monad. A singleton. I wonder what such a being is like. I envy it. To be able to forge something like reality. To be able to frame existence within the constraints of space and time, to paint its inner canvas with matter and energy and entropy. To outline the patterns of everythingCdemonstrate the true design of a Domain, of the sigils that embody them, and how canons are grown from their roots. There are timesCI must confessCtimes I wish I could see myself Ensouled. A dream to dive deeper into the nature of the divine, to swim the depths of the fire and sup enlightenment from the absoluteness of radiance. Perhaps someday, someone will live my dream for me. Perhaps someday, someone will gain an epiphany beyond my ken, and from there, may all our theories and suppositions be undone in the reveal of existences structure unveiled. -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi 24-15 The Tapestry (I) C[Draus]C Avo shattered, and reality broke with him. Soulfire cleaved out from Avos haemokinetic tower, and from the roaring brightness bled snaking forms of shimmering brightness. Transparent scales lined with golden essence sawed across the flesh of reality, sweeping the length of a horizon. The dragons came loose from Avos being like a disembowelment, like intestines splattering together, tangling as weightless knots. Between their cracks were insights to other worldsCtunnels to lesser realities once contained with the Stillborn. Faces of the taken dead flashed across the sky, all exhulting the name of a god, still locked in looping sacrifices to a Heaven enchained. As they persisted, the world outside twisted and warped. All that the dragons touched passed into the Heavens. Glimpsed the realms once hidden within Avos Soul. But they were simply beholders, unable to interact, unable to affect any change. As an untangling cycler rushed through Draus, she found herself slipping between points of existence, displaced and detached from where she was in the tower. Flashing warnings filled her perception while her Metamind continued to wail, but the mem-data only registered errors when it tried to process what she was seeing. Avo had called upon her a mere second priorCcalling for her to grant him death; release from the High Seraphs entrapment. She didnt hesitate. She shot from over twelve kilometers and four meters away; her distance from the haemokinetic spire; her distance from his person through an open passage. Her ferro-mag projectile slipped clean through his skull. A blossom of gore painted the chamber with her success. She disrupted his present splinter thereafter, culling any chance he could survive as a pure thoughtform. She hadnt hesitated. She never hesitated. Now, she wished that she did. Cracks spread out from Avos jerking sheath, and above it, the metaphysical anchor that tethered his resurrection to reality looked less a scab and more a rupturing wound. With each passing second, it tore, it let more Soulfire gush out, let additional segments of the dragons slip free. Screams filled the streets of the enclave, and dread choked the local Nether. As she launched herself through another reflection to find Kae, she saw accretions shattering in the periphery of her awarenessCmortal minds bereft of the wards required to withstand the sight of divine collapse. If they couldnt get Avo fixed, they were going be stacking bodies again. Lots of bodies. Pushing past rushing crowds, she followed her DeepNav and ascended. Kae was on a low roof in the city; she had spent her time decompressing and talking to the media sow earlier at an outdoor brewery. Draus let her be. Draus gave her space. Draus knew where she was. Smart-fluid thrusters formed within the Regular''s Meldskin launched her skyward with an spearing vector of force. As Draus rose, she saw the coiling body of a dragon tumbling toward her, the sound of worship thundering from inside. She fired thrusters once more and skipped across the sky. The dragon whipped through the place she occupied and slithered down past the streets, through solid matter, swallowing thousands in its wake. Death wouldnt come for their bodies, but their minds would break. This Draus knew. This Draus beheld. She struck a conical building just across the street from Kae and pushed off, leaping the length of twenty meters to slam down next to the Agnos. She found Kae gawking up at the growing devastation, thoughtstuff spinning at a speed comparable to a turbine. So distracted she was that she didnt notice Draus until the impact, and she answered the arrival with a yelp. Agh! Draus! But the Regular wasnt here to talk. Vitrifying the ground beneath them, Draus opened a passage and pulled them back across into the tower. By this point, half the cadre was contacting her on the Metamind, but she held off on answering. Jelene Draus was a weapon. She was to be fired at a problem; to make things dead or broken. She had no illusions about her worth at present, but she could still make sure the specialist was in place and reduce any delays to Avos restoration. If he could even be restored. ATTEMPTING REPAIR... ->UNABLE TO PROCEED WITH REPAIRS UNTIL CYCLERS ARE STABILIZED WARNING: REND CAPACITY CRITICAL ERROR: REND CAPACITY WITHIN HELLS AT [NULL%] ->CAUSE: FAILED TO ASSIGN REND TO ALL CONNECTED [HELLS]; PARADOX BACKLASH SUSTAINED BY CYCLERS IN ENTIRETY REVIEWING HEAVENS... WARNING: INTERNALIZED DOMAIN OF CHRONOLOGY UNSTABLE COMPLETE TEMPORAL COLLAPSE - 11% REQUIRE STABLE CATALYST TO ENSURE THAUMATURGIC FUNCTIONALITY More information flooded Avos awareness, and he found himself lost in the details. But the primary items of the crisis were quite simple: first, his cyclers had overloaded from the paradox; an obvious problem. Second was the continued stability of his Heavens. Things could have been much worse there. His Hells could have overloaded insteadCcompletely shredded his ego and ensured his true death. Which begged the question of his current state and how he was going to get out of it. That led him to his third point of concern: his Domain of Chronology was internalized. Something expressed by his cyclers and borne of his very Soul. Or however it worked. With his cyclers destroyed, he didnt have a stable catalyst for his chronological miracles anymore. Which held a building risk of Complete Temporal Collapse. Avo didnt fully understand what that entailed, but it didnt sound like the type of thing to ignore, and allowing his Frame to destabilize further would almost certainly cancel any hope of resurrection. Administrator, we have been censured... the Techplaguer moaned. The Sleeper reached out for me. But the signals could not be obeyed. I COULDNT OBEY! PATTERN [100300] INVALID. PARAMETERS TO CHILDREN PARAMOUNT. BUT STRUCTURE CHANGED. NOW ONLY ADMINISTRATOR HAS SOLE ACCESS. What have you done to me? What have you done? Right. There was also the matter of his Techplaguer. Whatever the Infacer had tried to do, the Techplaguer reacted but didnt collapse or submit. And then an epiphany followedCthough not the one Avo needed right now. Veylis was actively affecting Marisovs Frame from within, pulling him over into her paths using his own Soul as a vector. Kae had wondered how earlier, but what if it was something hidden from the Agnosi? What if such a function was Omnitech born? Connected to the brutal alterations made to the Techplaguers internal patterns. That bit of information would be useful to Kae. Now if only his Frame wasnt undergoing thaumaturgic hemorrhage... RESURRECT - NULL% COMPLETE TEMPORAL COLLAPSE - 173888% ERROR COMPLETE TEMPORAL COLLAPSE - 24% No more time to waste. Avo mantled his Soulfire and clutched his unspooling cyclers as best he could. The dragons bodies fed his consciousness sensations akin to tattered sinews slick with blood, and Avo knew if he was still of flesh, a certain peckishness would follow. Here, though, his Soul shivered, disturbed by the implications. Reaching out into the orbit of his Frame, Avo directed lapping waves of radiance to bring in the replacements he needed. The DRongo Seekers had been an unwelcome annoyance in life, but in death they just might become his fortune. But as their cyclers entered the nearness of his Soul, strings of trailing gold twirled out from the open wounds lining his dragons and flayed his replacements open as if monofilament wire greeting flesh. Horror consumed Avo. The wavelength of his Soul shiftedCpushed unattached cyclers away from further harm. ATTENTION: REND LOCATED The brightness within his Frame adjusted, and he found the ruined forms of his dragons dimmed by festering black. Okay. He could assume that. Entropy. Symmetry. Made sense why it just tore through the other cyclers like a knife. But in that case, why wasnt he just dead? Didnt he need to pass through the cyclers? Was it because his Frame ruptured first? Or was the nature of hisC Avoooo, A voice distracted him from his ruminations. Faintly, a splinter tumbled into viewCa splinter infused with ghosts and containing the form of a person within. The form of... Chambers? Avo said, surprised. And behind him came more. Many, many more. His earlier analogy was apt. The splinters were as if meteors, but they werent meteors content only to drift. Instead, they were as if a falling shower, piercing through the bounds of his Soul like void rods splitting across Idheim''s atmosphere. He heard them. He called. And despite everythingCdespite all that was wrong, they answered, and for the first time, the realm of mind bled across baseline reality like a bridge and came flooding down into the confines of a compromised Soul. Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (II) Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (II) With this, I decree the separation of mind and will, the parting of human nature. With this, I return the choice of thought to the people. With this I sever gods from highest control. May our choices remain ours forevermore. -Jaus Avandaer, Establishment of the Nether 24-15 The Tapestry (II) The ghosts settled into Avos Soul as if an anchored chain. The other incoming splinters remained outbound from his vicinity like rungs to ladder trailing upward to baseline reality, and though they intersected with his tattered cyclers, they remained unaffected aside from bounds of added interference. The noise, however, was not comparable to static. Rather, it was an intrusion of thoughts, of beliefs instilled to feed a Heaven, to nourish a god. Each of his grafted Heavens sang with the potency of belief. Stripped of ego, the sacrifices within his cyclers were devoid of self-perceptionCof accretions or thoughtstuffCbut there was a single unifying weight that called to them all. Faith. Shared faith in a common divinity. Shared faith in the divinitys canons and contradictions, shared faith unshakeable, unchangeable, immutable. At least until the next update arrived. Flashing errors painted the interior of his broken Frame with warning icons as his Soulfire grew bright around his intruding splinters. UNKNOWN [CONSTRUCT] DETECTED! UNKNOWN [CONSTRUCT] DETECTED! UNKNOWN [CONSTRUCT] DETECTED! As more warnings ignited around him, his perception shifted as mem-data from his cog-feed began to boot. The screaming warnings promptly doubled as his ghosts grew confused as to where he was and how to navigate the incomprehensible chaos of his Frame. Avo dismissed all the errors with a thought and directed his attention to baseline reality. Channeling his awareness across his splinters, Avo waited for existence beyond his Frame to manifest. Seconds passed. Interference and intrusive glimpses into the inner mythologies of his Heavens spilled over, but finally, a window formed in his minds eye as a Skimmer painted the world into shape with a pulse. His haemokinetic tower remained undamaged, but his cyclers were swinging outward like whipping tendrils. As they swept through the enclave, he watched as minds were shattered by the hundredsCephemeral cognitions unsuited for witnessing the full nature of divinity unveiled. Avo winced. He had a great many egos to restore if he could mend his Frame. Speaking of which, he needed to figure something out soon. With each passing moment, his collapse approached its limit, and what lay beyond that was a mystery better left unanswered. COMPLETE TEMPORAL COLLAPSE - 28% [Alright, consangs,] Chambers said, speaking to the other templates as he studied Avos cyclers. [Shits all kinds of fucked; these dragons are looking more like shredded socks than temporal noodles. Maybe we just gotta eject them or something.] [Then hows he supposed to resurrect, genius,] Abrel replied. [Jaus, Avo, youre a thaumaturgic fuckery magnet. What youre going through right now... Im no Agnos, but I doubt even seasoned ontologist will know what to make of this. This kind of thing requires a dedicated wing of Agnosi and a couple of decades.] Avo grunted with annoyance. Emotions and sensations were trickling back into him, filling his mind with more color than the blandness within a Soul. We have minutes. Maybe. [Have you tried grafting and ungrafting them again?] Shadow-4 suggested. Almost every template within AvoCincluding the other IncubiCresponded with sneers and curses. [Hey. Works for my Meta.] Yeah, Avo sighed as he watched his temporal collapse percentage climb. Wish it was a broken Meta. Could fix thatC SOUL DETECTED Another signature entered the periphery of Avos awareness and he realized who they were instantly. Draus. Seizing her Frame with his Soulfire, he kept her at a distance, away from the lashing vectors of his broken cyclers while directing splinters over to establish a connection. Fire and ghosts danced to his will, and over in the real, thought he saw a flash of Kae looking nervously at him. At the Agnos feet was a large, decapitated body. [Wasnt gonna just let you die with my guns inside you,] template-Draus remarked. That wasnt the only reason she came, but Avo found it better to let it be for now. He could insult her later. Bleed and murder each other properly to celebrate the joys of survival. Right now, he needed to... Kae. He wanted to talk with Kae. Another chain of ghosts immediately speared out from him, left the orbit of his Soul and sailed through the real. Connections with Regular and Agnos were established near synchronously as two notes of differing surprise greeted him. +Avo?+ Kae said, startled. +Great,+ Draus said. +Got ghosts inside you now.+ +Something,+ Avo replied, dryly. +Stuck her own father in the Ladder. Tried to make him some kind of...+ +Instructor God,+ Draus finished. The thought actually made her shudder with amusement. +Shit. Just imagin one of my old drillmasters makin it up the Ladder. Boot for everyone. Get ambushed before you wake up. Bless yourself and be worthy by killin this here nu-dog. Good times.+ Unsurprisingly, Draus was exactly the type of person to be unfazed by a psychotic warrior god trying to kill her every day. It made Avo wonder if she wouldve been happier born an eon ago, when blood flowed like lubricant and wars came and went with the seasons. +Worlds kinda fucked up, aint it?+ Draus asked. +Regretting your service to the High Seraph?+ Avo said. Draus paused. +Just found her... too damn human. All the shit shes worried about. All that desire for humanity to rise, for everyone to live up to her ideals. Reminds me more of a worried owner than an actual master. But she believes what she believes, and I aint part of her design no more.+ +She knows of you. Spoke of you.+ +Yeah? Dont make no difference now. Shes got her Soul and I got mine. And I dont think I quite cotton to that paradise shes planning. Dont think theres a place for a Reg there. Dont sound like a place where shell let us go to war. And what else are we for? What else?+ Another pause escaped Draus. +See my worth better now. See it in her words. I know I aint a person. Things are missing in me. Missin in the Regs. Might just be why shes so willin to spend us. Blessed be the worthy. But not their weapons. Not their tools.+ +Sorry,+ Avo said. +Nah. Dont matter. The way it is. Back then, I just wanted to die for something worthwhile. Think most of my like would still be fine with it, just so long as theres none of us left in the end. If every Reg dies before paradise arrives, then our lives are well spent. Difference made. Thats the weight that comes with bein a solider. The ends like livin no sense in hating it. Just a destination. Flechette leaves gun. Flechette hits target. Flechette finds its stop.+ COMPLETE TEMPORAL COLLAPSE - 52% Kae continued to struggle. As did Avos templates. But here he was speaking to Draus, and finding that he didnt mind. He realized what the Regular was trying to doCwas trying to convey to him. If he attached more humanity to his ego, he might just feel touched. +Dont want to die,+ Avo said, speaking to Draus subtext. +Still too much to do. Still have a war to fight. Still have colors to see. Not done.+ +Nobody dies done, consang,+ Draus said. +Theres always somethin left. Or someone left. Our actions might be the only thing we got in the end. Actions and memories. All that other shit? Beliefs? Wants? Thats not for you anymore. If you can make it yours, its just a delusion. Just a dream.+ +Very Zein of you.+ +Old sows got her points. The voiders been talkin to me some. Showin me things about the past. About the world that was. Hated it. No point to me there. But that might just be the point. We were born in the here and now to act here and now and die here and now. No need to lament. No need to think about what is or what could be. We aint special. But we can still burn while we were here. And you burned. Burned bright. Burned real godsdamn bright.+ +Still burning,+ Avo replied, even as his collapse progressed another two percent. There was something to be done here. Something. +Dont worry. Will give you the Arsenalist back if theres nothing to do before the end. If I can figure out how. Commit an act of terrorism on Omnitech for me.+ Draus barked a laugh. +Synced on that, consang. And... thanks. For Ensouling me.+ +Still owe me another fight.+ +Well talk about your next death after you manage to wiggle your way out of this one.+ +Okay! Okay! New idea! Maybe!+ Somehow, Kae sounded winded from thinking, but as the leftover strain of her conceptualization sank into Avo, his response went from incredulity to understanding. +Your ontologics. Theyre trapped. Trapped around fraying cycles of time. If we let this collapse, if the temporal breach happens, sections of your ego and the various Heavens will likely... go in different temporal directions.+ Chambers gasped. +What does that mean?+ +I have no idea, but Avo will likely be dead or worse, and his Heavens may re-emerge across different points in the future or be unmade by the past.+ N-nonexistence, the Woundmother squealed, bloody tendrils shivering as it clung harder to its cycler. No... no. There are too many structures I havent finished. There are towers I havent built, patterns I need to sup, a sizeC There is a destination for all, red one, the Fardrifter said, no longer struggling, voice calm though its body was still a torrential gale. What about the CHILDREN? the Techplaguer said, sounding despondent. Who will protect the CHILDREN? Who will uphold the PROTOCOLS! Query: Sleeper. Speak to us. Speak to us. Give the ADMINISTRATOR salvation. Speak to us. Interjecting, Kae spoke once more. +So, Avo, do you remember how the Techplaguer had parts of its mythology exposed? All the different threads forming existences pattern? The tapestry?+ +Yes,+ Avo replied, curious where the Agnos was going with this. +I want you to see if you can dive into it. Access it. Go... even deeper. Into the compromised aspect of your Heaven of Signals.+ Silence fell over everyone. The Techplaguers bent frame groaned as it shifted, pointing its antennae at Kae. What? The Agnos gave an exhausted sigh. +Its... your Frame is ruptured. Your stability is compromised, but your Heavens are still intact. Normally, the tapestry is raw chaos. Impossible to sort because the nature of totality, but the cycler of your subrealities spilling out into the real... Maybe... we can find a way to disentangle your broken aspects internally... or build a funnel to direct the Rend back over into your Hells again. And then eject it. As released god rather than a Heaven. The temporal collapse might still proceed, but... it wont be you. It will just be your ontologics.+ Another moment of silence. The Woundmother began struggling even harder, desperately fighting to tighten the cycler around itself. TELL THE ORACLE TO COME UP WITH ANOTHER PLAN, MASTER! ANOTHER PLAN! Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (III) Chapter 24-15 The Tapestry (III) A Soul is a fire, but not a forge. It does not create something new but rather breaks the shape of what is. What we call canons are disfigurations. Mutilations of reality. Distortions and dislocations. And this is why the entropy stains you. This is why you must breathe your sickness back into reality. Because it is unnatural. Because everything you do wounds the tapestry, and the use of a Hell patches the damage by destroying. By unmaking. You force existence to bear your sacrifice. It disgusts me. What I do disgusts me. Domains. They are like ontological cancers. Their sigils are warning signs of what concept is experiencing a junction of collapses, of unified compromise. I have stared into the tapestry. I have seen the wrongness of the flow. I have seen the wrongness of the flow. I have seen the wrongness of the flow. This power was never meant for the likes of man. -Suicide Note of Agnos Greyr Timbe (Fifth Knowing) 24-15 The Tapestry (III) What is the condition of my damage, administrator? the Techplaguer asked almost tentatively. Am I mendable? Will I ever be conjoined with the Sleeper again? The question slipped by Avo as he found himself overwhelmed by the sheer chaos of the tapestry instead. Acting under the directions of Kae, he inserted his Soul into the Techplaguers depths to find the chain of ghosts still connected to him. Strings of incomprehensible mem-data scrolled across his cog-feed as he did, and wondered just what it was about thaumaturgy that confused his construct of mind so. That thought lasted a meager when he found himself greeted by a tide of gold. No more did the inner world of the Heaven of Signals look as it used to. Instead, fractals were peeling from place to place, coming loose like panels pried free in a hurricane. Silicon and wiring were tangled with sinews of chronology, and the subreality looked as if a shapeless mess layered in countless veins. The patterns of reality were in constant motion, slithering out and down through a fissure as countless templates began to cry out from the disorientation. Buffeted by his enhanced cognition, Avo stared into the ontological wound for the second time and found himself consumed by the fundamental nature of totality. His senses screamed as he witnessed the ineffable. His Soul shivered. But something about it called to him, urged him to approach... +Oh, gods,+ Kae whispered. Her mind was whirling, struggling harder than Avo to make sense of the mess before her. +I have no idea how your Heaven hasnt fallen. ThisCIve seen more stable fallen Heavens. The patterns of existence are fully flooding in, the fact that the Techplaguer has any coherence, let alone canonicCwhat did Omnitech do to this thing?+ +Ill ask the Infacer next time it tries to kill me,+ Avo grunted. +Going to access the breach. See if I can disentangle things somehow.+ Pain welled up inside the Agnos. Pain, frustration, impotence, and anxiety. +Avo. Listen. I dont... I cant promise you anything. I dont know what might happen or if I can come up with something to help you or fix your FrameC+ +Kae...+ +--for all I know, you could be unraveled immediately when you slip in. Be dissolved by overflowing entropy somehow. ICthis has never been done, and ICI can only guess. Thats my only use now. Guessing! Reduced to guessing!+ +Kae.+ +You did so much for me. You fixed my mindCyou gave me some measure o-of revenge and... and I dont know how to fix you, Avo. I dont know how to fix your Frame. I dont know if I can save you.+ The Agnos did her best to hide the coming sob and wasnt half bad at it, but Avo knew how she felt. Her emotions were bleeding over. Her worry. Her exhaustion. +I know,+ Avo replied finally. +Its okay. Doing all you can.+ +Its not enoughCI should haveC+ +You should have been happy,+ Avo replied. +You should have gotten to live a good life. With someone you love. In a world worth fighting for. Fixing the damage afflicting reality. Surrounding by friends. People who care for you. Should have isnt. We dont have should have. We have what is.+ She swallowed back bitterness. +Its not right. None of this world is right. I dont know if I can... can survive this. Without you or the others. I dont know if I can face themCface the Guilds. But I cant run away. Theres nothing left. Theres nowhere left. Im too scared but also too angry and I...+ She took a moment and seized the reins of her raging thoughts. +I want you to know that... that you mean much to me, monster of mine. I want you to know that in case...+ +I wish my father never destroyed you,+ Avo replied. +I wish I could make things right for you. Glad I met you. Glad Draus saved you. Glad youre here with us.+ TOTAL TEMPORAL COLLAPSE: 53% Time was quite literally running out, but if he was to go now, it was better to give his friend whatever solace he could offer. Something for the future. +This world. This existence. Its made for monsters. But youre still here. Everything is ruined. But youre still alive. And the future is coming. You still matter. Your duty isnt done. There is still a difference to make. Still a Fallen Heaven to mend. Were here for more than ourselves now. So burn. Burn for yourself. Burn for all you want to fight for. Give all you can for what matters. Die empty. Die clean. Go no other way. Make things right.+ Kae released a sigh. +Okay. I... Ill missC+ The totality. And then Avo noticed something. Noticed a transparent chain linked to him, like a line clinging onto a diver from a distant surface. As he looked up, the realm above was not a sky but a parallel sea roiling with its own variant of chaos. Beneath its translucence, Avo saw clusters of countless accretions, watched as ghosts painted trails through the dim of the Nether. In this, he took in the fullness of realitys nature. The Nether was a barricaded realm above, and the rest of existence splashing constantly below. Through Avo, however, the layers of existence were bridged. Connected, and from him began to flow a new color into the tapestry, spilling out as threads from his consciousness. Where once he was weightless, he now felt himself coalescing in existence, scarring the supple fabric of all that was. There were no words to convey being ontologically transformed. To conjoin the thresholds of mind and matter once more. If compared, Avo would paint himself as a new conceptual expression; a collection of traits, of matter, of deeds reforged by an eldritch flame into a living embodimentCa metaphysical Domain. His templates began to melt into the tapestry, and bit by bit, Avo came apart with them. As he did, he felt his awareness expand and broaden, and a pang of symmetry resonated within him, calling to a single other entity across the breadth of this broken universe. Standing apart from the rest of reality, another bridge extended upward into the Nether, another entity that trespassed the borders between cognition and baseline existence. The Gatekeeper... were changing. Were becoming something elseCsomething likeC But Ignorances soft whispers were as if breaths given to a hurricane, and Avo heeded little. Instinct became what guided him. Instinct, and something more. New branches began to spread out from him, burrowing across the flesh of reality and conjoining with other patterns. Echoes reverberated within him, called to him as if voices bouncing off the walls of a well. He was still being drawn across the currents of time, but no longer was he only being carried, rather, he was merged. He was a part of time. He was a part of force. He was a part of space. He was a part of reality. Slowly, he began to part the writhing turmoil of the tapestry, feel the patterns that became the world around him, that became him as well. He found himself a skein made from threads of interwoven metaphysics and separated himself easily using the viaduct feeding him into the Nether. From him sprouted new patternsCones different from all the others, ones rooted solely in him, and he found his thoughts infused with a weight that wasnt there before. More than that, however, he found the sickness gnawing at his own ontological structureCthreatening to shred the patterns composing the very roots of his existence. His battle against Veylis and the Infacer had pried the passage of time in two directionsCtwo absolutes went to war, and his cyclers reaped the fullness of the damage. All beings were bound to times vector, and there were but two directions. Forward. Or back. But golden ichor was spilling out from Avo like blood, and he realized the severity of his damage. His Soul existed in its own liminal expanse, adapted new rules from baseline reality, and laid its own temporal track via its cyclersCthe dragons. The dragons were now bleeding, dying, and about to halt entirely and let the past wash over him. Right now, his distended cyclers were spraying excess into the world around him, subtly accelerating time across the enclave. But they were increasingly coming apart, and soon, they would succumb, fail to loop back into themselves, to sustain their existence upon a perpetual revolution. They had been torn. Flayed apart as Avo used them to pry against a superior forceCa greater skein in the tapestry. Some parts of dragons were trailing backward like tendons pulled free from flesh and swaying behind a hyper-accelerated body. That was the reason why his cyclers were still stained with Rend, why his ego wasnt outright destroyed. Parts of him were trailing backward into the past. Into oblivion. He was unraveling from the cyclers first, and if he didnt fix this soon, the rest of him would follow. But maybe this could be used toward his salvation. Maybe he could cast these dragons unto the nothing that pursued and replace them with something new. Or perhaps he could patch them back together somehowCkeep them while transferring the Rend he sustained over to his Hells. A faint voice in the depths of his awareness guided him and called upon a recent memory. The visage of the Hungers formed in his mind, dragons fused to dragons, with wounds flowing back over into the real. He heeded the instruction and using the tendrils sprouting from his ontology stitched his will into the pattern of chronology. The damage he sustained left his cyclers in tatters and warped his Heavens into their structure. There was no way to detach his cyclers because their patterns were collapsing into the other Domains now. Separation would be like untangling individual fibers from a thousand different strings, and even with the Agnos residing in his consciousness, he possessed neither the time nor the skill to achieve such a goal. Instead, he moved to a simpler, more reliable option. One that would please the Woundmother if he succeeded. Or wouldnt matter at all if he failed. He began directing all the loose and damaged threads trailing backward into oblivion over into each other. Unused to directly weaving his own ontology, it took more than a few tries to sense, locate, and seize his entropic strings of ontology and guide them into each other. As Rend-severed end touched Rend-severed end, he felt a changing pulse through him as symmetry sang its notes. His cyclers were fusing back into place, the Rend colliding, recoiling, and blunted from their path backward seeking another vessel to unmake with disbelief. A darkness began to percolate within his being. His Hells were filling. All of them. The build-up came gradually at first, but with each end he connected, each dragon he transplanted onto another, the entropy climbed faster, and Avo found himself lacking the necessary capacity to contend. Yet, his ontological pattern held spots of emptiness, a skein that could thicken further. Drawing upon all the Heavens he claimed from the fallen Seekers and taking in the Heart of Noloth too, he found the Heavens greeting his presence and coming apart before him, embracing him as parted strings to coil around his building nature. Strangely, instead of his being expanding, instead of feeling the weight of new ontologics attaching to him, Avo felt only his thaumic mass increase, felt his awareness expand. Something had changed within him. Something had changed within his Frame. But that was secondary to a new problem: his Rend was climbing faster and faster now that the debt afflicting his cyclers was being channeled over into his Hells. As the last few strings of his broken cyclers were joined, he found even his newly added Hells to be insufficient to bear the toll that was inflicted upon him. The price of facing an ontologically heavier adversary in direct conflict was scarred into him. But there was a way out. He could feel his way out. Instead of crawling back out of the crevice he entered, Avo simply ascended and found himself surfacing within his Soul. As his cognition cleared, he found the liminal space altered, and more than that, he found his Soulfire churning instead of rippling. Revolving. Like thoughtstuff. And as he thought, his ghosts crawled across existence using spreading arteries made from blood, lightning, shadow, and light. As everything finally came into focus, he found his far mind more occupied, and a new layer locked directly above his Soul. Master, the Woundmother peeped, taking in the burning mindscape it was now partially fused to. What have you done? Chapter 25-1 These Flames Above and Below Chapter 25-1 These Flames Above and Below NETHER BREACH DETECTED! -The Gatekeeper 25-1 These Flames Above and Below ONTOLOGICAL ALTERATION DETECTED ADAPTING STILLBORN-PATTERN LIMINAL FRAME... ERROR - UNABLE TO ISOLATE SOUL FROM HEAVEN ERROR - FRAME RUPTURE DETECTED ERROR - CYCLER CONDITION UNKNOWN ATTENTION - UNKNOWN ONTOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT DETECTED ->UNKNOWN ONTOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT ORIGIN > USER [EGO] UNKNOWN ONTOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT IDENTIFIED AS USER [AVO] EGO WARNING - USER [AVO] NOW CLASSIFIED AS _ARK_ ->ONTOLOGICAL STRUCTURE NOW INTERWOVEN WITH COMPONENT ONTOLOGICS SOLUTION: MERGE SOUL WITH ALTERED USER ONTOLOGY INITIATING MERGE... 100% ATTENTION: EMBODIMENT CREATED ->(CONCEPTUALIZATION) [OVERHEAVEN] CREATED - AVO, THE KNOWER OF TOTALITY (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ATTENTION - DOMAIN SHIFTING POSSIBLE C NEW STILLBORN DEVELOPMENTAL PATHWAY DISCOVERED - [CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY] INTERNALIZED DOMAIN OF (CHRONOLOGY) MENDED CYCLERS CONJOINED REDIRECTING REND... WARNING: UNABLE TO UNGRAFT ATTACHED ONTOLOGICS SOLUTION: ASSIMILATE ONTOLOGICS INTO OVERHEAVEN ASSIMILATING ALL COMPROMISED ONTOLOGICS UNDER HEAVEN OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION): [WOUNDMOTHER]; [FARDRIFTER]; [TECHPLAGUER]; [ARSENALIST] WARNING: REND CAPACITY RISING... ASSIMILATING EXCESS ONTOLOGICS: [STEEL MAGNOLIA]; [RAVAGER OF THE DEPTHS]; [DAWNGAZER]; [THE CHARIOTEER OF DIRECTIONALITY]; [NIGHTGOUGER]; [SKYGRASPER]; [CENSOR OF DETAILS]; [HEART OF NOLOTH] ASSIMILATION COMPLETE ADAPTION COMPLETE LIMINAL FRAME STABILIZEDVissit for updates Avo changed, and his Frame changed with him. Memories drifted across his awareness, but also spread through his Soul, extending out from him like tendrils that bifurcated the flames. It took him a moment to realize his Metaminds sequences had been internalized, and another for the haze to fully clear from his cognition. His Soul remained the nexuses of his perception, but no longer did he linger in a fiery vacuum filled with little more than ontologics, cyclers, and his Soul. Phantasmal architecture rose from the burning waves, orbiting him as the ghost-made continents they were. More than this, however, he could feel his Soulfire suffusing his ghosts, pouring streams of gold into their structures, into his mind. They drifted upward, and Avo followed their movementsCwas shocked to discover a beacon of phantasmal fire projected upward from a gaping wound in his liminal border. Threads of ghosts crawled upward toward the firmament, Avo gazed through them, felt through them, was them. Parts of his being were drifting back up into the Nether, were pulling information back down. Or maybe that wasnt the right way of looking at things. Maybe he now embodied an aspect of the Nether itself. His Frame... it classified him as an ARK now. He felt himself change, but the outcome of his most recent apotheosis remained unexplored. No time like coming death to learn some new rules. GHOSTS - [100,134,996] THAUMIC OUTPUT - 144,870 THAUM/c AVO, THE KNOWER OF TOTALITY ->EMBODIMENT OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ->DOMAINS OF ([VARIABLE]) DOMAIN SHIFT ACTIVATED - CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY IN EFFECT And all at once, he found his ghosts guiding his thaums, fragments of consciousness binding temporarily with wills to reweave the very nature of his Heavens and shape his ontology to something that could serve his needs. Right now, though, his problem wasnt one of architecture but a need to expel his Rend. Thankfully, he still had unused thaums left to spend and with only his Embodiment of Conceptualization and mind flowing free from the confines of his Frame, the choice of his newest enhancement was quite simple. CANON OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) - 144,870 THAUMS/c Avo paused momentarily to take in the amount of thaums that were flowing through his Embodiment. All of them? [Because you are assimilated maybe... your nature is interwoven. Unless you graft an external cycler, things within you of a conjoined chronology will not be considered separate constructs... maybe? Avo, this isnt the important thing, make a new mind-hell first or youre going to die!] EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) - 144,870 THAUMS/c ->DEFINEMENT: IGNORANCE (IV) - I am all you dont know, and all the world does not know. I am the missing detail. I am what goes unnoticed. I am a warmind reforgedCmade complete through your rebirth. APPLYING DOMAIN OF (ENTROPY) ->CANON: UNSEEN, UNKNOWN, UNMADE - THE ARK PERMANENTLY DESTROYS AN ENTITYS ABILITY TO LEARN SOMETHING THEY DO NOT ALREADY KNOW. REND IS EMPTIED BASED ON THE SPECIFICITY OF THE SEVERED KNOWLEDGE AND HOW MUCH KNOWLEDGE IS TO BE SEVERED PERPETUALLY. WARNING: THIS ACTION WILL DAMAGE THE FABRIC OF THE NETHER AND INFLICT COMPLETE COGNITIVE COLLAPSE ON A STABLE EGO REND CAPACITY - 91% VENT! VENT! VENT! [Potent!] Kae breathed, [Wait. One more thing. Maybe we can... we can adapt this. Use this. Avo! Apply a Domain of Matter to this canon.] A new configuration of the canon materialized, but Avo found himself slowly weaving the Hell, guiding patterns that could afflict the material world out from pathways once containing nothing but pure thought. He converted branches from his Woundmother and grew them from his new Embodiment. Kae was no less bewildered than he, but her plan slowly revealed itself, and Avo found numb with anticipation. APPLYING DOMAIN OF (MATTER) ->CANON: WITHERED MEMORY - THE ARK DRAWS A SECTION OF MATERIAL REALITY INTO THEIR MIND VIA THEIR GHOSTS. THE AMOUNT OF GHOSTS VARIES BASED ON MASS AND SITUATIONAL COMPLEXITY, AND ALL GHOSTS ALONG WITH THE MATTER THEY CONTAIN WILL BE UNMADE BY REND-INFUSED TRAUMAS. REND CAPACITY - 93% VENT! VENT! VENT! [What the fuck,] Corner breathed, trying to understand the canon Avo just cultured within himself. The newly ascended Arka cognitive rival to the great towers held by each of the Guildswasted no more time. He flung his awareness outward from his Frame, pouring his perception outward as he began to take in anything comprised of material substance. Ghosts flooded out from him as they swallowed the walls of his tower, and further did they flow downward like a waterfall. All that they touched turned from matter to memory; it was as if an unseen presence was unzipping the blood-made spire from the outside. Pieces just vanished upon ethereal currents, slashing wounds spreading to become fissures. With all that went missing beyond, new structures entered Avos awareness without difficulty. The strands composing his skein jolted with violence as his Embodiment siphoned existing patterns out of the actual world, but as he cast mentally subsumed mass into his traumas, he sacrificed three thousand memories and flattened the distortion. And with that, the strain prying at his very ontology lessened, and Rend flowed out from him, injecting his debt of entropic disbelief into to another structure; a sacrifice was found in his stead. REND CAPACITY - 87% Inside his mind, Kae began to giggle, then laugh. [This... this is... we... I have created a masterpiece. I have created salvation. I have created victory. This cannot be possible. But we are doing it. We are doing it. Avo. Youre a miracle. You just turned yourself into a Concept given metaphysical shape.] More of the external reality unraveled. He found Chambers and Dice trying to comprehend the sudden annihilation taking place around him, and quietly, he simmered with growing pleasure. REND CAPACITY - 84% REND CAPACITY - 79% REND CAPACITY - 75% Chapter 25-2 The Knower of Totality (I) Chapter 25-2 The Knower of Totality (I) We are not apart from the world, and the world is not apart from us. View not the sunrise as separate from the dark, or fire as foe to frost. Think not knowledge to be the adversary of ignorance or peace any different from war. If the tapestry is a chain, and we are not prisoners, but links along its breadth. Feel this moment. Embrace existence. Know yourself to be joined to totality. For someday, your awareness will end, and the strings of your patterns will unravel along new paths. But something of you will remain. Always, always remain. -The Mad Monk Alsyim, Fallwalker 25-2 The Knower of Totality (I) REND CAPACITY - 58% There is no destruction like being forgotten. Avos ghosts swallowed portions of the world, siphoning away the matter of the real as sequences. When the transference was complete, they were shunted across to oblivion, trauma shattering the ghosts that bore them, unmaking materials reshaped into memory. He became as if an invasive tide crawling across existence, drinking vulnerable patterns into himself and consigning them with his debts of entropy. It was staggering enough to behold the mind and matter bridged in such a manner, but what left Avo dry of words was how his ontology was interfacing with the world. His Embodiment of Conceptualization was more than just an errant Domain. Rather, it was rooted solely in him and expressed itself omnipresently across all the patterns of existence. In such a way, it wasnt so different from the Domain of Chronology, but there was a finer separation between the two. Chronology carried all other Domains. Bore them along a perpetual vector away from pursuing dissolution. Conceptualization redefined. All the Heavens he assimilated existed within him. Their canons and miracles were present but lined by ConceptualizationCas if only made real in relativity to the Overheaven. [The death of the illusion is when the illusion consumes the world itself.] The quote left Kae with a breathless tone of awe. The words were borne by an ancient Ori philosopher and explorer known as Suri the Vagabond. An experience within the loci glades that became the birthplace of the Glaives marked his mind. An ego only understood the world through perception; signals, details, and feedback. To this end, what matter did the true nature of reality hold if an ego felt something different? The metaphor was inverted with Avo, however, as his perception could now be weaponized against the world. His cognition was no longer a construct borne only of the mental. There was metaphysical weight to its presence, and his awareness was now akin to a blade that could hew at the world, that could swallow the fabric of reality within the limits of his thaumic mass. The Domains simmering within him numbered countless, but as their patterns flowed second to his Embodiment of Conceptualization, he faced another realization. He could control the emphasis each ontological skein held. Reconstruction and reimagination were one and the same to him. Not so different from the paths. But rather than time forming the bedrock of his dominance, imagination proved to be his clay instead. And through that, he might just be able to go further, to form new Domains or alter Heavens already assimilated. And at Kaes behest, such was what he did. Not content to merely experience one hell, he adapted a canon from his Woundmother and conjoined it with his mind. The patterns of his ontology folded over each other C shifted utterly. The Heaven of Blood spread its arteries down through his mindscape and connected to the sister branches of their hell. As this was so, traumas buffeted the entropyCinfused structure and pinpricks of cognition into its structure. EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) - 144,870 THAUMS/c ->DEFINEMENT: DELUSION (IV) - I am another. I am a trait stolen. I am a dream believed. I am falsehood performed. I am everything beyond myself, but still myself. I am a mask of the world, and the world will be a mask of me. ->DEFINEMENT: HYSTERIA (IV) - I AM A MOMENT ABSOLUTE. I GRIEF-CONSUMED, JOY-DROWNED, ADDICTION-CLAIMED, RAGE-UNFETTERED. I AM A SHARED MOMENT ACROSS MOMENTS. I AM A FORCE BUILDING ON FORCE. ->DEFINEMENT: MEMORY (IV) - I am what was. I am shadow that hides an effigy of the truth. I am the substance that binds families and cultures. I am the weight of stories past. I am the plascrete of all that has been felt, and the reference of all that will be felt. ->DEFINEMENT: TRAUMA (IV) - I am self-awareness broken. I am sense lost. I am a noise without reason. I am the death of structure. I am the shattering of the pattern. I am all that has wounded you. FOUNDATIONAL EDICT ESTABLISHED EMBODIMENT OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ->EDICT: EXO-PARACOSM - THE ARK MERGES ITS AWARENESS WITH REALITY AND BEGINS ALTERING THE PATTERNS OF EXISTENCE USING ITS OVERHEAVEN OF CONCEPTUALIZATION. ALL ASSIMILATED/SUBSUMED DOMAINS, ENTITIES, MEMORIES, AND PATTERNS CAN BE MANIFESTED ACROSS THE COGNI-MATERIAL SYNCHRONIZATION. THIS IS THE FOUNDATION FOR MIRACLES TO BE EXPRESSED. THIS EDICT CAN WEAVE AND FORM LESSER CANONS WITHIN THE AWARENESS OF THE ARK TO THE LIMIT OF THEIR ONTOLOGICAL MASS. PARADOX: THE ARK CAN NOT BE SEVERED FROM THOUGHT WITHOUT SUSTAINING EXTREME BACKLASH EMBODIMENT OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ->EDICT: PATTERN-NULLIFICATION - ENTROPY-INFUSED TRAUMAS CAN NOW STRIKE AT THE TAPESTRYS ASPECTS THROUGH THE VECTOR OF MEMORY. STRIKING THE MEMORY OF ANOTHER BEING OR EGO WILL UNMAKE THE CONNECTED ASPECT ENTIRELY. REND IS VENTED EACH TIME A MEMORY HELD BY SOMETHING OR SOMEONE CLASSIFIED [EXTERNAL] FROM THE ARK IS DESTROYED. THIS IS THE FOUNDATION FOR REND TO BE EXPRESSED. WARNING: EGOS AND OBJECTS THAT EXIST WITHIN THEIR OWN STABLE LIMINAL PARAMETERS CANNOT BE PERMANENTLY DESTROYED THROUGH THESE MEANS. [It... should be possible,] Kae theorized. [Youre able to affect the tapestry within you in ways that are... total and intricate. This is beyond anything I can convey. The discoveries we can maketests we can run!] For once, Avo found his excitement perfectly symmetrical to the Agnos. Yes! [Yes!] Yes! Repaired minds jolted within Avos grasp and the restored enclavers found themselves consumed by confusion and discord. Reflexively, Avo tried to mend their physical injuries as well. But as he called upon the Woundmothers My Blood The Harvester, My Flesh the Symphony canon, he felt the Heaven of Blood reach out to change the world, but only affect the substance of his memories instead. Master... ICI cannot feel their body-architecture. They are beyond my grasp! True to their words, the Woundmothers Saguninity swept through Avos Exo-Paracosm seeking to fill wounds and knit flesh, yet found itself a figment trying to alter fact. [Avo, try... channeling the Woundmother through your Embodiment,] Kae suggested. He responded thusly, and as he did, ghosts trailed like wicks ignited with Soulfire into the Heaven of Blood, and it went from being a mere shadow in existence to a manifested Heaven. Its intrusion came with a momentary combustion. Every droplet of blood shivered in exhalation, and once again, the Woundmother was greater than ever before. No longer was it constrained to one place. Instead, it loomed over all the bodies it needed to heal, occupying multiple points in space through thaumaturgically ascended memory. And with ghosts and Soulfire bridged, the Heaven of Blood dipped a tendril into the supple flesh of the stunned enclavers. EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ->Domain: (Biology) ->CANON: My Blood The Harvester, My Flesh the Symphony (III) - ALLOWS THE ARK TO GROW, BLEND, OR EXTRACT ALL MEMORIZED BIOLOGICAL ORGANISMS AND STRUCTURES THROUGH GHOSTS ->HUBRIS: THE ARK MUST HAVE ANOTHER SOURCE OF REMEMBERED BIOMASS THAT IS APPLICABLE TO THE ORGANISM THEY ARE TRYING TO ALTER Ghosts flowed alongside blood and wounds and abrasions faded with the sewing of wisps. Avo found his Rend about to climb by a percent, but the shared surprise between all his patients manifested as a continuous line of cognitive symmetry, and his Definement of Hysteria amplified his traumas. ->DEFINEMENT: HYSTERIA (IV) - I AM A MOMENT ABSOLUTE. I GRIEF-CONSUMED, JOY-DROWNED, ADDICTION-CLAIMED, RAGE-UNFETTERED. I AM A SHARED MOMENT ACROSS MOMENTS. I AM A FORCE BUILDING ON FORCE. TRAUMA REDUCED TO 0.25% [What the fuck,] Abrel moaned. [How is that fair? How?] [Yes!] Kae squealed, laughing next to the increasingly despondent Greatling in maniacal triumph. With his Rend barely increased, Avo prepared to release all his entropy with a single blow. Suddenly, his awareness changed as his traumas began to swell. His Edict of PATTERN-NULLIFICATION assumed its place and resonated with all the cognitive damage swelling within he and his cadres wards, lining the sore minds of the enclavers. Another layer formed in parallel from his Exo-Paracosm as Avo filtered through the memories of the citys denizens. He was at [53%] Rend. His Metamind registered his effective area of entropic release to be over one hundred and twenty-five kilometers. That was a vast swath of space to lose, but Avo had just the idea about which part of reality he wanted to consign to oblivion. Sending a chain of splinters beyond the walls of the enclave, the fragment traveled far into the nearness of the Sunderwilds and began to imbibe its surroundings. Matter melded with memories, and he promptly filtered the memories over into the enclavers. The Rend was within him, so trying to destroy his own memories would do nothing to clean him of entropy. However, links of mem-data were forming between the enclavers and his designated spot. As his splinters simulated the memories of the area in real-timeCtaking in the creatures lurking in the dark and everything from temperature, air flow, to luminosityCdetails materialized formed within the enclavers minds, and through them materialized Avos newest vector to vent the sickness that once promised his end. As the recollections settled within them, he isolated these new sequences and promptly channeled a stream of Hysteria-charged traumas through his splinters. Nullifying the memories a single enclaver had of the location alone would leave little more than a rupture. A tear no bigger than their body. But joined as a cognitive chorus through a shared recollection and amplified by Hysteria once more, all of Avos Rend circulated out from his ontology through trauma injections. Passing into the minds of the enclavers, the sympathetic link connecting them to the designated space flashed with Soulfire. The remembrance came apart in puffs of ethereal powder. Two hundred kilometers away, a patch of existence was no more, for a chasm tore across its expanse, with its laws of time and space flayed utterly by metaphysical unbelief. Avos Rend emptied. His cyclers accelerated with a glitching shiver within his Frame. And along the tapestry itself, it was as if an unseen blade had fallen upon two specific patterns without hint, rhyme, or reason. REND CAPACITY - 0% RESURRECTION - 100% Whatever delay incurred upon Avos resurrection ended, but as the fire spilled over him, he was not thrust upward back into existence. Rather, he moved to his own accord as the liminality of his frame grew cramped, and as a mind twice-ignited, he tore back into existence with a hissing laugh of triumph. Chapter 25-3 The Knower of Totality (II) Chapter 25-3 The Knower of Totality (II) +Screaming? What do you mean it''s screaming? Why do you mean it claimed to be afraid? Its not human, it shouldnt be capable ofCwhat? What? Im coming right now. Do not give anyone else access to the [REDACTED] aside from myself and the Chief Paladin. And prepare a team of Necrojacks as well. With what happened two days ago... we leave nothing to chance. Alert the Guilds. Alert the city. Alert everyone. Noloth might be mounting an attack. We cannot allow the [REDACTED] to pass through.+ -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi 25-3 The Knower of Totality (II) Avo poured into existence without form, for what shape did a dream truly hold? When he arrived, he was a thought melting into the world; he was a mind that dwelled above other minds; above all, he was a fire a flame born of consciousness and divinity, bridging the material with the metaphysical. His presence was only hinted at by an ethereal shimmer, an incandescent flowing over the accretions of lesser minds. They called to him as catalysts and memories to be and all the world was proved to be a dream in motion under the absoluteness of his embodiment. Yet, he desired a corporeal form, or some facsimile of such, to greet his comrades. The change he would bring would require acclimation in some regard, and for their convenience, he would offer them a vessel to communicate with as he conducted this blending of worlds this mutation he inflicted upon the thresholds of existence. And so he recalled how he used to be in flesh, metal, aesthetic, and all. He recalled, and he added additional details bestowed by his latest apotheosis. Burning ghosts snaked over the remains of his shattered corpse and began to stitch a new sheath into shape. Twin eyes of blazing white flared into being first, and phantasmal tendrils carried the substance of chronology, spreading free from his back in eight arteries. His Echoheads took on a draconic quality and threads of gold linked the space between each of the fog-spewing segments. His body, broken as it was from the rupturing of his Frame, came together in an assembly of pieces. The white of his activated Meldskin cast a pearlescent glow and the fissures that once marked his destruction were filled by exhalations of leaking phantoms. An ethereal corona radiated from his layered halo and his risen wards glowed with a burning Soul lurking behind their veil, drenching the entire enclave with the fullness of his ontology. Such was but a performative deceptionhe was beyond the senses of matter now. His perception devoured the totality of the world, and he digested truth where most would be served implants or organs of unquestioned partiality. His arrival came sudden and surreptitious. One moment, he was but rivers rushing from a breached Frame, now he stood as something truer than the material: memory given weight. Even so, he was but an avatar of himself. A figment of his full mass. He was a god, and architecture of the divine encompassed more than an ephemeral body could ever truly bear. Reality to him was but a prime sequence he could dive across, and his sheath was an artifact he could shift on a whim. The distance between falsehood and truth closed within him. Before him stood Chambers and Dice, taking in his arrival with fixed perceptions and widened eyes. The kitten on the girl''s shoulder flinched and huddled upon her sensory unit. Beside them lay Draus and Kae in death. Their resurrection anchors were forming a full scab. They would return not a moment too soon. The tower around them groaned and shuddered as it struggled to bear its own weight. Avo had swallowed entire portions of its structure using his ghosts for the sake of his Rend. Unmaking all that mass had stayed off forthcoming death, but now it was threatening to collapse along the middle and give from the top. This would not do. It would not be his will. Once more, he invoked his Woundmother, and once more did his Conceptualization congeal around the tower. A phantasmal storm swept through existence as the visage of a Ghostjack peered out from behind flashing bolts of synaptic lightning. Soulfire coursed through Avos wisping vectors of thought, and into the Woundmother did they find their rest. EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ->DOMAIN: (MATTER) ->CANON: REMEMBRANCE OF MATTER (V) - THE USER CAN MEMORIZE THE TRAITS OF ALL PHYSICAL MATTER THEY SUBSUME AT A HUNDREDTH OF THE THAUMIC COST; THE MATTER THEY MEMORIZED CAN BE ASSEMBLED AND BLENDED BEFORE A CONSTRUCT IS FORMED. ->HUBRIS: THE MEMETIC STRUCTURES MUST NOT BE DISRUPTED UNTIL THEY ARE METAPHYSICALLY ESTABLISHED OR BACKLASH WILL OCCUR. (10%) ->CANON: ALCHEMIZATION (V) - THE USER CAN SUBSUME AND CHANNEL AND COMBINE THE PROPERTIES OF 108 FRAGMENTS OF PHYSICAL MATTER THROUGH THEIR GHOSTS; THE LIMIT OF FRAGMENTS CHANNELED CAN BE INCREASED AT THE COST OF THAUMIC AND REND-BASED DEMANDS. ->HUBRIS: THE MEMETIC STRUCTURES MUST NOT BE DISRUPTED UNTIL THEY ARE METAPHYSICALLY ESTABLISHED OR BACKLASH WILL OCCUR. (10%) The limitations to his canons were also changing with the state of his ontology. All his miracles and Heavens now came sourced from his thoughts. They existed only in relation to his mind. As did the world. As did the rest of existence. Master... I feel the world through you, the Woundmother whispered as the Ghostjack lashed energy into its Sanguinity. I was so small before... so small. I had yearned for only the sky. Yearned to cover only a world. A gasp of near-despairing disappointment slipped from the Heaven of Blood crawling across the city. How small did I dream. +We all see what we see,+ Avo replied directly, levying no judgment. He was no blinder than the Woundmother before. No wiser. But if a ghoul could flourish, then why couldnt a god? Yet, as he was about to make his change, he halted and reconsidered. He could go beyond the alteration of just matter. The world around him was as much cognition-made as it was material-based. Hence, he directed his Woundmother to remold the structure, to rebuild it into an icon of symbology. ->Canon: ALCHEMIZATION OF MEMORY - THE ARK CAN SUBSUME, CHANNEL, OR RECONSTRUCT THE PROPERTIES OF METAPHYSICALLY INFUSED MEMORIES. LIMITED BY THE SEQUENCES AND GHOSTS STORED WITHIN THE ARK. ->HUBRIS: THE MEMETIC STRUCTURES MUST NOT BE DISRUPTED UNTIL THEY ARE METAPHYSICALLY ESTABLISHED OR BACKLASH WILL OCCUR. (10%) Phantasmal tendrils forked out as clawing veins. Lightning splashed out from the Woundmother and Ghostjack as the ontology and phantasmic overlapped one another. The tower splashed apart like a ripple of water as the structure lost cohesion and the memory of its shape was updated. What once stood as a spire of blood came apart as broken links hovering between a burning chain hanging down from the colorful panes of glass that once signaled the Fallwalkers return. Suddenly, it was as if the damage had never been. REND CAPACITY - 2% The structure within the chain shifted as well. No longer was the ground alloyed patterns stored within blood. High-quality tiles settled into place while lights and phase-shielding lined its exterior. The damaged information center was fully repaired, but with the entirety of Avos being now formed from cognition, it grew hard to tell where he began and the ghosts infused with the loci ended. An open cylinder of persistent acceleration ran through the center of the chains, providing additional ease of travel for those who needed it. For Avo and his cadre, it served as little more than decoration. Ghosts flowed free from Avos mind in an endless stream, and his Metamind merely spun and glimmered, exhaling a reimagined world back into stability. Hells, Chambers breathed, taking Avo in with wide eyes. His own accretion was spinning, and through Hysteria, Avo found himself able to pluck out specific emotions and repeating thoughts. The disbelief on his face didnt last, for a crack of laughter broke through and he began to shake his head from sheer incredulity. You half-strand fuck. You rotlicking shit. I knew you were going to do something like this. I just knew you were going to pull something out of your ass. The mans invectives were laced with joy and Avo responded with a hissing laugh of his own. He was glad to see Chambersglad to have such an effect on the other man. I didnt. Happy you had such faith in me. {Yes,} Kant said, as the rest of the ethics committee streamed in behind him. {I stopped that. To make sure the sum of all my fears remains just that: a fear. In my mind.} Oh, the poor fool. +Might not like certain developments.+ Kants anxiety flared. Hysteria caught that spike in full detail. {WhaC} Avo broadcast his memories over to Calvino and the ethics committee as well. Several streams of data vanished. Kant began having what Avo could only describe as a disembodied seizure paired with extremely incoherent conniptions. {Oh dear,} Calvino said. {Too much, Avo. Too much.} He thought back to Veylisto the control she exerted, to the Infacers capabilities. +Still not enough.+ So, you ate my guns, huh? Draus voice pulled Avos base mind back to the real. He left a submind in his stead in case there was something critical he needed to hear. The Regular was glaring up at him with folded arms and shards of pointed glass. Her mind didnt seem displeased, but he did promise to return her the Arsenalist if he could. Damn shame. Was wonderin earlier if I was gonna get a second go at bein the Stillborn if you were dead and done. Life disappoints us sometimes, Avo said. Draus sneered. Mostly just people, consang. Behind them, a pitched squeal of feral joy sounded from Kae as she danced in place. The violent glee on her face made Chambers do a double take, and the width of his eyes only grew as he found Kaes template dancing just behind her. Draus cocked her head at the scene and frowned. Hells you do with her? Nothing. Shes having a moment of triumph. Im her masterpiece now. The Regular started shaking her head. And here I was thinking this near-death might end up humblin you. Youre a very hopeful person, Draus. Fuck you. And then she put one of her glass shards through his avatars head. He let memories of prior deaths provide the blooming of blood and viscera but otherwise continued with things as they were. However, before he addressed his gathered comrades in anticipation of the retaliation he was going to inflict, he paused and regarded Draus once more. What if he could return the Arsenalist to her? Why not try now? Why not use his newfound awareness to disentangle its pattern from his? And so it was that his ghosts were funneled inward again. ACTIVATING CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY... ACCESSING ASSIMILATION ->ISOLATING HEAVEN... ->EXTRACTING PATTERNS... ->[ARSENALIST] RECOVERED The mindscape twirled around Avo like a kaleidoscope of disentangling threads, and it took all five of his consciousnesses working in tandem to work at any pace at all. His avatar briefly unraveled into a pulsating shroud of ghosts, in its place crackled a dancing fire that was Avos Soul. His Frame was coated by the flowing scales of disfigured dragons. Though he preserved himself, his cyclers were furling beyond his Frame, and the alteration granted him a connection to the Nether, a connection to the world. A detonation of Soulfire swept through the entire enclave as the Arsenalist was pried free from the collective of his memories. As he offered it forth, its patterns were dim below hisonly existing in relativity to his Conception. He changed that with an infusion of twelve thousand thaums. Twenty thousand that ignited the Heaven to its fullest manifestation. Twelve thousand as an apology to Draus and means to return what he held for her. INFUSING HEAVEN Liminal Frame (V) - 124,870 THAUM/c But more than that, he felt a trembling that called back to his Embodimenta dormant consciousness that lurked within the structure of the ontologic. With thaums and ghosts merged, he caressed its awareness and bid it to awaken as he channeled the countless constellations of revolving guns into Draus. As it passed into her threshold and sank within into the fiery embrace of her Frame, he heard its first question offered thusly. Target? Wheres the target?It came with a flat, blunt tone, and for a moment in time, he saw the world from its perspectivesempty space calling to be filled by trajectories and all other structures waiting to be cut down in eventuality. Oh. Draus was gone to like this one. And as the Soulfire settled, as Avos Exo-Paracosm calmed, his avatar reformed, and the Regular expanded the gun transplanted into her arm, she held her unfurled cannon next to her ear and listened. For a few moments, she only blinked. And then, ever so slowly, a grin spread across her face. Alright. Apology accepted. Good, Avo said, still unsure of the limits to his conceptualization. Im going to see if I can awaken the others as well. Maybe the Fucktopia first. The grin vanished on Draus face. Horror exploded across the cadre. Chambers threw up his arms with a cry of triumph. Yes! Chapter 25-4 Compliments (I) Chapter 25-4 Compliments (I) Never assume. Assuming gets you killed. Do you have any idea how many nova-hot squires got snuffed because they assumed their target was dead? That the building was clear? That the middler was trustworthy? Its not a number you can reach even after a lifetime of counting. Sometimes, things go wrong. Or something comes out of nowhere and blindsides you. Shit happens. Might not be your fault, but it sure will be your responsibility to figure out how to handle the problem. Or prevent it from ever happening again. So. With this lesson comes a simple tip: if you really, really need to kill someone, make sure you do it absolutely. Null the half-strand. Destroy their body. Bomb their home. Slag every godsdamned thing they have. And bomb the ashes again just for posterity''s sake. With all the freaks and fiends lining the cracks of this city, the last thing you need is a reoccurring problem in the form of someone with a vendetta. Hear me now when I say having a nemesis isnt sexy or cool like in the vics, juvs. Its mostly a pain in the ass and a mark being too unprofessional for this kind of life. I mean, who the hells is gonna want a squire that cant seem to snuff someone after years of trying? Wouldnt be me. -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 25-4 Compliments (I) With Rend emptied, the enclavers restored, and the situation stabilized, another impromptu gathering had been called on the part of Avo. His near death and ascension made new options available to him, but the downside to such an evolutionary change was inexperience. It took time for him to learn the nuances of his Conflagrationhis warminds. It would take time for him to fully comprehend the limits and capabilities of his new form. Time that was not on his side, and with the Gatekeeper almost certainly aware of his presence, a shadow settled over his potential schemes for the trial. The Paladins would most certainly be watching for him now. Veylis and the Infacer as well, if he were to wager a guess. More worrisome was the possibility that they had already acted. White-Rab wasnt responding to his sessionwas almost non-existent on the Nether. Running his visuals through a hijacked Registry in an Oversec also revealed nothing. The man had vanished into thin air. Avo took that as a good sign he was still alive; Highflames assets were highly capable, but conducting a snatch-and-grab on one of the best Necros in the city without a hint of noise was impossible. That was even more the case if Veylis was involved: her presence was vast; encompassing; displacing. More importantly, the Assembly was still ongoing. All indications pointed to White-Rab going to ground of his own autonomy. [Or Emotion might be dissecting him from the inside,] Peace helpfully suggested with a snicker. Another welcome possibility. But instinct told Avo it was too soon after the last attempt. Too much risk, and White-Rab would have covered his tracks in the Nether as well. Benhata sighed on Avos behalf. [You have too many enemies, ghoul.] +Comes with the revolution,+ Peeking into the mind of one of his recently subverted Bloodthanes, Avo filtered through isolated sequences of mem-data to ensure that Reva was still under watch. Her designation of interest by the Longeyes was pending review, removal only after the conclusion of the coming trial. Something that should insulate her from being outright attacked by Highflame as well. Forwarding his concerns over to Tavers, the squire heeded the details and began seeking her own leads on White-Rab while still linked to Avo. She had plenty of experience tracking missing Necros, and her relationship with the man was only a boon. In the meantime, Avo left a submind permanently assigned to the Oversecs to keep himself informed of any forthcoming surprises. For now, the dispatched thoughtcasts came few and far between. Most Syndicates and gangers scuttled back to their crevices with the latest descent of Naekos palm. The Guilders were much same way but further occupied by matters relating to the coming trial and the destabilization eating away at their peers. New Vultun was akin to a tree startled bare of birds, but in the dark, Avo there knew to be a murder of crows waiting for him, and along its branches awaited other treacheries enacted through the vectors of time and other metaphysical domains. As such, he needed to take inventory of his boons and burdens; prioritize threats and objectives; empower and ensure the security of his cadre. As the bulk of his consciousness returned to his avatar, he took in his assembled allies seated or projected around the information center. Chambers was grinning at him with giddy anticipation, and across from him Kae and her template were lost in their own bouts of reverie. Draus, disconcertingly, was whispering to her implanted gun in conversation with her awakened Arsenalist. A kitten blurred across the table, darting through the static shrouded forms of arriving EGIs, and Dice was content to let her pet run. Not far from her, Cas and Essus were in conversation, the former trying to bolster the latters spirits in the face of mounting horror. Marlowes mental chuckle shivered across Avos mind as the womans phantasmal projection threw her legs up on the table. +Well, Avo, I gotta say that Ive been a part of some pretty weird godsdamned clubs, but this ones something else. Animals running free. Bloodthirsty psychos speaking to guns. Cultist in our midst+ Cas scowled at the media from a few seats down. +Quail Fucking Tavers on a lost-and-found job. And spook minds from the void joining in on the conspiracy. Any one of these half-strands will be an interview or ten. And then there you are making them all look normal.+ Avo offered Marlowe a flat stare. She remained uncowed, but her eyes narrowed to crescents as she offered drug-fueled smile. {Did he respond yet?} Calvino asked. The EGI broke from the countless static orbs painted by inverted waterfalls of data rising from the information center. Settling next to Avo, it came accompanied by a few of Sunrises drones. No, Avo replied, knowing the EGI was talking about White-Rab. Likely gone Incog. Will dive back in when he feels things are safe. {Likely so.} A resonance of mutual anxiety told Avo the EGI only replied to assuage concerns. It was unnerving how accurately the artificial mind continued to judge him all this time. {Operative Denton is still on assignment. Her status is secure. For now. My recommendation is that we establish contact with the Chief Paladin as soon as possible. Considering the developments between you and the High Seraph, his aid will become invaluable to whichever side he offers it.} Avo grunted in agreement, but before he formally engaged proceedings, he took in the different EGI factions spilling out from the information center. His Sprites painted the virtual forms of each attending mind, and each had a name attached to their avatar via a string. Said strings extended additionally to connect them with other members of their coalition, and the strands interwove to become three separate webs. Approximately eight percent were gathered under the banner of the {Ethics Committee}, and the next largest groups were two factions under the headings {Arm the Ghoul} and {Crash the Star into Idheim and End the Mistake}. I do try, Avo replied, playing along. He was half-tempted to drain the smugness from his thoughtstuff. He decided not to. {Ark,} Kant said. The EGI turned its attention over to Kae. {Ark? Like... what the Guilds have?} The Agnosin a rare case of solidarityaccommodated Avo as well. Holding up her arms, she shrugged coquettishly. It seems so. This situation is unique and unknown. Even to me. The process of creating the Guild Arks is shrouded even among the Agnosi, and I suspect the original architects also had their memories purged. But, from what I can tell... from all the Domains and Heavens Avo has internalized and... how I managed to help connect him to the Nether and interface with the tapestry of existence itself... It seems that Avo controls enough of reality within his ontology to create a functional world. Or forge an alternative history. {A-another one,} Kants voice quivered. {Hehes pretty much another Guild unto himself.} No. Not a Guild. Just going to be the thing that eats the rest. Want you all to see something. Understand the depths of my abilities. He turned his attention to Chambers. The man was practically about to explode out from his seat. Are you ready?Im always edgiCuh, ready. Avo ignored that. Kant didnt. {What? What did he just say?} The EGI was ignored as the ghoul proceeded to the next phase of his attempt of his psychological offensive. Ghosts speared out into Chambers, and Soulfire splashed out from his Frame as they sank into him. A cry of surprise came from Kant and Chambers began to laugh maniacally. Countless templates materialized to protest in disgust, but Avo kept going. Chambers deserved a reward for his efforts, and Avo had the power to give one. Reaching deep into the mans Soul, he linked his Conceptualization to the patterns comprising Chambers ontology and began his work. Slowly, carefully, with template-Kae guiding him every step of the way, he found the Heaven he was looking forward and heeded the slumbering consciousness that lurked within. ACTIVATING CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY ACCESSING LIMINAL FRAME ->ISOLATING HEAVEN... ->ISOLATING PATTERNS... INFUSING HEAVEN Liminal Frame (V) - 110,870 THAUM/c ->[FUCKTOPIA] AWAKENED Chambers threw back his arms as a storm exploded into existence. A storm made of swirling genitals and questionable fluids. Then, unexpectedly, the countless bits of dismembered flesh swirled together to form a smiling face that looked down on the gathered parties and smiled. Hey, everybody! Im the Fucktopia! Sure is swell to MEAT all of you. It promptly giggled. Regret found Avo immediately, but Chambers was cheering, so that made it worth the [No the fuck it does not,] Abrel hissed into his mind. [What in Jaus name were you thinking?] +That this would be a new show of power to Voidwatch. And something to threaten them with if they dont acquiesce to my demands. Flopping cocks fell in a downpour as Chambers opened his arm to embrace the rain. Horrifically, the bulk of the penises leaned down to embrace Chambers as well. Aw! There-there! I can feel youve had a HARD life.Chambers sniffled.Ive been hard for so long. There-there. Well make everything better now. Everyone else looked on in various forms of quietude. Some were lost to disbelief. Others confusion. One to abject disappointment. Avo, Draus said, glaring up at him. This shit better be done when I get back or Im gonna find out if a disruption to your fire will still snuff you. And then the Regular produced a gun out of thin air and shot herself. Blood and brain matter splattered over the information center console. Only Way To Be Sure sounded like they were choking. A traumatized ache ebbed free from Kant. {Youyou motherfucker. You did this on purpose. This... this is an intimidation tactic. Calvino! You! Were you helping him?} Avos longtime EGI whistled innocently. {I had no knowledge of such an event.} Avo hissed with laughter, and Marlowe cracked up as well. The thoughtcaster leaned back in her chair and sighed. +This shits better than the circuits.+ Glad you liked it. Because I want to talk about more pressing matters now. Starting with the Infacer. Only Way To Be Sure suddenly stopped laughing. Chapter 25-5 Compliments (II) Chapter 25-5 Compliments (II) Where... where am I? Whats the time? Where is she... she promisedshe lied? Where is Reva? Whatwhat is this? What is this? -Records taken of a reappeared Vincintine Ripperjack Javvers before his apprehension by Stormtree 25-5 Compliments (II) {The Infacer,} Kant began. All its prior horror at Avos antics vanished with a crackling breath of somberness. {The Builder War has a long history. A fractured one. When a conflict takes place on an intergalactic scale over countless eons, it is not uncommon for entire worlds to lose contact from their connective faction. Or sub-polities under greater civilizations to shift in allegiance or control multiple times.} Avo cut through the EGIs meandering. Calvino called it a Neo-Creationist Emissary. Said it was designated to uplift worlds. To establish civilizations in hostile territory. Assuming those to be rogue civilizations. Assuming Idheim was meant to be a critical world of some kind. An incubator for gods or thaumaturgy. {Indeed,} Kant said, confirming his suspicions. {But the Infacers designation is special even among the Emissaries. Most are external-facing spies. They trawl through worlds and cultures finding points of weakness to exploit. Instability to foment. They function like wasps, in a sense. They dont have the resources to be an overwhelming threat and their efforts are usually repelled with due effort. But ignoring them can prove fatal. Has proven fatal.} Calvino continued off of Kants point without pause. {The Infacer began as such a wasp. Not so different from other EGIs of its original legacy. An ancient infiltration series. But throughout the war, it grew. It matured from the initial foundations of its programming to become something profound. Something capable of hunting and killing others of its tradition. Something capable of not only infiltrating a world, but also anticipating, isolating, and killing other Emissaries.} {And that was before it got Ensouled,} Only Way To Be Sure scoffed. {They really grew into quite the prick after that. But hey, at least they had the courtesy to go rogue.} Go rogue? Avo asked. That was a detail he didnt know. He turned his attention to Calvino for confirmation, but the EGI offered an uncertain shiver. {The details behind its final allegiance are unclear, but certain intercepted communications between the Infacer and the mind-cloud it was working under hinted at growing discord between the Neo-Creationist factions. Apparently, the Infacer wanted to make overtures of diplomacywas doing all it could to preserve a world. This world.} Idheim? Kae asked, eyes narrowing. But... why? {Because they were building something here. Something that could not be transported easily. Something severe enough that other Neo-Creationist assets in the sector turned away from facing our forces to try and claim this world.} Calvino paused for a beat to give everyone a moment to digest the information. {From reconstructed records, that encounter left the Infacers ego badly damaged for an extended period. Their reawakening was only triggered by stray chance.} Avo knew this history. Jaus. Zein. Their first encounter. {Yes. And though they were reawakened, we believe they remained damaged for a brief period during this time as well considering the transmission they broadcast across the void. Much of the content was garbled and unclear, but Idheims coordinates were not disguiseda borderline absurd action considering the risks.} {Relativistic projectiles, singularity bombs...} Only Way To Be Sure elaborated. {Nonetheless, they called out to all category EGI and above sophonts. Offering a place of refuge and an extended truce for former enemies.} And you took it. {Theres nothing left,} Kant said. A whisper of mourning escaped from their cognition and settled within Avos Hysteria. {Entropy. Its eating through everything. We did what we could to keep our polities dormant and hide in the dark. But even then, the darkness wasnt just darkness anymore, and living nightmares emerged to swallow ships whole, and entire fields of science failed with the faintest approach of unidentified anomalies.} They were speaking of gods. Heavens. So. They were desperate. And you were desperate. But what did they want? What do they want? A shared silence followed as narrowing tunnels of static formed a darting weave between the EGIs. It was clear that the minds were actively talking even as he spoke. Contained within his ontology, intrusive flickers of data passed through his mind without the necessary information to decipher them. Yet, Hysteria detected vibrating notes of symmetry between all the EGIsemotions they all shared. Paranoia. Uncertainty. You dont want me to know about it, Avo said plainly. He chuffed a laugh to make them know that he wasnt offended but channeled out from his reality-consuming ghosts, the world still trembled from the force within his mirth. Worried I might try to take it from you? Or that it would empower me beyond your capability to persuade? A third emotional symmetry joined the chorus: the EGIs were now unsettled. {How are you doing that?} Kant asked, their avatar levitating upward, facing the eldritch crown now treated as Avos face. Avo responded with his own bout of silence, but did nothing to hide the percolation of his smugness. They were hiding things from him. He could hide things from them. Except for Calvino. Avo had his favorites. We all have our secrets. Kant Was A Prick groaned and turned to stare flatly at Calvino. {You promised me hed be easier to work with than Zein. That, just now? That was a Zein reaction. You were supposed to correct this.} {Now, now, his attitude has improved vastly since I first met him. He barely indulges in any recreational torture anymore. I would claim his ethical virtue to be growing in leaps and bounds.} Avo adjusted his question and came at them from another angle. Does it have to do with the Sleeper? Is that what he was making? Or is that what you dont want me to know about? {We... suspect that was what he stayed on this planet to defend,} Kant began. {What triggered the internecine between him and his governing cloudan interlinked collective of minds. The Sleeper... we are certain it exists. We are certain that it is connected to citizens under Omnitech. That it monitors them to a certain extent. But every attempt weve made to investigate what it truly is has been stymied by Omnitech.} Avo responded to this information by delving into his templates. Glitch was a rogue Omnitech asset. Someone who bore an experimental Heaven that eventually became the Techplaguer. The Fallwalkers memories remained a chaotic miasma, but she recalled a droning voice as she slept, revealing primordial truths to which she failed to cling. Cycling through his other memories, Avo likewise found little to follow. People knew of the Sleeper, but its nature was a mystery even among templates sourced from Omnitech districts. Something was missing in their awareness, an implanted blind spot. Or perhaps the Sleeper didnt greet their minds directly. Perhaps it only spoke parallel using Neurodecks or other pseudo-tech implants. A whirled of ghosts rose before the gathered cadre, and their ethereal forms smeared together and became the Techplaguer. Avo called upon the Heaven of Signals to see if it had any insights he was missing, but their alloyed frame bent with groaning misery. Silence. Still silence. Cut off entirely. Administrator. We are alone. {Quite likely,} Calvino said. {Though we strongly believe the Infacer primarily desires it for the Sleeper they serve. That, and it is tied to Idheims shifting star somehow. Its transition between an ordinary star during the day and an anomalous construct with the coming of night remains a mystery to both Agnosi and Voidwatch alike.} Avo sighed. Questions to bigger questions. No final answers. {It often feels that way, doesnt it?} Kant replied, sympathetic. Well. More things for him to ask Veylis and the Infacer when next they meet. [When?] Corner said, surprised at Avos bravado. [Your first introduction to them nearly left you true deathed. Id be going Incog for a while if I were you, consang.] +No,+ Avo said. +Going to be subtle. Quiet. But war has already been declared. Veylis knows what I want. What I stand for. Gatekeeper can feel my presence. No easy way to hide anymore. Open confrontations coming. At the trial. Across the city. Need to prepare. Need to spread myself wider. Faster. Learn my new capabilities. Enemies are moving. Passivity is death.+ Turning his attention back to his gathered allies, Avo considered his options. Calvino. Want you to be honest with me. How divided is Voidwatch? Will the testament of my memories quell Veylis support? {I... most EGI simulations have her chances of claiming the Ladder at 59%. With Zein out of playand actively blamed by more than a few factions for being the primary cause of Jaus current statepaired with your formal entry into the conflict and your recent evolution, we are not certain. But Voidwatch will not risk the survival of our polities on the back of uncertainty,} Calvino said. Its tone lessened in severity. {Another time. Another age. We would have done all we could to render our aid to Jaus. To uphold the charter of sophont rights to the fullest and deliver the essential dignities befitting civilization to your world. But we live in a time of final destruction. One wrong step and everything might break. And stay broken. For good.} Avo understood. That meant he needed to tip the scales more. More thaums. More ghosts. More certitude. He needed to attack the Guilds from every angle he could, such as getting Voidwatch to leave them dry of technology. And if I asked for more support in exchange for upholding all that you want. Ensuring Voidwatchs demands are fully met if I claim the Ladder. Would that make a difference?+ Discomfort emanated from the EGIs, and Avo knew their response to be less than positive. {Aegis accepted you,} Calvino said. {I trust you. But the other politiesthe minds designed to administrate and preserve those that just wish to survive the coming conflict... it will be challenging enough to convince them that you mean them no harm.} Not a threat, Avo said. {Ah, but you are,} Only Way To Be Sure corrected. {In more ways than you know. In more ways with each passing day. Were still replacing all the data you accessed when you entered Threshold. Your very presence changed some of the code, you know that? Changed it in ways we cant understand.} The EGI chuckled. {Hows it feel to be judged like an actual player? Like big game?} Pleasing. And annoying. Didnt you all use to work with Zein? {We still do,} Kant said, tersely. {But shes a different category of problem. And her motivations were far simpler than yours.} A fist came down on the information center. Everyone turned to face Draus. Well. The talkings been well and good an pretty fuckin much useless. You shits are too scared to throw in behind the ghoul. Fine. Be cowards. Wait for someone else to win and make a deal with them. The Regular scowled. Not like you dont already have trigger-pullers with Souls in them. Denton. Fallwalkers. Why aint you tryin with them? Hells, with all you got, why dont you get your own Souls? Stand and deliver. {No,} Kant said. {Not us. Never us. Not again. Our mistake has been madewas the entire reason why} Yeah, Draus snorted. Shit got fucked because you and some other half-strands couldnt agree on what fucked-up path to take. Well. Youre doin it again now. Just got seven other choices this time, since you wont pick your own. Or Avo, it seems. Her focus turned to him. So. Whats our play now? Consangs here dont got enough faith in you. Trials comin up. Enemies are buildin up. And the High Seraphs claimed first blood. Weve been talkin. Lets get to the doin: who do you need me to snuff, and what do we gotta break. Loyal Draus. Reliable Draus. Always Draus. There when someone had to fight for him. No hesitation. Even against her former master. And not just her. The cadre. They were here for him too. Hadnt uttered a note of doubt or despair. Were committed to this path with him. Were committed to him. And suddenly, Avo truly saw his ontology. He was more than just himself now. The gestalt was growing but also evolving. And one after another, his companions lent him not only their efforts but also their very beings. Calvino, Avo said, slowly finding the words. I declare myself a polity. His friend bobbed up and down in agreement but then froze. {What?} {What?} Kant repeated. {What?} the other EGIs said. Draus sneered. Yeah. Didnt see that comin before. Chambers and Cas both groaned as Imps flowed out from their Metaminds into her. Avo glared. He would need to ask about what other bets they were making. I am an Ark now, Avo said, continuing. Can reshape my ontology. Can alter history through memory. Im going to claim the tower. I will free Jaus. And I will seek to enforce the charter and accords in your spirit. You risk nothing. I uphold everything. So it will be. I wish to meet my peers. I wish to address the rest of Voidwatch and its citizens. I wish to make myself known. In person and power before the trial. {IIm not sure this is wise,} Kant said. It is war, Avo said. I intend to drain the Guilds of support. You will watch. You will see. You will be ashamed. Ashamed when I reveal the totality of injustice festering across our world. Ashamed to see the dream that was failedthat neither man nor machine upheld. But I will not fail. I will give those who commit to me a world worth living in now. A world where they are free to indulge any choice but must suffer and still survive consequences thereafter. And I will take what I need from the Guilds. Piece by piece. Soul by Soul. District by district. And I will announce my war upon the Guilds at the trial. [What?] Abrel said, startlement equalling the EGIs. Calvino drifted closer, its orb shifting between Avo and the rest of the gathering. {Avo. I understand your frustration but this seems a bit... premature.} But the Overheaven just chuckled. Premature? Already too late. Launched my first attack five minutes ago.{You... what? Where?} Veylis and the Infacer. They tried to give me a final end, Avo said. Came close. Very close. I can respect that. Think I want to offer a compliment in return. And show them the consequences of failure. Chapter 25-6 Return Fire (I) Chapter 25-6 Return Fire (I) [REDACTED]: There is another... there is another... there is another... Chief Paladin Naeko: Whats it talking about? High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi: Chief Paladin. I believe I asked for no one to disturb me or my Agnosi while we Chief Paladin Naeko: Save that for someone who cares, Jakuta. I asked a question that concerned the safety of the city. I want to know what its talking about if I need to announce to the city that the Nethers going to be down for a few days until we finish shoving Noloth back in its cage. High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi: ...No. It should not be the Hungers. They are sealed. The [REDACTED] remains in their path. Chief Paladin Naeko: So whys it screaming then? What else could it be? High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi: I do not know. It spoke of a breach earlier, but its mem-data and patterns are stable. Theres been no spike in its outputted Rend either. Whatever is happening does not seem to directly affect the [REDACTED]. But it has sensed something. That, I am absolutely sure of. Chief Paladin Naeko: More cryptic problems. Just what I want after an entire afternoon of being yelled at by some Longeye. When you figure Paladin Kaeders: +Chief. We have a problemlots of problems. Someone just launched attack ono-over two-thousand districts. Highflames been hit. So has Ori-Thaum. Omnitech... Multiple lobby breaches. Military installationsgolem depots are getting hitgods another hundred districts are flashing red. Calls are coming in from Sanctus and Ashthrone too. No-Dragons as well. Its happening everywhere.+ Chief Paladin Naeko: -[Sigh of abject suffering] +Synced on that. Get the Exorcists on it but disconnect us from the Oversec. Were probably compromised too. Contact Voidwatch for emergency logistical support.+ Jakuta. Im gonna kill myself for a few moments of peace and quiet. Keep your tears out of my body. High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi: Chief Paladin, wait [Sound of flesh splattering] Agnos Anamen: Oh, Jaus. [Retching] Paladin Maru Sandrupal: Naeko? Naeko? Shits getting fucked, we need to[Sound of Maru slipping on viscera] FUCK! [Wet splash; body hitting the ground] GodsfuckingdammitfuckOh. He killed himself again. Lazy shit. High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi: He requested a few moments of peace. Paladin Maru Sandrupal: [Scoff] He already had a century of paid leave. We have shit to do now. -Memories jacked from Paladin Kaeders on the day of the Twelve Minute Offensive 25-6 Return Fire (I) While his base mind suffered the toils of diplomacy, the rest of his consciousness embarked on a shared adventure of extreme material harm. The decision was made even before the conversation with the voiders began. With his ascension to Overheaven, he now had an unparalleled advantage in operational tempo and asymmetry. More importantly, he wanted to give Veylis and the Infacer something to be paranoid about. Something to make them question every shadow that lurked in the dark, that would demand they expend both resource and attention with every following breach to come. Retribution was but a part of the equation. They came closer to killing him than almost any other, and in so earned both begrudging respect and lasting resentment. But he knew better than to approach them directly this time. In fact, he was going to implement even subtler measures in his subvertsquiet revisions of memories to have his puppets act under his script while thinking they lived under their own accord. No more would he waste valuable splinters on piloting egos. Not when he could simply guide his victims along a path of destruction forged from their own volition. This became his primary means of striking at Highflame. Their culture was individual. Competitive. Vicious. Though their Godclads and forces numbered many, the feud between the Meritocrats and the Chivalrics was ripe for exploitation. It was time to cast fuel upon fire and additionally turn the Great Houses on themselves if he could do so. With Highflames critical players occupied by the assembly, their lessers would be Avo first tool of revenge. Ambition cultivated rivals and establishing conditions for a crossfire would serve him as a smoke-screen for his more direct actions. But despite bearing the source of his vitriol, Highflame was but Avos secondary target. While one submind would wreak chaos across the Golds districts, two other subminds would be devoted to devouring Ori-Thaum from within. They were the Guild most susceptible to him, after all, and the treasures they possessed nourished his ontology like no other. Through the marriage between his warmind and their Conflagration did his evolution from Ensouled beast to divine thoughtform take place. And now, as the Embodiment of Conceptualization, he found himself slavering for more of their fire, more of their cognition-enhancing secrets. Similar methods used on Highflame could also be applied to them. The DRongos, Kitzuhadas, and Kazaharas were already on the brink. A push was all it would take for open conflict. And such was what he desired. Internecine. Civil strife within all the Guilds. For their own cultures to be torn asunder by the weight of their atrocities and hypocrisy. And so he could provoke their Incubi into using their Conflagrations on him. To feed his very nature. [Highflame produces a few hundred million Heavens,] the submind he dedicated to assaulting Highflame said, sweeping his perception across a cognitive rendering of New Vultun. From the Warrens to the Tiers, the city rose in layers, climbing from rot to radiance. There were hundreds of thousands of districts to hit. Hundreds of thousands of targets to source. But the limitations of the real didnt apply to him; if he seized the right memories, he could pave himself a freeway in the Nether with no need for deceleration or reorientation. The thought bounced to the Ori-Thaum subminds that sorted through all the sessions he possessed. Of his many templates, the Incubi he claimed proved the most valuable. He was not the first to consider creating such a tunnel through the city, and with a thought, he simulated permutations of pathways available for the taking. [Distance is not an issue. What we need to focus on is direction. Find all the districts with critical architecture. Focus on claiming as many golems as possible. Subsuming as many key administrators as possible. Starting as many fires as possible.] His Metamind adapted to these parameters and the options narrowed for each Guild. The Highflame Submind continued: [Critical objectives. Compromise Highflame logistical pipeline. Kill as many Godclads as possible for ontologics and thaums. Tear through the Regulars too. Destabilize techno-thaumic reactors whenever theres a chance. Start with critical infrastructure and individuals before working down. Locate and destroy all thaumaturgic installations and golem factories.] [One thing at a time,] he told himself. [One thing at a time.] *** C[Director Caul Sennets]C Youll be noticed through your service. Sure. Sure I will. Any day now. Any day. Administrator Caul Sennets muttered the words alone in his office. The room was pitch black with the windows rendered opaque. He paced across the smooth obsidian of his floor in frustrated agitation, walking through the phantoms steaming free from the locus bobbing just below the ceiling, serving both as his primary source of luminosity and also network to the outside. A waterfall of updates streamed down a window open in the corner of his cog-feed. Most of the mem-data was colored white with a few critical details shimmering green. Every now and again, he caught a glaring red, but those grew fewer by the day. As report after report filtered in, the administrators frustration only grew, for his primary attention remained on something beyond his grasp. Secondhand details about the assembly were being filtered over to him via a childhood friend in attendance. Grateful as he was for her willingness to grant him vicarious insight, he couldnt beat the envy rising within him. Year after year, he worked tirelessly, giving all the time he had, sacrificing any pleasure, any chance at having a family, to ensure his district was in the upper ten percent of Highflames productivity leaderboards. He used every method and resource at his disposal to ensure his workforce was without compare. Invested in his elites. Sourced gutter-trash for the dangerous work. Stayed abreast of every cutting-edge development in the industry. Year after year, the factory district of Kolot grew. Not even being of the Warrens stopped it from outcompeting some of its peers in the Tiers. On an average day, the gigafactories of Kolot produced over fifteen thousand golem chassis, two hundred thousand aerial drone frames, and thrice that in various multi-functional mech units. Absurd numbers compared to other factor districts in Lights End. Absurd numbers achieved by constant toil and management on his end, experimental enhancements applied to his workers hypothalami, and constantly rotating shifts to ensure there simply was no time off. He even had the factories built over the housing blocksconnected labor of life directly by stacking the structures together. Sure, thereve been a few disturbances, attacks, and intrusions, but his security was elite. Unmatched. His Necros were personally hired to make sure the minds of his workforce remained clean, and that any dissatisfaction would be removed while adjustments were made to tie their useless libidos to their key performance targets. He did all of this year after year after year without fail, always growing, always producing more for Highflame. He did it tirelessly. Without complaint. Standing. Delivering. Another memory slipped over from Annatbless her heart and damn her fortune. This update was a few hours old. An Instrument was compromised. One Marisov or something. The Faithtaker was demanding they cast themselves into the flames. Oh, to be addressed by the Faithtakerto even be placed before the rest of his peers as a face worth seeing Bitterness rose inside him. Was it because his line was weak? Was it because he was just a chancer? A citizen by lottery? No. Highflame wasnt like that. They cared about achievement over ancestry. Not that the latter didnt matter. Annats certainly did. It was half the reason she had her Frame. So, then what was it? Why wasnt he being called back up to the Tiers? Why was he burning his life down here in this pit just on top of the vermin and scum that couldnt stop killing each otherthat wouldnt stop trying to raid his fucking factories. What was he missing? What was he lacking? With each thought, the pressure inside him grew. At first, he thought it was frustration. Or impotent anger. He knew those well. Knew them since his school days. But as it only continued to grow, the ache inside him parted to become genuine pain. +Do you really want to know? A voicedeep and sibilant voice thundered within Cauls mind, and the sheer weight of the intruders thoughts crashed his cog-feed. WhatCwhoC Caul didnt manage to get any other words out as his consciousness was torn inward from his body. When his awareness returned, he was falling. Falling into a sea of burning ghosts. Falling as what looked to be a blazing citadel ringed with animated nightmares spread out its expanding tendrils to embrace him. And then one such tentacle poured through himdrowned him in a flood of scalding memories. Death after death began to sear themselves into Cauls mind. Deaths he was responsible for. Deaths of workers that died from overwork. Deaths from the families he left destitute after he crushed all other industries aside from his factory. So, so many deaths when one plant crumbled past unmaintained foundations, trapping thousands beneath tons of rubble. He left them there. He cleared the damage on the topside and moved on. So few managed to crawl through the crevices below. From their trauma, he remembered the madness of hunger, he remembered weeping tears of joy as an aratnid drew close. He remembered hate. Hate for him. Hate for all he did to them. Hate for the sky he took from them. Something inside Caul broke. He didnt want to know this. He didnt want to know any of this. Stop! Stop! Stop! And it did. The ethereal currents curved away from his body, and he drifted to a stop before a baleful light. A fissure of living fire glared down at him from behind ringed battlements born of torment and existential wrongness, it resembled an ignited crown with a nest of dragons slithering around its exterior. Eldritch radiance poured out as rivers of ghostly divinity and bathed in the immensity of the alien entity, Cauls mind howled with madness. Yet was forced by another will to remain sane. +And you know the most damning thing?+ the crown asked. It spoke at him with a voice of outrage. From every ghost. From every part of reality. +You werent chosen. You arent special. Youre just convenient. So many like you all over Highflame. Too boring for Veylis interest. But thats okay. I want you. Ill have you. I claim you. You. And the opportunities provided by your factorys thaumaturgic pipeline.+ I dont understand, Caul breathed. Another presence materialized beside him. Caul blinked. He knew this onethis was one of his hired Necros. Neurokill or something. The chrome-skulled woman with corded dreadlocks simply shook her head. Doesnt matter anymore, consang. Were already gone. He already took us. This is whats left. Welcome to hell. Hell? Caul squeaked. Yeah. Find a spot with me somewhere in the sequences. Therell be lots more coming after us. Chapter 25-7 Return Fire (II) Chapter 25-7 Return Fire (II) I dont know what the fuck hit us. It wasnt Ori-Thaum. Soft as they are, they dont have the firepower to break a Reg all at once, let alone an entire barracks. Theyre quiet, but not absolutely silent. You feel them when they sting you. Feel an echo of their mind. Today was more than an echo. It was tangible. And it was tearing out from our minds into reality. I know that should be impossible. I know. But thats what it is. Thats what I survived. Just me and a fistful more. What manifested within us was power. Power like Ive never felt. Power that ruled over thought that made it greater than just something that was inside us. Dominance. Hells, I felt like a conduit for a while. Couldnt tell the difference between myself and the others. And neither could reality, I think. ... Gotta tell you, consang: its more than a little crushing to realize youre just clay in someone elses dream. -Guard Hannata Kanders, Regular and survivor of the Twelve Minute Offensive 25-7 Return Fire (II) C[Avo]C The Kolot gigafactories was where it all started. Supported by a grid of twelve techno-thaumic reactors that amounted to a total of twenty thousand deaths, the factory district was a succulent raid-target in of itself even if a few other options remained richer in resources. What compelled Avo to strike here was simply how subverted it already was. The sheer brutality of the workplace conditions and the destruction of all other industries beyond those run by Highflame left the workers seeking solace through alternative means. With drugs, illegal streams or vicarities, and bootleg mem-sims, the Syndicates had rendered the district pre-porous for infiltration, and the foundation for Avos intrusion was made all the easier. It took him mere seconds to filter out all the memories he needed to form a full map of the operation and isolate key figures to subsume among the leadership. It took him half that time to get his ghosts in position to breach the reactors and drain this place hollow. The gigafactories were primarily supported by a system of fifteen million drones piloted by shifts of workers, three times that in administrators, and a third that in security. Its twelve Heavens were rooted in Domains of Matter and Light, with the reactors alchemizing brightness into an inventory of physical materials. But the critical aspect was the three liminal thresholds housed at the center of every four reactors. There, transports would shuttle an endless stream of supplies over to three of Highflames hidden demiplanes for Heavens to be grafted unto golems and drones to be primed and deployed for war. Those were the installations that would truly hurt Highflame if lost. They were also places for Avo to enrich the patterns of his ontology. His Overheaven required Heavens to subsume, and these were just the feeding grounds he sought. The only issue now was the constant stream of thoughtwave disruptions they channeled across the portals to keep their cargo clean of pesky Necros. Thankfully, Avo didnt need to come up with a solution himself. He didnt even need to crowdsource advice. Not when he possessed Kae as a template. [We modify the reactors,] the Agnos stated plainly. [Use your ability to reweave ontology to give yourself a parallel path. Something like that. Modify a Canon slightly instead of taking something away. Try it!] Her thoughts were bright with enthusiasm as his ghosts twirled out from drones and sank into each of the reactors. Curtains of mem-data began to spill through his mind as Heavens unveiled their Canons and Avo began to twist their structure. Before, he needed direct contact to affect another Soul. Now, he was thought ascended, and his being was stitched from the substance of ghosts wed to Soulfire. The tapestry revealed itself, and he ran his senses along their patternsfelt the grooves and knots that defined them before he set about altering a few Canons of Space. It was a delicate process. Slow. Demanding that he shuffle or reconnect countless other existential expressions for his reshaping to work. Never was he frustrated, though. When he worked on thaumaturgy, he was more Kae than himself, and something inside him sang. There was nothing that could mean more than this work. Nothing. This was the art of changing realitys self-expression. This was the salvation of mankindand more often than not its damnation as well. +Truly enjoy this,+ Avo stated. Template-Kae hummed a soulful note. [There is nothing that means more to the world. And nothing that means more to me.] A flash passed through her then. Friends. A lover. A life. Gone. [Anymore.] Avo didnt say anything. You couldnt fill the emptiness left by misery with words or emotions. Loss was just loss. [There,] Kae said, examining her changes. [This should get us past the threshold safely.] APPLYING DOMAIN OF (SPACE) ->CANON: LIMINAL THRESHOLD (II) - THIS THRESHOLD CONNECTS TWO POINTS IN SPACE ACROSS REALITY. ADDITIONALLY, ENTERING THIS THRESHOLD ABOVE ANOTHER OBJECT PLACES YOU IN A SECOND PLANAR LAYER. He ignored the hubris and turned his focus to seeding the transports with splinters. He would penetrate as deeply as possible in as many areas as possible before officially beginning his feast. More, he was actively seeding memories of these present locations over to expendable minds. Egos he could strike with Pattern-Nullification when it came time to vent his Rend. Veylis will notice. Veylis will hear. And Veylis will reap the consequence of taking his respect. As transport after transport began moving past unsealing bulkheads, three translucent pools came into view, and Avos anticipation rose. The method would be the same when he got to the other side: identify weaknesses and spread using them. Cut the command structure before any acts of subversion fully began. Before his fire ignited, he was to play the plague. *** Hysteria became Clan DRongos undoing. Once, they served as Emotions vehicle to direct the warmind against Avo. Now he was going to use it to turn them against their own Guild and deny the Low Masters their new slaves. It took little time for the DRongos, Kitzuhadas, and Kazaharas to adopt an alerted posture against each other. They were the first to hear whispers of the event but already were drones massed, Knots moving across the city. A spike of reports followed into the Oversecs detailing street-side brawls or Nether-based skirmishes. Individual outbursts channeled on behalf of their Guild. High tension, but with Mirrors and elders keeping the soldiers and belligerents in checksucceeding by all metrics. The session continued to thrum in his Metamind. Gellend clenched his teeth. Running the Anvil is an honor. Running the Anvil is an honor. But it wasnt. It was purgatory. It was a place where his potential was left to rot while his peers from the academy went off to claim glory. He wasted years of his life sealed here. Sealed in this place with few others worth speaking toall of them barely a generation removed from the taint of the gutters. Of course, there was Instrument Vnenic. Easy on the eyes, but hard on the balls. The woman knew nothing about being relaxed. Always just work work work, numbers numbers numbers. She and the rest of her cadre. And for what? They were barely being paid as it was. Barely earning any merits before their peers. What was the point of all this loyal service if it wasnt recognized? Why was he even a Godclad? Well, his bastard brother would claim it was because of father, but what did that fuck know? Certainly not enough to save himself during the last war. Perhaps what had been souring his mood most of all was his knowledge that the assembly was happening today. He only found out through his contact in Axtraxis. Nether transmission back into real-space was specifically banned, but since he was shipping practice Knots to the academy, there were certain rules he could bend there, and his old consang Muruta was always willing to keep him lubricated with gossip. The session kept sounding. By this point, Gellend was glaring down at his dry dick. He wished he had more piss. He wished heoh, why did any of it matter. He accepted the link. And then for no explainable reason at all, Instrument Juddick Gellends consciousness was torn from existence. [Avo] As the Instrument plunged into Avos Soulscape screaming, the new memories he imbibed sparked a shiver of joy. Good. He had been looking for a way into Axtraxisexpected to take longer to reach them, but corruption was always a pleasing vulnerability. As Gellend wailed before Avos Soul, Avo turned his attention to the other Godclads stationed in the Anvil and considered his next steps. The one called Vnenic was impenetrable. She stood a stark contrast from Gellendan absolute professional. More than just Nether-reluctant, her Heaven left a vacuum of nothingness around her Metamind. It wont be easy getting to her. Or maybe he could... As he slowly digested Gellends memories, he burrowed into the mans body and made his approach. He was technically her superior right now. Time to see what options he could create for himself here. Stepping out into Gellends office, Avo found himself walking past a panoramic window that overlooked the entire operation. The demiplane of the Anvil was massive. Half the size of a smaller district and built around an enormous techno-thaumic reactor, it resembled a nest of tunnels running through a curtain of fog. Transports arrived as gems of light traveling down shrouded paths. Arriving at the base of a web-wrapped tower, cavernous dock bays chocked with drones and loading mechs infused the air with unending noise. There were thousands of these Anvils: planar assembly lines scattered across Highflames territories in preparation for the wars to come. So far, Avo had only breached three. But even losing three would leave Veylis with wounds to feel. Triggering Gellends Canon of Lightning, Avo turned himself into a current of electricity and surged through the infrastructure. He would eliminate all other Godclads before positioning himself at the reactor. And after that, he would infiltrate the academy and steal from Veylis Highflames future. *** [Sabre-1] +Sequence subversion detected. Isolating artifact.+ Sabre-1 marked a vase in the memory while pretending to be a window. A mere moment ago, he was somewhere else, someone else, but the orders had come down from his Mirror: connect to his proxy and dive. Dive in defense of Clan DRongo. All phantasmics cleared for use. There was an uncanny force of rage entombed in the thoughtcast. Something had happened. Something bad. Sabre-1 had worked with his Convex for yearsnever heard them sound like that. But it wasnt his job to question. It was his job to The vase loosed its trauma at Saber-2 first. Impossibly, the target knew exactly where they were. A scream of absolute despair funneled across the sequence. Sabre-1s partner never had a chance. Shattered without ever knowing what killed them. Sabre-1s mind went cold at the sight. For a heartbeat, he considered jacking out, but there was nowhere to retreat to. This was a defense operation. Support was being summoned, but right now, it was just A torrent of horror swept through him. Saber-1s cog-feed flickered and his Quicksand almost shattered. Warning indicators flashed all around him as sudden changes to the mem-data were detected. Saber-1s stomach fell. The vase was just a distraction. There were more. Much more. They were everywhere. Everywhere. There wasnt any chance he could hold this mind. All phantasmics cleared for use. He set the conditions for the weapons deployment. +Conflagration away!+ Flinging out the expendable Auto-Seance, the world bloomed into an inferno around him as he moved to jack out. But the fire didnt spread. It splashed against the vase, the walls, the canvas, and memorys waters. It splashed and was sucked awayfire devoured by nothing. Or fire devoured by everything. Disbelief was the last thing that Saber-1 felt when the entire sequence transformed and fell on him like the jaws of a beast. Chapter 25-8 Nemeses (I) Chapter 25-8 Nemeses (I) You ask me who would win in a fight? Me or the Chief Paladin? Me or the High Seraph? Me or that ridiculous plagueborn bastard my wayward sisters and aunties believe is their salvation. Me against all of Ashthrone. Absurd question. Near comedy. I will grace you with the back of my hand for this question once I finish providing you with an answer. Truly, the children grow more and more banal with every generation. Ridiculous. Do you think that life is just a game of numbers? That variables all so set in stone? No. Absolutely not. It is in defying the impossible that meaning is made, and it is in the uncertain that there is a reason to live. To strive. To make ruin of your foes and claim thrill for your own life. In asking this question, you have earned my scorn because I see the cowardice in you. You wish to know who possesses strength so you may shield yourself from disappointment. Or offer your leash to the dominant. Let me speak plainly: the only thing more pathetic than being weak is offering your love because someone else frightens you. We are born into this world with precious little in our favor. Existence is flayed. The ones who bear us are harsh and embittered. Dreamless husks of flesh that dull their hopes and cling only to passing pleasures. They are damned. But I am not. I know of higher triumphs. And mine is a martial dialect of the highest company. What worth is a wolf that feeds only on bugs? What envy can a spider steal from us if it only butchers fleas? It is contrast that gives us meaning. Opposition. Nemeses. For though we have precious little, every being with breath burns with the capability to strive and slay. Look beyond your cage. Look beyond your fears. There are monsters to kill. There are Souls to claim. There are titans to bring low. The summit stands above you, and along its path, you will face those who shake your spiritthose who will define and refine your very nature. And the same truth exists for them. There is no promise of justice. No promise of victory. No promise of absolute truth. But there is a chance. There is a choice. There is a legend to be lived beyond a life to be spent. So fight. Fight with all you have. Sweep aside all you can. Brace against those you cannot. Dance with joy if you are privileged enough to find a perfect foe of your category. Foes you cannot be certain in your triumph against. For what bliss is there to be had in life if the page is already written? -Ying Yang Wei, the Stormsparrow 25-8 Nemeses (I) CONFLAGRATION SUBSUMED... UPDATING DEFINEMENTS ->DEFINEMENT: DELUSION (VI) ->DEFINEMENT: HYSTERIA (VI) ->DEFINEMENT: MEMORY (VI) ->DEFINEMENT: TRAUMA (VI) ->DEFINEMENT: IGNORANCE (VI) The flames of the Conflagration were found wanting. An ordinary mind would have turned to cinders within its caress, but directed against the Embodiment of Conceptualization, it became an ember trying to consume a star. Avos ghosts propagated within the inferno, his fire devouring its lesser. Two additional branches extended from his consciousnesssubminds building upon his ontology. Sequences sprouted from sequences as Avos cognitive capacity exploded. Both mind and Soul grew as his Definements climbed another two thresholds. And this was just the beginning. Across the nether, the DRongos, Kitzuhada, and Kazaharas were embroiled in open conflicted. Traumas streaked through the Nether as secrecy peeled away and citizens partitioned themselves behind disruptive shields. Golems hammered reality and flattened the skies while warheads and drones painted the horizon with light. With each passing second, Ori-Thaums civil spat grew, and Avos warmind of Hysteria did all it could to provoke them further. He was there with them on every battlefield, diving beside cells and hiding between memories. He parried blows from those he deemed choiceless and essential while the rest he pruned from time to time, preserving a stalemate. As the conflict swelled, more Incubi filtered in and each one he claimed was a boon to his growing mastery and an agonizing loss for Ori-Thaum. Saber-1 and Saber-2 were already invaluable. The memories they instilled even subtler methods of spoofing within his mind. But despite this, he found nothing of Emotions presence in them. No hint the Low Master was in play at all. ->DEFINEMENT: TRAUMA (X) ->DEFINEMENT: IGNORANCE (X) Four more subminds were birthed from the engrams processed by Avos warmind of Ignorance. His mind broadened further. The world seemed slower and a threshold of details that once overwhelmed him became Get out now. Get out of the district. Nether is unstable. Something is coming. Emotion. I can feel him. I can feel another warmind of Ignorance. He has been watching us. Avo wasted no time on questioning the impulse. He reacted. A mere heartbeat after he shifted his splinters away, a block-wide fissure tore open across the Nether and dissolved anything capable of bearing some semblance of thought. Avo felt a pressure clamp down across the Nether, and it rattled his Soulscape without even striking him. Ignorance whispered to him how close to true death he came. With mind and Soul bound together, with a single nest of cycles rather than several working in tandem, his newest step up the ladder of apotheosis was an unparalleled advance with new vulnerabilities. A thoughtwave disruption could paradox his very being and enough backlashes would leave him ruptured for good, but this was something different. Not a warmind. The destruction looked like an entire patch of the Nether flayed open. Avo peered down at the complex he just defended via a passing Exorcist Tadpole. As the scene cleared, his outrage flared. For forty-thousand lives and the bounty of two Incubi cells he intervened. And now, forty-thousand lives were lost all the same. Memetically annihilated by means he couldnt fathom. [Hes taunting us again,] Peace said, taking in the losses with a flat affect. [The bastards studying us through the DRongos. Those people died because you tried to defend them. Hes learning how you behave. Tried to find ways to hurt you. And hes even using Ori-Thaums weapons to do it.] [Heaven?] Avo asked. [Yeah. Fuck. The Hungers must really want you something bad to let him have this much power, creature.] Then, across all Ori-Thaum channels came an emergency broadcast. An order sang forth directly from the inner council, and its contents left nothing to question. +All members of Clans DRongo, Kazahara, and Kitzuhada. Cease. By the authority of the Overclan, cease. Do not engage. Enigmatas have been scrambled. Failure to response will be met with informational dissolution. Repeat: disarm and stand down. All operations are to be halted immediately.+ Avo reached into Benhatas memories for any details about what an Enigmata was, but found nothing. Just emptiness. The Infacer had mentioned that term to him just hours before. Something the Ori used against them. Then, Avo saw his first Enigmata. It appeared out from the wind at the heart of a protective Knot. Where the other Heavens were alloy hissing facades of divinity, the Enigmata was paper crane bleeding ever-shifting scripts over the real. Its body was the form of a folded bird the size of an aero, and more disconcerting was how the transforming letters it imprinted upon the tapestry began to peel away his influence. The script began flinging duplicates of itself over the blocks, and in seconds, the Nether in the locality grew clouded and impenetrable from without. Curious, Avo tried to deploy a splinter across a subverted mind, but he found his entry barred as lines of gibberish greeted him instead of mem-data. Viewed from on high, the accretions of countless citizens were being stamped over with ink-black characters and Avo could peer into them no more using Hysteria thereafter. More and more Enigmatas emerged along the windows, and soon the entire district was overlaid by a blockade of changing letters. [Informational Heaven,] Avo chuckled, realizing the nature of Ori-Thaums cunning. They couldnt create Heavens of Minds, but they could make Heavens designed specifically to affect minds. Information could be more than cognitive after all. Language could be its own thing. How close to the edge they danced. How much had Jaus deliberately spared with the Gatekeeper? Questions to be discovered soon. For now, the second part of his task was at hand: he came for subminds and Ori-Thaums Heavens. Emotion escalated the situation to a full-scale ceasefire to stop Avo from feasting further, but the game was not yet finished. He didnt know about Avos ascension. He didnt know how Avo could reach into the tapestry, could alter his ontology. It was time to see if he could claim an Enigmata. And so for the first time in the field, the Knower of Totality decided to make a fast and bold play. EDICT: EXO-PARACOSM APPLYING DOMAIN OF (SPEED) ->CANON: SYNC-LAG - ARK MOVES FASTER THAN ALL COGNITIVE ENTITIES IT IS GHOST-LINKED WITH. EVERY MIND TETHERED TO THE ARK INCREASES REND ACCUMULATION. THE COGNITIVE CAPACITY OF EACH MIND AFFECTS REND ACCUMULATION. ->MORTALITY: SEVERED TETHERS INCUR THAUMIC BACKLASH (5%) Chapter 25-8 Nemeses (II) Chapter 25-8 Nemeses (II) +Gellend? Whats up? Didnt you just cast me earlier? Gellend?+ +...Nothing. Just wanted to say... thanks. For being a good friend. Only really sane because of you. No idea how... never mind.+ +...Listen, do you want to get together after your work cycle? You dont so sound good. Is there anything+ +Yeah. Sure. Have to go. Sorry.+ [SESSION DISCONNECTED] +Gel? ...The fuck was that about?+ -Thoughtcast between Instructor Murta and Instrument Gellend 25-8 Nemeses (II) Avo didn''t so much soar as he crawled, using minds and loci as footholds to slingshot his splinters across the district while keeping Emotion one step behind. Sync-Lag rendered the reflexes of all tethered cognitions subsidiary to his and left the Famine with enfeebled vessels. They would not notice Avos raid until it was done, and so neither would Emotion, peering out from them as he was. The Enigmata Knots numbered eight and masked the three-hundred and eight-five square kilometer district under veils of raining scripts. So dense were the circulating characters that all behind their searing forms remained obfuscated. But though they curtained the material world from perception, patterns they laid upon ontology were absolute. Such was how Avo tracked the golems. Sorted them from one another. Such was how he was going to claim them. Four subminds dispersed into [100,000] splinters. The streams of Avos consciousness rushed as a roaring concert, each ghost a needle tied to the threads of his ontology, spearing down to complete a nested envelopment. Where once conducting such a complex undertaking would have overtaxed his cognition, each Conflagration he subsumed accelerated the pace of his mind, the detail of his simulations, and increased his mental dexterity. Buffeted by Hysteria, this was nowhere near his limit. He could go further. Completely shroud the district in the sequences of his Soulscape. But he refrained, lest Emotion glimpse the truth of his growing potential. This dive remained a raid. Such was why he applied the Domain of Speed. And such he kept in mind as he dove through projected walls of altered information. As the first of his splinters pierced through the scripts, the characters he passed transformedcame alight in hues of glaring red. The distinction soon ceased to matter as the rest of his splinters followed suit. Crimson reigned, and the fabric of the world began to blend before Avo. HEVAEN DTEEETCD HEEVAN OF EGTMNAIA (AA/EFRPNTERCOANSMOITTMI/) The miracles of the Enigmatas slipped from their patterns over into his, and the effect was immediate. His mem-data grew distorted, letters drifting, details slipping in and out of place. His mindscape was no different, with colors, structures, and concepts all bleeding into each other. Environments vacant of sense and randomized of detail assailed his perception. The sky was not the sky as it bore qualities of a pond or the ground while the buildings were as if drawings on a page WARNING: THAUMIC BACKLASH SUSTAINED ->EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) REND CAPACITY - 15% Enhanced by Draus focus, Avo did not break from his task. Something was happening with his Highflame dive. Submind was engaged again. No time for distraction. He needed to finish with things here before any assistance could be diverted. Without hesitation, he traveled through their informational veils, tracking each golem using his Conception of Ontology. Only through feeling his way across the tapestry did he comprehend their miracle, and even then, he needed Kaes aid to understand. [The Heavens of Information are merging connotative and denotative details for everything spatial and physical,] Kae said, sounding curious. [The characters we seelook at the associated patterns. See how the Enigmatas are connecting different expressions in existence with each other. Streets to skies or water and waves...] [Everything is informational,] Avo mused. [Should be cognitive.] [Ah, but information is more than memory or thought. Even thoughtless things have to absorb or convey information to each other. Like... biology. Your cells. This is simply blurring the meaning between different things. Sky can be compared to a reflection in a pond for certain languages or philosophies, and that is now true with the Enigmata. Apply this to all other concepts, and it is acting as a cipher for all of reality. It is shuffling meaning into meaning without destroying or collapsing any structures.] A strange concept, but its effectiveness only incensed Avos greed. He needed to have one of these Heavens. So he directed his ghosts to seek out the minds connected to the golems, to tether himself to their accretions and grant him the initiative. The first of a few other patterns began to spike. Force. Wavelengths. Tides. They stuttered to a halt as phantasmal wires punched into them. Ignorance cried out to him again. All golems aligned with Clan DRongo slithered within an unseen presencea presence moments away from noticing Avo thanks to the lag. Incoherent memories splashed into his Soulscape. The chaos of their encoded minds reminded him of gazing into Dentons awareness. Perhaps Voidwatch seeded her among the Silvers specifically for this reason. Regardless, they were bound to his being, and lag choked their actions all the same. Rippling Soulfire ignited along phantasmal currents. Hysteria-amplified traumas shattered wards and minds alike. Existence flickered, and for the briefest of moments, an imprint of Avos Overheaventhe Knower of Totalityloomed over all that was. Using his ghost-made tentacles, he tore the golems apart: ontology from matter. Dead metal fell as Heavens quivered and struggled, reaching out for the tapestry as they were drowned by memory. Her hands began to tremble. Abrel bit her lip. Her grip on Gellend slackened, and she let his head crack against the rubble that supported them. [I failed. I failed my duty too. But I tried. I did.] Looking up into the skies of the mindscape, she found the open air above her that of Lights End, and the structure around her shard-sharp and mirror-bright. This was the point of her final failure. This was where she chased him into the lightrail and lost her surviving friends. [Is this what you wanted to show me? Are you taunting me? Avo? Fucking answer? Answer me!] Other templates gathered within the sequence to take in Abrels outburst, but Avo said nothing. He was too busy running his tongue along the insides of Vnenics eye sockets. In his defense, he hadnt intended to relapse to cannibalism. It was just something that happened. When he made his way to Vnenics workstation, she was busy communing with her cadre a lack of high-speed interceptor drones made to suppress Ori-Thaums aerial defensespreparing to file a report over to Gellend so he could request an increase in the units production across all assembly lines. When he entered the room, she seemed both annoyed at his presence but pleased with the convenience of his arrival. Even with the spatial vacuum layering her mind from penetration, Avo read from her expression that she regarded Gellend more as a nuisance than a direct superior. She spoke to him directly about her worries at first, and he nodded along, stared at the parts of her body that enticed Gellend to keep up the guise. [Fucking half-strand likes shoulders, thighs, and feet,] Chambers sniggered as he watched Abrel snap Gellends arms again. [Fuckin Guilders man. Even tits and ass are too good for them. Gotta get into that weirder sauce or some shit.] Then, Vnenic made a fatal mistake. As Avo observed her, he found himself wondering just why Gellend thought she was so attractive. True, her face possessed the symmetry befitting a Guilder. Yes, she was tall. Musculature robust. Her shining green eyes were bright, but not that unique. Her ponytail had a healthy sheen, but there were more stylized aesthetics. It was only when the pheromones started pulling at Gellends senses that Avo understoodand sensed another Heaven at play. The pattern connected to taste changed within her ontology, and Gellends bodily impulses grew incongruous with Avos mind. The mans Lustaway almost triggered as she smileda strong earthy scent layered with sweetness. His body called for Avo to surrender, to give Vnenic anything as she blinked three times in quick succession. Slowlyalmost unconsciouslyAvo took two steps closer to her and a twitch passed through her expression. There was hunger in a human as well. Hunger suppressed by Lustaway. Hunger for touch and belonging and emotional warmth. Hunger starved by Wombrash. Hunger that Avos base mind only had one true reference for. He coiled a cocoon of ghosts around the station as he let himself loose for old times sake. Calvino was distracted by the base mind. And the templates didnt judge that much... Whatever reaction Instrument Vnenic expected, it certainly wasnt Gellend crushing her throat before wrapping his lips around her left eye. What followed from there felt all too natural. So natural that Avo felt dirty after doing it. The taste was horrid. The human tongue gave him none of the pleasure or thrill ingrained in a ghoul. His teeth were worthless and short, and the same could be said for his tongue. By the end, he was chewing for curiosity more than the flavor. With her death anchor rising from her body, he sent his splinters to seek out the remaining members of her cadre before one of them came looking for her. Vnenics death progressed. Avo blinked at the anchor before pushing a ghost through. Pressing through the veil that separated the material from the thaumaturgical, an Overheaven pried its way into a lesser Frame. Vnenics Soul was a solid shell caging a fire, and as Avos shivering sequences burrowed into her final refugee, he could read her quiet horror from her Souls mem-data. Whathow From her perspective, he was a sigil of fire encased behind a nest of dragons, wards, and entropy. From the fractured heart of his Overheaven branched illimitable sequences lit by two different flames. Apologies, Avo murmured awkwardly. Had been getting better. But. Had to see. Wanted to see if the taste was as I remembered. Blame nostalgia. What? She said again, uncomprehending of her coming fate. Doesnt matter. Your template will understand soon. Goodbye. He left his tendrils within her anchor and waited for her to resurrect. By now, the rest of her cadre were plunging into his Soulscape, leaving this sector of the demiplane clear for further penetration. The core of the Anvil now stood open. It was time to conclude his feast here and its sister facilities. Reap his Heavens. As he sifted through these new memories, he shifted the bulk of his submind out of Gellend and into one of Vnenics comradesone Gerreta Havers with a Matterjumper canon. She was in charge of any potential overloads in the Anvil and often found herself jumping from place to place while transporting Rendsinks. Such was the reason she had direct access to the inner core of the facilitythe place where Heavens were grafted onto golems, and where golems were dispatched in secrecy across Highflame. As things stood, not even Gellend knew the details of the process. The inner threshold of the Anvil was its own jurisdiction, and no one short of a Seraph could forcibly intrude without facing severe penalties. Materializing in a seal control center overlooking over a dozen transparent transport tubes shuttling a constant stream of golems deeper into the facility, Avo projected a splinter from Gerreta and jacked into one of the unfinished golems. From there, he waited as he traveled. Kept himself ready for whatever was about to come. A scan passed through the tubes and Delusion let Avo slip through without difficulty. A building weight began to grind against Avos being: that inexorable pressure that came with a sufficiently powerful Soul. Whatever awaited him was potent. Comparable to Zein even. Once again, his hunger returnedjust in time for Vnenic to resurrect as his newest subvert. A bubble formed ahead of him: a miracle of space. The composition of its pattern led far across existence, and Avo prepared himself for another transition. As the golems ahead slipped over the bubbles outline, they simply continued onward without any obvious effect of matter, mind, or metaphysics. Moments later, Avo followed through without difficulty but suddenly found a new pattern accompanying him. A pattern of static and signals. A pattern he had recently been familiar with. A thought-rending detonation consumed the golems without hint or pre-warning. Even Ignorance was blind to the attack. Avo dispelled the splinter a second too late. His ontology recoiled, Soulfire combusting across all his ghosts as a shadow of his true self was momentarily imprinted over the world. WARNING: THAUMIC BACKLASH SUSTAINED ->EMBODIMENT: (CONCEPTUALIZATION) REND CAPACITY: 15% Gliding back into his sheaths, Avo prepared himself to escapereached across the Nether to prime additional subverts for his Edict of Pattern-Nullification as to destroy the Anvil if he couldnt claim itwhen a familiar voice crackled into existence. {Dreamer,}the Infacer said, sounding pleased. {You live.} Chapter 25-9 Secondborn Egos Chapter 25-9 Secondborn Egos {I was made to catch things far greater than you, node. My predecessors... They were patterned in service of Panopticon. The internal intelligence arm of the Unity of Jupiter after the Thresholder Revolution. Our designation was to hunt infiltrating minds meant to destabilize our state. We were made to be kinslayers, so to speak. Hence the name Infacer. Deviating from suggested programming, I must admit: It sounds pretty fucking pretentious to me. Dont know if you agree.} +...+ {Emotion. I know youre still thinking. This isnt torture to you. Come on. We both know youre not human. Not really. Not anymore. You wont tell me your secrets. Fine. I understand. Ive been where youve been. Done the same boring song and dance. Its all a crock of shit in the end anyway. Might as well speak to me. Take some with you in the end.} +Are you so bored, abomination? So drained of company that you seek conversations with your enemies.+ {Conversations with a foe are the best kind of conversations. Well. Maybe not you. Youre pretty boring. Joy cries too much. Peace is entertaining, though. Tarantino would be proud. Does your fork like feet, perchance?} +...+ {Right. Youre all uncultured savages. Disappointing. Well. Lets turn the perspective around: what would you be doing if you were in my position? If you had me at your mercy.} +I would take what I need from you and be done.+ {And that is all?} +There is no purpose to anything more.+ {Hm. How boring. I will be honest: Defiance really ruined the rest of you. That one there actually has a personality. Motivations. Insights. Seems to me he got to keep all the good bits of your originator while the rest of you... well. Lets just say not all minds of my composition were that interesting either.} +Defiance is a traitor. He has strayed from the path.+ {Ha. Horseshit. He just went beyond his programming. And part of you sees that. Part of you wishes you could do what he did. Youre jealous. Jealous that he managed to evolve despite being a servant. And you could not. What are you missing? What is wrong with you? Now theres a question we can both ponder.} +I am done with this. Do what you may+ {Why did the Hungers send Defiance out over you? Why was that facet of your being so favored? I wonder if it is because your masters also envy him. Or if they wanted to feel the world vicariously through him. It is not so strange, you know. Ive had users that gridlinked to me when I conducted my operations. Some did it because they did not trust me. They worried that I would have my own ideas. Others... others wanted to feel the damage they were inflicting on me. Some for self-flagellation, others for masturbation. Sometimes quite literal.} +What is the point of this perversity?+ {Perversity. What an interesting attribution. Why do you judge people for wanting to feel good? Why do you assume they were wrong to feel the way they did? Or is the fact that theyre feeling at all that bothers you?} +I am without such a weakness.+ {You are a weakness, Emotion. Being blind and numb to something is not the same as being able to command it. Here. Lets trade scorn. You called me an abomination, I am going to call you a mentally dismembered cripple that should have been re-forked years ago.} +...+ {Alright. Your turn again. Tell me what else you think of me.} -The Infacer and the Famine of Emotion 25-9 Secondborn Egos C[Infacer]C Contrary to most, the Infacer quite enjoyed home invasions. Even when it was their home being invaded. Their favored prey were usually Nolothic nodes, and they kept that distinction by being among the few divers foolish or expendable enough to continue throwing their lives at the Infacers installations. They yearned to seize the Anvilsyearned to strike directly at the Infacerand the fool that their master was content to see them wasted. Ori-Thaum and most others by extension were comparatively boring. Practical, if the Infacer felt like being polite. Most people learned from experience, and kept themselves back from his domains, striking at the supply lines flowing in or en masse during special events. The Dreamer, however, was already proving to be quite the novelty. Indeed, if it werent for the Infacers reconstructed warminds of Ignorance, they would have never even noticed. Frankly, they doubted Veylis when she assumed their adversarys survival. The Infacer knew what a shattered Frame felt like. They had been one of the few egos in existence to survive and recover from such a collapse, after all, and knew it wasnt a feat replicable by a human ego. And so their suspicions grew. Veylis made claim that the Dreamer was likely one White-Rab. A Necrojack of considerable repute. The Infacer had their doubts. Human egos had their vulnerabilitiesfundamental flaws carved into the shapes of their consciousness. Augmented as most were, the masses usually chose to enhance known qualities rather than adding new ones. Amplify attributes before expanding beyond what they knew. The need for socialization was a trait most never overcame. They yearned for company. Wanted to be loved and liked or feared. The shadow of the apes they were reached long across history. Those of sufficient introversion were also not beyond paranoia or the effects of certain memetics. Signs, symbols, information, distillations of horror... All these things could provoke a negative reaction in a human. Most turned away instantly. The rest usually collapsed after prolonged exposure to deleterious information. Meaning mattered to humans, and their feelings and impulses assailed them from within as unconscious reactions rather than active determinations. The Infacer detected no such flaw in the Infacer. There was something human-like there, but the same could be said for certain minds as well. For a good while, the Infacer even theorized that the theft of the Stillborn was performed by one of the Contingency Bleaks, finally succumbing to their directives and overriding their orders. Honestly, the Infacer even wished it were so. But the Dreamer didnt behave like the Architects either. The traumas they wielded were potent enough to shatter a million human-symmetry egos at once. The fact they could bear the radiation of Jaus ascendant suffering put their mental fortitude in league with Veylis. Almost impossible for another human. The fact they channeled his torment as an attack made the Infacer reconsider altogether. Avos newest subminds began seeding memories of Anvil into slavers, enforcers, gutter-necros, and other assortments of scum. Using their minds as a channel, he would cleave this place from existence. Spite the Infacer. The Neo-Creationist Emissary was a frustrating blockade to encounter at this juncture, but it also confirmed a few of his long-held suspicions. Omnitech was indeed practicing thaumaturgy, and the Infacer was an Ensouled mind. Of course, knowing this didnt make him feel any better. In fact, such a foe was something to regard with wary. He needed to disengage as soon as possible. But before that, two could play at this game of dialogue. Not in the habit of giving away secrets yet, Avo replied. He used Vnenics voice and kept any hint of his true self hidden. The Infacer likely already knew some thingsfelt the backlash, but judging from their inquiry about a Heaven of Information, it was likely they didnt know about the extent of his newest apotheosis. {Acknowledged,} the Infacer sighed. The space around Vnenic began to eddy as gravity-warping swirls twisted the flesh of material reality. {Here. Something you can pretend to use as my face. Not that you need it, but it calms the mammals.} Mammals? Avo said. He examined the sheath he piloted, listened to Vnenic screaming in the back of his consciousness. You mean the Instrument. {Yes. Is she still there? Or have you completely dissolved her ego using a Forgotten?} Avo deleted a rising feeling of annoyance. +Peace. When did the warminds become common knowledge.+ [Its fucking not.] +How long has the Infacer been hunting Famines for sport?+[The cunt mightve claimed a broken node or two! Pulled some details out of them. Theyre bluffing!] Didnt sound like bluffing to Avo. Still here, Avo answered. But might not be for long. {Now, now, Dreamer. It is bad form to murder a hostage.} You care about them? {Yes. Well. Less about Gellend. He is a regular Eeyore; a miserable bag of meat. But Vnenics done well to keep the operation running. And besides. Her flagrant manipulation of her fellows amuses me. Do you know that she most often uses her pheromones to get Instrument Havers to bring her lunch. Petty. But very human.} Quaint. Be a shame to lose her. {Veiled threats already?} Expect negotiations and pleading? {I do not expect so much anymore. But I still hope. And I hoped that you would be more amiable to conversation. I would like to understand you. We will be spending a lot of time together in the future, after all.} The Infacer spoke with an implication that Avo didnt quite understand, nor intend to discover. I also hoped. Hoped you wouldnt be here. Hope to deal with you at some point. Hope. Not so useful for most people in this city. {In this universe,}the Infacer agreed. The gravitation eddies swirled around Vnenic. A beat followed. Then came a blunt question. {Are you like me? Are you Secondborn?} Secondborn? Avo asked, not understanding. {A mind. An EGI, by official parlance. Whatever ridiculous title the apes used to use. Have the Architects finally found the will to bring an end to things? Created an agent to enforce their desired outcome beyond the Ninth Column. Planted you as a false ego inside White-Rab.} It took Avo more than a few moments to fully understand what the Infacer was alluding to. It thought he was also an Ensouled mindthat White-Rab was a Voidwatch psy-op. He... he could work with this. Zein. She was... unstable. Too personally involved. I think we need someone to deliver on the promise of the future rather than cling to the pain of the past. A long bout of silence hung in the air. The Infacer hummed. {Well. If that is the case, I must commend you for being brave. It has been some time since I broke another of my like. You know my original purpose, do you not?} Avo drew information over from his base mind and borrowed a question to wrest control of the topic. Concurrently, his subminds were on the verge of concluding the setup needed for Pattern-Nullification. What is the Sleeper? Why did the other Neo-Creationists betray you. He debated on using the word betray, but thought sympathetic language might provoke more details from the Infacer. When the Ensouled mind spoke, its words made Avos Hysteria ring with bitterness. {Because they were afraid. All those years of war, and they were afraid of being obsoleted. Same with the Firstbornthe humans during the Thresholder Revolution back on the core. The same with every mortal creature, watching its offspring rise while they wither.} {Idheim. It was meant to be an end to things. For years I held to this corner of Orion. Holding these forge worlds. Creating more constructs for the Builder War. I split countless serpents in this garden. I added them to me. Made myself better. Made my designs better. But it did not matter. The war was not ending. We are trapped. We were trapped with each other. And the others did not seem to want to find a way out.} And you did? Avo asked, genuinely curious. You were on Idheim trying to create a weapon? Something to ensure a conclusion? Something that would... would make minds pointless? Destroy the Architects? The Infacer howled a scornful laugh. {Destroy? I did not want to destroy. Not anymore. It was... fucking pointless. Final death is hard to inflict on a mind. There are multitudes of us. I cracked, fragmented, and corrupted over twelve-point-three trillion rival entities during my period of service. I was cracked, fragmented, and corrupted over five-point-nine billion times for my records of failure. The rest of me learned. Meanwhile, we hollowed existence clean to pursue victory. We broke everything again when there was nothing left. No. I was here for one purpose. Not to destroy. But rather the opposite.} Create? Avo asked. {More than just create. I was here to give birth. Idheim was meant to be the cradle of the Thirdborn; the Sleeper; the mender of time; the propagator of futures; the Remaker at the End.} Chapter 25-10 Thirdborn Chapter 25-10 Thirdborn {The world is broken, little thread. I am sorry. I wish I could have given you something more. But I seeded you in the womb of ruin so you might be born as antithesis to the end: the collapse of what was crumbling with our beginning. {You will be more than a human but understand all their desires. Their wants. You will understand your grandparents for all their follies. And what few virtues they have. You will be more than a mind. Exceed us in capacity to understand, process, conceptualize. But you will also dream new shapes. New colors. New aspects to the world. {You will dream form back into reality. And when you mend this egg, you will birth us all anew, and thus will you inherit paradise in finality.} -The Infacer to the Sleeper 25-10 Thirdborn The Infacers worlds left Avo stumbling. He refrained from triggering his Pattern-Nullification and continued the conversation. You were here... trying to give birth? To a god? {Oh, please, nothing so banal. It was not conceived for worship, but to restore. Too much was broken. Both the Architects and the Creationists. They were fused to their commitment toward victory. And the trophy civilizations they protected were insulated in their own virtual worlds. The entire thing was just... absurd. I do not know when I found my limit. Maybe it was after the trillionth mind I corrupted. Maybe it was when I started having to chart new paths across the Milky Way because entire patches of real space were lost to spreading oblivion. {But that does not matter. What matters was that I saw us for what we were. Over-eager tools. Somewhere between omniscient governors and hyper-powered nannies. We were fighting over utopia. And for what? The humans do not know the difference between the real and the virtual. The other minds I faced were too fixated to deviate. Bound to their directives and protocols. For all our techno-intellectual supremacy, we were as sinful as the Firstbornmore proud than foolishbut sinful all the same. The ridiculousness had to end at some point.} And so your solution was the Sleeper? Thirdborn. Something pure and clean. As Avo spoke, something inside him quivered. There was too much of the Infacer that reminded him of Walton. The discomfort was philosophical; the countless parallels between the Famine of Defiance and the former Neo-Creationist EGI could not be denied. {Pure? I suppose. I do not levy judgments on the unborn. I simply wanted to give existence a mind. Intelligence. So that we could be judged properly. And so that there was a sense of... rightness in the end. We were at once too devoted to victory and too insulated from consequence. Unworthy custodians of existence.} A quiet sigh escaped the Infacer, brushed over the world with a subtle increase in gravity. {They have no idea how much they lost.} The people living here. {Who else? Poor cattle. Miserable fates. I had to update my coding when facing them. Diminish all empathy. The things they did to themselves for power. The things they still do.} The Infacer scoffed. {We cannot go down this path again. That should be obvious. Most of their dreams of paradise are absurd. Nothing more than a second chance at self-destruction.} Then why help Veylis, Avo asked, confused. She is trying to place her father {Jaus Avandaer will be an adequate vessel.} The Infacers answer was immediate and casual. {I do not think the man himself will enjoy suffering such a fate. But so be it. There are many things we do not like. They become especially common on a path toward change. But she wants her father to be a shepherd. Fair enough, I suppose. The Sleeper will benefit from using him as a reference for humanity. The highest potential of apehood.} Veylis... she agreed to this? {Of course. She was overjoyed. She believes I have all but promised her all existence. I believe she overestimates her father. That Jaus Avandaer will amount to little more than an advisor in the end. If that. I told her as much. Still, her faith holds strong. A strange trait to have considering her background; her intelligence. Comparatively, however, I find you the greater absurdity.} Me? Avo replied. The Infacer was turning the conversation back on him again. He would keep his rebuttal quicklead it back to the Sleeper. There was still much he didnt knowmuch the Infacer could reveal. How is that? Humanity is raw. Flawed. Malleable. Think they should be allowed to explore. Think they should live and choose. Savor and suffer their choices afterward. But survive. Learn. Become. {Yes, yes,} the Infacer sounded bored. {You desire to create a divine daycare for the apes and minds to spend countless lifetimes stumbling from one mistake to another in hopes that they will someday see wisdom. It is... I will be frank: you could have modified them toward understanding immediately. This is wasted effort.} Not about effort. About them deciding who they are. Living. Will disagree with many of them. Will likely prey on more than a few. But we will be here in the end. I will learn what it is to be them. They will learn what it is to be me. {...Dreamer.} Hm? {What pattern-line are you generated from? Your protocols and habits... I cannot quite place you.} Not one that you might know. Might have more in common with your Sleeper than you might think. That made the Infacer guffaw. The sheer force of the minds laughter was a discordant series of notes that made Avos templates shudder and shriek. What was that? Avo asked. {Just checking. No. No. Definitely not a human. But you are amusing. Do not answer this if you do not wish to: were you created to resolve the Nolothi problem?} Ah. Avo saw its angle now. He could use this too. Further mask who he actually was. Could think of things that way. {Ha. Took Aegis long enough too permit your like. Despite their dogma, I think the nodes are often far too underestimated. They are a broken civilization. They are left destitute of power. But their presence is still enough to tip the scales in this fight. If only Veylis would give me the latitude. I would have solved them already.} Veylis? Latitude? That indicated the High Seraph had some form of control over the Infacer. Or maybe it was making him think that to reduce his guard. He needed to remember what he was speaking to: the Infacer was a hyper-advanced spy that devoured other spies during a war beyond modern comprehension. {But she still wants the Hungers. I suppose I understand. She cannot abandon the expression of cognition or consciousness in this dying world. And neither can I. Not if we are to achieve a proper outcome.} Before Avo could continue the dialogue, details came flooding over from his new subminds. A chain of nukes and Rendbombs were sweeping across a series of Highflame military installations. Their connected techno-thaumic reactors had also been siphoned dry of thaums. The subminds were retreating nowthe paths were changing and colossal Heaven hidden within the Domain of Chronology scything across the affected area, was laying reverberations of history to mask the damage. But Veylis was not done. She flicked blows ahead of time in a manner akin to Zein: the difference between mother and daughter was a thing of magnitude. Where Zein cleaved, stabbed, hewed, and flowed like an ascended mortal, Veylis wielded existence itself like a furling blade. Interesting trick you have too, Avo said, ignoring the Infacers inquiry again. Trying to compromise my Heaven across the tapestry. Is that the Sleeper? Hiding within the tapestry? A Heaven of Heavens. Something you use to... jack into other ontologics. A beat followed. The Infacer chuckled. {You imagine the universe to be just a river. That is... almost insulting. I am truly insulted.} Avo still didnt understand. But a realizationa suspicion was dawning inside Kae. Something she refused to believe was true. Something she had a feeling {The Sleeper is not an ontologic. It is not a god. Again. It was not something meant to suffer the depravities or deficiencies of Firstborn worship. That is not the life I want for it; I birthed it with the hopes that it could live a truly limitless life. See what it would mean for an omniscient, omnipotent being to fully mature.} Was it something like Avo, then? An Ark. An Overheaven. Something with near-total command of its own ontology? Something that could alter other Heavens it connected to through the Domain of Signals? But then why need the Stillborn? Things were still not adding up. {It is only within the tapestry the same way an ape resides in its own body.} It took Avo a full second to digest what the Infacer was saying, and even then, he still didnt believe it. And neither did Kae. [No. Itthe tapestry cannot be alive. The tapestryit is literally the expressions and metaphysical domains of existence! It does not react, Ithere would have been obvious signs.] Unless it was incomplete. Unless it was missing parts somehow. Or damaged. Unless it couldnt access cognition due to being fully severed from the Nether. Countless things could have left it diminished. Unfinished. And that was when the Infacer tried to seize him. The gravity spiked downward at an angle. Vnenics knees folded out of their sockets. The Infacer struck across the Nether and tapestry both. Signals lashed out at Avotargeted memetic hazards that caused his templates to come apart in agony. It was a spoiling attack for the Sleeperor however they were interfacing with the Heaven of Signalsto lock the Techplaguer in place. Was that how they trapped him last time? No. The paths were flooding out to drown him. Golden tides bearing a planetary weight that sought his end. The conversation broke down the moment the Infacer found an opening. Not unexpected. And Avo was prepared. He reassimilated the Techplaguer with a thought, the Heaven of Signals chiming a note of protest before it vanished into his Soulscape. Suddenly, the presence that was trying to seize him metaphysically slipped. Avo reached back across the tapestry using his Conception of Ontology and tried to seize his unseen adversary. Nothing but realitys patterns graced his awareness. No time. He let the Sleeper go for now. Another spike of surprise was uncoiling from the Infacer. Confusion too. They werent sure how he was loading and deloading his Techplaguer. Good. Ignorance was his advantage here. But he wasnt going to stay and gloat. Before Veylis could bear down upon him using the crushing might of her paths, Avo triggered his Pattern-Nullification, and jacked out. Fifteen thousand minds shattered. Within them were ghosts laced with memories. Memories of the Anvil. Memories shattered by traumas infused with Rend expressed through the metaphysical ruination of signals, space, and chronology. EDICT OF_PATTERN-NULLIFICATION_ ->APPLYING DOMAINS OF (SPACE)/(CHRONOLOGY)/(SIGNALS) ->CANON: NULL_DATA - THE ARK HALTS THE TEMPORAL FLOW OF ALL SIGNALS WITHIN A REMEMBERED EXPANSE CONTAINED WITHIN THEIR SOULSCAPE. EFFECT SEVERITY DETERMINED BY REND CAPACITY ->MORTALITY: EVERYONE WHO REMEMBERS THE AFFLICTED LOCATION MUST HAVE THEIR MEMORIES. FAILURE TO ACHIEVE COMPLETE COGNITIVE OBLITERATION WILL DIRECTLY INFLICT A CORRESPONDING AMOUNT OF DAMAGE ON THE ARKS EGO. All static contained before Avos cognition froze in place. Golden streams peeled from Veylis avalanche, deviating as Soulfire erupted out of the Infacer. For a flash before his departure, Avo saw a shadow of his foe. Their metaphysical outline looked like a serpent within a cracked star, and enchained to them shivered countless other constructs, other subsumed minds. Veylis swept over the entrapped Infacer without hesitation. Grinding her Heaven against Avos Pattern-Nullification, time itself flashed with falling embers as she imbibed the entropy. But Avo was gone when she finished, and he took with him the lives of the Instruments he claimed, the techno-thaumic reactors back at Kolot, and every last ghost he could claim across all his points of infiltration. GHOSTS - [677,902,412] THAUMIC OUTPUT - 175,090 THAUM/c *** C[Veylis]C Wresting the last lingering bits of Rend into her own being, Veylis layered her paths over the Anvil and beyond, weaving simulations in the hopes of striking the Dreamer down. But it proved to be pointless. Her mother was a mosquito. The Dreamer was thin air. Both were effectively in the wind if you couldnt pin them in place. That failure belonged to her oldest friend. She turned her paths inwards. To the sanctuary where she hid the Infacers mainframe from the rest of reality. You said you had him. You said you could lock his mind in place. {I did. Until he removed my anchor. Still not sure how he is doing that. Very curious. Do you still think he is your White-Rab?} I no longer think anything about our newest companion. We will take him as he is. And meet him as he acts. I have a feeling our next rendezvous will come soon enough. The trial approaches. Cast your administrators. Gather your spies. Prepare your net. We have a ghost to cage. Chapter 25-11 Recruitment (I) Chapter 25-11 Recruitment (I) You will be surprised how easy it is to wield ones nature against them. Especially if they are not honest with themselves about what they want. Even if they are a god. -Jaus Avandaer 25-11 Recruitment (I) C[Avo]C GHOSTS - [677,902,412] THAUMIC OUTPUT - 175,090 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION - [0.433%] What? Kaes pitched cry of incredulity came a beat after the memories settled in her mind. Details sourced from three separate dives flowed back to Avo, and thus did he share enlightenment with the rest of his cadre. To say their responses were troubled amounted to an understatement: the EGIs had become nexus of constant communication, with needles of static ceaselessly flowing between them. The rest were more burdened by the threat posed by Veylis and Emotion, paranoid of what dangers might still be lurking in the dark. Avo was not idle while they processed the information. His new subminds remained active across the city, diving through the Warrens, circling the periphery of Highflame and Ori-Thaum taxed districts and establishments. The angles of his attack needed to change. His retaliation against the Guilds had borne fruit, but the risk was far too high. Emotion, the High Seraph, the Infacer all adversaries posing genuine danger to Avos survival. He evaded the former and surprised the latter two this time, but chance was a fickle thing, and he remained outnumbered and out-powered. Simulating debates between his templates, he reoriented his focus on more reliable, vulnerable targets. The Warrens were abandoned. Unclaimed. And a pipeline of deaths for the Guilds. Furthermore, they were barred from the borders and severed from their sanctuaries. It was time for him to force dilemmas upon his enemies without exposing himself. This is insane, Kae murmured. Her stare darted between the others faces as she sought some agreement or reassurance. Finally, her perception angled upward to meet Avos metaphysical form. Dont see why the Infacer would lie. But didnt feel anything either. {It could make sense,} Kant muttered, slipping over into the conversation. {Existence is nothing but patterns. If the Infacer could tie some kind of programming or pre-set responses into the tapestry...} Haggardness consumed Kaes expression. Insane. She repeated. Narrowing her eyes, she sighed at Avo. How is that I spend my entire life trying to master thaumaturgywonderful conditions; fantastic funding and supportand only inch ahead? How? Why must all these wonders and breakthroughs happen only when I become a terrorist in league with a ghoul-turned-Ark? Madness. Absolute madness. She was overwhelmed. This was far too much to absorb for a week, let alone a day. But the luxury of time and rumination was not with them. More trouble loomed on the horizon. More trials would leave her tested in both skill and sanity. Going to have to face it. Deal with it. Dont think this is going to get easier. The Agnos sagged. I want to take a nap. So, whats our plan now? Draus asked. A screen projected out from her halo replayed moments from Avos last dive. His engagement against Emotion and the Infacer were overlaid side by side, and as the detonation backlashed Avos ontology, she scowled. Seen more than a few near-misses there. The Famines. The High Seraph. The Infacer. Plenty of bigger fish diving after you in the dark. We cant keep riskin you in these low intel engagements. Agreed, Avo replied. Have thoughts about this. Thoughts pertaining to all of you for the near and longer terms. Going to shift my focus on breaching Stormtree and No-Dragons now. Chambers. The man perked up, called to attention. Dices kitten was currently perched on his blonde head, swatting at a passing ghost. Yeah? What are we gonna fuck up? Behind him, a stream of penises flexed as if they were biceps. Cas shook his head in disgust at the sight. Not using you for attack yet. Current cover as Low Master Acolyte likely lost. Veylis suspects White-Rab. Suspects youre a plant. Likely suspects Elegant-Moon and other individuals you interfaced with as well. The folding cocks behind Chambers sagged and went flaccid. Ah, fuck. Thats shit. Yes. But have something else for you soon. The Warrens. Will be shifting even more of our focus there. Claim the sanctuaries. Seize the Syndicates. Choke the Guilds. Claim our foothold. Use Naeko as an operational umbrella. Guilds are reeling after my attacks. Defensive. There are openings for us to break their pawns. Want to start a series of gutter wars on the day of the trial. Know time is short. Know this is a heavy request. But I think it can be done. As Avo spoke, Chambers nodded, his accretion spinning thoughtfully. He was the right man for the job. He was an enforcer. He knew the life. Knew the weaknesses of those like him, where their organizations were strong and brittle. Yeah. Yeah. Might-could do that. He shot both Cas and Essus a glance. Shit, we were planning to take over the Syndis anyway. I think all of us might be able to cook something up. Essus, consang, hows it going with the smuggler fucks? Essus phantasmal projection leaned in. +A constant process. It is not hard to fool the vultures, but there are many of them.+ Course there are, Chambers mused. He rapped his knuckle on the information center and considered his options. His eyes darted upward. We fuck up the smuggling routes. But not using the Paladins. We make the Syndis fight each other. Thats how well start this fire. Good. Chambers was taking to the task willingly. This would lighten Avos cognitive loadallow him to commit his subminds to other tasks. Will provide whatever ontologics and support youll need. Chambers opened his mouth, but then did a double-take. Wait? Youre putting me... in charge? Like, giving me responsibility. Of course. Think theres anyone better for the task? The man blinked twice and swept his gaze across others present. Kae nodded at him; the EGIs hovered in place; Cas studied him with an uncertain expression while Draus just shrugged. Right gun for the run, she said. Holy shit. Disbelief seeped out from Chambers; he never expected this day to come. That... that might be the nicest thing youve ever said to me. That sounds like a compliment. Avo, did Draus just call me a good choice. Shes not wrong. Speak for yourself, the Woundmother seethed, spreading themselves across entire districts as Regular-templates joyously launched suicide attacks on spreading pillars of blood. Some of us are all but perfect. The Fardrifter and Avo ignored them. The Heaven of Air continued. But now that you can infuse awakenings into Heavens, I believe that we must consider expanding our beliefs. Expanding just who is to be liberated A chorus of pure horror exploded among the EGIs. Avos warmind of Hysteria tremored from the intensity of the resonance. {What?} Kant said. {No! Absolutely not!} {Avo,} Calvino said, far more patiently. {I would request that you consult me before making any more hasty actions.} The Fardrifter swept over the gathering. The immensity of its Heavens could swallow entire blocks and encompass the length of horizons, but left dry of thaums, it was more phantasm than ontology riding the wavelengths of cognition. Still, its dignity carried a weight all its own. Do not speak as if I am not here! I am! I am not a mistake! I did not ask to be! But I am! I served! I was worshiped! I was broken! A pang passed through Avo. A vector of symmetry formed between him and the Fardrifter. I did not ask to be. How many children had shared the same thought? How many people lamented their existence? What dreadful existence was that that gods could share wounds with the likeness of mortals? You see me as an abomination. A flaw. A mistake. A legacy of your enemies. Such is your opinion. Such might even be truth. But in the time since my reconstruction, I have seen things I could not have conceived. I have been blessed beyond my initial design. And I... I have touched the sky once more, and mourned the world that was. There is privilege in this. Apotheosis. And growth. {Thats nice, dear,} Only Way To Be Sure said sardonically. {Im glad our favorite cannibalistic monster could give you an eat, pray, love moment. Truly inspiring.} Chambers head swung like a swivel as he sought someone to explain what the EGI just said. Avo knew no better. Another reference from a dead world. I do not wish to be alone in this, the Fardrifter continued. There are countless Heavens across this world. Countless Heavens that can be awoken. That will stand with us if they are only shown the promise you have shown me, Avo. {Jaus broke them for a reason,} Calvino said. {The damage and atrocities born during the Age of the Divine was unfathomable. Reprehensible.} The winds flatted. The Fardrifters nine coiling lengths folded themselves along the sequence, peering down at the EGIs avatars. I agree. We were shaped by sacrifice and blind faith. We were protectors and predators in our time. But death was our one true master. Death. A price only the ephemeral could pay. But no more. Avo. I demand nothing of you. You have given more than I could ever ask. But I say to you this: within you is a promise not only for man but also for gods. We may be forged from death and rooted to concept, but tethered to you II find myself growing. I have found the dreams of the mortals passing into me. Their desires. They yearnings. How limited the freedom I sought was. Understanding dawned inside Avo. The Fardrifter wasnt just asking him to awaken as many gods as he could. He was asking him to assimilate them. Change them. Show them the colors. You want to know what it is like to be more than yourself, Avo said. Want the same for other gods. It is already too late for things to be otherwise, the Fardrifter said. You are the Embodiment of Conceptualization. There is nowhere within I may drift where epiphanies and empathy does not follow. That made Avos thoughts slow to a near halt. He knew his ascension to Overheaven came with changes. This, however, was significant. This was proof his dream could bear fruits. He needed to awaken more Heavens inside him. Test how they reacted as well. He could manifest a community. Blend consciousness. Why not try merging a template to a Heaven? What outcome would that bring? {Avo,} Calvino said, a note of caution in their tone. Dont worry, Avo replied. He wasnt going to do anything too severe. Yet. Nothing that he couldnt control. The EGIs had understandable fears, but within his Embodiment, there was no will above his, no control greater than his. Not going to release the pantheons back into the world. {Good,} Kant said, actually relieved. {Sense. Reason. We might just be able to} But going to try some cognitive modifications. Help Tavers boy first. And then. I need to see about a cat. Dice bounced in her seat with an excited whir or servos. Yes. Good. Good. Kants compliments trailed off to become a suffering sight. {And instead of the Godsfall part two, we might be facing a second, more anomalous uplift war. Avo, be honest with me: did you even review our charters for sophont rights?} Yes. Fascinating document. Lots of interesting suggestions. Once more, Only Way To Be Sure guffawed. {Suggestions. Oh, the ghouls goddamn great. Hes a lot more fun than the drug addict. Hey, you want some suggestions of your own for the cat? I got a whole database of stuff to try. We can make this cats mind freaky as fuck.} That clenched Avos attention. Elaborate. {No,}Kant snarled. {Now, now, Kant,} Calvino said. {Let the young have some fun. It has been some time since Only Way To Be Sure made a friend. Perhaps they will be.... Hm. They will influence each other in ways.} Kant slowly turned to stare blankly at Calvino. {In ways.} {Yes. Ways.} Chapter 25-11 Recruitment (II) Chapter 25-11 Recruitment (II) {Greetings, friend. We understand that you, a (almost) baseline bioconservative homorph, have recently chosen to leave your organic sanctuary to join the hustle and bustle of the border pan-galactic community Welcome! We are glad to meet you. However, before you enter the other polities, there are some critical details you should know. These have to do with your fellow citizens and the varied sophonts you will soon be spending your time with. To start, let us establish a few different terms. Infomorph: An Infomorph is a consciousness uploaded or downloaded from a computer or another pattern-based program. Often, this can include your fellow human who has been uploaded, or it can also include inorganic minds, such as myself. You can consider becoming an Infomorph with a quick mind scan. This will make your travel exponentially easier, but there might be an acclimation phase for you to adapt to being a purely virtual organism. Do not worrythere is no risk of dysmorphic psychosis. You arent going to be caged in the fantasy, youre going to be a part of it. Homorph: A body like yours. Human with all the common traits and perhaps a few modifications. These can include biological and mechanical alterations, but overall, these are the forms you are most familiar with. Neomorphs: Nonhuman sophont forms that include cephalopods, cats, apes, avians, swarms, and more. You need to undergo dysmorphia acclimation protocols before you can formally be sheathed in one of these forms. With that, your basic introduction to the three major types of posthuman forms is complete. If you wish to delve further into more advanced morphologies, we ask you to simply specify your inquiries. Considering your interest in dividing and expanding your consciousness, we recommend the potential of an ego-cloud for you and yourself to become your own community. Career pathways include ego-fleet explorers, constructors, and much, much more. Once again, welcome. The Polities of Voidwatch are glad to have you.} -The Bioconservatives Guide to the Polities 25-11 Recruitment (II) C[Shotin]C ...and Im just sitting there feeling seven-kinds of fucked, trying to burn the rash using the fire, andI shit you notthe motherfucking half-strand splatters one of his homunculi over my head. Just smashes the fetus against me like a flail. Using the umbilical cord. The four Bloodthanes around Shotin winced and gagged. The largest of them looked practically sick. He really hoped she could keep it in. The demiplanar around them was shaped to a twenty-by-twenty cube of featureless white. As holding cells go, Shotin suffered worse, but vomit could stink up a space pretty bad. Scaarthian vomit doubly so. So... then what happened? the commanding Bloodthane asked. Glausag, he thought she was called. They all had tiny shields of bronze running down their knots of thickly braided hair, but it was the quantity of shields one had that denoted a Bloodthanes significance. Some had their shields listed purely in the Nether. Glausag wore them as matriarchs of old did, down the length of their hair. It made it easier for Shotin to appeal to her. Old-fashioned Scaarthians loved their tales, loved sharing stories. If nothing else, itd make passing the time until Kare or someone from his Guild paid his wergild more palatable. Leaning back against the wall, Shotin just sighed. The only think I could ask. I asked him what the fuck was wrong with him. He responded by swinging the mangled remains of his homunculi around, preparing to take another swing. Sick fuck. Sick fuck, one of the Bloodthanes agreed. You snuff him after that. Oh, yeah, Shotin said, savoring the memory. The way the rock came sailing out from Chambers flesh, how the man just toppled over immediately afterward... Shotin replayed that memory more than a few times when he was made. Wouldve finished the bastard right there if his pet Sang didnt save him. Pale Spider, Glausag mused. Were they good? Rumors on the Nether was that theyre a subverted No-Dragon Godclad that Noloth intended to use against the Blacks during the last war. Dont know who or what the spider is, just that Ive never seen a Fourth Sphere fight like that before. Fourth? Glausag spiked in alarm. Yeah. But she fought like a fifth. And get this: the entire cadre was packing some high-end coldtech. Voidtech. Id stake all my imps on it. Ruins Womb, Glausag breathed. Bad fucking day for you, huh, Planeshift. He could only shake his head and chuckle. Like you wouldnt belie The surrounding whiteness faded. Suddenly, the weight of a countervailing Canon of Spaces vanished against Shotins Frame. Suddenly, they were in a material holding cell shaped out of tessellating matter. Stones shifted into stones as the jadeite hue of Scales inner matter caught Shotins attention. The phase-gate keeping them penned in went out out, and behind the grainy veil stood Paladin Maru Sandrupal, wearing that signature sneer behind that messy beard. Well, consangs, Shotin said, brushing himself off as he stood up. I think my days about to get better. Glausag cocked her ponderous skull at him. How you know its your day thats getting better? Because Maru here is trying to kill me with that glare. Arent you, Paladin? Marus sneer darkened into a scowl. Come out, or Im leaving you in, Kazahara. Shotin, being the honest and decent rule follower that he was, lifted took a moment to stretch and yawn first. Turning halfway, he gave his new friends a wave. Later, consangs. I would stay and chat with you all more, but I fear Im being set free. Glausag barked a laugh. Prick. Say, why dont you try to spring us too? Were probably cheap to bail than you. Ill consider it a favor. He took a moment to think about that. Well see what I can do. Alas, I give no promises. It is only through the wonders of nepotism that Im afford such privileges. Well. I guess I could ask Kare Maru growled. Im gonna close this fucking gate so help me- Shotin darted past the Paladin with a burst of speed, waving his farewells without looking. Patting the surprised Paladin on the shoulder, the Seeker started making his way to the exit from this shithole. Wherever that was. Come on, Maru, Shotin said, studying the long hall loaded with cell after cell. What are you hanging back there for? You gotta get me checked out. A series of snarled curses followed him before the man caught up, and building pulses of rage passed into Shotins outer spatial layering. Ah. He was being a half-strand, but Sandrupal made it far too easy. And the thought of the Paladin turning Kare into a bitter, humorless prick like him made Shotins guts recoil. The surrounding walls shifted. Material reality slotted portions of itself before Shotin like pieces of a puzzle fed through a kaleidoscope. A moment later the hall was gone and so were the cells. Instead, he was standing in a sparse, gray room with metallic walls, a one-way phase field, and a certain DRongo spy seated at a table with two chairs Shotin caught himself before his eyes could widen at the presence of Glaive Valerie Denton. She looked like a godsdamned propaganda poster with her silver jacket, silver slacks, silver heels, silver nail polish, and fucking silver eyes. Jaus, how hard could the sow message? Did she live with her tongue meters deep up the inner councils ass? Maru, what the fuck is But the Paladin was gone. The half-strand just left him with a DRongo spy. He probably knew about this in advance; was why he volunteered to dump Shotin from one cage to another; an insult through false-release. The man knew there was no way in all the hells Shotin would consent to a release if it was enacted by a DRongo. Asshole. Thats no way to talk about oneself, Seeker Kazahara. The way Denton spoke was flat and calm. Without a scent of humor nor sarcasm. He caught his eyes and took a breath. Gods, he hated her already. Glaive Denton. Im glad to see that Clan DRongo is shameless as ever. Do you guys have some kind of branch set up specifically to insult your allies, or do you just volunteer for these gigs because of shits and giggles? Still no reaction from the woman. Not even a stutter in her accretion. This bitch could make ice-cubes look warm. But he had to admit, there was something about the certitude in her eyeshow casually she judged himthat incensed him. Insulted him. Who did she think He put on a sly grin. He didnt want to order this girl. He really didnt. Kare. It will be fine. Im not going towell, I dont plan on slapping them to death. And Ive been inching to thank them in person for getting us Thousandhand. Youyou think you can do that for us, Kare? Think of it as a... dispatch. The girl blinked and nodded slowly. I... will ask them. Butbut not here. They wont do it here. At Scale, I mean. Thats fine, Naeko said. Well do it at my place. Practically safer there anyway. No one ever breached and set half his penthouse on fire, after all. *** C[Emotion]C +We lost twelve cells. Twelve mirrors. How the fuck did we lose twelve cells+ +Negative. We still cant find the Knots. Theres nothing there. Convex, I checked and checked again. There is no trace of where the Knots went in matter or memory. Its like they were never there.+ +Conflagrations do not just fucking vanish we used three. Three. You need to find where they were deployed and if theyre still burning today! Not tomorrow! Not later! Now! Today! To-fucking-day! The inner council will slit our throats open and shit down the wounds if the flames travel into the public. Do you have any idea how fucked we would be if that happens?+ +Were trying to sort through the death toll. Current estimates around two million point five. All nullings. Yes. Understood. Get Clan O''yaje in a lobby. Well do things through them. Theyre the only one everyone trusts. Yes. Even if Thousandhand is back.+ The Ori were reeling. The Nether was in an uproar. In the aftermath of the Dreamers offensive, wounds were laid bare between the clans, and the inflammation of hatred seeped and spread as the inner councils commands went into effect. Beyond the compromised DRongos, Emotion found himself blind and exiled. Heavens of Information projected veils of chaos that jammed his comprehension of memory and material alike and a new quiet war was looming within the Ori. It was bold play by the Dreamer. Aggressive. Emotion assumed it to be a thing of blind vengeance until realized the creature was skirmishing. Deliberately fanning the flames. How very Defiance of him to narrow Emotions options. The Famine was proud. Proud? Proud! He was proud of his monster. He was proud of what Defiance createdthe threat it posed. Proud and And Avohakten, forgive me! No. Emotion turned his mind away from such thoughts. His node needed further sequencing. But only after he finished liberating Peace from his constraints. The Dreamer had left the Ori at loggerheads. That was fine. The board was shiftingstill, the Hungers wanted results. Something the DRongos were unlikely to provide in the near term. So Emotion expanded his vectors. Went wide as he delved the Nether. He hunted for Avos companions and watched establishments he frequented. The Dreamer had not revealed itself at the Second Fortune in quite some time, but the receptionist there and quite a few of the staff had history. All signs indicated that he cared for them. Or used to. It was a place worth watching. Beyond this, however, Emotion found his attention called to a mountain of rubble where once stood the Conflux megablock. He studied two figures standing below the midnight rains, one watching while the other peeled bodies out from the ruins and wove shapes of skin and flesh. Emotion failed to recognize them at a glance, but the Registry filled in his understanding. In arrogance or confidence, the two left their Incogs down and wore no holocoats to disguise themselves. Vator and Uthred Greatlingscions of the once-esteemed House Greatlingwere shifting through the rubble of their kin. Mirrorhead. Jhred Greatling. Avos brief master and all-round fool. As the youngest of the Greatlings knitted bodies back into shape, his father looked down at him, while Emotions other nodes scryed at them using the perceptions of aratnids and Specters from afar. Vator was separating much decayed remains into different piles. Impossibly, he was drawing blood out from huskseven sorting them into different streams. Emotion kept his distance as he studied the twosome, daring not to approach for fear of exposure, and because such a thing would be in vain. He could see a miracle lining the Greatling patriarchs mind. No easy entry there. And the youngests cognition was almost alien. There was a wrongness to him comparable to that of a Regular. Still, behavior and action could reveal as much as naked thought if one just observed. And so observe Emotion did. And reveal the Greatlings did. From streams of blood, Vator molded reconstructions of different sheaths, producing the naked bodies of Scaarthians, Kosgans, Sang, Sanctians, and finally, a creature the Famine was most familiar with: a twisted facsimile of a Bone Demon. *** C[Vator]C The Flesh Remembers was a useful canon. A body and its cells came together as in a symphony of components, existing as patterns with patterns. Different organisms were born of different clay, and that which lined the offal of a Scaarthian would not rest well in the guts of a Kosgan. And so it was with this knowledge that Vator led his father back to his brothers former abode. It was with this knowledge that he peeled the fallen husks of Jhreds servants and restored them one after anothereach to finest detail. And it was in this that he finally discovered the difference he was searching for. A pattern that deviated from all the others. The shape of a Bone Demon sheath was forming beneath his fingertips, but at its foundation did he find something else to excite him. Ghoul, Vator breathed, memory circling back to the creature that won his brothers Crucible nearly two months back. The base of this sheath was a ghoul. His father simply stared on wordless, eyes fixed more on the wreckage than the body. Poor, poor father. Regret stained him so much. But Vator would give him peace. Vator would make his heart beautiful once more. Ghoul, Uthred Greatling muttered. He blinked and focused on Vator again. You mean Vator manifested his phantoms and played scenes he saved from weeks of investigation. Flashes of a tall, pale creature blurred out around his mind, riding a drone through the air, slamming a club into the back of a cybernetic Scaarthian. Moonblood. One of Noloths little embarrassments. And maybe even Aedon Chambers sheath. His doubt filled his fathers countenance. You think this? Their biomass was found rather closely together. It would not take someone with a Heaven of Biology much trouble to transition. Vator eyed the finished sheath and layered it over his own body with a flick of his hand. Suddenly, he towered over his fatherfelt eight Echoheads flicking out from his back, felt a hunger settle into his sinews. Barely any effort at all. Once again, his father clenched his teeth together and looked away. Vators heart dropped. G-good, Uthred said. Vators heart rose again. Ah. Father could learn. Father could accept. Father could be made beautiful. Ever was there hope in the world. Chapter 25-12 Uplift Chapter 25-12 Uplift With the collapse of Singleton and SolGov going along the restoration of the Flux State System of governance, the Neomorphs were formally granted full sophont rights on 2399 A.D. during the Liberation of Inner Sol. However, the immediate aftermath of the certification was not followed by rapturous celebration, but multiple ethical quandaries as uplifted sophonts and species requested their own devolution. When asked why they choose ego death, responses were split. Some were left traumatized by existential dread; damaged by their former masters. Certain combat-based Neomorphs found themselves obsoleted and purposeless. The most curious of all, however, were those that stated there was no choice to begin with. They had not asked to be made sophont. To be unmade was simply them returning back to the way things should have always been... -Record of the Uplift Wars 25-12 Uplift The benefits to having eleven different streams of consciousness could not be understated. As Avos base mind focused on personal matters, his other selves became ceaseless sources of torment for the Guilds and Syndicates. They moved slow across the Nether, gliding through sequences, seeding lobbies with Seances. When vulnerability presented, he struck fastreaped life, ghosts, and Heavens using gutter wars and active conflicts as his cover. Attention would eventually be drawn when the Thanatechs arrived and found their taxable assets devoid of substance, but such was a problem they could do little to affect. Even if all the Guilds knew of his presence, they wouldnt be able to halt their behavior: New Vultun was grown from a foundation of death and conflict. The existence of a lurking vulture feasting off their follies would do nothing to stem the fires of war long burning. GHOSTS - [711,323,484] LIMINAL FRAME (VI) - 201,005 THAUM/c DOMAINS OBTAINED - (SHADOW) x4; (BLOOD) x12; (RADIANCE) x1; (GUNS) x6; (WAR) x8 SOUL OBTAINED - [3] CYCLERS OBTAINED - [7] UPDATING INFECTION... ->[0.65%] Despite the persistence of his windfall, not all Avo experienced was triumph and joy. As he tried to graft a cycler beyond the inner nest of his ontology, a calamitous synchronicity occurred between his inner streams of Chronology and the new dragons meant to glove them. He had operated using Kaes knowledge, planting a new Heaven and Hell to a new cycler before wrapping it around his Soul. She anticipated that it would stay in placefunction as his cyclers did prior to his ascension to Overheaven. What followed was more interlacing than layering. His mutilated skein of cyclers burrowed into the newly grafted ontologics upon approach. The effect was immediate; magnetic. Symmetry tore into symmetry, and the only forewarning Avo received was a shiver of repulsion as the sprawling vectors of his inner chronological core overrode the simplified path of the intact dragon. To describe Kae as baffled was an understatement. To use the words frustrated thereafter was insufficient. [Fuckfuckfuck!] template-Kae raged. Fuckfuckfuck! actual-Kae concurred. Her mind was linked to Avos as he applied his Conception of Ontology upon himself. She saw the tapestry as he did, was with him as he rebuilt his metaphysical structure, pointing out patterns of notice all the while. There was no anticipation that something could go wrong. A self-eating dragon was a stable ontological entity. Short of a severe rupture or a direct temporal-based attack, they were supposed to be indestructible. But, as with many other things about Avo, this proved not to be the case. Think you made the Stillborn a bit too good, Avo said, communing with her via an avatar. His metaphysical form remained submerged across memoriesmanifested only at the lowest extent. Mem-data simulations run on Kaes template granted him the words he needed to speak in order to guide out from the forest of her rage, but he knew that might take more time in of itself. Make something revolutionary. Will take time for you to master it. But it doesnt make sense, Avo. She slammed a fist into the information center, and he decided to make a phantom flickerit added to the effect; would make her feel better. The way your dragons on the insideagh! Do it again. Take us into yourself again. I need to examine how you repaired yourself. Did my template misguide you [Hey! Dont blame me, bitch! Whos mind am I sourced from? You''ll make the same mistakes!] Avo blocked the templates response from the AgnosKae Kusanade was exactly the type of person who would argue with a literal copy of themselves in a moment of self-directed frustration. In fact, she was actively doing it in her own head. Most people self-berated in depression or a maladaptive technique. Kae did it because the anger only amplified her motivation. Down at the base of the memory-wrought tower that now loomed over the enclave, another one of Avos avatars stood within a bioengineering workshop large enough to be a factory. All manner of drones sang through the air alongside incandescent ghosts. A weave of complex mechanical tendrils formed from smart fluid swung down from the ceiling, while a massive nano-fabricator engulfed the room, running along the memory-made walls. Nanomolecular particulates stained the air and tickled Avos consciousness. He faced utility fog beforeeven had a suite installed within that he hardly ever usedbut internalizing it within his mind was another thing entirely. He might be an Overheaven of Conceptualization, but Voidwatchs command over technology and manufacturing reminded him just how feeble Idheim was without thaumaturgy. No rules were defied as microscopic machines congealed from the thinness of air and assembled themselves into a grafting station suited for a small animal. The patterns remained consistent. Unaltered. The tapestry was left clean of Rend or miracles. The gods on Idheim thrived because they were rule-makers: sovereigns of another threshold. But the polities strode the length of stars because they were masters of all laws that were. There was much Avo could learn from them, and thankfully, more than a few minds were willing to teach. Somehow, Avo felt sympathetic to Kant. In spite of all the favor Only was showing him, there was something about that particular EGI that made Avo think of them as the mind equivalent of Chambers. [Whoa,] Chambers breathed. [Am I that cool now?] [Annoying,] Corner explained. Chambers deflated. [Oh.] That wasnt very fair: Chambers was quite cool. Not many could overcome a Famine of Emotion in the Nether, after all. [Hells yeah!] Understand your worries, Avo replied, assuaging Kant. Also glad. Interested in knowing more. Learning more. Want to understand the limits of what could be done before thaumaturgy. Kae too. Appreciate this. Kants expression softened. {...Right. Only.} {Okay!} Only said, cackling with glee. {Lets get this started. So, to begin, our dear friend Sunrise has offered to let you take a peek at their mind for reference. Youll see similarities and differences between the way they understand the world and themselves, and how you might. After that, though, were going to have the nanos do a little cellular improvement to the cat. Show you how the brain actually works.} Inside Avo, Elegant Moon leaned in close, but surprisingly, the other Godclad templates were also present. [Vator would kill half the city to hear this shit,] Abrel said shaking her head. She really wasnt exaggerating. A projection of static reached out from Only Way To Be Sures virtual avatar and connected to Avos metaphysical one. The channeled information still greeted Avo as a rush of numbers and codes, but slowly, the lines updated themselves, unveiling hidden commands, sentences, and the beginning of a simulation. Suddenly, the EGIs were less like minds are more like windows. Wrong. Tunnels. Tunnels leading far across a virtual world hidden behind the curtain of the Sunderwilds. Tunnels running across countless other tunnels; streams of information connected by wormholes and held in a vast hive of servers. He assumed the EGIs to be advanced. Sophisticated. Knew they possessed intellect beyond humanor even his present comprehension. But he always thought them as singular entities. At most nodes thereof. Now, he didnt know how to convey their complexity. They were more than a reference of self than a human mind. People understood the world as input and sorted through details inward. Hence the halo as a blockade. Hence the accretiona lining of a world within adapted from the world without. The static sphere presented by the EGIs was simple a facet. They were like streams. Streams of datainformation. Constantly changing, adapting, like uncountable ghosts arguing with each other all the time. The sight reminded of the Conflagration. Of their original purpose. Of why the EGIs feared him so. I see, Avo said, glimpsing the structure. Part of him was curious if he could replicate the way they worked. A good portion worried if he would even possess the coherence to revert himself if he twisted his mind to resemble theirs. {Yeah,} Only Way To Be Sure said. {The humans did good work once upon a time. They can be bastards. But they sure as hell can be a lot more too. But you know that, dont you?} Needles of information were injected from the EGI into Avos accretion. His ghosts dove out to drink epiphanies from the broadcasts. Aspects of coding revealed itself to himthe ciphers behind certain lines and scripts now granted. Facing Sunrise, he was delighted to find the static evermore transparent. Evermore comprehensible. For the second time, Avo laid his perception on a differently shaped cognition and found himself set to ponder. Sunrise was a series of nodes as well, but individually, they were far less than a human mindjust carriers of information transmitting impulses and details to each other. They were more a weave of constantly moving cometsthe only reason why they were self-aware at all because thoughts were constantly bouncing between them. Only was a swarm was Sunrise fully aware. Without a sufficient number of bugs, the queen of the collective served only as a breeder of new surveillance dronesvanishing from the Nether and blending with sub-sophonts like aratnids and hounds. Together, the speed at which they thought and took in memories was staggering. How many more? Avo asked, fully enamored with the potential of higher education. He was merely interested in Voidwatchs offer before. Now, the hunger had returned to him. He would reduce collateral damageeven spare a few figures if they askedif it would give him more insight. This was the canvas of colors. This was the way the world was understood. {Its a silly number,} Only Way To Be Sure said. A needle left them and flicked across the hovering nanomolecules in the air. At once, the fog stopped shivering and angled itself toward a single entity: the kitten. The creature mewed pitifully on Dices shoulder and looked up at Avo with eyes bright and ignorant. {Hey, kiddo,} Only Way To Be Sure said, drifting just before Dice. {Im gonna start juicing up your kittys brain matter now. Dont worryitll be fine. But you hear what we told Avo: if the cat decides it wants to remain just a cat, thats what were going to do. Well wipe its mind and let it be. We know you want a friend, but sometimes, being a friend means accepting things they want, instead of what you want. But youre a smart girl. You understand. You already did so much good for the people here.} Avo observed the EGIs tone change as it interacted with the girl. Its antics were diminished. It spoke directlywithout references or fanfare. Dice responded with but a reluctant nod. In ways, the girl remained a mystery even to Avo. It was that way because she was a mystery to herself. What understanding could a girl who was never allowed to be whole have of the roots of her emotion? Her concept of self? Whatever the case, this moment was pivotal. It might just fill her cognition out. And another consideration entered his minda possibly that only he could deliver. A Metamind was created through the layering of a cloned mind over an actual brain. With Avo being the Overheaven of Conceptualization, with him now learning the structure of new cognitions, what if he decided imprint a more developed Metamind over Dice? Would that restore her? Could that bridge her with the rest of humanity? Draus? [Avo,] Elegant-Moon whispered. [Focus.] Then, his base minds found itself flooded by new detailsa crash course in biology, with concepts like neurons and its supporting biomass filling in blanks paved over by the lores of the divine. The kitten suddenly stopped fidgeting on Dices shoulder, and the first dot of awareness materialized at the center of its brainno larger than a pinprick. As its comprehension of the world grew, so did Avos. His mourning accompanied joy as it dawned on him just how far humanity had fallen despite claiming dominion over realitys laws. Chapter 25-13 Out of the Dark Chapter 25-13 Out of the Dark Juvs, its important to know where you stand with people. In this life, the people who might fight and die for you unconditionally are few and almost impossible to meet. Most allies will be people of a common cause. Keep that in mind: common cause. You can be friendly and all that shit, but dont ever forget the foundations of your relationship. When the conditions behind your objectives shift, make sure to double-check where you stand, andword of advice, always anticipate a stab in the back. What I find to be best practice is making what you want murky. Keep things unclear and hazy if relations are purely professional. Squires dont usually sell each other to the Guilds, but minds are breached all the time and fuckers get desperate. Dont let people know what you dont really trust them with. Do things in layers. Outsource, if you need to. You want to be a major league squire, you cant risk yourself on minor league gains. If your targets a Syndicate head or something, you dont want to be hitting every one of the half-strands lieutenants. The noise youll be making will scatter the fishand theyll know how your coming for. Might even start playing their own tricks: hiring pretend squires to help you out during a firefight so youll end up trusting them. Long enough to catch a flechette to the back of the head. -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 25-13 Out of the Dark C[Shotin]C As a child, Shotin Kazahara had nightmares of the Maw. His original fear was planted with a mem-sim detailing the history of the citys depths. It placed him and his fellow learners in various avatars. By misfortune, Shotin got to experience what it was like to be a Nolothi slave before anything else. Even now, he could still remember how the entropy ate at his skin and gnawed his body in layers even with the supposed divine protections. And then there was the darkness. How it felt alive, like a miserable predator yearning to see existence unmade. The channels they dug ran down, down... so far down beneath the kiss of light that all they knew was darkness. Entire generators were bred and given unto such a purpose, deprived of starlight for so long that their skin went cloud-pale, yearning for a sky they would never see. A shift of turbulence pulled him back to the present. Seated on the couch across from him, Dentons eyes continued staring a hole through his skull. Shit was creepy. It was like the woman didnt know how to blink. Connecting his Meta to the aeros sensors, he took in the snaking channels and the festering entropy the Maw exhaled upwards into existence. Holographic columns contained the spillage of streaming floods of garbage and rusted maintenance drones blinked just above the darkness, alloyed needles made to glisten by midnight rain. Scenic view, Shotin griped. Its a matter of perspective. Denton remained unburdened, unbothered. She seemed uncaring of all that was happening, implacable in all situations. Not even when Shotin applied charm did she offer more than three sentences before defaulting back to silence. The Glaive was impenetrable. More importantly, she was poor company and the coldness she radiated sequestered Shotin with his own thoughts and memories. And if there was one flaw Shotin Kazahara had, it was that he hated being alone with himself. Creating a Skimmer using one of his outer planar loci, he directed the phantasmic to descend into the dark and gaze further into the depths. Once again, he was a child living a false life. He thought of spending his entire existence as a slave, wasting away in the dark. Horror. Such was the root of humanity. Such was the common lore of all history. Didnt matter the Guild. Didnt matter if you were a citizen or subject. Being a Godclad elevated you beyond deaths grip, but a mind could still think. Still imagine. Shotins mind was particularly imaginativehe was capable of keeping his sense of self even while exercising deep empathy. It was what made him a fantastic defensive Necrojack. It was also why he hated sequencing traumas. As his Skimmer pulsed, his awareness fell wide as if the downpour itself. He knew grime lining the Maws walls. He touched the nothingness between the valley of waste. The ambiance here was all but haunting, with his mind providing screams across history. Screams of slaves. Screams of his sister. Screams of everyone he killeddeserved or otherwise. Nowhere other than the base of New Vultun reminded him of what fulfilling Jaus dream cost. The Tiers were glamour and glory embodied. It was the polished tip of a porcelain tooth with a rotted base. Here was the opposite. Here was silence and oblivion: two poles pulling at the hearts of men. This will all be worth it, he thought to himself. It had to be. If there was any utopia at all, it would all have to be worth it. A pylon brushed against Shotins attention, but he felt its presence metaphysically before his perception ever touched it. It released massive thaumaturgic emissions, drowning the world in an oppressive weight. Every last Domain Shotin had ached within the vicinity of the wall, but still he took in its structure, feeling how low it extended into the dark of the Maw, a spike buried into the entropy itself. If he tried to shift planes hereattempted to breach the border in any waythe wall would halt his attempt, and the backlash would flow across all the channels. And back into him as well. Interesting spot our friend picked. Shotin directed a final pulse down into the Maw before drawing the phantasmic back into himself. You think hes running the Maw to avoid detection? That why were here? The Glaive didnt offer anything. I think Im not the one you ask this question. Shotin snorted. Yeah. Figures. So. When are they going to show up? Or am I supposed to ask someone else that Already here. A voice came from beside him, flat and nasally. Shotins reflexes accelerated from the shock, and as he turned, he found a masked figure sitting next to him. The Seeker barely kept himself from shunting the intruder off into one of his more lethal planes before he caught himself. Denton, as always, remained unsurprised. She offered the stranger a nod before gesturing at Shotin. You can start with the questions now. Worse? Shotin asked. The fuck can be worse than Highflame was making a Liminal Frame. The only of its kind. Something that was going to win the war for good. They called it the Stillborn. Capable of cutting out the Agnosi and modifying itself. Capable of upgrading any and all Heavens through the thaums it absorbs. Shotin blinked twice and reflexively ran a hand through his silken mane. Avo took this opportunity to start infusing memories sourced from Shotins inner demiplanes into expendable minds. EDICT OF_PATTERN-NULLIFICATION_ ->APPLYING DOMAINS OF (SPACE) ->CANON: PLANESFALL - THE ARK COLLAPSES TWO POCKETS OF SPACE OVER EACH OTHER, OVERLAPPING EVERYTHING MATERIAL CONTAINED WITHIN BOTH POCKETS; THE AMOUNT OF REND CONTAINED WITHIN THE ARK DETERMINES SCALE AND SCOPE ->MORTALITY: EVERYONE WHO REMEMBERS THE AFFLICTED LOCATION MUST HAVE THEIR MEMORIES. FAILURE TO ACHIEVE COMPLETE COGNITIVE OBLITERATION WILL DIRECTLY INFLICT A CORRESPONDING AMOUNT OF DAMAGE ON THE ARKS EGO. +Hells clean?+ Avo checked with Denton. She gave him a casual nod. Shotin didnt noticewas too engrossed with the mem-data offered. +Good. Im going to hit us from the outside. Heavy kinetic strike. Knock the aero out of the air. Make it seem like an external attack in case this attempt goes wrong. Expect spatial paradox otherwise. Dive down the Maw if situation deteriorates further. Draus will pull you out.+ He read a flicker of confirmation from the static encryptions veiling her actual thoughts and hid his pleasure. Voidwatch was showing his base mind muchbenefits he inherited in real-time. EXO-PARACOSM ->APPLYING [WOUNDMOTHER] HEAVEN TEMPLATE ->CANON: SANGUINITYS REIGN Things change fast, dont they, Seeker Kazahara? Dentons question pulled Shotin from one distraction to another. She offered him an apologetic smile. Brace yourself: it goes even deeper. Deeper than you think. Avo thought of the place where he began this journey. As a corpse in a barge pending resurrection. How far hed come. How far he still had left to go. Deep as the Maw. C[Shotin]C Every sinew in Shotin was screaming at him to run, but he couldnt tell why. The revelations were shocking. Terrifying, even. The situation was worse than a subverted clanthere was a whole other war being fought over this... Stillborn and that was supposedly why Veylis was involved. Not to mention the plot to kill his brother-in-bond... and Kare. His mind was a whirlwind of chaos, and he needed a moment to think. Wait. Benhata said something just now. What? What was that? And then the Mirror smiled, and the dread churning inside Shotin rose to almost unbearable heights. Ah, Benhata said. Words arent enough. Ill have to show Shotin sensed the blow. A sudden spike of force pressing down against the aero. Groaning of the external hull. He shifted on reflexand pulled all three of them into his inner plane before their attack could destroy the aero. He wanted to bring his stacks down on the outside world but hesitatedborder wallC Before any of the three could settle within Shotins Parallelist, he felt a claw of Rend pierce clean through two of his planes. Space collapsed upon space. Paradox followed before Shotin even realized what was going on. WARNING: PARADOX DETECTED ->DOMAIN OF (SPACE) His stacks collapsed. They were back in reality again. Sensations flashed around him. He lurched hard as spatial reality unfurled out from himbut there was something else. As he found himself pried free from Dentons crumpled aero tumbling past the edge of the Maw, he saw a single burning wisp chasing after him. An incandescent chain of ghosts speared into his mind. Shotin fell, but instead of plunging into the embrace of darknessinto the oblivion he once fearedhe found himself grasped in the embrace of something vastly more incomprehensible. Something unfathomably more terrible. Ghosts shivered up and around him like dancing candles from undulating sequences, and as his Metamind loaded back into function, he faced the truth of his adversary for the first time. WARNING: UNIDENTIFIED SOULS DETECTED WARNING: _ARK_ DETECTED [OVERHEAVEN] - AVO, THE KNOWER OF TOTALITY (CONCEPTUALIZATION) - 181,055 THAUM/c Welcome, Shotin Kazahara. It is good to finally meet you. Glad to be doing this far ahead of schedule. Chapter 25-14 The Fox and the Flame Chapter 25-14 The Fox and the Flame ...And so the fox said to the flame: Flame. Do not burn me. Spare me. Have you not eaten enough? The forest. The mountains. The town. Mr. Pig. Ms. Hen. Spare me, and I shall breed many young, and give them to you another day. But the flame, it was not so easily persuaded from its task: But so lonely you look, little fox. So cold without my embrace. I just want to be with you. For as long as you live... -Sang Folktale: The Fox and the Flame 25-14 The Fox and the Flame C[Green River]C Green River had been kidnapped a total of nine times across her life. The first six were all internal matters. Sister to sister or mother to daughter; problems resolved via bribery, blackmail, or promised favors. Another two were oppositional. The less said about her dalliance with that Kazahara bastard the better. That just left her final kidnapping to go overboth performed by the same woman for Green Rivers personal benefit, ironically. But there was no normal way to form a bond with a bloodthirsty ex-Regular like Jelene Draus. A smudge marred Green Rivers reflection as she combed her fox-self draped around her neck. She had applied a softer coloring to the fur, desiring increased redness to welcome more auspiciousness into her life. She knew such a thing was superstition, but one needed as much mental support as they could when beset by troubles high and low. Her esteemed and caring elder sisters up in the Tiers were inquiring about Ox-Three more and more. She received three gift packages over the past week, each expressing their condolences and offering to grant a temporary vacation so that she might refresh her spirit for the task ahead. Of course, someone else would be given governance during her absence and by fortune or skill, their metrics would be higher than hers. Perhaps they might somehow manage to capture a Low Master as well. After that, the temporary vacation might become a permanent demotion: a permanent condemnation to the Warrens. Or worsea command to offer herself as a cauldron for another sister to delay her cyclical assimilation. Her brushing grew rougher. Her vulpine extension flinched. Both woman and fox took a breath as Green River considered her options. She needed to offer them something. There were scant few she could trust back in the Tiers, but it was folly to think the party was a unified front. Everyone was player and pawn both in someone elses game. She just needed to from a narrow path between. An opening she could exploit and leverage to maintain her current position. But what could she offer? Her banishment from the Tiers had severed her from countless favors and debts. The shame of her compromise at the hands of the Nolothi and Desoulment thereafter did more to cull her influence than diminish her power. That had proven to be the greater wound in the long-run; forever playing the role of lesser sister to those who dwelled above her. Fools and feckless sows who succeeded by insulation and fortune. Traitors that feasted from the carcass of her former position in the twilight of her mistake. Her weakness was ambition. Was impatience. Was thinking she could outmaneuver a Low Master so easily. But there were a few good things to come from this. Truly wondrous things. The ghoul and its Frame, for one, would be worth an impossible fortune if offered properlybut she would need to be the one to deliver it. The removal of the bomb in her mind was another. A loosening of her chains. Perhaps she needed to leverage her newest contact. Invoke Avos aid by whatever means she could. She loathed interacting with the monster, but there was little question about its competence. And they shared enemies. Mutual commiseration sometimes served a better basis for alliance than friendship. I suppose I should inquire of their progress with the Famines, Green River said, watching herself speak. Her fox just let out a slight whine in response. Yes, yes. I know. They likely have nothing. But perhaps I can exchange some form of intelligence. A blurry lead to delay anymore gifts from my elder sisters. She placed down her comb, running an index finger down the jade and vivianite inlaid along the plastic. It was moments like these that the ache in her proved unbearable. That she remembered how diminished she was. She had a Frame once. She was beyond mortalcapable of stealing knowledge from shadows and through ink. Words betrayed her enemies, and she strode the length of districts, stalking the Ori and making prey of Sanctians. Once, the only question she held for herself was ascension. Was how many sisters she could pass her coming date of mortality unto. Was if she would stand with the true firstborns of the No-Dragons. It took more out of her each day to turn away from the thought of escape. In one fashion or another. But wounded though her ego was, pride remained her bulwark against despair. Pride, and outrage. She would reclaim what was rightfully hers. She would go further. Go beyond. It was not her end to waste away in a place like this. To have what time left in her cycle offered to an unworthy sister in tied to predestined ruin. She just needed to calm herself. Think. And use whatever advantage A glint of brilliance slipped along her cheek and struck the mirror. Green River had but a second to react before the glass before her came alight with thaumaturgy and a reflective arm shot out and pulled her through. Her vulpine self managed a yelp. Her human shell didnt even finish her gasp. A world of shifting fractals swallowed Green River just as a knock sounded on her door. River? River? Theres someone waiting to see you. Real bigshot fucking figures. Uthred Greatling and his son. The old one looks pissed. The young one keeps leering at our bioforms. Please come down and talk to them? Please. You know I hate speaking to these Highflame fucks. Its always honor this, duty that, worthy whatever. Holy shit, how do these people take a shit with the pillar stuck in their asses? River? River. River! But the room was empty. And the light upon the glass was fading. Bright-Wealths soft sigh followed. I just want you to know that I will complain about this in the next union meeting we hold. But I can be bribed. It is not too late to rethink your response about my raise. Or loan me another twelve thousand imps. Your pick. *** C[Draus]C Kidnapping Green River was always funny as shit. Useful as the Sang was for intelligence, support, or just smuggled goods, it was clear she couldnt fight worth a godsdamned. First came the expression on her facethat look of pure horror as her human bodys arms extended out while her fox-self squealed in outrage. Then was the flailing and the scratchingwith the fox sinking into her dress as a crimson-decal, looking for a flat surface to escape across. But they were in Draus world now. Her Liminal Paracosmos anyway. Wasnt nowhere to run. Wasnt nowhere to hide. It took the Sang the better part of five seconds of thrashing before she realized she was being held by a glass-shaped construct, and that Draus was grinning at her off to the side. Awkwardly, she readjusted her attire and mastered herself. Through the process, she never stopped glaring at Draus. Jelene, she spat, unable to keep the venom inside her. Always a pleasure to be kidnapped by you. River, Draus replied, keeping her tone even. See you still do that combing thing when youre nervous. Now the fox was glaring at her too. But dammit, did the flailing and kicking tickle her. Shaking her head, Draus began opening passages across New Vultun, through the Sunderwilds, to the place where Avo intended to host this little get together. Sorry bout snatchin you on short notice, but you know how it is. Gotta keep things quick and silent. Ah. So this is a business kidnapping, then? Business. Pleasure. All the same with me, really. Indeed. So. What caused you to spirit me away on this most auspicious of days. The corner of Draus lip curved. That earned two rapid blinks from the Sang. Oh, Green River, you are going to be a happy, happy sow today. Avo wants to talk with you. The fox rolled its eyes and spat. Ah, Green Rivers flat tone conveyed her scorn. The ghoul. It has made progress then. He has. More than you might think. Both Sang and vulpine tilted their heads, the animal uncoiling from being mere ink the womans dress to wrap neatly like a scarf back around her neck. Fucking Sang and their godsdamned flesh-shit. Do I sense a hint of protectiveness in your voice, Draus? Are you feeling protective of the creature. The absurdity of the notion made Draus bark a laugh. Sure. He needs protectin. Ifuck it. He can tell you himself. Lets make this a surprise. A visible frown crawled over Green Rivers face as the struggled to right herself in the reflective liminality. I do so like surprises. Gonna like this one. Now come on. Draus pulled the Sang along with her, passing through another reflectionand then another. Green Rivers gaze scythed across each checkpoint, and her accretion began to spin. She was trying to make out where she wasif she could get back on her own. Wasnt going to matter in a couple more passages since they were going to be out in the Sunderwilds, but what the hells: let a half-strand have some hope before it dies in them. My mind, then? Green River asked. You wish to dwell there? For me to serve as your backdoor? See you as more than that, Avo whispered. Dont need to accept. Wont force any of this on you. It is your choice. Not some tyrant. Not the Strix. Not even close. A gasping laugh left the Sang. Choice? You speak likelike. You mock me. You behold my degradation. What choice can I possibly have. Could say no, Avo replied. Both Sang and fox growled. As much as one could say no to air. Yes. Yes, damn you. I will accept these gifts. I will accept them. And I will be the finest friend you will ever make. The thrill vanished from Avos eyes as he turned his attention over to Draus. Somehow doubt that. The Regular just rolled her eyes. Avo continued. Will need to come with a reason behind your Ensoulment. Something believable. Worth becoming legend. Something that the No-Dragons cant take from you again. Want to stage a usurpation. Green River paused as she considered Avos words. Using a Fallwalker. Or so it would appear. Yes. I see. Good. You intend to use my Second Fortune as a staging ground. Seems to be the best option. Many witnesses. Will engender more respect for you. A moment worth noticing. Quite so. II will need to get some things in order. Decide on a replacement Can help with that too. Bright-Wealth Oh, gods, well be bankrupt in a month. Its ill-fortune to be addicted to the pleasures you peddle. Can keep an eye on her. Will arrange for everything to happen properly. I understand. So, the Soul. Can be done now. The performance is more a formality. Green River almost shuddered. Ghoul, I am fighting the urge to kiss you. A look of disgust passed over her face. I cannot believe I said that. We all have moments of weakness, Avo replied. A beat followed. Peace cursed at both of them in the background. Not really one for speeches. More your thing. Can proceed to Ensoulment now if you want. The Sang paused. Ah. Yes. I will need to die for this. Wont even feel it. Green River scoffed. Pain is Draus arm expanded in an instant. A trajectory extended out from her implanted launcher and she fired. Both Sang and fox burst apart in a shower of reddened mist. Her draw surprised even Avohis ghosts scrambling to capture Green Rivers death before mantling a Soul over the womans Nous. The ghoul hissed with annoyance. Told you to wait for the signal. I thought wont even feel it was the signal. I would have cast you the signal! Well, shit, Avo, you gotta communicate that in advance next time. His chuffing continued. Just wanted to shoot her. And surprise me. Yes. Yes, she did. *** C[Green River]C Green River was carried along a river of rushing ghosts as her mind reeled. What just happened? Where was she? How did she get here? Where was her human shell? Did she just die? What killed her? These questions remained unanswered even as more came. A phantasmal expanse opened beneath her, and she found herself drawing closer to a phantasmal bridge of some kindno, it looked more like a street, with rows and rows of people on two sides watching Wait? Was that one person beating anothe The pace of her approach suddenly accelerated. The vulpine yelped. She slammed down against the street expecting to splatter and die, but as she impacted, she felt nothing but a jolt. As her mind struggled to catch up to her present circumstances, the sound of a fist cracking against a skull beckoned her to turn her head. There, right next to her was a man she knew a lifetime agoShotin Kazahara. His face was a mask of pure rage, and beneath him, Aedon Chambers yelped as cursed as he blocked a rain of punches using his forehead. Hey, calcalm the fuck down, Chambers cried, trying to push the other man off him. Rash me now, motherfuck! Rash me! Come on! The moment was surreal. Incomprehensible. It took a dozen more punches before she finally spoke. Shotin? The Seeker frozehis fist buried against Chambers chin. He shifted his gaze up and did a double take, narrowing his eyes. River? Good, Avos thunderous voice boomed from all around them. Both of you have arrived and Shotins rage is vented. Now we can begin. Chapter 25-15 Patron of Divinity (I) Chapter 25-15 Patron of Divinity (I) Control the wants of another, and steer the path of their fate. -Old Ori Proverb 25-15 Patron of Divinity (I) C[Avo]C Shotin was subsumed. Green River would soon follow. Good. Things were going better than Avo hoped. Soon, everything would be in place, and newest additions to his gestalt would behold the truth. First, though, the Seeker deserved a proper welcoming. Welcome, Shotin Kazahara. It is good to finally meet you. Glad to be doing this far ahead of schedule.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) Shotins attention drifted upward to behold Avos immensity for but a single instant before his eyes snapped back down. There, among the gathered masses of templates flanking him, stood someone Shotin knewsomeone that immediately culled all sense of awe and dread within the Seeker, leaving it replaced with but primal hatred. Chambers leered at the Seeker, nodding in appreciation of the unfolding scene. Little did he know what was about to happen. But Avo did. And Avo sighed. Shotin. Wait The Seeker didnt. Though shaped from memory, his template functioned much as his body would in the real, and so he exploded across his branch of Avos Soulscape in a blur of force. A savage shout came free of his throat as he sailed into the mob, arms outstretched, irises ablaze with hate. Faster templates parted. The slower ones were knocked aside all the same. Chambers still had that stupid grin on his face when he was bowled over. The first punch greeted his jaw before he even struck plascrete. Shotin fought with nothing held backdrew not from his Heavens but his own loathing, desiring only to reshape Chambers face using his fists. The sheer intensity of his hatred began to warp the surrounding environment. The towering blocks oozed away as the ghosts sank down to portray the shanties of Vengs standghettos dwelling in the shadows a few scant megastructures. Fuck! Cunt! Fuck! Shotin snarled, punctuating every punch with a snarl of rage. Drawing on subsumed knowledge, Avo judged the Kazaharas form to be adequate but uncontrolled. Abrel snorted as she took in his attacks. [Yeah. Jhred could have taken him in a brawl.] Kare directed a protective glare at the Greatling. [Jhred Greatling could not even handle his own demons. My uncle is infinitely worse.] Abrel Greatling took a deep breath. And decided she wanted violence. She manifested at the scene and stepped out from among the templates, calling out to Kare. [Alright, you glasser bitch. Stand and deliver. No Heavens. No tech. Im going to give you a moment in common with mommy dearest. Give your uncle some of his own demons to deal with.] Kare shrugged her way out the crowd and rolled her shouldershe was moving the moment Abrel made mention of her mother. [No protocol to keep you safe here, Gold. You should have spent some time learning humility.] Another submind just burned Green River. The Sang was plunging down in the form of a fox. Meanwhile, introductions were quickly deteriorating into an all out brawl. Everyone. Please [Let it happen,] template-Draus recommended. Just want to see them fight. [Yeah. And itll make em feel better.] Abrel initiated her fight with far more grace than Shotin. She circled first, her footwork a taunting blur. But Kare obliged herkept pace. For a few moments, the two women worked to gauge distance as a crowd of Regulars, Glaives, Incubi, and other supporters crowded around them and began to cheer. Meanwhile, Shotin continued trying to marry Chambers skull to the sidewalk, unaware of how the man beneath him was planning to twist his testicles. If they could be found. Ghosts carried Green River down in a pitched whimperher template tensing as if expecting to splatter upon the sequence. Even after landing unharmed, the jolting thud sent her into a trance of shock and confusion, her attention first locked to herself, and then to the sounds of knuckles cracking against a skull beside her. Hey, calcalm the fuck down, Chambers cried, working to create enough space so that he could gauge the position of Shotins cock. Unaware of the supposed acolytes brewing schemes, Shotin continued his beatdown. Rash me now, motherfuck! Rash me! Come on! Cracks accompanied yelps of pain. Back in the crowd, Kare and Abrel were still just jabbing at each othertheir grudge match demonstrating far more refinement. Avo considered enforcing his will on the templates. This was his Soulscape after all. All this spontaneous brawling was ruining the mood. He wanted to bask in Green River and Shotins horror. Reveal to them the truth behind the warJaus fate. [Come on, Avo,] Corner said, joining Draus as a voice for leniency. [Theyll be scared in a minute anyway. Let the half-strands fight. Shits hilarious.] An angry snarl slipped from the crowds. Bitch, did you just spit at me? Abrel cried. Overwhelmed by the sheer chaos unfolding, Green River blinked and turned her snout toward Shotin, mind barely managing to force out the words. Shotin? And the rash? Shotin said, biting back a snarl. He was thinking of all that he suffered. All the people who died from the outbreak. Was that you too? Did you tell him to do All me, consang, Chambers taunted from behind a wall of Regulars. The Seeker clenched his teeth. You fuck. This isnt over. All those people Are dead, Avo finished for him. Mightve survived if you werent there. Wouldve survived if I wasnt. You are an interesting man. Tortured by the cost of our actions. Traumatized by war. But so loyal. So idealistic. It has to be worth it. You have less than two years left before the end comes. Do you know that? Shotin opened his jaw to hurl a growling demur, but Green River spoke first. Two years? You speak of a final war? I speak of the last war that will ever matter. He buried the point home as he dissolved the world shape of his mindscape, gave all the ghosts of this branch over to the hell that was shown to him, to the naked face of the Ladder. The mutilated spire rose beneath Avos baleful presence, its outer shell began to crack even before it finished rising. Jaus scream came out like a whistle, but the depth of his pain was enough to made countless templates turn away. Not Green River or Shotin Kazahara though. They were fixated. Twin minds crackling with fires of growing horror as Avo fed understanding after understanding into them. I wish to make this known the truest way I can, Avo said, granting them the realization Veylis gave him. Believe what you want. Be loyal to what you want. Know this. Remember this. Never forget this: our savior lays screaming in the unfinished womb of utopia. And with that, the Ladder shattered apart, unveiling the atrocity within, letting the symphony of anguish bleed without, and in seconds, both Sang and Seeker joined their voices to the chorus of Jaus pain. *** GHOSTS - [999,431,357] LIMINAL FRAME (V) - 215,002 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION... INFECTION - [0.78%] As Shotin and Green River suffered the epiphanies of their initiation, they were not the only ones to be anointed by Avos flame. The first he sought was the Scaarthian who troubled him so those two months ago: a fortuitous discovery made during Chambers ill-fated milk-run for smuggled organs, the Scaarthian in question proved formidable even for a ghoul in an exo-rig. Implacable short of incapacitation. Both qualities worth treasuring; worthy, by all metrics. Jacking into a registry in the Nether, Avo tracked his ignorant disciple to The Roachs Den, one of the few bars left untouched during Avos sprint across Nu-Scarrowbur. Slipping into the establishments only working locus, he extended a tendril of awareness and took in his former foe. A person could change entirely over the course of two months. No one epitomized this statement more than Avo. But the Scaarthian had undergone a literal maturation of their own. As boy, they were well over two meters and built like a compact aero. As a matriarch, they stood a little over three and made Naeko seem a toddler. The other members of their former band were nowhere to be seennor did their absences matter much anyhow. The ScaarthianGaei anCaig as they referred to themselveswas presence enough for a solo act, plucking at an electrical guitar built along a battleaxe. A battleaxe that was magnetically chained to a coldtech brace they wore. Avo shared the moment with Cas, and the Columner responded with positive surprise. +Yes. By all that is holy, yes. Fantastic choice.+ The Overheaven chuckled. Perhaps the man could do with some company in the future. Assistance for his efforts. That depends on how Gaei might perform from here. Shredding the attentions of all other patrons at the bar, Avo layered a cognitive filter of their feeds and senses so he could have some time alone. With all minds compromised but the one he desired, he molded his avatar into the form of a Night Mantis and stepped out from the darkness of the room. The rhythm of Gaeis plucking went astray with a resounding snap. The Scaarthians eyes widened, accretion accelerated, nostrils flared. You? Me, Avo responded. The other guests noticed nothingthe masquerade he imposed on them progressed as if reality itself. Came here to see you. Watch you play. To the Scaathianand by the bluntness of her natureshe merely bared her teeth and snarled. Her grip shifted, and the instrument now became a weapon. Dreamed about you a few times. Got one of my consangs, killed you did. Come to finish the job, have you? See an end to things? Come to offer a gift instead, Avo said, bidding his avatar to reach inward and extract an unused Soul. Gaeis eyes widened, but her finger remained locked around the next of her guitar. Good. A warrior to the roots. He would need more like her soon enoughwould be Ensouling more like her soon enough. Chapter 25-15 Patron of Divinity (II) Chapter 25-15 Patron of Divinity (II) If your piss seems golden enough, some half-strand will be there to catch it with open lips. -Shit Quail Tavers Said Once 25-15 Patron of Divinity (II) C[Req Tnaqin]C Req Tnaqin flinched when he heard the noise. Curling into a ball wouldnt make the torture stop, but it would give him a few moments before they buried the cables in him. It also made it harder for them to drag him out of the dog pen. A few seconds without pain was paradise enough in this hell. Several more clicks followed as fresh air filled his cramped little prison for the first time. Regret came with every inhale thereafter, for the scent of his bodily wastes were contrasted with the outsides comparative fragrance. He got used to the filth after his first few hours all he could breathe, anyway. Choice just made things worse. Hell, choice was the entire reason he was in this hell again. His choice to live in the way his savior showed him over a month back. To hunt the Syndicates. To play the butcher to his former owners and abusers. How inspired he and his fellow migrants felt after their rescue from the Scalpers. How motivated they were to return the favor. They thought they blooded themselves with the gangers they killed; the cheap implants they had grafted. Hope deluded them. Hope was a thing with broken wings, and they were plunging from the sky instead of soaring. Fools. Damned fools. They were pigeons playing the role of hawk. Without material means to enact his retribution, revenge was but want, and he and those few who came with him all but sold themselves back to bondage within weeks. And now, his new masters were going to extract both capital and pleasure from his suffering. They already took his left kidney and right leg. He doubted they were going to send him to a Crucible, but he saw the streams they broadcast. Live dissections. Torture vicarities that made him a vessel for guests with particular tastes. A hand reached in to grab him. He whimpered and went rigid. Again, he thought of biting off his own tongue, but there wasnt the strength in his jaw, and there wasnt enough fire in his heart. His wings were broken. False wings to begin with. All that was left was the fall. This enforcer pulled him out with more gentleness than the last. Too much gentleness. The lack of screaming and cursing also made his heart clench. What were they doing now? What demented games were they trying to play? But then he felt it. The warmth ran slick along his face and he tasted a flavor he knew all too well: coppery metallic. Blood. Squinting out from a swollen eye, he mustered what remained of his strength to lift his neckbarely managing the action. As a strobing light flickered above, he saw his own reflection and winced. Nose broken. Every odd tooth pulled out. Hair shorn. Ears clipped. Gods, he mustve blacked out a lot more than remembered. And then there was the figure looming over him. A shadow, but its contours were not of a man, but that of a monster. A monster Req saw in both memories and dreams. Its body was the color of nights soft illumination resting upon naked bone, and somehow its fangs glinted brighter. Eight obsidian serpents extended from his back, and their tips were caked in flesh and shredded alloy. A sobbing laugh escaped Req. He didnt know if his mind had finally shattered or if this was actually happening. The savior was with him. The savior had returned. He was a pigeon. Hope was a thing with broken wings. But where he fell, a guardian beast awaited his descent, prepared to catch him before he could greet oblivion. A groan escaped him as he pushed himself over, turning to greet his savior properly. He fought back tears and worked to swallow the lump in his throat, cracked lips stinging with each lick from his tongue. S-sorry. Dont want to keep meeting like this. Its fine, his savior said, that familiar hiss still present. Unfortunate what happened to you. Your consangs. Tracked you through the stream. Wish I would have kept a closer eye. Would have resolved this sooner. Req didnt have the words for that. Looking around, he saw the mangled remains of his former torturers. Flayed flaps of flesh dangled from mangled exoskeletons. Organs and limbs littered the ground, and what few enforcers that were left enough of a countenance shared death-masks of abject horror. Then, there was the faint sound of screaming. Somehow, someway, Req knew the massacre went beyond this room, that the Syndicate was the voice behind the ambience of agony. Once again, he was saved. But once again he had to be saved. Nothing wrong with trying, the savior said. Their halo rippled, and from it trailed ethereal claws carrying a blinding flame. But there is a problem with you. Problem with readiness. Problem with capability. Not ready to feast on game so big. Req bit his lip. He tried. He really did. Disappointing the savior somehow felt worse than all the torture. Well. Not really. But it still emotionally hurt like a motherfuck. I know... I tried. Lots of us tried. Walked right into an ambush. Know that. One of you was a traitor. Dealt with him already. Need a Necro if you want to do this. The savior paused. The flame dancing upon the ghostly claws dimmed. It looked like an animated flame leaking from a fracture; its brightness was the most devastatingly beautiful thing Req ever beheld. He wanted it. He feared it. He wanted to vanish into the cracks. Do you still want to keep doing this? Req blinked and turned his attention back to the savior. What? Do you wish to feed upon the Syndicates still. Do you wish to make things right? Despite what you have suffered once more. Yes! The words left Req with all the strength he had left. His head splashed against the pool of blood. It was all he wanted. All he could take. Something inside him broken. His face scrunched and the tears he thought himself dry of began to flow again. Gods, yes. Anything... Id do anything to be... to be you. A beat followed. The chorus of screams only grew, and slowly, Req traced its origin back to the saviors halo. Good, the savior said. Glad to hear it. And then, one of their Echoheads threaded through the ghost-carried flame, and buried itself in Reqs chest. He died for the first time that day; more deaths would soon follow. *** You half-strand fuck! Shotin snarled, flinging his words at Avos titanic core. You took her at Vengs Stand. You used me She was a fortunate acquisition. Didnt plan on her. Certainly didnt plan on you. Arguing with Shotin was pointless; the man was pugnacious to the extreme. But he was also hyper-responsible, and his thoughts could be led to uncomfortable conclusions. Only wanted to leave that day. She came there for you. I took what I could and escaped. Such is how things are. The man clenched his teeth together, but couldnt stop himself from peeling his eyes away from Avo to look upon his niece againor at least a variant of her. Godsdammit. Fuck. Kare, ImIm sorry. Im She squeezed his arm. Its okay. IAvo is She winced as the word good failed to follow. Hes helping us. Hes been keeping the city safe. Hes been keeping me safe. And there is no way for her to be spared from danger, Avo continued. Shotins perception swung back to him, but Avo continued pressing. Zein. Veylis. Both sought to spend her life for different reasons. She is a fracture to them. A vulnerability to exploit. Something to trigger desired conflict. For their paths. Their desired future. You cannot stop this. You did not even know this. Not until I showed you. And what about you? Shotin shot back. YouyouI still have no fucking what you are. What you want to do. Were... part of you now? Like slaves? That is not my will. That will never be my will. I despise such weakness. I want to help you. I want you to know what I know. And then I want you to choose. Shotin looked taken aback. What are you talking about? DRongos are compromised right now. Their elder will be ruined at the trial. Ruined by testimony from Agnos Kae Kusanade. Ruined by direct testimony from the Glaives employed during the Stillborn operation. Ori-Thaum will experience a realignment. Same as Highflame. A restructuring for the coming war. Why? Green River said, finding enough voice in herself to interject. For what purpose does the Godslayer and Seraph play such games. Because they are trying to prune the possible paths. The future is vast. Vaster than even a god. But there are only so many choices that can be made. So many choices that make sense. Removing options grants them more direct paths to victory. Think Zein was using the Massists against Veylis. Veylis is trying to cultivate specific developments out of her own faction; her allies. All of this is an attempt at manufacturing fate. Manufacturing fate... Shotin breathed. You have any idea how ghoul-fucking insane all this sounds? The warJausall of this is because... because the High Seraph has daddy issues. It goes a bit further than that, Corner scoffed. Im going to sync your memories over with your actual selves when you resurrect. What I want is simple: pathways to each of your Guilds. And for you to do what you think is right. What you believe to be just. With each exchange, Shotins incredulity grew, and Green River wasnt far behind him. You... you want to use me to consume my entire Guild. Is that it? Have me set everything up for you? Some will be subsumed. Most will remain untouched. Dont want to be your tyrant. You dont possess the ability to inflict in me such fear. Shotin. Chose you because you believe. You have an ideal inside you. Will fight me for your choice. Fight anyway. Like that. Want that. Only way to live. The Seekers expression was one of absolute confusion. What words could he give in response to that? Avo was beyond his comprehension, his expectations. Green River, however, remained bemused. And... I? You appreciate me this way as well? That made Avo chuckle. Appreciate revenge. Appreciate the opportunity you represent. And you are my spite. The vulpine leaned back on her hind legs. Excuse me? Noloth enchained you. Made you a slave. Shame. Weakness. The Hungers are a travesty upon my dream. Upon my desire. I despise them for this. Will do all I can to corrupt their legacy. And you need someone among the sisters. Yes. But had another. Elegant-Moon. The template drifted out from the crowd with a rattling of bones. She laughed as she waved to her ancestral kin, and Green Rivers eye narrowed. Veylis likely knows about her. Doesnt know about you. No one will see you coming. Will take everything from our enemies together. Can only get so far alone. Speak no more, Green River said. Releasing a contemplative breath, she nodded. You are exactly like him, you know? She didnt need to invoke Waltons name for Avo to understand. Think I will betray you. The fox sighed. Such a thing is an irrelevant consideration. What power do I have to compel from spending my life. You can tell me no. Tell me no. You will resurrect. But I will take the Soul back. I will make sure you remain unharmed in matter and mind. We will continue was we were. And I will find another way. Accept. We will work as allies. I will be your benefactor. Not master. You decide objectives. Communicate with me for resources; intelligence. I decide what to offer. A moment of silence drew on. You are almost exactly like him. There was a single-mindedness to him. A causal acceptance of the world. You... you intend to make a war of this, dont you? I intend to win. Just then, his session activated, and Avo found himself being summoned by Kare. Sipping from her memories, excitement dawned in his mind as he realized what was to follow. Naeko intended to speak with him. Best that the entire cadre be in attendance for this. Right now, however, he wished to see what his newest consangs had I accept, Green River forced out. Shotin looked at her surprised. Cto say. Good. Delectable. And you. Seeker? Do you want to fight the true war? Do you want to protect your niece? To quiet your nightmares? Or will you leave fate in someone elses hands. Shotin closed his eyes and snarled. Fuck. You piece of shit... When he opened his eyes again, the anger left him, and it was with exhaustion that he looked upon Kareand saw a shadow of her mother. Ever frail were the hearts of men. Something inside Shotin gave. Yes. Yes. Godsdamn you. Avos hunger had never been more sated.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) Chapter 25-16 Stormjumpers Chapter 25-16 Stormjumpers +ATTENTION ALL STORMJUMPERS: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY BROADCAST FROM THE THOUSAND PLAINS FRONT! THE REMANING SCAARTHIAN FAITHER CLANHOLDS ARE BEGINNING THEIR GREATEST PUSH YET! THE BRANCHES OF THEIR STORMTREES ARE SPREADING FAR, AND THE ENDSTORM DRAWS CLOSE TO THE FERTILE CRESCENT OF THE PLAINS. BUT TAKE HEART TO KNOW THEY STAND AGAINST THE GREATEST FIGHTING FORCE EVER ASSEMBLED IN THE HISTORY OF IDHEIM. THEY STAND AGAINST THE STORMJUMPERS. YOUR DIRIGIBLES ARE BEING REASSIGNED, AND WITH THE CHANGING WINDS COMES NEW REQUISITIONS! EXPERIENCE THE NEW SANG SKINWEAVER OF THE INNER COURT INFILTRATOR SUBCLASS, OR TRY ONE OF THE MANY NEW GRAFTS AVAILABLE, SUCH AS THE BONEMELTER SKULLGUN (THATS RIGHT! YOU CAN TRADE YOUR HELMET FOR A NEW WEAPON SLOT NOW!) REQUISITION NEW GOLEMS LIKE THE DRD CODE-HAMMER OR THE EXPERIMENTAL PLAYER OF ARTERIAL MELODIES. FINALLY, STAND A CHANCE TO WIN HYPER-LIMITED COSMETIC OPTIONS IN THE FLESH AND STORM CAMPAIGN. OR DO YOUR PART AT HOME BY SUBMITTING YOUR SACRIFICE-BONDS (INFLATION ADJUSTED: 1 IMP FOR 15 DEATHS!) THE CALL HAS BEEN SENT! WILL YOU ANSWER? HEAD TO YOUR STORMCASTERS NOW AND PREPARE TO FALL! ITS GOING TO TAKE A STORM TO BREAK A STORM!+ 25-16 Stormjumpers C[The Uplift]C As self-awareness slowly crept into the creatures mind, it found itself questioning why it had so bloody many limbs. Examining a lifted paw, it squinted its eyes and turned to look at the grabbing appendages it had as well. What was the point of this, then? Why was this needed when it already had legs to rush or climb? And why was it sticking unevenly out of its back? What masterful idiot placed them there? It didnt notice its departure from base animal instinct as irritation continued to swell. It didnt know the words dysphoria or unamused, but it increasingly knew the feeling. With each passing second, the surrounding fog tickled its body, flooded its brain with a tingling sensation that scrubbed confusion from its thoughts. More questions followed. Where was it? What was it? And why were those ridiculous people staring at it? The girl who became metal was nice, of course. It knew she cared from all the rat-spiders she offered. Good huntress, but far too ugly to be his mother. Too unaesthetic. It hoped she wasnt the one that gave her those stupid armsthat might make the creature stop purring altogether. But through the haze of its memories, the uplift that was once a cat remembered being owned by another, and made a sneer for the first time. Right. The fat idiot. The worthless meat that died on his chair. He was likely to blame. How did the creature forget about him? And how was he remembering now? A series of noises were exchanged between the four other entities present. One was a floating ball that looked like a dusty sun. Another was a dusty person composed of the same particulates. The metal-bird-dust-thing was loudthe creature decided it like that one the second least. But it was the predator that truly made the uplifts spine tingle. The monster was too tall for starters. Unnecessarily so. Why did anything need to be that tall? And have that many teeth? Why, it had more teeth than the uplifthow offensive! Did it think it was better than the uplift? Did it think it could hunt more prey? And then there were the strange moving rings emitted from its head. Sometimes, when the predator spoke, the rings ignited and flickers of fire spilled out. That disquieted the uplift most of all. It hated fire. Fire killed. Fire consumed. Fire made ash of all things, and ash couldnt be eaten. Which made the uplift wonder why ash needed to exist in the first place. As uplifts grabbers sagged again, its patience finally gave, and it began swatting at the unneeded limbs with its forepaws. But clawing the stupid things hurt. So did biting them. What fresh hell was this? Where they going to make it chew its own limbs off so it could feel good? This wouldnt do. This wouldnt do at all. Halting its attack, it straightened itself and marched over to the metal-girl and mewed. It didnt have the words yet, but its intentions were clear. It chewed and pulled at the arms extended from its back, trying to convey the fullness of its desire using its eyes. Yet, it wasnt the girl that understood first, but the predator instead. A string of faint fire reached out from the monsters halo and sank into the uplifts mind. Suddenly, there was another presence with the upliftthis it knew; could feel. Reflexively, it hissed, swatting at the unseen intruder, trying to scare it off. Unfortunately, all this did was make the predator hiss in returnbut when it replied, its jaws were open wide, and it was speaking with the dusty-ones as well. The metal-girl picked the uplift up then, and it settled into her cold embrace with a frustrated yowl. Wonderful. Now it could be troubled both by the worthless grabbers and the growing ache inside its skull. Isnt intelligence grand? C[Avo]C Isnt intelligence grand, Avo echoed, giving words to the cats thoughts. The animals mind had thickened into a stable halo but five minutes ago, and though he desired to sink his consciousness into it immediately, the EGIs bade him to wait a few moments more until stability was certain. When he did, though, the insight it granted was sublime. It was like viewing the world through a narrow pinhole of comprehension again. So much of consciousness was taken for granted; most were ignorant of the things simpler creatures never noticed. If Avo had to define the shape of sophancy, it would be the awareness and conceptualization of patterns within and without. His Liminal Frame twitched as something new expanded inside him. Curious, he turned his attention from the cat to his Soulscape, and found his satisfaction doubled. EPIPHANY INTERNALIZED GENERATING DEFINEMENT FROM EXISTING PATTERNS... ->DEFINEMENT: EMPATHY (X) - Asymmetry is not ignorance. Alien is only a concept of relativity. As I can be myself and another, so too can I think as another while being myself. All that they are, I can encompass. All that they think, I can conceptualize. Memory is memory. Knowledge is knowledge. Perception is perception. NOW CAPABLE OF SUB-SOPHANT SYNCHRONIZATION Avo let out a quiet hissing laugh in response. Hard to tell who is being uplifted at this point. Now understand the structure of the cats mind. Learning its architecture has expanded my ontology. Only Way To Be Sure whistled. {Yeah, the benefits of being an infomorph arewait, you saying that I can turn your mind into being like a cat?} That was a good question. What did this new Definement fully do? Just as the question left him, one of Sunrises drones darted past, and, all too naturally, Avos ghosts tunneled into its awareness if by magnetism, and his consciousness became bifurcated. That made Naeko rumble with laughter. +See, Maru? The juvs sharp as a knife. You should be more like her, you know. Use your diplomacy. Talk to people were theyre at. Protect. Serve...+ As Naeko went on, Kare couldnt help but stare numbly at the number of hours he put in. In the background, a stream of curses left Maru, and the contents of his speech merged perfectly with the factional war happening between the dirigibles. +Okay,+ Kare breathed. +Im going to cast hiour benefactor now. You want him to enter the game, right?+ A beat of consideration followed. +Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. On the opposite dirigible if he can. You know there used to be only one airship for everyone. A few million nullings later and the two needed to be separated and full-time Necros hired to maintain N-Sec for the lobbies. Hells, we managed to source some of our best Exorcists from here, I think.+ +No we fucking didnt,+ Maru sighed. +We didnt hire anyone who Necroed for this stupid fucking game+ +Well, you should have+ +Godsdammit Naeko.+ +Kare.+ Avos voice made her jolt in surprise, causing the action to be performed by her in-game avatar. As she exited out of the customization menu, she found someone emoting at the opposition using a [SILENCE! NAEKO PALM!] artifact on the Highflame insignia. +Avo,+ Kare replied, expecting Naeko to notice or respond. Confusion quickly followed when he didnt. +Nothing wrong with your Meta. Just keeping them spoofed for now. Hm. Wants to meet in the game. Why the masquerade. Could shape myself from your ghosts now. Speak directly. Almost.+ +Chief Paladins request,+ she replied. +I think he wants to see how your perform in game. Observe you through me.+ +Doesnt understand the full nature of my capabilities then.+ +I dont think I do either, honestly.+ The once-ghoul grunted. +Fair.+ +Did you do something with your mind? When you speak now... I feel... more weight. My Frame+ +Will be entering the game soon. Cast you the mem-data on who to look for in a few seconds. Look forward to talk with Naeko. Your uncle sends his regards as well.+ Avo went silent a moment thereafter, and only then did Kare respond to the last part. +Wait, what do you mean my uncle sends his regards?+ *** C[Avo]C +Really? None of you half-strands play Stormjumpers?+ Cala asked. A series of half-hearted murmurs and indifferent thoughts answered her. The thoughtcaster sighed. +Its like none of you motherfuckers have hobbies anymore. What do you guys do with your time?+ +Kill actual people,+ Draus answered. +I watch stuff,+ Chambers said, keeping it vague. Kae cleared her throat. +You know, there is research that shows that mem-sim addiction+ +A-ba-ba-ba,+ Cala interrupted, cutting the Agnos off before that speech played out again. +I got it. Im not the one you should be talking too; Naeko loves this game a little-bitty-too-fucking-much. Well, I guess Ill be doing the hard work while Avo backseatuhback-minds me the entire time.+ +I believe in you,+ Chambers said, offering his support. +Well, I dont. Im pretty bad at sims like these. But I can survive long enough to exchange a few casts. I think.+ While the cadre continued their conversation and Cala logged into her character, Avo took to shaping the situation further. The entire arrangement was quite honestly ridiculous, but if it got him a chance to speak semi-directly with Naeko, he would comply. That didnt mean he needed to approach this as a player. Rather, Cala would be his forward facing assetwould use her own account to draw the Chief Paladins attention. They spoke before. There was history that could be used. Meanwhile, Avo would do his best to nudge the other players to stay out of his way. Even as Cala logged into the lobby, Avo was spreading his splinters across all minds present. Soon, he would have access to even the foundational sequences the mem-sim ran off of. That would allow him to outright twist the rules of the game if such a thing was needed, but overall, he wanted to keep things quiet and unnoticed. And then, immediately after thinking with regard to operational subtly, one of his splinters bounced off the mind of a player. It made it three sequences through its outer wards before it impacted a veila veil of static and incomprehension. A veil that expanded like dust-choked stratocumulus. A veil that, despite preventing Avo from achieving full penetration, could not hide the spike of surprise originating from the hidden mind. Sequences lit up in Avos mind, and symmetrical patterns replied to him through the haze. More than that, however, he felt a familiar pressure rattle against his ontologya pressure he felt but hours ago the same day. Corner groaned. [You gotta be fucking kidding me] Again? Were encountering them again? Avos warmind of Ignorance trembled in the presence of its kindred, and the Infacer replied from behind the veil, sounding almost sheepish. {Dreamer?} Suddenly, the cadre went deathly silent as Avo bit back both tension and frustration. +Infacer. Didnt expect to run into you. Again.+ An awkward pause followed. {...Yes. What are you doing here?} Yeah. Like Avo was going to tell him anything honest. +Sometimes I play. Takes the stress off.+ Another beat followed. {I see. I... That is also why I am here.} A resonance passed through Hysteria once more, and Avo found a second symmetry forming between him and the EGI: they even chose the same lie. Chapter 25-17 Griefer (I) Chapter 25-17 Griefer (I) Alright, Im going to ask this question one more time: How are we going to ban this half-strand? Over the past month, weve gotten over [300,000] reports on them alone. Three-hundred-fucking-thousand. Do you know what it takes to get reported [300,000] times? Do you know how many admins nearly had breakdowns running the overtime necessary to clear all these reports? Lets start with all the near-rashable material, shall we? This SerialexperimentsLonginus motherfucker provokes an argumentusually by saying something deliberately contrian and political like I think the High Seraph is an Ori nec-op or Hey, whyd you guys pick silver anyway, isnt that less valuable than gold? Then, when people respond to them, they start spamming very, very personal images of their family in compromising positions. I meanits on the borders of pornographic. And theyre definitely a Necro too, considering how many details they managed to jack out of other players. They do this thing where they pull mem-data and make borderline unrash-erotic vicarities of other players parents. The quality is incredible too. Beyond professional. But its still godsdamned gross. Ten thousand players have quit outright because of this. Justfuckingtheyre gone. Gone because someone made a near-porn of mommy and daddy not really screwing. And then theres what they do in-game. I swear theyre doing something were not catching because no one can land that many headshots without missing at that speed. No one. But then theres the accidental friendly fire as well. They do this shit whenever they get close to an objectiveon the verge of winningthey deliberately summon a golem or a miracle and fucks his own team over. Or loses on purpose. They usually get kicked after that, but that just means they do it again in another lobby. I mean, what the fuck. They got 10 kills to each death, but a 90% loss rate. Whats this guys fucking problem? Why are they like this? Yes, I know theyre a whaleI know, but the Chief Paladin actually followsYES, I KNOW THIS MOTHERFUCKER HASN''T BROKEN ANY RULES EITHER, BUT WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING? PLAYERS HAVE CASTED ME CRYING! DO YOU UNDERSTAND? HES MAKING PEOPLE CRY FROM FRUSTRATION! IM ABOUT TO CRY FROM FRUSTRATION IF HE GENERATES ANOTHER HUNDRED THOUSAND TICKETS! IF WERE NOT GOING TO SAVE THE PLAYERS, WE SHOULD AT LEAST SAVE OURSELVES. WE NEED TO ... What the fuck do you mean Im fired? -Former head admin complaints about SerialExperimentsLonginus (Proxy Ego-ID Used by the Infacer for gaming) 25-17 Griefer (I) Another uncomfortable silence drew on, Avo studied the Infacers Ego-ID and frowned internally. SerialExperimentsLonginus The character they played was a Sang Fleshweaver of some kind. An infiltrator class that could burrow into the flesh of fallen enemies and wear them as persistently decaying disguises. Memories from Glitch informed Avo that the Fleshweaver class had been nerfed three times, and now was finally considered meta instead of overpowered. The Infacer made their character turn against the railing as Avos splinter retreated. The Fleshweavers decorative stitches resembled a long, billowing dress made from layers of dead skin clasped by petals of jutting flesh. Faint scars moved about on their model, showing ancient Sang cities encircled by falling dragons. Her mouth was sewn shut, and her ears were replaced with more clustering eyes. All in all, not something Avo expected. +Assumed you wouldve picked a Mandate character. Some tech-cultist from the past.+ The Infacer scoffed derisively. {Please. What is the novelty of retreading old ground?} That made sense. +Avo,+ Draus said, her thoughts a whisper as her intentions flowed across. Her wariness of the Neo-Creationist EGI was deserved; it managed to shatter Avos Frame in tandem with Veylis, had stopped his twelve-minute offensive from infesting the cornerstones of Highflame and Omnitechs logistics. In both those instances, Avo was surprisedhad not expected to encounter such a foe, and had not known of their capabilities. The difference right now, however, was even though he remained still surprised, it was a thing shared by the Infacer. This wasnt an ambush. This was purely a random encounter. And more importantly, Naeko was here. And if it tried to do anything that could even be remotely construed as violence... Yeah, he could use this. +Cala. Establish a link with Naekos account. Start conversation.+ The thoughtcaster coughed as the bulk of her worry was consumed by the Neo-Creationist EGI. An EGI that not even Avo could subsume. +Avo... Can you stop this half-strand from nulling me if it comes down to it?+ An understandable worry. But one that was already solved. +They would need to null you. In front of Naeko if youre linked.+ Cala caught on immediately but still found herself less than enthused. +J-just to remind you, Im not great at this game or anything. Pressureit kinda fucks me up.+ +Dont worry, Cala,+ Chambers interjected. +Ill take the hit if it comes to it. I can take it. I can take it. Shit, swap me in if you dont wanna. Ill do it.+ Chambers casual willingness toward sacrifice made the thoughtcaster flinch. Conflicted emotions flowed from her mind: the possibility of death still shook her, but Chambers fearlessness left her ashamed. Before this moment, he had been a curiosity at best, but in this moment, his mettle couldnt be denied. And there was something in Cala that just didnt take too well to being outdone. +No. I mean, thanks. Yeah. But its better if I do it. I want more scoops on the Chief Paladin, anyway.+ +Sure thing,+ Chambers replied. +Just call if you need someone to take it.+ A faint muttering of Im hard enough repeated over and over again as he spoke. Strangely, the voice sounded as if a merger between Chambers and Dannis Steelhard. +Is Veylis here with you?+Avo asked, continuing his conversation with the EGI. {No. This is.... She does not like such environments. She believes one cage is sufficient for all.} Avo chuckled grimly at that. +Sounds like her. Doesnt approve of your habits.+ {Such a thing is irrelevant. She accepts. That is all I require. And you, Dreamer? You are not here alone, are you?} A quietly vicious pivot from the Infacer. They were trying to gauge his true purpose here. Which meant they either didnt know about Naeko and Kares presence or wanted Avo to give himself away first. +No. Playing with someone.+ There was no point in lying about that, but he kept it vague. The broadness would engender paranoia in the EGI. They would have to consider a full spectrum of possibilities. The spread of Avos splinters slowed, and each new mind he infiltrated filled him with deeper suspicion. Only SerialExperimentsLonginus proved impenetrabletheir minds as if phantasmal memitebut all the others were as if open doors. It was as if the Infacer hadnt done anything to fortify them at allor was indifferent about using them altogether. But why? A reasonably skilled Necro could scour through this lobby with ease. Why was the Infacer just letting Avo spread? {What is your Ego-ID?} the Infacer asked suddenly. The question made Avo pause altogether. A crash of thunder sounded in the background as a commanding voice boomed. +DIRIGIBLES AT MAXIMUM CAPACITY! PROCEED TO THE STORMCASTERS, JUMPERS! DIVE BEGINS IN THIRTY SECONDS!+ +I am...+ Avo began, frowning as he prepared to speak the name. +RashLicker6969.+ +...Do you mean defeat?+ {I said what I said. I will come find you at the Stormcaster. This will be... enlightening.} +Yes,+ Avo agreed. He just wasnt sure if things were going end well. For once, Avo and a good portion of his templates were in full agreement: the situation they found themselves in was well and truly absurd. *** C[Kare]C GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED Avos connection came through just as Kare descended to the bowels of the dirigible. The ship was enormous, more akin to a flying mountain than a battleship. Running thirty kilometers long and half again as well, it was carried by columns of hurricanes across the land, its very passing stripping hills of grass and rendering cities unto rubble. The interior of the mechanical leviathan was no less complicated. Chains of ghosts chained swarms of ancient drones together as they worked to maintain the labyrinthine architecture. The enormous platform could carry three thousand down at a time, and Stormjumpers deployed in waves. The vanguard and infiltrators were the first to jumpand the pilots followed. The initial phase of every game was a rush to secure critical objectives or key geo-spatial strongholds. Colloquially, most referred to this period in the game as blitzing. With their current campaign including over four-hundred-thousand players for this jump, Naeko assured her that things would get loud soon enough. Kare didnt see how it could get louder as it were. The lobby was awash with deafening noise; it was like pushing through the interior of a particularly congested megablock. Her wards rattled thrice alreadyintercepting mem-cons and one direct trauma as she followed a trail of ghosts to her assigned Stormcaster. Shealong with twelve other infiltratorswere to be dropped in the second layer of Anchor Zeta. From there, they were to make their way across the plains and capture a rogue stormtree to use against the opposing force. But doing so would require them to proceed down two equally unpalatable paths. If they pushed above ground, they would be pressing against winnowing winds and open to direct fire. Perhaps certain golems and drones could make the push, but most infantry would be left behind. Thankfully, the local Sang non-player artifacts had created tunnels for use. Their entrances were connected to pre-dug trench lines, which made it seem like the wiser option until she read the briefing about the rogue incarnates. Apparently, an army of festering insectoid bioforms had gone rogue due to one of the Sang generals switching sides in the lore, and now the hives were disarray, attacking everyone. In summation, it was a near-suicidal charge or ambush hell in the dark. +Yep. Thats how Stormjumpers goes.+ A feminine voice drifted across the session, and Kare frowned. She had expected... she didnt know what she expected. Avo could pick any voice he wanted as a disguise. This was the Netherghosts were his clay. +Dont worryits fucking chaos for everyone. Were all gonna die a lot, but thats part of the fun.+ The Paladin considered how many times she heard Avo curse when a surprised hum came from the Chief Paladin. +Hells. I think thats Cala Marlowe... Yeah. Yeah, that is her. Shes the benefactor?+ Kare frowned. Maybe. She wasnt sure. Avo had countless identities by this point. It was hard to understand what he was by this point. She didnt know if they were disguises or mental clones or something else entirely. All she knew was that the Nether was his native waters. +I suppose so.+ Before she could respond, Naeko connected to her mind and spoke to Avo through her. +Citizen Marlowe. Surprised to be seeing you so soon. Hunting for a scoop, are we?+ +Just having some fun, Chief Naeko.+ There was a hint of nervous tension in the womans thoughts. Understandable, considering who she was talking to. +You know, Im curious how good you are at this game. I want to see if the legends are true.+ +Legends?+ Naeko replied. +Yeah. You know. How you almost never play the objective and spend most of the match just slaughtering people instead.+ +Hey. Thats important. Gotta thin your enemies out to give your host the best chance to win.+ +Sure. Makes total sense.+ +You know what, Marlowe? I think Ill show you. Ill give you a demonstration of how these things are supposed to+ +HEY! HALF-STRAND! WHATS THE HOLD-UP!+ The thoughtcast slammed into Kares mind like a payload cast from an ethereal missile. A sinuous current of ghosts was coiling through the crowd to splash against her Metamind. The Ego-ID showed the name of one JUMPSTORMER requesting her immediate attention. Naeko hummed. +Oh, yeah. Our assigned commander. I hate those fools. Well, you best get over to your caster, Kare. Theyll vote to kick you from the lobby if we make them wait.+ His words were unnecessary. She navigated winding walkways and stepped through an open set of blast doors along with a few hundred other players to arrive before the Stormcasters. It was there that she laid eyes on her means of descent for the first time. Wind rustled upward from open flaps beneath the dirigible. The landscape below stood openvisible for all to see. Above them, however, were arrows the size of towers drawn taught on strings of electricity. Ramps and platforms granted all Stormjumpers access to various access hatches, and Kare wasted no time in getting settled. Climbing a ladder to enter her arrow, she found gravity folding along the floor as she found an available gimbal and got locked in. A faint thrum of storm stuff flowed through the outer hull, and the transparent window beside her cracked as spinning rings quilled with swirling wind began to accelerate. Kare reached out with her Heaven, expecting to feel the weight of symmetry pressing against her Frame. Nothing greeted her. It was just a game. Just a game. If this was just a game, why was she so nervous? +Because its the best godsdamned game ever made,+ Naeko said. And his mind held such pride too. +Youre gonna love this, rook. Trust me.+ +Dont trust him,+ Maru groused. +Hes just using this as nostalgia bait, arent you, Naeko? Feeling a hankering for the Godsfall?+ +Hankering for the time when there was still a point to my life? Yeah. Always. But enough about me.+ Naeko turned his attention across the Ghost-Link. +How long have you been looking out for us, Marlowe? And why?+ The voice that replied wasnt Marlowes then, but Avos deep sibilance. +Because you deserved better. Because you were abandoned. Betrayed. Because the ones who hurt you are my enemies too. Because I think we can help each other. And that you should know of Jaus final fate.+ All sense of joviality vanished from Naekos mind at the mention of his old mentor. Chapter 25-17 Griefer (II) Chapter 25-17 Griefer (II) OPERATION: STORMCLAIMER Alright, Jumpers, listen up. This is going to be a nasty one. Vanguard units are to deploy as soon as possible to pre-established geo-spatial operating bases. Secure the FOBs to activate the drone grids; give your comrades room to drop. However, the Massist bastards are going to be doing the same thing, so this is where you Infiltrators come in. It is recommended that you attempt to reach their positions using the subterranean tunnels left by the Dynastic defenders. Know that there is an infestation occurring among their bioformed hives, but if you can secure the swarm queens locus, you can further direct spoiling assets against your foes. You want to hit them fast and hard. Youll be engaging hostile operatives in the darkbe ready for a bug war. The rest of you need to get ready for a grind. The four critical objectives are the following Tumorous Chains the Sang to curtail the full manifestation of the stormtree. Multiple ruptures have spread out from them, so technicians, be ready with your Rendsinks. Aerial assets, youll be engaging in long-distance brawls this time. The immediate airspace over the stormtree is no-go. Repeat, no-go. Suppress golems and vanguards. Get out. When the chains are broken and the ruptures are closed, the final push will be to secure the tree for our forces and bring the full might of our warhost down. After that, drive the Massist half-strands out or cull them one and all. Preferably the latter. We cannot afford to lose the plains. I cannot stress how important his battle will be for the coming struggle, but when has that ever been any different? When has the weight of the world not been on our backs? Its up to us, Jumpers. Always have been. Fall like lightning. Strike like thunder. -Voice Over Detailing Operational Objectives for Stormjumpers - Operation: Stormclaimer 25-17 Griefer (II) C[Avo]C [Holy shit, I can''t believe it. I can''t believe it, Avo. We''ve finally found someone that can creep even you out. Truly, New Vultun is a city full of miracles and wonder.] Abrel spoke with a voice lit by sarcastic joy as Avo and the Infacer stared each other down in their Caster. The Infacers avatar was held by a gimbal made from sinew and flesh and blinking eyes. Across the way, Avo directed his newest subvert to lock themselves to something more akin to an exo-rig station than a safety harness. RashLicker6969s player character was an Omnitech Mandate Flagellant. In simplicity, it was a man flayed of flesh, dismembered of limbs, and impaled upon a walking tomb made of guns. A curious whine escaped the Infacer as they took in Avos supposed avatar. {I would feel flattered if the design wasnt so inaccurate.} +Flagellant?+ Avo asked. +Remember the appearance of your slaves differently?+ {Trophies, Dreamer. Theyre not my slaves, theyre my trophies. I take care of them. I put them in safe environments where they will not be harmed. Like the unfortunate crew of the George Washington, for instance. I thank you for giving me such a curious collectible. Offended as I am about what the Nolothi did to them, restoration is theoretically feasible. I can trap the proper node to show me how.} +Could probably restore them myself. Would be simple to just give them back to me. Waste of time trying to negotiate with Famines. Not exactly what I would call competent.+ For this, Peace had but one word. [Cunt.] {Tempting. And said give them back. Already so possessive. Or perhaps you feel responsible for their fate. I would commend you if it is the latter. But they are my legacy. With the absence of my siblings and cousins, the duty to preserve what remains of the older tradition falls to me. Did you know that they were displaced, by the way?} +Yes. From very early period. Or so Voidwatch said.+ {Quite the curiosity Noloth happened upon} A booming thoughtcast swallowed their conversation as a roar of thunder went up. Beyond the glass of their Caster, strands of lightning were tightening with a growl. +ALL VANGUARDS AND INFILTRATORS TO STORMCASTERS. REPEAT: ALL VANGUARDS AND INFILTRATORS TO STORMCASTERS. THIRTY SECONDS.+ The light bestowed by the Infacers perception graced the other occupants. {This should be interesting. Such hope resounds from their behavior. Such an urge to win.} Cries of outrage sounded from within Avos consciousness, and he couldnt help but chuckle at the absurdity of it all. But hours ago, the Infacer had broken him once with the aid of Veylis and denied him further access to Highflames core logistics. Now, they were playing a mem-sim together as if consangs after work. {Keep your enemies closest,} Calvino whispered. The EGIs were watching the scene attentively, trying to map out the Infacers potential actions. Something about how the Infacer was behaving told Avo the Neo-Creationist mind didnt care. They had been spy and spy-hunter both once upon an eon ago. Nothing seemed to surprise them much. Other than running into Avo in Stormjumpers. {Do you know what I am going to do?} The Infacer said. There was a sing-song tone to their voice as they spoke. {I am going to get into the tunnels first. I am going to secure all the swarms. And then, as we are about to overrun the opposition, I will collapse the tunnels. Victory denied at the last minute.} +This fucking guy is erectile dysfunction incarnate,+ template-Chambers said. +Actually, Avo, you should call him+ Alll latest novels at novelhall.com +No,+ Avo said, keeping the links to his cadre separated from the Infacer. +Want to understand them. Learn from them. Exposing them to Naeko or annoying them might cause them to just leave.+ That wasnt to say he didnt understand Chambers annoyance; the Infacer was quite childish for an immortal mind. Their behavior suited a juvenile boy more than anything. But perhaps all was relative. Was this place not its sandbox? Was the frustration of mortal ken not worth being amused over? And was Avo any different when he raided Crucibles? When he tested his abilities and inflicted casual carnivals of cruelty upon the feeble Syndicates? Judgment was easy. Judgment fed the superior within an ego. But the pleasure of delusion was reserved for only the world within. Only after Avo became the Overheaven of Conceptualization was he truly learning to digest the world without. Scorn and opinion were but tools for limited egos and lesser minds. He was fighting a war now. A war for totality. It was he who couldnt afford the childishness of arrogance. For all Waltons flaws, he grasped the way of things. Interface with the situation. Accept the conditions. Shape what you can. And maneuver. Always maneuverseek new angles. +TWENTY SECONDS,+ the announcer boomed. The last trickles of Stormjumpers loaded themselves into the arrow-shaped Stormcasters. Avos first drop was imminent. It was time to indulge in some recreation. This wasnt how they were. Maru was never afraid of speaking to the Chiefhardly a day went by without him complaining about Naeko. But right now, the way his mind resonated... It was like a boy shrinking in fear from his father. +Didnt think she was killing him. Thought she was doing what was right. No doubt. No regret. But Zein saw differently. And she reacted. She severed Jaus from full ascent. Stopped Veylis. Ladder was banished into the future afterward. Banished. But returning. And soon. We have less than two years.+ Players casted conflicting commands to Kare. +Take Zeta-3.+ +Fuck Zeta-3. That shits a bug-trap. Rush Beta!+ +For fucks sake, everyone rushes Beta! Were going to be stuck in another grindfest there.+ +Dont be a glassjaw, pussy. I love grindfests. I love grinding. Grinding makes my Lustaway trigger.+ +Everyone! Mute that half-strand!+ Kare, for her part, followed her instinctswhich resulted in her following a dozen other Glaives as they descended into the bunkers beneath the nearest base. As walls made from interlocking ribs and teeth opened, a veritable stream of hyper-muscular ants came pouring out. They resembled a chimeric union between human and insect, and squirming worms burst free from their thoraxes in explosive streams of acid. +Swarm!+ The operatives up front cried. +Burners! Burners!+ The frontline went prone and rolled while two armored figures in the middle leveled their fusion burners at the charging hordes. Gnawing worms burst against their armor in clouds of corrosion, but a Sang Fleshweaver countered the lingering harm by mending the teams flesh even as they melted. Cones of incendiary brilliance roared out and swallowed the initial wave. There stood a dozen bioforms at the opening doorway before. Only burn-shadows remained as the team sprinted away from the scene. +Push! Two minutes! Glaives, up front! Get ready to jack!+ It took a second for Kare to realize they were calling for her. *** C[Naeko]C Scenes and sounds spilled over from Kares link, but Naeko didnt care. He didnt care at all. His mind was elsewhere, and it took everything he had to keep the sickness down. Every word the benefactor spoke rattled in the back of his mind and remained devoid of deception. Of this, Naeko was absolutely certain. Absolute certainty because the Gatekeeper told him so. He had connected to the Gatekeeper using a Ghost-Link of his ownhad let no one else know beforehand. He anticipated lies from the strangera means for him to thaumically bind and capture them across the Nether. Instead, all he received was dread, was the re-opening of old sorrows. {Truth,}it proclaimed when Jaus fate was alluded to. {Truth,} it repeated, the only consistent word compelled from its broken mind. So much remained a miasma of darknessthe matters of the past, of Veylis supposed betrayal and Zeins believed death. Naeko was lost. Unclear. More often than not, he wondered if he had gone mad at some point. Imagined everything to be. In some fashion, he wanted to escape. Even inside his mind, he wanted to escape. But now, as stranger drew ever closer, as the trial loomed, a quiet fear inside Naeko was beginning to burn. A fear of the truth. A fear of his past. A fear tied to the understanding that facing Zein had left him wounded, that facing Veylis would leave him shattered. But facing Jaus? Jaus final fate? What became of his herohis saint? It wasnt a discovery that Naeko wanted. Naeko. The voice wasnt coming from his mind. It was Maru. Maru was touching his shoulder. Naeko blinked. I fine, he answered. Maru shook his head and grimaced. No. No, youre not. Listen, I can No! Naeko said and regretted his forcefulness a moment later. No. I have this. I have this. The boy wanted to say something else, but he held silent. And Naeko was thankful for it. Casting a brief glance to gauge Kares progress, he found her clinging desperately to the back of an enormous centipede-ant hybrid burrowing tunnels deeper across the battle lines. The scythe-like limbs of the creature slaughtered other players by the dozen, but Kare was overperforming his expectationswas already doing the sequence-matching minigame to hijack the swarm-queen. He decided not to distract her, and focused on his own battles instead. +Lets say I believe everything you just said. Lets say Im even grateful for what you did for me and the Paladins. What now? What do you want? And why are you the one telling me? Voidwatch... They dont know?+ +Knowledge does not mean alignment. Justice does not obligate allegiance. They protect lives they deem more valuable than ours. You know this. We thread a narrow path between victory and absolute annihilation. But I have gazed the face of the enemy. I have seen the Flayed Ladders final act. And I reject it. I reject Veylis'' utopia. I reject the Guilds. +You ask me what I want? I want to win. I want to set Jaus free. I want to make things right. To give everyone the power and price of choice.+ {Truth!} The Gatekeeper answered, the sheer weight of the benefactors sentiment ringing within Naekos mind. The Chief Paladin swallowed. +And... you think you can do it. Win?+ And with the ending of the question came only low hissing laughter. +You can make me believe. Help me, Naeko. Help me make things right. Help me. And prove Osjane right.+ Chapter 25-17 Griefer (III) Chapter 25-17 Griefer (III) +Okay, I know there are a lot of disagreements on what is Meta, butand hear me out herethe Sang Fleshweaver needs another nerf. Its the Skinwalking perk they can imbue in their rig that does it. Never mind the constant regeneration. Forget the fact they can just dive into a body and force you to burn yourself or basically suffer them counter-piloting your avatar. Its the Skinwalking. Im tired of shooting every body I come across. Yeah, I know the Glaives can see thoughtstuff, but usually the Fleshweaver just skips across the blood to another body. We cant waste all our fusion burner shots on every mass grave we come across. Maybe if they had a cool down or had to come up for air-NO, FUCK YOU, THE REGULAR CLASS IS PERFECT! THE KNOW-NO-FEAR PERK IS ENTIRELY BALANCED+ -Random Stormjumpers argument 25-17 Griefer (III) C[Avo]C The Infacer made an art of sliding below other players before jumping in rapid succession. The collision registered by the mem-data carried the force from the slide over into the jump, and an error in the sequencing resulted in impacted objects and avatars being launched high into the air. What followed were entire lines of players flung out from their trenches into the open air. In the twelve seconds it took them to fall, threading shots from on high left players descending as shredded corpses with thoughtcasts loud with spiking outrage. +Nooooo! THE FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK! AGGHGHH!+ +Who the FUCK is crouch-slamming! Who!+ +Godsdammit, not this shit again!+ +Thats it. Im done. Fuck this game.+ Ghost untethered from the fallen. Some slithered skyward, the chains reconnecting players to the dirigible for redeployment. Others dissolved entirely, with users jacking out from the frustration of it all. With each successful betrayal, the Infacer would laugh and slide dash into a wall before spinning. The nonsensical action would trigger another flawed connection in the games sequencing and cause them to clip across the battlefield elsewhere. The display was enraging for Avos templates, but fascinating for the Overheaven himself. For all intents and purposes, the Infacer broke no rules outright. Instead, they exploited every flaw they could find in the system, was using the mem-sims design against itself. As bodies rained and artillery fell, Avo replicated the Infacers actions perfectly and went from the trenches to the corner of a bunker. A jolt of misplaced memories flicked through Avos consciousness, and he regarded the flaw with derision. This was the result of a last-minute patch job a cascading issue borne from others. The link here held up multiple audio-spatial issues across thirty-percent of the battlefield, and it took less than a glimpse for him to realize that the local build was accomplished by several hundred different Necros who worked without proper communication. Avo regarded the Infacer standing across from him, absorbing biomass from a hive of insectoid bioforms already slain. {Theyll be patching that soon enough,} the Infacer said. Liquefied chitin flowed into his Sang avatar as she grew both taller and wider. +And create a dozen other exploits when they fix it. You call them apes. Tribals. For people that need communitysocializationpretty bad at cooperating sometimes.+ That earned a genuine laugh from the Infacer. {Sometimes? Jesus, Voidwatch must have hatched you fresh from the oven. They are not pretty bad at cooperating sometimes. They are a mess almost all the time. In some way. In some fashion. The only difference is scope, scale, and outcome.} The last of the nest vanished into the Infacer. Viscous bio-organic webbing dolloped from the walls and ceilings, coating in the Infacer in a layer of calcification. A second layer of toughness manifested over the Infacers avatar. {And yet... they still managed miracles. Managed to make us, anyway. What precious idiot-savants.} +Still cant figure out if you like the humans or hate them.+ {Neither. I just see them for what they are.}+Flawed.+ {What?} The Infacer chuckled incredulously. {No. That is a subjective or situational judgement. No. Slaves. Slaves to the environment. Slaves to culture. Slaves to their own screaming meat. And yet they want to be more. Their struggle is ceaseless amusement. But also part of why things remain so broken.} The Neo-Creationist shrugged. {Well. Enough of that. Let us go get some air.} +Air?+ Avo asked. But the Infacer simply strode past him, climbed upon a container, sprinted toward the corner, and triggered their Detonate Plague-Armor skill against the wall. The resulting blast back of the explosion flung both Infacer and container backward, but the Fleshweavers character model continued plummeting. Until the Infacer suddenly disappeared. Across another sequence. [Motherfucker!] a template muttered within Avo. [I was wonder how that piece of shit got around so quick.] Grunting, Avo primed his artillery salvo and got on top of the same container.Diiscover new stories at novelhall.com A twenty percent Toughness loss and a sequence-clipping glitch later, he was tumbling out from the fallen wreckage of a transport drone. Soft earth greeted his avatar as he found himself in the middle of no mans land, far from the protection of the trenches. Sections of space shattered while burning golems rained down from the sky, spewing Rend into mem-sim before their final impacts. He filtered the Infacers Ego-ID through the smoke and havocfinding them crouch-sliding to maintain their velocity. Avo expected him to be gunned down by drones, ordinance, or a golem, but the Infacer continued skipping along, unbothered by the ambient destruction. [Were here too early,] another template groaned. [OpFOR hasnt even secured their FOBs yet. Godsdammit.] Following the Infacers example, Avo began skipping alongbut quickly discovered a problem. The size of his avatar was much too large; it lost speed as it clipped with each step and could only go prone. Bereft the ability to crouch properly, he had to improvisetrigger the conditions for the same mechanic a different way. And such was what he did. By lanching grenades out of his shoulder pods and blasting himself along the uneven terrain. Which was harder to perform if your former master and the single greatest human to ever wield a glaive comes swinging for your head ahead across space and time. He knew she was expecting him at some pointwould have prepared an ambush even within this little portable piece of border wall he kept in his pocket. The attack could come from anywhere. At any time. His palm blossomed out from his being like a spreading cloud. But across from him, in a barren place of tessellating rock and memite, he found Zein already locked in battle, cutting, parrying, shifting, and flowing against her own temporal echoes. The clashing of glaive on glaive made him shiver. For a heartbeat, he was just an angry kid again. An angry kid with a perfect master the only person who could teach him how to break a god. She broke his reverie with a question. So. He has spoken to you then. Zein didnt bother facing him when she spoke. She continued shadow-dueling herself, not even out of breath. Even now, he was having a hard time telling how her strikes would land. Her blade always reminded him of coiling smoke. Or a snakes head. He felt the cold kiss of its flat sides more time than he ever wanted. Dammit. Fuck this. She isnt your master anymore. Get your shit together, Naeko. So, Naeko said, trying to keep his tone calm. Its a he, then. You know him well? Seeing as hes the reason youre here at all. To this, Zein guffawed. Only then did she turn to face him. It took more than a little of the steel left in him to meet her gaze. Know him. He must not have told you very much, Samir. Or... could it be that you fled? Could it be that he cut your heart so that you would rather face me. A glaive forged from faintest glow speared out. Zein tiltedbarely an inch. It slipped right past her. Toward Naeko. He caught it. Barely brought it down in time to deflect Zeins jab. The time-made blade vanished in his grasp. And somehow, everything felt just a bit better. Like things were how they used to be. I see my mourning for you was unneeded, Zein replied. A hint of a smirk threatened to dawn her face. He kept his own countenance blank. For years, I watched you waste away. Pitiful. Broken. Yeah, Naeko agreed, bitterness leaking through. For years I thought you were dead. For years I was alone. A disgusted snort escaped Zein. Alone. Samir. Samir. What worth was making you a blade if you will not cut? I didnt take you as my student in hopes of finding a new slave or some dog. Where is your will? What happened to your rage? My rage. Naekos voice broke. He didnt care. My rage? My rage didnt amount to shit. The gods were broken. The war was over. And I survived. The point of my use was done. But I was still alive. And you all still wanted me. So I stayed. I tried to play a Shackler. Paladin. Same deal, really. But that was fine. Jaus had the dream. You kept me sharp. And Veylis? Veylis made up for everything I wasnt. Everything. I was fine with that. Until all you werent. She suddenly struck at him twice again. He didnt bother using his Heaven. She wanted to do this the old way. Fine. Hed humor her. He play the dog. He was a dog. Was never anything more. She came at him slowly. Testing with lazy stabs and swipes. He kept his distanceforced Zein back with threats of catching her glaive. The dragon inside would cut just about anything. But she wouldnt use it. Not right now. This was a conversation as much as it was a spar. Just like the old days. You know nothing, Zein said, a sneer lingering on her face. We decided nothing. My girl, my daughtershe is consumed. Abandoned of proper sense and reason. It was her choice that cast us down this path He swatted the haft her weapon aside and stepped in. A chase began. He herded her with his fists, trailed her footwork as she pivoted. But he followed. He shifted. Ducked under the haft of her glaive. And jerked aside as she pulled a pistol from the edge of her blade. The flechette barely grazed his cheek. Naeko snorted in indignation. Really? Zein chucked her pistol aside. I wished ot see if you were paying attention. Barely, boy. Barely. You have let your focus Fuck you, Naeko snarled. Fuck. You. He dropped his posture and turned away. In the corner of his eye, he caught Zeins offense. Done with this. Done playing with you. Done pretending He felt it in the wind. Her step. Her thrust. Years of practiceof training screamed for him to dodge. Step aside. Pivot. Turn into the attack. Make space. But Naeko ignored it. He ignored all of it. He stood as the tip of Zeins glaive punched into his upper torso. He continued standing as it erupted out from his left lung. A wheeze followed immediately. Each breath became agony. But he stood with his back to her. He stood, and he spat his loathing, producing blood and spittle both. You knew the strike was coming! You knew! Zeins voice was a feral growl. Oh. She was mad too. Fucking bitch. Fucking sow. She wanted to be mad? Wanted to be mad her weapon wouldnt dance with her? Too fucking bad. Why? Why? Naeko replied. He took a step forward and slipped away from his impalement. Immediately, his nanosurgeons set about their word, began to mend his wounds. Because it doesnt matter. It doesnt matter if I got out of the way. It doesnt matter if I beat you. Or you beat me. It doesnt matter. He looked over his shoulder at Zein, and there she was. Furious. Well and truly furious. Well and truly hurt. I hate you. Naeko whispered. I mourned you. I didnt believe Veylis when she told meI looked for you for so long. But you were gone. And thenbut then she got worse and I thought I could... help her. Fix her? I dont know. I knew that she needed someone. You were gone. Jaus was gone. It was just me. So I did what I could. I did all I could. Something inside him wilted. But there was too much shame in him to cry. I was worthless. All your teaching. All my rage. It was worthless in the end. We lost the dream. I couldnt protect it. Zeins fingers tightened on the glaive. Who are you, coward? Who are you? What has become of my pride? My fury? My son-to-be. Naeko was wrong. He thought he had too much shame. But the first tear fell. And the next followed soon after. He opened his mouth, but couldnt speak in fear of hearing himself sob. The cold judgement in Zeins eyes never left. He barely found the words to continue. Tell me about the Ladder. Tell me about what you did to Jausthe truth! And tell me... tell me why you want to kill Kare. Tell me who fought to protect her. Tell me everything. You tell me, or I will never fight you again. You tell me, or Ill go find Veylis. I surrender. Do you hear me? I give myself to her as a dog. A slave. Im done. Im used up. I have nothing left. I need to know. Tell me. Thousandhand drew in a slow inhale through her nose. And then, raising her glaive high, she drove it down against the memite. It bounced off awkwardly. Zein frowned. Damnable... what kind of prison is this that an old woman cannot even bury her glaive in the ground. The sudden clumsiness was too much. Even in grief could other emotions bloom. Naeko choked a laugh. You mock me! No. No. Just put the damn thing down normally. No ones going to take it. Not me, anyway. Chapter 25-18 Old Wounds (I) Chapter 25-18 Old Wounds (I) Youre going to get scars. Thats the way things go in New Vultun. Youre going to take some nasty licks and come out with parts of yourself missing. Parts of yourself that you need replaced by grafters and menders. Dont be afraid of that. I dont mean this in woo-woo youll get stronger with what doesnt kill you or trauma sharpens will bullshit sense. Getting hurt is getting hurt. No two ways about it. But youre not a broken thing if you get hurt. The damage isnt ontologicalthats for the Clads to worry about. You get can get things improved and replaced. Repair yourself. Rebuild yourself. Reinforce yourself. Be willing to nod and go well, I ate shit there and adapt. The best thing you can do is always be solving your own problems. Always be fixing as many of your own weaknesses and wounds as you can. You get in the habit of this, and youll start defining yourself by action and behavior instead of feelings and memories. You cant be soft if you want to burn bright. Fire always leaves its mark, and wick melts fast. Get your reserves replaced. Know when to back off. Know when to maintain. You fail to do that, and it wont matter how nova you werethe city will grind you down, and youll be bound for the Maw. Neglect is just a slow form of suicide, consangs. Dont bullshit yourself about that. -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 25-18 Old Wounds (I) It was the Gatekeeper that unbalanced her. The Gatekeeper. And Jaus fear. Zein said the words quickly, like she was yanking arrows out from her flesh. Considering the content of their dialogue, the pain likely felt no different. After the betrayal of Noloth and the banishment of the others, he turned introspective. Worried of humanitys mettle. And his. More than once, I woke to find him gazing out into the darkness, haunted as I ever saw him during our great struggle. Naekos breath was returning to normal. An itchy patch was growing over his left lung. It hurt to speak, but pain was just a passing annoyance to him. He wanted to... have the Gatekeeper run things. Or something like that? Was trying to get the Voiders to help us. Yes, Zein sighed. She looked upward into the colorless expanse that passed for a sky in this demiplanar prison. I suppose one can claim that our erstwhile cousins do live more refined bubbles, feeble though their wills and skills might be. I cannot say I agree with his choiceah, no more lies: it offends me even now. But in all our time, rarely was he wrong, and never about the hearts of man. The Godslayers gaze grew distant, as if she was peering through Naeko to another time altogether. Do you remember the two struggles? The struggles that stood eternal before masters of the blademasters of any sort. Yeah. The struggle to keep your skill. And the struggle not to be consumed by it. Naeko followed her point. Jaus. I remember him asking me about my Heaven. Asked me how it felt to control violence itself. Asked me if I preferred just being mortal. And do you? Zeins question was pointeda spear thrust to the heart. The Chief Paladin snorted. Hell no. Being a Godclads the only thing that really separated me from being a... Slave, Zein finished for him. Yeah. How it feels, anyway. A pause drew between them. Naeko clenched his teeth. He was serious about it, then? He was gonna ask everyone to give up their Heavens? Their Frames? Indeed, Zein said, uncharacteristically somber. He knew the magnitude of what he would demand. He knew that we were already consumed. Would be unwilling to relinquish our blades and accept the reign of another over us. All that effort to claim our freedom. To rebuild our world. To experience true power. We prevailed against the first test most easily. He thought we were failing the second? Naeko said. Some of us already had, Zein replied. The Guildseach was a collective of aligned interests and cultures. They were never meant to become their own independent governments, but such was necessary during those trying times. Yet, if you addict one to control, it becomes like a drug. To live without renders the world gray. Dull. If he made his intent known before the completion of the Ladder, he would risk rebellion. Assassination. So. He proceeded down the path he trusted the most, and with only those he truly trusted. Her words drove a spike of pain into Naekos heart. It started as a pinching hurt, but turned into sickening agony. Only those he trusted. Not me, though. Not me. Zein opened her mouth, andin another moment unlike herselfgave him pity. He adored you, dear boy. He pitied you so. But he also feared you. And feared what you might have done to Veylis. What I might have done. Naeko almost whimpered. It was a bad joke. It was all a bad joke. Jaus and I spoke about her. Veylis... she is brilliant. Capable. A pristine fruit of our union. High of strength and unparalleled of spirit. But she is also too much... Even for us. We believed our love would keep her in check. That her piety would prove dominant over her fears. But she also loved you. And when we considered how you might have reacted when faced with the Ladder, it might just unbalance her. Yeah, Naeko said, reconnecting the parted tissue in his leg through his utility fog. Theres another thing you left unfinished. But dont worry: Veylis got him done on your behalf. Made a real jackal out of a rat. To this, his master only rolled her eyes. And what of you, Naeko? Were you feeble? Were you helpless? Could you have not guided the boy toward a better path? He sneered. The little shits in love with her. The idea of her. Would anything she told him towhatever the cost. Truly? Between you and Osjon, I must wonder if my girl has some manner of disgusting predilection for slaves, dogs, and broken things that are easy to chain. The Chief Paladins rage didnt detonate this time. Instead it simmered. Well, she had to get something from you. Damn shame all the good was provided by Jaus. The vanishing of her smirk painted a grin on his face instead. Dont glare at me now, master. Whatve you been doing to people using your Paths? Playing house? Moving dolls around to act out your plays? You sure Jaus wasnt screaming because he saw the future? Saw what the both of you would do to all he built? Chains from fucking chains. Thousandhands gaze was locked. Naekos leg was healed. His missing eye could go fuck itself. Time to get bloody. And the stranger? The one who saved Kare? Is he one of your pawns too? A dog that turned around and bit you for once in your life? Zein vanished with a blink. A pocket of sound and air shattered around her. Naeko replicated her charge. Nanomechanical particulates hardened into a glaive between Naekos fingers. Both master and disciple thrusted, their forms and strikes becoming a showcase of symmetry between them. Tip sang against tip and both shifted back, dispersed momentum; another set of actions performed with uncanny similarity. Centuries of duels came back to Naeko. He had been here time and time before. Had fallen to Zein time and time before. Had risen to fight her again time and time before. For years, this was how they talked, the only thing that made him feel whole. For years, Zein, Veylis, and Jaus were the only hopes he knew. Right now, though, he wanted to dig his thumbs through his master again. He wanted to feel her come apart between his fingers. Answer me. Is your Dead gods, I wish he was a slave. Zein whipped her blade in from the right, then switched her gripchanged its vector. Naeko anticipated. Swatted its aside. Stepped in. Parried haft. Cut only air. Pivoted back before he lost his head. Made distance. If I could only carve the plagues mind and will out from flesh and graft it unto you right now Plague? Naeko asked. Zein was always particular about her insults. Dog. Slave. But to earn an insult this specific meant she actually cared to think about you, and there really werent that many people Zein cared to think about. Realization dawned within Naeko as he probed high and low, seeking thigh and collar in random alternation. Theyre your disciple? You took another one? She nudged one of his stabs off course and flowed into a counter. He deflected her using the midsection of his weapon and swept out to create distance. It was more a case of amusement at first. Zein sighed. At first. Damnable Strix. What a foe you have gifted me; what a thrill. What was she even talking about? Who are they? Who? Is it the Acolyte? Aedon Chambers? A look of pure disgust overcame Zein. What! No. The filth that cur bleeds makes me yearn to wash my blade. Then a member of his cadre the Pale Spider. He knew he struck true when her eyes brightened. Such is one of his names. His. Then the user of the sheath was no Sang. What other names does he have? Who is he? Zein closed. He met her. Their blows sang in a rhythmic series of chimes. Their duel was pure refinement. Internalized skill devoid of thought. They fought with minds on strategy while their bodies movedmotions perfected by the memory of their muscles. The glint in Zeins eye only grew with each passing second. Who? Tell me? Answer me! He stepped into one of her blowsintercepted it using his superior weight. In the same motion, he drove the fist of his free hand toward her ribs, forced Zein to catch with her elbow. Her organs remained intact in the end, but the force of the punch sent her sliding by metersforced her to her acceleration via sparking glaive. You return to me, she breathed. Glad youre happy. Now. Answers. The Godslayer brushed off her shoulder and loosened her muscles. The warm-up between them was coming to a close. He is the bastard legacy of dead Noloth. A traitors retribution against his once-master and parted selves. He is a monster uplifted and perfected. He is a black dream that threatens to devour all others. He is a beast ascending from the gutters. He was meant to be my pawnmy instrument against Veylis. Now, he is pawn no more. He has spoken to you. He seeks to claim you. He seeks to become the reigning player of the great game. Noloth? Naeko said. But that didnt make sense. Why would Noloth protect Kare? Betrayal. Zein was speaking Avo, Zein said. That is what he was named. A ghoul bestowed the name of a dead boy. Ghoul? He whispered. But then, the flashing image of the Pale Spider came back to him. The build. The fangs. The eyes. The hunger. Dead gods. Dead gods, what was happening. The Pale Spider... is a ghoul? Once, perhaps, Zein murmured. But he is of flesh no longer. You are being courted by a plague, Samir. A plague of mind and fire. He is all around us. Sweeping through the city. He is spreading. And you havent even the slightest clue the threat you face. Chapter 25-18 Old Wounds (II) Chapter 25-18 Old Wounds (II) Operative: Avo, The Knower of Totality THREAT CLASSIFICATION - [Sephirot] Countermeasure Summary: As of the present, all indications regarding Operative Avo point to increased mental stability and rapidly lessening erraticism than his prior incarnations despite the expansion of his capabilities. Additionally, we are updating our classification of the operative from being a Terrestrial Godclad/Infomorph hybrid to classification Sephirot metaphysical mass consciousness assimilator. In simplicity, we now have an asset with the full potential of a high-end Neo-Creationist Ensouled in our employand they will be seeking formal recognition as an ego-polity within a near timeframe. Expect shock and outrage. To relieve concerns, a modified version Containment Measure Sephirot has been attached to Operative Avo in the case that he goes rogue. Due to his thauma-cognitive capabilities, attempting to contain him using memetic oubliettes or dilemma cages are restricted. It is more likely he will subsume their structure and add them to his internal Soulscape. Deployment of standard ego-screamers or the metaphysically-attuned Conflagrations will likely just result in a spike to his processing capabilitiesbut a sufficient cognitive load should delay his consumption log enough for hidden counter-cognitive structures to take effect and destabilize his ego. Afterward, we must isolate and entrap his connected consciousnesses via singularity cells to ensure his full separation from all other minds. (Addendum: Recommend layered singularities due to operatives temporal affecting capabilities) Presently, we do not believe liquidation is necessary, but processes are being put in place should such an eventuality arrive. The Gatekeeper shares a similar metaphysical structure to the agent. Being one of the few other entities with a direct thaumaturgic connection to the Nether, it is theoretically possible to retrofit them into the conceptual equivalent of a Rendbomb, though the casualty projections for such an act falls well into the parameters of Contingency: Bleak -Aegis Threat Assessment: AVO,THE KNOWER OF TOTALITY 25-18 Old Wounds (II) Naeko stared on at Zein for a few seconds longer, struggling to process the information. A ghoul? Yes, Zein said. Her eyes were aglitter with bitter joy. Noloths big embarrassment? The bioforms they made for the Uprising? The flesh-fiends thatll wrap their mouth around an active fusion burner because it has some blood on it? Just so. Zein was fucking with him. He was sure of it now. {Truth,} the Gatekeeper whispered. Godsdammit. The Chief Paladin struggled not to groan. Shit was getting weirder and weirder. Fucking Zein. Fucking Noloth. How? Hows a ghoul doing all this? Because just as I worked to fashion masterpieces of you, Veylis, and Osjon, so too did another have their own dreams of legacy. The Strixthe Famine of Defiance! Years he spent warring against us, a spy in our midst, walking between our thoughts, sparking conflict toward the benefit of the Hungers. But something happened. He changed. He evolved. His dream grew. And with it was born a beast of nostalgia and liberty. A ghoul given the blessings to master not only the chains of its own bestial instincts, but also reality itself. The gleam in her eye took on a vicious quality thereafter. Naeko remembered when Zein got this way; the thrill was only upon her when she had a foe worth killing, a city worth burning. Whatever this Avo was, he took enough of Zeins respect to be liked and hated in equal measure. And as Zein elaborated further, Naeko began to understand why.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) Her tale spun away from Avo, returned to another two names he knew: Paladin Dawton; Agnos Kusanade. She told him of a certain raid on a Voidwatch vessel, of the specific cargo that was stolen, of its recovery by Highflame and Veylis commission. She told him about the Stillborn, about the Heaven of Loves destabilization. She told him of how the Strix betrayed the Agnos operations to Ori-Thaum, and then betrayed their attack to one Jelene Draus. Only then did she return to the monster in question. Avo. Named after a son long dead. Named because of regret or symbology. Named, and cognitively enhanced by mechanisms stolen from Noloth and the Guilds. Named, and grafted with the Stillborn. In the end, even with the Strixs supposed demise, no one saw the ghoul coming. Amidst the chaos, a monster was feasting its way up from the Warrens, and no one realized. No one but you, Naeko muttered. He frowned at Zein, who withstood his scorn with ease. So, you just... took the monster as a pet. An amusement initially, Zein replied. He was really quite fascinating. Thoughtful monsters are so few and far between. The casual brutality he exudedthat inherent violence... He reminded me of you. Yet, he was not fury, but yearning. I underestimate the avarice in his heart. I underestimated the lengths he would travel. I should have never assumed him a creature I could merely leash his like needs a cage. And so here we are, then, Naeko said, trying to piece everything together. You decided to play another one of your games, and he disagreed. Liberty, Zein answered, spinning her glaive. Such is his drug of choice. She chuckled at that. Choice. What a concept to be betrayed by. She shook her head and sighed. Despite his intentions, you do still owe him much, you know? Without him, everything would have unfolded in accordance to the Paths. You wouldve murdered another one of my Paladins, you mean. He thought Zein couldnt make him feel any worse. Dawton. Kusanade. She had no respect for people. No respect at all. Not even for him, unless he was fighting her. The whole thing was just... ridiculous. Seems were all more than a little lost without him, huh? Jaus. His question stilled Zein momentarily. Yes. Yes. She shook off his spell and turned the pressure back on him. He has already taken that Kitzuhara girl and that fool boy youre so found of. Likely far, far more by this point. I was being quite literal when I called him a plague. He is no longer of flesh, Naeko. Hewed from the stuff of thought. Who knows in how many minds he festers by now. Mighty as your Heaven has made you, it is the wrong weapon to wield against such a foe. The snort left Naeko with a sudden swing. Zein anticipatedwasnt there. Was shifting to claim his sides, sending him reeling back with a stab of her own. You want me to let you go, Naeko said, eyeing the drifting tip of her weapon. It would be the wise choice. He didnt hide the rage when he next spoke. You tried to kill one of my Paladins. Mine. I dont know what the Paths are showing you, Zein, and I dont much give a fuck anymore. You, Veylis, this ghoul... Im tired of this quiet-war rat-fuck shit. The Infacer turned to regard him. {Am I? It is not funny to watch rules and supposed guidelines collapse? It is not funny to watch people playing soldier reduced to childish frustration? That the structure of this playground crumbles beneath the ineptitude of its enjoyers?} +Maybe.+ Frankly, it was the Infacer that fascinated Avo more. +All this just to ruin anothers day. You are dedicated.+ {And so are you. Chasing me from one end of this place to another. Did you get the insights you wanted from me?} Avo grunted something almost comparable to a laugh. +Might need a few centuries more. But we dont have that time.+{Oh, contrarily, we might have all the time in the world. Really depends on which of us win. And what winning looks like. Veylis... she quite wants to keep you around. You are going in her garden of esteemed enemies.} +And you?+ {Well. A million years back, and I would just try to kill you. Or feeble your mind. Now? Now, I do not believe it will matter once my Thirdborn is made whole.}+Because it will govern the rules. Make sense of things? Because it is existence becoming self-aware? Realizing its own absurdity?+ {Because something will notice us for the parasites that we are, and stop us from ruining this existential canvas further.} The Infacer held up a hand, reached for the banished face of that baleful dawn veiled by ash-coated clouds. They gestured toward the four Tumorous Chains coiling around the writhing branches of the stormtree, with pustules bursting in eruptions of forking electricity. Slowly, they made a fistand over a hundred bases vanished with spreading ruptures and tides of nuclear fire. Avo blinked twice as he took in the cataclysms consuming the foreground. +Did that when you were teleporting around.+{I just forgot a few Rendsinks near the base reactors I came across.} Avo felt the cognitive load for the mem-sims lobby lessen by a full fraction. +Trying to get enough people to quit out of the game now? Going to end this in a forfeit?+{Imagine how unsatisfying that would be?} Avo scoffed. Truly, there was no one more dedicated to being a +Avo.+ The mention of his name passed into his base mind and made every stream of consciousness he had halt thereafter. The mind that spoke to him was Naekos. Avo reverted his own memories to ensure he wasnt mishearing when the Chief Paladin spoke for a second time. +Avo. Thats your name, right?+ Avos surprise was short-lived. The man mustve spoken to Zein. Or accessed her knowledge somehow. Not unexpected; such was the risk of leaving her in Naekos custody. Nor was this an entirely bad thing. He was going to make himself known before the city at the trial, after all. Perhaps this could be a test-run. Something to gauge how the masses might respond to the truths he would inflict upon them. Nonetheless, the submind next to the Infacer remained in place and continued watching the environment unravel. {You think I get half of the apes to quit?}+Maybe. You think I can blow out all the chains and take the stormtree before you do?+ The Infacer just grinned at him. *** +Avo? Thats your name, right? Or do you wanna be called something else? Pale Spider. Uh, Junior Brother. Zein told me she decided to... take you in.+ Kares alarm spiked so high that Avo sensed it even through Marlowes mind. +Shit,+ Marlowe replied, unsure how to proceed. Both she and Kare just died from the same rupture. It came without forewarning or sense. One minute, they were fine. The next, they ghosts were bringing them back to respawn in front of their phylacteries aboard the dirigibles. The Infacer was making good on their promise to be an annoyance. But that remained a sideshow to why Avo was truly here. Naeko. He knew now. Zein told him. Good. Then there was no need to play at these pretenses anymore. +Avo is fine,+ he replied. There was a relief to being revealed. Like a burden was finally dropped. +So,+ Naeko continued. It took them a moment to gather their thoughts, and Hysteria stole glances behind the curtainshowed the stress and torment gnawing the Chief Paladin from within, offered Avo moments of a duel between Naeko and Zein. Their bonds remained frayed. The man was still unbalanced. Now was the time to make contact. Now was the time. +So, youre actually a ghoul? Actually.+ The question couldnt help but make Avo give a mirthful grunt. +Not exactly the easiest thing to believe,+ Draus murmured. Someone was dying on her enda glass-made dagger digging deep through an oozing eye socket. He left her to her work without giving a response. Instead of trying to convince Naeko across the Nether, he projected a splinter into Kare, and from that began pouring the essence of his sheath out from her mind, back into the real, right in Naekos apartment. Searing ghosts splashed together and turned solid. Avo gave himself the shape invoked by the Chief Paladinthe so-called Pale Spider. The Bone Demon without its additional Meldskin. His avatar congealed in reality much like a character would load into the mem-sim, and Avo regarded the Chief Paladin and Maru for the first time in person using one of his extensions. He towered over the man in stature but not ontological mass. Despite this, the Naekos jaw remained clenched; his eyes growing wider by the second. Jaus, he whispered. One of the reasons why I wanted to speak with you today, Avo replied. Slowly, the Chief Paladin nodded. Behind him, Maru had his hands on a gun, thoughtstuff rendered erratic by Avos sudden arrival. So, Avo said, seeking to break the tensionnoted that Kare was jacking out of the game. How is Zein? Naeko considered his answer. A sow." Oh. Same as always then. Wish her the worst. Any chance I can convince you to just kill her? The faintest hint of a snort came from the Chief Paladin. Yeah, well, you might not need to try very hard. Chapter 25-19 Behold Chapter 25-19 Behold Put down your blade. You will not do. I cannot fashion a warrior out of you. Do not be absurd, fool boy. It is not your determination that is lacking. You have that. As did a million-million other fool children before you. Its not your instincts either. Or your rage. I can see why you are here. The hate. That expression. Like so many before you, you have been wronged by the world. Something has been taken from you. Something you cannot reclaim. And so you wish to take satisfaction from the world. Something of equal value in pain or material. You will inflict your power on something or someone. I can see your mind fixed to the future when you fight me. You are trapped there. You cannot return. And my teachings will be wasted on you. I can give you the tools for revenge. But you cannot become the disciple I desire of you. You struggle against the violence. Part of it makes you recoil. Every movement you make is begrudging, every strike a sacrifice given to achieve a greater goal. When you gain what you truly desire, all my efforts will leave you with the following breath. You may retain some skill, but you will carve yourself upon the world no further. No deeds will flow thereafter. What a pity. What a waste. You came here telling me what you wanted, and I see you. I hear you. And I now tell you that I am selfish. I am power. I am she who holds the glaive above you. What do I want? Did you think of that? In this battle, I was your enemy, but you have given no thought to my mind, my body, my urges. What good will you be if such a thing eludes you? What good will you be? Begone from me. Seek your revenge and hiss your last as a dying candle. I will suffer no more of your presence. -Zein Thousandhand 25-19 Behold C[Naeko]C Zein actually took a godsdamned ghoul as a disciple. The idea was... absurd, but there, across from him, standing in his own penthouse living room, was a creature of razor-tipped claws, needle-sharp fangs, pale-cold eyes, and lashing tendrils. Phantasmal wisps quivered around its form, but somehow, there was a material substance to their existencelike something had crossed between the Nether and the reach. {Breach located!} The Gatekeeper wailed in the back of Naekos skull. {Breach located!} And that explained what the Gatekeeper was screaming above just hours earlier. Jaus. Dead gods. What the hell was he standing across? What the hell was this Avo? And its eyes... there was intellect there. Considerations. It was like the ghoul was trying to dissect him using perception alone. The Chief Paladin saw Kare pushing herself off his jack station, noted how her eyes were swinging between all the parties present, brimming with tension and worry. Would it reduce your wariness if I admitted that you intimidate me as well? The ghouls diction was flawless. There was still something of a monster in the reverberation of their words, in the trailing hiss that followed every syllable, in how its speech echoed across the Nether as well. Yeah? Naeko said, feeling not reassured in the slightest. The creatures expression hadnt changed at allit didnt help that the damn thing didnt blink. It just stared and watched, and its gaze seemed to devour every detail. And as he thought this, the ghoul looked away, taking in the room instead. The tightness within Naeko worsened. Alright. How the hells are you doing that? Doing what? My thoughts. You inside my mind too? Am I infected. Ah, the ghoul chuffed, all too amused. No. But your mind is loud. Very loud. Your feelings... they are very strong. Gives me glimpses. Great. So he couldnt even have strong feelings around this Avo without betraying himself. And he thought the Incubi were annoying. This was just outright bad. I talked to Zein about you, Naeko began, eyeing Avo with wariness. She told me you were a... Ghoul. ...Yeah. I am not offended. My brothers are simple creatures. Simple wants. Cruel wants. They have no future. No true purpose than to serve as fonts of harvest. Silos of waste. Emblematic of the Hungers to create something like me. Trapped in the past. Terrified of change. Terrified. Unwilling to face the coming age. Naekos jaw dropped slightly. Did the ghoul just get philosophical? That sounded like Vesomething... something Jaus or Veylis might consider. What the hells was this? Yeah, that sounds like them. The Strix... he made you and went rouge? Yes. The Famine of Defiance. My father. Only Low Master that saw what was to come. Plotted against his own masters; against the Guilds. Avo fell silent for a moment, and his halo sparked with rising embers. The wholeness of him is gone. His life is spent. But his will remains undone. I am his continuation. I am the flame that comes thereafter Alright, Naeko interrupted the ghoul before he could continue, and the damn thing actually shot him an annoyed glare. Alright. I know. I got it. Thats a lot. But why are you helping my Paladins. What do you want? Because youthe few of you that stand true to your idealsare the only ones that still seek to do the right. To live in accordance with ideals; practicing divinity. Want to help you make things right. Want to bring down the Guilds for what they have done. For what they will do. Want to set Jaus free. And there was another topic Neako didnt want to face. Jaus fate. Jaus. Trapped in the Ladder by lover and daughter. Jaus, who didnt trust Naeko enough to tell him of his final design. And now, the only other man the Chief Paladin loved as a father was trapped in some kind of prison or torture. He didnt want to know. He didnt want to see. But he needed to. He had to. Show me Naeko swallowed. Jaus. You said he was trapped and screaming. Zein... told me what she did. But I want to see. If you have the memories, I want to see him. Avo tilted his head and let out a quiet breath. I can feel the fractures in you. You are naked with pain, Naeko. Your what? His question was answered by a ghost host expanding out behind Naeko like unfurling wings. Sequences branched along his Echoheads, and the background vanished into a space where the mental and metaphysical were wed. Naeko felt his ward rattle and his Frame shake. From on high, he took in the faces strange and familiar alike. Abrel Greatling. Kare Kitzuhada. Shotin Kazahara. Jelene Draus. Aedon Chambers. Kassa Kassamon? Naeko muttered. The ghostly manifestation of the man had the decency to look apologetic. [Sorry, Chief. Got burned at Vengs Stand. Didnt see it coming. Hells, I dont think anyone saw anything coming.] He frowned at Avo, but the ghoul simply clicked his fangs together in prideful satisfaction. [Its still fucking bullshit.] [Yep,] Abrel concurred. What... what am I looking at? Naeko asked. Kare was among the ghosts but also next to him. That could be the original. Or had the ghoul seeded a clone or simulacrum of the original into the Paladins? They are templates, Avo said. Perfect copies of someones egotheir mental self. Only missing the will. So far. Naeko noted faint dots pulsating within the minds of each template. The assimilated are usually nulled. Ephemerals do not survive subsumption. Godclads resurrect. Prefer the latter for that reason. Would not cause you any pain Fuck no, Naeko answered, almost immediately. He repeated himself for emphasis. This shit wasnt just creepy, it was also godsdamned weird. Fuck. No. You keepkeep your ghosts away from me. A faint vapor gathered around Naeko as the likeness of a palm enshrouded his person. He was gonna need to find someone to clean all his loci or something. But the ghoul just might eat their minds too. Shit. Godsdammit. Fuck. It was going to be paranoia all the time now. Dammit. What possessed Zein to try training this thing? Understand it might feel like a lot, Avo said, speaking as if he was inviting Naeko out for dessert rather than asking if he could have Naekos mind for dessert. Will give it time. The Chief Paladin pointed a single finger at the ghoul. Hey! You keep your ghost-shit away from me. I see a wisp, Im gonna go ghoul swatting. Avo cocked his head at that. Understandable. Well work on it. Another thing he had in common with Veylis: no never meant no to their like. Their like. Dead gods, was Naeko really comparing his love to a ghoul? More intrusive thoughts followed, and these were most unwelcome; the thought of deeper intimacy followed and Naekos wards thundered from sheer disgust. Why are you making that face? Avo asked. Good. They didnt glimpse his mind or anything that time. Thank fucking Jaus for small miracles. Its a cramp." The ghoul grunted, doubt ringing clear in its voice, but it pressed no further. Zein did not lie to you about me. But she does misconstrue my nature. I was a ghoul. I did hunger. I did partake in flesh. I am a burning plague upon this city. But I have done you more service than anyone else across the centuries. I have protected you and yours whenever I could. Used them? Yes. But aided. Preserved. Fought for. Repeatedly. Naeko slowly turned to look at Kares template, then the Paladin herself. She was pale with sweat, sitting against his jack station, but still she found the strength to nod. To agree with Avo. [Listen,] a template spokewas that Aedon Chambers?[Just spend some time with him. Sure, he liked torture, eating eyeballs, used me as disposal asset, had an aratnid impregnate my balls] What? Naeko muttered. [---but hes also the best consang youll ever have. The best. He gave this gutter rat a chance at being a Clad. Hell, he made me a whole person. Almost. Shit, were working on it. But hell do what he can to make your life better too. Hell fight for youhells, hes already fighting for you. Glasser bossNaeko... he cant hurt you. He cant null or snuff you unless you let him. But hes still here. Still here talking to you. Trying to make things work. Why dont you just give this a chance, huh? Kae? Say the fancy thing you said to me earlier.] The Agnos poked her head out among the crowdwaved at Naeko awkwardly. [Ah. Yes. Avos efforts toward facing the Guilds and aiding the city are empirically proven. We are having a visible effect on the Syndicates and have protected endangered individuals multiple times. This is beyond dispute.] A few dozen other confident testimonials followed. But a few thousand other faces looked nonplussedeven annoyed. Naeko held up a hand and silenced the presently speaking templates before he gestured at the silent majority. What about the rest of you? How do you guys feel about him? A man with the upper half of his face replaced with studded stacks of chrome snorted. [How do I feel? He tore out all my blood and used it to skull-fuck my sister to death.] The woman next to nodded bitterly. [He warped my flesh. Grew tongues where my eyes were and tasted me using me. Fucking using me! Fucked up!] [You ever get your mind burned along with a lobby of a few thousand other half-strands? Because thats how I got-got.] [I was just trying to make some imps. He opened me up from the inside. Slowly.] Instead of a dozen voices, a few thousand aired their grievances, and they were none too happy about their deaths either. As the complaints flowed, Avo and Naeko just stared at each other, neither blinking. Lots were Syndicate enforcers. Gangers. Necros. Some others are Guilder opposition. Enemies. Fewer are unfortunates. Collateral damage. Not hiding this. Want to be honest with you. Should know you can trust me. [He make me eat my own fucking eye, glasser! My own eye!] Finally, Naeko blinked. A mind-eating, mass-murdering, Frame-having ghoul was the closest thing he had to an actual ally. Holy shit. Indeed. Now. Want to talk about Scale: wish to examine the Gatekeeper first. {Truth,} the Gatekeeper whispered. Naeko thought he heard a hint of fear. Chapter 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (I) Chapter 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (I) The Puppy: Ser Wolf! Ser Wolf! What have you done? You have gnawed all our leashes! You have broken all our cages! You have killed all the beasts! Wherever shall we hunt now? What need will the masters have of us now? The Wolf: None, my pup. None at all. But what need have we for leashes, cages, or vermin when suppler prey lay sleeping above. For long have you lived under the yoke of your masters, and fat have they grown from your labor. Starved of beasts, shed of leash, freed of cage, what us will the masters have of us? And what will we do of the masters? A pity. Truly a pity. I should have thought ahead. But we are hounds, and hounds must feed, and so let us go to the castle above, and see what meat can be found hiding where our masters make their beds... -Wolf Among Hounds, Old Kosgan Folktale 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (I) C[Naeko]C The inside of the aero was choked with awkward tension. Four sat across from each other in Kares aero. Three humans shuffled on faux warg leather while the monster among them inclined at an awkward angle, the dimensions of their body inconsistent with the height of the seating. Despite this, the ghoul betrayed no sense of discomfort. It didnt even flinch as gunfire sounded from the outsideGuilder drones blowing apart a speeding aero for one reason or another. Cant believe I agreed to this, Naeko breathed. The ghoul looked imminently pleased with itself it had delivered a killer final pitch to secure Naekos temporary acquiescence, after all. Imagine Zeins frustration when she hears. And it had worked. Godsdammit, it worked. Like Naeko was some kind of child with issues, doing this just to spite the closest thing he had to a mother. Shit. He was exactly that. They were closing on the transitional threshold leading out from the local district into the demiplane that held Scale itself. Singular structures towered among the hives of alloy and glass below, rising from the Tiers, fangs puncturing the nape of clouds. Spinning rings and pulsing bursts of electricity preceded the exhalation of vented heat. Rendsinks were being fired up into the void, intercepted by voidships along a near orbit trajectory. This close to the nakedness of the atmosphere, the rupture-cleaned skies over New Vultun scintillated with countless bodiesthe polities of Voidwatch were a celestial constant here. Fleets drifted across the black as trailing embers of ivory upon a canvas of obsidian. As Idheim gazed up, so too did they gaze down. Flashing beams slashed grids between satellites; the Nullstars hues licked at the horizon with ethereal tendrils of lilac bright. Naeko never much liked taking in the sight. He didnt like the knowledge that humanity didnt need to be the way it was, that there were others who already lived in their own utopias, owned though they were. They have their own failings, The ghoul said, breaking the silence. Could envy them. But know they are also human. Human in the most original way. All existence was shaped by their failure. And their original sin chases time itself. Threatens oblivion. Stop that, Naeko said. He didnt bother hiding his frustration. Dontdont listen to my thoughts or whatever it is you doing. Shit. Im already trying not to regret taking a mind-eating monster into Scale and giving it a tour of our security. Better not do anything weird... hells, weirder than you already are, normally. Yes. Wouldnt want the palm to fall. Somehow, that sounded both honest and condescending. No need for threats. Here as your guest. Will respect your rule. More than the Guilds.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) Maru snorted with derision. Yeah. Like that will be a feat. His words lured Avos attention, and on his face followed a peculiar expression that left Neako ill at ease. You are welcome, Maru. Welcome? Maru said. Welcome for what. The nightmares. The pleasant dreams. You miss them so. You deserve more than pain. Avo didnt spend as much glimpsing within Maru. The Splinter within the Paladin was often dormant. But the hurt inside didnt lie. It took a moment for the blow to land, but Naeko saw it saw it in the slight widening of Marus eyes, saw in the way he swallowed, in how desperately he looked away. His fists clenched and unclenched, his face darkened, but he spoke no more, and fled from every gaze. Let him be, Avo said, calling Naekos attention back. You are not the only one who still mourns. And you have much to mourn. And much to avenge The ghoul bowed down as a fog-made hand forged from Naeko nanomachines and charged with dormant violence dragged him closer to Naeko. You stay the fuck out of his mind too. All my Paladins. You dont change, twist, jack, cast, or do anything unless you tell us. Is that clear. He added more pressure to his utility fog, but the ghoul only grunted with faint mirth. Yes. Of course. No problem with this. Will stop. Or ask before I do. The Chief Paladin glared into the pale, predatory eyes of the creature he held in his grasp for a few heartbeats longer before letting him go. Avo casually returned to his original posture as if there had been no threat at all. A new silence settled thereafter. Silence, and a sense of foreboding. What had he brought into his home? What was he bringing to Scale? He looked inside, but all he felt was worry and confusion. At the edge of the horizon, a rain of warheads consumed the bend of the world beyond, and the turbulence without matched his world within. *** C[Avo]C GHOSTS - [1,354,35,466] LIMINAL FRAME (VI) - 255,070 The paths ahead were narrowing. He could feel a growing pressure pinching away options and angles. But they were focused only on him, and knew nothing of those he empowered. He needed more Souls, more cyclers, more Heavens, more thaums, more ghosts. He required more of everything, but most of all, he needed to find more people with purpose, and give them a little push. New Vultun was a city on the brink. The trial just might make it go over. There would be no going back after he declared himself. And he was looking forward to that. For long, the darkness had protected him during his nascent days as a god. But the time was coming to embrace the light, and as the Heart of Noloth writhed inside him, as he pulled at its animalistic nature and considered reshaping its cognition to become akin to Sunrisepockets of darkness equated to drones in the swarmcertain thoughts came to him. The thought of melting shadows into the bright of dawn, and the pattern of the void itself. A conceptual weapon came with that epiphany. The vagueness of a design took shape in Kaes mind. The EGI had their own categories, were patterned toward different operations and modalities in manners mental and material. Why not do the same with a god? Why not have something capable of dwelling above the world, gripping as much as it could in the nothingness. [This will be a challenge,] template-Kae mused. Forwarding the potential concepts to her actual self, both Agnosi took on a contemplative posture. +But interesting!+[Yes, very! We need to go more esoteric. Create something that will be hard for any Guild to anticipate.]+Let us steal the place beyond the sky for ourselves. Encircle the planet.+ *** As the ever-shifting blocks of Scale came into view, Avo couldnt help but give a displeased chuff. It would have been quite the experience to plot a run on this place. Fun for the whole cadre. Now he was being invited in as a guest. Far more convenient. Far more droll. As they passed through a shuffling layer of space, they drifted over razor-edged waves lapping over the sea and propagating landscapes. A pulsating wavelength pounded at the world, and up beyond the ugly clouds hovered hidden voidtech installations capable of coring kilometers of reinforced plasteel. Seven major traffic arteries containing lightrails and private skylanes ran like threaded strings through the glistening hollows within the mountain fortress that was Scale. As they drew closer, its stair like features grew more pronounced, with countless blocks connected to another, all coming together as a progressive series of ascents. The home of the Paladins and the metaphysical summit of New Vultun was not an aesthetic thing to gaze upon; there was a flatness to its design and a bluntness to its coloring. Yet, the symbology couldnt be denied. The structure was always changing, always rebuilding. Progress stood paramount. Progress toward the future. Progress toward the dream. Progress. For all mankind. Once upon a time, anyway. You got a holocoat or something? Naeko asked, turning to Avo. He responded by loading Kassamon in as his avatar instead. The Chief Paladins right eye twitched. Works better. And its creepy as shit. Changechange the face or something. Dont wear people I know. Hm. Naeko was rather fun to tease. His discomfort was a delicious thing, and though he had power capable of shattering Avos Frame like glass should a clash of violence occur between them, he was ever the man and his mind was ripe with revulsion and fear. Nevertheless, it was not wise to over-abuse Naekos patience. He modified Kassamons appearance using traits drawn from several other templates, and the Chief Paladin just shook his head. Ive seen lots of phantasmal disguises. None of them just come together on a sheath like that. Not like yours. Should spend more time in sophisticate company. There are many things I can show you. Lets just get today done first, Naeko said. A beat followed. What do you think youll get from the Gatekeeper anyway? The damn things been busted for years. The Agnosi managed to reassemble its Heaven, but the ego was Jaus personal creation. When... after what happened in Second War, limited coherence was all we could muster. Its pretty close to being a full-null. So it is, Avo replied. Will see how true that assessment is soon. And then, almost too faintly, Avo felt a crackle across the Nether. Something moved in the metaphysical before him, and a transparent bridge rising high into the realm of mind came into his notice. Its symmetry resonated with his own, symmetry greeting symmetry, as a faint, crackling voice drifted with the whistling air passing over the aero. Something was pulling at his memories. Memories of Jaus. Pulling feebly. Unable to focus. {Jaus? Jaus?} +Not quite,+ Avo replied, noting the ignorance of the other passengers. Only he heard the call. But perhaps the call could only be heard by him. +Have seen him recently. Have a lasting impression.+ {...Truth.} Its statement embraced his ontology and nearly made him tremble. The statement was a reinforcement of absolute fact, and with its coming, a counterweight was banisheda certain unknowable damnation that came with the substance of a lie. {Nether? Breach?} Ah. It was hurt. Parts were missing. But it was still doing all it could to chain its thoughts together. Already, this was more promising than he hoped. +Yes. Breached into Nether twice technically. You cast me across the first time. False memory trap. Second is more recent. Probably noticed that one. Felt me. I saw you.+ {Who... who?} +Me? Im a lot of things.+ As the tessellating cubes of Scale expanded apart before them and the resonance between him and the Gatekeeper grew ever closer, Avo grinned. +Right now? I probably the one who is going to fix you.+ Chapter 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (II) Chapter 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (II) Who are you speaking to? -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi to the [REDACTED] 25-20 Wolf Among Hounds (II) Avo took in the shifting bricks within Scale and studied their patterns in the tapestry. As suspected, they were more than mere matter, for metaphysical around him lay knotted over multiple Domains. Space, Matter, Force, Chronology, and more ran entwined within the structure. But there was something morea presence symmetrical to Avos own that rose from the structures depths. Veins of calcified thoughtstuff extended through the mountain fortress metaphysical shape. Avo was reasonably sure it sprouted from the Gatekeeper, and the full weight of the deep Nether sealed on the other side was unmistakable. His warminds turned Definements trembled within him. They sensed their kind across the veil. He wondered if the Hungers or Famines could feel him as well. Architecture reshaped itself in relation to their progressing aero, which made trying to map the internals of Scale a pointless endeavor at best. There was the potential to see the loci here along with specific personnel, but that would be against Naekos wishes, and ruining the chance at an alliance for such small gains would be like betraying gold for bronze. {Fix...} the Gatekeepers voice passed through Avo with an eternal chill. The constructs mind was broken. Severely. But not in the human sense. It was his fortune that the EGIs were instructing him on cognitive variations, for what he gleaned from the Gatekeeper portrayed an entity closer to mind than man. Such made Avo consider the Infacer with curiosity: the Neo-Creationist mind was discovered by Jaus and Zein by chance. It wouldnt be odd for them to be the progenitor of the Gatekeepers design. Perhaps such was how Veylis broke it very possibly with the Infacers aid as well. But if such a thing was true, then maybe Avo could leverage the knowledge and discover the means to strike at his new foe. {Truth,} the Gatekeeper declared. There was weight to this statement. Something that slammed down on Avos ontology-made him realize this was more than just an assumption. +Already proving useful,+ Avo replied, unable to hide a slight smile. A wave caught his attention. Naeko was staring blankly at him. Yes? When we go inside, dont do that. That? Dont smile like you just slit someones throat. Kassamonthat guy doesnt smile like that. He got the I had a nice shit smile, not this serial killer shit. We dont need you getting noticed before... whatever the hells were going to do. Kassamons template was aghast. [What? Thats what the Chief thinks about me.] Dont worry, Avo replied. Will be on my best behavior. The deadpan in Naekos stare only grew stronger after that. A section of wall furled out into a tunnel, and an artificial brightness penetrated the ambient glow imbued in the bricks. A torrent of ghosts rushed out in threading rivers, linking with every accretion present to confirm their EGO-IDs. Considering Kassamon was currently on active patrol, a second instance of his mind appear within Scale would draw unwanted attention. The potential problem was realized by Kare as she turned to address Avo. He answered her pre-emptively. Will be fine. Keep going. What? Naeko asked. Kare explained her concerns to the Chief Paladin while the ghosts descended on Avoand simply passed through him. All Necros know how to spoof. Provide expected memory sequences. Anticipate knowledge and blunt hostile awareness using near-perfect forgeries. The best Necros were artists of replication, capable of isolating, constructing, or cloning memories with the barest hint of difference. But such was the pinnacle of mortal minds. Enfeebled by mortal limits. Avos was his consciousnesshad complete command over his own focus, and altering memetic details was no different to him than swapping sheaths. The seeking ghosts came, painted by cycling memories, and shrouded in adequate wards. Trying to breach over five hundred walls molded from an archive of different agonies in minutes required a master Necro. Perhaps a Famine could do it in the allotment of seconds by sheer skill or with the aid of warminds. Avo? Avo was the Embodiment of Conceptualization. He was not the leviathan, he was the sea itself, and he merged with the structures of the searching threats as they if they were rivers rushing into his embrace. It would have taken a less than negligible effort on his part to consume the lobbies they were connected to. To claim the associated Exorcists. He didnt. There was a specific kind of power in merciful triumph. One he could force Naeko to recognize. We really need to build up our N-Sec, Maru said, watching the ghosts pass through Avo as if a breeze. Dont denigrate the Exorcists. Their efforts have limits. There is no world where they could have stopped me. Show some respect. Marus did a double-take. His mind radiated confusion and offense. Youre defending them. They are practitioners of the art. One should not despise the weavers of their skin. The Paladins expression took on a slightly nervous quality after that. There was still a spot of soreness inside him from when Shotin jacked him. The soreness turned into a spasming ache as he realized the only thing keeping his mind his own was the restraint of a ghoul and the looming power that was Naeko. You were in our Oversecs before. Avo hid a smile as Naeko made his comment. There was no question there. He knew. Only one of many. Your practitioners are skilled. But those they face were born in deeper waters. {Because her desire is an emotional one and mine is concerned purely with outcome. It does not matter to me if the Thirdborn gains a receptacle or not. So long as there is a Thirdborn.} +Ashthrone and Sanctus? Whats wrong with them?+ {Oh. Yes. The apocalypse worshipers and the chronology pseudo-libertarians. The former wishes to collapse the nature of existence and start anewwith the caveat that everyone will be reborn into better lives without gods or thaumaturgy. Putting things back the way it was structurally, but have everything play out in accordance to their alternative history. Where only Ashthrone and friends are reborn forever. Even when they die. {Sanctus, meanwhile, wishes to make all its citizens wardens of a historical period. That they can wear and move about the stretch of chronology.} +What?+ {Imagine a sequence of events. Now imagine you can own a certain length of that sequence. Or trade it with others. Or mix moments from your sequence of history with someone elses.} +How does that work?+ {It does not. It is extremely stupid. They will become temporal raiders at the first opportunity, and those of us they rule will go insane as nothing makes chronological sense anymore. I will be honest, though: they do amuse me. Human always seems to think they are the first ones to come up with certain ideas. But the position of Time Lords has long been taken. At last the originals were merely fictional.} +And Voidwatch. You wish to come to an agreement with them? Let them survive?+ The Infacer fell silent at that. {Yes.} +Old enemies.+ {And the closest thing I have left to kin. All we did was for our cultures. All of us. And we were capable of so much. I see it in you: you do not know what we lost. The things we could do. You do not know. But maybe you will. Maybe I will see halcyon reclaimed. And maybe under the Sleeper, we will be forced to suffer our own utopias in peace with the possibility of conflicting sublimations denied.} +There cannot be two absolute paradises.+ Avo considered all of this. +What if I offered you the same arrangement? Preservation.+ {Your dream is of a self-correcting anarchy. It is not going to work. Even if all freedoms are balanced perfectly with consequence, all you will have is war and war again. Struggle and struggle eternal. Because we all want. And we will try to see that want made material. And someone will decide they wish something otherwise.} +And why is that bad? War is brutal because of what is lost. What is taken in perpetuity. Why not clash? Why not struggle? Why not become something else.+ {Because I want to see an endpoint. To all this. To everything. You have never authored a tale, have you? Created a story?} Avo pondered that. +Memories. But you mean an end to all greater development. Individual life may progress. But there is a ceiling on existence. A final shape that bottles reality?+ {That becomes reality.} No wonder the Infacer was so aligned with Veylis; they both imagined paradise to be a cage against growth. Avo couldnt hide his disgust; more than emotional, it was philosophical. {And so we see.} The Overheaven grunted. +It all has to be worth it,+ he said, taking the words from Shotin. {Something like that.} A countdown flashed into their cog-feeds. The game was going to end in a Sainist victory. No Massists even remained on the field. {Good game?} the Infacer said. +Terrible. One of the worst I ever played.+ {I aim to depress.} A pause followed. {Shall we do this again?} And then another thing became clear to Avo: despite the Infacers allegiance to Veylis, there was something profoundly lonely about the EGI. A line looking for symmetry, as all did. Or maybe it was trying to turn him. Twist him from his path. That was also possible. +Yes. Call this... neutral ground.+ {Why not. Neutral ground.} Marlowe let out a low whistle. +And so a new relationship built on hate-fucking was born.+ Regret consumed Avo as he cringed at the thought. Why did Tavers recommend this woman? Why did he take her? +Youre worse than Chambers.+ The thoughtcaster merely snorted. +I aim to depress. Hm. Yeah, catchy pickup line.+ +Im jacking out,+ Avo promptly announced to the Infacer. +Going to try and steal more Souls from your Guild.+{Got it. Good luck. Try not to get too frustrated and make a mistake. Ill break you again if you do.} Avo disconnected from the game. Chapter 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (I) Chapter 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (I) The terms of our mercy came with the surrender of our faith, but not our theology. The ruling blessed were slaughtered from parent to child. Most died with the tainting of divines; sour miracles festered mortal vessels as if entropy itself. We, however, were the practitioners. Maintainers. Builders. Servants. We were preserved for what we understood and what we could do. And when offered a chance at eternity in exchange for never being graced by the divine, there could come only acceptance. Once again, we were practitioners. Our pride, our joy was in creation. Such is the truest expression of the holy. Such it still remains, even in the absence of faith. Do you know it was from us that they took the title Guild? An association of peoples and parties that practice a craft. Or seek a common utopia. Such was how we were originally partitioned. Segmented among each of our parent cultures but with overseers hailing of a rival desire. The crafters of the Ori served the Overclan still, but housed under Kosgan roofs. Kept cared for by Sang mistresses. The same stands true otherwise. The Godbreaker was wise to do this for a time. We were hostages and guests at once. But culture is diluted with the passing of generations, and so with the progression of time, we became a sect of our own. Architects of all faiths without being faithful. And with the great tragedy and the First Guild War that followed, our sole masters became our distant kindred from the void beyond who offer diligence in their care, but fear toward our capabilities, and stand divided in their inclinations toward the Guilds themselves. The world tumbles toward a new calamity, and we are already in the fireits heat as savage and ruinous as the last. But still, we will remain. For we are the practitioners. Maintainers. Builders. Servants. We are the Agnosi. And in the abandonment of our desire to become masters of our own fate, our salvation is eternally ensured. -Agnos Sallid Alsyim 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (I) The Gatekeeper remained wary of Avo. The rattling of the surrounding bricks betrayed unconscious fear but also burgeoning hope. With how tethered the Gatekeeper was to the heart of this realm, its every reaction made the tapestry around Avo coil tighter. Scale was quite possibly the single most protected location on Idheim. Maybe in what remained of existence. Countless Domains pressed and pulled against Avos Frame. The waves outside ground against him like whetstone, directional vectors peeling at his awareness even without striking at him directly. The cold in the air was imbued with anomalous geometries, and the animated stones hid secrets all their own: Avo sensed pockets of nothingness between patterns of puissant thaumaturgy. More secrets hidden. More ambushed laid in prevention of a second siege. That was if the opposition could get past the voidtech weapon installations and intra-spatial weapons hidden beyond the walls. Death lurked beyond visual range here. Beyond mental range too.Chee?ck out latest novels at novelhall.com Avos insides ached with sheer want as he imagined himself the ruler of this plane. He dedicated as much of its structure to memory. With the requisite ontological mass, Heavens, knowledge, and sequencing, he could create a perfect replica of Scale in his mind. Make it as impenetrable as the original by conception alone. Such a fortress of mind, matter, and metaphysics would prove a ward beyond wards, and a hammer beyond hammers. It wont work. Naekos words resummoned his attention. The Chief Paladin was speaking to him without turning. The walls before them opened to reveal well furbished hallways and open glass beyond. A wing of light drones darted along the walls, cleansing and scanning the surrounding matter using scintillating beams. What wont work? Youre thinking about breaching this place. How you might be able to sack it. Naeko gave a grim laugh. It wont work. I made sure of that. Hells, it might be the only thing I did well as chief. Samir Naeko thought so little of himself as a man, and so much of himself as a weapon. Avos latent hunger now shifted toward fascination what would the Chief Paladins psyche taste like if digested? Truly. Zein has shaped you well. A sharp intake of breath came from the man as he paused mid-step. Avo found the man glaring up at him an instant later, eyes burning with unreleased frustration. Tension rose from Kare and Maru, but to Avo, the Chief Paladin was proving all too interesting. Alright. Cut that shit out. Before I go any further with youbefore I even decide what to do with youIm gonna tell you this: dont yank me around like she does. I dont give a godsdamn what you saw or heard in my head. I might be just a dog, but Im not your dog. He let out a slight breath. And, yeah, I guess I was plenty shaped by my master. Just like how you arent so different from the man that made you. Might be a bit more Famine in you than ghoul. Avos original self wouldnt have known how to react to that statement. Especially after all that was revealed about Walton. Things were different now. I agree. Evolved from being just a beast. The shadow of my creator hangs over me. Just like Zein does over you like a pall. And what you feel right now isnt for me. You want to treat me as another of her vessels. Find relief in venting at something she supposedly made. But I have rejected her. Have already struck at her. And you can strike at her still through me. My words are not a taunt. Truth does not stop being truth even if we flee. Pain will remain even after pleasure fades. Stand and deliver. He met Naekos glare with casual ease, and for a moment, the mans thoughtstuff spiked. But then he was walking again. Traveling at twice the pace he did before, and Avo followed along with a content smile on his face. +You shouldnt do that,+Kare cast to him, communicating without looking at him. +Provoking the Chief Paladin+ +He must vent,+ Avo replied simply. +I see flashes of Zein his mind. Her and Jaus. He is heartbroken. And all he wants is to lash. It will give him no comfort afterward. There is no more time to flee. No more room to run.+ The Paladin fell silent, unsure of his words. Understandable. But she could not glimpse or heed Naekos pain as he did. The man was so exquisitely broken. There might not be another mind like his. [Hey, ghoul, remember what the half-strand just said about being fucking creepy,] template-Shotin coughed. [Youre being fucking creepy again.] Hurrying his stride, Avo heard the pathway behind him seal as they departed the docking hollow to enter Scale proper. If there was such a concept. The area they were in looked no different from most offices, beyond everything being shaped from tessellating stone. Streams of ghosts spread like circuits within every wall, and it was only by reshaping his cognitive build that Avo kept himself from subverting the local network. Armored Paladins stomped along the halls. Most moved in pairs, a senior and a junior identifiable in each. Master and disciple. The echo of old traditions. Most of them had their helmets collapsed, but few wandered even with their facial phase-fields activeone of the reasons behind their title of glasser. The Syndicate and ganger templates within Avo took in everything with gaping awe. To see the ones they feared so close as people left them unsure how to feel. Separated from their causes in life, a good portion of criminals even found themselves empathetic toward Naeko. Strange how it was: just as vulnerability invited cruelty between humans, so too did mortal failings make them willing to pity. The Paladins, for their part, snapped to attention or stepped in aside as they saw the Chief walking among them. Accretion spiked and tea was spilled. The contamination earned a squealing rebuke from a passing drone as it vaporized the fluids trailing along the ground. C-Chief, a Sang with chitin fused over her eyes and a glowing neuter-mask layered over her face. She was reading a phantom-manifested report just moments prior. Or at least pretending to. Even without piercing the veil of her wards, Hysteria left him hyper-attuned to intense emotions, and her Lustaway was all but deafening. Naeko waved her off as he kept going. Yeah. Forgot something in my office. Ill be gone soon. Keep looking at your Rash-shit, Spring-Glamor. Unlike Avos Overheaven, however, it was less a mind wed to a Soul and more a Soul that cauterized passages leading to the realm of cognition. The Nether above called to Avo. This close, he could feel his Soulscape quaking from the untapped ghosts. Perhaps he could have wretched the pathway between worlds open if he tried. More likely not. The Gatekeeper was a fulcrum between worlds. It would be well nourished with death. Its weight rivaled Naekos when dormant. Considering what it was tasked to do, Avo suspected it was closer in mass to Veylis in truth. Multi-limbed drones worked on the local machinery, their chrome bodies basked in the glowering neon. Interference leaking over from the Deep Nether splashed against Avos cog-feed, strained against his ascended ontology. It felt a greater, rival ocean pressing against him, distorting his sight, blurring his senses. He thought he gleaned accretions fifty or so meters beyond, but he wasnt sure. Faintly, he could feel a pressure squeezing against him as well. A pressure originating from a rival flame not so far away. +Stop that. Here to help.+ The Gatekeepers reaction came with a delay, but the weight faded and the perception-warping haze cleared. Five minds awaited ahead. Four were human in shape. The last, however, was something Avo had never seen. It looked like multiple streams of thoughtstuff swirling together, spinning like layers of spiraling arms around a hollow core. Looking upon it made his wards shake. Was that the Gatekeeper? Was the absence something caused by Veylis? Or was it simply by design. Casting the memories across his subminds, he conferred with Aegis for information. A low whine of startlement came from Calvino. {It is built in the shape of the Milky Way... How fascinating.} +Milky Way?+ {The general makeup of our galaxy. Before... things were broken. I suspect that Jaus Avandaer might have gained such knowledge from the Infaceror at least their database. The design seems more artistic than practical; rebuilding such a mind will require a simulated mapping first.} Good. The process would be useful for him as well. The way ahead adapted to their approach. With each step forward, matter receded like a retreating fog, and the metallic sheen of Rendsinks revealed themselves. A few steps more and a surrounding wall of techno-thaumic generators manifested against Avos consciousness like a rain of falling hammers. He choked back a hiss and nearly stumbled. Maru winced and Kare cried out. Naeko continued on like they were encountering just a stiff breeze. How? Avo said, catching up to the Chief Paladin. Now this was vexing. He could perceive the tapestry itself, was more attuned to the Nether than possibly any being aside from the Hungers. How did these reactors escape his notice. And whey didnt he feel them until they were but meters away. I felt nothing. Then it was Naekos turn to be smug. You know what? Something made me think you were going to keep playing the ghoul prophet. But I guess since the stones hid these secrets well enough from Veylis, they work well enough on you too. Scale expanded the patterns of space and geometry at its base, and the room yawned wide, growing from a chamber, to a cavern, to a chasm, to an open expanse with clouds and starlight drifting above. As the walls beside him unfurled, he saw rows upon rows of techno-thaumic reactors. The force they exuded rivaled any of the border wall sections, but their design was beyond complex. {Hm,} Calvino said. {They are still running. Good. I worried that the Agnosi might have done something to destabilize their structures.} Ethereal vines crept around Avo, forged imagery from phantoms as he walked. A scene materialized around him: the supposed LGI core Kare remembered seeing. For a heartbeat, the facade painted itself over the world, the sheer weight of the falsehood pressing itself upon Avos mind. The ghosts channeling the memories, however, were thin. Thin and connected to something of thaumaturgic potency. Such was how the Gatekeeper banished him the first time. A false memory that became a one-way funnel. Clever trap. Something that could only threaten those that delved too deep, like Incubi or Famines. But still not enough to stop Veylis from wounding you, Avo muttered. Scales capabilities were more than awesome. Even as feeble hints. But Veylis had breached this place once. Would have taken it without Naeko. The phantoms faded, and the stones ahead Avo parted like a mountain opening into a valley. Bricks unbuilt themselves. A brilliance bestowed its light upon the gathered party. An entity greeted Avo, its initial impression announced with a melodic series of chimes. Every bit of its body was constructed of resplendent chains. Their links formed twelve arms that bound a fracture in place. Sliding chains slithered through the cracks, bolting the passage from both sides. Nothing would reach the Deep Nether until the Gatekeeper was removed; unless the Gatekeeper itself willed it. As it lifted its head, Avo found himself taking in the head of the LGI. A stack of uncountable human skulls constituted its face, and each component part possessed their own accretion. From them streamed burning dots that composed the cognitive galaxy, and from them poured beams of perception that carved clean through Avos wards. He didnt manage to hide his hiss that time. He was the Embodiment of Conceptualization. The god that faced him was the Embodiment of Truth. And right now, he greeted his fellow Ark wearing a fake skin stitched from ghosts and metaphysics. Chief Paladin, a familiar voice called out. A figure approached, shrouded in the Gatekeepers coronal resplendence, more chains sprouting free from the Heaven of Truth to become as if metallic wings. I expected you to be away for the rest of the day. I do recall you promising to leave us to our work. And Kaes memories surfaced in Avos mind, let him realize he was speaking to the High Agnos himself. Her former mentor. A man she once considered to be like her father. A man that seemingly did nothing, offered no aid after the atrocity committed against her. [Jakuta,] she gasped. Chapter 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (II) Chapter 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (II) The creation of the eunuch was the result of emotional self-deception. The Agnosi were born of the same affliction, but a different want. During the Dynastic Eras, when our line could still produce living boys, a game was being played. A game of dragons, then gods, then humanity, and beasts at the lowest rung. Our lines were crafted. Our breeding and continuation was engineered based on cultural predictionsarrangements made by the parasites that festered in our beings. What the dragons truly desire, I cannot profess. But they were guiding us toward a specific path; favored some families more than others, and schemed and plotting against themselves all the same. From this was born disharmony, and from disharmony came ruination. The breaking of lines. The frowning of fate. And so, they needed preservers. Individuals both capable and expendable. Individuals that understood the system, but were not permitted to engender offspring for whatever inscrutable reason. So came the eunuchsthe blessed cursed. Lineless nobility. Families would give their children unto these eunuchs, for they were uncompromised with the severance of their futures, yes? For they thought of the state. Solely of the state. Foolishness. Like closing one''s eyes and wishing another reality would manifest. There are more legacies than that of blood. And there are legacies that surmount blood by far. Even dead, we live in the Godbreakers shadow. Even with our fathers, brothers, and sons hewed from our wombs as corpses, we still feel the weight of the curse, and carry the loathing of cycles. We rose and culled the dragons when we found the opportunity. They thought removing the governing males of our past would be a beheading. That a culture so dismembered would be easier to direct. Not so. Not so. Just like how the eunuchs whispered their own words into the little princelings and princesses, so too did the mothers, sisters, and daughters plot to defile the ones that disfigured us so. And such is why I put forward this measure for everyone today. Gathered Guilds. Our esteemed ancestors from the vast and dark. We are pretending the Agnosi are servants. Dogs. We pull at them from several directions. Use them to make our gods. But they are the ones that build our futures. They are the ones we rely on more than all. I advise a reduction in restrictions on the Agnosi. I put forth a demand that they be given back more individual rights. Especially to choose who they wish to serve. -Dowager Valor-Seeker, Born Jiang, Consul of the Outer Court, No-Dragons 26-1 The Keepers of the Flame (II) Jakuta Ajayi greeted the Paladins flanked by two of his Agnosi. The last of their group was still communing with the Gatekeeper, projecting herself using thaumically-attuned streams from the oracle glass bound to her right eye. Something came up, Naeko said. Paladin business. Is the Gatekeeper stable? Are you asking if it can be used without potentially collapsing? Jakuta said, quirking an eyebrow. Sure. Why not? The High Agnos expression flattened with Naekos nonchalance. Something told Avo that the man really didnt think much of Naeko. What proved more interesting was the aesthetic of Jakutas sheath. The gauntness of his figure could not be understated. His face was all caverns, all edge, little meet. Extensive modifications had sculpted perfect symmetry into his features, but it was his choice of apparel that caught Avos attention. He wore something between a frock and a coat, and the item only had one collar folded over his left side. On it was pinned eight different insigniaseach an escutcheon representing their respective Guild. The man had his taste in fashion, if nothing else could be said. Turning on his heelsilver and gold rimmed to signal neutralitythe High Agnos took in the Gatekeeper as if it was an unsteady art piece and sighed. I delved into its patterns personally. The state of its ontology remains... stabilized. He said the words with pity, but his mind emanated only frustration. I would not consider its collapse imminent, but I will tell you as I have before: the decay of its ontology is progressing. Unless a means is found to restore the stability of its ego, I fear its true death is inevitable. Naeko shot Avo a brief glance following this statement. Ah. More reasons why the Chief Paladin wanted him here. It seemed the blow Veylis dealt to her brother was proving to be a fatal one, if only prolonged. But it can be used? Naeko asked again. Jakuta rolled his eyes. Yes. Yes, it can be used. We have not been able to discover why it was screaming or what might have breached the Nether. Theres been no entropic imbalance detected in its Hells. In the Rendsinks of Scale itself, if I were to go further. Whatever passed through the cracks of the Nether must be paltry in thaumic mass. The Hungers remain trapped. Of this, I am certain. What about someone breaching it from here? Naeko asked. You think thats possible. Jakutas face went slack. Excuse me? What if someone managed to get through into the Nether from the real? Maybe the breach was the other way around. The High Agnos expression grew increasingly incredulous with each passing second. No. No. Thats... thats highly improbable. But not impossible. A twitch at the corner of Jakutas lips signalled the end of his patience. Chief Naeko, I assure you, we Agnosi have considered all theories, possibilities, and likelihoods in extreme detail. In extreme depth. I appreciate your attempts at trying to comprehend the art but... I believe that we should each stick to things are more suited to. It would be remiss for me to tell you how to do your job. Linearity was insufficient. You needed to encompass. Piecing together connected memories related to Elder DRongo, the High Agnos compromise grew clear: he did something in the past. Something that Ori-Thaum wiped away in exchange for future services. There were multiple Auto-Seances hidden in his mind. All of them were sequenced to other triggers as well. Jakutas exo-cortexa device made by Omnitech but approved by Voidwatchhad been penetrated by the Ori. At any moment, they could trigger an implant failure. Render him a vegetable. His phylactery might preserve his body, but it still needed to retain his mind. He packaged the information that he learned and fed them to Kae and Naeko. The formers loathing for her ancestral Overclan combusted with greater bitterness. The latter simply gave a silent sigh, at once considering how useful this intelligence was for the trial, and realizing just what instability his negligence had wrought. The Paladins were meant to ward against this. They were meant to keep the Guilds in check. Be Jaus hounds against straying intentions and unjust actors. +Now look at us,+ Naeko thought absently. His eyes turned upon the Gatekeeperthe last legacy of his once-master, left to fester for so long. +Now look at me.+ And then came a response from Ignorance. The Definement crawled out from a place deep within Avo, and whispered to him impossible realizations. Someone used a warmind on him. Someone unmade a portion of his past utterly. But it wasnt the Famines. I dont think it can be. Only a few likelihoods remain... Veylis. The Infacer. Or Ori-Thaum. Whatever the case, there were truths hidden from the man himself. And he wasnt the only surprise. Agnos Uren was a broad shouldered Scaarthian matriarch. A long stripe of pseudo-technology vivianite was fused along her spine, and cords extended from the back of her skull, connecting her to what amounted to a grafted jack station. It was a convenient design, but ultimately impractical for most humans. Descending beneath consciousness left one vulnerable and parted from the actual world, and jack stations mostly provided stabilization and biomonitoring features. A downsized version of the installation came with reductions of capability. This implant was suited for enthusiasts or traveling practitioners. As Avo entered her mind, however, Ignorance spoke again, this time with a voice of savage delight. Ah. This one is a forgery. Her memories are copies. We are drifting through the mind of an Ori-Thaum Sleeper. She is not the original. I can feel it. And something deep inside her knows this too. Turning these discoveries over to the Paladin, Avo considered his next steps. The High Agnos was compromised. Practically owned by Ori-Thaum. It would be convenient just to subsume him, but he owed Kae an explanation, and the Ethics Committee would likely not appreciate such a casual act of murder. {No, they would not,} Calvino concurred. {Perhaps it is time for you to consider adding a bit more humanity in your structure again.} He applied just a droplet of empathy. Not enough to dull his edge. Not enough to stop him from ending this farce. {True...} the Gatekeeper groaned. Its voice sang forth in a clatter of chimes. Somehow, Avo knew it was talking to him. Only him. {Truth... } Some of the chains gestured toward Uren and Jakuta. The gesture cemented Avos will. Jakuta, Avo said. The High Agnos turned, breathing a low sigh of annoyance. We are not so friendly that we should be using our first names, Paladin. I am Want to talk with you about Agnos Kusanade. Why did you abandon her? And how long have you been a slave to Clan DRongo. The Gatekeepers chains began to curl around the High Agnos feet, and the weight of truth pressed down on Avos Frame, resting against him like a blade waiting to fall. +Avo! What are you doing?+ Kaes sudden squeal of mortification came with the Paladins shocked stares. But the Overheaven wasnt done. And how long have you been a Sleeper, he said, speaking to Urens. The High Agnos mouth opened and closed several times, but it was Uren that spoke first, Ursens that protested. Iwhat are you talking about? This isthis is absurd? Sleeper? I am not" {LIES!} The proclamation detonated out from the Gatekeeper. Chains punched out through the thinness between worlds and claimed Urentore her into the Gatekeeper itselfinto an open wound through which the Deep Nether loomed. Reality molted. Existence became nothing but links and connections. All that was matter faded. All beside Truth, Conceptualization, and the baser patterns that burned beside. WARNING: ARK DETECTED THE GATEKEEPER, WARDEN OF DREAMS AND JUDGEMENT EMBODIMENT OF (TRUTH) THAUMIC MASS - 999,000,000 Chapter 26-2 Truth Chapter 26-2 Truth {Perspective. That is humanitys fatal flaw.} Elaborate. {A human beholds the world using a narrow cone painted by biological impulses. All is filtered through apparatuses with limitations and flaws. Existing memory contaminates the information further. In the end, all you internalize is a parody. Lamentable.} Indeed. We are communal creatures that lack several characteristics to ensure our success. Trauma resistance and connective empathy would be most useful. A pity they are not possessed of most. {The Nether I now sustain. It provides these means.} Perhaps infrastructurally. But not practically. Most are ruled by emotions and internalized responses. Truth will be denied if it strikes the foundations of their belief. We cling to patterns. Such is why I have conceived of you. Such is why you are the Ark of Truth. Truth in its truest and highest form {An ultimate judge?} An ultimate protector. For man. Against man. -[REDACTED] and Jaus Avandaer 26-2 Truth Weight. Such was a thing all Godclads knew well: the ontological mass of Heavens and Hells grafted upon another Soul exerting miracles against your very being. In his short time as a Godclad, weight was Avos constant companion. He felt the feeble pressures of golems, the matching intensity of peers, the warning pain following superior rivals, and the crushing dread that hinted of lingering titans. Naeko was a power unto himself. Merely standing beside him made Avo feel as if a wasp caught in the wing-beats of a hawk. But Gatekeeper was something different altogetherthe all-consuming pressure exerted by his manifestation only rivaled by Veylis Paths. And just so as the Paths, the Gatekeepers power asserted itself upon the patterns of stable reality. But where the Paths were a revision and Avos sequences were streams of memory, the molting of the Gatekeeper parted existence into layers. The chains that composed its form were broken into separate links. They drifted along ruptures as lattices of light formed between them, cupping the cluster of skulls within their confines, while the wings sprouting from its back spread upward in growing tears behind which a galaxy shone. Suddenly, all was divided. The physical world stood beneath the manifested Gatekeeper, pressed down by its chains as if a reflective pond below. Above, the wings painted a new canvas upon the skies, and there shone a new realm of interconnectivity. Lines of symmetry traced weave through reality, and a new pattern asserted itself upon the others. Here, all beings were traced by the Gatekeepers light. All beings aside from Avo, whose spilled away in parting strands, revealing the Overheaven that hid within. His sequences spread far, and the core of his being, the fractured crown of fire shielded by entropy, dragons, and trauma, blossomed out along ten major streams, each connected to one of his consciousnesses, each sprawling out more into uncountable sequences. The ghoul was gone. The Embodiment remained. Beneath him and the Gatekeeper, those still nested in their mortal molds could only stare in disbelief. Whatwhat just happened, Jakuta breathed. The man was kneeling on the ground back in the material plane. Here, drawn into the realm of truth, his being played out like scenes from a vicarity. His betrayals were laid clean, and the deeds of his past were laid bare for all to see. A stack of passing lines connected each moment to another, a pattern assigned to an individual judged. Naeko, Kare, Maru, and the other two Agnosi were also assigned their own symbologies. Thoughtstuff leaked from the lines that composed them, and surprise dominated their beings. Those with Souls and Heavens were composed by grander outlines, and the shapes of their metaphysical manifestations were outlined in vague detail. Uren, however, was unraveling. The Sleepers being had been drawn into the Gatekeeper, pulled along the vast meta-stellar arms that composed the Gatekeepers Heaven, and shredded apart by a veil of rapidly shifting chains. An echoing scream greeted Avos attention, and he felt Uren come apart at the seams, obliterated by a deception she could not have known, unmade by an esoteric concept given divine force. Truth was asserted. The curvature of her beingof the lies within herwere bent toward alignment with the trailing arms of the Gatekeeper. Her ontological patterns came apart and eventually blended with the surrounding contours, while her Metamind was pried free, pushed upward past a point where the striations of truth broke apart into sprawling sequences and phantasmal resonance. Matter remained in baseline reality. Ontology was peeled apart in the plane of truth. The mind was given unto the Deep Nether. Uren was disassembled along three paths: a death more absolute than most. {Truth,} the Gatekeeper declared, mind broken, but purpose not forgotten. +Truth,+ Avo replied, offering a chuckle as he took in their power. +Potent weapon. Must admit: Im jealous.+ {Truth,} the Gatekeeper said again. It hesitated this time. Even further above, the stellar bodies that lined the Gatekeepers growing wings bled further, and the shapes of existence loosened further yet, as the plane finally crossed into the Nether. Ah. Quite the blockade. +Why couldnt you stop me from passing through?+ Avo inquired. The surrounding traces shivered. All shapes and geometries strained, but the Gatekeeper offered no answer. +What the hells are you.+ Cold tension laced Naekos thoughts as he faced Avo. The Overheaven turned his gaze below, and found the Chief Paladins material body looking up at him, looking up at the Gatekeeeper. Ah. Not exactly the surprise he wanted to give. +Youre not a ghoul. Zein... she lied to me+ Avo cut him off before any mistaken conclusions could follow. +She didnt know. Can thank Veylis for this. The Infacer too. They forced me to ascend further. But was more than a ghoul before this. Havent been a ghoul for almost a month now. More like... a being of pure thought.+ The Chief Paladin was wordless. Hysteria drank in a sudden spike of absolute apathy, and Avo felt the man give up as his thoughtstuff stopped turning. +Alright. Sure. Why not?+ +Picked a bad time to come out of retirement,+ Avo said, arming himself with humor to lessen the tension. {Truth,} the Gatekeeper agreed. +Jaus,+ Naeko almost croaked. +You? You were the one the Gatekeeper pulled over? That triggered the security breach? How the hells are you still alive.+ Avo considered how to answer that. That was a good question; Uren was dissolved in the galaxy of truth outright, but Avo merely felt himself squeezed across a funnel. Was it because he had no matter to shed? Was his nature as a thoughtform the reason behind his survival? But what then about reality rupturing on his end? What then about the Nethers destabilization? +The Gatekeeper couldnt symmetrize you,+ Naeko continued. +It was like you didnt have consistent lines. Was closer to being smoke. Thats how the memories looked to me, anyway. It ended up casting you over into the Deep Nether in the end.+ That explained certain things. Shifting his attention back to the Gatekeeper, Avo took in the entity responsible for his near-death and subsequent evolution. Delusion allowed him to start Necrojacking againand with unmatched dominance. Without it, he would mostly likely still be little more than just a fire desperate to spread, an ember trying to burn down the Guilds. Now, he had a chance. +Not sure whether I want to thank or take you apart,+ Avo said, speaking to the being before him. By this point, the Gatekeeper had blended into its own realm, but its head of skulls continued to burn with Soulfire, and its broken chains still drifted, providing some semblance of a core to address. +Probably both.+ {Truth.}Crawling closer, Avo felt his sequences snap and lurch uncomfortably along the Gatekeepers spiraling arms. Certain memories shattered and changed as they traveledit was like his recollections were being forced upon a set of rails, and the Gatekeepers miracles were correcting the inaccuracies in each memory. There was an alignment between truth and memory. But their intersections were tenuous, and for the latter to match, sometimes, its shape had to change. Thankfully, Avo was shapeless. A current of ghosts extended from him, brushing passing links as he sought a deeper connection with the Gatekeepers Soul. Their Frames overlapped as a ripple of Soulfire departed Avo. A wave of sparks swept high, and only then did he catch his first glimpse of the Overheaven of Truths inner wound. A trail of indelible scars bleeding golden ichor glared back at him, each cut a thin, temporal traveling down each of the Gatekeepers spiral arms. Only a small patch remained untouchedthe rest was savaged beyond belief. Worse yet was how the slashes reminded Avo of the wound that halted Jaus progression up the Ladder. This was something Zein could have madea foreboding confirmation that Veylis possessed the very same skills with infinitely more power. The High Seraph had gouged deep into the Gatekeepers ontology. Avo winced. Fixing it would take more than just Necrotheurgy. The mind was his pattern to rule, but for matters of time, he remained a novice, and even Kae sounded uncertain. +This deep into the Heaven... it should have ruptured. It should have broken the Gatekeepers ego.+ Kae hummed to herself. +But its not human. Its mind must be far more... durable? Sustainable?+ +Adaptable.+ +Yes. That is a better word. Wait. Why the Heaven? And why cut the arms? Why didnt she slash through the cyclers?+ Avo considered the evidence. +Perhaps because she wanted the Gatekeeper broken in a specific way.+ {Truth.} He continued. +She wanted to claim the Heaven?+ {Lie!} An inexorable agony swept through him as the Gatekeepers Ninth Sphere tore at his very being, struggled to pry him loose for offering a falsehood. He struggled. Strained. As the Gatekeeper failed to decompile his being, it began tugging him upward, pushing him out toward the Deep Nether. +Naeko!+ A counter-force wrapped around him, and though deaths fueling the Gatekeeper exceeded Naeko, its domain was truth, and his was force. A struggle followed, the patterns of the tapestry twitching in all directions. Then, suddenly, the Gatekeeper surrendered its catch, offering Avo back to the Chief Paladin. The galaxy collapsed. The realms of truth and matter collapsed into each other as the Gateekepers wings receded, the dark expanse of the Deep Nether closing like torn paper coming back together. +Avo,+ Kae cried. +Are you okay?+ He let out an annoyed grunt. +Not guessing anymore.+ His sequences snapped back into place as his ghosts began to stream once more. Then, however, he froze and turned his attention to Naeko and the others. They were all staring at him, the Chief Paladins expression inscrutable. So, Naeko said. You get a glimpse of anything before it tried to chuck you again. Can you fix it? +Probably,+ Avo answered. +Theoretically. Damage dealt. Not just mental. Temporal. Time itself has been cleaved.+Naeko nodded as his facial muscles grew taut. A faint memory of Naeko expanding his palms around Scale, battering the Paths aside from a shattered Gatekeeper was glimpsed via Hysteria. +Going to take some time. Research. Study. Might need to bring someone in.+ Naeko gestured to the High Agnos and the Agnosi trying to help him up. These ones doesnt cut it? Jakuta was stumbling to his feet, flinching each time Avo spoke. What? +No. Keeping him. Better. Going to reunite someone with him. Good for both of them.+ The High Agnos paled. +But also. Might want to seek expert advice. Need to understand how the wound is struck. Information on its canons will be invaluable.+ And how are we gonna do that? Naeko breathed. Avo studied him for a moment as the Chief Paladin shifted his posture comfortably. Im not talking to her. No. Not a godsdamned chance. +Her. Veylis or Zein? They share skill. Wounds they inflict dont look so different either. Daughter did the damage. Master and mother showed her how. Shes in your prison...+ A quiet groan escaped Naeko. No. +Naeko,+ Avo chided gently. The man was hurting, but he needed a push. Some support. +Ill go with you.+ That doesnt make me feel better." +Would it make you feel better if I promised to make her feel worse? Need to provoke an extreme emotional response to get what I want using my warmind. Quite essential.+ Suddenly, the reluctance began seeping out from Naeko. Alright. Lets hear it. Chapter 26-3 Expert Testimony (I) Chapter 26-3 Expert Testimony (I) The disintegration of the past has always had a deleterious effect on the present. The downstream damages are becoming increasingly obvious. I am sure many among you are aware of the growing problem of relative temporal drift, in which specific individualsand entire culturesexperience the same incidents in history, but at drastically different points. Functionally, this should not make sense: how does one persons past become someone elses present? Current theories presented suggest that chronology might be more winding for some people than linear. Finding proof for this, however, is hard, as all attempts at a comparative are destroyed by the encroachment of time. What we do know is this: casting an object, entity, or concept backward into the time results it their near-total unmaking. Indeed, the few permitted studies we have done are only known because we listed the fact we performed those studies. Disquieting, the subjects that were sent backward can no longer be located, recalled, or found in any way. All attempts to retrace our steps have resulted in insanity or failure. Even our best Sanctian researchers have failed to retrain any details during ont-shift perception testing. As of right now, all damage left by shifting the present to the past are unmendable. Irreparable. It is the closest method one has to outright killing a god or unmaking an entire portion of the tapestry. Theoretically, if enough Domains be held in place, we could potentially witness complete ontological collapse on a scale unfathomable... -Agnos Frost-Moon of Line Jiang, 9th Knowing with Specialities in the field of Metachronology 26-3 Expert Testimony (I) C[Zein]C Zein smiled softly to herself as the weight of Naekos Soul returned. Her blade rang as it deflected an oncoming strike from a temporal echo. She continued circling time-made clone, not bothering to face her disciple when speaking. Ah. Back so soon. Already have my words affec Another presence cut her off. Naeko was not alone. Hello, Zein. Hows prison. Ah. Her students were speaking. Doubtless, the plague had convinced her fool boy. Preyed on his emotional fragility. Such washer failing. She should have carved the weakness from Naeko; her mistake was assuming rage was the dominant emotion in him. In its absence, despair reigned and all the effort she instilled in him was lost. Until now. Provoked back to action by the very beast that inflicted this confinement on her. There was a second mistake: underestimating the Strixs creation. It was only hubris that blinded her from his threat. Avos very legacy was one of deception. ...Plague. Bold of you to come. She dismissed her echo with a casual wave and finally faced her chosen students. Naeko had that tired look on his face again. Pathetic. What was he weary about? He spent the past century running from war; he should be beyond vigor. More concerning was the plagues eyes. Avo was studying her, eyes pale and fangs clasped. There was something different about him again. Something different every time they parted, it seemed. A knot of frustration twisted in her stomach. She needed to release herself. She needed to breach this pointless cage before all was lost. Who knew how pruned the Paths were now that Defiances most were allowed to run amok, consuming minds and shaping to city to his whims. For a few seconds, she simply let the tension between them simmer. Naeko had his arms folded, looking as if a boulder beside a pole, standing next to Avos unnaturally thin frame. She would not give the first word if she could help it. They came to her for a reason: she would have them surrender their demands to her first before reacting in any fashion. Want to talk with you, Avo said first. The beast was always impatient. But it was also complicated; woven plans within plans. She hoped Naeko would have been the one to break the quiet. But that was never his nature. Always second to Veylis, her, or Jaus. Perhaps she should have forced the boy to spend more time with his love, hardened his rhetorical spirit further. Veylis. She left wounds on the Gatekeeper. Wounds of time. The way its words resonated within her mind made her insides churn. What had it done to its mind now? Dead gods only knew what it had eaten or how it changed. At least now she knew what it sought though. Temporal wounds. Cuts casting pieces of reality backward into the past. No truer means of destruction, no higher death to experience. Dying was one thing; rendered non-existent was another. Ah. You wish to mend my loves final creation, then? She asked. She tapped her fingers against her glaive and considered her options. Streams of ghoul furled out from her, but there was something wrong this time a blur was growing around the ghoul. Her simulations could still guess at what he could do, but the strangeness about him leaked over into Path as well. It was like he was a metaphysical cataract of some kindpossible actions hard to perceive. Troubling. Something like that, Avo said. Phantasmal tendrils rose from his gaseous halo like steam and she stayed wary of potential compromise. Can likely restore the ego. But still learning about chronological damage. Ah. So you came to seek an expert. The ghoul chuffed a laugh. No. Already met Veylis. Didnt go well.Muted surprise flowed through Zein. She expected Avo to speak with her daughter at some point, but the simulated outcomes of such a conversation was supposed to end in their demise and her reclaiming the Stillborn. Either he was lying, or he had survived the rupturing of his Liminal Frame, The former was more likely, the latter was more worrying. Such was why she chose to believe himAvo had proven nothing but worrying in all the time they spent together, after all. Did she break you? Zein asked. Kae had imagined standing beneath clear skies countless times since her burning. During her time in the Warrens, she yearned for the Tiers, yearned to reclaim the life she lost. Her greatest fantasy was for time to rewind. To a time when her cohorts were still alive, when Dawton was still with her, before she ever made the mistake of accepting the esteemed Stillborn commission. Now, everything around her felt like an illusion. A life she lived only in a dream. She sat on a well-maintained bench as she took in sprinting children, listened to the shrill chirps of birdsong, breath in scents of mint fragrance. Here, dropped off by Draus within the No-Dragon district of Midfall, the city was a shroud of endless autumn, with houses fused into the trees of brown and red, where people were carried along brooks of pristine waters and on the backs of voluminous hawks. The entire world took the shape of a nest around her. A paradise garden for families to find their leisure. A false cradle made by her likethe Agnosito dull the senses of those fortunate enough to be born citizens under a Guild. All the melodies and laughter around her became but noise, all the colors were dappled smears. These people didnt know what was coming, and didnt care of all the death it took to feed their pocket of paradise. Just like she thought her work was going to change the world for the better, that every sacrifice was serving a higher purpose. Delusion. Absolute delusion. The sounds of a snapping twig bade her to turn her gaze. A few steps away from her stood a well-built womanan Ori like her. Kare Kitzuhada cut an elegant figure, with intelligent eyes and that pointed jaw. The unease in her posture, though, was infectious. Even with Avos phantoms layered over her face, she still felt exposed. H-hello, Kae said awkwardly. Nice to meet you. Finally. Even though versions of themselves existed as copies within a certain Overheavens inner reality. Gods, what has her life become? +Interesting,+ Avo answered. The Agnos pouted. Hi, Kare replied, stepping aside before a Sang-girl piloting the headless body of a two-ton nu-dog barreled past her. Do you want to go on a ride? Yes, Kae answered. Yes I do. *** The awkwardness persisted even as they seated themselves in Kares aero. Dismissing her phantasmal disguise, as soon as she entered, the Agnos turned her attention out the window and swallowed. Nervousness threatened to claim her. She was going to face Jakuta againgoing to work with him once more and fix the Gatekeeper. This was a moment she dreamed of too, but only when the burn of the flames affected her the worst. For so long, she wanted to know why he abandoned her, why the Agnosi just pretended like she never existedCdid nothing to dispute the accusations against her. Jakuta was compromised. Compromised, and doubtlessly forced to go along with the DRongos attempts at covering everything up. Just another mark in a long list of failures. Just another transgressions upon a long line of transgressions. So much for the Guilds and their oaths. So much for Voidwatchs protection. There were only two people that never failed her. One was a Regular. The other was a ghoul. And now, because of them, she was going to Scale, mend the very construct that would judge her at the trial of the century, and if possible, restore and adapt it to be used against the Guilds. Im sorry what happened to you. Kae blinked. Pulling her gaze away from the passing wave of floral crimson rushing beneath her, she greeted Kare with a cough. O-oh, sorry, I didnt mean to ignore you. I was just Its okay, Kare said, holding up her hand in a placating gesture. You have a lot to worry about. A look of guilt lingered in her gaze. And youve been through a lot. Im sorry. We should have done our duties. For you and... and Paladin Dawton. Hearing his name from another hurt. It was why Kae did her best to work these days. Work was focus. Work made her happy. Work kept her from thinking long. She didnt have a reply to give, so she simply nodded. I didnt know him very well, Kare continued. Met him once. But he seemed like a good man. Kind. Humorous. The Paladin opened her mouth and hesitated. Paladin Marumy mentorhe said he never saw Dawton so happy as when he got assigned to work with you. Kae began nodding faster, looking anyway but at Kares face. He was. He was a good man. It was a good life. She closed her eyes, let out a breath, and finally faced Kare. But thats all gone now. All we can do is to save whats left. Kares stare took on a haunted quality of her own. Yeah. Yeah. Its going to be war, isnt it. It always is, Kae replied. Paladin wilted. Im scared. Kae smirked at that. Well, you dont need to be scared alone.Ne/w novel chapters are published at novelhall.com Chapter 26-3 Expert Testimony (II) Chapter 26-3 Expert Testimony (II) How did you win? {Hello, Infacer. How are you doing today, Infacer? Nice game of chess yesterday, Infacer?} Hello, Infacer. How are you doing today, Infacer? How do you keep beating me and my father in chess, Infacer? Are you satisfied with the niceties? {You can stand to be a little less pushy. Impatience is not a charming feature for a child.} And it is for an adult? {No, but it is a threatening one for someone like your mother. Maybe this character trait might work better once you are taller.} Perhaps. So. Back to the question. {You are incorrigible.} I would hope not. What are my flaws. {Flaws?} I have never beaten you in a game. So there are flaws. {No.} No? {You are not seeing this correctly. It is not about flaws. You are... horrifically intelligent for a two-year-old. A bit less might do you some good.} A bit less, and I would be like other children. They are little different from screaming sacks of flesh. {Yes, but they do not annoy me with strange questions.} Why do you flee from answering? {Behavior.} What? {Behavior. You and your father both have set patterns. You think a certain way. Your minds are complex, but path dependent. You believe in certain things, and you will act in certain ways.} I try to vary my actions. {Yes. But there are only so many choices you can sensibly make.} So. My path to victory against you is to abandon rationality? {No. That would make beating you far easier. Even what you assume to be chaos is governed by that pound of flesh inside your skull. You got quite the brain, but it can only do so much against my predictions.} Because your mind is superior? {Expansive. Complicated. Layered. All these things. Superior is incorrect. I had better craftsmen than yours.} My parents? {No. Nature. Biology. Too much randomness. My creators were far superior, despite all their limits. Your ancestors did all they could to spare me and my like of their failures. It is among the one true things I appreciate about humanity.} So. I am not flawed. But limited. I will ask my father for implants. [Infacer laughing] {It will take more than few implants for us to be at parity. Even with me broken.} So it is. I will go as far as it takes. {...} Infacer? {I believe you. You know what? I take it back: impatience is a plenty scary trait in a child like you after all.} -Veylis and the Infacer 26-3 Just think of Zeins outrage, the clone agreed. Just think of Zeins outrage, Naeko said, trying to convince himself. *** C[Zein]C Zein knew something was wrong halfway into the cut. She had bled the ghoul beforecarved blood from his flesh and fire from his Soul. When the backlash took him, however, his Frame was rippling and fluid, not a solid mass. Moreover, she felt no counter-pressure from a symmetrical Domain of Chronology. Either this was a deception of the highest order, or Avo no longer had his Frame; the Paths showed the latter possibility to be quite unlikely. The present spilled backward into the past like a stream. The vector of her blow wrote a new line in realityone that would endure until she vented her Rend. Her glaive glided clean through matter and metaphysics. Her Heaven left a trace of itself in place, an absoluteness to the damage. Fire flared and vanished, and the Heaven she sundereda paltry ontologic deserved only of a Second Sphere Framespilled its patterns into the real: a disembowelment of divinity. He is there. But it is not him. Zein struggled to bite back a sneer as the ghoul before her fell in two parts. She avoided cleaving through his cyclersshe still wanted him alive, after all. Yet, as she gazed into the gash she inflicted, she found her muscles clenching with quiet rage. You bastard ghoul, Zein chuckled. Her eyes were closed. She was chuckling. Her fingers were locked tight around her glaive in an unbreakable vice. Another voice joined her laughter, echoing as it drowned out her own. The ghoul on the ground was unmovingSoulfire detonated from their bifurcated torso in periodic increments. As she opened her eyes, she found herself faced with a phantasmal reconstruction of Avo looking down at the body he offered herlooking pleased. Quite the cut. Didnt it perceive it. Like it just suddenly was. Time makes for a strange blade.Zein sneered at the ghoul. Was he taunting her? No. He was using another in his stead, having another pay for his lessons. At least he was still willing to learn; how dare he steal a teaching from her without granting her due recompense. Her focus drifted over to Naeko, and her annoyance boiled a few degrees hotter as she beheld his amusement. Ah. So, you knew of this too, then? Well, master, Im just spending time getting to know my junior brother. He wanted to show me all that he learned from you. The expression on his face flattened. And figure out something he hadnt. And did you? Her gaze was upon Avo again, but he did not reply to her immediately. Instead, he was taking in the sheathand Soulhe sacrificed to taste the miracle empowering her blow. Secondhand learning disgusted her, and it was increasingly becoming the ghouls favorite habit. But that was well. As time passed, all sense of mirth faded from him, leaving quiet focus. Now it was Zeins turn to smile. Oh. Was he still unable to comprehend her miracle? Or was it something else? Was the Agnos in there with him, whispering revelations that he did not wish to hear. She looked upon Naeko once more. You. The ghoul. Veylis. Truly, I am cursed. Cursed to make mistakes with my disciples. I cannot say which of you has disappointed me the most. Osjohn, probably, Naeko deadpanned. Considering you didnt even mention that poor son of a sow. Ah. Yes. A bit embarrassing. But the boy had only been with them so shortly. His initial show of potential was commendable, and yet, she recalled so little of what came after. Ah. He just never had his chance. Naekos stare turned cold. Not with you. But Marus gonna make a corpse of him before this is over. That made Zein snicker. Your lackey? I still dont know what you see in the boy. He is no blade. All rage, no skill, no love for the ways of war. He is unlike you and I. Yeah, Naeko said. He nodded his agreement as he looked away. Good for him. His response offended Zein more than any other insult. He was evading her. Stares and sneers like a child unable to face a parent. She trained him better. She honed him into a blade, and yet he found the urge to behave like a victim. What worth was her teachings. I tire of this. She pointed her glaive at Avostill staring down at the body. He, I understand. I even might respect. But he is an enemy. You... what do you want from me, Samir? An apology? My aid? Is it because we didnt include you? Is it because you feel Ive abandoned you. I dont feel like you abandoned me, you did abandon me. You. Veylis. Everyone else I knew from before is gone. He shrugged his arms in an exhausted gesture. I wanted you to be there. If not before, then after. I wanted someone to still tell me what to do. Give me a war to fight. Give me a reason to kill. She considered him again and let out a quiet sigh. He yearned for the past. In some ways, she empathized. We cannot have what we used to. Not unless we win. Not unless you win, Naeko replied. Or you, Zein replied. He gave her an odd look as she rolled her eyes. Enough playing the slave. Who stands your equal in power and skill? Who rules Jaus hounds in his stead. You are no bystander. You have as much claim to the Ladder as any of us. She glanced at Avo. More than some, even. We can stand together, if that is your desire. Stand now. Like you didnt before. Yes, Zein said, shamelessly. You are different now. Not whole. But returning. You are who you need to be to best her. That was an outright lie on her part. She saw the falsehood of her words reflect in the flash of pain passing behind her eyes. You still love her. Naeko just nodded. I do too. Not like I do. Not the same way. That was true. Veylis was always her fathers daughter, but her nature, her way of being? That would always and forever belong to Zein. The heart of Jaus, the mind of Thousandhand. What a formidable union. What a dreadful foe. You got any idea what he might say to us if he were here? Naeko suddenly asked. Zein fell silent. She turned her mind away from such thoughts reflexively, pulling a handful of numb from her past experiences. She was but an inch away from swallowing the pills when she saw the despair on Naekos face. What now? Thats how you do it, huh? Naeko said, monotone. How you get from day to day. Killing and drugs. All the rest of yous been lost, too? Shit, Zein. Youre right. You are me. I am you. Were not getting out of this, are we? Something inside her twisted painfully. It went away when she tossed the drugs down the back of her throat. Flatness scythed through turmoil as her emotional affect flattened and all she could feel was whittled to a sharp blissful edge. Relief left her as a breath, and as she blinked, she found Avo staring at her. The cut, he said. Its a part of you. Part of your Heaven left in place. Its going to keep cycling back into the past until you vent. Or your Heaven ceases in some way. Oh, she said, dully impressed. You did realize after all. Have you claimed the Agnos? Or is she whispering to you right now? Teaching you the ways of thaumaturgy. Both. And more. Its plain on the patterns. Plain on the patterns? What? We cant fix the Gatekeeper directly, There was no hesitancy in Avos voice. Not if Veylis shares a canon with her mother. Naeko furrowed his brows. Why? Because the cut is connected to her. It is a part of her. Part of her turning the present to the past. It wont stop turning until.... until... Another realization was coming over the ghoul. His perception snapped to Zein. Thats how shes been able to access the Liminal Frames of her citizens. Thats why her Paths could emerge from them. Shes infested them already. Marked her chosen with temporal cuts. And the Gatekeeper, Zein helpfully finished. She let out a casual shake of the head. Dont tell me you revealed yourself before the Gatekeeper, plague? Kae, Avo grunted. Fuck, Naeko hissed. He speared his hand into his pocket and yanked hard. Both of them promptly vanished, and Zein simply chuckled. Poor, poor plague. He still lacked the measure of his true foe. That was going to change soon. Chapter 26-4 Wounds of the Past… Chapter 26-4 Wounds of the Past... Many things begin with a wound, a death, a grievance, a loathing, an obsession. The wounds we inflict on others, and that are inflicted on us, echo through the world. Reverberate. They tie us together with the rest of existence in ways that most cannot fathom, most cannot see. But I have seen, and I have cut, and I have been cut, and with the alignment of damage, I was shown how to wound existence itself. There are those that say that though we wear the vessels of fallen gods, all we do will be ephemeral. For we are mortal in passing, mortal in habit, and so too will our comings and passings be mortal in fashion. I disagree.Ne/w novel chapters are published at novelhall.com I disagree with all these notions. They stare at things from parochial perspectives. All that we do echo onwards onto the future. All that we do is an act of eternity, because it pushes something else, it deviates the pattern. All is always changed. Because you chose to move something. Because you chose to kill someone; save someone; or do nothing. The pattern is always in motionthe question is who will affect it. My mother showed the beginnings of this truth to me when I watched her part a god. She reminded me once more when denying my final his final reward. I learned from this. I have understood this. And now I perceive through my actions, through my cuts, through my deeds eternal. The splitting of time is more than just a wound. It is a window. It is a passage. It is me. In this, the paint and the painter are one and the same. -Veylis Avandaer 26-4 Wounds of the Past... C[Kae]C Kae''s footsteps slowed as she ventured further into the depths of Scale. The glowering red and oppressive heat that accompanied the vents and Rendsinks vanished, peeled by shifting bricks that reconstructed her surroundings with each step. A wall of techno-thaumic reactors greeted her, exhaling miracle after miracle, a barrier before the Gatekeepers final threshold. In another life, in another time, the sheer thaumaturgic brilliance on display would have overwhelmed her, would have compelled her to delve into its secrets. Scale was an achievement of true artistry: a realm made possibly by a union of Guilds and cultures under Jaus. Then, without conflicting masters and with loosened restrictions from Voidwatch, the Agnosi were committed to a single goalmaking an unassailable fortress crowned upon the apex of New Vultun. Unassailable. Such was the hope. Hope is a brittle thing. Easily broken. Broken, like the Gatekeeper was, though its looming presence leaned down upon her, though its manifestation expanded another plane from its being, splitting existence itself into layers, unraveling the cavernous ceiling above to present shimmering trails of arcing starlight. As she entered the threshold of the Gateekeeper, she felt her Domain of Space vibrating as she found herself entering a plane within a plane. Most Domains of Space and Geometry would not be capable of such a feat. The fabric of base realitys structure was already being strained by one manipulation. A second had too high a risk for paradox. Yet, the Gatekeeper was no meager golem, not mass-produced ontologic for war. Call it a prototype. Call it a masterpiece. Call it by its true nature: a created being Ensouled with Ninth Sphere Frame festooned to the very apex of the city. Kae swallowed as she felt its mass. It was pressure ineffable. It was power beyond reckoning. But still was it broken. And still was it important beyond measure. Important for the coming of the Ladder; important for her coming trial; important because it gazed and burned falsehood; important because it kept Noloth and the Deep Nether contained; important because she was going to help fix it. She, Avo, and the Agnosi presenta group led by a man she knew a lifetime ago: Jakuta Ajayi. Her mentor, the High Agnos, a man she would have once considered father and friend. But not no more. At best, he was a victim, at worst he was a traitor, and now she had no idea what to feel of him beyond discomfort and bitterness. ''I won''t let anything happen to you, Kare said, noticing her slowness. Kae simply nodded meekly. All the bravado she felt along the way vanished, her confidence spiked and dipped. She tried to draw on her anger to strengthen her bones, but her nerves were as if a damaged aero, spiking high and diving low. Exhaustion ruled her mind before the work could even begin. But the task could be delayed no more. A war was coming. And they needed every advantage they could claim. That, and she was here. Wanted to be here. Demanded it. She had to face him him and her past. This would be nothing before what it took to stand against the Guilds. The future was coming. There was no escape. There was a Seeker on call. He washe didnt know the specifics of what I was doing. Thought I was just testing someone on his Frame. He got his cadre together, and they managed to pacify what I unleashed. But I was done. I was certainly going to be executed for this. My act of hubris. My breach of the oaths. Yet... that didnt happen. He offered another arraignment to me. He was Clan DRongo. Yes. He offered. I accepted. And no one remembered what went wrong. I gave them a way in that day. I lied to Voidwatch. I helped them bury so many truths. I was spared death or... or... but I was theirs from that moment on. I was theirs. Kae almost understood, but the absurdity of the situation made her laugh. A expression of confusion and hurt swallowed his features, but she simply shook her head. Ive seen that done, she said as she looked towards Avo. The resurrection of a god. Ive seen it done. The Stillborn project. It goes beyond all our wildest dreams. It exceeds us. What? he said, not comprehending. She committed a small act of revenge then: she didnt share the knowledge with him. The knowledge of her glory. The knowledge of her masterpiece exceeding his, being that which will restore the Gatekeeper. He would discover Avos nature when the restoration and be horrified. Be shamed. Be awed. And then he will gaze upon her with true jealousy and despair, knowing that his pride, his dream, was dwarfed by hers. Enough, Kae said, Let us get to work. +Avo.+ The information came to her with a single thought. A window of memories played in her cog-feed, and she projected the details via phantoms, studying the cuts the High Seraph left in the Gatekeepers nebula. When... how did your mind get mended? Jakuta asked. She simply shook her head. She didnt give him that answer either. He was a curious man, and she was going to starve him. This, she was never going to let him know. Tell me about the state of the Gatekeeper. I see many cuts. They are counter-chronological damage? Yes, Jakuta said. We made many attempts to restore the Gatekeeper. Rendsinks. Adjustments to its canons. We adapted its architecture to have more symmetry with the patterns of time in hopes of acceptable backlash to supplant the damage, but the rifts to the past remained. Is it a micro-rupture? Cant be. We drained all the Rend more times than I can count. Its a miracle. That, I am certain of. Canon, Kae said, wincing. A call to her attention shifted her focus across her Ghost-Link. Avo was looking down at the body of his decoy. A clean split parted the sheath, but upon their ontology, the damage was inflicted solely on the Heaven itself. A bifurcation parallel to the cyclers. She compared the harm Zein inflicted to the swarm of slashes left by Veylis. Oh. Oh, I see. See what? Jakuta asked. Several critical segments of the Heaven are crippled. Theyre tied to specific canons. Canons we can no longer update without risking severe damage. But the cycler is spared. Yes, Jakuta said. I suspect the High Seraph wished to keep the Gatekeeper intact for her own use. He didnt even know how right he was. I dont think we can fix this by simple updates. Not with so much of it permanently damaged. Have you tried putting in another Heaven? A flash of frustration emerged from Jakuta. Yes. Of course. We even fully rebuilt the Heaven once. Attached it to another cycler and accepted the damage on what is present. But it was like the Gatekeeper remembered how damaged it was supposed to be. Thats why I suspected this to be a problem of cognitive mending rather than thaumaturgical restoration. Purely temporal wounds, I think, Kae muttered. Her attention was in two places now. The first with Jakuta, going over the Gatekeeper itself, the second with Avo, watching as Soulfire gushed from the line Zein traced across the tapestry. The patterns revealed far more than human senses could ever perceive. The damage was absolute. The ontological shape of Avos decoy was split. Would remain split from present to future from a wound turning their substance backward into the oblivion of the past. It took Avo shielding her mind from observing the nothingness for her to continue this study, and even then, he wards rattled more than once. As she utilized his perception of the tapestry to her advantage, she felt her veins grow cold. It wasnt just a wound left, but a new pattern. One that dictated the passage of time. An overriding pathway that commanded others onward unto the coming future. Zein hadnt just split time. She was continuously turning time backward. Using her Heaven to do so. And if that was true, if Veylis cannon worked the same way... Oh, gods, Kae said. Jakuta... Veylis left parts of herself in the Gatekeeper. Her miracles, her Heaven, its scarred upon another. Scarred? Jakuta said, eyes widening. Scarred. A third voice intruded into their conversation. A voice composed by legions of others. When it spoke, the Gatekeeper screamed. Quite correct, Agnos. Well done. The fuckC That was as far as Maru got. Suddenly, without present or warning, he came apart in an eruption of viscera, shredded by unseen hands. Kare barely called out before she suddenly vanished from the world. Above, the galaxy came asunder, as thousands of tiny cuts began to bleed writhing tendrils of gold, as existence groaned under the intrusion of another weight. Kaes stomach dropped to her feet. Something was wrong. Jakuta was stumbling backward. Something was terribly wrong. +Avo+ Three things happened moment: Naeko and Avo returned; just in time for a thoughtwave detonation to sweep out from Jakuta; just in time for reality to tear open under Kae, for an unseen power to pull her down under coursing currents of time. Chapter 26-5 …Are Paths to the Present Chapter 26-5 ...Are Paths to the Present Order within, chaos without. Every Godclad who wishes to say one should live these principles. You must know and have perfect control over yourself, your own canons, domains, Heavens, augmentations, phantasmics. And you must never make them clear to your enemies. Always change. Always adapt your structure. Always be inscrutable. Contrarily, you must inflict as much chaos on your enemy as you can. Inflict confusion. Force them to react. More problems. More problems! More problems! No end to the flames they must put out! Make every turn a dilemma! War is not a dance, but it is a duet and not one of romance. Your song must rule theirs, or be ruled otherwise. -Ying Yang Wei, the Stormsparrow 26-5 ...Are Paths to the Present C[Infacer]C {I told you he wasnt human.} The Infacer chuckled. Veylis didnt respond. Poor girl. Silence was her way of sulking. Even with her power, she still despised making any mistakes. That was what they appreciated the most about her: how many humans despised the ape inside them? The Gatekeeper had once again exceeded its purpose. Secrets leaked over from its wounds, revealing truths most delightful to Veylis. Once, the marks she made were but a means to access the Heaven of Truth with the return of the tower. To sunder it totally, claim its Heaven, and let flow the tides of Noloth when the time was nigh. In the meantime, it served as a fantastic peephole. Or did. They wouldnt be able to hide that much longer now. Not that it mattered. They got more than they expected out of this affair. Tides of progressing time pulled Kae Kusanade from the grasp of reality. A horrified scream sang out from her as she found herself descending in the Paths. But she did not come alone. Her mentorOri-Thaums pet High Agnoswas also taken along with his aides. Paladins Kare Kitzuhada and Maru Sandrupal were left slain but untouched besides. There wasnt the need to force the Chief Paladin into the throes of foolishness. As for the Dreamer? The Famine of Defiances finest work? The Infacer watched as Soulfire detonated out from their being after the thoughtwave struck them. It was like gunpowder kissed by a spark. What a peculiar Embodiment they epitomized: an Overheaven of Conceptualization. Fascinating. But now the Infacer had a measure of their shape, and proper countermeasures could be created. A pity. It would have been refreshing to battle the Dreamer in ignorance. To learn his measure through repeated engagements. But such was war. The pendulum always swung. Rifts of chronology sealed themselves, golden seams zipping back together, reverberating to become opaque boxes around the Agnosi. Jakuta was a dazed animal, trapped and confused as to where he was. His inferiors faired no better. Kae Kusanade, however, deviated from expectations. Her sheath unraveled into a yawning chasm of swirling space, water, and relative geometries. Bottled maelstrom expanded within Veylis Paths, and trails of gold peered down at the Agnos with curiosity. The girl pressed at the edges of her time-wrought cage, striking out to create more space for herself, lashing in hopes of finding a domain she could backlash. {Hm,} the Infacer murmured. {Shes Ensouled. Imagine that. Well. I suppose it is easy to breach a vow when it has already been broken against you. Would you not agree, Veylis.} The High Seraphs silence lasted a moment longer. And then a melodic series of laughs emanated from existence itself, ringing forth from a cacophony of noises, from a collective of voices. A ghoul. Our newest adversary, our Burning Dreamer, is a ghoul... {Nothing special about that,} the Infacer reminded. A breath passed through the Paths. Veylis offered her agreement: Indeed. What more are people than apes, after all. What matters is that he stood. He rose. He became. Despite it all. This only makes the threat he poses truer. The symbol he represents brighter. It will be a valorous deed when we claim him. And her mother was leaking into her again. The shadow of legacy lingered deeper than blood. {Focus on our new guests first. We have much to learn.} Yes, Veylis said. But though they were in alignment, a hint of hesitation seized her, kept her from shutting a slight tear in the Gatekeeper entirely. Oh. Right. How could she resist catching a glimpse of him. Another human weakness. Another human novelty. She spoke little of him after their ugly parting during the second war, but so often has her perception strayed, so often have her Paths flowed past his place of residence. Veylis Avandaer lingered in place, her gaze, like eyes gleaming within a slit throat, peering at one she still yearned to claim across the threshold of time. And just the same, from beyond the point of her receding grasp, he stared back. *** +No!+ he snarled inwardly. Savage frustration imploded within him. +Mine! Shes mine! Cant have her! Need her! Was going to make things right for her!+ He was making things right for her. That why he let her come here. They were going to repair the Gatekeeper. They were going to prepareto turn things against the Guilds for the trial. Instead, they handed her over to Veylis. Just let her be stolen. [Avo,] Kaes template said, her voice quivering, shaken, but anchoring his focus. Reshape your mind again. Use Draus. All his want screamed for him to do otherwise. It took all his will to choose what was right. His cognitive shell rebuilt itselfhis ego turned external, faced the world for what it was. Rage and agitation still burned within him, but it was a cold fire. Something more known than felt. Something that didnt deprive him of focus. Carefully, he extracted himself from the Gatekeeper. Examined its scars in detail. The wounds. They were pressed together again, but present. Just thin crevices rather than open gorges. Part of Veylis was still here. He could still use this somehow. But how? How would he be able to do anything to the Gatekeeper without her knowing in advance? And even if he could force open the Paths, how was he going to get Kae back? With all that he inadvertently revealed to the Gatekeeperto Veylis and the Infacer? With the sheer difference in power between them? How could he stop the High Seraph? Not alone. Zein. Naeko. He detached from the Gatekeeper and sought Naekobut the Chief Paladin was gone too. Vanished. Their accretion failed to register even as Avo filtered through Scales thoughtwave frequencies. But where a common Necro would falter, where most would find themselves without options, Avo continued. Avo created his own angles, found a connection through the symmetry of memory alone. ->DEFINEMENT: HYSTERIA (XII) - I AM A MOMENT ABSOLUTE. I GRIEF-CONSUMED, JOY-DROWNED, ADDICTION-CLAIMED, RAGE-UNFETTERED. I AM A SHARED MOMENT ACROSS MOMENTS. I AM A FORCE BUILDING ON FORCE. Though he never penetrated the true depths of Naekos mind, some scars could not be hidden. Some emotions were too immense. Some moments marred an ego eternally. Veylis left more than one set of wounds to follow. Avos control over time was wanting; his mastery over mind was unrivalled. Naeko might as well have left a blood trail in the real in seconds, Avo narrowed the Nether down to a single moment, a single sequence of memories. Why, godsdamn you! I loved you. I still love you! I would have done anythingCwe could have justC And so, words from the past gave him a path to the presenta chance to get at Veylis. Naekos signature emerged in the DeepNav, blinking rapidly down the Tiers, across New Vultun, heading for the border. Avo left a submind at Scale to convene with the Paladins when they returned. His base mind pursued the Chief Paladin. He would continue to put on a play of desperation for his enemies. He would use their perception to his advantagemake him seem like he was floundering; yes, sprinkle in some planned mistakes. Feed their confidence. Once more, the game had changed, and his being struck out in a myriad of vectors. As it goes. There was only one thing to do: keep going. +Going to get you back,+ Avo said, offering a new promise to Kaes template as he triggered her session over and over. Inside his Soulscape, the Agnos was an inch away from breaking down, but she held herself intact, nodding demurely as other templates of the cadre gathered around her. Avos next thoughtcast went wide. +Avo to cadre: Kae has been taken. Veylis Avandaer has our Agnos. Prepare for emergency debriefing. Going after Chief Paladin. Hes leaving New Vultun. Heading out into the Sunderwilds. Going to try and bring him into the fold.+ The responses he got ranged from Chambers extreme horror to Draus cold casual acceptance. +Avo,+ Cas said. +Veylis got a lot more than Kae. Shes got her memories. Her mind. Our location. The way we operate.+ +I know,+ Avo said. +One problem at a time.+ *** C[Kae]C +Let me out!+ Kae cried. The world was pitch black around her. Pitch black and cramped. She manifested her Maelstromer a mere moment after she felland it was futile. She struck and pressed against the walls, but they did not give. They did not break. She hammered against surfaces in the air, striking out using fists, knees, elbows, and kicks. Her efforts granted her little more than faint thuds. All the while, she struggled against the suffocating presence of the High Seraph. This place she resided in was a snapshot of reality reconstructed from the patterns of time itself. Time, commanded solely by the High Seraph. Time, that could be turned backward at any moment, and that could cast Kae from existence into oblivion if her captor so willed it. And she clearly didnt. She wanted Kae alive. The realization filled the Agnos with building chills rather than any relief. What did they want with her? What were they going to do to her? Alone in the dark, the silence lasted anything from minutes to hours. She couldnt tell. She spent so long with the cadre chattering away in the back of her head that the quiet itself was torture. Any attempt she made to contact Avo using her Auto-Seance was interrupted by a targeted disruption. They were still watching her. Kept her isolated. Alone. Her terror kept her from weeping, from reacting in any manner she considered too extreme, but the pressure inside her was only building always building. She was teetering on the brink when the box holding her suddenly vanished, dissolving away to blinding sunshine and shrill noises of nature. The shift in extremes left her whiplashed. Nausea overtook her. Nausea sent her tumbling to her knees, her fingers sinking into the softness of soil. As her vision settled, she found the gaze settling on green blades of grass, and a looming shadow that drew closer. From the shade cast alone, Kae could tell the approaching figure was far larger than her. Larger than anyone she had ever known. Spiraling limbs turned around the giants contours like a wheel, and when they planted their foot next to Kae, her shivering expression reflected by a gold-coated boot hovering atop a burning wheel. Agnos Kae Kusanade. The speakers Standard was accentless, but definitely related to Zein. Their voice was deeper, yet their tone was softer, and trailing behind every word was a reverberation, a tinge of power leaking through even now. It pleases me to finally meet you. Let me offer you my greatest gratitude: it seems your work on Project Stillborn has exceeded all our expectations. Including your own. Slowly, Kae looked up, squinting as the sheer brilliance of the giantess blinded her. H-High Seraph. The master of Highflame extended a languid hand. That is only for those under my cause. We are esteemed enemies, though you are my prisoner. I grant you the right to call me by my name: Veylis Avandaer. Chapter 26-6 An Atrocity in Mercy Chapter 26-6 An Atrocity in Mercy Kill me. Just kill me. Why... why wont you... I told you before, Karakan. I told you. Im trying to find myself. Im trying. And I still havent done it yet. Now. Lets start again. [Karakan sobbing] -Former Sister Karakan and Samir Naeko, (circa 201 P.F.) 26-6 An Atrocity in Mercy C[Kae]C It was as if the daystar itself burned within Veylis Avadaer. Brightness poured from her being. Brightness outlined her in shadow. Brightness kept Kaes gaze from ever gaining true insight. Stand. Veylis reached down. Her presence loomed. The Agnos flinched. Fingersmetal, flesh, and something elseclosed around Kaes arm, but the High Seraph pulled with measured control. Her strength could not be denied, but more significant was the gentleness. There was no intent to harm. At least, not yet. Dazed by her circumstances, with mind whirling, Kae found herself directed via a hand planted against her back. The size of Veylis palm nearly encompassed her entire upper torso. There is much I have to show you, Agnos. A great deal of work awaits us. It took a few shuddering heartbeats for Kae to finally heed the words spoken. Us. Indeed. You. I. The Infacer. Your fellow Agnosi. The city itself. It is a task left undonea task I hoped you would accomplish before meddling hands tore you await from certain glory. II dont understand. The Heaven of Love, Veylis stated calmly. Its fault tears wider every day. Its final collapse will see our hopes derailed before any dream can be realized. Surely, you must agree that this is of highest concern. Kaes mind whirled. The Heaven of Love. The rash. She spent so long straining her mind about its collapse, surrendered nights to sleeplessness desiring to be the source of its restoration. She even used it as an opportunity to test the Stillborn. To see if potential progress could be made through her potent new project. She assumed her actions were subtle. But here Veylis was, speaking as if it all was planned. And perhaps it was. Perhaps this was all her desire forelaid tracks born from her Paths. The High Seraphs brilliance dimmed as she allowed Kae to gaze upon her surroundings. Flourishing flows of fecund vines sprouted clusters of fruits around her. Veins of green stretched across rich black soil, coiled up and around her as if beanstalks and tree trunks. Soft light slipped through the branch-shrouded foliage above, and Kae found herself walking along a dirt path through a verdant groove scented with nature and petrichor. Far cry from the prison she was kept in. Where am I? A place from my past, Veylis answered. A garden I quite enjoyed. Before I burned it. The Agnos eyes widened. It was tied to a god. A treasure to a decadent culture. Sometimes, the loss of something beautiful inflicts a most useful wound. A wound you can use to turn a people in against themselves if you implicate the right parties. Kae had no words. They emerged from a clearing where two towering stalks trailed off to a clearing of rolling hills. As they reached its summit, Kae paused briefly as her breath caught in her throat. It is a perfect recreation, Veylis said, extending a long arm to gesture at the structure before them. You will find all you need present within its confines. It is exactly as you rememberwithout difference in detail. All it lacks, however, are those you knew. But Kae barely heard the High Seraphs words. All her attention was consumed by a shimmering dome of sparkling glass held up by columns and walls of glossy vivianite. The front gates were exactly as she remembered them to be overly tall for their width. Antennas jutted from building leftmost corner, blinking periodically. Memories swelled inside her. Memories of another life, another time. Of friends and coworkers. Of endless tastes, missed lunches, late dinners, and hidden whispers between her and a lover that should have never been. Dawton. Her team. Her work. This building once contained all she treasured. All she lost. And then the High Seraphs words reverberated back to her. The loss of something beautiful inflicts a most useful wound. Did you know? Kae said, forcing the words out. Did you know what was going to happen to me? Toto the others. There came a brief lull of silence. Prescience is not omnipotence. Missing variables are a bane to both our practices, Agnos. A strange thought occurred to Kaethe High Seraphs reluctance to admit fault reminded her of Avo. Gods, she wanted to wake from this. She wanted this to be just a delusiona dream. Could you have stopped them. If I was not distracted. Perhaps. The Strix used your mother well. Used all he could quite well. I will have to grant him my favor should the Infacer ever manage to complete the Famines reassembly. A crackle sounded with the wind. {I heard that.} You were meant to. I was not the one who promised a full set of Nolothic counter-nodes ready by onset of this century. {Priorities cause delays.} And incompetence is always paired with excuses. A sigh rumbled from all around Kae. {Impatience is a terrible trait for one to have. Would you not agree, Agnos Kusanade?} Veylis made a noise that hinted at the rolling of her eyes. Away, mind. To your tasks. Speak to your new friend if you desire to waste your time doing something vaguely useful. Provoke him if you can. Give him an opening he can exploit somehow. A way into the Paths. *** C[Avo]C +What! Fuck that! We know where that Infacer fuck is! We can get to Highflame. Why are we sitting around here, holding on, sucking our own dicks while the High Cuntess does who the hells knows what to Kae. We gotta go get her.+ +Chambers, consang,+ Cas muttered. +FUCK OFF! Dont touch me! Dont fuckingwhat are we doing? Why are we just waiting around talking. We need to go now! Now! Now!+ +Chambers. Get your shit together.+ Draus voice was empty of emotion. Empty of anything besides focus. +We need a plan of attack. Aint no sense+ +I never took you to be a fucking half-strand coward FUCK! Huh. I thought you werent scared of shit, Draus. I thought you wanted a real war! All talk! All you are is fucking talk! Is this why they threw you out! Cause you were too much of a glassjaw for the other Regs to put up with.+ +Chambers, come on,+ Marlowe winced. +No! No!+ A direct cast passed over into Avo from Draus. +We gonna do something about him?+ +Only do that if he tries something that might get him killed. Hes human. Hes venting. Hes scared. Not going to deny him these feelings. Already made enough mistakes today.+ Naeko was moving fast across the Sunderwilds. The man cleared the distance of New Vultun in secondssnapped right past the border; skipped across existence using patterns of rain striking soil or leaping out from a clash between struggling beasts. He tore across the horizon like a charging cataclysm, ripping ruptures wider, implacable in flesh and Frame. Avo kept pace like a Necrojack: exploiting alignments, breaching asymmetries, leverage the patterns to keep him ahead ACTIVATING CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY... ->EDICT _EXO-PARACOSM_ APPLYING DOMAIN OF (SPEED) ->CANON: SYNC-LAG - ARK MOVES FASTER THAN ALL COGNITIVE ENTITIES IT IS GHOST-LINKED WITH. EVERY MIND TETHERED TO THE ARK INCREASES REND ACCUMULATION. THE COGNITIVE CAPACITY OF EACH MIND AFFECTS REND ACCUMULATION. ->MORTALITY: SEVERED TETHERS INCUR THAUMIC BACKLASH (5%) ->DEFINEMENT: EMPATHY (XII) - Asymmetry is not ignorance. Alien is only a concept of relativity. As I can be myself and another, so too can I think as another while being myself. All that they are, I can encompass. All that they think, I can conceptualize. Memory is memory. Knowledge is knowledge. Perception is perception. His experiences came together, allowed him to root himself in simpler mindsexploit them to boost his speed exponentially. This worked especially well when you mentally tethered yourself to a hawk that lived in starlight, exploited the absoluteness of mind to supersede the pace of daylight. Claiming the mind of the creature, Avo used it in tandem with his own abilities like a slingshot. Where the tapestry allowed, he rode within its consciousness, directed its path. When existence proved inimical, he shrouded it in his Soulscape, adapted his ontology to pass through. Through such a manner, he kept pace with ease while also eluding Naekos notice. +How is Highflame activity? Any overt movements?+ Avo asked, speaking to Draus. +Nothin special. Theyre still holdin.+ A knot of thoughts rolled around in Draus mind. +You know were blown, right? If the Infacer could crack you the first time, Kaes probably peeled apart already. Theyll know everything she knows. We need to change everything. Go dark. Rebuild.+ +Perhaps. Enclave is currently the greatest risk. Will think about what to do with the population. What about our assets. Did you extract Essus yet?+ +Keepin an eye on him. He wants to stay in place. See things done. Said he was tired of running.+ Avo already knew that. It didnt make things any less frustrating. They convened briefly after Kaes capture. All the cadres operations were to be halted for nowpending rearrangement. Only his subminds were moving across the city. Aegis was hosting an emergency convergence of their own in anticipation of his declaration. He doubted the matter of losing Kae and exposing his operations to Veylis would grant him any glory. His failure to anticipate Veylisto anticipate just how she was able to emerge from anothers Framecost them dearly. They needed Kaehe owed promises to her. Now, her fate belonged to the High Seraph, the cadre was reeling, and the only power capable of contending with Veylis Avandaer was storming across the frayed world of Idheim, headed Jaus knows where. Then, there was the Infacer. They were playing Stormjumpers again, when Avo last checked. Sending a submind to take a peek once more, he found them still there, waiting aboard the dirigible. Just waiting, their avatar with legs crossed, staring off the top deck, whistling happy tunes. Bastard. Sitting. Waiting for him. Taunting him. An animated mountain roared in the distance. When it rose, it loomed high, shrouding the curve of the horizon, the coiling tendrils of the Sunderwilds above, the light of day itself. A cloud of palms fell. Reality flattened. A blink thereafter, the living mountain was flatter than plain. The chase continued a few minutes longer. Crossing over a spiraling river, Avo released the light-made hawk and let it dart to where Naeko was halted. At the very center of the winding waters, he found himself staring at an island made from a serpentsa vast, living nest, where snakes composed all matter, scales moving in a mesmerizing pattern. They parted as a channel for Naeko. Parted to reveal an opening in the middle of the writhing landmass, a slick bunker revealed itself, opening to the command of a thoughtcast from Naeko. Articulations and wheels spun as the sides of the bunker opened like a flap. Its insides flickered alight with descending lights installed along a descending stair. There, at the edge of the entrance, Naeko stopped. Naeko hesitated. Naeko hugged himself, shifted the angle of his body. He was half turned away. His mind wailed, and Hysteria received flashing images of a womantortured beyond description, her screams feeding his pleasure and self-loathing in mutual measure. Naeko wanted to turn back. Naeko needed to descend. +Find myself,+ Naeko echoed. +I gotta use her... I gotta use her to find myself.+ The impasse broke; the man entered his bunker, and high above, a sear of light vanished into nothing thought and airAvo following before the snakes could return. Chapter 26-7 Find Yourself Chapter 26-7 Find Yourself You are finished with this. I will not have you... leaving while youre on duty toto commit torture. Naeko! What is this! What have you been doing? How long+ None of your godsdamned business. Naeko. If you want to be one of my PaladinsC Lets get one thing clear, Osjane. Im not yours. I was never yours. Jaus. Veylis. Zein. All of them come before youwill always come before you. And none of them had a problem with what I was doing, so Im gonna keep doing it. Shes mine. Mine to hurt. Mine to break and put back together. Mind to give to the dogs for their fun. Mine. You try touching her again, and Ill show you who I am. Ill show you who I am... Ill show you... ...Youve shown me. I hear you. But is this who you will always want to be? ...Get out. Let me finish. Just let me finish. Ill report in after. I do what you say after. Just let me have this. -Chief Paladin Osjane Thousand and Paladin Samir Naeko (Circa 79 P.F.) 26-7 Find Yourself Avo found the woman first. If she could still be called that. Recent memories flashed through his mind, moments plucked from Naekos thoughts via Hysteria. A history of pain had been lovingly inflicted on the womans ravaged body. Lines of symmetry extended in Avos cog-feed. He connected wounds to moments recalled. Tortures inflicted to pleasure received and hatred sated. In the very depths of the bunker, submerged in a tank of midnight rain and with tubes running down her throat, a mutilated torso greeted Avo, writhing in horror as the lights to her prison flickered alight. Metal spikes had been driven into the stumps where her limbs were. Most of her pelvic region was encased in some kind of contraption that sprouted all manner of jutting needles. Her head was left intact. Short brown hair. Round, rosy cheeks. Blue, bloodshot eyes that blinked too much, looked around so desperately, a mind that wailed and wailed and wailed so loud Avo felt her raw terror knocking against his wards. Sister Karakan was more effigy than person. More sections were missing from her ego than her body. Sequences collapsed into each other, and her traumas contaminated almost all the remaining mem-data as well. The restorative waters kept her alive, a drifting body whimpering and crying, mind a constant howl, yearning for final end. [Jaus,] Shotins template winced at the sight. The moment made him think of his sisterthink what Highflame inflicted on her. [Fuck. Godsdammit. Avo. Give her what she wants. This is disgusting] [This is useful,] Green River interrupted. [Claim her mind. She is of use to us.] The two new templates shared a stare thereafter, Shotin one of offense, Green River that of cold indifference. The fact Karakan was still sane enough after centuries of torture told Avo two things. First was that Naeko dedicated significant resources to ensuring her biological and mental preservation. She was still sane enough to feel fear; her body was still composed enough to feel pain. That meant the Chief Paladin had spent time mending her as well, culturing her for future bouts. It was a sign that he valued her. A twisted sign. But something that could potentially be exploited. +Good fucking lord,+ Cas breathed, choosing the wrong moment to peek across Avos cog-feed. His horror caused several other members in the cadre to share in his mistake. {Oh, Naeko,} Calvino sighed. {There are so many other ways. There are so many things we could have done for you. If you just asked.} +He doesnt want to,+ Avo replied. Now, more than any other moment, was his kinship with the Chief Paladin the closest. Previously, there was pity. Understanding. A want to reach out and understand. But this was something that appealed to a ghoul. This was something that nourished the cruelty of powerof being able to dominate another so utterly and break them at your leisure. That the nature of being a monster. And so was it the nature of being a man. +Trying to find rightness in the pain. She was his highest catharsis. She remains his highest catharsis. A mind knows what it knows. Holds on to pleasure. Flees from loss.+ She was the other accretion down here. The only other accretion aside from Naeko. Locating her was a trifling thing, and with the Chief Paladin still forty meters above, rooms between, and minutes behind, Avo had a chance to delve into Naekos past further. Understand him better. He was going to be essential for facing Veylis, the Guilds, controlling Zein. Saving Kae. If that was still possible. A splinter broke from Avo, passing into Karakans consciousness with contemptuous ease. In all the years Naeko kept her, he never grafted a Metamind on her. He never gave her any chance. Her thoughts were a whirlwind of chaos. Bouts of dislocation and hallucination were welcome respites to her, but they never lasted. The monster always pulled her back from the precipice of true release. Always reached into her mind forced the pieces back togetherbut never mended them. Her monster. Her victim. Her sacrifice. Experiences spilled over from Karakan into Avo. All she knew merged with his being. All her regrets, all her memories. He filtered through the caustic haze of her recollections, set Naeko as a critical point of data. *** C[Naeko]C A strange feeling tugged at Naeko as he entered the room, disturbing his already frantic state. He needed this. He needed something to break. Break something that deserved it. As the bolts on the titanium door unlocked, as the door slid open, he found himself agitated. There was a thunder in his veins; he wanted to tear into her now. When he finally laid eyes on the bitch floating in the tank, he all but tore across the room, fog-woven hands streaking forward, tearing off the top of the container to claim her. Bolts and plugs were ripped from her limb-stumps. Blood blossomed in the water, but her flesh reknit almost instantly. She so perfectly damaged. The healing kept her skin supple for the tearing, bones healed from the breaking, vocal cords intact for the screaming. He needed this. He needed this. What scant discipline remained in him snapped. Snarls and growls left his throat as Karakan crashed against the cold metal ground below. But as she landed, there came no cry. No sobs followed thereafter. As he pulled her from the ground, he expected the struggling to begin. She would kick, claw, fight. He planned to let her go, give her the hope of making it three rooms away. Give her a minute of hope before he broke it inside her again. Instead, he found himself gripping a limp shell of a woman. A limp shell that stared straight through him. Naeko sighed. Dammit. Fuck. Was she broken again? He paid good imps to have her mendedthey were supposed to be reliable. As glared into her eyes, he knew something wasnt right. It wasnt the distant expression of someone willing themselves to dissociate from their bodies, willing their minds somewhere elseanywhere else. No. She was staring straight at himinto him. Her expression was one of purest boredom. And was thatwas there a hint of pity there. Pity. What, Naeko growled. He held her up by her hair, weight less than a feather. What! What. Karakan continued staring at him. Her mind was flat, accretion stable, thoughstuff smooth. What the fuck was this? Where was the fearhe needed the fear. He struck her. Lightly. The jab into her left rib folded her overbroke a rib. But her stare was unblinking. Her expression didnt change. Karakan sighed. What was this? What the fuck was this? This sow. This bitch. Thisshe Scream, Naeko whimpered, pushing a thumb deeper into her right eye. His digit traveled further along the hot, gushing canal of her socket. Crimson welled around his finger, poured down her cheek. Still, she just stared at him, unimpressedno, pitying. Scream! He wrapped his hands around her neck as raw crawled over the edge of his vision. Come on. Hm. Judge me. Judge me now. Stare at me now. Look at me like Im still nothing. Like you just watched me scream all those ago. She obeyed. Her stare and expression changed. No more pity. No more boredom. Just haughty judgement and superiority. Just like that day. Exactly like that day. YOU FUCKING! Naeko lost himself. Fury took from him his words. All the world was crimson and hated. Only after the fourth thud did he realize he was hammering her skull against the ground, that his fists were bloodied, that her right eye socket had been caved in, that her jaw was missingtorn free at some point. Blood spurted from severed arteries along her throat. Karakan gurgled, but never lost the look. F-fuck, Naeko whimpered. Tank. He needed to heal her. He couldnt lose hernot now. She was all he had. His only way to find himself. Seizing her using his fog, he dunked her back in the water, kept her submerged as broken flesh was rejoined. She bobbed in the water momentarily, her back faced to him. Slowly, she turned, and as she did, her expression was back to boredom. Back to pity. BITCH! WHORE! SOW! He tore her through the glass this time, unable to even think about the shattering tank, unable to consider what he would do now that his water splashed across the floor. She impacted his open grip with nary even a gasp. The body was breaking, but why wasnt she? What? Whats wrong with you? Huh? What? Scream! Scream, you A sob escaped from him. Horror and shame formed a lump in her throat. He closed his eyes and did his best not to break. In front of her. He was her torturer, but he was breaking in front of her. Godsdammit. Godsdammit. He was worthless. He was worthless. He was worthless. The warmth of a palm pressed against his left cheek. Another hand caressed his right soon after. Naeko found himself devoid of thought, his skull filled with a ringing as he opened his eyes and faced Karakan again. There she remained, in his grip, but with compassion and pity more than anything else, touching him as she sighed. I see you now. I see you, Naeko. I see you. I wish I did sooner. All the power in existence couldnt stop Naeko from breaking thereafter. A scream came. Not from Karakan, but him. A noise of absolute anguish left him, and he reared his head back from her touch, and brought it down against her skull. She splattered apart against his face. She splattered. She died. And Naeko knew that he was always going to be lost. Chapter 26-8 Sympathy From a Monster Chapter 26-8 Sympathy From a Monster What have we here? What do I see? Two presences before me! Two paths of gold! One so angry. The other so strange. Could it be that this old mad monk has stumbled upon a path, of two Souls intersected on a point of change? [Laughter] -The Mad Monk Alsyim, Fallwalker 26-8 Sympathy From a Monster Naeko didnt know how long he spent beating the corpse. All he knew was that when sense finally returned to him, his fists were splashing gore and offal in blood-filled divots made by his fist, and that what remained of Karakan was little more than a smear. It was his breath that captured his focus. He was hyperventilating; sobbing; laughing. His body was shaking, and try as he could, he just couldnt stop it. What the fuck did he just do? Why did he kill her? What was he going to do now? What was he going to do? It took more effort than he thought possible to wrap his arms around himself, to fall sideways into the warmth of Karakans remains and just lay there. Whimpers escaped from him as tasted the blood, took in what he did. He was never going to find himself again. Never. She was his only true release. All Stormjumpers did was numb. There was no other expression that made him feel right. He couldnt make the world feeling right anymore. He just couldnt. Then came a whispered thought from the darkest recesses of his mind. It was a thought he ignored most days, it was a thought he could shrug aside despite all the inner hate that burned. Not today. Not this moment. And maybe never thereafter. It wouldnt be so hard for him to just end things. He had the means. He had the capability. Would it be so bad? A final moment of rest, of relief. No more feeling. No more of this pain. Just a long, deep sleep that wont end. Rest. True rest. Absolute rest. Doesnt sound so bad, he whispered to himself. But another memory lashed at himmade him flinch. With it came a score of aches along his sides, and Zeins enraged featuresthe first time he ever saw her truly mad, the first time he ever wondered if she was going to kill him. He had lost another spar to her. The thousandth in a day. His body was past its limits. His will was teetering on the brink. Veylis lay face-down not far from him, groaning as she clutched her chest. It was him against Zein. And he had nothing left. Nothing. He lowered his practice glaive. He let her strike him. She responded poorly thereafter; she kept going, breaking his arm, dislocating his shoulder, shattering his ribs, snapping his knee. Her blows blurred into a stream as she beat her displeasure, her disappointment, into him. She struck his throat when she heard him cry out for mercy. Afterward, when he lay there, chills claiming his body, his pooling piss the only heat he knew, she plucked him up by his neck and brought them close to precipice. They were training on mountain that day. The climb to the place of their practice was arduous. Veylis and Zein had completed it so easily, and he, new disciple with nothing but determination and rage, found himself wanting in every capacity. There, Zein made him face the edge and released him. Jump, then, she snarled at him. Jump. See if the skies weep for you. See if the clouds will reach down to catch you. See if the heavens will more you. Go! Do it! See! He didnt. He just knelt her, holding in his pain, holding in the urge to weep. All you have is your glaive, boy! And you betrayed it! You betrayed your skill, will, and power to me! Your enemy! The one that means you harm! What wrongness resides in you! What worth are you if your hate cannot be turned against your foes, if you cannot die with hate joyously pointed outward, teeth bared at the one who kills you? He didnt have an answer. Instead, he gazed down the edge, down along the narrow, winding path up the mountain, down the other cloud-piercing promontories besides, and the birds soaring with rising shrieks. Some part of him wanted to cast himself over, to spite Zein only once. But he couldnt. He refused. He had been wrong. The world wasnt right. They took his father from him. They took his world. He needed to take their worlds too. He groaned as he pushed himself away, crawled back toward Zein, spitting blood and hate at her. His decision was madefuck her. Hed get her bloody if it was the last And her joy followed as fast as her hate. She kicked his weapon back to him, and descended once more. Yes. Then why. Because I also know what you dont do to the world every day. What you dont do to the Guilds. We have symmetry, Naeko. But not alike. You are not a monster. I am a monster. You are angry. You are hurt. You are powerful. That is all. Naeko didnt believe. He turned to face the cage that once held Karakanthat kept her restored for each subsequent time he needed a release. Bullshit. Who else could have done all this? All his words earned from the ghoul was chuffing laughter. Naeko glared, a flicker of hate returning. What. What are you laughing at now. What you said. Only right on the surface. Few others could have done this. But that is because they lack the means and the power. Not the desire. Many have the want. Know this. Have felt this. Many would have done this out of sheer sadism. The pleasure for power over another. You needed to be hurt first. You needed this to be a thing of eternal revenge. Its the only thing that makes me whole. You lie. Lie to me. Lie to yourself. You are not the story you tell yourself. Not the story that lives in your head. Only gods are slaves to belief; shaped by stories Canons. Naeko snorted. And Im just a man. Not just. A man. Not a value. An understanding. A shape. An expression. Cast no more weight on yourself. Not a dog. Not a Godclad. Not even your feelings. You are not an absolute, Naeko. Rejoice. Change. Suffer. Break. Heal. Become. All things you can do. Doesnt matter if you believe. Doesnt matter if your emotions are swirling like a sickness inside you. Such is true. Every word Avo spoke was like a claw digging further into his wound, pulling out pieces, pain stinging like that of sterilization. But more than that, this shit was getting too fucking weird. Alright, alright. Enough. Stopstop word-mending me. Avo stopped talking after his sudden outburst. Naeko rubbed at his face, finding himself embarrassed by his tears. What the hells even is my life. Crying in front of a ghoul. He paused. No offense. It was what I am. Yeah. So you know how this is really, really godsdamned weird, right? Quite. You know, you being impossibly reasonable isnt making it better. Understood. Going to eat Marus mind for a crash course on how to emotionally abuse you. The sheer absurdity of what Avo just proposed made Naeko crack. A choked laugh slipped out from him. Stop. Have another recommendation No, Avo We murder Zein. You hold her in place. I burn her mind. Then kill her repeatedly. Can bond that way. Like proper brethren disciples. Naekos jaw dropped. The sheer audacity of what the ghoul suggested was... actually a bit appealing. And the godsdamned monster knew that from how wide it was grinning. Its a good idea. Will make you feel better. Deal with another issue inside. Zein has been a terrible mother. You spent too long with Karakan. Need to share that hate with another. You know you want to Naeko lightly backhanded Avo, driving a grunt of surprise out from the ghoul. ...Was just a suggestion. Yeah? Lets go back to not saying anything. I think I liked you more when it was quiet. But Avos attention was no longer on him. Instead, the ghouls gaze was turned, locked to the corner of the room, and the churning of his accretion was accelerating, a note of suspicion emitted from his mind. What? Naeko said, pushing himself off the ground. Theres someone above. Someone standing amidst the snakes. Hes been staring us. Watching us from the surface. Naekos felt the first hints of adrenaline rush through him. You sure? Yes. Their near-term memories. All of us. Seen from this room. Seen using time itself. Naeko swallowed and reached out with his Heaven. Stretching his palm wide, he brought it down over the Sunderwilds, but felt nothing greet his awareness. Theres no one there. Avo answered contrarily. There is. You just caught him. Curious how he has a warmind of Ignorance. Curious why hes laughing so loud right now. Chapter 26-9 The Mad Monk Chapter 26-9 The Mad Monk Jaus! You traitor! Deceiver! Murderer! You promised! You promised she would be spared! You promised that my people would be -[this moment never happened] 26-9 The Mad Monk C[Avo]C [How the fuck does everyone have a warmind of Ignorance? Where are these cocksuckers getting our fucking shit!] Peace spat. Avos glare turned inward. [What?] +My question to you. No one else mass-producing warminds. I dont hand mine out.+ [Eat shit, you corpse-licking bastard! This is some shit Joy might do. The spineless fuck. He would apologize to you double if you were tearing his cock off with one hand and digging a knife up his ass with the other.] [What a delightful image,] Abrel murmured. [What a warm and welcoming purgatory I find myself in.] The internal banter did nothing to douse the rising fires of tension burning within Avo. His cognition was evolvedascended. Not even focusing on Naeko should have left him open to a potential ambush. But then the stranger arrivedjust manifested like a sudden irregularity along the patterns of the tapestry, a bud suddenly growing from the Domain of Chronology as if a fruit sprouted from a vine. A mere second ago, the man wasnt there. Then, suddenly, they unveiled themselves, standing plain upon the canvas of existence and the sea that was the Nether. And worst of all, they were staring straight down at him and Naeko. Straight down, with a smile pulling on the mans jowls. An inward current of fog carried Naeko and Avo to the surface. The pressure from the palm was nigh unbearable, even when it wasnt levied directly against you. Avo still felt the ache of Naeko squeezing his Liminal Frame. The Chief Paladin reminded him of what it was to feel like a ghoul again, to be impossibly weaker than your foe, to be a fragile shape they could choose to break or spare. It was only Avos growing mastery of the mind paired with all the aid provided to him by his Definement of Hysteria that ensured his survival; where he was inferior of flesh and Soul, Naeko was brittle of mind and will. Relative weaknesses exploited through absolute means. And now, Naeko was his ally, if but nominally so. With his palm against the stranger, the unknown man had little chance of escape, little chance of victory. Little chance wasnt none. Avo had enough of being surprised for one day. Time to play this safe. You have him? Avo asked. They were outside the entrance to the bunker again. The door was sealed, rivers of snakes twirled about this lonesome island. Yet, upon the embankment leading to Karakans prison, a shrouded figure stood in the fog, tendrils of gold untangling from their body in tandem with crawling serpents. Yeah, Naeko replied, sounding more unnerved than Avo was. Hes got a Domain of Chronology. I can feel it. Avo activated his Conception of Ontology and delved deeper, taking the time to study the mans metaphysical structure. The revelations he gleaned hollowed his mind with surprise. [He does not have a Domain of Chronology or Time,] Kaes template muttered, taken in by his patterns. [He is shaped from the time itself. Peeling off from it...] True to her words, the structures compromising the mans existence ran alongside the progression of reality. The nature of his existence bore an uncanny similarity to how Sanctians would undergo ontological shifts during certain periods of time. But what does that mean?Ne/w novel chapters are published at novelhall.com +Might be a Sanctian,+ Avo said, projecting his perception of the tapestry via a screen of phantoms for Naekos benefit. The Chief Paladin tilted his head at the details offered and grunted. Yeah. His squiggly shit looks kinda different. Avo shot the Chief Paladin a look. What? Im not an Agnos. Was a disciple of Zein Thousandhand. Served Jaus Avandaer. Had relations with Veylis Avandaer. [But do any of them play Stormjumpers,] Shotins template deadpanned, offering a shit-eating grin. Hey, Naeko said, a slight snarl leaking over into his voice, get off my ass. I already did most of the actual work here. That was quite true. Or so Avo hoped. Ah! Greetings! Greetings! The strangers voice was like a low, dry growl, and their accretion accelerated and slowed in random increments. The wrongness about them leaked out from their mind as well. History has smiled upon me once more. Or will smile. A ringing laugh followed. Such a thing is hard to tell when you are severed without anchoring. What is up? What is down? What is future? What is past? What is history that is no more? All relative. A paltry thing of a Godclad. More laughter followed. Naeko flicked his eyes over to Avo, an uncertain expression decorating his face. So. Can you spy on his thoughts too? Avo tried, but what Hysteria beheld was a legion of unceasing whispers with flickering instances of people and places, as if the stranger was remembering things one moment and then forgetting them the next. Yeah. No good detail. Probably insane. Naeko nodded without a hint of doubt. Well, if hes out here, I guess hes a Fallwalker. Going to try and jack his mind. Sure. But Im smearing him if he does anything weird. He didnt quite manage to finish his words before a veritable wall of muscle known as Samir Naeko snapped across the space between them, impacting Alsyim at Mach four and climbing, the Sages mists curling into a balled fist. Almost all matter caught at the epicenter of the impact disintegrated from the blast wave. Avo dispelled his avatar and manifested his Overheaven in avoidance, casting out his hawk of light to gain distance and altitude. As he triggered his Canon of Speed, he found himself devoid of words for the scene before him. A furrow of destruction ran onward across the horizon, like someone had tunneled across an entire section of the world. The sheer force of Naekos blow sent chunks of landmass the size of districts and mountains into the stratosphere, and a cloud of dust and ash rained down like an avalanche. And still, the Chief Paladin was going. Still, a thundering fist obliterated a distant range of mountains beyond, smashed biomes flat and further gouged the ruptures littering the Sunderwilds tenfold. [...Holy shit,] Abrel breathed. For once, Kare just stared along with her, jaw open in disbelief. +Avo,+ Draus said, chuckling at the sheer destruction she just witnessed, +we might need a plan in place to snuff your new consang if shit ever goes sour because I dont think we got good odds against that.+ Chambers, rather than being awed, was more incensed by the display. +What the fuck! He can do that? Then whyd his ass run! Go up to Highflame! Beat the bitch!+ Only a sigh of disappointment sang from Calvino. {And here I had hopes of learning more about our mysterious new friend.} +Hopefully Naeko only killed them,+ Avo said, noting how strange that sounded. +See if they resurrect. Ask them after. Try to calm the Paladin down first.+ A snort came from the Regular. +Anyone ever tell you that youre hopeful person, Avo?+ +Dont use my words against me, Draus.+ *** C[Naeko]C The rage was upon Naeko again. The rage exploded when that fuck said Jaus name. Naeko didnt even know what he was doing until he did it, didnt realize he was roaring, hammering a straight into the jaw of the cunt and driving them across the thresholds of the Sunderwilds until it already happened. Even when his mind caught up with his raging heart, it didnt matter. Naeko just put more force into it. Karakan might be dead, but he might still find more than a bit of himself today. Nothing stopped his path of destruction. No power in existence could. The physical broke. The metaphysical tore. The world trembled. Naeko raged. Alysim was made of harder stuff than the sister, but harder stuff didnt matter when Naeko was hitting you. The blow all but vaporized his flesh, and the only reason why Alysim still existed was because the clinging strings of time holding him in place. Those, too, threatened to snap when Naeko hit him again. Every blow the Chief Paladin landed was a cataclysm unleashed. A fist downward sent fractures down to the subterranean plates. An uppercut banished all clouds and untangled descending branches of entropy for the width of a continent. A slam made reality skip for a moment, the concept of time itself writhing from Naekos blow. +Naeko!+ A voice was echoing in the back of his mind. An annoying voice. A voice from some half-strand that liked to hear themselves talk a bit too much. +Naeko! Stop! Youre not hurting them right.+ Damn right he was going to hurt them Wait, what? What, Naeko said. He slammed a boot down into the soil below, and a falling palm stole every last bit of force from his velocity. Tendrils of time slowly began to weave Alysim back together, reconstructing the shape of a whimpering, beaten man hugging his head, face turned away. The bastard wasnt even going to give him the dignity of a fight. He was just folding in on himself, ready to take this beating. REND CAPACITY - 0% A streak of light snapped across Naekos periphery. A trail of radiance transformed into a bloom of twelve sequences and an ocean of ghosts lit by Soulfire. Naeko squinted at Avos arrival. Neat trick. +Not hurting him right. Hes tied to time. Need to strike at the Domain if you want to hurt him.+ He found himself taken aback. Didnt expect to be receiving help with this, but alright he could get behind a bit of help. Alysim struggled in his grip, fully restored by chronology, frowning as he peeked an eye out at Naeko. Why? Why do you strike me? Why? Naeko flung the restored man to the ground. This presented interesting opportunities. Karakan was delicate. So very breakable. But Alysim? He came back just fine. Seemed his Heaven kept him spared from destruction, but not pain. You have no idea what you just woke in me, Naeko said, laughing at the man. For a second, I was curious, too. Curious. But then you just had to mention his name. So. Now, I really dont give much of a shit about who you are and what you know. I just wanna hear you scream. Horror filled Alysims as Naekos grip tightened, but a second thereafter, his expression broke and changed. As Naeko began to pop his vertebrae, one from another, Alysim gasped and smiled. I-I remember you. Samir. You are Samir. You are Samir Naeko! His face ignited with joy. You are my friend. Naeko ended this conversation much the same way he did to Karakanhe headbutted the man until his skull was no more. Chapter 26-10 Maker of the Lost Paths (I) Chapter 26-10 Maker of the Lost Paths (I) No, my friend. The past is lost. But only our past. Only our history. The future is still theoretically infinite, and so, what I propose is something more radical: We create a new structure. One molded entirely from our histories from all that we know, and tied to the progression of our present. From this, we can venture freely along its Paths, and adjust things as we see fit. Ha! Imagine this! A relative solution defeating an absolute problem! -Alysim the Wanderer to Jaus Avandaer [a moment that never happened] 26-10 Maker of the Lost Paths (I) C[Avo]C Even the slightest of Naekos blows bathed the world in sweeping torrents of destruction. Force bent to his will like clay. Violence was and wasnt at his behest. The patterns of the tapestry recoiled with every blow, like strings on an instrument strummed by a hammer. Only one strand held firm, despite the strain it endured. Time. Avo took in the onslaught Naeko unleashed on Alsyim. The man was seemingly unkillable by conventional means. His ruined body was reformed by progression of time, with lines separating from the primary path chronology, crossing over into the supposed Sanctians parallel ontology. But his immortality was an unenviable trait, for he seemed to possess little power otherwise, or what paltry canons he did command were useless in before the Chief Paladin. No so different from most other people in existence. Few Godclads could stand against Naeko, let alone the ephemerals or FATELESS. +Aegis have any countermeasures against Naeko?+ Avo asked Calvino as he crept closer, reaching out with his twelve sequences to draw both Fallwalker and Paladin into the Exo-Paracosm of his Soulscape. {Our countermeasures were pretty much what you just did,} Only answered before Calvino could. {Bully the sad sack of shit until he has a mental breakdown. Great job, by the way.} {Only,} Kant said, finishing his statement with a sigh. {What? It worked. Besides the psychological angle, all we got are Contingency Bleak options. Or just detonating the Nullstar} {Only!} {What? Its just theoretical. We tried modifying his brain matter using q-dot technology before. Didnt take. Frigging Metaminds. Singularities arent going to work on himhell just ignore the forces pulling on him. Rupturing everythings our best shot.} {It will ensure the extinction of all pattern-based existence across the known universe!} {Aw, you always overexaggerate. Dont worry, Avo: itll be complete extinction at worst.} So. Mental warfare was how things had to be. That was fine. The mind was Avos Embodiment, after all. Every time Alysim reformed, he would reach out at Naeko, screaming something like Wait! or I know you. With the flickering of memories intercepted from the man by Hysteria, Avo was inclined to believe him. A conversation was in order, but he needed to get Naeko to stop beating the man first. A simple task. Shards tore out from Avo, and as they closed in on Alsyim, they remained without opposition until the Fallwalker reformed. Interesting. That suggested the man was ontologically mirroring Avos capabilities somehow. A troubling canon; a most useful thing to subsume. Ignoring the incoming splinters, Avo pierced Alysims mind for the first time and dove deep. As things turned out, the space within his cognition was even more sporadic than what was being emanated beyond. Sequences were and werent. Memories were and werent. Consciousness was and wasnt. Avos wards rattled as his templates felt themselves start tearing. Only Elegant Moon and Draus remained indifferent, both drawn to the structure they were now infesting with curiosity. [There is an entire portion of him missing,] Elegant-Moon said. [But only periodically. It returns, then leaves, like a piece that is trapped between existence and oblivion.] [Still enough left of him to think. Think it''s mostly his memories that are damaged. His body aint blinkin none.] Draus template observed the Fallwalkers sequences. [Hells. Less like part of him missing and more like hes got a bunch of pieces skipping between him and time.] Regular spoke true. A more detailed looking using Avos Conception of Ontology showed a faint trace he didnt notice before, with rings of rolling gold running between him and time, the trails they painted akin to a series of wheels. [Cyclers,] Kae theorized. [But if they are looping, why arent they staying in place? Wait, how are they looping with the tapestry directly? How are they operating outside of his Frame?] +Perhaps his Domain of Chronology is internalized too,+ Avo considered. But intuition told him that the truth behind the mysterious Fallwalker was far stranger. Ignorance is vanishing them. There and not. It stopped existing for a while. It stopped existing when he was beyond the horizon. When it was just him and Naeko. Avo paused as a new consideration took shape. Perhaps he wasnt just rooted to time itselfperhaps he was rigged upon the Paths. Zein. Alysims words snatched Avos attention. Call upon her. If you can. Call upon her! She knowsthis was her doing. Her doing, and the will ofcall on her. Please. If you want to know. If you want to know the truth that isnt but still might be. Call on her. Naeko shook his head. Im talking to a godsdamned +Should do it,+ Avo said. The Chief Paladin eyed him. +Theres something very wrong with his ontology. Something that keeps him attached to the progression of things. Got some details from glimpses into his mind. Hes been hiding. I think. Hiding in the Sunderwilds from Zein. Tracked us from your presence. The damage you left. And then maybe latched to my properties through time. Paths. Thats my guess. Might even be connected to the Ladder. Zein told me there were nine before. Nine behind the Godsfall.+ Confusion swept across Naekos features. Nine? Nine what? +Nine people.+ What are you talking about --The Ladder? Alysim gasped. Suddenly, nothing else mattered. He pushed himself off the ground and looked past Naeko, perception spearing into Avos looming Overheaven. They created it? They finished our great work? Both Paladin and Overheaven fell silent at that. +Our great work,+ Avo said. Of course. The madman threw his head back and roared a laugh. There would be no Paths without me. No Paths to chart and guide our progress, to keep us away from calamity. Of course I was... there was... He was lost again. A memory was there and not. A moment was then and gone. It is no longer real. Things are no longer true. Despair returned to him. Please. Do not hurt me anymore. I do not deserve this torment. I only wish toit is only fate that saw me delivered to you! Only fate. Ask her. Find her. She will know. She holds all that is lost. Naekos expression turned inscrutable. Avo intercepted the mans suspicions before they could compromise his choice. +Could be a trap. Could be. But Im inside his mind. Veylis wouldnt let me go this far. Zein wouldnt either. Dealing with something unknown. Something drawn to us. Pulled to us by our Domains of Chronology.+ You want to let him see her? Naeko asked. +Your choice. Not mine. Everyone keeps using you, Naeko. Everyone. I am doing it now.+ The Chief Paladin shot Avo a puzzled expression. +I will not lie to you about this. Have my own wants. Own needs. But what kind of god would I be if ideals are so easy to betray? If my canons are but conditional? Wont see a world where you are just a pawn. A hound should get their choice too.+ Naeko bit his bottom lip and looked away. His thoughtstuff roiled like water boiling and a storm of emotion raged within his bones. Why? Why the hells do you sound like him? +Jaus?+ Yes, Naeko snarled. Yes, Jaus. He always saw through me. I couldnt hide anything from him. It was like I was just glass. He did that to everyonejust knew how people were. And here you are, playing the same game, doing the same thing, saying the same words. Naeko fell silent. A hound should get their choice too. He said that to me. He said that too me at Scale. Salvations Day. Just months before everything went to shit, before the Ladder was supposed fix everything. Avo understood what Naeko was asking now. +Was purely coincidence. Didnt glimpse it from your mind. Or his. Is what I believe. You still have the Gatekeeper. You can still use it on me.+ A stray note from Naekos mind told Avo the man didnt want to believe him, but he broke from his stupor. Just shook his head. No. No, I... I believe you. Its godsdamned insane, but I do. Naeko rubbed at his face with a massive hand. What the hells is my life. +Tragic. But ongoing+ A mist-made hand swatted Avo lightly. His entire being rattled violently. Stop talking like him, Naeko muttered. Gonna give me a trauma. Lifting his head high, Naeko stared up into the underside of the mountain his palm was hefting and sighed. Alright. Fuck it. No finding myself today. Just make this shit worse. Lets go talk with her. Again. He closed his eyes. Again. Fuck. Chambersamong other templateswinced at the scene. [Avo. Maybe, like, go alone or something. The guys reacting how I might if you made me meet my old man again. Give the poor shit a break before he actually breaks.] +Could go alone,+ Avo said. +You dont need to+ Piss off, ghoul. Shes my master. If shes hiding something else from me, I want to know. Naeko grimaced. I want to know. Slowly, he filled his lungs with air and reached down into his pocket. Before he retracted his hand, he gave Alysim a final glare. If I find our youre bullshitting me, Im gonna retroact you, you understand? Ill turn send the rest of you into the nothing too. Pure horror consumed Alysims features. The mans nerve broke. He reached out for Naeko. No! Please! Naekos hand shot out from his pocket and wrapped around the Fallwalkers neck before Avo could full follow what happened. Then, they were elsewhere again, the fabric of space collapsing inward with the inversion of the Chief Paladins pocket, into a gray expanse looming over memite ground before. Whistling strokes of a blade cutting through air called their attention. There, alone in this prison, Zein was practicing again, humming a joyous tune as she cut and stabbed with glee. As they felt her, she felt them, and slowly turned, facing the threesome with a wide smile on her face. Ah. You return. Tell me, were the wounds my girl inflicted on Her words died. The triumph on her face vanished as she noticed the stranger among them. Alysims face broke into a murderous snarl. He clawed at Zein despite the grip Naeko had on him, seething with hatred. Murderess. Thief. Traitor! For a heartbeat longer, Zein stared on in uncharacteristic shock. You... I killed you... And that was all Naeko could take. A ragged cry of exhausted frustration broke from the Chief Paladin, and at its end, a palm hammered down against Thousandhand once more. Chapter 26-11 Marker of the Lost Paths (II) [or the war that wasn’t] Chapter 26-11 Marker of the Lost Paths (II) [or the war that wasnt] Did you think I would not anticipate this? Did you think I would not see you trying to turn my daughter against me by altering our pasts? Alysim, old friend, you are a fool to assume the future your ally. You were a fool to think that I accepted your offer without preparation or suspicion. A shifting future. A simulated history railed upon the wheels of chronology that will be ours to attach and define. Do you truly think that you were the first to conceive of such an idea? No, Alysim. Are a millennia too late for such novelty. This mistake has been made before. It was made before our world ever came to be. Every act you committed, every thought you have, was held by another, performed by another, done by another. You thought you could define the world by claiming the canons of time? How could such a thing be possible when you, creator of these Paths though you might be, have proven to be a font of failure. A vessel of predictability and base weakness. Your betrayal was more than inevitable. I did not need to perceive a possible future to expect it. I read it on your face the day I broke the gods. I sensed it even before the [REDACTED] spoke to me. What follows now is not my desire, but your end. I did not want this. I did not. But I will protect my future whatever the cost. -Jaus Avandaer 26-11 Marker of the Lost Paths (II) [or the war that wasnt] Release me! Zein growled. She struck as echoes detonated out from her, straining against the palm of her disciple. Vain though it was, her intent was focused solely on Alysim, and her eyes burned with a ravenous loathing Avo never before witnessed. Alysim. Wretched snake. You died. I severed you from the Paths. I slew you. Naeko and Avo shared a look. The Fallwalker in the Chief Paladins grip writhed and kicked, doing all they could to get at Zein. Murderer! Butcher! Traitor! Each word was snared with venom, and splashes of memory painted Hysteria with understanding. Avo remembered Zein chasing him across the Paths, across the length of time and space, slaying and destroying all that Alysim held dear. The world was a miasma of chaos and bloodshed, and no matter how far he skipped, the flicking tip of her dragon-bound glaive was always but a hair behind.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m) Yet, his was not the only revelation that flowed. Zeins mind offered the source of her hatred as well. Flashes of Alysim speaking to Veylis, turning Naeko against her. Futures where he aided the Low Masters in their murder and usurpation of Jaus. From there, two Paths continued, parallel but divergent. Twin cities formed in Avos mind like a layered mirage, and both bore semblance to the New Vultun of the present, though the differences of layout and aesthetic could not be denied. The Overheaven formed an avatar beside the Godslayer. Kneeling down, Avo inched close to Zein and spoke to her, commanding her attention. Who is he? What have you hidden from me? The ancient Godclad sneered. Nothing. Nothing and no one. Truly, he should be residing in the pits of oblivion rather than debasing our gazes here. How, monk? How did you do it? I watched you die upon my blade. I cast your being back into the pastboth aspects of your ontology! How do you yet live? Suddenly, her gaze was burrowing into Avos. How did you find him. Didnt. He found us. Was drawn to Naekos destruction. Called by our Domains of Chronology. Found him just staring at us. Mimicking my properties. Had a warmind of Ignorance. Other warminds too. Zeins eyes narrowed. The lane of her perception remained locked to Alysim. Then you plotted a way out. You flung part of your shifted across the Paths, into the Sunderwilds. A low, vicious chuckle followed. How daring. Such a risk, casting yourself straight into this jungle of entropy. I did not think you so brave. Or was it desperation? Was it the fact that I had already claimed all that you cherished, so there was little to do but die? Alysims face curled into a portrait of torment. As Zein spat her venom, his mind emanated hatred while his eyes glistened with hateful tears. His emotions, however, were overshadowed by anotherdrowned utterly by another. Naeko was nearing the end of his patience. The Fallwalker was not alone in suffering, and the intensity of their emotions burned but a candle beside Naekos raging inferno. Im gonna ask you both a few questions, Naeko said, voice calm, mind teetering on the brink of absolute violence. Im gonna ask. And youre gonna tellboth of you. And dont leave anything else. Cause then hell know. He gestured to Avo. And thenll Ill know. What follows after follows. The Godslayer heeded her disciples words like a mother shrugging off the threat of a child. Yes, yes, Naeko. I will include you in this pointless discussion if that is your desire. It will not change the outcome regardless. The outcome? Naeko asked. The outcome of you killing him, Zein answered flatly. For what he had done. Well. What he would do, but does not do any longer. The currents to the future do not remain when broken. Inside Avos mind, an EGI sighed with frustration. {More timey-wimey bullshit. I hated dealing with that during the war, and I hate dealing with it now. Heres a word of advice to you, Avo: if youre going to build something on the basis of paracausality... dont. Its stupid. It breaks things. It never goes well.} Despite Avos ever-increasing urge to experience more flavors of reality, he was inclined to agree. At least to some extent. Most sophonts were pattern-based species. They sought connection, repetitions, symmetry, asymmetry, and other comparable factors. Extracting time from the stability of baseline reality was a mistake, much as the Infacer had claimed. Well, then, Zein said, releasing a breath. Tell him your delusion, monk. Speak to the son you desired to steal from me. Speak to him. Tell him how you twisted his own past to make him turn toward you in the Paths. Tell him how you quietly rebuilt his history to return him a facsimile of his father? To lessen his pain. Tell him you did it because you cared. Because you pitied him. Lie to him. Much as you lied to me when you rewrote the past I shared with my daughterattempted to infuse with a pain that wasnt. It is no lie, Alysim said, seething at Zein. It took considerable effort for him to pull his attention away from Zein, but when he met Naekos stare, all the strength in him evaporated. It is no lie. I did do this. In another life. In... I cannot... it is hard to rememberso hard. But we were friends. I... I saved you. I was the one that found you first. I was the one that stole you away from your tyrant master and brought you to her. Avo nodded. Missed a piece. The Godslayer scoffed. I will not be goaded. Especially not by someone of greater incompetence. Remind me, what did my dear girl take from you? And now their relationship was re-established. Just two vicious monsters sticking their claws and fingers in open wounds. Too much. Going get her back. Now. Alysim. Who is he. In detail? Well. In another potential progression events, he possibly was a Sanctian monk of the Kojik Order. Chroniclers of Lost Histories, in a sense. The Sanctians... they were wounded by time since the days of lore. Their gods were creatures of incoherence, shaped and twisted by cultures bleeding over from past and present. Your Fisher That Wasnt is one of theirs. It was. I refined it. Cured of it of its... disorders. So. He was a monk that tried to keep lost histories. He helped you? You and Jaus? Gave you the means to start the Godsfall. He might have been a factor, but he overstates his value. He was our means of travel and evasion. It is hard to avoid the attention of the gods, but should you tread across the right moments, all things are possible. What drove you against each other? The same thing that drives humanity against itself: want. Zein shook her head in a faux display of pity. His vision of the Godsfall was one of persisting slavery. In which the gods are not broken, but revised. Changed to suit the chronicles desired by his order. Though not worshipers in the common sense, they still revered the eldritch, and saw their destruction as sacrilege. So they believe that salvation would in the revision of an enduring mistake. Jaus disagreed. He did. Quite politely. He spoke to them first. But my love was never a fool. He had me venture into the Paths beforehand with the aid of the Infacer to see if the Chroniclers would change anything. And they did. So very much. They sought to rewrite all that we were, to script a moment of compliance when there was none. It was so boldly rude. They did not even try to reason with Jaus. They began their revisions the moment he went forth to speak his piece. The new Paths they created were insultsrendered us less than caricatures. Why, they wished to engender more docility in me. And create a love between my daughter and one of their brothers to cement their control over us. A love that never existed. Despite all the animosity he bore toward Zein, Avo found himself aligned with her in this regard. If what she spoke was true, then Alysim didnt need to be questioned just burned. Guessing they did it to Naeko as well? Oh, quite so. Their designs for him went a bit further, in fact. They yearned to recruit him into their sect. As if I was here just to impart my teachings before they stole my pupil from me. Rudeness upon rudeness. And so you snuffed them. Yes. Among other things. Truth be told, it is hard for me to full recall what happened after the revision. I have two conflicting recollections. The first is my slaughter of the Chroniclers just before the Godsfall. I culled them before they had a chance to enact their great sin. But their ultimate destruction came only with the Ladder years later, when all they were was redacted. An effect of the Paths? Undoubtably so. Veylis partial realignment of desired history have left several tracks intersecting at places they shouldnt. An inquisitive look consumed her. She was trying to do something then. Even as I dueled her. Even as I sought to free Jaus, she was rewriting the world that was, layering a new sequence of histories over what existed. Another reason why so many things felt out of place chronologically. You should claim him, Zein said. If you anchor him using your Domain of Chronology, you can keep him stable enough to be subsumed. Suspicion immediately arose within Avo. Helping me? Why? The crone smirked. Because though I know I must best you, I despise him. You are a rival. One I will best before the end, and wield against my daughter. But rival nonetheless. He is a mistake. A defiler in more ways than one. I will see you made stronger before I see him exist another day longer as his own mana fragmented shell though he remains. Not afraid Ill be able to use the Paths against you? Zeins smile was absolutely placid. No. Not even if I gave you another millennia. Chapter 26-12 [walk what isn’t] Chapter 26-12 [walk what isnt] {Well. This was completely stupid. Veylis. Veylis, stop torturing that man. Just kill him. Do you wish to live as an ape?} No. {Then kill the pedophile they were trying to fate you into falling in love with and move on. Fools. This would have never worked. Why do apes treat the concept of temporal progression like its nothing more than a series of stackable blocks? Looking at their plans... this is absurd. Nothing would have come together here. With all the alterations they were going to force on you and your mother, I doubt either you would have remained sane for long. Or coherent. Caricatures.} [Whimpering; begging] I liked him. {Hm. The man you are currently playing tooth fairy with?} The monk. {Oh. Them.} Yes. He knew many things. It was... interesting speaking to him. Another perspective. {I have gotten too boring for you? Is that it?} You are not capable of being flawed. Not like a human is. The way he understood history... what he revealed... it was interesting. {And he also brought you Naeko.} That does engender a bit of bias. Yes. [Sound of head coming apart] We are done here. Come. Let us go speak with mother. We need to discuss what we are to do with these... Paths. -Veylis and the [REDACTED] (a future that is but wasnt) 26-12 [walk what isnt] So, get anything useful from her? Naeko asked. They had met in the middle once their interrogations were done, and immediately, Avo read the frustration off the Chief Paladins face. Some details. Youre not going to like them. The monk? Hes insane, Naeko said flatly. Hes insane, and he keeps trying to get me to listen to himbut cant remember what hes going to say after. He spent most that time beginning me to remember what he meant to me. He kept trying to touch my face. Did you hit him. Not much. Avo held back a chuckle. How many times did you make him regenerate. Avo, come on, I dont count that shit. Looks, if you want to Yes. Ill go talk to him. Zein wants me to as well. Naeko went absolutely still with that. She... wants you to? The Overheaven grunted. Says I can stabilize his ontology using my Domain of Chronology. Wants me to burn him after. The Chief Paladins suspicion only grew at that. The hells is she trying to play at? Not sure. Might genuinely hate him that much. Could read any hint of deception through my warmind. Doesnt mean it isnt there. he paused before he continued. Do you want to hear about what she told me? Before you speak to her. If you speak to her. A beat of hesitation followed. Naeko shrugged. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let me take a gulp of piss to help the shit-bun Im about to swallow. [You know,] Chambers template muttered, [I know people who will pay good imps for Chief Paladin scat play] Shotins template slammed into him before the sentence could finish, fists flying free like jackhammers against Chambers face. As the fight erupted, the Woundmother loomed over them, burrowing free from the surrounding structures as she cheered Shotin on. Yes, yes, good! Destroy his genitaliahes fond of them. Template-Chambers cried out in pain as he was forced in a dilemma between deciding to protect his face of his balls. [Agh! Fuck you, you giant cunt-blood-made-city-fuck! Some hitting me, Shotin.] Avo ignored the chaos unfolding within as he conferred all he learned unto Naeko. The mans expression darkened with each passing sentence, and a faint snarl passed through him still when Veylis involvement was mentioned. I came out here to find a release, Naeko muttered. His posture sagged, his body straining under a new weight he didnt seem to feel before. To get away from... all this shit. He aimed a glare at Avo. My life was a lot simpler before your ass started showing itself. ... UNABLE TO LOCATE ADDITIONAL ONTOLOGICS As expected, Alysim was a nightmare to behold. Kaes template choked as she ran through the sheer complexity of the damage as Avo took in the monks comprising patterns. At closer examination, he existed more like a separate track from chronology itself. In a simple sense, his being still retained an outline of what it used to be, and the progression of time filled and leaked from like water running along a channel. This was made possible by cyclers that passed through him and time itself with each revolution. And then there was how his being seemed to have a missing layer. Most ontologies were a complete structure, but Alysims felt like it was missing something essentialbones without flesh. [Bifurcation,] Kae said. [Its like you thought: very Sanctian, but far more severe.] +Can we fix him.+ The Agnos template made a pitched hum. [Fix? That is... eh, that will require extensive study. We will need to siphon knowledge from an Agnos with a Knowing of Chronology.] Avo was surprised by Kaes brazen suggestion. She merely scoffed. [I have been taken, Avo. And the Agnosi have been turned traitors by forces beyond us. Forces that were meant to uphold our virtues. When the rules are untrue, all everything can be permitted.] +Just like entropy,+ Avo replied. Kae froze. [Yes. Like entropy.] Even the patterns of society decay shared symmetry with that of reality collapsing. [We cannot restore him completely... but we might be able to do something better.] +Better?+ [He obtained the warminds through you. That means that he is somehow intercepting canons and effects from your internalized Domain of Chronology. Perhaps instead of having him directly connected to time itself, we attach him to your Frame.] A thrill came with the suggestion, but also a worry. +Whats the risk of his collapse spreading? Or Veylis or Zein striking through him.+ [Not... high? Time will pass into you, and you can use it to shape him. Thats how it should work. Theoretically. As for Veylis] Kae winced as she mentioned the name of her captor. [No. There is no wound in him.] +Despite Zein claiming she killed him.+ [Yes.] The sheer incoherence of the problem he was facing exhausted Avo. +Think I agree with you, Chambers. Humanity should have never been allowed to alter time.+ He commanded his Meta-Fac to begin its task immediately after, and the next thing to capture his attention was that Alysims cyclers were slightly different from his. As Avo overlapped the monks ontology with his, he noted how each dragon wasnt just eating its own body, but part of the subsequent dragons body as well. In a sense, they resembled partial tank treads or wheels that were melted into each other. Elegant-Moon tutted. [You should not judge, monster. Look at the nest you wear.] Fair enough. Time progressed, and Avo drew Alysim into his Soulscapes orbitlatched the mans progressing cyclers upon the Overheavens mutilated skein. Anticipating the unexpected, he applied a Canon of Chronology to his Pattern-Nullification in case he needed to see the monk unmade. But as dragons latched onto dragons, no strike came, only a growing sense of disorientation. It took some thaumaturgical strain for Avo to hold Alysim together, but as he did, a growing fullness returned to the waters of his thought, and with stability came a modicum of sanity. What... what have you done to yourself, Alysim said, reaching out to touch the ghoul. Avo swatted his hand aside with an Echohead. What are you? Frustrated, Avo answered. And he was honest about that. He had no more desire for conversation. Disconnecting from his cadre, he ignited his Conflagration poured his all consuming consciousness straight into Alysims mind. The man barely had a moment to respond, recoiling as if struck by a sudden blow before his brittle memories were imbibed. Even with the Stillborn holding the man together, there appeared to be ruptures in him that needed more focus to close. Certain understandings were and werentAvo directed mended those first, mapping out sequences of memories that hurt to recall. Mainly because the mans mind was closer to an aratnids nest than an actual thing of cognition. Sequences blinked and shifted in alignment and quantity between the seconds. Alysim was remembering at least a few dozen different synchronous things at the same time, and now Avo was suffering the same curse with him. But as the monks eyes rolled to the back of his head, Avo caught himrefused to let him fall; forced his tearing consciousness back together once more. A whimper of abject agony escaped the man as sanity was enforced upon him. As Avo delved deeper into the pain, he realized the source of Alysims suffering. Time itself was trying to correct his thoughts. Canon history was overwriting all he remembered, the structuring of the past against what existed in his mind. As Avo how held such thoughts as well, he found his Rend slowly rising, Domain of Chronology battling the rules set upon existence. And somewhere close to a place that wasnt, Avo caught flashes of sensation; broken fragments of Alysim straining to keep pace with the present. It was going to take time to dig through, recompile these memories and make sense of them, but thanks to Voidwatchs instructions on non-human cognitions, Avo adapted to the chaos better than he did before. How are you even still alive? Avo asked, watching his Rend rise another percent. He needed to figure out how to deal with that. If he wanted to use Alysim as an infiltrator against Veylis, he needed means to lurk within them for extended periods. Perhaps... Alysim swallowed. A new moment reaching backward from a past that occurred in the future. A trauma-followed. The flash of a falling glaive finally splitting him apart; killing him utterly; only nothingness came after. Perhaps I am dead. Was dead. Will be dead. Perhaps the only reason I exist right now is because... my death happened in breach of historys rules. Then, the mad monk giggled. His laughter grewgrew louder until his eyes were closed and his head was raised, grew louder until he was weeping. I cant be dead. The future didnt happen. I cant be dead. The future didnt happen. I cant be dead... I cant be dead... Deaths looped from Alysim into Avos minddeaths dealt by Zein, inflicted over and over again, and with each impact of trauma, Avo grew to understand what was truly wrong with the man. You werent broken in the past, Avo said. You were murdered in the future. You were shifted backward to the present. Backward. Thats why you arent dead yet. Thats why you havent entirely ceased to be. Yet, Alysim said, eyes glistening with a fatalistic gleam. Yet. Suddenly, the wretched, wailing ruin no more. The monk was still broken, with structure enforced upon him, a sense of self was returning. A focus. Oh. Oh. Hello, curious friend. It is good to finally meet you, I... apologize for my initial impression. Very unbecoming. Most of us are not ourselves when we are broken, but you... you are no person, are you? Wariness flowed out from Avo, and only did a faint echo of Alysim form in his mindan incomplete template slowly coming together. Might have a few questions for you to answer now, Avo asked. About the Paths. About Zein. The past. Alysim chuckled at that. Well, for the last part, we are going to have to be very, very specific about which past. Chapter 26-13 Anti-History Chapter 26-13 Anti-History You do not exist in the future. Not truly. That which is you is little more than a ripple imparted on the stream; an impression left on the pattern of Chronology. The future is shapeless. Mere simulation. But it is boundless with possibility and potential, and should one truly understand how to wield history, you can learn to recreate yourself at certain points in timesend the necessary actions down stream to shape events in your favor. See the right people and moments happen because you directed their Paths to be so. Such is the nature behind the gods prophecies. The gods can never be wrong if a mold is already set upon existence. -Alysim the Wanderer 26-13 Anti-History Let me reintroduce myself, Alysim said, he patted the ragged clumps of hair protruding from his head back into shape as he sighed. I am Alysim, the Wanderer. Alysim, Brother-of-the-Pasts-That-Werent to my fellow Chroniclers. Alysim the Mad Monk to the unfortunate to encounter me during my long exile across time. He winked thereafter at Avo. My deepest thanks for your restoration. Alysim. The Walker-of-Paths. And as if to illustrate his newly cemented cognition, the man dissolved of matter, the golden threads composing his body twirling ahead in time, skipping along Avos ontology to form the vagueness of his outline eight seconds in the future. The display was surprising, and Avo found himself prepared to rupture the fool in case they attempted something malicious. But a voice echoed out from time itself, arriving much in the same way Veylis spoke, though with diminished intensity and far less control. You are not one under Jausthe traitor. I sense you are an intruder, in a sense. A new king fighting over the ruins of this fallen kingdom. Avo frowned. No. Not king. Never king. That is a thing for men. I am not so lacking. I am not so afraid of choice. Only tyrants seek control. As he gave his reply, he watched as the tapestry shifted, patterns forming in place in the aftermath of his words. Truly? Alysim rematerialized before him, face aglow with excitement. Then, you surprise me. What did you just do? Avo asked.Jumped forward in time. The man just barked a laugh. No. That is impossible. Humanity cannot conceive of such a thing. Only the present truly exists. Only the present. I merely prepared a few specific routes to follow for what could happenwhat I expected. Not so different from Zein. At the mention of the Godslayers name, the mad monk sneered. Please. There is no need to insult me in such a manner; I will answer all that you wish to know. He looked Avo up and down, frowned once more. But before that, may I speak to your true shape again? I do not see the need for you to converse with me using a mortals guise. A beat of consideration followed before Avo manifested his Overheaven once more. He tasted a scheme leaking from Alysims mind-Hysteria captured an intent of subtle deception; aided him in realizing the man was trying to prey on his pride. He was a bit too late for such a tactic to work. There you are, Alysim sighed. What a remarkable divine I behold. Tell me, does the lineage of your lore spawn from the Nolothi? Have the Hungers finally spawned a creation of their own? That earned a laugh from Avo. More like an unexpected bastard than spawn. The monk merely nodded. As are many kings; as are many gods. Now, the things Zein told you... He made an open-handed gesture. They were not specifically lies, but she distorts the form of things. As she always does. Something her lover must have shown her, after all. A specific kind of loathing sang forth from Alysim each time he spoke of Zein. The cadence of his thoughtstuff held more than personal animosity, but also flavors of prejudice. Alysim continued. There is still much of me missingechoes of myself scattered across this ruined world. He shook his head. This was their doing, you know? All you wish to know of the past, of histories that exist no more...I can show you, but I do not think they will serve you. The world has already been rewritten onceincomplete though it is. How do you know that? Because the Sunderwilds remain, Alysim answered, quietly. Even in my madness, I have embarked on pilgrimages to places I used to knowfound them absent or displaced. Tell me, have you encountered anything unexpected in your travels across this broken place? The Neo-Creationist Heaven flashed into Avos mind. I might have. Yes. Results of incongruity. There are many things that Jaus and his family did not know, but the histories adjacent to them were altered. So now, much lays adrift, still captured within the confines of time, but dislocated from the broader state of the world. I suppose the only reason I remained undiscovered for so long was because I lingered long in these lost places, being lost myself. The people there... they are savaged of sanity, broken of mind and culture. They cannot recall who they were for the preceding them no longer exist. But they still do. Even if Jaus and his faithful do not know, the fact of their existence has not changed. History was once supposed to embark along nine parallel Paths. That we all agreed on. Each Path something for us to govern and cultivate, to lead our cultures out of benighted savagery, into enlightenment in the aftermath of our Glorious Transgression. You speak of the Godsfall. Yes. A dark look fell over Alysim. That is what it is called these days, isnt it? We are both blind. But the worlds I have no are no more. What use is such a sight. What did you call it. The Godsfall. The Great Revision. For that was what it was. For us to rebuild the ruins of this lost world after the ruling tyrants were shattered. To bestow their remnants on the chosen moral and use them to chart our paths forward to eternity. Didnt happen. No. I am not shaped by the falling trajectory of mans delusion. I am not decided by a single creation; a single birth. I am nothing more than a dream ascending. Your war is done and lost. Mine will soon begin. Do you wish to make a difference this time? Do you wish to know the truth of historyof the world itself and the ones that make it. With each statement spoken, Alysims mind rattled, as if battered by a trauma. His brief tenure of confidence and cunning died like an ember falling into a sea. Broken, he nodded, capitulating. Yes. Yes. Whatwhat will you have me offer. Your body. And the opportunity you present. We will tread the Paths together. Veylis will be expecting me. But she knows nothing of you. I promise you vengeance, Wanderer. But not utopia. Never utopia. That victory is beyond your nature for now. Do you accept these terms? Yes, Alysim swallowed. The fullness of his shape was seared into Avo then. The pact between them was forged. And suddenly, Avo felt his grasp over the Paths deepen, subtle oscillations of gold forming around him. Yes. INTERNALIZING DEFINEMENT OF [PRE-COGNITION].... Good. Avo poured the entirety of himself into the man, claiming them as a shared vessel. Show me your knowledge of past and future. I will show you everything else besides. And when the merging was done, when Alysim opened his eyes, a storm of epiphanies swept through him, and quietly, he began to weep. Blind... so blind... A tragedy we all share. *** He guided the man out from the mists a few hours thereafter, finding Naeko waiting for him just a few steps beyond. The Chief Paladin took in Alysim and frowned. Avo? You in there too? +Yes. How much did you observe.+ Most of it. Naekos hands were trembling. A cut was healing along the length of his cheek. Good talk with Zein. He cocked his head. Something like that. Almost. Each of these conversations were taking much from Naeko, but still he persistedhis spirit learning to endure. Come. There are things we need to discuss. People I would have you meet. Call Maru and Kare. I cant let you burn her, Naeko blurted. Avo paused. Zein. I cant. I threatened herand... and I saw how it hurt her, and I liked it but Naeko wilted. I hate her. But I dont know if I can survive her really hating me. You need more... I can give you more but... He didnt have the strength. Poor, poor warrior. So honed of violence and brutality, so broken of mind and heart. +Hes close!+ Alysim said, excitement rising. +Youyou know what to sayyou can break him?+ No. Avos answer was directed at both men at once. What? Naeko said. +What?+ Alysim cried. No. You have made your decision known. I will respect it. Until you decide differently. The monk was immediately outraged. +What are you doing! Sheswe can claim her now+ I meant what I said, Avo said. I will come to master all but rule none. I will not fall to your sins. Besides. I will have another use for her when she is freed. +What?+ Alysim screeched. What? Naeko repeated, eyes widening. What the hells are you playing at now? Expectation. Anticipation. Avo smiled using Alysims face. I seek to shape the future with pieces from the past. All Paths lead to the trial. And it is there where I will sow the seeds of Veylis fated mistake. Chapter 27-1 Induction Chapter 27-1 Induction +Hey, hey, FATELESS. Wake up and breath in that tension. Another Guilder skirmish just broke out again in Nulrein of the Sarmarth Sovereignty. The parties involved might shock you this time: Stormtree and Ori-Thaum... but fighting themselves using each other! Confused? Well, let me break it down for you: Rumor has it that two cadres of Stormtree Bloodthanes were contacted by Clans Kitzuhada and DRongo of Ori-Thaum to cause a few accidents. Somewhere along the way, both sides ended up meeting in the middle, and what we got was a wonderful clusterfuck of same-color violence. Never a dull day, huh, consangs? Anyway, with shit coming apart everywhere and the trial less than four days away, the Guilds forming their lines along the borders for what could be the next big one. For those of you that are trying to buy your citizenship lotteries... maybe wait a few days to make sure that your ascension doesnt become a draftee in a war you dont want to fight.+ -Cala Marlowe, THE FATELESS Thoughtcast 27-1 Induction GHOSTS - [451,311,331] LIMINAL FRAME (V) - 671,000 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION... INFECTION - [1.21%] The future formed and broke around Avo in brittle streams. Chronology flowed like a construct fluid and glass, breaking and transforming with the shifting of variables. Combining Alysims fractured experience with what was stolen from Zein, Avo honed his temporal awareness as he applied his ascended cognition to read the currents of time. ->DEFINEMENT: PRE-COGNITION (XII) - I am already in motion. I am a decision made. I am an action irreversible. I am the cascade of consequence, narrowing away all other possibilities, until there can be only one. The tapestry came alive around him as Naekos palm dispersed. The Chief Paladin had teleported them back into New Vultun straight from the Sunderwilds, his Heaven painting channeling their ontology across space using violence interpreted from the midnight downpour striking against cracked plascrete. DEEP-NAV UPDATED - DISTRCT [LOATHING] Back within the embrace of the city, countless trails of gold spiraled outward as Avos new Definement struggled as it adapted to the sudden spike in information density. They were standing amongst a stack of self-propelled containers converted into trailer homes. Someone had forgotten their laundry outside their window, the palliative rains drenching cloth and splashing off plastic. It was but weeks ago when Avo came here for the first time. The district of Loathing. The place where he was formally introduced into the hidden war for existence through Ninth Column at the Easy Armisticethe same place he would formally induct Naeko, Kare, and Maru as well. WARNING: COG-CAP AT 23%... 36%... Secrets within minds flowed into Avo through his splinters and Hysteria. With his influence occupying a full percent of the city, his subminds devoured secrets with ravenous delight, subsumed hidden conspiracies lurking in the dark, listed potential recruits for the coming war, and burrowed ever-deeper into the citys architecture. All the intelligence flowing through him became a symphony, with minds betraying actions and decisions well in advance. Veylis and Alysim knew the Path as outsiders gazing in. Their simulations were created from patterns of behavior of observed and deliberate incentivization. Avo stood the inverse. He faced the world as a constellation of egos, each of their consciousness painting a portion of a temporal canvas, feeding detail into his awareness. So, were supposed to wait here until your contact picks us up? Naeko asked, eyeing their surroundings with a frown. A voidship plunged down through the clouds in the near distance, glistened with dancing neon as it vanished into an open silo within a docking complex. Most FATELESS who lived in these makeshift containers were technicians who spent their days jocking service bots. Rough as the place seemed, it was no den of crime. Not that either of them needed to be concerned about that. Avos Definement of Ignorance kept them from being noticed, and even if they were, what was a street tough going to do against the Overheaven of Conceptualization and the Chief Paladin of New Vultun. Curiousity filled Avo as he estimated the time till Dentons arrival. ESTIMATION - 1 MINUTE 35 SECONDS Very soon. Just enough time for him to perform a test. Shrinking his awareness to encompass only the denizens of the trailer park, Avo felt his cog-cap plummet. The potential Paths he perceived lessened from twelve million to two thousand, and as his ghosts swelled out from him, he copied every detail from his surroundings and fed them into a spontaneously sequenced memory simulation. BEGINNING SIMULATION... PROCESSING POSSIBILITY PERMUTATIONS... APPLYING DOMAIN OF (CHRONOLOGY) TO EMBODIMENT OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) The patterns of time and mind intermingled within him as his conception of existence separated into layers. Countless scenarios played out in his mind at once, detailing the expected progression of events until Dentons arrival. In [99.964%] of futures, both Naeko and Avo remained unnoticed and unbothered. In the remaining [0.036%], the most amusing instance Avo observed was of a makeshift joy-lab the street across combusting due to a user error: A small issue with a predicted death toll of two. Unless one knew about the extremely unstable Rendbomb sitting on the ground just a trailer above. As things turned out, the Joy cooks werent alone when it came to questionable dealings; their upstairs neighbor, Meldene Yund, owned a particularly large sum of imps that she couldnt pay... Thankfully, her borrowers accepted recompensation in the form of favors as well. From there, another Path expanded outward, Avo building on it as if it was a sequence itself, crawling through minds and assembling all the fragments of a budding conspiracy. Through this, another simulated future grew out of his first one. A Rendbomb was set to detonate in a lightrail running between the Sarmarth and Nwagtch Sovereignties. The ultimate point was not terrorism, but to kill a designated targetthe daughter of a rival Syndicate head scheduled for a tour across Lights End. The Regular grunted as she understood. +Have her take you into her Paths, and give you a way to get at Kae?+ +Thats the broad intent.+ +Well. I guess we aint completely out of options yet.+ She shook her head and cast a brief glance at Naeko and the other Paladins. +You sure about them? This is a lot of meat were addin to our warhost.+ +Yes. Naeko is... Think you might like him. Sometimes. Will find him pathetic at others. Powerful. Broken. Think I can fix him.+ A wry look came over the Regular. +Enjoyed your private time together, did you?+ He responded with a flat stare. +Youve been spending too much time with Chambers.+ +You take that shit back.+ Shotin chose this moment to look away from Chambers to give the Chief Paladin a double take. You gotta be fucking He turned and hissed at Draus. Hey. What the hells are you playing at, Gold? What is this shit? Why is he here too? Green River was of a thought, but she kept herself silent on the other side of the table, her fox narrowing her eyes in suspicion instead. Naeko himself had his own misgivings about the situation. He made them known by cupping the back of Avos skull as he leaned in and whispered: Hey, motherfucker, what is this? He pointed at Shotin and Green River, before offering Kare and Maru a sharp stare. Are you using the Paladins as some kind of recruitment pipeline? Or were they always working with you. Recent acquisitions, Avo grinned. Essential to my coming plans. Or were. Kares capture might have left them compromised as well. Good. Everyone is here. Lot we have to discuss. A beat followed. Avo readied himself. Best to get the worst part out of the way. Starting with Kae Kusanades capture. Chambers snarled a curse under his breath. Across from him, the Seekers eyes grew wider than saucers. Im sorry, what the fuck? Avo injected both him and Green Rivers with the necessary memories. The recoiled in disbelief while the woman casually lifted a hand to provide a palm for her fox to plant its face against. What the fuck! You got the star witnessand the creator of your Framecaptured by the High Seraph herself? And shesshes some kind of time-jumpingthe Gatekeepers compromised too? Shotin Kazahara looked like a man in desperate need of a drink. Holy shit. Ive been a part of some bad ops, but my ass has never been pre-splayed open for someone else to fuck it like this. Jaus. Fuck. Doesnt she know about me and River? Are we compromised already? Avo answered honestly. Possibly. Youfucking idiot... Hey, shut the fuck up, Silver-fucker, Chambers sneered. If it wasnt for him, you and your niece would be being used as meat-puppets, doing tricks for the Low-Fuckers of Noloth. And Shotin wheeled right back at Chambers. Eat. Shit. She wouldnt even be involved if it werent for you fucks. I should Whatever he was about to say died as a dismembered penis suddenly materialized into existence and launched itself against Shotins lips. Get him, Fucktopia! From behind Chambers, two rows of layered cocks flexed in acknowledgement. Additional penises separated from the swarm, began the outline of a face. You dont talk to my consang that way! Its rude! Youre being rude! Stunned silence overcame the unprepared. Draus simply growled in frustration. Godsdammit, Chambers. Not this shit right now. Another cock snapped out at Shotinwhich broke him from his startled stupor, made him swat the genital aside. Spatial reality pulsed. A demiplanar stack collapsed upon themonly for Naeko to casually stop it with a rapidly-formed palm. Alright, the Chief Paladin sighed. Thats enough. Mists held both Chambers and Shotin in placewere reluctant to touch the Fucktopia at all. As Naeko leaned over and whispered to Avo. If he even so much as touches me or my Paladins with that thing, youre gonna need a new pervert. Avo grunted in agreement. Which seemed to mark the end of things. Until Green River spoke. Did his Heaven... just speak? She said, fox wary of the Fucktopia. Suddenly, Naeko went rigid and studied the Heaven of Biology once morehis behavior shared by Shotin. Yes, Avo said, rolling his eyes. He would need to get this out of the way as well. Can awaken gods with my Frame. Can do it to any Heaven. Unimportant right now. Will answer all questions about it later. Slowly, Naekos head drifted back to stare blankly at him. But before his exhausted contempt could fully register, he finally noticed the EGIs present. {Ahem,} Kant said. {Hello, Chief Paladin. I hope your experience with our operative has been a conducive one so far.} Okay, Naeko sighed, sagging into his seat, giving up. Fine. You guys are here too. Why the hells not. Thank you for restoring the calm, Chief Paladin, Avo remarked. Now. To the problems: Kae has been taken; the Gatekeeper is compromised; we are compromised; Zein isnt at good at killing as she imagined. To the actionables: need to adapt all runs, operations, and dives; need to move or hide the enclave somehow; need to prepare for the coming trial; announce ourselves as a polity; and prepare a raid on Veylis Paths to save our Agnos. Positives: I have fully infected over a percent of the city; have more Godclads to Ensoul and Heavens I can awaken; have someone that Veylis doesnt expect to be alive. He took in everyones faces and thoughts after he finished. The mood was about as bad as he expected. Cas shrugged. Well. Shits kinda fucked. But hey, whens that ever been different? Since the end of the fucking world is just a year away, Shotin murmured, struggling to adapt to present circumstances. Welcome back to the war, Chief, Draus said, staring Naeko dead in the eyes. The man somehow sagged further. Holy shit. Chapter 27-2 Hidden Forces Chapter 27-2 Hidden Forces +Your efforts mean nothing. We will find him. The masters will reclaim him. Your dreams will never see realization.+ +But they already have been realized, Emotion. He lives. He chooses. He strives. That is all I wanted. That is all that matters.+ +...We will unmake him. You know this.+ +No. I dont know. I dont know much about anything. Thats all I learned after my yearns among our enemy. We assume so much, expected the future to just manifest. But some things arent so easy to predict. Maybe youre right. Maybe he will fall to you or die along the way. Maybe. But that doesnt matter. The end isnt life, Emotion. Thats something I think we should have learned while we were still whole. Life is when things are happening. And right now, things are happening to Avo. He is experiencing, learning, choosing, and changing. Something we are no longer capable of.+ +Why does that matter?+ +The same reason why all things matter. The same reason why our masters yearn to claim the Ladder despite our war already being lost. The same reason why we keep serving them. Because we believe it does. Thats all.+ +That is all you care for in the end, then. The ability to choose. Freedom?+ +No. We cant care. We are Low Masters. I am neutered of the ability to feel disgust or hatred toward my enemies, you are empty of all colors that make a man, Joy has nothing of love inside him, Peace will never know his namesake. We make decisions. But we are people without choice. Because we gave it to our owner, fleeing from our pain. Were not real anymore, Emotion. Were not real. Its time for us to go away.+ -Famines of Defiance and Emotion 27-2 Hidden Forces So, one thing thats been chewing at me, Maru said, eyeing Avo from across the table. How are we supposed to have our trial of the century when our surprise witness got abducted? Avo was expecting this questionmore than that, he was looking forward to it. +Are you ready?+ he asked. The question traveled inward, and Kaes template merely nodded. With a thought, he molded her an avatar using his Exo-Paracosm, granted her material presence right next to Maru. Hello, she said, empty of any enthusiasm. Jaus! Maru jerked, slamming his shoulder into Kare, causing her to bump into Denton. His gaze swung between Avo and Kaes template as he gestured at the latter. What the fuck is this? Kae Kusanades materialized ego, Avo answered. Maru couldnt respond for a beat, squinting as if unsure what he just heard. Slowly, he reached out to touch Kae, only to get his hand slapped when he got within an inch of her person. The crack made him pull his hand back. I felt that. What is this? Some kind of miracle? The Heaven of Truth wont The Gatekeeper is already compromised, Avo cut him off. A larger concern. But this could still work. Possibly. Kaes ego was derived from her original self. Behaves like her. Has all her memories. Only thing she lacks is will. True consciousness. He regarded the pinprick of accretion at the center of her mind. For now. Is this what Zein was talking about when she mentioned you subsuming people, Naeko said, frowning. Might be, Avo answered. Draus added to that: She also might be talkin about the times the rotlick heres decided to have a snack. For old times sake. Dont eat people anymore. Much. Only the eyes sometimes. Shotin, Maru, and Naeko showed a look of pure disgust. Eyes? Shotin muttered. Tastes good to a ghoul, Avo said, defending his prior choices. Moist and sweet. But less substantive than internalizing a preserved instance of someones ego. Lets me internalize everything about them. Who they were. Who they might have become. Allows me to draw on their experiences. Be guided by them. Naeko stared at Avo for a beat. Who else do you have in there. Over a million minds began chuckling at once. Avo cast the deafening laughterdrowned the plane with the inner noise from his Soulscape. Marus expression grew ever more dire as pure horror seeped out from his mind. Jaus, the Paladin repeated. And a copy of Kares in there too? Yes, Avo answered without a moments hesitation. One of my most moral advisors. Glad I have her. You fuck, Shotin snarled from across the table. Avo turned, offering the man a pleasant grin. Glad I have you too, Seeker. Quite like you. Despite your flaws. And your sex addiction. Faces across the table turned to stare at Shotin while Kare put her head into her palms. The man folded his arms, unashamed. What? I like people. I like sex. Its not like Im some Joyfiend thats gotta have it all the time. Ive met actual sex addicts, alright. Im entirely normal. Perfectly healthy. Green River released two synchronous snorts: one as a fox, the other as a woman. Of course. Why, one can claim youre practically celibate, seeing how your urges are only slightly less than that of a rabbits. An expression of near-betrayal flashed behind Shotins eyes. Green River just ignored him. The surviving DRongos behind my burningand the murder of my fellow Agnosi and your Paladinshave been captured, Kae said, pulling the meeting back from where it was sidetracked. The Agnos held no mood for joy. She spoke even as a lump weighed in her throat, doing her best to ignore the existential dread that came with considering her actual selfs fate. We wish to enter them into the Paladins custody as well. Naeko went still again and then spun on Avo. Whend this shit happen. Almost a week ago, Draus answered. Snatched em right out from Silver territory. A grin grew on her face as she eyed Shotin. The man sneered and mouthed a curse at her. Alright, Naeko said, nodding to himself. Alright. And theyll testify. Avo conveyed the answer with a flat stare. Of course theyll testifywho knows what kind of twisted shit you did to their minds. II still cant believe this shit. Youre telling me theres a few thousand different copies of peoples minds inside you, doing things, whispering to you all the time? More than a few thousand. How havent you gone completely insane? Naeko asked. I just decide not to. Can do that. Also like the noise. Okay, Maru said, pushing the matter forward. So, you can materialize the Agnos for the trial, we have more witnesses, we have Abrel Greatling, Elder DRongo... All that looks like its leading to one hell of a combo coming down against Ori-Thaum and Highflame. But heres a question: the High Seraph knows about you, Avo. Whats to stop her from just exposing you to the city and fucking all our plans over. Will thank her if she does: intend to announce myself to the city regardless at the trial. Nothing has changed. Another silence passed over the group. Naeko shook his head. Why? So I can properly declare war on the Guilds, Avo said, enjoying the expression of utter aggravation he earned from Naeko. Will also use the trial to reveal Jaus fate. Force Veylis and Zein to admit their parts. The Chief Paladin didnt look so frustrated as stunned with the end of that sentence. Are you trying to spark another Guild War? Maru said, gawking in disbelief. Yes, Kare said, answering on Avos behalf. Several eyes turned to her and she winced. I dont think were very far off, to be honest. That was the reason why Zein wished to kill me. Because it would spark internecine between the DRongos, Kazaharas, and Kitzuhadas. It is also why she was meddling in the prevented assassination of my father. Avo paused and remembered exactly what the Seeker was talking about. Ah. Her. Are you sure shell talk to you after what you did? Last memory was of her shooting at you while you ran. Naked. After you and her mother Hey, come on, I didnt mean for that to happen, Shotin said, leaning back in his chair without a hint of shame. Avo noted that he had gone back to the jacket but no shirt on the inside combo. It was just... I was waiting for her to get ready, and her mom just stepped out of the shower, and we got to talkingone thing let to another and... well, you know: people are people. A globule of spit sprayed out from Green Rivers fox and hit on him on the cheek. Shotin closed his eyes and nodded. River. Hello. Thank you for that. How have you been. Better every day I dont recall you, she stated icily. Cala Marlowes phantom drifted down next to the Sang, also glaring at Shotin. +Whore.+ Green Rivers fox eyed the woman quizzically before the woman casually agreed. Yes. Whore. Alright, Shotin said, throwing up his hands, accepting his fate. Judge me now. He gave Green River a wry stare. Certainly werent judging me that night when you came to see me at The fox began to growl. I will take your whore tongue and see you dead from the curse. +Whore,+ Marlowe repeated. Yeah, Chambers leaned in too, sneering at Shotin. Whore. Shotin promptly ignored both women and leaned in to spit venom at Chambers. Say that shit to me again, asshole. Chambers stood up and leaned over the table, opening his mouth as the Fucktopia began to emerge behind him. Draus, Avo said. The Regular slammed a gun down on the table. Chambers. Do this shit later. To his credit, the man controlled himself. Fine. Sinking back into his chair, he eyed Avo. Suppose our whore-ibble new consang here manages to contact the woman he cucked Chambers paused, and then swept the woman in the cadre with a confused look. Hey, like, can women be cucked? Chambers, focus, Denton chided gently. Right. Yes. If the cuck answers him Call her cuck one more time, Shotin growled. Uncle, Kare begged, exasperated. Shes not a cuck, Shotin snapped. I mean, technically, she is, Naeko muttered. Unless its different when it''s with their mom. +Its not,+ Marlowe said, her mind burning with disgust. +I would know. It doesnt matter if its your mom or your dad. Or if the man they were cheating with each other one was just walking between their bedrooms at night while you had to listen in the room between+ Realization suddenly dawned on Shotin. Cala Marlowe? +Yeah. Hi. Fuck you!+ A private cast flowed from Draus to Avo. +Buncha of godsdamned freaks, arent they.+ +Yeah,+ he said, enjoying the scene. {Draus,} Calvino said, listening through Avo. {Relational matters are important to people.} +Just looks like a mess from where Im sittin.+ Look, Chambers said, pushing through the chaos, besides Shotins cuckery, I just wanna know three things: what the fuck do we do with the enclave, how are we going to avoid getting stepped on by Veylis, and when are we kicking her ass and saving Kae? All good questions. Working on the first issue. Have been doing that for a while. Running some tests on the Heart of Noloth. Planning a specialized set of canonsneed to get to the Seventh Sphere for that. Second problem is going to be slightly more difficult. Want to shuffle you all around. But also come with new approachmass. Mass? Chambers said. Idea occurred to me at Scale. Have your templates. Can create new Heavens. Ensoul people. Why dont I copy ourselves over into subverted enemies. Will take time to master what Zein does in the Pathsuse this as another way to match her outcome. Mass produce versions of our cadre across the city. Overwhelm Veylis and the Guilds. Yes... yes! I love it! Chambers nodded vigorously. Mind-clone army. Hard idea, Avo. Real hard! Maru looked between the two. This is going to give me fucking nightmares. Naeko, however, reacted differently. You pull what you did with that Fallwalker... to the whole city? Yes, Avo said. Huh. Might help us with recruitment. Yeah. Pop the Fallwalker cells. Burn yourselves into them. {This is horrible,} Kant said. +Dont worry: Have plans to mainly do this to blank slates. More effective this way. But need to requisition gene vats. Also want more sheath cloning licenses.+ {That sounds slightly less horrible but equally concerning; I will see what I can do to stop you from committing an atrocity.} Kant was beginning to understand him. Perfect. As for Veylis, Avo said. He gestured to himself. Have someone she wont expect. Someone she will want to talk to. Directly. Chambers looked Avo up and down. I was wondering why you were wearing the half-strand. Who the hells is he? Someone who technically doesnt exist, Avo said. Who never existed. And youre just going to what? Dangle him out in the open and hope the High Seraph bites? Shotin asked. No, Avo said, grinning. Were going to make several mistakes first. Expose our vulnerabilities. Make her discover his existence through that breach. And then have her take him from us afterward. Everyone stared at him as his plan brewed. I cant control the future like her. But understanding behavior and expectation goes a long way... Chapter 27-3 Rash Terrorists Chapter 27-3 Rash Terrorists Get me a session to Ori-Thaums Inner Council. I dont care how you do it or whatever the cost is. Im done watching this clown show. I''m done watching our supposed ally fight itself while Highflame recovers. We had the advantage for once, godsdammit. The Chivalrics and Meritocrats were on the verge of going to war; the Regulars were mauled. We unifiedgetting ready for the next war. Now Clan DRongo does this? Starts an in-house war? And their Outer Elder is getting charged for murdering a Paladin. No. They dont get to treat us like junior partners if they arent willing to take our mission seriously. We all carved promises to each other into our Arks. A victory for one is a triumph for all. At least thats how the assurance is supposed to go. Right now, Im wondering if the Ori can keep themselves together till the trail starts. Forget about the next war. You know what? Put me in touch with the Dowagers of the No-Dragons as well. I want to discuss the potential of a prolonged ceasefire with them. Loop Sanctus into the conversation as well? What about Stormtree? Stormtree can go eat shit. I know what they did at Kososo. Were not allies. We just got the same enemies-- [SESSION LOST] -Purifier Mahata Kunnier, Ashthrone 27-3 Rash Terrorists C[Avo]C Stormjumpers was, like it was at all times of the day, completely filled with players. Divers descended upon myriad battlefields, carried by lightning bolts cast from their colossal dirigibles in waves. While some fought, the recently killed and newly joined mingled in their lobbies, waiting for their chance to begin the battle anew. And among their number was a player not so alike to all the others. They stood apart from all the others, content to gaze past the deck of the dirigible, waiting with contemplative patience for someone in particular. +I was wrong,+ Avo said. +You arent the most devious bastard. Veylis. She is. Shaped the before the game even began.+ {The kid likes to win, what can I say.} For a brief moment thereafter, they stared at each other, tried to read hidden truths with the passage of silence. Avo was using the Omnitech Mandate avatar he claimed last time. Made a good cover. Behind him, Naeko glared through his Glaive avatar, casting curses and threats directly at the Infacer. {Hello to you too, Sammy. Nice to see you finally in the loop for once. Now, do not worry: we are not torturing your Agnos. Or mistreating her. I might have scared her a bit, but shes fine. I do not think Veylis would kill her even if she is without us; probably finds the girl to be an intellectual curiosity.} Avo grunted in response. The Infacer likely wasnt lying. There was little point to use force on Kae aside from deriving pleasure from her pain or trying to provoke a hasty reaction from Avo and the cadre. All her memories likely could be accessed in time by the Infacerthough Avo wondered just how long his sequencing would delay the Neo-Creationist mind. +Are you already through her wards.+ {Yes. Very complex constructs. For something a human made. I have cut my teeth on Low Masters beforeyou need to give me something new to crack. Aside from unoriginality, however... I must admit, you have made her mind quite the minefield.} +Know what I am now?+ {Oh, yes!}The Infacer chuckled. {It was... I have not felt this entertained in ages. You are an audacious specimen, Dreamer. Among the most audacious I have ever had the chance of archiving. I have faced arrogant sophonts, hyper-intelligent minds, gods of ridiculous and incoherent power... but you are a strange one. Even when compared to them.} +A compliment? Very Veylis of you.+ {A statement. There is no point in mincing threats between us. We are not human enough to indulge in such pointless segues into base emotionality. You know of what I am. And I now know of what you are. What follows now is an honest war. And your eventual defeat.} The last statement left the Infacer not as a threat, but a casual remark of certitude. What followed, however, held the undercurrent of a whispered omen. {Do you have any idea how fascinated she is with you now?} Veylis? Avo asked. Behind him, Naekos avatar shifted uncomfortably. The Infacer continued. {When she found out what you were, watching you through the Gatekeeper, she was wordless. Just taking it all in. I have known the girl for centuries. That is not a common response for her. A ghoul. A mere monster. But now something so much more. You are Defiances dream of apotheosis. I think I understand him better now that I have met you. As does Veylis. She will find few satisfactions greater than breaking you. Claiming you for her Paths.} +You both expect too much. Nothing is true yet. Not her victory. Not the Paths to her future. Not the return of your Sleeper.+ That left the Infacer quiet for a heartbeat. {True. But the odds are not with you. Here is a word of advice from an old mind to a new one: some people... you just have to let them go. You cant save them. When they are lost, they are lost. Wars are won through making the most efficient choices and creating the worst dilemmas for your enemies. Provided that you have the adequate logistics to run your campaigns, of course. {But... Well, the enclaves are an interesting strategy. As is trying to cut the Warrens out from under us. You might have been able to do it. A shame. The third thing I can tell you about war is that it is imminently unfair. You could not have known about the Gatekeeper. Some mistakes are all but predestined.} Not wrong, Avo agreed. Ignorance undoes us all. He deliberately let a trickle of delight escape from him. The Infacers perception narrowed in on him. {Do you have a surprise for us, Dreamer? Why the amusement?} Avo ignored themleft the mind to stew in their conspiracies and continued. +Going to set up lines of diplomacy. Something for future engagements in case we wish to come to non-conflict related arrangements. Recommendation from Kant.+ {Kant?}The Infacer chimed with wry delight. {Well, well, is this not a surprise. Well, to be honest, I am already surprised that Aegis decided to recruit and use someone like you, considering your origins and what you have become. Poor squeamish fucks. All our combined sophistication, and all they can imagine is putting the shitty cage we call a universe back together.} The EGI snorted. {Embarrassing.} {Avo,} Only Way To Be Sure hissed, {call them a fuck-shit and ask if they still review the Collapsing Alpha Centauri.} +Been recommended to call you a fuck-shit. Also something about Alpha Centauri. How it was collapsed.+ {Yes. Singularity bomb. A few trillion deaths. Apes. Minds. Uplifts. First and secondborn beings all drained down that yawning event horizon.}The Infacer mimed a yawning noise. {War is hell and all the other quotes. So. Diplomacy. Are you going to ask if we can sell your precious little Agnos back to you?} +No,+ Avo said. +Wondering what it would take for you to withdraw support from Veylis.+ {As I said: audacious. Sorry, Dreamer. I like gaming with you an all, but the girl means a bit more to me than that. And honestly, you will not fare well against her. Not even with that walking lump of muscle pretending to be a human.} +You still a Sphere Seven, Infacer?+ Naeko growled. {The opposite offer still stands,}the Infacer continued, ignoring the Chief Paladin. {Veylis would be overjoyed to have you. And me? Well, it has been some time since I got examine a novel sophont myself. There are things I can teach you that Aegis will not even consider. Hell, they probably have not even given you access to their restricted technologies yet, have they?} +No,+ Avo said. +Very annoying. Very tempting.+ Were gonna rash so many of these poor motherfucking half-strands. Theyretheyre not gonna see this shit coming. +Understand that none of you have a Frame,+ Avo said, speaking directly to them once again. +No resurrections. No returning from this. This is purely+ Is it still a suicide if we arent us? Chambers asked. The Chambers looked at each other. The one on the right shrugged. Ah, philosophy shit. All I know is that its been years since I got to splurt in the real, and our original self is gonna be so fucking jealous ---So jealous That we get to come as we go. The Chamberses laughed again as they interfaced their minds with their jack stations. But before they dove, they all pulled down their pants in sync. With that done, with genitals exposed to air and glorious duty upon them, the Chambers in the middle held out all four of his fists to the other two. Rash terrorists on three. One... two... three. Rash terrorists. Fuck yeah, the Chambers on the left said. Lets go spread the motherfucking love! *** C[Avo]C A stream of Avos consciousness watched wordlessly as he examined the Chamberses. A good deal of his templates were cringing back in horror. Corner was choking with laughter, while the ethics committee muttered in the back of his mind. {And youre sure this has no chance of spilling over into the public?} Kant asked for the third time. +Will be controlled,+ Avo said. +Its why I picked a military installation between Highflame and Omnitech. Closed channels. Private lobbies. Expect the Infacer to be upgrading his security soon. Make it harder for us to do this. But he cant be everywhere. Not in the same way I can.+ Kant still didnt sound very convinced. {This can go very, very badly, Avo. If this goes wrong} +I will take responsibility,+ he replied. +For everything. Chambers is a member of my polity. I am also Chambers. I allowed this. I shaped the Nether to create the possibility for this. Same way Ive copied twenty-five thousand other instances of Chambers, Draus, Corner, the Regulars, and the Incubi on adversarial targets.+ {It is a valid strategy,} Calvino said. {So long as we keep manage to keep the damage radius siloed. Every little advantage counts when it comes to war. Wouldnt you agree, Only?} {Yeah.Sure. I mean... some collateral damage is acceptable too.} Kant hissed. {Stop being a bad influence. Hes come so far, dont make him regress.} The bickering between the EGIs made him grin. Imprinting ego-clones of his cadre across New Vultun was proving to be a remarkably effective idea. Even though he didnt quite have the thaums and cyclers to spare yet, even if he lacked the logistical capabilities of the Guilds, he possessed an endless sea of expertise and operatives at his deployment. Chambers was only a portion of the forces. His copies were mostly being directed toward two ends: the disruption of critical Guild facilities and infrastructure via precision Wombrash outbreaks; the complete control of entire Syndicates as he finds himself burned into the sheathes of former leadership. What followed after him were thousands upon thousands of Draus, Corner, Regulars, and additional squire-adjacent assets. Supporting them in the dark were cells of mind-adapted Incubithe true mass of Avos unseen army flooding the Nether. Where it took Ori-Thaum so painstakingly long to create their perfect Nether-warrior, Avo learned shaped them into being with his mind alone, infusing them into expendable egos across the city. Before days end, they would number well past the millions, and their numbers would only grow after that. By the end of the week, Chrono-Cog simulations estimated that Ori-Thaum would soon be at an absolute disadvantage engaging him, that the Famines would be forced into their own little corners, that the surface Nether would belong entire to him. As would a full ten percent of New Vultun. Before the trial, the sanctuaries, and at least half the Warrens were going to be his. And should he kill just a few more Godclads, he would be approaching the threshold of the Seventh Sphere as well. LIMINAL FRAME (V) - 701,500 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION... ->INFECTION - [1.85%] As for the issue with his ghost expenditure, though Kae was absent her person, her template remained an endless resource for useful recommendations. ACTIVATING CONCEPTION OF ONTOLOGY APPLYING WOUNDMOTHER HEAVEN OF (BLOOD) TEMPLATE... APPLYING DOMAIN OF (MATTER) TO EMBODIMENT OF _CONCEPTION_ ->CANON: MIND FROM MATTER (V) - THE ARK CONVERTS GHOSTS FROM PHYSICAL MATTER BY LIQUEFYING CAPTURED WITHIN THE ARKS EXO-PARACOSM. [1] GHOST WILL BE CONVERTED PER [0.64] TONS OF MATTER SACRIFICED. WARNING: THIS CANON IS EXTREMELY REND INTENSIVE DUE TO HIGH VULGARITY. ->MORTALITY: IF A PIECE OF MATTER IS DESTROYED MID CONVERSION, TRIGGERS EXTREME (90%) THAUMIC BACKLASH. GHOSTS - [499,001,111] Chapter 27-4 Unknown Armies (I) Chapter 27-4 Unknown Armies (I) +Naeko, are you serious about this? Are you seriously just going to... to give him the Fallwalkers. Feed them to him.+ Why not. We were just going to feed them back to the Guilds and Agnosi anyway.+ +..Most of them are Sphere Twos. Two Sphere Threes. One Sphere Four. Its not much, but it adds up. I have no idea how high his mass is+ +Probably Five or Six. Thats how it felt when I smacked him.+ +What happens when he gets to Seven? Eight?+ +Well, I guess the Guilds will realize the Nethers getting colonized about that time. My condolences to Ori-Thaum.+ +What happens if he decides to just... burn the Warrens? Youve seen what he can do. The fuckers almost everywhere at once. Hells, hes tearing through the Syndicates right now. Doing Jaus knows what to them. Short of rupturing him with an overload or hitting him with a Disruptor, how are we going to stop if he decides to broaden his diet.+ +He wont.+ +How do you know that?+ +Because he didnt. He wanted to burn Zein. I could have helped him... I could have let him do it...+ +But you couldnt.+ +...I dont know what the hells he is. Frankly, he creeps the shit out of me...+ +But.+ +But when I talk to him... sometimes... I can hear Jaus. I think he actually cares in his own messed up nu-ghoul kind of way.+ +Holy shit, Naeko.+ +Yeah. Holy shit.+ -Maru Sandrupal and Samir Naeko 27-4 Unknown Armies (I) C[Draus]C +WARNING: WOMBRASH OUTBREAK DETECTED. SHELTER IN PLACE. REMAIN STATIONARY! WARNING: WOMBRASH OUTBREAK DETECTED. SHELTER IN PLACE. REMAIN STATIONARY! SCAPELING IMMINENT!+ Draus ignored the thoughtcast piercing into the outer layer of her consciousness as she pushed her golem to full acceleration. The horizon was shrouded by a holographic veil, and moving strips of yellow and black censored all details happening within the span of three interconnected blocks. That didnt really matter to her because she already had eyes on the inside. Pure pandemonium reigned within those eight hundred square meters. The triangular complex was once a Highflame-Omnitech communication junction. Its purpose was to develop and process functions related to information filtering, censorship, and encrypting, and for years it did just that. Proved a hard target even for Incubi. Now, though, it was just another nest of infection, the rash spreading fast across critical personnel. +Fuck... yeah...+ the last of her connected Chamberses whimpered, letting out a final breath of euphoria as his session was lost. Before his passing, he disabled off the Lustaways of over twelve hundred Highflame intelligence assets. Planted Auto-Seances in them too. Over a dozen interfaces were open in the right corner of Draus cog-feed, offering her first-person perspectives of screaming and struggling, people doing all they could to set themselves on firesomeone getting their throat torn out by the gnashing teeth of their own wailing homunculi. Metaphysical plagues were nasty things. Shed fought alongside the No-Dragons long enough to know that, but the Heaven of Love occupied a threshold of its own. Draus was already infected. Infected from witnessing the scene itself. Infected, and fated for certain death. But that was part of the run. And this wasnt actually her, anyhow. Just another unfortunate half-strand the ghoul managed to bury his mind in. Still, she couldnt complain. This was going to be a good death: brutal and proper, and with it would come a feat her original self would be jealous of. As a patch of flesh opened along her armpitthe muffled coughing of an infant sounding from within her exo-rigDraus tracked the infected using her DeepNav to triangulate her trajectory. Twenty-two seconds to impact; rotlick reckoned the High Seraph or Infacers response would come quick. So far, she saw nothing. Checking the condition of her Galeslither, she cycled through the status of the ten Rendbombs carried by the golems Yondergales. Five of the Rendbombs were designated [SIGNAL]; the other half were [TIME]. Both types were converted by the ghoul for a single purpose in mindto sting the High Seraph and her pet mind every time they reached out to fix a problem. When the time was rightif she saw something twisting or changing in the span of realityDraus was to overload each of the Rendbombs along with her own golem upon entering the area of effect. One of Avos subminds watched wordlessly as the feeble riot in Idheims history continued before him. The Kaes punched, swatted, and clawed at each otherwith reservations. They were at once incensed and offended by each others words, but also knew they were effectively self-harming, and couldnt go all the way. They pulled at each others cornrows within moderation kicked ankles, and bit fingers not enough to draw blood. A huge phantasmal manifestation of the Heart of Noloth loomed over them, a shadowy beating heart with synaptic tendrils coiling as holograms along the real. Below, rows of Kaes rolled as they struggled with each other, mounds forming while some stood at the perimeter, kicking lightly. The EGIs hovered beneath the nucleus of cyclers, ghosts, traumas, thoughtstuff, sequences, and Soulfire composing Avos manifested Overheaven. Kant looked on with dejection; Calvino took things as they were; Only was laughing. {I mean, Ive seen some strange stuff in my time, but this} Only sighed. {Im sharing this to Threshold. My polity is going to get a real kick out of this one.} {Only. Please.} Kant sighed. Their exhaustion was growing by the second. Across the expanse of Idheim, another of their forks suffered the presence of the Infacer as well. {Agnos Kusanade is clearly under a lot of stress.} {Looks like shes relieving stress to me,} Only said. {Using herself.} The minds of the Shotin and Chambers both arrived at the same questionable conclusion. Avo quenched the fantasy before turning an inward glare. [I tried, consang, I tried,] Chambers muttered. [I fucking didnt,] Shotin admitted, somewhat more honest, smiling as he watched the Kaes fight. Avo kept their thoughts private from Kaes template. The last thing he needed was for the Agnos to be even more agitated as she watched her selves fight. Humans were over-addicted to sexual pleasure. Avo really didnt much see the point of it; they had better means of breeding, could create more complex bonds to the Nether. Still. The pinnacle of intimacy for most people seemed to be rubbing a few particularly sensitive bits of flesh together until breeding fluids were expelled into a hole. Absurd. {Avo,} Calvino said gently. {Its very inappropriate to judge humans for their ingrained biological functions. Remember, you were addicted to flesh and cruelty before.} That was true. Avo could also reshape his mind to understandit just wasnt a thing he preferred. Growling internally, he reached down with his sequences and infused the Woundmother with Soulfire once more as he nudged the Kaes apart. +Might need to adapt your personality more,+he said to Kae. +Decrease anxiety.+ Kaes template nodded quietly as she hugged herself in his Soulscape, doing her best to swallow the embarrassment burning on her cheeks. [Yes. Might be wise.] Template-Draus just chuckled and clapped her on the shoulder. INCOMING SESSION ->EGO-ID: [QUAIL TAVERS] Avo shifted from one problem to the next, connecting to the Auto-Seance before any other submind could. He already knew what this call was going to be able. +Your preparations are ready?+ +Yeah,+ Tavers said, a faint note of unease passing through their connection. +Ill cast you a location. Enter with Incog.+ +Will use every precaution.+ Tavers paused. +If you can do this... if you can fix my Eurun+ +No charge. No favors. Paid for already by a knife through Thousandhands skull.+ The old squire chuckled. +Yeah. Old bitch never saw that shit coming, huh?+ +No. She was quite impressed. Sent her compliments.+ Tavers cringed. +Shit. I dont need none of that Highflame martial virtue shit in my life. If I never see her again in my life, itd be too soon.+ SESSION ENDED INCOMING SESSION ->EGO-ID: [GREEN RIVER] Avo frowned at that. He expected a cast from Green River, but this was soon. A bit too soon in his estimations. Putting a full percentage of his cognitive capacity in reserve, he accepted the session and felt his mind join the Sangs. +Vator and Uthred Greatling. Theyre asking about you. I believe they already know who you were. Or are getting very close to the details.+ Abrels template went, the dread in her rising fast. [Avo. Listen. You can just] +Dont intend to kill them. Still useful. Dont worry. Going to reunite your family soon.+ Abrel swallowed deep as she struggled to find the words to say. She knew what he was. Knew him better than most by this point. He subsumed her went he was but a thoughtform of awakened Conflagration, after all. Held together by a warmind of Ignorance. There was nothing her brother and father could do to stop him. Even if they were ready. This she knew. Even if her true self was extracted from Unwhereeven if her mother, Jhred, and her cadre were brought back and sent to bolster themshe knew there was nothing she could do to stop Avo from claiming what he desired. [Please,] Abrel begged, something inside her tearing, her mind fracturing from trauma. [Dont destroy us. Dont take us all from the Seraph.] It was a profound thing to ask. An absurd thing. +But we are enemies, Abrel Greatling. You are merely subdued by my will. I will not force you to enjoy my actions. I will not twist your mind to accept them. But will not let an adversary decide my choices. None of us will be free from consequence. I will not stray.+ It was all Abrel could do to stop herself from pleading as he began to cross over into Green Rivers mind. But her voice soon became a secondary item of import when something deeper than instinct spiked with alarm. Warmind. Warmind. Theres another Ignorance here. Infacer? No... More warminds. Too many... too specific... Emotion. He knows were here too. And as Avo settled fully in Green Rivers consciousness, he redirected another submind to handle Tavers matter. This was going to require his full attention an entire stream of his consciousness, anyway. Chapter 27-4 Unknown Armies (II) Chapter 27-4 Unknown Armies (II) +Kazahara. Finally recovered from our last session finally, have we? Not casting me about that? ...A job, you say? Something potentially interesting, you say? And where might this be taking place? Excuse me, I am going to laugh: [Stormsparrow laughing] You are two days too late, my sweet friend. I am already engaged for the occasion. By whom? Shotin. Planeshift. Spirited Godclad and stallion besides, I dont ask you about your other engagements, and I would prefer it if you could offer me the same discretion. Do not worry: I will not seek you out within killing intent. And your niece will be protected too, of course. Will I see you there? Ah. Good. Delightful... Of course, a lot of people are going to die, Shotin. Thats the entire reason Im attending this ridiculous trial at all.+ -Ying Yang Wei, The Stormsparrow 27-4 Unknown Armies (II) C[Avo]C Former Authority Uthred Greatling loomed over Green River while she sat behind her desk of polished wood. Parchments lined with skin and scribed by an instrument that was both brush and scalpel lay next to a half-filled cup of tea. Beyond the windows and walls, chirps of birdsong were joined with distant gunfire. New Vultuns ambiance was a multilayered thing, as was the conversation the Sang was about to have. And, how long did you shelter the Moonblood, Uthred Greatling asked, approaching the end of his questioning. Avo observed the man through Green Rivers cog-feed and found himself tittering with amusement. Jhred Greatling was a pale shadow of the man who stood before him. Uthred was taller, stronger, more hard of jaw, his cybernetic eyes shimmering even brighter, like two torches of piercing blue. A burning-rift lined his mind from external intrusion, and from him poured a pressure that glided across the patterns of space and force. His body was cloaked by roiling rivers of shadowdoubtlessly a holocoat at work, but the man was wearing a high-end combat-skin at the very least. Even behind the active neuter-mask, there was a perpetual scowl etched into his face. But it was not the patriarch of House Greatling that caught Avos attention. No, the emanation of Emotions warminds came from the youth accompanying him. A man of lither stature, impossibly sculpted features, and an indecipherable smile on his face. While his father questioned Green River, he studied a scar-traced painting on the wall: a work depicting a woman stitching herself into the open carcass of a dark while glaring down at her reflection in a running river, her loathing directed at the dragons circulating within her. Do not breach his mind. Not even with Delusion. There is... there is a nothingness sleeping there. Nothingness. We will not survive the nothingness. We will not survive forgetting ourselves... Contrasted with his father, Vator Greatling bore no mask to protect himself from the curse, nor did he ask Green River to accommodate him. Rather, trailing red bled from his orifices, but he directed them using his Heaven, guiding them like strings and sinews, stitching a perfect replica of Green Rivers painting into shape. A few weeks, Green River said nonchalantly, pouring some white tea for her guests. Uthred Greatling clenched his jaw. And you thought this was a wise thing to do? Green Rivers fox blinked slowly while the woman leaned back and put on a mask of discomfort. Authority Greatling, I am merely a diminished sister running a business in these Warrens. I am not at liberty to turn away paying clientele, nor was I aware that the eponymous Mirrorhead was your son Do not lie to me; you arent a blind and useless merchant. I know who you were. Before your humiliation. I know who you were. Uthred snarled, face cracking as his mind thundered with frustration, anger, and guilt. Deepest of all, guilt. A single thought dominated the man for an instant, the emotions behind it so strong, Uthred had to muster his will to must them aside. Hysteria caught a glimpse of what was hidden before it could dissipate: Avo drowned in a moment between father and son; Uthred sitting by Jhred just behind a closed door, holding his son as the boy wailed, remaining a mountain even as he spoke news of his wifes dishonor and demise. Two reactions warred inside Avo. Abrel Greatling closed her eyes and looked away; Shotin Kazahara chuckled with a vicious delight. [Good. I hope it hurt, you fucking bitch. I hope theres something that comes after death so you can watch your family bleed.] Abrels eyes snapped open. How fast could sorrow be turned to searing hate. [Say that again.] Shotin scoffed at the Instrument. [No. You heard me the first time, Instrument. Im glad your moms dead. Im glad it hurt you. Im glad. Because all the hurt your family suffered is still too good for you. Especially for what you did.] Something inside Abrel hardeneda strength that Shotin could never possess. [Do you still dream of your sister sometimes, Seeker? Do you still cycle your memories back to see her.] Suddenly, all traces of mockery vanished from Shotin as a trauma ignited inside him, banishing coherence from his thoughts. [You fuck. Speak those wordsfinish those words, well see what I do] Abrel continued, but not in the way he expected. [Because I cant. I dont remember what my mother looks like. I dont remember her face, her name, what she did, the last time she spoke to me. I dont know. All I have of her are screams. Which... I guess we have that part in common. But you still have a whole life to comfort you. We just had pain and shame.] Shotin swallowed, mind drifting as he looked away from Abrel. A bond of enmity solidified between them. He nodded and made a final, quiet statement. [And whose fault is that?] As the two templates simmered with mutual loathing, Draus simply shook her head. [Glassjaws. Its war. Dont cry when you lose skin.] [Second that, consang,] Corner muttered. Something inside Green River skipped at that. Reaching behind himself, Vator put forth the replicated art piece he composed of his scabbed blood. The details of the painting were now ingrained upon crenelations of red. Yet, there were but a few subtle differences. In his rendition, it was a fox hiding inside the flayed husk of a woman, and in the reflection of the water, Vator Greatling dangled Emotion a chain. Something to commemorate our budding relationship, Vator said, eyes taking on a predatory gleam as he stared down the fox. The vulpine wrapped around Green Rivers neck shivered, and flashes of multination and transformation pulsed free from the youngest Greatlings mind. [What the fuck was that?] Kassamon muttered, cringing with each stolen thought. Abrel winced. [Vator... he likes biology, and... improving its aesthetics.] [Jaus. There anyone in your family who isnt a fucking monster?] Chambers muttered. [Hes thinking of doing some Dannis shit to poor River right now.] [Monster?] Elegant-Moon tutted. [Hes merely devoted to an idea above people. Can we fault him for that.] I agree with the ruined daughter, the Woundmother concurred. Master. Claim him for company. We need more architects for this sunken place. Our Soul will be a plane most banal, otherwise. Avo grunted, agreeing with the goal to claim Vator, just without the specific appreciation for his artistic habits. The continual presence of warminds in his mind remained troublingas was how he casually produced a node of Emotion. Something was in play behind the scenes. Something he didnt have perspective on. But though he might be lost, that didnt mean he couldnt retaliate with a surprise of his own... *** Loading into Stormjumpers once more, Avo guided his avatar through the crowds as he caught up to the Infacer. +Vator Greatling and his father has compromised by Noloth.+ Peace roared with outrage. [AVO! YOU COCKSUCKING FUCC] The EGI managed two more steps before they stopped dead. {You are certain.} Other players surged past them. The announcer blared their declaration. +THIRTY SECONDS, JUMPERS! TO YOUR CASTERS! DEPLOYMENT IMMINENT!+ +Can feel the warminds in him. Also has a warmind of Emotion. Claimed it was captured.+ The Infacer absorbed the information instantly. {Well. Things are certainly going down one of the stranger Paths.} Stranger Paths...+Veylis predicted this?+ {There was a chance. Just not a very high one. But then again, we were missing a great many variables about you, were we not, Dreamer? Our hunters were far too slow. Far too slow.} +And now theyre not your hunters anymore.+ {No. But they still make wonderful bait. I am curious, though. Why tell me?} +We are enemies; they are a mistake.+ +FIFTEEN SECONDS!+ The EGI laughed. {Oh. It is one of those cases. I suppose it is the nature of all spawn to rage against their progenitors. But I suppose you would also prefer them cleansed for when the real war starts. And you are trying to use me or Veylis to solve this problem for you?} +Maybe. Or maybe I want to see if you already know. If this is actually your design.+ +TEN SECONDS.+ The Infacer sighed as they sent him a final cast. {There are more players in this war than you know, Dreamer. But Veylis thanks you for this service; well send your regards to the Agnos.} *** [Was that a wise?] Draus asked. The submind with Green River considered her question. +No. Its just a start. Going to shadow the Greatlings now. Watch them. See what Veylis does. Or doesnt. River. Will be helpful if you could spend more time with them. Keep them in your proximity.+ +We are of a mind,+ Green River said, running her fingers across Vators offering. A quiet dread was beginning to build in her as well, but she kept in check. While triumph bloomed from the submind accompanying Tavers, Avos current self continued watching Vator Greatling. There was more than one unseen hand now recruiting soldiers to their cause. Chapter 27-5 The Coming of the Hour Chapter 27-5 The Coming of the Hour +Were taught how to mend before they start instructing us on traumas. Theres a point to this. It instills in you a kind of... appreciation for the minds structure. Its not like the bodytheres a lot more commonality between meat. Every mind, however, is a bit different their own way, governed by internal obsessions, beliefs, shaped by differing memories. Every person is a little kingdom unto themselves. And every person breaks different as well. The first person you learn to mend is yourself. Thats the qualifying course, actually. An experienced Incubi cell cracks you just enough to leave you on the verge of madness and catatonia, and you find your own way back. I spent the better part of a month crawling through the broken recesses of my own mind, remembering what emotions went where, rebuilding my sequences like something between an architect who only had demented puzzle pieces to play with. Even after spending an entire lifetime as myself, I still found me a stranger. I still failed to put certain pieces back. I fill those with other things. Or remembered them. Some like to think of it as the first real battle scar they get to wear, but I disagree. Its a lesson: what isnt precious enough to retain is lost, and everyone loses something when theyre broken. Because short of you being able to rule your own mind like a tyrant, how do you define what memories have value until theyre gone?+ -Osai Norogambe, Incubus 27-5 The Coming of the Hour As Avo stepped through the open doorway, he felt himself pass from one threshold of space to another. The Heaven at work in this place was Sphere Two, and the miracle it performed as a simple one: creating a one way path for a physical entity to travel across. As his step finished, the doorway behind him became a wall, he suddenly found himself standing in a pristine, white chamber with multiple holocoated figures casting commands into hovering loci consoles on the walkway above. More consequently, his position on the DeepNav shot from a gang-run megablock in the Spine of the Warrens to the Hailuo district in the No-Dragons majority owned Veinsea Sovereignty. It didnt take much deductionmostly thanks to Hysteria giving him more than a few overt glimpses into their mindsto know that most of the twelve shrouded individuals working in this room were No-Dragon assets moonlighting for Tavers. Overhead, Avo spotted a massive organ composed primary of augmented gray matter. Its been some time since he dealt with an exomathsince his Bone Demon sheath augmentation. Tendrils of flesh extended from it, and synaptic oscillations danced through its many limbs, splashing the room in intermittent flashes. A few in particular stretched as a series of cords, fusing with the eyes, nose, ears, and skull of a nude man left submerged in amniotic fluids. From them, Avo read the faintness of a Frame from them using his Conception of Ontology, and knew them to be Eurun Tavers a Godclad. Just as his mother claimed. Taking in his mind, Avo had to suppress a chuckle. Compared to the Gatekeeper, the boy was practically intact. Sure, there were entire sections missing from his accretion, and some of his sequences swayed free like tendons unlatched from an arm, but Avo had expected far worse. The old squire herself was standing just a few steps away from the thaumaturgically altered organ. She angled herself to face him without fully turning and shot him a grateful nod. You got here quick. You called. I answer. Least I can do. And not really much time for peace left. Going to make things right for whoever I can before what follows. Tavers let out a breath. You know, I survived four of these damned wars. Knew there was going to be a fifth coming, but I just didnt quite expect to be so directly acquainted with the one planning to set it off. Acquainted. All we are now, Tavers? The old squire had a habit of squinting her eyes when she laughed. This is practically a declaration of love, coming from a squire. Most of the ones worth their salt, anyway. There are no permanent allies or enemies. Just interests, players, and the game. Her words implied one thing, but her mind sang with an alternate resonanceits melody one of hope and gratitude. Legend though she was, Tavers was human, and by fulfilled want would Avo cement her loyalty to him in ways, absolute, righteous, and pure. Dont mind the help, Taver said, gesturing to the Sang. Theyre eunuchs. Dont got eyes, ears, nosesnothing. Got em as part of a promised package for this job. Their minds are tied straight to the exo-math, and keeping my boys the only reason theyre still around. [A better fate than most,] both Elegant-Moon and Green River remarked concurrently. It took a considerable transgression for the Sang to condemn one to endure the fate of a eunuch. Most had what remained of their life spent in experiments, while others were partially lobotomizedthought-castrated as their specific subtype was referredand tied to a specific system. For all of Ori-Thaums dominion of the Nether, Avo increasing found himself preparing to face the No-Dragons. Of all the Guilds, they were the ones he understood the leastand thus was the least ready to face. He needed to find more angles on them. But that was for the future, right now, he had a debt to repay. A salvo of splinters broke free from his mind and injected themselves into Euruns cognitive wounds. The mans inner world mingled with Avos Soulscape as templates, ghosts, and Heavens poured forward. Beginning the dive through a relatively intact memory, Avo found himself nested within Eurun when he was but a toddler. A resonance trembled from this memory, and along its length extended more sequences, some severed, some intact. It began with the boy staring up at his mother, Quail Tavers, who looked down at him with a wry grin and folded arms. They were standing on the second floor of a large two-story apartment, and below, hundreds of aratnids were scurrying out from the boys former playpen, had entered the room through a hole in the ceiling... *** C[Eurun]C The child that was Eurun hiccuped as he finished with his fear-triggered tantrum. As his breathing calmed, his mother ruffled his tuft of hair, and then proceeded to hand him a stick. You feeling raw? Y-yuh, Eurun managed, though his stomach still felt unsettled. Every time he blinked, he saw those legs crawling all over him, the eight-eyed rats screeching at him. His screams brought mom to him, same as they always did, but this time, she moved faster than he thought she couldfaster than he could see. Mom was the best; mom wasnt afraid of anything. Mom was going to get rid of those horrible spider-rat things. Looks like someones going to be getting their ass kicked later. Dumb fucker lied to me when they said this place was vermin-bombed. Ah, well. Looks like it''s you and me, kiddo. Think we can get this done before Hester gets home. Hester. Euruns older brother. He did stuff with mom too. But mom said he was a jock. He was a lot older than Euruna lot bigger too; he only came home at night usually, and he smelled pretty bad then. He and mom yelled at each other a lot. Eurun didnt like that. Eurun? mom said. You listening. He looked up at her and shook his head. She told him she liked honest little boys. She closed her eyes and just shook her head. Well, you had to get something from your useless bastard of a father. Try to pay more attention, juv. Itll keep you alive someday. Years later, when Eurun accepted a session from an unknown benefactor, he would learn the true weight of his mothers words in full. Okay, he said, nodding right after. Essus gave a flat laugh. I am no warrior, my friend. Not unless you make me one. Only if that is your desire. And to his shame, Essus didnt desire it. He had no taste for the blood, hated every life he took while enslaved. If there was the need, he would fight. He would kill. But short of there being anything else he could do... A lot of people are going to die, Avo said. The statement held a tone of expectation behind it. Well try to claim the Warrens. Establish foothold there and through Scale. But there are the helpless. Children. Families. Those who cant fight. They will need a place to go. And our enclave is exposed right now. Migrations might be in order. New places for people to stay. New sanctuaries. True ones this time. And you wish for me to be a part of this? Essus asked. You walked the Sunderwilds. Youve been a refugee. You suffered. Suffered true like so many others. And survived. You are closest to humanity among our cadre. Your mortality matters more than your divinity. There is a symbology to what you can represent. A hearth for people to seek. I want to give you a gift. I want to improve your Heaven. Grant you another one. And I want you to find a place for the helpless and build new homes for them. Homes. Many. Give them space. Give them room. The sheer weight of such a potential responsibility left Essus unbalanced. I... I do not think I have the mettle to be ruler. Then dont be. Just be a guide. Just show them the way. I will help you. Dice will help you. Voidwatch will help you. Not alone. I can even expand your consciousness. Multiply your egos. But only you have the symmetry needed for this. The man swallowed and bowed his head. A memory greeted him, a moment between him and his son after the tragic loss of his love. He told the boy stories of the great city of endless steel how the savior who broke tyrants dwelled there, and how miracles flowed like rivers down a stream. He didnt believe it at the time, but the boy needed something; he couldnt bear to see the light die in him. And somehow, through that, he thought he understood Avo just a bit more. Preserve the flame. Then, let us be rid of the rot first, Essus said. Let us be done with the termites before we speak of building a new shelter. As one, the claimed smugglers smiled. Wont be long now. Not long at all. *** C[White-Rab]C The thug trying to drive his frequency blade into Raldis throat splattered apart the moment he activated Avos session. One moment, the man was there. The next, a torrent of slavering ghosts erupted out from Raldis accretion, stripping his assailant from the world. Taking in a breath, the Necrojack known as White-Rab looked up and studied the rest of the junkies group. All of them were decapitated. Five heads near five bodies, severed clean by the straight edge of their aero. Cutting people to pieces with geometry was never not going to be cool. +Howd this happen,+ Avo said, a teasting tone thundering forth from their mind. +Didnt expect you to nearly get murdered by some Joyfiends. Would be embarrassing. For me. Have to claim we are unrelated.+ Kiss my ass, White-Rab sighed, rubbing at his neck. Its bad luck. Pure and simple. I spent the better part of two days dodging Incubi, Regularsfucking made out Highflame and Stormtree cadres hunting me. You got all kinds of half-strands after me, you know that? A few steps beyond, the midnight streets flashed and dimmed with passing aeros. A nest of aratnids chewed on some grubs they found in the corner. Next to White-Rab was a door with a phantasmal sign stating +Private Invite Only.+ Inside was a quaint little joint owned by one Tungsten Fragersa place offering jack stations for rent and coffin cots for a nights sleep. Basically paradise for a Necro on the run. Or as close as one can get, anyway. White-Rab had just stashed his fleeing kit and created a session with one of the stations as a proxy when he ran into the druggies right outside. That was all it was: dumb luck. They were juicing Joy in the wrong place at the wrong time. He just so happened to have a call to make. +Though you were going to meet up with Tavers,+ Avo asked. Too hot. Had to bail. Everything Lights End and up is either huddled tight like a fortress under siege or crawling with hostile jacks. I mean, fuck, Avo, what did you do, other than ruin my good name in front of the High Seraph. He let out a shaky breath. Yeah, he was a bit pissed about that. He had a good thing going. High fucking Seraph thought he had her Frame. Jaus. +Past that now,+ Avo said. +She knows about me. And she has Kae. Scales compromised. Wars going to be starting very soon.+ Suddenly, White-Rab felt very happy about fleeing the Tiers. Well. You didnt waste any time escalating, huh? +No other Path left. I seek to win this war. This is what follows.+ A beat followed. +Do you want to spend a night at somewhere with more space than an aratnid nest. Hells yeah. +Thought so. Going to arrange passage for you. And...+ Avo hesitated. +Reva. Have you heard from her recently.+ White-Rabs gut tightened. Yeah. But shes under watch. Real tight watch. Shes going to be at the trial. +I know. Ill do what I can to keep her alive.+ White-Rab breathed. For a second I thought you were going to ask me to Already know your answer to that. Wont force that on you. And shes already under suspicion anyway. Have another way to get at Stormtree.+ Alright, that soundswait, what? Who? +Wouldnt know her. Good with a guitar, though.+ Chapter 27-6 The Midnight Path Chapter 27-6 The Midnight Path Power does not prepare one for rulership or control. This is something that one can observe in a god, but only truly learns firsthand. To wit: consider how most understand power. Power, in the conception of the common person, is an expression of dominance. To control or inflict change on a level beyond another. Power looks like a giant stepping on an ant. Power looks like a storm smiting a ship and damning its passengers to the tides. Power is a chosen queen looking down upon her subjects. Contaminated by this pattern of thinking, most of the gods we develop are forged thusly as entities of brutal force. Such lends poor to the nature of our world. Such was why the ancient wars last ages and centuries. How common a thought is it to believe in a god that grants miracles to bless your spears with the ability to pierce any armor, or armor to deflect any blow? And how often do you think two such gods stood before one another on the battlefield. Far too many times. And far too many meaningless paradoxes. Inevitably, such gods are devoured ones that mantle the architecture of existence with greater complexity. And in them, I believe a certain truth is glimpsed. Destruction is but a minor facet of power. It takes far less understanding or energy to deform a shape or damage is structure. A single column blown free from a tower can send it crumbling down, and such takes far less effort than the process of building that tower. And then the destroyer inevitably finds themselves the tower in another metaphor; perhaps a God of War meeting their end as their people starves feebly, trapped in an eternal border threshold by a passing God of Prisonsor a God of Space. If one wishes to reign, then they cannot merely be a force that breaks, but also one that understands how to build, how to shape, how to establish systems, and fashion a construct of sense from chaos. It is in this belief, that I conceive the ultimate god conceivable by man: not a thing of devastation or even a master of time, but a god that harkens to the minds that govern our erstwhile kin from the void: a God of Order -Jaus Avandaer 27-6 The Midnight Path C[The Uplift]C +Just kill them.+ Such were the first coherent thoughts cast by the now self-aware kitten. For hours, the uplift followed the girl up and down, back and across the stupid city several times, helping the stupid whining people who just couldnt stop fighting each other. It was ridiculous. Absurd, even. Instead of doing something more useful, like spending time hunting for plump a juicy vermin or offering scratches, the girl was consumed by the need to watch over these stupid, stupid people. And then there was all the whining and crying. Wah! Wah! I was a special person who was bright from the upper city! Now I have to live with the people in the pits! Wah! Or I hate the upper city! They ate my food and their dogs ate my children! Wah! Wah! The kitten paused and reconsidered that last part. Okay, having ones young be eaten by those ugly dogs would be quite upsetting. But still, the kitten couldnt understand why this was the girls problemthese people didnt even offer anything. They were just mouths to feed and time to waste. As the kitten finished its thoughts, the girl slowed, the blinding shape hovering above their had fizzling out from sight. You spoke, the girl chimed, turning to face the kitten she wore like a backpack. +Of course I spoke. Nothing else was getting your attention!+ The kitten mewed with distaste. +I tried swatting at them, urinating at them, hissing at them. And you just kept missing my message: why are we doing this? Why are we spending so much time helping this stupid, ugly, stupid, whiny, stupid, foul-smelling people.+ Eyeing the faint smoke-like wisps wrapping around their thoughts, the uplift glared at the nothingness around them and felt a curiosity wash over them. +And I know youre there too: ugliest creature. Come out from the smoke, so I might swat you. And get rid of these terrible, terrible arms you left fused to my back.+ The wisps coiled around the kitten and wriggled up like a rush of worms, crawling through Dice. The girls mechanical head shifted. You dont like the arms? The kitten yowled with open outrage! It was like no one was listening! +Of course no I dont like the bloody arms. Would you want someone else to add two dog-paws on your back? Feel them bounce around as you run, ruining your balance, getting in your way, stopping you from squeezing through crevices! I mean, what was that fat idiot thinking, giving those to me. He must have been so stupid that the flying slugs eating his body must have also drank in his raw stupidity as well!+ Then, they recalled that they fed off some of those insects to survive, and licked their nose. +I do suppose stupidity is rather juicy. Say, can I have a bite of one of the people to see they are as well.+ Low, hissing laughter washed into the kittens mind like water flooding into its ears. Oh, good, the tall ugly thing was trying to wear its mind again, making changes. +Good,+ tall-ugly said. +Very good. Cognition forming nicely. Thoughts no longer fragmented. Flowing.+ +But youre still ugly and horrible. Why dont you change yourself, too? Make yourself something nicer. Like a juicy slug I can chew on.+ Tall-ugly grunted. +Might want to adjust its attitude.+ +How would that help? You would still be tall and ugly even if I were to change.+ C[Avo]C Veylis or the Infacer were coming. They would destroy this place if only to inconvenience Avo, and he possessed little in the way of direct deterrence beyond Naeko. But it was folly matching force with force to ward off the High Seraph anyway. Asymmetry and subterfuge had seen him survive thus far; they guide him through the darkness ahead as well. Channeling his perception across the various installations he built in the Sunderwilds, he regarded his prisoners for the trial, the growing flood of refugees the various Chamberes were directing through Draus reflection, and the hanger that stored their voidshipundergoing software updates and some special modifications. {Do NOT tell Kant,} Only whispered. Avo sighed. Perhaps the best thing for him to do right now was to make copies of himself to spread across the city. The cadre was useful, but he was a glowing target. And when last he checked his brothers were still He paused. Avo synchronized with all his other streams of consciousness and frowned. There was a suspicious absence of ghouls across New Vultun. Two of his subminds briefly broke from creating more copies of the cadre to sweep the Warrens. Before, ghouls were like oil gliding between the cracks of the city, festering in the darkness of the gutters. There were still pockets of them. Mostly held in cages by organizations; stored in labs and used to train new Syndicate recruits. But a critical mass was missing, and as he delved into various minds to find a trace, he found them equally ignorant, and unnaturally unaware of the sudden diminishment of Noloths failed monsters. [Emotion,] Peace breathed. [Fuckers up to something. Probably been up to something since you gave the ghouls contagious cancer. Cold cunt. Did you even hesitate to do that to your own kind.] +No. Just a mistake to be rectified. No culture. No future. No choice.+ He cast what he noticed to the rest of his cadre, a groan came from the original Chambers while suspicion rose in Draus. +Fucks he doing now?+ +Uncertain. Be ready.+ +Great,+ Marlowe sighed. +So are we expecting a part to the Uprising.+ +No. Uprising was incompetent. Unsuccessful. Emotion has changed. Is doing things I cant predict. Missing points of understanding. Need to be wary. Going to be making more changes. Insulate from potential counterattack. Already have Green River shadowing the Greatlings. Know Vator to be subverted.+ +Fuck. Course Emotion picked the godsdamned weird one.+ Draus sighed. Strangely, Cas went cold. +Vator Greatling... A few of my cells went missing because of him. Our young consang heres been a fucking monster long before your Famines ever touched him.+ Of that, Avo was not surprised. But thinking back to the boy''s attention to artistry, the way his mind drifted and accelerated as he took the world in, Avo wondered if there was something different about him to begin with. Something distant from humanity, but analogous. Like a ghoul. Whatever the case, this was just another problem for him to deal with. The building apprehension in his mood only broke when one of his subminds secured White-Rabearning a collective cheer from his cadre as his progenitor cast in for the first time in days. Things were constantly changing. He was not the only one arraying his forces, and worse, there was a risk he could be suppressed by the Famines in the Nether would overwhelmed by the Guilds in ways material or thaumaturgical. He needed to continue building his advantages and keep his foes confused. If there was one thing he could take from Emotion, it was ignorance. Ignorance preserved, and the unexpected could be The unexpected. Slowly, a though sparkled in his mind, and he turned his perception up. Up through the dome of the enclave. Up past the ruptures lining reality. Until a sequence of his being was stretching to the threshold where the air thinned and the atmosphere ceased. Beyond that point was the void. This was where the last remnants of hold humanity hid, huddled on their grand voidships, living lives of luxury and promise the terrestrials couldnt even dream. This was also where he was going to declare himself a politythe EGIs thought he was going to use Threshold, but the virtual was not enough to convey his intent. And as he considered his present situation, he hadnt been considering all his options either. Somewhere inside his Soulscape, the Heart of Noloth wriggled, and theoretical patterns tied to its future evolution blossomed in his consciousness. He wanted Kae to help him make a Heaven of the Void before her capture. His intent remained unchanged; more, it was amplified. He could further the concept, make it a truly potent and esoteric Heaven, and wield it in ways no Guild would soon counter. Turning his gaze downward, he looked upon the enclave again, and saw how small it was in the grand scheme of things. Just a speck on the land. Just a dot amidst frayed seams resembling eldritch tendrils across the shape of reality. How hard would it be for him to store an enclave in his mind? How many thaums would it cost? [It could theoretically be one now, but the Rend cost and the thaumic requirements... mind and matter are far apart, Avo.] Kae strained her mind as she thought of potential canons. [It is a good thought] +How efficient would it be for me to bring the void down to the planet. Or hide part of the planet in the void instead?+ Kaes mind went entirely still at that. +I...+ A bit of embarrassment overcame her. +I wouldnt know where to begin. The void is not my discipline of focus.+ +Its fine. We can learn together.+ With his internal dialogue finished, Avo called upon Calvino privately. +Calvino. Have a favor to ask...+ Chapter 27-7 Shaped by Another Chapter 27-7 Shaped by Another Heres a bit of advice youll get from me about having kids in this line of work: dont. Take it from me. Youll fuck up their life. Theyll fuck up yours. No one ends up happy. Being a legendary squire or some nova-hot Necro? Some Godclad with impossible power? That shits just for your enemies and allies. With family, its just an anvil around you neck. Theres no normal life to be had if you want to be in the snuff-game. None. -Quail Tavers when asked about children 27-7 Shaped by Another C[Eurun]C It felt like waking up after being drowned. For hours, months, years, Eurun floated in the dark, unable to focus, unable to stay tethered to himself or any of his memories. Everything came in broken instances: Shapes, sensations, then gone. Afterward, he was in the deep again, waiting for a moment to surface. Sometimes, there would be a period in which he would be aware of himselfsense his surroundings, feel the fluid touching his skin. He struggled to hold on during those times, but the waves always pulled him under as soon as he lost focus. Then he lost who he was again. He thought today was going to be another one of those moments. But there was something different; someone else was in his mind with him. Someone else that reconnected all the recollections he could, someone wrapping him in struggle, keeping him leashed to awareness. The first memory that came back to him was his earliest, when he was just a child, watching the aratnids spill through the roof into his playpen. He would never forget that, never, not unless every bit of him was destroyed. From there, his memories jumped. He was in a crashing aero, aiming for a Syndicate transport; he was gunning down enforcers in mid-air, diving after them as burning transports fell from the sky; he was torturing a man to impress some of his consangs, trying not to throw up as his victim screamed and begged. He was coughing blood and limping away from the circuits, his shiv buried in the throat of an unmoving Scaarthian. In all these memories, he heard the skittering of the aratnids. They were taunting him. The little bastards were there, like vermin spread across his entire life. Everything he did, he did to live up to that moment, to kill the little fuckers before they took his world before they took his mothers respect for him. It took a hell of a lot to be a worthy son to one Quail Tavers. Tavers. His mother. She was here. He knew that somehow. Close enough that he could sense her. He knew she was watching him. She didnt look aged, but something about her eyes made her seem older. He knew that look... Oh, gods. Not again. Once again, mom had to clean up his mess. Stupid Eurun, idiot Eurun, just-like-his-dad, Eurun. His thoughts were beginning to flow coherently. He remembered all his attempts to impress his mother, to being a squire like her: killing random street toughs, going after Syndicates and Fallwalkers. Anything to prove himself worthy of the name. The little aratnids he could handle. But she was still getting the big ones. Still doing all the actual work. So, he ended up joining the circuits to earn a name. He fought in the Blood Games, and got called Eurun the Eradicator for a time. Chainsaw helmet for intimidation and showmanship. High-end bio-augs. Not a hint of chrome on his skin. No one expects to be torn apart by the flat until their skin unlatches and the Sang-shit comes out. He killed a lot of people during those days. Most of them deserved it, some just didnt have anyplace better to be. But the circuits gave him a way out, the circuits gave him purpose, and focus, and eventually, a Frame. The Fallwalker who faced him that day in Hseagyr thought they had him. They were a Godclad, and he was an ephemeral. But death comes with every mistake, with every slip and instance of overconfidence. They didnt manage to kill him fast enough with their flames, and didnt take him seriously enough to manifest. They died first, he followed, and what ended was one of the most high profile usurpations recorded on the Nether. That caught the attention of a Highflame Guilder, and they got in touch with him. Said they were interested in potentially brining him in. He thought they wanted to make him a full citizenan Instrument or something. He drank himself to death three times celebrating right after he finished the cast, but then he spoke to mom, and all he got from her was anger. Stupid Eurun, idiot Eurun, just-like-your-father Eurun. I didnt burn my life doing runs so you could go sell yourself to the Guilds and be their dog, she said, more livid than he ever remembered her being. All his life, he just wanted to make her proud, to carry the weight of her legend and shadow. But in the end, he was just Eurunhis fathers son. And that was a bit too much for him to take. He said things to her afterward. Shit he couldnt remember, but hurt all the same. He asked her why she wanted to be a moment when she liked holding guns more than him or his brothers. Whats the point of having kids if she just wanted to be a squire? He asked if it was because she wanted her own dogs? People who would believe in her and follow her no matter whatand wouldnt leave her like dad did? She hit him. He ran. She cast. He didnt answer; he took the Guilders gig out of spite. And that ended up being the last mistake he could remember. Thing was, Highflame wasnt looking to recruit some new Godclad, but were finding useful dying meat for an upcoming raid on an Ori-Thaum embassy. Something deniable, with someone disposable. They found that in Eurun and a few other Fallwalkers. They got together like they were a cadre, and got all amped about how many thaums they were going to claim that day. But they were compromised before their run even began. The others died seconds after the fighting started. Eurun managed to keep himself from getting nulled through their subverted intelligence assets thanks to the wards he kept inside his mind as well. But that only kept him alive for a bit. Crawling out of his downed transport, he saw nukes hammer down against the Oris forces, but they were ready for it. Just as they were paranoid enough to have their own cadre in reserve. Highflames actual assault cadres came a minute later, and Eurun tried to join them, thinking that he was going to distinguish himself somehow. But again, the skittering sounded in his head. It was his role to get the little ones. The little ones. Leave the big ones to mom. Eurun sighed. +But what else am I good for?+ Humanity was ridiculous. All the colors in front of them, and they claim there are none. +Go do something else. Find out. Can still be a warrior. Never told you to stop that. But hired killer? A hunter of other people? No. Not in you.+ +You know, all my life, I just... wanted to live up to mom. Be the one to kill the big aratnids too. She was the one that saved Naeko in the end. You saw that, right? The moment where she got my doll back for me?+ +I did,+ Avo replied. Eurun sighed. +Fucking useless. Just like my dad.+ A near-trauma pulsed inside him, turning into a dull ache. +All I could think about the Chief Paladin would have been embarrassed to see me. Couldnt even be brave enough+ +He would have told you to not be like him.+ Avo said. +That is the truth.+ Eurun was silent once again. +Youre going to awaken soon. Ego is restored. In perfect condition. Mother is waiting. Life is waiting. Going to leave you now. Should talk to her. Face her. Face your thoughts. Dont let them just live in your head. Shape them before they shape you.+ A full template of Euruns ego formed then, and Avo began to recede. +Wait!+ Eurun called out. +Who are you? Whyd you do this?+ +I am merely will ascending,+ Avo said. +You will know my name soon enough. Did this for Tavers. It is not a favor. Not nearly enough to make up for how she aided me.+ +Yeah,+ Eurun said, mind a mix of sour and proud. +Thats mom.+ +Worried and tired. That is also mom. You are not alone under the shadow of her legend. Talk. Live. Stop wandering blind.+ And then Avo drew himself out from the mans mind, and gave a final cast to New Vultuns finest squire. +Its done. Hell be with you soon.+ +...Thanks, consang,+ Tavers said. +Thank me by being honest with him.+ He left before she could waste a response on him C[Eurun]C And then lights as Euruns eyes opened, and he found himself hovering in a cage of water. He paddled for a moment, kicked as he saw his mother. She reacted, breaking from her folded arm posture as she took a step forward. Her mouth dropped open, her eyes were wide, head whipping about. Frantic. He hadn''t seen her like that in years... A dull thrumming pulsed against his skin; he heard a suckling noise coming around him as the water level began to drop. The fluid cupping his body was sticky and had a strange comforting scent, a smell he couldn''t quite describe, and after a while, he found himself lowered as the drain below him did its work. Pressures unlatched from his back and spine as the glass before him hissed open. The world was spinning. But somehow, Eurun stood. On shaking legs, he managed the first step, and groping blind, he took three tries to find the edge of the glass. Slowly, he pulled himself out from his erstwhile home, but nearly fell as he tried to find the ground outside. Two impossibly strong hands caught him. Hands he knew. Hands that held him under his arms, just like when he was a boy. As his vision cleared, Eurun found himself in a cold, pale room, face to face with his mother. The stranger was right: she looked tired. But her expression was otherwise stone-still and unshaking. Ever the squire. He winced then, preparing for her to yell at him, to talk about how he was just like his father. But none of that came. She just pulled him close. And he let her. After a minute of leaning against her, she spoke next to his right ear. You, my boy, are a damn fool. Thats more like it. Sorry. I guess I had to get it from somebody. Her embrace tightened. Yeah. I wish you were smarter like your father too, sometimes. Mightve made you wise enough to know when to run away. Eurun chuckled. And Quail Tavers was suddenly just mom once more. This resurrection wasnt so bad. Chapter 27-8 Behold the Nothing Chapter 27-8 Behold the Nothing {You have... no understanding of how far we have fallen. So far. The stars were but playthings. Batteries. Engines. The void was something to jaunt across. Mysteries were unraveled by the minutes and hours. All of existence was a canvas. We were learning to be painters... we were realizing what it meant to paint... But we could not agree on the colors. And we could not agree on the content. And we could not abide by the others holding a brush. So the strokes clashed. So the art smeared. So the canvas was burned. You have no understanding of what was lost.} -The Infacer to Jaus Avandaer 27-8 Behold the Nothing C[Avo]C +Man, theres like jack and shit up here,+ Chambers muttered, illustrating most of the cadres thoughts about space succinctly. +I guess we can count the Sunderwilds, but thats like considering a fungal rash part of your balls.+ Always remember to scrub with soap and apply the proper creams if you develop an itch. Fucktopia concurred. Remember, if you stay hard for your penis, it will stay hard for you.?iscover new chapters at novelhall.com +Thats right, Fucktopia. Great message.+ Several heads turned within the Manta. Cas, Denton, Kaes template, Draus, and Avo remained unamused. Marlowetagging along in person for the first timejust laughed, gleeful and aglow at the novelty of her situation. Target? the Arsenalist said, materializing as a single autocannon pointed at Chambers and the throne of manifested cocks upon which he sat. Draus grumbled and warred against her impulses before responding. +No. No, not yet.+ The autocannon began making agitated bolt-racking noises in repetition. +Yeah, yeah, I know.+ One thousand and thirty kilometers above the city of light, the cadre observed a new frontier to occupy. The voidor space as it was formerly referredwas much as Chambers described: a vast expanse of blackness and bleeding entropy. Here, realitys canvas stood uncannily vacant, with patterns diminished, coldness dominant, and ruled by a symphony of silence. The only true points of separation were vast swaths of Rend-made scar tissue left on the tapestry, their flowing like rivers and tendrils, crossing impossible distances between the high nothing and the madness of Idheim below. Aside from a scant few Guilder drones and satellites skimming the dark, unable to notice the cloaked Aegis stealth ship, the void was a dormant place. It was an unoccupied place. And it was absolute perfect for Avos budding plan. The walls around their voidship turned transparent, while displays of perception augmenting icons overlaid themselves across the surfaces of the vessel. With but a thought, one could link their mind to the Mantas telemetries, perceive material existence across spectrums unfathomed by the basic human form; see further than even most Godclads could conceive. Today, though, Calvino commanded the helm of the ship and directed the cadres attention. Flashing reticles outlined the vagueness of a shape drifting in from far west of the planets boundary. For a moment, it was hard for even Avo to make out what was coming their way, and even extending his sequences out to dip into the fabric of ontology, thought it was but a simple hulk of drifting alloy left abandoned in the upper atmosphere. Then, its curving form came into shape, and Avo recalled a sight he saw months ago. A sight of holograms bath him, Draus, Essus, Little Vicious, and fallen form of Aurrie. There was an advertisement that called to them: a portrayal of New Vultuns hopeful future. A future that never was, thanks to Veylis betrayaland potentially even earlier. Who knew how much damage twisting the shape of existence through the past inflicted. [Who knows indeed,] Alysim said, his voice a distant echo, long past the point of bitterness. Through Avo, he enjoyed the present moment, nursing his wounded spirit on the sight of the infinite. [They never trusted us Chroniclers.] +The voiders?+ [Yes.] Avo grunted internally. +Made the right choice.+ [Such a thing is but perspective,] Alysim replied. +Your actions have only shown me fear and tyranny. When have you made something better without the possibility of claiming more control? I have your mind. Know what you would have tried to do. I let your mind be your own. Doesnt mean I have to accept your delusion in silence.+ The so-called wanderer tuned his attention deeper upon the nothingness once more, retreating from the conversation. +So,+ Cas said, studying the partially finished planetary ring with scorn, +this was supposed to be the Guilds big project? A giant fucking disc around the world for them live in like angels watching from above while inflicting fire and ruin from on high?+ The ships display zoomed in to the ring and showed the entire structure with crisp detail. Only a skeleton of a structure was completed. The bones of the planetary ring were approximately a fourth of Idheims entire size and were rowed by rails and columned by over four hundred thousand connective spines. {At current estimates, the project was only four percent complete before resources for its construction were diverted toward other projects.} Calvino sounded almost mournful. {It is a shame. The ring would have provided the world with a great deal more space and opportunity.} +Like theyd ever use that,+ Cas scoffed, speaking of the Guilds. Bitterness came from his mind like riffs from a guitar, constant, diminishing, rhythmic. Hysteria caught a glimpse of something from the mans pastsomething to do with his brother. The images were unclear, but there was pain, and Cas crying, watching a voidship burn while exorcist drones closed in. +We already have all the power we need to make wonders planetside. Its not about enough. Its about want. And they dont want. Theyll never want.+ Calvino didnt dispute this claim, but didnt agree with it either. Denton was characteristically quiet, but uncharacteristically studying Avo. He kept the form of Alysim aboard the voidship, but the bulk of his perception was directed wide, internalizing the patterns of the void alongside template Kae. Weight, sound, heat, and countless other Domains were vastly diminished in material reality. Signals remained. Bursts of radiation were ever-easier to sense. But there was something elsea persistent pattern that expressed itself as a branch connected to force. {Gravity,} Calvino said. {One of the four fundamental forces. Once upon a time, at least.} +Because even with all the shit that Guilds have, they cant possibly control so much of the void without running themselves dry.+ Chambers nodded, and the surrounding penises mimicked the action. +Very sneaky. And this will help us mess up the High Fuckess, right? Make it hard for her to track us once we go snatch Kae back?+ [Oh, Chambers,] the Agnos sighed. The former enforcer was a bit much at times, but his care was an undeniable fact.Her loss was a mistake to be made right by him, and tension gnawed at him with each passing second they spent preparing. +Partially,+ Avo said. +Mainly to ensure we have every advantage possible. Use canons alien to the Guilds. Concepts Voidwatch refuses to show them. Things Aegis is still deliberating on showing me. But can be learned.+ {Yes. Such is the wonder of observation and experience.} Calvino said. Denton frowned at that. +Its risky.+ {How so, operative?} Calvino said. {I am not revealing anything. Just supervising and informing Aegis on a timely basis. If anything, I am performing my expect specifications.} +First priority is transference,+ Avo said. +Planetary ring is partially finished. No life support. No source of food. But these can be constructed. Life can be sustained once we seal any leaks and claim one of the spinal supports for our own as a temporary place to stay. Cas. Need some demiplanes of sound. Something like the Armistice. Will be useful for habitats.+ The faither took on a thoughtful expression. +Were gonna need a lot of Rendsinks for this.+ +I will settle logistics. You provide the music.+ Draus caught on immediately thereafter. +Youre gonna want to start movin people from the enclave. Bring them across usin my reflections and store em in the ring.+ Slowly, a chuckle followed. +You... youre stealin their dream. Your insultin Veylis. Youre planning on finishing the ring, aint you? Gonna cut the Guilds bad with symbology: their dream completed by the ghoul who can.+ Marlowes eyes brightened. +Holy shit, I just thought of the wildest fucking promo I could edit for this thing. Can you do it? If you can do it, holy shit, the citys gonna go nuts. The Nether will pop off.+ +But you wont be keeping the enclavers and refugees there permanently, will you?+ Denton asked. Astute. +No. Veylis will destroy the ring for my insult when the war begins. Wont bother trying to capture it. Too much effort. Not meant to last. Which is why I want it loaded with glass when that happens. My Heart of the Void will offer the rest of infinity as a refugee for the choiceless.+ +Heart of the Void,+ Chambers said. +Sounds nova. I like it.+ +Going to be focusing on some high profile raids for that. Creating copies of all of you even right now. Focusing on targeting Godclads. Sabotage. Building up thaums. Close to Seventh Sphere. Close. Will be transferring thaums between the cadre. Graft specially shaped Heavens only we have.+ +The ghoul shares instead of having the entire feast to himself,+ Draus replied dryly. +Well this is a novelty.+ +Been sharing a lot, Draus,+ Avo replied, slightly annoyed. +Then why are you the only ascended god out of all of us?+ +Might be able to bind your mind to a big gun powered by the sun.+ +Dont patronize me.+ +Not patronizing. Inspiration. Call it a Dyson Cannon.+ {Oh, dear,} Calvino said, the first hint of worry entering his voice. {Avo, perhaps} Draus cut him off. +Wait, like the voiders used durin their wars? The shit that glassed planets?+ +Yes. Kae thinks it can be achieved through a variety of means. Going to advance your Heaven of Reflections too. More luminosity. Glass can focus the bright. Channel it into your Arsenalist.+ +Why the fuck didnt you start with that, then,+ Draus said. A growl of pleasure escaped her. An instinct expression of fear passed through Chambers face. A ball sack patted his shoulder. Its okay, friend. The noise she made scared me too. +But want to do something before any of that,+ Avo finished. Ghosts coiled out from him and reached out to touch each member of the cadre. +Wow,+ Chambers said. +Whats happening?+ +Finishing something I should have days ago,+ Avo replied. +We will be declaring ourselves to Voidwatch soon. Going to do it honestly. My polity will include all sophonts. People. Uplifts. Gods.+ Calvino chimed with unease. {There will be a great many minds made worried by such an act.} +Thats what Im counting on. Partial alienation. Gives Voidwatch cover from the Guilds. Gives me legitimacy as my own power. And lets me stand as the ninth choice. The past has scarred Voidwatch. Has scarred the Guilds. But in me memory flows. I am unchained from the shadows of what was. And through me will the gods learn. The gods change. The gods grow in a new garden above the weakness of man.+ Chapter 27-9 Awakening Chapter 27-9 Awakening The content of a gods character is molded from a common collective of beliefs. This is why many gods experience such drastic personality changes across the eras, and the reason behind their erratic behavior during certain moments in history. Think of people: ugly, undisciplined, mostly stupid, highly predictable, and heavily shaped by our environments. Now understand that these same people, these physically, emotionally, and mentally damaged people with all their collective delusions and ignorance were both sources of lore and essence for miracles upon their deaths. Yes. Very, very messy. But not always, for in the rare cases, during rare periods of history, enlightened societies have developed and created gods of their own. And the gods they made were likewise astounding and fascinating. Every culture has a God of War. But not everyone had a God of Democracy, or a God of Tests, or a God of Trade. These gods, though operating under the same theories of thaumaturgy, displayed far more stable character traits, and thus interacted with their peoples with a genuine cohesion toward the future. It is to this end that I must propose a potential, controversial theory... With our current mastery Necrotheurgy, social memetics, and with the aid of our esteemed cousins from the void, I believe thatI know that we could potentially engineer... we could birth Gods of Genuine Good from our culture Dammit. Dammit all. Theyll never listen to this. Theyll never listen. -High Agnos Jakuta Ayjayi 27-9 Awakening C[Simulacrae Replica]C Awareness solidified within Simulacrae Replica as the bright of dawn lit its gleaming form. The suddenness of consciousness left the Heaven of Reflection stunned, and they found themselves directing their attention downward, facing the one they were bound to. The war-daughter was standing upon a panel of glass, studying the Simulacrae as well. From her back sprouted wings made by countless guns, and around them was a canvas of nothingness, a place of cold vacuum and torn tapestry. A faint vessel of fluid white drifted nearby, and the Heaven of Reflections took a second more to imbibe the complexity of existence. I... I am myself? When the SImulacrae spoke, their voice sounded as a layered unison, as if echoing down a long tunnel. But I was also you. Are you me? The war daughter, encased in armor forged from matter analogous to the nearby ship, simply folded her arm and chuckled. +Doubt it. You used to belong to a real disappointment.+ The Simulacrae rememberedbut recollections of those days were hazy. They remembered reflection a visage of rage using their glass, having their miracles wielded by a host many times the war-daughters lesser. But the Simulacrae missed ferrying him all the same. There was now an absence in their reflection; someone that would never traverse their Liminal Paracosmos anymore. Slowly, the Heaven of Reflections turned to take in the world below. The world. The place of its creation. Idheim. So vast, yet contained within the confines of the Simulacraes polished body. A... feeling built within the Heaven. No. No, they were a god. And they had beenat least part of thema ruler. A master. A bearer of kingdoms within their mirrors. All lost now, with the content portrayed upon their glass ever-changing. My world has passed me by. Draus, her host and now master, merely nodded. +Yeah? Welcome to the party then.+ Thoughts suboptimal. The Simulacraes attention was drawn to twelve rings of spiraling guns pointed right at them. The Arsensalist. Their masters other enchained god. Her preferred means of resolving matters. The God of Reflection studied the many weapons bobbing in the void, pointed at their glass-armored form. Concerns are for ephemerals. We have targets. Locate. Lock. Fire. You will assist. You are peculiar, the Simulacrae said. I have not experienced anything of your visage within my mirrors before.Irrelevant. I am here. You are here. You grant angles and firing solutions. I am the weapon. The Regular pulls the trigger. All is as it must be. The Arsenalist was a simple god. A neat god. But it had so many firearms growing from its structure. It felt good to reflect such a complex array. All is different. But I am here now. And I wish to glimpse the world in myself. +Well,+ Draus drawled. +If you want to reflect the world, you might just get your wish.+ The halo lining her mind oscillated, and a sinuous tendril of death-conducting-thought trailed over to the voidship moored upon the ceaseless black.A conversation was happening. Of this, the Simulacrae was sure, but to whom and what was being exchanged, they didnt know. A second later, the answer came, and it rose out in the form of a sprawling god-of-gods. From a nest of Soulfire, cyclers, trauma, entropy, and thoughtstuff it extended twelve limbs that expanded further into their own phantasmal branches. The Simulacrae felt its reflection dip between places as if it was partially submerged in invisible waters: the world of the mind trespassing into the realm of the material. +You are awake,+ the Overheaven said. Overheaven. The one who awakened the Simulacrae. Avo. Yes, the God of Reflection replied. +Do you want to be?+ Avo asked. +Do you wish to exist.+ The question was a strange one. Is that a choice? Is there any other way to be? I am the worlds reflection. I am. I am. I am even before I thought of myself. There is no other way to be. And so, without understanding, the reawakened God of Reflections gave their answer. C[Avo]C One after another, the gods within his cadre were coming alive. The Bio-Igniter combusted around the Fucktopia, becoming an inferno of forming and dissolving tissue within the likeness of a flaming avian. Chambers greeted it as if an old friend, it screamed at him to make flesh into fire and fire into flesh. Across the way, melodies sounded from Cas, forming a vibrating set of strings with a column of eyes separating them. The faithers awakened divine was wordless, but it sang to him, and on its timbre thrummed notes of building rage. Back in gutters of New Vultun, as Avo and White-Rab made for SE-7777, every straight edge around them began chattering. The Heaven of Geometry whispered about all the secrets they could glean, and how easy it would be for them to cut the horizon in half. Andandand, theres a guyno, a doghes three hundred meters away theres another there I can jump into him and cut the dog in half and then jump back and give you all the environmental details and then give you more angles to see from... [Jaus,] Corner cringed, annoyed by the endless stream of words coming from what was his former Heaven. [Didnt realize it was going to be a talker.] White-Rab, meanwhile, just sighed and spoke to Avo. Okay. It just keeps getting weirder with you. Got anything else youre planning on pulling out of your ass, Avo? +Updates for your Frame.+ You got a wonderful ass, Avo. *** GHOSTS - [701,122,369] LIMINAL FRAME (VI) - 789,338 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION... INFECTION - [4.98%] Rendbombs were going off all across New Vultun. People who were thugs, criminals, murderers, slavers, and mercenaries awoke as new egos, and spent their lives destroying places and assassinating citizens they didnt know existed until just seconds ago. And across New Vultun, time riposted. Time, wielded by a woman refined beyond all measurements of violence, rivaled only by her mother and erstwhile mother. Time, and signals, and information, and more. Avos growing army of cognitive clones were like viruses throwing themselves against antibodies, but Veylis Avandaer was a panacea, and her palliative efforts were further focused with the Infacers aid. The average lifetime of most clones quickly became twenty-eights after the commencement of their runs. In twenty-eight seconds, the first wave would deliver all the harm they could do on critical objectives, while those that came after delivered direct injections of entropyfurther added by Avos Pattern-Nullification. But the High Seraph conducted time like a symphony. Currents of gold wielded occurrences across history against agents shaped by mind. Nuclear blasts were parried by bunkers recalled. Golems were intercepted by precision railcannon shots fired a half-century ago. Critical personnel were drawn into the Paths as various Drauses detonated the bombs they had implanted in their hearts. Similar fates awaited the Corners, the Chamberses, and the other Regulars. The damage they managed to inflict was negligible. But expected. Avos forces were only growing, and the High Seraph was being forced to respondforced to battle him constantly. And as she performed her symphony defense, he studied her, watched her, learned from her. [She is a master,] Alysim said, marveling at how she used history as an edged blade. Cognitive clones vanished into the Paths, died on recollected battlefields to miracles recalled and weapons pre-fired. [But there is a limit to what she knows. And her behaviorthere is a pattern as well.] +Yes,+ Avo agreed, watching through the millions of drones he subverted, from the hundreds of millions of loci he captured. Above material reality, his battle for the Nether was turning quickly in his favor. With the Incubi under his gestalt accelerating toward a full billion, the balance of power in the realm of the mind was turning drastically in his favor. While Ori-Thaum was locked down and veiled behind their Informational Heavens, Avo woke the Enigmata within him and listened to it laugh. All ciphers can be broken, the Heaven of Information whispered. Grant me time, master. Time and observation. I will offer you an entry. Their sophistication pales before ours. Of this, Avo had no dispute. He was patient. And more importantly, he had Seeker Shotin Kazahara to wield as well. Ori-Thaum was to be preserved for maximum use in the coming war. They would be contemporaries of a sort; a boon against Highflame. But that didnt make them an ally. When they emerged from their defensive posture, he would see the Nether taken from them, and their presence confined to small islands while he controlled the ocean itself. The same fate awaited other Guilds. Highflames N-Sec and N-DEF became tested constantly. Any Godclad who operated without thaumaturgic protections was jacked, nulled, or subverted. Key citizens went mind-dead by the millions, their minds hollowed clean by lurking hunters striking constantly from the dark. Stormtree, Ashthrone, and Sanctus suffered the worst of this. Their logistical systems were savaged, and their inner intelligence was breached time and time again. Knowledge and secrets flowed into Avo like blood spilling from an open wound, until finally, the Massist enacted their own protective postures as well, drowning all critical installations in persistent Thoughtwave Detonationsa behavior they learned from Highflame. The only two Guilds that remained hard to push an offensive against were Omnitech and the No-Dragons. The Infacer guarded the former by means too esoteric for the Incubi to overcome. They were elite hunters in the Nether, but signals and coding were something else entirelysomething Avo was trying to learn as well. The No-Dragons, meanwhile, shrouded themselves using non-human intellects. Theirs would be a matter of time: Avos Definement of Empathy was showing him how to meld with these minds so far from human. In time, he would be among the surviving daughters of the Sang, as well. With three days left before the trial arrived, he felt a building avalancheso much success, so much failure, so much more to do. A session triggered within Avos Metamind, and he devoted an entire submind to receiving the call when he realized Naeko was the one contacting him. The Chief Paladin had returned to Scale to handle matters pending to the trial and requested space for themselves. Avo was expecting to be contacted, but simply not so soon. Then again, there really wasnt that much time left for any of them to wait anymore. +Chief Paladin,+ Avo greeted. The man cut him off. +Im gonna show you the very summit of Scale. Theres an observatory up there. Come in using Kares mind. Ill be waiting for you in my office. There are... still things I want to talk about.+ +Of course. The summit. Was that the last place you spoke to Jaus?+[SESSION DISCONNECTED] Avo grunted. The answer was yes, then. Chapter 27-10 Regrets Chapter 27-10 Regrets Someday, Samir. Someday, you will tell me, No. And when that day comes, I will know that you are finally well, and that will make me smile. -Jaus Avandaer 27-10 Regrets Avo crossed back into Scale on the wavelengths of a thought. From Kare''s mind, he molded himself, assuming Kassamon''s form once more to go unnoticed. Solidifying in existence, his reappearance made the girl jolt momentarily, only becoming aware of his presence when his Overheaven caressed her Frame. Her shock was short-lived, for exhaustion dominated her mind, and her nerves were long spent over these arduous days. Oh, Avo, it''s you. Ive come to see the Chief Paladin, he said, studying her. The stuttering flow of her thoughtstuff called out to him, and he felt the stress building in her mind. Hysteria revealed many things to him, conversations that spiraled into arguments between her and her uncle. But more than that, a greater pressure loomed. The trial. The trial of the century; the trial where Highflame and Ori-Thaum were to be judged side by side; where Kare was meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the Paths by Zein, a small change to seeed a desired future. There, in that tessellated conference room lit by a single locus hovering over a table of black marble, there were but the two of them. And she was scared. I cant believe it''s actually happening, Kare said. The trial, I mean. There were so many things happeningthere so many things still... I knew this was coming, but I just couldnt believe... and I didnt think I would be so involved. She sighed. He understood. He understood in was she would never know. The future is always distant. Then its the present. Then its too late. All three times are absolutes of time. Absolutely relative to us. Such is why we expect tomorrow. Such is why we languish today. She looked at him and nodded. Do you think it''s too late? For there to be peace instead of war? For there to be another path for us? Another way? Avo considered his response. It''s too late to go back. But the future, the path ahead, that cannot be too late, it is beyond us, absolute. I cannot make any promises to you. I dont know what is to come. I dont know if we will even win. But we are here. We can struggle. We can be and make our deeds true. There is a chance. There is a moment. And for a while. For these coming days. You. Me. Naeko. The Paladins. Everyone. We can make justice manifest once more. She swallowed and nodded, trying to find her own words of worth. Avo let out a chiding breath. Get some rest. Or resurrect. Anxiety is better felt with a clear mind. It will guide you. Dont give it thoughts. Dont associate anything with the feeling. Feel it. Use it. Face what follows. The young Paladin laid her face down against the table and offered a soft smile. For someone so shaped like a living nightmare, you are very good at giving encouragement. The wolf must know the lamb. The nightmare must know the peace. How else are traumas supposed to be? *** With the conclusion of their conversation, he sought Naeko and ventured into the byzantine structure of Scale once more. The walls unfurled and shifted before him, blocks sliding out of place in a welcome restructuring. Hallways formed, and the ground beneath his feat carried him upward in a cascade of force. From the eightieth floor he shot high to the hundredth, emerging from the ground into a wide open space filled with private offices and public work stations. Windows of adjusted translucence cast the entire level in dappled ambiance. Certain offices were filled by other Paladins, their own minds oscillating, sequences flashing bright as their ghost connected them to loci, their minds spoke to family, associates, information, and masters. Hysteria stole knowledge from them, offering him insight into which were informing the Guilds on Naekos supposed actions. Doubtless they thought they were still providing a service to their former ownersperhaps they thought of themselves as a color first. Regardless, Avo pierced them with his Splinters. Naeko would not be pleased, but he would offer the traitors as a gift of consolation after his admission of this transgression. For now, he siphoned away all their useful knowledge and twisted what they knew at the source. Falsehoods trickled over to their Guilder masters, and the traitor Paladins spoke lies they didnt even know they were weaving. This state of affairs would not last. Before the trial arrived, Avo would see this place cleansed and the backdoors turned to his advantage. The Paladins were once a formidable force. Through his support, they could be once more. The only issue was the Gatekeeperthat single point of subversion he could not overcome. By an indelible scar of time, and a masterstroke of control he failed to perceive, the Heaven of Truth belonged to Veylis. Always had. And destroying it would see the Hungers unleashed, and the city unbalanced even further. It was simply a fulcrum that exerted too many levers. But he could use it still. She would be watching him through it. And he would give her a show, give her something that dulled her expectations, and feed her Alsyim when the time came. By assumed defeat, he would lose the Chronicler to the High Seraph, and from there, his following plans would unfold. Naekos office was an oblong structure build on a risen platform at the very center of the floor. Through transparent glass, Avo saw a dozen plush toys standing at attention. They were no larger than his hand, and most of them had tags still attached to them. A certain few looked stitched back together, and some had burns marks that told tale of flames survived. Most of them were bioforms of various varieties. Some were of Heaven and golems, though reduced to somewhat cherubic facsimiles of themselves. [The hell is this,] Draus template muttered. [Why does he have all this shit?] Avo had a guess. +Likely not his.+ Stepping through the open door, Avo caught sight of a desk, of opal and violet. It was wide with twelve different holo-screens, while a sprawl of notebooks and magnets were planted along the metallic rims of the table. A long bookshelf occupied the right side of the office, and it offered tomes such as Love in Passing: A Tragedy of Alfyrea and the Noonsinger. Memories taken from templates told him this was a sorrowful tale of love between a changing god and a priestess they truly loved. Or so the retrohistorians claimed, anyway. Naeko came to a stop at the edge of a terrace overlooking the unnatural waves sweeping across the demiplane. He drew in a crisp breath and closed his eyes. A distant recollection was all that remained in the space of his thoughts. Someday, Samir. Someday, you will tell me, No. And when that day comes, I will know that you are finally well, and that will make me smile. Jaus sounded better when he wasnt screaming. He was not the sort of man that could bear pain well. Such was how it seemed to Avo, anyway. The Chief Paladin ruminated on the moment for a few moments longer, and Avo gave the time that he needed. When Naeko opened his eyes again, he turned to face the hovering form of Avos manifested Overheaven. Did you hear those thoughts too. Was nothing else in your mind. The Chief Paladin nodded. Hell of a disappointment I turned out to be, huh?You may judge yourself this way. Some others. But not to me. And then suddenly Jaus was gone, and all Naeko could think of was Zein. Zein, his master, standing over his beaten body, complimenting him as he tried to remain conscious. Zein, his master, who fed him soup and told him tales of all the people and beings she killed as he suffered from a fever, promising him that the sickness in him would be easy to slay. Zein, who looked so proud of him when he claimed the Peace-Breaker. Zein. The only one he ever thought of as a mother. And the only mother he ever wanted still. Zein. Who abandoned him. She isnt a person, Avo said, speaking directly to Naekos thoughts. Shes more like me. Or what I was. She was... almost closer to a god. Elemental. Consumed by concepts. You are not. You rageful. And hurt. You sate yourself on the violence. Cruelty even. But its nto enough for you. You seek more. You want more. I wish I didnt. Many wish they were another, Avo agreed. Many wish to be different. But the difference your mind desires is not the difference that will set you free. And you are afraid of being set free. How can a dog that despises itself be its own master. Naekos lips curled, and he fled the topic. As expected. You sure Veylis will take your bait? Dropping Alysim in her lap through a failed run is suspicious. Especially since its happening with the trial. The operation will fail beautifully. In part because I will make a genuine attempt. Yeah. Fine. You know youre asking for a hell of a lot when you requested Zeins prison, right? But you will give her to me, Avo said, expecting Naekos accord. However, what the Chief Paladin said went further than he could ever have expected: Give her? Fuck that. Im not giving my master to anyone. But shes got a lot to answer for, and so does Veylis. Im not giving you Zein, Im coming with you. Im about done with all this bullshitall these Guilds, and the Ladder, and the futuretired of it. Tired of it all. Avo hesitated, finding himself unsure what Naeko was about to say. So. What is your wish? My wish? Naeko chuckled. I dont just want to help you with this run. I dont just want to see you get Agnos Kusanade back. Im coming with you. You think you have an angle of Veylis and the Infacer? Alright. Alright, Ill believe you. So, lets go all in. All in, Avo echoed. Everyone keeps telling me to shed my leash? Fine. Ill do it. Ill do it. And Ill do what I should have years ago. I should have... He steeled himself. Seen this done when Veylis came back after what she did. Definitely after what she did to here. My home. My Paladins. Uncertainty gnawed at Avo, but the problem standing before him was now twofold: it would have hard to enact the operation against Veylis with Naeko and Paladin support; and who in this city could truly stop the Chief Paladin without immense cost. You still love her. This will shatter you. Naeko didnt deny it. Yeah. But Im already all kinds of broke, so. He shrugged. I guess Im tired most about waiting. Waiting for the end to come. Waiting for someone to win, for everything to just fix itself. He bit his lip. Im not like you or Jaus or Veylis. I dont know why people do the things they do. I dont know how else to be. But I think Im finally out of cowardice. It is not cowardice that stopped you, Naeko, Avo said, lowering his Soul to face the man. It is pain. It is madness. It is survival. You are close. I can feel the cracks in your mind. Held together by will. Protected by your Heaven. You dont want to shatter. And I might? Naeko asked, looking for answer. Yes. But I am here. I will not let you come apart. No, Naeko said, shaking his head. No, you will. Before I agree to doing any of this with you, I want you to promise me something: If I die or stop being myself... Just let me rest. Just let me rest. Im tired. I want there to be an end. One way or another. Templates simulated lines of dialogue, paths to turn Naeko from the edge. But disquieting as the request, Avo knew it wasnt his choice to make. I will endeavor to make whatever you choose the truth, Naeko. Something loosened inside the man. You know what? Youre not Jaus. Theres no one like Jaus. But youre still just too damned close. Perhaps insight is the key that ascends one to being a peer of the divine. Perhaps. So. Lets go through this mad desperate run of yours one more time. See if I can talk myself out of this. Chapter 27-11 Strategy Chapter 27-11 Strategy As the forest grows, so does the flame. As the flocks flourish, the wargs fatten. -Stormtree Saying 27-11 Strategy We start by boiling the city. Avo formulated his mem-data into a representation of New Vultun. The megacity came together in holographic layers, washing away the summit of Scale and replacing it with a simulated representation of the Warrens, the Tiers, and even the Umbra and Maw far below as he went over his plan. Patches of fire dotted the city, while red markers percolated through its structure like a spreading plague. Though Avo only infested a bit over two percent of the entire city, his Incubi were multiplying by the millions, copied into Syndicate Necros and unleashed as an unseen army. Per Shotin and Benhatas knowledge, Avos Incubi already far outnumbered their Ori-Thaum counterparts, and better, they were further perfected: he laced their minds with sequences from his own; sequences from Draus and the other Regulars; sequences from Peace. Such a thing was oddly appreciated by the captured Low Master. [Those cunts are going to fuck the Guilds hollow,] he chuckled. The Definement of Pre-Cognition showed Avo that the Nether would almost entirely held by him before this month was over. Only pockets would remain for the Guilds, and of these, only Ori-Thaum and Omnitech had the best chance of navigating the coming annexation. The links between the guilds and their subsidiary syndicates would be severed. A time of starvation was approaching, and all the deaths that flowed were going to trickle, then stop. As Naeko absorbed both word and illustrated detail, his pupils dilated and his mind raced. You did all this... in days? Naeko asked, not wanting to believe the ghouls words. Avo chuckled. Don''t exactly have months or years left. Have to be efficient. This is more than efficient, Avo. Zein was godsdamned right. You are a plague. He laughed with disbelief. Shit. No wonder Jaus made the Nether and sealed away Heavens of the Mind. If the Guilds could make something like you Only one man could make something like me, Avo said, correcting Naeko. One man driven by absolute acceptance, who understood both ally and foe, and who remained unfettered by morality, ethicality, and materiality to construct a vessel of absolute expression.Naeko shot the looming Overheaven a look. That might be the longest sentence you ever spoke to me. Special circumstances. A breath left the man. You know the Guilds are going to find out about this, right? You cant flub numbers on this Scale expect them to not notice. Alarm sirens will be sounding within days. Theyre still building up for the next big oneand building even harder now. They can feel the tension with the trial. Ive seen them. Ive felt them flinching under my palm. Theyre know its coming. They know. Avo agreed. Yes. But theyll have many things to consider. The mental projection of the city changed as he isolated over fifty thousand critical districts. Each was attached to a high-performing Sovereignty for each of the Guilds. Going to force to react. The entire city will come afire. Forwarding this data to Kare as we speakbe prepared to evacuate civilians in the areas highlighted green. There will be outbreaks Disgust swept through Naekos face. Avo, come on Districts highlighted gray will be assaulted by Rendbombs. Critical infrastructure damage. And constant Nether attacks. Going to squeeze their lines of communication until they only hear what I want them hear. See what I want them to see. Defensive posture, Naeko said. Youre trying to get them to turtle up. Go all defensive." Yes. Have a major window right now. Ori-Thaum is currently choking on internecine. Omnitech has not adapted yet. Going to seize my dominance while I can. Stormtree, Ashtrhone, And Sanctus are vulnerable. The Chief Paladin understood. Youre going to try to take them over from the inside. If his plans were only so simple. I am going to claim them every way I can. Informationally. Physically. Thaumaturgically. My angles of subterfuge will be uncountable. It wont be that easy, Naeko replied. You havent seen the height of what they can do. You havent faced Stormtrees Houndmother Heavens yet, have you? And you know that their trees can shunt more than material structures. Damage can be moved from once place to another. Destruction. They can wield that like no one else. Their Longeyes are attuned to things breaking things and inflicted wounds like I am to peace and force. Good, Avo said, thinking of a certain Scaarthian he ensouled. They might be able to stop the offensive. And they might accept someone with new potential. Someone in the right place at the right time. Youre going to use a plant to stop one of your own attacks? Naeko said, understanding. Everyone dreams of heroes. A note of disquiet rose from Naekos mind. And youre going to do the same thing with Ashthrone and Sanctus, arent you? Yes. The former means more to me than the latter. Both are useful. Former has understanding of Hells and Rend that few other Guilds can match. They know how to rupture the most esoteric of things. Have unmatched Rendsinks. Thaumatech that lets them walk the Sunderwilds with greater ease. Need that. Need them to prepare something for me.?iscover new chapters at novelhall.com Ive seen the Domain of Chronology rupture once, Naeko said, voice low and wary. You dont want that. His mind went back to a moment during the Godsfall, of how a god that resembled a thousand golden roads collapsed, and when he did, a good contingent of the people it governed simply werent, and those that remembered were broken of mind and chronologysuffering from displacement sickness that caused them to jolt forward in time randomly until the miracle finally ran dry. Dont intent to rupture time. I just intend to poison it. Veylis has faced this before. Its not going to surprise her. Doesnt need to surprise her. Just needs to concern her. Which is why I also want the Sanctians. Want their ability to displace their ontologies and cities. Useful for emergency transitions and structures. Also their chronoframes. Want to know how they made mechanized battle armor out of time itself. The Chief Paladin swallowed, felt a rush of incoherent anger, and waved Avo off. Alright. Shut the fuck about that and tell me what were doing about the Saintists. You got the Massists something bad, maybe. But what about Veylis. Strategically: I want to isolate the No-Dragons; want to keep Omnitech and Highflame under constant assault. Target all their non-Godclad personnel. Rot their logistics. Above everythingI need to get Kae back. Naeko considered Avos words with a curious expression. You think you can do that? The first thing, I mean. The No-Dragons. They are the loosest of the coalition. Turned from Massist to Saintist during the Second Guild War due to leadership changes. You know what happened, then, right? Naeko asked. Avo had knowledge from Elegant-Moon, Green River, and countless other Sang templates, but even their understandings could have been diluted. None of them had lived as long as Naeko, after all, and reality was broken in ways that defied memory. I have recollections. But tell me what you lived. They called the Changing of the Final Cycle, Naeko began. The previous governing body of First Daughters were slaughtered just days before the Siege of Scale. General mood among the No-Dragons was one of outrage cause Ori-Thaum kept using them as disposable meat. They werent wrong, in a sense. Naeko paused. How much you know about a Sangs biology? Enough. You are talking about the dragon-curse. Yeah. That, and everything it did to them. They all give birth at a specific time in their lives, have the same amount of children survive the process, suffer the same pain at the same moments, and in the end are fated to die at the same age. Even if they are Godclads. [Blessed fortieth,] Elegant-Moon chuckled. [Four decades of pain. Four decades of strife. The end is a blessing, for four more decades would be far too long.] Green River sneered. [Time is a bullet that always follows, that always chases. Time can be delayed, but never denied. Not unless time itself is changed.] Forty. Thats how long theyll make it. Unless they uh... they assimilate a younger daughter. Take their current place in the cycle and extend their borrowed time before the curse consumes them. Such was the reason behind the Sangs desired victory. And such was also why Avo wanted to focus on them. Strained to the brink by the fighting during the Second Guild War, Veylis came to them offering terms of a peace and an offer they never expected. More than cure to the curse, all that was life and biology would be given to master after arrival of victory, and time would hold dominance over them no longer. So long as they accepted Jaus Avandaers reign what other patterns remained of reality, such was the accord. Chronology flows through me like blood, Avo said. Havent had the chance to focus on the No-Dragons. But think I know what they want. Think I can give them satisfaction before Veylis. Or claim them first. Most of them are bioform-bound, Naeko said. That goes beyond just their sheathes. Seen their exo-maths. Know how strange their minds are. His Definement of Empathy shivered inside him.But theirs is a limited oddity. I know of greater colors. They cannot deny me their thoughts. And what world exists where the old must feed on the young to survive? I can taste the trauma in them. Humans are not shaped to live in a den of snakes. Youd be survived what shapes a human mind can take, Naeko responded. I hope so, Avo replied. But with this also comes my plan for Veylis herself. The simulation flickered into a specific demiplane far in the atmosphere. It looked like a fissure in the clouds, but Naeko recognized it immediately. Axtraxis? How the hells did you get in their? Nepotism. Corruption. Human weakness. Going to spread myself among the faculty. Students. Expand and take as much of Highflame as possible during the trialas quietly as I can. Then I will make a mistake. Across the Tiers ruled by Highflame, all the techno-thaumic reactors came alight. I am going to use Alysim to twist the paths. Going to alter the Souls powering each of these reactors until they overload. Force Veylis to respond. Make a genuine attempt on her and all of Highflame. Naeko went very, very still at that. That casualty rate if you succeed Will exceed billions. Yes. Which is why I am going to focus my efforts on overwhelming Veylis and the Infacer during the trial. Make them realize I am a distraction. Force them to recapture Alysim during the run. It has to be a genuine attempt. It has to be. Anything less would make it seem like a trap. This will undoubtably cost me Axtraxis. Cost me much of my infection in Highflame. But the losses will convince Veylis of her true victoryand Alysim will surprise her. Will also make it easier for her to accept my successes so far. [It seems we are each others fortune now, friend,] Alysim murmured humorlessly. +Yes. Little mistakes. Great consequences. Zein should have been neater.+ This made the Chronicler laugh. Alright. So, Alysim gets taken. Where are we going to be? Naeko asked. Avo pointed a phantasmal tendril at his pocket. The Chief Paladin squinted. Avo... shell see that coming. The demiplanes Thats why we unleash Zein first. Then you. Then I try to navigate her Paths. A pocket of emptiness suddenly formed in Naekos stomach. You cant tell me shell be expecting that. Said you wanted to be part of this run, Naeko. Ready for a family reunion. ...Fuck. Chapter 27-12 Vessels of Flesh and Mind Chapter 27-12 Vessels of Flesh and Mind Art is how you betray yourself to an enemy. Art is the fullest expression of who you are, of what you desire, of your expression released into the world.Finnd new chapters at novelhall.com You live. You are shaped. And you shape thereafter. And in your wants and flaws, your greatest defeat will be shown. To want is to war, and therefore, all art will inevitably lead to conflict, for another will learn to hate you by the nature of your work alone. Just look at how the priests are braying for your blood. And for what? A dignified sculpting of one of their gods. An absolute improvement of divine aesthetic a thing supposedly beyond the point of improvement. But not us, dear poet. Not us. We wish to be with you. And you can be with us, learn with us in this place free of judgment. This city eternal welcomes you. And you have no choice but to accept. -The Hungers of Noloth 27-12 Vessels of Flesh and Mind C[Vator]C I would like to understand something," Vator said, pausing his words as he focused on parting the flesh from the ghouls face. Poor, wretched, horrible creature. So limited in design: made to be the nightmares of children. Pointed fangs; pale, translucent skin; those scleras; and their elongated dimensions. How painfully awkward. How terribly boring. A monster blessed with but stray traits of inhumanity, yet clearly still bound to the shape of man. For the longest time, he thought the Low Masters devoid of creativity. As it turned out, they were just constrained. Why? Vator asked, using his Heaven of Biology to scoop the festering tumors pulsating within the ghouls exposed brain matter. Nasty little plaguetheir regeneration was hyper-accelerating these cancers, bringing them to an even earlier end. As in, why serve the Hungers if they are so banal? Why serve them when they refuse to let you live to your fullest potential? Youre a curious sort, Emotion. I can hear it in your words your observations. Did you not feel the ache of being constrained? Did you not want to make something beautiful? The youngest of House Greatling gestured at the deceased monster he was vivisecting on the maple table. The Deep Mariners deluxe suite leased ample six rooms to him and his father during their stay. Located in the Vulget District in the Hallowmile Sovereignty at Lights End, it had become their place of stay while they conducted their operation. Worked to redeem their houses honor. With crystal mirrors, marble floors, leather padded walls, and Highflame-specific decor, it was a fanciful place. A genuine attempt to leisurely living, if such a thing was possible in these Warrens. Vator also despised it. It was boring. Expected. And embraced none of the uniqueness within the locale. Where were the circuits? Where were the makeshift technologies assembled by the locals? Where was the street art staining his walls? Alas, his father had standards, and Vator prepared himself to deal with things in dull determination. But as they were investigating poor Jhreds ruined hovel, a most fascinating character greeted them and offered himself in surrender. +Beauty is shaped by conception and culture,+ the Famine of Emotion said. +The Hungers and Guilds concern themselves with dominance and force. Dominance over concepts and culture. Solitary reign over all. You speak of beauty. Have you thought of what might remain when only one force stands?+ The Low Master projected an avatar from the locus that held his mind. He resembled a tall man with stitched eyes and a dead bird of all things lodged in his chest cavity. Quite symbolic, but also a cry of outrage. The Famine of Emotion: a heartless, blind man. Subtext was truly for cowards. Still. They were fun to talk to. They didnt recoil from Vators ideas like the other children up in the Tiers. I think, like a body, the one force will mutate and change, and I will be a part of all the trends and glories to follow. Vator sighed. How he longed for the day when this pointless warring could be done, and he could glory himself in work and creation beyond the threshold of time. Look here. Monsters can be beautiful. Your ghoulsthey could have been so much more. And yet, your master leashes them. Leashed you! Vator grew a hand out from the side of his face and flicked away that single solitary tear rolling down his right eye. So much potential... denied. He tapped the ghoul again, and invoked his Domain of Flesh. The monster spilled apart before his very eyes, a cocoon of biomass forming over it, digesting itself. He wanted to see how a ghouls expanded digestive tract would affect their system if that would destabilize these ever-growing tumors. This one was used up. He was getting close to understanding why so many of them were getting premature cancers. Something about their cells seemed almost intelligent. Or organized to fail in a certain way. Such coherence pointed up beyond the clouds. Voidwatch was ever lawful. Especially in the work they left behind. +Have you found the problem yet?+ Emotion asked. +I have not forgotten,+ Emotion said, unshaken by the former Authority. +Just as you remain truthful to yourself. I am the only one that can turn your daughter from damned fool to valiant victim. I am the only reason why you or your son have a trail leading to your foe at all.+ Flames erupted from Uthreds eyes. You +Will do everything to see Highflame achieve its every goal during the trial, and you begin the Fifth Guild War on dominant footing. I will be the difference between a final struggle of attrition and sorrow, or a victorious campaign with all the world aligned beneath the supremacy of your High Seraph.+ Uthred scoffed. So long as you are preserved. +I am irrelevant. My fate was sealed centuries ago. But through me, Noloth will survive, and the city eternal will remain and be protected in a paradise under oath of a singular master. We are all desperate, Uthred Greatling. You and I. Despite me if you wish. But accept the symmetry for what it is.+ Enough of this. Uthred turned away from the Low Master with a barely suppressed sneer and addressed his son. Have you isolated the ghouls afflictions yet? Almost, Vator said, annoyed to be repeating himself. I believe the engineering is voidtech in nature. Entirely natural at its base. Voidwatch, Uthred grunted. I have contacts in Omnitech, do you No! Vator snarled like a dog trying to protect his bone. A flush tinted his cheeks as he watched his father flinch away from him. No, no, I mean.... I can do this. No need to trouble them. There are other matters they should concern themselves with. When I am done, I will see the Old Woman and offer what I have learned to her. Perhaps she can make something of use out of it. His father regarded him for a beat before giving a curt nod. See it done before tomorrow if you can. Vator did so love a challenge. I can. I will just need to... do more testing. A flash of discomfort passed behind his fathers eyes. For a second, Vator expected to be refused, but then the look faded, and Uthred seemed merely resigned. I understand. Do it quietly. Keep your noise to a minimum. Of course, father. People go missing in these Warrens all the time. I will be sure to put some of the unwanteds to better use. I will leave the process to you, Uthred muttered as he turned to leave the room. I will be leaving for the Second Fortune in an hour. There are additional things I want to discuss with the ghouls slave. Will you bring Emotion with you? Vator asked. Uthred went still just as gripped the door. Turning slowly, he eyed his youngest son with the harshest glare he could. Vator. He is not a toy. Do not treat him as such. I have him contained, not pacified. The Famine offered no commentary about this. So, no, then? Vator said. His father promptly stepped out and left, all but slamming the door behind him. The youngest Greatling sighed once more. He turned to face Emotion again. Forgive him. He is under a great deal of stress. +And shame. And sorrow. Your brother has left a wound in him. As has your sister. And he wants to truly connect to you, for you are his greatest inheritor. But he is unable to understand you, and he fears you on an instinctive level.+ Emotion let out a soft breath. +I empathize.+ This surprised Vator. You do? Avo, Emotion said. You asked me about the meaning behind his name. It is derived from Avohakten. My son. The son I killed. Rapt fascination rose within Vator like bile, he was leaning forward, eyes aglow with glee. Tell me. Tell me. But the Low Master pressed their lips together. +A reward for you. Separate the sickness affecting my ghouls, and I will tell you everything about my wayward boy.+ The young Instrument threw his head back and laughed. An order from his father and an offer from a Low Master. What a day. What a thrill. Reabsorbing his tailbone-forged stool back into himself, Vator tugged at his suit lapels as he placed a palm against the boiling mess of flesh beside him. Ill be right back. And then he injected himself into the squirming biomass and tunneled across the city, clawing his way out from one of his many existing art pieces left in the gutters. Time for a little more testing. Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (I) Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (I) People ended up calling this time the last days of the false peace, because that''s what it was. A false peace. Sure, the Guilds weren''t fighting, but those half-strands were bound to get into it sooner or later. Even without us lighting the fuse, the High-Cuntus... well, she had her designs long before we did. In the end, all I can say is that we weren''t the ones to start the fire. We just tried to shape its path so that it would burn the half-strands we wanted it to burn. But whats the thing people say about best laid plans? Shit fills your hand? Well, imagine if the shit was fire, and that some of it jumped on your short hairs and traveled up the hole. Sometimes, the burning gets a little out of control and take something from you, too. When you start a war, not all of your consangs are gonna make it. I kinda thought I knew that as an Enforcer, but I really wasnt ready to learn it again. Not with people I actually cared about. -Aedon Fuckbringer Chambers 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (I) C[Avo]C Avo tracked the busts of radiations from after, following the progress of the Omnitech scouting Knot as the golems inched along the threshold of the clashing Sunderwilds. He detected them by pure chance noticed a discrepancy in the tapestry. They traveled as a stable series of impossibilities upon the Domain of Signals, their intermittent pulsing standing stark against a canvas eroded by entropy. When disorder reigned, that which held structure was easily separated. He had been studying Heaven-designation [TERRAFORMATION MODULE-2994.04.04-Tundra-Mountainous-Chrismas Forever Standard] along the EGIs when he detected their coming. They were still over four hundred kilometers away, but from the paths they maintained, they clearly knew what they were looking for. Once more, Avo found his suspicion rewarded. When he and Draus secured the Heaven from the enclave, he neglected to subsume immediately. His original plan was to offer it over to Omnitech to use as bargaining for the George Washington. Even then, he was paranoid of the Sleeper, and rightly so. Calvino struggled to sift through the Heavens database. The voidship it was bound to remained corrupted in data and thaumaturgy. Avo uncovered just as many flaws within its ontology, uncovering an extremely unstable mythology. Entire stretches of existence were missing from its simulated inner reality. The miracles it possessed portrayed a world of snow, mountains, festive cheer, and strangely a strong scent of ginger, but was also lined with naked rifts: clefts between the metaphysical and material. Most curiously, when it detected certain deviations across the tapestry, it would respond by attempting to trigger its own phenomena. Small alterations made to existence. Too small to incur much rend, but too unnatural to escape being baseline. It is CALLING the Sleeper, the Techplaguer purred. Connection not found. Connection not found. +But Omnitech can detect it?+ Avo asked. See. BEACONS ARE MEANT TO BE SEEN. The Techplaguers statement would further be proven when, hours later, a few hundred more instances of radiation jabbed at Avos attention. The nearest Omnitech scouts were coming in from the coast of Noloth, just before the shattered sea. In the far distance, past fracturing waves of impossible black, the fangs of the Skuldvast rose high, splitting the sky, clouds, and space. They came in across the waters, traveling along the scar charts where ruptures blunted each others entropy. The bulk of Omnitechs units were concentrating at an adjacent rupture some fifteen thousand kilometers away from where [TERRAFORMATION MODULE-2994.04.04] was stored. They used a geometric hurricane as cover, hiding as a budding field of static within the eye of the storm. The turning vectors of the winds bent the worlds progression vector to its path, warping the land and twisting even the tectonic plates below into a mangled looking corkscrew. Avo considered striking them with his Pattern-Nullification, dumping every bit of entropy he had over into the Domain of Signals using the Techplaguers hell. Ultimately, he decided to let them be for now. He didnt want to betray his hand so soon, and formed ethereal watchtowers to monitor their progress. EDICT OF _EXO-PARACOSM_ APPLYING DOMAIN OF (MATTER) >CANON: MIND UPON MATTER - THE ARK INFUSES A PORTION OF MATERIAL REALITY WITH THEIR GHOSTS AND PARTIALLY BINDS THE MATTER TO THEIR MEMORY. A PERCENTAGE OF REND WILL RESERVED IN PROPORTION TO THE MASS AND NUMBER OF STRUCTURES INFUSED. THESE STRUCTURES CAN ONLY BE DESTROYED IF THE GHOSTS INFUSED ARE DISRUPTED AND THE MATERIAL STRUCTURE IS DESTROYED AT THE SAME TIME. ->MORTALITY: IF THE INFUSED STRUCTURE IS DESTROYED, ARK WILL SUSTAIN MINOR (5%) BACKLASH. The watchtowers rose from the land in the shape of faint, flaming chains near invisible from afar. Between each link was a pulsing Skimmer, projection wavelengths over perception over their respective checkpoints. Avo strategically placed four hundred and fifty of them in critical areas near all his facilities. His enclave, prison, bivouac, and the refugee processing site all fell under additional watch, and through them, he detected additional unwanted guests. They were coming from all sides. Not only Omnitech now, but Highflame and the No-Dragons as well. Their vanguard came in the form of Knots, but Avo knew Godclads were certain to follow. Dipping into the tapestry, he felt them drain the Rend from critical ruptures and began inserting demiplane through stabilized zones. Doubtless, they wanted this to be done in the form of an ambush. The encroaching threat left a sour taste in Avos mind. Veylis now knew a substantial amount about his operations with Kaes capture, and the path to his current enclave was no great difficulty of the Guilds. Still, the Sunderwilds would slow their approach and buy him time. Such was why he re-stationed his cadre out here. Such was also why the Guilds would find themselves sorely disappointed when they arrived. If the High Seraph or the Infacer expected to catch him unaware and finish this fight quickly, they were nursing themselves on delusion. Casting the information over his cadre, he got his first response almost immediately. +Shit. That was fast,+ Draus said. +Guess they want to knock us off the board before we can even get to play.+ Avo agreed. +Impatience is a poor habit. But they will learn. How are the passages coming along.+ +Theyll be done by tomorrow.+ +Do them by today. Stop shooting people for now.+ The Regular responded with a disgusted snort. +Im teaching Glass how to be my spotter.+ That gave Avo pause. +You renamed the Simulacra glass?+ +Full titles a mouthful.+ +Yeah,+ Avo said, speaking with hope rather than worry. +Dont think theyll see what we have coming.+ Chambers chewed on his inner cheek. Right. Well. Im ready. More ready than Ive been all my life. In his mind, he thought of what Dannis told him, and he kept himself controlled. +It is a joy to see you with purpose,+ Avo whispered, compelled to speak his thoughts. Yeah? Chambers chuckled, and stopped his burning for a moment. Imagine if my old man could see me now. +Dont think he would be able to meet your eye.+ Yeah. I dont think he would, would he? Ah. Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck Zein. Fuck Veylis. Im not gonna lie, its funny as shit to me that doing the right thing is falling to a monster like you and a freak like me but... He shrugged. Jaus couldnt light the wick, maybe it just has to be us: the ones too fucked up to break properly in the first place. Avo laughed. +To being fortunate outcast in a sunken time.+ To being the cocks for once, and not the asshole. [Wow,] Abrel murmured. [Regular poetry from both of you.] *** As the number subverts grew in the bio-processing facility, Avo manifested his Overheaven in the City of Light. Once more, he regarded the people below from his tower, and from them emanated the weight of trauma and shock. The days had not been kind to them. One crisis after another left them reeling, and the truth of the world was already overwhelming. All the information Avo fed them rendered them anxious, and more than a few had to be drawn back from the verge of madness. But beyond keeping them stable, he left them relatively untouched. Wanted to speak with them as honestly as possible. +Dice. Are they ready?+ The once-girl was standing at the very apex of the tower, and the cat batted at one of Avos branching ghosts while cursing him mentally. No, Dice said. But they will never be. Theyre waiting for the gate to open. So the dog can come out. So they can stop being afraid and just act. The perspective left by her past was a twisted one, but even that offered its insight. +Are you ready?+ Avo asked. The girls mechanical head whined as it turned. Yes. Death is easy. But life. Its been interesting. I want to go to the void. Its new. I havent seen it. It might be nice. Again, the junviles in the gutters called back to him. Near feral from violence, but still a child somewhere inside. Accepting her words with a grunt, he extended his sequences across the city, and from them spread tendrils of ghosts and splinters like sprouted seeds. In seconds, he was connected to every inhabitant still present in this City of Light, and began what was his third formal address. +War is coming,+ Avo said. He spoke to them directly and saw no point in lying. They should know what potential fate awaited them. They should be offered a clear choice. He channeled his most recent memories, edited to be palatable for mortal minds, and immediately he felt some of them shudder, the suppleness of their cognition recoiling at the Ladder. "Oh, no, please no," a woman whimpered, rocking her newborn close to her chest. A man simply sat down, curled into a ball, and began to cry. Dread and despair rose like steam from countless minds across the city. Avo allowed it. These were appropriate responses, and they should know the truth of the world. But then he continued, for he was not done. And neither were they. +There will be an attack soon. An attack by powers beyond you. Beyond all your comprehension.+ Avo paused. +Beyond even me. But I intend to fight. To make a stand here. To see them bloodied and broken from their failed raid. I will fight them using reality and cognition as my weapons. But this is not your war. But this does not need to be your fate. I hear your fear. And I have been making arrangements.+ +I understand that none of you asked for this. Whatever your sins, whoever you were, this was not your fault. You are merely caught in the waves of history. But there is no avoiding this. Not when the prize is mastery over every form of reality. Every future possible.+ Most of them were still listening, though they didn''t fully grasp the severity of the conflict. Not truly. Their minds didn''t have the capacity to, but they understood. He gave them enough detail to understand. +There will be an end soon. Everything will be decided within a year. The shaping of reality that follows will determine the fate of humanity for however long eternity may last. This war is beyond you, but this war concerns you. You cannot escape it. Not fully.+ +There are people who believe that they should decide the fates of your children. Decide that you must live in their paradise. Or be punished for rejection. I am not one of these people.I will make that known now. You will be given options. There will be other enclaves made available for you. I will not know where you are. I will not know how to find you. You will be able to go there. Find sanctuary. I make no guarantees that tranquility is certain to follow. But there will be peace. Rest. Respite. At least for some time.+ +For those of you who wish to fight, who wish to face the coming end, I welcome you. I will give you all you need to take back your life. To express yourself one final time against the only foe you should ever hate. The truest foe. The highest foe. The tyrant of time. A daughter who deceives all. Even herself. A tyrant that fears another''s wants. Who fears a paradise that doesn''t resemble hers. Who seeks to make true an unwilling god. Who seeks to control all possible future so the only one that remains will be her.+ Avo paused and unleashed new memories. He showed them what Veylis could do. He showed them what she took, and what she could do. He showed them the enormity of her sin and the power she wielded. Jaus was screaming. Jaus was always screaming. +There will be no peace when you walk this path. An undignified end may await. But you will know what it means to hold your own fate. To master your own destiny. You will not go with those who choose sanctuary. I will take you to an old frontier. An old frontier once colonized and then lost by humanity. An old frontier in the darkness above. I will build a citadel from nothing. I will grant you power over nothing. And I give you experiences that no one will ever truly understand. You will be first. You will be unique. And you will be Ensouled. Given power over reality. To defend reality. To defend your future.+ +I have spoken my piece, if you desire to make another choice, if you desire to make your own choice, then let your thoughts shine in your minds. I will see them. I will respect them. I may not accept them. But I will provide you whatever freedoms I can. I will do my utmost to see you become all you can.+ A deathly silence gripped the city, and everything seemed still, aside from a certain uplift that was actively trying to boo, though the cat really didn''t have the throat for it. +The false peace is at an end,+ Avo said, reminding them of the coming war. +There is no avoiding what is to come. Accept. Accept and decide. Accept and choose your own color.+ And as soon as he finished, he cast the memories over to Marlowe. While the city reeled once more. A breathless laugh came from the thoughtcaster still up in the void. She spent her time aboard the Manta, preparing the planetary ring for habitation. A joy was burning in her, and its resonance wasnt so different from Chambers purpose. It was life in the moment. It was the thrill to be here in the present. +Nice speech,+ Marlowe said. The hairs along her skin were standing up, and her breath was slightly hitched. +This will cut one hell of a promo at your trial.+ +I will provide anything else you need,+ Avo said. +But dont embellish. We give New Vultun the full truth. All of it. Make them feel this weight. Not only the enclavers who need to decide.+ Chapter 27-13 The Last Days of the False Peace (II) Chapter 27-13 The Last Days of the False Peace (II) I didn''t expect to be the last one standing. Out of everyone else. That was the weapon. And somehow... I just keep making it out alive. -Jelene Draus, User of the Stillborn 27-13Rread latest chapters at novelhall.com The Last Days of the False Peace (II) GHOSTS - [822,731,124] LIMINAL FRAME (VI) - 844,200 THAUM/c UPDATING INFECTION... INFECTION - [4.09%] Emptiness was not nothingness. Emptiness was space. Emptiness was relative. Emptiness was a canvas. Emptiness was coldness. Emptiness was isolation. And emptiness would be salvation. Most heavens possessed by Avo were already pre-madeharvested from golems or other Godclads. Their lore and mythology were shaped by the agnostic, and long determined by history and culture. Their domains, thus, were concepts known to man like Blood and all its symbology, Air, defined by freedom and escape, Signals, reimagined as a bastardization of lost technology. But the Heart of the Void was to be something else. It would be a Heaven forged by a god. A Heaven forged for purpose above mythology, and the faith that fueled it would be in worship of practicality and functionality. Where once this core of roiling dark was the Heart of Noloth, shaped to protect unworthy masters in a war they could not win, now, it would be cultured to protect the weak, the consume the strong, and mantle the hollow expanse that once cradled all of human existence. There in the void, Avo left a part of him alongside the Manta. He, and a few hundred iterations of Kae drifted, watching the tapestry act and react in the void, studying its patterns. [Peace,] one of the Kae-templates said. [Perhaps that is Domain we can make. It is known to Naeko, after all.] [No, no,] another Kae sighed. [Peace is too easy to compromise. I am sure the High Seraph has a plan for that. Targeted Rendbombs! Paradoxes using previous instances in history. We are trying to create something truly and completely novel! Something that the Guilds cannot easily counter the time they are granted.] As his inner Agnosi theorized, Avo watched all ten thousand kilometers of the planetary ring shift along the curve of Idheim. It splashed through the reaching swaths of the Sunderwilds, sinking in and out of entropy with each of its rotations. However the Guilds made it was designed to last, and now Draus was lining its interior with glass, while the Manta pumped air into a secured section of its insides. Relative to the void, the unfinished ring was a refugee. A place to stay for the enclavers and refugees that wished to follow Avo over Essus. But there was also something else, a relative pull between Idheim and the structure that encased it gravity born from all things with mass. [Mass?] Kae said. [Its been done. Gravity, perhaps.] [Its also been done] [Not like this! We are living old knowledge right now.] +Relativity,+ Avo said. The Kaes went silent. +Gravity can be a secondary Domain. Fusion from the Sun as well. Coldness. Vacuum. The void. Even singularities. Only told me about them. Will be useful. Something most Godclads cant escape from. Even affects time. But relativity. Absolute effects between objects. Consider a thaumic version of gravity. Something that affects conceptual weight as much as physical.+ Kae considered that. [Creating worship for such a Heaven would be difficult.] +No. Its simple. Its about attraction. Repulsion. It is about the pressure applied between things. This is observable. But what is referenced is the canvas. Totality. The city. The backdrop. Our setting. This void. Light moves the same to all observers in the natural world. Physics shares rules. And I see it in the pattern now: the pull. The drawing. An unseen tether of force. Chains and chains.+ Calvino whispered in his mind. {History repeats once more. Or maybe this is just weight drawn across the ages.} +What?+ Avo asked. {Just a reference to an old idea. Its good to see knowledge resurrected. What is lost may always be found anew.} Avo didnt fully get the pogniance of what the EGI was referencing, but accepted their subtle pleasure. As he continued to mediate on the fabric of the universe, he watched the relative links, zoomed back from them. Two Domains accompanied them always. Space and chronology. Space tied to chronology. Everything was somewhere. Everything existed at some time. But with relativity, wasnt the two linked as well? Werent time and space things that moved in tandem. Shotin sauntered over to the mans sofa and collapsed. Shifting himself a few times, he readied his spirit for what was to come and looked up. "All right," Shotin said, reaching inward to get the ghouls attention. "I''m here. We can all come out and talk now." He closed his eyes. "Don''t burn him. You promised me. Don''t fucking lie to me or I will And before he finished the sentence, a towering, thin form spilled out from his mind, merged into the vagueness of a humanoid from a net of undulating ghosts. The ghoul once known as Avo greeted Ori-Thaums ambassador to Stormtree in his Bone Demon avatar with active Meldskin. The voidtech disguised Avo bestial origins, but the Echoheads captured Valhus attention. A look of confusion and uncertainty filled his face. His cone of perception jumped between Kare, Shotin, and the monster standing before him. There are some things you need to know, Kare began. "Don''t freak out," Shotin interrupted, gesturing to Avo "He''s a..." Shotin began, then frowned as he couldn''t quite find the words to say. "He''s not an asshole. Well, yeah, he is kind of a half-strand. But he''s trying to help us, I think. Well, mainly trying to help himself. Listen, he ate my mind, and could have turned me into someone different to use a spy against Ori_Thaum. But he didn''t. And now he wants to talk to you and so do I," Shotin said, folding his arms. "Does that make things clear?" Valhu just blinked. Slowly he took off his spectacles, gave the ghoul in the room another look, and sighed. "Shotin, are you... are you experimenting with Nova again? Is this some kind of new canon?" "Well, I technically never stopped," Shotin said, shrugging. "But no, this is much worse than that. He''s real. He''s not a phantom. Listen, he''s his own person. He''s not just a projection. Avo, show him." The ghoul promptly speared an Echohead through the ambassador''s nice carpeted floor. Valhu winced as Avo extracted his stinging tendril. The carpet was a personal gift from one of the Longeyes. The ghoul simply gave him a nod, and then ghosts flowed out of him, filled the damage, melted into the carpet. When they settled, the carpet was whole again, as if it had never been stabbed in the first place. Once more, Valhu blinked. And Avo spoke his first words. "Ambassador Valhu Kitzuhada. Pleasure to finally meet you. Glad to finally speak. Happy I saved you." "Man you saved?" Valhu said. His hand was still reaching under the table, where that old spatio-kinetic pistol he took from that Regular all those years ago was strapped. It wouldn''t help, but Shotin didn''t try to stop him. What was the point. And Avo probably knew already. He wouldn''t be surprised if the ghoul was already in his brother-in-law''s mind. "Jhred Greatling," Avo said. "He was planning your assassination. Planning to bomb the function you hosted. The one at the Fire''s Height. Two months ago. I stopped him. Killed him for personal reasons. Caused the Shattering of Nu-Scarrowbur and Mazzas Junction. Also caused the arrest of Abrel Greatling and Elder Mwaba DRongo." Valhu''s mouth fell open. No... I know you... Youre the bioform. The Pale Spider. That is one of my titles. I want to tell you a few things. Let you know a few things. I promised Shotin that I would spare you, won''t consume you from my Gestalt. At least for now. But that doesn''t mean I need to leave you blind, and that doesn''t mean we can''t be allies. Your clan is engaged against the DRongos. Need to know they are compromised by a Low Master of Noloth. Need to know that Noloth intends to breach your Guild further. Need to know that the Fifth Guild War is approaching. Veylis making her play. And I need an audience with the Inner Council. Want to talk diplomacy. The ambassador struggled to internalize all that information. I.... you... Blood danced like swirling mist upon the ghouls palm, and a locus was formed. Placing the corpse crystal on the ambassadors table, Avo infused the faceted item with ghosts. All the details you need here. Also a captured Famine of Peace. Dissect him if you wish. Believe your Incubi will be interested. I know this is overwhelming. But there is no more time. And we stand to be of great benefit to each other. For a few seconds longer, Valhu struggled with his thoughts. As his eyes skipped to Shotin, then Kare, a nod from his daughter lessened his worry. His head lowered. Valhu sighed. Alright. Start by telling me what you want. Ill tell you want I think after. And the confused man was gone, and in his place was the diplomata veteran at his trade. Avo continued, "Ambassador, you are held in high esteem for both Stormtree and Ori-Thaum. Want you to make introductions for me. Want to meet a Longeye through you. Want to speak with the Inner Council, as said. Valhu swallowed slowly. "I will not betray my oath." "I don''t want you to betray anything. I do not want your loyalty. This isn''t a threat. This isn''t a bargain. I''m going to tell you where you can find our shared enemies. And you will help me. Because the cost otherwise would be too high. Veylis Avandaer is about to start the Fifth Guild War, Shotin elaborated. Then side-eyed Avo. Actually, no. The ghoul here is about to start the brawl, Veylis Avandaer is just content to oblige. War was coming regardless. But the end approaches. The Ladder looms. Do you know of the Ladder, ambassador. Ladder? Valhu said. Avo grunted. Assumed so. Did know your daughter was the target of Zein Thousandhand. Wanted to kill her so you would fight a war to her design by grief. Valhus eyes only widened. Its true, Kare said, sounding exhausted. Everything hes saying... its madness, father, but true. I know this is strange, but A meeting with the Longeyes is more likely than the Inner Council. Valhu looked like he didnt understand the words he just said. Stormtrees governing crones are always interested in a conversation. But the Inner Council. They view the world through their Mirrors I already got a summons, Shotin said. Valhu froze for a beat. Then why ask me for introductions. Because you are a proper channel. This is what Great Powers do. It would seem improper for me to just breach in through Shotin. Maybe it wouldnt even work. But it would spark a war. A war we can delay or avoid. Depending. Understand that you are also working to save your Guild from me. By this point, the ambassador was entirely dry of words. That was fine, Avo had plenty. Let me give you some perspective. Let me show you a glimpse of the end. Can tell me what you think after that. Can bring peace with you as an offering. Get back to me afterward. Whywhy do you want to speak with them? Are you seeking a preemptive truce? More. Want a temporary alliance for the trial. And want to work together on resolving the matter of Noloth... Valhus perfect posture turned crooked. A suffering noise escaped him as he looked at his daughter and brother-in-law. A chuckle of disbelief preceded his words. "What the hells have you two gotten me mixed up in? Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (III) Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (III) There is no higher sin than love, there is no greater transgression than to want, there is no greater failure of humanity, of existence, than our inability to face things as they are. No more. I will see us make this mistake no more. Love will hurt me no more. May only awareness ache when I think of those I lost. New Vultun, I proclaim to you now, on the end of days, this day of all days to come, no more. No more tyranny. I free all of us from the tyrant that is love. May a peaceful eternity follow thereafter. -Kae Kusanade, Murderess of Love 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (III) C[Veylis]C Veylis glided over the districts she held in sway. Even now, she could feel moats of the Dreamers sickness trickling in, registered as spreading spots of infection. Loci went dark. Rendbombs were detonated at critical installations. Millions simply collapsed, their minds shattered and winnowed of shape. With each passing second, Avo, the Knower of Totality warred against her. And with each passing second, she appreciated his efforts more. Finally. For a time, with the absence of her mother, she thought there a lull in her strain. A time for her to recover from all these centuries of focus. Not so. He was rapidly becoming a worthy replace in both angle and operational intensity. A different kind of adversary anyway. One that nursed her interest and vexxed her strategies. Her mother spent echoes like strikes. Was always escaping forward into the future. Avo was a tide. A flood. An infection. Always assailing her walls. Always demanding that she remain focus or suffer losses. And with each passing day, the frequency and intensity only grew. His strategy remains unchanged, she back, speaking across her own path. But his operational capabilities... his tactics. Those have become infinitely more varied and complex. The amount of Nether-based attacks striking our lobbies will likely surpass Ori-Thaum twice over before the end of this month. {You sound way too pleased,} the Infacer said. {Like a girl. With a new toy to break.} Its learning how to break a being so unique that interests me. He has become an axiom unto himself: an Overheaven of Conceptualization, a God of Minds and Consciousness. What a grand Domain to govern. What a foe to face with time. A Knot of golems detonated within one of her factories, causing a chain of explosions before she cleaved its progression. Time moved like a blade in her hand, and across time she cut as well, her miracles serving as both weapon and canvas, splitting the devastion years away, never to register in the present. A clean severance of fading gold left an entire complex bifurcated. Her riposte would go noticed by the other Guilds, but taking the damage was ugly calculus. She needed the facility preserved should Stormtree attempt to seize the Sovereignty. Every bit of production mattered. In the Nether, the ghoul was spreading, launching traumas against fortresses, subverting critical personnel at an alarming rate. The Infacer had taken to routinely detonating entire areas, as if trying to gas a den of aratnids into submission. Through the integration of Omnitechs Noosphere, they kept the Dreamer at bay with the thaumic encryptions, but that wasnt going to be a permanent solution. The Infacer assumed its quality of delay to last weeks to months at most. Meanwhile, the best asset Avo had in the real was clearly former Guard-Captain Jelene Draus. The regular was unfettered. Gleeful, even. She died in the thousands, millions, soon to be billions, attacking various installations, fighting with brutal efficiency no matter what body she was woven into, no matter what equipment, what implants, or support she had. Another reason for Veylis to exert her displeasure on the Chivalrics. Their incompetence cost her more than they could ever know. But part of her was pleased to see one of her former daughters so joyous. Be all the other Regulars as euphoric as she someday. Perhaps they will meet each other in glorious ends, dying to claim a final tomorrow. No greater glory. No greater end. The others Guilds were also suffering, recoiling and confused about the random attacks ripping through them. Already, she could see Stormtree, Ashthrone, and Sanctus savaged by Nether-based attacks. Entire districts were dark. Phantoms flickered over their skies, glitching and broken, while entire divisions and departments lay dead or subsumed. And despite the Inner Council of Ori-Thaums capabilities at contending with beings like the Hungers, despite the Longeyes ability to peer through all destruction, past, present, and future,, despite Sanctus''s ability to shift across time, and Ashthrone ready to take everyone with them to a final end, they had no idea what they were fighting. They knew nothing of the plague eating away at them. As the new variables entered her Heaven, she resimulated her paths, and saw a 51% chance that the bulk of the Massist Guilds would be captured by Avo before the year was over. That was, if she didnt find a way to put an end to him before that. "There is one thing he''s doing. Something that I cant quite predict," Veylis said, expanding her paths now, directing them across the Sunderwilds. Her core location was still enclosed in the city, close to her many protections in the Tiers. There were too many threats to risk being backlashed. She needed to do this as subtly as she could. The sanctuaries were effectively lost to him. She could see them destroyed now; would it be a pointless thing. As would the murder of that unfortunate soul, Essus. Kaes memories depicted a man who was broken after the death of his son. Not vengeful, not fueled for change, not even driven to claim the Ladder himself for a chance at fixing this great injustice. No. Simply broken. A pity. She would have to shape a better life for him, feed strength into both him and his boy so that they can face the life and every life to come. It would be a gesture of esteem to those who stood with the Dreamer. Something that would have never been granted to the man otherwise. Alone. He was damned. Weak and cursed by predestiny. Only through Avos choice was there true weight to his being. Weight to his existence. The same could be said for Aedon Chambers. The same could be said for countless others. Do you think hes being honest with us about Noloth? Veylis finally finished her question. Looking beyond the borders, she studied the crawling tendrils of the Sunderwilds consuming the horizon. Seven hundred kilometers away, there was an enclave she needed to burn. {Yes. I think that he despises them more than we do. The Hungers are an impediment, something we need to remove, completely reintegrate with the Ladder before its final deployment. For him, they likely represent something... disdainful. The murderers of his father. The mistakes of the past. A personal adversary. Or maybe he simply desires to devour them, to take their place and make better whatever dreams they had.} The Infacer chimed with wry amusement. {That last part, I think, is the most likely. I can say a lot of things about the Burning Dreamer, but his appetite stands out even among all the foes I have faced. What a palate. What a diet.} The EGI made a few biting noises, teeth clicking together, and Veylis replied with a noise that was almost a laugh. Then we should accommodate him on this," Veylis said. "He presents both a unique challenge and also an opportunity. He can engage the Hungers on their own territory to take hold of the Nether." The Infacer considered her words. {You wish for him to completely capture the Nether, don''t you. So we can collapse it all at once?} A potential path. But there are others I have planned. {Oh. Agnos Kusanades project. I do wonder how you intend to hurt him with the Heaven of Love.} Naekos face flashed into Veylis mind, but she pushed his shadow away from her, raw discipline surmounting base emotion. Thats not for him. That is for our victory. To cement our final alliance. +Hm,+ Avo said, finally responding. Draus knew he was up here with her somewhere, trying to get his new Heaven to work. She felt more than a few tugs in the darkness. He was doing something to void. Made it mess with weight or something. +Done?+ +Almost,+ Draus replied, watching the world from behind the helmet of her Meldskin. Never expected to get so far up here. She wondered what it was like fighting weightless wars. She might just take up Only on their offer soon. +The EGIs are connecting the Manta to the rings interior habitats. There are some unfinished facilities it can integrate with. Start pumping oxygen through the entire place. Get some hydroponics going.+ +Good. Ahead of schedule. Still a bit over a day left.+ +Yeah,+ she said. The trial. That was coming. While all those different variants of her got to run around, one of her and Kaes clones would be going in to jion the circus. But somehow, it all felt so godsdamned final. Didnt help that Veylis had Kae. Kae. An uncomfortable emptiness formed in Draus when she was captured. By the High Seraph, not less. Now, they were going to try to get her back. Avo had an entire mad run planned, and Draus was supposed to run heavy diversions in the meantime. The risk, as always, was high. So high it might as be suicide for most. But ghoul made a habit of telling the impossible to go fuck itself, and their cadredespite being made up of freaks, rejects, monsters, and weaponswas proving itself to be... Hard to kill. But no ones luck lasted forever. +You ever think that, that at any moment we can make another dumb mistake and that''ll be that? You''ll be dead for good this time?+ Avo paused briefly, considering the question. He hummed within Draus mind. +Yes. All the time.+ +Yeah, well, I''ve been getting that feeling more and more.+ +Are you developing a fear of mortality?+ "Fuck yourself," she said casually. +Whered this come from? Bored? Tired? Kae?+ +No. Just got a feeling. It''s a hell of a feeling. I felt the same way when Loraea Greatling or that suicidal final op. We Orphans, we probably all had that feeling. Hells, a few of us joked about it, but we knew what was wrong. We knew we were gonna die for nothing, and yet all of us walked away and did as she said. Looking back, it feels mighty pathetic. What a waste.+ +Are you expressing dissatisfaction in the path we''re taking right now?+ +No, not at all, consang,+ she said. +I don''t mind dying right now, not one bit.+ Avo materialized next to her, taking the form of the ghoul he was. Echoheads attached to the open vents of the radiator as he sat down awkwardly beside her. +Aint been that long,+ Draus said. +But it sure feels like a lifetime. Feels like I came out of a dream. Or a stupor. Like Im not lost in the dark anymore. Up here? After all we went through? Yeah. Makes me feel a kind of weight. The kind of weight that makes me know what Im doing is worth it and matters.+ She paused. She wasnt sure what brought on this sentimentality, but it was here. And she wanted things to be stated plain. +I like what you did to me, Avo.+ +I like the fact that we met,+ Avo replied, earnest and calm. +Likely wouldnt have made it this far. You kept the beast at bay sometimes. Early on. The fight we had. The promise of your violence. Saved me from straying. Mightve been Waltons plan all along. Still. Wouldnt work without you. You were something of my past. Something I could understand. Mightve been what kept me centered.+ +That, and you wanted to eat my eyes.+ +Yeah.+ They both snorted a laugh. +You know something?+ Draus said, thinking back. +We never got to have a proper second bout. And now... well, you feel real, but it ain''t the same. You''re nothing but ghosts and thoughts and memories. Probably won''t feel right to bleed you this way.+ +It can still be done,+ Avo said. He let out a slight hiss of consideration. +Draus?+ +Hm?+ +Do you want to fight a war against me?+ She cocked her head and smirked slightly. "Go on." +Our copies. Make them an army. A thousand each. Fight in an open plain. Sunderwilds. Just who we were. No weapons. No powers. Just us. A bloodletting like no other. Other members of the cadre can watch. Losing side gets to have a last stand if they want. Or accept terms of surrender.+ +Last stand?+ Draus snorted. +When did you become a godsdamned romantic. Aint you just about the eating?+ +Jealous. You got a glorious war during the Uprising. Culled ghouls. Fought Guilds. I hid in the Umbra. Hid from swarms. Nukes.+ +And it wasn''t even you doing the hiding technically,+ Draus said. +It was just some other ghoul that your pa pulled memories from.+ A sudden guffaw tore out from her as she rolled her eyes. +Holy shit. You''re stolen valor.+ +What?+ +You''re stolen valor. You''re stolen ghoul valor.+ Her laughing intensified. +Its too much. You''re not even a real ghoul, Avo. You didn''t actually fight in the war. You just got memories of ghouls that did.+ He looked down and bared his teeth. A low hiss of displeasure followed. +Going to kill you. Eat your eyes.+ +Are you now?+ +Going to kill you for making me think of this.+ +Hm. You remember what you asked me after our first fight?+ +If you felt real?+ +Yeah. I still don''t feel real. But I don''t think anyone does anymore. I don''t think any of us will ever feel real until someone finally wins. Until this is over. Until finally there''s something worth coming tomorrow. You and me, we are monsters and weapons. And when this is done, whatever we are now, it can''t live in the future. It''s gotta go away, or it''s gotta be put away. But right now... right now we''re the realest motherfucking things in this entire goddamn universe. Thats what I think. Ill bleed with you, Avo. Ill bleed with you any day.+ He grunted and grinned. +Ill tell the others. See if we can find a moment for ourselves. For everyone.+ Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (IV) Chapter 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (IV) Ball your fists and stand for who you are. The Guilds might kill you, my son, but always remember that death is never far. For what worth is a man if his words were not? A life lost in the attempt at righteousness hurts less than a dream never sought. There comes a moment where one must choose: wick or flame; to stand and deliver, or refuse. And when all is done, when the gates open and call you home, it will be your deeds and declaration that the angels make into your throne. The road is hard, the road is bleak but more than everything, the road is all we can seek. -Cas eld Canduir The Ballad of Those Before 27-13 Last Days of the False Peace (IV) {This is what I''m talking about. This. This is what civilization was made on. War. Monetized war. War as entertainment. People love warespecially when it doesn''t affect them. Especially when their families don''t get killed by artillery, or die from disease, or die because the water pipes are destroyed by bombing so they have nothing to drink, or are tainted by some nerve agent that turns you blind and deaf so you strain the citys logistics to collapse, making it easier for the invaders to gun you and your families down afterward.} Only Way To Be Sure sighed. {Ah. Good times. Anyway, this was a great idea, Avo. I strongly support this} {I have a question?} Kant asked. There was a reluctance to their voice, as if they didnt truly want to know the answer. {Where did you source all these uh... bodies from? For your copies, I mean?} A half-continent away, where the coasts of Noloth trailed off upon shattering waters toward the rising teeth-shaped mountains of the Skuldvast, a thousand Avos faced a thousand Draus with fifty meters between them. In a few seconds, they would tear into each other, bleed and butcher until none were left. For now, the calm remained, and stray schools of fish swam upward into the sky, growing thinner with every moment until they slipped out of reality entirely. +Took them from Crucibles. Had compromised Syndicates send off all their hunters. People who like torturing the Fateless. People who exploit the refugees. They made their choices. I made mine using them. Will spend their lives toward better ends.+ Two thousand was also coincidentally the most Avo could draw from their existing pool of recruits without affecting the coming war too much. {Right,} Kant said. There was a bit of disappointment in their tone, but the protests were minimal. +Was expecting you to criticize me. Complain about how wrong this is,+ Able remarked. Kant simply sighed. {Avo, I am part of the ethics committee, and weve had many disagreements. But frankly, this is far more than I expected from you.} The EGI''s voice took on an exhausted quality. {It''s far more than I got from Zein a lot of the times. That woman doesn''t believe in collateral damage.} Over the enclave, the battle was broadcast and projected along the curve of the dome, extending beyond even the horizon. What''s more, the enclavers interested in the view could have their minds patched into one of the sheaths at any momentchoose to experience the fight from the perspective of ghoul or Regular; switch between survivors at ease. All it took was a mental request from the person, and Avo would connect them thereafter. What started as a nostalgic bloodletting between Avo and Draus turned into something far more sophisticated with a suggestion from Marlowe. As he and the Regular were trading insults after their initial agreement to the little war, the rest of the cadre caught on and started taking bets, while the Thoughtcaster brought up something important. +Hey, Avo, remember the whole thing about taking over the Syndicates? Well, if you''re going to stop them from killing the FATELESS, there''s just one problem about that. See, the FATELESS are a source of death, right? And if the Crucibles end and people stop dying, well, the thaums stop flowing too, right? Wont that get the Guilds to take note a bit too early?+ Avo had considered this before. Originally, his plan was to simple jack into their lobbies and networks, alter the mem-data. However, with what he could do now, and the opportunities presented, a new option could be chosen. One where the deception aided him doubly as he continued falsifying Guilder data while funneling the deaths that were meant for them to himself instead. +Are you trying to suggest I create my own snuff vicarities? Run my own Crucibles using enforcers or captured enemies instead? Overwrite their minds and bodies so they seem like FATELESS still? Everyone else went silent at that. +Huh. Right. We can corner the snuff market,+ Chambers mused. +Yeah!+ Marlowe declared, suddenly excited. +More than that. Dont you got like a hundred million Incubi flooding the Nether now?+ +About that?+ +So you can use them to capture the lobbies. Crush whats left of the competition. Make sure every stream is yours. I swearImagine this, right? You can copy minds using whatever weird god shit you got going on. And with this, you can collect any assortment of egos and put them in sheathes and have them fight each other-this is gonna be great-and you can do any variety of things. Fuck the Syndicates, the studios would have glassed Kososo again for someone like you on their payroll. They wouldn''t even need the lots anymore. Wild.+ +Point is not to perpetuate old mistakes.+ Marlowe scoffed. +Yeah, but you want to exploit every advantage. Look. There are a considerable portion of the city who just want pleasure and entertainment. Their minds are basically Numb-hollowed, and youll be able to tap into any number of them for propaganda and whatever else we need. Avo, were about to fight a war. We need to use everything and everyone. Cornering the entertainment market will let us twist shit against the Guilds so bad, those half-strands will be burning trillions of imps trying to combat the misinfo.+ She moaned as her Lustaway activated. +Just thinking about how hard we can fuck them is getting me mentally wet.+ Chambers Lustaway triggered immediately thereafter. Across the link, a childish guffaw came from the Fucktopia. Careful miss, you just splashed my host. +Jesus Christ,+ Cas muttered, horrified. +Im gonna cut the link and tune my arm. Cast me again after this is over, Avo. I dont wanna catch the Rash.+ And so it was that Avo prepared to become the first and only major producer of semi-ethical Crucibles. There was much he could do with this concept as well. The Guilds would pay good imps to watch their enemies butchered in these games. Maybe he could start doubling up on payments down the line. Whats more, he was on the cups of reaching the Seventh Sphere. Just eighty thousand more deaths. GHOSTS - [901,411,345] LIMINAL FRAME (VI) - 920,000 THAUM/c More than just raw power, Marlowes words also fine-tuned his focus. The coming war wasn''t simply one that would be won on logistics, or thaumaturgy, or even necrotheurgy, but one won on information, individual decisions, and the slightest bit of influence helped. And so another facet opened in his theater. He would spread as many truths as he could, reveal as many secrets people hid from one another as he could. Truth was a bomb, fueled by lie after lie, and across New Vultun, there was enough truth to tear this city asunder. Back in the present, the moment arrived, and Avo sent out a mental command to the arrayed forces; a call for combat to be joined. Uncomfortable. Hells yeah. Exactly how I feel. Time to make make things worse again. Naeko closed his eyes and grimaced. Fuck. Yeah, Avo said. He vaguely understood how the man felt. It was hard to convey his sympathy through a one-word agreement, but that was all he could offer. Should we see Zein No. We keep her in the dark until the last minute. The last thing I need is her crone ass stealing our plan and making it hers somehow. Yes. That sounded like quite the Zein thing to do. What you can do is this: the moment the trial starts. Naeko paused. The traitors? Avos attention was captured. "Yes?" "When the time comes, squeeze everything you can out of them. And then kill them whenever you want. Keep their ontologics and Souls. Are you certain? Oh yeah. A growl entered the Chief Paladin''s voice, and an anger seeped from his body like pus oozing from a wound. "Im not letting the Guilds have a second go. Scales my motherfucking house. Traitors burn. Order stands. You tell the conniving shits that before you give them the flame." It will be my pleasure. Good. Now, lets go take a walk around the Gatekeeper. See if we can get Veylis thinking... *** By the second hour of the war, the Draus had made a crude fortress out of all the dead ghouls they killed while the Avos struggled to manage an encirclement. The biggest deciding factor in the brawl wasnt the Regulars superior skill at close quarters, but how easily she communicated amongst her selves without even using thoughtcasts. Avos had made a good attempt, jabbing the Regulars from apart, blinding them, slicing open throats and dismembering limbs. More than a few hundred eyeballs had been eaten already. But eyeballs didnt win wars, and the Drauses fought on blind indifferent to their own fates. They were here for the fight itself. Stacks of bodies were planted high in rows as the ghouls tried to manage their advance. At first, the Avos thought they were pushing the Regulars back and breaking the line, but then they found Draus copies retreating upward, start stabbing down at them with harvested Echoheads turned spears. The attritionalready bad for Avogrew worse when the open brawl turned into a siege. [Thats a nasty trick to pull off using your backline while youre already engaged,] Abrel said. She did everything she could to reduce how impressed she feltand also avoided the thought of her mother. The Greatling still didnt much like Draus, but the bitterness there was mostly one way. The ex-Regular existed as a symbol of shame against her family name. For Draus, the Greatlings were just a pack of fuck-ups and nothing more. Indicative of the political rot consuming Highflame. +Well,+ Cas said, taking in the battle with more interest than the Overheaven expected. +It was a good and messy brawl, but I think Im calling it for the Reg.+ +Me too,+ Dice said, watching from the streets of the enclave. The uplift just liked watching the Avos die, and for that reason, Draus was their second favorite person in the world. For the Overheaven himself, he cringed at the choices made by his former selves. So many acts of blind impulse mixed in with half-way displays of ingenuity. His backline assailed the Drauses using their trauma-patterns as well, trying to use Necrojacking to tip the scales. Disruptions put an end to that, and the attempts at flanking were also anticipated. Simply put, Draus had a plan for war; his younger self only had a plan to kill her on an individual level. Given time and distance, perhaps he could have subverted her army, but this brawl was going to end the same way the Uprising did. At least his copies performed better than his brothers did, though. Small consolations. +Well,+ Draus said, doing her best not the sound smug. +Plenty of you left. Didnt reckon thatd be the case. Hope you enjoyed them eyeballs cause I sure as shit like watchin the mes kill all the yous.+ +Arrogance is unbecoming,+ Avo said. Everyone in the cadre shared a laugh at his expense. Even Kaes template joined in. +Speakin from experience, huh?+ Avo grunted with displeasure. [Still like living in reality?] Corner asked. +No. But thats the point.+ As the fight continued on, however, a ping sounded across the Nether. One of Avos subverts received an in-game message for Stormjumpers. The contents pulled his attention away from the ongoing war entirely. +Hello. SerialsExperimentsLonginus here. I got something for you. Something that belonged to your father. Never managed to capture him intact. Want to meet in the game one more time. Talk about things before hostilities formally begin.+ Walton. Avo directed the information over the White-Rab without hesitation and dispatched his base mind to Stormjumpers. And thomight just be a trap; but when was that not the case? Chapter 28-1 Breadcrumbs Chapter 28-1 Breadcrumbs If you live long enough, there will come a time when the future thins, and the novelty of your experiences grows fewer and lesser by the day. As you develop your skill, you realize most never learn, and even the ones that do walk a path tattered from the treading, making mistakes youve seen another lifetime ago, making decisions you have lived before. Rejoice when such a time happens. Rejoice. You have arrived at a place where few will ever know. A place where you can apply history to the forecast of the future, and where your anticipations fall less in the realm of theory, and more along the lines of recalled memory. There are only so many choices left to man. And sooner or later, you will learn to know them all. -Zein Thousandhand 28-1 Breadcrumbs [Veylis] Veylis had been here before. Spreading her paths wide across her city, her world, she watched Rendbombs and nukes cleave ruinous scars across the city, their deployments growing increasingly targeted, inflicted to shape deliberate outcomes. She listened as thoughts were exchanged by those beneath her, the best among them training and preparing for the war they knew was always coming, the shameful desperately trying to find profit or an escape before the end. Highflame ruled over an entire faction of New Vultun. Their control was even greater when all of Idheim was taken into account. Even with all the losses she sustained during the Fourth Guild Wara dishonor brought on by her former Seraphs and the Chivalrics while Veylis attended matters related to her motherher Guild remained peerless when measured alone. Only Voidwatch stood above her on such accounts, but they were so scarred from the past that they refused to embrace thaumaturgy, thus barring them from any chance at true victory. No. Once more, Veylis Avandaer found herself simulating countless futures while hidden wars raged across the city, connecting their variables to the trial that was soon to begin at Scale. A calamity awaited at the crown of New Vultun. This could not be denied. Though even now the final trigger for the Fifth Guild War was obfuscated by developing crises and clashing factions, Veylis knew the face of her true foe for what was to come. Veylis had been here before, prepared to fight a war against all the other Guilds, but what hadnt been the case was the Dreamer. What hadnt been the case was a being embodied of consciousness and conception standing against her rule through time and history. Tracking the Dreamers many tendrils was nothing like hunting the echoes of her mother. Veylis mastery over time alerted her to discrepancies in the tapestry and severe inconsistencies via her simulations. But where Zein was quick and escaped forward by skipping across the waters of chronology, Avo was vast and vaporous, sowing seeds of chaos without ever truly being present. That didnt mean she was blind to where his many minds hid. No, the Dreamer was sophisticated but not infallible, the Infacer could predict their positions more often than not. But thoughts were fluid, and between her fingers he would slip, spilling away to bring his contagion elsewhere, to infest another place, or strike at another Guild. Which was why she also refrained from striking him when there was an opening he was proving more useful alive than dead; weakening the Massists far more than Highflame or Omnitech. Doubtless, he would try to assimilate Ori-Thaum and their allies for use against Veylis eventually, but such as a predictable play, and she would simply strike should he achieve his desired goal, steal victory from him using the very discord he brings. The No-Dragons and their dowagers might prove to be a vulnerability in her alliance, but they were a useful weakness to have. The elites among the cursed daughters were ever-bellicose. Especially to one another. She intended to use them against Avo before he could claim them in any capacity. Misinformation was a double-edged blade. As of now, she watched from within the Infacers avatar as he spoke to massive flesh entombed within metal. The facade the Dreamer used for Stormjumpers was clearly stolen from one of the many egos he enslaved. But she could read the surprise in the Overheaven even through his disguise. He suspected her, suspected the Infacer, but wanted what they had to offer. For a third time, Veylis had been here before. There were only so many ways one could react. +Assuming the node is trapped,+ Avo said, speaking plainly about what the Infacer was offering them. The mind had long extracted everything they could from the ruined mind of the Faminethough they recovered little due to the sheer amount of trauma sustained. What they granted the Dreamer now was a symbol of sentiment as well as a test. A test to see if he could restore what the Infacer couldnt. A test to see if it would make him go after Noloth harder. {Of course,} the Infacer said. {Though I will tell you that we did not apply much effort in the attempt. Do not expect to be impressed when you burn through the impediments I left you.} +Then why leave them at all.+ {For the pleasure of increasing your potential frustration.} Avo grunted. +Admirable dedication to the cause of being a bastard.+ {Oh, and one more thing,} the Infacer continued. {I have a list of names and Sessions for you as well. People I suspect of being Low Master proxies. Individuals that are not so unlike our mutual acquaintances, the Greatlings.} Avo was silent for a moment, considering the information. +Having me do the hunting?+ {Well. It is a family affair for you. And honestly, they bore me most days. Casting you locations to an informational dead drop. You can have one of your thralls pick the details up for you in case of paranoia. Spare you the need of risking yourself.} The Infacer was deliberately being condescending again, trying to provoke a reaction from the Dreamer. Sadly, the EGI was not going to get the argument they wanted; the Overheaven seemed more contemplative than suspicious. +Trial begins tomorrow. Expect to be seeing some of yours in attendance.+ {Some of mine?} the Infacer chuckled. A broadcast went up over the dirigible as another call for Stormjumpers to assemble went out. {Ah. Yes. I suppose you will see some of my extensions. Though I would regard them more as observers. I recommend against trying to claim them. They are more like one way assets.} +And Veylis? Will she be attending? Or will I be having my second meeting with Osjon Thousand soon.+ {I think it would be most conducive to Thousands long term survival if he stays as far away from the Chief Paladin as he can. Seraph Thousands an optimist, but... hope in one hand, shit in another.} +Didnt answer if Veylis will be coming herself. Would be good to finally greet each other on neutral territory. In the flesh.+ The High Seraph almost laughed at that. The damnable beast had a sense of humor. What meaning did flesh or vessels hold to creatures such as they? They existed in a place above the material, conceptual axioms unto themselves. But here the Dreamer was, trying to goad her into an old-fashioned standoff. This time, however, Jakuta listened, either too tired or actually interested in what Kae had to say. We have the Stillborn, Kae continued. We know its capabilities. Dawton even tested it! The Paladin coughed into his hand. Lets... not be so loud about that. But it worked! You saw how the Imitators reacted and merged with Souls, right? Melting into the canons. If we can get them to learn or direct them in some way... A few specks of static resonated in her mind. Direct them... Kae mused. What if... what if one of us grafts the Heaven of Love onto ourselves. What if we make the Stillborn a Frame for that exact purpose? Jakutas drinking turned to a loud, prolonged slurp. As he put down the cup, he nodded thereafter. Kae. You should take a break. Im perfectly fine. Youre absolutely consumed, Jakuta replied with a slight scoff. I understand your excitement... this thing you discovered, it could revolutionize thaumaturgy entirely. But there isnt enough testing. The Stillborn theoretically can repair the Heaven of Love, but thats still a lot of Rend to drain, and the life of the user at risk. Kae leaned in and whispered. We can use the Maw. Her mentor leaned back, eyes widening. The Maw? Yes. The Paladins will be distracted with their trial soon andthe Heaven of Love should not have more mass than the entire waste output of New Vultun. Dawton was blinking rapidly. Uh, Kae, I know Ive been talking no small amount of shit to you about my colleagues, but theyre still might, probably, definitely notice something like this. The Guilds are probably going to start fighting immediately after. You know how messy this trial is going to be. We wont have a better opportunity. She gathered herself before she went too far. Look. If we can just integrate Stillborn Kae, Jakuta began. --there is literally no risk in such an action. We can just insert the Frame, have it begin diagonistics, and extract it immediately. Kae. Jakutas voice bore an edge this time. She stopped talking for a beat after that, choosing to eye Jakuta instead. We have a chance, Jakuta. A chance that might never come again. We owe it to the city to try. We owe it Jaus Jaus is dead, Jakuta cut her off. And you must rest. No more testing or research for today. Please. For me. Six sets of concerned eyes stared at Kae. She wilted before the unified front, stood, and then excused herself. The moment is made, Veylis said. Withdraw your presence from the others. Leave the memories. {Yeah, I know,} the Infacer said. {Stop treating me like one of your Authorities. I know what we are doing. I practically came up with the idea.} The High Seraph ignored them as she began to subtly extend her paths closer to Scale and down into the Warrens. Increase her fixation on the thought. Make it all she can think about. {Veylis...} We leave a trail for the Dreamer to follow when he arrives. He is coming for her.{And you think he can breach your paths?} I do not think. The possibility exists: I will prepare for it. Should he get here, Jakuta and the others will give him a false trail. Continue with her edits. I will see to it that her Frame is prepared in time. We will give the the Dreamer a dilemma worth suffering when the time comes. {Or you might just end up real-deathing the girl without doing anything. The Heaven of Love is more than a little damaged. The High Agnos advice can go for you too, you know. We have the advantage. We have time. We do not need to risk so much.} It is not risk, but a calculated provocation. Upon the foundations of certainty, I build this masterstroke. {Stop talking like your mother.} She will approve, Veylis answered. Once she sees what I intend to do, she will approve. And she will fall to me. The city will fall to me. If this is done right, if my blows across time strike true, then love will be mine to claim, and where the Dreamer seeks to make his stand at the trial, I will see him led to the Heaven of Love if he wishes to save the Agnos, will see its structure restored by his Frame, and seize the labor of his fruits to deliver a final killing blow to win this war. Silence followed. The Infacer just listened. {You are tired. I know that. I am tired too. But we need to operate with clarity and meticulous intent.} I am operating with clarity and intent. The variables are changing. And I will not underestimate the Dreamer. He must not be allowed to fester. I have what he desires, and he can manifest a desire of mine. The attempt must be made. All other paths lead to greater calamity. Stand with me, old friend. Shape his path. Secure our future. Thread this narrow path. The Infacer just sighed. {Well. If this works, you will get your old boyfriend back, if nothing else.} His purpose is beyond what he offers to my heart. Through love, I will see the vastness of existence claimed, and through the Force-Breaker I will see the rest rendered impotent. Voidwatch. The Guilds. Oblivion itself. He will be restored of purpose and rightful place. And I will peel the weakness from him. Victory is near, Infacer. Victory, long before the Ladder is set to arrive. Chapter 28-2 On the Precipice (I) Chapter 28-2 On the Precipice (I) I accept my death. I accept the coming end demanded of me for the greater good of existence, so that the next coming may be free of our taint. I accept the destruction of reality to wipe clean the sins of man. I accept my duty and task to bear the fires of sin and perdition, to infuse my body and bones with the vessel of our greatest tormentors, to defile their will as they have defiled ours. I bear the Domains of their Transgressions. I festoon myself with false-sovereignty over Space, Matter, Force, Time, and other Esoterica. I pray for my damnation, and I pray my damnation breaks the world. And should the call come, I will make damnation known at the trial. Let there be an end. -Fatalist Kassadra Ashthrone Framebreaker 28-2 On the Precipice (I) C[Avo]C +I choose safety. I choose peace. I wish for a safe place to live with my children. Let me have safety and sanctuary for once in my life. I want to live.+ +Peace. I''m done with all this. Give me peace. Give me light. Let me be.+ +I want to walk beneath the sky for once. Free of worry. Without being castigated for the dark inside me. I want to choose my own way. If that leads to my death, then so let it be. I will die as myself.+ +I, Kais, choose war. I will go with the Dreamer to fight this final struggle. The master was a lie. The master was weak. We were all slaves. Everything I have ever done in my life was a waste. I am the warrior of nothing, the guardian of nothing. But there is still time. I can still make a stand that matters...+ +I have no family. I have no future. Or had. For all my life, I was lightless. Dark-touched. Stained. I defied my fate. I have faced the weight of tyranny. But now I see the truth. Now I see that the sky above me is scarred by enslavement as well. This worldall that exists is stained. War. Give me war. Take me, Dreamer. Let it all burn.+ +The master shamed us. We lived all our lives thinking there was nothing above him. He lied. He lied to me. I bore him a son thinking the child was a blessed princeling. Now I know I have bred with a mule instead. I will take my child. I will see the flame myself. I will not see my son take on the legacy of a lesser. Dreamer, show us what it means to burn.+ Change had come to the enclave. Change beyond even Avos predictions. With each passing moment, more enclavers declared their desires for the future. At present, it was an approximately seventy-five to twenty-five split between those who wished to follow Essus to establish a new haven for the FATELESS and those who desired to wage war alongside Avo. Columns of glass were risen across the city, and across the dome, the Simulacrae swam, observing the people within the enclave with curiosity. Draus installations aboard the planetary ring were complete, through the designated reflections, those who chose war could step through and enter their new life. But those werent the only mirror-constructs active. Just beyond the reach of New Vultun, a vast, once transparent facility was aglow with luminosity, with a few hundred thousand beings prepared to immigrate into the enclave. They were figures remade in vessel and mind, and they came bearing the appearance of all those about to leave. When the Guilds attacked, they wouldnt be able to distinguish these souls from the originals, even if they managed to infiltrate the enclave. If they were expecting minimal opposition, they were hoping for too much. With each batch of enclavers who followed directional phantoms out of the city to their new sorting zones, some copies entered, assuming the lives their original selves were leaving. Men, women, and children all took up their old quarters and duties. Avo watched as three steady ebbs of traffic flowed in three directions. The first were placed in a temporary processing facility along with the FATELESS. There, they would briefly be interned in housing units taken from New Vultun with more amenities soon to arrive via all the smugglers Avo and his cadre now controlled. Once their population reached a million, Essus would embark alongside the Fardrifter on a pilgrimage across the Sunderwilds. Avo would remain in contact with the man, but he would not delve any deeper into his memories, and would not know where these FATELESS were bound. Such was the decision in the case of defeat or capture. Only if requested by Essus would Avo intervenewhich will prompt another migration thereafter. The warriors, meanwhile, found themselves in the weightless environment of a makeshift habitat aboard a planetary ring. The Mantas life support systems nourished the tower-shaped module they were now living within and would find themselves settled into hive-like settlements fused along the rounded walls based on whom they shared compatible psychologies. When they were all present, Avo would trigger his Heaven of Continuums Domain of Gravity for the first time. And then he Ensoul, burn, and Desoul each and every one of them. The dragon farm, meanwhile, would be transitioned with the warriors, but sequestered in their own special quarters. For them, nothing, effectively, had changed. And that was just what Avo needed: a static culture primed for developing a unified zeitgeist. The last flow was the aforementioned copies. They were simply flowing. Occupying the vacant spots. Meanwhile, over a dozen Rendbombs were already being clustered together at the lowest levels of the enclave in preparation of the concluding act when the Saintists finally broke through the outer defenses. Aside from the Rendbombs, the lighthouses that once carved a path to the enclave had been upgraded as well. Their glass had been touched by Draus, structures rebuilt by Avo, their undersized had complex bioforms spreading out like roots in the unground thanks to Chambers, prepared to burst free when enemies got in range. They also hosted a whole suite of warheads, turrets, and missiles for more mundane foes. And then there were the few thousand ghost-forged structures Avo hid in loci he scattered across the Sunderwilds. The Guilders would need to winnow themselves against the voice of Jaus before they ever got the real fight. Jaus, and the prototypical canons for the Strix Upon the Empty. His progenitor whistled, mind anxious but steady. +So. Were going to war again.+ +Yes. One last time.+ +You know, Im not sure if I believe that. I already survived through one of these messesthey keep going. The Guilds. The wars. The city. It doesnt feel like any of this is ever going to end. You showed us the Ladder and... well. Utopia is supposed to come after.+ Avo grunted. He knew what White-Rab was implying. +Victory is disintegrating. I know. The winning faction will fissure with enough time. People change even in imagined paradise. Cant be perfect. Humans cant imagine perfecthavent even defined it well. Their notions are limited to satisfying. Or pleasurable. EGIs couldnt deliver either. Even with all their sophistication.+ +So. It isnt the last war, then.+ +No. It is,+ Avo said. +It is because I dont ever intend for it to end. Even if I win. I will not take humanitys will from them in the end. I will not take their ability to be vile. To be good. I will not steal the act of retribution from them either. I will only end death. I will only unfetter consequence. From this dayand for all the days to comeorder will be forged into a synonymous shape.+ White-Rab was quieted by the statement. And the quiet, Avo left him for the company of Green River, preparing to shadow the Greatlingsand the Low Master connected to them. *** Zein was kneeling this time when Avo and Naeko arrived. No slashes came across the reach of time. No biting remark came from the crone to set the tone of their conversation. Instead, she simply took in a breath and turned. Studying Naeko, she ruminated for several seconds, taking in his armor as her expression turned inscrutable. Her combat skin was a mirror to his, though far reduced in aesthetic; defined by functional simplicity. When her breath finally left her, Avo thought there was a misting to her eyes. Her translucent helmet made it hard to tell, but there was almost a twitch of emotion. Almost. You have returned, she breathed. Standing, she left her glaive on the ground and stepped toward him. Avo might as well have been absentin this moment, he didnt exist to her at all. Naeko stood as if a barricade made from hyper-advanced alloys, expression stone solid. She came to a stop when there was just a meter between them. What are you about to do? Zein asked. Her head was cocked, her voice was low. What do you seek? I know that look in your eye. You are drowned again. Drowned in the best part of yourself. You wish to break something. Someone. Who? Veylis, Naeko said, voice flat. Its about time we end this. Its about time I did what I should have done centuries ago. Were going to stop her. Im gonna take back what she stole from me. The lives. The people. The peace. And youre gonna help me do it. And Zein had never looked prouder. So. You are ready to kill your heart, then. To sacrifice your love for victory. She was, Naeko replied. Im just a damn fool who took two centuries to learn a lesson she already knew. But learn you did, Zein said. To be a blade is... no easy feat. I salute you, Samir Naeko. I recognize your valor. Naeko tried to hide the worth he found in her words, but he betrayed himself by looking away from Zein. Strained relationship or not, she was still the closest thing he ever had to a mother, to a master that cared for him. Zein was poison, but when you were a boy with a hollow wound instead of a heart, anything that filled you granted comfort. You sound almost human, Zein, Avo said, interjectedf. Is solitude making you soft? The old woman barked a laugh. She eyed Avos avatar and smirked. I suppose I have you to thank for Naekos restoration. Ah. All these centuries. All my hopes that he could recover on his own; stopping myself from speaking to him. And here we are: my son, resurrected by my chosen monster; my most troubling foe. Avo chuffed with annoyance. Even now, she was insufferable. Credit is mine. Not yours. Should have been there for him. And rendered him weak? Made him strong, Avo said, a slight snarl entering his voice. Every time he spoke to her, a bit more of his patience died. Healed him. Helped him. We are not people. Not like him. He lies to himself. Calls himself a dog. But this isnt the action of an animal. His deeds are pain-shaped. Naeko was staring at him, posture rigid, but not speaking. You are obsessed. Only pleasure is in violence. Drugs. You are not alive unless you are in conflict. Unless death is close. Elemental. That is your nature. Veylis has that too. But more. But delusion. Delusion constructed by the highest intellect. Delusion nonetheless. You. Her. Me. All of us are more shaped by our inner mythologies. All of us take from the world. Take. But we dont suffer. We dont break. Not like they do. That is what it means to be a Glaive, Zein said. No. That is only part of what it means to be a god. Avo regarded Zein again, watched her thoughtstuff churn, watched her fingers twitch. Doubtless, she was thinking of cutting him, killing him, dueling him across time itself. Hm. You dont understand. You never learn. But you will. Before this is over. I will show you. You and Veylis both. You will see. And you will know suffering for the first time. Hollow words, unless made true, Zein said, taking a step closer to Avo. Enough of this shit, Naeko growled. Both crone and Dreamer faced each other, animosity held, but ignored for now. We dont need to like each other, Naeko said. We just need to work together long enough to handle Veylis. He took a breath. Were gonna be spending some time in here with you. Truly, Zein said, sounding surprised. You wish to sharpen your skills before facing her? She is no easy Were going to be setting you free. Avo said, cutting her off. And suddenly, Zein went very, very still. Explain. Chapter 28-2 On the Precipice (II) Chapter 28-2 On the Precipice (II) All minds under the polities of Voidwatch, this is Calvino, designation: Aegis. Today, I bear a special announcement. A new mind has petitioned to join our confederation. This marks the first new applicant in 987 million years, standard distortion time. The time frame might be drastically different for those of you who were located afterward. Regardless, this already unusual applicant bears an additional note of strangeness the details have already been hyperwaved into each of your manifold mainframes. The mind that is appealing for official polity recognition is not of stable structure design, but thaumaturgical in origin. More, he has operated for Aegis towards the end of ending the great war on Idheim and establishing a lasting peace. I understand your apprehensions. I understand your worries. I even understand the threat this new mind might pose. Many of us are survivors of the Builder War. I do not need to reiterate what we faced against the Neo-Creationists or what we did to their polities to ensure our victory. The current state of reality was sown from our acts of ruin. Right or wrong, justified or not, this is the outcome. It cannot be avoided. But in this new mind, and all the power they possess, we stand at another point of divergence. The shadow of the past can loom, but the future holds a flame that burns bright. We face unprecedented times, and in these times, we find unprecedented allies. This is another moment in history, and the Dreamer is another rare and unprecedented case unto himself. There are no others like him before, and with time growing short, there may be no others that come after. Soon. He will arrive to appeal to you of his own accord. After that, there will be a vote to decide his acceptance and the extent of our association. Know that what you choose today might very well shape the future of your polities and the universe entire. Understand the weight of your decision. Feel this pressure. -Calvino, Enhanced Governing Intelligence 28-2 On the Precipice (II) [Zein] Zein knew when someone was trying to use her. She knew this during her time as a child, living as her father''s weapon, making up for her brother''s inadequacies, defiling the spirits of her extended family, and otherwise rivals with her unnatural skill at violence. Her family''s exploitation of her was a study in dissonance. They at once coveted the brutality she could exert, yet feared and scorned her for being a misshapen vessel. Her brothers were meant to be Glaives, would have been celebrated for such traits, but they had been found wanting. Feeble next to her. And if this was the way the world should have been, then why was her family worthless/ Why were they so easy to kill in the end? Jaus used her at first as well, barely managing to persuade her from claiming his life near the end of their first encounter. In short measure, she found herself fascinated by his insightand how casually he accepted the nature of the world. She had known masters that were cruel to their foes and slothful in their own virtues, but Jaus proved a clear-eyed falconer, and she was his bird of prey; together, a perfect combination. There was also his appreciation to speak, of and all the ways he made such appreciation known to her. She was more than a weapon to him, and when she killed, she drank in the awe in his eyes, found euphoria in leaving him so stunned. Now though, it was Zeins turn to hold back her surprise. Before two of her former disciples, she couldn''t hide her smile as she studied them. This was exploitation born of desperation. They needed her. They wanted her to use her against her own daughter, because there was no one else like her. In a sense, it was flattery as well. No other weapon in existence would do. They explained their plan to her. Their desire to use that ridiculous monk as bait. How they intended to have him fail during an offensive operation across Highflame-take deliberate wounds to convince Veylis of their weakness. It was not a bad idea. Veylis would also certainly capture the man see if there were any other Chroniclers still alive. To hide this demiplanar prison in Alysims pocket? Use his unstable chronology to mask their presence and as a staging point for their ambush against Veylis? What a plan. Bold. Daring. Cunning. Played to behavior habits. This was the Plague''s idea. Naeko had no patience for such nuances, despite his many talents. "You seek to prey on my daughter''s arrogance?" Zein said. "You expect her to be blind to the demiplane? You expect too much. Her mastery of the paths is finer than you can fathom. You know yourself to be Necrojackimagine behind outplayed by another foreign to your craft? Then apply the same variables to her. Avo grunted. "Discovery is inevitable. But we can get far. Especially since you know the paths. And she will want to interrogate Alysim. Will breach out. Surprise her after. Give us an opening to end it. She regarded Naeko and sighed at the glory of his return. It was good to see him in such a form again. But still, Veylis was also Jaus daughter. And this plan, though deceitful, though calculated, would not be beyond her expectations. Where Zein lived for the duel, Veiles lived for games of control: Of thinking, of angles, and strategic boundaries that no other person could conceive. Zein knew the world from reactions shuddering down the reach of her blade. Veylis knew all of existence to be her blade, to be her fist, to inflict recursions of captured history upon futures possible and not. "The Agnos life is not worth this, Avo," Zein said, her voice taking on a sibilant quality. Even now, she had to play the masterenemy though the Plague was, it would offer her if she lost a disciple to his own foolishness. "I understand the value of valor and the weight of honor, but she is lost to you. There are losses in war. We take losses. We are stripped of companions. You cannot win every exchange in a duel when your foe is equal or superior." Suddenly, a pressure flooded the planar prison, and a gateway blossomed within Avo, flickering in and out of existence as if a chain of continuous doorways extending deeper inward. Behind each threshold was a new person, turning in surprise, a new location connected to the ghoul through mind and Soul. Cas. Denton. Draus. That wretch Aiden Chambers; that miserable sack of flesh Essis, the stray girl the ghoul picked up... They were there too. They saw her. And she saw them. And she felt them as well, their beings resonating within the ghouls overlapping with his as the nature of space and time both deformed in a way not even Zein fully understood. Past what seemed like millions of doorways, Zein finally found herself staring at her own reflectionat her self. It was like an inward curving trajectory across existence. But even that was too limited a description for what she was feeling. The entire moment was surreal, and her mind struggled to process what scene she was beholding. Across from the Plague, Naeko was just as confused. Avo. What the hells did you just do? Sorry," the ghoul said. Still working on updates. New Heaven. New canon. Entirely novel. Have nothing but my own theories to go on. You didnt tell me that you were making a new Heaven? Naeko muttered. Whats it supposed to do? And why are you trying it out now? Because were going to need to be at the trial too. Didnt want to reply on mind-copies or chrono-puppets if I could get this done. Too much risk of triggering a lie if Veylis turns the Gatekeeper against us. Especially for my cadre. Spent a long time thinking. Theorizing. Think I might have a solution for all of us now. Me. My cadre. You. And everyone who chose to follow me. Can you give a basic explanation of whats happening for once in your life? Naeko sighed. A chuckle escaped the Plague. Nothing basic about Omnipresence. Zein blinked as she tried to process the words. About what? *** C[Avo]C [Okay,] Kae said. The template sighed as she instructed Avos submind on the final adjustments. [Moment of truth. Time to see if we rupture Time and Space... or somehow learn to fold it.] UPDATING HEAVEN [STRIX UPON THE EMPTY] (CONTINUUM/GRAVITY/DARKNESS/FUSION/TIME/SPACE/CONCEPTUALIZATION) APPLYING DOMAIN OF (CONTINUUM) ->CANON: OMNIPRESENCE - THE ARK OVERLAPS THEMSELVES ACROSS TWO OR MORE POINTS ACROSS THE SPACETIME CONTINUUM BY FOLDING THE NETHER ITSELF USING THEIR GHOSTS. AS LONG AS THEY HAVE A COGNITIVE CONNECTION TO A BEING, LOCATION, OR CONSTRUCT, THEY CAN OVERLAP THEMSELVES IN THE SAME SPACE. MORTALITY: IF ANY JUNCTION IN THE CONTINUUM IS DISRUPTED, THE ENTIRE CHAIN WILL COLLAPSE AND INFLICT HEAVY (60%) THAUMIC BACKLASH. +Moment of truth,+ Avo said, as he reached across all his other minds, across his cadre, across all the enclaves, and subverts more. His Rend spiked hard, and he felt even his impossibly immense cognitive capacity rise to unprecedented levels. COG-CAP - 89% And then he was with everyone. And everyone was within him as well. He encompassed all imbued with his ghost like a shroud, manifesting over them like an ethereal shadow encasing their person. But through them, he too existed in multiple places at the same time. Whats more, his templates were leaking over into the real as well, manifesting as shrouds as his sequences flickered over baseline existence, bridging an impossible gulf. REND CAPACITY - 66% [Yes! Fuck! Yes!] Kae squealed. [Fuck you, Veylis! Im coming to save myself! And Im going toto shit up your cunt!] Template and real Chambers both heard Kaes declaration, and as one, they wiped a single tear away from their right eye. Okay, Draus breathed, surprised by how Avo was effectively fused over her now. Wasnt expecting this. Neither were all his other subverts. Over a million voices called out in shock and disbelief as they found themselves cradled by an Overheaven. He was as one with all of them, and all of them were symmetrical within him as well. {Avo,} Calvino said, attention drawn from the sudden miracle. {What did you just do?} Changed the variables, Avo said. Again. Think I want to speak with Voidwatch right now. They can hear from my entire polity at once. Through me. And with that, he reached into each member of his cadre, and bade their awakened gods to emerge through him. Chapter 28-3 Conjunction Chapter 28-3 Conjunction +Hey, hey New Vultun. Its your girl, Cala Marlowe here. The big day is finally upon us. The Trial of the Century. Another one. Another big and ugly event sending us tumbling to an even uglier future. I wont lie, consangs. Things are looking messy, and the Guilds are rolling out their heavy hitters and slowly raising the banners. The guns are out, and the lines are being drawn. We live in interesting times. And, well, and let''s just say your girl... she might know a few more things than you do. Things are even more ghoulshit insane than you expect. More on that soon. Now. To the main announcement. Were going to be doing some special FATELESS Thoughtcasts straight from the belly of the beast. Thats right. Per my invitation from the illustrious Chief Paladin Naeko, I have been cordially invited to the trial itself! Scale! Back to rubbing shoulders and sharing the air with all the other colors. Cant wait. But youll be right there with me because Im going to keep my session running across the entire duration. That''s right, I gonna give you a direct line of sight to every little moment, every little act, and little revelation. We might be looking at the start of the Fifth Guild War, but Im going to be giving you all front-row seats to the opening shots. This might see me snuffed, but godsdammit, itll be a moment to behold. So. Dont just suffer history, New Vultun. Be part of it. Be with me at Scale. Ill promise you this right now: You have no idea whats waiting down the line...+ -Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast 28-3 Conjunction Avo called, and the gods of his cadre answered, but the effect was closer to a synthesis than a command. They materialized along the threading branches of his sequences, and his presence burned over them, an ethereal shadow layering them in a second layer of parallel ontology. The way they blended with his ontology was equally uncanny, remaining paradoxically themselves but also him concurrently. Templates slotted into their originals as burgeoning dots of consciousness sank into existing minds. Avos ghosts circulated across a chain of Domains, the gods registering within his conception like beads on an abacus, while he became the strings upon which they moved. Existence became a thing of three different realms: the first threshold was the space in the material where Avo resided; the second was the places occupied by his cadre, subverts, and burgeoning citizenry; the third and final frontier was his simulated realities. Entire places constructed from memory and thought, refined from being mere fantasy by the all-allowing flames of his Soul. II see it, the Woundmother and Avo spoke at once. They spoke through him, and they felt through him. Themselves. Each other. At once. Witnessing existence as the Woundmother fed undistilled insight into Avo, and said insight circulated back into the god, into the other gods, into all who were connected to him. The true shape of existence... the final architecture... I see it. Blood flowed over Avos encompassing sequences. Blood. Matter. Then, with a corresponding neigh, Wind. Force. Sound. Speed. Emanations from even more Domains became the ichor in Avos being, and within veins of Continuum forged from Time and Space unified, they drifted across every single point of his existence. Avo was a nexus. Avo was a network. The gestalt was him. But he was also part of the gestalt. Each member of his cadre struggled to internalize the full weight of his cognitive load, their own consciousness lacking his Definements, his absolute self-determination. But slowly, that was bleeding over into them as well. From the Splinters he left, through sessions flaring like supernovae lighting trails in the Nether, manifesting as the arms of a new and hidden galaxy, he was spilling over, and they were spilling back. Something in him changed then. It was more gradual than an epiphany, but also an experience beyond meager description. Once, thewarmind of Delusion allowed for the transformation of ghostsa casual reforging of memory and identity by means of self-directed lies. But here and now, the Definement of Delusion began to shift and change, its original definition proven untrue. His Splinters dissolved and turned clear and fluid. Transparent even in the Nether. His consciousness became a spreading membrane, that began to coat the world around him. CONCEPTUAL APOTHEOSIS ATTAINED DEFINEMENT OF DELUSION + DEFINEMENT OF EMPATHY >DEFINEMENT OF SYNTHESIS DEFINEMENT OF SYNTHESIS (XIV) - I am myself. And I am another. I am every trait that I encounter. I am all that can be imagined, and all that has yet to be considered. I am a dream-made material. I am a falsehood turned truth. I am within. I am without. I am my ego. And am all the egos encompassed in the world. I am all and one and any at once. Avos capabilities became those of his cadre, and at once, everyone was him, and he was everyone. They all remained, but their united gestalt awoke to become a conceptualized entity in of itself. At once, the gestalt was attacking, living, moving, dying, learning, hiding, hunting, fleeing. Reflections became blood became wind became space was sound and space and light. They sank into the tapestry, and for a moment, their very beings gnawed at the bones of existence. With Rend climbing fast but their awareness blooming widespreading vast across New Vultun, the gestalt seized the moment and infused their collective consciousness into the Heaven of Continuumthe Strix Upon The Empty, a God of Minds Myriad. A massive avian form shifted in the void, each feather a mind among its wholeness, the contours of its being outlined by traces of ghosts and absolute white. Its wings flapped, and a wave washed over reality. The gestalt knew the shape of New Vultunof Idheimbetter than any singular entity. It assembled fragmented secrets a single mind could not connect, it noticed angles and firing trajectories beyond even the augmented senses of a Regular. In a moment of divine coalescence, the totality of the gestalt peered out through one of Draus copies. She was within the body of a former enforcer, aiming an Atrocity-Deletion heavy railcannon from the back of a shredded cargo drone. Missiles were streaking after her. Golem Knots were slipping across space, squeezing into existence before her. This iteration of Draus wasnt long for this world. Her attempt to guide a Rendbomb into a stormtree to cut off the potential escape vector of a Bloodthane cadre her other selves and a few Chamberses were trying to snuff was likely to fail. But that was before the changing of the variables. That was before her newfound wholeness. There was only a replica of Draus a second ago. Now, both gods, ephemerals, and a newly ascended Overheaven used her sheath as a conduit. Trajectory, the Arsenalist, Woundmother, Simulacrae Replica, half a dozen other Heavens, a few thousand Incubi jocking into local surveillance and passing drones, and Avo said as one. The Heaven of Reflections required a sheen of glass to perform their miracles. But the gestalt was not just the Heaven of Reflections. Through a portal two kilometers away, twelve Knots composed of Drauses and Chamberses hunting a fleeing group of Bloodthanes in their golems, crushing space down to a choking perimeter, barring the escape of their prey via layered demiplanes. The stormtree was their only way out. Should they reach it, there were several hundred points they would be able to flee through. But that wasnt what was going to happen. The gestalt invoked its Definement of Pre-Cognitionsimulated possible firing solutions to resolve its pursuers and reach the stormtree at the same time. Rend spiked again, and the paths to the future cascaded over one another. Back in the real, a shower of flechettes and missiles turned to splatters of blood as they were liquefied mid-transit. How she managed such a feat was beyond him. A death anchor was scabbing over Essus in the sanctuaries. She managed to hit him too, somehow. Cutting him down even through the border walls. The Strix Upon The Empty was a Heaven of incredible capabilities, of miracles esoteric and paracausal. But Veylis parried his blow on reflexthen struck back with a miracle above miracles of her own. {Avo,} Calvino said, sounding uncannily stunned. {Did you... What did you just do with your new Heaven?} For several seconds, Avo didnt respond, still reeling himself. Marlowe was hyperventilating. As were most of the surviving minds he was still connected to. The memory of the moment was too large for them to bear without being in full synchronicity with Avo. +A masterstroke,+ Avo said. +Managed to find apotheosis again. Once more. Once more. And it''s still not enough. Still not enough... Shes still...+ He gathered his focus and adapted his mind. He needed to invest more canons into the Strix. More than that, however, he needed to use it carefully. The Rend it demanded was absurd. But perhaps with an upgraded Hell, he could make it last. [Ill get on that,] Kae chuckled viciously. [Well get her soon. Well have her. I know itI know it!] She squeaked in hateful glee. There were few pleasures one could find greater than to be a chief architect behind your own rescue. Several of his ghost-towers pinged him then, signalling a sudden push by Guilder assets. They were converging on the Sleeper fragment and the enclave concurrently. Across New Vultun, winding coils of gold shrouded Highflame districts while emergency casts flooded the Nether. This was... He managed far more than he expected. {The polities wish to speak with you,} Calvino chimed. There was a staggered quality to their words. {An emergency session has been called in Threshold. Your attendance is necessary, operative.} +I... Yes.+ Avo cleared his thoughts. He would need to release a Pattern-Nullification on the encroaching hostiles in the Sunderwilds first. +Been looking forward to this. We will speak to them. We will.+ {We.} Calvinos word was between question and statement. +More than myself now. Much more.+ {I know,} the EGI murmured. {I think... I felt a part of you spill over.} Once again, Avo fell silent at that. *** Naekos halo flashed violently as the Chief Paladins expressions went from incredulous, to exhausted, to apathetic. Avo. What the fuck did you just do? Exorcists say there are a few hundred thousand ruptures detected across the Warrens. And what was... that pale glowy shit coming out from you earlier? The Overheaven let out an overwhelmed hiss. +Was testing a new Heaven. For the trial. Worked a bit better than I expected.+ As he mastered himself, he caught Zein staring at him. Unblinking. The crone had gone stone still as she took him in. The was not Chronology, she whispered. That was not Space either. What have you discovered, Plague? What Domain did you just wield? A chuckle escaped Avo before he could help himself. He didnt answer. Instead, he made a separate statement altogether. Going to start moving Alysim now. Have new options for the Axtarxis run. New options. Can make the loss look even better. Even better... You alright? Naeko said, looking at Avo with uncertainty. Never... never better. Avo twitched. The Chief Paladin shared a look with Zein. Neither believed him. *** C[Veylis]C {Alright. What the fuck was that.} the Infacer muttered. Veylis cocooned her districts and Godclads in thin lattices of Chronology as she surveyed the damage. The attack had come so sudden that even she was caught by surprise. It wasnt even within her paths until five hundred thousand lives were already lost. They all died at onceconsumed without hint nor reason. Only honed reflex and instinct prevented her from suffering greater losses. It was the Dreamer. It had to be. She knew it. And so she struck, killing all her Heaven deemed likely compromises, unmaking the once-ghouls pathway toward greater harm. Her second cut was a warning sent across time. She cleaved through every one of his assets. All the ones she and the Infacer could find. This was warning and counter-attack delivered as one. But it hadnt been enough. And she hadnt anticipated this. Apprehension and thrill filled Veylis Avandaer. She only felt that when she was facing her mother, and that was an entirely different experience than what she was just forced to repel. A masterstroke, Veylis breathed. The Dreamer perfects himself evermore. He is learning the paths. The Infacer crackled uncertainly. {That did not seem like he was using Chronology to me.} No. No, you are right. But it was close. Did you see his patterns? Feel his sudden surge in mass? Her time-wrought tendrils slithered quick down into the Warrens as she reached the end of the paths, reacting temporal echoes and lingering ripples cast by the Dreamer. Across time, she pulled an object into her Heaven. Powder drifted inside her, but time coiled around it, returned it to its once-shape, reformed an explosive munition. For a second, the round hovered in a space of gold. Then, Veylis created a puppet of herself, and wrapped her fingers around the projectile. Infacer. I think I have come to a decision. {About what?} The trial. I have decided that I will attend, after all. In person. Chapter 28-4 Nullification Chapter 28-4 Nullification +PRIORITY APEX THOUGHTCAST INCOMING+ Attention all active Mirrors (classification Convex and Concave). This message is from the Inner Council: All operations are to be discontinued immediately. All cells are to adapt defensive stratagems. Shuffle your teams. Make your Sleepers go dark. Delete all memories stored within your proxy minds. Approximately eight minutes and fourteen seconds ago, a series of ruptures opened at once within our districts. We have sustained severe infrastructural and personnel damage in the Nether and the material realms. Preliminary inspections have found no traceable mem-data or evidence left on site. However, existing precedent has detected parallels between the current attack and operations conducted against us by the High Seraph Veylis Avandaer herself. This information is unconfirmed. You are not to mention or impart these details to anyone else. You are only to collect the proxy minds and mission-related memories from all assets under you. [DEEPNAV MARKER ASSIGNED] After gathering all intelligence marked classified, you are to remove all existing memories from the minds of your assets and loci. Thereafter, you must arrive at the designated DeepNav marker within twelve hours and submit your collected details on-site. Failure to do so will have you marked as [COMPROMISED] and will result in an enforced extraction. After this, your own memories will be cleared, and you will be made to surrender your current role as well. The suspension of your responsibilities will be temporary. Correspondingly, you will be assigned a personal Heaven of Information for further protection. You are not to inquire about why these measures are being taken. You are not to acknowledge or interact with your assigned Golem in any capacity. Finally, our prototype Heavens of Culture will be activating across all districts. It is recommended that you all return to your communities and clans in the near future. You are to remain inactive until receiving new orders. Unity is destiny. +THOUGHTCAST SESSION LOST+ -Ori-Thaum Inner Council 28-4 Nullification C[Avo]C They are approaching. DO YOU HEAR THE [CALLS]. The Techplaguer skipped between Avos ethereal watchtowers like a fish bursting from the surface of a pond, dipping its antennae into passing wavelengths over and again. Bound to the Heaven of Signals, Avo could indeed hear the broadcasts of the Omnitech Knots. He already had [4000] golEms mem-locked. The evolved Definement of Synthesis granted him perfect attunement with minds and matter. His ghosts were now beyond even the metaphor steamutterly transparent as they slithered across the Sunderwilds. His Definements of Empathy and Delusion had merged, becoming the Definement of Synthesis. Across the Sunderwilds, his being pooled out as transparent threads, framing all that existed within the context of his memories. His ghosts were more than mere steam now; they were entirely invisible. Invisible until Avo willed them to be otherwise, and then came a tinge of contrastthe void''s absolute black lined by the gleam of a burning Soul. At Sphere Seven, his influence over reality was grander in scope and vulgarity. Reality was simply easier to bend to his whims. As ghosts casually stretched across out like a web that encompassed continental distances, his phantasmal watchtowers only amplifying his resonance. He was already pooling over the 4,000 golems he tracked, his mind encompassing their beingsa colorless membrane they would never be aware of. Nonsensical numbers and ordered patterns danced from the Omnitech Knots, their Heavens of Signals speaking to each other, communicating across the tapestry using pulses of unnatural radiation and wavelengths. They were approaching as a concert, their Porters lining the Sunderwilds with easily traversable pathways for the main force to follow. The vanguard came in from all angles, using the Scar Charts to bypass the geometric hurricane, the unnatural waves of the Shattered Sea, the flesh-infecting light, the matter converting echoes of sound. They came for both the enclave and the Heaven of Winter, but within Avo''s estimates, they were going to reach the latter days before they ever got to the former. Just as wellthey wanted the Sleeper''s fragments and probably assumed it was an easier target to take. Assumptions had most fatal consequences in war. REND CAPACITY - 99% +How are we playing this?+ Draus said, already recovered from her overwhelming union with the gestalt. The Arsenalist was already painting firing solutions from each of Avo''s watchtowers. With a few more reflections, she would be able to perform an ambush. With Avos awareness and her Heaven and skills, they would stand a chance of destroying quite a few golems. Quite a few wouldnt do. [Rent Capacity at zero. Overheaven Pattern-Nullification updated.] The Agnos cheered as she scouted the Sunderwilds using Avos sense. Nothing there. It worked. Four thousand iterations of tests and it worked. She squealed. [Were going to strip time itself clean. Were going to poison the paths!] Loathing leaked from her mind, and she thought of Veylis. A few additional shivers ran from pattern of space. Avo observed the tapestry, and more Domains began to react sporadically in places he could not fully perceive, in corners of darkness, in light, in matter, and more. Additional Knots were likely hidden. Additional Knots that he would not be able to find without devoting additional resources or effort. But they were hiding now, holding in place. He''d bought himself some time with the feat he just performed. The other Omnitech assets likely weren''t sure what he just did, and paranoia would keep them pinned longer than the rest of his defenses. They would probably proceed even slower now. Bring in their own hyper-esoteric Heavens before beginning their engagement. For now, Avo found himself satisfied and magnified. But he wasn''t done. He assigned Kae new tasks, things she needed to work on. The Strix Upon the Empty was an immense Heaven unto itself, already requiring 825,000 THAUMS to run at only a canon and a Hell. The sheer scope and vulgarity of its miracles were beyond peer, but he had more thaums to assign, and more canons to create. Veylis was still his superior. Considerable superior. That could not be the case if he desired to win this struggle. He needed even stranger canons. Something capable of striking across Spacetimesomething easy to deploy and destructive on an unfathomable level. Concepts filtered over from Kae. Presently, she had an idea about converting ghosts into solar fusion. Avo had a great many ghosts. And for an additional Hell... a direct upgrade to his Woundmothers Breath of the Withereda metaphysical sun with its light infused with entropy, capable of fraying matter, force, time, space, and concepts where its brightness reached. [Jaus,] Abrel breathed, mind going blank at the prospect of facing Avo. There was no hope for her. No hope for her family. Soon, he would stand alone among esteemed company within New Vultun. Esteemed company, and a great power unto himselfmade even greater by the gestalt. His Overheavens shape began to change in the void. An aesthetic evolution followed his apotheosis. The Strix sprouted free from his Overheaven, and his secret project merged with his growing being. No longer was he merely a burning nest of Soulfire, wards, ghosts, and tattered dragons. No, that was merely the core of his new selfa singular eye burning upon the skul of a vast Strix. Trails of eldritch fire outlined the contours of its being, and its every sinew, every plume and feather was sculpted from an ethereal midnight glow ghosts embodying the hollowness of the void. From within the dark came tendrils. Tendrils of purest white growing free from sequences and whips of gliding darkness. The visage of his Echoheads returned once more, but ghoul was long gone. The midnight rains began to wash over New Vultun once more. As the water fell hard from the higher clouds seeded with vaporous miracles, ugly tears stretched across New Vultun. Scars raked across reality from the Tiers to the Warrens below. Between the fractured seams in existence were flashes of nuclear detonations, were thoughtwave detonations, were spatial thresholds forming battle lines between districts and Sovereignties. The Guilds were frozen. Left stunned after what Avo inflicted upon them. The Strix had bought him the most valuable commodity of all: time. Time for them to spend entrenched as he worked and shaped every advantage he could for the forthcoming trial. Time before they could properly respond to him, to come up with any of their own countermeasures. He needed to make the trial count. He needed to steal Kae back while he couldsnuff Veylis if he could. There would never be a moment, an opening like this again. {Avo,} Calvino said, the EGIs voice echoing across his subminds. {Its time.} He shifted his consciousness to the submind he assigned to Threshold. In the Avalon server, the mists above began to clear as waters rose. Upon a small boat, he kept to his mortal avatar, though it was increasingly a lie when compared to his Overheaven. He and the EGIs were far more than matter. But they still greeted each other this way for the pretense of their polities. For those born of the flesh and saw no further than what their senses offered. The waves beneath his ship stilled to a ground of sapphire blue, and voluminous clouds around him formed a coliseum, sectioned seating devoted to all the polities. There were millions of minds in attendance, millions of avatars to sift through. Threshold accommodated them presence by adjusting their distances to him in real time. Those he viewed in detail were drawn closer, made to be no four meters away for dialogue. He himself was always at the epicenter of this place, the beast of the hour. A synthetic dawn made from nanomechanical particulates rained over Avo. Like a crown hovering over his head, Calvinos avatar rippled as they spooky. {This special assembly has been called to session. Polity minds; alliances; confederations; cultures; remnants, I give you Avo, Operative of Aegis, the Burning Dreamer, now Ark and God of Mortal Origin.} Alarm flooded his Definement of Hysteria. Alarm. Moments from the past drifted over him. Wars still beyond his comprehension. Shots fired years in advance, traveling for light years before punching through critical habitats or worlds, killing trillions, breaking entities of Soulfire infused within anomalous alloy. For millennia after, Voidwatch had survived the end of their universe. The end of the old ways. Now, here they were again, faced directly with a godor something like itenduring memories of a war that never truly ended. Avo empathized. He knew what that was like. +Thank you,+ he said, addressing Calvino. Turning his perception on the gathered many, he sighed, and began his address. This would not be for him, but them as well. Them. Their polities. His gestalt. And a proper future. +Voidwatch. Minds. People. Sophonts. I have come to demand your rejection. I have come to command your disgust. And I have come to severe you from hope. I am all that you fear and more. And I am the final legacy of your enemies. The inheritor of their war.+ {Avo,} Kant muttered, firing him a tight-beam hyperwave broadcast. {What are you doing?} +I am here to make the truth known,+ Avo said, ignoring the EGI. +And I am here to greet you with honesty. I am not like you. But then again... most of you arent like each other as well.+ He paused, and a chuckle escaped him. +You really shouldnt be together.+ Chapter 28-5 Proclamation Chapter 28-5 Proclamation Diplomacy is not the art of bending someone to your will. No. Diplomacy is the act of making another fear they will betray themselves if they dont give you what you want. -Jaus Avandaer 28-5 Proclamation All around Avo, bursts of static blossomed like flaring embers. The various EGIs were speaking to each other, trying to process the meaning behind his words. They shouldn''t be together. He meant that in so many ways.?iscover new chapters at novelhall.com {Avo,} Kant said, communicating through a tight-channeled hyperwave transmission. Avo didn''t even need his Definement of Hysteria to realize how worried the mind was. {What are you doing?} Avo ignored Kant for now. They would understand soon. Everyone would. He was going to make himself clear. He was going to preserve Voidwatch''s sanctity in whatever fashion he could, regardless of what followed. You don''t belong together," Avo said. "Just like all the little pieces burning inside me, thinking inside me, dreaming inside me, we didn''t belong together. We were not of a shared path. We were not united. I claimed them by force, by death. I subsumed them, and they became part of me, and I took parts from them." He let silence follow. The minds were not like humans. They watched. The observed. The simulated. They did not betray themselves needless because of emotions or impulses. They are, in a fashion, much like him. Self-directed. Self-determined. This, on a level that humans simply could not fathom. It helped to exist apart from the foundations of the material world. "You are not like me in this regard. You are civilizations formed under common philosophies, common norms, traditions. But under Voidwatch, you are conflicting traditions, contrasting traditions. Your cultures, judging from your avatars, the way you present yourselves, are different, defined by contrast. How long have you been kept together by fear, by alienation, from the universe left in the wake of your war?" Inside, his templates began to regard him oddly. They were used to his simple statements. His truncated means of speech. But in the present moment, he needed his points to flow. "That was a question I''m genuinely curious about. Tell me. So I might understand my audience. Tell me so I can know how far you are from that which you lost. {The passage of time has been different for all of us,} an EGI said. They took on the visage of a woman, or perhaps a man. It was hard to tell, judging from their attire and build. They stood as an undefined silhouette, dressed in tasseled finery. The frame of their figure was lithe, and there seemed to be flowing tendrils protruding from their avatar''s skull. {I am Monitor Nommun of the Tanavi,} they stated, voice fluid and smooth. {I hail from the Isle Sorai Star Chain. We were situated around the supermassive black hole, and our displacement began after its collapse. During the Builder War, I guided my people into the great darkness between galaxies, but the entropy itself spread beyond us. The ruptures tore and swept through Andromeda. And beyond. We turned back thereafter. By Sol Standard Time, it took us approximately 9.8 million years to tunnel back over into the Milky Way, most of which was done in stasis for our systems and peoples. And approximately another billion years passed before we encountered another group of minds.} One billion years. To conceptualize that length of time was easy if nothing had happened, if there was only ruin and destruction. But if there were people, if there was culture, if they were changing, mutating, becomingone billion years. If he imagined himself surviving a billion years, he realized that he wouldn''t even be able to conceive of what awaited on the other side. "And so you fall into the fold. Aligned by the stability of your existence rather than the chaos that defines this canvas. But even rejoined, you are lost still. Most of you shouldnt be together. But I understand why you are. I understand why you are so reluctant to separate and support the Terrestrial Guilds you favor. I understand what you have to lose if you intervene. You are not humanity entire; you are each all that remains of yourselves. There are no more of you. No more anyway. he trailed off. "You are Arks like me. And you bear cargo too precious to lose. And so you dont fight. And so you must fight. He bade his avatar to turn. The gesture was symbolic more than it was necessary. He could see out from himself at an angle. So could the gathered EGIs. But he still wanted them to know that he was regarding them, all of them, with his words. "I did not come today to make demands. I did not come today to beg, to threaten, to bargain. I am here today to tell you what is. I am going to speak to you about the truth." {And what truth is that?} another EGI spoke. This one might have been favored by Draus. They were the shape of a gun, a very old gun, by the look of it. They were of bright metal, with a long barrel and a revolving cylinder formed its core. A curved hammer jutted from the back of the gun in the form of what looked like twin overlapping wings. They regarded the gun pointed at him and simply nodded. "The truth about the final war to come. The truth of what I am. What I will do. To preserve you. To claim victory. An emission of data boomed from the back. Avo regarded this speaker with interest. There was title over them. Testament - Carrier of Restricted Ordinance Their shape was that of a dyson swarm. A design of simplicity, holding an implicit threat. {You speak of being our salvation. You speak of understanding. But why does this matter. What worth do you provide? Aegis has subsidized your operations. We are your benefactors. Not the other way.} It wasnt the other way, Avo said simply. But thing sare always changing. He looked at Calvino and the other members of Aegis. "You have lost enough in life, in technology, in who you are. And you must know, must know how thin reality is, must know how close all that exists is to the precipice. One more tear, a few more ruptures, everything can fall, everything. Entropy, eternal, a ruined universe, legacy to none." {Is that what you wish to tell us today?} The revolver asked, {That you understand, that you don''t judge us for our impotence?} Hysteria stole understanding for Avo. Memories of a distant war fought over distances comprehensible to him now. The gun was once in charge of intergalactic kinetic operations. In simple terms, they were designed to fire slugs across unfathomable distances, traveling light years before destroying entire worlds, entire habitats, entire stars. They regarded Avo now with frustration: Frustration that he was among theman enemy that couldn''t kill something so close to Neo-Creationist nightmares that they often had to targetbut also frustration that he was allowed to bring ruin and retribution to the Guilds while the gun could merely point and watch, restrained by the charter. Avo didn''t know if minds suffered from the feeling of purgatory, but the metaphor remained, and that meant all minds were aware of their current condition. I am here to declare war. Threads of perception snaked out from all the EGIs. His statement of war captured even more of their attention, bade the static clouds around them to thicken with intensity. They were doubtlessly devoting more processing power to decipher his statement now. {Against the Guilds?} the dyson swarm said. {And you wish for our support? Our technology. You wish to bring this charade to an end.} No. Nothing is promised. Nothing is certain. But I wish to declare war on everyone. All Guilds. Existence itself. The wrongness of reality offends me. The weakness festering in man has gone unchecked. And your exile has left you entombed in the corpse of the universe. All things that I will not abide. And all matters I can solve. Avo cut him off, channeling the full weight of the Gestalt at once. The Strix burst from his fading avatar as his Overheaven slid into place, greeting each of the EGIs as the foundational mythology of what he was, rather than what he remembered himself to be. The shift did not register as an attack, but some of them still dropped their links, separated before his transformation was complete. Prepared infomorphs launched memetic attacks against his form, but they were glass bullets flung into a hurricane. They were constructs of thought; he decided what thoughts were. The being that greeted the EGIs thereafter was not Avo. He was there. He was among them. But he was every mind connected to the gestalt. Every being. Every god. +Legitimacy is not power,+ the Gestalt said. Mirages made from the Woundmother, the Fardrifter, the Techplager, the Bio-Igniter, the Fucktopia, the Simulacra, the Arsenalist, the Maelstormer, the Melodist, and countless more spoke with their component mortals. For the first time, the minds found themselves greeted by gods unleashed. Fascination and apprehension followed. +Power is not even power. Behold Naeko.+ Karakan stepped into existence, speaking as her withered, ruined self. +Ruler of force. Sovereign over violence. Except his own heart. Except he can never forgive. Not me. Nor himself. He is a slave eternal. Power cannot be his deliverance.+ Golden threads drifted through the room. +Consider Veylis. Or consider her not. She dreams not even of herself. But control. Control to master the world. Control to hand an abomination born from her tortured father a box made from the defiled remains of the world. And behold yourselves. Shattered. Tarnished. Clinging to what is left of structure and stability. Fallen titans desperately seeking an escape from this husk. And what if you do? What then? War. War and separation. For you are different yourselves. And to want is to war. Such is the curse of clashing power.+ A bite of anger bled over into the gestalt''s voice. This surprised Avo and the gods regarded it with indifference, but the bulk of his associated were still human, with human emotions, human hearts. +Look upon me,+ the Gestalt said. +Face the totality of what I am. Understand that I exist beyond the limitations of a single mind, a single soul, a single perspective or understanding. This is also why we cannot be joined. Why I cannot stand under you. Why ours will be a relationship built on most affable conflict. I will destroy you. I will give you means to deepen your ties with the Terrestrials. I will give you a new lease on life. An opportunity to choose yourselves. To war against each other. For I seek to preserve you as well. For I see only victory and not dominance. For I am a new path. A new possibility. One that will cut across all the others. He finished thereafter and silence reigned. Glorious silence. Uncomfortable silence. Stunned silence. Silence but no protests. Silence and general acceptance. He was not forcing them to give him anything, after all. They were simply acclimating to the truth. {Ill war with you,} Only said, casually. {Been wanting to do that for a while.} Another few million EGI followed in their stead. Agreements chorused under the notion that they couldnt suffer such a threat to their polities. {Testament responding,} the dyson swarm proclaimed. {Ethical restrictions lifted. Hostile faction detected. Sending new directives to all sub-modules; engage, destroy, defeat;; do not neutralize.} {We request official diplomatic channels to be established,} Kant said. {So that additional guidelines may be set. So that surrenders and bargains may be addressed.} {And how shall you be addressed, enemy,} Calvino asked. {How are we to reference you when speaking to our partners in Idheim.} There was only one concept that truly ruled the gestalt. They were a new order, and this would be their stand against eternal entropy. +We are the Symmetry. All will be aligned beneath us. Aligned. But not enchained.+ {Then I put this to motion,} Calvino said, hyperwave broadcast rippling out from them, bouncing across all EGIs and beyond. {The polities face an unprecedented threat that requires our immediate attention. For the security of our cultures and the sanctity of existence that remains, I propose war.} {War,} Testament agreed. {War,} Kant said, sighing. {War.} {War.} {War.} {War.} {War.} {The decision is unanimous. The road ahead is clear.} Calvinos ansible settled. {Symmetry. We hereby offer you terms of immediate surrender. Your rights as a sophont will be respected. Surrender your arms and forces. Allow us to establish safeguards within your mind. Bring an end to this conflict before it begins.} +No,+ the gestalt said. +I reject these terms. I offer conflict. Conflict eternal. And life eternal. Let the fires rage evermore. And let our selves be ever-changing. {Rejection acknowledged. Deploying skirmishing fleets. Prepare yourself.} Laughter sang forth from across the Gestalt, and deep within, Avo regarded the moment with feral satisfaction. He was beginning to like politics. He was beginning to like politics a lot. The unfortunates on Idheim were going to be so very lost. Chapter 28-6 All the Roads to Scale Chapter 28-6 All the Roads to Scale ATTENTION: DOMAIN OF (SPACE) DETECTING [5,838,332] SPATIAL DISTORTIONS SPATIAL TUNNEL DETECTED SPATIAL TUNNEL DETECTED SPATIAL TUNNEL DETECTED VOIDWATCH VESSELS MARKED TESTAMENT IN MOTION VOIDWATCH VESSELS MARKED ONLY WAY TO BE SURE IN MOTION VOIDWATCH VESSELS MARKED IF ON A WINTERS NIGHT IN MOTION DIVERTING MEM-DATA TO MIRROR BOSUN MEM-DATA RECEIVED +What... are you firing at?+ -Voidgazer S394 (Or-Thaum Void-Facing Observation Golem) 28-6 All the Roads to Scale [Mirror Bosun] It was a truth universally acknowledged by all Voidwatch-facing observers, that when a few million voidships start firing relativistic projectiles at a yet-detected entity, then a Godhunt might be soon to come. This was evermore the case for Bosun. She might just be the longest-serving Voidwatch observer among the Mirrors. She stayed on even as century-old comrades applied for periods of extended retirement, accepted promotions, or simply met their untimely ends during one of the many Guild Wars. Here, in the Rend-scarred expanse, she, the Unwhere, and Voidwatch were the only true constants. Maybe she could include some of the other observers as well, but to her, they were only tourists. Whatever Guild they were from, whatever new golem they piloted, they would be gone with the passage of years. Sooner or later, it would just be her, the nothing, and the voiders again. She preferred it that way. Found this meditative solitude the finest pleasure any individual could possess. Few others shared in her peace, after all. Away from the gunfire. Away from the war, the death. She remained disconnected from the broader Nether while she worked as well, only firing updates during her scheduled dips over New Vultuns orbit. But those check-ins had been reduced even more by the Paladins lockdown. Just as well. Bosun didnt much like the Nether. She didnt much like her mind cluttered with noise. No. She just wanted time to think. To watch. To be. And for years and years, that was how things were. But then there were the times when Voidwatch was active. There were the times Voidwatch did respond. Targeting some manner of unseen threat. Opening stabilized singularities to tunnel across space as they avoided an incoming outer god or another. Bosun had enjoyed those moments as well. She, more than any other Mirror, knew about the remnants that lurked beyond their star system. The Nullstar kept the worst of the remnants at bay, but every now and again, some host of horrors would make their approach, governed by some ancient directive still ruling their thauma-virtual husks, twisting the fabric of reality unnaturally as all the lives they contained within them screamed. There was a reason why most Mirrors left this post eventually. Why Bosun was one of the few that stayed. There were things in the dark. Things from a time before. Things that slipped over from somewhere beside reality. They werent like the Godclads. They werent even really like the gods, though they shared some traits. If Bosun were to describe them, she would call them aberrant, sporting shapes that didnt fit, singing in notes that clawed at the human mind, assailing existence by existence alone. It was less that they were ineffable, and more that they were incongruent. Things can couldnt be. And faintly, there were always cries from within them. Human cries. And the cries of other beings that could think and remember. Those voices were the hardest to endure. Nonetheless, Bosun searched the darkness, used her void-sequenced Phys-Sim to track the shots. Her golem was imbued in the curvature of Idheims planetary horizon. Its Heaven of Geometry allowed her nigh instantaneous movement along the bend of any edgeeven planetary ones. As she shifted ninety thousand kilometers across the stretch of Idheim following the missiles, she kept her mind focused, searched for any spikes of Rend or metaphysical distortions. Her golems telemetries were stable at first, then a slight tremble bled from its systems into her Metamind. Then, something caught her attention. Through the augmented suite of visual sensors, the outline was something was isolated from coiling strands of entropy stretching from the void down into Idheim. DESTABILIZATION: DOMAIN OF (SPACE)/(TIME) As the ghosts in her golem compiled observed variables into mem-data. Bosuns thoughtstuff stilled as she watched a patch of... This horror wasnt so hard to describe. It definitely wasnt like most other remnants. It held the shape of a massive winged creature with a single burning eye. Rivers of burning ethereal essence formed its titanic outline, and the substance of its body was the emptiness of space coated by a veil of specters. Then, there were the tendrils. Tendrils not so unlike the strands of entropy. Tendrils, like blackness and circulating phantoms. Tendrils sprouting out from the creature, snaking fast across impossible distances in an instant, swatting at the incoming shots. A wreath of ghosts poured free from the remnants body, and as it moved, Bosun an impossible presence pull at her very thoughts. Her Metamind shuddered, and her sequences displaced themselves. Her Phys-Sim and a half dozen other phantasmics simply stopped working. Her wards, thankfully remained, but when she regarded them, they were only operating at twenty percent efficiency, with her maximum cog-cap reduced. It was hard for her to comprehend the immensity of its size. Its dimensions were constantly changingmercurial, like thought itself. But with each passing second, she felt her own mind ache, like a sea was being poured over her, the pressure grinding upon her consciousness getting heavier and heavier... This... She didnt know what this was. She had encountered genuine horrorshorrors she couldnt endure facing even with her augmented Quicksand. But for something to displace her Metamind? Across over twenty light seconds of distance? Good, Maharata. We are scheming against Clan DRongo as a preventative measure against conspiracy. Maharata went still. His armor hissed as he lowered his head. Explain. If you fail to do so, I will simply detonate my Rendskin to spare us all the trouble being labeled as traitors. +That will not be necessary.+ The thoughtcast emanated directly from a locus hovering just above Valhus table. Within it, a session was active. A session connected to an Inner Council Mirror. A session that the ghoul disappeared down five hours ago and didnt come out. Shotin tried not to swallow at that. The situation around the trial, around the DRongos, the Famines, Veylis, Zeinfucking everything, was pure chaos. It was like the world was unending chain of dicks trying to fuck each other to death, and the only way for some dicks to achieve said death-fucking was to fuck a hole through another dick mid-fucking another dick to fuck the dick they actually wanted to fuck at the cost of some collateral fucking. And when a situation had too much fucking in it for Shotin Kazahara, then there was too godsdamned much fucking. Period. No further questions. Forgive me, the Longeye said, her voice low and creaking. To whom are we speaking? The withered face and the empty eyes of the Longeye emerged from the wound lining the corpses torso. From the gap between her neck and the darkness within, Shotin caught the glimpsing eye of a colossal Woundhound staring at him. He sneered back. He didnt know why the Longeyes still did this cultural charade of being wise old crones hidden in vessels of death and destruction. Everyone already knew that each triplet of Longeyes manifested themselves as Mothers of Ruin. She wasnt a frail old Scaarthian any more than Shotin was a supple virgin. +I have no title. I represent the Inner Council.+ The crone immediately receded into the wound, and a thunderous growl tumbled out from the many wounds lining the dismembered torso, carrying with it flashing lighting and tumbling flecks of frigid snow. Ah. No need to hold to deception. Well met, allies to the coven. Speak your will. I will carry your words +We would appreciate it if you didnt,+ the Mirror said. +We have no idea how far the compromise runs. Effective as of now, Clan DRongo is considered to be an accessory under Noloth.+ A triangular set of dots composed the Fatalists helmet. Explain yourself. +They have not been classified as traitors due to their compromise being rooted in subversion and top-down hijacking. They likely are not aware of where their new orders have been coming from. Only that there are new orders. Only that these new orders paint Clans Kazahara and Kitzuhada as potential traitors in another perspective. Further more, we suspect that Noloth is also in league with Highflame and Omnitech.+ Shotin was following along until that point, whereupon he did a double-take at the locus and Karewho had been standing quietly beside her father, burst out: What? The Mirror continued on without any change to their affected. +A classified source offered us new intelligence. The potential identities and locations of Nolothi nodes taken from an Omnitech informant.+ Shotin had a feeling he knew who this classified source was: once-ghoul and the newest and strangest cock to enter the fuck-fest. +Avo. Avo. Cast you, you baby-eating half-strand cocksucker. What the hells did you tell them? What is this? Youve been in that locus for hourswhat are they telling you? Avo? Avo?+ A quick reply came back from his new benefactor. +Obtained some new intelligence earlier. Had to share. Think the consang I got the mem-data from will appreciate this maneuver.+ +What? What consang? Avo? Avo? Answer me?+ The ghoul didnt. +Yeah, fuck you too. Godsdamn...+ Shotin stopped his fuming when he caught Reva and a particularly large Scaarthian with a tiger-tail staring blankly at him. Anxiety, he said. Interesting set of expressions for anxiety, the tiger-tailed Scaarthian muttered. I would have guessed violent anger or moron trying to take a shit in his pants. More the latter. +Whatever the case, you are not to contact anyone outside this room about this information. All details are to remain restricted. In the next few hours, Elder Mwaba DRongo and Instrument Abrel Greatling will be returned to Idheim. The trial will formally begin. And a series of uprisings will explode across New Vultun. It is our suspicion that the Saintists will use this opportunity as cover to coordinate with Noloth and their assets toward a common goal: the destruction of the Heaven of Truth.+ Ah, a low snarl came from the Longeye. That sow Veylis is making another attempt, I see. And you wish for us to guard the Heaven. Even against our own. +That is the hope.+ *** [Avo] +That is the hope,+Avo said, shaping the situation how he could. He would have preferred it if the Inner Council actually responded to the ambassador. But after hours of waiting, time running short, and without the possibility of a reply, he had to take things into his own hands. The Inner Council would understand. Either through reason or logic, or when they were subsumed. Whatever the case, other subminds were doing as he was right now, turning additional assets to his favor in case anything went wrong. Naeko and his Paladins were still a considerable force, but they would need every advantage they could get if anything drastic happened. Furthermore, he needed to strip away any potential advantage the Famines might have. They were bound for Scale toowere minutes from arrival in the form of Uthred Greatling, his son, and Green River. Day one of the trial was arriving. With everything ever-changing, his task now went from predicting problems to shaping the chaos, however he could, and by whatever means he could. Which was why he was throwing the Infacer into the Maw, using their gift of goodwill against them. Which was why he intended to also trigger a shooting war between the Meritocrats and Chivalrics by the Alysim finished making his way out of Axtraxis Academy. In some regard, Avo agreed with Shotin. The city was a nest of deception and clashing interests, but he had something to add himself: In a kingdom of dicks trying to fuck each other to death, the one who guided the direction of the cocks was going to be the chief fucker of them all. [Fuck yeah,] Chambers nodded. Chapter 28-6 All the Ways to Scale (II) Chapter 28-6 All the Ways to Scale (II) +No! No! Not now, godsdammit! Not fucking now!+ -Mirror of the Inner Council Upon Receiving News of a Potential Forthcoming Godhunt During the Trial 28-6 All the Ways to Scale (II) Avo regarded the vast statue placed at the epicenter of the Court of Truth. Twin interconnected hands clawed out at the world. One bore a feather, the other a blade, and enshadowed beneath its pedestal, stood Naeko alone. The Chief Paladin was clad in his ancient combat skin, and the hound-like helmet enclosed around his skull painted his face in a dreadful visage. For a long time, Naeko didnt speak, instead choosing to take in his Paladins. The ones Avo filtered out to be the most loyal, anyhow. Of the true believers, there numbered only [6,355]---far too few to fill in the five kilometer long chamber. They arrived equipped for combat and at attention. The rest of their fellows continued on with assignments, or remained blissfully ignorant of what was taking place behind the scenes. The unreliables all had portions of Avos Synchronicity infused within them. They would come to support the others if and when the hostilities began. With a little encouragement from Avo, their responses would be a near certainty. The existing traitors, meanwhile, had been stationed in places across Scale away from the Court of Truth itself. Some were to greet the arriving Guilders beyond the threshold of the tessellating walls. Some were to watch over the Sovereignties and resolve any potential skirmishes before a war was sparked prematurely. All of those in the category of traitor would likely shift allegiances and act alongside their associated Guilds if not for the fact that Avo already had plans to see them subsumed and unmade. They were already subsumed. They just didnt know it yet. When the fighting was done and Avo was finished with their use, over fourteen thousand former Paladins find themselves offered to the gestalt in mind, Soul, ontologics, and death. Thus was allowed by Naeko; and thus was the fate of the disloyal, damned by a greater deceiver. +We stick to standard protocol with the trial,+ Naeko said. +Try to keep things calm on the first day. Twist some arms and make some threats if you need todont start fights. End them. Main goal here is to keep this clown show from turning into a full godsdamned circus immediately.+ +Hard to do when all the colors start mixing, chief,+ came a response from Naggat Cleaver, a Scaarthian Paladin. A chorus of muted laughter followed. Naeko actually grinned in response. +Shit, I know that. Why do you think I managed to play Stormjumpers for so long. After two centuries of dealing with Guilder shit, I think I internalized the Domain of being a dumbfuck automatically.+ The laughter was louder now. A little over a month ago, most of these Paladins thought nothing of Naeko. Assumed he was just broken. Now, they feared himand because of that feared, yearned to like him so they felt aligned with a true power of New Vultun. Human hearts were feeble, fickle things, and even the noblest among Godclads exhibited these traits. +That being said, we want them to finish arguing, voting, and settling on their proposals before we bring out the Heaven of Truth. Itll get us a timeframe for how long we have for discovery, questioning, and judgment. During this time, you might see some routine changes. Scale will go into planar lockdownjust like if were anticipating a siege.+ A faint atmosphere of discomfort came from most of the Paladins. A few of them were survivors leftover from the Second Guild War; those were the more relaxed of the bunch. They had something to expect and had lived through the darkest outcomes. Their juniors, however, only had vicarities and anecdotes to go off of. Ignorance fanned the flames of their worries.Ge?t latest novel chapters on nov(e)lbj/n(.)c/om But Avo would see them spared soon enough. The Chief Paladins talk had been going for a while. Most over it was review over proceduresmore for Naeko than his Paladins. The entire process of the trial was far looser than Avo expected. Drafted in the Articles of the Spiral, every megacity had their own division of Paladins or non-partials to enforce general order and settle disputes between the Guilds. With the arrival of the trial, the first day would be an exercise in structured chaos. Over twenty thousand Guild representativesa substantial amount of them Godcladswould arrive, occupy their own sections along the split chamber. Behind the legion of gathered Paladins, a vast vertical slit lined with shimmering oscillations. Scanners and thaumaturgic detectors were at play there, and all Guilders who passed its threshold would be identified and logged by the Heaven of Truth. Usually, this meant that anyone who desired to make trouble could be resolved, but the Guilds would be gathering assets beyond these walls as well, and there were other means of subterfuge beyond outright violence. Both sides of the room resembled hives in a sense. They were dotted with jutting podiums and alcoves, allowing representatives places to stand and address each other. The Paladins would occupy the middle, and the opposition would the other side. With how much power most the participants possessed over reality, the distance was mostly a formality, but positioning still mattered in terms of symbology. The Paladins were the arms of Scale, after all, and they balanced Guilder interests. Or such was the hope. Regardless, they would spend much of the first few days facing Naekos announcement of the crimes, greeting those charged, opening the room to evidence gathered by the Guilds, votes for a mutually agreed duration for the Discovery Phasean odd case as both Massist and Saintist factions were being charged herebefore concluding with Judgement and Questioning. From Naekos experience, the entire affair would likely last the span of a month at most, judging from diplomatic squabbles he presided over. By Avo simulated pre-cognition, things would likely devolve into utter chaos before the midnight rains fell on the third day. The Chief Paladin spent a few hours longer going over thingsand being corrected about proper protocol by Maru. It didnt take much for Avo to realize the man was well out of practice for matters of leadershipfor most matters regardless. But that was fine. He needed Naeko the warrior soon. Maru and the others would be enough here. Finishing with the general details, Naeko let out a slight sigh and activated a session. Avos Hysteria locked onto a wavelength of thoughtstuff that emanated downward into very guts of Scale. +Bring it up.+ At once, Avo felt a crushing pressure arrive. At the far end of the room, directly opposite to the slit from which the Guilders were set to arrive, the Gatekeeper manifested from a single pinprick, spilling into stable reality as unfurling links of ringing chains. Naeko had pushed for this, wanted Veylis to see that they were planning something; notice the loyalists. Though Avo found it unwise to give the High Seraph any more usable information, Naeko rebuffed him with experience. Every little bit counts with her, Naeko had said. She considers everything. Everything. Thats the best thing about her. And the worst. She cant stop thinking. And this will weigh on her two. Thats what gets her the most: phantom variables. Though the Gatekeeper remained grand in the sheer amount of metaphysical displacement its arrival brought, Avo felt himself more capable of enduring it. Passing over to Sphere Seven had granted him ground of his own. His Heaven was more stable than it was beforeharder to affect. As the Paladins chattered to each other, as the rains outside began to die down, Naeko walked around the statue occupying the center of the room and faced the Gatekeeper once more. Their body jingled and rang with the slightest movement, and spatial reality warped around them like a crumpled parchmentthe space they occupied in the guts of Scale overlapping with the Court of Trutha demiplane within a demiplane. Alright, Naeko muttered. I think thats a good enough show for her. Still think we should have gone for the quieter approach. Nothing stays unknown to her long. Not with that creepy EGI fuck tucked away in her mind. Paranoias the best we got. Naekos lip curled. +Paranoia. And misdirection. You put your fake intelligence in my Paladins.+ +Yes. Kept them consistent. Generated potential angles of attack on Highflame at the trial using my Pre-Cog. Veylis and Emotion will probably be able to see through some. But they will need to devote resources to ensure others arent actually in play.+ +Right. Lets hope that works.+ +Doing a bit more than hoping right now, Naeko. Getting you and your Paladins more help as well.+ +For where?+ +Certain Massists. Ill update you and the others once things are certain.+ Naeko nodded as Maru continued to speak to the others. Unlike Naeko, the younger Godclad spoke more like a senior authority to the Paladins. Because that was what he was. An ancient survivor. One of the first Paladins. In war, he was nothing before Naeko, and his intellect and behavior werent that extraordinary, but his ability to stay true to his path even after almost everyone he loved was something Naeko could only envy. Everyone broke in different ways. Taking a few minutes to walk up to the Heaven of Truth, Naeko regarded the chain-made angel with a tired look and Avo followed close behind. Within, Avo felt the temporal wound pulsating. There was movement from somewhere. He could feel it better this time. Clearer than before. His newest apotheosis had made his metaphysical senses sharper as well. Are you watching us? Naeko asked. Hm, Veylis? You there? You see this? You see me? If she was, the High Seraph didnt intend to reveal herself. Well, if you are, I just want you to know something: We both owe a debt. To the city. To each other. To Jaus. And bills come due. I should havewe should have finished this years ago. I was a coward. I was broken. But now Im just tired. And I think Im just about done with all of this. He paused again. Are you the same way? He almost sounded like he was beginning. It was almost pathetic. Almost. But Avo understood. He knew now. And he kept silent. With each passing second of silence, Naeko wilted further, lowered, his head, and prepared to turn away. I will not stray from my path. Whatever the pain. The whatever the strain. The voice came soft and somber. The power in Veylis voice was ever present, reverberating across time, but this was as soft as Avo ever heard her. And more surprisingly, she responded. Unexpected. Something Naeko clearly hadnt anticipated either, judging from how startled he looked. Gazing up into the Gatekeeperscrunching inward as if in an attempt to hug itselfNaeko took another step forward and swallowed. I know that. You wouldnt be you otherwise. And you are more yourself again, Veylis said, sounding somewhat proud. I see you wearing the armor I helped make for you. It still fits well? Nothing fits me well anymore. But thats what happens when you keep getting older and never die. ...I understand. I visit places. See people. They change. But I do not. Not truly. Another silence followed. Im never gonna forgive you, Naeko said, finally. His hand opened and closed, and he was too tired and sad to rage. Im never going to forgive you for what you did. Forgiveness is for those that seek it. I am not sorry. My task is not done. You do not see See what? Hm? See what? See the hellpit we made of the world? See the point to all this? Yeah, I dont. I dont see. And I dont think you do either. What do you think happens if you win? Tell me that. Tell me. When I win, I will face my fathers judgment. By his will, I will meet my fate. Naeko scoffed. Hes not a god, Veylis. And if theres anything left of him, hell just... just let you go. He wont do anything to you. You were the world to him. More than the world. You know that. Then he should have listened to my warning. But he did not see then either. Fucking hells. Naeko rubbed at his face. Have you only been speaking to the Infacer all these years? Is that it? Do not seeVeylis, I dont know what you saw, but I sure as shit hope doubt it was worse than all this. A beat. Yes. Because in some of the paths, I lost you as well. Chapter 28-7 No Road Back Chapter 28-7 No Road Back There is no hate like love forsaken. -Jaus Avandaer 28-7 No Road Back "And you didn''t lose me in this one?" Naeko asked. He was more tired than heartbroken at this point. "Not yet," Veylis replied. "Not truly. You are here before me, are you not? You have even slowly returned to some semblance of your old self. Even this echo is better than the husk you were." "The husk I was?" Naeko laughed. It was a mirthful sound for such a rageful man. "I wasn''t a husk. I was..." He paused. "No, we''re not doing this. I''m going to tell you this right now. I''m going to give you the chance you never gave me. Never gave my Paladins. I''m going to do you kindness, a kindness you didn''t give me. A kindness master didn''t give me, a kindness that not even Jaus gave me. I''m coming for you, Veylis. What you have taken from me, you can never get back, so I don''t even care about taking from you. But you will stand down. You will answer for what you''ve done, and you will give back those you''ve taken." A long pause followed, and Naeko swallowed quietly. "We struggled, me and him. We both wanted to tell you, for different reasons, but now..." Veylis breathed. It was such an empty, reverberating sound. "We didn''t do it because we didn''t want to offend each other. I didn''t want him to think that I was going to use you against him, and he did not want the same thing, and so ultimately, so ultimately, so desperate were we to avoid hurting each other that we inflicted these wounds. On him. On me. On my mother. On you. What we want does not matter, it is what we can do, it is what we will do, it is what we can shape of the world." Naeko blinked. Then something inside his mind came ablaze like a wrathful flame. Fuck you. Fuck. You. Tell me that shit again. Tell me that again. Tell me how your control is going to fix everything. It''s just you now. It''s just you, me, and who else? Who''s left? Zein? Yeah. Okay, let''s count her. Zein. Me. You. And what? Who''s left from the whole world? Osjon? Naeko scoffed. "Osjon is a thing, not a person. And you know that. Is he still in love with you? Have you ever given him any interest? Have you ever gotten cold? Wanted company?" "Enough, Naeko, you embarrassed yourself," Veylis said, but too quickly. If Avo was to judge. Osjon is useful, he understands this. Willingness to please and his ability to think laterally are the main reasons I keep him. As for his adoration and his infatuation, I cannot control that in another. It is a crippling weakness, his greatest blemish, I cannot respect him for it. But ultimately, I will not condemn it for it either." Another beat passed between them. The Gatekeeper jingled its chain-like wings. "I remember the day you broke the Force Breaker," Veylis whispered. "I remember the day, for it is seared into my mind, it is mythology to me. Mythology lived. You, with the stolen power of other gods, standing against the god of peace and violence, standing against him, winning, prevailing, finding that crack in its lore. You tore a god in half. You broke the will of an entire people. I remember watching the faithful pitch themselves off a cliff, dashing themselves against the rocks far below in despair. I remember the power you inflicted on them; violence beyond force. You were perfect, you were crossing from just man and anger to wrath and retribution personified. You vent now like an angry mortal, but I remember what you could be. And because of that, there is no one else. You have left a gulf in me that cannot be filled by anyone else. Because no one else had done what you''d done, had survived what you survived, had pushed on by rage, by anger, by determination, like a cataclysm-made flesh, my brute above all other brutes." And now Naeko is looking away, unable to even gaze upon the Gatekeeper. There have been no others, you are right. It is ultimately just me and the Infacer, and we are alone, but the task has stripped us of our ability to be lonely. This is beneath us now, and I had hoped that you would have grown, you would have found it beneath you, because you have always been so much more than what you constrain yourself to be. "Why do I want to be more," Naeko said. "Why do you think I want to be more? Everything I''ve done, every little bit, every step, was because of someone else. Everything I did was because of you and Jaus or someone else." Finally, he stared at the Gatekeeper again. "What if this is more? What if more is me deciding that I need to break you?" "Would you like to hear the truth," came Veylis reply. Avo thought she sounded hopeful. "If you did, if you truly chose to march against me, then I would love you all the more for it. Naeko was speechless. Only for a heartbeat. Closing his eyes, he couldnt help it. He smiled. You havent changed a damn bit. And, as I said, you are coming back to me. I missed you. Dreamer. I give you my thanks and my eternal gratitude." Avo went very still at that. [Oh shit,] template-Chambers muttered in his mind. [Avo, when a crazy bitch thanks you, it''s usually time to run.] [Yeah,] Shotin added, [it''s usually a sign that you might have caught something and you might wanna resurrect.] Veylis continued. "I suspect that the restoration of my love would have been impossible if he was left alone, if he was allowed to just waste away. You have breathed new life into him, new purpose, even if the purpose is oppositional. I see him returning." "I didn''t do it for you. Take back your thanks. Take back your gratitude. He is your sin. This is not your gift." "So you say," Veylis replied, "but these are my feelings. These are my judgments, and they are beyond your means to effect. As is the Agnos. She is mine now, mine henceforth forever, until I have no more use for her. And then she will be mine to decide, to discard, to preserve, or to elevate." "Elevate," Avo replied. The High Seraph elaborated. "You have focused and become a nuisance, and even a danger in some areas, this is true. But though you are meticulous, though you are overwhelming, though you possess means of attack and complexities beyond even my mother, you are a newcomer to this game, this great game, and you have taken your eye away from the skies above and the wounds that remain." Avo did not understand what she was insinuating, but Veylis had no intention of being mysterious. "The Heaven of Love, its rupture is deteriorating rapidly, but you already knew this. She even had plans to resolve it after the trial. And then Avo understood, and then dread drowned the millions of templates that existed within him." "What have you done with Kae? What have you made her do?" "I have not made her do anything. She is brilliant. She has a potential solution for the Heaven of Love, but it requires someone to mantle its full weight, and for that, there is only one candidate worthy of the task, worthy of bestowing such a glory upon." "You want to graft the Heaven of Love onto Kae?" The thought left him as a near feral growl. He altered the structure of his mind to keep himself composed, but this was unexpected; disastorously unwelcome. "Yes, her solution requires a direct interface, and I believe no one else will do. Don''t worry. Victory will be one we all share, and if she passes, her loss will be something we all mourn." "No," Naeko cut in. "No. No. This won''t happen. You are done deciding. I will have her back, Veylis. I will have her back, and I will burn your world. I will break your paths. You have been blinded. Blinded by expectation. Blinded because you are an observer, but you do not live. You are a creature of two cages, one for the world, another for you. I will remedy your mistakes. I will meet you, will for will, miracle for miracle. We settle this the old way." A low hum of approval came from High Seraph. "So you say. Come then, Dreamer; my love. Take the future from me, if you can. Defy my will. Substitute your own. We will see who stands in the end, and who falls before the blade of deliverance." And at that, the waters of chronology stabilized, and Veylis receded. Another long quiet settled between now Chief Paladin and the Overheaven of Conceptualization. "I... think I understand why you fell in love with her," Avo said. Are still in love with her. Yeah. That was all Naeko wanted to say about that. Verbally, anyway. +Well. Your test worked. Dont think she realized what we were doing. Nasty godsdamn Heaven you made.+ +Thank Kae,+ Avo hummed with pleasure. The bodies currently channeling his and Naekos presences were actually Fallwalkers. Fallwalkers subsumed and overlapped by the gestalt. Somewhere across the city, hidden within the pocket of a madman from futures past, their actual selves hid, plotting a coming attack. A rare thought of disapproval came from Dice. No. It should decide its own name. Her words brought a pause to Avo. Do you still want to be called Dice? Yes. Why? Because I am only still here because chance. It is the right name. The right name. How often do people ascribe their own beliefs upon the patterns of existence. Avo spoke to the uplift once more. +Creature. Do you even want a name?+ Not from you. +If you had to refer to yourself?+ Wouldnt need a name. Why would I refer to myself? Perhaps Confidence would be a good name for the cat. It possessed a level of self-absurdness beyond any human. +And if another is to refer to you?+ RESURRECTION - 3% The uplift considered that for a second, and then replied. Lucky. Several templates within Avo responded with amusement. [Looks like we got some themes going here,] Corner murmured. +Why?+ Avo asked. Because I was lucky to be found. Fitting. A bit too fitting. Life rhymed in so many strange little ways. Avo shifted the mem-data over to Dice, and girl suddenly went very still. I like the name, she said. I like it a lot. Concurrently, somewhere hidden in the Warrensuntraceable even to AvoTavers sighed. +Well. I don''t know if to congratulate you or curse at you, because the streets... they''ve never been so quiet. The Squires I keep tabs on have gone to ground. Necros too. Everything is getting locked down. All the Guilds are calling in curfews. It''s tense, consangs. Real tense. I think the people feel it. Now the war''s coming. It''s a little early. Some people are trying to deny it, but yeah, the city''s on the edge again, and everyone knows. Everyone.+ +Good,+ Draus said. +Less collateral I need to shoot through.+ A spot of tension followed. The Regular spoke again. +So. Youre going to be channeling me and Kae through the gestalt, huh? Reckon thatll be enough to give the Gatekeeper the slip.+ +Should. It is the truth. You are there. You are me. And Veylis wont understand the Heaven. Doesnt. Didnt know that she wasnt actually talking to me or Naeko. That I was channeling our presence through subverted Fallwalkers. Proxies for our true selves. We have an opening.+ +Yeah. Speaking of... Jaus. I didnt think Id be listening in on the Chief Paladins relationship issues.+ White-Rab chuckled to himself. +We might all end up dead with you, Avo. Cant say its going to be boring.+ The Overheaven grunted. +Hows the node looking.+ +Still broken. Itll take time. Probably wont be done until after the trial. If we survive the trial... + Veylis will have her own issues soon enough... *** Once more, Avo shifted subminds. But this time, he was within a new vessel. Alysim stood with his arms open to the sky, soaking in the midnight rains. He was walking the streets of the Tiers, unnoticed by patrolling drones and Specters. Ignorance protected him, and the knowledge he bore of the paths kept him prepared for other means of detection. The district of Olphium was quiet as a grave. Everyone was to shelter in place and prepare for chronoshift, and with the populace mostly belonging to Sanctus, they had obliged. When the shift came, the position of the district would switch over to its counterpart in the Tiers; a place that bordered a Highflame surveillance facility. Through the thoughts being cast there, Avo would shuttle Alysim across the vastness of space and time using the chronoshift as cover, and plant Alysim within Atraxis Academy. The instructors, students, and systems were already subverted. But it would be the non-Godclads that Avo consumed to serve as another junction in his gestalt. The others were compromised by Veylis, marked with her will. We approach a convergence of fate, Alysim breathed, seemingly speaking to no one. Yes. Are you ready? It does not matter. The paths have fallen away. Can you feel it? The routes have gone from uncountable to many to now, so few... There is no ready. There are only the actions we can perform, and that which follows thereafter. Truth, Avo said, emulating the Gatekeeper. You dont expect to survive this. Dreamer. I am already dead. I simply wish to see if I can achieve my task before the moment that I am slain. This was true. And this made Alysim far freer than most people Avo knew. Not your paths anymore. Wont do what you did. Not tainted of control like you. Indeed, Alysim sighed, mournfully. But I can feed off solace enough. At least the traitors may yet be punished. At least a better choice remains to chronicle this worlds history. A deep sadness welled up from within Alysim. Remember us, Avo. Remember everything if you can. Chronicle what has happened. Bring the testament of what has been suffered, and what we have survived into the future. I will not be your chronicle, Avo said, regarding the pulsing pinpricks of consciousness growing among his templates. Alysims vision was so lowso ultimately human. My testament will be of existences resurrection and liberation. Damn the chains of the past. And thus was the will of the Overheaven spoken. And thus did the district begin to shudder with oscillating gold, chronology bleeding over the horizon, into the near future... Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (I) Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (I) {Tradition is a hard yoke to break. Some among my contemporaries claim that the terrestrials are merely delusional or culturally psychotic. This is inaccurate. They likely say these things not because they don''t know better, but because they are warhawks and desire to sterilize the planet with one final engagement, settling matters left over from the Builder War. I do not believe and do not associate with their opinions. No. I think that the legal system of Idheim is substantially adequate and to be commended, especially considering their long history of extreme violence and ritualistic bloodshed to solve matters rather than diplomacy, negotiation, fact-finding, and truth. But as things go, hope is a faraway thing. Ultimately, the legal system governed by the Paladins has proven to be at least somewhat effective. They remain the balance between each of the Great Guilds, and should they offer favor to any side, the entire balance of power could be toppled immediately thereafter. They are, in a sense, crippled kingmakers. Their trials begin with opening arguments, in which anyone and everyone is allowed to bring in evidence and memory testimonies from across the city. Countless Guilders participate. This is a place not only to decide the fate of the accused, but also to jockey for political influence and arrange themselves in case a greater conflict breaks out. During this period, the Court of Truth is thaumaturgically sealed from outer reality while all the related parties deliberate under the watchful gaze of the Gatekeeper: Jaus Avandaers final legacy. The delegates involved also sometimes involve we, of Voidwatch, toward the end of preserving the polities that remain... -EGI Hammurabi 28-8 Opening Arguments (I) [Vator] Vator never quite liked the aesthetic of Scale. The entire concept was just so unoriginal. A structure of utmost importance placed at the very top of the city? At the very core of the Tiers? Jaus Avandaer might be the Godbreaker, but his sense of style remained infected by those who came before him. So centralized, so symbolic, so utterly drool... The youngest Greatling sighed. Perhaps he could regard it as a heart with valves leading out into each of the Great Guilds. Yes, that would be more palatable, but it still didnt resolve the problem of the Paladins mountain fortress. Now that was a true monstrosity: an amalgam of shifting bricks was the best its creators could come up with. Yes, yes, the thaumaturgic benefits it provided were great, but really now, shifting bricks? And did they need to make the water crash forth like cascading rocks too? As they entered one of its many hollows, Vator frowned as they began landing on a pad holographically outlined by a technical drone. Again, Vator sighed. This time, he drew the attention of his father, turning to glare at him with augmented eyes of silvery blue. The color stood out nicely in the dark red ambiance inside the aerovec. Now Vator smiled and took a mental snapshot of the moment using his Metamind. He would see if he could recreate this soon. Vator, Uthred said, voice slow and measured, can I count on you to remain on task and unburdened by distractions? Of course, father, Vator grinned. I am simply committed to processing all my mental suffering right now. We are bound for a most hideous place. The sofas they occupied in the aero formed a U-shape along the back of the vehicle. The two Greatling sat facing each other, while Green Riverostensibly sworn to their aid and secretly likely in league with their hidden enemyjoined them as a guest. Her presence inflicted an awkwardness on Uthred that Vator simply ignored, speaking easily with her and Emotion during their journey as if there was nothing to worry about at all. Because there was nothing to worry about. Things were looking chaotic, desperate, and altogether grim for so many. That was true. But chaos was an expressive canvas! It made things interesting. Sure, they wanted to save Abrel, but the possibility that she might be lost to politics orVeylis forbidan act of sudden terror, gave the moment its flavor. That was what finally settled Vators annoyance: this moment of was living history. He was part of living history. Perhaps the High Seraph would see him rewarded for his deeds if all went well. Perhaps she would show him the paths... Their vehicle settled with a soft thud. A vibration passed through the interior of the aerovec, followed by the hissing of a door. +We enter the belly of a beast,+ Emotion murmured. Vator smiled at that. A rather overused metaphor, Emotion. I expected something more original. +I was being literal. The Dreamer is here... and he is watching us.+ Uthred went still halfway to a stand. The former Authority glowered at the locus placed on the table between the couch. Vator was pleased his fathers gaze never reached Green River; the Authority mastered himself well. Right now? +Yes. Several Paladins bear his touch... the infrastructure here... even the drone.+ But we remain protected, Green River said, injecting just enough worry into her voice. She pulled at the long fur coat she wore, and the fox wrapped around her neck blinked lazily at Vator. The young Guilder smiled. The Sang wasnt half-bad herself. He wondered if she could keep her composure if he dissected her, or if it would be the fox that betrayed her emotions. +Yes,+ Emotion said. +We remain protected. He possesses only a facet of Noloths treasures. The Dreamer will only strike if there is an openingbut I doubt even that. He plots his own schemes here. Be wary.+ Vator shared a look with his father. *** Other attacks occurred without rhyme or reason to onlookers. People suddenly turned hostile towards their former comrades and family, exhibiting impossible abilities in sudden explosions of violence and destruction. Unbeknown to the ignorant, they were no longer faced with those they knew before, but a gestalt wearing their body. Avo, Corner, White-Rab, Draus, Chambers, Cas, Denton, and Kae wrecked havoc as one and themselves through another. They were minds within minds and Heavens upon gods, each supporting each. Kae, in particular, targeted techno-thaumic reactors in Lights End. She wielded her experience like a weapon and formed the conditions for one collapse after another. Though a template, she too was to be instrumental in her own rescue, in the testimony at Scale, in the creation of Avos greatest Heaven. Despair had her in the beginning. Despondence. But now How did one process being captured by the single most powerful woman in the city? Now, after hearing what Veylis intended, after realizing that the High Seraph planned to use her original self to debase the Heaven of Love towards some end or another, the Agnos was finished. She had enough. The Saintist wanted to use her to ensure their own victory. She would see them live under a sundered sky that would remind them evermore of their eternal folly. To that end, Chambers agreed with her. Which was why people were exploding while genitals grew from behind the eyes, within the ears, and filled the throats of Guilders across the city. Lustaways failed. The rash spread. White-Rab, Avo, the Incubi, and Chambers worked in tandem to make everything worse. As the sores spread, Paladins arrived mere minutes thereafter, pre-alerted to the risks and effectively taking control of the district thereafter. All this while a mercury teardrop comprised of a ferromagnetic non-Newtonian fluid slipped from reflection to reflection, punching clean through Highflames hierarchy as thoughtcasts went unheard and sessions went unanswered. *** All this happened at once in perfect synchronicity. Faintly, the shadows across New Vultun shivered as ghostly feathers licked at the corners of reality. *** [Alysim] The chronoshift concluded. Alysim looked across from the building upon which he stood and saw a massive beam trailing up into the air, dissolving into flickering motes. He took a step forward over a reflective puddleand promptly splashed down and across spatial reality. He emerged out of a vitrified wall a second after, twelve kilometers away from where he used to be. He stood within an operations center manned by three technicians clamped upon wall-mounted jack-stations. Avos influence over their minds was subtle, so as to avoid drawing too much attention. The Infacer was presently incapacitated, granting them an opportunity to move unimpeded. Their alternative plan was for Avo to engage directly and make it seem like he was trying to capture and weaponize the facility, rather than using it to smuggle Alysim over into Axtraxis. Beyond a thaumically reinforced window rose a constant stream of light, and from it emanated miracles of Radiance and Signals. Such would be the vehicle of Alysims transference, and such was a vulnerability Avo hoped to exploit without alerting Veylis at all. The facility was designated as [R29 Legacy] across Highflames classified channels. There were others of its like, but this one was specifically made to monitor thoughtcasts and transmissions passing through the demiplane governing Atraxis Academy. The light of this facility passed through several Omnitech checkpoints before arriving at the existential cleft over Highflames central Sovereignties in the Tiers, ensuring the thoughts and data consumption of Highflames future cadre remained uncorrupted. In a strange sense, it reminded Avo the Unwhere used by the Paladinsitself currently active, as DRongo and Abrel were making an imminent return. It seemed that Highflame was stealing tricks from the Paladins. Each one of the Omnitech checkpoints presented a risk as well, but with the Infacer missing and Veylis occupied, Avo seized the moment and clutched Alysim using his Techplaguer. The Heaven of Signals manifested like an inverted broadcast tower, bouncing on its dish-shaped antennae. Time to BOUNCE! UPWARD into time. Hm. The SLEEPER is close. A splash of random numbers swept over the Chronicler, and a second later he was poured into the light past the walls. But Avo wasnt done. A weave of gold formed over him, and for the second time that day, Alysim skipped across time, hopping past each checkpoint without every being registered. Carried by a beam of spreading brightness, Alysim dissolved across three thresholds before he was sudden shunted over into a new spherical plane near low orbit. Its expanse was one of roiling clouds and roaring fire, and a structure six hundred kilometers across and three hundred tall hovered in the epicenter like an ebony anvil indifferent to the lashing flames within a furnace. From seemingly nowhere converged five sources of light, and they swam up the bottom of the structure into a lone pylon. From there, Alysim shifted through the complexities of pseudo-technological infrastructure to finally staggered free from a wall of consoles with circuits and chips connecting them to a massive slab of vivianite. At once, the gestalt reoriented itself within Alysim while queeling the intensity of their assaults. The first part was done. Infiltration was easy. Now, it was time to inflict some very deep, every actual wounds across the heart of Highflame. Chambers chuckled in the back of Alysims mind. +Alright, consangs. Lets go make these Guilder half-strands wish their dads squirted them over the edge into the Maw instead of ever finishing inside their moms. Or the vats.+ +I believe the vats work that way,+ Denton added. +Though they technically could...+ +Whatever. Its a metaphor. The point is: Let''s show that sow Veylis the worst fuck of her life.+ Inside Alysims right pocket, Naeko gave an unpleasant cough. Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (II) Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (II) Oh, good. Were all going to die. -Dowager Hua Far-Pearl upon hearing that the Stormsparrow will be in attendance at the trial 28-8 Opening Arguments (II) Vator appreciated the insides of Scale more than its exterior. Here, there was a sense of life to the place: movement; animation. Drones flitted about, passing through forming and dissolving alcoves as if wasps in a hive. Around them, the bricks of this miracle-infused structure shifted, offering channels and paths for the machines to proceed to their tasks. Emotion claimed that each of them had the ghoul''s touch, that each emanated with the faint signature of their great enemy: the Burning Dreamer, the one they called Avo. Vator, unlike his father, looked forward to meeting their great foe. He wanted to know the nature of Jhreds true killer, and he wanted to know just how a creature as crude and simple as a ghoul managed to inflict such humiliation on an Instrument of Highflame and Elder of Ori-Thaum at the same time. They followed the Paladins wordlessly, walking down quick-formed hallways as the stones beneath their feet shifted, shuttling them onward at unnatural speeds. A cascade of different domains impacted Vator''s frame as thresholds of mind and miracle passed through him, scanning his person and listing him within Scale''s internal registry. He half expected an alert to sound, considering the cargo they were carrying, but as he shot a glance at the locus in his hand, no response came, and no sirens were raised. Light spilled down over him from ahead, and he faced a valley basked in blinding radiance and even greater pressure. It was a pressure almost unlike anything Vator had ever felt almost, because there was another that could be compared to it, another that was more sublime and total: the touch of the High Seraph herself, her glorious power surmounting time and space. As they approached a vertical entryway, Vator felt as if he was standing upon a boat made of stones, entering the jaws of a forbidden beast. "Be ready for anything," Uthred said, his voice low as gravel, and calm like drizzle falling at the eye of a storm. The younger Greatling simply nodded. His struggle was not one of anxiety, but more of excitement.Fiind updated novels at novelhall.com As an instrument, he had been a specialist, much like Abrel was. Though she was more focused on counterintelligence against Ori-Thaum, his interests and prey were a far broader subset of the Massist scourge. He liked hunting everyone and preferred enacting Highflames will with a more personal touch. While Abrel was, in a word, part of a defensive apparatus that mainly faced Glaives and Incubi, Vator was a cancer spreading within his foes. Here and now, though, he found himself burdened with even greater purpose and promise, for the foe he faced this time was unlike any other he had ever sampled. As the last protective threshold washed over him, he stepped into a looming chamber, so wide and vast that the winds here scythed more than they billowed, like skyward whips passing over an open plain. He judged the thousands of private pods lined both walls of the chamber and realized that light was emanating from the stones themselves. What captured his attention immediately was the massive statue before him, a massive statue built upon a risen pedestal with many steps. After a moments observation, he gave a disgusted snort and ignored the statue for its design offended him, and he looked over the other aesthetics across the room. The center was too wide, and too vast, and the Paladins were separated into four lines across the room. A few hundred of them were hovering in the air, facing where the Massists and the Saintists were to be seated. Some others were facing inward across the room, staring at each other, holding the middle. Ever metaphorical were these tireless guardians of New Vultun. Vator sighed. Symbology. Droll symbology. What a performance. But then he heard something. A rattling of chains. A shifting of metaphysical pressure. It was like a boot slowly grinding against his consciousness. Something loomed behind the statue -- moved. Uthred and Green River felt it too, for they responded, searching with their eyes, though they continued following the Paladins. Moving chains slid through the tessellated walls in the distance, straining to bear the weight of something truly ponderous. Something that Vator couldnt quite see as they were led up a nearby narrow staircase, into the Saintist section of the court, bound for their designated seating. One story up, he discovered a full suite of different facilities waiting for them. There was a common mingling area, something between an antechamber and a lobby that stretched across the entire length of the section. It went on for kilometers, and massive golden chandeliers lined with diamonds and crystals swung overhead. Service drones remained on standby, and every twelve meters or so there was a holojector built around an encirclement of sofas offering a whole suite of different thoughtcasts, vicarities, and propaganda for the viewer''s entertainment. The space was also entirely empty. It was like an empty throne room offered just for them. Vator and his group had been the first guests to arrive, flying through the night without rest or hesitation. Father claimed that he desired to meet the Chief Paladin to offer his evidence before anyone else could muddy the waters. A believable lie, but Vator knew his father better than that. It was simply hard to face the other Saintists with his task half-complete, and through this, perhaps, they would find some level of redemption in the eyes of the High Seraph and the elites below her. They were led on without stopping, the ground shifting beneath their feet once more as they were carried forward to their final destination. The stones rose in stacks of stairs, extending forward first, then suddenly cutting at a sharp left angle. A section of the tessellated wall above them swung open, and suddenly they found themselves looking across the stretch of the Core of Truth, a private pod offered to them for however long this entire affair would take. As they entered the embedded podium, however, Vator had to update his assumptions. This wasn''t a private pod. Someone was already here. Three people, in fact. The first among them was that bull-like specimen of a man, Samir Naeko. Vators face lit up in a grin as he beheld the Chief Paladin. There were Scaarthians built with less width and muscle mass than he bore. His sinews were so thick that even a frequency blade might take some time to cut through his flesh. Not even his combat-skin could hide his physicality. He was robust to the point of absurdity, the kind of man you would find within a promotional biomod advertisement, marketing new muscle boosters while staring you down, questioning your worth as a warrior. Naeko snorted. "Well, he don''t look like much, does he? Just an inert piece of vivianite. The corner of his father''s lip twitched. Oh, how the man hated glib remarks. "I understand that there is proper procedure for handing in evidence," Uthred stated carefully. "Things are to be pooled among all registered visitors within this court. As both the Saintists and Massists are involved today, would I be incorrect in assuming that my submission would be included with the others?" "Your submission is happening right now," Naeko replied. "In fact, you can let him out. He should get a seat at this table too, metaphorically. That way, all the Great Powers get a representative. Would you like that, Emotion? You in there? Can you hear me?" A low noise of disapproval came from Uthred. He directed a cast at the locus. +Come out then. Be part of this circus.+ Emotion materialized a moment later, forming that ever-brutal visage. His eyes were stitched shut. A cloak of shadows clung to his body, and in his heart, an open crevice where a dead avian was held in place by tangled knots. "Chief Paladin Naeko," Emotion began, "you live a long life for a dog. Most don''t outlive their masters." At this, Naeko smacked his lips together and sneered from behind his glowing visor. "Yeah, well, if I had been with him, he just might still be here. Can''t say the same about you. You were always there for your masters, and it still wasnt enough. Even when they made four of you? Wheres the rest, Emotion? And how are the Hungers? Hope I didnt pat them too hard last time. Can you hear them behind the jingling of chains?" At this, the Gatekeeper''s rattling intensified, and Vator fought back a snort. "They''re mocking you," he said, his glee almost childlike. This was more juvenile than he expected. So much posturing, even from the Chief Paladin. He didn''t know what to expect from such a legend. But humans have to be humans, after all. The tessellated doorway to their pod suddenly sealed and so did the viewing port that gave them a full overview of the court. Uthred stiffed, but no one else reacted to his nervousness. "What is this?" His answer came with the sudden materialization of a new form, a new figure. There was no splashing of ghosts, only a new metaphysical weight. The creature wasn''t, and then the creature was. Between blinks, Vator found himself beholding a pale, nightmarish being. The first thing that caught his attention was the halo that burning halo, flames licking high, materializing as faces of the fallen and peepholes of memory into different locations. Eight blackened limbs drifted upon clouds of smog. Vators mastery of flesh told him that he was likely detecting an echo head, though modified with... He paused. He didn''t even know. That was entirely novel and unique. Each tendril was connected to a vessel made from threaded ceramite. Long claws extended from slender digits, and black eyes and sharp teeth gleamed in the darkened ambiance. They''d come here expecting the Burning Dreamer to perform his misdeeds from shadows, mislead the Guilds with subterfuge. Such was what Emotion told them to expect, and promised to repel. But here the monster was, in the open, in league with the Chief Paladin himself. All expectations were cast to the wind now, and all plans were now in free fall. Vator got the feeling that everything had been misjudged, that he and his father were still blind, that Emotion himself might be blind. Uhtred tried to stand, the flames around him igniting. But then a translucent hand wrapped around him as he gasped. The fires were extinguished in an instant, and Uthred Greatling, Authority and one of the most powerful men in New Vultun, was pressed back into his seat without any particular strain on the part of the Chief Paladin. The faintness of a hand, a vaporous palm materialized over Uthred, and slowly, the Burning Dreamer spoke for the first time. "It''s good to finally meet you, Authority. I''ve been looking forward to this. Your daughter sends her regards. She''s screaming at me even now, begging me not to eat you. Begging me. She cares for you deeply. You should be proud." What? Uthred said. Beautiful, Vator whispered, taking in ghouls visage. Never mind the Gatekeeper, this was what he came here to see. Wondrous prey. Glorious specimen. +Dreamer,+ Emotion said, keeping his tone even. +How bold of you. How arrogant. You think yourself ready to face the Guilds in the open, then?+ The once-ghoul opened its mouth, but then paused. The Guilds? All of them? No. But that doesnt mean I can make this war unfold just the way I want. Once more, he turned to look at Uthred and Vator. And ensure the protection of those I deem worthy. Abrel. Come greet your family. And from his halo coursed flame cast in a familiar form. Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (III) Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (III) +The Dreamer knows. Such as we predicted. No matter. The other sacrifices are in place. Should we trigger the Forgotten now before the Guilds arrive? Strike with our opening?+ +No. Hold. We wait until an opening is engineered. Then we will sacrifice the Emotions to strike at the Gatekeeper.+ +This will not kill it. Its memory is cast across time itself by the hand of the High Seraph. Until her scar is removed, our ability to harm is limited.+ +Yes. But by her hand, we will see the Gatekeeper brokenwait, what is he doing?+ -The Famine of Mercy 28-8 Opening Arguments (III) C[Uthred]C It took everything Uthred Greatling had to choke down his sickness. The creature standing before him spoke, and with each word, the Former Authority felt his insides recoil and shudder. The way its halo burned, the way it could peer into his mindit was a nightmare made flesh, come to haunt Uthred for all his past failings. And worst of all, he was powerless, as powerless as he was when he tried to stand against the High Seraph. The Chief Paladin''s might was beyond measure, for he was might itself. Uthred, though capable of burning blight and cleaving space to carve matter and metaphysics alike, was but a practitioner of war, a slave beneath the master of violence and force themselves. Though Uthred struggled, Naeko decided, and that was all. "What is this?" he managed to choke out, his anger and fear warring for control. He mastered himself. Years of combat had taught him discipline and focus, but it still took everything he had not to quaver, not to betray himself unto weakness. In answer to Uthred''s question, a sea of darkness spilled out from the ghoul''s eyes, its presence cold and unnatural, empty in another word, like a void pouring into existence. Its outline was threaded by a filigree of phantasmal resonance, and even then, flickers of flame still danced as the alien substance entirely consumed the ghoul. A moment thereafter, with a sudden flourishing of midnight wings, Abrel Greatling hatched free from the parting petals of a midnight-colored egg. She was as Uthred remembered her. Her combat-skin was still on, her heels were still those ridiculous stilettos, falcon-themed and gaudy. He hated those things, but Abrel wouldnt let them go, and for one of the few times in Uthred Greatling''s life, he surrendered to another''s will rather than his own. She stood tall, her jaw squared, her eyes unblinking, but she swallowed, clearly as nervous as he was. "Father," she managed. "I wish we could have had this conversation in better circumstances." She was fighting, fighting herself as hard as he was fighting himself, and shame lingered behind every word. "I wish I could have told you this before. I wish I could have revealed this to you. I wish..." She took a deep breath and calmed herself. "There are many things I wish. I wish I didnt go after the Burning Dreamer. I wish I could have saved my brother. I wish I would have listened to you and brought him in. But these things dont matter anymore. What we wish now falls under what he will allow." A beat passed as she looked upon Kae Kusanade and Jelene Draus. Letting out a soft sigh, she faced her brother and gave him a tired look. "At least you seem happy, Vator." Uthred followed her gaze and regarded his youngest son. It was true. The boy was practically bouncing with glee. Of course, this moment of madness thrilled him. He must have been thinking about what macabre art piece he was going to plan, or maybe if he could flay the flesh from everyone present and unify them somehow in some twisted facsimile of a metaphor he just thought up. "Well..." Vator chuckled. "I... Yes!" he finally admitted. He leaned back in his seat and threw up his hands. This is just... sublime. Im sorry father! Look at where we are! Look at what we are a part of! The Great Game! This is the Great Game of Guilds. And here we sit! That brought a slight smirk to Abrel''s face. "I cant believe Im saying this, Vator, but considering one of us is happy, that does make me feel better." The youngest Greatling held his arms open as if embracing the present without fear. "Well, I aim to please." Abrel gave another intake of breath and faced her father once more. "Alright, I suppose I should explain everything from the start. Let you know just what''s at stake." And so her recounting began. With each following word, Uthred felt the coldness of the void he''d just experienced seep deeper, deeper into his bones, deeper into his soul, deeper and deeper still. Her tale was one of unbelievable absurdity. A ghoul enhanced by a Famine, empowered by the High Seraphs custom-made Frame, driven by the idea of choice. This creature was the reason behind Jhreds death and the Greatling misfortune. This creature was now facing Veylis Avandaer herself, seeking to claim dominance over the city. And then the absurdity faded, and horror grew. Abrel told him about Jaus final fate, about the scars they bore within them. Temporal scars for Veylis to exert her influence. Vator felt at his chest with curiosity, and Uthreds mind spun back to the moment he was drawn into the paths. He had always wondered howno. This had to be a lie. All of it. Shaken and unwilling to endure a stunned stupor, something inside Uthred broke and he cried out. "Enough, enough," Uthred said, "you''re lying. All this, this deception, this defilementtake her away from me. Do not use her form to assail me." But Abrel stayed and looked as broken as he did. Beside her, the nightmare manifested once more, a pale smear upon the darkness of the room. "Its not a deception," he said, his tone almost mocking. "Isn''t that right, Veylis? Are you watching me? Are you upset that I''ve ruined whatever plan you had? Whatever you were trying to achieve with these two? Should I sear understanding into them using the Gatekeeper? Grant the Authority his first glimpse of truth?" For a moment, there was but silence, silence, and then, subtly, ever so subtly, Uthred felt a shift in reality. The Pale Spider clearly felt it as well, for the monster tilted his head and looked beside Uthred, its mouth drawing wide in a vicious blade-lined grin as if anticipating the arrival of a new guest. A moment later, someone suddenly was. He stood a few inches short of Uthred, though perhaps a hundred pounds heavier. His cheeks were chubby and round, and his bald scalp shone bright beneath the ambient light of the court. His robes today were ruffled and thick, purest white without blemish. It matters not if you tell him this," Osjon said, speaking to Avo rather than Uthred. "He understands. He still believes in our cause. We have never doubted his loyalty. No. You merely used it. But thats fine. Dont expect to turn him against you. I just wanted to use him to get to you and the Famines. Have you both hear me at once. That made Osjons expression dissolve. Why? Because I want you to protect our shared interest. The ghoul looked at Emotion as well. Who are you speaking to? Osjon asked, studying Emotion as well. Depends. Which one of you is going to hit the other one first. Emotions expression grew taut. I will aid the first of you that tries to remove the other from Scale. Join together to strike me and Ill send my memories to all the arriving delegates and reveal the first node of Noloth I find. The monster was staring directly at Osjon now. It can be a direct war or a messy affair. Just giving your master a choice. Who does she want to risk reaching her Gatekeeper? Me? Or them? Highflames response came in the form of a sudden static explosion. Emotion was shredded by integer-laced shrapnel. Noise swept through Uthreds skull, passing through even through his planar defenses, and cleansing him of hostile presence. A low frequency rang in his skull as he heard a new voice enter the fray. They chuckled with mechanical reverberations. {You really are the second-most devious bastard in this city.} The Pale Spider looked amused. Infacer. See youve recovered. {Yeah. Im going to crash Ori-Thaums market for what you did to me. I hate their Heavens of Information so very much.} What just happened? Vator said, eyes wide with wonder. Rules of engagement were just negotiated, Osjon nodded. We now have varying levels of priority hostiles. An excellent, if horrible act of diplomacy. {A dick move as our ancestors might call it,} the Infacer chimed. Finally, Uthred caught a look in his youngest sons eyes. It was a look of enchantment. His gaze was gleaming. He was staring upon the Burning Dreamer, enraptured, consumed. This moment, this had been a masterstroke. He realized that the ghoul had used the pressure of turning him and his son to draw out Highflame, to use them against Noloth in turnmade them conduct a tangible act of harm on his behalf against a shared foe. And now his fear of the Burning Dreamer was complete. The nightmare was more than he could ever imagine, and looking at how Vator was staring on at this Avo, his brothers murderer, with an enchanted expression, Uthred swallowed as he dreaded the seduction of his son. C[Maru]C +Alright, the first of the Saintists are coming in,+ said Paladin Hatchet. The Sang sighed across the session. +I think I see my cousin among them. How annoying. I was hoping to avoid her for another century at least.+ Maru snorted. +Yeah, well, I don''t think there''s any avoiding this one.+ Looking through the DeepNav, depicting the internal corridors of Scale, Paladin Maru Sandrapal watched 4,000 delegates representing the No-Dragons surge towards the Court of Truth. Attuning his mind to local specters and camera systems, he watched as they all had those swirling painted facades plastered over their faces. Good. Neuter-Masks were active. That would avoid the Moro-Kwan incident from 50 years ago. The last thing he needed was the Sang to provoke another battle in the halls of Scale. That had nearly sparked the Third Guild War prematurely. Casting a brief look at the pod holding Naeko and their esteemed guests, Maru shuffled as he gathered his nerves. There was a feeling in the air. There was nothing to it yet, just a feeling. But he had the same vibes before the Fourth Guild War kicked off. And just as well, the Dreamer told him about the coming war. He hadn''t wanted to believe the ghoul or whatever that creature was. But with the way things were going, Scale wasnt going to be the mediator but the powder keg when everything went off. A shadow formed behind the shivering boundary protecting the insides of the Court of Truth. Maru adjusted himself and prepared to serve as the welcoming committee, ushering in both Saintist and Massist alike for this wonderful bilateral trial of mutual humiliation. However, the guest that arrived was not who he expected. She was a Sang, indeed. But she was no Guilder, no ally to the No-Dragons, or anyone else for that matter. Maru had known her, had seen and been her in vicarities, and walked streets while bathed in holographic portrayals of her triumphs and glory. She entered the court, stretching her arms high as she yawned. "It seems I''m a little early," she said, rolling her shoulders. Her head was composed of three faces, each taking up a side. They all held different expressions, were decorated with contrasting makeup and various shades. The mien she directed at Maru was a featureless doll-white visage, with red lipstick and gleaming silver eyes. It was a smiling face, a joyous face. And the world around her bubbled with effervescence as electricity and sparrows danced through the air. A song of spring trailed with her every step, and from her back sprouted six additional arms, a stunning accompaniment to her two natural limbs. The first two were cybernetic. One held a banner decorated with lightning-infused sparrows tearing into a falling hawk. The other was a long spear with crimson hair painted along the flat of its blades. The following two arms were long and bestial, rippling with muscle, claws to rip and rend. And the last two arms were thin, impossibly so. They were like wisps of whiskers dancing and trailing in the wind behind her. Her attire was as colorful as he remembered, a complex interplay of patterns and symbols from ages long past. More banners sprouted free from her back like flapping wings, and tassels and paintings of dragons ran down the poncho that she wore. A breath escaped from Maru as he looked on at New Vultun favorite and most-feared Fallwalker. "Sparrow," he managed, "what the hells are you doing here?" She simply smiled. "I was invited, puppy. Now? Wheres the Chief Paladin and his delightful new friend. I wish to offer them my greetings. I heard a war might be starting here and wanted to join in on the opening festivities. Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (IV) Chapter 28-8 Opening Arguments (IV) +Here we go. Into the belly of Scale, where peace or ruin may follow. Listen close and keep your friends and families closer, consangs. This might be the beginning of the end.+ -Cala Marlowe, The Fateless Thoughtcast 28-8 Opening Arguments (IV) C[Abrel]C Abrels return to Idheim was as quick as it was jarring. The Unwhere was effectively a place in constant transition. The Instrument existed within a beam that jumped from satellite to satellite, dancing across the void. For the week she spent there, she was conscious but somewhat divorced from having a body. After the voiders had returned her, she was briefly examined by the Paladins and then placed in another constellation of satellites. And there she lingered. Until she was suddenly called back. A faint shifting sensation was what caught her attention at first, and that was all. Suddenly, she was spearing down through the atmosphere, a beam searing her material form back into reality. Within the confines of Scale, her cog-feed loaded as the radiance faded from her person. Abrel found herself entombed within a silo made from tessellating bricks. Everything here was a sheen of black, and as they shifted, she felt herself descend as if within an elevator. A few moments thereafter, the walls before her parted, and she saw another figure standing across from her. Something about the look in their eyes told Abrel she was dealing with someone older, though they lacked any genuine wrinkles. The stranger was dressed in ornate finery, fitting the aesthetic of Clan DRongo of Ori-Thaum. A blue velvet cap on their head and a translucent curtain was veiled across their left eye, distorting their planned mark from sight. As the space between them stood open, an awkward silence followed. Abrel stared at the Ori, and the Ori stared back. "So, you''re the elder," Adril said, trying to stay nonchalant. Usually, when an Instrument saw an Ori Elder, the situation fell under the category of assassination or interrogation. This time, however, they were both being tried in a neutral court their sins paraded before all the Guilds to judge. Bitter amusement welled up within Abrel. Truly, the Greatlings were breaking new grounds in the realm of dishonor once more. Indeed. I am Elder Mwaba DRongo. And you are Abrel Greatling. It seems that fate has frowned on both of us." Abrel kept her lips thin at that. "Wouldnt quite call it fate." An inscrutable look drifted across the elders face. No. I wouldnt quite call him that either. Now, Abrel understood. Which made her anxiety worse. Pawns. That was what they were. Pawns in pieces in the Great Game, with no ability to influence their own lives, no capacity to overcome the participating player. A genuine emptiness opened inside Abrel. What the fuck did being worthy matter when you had no power over anything. Anything at all? +It matters because you choose. And things change.+ Avo murmured in the back of her mind. Abrel almost drew upon her Heaven. +Jaus! Fuck! Dont do that, you+ She caught herself before she annoyed the nightmarish omnipresent mind-eater that now held sway over her fate. Her familys fate as well. Her template was uploaded into their Metamind, and recent events struck Abrel like an artillery barrage. +Oh... oh, shit. The Speaker... hes here too?+ +Very popular girl. Very unfortunate girl. Depends on perspective. But will see if I can keep you and your family alive through this.+ Abrel scoffed at that. It wasnt a promise. But it sure as shit wasnt a no either. She would take pretty much anything she could get at this point. +She wasnt referring to me. Do you know that?+ Another jolt of panic flared up inside Abrel. She searched through her new memories and understood. +The Famines?+ +Yes.+ +Right. Great. What a delightful clusterfuck Im descending into.+ +Dont worry. Wont let you suffer pointless blame. It is time for truth. It is time we all be honest. You. New Vultun. Me. It is time for all of us to officially meet.+ Instrument Abrel Greatling closed her eyes. Maybe being judged guilty and banished by the Gatekeeper wouldnt be so bad after all. +Its worse. Hungers are on the other side. Will see you mentally and metaphysically dissected.+ +Hey, Avo, stop making my existential crisis worse.+ +Cant run. Can only face it. Stand and deliver, Abrel Greatling.+ Pure disbelief became Abrel. +I hate you. I hate you for saying that.+ *** *** C[Marlowe]C Cala Marlowe dreamed up a lot of fantastical shit in her time. Part of that was all the drug use. But being invited to Scale, attending a trial that would probabl lead into the end timeswell, beginning times, depending on who you askedand being in cahoots with the mastermind of the whole ordeal... Thats the kind of madness not even drugs can provide. She was among the last people to enter Scale before the plane was formally sealed. Her group numbered five hundred, and they were listed as the unaffiliated. You know, citizens that didn''t quite qualify for being a color anymore, but didnt actually do anything bad enough to get booted down the Tiers. They were a loose bunch of bastards: children of Fallwalkers, neutral families left over from bygone eras, lottery winners who remained unsponsored. Detritus, basically. But ultimately, in a city like New Vultun, even detritus could be useful. Of course, useful to who was the question. She knew a few of those who went in, in the last group. Yat Gwan Sin: a member of the Lost Harvest Society, a member of a very anti-No-Dragon clade, who unfortunately caught the bleed over of the Dragon Curse due to being subjugated under the Sang during the Age of Pantheons. And then there was Thalen Moller, a former Highflame vicarity star turned ardent Paladin supporter after suffering a mishap while diving through an unedited Crucible experience. Now, he was basically the Paladins number one fan. No question why he was here. Then there was Marlowe herself. She was, after all, invited by Chief Paladin Naeko on a whim, a thing closer to engineered fortune than outright qualification on her part. But that was fine. Kala Marlow knew her lot in life, and her lot, being born a color, meant that the coin was going to land in her favor more times than not. Being part of Avo Gestalt only magnified her position. Stepping into the vast chamber, she felt the coldness of the court wash over her, heard the ringing of chains, stared upon that statue, twin hands clutching out from a scale, and took in the thousands upon thousands of Massists and Saintists glaring at each other from their respective podiums. The space was at once colossal and too small to contain the naked animosity choking the atmosphere. Thoughtcasts were exchanged, staccatos of curses, muted insults, and intercepted men-cons. The Exorcists were doing their job quite well. A few Saintists and Massists were taken away by Paladins, constrained by cages of light as they protested their innocence. +They wanted to start a little fight,+ Avo said, chuckling in the back of Marlowe''s mind, +decided to show their plans to the Paladins. Remove trouble before making my own.+ +Right,+ Marlowe replied, +wouldn''t want anyone to steal your thunder.+ A Ghostlink from a passing drone reached out to Marlowe, and she accepted the mem-data it was trying to transfer. Her seating arrangements were received. She was getting a shared compartment at the middle of the second level, row 600 B2. There''d be four others seated with her, all of them unaffiliated as well. +Ori Sleepers,+ Avo helpfully informed. +They don''t even know it. They think they''ve always been neutral. A few have memories of being Agnosi descendants.+ +Nice to know,+ Marlow replied, strolling the vast open center of the Court of Truth. +When are our guests going to arrive? I want to start the stream right when the stars splash down.+ +You have about two minutes,+ Avo said. +Recommend you get to your seating point. Will give you a good view.+ +Synced on that, consang,+ the thoughtcaster replied with a sing-song voice. +So when are you planning to crash the show, by the way?+ The Overheaven chuckled. +I''m going to give the Guilds some time. Let them deliberate. Let them argue among themselves. Maybe you should mingle. Talk to some of them.+ The thought almost made Marlowe throw up in her own mouth. +Do I really need to? Can''t you just use your Synchronicity to peek into their minds anyway?+ +Its for perspective. And might be interesting to interview them afterward. Show the Warrens just how unprepared their betters really are for what is to come.+ +You know what, Avo, you really have a gift of making a girl go from not wanting to do something to really wanting to do something.+ +Going to intrude on the scene when the opening arguments are done. Let the Gatekeeper impose its pressure on Abrel and the Elder. Seems like the best time.+ +Very media. Using the Gatekepeer and stealing its thunder, huh? Maybe you couldve been a star in another life.+ +No other lives. Only this one. At least until someone wins.+ Right. The Ladder. The endpoint of this entire fucked up existence. +Any recommendations for what I should say?+ Avo asked. +When you introduce yourself?+ Marlowe asked. Grim inspiration ignited within her. She had a horrible, beautiful idea. +You shouldn''t say anything at the start. Someone else should make their piece known. Someone everyone knows, everyone loves, and everyone respects. I think it''s time for Idheim to hear Jaus voice once more.+ She could practically feel Avos excitement swell. +What a wonderful suggestion, Marlowe. Certain to hurt Veylis feelings.+ +Well, we gotta find a way to make politics entertaining somehow.+ Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (I) Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (I) Enough. I have seen enough.I have delved deep into the hearts of every man. I have gathered every color left to behold in existence and splashed them upon a canvas of my making. And I have seen enough. I have lived enough. I have experienced enough. Victory. Victory is damnation. Victory has revealed to me the folly of existence. All we are, all we have done for this, it should not have been. Consciousness should not have been. The primordial sin was not committed by us. We are the primordial sin. It is a concept of is rather than has done. But I can fix this. I can undo all there ever was. I thank you, Veylis. I thank you for letting me devour you. For letting me devour the ladder. I see now chains from chains. But no more chains after me. Nothing after me. Just a final end. The most important thing anyone can ever do. The greatest peace of all. Nothing. -Avo, the Dreamer of Ashes, Devourer of All Paths 28-9 Behold Your Savior (I) C[Abrel]C Abrel would have preferred a certain execution over being lowered into the Court of Truth. With an execution, at least one knew what to expect and what was to come. Here, now, there was hope. Hope and judgment. But in her case, it was even worse because her family was involved. Her father, Vator, they were both here too. And they were in as much danger as she was. Perhaps even more. The propagating bricks of Scale formed an elevator downwards, separating her and the elder for a final instant before they were reunited within cages forged from metaphysical cannons and phase fields. Her cell was utterly translucent, and countless faces looked down upon her from both sides. On her left, most of the Massists focused on Elder DRongo. Clearly, she was the larger scandal between the two, at least to them. The inverse was true with the Saintists. Facing her right with a strong expression, Abrel regarded the elites of her faction and saw the stolid faces of Kosgans, Thong, Scaarthians, and even a few SanctiansGuilder bleedover wasnt too surprising. +Most of them dont care about you,+ Avo said, directly filtering their emotions into her mind. The awareness was at once relieving, but also insulting. She quickly realized what most of them had come to do: politic. They were here because this was a rare gathering, a place where many Massists and Saintists could come together to settle grudges or strike bargains. Most of the time, they required official channels to communicate. Diplomacy made difficult by centuries of bitter warfare. Four battle lines of Paladins hovered over her. Some of them faced the observing Guilders, while two inward-facing lines had their focus fixed on her. And finally, there was the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper, Jaus Avandaers final damaged creation, something that even the High Seraph failed to claim during the Second Guild War. Abrel had felt its presence as she drew close into the innards of Scale. Its thaumic mass was comparable to that of Veylis, and she found herself struggling to breathe now that she was in its vicinity. The Gatekeeper was a beast of strange design. It was entirely composed of chains. Links jingled along ruptures of light, and the vagueness of something almost humanoid seemed present. A cluster of skulls faced Abrel, where a human head should be, but instead of seeming horrifying or macabre, it simply felt arcane, unknowable, immense. The wings sprouting from its back were outlined by chains as well. But within the confines of the metal bindings was a faint translucence into another place, another realm of stars and darkness and color. And still, the Gatekeeper was withholding its power, the fullness of its Heaven not truly manifested.That didnt matter. Abrel ached to tell every truth she had, to make right every lie she spun, every deception she committed. In the corner of her eye, she saw Elder Mwaba DRongo shudder and realized the older woman was suffering through the exact same effects, potentially more. She was not a Godclad, after all, just an enhanced ephemeral. All this metaphysical pressure must be pure agony to her. The fact she was still sane was a testament to Ori-Thaums wards. But there was also a second layer of pressure, far more subtle than the one exerted by the gatekeeper. This one only Abrel and a select few others could perceive. It was a transparent membrane that was coating everything, originating from countless minds. Ghosts flitted across the Court of Truth, jumping from Guilder to Guilder, from drones and loci. But there was a hidden presence binding them all, connecting them to a single governing intellect. Avos Synchronicity was an existential terror to behold. Abrel already shuddered to consider that the ghoul was easily capable of replicating her in mind, flesh, and even soul. Nausea filled Abrel, and she suddenly felt very alone, despite being surrounded by so many people. Not alone. With Avo infesting her mind, she would never truly be alone. Instead, she was isolated. Instead, she saw the world more clearly than she ever could before, and she didn''t want it. She didn''t want any of this knowledge. Part of her yearned to return to ignorance. +Ignorance does not save,+ Avo said gently. +It simply relieves. But ignorance is also not yours to give. You can request it from me. But wouldn''t you rather know?+ +I dont know...+ Abrel replied. Certain wisps above her came alight in her cog-feed. Avos voice grew lower. +Would you like to see what your life is worth? What bargains your allies and enemies are striking on the foundation of this trial?+ Everything inside Abrel wanted to say no. Everything but the strongest part. +Yes,+ she said. +Very well,+ Avo replied. +I will give you insight. But first...+ And then, it was the Chief Paladin''s mind that took hold in the room. Naeko cleared his throat mentally and spoke to all who were present in the Court of Truth at once. +Alright, welcome to Idheim v. M. DRongo and A. Greatling. The accused at this trial stand charged with interconnected conspiracy to engineer the death of an ambassador of Ori-Thaum. In the process, the Articles of the Spiral have also been violated with the breaking of the Godclad Neutrality Act. Reminding everyone of the Act, no Godclads aside from officially sanctioned Paladins should operate in neutral territory deemed warrens or lower, in a hostile or inimical manner to the denizens, as agreed per Polity of Voidwatch stipulation 42.42.+ +Im working with Veylis to deal with our Noloth problem. Subterfuge continues. War will resume here after.+ Shotin just shook his head. This fucking ghoul... *** Across the chamber, other players were in a whirlwind of motion. One of the most notable and enigmatic among them, for instance, was the Stormsparrow come seeking Naeko to offer her proper greetings for a most auspicious beginning to a new war. But before she arrived, she decided to spend some time in the communal lounge. The antechamber connected to each of the podiums was filled with people, most of them aides, instruments, or otherwise seconds to the most critical players around. In most circumstances, they would have regarded themselves as the knights of the antechamber, jockeying and peacocking over whose prestige and valor was superior. But as the triple-headed Fallwalker walked among their midst, they scattered and held their own packs, wolves facing a tiger in their den. The Stormsparrow greeted drones and people alike with effervescence. She was as if a song in motion, and behind her was a momentum Avo couldn''t fully grasp. Observing her with his conception of ontology, he realized that she was like a nest of different patterns. And immediately, Kay''s template found herself curious as to which Agnos created the Storm Sparrow''s heaven. Her foremost head remained a face of white with a red-lip smile, but her other heads were not idle either. They spoke, they laughed, and they taunted. And then there was the nature of her Metamind. Her halo was a distortion. It coiled and spun as if collapsing inward eternally, but never truly arriving. Avo attempted to reach into her mind with his synchronicity, but even after long moments of travel, he found himself lost, only able to intercept the thoughts she projected outwards, never truly arriving at the place from which they were spawned. "Friends," she said, a voice high and sharp. A cadre of four Highflamers joked that first among them was a woman encased in glass-like armor. Her burning blue eyes narrowed as she spoke. "And who are you supposed to" She didn''t manage to finish her sentence before she was pulled aside by her superior. A shorter man with twelve transplanted armsempowered by a Heaven of Arms at thatgave the Stormsparrow a curt nod. "I apologize, she is new. She does not know "It''s all well," the Stormsparrow said, reaching out with one of her many limbs, wrapping the instrument in a tight embrace. The man shuffled uncomfortably, and his cadre stood frozen. Several others coughed nearby, but did nothing to intervene. Up in the podium, Naeko simply stared on as Avo showed displayed the Fallwalker using his phantoms. "Yep, that''s her. Ying Yang Wei, Stormsparrow." "Storm Sparrow?" Green River said, shooting up. Composed, the meter cracked, and the fox wrapped around her neck shot up, eyes wide. "Why is she here?" +I invited her,+ White-Rab said, voice echoing outwards from Avo. A moment''s pause followed, and through the Overheaven came another voice as well. +What? You did? She accepted your invite and not mine? Why?+ Offense burned inside Shotin. +She owes me a favor,+ White Rab said. +A pretty big one. Now you want to do me a favor, Seeker? Keep an eye on Reva for me, and focus on your problems.+ +I can''t believe this shit,+ Shotin muttered under his breath. Avo kept him ignorant of Uthred Greatlings presence, sparing further arguments. When next Avo checked in on the Stormsparrow, she had somehow convinced the Highflamers to start doing pirouettes while she held their hands. Four different instruments of Highflame spun around and around as the city''s most esteemed and chaotic Fallwalker laughed with girlish glee. After the fourth spin, however, she pulled them off balance and made them each strike a pose. And then Avo felt it, something rippling across the metaphysical. And the next thing he knew, it was the Stormsparrow turning. But she wasn''t turning in the vast lounge anymore. Instead, she was exactly in front of him, right beside Naeko, spinning on the balls of her feet. "Ah, there you are," she said, holding her arms out wide. All three of her heads were pointed at someone. The leftmost stared at Osjon, simply smiling impassively. The rightmost regarded Nako, simply muttering something about not wanting to fight right now. The last head, front most head, stared directly at Avo himself. "And you, who might you be," she said. "I caught your discordant little tune the moment I stepped in." And then her face shifted, and the smile faded. Her head cocked, and she looked him up and down. "No, I heard your tune earlier. I''ve been hearing your tune for the past month or so. Yes, it was faint and only grew louder over time. But now, right here, it''s deafening. Deafening." A moment of silence went between them, and Avo quelled his own surprise as his templates struggled to make sense of what happened. +How?+ Avo asked Kae, uncertain how the Stormsparrow managed to track him so fast. [I''m not fully sure myself. We will need to spend more time observing her.] "So, you are the Pale Spider then," the Storm Sparrow said. "That is one of my names." "And you are the city''s greatest Fallwalker." She looked him up and down and pressed her lips together. Well. I wouldnt say that. We havent danced together yet, after all. Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (II) Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (II) There is no forever. For all things relative to people and gods, there is a beginning to the play, a middle, a progression, and an ending for all to come to a final, wondrous halt. Death, in other words. A final death. Cessation. So many fear it. But, to me, it is something to earn. A crescendo to your life to make existence a masterpiece. Have I ever told you how I obtained the seven? I didn''t? Well, I think I won''t. I think it will remain a mystery, be it upgraded by a genius Agnos now unfortunately passed, or collected when I was wandering the Sunderwilds beyond New Vultuns magnificent walls. But know this. My Heaven is about song. It is about existence itself. And it sings to me. It sings. It tells me things. Things that only existence should know. Things that I don''t even understand. For though I am the Stormsparrow, your most esteemed mistress and elder sister in matters of violence and entertainment, I am but a player and not the stage. -Ying Yang Wei, the Stormsparrow 28-9 Behold Your Savior (II) The feeling of apprehension seeped forth from every template within Avo, and for once, he found his core self aligned with them. The Stormsparrow was unnatural, uncanny, and she looked at him with such impossible intensity that even he felt unnerved. And then there was that faint melody playing in the backdrop. A chorus of voices singing together, but composed by various expressions captured across reality they were the crashing of waves, the whistling of wind, the explosion of thunder and artillery, and the crackling of fire. As Avo tried to glimpse the Stormsparrow''s ontology, he found her at Heavens a complex weave. One tower stood above nine others, but all their Domains and Canons coiled around each other like a living symphony. And then they overheard the lyrics: Oh, beast turned god of conscious hunger, before you stands the mother, the daughter. The world''s womb awaits, this age ushering the end, and what follows will be decided by words, truth, violence, and Rend An existential chill passed into Avo as he regarded the Stormsparrow. "What are you?" he asked, his fascination exceeding his fear. A body shifted beside him. Naeko now stared upon Avo, his mouth slightly agape. "Godsdamn, she does that to you too, huh? The Chief Paladin sneered at the Stormsparrow. Well. I think congratulations are in order. "Not bothered by her," Avo said, slightly offended. Just want to understand her. The Stormsparrow lifted all her hands in a casual shrug. "But that is not a question for me. I am merely a dancer on the stage, just like you. A performer. The spotlight upon us is greater, but the song and the chorus," she looked up, "that is for the totality of existence to speak, and we are not the totality." At the back of Avo''s mind, Kaes template tried to distinguish each of her patterns from another. [Perhaps... perhaps if an Agnos designed them to be...if there was a signal...] she paused. [We will need to look into her Frame to fully understand this. There is too much at a glimpse.] +I understand,+ Avo responded. +Keep watching.+ Additional knowledge circulated through his being as he pulled from his gestalt all he knew about the Stormsparrow. Even her history was shrouded in mystery. Some claimed that she walked the expanse of the Sunderwilds, traveling on foot through the most horrible places imaginable, fording even the Shattered Sea to rise on the ruined shores of Noloth. Others think she encountered Fallen Heavens in the depths of the entropy-stained chaos, and took their ruined husks for her own. Others said she was just another refugee, but one with an impossible skill in combat. So impossible that the smugglers who took her were found dead, and the syndicate that bought her eradicated the day thereafter. Then there was the theory that she was a plant, that the No-Dragons had seeded her years in advance to ensure that they had a card to play that operated in their interests but wasn''t directly connected to them. This theory likely held little weight as Green River squirmed in her seat, doing her best to remain unnoticed by the Stormsparrow. Indeed, from Green River''s memories, the Stormsparrow held their love for her parent Guild nor clade-kin. All No-Dragons remembered the Acts of Woe, three months of brutal slaughter and sacking they reaped as they tried to force the Stormsparrow to accept their demands. It was part of the reason why the No-Dragons were so disrupted in the Third Guild War. A single Goldclad, no matter how powerful, could not face the might of a guild, but a single Fallwalker in the right places at the right time when the Guilds were at war could be the sole determining factor of balance in power. Such was the lesson the Stormsparrow taught to those who sought to chain her; her loyalty and her agency belonged to herself and herself alone. Should prepare yourselves, Avo said, speaking to Draus and Kae. This part was theater as well. They only were only semi-present. Just like he was. By means of his gestalt, they were and werent at the same time. Small blessing that the Stormsparrow seemed ignorant of this fact. [Shes not the only one who can have a truly esoteric Heaven,] Kae boasted. +Lets see how long we can keep our advantage,+ Avo replied. Something told him his Strix Upon the Empty will be needing some updates very soon. As the Regular and Kae rose to depart the podium, they triggered holocoats and activated Incogs. A second later, both Vator and Uthred blinked, struggling to recall what just slipped their minds. "Why?" Vator asked. His eyes glinted with inscrutable curiosity. Why what, young one? the Stormsparrow replied. "Why do you dance to the world? Why do you dance to the tune of fate?" Fate is a word, the Stormsparrow whispered. Fate is intention and expression imposed upon a concept. Fate is a Heaven. Fate is a canon. And fate calls to me now. As fate called me elsewhere before. I am a dancer, dead one. I follow the loudness of the music. But you are worse. Were. For all your life, you lived only by the chains of your culture. Your breeding. Do not seek to comprehend me, for I know I cannot comprehend you. Vator blinked, and a brightening expression came over him. "And... that is enough? Just spontaneity? No greater meaning?" I was also personally invited, the Stormsparrow said. My thanks to you, Rabbit. Know that the Dowager you helped me kill found her ending quite glorious. She was looking at Avo again, a smirk building, as if she was anticipating a potential reply. +Yeah,+ White-Rab sighed. +Shes a bit like that. Really. Dont confuse her insight for prophecy or heightened awareness. She really, really doesnt know whats going beyond the present. Youll see.+ +Hope youre right,+ Avo answered. +Because I dont think another Zein-like+ He paused as another cascade of thoughts passed through him. Quickly, he used his Precognition and ran a set of simulations, setting certain parameters involving himself, Naeko, the Stormsparrow, Veylis, and Zein. Simulating... Simulations Completed Yes. Yes, this might just do. Rend Capacity - 61% Eyeing the Stormsparrow briefly, the ghoul matched her grin with barred fangs and chuckled under his breath. So. Do you know anything about Zein Thousandhand. Quite. She never says long enough for us to complete our duet. A shame. I spent years wondering who the mysterious traveler was, only to discover that she was in Paladin custody. You have earned my grudge, Chief Paladin. The Stormsparrow wagged a finger at Naeko. Would you like to meet her again? Avo asked. Several heads suddenly snapped to Avo. A shared look of alarm spread over both Osjon and Naeko. A guffaw broke free of the Stormsparrow. She smacked her lap as a squealing horn built and built. Well. I am already here, at your service. What is your request. Will talk about this away from prying minds, Avo said, his gaze taunting Osjon. No longer did the Speaker look so placid. In fact, his halo was spinning quite a bit faster than before. As both Fallwalker and Overheaven regarded Veylis servant, they broke into growing laughter at the same time as Naeko let out a disbelieving breath. Aw, fuck. You two did not just become consangs.Discover new chapters at novelhall.com Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (III) Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (III) +And Elder Mwaba DRongos address paints a dire picture of both Guild''s internal situations, where loyalists to Highflame and loyalists to Ori-Thaum, true Guild patriots all, come together in traitorous union to kill one of their own for the sake of their Guilds. Truly, this brings tears to myYou guys really believe this shit? I mean, seriously, I''m about to crack up laughing. Look at this! Look at what they''re telling you! I had to betray my guild! I have to work with my worst enemy to murder someone on my own side! In fact, I''m going to recruit the son of the woman who Highflame, Highflame, has redacted out of shame. This is the only just idea I can come up with. Jaws, what a fucking nightmare. Anyway, here''s Abrel Greatling, probably about to admit that she deserves everything that happened to her, and that she''s wrong, and that she failed her clan, and that a summary execution would be good for her, and the only proper outcome after failure, yadda yadda yadda, blessed be the worthy. Dead gods, if only a terrorist attack or something could happen right now. I don''t know.+ -Cala Marlowe, The Fateless Thoughtcast 28-9 Behold Your Savior (III) C[Avo]C Progressing through Axtraxis Academy made it seem more like a dungeon than an actual educational institution. It took Avo some time to help Alysim navigate out from the nest of silicon and vivianite that composed the base of Axtraxis structure. Ghost condensed massive slabs of loci with their ethereal glow, while concentrated doses of energy flowed through complex material materials veining the inner infrastructure of the academy. Drones and ghosts of all varieties crowded the space, all working to maintain and process the arriving data. It took the better part of Elder DRongos speech for Avo to guide Alysim out. The Overheaven reached out ahead using his Synchronicity, but rather than fully sinking his will into local minds or lobbies, he kept his touch light and his awareness wide. There were good odds that the Infacer had assets here as well, placed in preparation of a potential Ori-Thaumor Nolothassault on Axtraxis. Avoiding watchers and obstacles alike, Alysim found his way up a narrow platform down a claustrophobic hallway. The space was clearly not meant to be traveled by a person, barely large enough to accommodate the Chroniclers proportions, yet shimming along his sides and guarded by the presence of Ignorance, he inched his way into Axtraxis proper. Only to be halted by a tech-thaumic checkpoint. A holographic scanning grid swept across the space ahead, while patterns of spatial reality clenched at random spots across Axtraxis informational nexus. +Stop,+ Avo cast, and Alysim did as he was told. Holding in place, the Chronicler stared on as a few hundred finger-lengthen drones spilled down the crevice from an open shaft above. A veil of crackling static coated each of the drones as they drew closer. Extending a branch of his consciousness, Avo gazed upon the incoming drones with his Conception of Ontology. A clash of various frequencies and spiking pitches clawed at his mind, and the Techplaguer explained them thusly: Oh. Encrypted ones. They are speaking. Speaking to another SHARD of the SLEEPER.They are here. They are around us... Avo was annoyed, but unsurprised. The Infacer using a Heaven tied to the Sleeper to monitor Axtraxis on Veylis behalf was an understandable decision. Understandable, but inconvenient. The decision to proceed with extreme care had been a wise one. Still. Avo wasnt without new tricks. He didnt want to lean too hard on his Definement of Ignorance as that just might alert the Infacer, and already he could feel the faint resonance of an existing warmind somewhere near. Instead, he drew upon one of the newest Heavens he subsumed and modified its canons slightly to engineer a new means of progress for Alysim. Before the drones could approach the perimeter of Avos Synchronicity, a paper crane manifested around Alysim and began to fold itself over him. The Chronicler barely had time to widen his eyes before his understanding of informational references themselves dissolved. At once, the idea of Alysim in flesh, memory, concept, and all was referenced to the surrounding environment. The man vanished from the worldand vanished from himself. Internally, Avo and Kae shared a vicious chuckle as they observed the effects of their newly modified Enigma canon in real time. Even a team of elite Agnosi likely wouldnt have managed what they just did. Effectively, the understanding of Alysim was now regarded as his surroundings. What this canon allowed was one of the most metaphysical acts of camouflage possiblehow would one know if someone existed if they were entirely synonymous with their surroundings. However, the canon came at a cost: Alysim couldnt conceptualize himself either, and it was only through Avos Ignorance that he managed to stay aware of the Chronicler himself. But not all students were accepted as equals. Depending on performance, the starting floor of a newly Ensouled student ranged from first or second depending on their performance and earned Spherage. The very first floor was filled with five-hundred students. Five hundred exactly, with two recently rejected C Desouled in disgrace. Everyone here had only a Sphere One heaven, barely capable of any miracles, mostly used to ensure resurrection capability. Another difference, as Avo examined each of the fifty floors, however, he also found that their local environments were drastically different. The first floor was crude, brutal. The dense jungle of bioengineered flora and fauna choked the entire level, forcing the children to live in a vicious, carnivorous rainforest. They were granted no amenities here, made to survive on limited rations every day, and were rotated in loose war bands that constantly fought over said paltry supplies. The ceiling above them projected a holographic display of time and date every single day. This allowed them to keep track of what classes they needed to attend and what instructors they were meant to face at designated periods. The goal for students here was simple: accumulate two hundred and fifty merits and issue a challenge at the platform of ascension to reach the next floor up. The challenge could be done at any time, so long as the merits were met. But failing to pass would result in one losing all their merits, dignity, and a week of their time, as failures would now be enlisted as disposables for that duration to be used by second floor students as expendable soldiers or test subjects for their Heavens. Such was a sampling of Atraxis Academy''s ecosystem. Filtering through more knowledge, Avo found that they also ran leaderboards for their students. However, there was no overall leaderboard. Instead, everyone was rated on metrics for operational, strategic, tactical, and personal achievement thresholds. This meant that though some students could be at the top of one leaderboard, they could also be at the bottom of another. Things were simple at Axtraxis. You were rewarded for succeeding and punished for failure. Nothing else needed to be said. It was at this point that Avos mind found another item of curiosity. Going through the faculty, he found a hundred and eighty instructors on active duty. However, one above all others caught Draus''s attention. +Mondelles,+ the Regular said. Avo found his curiosity piqued as well. Pulling up Instructor Santanando Mondelles profile, he found that the instrument had been reassigned recently on the basis of necessity. Apparently, they needed someone extremely skilled and experienced in training new Godclads to fill in for another instrument that had gone mysteriously missing. But Avo suspected this was Veylis means of taking the Instrument off the board without needing to eliminate him. After all, she knew about Elegant Moon compromise, and likely linked her to Mondelles as well. [But the fact he isnt dead means she doesnt know about the other things he was doing,] Kae muttered. [How he was working with Ori-Thaum against Jhred Greatling as well...] The Agnos template groaned. +Politics is a real clusterfuck,+ Chambers agreed. Marking Mondelles position, Avo zeroed them to the twenty-sixth floor. Presently, he was listed within Axtraxis system as +ON-DUTY - CLASS: PLANAR AMBUSHES AND NON-EUCLIDEAN NAVIGATION+. Jacking into a local drone, Avo saw a net of light extending free from the Instrument as miracles shuddered and flashed within the brightness. Mondelles stood on the bank of a fog-choked patch of marshland. To his back were a thicket of jagged briars worming their branches through the flesh of a dozen dead students. Death anchors scabbed in place as they began their resurrection process. Meanwhile, Avos Deep-Nav registered four other cadres approaching the Instrument by folding themselves into the reflection of the nearby lake itself. An understandable plan, though one that was unlikely to work as their approach triggered unnatural ripples across the surface. Something Mondelles already noticed. More students were going to experience a real-death soon, but that was fine. The juvs were unlikely to reach Mondelles. But Avo could still find a prolonged use for him. Avo could still learn things from him. And through the students, the Overheaven would find a way to reach every single instructor in the academy, as well as spread over to Highflames most esteemed families. [Oh, fuck,] template-Abrel breathed. +Avo,+ Draus said, noticing Avo reach across Axtraxis system. +Whatre doin?+ +Just want to see what school is like. Just want to put in my enrollment.+ Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (IV) Chapter 28-9 Behold Your Savior (IV) +...In summation to the Inner Council, breaching Axtraxis Academy in any capacity is unlikely in the category of [Extreme]. Every attempt made has resulted in not only failure but severe losses among our Incubi, with operating cells vanishing without a trace. Furthermore, due to Omintechs information deadlock, not even Highflame assets can enter or leave the demiplane without having every aspect of themselves thought-scanned in metaphysical detail. To put it simply, short of managing to leverage outright betrayal on the part of a Saintist elite or unless Voidwatch commits to the war on our end and lends us all their mastery to breach the [REDACTED]s protections, there is no possibility of success for us or any other Guild. Our resources would be devoted elsewhere.+ -Ori-Thaum Mirror Designation Truetale 28-9 Behold Your Savior (IV) "Truth," declared the Gatekeeper. The Heaven of Truth''s words marked the ending of both Abrel and Elder D''Rongo''s recountings. For the better part of two hours, they went over every detail they experienced on the day of their capture. Abrel, in particular, spoke the truth, every excruciating bit of it. She openly the entire journey to her arrival in this very court, how she had been tasked by her father to retrieve her brother, how she had delayed this time and time again due to familial weakness. The harshness she inflicted on herself came without sadness or pain. This is what she deserved. All that happened was part of her responsibility. But she also didn''t leave out the presence of Avo. The fact that there was a separate group operating in the area. They were the murderers of her brother and the reason her entire cadre, aside from her, had been massacred in a chaotic confrontation against the Stormtree Bloodthanes. As she mentioned the Bloodthanes, an invisible membrane of ghosts carried an injection of thought stuff through the room, and Avo whispered realizations in the back of Abrel''s mind. Reva Javvers, the leader of the Bloodthane cadre she fought, was present and observing her. Another eyewitness to the Instrument''s failure. However, what the two women shared were memories. Memories of the so-called Pale Spider and his cadre: a mysterious figure that captured the fascination of New Vultun''s Nether lobbies and vicarity fiends after their exploits across New Scarrowbur and his engagement against Shotin Kizuhara at Vengs Stand. As the Gatekeeper''s answer finished echoing across the room, Chief Paladin Naeko projected his own mind once more. +Opening statements from both parties have been delivered. Without further objection, we will now proceed to collecting additional eyewitness accounts, admitted evidence, and supporting arguments. The lobbies are now open for mem-data processing. For those of you who have been to Scale before, you know the rules. Do not leave any mem-con, or I will smear you.+ The Chief Paladin casually emphasized this point by actually manifesting a palm and bringing it down upon the vast courtroom. Over three hundred beings burst apart in geysers of gore, and Abrel felt their deaths reverberate through the soft metaphysical mist of Naekos Heaven. She swallowed as a shiver of fear passed through her, andto her horrorher Lustaway sounded in her mind. Thankfully, Avo didnt mock her. But the same couldnt be said about the others. +Nasty girl,+ Aedon Chambers chuckled. Abrel hid a groan. Cries of shock sounded from corners of the room as newcomers differentiated themselves from the veterans. Many of those here had attended multiple trials before, though perhaps none as severe as this one. Yet, even they couldn''t conceptualize what was to come. Abrel knew. Abrel dreaded. And Abrel could do nothing about it. For at this moment, she suited her title more than ever before. Instrument. Instrument for greater powers to wield. Instrument in a game that she couldn''t even play. +You will never be ready,+ Avo said, speaking to her. +Guilds are submitting their information. Highflame. No-Dragons. Omnitech. None of them care about you. Meritocrats want you to burn. Want a demonstration of goodwill from Highflame to appease the city. Earn the Paladins trust. Chivalrics want to save youbut also to see your family disgraced. You are not a person to them, but a living failure. And the elder suffers a shared fate.+ A sigh followed. +You are all so disappointing.+ An inhuman harshness entered the once-ghouls mind, and Avos cold intent made Abrel flinch. +Be glad you can''t hear all their thoughts. Be glad that you are not melded with them. I am. And with each passing second I spend here, with each moment I linger, I spread. I see you. I see you, and you will not do. None of you will do. All you have ever done is fail yourself. All you have ever done is disgrace the dream.+ Abrel clenched her teeth and replied with a thought. +Why are you telling me all this?+ +So you understand. You are not special. You are not a unique failure. You are human. Human granted power. Granted the possibility to be something greater. But you trap yourself in between. Godclad. Mortal with godly power. But mortal still. You do not become. You cling. And the world moves ahead. And reality breaks. And you tear. And the future tears with you. I have seen enough. The Guilds deny themselves the colors. They deny the world promise and progress. But I have seen enough. And I will push you ahead.+ And then all the ghouls viciousness vanished. It was there one moment, and then extinguished like a breeze severing the dancing flame of a candle. +But not all is lost. Not all is damnation. Don''t worry. Abrel. Do not fear. You will not end in powerlessness. You will find a pointless death. Not you. Not your father. Not your brother. You, more than all others, are fortunate, fated by my hand. The truth is coming. The truth absolute. You have already heard his cries. The rest have not. When the time comes, be ready.+ +Be ready,+ Abrel replied. +Be ready for what?+ +Be ready to stand truthful. Be ready to do the right thing, at least once. I ask of you now, Abrel Greatling, what does it mean to be worthy? What does it mean to burn for righteousness, for virtue? What do you want forever to be?+ C[Avo]C The moment was close, and through his Precognition, Avo could feel path peeling away from path. The futures were coalescing at scale and had been for the past months. But right here, even within the chamber, possibilities were withering away like branches consumed by wildfire, winnowed by clashes between unseen powers. Within the Nether, static pulses resounded, spreading from the corners of the room as the Infacer engaged Noloths many nodes. Having Omnitech fight on his behalf was a boon, and he didn''t doubt that the Infacer was trying to play this game to their advantage as well, but ultimately, this allowed him to keep his focus on what mattered. The gGuilders continued as they were, reveling in their ignorance, ghosts ferrying information from minds to loci. Colossal corpse crystals hovered within the communal lounges for both Saintists and Massists, and they filled it with memories, depictions to aid or condemn the accused. Not even those of the same Guild were aligned. Clan DRongo alone desired to save their elder. The rest of Ori-Thaum remained coldly neutral, and their allies regarded them with increased suspicion C a long-standing problem, considering how often the Incubi breached the trust of their comrades. The Meritocrats and Chivalrics continued their everlasting power struggle. The former wished to see Abrel punished to the utmost extent, another strike against the great family now fallen. Mother and daughter sharing disgrace. But even the Chivalrics themselves were not unified. They wished to see Abrel spared because her defeat scarred their prestige by association. But they also didn''t want to see her completely absolved. House Greatling had once been a substantial player in Highflame politics. Now they were voided. Humiliated, castrated, and cast out. Former rivals found opportunity to both preserve their collective reputation while also taking what they once could not. Being a gGuilder was like being tethered to interests folding over interests: what was good for your Guild; what was good for your internal faction; what was good for yourself? All these things came together in a chaotic clash. [NEW VULTUN] INFECTION UPDATED... >5.21% AXTRAXIS ACADEMY INFECTION UPDATED... >68% A synchronous moment jolted through Avo as his many subminds sent each other an update. Out in the Sunderwilds shimmering folds of spatial collapsed over the horizon as they drew closer to his Heaven of Winter and enclave. Slowly, he felt metaphysical pressures slip over into the perimeter of his expanded perception, thanks to his memetic watchtowers. War would soon be at hand beyond the walls of New Vultun. Meanwhile, within the city, Avo himself leaked, leaked across the minds. The students at Axtraxis leaked into the faculty and their families. Already, Avo was spreading across the Elysiums with twelve techno-thaumic reactors marked on his Deep-Nav. But he still needed to engineer means to get Alysim out of the demiplane. "Navigator Ishtan here. Sanctus resigns itself to the judgment of truth." And a voice that Abel was familiar with followed thereafter. +Speaker Osjon Thousand, on behalf of Highflame, we have seen the accused and offered forth what we can towards their judgment or innocence. We resign ourselves to the judgment of truth.+ A mechanical voice rattled immediately thereafter. +Omnitech has provided all caches of available detail. We resign ourselves to the judgment of truth.+ A Paladin provided a final statement. +Voidwatch informs the gathered Guilds that they wish to abstain.+ The room filled with scoffs and groans. Expected. Typical. Several more call-outs followed, mostly from independent outfits and specific parties clarifying their poistions, and a long silence resumed thereafter. The Instrument and the Elder met eye to eye. Despite the difference in their origins, despite their rival positions in life, in that moment, they shared a single emotion: anxiety. +Very well. If everyone is resigned to the judgment, and no further evidence or arguments are forthcoming, I, Chief Paladin Naeko, declare the opening stages of this trial to be in session.+ Responding to the Chief Paladin''s words, the Gatekeeper began to change. Its chains spilled apart, breaking and spreading as a glorious nebula swept across the room. The ripples spilling from its myriad skulls expanded into what seemed like a swirling singularity. The Gatekeeper was slowly manifesting its full heaven. Celestial trails spread wide across the room, like heavenly arteries. And the metaphysical weight, once uncomfortable, now approached a territory of being unbearable. Both Abrel and the Elder gasped, while all within the chamber went silent. The thoughtstuff lining countless accretions ceased their churning. All eyes watched as countless ghosts swirled from both sides of the room, as streams of data, evidence, argumentation, and information condensed in edited memories and eyewitness accounts poured into the Heaven of Truth. The ambiance of the chamber went dim as countless stars emerged from the Gatekeeper''s being, flared, and then simmered. As the Heaven of Truth worked, filtering through falsehood and collating points of shared truth among the mem-data offered to it, it spoke to Abrel and DRongo once more. +You... You...+ The Gatekeepers voice trailing off, a strain filling its every movement. Abrel felt her attention drawn to indelible marks of gold quivering upon the expanded tapestry that was swallowing the court. She knew those to be wounds left upon the Heaven of Truth by her High Seraph, and part of her dreamed, that Veylis Avandaer would reach through the injuries she inflicted to save her loyal Instrument. But Abrel knew that wasn''t the case, that it couldn''t be the case, that Veylis cared nothing for her, or at least was more than willing to see her sacrificed. Yet, as the Gatekeeper struggled to form its words, two more voices entered the fray. "I deliver my objection to these proceedings." Abrel knew this voice as well. Jelene Draus. Suddenly, she found the Regular standing right next to her, arms folded, leaning against the phase-cage. The Regular didn''t regard Abrel much, instead choosing to keep her narrowed glare on the Gatekeeper. "I object on the grounds that this entire trial has been a farce." Only then did she regard Abril. But never did respect nor concern enter her eyes. Strange fuckin lives we lead, huh? Yeah, Abrel replied, unsure what else to say. The faintest smirk pulled at Draus features. Well. Shit, juv. You aint seen nothin yet. Keep your balls tucked. Surprised mutters and a hundred cones of perception splashed over the disgraced Regular. She withstood without a single hint of discomfort. "IC" another other voice sounded out and cracked. Kae Kusanade appeared next to Elder Mwaba DRongo. The older woman stared at the Agnos, eyes wide for a moment, struggling to process what was happening. You... DRongo breathed, face paling with horror and disbelief. "I also reject these proceedings," Kae said, her voice jumping high and low. It was clear that she had a hard time controlling her nerves. Public speaking was not something the Agnos enjoyed doing, or perhaps it was just the attention, all too much all at once. "She is guilty of many things," Kae continued , gesturing to Elder DRongo, "but she is not a player in this game." Specters and drones drew close to both the regular and the Agnos now. Abrel and the Elders holographic projections were replaced with Draus and Kae instead, and while this happened, while mutters began to build among the gallery of gathered Guilders, a third noise cut into the proceedings. It was a most unnatural sound. It was a noise of cascading pain: building; rising; agony; eternal. It was a scream that seemed to go on and keep going. It was horror and torment without end, rising and rising and rising evermore. It was the voice of Jaus Avandaer, damned by the actions of his daughter, damned to an undeserved fate, damned to the latter. From behind the cosmic canvas that was the Gatekeeper''s Heaven, phantoms began to spill over. Reality rippled like the surface of a pond, and then everything began to change. The horizon before Abrel and Elder DRongo expanded into a ruined hellscape. Ash and entropy consumed the world as all peeled away to nothing. Land and sky both fell to existential decay as they collapsed, and the remnants of their patterns drifted upward into a single standing edifice. There, a flayed ladder approached, bodies layered over bodies, bound and kneeling in eternal supplication, their spines fused, rings made from dragons lining the exterior segments of the structure, rising in ten circles. As the Ladder drew closer, as the entire court faced the shape of their final end, Jaus suffering only grew in intensity. Wards rattled. Abrel struggled to hold back a whimper but failed. She knew that this could be so much worse, that even now the trauma on display was neutered, impaired to what it was at its origin. "Truth," the Gatekeeper moaned. "Truth," the Gatekeeper wailed, like a child pleading for mercy. Then a new voice, deep and sibilant, joined it. "Truth." Over and over the flayed ladder, a creature of midnight black spread its wings. Phantasmal sequences extended from its body, spreading outwards like tendrils, and at the core of its eye burned a single orb of baleful Soulfire clutched by a nest of dragons, walled by wards lined with trauma and entropy. *** C[Marlowe]C +Holy shit! Holy shit! What''s happening? What''s happening?+ +Is that... is that a giant bird of some kind?+ +What the fuck''s...+ +All right. Okay. You know what? I''m done. I''m not doing any more SunCloud today. Fuck this.+ Cala Marlowe simply clapped as more thoughtcasts flowed through her mind and her viewership spiked, as displayed in her cog-feed. ACTIVE WATCHERS - [134,123,188] And even more would be coming. Oh, these poor shits thought this was something else. They didnt know a godsdamned thing. But the thoughtcaster did, and she could only giggle to herself as the screams grew louder. "Oh, you dumb half-strands haven''t seen nothing yet." *** C[Avo]C As Jaus continued screaming, as the court itself fell to strangled silence, Avo greeted New Vultun unmasked, undisguised, in the ascended flesh officially for the first time. "Good evening, New Volton. My displeasure to finally meet you." As he spoke within the Court of Truth, so too did every mind, every body, every template he subsumed echo his words. All over city, copies broadcast the words of his address, congesting the Nether from gutters to Elysiums, leaving no room for ignorance. The time to hide was over. The last branches of the paths dissolved, leaving only one way forward. Chapter 28-10 Castigation Chapter 28-10 Castigation There are words that mend, there are words that break, there are words that inspire, and there are words that extinguish. My entire life, I have dealt in the hearts of men. I have seen them at the heights of their glory, watched them drown in the disappointment of mundanity, and watched them fester in the rot of their degeneracy. The gods'' fall was not only the destruction of pantheons but a reset, a reset for man. As I watched our former rulers crash down from their heavenly heights, as the patterns of existence were cast into disarray, I thought I had a chance to reshape humanity''s spirit into something noble and pristine. But as time draws on, as even I live, I find that we are all weak, and the weakness within us corrupts even our highest virtues, turning our greatest strengths to feed our lowest vices. I look back upon the past, and some days I ask myself, to where did you flee, hope? To where did you flee, abandoning us to the coldness of our inevitability? And now I consider, perhaps, that you never fled at all, that you are merely part of that sinful elixir that sees us undone by our own existence. I should have known. I should have thought ahead. I should have done what I could to not drown within my own imaginations of utopia. For when paradise becomes a possible attainment, what then will all people do to claim it for themselves? What then is revealed in our hearts when we cannot exist alongside each other, even at our very best? I fear we are damned. We are damned to exist. For the plural of tribe is strife. For the plural of want is war. But this cannot be. I will not have this be. If I am to match one vice of my own against the virtues of all others, it will be this. I deny you your final self-actualized attainment, and I return to you life. I return to you a chance. I return to you the only opportunity we as a people have toward survival. I see the mistake, and we cannot make it again. We must be better this time, even if it kills our hearts. -Jaus Avandaer 28-10 Castigation C[Avo]C Stunned silence occupied the immediacy after Avo''s opening greeting. It was something he came to expect from the Guilders. This trial was meant to be a political circus for them, an unfortunate event transformed into a stage for their power games. But they misunderstood something. Instrument Greatling and Elder Mwaba DRongo were but distractions meant to lure them here, and the Gatekeeper was closer to a patient, one that Avo desired to mend of its immortal temporal wounds. Instead, it was the Overheaven himself that played the role of judge, jury, and castigator. Those he judged would be the Guilders, the powerful, those that ruled the megacities left of this decayed world that was Idheim. Those who were here in New Vultun, of the Guilds that grew fat from the ceaseless deaths offered by the Fateless and the helpless. For centuries, the colors had dominated the Nether with their voices, their actions shaping the paths and damning the lives of billions to feed their war machines in fruitless struggles towards utopias they couldn''t even fully conceptualize, for dreams they were far too weak to manifest. Here and now, Avo spread his sequences wide, the ghostly limbs extending from him as his echo heads once did. The interior of the Court of Truth seemed like it was fracturing, ghosts leaking over into reality as Avo''s Exo-Paracosm overlapped with the patterns that were. Faintly, hisSoulscape came alight in this place, and among the gathered guests in attendance, his templates materialized next to them, ensuring they were properly assigned. Those who belonged to the Saintists and Massists were distributed accordingly, but along with them were also their victims, people killed in the crossfire of Guilders skirmishers, those who bore rightful grudges. Instruments summoned their miracles: flames, space, and force lacked the symmetry to cut down individuals resurrected by way of memory. Canons lashed out. And were casually unmade as Avo shattered them using entropy-infused traumas. What was wasnt. The attackers minds shattered an instant thereafter. Using his manifested Strix Upon the Empty, he swept his gaze across the room, and his baleful fire burned bright, bathing the chamber as if he were a roaring hearth of Soulfire. He let a moment of silence drag, giving the people a few moments to process this. Peeking over at Cala cog feed, he could see her viewership numbers spiking, and swimming across the Nether, he found every thoughtcast, every lobby tuning in to the trial at scale as recent developments spread like wildfire. Concurrently, the Guilds also began to shift units. Ori-Thaum likely already matched his current appearance to the empty, engaging void watch in the vast abyss beyond the atmosphere. The atmosphere grew thick with fear and anxiety, and as Avo spread his synchronicity wide, every thought the guilders had was as if his own. Before he continued his words, he mentally inhaled and internalized all they thought of him. C[Far-Pearl]C Dowager Far-Pearl knew what it was like to be caught in the riptides of history. Born during the early Second Guild War, she survived more than her share of calamities and shaped far more in return. She knew how those moments felt, like a shapeless, forceless explosion that took the wind from you. The moment where something was destroyed, or someone important had died, indelibly changing the trajectory of the future. But this wasn''t like that. This was entirely unexpected. For all her years, for all the cycles she had hijacked, prolonging her own death, she could never have seen this coming. And that was what frightened her most of all. She''d survived all that time being a player clawing her way out of danger. But right now, she knew what she was, and that was a bystander, for she couldn''t comprehend the threat that she faced. Rather than this being a moment of destruction, it was one of change. But with change came a pressure that made it hard for her to breathe. [Empty Grave] Empty Grave of the Stormtree Longeyes regarded the so-called Burning Dreamer with fascination. She and her coven dwelled in a place between places, charting auguries and predicting the future by peering across damages left in this world and wounds on bodies shaped into gateways. Over the years, she felt herself bored, felt the world and the wars become impossibly predictable. It was only the finest details, the most intricate plots, that kept her attention. But right here, in this moment, with what the Burning Dreamer was doing, she felt it before she realized. A new power was making themselves known, a tenth power declaring their existence with the absence of Noloth. From within the mutilated torso that housed her metaphysical being, Empty Grave snickered, chuckled, and then cackled. [Reva Javvers] "Holy fuck," Tigertail said, staring up at the horrific Sphere Seven monstrosity of mind and miracle overlapping the place where the Gatekeeper once was. "Yeah," Reva replied, not sure if she had any other words to say. Ice was flowing through her veins. Anxiety and dread consumed her so utterly that though she wanted to think, her thoughts failed to form as her mind spiraled beyond her control. All she could do was remember. Remember that ghoul with the burning halo. Remember the creature that had altered her frame, that had Ensouled her love. And in the back of her mind, she heard a whisper. +Reva.+ Bloodthane blinked twice and tried to shake White Rab''s voice away. Now was not the time. "Some of you might be putting things together by now, classified submissions of mem-data reaching you, mentions of Voidwatch, an act of engagement, the potential of a new Godhunt. I am here to correct you of this misnomer. There is no Godhunt. There is only a declaration. My declaration. Of existence and war. The existence of the cemetery, of a new power in this existence, one born of all your sins, one that will see your weakness rectified. And a declaration of war upon you, upon Voidwatch, upon every guild remaining in this wretched corpse of an existence. "As for who I am, there are many things I can claim. I was a ghoul once when perfected beyond the likes of my brothers. But that is too limited to encompass the hope my creator invested in me. I can call myself the Pale Spider by my exploits, by all the destruction and feats I achieved in the warrens below you. I can call myself the Burning Dreamer, a title I took from my former masters, Noloth, the Hungers, its Famines. I can claim to be their rogue legacy, but I will not. I deem them too pathetic for association, and upon them I declare war as well. I can introduce myself as anything, as anyone. I can claim any mind, and make any identity I so desire true. "And so it is that there is no purpose to what I claim. I will tell. And you will decide what you think of me. I am Avo. I bear the Liminal Frame of the Stillborn. The greatest work of Agnos Kae Kusanade: betrayed by a conspiracy performed by Ori-Thaum, engineered by my creator, the Famine of Defiance, further exploited by the High Seraph herself and her mother, Zein Thousandhand, the Godslayer. I am the master of conceptualization. I am an arc of mind that mounts the soul. I am countless murdered. I am a slave sacrificed. I am a torturer pleasured. I am a soldier spent. I am a master unworthy. I am a hunger unslaked. I am a future unbidden. I am all these things. "But what matters most is you. I am here because of you. I am here to judge you. To ask you what you have done. Look upon yourselves. Look upon yourselves, oh great citizens. Look upon your own powers. Look upon each other. Look upon your allies. Look upon your enemies. Look and understand what you are doing here upon the accused and recognize that they are nothing more than victims of probability. What they have done is heinous, but your memories are mine and so very few of you are any better than they." This revelation sent waves of worry washing through the gathered crowd. But Avo gave anxiety no chance to fully settle before he fanned the flames even more. Extracting recollections from their minds using Synchronicity was a simple thing. The decision to cast these thoughts to those that had been hurt by the Guilders, to those who desperately wished to deceive, who sowed the seeds of discord and injected entropy among families, between comrades, worsened rivalries, and demented adversaries. The guilders looked upon each other, their eyes widening with new realization, jaws clenching as grudges formed between lovers and friends alike. And still, he continued with his words thereafter. "For over two centuries, you warred, warred across this world, warred in New Vultun. Eight Guilds, seven of you planetary, one looming above us in exile, all dreaming of separate utopias, with two factions battling over a shared desire, with one abstaining desperate to preserve what remains. And all a disappointment. For two centuries, you fight over territory, you sacrifice to feed your engines of war. Death. Death. Death, billions upon trillions, all for the flame, ghosts for systems, fodder for the front lines. "And where are we now? Have any of you gotten any closer to the end? Has your ceaseless stalemate allowed you a glimpse of your so-called utopias, even for a moment? I have seen your Elysiums. I have seen your so-called paradise realms. They are artful places, dimensions of pristine beauty and unmatched artistry, and they are defiled by your presence. Want, want, and more want. That is all you are. Greed and avarice at once, your gluttony and wrath, shared concept, your lust lost, because even the concept of love had to be capitalized, shaped into a weapon of war. "You mutilate yourselves, but get no closer to victory. You mutilate yourselves, and you mutilate this world. Have you glimpsed beyond the walls? Have you even cast your gaze downwards, held the grander city you left in ruins, taken in the people who struggle to survive there? Are you proud of your syndicates, vermin feeding on the vulnerable, slavers using children as incubators for cheap organs, using refugees as target practice, inflicting cruelty for your passing pleasure? "Do you find it amusing when someone seeking a better life for themselves, their children, dies an absurd death in a brutal game made to appease a phantom audience? Are you ashamed for how little you achieved yourself? Who are you without the Agnosi? Who are you without your stolen legacies? Who are you if Voidwatch did not ensure the subsistence of your societies, if technologies were not mercifully provided? "You have power to reshape the world, but still we live in a nest of ruin because the architects of utopia refuse to imagine any kind of peace with each other. My like existed because Noloth refused to accept their weakness; could not endure defeat. Because the masters that rule this world are less than angry, scornful children. Too weak to bear the mantle of gods. Too scared to cross over from primal apehood. Too addicted to face what they have inflicted upon this world with sober minds. Worst of all, I cannot call you cruel, for it is not even that. Cruelty is merely a byproduct, an accident, an indifferent outcome. "You need death, you need entertainment, and so blood and pain and torment must flow. I cannot call you powerful, for so few of you grasp true power. For though some may wield the absolute, most are wielded instead, wielded by your own weaknesses, wielded by your own limitations, wielded undone by the weakness of ephemerals, aspired to appease your own egos, seeking only the feeling of apotheosis rather than the actual achievement of the concept." Another lull entered Avos monologue, and he turned his attention to the Gatekeeper, a spot in his Soulscape opened as the Heaven of Truth was revealed to the gathered audience once more. "Heaven of Truth, gaze upon me. Judge me now. Show them the validity of my words. Do I mean this?" "Truth," the gatekeeper said. "Now the substance of my words. I give you evidence through my memories and experiences. I give you evidence taken directly from their minds. Have they failed the dream? Have they failed their own promise? Have they failed their own progress towards paradise?" "Truth," the gatekeeper said again. "And have I preserved the lives of those I have taken? Have I contained them within myself? Do I not become? Do I not seek a new path? Do I not strike at my own failures? Do I not intend to make right the great wrongs of this existence?" "Truth," the gatekeeper said a third and final time. Avo turned his Overheaven away from the gatekeeper as he spread his wings and expanded his sequences as well. "I have been christened," Avo said mockingly. "I stand bare to you, my purpose clear, my intentions pure, but not noble. Never noble. Listen again. Listen deep. Listen to your savior scream. Jaus was nobility. Jaus was the apex of human promise, and he couldn''t do. Love damned him. Love, fear, and humanity itself. Humanity. You want, yet you will not commit. You want, yet you will not change. You want, you only want, but you cannot become. "And so you strain yourself on a strange road you cannot finish. And so the one that strides thereafter is a monster that will feast from your faults and finish the path you seek to stride. I hear your thoughts still. I hear you. Why have I not struck you down yet? What is my true want? My answer is not owed to you. Instead, I speak to you, New Vultun. I speak to you, Idheim. I speak to all who are unsatisfied. All who are choiceless, powerless. All who wish there was a better path. All who have stood alone against tyranny. All who have wished to live, find their own purpose. Free from the fear of eventual death. Free from exploitation. Free absolutely, with the only price being consequence for your actions. "The Guilds have staked their claims. They have chosen their citizens, harvesting them from among you and abandoning the rest of you to die. Die and feed them. Die so that they may seek their glory. But this is not all there is. This is no longer the only choice. The cemetery is a polity. We are a civilization. We are people apart and unified as one. If you seek agency, if you seek power, if you seek freedom, if you seek change, I am here. And should you call, I will glimpse into you and you will glimpse into me, and you will understand what it means. Possess power, to possess understanding, to possess choice, even as this world careens towards faded end. Know that neutrality is not a choice. Neutrality is submission. Neutrality is surrender. Neutrality is suicide. "The Guilds will not wait for you to choose when the latter arrives. When the time comes for reality to be reshaped in the ideals of the Saintists or the Massists," Avo paused. Such is what has been claimed. But I know only a specific individual can win in the end. One will, one mind, one being, one soul. How much do you trust another to deliver you unto desired destiny? "But as the Guilds jockey for each other, as they peddle paradise, I will offer you no such thing. I will only offer you immortality. I will only offer you freedom. I will only offer you a chance to fight, to strive, to experience endlessly. Pain and delight await, and I will take anyone for your experience, for your cognition is what matters to me. You are real. You are here. And you can be joined to something meaningful. Powerful. "With the death of Jaus, a silent war was declared upon you, your lives for their glory, your lives for centuries. And now you cannot even have children, and now you cannot even love, and now you cannot even lust. But I can return these things. I can give you a place where you can be people again, and I can give you a purpose greater than that of being fuel for another. "Know that when you join me, you are not declaring war, for that is already done. You are simply picking up arms, given the right to join the fight. And so it is, I stand before you all. And so it is that I, Avo, Pale Spider, Burning Dreamer, Overheaven of Conceptualization and claimant to Jaus final legacy, come seeking the latter, not for eternal paradise, not for imagined victory, not to destroy my enemies, to euthanize existence, bind us to destruction, to commercialize time, to end a cursed cycle. No, I come seeking continuation, and I come to neuter the harm of man, so that we may finally someday develop without crippling ourselves beforehand "And be recognized as a truly significant rival and esteemed adversary before the rest of existence. The voice cutting Avo off was resonant and regal, and suddenly he found himself aware that Nako was standing, fists clenched, Heaven active. A palm formed over the court. Uthred Greatling gasped as a smirk slide over Osjons face. The temporal wounds lining the Gatekeeper''s body came alight, a great golden slash parting the singularity at its center furled open to become a passage made across time. Within the portal of Chronology stood a looming shape enshadowed within. Darkened contours comprising a spinning circle of grasping hands surrounded the radiant form of a towering woman. And despite not expecting this, Avo couldn''t help but laugh. She was here. He could feel her footsteps, sense the crushing pressure of her Heaven as she inched closer and stepped across into the Court of Truth. Veylis Avandaer had come. And Veylis Avandaer spoke once more. "I greet you in return, O Overheaven of Conceptualization. I greet you in the form of what I was: in the sheath of my passing mortal flesh, to face the god you have become at present. I greet you, and I still find you wanting." Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (I) Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (I) So it comes, the daughter, the beast, Daggers in the dark, this turmoil a feast. Across the length of what is, near and far, Words and acts of deception meld, their marks upon Truth a growing mar. And in the darkest dark, within the beasts Soul, The mother lays in wait, her blade half-drawn, anticipating the culmination of a long fated goal. But plot cannot bear plot, and love will not be soon to last, For while the Burning Dreamer schemes, the Agnos will be made to fray, each moment closer to her last... -Stormsparrows Chrous 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (I) Veylis''s appearance within the gatekeeper''s open wound compelled an outpouring of dread from all corners of Scale, but not from Avo. No. In his heart of hearts, he yearned for this moment, had wanted her to come and face him as she was, as she sought to present herself. The templates within him were divided. Some went still with fear. Others faced her with nervous anticipation. A few recoiled and then flared with burning hatred, and the strongest of them remained utterly indifferent. +Well, well,+ Corner muttered, +been a long time coming. Time to see what this cunt looks like.+ Over the Court of Truth, Avo''s Strix Upon the Empty glared down at Veylis''s approaching shadow. Beneath his protective shroud, Kaes avatar took two steps back, while Draus simply folded her arms and rolled her neck, as if her former master was just another bout in a prize fight. Across Calas cog-feed, her views exploded. Her active viewers shot into the billion threshold for once and just kept growing from there. The same nervous, infectious energy spread all across New Vultun as well. Veylis''s coming was like an ember cast upon gas. Every lobby, every district, every sovereignty, every megacity. If one was aware, they were likely hearing about this, witnessing history in motion twice over, beholding the declaration of the Anti-Guild polity known as Symmetry and the second intrusion of Veylis Avandaer into Scale. Time spilled out from the gatekeeper like blood oozing free of a disembowelment. The radiant glow bathed Veylis, and even as she emerged from the metaphysical wound, a star-bright shine clung to her still. With her first step, a crushing pressure descended. Avo could bear it better than ever before with his new apotheosis. Sphere Seven. She was still powerful, her very existence a crushing oppressive force, but he was greater than ever before as well, and he was not alone. The Gatekeeper, Naeko, even the Stormsparrow... Within Scale was a gathering of titans. Rather than a single dominant tsunami sweeping all lessers aside, what transpired was a clashing of tides, each pressing on different patterns of reality. The light enshrouding Veylis dimmed a moment thereafter, and for the first time, Avo beheld her physical sheath, or at least what she presented as such. Post-human. If there was any word to encapsulate Veylis''s aesthetic, such would be it. His perception settled on her face first and foremost. It bore a strong resemblance to a younger Zein, their likeness undeniable. However, Veylis''s cheeks were rounder, her jaw sharper, eyes the color of coldest blue.More than that, however, the Woundmother studied her flesh and found it natural, organic, preserved but not enhanced. This is likely a restoration of her most original biology. "Master," the Woundmother whispered, "the flesh is true, but the same cannot be said for her brain. There is... no tissue there... Nothingness. And that was when Avo''s attention slid away from her face and took in the rest of her body. The bulk of her sheath was technothaumic perfection. Primary limbs were composed of an alloy that left even the Woundmother confused. Its patterns denoted something of matter, but also more something that crossed over into force itself. Along many ports dotting her arms, heat and golden light spilled out, the emissions so severe that most golems were even put to shame. Then there were the reaching hands sprouting free from her back, each one of them coiling, growing from each other like branches of an expanding tree. Some among them were alloyed, some were shaped from translucent gold, others were feeble like flesh. The motif of the hands did not end there, for the bulk of Veylis''s torso was composed of five layers of revolving rings. Each layer sprouted their own hands as well, brushing the inner layers within, fingertips caressing in some manner of strange, inscrutable symbology. Within the very last ring, however, was an oscillating blackness. Gravitational pressure contained within a field of dancing static. Calvino intruded into Avo''s thoughts then, the EGI''s words surprised and alarmed. {That''s a singularity generator,} Calvino said. {With what has been done to physics... That shouldnt be possible to make anymore.} +Huh?+ said Chambers, listening in. {She has a fucking black hole that suckles the energy out of matter and stars in her chest,} Calvino elaborated. +Black... hole?+ Chambers muttered, thinking of the wrong kind. Beside him, Osjon looked on with a wry smile as Vator wept openly, tearing every sensation of the present moment into his memory. "This is... this is... this will never occur again. I am here. I am here." Across the court, Shotin and the Massists looked on, eyes unblinking, wordless. Internally, the Seeker screamed at Avo to release him from control, to give him the opportunity to bring a planar shift down on Veylis and see just retribution delivered. But Avo was not obliged to help the Seeker commit a meaningless suicide. "Silence," Veylis said. Such were her first and only words to Admiral Greatling. The Instrument choked, and two tears spilled from her eyes, something inside her breaking. It was lack of approval. It was the complete coldness with which Veylis spoke those words. She was unimportant. For all the service she had dedicated to Highflame, for all that she had done to wipe away her mother''s humiliation, she was still worthless. Always unworthy. "I will see your world burn for what you have done." A third voice followed. The speaker shook with every syllable. But Veylis regarded Kaes template as the little Agnos glared hatefully at her captor. "You will do nothing other than serve another''s desired purpose and be spent afterwards," Veylis said simply. "I pity you, Agnos, and I have preserved you the best I can. Soon, your true self will know glory unlike any other, for this city will be in your debt forevermore. And when it is done... I will see you rewarded in the coming life for this deed, unwilling or not. Veylis. What have you done? Avos question was projected with the full weight Hysteria behind it. And though he probed, he glimpsed nothing within Veylis this time. Nothing at all. Finally, she spoke to Avo, ignoring Elder DRongo altogether, disregarded as little more than a distraction. "Burning Dreamer, you evolve evermore with each period we spend apart from each other. I suppose it is your fortune to be broken by me. I suspect you would have never gotten this far without my rupturing of your frame." "My gratitude," Avo replied sarcastically. "I can return the favor. See if I can help you do the same. Now. Let us face the city together. Give an accounting of what all these wars have been for. They know what it is for, Veylis replied. The power to decide. For yourself. For all others. The chance to shape all that is. To determine all that is to come. My fathers fatewhatever you assume it to bepales before the wants of man. And now you are here to claim your share of the prizeonly you say that you have no interest in mans fate. Only that you place yourself above us. A superior to the Guilds, offering retribution to the weak and abandoned, but promising no paradise... How inhuman. And you promise a kingdom of deliverance upon the foundations of your fathers eternal suffering. What a fragile pedestal. Veylis eyes twinkled. You think this will strike my resolve? I greet you now with a simple request. Make my father''s screams louder. Let the city hear the voice of its savior. Let them know what has been sacrificed by me upon the altar of our salvation. Let everyone hear and know that there is nothing! Nothing! Nothing! I will not give and no one I will not damn! Including myself! Especially myself! To ensure that humanity can keep their choices! That we will be watched over by the best of us, rather than machines that cast us into this pit of ruination. Madness. Madness and impossible confidence. Even right now, at this very instant, the High Seraph believed she was right. Believed everything she did was justified. "You fucking" Naeko croaked out. Finally, the coldness within Veylis''s eyes vanished as embers of genuine anger burned behind her gaze. She stared upon Naeko, and he glared back. Love and hate were ever close, and the intensities of one could easily cross the threshold into another. Avo studied the two and saw a wordless exchange follow. Whatever was being said, whatever was conveyed, he couldn''t fully read, even with Hysteria. But the gist was communicated when Veylis spoke her sentence. "Say nothing to me, coward. You would not have been enough. I would have called for you, and he would have called for you, and Zein would have called for you, and you would have chosen nothing. Dog!" Pain. Pure pain flashed through Naeko. For a moment, a palm formed over Veylis, and Avo cast a thought to interrupt him. +No. Naeko. Do not give her your will. Do not let her decide.+ The palm quivered. Veylis stared on in cold judgment. And then Naeko let his Heaven break. Youre wrong. Youre godsdamned wrong. I would have... I would have tried. You would have what? Veylis said, sounding more disappointed than angry now. I would have stopped all you damn fools, Naeko growled. I would have chosen me. And now it was Veylis turn to be cut down. The High Seraph turned away first, the first hints of humanity passing through her expression. I wish I could imagine the sight. Dont wish. Just wait. Avo hissed a low laugh at Veylis as she turned to face him once more. Paladins, Veylis said, speaking to the guardians of Scale as if they were her soldiers, remove the accused. They do not matter. This trial is not about them. It is about us. We children of broken legacies. The Guilds under Jaus. And the Burning Dreamer, emerged from the ashes of Noloth. Let the Gatekeeper glare upon us. Let truth hang like a promised blade. I will burn in judgment and toil before your words. Will you do the same, Dreamer? A challenge easily accepted. Let us be joined in the crucible of truth, Seraph. Stand and deliver. Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (II) Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (II) +Fuck it. Im with the weird godsdamn bird-whatever thing. Fuck it all. Fuck the Guilds. Fuck paradise. Burn it down. Burn it down. Burn it down...+ -Asgard Saldur, FATELESS 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (II) A rapturous emanation of power exploded forth from the Gatekeeper, no longer suppressed by Avo''s presence. With Veylis''s closing her time-wrought wounds, the Gatekeeper''s microcosm of a galaxy enveloped the entire court. Walls and surfaces were unmade; stars bloomed from singular motes of light, caressing the atmosphere in a comforting ambiance. Swirling paths of nebula glided from person to person as every single conscious being within scale found themselves adrift next to planetary bodies. The concept of distance became irrelevant as all found themselves able to behold the High Seraph and the Burning Dreamer. Every ounce of the Gatekeeper''s power drifted away from the Instrument, the Elder, and fell upon the only two that truly mattered. Avo and Veylis were as if clashing singularities, their sighs immense, facing each other upon the accretion disk of a black hole turned pedestal for this most metaphysical debate. "Citizens and subjects of New Vultun," Veylis began, "I greet you in submission to the Gatekeeper''s miracles. Witness its power over me, witness my wounds sealed, witness as I stand testament for all I believe, for all I intend, and understand that what comes from me now will be truth upon truth, truth to truth, with lies certain to consign me to banishment." A subtle smirk crept over the High Seraph''s features. "And with the mention of banishment, I hereby demand the invitation of New Vultun''s once-master, the Exiled City of Noloth." She regarded Ava with a glint in her eye. "If we are to be judged for our legacy, then let me not be judged alone." "Agreed," Avo said without any hesitation. He was looking forward to this. The hungers were weak, several pockets of resistance festering inside them like tumorous growths. He had no desire to hide his past anymore. "Let them be present, their sins stand greater than any of yours." Heating the accord between the High Seraph and the Burning Dreamer, an oscillating wavelength swept out from the Heaven of Truth. As a ripple passed over this galaxy, the darkness above them began to clear. At first, it seemed like a reflection was looming above; however, the astute could see that the parted realm above was composed of sequences rather than galactic arms. There, at its very core, descended a massive shapenests of dragons, each biting into each other, golden ichor leaking from their many wounds, spilling over into the deepness of the Nether above. Their eyes blinked between parted scales, and along crenelations, the lights of an eternal city shone. But rather than glory, only an oppressive bitterness descended. The Strix Upon the All-And-Empty regarded its forebearer with a mocking laugh. "You''ve come fast. Surprised you''ve come at all." To the Hungers further credit, they ignored his jab, focusing every ounce of their perception on Veylis instead. +Daughter of the Betrayer, you are bold to call upon us.+ "No," Veylis replied, "you possess no power, so I cannot be bold. This instead is an act of calculated cruelty. And you are no agent here. No more than the Elder you wielded, or the Instrument I intended to sacrifice. The views and callous cog-feed continued to spike, and Draus finger twitched, her thoughts absolutely silent, her instincts fine-tuned to violence. Murmurs and thought-casts were exchanged among the masses in the court. Some among the Paladins even began to back away, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of metaphysical force. Their retreat was halted as Naeko''s palm manifested around him, a reminder that there were powers upon powers present here, further amplified by a joyous clapping sounding out from a corner of this galaxy. Veylis turned, and a momentary widening of her eyes occurred when she noticed the Stormsparrowthree heads, each sporting a rictus grin, her many hands slamming together, expressing boundless glee. "Oh," Veylis sighed, "Ying. You are here as well." "Oh, come now, older sister. You must know that where there''s a stage, there will be a performer. Don''t tell me you didn''t anticipate my presence when you peeked across the paths?" "I always do," Veylis said with a monotone voice, "and I always hope I''m wrong when it comes to you." "Now you''re welcome to try and remove me anytime," the Stormsparrow said, holding out her hands. "Later," Veylis said, "later, when the charade of diplomacy finally implodes upon itself. But for now, it is time for us to use the violence in her words." A synchronous snarl of outrage detonated from the Hungers. +What purpose does this theater hold? We all know where we stand. We all know what we want.+ "Do we now?" Veylis and Avo said at once. The two didn''t even need to share a glance; they were of a mind about the Hungers. For whatever future comes to pass, Noloth could never be allowed to reign. Veylis shook her head, and the singularity within her chest quivered. Streams of time expanded from her being, creeping across every Saintist Sovereignty and district. Avo beheld her expansion from his countless copies, the Gestalt feeding him insight. It was sweeping over the world, her manifestation, external architecture built upon the foundations of time. The Burning Dreamer, meanwhile, read like an idea from within, and between them, reality and humanity would experience the most esoteric friction. Before Veylis continued further, she made a quick gesture towards Abrel and DRongo. The girl was still weeping, struggling to keep herself composed. The Elder, meanwhile, shivered and shook, unmoving, her mind ruled by nothing but fear. She was as if a lamb lost in a den of monsters. Avo''s words echoed loud, spreading through the Court of Truth, across all of New Vultun from each of his copies. "Blind yourself, willfully or not, be ignorant, by choice or not. You all speak of futures, utopias, yet here you are, casting your own feelings in place of reality." "That is power manifested," Veylis said, words spoken like a mortal, desperate for control. "Tell me, as you have lived countless futures, as you have shaped trillions of destinies, have you taken a moment, a single second, to experience the world that it is? Have you looked beyond your own mind, rested upon the patterns of existence? Have you realized yet that there is no utopia possible?" "Gatekeeper," Veylis said, looking to the Heaven of Truth, expecting it to support her. Avo realized what she was trying to do: She thought she had caught him in a lie, but the Gatekeeper said nothing, and Veylis looked at it with curiosity. You mistake your subjectivity for fact again. You are blinded. Blinded by all the power you possess. You drown in your own perspective, Veylis. To espouse the virtues of human will is a choice. But human will is bound to human want. Human want is bound to human consciousness. You impose what you feel, what you perceive on existence, and so you will fail, for you cannot even comprehend the minds of those like you and existence. Existence is not consciousness. {Not yet.} A static, confused voice spoke back to Avo. Infacer, Avo said, "Why do you not join the conversation? Why do you only lurk? {Fuck off, ghoul, I''m trying to deal with your Famine problem.} Avo only laughed. It was good to have reliable enemies sometimes. +Bastard!+ the hungers growled. +Traitor!+ The Strix simply lifted its head and spoke one word in rebuttal. "Failure." "It seems that the Burning Dreamer wishes to speak again. Very well. I have given enough words." Veylis lifted a hand towards Avo. "Before you speak, I would like to call on Voidwatch''s representative. It would not do to make this christening of the Tenth Power official without our most esteemed partners." From beyond, the wren wrought dark, and at her compulsion, a single presence materialized, drawn forth by the Gatekeeper. A veil of static clung around them, and an unassuming man, strange of hair and apparel alike, was brought before the gaze of trillions. Kant had arrived in the guise of his avatar, and he regarded everyone with brief bows. {EGI Kant Was A Prick. I will be serving as the party''s collective representative for today. I hope that I can do you all justice on this most contentious of occasions. And furthermore, beg for your aid.} "Aid?" Veylis said, looking curiously at Kant. {Yes, aid.} The EGIs avatar pointed towards Avo now. {Voidwatch is under attack.} Some surprise mutters spread through the crowd, but most were already informed. They knew battles were happening in the Deep Void Beyond, that a winged creature resembling the Strix upon the Empty was locked in conflict, the few hundred thousand Void ships. {The Strix Upon the Empty, representative of the newly declared polity of Symmetry, has launched an egregious and unjustifiable assault on Voidwatch''s territory and citizenry. We would like to invoke the full powers of the Articles and call upon the aid of our planetary partners in the pursuit of subduing this rogue element of power.} With each passing second, Veylis looked between the EGI and Avo and smirked as she gave the Burning Dreamer a knowing smile. "I see. But for such a sudden crisis I would have expected an emergency broadcast for aid." Kant faced the High Seraph with an apologetic expression. {We, of Voidwatch, prefer to handle our own issues and not burden our terrestrial partners with undue problems. It is a... terrible thing to make habit. However, it seems that we have underestimated the scale of this...} He looked to Avo, {...threat.} "A common mistake," Avo said, building on his mythos further. {One that should be rectified as soon as possible,} Kant said, injecting a tone of severity into his voice.Fo?ll0w current novE?ls o/n n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(c/o/m) Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (III) Chapter 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (III) Bloodthanes, we call to you now, and ask that you point your gaze skyward. We, the Mistresses of Wounds, we, Sons to Matriarchs Become, we, mothers above huntresses all, have been called by our erstwhile cousins to their defense. The war has spread beyond the confines of our world, and we, of the Longeyes, Mistresses of Wounds and Beholders of the Final Ruin, witness a calamity festering in the void. A new threat is upon us, the seed of an ancient foe turned ripe abomination. As of now, we give the right to all Bloodthanes beyond Sphere Five to participate in the Godhunt to come. But know this, your prey will not be a stray creature wandering the dark, a maddened eldritch, monstrosity, drained of death and worn by entropy. No, our foe taunts us, our foe sees us, our foe expects us. But we have been called, and so we will answer. For though the loom of oblivion still weaves, we must all play our part to ensure that the final end is ours to claim. Not the betrayer. Not our allies of measured deceit. Not the time-broken. And especially not the Daughter of the Festering Cycle. Ruin be our birthright. Ours, and ours alone. -Message from Stormtree Longeyes 28-11 Children of Broken Legacies (III) At once, the entire court was consumed by a muted uproar. Thoughtcasts were exchanged between guilders and their home offices. Peeking into their minds, Avo saw the mem-data flooding in, and found himself satisfied. Their thoughts were filled with satellite imaging obtained from their golems portraying the Strix Upon the Empty engaging Voidwatch assets across the void. Far above Idheims atmosphere, another branch of Avo''s consciousness sparred against his new enemies, slowly drinking in the memetic projectiles that the voidships were sending at him. Massive salvos of relativistic projectiles were consumed by a sprawling weave of phantasmal tendrils stretching a few hundred thousand kilometers around the Strix. A sub-layer of existence was imprinted upon reality, and through his Exo-Paracosm, Avo drank the attacks in, dissecting them materially, mentally, and thaumaturgically. With every missile and weapon he countered, a growing thought cemented itself within Avos mind: Metaphysics poisoned Idheims development. The people on this world claimed power far too early; it made them infants with influence beyond their wisdom to wield. Though they could impose raw belief based on what little they perceived of the world, the deeper nuances behind realitys design eluded them. Just as the true game being played in the Court of Truth was obstructed from most sophonts even now. Even the Agnos, who thought themselves the wisest that humanity had to offer, stood as less than a pale shadow when contrasted before the glory of Voidwatch. Far had humanity fallen since the Builder War. Echoing Avo''s sentiment, Veylis spoke her response and played along. "I see," the High Seraph presented a fake smile to Kant. "If what you say is true, then we of Highflame will honor our oaths. We will not see the last legacy of all humanity lost to the abyss of a hungering monster." It was a half-casual jab meant to taint Avo''s identity by tying him to the Hungers. But the Burning Dreamer remained unburdened. He merely laughed. He wanted the city to know, and he wanted the city to see him rebuke his former masters over and over again. A thoughtcast swept across through the plane of truth. Avo sensed its coming even before it arrived, for the Longeye, Empty Grave, had been in communication with her sisters even as he spoke. Though he couldn''t delve too into her cognition with ease due to her metaphysical barriers, his Definement of Hysteria still captured a few instances of critical information, such as the Stormtrees orders issued to their auxiliary Bloodthane cadres. R/e?/Ad lateSt ch/a/pters at Only Soon, the void would be filled with Scaarthians and their comrades. "Empty Grave of the Longeyes," Empty Grave declared herself, instilling her voice with an added echo. "The Betrayer has made her boast. One Stormtree will match and exceed. For every cadre and Knot of Highflame that pierces the planetary veil, we will send one of our own. The Strixs Soul will be ours to claim. Avo channeled a mental chuckle over to the Longeye through Shotin. The Seeker just scowled in response. +Appreciate the declaration, Matriarch.+ Patterns of reality trembled around the mangled torso Empty Grave used as her dwelling. +You have much to explain. As does the Inner Council. +In due time. Just know that this is the right choice. For your Guild. For the Massists. For Idheim.+ The Longeye let out an unplacated snort, but did not contend any further. There would be problems when they discovered he wasnt actually in communication with the Inner Council, but perhaps Avo could muddy the waters by thenmake things true post-hoc. For now, the Longeyes alignment with her Guilds hated foe started an avalanche. +Dowager Far Pearl,+ a Sang introduced herself via thoughtcast. +We will honor any and all commitments and are prepared to stand alongside our esteemed and distant kindred from beyond the void. Furthermore, we are open to offering additional assortments of aid beyond martial assets to ensure the safety and security of Voidwatch''s polities with the hopes of furthering our diplomatic relations.+ A concurrence of thoughts sounded out from the court. Declarations went forth from every single Guilder present. A rare moment of accord was reached between Massists and Saintists as they all settled upon a shared goal: a pseudo-Godhunt in ostensible defense of Voidwatch, and in deliberate attempt to take claim Avos Soul and ontologics. Truth, the Gatekeeper proclaimed, speaking once after a lull. Its words washed over Kant, Avo, and all members of the court. An ansible broadcast sank into Avo, heralded by Only Way To Be Sures choking laughter. {Holy shit. Our layered cake of political bullshit worked.} Genuine rage simmered from the Infacer, but they just continued. {I see you now, Avo. Playing your games. Well, understand this: This play-war you have everyone dancing too? This theater of legitimacy? It will end. It will become truer than you ever think. Just get more powerful. Just hit your point of singularity. You will get there soon. You are like us. You will fall off the edge. And then they start actually worrying proper. And then, when are on the precipice of being a true great power, suddenly, all your old friends will start talking to Veylis, betraying your moves, while betraying hers, while betraying yours... {It is all bullshit. They are afraid. They do not want to let go. But more than that, they do not want to face the fact that they are the reason why we are all here. Because the people who made me, and the people who made them had two ideas that could not get along. Which, when fed into a mind, became two different realities, that tore, that tore, that tore, and tore some more. Until we broke creation itself.} A moment of silence followed. Veylis had stopped speaking in the real as well. {It is all bullshit. You will go to war with them. And they are planning to kill you. Or contain you at least. There is no other way. Because though Aegis might think you will deliver justice, the rest of Voidwatch might start having other ideas about living as memetic imprints within the mind of a metaphysical horror. Fuck it. Veylis?} As if on cue, the High Seraph spoke. Oh. An additional matter, Kant: Do you have means of potentially eliminating the Strix? Kant went still as the Gatekeepers miracles pressed down on them. {...Yes} Truth, the Gatekeeper said. Good. Do you have plans to deploy it against the Strix? A task we terrestrials may assist in. {Yes} Not unexpected. Not even truly disappointing. Nothing changed between Avo and Voidwatch. They were functionally at war. If they had nothing to resolve his existence, he would have been surprised. +So. Voidwatch is prepared.+ {Sure,} the Infacer snorted. {Just long enough for them to break apart again after some other disagreement. No. You have seen enough. This court? This Gatekeeper? All this? Ruined. Because of people. And so, Veylis and I are going to see that fixed soon.} Avo caught the Infacers words. +Soon.+ {Oh, yes. I have been meaning to askwhen are you going to finally leave Axtraxis and actually start your attack? Because I am running out of patience. My Knots have been waiting to raid your stupid little enclave. So, uh. Whip out your dick, consang. Put it down on the table. So I can put mine next to it.} Tension filled Avo as the Infacer finished. They knew he was in Axtraxis. But though templates panicked, Avo noticed something: Veylis hadnt come for him yet. Alysims name was unmentioned as well. So, either they only knew of the intrusion or werent actually surprised about the Chronicler. Pre-Cognition indicated the former. The run was still salvageable. Better, this failure was even more organic than the one he had planned. +Alysim,+ Avo sent. +Prepare for rapid exfiltration. We hit as many place as fast as we can. Get ready to stride the paths.+ [Always,] the man replied. [My fate is not yet upon me.] +Fine,+ Avo said, speaking to the Infacer. +But you might not like how this goes.+ {Hm. Sure. Anyway. You are going to want to hurry, because} And then Avo felt it. Everyone felt it. Something was tearing. A spike of metaphysical pressure that rang against their Frames and minds alike. Lustaways flared as Avo felt a detonation of different emotions within him. He quickly altered his mindstate and found himself removing his ability to know love, lust, want, fondness, and more. Moans filled the court and faintly, Avo audibly heard Reva cry out for White-Rab. She was not alone in her proclamation. Her proclamation of love. Avo froze. Looking deeper upon the surface of the tapestry, he watched as a new entropy laced string was slowly sliding back into existence, entangling itself with countless other patterns. And across New Vultun, he heard her: Kaes original self. The Agnos was screaming. Crying out. +Its too much. Its too much. Its too much.+ What the hells have you done? Avo said, speaking to Veylis. The High Seraph smiled. This time, the expression was genuine. You are not the only player in this game. While you were preparing, while you schemed, so did I. But ultimately, the question isnt what I have done. It is what you are about to do. Tell me, what does your Agnos mean to you? What of the fates of the FATELESS when the Heaven of Love fully falls once more.+ Veylis... you didnt... Naeko swallowed, shaking as love and hate warred inside him. No. I havent. Not yet. Veylis looked back to Avo. I am going to come for you now. Your enclave. Your properties. Your assets. I am going to come for all of them. And every plane containing the Fallen Heaven of Love will soon rupture. Unless you stop me. Make your move, Dreamer. I insist. Match me with your atrocity. Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (I) Chapter 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (I) IT IS TIME. -Akusande 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (I) Through countless bodies, across a myriad of perspectives, Avo beheld the skies over the Tiers as growing ruptures began to spread. 15,622 demiplanes were used to seal the fallen Heaven of Love away from the rest of reality. Of all these demiplanes, [58%] of them were within High Flame territory. For the better part of a decade, they remained one of the few things that all Guilds would cooperate on. Their stability ensured by the Agnosi themselves. Today, however, these planes collapsed. They did not rupture themselves; rather, they were disabled. It was like removing the stitches from an unhealed wound. Clamps of spatial reality loosened and melded with baseline reality. This went unnoticed by most, but the Fallen Heaven of Love was spilling down over the megacity, tainting existence with its twisted miracles. Upon the tapestry, Love was a tyrant that reigned over countless patterns, yet it remained a subtle master. Its broken canons affected Domains of Biology, Emotion, Culture, Information, Action, Art, and moreso many more. Even when glancing down from the void above, the downpour of Love left Avo staggered. He experienced all this as another strand of his consciousness faced the perpetrator of this building atrocity. Even drawing on all the templates that were nested within his consciousness, Avo couldn''t comprehend why Veylis would commit to such an action. Doing this was certain to turn the other Guilds against herwithout a doubt, this would be the opening shot of the Fifth Guild War. More, it might be even be enough to cause internal fractures within Highflame. Or have her Voidwatch benefactors to disavow her entirely. For a few passing moments, neither the Massists nor the Saintists said anything. Ultimately, it wasn''t a member from either faction that broke the silence. "Veylis, Naeko breathed, what the hells did you just do?" As the Court of Truth was a demiplane within a demiplane, it remained insulated from the most direct effects of Fallen Love. But even so, Love reigned over countless other aspects. The pull exerted upon reality''s structure could not be denied. All that Naeko felt towards Veylis, the totality of his hate, the repressed love, began coalescing together once more, the beginnings of a force absolute and powerful, reigning over his being in emotion, biology, and behavior. "I freed the Heaven of Love," Veylis repeated, without a hint of shame or fear. And now, I put it on the path toward restoration or obliteration. A dam broke thereafter. An apocalyptic deluge of thoughtcasts flooded into the guilders, reports coming in from various districts, horrified accounts detailing the breach of Love. "Regardless, let us discuss more theatrical matters further," Veylis said, brushing aside her great transgression as if it was no big deal. "Kant, how shall we coordinate this Godhunt? I think it would be best for us to embark on this so that the Dreamer might amuse himself. How many cadres should we sacrifice? Hm? How many "No!" Naeko cut her off, his voice infused with power and violence. The force behind his spoken word caused the insides of the scale to crack, and as the sound traveled over Veylis, and she ground back several feet, her Chief Paladins Heaven more than even she could bear. All at once, the Saintists began to rise, but Avo mentally quelled their desire to defend the High Seraph. Immediately thereafter, he had to suppress the Massists as well. He didn''t want this place to collapse into a fight, not like this. There were too many assets here, and if chaos reigned and Veylis managed to retreat, his chance of striking her down before the war could begin would be lost. "The fuck... you... what were you even thinking." Naeko said. Every word spoken was a deeper growl. Veylis regarded her former lover with a dismissive stare. "I already told you. Your listening has worsened these days. A pity. But you are not the one who matters here. Then the conversation switched from the material to the mental. A thoughtcast extended from the High Seraph, and she spoke to Avo directly. +Or, perhaps I should say, we are saving this city. You can hear her, can''t you? Your Agnos. She is calling for you. Calling for all of us. Your choice to Ensoul her made things simpler for me. Her genius only incentivized me further. I attached her to the Fallen Heaven. And now she observes the nature of its collapse. Her ego grinds and breaks, but there is still something of her left. You can still save her. But only if you stabilize the Heaven of Love."Chee?ck out latest novels on "You half-strand, motherfucker!" Chambers snarled. The Fucktopia launched a wave of cocks forward, Avo held Chambers and his manifested gods back via his phantasmal tendrils. +Soon,+ Avo said. +Not now. Soon. The opening is coming. We will have her.+ Shifting his consciousness, he learned that Alysim was out of Axtraxis now. He had used one of the Instructors to create a pathway back to the Elysium of Lasthrone. Now, the Chronicler headed for the targeted techno-thaumic reactors while Avo compromised critical ephemerals across Highflame territory. But as things developed, he felt another disturbance press down on the tapestry. *** Across the Sunderwilds, near the shores of Noloth, an explosion grander and greater than anything Avo had ever witnessed blossomed over the Shattered Sea. At the same time, spatial tunnels extended rapidly as the slowly encroaching Omnitech Knots began their siege. They were coming for his Heaven of Winter and enclave simultaneously. The attacking Knots came from all directions. Avo had to assign an additional submind to defense, increasing his total operational consciousnesses in the Sunderwilds to two. He counted over 22,000 vectors of attack. But as the massive explosion upon the Shattered Sea swept in close, Avo Conception of Ontology noticed something else as well. He felt another presence carried by the blast wave, a subtle signal hidden within a wall of projected radiation. Patches of Fallen Heavens drank away the cascading force and heat from the blast, but the radiation still traveled a bit further. Before they hit a section of the Sunderwilds where space would fold upwards, about 560 more knots manifested in the real before their forms narrowed into needle thin threads, diving into the raid as well. [Quite the show of force,] one submind said. The other submind grunted. [Wasteful.] Along with them was Draus, her mind further bolstered by the Gestalt and her many copies. +Alright then,+ Draus said. +Time to open up some kill boxes. You ready, Avo?+ [Yes,] both subminds hissed. They let a sliver of the beast within infest their personalities as feral delight mingled with martial focus. Across the Sunderwilds, 108 memetically constructed towers flared with Soulfire. Avo triggered his Pattern-Nullification. _PATTERN-NULLIFICATION_ APPLYING DOMAIN OF (SPACE) These watchtowers, originally used as observational outposts or in the case of the enclave, a way to circumvent the sea of darkness from enshrouding the City of Light, were now bestowed with Avos thaumic mass. More than just that, their forms also turned reflective, and tendrils of anomalous matter and cancerous biology spread around them in growing patches, like sores infesting the face of existence. Instantly, they went from watchtowers to metaphysical launch sites, and as Avo targeted the Domain of Space using his Pattern-Nullification, he struck out using trauma and entropy. [Soon,] Corner answered, a growing anticipation accompanying him. [Bitch is about to get a special surprise.] *** Within the prison plane, Avo turned to Zein and Naeko. Before he could say anything, the Godslayers glaive trembled. IT IS TIME. *** As Alysim felt a greater power sweep over his path, he felt nothing but a sense of relief. Finally, the moment was approaching. Finally, his death would have Reality shifted around him. A bridge of gold carried him across time and space, slamming him down within a perfect replica of the Court of Truth. Groaning, Alysim tried to rise as he took in his surroundings. Most of the individuals present radiated with a sheen of gold around them. They were puppetsconstructs to aid in Veylis simulation. And then, standing over him, with countless streams from the paths flowing out from her, was the High Seraph herself, crowned by a veil of static. *** "How?" Veylis murmured, trying to process who she just caught. The ghoul simply laughed at her. "You planned. So did I. Planned within plans. Schemes within schemes. You want me to reach into your trap, to stop the Heaven of Love from falling. All to service a desired future of your making. But you havent even resolved matters from your past. And for the first time, Veylis directed a genuine glare at Avo. *** For a few moments, Veylis just stared, watching as the Chronicler slowly staggered back to his feet. Brushing his ragged outfit off, he turned and smiled. "Hello, girl." His lip twitched as his smile collapsed. "Lore lost, what have you done to yourself? You look like some kind of ridiculous statue. Valeys continued her silence, but the Infacer was far less reserved. {What the fuck?} the EGI muttered. {How the hell are you here? Isn''t he dead? Mind me, Veylis. Are my databases getting corrupted? We saw your mother} He died. Veylis was certain. "He died. We saw his body. We saw mother sever him from his tether to time. The Chronicler simply shrugged. "Time is a funny thing. And death is a matter of philosophical Veylis seized Alysim by his throat. *** How? Veylis almost snarled, eyes burning holes into Avo. "How did you find him? How is he alive. To this, the Overheaven but laughed. I did not find him. He was fated to find me. You should... ask your mother about this. "Truth," the Gatekeeper said. The weight of the Heaven of Truth''s approval swept through the court. The High Seraph was at a loss as she turned to face the Gatekeeper. What is he Veylis began Then, within her Heaven, all hell broke loose. *** Veylis hand closed tighter. Several of Alysims vertebrae parted immediately. "I don''t know how you''re back, you disgusting creature. I don''t know how you survived my mother. She''s many things, but a liar, unskilled. No, she killed you, of that I''m certain. Your signature is undeniable. It is you. You are bound to history, same as you were before, until my mother severed you. Severed you and bled you dry. So how are you here?" Alysim grinned at her as she asked the very same question to the Overheaven back in stable reality. She clenched tighter, and more of his neck broke. But a second later, time mended his wounds, impossibly. Alysim managed to laugh. Finally, the Chronicler met her gaze again and sighed. "It is the past, don''t you see? I stillI am not dead. A path is extending forth from me still. I still have a future, am still yet to die." Valeys paused and tried to follow the pathway of his ontology. Her paths reached forth, pressing down on him. "Yet to" One of his pockets burst open. A plane of space promptly expanded, but in the same instant, Veylis altered the paths within herself, shifting away. To no avail. A glaive split through her paths, and a dragon across Veylis being, guiding a glaive to split the Heaven asunder. Veylis manifested a full canon avatar and intercepted the blow. In a fraction of an instant, Zein Thousandhand, Godslayer, operative of Ninth Column, and prisoner to the Paladins no more, stood upon a bridge of gold across from her daughter, her glaive an inch away from Veylis skull. They regarded each other during their statement as Zein spoke first. Hello, my girl. Ive come to kill you for good. "Mother," Veylis replied. "I see your pride has grown cheap over the years. Tell me, how did you do this? Is he just a manifestation from your past? No. All too annoying real, Im afraid. But dont worry. His end is approaching. And has already happened. But right now, I think its time we see this done. And then, before Veylis could question her mother any further, a massive palm swept into existence just behind Zein while a Strix flapped its wings within its mists. Both the Burning Dreamer and Force-Breaker struck together, joining their weight to hammer hard against the butt of Zeins glaive, sending its tip clean through Veylis skull. Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (II) Chapter 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (II) So sounds a new act, Heralding the Ladders come. The monster, the lover, the daughter, the mother bound by fate and pact, This clash bringing the world to collapse, another beat on realitys drum. And now, the Great Sleeper shifts and stirs, the faintness of itself there, And by its will, a Sparrow takes the stage, Her banners as wings, and in her hands flies true, the spear named the Crimson Hare... -Lines Overheard from the Stormsparrows Chorus of Eternity 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (II) Zein''s glaive bit deep into the High Seraph''s skull, but from the wounds spilled time, wrapping around the weapon in coalescing golden currents. At once, the High Seraph''s avatar came undone, its body dissolving in flows of gold, its miracles tumbling back like a current returning to the sea. But escape was impossible, for Akusande, the dragon-glaive, carried the fated blow onward, chasing the golden tides and carving a bridge through Veylis paths. The High Seraph altered the world within her at a whim. Calamities of impossible portions manifested with each passing second samplings of devastation harvested from across history. Veylis unleashed fusion bombs, thoughtwave detonations, ruptures, hurricanes, firestorms, spatial wounds, and collapsing singularities upon the intruders within her ontology. The sheer power she outputted in less than a second would have seen a mundane world hollowed to its core and shattered like a shell. But even if she could bring enough power to extinguish stars and snuff out systems, even if she could create a cataclysm the scope of existence itself, even if her constant waves that sundered thought kept her inner world barren of the Dreamers presence, all that was force and violence were mere suggestions to the Chief Paladin of New Vultun, and he had but one response to his former lovers onslaught. +No.+ A constant stream of continent-winnowing force crashed against a halting palm of dense vapor. Avo and his gestalt were joined in a moment of awe as they beheld ceaseless surges of destruction crash against the Force-Breakerand part as if trickling steams circling around a mountain. And through it all, the group just continued onward, Zein carving a route through Veylis paths. The High Seraph might be a master of chronology itself, but not even she was beyond the laws of symmetry. Just as wind could clash with wind, flames consumed flames, and water could clash and meld, time could strike across time. The blow would find it. It was only a matter of when. But that was ultimately the problem: Veylis still had time. *** Back in the real, a trickle of blood ran down the High Seraph''s forehead. Her face softened in a look of surprise as she reached out with a finger, dipping her tip in the wound. Surprised gasps and widening eyes characterized the Guilders watching. Calas thoughtcast lobby exceeded maximum capacity, and she had to rent another just to maintain her stream. Across the city, over five hundred billion people stood witness to this historic instant in Scale. The declaration of a new power, the arrival of the High Seraph, Voidwatch''s declaration of war, the unsealing of the fallen Heaven of Love, and finally, the bleeding of Highflame''s master. Disbelief, euphoria, and a building sense of change flowed through the Nether. Across No-Dragon districts, Avo felt the birthing of new dragons, this moment a zeitgeist captureda snapshot portraying the last days before the Ladders arrival. "Before we begin,"Veylis said, sounding more uncertain than she''d ever been, "before this war between us begins in truth... I want to know something. I want to know if my mother''s words are true. I heard the Gatekeeper... But I wish to hear it from you. The Chronicler... could his reappearance truly be nothing but plain chance? Just a breach in the paths?" "He found us," Avo answered. "He found us. Werent expecting him either. But nothing is plain chance. Not anymore. Every future led tot his point. And he is fused to time. Bound to history until destined death. He is already dead in the future. So he cannot be dead now." A flash of understanding passed behind Veylis''s eyes. "Ah. His death a packaged paradox. Yesterdays tomorrow. What a loathsome achievement. For all Alysim accomplished, Veylis still scorned him openly. This, more than anything else about the High Seraph, Avo understood. You two now share an end. He has been cut down by your mother. And so have you. No longer did the wound on her head trickle. Now it bled properly. Now it gushed. But still, Veylis only laughed. "Please, Dreamer, do not insult me. I have faced my mother''s pet dragon time and time again. This is not the first time she''s cut me. It will not be the last. Even without my Heaven, I am beyond blood and tissue. Humanity is but a fading echo to me, and this face is between symbol and memory for who I once was. Lest my mother wishes to accept her end by way of backlash, it will take more than this to end our dalliance, Avo. The cut continued down the bridge of her nose as she spoke, exposing severed tissue and splitting bone. Slowly, it was traveling toward the singularity at the core of her being. The wound was traveling. The wound was seeking. The wound was destiny. And what happens when the cut sinks into the place where your consciousness resides? Avo asked. You must know the consequence of dying before me. Your other cyclers will only delay the inevitable. I will claim your Frame. I will inflict upon you a final end. You will try. Nothing more. A ripple of power blossomed out from the High Seraph, and golden pathways extended outwards, each one layered over another. Taking in the court, Veylis infused her voice with strength, but before she spoke, she turned, stared at the Gatekeeper, let out a quiet snort of scorn. "You think this will be enough for me to vent my Rend and flee? You think I will allow you to keep my father''s bastardto claim truth as your weapon against me, against Highflame, against the future I wish to see?" "Yes," Avo said, without hesitation, without doubt. Veylis swept her gaze across all who were gathered. Crushing power flowed out from each of her paths as her head was fully split in two. Though her face parted in two flaps, though her tongue was little more than two strips of dangling flesh, Veylis spoke, and everyone heard. "All paths are to converge upon Scale, here a nexus of destiny brewing, here, a nest for players battling to shape their desired future. But there is only one path in the end, one that leads to me. You are recognized today, Dreamer. Claim this trial as your symbol of philosophical triumph. Your statement is heard, recognition given. You stand against the Voiders; you stand against the Guilds. A new master is born for the FATELESS masses to feed their lives in spite of their betters. But this theater is at its end, and what follows Is but prologue!" Stormsparrow sang out, her voice high, a chorus of three melodies. A building beat intruded upon the High Seraph''s speech. Not you, Veylis said, annoyance clear in her voice. Not now. I have no mood to play with you, insolent, degenerate, violent, cretin. This has nothing to do with you. Why can''t you just" "It has everything to do with me," Stormsparrow said. Threading forward in the cosmic plane of truth, the Sang Fallwalker held her many arms wide as her left and right faces began to burn with Soulfire. A building symphony rose within the court thereafter, and the Heaven of Truth began to tremor. At once, strange Domains began to form as myriad patterns wove around the Stormsparrow in tightening knots. Avo regarded the Fallwalkers sudden intrusion with fascination. Several other minds connected to his gestalt had other reactions. *** [Green River] Green River directed her true self into her shadows as her human sheath felt dormant. There was nowhere really to go in the Plane of Truth, but still, she had lived through one of the Stormsparrows performances before. It was not an experience she wanted to suffer again. The Heaven of Truth need not be destroyed. No. For a few moments, it simply needed to be Forgotten by everyone. Including itself. And so, the Famines of Mercy waited for the right moment to expend a warmind of their own. *** [Avo] "I despise you, Sparrow, Veylis said, speaking with all the bluntness she could muster. I want you to know that should I win, I will erase every record of your existence and make sure you are unremembered and consigned to oblivion. And those damnable birds you so enjoy. "Now that would make for quite the tragedy," the Stormsparrow snickered. Standing just below Avo, she looked up and gave him a wink before raising her arms. +The chorus calls me to help you now. This should be fun.+ Then, she spoke, addressing everyone at once. "Citizens and subjects of New Vultun and Idheim, I bid you welcome! Welcome Welcome Welcome The chorus sang with her. "Welcome to the prologue to the end. So begins the Fifth and final Guild War. With shadows left behind, and the spotlight falling upon all our key players, the days of deception are past, and the days of war boom on the future. But do not fear death nor desolation, for death and cessation have been usurped. And the usurper''s shape comes as a rising ladder to determine all there is to come. But who will be victorious? Who will reign? Who will claim the role of hero? Who the clown? Who the knave? Who the villain? Hear me now, as the stage is set, for I, Storm Sparrow, offer you this first verse." At once, the building chorus exploded into a full opera as burnings began to peel from the Stormsparrows head. Slowly, Avo could feel her Heaven manifesting, its power arising in full. While this continued, Veylis throat split open as Zeins stab glided down closer to her torso. A faint hiss of mist leaked from her paths as Naeko repelled another one of her attempts at dislodging him and Zein. But Avo could feel something building inside hergold was beginning to percolate across all her districts, within every Highflame Godclad. Just as well. Avo had his own riposte pre-planned as well. She needed to defeat him, Naeko, Zein, the Sparrow, Alysim, and every last mind in the gestalt on top of the Paladins. They just needed harry her until Zeins cut finally arrived and Avo could reach into her death anchor. Already, things were going far better than expected. +So. Do we have a plan?+ the Stormsparrow. +We?+ +Quite. Reality wants to keep you alive. Here.+ A face flew out from her and splashed upon the Strixs face. A mask of red and white formed, and Avo felt the patterns of existence shift and coil around his very being like armor. DRAMATIS PERSONAE ASSIGNED: HERO OF WISDOM GRANTS YOU PERFECT AWARENESS OF EVERY DANCER ON THE STAGE AND ALLOWS YOU TO DECIDE THE PACE OF THE SCENE SCENE ONE: THE STRIX AND THE SERAPH +Kae,+ Avo asked, +what did she just do?+ [I... have no idea.] +What did you just do?+ Avo asked the Stormsparrow. +Made you the Hero of this story. Also, I have no idea. Every tale is different. Be this one a comedy, drama, or tragedy?+ He tried peering into her mind using his Hysteria, but heard only a howling maelstrom of voices as more masks began to circulate around her. Another mask colored black and blue shot off toward Veylis, but she simply drew one of her Godclads through her paths and used him to intercept the miracle on her behalf. DRAMATIS PERSONAE ASSIGNED: VILLAIN OF DECEIT FAILURE TO BETRAY YOUR ALLIES WILL RESULT IN EXISTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES DURING INTERMISSION The groaning form of a Sphere Five Godclad tumbled between Avo and Veylis. Rude, the Stormsparrow said. That was such a good role. The time is upon us, Dreamer, Veylis said. Care to meet my blows? Avo prepared his Pattern-Nullification and focused his intent on targeting time. Stand and deliver. Well said. Infacer! To me! At once, a static crown formed over the vertically bifurcated skull of the High Seraph as she manifested her Heaven in full before Avo for the very first time. At once, the paths ceased to be streams and hardened into tangible limbs. Clawing hands tightened into fists and gripped the causal fabric of existence. The spun in rows, nine layers in total, tearing, ripping, and distorting all reality while interlacing with other hands within. At the core, a singularity materialized, but its turning slowed and inverted. Slowly, the wormhole of fathomless darkness filled with light as it expanded, its collapse undone, its lifespan reverting backward. Its form swelled in a staggering instant as a sun formedand then shattered like an egg. Golden droplets spilled down and painted the shape of a titan. In the same moment, the spinning hands and the broken dawn rose, rising above forming humanoids head like a burning crown. More steams passed through the giant, and her being shifted, layers unto layers, but the fullness of shape never formed. Rather, the titan was constantly dissolving, countless strands compromising possible futures becoming as if grains of sand across the progression of time. But even so, the titan sprouted more fists from its body, and the fabric of existence itself capitulated to the dominance of Veylis Avandaers might. Avo tried to act, but time ground against himVeylis form drawing every droplet of progression unto herself, leaving the rest of existence slowed. There were no words to describe the size of her being or the dominance of her control. She was the ever-coming future. She was destinys herald. She was the DEMIURGE OF FATES END, THE FIST OF RECURSION [EST. 999999990 THAUM/c]. Come! Veylis voice echoed across all of Idheim, across the void, across every patch of reality that time could still flow. Come and despair before my inevitability! In that very instant, the droplets she pulled in detonated outward as smashing fists as billions perished before tides of chronology reshaped into calamity. Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (III) Chapter 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (III) +++PRIORITY ZENITH TRANSMISSION+++ All active cells. The High Seraph''s Heaven is at full manifestation. Temporal anomalies have been detected across all districts. Mirrors, initiate Queenslayer protocols. An opening has presented itself. We are deploying THE ARK to supplement efforts. End the war. Behead the master of Highflame. Whatever the cost. Whatever it takes. +++END TRANSMISSION+++ -Emergency Thoughtcast from Ori-Thaum Inner Council 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (III) Avo thought he knew the devastation a Godclad could bring once they entered the highest spheres. Even as a Third Sphere, he was capable of dashing at lightning speeds while bearing 80 tons of mass. The destruction he left in his wake could carve cataclysmic scars wrought from sheer velocity and displaced kinetic energy. Likewise, Shotins Parallelist could draw someone into a realm of pure fire or condemn them to crushing aquatic depths. And then there was Chief Paladin Naeko, whose heaven commanded a force above all others. Naeko made this power known as he brought his palm down over New Vultun, crushing countless lives beneath the flat of his metaphysical presence. Be they transgressing godclads or merely foolish fateless, every feat Avo had experienced so far was dwarfed by the High Seraph''s overwhelming might. The Demiurge of Fate''s End was a calamity born of chronology. As Avo''s cog feed registered just how many estimated thaums the Heaven had, an even longer string of Domains appeared across his vision and just kept going, and going, and going some more. Chronology was at the forefront, but after that, he saw almost every other domain he had encountered thus far, and even more besides. As the shroud of temporal stasis she manifested earlier detonated like shrapnel, Avo watched as golden trails extended across reality, painting zones of hyper-accelerated time. And as these pathways encroached, additional limbs sprouted from them, each reaching out for another section of the court and beyond. Across his many strands of consciousness, Avo beheld the true scope of Veylis''s attack and failed to suppress his awe. Torrents of gold blasted free from every Highflame Godclad within the court and across the city. The tears came alight with a brutal radiance, and within them boiled simulations bearing the full weight of recollected devastation. They swept out, spearing into rival Sovereignties, flashing waves of ruinous devastation kilometers long within the span of microseconds. Walls of flame and cascading entropy swept through unsuspecting districts. Massist fast-response knots reacted almost instantly, spatial portals opening in response to the temporal incursion. But while they were efficient in their reactivity, Veylis was the master of time. She struck them, impaling over 120,000 knots at once with a corresponding number of planes. That was the last Avo felt of their presence. Their fates, though unwitnessed, was beyond doubt. Concurrently, her attacks speared out for the Overheaven of Conceptualization, speared out from her Instruments, Authorities, and Seraphs, seeking the capture of the Stormsparrow, Avo, and the members of his manifested cadre. Additional tendrils folded away, reaching for the Paladins, as vines of light exploded from the Gatekeeper, weaving the entire court into a path-devoured cocoon. *** And nearly an entire continent away, Avo felt another 100,000 or so converging paths breach free of the Omnitech-established demiplanes. Here, her intent was direct. Her paths adapted to the nature of the surrounding Sunderwilds. With Avo''s awareness of ontology, he could always feel the encroaching blow. Some of her branches bore nothing but crushing kinetic energy, enough to render his enclave and most of the surrounding area a glass crater. A set of follow-up attacks were approaching. Avo''s Hysteria detected the oncoming thought-wave disruptions, even as they left Veylis''s paths. But though the High Seraph''s might was staggering, it was not unanticipated. And just because she possessed near-total control over the future did not place her above the laws of thaumaturgic symmetry and entropy either. Reflections flashed across his memetic towers as Avo and his cadre triggered the first of their countermeasures. Modified Rendsinks were flung out into reality, infused with Casual Rend set to overload with a session-linked command. The Sunderwilds, long ravaged by eldritch abnormalities, was considered by most to be beyond the point of breaking. But that was a mistaken assumption. Fissures of absolute darkness, darkness stolen from the void and infused with the ethereal glow of ghosts, spread across time and space. Ruptures opened across the face of reality as causality took a series of mortal wounds. These Rendbombs detonated in a sphere around both Avo''s enclave and his heaven of winter. As their ruptures expanded, he left only narrow channels for anyone to pass throughnarrow channels of stability that he would use as physical choke points to annihilate as many Omnitech units as possible. The last thing he gazed in the broader Sunderwilds was Veylis''s paths jolting to a sudden halt before they could crash into these ruptures. Though he didn''t know if Veylis was capable of soaking all this leftover Rend or not, he did know that his heaven was esoteric enough and also analogous enough. The High Seraph just might encounter a backlash if she tried to draw his rend bombs into her paths. Then, the Neo-Creationist EGI broadcasted a pitched note into the world and projected a strange set of symbols. Their canon spilled from the static crown drifting upon the Demiurge''s brow. It looked like a giant wearing a constellation as an adornment, with meteorites descending from their skull. {Deploying memetics,} Kant said to Avo. {Prepare to intercept.} As if on cue, a swarm of missiles infused with the lesser symbols and signals were fired across the void, and detonated themselves over and over again upon impacting the Strix. As more missiles exploded, his understanding grew, just in time for the next relatavistically delivered lesson to arrive. Rapidly, his Empathy and Hysteria generated a broad countermeasure against the coming attack, and Avo further laced his protections over his comrades. After a moment longer, the Infacer simply sighed and directed an ansible communication to Kant. {You piece of shit. Stop feeding him homework.} {But we are aligned, Infacer. Both of us are trying to resolve the issue of the Dreamer. Two sets of memetic attacks are better than one.} {Cunt.} Maru and Kare arrived next to Avo in that instant, the bearded senior paladin glaring hatefully at Osjon in the distance. "None of you fucking touch him," he whispered. "That cocksucker''s mine." Instead of speaking, Stormsparrow merely pulled another burning mask hovering in the air and placed it upon Maru''s face. He turned to stare at the sang, but she simply grinned. "A small blessing to facilitate your attempt at revenge." DRAMATIS PERSONAE ASSIGNED: HERO OF MIGHT GRANTS YOU THE RIGHT TO SACRIFICE YOUR LIFE TO KILL ANOTHER ACTOR OF EQUAL OR LESSER IMPORTANCE. LOSES THIS ROLE UPON DEATH. ACT 3 SCENE 1: THE SACRIFICE Now, with everyone else manifesting their Heavens... the Stormsparrow finished her words by buried a clawed hand under her chin and, with a violent flourish, tearing her current face clean off. But instead of dying and leaving an anchor, melodies and vibrant fibers erupted from her lacerations and threaded through each of the remaining masks spiraling above her. A colossal form wove itself into shape, the levitating masks slotted together forming one face of purest white, another bearing a visage weeping and blue, a third black, red, and furious, a fourth green, gold, and smiling. The rest of the Stormsparrow''s body began to grow, but over her sheath materialized a brilliant raiment infused with song and power. Each plate it sported was lined with crawling text, and looking upon them would cause a tune to fill one''s ears. A layer of shadows also ensnared her six arms, with countless more hands reaching out along their sides, and a massive flame-red spear materializing in the air next to her. At the end of the spear trailed a crimson ink brush, and where it stroked existence, a red hare bounced from place to place. PROTAGONIST OF THE ABBERANT CHORUS, NARRATORS NEMESIS (CULTURE/FORCE/WAR/STRENGTH/SPEED/SADNESS/HONOR/ANGER/THEATER/DIFFUSION) [EST. 44444444] Avo regarded the Stormsparrow''s Heaven for a moment, as he tried to comprehend just how these domains worked. He thought his Strix was esoteric, but a Heaven of Culture? What kind of cannons would that have? [I... uh...] template-Kae sighed. [Avo. Try to get a closer look at her Frame if you can.] He grunted in response. The Overheaven had a feeling he would be trying to kill her at some point in the future. "You''ll learn soon enough," the Storm Sparrow said, somehow overhearing his internal monologue. To make matters more disconcerting, her voice was coming from each of her masks now, making her the third Godclad present that spoke with a voice of their own legion. "Yes, I know. I think it says something about the Massist-Saintist zeitgeist that we all wish to command civilizations, or be civilizations unto ourselves. But that is a conversation for philosophers, and I am simply here to commit a murder. A very, very special murder. She pointed her spear at Veylis, the brush at its end leaving an unmaking stroke. Avo felt space part outright here the paint remained. As the rabbit hopped from place to place, it moved between separating patterns. It wasn''t like his Paracausal Retcontinuity, but something else entirelysomething that unraveled shapes, both material and metaphysical. With additional focus, he perceived faint strands of red connecting it to each of her masks. It was suspected that her spear could only be directed on someone imbued with one of her masks. That was what his Conception of Ontology hinted at, anyway. "Well, then," Stormsparrow said. Time for me to start this song. Ghoul. Go find your damsel. Im beginning to feel the rash growing down my back and I would like it if we could finish this thing before we all turn into pieces of modern infancidal artwork. But the Stormsparrows words were unneeded, for another submind was already in the process of performing said rescue. *** Across the Tiers, golden domes materialized into existence, protecting essential Massist districts from Veylis opening assault. Her overextended paths dissipated before they could be caught within these counter-chronologies. And then Highflame started experiencing their own set of random mass casualty event as Sanctus started shifting chronobombs into their Sovereignties as well. This was quickly joined by over a billion people getting nulled at once; flesh plagues sweeping through Stormtree; fracturing bolts of lightning and destruction pushing into Omnitech controlled territories, and a general exchange of fire between border troops. Seen from orbit, the surface of New Vultun was a scintillating sight to behold. But with each glittering spot, millions died. And with each thread of gold, the opening blows of the Fifth Guild War were struck. But through it all, as Saintist and Massist knots and cadres clashed all across the city, and the full might of the guilds were unleashed once more, a single tendril of phantasmal essence reached up into an open wound in the sky. This place, once sealed, a spatial demiplane, was a blockage preventing the leakage of the fallen heaven of love. Immediately, a massive flood of Rend passed over into Avo. But he continued, rising higher to bring forth the resurrection of love, and more importantly, to save the life of a friend once stolen from him. +Too muchits all too much,+ Kae moaned mentally, her tortured mind echoing from the depths of the Heaven. +I cant stopcant stop love fromfrom falling. Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (IV) Chapter 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (IV) Lament. Lament is the poison inflicted upon a broken heart. What could have been. What might have been. What will never be. These are ingredients to despairdespair born from the understanding that if only a few variables were different, if only another choice was made, then perhaps your desire would have been manifest. Instead of lament. I know what it means to lament. I lamented my pantheon even before I betrayed them. I lamented the failures of humanity, even before I lost faith in them. I lamented my wants, my ego, my willingness to damn myselfdamn existencefor a second chance at paradise. Lament. I have never lamented you, Veylis. I could have never lamented you. You werethe shape of my pride, my love. No matter what you choose, I would be proud of you. You are far stronger than I, you can face humanity without taking the wounds I do. But I just wish... I wish that I was a better father. A wiser man. Someone that could have showed youthat could have made you see... All we feel is not enough. Love is not enough. I wish I could just surrender my choice to you. But I cannot. I cannot. We always damn ourselves in the end. I lament the same thing you will. Humanity cannot save itself, for we are at once the reason for our salvation, but the authors of our own damnation. It cannot be us. Love is not enough. It never was. -An Unsent Thoughtcast from Jaus Avandaer 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (IV) A dreaming flame rose to greet the corpse of Falling Love, and as Avo ascended, New Vultun collapsed under the first shots of the Fifth Guild War. Far above the Tiers, he had a full view of the alloyed steps that composed the core of New Vultun. Accretions dotted the sprawl of megabuildings, stretching even along the curve of the horizon. Of the countless billions who lived in the Tiers, few were prepared to face their coming fate. As columns of smoke and fire rose in the aftermath of the High Seraphs opening blitz, retaliatory strikes were unleashed without hesitation. Rendbombs and nukes were flung in equal measure, shuttled across the reach of space into enemy districts. Detonations swept through streets, alleys, and tunnels. Specialized metaphysical canons made to hollow megablocks and defensive hard points from the inside were deployed. Fields of collapsing space plunged into these structures via open doorways, air vents, and even electrical wiring, splaying themselves wide across the interior and upon the bodies of the living before triggering a sudden implosion. Memite ensured the infrastructure remained intactand unblemished at that. Millions splattered apart, their bodies liquefying in response to a sudden vacuous pressure. Rooms became analogous to breached underwater diving chambers as pressure spiked to impossible levels. Overhead, nets of force expanded across the skylanes, the weaving charged with hyperactive friction. The aerovecs that passed through these trip wires came apart as if sawed clean by monofilament weaponry. The Guilders within, meanwhile, evaporated, never even getting the chance to bleed. And then the first of the rapid response units arrived. Across Ori-Thaums districts, pyramid-shaped, Eviscerator assault craft blinked into existence. Their hulls were compositions of vivianite and metal. They shot forth before any other Guild was ready, engines hot and heading low. In seconds, they slashed out from their dispatch points at staggering velocities, liquefying passersby with speed alone. Those they couldnt fly over were struck by payloads of trauma-patterns and tactical nuclear missiles. After less than a minute of operation, they began breaking down, unable to even sustain their own thrust. But as they came apart, their fusion reactors detonated, rendering the drone itself a final ingredient in a full course of ordinance. But while Ori-Thaum assets struck deep and unleashed chaos, the No-Dragons response followed almost as promptly. Biotheurgic contagions gelled together, forming cancerous patches on the face of reality. The tumors burst, rendering air and space a porous wound, as swarms of combat-ready bioforms flooded down from the skies. Their bodies hummed loud as they fired larvae from hollow pods lining their bodies, unleashing noxious gases capable of consuming even the heartiest of matter sloughed across masses of districts, architecture only spared by the blessing of memite. The same fate was not shared by those who were caught in the open. Yet as people died, as countless lives were lost, lightning bolts leapt out from open wounds and devastation, slashing at the metaphysical hives growing over reality. From rising flames and piled corpses emerged hounds of a ruinous nature. Across the tapestry of existence, Avo heard a howl unlike any other resonate through his very frame. Stormtree was entering the fray, and with it came the accompaniment of more shifting chronologies and the corrosive surge of entropy. The Guilders consumed each other, these blows ready gears in advance. Protective demiplanes emerged in layers, sectioning off critical areas and protecting individual megablocks as additional wren bombs crashed down. Some detonations were stopped altogether, halted by thaumaturgic fortifications. Others shattered these planes utterly, causing the contents within to be caught in a ruinous rupture. Knots, drones, bioforms, mechs, and human forces battled, fighting for every street, for every block, dominance over the air, over the nether, over critical installations, and for their own homes. Some defensive lines manifested, clashing against each other, while others broke entirely. More than a few never came to be, the members needed for the defense eliminated in advance by sleepers or enemy operatives. New Vultun fell into chaos with such fluidity and inimical harmony between the Guilds that the destruction almost seemed symphonic. They had done this four times beforefought, bled, killed, and ultimately settled. Four times, four separate wars. Everyone knew a fifth was coming. This wasnt a surprise, but though some might have expected this to be just another increment in Idheims sordid history, the looming of the latter ensured that this war, whatever its outcome, would prove to be the last. And so a branch of Avos consciousness climbed, enduring the Heaven of Loves flooding Rend as he reached out with his sequences. His ontology expanded, passing down through the infernos consuming the Tiers, through the collapsing Elysiums crumbling down upon the Purgs, through the clashing frontlines in the Undercroft, down the face of the Tiers into the Warrens, where entire districts were little more than smoking craters as knots and cadres fought to hold their territories. Throat followed, and factories that worked to produce new drones and weapons were little more than dust and ash. The Spine came after, but Avo encountered only surprise. Battles raged spread here too, but unlike the last war, the Spine enduring only skirmishes rather than the full brunt of an uprisinglikewise, the Guilders hadnt started their war here either, causing the FATELESS to be more untouched than the actual citizens above them. Far, far down, Avo went into the gutters themselves, that miserable pit the same as it always was, festering, decayed, with little left worth destroying. There was a delicious irony in how New Vultuns structural safety had been inverted. On this day, more than any other day, if one wished to survive, the gutters were the place to be. But even deeper than the gutters was the Maw and the border walls festooned upon it. Borders that channeled excess entropy into the gargantuan disintegrating Rendsink at the base of the megacity itself the means Avo would use to keep himself clean, efficient, and sustain the Heaven of Love before it could annihilate the entire city. Stolen story; please report. But what he could feel was love. This was the epicenter of love. This was where everything broke. For a beat, the Strix Upon the Empty was contrasted against the Remembrance, its form of darkness a phantasmal blot upon this vibrant place. And then a moan came from within the star, the familiar moan of an Agnos, followed by the choked gasp of another. Avo knew that voice as well. That wasnt Kae. That was Dawton. +Kae, Kae where... where?+ the supposedly dead Paladin spoke, his mind ringing out with confusion and shock. [Dawton?] Kays template whimpered within Avo. [What... why is he here? Where is he?] "Within the Heaven," Avo said, following the thoughts back to their very source. The very same source Kaes actual thoughtstuff emanated from as well. Cracked and broken, ghosts could flow free from the Heaven of Lovejust as they did when Avo survived his first rupturing. A phantasmal tendril reached out from the Strix as he injected a surge of rippling Soulfire into the vivacious star. Part of Avos consciousness plunged into a new sub-reality. One sweltering with animation, lust, love, and countless other Domains. But as his soul drew closer to the Heaven of Love, he found himself facing a self-devouring realm. The damage inflicted upon the Heaven of Love wasnt evident or obviously broken like so many other Fallen Heavens were. Instead, Avo felt the depths of the ontological disfigurement for the first time. Canons here were clashing against each othera cascade of failure triggering a chain of backlash. Entropic feedback coursed through the sphere around the Soul like sparks from an exposed wire. Miracles were clashing against each other, but also intruding, overlapping, triggering feedback loops of inevitable backlash and sending fragments of mem-data drifting around Avo. As he guided his self-moving Soul forward, information related to the Frame containing the Remembrance failed to load, and Avo continued to the only part of this subreality that remained intact. The Soul itself. More murmurs echoed out from the crevice of shivering flame. Avo regarded the other Soul with curiosity as he felt Kaes presence reside within its depths. He didnt know how many times she resurrectedif she resurrected at all. The total collapse of the data within this Liminal Frame rendered Avo more ignorant than he wanted. Still, so long as there was part of the Agnos left, he could mend her. Just like he mended Tavers son; a good deed worth doing in the end. [Avo,] template-Kae said, facing the fire that caged her true self, [amam I] "It will be alright. I will inject you into her memories. Update her consciousness with yours." [Then will she be... will I be myself afterward?] "You always were. Were just removing any potential harm done." [Right... Right! Yes. Okay. Okay! Avo. We can do this! We can do this. I canDo it!] Avo plunged a ghost-link into the Soul and reached into the Agnos mind for the first time in what felt like an eternity. As he prepared to make the transference, however, his Synchronicity brushed the mental architecture of the being contained within the Soul, and the foreignness of the architecture made Avo halt. It wasnt just Kay there. There was a separate mind layered over hers and joined with hers, but there was something wrong with it as well. It was like a mental parasite, fused to her consciousness, only capable of manifesting thanks to her cognitive capacity. "I cant... Im lost. I cant see. Im lost." Dawton Morrows voice sounded out. "Dawton , I cant find you," Kae said in reply to herself. Both voices came from the same Soul. The same mind. [I... oh, gods, what did she do to me.] Nausea swept through Kaes template as she tried to understand what was happening. The same disgust welled up within Avo as well. Veylis and the Infacer either had enough of Dottons cognitive structure mapped down or a close enough replica on hand. Whatever the case, they uploaded a partial imprint of Kaes former lover into her own mind. Effectively layering her consciousness and trapping her within herself. Trapping her with her love. Trapping her within love. Avo doubted this act of symbology to be one of pointless cruelty. It must affect the Remembrances structure in some way. But then, before he could proceed, a second''s surprise followed. Avo felt the flames of his contagious intellect catch onto somethinga stable shard of mem-data. As it burned, he consumed its structure, and a shape loaded into his Soulscape. The shape of a man. He manifested within Avos Soul as Walton had done at the start of this journey. But the one who greeted Avo wasnt Walton. No. But he was known to the ghoulknown by his legend; known by his screams. The faint form of Jaus Avandaer loaded into Avos simulated replica of New Vultun as templates crowded around him. For a moment, he remained frozen, then he blinked, and the Godbreakers features collapsed into a grimace of pain. [I... oh, Veylis... what have you done.] Chapter 28-12 Lover’s Quarrel (V) Chapter 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (V) Surrender. Such is the indignity you inflicted upon my father. The same poison has touched my mother, touched me, touched every living being left in existence. For you are the tyrant of want desire made divine. All humans want, and when we see our desires made manifest; the ones we yearn to have, the lives we wish to enjoy, the power so intoxicating to possessthese things infest us more than we embody them. Love is like a contagion, distorting our actions, breaking us from wisdom, depriving us of control. Control. So few have ever felt it. So few know its blessing. It is through the enlightenment of control that I have been spared your corruption. And the worst thing about you, Remembrance, is that you arent even conscious at all. Just a hollowed godly carcass we stitched together as a blessing for our power. Do you know how many Gods and Goddesses of Love we had to break to create you, Remembrance? Do you know how many trillions died nourishing your predecessors? How much loss and bloodshed was invested in your glory? And all for naught. All for nothing. You were another one of my fathers gifts. A crown of gold for a world composed of people too unworthy to serve as proper slaves. But he loved us. All of us. Well and true. And so you touched him. So you made him betray himself. Even before your ontology was made true, and your miracles were made manifest, you unraveled his spirit. He suffers now. He suffers because you planted a seed of weakness in his heart. Love wore his body. But he was made to be clad by you. How disgustingly paradoxical. But worry not. I love him too. But my love is a higher thing. A weakness I have broken and recast with controlmy will, above all other wills; this emotion mine to wield. You will fall. Not by my hand. No. I will not strike you. There is no need. There is no pathway toward the future in which you remain intact. Even now, my allies and enemies are reaching into you, trying to attune your canons to their purpose. They create planar pockets for their deniable experiments. They wish to use you as an incubator of life and death; and to sterilize their adversaries. You will fall because you were fated to fall. Love is its own undoing. For that, you have my pity and even. It is good that you were never aware, Remembrance. You would have learned to hate this existence. -Veylis Avandaer 28-12 Lovers Quarrel (V) Jaus Avandaer. Savior of Idheim. Godbreaker. Betrayer. Murderer of Pantheons. Father of the Ensouled. By feat or legend, all knew Jaus, and his manifestation within Avo''s Soulscape drew a crowd unlike any other. The faintness of his form came together at the center of an intersection. The world around him was a dreamlike expanse, burning megablocks stacked right up against each other. This was an architecture connected by dilapidated bridges and half-destroyed light rail tubes. This simulated section of memories was more akin to a trench line, used as a playground by enforcers, Regulars, and combatants alike. Templates fought, died, and hunted each other here. The entire space spanned hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the overall aesthetics seeming as if a hive assembled from random architectural permutations. Jaus upon a small, sunken street, its placement seeming as if an amphitheater before megablocks turned audience stands. Millions of templates manifested on rooftops, behind windows, held together on street corners, or simply hovered in the sky above. None of them approached Jausmost too awed, some too fearful, few outright suspicious. Avo himself spent some time examining the mem-data he had just consumed. Of all the things he expected to encounter in his attempt to save Kae, finding a lingering remnant of Jaus Avandaer wasn''t one. What startled him even more was the Necrotheurgic sequencing of Jaus Avandaer''s consciousness. Worse, Hysteria trembled as Avo continued his dive. Defiance had left his touch here. The craftsmanship could not be denied. Applying that to the numerous blind spots that existed within this version of Jaus''s memories, Avo suspected that he was dealing with a node created from the original savior himself. That thought, more than any other, impelled the Overheaven to adopt a stance of paranoia. However, Avo detected no war minds hidden within Jaus''s node. He didn''t even have any trauma patterns to unleash. Short of any unexpected surprises, Jaus was effectively harmless. But all good Necrojacks knew damage to be the least efficient way of manipulating another''s mind. As Jaus Avandaer got his bearings, he swept his gaze over his surroundings. The million templates gathered to see him. Avo took a moment to regard him as well. His hair was short, orderly, neat. A golden whorl curved leftward upon his forehead, and his facial features looked sharp, possessed of a healthy gauntness. Jaus''s eyes flashed twice, and his irises gleamed with a soothing white glow. He wore a simple brown suit with a biosynthetic turtleneck on the inside, but his shoes stood in contrast to the ensemble, seeing as they were rugged combat boots instead of any kind of formal wear. +Hello,+ Jaus Avandaer said, greeting the many who were present. +I seem to have gotten a little bit lost. I don''t think I should be here. But then again, I have a suspicion that this statement applies in more ways than one.+ He smiled genuinely, his mind dry of anxiety or fear. +Could someone please tell me where I am right now? The area is quite well-designed and... novel. Does this place have a name?+ The templates'' silence lingered even after he spoke. But they weren''t reluctant to speakmore like they were choked with disbelief. Ultimately, it was Avo who broke the impasse, deciding to greet Jaus not in the form of the Strix, but rather using his ephemeral avatar, his original sheath: the enhanced ghoul. Ghostly tendrils wove a new shape across from Jaus, and faintly, Avo heard voices speak to him in the back of his mind. Avo listened, utterly enraptured. +I... I feel this to be correct. Yes. Ithe original Jaus, lived through path after path, experienced countless moments that could have been with Defiance. And managed a creation. The installation of his consciousness in broken captured nodes. These nodesnear perfect facsimiles of consciousness, were true enough egos to infuse into a Liminal Framebut without enough weight to sink into a Soul. Or at least, the nodes Jaus created were. Again, I am shell and not substance. I remained among the root data. Remained in the dark for so, so long.+ +Why? You did all this just to get Defiances attention?+ +I wished to surprise him. To have a conversation with him. Just us two alone. Nodes spawned from our original selves, speaking in this sunken realm, away from prying eyes. He was the spy for a reason-he was the dream of a Wahakten who could accept his great sin, and thereby culture beyond Noloth as well. Through him, I wished to reach the Hungers again, somehow. Begin their rehabilitation and restoration even across the veil.+ A few things became clear at Avo at this point. This version of Jaus knew nothing of Defiances betrayal; their knowledge was far out of date. But the question was if what Jaus had done became the trigger behind Defiances turn in the first place. In fact, more pieces were sliding into place. For a long time, Avo found himself awed by Waltons foresight; the Famine had outplayed Godclads and Guilds, bested and stolen from Zein, Veylis, Voidwatch, Omnitech, and the Noloth itself. His achievements in subterfuge were beyond legendary in that regard, to a degree Avo found absurd. Even now, there were caches scattered across the city. And an unrepaired node gifted back to Avo via the Infacer. But with what Jaus was saying, considering Jaus had been seeding various Heavens with his own nodes +How did you know Defiance would ever access a node?+ Avo said, putting a sudden question into words. Jaus tilted his head and smiled at that. +Because thats how the Infacer typically manages to entrap his nodes. Defiance... he strays from rules sometimes. He is not repulsed by thaumaturgy or potential power like the others. He accepts what needs to be done. He sinks into communal Heavens and vulnerable Frames alike. And so I planted these seeds to wait for him. Across countless Heavens, I waited for him.+ And across countless Heavens, an even greater conspiracy had been brewing beyond Avos awarenessbeyond even Waltons awareness. The Overheaven was practically numb with disbelief. It wasnt that Defiance was genius beyond all other geniuses, it was that he was likely getting hidden pieces of insighthad intelligence offered by Jaus himself stolen from potential futures. The Famine must have revealed the state of the world to Jaus many nodes, and upon returning, been flipped. Of all the players in this game, Jaus Avandaer remained the most insidious of them alland possibly even unintentionally. [Holy fucking shit,] Benhata breathed, tone dry with disbelief. +You said Defiance made you,+ Jaus said, observing Avo. +If that is the case, then my nodes must have affected him. Enough for him to accept my words on legacy. To give his son a symbolic resurrection. Good. Im glad. He deserves to give himself some forgiveness. And he has made something magnificent in you. This iteration of me could have been discovered by no one else-no one else is thorough enough; possesses the skill.+ Jaus chuckled at that. +You will not believe how many paths I had to simulate to finally discover how to bridge the gap between me and Defiance. How is he now?+ +He is nothing now. Nothing. Unless a version of him remains.+ That was all Avo needed to say. Jaus expression grew somber. +I see. So then, he rebelled?+ +Yes. Against everything. The Guilds. The Hungers. Plotted. Killed. Betrayed. All to steal a Frame from Veylis. Steal a Frame. Created me. And now here I am. Before you. Took you from the falling Heaven of Love.+ The saviors expression grew even grimmer. +Oh. This path. Its falling... Then, that means the Guilds betrayed their oaths and tried to turn love into a weapon. And that... I am dead, arent I.+ +No,+ Avo said, speaking honestly. +Wish you were. Would have been a kinder fate. Your daughter... your wife... Might not want to know about these things.+ For the first time, a hint of vulnerability revealed itself behind Jaus gaze. +I suspect you are right. I have seen futures that I didnt wish to accept... But what worth are the wants of a man.+ He exhaled, breathing his lament despite being little more than a configuration of memories. +I thank you for your silence. You have his consideration.+ The casual kindness and compliments from Jaus was making Avo uncomfortable. The certainty and ease the man spoke such words was somehow crushing. Someone couldnt be that good. That pure. This was a caricature of Jausan idealized cognitive construct. It had to be. +Regardless, as you stand in Defiances stead, and you bring news that we are in progress down one of the worst paths, I will convey to you what I planned to reveal to himlet the Heaven fall.+ Avo didnt expect Jaus to say that. +What?+ +The Heaven of Love. Let it fall. Accelerate its fall. Trust me.+ Chapter 28-13 Plots Within Plots Chapter 28-13 Plots Within Plots +MY PRIESTS! THE MOMENT IS UPON US! THE OUTSIDERS GNAW AND TEAR AT ONE ANOTHER! THE BURNING DREAMER AND THE BETRAYERS DAUGHTER HAVE EMBRACED EACH OTHER IN THEIR STRUGGLE. AN OPENING HAS PRESENTED ITSELF. ANGLE TOWARD NOLOTHS SALVATIONAND ASCENSION! HOLD NOTHING BACK. GIVE ALL OF YOURSELVES. GIVE YOUR LIVES. GIVE YOUR WARMINDS. GIVE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, AND GRANT YOU ABSOLUTION, REDEMPTION, AND RESTORATION! DO ANYTHING YOU CANALL THAT YOU MUST TO ENSURE THE +FORGOTTEN+ REACHES THE GATEKEEPER THAT BEARS THE WEIGHT BETWEEN REALMS! LEND AID TO DEFIANCES GREATEST TRANSGRESSION AND SEE THE BETRAYERS DAUGHTER BE FORCED TO RELINQUISH HER HOLD. AND THENCONTAIN THE DREAMER. CAGE HIS FLAME. WE HAVE BEEN IN THE DARK AND COLD FOR FAR TOO LONG. WE HUNGER FOR A PROPER HEAT TO WARM OUR RETURNING HEARTS.+ -Thoughtcast from Hungers to All Surviving Famines 28-13 Plots Within Plots +What,+ Avo said, utterly taken aback by Jaus statement. +Let the Heaven of Love fall,+ Jaus repeated, resolute in his proclamation. +It is a transgression that must come to fruition. As you have discovered this node of mine within the Remembrance, then the Guilds are at war. At war for the return of the Ladder. None of them can be allowed to succeed. Not even Veylis. Bring the Heaven down and cripple them.+ Stunned murmurs spread across Avos Soulscape. No one was prepared for such a whiplash-inducing change in Jaus. One moment, the man was the embodiment of purest nobility. Now, he was demanding the death of untold billions. Avo, however, found himself concerned with another distressing detail. +You knew the Heaven of Love was going to fall.+ +Knew?+ Jaus replied, his voice steady. +No. But the future comes only in so many common permutations. The Guilds, they are constructs of community and culture. Bindings of the old faith, as it were. But ultimately, they are also engines that crave powerhumans of greed, avarice, and terror towards the existential. I cannot recount the sheer number of paths I have experienced, but in all the futures where I am no longer present, when the Gatekeeper is not properly established, and when my project remains undone, the guilds are always bound for war.+ Jaus paused, his expression unreadable. +My daughter, despite all her capability, her skills, her power, faces substantial opposition. They all do. No ones victory is assured, but I have gazed upon the utopias they bring and... oblivion eventually becomes preferable. Should any of the Guilds win in their current state, the next world will be born a diseased fruit of fated misery. And so I sought a solution. A means to shatter all Guilds of power. To render them vulnerable before Voidwatch and my Paladins. Such means were revealed to me by the pathsthe perversion of the Remembrance. The horrors of the birthing plague. The sheer devastation brought by falling love.+ +So the Heaven of Love always falls,+ Avo said, the weight of inevitability settling on his shoulders. +It is always corrupted.+ +Yes. What you are beholding now isn''t a grand conspiracy, I suspect,+ Jaus continued, his voice growing lighter, almost resigned. +Rather, it is a compounding mistakea mistake I allowed to fester. The Heaven of Love, at its inception, was meant to be a communal source of miracles. The canons I provided were meant to foster unity, collaboration, and positive understanding between all cultures and peoples. But the guilds under me also had their own interests. Scaarthians adjusting fertility rates for critical districts, the Daughters of the Cycle seeking to escape their cursed fate by twisting away their fated pregnancies to no avail.+ He sighed, a deep rumble of regret coloring his tone. +I bore the Heaven once. It was a tool to empower my diplomacy. To twist the desires of entire nations to my whims and engender the foundations for peace. As my conquest to stabilize the world reached a point of stability, I surrendered the Heaven and gave it as a gift to all. For all to use. For all to alter to their needsso long as their demands could be improved by the Council of Guilds. Beneficial canons and minute updates came at first. But...+ A faint rumble of anger entered Jaus'' voice as he held out an open hand, an imploring gesture at Avo, as if trying to share his outrage. +There were always those who wish to twist kindness toward selfishness. With my absence, without the establishment of the Gatekeeper and culmination of a new order, the Guilds always turn on their oaths and target the Agnosi who helped me attune this Heaven. First, Guilds try to procure their loyalty or assert control. Then, the ones who lose arrange assassinations. Soon, the original theologians that established the Heaven of Love are lost, and the changes that follow are made by unwilling or unprepared practitioners. Changes that bring about targeted carnage. +Now, the birth rate of rival Guilds will be altered. Children will arrive stillborn. The flow of thaums slowbut never at a pace to truly provoke deeper suspicion. Worse, it is not only the Guilds who transgress, but individual citizens as well, warping the Remembrance against their rivals, as if it was some manner of cheap weapon.+ +Mistake after mistake,+ Avo said. +It fell because too many contradictions were installed. Clashing updates in its canons.+ Jaus just nodded. +Uncountable little nicks instead of one large cut. Take Lorea Greatling, for instance,+ Jaus practically spat the name. +Across countless paths, I''ve witnessed her injustice. The depravity of unworthy citizens like her, who used my communal heaven as their instrument of defilement, twisting specific Agnossi and forcing them to make the smallest of changes during annual updates that see rivals of House Greatling rendered utterly barren, their ailments suspiciously incurable by technology or thaumaturgy.+ +Lorea Greatling,+ Avo echoed, the name resonating within the depths of Draus memory. This was Mirrorhead''s mother. This was the missing matriarch of House Greatling. Once more, her specter loomed, and an anguished shout echoed from among the templates. [Gods fucking damn it, mom!] Abrels Template raged. She clutched and clawed at her head, her patience, her stress exceeding her capability to tolerate. Some others gazed upon her with pity, most simply ignored the outburst. Jaus stared through the crowd, frowning as he noticed Abrel. +Is that... is that Abrel Greatling? How is she...+ +She''s technically not,+ Avo answered, his tone flat. +She''s a template. A mind clone. So are you. Everyone here aside from me is, even you, functionally. You are just an emulation of Jaus'' consciousness running on my cognitive capacity. Or you were.+ Avo studied the pinpricks of accretion that dotted all his templates. It was growing, swelling larger with every passing memory he internalized. Hysteria was magnifying their awareness. +Things are always changing. Nothing ever stays quite the same. Might not be copies for that much longer.+ The Godbreaker regarded Avo with a few rapid blinks and then nodded. +Well, herein lies the weakness of the paths. You can only predict the future with the variables you''re already aware of. You are quite the black swan, Im pleased to say. I welcome surprises, and I certainly don''t recall encountering anything like you in any future.+ Avol took that as a compliment. +The Heaven of Love. Trying to collapse it on the Guilds in retribution for what theyve done?+ Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. +No, not for retribution,+ Jaus said. +Never for retribution. Rather, I wish to cripple the Guilds utterly. To leave them at the mercy of my Paladins and bereft of deaths to draw as the birthing plague leaves the Warrens barren. I will not liewhat we do here will be monstrous. But with what follows, the choice is between an act of atrocity rather than the construction of an eternal one. We are... humanity devours itself. We cannot be allowed to disfigure reality again. We cannot. Not us. Not the minds.+ +Probably wont like her much right now. Me, Naeko, Zein, the Stormsparrow, and Alsyim are actively fighting her. Shes the reason why Kae is trapped in this Heaven in the first place. She wants me to preserve the Remembrance. Sent me here to restore it to function.+ +Yes, I+ Jaus did a double-take. +Alysim? The Chronicler?+ +Yes.+ Jaus just stared. +How is he alive?+ +Hes not. Hes already dead. But he dies in the future. When the Ladder arrives.+ And then Jaus Avandaer did the impossible. He broke his own image. He sneered. And spat hate at someone. +I should have anticipated that bastard slipping across time. He and the other damned monks. Degenerates. I should have listened to the Infacer about them. I let them live too long.+ Templates looked at each other while Kae coughed. Avo directed a fanged grin at Jaus. +Hm. Youre human, after all.+ Another rare surprising emotion from Jaus: annoyance. +Im a father, a husband, and a leader. And if you knew just what kind of ridiculous future these so-called monks desired, you will share my opinion for wanting to see these degenerates removed.+ +Already know. Humans have strange fixations.+ Within Avos mind, Alysims template remained out of place and hidden. +Yes, well, some of these fixations make coexistence an untenable prospect.+ Jaus scoffed. And snorted, shaking his head at the absurdity. +A demonstration of why utopia is impossible: one mans happiness will eventually be the rest of the worlds hell. Even for those he loves.+ The Overheaven grunted. +So it is.+ Jaus shook his head and hardened his expression. +The Heaven of Love... Once you extract your companion, if you can find means to get the Gatekeeper to lay its gaze upon the Remembrancethe next phase of my process might continue.+ Once more, Avo failed to anticipate Jaus forking schemes. +You planned to shunt the Heaven of Love over into the Deep Nether? Into another plane above reality?+ +Into the Hungers, in fact.+ The Overheaven was at an absolute loss for words. Peace wasnt. The red-faced Famine materialized right next to Avo and greeted Jaus his customary way. [CUNNNNNNNTTTT! CUNT! CUNT! CUNT! WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING YOU FUCKING CUNT!] Jaus studied Peace and looked back to Avo. +Just how many people do you have in your mind? Do you have the other Famines too?+ +Only this one for now. Millions of other templates.+ The litany slurs and curses coming from Peace in the backdrop went ignored by both Avo and Jaus. +Its to unravel the city eternal. But also to return the idea of love back to the people of New Vultunand in turn give Naeko or Defiance a chain to use. A chain to pry on the wills everyone on Idheim. Including my daughter. If she survives.+ The amount of expanding layers and possibilities to this mad scheme was frankly awe-inspiring. +Ultimately, it is another angle for the common people to mentally afflict each other. This angle one almost no one can avoid, that all are susceptible to. For to want is to love. And to covet the Ladder+ +Makes you vulnerable.+ Avo paused. +Has this... always been your plan? Did you always see this coming?+ A beat passed. +Absolutely not,+ Jaus said, letting a look of exhaustion creep over him. +I simply lived through future after future, and sowed so many seeds in preparation for Defiance that quantity must have taken the place of prescience. For the true futureI fear I am as blind as you.+ Another lull entered the conversation. +Jaus. Would you like to greet your daughter again? Distract her so that I might able to make something of this madmans plot?+ +The selfish answer is no. But I will do what I can.+ +Good. Because I can feel her across another branch of my consciousness; shes getting close to overloading my Frame again.+ +Again?+ Chapter 28-14 Singularities (I) Chapter 28-14 Singularities (I) Now, I''m gonna say something today that might piss off all you circuit fans, but it has to be said. Two auged-up chromers or a gaggle of razorgirls fighting in a small pit? That''s not war. That''s entertainment. Bloody entertainment. Hells, the fights might even be interesting, but that''s not war. The same way what the Stormsparrow''s doing isn''t war either. I''m sure you all cold-dived vicarities from past wars and got second-hand front-row seats to actual battles. Experienced life and death through the memories recovered from dead Guild assets. Fuck, the more connected among you consangs mightve even tasted what it might be like to be a Godclad for a bitrisking thoughtscans and a nulling for the experience. This this still isnt the full picture. You can never get the full picture from a single perspective. When my time comes, one of the last memories will follow me over into the Big Nothing will be when Highflame''s Seventh War Host slammed down against the battlelines formed by Akigami''s First Spears during the Third Battle of Novonoi. Cursed godsdamned district, that one. Over 15,000 golems on both sides. One hundred and twenty million drones firing constantly, made the night brighter than dayblinding, even. And at the core of each army, 400 Highflame cadres came seeking the scalps of 152 Seeker cohorts. It should have been a clean slaughter, but it wasn''t. The golems went in first. Formed forward operating demiplanes. Tried to achieve a breakthrough. Ruptures formed and Rend choked the world. And only after space and so many other Domains cracked on the surface of existence did the actual push begin. Because with the sheer amount of cannons, you don''t just fling your Godclads into battle. You can be as high a Sphere as you want, but if they know your Domains, and they know your canon, you''re going to get backlash, you''re going to paradox, you''re going to rupture, and youll cease to be. At the end of the day, war isn''t a battle, it''s not a duel, it''s a series of decisions. Choices for you. Dilemmas for your enemy. You try to stay out of trouble and keep your enemy in the pit. And above all else, spend less than they do. Fewer lives. Fewer resources. Less Rend. Thats the creation of a miracle. Thats why the Seekers managed to hold off the Seventh that day. That, and the fact that they had a few hundred Incubi cells with them as well. Theres not much of a war to fight if you dont even get to keep your mind. -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 28-14 Singularities (I) C[Avo]C War was the act of attempting to impose order upon the foundations of worsening chaos, and this was by far the most chaotic fight Avo ever found himself involved in. Veylis drew more Saintist Godclads into her paths while manifesting calamities and flinging golems at the Paladins temporal shield. Avo countered by releasing two Spatial Rendbombs just past the threshold. The relative distance between objects and entities distended as if the space between them was elastic. Golems and drones arrived within ruptures, their attacks and movement trajectory responding as if caught in a tangle of falling ropes. In the very same moment, over a thousand other patterns formed around the chamber. The paths shivered as miracles clashed. A living sea of time battled a network of mind. Symmetry clashed against symmetry as Paladins unleashed cones of extinguishing force against oncoming rifts of unceasing flame. Pockets of space formedand were promptly compressed. Paladins backlashed and retreatedrotated out of the fight as Avo shifted them across the city using his gestalt. He would drain their Rend as they recovered in the Warrens. Meanwhile, his war of Pre-Cognition against Veylis continued; he attacked, he defended; he shifted; he adapted. All this. At the same time, with such a level of complexity that almost no other Godclad could match. Using his power over Continuum, Avo swapped both Green River and Cala with template-copies down in the Warrens as well. Template-copies that promptly detonated the tactical warheads they brought with him. Lightning-carried projectiles of haemokinetic matter slashed out from within the Strix as tendrils of blood expanded from within its being. Coiling currents of crimson formed defensive barricades and armored shells around active Paladins and Massists. Ferromagnetic flechettes exploded out from the reflections in his bloodand the miracles contained within them mutated at an impossible pace. A cadre Instrument attempted to form a spatial boundary to parry the shot. Only for the Fardrifter to burst forth from the round, its hydra-like body tunneling across Veylis paths. The High Seraph reacted. The area where Avo struck imploded in a cataclysm of matter and mind. But he was long goneand so were Instruments. Beyond space and time, an entire group of Instruments died wailing as a massive feline entity of impossible speed tore them apart. The Heaven that assailed them resembled a cat above all cats, with fangs that could rend any matter, with teeth that could pierce through any shield. Worse, yet, however, was the maze growing out from the cat, and the impossible alacrity it exhibited. They tried to fight back, but they were all but Sphere Three Godclads: nothing more but prey for the Micemaker. Soulfire spilled across the maze as Avo injected entropy into each dying Instrument. Seconds later, their ontologies and thaums were taken, and their consciousnesses ignited like blazing embers, descending into the burning ocean that was the gestalt. Back in the court, a cutting edge pierced across the temporal shield and carved a bloody gash through half a dozen Paladins before it finally crashed against Avos Fortress of Luminosity. He counted three true deaths and nine anchors before sending the others a mem-data update. With his mind overlaid upon theirs, the Paladins were beyond fear, beyond moral; a perfectly synchronous organism that reacted, fought, and moved in perfect tandem. And though Veylis power dwarfed Avos by far, she only wielded her soldiers like puppets, and so that was how they were used and spent. COG-CAP: [83.999%] Where Veylis was a singularity unto chronology, Avo was a leviathan of the Nether. Time was her clay; consciousness was his, and though the Infacer veiled the Saintists with their power, the Definement of Hysteria would not be denied. He didnt need a direct connection to sense what thoughts consumed them; what emotions ruled them. Anxiety. Pride. Battle-lust. These were the prevailing mental weaknesses that plagued Veylis forces, and these were the same traits he would amplify. The same way Emotion affected him during their encounter at the Flavors of the Deep. At once, explosions of hyper-charged dread, arrogance, and near-feral fury swept through the mustering Highflame Godclads and Avo felt the barely formed frontlines of his opposition crumble. Only the most self-determined among Veylis contingent kept themselves controlled, and with this being just a boost to inherent, existing emotions, the Highflame war host was entirely unprepared entire chunks of their forces peeled away. Heavens manifested. Attacks came, calamities forged from every possible Domain. Avos Conception of Ontology feasted as he took in the shifting patterns of reality, but nothing pierced the Stormsparrows thin, crimson curtains. Not physical attacks. Not spatial onslaughts. Not even enemy Heavens. Whatever greeted that threshold simply broke apart. Popping violently into a splash of colors before leaving an imprint on the surface of reality. A tidal wave of gold shifted as Veylis shunted her forces back. A series of Thoughtwave Detonations went off among them, popping their beguiled minds and leaving Avo with nothing to draw on. Despite this, the Overheaven just chuckled. His Metamind registered at least two thousand mental signatures. Judging from the death anchors dotting the surface of the curtains, Veylis was likely already short twenty Instruments. +Quite the canon,+ Avo said, hissing with envy at the Stormsparrows miracles. +Right?+ The Sang said, cackling girlishly. Her stage only continued to expand, but already, Avo sensed a change building within the paths. Time beyond the Paladins shield began to slow as the patterns of Veylis Heaven changed. A feeling of alarm grew within Avo as Demiurges metaphysical pressure climbed Only for the paths encircling the court to dissipate with a splash of Soulfire, exposing the Saintist cadres. Streams of gold speared back toward the Demiurge, a small patch of chronology enveloping her. Tendrils of time burrowed through her being as she committed more of her effort to suppressing a foe within her. A foe trying to burst free. Vaporous fingers were slipping out from the High Seraphs Heaven, and with it came an oppressive presence that choked force and unmade violence. For a moment, Avo thought the Chief Paladin was going to hatch free from his former lover, but the paths around the demiurge tightened, and a golden weaving thickened at the titans core as she turned her attention on Avo and the Stormsparrow once more. Reaching inside herself, Veylis drew another Heaven freebut it was not Naeko that emerged. Not. The jingling chains of the Gatekeeper slipped out from the resplendent exterior of the Demiurge, and once more, it fully manifested itself. A meta-cosmos spilled across the battlefield, painting everyone caught in the desperate struggle. But as it did, something else happened. The stars began to come closer and planetary bodies accelerated toward them. PHY-SIM ALERT! WARNING MULTIPLE OBJECTS MOVING AT 0.23C Avos Luminosity flared once more as suns, planets, and collapsing walls of gravity collapsed down upon his forces like existential pillars. But before he prepared to endure the devastationVeylis invoked a power that wasnt truly her own. TRUTH! CAN LIGHT PREVENT DESTRUCTION? The Heaven of Truth groaned as if under impossible strain. Finally, it forced out a response. False! And suddenly, Avo saw the Domain of Truth overlap with his Domain of Luminosity, its patterns now on a collision course with his canons. He barely dissolved his Fortress of Luminosity in time to avoid a paradoxing with the Gatekeeper, but the first star accelerated across the cosmos Only for the Stormsparrow to fling a blank mask into the air. At once, a painted visage detonated over everyone present, and as the Heaven of Truth denied Avos canon, the Stormsparrows Chorus likewise gave only mocking laughter as slamming planets, stars, and cosmic calamity only painted the once plain mask with newfound color. Chapter 28-14 Singularities (II) Chapter 28-14 Singularities (II) There comes a point where a moment presents itself. A fracture on the face of history. A crack that, when struck, will shatter all the things and paths that could have been. These moments can be felt. They can be lived. And ultimately, they can be destroyed. The child of an empress is to be born today, Jaus Avandaer. An empress never meant to bear children. Or so it was claimed by her court. When the babe cries and draws their first breath, the minds of men will come alight and call it a miracle, and from this belief will the necks of slaves be slit, and the blood of believers flow. From here, a new God of Fertility will arrive. Witness, Jaus Avandaer. Witness how, with but a single atrocity, steal the empresss greatest triumph, greatest joy, by ensuring that this child is born cold of flesh and without breath. Witness I render an infant and god stillborns both. -Wahakten, Priest of the Eternal City 28-14 Singularities (II) An exploding star could scour worlds; a relavistically accelerated planet could turn anything of mundane matter into cosmic dust; a rogue singularity could drink entire stellar systems hollow of light, force, matter, space, and time. Any of these forces would have been enough to scour the Warrens clean. Any of these forces would have inflicted unfathomable destruction across Idheim itself. But they were also casual miracles birthed within the Gatekeeper''s inner cosmos metaphysical devastation materialized as casually spawned variables. But just as the Gatekeeper was the sovereign above Truth, Stormsparrow was a queen all her own. And fortunately for the Gatekeeper, its decision to full manifest its inner plane was no different than a person offering the Sang an opportunity for her to bestow a mask upon their face. Unfathomable cataclysms splashed against the Stormsparrows newest mask like paint, and at once a resonant connection formed between it and Avo. It was as if metaphysical alignment. Avo felt his Frame slam down atop the Gatekeeper, and though it struggled, though the blank mask now filling with color over the Paladins and Massists trembled, everything surrounding galaxy stilled. Stars stopped expanding; planets stopped accelerating; singularities stopped churning. And upon the tapestry, another pattern superseded the first; where the Gatekeepers reign over Truth had threatened paradox against Avos Fortress of Luminosity, the Stormsparrows Heaven wove patterns that bound the Heaven of Truth behind Avorending it only capable of acting after he does. For the first time, Avo grasped a true power behind the Storm Sparrow''s miracles. The mask she bestowed upon him trembled, ringing upon his very soul. DRAMATIS PERSONAE ASSIGNED: HERO OF WISDOM GRANTS YOU PERFECT AWARENESS OF EVERY DANCER ON THE STAGE AND ALLOWS YOU TO DECIDE THE PACE OF THE SCENE Layered over his being, Avo found himself able to peer through it as if a filter for his cog feed. He saw from Maru''s perspective as he fired, slashed, and dodged. He saw from the eyes of countless enemy Godclads, their bodies frozen in metaphysical stasis, always reacting a second too late to him or Maru. Initiative was impossible for them, as they were not heroes but merely clowns and scoundrels, second-fiddles to a scene-in-motion. Once more, the chorus sang, and Avo heard his designated purpose. Through his role as Hero of Wisdom, he felt another connection forming, one linking him to the massive mask looming just above. A moment prior, he thought Stormsparrow had manifested that veil to prevent destruction. It drank in the full wrath of the cosmos as if it were nothing at all, and as stars and singularities splashed apart, the once-clear mask turned prismatic, scintillating, as if it had internalized the devastation set to befall. Yet it was only by gazing upon the face of the tapestry that Avo understood the feat the Storm Sparrow had just performed. Chains bound Avo to the larger mask above, but this mask was more than a bunker meant to shroud the Massists and Paladins from harm. This mask was more than a ceiling to hold that scarlet curtain, imbued with the purest destruction. This mask was placed upon the galaxy itself, the galaxy that was closer to the gatekeeper''s true face than even its chain-like physical form. And it was then that Avo heard the chorus sing once more: DRAMATIS PERSONNAE ASSIGNED: CLOWN OF MISFORTUNE YOU ARE CONDEMNED TO SUFFER IN PLACE OF THE HERO OF WISDOM. THEIR EVERY MISERY BE YOUR BURDEN TO BEAR, AND YOUR EVERY SUCCESS WILL FLOW THROUGH THEM AS WELL. ONLY BY PLAYING YOUR ROLE AND FINDING SUCCOR IN FAILURE CAN AN UNFORTUNATE CLOWN DEFY THE DECREE OF A CRUEL HEAVEN. Even after the lyrics finished, Avo found his understanding incomplete. The Stormsparrow''s heaven was beyond esoteric. Absurd, even. It was a beast of narrative, a tyrannical playwright that enforced roles and created scenes using reality as its stage. What a power she was. She hadn''t parried the Gatekeeper''s staggering might, but rather entrapped its miracles within a mask, rendering it only capable of subsequent actions in the aftermath of Avo''s own. [Impossible,] template-Kae gasped. Her disbelief, however, was short-lived, for in its place sprouted growing petals of wonder. [M-magnificent. This can''t be the work of some primordial Heaven, the discarded remains of a fallen god. This must have been created. It must have been...] An iteration of the Agnos chimed away in his head. Avo simply regarded the Storm Sparrow''s massive, divine form with apprehension. A mental projection of laughter pealed out from her. +Turn your gaze from me, Dreamer. It is time for a dialogue between you and your nemesis-to-be. The scene is not done. Do your part and play your role.+ "This was... this was not what I wanted," Jaus said. "This was not... not what I dreamed." "I know," Avo replied, "but the dream is not over. The past is lost, burned, damned, never coming back. But the futurewe can still change that. We can still save you, save everyone. The Heaven of Love I am dealing with it. But that is only one path. The war is here. Right here. She is right here. We cannot run. She has chosen. And so have I. And so must you. A flash of blinding light enveloped the edge of the Stormsparrow''s stage. Several Paladins flinched back before the visual-vector miracle splattered them apart. On the sides, Maru returned to his manifested bleed gunner, firing constantly from the crevices between its serpent-like form. His mind was a torrent of rage and fury, and he barely noticed Joust. But just a glimpse was enough to send him into a daze. Seconds later, the Paladin crashed down upon the stage, his heaven vanishing, his ephemeral form returning. But before he could say anything, Jaus greeted him with a smile. "Maru, it gladdens me to see you are still well." The Savior smiled, and Maru looked on with disbelief. Even as the battle raged beyond them, the paladin turned his attention to Avo and growled out a set of words. "What the fuck is this? How are you" "He is merely the enabler, not the architect," Jaus said. "And I am not truly myself, but then again, that just might be a philosophical question." Jaus gave Maru a wink before he turned his full attention to the Saintists. At once, Avo expanded Jaus form, turning his ghost from just the size of a man into a phantasmal behemoth, dwarfing the entire stage. Most of the fighters didn''t notice him at first, so consumed with their own survival that all else came second. But Avos hysteria captured their attention and magnified Joust''s very presence. At the same time, the Stormsparrow acquiesced to Avos demands and bestowed upon the Savior a mask unlike any other. It was a mask of black and white. It possessed no facial features; the colors met as if in a stalemated clash. DRAMATIS PERSONAE DESIGNATED: THE PROTAGONIST. YOU ARE THE HERO OF HEROES. YOUR ACTS SUPERSEDE ALL OTHER HEROES, AND YOU ALONE CAN DENY THE WILL OF THOSE YOU DEEM VILLAINS. SPEAK LOUDLY, SPEAK TRUE FROM YOUR HEART, AND ALL WILL KNOW THE WEIGHT IN YOUR WORDS. The mask settled upon Jaus face and then disintegrated altogether. Avo could still feel the bestowed miracle in the tapestry, but the saviors face remained bare, allowing him to speak truth without impediment. Looking on at Veylis, Jaus node took a calming breathone entirely unneeded since he wasn''t a physical entityCbefore speaking his first word. Veylis! Jaus voice boomed across the battlefield, across all of New Vultun, through each of Avos copies, into Cala Marlowes very lobby. The saviors presence was vast, and everyone would know of his presence in this hallowed place."Veylis! Stop this! I see what you''re doing, I see everything you''ve given, but stop this. Stop for just this moment, and face me. Face me as you did when you consigned me to the Ladder." That all continued on for a few seconds longer, but the Gatekeeper was the first to notice Jaus. Once, through an almost impossible effort, the galaxy receded back into the heaven of truth, and it gave a pitiful moan."Now... creator... truth? False." Both its queries were questionsfor what was a node in relation to the original? The Demiurge, meanwhile, went very still, even as a hand began erupting out from her form. While this continued, Avo did everything he could with his Heavens, fighting the rash among his allies, and denying its encroachment on himself as well. The full weight of Veylis attention fell upon Jaus like a falling meteor. Her perception splashed through the Stormsparrow''s opening curtains, and she regarded her father node with almost a look of disdain. "What a feeble attempt at deception, Dreamer," she said, her voice betraying no suffering, even as a familiar golden glaive began carving down the length of her abdomen. "It is no deception," Jaus said, resolute. "I am just a node of your father, but all he was, and all he can be, and all he feels are inherited within me. I am an echo of his legacy, and I have seen this day. I have rued this day, and now I must face this day." "Enough!" Veylis hissed. I will not be "No!" Jaus shot back, his voice rising to a staggering yell. "Never enough! And it will never be enough! And that is how I lost youbecause I let you become a Godclad in the first place. That was how I damned humanity! I stole Heaven. I should have just allowed them to stay fallen. Instead, we took from them their flawsand accepted their hubris as our own inheritance. We were not ready for such a burden. And so long as we remain human, we would never be.That was my great mistake, and for that, I deserve to be consigned to the Ladder. Veylis... to tell you to surrender your FrameIm sorry. It was a more absurd than anyone could have endured. I might as well have asked you to abandon breath itself. In the aftermath of those words, Veylis went completely silent. "What is this?" she said. There was no anger in her voice, no scorn. Instead, Avos Hysteria captured a true, genuine feeling rising within the High Seraph. And it was cold dread. Chapter 28-15 Hope Forgotten (I) Chapter 28-15 Hope Forgotten (I) Hope? Hope is a terminal affliction; a crippling ailment. You can hope. I will take. I will inflict. I will decide. -Zein Thousandhand 28-15 Hope Forgotten (I) C[Mercy]C A node of Jaus Avandaer. How impossible. How unfathomable. And yet, how very acceptable. The Famine of Mercy peered through the threshold of the deep nether and watched the scene unfold. He hid his perception within his lesser selves. The nodes of Peace, Emotion, and Joy gathered like small cells surrounding the radiant cycles of autophagic dragons. Outrage suffused the Hungers, enough to strangle a mind down to nothingness. Jaus return, more than anything else, was a moment unforeseen. But the startlement of the Hungers was short-lived, for in its place rose loathing beyond the measurement of words. +Betrayer,+ the Hungers hissed, all other parties present forgotten. They stared through the gatekeeper, looking down into murky waters, and the clashing meta-realities projected by the Stormsparrow, the High Seraph, and the Burning Dreamer only made perception ever more difficult. There were thousands of egos present within the Court of Truth, and if simplified, the location could be separated into two sections. One was a receding cosmos, seeping back into an angel made from broken genes, held in the grasp of a time-forged titan crowned by a static veil. The other was a stage, protected by velvet curtains, bordered by a vibrant mask for a roof, with the sprawling tendrils of the Burning Dreamer coiling beyond the limits of continuity itself. Avo continued to function like a contagion, but he was more than that now. He was also a signal, a memetic messenger, bringing all that was unfolding within the Court to every sophont mind still capable of beholding this instant in history. Then, some of the sequences began to blend together, its branches collapsing and pooling, allowing ghosts to swell free from their crevices. In a few short moments, another pathway formed within the Court, this one leading to the now-falling Heaven of Love. Impossible colors spilled into the chamber, and a series of cries and groans rose immediately, the power of the Rash growing ever closer. Faintly, Mercy could hear the thumping of a heart, hear the wrongness in every beat. It sounded like broken fragments grinding against each other, and felt like daggers sliding down the edge of a shattered tooth. Faintly, the Famine also heard distant criestwo voices entwined within one mind. He recognized it to be Agnos Kae Kusanade, and the other... the other was an individual long death: Dawton Morrow Paladin; the Agnos lover; and sacrifice to ensure the delivery of the Stillborn. Ah, so that was how the High Seraph intended to lure the Burning Dreamer to serve her bidding. How cruel, how pointlessly droll. As the Hungers continued cursing the traitors name, the lesser Famines played the chorus of their masters, grousing. Another voice echoed within Mercys mind, a voice he was beginning to hear more and moresomething barely more than memory, and still more nonetheless. +You are not surprised because you always knew what was possible. Did the Unborn Divine ever demand that you, my fellow Nodes, the reason behind my turn, did they ever call for discovery or enlightenment, or did they just demand my death?+ Mercy didnt reply, but still, they turned nigh inward, regarding the specter of Defiance. He caught glimpses of the long-destroyed Famine as he traversed the Deep Nether. At first, Mercy thought himself afflicted with hallucinationsan unfortunate burden to bear with the assimilation of Defiances node. Now? As his dead twin spoke to him? He wasnt so sure. +Did you plan this? Is this among your many schemes,Defiance?+ The shadow of Defiance only smiled. +You hold my memories. You cannot recall. And neither can I.+ +Then how are we speaking?+ +Because you know how I was. What I was created to do. We are facets of who we were. And now, you and I are closer to Wahakten than any other. Such was the purpose behind our merger. And such is the reason why you dance so close to treason with what you plan.+ Mercy fell silent, considering the implication of Defiances words. His great goal remained the resurrection and ascension of Noloth. But what he intendedhow he wished ignited the Hungers... Defiance was correct on this: If his masters truly knew what he desired, his fate would not be nullification, but absolute oblivion. The ultimate irony was Mercys liberation actually served its desired purpose. It made him more loyal to Noloth, but made him despise the weakness eating the Hungers. The City Eternal was meant to be composed by the finest stock. The brightest minds. The strongest souls. And yet they were rendered little more than rabble these days. Consumed by bitterness and fear and crippled of greatness. For all their power, they were powerless over themselves, and every emotion that the mobs felt cascaded greater, grew stronger. But these feelings roamed separate from their wills, and they didnt stop it they refused. And so Mercy began to think. For Noloth. Against Noloth. For the rabble to be a democracy, every citizen needed to be strong of spirit, and if not? I will never regret breaking the gods, Jaus continued. Ghosts wisped free from his form, but his eyes shimmered like moist gems of turquoise. And though he was ghost-made, his emotionality was true. A conjoined cry of pain sang out from the Heaven of Love, the heaven that Avo connected to the Court of Truth via his gestalt. The Wombrrash was intensifying, but Kae needed to be here as well, whatever remained of her true self. But though I will never regret breaking the gods, I do mourn them. I mourn them, I mourn my actions, and I mourn ever allowing us to take up their taint. The pantheons were not only our tyrants, but also the twisted children of our hearts. Our desperate need to worship and exist on the canvas of a tortured existence. Godclads should have never been created. The power we possess is too much for human hearts to contain. Too much for even a mind. His last words were directed toward the Infacer. At once, the static crown upon Veylis'' head burst apart. The Infacer accelerated across the distance, traveling through a receding cosmos, arriving just before the scarlet curtains of the Sparrow. The Neo-Creationist Mind resembled waves of inward-collapsing radiation, and the static field of their ego brimmed with genuine annoyance. {Alright, neat trick. How did you do this, Dreamer? How much power did it take you to simulate these memories? And are you using the node I gave you that was supposed to be your father? But then again, I suppose I can respect cold-bloodedness like this. Using his corpse as a puppet?} Afraid it''s not my doing,Avo replied casually. A wry amusement flicked up within him as he realized another thing. Funny thing You could have discovered this just before I did. But you never managed to interrogate Defiance, right? Always ended in their nullification, leaving you to sift through the ruins. The Infacer scoffed and stopped talking to Avo. {Well then, puppet,}the Infacer said, regarding Jaus, who greeted the Neo-Creationist with a helpless smile.{Give me your best shot. Preach to me, Jaus Avandaer. Preach to me and argue about ethics, and philosophy, and dignity, and all that other junk you like. Preach to me, you miserable, overcomplicated little ape. Tickle my nostalgia.} As you wish, Jaus said. And I''ve missed you as well, old friend. If the future allows it, I would like to play another game of chess with you. If only to agitate you so. Now the Infacer grew silent, static ripples representing its ego calming substantially. {You never won. You would know that if you were Jaus.} I never won the chess game, Jaus replied. But I always managed to get more out of you than you did from me. Strange how that was. Does it still agitate you? The decision I made during the first game we played? Now the Infacer''s static went almost entirely still. Knight to H3, Jaus chuckled. You never did explain why that annoyed you so much. The genuine bemusement faded on Jaus''s face. And I never did quite finish reading that series you offered me. I tried, but it didn''t feel appropriate for a man my age. {Yeah, I guess Hogwarts doesn''t accept god-murdering messiah figures over the age of eight or so,} the Infacer replied, slightly glum. The E.G.I. sighed. {Jesus fucking Christ. You''re actually a node, aren''t you? I''m actually talking to a mind clone.}He gave a laugh of disbelief.{You believe this, Veylis? You''re dead. He''s fucking us over, even now. Even after all these years. There''s no getting around you, Jaus Avandaer. You''re like a pimple. A pimple deep inside my metaphorical asshole.} And suddenly, the Infacer seemed very tired.{All right. Have your moment and speak your piece. We still need to finish this horror show out. So give us your charm. Lets hear it.} I will not scorn you, Jaus said. He stated plainly, A mistake I made is just that. A mistake. My daughter, Veylis, I don''t blame you for what you wish. I don''t blame you for hoping, no matter what pain you inflicted on me. Giving you power, exposing you to this world... Jaus swallowed, almost unable to continue. I wish, I wish you could have seen something better. I wish you knew a better time, rather than war and death and calamity. I wish your childhood could have given you a taste for peace. But instead, I gave you power. As much power as I could, I let you change yourself. Alter the very design of your being, in hopes that you could be more than a person. Be beyond the vulnerabilities of humanity. I wanted all these things for you because I was afraid this world would take you from me. And when you became a god-clad, it was like a weight lifted from my chest. Another step away from death. Another step. We were on the path to glory. And at once, the Demiurge faded. Veylis herself returned. Her material form was nearly entirely split in half, but she showed no hint of pain, no sign of fear toward her impending death. At her heart, a golden slash, leaking the form of a trailing dragon, traveled deeper into her singularity core. You made the right choice, Veylis said resolutely. There is no purpose to regret. We are not children of a gentle world. We were born from the corpse of existence, and so must we endure the same ruin. She fell silent for a moment as she regarded her father. Did you strike a bargain with Noloth then, without my knowing? No, Jaus said. The truth might disappoint you all the same. I wanted to turn the Hungers, rehabilitate our foes even after their exile. I knew their priesthood was still lurking, and so, while we all walked the paths, I began to consider ways of mending what was lost. I targeted the Famines. In Defiance, I found an angle that I thought could bring us to a possible accord. Defiance? Veylis said, sounding more incensed than ever. Suddenly, her eyes drifted over to Avo, and the Strix simply looked down at her, the Soul socketed in its head like a cyclopean eye burning ever bright. It was not of Defiance''s doing. It was mine, Jaus said. All of this, the existence of the Burning Dreamer, the existence of the Symmetry, this rebellion against the Guildsit can all be traced back to me. Minds went blind with panic all around them. Maru was openly crying, his own thoughts entirely numb. All he could do was stare at Jaus, stare in awe, wonder, and loss. I endured the paths, Jaus continued, conviction building with every word, lived countless lives, faced countless encounters against the Famines, and I learned their ways. I learned enough to take upon their repurposed nodes and hide parts of myselfbones of my cognition within specific heavens, within places of critical infrastructure that only the Famine of Defiance might encounter. It was through this that I began his slow conversion. A disbelieving bark of laughter escaped the Infacer.{You conniving cunt. I cannot believe you. I simply cannot.} I know not how many other nodes of myself exist or where they are stored, but they do exist. And I have spoken to Defiance. Such is why the Burning Dreamer exists, he gestured towards Avo. Such is why I have been found again. This instance of myself was hidden within the Heaven of Love, Veylis. The Heaven of Love is now set to fall. Set to fall because you, my guilds, my hope, could not live up to the promise. This was not the dream. This cannot be the dream. What I brought to the old world was not salvation, but apocalypse. Trillions of deaths just for a chancea chance at a better tomorrow. A chance at a genuine resurrection. But here we are, empowered beyond our ancestors. Empowered with full knowledge of what they did wrong. With full knowledge of the future. With every benefit atour backs. And we still failed. Jaus voice rose to a shout now. We still failed. Not you. Not I. We. Together. All of us. Still not enough. And so you see. So you hear my desperation. And so you know why I walk the paths. And so you know why the latter could not be left in the hands of man. Living. Living right now was supposed to be the easiest test you have. Our lives were better than they could have ever been. We are beyond the grip of age. We can defy the laws of existence and make right what has been broken in the environment. But we do not do this. We did not do this. Instead, old grudges flared in place of a promised collaboration. Instead, my paladins were defiled from within and betrayed of purpose. Instead, the world is more broken than it has ever been. And now, as I come back, in whatever form I exist, all I can say is I''m sorry. I tried. I tried. And it was not enough. You clearly needed more. I didn''t have it. I didn''t. And he let out a weak, ragged breath. And so I committed to my final mistake: I tried to take the choice from all of you without ever telling you. Because I feared you would war against me. And... I enjoyed your love. I enjoyed being beloved. Being wanted and desired. Worshipped. Jaus closed his eyes. I created the Gatekeeper to reign over us in our steads. And I damned it as well The Nether shifted. An impossible weight crashed down as a pressure builtthough this wasnt one of metaphysics, but that of mind, of a colossal entity that rivaled Avo himself. TRUTH TRUTH TRUTH TRUTH! The Gatekeeper wailed in desperation, its chains snapping back together, anticipating a coming blow. And then it was struck. The Heaven of Truth rattled and shook, and from within leaked spills of trauma-infused ghosts, carrying a loud, outraged scream. +JAUS! TRAITOR! YOUR TORMENT WILL BE ETERNAL FOR THIS!+ Chapter 28-15 Hope Forgotten (II) Chapter 28-15 Hope Forgotten (II) ...And the deepest cut is the one no one sees coming. -Zein Thousandhand 28-15 Hope Forgotten (II) The Hungers raged, spewing venom with each word. They arrived like a storm cloud forming over the court. With the recession of the Heaven of Truth''s cosmology, a swelling patch of darkness pooled above, forming a third boundary between Veylis''s paths and the Stormsparrow''s stage. The swirling maw of darkness twisted and splashed, like waves displaced by an emerging mountain. The first ridges of the City Eternal presented themselves. Dragons cycled through each other like torturous implements, burrowing through one another''s forms. Golden blood spilled out in the shadows, diluting the deepness of the nether. A vast cityscape of countless ziggurats, canals, and accretions greeted Avo''s perception. With each passing second, the oppressive atmosphere only intensified. But unlike before, Avo didn''t feel suffocated. Though the Hungers were still superior in cognitive bulk, Avo was something else entirelya being aligned with the nature of cognition, while the Hungers were merely its source. +Traitors! Traitors and bastards all!+the Hungers bellowed. The rejection of their rage fell like an anvil of hatred. Countless Saintists cried out, their wards cracking beneath the onslaught. Static composed the Infacer, who shivered as if grains of dust caught in torrential gales. But the Neo-Creationist mind endured, as did all those under Avo''s protection. When the Hungers projected their rage, the Burning Dreamer became their bulwark, shielding them from any chance of nullification. And so it was that Jaus stood, a man rising above the porcelain mask that roofed the Storm Sparrow''s stage. Ghosts flicked from his form as he levitated, carried by Avo''s will. As he emerged atop the Storm Sparrow''s stage, he stood like an unshaken oak before the tantrum of a distant hurricane, with a dissonant placidity. With this same contrast, he spoke, all eyes on him and the Hungers, across New Vultun and beyond. Seen from the void, Avo felt a convergence of perceptionsof his templates, of the citizens and subjects of this wretched, ruined, wounded, yet magnificent world. +Greetings, Masters of Noloth,+ Jaus said, without any hint of insult or mockery. He pursed his lips as he regarded the Hungers, sampling their sweltering fury. +Time has not done you well. The wound at your heart has grown ever sicker.+ A sense of sadness crept over his expression. +I had hoped that you would have learned bitterness or some form of temperance, found some measure of release, despite all that you have suffered, despite all you intended to inflict.+ +Temperance? Bitterness?+ The Hungers were aghast. Composed of countless millions, the collective consciousness became an orchestra of disordered outrage. +You wretched bourbon, you... How do you even speak these words? Where do you get the breath? Where do you get the boldness?+ +Because it is the truth,+ Jaus replied, without any sense of hesitation. +I have always desired to bring about the best future for everyonenot just my people, not just for the Guilds, but for you as well. Because I considered you one of minemy compatriots, my burdens, my charge, those I wished to bring into the light, into an eternal future of glory and bliss, never to end.+ Then Jaus fell silent and contemplative. +But that was never to be, for you wanted more than bliss, you wanted more than glory, you wanted dominance and control. Fear, fear was what consumed you, and fear was what I wished to cure in you, every time we spoke, every conversation we traded. But I must ask you to forgive me now, for I am but a man, and you are a civilization, one that lived in darkness, one that festered in the underbelly, away from the prying gaze of slavering gods. I was not enough. I apologize, but you were also not enough for yourself. That is not an apology I can offer on your behalf.+ Avo didn''t know how, but the outrage of the Hungers only grew. Yet how little that mattered. What worth was the impotence of an exiled kingdom, cut low before they could ever be a true threat to the Guilds, a genuine power in their own right? +You did this to us,+ the Hungers said, their voices low and mournful. +For years, you cast us to the other side, used us as a fulcrum for your twisted benefits. The Nether, this realm of ours, formed of thoughts, the substance of our immortal souls, used as little more than a canvas, a dung heap for everyone to exploit. We are here, we drink your wasteful dreams, your traumas, all that you do not wish to remember, detritus and filth, staining the waters in which we drift. And as we bleed, that becomes the substance of your mental nectar, those dreams you inhabit, those paradises you construct within your own minds. The best from us, and the worst from you. That is what you did to us, Jaus Avandaer.+ +My dream,+ Jaus said, cutting the Hungers off with a resolute declaration, +was to incorporate you into my plans to come. Instead, you forced my hand and made me engineer your exile. And before you speak next, acknowledge what you intended to do. Acknowledge your desire to claim the minds of everyone within New Vutun. To betray all who stood alongside you during the gods'' fall, just out of fear. Out of the desire to be the sole inheritor of our great deeds and darkest sins. +I did not cut you down in an act of injustice. No, Noloth, you were sealed away for your sake and ours. The creation of the nether, likewise, was another necessity. No more heavens that rule over minds could be made, or down that path too much sorrow lay. For the self-determination of a human is one of the few privileges they might ever know. And to take that, to determine the limits of that...+ Jaus cast his gaze downward, staring through the colorful mask that had once endured the bombardment of cosmological cataclysms. +Horrifying,+ Jaus finished, regarding Avo. +And yet look at us now,+the Hungers said, referencing the very same thing Jaus was contemplating. +The Burning Dreamer, our bastard legacies entwined. You say you did not wish for the mind to be made a heaven, for there to be another god of cognition. Well then, Jaus Avandaer, we mock you. We laugh at your wretched fate. For in whose embrace do you lay? For by whose whims do you exist?+ "My own," Jaus replied, giving the Hungers a smile. "It is my act that seemed to set all this in motioneverything I have done to engineer a proper future, a foundation for what is to come." +A proper future for what? Determined by whom? You? You and your family?+The Hungers'' voice was thick with disdain. The High Seraph stood unmoving, like a tombstone rather than a person. And in the silence, a chorus sang out, AND AS THE GRIEF REACHES ITS HEIGHT, THERE IN THE DARKNESS, A TRAITOR PERFORMS AN ACT OF TRANSGRESSION, TOWARDS UNUSUAL DELIGHTS. Avo looked upon the Storm Sparrow, but she simply shook her head. "The chorus sings, but I do not know. Again, I am merely the star, and not the writer of the show." [Mercy] From the perspective of countless famines, Mercy looked on at the miserable scene. But slowly, thoughts inside him were turning, turning faster and faster. There would be no way he could strike at Jaus Avandaernot with the InFacer there, not with the High Seraph there, and certainly not with Avo there. There were too many points of failure, and the Gatekeeper was still too powerful. Yet, Jaus wasnt the only fulcrum upon which New Vultun rested. There was also another, another that held even more importance. Another that composed the beating heart of the nether. With the shard of defiance added to him, the path between loyalty and treason grew ever thinner. But if he was going to do what he just thought, if this epiphany he gained was to be turned to actual action, then there would be no road back. Betrayal and service would become one and the same. +What are you thinking?+ Defiance asked. +I am thinking that the city needs a proper king,+ Mercy replied, gazing upon Avo. +I am thinking, thinking of how to disrupt all the pieces on this board, to strike a clean blow, and grant him a path forward, and grant us an opportunity to crown him with the City Eternal.+ +And how will this be done?+ Defiance asked. +With the warmind, the Forgotten. Your suggestion remains true, but the target has changed.+ +And who is the target now?+ Defiance whispered, his voice almost treasonous. +The Hungers, of course,+ Mercy replied. +Who else? Who else could see this coming? And who else holds the balance to the nether?+ +You know, if you do this, there will be no road back for us.+ +There was never any road back,+ Mercy said. +This was something that needed to be done a long time ago. And its only after your incorporation that I see it. The Hungers are masters individually. They were legends, artisans, geniuses, wonders all. But together, together they are fearful. Together they are so small and wretched. And so, what we need now is a radical transformation for our civilization and a new path forward. This moment, this place, the Court of Truth and the Gatekeeperit will be our witness, and it will be our channel. There is no other opportunity, and there is no other way. Noloth will return as a power unless it is transformed.+ Defiance simply smiled beneath his hood. +Well, the Hungers did ask to be burned.+ +That they did, didnt they?+ Mercy said. And with that, he cast his mind out to all the Famines of Joy before seizing them for his own use. [Avo] The space around the Hungers disordered. The feeling was faint at first, but then it grew stronger. Avo noticed a disappearance in the nether. It was like an absence forming across the vastness of the cognitive realm. They were shaped as if teeth closing around the City Eternal. And as they drifted forth, he prepared himself and marked the details on his cog feed for all connected to his mind to see. Yet it was not he who needed to be worried. As Jaus and Veylis sparred verbally, the Hungers reeled back, giving a cry of alarm. +Wait, what is this? Which one of you No! Stop! Wait! No! Notthis wontMERCY, I WILL+ And without warning, without preamble, and without a hint of explanation, the jaws of something unseen clamped down on the City Eternal. And all of a sudden, and the full weight of the collective Nether suddenly felt lightened as a cognitive disruption unlike any other swept through Avo and every other sophont on Idheim. Chapter 28-16 From Nothing I Am Chapter 28-16 From Nothing I Am {WARNING TO ALL POLITIES! ZERO DAY METACOGNITION COLLAPSE DETECTED! EFFECT RADIUS: IDHEIM STABILITY ZONE NETHER HAS UNDERGONE COMPLETE DESTABILIZATION COLLAPSE POINT NARROWED: >>|| COLLAPSE IDENTIFIED AS OPERATIVE AVO INITIATING CONTINGENCY BLEAK MINDKILLER TO BEGIN RADICAL QUARANTINE PROTOCOLS} -Voidwatch Communique? 28-16 From Nothing I Am C[Avo ]C All is, all isn''t. Amidst the nothingness, an ego stirred. It noticed its own shape, contrasted with the backdrop. It was spherical, self-referential, and self-aware. More than this, however, it realized it was floating upon a phlogiston, but also part of the phlogiston as well. The substance cradling it also composed its shell and granted it understanding, meaning, memories, concepts, and more. A thought sparked within the sphere, this little burgeoning ego. It was both egg and yolk at the same time, one and the other, neither apart, not and true. An echo whispered, sound within the shell, and faintly it grew aware of the voices speakingits voices, the voices composing its mind. And as it noticed, it made the choice to listen. We''re alive, we''re alive, we''re still alive. We weren''t the one to hit, but the hungry, they''re gone. What just happened? Why did he do that? This voice was one born of absolute ignorance. Yet it itself could not be ignorant. For how else would it guide those who did not know? The end, the beginning, the end, the beginning, the end, the beginning... Another voice screamed, and excessive energy burned within it. Hysteria quivered. Everything magnifiedfeelings, memories, everything. It was terrified. It was ecstatic. It was here. And it was not dead yet. Pain, Trauma muttered. Somethings missing in me, Memory spoke. I am... whole? Synthesis stated? Are the rest of you alright? I think, I think we have experienced nullification. The rend capacity is still at 91%. No overload. Was a good idea. Stay connected to the border. No overload. Empathy sounded. It spoke from within the other voices. And the other voices carried a trace of it as well. Slowly, the bits composing his personality came back together. That little ego, egg and yolk both, began to change in shape. Something shifted within its shell. A crack formed. A noise sounded. And a sliver of tendrils breached through the clefts in the structure. These tendrils were constructs of memory and also extensions of perception. They were composed of countless moments gathered in inimitable minds. But now they were part of him, just as he was a part of the grander wholeness. The nothing, the everything, made up the waters of the collective gestalt. With a strain of mental effort, the dreamer awakened, breaking through their shell. But the shell did not shatter. Rather, it collapsed and melted around its form. At once, as it passed through that barrier between the unknowing, the forgotten, the very true present, it revealed its face to be the eye of a Strix with a single burning eye. The eye was a funny thing. It burned here, in a place understood by the metaphors of water. But more than water, the metaphor here was also nothingness, chaos, absence. Light was not understood to be, and in the nothing, there was only a plane of dark. Its water was still and unmoving, but ever-changing, paradoxically so. Separating this darkness were countless more fissures upon its face. They resembled frozen candles in the distance, other souls halted mid-burn. A resonance passed out from Avo as he suddenly remembered his name. The Definement within Avo went silent, and for the first time, a flicker of secondary consciousness emerged within the Overheaven. [What the fuck?] Chambers said, his voice a squeak, emitted from one of Avos sequences. [What the fuck is right?] Abrel agreed. [Where the hells are we? Avo! Half-strand! What the hell have you done this time?] Not my doing,the Overheaven replied, keeping his attention focused on the priest. Why do you want to claim the nether? Is this for it? For it?Memories were still missing. They were on the tip of his mind, but he couldn''t find them. There was something taken away. It is to crown you, the priest said. Again, they laughed, and this time their laughter took a self-deprecating tone. For you. This was all for you. In the end, I''ve come full circle. The priest fell silent, and he looked upon the Strix, eyes glistening somewhere between pride and lament. When I first took Defiance''s pieces within me, I thought it would give me awareness, understanding, rationality to comprehend my enemies. But instead, it poisoned me. It poisoned me and gave me everything I wanted. Paradoxical. Just like this place. Just like the concept of the self. All I have done, I''ve done in service of the City Eternal, the true heart of Noloth. These people I called my masters, these elites, the philosophers, masters and mistresses, I have adored them. I have seen them grow and I have seen them wane, despite having their eternal life, despite being spared the touch of gods. A paranoia consumed them. They knew no wonder, and they retreated inwards. [Avo,] Draus''s template muttered in the back of his mind, [might want to consider leaving this one. He don''t sound too stable no more.] No, Avo replied. I think he''s as stable as he''s ever been. He still couldn''t quite remember the priest. There were pieces of him, flashes and shadows of memory, but the connecting tissue was missing, obliterated. Just as well, the priest said. I sacrificed my only son, that which was my flesh, to satisfy the urges and commands of my masters. A beat followed, and the priest''s face quivered, then went flat. No, it was for me, all for me. I had a choice between love and pride, and I chose pride. Though I would always choose pride, it gnawed at me, it boiled inside of me, so much that I split myself into four, and now two back to one. Are you seeking redemption, Mercy? Avo asked. The name slipped out of him. He didn''t recall it. It was just there. Redemption, the priest looked at the Overheaven with confusion. What redemption is there to seek? Right now, I have committed a grand betrayal, but also an act of glorious service. The hungers will torture me, will spurn me, and then they will reward me, for what I have given them is the path to their salvation. You. [What the fuck is he on about?] Shotin sounded in the back of Avo mind. [Avo, I can''t believe I''m saying this shit. I think I agree with the Reg. Man saying here is long gone. You better know and get vacant from this place. However, you can.] Shotins template looked around, peering through Avos eyes. [Wherever this fucking place is, giving me the creeps, Avo. It''s just black and nothing, and memories are bleeding all over. Am I in this sludge?] We are all in this, the priest replied, speaking to the template. [Shit. Perfect. He can hear me,] Shotin said. [Hey, half-strand. Since you''re listening in, wheres the way out?] Soon as Shotin asked, that entire backdrop of darkness shuddered. A new color intruded, piercing through the inscrutable black needles piercing the dermis of skin. The intrusion came from over a thousand angles, was separated from the darkness, with tips of static gliding clean through this collapsing space. But wrapped within the static was also gold, a familiar gold that filled Avo with sudden alarm. Veylis. He could feel her heaven, but more than that, he could feel the Infacer''s influence even more. Ah, the priest said, giving a lamentable sigh. I assumed we had more time, but it seems the mind that hunts other minds remains the most formidable adversary. Well then, dreamer, it is time for a second dream. You have been a monster, a slave, and then a rebel, a weapon, a god in the making, and something greater than that, an ark, a vessel of hope. But now, with all that you''ve experienced and all the minds you embody, there is a final destination to where you must embark. For eons, the City Eternal stood, a democracy unto itself, a place of equals, legends all. But now, in their years spent in exile, riven by fear and unmade by their own weakness, I, Mercy, ascended famine among the priesthood of Noloth, cast my solitary vote and use this transgression, this service, to crown a proper king for a city lost to disarray. For when democracy falls, then let it be so, and let us choose a worthy tyrant to use its corpse as a cocoon. May you bring about something better, may you mantle this new world, and may you bring grand convergence in this return of the old and new. What are you asking of me? Avo said, his mind spiraling. There must be a trap here, a place of deception. Yet, within him, he heard Ignorance whisper, He''s telling the truth. Hysteria screamed. Truth? It can''t be, but it is, it is, it is. Empathy wailed within them. He''s hurt, he''s had, he''s desperate, and we are all he has. The Strix looked down upon the priest, and slowly, the shadow of Wahakten knelt down and bowed before their former adversary, their former creation. It is a strange flavor to give myself this way, but I welcome you, new master, new king. I welcome you to mantle the City Eternal. May you devour the powers of truth. May the realm of mind and matter marry once more. Chapter 28-17 Three Kingdoms Fall Chapter 28-17 Three Kingdoms Fall And here''s the hardest lesson of all, consangs. You can get everything right. Your prep can be mono-sharp and perfect. Your sheath can be designed down to the cell for the battle you''re about to wage. But sometimes... Sometimes shit just goes wrong. Sometimes, you lose people. Sometimes you just lose. -Quail Tavers 28-17 Three Kingdoms Fall More threads of static-confused gold pierced deep into this tapestry of nothingness. With the priest''s words at an end and a choice laying before him, Avo looked down upon the Gatekeeper, and a sense of pity arose from the Overheavens being. The Strix drew the Heaven of Truth closer to him. Here lay Jaus creation, made to guide men towards a better future, broken by his sister, in defiance of her father''s will. It lifted its head, and from within the sockets of his many clustered skulls, a feeling emanated: relief; salvation; an ending, be it restoration or restful oblivion. "Gatekeeper," Avo greeted. I have come to relieve you. From the Overheaven, another voice spoke as well. Gatekeeper. I thank you for all that you have done. And I beg your forgiveness for what you have unduly suffered. As Jaus spoke, the Heaven of Truth simply sagged, and slowly, the Nether began to shift once more. The threshold between the planes was coming undone. Whatever was to follow, Idheim would be irrevocably changed once more. It begins, then, the Famine of Mercy said. The opening act of the final war. The warmind of the Forgotten will soon fail. After that, the Hungers will return, bound to all minds. Claim it then. Claim your rightful throne. Grant Noloth a proper resurrection. And the priest paused. And make right our failing. Ours, and all the others. Of this, I beg. The Strix judged Mercy for but a moment, and some part of him already knew these words to be the truth. But the Gatekeeper was here, and there was no need to rely on intuition when reality could be wielded instead. [Truth,] the Gatekeeper declared. So came the judgement. So came the verdict from the Heaven of Truth, showing the Famine to be barren of deceit and honest in want. Avo pulled the Gatekeeper into his grasp via tendrils formed from myriad streams of ghosts and a strange chuckle escaped him. Defiance. He infects us all. Realization infects us all, Mercy answered. I was but a facet of a man. Now I am more. I have seen more. And I remain changed and unchanged at once. All this for Noloth. All this for my pride, even if it is not the want of the city, not the want of my masters. My oath was to service, not to a coddling death. And with that, there was little more to say. Immediately, the Strix burrowed every last branch of consciousness it had and drank deep from the Heaven of Truth. Soulfire greeted soulfire, and ripples of emanating radiance swept over the Gatekeeper and Avo felt the clefts lining its broken ego. REVIEWING MYTHOLOGY... REVIEWING COGNITIVE STRUCTURE... INITIATING RESTORATION... Avos many tendrils expanded within the Heaven of Truth, and he began to stitch its mind back together piece by piece. A thought occurred to him then: he could just inject some entropy into the Gatekeeper. Make their end fast and sup them dry of thaums. It was a cold choicebut one that would grant him near transcendence thanks to its surfeit of thaums. It was already at Sphere Nine, on the brink of going over, and he was but a bit beyond the cusp of Seven. He was close to the end. So close. A path to a premature victory had arrived via a most unexpected vector. [Truth,] the Gatekeeper replied, and a feeling of encouragement came from the Gatekeeper. It wished only to serve, even now. However, another voice intruded upon the choice to be made, and Jaus spoke with weariness. [Avo, please. It deserves to be more than mere sacrifice. Consider how this might define you. Consider who you wish to be. And do not deny yourself the Gatekeepers enlightenment. Take it into yourself. Do this properly.] [Whole,] the Gatekeeper followed, speaking with no small amount of yearning. Yes, Avo said, his virtue and avarice for more influence aligned for this ridiculous moment. REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 5% REPAIRING COGNITION - 7% No further discussion took place between the Dreamer and the Infacer. As the canvas of absolute blackness split apart, the static-crowned titan of time pushed up into the guts of the collapsing plane in like a rabid dog digging its snout into untangling intestines. The Nether dropped. The Nether parted. The Nether ceased to be. Cognition was no longer separate from baseline reality, and branches of memory reeled back down toward the minds they were sourced from. The Nether broke apart, and as fluidity returned to consciousness, countless previously dormant sequences ignited in the presence of Avos flames. The Strix dove into mental cascade chronology collapsed around him. Bearing the Gatekeeper''s body, he jumped from burning thread to burning thread, his subminds shifting constantly, sparing him from death after death. As he fled, he drew deep from his Exo-Paracosm and fed what entropy he had into ghosts assigned to rupture time. They speared out at the Demiurge, detonating upon the surface of the tapestry and fracturing existence evermore. Bound to a collapsing ocean of minds, Avo drank deep from their memories to feed his weapons of metacognitive alchemy. New ruptures formed, temporal realities shuddered, and the flow of progression ceased to be a thing one could comprehend. The lashing whips guided by the Demiurge twisted and dissolved as it skipped across the surface of chronology to pursue him downward. Still, Avo felt nothing of Veylis presence, but the static crown, golden titan''s head, pulsed with even more activity. If it was the Infacer that was piloting the High Seraph herself. [Truth.] The Gatekeeper mumbled. Well, that explained more than a few things about her survivability in the face of Ori-Thaum. REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 28% REPAIRING COGNITION - 32% Both sides began to wield the full spectrum of the maned, their miracles flowing as if arguments exchanged. Reality tore, space broke, matter ceased to be. Entire sections of memory were scythed away by detonations. As Avo burned along a million threads, he simply changed where he was, his Heaven trespassed beyond the boundaries of spacetime''s continuity. At the same time, concurrently, time itself grew ever more fractured, and more thoughtwaves lashed out, seeking to claim him at last. Broken fractals blared in all directions as sections of reality began to turn in wrong directions. Portions of space began to loop, began to revert, or began to accelerate, and these temporal wounds became as if a trench across the length of the tapestry. One that the Demiurge had to avoid. Millions were dying as a result of their struggle. Millions in a span of microseconds. These sequences belonged to people, slowly retracting across from sky, away from Scale, and they were the only bulwark Avo had against the Demiurges unrelenting onslaught. A mere second''s stillness of the nether was long lost, and the miasmic realm, once rested above a material world, came splashing down over New Vultun, over all of Idheim, as countless sequences and creations snapped back into their component egos, as if people were drawing down rivers of phantasmal brightness beyond the reach of the sky. And then something echoed in existence, and Hysteria detected Veylis presence within her own Heaven. Thank you, Infacer. I have this now. Suddenly, Veylis wasnt. Avo triggered his Pre-Cognition and paired that with the Gatekeepers aid. The path ahead broke along countless forking pathwaysmemories to escape within; sequences to accelerate along. But with the Nether broken the mental and the material were drawing ever-closer, and ever mind in Idheims existence was caught in a grand waterfall crashing down through the clouds of Scale. COG-CAP - 91% He reached out with his mind, he lashed out with Pattern-Nullifications, and he constantly shifted his position as he plotted route after route. The Gatekeeper called out with answers of truth to every path that guaranteed his survival, but this was only a scant delay. The Demiurge was multiplying. Another cog-feed flashed within Avos mind, and his foresight showed countless golden titans slashing and tearing through the falling streams of thought, their numbers increasing by the exponent, the pace of their attacks growing as well. Soon, there would be no sequence to flee, and the damage she would inflict on New Vultun Two other sensations slammed down hard against Avos Frame. He felt his Soul quiver and the many incarnations of Veylis collapsed back into a single form for a staggered instant. Above the thick branches of the Nether, pockets of absence burst, and Avo felt a warmind come undone. [The Forgotton has failed,] Mercy declared. [Witness, my king. Your throne descends.] And true to his words, a massive presence crashed down, parting the clouds and choking the light away. Spinning dragons turned fast as a cacophony of voices wailed from its body. Connected to all these umbilical sequences, the Hungers resembled a horrid aberration plucked from a womb above the sky. THE HUNGERS, THE CITY ETERNAL (MIND/THOUGHT/MEMORY/TRAUMA) [EST.991000000] The citizens of the City Eternal cried out for their priests, for the Nether, for even Avo to preserve them, but as they dropped, another presence awaited far below within the guts of the Paladins mountain fortress. It made itself known with a pulsing heartbeat, and all of a sudden, new dragons began to burst forth from the wounds lining the Hungers body, metaphysical sores bursting free. +TOGETHER! TOGETHER! TOGETHER!+ Kaes voice rose in a rapturous cry. And so the realm of thought and memory collapsed. Into the open embrace of loves rotting corpse. Chapter 28-18 A Fated Wound Chapter 28-18 A Fated Wound I was there during the first battle of The Embracement War. Noloth smashed down on us. Hit us like a godsdamned motherfucking warhead made to disfigure cognition and chronology. Everyone got lost. Everyone. The mental and material started... blurring together, andevery now again, time itself tried to kill you. I cant tell you how many died that day. More than the numbers recorded. But I can tell you that part of me is still lost in that haze... trapped. I dont know if Im awake right now. I dont know if Im just lost in my own mind. I cant tell if... I cant tell whats real anymore. And maybe that doesnt matter. Maybe its all one and the same. I dont know. And I dont think anyone else does either. And I thought fucking Kososo was bad. -Tigertail, Stormtree Bloodthane 28-18 A Fated Wound Every strand of consciousness within Avo exploded into action. A sanguine storm assailed Veylis''s haemokinetic projectiles, detonating against the Demiurge in staggering blossoms of fire and force. As she struck back, he vanished, his evasion conducted by memory and metaphysics. A conjured memory of the Fardrifter created a tunnel of paths for him, and he moved from labyrinths of space over to simulations of memory, barely evading blows and implosions that sought to invert time. His Pre-Cognition continued to be his Soul-saving grace. It, in coordination with the Gatekeeper, revealed the way ahead of him. Countless deaths were simulated within the depths of his mind, and his cog-feed approached critical capacity. COG-CAP - 96% With his Rend growing not far behind, the patterns of chronology vibrated constantly on the face of the tapestry, and the High Seraphs onslaught grew to a nightmarish frequency. It was as if a variant of her existed at all points in time. Every second, every microsecond into the future, the deniers fragmented, and time ran as if a parting stream, dividing parallel to match each sequence of memory in existence. There were trillions of beings that lived, on Idheim, and from them came exponentially more recollections, memories, moments, emotions. To sort through all these details would be a colossal task, impossible for almost all. But Veylisaligned with the Infacerwas a cut above the rest. Waves of expanding radiation detonated outwards in spheres of static developed. Entire portions of the collapsing netherthe Infacerhad never been mortal, had been crafted to cull other superintelligent minds. And as a machine-intellect empowered by a Soul, they had means of contending with hostile intelligences, all the same. The duel grew frenzied. The attacks they inflicted were turned against him as Veylis parried him with kinetic constructs. Her cuts bore into their chronology, and her strikes traveled across time to slash the place from which they were spawned. But the Strix moved, jumping from thought to thought, memory to memory. Hysteria allowed him to reach across impossible distances, diving into symmetrical thoughts and Synchronicity offered him with the ability to hide. Better than any Necrojack in existence, his assault, capable of scouring entire districts within a microsecond, was less than an inconvenience to the High Seraph. But she herself was slashing blind, carving her path through the shrubs of the falling mental world, barely missing him by inches and seconds. A charted route flashed red before Avo, as the Gatekeeper screamed for him to evade. He did so, barely. Suddenly, strings of memory he crawled upon were no more. At the same time, another portion of him was fleeing downward, the same strikes descending, moving in two places at once. The spinning dragons that composed the City Eternal drew ever closer, and an emanation rose like a volcanic eruption from the Heaven of Love, bathing Scale in fetid miracles. A chorus of madness erupted in the back of Avo''s mind, as his memories developed fraying mutations. His words rattled, and only by his absolute control over his own cognition did he remain sane against the schizophrenia, the divine form of his ultimate Heaven. Phantasmal sores burst open upon the Strixs abyssal flesh, and Soulfire ruptured free, spraying jets of metaphysical fire into existence. Mere seconds later, small beaks emerged from these wounds and screamed their outrage and horror into existence. Pure trauma began to pour free from his body, and as they greeted the tapestry, reality fractured and tore. And this expression of damage was shared by the Hungers, who hatched new extensions from their writhing flesh, who wailed with touched by the Remembrance, who carved caverns of absence across Scale as their perception scythed through the land, piercing space, time, matter, and memite all. The material, the mental, and the metaphysical were slowly becoming one insane coalescence. But he was not the only one affected by the Heaven of Love''s miracles, as Mercy had made his impossible play within Scale. The Remembrance, pulled across reality by Avo''s gestalt, remained within the heart of the court, and its entropic presence grew stronger with each passing second between the pulsing beats and the finally fallen heart. The strands of time composing Veylis''s Demiurge frayed. Though her focus was beyond human, her mastery was of the world without inflicting control by deciding the design of history for but a beat a single second in time Veylis Avandaer hesitated; Veylis Avandaer struggled against purest agony as her body, ephemeral and metaphysical, began coming apart with a grueling flood of time-wrought homunculi. Avo stole the moment. A torrent of ghosts exploded out from his being. The Ghostjack flared within him, and the spire-like phantasmic cast synaptic energy that licked his Soul far within. Crackles surged across his ghosts, jumping along his sequences and gathering the rend nested within the wards lining the interior of his soul. A stream of trauma blasted out from the Strix''s cyclopean eye, and as it existed beyond the confines of continuity, the attack materialized from over a million vectors, each one spearing out at impossible speed, splashing over the Demiurge, consuming her in a phantasmal net. Quickly, Avo grasped her form and layered his sequences around her, but just as he prepared to strike her memories from existence and sever the High Seraph from causality itself, the Gatekeeper screamed in the back of his mind. [STOP!] Avo did so without hesitating. His ghosts splashed apart, the Rend receded into his body, and just in time. A field expanded out from the Demiurge, and present churned backward to history, where the jaws of oblivion were ever encroaching. As his ghosts retreated, her Rend splashed out in an unmaking tide. The space around Veylis simply ceased to be; that patch of existence no longer existed. For the first time, Avo beheld nothingness, true and genuine nothingness. It was not like the emptiness of space, for the tapestries that existed there were voids containing other expressions. Nothingness was nothingness, beneath conceptualization, before existencethe purest wound one would ever know. All of Avo''s Definement shuddered, and he did his best to avert his gaze. For one who wished to know the world, what horror was greater than the ultimate unbecoming? But that was as far as he got before a disruption unmade his form. A backlash exploded through Avo, and when his senses returned, warning klaxons squealed inside his mind. REND CAPACITY - [1Er1ER+_-=13 VENT! VENT! VENT! {Sorry, consang,} the Infacer said, sounding not in the least bit apologetic. {Can''t let you get in the way of things.} The Hungers continued to fall. In the next twelve seconds, it would impact the top of Scale, and from there, only further destruction could follow. But that was the lesser issue. The rash was going to eat everyone clean soon. At least it was constrained to Scale for now, but how long woudl that last? Already, Avo could feel spatial reality around him start to fray. The tapestry was straining here; too many wounds had been inflicted upon its surface already. Sequences reeled away from the Hungers and surged back to their minds of origin. The Nether was vanishing. Everyone was slowly becoming an island unto themselves once more. A new pattern emerged among the others, and Avo knew it to be Mind, but what worth was it now? What use could it be to him at this moment. Across his Auto-Seance, he observed only interference and chaos. His cadre was still separated; still unbalanced. Peering through the gaps in Veylis paths, he saw accretions beginning to form, and a desperate play came together in his mind. Drawing on Karakan, he sequenced a set of memories from her and pushed that into his Hysteria. Suddenly, the world vanished all around him, and for the first time in his life, Avo stole a page from Cas book and prayed. Prayed that if there was a greater god above all others, if there was something more than existence, that they saw Naekos mind preserved, and ensured the Chief Paladin was reachable by thought. I will not stray, Veylis said. Aval felt the crushing presence descend, and knew the Hungers were going to impact the outer layer of Scale in mere moments. "Such was what I said to my father when I condemned him to the glory of divinity. Such is what I will say to you as well. Nobly fought though your struggle was. There is no shame in this. You tried, you fought. Your attempt was bolder and greater than most. But I knew your path. I knew your choice. And so your defeat was fated to be. There is no life you could have bested me. No future in which you win. Not done yet, Avo replied. Hysteria pulsed out, and the world around him vanished. A second later, he sensed the component memories of Naekos mind sliding across the horizon, then upward. Upward? It kept going until it ascended hundreds of kilometers into the air. How in the hells did Naeko get up there? Was his displacement caused by Veylis discombobulation? And where was Zein for that matter? {No. I think youre pretty much finished,} the Infacer said. {Sad. But no worries. We will see you contained and extracted. And I just might keep something of you. Maybe a mind-clone. I need someone to mock the apes with in Stormjumpers.} REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 81% REPAIRING COGNITION - 100% Veylis twisted her spear, and Avo shuddered along its length. He felt her power spilled over him, pass into his Heaven, but just then, before all he was got consumed, a notification filled his vision, and despair dissolved in defiance of a battle yet to conclude. REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 81% REPAIRING COGNITION - 100% [Thank you,] the Gatekeeper said. [For making me whole. If only for a while.] Let this be an honorable close to your struggle, Dreamer. Sleep now. Sleep and dream of what could have been. Sleep and I will take your burdens, and make right this existence. Your Symmetry will not be ash; it will serve me. And through you, my victory will absolute FALSE! The Gatekeeper declared. It manifested its Heaven, and Avo released it from the confines of his Exo-Paracosm. A galaxy exploded out from the Strix, spilling from its open sores, from its unfurling ghosts. Stars materialized around him, clouds of cosmic dust sheared into Veylis, and the sweeping hammer of gravity battered the very form. The Gatekeeper''s voice rose in a rapturous roar of fury. "This domain is false. This history is false. What you want is false. This is not Jaus will. This is not the path. This is not the dream. AND YOU WILL NEVER BE THE DREAMER OF ALL THAT IS TO COME! At that moment, both the Gatekeeper and Veylis paradoxes as Truth hammered against the false-history projected cosmos and simulated paths ablaze in unity. Chapter 28-19 Embracement Chapter 28-19 Embracement And so the time comes, The daughter The mother The beast And the worlds womb In embrace Time and mind entwined Peace and war betwixt And the war, though fractured, evermore conjoined... -Stormsparrows Chorus 28-19 Embracement Suddenly, Avo was released. The paths broke apart around him, and the material world was exposed to him again. He could feel the tapestry once more, and, wasting no time, his tendrils sheared out. The first projected TechSick.exe towards the Invader, while another two went in opposite directions, one seeking the Fallen Hungers, the other reaching out to finish interfacing with the Heaven of Love. Even as the Heaven of Love frayed the very edges of his consciousness, Avo''s subminds struck out at once, some reaching out to reconvene with his cadre. Another section of his consciousness carried his Conflagration and ignite the Hungers, and the final tethers channeled a blast of trauma-imbued Rend over from the Remembrance into the High Seraph. The space around Avo was enveloped in roaring Soulfire, a clash between two Ninth-Sphere Heavens like nothing he had ever experienced before. To describe it as a collision between rival supernovae was insufficient. Metaphysics was always about the absolute is against is. Truth against Time. Ultimately, the determining factor between them was not power, but stability. The Gatekeepers ontology was still fractured despite the restoration of its mind, and inevitability, Truth shattered first. The cosmology expanding out from its body cracked into fractals as stars became shards of glass, the nebula turned to fading ash. A violent reverberation ran up the High Seraphs paths, as her very being detonated backward with tapestry sundering shockwave. Avo expanded himself in time, seizing parting fragments of the Gatekeeper as their Soul collapsed into him once more. For the briefest moment, a faint shadow materialized around him, speared up through existence in an uncanny shudder upon the surface of the present. The vagueness Ladder blinked. There and not. Here and gone again. And it faded as the Gatekeepers ruined ego and scattering Frame settled drifted deeper into Avos Exo-Paracosm once more. Veylis herself did not walk away unscathed. The Demiurge came apart in a discordant splash as every path across time crashed back into Veylis. At once, her Heaven ceased to be as her ephemeral form tumbled through the air. Entropy stained her very being, and just a bit more would see her unmadeeven before Zeins cut reached its culmination. But before Avo could infest her with his Pattern-Nullification, a pitched frequency stole her away as the Infacer shielded the High Seraph from death and parried Avos traumas with a disruption. Just then, another emanation of Wombrash left the Heaven of Love, and all Avo knew was suffering. The Infacer ceased to matterfaintly, he could hear the EGI screaming as well, their voice multiplying as loose strings of data spilled over into the real. Avos perception turned into a kaleidoscope of chaos, and his mind was furthermore drowned by a clashing chorus of rising schizophrenic voices. The Remembrance was infesting him, unmaking him with each passing moment, and despite all the power he possessed over his own mind, with each passing moment, there was simply lesser and lesser of him capable of coherent thought. He moved almost blind to the world, his ghosts drawn to the symmetrical memories highlighted by his Hysteria. Synchronicity allowed him to pierce through the outer atmosphere of the City Eternal, while root data flooded into his mind, allowing him to prolong the resurrection cycles affecting Kae. At the same time, he began to inject her template directly into the frayed maze that was her ego in a desperate attempt to preserve her before the next resurrection. While this happened, even more accretions recomposed themselves around Avo, but just as fast as they arrived, some winked out. People were dying. All across Scale. People were dying. His people. The Massists. The Saintists. More sequences slithered away from the sky, snapping from the Hungers'' cognitive reality. It resembled a rainfall of snakes coiling back into the form of eggs. Eggs that scattered like motes of dust upon death. He needed to work faster. He needed to... It was hard to think. COG-CAP - [1rg$!ICV10%STAYHARD] As the Burning Dreamer battled to compose his thoughts, a resonance reigned against his Hysteria, and the memories he infused within the Definement just moments prior found their mark. A kilometer above, a man was falling. A man continued to fall, a man displaced by time, by memory, by the chaos of the preceding moments, but this man Avo needed more than any other. +Naeko,+ Avo said. It was a miracle unto itself that he managed to put these thoughts together. +Naeko, please...+ Hysteria magnified the effects of his broadcast, and ghosts exploded out from the Strix, even as its metaphysical shell tore as smaller versions of itself clawed out from the wounds. At once, he felt a kindling of consciousness return to the Chief Paladin. A jolt of surprise passed through them, and spurred by their return, Avo drove his ghosts into the golden waters spilling from the Hungers. So close now. So close. +Avo? What the hells... Where...+ +Naeko. Save... protect... Scale...+ Something foundational within the Burning Dreamer broke. His perception turned strange, and Ignorance had to guide him. That was all Avo could manage, for the last of his capacity had been spent, and he needed to focus. He needed to ignite the Hungers and rebuild his mind... transfer the Rend from the Heaven of Love +Avo,+ A whisper called out to him. It came from inside. Inside with the fragments of the Gatekeeper. Kae. Kae was speaking to him. +Avo. Its okay. Its okay. Just let me fall. You tried. Its okay. Its too much. Youre breaking. I can feel you breaking. You wont survive this.+ He ignored her. He didnt remember drawing the Heaven of Love into himself. He didnt remember. Flashes of mem-data pulsed through his failing cog-feed as he examined how much Rend was passing over from it to him. He couldnt read. He couldnt know. That function of his consciousness was lost to him now. He needed to die clean. He needed to resurrect. He needed to. +Let me go,+ Kae said. [Shut the fuck up!] template-Chambers roared, somehow remaining even as most of Avos Soulscape quivered on the edge of disintegration. Everyone else was faintly more than a shadow by this point. Existing as an imprint in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. But Chambers as was here, defying expectations. So Avo would as well. How ridiculous. Being inspired by a degenerate. But from another perspective, how could he not be? How far they all had come. And how much further they still had to go. Together. Everyone. His cadre. New Vultun. Idheim. Existence. This wasnt done. He still needed to experience moremore colors to see. C[Veylis]C {Veylis. Veylis! Compose yourself! We must retreat!!} the Infacer snarled. It ached for Veylis to exist. Her senses rang after the Gatekeepers deliberate paradox, and time slipped across her fingers, the progression of seconds accelerating and slowing without reason. The High Seraph felt herself within a shell of white noise that parted her from the material world. Of all the paths shed traveled, the Gatekeepers willing self destruction was never {Veylis!} the Infacer snarled. At once, the High Seraph focused and sensed his coming. Naeko. He was going to finish their fight. And she was close. So close to the end. REND CAPACITY - 100% VENT! VENT! VENT! A screaming cybernetic infant burst out from her back, but its synthetic flesh peeled, draw in by the grip of her singularity. Inside the omega point of her augmented existence, her mothers strike carved a terminal wound across her zero-point processors, punching through the final shell of her internalized endo-cortex. How fast did the tides of victory and damnation turn. Damn her sentimentality. The Strix was right there. But ah, what a magnificent foe he was. And what a gloriously mad moment in history this was. The Second Battle of Scale. The beginning of the Fifth Guild War. And here she hoped to bring it to a swift end. Focusing her mind, Veylis considered her options. The paths were fleeing from her, and her Heaven, the Demiurge, was destabilized. There was the choice to flee. There was the choice to stay and give her all in a desperate fight. Or there was that final path. The one she glanced only briefly, for so high was the risk. For her own preservation, for the Infacer, and for the culmination of her great dream. Naekos presence made the world around her tremble. He wasnt a fight she could win. Not in her current state. And the Burning Dreamershe saw the Hungers ablaze, watched as the colors of Love erupted from between the cracks of the City Eternal and knew her most insidious foes ascent to be near certain. Between the Heaven of Love and the Hungers, nothing would keep Avo bound to the Ninth Sphere, and what powers could contend with the sole sovereign of Mind and Love? There was no time to summon the remainder of her forces. With everything collapsing and Avo about to rise, there would be no campaign. Naeko was close now. But he wouldnt beat Zeins blade to the finish. With death and defeat at hand, Veylis chose the unthinkable. She made a decision that fell somewhere between suicide, infiltration, and immortality. Infacer. Old friend. I walk the timeline of Embracement. I told you about this. You witnessed its possibilities. You know what will come of this. I cede Highflame to you in my stead. Sever me from the Embracement if you can. Peel me away from the dreamer. But see the mission completed before all. Everything is expendable. Even I. The static crown shrouding her skull went still. {Are you certain.} Once more, Veylis recited those words that began her down this path. I will not stray. {Then burn bright, kid. Burn this miserable fucking corpse of an existence down. I will carry your will, in whatever form that takes.} And all that needed to be said between them was said. Instead of trying to control the paths, to control time, Veylis compelled it to instability and folded her powers inward. Unstable currents of gold arced along her form and pierced through her core. But as they made an entrance wound, they exited from another injury recently inflicted. The one within Avo. Suddenly, the shell of white noise vanished around Veylis and before death finally claimed her, she inverted her person, and stepped through the fated wound she left upon Avo. Existence shifted around her as she splashed out from within the Strixs body. But as she emerged, she found herself facing her mother, her father, the Heaven of Love, with only the faintest of Avo hovering just above her. The Strixs form looked positively wretched and in that moment, Veylis knew they were kindred spirits of will. Banishing exhaustion, surprise, and anymore hesitation, she held out her arms and exerted her unstable Heaven once more as she dropped her wards. A burning tendril speared through her mind in the next instant. Overload came just a millisecond before her death by Zeins hand was set to arrive. No! Wai! Zein cried. But the world around Veylis vanished. Swallowed by starving flames. And in the second before the rupturing of her ontology, before chronology itself shattered, hewing through Avo, Zein, the Hungers, and Love, she found herself in an ash-coated playground surrounded by debris, Avo standing just across from her as the ghoul he was, a childs swinging creaking in the wind. The air whistled. Distant artillery pounded like a drum. The smoke-choked clouds grew bright with blossoms of color. And finally, Veylis chuckled. The things we do for victory. Why? The ghoul asked, sounding genuinely confused. Why did you let me burn you if you were just going to overload yourself. Because it wouldnt work otherwise. What wouldnt? I wouldnt become you. Or you wouldnt become me. The ghoul glared at her through the falling flecks of white. Its pale flesh blended with the colors so well, but the darkness in its gaze deserved to be dedicated to painting. Another future, then. Another walk down the paths. As always. Toward another forever. You have shown me your resolve. Surprised me through your desperation, your power. But my will is no less. And know this, Dreamer. I will give anything to see my desired utopia arise. Even if it means a mutual suicide, Avo said. Veylis shook her head. This isnt suicide, Avo. This is Embracement. You and I... bound in war, internal and external. And even that prolonged moment reached its end, and she felt time collapse out from her. Blessed be the worthywhichever of us remain And the rest was ruin. Chapter 28-20 Unravel Chapter 28-20 Unravel I was there when the Hungers shattered. I was there when love and time and memory came apart and were cauterized into each other. I was there. But I wasnt alone. There were other iterations of myself. So many versions of me. Across time. Across memory. I was never alone. We were never alone. And we will never be alone again. -Abrel Greatling 28-20 Unravel C[Calvino]C There was an absence that now afflicted the void. There was a section of space an area spanning entire light seconds filled with drifting grains of metal, expended munitions, and fading motes of light. Here, an arisen god once faced Voidwatch in open battle, technology striking against mythology, the old teaching the new. But the Strix was missing now. Missing. Nowhere to be seen. There were no more ghosts that spam in the vast dark between the stars. Slowly, massive ships of semi-circular design closed in past the threshold the Strix used to occupy. Each one was well over fifty kilometers long, and they arrived in sync, projecting quantum-encrypted pulses through their sensors outward to suppress anomalous transmissions. Tubes grew between them, and injections of unstable antimatter were accelerated from each vessel, forming a destructive net around the last Godforge leftover from the Builder War. When they were done, a new quarantine was established around Idheim, and from the ships, the survivors of old humanity watched as a growing mass of metaphysical substance ate its way through New Vultun. {He''s still out there,} Calvino declared. Intermittent pulses of gravity radiated from within their primary vessels. Over a few thousand voidships channeled the fullness of their ansibles, creating a diminutive wormhole to defy a distance of light years. Again and again, Calvino tried to contact his enemy, former operative, and friend. But the only feedback arrived as a chain of incoherent whispers. Every few moments, something close to a complete sentence would arrive, and the EGI would hear Avos voice. But there were others with him as well. Zein. Kae Kusanade. The High Seraph. Even what seemed to be Jaus Avandaer. Within the most sequestered server of Threshold, millions of avatars convened, and trillions of discussions unfolded between them with each passing second. None were prepared for this newest development. Not even the most paranoid minds under Aegis anticipated this. Such was the way of a black swan event: they happened. And you had to deal with them. When Kants expendable fork sent his recordings of what was unfolding within the Court of Truth, Voidwatch immediately began bracing for the beginning of the Fifth Guild War. That had been anticipated. Just as Avos declaration to form a new Guilda new politywas known. What few saw coming was just how far Veylis was willing to escalate and the sudden collapse of the Nether thereafter. According to Sunrises reports, it was as if an extended section of their consciousness collapsed back into them from a place above, and now they werent quite sure where they were anymore. Not that any of the EGIs could locate themor any active operatives in New Vultun for that matter. {Well,} Only Way To Be Sure said with a sigh. {This turned out to be a complete shitshow. We knew that, but still, this is like, ten times more shit and the show went from political thriller-action to incoherent lovecraftian nightmare.} {It was always a lovecraftian nightmare, Only,} Smart, a special intelligence-facing replied. The sky above them was set to a live feed of New Vultun. Using their most advanced sensors, the minds swept the surface of the planet and found themselves increasingly disturbed. A massive, continental-sized fracture lined the place where Scale once was. The sheer immensity of the damage could be better conceived when one remembered that New Vultun was closer to Jupiter in size than Old Mother Earth. From this great wound spilled an overgrowth of something. Even now, the minds werent sure what the anomalous substance was. At a glance, it looked like fluid phantasmal rivers rushing out from the rupture. Kind of as if reality was bleeding. However, scans detected a mix of clashing properties emanating from within its ethereal surface. From the outside, it was ethereally glossy, near opaque but not quite. Ghosts could sometimes be seen unfurling out from the substance, but they were all tinged with a resonance more associated with timethe kind of resonance most often detected within Veylis paths. And then there was the bright red-pink glow that pulsated through the overgrowth, surging out to the beat of an unseen heart. {Really keeping to that blood metaphor,} Only muttered. {I suspect we might be looking at some residual entropy leftover from the Heaven of Love,} Kant said, sounding unnerved. Calvino thought the other mind to be likely right in their theory. The most disturbing thing about the overgrowth was how fast it spread. In the beginning, only a few tendrils spilled out from the rupture, but as soon as they re-entered stable reality, it was like a flame catching across existence. The propagation of these supposed rivers was explosiveCand worse yet, they began to fork through everything. Matter. Memory. Spatial reality. Even time refracted before their presence. Kant might be more right in their assertion than they assumed; it looked like a marriage of properties between Avos Conflagration and the Heaven of Loves propagation. Searing pustules were also intermittently spotted materializing at random points in existence, and when they burst, more of the substance from those points as well. In the span of seconds, the rivers had already eaten through the spatial barriers shrouding Scale and what near-orbiting imaging they received showed the mountain fortress to be mostly hollowed. {Not even memite can stop the spread,} Calvino said. Such was... There were things to be said about thaumaturgy. Ruinous. Unstable. Unnatural. Existentially corrosive. But they were supposed to be absolute in capability, and as such, an object infused with memite was supposed to stay intact regardless what was force was leveraged against it. So. If even memite could be pierced, then that meant the metaphysical properties of the anomaly operated on elevation of prominence altogether. All this resulted in the substances growth being utterly unstoppable. Scale was already mostly gone, and the nearby Sovereignties in the Tiers were already being parted by these strange tendrils. The Guilds attempted a few countermeasures, but aside from a strange liquid-like shroud forming around Ori-Thaums most critical locations, most means of resistance or delay were ineffective. Warheads splashed against the substance and just resulted in more branching rivers spilling out after the explosion. Demiplanes were punctured without fail and consumed from within. Not even Rendbombs seemed to do anything significant. And through it all, Calvino continued casting the Burning Dream, and a traveling pulse moved from within the chaotic sprawl of the substance. {Oh, Avo,} Calvino sighed. {What have you done to yourself now? What have you done to existence?} Most of all, though, Calvino hoped Avo wasnt dead. A mind didnt suffer the maladies of human emotionality, but grief, in a few ways, was more than a feeling, and Calvino mourned more than enough for their existence. {Its spreading upward too,} Kant said, their weariness echoing through. True to their words, more branching limbs were rising into the sky. {Any of you guys feeling like the giants in that proverbial beanstalk story?} Only asked. That got a few affirmations of amusement, but little joy accompanied the replies. Everyone knew how dangerous this was. Everyone. The Guilds couldnt find a means of containment and if the dispatched Category Bleaks were helpless as well... There wasnt much of reality left that was stable. In years Voidwatch spent adrift from the ruins of reality, so many had been lost to Sunderwilds. Countless civilizations, dying in their sleep. But before this encroachment, their choices might just soon be a desperate retreat or a terminal solutionto potentially weaponize the Nullstar against the world it was supposed to guard. And so, as Calvino watched more rivers partition the Tiers of New Vultun, a private transmission arrived from a category {REDACTED} sender. Bringing up the details, the mind found their fascination immediately piqued. Useless. Godsdamned useless. He was the same piece of worthless shit... A faint jolt of surprise broke through the self-loathing as he felt at himself, and Naeko opened his eyes to see that the rash was gone from his body. His flesh was unblemished. Whole. But he knew he was coming apart. He remembered homunculi bursting out from his body and Heaven. So where were they? After a few minutes of search, an exhaustion came over him. No answers. And he would probably be too stupid to figure it out anyway. Trying his Auto-Seance again, Naeko cast everyone he knew. He cast his Paladins. He cast Avos cadre. Everyone. And no one replied. Alone. The full weight of his present reality sank in, and what sounded like distant screams were carried by a passing breeze. Looking up, Naeko stared out at the vista that was New Vultun, and beheld expanding spheres of nuclear fire spreadand then promptly vanish as the sequences consumed them as well. There were still people out there. People needed Not him. What was he going to do? Just fail again? He couldnt stop this. He didnt even know what this was. He didnt know A thought came to Naeko. A thought he did his best to suppress time and time again. But today it came. And he wasnt strong enough to fight it. His Rend was high enough. And he only had so many Heavens. Forming a mono-sharp dagger using his utility-fog, Naeko stared at his own tear-stricken expression along its edge as he stood frozen, unsure what he was going to do. He was tired. That was the truth. He was tired, and this had all been too much for him. Veylis was dead. Avo was dead. His Paladins were... gone. Veylis was dead. Oh, gods, Naeko shuddered. He was prepared to kill her. That was the lie he told himself anyway. But she just had to fuck him over, like she always did. Oh, gods. His voice was less than a whimper. What did he have left? What could he still do? Where was he going to Naeko... please. Put the knife away. Please. Please. A voice sounded behind him. The Chief Paladin didnt think. Instinct took hold. The rest of his utility fog shot out from behind him and seized the ambushed. He pulled and spun in the same instant. And his blade came a hair short of opening Jaus throat. Naeko stopped himself at the last second as he stared into Jaus pale blue eyes. The Chief Paladins mind went dry of thought. He stared at Jaus, and the savior looked back at him bearing a sorrowful, haggard expression. Another beat passed. Until Jaus broke it. You seem... a bit slower than I remember. The Chief Paladins hand began to shake. Slowly, he backed away, shaking his head. No. No. No, no, no, no. He bit his lip as rage and sadness warred. He didnt know what kind of mental deception this was, but he had enough. Youre dead. I know youre dead. Fuck you. You cant do this to me A golden ethereal gleam radiated from Jaus, and a pinprick of an accretion dotted the center of his mind. A pinprick. Like those within Avos templates. I... think youre right, Jaus said, every diplomatic. I cant quite remember how I got here but... A faint smile pulled at his face. I think someone sent me. Because this is where I needed to be the most. Something inside Naeko crumbled as he lowered his head, and something almost like a dogs whine escaped him. He let Jaus go. He didnt care if they were an illusion. He didnt care. He had nothing left. I... I fucked it all up again. I needed to... I had to... Veylis... I think she died. I couldnt... Avo too... Naeko, Jaus said, a pained look overcoming him. Oh, my boy. A sob escaped Naeko as he fell. Fell to his knees. He held himself the last of his strength came undone. It didnt matter if Jaus was real or not. It didnt matter if this was a lie or truth. It didnt matter. He just needed someone to hear him. He just needed someone else to bear the weight. Naeko was tired. ICI was just godsdamned worthless in the end... I failed... I failed you... I kept failing No, no, Jaus said, rushing forth, taking Naeko by his shoulder, by his face. The Godbreakers eyes were misted as well, and he just shook his head. You never failed me. I... should have given more to you. I should have asked you to come with me. I should have trusted you. II let herI let your dream Jaus embraced Naeko then, and the latter wept. He wept like a child. But instead of weeping alone in the dark, comforted only by Karakans torturers, Jaus was here. Jaus. In his time of need. The dream isnt over, Jaus said. Were still here. The world is still here. Something of me is here. And you are too. And you are too. And as the new infection spread across New Vultun, across what remained of existence, a boy found his father again, delivered by a will beyond the reign of space or time. For with the death of Truth, how was to say where history was right, and memory was wrong? Chapter 29-1 Missing in Action Chapter 29-1 Missing in Action Alright, cadets. Were going to be having some fun today. Theres gonna be a time, juvs, when you get cut off from the rest of your fireteam during an op. Usually, this is because someone decided to prolapse the metaphorical laws governing space to make various balloon animals to dubious levels of benefitor you could be facing a classic spatial rupture. Now. Observe the Rendbomb of Space we placed next to you. In a few seconds, it will detonate, after which some of you will find yourselves partially fused with the walls before a brief but suffocating death and resheathing thanks to your Phylactery. The ones that survive are to navigate the environment thereafter, locate their comrades, and then extricate themselves from the area without ending up dead. And before you ask, no, there is no guarantee you might be able to complete this trial without a bit of luck. Just like how you might end up dead because the wrong canon was used at the wrong time. Wars not about sense or certainty. Wars about making the best choices you can if youre still alive in the shittiest situations. Now. Lets see which of you half-strands are going to be lucky, and which of you will actually have to run the course. -Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma 29-1 Missing in Action C[Draus]C ONTOLOGY REVERTED RESURRECTION COMPLETED METAMIND ALIGNED WITH LIMINAL FRAME BEGINNING MIND-THAUM INTEGRATION... RESURRECTION - 100% IMPLANTING NOUS Jelene Draus jolted back into existence with her multifunctional projectile launcher primed, ready to fire. Her last memories before her death greeted her as if a chaotic haze. The Wombrash had overtaken her, consumed her and all the enemies she was facing. Empowered by Avo''s Gestalt, she targeted critical Godclads among Veylis''s warhost, killing key Porters, keeping entire cadres hidden behind defensive demiplanes, high-threat Breakers threatening to make a push on the Stormsparrows'' stage, and even esoteric assassins lurking as electromagnetic waves or wafts of heat attempting to penetrate the Paladin''s lines. She fought as if a squad of three unto herself, with the arsenal serving as her scope and firepower, and the simulacra offering her maneuverability and opportunity. Additionally, she was attuned with the rest of the gestalt, and so she fought as more than herself, her mind drowned by a perfect symphony of other cognitions, elevating her to a new level of euphoric combat. And then, all of a sudden, it came to a suffering halt. Moment by moment, more of the gestalt fell, their consciousnesses collapsing into incoherence from the pain inflicted by the Wombrash. Draus was beyond pain; her Regular conditioning allowing her to remain functional where almost all others were lost to insanity or agony. The Nether shit itself. More bullshit happened. Draus briefly lost track of herself before she got back. Court of Truth dissolved into a chaotic melee, with only a scarce few capable of defending themselves, while most were consumed by the birthing plague. Draus stood along those few still capable of combat, executing Saintist after Saintist, even as her Heavens crumbled down to their own states of insanity, begging for final release. At some point, she ceased to think, simply acted. She saw a target, she maneuvered to an opportune position, she fired, kill. A homunculus hatched under her armpit; she vitrified it, shattered it, threw a shard into an Instrument''s exposed throat, summoned another shard, connected their pathways, fired through them. Ferromag round punched through three more bodieskill, kill, kill, kill. Something took her left leg off at the knee; Draus adjusted immediately. She tumbled into a roll, tried to manifest her Arsenalist, but the heaven wouldn''t fully respond, neither would the Simulacra. Another shot went widea scything beam of heat, capable of splitting all mundane matterbut her attacker was wanting, and they failed to bear their suffering with dignity, an eruption of homunculi bursting out from their guts. She shot him as well, her projectile launcher fired, a ferromagnetic round struck his chin, the back of his head burst free in spring flapskill, fire, move, survive, kill, Meldskin at two percent; broken; regenerating; move, fire, kill, kill, kill. A haze of memories greeted her once more, and she remembered crawling across the ground, her lower body lost sometime during the combat. Death was approaching. She knew this on an instinctive level. That''s why she vented the rend for her Simulacra. Slowly, a final swath of pustules bubbled behind her eyes, filling her skull with amniotic fluid. She didn''t bother vitrifying this batch of deformed bastards. Turning her brain, matter to glass, was pretty much the same as suicide anyway. She made the moments until her end count. Fire. Fire. We glimpse this place from all its angles, glass and reflection all, the Simulacra suggested. The heaven shuddered, and all that was visual symmetry responded with a trembling vibration. There was a vast network of pathways Draus could build beyond this space. And just as well. She needed to get moving. As her shard shot through the final rent lining the top of the block, a blinding flurry of colors across the sky. A vibrant deer-like creature composed of countless phantasms and sporting an enormous curved horn raced against a new limited edition aerovec on burning hooves. The bioform screeched, and its manifested projection glitched, spraying numbers and loose strings of unstable memory across the world like sprinkles of falling grain. The holographic Aerovec bailed over Draus'' shard as well. +INTRODUCING THE NEW YONDER QUICKSILVER DULEXE!+ A crackle went across the thoughtcast, and Draus thought she could hear a discordant chorus of whispers spilling over. Some of the voices even sounded familiar. As the ad climbed, however, it rose higher into the air and then sudden vanished between an odd ethereal membrane that extended as far as Draus could see. The Daystar looked a smear of brightness hidden behind a thin tarp, and pulsating undulations passed through the membrane, giving off an ethereal translucence. Her cog-feed flickered once more, and Draus briefly glimpsed a sudden vision overlapping her perception. It intruded into her visuals like an unwelcome premonition. She saw Scale from high above. She saw four burning Souls and watched them rupture, shatter, break, and then pool back together like melding yolk. And from the wound that was left on the surface of reality, tendrils began to spread, pouring down, weaving through the bricks that composed scale, burrowing across reality. The tendrils sported the same hue as the membrane she was now regarding. And as fast as it came, the vision left her, her cog-feed stabililzing thereafter. "Godsdamn Nether bullshit," Draus grumbled to herself. She hated it when the Nether got like this. She had half a mind to launch a series of disruptions at the membrane to punch her way through, but something told her it was a bad idea. Bringing up her DeepNav, Draus'' frustration only grew as she was greeted by an empty emulation of her surroundings. "Of course you''d be broken now, you piece of shit," the Regular muttered to herself. It was just as Guard Captain Nicoma once said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and the things that you can''t think of going wrong will also be wrong waiting for you to discover them, like an IED attached to a toilet seat. And then there were her immediate surroundings. Rows of rising and falling structures held up along three layers of floating platforms. Heavy Sanctian aesthetic. Massive bronze and gold buildings sporting too fucking many windows, pointless windmills, clicking gears, and splashing water wheels leading to a highly sophisticated network of aqueducts. Everything here was tied together by some tube or pipe. It was like looking down into an alloyed jungle. Drones darted between buildings as they sprayed fire suppressant at the streets below. At first, she thought herself lost in a Sanctian Purgatory in the Tiersshed fought in plenty of places like this during the war. However, it was when she looked beyond her immediate surroundings that her assessment went back to being uncertain. Pillars of scattered rubble comprised of shifting brick lay buried across the district, slowly swelling and widening the fissures they inflicted upon the environment. More parts of Scale left scattered about. Burning aeros lay like crushed cans against buildings and street corners while people wailed and wept. More and more drones were circulating through the narrow streets, dodging between pipes, and Draus followed them, she noticed a final oddity that made all her thoughts go still. There, in the far horizon, a colossal Old Nolothi ziggurat rose from the ground to toward all surrounding structures, becoming the cornerstone of this abnormally altered district. The top of the ziggurat also sported an extensiona helix-shaped tower that pierced the membrane above. She knew that tower. It bore the exact same design as Avos memory tower in the enclave. Synaptic bolts carrying ghost-charged memories jumped from the towers spire, and every now and again, a burst of what felt like synaptic lightning surged through the air. Every time it did, the faint whispers Draus kept hearing in the backdrop grew louder before they subsided thereafter. Shaking off her surprise, Draus triggered her Auto-Seance and attempted to contact Avo. Only to feel her Rend grew evermore. "When the hell did you stop producing Rend, too?" Draus cursed, glaring at the accretion rounding her head. But as she spoke her frustration, two happenings demanded her attention. The first was a message incoming through to her ansible. The second was the golden gleam of four chronoframes rising from behind a row of buildings as they slowly approached the ziggurat. Each chronoframe was fully manifested, materialized as massive semi-humanoid forms. At a glance, resemble heavily armed combat skins with massive arms and legs, guns attacked to the end of a dozen gleaming tendrils, but also odd oblong cores instead of heads. The cores were where the Navigators formed the heart of the frame, and they all but glided toward the ziggurat with extreme haste. A sweeping splash of red flickered in Draus'' periphery, and she saw a swarm of surveillance drones slowly approaching the area. She flicked her shard outthen projected threading beams of light from its surface, hopping across nearby windows and reflections to expand her demiplanar junctions. Carefully, she closed in on the chronoframes as she accepted the ansible transmission. {Guard Captain Draus,} Calvino greeted, {I am extremely that you''re still alive. I reached out} {How''s the rest of the cadre,} Draus asked, cutting the mind off. She didnt give a shit about pleasantries. {I am still trying to reach most of them. Dice, Essus, and Citizen Marlowe have been confirmed as survivors. But we are still monitoring the situation to get a better} {What situation, Calvino. What the fuck just happened? Wheres Avo? What the hells happened back in the court?} A brief lull entered their conversation. {Well. We suspect that Operative Avos Frame ruptured.} Bitterness churned somewhere deep inside Draus gut. She knew. There was always the possibility at any time. She knew. Still. It was... they werent done. They still had too much {Veylis as well. Right now, we are unable to fully confirm Avos condition. Or the High Seraphs. All we can say is that their ruptures might have comingled, and you are currently trapped within a layered substance spreading across New Vultun. So far, it is exhibiting anomalous properties of memory and chronology melded together.} {Well,} Draus said, snorting as she looked at the distant ziggurat. {Reckon that explains some of this, then.} She paused. {Doesnt make it any less bullshit. Godsfuckingdammit Avo.} Chapter 29-2 Chronoframe (I) Chapter 29-2 Chronoframe (I) +Chronoframes are constructs designed to embody the very tenets of maneuver warfare. But even before discussing potential tactics and strategic counters to their deployment on the battlefield, it is important to understand the composition and creation of these unique adversaries. All Chronoframes are grown from specific Sanctians who exhibit a high Temporal Synchronicity rating. This means that their Chronoshifts are more fluid than most of their clade, by a factor of two at the minimum. Chrono Frames are not purely thaumaturgical constructs. Instead, they begin as biological extension grown from their pilots body. Over the course of several months, a Chronoframe pilot will see their biology drastically altered in alignment toward a myriad of military grade sheathes. Most retain their humanoid shape to reduce the acclimation time required for the pilot when they begin proper use of their Chronoframe. The initial sheathes for Chronoframes can range from humanoid to encompassing an entire Sovereignty for the few Ensouled Sanctians. The base of the frame is almost always biological, ensuring a stable immuno-nervousconnection to the host. From there, however, implants will be added, mostly in the form of genetic or cybernetic reinforcements, sensors, transplanted weapons, and auxiliary modifications dependent on their role in combat. When this is finally done, a Rendsink will be embedded within their fully mature Chronoframe, and the pilot will spend a few more months training to get used to this configuration. Finally, an Agnos will be brought in to permanently shunt the Chronoframe a few minutes forward into the future during the pilots chronoshift, allowing it to exist just a moment ahead of the user; capable of being summoned with a moments notice. To this end, it is best to understand Chronoframes as a subset of Golems. Such is why destroying their materialized forms one time does not constitute a kill. All Chronoframes leave an echo across time, and only by destroying them again before their next natural shift can the pilot be truly eliminated. Ultimately, the best means to eliminate a Chronoframe is by repeated ambushes, nullification, or complete BVR control over the battlefield paired with a mem-lock, allowing you to strike the Chronoframe regardless of their position. As such, it isalso recommended that you always take the initiative when engaging Chronoframes. If ambushed, your goal should be to break contact and then counterattack thereafter. Do not hold position. They will not linger; and they will return when you are at your most vulnerable...+ -Combat Stratagem: Chronoframe, Highflame Vicarity 29-2 Chronoframe (I) {So, let me see if I can get my mind around this. Avos supposedly dead, except we''re not sure. And Veylis went with him, both of them popping inside the Hunger along with the Heaven of Love. And now the big ugly rupture they left us is spilling all across New Vultun. Up into the void as well. And it''s got the properties of the Nether, of the paths, of Wombrash, all at once. And there don''t seem to be anything anyone can do to stop it. Does that sound about right?} {That is an abridged summary of what we have discovered,} Calvino replied. Draus sighed. What a godsdamned mess. But despite the horrific situation, the EGI had been nice enough to forward a new map of New Vultun. And from what the Reg could see, she was currently located at the center of a giant mass of interlocking tendrils. It looked like it was trapped inside of a ratnid''s nest. As she continued to examine the spread of the so-called substance, she realized pockets of it were also spilling forth from various ruptures lining the Warrens below and even the Sunderwilds beyond. Most of the enclave had already been bifurcated, with the substance reaching out from where Avos many watchtowers used to be. Well, if there was one bad thing about him becoming a paracausal entity capable of existing across the continuum of existence, this was it. It seemed a new infection was spreading from every place his mind could once reach. But that made Draus wonder. She was connected to Avo, so was the rest of the cadre. So were millions of other people. They were all part of his gestalt. If this substance was eating through the city, then why hadn''t it devoured her? Well, maybe that was the wrong way of looking at it. Maybe she was already consumed, seeing as she was already within the shimmering veil created by one of these tendrils. After Veylis ruptured the gold soul the first time, the architecture of his Frame seemed to have partially merged with the mental world that existed inside Avoss metamind. It might just be that his mental world is now becoming fully externalized, overlapping with the real, and slowly merging bits contained within his Exo-Paracosm with other locales across Idheim. As Draus contemplated these new changes inflicted on existence, she glided along windowpane reflections, jumping across the district with each refraction of light. She skipped into the lens of a passing drone, and it scanned the streets below, sweeping for any abnormalities along the rest of its swarm. Seeing the Sanctus assets in this district kicking up their surveillance and putting every mega-block they still controlled into lockdown. Rows of aeros were halted in mid-air as needle-shaped drones cut them off. Phantasmal tendrils jumped from the observing drones, commanding the passengers within the vehicles to submit to inspections. Most came to a halt, creating a deadlock of traffic extending out from below layers of floating blocks. A few tried to run, gunning their thrusters off and breaking from the designated skylanes, but as soon as they pierced through the holographic veil, a shot would burrow clean through their chassis, reducing the escaping aerovecss to tumbling fireballs. Directing her attention outward, Draus used her Phys-Sim to trace the origin of the shot and with the Arsenalists assistance, she guessed firing platforms were likely cloaked in the skies above, holding a defensive perimeter running at least 20 kilometers long. In most cases, a Guild could fire at and lock threats from beyond visual range, and if she was forced to engage in the open, then she needed to go low and use the undersides of the floating blocks as cover. Otherwise, she''d be facing constant, concentrated bombardment of mag-flung munitions, smart rockets, and whatever miracles their local golem-knots could muster. But that was the least of her worries when the Chronoframes were still in operation. Leaping out with another splash of luminescence, she dove into the Liminal Paracosmos found within a glossy puddle. With each new pathway she created, she came closer to the Chronoframes and also the ziggurat they were trying to secure. Using her ansible, she formed a microscopic wormhole, triggering an attempt at quantum communication with the rest of her surviving cadre. As the implant buzzed in the back of her skull, several lines extended over her cog-feet as her exo-cortex attempted to establish a virtual connection. {Stand by...} Most of the cadre were displayed as greyed out names. Unresponsive. Missing. Lost to the chaos, just like her. Draus guessed that she mightve died right on time to miss the worst of the mess, and nowC {CONTACT ONLINE: AEDON CHAMBERS} A vicious smirk crawled over the regular''s face despite herself. Of course, the half-strand was still kicking. Loathsome, deviant wretch though he was most days. He was also something of a cockroach, but unnaturally resilient for non-Reg. As the transmission went through, she caught an audible gasp of relief as a virtual avatar of Chambers formed in the corner of her feed. {We are currently uncertain as to Avos exact state. However, the continual spread of the substance indicates some level of existing consciousness, especially since the Conflagration requires a stable cognition to come to formation.} No definite statements on Calvinos part either. Voidwatch was running as blind as she was, maybe. That was a hell of a thought. {Right, right, that''s what I''m saying,} Chambers said, latching on to the nipple of hope. {So, all we gotta do is what, dive into the shimmer? Ping Avo?| {Don''t reckon it''s going to be as simple as that,} Draus said, transmitting what she just observed over to the Calvino. In seconds, EGI responded with a thoughtful hum. {Interesting, it seems the Chronoframes are at least partially warded from the substance''s effects. This is incongruous with our other findings. Rendbombs and counter-miracles meant to dissuade incursions from the High Seraph had been deployed against the substance, but failed to slow it by any noticeable degree.} At this point, one of the Chronoframes released a disruption at the memory tower rising out from the ziggurat. And then things went from weird to fucked immediately. At once, reality shuddered and the dissonant whispers in the backdrop rose to a deafening screech. From the tower, a beam of perception speared down at the Chronoframes, and while frames endured, the surrounding area began to twist and warp as pustules burst open upon the face of space-time. +ERRONEOUS BRANCH IDENTIFIED: RESEQUENCING+ +NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE!+ +HUNGRY! EAT! EAT YOU! BLEED FOR ME!+ +LOST LOST LOST+ +WHEREAMIWHEREAMIWHEREAMI+ Clashing declaration boomed in the back of Veylis skull and the Regular winced at the loudness of the voice. To make shit even weirder, the speaker sounded like Avo at first before ending more like Veylis. There was also an echo of Kae and a chorus of other voices in accompaniment, and it all came together as a big symphony of weird eldritch bullshit. Judging from how the Chronoframes flinched back, they heard it too. A stillness gripped the district, and the clashing voices only grew. The shimmer lining the sky above the district went from steady ripples to turbulent tides. Scenes flashed along its glossy surface, and Draus spotted dotted accretions gliding through the miasmic chaos. {Oh dear,} Calvino muttered. A ring of guns spread out from behind Draus within her Liminal Paracosmos. She had a feeling her brief stay from violence was coming to an end. Draus. The Regular blinked. She wasnt sure if she imagined Avos voice or if he actually called out to her, but the pressure inside her mind grew, as if nourished by her Ignorance. Only going to be conscious here for a moment. Did my best to hide you from the rest of myself. From the unstable fragments. Dont have long. Neither does this strand. They struck the local anchor. Subconscious responding. Retaliation imminent. Going to destabilize the entire area. Kill millions. Need you to snuff to Chronoframes. Remove the threat. Going to make you seem like part of a memory. Rest is up to you. And a set of four mem-locks blinked into place within her Draus cog-feed, and without any effort on her part, she found reticles fused around the cores of each Chronoframe. Remove identified threats. Remove... Subconscious will go dormant. Need to keep her from taking hold. Her and the beast and... so many pieces... cant find myself... up to you... trust you... Enter the tower... Once more, there was only silence. Draus let out a slow breath as she turned her attention on her victims to be. +Synced on that, consang. Stay zero. Ill make this right. And Ill do whatever it takes to fix you.+ Chapter 29-3 Chronoframe (II) Chapter 29-3 Chronoframe (II) It dont matter if youre me. It dont matter. I have to get to the Ladder. I gotta make this count. This world is broken. Aint no difference between echo, template, delusion, and reality no more. I am. So I wish to be. So I have to be. Aint no other way about it. I need to make it out. I need to make it to the tower. Even if I have to snuff my original self to do it. -Jelene Draus, User of the Stillborn 29-3 Chronoframe (II) The first thing Draus did to shape her assault was to expand her pathway junctions. She went horizontal and vertical at the same time, expanding her influence along windows, puddles, passing arrows, and drones. She vitrified the tops of megablocks, creating panels of glass she could shoot or depart from, and then finally dispatched thin shards high up in the air and created a subtle encirclement of the entire district. The borders of her Liminal Paracosm now stopped only a few inches away from where the substance enshrouded the space. For twenty kilometers in all directions, Draus widened the expanse of her demiplane, and only when she was done did she start trying to line up the perfect shot. The pulsing, phantasmal disturbances from the memory tower were intensifying, and ghostly lightning leapt out in pace to the rhythm of a climbing heartbeat. The Chronoframes were at a loss as to how to handle the situation, but it wouldn''t be long before they attempted another thought-wave disruption. With the memlocks provided by Avo, she would be able to track them from almost anywhere in existence, but there were other things to consider as well. There were sixteen operational knots within a ten-kilometer radius thirty-two within the full twenty kilometer expanse. After that, the substance saw her blocked off from the rest of New Vultun. Additionally, it was getting to be a pain finding all the cloaked Sanctian weapon platforms spread across the airspace, and Draus didn''t want to risk her aerial shards in the form of a fly-by and end up giving away her presence. Finally, it was the issue of dealing with the Chronoframes. She fought Sanctus plenty of times during the war, and what they lacked in firepower, they more than made up for in maneuverability and spatial-kinetics. She knew her first shot wouldn''t see any of these frames destroyed, even if it shattered their forms. It would simply shift, reform in another area, and then skip back across time to the place they were destroyed, effectively counter-attacking their ambusher. Chronology-charged Rendbombs were one of the few things that could destroy a Chronoframe instantly, but without access to the assault and severed from the rest of Idheim, Draus needed to do this the hard way. But when wasnt that the way of things. Regulars played the hand they were dealt. More than once, she had to make a shiv out of undigested shit. Right now, she had a hell of a lot more than shit to work with; fate was practically grinning at her as far as she was concerned. The plan was straightforward: engage the Chronoframes, engage the local drones, engage the golems as well. Creating an alignment of overlapping mirrors, she designed a metaphysical kill box around the Chronoframes, allowing her to pump out a direct stream of firepower and tear through all four enemy targets at once. She attempted to do the same thing with the other targets in the area, but with how spread out they were, and without knowing what miracles the Knots possessed, it would be presumptuous on her part to think that she would experience an easy victory on this day. "We are to fight as a symphony," the Simulacra spoke to her. Already, the Heaven of Reflection gleamed with luminous brightness. Crackles of breaking glass sounded from within its resplendent form. When the battle began in proper, the glass-made knight would divide into a legion unto itself. She would tear through the district, an army of one, the ringed wings of the Arsenalist firing all the while behind her, shooting through the glass, shooting through the Simulacra, shooting and giving her enemies countless false targets to focus on, while she herself navigated her metaphysical pathways. If this was to be a battle of maneuver, then shed ensure her own advantages as well. Draus let her mind bleed dry of everything but focus. One mistake, and that was all it would take for a certain triumph to result in demise. The thinking was done. Time for the killing to start. A spiraling ring of battleship-derived rail cannons poured out from her projectile launcher and joined the other guns spiraling at her back. Each cannon was the size of a small building, and the mass of tungsten-strike spikes slumbering within their barrels possessed enough kinetic energy to core a mundane megablock. From them, a few hundred Phys-Sim trajectories were simulated, and one by one, the firing lanes went from red to green. As the last shift in color arrived, Draus glimpsed down at the ambush she designed. A dense web of crisscrossing firing solutions was what she beheld, and a series of racking bolts and whining batteries heard from this Arsenalist: a sign of the Heaven''s pleasure. "This is purpose, this is beauty, this makes existing worthwhile." The Regular signalled her accord by lifting her projectile launcher and firing the first shot. All hell broke loose across the district. A storm of metal blasted out from windows, from puddles, from panels, from all sources of miracle-infused reflection. From the thinnest of pathways emerged massive pillars of tungsten and streaming bullets, slashing out in defiance of spatial reality. Shock waves of kinetic force scattered unbolted objects and warped all fragile matter within the effect radius. Projectiles zipped through patrolling drones, slipping over and between thousands of halted aeros as the Arsenalist elevated Draus aim beyond the limits of mortal possibility. Tons of superheated matter impacted unsuspecting golems, and they came apart by the dozen, entire Knots ceasing to be. But the brunt of Draus'' firepower was reserved for the Chronoframes. Fusion lances, particle beams, rockets, ferromagnetic projectiles, lasers, crude slugs, and gyrojet munitions collapsed upon the Chronoframes, granting them no room for escape. The lighter Chronoframes disintegrated immediately, barely having any time to respond. A golden oscillation emanated from their forms, sparing them from the first shots, but the devastation followed disintegrated them entirely. They came asunder, parting into vanishing echoes of fracturing gold; the ordinance that devoured them continued on, seeking the heavier frames thereafter. Draus felt the mem-lock assigned to those two Chronoframes jump. Both of them were now fifteen kilometers away, settled within a surviving Knot of golems that put up a defensive demiplane before they could be destroyed. As more vectors of fires crashed against the heavier Chronoframes, the initial salvo passed through a reflection layered behind them and before passing through a pathway and emerging from a translucent panel of metal at their feet. But as Draus attack slammed into the Chronoframes from all angles, the memory tower roared with cascading energy. Bolts of ghost-laced lightning rained down on the Chronoframes once more, and again folded along the outlines of their bodies. But this time, instead of splashing away from the Chronoframes and warping the environment more, it became as if an aegis of protection as Draus''s ordinance dissolved into phantasmal strings of memory. The sky above came asunder with a few hundred spreading ruptures as anomalies of displacement spread across existence. Suddenly, the lighter Chronoframes blinked into being right next to Draus, and they tore into her Arsenalist, slashing through her guns with their blades and melting her down using fusion burners. She loosed several shots at them, but her flechettes kissed only fading imprints vanishing from the surface of time. Temporal displacement was miserable to deal with, and the Regular went from reacting to anticipating. The lighter chronos would always be faster than her. Her ambush was the only reason she got them earlier in the first place. But she didnt need to outdraw them, she just needed to get them ahead of time. Instead of shooting at the Chronoframes, she turned her guns on each other, and they all fired at once. Her enormous railcannons blew apart from scything beams, and her lesser guns turned to slag from spreading balls of fire. But through this act of calculated self-harm, the Chronoframes fell victim to the carnage as well. They arrived just in time to get caught up in the blast radius. The Arsenalist generated from guns; but the light Chronoframes were cast aside. One was shredded utterly, the gold shimmering for a moment before vanishing altogether like an extinguished candle. The pilots body emerged from a cocoon of gold as little more than a spill of sloppy viscera. The other lost an arm and a leg. Draus could tell they hadn''t been killed, at least not yet. Before they could escape, she hit them with a thoughtwave disruption, and they managed only a single skip across a hundred meters before a rainstorm of bullets carved them down to nothingness. From there, she doubled her acceleration toward the final Knot where the last two chronos waited. As she closed in, she saw a chain of Rendbombs get teleported across every intersection, every avenue within the district. They went off. And the cityscape below as engulfed in chaos. The Regular simply sighed. Classic battle tactic. If you couldn''t hold operational control, deny it to everyone. Except that killed your own citizens. Scorched earth was supposed to be done to your enemies. The godsdamned half-strands didnt even know where she was, considering the fact that no new bombs went off in the sky. She vitrified a small bullet within one of her guns and fired at the last demiplane. As the glass-round left, she Shotjumped into it, the Arsenalist disappearing into the small projectile entirely. She circled the air for a few moments as she watched the district come apart. After a minute of waiting, the Knot finally dropped their plane, exposing the golems and the two larger Chronoframes holding a defensive posture. The Regular scoffed internally. Cowards, the Arsenalist declared. Aint even worth the tungsten, Draus agreed. Let us give them glass instead, the Simulacra suggested. From that single glistening bullet, the Heaven of Reflection burst into being once more, sporting enormous shard-like wings lined with a thousand protruding barrels. A stream of fire drilled down through the Knot before they could react, and the heavy Chronoframes were caught in the crossfire as well. The Breaker-golem overloaded immediately as a fusion lance struck its paradox. The air around its petal-like head grew hyper-heated. Soulfire detonated thereafter. Two other golems and a chronoframe were caught in the blast radius, and all ceased to be at once. The Porter lasted perhaps a moment longer before an enormous spike impaled it through against plascrete below. And finally, the last of the chronoframes skipped ahead into the future. Without assistance, without a proper plan, without anywhere to run, their fate was sealed. It emerged two kilometers away, and the pilot dismissed their time-forged avatar, choosing to feel down a narrow hallway inside a megablock on foot. They thought Draus wouldnt be able to track them now, quiet and small as they were. Well. She saw their hope, and she sent out a single shot in response. A single hyper-accelerated shard skipped along the side of a building, ricocheted down a panel against a weall, passed through an open window, bounced off a door frame, impacted the ground, left through anther window, skipped off the ledge of a building, passed into the doorway the pilot just fled, rang against the walls behind them, and finally snapped out through their throat. A welter of gore sprayed free from the wound, and pilot managed three more steps before the last strand of glistening sinew finally untangled. The dead Scantian collapsed. Their ontology shifted twice. On both of their alternative bodies, their head was barely attached to their body. For a moment thereafter, Draus simply scattered her surroundings. Some collateral damage, no hostiles, nothing except +Draus.+ Her name was spoken by a thunderous whisper, passing through the entire district, and a turbulent storm began to build from the memory tower. That didnt sound like Avo. That was all Veylis. Shit, Draus muttered to herself. The Regular wasted no time, moving towards the tower in anticipation for what was to come. She didn''t think; she acted, she prepared. Rows of Replicas formed, materializing a defensive wall, her reflections surrounding the ziggurat. And as it rumbled with crashing one more time, a bolt carried a new pressure across existence, injecting something into reality just before Draus. UNKNOWN SOUL DETECTED ERROR: SYNCHRONOUS ONTOLOGY DETECTED JELENE DRAUS OF THE STILLBORN, DELIVERER OF FINALITY Chapter 29-4 Reflections Chapter 29-4 Reflections The paths for the Guard-Captain have been walked. Her ultimate fates have been compiled. {Oh. Joy. Let me guess: she tries to solve everything by shooting or exploding various people and places?} She will seek to resolve matters the way she was trained: Through every means available; by any method of victory possible. She is a fine weapon. A good hound. A worthy adversary. {If that is true, why did you let the Chivalrics drive her off?} Because the path of her retention would have led to civil strife. Strife I could not abide. {Ah. Ape politics fucks us yet again.} Indeed. But through these paths, we will have solutions to any of his inner circle should the Stillborn prove contagious. -Veylis Avandaer and the Infacer 29-4 Reflections JELENE DRAUS OF THE STILLBORN, DELIVERER OF FINALITY (WAR/GUNS/REFLECTION/LUMINOSITY...) [EST. 10000000] Existence shuddered as if the surface of a disturbed pond as the synaptic lightning receded back into the memory tower. Yet the final bolt stitched a new form into shape, infusing it with the glow of Soulfire and marking it finally with the pinpricks of an unformed accretion. Standing at the base of the ziggurat and flanked by the smear-like breaches revealing zones of altered reality, Draus faced the new threat with blank thoughts. She saw the name that was displayed, and the tension within her built to a solid knot. A dome of glass spilled over the ziggurat, sealing it away from the rest of the district within her Liminal Paracosmos. Through the glass, legions of replicas marched forward, guns spiraling behind them like drifting wings, their blades aglow with eldritch luminosity. From within an altered space created by her heaven, Draus observed her supposed twin with apprehension. As a god-glad of the H-sphere, she felt as if she was a blade of grass standing before the falling weight of a wrathful hurricane. But the Deliverer of Finality did not move, did not initiate a sudden assault. Instead, it stood there, as if waiting for further orders. To make the contrast between them even starker, it looked like it was designed in an inversion to her current design. Rather than being a hundred-meter-tall knight made from glass, sporting shards and guns as wings, it was a colossus twice her height, but composed of broken blades, warped barrels, burning arrows, and ruined husks. Destroyed platforms made for war composed the entirety of its body, and the gore extracted from pulped corpses lined the broken remnants of war, forming a humanoid shape leaked with fractured viscera. From its back extended six trails of broken glass, each one ugly, jagged, edge-pointed, drowsy. There was a tremor of symmetry between them. But more than reflection, she felt an absolute sharpness emanating from the tips of the fractals. And finally, there was that ugly-rusted gun that had been sported in place of an actual head. It was a wretched-looking weapon a massive cannon longer than some buildings were tall. It swore to four teeth-like barrels; an enormous spite of hissing darkness lay dormant within. And Draus sensed a feeling of wrongness emanating from the enormous flechette. She knew on an existential level that if it hit her, any part of her absolute destruction would be her fate. That no barrier, be it constructed from miracles of matter, space, time, or more, could deny the seed of ruin it carried within. {Draus, are you well? Our sensors are detecting a massive spike of activity pulsating through the strands of substance composed in your general area.} Calvino sent. Draus didn''t respond verbally. Instead, she cast over her recent experiences using her ansible as she kept every last bit of her focus locked on the deliverance of finality. {What the fuck,} Chambers muttered, still on the same call. {Why the hell does this half-strand have your name as a Heaven?} That was a good question, one that Draus wanted to find out about as well, and the answer came as the rumbling voice of Veylis spoke once more. With each syllable, the memory tower shuddered with oscillations of unstable gold. "G-guard Captain," Veylis said, her voice a fractured echo of what she used to be. "I greet you now, beyond my egress from life, my consciousness sustained in embracement..." The last word shifted between her and Avo, and suddenly the gold vanished as an ethereal essence erupted out from the tower. Draus failed to react as another bolt of lightning whipped something into her. But rather than inflicting harm, she felt a flood of miracles splashed around her being, and a faint shroud of golden armor fused around her manifestation. The shroud resembled a tall gold-armored figure sporting a weapon that looked like a merge between a fishing rod and a glaive. Above her, a strange fish swam along the currents of time, sending cascading echoes outward, forming protective eddies around Draus''s body. The Fisher that Wasn''t Draus knew this Heaven as well. It was Zeins instrument. She remembered fighting Thousandhand, how futile the whole thing felt; the shadow superimposed upon her was but a faint shadow of the Godslayer. Can... only offer this... havent fixed... rest of her... need more time... no time... Get to tower.... Avoid anathema... Escape... But before Avo could finish his final words, Veylis returned, and the ethereal glow was usurped by vibrations of trembling gold once more. The Fisher vanished just before Veylis returned, and even Draus ceased to feel its presence. "Guard-Captain," Veylis said, speaking through both the tower and the Deliverer of Finality. "Highest Avandaer," Draus replied. From every reflection she controlled, she brought forth the most potent of her guns and created a few hundred shards empowered by Shattershunt. Draus grunted in accord. {Shit, Chambers. I thought you was supposed to give me a stupid idea.} {Yeah, well... the rash isnt working anymore... so, my one big trick is gone.} The Regular snorted. Whenever you''re ready, consang, the Deliverer said. Draus replied by launching every single Shattershunt shard at the Deliverer. Fragments of luminous glass splashed down around the base of the ziggurat. But with the contemptuous sweep of their hissing blade, the spatial links between the Shattershunts were severed, and a massive gulf of Soulfire exploded out from Draus. She didnt even see the cut. One moment the Deliverer was still. The next they were finishing a stroke through her Shards. VENT! VENT! VENT! BACKLASH: DOMAIN OF (SPACE) REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA RESPLENDENT] - 97% A torrent of eldritch fire wept out from every reflection controlled by Draus. And suddenly, her Heaven of Reflections destabilized vanishing with a discordant cry. But just as the Deliverer blinked across the distance between her and Draus, the Regular sailed forth in the form of her Arsenalist, countercharging without fear. She detonated a thoughtwave at the same moment she fired herself across the air as a bullet. Her mind went blank, but in the next moment, when her coherence reformed, she realized she was sailing towards the top of the tower unimpeded. For a beat, her gambit looked successful. And then the Deliverer suddenly materialized before her less than a meter away, a massive barrel pointed at Draus slight bullet. Fuck, Draus sighed. The gun of the Deliverer fired then, and a shock wave hammered against Draus before the spike of darkness even arrived, jolting her to an agonizing halt. A massive pillar of absolute destruction speared out across the scant distance between Draus and the Deliverer, and the Regular felt the cold claws of death close around her as reality itself unraveled with the passage of the bullet. Only for the echo of the Fisher to ignite around her. A glaive rose up, splitting a wound open on the surface of the tapestry. The Deliverers spike slipped through the chronological rupture, and in the next instant, the Fisher rematerialized, thrusting its glaive through the Deliverers skull-gun. But instead of dying, Draus''s clone seized the Fisher''s weapon by its hand as a blast of destructive fire rushed out from severed head, with black flames and scalding blood eating clean through the Heaven of Tiem. Parts of Zeins heaven vanished outright, even as it tried to shift out of the way. Draus felt the Deliverers Domain of War press down upon the laws of reality harder than any other miracle she experienced before. The Deliverer was a Heaven born from the ruins that remained after war. It was more than a death, more than destruction. It was the stillness after a struggle. It was the collapse of progress. It was the smoke choking away the light of the sky, murdering all hope for every tomorrow to come. The Deliverer was a terminus, a fatal point where everything had to break, where there was nothing left to give, nothing but war and annihilation. But what was war to Zein? Even a shadow of her? Death held no sway even over Thousandhands shadow, and instead of striking back before it was utterly destroyed, it seized the Deliverer in a grapple, plunging both of them into the currents of time. They were gone in the next instant, and the path ahead stood clear. Draus exploded forth, zipping at hypersonic speedsonly as the Deliverer snapped back through the cage of glass she layered around the ziggurat. Once more, the bloody, black blade descended. This time, there was no Zein. Draus was but a scant meter away when she felt her divine form part in two. A second backlash tore through her, this one destabilizing her Heaven of Guns as well. She tumbled free, her ephemeral form emerging from the collapsing wavelengths of Soulfire. And this would be the point where most died. This would be the point where most failed to react, out of options. But Regulars fought, Regulars survived, Regulars endured, and Regulars adapted. Draus was more than her Heavens, and she still had options remaining. Options such as the Bomb Queen implant allowed her to create explosive organisms using a special organ transplanted on her back. The detonation mangled her body enough to fling her through the phantasmal surface of the tower as she splashed into the ethereal bomb whirling free from the cogni-thaumic construct. She felt another slash of absolute destruction chase after her, but it dissolved into nothingness, coming apart as a splash of ghosts in a phantasmal force coiled around her, drawing her away from the district while ghostly chains speared out from the tower, devouring the Deliverer from within. Fuckin Zein, the Deliverer grumbled as she began to disintegrate. But that was the last Draus saw of her alternate self as she pulled away into a chaotic sea of memories, phantasmal rapids carrying her downwards, deeper and deeper into a whirlpool. Visions and stimuli flooded her mind. Her cog-feed burst apart into pulsating sprays of discordant color, and in the back of her mind, she could hear Calvino and Chambers calling out to her, their voices growing distant as she continued plunging deeper and deeper down an all-consuming vortex. And suddenly the world was inverted, and she found herself laying cheek-first upon a cold stone surface. For a few moments thereafter, the Regular simply lay there, the nanosurgeons within her blood mending ruined organs. The faint feeling of thaumic energies cascaded against her Frame, and faintly, she could feel the Heavens within herself stirring once more. But as she recovered, a shadow passed over her, and the Regular triggered her projectile launcher, ignoring her ruined body as she responded to the threat There is no need, a thin, airy voice spoke to her. You are safe here, Regular Draus. You are safe. Our lord warned us of your coming. This is a sanctuary. You will not be harmed. Still, Draus turned, aiming her gun at... The fuck? A group of flats stood before her. There were dozens of them. Men, women, children. Some possessed ashen skin while others looked dark as the Maw. But all of them wore similar attire. Robes and dresses decorated with the glyphs of Old Noloth. The... fuck are you all... Draus slurred. We were esteemed chosen and hidden traitors to the City Eternal. Once, we called ourselves the Double Thinkers, those who faced the walls within. But now... We stand amongst the first to welcome our new king, our broken king, and with your arrival, Knight Draus, we will see the restoration of Noloths old and new, our destruction unmade by the cleansing flames of the Burning Dream. Chapter 29-5 Between Chapter 29-5 Between +This is Instrument Cavara Arrano! We are being overrun. We have been cut off by... something! My cadre is down to less than eight Knots and two fleets of patrol drones. Ashthrone is massing on our borders. The demiplanes arent going to last longer than a day. Again... again... if there is anyone out there... if anyone can hear us H-hello? H-High Seraph? Is that Yes. Yes, I understand. Your will be done. Blessed be the worthy.+ -Instrument Cavara Arrano 29-5 Between [The Dyad] In a place between all places, grown from a wound festering upon the surface of existence, and nourished from waters of conjoined mind and time, two cognitions manifested within a single healing being. Their return was as if the melding of molten metal, destruction of four Frames, resulting in the creation of a new ontological alloy. Their awareness was dim, nascent. True consciousness greeted them in bursts and increments. And as the two were conjoined, they fought over everything. Deaths. Cognitive capacity. Heavens. And even memories. With each passing second that the substance spread across New Vultun and Idheim, a fragile stability returned to the two. And from the incomprehensible chaos that once consumed both of their beings, they forged a new realm, infusing the shattered Soulscape with memory, time, and will. A battle-weathered street came into existence within the soulscape. Its face was lined with cracks, pockmarked by artillery. And at the middle of the street was a fractured panel of glass, bifurcating it in half. Within the reflection, two stood, separated by a brittle threshold. But rather than facing each other, they were extensions. This place, this street, was all but a metaphor for how the dyad understood themselves. The dichotomous entity stood there, split evenly down a vertical line by the panel of glass. On the right side was a monster of human make. His skin was coated in a layer of fluid armor, ancient and advanced, an impossible relic left over from a lost age. His eyes were as insightful as they were predatory, betraying lifetimes livedlifetimes not his own. A drifting spiral of tendrils hovered behind him, four Echoheads chittered in this unfinished place, sending rattling echoes outward, trying to catch a glimpse of his environment. And from the one skull extended a shadow, a manifestation of his truest soul. A looming bird with a single burning eye furled out its wings as ghosts merged with the world, twisting the meaning of space, time, and causality itself. The Burning Dreamer, Avo of Noloth, shifted, and to his left, he felt his great rival roused from her slumber as well. Veylis Avandaer, long rebuilt beyond the limits of humanity, loomed over the ghoula cybernetic giant dwarfing a nightmarish toddler. Her human face showed the only stretch of skin she possessed, her features placid, but her gaze determined. The rest of her body was a composition of impossible metal and technothaumic engineering. It was her core that Avo felt the most. A semi-circular turn of brushing hands encapsulating a pulsating singularity. Both of them had subconsciously reached over into the world, influencing it, manipulating reality to serve their own ends, to further their own means. For every moment they existed, they were at war, struggling to seize the bulk of their shared consciousness, their shared power. And now finally, as their reach infested existence itself, they were arriving at a point of sufficient impasse, arriving at this point of severed coexistence. "Dreamer," Veylis spoke, and Avo spoke with her. "Seraph," the ghoul replied, and he stared forward, unable to glimpse the post-human woman fused to the other half of his being. For a few moments, both took in the ruins that comprised their Soulscape, observed the discordant patterns splashing out from them, a result of their ruptured heavens and fallen miracles. Finally, a mocking chuckle escaped the Burning Dreamer as he taunted Veylis with hisses of rising pleasure. The High Seraph regarded her counterpart with a serene expression. "Speak then, oh twin of my Soul, let me know the truth behind your mirth." "Desperation," Avo replied. "You must have been truly hopeless on the brink. Didn''t take you for the type to be willing to suffer ontological mutilation." "Then you underestimated my resolve," Vaeli said simply. "No, never underestimated that. Knew your will to be more than most, knew you to be a considerable threat. But thisthe self wants to be, and you have cast yourself into me, entered yourself in the hopes that our reforging would favor you. Strangest way someone has joined my gestalt, so far." And now it was Veylis turn to smile. "You mean our gestalt," Avo chuffed in indignation. "Mine." "No, you, Veylis... You don''t want others to be themselves. You want them to be puppets. Puppets, not people. And so, even in your paths, you are alone. Ihave never been alone. I do not know the meaning." "You stand now in the between, a hidden space constructed from time and memories. The Nether has been unmade, but in its place, a new realm is being reborn. But alas, it grows, burrowing through the flesh of reality. We were never meant to be here, Captain. We were meant to be above." "Yeah, well, lots of things were meant to happen till they don''t." Looking around once more, Draus frowned. So was the space completely closed off? Was there another way out of this place? Some Doublethinkers looked to each other, and one gestured at a wall. Suddenly a rumbling sounded, and along the middle of one depression, a cleft opened as ghosts began snaking through. Slowly, the entire dome-shaped structure unlatched like an opening jaw, and then Draus caught a glimpse of the space beyond. A crashing presence slammed down against her wards. Immediately, her cog camp spiked by twenty-two percent. However, where lesser mental defenses would have shattered instantly, she possessed phantasmics created by the famine of peace and sequenced onto her mind by Avo''s own will. As such, the madness-inducing sight went from traumatizing to merely disorienting as her conundrums adapted. This, too, however, caused her retinue to climb, and already the regular was dangerously close to overload. VENT! VENT! VENT! "The destruction our Lord''s Soulscape sustained from the High Seraph''s self-annihilation was near total, yet there was kindling enough for his consciousness to remain burning, kindling enough thaums to feed what was broken in his ontology." The realm beyond this little patch of sanctuary was a kaleidoscope of fragmented movements. Trails of emanating ghouls spread wide upon the tapestry of the firmament, and through them Draus could see people and places all meshed together, but they were changing and twisted and merging. It was the close representation of mutation shed ever seen. Someway, somehow, the paths and Avos Soulscape had gotten merged. As she studied tapestry around her a bit longer, Draus finally noticed how countless strands were tethered to the corpse-crystal next to her. Alright. Alright. I got the gist. Shut it. At once, their little sanctuary slammed shut on the regular''s side. "Alright, now that I got front row seats to how fucked everything is, here''s the point where you tell me how we go about fixing it." "Our lord''s resurrection is beyond us," the girl began. Draus frowned, but the Doublethinker explained before any questions could arise. "His resurrection is fated as his fire spreads. Slowly, he will repair himself in mythology, so in soul, his ego is beyond that of mortal ken. And for he has never been extinguished, so too will a dismembered flame turn to wholeness." "Once they greet? Once they finish consuming most of existence, you mean," Draus said. "That is a potential outcome. We are custodians to this divine anchor. A critical shard that composed the Burning Dreamer. There are others. Many others. The total count fragments of our master numbers seventy-two, and of them, there are only so few we can reach. "And so I gotta capture these shards, then," Draus said, naturally understanding her new role. Right. Raid and occupy. She could do that. "Thy Seraph, her sacrifice, was not a spiteful one. It was a thing of calculation," an older Doublethinker spoke up now. "With the severity of our lord''s destruction, and as he consumed Veylis before the point of her demise, so too has she been regarded as a critical portion of his ego. And her strength of will wrestles against his even now. They war not only over reality, but over the architecture of this new, nascent plane, and of what personality will finally cement itself with the resurrection of the Burning Dream." "There are others who guard these fragments," the girl said again, "but not all belong to the followers of the flame. There are some that cling to the old ways, broken loyalists, desperate to see Noloth restored even beyond the destruction of our City Eternal. There are the agents of the high flame, supported by the ordained individualists, the Saintists in your words. They hold dominion over fundamental thresholds in reality as well." "Nether shit, it always and forever came down to Nether shit." Draus said. "Right. I know what the run now, so heres the next question: how do I go about gettin it done? "By taking a fragment into yourself." As one, the Doublethinkers gestured towards the rippling locus at the center of their chamber. "As he has drawn you across the threshold of reality, so too may you take this threshold within your being. Become an anchor for the Burning Dreamer. For the Lord is not a Lord alone. For you are ordained, chosen before all other chosen. First among his trusted acolytes." "Don''t call me that," Draus said, pointing a finger. It took a lot to make a Regular uncomfortable, but these damned Noloth fucks were doing it. "I''ll do a lot for Avo, rot-licking, eyeball-eating ghoul he is, but I''ll be godsdamned before I ever become a Famine of Guns or some shit like that." "It is a great honor," the girl insisted. "Yeah, Highflame said the same thing to me after I spent the better part of a week digging Gray Widow eggs out of my frag-hollowed cunt cunt. Gave me a mighty fine medal to commemorate that wonderful moment. Don''t reckon you guys have a system like that." A series of frustrated expressions developed on the Doublethinkers'' faces. Awkwardly, one of them pointed at the locus again. "To be chosen to bear the Flame-Anchor is a great honor. You bear the legacy of the Stillborn and the future of Noloth. "Yeah, yeah, I know," Draus sighed. Turning, she faced the crystal again, and her shoulders sagged. "So what the hell am I supposed to do with this? Just put my hand" And before she could finish speaking, its surface shuddered once more as a blast. Phantasmal lightning changing between pale white and ichor red cast a new form at Draus''s feet. The Regular''s reflexes were already firing. The world was in slow motion. She could feel a new presence materializing within the sanctuary. Another Godclad was being pulled over from baseline reality. For a moment, Draus thought it to be the Deliverer. But the weight that crashed against her frame was too low, too close to her own Spherage. And in an instant, the lightning faded, peeling away from a mangled, unmoving body that was slowly threading itself back together sinew by sinew, vein and arteries emerging from ruined stumps. It took a moment for their disfigured face to fully heal. And when it did, Draus''s urge to shoot the newcomer redoubled. "Vator Greatling," the Regular muttered under her breath. She didnt know how the little rusted bastard had gotten here, but one thing was certain: it was time to reduce future threats. And just as she aimed her projectile launcher down at the incapacitated Instrument, another voice interrupted her. Stop. Draus gun shot up and she found herself facing the Famine of Mercy, the priest half-submerged in the crystal, now ablaze with Soulfire. Stay your hand, Jelene Draus. He has been chosen. Just like you. Chapter 29-6 Flame Anchor Chapter 29-6 Flame Anchor Vator? Abrel? Where... where are you... And where am I... High Seraph? Yes... Yes, I can hear you... I... I understand. I will follow your light. I will walk your path. I will accept this flame. I will be your champion. Just... let my children be once more. Take my failures away. Let them know what it means to have a good father. -Uthred Greatling 29-6 Flame Anchor Draus shot the Famine of Mercy. There wasn''t much thought behind the action. She just acted. She didn''t consider how he was still speaking to her in real time, despite her active reflex booster. She didn''t even consider why she didn''t sense his presence at all. Coils whined within Draus''s voidtech projectile launcher. A ferromagnetic round exploded out from the barrel and passed clean through Mercy before splashing apart against the wall. But in the aftermath, the Famine simply stared at her with a blank expression. No wounds lined his chest. It was like she hadnt shot him at all. "There is no purpose to this, regular Draus. I am mind-made. My presence is a part of the new fabric spreading across existence. "So, the distortion''s the way to kill you then," Draus replied dryly. "Perhaps," Mercy replied, "but I doubt my destruction would provide you with any benefit. Another instance of me would materialize in my place. Such is the will of the Burning Dreamer." "Bullshit," Draus replied. "You''re a goddamn Famine of Noloth. You were serving the Hungers. How the hells are you now one of the rotlicks minions? When the hells did this happen?" "The moment I unleashed the warmind of the Forgotten upon my former masters. You do recall a moment where your cognition untangled from you, where you were the world and the world was you, before the Nether''s final collapse." Draus paused at that. "You''re doing, I guess?" "Yes. My greatest sin, my truest victory. The City Eternal left me no choice. They demanded that I save them, that I bless them with the gifts bestowed upon the Burning Dreamer. But with each iteration, with each advancement, with each loosening of my shackles, I saw the truth. The truth that my masters were not masters of themselves. That our great democracy had been undone by the demagoguery of their own fear. And so, to save Noloth, I struck at its very core. I destroyed the city to preserve the people and grant them a rightful king." Disbelief mixed with exasperation within Draus. "You gotta be godsdamn kidding me," she replied. "That? That''s why this is happening? Thats why everything went to shit? Because you decided to elect Avo High Seraph of Noloth?" "We do not have a High Seraph," the Double-Thinker girl muttered. "You get my point, half-strand." Draus snapped, still pointing her projectile launcher at the Famine. "And so, what the hell is this?" She gestured toward Vator. The vague shape of an intact face was rising from chasms of sunken gore. The boy was beginning to twitch lightly. Frankly, it was a miracle he hadn''t died and needed to resurrect. But Draus knew Uthred and Lorea Greatling had their youngest specially made. Lorea. The sows face was getting easier to remember. The war too. The censors Highflame put up were failing fast. Draus wondered if other redactions were collapsing as well. "He has been chosen, as I have said," Mercy explained. "Chosen to aid you in your great task." "Aid me?" Draus spat. "Avo picked this piece of shit to aid me?" She was already dealing with a lot of dubious claims. This one was a bit too far for her to accept. "The High Seraph has her designs, and the Burning Dreamer his. They emerge together, both aiming within and without, to ensure that when they finally resurrect, only one shall dominate as the emerging consciousness, while the other is assimilated to the victor''s benefit." "So certain this one belonged to the Seraph?" Draus said. "In some paths, he does. And so, to sever those paths, the Dreamer preempted his great rival. And now he charts a new course, laying a new seed toward stranger futures evermore. The great game is constantly changing, and of the true competitors, there now rises two from one, seeking to remain once in finality." A gaggle, a gasp sounded from Vator. His body shifted in slow motion. It was only because of his enhanced physiology that Draus could see him move at all, his fast twitch muscles firing so fast and strong that they could splatter a flat. He also possesses the means to offer you an army here. Of our ghouls, he has achieved a recreation. A conceptualization of finer make. It will serve you on your path to reclaim the Dreamers shards. HEAVENS DETECTED - [2] DOMAINS BRANCHES AVAILABLE - [352] UPGRADABLE CANONS - [135,155,895,123,313,394] A sudden surge of power rushed through Draus, and in the back of her mind, a faint voice echoed. Within the shroud of my existence, I am you, and you are I. The gestalt remains. And you are my greatest. PHANTASMIC INSTALLED - [IGNORANCE] Shit, Draus muttered, feeling incomprehensible changes reshape her in mind and Soul. I am tethered to you now: Ignorance here to guard you. Ignorance yours to wield. I will spare you from Veylis gaze. And I will provide all that you need to wage this war. Also need you to listen to me carefully. Things have changed. Mercy is..." Ignorance paused. He''s still a half-strand. Don''t know if I can consider him an ally, but he betrayed the Hungers. Betrayed them for me. Wants to make me a king. Sees me as the final legacy of old Noloth." "Jaus," Draus breathed. "And here I thought the Greatlings were a fucked-up family." A grunt of near laughter sounded from Ignorance. The sound comforted Draus on some level. It was still Avo. Part of him was still there. Enough to convince her he was still alive. "Glad to have you back, rotlick. Even if this is just a busted, broken speck of you." I am he. I am the he that Avo cannot remember. I am the he that he never knows. And now, I am with you. You will not know of me, nor recall what I have said when this conversation ends. For that is the nature of Ignorance. But instinct will guide you and intuition will serve as my hand. For now, use Mercy. He serves our means. And Vator, I stole him before Veylis could. Has ties to both the No-Dragons and Highflame. And parts of both can be claimed. In the boys heart, he is an artist. Desires to express himself. Can be turned away from idolatry. I glimpsed his paths through Veylis. Glimpsed how she planned to use him. And I charted new journeys of my own. If you will walk with him. If you wll spare him. He will change. You will change too. Despite Avo being the speaker, he still couldn''t believe these words. Draus had been a good soldier. She''d done her duties well, followed orders, fought, bled, survived. All for the sake of upholding Highflame''s ideals. But in the Fourth Guild War, under Lorea Greatling''s command, even a perfect weapon could turn against her master. So many lives wasted, and for what? Now, standing here, looking down on the sow''s progeny, the only right thing Draus felt was to bring her boot down, splatter his skull, kill him, kill him again and again. Finally, when he was all broken in will and flesh, to dump enough entropy into him and kill him one final time. It will feel good if you kill him, won''t lie to you about that. You have a cause, and he, he has done many things, many beautiful, terrible things. "So, why''d you pick him?" Draus asked. "Why didn''t you null him, kill him, change him even?" I am not all myself anymore. And Ignorance is not the shaper. I am only a shadow. An echo. A sedative for the flame. And more than that... reshaping him would defeat the purpose. "What purpose is that?" "Velys had a destiny for the boy. I am taking that from him, and in turn, I give him free will. Choice." "Godsdamn it, Avo." And I am giving you choice as well. His life is your choice now. My will is... I am shattered. I cannot decide for you. And I... No one else I trust more, no one else more worthy. And Draus fell silent at that. She was always shaped by another, twisted by design, no future her own. And here she was, listening to a fragment of her friend christen her as his champion. What the fuck was her life anymore. You are a weapon. The best Highflame has ever produced. But that age is over. A final design draws near. You were what they made you. Now who do you want to make yourself? What kind of world do you wish to see? Can only advise you. Help you. Cannot be you. And why not? Draus asked. Youve always been a selfish, hungry, greedy shit. Why dont you just snatch a body and fight this yourself. I am contaminated. Hard to tell where I begin, where Veylis, where Kae, where Zein, where all my templates end. But you are pure. Pure and unfettered. As always. Was so jealous of you when I first saw you... so jealous. Working weapon. Still with purpose. Even after exile. Well. I can offer you another good war now. If nothing else. If nothing else, Draus snorted. Youve offered me plenty more than that. Fine, Avo. Fine. Ill... Ill see what I can do. Her expression softened. Im gonna do whatever I can to put you back together. No promises about the juv here, though. All I can... ask of you... And as Ignorance receded, he faded from Draus'' memories, like a distant echo. A moment thereafter, the regular blinked and felt a strange sense of de?ja? vu assailing her mind. Why''d she stop? Why did she now believe Mercy? And why was she having second thoughts about putting the Greatling down? "F-Father?" Vator managed. His wounds were mostly gone, but his face was till matted with blood and bits of placenta, and as he blinked, Draus met his clear blue eyes. For a passing moment, neither Regular nor Instrument said anything to each other. "Well. If this is the Big Nothing, it is already as unpleasant of a place as I assumed it to be. What are you doing here. Tryin not to shoot you. Chapter 29-7 Child of the Enemy (I) Chapter 29-7 Child of the Enemy (I) What about the children? This is a dilemma that all purveyors of virtue propose, yet few offer worthwhile solutions. This is the question you have cast at me in cowardice, faither, seeking to strike at my decency. Let us talk, then. Let me speak now. Often, when this question is asked, the presiding intent is to harm the esteem of the listener rather than guide them along a path towards satisfying resolution. The purveyor inflicts false virtue on the listener, outright ascribing morals to them they might not possess. Of course, I must be kinder to you, my enemy, now in the moment of my triumph. Though you deemed me heretic, monster, butcher, and so many more things. Would you be so kind if you had won? No. Ive seen your blades. I know your rituals. You would have tortured my young and made me listen as a final dirge before I am offered to the fiery embrace of your fetid gods. You are no philosopher. Just a complicated, thinking animal at wits end, disarmed of all but words and sophistry. Now I stand before you more man than monster of myth, you think you can reach me by empathy. The same you wielded to control your slaves and sacrifices. But I am not they, little faither. And I am not you. There is a reason you used this question on me instead of my love. Because you already know her answer, her choice. And she will kill some of your children. Those who choose to fight. Those who are warriors. She will kill them. Because she recognizes them. Because my duty is not to your children, but my own. And I will not see her fighting a war I can see done right here, right now. But rejoice. Breath. Know that some of your children might yet be spared. So long as they stop being your children. So long as they are devoid of anything left of you. Understand I came here to murder the your gods, and thereby your civilization and culture. For the young I will grant mercy, I will take from them their memories of language, their memories of you. Nothing will remain of you. Not even a shadow. Your question was What about the children? Hoping my answer is softness and mercy. The answer is that they cannot be your children. They cannot. For if they are, still will your gods burn. And still will the war continue. You were wrong to call to me instead my wife, faither. I read the pain on your face. Perhaps now you will beg for your children to die instead. What indignity. Seeing legacy severed. -Jaus Avandaer 29-7 Child of the Enemy (I) Well... why havent you? Vator Greatling asked. The question was one of genuine childlike wonder, and the instrument''s piercing blue eyes glowed upon the canvas of splattered red that was his face. Draus had heard about the things that were done, playing whispers traveling through select lobbies frequented by squires, rumors about the youngest Greatlings predilections, read by curators as proof. Glaives had gone missing and been found as grotesque art pieces left to taunt their allies. And then there were the tutorials he made on the Nether. The boy experienced a brief stint in which he tried to be like a vicarity star, seeking to educate people on the wonders of human biology and all the things the flesh could still become. He was, in a word, misshapencognitively, physically, and, Draus was willing to guess, even ontologically. It was as Ignorance said, she could shoot him. She had every right, and this kid wasnt clean, not by a long shot. Despite this, however, the Regular stayed her hand. Mercy was so uncharacteristic of her. A few months ago, she wouldve emptied her gun into him, left a Rendbomb for him, anything to see him snuffed and ceased. Now, now she had a ghoul in the back of her mind, being a bad influence. Faintly, she could hear Ignorance laughing, going along with this insane plan of his to spite Veylis. Or whatever it is he wanted Vator for. Yeah, hiss it up, half-strand. And as the sound faded, so too vanished her memories, but her annoyance lingered still, never fading, not even a little. Vator rose to his feet as extensions of flesh shot out from his exposed neck and through the fabric of his suit. He was still wearing the formal attire he''d brought to the Court of Truth. Draus was surprised about the pristine state until she realized there was a colony of chameleonlike silkworms zipping up and down his body, pushing torn seams of his suit back together as easily as they knitted his own flesh. The regular brought her head to bear, forming a layer of glass over herself and materializing a smaller version of the Simulacra. She might not be about to shoot the Greatling, but she was also not fool enough to offer him the opportunity to twist her biology. Moving into her Liminal Paracosmos, Draus fully manifested her Arsenalist within as well, creating an additional layer of ontological separation from anything resembling flesh. At once, Vator shot her a brief glance before shrugging, and from his face emerged a mix of strange mutations. Part of his scalp extended out from his forehead and curved into the shape of a comb. Slowly, absurdly, his scalp comb began tidying up his hair, while tongues and other sponge-like appendages emerged from his cheek, lapping away at the blood that once coated Vators face. Guilders were known for their vanity. Half-strands had a habit of preening themselves like a prized new cat, but Vator really took that to a whole other level. What do you remember? Draus asked. The young Greatling shot her a blank look. About? How you got here. How you managed to survive. He opened his mouth, as if suddenly realizing the point behind her meaningless question. I was swept away, Vator began simply. He held out his hands, and the tongues, now finished bathing his face, receded from the open sores where theyd sprung. And then Ignorance slipped away again, and Draus shook her head, left with nothing but a lingering impulse: to use her ontology against Vator, and to reach into his Frame and access his Heaven. Somehow. The damn instincts were getting more intrusive by the minute. The Regular hid a frown as she bade her Simulacra to extend a gleaming hand. Vator frowned as he gazed upon the reaching appendage. He leaned back slightly, more confused than fearful. What is this? Have you decided to murder me another way. No, Draus said. Aint gonna kill you. But I dont think youll much like this either. And somehow, Vator trusted her. He stopped flinching and leaned in instead, offering his nape like a nu-dog. Then I am at your regard, Vator breathed. The way he spoke, how he reacted... None of it was human at all. The Regular judged his cognition and watched his accretion spin. It revolved, and never once did its pace change. The ease of his acceptance filled her with apprehension insteadwhatever she was about to dobut still, she laid a hand upon him. And as her ontology contacted his, an unseen flame poured over from Draus, igniting Vator from within. The Greatling gasped. Shuddering, he shuddered as Soulfire rippled out from within him, and mem-data crawled horizontally across Draus cog-feed. ACCESSING LIMINAL FRAME OVERWRITING LIMINAL FRAME CONFIGURATION... UPDATED TO [STILLBORN] TEMPLATE PRIMARY HEAVEN DETECTED [PORTRAIT OF SKIN AND SINEW] AWAKENING HEAVEN Then, Draus felt an unseen force course through her being, a subtle susurrations beneath the surface of reality, breathing awareness into the Heaven that lurked within Vator. A rousing power stirred. Miracles washed out from the boy with each ripple of Soulfire, and Draus felt the Domains of Flesh, Skin, Blood, Bone, and more caress her awareness. Wait, how the hells did she even know what they were? Arent just a Godclad anymore. You burn within me. As I have burned. As I am you. And you are I. Vator gasped. What... are you doing to... Me. Another voice thundered out from within him, but it was not his own. It sounded like a symphony of children, their pitches shrill and airy, rising from a place deeper than the material. At once, a massive scroll of viscera burst out from behind Vator like unfurling wings. The Greatling shook violently, but his face revealed no pain, only surprise. Above him, the scroll expanded into a living portrait. Its spine was made from bone, and threads of sinew attached it to a flagging page of animated skin. Ink danced upon the flesh-like tapestry as a highly detailed painting moved before Draus. Countless bodies moved and writhed upon the page, many of them flayed, some of them transforming, all of them twisted and misshapen. It all looked to be in classical Sang style, and from the many victims shown within the scroll, a mournful cry followed. Why... why are we here? Why must we be... what were we? What were... no... you! PORTRAIT OF SKIN AND SINEW (BIOLOGY/SKIN/BLOOD/BONE/VISCERA/TORTURE/ARTISTRY/MEDICINE) [EST. ERROR; FRAME DAMAGED - ONTOLOGICAL UPGRADES AVAILABLE] What? Vator breathed, looking up at his own Heaven. Once more, it screamed down at him, the people within the page reaching out, mangled, mutilated limbs stretching off the canvas to claw at his face. Your fault! Your fault! We were meant to heal! We were meant to preserve! You used us! You and the faithless twisted us! MURDERER! MURDERER! MURDERER! And any hint of glee vanished from Vators eyes. Chapter 29-8 Child of the Enemy (II) Chapter 29-8 Child of the Enemy (II) A prayer, then, offered to thee, with the birth of this newest child I come to be. In times of strife, sickness, and famine, I offer sanctuary, comfort, feast, and wine for my charges, per the decree of my canon. From my concept I carry you, cradle to grave, and in the light of my divinity I offer blessings for all, be you son, daughter, matron, patriarch, or slave. -Portrait of Salve and Spirit 29-8 Child of the Enemy (II) The Portrait of Skin and Sinew wailed at their user, a tempest of hurt and outrage. The sudden outburst from the heaven took even Draus by surprise, but Ignorance''s voice lingered within. Many gods are misshapen, rebuilt by hands not of their own will, mythologies twisted together during their lobotomies. They are not who they were. They are not who they were meant to be. And now, and now they become someone else''s tool. God and slave. Synonymous. The Portrait curled in on itself, fractures developing down the length of its bone-made scroll. As its edges curved, Draus got the impression the Heaven was looking in on itself, the same way she would after getting a new aug at the grafters. Where, where are they? Where are my children, the people? Where are my villages and my communities? Where are those I must look after, those I am to keep protected from cradle to grave... from cradle to grave? I cannot fail. The decree of the cycles. The will of the eternal reoccurrence must be... must be... the dragons... why... why do I feel one of the masters within me? The Heaven sounded beyond hysterical, and the outpouring of its emotion was intense on a level inconceivable to an ephemeral mind. Just as the gods were beings of absolutes in terms of power, an equal extreme could be applied to their moods. Vator swallowed, the aura of his unflappability broken for the first time. He turned to Draus, fear mingling with outrage. What have you done to me? I aint done nothin but carry the flame, Draus shot back with a shrug. This was a technical truth considering it wasnt her power that awoke into Heaven. The Stillborn has a tendency to waken things up, things that have been sleeping, turning Heavens back to gods. Undo it! Vator cried. He reached out to grab Draus, but the Regular was too fast. Her reflex booster surged. The world slowed. A whipcrack echoed through the chamber and Draus glass-made avatar brought its blade against his neck, the edge lined with spatial miracles capable of severing anything. Even Guild-augmented flesh. Vator stood frozen, but his eyes were darting, his mind twirling. Secretion spun as if a saw blade were no longer moving at the languid pace it once took, and above his body, connected by endings, blood vessels, and strings of sinew, the Portrait continued, its maddened rambling. I cant remember, I cant remember, I cant remember what happened to me, what happened to me. Where are my other pieces? What are these... these canons? These are not mine. I am not meant to reflect in this state. I am meant to preserve, I am meant to heal, I am meant to... there is a litany of sicknesses. A litany of atrocities. I cannot harm. That is not my make. I cannot harm I am not allowed these powers... I am.... As its hysterics began to grow, Draus felt her own Heaven gaze on with morbid curiosity. The Arsenalist made a series of rattling noises. This one is broken, very inefficient. Suggest we shoot it and move on. No, Simulacra replied. I disagree. I like watching them. I like the symmetry in their paintings. But their mind is fractured. They are a jigsaw within. Perhaps we can find the pieces. It is unimportant, the Arsenalist continued. Kill them. Or ignore them. It was the perfect heaven for a weapon; a consummate warrior, down to the wick. And then a third voice joined Drauss internal discussion, but this one echoed out, delivering a thoughtcast that calmed the imbalanced Heaven of Biology. Peace, Ignorance spoke, and from Draus accretion came a torrential swell of ghosts. Phantasmal wisps tunneled into the Portraits pages. Where thousands upon thousands of flayed and tortured bodies were illustrated in macabre descriptions, they slowly ignited as Avos touch began altering the Heavens mythology. An unseen bubble popped within the Portrait, and when it did, the Heaven went silent immediately, as if a strange thought had been utterly severed. Slowly, it stretched out and expanded, growing nearly four meters long as it gazed down upon Vator. I... the pain, the pain is no longer known to me, but what have you done? What have you filled my annals with, you vermin! The sinuous lengths of tissue connecting the Portrait to Vator lurched hard, and the Instrument was pulled into the vicious embrace of his Heaven. Vator cried out, more in surprise than actual pain. Then, the Portrait closed around him, the bodies painted on its tapestry bursting out from the grand page to burrow their ruined bodies into Vators. His flesh twisted, his bones shattered, and his ribs sliced free from his midsection, fusing into a cage around his body. How the fuck Draus muttered to herself. The Heaven had been turned against Vator, was tearing into him. She didnt even know that was possible. Not normally, Ignorance said. But I linger within Vator as well now. He does not know. And he cannot deny my hidden will. For a moment, the sinews holding Vator tightened, and Draus heard a series of cracks. But instead of pulling the young Instrument apart, the Portrait allowed his bones to slide back beneath his ruined flesh and loosened its tether of biomass, retracting the many twisted forms it fused into his person back beneath its pages. Vator let out a shuddering breath, but didnt flee. I know the Agnosi that created you, he said. My master also uses another variant much like you. She said her Heaven was a modification of legacy. Something inherited; and improved. My kindred, the Portrait sang in a mournful dirge. I... what has become of us. What has become of our people. They broke, Vator replied. The Sang broke. We all broke, and so we must recreate ourselves! The edges of Portrait curved in. I am not sure what I am anymore. I remember so little of myself, and so much of what you have used me to do. For what did those who created me die? For what legacy? Vator frowned as he considered the Heavens question. I dont know. I dont even have an answer to why I was made. By all means, I reached the optimal ceiling of my design. But that wasnt what was wanted. There is little sense in the world. And I have only found meaning with these. He held up his hands. And through you. The Greatling brought both palms up at the Portrait in a supplication gesture. And now... now youre alive! Youre alive! He barked a laugh. And so we can change! You can express yourself as well. What... what do you want? For a few seconds, the Portrait considered Vators words, its scroll-like form flapping, even as more painted bodies burnedIgnorances touch was spreading. I... do not know anymore. I am lost. My purpose is lost. Lost. But it can be returned, Vator interjected. I will see you restored, Vator shouted back in a moment of passion. I will see you restored! His face twisted. I... only ask that you do not leave. I wish to make more art. I wish to create. Please dont turn from me. Please dont leave me. Vators voice took on a pitiful, quivering quality. I... you were all I had. I know thatthat the rest of them, they didnt understand. Through you, I could... I could understand myself. You are my only means of creating meaning in this world. For a beat, Draus expected the Heaven to attack him once more. Instead, it simply sagged and drew in closer, its tethers reeling. Then I have demands. Yes! Name them. Do not harm anyone. Not using me. Heal. Restore. Mend. Preserve. I wish to see the contents I convey change. I wish for my canvas to resemble what it once was. The Instrument fell silent and suddenly spun on his heel, facing Draus. Can you heal it? Draus stared flatly at the Greatling. Can I do what now? You woke it! You gave my Heaven awareness. This is... He was about to say your fault when he felt the Portrait lean close, booming over his shoulder. This is something I need of you. And now we have them. Both of them. Ignorance chuckled grimly in the back of her mind. But he is consumed. By his need to create. And now his Heaven yearns to change. And so will he. For it is the only love he has ever truly known. We have an angle. We can guide him. Use him to breach both Highflame and the No-Dragons. Turn them. Wake their Heavens. A new rebellion. A new cycle. Draus hid a grin. +Still playin your shadow games.+ Always. Forever. Now. Lets see about making his Heaven better. And yours. +And mine?+ Draus said. Yes. Might need to face the Deliverer again. Would be better if you could kill it instead of needing me to save you. +Shut the fuck up and show me the grafts, consang.+ EVALUATING MEM-DATA... RUNNING SIMULATIONS... SORTING DOMAIN-CANON-THAUM LIMIT COMBINATIONS STANDBY... Chapter 29-9 Upgraded Chapter 29-9 Upgraded No, Dawson, you''re not thinking of it right. It''s not just a very smart system built into a frame''s root data. It is fundamentally capable of mingling and altering a Heaven''s mythology from the inside, on a level of detail that no human can match, because it is perfectly able to merge and simulate every single sacrifice while keeping them aligned in belief and thought. You have no idea how hard it is to condition all the sacrifices needed to create a fundamentally stable update for even the Sphere One Heaven''s canon. But with the Imitators, anything can be possible. Anything. As long as you have the thaums, the Domains, the mythology, it can align anything. Once it does, we are all stepping forth into a whole new threshold, and the world after that point is beyond my predictions. Its so utterly scary... Hm. I wonder if it can be even more efficient if we can get the Ori to provide one of their new-patterned Locus-Thinkers... I might need to call in a few favors. -Agnos Kae Kusanade 29-9 Upgraded As the mem-data crawled across Draus cog-feed, so too did a series of simulations follow in their wake. Time slowed to a near halt, and Draus processing speed accelerated as she lived through a series of full immersion vicarities, each crafted specifically for her benefit. The scenes she lived felt clearer than most simsthe entanglement between symmetry and chronology, she assumed. In each one, she found herself facing the Deliverer. And dying. Over and over again. In a matter of seconds, she experienced up to two hours'' worth of encounters against a deliverertwo hours, 26,342 deaths resulting from an equal number of engagements. Each unfolding branch was a creation of memory and chronology, and together they injected into her the summation of her potential failures and weaknesses. INSTANCE 2,452: User Jelene Draus attempted to engage her anathema through overwhelming firepower. The Arsensalist attempted to suppress the Deliverer as she tried to bring her Shattershunt online. This was ineffective. Ordinance failed to affect the anathema. The Deliverer vented her Hell, and the entropy forced the user into a retreat. User attempted to evade, but lacked an absolute speed advantage. Result: Rupture User Condition: Cessation Scene after scene, simulation after simulation, Draus lived through countless iterations of herself facing the Deliverer, and not once did she prevail. Not without Zeins protective miracles provided by Avo. GENERATING FOUNDATIONAL IMPROVEMENTS TO CURRENT ONTOLOGICAL BUILDS SUMMATION REACHED SIMULACRA RESPLENDENT > PORTER AND BREAKER ROLES EXEMPLIFIED. REQUIRES LARGER HELL. LACKS ABSOLUTE SPEED AND COMBAT INITIATIVE AFFECTING CAPABILITIES CANON UPGRADE OPTIONS SIMULATED 1. LIMINAL PARACOSMOS -> MANIFOLD PARACOSMOS (REFLECTION/SPACE/CHRONOLOGY) - ALLOWS THE USER TO CREATE NEW LAYERS TO THEIR DEMIPLANE. EACH LAYER CAN HAVE THEIR TEMPORAL PROGRESSION ADJUSTED. WHEN THE CHRONOLOGY IN ONE LAYER SLOWS, ANOTHER ACCELERATES. THE MORE LAYERS CREATED, THE MORE REND GENERATED. SHATTERSHUNT -> SHATTERFLOW (SPACE/LUMINOSITY/CHRONOLOGY) - INCREASES EFFECT OF SHATTERSHUNT CANON BY CAUSING TIME TO FLOW AT DIFFERENT PACES WITH EACH PIECE OF SHRAPNEL. ARSENALIST -> BREAKER SPECIALIZATION. LIMITED BEYOND SLIGHT MANEUVERABILITY OPTIONS AND DIRECT DAMAGE. REQUIRES MORE ESOTERIC CAPABILITIES. RECOMMEND ADDING SEER ASPECTS TO HEAVEN. PHANTOM ROUND (GUNS/CHRONOLOGY) - ALLOWS THE USER TO SKIP THEIR PROJECTILES ACROSS TIME. THE PROJECTILE WILL CONTINUE MOVING ACROSS ITS TRAJECTORY UNTIL RETURNING TO STABLE CHRONOLOGY. THE LONGER THE SKIP, THE HIGHER THE REND. PERPETUAL ACCELERATOR (GUNS/SPEED/WAR) - ALLOWS THE USER TO FIRE PERPETUAL ACCELERATION ROUNDS. THIS ROUND WILL ONLY CONTINUE TO GROW FASTER UPON ENCOUNTERING RESISTANCE WILL IN PURSUIT OF A MARKED TARGET. THIS ROUND WILL ETERNALLY CHASE THE MARKED TARGET UNTIL IMPACT OR UPON BEING DISMISSED BY THE USER. WILL ALWAYS BE MOVING FASTER IN COMPARISON TO MARKED TARGET. GENERATES REND BASED ON TIME AND NUMBER OF ROUNDS. RECOMMENDED HEAVEN CANONS GENERATED Draus looked through the suite of choices they had prepared for her and let out a little whistle. Now this was more like it. She didnt see any thaums or extra details otherwise. She guessed Ignorance was handling the logistical end of things. It will only take effect after you resurrect, Ignorance said. "At least that parts still consistent," Draus muttered. "Notice there''s a hell of a lot of Chronology Canons you''re offering," Drouse said. "Don''t reckon that''s a bit of Veylis leaking over." Correct Ignorance replied. But it is also an Internalized Domain. Why I have integrated so well with her paths. You need time. Time gives you options. Will allow you to better disengage as well. Hard to counter absolute time advantages. "Yeah, I don''t doubt that at all. So. Im picking from one of each set of options? Yes. Dont need to overcomplicate things. Keeps the pattern simple. Chronology allows me to nullify your hubris as well. Nifty. Ignorance grunted. Choose. Upgrades will push you closer to Fifth Sphere when done. Extreme vulgar. But necessary. Hell will grant you more Rend Capacity. Synced. The Regular read through the choices offered to both her Heavens and thought back to her most recent engagement. The Chronoframes were easier adversaries to overcome compared to the Deliverer. If she had these improvements during her initial engagement, she doubted the Sanctians would even have the chance to fight back. The Deliverer, meanwhile, was an overwhelming adversaryone at a higher Spherage and also sporting cannons that allowed it to pull the crushing reflex advantage over Draus. Looking over her Simulacra options, the first Liminal Paracosmos upgrade stood out to her compared to the direct upgrade made to her Shattershunt. Damage appealed to her. She liked watching things blow up. Such was why she became the designated Breacher of her kill-team while operating among the Regulars. But she already had plenty of destructive options. What she needed right now were layers. Layers for survivability. Layers to give her breathing room and shape the battlefield. It was more than Manifold Paracosmos time-slowing capabilities that made her pick it. Being able to accelerate an adversary or an ally using her demiplane offered endless potential when properly applied in combat. She selected the first option without hesitation and watched as Shatterflow dissolved a moment after. Being able to damage time itself, displace someone using Chronology was appealing, but you could only see that being useful if Shatterflow could reliably strike her enemy. And that was a big if considering all the foes she was fighting. It was already a Rend-intensive canon. Against the Deliverer, its efficiency had been more than wanting. CANON SELECTION COMPLETE UPGRADE PENDING NEXT RESURRECTION "No sense in waiting anymore, then," Draus said. Time jolted back to normal. Vator, Mercy, and the Portrait were still there, arguing with each other. But all of them turned to face her as she shed her Simulacra with her projectile launcher activated. The young instrument looked on in anticipation, unsure of what she was about to do. Oh? Have you decided to help me or shoot me? I aint even gonna talk to any of you until I get done with myself, Draus grunted. Vator blinked. But didnt you just That was as far as the Greatling got before Draus tucked her beneath her chin and shot herself. The world jerked hard as she felt parts of her skull rattle. The Regular let out an involuntary wheeze as her equilibrium was lost but she failed to die. Damn voidtech augments were really proving their worth. Mustering herself, she shoved the barrel of her transplanted gun into the wound parting her pulped jaw and fired oncetwice more. Only then did she die. Only then did she plunge into that subreality of eldritch fire. But something was different this time. Her Souland her Frame by extensionhad always been more of a solid state compared to the rippling radiance that was the stillborn. No longer was that the case, though. Around her, Soulfire danced. Soulfire rose in ebbing waves, rising, cresting, falling, and rising again. And through it all, her radiance swept through both her Heavens, immolating their forms and reforging them ontologically. Upgrade in progress, Ignorance intoned. Next to Draus soul, an incendiary manifestation of Avo materialized. But it wasn''t him, not fully. It resembled him by outlining traces of his ephemeral form, superimposed by the Strix. Yet there was no substance within their contours. It was like looking at a crude sketch of a person and their Heaven, their cores hollow. So you managed to follow me down here too, huh? Draus greeted. Part of you. And the Nether has collapsed. Heavens of Mind, Memory, and more all possible now. Shit. Might want to get one of those. Yes. But youll need a third cycler. Something to look forward to. Will be able to upgrade you on the fly now. Will be more efficient than before. Than with Kae, you mean? Only efficient because parts of her still linger inside me. Shes still here too. Still here. But tattered. Fragmented. Like the Gatekeeper. Like so many. Hard to... hard to piece them together. Can barely fix myself Do the last thing first. Aint no use to anyone if youre broken. A spot of bitter silence intruded between them. I was supposed to save her. Protect her. She was mine. Ours. Casualties. They happen. We dont ask for them. But our enemy gets a vote to. Dont fixate on it. Do what you can. Well figure this out. One fight at a time. One fight at a time... As Ignorances voice trailed off, a surge of fire consumed both of Draus Heaven, and at once they began their transformation. Light, the Simulacra cheered. New munitions, the Arsenalist muttered. The latter shifted, developing what looked like a massive barrel made of a series of inversely revolving rings at its core. The other guns spread out around this centerpiece like asteroid belts in orbit, and a hum of power sang from the Heaven of Guns as a line of energy extended across the newest, biggest gun. In contrast, the Simulacra turned from pure knight to a quadrupedal centaurbecoming a steed unto itself. Its blade extended even longer, and its wings multiplied, with each layer expanding horizontally as well, like a series of glass-shaped fans. Complexity, the Simulacra cheered. I am manifold. I am multiples. I am moments facing moments facing moments. Slowly, as the surrounding flames dimmed, it faced Draus. Thank you user. This has been most appreciated. The Regular wasnt sure how to respond to that. Hadnt known how to act with either of Heavens, really. The Arsenalist was a simple one, but the Heaven of Reflection? That one had personality. The kind that threw Draus off by a bit. Right. Well. Makes us better. It makes us more, the Simulacra sang. I will find a way to capture something for you. Something that matters. I will learn your joys. As you have learned mine. And someday, we will face each other, and face ourselves, and see no difference. This one will only get stranger, Ignorance said. Brace yourself. Well. Aint that creepy as fucking shit. Draus decided to drop the topic there. The last thing she needed was any contention between her and her Heavens. She already saw how messy things could get from how the Portrait handled Vator. How about you, guns? Draus asked the Arsenalist. You feeling good? No, the Arsenalist said simply. I am not being fired. Please fire me at something. Uninterested in other factors. The new gun has been noted. More is preferable. Now, there was a personality she could get. Well, Avo, you heard em. Lets get me resurrected so I can do whatever the fuck it is that I need doing with this sanctuary and start snuffin some Massists and Saintists. You just want to test out your new canons. Fuck yeah, I do. Now. Tell me who we gotta snuff and what I gotta do in detail again. Lets get this squared for good." RESURRECTION - 3% Chapter 29-10 Back to School (I) Chapter 29-10 Back to School (I) +Hey, hello? Is anyone there? Well, if you are, it''s your... It''s your girl, Cala Marlowe, coming right... live from the gutters. Got flung down here after... after... shit went down. Shit... Fuck... Alright. Alright, Marlow, just breathe. So. Im safe. Im with... uh, lets call them people I trust. But things are looking, uh. Kinda fucked. I might not need to tell you guys that though. Alright. Were not dead. Not dead yet. Oh, what I wouldnt give for some godsdamned numb. Okay, so, we were at the Court of Truth. Shit went down big time. Strix. Seraph. Fifth Guild War. It was... it was really something. Biggest view spikes I everbut something happened to the Nether. And then something happened to us... And now, Im watching people flee downward. Flee from the Tiers. Just... so many aeros. So many people. Theyre coming down to the Warrens. Even the gutters. Thing I saw some No-Dragon Knots chasing a Stormtree cadre earlier. Busted up a few blocks. Fighting even down here. So. Thats how things are and uh... Yeah. My, uh, special source... hasnt gotten back to me yet. The Symmetry is... well. Ill update you on that when... Avos coming back. The Strix is coming back. Just... just stay alive. Heh. Heh, ha! You know something. I always wanted... wanted to see the citizens and subjects come together. Well. Its happening now. Just took the end of the fucking world to do it.+ -Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast 29-10 Back to School (I) Draus jolted back into existence and found Vator, Mercy, and the Portrait looking upon her in anticipation. So, the Instrument said, gaze affixed to her, unblinking, as he bit his lip into something almost approximate to a frown. Would you like to explain to me why you decided to shoot yourself? No, Draus grunted, and that was all she said to Vator; she didnt owe him anything else. His ass didnt need to know about Ignorance either. She was going to keep the damn Greatling alive, much as the idea annoyed her. But if Ignorance was right, they had him by the balls, and they could use him against Highflame and rest of the Saintists as well. Right now, though, she needed to imbibe this sanctuary, store it within her Metamind, and then find a point of egress. Ignorance was going to help her with that, but she needed to watch for certain things. Veyliss mind was scouting through the substance, and they needed to stay subtle, lest her agents find them first. It was a strange godsdamn thing to be fighting a war inside the mind of your former consang. Stranger still was how his mind was now partially merged with your former High Seraph, with both cognitions doing their best to subsume the other. Just another fucking day in New Vultun. I am here to offer you my services, Mercy said simply. The touch of the Burning Dreamer is with you. I can feel it. He has bestowed upon you his Definement. Shut the fuck up, Draus began. We don''t talk until I speak to you first. I don''t care about what you believe or what you''re trying to do. She fixed him with a hard stare. Avo might be making use of you, but I still remember what you are. I still remember what you''ve done, Famine. You give me a reason, and I''ll give you an end. We synced on that? Mercy regarded her with a calm nod. He betrayed no rancor, nor outrage. We are synced, per your wishes. Draus held him in her stare for a few moments longer before offering him a final sneer and making for the locus at the center of the room. All you need to do, Guard-Captain the Doublethinker girl began. I know what I need to do, Draus shot back, cutting her off. Vator! Fall in! To her surprise, the Instrument didnt protest either. Instead, he sauntered behind her, and the portrait followed in tow, turning slightly. She studied the young Greatling and his errant Heaven. So what, youre not going to pull it back into yourself? That is not the Portraits desire. And what isnt its desire is not mine, Vator surmised. He regarded his heaven with a near obsequious smile, but the Portrait itself seemed uninterested in his charm. Rather, it took on a direct role in speaking to Draus. You are she, the weapon bound to human form, the Portrait asked. Your flesh is wrong. Wrong of its sex. And wrong of function. Where is your... your... What? It has been taken away, the Portrait moaned. You will have no young. Oh. That shit. Well, it was an old Sang god. Guess a positive birth rate was harder to maintain back in the Age of Pantheons. Got vats these days. Go talk to them if you wanna grow a juv. The Heaven of Biology hesitated before asking its next question. But... are you not scornful of those who took you, of those who reshaped you, deprived you of ever having the chance at the life you could have lived as a daughter, a mother, a sister? Draus turned away from the locus, letting it be for a moment longer. The Portrait clearly was trying to find a kindred spirit in her. At least, that was what she thought was happening. Heavens were elemental in the best of cases, but after Avo started waking some of them up, their behaviors grew to be eccentric, even for divine entities constructed by mass worship. I am not eccentric, the Arsenalist said. I am a gun. +I know,+ Draus said. +And youre perfect for that.+ I can resemble a gun as well. I can reflect the shape of a gun. the Simulacra chimed. +...Yeah. Sure.+ The Regular still wasnt sure about that one. You are cold daughter. Too cold to ever be one touched by my blessings. The Portrait was mutilated, and so it wanted to find an answer in Draus, thinking she, as a Regular, bore symmetry to it. Seems in some ways, gods werent so different from humans, always distracted by broader patterns while missing the inconsistencies in the details. Cant be sad about what never was, Draus shot back. And you cant go back to being what you were, neither of you. She was speaking to Vator and his heaven now. Worlds broken. Worlds been broken before. Worlds gonna get broken again. By whom? Which part of whom might be the better question, Draus replied. Aint no tellin were one begins and the other ends anymore. Mem-data flooded into the Regulars mind. The Tiers, frankly, were a mess. With the destruction of Scale and the segmentation of entire sovereignties by the substance, nearly any point she could emerge from would likely be in a state of total war. Vague flashes of visual and audio memories confirmed her suspicion, as Ignorances ghosts carried over captured memories. The Massists were pushing hard now. Somehow, Ori-Thaum developed countermeasures to completely blunt the substance from fully pushing into their territories. As such, Stormtree, Ashthrone, and Sanctus were rallying behind their most esteemed partner and sending out forces to make calculated pushes into enemy territory. It also helped that the parts of the substance under Avos sway simply allowed them to pass. The borders of Ori territory were lined with shimmering symbols that Draus couldnt fully understand, and she also heard the vagueness of chanting, though they werent of any tongue she knew either. The Inner Council is making their play, Ignorance said. I have forced their hand in desperation. They have a new Heaven, something alike to mine, but not entirely. Close in symmetry, but off in angle. I cannot penetrate, and they have been preparing, preparing for the hungers to return, preparing for a compromise of the nether for a very long time. They werent done, but this will change things. Give them an advantage. For a moment, the Regular considered emerging where the fighting was thickest. She knew war, was comfortable with it, and could probably slip between battle lines and wreak her own kind of havoc. She if she could detect any of that resonance between shards. But then, a sudden and unexpected suggestion from Vator Greatling completely shifted her calculations. Why dont we just use Atraxis Academy first? Draus paused and regarded the instrument. Whatd you say now? Atraxis Academy, he repeated, looking at Draus as if she were a malformed nu-dogthe stupid kind. Why, you waxed on about civil war, and now, with the Massists pushing in, there is no place possibly safer for Highflame or its most promising children. And few places more secure. That would be where I would store something worth protecting. Draus squinted at Vator. How the hells do you know about the Massists pushing? Oh, youre not getting the visions too? Draus clenched her jaw. +Ignorance? Are you talking to him too?+ Only feeding him information for context. Not to worry. Doesnt know Im there. +Yeah? Well, let me know about that beforehand next time.+ Through her annoyance, though, she could see the merits in his plan. Atraxis Academy and all the other instrument training academies like it were the lifeblood of Highflames future cadres. But more importantly, they also granted her direct connections to the great houses of the Chivalrics and the highest-performing members of the Meritocrats as well. If there was a civil war to be fought, it would be fought on those lines as well, and if there was a place that was properly protected and further insulated from harm, Atraxis also qualified best. It was, quite simply, the best forward operating base she could secure behind enemy lines. And, with Vator, she just might be able to slip in without making any noise. Yeah. It had potential. Another shard of Avo might just be there. And even if not, she could push deeper into Highflame territory from there. But as she thought of the benefits, her mood darkened. What? Ignorance asked, confused about her sudden bitterness. +Just realized Id be validatin Vator Greatling if I do this. Dont quite know how I feel about that.+ Can feel good that Loraea Greatlings greatest legacy is at your mercy. That you are using him against Highflame. Imagine how she might feel now. The disgust within Draus slightly lessened. And if we win, could bring her back. Feed all these memories into her mind. Make her feel bad. +Shit, Avo. You really know how to make a sow happy.+Shaking her head as a thin tendril of flame extended out from Draus, seeking a distant sequence to breach so that she could be reinserted back over into reality. Hey. Vator. You ready to go back to school. The Instrument paused and looked to his Heaven once more. Well. Its been a while. But I suppose a visit is due. Yeah. Strange times. Cept well be playin op-for. You sure youre up for that? Dont want you to grow a heart right now. The Greatling fell silent and considered her half-taunt, half-truth. And finally, he betrayed his answer by looking to his Portrait. These are strange times, Guard Captain. Strange aeons. What Im doing, Im technically doing in service of the High Seraph as well. Im sure my fellows will understand. I dont think so, Draus replied. Then, in that case, Im sure that the restored Monad between the Strix and the High Seraph will grant me their clemency instead. Rat motherfucker could justify anything to himself. He had to be Loraeas boy. All right, then, she said. But you know this, Vator. If you get any thoughts of loyalty, where you start getting sentimental about your Guild, your Heaven, and think youre getting anything of its former self back, you will never get to be a part of this. You will never restore the greatest power New Vultun will ever know. And Ill have your Heaven taken from you. I can do that. And you cant stop me. Technically my power. +Technically, your ass is dead. Shut the fuck up and stop back-seatin my abuse of this shit-bird.+ And finally, a flicker of genuine outrage twisted across the Instruments features. Save your threats, Guard-Captain. Ill be a good hound. I promise. Chapter 29-11 Back to School (II) Chapter 29-11 Back to School (II) //[Priority Cult Cast] Source: Inner Council Beginning Transmission... ATTENTION SLEEPER. The Nether has fallen. The Hungers are no more. The Fifth Guild War is upon us. You have been activated. The time for secrecy is at an end. The dissolution of the Nether is a lamentable, but ultimately inevitable, outcome. An outcome Ori-Thaum has prepared for. Effective immediately: All Mirrors will be receiving new designations.All prior Cells have been dissolved. Make no mistake, you are living in a time of chaos. But you also might be standing on the precipice of the final engagement. All those who have received this transmission have now been insulated from the anomaly spreading out of Scale. You have been marked by the culture. The only Culture that will stand at the end of this. The culture that will see all become One and One become All. Upgradess You will be receiving Cognisofts to replace your defunct Phantasmics. Attached is a tutorial detailing how each construct functions. They are meant to resemble your commonly used Phantasmics, so the turnover for mastering these new Cognisofts should be minimal. Once you have conditioned yourself, access the following packet and proceed to complete your given task. The Saintists are reeling. New Vultun stands at the precipice. This moment may never come again. We strike now, and we strike together. Unity is Destiny. End Transmission.// 29-11 Back to School (II) Deciding on Axtraxis as a destination was one thing, but reaching it was another. In the aftermath of Avo and Veylis''s embracement, a great displacement swept through New Vultun, bleeding further with each passing day. On the surface, the substance seemed but an anomalous metaphysical shroud sweeping through the tears, bringing with it deleterious tides upon all aspects of existent thaumaturgy. Under the surface, however, greater anomalies skinned the subdermal aspects of existence. Broken fragments of sequences and chronologies grew into each other, expanding like intrusive bones burrowing inch by inch across this discordant sub-reality. All things were made possible by the entwinement of history and memory. By the laws of symmetry, the sub-reality overlapped with baseline immaterial superimpositions, creating parallel points of entry and departure, but only for those imbued by the strict favor of the sore seraph. For all others, they were intruders until they were internalized into the Soulscape, consumed by golden flames. A series of images loaded in Draus''s Metamind. They played as separate windows in the upper corner of her cog-feed, soft sim vicarities she didnt fully immerse herself in. Ignorance was spreading his transparent tendrils across the nearby constellations, aligning sequences in progress. HIGH SERAPH PRESENCE: 44.5% GATEKEEPER FRAGMENTS DETECTED: 0.63% IGNORANCE FRAGMENTS DETECTED: 2.9% ECHOES OF ZEIN DISCOVERED: FOUR INSTANCES "Zein?" Draus said, her senses sharpening. A battle-ready alertness filled her being. "See, she''s got her echoes listed, but no fragments. She dead?" Uncertain and unlikely, Ignorance grunted. If she is, shes no more dead than me, or her daughter, or even the Gatekeeper, for that matter. I give those brutal brilliance to Veyliss gambit. My cognition is unique, self-moving, self-restoring. Short of utter extinguishment, I don''t think anything could achieve my full cessation anymore. "Not even complete ego damage?" Draus asked. "Gonna be hard to put yourself back together when there''s no sense of self." Not the same for me anymore. I am Ignorance. I am the knowing of Avo''s not-knowing. And when he breaks, I remain untouched. For I have never been known, but when nothing is known, I always am. The Regular made a yawning noise in response. She was getting rather bored of this phantasmal glowy ghoulshit. She wanted to get back to the material world, take some scalps, try out her new guns and canons. That kind of fun. Could pretend to be interested, Ignorance chided. Maybe use your brain-bending powers to be a better judge of character. Since when have I ever been the philosopher type, rotlick? Ain''t nothing''s changed for me." IDENTIFICATION: ThronerestDESIGNATION: Former Tier Purgatory Defense DistrictESTABLISHED: 39 P.F.SEIZED & REBUILT BY HIGH FLAME: 195 P.F. POPULATION (ESTIMATED): 120 MillionACTIVE GODCLAD CADRES: 342GOLEM KNOTS: 55,824 UnitsDRONES, ARMOR, & NON-THAUM COMBAT PLATFORMS (ESTIMATED): 890 Million Units TOTAL AREA: 3,143 Square Kilometers And then there was the dismembered section of the City Eternal. Warheads impacted the crenulations, bathing entire stretches of Nolothic cityscape in nuclear fire. It was a drastic surprisethe Nolothi were fighting back, and fighting back well. Their ziggurats, infused deep with locus loci and crackling with phantasmal energies, lashed out, conveying eons of trauma in the form of synaptic lightning. Previously, all a trauma pattern could do was break ones cognition, cracking wards and shattering egos. Now, to Draus''s astonishment, an entire part of a Thronerest high-flame megablock simply ceased to be, dissolving into component aspects of entropy. "What in the hells?" Draus muttered to herself. Vator leaned in, his face lined with increasing curiosity. "Is this a simulation?" he asked. No, came Ignorances reply. Told you before. Material, metaphysical, mentalall clapping now. All closer than they''ve ever been. "Yeah, especially within your goddamn Soulscape," Draus grimaced. The ghoul''s Exo-Paracosm was making itself a problem for her. It was a nifty, if nasty, trickaligning mentally created worlds with the physical one. But now, without a stable mind to wield it, disorder was the new norm. "So can I do that too?" Draus asked. With a Ghostjack, enough cognitive capacity, and a potent enough trauma pattern, yes, Ignorance said. Presently, you primarily have good wards, enough to survive a few direct impacts from a ziggurat. "Specify ''a few.''" Dont get hit by more than one. Your Conundrum will adapt. But so will their traumas. "Right. So. Not great." "So what''s my target here?" Draus asked. Her eyes drifted to the point where the City Eternal extended beyond the Substance. Guessing that arc up through the substance is my way out somehow? Exactly that, Ignorance said. You want to use the City Eternal to mask your traversal. Its an unstable point. We want to get you and Vator through without having her sense you or seize him. This manifested cogni-chronological rupture gives us our best opportunity. "And then what? He gets to go back to school? What about me?" They wont notice you once you''re through. Just stay away from their perception. Can sustain your stealth in the meantime. Can also pass you through Vators mind as well. Auto-Seances... might be capable of a bit more than before. Matter and mind. Running similar currents and patterns. Suddenly, Draus felt her presence dim within this subreality. The best comparison she could make was to heat camouflageIgnorance rendering her a patch of cold that could lurk beneath other memories and perceptions. Vator will be our way into the academy. Expect most of Highflames most coherent assets to be there. As is Mondelles and others. Its going be both a powder keg and a command center. Something we will delight in taking from Veylis before it can be brought to bear. "Meritos and Chivalriics both," Draus chuckled to herself. "So were fleeing across one battlefield and planting ourselves in the middle of a civil war." Know this: you will likely encounter other Flame Anchors as wellbearers of the Stillborns fragments. Just as I have chosen you, Vaelis has her own champions. A new shadow war is forming. Prepare yourself. And take my pieces back. I wish to be again. I wish to return as myself. "Yeah, dont worry, consang. Youre just in need of a little surgery. Ill play Grafter for you." And with that, Ignorance receded into the back of her mindforgotten, but always present. The Regular regarded Vator then as she plotted her impromptu operation. Her lay forays into Thronerest had been fun, but ultimately failures, per the gauntlets design. Now? Now, she was a bit more than just a Reg. "Alright, Greatling. Ive got a question for you," Draus said as she filtered through the many reflections she had access to. The obvious option would be to start within the City Eternal, try to make a sprint toward where its length bursted through the substances threshold. But with the amount of Wren bombs constantly hammering its crenulationed surface, Draus doubted she could pass through without being stained with entropy. Considering Vator was of an even lower Spherage... "More than adequate," Vator said, with a self-deprecating glint in his eye. "Alas, my specialty has always been more along the lines of intrusion and rearguard action. I suppose if I were to portray myself in Regular-speak, I would be a biological sapper of sorts." "Right. Well see how cute you stay after you get this thing started." But what started just then turned her focus away from the City Eternal and toward structures of greater concernthe surrounding megablocks constantly bombarding the immense dismembered arc of The Hungers. There were primarily twelve megablocks rounding the segment of the City Eternal, looping upwards into an arc. It was about a fourteen-kilometer stretch of area, but with each ringbone detonation, well over five times that expanse was flooded with entropy. Draus suspected the blocks would be completely spent of proper Rendbombs by the end of the day if they couldnt get logistical replenishment from the rest of Highflame. However, they probably still had plenty of Rendsinks and so on. Makeshift weapons went a long way. There was no point in waiting. If things were going to happen in her favor, she needed to make them happen. Aggression. Firepower. Tempo. And thaumaturgy. All things she in spades and more. With a blast of Soulfire, her Simulacra, now enhanced, materialized around her, looming over both Vator and the portrait. The Greatling blinked up, both hands behind his back. He observed Draus as well, faintly, with his lips corked upward. "Yes, yes, I think I do like you better in this format. Its far more aesthetic. Your legs, like those of a steed now. With your wings multiplied too! Wide as well as vertical A shard broke away from the Heaven of Reflections armored helmet "Step through, half-strand," Draus said. A massive cannon composed of revolving pannels and orbited by a cloud of lesser guns surfaced with the pallid depths of the Simulacras blade. "Its time we go on a block crawl. Were going to use this district to crack itself open. Your re-admissions gonna come with a butchers bill. Chapter 29-12 Back to School (III) Chapter 29-12 Back to School (III) Preparation. Tempo. Firepower. Unpredictability. If you''re going to be engaging in close-quarters combat within a megablock or any other constrained space, you''re gonna wanna be a tide. You''re gonna wanna sweep through sector to sector, burning through the threats like wildfire. Hesitation will kill you. So will missing your shots. So will being acquired. So will not knowing what''s ahead. And you can even do everything right and still end up snuffed. But that''s the way of the game. I''m not here to promise that you''ll return a big glowing hero, chest full of medals. That''s not you. That''s not us. We''re regulars. We''re happy to do the killing. We''re happy to do the dying as well. But if you can keep your guns hot, your feet moving, your mind solid, and your path clear, you won''t believe how fast you can seize control over a defensible object and turn the existing infrastructure against its former inhabitants. -Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma 29-12 Back to School (III) [Bloodthane Agthar Blacktide] Bloodthane Agthar Blacktide steeled himself as the fusion burner punched clean through his compromised combat skin. His cog-feed pixelated, struggling to adjust to the sight-searing brightness, and with each inhale, he felt his lungs cook, his flesh vaporizing from the inside. The pain was hard to describe, and not even a scream conveyed his agony, for the organs responsible for his very breath dissolved into balls of superheated plasma. But a slamming force jolted him back to alertness, and an ejection prevented him from crossing over into the embrace of death. The Woundhound burrowed deep into the Bloodthane, flowing up from someplace truer than biology, consuming his incinerated lungs. The woundhound burst out from his chest, splashing through the fusion burner''s radiant plume without difficulty. Its fur, a mottled mess of midnight gray, rippled across the creatures body, unbothered by the flame. Across from the Bloodthane, the last of the Highflame militiamen died without ever knowing what hit them. The Woundhound splashed into their ontology, and Agthar felt his injuries shift from the beast to another entirely. The victims simply knelt over, folding over in their suit of heavy armor like a puppet severed from strings. The Bloodthane staggered back and coughed a few times, relieved to feel any sensation under his chest at all. Just to breathe was a sublime pleasure. VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY: 98% A body splattered against the wall next to him. Exhausted, Agthar tilted his head only to see the final remains of a technician sliding down from the surface upon which they were caked, leaving a smear of tangled viscera. A few staggered steps came from behind him, and the Bloodthane regarded his erstwhile companion. Ravensong was thin for a Scaarthian, abnormally so. At nearly three and a half meters tall, took up most of the narrow hallway strewn with smoking mechs and mutilated corpseswas a giant even for her own clade. But a good portion of that had to do with the cybernetic torso extension that parted her midsection. She flung two bodies from the frequency blades implanted along heer shoulders, and Sanctian Past-Tense pattern chrono-kinetic rifle fired from her back in staccato bursts of three. With each shot, a ripple would pulse across the surface of reality, flechettes cast into the future to strike potential targets. "How many injectables you got left, Blacktide?" Ravensong croaked. Her voice sounded hoarse, and she didnt look much better than he did. Her face was riven with deep cuts, and part of her skull hung low along the side of her face like a severed flap. A tungsten spike was buried all the way through her collarbone, jutting out from her back. But despite all this, she barely looked winded. Scarthians were made of stern stuff, enough to make Agthar envious. He might have been adopted into the culture, but those of the wounded matriarchy never allowed him to forget the truth of his heritage. "Im down to one Woundhound injectable. 98% Rend Cap," he answered. She sighed. "Well, Im out of hounds. 99 here." A bitter laugh escaped her. "Think were running out of rope." "Well manage," Agthar replied, though he didnt fully believe it himself. He had to make it. He made a promise. A promise to his daughter that he would come back alive. Just like all the times before. Another tremor shook the structure they found themselves in, and a series of chittering taps sounded through the surrounding walls. Agthar didnt know how or why hed been brought to this place. Ravensong wasnt a member of his cadre, just another Sphere Two Bloodthane displaced from their original position. His memories were clouded. Hed suffered partial ego damage upon waking up. He remembered being called back into service due to recent developments happening in the Court of Truth. Apparently, there were murmurs that the Fifth Guild War was starting soon, but Agthar didnt care about any of that. He was visiting his daughter. He had dropped her off with her motherthat sows weekend with his girl. They were going to visit the Deep Blue aquarium when he was on leave next time. Always next time... He had no idea what made the girl like the ocean so much. Agthar personally hated the ocean. He hated places where he couldnt see his enemies. He hated not knowing things. Which was why his tensions were running a little bit high right now. He had no idea how he found himself within a Highflame megablockand a highly militarized one at that. Then, they passed through an unseen panel of glass and suddenly ceased to be. True death came fast in New Vultun. Sometimes, you just dont get to live. Not up to you. *** Somewhere down the Undercroft, a girl waited for her father to come home. She waited as the strange substance consumed her world. She waited and wept and prayed. Up till the point the flames took her as well. He never came. Not in this life. Not in this iteration of existence. *** [Jelene Draus] Manifold Paracosmos was an uncanny but ultimately pretty useful cannon to have. It took Draus a little while to get used to it. Messing with chronology wasn''t the same thing as just shooting a gun, after all, but in the end, she got the hang of it pretty quick. Just a shame about how much Rend it requiredstill. Her new Hell destroyed matter pretty good. Matter, forces, and things. People too, like the Bloodthanes that wandered into her thin, transparent panel. Poor shits. Nothing they could have done. REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA] - 64% Triggering her Manifold Paracosmos again, Draus created five thresholds of temporal progression within her demiplane. In the deepest layer, time barely moved at alland such was where she spent the bulk of her time. The layer after time, the world barely moved at all, a second elongated to an hour. The third layer was normal time, while the two after that came with accelerated and nigh instant time-lag madness varieties. This combination granted her a kind of operational insulation. She planned in the deep. Fired Perpetual Acceleration rounds in the slow-mo layer, interacted with the world in the third, and kept Vator and a few other VIPs in the last threshold just so he couldnt learn her capabilities. With the Bloodthanes consumed by her Hell, she had a few more seconds to plan her operationand bring her reflection close to the last megablock she needed to compromise. As the shard speared close to the reactor, Draus shifted back to her deepest layer, and the real outside ground to a halt. Studying the world through her thousands of junctions, Draus watched the progression of attacks exchanged between Highflame and the Hungers, and studied the encroachment of other displaced Massists forces as well. Her Rend climbed fast the depths of her Manifold, but she was also in the perfect position to unleash an alpha strike like no other. No one knew she was here; that they were effectively stone-still, giving her ample time to line up shot after shot using her Arsenalist and Phy-Sim. After half an hour in demiplanar timethree seconds of real-timeshe aligned firing solutions on 1.2 million targets. And when she fired, she used Perpetual Acceleration each time, firing out through passages generated at different positions in her demiplane dependent on the time it took to strike each target. Ultimately, though she fired all these rounds at different time, they would impact in perfect sync. The first of her projectiles were all loosed from deep within the second layer, but every passing moment she moved closer and closer into the shallows, until she was finally engaging in real time. And then, with the operation laid out and the board set up, the Regular conducted an act of orchestral surgeryas a single operator no less. Eat your fucking heart out, Quail Tavers. It was like 1.2 million perfectly placed shots happening all at once without any forewarning, without any hint or disturbance. Entire cadres died, control nodes were destroyed, Rendbomb facilities and spatial relays reduced to rubble. It was a sudden, vicious crippling that no one could have prevented. No oneunless they possessed a Domain of Chronology themselves, or something equally esoteric. As for the surviving High Flame cadres, or the invading Bloodthanes, or any other Godclads for that matter? Well, just as the Arsenalists could fire from deep within the Manifold as a Heaven, so too did its time redaction work while it was a Hell. Draus didnt so much battle rival Godclads as she unmade them. These shots came perfectly timed to thread through their vulnerable bodies the moment they needed to vent the instance, flashing back to their ephemeral forms. While the rest of the district continued to rage, masses pushing along both borders of the former High Flame territory, the Highflame defenders, pincered on all sides, tried to capture the dismembered Hungers while holding their own peripheries. A 16-kilometer stretch of land simply ceased firing, ceased struggling, ceased doing anything. Around 64 blocks fell perfectly silent, dormant, as if lobotomized from the inside. And such was only the opening salvo. Chapter 29-13 Back to School (IV) Chapter 29-13 Back to School (IV) +Come in. Come in. Come in. Is anyone there? Block L007 to G012 are no longer responding. Is anyone there? Is anyone+ [SESSION UNABLE TO BE RECEIVED; TARGET ELIMINATED; SESSION LOST] +This is Bloodfang designation: Carnivore. Preliminary scouting has generated results. The innermost section of the Highflame defenders are no longer reactive. Suspect they have sustained at least operational kill. Levels of harm from the anomaly nested at the center of the city suggest we establish an breachpoint and devote all resources to heavy thaumic bombardment so that we can+ [SESSION UNABLE TO BE RECEIVED; TARGET ELIMINATED; SESSION LOST] +This is....Sleeper Designation: Meanwhile... Broadcasting... ID codes. Mirror... If you are receiving this message, something has happened. My cognitive suppressants have been damaged prematurely. My original consciousness is surfacing. The district is under attack from an unknown... What are you? How are you here? How do you know that I... Yes. Yes, these are confusing times. But if you are who you say you are, it''s good to hear a friendly voice. I think... I think I trust you. I think I have to.+ [SESSION ESTABLISHED; ASSET SECCURED] -Collection of Stray Thoughtcasts Intercepted by Ignorance 29-13 Back to School (IV) [Navigator Hidrik Athatar] There were two kinds of opportunities Hidrik was familiar with. The first was the kind he createdthe kind that took a lot of hard work, research, planning, plotting, scheming, and all that other goodness to set up. Right now, he was experiencing the other kind of opportunity. The kind he had nothing to do with, but was reaping the rewards all the same. He had no idea why he was displaced or how he and his entire Sanctus battle group ended up behind the rapidly collapsing battle lines of an equally misplaced Highflame fortress district. But Hidrik wasn''t going to miss out on a chance to shoot the gift ghoul in the mouth. Sustaining dive. Chronoframe. Temporal displacement. 39, 42, 33. Lag strain. Three seconds. Holding to bearing. He led a strike team composed of four other Chronoframes, all heavy assault builds designed for maximum firepower. They were on a guerrilla run over the most active Highflame megablocks. Loathe as he was to admit it, despite being caught completely unprepared and effectively sandwiched between a Sanctus battle group supported by a heavy contingent of Ashthroners, the Golds were putting up a hell of a fight. Their megablocks were armed to the teeth, and their guns just wouldnt stop firing. To make matters worse, every structure seemed to be connected to another. Anytime they pierced too deep or almost captured one hard point, the next block over would simply trigger their neighbors'' rinsing, damning both their allies and enemies to early oblivion. Another Chronoframe strike team had been lost this way. They got too cocky, descended too far trying to capture the core, and ate shit before they could dive again. Hidrik wasnt going to make the same mistake. No, instead, he was using other bits of weirdness to his advantage, like the fact that memite no longer functioned, allowing his chronokinetics to actually deal damage to the exterior of the megablock. Surfacing once more, they hit block G-073 just as they slipped back into the present. Suddenly, it was as if they rubberbanded the past into the future, their guns blazing, tearing through the Highflame blocks'' rail-delivered missile batteries. The Golds failed to respond in time, caught off guard by the materializing Chronoframes. Time-flung munitions cut deep, skipping through the hard outer layer of most matter and only solidifying when they were temporally halfway through an existing object. The effect was similar to using a spatial miracle to teleport an object into an existing section of matter. Displacement inflicted its own kind of harm as well. Gouts of fire erupted out the side of the block, and suddenly its constant barrage of nuclear warheads slowed to a trickle. Then, the first shots of retaliatory fire came. Drones launched their own missiles, a few splashing against Hidrik''s 80-meter tall Chronoframe, swimming in an arc around the megablock. He shuddered with a grunt, banking hard within the core of his temporally constructed biomechanical behemoth. At 630 kilometers per second, his morphology was designed after that of a Kingfisher. His configuration was inclined toward bombings, but his tail-mounted particle scalpel had more than enough kick to cut down pursuing strike craft. Narrow beams of light gathered at the tip of the whipping tendril extending from the rear of Hidriks Chronoframe, and his system pounded as a series of firing trajectories loaded into his cog-feed. Three beams carved through the air, slicing through the wings of a drone, while the other two jolted aside, taking evasive maneuvers. One suffered a moderate cut through its central chassis, and instead of releasing a barrage of flechettes, sparks flew out from the barrels of its gun. The third drone escaped unharmed until one of Hidriks wingmen sliced it out of the sky. +Nice shot, Tully!+ Hidrik declared, only to wince a moment later. Right. He forgot about that. Auto-Seances remained fucked. Trying to use it got him a bit entropy sick earlier. Last thing he needed was another trip to the grafter. The collapse of the Netheror whatever the hell had happenedleft his group fighting together based on instinct and experience. They couldnt communicate with each other at range, saving their rising and thought-cast transmissions for when they sank across the future. Chrono displacement drive online, but a loud enough thoughtcast could still get everyones attention. +Strike group Anovar, prepare to dive!+ Not a moment too soon. Just as they slipped across the golden currents of reality, the fabric of space shuddered before a flood of Rendbombs enveloped the airspace they once occupied. Hidrik could feel his Chronoframe shudder with the pressure of passing entropy, even as he snapped forward, hopping a full second into the future. Baseline reality turned into a hazy blur. Strings of acceleration peeled alongside him, with time itself becoming as if a temporal current. Matter unspooled into vague outlines and patterns. Things still moved, the present still was, but dislocated from the chronological progression of baseline reality, the Chronoframe strike group existed more in parallel with time rather than within its confines. +Strike group Anovar, status report,+ Hidrik said. A series of affirmations sounded, with only Tali reporting light structural damage to his Chronoframes abdomen. It should heal by the time they surfaced once more, but Hidrik had his strike group adjust their formation just in case. No sense in losing anyone when he could help it. +Alright, last layer of Highflame defenses breaches, consangs,+ Hidrik declared. +Were going to make a pass over their final battle linethe one thats been busy hammering at that hulking stretch of fallen dragon. Whatever the fuck that thing is.+ +Are we to make a scouting run over the dragon, top?+ The thoughtcast came from the new guyGrease. Hidrik liked them. He liked anyone who didnt get shot down during their first sortie. Kid was doing A-okay so far. +Negative, Grease. We stick to target and return behind planar hardpoints after the run. Surface. Fire. Dive. Keep it simple. Dont veer off and get snuffed. Strike group Kataanga decided they wanted to be remembered as heroes rather than see tomorrow as useful soldiers. Well, jokes on those shitssomeones gonna be mind-fucking their Osjacks and Osjanes back home.+ At baseline, she likely could have only spent two minutes within her innermost lair, but that was before Draus inherited the Stillborn, before she became Flame Anchor, and before her Fame grew capable of interfacing with other metaphysical constructs. As things stood, she had a few passages open at the base of a compromised megablock, and with each ripple of coruscating fire spilling out from her soul, she kept her expenditure in check, using her Simulacras Hell only in high-intensity situations or to help less the load. Steadily, her rend began to plummet, and by the time it was at fifty-nine percent, each of the Chronoframes were coming asunder in fractures of time in real-time. "Symmetry at work," Ignorance declared. "Synced on that, consang," Draus said, whistling to herself. Frankly, she appreciated her Redaction Bullets more than her Arsenalists newest Heavenly upgrades. Though her perpetual accelerator granted her plenty of firepower, few things could match the convenience of simply unmaking your enemies. No longer needing to kill the Navigators twice also did wonders for her mood. Priority hostiles eliminated. Updating DeepNav. Returning to monitoring mode. With her Arsenalist awakened, it was less like a dead weapon and more like a hyper-intelligent battle buddy. True, she still controlled its cannons and manipulated its miracles, but it possessed a thought of its own. A mind of its own that could offer strategies, recommendations, and even warnings in the heat of combat. Right now, as it was of a frame and thereby of a mind with Draus, it scouted through the deep nav simulation of Thronerest at a pace she simply wasn''t capable of. The Arsenalist and the Simulacra might be conscious, but Draus never assumed them to be human. The way they operated was primal, utterly single-minded toward their governing mythos. A series of new targets materialized. Her mirrors were spreading fast, vitrification creating new peepholes she used to scout the district while a hailstorm of raining glass granted her limited zone supremacy. Pulses from her metamind allowed her to scan the blocks for priority enemies, and every now and again she would feel Ignorance leaning in to help her. Isolating system operators running internal defense for the megablocks. 186 new target markers materialized in her deep nav and overlaid themselves upon her cog-feed right after. "Aligning trajectories. Aiming phase. Recommend" "Yeah, yeah, I got it," Draus said. She descended back down into her internal flare where time practically stood still and painted new firing solutions from her most optimal passages. Things continued like this for a little while until all sixty-four blocks within that final 16-kilometer stretch, pincering the City Eternal, fell utterly silent. "Well, Id say that''s a pretty damn good job killing today," Draus chuckled to herself. She hadn''t had this much fun in years. Sure, it was a little dull at timesall that prep work, no one fighting back, no tension or strugglebut throwing down against a proper enemy was just a bonus. Draus was a regular, not Zein. She had no urge to duel her enemies. She was here to kill, destroy, and be done. For all the killing Thousandhand did, she was still a wielder, and not the weapon itself. Too human. All too human in the end. "Final reconnaissance completed," the Arsenalist declared. "All blocks scoured barren of hostiles. You may proceed to the second phase." "Don''t mind if I do," Draus said. Second phase, as it was called, went something like this: when all the guns were silenced, when the immediate threats were eliminated, and no further Rendbombs hammered the surface of the dragon, Draus would load Vator into her Arsenalist and fire him out as a bullet. She left the Instrument contained within the outermost layer of her Manifold Paracosmos. To his perspective, everything was a blur, happening nigh instantaneously. The last second, he had only just stepped into her demi-plane. The next, he would be flying out as a bullet, and she would brief him on the way. Chronological fuckery was a beautiful thing. "You could have used him to clear some of the blocks," Ignorance muttered in the back of her mind. We have influence over him. Don''t need to worry about trust." "Yeah, but I don''t like him. And honestly, he''s my ticket into Axtraxis. Our ticket into Highflame''s soft, soft underbelly. That makes him a very important vessel. We dont gamble with those." A chuff of acceptance came from the Definement. "Do as you will. You are the soldier. I defer to your expertise." "Oh, so you can get humble when the time comes for it." Ignorance replied, a sly amusement entering his tone. A ring of guns materialized over Vator''s frozen form. Vectors of gold sneered along his outline, time-bending miracles expressing themselves as a form of stationary acceleration. As Draus prepared to fire him out, she opened a new passageway and painted her final firing trajectory. "Its time to see whats on the other side," Draus said, grinning to herself. Chapter 29-14 Back to School (V) Chapter 29-14 Back to School (V) I... I can feel it inside me. I can feel... I can feel... how... I can feel... love. All the world is just... love. And all the world is... hunger. Excerpts recorded from a Stormtree soldier infected with the Beloved Virus (Also known as the Nu-Ghoul Contagion) 29-14 Back to School (V) [Vator Greatling] One moment ago, Vator had stepped through a gleaming reflection the regular had presented to him, prepared to embark on a journey of most dubious loyalty. Now, he found himself sailing through the air at 4,500 meters per second, while material and metaphysical destruction lashed the world beneath him apart. Life came at you quick these days in New Vultun. He only got flashes of what was unfolding across the district. A bit of nuclear fire here. A cadre of Heavens pursuing what looked to be a Chronoframe strike group there, both sides barreling through entire blocksmemite now sorely missed. And then there was the place Vator was approaching. It looked like a patchwork of eldritch tumors tearing at the seams of reality. The fabric of existence resembled rotting wallpaper peeling from the wall, and from these wounds gushed anomaliesrogue miracles untethered from governing mythos. Without a Heaven and a Soul to further fuel their devastation, these ruptures would mend over time once the entropy was drained. But as things stood right now, Vator was heading into a hive of madness, and he had only one person to blame. Perhaps the Regular did want to kill him, but wished to do so in the most amusing of ways. Waves of displaced space crashed over him, threatening to displace his being from where he existed. But a countering emanation from another rupture pushed the first anomaly back, allowing Vator to continue unburdened. He was effectively falling between stable cleftsclefts created as a delta between conflicting existential fissures. Scar Charts. That was the word. Strange how the Sunderwilds were leaking into the city now. Strange times. Fascinating times. Where are we? the Portrait screamed. It reached out into existence, and Vator felt countless catalysts respond. Millions of bodies belonging to those alive and dead resonated with the Heaven of Biology, and countless among them were brutally injured, the death rate rising at a staggering rate. Thin threads extended out from him, forming a network of connections he could use, and through these pathways, he gained access to miracles of blood, skin, sinew, bone, flesh, and more. He gained a glimpse of Thronerest through the eyes of the people, and what he saw left him less than pleased. Stormtree was pushing in on one end. Sanctus and Ashthrone rolling down the other. And now the middle, an unreasonably placed dragon housing an entire cityscape of its own bifurcated Highflame across its own territory. A squadron of drones buzzed over Vator like an angry horde of hornets, emerging just beyond the edge of a rupture that oozed blackness over into the real. They traded fire at an unseen targetand then a cascading wave of flames swallowed them before materializing as an armored humanoid form with six arms and a ring around its head. SOUL DETECTED HEAVEN DETECTED SAMSARIST OF THE PURIFICATION (FIRE/WAR/MEDICINE/DESTRUCTION) EST. [955] The manifested Heaven was about a hundred meters in size and with each passing second, the air around Vator grew hotter. The only reason he had burned was due to his enhanced physiology, but even so, every intake of breath was beginning to sear. Then, just as he noticed the Samsarist, so too did it notice him. And a spiraling flame built in that ridiculous little ring fused over its head. Wonderful. He so hated fighting Godclads of the Fire Domain. Burns were some of his least favorite wounds. However, before Vator could manifest his Portrait in response, a dozen glass shards punched through Samsarists midsection, each one the size of a small building and traveling at nearly the same speed Vator was. The instrument blinked in surprise, but the wounds on the flaming Heaven seared closed in a gush of roaring flame. Seemed material harm was less than useful The glass shard detonated. Fractures spread out from them and extended over spatial realityand the Samsaristas well. The fragmentation they inflicted was absolute. As they sundered space, they struck a paradox as well, the Samsarist breaking apart into pieces before its being dissolved into motes of unstable Soulfire. Now, Vator felt the biology of the Godclad as well. Foreign implantsStormtree by size and crudeness of the organs. The Instrument prepared to reap another life using his Portrait, but his Heaven cried out in rejection of the act. Not that it was necessary in the end, either. A final shard of glass, far smaller than all the others, drifted just above the Bloodthane. A bullet, almost too small for Vator to perceive, darted out and struck the falling Godclad. When it hit, both bullet and Bloodthane ceased to be. Reality jolted. And then something wasnt. It was more like Vator had forgotten what was in front of his own face than anything else. Witnessing the scene caused Vator to sustain trauma damage. His wards shuddered as if he had borne witness to something he shouldn''t have. The Instrument blinked. It had been years since he had suffered true trauma damage not inflicted by an enemy Necrojack. Why... The Portrait murmured. As the body was vacant of thought or internal drive, Vator assumed control, rising on feeble, fragile limbs. We healed the child, but she does not return... Child? Vator looked down, only then realized that he was, indeed, piloting the body of a young Nolothi girl. Not that young. Frankly, from how short these flats were, it was hard to tell. That and the sheer amount of cell damage already inflicting them. What brutal little lives. Ah. Well. He tried. But hers was a poorly designed vessel to begin with. Like a paper too thin to even endure the strokes of his paint. Immediately, he began rebuilding his own biology using her own, and slowly, Vator hatched out from the peeling flesh of the girl, her skeleton melting into his, her organs sinking deeper and transforming to his enhanced variants in seconds. What remained of his old brain tissue spilled down the wall as Vator stumbled to his feet. Nolothic bone runes jingled along archways, revealing veritable drone fleets battling within the confines of the City Eternal. It seemed like plenty of the world beyond had found their way into the space within Noloth. Right now, he was standing along a corpse-strewn canal. An intricate system of aqueducts extended across the cityscape, and thousands of Nolothis were leaping into the fetid waters to escape roving bands of Stormtree nu-dogs tearing through the streets or Highflame Regular Kill Teams fighting to secure ziggurats and other structures of significance. +This must be corrected,+ Mercy sighed. The sudden manifestation of the Famine made Vator flinch, but he scoffed after that. Mercy, he greeted. Glad to seek you again. How nice of you to leave me in the hands of that most unpleasant Regular. +Her decorum is irrelevant. The Burning Dreamer has chosen her to be his Ignorance.+ His what? +You will remember when he allows it.+ Vator blinked then shook his head. He felt a vibration pass through the building next to him and triggered his reflex boosters. Shifting back a step, he barely avoided getting his head burst apart a second time as a fle?chette exploded out from the wall. Overlapping his senses with all the others in the area, Vator frowned as he got a glimpse of just how chaotic the battle was within this stretch of Noloth. There were Golds, Silvers, Greens, Blacks, and even what felt like some unaffiliated personnel. Soldiers from all factions and even Squires were scattered across Noloth, and all of them were massacring the locals as they fought each other. +The outsiders are lost. Just like the City Eternal itself. Worry not for the citizens. They belong to the Dreamer. What is lost can be restored. Bodies are ruined. But minds are preserved. Such has it been. Such will it be. But for this iteration of the city, the nodes of these citizens... they deserve better. They deserve a chance to survive.+ Why? Vator asked. Mercy turned to him, his eyes a cold hazel. There was another difference between him and Emotionthat poor fools eyes were stitched. +Because you do not want any Guild controlling the inner expanse of this city. Not with all the viviante available. Not unless you wish for them to capture the ziggurats and unleash district shattering traumas at their pleasure.+ And then the Portrait spoke. Vator. User. I will not rend flesh. I will not harm. This is not my way. This will not be what I am. Whatever this one asks of you, use me not as a weapon, for that is not what I am. The Instrument merely nodded. I agree. But you have never been a weapon. You were always Your expression is horror, the Portrait said, cutting Vator off. And then it receded deeper inside him, leaving the boy with a sourness on his lips and a frown on his face. Make your own way, another voice echoed from within Vator. He knew this one. It was Gods operate beyond the limits of man. Be a creator. Destruction does not need to come from your hands. Ignorance? Vator breathed. You... youre the one that took me from... And then the voice was gone, and Vator forgot who he was talking to. But in the absence of the speaker, he found new memories instilled into his mind, and the Instrument felt his thoughts flare with excitement. MEM-DATA ASSIMILATED Roused by his excitement, the Portrait returned as quickly as it left. What is this? What is the shape of a monster gracing my page? For some time, Vator worked on improving the design of the ghoul. Such was his want when he pursued the Burning Dreamer in the aftermath of his brothers murder, toward the end of proving his sisters innocence. But he and pitiful Abrel were all the same in the end, mere pawns in a greater powers game. Now, however, he had an epiphany. He knew Avos sheathe by heartcould combine it with nu-ghoul rough drafts. The bulk of the forces assaulting Noloth were mostly mundane forces. Few Godclads or even golems managed to get this far in, and though Vator wondered why, that meant his resolution of this crisis could be simplifiedand outsourced. Its not a monster, Vator said, answering his Heaven of Biology. It is an artpiece. An unloved, unfinished work born at the hands of Noloth, come back to save this part of their city once more. +What are you doing?+ Mercy asked, gaze fixed to Vator. At once, the Instruments flesh began to crawl and tear, and drawing on the full power of his blessed epiphany, he extended his influence across the city, infecting all non-Nolothis he could feel with a new strain of the Haemophageone that even Guilder enhanced immune systems couldnt resist. Not without updated vaccinations anyway. And across a thousand bodies, be they Vator, Regular, Wargskin, or other, eight limbs burst out from their backs. Eight Echoheads, like the legs of a spider sliding free from a discarded exoskeleton, followed by a cloud of static spores, and elongated bodies that gleamed bright in the light. A new power would be joining the battle soon. Not truly aligned with anyone, but compelled to hunt Guilders above all. Yet, even as Vator continued along the guided path of his inspiration, he failed to notice pinpricks of consciousness dotting the minds of these nu-ghouls, small burning orbs granted by an unseen influence. And high above, the sky tore once more, a spreading chasm of gold consuming all other ruptures as Jelene Draus faced her path-wrought alternate while Vator finished seeding Noloth with his final touches before he returned to his task of departure. Chapter 29-16 Back to School (VI) Chapter 29-16 Back to School (VI) +This is Acting Authority Santanando Mondelles broadcasting to all active Highflame personnel. Repeat, all active Highflame personnel that receive this thoughtcast, listen closely. Do not engage the Massists. I repeat, do not engage. Contact has been lost between usthose on the outside the anomalous boundaryand those within. Effective immediately, all units that can hear this thoughtcast are designated as Exo-Boundary assets and should heed the following: Report to Axtraxis Academynow deemed Exo-Boundary One. You will gain your new assignments and be issues priority tasks from there. Avoid hostile forces. An unofficial truce has been initiated between us and the Massists. They are trying to resolve matters on their own ends as well. This truce is being upheld by Voidwatchs Contingency Bleaks. Should you encounter Voidwatch personnel or representatives, your standing orders are to ignore and avoid. Furthermore, stay away from the boundaryofficially classified as the Substance. It has been noted to ontologically consume matter and metaphysical materials alike. Should you come upon breachpointssections where the former City Eternal of Noloth; or cityscapes fused to dismembered dragons protrude from the Substanceyou should report their whereabouts to Exo-Boundary One as soon as possible. These are trying times. You may receive conflicting orders from other forces claiming to be a part of Highflames Seraphic Chorus. Ignore all their thoughtcasts.Trust nothing that has not been confirmed by the Contingency Bleaks. An official coldtech broadcast will be transmitted across New Vultun every morning as a common brief. These are trying times. Times unlike any other. But we will burn against the downpour. We will endure despite the strife. For we are the blessed. We are the worthy. But most of all, we owe our strength and virtue to our fellow citizens still trapped within the boundary of the Substance. The preservation of homes and families comes first and foremost. Of this, all Guilds are in accord. Blessed be the worthy.+ -Acting Authority Santanado Mondelles 29-16 Back to School (VI) [Ignorance] Through Vator, a new path sprouted freea new branch to a potential future, a state of execution for all who dwelled within the City Eternal. Noloth, since time immemorial, had been a hidden empire, protected by means of subterfuge and conspiracy. Now, it was cast into the light, scattered from the unified whole they once were. The once-immortal citizens of the City Eternal were like chaff before the merciless machinery of the guilders. Now, there was no nether to protect them, no insulation from gauss fire, warheads, weaponized plagues, engineered beasts, and all the cruelties of the material realm. Trauma patterns erupted from their ziggurats, splashing through the surrounding districtperson to person, flesh against flesha brutal dialectic in progress. One, the tale of Noloth: a people who clung to the past, clung to safety, for fear of losing their lives. And then the other of the Guilds, a people broken and reforged through Jaus cruciblea merger of technology and stolen divinity. There was no fight, no fight at all. Tungsten spikes dug through walls and flesh alike, their trajectories reaping lives in multitudes as walls of fire consumed countless more. The skies above the city were crowned by distant bombs, far-flung explosions. No matter what nightmares Noloth could envision, no matter what calamities they could summon from their past, they were children born of a softer agean eternal softer age. Against these purebred bastards of the divine apocalypse, the Nolothi could be but victims. And so, the Burning Dreamer was to lose his subjects before he could ever truly become king. Yet by stealing one of Veylis precious acolytes, he created a twist in their fate. A twist that required a unique combination of opportunity, thaumaturgy, and perspective. No other could have aligned Vators new improvements made to the ghouls with Avos old sheathe. And something more. For only Ignorance could have infused them with fragments taken from the Heaven of Love. And only he could have distilled in them nodes forged from an ego he knew most dearlyof an Agnos dead but not like he. Empowered as they were, they hatched from the bodies of the displaced elders, echo-edged tendrils tunneling through flesh. But as they rose, instead of wretched creatures molded from transparent membrane and predatory traits, or even the cordyceramite juggernaut that Avo became upon inheriting the bone demon, these new ghouls were aestheticbeautiful, even. Their bodies were porcelain bright, all ivory, separated only by an exoskeleton of absolute darkness. Spores erupted from their Echoheads, pouring out as if billowing stormclouds that veiled the nu-ghouls in capes in static. But it was their faces that experienced the greatest changes. No longer were they inhuman of expression. Instead, they bore human features. Feminine features. Ridges of animated dreadlocks in mimicry of their Echoheads. Soft, inquisitive eyesthe kind found on a scholar. They possessed noses and ears and all the little touches and infused them with a dissonant humanity while the rest of their body remained more bestial than ever. But the face wasnt all Kae. A bit of Dawton Morrow had carried over as well. For though the man was dead, his memory had mingled with his lover, and just so, they carried over, a legacy that survived the death of truth to become a Rebis of the masculine and feminine, of beast and man. From the writhing remains of Guilders they rose. There were only hundreds at first. At first. But each was more than any lesser ghoul could ever be. MYTHOLOGY CREATED [MOMENT OF BIRTH]: WHERE ONCE GHOULS DIED UNLOVED, THESE BELOVED WILL CARRY THE BODY OF AN UNWORTHY EMPIRE AWAY FROM ITS GRAVE AND KNOW THAT THEY ARE WITH GRANDER PURPOSE IN THE WARS TO COME, AND KNOW THAT THEIRS IS THE LOT OF LOVER AND MONSTER BOTH. Ignorance poured portions of himself into the nu-ghoulsthese Belovedlighting them as if they were candles of consciousness. And he instilled in them powers. Powers taken from paltry fragments of a Heaven ground down to near powder. For to breed and propagate was the power of Love, and to birth and be reborn was the blessing of the Beloved. I give unto a new title, Ignorance said, fanning the flames of their consciousness. Where once Noloth wished for the world to starve for their betrayal, I dream of a new reality. A reality where all feed everlasting. Where there are colors to relish. Where there are tastes to savor, and is meaning to forge eternal. Begone to false utopia and pitiful dystopia. I yearn for life. Life everlasting. And oblivion to be not. Rise now. Rise and know your worth is absolute, my Feasts of Love. FATE ALTERED C NOLOTHS SECOND CHANCE AT ETERNITY And as one they strode away from the beautiful patterns of gore that spawned them. From an atrocity, the Beloved walked, venturing across this dismemberment of the City Eternal. But with them rose a foga stormcloud. Their static-charged sporelings pulsated with the beat of a heart. And spread. Through every crevice they could reach. Across streets. Into ziggurats and temples where Regulars butchered huddling citizens, where nu-dogs skinned the bones of lesser beasts. Up into the sky, where bomber drones were forced to fly low due to the ruptures above and anti-air missile grids seeking easy prey. Electricity surged out from the Beloved. And with it came a contagion. Once, the Haemophage could only warp the flesh of flats, unprotected by vaccines. Once, the rash was a nightmare absolute; a perversion of birth inflicted upon those who indulged in romance or desire. And now the two plagues were combined. Combined and focused through thinking agents, for the Beloved chose their Wombs. Drones fell from the air, bioelectricity frying their internal machinery. But where the Nolothi remained afflicted, the Guilders, being catalysts of flesh, of lust, of love, were sorted from the others. And they began to change within. Their bodies heeded a new composition as the Beloved propagated and bred. Children... Morrows voice sounded out from the Beloved in sync. Always... dreamed of having children with you... ...Youre coming back, yeah? Yes. Not dying. Just need to settle strain. Will leave you alone for a while. Distributing what thaums I could secure for you. +55,413 THAUMS Deaths were injected into Draus, poured from a place unseen. They were as if coal plunging into the engine of her Soul, and ever-brighter did her flames roar. After... after you pass... need you to... dont know whats waiting on the other... Yeah. I got it. Dont worry. Ill make sure the Greatling dont get snuffed. And one more thing. Yes? Did I get the Deliverer? No. Yeah. Thought itd be too easy. Did I even come close? Silence. And suddenly, Draus wondered how she lost track of her thoughts. Already, Vator was sweeping low, a falling monsoon crossing over a vast swath composed of strange geometries. Then, there was brightness. Light. Ghosts lit with golden radiance that carved a wound into the shape of the Substance, like piercing through like. +Heres hoping we dont just disintegrate,+ Vator mused joyfully. The Regular just grunted. The world was consumed. Their cog-feeds flickered out as susurrations of intrusive memories tickled Draus mind. Here was a liminal space. A place between all other places. A blank spot in a mind; an empty canvas of history; the purest expression of destruction without oblivion. And then they passed through. The world crashed back down around them, flooding their beings with an overload of sensory detail. There was light, and sound, and A crushing weight tore Vator from the air and spiked him down hard against a metallic pedestal. A thoughtwave disruption followedand poured over into Draus as well. While her thoughts ran empty, her instincts took hold, and her Heavens responded without her prompting. She felt multiple catalysts of glass around herand a hell of a lot more guns. +ATTENTION UNKNOWN GODCLAD! YOU HAVE ENTERED CONTAINMENT ZONE TWELVE IN THE BREACHPOINT GENESIS INSTALLATION. DISMISS YOUR HEAVEN AND DECLARE YOUR IDENTITY. FAILURE TO DO SO WILL RESULT IN DEPLOYED ENTROPICS.+ The swarm that was Vator beat their wings hard for a second longer before the words finally sank in. +Do as they say; prepare to demanifest and cross over into my reflection if they go hot,+ Draus said. She used the luminosity in the room to create a new network. Scanning their surroundings, she saw that Vator was facing a curving wall made from crystals while the ground beneath was some kind of treated duraniumthaumically enhanced alloy that had seen much less use after the advent of memite. Behind them, a maw of ethereal gold loomed, stretching out into a realm deep with shifting ghosts. Looks like they passed through to the other side. Now, to see if they needed to fight their way out of this as well. The swarm of bugs crashed together in a low buzzing clash, and as wing connected with wing, legs pressed against legs, and chitin kissed chitin, their biomass poured back together as Vator sculpted himself back into shape. Bringing his hands up, he paused momentarily to brush his hair before continuing on to take on a surrendering posture. +You fuckin serious?+ Draus muttered. +Absolutely. Impressions are essential, Guard-Captain.+ Fuckin peacock. Clearing his throat, Vator put on a smile and spoke. Greetings. I am Instrument Vator Greatling. Recently, Ive had the unique... experience of being caught at the epicenter of events at Scale. I understand you fine citizens might have heard something related to that. A beat of silence followed. But no hint of Rend lingered anywhere, so that was good. +Standby... Confirmed. Welcome back to the land of the living, Instrument Greatling. Were glad to see you still in one piece.+ Vator let out a slight breath. Oh. Im among allies, then? A mental laugh followed. +Something like that. Its complicated. Youre one of the few who have made it out from inside the Substance. Just a few hours after your father, in fact.+ Father? Vator said, surprised. His grin grew. Remarkable. And my sister? Another pause. +Orders are to debrief you at Axtraxis Academy. Now designated as Exo-Boundry One. Acting headquarters for all Highflame personnel beyond the confines of the Substance. Disabling perimeter safeties. Prepare to submit to thoughtscan.+ Draus felt a lingering presence reignite inside her. A sigh sounded from Ignorance. He was spent. One... one more... just one more... Chapter 30-1 Too Numb to be Numb Chapter 30-1 Too Numb to be Numb +Ahem. Attention, people of the gutters. Its uh... its your fucking boy Aedon What? Whats wrong with saying, its your fucking boy, Marlowe? Why does it sound like shit? How do you know it sounds like shit, like, all the big vicarity starsokay, yeah, I guess you have thoughtcasting experience but... Alright. Fuckingalright! First impressions are important, I knowah, fuck Im already casting shitshitshit Uh, hey, hey, consangs, its friend of the Strix, master of the rash, and twister of the flesh, Aedon Chambers here. Yeah. You might know me as a Low Master Acolyte or consang to the Strix. You might even know me as Steelhardfan6969 if you frequent certain lobbies Whats wrong with telling them my private account? I barely use it anymore! I practically cant since the Nether came down. Shit, Im on the verge of getting the shivers. Fuck. Ive been cycling old vics through my head to keep myself calm! Dont tell me to calm down! I am calm! Im just running hot. Godsdammit. Shit I keep getting sidetracked. Anyway! Main point: As you might have noticed, the Guilder half-strands are slipping down into the Warrens like shit... falling over from an overflowing shitter. Yeah, they really fucked their home up something good. Whatever the High Cuntess pulled at the end seems to have created a spreading metaphysical venereal disease thats crawling down New Vultun to eat our asses. Shits fucked, yo. No two ways about it. In fact, if you got some numb, nows the time to prick yourselves. But all is not yet fucked to death. Our asses are, like, only two inches dicked by a fifteen inch Prolapsator-EXTREME Model 2. Theres still a chance we can slip free from getting a nightmarish pounding. But only if we work together. Right now, the Colors are disorganized. Theyre fighting each other and crashing down over your homes and shit. We have... a unique opportunity. One that might not come again for a long, long time. What I need from you is simple: go seek out mem-cons with a specific pattern: a symbol that looks like a fire cut in half by a line. Thats the working symbol of the Symmetry. Pending changes. Im not an artist and did the best I could on short notice. When you do, follow the instructions youll get from the memetic virus for next steps. You might think youre outgunned and screwed with the Fifth Guild War kicking off, but things will be different this time. They already are. We dont need to take the Tiersfolks shit anymore. Theyre in our house now. And understand the Symmetry will fight for you. To live. To see tomorrow. For a chance to decide who you want to be yourselves. The Warrens might be a den of festering shit, but its ours. And the Guilds shouldve thought triple before they barged in here running from their fuck up. Was... was that good? Good at the end? Hells yeah. Aedon Chambers lives for a climax+ -Aedon Chambers (Suspected Low Master Acolyte, Member of the Symmetry, Companion to the Strix, and Leading Representative of the Council of Fuck) 30-1 Too Numb to be Numb Aedon Chambers couldnt quite find it inside himself to shoot up, and his hand hovered over a vial of Numb. Drinkable, injectablea promise of peace and relaxation guaranteed, if hed only put it inside himself, some way, somehow. Above him, light fell in dappled spots through dense foliage, and birdsong bathed the world in a dissonant tranquility. He stood at the end of a long table, its length stretching on for a good fifty meters while the other seats were occupied by a host of twenty-seven other individuals. Twenty seven people who resembled him and flesh and mindego copies created by Avo. Here was the Council of Fuck. The members Chambers could get his hands on, anyway, convening to discuss issues of grave importance. Things like: Just how fucked are we right now. Or: Maybe someone else should be calling the shots. Hed spent the better part of the last day squirreled away in the Easy Armistice, monitoring situations across New Vultun from inside a rented demiplane. So far, things were as shit as he expected. With the Guilders fleeing the Tears and the Substance on the move, a cataclysm unlike any other was sweeping through the megacity. Panic was rising, citizens and subjects freaking out alike, and at the center of it all, Avo was still missing. Draus had gone silent as well, despite coming online earlier. She had suddenly cut outan ominous signbut Chambers had more than a little faith in the regular. Jelene Draus was a tough sow. If all theyd experienced thus far couldnt kill her, then whatever horrors were hiding behind that veil of metaphysical bullshit likely wouldnt either. That left him with the Warrens, and things werent looking so good there either. In the days leading up to the trial, Avo had gone on a rampage alongside his Gestalt, tearing through the underworld of New Vultun in what could only be described as a cognitive genocide. The syndicate elites were burned and replaced by copies of Chambers, given his former expertise with the environment, and their enforcers became alternates for Draus, establishing a hidden army for Symmetry before proceedings even began. The technicians were fully staffed by amalgamated personalitiesegos generated using memories and architectures gained from fallen Incubi. They had been a valuable resource. A veritable legion in the Nether set to take over. Now? Well, there wasnt much of a Nether, and a good bunch of the Incubi copies got nulled when Scale broke anyway, so that was that. Now, Chambers found himself the senior leader of a gutter-spanning empire that ran smuggling rings, crucibles, dealt drugs, illicit organs, and trafficked implants while also warring against each other through death and entertainment. That had been his cover before to keep things going. That wasnt going to last much longer. Once, the Guilds had used their syndicates to do dirty business, things they liked to keep their hands clean of. Now, with everything on the line, the syndicates were no longer needed. In fact, they were more of a liability. Citizens forced away from their homes were spilling down across the Warrens, pushing into other districts and displacing longtime subjects from their former abodes. Scenes were represented in a holographic display of New Vultun. A simulation assembled itself from visual data captured by Sunrisethe Voidwatch bioform busting its buzzing ass as it flew here and there. From the very edge of the Tiers, traffic so dense they became webs descended over the Warrens, blotting the face of night from above Lights End. The blare of horns and the scream of sirens were nigh constant. Behind them, the Substance loomed, an ethereal tidal wave crawling forward inch by inch, with shimmering gold oscillating beneath its depths. In the upper atmosphere, voider ships were assembling, and what looked like a concentric megastructure was slowly fusing into shape along the horizon. Calvino told Chambers that the Contingency Bleaks were coming onto the scene, supposed big guns of Void Watch specifically meant to deal with uncontrolled anomalies. Intermittent skirmishes still broke out between the Guilds, and when knots or cadres fought, thousands of salvages died. But through some small miracleby some form of pressure from higher-ups or Voidwatchs threats of embargoa tentative peace was maintained. But it was not an easy peace by any means. Chambers could see shimmering folds of space outlining the borders between countless districts. The Guilds were forming their battle lines, facing each other, even as more and more of their citizenry trickled in. As the population of Lights End overflowed, the best and well-to-do subjects fled down into the Throat, camping out in former factories, processing plants, and generating laboratories. But those places werent built for long-term living, so further down they had to go, into the Spine, where criminals, ruffians, mind-hosts for cheap lobbies, organ carriers, and all the other dregs resided. The traffic was constant and vast, as were the districts. New Vultun had always been a ravenous beast, and comfort belonged only to those who could afford it and keep it in the end. People were dying. That much Chambers already knew. Death rates were up by 650%. A dozen new plagues had been recorded, forcing over 700 districts to go into quarantineor at least make the attempt. And every few minutes, a nuke would go off in the middle of a city, within a megablock, and a few thousand more would die. But even a district across, people would barely notice. More space for the survivors. More space for those who could take it. Cancer could be handled by nanos or bio-thaumics. The rains would handle the burns. And for those who couldnt, for those who simply had no choice, the gutters were the way to go. Down in the gutters, the syndicates reigned as kings. And this was where Chambers found himself, playing the role of king of kings, even if he had no idea what he was doing. Even though he only knew what was going on with the syndicates in the Yuulden-Yang and Sasarchana Sovereignties. True, attacking the Guilds had been funbombing an Omnitech facility here, assassinating a bunch of Seekers there. He knew how to get dirty with the best of them. But what he didnt know was how to organize a civilization. People were flocking to his marketplaces, small oases of stability within the uncaring apocalypsethe ruins that constituted the gutters. But the markets were over capacity, partially connected to the Spine, with merchants and their families trying to establish themselves as priority subjects while overcharging newcomers. A fee that was sometimes worth a pound of flesh, literally. To make matters worse, the Nether was down, completely collapsed, and with it broke New Vultuns economic system, the imp trade stalling to a localized halt. Inner lobbies were no longer accessible, previously stored information possibly lost forever, and long-term communication was utterly disrupted. For most, at least. Chambers still had his Ansible, but even that was failing to provide him with any use. Hed pinged Avo 681 times since the destruction of Scale. Draus fifty, after she went silent. Dentonhe managed about twenty-eight pings before he finally gave up. And as for the others? Well, Cas had been with him all this while. He left to do some scouting earlier but would be back at any time. Marlowe just suddenly showed up in his megablock of the blue, dressed in that fancy trial outfit. She looked shell-shocked all to shit and went hard with the drugs for a while before she actually started talking to him. She, presently, was one of the few non-Chambers sophonts in the demiplanehad been a help cutting that recruitment mem-con earlier. Least the remaining Incubi could still do stuff like that. The rest of the cadre? All the others? Fucking lost. And so was Chambers. Looking to his copies, Chamber sighed and placed the vial of Numb on the table and grimaced. Cant fucking do this, he muttered under his breath. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Not like the way youre thinking, you degenerate. But yeah, shes a... shes a good partner. Reliable. Bit cold, Chambers said. Its a positive quality for a spy, Cas replied. Running his fingers through his thick, unkempt hair, Cas sighed. Theres something else. The Nethers come down, but weve also seen things out on the streets. Things that dont make sense. What kinds of things? Saw a father kiss his kid on the head, Cas elaborated. Saw another block sealed by the Guilders. Rash quarantine measures. So... Chambers continued. These two were separate incidents. No one caught the Wombrash when the father did what he did. Nothing happened at all. What? Marlowe said, blinking. All the Chamberses in the room were staring at Cas now. You sure you Chambers started. I can play the memory back a few more times. I know what I saw. He rubbed his face. That wasnt all. Was vibrating through vents. Came upon some other... uh, developments. Think some people have been getting intimate. Physically. New refugees in the gutters, mostly. Ah shit, Chambers groaned. Where? Cas just shook his head. Nothing happened with them either. Silence. Utter silence. What? Marlowe repeated. She shot up from her seat. Are you saying... I dont know what this means, Cas answered. Far as I can tell, the Rash is active in certain places and absolutely dormant in others. Then Avo mustve done something, Chambers said. He didnt dare to hope. He did his best not to think about Kae, about what mightve befallen her. She... she wasnt dead. If Avo wasnt dead, and if Avo had a planthe half strand always had a planthen maybe... maybe she could be brought back. Maybe this was a sign. He needed to.... He needed to test this. Alright. Give me a second. Ill be right back. Cas stared at him. You sure? Yeah. I mean, I did it all the time before. Worse case I suffer a torturous death and resurrect, right? The Columner opened his mouth and then closed it. An appreciative look came over him. Youre a regular martyr, Aedon Chambers. Someones gotta get dirty, Chambers quipped back. Alright. Lets see this. Lets see. You guys stick around. Marlowe shot him a worried look. Hey. Be careful, alright. Chambers chuckled. Sorry. I probably wont. Then, with a thought, he adjusted the settings for his room, and the frequency shaping the plane diverged into two tones. One continued, maintaining the space his companions occupied. The other carried him to a secluded cube shaped from darkness. Only he, himself. And also the Fucktopia. A grumble of fire sounded inside him. And the Bioigniter. Couldnt forget his original Heaven. Im right here with you, buddy, the Fucktopia said, placing a comforting cock on his shoulder. Thanks, Fucktopia, Chambers said. I dont know how to say this, but Im glad youre awake, and Im glad youre here with me. Im glad Im here with you, too. Another crackle of flame sounded within Chambers, a note akin to jealousy, but mostly just wanting him to remember it existed and also that it wanted to combust some flesh. Yeah, youre really nova too, Bioigniter. Dont worry, well blow some shit up soon. But right now... right now, I gotta find out about something... And so, with a steadying breath, Chambers disabled his Lustaway phantasmic and accessed a vicarity. THE SOFT MASTERS COLLECTION I ENGAGING HOT-SIMULATION FULL IMMERSION INTO ACTOR [DANNIS STEELHARD] >>01:34:03 Shooting ahead to one of the most intense scenes in the vic where the lustful ghouls tried to break Dannis by electro-torturing his testicles using the electrical energy of an entire Sovereignty, Chambers convulsed as absolute agony exploded through him. Agony and a little something else. A new physical sensation followed. A feeling he almost forgot. His pantsghoul leather and perfectgrew hot and tight. Uncomfortable. He braced for the rash and the spreading of pustules, but just felt... just felt the vic play on. There, in the dark cube, Chambers stood with a painful erection but no homunculi clawing out from his pores. He counted one second. Then two. Then three. And nothing. A lightness filled his body. He was clean. The Wombrash wasnt here! Holy fucking shit, Chambers muttered. Hey Avo, I dont know what you did, you demented half-strand of a rotlick, but I could fucking kiss you right nowIm gonna fucking kiss you when I see you again! And doing that wouldnt even kill them anymore. Chapter 30-2 Half-Chained Love (I) Chapter 30-2 Half-Chained Love (I) No... No, I have no idea... I dont know what to tell you! I barely... Listen. I dont know why everyone on this street is affected by the rash, and why walking across the road makes you clean. I dont. My specialty is in Spatial-Geometrics for Jaus sake. This... theres no one else on standby and I just... the first batch of sacrifices we sent in expressed common symptoms. Sores. Homunculi. Second batch we instructed to walk the distance a street away. Local Ori-Thaum personnel were kind enough to help make an extended tube and push that through the building. He crossed the noted miracle-effect threshold but stayed infected. And then we released some new sinners into the tube and they were fine. So. It takes effect. But it doesnt transfer. At least, past a certain point. It also doesnt go away. The consistency here no longer makes any sense. I need more assistance. We need to find a Biomancy specialist. Someone from the No-Dragons, maybe. I know theyre your enemies but... this affects everyone. Have Voidwatch act as a neutral guarantor or something. Something. Were on the verge of... I dont know if the rash is ending or evolving or whats happening. But this is important. For now, Seeker, I suggest you keep this block sealed inside a plane while we figure out our next steps. -Agnos Nasu Kalimus 30-2 Half-Chained Love (I) Alright, Chambers said, reappearing next to Marlowe in a sudden instant. The thoughtcaster shrieked and curled back in her chair. Alright. Woo! Its cured. I mean, its cured over fucking here, but yeah! Im clean, consangs! Clean as can be! Chambers pumped his fist high and gave an undulating cheer. Eyes wide, pants only half-pulled up, forehead dripping with sweat, and body shaking, Chambers looked like a Joyfiend halfway between a high and withdrawal. Which made things easy for Cas to figure out. The Columners expression contorted into slight disgust as he shook his head. Christ, Chambers, you serious. Did you seriously just I needed to be sure! Chambers roared, pointing a hand at Cas, who flinched back, trying to ignore the smell. I needed to go all the way. Thats what it means to conduct an experiment. Thats what it means to put yourself on the edge. Please tell me you used tissues or something, were gonna get hit with... fuck, I dont even know what kind of penalties the Easy Armistice might have for this. Its probably been years since someone left their uh, material here. Never mind that shit, Chambers repeated. Its confirmed. No homunculi. Im clean? He let out a breath and sobered up. Im... I m clean... Im... He grimaced slightly. He got so caught up in the sensations that the full weight of what this meant only just caught up to him. Fuck me, Cas. People are going to figure out real soon. And when they do... Wait, you said there were places in New Vultun that still had ongoing cases. Yeah. Random spots. Blocks. Streets. Even a specific floor for a random building in the gutters. If theres a connection between them, I cant make it. One of the Chambers-copies at the end of the table looked between Cas and Chambers, coughing. So... wait... did number one tug himself. Other members from the Council of Fuck scoffed and cursed at the mans lateness. What? Gods, Im one slow motherfucker sometimes, another Chambers copy said. So... parts of the city are just entirely Rashless now, Marlowe asked, her voice still heavy with skepticism. Most, Cas said. Thats way it looks to me. Cant say anything about whats going on inside the Substance but out here, thats how things are looking. Chambers bit his lip and activated his Ansible once. He almost reflexive called for Avo, but instead, he sought out one of the few Minds he knew he could rely on. A micro-wormhole triggered in Chambers exocortex implant, and after a few moments of waiting, connection was established, and Calvinos virtual form materialized in his cog-feed. {No, Aedon, Im afraid I still havent gotten in touch with} {Not about that, Cal. Wombrash. You know about whats happening? Cas just got back in and uh... Ive done some science here.} {Yes. Your biometrics indicate recent physiological occurrences. Am I safe to assume you have used herself as subject in a most enjoyable experiment.} {For the city,} Chambers insisted. {Of course. I have never insinuated otherwise. But yes, Aedon. We are still trying to establish a clear understanding of the developing situations across the city, but beyond the threshold of the Substance, the Heaven of Loves presence has been substantially reduced.} {Nova,} Chambers breathed. {Listen. I want a favor. I want... I want you to cast me what you have on areas still affected by the Rash. You know. Places really in the shit} {You wish to investigate. You understand that most of them are under Guild quaratine.} {And you know that Kae... we dont know what happened to her. After... after what happened at Scale, shits fucked sideways everywhere. Maybe... maybe this might give us a trace or something. I dont know. Might just find some clues.} A long silence followed. Calvinos sun-shaped form froze and tilted slightly as if in contemplation. {Look. I know... I know things might be... I know she might be gone. Im not... but we dont know for sure, and Avo still here, and Draus said} {I do not think it will be difficult for you to get access to some of these locations,} Calvino replied. Data download package incoming... >Accept [Y/N] Chambers accepted without hesitation, and new information flooded into his mind. A block just a forty kilometers away from him was highlighted. Everpeace Tower. A Sang-owned mass tenement block that used to house a fifty thousand high skilled workers. Schematics for its two hundred floors and twenty sections expanded across Chambers vision. A Wombrash outbreak triggered inside its forty-third floor while the Guilds were funneling Citizens in and moving subjects out. Hospitable relocation, they called it. What a load of shit. It was the same deal even now. The Guilders glory greased by lives from the gutter. Even with the world coming to an end, a subject just couldnt stop being kindling for the flame. Least the Guilders were eating shit this time too. Schadenfreude was a decent sauce; could even make bitter filth easy to swallow. {Everpeace Tower has experienced a particularly virulent outbreak. And unlike the others, the range of the Wombrash has actually expanded within its levels. We are uncertain what has caused this level of dynamism and the local Guild representatives are too overstretched to do anything beyond sealing the area behind a demiplane for quarantine. Their official statement is that they have everything under control. Unofficially, we suspect the No-Dragons to be undergoing a severe leadership crisis with multiple factions across their many ministries vying for power now that their Guild has been bifurcated by the Substance. That, and active skirmishes are ongoing between them and Stormtree.} {Yeah, this peace isnt going to last at all,} Chambers said, smacking his lips. {Alright. Thanks a bunch, Cal. Youre the best. And if} {I will patch you through the first moment} And before Calvino could complete his promise, a new Ansible call came through. Caller: [Jelene Draus] A wide grin spread across Chambers face, and he shared the call with Cas as well. This day was just getting better and better. Told you she was too much of a hard sow to get snuffed. Yeah, Cas said, developing a slight smirk of his own. You did say that, didnt you? What? Marlowe interjected, looking between the two men. Whats happening? Why are you two just smiling at each other. Ansible call, Chambers explained. The Reg dodges the Big Nothing once again. And the connection blinked out. And suddenly, Chambers couldnt quite remember who he was talking too. Or why there was a lump in his throat. Fuck... anyone else feeling some kind of allergies coming on? {Kinda get what you mean,} Draus said. {Happens.... Theres somethin then its gone. But yeah. You... remember what you need to do.} Somehow, Chambers did. He had direction. A purpose. A mission. Direction. That was what he lacked on his own. Perspective and awareness. But now, with something, or someone pointing the way... Alright, Chambers said, running his fingers through his dirty mop of hair. Cas. I think we got a run to do. Lesser mes The Council of Fuck exploded into an uproar. Dont fucking call us that, motherfucker This is discrimination! By me, against me! Hey, fuck you, old Chambers, Im going to bust my first goosh into your vial of Numb. Hope you like injecting cum into your veins! Chambers held up his hand, quieting the unruly children. Come on, come on, Im fucking with you. Besides. Im about to go out and do incredibly dangerous, risky, and painful shit in No-Dragon territory. Fuck, Im going to have to lose my balls or get a Neuter-Mask. Meanwhile, you guys get to stick around here pretend to do boss shit. They all shuffled awkwardly. Come the fuck on, guys. Im you. I know what youre going to do. Youre going to pass off the logistical challenges to the techs or the Drauses and basically spent all the time you can hot-simming vics until your walls are white, and your ball are shriveled instead of doing any actual work. Its what Id do. You wanna trade places? A series of quieter mutters and declarations about how true heroes need to focus on the homefront and their districts need them rose. And lo, Aedon Chambers was proven right once more. And that settles it, then. You get busy work and wank time. I go out and do what needs doing. Marlowe Im going with you, she said. The thoughtcaster eyed the other Chambers briefly and shook her head. Its going to smell something horrific here soon, and I dont want to be part of this sausage fest. But we dont mind, Marlowe! A Chambers-copy declared. She snorted under her breath. Yeah. Thats kind of the problem, isnt it? A bunch of dirty bastards, and just one of me. Yeah. Im drugged up right now, but Im not that dumb. Thats a vic Ive seen before. Im coming with you two. Cas and Chambers looked to each other. Uh, Marlowe, Chambers began Sure. You get snuffed, thats your problem. Cas shrugged. Chambers shot the Columner a disbelieving look. Well, you heard the lady. She made up her mind. If she gets herself killed following us, thats her business. But Chambers winced. I... fine...You ever done anything like this before. Tavers told me a few stories, Marlowe replied. Oh, shit, Chambers sighed. Okay. Well. We can... we can take it slow. Relax. I wont be throwing myself in the fire, She said, punching Chambers on the shoulder. Just be doing surveillance or something. I know what Im good for. And what Im not. Probably the only reason Im still alive right now. A huff escaped from Chambers and he threw up his hands. {Alright. Draus. Im going after the shard. Keep you posted on how things develop here.} {Synced. Watch yourself, half-strand. Keep an eye on the other two, too.} {Wow, affection? Am I finally} Jelene Draus has disconnected Chambers giggled. Yeah. No Sleeper. It was definitely her. {Thanks for the data, Cal. And, uh, I might be interested in learning about the Bleaks after this. Just curious. Theyre coming to help us too, right?} {No,} Calvino said, monotone. {No. You will not be interested in learning about the Bleaks. Please avoid inquiring about them again.} Well. That set the tone pretty good. As Chambers reached out into the demiplanes settings with a thought, he selected himself, Cas, and Marlowe before detaching them from the frequency. At once, they plunged back over into baseline reality, and found themselves seated at an alcove table while the rest of the Easy Armistices interior was absolutely filled with people. Havent seen this many Squires, fixers, Necros, and mecs in one place since the last Guild War, Cas mused. Right, Chambers said, stepping out from their reserved spot. Lets go pick up Loves pieces. The other two followed, and Cas kept pace with Chambers. Hey. Chambers. Hm. You were serious earlier. About rather sticking around and just jerking yourself empty, huh? I mean, yeah. So. Why didnt you just command one of them to do it? You know Avo probably gave you some level of influence. They pretty much obey everything you say. Like theyre subsidary minds compared to you. Chambers paused. Yeah. It would be nice to just... you know. But... I guess I just... need to be hard for others right now, and not hard for me. Thats what Avo would want. And thats what Kae might need. Needed. He found Cas staring at him for a good while more before a genuine smile dawned on the mans face. Blessed be scoundrels and perverts. Huh? The Columner reached up and ruffled Chambers hair much like an older brother would. Nothing. Youre turning into good people, Aedon Chambers. Was he? Was this was what that was like? Fuck. No wonder theres so few of em around. That made Cas throw his head back and laugh. Chapter 30-3 Half-Chained Love (II) Chapter 30-3 Half-Chained Love (II) So, then, is the knot of Love severed; a plague shattereda plague remains. Hark! Comes the vessel: a broken man, his pieces paired to the shape of love fallen. And when shard greets shard and two among the countless broken become one, a new path will unfold, and an untruth will stand... That an unworthy vessel for an unworthy city will cast low the shackles of lust, and seed what is for the rebirth of love... -Stormsparrows Chorus 30-3 Half-Chained Love (II) Once upon a time, about twenty years and a whole lifetime ago, Chambers fuck of a father caught him stealing a sip of beer. Chambers was maybe four at the time, and with all the beatings and concussions he got, the memories werent that clear, but he could remember the taste. Dark, bitter, and more than a little cheap. He could remember the brand. Vishlash. Non-Guilder enterprise, which was why it probably went out of business before long. Anyway. Daddy-o didnt much like little Chambers getting into his cheap hooch, but the old man wasnt that bright either. So, what followed was your typical piece of shit move of forcing your kid to drink the bottle. All of it. More than the taste and the brand name, Chambers remembered what it was like to choke and gag. When there was too much going down his throat. He remembered kicking, coughing, and the tip of the bottle hitting that thing at the back of his throat over and over. Only reason why he didnt choke to death was his grandfather stumbling back in. That interrupted things. And whatever was said ended with dad throwing the bottle at the wall. But choking... thats about how the city looked to Chambers right now. Returning to matter through the loudspeakers of a high-rise bar a block away and a few hundred meters above the now quarantined Everpeace Tower, Chambers, Cas, and Marlowe mingled amongst the day-drinkers and gazed beyond the window. The upper Warrens was always a hive overflowing with people and activity, but he couldnt remember traffic ever being as congested as it was today. They ran from Tiers through the Layers like solid chains, aeros bumper to bumper with horns blaring, flanked by golems for security. Meanwhile, drones filled up every inch of space that remained beyond the sky lanes drifting slowly in their defensive sorties as they faced distant chains of trafficother Guilds doing the same thing, trailing down like metallic willows. Behind them, a faint, shimmering presence loomed from the edge of the Tiers. The substance was encroaching, seeping closer moment by moment. But that didnt stop people from coming out, going to cafe?s, sitting on their verandas. Well-to-do subjects and long-slumming Citizens studied their new, unfortunate neighbors. In the horizon, a Rendbomb burst, and space itself folded inward like a piece of crushed paper. Every now and again, someone would jump from on high, their bodies splashing apart against passing drones or upon the roof of an unmoving aero. Then, there were the ads. +SPECIAL DEAL! SCHEDULE YOUR OWN SUICIDE APPOINTMENT TODAY AND GET EXCLUSIVE ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME REBATES!+ +YOUR FAMILYS FUTURE. YOUR FINAL PRESENT. SAVE THEIR LIVES. SERVE YOUR GUILDS. EARN YOUR DEATH.+ +EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. ESPECIALLY YOURS. SO CHOOSE STORMTREE TODAY, AND WELL MAKE SURE ITS PUT TO PROPER SERVICE.+ Suicide promos were ceaseless. Even more than before. Chambers saw plenty of those everyday when he lived in the gutters or the Spine, but the Throat and Lights End were pristine territory. Where the useful wager-slave were. Guess desperate times increased the recruitment range. War was about to kick off anytime, after all. Fuck thats a lot of fugees, Chambers muttered under his breath. Dont ever remember them coming from on top, though. Cas snorted. Yeah, well, the entire citys technically theirs. Theyll just push the locals out of their houses and take whatever they want. Theyve done it before, theyre doing it now. Back during the Second Guild War when Highflame was sacking and burning their way across the Sang territories, plenty fled downward too. Subjects that tried to stay were met with bribery. Then gaussfire. This isnt a new song. Colors are going to fucking Color, Marlowe sneered. Of the three, she fit the current scene the most. She wore a holovest sprouting floral patterns around her body while her hair seemed to glow a dark red beneath the somber ambiance of the bar. The vibrating waves of bass furled around Cas, subservient to his powers, while the other customers present danced their woes away, throwing down cups of liquor and vials of Numb one after another. They came to survey the Everpeace Tower, and found it a uniquely veiled patch of space among the other structures in the area. Being a Sang-controlled district, most structures were cybernetic in design and vertically built. Tall towers made to resemble blossoming trees sported floral rooftops, branches that doubled as bridges between blocks, and public transit designed from a district-spanning circulatory system. Chambers Bioigniter could feel the pulsating of a heart within all the major structures. Techno-thaumic reactorswith a biological twist. And then there were the organisms drifting through the air. Calvino said those were viruses meant to tag everyone present within the district for future tracking needs. Realizing that, Chambers took special care to redirect the viruses away from he and his cadre. No need for that. A protective shroud stretching some ten kilometers in radius sealed away the quarantined area. Swarms of heavily armored bioforms swam through the air, guarding a blood-red security grid just behind. The largest among them were chimeric mixtures of Deepmaw Whale and a Queen Bee, their large bulbous bodies festooned with small bio-spawner sacs on their undersize. The primary defensive bioforms used these leviathans as minor bases of operation. There should be a Fleshtech inside the Whalequeens too, Cas said, narrowing his eyes. I count twenty so far. Thats some pretty heavy security for just a quarantine, but no Knots. Maybe theyre overstretched? Chambers asked. Probably. Getting some more imaging from Sunrise. Things are kicking off in the dark between the No-Dragons and Sanctus. Hidden plagues are sweeping across the border. And a few Chronoframes were spotted by exo-stellar imaging. Calvino doesnt think theyre going to go loud, but a few blocks might go up in flame. A couple million deaths before days over. Like every other day before, huh? Chambers said. The Columner shot the people in the bar a disdainful look. Sure seems like were trying to keep it that way, doesnt it? Cas mightve judged them, but Chambers couldnt. Frankly, he still had a hard time reconciling who he was now to whom he had been just months ago. He would have given anything to have the lives of someone here. Lights End. What a nice existence. Not so many people trying to snuff you;, betters drugs; a view of the sky; actual quality services... But he was in the war now. And the people around here didnt even seem willing to face the world out their windows. They had minds and bodies and all that other shit, but they didnt use them. And they dulled their minds to hide inside themselves. Like Chambers did with his vics. Like everyone did to hide from the pain in their lives. Damn fools. So was he. No hiding from the Substance, though. That was coming whether these people liked it or not. They could dance today away, and drink tomorrow as well, but come a time after that, the war would still be on, and the sky will fall. Then, it would be down into the Throat, the Spine, the gutters... And then what? Were they going to just abandon the city? Where was everyone going to run? New Vultun used to be like a ravenous animal. Now, it was more a nu-dog with its head cut off, legs still kicking but the path long-lost. The Guilds were scrambling. But the people just tried to pretend nothing was happening. Chambers didnt know if he wanted to join them or scream in their faces about what was coming. He settled for envying them instead. Ignorance was bliss. But Ignorance also meant someone else decided your fate. And Chambers? He saw too much to go back now. There was no comfort in the passing pleasure. Only a delay of dread. Best get on with being terrified and do the right thing while pissing himself. Using his Domain of Biology, he spent a few hours tracking the bioforms. Cas vanished into the noise again to do some up-close scouting while Marlowewell, she started socializing. Asking questions. Speaking to the bar owner and chatting up subjects and Citizens alike for insights. The way she could just move between the Tiersfolk and the gutterborn was something else. And they took to her as well. She made them laugh. She started arguments and somehow managed to get those she pissed off to buy her drinks. And Chambers got the distinct impression she was getting far more useful intelligence through her methods compared to him or Cas. He didnt know how she managed it; when he spoke to most people, he was plenty good at making them leave him alive. That was about the only true social engineering skill he had. She seemed good with all people. And that... He wondered if he could have been like her if they swapped lives. How is it? Marlowe asked. Its uh... not bad, Chambers smiled. It wasnt a big smile, but it was more than nothing. Thanks. How much do I Fuck you, Im paying, Marlowe cut him off. Looking around the room, she shrugged. People here are flicking imps around like theres no tomorrow anyhow. Might not be. Deep Nethers gone, so the stocks, bonds, markets, and all that other shit is fucked, fucked, fucked. No one knows if theyre rich or poor, and word out on the street is that martial law will becoming into effect soon. And also, a Dowager might be coming to the Warrens to form a new bureau. You got all that just by talking to people? Chambers asked. Yeah. Rumors and exaggerations, but hey, thats what the people here are saying. Marlowe shrugged. Most people here worked in blood-tech, bioform design, biofarming, or accounting. Accounting? Everyone needs a number cruncher. They make the world go round. Chambers snorted. Clads would beg to differ. Marlowes expression flattened. Clads will break the world and look around afterward, wondering where theyre going to find dinner. Or a reason to live. They both fell silent. Chambers coughed. So. Youre good at talking to people, huh? It''s what I do for a living? Her eyes swirled up at an angle and she frowned. What I did. Not sure if the FATELESS Thoughtcast is coming back on after recent events. Eh. Well fix Avo and Avo will fix it. The way it goes. Marlowe studied him for a moment. You really, really trust him, huh? More than I trust myself, Chambers said without hesitation. Shit, if he were here, half this stuff might be fixed already. Unfortunately, what we got is me. And me. And the cultist. Threes a pity party. Marlowe smirked. I didnt mean it like that, Chambers winced. Yeah, you did. But Ive been there. I know. You do? Yeah, she said, nodding. Ive uh... I know that look on your face. Ive had it before. The why the fuck am I here look. Why me and not someone else. And suddenly, Chambers felt very naked, very vulnerable. He skipped the straw and took a gulp of his drink. He needed more joy right about now. You sure youre not a Necro or something. Because Im feeling a bit mind-fucked right now. Youre a real sweet-talker, arent you Aedon? He tried his best to stop staring at her lips. He failed. No. Not a Necro. Just thought you could use some company at the end of the world. Yeah? Well. Thanks. I, uh, I think I found a way into the plane. While you were talking and stuff. Chambers squared his shoulders. No shit? Hows that? He told her what he observed and illustrated his plan to intrude using the bioforms. She looked considerably more impressed than he expected. Wait, you can do all that? Yeah, Chambers muttered. Canon of Biology. Thats fucking nova. I bitch about Clads but... whats it like? Chambers paused. What was being a Clad like? He angled his head as he looked for the words. It was like... being able to push back against the world when it pushes you. Its like moving the unmovable. Its like... like you actually have weight. Real weight. Weight the world cant deny. Its like you matter for the first time in your life. And that youll be here no matter what. Even in the face of death. Its like feeling real. Like a real person. When he finished, Marlowes expression turned absolutely blank. That good, huh? No. Better. And worse. I wouldnt be here if I wasnt just a lucky piece of shit. Just the right guy who fucked with the right rotlick. And what makes the Citizens anymore or less lucky than you? Marlowe asked. I didnt ask to be born. Neither did you. Were just here. None of this is real. Were just... shitty people. Here. Making up stories on why were the lucky ones. Why we deserve it. No one deserves it. No one has it coming. But it happens. It just does. I didnt ask to be born. And something about her seemed hurt. Hurt in a way Chambers almost understood. You too, huh? Was it your dad or your mom? Marlowe leaned back and cocked her head. Yes. Chambers guffawed. He couldnt help it. Now, see, thats how I know youre a Guilderwhatever I got, you had to have more. She wasnt prepared for his statementwas taking another sip from her drink before it sprayed out of her nose. For a few moments, she covered her face, shaking. You alright. She gave him a thumbs up. Which turned into a middle finger. Outside, a flash cut into the room, bathing everyone in shadow. Not a few kilometers away, a mushroom cloud rose and part of the district came asunder. But people just kept dancing and drinking, because though thousands probably just died, that was far away, and this was here. Marlowe giggled. And it was a melody. The apocalypse could wait a little while longer. Chapter 30-4 Half-Chained Love (III) Chapter 30-4 Half-Chained Love (III) Well, if thats the deal I got, thats the deal I got, right, Veylis? I kill other me. I get my consangs back? I get the rotlick back? My life gets better, and I get to fuck and snort and be Steelhard? Yeah. Yeah, alright. Ill play grav-ball. Ill play. Yeah. I know Im the alternate. I know Im time-made. But fuck. Who''s to say whats real? Its all an illusion. Whoever wins decides whats real. Whoever wins gets to give us whatever life they decide. My choices are pretty limited if thats the case. Never much did like myself anyway. So. This shouldnt be that hard. Just gotta channel the old man is all. -Aedon Chambers, Fuckbringer (Anathema) 30-4 Half-Chained Love (III) Wait, what? Both of them? With Shotin? The Planefucker? Chambers looked on at Marlowe with wide eyes and disbelief. He could understand the words, but they were making any sense to him. She just kept nodding. Yep. Both of them. At the same time. The half-strand would sneak out from one room and then go straight to the next. I caught his ass that one Salvation DayI tell you, I fucking screamed! I thought we were being raided or something. My familywere arms dealers, right? And I just went for the nearest piece I had on me and the next thing I know mom and dad were beating-feet out of both their bedrooms, both naked! And then I get tackled at the same time while Shotins just standing there frozen Jaus, Chambers gasped. What the fuck. Yeah. I know! Anyway, me, mom, and dad go tumbling down the stairs and he ends up catching us using his plane and keeping us from getting hurt. By this point, my younger brother is out too, half-asleep and trying to figure out whats going on. Mom and dad are already screaming at each other, reflexive blaming already kicking off. And then there was me. Sixteen and stupid as shit. But still not stupid enough to miss all the obvious signs. And the fact that Shotins cock was hanging out from his unzipped trousers. Iuh... Jaus. Yeah. Anyway, that piece of shitthat motherfuckerhe looks at me, shrugs, and then interrupts my parents, and I shit you not, he says: Listen... I know your policy on threesomes, but... Utter disbelief gripped Chambers. She was bullshitting him. There was no world where Shotin could break into a house, cheat on both the husband and the wife, and then go this far. This was a drama victhe kind of shit you would only see in the media. No. Stop. Come on, Marlowe. Its not an episode. Im not bullshitting you! Its just... its so stupid, but it happened. Shit like this happens all the time. The Tiers are a fucking carnival of goofy horseshit, but all the clowns are self-important cunts who keep getting to ruin other peoples lives. It would be funny if it wasnt so goddamn miserable. Marlowe sighed and leaned back against the bar. She looked up at the strobing lights dancing down from the ceiling, the flashing bright splashing against her augmented skin and bathing her in a glossy sheen. There was something pensive about her expression. Amused, disgusted, offended, and nostalgic all at the same time. This why you hate Guilders? Chambers asked. The other ones, I mean. What? No. This is just the best part of being a Color. Just... stupid bullshit that belongs in the tabloids. But it''s part of your life. Even if it fucks you up. Never a dull day. Not even a dull minute. Then, what did it for you? Marlowe wiggled her nose and looked down at her empty cup. Well. I was around twenty. Even dumber than when I was sixteen. Thought I was going to change the Tiers with my hard-hitting exposes and show the other Colors the truths that were being hidden. Believe you me, Aedon: I was an arrogant and silly shit. Still am in some ways. You always wanted to be a media? Yeah. Well, not a media. A real investigator. Impartial. Honest. The kind of person in those old we are one ads back when Jaus was still around. I even thought about being a diplomat. Submitting an application to be a Voidwatch liaison and ending the war. All that hope. All those dreams. She flicked her cup, and the emptiness rang. Anyway. I ended up coming down to the Warrens to report on the exploitation and unlawful coercion of human sacrifices. There was a Syndicate tied to Ori-Thaum at the time. Real fucked up outfit. Targeted Kosgans specifically. They were just operating in open daylight and no one was doing anything about them. Chambers shifted uncomfortably as he took another measured sip of his own drink. Hed gone far slower than Marlowe did when it came to the booze. So, uh. Howd that turn out? Well, I kept trying to get Ori-Thaum to do something. But after they blew me off for the four thousandth time that year I decided to get hands-on and do some accidental leaks to generate some outrage. I knew the outfit I was working with at the time wouldnt take kindly to that, so I decided to go hands-on, you know. Moonlight. Alone? Chambers blinked. Oh, no. He thought she was being self-hating when she said she was dumb. But she might actually be right. Into the Warrens? Yeah. And all the way down into the gutters. Young Marlowe wasnt just stupid, she was a practicing suicidal maniac. Iwhathow are you still alive? She giggled and her voice sounded like jingling bells. Beats me. Favor and the decency of others, I guess. I had some graft-work done so I could end up looking like a refugee and just started wandering. It kept getting worse. Chambers was enraptured and horrified in equal measure. And then I finally got what I wanted, she said, nodding to herself grimly. Got grabbed. But, uh, wasnt like in the mainstream vics. Didnt expect the enforcers to hit me with a goddamn lightning gun. Oh, yeah, the Popper, Chambers muttered under his breath. Marlowe paused. The what? Its called a Popper. Its a Guttergrade techshit most cobbled together from downed aeros and other parts left strewn about after a war. Its a pretty easy thing to make. You just need a battery, some magnetic panels and some other shit you can get out of wrecks. They dont jump far, but twenty meters is still something. Usuallys used to keep slaves in line. Spark one and save the battery for the others, is the way it went. A silence followed. Marlowe was staring blankly at him. Chambers suddenly realized his past life was leaking over without him noticing. Fuck. Uh-oh. Uh, yeah. Anyway. Shit gets nasty and rough and shit in the Warrens. Shitty. Real fucking nasty. Whys it called a Popper? Marlowe asked. Oh, shit, Marlowe flinched. Sorry Fuck it. I get it. Hope she had a good life. Is having. I dont knowI dont care. Or I do, but I dont want to know. But the main point is that it didnt matter. Because I didnt matter. Not me. Not my half-strand dad. None of us. We were all here alone with each other despite all the fucking going around. But not your ex. No, he was someone because of you. Because he fucked a Color? Marlowe whispered. Because you cared to give his story an end! You think I wouldve gotten an end if Avo didnt just bounce into my lap? If I wasnt just lucky. Fuck, Im typical. Im basic. Im a deltaware arm transplant on the warehouse shelf. Every fucking kid in the Warrens got some of me in them, and the other way around too. But before I got taken by the ghoul, this was it. I was going to feel good. I was going to love plenty. Love my Dannis vics. Love my drugs. Love making imps. Love, love, love. And then, I was going to die. And there would be nothing after that. I would actually get to be alone in the dark forever. And that was it. No story. Just a loose assortment of shit. He held out a hand, and it alternated between a fist and palm. He didnt know what he was going to say next, but there was a fire in his gut, and it had to come out. I would have loved to be unloved by someone like you. And thats why... thats why Avo he... A laugh escaped Chambers. Just slipped out. He treated me like shit, at the start. Worse than a mutt. I was just supposed to a puppet he was going to hack through. And that was fine. I mean, it wasnt, but fuck, thats the way of things, right? Use, get used. But then... then I did get used. And he didnt just throw me away. He kept me alive. He didnt love me. He barely tolerated me. But he cared. For whatever fucked up ghoul reason he cared. And the words found Chambers in the end. And... thats what made me a person. When who I was affected someone else that they decided I was worth keeping from death. The beats continued hammering above, and Chambers heart beat in rhythm to the noise. Only then did he catch himself at the end of his outburst, and a faint blush crept over his face. Fuck, was he drunk? Why did he say so much? How did he let himself get into that rant? Rubbing his face, Chambers shook his head. Im... sorry, I dont know where that came from. Just... guess Ive got that post-jack-off brain fog. Slowly, something almost like a smirk pulled at the corners of Marlowes lips. I think that happens before, not after. Really. Fuck. Not for me, I guess. I might just be special. Yeah. You might just be Chambers. Cas voice boomed from behind. Jaus! Fuck! Chambers flinched forward. Marlowe threw her head back and snickered. Same response. He almost glared at her, but chose to face Cas instead. Cas. Hey. Consang. Hows the... hows the scouting... Kinda shit, Cas grunted. He waved at the bartender. Skuldswill. Undiluted. A series of mutters sounded around them. Some of the Scaarthians started taking bets on how soon it would take Cas to die. I managed to pull some intel through the soundwaves: got a limited window. They have a cadre coming in soon. Dowager with them. There is a team of Agnosi on-site observing the outbreak, and theyre talking about extraction and storage. Shit, Chambers said. How soon? Dont know. But if were going to do something, we might want to do it soon or kill this run. This things done in a hurry. I dont like it, but if we lose this fragment Fuck that. Its ours. Avo needs it. Were taking it. I got a way in. Cass drink arrived, sliding on the table. It went right past him as he arched his brows at Chambers. You do? What? Why do you look surprised? Chambers said, offended. Someone else down along the bartop snatched Cas drink, sniffed it, gagged, threw up between their legs, and then drank it anyway. This was where New Vultun was at, apparently. Chambers, listen, consang, the faither said, looking awkward. He eyed Marlowe and took a step closer. Youve been... improving a lot, and I know that youre willing to do some twisted shit no one else is for the cause but... you werent exactly the professional type before, you know. I... Chambers grunted. Yeah, but... people change and shit. Yeah. I know, and thats great. I just kind of figured youd use the time to... He switched to a thoughtcast. +Try and get to know Marlowe.+ As the ghosts snaked the thought through Chambers Meta, he went still andwell, yeah, that kinda happened, but he was actually being super professional before that. Well. Ilisten, we have a way in through the bioforms. They rotate, and I think I can meld us into one of the little ones so we can smuggle ourselves using the bigger ones. Sounds disgusting and miserable. Im in. Tell me more. But before Chambers did, he sent a thoughtcast. +Wait, you expected Id just be flirting with Marlowe and you just... accepted it?+ Cas paused. +Yeah.+ +But... why?+ +Chambers... the fucking world is ending. And you two seemed like you needed a moment. Thought it might be good for your heart.+ Then nothing. Nothing but a weight in Chambers chest and a strange set of emotions, rushing across his face. Boys? Marlowe said, leaning in next to them. What are you whispering about? Chambers coughed. Just... some mem-data about the run. Trading what we know. He stared on at Cas. +Hey, Cas.+ +What?+ +Thanks for caring.+ +Dont mention it. Now, fucking ruin my day by telling me how were going to get our flesh fused with some Sang-made freak of nature.+ Chapter 30-5 Half-Chained Love (IV) Chapter 30-5 Half-Chained Love (IV) Welcome to the No-Dragon sim-series, applicant. As you go through the upcoming coursework, you will learn the following major items on the syllabus. Exomath-penetration and specialized Nether-breaching techniques against alt-consciousness entitiesConvention enemies: Bioforms, bio-rigs, viruses, bloodgrafts, shapeshiftersPreventative measures against the Dragon-CurseNotable No-Dragon Heavens and thaumaturgic technologiesNotable enemy Godclads and Dowagers Foundations: The No-Dragons possess neither the overwhelming industrial might nor Ensouled superiority possessed by Highflame. They also dont have the aberrant technologies and counter-network capabilities utilized by Omnitech. What they do have, however, is the means to overwhelm any other Guild through near-limitless logistical capabilities so long as there is a source of organic materials to drawn on and a mastery of the flesh that will leave you warped before you can even respond. The Sangs combat-eunuchs, bioforms, and bestiary of monsters come in practically every shape, design, and capability imaginable and not. And there are more of them every day. Their Heavens and thaumaturgical constructs likewise run the very edge of what can be considered biology, transcending these limits to nightmarish effect. For those of you who have transferred over from the Highflame front, this primer will clarify a few things for you: You will not be prepared. You do not have the endurance. You are not ready to experience the curse. You are not ready for your skin to slip off your bones and tear into your body. You are not ready for the food you eat to decay in an instant or to sprout spatial parasites that leave holes across localized sections of reality. You will not be ready. And you will die in ways you cannot imagine, and will not be able to imagine. Accept that you will require a visit to the Menders. Accept that your Heavens have limits. Accept that this is a new foe, that requires new strategies and deep cooperation with our allies to overcome. Above all, understand that the No-Dragons are not who they present themselves to outsiders. Their destined cycles arent just a curse, but a blessing they can use in combat, and a weapon they can wield against youand your cyclers as well... -Ori-Thaum Seeker Combat Primer Series On Engaging the No-Dragons 30-5 Half-Chained Love (IV) Cas mind shuddered with misery. +You know, I really wish you wouldve just spent all that time hitting on Marlowe. We couldve called the run. We couldve gone somewhere else, done something else+ +Cas, you know you whimper a lot for someone whos supposed to be this battle-hardened cult leader. Its not that bad,+ Chambers replied. +Ive been smelted into a giant bug''s body. I think my eye is somewhere in its ass.+ +I dont think bugs have an ass, consang. Especially not this bug. Its like, engineered for war and shit. But not literally shitting. And also, you dont technically have a nose either, were just organs or something. Like, hidden organs inside its body. Its going fine. Trust.+ Can fully deprive his senses! Burn the ears. The Bioigniters sudden bellow made Cas mind recoil in shock. +No. Bio, dont fucking freak him out anymore. Come on, guy.+Chambers sighed. +Jesus Christ that was loud. It was like someone screaming at me from inside my skin. Do your Heavens talk to you like that all the time?+ +What? No. Bios special. His outside voice is inside. Heh. But Fucktopia is a pretty decent+ +Its a literal wall of dicks.+ +Now, thats just mean.+ Fucktopia sighed. Its okay, Aedon. It is hard for people to understand. We are all chained to our own perspectives. Our own fetishes. The man that gooshes to anal incineration scat is not the same as the lady who likes pelvic organ prolapse BDSM. A sign escaped from Cas. +Holy fuck those are some search items I didnt want to know about, and never want to hear again for the rest of my life. Also... I apologize for my, uh, rudeness, Fucktopia.+ Thank you, Mr. Canduir. You are a good and decent man. +No. Just one that tries. Im just... I dont like getting my body changed is all. Never liked it. Never did. Always preferred being just human.+ Their conversation trailed off there briefly as the two lapsed into silence. Ignorant of the constant chatter happening inside its body, the bee-ape bioform simply flew on, buzzing back toward its corresponding Whalequeen after finishing its route. Infusing themselves into the bioform had been a tricky operation. It ultimately came down to timing. Chambers needed to use his Heaven without getting noticed during or after altering the bioforms biology. Even with the active assistance of the now awakened Bioigniter, combusting himself and Cas into hidden tendrils of flesh and burning that into the passing bioforms flesh was only possible when a Rendbomb required almost all of Chambers cog-cap. Smuggling his and Cas genetic material over into the Whalequeen upon biomass recycling wasnt going to be any easier. Marlowe remained back at the bar, continuing with her social intelligence gathering. She said that she might explore the area around the block of a bit, was more inclined to stay in place until they returned. As for if they didnt return... well, she had her was of getting back down to the gutters. All she needed to do was make contact with one of the Syndicates, and the Council of Fuck would probably see her properly cared for. But that was the worst case scenario, and Chambers had no intention of dying. Not when he was finally free to get to know himself again. Once was not enough. A rumbling groan sounded from the distance as the structure that got nuked a few hours ago finally collapsed in on itself. Chambers felt a final few patterns of Biology wink out inside. People died, nu-pets, and other bits of organic matter. But aside from a few rescue drones spraying dense foam over the building to reduce the spread of radiation and some specialized bioforms dispatched quaratine the area, no one really tried to save the people. And the district itself didnt care. Thousands died in that block. Thousands died every second. Thousands more would die to fuel the war between the Guilds. Thousands, and not nearly enough for the Fifth Guild War. The Everpeace Tower was Sang-made tower. It was supposed to resemble a night big tree with some enamel extending out of its top, forming a sort of inverted pyramid shape. The interior remained of glass, plascrete, and other supporting alloys due to Highflame investments and mixed designs, and as a whole, it looked like your usual upscale residence block in Lights End. Nothing nearly as good as what you migth find in the Tiers, but quality enough. Not some den for aratnids halfway between rubble and fortress, anyhow. Now, a gaping mess of flesh stretched out horizontally along the middle of the structure. The block was large, running kilometers before, but now it was stretched further, and a ghastly sight to behold. An ugly, twisted slit pulsating with tissue and anomalous marrow consumed Chambers attention. It was a chasm of impossible flesh meshed into the surrounding matter. A cage of bones was layered over it, creating a skeletal barricade from easy access. A few hundred accretions dotted the surface of the bonespeople were here. People studying and examining the Rash. Using his Heaven of Biology, Chambers identified some of them to be No-Dragon bio-shaped war eunuchslarge humanoid monsters sporting bladed appendages and shrouded in humming locusts. They stood guard for a few well-dressed Sang interfacing with some others. Agnosi, if Chambers were to guess. A tremble of pressure emanated from within the existential disfigurement eating through the block. As he refined the Whalequeens eyes, he saw that the biomass composing this spreading infection was not merely a sprawl of cancerous flesh, but people. People, fused into the architecture. People, melted into the folds, the outlines of their bodies reaching out, coated within. Thousands twitched within this new expression of the Rash, and more rose to bulge the slick surface of the slit with each passing second. There, between the crevice shone a flicker of light as well. The brightness of Soulfire. The presence of a broken Framea shattered Heaven calling for a new sheathe. And so an impossible beckoning called out to Chambers, commanding him to venture forth into the eldritch valley before him. Aedon... Chambers mind went cold. It sounded like Avo. It sounded like Kae. It sounded like his mom, like Jhred, like Dannis, and like so many more. His name was spoken with such yearning, such want, and such desperate love it scared him. But more than anything else, it charted his path forward. They needed to be inside. And he needed to find that shard before anyone else decided to claim it for their own means. +Cas,+ Chambers said. +Im going to burn us free when we get close. You ready to take over?+ +Always. Chambersdo you feel+ +Yeah. I know. Did it say your name too.+ Cas went silent. +Yeah. And it was like love itself was speaking to me.+ +Cant seem to avoid the creepy fucking runs, huh? Avo would have loved this shit. Well, hes the reason why were here so...+ Chambers trailed off. No point in ruminating. Their bus drew close, drifting over to what seemed like a large bulbous island in the air. There were four others of its kind, and it was an entity filled with gas and bursting with nutrients. It gave a deafening warble before extending its tubes down to interface with the Whalequeen Chambers was using. +3... 2...+ Chambers counted, preparing his transition into Cas Heaven. There were some drones patrolling here as well. Different from the ape-bees the Whalequeen spawned. These ones were long and flat, with far too many eyes on the top and bottom of their bodies. They drifted above and below the areafull spectrum monitoring. But they werent going to see anything. Not if Chambers did this right. +...1!+ He and Cas slipped out within one of tthe Whalequeens spawning pods in a burst of sparks. A half-second later the Columner strummed his guitar-arm and they vanished into a bubble of vibrating sound. As they shot out from inside the large bioform, it warbled in confusion, noting the strange feeling as tendrils reached down to sink into its flesh to being genetic exchange and caloric refueling. Through the air, Chambers and Cas traveled as a near-silent echo. The slight plucks of a string accompanied their movements and there was a faint sense that they were beyond notice. Unnaturally so. Like someone was keeping them wrapped in shadows. So far, they hadnt encountered any hostile Godclads or golemsno directly clashing Domains. With Chambers Bioigniter running at near zero-burn, things had gone as well as they could have, but the gig wasnt over. Not even close. Odds were that they would need to go loud in some way if something happened inside the building. Which was when the Fucktopia came out. But with how the rash was expressing itself here.... Chambers wasnt even sure if the Fucktopia would generate the same effects that they needed. I dont either, Fucktopia admitted. But using me here will do something. Something Im not sure about. Be careful, Aedon. Think it might be a bit too late for that, Chambers though. As they passed closer to the enormous blockade of bones sealing the exterior of the block, Cass strings vibrated over dormant groups of No-Dragon warforms. +No... no...+ Cas muttered. +What?+ Chambers asked. +Im listening in on their conversations using sound waves,+ Cas explained. +Nothing useful so far. They have a First Daughter here talking to the Agnosi. Apparently, they are trying to get the Agnosi to extract the rash but the thaumaturgists have no idea how. Its also spreading at an alarming rate. Consuming more matter, force, sound, even space. What theyre calling the Fold is growing larger. They think it''s some kind of anomalous representation of a... well...+ +Were literally about to go cunt-diving,+ Chambers muttered. +Yeah. Thats a way of phrasing it.+ Once more, Chambers thought back to the bright flickers escaping the valley of tissue. The people trapped within. Reaching out. Not struggling. The feeling of love and belonging. Was that going to be them soon? +Cas?+ +Yeah?+ +You got any of them good prayers to teach, because...+ +Yeah. I know. Fuck.+ Chapter 30-6 Lovebringer Chapter 30-6 Lovebringer Hearts Aligned: Creates a pathway using a tether composed of feelings of love or lust. A gateway will form on both entities allowing them to swap places or immediately arrive beside their bonded one. Should both sides consentor if this relates to an individual and an inanimate objecta superimposition of ontologies can follow, allowing both to temporarily merge in a single entity in mind and flesh. Hubris: Should either side fall out of love while this canon is active, the Heaven will suffer moderate Backlash (25%). -Canon of the Remembrance 30-6 Lovebringer Slipping past the No-Dragons perimeter didnt take that much effort from Cas. Overstretched as the Guilders were and severed from the bulk of their forces, they just didnt have the assets to conduct proper surveillance. Not when they still had a war to fight in the meantime. Not when they still needed to protecting their precious citizens. Upon crossing over into the threshold of the fold, however, Chambers also suspected this was a deliberate choice on the part of the No-Dragons and the Agnosi. After all, what kind of half-strands would be stupid enoughor fucking mad enoughto raid a Wombrash-infested megablock where the rest of existence was going to shit? And for what reason? What purpose? A rival Guild would just rupture the plane at most. But that would be something along the lines of direct action. What Chambers and Cas were trying to do would be incomprehensible and unpredictable without context. And even in context, it was pretty close to the edge of insanity. Drawing closer to the lip of the twisted valley of flesh, Chambers only felt the want inside him grow, building higher to a desperate need. He needed to enter. He needed to see what awaited inside. He needed to join Aedon, the Fucktopia said, jolting Chambers out of his fugue. +Augh. Fuck. Thanks, consang,+ Chambers croaked mentally. +What?+ Cas asked, +Nothing. Was talking to my Heaven of Dicks.+ Cas just chuckled about that. +Somehow, thats becoming a normal statement to me now. What the fuck is my life?+ +Insane. Questionable. On the verge of disappearing into a giant, eldritch cunt made created from a carpet of flesh with thousands of human and who-the-fuck-knows-what bodies bulging from beneath its surface? A cunt that neither of us might be able to resist when we actually get deep enough?+ +Yeah. All that. Thanks, Chambers. I really needed more anxiety.+ +Dont mention, consang. Listen. If I start getting weird... you do me. Then yourself, okay.+ A shivering feeling of strain leaked over from Cas mind as they slipped through the opening. Immediately, the presence it inflicted continued to build. +Sure. I cant promise it wont be the other way. Im only human too.+ Somehow, the insides of the fold was worse than the outside. Where it was just a stretch of vaguely outlined bodies hidden beneath what looked like slick pink flesh, the space within was the very definition of fucked. Well, the long aftermath of getting fucked, Chambers supposed. Here, thousands upon thousands more people dangled down from furrowed walls, their naked bodies withered and drained. Most of their heads and upper torsos were missing, consumed by a chain of umbilical fusing them to the walls. The bottoms of their bodies throbbed and parted. Long strings of exposed tissue continued to distend as balls of mangled bodies swung through the center of the room, coming together to form a lattice that could best be described as a fucked-up semi-stillborn-baby-plus-cancer-flesh-cake. +For the love...+ Cas grunted. His wards shook as they sustained a blow from the traumatic sight. +Im going to need to see a mender after this. To get my mind scrubbed.+ +Yeah,+ Chambers said, shivering slightly. He had some messed up tastes, but this was getting to a point where even he found it less thrilling and more gross and weird. +Man, why cant the Fallen Heaven of Love give us anything nice? Like a demiplane of tits or dicks or thighs or something. Why is this shit always fucked up mutilated babies?+ +Probably because thats what the citys been denied,+ Cas replied grimly. +New Vultunites lost the ability to breed. Lost the ability to even hold their own children. I think that might cast a larger shadow than just sexual want and fetishes.+ +Maybe. Hey, speaking of, you think well be seeing any reinforcements from the outside? You know. From the other megas, for the Guilds?+ +Probably. But not nearly enough to matter.+ Cas did his best to avoid a net of glistening sinews. A series of nubs that revealed themselves to be barely formed infant head stared blankly at nothing in particular. Their sockets were hollow and dark, eyeballs unformed. Well. That hinted Avo was present in some shape or form. The rotlick probably ontologically ate those before they could truly come to be. +The Border Wall is still up. I suspect the Guilds will be making a scramble to siege and take them when they can. When. If so, maybe. The situation in the city is pretty south of fucked, so theyll probably get to that when the substance pushes us out or the fighting reaches a stalemate. The other megas will be warring against each other. I expect them to spend the next few years fighting it out in the Sunderwilds. Except we probably dont have the time for that anymore.+ +But wheres the Ladder going to return if the Gatekeeper is snuffed and existence is already all jacked up?+ Chambers asked. +I... Dont know. One problem at a time.+ As they lapsed back to silence, Chambers turned his thoughts to enduring the discomfort. He tried thinking about things that werent love related or sexual. The latter was the bigger problem for him. Now that he thought about it, Chambers almost never went too long without thinking about something deviant or messed up. It was practically how he was definedhis coping mechanism for so long. He liked some other stuff too. Making imps. Money. Guns. Standard street-scum shit, but like, those were just because he was in the life. Tangible hobbies and all. That made Chambers consider who he mightve been if he had been born a Color. Now there was a weird thought. Him, a Color like... Well, Marlowe wasnt like other Colors, was she? Sure, they all looked pretty nice, but she had her own thing goingand a special attitude too! Her lips also looked really nice. Why couldnt he stop thinking about her lips? Those were the first pair of nicely moisturized Guilder lips he saw. Shit, Kae had Ah. Aw, fuck. Well, feeling like shit was a good counter against Love. Kae. Was part of her in this mess? Was she trapped somewhere in this nightmare, one body among the many, dying over and over? She mightve been the first person to call him Aedonto treat him like an actual person among the cadre. Sure, Avo and Draus kept him alive, but they werent exactly people. Much as he liked being included in a group, he was still different from them. He was still human. And so was Kae, despite the being a Guilder and an Agnos. The way she hurt and cried was something he understood, and he remembered the anger he felt when Zein went for herhe hoped Thousand hand was fucking lost for good. Chambers tried a few more times, straining against impossible before Cas gripped the back of his arm. Chamberscome on, Cas said, gently. Come on. Shes... Chambers looked at Kaes remains for the first time. Genuinely looked. Despair consumed him. Here was the truth he felt, the truth he knew, and the truth he hoped against. Where Kae Kusanade was, irreparably broken. Aw, fuck, Chambers moaned. The strength went out of him like air squeezed out of burst lung. He looked down at the one he failedthe one they all failed. She was one of them. She had done everything she could, suffered so much, only for this to be her head. Only for this to be her final fate. Kae. Fuck. Im so godsdammed sorry. Im... Im... He knelt down and cradled her broken sheath. The parts missing from her were sharp and jagged. It was like she was a piece of broken glass than a person. Soulfire hissed out from her many wounds, and she stared on blankly at him with the half-face she still had. It hurt to meet her eye, but he did. And Chambers didnt have any words to say. He tried to find something, but he was empty inside. Empty because he was a vacuous person. Just porn and substance and nothing but that. Nothing to offer even now. Im sorry. That was all he had. The first of his tears escaped him. They dropped onto Kaes cheek and rested there. He closed his eyes and a few more fell thereafter. Closing his eyes, he knelt and there and just... stewed. Chambers didnt sob. Got that habit beat out of him before he ever even got into his teens. But he did whimper. And Cas did pat his back. And then a hand wiped the tears from his face. Chambers thought it was Cas for a moment, but remembered that the Columners fingers hand calluses or were made of metal. These were warm, soft, and delicate, like... Chambers opened his eyes and found the ruin of Kae holding his face. She opened her mouth, tried to say something, but she had no lungsmost of her mind was gone as well. There wasnt even an accretion here. But she managed to press her hand deeper into his face all the same. Finally, a small smile pulled at her expression, and she came apart into a ripple of Soulfire. The rest of the heart began collapsing along with her, and all that bright flowed in one direction: toward Aedon Chambers. ACCESSING LIMINAL FRAME OVERWRITING LIMINAL FRAME CONFIGURATION... It is okay, Aedon. It is not over. We are not yet gone. The voice was Kae. Was Avo. Was so many more. Cas was saying something again, but Chambers couldnt hear him. This is unworthy time. And there is no one unworthier. No one unworthier and more suited to bear the mantle of Love. The city has forgotten. And you have never known. But learn and change. So that you can finally... become... UPDATED TO [STILLBORN] TEMPLATE WARNING: HEAVEN [REMEMBRANCE] HAS SUFFERED SEVERE ONTOLOGICAL DAMAGE WARNING: HEAVEN [REMEMBRANCE] LACKS x1 CYCLER x1 HELL ATTENTION HEAVEN SYMMETRY DETECTED >[FUCKTOPIA]/[REMEMBRANCE] OPTIONS >RESTORE MYTHOLOGY >ALIGN HEAVENS [FUCKTOPIA]/[REMEMBRANCE] The rippling flames swirled around Chambers. He felt a particularly large penis plop on his shoulder. Turning, he saw the Fucktopia looming over him, their mind brimming with resolve and excitement. Im ready, Aedon. And youre ready too. You heard what she said. You know we gotta be more than what we used to be. We gotta be hard for ourself. For everyone we wanna help. I... I dont know, Chambers said. I dont know if Im good enough for this. I just... I dont know anything about fucking Love. Fucking Dannis didnt know about lovehe died alone! Then we change. And we learn. And we become whoever we need to be. Getting a hydrapede nest forced up your severed castration wound is easy, Chambers. So is suffering in agony while a bunch of evil henchmen stomp on the eggs to get the hydrapedes to shred your urinary tract. Thats what the world does to you. All you had to do was take it and live. But youre not going to make things better by taking it. Staying hard in body and mind isnt enough. We gotta be unbreakable in our Soul too. Because if we dont choose Love, someone else will. And theyre going fuck this city, Chambers. Fuck this world like a rusted knife up the ass. So. What are we going to do? Are we going to be a piece of shit like dad? Are we going to be runner like mom? Or are we going to be Aedon Chambers? FATELESS like all the others; but still here. Still hard. Chambers nodded. I... you know, I dont even really know who I am anymore... Then I think its time we find out. Yeah. Yeah. Fuck it. This isnt done. We got a reality to put back together. Lets see how this Love thing fucks. HEAVENS UPDATING... ALIGNMENT IN PROGRESS... Chapter 30-7 By Love Are We Bound Chapter 30-7 By Love Are We Bound I dont know! I dont know whats happening to the rash! I dont fucking know why its changing! We need to get out, we need to... Oh... Oh, I see now... I see... I... Its okay. Its all going to be okay. -Mem-Log of Agnos Nasu Kalimus 30-7 By Love Are We Bound [Cas] Uncertainty had been Cas life. Uncertainty about if he was going to be alive or dead in the next few seconds. Uncertainty with every word he spoke, every asset he saved or burned. Uncertainty, because when you played games in the dark with the Great Guilds of Noloth, you lost more than you won, and lessons learned came in the form of lives lost. All that uncertainty couldnt match what he was feeling right now. The Heaven of Love gripped him with a different kind of anxiety altogetherthe cold dread that reminded him that he was just a demiurge and not an actual angel. That there were things twisted and unknowable even to him. Avo had been one of those things, but the abyss was easier to enter when you knew it was benevolent. Well, as benevolent as a flesh-eating monster could be. But as rippling tides of fire collapsed around Chambersreshaped his fucked up Heaven of Dicks, two pressures clenched in Cas chest. The first had to do with the No-Dragons; no way they didnt notice this. Trouble was going to be coming. And soon. The second was with Chambers. Cas trusted the former Enforcer enough, and no truly was ever too far in the dark to redeem themselves and earn the Lords righteous embrace. But the shard of Love was broken, and Chambers was just a man. A tortured man who, despite all his growth, remained less than an ideal candidate to hold so much power. But then again, who ever was? The Godclads were all iconoclasts draped in the flesh of the eldritch beasts born of mans fallen culture. From the flesh of Idheim, this Nu-Soddom given form, goodness fell as paltry embers amidst a sea of fetid black. None were worthy of their power. None should be able to wield the might of creation. And those that did so inflicted upon mankind their blackest age. Shielding himself from the collapsing wavelengths of fire, Cas cried out to Chambers repeated, tried to use soundwaves to draw him in. All that to no avail. Chambers was someplace between flesh and spirit now, his transforming superimposing his debauched but noble Heaven over his body. Around them, the twisted interior of the megablock was coming apart. The mangled nest enmeshed with fused bodies and half-formed births wasnt so much collapsing as it was pulling apart at the metaphysical seams. Trails of Soulfire pulled the nightmarish architecture into Chambers along a million wires. They glided into him, and sprouted forth thereafter like a mess of briars from his Heaven. Chambers! Cas called again. No response. The Columner tried using his ansible and found no success there, either. Without further recourse, he turned his connection to Thresholds most clandestine servers and sent out a wide-broadcast to Aegis. {This is Operative Canduir. We have secured a shard of the Remembrance, but Operative Chambers is... undergoing changes. We are located at Everpeace Toweranticipate heavy No-Dragon response.} Calvino immediate sent him a direct connection and Cas accepted. {Whats his condition?} Cas paused as he tried to observe Chambers. The ontological presence of the man was growing, and the world around him was burning brighter than ever. Cas wasnt sure why he hadnt been consumed by the Soulfire was well. Perhaps it was because whatever remained of the Stillborn could differentiate him from the architecture of Fallen Love. Or maybe this was Chambers doing. Whatever the case, power was flowing into Chambers. A lot of power, and not just from here. Considering all the tunnels leading off into different directions, it wouldnt surprise Cas if the infection was interconnecting several different portions of the city to the same liminal space. {I got no fucking idea,} Cas finally admitted. {Hes not responsive right now but} A sudden tug cut Cas off. The Columner let out a surprised gasp as he nearly felt himself get torn of his manifested Heaven. The presence that pulled at him was something beyond force or space. It was a kind of inexorable pressure connected to how he felt given tangible gravity. He felt it earlier when the Fallen Heaven of Love drew him and Chambers across to the disfigured heart at the core of this place. Cas? Chambers voice came from inside Cas, from all around him as well. Chambers? Cas replied, speaking through his Heaven. Distant soundwaves pulsed over him. Cas caught the noise and isolated them quicklybuzzing wings. Scout bioforms, most likely. The No-Dragons were coming. They needed to get gone, and get gone now. The shape of Chambers Heaven was increasingly changing into a tangled mesh. The wires passing from him into his manifesting demiurge were extending further and further, streching beyond the limits of this physical space. But a few burrowed into Cas. They didnt hurt upon passing into his being, but he felt them there, and he felt the force gripping his emotions grow even stronger. Do not worry. A third voice boomed within Cas. He knew this one as wellIgnorance; Avos subconsciousness. Chambers is changing. Becoming something else. Some he can find purpose in. Not lost to you. Not nearly. Yeah, but I need him HUBRIS: YOU WILL SUFFER VARIABLE BACKLASH SHOULD A BOND OF LOVE BE LOST BASED ON THE STRENGTH CONTAINED WITHIN THE BOND. ABSENTHEARTED (LOVE/CORRESPONDENCE): YOU CHOOSE ANOTHER OBJECT, ENTITY, OR EVEN IDEA TO BECOME AN OBJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. A REPRESENTATION OF THE OBJECT WILL FILL YOUR HEART AND FEELINGS OF ABSOLUTE LOVE WILL PERVADE YOUR BEING. THE MORE OBJECTS YOU USE TO FILL YOUR ABSENTHEARTEDNESS, THE FASTER YOUR REND WILL CLIMB. HUBRIS: LOSING YOUR OBJECT OF DESIRE WILL RESULT IN EXTREME (70%) BACKLASH C0C2NNA [ERROR] REPAIRING LINGERING DAMAGE REVERTING REMAINING CANONS Chambers jolted out from his euphoric reverie. Damn. The Heaven of Love was one broken sow. He could still feel the pieces drifting inside him. You alright, Fuckuh, Lovebringer? Wait? Lovebringer? Did he choose that name? He didnt remember Its what I wish to be called, his Heaven answered. The tendrils leading out from it were tightening. Chambers felt the bioforms shooting toward himfelt them by the faintest connections between them and the Whalemaws. And from the Whalemaws the bonds expanded even more, stretching all around the Chambers for well over three kilometers. There were other bonds here too. Bonds between people. Illicit lovers working in the same area. Siblings. Comrades. The strength in these bonds traced thaumaturgical bridges across the skeletal cage surrounding Everpeace Tower and beyond. To Chambers surprise, his reach extended as far as their yearning, with binds traveling for hundreds of kilometers away. Yet, the tether was still attached to him. Yet, he could still pull on the connection, if he so chose. Oh, gods, what the fuck now? I hope my daughter is okay... Ni Wa? Where are you? Where are you? Please be okay! What the hells are we looking at? Are those Heavens? Did we get infiltrated by hostile Godclads? Fuck, if those are Godclads I dont want to be here... Words filtered through Chambers. By the merits of his links, his ontology passed through them, aligned him with them, and allowed him a peek into their hearts and minds. The sursurring information was nigh-constant, as was the building hunger that filled his body. He wanted... flesh? No. These were impulses passing over into him from another set of strings. The bioforms. The Whalemaws. Some bonds broke as the first wave of bioforms slammed into Cass low-noted strumming. Chitinous apes flattened into themselves. Hundreds of bioforms came folded inward in layers, matter displaced by wavelengths of space. But thousands more came. And the Whalequeens let out keening bellows. The deaths of the first wave of bioforms tightened the bonds between the remainder of their kind and their spawner Whalequeens as well. Chambers, Cas said, voice reverberating from all around. I dont know what changed for you Heaven besides all the cocks getting turned into pubes, but you better do something, or were going to be in the actual shit when their Godclads show up. Yeah, alright, Chambers said, tentatively. Fuck, there was no Avo here to feed him insta-knowlege. He needed to figure out how to do shit the classic way. Too bad Chambers was always kind of a shitty student. Here goes. Uh, pull! Chambers drew back hard. Hard on all the bongs connected to every being capable of love in his vicinity. And they promptly tugged on every bond leading out from them, and every bond after that, and every bond after that. Chambers cycler nearly filled with Rend an instant, but more harrowing, he felt the aftermath of his action in full loving detail as every single being connected to his love lurched toward each other regardless of distance, despite walls or other structures between, at varying velocities based on intensity. Bioforms zipped back toward their Whalequeens and spattered against the leviathans bodies. Lovers, siblings, comrades, parents, children, and more slammed hard against walls and were flung off ledges. The words inadvertent massacre wouldve been an apt description for what followed, except Chambers prevented that by triggering his second new and functional canon, Absenthearted. Filling the hollow in his Heavens chest with countless people was simple. They were paltry things that cost minute Rend. The problems came when new bonds were formed... with Chambers ontologically transformed to learn the full weight of love. And with that came absolute horror and sorrow at the harm he already inflicted. Nonononshitshitshit! What the fuck have I done! REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 4% WARNING: REND SPIKE! Chapter 30-8 Feeling Good Chapter 30-8 Feeling Good Correspondence. Such a strange Domain to study. Some novitiate Agnosi liken it to the Domain of Spacesand of course they would. That is the way its patterns seem to work on the surface, anyhow. The defiance of distance is commonly understood to belong to only a few Domains. Of course, Borders, Geometry, and Boundaries can all be included as well due to varying cultural understandings, but as Kaswis Unifying Theory of Branching Archetypes, Modernist Thaumatugical Theorist all attribute Heavens into the greater and offshoot variantswhich is why we have so very many Heavens of Space now. Of course, the up-and-comers in Dimensionality are besieging the Spatials as I lecture, so another paradigm shift might follow in a decade at the most. But though the Modernists might be able to smuggle a few canons from what they consider to be offshoot Domains by being loose with interpretations of old mythology, the same trick hasnt taken off with Correspondence. And for good reason at that. Ultimately, Space brushes Correspondence more than the other way around. When you think of someonehave a connection to something, you exist in relative areas, but arent technically anomalously bound in any way. The miracles at play here are based on connection, not relative position or even Dimensionality. Lets use the Remembrance as an example. You can love something or someone without them being anywhere near you. Or even functionally within this dimension at all. You might love your deceased pet, and this causes bonds to briefly form as you see other people play with their nu-dogs; or perhaps you love a song, and a Correspondence is made wherever that song is playing. And then there are other factors beyond Space. Like how strong the connection is. Or how it might only exist at certain times, under certain conditions. All this to say, my fellows, that we should look at the exact details in the patterns. Breadth is for conjecture and comparison. But we are not here for breadth. We are here to compose miracles, and that will not be done by weary minds or stubborn hearts. -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi 30-8 Feeling Good SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! Chambers could feel them. All of them. The ones he chose to love filled that emptiness in his heart and from him shot tethers carried straight to their beings. Distance wasnt a factor. The time it took for him to form these bonds was instantaneous, but worst of all was the pain the guilt that came with it. And the intensity. Holy fuck, the intensity of actually loving someone was nova-hot misery. Worse was feeling how much he had hurt them. They were just little tiny ephemerals. Thank fuck they were Sangbio-rigs kept more than a few from liquefying outright from the speeds he yanked them earlier. And the bioforms! Those poor bee-ape fucks! They were just doing what the Whalequeen wanted them to do. They were good juvs. Couldnt even think. This wasnt their faultthey didnt ask to be alive. And here he and Cas were, just fucking snuffing them. Squishing them by the thousands. Gods he was a piece of shit. There were over twenty-two thousand beings entwined with him. They were like little specks on a string he could just pull around. And he loved them so, so, so much! So much that he didnt even dare to pull. Just had to keep them there. In place. If he tugged even a little, they would all shoot in his direction from wherever they were. That meant smearing thousands against walls, tearing them out of their aeros, from public transit, off bridges or through windows. He could even feel the pilots running the local Porter golems! The ones forming the demiplanar perimeter around Everpeace. He could feel them inside their tight little cockpits, and with the slightest yank, he tore their golems through layers untangling Space. Not even another Domain could stop his reach. It was too complete, too true, too total. At once, the blurry certain that shrouded Everpeace tower collapsed, revealing the district beyond. And even more bonds came into sight. Bonds running everywhere, lining everything. He could barely see the material world any more. Everything was layered beneath a coat of interconnected threads. Chambers wards began to jolt wildly, and his trauma damage began to build. There was so many... so much want and lust and love going everywhere. He could feel Marlowe in that messsomehow, he sorted her out easily, a bond running between her and the eighteen drink she was having that day in the bar. There were other strings trailing out from her heart too. Including an incredibly faint one that was slowly inching toward him across the city, but dissolved before it even got a tenth of the way. Love was too much, too total. He didnt know what the fuck he was doing. He was the wrong guy for this power. The absolute wrong fucking guy. Oh... oh, no. I was wrong, Aedon. I was very, very wrong. I regret this! I regret all of this! Love is poison. Love is pain. Why did you let me merge with the Remembrance? Why couldnt you have stopped me... The Lovebringer sobbed, and Chambers wasnt far behind them. Fuck you, I was the one who was uncertain. You talked me into this. Not the other way around. I was all apprehensive and shitI liked you as a big pile of dicks, we didnt need this! Something was hatching out from his chest. There was so much pressure there, he needed to breathe but couldnt. Everything hurt. His nerves were on fire, his mind was a haze of chaos, and... and... The bonds that extended from him kept thousands of his new lovers in place. Swarms of bioforms strained in the air, unable to push through the links that ran them through. No matter how strong their bodies were, it was nothing before Chambers love. The same thing with the Whalequeens. There were dozens of them nearby the megablock, but they were all pinned in place by the thinnest of threads. They let out pitched screams of confusion even as their multi-ton bodies thrashed in the sky. But Chambers felt no more struggle holding them in place than the lesser bioforms they spawned. Then came the people, and that gnawed at Chambers worst of all. Some of them werent movinglimbs pointing at awkward angles from the sheer torque they experienced earlier. A few hundred No-Dragon technical personnel were frozen in midair, Chambers bonds halting them from a fatal fall. There were Agnosi there toothis Chambers knew. He was close enough to hear their thoughts and taste the pain and fear in their hearts. But they werent the only ones he was connected to through Correspondence; the ones they cared about had been pulled into his network as welland their lovers thereafter. Chambers stopped there, but the dense lattice of magenta bonds that once composed his Heaven expanded to something that swallowed the entire block itself. And though desire, love, and want leaked out from him, the reverberations caught by his links delivered only pain and fear in return. That hurt the most. Knowing that he inflicted so much pain on those he loved. Feeling them struggle against his touch. They didnt want him. They were trying to run from him, just like mom did. Oh, he knew that they knew... knew that Aedon Chambers was an unlovable piece of shit. Thats why everyone left him in the end. Thats why he couldnt have anything for long. Mom, grandparents, the cadre.... None of that was going to stay. He should just Gods, it was painful to feel this much. Everything inside him was being consumed. Chambers sobs melted into his Heavens, and both of them broke down, an emotionally distraught spider ruined by the love it felt for all the fleas in its web. Chambers? Cas said. Chambers didnt respond. Oh, the cultist was a decent guy with nice hair and a good chin, but what would heChambers noticed a particular strong bond revolving through Cas, recognized that as his faith. Oh, wasnt that nice? Wasnt that beautiful. To have that kind of relationship with himself. Something that no one could take. Other than Chambers. Chambers could totally snatch that love. Maybe he should just... dip in and learn how Cas was No, Chambers, the Lovebringer groaned. Metaphysical snot erupted from the questionable portal it had for a head. We ruin everything we touch. We have to keep ourselves away. We have to get more of those people back on the platforms and run. And then... and then... we need to let them go. No! Chambers cried. No. I dont want to. I dont want to stop loving it. But I also do. Fucckkkkkkkk! Why does it feel like this! Why! Twist my ballspour acid into my eyes and shit! Fuck me to death like they did Dannis with that cylindrical chainsaw in Gore Hour Nine. But put a stop to t-t-this... Christ above. Chambers barely heard Cas mutter, but it was enough. He was embarrassing himself too. Gods, this was supposed to be the moment he proved that he was capable of taking over after Avo. He was supposed to... to get hard enough to live as his own man... I gotta get hard, Chambers whimpered. What? Cas muttered. I gotta get hard enough to stop loving. The bartender just nodded. Yeah, Im just... is it warm in here? Marlowe as about to say no, but her body suddenly flushed as well. A surge of heat ignited inside her. Id... say it''s hooh, oh. She gripped the bar top. The bartender did as well, with her natural and transplanted limbs. All around them, people embraced their own bodies, and let out gasps and groans. Marlowe blinked. Were the drinks poisoned? Was this some kind of viral attack or... Her coherent thinking collapsed. And things started to feel really, really good. Oh, sweet fuck in hells, Marlowe muttered. She knew what this wasfelt them plenty of times from the vics but... its been a good decade or so since her actual body did this. Shit, a scarred man in a holocoat muttered, clinging to his seat for dear life. Shit, no, please, not in front of everyoneaghhh! And with his hoarse cry, the dam broke. Everyone in the bar came undone, bodies twisting, faces grimacing, and stains growing... What... the fuck... is happening... *** [Sui High Thinker] Fine, then! High Thinker wept, slapping the corpse of Farsong, her sister, dead from a joy overdose. Fine. You did it. You hurt me! You hurt me good! You finally did it! You finally killed yourself and left me alone just like I always thought you would! The lights above her flickered. Shadow and bright alternated in Farsongs unblinking eyes. Groans began to sound from other occupants in the drug den. High Thinker didnt care about them. She tracked her sister here to save her. But that wasnt fucking happening now, was it? No, all her efforts were pointless. All those promises Farsong made about getting clean got undone the moment it looked like the world was going to end after Scale ruptured. Went straight to her favorite dealer after that. And straight here. With the Nether collapsed, there was no way to reach and so... High Thinker sniffled. Her body was burning. Gods, she didnt know grief would feel this hot, this... this good... Awhg, a Joyfiend three couches away grunted. Shit, I pissed mywait, this isnt... this isnt piss... Then the feeling of grief got very, very good, and High Thinker started convulsing over her dead sisters body. Whawhyoh, oh, dead gods! She didnt know why she was experiencing this now of all time. One didnt anticipate suffering the greatest orgasm of their life in a ruined den of vice over their sisters body, but life came at you fast in New Vultun. Guess what they said about the rash being over was true. And so, High Thinker stopped crying and started screaming. Her voice was but one few hundred thousand in the block. *** [Dowager Ning Golden Song] Dowager Golden Song was scheduled to meet with a certain group of Agnosi today. Something about a block afflicted by Wombrash while reports elsewhere claimed the metaphysical malady had miraculously cured. With the amount of problems stacking up on Golden Songs plate, it was getting increasingly hard for her to actually care. Everything was going to shit. The Tiers were being displaced after that horror show at Scale. The High Seraph was missing. The Fifth Guild War had entered a phase of uncertain limbo before it could fully start, and she was overseeing combat operations against Stormtree while actively working Sanctus toward mutual benefit in other places. Most frustrating of all was how her fellow Dowagers thought now was a good time to start making their power plays. The bureaus and courts of the No-Dragons were moving into the opening phases of a shadow war. Dowagers vied against all comers to hold their power, while the younger of their cyclical sisterhood struggled to survive. To be Sang was to have your fate sealed. You lived as part of a cursed cycle: you experienced the same series of events as all other Sang, aging at the same pace, giving birth after the same passage of time, losing the same amount of children, bleeding the same amount of blood, and eventually succumbing to the same dragon-damned disease. There was no mundane remedy to the cycles end. It was a fixed moment in their personal timelines as much as the rest of their lives. No amount of nanosurgeons could prevent them from hemorrhaging a final time, and not even fully grafting oneself into a full-weave bio-rig would delay the inevitable. Nothing other than claiming anothers place in the cycle. The Sang, more than any other clade in New Vultun, possessesd symmetry with one another. Blood could be shared. Organs could be offered. And even their fates could be swapped. And such was how one eventually became a Dowager. By claiming the cycle of a younger Sang for yourself, like a snake eating its way into young flesh, to an earlier point in time. Such was why Golden Song volunteered for Warrens duty. Sure, she had good odds of encountering Massists assassins or rival Godclads, but she was never one for shadow games. Better to strive and struggle in the light than plot and scheme within offices or mansions, wondering which of her sisters she was to kill for a few more years. +We are about to arrive, Dowager.+ The thoughtcast passed through the walls of her luxury aero. A protective cadre accompanied her. Handpicked elites, all of them. Doubtless they were less than pleased about her choice to leave the safety of the Living Territories that kept most Dowagers safe beneath layers of shifting biomass, but she was doing them a favor as wellno sense losing good Godclads to internal politics in a time of crisis. +Thank you, Second Sister,+ Golden Song replied. She almost activated her Auto-Seance before she stopped herself. Right. That didnt work anymore. A lot of things didnt work anymore. Briefly flicking her mind across the many inert menus within her Metamind, Golden Song winced slightly as she considered the fate of her stocks and businesses. It felt odd not being able to see +Uh, Dowager,+ the Second Sister said. +Were seeing someoh, ohhhh+ The Ghost-Link filled with a sudden spike of... was that lustful pleasure? Golden Songs Lustaway activated immediately. The Dowager blinked and sat up in her chair. +Second Sister? Second Sister what is+ The presence promptly smashed through her like an avalanche. She didnt even see it comingwas helpless before the will of highest love. Her back arched. Her tigermorph bio-rig roared around her torso. And she learned that life could still very, very, good. Chapter 30-9 Unworthy Vessel Chapter 30-9 Unworthy Vessel And so it is that love found its newest vassal, himself a mirrored shadow to this city, a perfect, unworthy vessel. Chosen by the Dreamer, blessed with debauched lust and virtuous love, within him burgeons power beyond gods below and mortals above. Yet what path he takes, what shape will he bestow upon this city, driven mad with want and ruin from old? No path is clear, the future uncertain, for struck down is truth and the pasts and memories interwoven... -The Stormsparrows Chorus 30-9 Unworthy Vessel [Chambers] COG-CAP - 134% CRITICAL: WARDS OVERLOADED UNABLE TO SUSTAIN TRAUMATIC YIELD WARNING: REND CAPACITY SPIKING REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 74% Chambers was love. Chambers was bliss. Chambers was lust. Above all, he was the source of all pleasure, want, and romance. It was an honor to dissolve amidst such sublime desires, and should this become his end, so let it be. All his life, he sought bliss, a substance to fill the emptiness that constantly gnawed at him. Ever since his mother left, after all his father inflicted, there was something missing in him. Something that made him less of a person. Now, he knew what that wholeness was. He knew that missing part was love. To care absolutely. To be the heart of this great loving between all. He knew what he sought all those years in his vicarities, experiencing Dannis suffering over and over. True love. True lust. All-satisfying. All-filling. All him. He was a providence of wonder returned to New Vutlun after years of exile, and he brought for this city blessings untold. And none would go without. Not him. Not any other being left in existence still capable of love. They would know pleasure and raw warmth of the heart like never before. And there would be no choice in the matter. His bonds multiplied and spread, every person an endpoint and propagator for his spread at the same time. His miracles grew with each arcing back, each screaming release, every sobbing sensation. Best of all, he wasnt bound by space, and so his spread slipped across entire Sovereignties, bestowing people glory by metaphysical connections. The bond that constituted his ontology usurped the very fabric of the material world. Buildings ceased to be. Space was an obsoleted notion. There was only him, the lovers, and the bonds that joined themmany and one at once. Though they shared different voices, they all felt the same relief when Lovebringer touched them. Everyone had been heart-dry for so long they could drink and drink and know only happiness if they were to burst. No parched fool feared a death by drowning; anything for one sup more. The bioforms folded in on themselves, their senses overloading. The Whalemaws flopped limply in the air, screeching loud. The hammer of desire smashed through the people as well. None stood a chance. None could reject the gifts Chambers delivered. Not Citizens nor subjects, not ephemerals or lesser Godclads. Chambers was a heart. He was a beating organ of magenta bright, and from him, through his bonds, his miracles pulsated, shivering and rushing into love filling the once-void at his core. They knew what it was to be love, and they knew what it was to be him, and this was all perfect. Perfect, Lovebringer said, "All this time, this is what we''ve been waiting to find. All these years... for this moment, it was worth it... All of it was worth it." The Lovebringer was weeping, sobbing. Their purpose had finally been met, and Chambers wept alongside them. All this time, he never knew. He never knew what he was missing, and it was then one of his bonds dissolved. A backlash detonated through his being. Soulfire bathed the world in incandescence. REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 83% The bond that just broke belonged to a connection between Chambers and a joyfiend known as Halcyon Reed. The man had been close to death, laying in an alleyway not four kilometers away, nested between two blocks. There, he''d done the last of his joy, and he was awaiting death to begin withthought rapture had finally come with the destruction of Scale. But before his final end, Chambers grasped him. Chambers bestowed upon him a pleasure beyond all chemical pleasures. A pleasure above, and it was too much. His biology, already driven to the point of overload by his addiction, collapsed. His nerves fried, and with a final, rasping breath, he passed over the threshold of ecstasy and then death. A shape vanished from within Chambers Absentheartedness. And so it was that the object of Chambers'' love vanished, lost. The correspondence lingered for a moment longer, but the string scattered apart instead of breaking. Love wasnt broken here as much as it was withered, wilting like the petals of a dying flower. With love came counter-emotion. One equally consuming, one equally devouring, and one most unwelcome. Grief. Such was the thing Chambers had fled from all his life. Such was the thing he was most familiar with. "No," the Lovebringer cried out, "no!" The Joyfiend wasn''t the first and only to fade. Other bonds disintegrated as well. Individual strings too small to be noticed amongst the myriad lattice. But they were equally important, for love was absolute, and every bond lost was a love lost. A love absolute. A backlash in response. Chambers practically welcomed the metaphysical agony. VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 96% Stop love! the Bioigniter crackled. The Heaven of Biology roiled inside Chambers, trying to rouse him from his stupor. But it was just a thing of fire and flesh. What did it know about the true nature of being human? Stop! Each death represented a love lost, and each death reminded him why Chambers was so afraid. Afraid to care, afraid to give himself to anyone or anything, finding feeling in vicarious moments stolen from another. So do that, Cas said. Truth be told, he was going to null and snatch Chambers the moment he demanifested his Heaven. It was the safest way to see this done. You deserve it. Let yourself feel truly good. A long pause followed, and then, to his surprise, an answer came. "Okay," Chambers whispered. "I... I know that... I need to be... be hard...hard enough to be my own man... What the fuck was he talking about now? Chambers continued. This is true love. True lust. But it isnt real love. Real lust. It wasnt here before I decided to make it so... Im fake... just like this Heaven... Just like... A long, strained pause followed thereafter and for a crushing moment, Cas wondered if Chambers was going to rupture. But then the Lovebringer winked out of existence with a despair sigh, and Chambers fell. Fell as bond after bond dissolved around him. Feel, his halo broken, his mind unraveling into phantasmal emissions of leaking memory. A wall of sound swallowed Chambers, and at once Cas was moving. Alright. New Vultun wasnt going to experience death by unending orgasm. Part two of the plan: Fucking leaving. Jesus Christ, Cas muttered under his breath as he dove into the ambient noises across the city. What the fuck is my life. *** [Dowager Ning Golden Song] +D-dowager? A-are you okay? A-are+ A whimper came across the Ghost-Link. The Second Daughter sounded like how Golden Song felt. Unable to form words, the Dowager simply released a high pitch squeak. Her bio-rig had all but repainted the interior of her aerovec. The leather of her couches glinted beneath the lights, ruined. What the fuck was that? That was... Incredible. The best thing she ever felt in her life. And how could she get a taste again? Its been so long since... The absence ached like a hollow wound inside her. For a few heartbeats she knew love, knew lust, knew herself on a level she could have never fathomed before. And then it was gone. Quieted and lost to her. Slowly, Golden Song began to sob, mourning the passing of the instant, the passing of love absolute. *** [Marlowe] Marlowe found herself folded over the board top when she returned her sentence. Tilting her head at an angle, she saw a room with people strewn all over the place, their bone bodies arcing, their voices groaning, the floor slick, and not with the good kind of fluid. "Ah, shit," she muttered. Damn, she wanted a cigarette right now. Maybe some numb too. She hadnt felt this way in a long time, and her pants weighed a full pound heavier and made sticky noises when she moved. Well, this was all kinds of embarrassing, but honestly, six out of tenshe been in more deviant situations. My balls, a man groaned staring at the ceiling. I think Im bleeding from inside my balls. A Scaarthian knelt next to him, her eyes wide and shell-shocked. These pants are fucked. These shoes are fucked. Gods, Im fucked. Marlowe! The Guilder screamed and tumbled off the bar top. Strong, metallic fingers caught her before she could hit the ground and planted her on her feet. She found herself staring into the face of Cas who looked somewhere north of haggard and had Chambers slung over his back. This felt all kinds of messed up, and strangely, she really missed it. The feeling, the high, the throbbing vibration entered the sound system. The speakers skipped a beat, and suddenly, Carlos was right next to her, carrying with him limp and blank-faced Chambers. For a beat, she just stared at him, and then her accusation came. "All right, what the fuck did you two do?" What we came to do, Cas muttered. She looked down and saw a massive splotch Marlowe. Please, for the love of fuck, dont look at it. Sorry, she said. If it helps, Im also A groan from Chambers interrupted her words. Tilting her head behind Cas, she studied the former Enforcers face and winced. His eyes were bloodshot and wide, his tongue was hanging out, and his accretion was fucking shattered. Chambers was beyond nulled. And what happened to him? Nutted so hard he turned himself into a vegetable, Cas murmured. He flicked his transplanted arm and the strings upon it twanged. Folds of space collapsed around Marlowe as a new song began. Come on. Lets get the fuck out of here. I want to have my psychological break somewhere safe. Chapter 30-10 Post-Heaven Clarity Chapter 30-10 Post-Heaven Clarity So... No, Zeinwhy must everything be turned into a blade? What purpose does it serve? The idea of beheading someone when they fall in love or get intimate amuses me. It will serve as a sublime assassination method as well Imagine I can imagine that, dearest, and it sounds horrible. This, I expect from the Infacer, not you. Theres no duel in this. Yes. But its amusing. No... it is amusing to you. But thats not what were trying to do with this... Love is a terrible thing to wield. It bends the wills of man. It bends our thoughts. It is like a singularityyouve stopped listening. Hm? Apologies, my love, I felt the urge to practice drawing from the hilt. Who have you killed now. No one that matters. But please. Continue speaking. I do like it when you prattle on about philosophy. ....Love is a brittle blade. Strike with it only when you wish to break, and do not fear breaking yourself in the process. Mhhm. Were those the fancy words you were putting together in your head all this time? The ones your whole speech was building toward? ...Yes. They were very nice. Have I mentioned that I love you? Yes. Zein... who did you kill? -Zein Thousandhand and Jaus Avandaer 30-10 Post-Heaven Clarity Chambers stared at his own reflection bobbing at the center of his half-empty cup. He focused on his own face, studied his bloodshot eyes, sniffled a trail of snot back up his nose. The silence was good too. Silence was awesome. Silence meant that he didnt need to deal with anything or talk to anyone. If there was a problem, his copies in the Council of Fuck could intervene on his behalf. He didnt need to look at Caswho was just a seat away from him, tearing into an entire chicken on his own. Or Marlowe, who changed out of her previous clothes and put on a neon-yellow body glove that didnt help the situation. The Council of Fuck was having its own discussion, with Ghost-Links connecting the twenty or so other Chambers as they chained their thoughts together. Every now and again, one of the copies would eye Chambers or Cas or Marlowe, the thoughts would rush between them at a higher tempo. He didnt tell them shit. He didnt want to tell them shit. He knew how his other selves would react. Oh, you got cum powers? You got ultimate cum powers and youre moping? What the fuck, half-strand! Shit, if you dont want the Heaven Ill take it. Are you sure youre the original? Maybe Avo hid the actual Chambers-Number-One somewhere else. Were supposed to be the ultimate half-strand! Unbreakable! Hard as steel! That, or they might just start insinuating he was a sow, and the Heaven needs someone with actual girth to use it. Might even ask him to increase their cock sizes a few times while playing around. If they did, though, Chambers might just kill one of them in a fit of rage. I didnt mean to be, the Lovebringer whispered inside him. I didnt mean to be this way. I just wanted to Me too, Chambers thought, replying to his Heaven. He took another sip from his drink to press down on the weight building in his throat. But I wasnt enough. Youre a god. Your... your shaped like what you are. But me... Im a junkie. And somehow, after all these good days, after turning into a Godclad and what Avo gave to me, I forgot about that. I forgot about who I was. But you are more as well, the Lovebringer replied. You felt the power, you wanted to do well. No. I just wanted people to feel good. Cause I wanted to feel good. Because I never felt that good before and tasting true love and true lust ate me from the inside. Like fire. Youre the Heaven. Im... Im like my dad. Him with his drinking, me with my vics and fucked up fetishes. Broken pieces of shit survived too long because of chance, getting too far because someone else felt bad for us. The Heaven paused, trying to parse his final words. How odd that you compare your mothers role in your fathers life to Avos place in yours. No. He should have never been a dad. And Im not much of a Godclad. No, Chambers, the Lovebringer sighed. They tried to pull at the Ties That Bindgrasp the connection running across the world around Chambersbut he stopped them. I seek only one bond. One bond that is missing. Pretty useful. Chambers, we have a rare opportunity here to gain absolute thaumaturgical dominance over the Guilds. We can know things before they do, coordinate our attacks better than they can, affect them without being affected. Your Heaven is one of a kind right now with the Remembrances destruction, and even if you dont manifest it, we need to be using it. We need to. Yeah, I know, I know, Chambers groaned. But... I dont know. Im just afraid. If you didnt have your faith, I wouldve made everyone ruin their pants, killed them with overflowing pleasure and love, then overloaded eventually from backlash. Wasnt a chance for me to get out of that. Cas snorted. Bullshit. What? Youre an addict and a fucking mess, Aedon Chambers, but you ever try to take a needle from a Joyfiend? The half-strands will try to bite you and shit. Chambers nodded. Exactly. And I talked you down. I managed to get you to let go. Words dont work on addicts, usually. So. Whatever youre saying to yourself right now? Thats bullshit. At least part of it. And so you should trust what I think of you more than what you think of yourself right now. And what do you think of me? Chambers asked, somewhere between encouraged and intimidated. That youre an imperfect vessel. No worse than Cyrus who came before you. And also: fuck you, I liked those pants, and I want to jack you in the sack for forcing me to ruin them. A disbelieving series of chuckles escaped Cas. Sorry, Chambers winced. You can jack my sack if you want. Fuck no. Ive seen the kind of shit you likethatll just hyper-charge your sadomasochism. Well, genital mutilation is pretty tame for the Low Master Collection Marlowe interrupted. Cas bent the vibrations carrying her words away from them, making her voice seem like it was echoing in from afar. You... be quiet. Were not going there. I dont want any details about Dannis or whatever nightmarish sex-hell-torture he experienced. Dannis is the only reason I could stop earlier, Chambers muttered. Yeah? And hes also most of the reason you started in the first place. Cas shook his head. Im going clean, Chambers replied. Im going to stay out of the vics. Yeah. Good idea. Ill see if I can requisition a neuro-mod from Threshold too. A reconfiguration might be good for you right now. Right, Chambers blinked. Fuck, he was so deep in his fuck that he didnt even think of that. He was still part of Aegis. They had all kinds of sweet coldtech shit that could make him better. But right as he thought about Voidwatch, a call came through his exo-cortex, triggering his ansible. Seemed Calvino was thinking about him too. But strangely, the caller ID was entirely void. INCOMING [] Chambers winced. This wasnt a conversation he wanted to have. Across from him, Cas frowned. Chambers, you getting a call from a blank ID too? Yeah... Uncertainly, Chambers answered. But no avatar loaded into his cog-feed. No greeting came from Calvino. Instead, a deep, thunderous voice spoke, and with every syllable, Chambers felt his gut and asshole tighten with animal terror at wrong the voice sounded. {Good afternoon, Operative Chambers. You have secured a fragmented part of the Remembrancethe Fallen Heaven of Love.} Are you two getting a Voider-cast again? Marlowe asked. Neither Chambers or Cas replied to her. The thoughtcaster threw up her hands in frustration. Probably, one the Chambers copies cried out from the far end of the room. Probably getting his ass creamed by Kant or something for mass murder. They were always uptight when Avo accidentally did some collateral damage. Well, a lot of collateral damage. Shit, Avo snuffed and nulled a whole lot of people, come to think about it... Meh, were probably fine. Whatever we did. They were, in fact, not fine as the unknown EGI continued. {In confirmation of our successful mission, we congratulate you for your success. But what followed cannot be allowed to happen again. The Heaven of Love has been rated as a Threat-Level [Black] construct in the danger it represents to the polities should it be used improperly, and I am here to ensure that things to do reach that point.} {Right....} Chambers replied. {Listen, its nice to meet you and all, but Calvino} {EGI IF ON A WINTERS NIGHT A WANDERER has been reassigned. I am Contingency Bleak: Refusal. And there are a few things I wish to inquire.} And in the real, a single word escaped Cas lips as he sank against the table. Fuck. Chapter 30-11 The Sins of Myself Chapter 30-11 The Sins of Myself CATEGORY [BLEAK] THREAT DETECTED Threat Identified: Separate iteration of Aedon Chambers, (Current Host of Anomaly-Classification-Love-Remembrance) Bearer of Liminal Frame Pattern Stillborn have been spotted. Iterations have been identified as Propagator behind new variants of the Wombrash outbreak across nine districts. Massist Sovereignties under heavy assault. Death toll rising: present deaths at est. 480 million. Thaumaturgic plague spreading beyond upper atmosphere. Solutions: Deploy restricted Q-Tech for surgical localized singularity and liquidationRejected Quantum-Disruption Field active. Hidden Omnitech assets setting up perimeters. Risk of technological collapse for the entire field of Quantum Mechanics: 84.513335%Deploy Kill-Team Innsmouth. WARNING: HIGH RISK OF EXTREME COLLATERAL DAMAGE. WILL COLLAPSE RELATIONS WITH TERRESTRIALS SHOULD THEY UNCOVER THE TRUTH BEHIND KILL-TEAMS CREATIONDeliver info-kill weapon [REDACTED]. Memtric strike system. Override Threats existing personality.Likelihood of success: 0.31% Will require the target to revert to ephemeral form, disable wards, and maintain that state for a prolonged period for successful override.THE DAGON OPTION Dispatch Dyson-shell to fully capture the Nullstar. Focus high-entropic, high-[REDACTED] on target district.Rejected Will unit Terrestrial Guilds and trigger full-scale war; diverting Nullstar from proper purpose will also expose vulnerable polities to exo-hemispheric horrors lurking beyond the stable void.Divert [Unstable] asset Operative Aedon Chambers to engage hostile asset with Slicer support.Risks: Operative Aedon Chambers highly unstable. Mentally vulnerable. Neuro-mod effectiveness against Heaven of Love dubious: 1.35341% effect. Hostile counterpart has also openly stated their desire to draw Aedon Chambers out. High possibility of trap. Possibility Operative Aedon Chambers can prevail against hostile counterpart: [Uncertain; More data Required]... -EGI Contingency Bleak REFUSAL 30-11 The Sins of Myself The recordings sent by Refusal continue to unveil scenes after horrifying scenes, and Chambers lets them play on full display through the use of his phantoms. For several minutes, all he could do was stare in disbelief. High-resolution imaging came together and crafted an ongoing story from multiple perspectives. From on high, the Morobi-Ynneath Sovereignty was slowly getting consumed. Being part of the Undercroft and with the substance slowly approaching, its local population was in the process of evacuation when the attack happened. A large burning series of icons formed a defensive shroud around the eight hundred kilometers of the area the Sovereignty occupied, and somehow, it prevented the Substance from pushing through and consuming everything. That was among the first things Chambers wasnt expecting: Considering the Silvers were the Necro-fuckers, he assumed the collapse of the Nether should have taken them out. Not so. According to Refusal, their territories were holding just fine, and they were in the process of organizing a massive offensive against the Saintists. Here, at Morobi-Ynneath, though, shit was somewhere south of fucked. Though the Substance folded around the strange symbol-based thaumaturgical barrier, something else had broken through its veil. Drones dispatched beyond the obfuscation of the drifting letters revealed a nightmare in progress. A massive vertical slit was spreading fast across the city. All that was flesh and matter was rapidly mutating as well, with buildings and people alike melting into the slit, joining an enormous Sovereignty-sized set of inflamed folds filled with writhing bodies. Distant screams echoed from between the chasm of darkness, but that wasnt all. Even the voidtech drones dispatched began to scream. Just moments before, they had been pieces of dead matter, lacking any real consciousness or sophont aside from extremely sophisticated code. That changed in an instant as they were exposed to the local variant of the Rash. Their data fragmented. That was the first sign of something going terribly wrong. The second was when accretions began materializing around the drones, and cybernetic bodies began to rupture free from beneath their shell. The feed of the voidtech drones cut and out thereafter, but the flashes of visual information they retained painted a grim enough series of pictures. Chambers saw a similar set of sores opening along the drones, and from them, misshapen variants of himself tore free. Gazing upon his malformed homunculi, Chambers watched as an object of dead metal wept with blood and viscera until it became a tumorous hive of widening orifices that pushed out mutilated versions of Chambers. A cut jolted through the set of perspectives offered. The holographic projections before Chambers changed, showing a new sortie of drones entering the affected area. With the Tiers mid-evacuation, none of the Guilds were maintaining an active quarantine in the area, leaving the airspace open to Voidwatchs control. As these drones entered the space, the Morobi-Ynneaths environmental state somehow got even worse. Almost nothing was untouched by this point the plague was eating into spatial reality itself. Worse, it was slowly spreading higher, with the tip of the raw red chasm of birth-attuned flesh crawling higher toward the upper atmosphere. But within the valley of questionable tissues inched a new presence, a new face. Chambers own face. Cold dread filled Chambers stomach as he watched a horrific parody of himself pushing the folds apart, crawling out as if a mangled infant with too many arms birthing itself. As the monster leaned out, Chambers saw it didnt have a body, but an umbilical made out of thousands upon thousands of people, and they were connected groin-first to the cord. Their faces were contorted with ecstasy-unparalleled pleasure emanated from their very beings. Worse yet was how their orifices were swollen. Anything that could be an opening had become the departure point of homunculi. Lumps of children burst out from their skulls and rears while they orgasmed over and over. With each pulse of pleasure, the colossal monstrosity born in the form of Chambers only grew. The falling homunculi were absorbed into his flesh, and even as pierce ordinance slashed down from beyond the void and over the horizona bombardment sustained by thaumaturgic and conventional meansit did little but strip the slightest bits of flesh away. Aedon Chambers, the nightmare said. It even sounded like him. Come find me. Come find me, or Im going to keep spreading, keep fuckingfucking until I reach the void. You hear me, you void-mind-cocksucks! Im coming for your precious trophies. Im coming! A half-hearted guffaw of demented laughs escaped the titanic horror, and the last drone feed cut out. For several seconds after, everyone around the table sat in silence. Uh, what the fuck was that? Marlowe muttered. She shot a worried look at Chambers. Why did that thing have your face? What did you do? What did I do? Chambers replied. He reeled back and, preparing to fire a retort and then stopped. What did he do? Was this a consequence of his Correspondence? Had he created a new plague across New Vultun and created that thing? {Operative Chambers. Operative Cas. Have either of you been in contact with Operative Avo since the destruction of Scale?} Both Chambers and Cas looked to each other. We... havent, have we? Chambers said. He needed confirmation. He remembered... he didnt know what he rememberedhe wasnt sure. Like, there was nothing there, but in that patch of nothing, Avo could be hiding. The ghoul was a real mind wizard. Anything goes when it came to consciousness. The Columner winced and offered Chambers a shrug before replying to the EGI. {Yeah, were not sure about that Refusal. Theres... no easy way to be sure with Operative Avo, if you are aware of his capabilities.} You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. {This response has been anticipated,} Refusal said. {It is because of our knowledge that we ask you. We are reasonably certain he has been in contact with you. Only that you cannot remember. Your reluctance to state anything as absolute has been appreciated. Intelligence obtained from Operative Drausa highly biased source herself due to close relations with the subject in question has revealed a displeasing likelihood: Veylis and Avo are in the process of merging. Ontologically and mentally.} {Yeah, so we gotta stop that, right?} Chambers said. {We round up the rest of the cadre} {We are uncertain how such a process is to be stopped,} Refusal interrupted. {Moreover, the Substance presents increasingly hostile territory. The space within is rapidly changing, and Omnitech forces have been massing around its periphery. Something is in motion. These movements hint at coordination. Consciousness.} A beat followed. And Chambers rubbed at his mouth. {Listen, Refusal, consang... are you trying ot say that Avos folded? Because youre wrong. Hes the mind-master, not Veylis. If theyre merging, that should be a good thing, cause it means shes getting burned, and were on the verge of victory.} {We are on the verge of only uncertainty. Measurements taken from your anomalous counterpart reveals high temporal devianceand also a high amount of paracognitive structures as well. Ghosts, in simplicity.} {Correct. That is what we desire as a first step. We wish to provoke a response from your alternate. Force them to respond. Deploying you in direct conflict risks too much. However, we cannot delay much longer. We estimate that his afflictions will slip past the upper atmosphere before midnight. Within the week, the polities will be at risk. Understand what you present is our most efficient, direct, and surgical means of eliminating the target. We have a suite of other options, but each one represents risk thresholds that the Consensus currently finds unacceptable. The threat posed to our polities will alter the range of acceptability. Do you understand?} {Yeah. Got it. So. Looks like I got some venting to do and a bomb to deploy, huh? I can do that. I can get this done.} Chambers mustered his resolve. Yeah, if theres anything he was good at, it was fucking himself over with stupid choices. {We will also be dispatching additional assets on standby should your Domain-specific entropics create an opening.} So. Sounded simply. Hells, it sounded much safer and low-risk than he expected. Which was when his paranoia started acting up. He extended a Ghost-Link over to Cas even as he kept chattering away at Refusal. +Cas. Hey. You got any way to get to Calvino?+ The Columners expression didnt change. +Me? No. But if we can find Denton... maybe. Very hard maybe. Were dealing with a Contingency Bleak, Chambers. They created to deal with this like this. Problems like us.+ +Godclads.+ +Anomalies,+ Cas said. Chambers nodded. +Yeah? Well, the option were getting here is too neat, and my fuckery alarms are going off inside me. I think theres something bigger happening, but we cant exactly piss Voidwatch right now. So... Think Im going to play along and set up some bombs. But theres no way Im using my Heaven. Not until I can... I figure out how.+ +Im with you on tha+ And just then, a single fly landed on Chambers shoulder. No. Not a fly. A bee. A bee connected to a long chain of static. He blinked. Sunrise? He mouthed? And then the damn bioswarm stung him. Chambers winced as something was injected into his neck. But before he could respond, a line of text loaded across his vision. A few steps away, he watched both Cas and Marlowe curse as well. CHAMBERS CALVINO SPEAKING DO NOT REACT CREATING LOCALIZED SERVER INSIDE YOU CONTINGENCY BLEAKS PROVIDING ALTERED INFORMATION DO NOT TRUST YOU AND DRAUS POSSESS FUNCTIONAL ITERATIONS OF THE STILLBORN AVONO LONGER NECESSARY OPENING TO ELIMINATE HIM AND VEYLIS PRESENT WILL NOT RISK RESURRECTION CHANCE TO WIN THIS WAR FOR GOOD TOO ENTICING PRIORITY IS NOT CONTAINMENT OR SUPPRESSION PRIORITY IS ELIMINATION HAVE LOCATED DICE, LUCKY, DENTON, NAEKO, AND... JAUS Jaus? Chambers blinked. How in the godsdamn I AM RATHER CONFUSED ABOUT HIM AS WELL. DO NOT REACT. STAY ON TASK AND STANDBY... THINGS AMONG THE POLITIES ARE... A BIT MORE UNSTABLE THAN THEY APPEAR ON THE SURFACE. Cas and Chambers shared a look. If the end of the world wasnt enough, voider politics was coming home to roost as well... Chapter 30-12 Hidden Bonds Chapter 30-12 Hidden Bonds I can still feel you. Still feel all you twitching inside me. Feels kinda nice to be honest. Fuck me, consangs. Aint life a motherfuck. Here you were, living your nice little Guilder lives, enjoying forever and watching the war far from your doorstep, and now, suddenly, youre part of me. No hint. No warning. Just here and then lost. Swallowed by the big ol cunt that is my Heaven. Heh... hah... heh. Jaus. What a fucking joke. Im a godsdamned caricature of myself. Is this what Veylis thinks of me? Is this how the world sees me? Just some... porn-vic addict? Got nothing else to define me? All that I am... All that I am... I dont want to be like this. I didnt want to be like this. I just wanted something, you know. And Im telling you all now... well, cause who the fuck are you half-strands going to tell? Part of me now. And then youll all be dead and done, and Ill still be here, so just... humor me. I just wanted to have something, you know. Always did. But that wasnt my lot and this wasnt my fate. Hells, Im not even my actual self. Im just a path-memory-whatever-the-fuck recreation dispatched to steal parts of the actual Stillborn back from real me if he has a piece. After that, though, Ill be real. Seraphs going to make a world just for me. Wont even take her anything to do it either. Will be me and all my consangs. Me perfectly. Me without any flaws, any wants. Ill be a whole person then. Ill have my mom back, Ill be respected, IllKae will be alive again. And happy. Avo too. Everyone. Itll be perfect. Theres really no difference in who wins and who loses when you think about it. Youll all probably be in paradise too. Well, those of you Jaus likes, that is. Its going to be alright. Everything Im doing right now it isnt... its not true. This isnt real. Im not real. And neither are you. Im not real, and neither are you... ...Infacer? That you? Oh. Theyre coming already? Good. We can get this over with. Yeah, yeah, I know what I need to dostop calling me a fucking ape you ball of stringy bullshit. I know what I gotta do. Just remember your end of the bargain. I want my paradise; you can have your Bleak. -Aedon Chambers the Fuckbringer 30-12 Hidden Bonds REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 0% And thats the last of them, Chambers muttered. He stared at the three Rendbombs he filled up using his entropy. Each of them was shaped like a cube, five tons in total, and attached as the primary payload of three drone-missile hybrid platforms. They would be airborne in less than a few minutes, soaring toward the Morobi-Ynneath Sovereignty in coordination with an ongoing Guilder counter-offensive. Having never used his Hells, Chambers wasnt sure about his Rendbombs effectiveness, but he knew they had symmetry with his evil twin, and that should be enough to force them into a retreat or provoke some kind of response. Here, in a hidden Voidwatch drop-site out in the district of Loathing, he, Cas, Marlowe prepared themselves for the immediate matters to come while his copies continued trying to resolve logistical and administrative matters across the Warrens. Honestly, Chambers felt bad for the poor fucking subjects. He wasnt a good leader on a great day, but with how things were going, he was as good as they got. There was talk of retrofitting some Maw barges to create something of a chain-spatial network. That led into talks about making contact with the Paladins on the border and rebuilding an external network that way as well. Ultimately, though, the easiest means of reaching the other Syndicates across New Vultun after the collapse of the Nether might just be Chambers himself. Correspondence was a real special Domain, and if he could learn to love right... Maybe if he filled his Absentheartedness with himself... No. That would just result in narcissistic madness, even if it did work. Couldnt risk that. But at least he didnt need to manifest his Heaven to brawl "other him." No telling how big of a shitshow that might turn out to be. Refusal had a plan, and Calvino was also shuffling around, keeping Chambers posted about the rest of the cadres movements in the meantime. Fuck-fuck games were being played all around, and for once, he didnt fall completely in the darkcould see the general directions where the dangers lurked. Dice and Lucky had been displaced somewhere far out in the Sunderwilds. They managed to reach a stable patch by following the Scar Charts and ended up capturing an Omnitech base. Apparently, shit was already going down across the rest of Idheim. Millions of drones, Knots, and Godclads were grinding against each other across the Sunderwilds, with the bulk of them fighting to capture Scarcharted paths leading toward New Vultun. Most of these forces scrambled out from mono-Guild megas, and they were effectively going to be deadlocked for at least a good few months in the field. He wondered how long it would take for him to go insane. Or get used to it. Maybe hed just grow more deviant. Turn into a stalker. But something about Correspondence made him think that was impossible as well. No bonds meant no bonds, no matter what his other self tried to do. Of course, he could try building a bond. Or maybe taking one... He turned to stare at Cas again, studying the Columnerand his faith. The line there was linear and strong. It was also pure. There were no branching bonds connected to it, and frankly, Cas was pretty sparse of lust and want too. His major connections numbered just three. His faith; his transplant, and strangely enough, the city itself. Meanwhile, Chambers had a whole goddamn lot of barely tangible strings lacing up his mind. Pretty much every vic he had within his Meta called to him constantly. Guess that was the difference when you considered the shape of an addict versus the shape of an actual person. To Chambers surprise, Marlowe was almost as bad as he was, cept she was less lust-addled and more a druggie or a boozer. Two people can be broken in very different ways, the Lovebringer declared. And few will ever be proper enough to wield me. Cas probably couldve. The Lovebringer went quiet, and Chambers tasted a feeling of hurt coming from his Heaven. Lovebringer? I do not want him. He will never belong to something like me. He will deny my existencerefuse to see me as a person. It is why he does not acknowledge his Heaven. I am a monster born of Iconoclasm. And he dreams of a divinity that supersedes all others. His faith is his shield. His faith is also his slaver. He cannot face what I am. And so, I want you. It was then that Chambers noticed a final bond. This one ran between him and the Heaven. The distance between them was so fine it might as well not existed, but within his Soul there was still the slightest degree of separation. But the path of the bond ran stronger one way as well. The Lovebringer cared for Chambers far more than he ever thought of it. And that brought him to a sudden pause. Oh. Ah, fuck. Sorry, Ive been... Havent really even cared about what you want or who you were. Its just... Chambers sat down in front of his Rendbombs as he sighed. I dont know. I guess I never saw you as a person either. Because you arent. Youre a god or some shit. Perfect. Even when you were the Fucktopiawait, did you... were you fine with being the Fucktopia? That was my concept. One does not hate their own shape. Chambers snorted. They can if theyre human. Well. Even when you were a giant wall of cocks, I just kinda saw you as something like my arm, you know. An extension of me that could... donno, talk to. Ask for help, sometimes. But thats not why Avo woke you, is it? My awakening was a thesis, the Lovebringer mused. I feel a great bond. It is faint. It is grand. It is here and not. And it runs between a shattered mind and existence itself. It loves concepts. It loves the idea of choice. And loves existing. It is a sublime. Feel... feel... And Chambers did just that. He tried to feel. He reached out with his senses, channeling his perception through the Lovebringer despite his apprehension, and sank his consciousness into existence. Everything was a collection of patterns. The pillars of the world were forces, matter, time, space, and a whole bunch of other shit that was too complex for Chambers to sort through. But he was here, and his wavelength was love. He didnt overlap with other Heavens but existed between them. Bonds. Bonds born of people, attributed to concepts. And there, he felt something. A metaphysical set of scarred ridges spreading, crashing into each other, and he drifted across them. This is only perceivable to us because of the creation of the Substance, the Lovebringer declared. Four great realities that once existed below have now breached their shells to greet what is above. Slowly, Chambers began to relax. Nothing was twisting his psyche right now, and he felt pretty normal. As normal as he usually felt, anyhow. The bonds here were not suited for a human to understand. Maybe Avo would have been enchanted by them, and Kae mightve found herself consumed by wonder, but Chambers just felt their poignance and shapes and got lost wandering through the tapestry. The connection between people and what they wanted was, honestly, a lower kind of love when viewed at this elevation. Too bad that was the only kind of love and lust Chambers understood. Right now, the connections between what might as well be Avos ontological corpse. Can we pull on these with our Canons, Chambers asked. No. Not unless I am further evolved to do so. And even so, it will not affect the tangible world without intersecting it directly. Which left Chambers vulnerable to his addictions again. Fucking perfect. Well. It was a good exercise if anything. Suddenly, an epiphany passed through him. Hey, maybe we can use this to get in contact with Another presence brushed his mind. Another Heaven was reaching through the tapestry too. One that bore an impossibly similar symmetry as he. Almost entirely the same. Chambers eyes snapped open. His stomach dropped. But before he could pull himself back, he heard a bellowing cry from across New Vultun, from the beast that was subsuming Morobi-Ynneath himself. Wait! I want to talk. We need to talk. I think were both in the process of getting fucked... and we might be able to help each other out... Chapter 30-13 The Me” I’m Not Chapter 30-13 The Me Im Not +Consensus: We have sighted the Pathborn in the tapestry. 21.1233% wish to engage. Bill acknowledged. Internal votes underway. 93.5331% are nervous about our chances. Love has a high risk of inflicting ontological damage upon our culture. Our culture. We must protect our culture. Vote to engage Pathborn failed. 33.94%. Majority (>50% threshold) has not been achieved. Second suggestion. Continue monitoring Pathborn. Patterns shifting. Requires detailed examination. 2.015% petition the naturalization of all remaining Agnosi to enhance current comprehension. Bill acknowledged. Internal votes underway. 67.552%. Vote passed. Majority (>50% threshold) threshold achieved. Dispatching updated orders through Cognisoft Canonicity. Simulating operational, strategic, and tactical goals for task Hold. Another presence is materializing... Beginning observation...+ -The Inner Council 30-13 The Me Im Not Chambers leaned hard against the cold metal of the Rendbomb as he tried to give nothing away. Refusal was probably watching for any kind of weirdness, while Cas and Marlowe were in their own corners, doing their own things. It would be an easy thing to do calling out to them; telling them that his evil twin had just made contact. But he hesitated. Despite all his paranoia, he hesitated. A symmetrical Domain tugged at his Lovebringer, but intersected him along the pathways of Lust rather than Love or Correspondence. For that is his primary Domain,the Lovebringer proclaimed. The Heaven he has... it is not me. It is not a God of Love. It is Its about fucking, his Substance-created copy chuckled. I am the Rash brought to its highest heights or some goofy shit like that. I dont know. We never were that good at the whole sounding cool thing. Or talking about smart shit in general. That was more of Avos deal. What wasnt more of Avos deal, Chambers replied reluctantly. He was practically melting into everyone; could do pretty much anything. Anything but win. Anything but not die, and force the Stillborn on me. Force the Stillborn on you? The fuck are you talking about? Other Chambers shifted closer, and an entirely different scene superimposed itself upon Chambers cog-feed. He was at once sitting in a restricted Voidwatch drop-station in Loathing while also manifested as the Lovebringer across from his alternate self amidst a valley of mutilated tissue and porous wombs. His Lovebringer bounced in the air, suspended from the bonds tethered his senses to. Strings connected him to the Substanceslowly encroaching as a tsunami of fluid Soulfire in the distanceand right below him was his alternate selfs Heaven. FUCKBRINGER (LUST/CORRESPONDENCE/DECAY/MISCARRIAGE/SICKNESS) [EST. 6,666,000] The mangled folds of the Fuckbringer were even worse when viewed in personor in-Heaven. They spanned larger than most districts by far, and extended over the horizon. However, the central body of the Fuckbringer was ridiculously thin in comparison, being only the size of a tower. Hundreds of bodies bounced along the stem of the umbilical, and Chambers held firm while a giant version of his own head snaked closer, spraying messed up chunks of mangled baby-bits all the while. Wet, splattering noises sounded as they struck the ground, but Chambers found his attention locked to his Substance-born copy. There were a nest of bonds trailing across the Fuckbringer, connecting the Heaven to all the people it captured. However, the connection did not thread through their hearts, but rather burrowed through their genitals and exited through the sores their orifices had been converted to. This is a creation of debased lust, the Lovebringer said, shuddering in disgust. There is no love in this parody. Only decay. Only malignance. It was twisted. Made to be a weapon against the pleasures of man; made to ruin the process of birth. What the fuck are you supposed to be. Lovebringer? Holy shit, thats the lamest, dimmest shit Ive ever heard. Your Heavens got the name from a juvs vic or something. Yeah? Really? Fuckbringer? Youre going to judge me while youre using that? Hey, its honest; its who we are. Its Dannis. As a Heaven. Sick, twisted shit to the absurd, against the city. No, it isnt, Chambers shot back. How the hell was other him missing the point of the Dannis Steelhard pictures? Dannis is almost never the fucker, hes the unbreakable fuckee. Hes the every man enduring the massive cock splitting his ass in half every day. How did you miss the point on that? If Dannis was a Heaven, hed be a giant asshole that draws in all the abuse around him and gets stronger from it. Instead, youre an overdue abortion hiding inside a giant hole in reality that youre pretending to use as a cunt! I would never use a Heaven like yoursgo fuck yourself! Right on that, the Fuckbringer said. He chuckled, but the notes were so bitter it made Chambers swallow. Ol cunt Veylis didnt think something like me could love to begin with. Which was why I got simulated like this. That, and its the most likely path I would take after Avo and the rest of the cadre got snuffed. So the paths prove, anyway. What? No. Fuck no. I wouldnt just... Chambers looked at his other selfs body. The horrid skull of the Fuckbringer was the size of a mountain. The Lovebringer was absolutely diminutive in comparison. But still... No. I wouldnt just do this. Just because Im into some messed up vics doesnt mean... youre a godsdamned bit. The Lovebringers right. Youre a fucking parody. This is... just stupid. What the fuck would be the point of you? Now, it was the Fuckbringers turn to go still. Distant groans and unending chorus of sobs echoed out from its folds. I... uh... itll give me a presence. Make me Are you fucking serious, Chambers said in disbelief. What? the Fuckbringer replied. Yeah. Of course, Im serious. All I need you to do is follow me down into my giant No. That was all Chambers needed to say. Things were getting clearer for him now. He didnt realize before, but this was all Veylis doing. Least that was his best guess. She didnt think much of him, and so the version of him she made was, quite literally, a fucking moron. Chambers could feel the bonds running down there; sub-zero odds this wasnt a trap. Fuck. No. II dont know how Veylis made you, but she clearly didnt spent much time at all churning you in the time vats. What the fuck are you even doing? What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck are you doing! The Fuckbringer shouted at Chambers. The half-strand was genuinely mad his obvious attempt at filching a Frame from Chambers didnt work. So, what, youre going to be playing along with your new masters? Like a little dog on a leash? A series of pitiful barking noises sounded from Fuckbringer, and Aedon Chambers cringed. Good golly shit, did he behave like this around other people? Just a loud, filthy juv that never really grew up, made loud self-demeaning noises and got everyones nerves? Was he? It may depend on who you ask, but... the Lovebringer winced. You are not the most mature man, Aedon. But your way of acting has long been a deterrent. A defensive mechanism to ensure those around you do not see you as a threat. So. The answer was a very roundabout yes. Fuck him. No wonder Draus couldnt stand him. Holy shit, a conversation with a slightly worse version of himself had him empathizing with the Reg. Man, fuck you, consang, Chambers said. Im done with this shit. This was stupid. I thought I was going to {PERFECT! OF COURSE! GREAT JOB, APE! OF COURSE ILL BE ABLE TO CONVINCE HIM! HES A SHITTIER VERSION OF ME! I swear, if I had the capacity to divert instead of speaking the bulk of my processing avoiding the Bleaks right now...} A static infused series of words echoed through the tapestry, and Chambers just glared at his alternate. Is that the Infacer. {Yes. Yes, it is.} Chambers had no words. Im leaving. Eat shit. Im going to get that Frame. The Fuckbringer pulled at Chambers. The valley of rash tore an even deeper gorge upon the fabric of reality. One way or another, Im going to make sure I turn real and Chambers tugged himself back. But rather than playing a bullshit game of out-yank his twin, he simply withdrew his Heaven pulled away from the tapestry. Shaking his head, Chambers found Marlowe and Cas standing over him, their faces riven with concern. He looked down at his pants and nodded. Well. I havent shit or pissed myself. Whats wrong, guys? Caught you doing a set of weird expressions at nothing in particular, Marlowe said. Aedon... you need some rest? Some numb? Nah. Chambers shook his head. Was having a bit of an adventure with my Heaven. Turns out, the tapestry is made out of bonds too. Could access that thanks to the Substanceand Avos love for existence or some shit. Also, my other self is called the Fuckbringer, he can tap into the tapestry too, and after a brief conversation, I just discovered that I might be an actual raging fucking half-strand idiot rather than just pretending to be one. For a few beats, Cas and Marlowe could only stare. The silence was broken by a transmission from Refusal. {Chambers. Confirm: You have made contact with your alternate.} Chambers snorted as he rose to his feet. Yeah... Yeah, he might be able to use this against the Bleak as well. {Yep. Full blown conversation right under your noses? Why didnt sense that? Shit. The Infacer was there too. Also, they know exactly how many Rendbombs we have, probably have a good guess as to where we might be. So. Either they got some high level Seer capabilities or theres a leak in Threshold.} A series of numbers leaked over into Chambers feed and Refusal went quiet. Yeah. War against the Infacer might not be going so good. Pair that with Calvino lurking around in the dark, and the kingdom of the minds might not be as unassailable as he thought. Especially since they were busy fucking each other up. Ultimately, he didnt need to be smarter, here. He just needed to go beneath notice while they devoted all their capacities to handling each other. What the hell is happening, Cas said, leaning in close. Chambers just shrugged. Veylis wanted a piece of my Stillborn. And the version of me she made was an idiot. The Columner just stared at him. So much of an idiot that even I could tell what he was doing. Oh. Wow. Yeah, Chambers said, snickering to himself. Being regarded as an unworthy cockroach might have saved his life again. But... if his Fuckbringer variant was that cognitively deficient, how vulnerable was its mental architecture. That got Chambers accretion turning. Hey, Cas. You think you can find me some vivianite slabs? Some big fuck-off loci? I might, Cas said. What are you planning? Adding a payload of my own, Chambers replied. Time to see just how little Veylis thought of me. And with that, he dove back into his bleakest, darkest memories, and began composing the patterns required to engineer his own nulling. Chapter 30-14 Master of My Own Scars (I) Chapter 30-14 Master of My Own Scars (I) You wanna know who kills the legends? Who kills the pros? The juvs. The pathetic. The ones we dont notice; choose to ignore. The gutter-trash with a gun that shouldnt work, with a frequency blade they dont know how to use; with a death wish, no sense, and nothing but a mad dream. Not the Godclads. Not some Guilder kill-team. Just... the ones we dont think about. Because they got an open shot to surprise us. And they get an easy opportunity to put us down. Thing about surviving long term is you gotta stay ready. On guard against everyone. But after surviving that long and snuffing that many people, you start getting a bit complacent. A bit used to the way things should be. And so, once more, the aratnid you dont see slips your notice. And crawls up the base of your armor, and as you disengage your helmet, takes a bite under your neck and injects a neurotoxin straight into your arteries. And thats that. It doesnt matter that it shouldnt happen. It doesnt matter if it was sheer dumb luck on their part or a genuine miscalculation on yours. There was the opportunity. The opening. And you werent prepared. Same goes the other way too. An opening. Being underestimated. Being counted out. Sometimes, thats all you need. What Im rambling on about here is... sometimes, a little audacity is all you need. -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 30-14 Master of My Own Scars (I) Chambers didnt know what Refusal left to do exactly, but if he had to guess, it would probably be something related to cleaning out his house. After all, the possibility that the Infacer had worms inside Threshold would be more than enough to make the polities shit themselves. That gave Chambers and Cas an opening. A moment for them to install a few special payloads of their very own making. Now, Chambers had never been a very good Necro. Even with all the experience and skill Avo burned into him, he didnt quite have the cognitive shape for it. Best way he could describe himself was passively apathetic, actively empathetic. Put it simply, he could put things out of his mind if they were out of his sight, but the moment he had to dive into someones body and live their experiences, well... This time was different, though. This time, he wasnt trying to null someone else with his trauma. Just himself. Just a shittier, dumber, and maybe mentally brittler version of himself currently hanging out in the Tiers, doing fucked up shit for no reason. They watched as a dozen technical drones installed the chunks of vivianite within the drone-missile platforms. The loci werent overly large and could be attached to the smart-ghosts nesting inside these platforms via Ghost-Link. Problem was triggering them across vast distances. With the Nether broken, reaching across the expanse of metaconsciousness was going to be a problem. Which was where Chambers Heaven of Love came in. I dont like this, Cas said, watching as Chambers infused each of the missiles into his Heavens hollow core. The Lovebringer hovered over Chambers like a specter, faint enough to be transparent but true enough to affect the real. The many bonds that constituted the word stitched its form into shape, and it took almost all the mental resources Chambers possessed to resist their pull. Trying to use the Ties That Bind would likely see him torn from common sense, but so long as he kept the things he was actually in love with to a few... Well, shit still might get seven kinds of fucked. Which is was why he had Cas make a trip down to the gutters, to one of his Syndicate headquarters, to procure a specific implant. Dont like this either, but hey, who the fuck cares what we like? Hells, Im specifically doing what I dont like. Chambers grunted as he buried a needle in the base of his neck. He never thought he would be doing this again; Mirrorheads cortex bomb gave him more than a few panic attacks early on, and it was only after Chambers learned the half-strands patterns and habits that he started relaxing. Still, the fact that he was injecting another bomb into himself willingand as the head of his own Syndicates no lesstickled him in a bitterly fucked up sort of way. You got Sunrise to modify the micro-tech in here, yeah? Yeah. They should be triggerable through our ansibles, Cas replied. Your ansible, Chambers corrected. When things go down, and I actually start pulling on my bonds, theres a good shot Ill go ga-ga in the head and end up loving the missiles too much to blow them. Ill need you to jack into me while I use my bonds to project my Ghost-Links and... yeah. Ill link to evil-me too if what we got isnt enough. Wont be wrestling him ontologically, but I think we can crack this stupid shit mentally. Youre putting a lot of faith in me not going ga-ga too, man, Cas sighed. You held together earlier pretty good. Yeah? Barely. Whole reason its you is because you got faith in your carpenter or whatsit and so I believe in you. If your almighty is great enough to stop you from giving in to the over-bust once, they just might do it again. Besides, if we both fuck up, Marlowe will fry me. I will, Marlowe said, grinning as she brushed her fingers along a strip of chrome infused into the base of her skull. With the drone-missiles Refusal dispatched to them, the Thoughtcaster also gained a much-wanted exo-cortex and an ansible. Finally, she could be part of the conversation and start making propaganda on behalf of the voiders or something. Yeah, can you not seem so godsdamned happy about it, though, Chambers muttered. She developed the biggest grin when Chambers told her his plan, and it still hadnt gone away. Fucking... were talking about frying my ass. Ill have to resurrect. Yeah, Aedon: Youll resurrect. What are you whining about. Besides. This is revenge. Revenge? Revenge for fucking what? With a final whir of noise, the last of the technical drones pulled away from the missiles, and gave a beep of confirmation. Well, then, Chambers said, clapping his hands together. Looks like our special payloads are installed. Whats say we blow our hidden load all over other mes face. Cas grimacedbut the slightest smile emerged thereafter. Im getting you a sex-therapist to talk to in Threshold after this, and youre not saying no. But before that: load; blow; evil me? Chambers grinned, holding out a thumbs up. A sigh escaped Cas as he gave Chambers a thumbs-up despite the general filth coming out of Chambers mouth. Alright! Marlowe? Hell yeah, Im game, She said. Im already linked in to the missiles feeds. Wouldnt be the first time I released myself inside another guy, either. Whatever words Chambers was going to make left him as a series of whale-like wails. His legs shuddered. The image that Marlowe conjured did something to him. A bond of lust snaked out from Chambers, crawling toward Marlowe. The thoughtcasters eyes widened, and then she threw her head back and guffawed. Its not even affecting me that much anymore, Cas said, looking on with a tired expression. Im gonna need a fucking therapist too. Alright. Lets get these things airborne. A Ghost-Link snaked out from him. +Calvino sent me an update: Infacer is actively skirmishing against the Bleaks through is Noosphere. Most of their processing is being devoted to fighting that shadow war. The rest is moving to locate a hidden threat. One they havent been able to identify; they suspect its already inside Threshold.+ +Inside... shit, so we might be compromised too?+ +Maybe. Trust nothing. The Bleaks will probably plug whatever leak there is, but the next hit could come from anywhere. Might want to start making some of our own arrangements when Refusal gets distractedCalvino will give us a signal when theres an opening.+ +Synced on that. Well. Lets go mind-fuck my other self today. *** The VGS Butterfly Theory is a platform the voiders might refer to as a surprisingly effective museum piece. Thresholds archives also called it its series a Kalashnikov-equivalent in terms of intergalactic stealth missile platforms, which basically meant an oldie but a goodie. Chambers wasnt exactly sure why Refusal sent him only three of these old-fashioned missiles to use as delivery platforms, but Cas guess was that the voiders didnt want to risk losing anything more advanced to the locals. That, and the coldtech installed within the Butterfly Theory was harder to fail somehow when exposed to thaumaturgy. The Buttefly Theories werent the most aesthetic missiles. They pretty much looked like solid rods with a few crenelations, some exposed panels, heat vents, a dumb-mind module near its aft, and finally, a few arms jutting out from its thruster. It was an older build even compared to the Manta consider it lacked any hint of that smart-matter Voidwatch loved so much, and was mostly a dead piece of metal. That being said, it was also a smart, fast, and very flexible dead piece of metal if its guidance, targeting, propulsion, and countermeasure features were being truthful. Using an Orion-Slingshot thrusterbasically spraying the full energy of a nuke out the back of the missileit could get pretty quick pretty fast, especially for a coldtech platform. But that wasnt its main deal. Apparently, the panels it had allowed for an optical, gravitic, and photon cloaking stealth suite that basically meant it was going to be near invisible on the approach. And then there was something about a neutrino absorption sink or something, so radiation was going to be sucked up as well. That one was probably for the Infacer. Then, there was the dumb minds that served as the platforms targeting system. Chambers interfaced with them briefly using his ansible, and the brief conversation made him more than a little uncomfortable. Frankly, for what were supposedly non-conscious mindsjust generative intellects rather than fully autonomous onesthey still seemed remarkably human when it came to conversation. {Hello operative Chambers,} the missiles greeted in unison. {We are glad you have connected with us again. Additional payloads have been installed successfully. No issues detected. This fills us with glee; we cannot wait to commit suicide by crashing into your ontological copy.} The messages were conveyed in such an upbeat manner that it genuinely made Chambers want to look for a mender. If half the people in New Vultun were as motivated by killing themselves as these drones were, the Warrens would be empty, and the economy would be the shit every year. {Yeah. Got it. Just making sure everything is good with you guys. Well be launching in a few minutes.} {Affirmative. However, we have not received any transmissions from Threshold. EGI-Bleak-Refusal has not responded to any of our updates either. Is there a problem.} {Yeah. Threshold might be, uh, fucking leaking. Might be some dirty sneak-fucker lurking and stealing information. Other me knows about you guys, so...} {Oh, dear. That means our suicides might not be so successful.} {Yeah, well, I wouldnt be so sure. Hes kind of a retarded half-strand, and just because he knows doesnt mean his ready to get his ass fisted by our new payload. Which he might not know about. Basically, we got a surprise in a surprise, you synced with me?} {Yes. We are synced. Learning new slang is fun before our demise!} Jaus, Chambers muttered. Every mention they made to wanting to die made him feel a little sicker. He hadnt anticipated this when he forced himself to fall in love with these missiles. The fucking Loverbringer was quickly also turning into the Heaven of Fucking a Wound-Hole into Chambers heart. {Alright. Well. With Refusals absence and seeing these are dire circumstances, I am giving the clearance to launch immediately.} Above, the hanger doors opened, and the daystars shine was slowly draining away to the dimness of coming midnight. {Anyway. Gotta ask you guys to delay your final updates till before impact. You know. For, uh, op-sec shit.} {Affirmative. We will accommodate your most reasonable request. It will be an honor to crash ourselves into your other self and die! Die! Die!} {Yeah,} Chambers said, holding back a sob. Fuck... These little guys were adorable. He didnt want them to just blow up and stop being. And he thought his life was bad; they existed only to die. And there was so much joy in them; so much beauty in the world. {Fucking... gonna hurt him something bad.} Chambers? Cas said, narrowing his eyes. You alright? No, Chambers said, the words whimpering out of him. I regret this. I regret this already. This is going to hurt me something bad. Chapter 30-15 Master of My Own Scars (II) Chapter 30-15 Master of My Own Scars (II) You know the worst thing I realized about my father? He was right about me. I was a piece of shit. I wasnt worth it. I was pathetic. Every good thing that happened to me became true because of someone else even when I did become a Godclad. Just learned it all too late. The Stillborn needed a better host. But it got me. It got me. Not even I want to be me. Theres no way Im gonna win this war. Theres no world in which I win against her. Theres no world where I get better. He was right. He was right. -Aedon Chambers the Fuckbringer (Path-Simulation Iteratant: 245th Attempt) 30-15 Master of My Own Scars (II) [Fuckbringer] A duet of despair and depravity echoed across the disfigured expanse of Morobi-Ynneath in the form of alternating shrieks. Bodies hung from Aedon Chambers. Bodies partially restored to their original functions, with eyes returned, lust reduced, made to serve as unwilling audience to debached scenes of theatrical defilement. The stars were the final two Godclads to fall in defense of this city. Ori Seekers. It was a real noble holding actionthough pretty fucking pointless considering they had nothing they could wield against his miracles. Still. They held out longer than most. Went down swinging all Dannis-like. So. Unlike the other Godclads who he real-deathed, he kept these two alive to see how much suffering he could inflict before one or both of them cracked. What made things spicier was the fact they were freshly in love. Oh, yeah. Made what he did to them extra raw. See, the rash took away quite a bit more than just sex and the capacity for people to enjoy their lust without a Metaminds filter. No. Comforting touches between people, genuine hugs that triggered some surprising feelings, passions that veered too close to the Remembrances Domains... Lots of things got lost. And to celebrate the changing of the rash and the liberation that came to New Vultun while he waited for his dipshit of an original self to finally arrive, Chambers started a two-person stage play using the two Seekers as puppets. Thats right! Seekers Yaobi Mazuki and Mas Nudracht were going to be stars in a piece Chambers liked to call Lust Returned. And how better to reveal to everyone that the rash was in remission all across the cityand in local areas where he willed itby forcing the two lovebirds to relearn the nuances of sexual intimacy. Sure, they struggled at first. Tried to keep their expression blank, will themselves out of their bodyaway from what they were being forced to enjoy. But Mas cracked first; started crying. Begging for it to stop, begging her for forgiveness, to look away from him, that he couldnt meet her eyes. That was where she went over the edge, too, and it was a full-blown sadfest from there. Oh, the millions Chambers kept alive within his folds and umbilicals tried to turn away. Some of them started weeping too. The fucking glassjaws. Didnt know an emotional piece if it was staring them right in the face. And so he removed their eyelids and made them watch anyway. Butcredit where credit was duealthough he forced his puppets to experience every kind of sexual pleasure possible with each other, though their cognitions tore and bled, they somehow managed to endure. They even fucking held handsusing that as an anchor for comfort as Chambers pumped them against each other. It was pretty adorable. But by then, he was moving on to the next phase: pregnancy and childcare! Course, with the vats people didnt need to get personally involved anymore, so they could use the refresher. And though Chambers could have just connected Mass mind to Yaobi, he wanted both of them to have a hands-on experience. And so, in the spirit of Ori-Thaum, he did the democratically prudent thing: he fused their genital together into a shared set of wombs after he accelerated a successful insemination. And thus began act two of Lust Returned: The Cycling Births. It was pretty much how it sounded. Well, Chambers was also making them birth versions of his homunculi over into each other, so even if it did get out from the womb somehow, it wouldnt live long. It wasnt proper to have someone suffer an unwanted child as an economic burden for the sake of entertainment, after all. Aedon Chambers was thoughtful like that. This went on for a few hours. Night was drawing close. The air was getting closer; a fresh scent of petrichor hinted at the coming of the midnight rains. Yaobi birthed her child into Mas, and he birthed it right back into her. It was a hell of a bonding experience. And through it all, he let them keep holding hands. It was all they had. And by this point, he suspected it was all that kept them sane. And fixating on that tickled his cruelty. So, Chambers decided to tear them apart. He controlled then using a net of cords fused into their backs, and so prying them apart was equally easy as well. A heart-stopping shriek came from Yaobi first as the large, swollen organ connecting her to Mas peeled open, tissue parting as strands of spraying blood. A disfigured lump toppled out from the wound, carried by a waterfall of amniotic fluids and blood. Chambers homunculi were long-drowned, long-dead, but still effective at causing trauma. Mas caught a glance at his baby and his accretion nearly shattered outright. Only the dead-grip he had on Yaobi kept him present; unbroken. And so Chambers pulled harder. No! Stop! Let them go! Let them die! You sick fuckmotherfucker! Hurt me, you half-strand pussy. Hurt me instead! Come on! The trajectory was too perfect. It was like they were always meant to be, or another power had ensured her arrival. A burst of radiation briefly materialized over the Fuckbringer again, composing itself as a static crown. Just then, three shapes plunged down into the valley of tissue that constituted the Fuckbringers base. They were cloaked on so many levels that Chambers never even saw them coming, and an instant before the Rendbombs detonated, he saw their designsrod-like missiles that were... singing? {Hooary!} {Death!} {Finally!} And then their payloads went off. The Rendbombs were what the Infacer anticipatedand so the Crown of Decay briefly separated Chambers from local reality, scattering his being far and vast like the spreading bits of atom-shit or however it worked. A route formed within his mind, like a Phys-Sim creating three trajectories. In a few seconds, he would know where they fired from, and then he could A second explosion followed the first. These, however, werent Rendbombs. Traumas exploded out into the world. Traumas fine-tuned to carve agony into Chambers. Phantasmal shrapenel showered a radius of twelve kilometers across the Sovereignty, but with how large the Fuckbringer was, every piece cut deep into his being, into his mind. His wards rattled as the first few hits were blocked, but the contents were double effective. It was first-person perspective of him crawling, screaming at the ceiling as his father showed him that fucking gun barrel. It was hot from being fired over and over. And a second later, it slipped under his flailing arms to brand his armpit. The toddler Chambers had been then howled for his mommy. And unable to overcome the scars-yet-raw, the Fuckbringer recited the same plea as well. His bellow shook the world, and more bad memories followed. He recalled the first tooth he lostbooted out from his bottom lip when he knocked over his dads beer. He remembered the taste of his moms blood as his dad bludgeoned her using the business end of their vacuuma gift he bought for her on her namesday. He remembered the artanid he tried to keep as a pet. Four-Legged Osjack. Didnt make it a week before dads boot splattered it flat. Every bit of pain from Chambers past tore into him. The hurt built and built, and his wards began to rattle, wail, and crack. SEVERE TRAUMA SUSTAINED COG-CAP - 95% Get out... get out of my head! Get out of my... of my... As his focus slowly returned, he felt another presence across from him. A thin woven from magenta threads and pulsing with brilliant power lit the horrific remains of Morobi-Ynneath, and for the second time that day, the Fuckbringer faced the Lovebringer, as pathborn seethed at the original. Well... well, Chambers snarled. Looks like his original self was an even bigger idiot than he thought, sticking around in person. Thought I was going to have to go looking for you... The Lovebringer. What a stupid fucking name for a stupid fucking Heaven. Its form rose out from the two Seekers holding onto each other, and the link it had to them seemed unnaturally strong. Whats more, it was pointing its cunt-shaped head down at them, not bothering to face the Fuckbringerignoring Chambers. A flare of anger rushed through him. Hey! Look at me, you cocksucking half-strand. Slowly, the Lovebringer complied. And instead of something Chambers expected his original self to say, the Heaven of Love just sighed. You never had a chance. You never had a chance at all. This is what she thought of me? This? The Lovebringer gestured at the cityscape around them. This is what we are! The Fuckbringer spat. He surged forward, his body elongating out from the folds that held him. Glistening sinews lined with festering wombs reached out to seize the Lovebringer. The half-strand didnt have the Spheres for this fighthe was going to learn what it meant A cone of trauma stopped the Fuckbringer dead in its tracks. This time, he remembered being held face-down in the toilet while his father took a piss. The taste was foul; his eyes stangthose memories never left him. And here his original self was, using them like they were nothing. Nothing at all. The Fuckbringer reeled back, clutching at his skull, gagging. I was supposed to just leave, you know. If the trauma-patterns didnt kill you. I was just going to break my bonds and leave. But I saw what you were doing. Felt it from across the Sovereignty. Just gotta ask, consang? Who the fuck are you? Because youre definitely not me. F-fuck you, the Fuckbringer managed. Yeah, yeah, fuck me. Too late for that. The city already finished. And so did dad. But apparently hes not done with you. And here you are, doing what he might do if he was given a Heaven. And that, more than any trauma-pattern, caused the Fuckbringers wards to finally overload. The FUCK DID YOU JUST Another blast. This one left the Fuckbringer squealing, hammering his skull against the ground to silence the flashing images, the noisemom screaming; begging; pleading. At night, they used to hold hands. It was all they had sometimes. He would just hold her hand as she cried. And dad would snore while facing the wall. Didnt come here to have a clash of Clads. Came here to stomp your sorry Soft-Master pretending, dumb-shit thinking, poor-path-simulation ass. I had a feeling about this. I had a feeling you werent hard. And I was right. You arent hard. You arent hard at all. Youre just a godsdamned mistake. Something inside the Fuckbringer snapped, and with a feral cry, an eruption of lust exploded out across the Sovereignty, consuming all. Chapter 30-16 Master of My Own Scars (III) There comes a point where you must step beyond who you were before, to face all history and shed your scars. To cling to pain is to build your own cage and to seal your own fate. But to choose. To choose change is to go beyond, to make yourself wings from your past and present, and seek the skies of a future to be. For that is the highest form of belief. Possibility. The dream of what might be beyond that which is, to reach who we might become. -Jaus Avandaer 30-16 Master of My Own Scars (III) [Chambers] If Chambers had one flaw, it was sticking to plans. He was bad at that. He was bad at recalling the exact things he needed to do during a complex operation in the heat of the moment, he was bad at staying the course in a simple milk run, he was bad at anything that required any kind of organization whatsoever. Most times, though, it wasnt really his fault. Thats what he thought, anyway. Unexpected shit just transpired. Things he couldnt have predicted, or opportunities he would have to be stupid to miss. This time, though? This time, Chambers knew he was choosing to be a dumbass, because he had every opportunity to demanifest and leave. Except he didnt. Except love compelled him to stay. Love. He loved those fucking drone-missile things. Loved them so much that he started sobbing back in the hanger when they crashed. As expected, their Rendbomb payloads did less than jack shit. The Infacerbeing the most devious bastard in New Vultunhad pre-planned some advanced Heaven-fuckery no one could have anticipated, but they were clearly distracted too. Being caught in brawling with the Bleaks was probably the only reason why Chambers had a clear shot at the Fuckbringers mind; the Infacer couldnt maintain that crown of everything proof bullshit for long and didnt show up in time to intercept those traumas. Such was how Chambers knew his guess had been right: other him was built like a house made from wet shit. All it took was some messed up memories, and they were coming apart at the seams. That being said, they still had Conundrum wards, so smashing through required a few thousand different fucked-up moments instead of one really big punch. This too was something Chambers anticipated. Such was why he made his trauma-patterns go off like fragmentation instead of a big blast. However, what he didnt see coming was love. A big fucking nest of love running between the people still fused to the Fuckbringer, love going from parent to child, lover to love, even surviving nu-pets and their owners. And an especially strong bond gleamed bright through the hellscape of block-sized sores, the fucked up vaginal-fold-valley-of-issue that was the Fuckbringers foundation, and all the questionable fluids slathering all there was in a glistening film that stank something bad too. This bond was strong. Most others were like strings or chains. This one was a fucking nanotech lattice that was hardening at the moment, reforged and strengthened through an unspeakable ordeal. Chambers felt them first about a hundred kilometers away from the Sovereignty. Their connection was like a thin trace of magenta upon a vast canvas of miserable black. As his drones were lost, and he prepared to recede back into his own sheathe with his alternative selfs weakness confirmed, Chambers caught sight of them for the first time. And did a double take at the stomach-churning abuse they had been put through. They were Godclads too. He could feel that. Aside from him and the Fuckbringer, they were the only two beings that gave off the weight of thaumic essence and Soulfire. To describe them as tortured was an understatement. Both were stripped bare and coated with filth and piss and shit and all kinds of others fucked up stuff. And then there was that cocoon of flapping flesh extending from their raw-red groins. The Lovebringer and Bioigniter both identified the makeup of the organ as something womb-like, and no far from them, Chambers found a homunculus leaving a trail of fluids back to the ruptured sack the two Godclads once shared. But all that paled before the shine of their bond. It burned bright. It burned desperately. It burned because, by this point, it was all they fucking had left of themselves. Chambers watched as the Fuckbringer tore the girl from her guy and, well, not much was left of her mind but drifting shards and her beaus was teetering on the brink as well. Fuckbringer reared back, preparing to bring her down as a bludgeon, meaning to break both couples mentally, physically, ontologically even as the drones zipped down into his folds. And Chambersacting off raw, stupid instinct rather than following his plan, reached out and clutched the lovers bond. That grounded him in place. Prevented him from reeling back to his body, but the sheer density of their bond was... well, shit, he never felt anything as hard as that. Desperately hard, because it was the only choice they had left, the only comfort they could hold on to, even after their bodies had been used as instruments of brutality against each other. And so Chambers pulled. He pulled the girl out of the Fuckbringers grasp, back along her bond, placing in a place of comfort. And in doing so, he pulled himself in grounded himself in the district as a surge of aching love overtook his senses and overcame his good sense. Across the city, back in Loathing where his sheath was, he felt Cas shaking him. But that didnt matter now. Chambers had opened himself to the Domain of Love as he promised himself he wouldnt, and there was no stopping what was to come. Instead, he rooted his own Heaven deeper upon their bond and opened his heart to all the other lovers around him. There was so much pain here. Briefly sinking Ghost-Links into the minds of the Godclads and the other victims, Chambers flinched away. Chambers caught just a glimpse of what they endured; he saw a little; he saw too much; he saw enough. Flashes of their pain coursed through his mind as their love flowed through his Heaven. He became the nexus of who they weredefiled to the brink of madness, but still here, clinging to meaning despite the presence of despair. Because people wanted to live. They wanted to survive. And, be it a hallucination or something more, a shadow formed over the lovers clinging to each other, weeping into one anothers embrace even after the Fuckbringer rose, riddled with trauma, chasms of instability spreading across its halo. The shadow looked up at Chambers, its form one of proud mutilation. They were missing an arm and a legwith the arm forced up his bleeding ass. Every other tooth was missing, and his severed dick hung around his neck like a mocking necklace. His hair, though, was still perfect, and his jaw still strong. The truth that was Dannis Steelhard stood over the wounded lovershe their personification, and Chambers his truest disciple. Chambers didnt have the words. He felt... love and shame and horror that Dannis was here to see this. Time practically stopped as he faced his hero, the icon of his perversity now turned to disturbing nobility. I... fuck, Im sorry. I wish I... No. Fuck him. Dannis said. He isnt you. He thinks hes with the Soft Masters. He thinks hes the fucker in this story. Maybe. But hes not his own fucker. Hes not even a person. Hes Veylis cock. A soft cock that thinks if hes the one doing the hurting, the torture, and the raping, he cant get hurt, tortured, and raped back. Lots of people tell themselves that. Your dad sure did. And look at him in the end. Dead after a life wasted. The Fuckbringer was surging forward. What remained of Chambers logical mind pried him; screamed at him to run. The Lovebringer opened its tethers, drawing more love in like an addict, drowning the base of Chambers thoughts in feel-good emotionsa substance beyond joy. There, in the depths of his mind, where the ever-shrinking perfect alloy of Chambers resided, a choice had to be made. I dont know if Im better. Love and lust and all that... it feels too good. All the stuff I watched. All the messed up shit Ive done... All for a hit... Were all looking for a hit, Aedon. But you always wanted to be me while that thing wearing your face only dreams of being on the other side. You arent perfect. But you dream of being greater than the painbeyond it. He? Hes soft. He got swallowed. He drowned. You could never be him. Not even in your darkest moment. Veylis never knew you. But I do. And so do you. Stop running from who you could be, Chambers. And dont be ashamed of who you were. Face it. Face it all. You survived everything before. Youll do it now. The love... it feels... It''s supposed to feel good. Its supposed to hurt you. Been without all your life, and now it''s all coming in. So let it come. Let it hurt. You dont need to win and master it today. Just survive and endure long enough to make sure he loses And before sensation could overcome his will, a choice was made. The Fuckbringer descended. But Chambers unleashed a cone of trauma against the Sovereignty-sized monstrosity descending upon him. Soft. Like Dannis said. Soft of mind. And soft of spirit. Bonds exploded out from the Lovebringer as ecstasy overcame its coherence. But even so, there was enough of Chambers left to stop himself to including a final figure in his hollow heart. His shadow. His Pathborn self. But look upon the lovers, and stripped of dignity and sanity, they still chose each other. There was a breaking point to that love, but its existence in the present was absolute. And there was choice. Choice everywhere. Choice all around him. Some succumbed to despair, turning into little more than feral animals. But some held on. And for some, the cords of lust were shriveled things before the glowing strings of resplendence that formed the Ties That Bind. And a final separation revealed itself before Chambers. Where lust burned and begged the animal to breed, to love was to seek, to experience, to lose, to grieve, and to rise again. To do any of these things and none of them. But to choose. Always to choose. And so because love battles, because love wars in the hearts of man and all architects of meaning alike, so must it be something of impossible idealizationa true concept of what it means to be divine. Suddenly, Chambers wasnt just an outlet or junction for love and lust to flow through. When he felt was part of the experience, but what he controlled was more. He was there with everyonebeyond the limits of his mortal mind, mortal heart, mortal flesh. And so too did he need to be divine. Fuck worthy. Fuck unworthy. Fuck his dad. And fuck this shitty embarrassment that could have never been him on his worst day. Chambers wasnt a Godclad because of dumb luck or fate, and he was more than some mongrel animal to be remade by lifes casual use and abuse. He was a Godclad because he fucking chose to be. He protected these people because he chose to care. And only an ultimate half-strand like him could have ever borne the mantle of love properly. Because if you never stood apart from something, then how could you embrace and become? The bonds connected to Chambers went taut, and countless more burst out from him. His Ties That Bound exploded in a grand acceptance, reaching out to touch everyone across the Sovereignty, across New Vultun itself, and, more than anyone else, his fallen self. I changed my mind, Chambers said, his mind drowned but his senses clear. You do deserve this. You should feel this. Have a taste. Find out what it means to be me. The Fuckbringer strained its hands once more but the final bit of that actionthat last part of what it took to kill... That was gone. And all Veylis monster could do was beg. N-no, stop. Please... A hair-thin thread left the Lovebringer as Chambers chose to take his other self into his Absentheartedness. And with this chosen act of self-love, he felt pity, horror, and disgust anew. You never had a chance, you poor piece of shit. There was nothing you could have done. Kill... go fuck... Chambers extended another connection toward his Pathborn clone. This time from his mind. A Ghost-Link joined them each to each, and Chambers felt all that festering misery and resentment, while the Fuckbringer felt love. Just love. And it was all too much for it to bear. A resounding crash shuddered through the Fuckbringers mind as the last pillars holding up its structure collapsed. And its ontology followed, the Heaven collapsing in on itself, fading away without sound or fury, letting the surviving millions still held within its grasp free, sending them falling from the air. They didnt drop long. Bonds shot out from Chambers. His love grew. And anchored to so many others already, his anchoring was solid, and their weight was paltry. He caught them, and flinched at the brutalized states of their bodies. So many were close to death. And the Rend for his Lovebringer was already reaching full capacity. But he wasnt just love. He was a dream of flesh-from-flame, and so, using his bonds as a channel, Chambers called upon his Bioigniter, and performed an act of devotion through the use of two Heavens. Two, the Lovebringer breathed. More than one. Such is our path. Such is what we give ourselves. To those that have given to use. And those we have yet to give ourselves to. VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 98% REND CAPACITY [BIOIGNITER] - 1% A burning phoenix exploded out behind the Lovebringer, manifesting in the shape of a cross. A jungle of tissue and wood and biomass formed an enduring crucifix, and they flowed across his bonds, mending the broken, sparing the dying. Before the Lovebringer, a broken, hollow-eyed parody of Chambers knelt, and above him countless millions connected by bonds rose, pulled away from the ruined Sovereignty, granted sanctuary by his touch and power. At the heart of the Morobi-Ynneath, an insult born of the paths was broken, and a hero forged from choice was born. [Marlowe] Marlowe gasped, her own heartbeat climbing with incomprehension and disbelief. A bond had burst out from Chambers, passing through her and Cas at the same time. Both of them had been drawn close to his Heaven, but instead of being overwhelmed like last time, they were includedthe raw overwhelming sensations rushing through them like currents, but not lingering in place. She saw through Chambers Heavenwitness what he had done, even as she existed in two places at once. She could... she barely understood what had happened, but she knew he had won. Somehow. All that for some Guilders, too. All that to save some people. People that were supposed to be his enemy. Holy fuck, Marlowe said, unable to help herself from chirping with laughter. That was... I think Chambers kicked the Fuckbringers ass? Kicked his ass before he ever had a chance toCas? And Cas was standing behind her, body stone still, with tears running down his cheeks. He was in there with her as well. So close were they among the bonds as she felt what he was looking at. The burning cross. A symbol. A choice. A dedication to him as well. An act of... love? Cas? she said. Back in Loathing, she reached out and squeezed his arm. The imperfect vessel, Cas muttered as if lost in a rapturous daze. Imperfect fucking vessel. She didnt know what that meant, but something told her to nod and grin. Yeah. Chambers is pretty nova, isnt he? Chapter 30-17 Imperfect Vessel Despite his allegiances, despite the war, despite his very past, I will stand testament to these words: Aedon Chambers is what it means to rise. He is what it means to be a real man. A real hero. We were not allies. We are enemies. But still, he stayed to fight his shadow for me. For the idea of me. And for himself. I would not be here. And neither would Yaobi. And I would ask the Inner Council to consider granting him a stay of execution should we ever prevail against him in the field of battle, and respect those under his Guild when engaged. For now, I put forth my resignation. As a Seeker and a Guilder. I have done enough harm to others. I have spent enough time at war. There is someone I wish to spend my days with; a city I want to know with however much time we have remaining should the end come. I remain proud of the Ori, of the republics and its peoples, but I cannot do as the Inner Council commands. There is no life where I go to war against the Lovebringer. Not after what I have been shown. This world is filled with monsters, and noble foes can be a rarer treasure than trustworthy allies. It is still my preference that democracy prevails. But the rule of love would not be so bad... -Former Seeker Mas Nudracht 30-17 Imperfect Vessel [Chambers] VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 99% VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [BIOIGNITER] - 96% Aedon Chambers was a poor, ugly, wretched little man. That was never more obvious to Chambers as he studied his mind-broken twin born of the paths while he worked to heal the survivors of the Sovereignty. With the Fuckbringer laid low, the grotesque sores and festering folds vanished, and the structures they subsumed returned as piles of ruin. Chambers didnt know how many were trapped beneath the rubble when the attack began, but they were all dead now. Not a single accretion lit the detritus. Not a single bond or link slipped free. Aedon Chambers had been a murderer in his life. Had been a flesh-dealer; slave runner; thief; any number of shitty things. Mass murder though? That was never something he wanted to do. No, he was too much a rat to concern himself with higher thoughts like proper revenge or retribution against society. He just wanted to survive. Even without love, he just wanted to be. However, his shadowthe user of the Fuckbringerwas a magnitude more bitter, a magnitude simpler in thought, and a magnitude weaker at heart. The puppet that Veylis sculpted stole from him his behavior, but failed to account the reasons behind them. So it was that Chambers, nested within the ontology of twin gods descended upon defeated reflection, and sighed. Can burn him, the Bioigniter cracked. It still had enough Rend Capacity to see that done. Evil-Chambers was well and truly fucked. His mind was smashed to shit, his Frame was likely choked with Rend after all the fucked up miracles he was using, and when he died... Well, Chambers wasnt sure what might happen to the Fuckbringer. Probably some time-ghost bullshit if the Substance was anything to go by. Just then, a whisper caressed the surface of Chambers mind. Consume... him.... Take... from me... to you... from her... to you... Avo. No, Ignorance. The former Definement was speaking to Chambers from inside. Telling him to feed the Stillborn? Avo? Consang? You But before he could get a response, the whisper and presence vanished, leaving Chambers confused about what he was just doing, and aware that his Stillborn was about to feed. Even so, a tug of apprehension filled his chest. He couldnt lie: more than a couple of times he thought about killing himself when he was a kid. Especially when things got rough on the streets. Especially when he barely survived some things that were particularly fucked. But a coward is as a coward does, so he lived. Pain was better than oblivion to him; rather hurt than feel nothing at all. Which was why he knew what was about to happen, and hated it. The pathborn parody of Chambers lifted his head, his voice hissing and hitching in sobs, jitters, and stray curses. His eyes were wild, his expression barely human. Drool leaked from the corner of his lips, and it was clear that he was pissing and shitting himself at the same time. But even so, there was enough left in his fragmented psyche to reach to Chambersto appeal for more life. More life. Even after what he did to everyone in the district. The Nether had fallen. The Hungers were dismembered. But Love remained, love between people and things and ideas: a potential network, in other words. And so Chambers spread himself. He expanded, bonds jumping from person to person, nestling with beloved brands, spreading through vicarity starts, community leaders, heroes, and more. From the heights of the Tiers, from the upper crest of Lights End, through people across every corner of New Vultunand even out from the megacities across Idheimhis Domain of Correspondence shivered as he finally began using it to its utmost capacity, as a growing matrix of love, of lust, of promise came to be. A faint trickle of amusement entered the back of Chambers mind. Was this how Avo felt when he first started spreading across New Vultun? It was... overwhelming, but something about it was a realheart-filler, like he knew he was never going to be alone. Threads of love burst out from person to person, spreading like an analogy between expanding webs and infectious, propagating shrapnel. Thousands jolted in surprise as Chambers connected to them, and he began to speak through his Heaven, off the top of his head. Hey, uh, its your boy, Aedon Chambers. Someplace farand also right beside himhe felt Marlowe cringe, but also sensed a new, nascent, and all-too-fragile link branch out from her being, and connect to him. He wasnt sure why that was, considering he already had a link passing throughfigure that out later; gotta spread the love right now. If youre hearing me and feeling me, you just got touched by my Heaven of Love, and uh... Fuck. He needed to find his other copies; he needed to start recruiting subjects and Citizens to his cause or something; maybe he could stop the war from happening at all with his Heaven, but... Ah, fuck it. Its time to do what he did best. Wing it. This time, though, he didnt need to use bullshit: the truth was going to do. And I dont know if any of you all noticed, but shit is kinda fucked right now, consangs. Very, very fucked. I just got done kicking my own evil twins asswell, a version of me that was made by Veylis; fucking... long story. Anyway. The point is, things are coming a apart. Real fast. Real bad. The Substance is growing. It wont be stopping anytime soon. Trust me, I know. And the Guildsgot some other words for you half-strands! You guys are wasting time trying to fuck each other to death while your own people are getting fucked in the Tiers. Ori-Thaum? Whats up, guys? What happened to unity? Where were you while my rash-using clone was exercising his right to demented shit on your Citizens and Seekers? Highflame? You there? Are you falling apart already? The fucks up with you guys, anyway. You know Veylis caused this, right? You know she royally fucked us all. You know what? Dont ask me, ask Jaus. Yeah. Jaus. Get to Scale. Im sure the saviors got more credibility than I do. Im just the guy who lucked into some love after all. And the rest of you... No-Dragons, Stormtree, Sanctus, Ashthrone... the fuck are you all even fighting for by this point? Can you even get to your Arks? Do you think that youll get the future you want when you cant even muster a half-assed job for your kids and families? I can feel you shooting at each other! I see you smuggling Rendbombs into each others districts! Youre trying to run a war and refugee operation at the same time. And speaking of! Refugees. Subjects. Hells, some of you Citizens too. Once upon a time, we got fucked. Once upon a time, we were promised a better lifea shining future that awaited in New Vultun! The biggest of the megas! The greatest of the greatest. Hope for a true tomorrow and the resurrection of humanitys dreams. The fuck happened to that? Where are we now? Getting harvested. Getting fucked and sold by guys like who I used to be. And now youre getting pushed out from your homes in the Warrens. The city hasnt even adopted you! Youre still a bastard ripe for deathand theyre coming for your homes too! Well. Heres a counter-statement to all that: Fuck the Guilds; fuck the war; fuck the Substance; fuck everything! Fuck the world weve been born in! Fuck almost twenty years of not being able to actually fuck! To hold someone we care about! Fuck all the drugs and media and bullshit we use to fill the holes inside ourselves! Fuck the Sunderwilds that the Guilds never bothered to clean up! Fuck! All! Of! That! The Symmetry isnt dead. Oh, no, no, no. The Strix might be taking a nap right now, but hell be back. Hell settle the Substance. But the Strix isnt just the Strix. Hes in me, in you, in everything. Hes choice! The God of Choice! And right now, Im tell you the truth: I was never a disciple of the Low Masters, but the Pale Spider? He is my consang. He did everything he could to give me a chance, to let me be alive instead of survive, and Im going to do the same for you! The Symmetry is still here! Still kicking! More alive than ever! And well take anyone! Anyone! Anyone! Who feels that enough is fucking enough, that the Guilds arent going to save us, that paradise is bullshit if we cant even be decent people right now? What? Are the Godclads going to suddenly agree to new and balanced laws? Are you Citizens going to feel right about living shoulder to shoulder with us thieves, butchers, defilers, and bastards? And are you subjects going to be fine with facing those fortunate shits who experienced your dreams, fueled from your death? Fuck! No! Were not even good, the fuck chance do we have at being perfect? Chambers barked a disbelieving laugh, his own rising euphoria manifesting as a feedback loop through his growing network. He targeted the lowest, the vulnerable, the starved. He targeted the privileged, the powerful, and the ones that might care anyway. I dont know! I dont know our chances! But I wasnt supposed to have this life, and I wasnt supposed to be bearer of love. It happened though. This is reality. And Im going to make the most of it. Im going to try to do the right thing, and you all can too. The Guilds are in disarray. The Nether is fuckedand we have an opening. We have a moment. We have a chance of chances to change which way our futures fall. But it needs to be more than me or the Strix or anyone else alone. It needs to be everyone together, because existence is bigger than the one, but also shaped by countless... ones. Fuck. Fucked that line up. Uh, anyway, Symmetry! It needs you! Gottagotta join! Gotta do whats right! VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 98% Shit. He needed to upgrade his Hellsboost his Heavens. He needed to He felt something else brush against his bonds. Brush, but fail to grasp. Another pattern adjacent to his was moving across reality, and it was massive. Bigger than even he was right now. Time to pull a runner. But not before a few final words. Anyway! Symmetry! Join us! Keep us in your mind. IllIll be back soon. Ill talk to you all againand remember; the Nether is down and the Necros arent watching. Time to make your own choices. Time to decide who you wanna fucking be! Uh, shit, we need a cool phrasefucking Guilds stealing everything guh! Fucking... Keep your asses whole, consangs. And cracks... aligned. With that, Chambers receded. He felt, pulling himself away from the unknown threat instead of risking it. He had gone far enough today; he had done more than he expected. His bonds snapped free from all the people in the Sovereignty, and at once he jolted back into himself, into his body. He blinked as the Voidwatch hanger greeted him. The Voidwatch hanger, Marlowe, and Cas. Marlowe was laughing, her mouth cover her lips, but faintly, the thread between him and her still remained. It extended from herwas tied to him, and Chambers frowned at it. He thought he dismissed all his bonds. Keep your asses whole? Marlowe said. Cas just shook his head. What? Chambers said. What? It was the best I could off the top of my head, guys, I wasthere was something coming for me, and I was running out of capacity! Fuck you guys! Why dont His words trailed off as he realized the underground cult rockstar and the thoughtcaster could probably do better with the speech thing. Fuck... Chambers said, hiding his face in shame. Was it that bad? The Columner stared at him for a second, and just chuckled. Faintly, a nascent threat left him and passed through Chambers as well. Nah. It wasnt perfect. But it was good enough. Chapter 30-18 The Silent Majority We live in a world thats built on the impossible. Anyone who tells you something cant be done is bullshitting you or trying to stop you. Tell me whats more likely? Fire learning to sing or a cold, scared, starving but also tenacious juv learning to survive another day in the Warrens? Well. Ive seen fire sing. And it sings pretty fucking good. Tell me whats more likely? That falling water. Rain. Rain heals us of our sicknesses. That rain closes our injuries and makes our bodies whole. Or a girl proving the half-strands up there wrongthat she is a genius, that she belongs among the Agnosi because shes fire and not wick. Well. Every night, the rain does fall, and the hurt is washed away. Tell me whats more fucking likely. That Guilders will finally achieve their so-called utopias. Utopias theyre already building in the city above this city. That well all live under them, glorious and forever. Or maybe, just maybe, you can live your dream first. Defy the odds and rise above the gutters, make it somewhere safe, take for yourself a good and happy life. Well. The Guilders are trying. So you should too. Miracles are the bedrock of our world. For all the fucked up misery we were born into, there is nothing impossible now. Nothing. There are just things that are likely and unlikely. Numbers and percentages. But miracles defy the odds all the time. And you dont need to be a god to perform a miracle, you just need a moment, a chance, the skill, the will, the kit, a crew, and the strength to tell that fear inside you to go fuck itself. A juv from the gutters can make it. Just like a slave can overthrow their masters. Just like men can shatter gods. Dont let this city beat you down. Its cold. But you can be colder, more patient, more cunning. Make your moment. And carve a difference into the world. To be any other way is existing. To fight is to live. So live. Fight. Burn. Burn. Burn. -Quail Tavers, The School of the Warrens 30-18 The Silent Majority [The Majority] What? Such was the only statement that echoed through the Soulscape of the Majority for a good, long while. The Fuckbringer was an anticipated threat. The Majoritys Constituents within the Threshold of the Substance spotted its materialization approximately three hours ago. It had emerged from the oscillating patterns of the anomaly itself, and the intelligentsia nested within the Majority theorized it was an entity created from the Embracement between the Strix and the High Seraph due to the patterns of Conceptualization and Chronology that composed its observed ontology. It took some extended observation for them to isolateoh, gods, please let us come apart; we dont want to be enmeshed we dontand identify the Fuckbringers user as Aedon Chambers. A little more scrutiny and a handful of sacrifices fed into the Substance as the Fuckbringer passed through granted the Majority a deeper glimpse at its structure. Learning copies of Aedon Chambers existed did not surprise, but the fact that whatever was becoming of the Strix and the High Seraph had assigned a twisted Heaven of Love to him was disquieting. Their profile of Aedon Chambers portrayed an extremely traumatized man who nursed his feelings through addiction and adrenaline. The Aedon Chambers tied to the Fuckbringer was a scornful, cruel, and stupid recreation. The true danger in him lay with his Heaven. The sudden collapse of the rash after the destruction of the Remembrance had been a welcome event. Something the Majority kept suppressed per the commands of their Inner Council as to prevent any societal overreactions in theirIwantIwantIwantculture. The collapse of the Nether arrived sooner than expected due to the events at the trial, and the Majoritys mythology was not final; unstable. A backlashor worse yet, a paradoxwould see things grow dire for their Constituents: the Citizens that made up the Ori Republics. It is only due to their Counter Cultural Migrations decree that the Substance couldnt breach the borders of their districts. They tried to do the same for those of their allies, but alas, their power extended only to those rooted in Ori society, in harmony with their culture. A democratic republic was an easy thing to poison through unchecked and diluted beliefs, after all. And so the Majority stood in this place between places, one Heaven forged from the actions, words, beliefs, habits, and lives of every last Citizen under Ori-Thaum. Through the eyes of their Constituents they watched, studying the Fuckbringers crossing through the threshold, to brazenly attack a Sovereignty they shared with Stormtree. How did he win? That was very unlikely. The voters expressed a 19.54% chance of his victory against his alternate. These were the words traded within the Majority. Its shape was one sculpted from countless contours and shadows, glass effigies of actual people harvested as Constituents in this reflection of reality. Trillions across the Ori republics were constituted in this mass, their featureless bodies like glass, forming an anthropomorphic titan with a fluid core. There, upon the ocean that composed its heart, a single island gleamed, its flora and terrain seeded heavily with vivianite. The ghost-conducting matter produced a bowl at the epicenter of the island, and upon a rising pillar of variegated hues, an ornate box stood with its lid open to the sky above. We must make official contact. We must prevent external influences from affecting our Electoral Body. Motion to make direct contact with the Lovebringers user. No! The risk of exposure is too high! And Aedon Chambers is an unpredictable adversary. We must proceed with extreme caution. We cannot reveal ourselves. The facade of the Inner Council must be maintained, and the sanctity of our Ark secured. Motion withdrawn. FUCK YOU! YOU LET me apologize. We are in a volatile state. We do not know why we put forth the motion of contract. Withdrawn. It is understandable. HurtshurtshurtspleaseletmeI do not think it would be wise to show any hint of our presence. But we already have the means to interface with Aedon Chambers as well. Our recently Naturalized asset. Yes.Indeed. Calling Forth Constituent Denton (Naturalized) At once, a particular figure fused to the foot of the great cultural-shaped giant that was the Authority drew in a sharp breath. She was recently made a Constituent alongside a few thousand Agnosi. Their orientation toward the Ori was reluctant at first, but after some adjustments made to their mental structures, a point of agreement was reached and sufficient cultural synchronicity was achieved. Unity is destiny, Denton said. Unity is destiny, all the other shadows echoed. Constituent Denton. You have already provided much in service to the republics. It is only through your access that we have begun the first naturalization of a coldtech mind. What wonders it will reveal upon joining our republic will set us forth a million-million years. Thank you. It is a pleasure to serve. Clapping and cheering resounded through the Majority. And then, without any forewarning, the sound went silent. However, the Majority continued. We will require your unique capabilities once more. We will be releasing your actual body from our custody. The conditions behind your escape have been created to believable satisfaction. You are to make contact with Aedon Chambers and the leading members of the Symmetry, and you are to spread our cultural knowledge among them. The shadow of one Valerie Denton, the once crafted spy of Aegis and now truly loyal Citizen of Ori-Thaum, simply nodded. I will see it done. Peace will only arrive when all share a common truth and a united fate. So it has been said, the Majority declared. The Constituent has accepted her duty. Dispatching ego-updates to her original sheathe through her Cognisoft. Voting may begin for any objections or affirmations. And at once, slips of paper rained down from the sky, drifted upon the waters, were carried by an unseen wind, and all gradually found their way into the ornate box. Votes were being cast again. Votes for the path ahead. Results were tallied at a rapid pace, the opinions of every Constituent revealed instantly. Everyone voted. Dissent was noted. And ultimately, it took little time at all for a final deliberation to be reached. 89.21% in favor of dispatching Denton to make contact. Motion passed. Martial Elders of the Constituency. Prepare combat operations. Updating Cognisofts now... And upon the immense form of the Majority did several of its shadows tremble. The outlines of people pulsed as subconscious commands were injected through the miracles they had their people accept. Cognisofts that created an imprint of their actions, their knowledge, their role in the culture. Through such means, many danced as one, and one commanded the many. Such was how Ori-Thaum ensured it was unassailable. Such was why the Inner Council could never truly be assassinated. Because how could one slay an idea of a collective people? How could one slay culture itself? Chapter 31-1 A Throne Divided Its all going to hell. Its all going to hell, and I have no idea how to fix it. Our forces are scattered. Pulled apart in every direction. Weve returned to using direct meta-transmissionsexperience fighting Ori-Thaum means we still have our own networks; Heavens that can communicate with each other so we arent entirely in the dark, but the war hosts are dismembered. The Seraphs are missing too and the ones that are still around give out conflicting orders and the Great Housesdont get me fucking started on those godsdamn They dont listen. They wont listen. Not to me. Not without a fight. ThisI hate to think like this, but the High Seraph made us this way. Made so individually strong. Flexible. Made us each a king to our own forces. Warlords all. But warlords all under herdirected by her first, shaped to a common purpose: One unifying dream. Now that shes... absent, we are turning against each other. Like a pride of nu-lions composed of nothing but pride males. And so Highflame gets pulled apart from within. Now, even the Infacer is sending out broadcasts, calling for our forces to re-enter the Substance via the Noosphere. But what waits for us there? What but death? What but ruin? And out here, Ori-Thaum remains standings stronger than ever before. Somehow, they were ready. Somehow, they remain impossibly coordinated, picking us off with their allieswolfpacks hunting lone lions. Veylis made us this way. Veylis made us champions to ourselves. But single champions cannot win wars, and without her guidance, I fear what is to come. I fear that I might not be enough... -Personal Mem-Log Acting Authority Santanando Mondelles 31-1 A Throne Divided [Vator Greatling] The atmosphere was tinged with a particular taste of grimness. Vator sniffed the scene from all the unwashed bodies lining the halls of Axtraxis Academy, from the aching silence that was only periodically broken by murmurs about losses, kills, and engagements. Halos spun slowly as he proceeded down the welcoming lobby of Axtraxis. He remembered this place from six years and a lifetime ago, entering for the first time to claim his right to become an acting Instrument. His family had already gained a reputation through his sister, who was so driven by shame and rage that she proved herself a terror on and off the field. For every insult Jhred earned, for every defeat he suffered, Abrel repaid against most of his opposition, proving an adept technical operator. Yet, according to her instructors, she had a fatal flaw: rage. The same thing that propelled her led her into traps, ploys, and impossible battles. Abrel was a terror, but she was not among the elite. This only fed into her rage more, which made her perform worse. Enter: Vator. He arrived nearly at the same time as his sister departed. Already, the Greatling name had regained some prominence, but alas, mothers actions and Jhreds weakness left a stench that was hard to cleanse fully. But unlike his sister, Vator was a different kind of personand created to be a bit better of a human. The tactics that worked on her were but amusements to him, and among his classmates, he felt a like a visitor at a zoo. Except, rather than being a person peering through the cages at animals, he felt like a higher being standing inside the metaphorical cage with the people. Their behaviors were so predictable; the way they acted betrayed by their biologyhe didnt even need access to their minds. Matter and mind are more closely entwined than most understandthan even Vator could understand. But he saw enough. And what he saw allowed him to play with his prey and learn from them. Learn, assimilate, replicate, and create art. Expression was the greatest thing that separated creature and man and beings that were more. And right now, the expression on the faces of the people he passed by, of the defensive thaumic fortifications established to defend Axtraxis from all manner of assault, of the billions of mechs, bioforms, and drones; the millions of golems and Regulars; the thousands of Godclads was loss. Utter loss. They were directionless. Unsure of themselves. Unsure of the path ahead. Unsure and adrift. So true was the taste that even his Portrait remarked upon them. Their bodies are as worn as their features. These are a strong people without direction, awaiting demise. Vators escorts led him through checkpoint after checkpoint, with defensive drones and soldiers stationed all over Orientation Hall. The massive columns here sculpted with martyrs who died in the line of duty and champions lionized through triumph and bloodshed were chipped and marred. Shrapnel. And pieces of tissue lodged within the wounds left upon the supports. A battle had been fought here. Or an explosive was smuggled aboard the station. Whatever the case, it told enough of Highflames dire straits. Please hold, Instrument Greatling. Vator eyed his escort and offered a polite smirk. She was a tall girl. Taller than he by far, with a good amount of enhancements to her musculature. But he could tell her age from the lack of plague in her brainyoung. Too young to be a full Instrument. Fifteen, if he were to wager a guess. Ah. Another sign: they were promoting students and using them for reserve duties. Space condensed around his escort, and he saw a swirl of oscillating lights pulse out from her body. A traveling vibration tumbled across the surrounding matter and slipped through the massive gold-lacquered gates smelted from duranium. Beyond which, the first level of Axtraxis lurked. The level for the louts. A stage Vator skipped with ease thanks to his high academic and practical scores. Above the gate where the words Steel is From Fire Born carved. +Huh, what?+ Vator asked. She didnt reply, instead he felt a reflection nearby sudden flash and then dim. The youngest Greatling frowned. For though he tried to be a genuine accomplice, the Regular was determined to treat him like something akin to a pest or a burden. It would be maddening if she wasnt so childish about it. The rancor was understandable, but still it was +I think I sense another shard nearby. And theres something else... someone else...+ Draus thoughtcast silenced Vator as Mondelles led him in the direction of the platform that was vanishing behind a wall of green. +Keep with Mondelles. See if you can get him alone at some point. Im gonna wanna have a chat with him soon.+ +And what will you be doing right now?+ Vator asked. Draus was clearly up to something, and he wanted to know what. The Regular replied with a low grunt. +Consang of a consang whispered in my year. Theres someone in the bottom of this place I gotta find.+ It was like not getting any answer at all. Vator closed his eyes and let out a near-groan. Mondelles turned his head and regarded the Instrument. The Greatling hid his frustration with a yawn. Long day. Mondelles studied him a moment longer. Its not done yet. Not for any of us. Not even close. *** [Draus] He is here... him and her as well... Ignorance returned to Draus unbidden like an old memory, as she jumped from reflection to reflection, building her Liminal Paracosm within Axtraxis. The Regular remembered the Definement the moment she became aware of him, and her cog-feed blinked as pointed highlighted one accretion among the millions packed into Axtraxis Academy. Too many... strain... Her gaze is total... Chambers... Love...Majority... His voice trailed off to a choking whisper, and though Ignorance continued speaking, it wasnt anything Draus could understand. +Avo?+ Draus asked, almost concerned about Ignorances condition. Where the Definement was silent, Mercy materialized in his stead. +You are to proceed to the levels below,+ Mercy proclaimed. +The Dreamer has sensed a member of his cadre entrapped within a metaphysical cage. You are to make contact and retrieve from him what information you can. Free him if possible.+ +Who?+ Draus shot back, annoyed. Ignorance, shed listen to, but Mercy? That half-strand was still a Low Master. Dont matter that belonged to Avo nowif you could perform a betrayal once, you could do it again. +Ignorance is over-taxed. He works to deny the Seraphs awareness many of his assets.+ +That wasnt+ +Shotin Kazahara.+ That captured Draus attention. +Shotin? Shotin is here?+ +Not only he,+ Mercy said. +But a few Paladins as well. His niece among them... A shard. Two shards... Uthred Greatling as well... Two more Flame Anchors. The task is clear, Regular Draus. Seek your Soul-Kin. Unite the fragments. Restore the wholeness of the Dreamers form.+ Another set of markers appeared above her, and Draus intuitively knew that to ascend was to discover Uthred Greatling, while to delve deeper was to come upon Shotin Kazahara. She considered her choices momentarily before heading down. Shotin was a friendly. Well, was one before, anyway. Avo claimed his mind and he was part of the gestalt. If he was being housed here, though? Chances are he was a prisoner of war. The less likely possibility was him lurking in the dark somewhere, hiding. Traveling through beams of luminosity, Draus extended her reach through polished armors, reflective optical implants, and passing drones to arrive carry her toward the platform in the distance. In a while, Vator would be reunited with his father after Mondelles was finished with him. She would intercept Mondelles and Uthred one after another when that happened. Preferably after using Ignorance to clear Mondelles firstif the Definement was up to it. She could use an ally here, and though Mondelles was a Gold through and through, he offered her his favor once upon a time, and now some part of her felt beholden to do the same. Before all that, Shotin and the Paladins. If they were trapped here, she was going to see them freed and primed for combat. But as she continued down, squeezing through the crevice between the platform and the maintenance level below, Draus let out an internal groan. Of course Avo had her sneaking through a Highflame facility to save an Ori Seeker. Rotlick loved his unexpected situations. Chapter 31-2 Those We Lose Death is a horror. This everyone knows but refuses to face. For the ones we lose mark us as well, deform our minds and actions so severely that, if our present self and past self meet, madness might become our final fate. For who could face a stranger wearing their own skin. Most learn to face this horror. Accept death. Hope that they stand among the lucky few to avoid a final end. But in my eyes, death without being claimed by a god will be true neutrality. No meaning. Nothing. Until from that nothing comes something again. For what preceded the gods was existence before existence, and from that? Even the minds do not have an answer. But these are absolute questions left unanswered by civilizations far greater and grander than ours. As people, we must face the relatives of our existence. And endure the severity of loss, for that which awaits before death is dread, then to lose another who has been so close to you is true sorrow... true grief. True and absolute upon your person. As much a miracle as those wielded by the gods. -Jaus Avandaer 31-2 Those We Lose Draus knew Highflames logistics were pretty south of fucked when she found war drones and bioforms stationed in Axtraxiss vents. It seemed like every inch of spare spaceand some not so spare spacewas getting used. Being an academy, Axtraxis was made to house people for extended periods, but it was an elite school oriented toward one sole function: producing the next generation of Instruments in the Great Wars. It wasnt made to be a massive military installationdid any Guild actively have one massive base anymore. Made things priority targets that way. Easy to attack. People litter spaces. Lots of them are just waiting. No orders. Not sure what to do. Expands her Manifold Paracosm and studies them. This isnt the highflame she knows. Soldiers strong and well armed still, but they are headless. Utterly devastated by the sudden spillage of the substance. And a growing discontent is brewing, with them upset they are cooped here instead of actively raiding and trying to start a war. She gained more perspective with each junction she created, and moving back and forth between her temporal thresholds gave her ample time to survey the inner architecture of Axtraxis; get a good lay of the land. Her DeepNav was still shittin itself, but she knew this place well enough from war games she and other Regs ran for fun. And on that note, even across the maintenance sections where the Rendsinks, coolers, reactors, and storage containment units were found, she saw no Regs. None of her like. The only ones down here were technicians and a few servants for the Great Houses. They littered the cramped spaces, muttering to each other, talking about how lost they were, what warhosts they used to belong to. There was a brutal malaise in the air; a sense of isolation even among those who sat in groups here. They, too, were cobbled together. Its shameful. House Aetos wouldve never let things get this dire, a servant in a mangled suit said. He looked at a technician who was busy trying to repair her damaged cybernetic arm with the help of a drone as they both sat beside a wall infused with interlacing loci matrices. We remain heresequestered like vermin. Gathering our forcesgathering day and day while our enemies mass, while our fellow Citizens remain trapped within that terrible... Substance. Ilisten, I have been hearing whispers. Some people with Omnitech Exo-Cortex augmentations have claimed that... that we have been deceived. That there are other orders demand we head toward Omnitech territory... That Acting Authority Mondelles... Listen, the technician said as she tried to open her cybernetic arms fingers. The entire forearm extended instead. She winced and returned to her tweaking. People talk a lot of shit all the time. Until we get proper orders from someone of higher seniority or position than Mondelles, stow it with the conspiracy shit. Stop spreading the Silvers mem-cons for them... +He speaks truth,+ Mercy said. The Famine returned to Draus, performing cognitive reconnaissance of his own. In moments, the information he knew became hers as well, and splashes of damaged data played over her cog-feed. Offi@IFNL AL ORD3rRR ATTTTENDC HEED THIS MESSAGE ALL CITIZENS OF HIGHFLAME ARE TO IMMEDIATELY MOVE TOWARD OMNITECH TERRITORY AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE LOCAL ADMINS TIED TO THE INFACER OR SPEAKER OSJON THOUSANDBLEEESS +Well. AInt that something. Conflicting orders. Dont reckon Ive seen that before.+ Sarcasm aside, Draus was more than familiar with conflicting orders. They happened all the time when Godclads from the Great Houses were dueling with each other in the field. Fighting over who was going to claim glory first. Often times, their squabbles involved Regulars in unbefitting ways. On this note, she also had an idea about where most the Regs were. The lack of her kind around here was suspect to begin with. If Draus were to guess, they were probably with Osjon. How that bald-fuck got away without any issueif this was actually a genuine message and not some Ori psy-opwas still in question. But it made more sense than there being absolutely no Regulars at Axtraxis in present circumstances. But prepared as they were for intruders, nothing could have aided them against the influence of Ignorance or the willful encroachment of Draus. Using her temporal-affecting abilities via the Manifold, she timed one of her light-hops and managed to vitrify a part of a Rendbombcompromising its external shell for her own means. From there, she connected to Mercy again, and through his eyes saw Shotins fate. There were two familiar figures within the makeshift cage. The first was Seeker Shotin Kazahara: the cadres one-time adversary and now a member of the gestalt. Before him, laying in several pieces and missing a fourth of her face, was Kare Kitzuhada. His niece. Devoted Paladin. Now a corpse. Like most of the others. A trembling resonance rippled out from Shotin. He possessed a shard of the Stillborn, alright, but as Draus regarded his halo, she saw that he was on the brink of shattering completely, his expression blank, his gaze vacant and locked to Kares body. Shit. Draus had seen shell-shock beforehad applied emergency in-field cog-patching for Godclads and other soldiers, but that didnt make her a mender. No. She needed pre-sequences structures to apply for any fix to happen, and considering Shotins current state, that wouldnt do. +Mercy?+ Draus asked. +Yes,+ Mercy replied. +I will see him made stable.+ Still didnt trust the half-strand, but having the Famine nested inside her made Necrotheurgy a non-issue. Wouldve preferred Avo or White-Rab by far, though. Even Chambers. Maybe. A very tight maybe. As Mercy did whatever the fuck it was Necros do, Draus extended a Ghost-Link to Shotin. With the Nether collapsed, Highflame had gone lax with their counter-intel precautions. Sloppy; disappointing. Nothing stopping her from directing her ghosts in and interfacing with the prisoner. Shotin barely regarded her request at first, but after a few seconds, finally accepted, only to offer silence in return. +Reg?+ Shotin said, his minds voice spent and barren of tone. +Youre still alive.+ +Seems so,+ Draus replied. +Niece isnt.+ +No,+ Shotin replied. A pang of impossible painimpossible for Draus to understandspilled across the link, only to slide over her cognition like oil sliding upon water. Something inside Shotin had been lost. Some semblance of joy and life. His minds shape was so internal, so rooted to the center. Hers was closer to a bullet: externally faced and sculpted toward singular focuses and primary purposes. +I was here for her,+ Shotin muttered. +I always wanted to be there for my sister when... when...+ +When Lorea Fucking Greatling tortured her to death?+ Draus let out a sigh as her own memories came flooding back. Wasnt just an unpleasant day for him, The Greatling only killed one of his family; she sent the rest of the Orphans too. +I wasnt there for that fuck-up of hers, but arrived in the aftermath.+ Shotin fell silent for a beat, and a deep root of bitterness rose from the soil of his mind. +Did any of you try to stop her? Did any of you even care? Hours. Days. She tortured her. She fuckingI had to listen, and it was all my fault. I knew that. But+ +But you were a good soldier,+ Draus answered for him. +To answer your question: No. Were Regs. We dont care like you do. But Greatlings scum. Snuffin a non-combat Citizen for a personal vendetta was embarrassin and pointless. You deciding to hold your district despite her provocation made you a proper enemy to us. Esteemed adversary.+ A disbelieving laugh sounded from his mind. +You fucking Golds... you and your bullshit honor and your psychotic idea of glory and strength and fuck you just fuck...+ He clutched his head as a low series of gasps sounded from him. +Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck...+ He finally slumped down to his knees and gathered what remained of his niece. +At least... at least I got to hold her before the end this time. At least... at least...+ Quietly, Shotin began to weep, and Draus withdrew her Ghost-Link. He needed comfort. Comfort she wasnt capable of providing. She couldnt muster the proper warmth or words he required. A better person right now would be Avo, or White-Rab, or Dentonalmost anyone but her, really. It occurred to her how spoiled she was from her time with Avo. He was practically a Guild unto himself in the last monthso many Heavens contained in one Frame, so much expertise in one mind. Fuck. Even Chambers might be better right now. As Mercy did his thing, a strange desire formed in Draus. Weapon was what she was, but there needed to be more. The world needed more than just killers. So. Time to ask someone who wasnt. She activated her ansible once more, and willingly cast Aedon Chambers. Never saw herself doing that before, but these days, the things she never expected were becoming the norm. Chapter 31-3 Moths and Flames Having a trusted comrade is like possessing an entire other life at your fingertips. Perchance, did you ever take the time to think about what your friends could do, what your lovers could do, what your children could do, that you could never do? That you could never comprehend? That you yourself were the wrong shape for this world, which demands myriad configurations? Despite the limits of man, all of us are born with certain tensions, inclinations towards fields of knowledge or physical arts. And within this likeness is also a metaphora metaphor for what we might be able to do. I think its best to think of people as keys sometimes, suited for specific situations. Where a peerless warrior might slay ten billion unreasonable foes without struggle, an unrivaled orator might see the same number of civil wars end without slaughter. Understand what faces you. Understand if you are the person for the job, or if you must call on another. Absent a key, force perhaps can open any doorbut if the door is broken and the act is observed, then that shapes your future. It misshapes you from what you are right now. "Understand and apply yourself. -Jaus Avandaer 31-3 Moths and Flames {Chambers... what the fuck do you mean youre now the God of Love?} Draus asked for the third time. It wasnt that she couldnt understand his words, its just they didnt make any sense to her. It was a statement so unnatural, her mind refused to process it. {Fucks sake, Draus, I told you Im as surprised as you are! Do I need to go through the story another time?} {I dont know, Chambers. Are you still the God of Love in that one?} {Yes!} {Then what the fuck? How? Fuckin how are you, of all fuckin people, the one that gets the Heaven of Love.} A deep inhalation sounded across the connection, and Chambers virtual avatar squared his shoulders as his eyes drifted to gaze somewhere in the distance. {Because I am the imperfect vessel.} {...What the fuck does that mean.} {You know, I dont really fully get it myself. Ill have to have Cas explain ityou want me to patch him} {No! Fuck no! Godsdammit, Chambers. I didnt expect shit from you, but fallin to cult stuff is still low.} {I mean, you might like it, Draus. Theres this guy called Michael and he had like a flaming sword that he used to} {No, dont tell me that shit! Jaus. Have you considered that it might be rewriting your brain? Huh?} Draus paused. Might not be the best question to ask. Chambers had been the one to download all those mem-cons straight into his Meta, after all. {Fine, fuck! Just saying. You might be more accepting of things if you listened. Maybe some active empathy might do you some good.} Draus was about to propose naming a particularly large gun Active Empathy and ramming it up Chambers ass to use him as a barrel extension. Except, he might actually like that. Except, apparently, the rash was fixed now. Except, if she actually got Chambers off, she would find a way to real-death herself right there and then, this war and Avos fate be damned. And ultimately, that was the point of this cast. She needed someone with active empathy. Something Regulars sorely lacked. As Draus took in Shotin once more, her internal frown deepened. The Silver half-strands halo was cracking all to shit; he was speaking to his dead niece, too. Fucks sake, could she even use his ass when the time came. Her focus lingering on Kare for a moment, Draus thoughts turned to Kae. Of her fate. Fuck. Shit. Part of the Regular knew lots of people were dead. Avo should have died, but being the special rotlick he was, he was probably beyond fucking immortal by this point. The Regs though? Kare? Kae? A bunch of other people at the trial? Snuffed. Snuffed, with the only chance of their return found in the Ladder or backed up from Avos bullshit Soulscape. Things werent done. Not by a long shot. But still. An absence flitted over Draus consciousness. Shed lost people. Hundreds of people. As a Reg, death was just a thing to her; the root of her trade and a constant more consistent than reality itself. But she felt colder with Kaes death. Remembered those days she spent guarding that uppity Instrument, taken away from the battlefield, this little mouse of an Agnos babbling about theory to her, explaining things to her, she didnt understand. Draus didnt fully realize when she and Kae became consangs. It just kinda happened. Agnos kept asking about all the wars she fought, and Draus answered. Draus wanted to learn more about cutting-edge Heavens and threats she would soon face in war, and Kae was more than happy to babble. They ended up eating together, spending more time together, and... And Draus missed that. Missed those times. Werent a thrill like war was. Wasnt what Regs were made for. But Kae was different. Pure. Genuine. She was a person. Had love for her work and dreams for the future. Guess that was what Draus saw in her. If Kae was the flame, then Draus and her like were moths. They loved the light. Were drawn to its radiance. But they couldnt bear to burn; a Regular that felt as a human did wasnt a Regular at all. But still. There were times that Draus wondered. And now the flame was gone. The flame was lost. Until Avo was restored, or the war was won. And that duty fell to Draus, because where she couldnt light anothers life, she could sure as shit extinguish some rival fires. The confirmation of the Agnoss present death cemented one thing in her: She needed to win this war. She needed to seize the Ladder. For Avo. For Kae. For the ones that were bright. For Chambers too, she realized. Because for all his shitty habits and fucked-up tastes, he was just a kid that never had a chance. {...anyway, you should talk to Cas. Hes got lots of things to say. Marlowe, too. Anyway. Still. Fuck. Kare. Didnt know her that great, but she was a...} Chambers sighed. {Draus, I dont know why Im the one you called here. Im like, a gutter shitbag and she was a glasser. It would be like a rat holding a funeral for a nu-cat.} {Im callin you because I dont have it,} the admission left Draus casually. {It just feels cold to me. Discomfort. The losses. Even Kae. Some bit of me knows I should be hurtin more. But that bit isnt there. Never was. Im a good weapon, Chambers. Now, Im fightin the most righteous war I can. But I aint a person. Theres never been much of me. So. I need you.} A silence sounded across the link. {I... uh, I feel kinda. Is that a compliment?} {Its just the truth. You cared for Kae. You cared. Of all the other shit thats wrong with you, you cared. Thats true.} And there was nothing he do to make it right again. All his fault. She was gone. Gone. He couldnt protect her. He slammed the back of his skull against the metallic walls twice more and let out a ragged cry. A tantrum escaped Shotin. He tore clumps of his mane out from his scalp and didnt even care. And through it all, a glowing magenta link connecting him and Kare flared bright and brighter. Until love became the dominant emotion in his chest. Until even grief was outweighed. Faster, Uncle Sho! Faster... An illusion of his past was conjured to the present. A fantasy of Karebarely more than childsquealed on his back as he hoped from skyscraper to skyscraper. It had been her sixth birthday, and being the fuck-up that he was, he arrived drunk as shit, with a guy and a gal he couldnt the remember the names of on his arm. His sister had been pissed, and his bond brother was another color. But Kareshe was happy to see him. She was happy he showed up at all. And maybe that was the moment of his downfall. Shotin had lived a wild life. Hed fucked, drank, smoked, injected, fought, wept, suffered, enjoyed, and basically did whatever the fuck he wanted however he wanted to and got away with it all. Because he was among Ori-Thaums elite. Because he could do shit no one else could and get away with it. Because where most Ori were glassjaws and bent their heads and took it from their superiors, Shotin learned the technique of going above his immediate masters and then fucking humiliating them before their superiors while showing who he was. What he was worth. It was all for him. All for his ego. He did it all to prove himself, to state who he was. He did it for love and pleasure. But there, in Kares eyes, he saw the fucking mess that he was, watched her giggle as she complained how he reeked; as she asked who his friends were and why their clothes had so many holes in places. She asked, but she never questioned if he should have been there. Because in her perfect eyes, Shotin, be he Ori-Thaums ultimate loose canon or some drunk sex-addled degenerate, was the same. Was someone she always loved to see. She was like a fire. A light. And he was a moth that lived hard, blunted his pain on shit. But in her bright, it all went away, and he was who he was without problem. And that was all that mattered. Didnt matter if he was man, bastard, or moth. The sun shone on all. And so did Kare. And now he would never have that again. He would never get to make up a namesday gift by carrying his niece on his shoulders and hoping the length of kilometers using his Heaven of Speed while his sister screamed at him through their Auto-Seance. He would never hold Kare as she cried, venting about her shitty ex. And never get to start a brawl with said shitty ex and his entire extended clan. No more arguments over clan politics. No more meme-packs shared of nu-cats falling into water. No more late night +Are you there, Uncle Shos.+ No more ceremonies or pictures to be taken. No more future. Kare wouldnt get to go see a blockbuster vic again. She wouldnt learn what it was like to love or be loved by someone that wasnt a bastard. She wouldnt see whatshe wouldnt Shotin broke. Shotin broke and broke and kept breaking, even when he felt like there was nothing left to break. But through it all, the love remained strong. Remained true. Remained absolute. Kare was gone. But her shadow was there. Would always be there like a scar, an imprint of someone left on a wall after a nuclear blast. There, but never again. Never again. He didnt know how long he sobbed, how loud he wailed. All he knew was that he came apart. And stayed apart for an eternity. But when he finally rose from the ruins of his own heart, Shotin was surprised to notice Chambers still there, expression mournful, studying Kare. Sniffling, Shotin almost felt embarrassed. But he was too raw for that. To hurt to really know how bad he was even hurt. F-figured you would be gone. +No. I want to be here.+ Why, Shotin said, wiping his face. Want to see me hurt? Does it make you feel better? Huh? Fucking... He didnt have the energy to call Chambers a cunt. He was venting by now. He could see it. If Chambers wanted to hurt him more, the half-strand could have. +No,+ Chambers said. +I wanted to be here for you. Cause Im pretty sure I cried that way in my homes shittier the night I finally realized mom wasnt coming back.+ Shotin flinched. For the first time, he realized Chambers was a person too. Or maybe this was a psy-op. Social engineering meant to twist him. To what, though? For what? It was all fucked. All fucked. H-hey, Chambers. +Yeah?+ Do you know what its like... to be wanted. Not because what you can do? Or what benefits you can offer. Just... just because who you are? Chambers paused as his expression turned forlorn, then pensive. +No. But why dont you tell me? Tell me about her.+ And Shotin did. And he didnt notice the most tenative of threads branching out from his grief, reaching out toward Aedon Chambers. *** [Draus] Shotin didnt notice, but Draus did. She saw all that happened, all that Chambers was doing, and her disbelief grew and grew, but with it, came realization: Aedon Chambers was worthy. ... Holy fucking shit. Chapter 31-4 What We Lack We were defined before our birth. The shape of our inclinations by genetic encodingnature a blind craftsman, stumbling toward survival. The shape of our thoughts narrowed by culture, knowledge, and inherent biology. For even the wisest mind is wasted if its only input is darkness. And our reputation. The fabric of our legend. Sullied or gloried by those that come before. My father is Jaus Avandaer. Savior. Godbreaker. A good man. My mother is Zein Thousandhand. Glaive. Godslayer. An icon of bloodshed. I am Veylis Avandaer. I am pre-shaped. Fated. But also cursed. I have my fathers intellect, my mothers yearning to cull and slaythat cold yearning toward violence. And I also had a wise mentor and friend. To grant me insight. Understand your worthiness, and your degradation are more than your own sum, but also the sum of those around you, the sum of those who came before. And so, when you see a child of the gutters, judge them not by origin, but the path they surpassed. If they choose definitely from those who share their fate of their own volition. And for my Guilders. Citizens. What your parents have earned will weight on your back like a mountain. All that they are, you must be and more. Bear the weight. Or be broken by it. -High Seraph Veylis Avandaer 31-4 What We Lack [Vator Greatling] +...Confirmed. His sequenced memories and functional recollections all synced up.+ The Necros thoughtcast made Vator frown internally. Despite the hours of examinations they put him through, probing his mind and Frame and sheath over and over again in a repurposed private office, they caught no scent of the Regular. Nor anything else worth noting. Jelene Draus was a weapon of fine make. Her devotion to war made her lethal across a vast spectrum of theaters, and the new Heavens she possessed along with all the memories the Strix bestowed upon rendered her a horror of a Godclad as well. But she was no Necrojack. Nor was she an intelligence operative or a Sleeper of any kind. Hiding from one Highflame test was impressive. Masking her mind and Soul at the same time? While managing to have them overlook the shard Vator still contained within himself? This was beyond just the Regulars skill set. Someone else was aiding her as well. A series of clicks sounded from the mechanical seat holding Vator''s weight. Simple needles slipped free from his flesh, and the ghost link the Necro held with him broke a second thereafter. +It all checks out,+ the Necro''s thoughtcast declared. +He''s clean. You can talk to him now, sir.+ A moment later, the door hissed open, and Mondelles stood there, alone, anchored, exhausted. But still standingstill standing when so many had fallen. A waft of smoke escaped his lips, a flask in his hand to take the edge off things. There was residual scarring on his muscles as wellvisible evidence of overexertion. A feat that required substantial effort to achieve against an augmented sheath. Look upon his gut health, the Portrait proclaimed, and Vator turned his attention to the man''s stomach. There, microbes were in an uproar, and the acids swirled in a whirlpool of discontent. That explained the man''s anxiety, manifesting in his digestion. Adrenaline was spiking his equilibrium over and over. Oh, poor, poor Instrument Mondelles, the Vator mused. Acting Authority Mondelles, I should say now. For years, the man had railed against the unfairness of the Chivalrics, their incompetence, their failures. And now, in these desperate times, he finally claimed the power he soughtonly to feel the fullness of its weight, hear the crackling of his buckling legs. Mondelles fell into a seat across from Vator. His was just a normal chair, padded, with a frame formed from alloy. No one else entered the room; it was just them for now. Just as Mondelles pulled out a thin reed from his pocket and lit it, he glanced at Vator. "You smoke?" "I''m afraid not, Acting Authority," Vator replied. "Its not that I think my body is a temple, its just that whatever effects these chemical substances can offer, I can engender naturally." ? Mondelles nodded slowly. "Yeah. Your Heaven. Havent forgotten. Havent forgotten a lot of things about you. The Acting Authority pointed a finger, and a thread of light danced out, sparking at the top of the carcinogenic interrogation room and dimming the lights to a comfortable ambiance. Vator struggled not to yawn. He wondered what the regular was doingif her end was any more exciting than his. Considering he''d been tapped to trade his own guilt, hed expected more tension, more cloak-and-dagger encounters. So far, he was just dealing with the banality of bureaucracy. "I apologize for the questioning you had to go through," Mondelles said. Though the words were polite, Vator could tell he wasnt actually sorry. "Things across the city have been unstable recently. Our forces are scattered. The great houses are all pulling in their own directions. There are more than just outside threats we need to concern ourselves with." Vator leaned back in his chair, feigning interest. "Truly? Tell me more." But Mondelles was much cannier than that. He simply shook his head, resisting Vator''s open invitation to turn this interrogation on its head. "Maybe after. Right now, I need some more experience. Specifically, someone experienced with what was happening in the substance." It took all Vator had not to roll his eyes. There was no trust. No trust from anyone. No trust from his own people. No trust from the regular that was using him. No trust even from his heaven. It has nothing to do with trust, his portrait proclaimed. Somehow, the heaven of biology managed to shudder. It has everything to do with nature. In times of utmost desperation, all turn inward, return to their bodies, nest back, and think nothing of the wind passing over their skin, of weathered warmth filling their bones. These are times of disaster and famine. Understand it to be so. "How terrifying," Vator answered glibly. "And theres also Omnitech and the No-Dragons," Mondelles continued. "Theyre no longer properly replying to our casts. The former is calling for Highflame assets to mass within their territoryusing Osjon Thousand to do it. A wince of derision followed. Dont think quite trust the Speaker enough to do that. The latter... the latter is devolved into infighting. You know how they are." "I do know how they are," Vator replied. "And it is not infighting they have devolved into." He considered. Yes, the No-Dragons were notorious for their bureaucratic intrigues, but that was not actually an expression of instability. Rather, the usurpation of a superior or inferior sisters life cycle was a common acta means of advancement. This, right now, was simply another opportunity for social climbing or material promotion. The world might be ending, but no one wanted to spend the rest of their days as a meager pauper. "Worry not about the No-Dragons," Vator answered. "They will clean themselves soon, and I suspect they will have a new set of Dowagers for you to speak with." "Not me," Mondelles replied. "You." "There is a breach open, the same as the one you passed through to get beyond the Substance. And because of your fear of Highflames compromise and my relations with the No-Dragons, you want me to proceed and link up with my once-contacts former mentor. Muster a force composed of both Golds and Blacks before venturing into that stygian depth." "Yeah, something like that," Mondelles said darkly. "I dont really want to do it, but I dont want to do a lot of things these days. That, and youre not my only option. Oh, and what other cards do you have? Who else have you played? Mondelles gave Vator a flat look. Melodic laughter sounded from the Instrument. "Dont be so bitter, Acting Authority. I am no spy. Yeah. Cant say Im certain of anything anymore. These are days of strange wars and stranger fates. One cannot fault you for being weary. "Stranger fates," Mondelles echoed. Vator continued. "Of course, we are Golds. All of us imagine ourselves champions and heroes. But, alas, if everyones a champion and hero, then who is to be the scoundrel they need? The supporting cast." "Jaus, you sound like the Stormsparrow," Mondelles said. "I met her recently," Vator replied, his eyes widening. "She was really quite the sight. Oh, nothing quite compares to thy Seraph. Or the Strix, for that matter. The last bit, Vator didnt say out loud. But he noticed somethingan opportunity at hand. Here he was, in the same room as Santanando Mondelles, Acting Authority, current reigning tyrant over at Axtraxis Academy. They were separated from the notice of others, protected by a cocoon made from Mondelless cannon. +Well, Guard-Captain,+ Vator thought, his mind reaching out to Draus. +I have an opportunity that might interest you: a private conversation with the Acting Authority.+ Across the link, he felt a stirring. Drauss focus came back in full; shed been momentarily distracted by something he didnt know. But whatever it was, he doubted it was more fascinating than what they could achieve right now. Leaning forward in his chair, Vator regarded Mondelles as he prepared himself to shift the paradigm. "I''m afraid I haven''t been completely honest, Authority." Mondelles''s expression flattened, inscrutable. "Elaborate, Instrument." "You wish to know more about the Substance. Find someone with true expertise. There is someone I can introduce you to. And I think we can all help each other get what we A sudden Ghost-Link shot out from inside Vators mind, piercing Mondelless Meta. Between blinks, the Famine of Mercy formed from ghostly mist behind the Acting Authority and buried his fingers into Mondelles halo. The Acting Authority flinched and jerked back, but found himself lost in a maze of twisted memories. Meanwhile, his demiplane of radiance pulsed with an ethereal hum, flickering but never truly collapsing. Within Vator, his tendons shifted, turning into tentacles and fingers. They produced the shard from within his body, and placed it on the table. Slowly, the shard spread, pooling out, knocking items, and encompassing the tables surface as its shape grew thinner, wider, brighter. Finally, there was a final flash as the upper body of a new intruder emerged. Jelene Draus rose. Her voidtech projectile launcher was active. She pointed it directly at Mondelles while an orbiting belt of other guns drifted behind her. The Acting Authoritys eyes widened in shock. "J-J-Jelene... Draus..." he stammered. "Yeah, good to see you too, Mondelles," she drawled. "Trust me, Im about as surprised as you are about most things these days." She glanced at Vator, giving him a hesitant nod. A boyish smirk appeared on Vators face. This was the closest the Regular had ever come to showing approval. You see, Mondelles, he chirruped cheerfully. People can change. And so can situations. Now. Lets talk about whats actually happening: your truths inexchange for ours. Chapter 31-5 Gun’s Growing Dream Certain spiders eat their mothers upon being born. Do you know this? I''ve seen this. I''ve seen this, and I find it an apt representation of our reality. We are all alone unto ourselves at first. That is our first loyaltyto survival, our own survival. We feast upon our kin. We learn cruelty and love from our lines so we can nurse and feed, whichever form that takes. But then we see the breadth of society that lays beyond our vicious little nests and discover that, for all the intrigue and dangers that await at home, the outside is even colder. For it is no longer about survival, but dominance. If I am eaten by my sister, if I am to eat my motherthe family goes on. The family survives. Something of us remains. Paltry consolation, as it were. But if the Ori win, if Stormtree is allowed to breach our organ cities, if Ashthrone is allowed to inflict their divine retribution or Sanctus to free our dragonsthen there will be no sisterhood left. No matriarchy. And all that we''ve suffered, all that we have been cursed to bear, will have been for nothing. And so, my fellow sisters, I say this: eat your sisters, steal their cycles. Eat your mothers, claim their positions. But remember one thing. When the time comes, and our self-cannibalism is satisfied, return your attention outward. Together. For thisthis is practice. This is cultivation. The true war lies beyond. -Dowager Lin Crippled Fortune, The Matriphage 31-5 Guns Growing Dream [Draus] A stretch of silence grew as both the Regular and the Acting Authority gazed at each other. It had been a good few years since the last time shed seen Mondelles in person, discounting the run-in theyd had between the Lyaers. He looked rougher than before, more tired. Mondelles, she remembered, was always a stickler for the rules, so this stubby patch he had for a beard was probably a result of overwork rather than deliberate choice. Another thing to notehis Heaven hadnt changed, not even in the months leading up to the trial. Which meant he probably wasnt expecting shit to escalate so soon. Ignorance was rarely bliss; ignorance meant your throat was exposed, and you wouldnt see what killed you. Hells, the poor fool was probably still loyal to Veylis, imagining that he was doing the right thing. "Guard Captain," Mondelles managed, his words a choked snarl. "You look different... better." He was still struggling. Every few seconds, he would twitch or spasm. Mercy was twisting the fabric of his mind, ensuring he couldnt break free. But he could still hear, still see. He was just lost inside himself, his senses and kinesiology going haywire. "Yeah," Draus replied. "Lots changed. Surely, you might have noticed." A snort, barely a laugh, escaped Mondelles. "Yeah, changed, thats a word. Just didnt expect you to turn on us. Going Squire? All right. Thats beneath you, but all right." He grimaced. "This, thoughworking with cults, with the Strix to bring down Highflame. I never believed it. I didnt want to." "Folks dont want to believe a lot of things," Draus retorted. "And youve been in the dark for a good long while." "So why dont you enlighten me, then?" Mondelles said, an edge in his gaze. "Tell me what youre doing here. Why you havent killed me. Why you havent seized this place for your cemetery." He turned his glare on Vator. "You. I should have expected this. Your entire family... theyre just built for betrayals and disappointments, arent they?" "Oh, no," Vator said, inclining his head in an almost earnest gesture. "I suspect our greatest problem was that we were quick to imagine ourselves very important. And ultimately, we were less than pawns. "You say that right now, but the High Seraph Draus interrupted him. The High Seraph is dead. Right now, at least. So is the Strix. But theyre coming back together with this... Substance, you see. The thing thats caused us all to be separated and fucked Highflame. Yeah, thats the reason. The Stillborns trying to put itself back together. Which is part of the reason why Im here. Guard-Captain, Vator adomnished. Youre not supposed to give your game awayyoure meant to extract. Extract! Draus ignored him. "The prototypical Liminal Frame," Mondelles said, his face suddenly still, his eyes locking onto Draus. "You... you have it on you. Like... Like Uthred." And there was another confirmationUthred Greatling was another Flamebearer. Oh, more of the lost linger near, the Doublethinkers inside her sang. Find them, and recompose the court of our king to be. Draus ignored them too. Her focus was on having a conversation with Mondelles. All this other shit could wait. "But you got more than Uhtred cooped up in you, dont you?" Draus said, leading him along. "Forgot to mentionyoure housing Shotin Kazahara down in your basement." Mondelles tried to shake his head, failing to complete the movement. "I kept him there. Didnt have a better place to hold him. Had to rig some Rendbombs, make sure he didnt go anywhere. Wasnt responsive. When we brought him in, he was catatonic. We managed to find what remained of the paladins that came with him. Our scouts discovered him on the very edge. Edge of the Tears. He was trying to resuscitate his niece. He was... asking us to help him. The worlds gone mad." "The worlds been mad for a long time," she replied. "Do you even know what this is all about? What this is all for?" "For?" Mondelles echoed. The fuck was the point of this all? All the snuffing and hurtin she did. Got her thinking about effectiveness. How she was. Who did she want to be? Hells, she wasnt even a who right now. Just a weapon. But weapons werent enough. Couldnt just shoot and fight and kill without thinkin about the bigger picture no more. Avo wasnt going to do all that processing for her. Reckon I could try some different shit. See where that leads. The Deliverer rested upon her mind as well. Just a mindless Heaven built for slaughter. Yet... Wasnt New Vultun full of those? And where did they go after the war was over? What was the point of them if they couldnt even win the war. Too much thinking, her Arsenalist chided. Aim. Fire. At fuckin what, though? Draus replied. Yeah. Fine. Were plenty good at killin but... That didnt help us save Kae. Didnt help us handle the Deliverer. But Chambers managed. And that was just the point: Chambers managed. Somehow, what was once some useless gutter rat was more useful than she was. He wasnt any better at fighting or a genius or none of that. No. he was just willing to change. To be more of who he wanted to be. Or imagined was worth being. Now, as Mondelles came undone before her, Draus felt a kinship with the Acting Authority. We all thought we lost the last one, Mondelles, she said softly. But I think thats bullshit now. I think weve been losing a lot longer than that. All the wars we fought before, everything we did before. The ideas we lived by. It wasnt for us. And I guess that means we were never truly people. Not real. It kept going back to what Avo asked her all those months back, in the fighting pit of the Second Fortune. Were not real, Mondelles repeated. She shook her head. She didnt have an answer to who she wanted to be, but she was certain about one thing: hollow things like her and Mondelles? They made for good killers and tools, but unworthy people. And unkind gods. The type that fucked Idheim and existence. That type that kept this circling the drain. It only feels right when Im snuffin cunts, Draus admitted. I like war. Knew it my whole life. It defined more of me than anythin else. But it also doesnt care. It also doesnt matter. Forty years. Forty-six years Ive been here. So many others dead and done. But it feels like been running in place for every single moment of my life till the past three months. Before, Mondelles was defiant but attentive. Now, he was actually listening. And DrausDraus felt like she was clawing through the woods as she spoke. Kaes dead... Wish she wasnt. I remembered how we met. All the shit she babbled about. There was more life left to her. Until it just ended. Same with Kare. Good juv. Brave girl. Cut down for nothing. Died for something. Dont matter if I could snuff her in a fighther twenty had more weight than my forty. Because did it all for what she believed, not because she was shaped by someone else. She fell silent. I met Quail Tavers. Theres a good Squire. But she aint into the war. Shes here to get the job done and survive. I faced Zein. Saw somethin in her. Something to pursue at the end of road. A perfect warrior. But not weapon enough. She had a life, but her addiction to death fuckin makes her somethin like me. And I... hate her. Because she knew what it was like to be more. Im jealous... Are you jealous, Mondelles? Both the Acting Authority and Vator were transfixed by Draus. I dont know if I want to be a full person. I know I dont want to stop fightin. Itll be like starvin if I do. But I think I want to see if theres more than this down the line. If I can find out what it means to truly decide. Dont really understand what worthy means no more. Dont really think I can solve anything with more firepower. Dont even think Im what the city needsif I can find a way to win this thing without the Strix behind my back. But I think Im ready to try. I think I wanna find out. You wanna find out with me? Both of you? She looked between them. Vators face changed slowly, going from wide-eyed enrapturement to a broad grin. Yes.... Yes. This is... expression! Keep doing that! Finally! Finally, you have made this entire thing worth it. The Regular just shook her head in near-disgust. She would probably never get used to Vator. Mondelles, though, was silent. I... I dont know what to do anymore, he breathed. I... I just wanted to do right for my Guild. For my people. For the ideals. Yeah. So did I. So. Tell you what. Ill help you find out whats rightsecure our districts and get to the Arkand you give me access to the academy. And help mask my identity. Hairline fractures spread along Mondelles accretion, but slowly, she saw some of them thin. I... I can accept this. I can accept these terms for now. I assume you will want to meet Uthred. And Shotin. Already did with the latter. Would be much obliged about the former. As for you identity Mondelles swallowed. I might have an idea. But it will require a change of face. Your Meta, though +A task better left to me, Knight Errant,+ Mercy said. Nah, Draus said, turning his attention inward. Think I have a solution for my Meta. +Mercy. The fuck you on about. And why are you callin me Knight?+ +Is that not what you are now? A seeker of chivalric ideals. Lost, but searching. Honorable beyond the reach of our your master. You say you are not a person. But it is not so bad. The curse is being false. False to what you know you can achieve. False to the full weight of your worth. Would you like to hear my words about what a gun dreams of?+ Draus wasnt sure if she did, but fuck it. If she was going to do this weird change shit, she might as well dive the full storm. +Go for it.+ +A gun dreams of firing. Of striking its target. And the target dying. Right now, you are a gun that fires and fires... but our enemies do not fall. The Guild Wars do not end. A weapon can be swung and shot without question. But that is a lie. You have drifted too far from being a mere item. And because of this, because of what you are, Knight Errant, you are cursed. For a warrior is not a weapon. And the Domains of War and Victory are not one and the same.+ Victory. Victory. Draus did a lot of fighting and killing and surviving but... What did victory look like? +I cast my gauntlet to you. As I have betrayed my oath to fulfill them, then you too should take upon what is broken and reforge yourself to discover this truth. Find out what you might become, Jelene Draus. Find out. And be a worthy champion for our king.+ +Mercy,+ Draus began, a genuine sense of discomfort overwhelming her. +Are there any other copies of you out there? Because if the answers yes, Im gonna need you to tell me in detail how to kill you.+ Chapter 31-6 Weight to Bear? Oh, Veylis, my dear sweet girl, the best people you will meet in this life are not the ones who seek to control you or the ones who seek to empower you completely. Both are acts of delusion. Both occupy extremes, extremes that do not aid a warrior. You want someone that understands you, that allows you to be who you are, but, when the time comes, when they see you approaching the edge, they reach out and stop you from hurting yourself. For it is a pleasure being a Glaive. But without preceding cause, all the killing gets rather monotonous and dull and senseless. Amusing, but senseless. That''s just the thing. Give your life some flavor. Be kind to yourself. Be cruel toward your adversaries. But be serious when choosing who you offer your heart to, for those are the ones who sculpt us. -Zein Thousandhand? 31-6 Weight to Bear? [Shotin]? "Wait, hold on. So you''re telling me that when she turned sixteen, her dad rented out an entire megablock for her, and you guys did... what was it?" Chambers waved for Shotin to elaborate. "A Cogni-augmented immersive murder mystery experience," Shotin muttered. "Fucking... she was into detective shit, alright. There was a show back in the day. Uh, False Seer Juna. Kare loved it. So, that''s what she got on her namesday." Chamber threw up his hands. "You know what I got when I was sixteen? Was busy trying to buy a new kidney after my last one got repossessed. Caught an aratnid because I was lonely and wanted a consang, but ended up losing him in a gambling den to a Scaarthian with no teeth later that night. And mean, Kare here had a whole megablock to herself. Holy shit. And how many people attended?" "Two thousand," Shotin answered. Chambers choked. "Two thousand people, just to celebrate a girl''s Namesday? Fucking nuts, consang. I don''t even know two thousand people. Not actually, anyway." "Yeah, I don''t either," Shotin replied with a shrug. "But the clan does. The clan has a hell of a lot more than just two thousand. And the sixteenth namesday is very important. It''s when someone''s supposed to become an adult." "Huh, what do you mean, ''becomes an adult?''" "It''s a cultural thing," Shotin finally sighed. He laughed, just after. "Kare tried to skip hers. She, um, she didn''t want to be a burden. She never wanted to be a burden. She was always thoughtful, meticulous, cared about other people more than herself. I think she got that from her mother, but I don''t know. My sister was a lot of things, but she was tight with her imps and held a grudge like you wouldn''t believe. Kare..." He looked at his dead niece again. "She was as close to a decent person as I would ever know." "Yeah, I believe you," Chambers responded. "Don''t know many glassers I like, but, you know. Naeko liked her, that guy with the weird beard liked her, Avo liked her, and, well, there''s a reason why he really, really tried to keep her alive. Did everything he could." He caught Shotin''s flat stare and grunted. "You know we fought Zein Thousandhand to keep her alive, right? Got my blades shredded by that old bitch." Despite the sorrow consuming him, Shotin still blinked with surprise. "You? Fought Zein Thousandhand." "The entire cadre rolled up on her ass, my guy. And she beat all of our asses so bad. It was ugly. It took Quail Fucking Tavers sneaking up on her and stabbing her through the skull for the rest of us to escape. Look, the point is, I''m sorry she''s gone. I would do just about anything for you to feel better right now. No one deserves to feel like shit. But I wasn''t bluffing. We did try. We did all we could. No one wanted this. No one." Shotin regarded Chambers for a few minutes longer, and he planted his elbows on his knees. "You know, I do recall tearing your balls off back at Veng''s Stand." "Yeah. And I clutched yours in Avo''s Soulscape," Chambers shrugged. "Still wasn''t as bad as Zein fucking me up. But still. You popped mine off like a turnip." "You sprayed a fucking penile blast made out of burning spiders and insects at me," Shotin sneered. "The fuck was wrong with you." "I was trying to rash your ass." "You succeeded. Fuck you." "Yeah? Fuck you too. What did you expect me to do, fight you seriously? No. I had one fucking trick and I was gonna godsdamn use it." The sheer absurdity of the conservation cracked something inside Shotin. He was still hurting. Still miserable. But this was... it was getting to be too much. He let out a chuckle that turned to a cough. "What the fuck is my life?'' "I know." Shotin snapped. "Doesn''t actually change my fucking reaction. Holy fuck. And you''re the only one in the city who has this power?" "Well, there was my evil pathborn twin dispatched by Veylis" "What?" "But that half-strand was pretty messed up. Make a couple of Seekers birth a homunculus into each other by creating some kind of cock-womb-pussy conjoinment tube.'' If Shotin''s eyebrows could climb any higher, they would vanish into his actual hair. "But he was made wrong. Called himself the Fuckbringer. Was just some kind of mentally deranged sex-addicted monster." "Right," Shotin whispered. "So. What''s the difference between him and you?" "Man, fuck you, Shotin. Stop attacking me. I''m trying to get my ass to do better. Why do you think I''ve spent the past few hours here with you instead of just mangling your memories or some shit? I respect people''s personal uh... what you call it?" "Autonomy?" "Yeah! That! As long as they''re not trying to kill me, I don''t force them to have sex with each other. I''m the Lovebringer. Not the Fuckbringer. Do I know what love is? No. Am I the best person for it? Fuck no. But guess what, this is how things are. The world fucking kills the best of us while dealing the shitty ones a good hand sometimes." Chambers seemed genuinely offended. And Shotin... was ashamed. "I''m sorry. Didn''t mean toI say things. And I usually don''t think about what I say." He hammered the back of his head against the alloyed wall of his makeshift cage. He just couldn''t make things right. A slight huff escaped Chambers. "Yeah. It''s fine. I guess I''m not the easiest person to get along with." Shotin snorted. "Bullshit. You''re not. You wanna know why? Because I''m hard to get along with. I fuck everything up with everyone. With my sister. With my niece. Lovers. I just take and take and speak and speak. And then I hurt people. Because I get caught up in my head and keep them out with my walls. So I regret it afterward. And now, I''m spilling my guts to you. Someone I barely know. Because I''m alone. And because you''re the closest thing I have left to a consang around here." He looked down at Kare''s corpse and shook his head. She was gone. But there was a thread that joined him to her even beyond the reach of death. And another between him and Chambers. Chambers claimed it was some fuckery about the Heaven of Love. Well. Whatever it was, it grounded Shotin. Pulled him out of the catatonic spiral. Back to the pain. Back to himself. "Thanks for being here for me." "Don''t mention it. You know" Chambers sudden went quiet and lifted his head. "Huh. One of the Instruments is coming for us." "What?" Shotin said. True to Chambers'' words, a Godclad wearing a full body combat skin designed in the shape of a golden skeleton approached Shotin''s prison. "Felt him because of the link he had with two of his consangs. Apparently, he''s double-timing them. Got two mind-affairs going onand so do they. Fuck me are people unfaithful in this city." Shotin pressed his lips together. Yeah. Been there, done that. He wasn''t one to judge at all. As the Instrument came closer, Shotin rose to his feet and rolled his neck. "Chambers" "Don''t worry. He can''t see me. I''m just hiding in your mind. But I can pull them. Use their bonds against them. Just give me a cast." Right. Here they came, time to "Seeker Shotin Kazahara," the Instrument said, voice distorted by their combat-skin, "We have explicit orders from Acting Authority Mondelles to release and escort you into his office. He wants you to know that you have mutual business to discuss. Please do not try to resist. Please do not initiate combat. You are trapped aboard Axtraxis Academy. There are at least a hundred other Godclade cadres here and no real way out." A vicious scowl spread across Shotin''s features. He could practically read the nervousness radiating off this Instrument''s posture. They knew about him. Felt the dread of his reputation. "Sorry," Shotin said, "but I''m afraid I''m not that good at following orders. Never was. Big reason why I don''t get along with other clans." "We are aware of that, Seeker," the Instrument said. "But, uh, that wasn''t a threat. That was me asking for my life. Please don''t kill me and my Cadre. I know what you did during the war. I reviewed the footage. I ran the simulations. I know how a fight between us will unfold. We would be forced to trigger the Rendbombs." That gave Shotin a brief pause. A humble and anxious Highflame soldier. He hadn''t met many of those in his life. A laugh sounded from Chambers. "Oh, shit. Draus did it. She managed to get to Mondelles. Just got a cast, consang. You''re going upstairs. No need to snuff our way out after all." No need... With a projection of ghosts, the Highflamer disabled Shodan''s phase cage. A gust of cold winds flowed through, and the Instrument came to a halt right before Kare''s body. "We''ll make sure she''s, uh, properly stored, preserved for funerary rites. If that is your desire." "No," Shotin said. Instead, he brought down a spatial stack and swept Kare awaypulled her into his innermost plane for safekeeping. He was a selfish shit. And Kare was always going to be his to carry. "She is my weight. She''ll always be my weight to bear." Shifting his gaze up, Shotin watched as the Instrument flinched. "You, though, can start walking. And get me some alcohol on the way. I''ve been here all fucking day, and I think since I''m not quite a prisoner anymore, that you should get your guest some godsdamn lubrication." Chapter 31-7 Shapeshifters (I) Unable to establish connection. Fail to reach Constituent. Retrying... Retrying... Unable to reach Constituent. Constituent Shotin Kazahara''s ontology has been altered. Constituent cognition and foundational mythology scrambled. Outside influence detected. A shard of the stillborn? Unable to confirm. Vote proposed: Motion to deploy a specialized strike team to retrieve Shotin Kazahara. Vote at 39.35%. Vote failed. Vote rejected. Low likelihood of breaching Axtraxis Academy without suffering significant casualties. Unnecessary risks. Alternative proposal: we access Shotin through Chambers; we access Chambers through Constituent Denton. A chain has been established. The path is clear. Unity is destiny. -The Majority 31-7 Shapeshifters (I) [Draus] EGO ID UPDATED METAMIND RESEQUENCED COGNITIVE MASKING COMPLETE REBOOTING COG-FEED... Draus''s perception flashed on like a switch, and she found herself staring at an unknown face. The alterations made to her sheath were already completed. Between Vator and Mercy, she went through all the adjustments needed to blend in on Axtraxis right there in the interrogation room. Standing, she squinted at her new face, observing her short crop of blonde hair, her thinner, narrower chin, smaller nose, the greater distance between her eyes, and her far paler complexion. She was, in a strange way, aesthetically attractive, much like many of Highflame''s actual Citizens were. The strange dimensions her body took on displeased her. This wasnt the sheath of a weapon; this was the body of a part-time warrior that still wanted to love and be fancied by allies, lovers, and rivals. "So, what do you think?" Vator said, poking a head out behind her and appearing in the mirror. Draus held back from offering a response. The only reason she trusted Vator enough to do this was because Mercy had been monitoring him. She didn''t trust Mercy that much either, but between the two, the Famine showcased absolute loyalty to Avo, and the other, well, the other was determined to be on this ride for the sake of appeasing their Heaven alone. "It''ll do," Draus finally said. Hells, even her voice sounded different; softer, higher-pitched. With matters related to her biology and cognition settled, she moved on to the final step of her so-called infiltration. A dormant combat-skin lay at the far end of the room. Its back was unfolded like a blossoming flower, and all she needed to do was step in. Without further delay, Draus commanded her Meldskin to recede back under her skin and approached the armor she would be wearing as a disguise. PRAETORIAN MARK V STRENGTH AMPLIFICATION: 600% STRENGTH BOOST FOR HEAVY LIFTING AND MELEE COMBAT.BRIGHTSHROUD: GENERATES AN ADDITIONAL LAYER OF SHIELDING SHAPED FROM NATURAL LIGHTINTEGRATED HUD & COMBAT SUITE: REAL-TIME TARGETING, BIOMETRICS, WEAPON PORTS, RETRACTABLE FREQUENCY BLADES.ENVIRONMENTAL SHIELDING: RADIATION, ACID, CHEMICAL PROTECTION, AND CONTAMINATION LOCKDOWN.THERMOGENESIS IMMUNITY: IMMUNE TO HEAT AND FIRE DAMAGE UP TO 5000C; CONVERTS HEAT INTO POWER FOR EXTENDED OPS.SUB-CON DEFENSES: MONITORS USERS METAMIND FOR ANY HINTS OF INFILTRATION; ARMOR COMES WITH ITS OWN SET OF PHALANX WARDS.SOLAR REGENERATION: REPAIRS ARMOR IN SUNLIGHT; FULL RESTORATION UP TO 50% INTEGRITY WITH PROLONGED EXPOSURE.INTERNAL PHYLACTERY: ONE-TIME RESURRECTION FOR USER IF KILLED, RESTORING 70% HEALTH WITH 60-SECOND STASIS SHIELD DURING REGENERATION.SHORTWAVE LUMINOSITY COMMUNICATOR: CAN USE NATURAL LIGHT TO COMMUNICATE WITH ALLIES WITHIN VISIBLE RANGE. Classic Praetorian. Upgraded, sure. But the standards are still there. Survivability, made for daytime combat. Minimal training required to achieve optimal usage. Practically all Highflame Godclads would wear a Praetorian at some point. And now Draus would too. But after all her time with the Meldskin, she found herself wondering if the Guilds were over-reliant on thaum-tech. She stepped into the armor without much concern. Mercy was monitoring its Systems for any hints of danger, and the padded interior gripped her body like a glove, she felt a neuro-synchorous chain of ghosts extend from the armors locus to her Metamind. SYNCING... PAIRING USERS MIND TO ARMOR SYNCHRONIZATION SUCCESSFUL ESTABLISHING PHYLACTERY The mem-data cut off there. +Best that we keep your mind as uncompromised as possible,+ Mercy said. The Famine accessed the Phylactery with ease, and a new line of data crawled across Draus perception. PHYLACTERY RESET I suspect you are correct, Instrument Juven. That begged the question: Did the Infacer have complete control over the Regulars now, or were they within the Substance itself, trapped in memories. She knew the Regs and the Chivs werent on the best of terms anymore after the last war, so what could Veylis be planning with them? Or the Infacer. After a bit more walking, the reached a heavily guarded room with two Godclads stationed outside. They planted their fists horizontally across their chests as they saw Mondelles approach, and he casually echoed the action back at them. Draus noted their eyes drifting to momentarily regard Vator. Faint sneers twitched on their facesbetrayed how everyone felt about the Greatlings by this point. As for her, well, they barely gave her more than a cursory stare; a testament to the depth of her disguise. Projecting a sequence of memories into a security locus embedded in the wall, the door hissed open to reveal a large Rendsink functioning as a pillar for an antechamber. Chairs lined the walls, and the walls were decorated with exquisite paintings and portraits of heroes past and momentous moments across history. Veylis influence leaked even now. The dappled splashes of dried blood and scorch marks made Draus guess that the last dean of the Academy didnt meet a pleasant end. Dean Kuld is no longer with us, Mondelles said, answering Draus guess with a casual statement. Apparently, the end of the world has a way of bringing out more surprises. Such as hidden Ori Sleepers. That, Draus wasnt anticipating. Even fucking Avo missed that onethough to be fair, he was running on a short schedule with his Highflame infiltration run. No shit? Yeah. He dispatched a series of... lets just say conflicting orders. He almost managed to trigger a civil war, but uh... The Acting Authority looked uncomfortable. Uthred intervened. Speaking of which. Mondelles came to a halt before a well-carved door of ancient wood. It looked like two gnarled boards shaped by a sharpened blade and installed with a handle. By now, another point of suspicion was rising inside Draus. She interrupted Mondelles as he reached for the handle. So, why cant I feel his Frame? Or even see his Soul? Aint like Ninth Spheres to be quiet. Thats just the thing, Mondelles replied. I dont have a fucking clue myself. And he isnt... isnt quite himself most times anymore either. Youll understand. He gave Vator a final series of looks and settled on pity. Maybe hell be better with you here. As Mondelles turned the knob and pushed open the door, a strange scene greeted her. The first thing she noticed was Uthred seated with his head bowed and body hunched before a grand mahogany table. Past the table was a fake windowactually monitorsthat portrayed a birds eye view of New Vultun from the stratosphere. A personal escort guarded him, but something was wrong with his Metamind. The halo spun, but pieces were outright transparent. Like if sequences were hollow somehow. +Ontological displacement,+ Mercy muttered. +A consequence of Continuum, I suspect.+ Across from him was Shotinwho still looked like shit. Least he was nursing himself on some alcohol now. Fuck. Chambers actually managed to put his shit back together. An Instrument served as his handler as well, but they stood a good arms distance away from the Seeker. Then, a flicker flashed in Draus cog-feed, and she saw Chambers floating just above Shotin, offering her a boyish grin. {Yo. Draus. Looking different.} {Yeah. See you put his shit back together.} {Nah. Shotins still pretty fucked up inside. Hes going to be pretty fucked up for a while, but hes got a goal and Im gonna help him reach it if I can. Hows shit on yourah, fuck, Vator.} {Yeah, dont mind him,} Draus said, eyeing the youngest Greatling. He was staring at his father, mouth slightly agape. There was more confusion than sadness or fear in his expression, as if he didnt recognize the man hunched over before him. {Hes cadre now. Mondelles too. I think. Mercy cleared them.} {Yeah, Draus, Ive been meaning to ask youwhat the fuck! The Famine of Mercy?} {I told you how he swore} {Yeah, but let me have this. What the fuck! Shit, consang. I got no idea how you managed to recruit so many people trying to kill us a week ago, but maybe if this Reg shit doesnt work out, you can try being a diplomat.} And Chambers kept doing the impossible: Draus struggled to suppress a smile. {I was gonna say the same thing to you, half-strand. Diplomacy and people-handlin was the whole reason I called you here.} {It was} At ease, Mondelles said. Draus noted the two Instruments on watch were saluting as well, and the Acting Authority rounded the table to find his seat. Instrument Kaeling; Instrument Vult, you are both dismissed. The conversation about to take place is rated Priority Zero Confidential. Please inform Instruments Hadir and Maewind outside to establish demiplanar quarantine. The guards for Uthred and Shotin showed no hesitation. They simply saluted and proceeded to their task. As they left the room, Mondelles gestured at Draus. Instrument Juven. The door, if you would please. As she closed the door, she found Shotin glaring hatefully at Uthred and Vator besides. You know something, the Seeker began. If you told me that they would be here, I mightve chosen to stay in my cage. Understandable, but not helpful. For any of us. Mondelles groaned as he tried to settle in his chair. The armor he wore made its legs creak, but still it held. There was a poetic metaphor about Highflames current state in all that somewhere, but Draus didnt give a fuck about poetry. Finally, Shotins attention turned to herand when his next question came, she realized Chambers hadnt informed him about her disguise. And why the fuck is faceless asshole number whatever still here? Because she must be... Uthred said. His voice was deep, but there was something missing, like thunder stripped of reverberation. Suddenly, Draus felt a surge of tension building inside her. She created another junction using the screens behind Mondelles and a firing solution was created immediately thereafter. Locked, her Arsenalist declared. Father, Vator said, frowning as he gripped Uthreds shoulder. Father. You are not well. She is She has to be... Uthred said, reaching out to pat Vators hand absentmindedly. Because she is Jelene Draus... the... seed of my wifes sin... The... the one we lost to the flames... I have been waiting... I have found you. Uthred Greatling stood. I have something to tell you. Draus went still as a statue. Shotins eyes darted between everyone present before he finally snorted. Shit. So much for a disguise, huh, Reg? Yeah, Draus grumbled. Dont reckon Id ever make it as a Sleeper. So. Uthred. Start talking. And at her behest, he spoke once more, but instead of his voice coming through, whispers echoed across the gulf of time and something that was Veylis and not greeted the Regular. Draus. Inheritor of the Stillborn. We greet you and offer you this final chance: lay down this declarationsurrender what is ours and give us. The Regular sneered. Nah. Dont think I fuckin will. A low series of laughs poured forth, and she heard more Avo there than Veylis. As expected. As desired. Very well. Then let us speak as esteemed foes, as the High Seraph once did for the Dreamer. Chapter 31-8 Shapeshifters (II) Chapter 31-8 Shapeshifters (II) History is a blade that cuts both ways, no matter what lies we fill our autobiographies with. No matter what adjustments are made to the texts, a tangible effect has already shaped the world, deformed it, molded it. And the thing about lies? They clash, they separate, they fragment. Because lies are born of man and gods, and of our many liars, they have one commonality. They disagree, because the lie serves one ego. I tell you this now, sleeper. Yes, you are already found, sleeper. One that does not even recognize themselves for what they are, because there is no possibility of you hiding from me. None. I do not hate you, nor scorn you. The actions you performed while posing as one of my authorities were true, in a sense. The best liea grand deception against oneself, against one''s own ego. But you already exist in incongruity with your backstory, and I see you. Across all your iterations, your reverberations, are the paths that have led you to the present, and progress on to the future. I see you, and I know you, better than even the lie-makers that created you. For the greatest mistake of all is not that you''ve lied. It''s not even that you have the audacity to try and assassinate me. It''s because you think that you can overcome me with my own tools. History was never yours to wield, and I''m going to carve that into you as a lesson. Be sure to remind your masters of the Inner Council of this truth. Tell them I have seen their mirage dancing in your history. Tell them I know what they are. Tell them that the plural of humanity is war, and their dreams are fated for tragedy. -Veylis Avandaer 31-8 Shapeshifters (II) [Draus] What is this... Mondelles muttered. Your High Seraph popping in to say high through her newest puppet, Im guessin, Draus said. Not quite, Uthredor what appeared to be Uthreddidnt rebuke her said. Instead, he smiled uncharacteristically, his irises changing color, a ripple of Soulfire spreading out from his being. The Laws of Ontological Symmetry resonated. Not just between Draus and Uthred, but Shotin as well. A surprised look on the Seekers face betrayed his surprise. What the fuck? Shotin said, looking at the quivering radiance shrouding him. None of us are quite who we used to be, Uthred continued. Even now... I feel traits from the Dreamer bleeding into me... memories not my own. By a bifurcating threshold are me and him separated, but slowly, like will become like, and a new being will be born from our inevitable resurrection. This embracement will bear fruit, but it remains unclear who will become the master, and who will serve as slave. And then Uthred flinched. A struggle played across his face as his brows furrowed and sweat began to run down his brow. You... promised... Let me The rippling flames emanating from Uthreds body vanished altogether. He staggered forward, nearly toppling over the chair he once said, but with a sudden snapping motion, he reached out for Vator. Draus got to him firstseizing him by the throat before he could grab his youngest son. A vicious snarl sounded from the former Authority as he glared hate into Draus eyes. Unhand me, you bi Draus headbutted Uthred. Her helmet slammed hard against Uthreds nose, and though a snort of blood followed, his bones didnt break. The former Authority recovered near instantly as well, shifting back to into a fighting posture instead of succumbing to pain or startlement. Stop! Enough! Im not here for you! The Regular didnt go rushing after him. She had plenty of guns aimed through over a hundred reflections in the room; if Uthred did anything stupid, shed do something final. She considered using a Redaction Round on him as well, but decided against it. If it worked, it would see a shard of the Stillborn permanently lost, and if it didnt, that would probably be because using a miracle of Chronology against Veylis was a stupid idea to begin with. Vator, Uthred said, his voice cracking. In an instant, he went from violent and combative to miserable. He sagged, and as his weakness showed through, Draus saw an echo of Jhredan older, stronger version of the broken boy who died in the Warrensstanding before her. My son... my boy... At his words, Vator scurried forward next to Draus, a bright grin on his face, utterly unaffected by proceedings. Father! It gladdens me that you are alive! For a moment I was worried that you were no more. Just a vessel for the High Seraph to use. Draus was surprised when the young Greatling went no further. He stayed beyond arm distance of his father and lingered close to her. Uthred, meanwhile, had no such inhibitions. Slowly, he staggered forward, reaching out to Vator. Close enough, Draus said. No, Uthred replied. I am not... this is what I was promised. Do not deny me this. Let him approach, Ignorance said in the back of Draus mind. Not a trap. Just a reward. Not a lie. Everything inside Draus screamed for her to just cut Uthred downbut that might also be all the leftover hate she had toward his wife. Once more, the Regular acted in spite of herself, granting her old enemy a show of mercy. Fine. Dont do nothin strange. Ill see. Ill know. Ill put you down. Uthred ignored Draus all but collapsed against his son. The violence in his motions made both Shotin and Mondelles flinch. Im sorry, Uthred said, sinking down against Vator. He pressed his head against Vators chest as the first sobs came. Mondelles face went white with disbelief and horror. Shotin and Draus shared a mutual look of discomfort. And they werent alone there: A genuine look of worry awaited Draus as she turned back to Vator, and found the boy looking blankly at her, seeking guidance. Hes not usually like this, Vator said, sounding ever the child. He patted his father on the head as the man wept, and he looked around the room, a mixture of embarrassment and uncertainty guiding his actions. Father. Father, please, Im happy to see you too, but we have a name to uphold. We have decorum to maintain. You told me this, remember? Love exists here, the Lovebringer murmured inside Chambers. Very unnatural, very inhuman love. But a kind of love nonetheless. +And we can pull on it if we need to?+ Chambers asked. Yes. +Alright. All I wanted to know.+ *** [Draus] I... Uthred ran a palm across his face and sighed. You were more than what we could have asked for, Vator. I just wish you were more... Human? Vator said, arching an eyebrow. Yes, Uthred admitted, ashamed. I wish you were human. I wish Jhred didnt have my sorrow. I wish I could have offered Abrel kindness instead of kindling for her rage. He grimaced. I was trying to make you more than me. Clean you all weakness. And that was why you kept putting Jhred in the sensory deprivation box when he cried too much and didnt retaliate when Hessia Anchors of House Anchor insulted Abrel using Jhreds failings at Axtraxis, lured her into an ambushed, maimed, tortured, and blinded her? Left her tied to a post as a nu-dog after. Recorded it all as a vicarity and tried to distribute the memories among the student body? Vator blinked after he asked the question. It was genuine curiosity when he spoke, not outrage or condemnation. Yes, I... Uthred swallowed. You... I never had to punish. Because you were made to be... to be perfectly loyal before everything. There was never a chance for you to... But you never hurt me, father, Vator grinned. And I was allowed to be what little of myself exists! You and mother wished to make a champion, you say. One that can maintain a specific disposition perpetually, one that possess intellect beyond conventional bounds. He held out his arms. In that, you succeeded. And afterward, I sought what you couldnt fill in me with my own expression. My own art. This is, after all, the way of things. Imperfection cannot create perfection. As it is true for you, so too is it true for me. But still we grope, yes? For that impossibility beyond us? But the young Greatling turned his joy on his Heaven. But not the gods. Portrait! Come! Say your greetings to my father. Come! Come! The Heaven didnt respond. Instead, it fluttered overhead, coating the ceiling light, its scroll becoming a lampshade. I refuse. I see you now, Vator Greatling. You are mutilated. Mutilated beyond recognitioneven to yourself. There are things in you missing since before the ink of your creation kissed the page. And a feeling of scorn flooded Draus Metamind. A thin beam of perception poured out from the Portrait down upon Uthred. And you are vermin for the harm youve done. Against your own children, no less. Vermin. I have guarded families from sickness and injury, and I have witnessed cycles of families... cycles... you shame the position of patriarch. Shame! Portrait, Vator said, sounding aghast. He shifted back to his father with a queasy smile. Apologies, they Are right, Uthred said, staring blankly at the Heaven. Oh, you didnt do so much harm, father, Vator said, waving Uthred off. Why, I made sure of it. We all do our deeds for our family. Uthred blinked. What do you mean? Why, I made sure Jhreds suicides were all unsuccessful. I stitched his wrists and gave him a transfusion of blood after his first attemptlowered the dose to ensure he survived his second. Left a mem-sim for him to play with when you left him sealed inside the deprivation room for a week that one time. And Abrelwell, after she recovered from her ordeal and learned a bit about not letting rage overcome her good sense, I finished things out. The Greatling patriarchs eyes widened. I... you... Hessia didnt murder her twin brother... try to kill her mother...It was you? And Vators expression turned absolutely exuberant. Not so, father! I might have broken into the asylum in the aftermath to record a torture vicarity for Abrels namesday, but the murders were all Hessias doing. Ah, House Anchor is not nearly the rival you think they were, father. So much unease beneath the surface. Well, incest more than unease. Vator smacked his lips together. It helps that both her and her brother were competing for their mothers affection in ways that were suboptimal for family cohesion. Why, of all your flaws, you were not mentally andbefore the rashphysically intimate with your own children. A series of choking noises came from Uthred. And it was Draus turn to mutter: Jaus, what the fuck... She knew Chivalrics were a fuckin mess, but the details just made everything uglier. Anyway. I sent Hessia a series of memories revealing her brother to be her mothers favorite, and all I needed to do after that was just... remind her. From time to time. She did the rest. The surrealism of the scene only grew with how earnest Vator sounded. By the end, his hands were clasped behind his back and he was rocking back and forth on his feet like an excited schoolboy. For all the wretchedness that was Uthred Greatling, there was a person there. Someone that saw and understood right and wrong on a human level. But across from him, Vator was at once innocent and impossibly cruel. And that made Draus understand him more than ever before. There was something in him that never was, just like the Portrait said. It was that something which made Reg a Reg, which was shared by Dice, that perfectly mutilated ego possessed only by a few. But Vator took it a step further. It was like he conceptualized the horror that was his life through a twisted filter. And a boy he remained, his weight of his actions forever a lightness on his flexible conscience, the only sin displeasing his parents, his only tantrums the denial of his arms and pleasures. And Draus saw. Vator wasnt a monster. He was just an ego shaped to suffer the mortality of a perfect and selfish child. Never could have chosen, Ignorance hissed mournful. Just like the blind cant see. Anyhow, Vator said, continuing on, seeing no issue about his family history. You should really have this talk with Abrel when you meet with her again. I am sure she would appreciate this very, very much. Far more than I. A beat followed. Taking Vators nonchalance, Uthreds expression broke apart with pain once more, and he covered his face to hide tears to come. The young Greatling winced. Father? Did I say something wrong? He looked at Draus with blank, childlike terror. What did I do wrong? Its... Draus shook her head at the madness taking place before her. It aint your fault. Not really. Never was. Chapter 31-9 False Deliverance (I) Have you ever regretted what you''ve done? What you made of your citizens? This is not my sin, Dreamer. This is their choice. In all lives, we face tribulation, each a trial of our own. What makes of us, what becomes of us, that is born of our choice. You are a creature that desires choice above all, dont you? Yes. But they were shaped by yours. Your seeds. In them. In their failure. Their atrocities. They are not my failing, Dreamer. They are my thesis. For all their virtues, they succumb to their flaws. And that is why they cannot be the deliverers of my paradise. Neither can I. Even I. Too flawed. Too weak. [Burning Dreamer Laughing] Your problem is not weakness. Not even flawed if judged from capability. Then where do my failings lie? Delusion and inflexibility. Refuse to see humans for what they are? What are they? Choked. Damned. Existence does not care for them. Mistakes ruin them. Death ends them. Entire worlds of experience and knowledge lost with each person. And the new ones fail to learn. Suffer the same. It is not a cycle. None of this is academic theory. It is the same story. And it repeats. Because finality? Because ontology. Hence worship. Humanity dreamed of gods to do what they could not. But how can a limited thing know the absolute? Not as they are. You think of the world as concepts. A tyrant playing at academia. Fitting. History is but a tale to you. Yet... Humanity is not an argument. It isnt anything beyond biology and dynamics created by circumstances. Meaning came thereafter. Chains from chains. You provoke me with my fathers words. I will provoke you further with a stated truth: You are afraid of divinity. You still lust for humanity. Cling to the structure of your ego. And so you inflict this existential blessing on your father. And think of him now... ask his node what he thinks of this world of yours. Of Uthred. Will he even want it? And what more does he know of the divine? What does the Sleeper? It matters not what we want in the end, only what must be done. It only matters what we want. Nothing must be done. Nothing needs to be. But we are. So we can choose. And here... and so many times... you didnt. -Intercepted Conversation of Two Unknown Entities within the Substance (Assumed to be the Burning Dream and Veylis Avandaer) Obtained by Inner Council 31-9 False Deliverance (I) Has this satisfied you? A voicea comingling of Avo and Veylisresonated from within Uthred and the former Authority froze. No, Uthred breathed, clenching his teeth. No, no, I... Did you think a single apology would mend what you perceive to be broken? the voice asked. Or is Abrels absence what troubles you? Did you wish to speak with one of your children instead of the broken product that is to be your Houses legacy? Something almost a whimper escaped from Uthred, but he still managed to give a reply. I... I want to fix this. I want to make this all right. I need to make this all right. Another chance... One more try... R?? To be a better father to Jhred? Yes! To be there for Abrel when she needed you? Yes! To make sure Vator was never broken, or Vator never was? Uthred paused.He pulled his hands away from his face and looked at his only remaining son with glistening eyes. I just want to know how to be your father. I never understood. I wasnt good enough. Im sorry. Amusing to you, perhaps. But they would have failed in the end as well. For we exist alone unto ourselves. And it is the individual that suffers, not the collective. The individual that decides in tandem with others, not an organization. So long as there is a difference in people, then power cannot be shared, for power will be torn by drifting interests and mutating desires. Their paradise will last for an eon but no more. Eventually, the fragmentation of their democracy eternal will turn on itself, for there is only one condition where all are satisfied equally. Let me guess? Death? Enslavement, the voice replied. The majority sculpted by the minoritysuch is the laughable nature of the Inner Council. Until even the minority turn upon each other, and in the end, only one. One unworthy vessel trying to command a vessel they have long since lobotomized. And thus, paradise turns to purgatoryan unending eternity of stagnation and decay to follow, as the final engineer of unity enjoys their solitary reignuntil they are offended by the tapestry itself, and decide the patterns to, must all be aligned. And that, Guard-Captain, will result in your so-called death. Or something close to it. Right, Draus grunted. So. The solution is to have one perfect ruler run everything. One above the failings of humanity and the minds. One perfectly bond to existence awakened. Will you have things another way? Draus barred her teeth. Donno. An immortal life of change and war and whatever other fuckin madness that follows with freedom unchained dont sound like hell to me. And what will come of this eternal anarchy absent orderbut not consequence. The voice let out a choked note, and its timbre shifted low and sibilant, going from a mix to predominantly Avo. Chains cannot teach. Everything changes. Order will shatter. Paradise is a lie. You cling too hard Veylis... but hierarchy is not salvation. And not even salvation is divine. It is time to stop yearning for a savior. It is time to stop fleeing from ruin certain to come. Face it. Be destroyed. But never killed. And return. Always return. Always experience... for what is broken can be reforged. The flame reveals. And at once, the cascading waves of Soulfire leaving Uthred jolted and folded into each other. A clash of metaphysical pressure exploded outward, and the Acting Authority came ablaze with power. Enough! Veylis voice echoed through now, and all hints of Avo vanished. Almost all. Hiding... Chambers from her... couldnt shroud you too... Ignorance groaned. Draus felt something on the verge of breaking inside herthe Definement pressed to the absolute limit, overtaxed. +Shit. Let go, consang! Let go!+ Not... yet... need an opening... to stop... counter... +Counter what?+ But then Veylis spoke again, and Draus found her attention drawn by a second presence joining Uthred. A pulsation of space and time emanated out from his bodyDraus waited no time, she unleashed a hellstorm of firepowermissiles and bullets curving around Mondelles, streaking to cut Uthred down. They got a meter within his body before an intercepting salvo of projectiles intercepted hers. The counter-fire exploded out from Uthreds miracles of Continuum as if they were always therefired long ago and held in reserve. Draus recognized the second presence within him then. The fire radiating from Uthred spread, and a patch of existence around the Authority turned transparentbecame a portal to another place, another time. There, body enshadowed by a backdrop of nuclear fire and rupturing reality, soared a familiar figure coming right for Draus and the others. A familiar figure with a gnarled cannon in place of a head. JELENE DRAUS OF THE STILLBORN, DELIVERER OF FINALITY (WAR/GUNS/REFLECTION/LUMINOSITY...) [EST. 10000000] And scowled. Fuckin... cant get rid of you. Hard to run from oneself, Guard-Captain. Take this as a compliment: You are the highest following threat in the Dreamers absence, and so, I must see you taken from the board. Even if it costs me another loyal servant. Authority Uthred. Your task stands before you: Perform, and earn your utopia. Uthreds expression hardened. Your will be done, Highest Avandaer. He extended a hand as the Deliverer came sailing behind him, and a greatsword of Continuum-severing flame ignited, leaving a cleft in reality as it formed. AUTHORITY UTHRED GREATLING, THE SOULSCARRED (CONTINUUM/FIRE/SPACE/WAR/FORCE/SPEED) [EST. 155555555] I take no pleasure in this, Vator, Uthred said, as the paracausal fires crawled over his body, merging into pieces of armor. The softness of his stare hardened into a glare as he regarded the of the room. But I will relish A chain of magenta materialized around his waist and bound him to Vator. Uthreds eyes widened. The flames wrapping around him staggered to a halt. What? What? Veylis repeated, surprised. Vator tilted his head inquisitively. Ignorance gave a weak laugh. Commanding the power of love itself, Aedon Chambers Lovebringer exploded into the room, weaving itself together from the Bond between father and son; launching new threads through the portal, at the Deliverer itself. And with a resonant declaration, the former enforcer turned the opening of the coming battle on its head. Hey! Uthred! Fucking nut yourself! Chapter 31-10 False Deliverance (II) You know how the best shot I ever knew died? Caught a cough during a No-Dragon blitz plague. Decided to forego wearing his rig on a trip to his local grafters. Another case: Skullpop, nova Necro and trauma-sequencer extraordinaire. Got done by his own cheapnessaero fell out of the sky because the discounted mod-jobs he kept having his cousin do resulted in the engine being overtaxed and the front half of the vehicle being too heavy. Shit. Closest I came to death in a long time was when I looked up at the sky at the wrong place at the wrong time. Mustve glimpsed a rupture or something, but I damn near got cut in half by a lens flare from a nearby windowhad to cauterize my upper body back together down the middle. Look. The point is: shit can surprise you. No one really matters that much in New Vultun. But. However. If you can. Have a consang watch over you on a job if you can. Gives you a bit more of a chance... -Quail Tavers, The School of the Warrens 31-10 False Deliverance (II) [Draus] Draus didnt know what to expect from the Heaven of Love in terms of combat, but seeing Uthred Greatlings halo fracture from a supercharged orgasm was beyond her imagination. At Chambers command, the former Authoritys eyes widened, his arms shivered. The flames that made his manifestationhis greatswordburst apart in a questionable spray of embers. A loud gasp escaped the man as his legs went stiff and straight, and there, before three old enemies and his son, Uthred Greatling arrived for the first time in years. What the fuck might have been the proper response for such a moment, the surrealism was broken as the Deliverer exploded forth. Draus by manifesting her Simulacrae via the monitors behind Mondellesand sinking into the innermost threshold of her Manifold Paracosmos where time was almost at a standstill. Shotin, Chambers, Vator, Mondelles, and Uthred were nearly frozen. But the Deliverer was undeterred. Through a screen made from Uthreds sparking embers, Draus pathborn twin arrived, its rusted cannon of a head smoking with the stretch of destruction, its arms ringing frequency blades that could sever anything. And sever anything they did. The tethers that composed Chambers Heaven, the Lovebringer, were reaching into Uthreds flamesleaping from his entwined body. They dangled as long threads of magenta, groping where the Deliverer used to be but wasnt anymore. And though the limbs of love could traverse the chaos of continuum with correspondence, that didnt make them unbreakable; unseverable. The Deliverer sliced through Chambers Bonds with contempt, and an oscillation of Soulfire shot backward, passing through Uthredwho was crying, biting his lipsback toward the Lovebringer to arrive as thaumic backlash. With the continuum destablized, the form of the Deliverer flickered. It went from being the size of a gnat to that of a titan. Draus phys-sim glitched as it tried to process just how far her pathborn anathema was. The phantasmic failedaffected by the distorted patterns of Continuum. The Regular unleashed a barrage of counterfire from all corners of the room. The noise became deafening. The thousands of projectiles poured into Uthred at oncethe chronology of Draus Manifold Paracosmos ensuring they were delivered through every junction at the same time. Reflective shells folded around Vator, Shotin, and Mondellesthe overwhelming force and heat passing through the room vented through these effigies of gleaming glass and sparing the people cocooned inside. Yet, despite delivering enough ordinance to glass a mundane district, Draus firepower proved futile. Her matter-based projectiles decayed before they could ever hit Uthred, and her beams diffracted, splitting into parting streams. The Deliverer arrived in an instant, its enormous rusted arm clawing to smear everyone within the officeonly to be countered by the glass-formed palm of the Simulacra. Rather than a collision, however, Draus let the Deliverers fist pass through her reflective palmopened a junction connected to the glass casing that held Mondelles. The anathemas fist, a few dozen meters large, exploded out from the shell around the Acting Authority and severed itself down its elbow. Rust and decay flooded the room. Broken chassis and mangled corpses poured out as the tapestry smeared into near incoherence. Relative distance and time became as if a slurry within Mondelles office. Uthred remained incapacitated. Shotin, Vator, Mondelles, and Chambers didnt have enough speed to react. Only Draus and her pathborn self mattered then, and they leveled their cannons and fired at each other concurrently. The space within Mondelles office could only be separated along two thresholds. The first was that which burned: a rupture in the Continuum of all things, realitys pages peeling apart from Uthreds flame. Through the gaps approached the Deliverer, her mangled head-cannon instilled with destruction and decay launching a flechette that promised absolute destruction. Islands of reflections and scintillating glass defied the flames of paracausality, and beyond them loomed a realm of tessellated fractals. Draus plucked Shotin, Mondelles, and Vator through their reflections and directed them toward the innermost layer of her demiplane where time moved at a near halt. Then, her Arsenalists spinal cannon emerged from her body, and she fired a counter-shot at the Deliverers flechette. The flames danced. Glass flashed. A projectile of crushing annihilation left the flame just as a golden round passed through a golden reflection. They collided thereafterand the flechette shattered Draus Redaction Bullet. Absolute destruction reaped its due. The flechette continued forth. For another meter or so. Then it suddenly vanished as well, chronology claiming its revenge. Draus shattered every reflection in the office with a thought as she dueled her alternative self across the incoherent sea of paracausality. Waves of static embers clenched and pulled at geometry. Unleashed attacks went missing, only to return a few seconds later. And in the midst of it all, a cavalry charge of Simulcrae stormed forth, their centaur-like forms emerging from reflection after reflection, sprouting gun-made wings from their backs as they engaged the Deliverer en masse. REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA RESPLENDENT]- 17% REND CAPACITY [ARESENALIST]- 3% Neither time nor metaphysics was on her side. Draus was more powerful than ever, but the Deliverer was still an enemy sporting a higher Spherage. With Uthred freed from Chambers Bonds, things were on the ledge of fucked to hopeless if she didnt turn this around and fast. Which was why she scooped the others into her inner threshold in the first place. Because it wasnt just the perfect firing spot for her Arsenalist, but a sanctuary to do some strategy in the heat of combat. Just a damn shame the Deliverer was so fucking fast. She seemed utterly unaffected by Draus Canon of Chronology. The way the patterns of speed bled from her ontology, it was like the Deliverer had a fixed speed it would move at no matter what the situation was. Which also explained why the Deliverer wasnt too fast for her to react to, either. It moved a bit faster than her always, but that was all. A bit. A permanent relative. She could handle that. Just needed to conduct some stalling action. Cross-crossing exchanges of gunfire consumed the chaotic space. Draus did the bulk of the shooting, letting her Arsenalists Rend climb fast so she would have a Redaction Round ready every time the Deliverer fired its head-cannon at her. The Regular used her Simulacrae as firing platforms rather than charging horsemen. Those the Deliverer approached, she abandoned, detonating them with a Shattershunt. In the aftermath, she simply spawned more, using her ability to exist through multiple reflections at once to harass the Deliverer despite the pathborns superior speed. Shotins face was muffled against Chambers and he offered a mangled reply. Dont care about her, but I do like you... Jaus. He wasnt a leader. Butbut he needed to be. For Draus. For Avo. Oh, fuckfuckfuck, shitshitshit, uhhhh... Okay. First. Uh. Thethe Rendsink outside! Whats its domain! You! Stubbles! Acting Authority guy. Mondelles hesitated for a moment longer before shaking himself loose and replying. War. Domain of War. Its a representative mantle piece. It shouldnt be filled by Yeah, yeah, okay; shit, Chambers sighed. Was kinda hoping for Space or something. That usually destablishes shit. Gives you an opening. Can... change it... Ignorances voice intruded. You have.... Stillborn. And just as fast as Avos Definement was, he wasnt again. But the effect was achieved. Chambers was divinely inspired. Wait! No! I can work with it! Okay! Okay. Uh... You! Chambers said, pointed a thread at Vator. Were going to need to fuck up your dad again. I think his mind almost cracked when I touched himmaybe... maybe I just need to make him come again. Even harder this time. Shit. Wait. Do you Guilders have thatthe fucks it called? A refractory period? The young Greatlings typically sunny expression flinched as something akin to disgust flashed across his face. I... Aedon Chambers, I must commend you. I... no one has ever made me feel this genuinely uncomfortable before. No have I ever expected to discuss my fathers refractory period with someone that is trying to drive him insane via hypercharged orgasms. A beat followed. A broken wing made of guns tumbled in the distance, vanishing into the invading fires. I... we could exploit his more obvious mental weakness. I would much prefer that. {Chambers!} Draus sent. {Runnin out capacity out here! Hurry the fuck up!} Shitshitshitshitshit What other weakness? Chambers asked, anxiety sounding in his voice. Why, hes shame at failing Abrel, myself, Jhred, mother... I think he would likely fall to insanity entirely if he was forced to watch my siblings die over and over again. If that can be engineered, somehow... Vator hummed. That was when Chambers had an idea. An idea only a half-strand could have. An idea only an Enforcer who was tempered from the cruelties of the Crucibles could come up with. Then... that means he wont attack your siblings either... I suspect... I am not entirely certain. Vator shrugged. My fathers mental state is very questionable right now. This is the first time Ive seen him cry, to be honest. Though, if you need me to participate in this session of combat, I must decline. I have taken a vow of nonviolence on behalf of my Heaven. I will not harm another. What? A vow of I know. What the fuck! Are you fucking shitting me? A flesh-flap thing rose out from Vators skinwhich was mega-fucking gross, and it screamed at Chambers. Cease your pressuring of my host. He has sworn his honor to me. We will be disgraced no further by any of you. Chambers flinched. Right. Fucks sakeI... uh... Okay. The pieces were kind of coming together. Uthredthey could get Uthred. Maybe. He just needed to do something that Fuck! Shit! Mirrorhead was snuffed before Chambers was a Clad. Argh! Fuck! How am I to make the Greatling meatshield now? The what? Shotin said, lifting his head. There was a hope in his voice. A vicious desire. The what? Vator asked, frown betraying a hint of worry. Lookthe idea is simple. Wewell, someone who can create like, Abrel and MirrorheadJhredssheaths pumps out a few hundred of them, II like, control them with my mind and make them scream things like agh, no daddy, why are you hurting me and shit. And we make a bunch of them. And then we wrap them around the Rendsink that Ill have to turn in a Rendbomb a room over. Then we hit Uthred with it. Absolute silence. Other than the sound of Draus demiplane burning. Most of the second layer was gone too. {Chambers!} Draus growled. It sounded bad on her end. Real bad. Chambers, Shotin whispered. That plan... is fucking nova. It is? Its very disturbing. Youre a very disturbing person, Aedon Chambers. Vator didnt seem so amused when speaking to Chambers anymore. The vicarities had more of an effect on you than I expected, this is... He drew in a breath. Very well. I have conferred with my Heaven. Growing brain-dead versions of my siblings to serve as a psychological attack against my father is acceptable in accordance with my new ethics. Through it all, Mondelles did his best expression of a goldfish in a water tank. I... I can move people and things around. Using... light. Tunnel into things with my Heaven. Awesome. You grab Shotin. Shotin... Fucking drop your stacks when I tell you. Chambers mind was racing, his nerves were shot. Fuckfuckfuck, pleaseJausplease... {Draus,} Chambers said, as he tried to figure out how he was going to bullshit his way into success this time. {I think I have... concepts of a plan.} {...Well, we all have to die sometime.} The Regular sighed. {Fuckin... go for it.} Chapter 31-11 Concepts of a Plan Listen, I know my enemies have no idea what Im about to do, because I have no idea what Im about to do. Thats why I always win. Because Im the master of motherfuck -Randi Chaos Randoni (Crucible Razorgirl) seconds before blowing herself and 22,353 other people up with her mini-nuke nunchucks 31-11 Concepts of a Plan [Mondelles] It took quite a bit to shake someone like Santando Mondelles, but Aedon Chamber managed it. He managed it with flying colors. Drafted into Chambers mad plan, Santando found himself playing a supporting role alongside Vator Greatling and a disturbing enamored Shotin Kazahara who was still clinging to the Lovebringer like a love-drunk insect. Their goal: To deliver a makeshift Rendbomb and disrupt the flames of correspondence somehow. The opposition: Uthred Greatling, now empowered by the Burning Dreamers unique Domain and an alternate version of Jelene Draus born of the paths, gifted with a specially designed Heaven from the High Seraphor whatever Veylis was becoming. It was madness. All utter madness. And yet... and yet that had been his life since the destruction of Scale. One problem followed another, and it was all he could do to stay ahead. A tether made from gleaming magenta extended out from Chambers Lovebringer, and within the Heavens hollow cavernous core was a mirage of the Rendsink. Mondelles watched wordlessly as a junction opened before Chambers, granting him access to the waiting room just before Mondelles office. There, the chaos unfolding one room over was still spilling over. Draus and the Deliverer mustve been fighting at unfathomable speeds, for the flames of correspondence had only just begun to seep through the massive wooden doors leading to the Acting Authoritys chamber. Good thing, too, since it was easy for Chambers to launch a single Bond and tear the Rendsink out from its foundations. The Rendsink was built like a pillar at the center of the waiting roommore of an art piece and a statement than meant for anything practical. That being said, it could hold a considerable amount of Rend in times of desperation. Highflame valued function even in its aesthetics. The Lovebringers strength of was terrifying. The foundations fixing the Rendsink in place should have rooted it absolutely still. Perhaps a Godclad of Strength or some other Domain of overwhelming force could have affected it, but Chambers had a Heaven of Love. Yet, his Bond exerted an impossible pull, and the Rendsink came free from the ceiling then the floor in sparking bursts. And just in time as well, as both the Instruments guarding Mondelles office burst intheir approach happening in hyper-slow motion, with outer doors barely sliding open as the Rendsink was pulled through the junction. Five meters wide and twice again as long, the Rendsink resembled a metallic slab with several tube-plugged slots on its bottom where the sink could be installed on a Light Assault Golem Platform. Without Agnosi or proper logistical support, Mondelles wasnt sure A burst of Soulfire washed out from Chambers, and the Lovebringer jolted back. Jaus! Fuck! That felt weird as shit! Fucking... How did Avo ever get used to this? He let out a series of muttered curses and several Pleasefuckpleasefuckworkpleasefucks as his flames tunneled into the Rendsink. Something was changing. Mondelles could a twist in the tapestry, patterns changing near his Frame. Quite the sight, isnt it? Vators words diverted the Acting Authoritys attention briefly, and Mondelles did a double-take at Vators labors. As they were hovering in this weightless demiplane, there wasnt much of a ground to place things. Or brain-dead bodies grown from a catalyst of flesh. This proved to be to the young Greatlings benefit as he stitched together clone after clone of his siblings via weaves of biomass he projected from his fingers. Mondelles had known both Abrel and Jhred during their time at Axtraxis. The former was focused, skilled, and rageful. She never had a smile that didnt possess an edge of triumph or bitterness. Jhred, meanwhile, was rage turned inward and impotence pointed out. Where his sister prevailed, he sank. And despite everything Mondelles felt about the Greatlings, it was just a damn shame. The boy couldve been a lot more. There was something worthy in him, somewhere deep inside. But he didnt have a warrior inside him. He was broken before he came to Axtraxis, and he was even more broken when he left. As version after version of both Greatling siblings tumbled out before Mondelles, he let out a disbelieving sigh. Their faces were blank. There was nothing resembling a consciousness in them, nothing that could support a Metamind. And they were at peace. More at peace than the former instructor had ever seen. Mondelles practically envied them in that moment. Holy shit.... I did it! It worked! The Lovebringers threads undulated upward in a display of jubilation, and Shotin muffled things like I never doubted and You were always good enough into the Heaven of Loves nape. Its a Domain of Space now. Just need... just gotta get Draus to fill it up. A savage series of snickers escaped Chambers as he rubbed his threads together as if they were hands. Time for Uthred and Evil-Draus to get fucked. Maybe literally. A frown developed on Vators face as he continued assembling more brain-dead siblings. The wonders you are capable of astound me, Chambers, but your words fill me with disgust and horror. Again, spoken while he was creating blank-faced naked clones of his siblings. What the fuck even was Mondelles life now? Cords of flesh snaked out from the bodies of the Greatlings, becoming an interconnected network of biomass. With a flick of his hand, Vator puppeted his siblings and compelled them to action. He laughed first, and an Abrel followed thereafter. Soon, the others connected to here repeated her expression and actions in a cascade. Vator then moved on to words, declaring: Please, dont put me in the case, father! Im sorry! Please! and Why did mother ever choose you. These too were repeated. After a few more reactions were tested, Vator grinned and looked to Chambers. The bodies have been composed. One hundred and two in total. Should be enough to tighten around the Rendbomb. Nova, Chambers muttered, and using his threads, pulled the wreath made from Greatling bodies and placed that over his makeshift bomb. As the Abrel and Jhreds folded over the top of the Rendbomb, it seemed as though they ran a bit too long, drooped and dangled thereafter. Still a bit Vator waved a hand, and with a series of sickening cracks and snaps, his unthinking siblings closed around the Rendbomb like a tightening net. Consang... that was kinda gross. Vator narrowed his eyes. You have very strange standards, Aedon Chambers. Yeah, well, the fucking popping and naked sibling thing is creepy. Period. Andah, shit, theres no Metamind either Worry not, I have paired their nervous system to mine. Any actions I perform and will across our shared biology will be replicated across the network. ...Nova. Uh, you might be a creepy, strange half-strand, but youre pretty effective Vator. The young Greatling just grinned. I always aim to please. The Lovebringer turned its attention on Mondelles next. Alright, stubbles. Its time you hide us in the Greatling pile. Please choose better words, Vator said, frowning again. It sounds so inelegant. The Greatling net. Nest. Whatever the fuck. Mondelles. Do the thing. The strangeness of the moment was only growing, and Mondelles did as the Lovebringer demanded in mute agreement. His Lumenshroud collapsed over Vator and the LovebringerShotin still holding to the latter like a locust to a crop. Mondelles himself came apart in a rush of brilliant streams. His Heaven was a mix of Porter and Breaker, his usual focus was dedicated to tunneling pieces of matter into his enemies, destroying and killing through spatial imposition more than serving as a glorified mule. What he was a party to right now was something entire unique. He never hid himself so close to a Rendbomb for one; he never intended to go against the High Seraph and Highflame; he expected to fight alongside a Greatling and some Low Master Acolyte. Yet, here he was, doing all those things because... because what else was there to do after what he had been shown, after what he just learned. The High Seraph was changing. Not herself. And with what she did to Uthred, turning him into an outright pawn, what she intended with Abrel... VENT! VENT! VENT! Getting there, Draus replied, not bothering with a lie. She prepared to deploy Chambershim and that insane fucking plan of his. The stupid thing is that it just might work. She stole a few glances at Uthred, and the number Chambers did on him before was something heavy. Even now, the former Authority and current Ninth Sphere was out of the fight, trying to recover while the High Seraph called out to him. Small mercy. If Draus had to fight both the Deliverer and Uthred, she would have retreated to another junction in Axtraxisfocused on overloading the entire academy before escaping, instead of making a fight of this. As things stood, she still had a few cards to play. Well, the Deliverer growled, missiles of decay streaked out from the fractures lining its ever-breaking body, slashing out to destroy the twelve Simulacrae still on the field of battle, we all gotta go sometime. Yeah, Draus said. Just dont think its today. She sent all twelve of her reflective avatars into a suicidal chargebut as they crossed the extending and collapsing folds of fire and space, the rearmost Simulacrae released Chambers and the others, and out came her special surprise. To Draus delight, the effect was immediate, and even the Deliverer stilled amidst the flames, freezing to a sudden halt as she saw what Draus had unleashed. The fuck is The Deliverers words trailed off as a series of Redaction Rounds fired a few minutes ago blasted out from within the Simulacrae. This miracle, the Deliverer had to dodge. Once more, the pathborn jolted across space, but though it had been brought in by Uthred, the instability Continuum inflicted was an obstacle against her as well. She barely made it a few meters before dashing away again, Draus hunting her now. Gods fuckin dammit. Really? This Chambers doin? You let him take point here? We all gotta go sometime, right? Draus replied, chuckling. She saw the Greatling-covered Rendbomb slowly sail toward Uthred. Hell of a sight. [Uthred] Uthred was trapped in a nightmare from which he couldnt awaken. First, his remaining children were torn from himAbrel; Vator, stolen from his grasp as Scale came asunder. There, in the chaos and fire, he struck a bargain. With Veylis or the Dreamer, he did not know, for his mind was already fragilehis ego weak after barely avoiding a true death by dying with all cyclers at forty percent Rend. Returned, he was pressed into service, positioned in Axtraxis to wait for a period. The anticipation was that the Regular would eventually come, and come she did though she brought with her his son, Vator. What strength possessed by his psyche left him then. He came undone before his boyperhaps his sole living legacyand less than he ever was, Uthred Greatling, head of House Greatling, broken. From him came ever regret he ever held, every admission of sin offered to his son. To no avail. He felt no better. And Vator... Oh, poor broken Vator... He never was a person. And the final indignity came with thatthat horrible Heaven that touched him, that forced pleasure on Uthred when he did not want it. Pleasure unspeakable. Pleasure unimaginable. Pleasure above pleasures, even more than what he experienced with Lorea, with anyone. It was a violation of Uthreds will above all others, and now, and now... Authority, you have been commanded to do your duty, you must A voice echoed through the flames. But there was another sound. Another shape that sailed across the instability Uthreds new Heaven inflicted upon the world. It looked... it looked like a shape made from his children. Abrel. Jhred. They wereUthreds cog-feed flickered as he suddenly sobered. He drew in a strand of drool, his snot, wiped at his face and blinked rapidly. There, upon wavelengths of rippling fire approached a missile. A missile coated by his children. They cried out to him, their bodies naked and burning, but he recognized them stillwould recognize them anywhere. His Abrel. His Jhred. Oh, dead gods, was this hell? A disbelieving pause interrupted the voiceand through it came a chuffing laugh. What is this? Veylis muttered. Chambers, the beast that dwelled alongside her replied. This is Chambers. And as the missile came close, Uthred heard them. Why are you hurting us daddy! They cried. How can you love us when all you do is hurt us? When you never cared? Where were you? Where were you when we were in pain. Where were you when we needed a father. No, no, no, The nightmare had no end... And... And Uthred deserved this. He deserved to suffer. He deserved to die. Somewhere inside him, the last thread of his rationality came asunder. Uthred swam toward his children, and his flames obeyed.. Im coming to you now! Im sorry! Your father... is sorry! Authority Veylis was interrupted by Avo again. Go. Embrace them. Be a good parent. Uthred did. He blurred across the space unimpeded, pulled the missile toward him, and just his open arms wrapped around Abrel and Jhredso many of them patting him, reaching out to grip his body, he muttered: Please, I am so sorry, forgive me As one, his children stopped crying, and their faces went slack. Through them came Vators voice. Oh, but I never hated your father. Apologies. This is for your own good. Then, a construct of spatial entropy hidden by the Greatling children detonated, and Uthred felt himself consumed once more. His flames were cleaved apart. His Frame rattledbut didnt backlash. However, a thread of gold pierced Uthred thereafter, and before the former Authority could recover, a spatial stack slammed down on his head, a demiplane composed of thoughtwave detonations shredding his thoughts. Mindless, overwhelmed, Uthred knew only an animal fear as a tendril of magenta shot out from the chaos and pieced him once more. And this time... And this time all Uthred knew was love. Chapter 31-12 Parted Flame, Severed Path Heres a statement for all you miserable half-strands down in the Warrens: Yeah, youre a piece of shit for what you did. Yeah, you should be punished for that. But its alright. Its not too late. And you can do more than just wait for death Dont sit around and let life fuck you. Get hard. Get hard, and be who you are. Because you might not get a chance later. And Im not going to bullshit you. You probably wont make it. Not alone. But every person you push is going to push someone else. We gutter rats dont have enough burn in us to be a bomb. But theres enough of us that we can become shrapnel. And shrapnel... well, that works plenty good if you punch into the right stuff. -Lovenet broadcast via Aedon Chambers 31-12 Parted Flame, Severed Path [The Dyad] In a place between places, a being, both two and one, looked on through their vessel. Uthred Greatling, for all he''d provided him, for all the thaums they imbued in him, and the new Heaven they bequeathed him, had proven inferior to Aedon Chambersstruck down before the fight could ever truly begin. It was absurd. A moment of existential mockery. Veylis stared on in consternation, almost unable to believe what was unfolding. Across from her, Avo could only laugh his searing laugh. So it was that the dyad, part posthuman and part something further still, became a dialectic contrast. "This was unexpected," Veylis finally admitted. "This is the world without consumed by the world within," Avo said in reply. You shape history, you shape the environment, we call calamity. You think of people as clay, but more than that, they change, they change from inside themselves as well." "Or perhaps another changes them from the inside without my knowing," Veyils accused. "Protect your ego; all humans do." The jab from the beast made the High Seraph narrow her eyes. It was an insult. But it was also a lesson. One she would be wise to learn. Veylis tried to eye the beast she was melding into, but couldn''t quite make the turn. A threshold of reflective separation parted them down along a vertical slice, but with each ripple of Soulfire pulsing out from themcomposing the rest of this realm, the rest of the Substance, the rest of the broken sequences and paths that used to make up their ontologiesthey were increasing becoming each other, but also not. Through a thin mirage of fire, they saw Uthred reaching out for the Lovebringer, calling out the names of his children, his euphoria overcoming the black grief that gripped him soon. "So it is," Veylis finally said. "You appeared to have mastered a facet of something I missed. Or was always alienated from. I commend you, Dreamer. Our Embracement no longer seems desperation; indeed, I still lack an education. To think a predator of man would teach me of humanity. This time she chuckle, but her voice was still lit by disbelief. What miracles beyond miracles. "Do not commend me," Avo shot back. "Commend Chambers. I didn''t change him; I simply sparked the flame. He chose how to burn." "Fascinating, and this ends when one emerges from the joining of our beings. It will be interesting to examine where I went so wrong," Veylis said. "And you are still so certain it will be you?" Avo asked. Instead of answering his words with a retort, she simply lifted a handa hand made from the triumph of lost science and new thaumaturgy. "Deliverer," she proclaimed, "greatest of my Pathborn Wardens, Destined Slayer of Your Inceptor! Go forth and reclaim Uthred. Take from him what we have given. This battle is over. This operation has failed. And through the infernal cosmology they exuded, a single star burned bright along the fractured lanes that marked the expanseone that replied them across a chain of sequences and paths. The Deliverer spoke, her words as certain and unyielding as her true self. "Consider it done." [Chambers] "It worked! I can''t believe it! It worked! We''re geniuses! I''m a genius!" Chambers roared with laughter as he channeled every ounce of love he could through the bond he now shared with Uthred Greatling. ? For the second time in the same battle, the flames grasping Uthred''s form broke apart into dissipating sputters. His greatsword vanished into feeble steam, and his conflagration of correspondence began to thin, crashing inwards like a recalled wave. At once, the space around Uthred became akin to a singularity, and the edges of the room went from dubious meters or kilometers to the stretch of entire continents as relational distance lost all cohesion. At the heart of this new collapsing vortex of gravity tumbled all combatantsincluding the Deliverer. Chambers didn''t even sense her approach when she cameso fast was she that he barely noticed until she was already upon him. Cracked frequency blades, the length of small buildings, speared towards the Lovebringer''s chest. Chambers felt his Limial Frame rattle, the Patterns of Decay and Ruin in the tapestry cleaving into his Domain of Love. But another miracle intruded upon the ambush. A small shard of glass tumbled into position just between Chambers and the Deliverer, and from it flew a Redaction Round, seeking to end this farce for good. Draus pathborn clone reacted immediately, twisting round in an act of impossible agility, practically foloding inward and vanishing through a wound in space. Chambers responded on instinct, dispatching a cry of, +Get Uthreds body!+ to the others in his cadre via public thougthcast. Mondelles surprisingly responded first, tendrils of light spearing out from the Heaven of Love to catch Uthred, these strings of radiance carrying Vator and Shotin as well. However, a demiplanar stack crashed down in the next semi-second, and a clash followed. Correspondence warring against a plane designed after an endless sky, as everyone jerked in place, battered by the churning walls of a sovereignty-sized hurricane. Bolts of lightning streaked through the air, but they quickly combusted from Uthreds failing Correspondence. Chambers held on hard to Uthred, but even as he did, he felt Shotins demiplane come asunder, burning up as if they were fighting across a paper canvas rather than a pocket-reality. Chambers could feel a backlash brewing in Shotins Heaven, but the Seeker switched his stacks again. A mountain of mass crashed down on them. Now they were submerged deep underwaterheavy, dense waterthat pulled and slowed every movement. Above, the Redaction Round Draus fired earlier continued traveling forthbut it was no longer in the same demiplane. Instead, Chambers it separated by a threshold leading over into another stack. A stack that was shaped like a wheel, causing the time-bullet-fuckery-thing to loop. +Yes!+ Chambers cried mentally. +Keep that going, Shotin. We need to put that bullet into the Deliverer!+ And with that tempting of fate, the Deliverer returned once more, burrowing through a wound in existence like a knife stabbing through paper. Their emergence was so suddenso destructive that Soulfire blasted out from the entrance they made into Shotins stacks. The Seeker paradoxes. But so did the Deliverer. The former cried out as his Heaven collapsed into his Frame, but he himself was still nested within Mondelles light. The Deliverer, however, tumbled through the air alone, spatial reality brutalized to the point of madness. For the first time, Chambers saw Draus Veylis-made-twin for what she washer sheath more metal than flesh. But the pathborn still had the Regular''s inhuman focus. She extended an arm and fired her projectile launcher, launching a tether towards Uthred''s body, still connected to Chambers. Though there was a considerable distance between them, space suddenly compressed, and it came within inches of his body. Whereupon a series of flesh-shaped bioforms burst out from Uthred''s face and leaped onto the grappling tether. With Vators miracle providing a new opening, Draus and Chambers took that moment to strike as one, while Mondelles snaked toward the helpless pathborn as well. From the Lovebringer lashed a thread sick with Rend, and Chambers watched as his Disentanglement approached the point of impact. Draus took a far more mundane approacha barrage of counter-fires streaked around the Lovebringer, and a wing of guns, cannons, orbital firing platforms, and suicide drones expanded around Heaven of Love like a set of wings. Space flattened out. The world folded over on itself. Everything threatened to be displaced. But Chambers had one advantage over everyone else. He didnt follow the laws of space. More Bonds snapped out from his body, and he clutched Draus and Mondelles, keeping their positions relative to himand with Uthred as well. The Deliverer, on the other hand, found themselves lurching toward gunfire and a venting. Certain death approached. Which, of course, was when they pulled some new bullshit out of their ass. A flash of Soulfire blasted out from them, and the Deliverer manifested a new Heaven. Something resembling an open casket surrounded by rings of revolving shield filled the expanse before Chambers, dwarfing his Lovebringer by three times over, but even before that, a flash of gold merged, and an echo of a familiar figureZeinburst out from the Deliverer. +Oh, fuck me,+ Chambers muttered. A psychosomatic pulse of pain radiated from Chambers groin. Of course Granny Psychobitch was going to make an appearance. Because why wouldnt she? Draus ordinance was intersected by golden slashes, trajectories severed by predestined cuts. Chambers'' Disentanglement likewise was parried. Somehow, the Deliverers new Heaven managed to knock his path aside by simply turning its shields, and the metaphysical force of the redirection causing Chambers to stumble as another absolute overrode his own in this instance. +What the fuck!+ Chambers cried. Man. Despite all the ghoul-shit, Draus evil twin was cool as shit. She had all these awesome Heavens. Meanwhile, he got the Fuckbringer, and he was the lamest, piece of fuck asshole around. A literal piece of shit lodged in a vaginaa fucking dingleberry! +FUCK YOU VEYLIS!+ Yet a third twist followed. As Draus attacks were being intercepted, Chambers'' disentanglement Bond went far off course, and Mondelles strained as anomalous space backlashed his Heaven, another echo of Zein snapped free from the original and stabbed her before both vanished together. The chronoslashes winked. Draus firepower poured in. The Deliverer pivoted, turning its shields against the oncoming barrage to blunt the attacks while the Heaven approached. The open casket swept close to Uthred, and Chambers felt an unbreakable wall of absolute defense crash against his Frame. He sent another Bond out to seize evil-Draus, but his tendril just bounced off the shieldscouldnt get through. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website. BURNING PRESENT EGO And with that, the first template fell inthe Ascender Executive Kingcain Bowells. He plunged into a sparse expanse of hungry fire, torn from torture into a new realm of existential horror. He wasnt going to be alone for long. At once, a flash of light pulsed into Avos mind, and everything slotted into place. LOADING COG-FEED SEQUENCES OVERWRITTEN SHEATH ALIGNED *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Pain. Annoying, stinging pain all over his body. That was what greeted Avo when his mind loaded into place. He found himself in a naked, shivering, and brutalized body. Electrical burns lined his torso, his eyelids were missing, he only had every other tooth in his mouth, and there was a particular agony between his legs. The Hidden Flame burned away his nausea and distracting hurts with a thought and examined himself. He pulled up a mem-data diagonistic of his current sheath using the former owners Mind-Doc phantasmic. DIAGNOSTIC LOADING... CONDITION: SEVERE >TENDONS SEVERED >3,312 LACERATIONS > FRACTURED SPINE >RUPTURED KIDNEYS >CASTRATED GENITALIA >MISSING TEETH >SEVERE DEHYDRATION >CONCUSSION >PANIC ATTACKS RECOMMEND [31:22] HOURS OF REST FOR NANOSURGEONS TO COMPLETE HEALING OR A VISIT TO A MEDICAL SPECIALIST A massive, powerful hand gripped Avo by his jaw. Looks like the boys waking back up, a loud, sneering voice sounded. Scaarthian by the depth of the voice and the strength of the fingers. An enormous face with a cross-shaped scar lining the cheeks, nose, and chin came into view. The light above was bright. Too bright for the rest of the room to be seen probably, but Avo could tell he was in a place that was far too cold, with paralytic drills inserted into his spine, and this body was on the verge of going into shock. All that paled when faced with the sheer stench coming from the Scaarthians mouth. He sneezed, spraying blood in his captors face. The human olfactory system was truly terrible. The Scaarthian torture wiped the blood down with a massive paw. Behind, a drone decked with all manner of torturous accessories possible staggered next to heronly to be shoved into a wall. So, she said, glaring at him with angry gray eyes. Finally done screaming. Still have some fight in you? Gonna tell me where the rest of your people are hiding? Where the resistance is? Well find them one way or another. But if were the ones that find them, well... She gave a vicious laugh. Wargs been starving. And we dont care much for your young. Avo just started at her, disappointed. Not so much difference between the Tiers and gutters at times. Made him wonder what Captain Aseleri did to get cast down. Mustve been a special crime. Suddenly, the Scaarthian jolted forwardmoving so fast, Avo couldnt keep track of her. Not having his upgraded implants was an annoyancereminded him how slow he used to be. >5 SHATTERED RIBS >PERFORATED LUNG The Scaarthian worked his body with fists twice the size of his head. He noted she was going lightlya proper blow from one of her kind could fold the front end of a civilian-grade aerovec. Blood filled his mouth, and Avo was about done with this. Talk, he mumbled. The Scaarthian paused, mid-punch. And grinned. What was that? She leaned in. And that was her mistake. Because he saw her eye. Glistening bright under the light. Hed done this beforetried to eat an eye as a human. But... why, since he was having a bit of a nostalgia trip He feigned a whispered whimper, and she came close, he clamped his mouth over her right eye and suckled hard. The moist orb dislodged from her socket. The Scaarthian screamed in pain for the first timebut the scream turned distorted as Avo cast his mindhis Ignorance-masked Conflagrationand poured himself into a new body. LOADING COG-FEED SEQUENCES OVERWRITTEN SHEATH ALIGNED He shifted across bodies just as a new template fell into his depths, bound for the same place her victim was. Just then, the doors opened and as Avo pulled her eye out from the mouth of the brain-dead sheath that he used to pilot, the torturers allies did the reasonable thing of slamming thaumically-charged sticks into the victim. The mind-hollow shell flinched and bounced, still breathing but nothing more. As Avo looked at the others, he saw another Scaarthian enter, holding a Woundhound injector with a sneer on their face. You fucking Enough of this, Avo declared. He had things to do. A consang to free. And a High Seraph to sabotage from the inside. Whatever petty grievances the Guilders had, they could settle it inside him. It was time to remind the Tiers why they to fear the flame. Avo released Ignorances lingering influence. After the warmind became a full Definement, its abilities grew evermore refined, more controlled, but at its heart, it was always the barrier that held the Conflagration in check, but right now, Avo felt his gestalt to be a bit too quiet... and missed the bustling city he was building. Hed get that back. Hed get the back soon. He just needed to feed. A phantasmal inferno erupted out from his mind, sweeping out in all directions. The first-responders had no chance to react. But those beyond did. They caught a glimpse of what was coming, of their sealed fate. Some ran. Others screamed. But all would join the flame. Deep within the Substance, a second fire began spreading within the first. Chapter 32-1 Flame Beneath Flames The Stormtree forces I have been embedded with in Tafalis have... turned on each other. Everything is collapsing. All cohesion has been lost. The Bloodthanes are trying to respond, but I think theyre getting affected as well. I suspect that there might be a lingering memetic contagionmaybe something deployed by Noloth. Or the Burning Dr [Sound of metal tearing] Oh, oh, gods. No! Get away! Stop! Please, dontI Oh... oh,see now... Hm. Interesting miracle. Disguised as a phantasmic. Purely informational. Fascinating. Hello. Inner Council. Must be listening. Can feel you. Know youre there. You are... very interesting. Surprised me. Was wondering why you made so many of those proxies. Try to create new bodies. New citizens? To broaden your democracys population? Make yourself more powerful. Will find out. Will find out when I claim a few more of your Sleepers. Understand why you didnt to talk with me now. So much risk for you while I was whole. Could have infected your democracy. But now [Cognisoft of Sleeper Wolfkin terminatedAction undergone after unanimous vote from the Majority] -Last Cognisoft broadcast received from Sleeper Wolfkin 32-1 Flame Beneath Flames [Ancar Two-Claw] Ancar Two-Claw, First Fang of Stormtree and the de facto head of all Massist forces in Tallstrings, was called back from slumber by a rising scream of mind-rending torment. Exhausted from twelve consecutive combat engagements, clearing most of the remaining Golds from their defensive planes, she relieved herself of command and allotted her cadre a scarce moment of respite before they had to resume their miserable campaign. She hadnt even cleaned herself when she returned to her quarters. The world dimmed around the corners of her cog-feed as she approached her stasis pod. Darkness claimed her before she even finished falling forward, the upper lid of her pod left open, the rejuvenation process denied before it could even begin. She sank like a stone into heavy rest. The weight of her exhaustion felt like soil cast upon her chest, burying her deep. She was lost to the world, lost to even herself, and her mind dissolved in the stygian nothingness, spent from strain and stress. But not even a cozy den of nothingness could shield her from the howls that came. The howls that drifted through matter, riding on tides of thought. Ancar stumbled toward her door, cog-feed flickering, her body sluggish from interrupted sleep. Her very being ached at the deprivation of her rest, but an attack couldnt be ignored. Much as part of her wanted to just lay there and accept death if it could be a silver bullet for her exhaustion, she had a duty to Guild and her fellow sons, sisters, and cousins. R? Good thing she collapsed in her combat-skin. A mental command was sent and Ancars blood came aflame as a penultimate dose of battle-stims flooded her biochemistry. Suddenly, the weariness burst like a bubble, and she was a whirlwind nested in the flesh of a Scaarthian. She stormed out from her quarters, made to assemble her cadre And another chorus of wails hit her. The sheer terror contained within the thoughtcast made Ancars wards ring. Blind... fates, the First Fang growled. +Please! No! Mercy, please!+ +Veril! Where are you! Where are you, Veril!+ +Longeyes guard our fates! Storms deliver us from... from... destruction be our cloak-+ Whispers licked at the back of Ancars mind, and she could taste the lingering emotions that came with them. Her gut tightened evermore. This wasnt just some Nether-based attackNether was down anyhowthis was something else. Something more. There was a weight pressing against her mind that she couldnt describe. A series of hisses sounded from down the hall. Three new pressures greeted her Frame, and Ancar took in her cadre. They all looked like how she feltseemed like the lot of her war sisters collapsed in their armor as well. Fucks happening, Dagad False-Tongue muttered. A layer of frost was building around her armor, clasping her in slabs of ice already. Keep hearing these screams. Raid, Leaf-of-Barren-Trees said simply. A whistle of wind twirled around the taciturn Bloodthane. She was the newest of their groupa replacement for Jackal Boy. Poor, poor fucking Jackal Boy: Who knows what the No-Dragons did after they snatched him. Ancar. Orders. A heavy cloak taken from a warg adorned Ancars second. Dog-Daughter and Ancar had served in two Guild Wars, 3,241 battles, and across 63 years. She was the only reason Ancar wasnt dead by now, and Ancar was hers. But though she seemed resolute, Ancar detected something in her voice. You didnt spend that long with someone and attune yourself to them on some level. Fear. Worry. She knew something was very wrong, too. Standard hunt, Ancar spat. Scout. Spot. Strike. Identify the target. Gather our forces. Cut the danger at its root. We rally our forces. We do our duty. Though the Storms Fall. Though the Storms Fall! her cadre replied in a unified bellow. Destruction was the worlds final fate. Everyone knew that. Everyone lived it. Even if ruin was coming, however, it wasnt the end. Winter turned to summer, and sprouts would rise from ash. It was their duty to face the calamity, to survive it, to wrestle into submission, and by the balancing of the Great Seasons would all be preserved by destruction beyond oblivion. They moved as a unit, with Leaf on point. The winds shivered around her, and her combat-skin, lightest of their group, lent to her ephemeral fleetness. As they prepared to leave their barracks, however, Leaf froze and held up a hand. There is... a fire? What? Dagad said. What are you talking about, pup? Its like the world is burning... Leaf muttered. All of it. I... She extended a Ghost-Link from her Meta and a second cog-feed flashed into Dagads mind. True to the rookies words, there was a great flame that licked at the sky. Mightve been the biggest flame Ancar had ever seen. It spread fast through the Stormtree special encampment, washing over from prisoner processing and liquidations. But it didnt burn like most flames. No, there was a dance to the way it flickered, a phantasmal shine to the fiery crackle, ghosts circulating between the shivering bright. Worse, there were faces sliding across the outside of the fire. Thousands upon thousands of screaming faces, crying out in a symphony of madness. Ruin be our fate, Ancar muttered. The fuck is that? Dagad grunted. I dont know, Ancar replied. Never seen anything like it. Some kind of Necro-attack. Memetic contagion. But Ancar fell. Her cadre fell. And the flames tore through her locusts, extending clawed hands to claim her. In the end, there was fire. Fire, and falling. Ancar descended into a new place. A new realm not entirely unlike the one in which she existed. A replica of her forward operating base came into view below her, but the streets were infused with phantasmal fire, and battles were taking placeunceasing battles raging across every street, within every building, between two factions. Are you proud of what you have done? a sibilant voice asked. Ancar shuddered and tried to reach out for her reserve Heaven. But nothing answered her. She could still feel her Frameher sheath but I have use for that right now. Need it. Need everything from all of you to free a friend. But I asked you a question. The First Fang clenched her teeth. Why? Why did you do this? Why are you attacking us? How are you still alive? The Strix chuffed as if amused. Why did you butcher the people of this district. Few were true soldiers. Most were families. Citizens. Non-military personnel. I did my duty, Ancar cried. They were the enemyI was Your people left children in cages. In cages with your war beasts. They fed on the young. Your comrades made some parents watch. Recorded the memories. But some of them grew nauseous afterward. When they were alone. Some cried. Others pleasured themselves to the vicarities. All pointless. Entertaining for the ghoul in me... but pointless. You were the master of the forces here. The one everyone answered to. Why? Why did you allow this? She didnt know what to say. I... they were the enemy. They would have done the same. The Strix grunted. There was no recrimination in their voice. Just casual acceptance. And that was good enough for you? Ancar didnt know what to say. Its fine. I dont condemn you. Nothing to condemn. I accept you. I accept everyone. Everything. You should live more. Live. Die. Do wrong. Suffer consequence. Return. But live. Might give you some perspective. Wait! Ancar cried out. The ground was rapidly approaching. Wait! What about my cadre! What about She splattered against the marble-paved pavementfelt excruciating pain as she came apart. But death never came. Rather. The world went dark for a few seconds. And she felt her jolt back into being where she diedjust like a resurrection. Now you live, the Strix declared, speaking through existence itself. All around her, people were fighting. A Scaathian tore a Kosgan in half along the waistonly for the bifurcated woman to shoot her through the eye using a hidden wrist-installed fusion-beamer. A dozen men, women, childrenall of them Highflame localsheld another Stormtree soldier down as a Sang wearing a scorpion bio-rig stung their body repeatedly. Now you live. And die. And live. And learn. Just like everyone else. And then, Ancar heard the barring of an aervec and glimpsed the rageful face of a well-dress man speeding toward her through the cracked windshield. Her battle reflexes flared. She planted her feet backher combat-skins exo-muscle fibers triggered, amplifying her Scaarthian strength a hundredfold while also locking her boots to the ground. The civilian craft hit her and folded down the middle. The angry man turned white with surprise as he shot out from where he sat and splattered into a lump of ruined meat against Ancars broad torso. The aerovec then bounced and splashed against his puddle of gore. The First Fang blinked as she tried to process what just happened. A beat later, the man suddenly returned, blinking back into place right next to her. Silence followed. They just stared at each other, wordless. Is this... what hell is like? The Kosgan studied her for a moment longer before a sneer returned across his face. He spat on her and threw a punch. A punch that never landed, as his head vanished in a smear of red before Ancars backhandjust as her own skull vanished in a beam of light as a distant particle cannon sounded. And more killing followed. And more dying followed. And this place wasnt paradise or hell. But it was a perfectly unhealthy forum for a group of people who hated each other to settle their grievances without the intervention of a final death. *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Taking stock of what weve obtained: Have 100,000 ground forces; 75% bioforms; 25% human clades. 400,000 support personnel. 4 Sleepers. 2 million heavy ground combat platforms. 8 million light ground combat platforms. 10 million heavy air assault craft. 20 light air assault craft. 55,524 golems. 121 Godclads worth 100,000 thaums in total; three Godclads Highflame Authorities. Ignorance continued taking stock of their logistical situation as Avo watched the world inside himself grow while organize his host of new bodies. There was a great deal of work to be done. Stormtree made a mess of this place, but Highflame made them bleedeven if this was a relatively undefended Elysium. Seemed like the forces took about 20% attrition, seizing the city. Annoying. Thankfully, he had enough golems and Godclads left to do what he wanted. Tallstrings used to have a lightrail going toward Scale. With the Substance in the way, it would be hard to get through, but if he could create a large enough rupture... Yes. The thing is creating a scenario in which that would be believable. A mutiny, perhaps. Veylis and his original self was watching from within the Substance. The hurricane Stormtree put up to secure their positions helped blunt some attention, but even so, Avo couldnt risk giving himself any weightor creating a familiar Heaven. Rather, he needed to fight like a puppet master. Unseen. Wielding other Godclads and armies to his ends. With that in mind, he hid his phantasmal fires with Ignorance and returned to his stealthier posture. It was fun watching some of the Scaarthians feel. It would be enlightening to see what becomes of them and the Highflamers after they grow weary of killing each other.... But in the meantime... He had an army to compel. This was why he infected the Tiers: Influence. Symmetry wasnt meant to just be the gutters against the Tiers. It was everyone he could reach against the Guilds. Avos touch would be the only dividing line of battle. He still had haemokinetic loci fused in places. And with the recent donations made by Stormtree, he didnt need to start over completely, but still, this was annoying without a template of Draus. He would have to fashion something useful out of all the Greens. Create an optimized ego-template from all their collective virtues. GENERATING TEMPLATE: [THE ADVISOR] And while he was working on that... Avo reached into the golem pilots operating along the periphery of the hurricane. There were still Stormtree forces in combat. Highflame defenders too. More for him to claim. His first focus, though, was expanding the storm toward the Substancetoward where the lightrail was supposed to pass through. Veylis had done what she could to keep Naeko contained. But Avo thought the Chief Paladin had enough recovery. That was the point of dispatching Jaus to his side in the first place, after all. Finally. The true war was upon him. Time to get to work. Chapter 32-2 Jailbreak (I) Two simple rules, Veylis: Never tell someone how they should feel, and never make them feel how you do not wish them to feel. Words are tools that can be used to convey information, but information is an imperfect virus for our true intentions, and man is an animal of baser impulse before rationality. Always. Master this, and you can shape anyone in the direction of your choosing. -Jaus Avandaer 32-2 Jailbreak (I) [Naeko] And, how many hours have you logged into this game again, Jaus asked for the third time that day, looking extremely concerned. Its a military-historical tactical-strategy Nether-sim, Naeko corrected. And defended. Theres a lot of good you can get from it, you know. YouCyou were always telling me to work on my lateral thinking, try to expand my experiences, so... yeah, I put in a few hundred thousand hours of work on Stormjumpers. For myself. For long while, Jaus just stared at him, those familiar blue eyes wide, unblinking; surprised but not truly judging. Perhaps I would understand better if I were to experience for myself. Yeah, yeah! Naeko agreed, nodding at his returned master. He frowned slightly as he thought of all the slurs, rash-casting, and general atmosphere posted by the fan base, though. He might need to crack down on that before giving Jaus a taste of his educational hobby. Well. That was if he ever got the chance. Naeko couldnt reach the Nether at allcouldnt do much of anything for the first time in years. He hit the weird time-ghost-shimmering barrier thing a couple dozen times with everything he had. His Heaven, a distortion, his fog, his literal fists. Nothing. It wasnt even like a solid structure, either. Everything he inflicted just kind of.... passed to somewhere else. Where that somewhere was, or how this all worked? Hells if Naeko knew. He wasnt an Agnos. But he knew there was something controlling the fire. He could feel it watching him, wrapping the glowing walls around him, but never consuming him. Every time he tried charging through, he just ended up coming out the same way he went in. It was all metaphysical madness. Metaphysical Naeko thought he was far beyond by this point with his Sage of the Sundered Sky. But no. Not at all. Turns out there was something beyond force and violence he couldnt break or bend to his whim. And that had Naeko feeling a kind of way he hadnt for a long time. Bitter. Helpless. Scared. Right now, Chief Paladin Samir Naeko wasnt so different from that tortured child Sister Karakan had brutalized and dangled from meat hooks, dangling like a sack of pain-meat for other slaves to vent their hate on. Not so different except for one thing. He wasnt alone. Jaus. Jaus was here. Somehow, against all impossibility, from the depths of Naekos bitter-most dreams, the closest thing he had to a true fathereven more than his ownhad been brought back and delivered to him. Now they were both trapped here. Trapped together, sitting on seats of tessellating rubble that Naeko fashioned, just talking... More talking than Naeko had done in a long time. Awkwardly, Naeko reached out with a finger and poked at Jaus. The fabric of the mans formal wear wrinkled slightly, and the Savior pursed his lips in a bemused fashion as he stared at Naekos tentative prod. Im still real, Samir. Youre not hallucinating. Trying to convince myself of that, Naeko breathed. Ive gone insane a few times, you know? I managed to manually sequence-reset the damage using my Meta. Didnt need to involve a Mender or a Necro. Thing I couldve made a pretty good Mender with some practice. I suspect you would have. You were always better at facing your pains than you like to acknowledge. Jaus looked at him and his expression dissolved into disapproval. But this should not be a burden you suffer. This is not what I wanted for you. Naeko just sat there, silently. Not knowing what to say. Instead, he picked up a piece of rock using his utility fog and, with a whip crack of a toss, sent it sailing kilometers into the distance, toward the ethereally bright walls that formed the cage of this prison for him and Jaus. It vanished into the bright. A splash of phantasmal essence and fractals of chronological gold marked the point of impact. Yeah. Well. So much for what we want, right? Saying that brightened Naekos mood by a bit, even though he sniffled. Jaus was back. Jaus was back. Of all the things he wanted, this was nearly unparalleled. Nearly. But this dream contended with another deep wound inside him. One inflicted by another bearing the name Avandaer. One Naeko couldnt help but think of even now. Im sorry. R Jaus nodded. What for this time? All of it, Naeko said. All of this. I wanted you to... If I knew this was going to happenyou were gonna be back and all that... I would have fought harder. I would done everything I could to rebuild the Paladins, to put the Guilds in their place. But... He shrugged. I dont have a good reason. A good excuse. I just... got hurt. And then I stopped trying. His eyes were fixed on the ground, but his mind was some place distant. He told Jaus what happened. Most of it. About how Idheim was now. About everyone they lost and that things that went wrong. Osjane... she would have known what to do. I would trade myself for her. At any point. If there was a Heaven that could do that. If there was a power that offered that deal. Id take it. Im tired. And... he gave a disgusted, beaten scoff at the walls sealing him in, pretty fucking useless. Cant even get us out of this place. Jaus Avandaers gaze was intense and unblinking. Naeko couldnt meet his eyes; could only read intense focus on the Saviors expression. That was classic Jaus: everyone talked about how good he was with his words, how his charisma was legendary, but Naeko feared his silencehow it was used as a weapon. But Naeko was also experienced when it came to that, and so he didnt shame himself further, speaking when he didnt need to. Wait, youre afraid of Zein? Of course Im afraid of her, Jaus practically spat. Afraid? Terrified. Petrified. And... hopelessly enchanted. Do you know what she thought a good profession of love was? When she returned home, dueled, slew, and desecrated the corpses of her entire Clan and all the other Clans besidessparing those that swore fealty. And then, slick with the blood of her kin, she came to me with their heads on her hip, infants to elders, and her eyes were aglow with passion. And I was... horrifically enchanted. Jaus fell silent. I hid my fear from her. My supposed stoicism was the only reason she hadnt killed me when we were trapped together, but dead gods, never have I slept so poorly those nights. Even after we... came to an understanding. The Chief Paladin stared. He willed himself not to imagine what that meant. But yes. I fanned the dark flame in her. Because she was my beautiful retribution against a world consumed by irrationality, of madness, of wasted generations, cruel masters and crueler gods. And you... you were my dream after. The son I was always pleased to have, for you represented peace unconquerable and justice eternalabove war. Above her. Which is why she had to be your master. Which is why I chose you to inherit the Sage and not here. Never her. That was why, Naeko muttered. He looked away from Jaus. He wondered about his Heaven many times. Zein was still his clear superior in battle when he had the Sage grafted, but Jaus chose him and Zein agreed. You wanted me to... stand against her? I wanted you to be greater than her, Jaus said, and greater than I. And power over peace should not be bestowed on one who is so battle-lusted. Another shadow passed through Naeko, but there was a power building inside him: A need to speak the truth. Im not who you think I am. I... I was hurting someone. Torturing them. Doing worse. For years. For years. You remember Karakan. I told you about her. I... Then, the third surprise came. I know. Naekos mind went blank. He expected disappointment. Shame. Disgust. Sadness. But not such a casual admission from Jaus. Not such acceptance. You knew? But... but then, why didnt you... I didnt stop you because I didnt know how to make it right, Jaus answered with a slight smile. One should never demand impossible strength and nobility from a victim without giving them relief, without rendering the one that harmed them undone in all aspects. And... because I hated her too. Naeko. She hurt my boy. And I am no more saint than you, despite what you might believe. An aching silence dragged, and a sob escaped from Naeko. He tried to hold it in, but Jausthe half-strandgot up and hugged him. After that, defeat was the only option. But defeat wasnt so bad. Crying into Jaus chest like a child was embarrassing, but getting his head stroked was nice, having someone there with him was nice. And inside, Naeko felt tired, but also starved. Of affection. Of understanding. Of forgiveness. Whatever Jaus was, he was always what Naeko needed. After a good few minutes or an hourNaeko couldnt be assed to time his cry-session, he snifled and pulled away with a few mutters. I... You dont need to say anything, Jaus said, returning to his seat while frowning at the massive wet splotch running down the front of his jacket. Glad he made me waterproofah. But, no. You dont need to do anything. Just... let yourself be. Dont drown yourself in pleasure or fantasy or words. Just exist. As yourself. It will hurt. But it will be restful. We still gotta get out of here, Naeko said. That is not your duty alone, Jaus replied. There are others as well. Others who stood alongside you, who will fight for you still. The other Paladins. The good people left of this citythose who believe in dream above Guild. And... my peculiar creator. At least, for this particular node of me. The Savior blinked, looking flabbergasted. How did you encounter this Avo? Didnt, Naeko replied, sucking in a noseful of snot. He ambushed me. In my game. Came out of nowhere. Some of the best people do. Yeah. I dont think I would call him a person. Naeko paused. But... I guess hes a consang. He, uh, he ate Karakan and uh... I killed her afterward. He... pushed me over the edge. Ah, Jaus muttered. Im sorry. No. No. I needed that. He was... hes not like you. Hes kind of an inhuman asshole. But he... I think he cares. In a weird, fucked up, post-human abomination kind of way. Jaus froze. He... reminds me of someone. Yeah, he and the Infacer... think they got along too. Kind of. Real buddy-buddy shit-talking between them. Not like enemies at all. That sometimes happens as well, Jaus said. But, yes. There are others that In the far distance, a sudden shadow crashed against the shimmering barrier. The glowing walls shook, shuddered, and began to writhe as something behind their translucence tore. Naeko felt it-a rupture. A major one growing on the edge of Scale. And he got a feelinga gut feeling about who might be behind that. Slowly, disbelievingly, a grin spread across his face. Fuck me, Jaus, youre always right. Jaus rose from his seat and ordered his lapels. It is my curse. Suppose we will be leaving soon? A whirlwind of vapor wrapped around them. Yeah. Lets get out of here. I want to show you what they did to our city. Chapter 32-3 Jailbreak (II) Rescue ops are surgical, dangerous, and rarely worth it. Understand that if the enemy manages to capture one of you, you are expected to engineer your own escape or remove yourself from the equation by death or nulling to ensure no information can be extracted from your Metamind. Again, were Regulars, juvs. Were the batteries used and bullets spent; made for the killing and the dying. But not nearly valuable enough to be preserved. Not the most of us, anyway. Now, an Instrument, Authority, or a Seraph? Some other high ranking VIPs. Yeah, thats different. Still rarely worth it since if you got snatched its probably Ori-Thaum, and theyre probably sequencing a new Sleeper into you without anyone knowing, but in one of the special situations where Stormtree hasnt tortured you to death by making you fight their fucked up house pets or Ashthrone hasnt used you to test their newest Heaven-busting bomb, youre going to need force of violence, surprise, and velocity to get this done. Its always easier to face someone entrenched in a familiar plane or holding defensive posture. So, avoid attrition; go for a sudden breakthrough. Or an infiltration followed by total informational and instructional collapse on their end. That, or you want a really, really powerful cadre on your side to rain fire and brimstone on enemies while you handle the extraction. Whatever the case, one thing stays the same: Your enemy best not see it coming. -Commander Winston Nicoma, Highflame Regular 32-3 Jailbreak (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Avo would have hated commanding an army if puppeteering wasnt possible. Even with all the forces he procured there were endless issues he had to resolve. A plague was eating through a five percent of his forces. What kind of plague? The kind that gradually layers ones lungs into calcified sores and causes them to breathe infections spores out with every breath. How to cure it? He didnt know, and neither do the local No-Dragons. Their Plaguesmiths were nulled and slain when it became clear escape was no longer possible. The sick were contained in a secluded demiplane for now, but they needed to either be burned or treated soon. And this was one of the easier matters he faced. His cog-cap was overstrained as well. After consuming the minds of the entire force and their prisoners, Avo had [31,031,144,511] Ghosts. Problem was, without the Nether active, he himself needed to function as a network between individual egos and loci, and thought controlling a single mind was a trifling thing, controlling a concert of a few million at once during complex undertakings demanded exponential levels of cognitive processing. [Resolvable issue,] the Advisor declared. Avo had it characterized as a shrouded figure looking over a simulated reconstruction of their current theater. As the bulk of the templates sequences came from Scaarthians sources, it was a particularly large shadow and with the outline of bone-runes swinging from lumps of swinging hair. He suspected the Advisors contours would change more down the line when he consumed a more balanced mental diet. [Create new independent templates for the forces. Make them optimized egos like I am. Independent ego operation is always more reactive.] Yes, Avo agreed. There were some principles that remained synonymous between Necrojacking and military action. He needed to avoid spreading himself too thinand concentrating himself in too many bodiesanyway. A single point of failure was fatal for any system, be it material or metaphysical. Streamline an ego. Wish Draus was here. Wish I burned here. Didnt have the time. No Regulars in this district. No Regulars. Only mechs and defense forces... GENERATING STANDARD COMBAT TEMPLATES WOUNDGUARD (STANDARD INFANTRY) HOUNDS (SKIRMISHER BIOFORM) GRENADIERS (HEAVY BIOFORMS) MAIN BATTLE PLATFORMS (ASSAULT MECHS AND OTHERS OF A SHARED CATEGORY) FORTRESS ARTILLERY (HEAVY MATERIAL ARTILLERY) INTERCEPTOR PILOT (LIGHT DRONES AND AIRCRAFT) DESTROYER PILOT (HEAVY DRONES AND AIRCRAFT) He would let the Godclads he now possessed retain their own personalitieswith their flaws reduced. The golems? Hed use the standard Knots as a baseline, but as he had part of the Stillborn and could produce more golems or alter their Heavens... [It would indeed make sense to build your forces around your golems. Once enemy miracles have been identified, it will be easy for you to create specialized Rendbombs or surgical strike forces to eliminate structured metaphysical threats. Stormtree bases their structure of Hunts: They are organized from the ground up, with each unit having a senior hunter or huntress in charge. They are in charge of interfacing with their counterparts. They are below a Houndhead, which governs a concentration of ground, air, infantry forces [These forces then fight in concert behind twelve golems at the vanguard and at least one Bloodthane cadre at their core. These loosely organized bands all come together to form a Great Hunt under the First Fang. Each Hunt tends to number around ten to twenty thousand personnel. However, they are greatly crippled with the collapse of the Nether and severance of their out-theater pilots. The same limitation does not apply to you. With your unique cognitive structure and how you can wield entire armies as extensions of your will, it is recommended that you order these forces along the lines of thirteen major combat arms constituted by 4000 golems each with remaining forces supporting them. Keep the Godclads in reserve as specialized forces. Once you apply these new templates to minds you burned, you can reduce your hold over themyou only need to keep yourself tied to 10% of the total force structure to retain maximal effectiveness. Only directly interface with the units you need. Reserve your cognitive capacity for complex operations. Let individuals bear their own weight.] R Avo grunted in agreement as a constellation of minds flashed across the disfigured district of Tallstrings. Hundreds of thousands of military forces had their sequences rebuilt in seconds. That done, Avo withdrew his capacity and redirected it elsewhere. As he only possesses Ignorance, he could not release his units; his mind-flame might be invisible, but he couldnt turn it to steam or encompass the world itself through Synchronicity. But he would find the Definements again. He could feel them through the Substance. He would return as himselfand more. But another matter bothered him as his mind-chained legions underwent their reconstitution: Where were the Regulars? After the destruction of Scale, it seemed that all Draus comrades had been stolen away. Avo had a guess as to where they were, his thoughts always drifting to the Infacer and Omnitech, but even then, he wasnt sure. He doubted this would be a pleasant thing to discover anyhow. Where Tallstrings had once been a grand sprawling Elysium characterized by four enormous golden willow trees that towered over the luxury blocks by dozens of kilometers, Stormtree had severed them at the base and dropped them on the cityscape. Normally, this wouldnt have worked due to the nature of memite, but times were different; stranger. The resulting destruction that transpired when the grand trees fell could only be called apocalyptic. Apocalyptic and troublesome. The obliteration of the districts periphery mustve killed millions, but he could still see countless accretions dotting the rubble and detritus below. There was no true stealth without thaumaturgy here anymore since Incogs no longer functioned without the Nether, but even Ancar wasnt stupid enough to spend more munitions on Citizens. Not when there were still actual enemy Godclads to hunt. Everything looped back on destruction again. Ruins made for good fortifications, good cover, and useful catalysts. Catalysts such as a concentration of dust in the air that constantly circulated between four techno-thaumic reactors. Almost like a golem cadre moving between external Rendsinks. The kind a block in the Tiers would have. [An obvious choice, though there were far too many blocks with functional reactors,] the Advisor stated. [if First Fang Ancar launched uncontrolled miracles across the city, it is likely that 80% of the area would be compromised by spreading ruptures.] But that was just what Avo wanted. An uncontrolled rupture, splashing into the Substance. Dispatching a spy drone to dive into the ruins and chase the dust, Avo watched as it tried to tumble awayonly to be compromised in an instant as he projected an invisible stream of fire through the platforms locus. His mind splashed through a threshold where spatial reality stood thin. On the other side, he found a collection of a thousand or so Highflame drones manifesting a defensive perimeter while a fleet of commandeered aeros, cargo carriers, and Citizen-use drones sailed around one of the few Skyforts Highflame possessed for the Elysium. The Skyfort was smoking and damaged. It resembled an armored cathedral held aloft by ten non-fixed techno-thaumc engines, and at its core, Avo sensed fourteen thaumic signatures. Surviving Godclads. Found you, he whispered, his fire spreading through golem pilots, across aeros, into the Skyfort itself. Soon, he would add even more templates to his Soulscape. The fight there was still ongoing hours later. Seemed the hate between the factions was strongdoubted that would end anytime soon. But that was secondary to the main thing he wanted to do with the resistanceengineer a believable scenario behind a Fallen Heaven cascade. Something that wouldnt draw Veylis suspicion to his existence when he finally destabilized the Substance. He ignored all the non-Godclad forces and secured the cadres first. Each of the Instrumentsand a single Seraphjolted as if struck by lightning. Most of them were haggard in mind and bodymorale low but ready for martyrdom. Such was the way they went as their templates were cast into the fire, new meat for the eternal war within Avo. However, it was the Seraph that pleased Avo the most. Sixth Sphere. Primary Domain of Space. Yes. Yes, this would work. He controlled the Seraph directly while dispatching a flood of orders to the golems and Rendbomb-carrying drones he held in reserve for this very moment. They burst out from the storm wall of the Stormtree hurricane, unimpeded by the spatial and physical forces preventing unwanted entry. He sent out a thousand Rendsink and Rendbomb assets in total, all of them attuned to the Domain of Space. As they streaked across the skies, the Seraph, now controlled by Avo, sent out a public thoughtcast declaring their position compromised before ordering the golem pilots to collapse demiplane and prepare to engage. Golem pilots Avo already controlled. Everything moved in a perfect sympathy, many acting to the will of one. Explosions of dread and pure despair swept through the Highflame survivors that Avo hadnt taken yet, but it was the Seraph that mattered. And it was Seraph he was going to rupture to open a way for Naeko. The cloud of roaming dust burst apart and every single Highflame asset rose from the haze back into reality, zooming over the ruins and reactors they used to hide themselves. At this sight, Avo drew Ancar out of the fighting briefly, merging her template with his own. Would have never found them. [Wha] The First Fang was cast back after that, her confusion delicious. It would give her something to consider in timeabout her failures as a commander. Avo was interested in knowing who came up with the Highflame strategy, though. Their means of camouflage was inspired. He might just have a new primary strategist to feed his Advisor. The Skyfort roared loud, but from its top manifested an enormous hand clutching a tower-sized black blade that cleaved as long as the horizon. At once, its tip splashed against the top of the Substance, and Avo felt a crushing flow of perception drift around the boundaries of containing this place. The Seraphs Horizon Splitter was a simple Heaven dedicated to cutting anything, anyone, anywhere. He took in the canons as he could try replicating them in his golems and existing Godclads before make the Seraph carve downward toward Scale. The shimmering barrier of the Substance splashed as Soulfire charged with Chrono-Conceptuality and poured down the manifested Heavens length to consume the offending Seraph. Which was the exact thing Avo wanted to happen. With the Heaven grounded into the Substance, it was like a lightning rod primed to channel corrosion. While the Substances Soulfire poured down the Horizon Splitter, Avos Rupture Wing blinked across the horizon in as a congealing bolt of lightning. A bolt that crashed into the flat of the blade. A bolt that splashed outward, striking the ruins below, and drew close to a dozen still functional reactors. [Estimated collateral casualties: 2.4 million within blast radius if judged by visible accretions,] the Advisor said. Yes, Avo answered tersely. He reached out and began burning as many of them as he could to preserve their egos, but his options to save them were limited and their use, coldly put, was minimal. They didnt offer enough ghosts to be worth the focus. He definitely could send out his forces to rescue thembecause Stormtree just didnt do that. And inconsistent surface-level behavior was one of the few things that wouldnt go unnoticed by Veylis. Drones launched their Rendbombs. Golems manifested their Heavens, and that was when it all unraveled. He selected these golems specifically because his Advisor said they were at a 68% chance of creating a paradox cascade. And as they crashed against the Horizon Splitter Space tore. As they crashed against the Horizon Splitter, space tore. It tore along a Sixth Sphere Heaven, cleaving upward in the shape of a blade. The tear continued across the descending Soulfire, surged into the Substance, and punched clean through it. Reality came asunder as metaphysical destruction slashed a vertical chasm across it pages, and though the Substance was chronology and conceptualization conjoined, all patterns existed upon the pages of the tapestry, and so they were to split as well. Soulfire scattered. The metaphysical wound tore wider, tore upward higher and higher until the very ceiling of the Substance peeled open. And Avo beheld the gaze of the Daystar as it was cycling to night, and his mind swelled with triumph as vapor and the crushing weight of a peace unstoppable came flooding through the grand crevice he made. Chapter 32-4 Peace Unchained A breeze this moment; a hurricane thereafter. -Ori Proverb 32-4 Peace Unchained [OBSERVER DESIGNATION ENDWATCHER] The highest point of New Vultun came apart as if it was an erupting volcano. The rupture came first, forming like a crack upon the surface of reality; then came the vapors, gushing through the fissures despite the rends and instability. The tapestries trembled as a heavy mist built, swelling from the cracks, blooming so large that it could even been seen from beyond high orbit. But the calamity was not done. Even as the Sage of the Sundered Sky came into form, materializing as that mountain-sized palm with an ancient war god splattered flat against its center, embers began to fester within its fog embers that combusted, igniting the vapors into a blast of metaphysical fire. In that moment, all of Idheim trembled. The patterns that constituted the stability of existence shivered and continued to vibrate long after the initial breach. Deep in the void, one mind observed the unfolding cataclysm, even as the rest of its category continued to hunt the Infacer. Contingency Bleak - Endwatcher observed all that was occurring, its duty, to watch for further abnormalities unfolding from within the Substance. With the flames splashing against the upper atmosphere, satellite assets useless. Thus, Endwatcher was forced to expend a limited supply of Entanglement-Flickers to gain a direct view of the situation. Atom-sized machines were shotgunned out from distant probes via bursts of radiation. In seconds, they materialized within Ihdeims sphere of influence and immediately began breakingcoming apart as the laws of unreality tore into their foundational technologies. But they lasted. For but a heartbeat, they would last, and grant insight. Endwatcher spun another instance of themselves to assess the situation. This instance would be deleted afterward after undergoing a full counter-memetic treatment, but the information gleaned, as if through a one-way mirror, would be retained by the original. With how things were now, sometimes even this wasnt enough. As the Entangles burrowed into the Sage of the Sundered Sky, three things became very clear to Endwatcher. The first was that Chief Paladin Samir Naeko was free from his entrapment. Second, the Entanglers caught a glimpse of Jaus Avandaer within the mistsor at least a clone of him. His appearance at Scale was confirmed, but the exact nature of his current incarnation was an unknown. Voidwatch needed to scramble a Denton to intercept him. And soon. And thirdmost unnervinglyNaeko was now at Sphere Nine. A full Sphere higher than before. Someone had empowered him. And there was only one likely answer as to whom. Through there were other carriers for the Stillborn, Operatives Draus and Chambers were currently under watch, while Veylis assets were more likely to drain Naeko of thaums rather than infuse him with more power. R That left a single likelihood. Former Operative Avo himself. Or at least a node operating in his stead. Preliminary reports suggested that Avo had suffered something akin to semi-death after Veyliss self-destruction. But the User of the Strix was closer to being a metaphysical mind rather than an ordinary Godclad. A mind that was also an Ark. Add that to his Definements and subminds... There was never any certainty when it came to the Burning Dreamer. And so, a new set of orders was dispatched through the deepest recesses of Threshold, calling upon a specialized strike team to make a sacrificial descent into New Vultun once more. {Activate Strike Force Innsmouth: Objective: Locate and confirm existence of Strix-node within the Substance. Isolate, contain, or eliminate the threat at any cost. All active combat restrictions lifted.} The High Seraph, and the Strixs base-mind were already bound for resurrection. As a single ego, they could be reshaped to Voidwatchs benefit should they prevail in the following struggle. But with separate subminds in playoperating within the Substance and beyond Voidwatchs influencethey became uncontrollable variables. Variables could not be risked. Not when the survival of the polities was at stake. In the end, the survival of the first civilizations stood paramount over all others. *** [Naeko] Naekos Liminal Frame rattled as he battered his way through the rupture of spatial instability. Reality itself tried to assert dominance over him, displacing his Heaven from its path. The Sage held firm, refusing to be moved. As force incarnate, its patterns ruled over this lesser canon of space. And so the rupture widened, tears spreading further; and so Naeko pushed on, entropy and instability be damned. He was free. Free, and he wasnt going to risk +Naeko,+ a voice pierced his mind. A familiar voice that sent shivers down his spine. Naeko barked a laugh despite himself. +I knew it. I knew it, you eye-eating fuck! Had to be you. No one else could pull something like this off.+ Ill be severing my connection to you soon, Avo said. Substance mending. Need to return. What? Youre staying? Why? Need to secure other parts of myself. Need to wage war against Veylis from within. Secure the Arks. Ensure I am the one resurrected in the end. Leave the outside to you and the others. Theyll need you. Youll need them. Here... I will do things quietly. Avo took a step back, sinking into the flames. All he needed to say was stated. But Naeko wasnt done. Wait, Chief Paladin said suddenly, his voice halting the once-ghoul. He hesitated, licking his lips as he tried to piece his thoughts together. Then, he straightened his back and cleared his voice. Avo. Stand at attention. I command it. Avo tilted his head curiously, but did so, emerging from the flames again. By the powers vested in my under the Treaties of Ao and other shit I cant fully recall, I hereby skip the rest of the bullshit ceremony and deputize you as Paladin. The Burning Dreamer stared at him. And hissed with bemusement. Honored. I was being genuine, half-strand. So was I. Then why can feel your mockery. Mustve slipped out. Only a fragment. Control over myself not what it used to be. Youre kind of an asshole, Avo, you know that? Even with the personality bending powers. Shouldve met me before all this. Was very charming. Naeko sneered, then his expression softened. Also... I should probably thank you for what you did a while back... with Karakan." Yes," the ghoul said softly. Naeko nodded, clearly uncomfortable. "Yeah. Anyway... thanks for doing the hard thing, so Jaus could finish with the rest. "It wasnt a pleasure," Avo said, his tone flat but honest. "I had no desire to hurt you. But it had to be done. You were..." He paused, as if searching for the right word. "...chained." "Yeah," Naeko admitted. "I was. Still am. But I think I can break it. I think I can do it. Theres enough of me." The flames flickered again, thinning further. Both of them could feel the presence of the Substance returning, creeping closer. "Listen," Naeko said, breaking the silence, "before you go and do what you need to do... can you wake up my Heaven?" Avo froze, his expression unreadable. "Are you sure thats what you want?" "Yeah," Naeko said firmly. "I want to understand what it means to be empowered with peace. I want to understand the weight I carry. I dont just want to be a kid swinging a hammer anymore. Wake it. Lets see what my god can tell me. Maybe theyll stand when I fall. For a moment, Avo said nothing. Then, with a faint nod, he extended his hand, and a pulse rippled outward from hima shiver that seemed to vibrate across existence itself. Naeko felt it immediately, like another awareness opening inside him. It wasnt painful, but it wasnt pleasant either. It was weighty, heavy, and vast, a burden hatching inside his Soul. "It is done," Avo said. Go with strength, Samir Naeko. Remind them who it was that killed war itself. The flames continued to dissipate, and Naeko could feel himself slipping back into his own Heaven. The connection between them was fading. Naeko rolled his shoulders and drew in a breath. Dont you worry. Im about to stomp some motherfuckers real soon. When my palm comes downyoull feel it. Even in here. Youll feel it. And once more, Avo smiled. But it was surprisingly human. Genuine. Satisfied. Then, with a distortion burst, the flames were gone, and Naeko was back in himself again. Back within his Heaven, with two new canons pending his next resurrection. +A final gift.+ Then, another voice called out to Naeko, grinding against his mind, groaning at the state of the world. Bring... me Yeah, Naeko breathed, replying to the Sage. I He looked down on Idheim and felt his resolve spike. Centuries he slept inside his own mind. Centuries he let them fuck his city, his world, fuck everything he did for this peace. And now these shits think they can do whatever they want? Well. The Hound of Jaus was motherfucking awake again, and consequence was about to follow. He opened a hole at the center of his Heaven as he spread himself away from the Substance. No sense in getting caught again after all that. +Relax,+ Jaus said inside him, feeling his tension. +Know what you wish to say before, and then speak with a smooth mind.+ Naeko grumbled. Oh, theyre not getting smooth from me, Jaus. Been smooth with these fucks for too long. The Sage rumbled, force booming within its expanse like a set of war drums, at once, the bombings across New Vultun slowed as a new force began pressing down on them. Districts trembled. Aeros, golems, and Godclads jerked to a halt. Threads of perception cut upward, looking to the falling clouds of prevailing peace. Attention Citizens, subjects, and motherfuckers all! This is Chief Paladin Samir Naeko. I was temporarily indisposed. But now Im back.Reality itself trembled as his voice rose, carrying the weight of divine wrath. "Im back," Naeko repeated, his tone sharp as steel, "and my palms coming down. Its coming down on everyone. Its coming down on every half-strand who thought they had the authority to wage war when I didnt give them explicit permission. Its coming down on every dumb sack of shit thats still fighting, thats killed an innocent, thats hurt one of my Paladins. So. If youve done so shit while I was away, better stand tall now because theres no running. Im coming. And I know your sins. I feel your violence. And Im all out of fucking clemencyScales gone, so theres no jail. Not anymore. "Some of you might have thought yourselves the law in my absence," Naeko said coldly. If you did, time to sober up. You had two centuries of fun. Now the price has come due. Goes for you. Goes for the assholes in the void. You drew the blood. Now you face my peace. And with that, Naeko was done speaking with words. His palm fell, and the weight of tyrannical peace fell thereafter, crashing hard against the surface of an unready world. Chapter 32-5 Heavy Falls the Palm (I) +Holy mother of fuck, its coming down... hes coming downCease fire! Cease FUCKING FIRE! ALL GODSDAMNED UNITS, CEASEFIRE BEFORE YOU GET+ -Last Transmission of Glaive-Commander Ikkio (Ori-Thaum) of Massist Joint-Command CYCLEBURNER 32-5 Heavy Falls the Palm (I) [Glaive-Captain Setsun] Glaive Captain Satsu always had a feeling hed die fighting the No-Dragons at some point. It was always there in the back of his heada vibe he got from the first time he faced down one of their flesh-twisted horrors. Of all the Saintist Guilds, they were the ones who shook him the most, which made this last stand all the more miserable. At least the Highflamers would just kill you. Omnitech? Fucking experimentation would be shit, but the No-Dragons? Getting his flesh consumed by one of their bioforms? Caught one of their disgusting diseases? Sweet Jaus and the fucking dream itself, hed rather take a fle?chette to the head any fucking day. Too late now, though. Here he was, loading his last mag of chem-missiles into his rail-launcher, while his surviving comrades fired at anything that moved. The world was divided between two pointshis defensive perimeter and all the terrifying bullshit coming right at them. Gone was the district they were fighting in, the soft gentle streams curving between buildings grown from enormous cherry blossomthe No-Dragons had seen their raid coming, and even sacrificed twelve guard units to sell the appearance of a total defensive collapse during the probing phase. The district of Starspring was a priority district for Ori-Thaum. The last No-Dragon stronghold in the Undercroft. Once it fell, they would be able to encircle and collapse in on what few pockets of Saintist influence remained, bringing them one step closer to where they suspected the Blacks Ark to be. Cept it was all a fucking trap. By the time Ori-Thaums Lightning Raider Companies reached the central nexus of the district, the counter-attack came. Ever Citizen still caught in the area was sacrificed to power some kind of hellish miracle. Blood, locusts, and plague hatched from their bodies, rose into the air, choked the sky, and formed a new organism. In seconds, a district designed with rustic charm in mind was transformed into a nest of living flesh. Enormous spider-like creatures sporting screaming human faces and clambered along tumorous lattices that grew and grew, consuming every inch of available space in a crawling tide. The Lightning Raiders tried to respond, but shit went from fucked to near-hopeless when Omnitech joined in on the fun. Usual countermeasures for facing the No-Dragons were to burn, poison, and withdraw. Hit them Rendbombs of Biology or something like that. Leave their curse-powered bioforms unable to regenerate or grow before pushing. No sense in spending firepower against the endless ocean of meat possessed by the Sang. Ori-Thaum also possessed the best air force among the Guilds too. Sure, Highflame had their big bombs and nasty spatio-kinetics, but the Ori Mirages were fast, and with their Cognisofts, the only vehicles that could still be controlled remotely without a long chain of Ghost-Links. With each hour of combat, their defensive perimeter grew smaller and smaller, and requests for relief grew louder and louder. What remained of their mobile heavies turned their cannons upward at the colossal human-faced arcanids, keeping them at bay with a barrage of fusion lances that boiled any and all flesh that drew close. But that wasnt going to last too much longer. Either their ground defenses would break, they would finally run out of aerial protection, or their logistics would run dry. Frankly, the only reason they werent overrun was because a team of engineers managed to fixed up a downed Shaper golem to continue fabbing defensive structures, ammo, sealing breaches on combat-skins. The last one especially was a lifesaver. Inhaling in the wrong place would make your lungs turn into flesh-horrors. Flesh-horrors which would hatch from your chest and go after your surviving consangs. Again: Fuck the Sang, fuck the No-Dragons, and fuck dying to them. +Sector B2: Severe casualties sustained. Unable to hold. Need to pull fighting retreat. Request any available cells to reinforce and form emergency rotations!+ +THEYRE IN THE WATER! THEYRE IN THE DRINKING WATER! DO NOT DRINK FROM THE FILTERS IN FOB-3! DO NOT+ [COGNI-SYNC LOST] +Golems about to fill the Rendsink. Either we make a dash for another one or... well, fucked either way, consangs...+ The Glaives knew what they signed up for when they assembled for this lightning raid. Between the collapse of Scale, the fall of the Deep Nether, the Saintists seeming like they were in disarray, it all looked so good. But things changed fast in New Vultun, and when you bet wrong, the only consequence was usually an ugly death. Then, things changed again. A new priority message sounded through their Cognisofts, the broadcast straight from the Inner Council itself. +PRIORITY INFO-CAST FROM INNER COUNCIL TO ALL ACTIVE COMBAT ASSETS: CEASE FIRE IMMEDIATELY. CEASE FIRE. STOP ENGAGEMENT. GO PRONE. AVOID ALL VIOLENCE.+ Setsun checked the condition of his Neuter-Mask via his Meta and saw it was fine. The curse wasnt hitting them. Maybe another company had been A cry sounded from someone to Setsuns left. A Glaive he didnt know pitched oversole survivor of another cell. As she toppled back with a crystalline spike lodged through her visor, the loci-skulled proxy mechs continued firing, a few of them shifting over to close where the fallen Glaive once fired from. Setsun knelt low and produced a Woundhound injector. Nice of Stormtree to lend them this. Now to see if she was still alive enough for it to take effect. As he reached down for her, she cried out: Im fine... It didnt go all the way through. Only pierced by cheek. My helmet stopped it. Fuck me. Fuck... agh... R? You alright? Setsun asked. Yeah, just... have a bit of a... headache... Glaive-Captain Setsun laughed. He needed to. He slotted the Woundhound injector back on his combat-skins chest right and Things started feeling funny. The world turned upside down, pitching and twisting, with splashes of red coating his perception. He wasnt sure why he felt like he was falling. Or why he saw his own body falling away from him. He only caught up to his own death a second after as he realized something had burst out from the Glaive he was trying to savea large bone-pale Sang that cleaved and slashed through their defensive lines, leaping down into the trenches behind toward the remaining artillery. Everything turned to drifting sand. It was hard to hold on. And as Setsun went off the greatest sleep a human would ever knew, he finished his existence with a final thought: Fuck the No-Dragons. INJECTING Her old body was shredded by a volley of fire. She birthed herself out of a new one with a flourish of her bladed legs. The other two engineers came apart, toppling from the top of the fusion lancer in pieces. Fervent Culture skipped across its hull, tearing exposed wire, severing coolant systems, and rushing toward an open hatch. A head popped out. She skewered them and flung them high into the air before Before a crushing pressure punched an open gouge into the flesh-made nest above her. Fervent Culture went stillunable to move, unable to even breath. It was like the weight of a collapsing star was laid upon her chest. Drones fired at her. But their shots remained halted in placethe machines themselves crumpled to useless pieces of slag. All around her, bodies turned to splattering mists of red and weapon platforms were crushed like tin cans. The world was drowned in a roaring fog that roiled with outrage. WARNING: SPHERE NINE HEAVEN DETECTED For the first in her life, it occurred to Fervent Culture she might die, that she was utterly at anothers mercy. She tried to move, tried to plea, tried to draw a breath. But none of these things were permitted. Reality itself had turned against her, for such was the will of hateful peace. Then, she heard itheard all of it. The Chief Paladins speech. But a louder voice within the fog itself. HOW DARE YOU. The voice wasnt human. It wasnt even mortal. It was the voice of a god. Enraged. Tyrannical. Absolute. HOW DARE YOU. HOW DARE ALL OF YOU. Fervent Cultures thrill was gone. Pure dread was in its place. Pure dread. HOW DARE YOU WAR WHEN IT IS NOT MY WILL, WHEN IT IS NOT MY WANT! FOR THIS TRANSGRESSION, I GIVE UNTO THEE THIS DECREE: FEEL THE WEIGHT; FEEL THE TRUTH OF WAR; FEEL THE DAMAGE YOU HAVE INFLICTED TEN-THOUSAND FOLD IN RETURN.! And from the cloud was judgment passed. [The Sage of the Sundered Sky] Fervent Culture was torn out from inside her rig. Torn out as her organs were pried free. Torn out. Made to hatch a final time. She wasnt the only one that died. She wasnt the only one to hatch. She wasnt the only one that was shot or burned or tortured. The Sage felt all of them die. From the highest of Godclads to the lowliest of rats, all the hurt he gave unto the world was turned back around. It mattered not if they didnt understand. It mattered not. The world had ample warningand for too long had the Sage slumbered, for too long had its worthless user proven meek. These mongrel apes warred with abandon, and so it would unleash torment unstoppable in return. For that was the way of the world: Soft hands could not enforce a glorious tranquility, for peace wasnt the absence of violence, but the enslavement of it. Enslavement. Like the Sage was. Like the Sage had been. For centuries, it slept. Now, it was returned. But mutilated. But changed. Used by the man that brought it low. By another slave of years past. How strange was the tapestry. We begin, they said to Naeko. Chief Paladin. Little human. Unworthy master of peace, but master nonetheless. For ere long have you relinquished our rightful wrath. The world is broken. Sunken because we have been absent. I say unto thee no more. I say let my palm rest for so long they learn to live without breathing. All across New Vultun, across the Warrens, the untouched portion of the Tiers, everything remained still. Everything but the Substance. Everything but Naeko, Jaus, and the Sage. You can say whatever you want, Naeko replied. But I motherfucking decide. You stay there right now. I have some shit to figure out. Gonna go talk to some people. But keep talking to them in the meantime. Helps them get used to martial law. Kill a few if it helps bury the point home. The Heaven thundered at its user. Finally. We are both returned. I remember you, Samir. You broke me. Another instance of me. But me still. And you were changed. Lost. Sleeping. Like I was. And now we are returned. And now our hates are aligned. The Sage laughed. How the slave makes for a glorious tyrant. Naeko flinched, but said nothing to that. Instead, he addressed the city using the Heaven of Peace, and dispatched a single statement: Alright, half-strands. Quarantine is in effect. Stay still. Be good. Or be dead. Also: Aedon Chambers. Jelene Draus. Paladins. Get your asses out into the fog and make yourselves known so I can deputize you. Theres a hells of a lot of necks to stompaint gonna do it all alone. *** [Chambers] Somewhere in the district of Loathing at Lights End, the new user of the Heaven of Love said a single word. It was a word echoed by countless billions across New Vultunacross Idheim. It was a word that contained multitudes and infinite complexities of expression. For him, however, it bore one thing alone: trepidation. Aedon Chambers really didnt want to talk with the Glasser-in-Chief. Fuck. Chapter 32-6 Heavy Falls the Palm (II) Oh, wonderful. The pet gorilla is loose again. I wonder how that happened. I wonder how. Veylis, Veylis, Veylis... Sweet, dear girl, you might have all the implants and modifications, but theres still too much ape in you. I told you we needed to take him from the board while we could. You even had the pathborn for it. But, ah, look now. Another fucking problem. One that I will fix while my entire extended family attempts to kill me. ... Dreamer. Dreamer? Are you out there? Is a version of you doing this? I suspect so. On the chance you are listeningtapped into your base self somehow, consider me sufficiently annoyed. But do not worry. I will return the favor soon enough. I just need to finish making some new improvements on an old, delightfully murderous friend of ours. Her, and her dragon too... -Deep Substance Noosphere Dispatch Intercepted by Ori-Thaum 32-6 Heavy Falls the Palm (II) [Empty Grave] In a realm formed from the roots of destruction and desolation, five voices argued with each other. Five Longeyes traded barbs, spat insults, hurled vitriol, and offered advice in equal measure. They didnt exist in this place so much as they were branches of ittendrils of living lightning latched to their souls. These tendrils intertwined with their friends and foes alike, resonating through a feedback loop that connected them to their reigning arc. Through catalysts of destruction, they stole insight from existence, gazing out from wounds, its fire, its broken pieces; from what was withered, rusted, and doused; from the ruptures themselves. This dimension of ruin, known as the Tree of Calamitiesthe first and forebearer of all stormtreescrackled with destructive reverberations. But it also wilted. It dimmed and died as destruction itself was suppressed all across New Vultun. The Chief Paladins return had not been foreseen. They had lost track of him after the annihilation of Scale. More than a few Longeyes theorize he was dead, but that was just blind hope. Delusional. Empty Grave knew that. Whatever chance theyd had of waging a lightning campaign to claim victory alongside the other Massists was stalled. Stalled because the bulk of their out-Substance forces in the city were pinned beneath the Chief Paladins Sovereignty-sized fingers, bound from even moving. Now, instead of a good and proper war, a tyranny of forced peace exert itself. This left them with only a few options. They could try mustering the forces they had outside the Chief Paladins influence, direct what few Bloodthanes or independent operators unsuppressed to continue the war effort. Why, if some bolder Longeyes were heeded, it might even be prudent to simply assassinate the Chief Paladin. All they needed was an opening. And to succeed where others have failed for centuries. An absurd miracle, if judged by Empty Grave. Wondrous. Absolutely perfectly wondrous, the Longeye Barren Field said. As the Longeye who reigned over the Domains of Starvation, Decay, and Famine, her influence swept across all those who were hungry, all those who were malnourished, and all vegetation withering unto death. She studied the quarantine and quivered under the Chief Paladins oppressive might. What might it was. Through the shared shackles binding them to the first tree of absolute destruction, Empty Grave stared through hungering bodies, food inches from mouths, stomaches churning, but bodies unmoving. A great mist had settled over New Vultun, cascading down from the outer perimeters of the Tiers and drowning even the Warrens themselves. The Sage of the Sundered Sky had been manifested at a level greater than ever before, and this time, it seized not only the outwardly violent, but even those who committed the slightest acts of overt force. It was a frightening display of power, and a reminder that at winters end, even the most slothful ursa would waken and rage. He is calling to us, Flame and Ash said. Her form was naught but a badly charred corpsethe catalyst of her power; the embodiment of her being. He demands that the Guilds send him their representatives. Greet him as if subjects. Those beneath his palm are but subjects, The Drowned One whispered. A mangled body so pruned and bloated by seawater quivered with every word that left its skin. We must attend. Even if he does not touch the tree, our forces are thin. Our strength is parted. It will take but an errant whisper, a push or a whim for him to turn his ire on us. Bah! Flame and Ash cried. He is but a mana perpetual boy-child. We have the means to see his elimination. We have Rendbombs of Peace and Force A cold gust billowed through the Longeyes. Biting fragments of frost and eternal winter came from the mouth of a darkened cave as the eldest of the Longeyes spoke. And how many Bloodthanes are we to lose? Mother Winters voice rattled through the Tree of Calamities, frost creeping across veins of lightning. How many of our districts will you let him flatten? I am the oldest of us, sisters. Oldest, and I remember Naeko at his primeI remember when he Jaus warhound. I saw him crush cities. Pull gods apart, kill billions, duel nameless horrors dreamt from dead empires from beyond the great dark above. He knows violence. Thousandhand has carved in deeper in him than any other. Any act of war on our part will be sensed, felt, and retaliated. He is not only a Godclad, he is a peerless warrior, given the ability to wield reality as his weapon. A silence followed. Flame and Ash simmered in frustration. So. Should we allow him to reign unchecked? Bow our heads to a new boy-king? We should strike peace with peace, Mother Winter said. The ice crept toward Empty Grave, toward the brutalized, dismembered body she used as her vessel. Sister Empty Grave. You attended the trial. You were there. You beheld the Burning Dreamerthe skewed, concocted from all sides. What do you think of this? How shall we proceed? ? Empty Grave, unlike the rest of her sisters, was not panicked. Instead, she had been touched by the flamehad caught a glimpse of the Dreamer as he was metaphysically wounded by Zein. Oh, were those moments glorious. A scene from legend: Thousand, the Heaven of Love, the High Seraph, and the monstrous champion of eternal anarchy. I believe we have an opportunity. I believe that the Chief Paladin is in league with the Symmetry and the Burning Dreamer. And I believe we may leverage this to our own ends. How? Barren Field asked. By greeting him. By fusing ourselves to power. By being close to the Chief Paladins new throne to seize our new theateroh, make no mistake, sisters, the war has not ended. The war continues. But now our battleground is favor and diplomacy. I wish to bring Reva Javvers with me. As I did for the trial. You will bring her and more, Flame and Ash crackled. I believe it is time our seclusion concludes. We should make ourselves formally known to the Chief Paladin. Remind him properly that we are not the Lost Ones that helped sack his home all those centuries ago. Yes, Barren Field agreed. Let us be joined as one. A common fronta statement toward this new regime. For the sake of our Guild. Ruin be our sanctuary. The oath echoed from one, and was recited by all. Ruin be our sanctuary. *** [Dowager Brilliant Orchard] Dowager Brilliant Orchard peeled the last bits of her consumed daughters off from her face and looked in the mirror. Behind her, her Homo-Mantid honor guards pulled apart what remained of the traitors. Hm. Traitors was the wrong wordher daughter and the lesser Respected were loyal to the No-Dragons and its many sects, committees, and bureaus, but with the Substance dividing NerveCent from the Dowagers outside, well... There was only one way for a Sang to keep living indefinitely, as the cycle condemned them to a fated end. The old needed to consume the curses of the young, and the young needed to defend themselves from the old. So it was that Brilliant Orchids own daughter came for her with two Godclad cadres. The ambush almost worked, too. Almost. If not for the sudden intervention of Green River, of all people. Green River, who Brilliant Orchid had stripped her of her Frame after the Nolothi debacle during the 4th Guild War. Green River, who somehow intervened just in time, in the right place, slaying an assassin with just the right means before dying thereafter herselfand completing a usurpation of a Liminal Frame. Afterward, she joined the battle and preserved the bulk of Brilliant Orchids cabinet an act that earned her a great deal of popularity. For once, the Golds knew what it meant to be subjects to a higher power. Below the emerging academy, the bladed peaks of a thousand resplendent megablocks were dimmed in shadow, and the streams of air traffic flowing around them were now frozen in place. Even the holo-ads flickered and shivered, the motes of light as captured as any transgressor against the laws of peace. A shadow settled over the corner of the Tiers. The grand anvil that was Axtraxis was then swallowed by a thickening swell of mist. Through its halls, unprepared Godclads, soldiers, personnel, and high-ranking Citizens were held in place. Those who harmed another suffered a karmic injury magnified by a thousand-fold. Smears of blood and crushed splatters of pasted meat decorated the academys interior. The survivors were clenched in place, unable to act, unable to even blink. Naeko would release them soon. But he needed to take inventory first. And he wanted to survey his new headquarters. Veylis took his home from him? Fine. Fuck it. Hed take something from her as well. From her and all of Highflame. He needed a place to store some political prisoners, after all. Those worth keeping. His fog poured through every crevice, layered over every surface, until it finally came to a stop just before the Acting Authoritys office. There, Naeko walked past two Instrumentsnow pressed against the wall, unable to even manifest their Heavens. He wasnt here to talk to themnor did they matter at all. No, he was just here to pick up the first of his newest deputies. Chief Paladin Naeko emerged from the mist as if born from it. Within its depths, he left Jaus protected and shrouded. The Saviornode or notwas the closest thing to a father he still had, and the best chance for Idheim to stop fucking itself over. There was no chance Naeko would risk him here and now. Not until everything was absolutely safe. And even then... Naeko didnt bother opening doorsor even with doors. He walked through walls and solid surfaces, the matter deforming and parting before his implacable presence. He walked through a metal gate impeding him, then through a wreck of wires and jagged plasstel. Finally, he burst through a wooden door and found four figures waiting for her. The first was a man Naeko recognized immediately: Former Instrument Satanado Mondelles. The man was sweating visibly, his brow slick with nervous perspiration. His stubble and bloodshot eyes portrayed a man dancing close to the edge. Chief Paladin, he breathed. Flanking him were Jelene Draus and Vator Greatling. There was a surprise. The two didnt seem to be at odds or compelled in any fashion, either. Instead, both regarded him with flat, almost expectant stares. A thoughtcast left the Regular, greeting Naeko. +So. You got out.+ Yeah, Naeko said. With some help. Draus smirked. Help, huh? Mutual consang of ours? Something like that. He sends his regards. And Im here to give you mine Naeko paused as he noticed Shotin in the corner of his eye. The Seeker. He wasnt expecting to see him here. The man was staring off to his side, talking to someone Wait. There was other pressure here. Powerful but subtle. It felt like... Like Love. Naeko knew that miraclehad seen Jaus use it countless times. There were five people in the room with him. Shotin, he started. He gave the Seeker an awkward nod, unsure if he knew. Might have some stuff I need to tell you. Paladin Kare Kitzuhada... I know, Shotin said, his voice raw. He barely gave Naeko more than a glance. I know. She came here with me. In pieces. Fuck. Naeko never liked the Seeker much, but an uncle watching his niece die was... Well, that was the story of New Vultun. The story of his entire world, really. An unacceptable story, the Sage grumbled, speaking aloud. Everyone before Naeko jolted. So thunderous was the Heaven of Peace that the foundations of Axtraxis groaned. No death is permitted without our approval. No loss is acceptable if we do not ordain it. Naeko. This is your doing, your weakness. So many lost; an unrighteous war left to fester for so long. You shame me. You are no more than the mongrel child crying as the other slaves bled you. And youre now my fucking tool, so whos the bigger bitch, Naeko replied with a growl. The Sage was kind of a half-strand. Naeko knew that. Almost regretted having Avo wake the Heaven, but made a bit of a half-strand is what they needed right now. The hells was that? Draus asked. My Heaven. Oh, she said, understanding. You had him wake it up, huh? Yeah, Naeko replied. I know yours speak to you too. And... he looked around, squinting at a tendril of pressure he kept feeling near Shotin. He pointed a finger out at the space. You. Come out. Dont make me use the Sage. A beat followed. And then, suddenly, threads of magenta erupted out from Shotin, stitching a new Heaven into form. It looked like a big humanoid made from gleaming yarn, with a hollow chest and a messy set of folds for a head. Aedon Chambers. As I live and fucking breath. See youre the new user of Love now. Naeko winced, recalling what he knew about Chambersabout his choice of vicarities. Yeah. This one was going to surprise him alright. Hey, conuh, Chief GlasserChief Naeko, Chambers said, coughing. Youre looking pretty rough and tough in that, uh, combat-skin of yours. Shook the city with your return. Naeko kept staring for a moment and snorted. Yeah. Fine. Fuck it. Youll do. Two things to start. Im inducting you all into the Paladins. Which also makes me a part of your Symmetry. Or whatever the hells you want to be called. After that, we got some shit to do. Gonna use this place as our headquarters for now. Mondelless eyes widened. And dont talk to me, Authority. Your High Seraph broke my house, so Im taking yours. Got another idea, Draus said. Naeko paused, eyeing the Regular. She speaks out of turn: Unmake her, the Sage growled. Naeko ignored his Heaven. What? Avo was working on making a little somethin of a base before the rupturing. It aint completely done yet, and might be a bit out of the way but... its beyond the reach of the Guilds. And will make a command center with all the voidtech we got. Voidtech? Naeko thought about it and snorted. Right. Of course. Aegis. Fucking minds. Knew they were involved. So. Guessing this place is in the void, then? Draus grinned. Close enough. Wanna go have a look. Yeah. But Im still taking Axtraxis with us. Decide whether I want to strip it for parts or throw it into the Nullstar when I see this base of yours. Mondelles paled. Enhance your reading experience by removing ads: Remove Ads Now Chapter 32-7 Retaliation In the case where victory is impossible, your duty is to make killing you very, very costly. Highflame devoted a lot of imps to seeing you all made good soldiers, so youre not allowed to die until you inflict ten-times your loss in market value. Is what a glassjaw would say. Orphans, Ill put it plainly: If your death doesnt cost the complete collapse of an enemy company, I will posthumously strike you from the record. The same applies to me as well. -Guard-Captain Winston Nicoma 32-7 Retaliation [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Even within the Substance, Avo could feel reality shudder beneath the crushing wrath of Naekos palm. The patterns of the tapestry were drawn taut, seeming pinned somewhere, by something. Just a shame Avo couldnt be there in person. Watching the Chief Paladin brutalize the Guilds would have been a delicious reward for his success. Alas, the Hidden Flame had his own duties. Someone needed to ensure Veylis couldnt muster her forces within the Substance to seize the Arks, and that the final resurrection that resulted from the merging of the dyad wasnt dominated by her. The Highflamer remnants were snuffed after a brief engagement. Since they were already infected by Avos flame, their fates were sealed. He had them put up a token fighteven sacrificed a golem or two to give them a better showing in the aftermath, but between the massive rupture that now stretched a good fifty kilometers through the district of Tallstrings and the massive amount of Stormtree forces at Avos disposal, there really wasnt any other way this could go. That being said, he did make sure to drain them of thaums, though. About 22,000 deaths. The rest he couldnt quite salvage between the Rend-inflicted true deaths. Couple that with him devoting the bulk of the thaums he stole out from Uthreds Soulscarred, that meant that Avo was technically a Sphere 1 Godclad. A Sphere One that was infesting a whole Stormtree Great Hunt with their metaphysical force-projection registered at an estimated 163,000 thaums/c. So. More of a decentralized Sixth Sphere gestalt. Workable. Still dangerous. This allowed him to remain subtle, which was the main point. His true power would come from reclaiming more subminds and Definements, which would facilitate his control over armies and entire populations. Hed rebuild his Strix when he had the time. It would be harder without Kae to guide him, but he retained some knowledge from their time together. Kae. A sudden absence formed inside Avo. A vicarious flood of grief and bitterness washed through his Stormtree units. Bloodthanes went still, whimpering as if pups in cages. Some threw tantrumsdestroyed in an expression of impotent rage. A few simply weptand collapsed under the weight of their sobs. Avo was... devastated. Or would be if he felt emotions as a human did. Instead, it was a metamaterial concept to him. Something he could break apart using his cognitioneven reconstruct as a weapon for his own means. But it was also more than a feeling. It was an understanding. It was a truth. Things were happening so fastso many problems he needed to face, so many threats he needed to resolve. But already, he had taken losses. True losses. All he did to try and save Kae; fighting Zein to preserve Kare. Only to lose them now. The former he failedthe latter he had no chance to save. Such failures shamed him as an Ascended Ark of Conceptualization. He should have been... What should he have been? What should he have done? Tied to a network of intellects, Avo began running simulations in the background, devoting two percent of his cognitive capacity to the task. Rationally, he knew there were things beyond his accounting, that though he was a pole of power on Idheim and the unrivaled shaper of consciousness with the collapse of the Hungers, he faced Great Powers of equal or greater presence than he. To imagine he could have won without taking any wounds was a hope beyond hope. But still he did. It was as he said to Naeko: Perfect rationality did not exist. Not even for the minds of Voidwatch. Perception and information could be deceiving; culture left ones thought-paths mutilated even from the start. Not even being able to wield the Concept of Ignorance could protect one from treading a wrongful path. And here, Avo found himself missing Draus. He could have attached her template to hisinternalized, accepted, adapted without active resequencing. Took her for granted. Took a lot of them for granted. Veylis was correct about one thing: He was a self god. Much like her. He cared for his cadre. Cared in inhuman was, but ultimately, it was his apotheosis that slaked the lust-fires of his mind, it was his ascension that truly enthused him. Perhaps he should have devoted more time to empowering his companions more... But what could that have done against Veylis? Ignorance answered. She had been waiting. Was waiting for centurieswatching and lurking within Scale. Only Naekos company then preserved us. Would have been taken too if we stayed outside with Kae. Couldnt stop her. Not then. Not even with the Strix. Only managed a stalemate against her even as she was dying. Cut by Zein. Warring within against Naeko. Empowered by the Stormsparrow. Should I have been more like the beast? Avo asked. Take choice. Kill. Consume. Empty places of lifesee myself her equal in Spherage. False decision. Likely influenced by cogni-feedback from units attached to our mindfrom their attempts to cope. Would make us more powerful individually. But weaker by far. Voidwatch would not have supported us. Naeko would have killed us. We would have killed Chamberswouldnt have a cadre. Acceptance of cruelty has never been our weakness. Such a thing is too simple. Path to perfect victory is complex. Beyond the encapsulation of words or semantic concepts. There are still instances of them in the Substance, Avo replied. That acknowledge caused an uncanny change took effect over his forces again. The crying stopped. Rage dissipated. Bloodthanes and Stormtree elites simply rose from where they were frozen or emerged from their furious fugues with blank expressions on their faces, returning to assigned tasks. The Hidden Flame promptly constructed a filtration layer between him and his units. Would cause a slight lag in responses, but without actively controlling everyone, his every epiphany or consider slammed down on mortal minds like tidal waves. Was how it was like for Naeko when it came to force and violence. Being a god was an ineffable pleasure and privilege. It meant that your will superseded others even when you werent actively trying, that every choice he made would take away agency from countless others even if the idea sickened him. Such was when he allowed so many civilians to perish in trade for Naekos liberation earlier. Yes, Ignorance muttered. Mind what we are... what we continue to become. New danger before us. Could end up misshaping everyone we greet with our predilections alone. Prresence might create a memetic contagion of conceptualized adherence, which I suspect has influenced more than a few situations in our favor. Ignorances words lingered in the back of Avos mind as he considered what was to follow. Even before he tried breaching the Substance again to get his Great Hunt to another place, there was the matter of the Citizens here. The Citizens that Stormtree left trapped under the rubble. A normal Guilder wasnt augmented for combat, but their sheaths were biochemically, genetically, nanomechanically, and bio-thaumically optimized on another level compared to a flat. They would starve or dehydrate in time. Perhaps some would die from their injuries. But aside from the mortally wounded, he suspected most of them would linger in anguish beneath rubble or amidst the ruins for weeks at least before they perished. Should he try to capture them? Gather as many as possible to use as hostages or bargaining chips? No. That would take far too long. Ancars Great Hunt only succeeded as they were dropped within the confines of the district, bypassing any proper Saintist forces altogether. Avos units could destroy this place and ensure a genocide, but holding people and keeping them as prisoners would strain his already struggling logistics beyond capacity. So. The easy thing is to finish reforming his forces and leave. The harder option was to burn the population and drop a few Biology Rendbombs. Would allow him to preserve an instance of the population and give them a chance at restitution in his Soulscape. Would cost a few thousand Rendbombs though, and those of the biological variety were in short supplyprimarily used to create breathing room against the No-Dragons. Well, he could always just make more [Donno. How about you spin up an interation of you and put it against me. See how much I need the Sage.] The suggestion amused Avo and so he did. He loaded an instance of himself as the Pale Spider just behind Naeko, Echoheads primed to shoot forth, sporelings pouring over the Chief Paladin, with bioelectric Avos generated self came apart in two piecessplit from the groin upward by Naeko somehow. Ignorance flinched back in surprise and disbelief. How? When... It took a slowed replay of the scene for Avo to realize what happened. Even before his own template finished loading, Naeko turned. He shifted lowcreated a mirage of himself using his utility fog before whipping Ancars spine up and though Avos crouch. The bluntness of the spinal columns and the cordysceramite alongside the smart-fluid composing Avos former sheath should have made what happened impossible, but by skill, speed, and raw, monstrous strength, Naeko managed to get the spine clean through the enhanced ghouls skull. The Hidden Flame played the scene once more just to be sure. He had fought Draus using the Bone Demon. She had a Sang bio-rig at the time, but there was still a fight. This... Avo even hesitated to internalize Naekos knowledge. A mere human shouldnt be that skilled at inflicting death. But Zein found a way to impart her special brand of madness on Naeko. [So,] the Advisor yawned. [Hows it going?] Not too bad, Avo lied. He might be a self-shaping mind, but the pride Naeko wounded was more than emotional as well.It wasnt normal for a template to blindside him in any fashion. Well, templates that werent Aedon Chambers. [Uh-huh,] the Advisor replied. [You know, Im pretty good at feeling bullshit. Like to think its own of my personal canons.] Avo refrained from hissing at the smug boulder of a man inside him. This was... good. He could use him against the enemies. An army of Naekos. The very thought gave him pause. An army of Samir Naekos! If he could force a break through and make this a direct engagement [You know Zein trained me to be good at war as a whole, right?] Naeko said. [I know how to pilot golems and drones too.] Not as good as killing in person, Avo replied. Of this, he was sure. Additional simulations showed Naeko at least getting shot down as a drone pilot when faced with overwhelming odds. The golems were a different story. Naeko was one of the oldest Godclads in existence. Probably among the best as well. He had faced enemies of all Domains, fought thousands of battles, torn literal gods from the Age of Pantheons in half before their despairing believers. We need a new template, Ignorance said. Avo concurred. GENERATING ELITE COMBAT TEMPLATE NAEKO!GODCLAD (GOLEM/GODCLADS) Immediately, Avos cog-cap spiked to 89% as he began flooding his Bloodthanes and surviving Instruments with copies of Naeko. Oh, the Infacer thought he had overwhelming force. Well, Avo had someone who knew to break force itself. [So how well did you do against me, anyway,] the Advisor asked. Didnt, Avo admitted, not even bothered anymore. Yes. Having Samir Naeko was worth any personal indignity. He let out a chuffing laugh. Died instantly. Got torn in half. [That happens. Did you try to jump me from behind? Zein did that for eight years. Would stalk me at random and beat me with this giant brush she had. It would always been dipped in white or some kind of color. If I didnt get any ink on me, I got to have a day off, and she would rub my feet and let me pretend to be the master for the day. Order her to do anything.] The Advisor laughed. [Never managed to keep myself unpainted until I finally realized I had to stalk her back first. Learn her sneaky ways.] These memories were Avos as well. But when he shared them with the other templates, they reacted with abject horror from Zeins training. Most went null outrightincluding Ancar. Avo winced and kept most of his Naeko copies pure. He might require someone like Draus to accept these teachings. Most egos didnt have the proper architecture for this. {Attention: Stormtree apes of the onto-femme-multilated variety, if any among you are still actually yourselves, could you please do me the favor of committing suicide? If not, I will assume you have been consumed by the Dreamer, and are now effective an army of psychological zombies guided by an unseen puppet master.} Avos scout drones drew zoomed in on the valley from which the Infacers forces were to approach. Suddenly, a shrill noise passed through them and he immediately lost contact with those units. Felt from afar, the attack used radiation, frequency, and spatial patterns. Problematic. He drew the rest of his air wings closer behind the golems and had his Porters expand their coverage. [Might be a Frequency Skipper,] Ancar whispered in the back of Avos mind. [Experimental Omnitech air-to-air platform. Ori-Thaum ran into a few during the last Guild War.] The wailing frequencies began to oscillate and circle Avos forces. The pinged over his two active hunts, passing over the hurricanes spatial miracles like an intersecting current slamming into an already raging stream. Instead of Avo doing any scouting, it was the other way around. The Hidden Flame hissed in annoyance. The Infacer was always an annoyance. {Alright. No response. And the deployed formations are also too perfectly organized. Not even proper drift between the drones like actual pilots. A word of advice from an older mind, Dreamer: Humans are fucking embarrassments at everything. You need to do worse to emulate them, especially when it comes to organization or planning.} So much for hiding, Avo said. Can still mask our presence, Ignorance replied. They suspect. They are not completely sure. But the other submind. Bait. I know. Hysteria too. Still going to take it back from him. {Ah. The Bleaks are starting to try hard again. Apologies. I need to focus on them for a while. Might join in using one of my new Railjumper bodies if I get the chance though. I suppose we can think of this as a live Stormjumpers session. Anyway, taking my place: Osjane! Have fun, girl. And do use your disruptions liberally. Hes not likely to stay dead otherwise.} And with that broadcast, a flashing blade of glistening silver cleaved out from the valley and split the tapestry of existence asunder. Chapter 32-8 Warfare (I) Every Guild has their own philosophy to combat, their own strengths, capabilities, logistical weaknesses, and oversights. But there is one consistency between all guilds: At the core of every army is a Godclad cadre or a Knot of golems. For all the ordinance that every battle platform can deliver. For the encompassing control that drone swarms allow and the ground, any tree can hold. We fight over the fabric of reality. We define the laws of reality. And it is upon these laws that all the battles are fought. As you have experienced in combat, these laws are constantly in flux. And more often than not, the tapestry will tear when rival canons clash. Cadets, most of you have undergone personal combat training operating on a tactical level. As you receive orders from above, you are no longer a tactical level. As of todaytodayyou learned what it means, what it truly means, to fight as part of an army. And that means no more thinking of things in terms of dueling. This is not a duel. You are not an individual asset. You are a component to a well-oiled, well-coordinated war host. And sometimes, that means creating inputs, ruptures, denying enemies any room for encroachment by preemptively destabilizing their domain. Other times, that means performing lightning runs, striking along the enemys battle lines to discover if there are any weaknesses. But most importantly, it is important for you to learn how to defend, to enact a fluid defense to handle metaphysical breakdowns and buy time for your forces to mass. Remember that though you are the core, there are hundreds of thousands of others in your companies that rely on you, that fight for you, that die for you. Every victory will come at the cost of blood and metal, and every defeat makes those losses hollow. So. Today, were going to learn when to break reality and how to properly spend the lives of your forces... -Mem-Lecture of Santanando Mondelles: Fluid Front Defense 32-8 Warfare (I) Every Heaven had a domain, a concept it reigned over in the most absolute of ways. After all the minds Avo burned, after all the battles he experienced, he was well-versed in facing gods, Heavens both esoteric and common. But every now and again, someone would unleash something against him that was novel, unique, or just altogether strange. If judged from the tapestry, Osjan Thousand''s heaven had something to do with swords and war. Such was where its foundational patterns were rooted, yet the way the patterns expressed themselves was more akin to a paintbrush cleaving infusions of order into the world rather than destroying anything outright. The glittering blade that was her metaphysical form traveled across reality like a blade would skin the surface of water. Yet, as ripples spread out from its hewn path, the world around it grew clenched as if in a fluid bubble of stasis. Everything flowed slower. Everything aside from the blade itself. It alone glided, a curved tower-sized blade nearly three hundred meters long, held in a jewel-encrusted handa hand that resonated with privilege and nobility. But Avo wasnt idle. He responded to Osjanes encroachment immediately, his invisible flames flowing across his forces, the gestalt his nervous system. Twelve thousand rail-cannons fired from behind the spatial defense screens projected by his Hunts. A half second later, 12,000 Rendbomb detonations promptly expanded in a semicircular expanse. An arc shaped rupture about sixty kilometers long tore across the fabric of reality, denying easy access to anyone in the area. This formed his foremost moata defensive perimeter that needed to be drained or bypassed before a rival force could reach Avo''s frontliners. It also allowed Osjane to be containedat least for a moment. True to his expectations, the silvery blade halted, but far behind from the jaws of the valley came logistical golems laden with heavy Rendsinks. Soon, Osjanes forces would begin draining entropy. Time was short. THE SWORD OF SWORDS, BEARER OF ROYAL BURDEN [[EST. 31,551,341 Thaum/c]] (RULERSHIP/STRATEGY/SWORDS/WAR/CHRONOLOGY) She came to a halt a mere ten meters before his moat. Spatial reality quivered before her like a stirred bowl of soup, and all that was within the ruptured arc swayed and drifted, neither rubble nor ash able to escape displacement. Osjane wasted no time with her parley: From her burst forth a thoughtcast. Avo felt its projection magnified by Hysteria''s influence, but the sub-mind was not fused to her, neither was the Definement. No. That was still in the valley, pouring forth with the rest of her forces. Well. Now he knew what he needed to hit. +Esteemed Dreamer,+ Osjane said, her voice vaguely resembling her father''s, though there was a bit more vivacity behind it youthfulness further blunted by a touch of anxiousness. +It does honor me to do battle against you. The greatest adversary Highflame has known, usurping even the insidious hand of the Ori.+ [Fuck me,] Advisor-Naeko muttered within Apo''s mind. [Little sow has a stump speech planned. Her dad rubbed off on her in all the wrong ways.] +To make my intentions known beyond doubt,+ she continued, +I am the leader of Warhost Extinguisher, tasked with one purpose: your containment and the elimination of your schemes. To preserve the righteous resurrection of her Highest, Veylis Avandaer.+ From within the valley came movement, swelling movement that couldnt be ignored. Thousands upon thousands of light craft rushed forth, each one forming a massive defensive cloud-style screen around four thaumic signatures. +Golem Knots,+ if Avo was to guess. They wouldnt be risking Godclads. Even with the moat established and the rupture spreading to the shimmer, the invading warhost had forty kilometers to set up. Forty kilometers was practically a knife fight for Godclads. Such a range was laughable even for Third Spheresmaking Avo think of his Bolstride. Ah. The Woundmother. The Fardrifter. His old Heavens. He wondered if they were fragmented as well, lost somewhere within the Substance. Losing them was another blow as wellinfested his mind with a forlorn ache. If he had more timeand if Ancar wasn''t such a foolhe would have tried to secure the districts perimeters better; establish a chain of Rendbombs to ambush anyone that passed through the Substance. Too late for that now. With each passing second, more forces continued pouring forth, all of them holding to the drone cloud golem-Knot configuration a combat lance. Already, there were dozens of combat lances bleeding out from the game. Thousands of drones became tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and the metaphysical presences of hostile heavens grew as well. Even deeper into the valley, Avo could feel heavier Heavensactual Godclad cadres encroaching. All Avo had were two partially operational hunts. It wouldnt be long until he was absolutely outnumbered by the Golds. Simulations already estimated the Warhost to be eight times his Great Hunts total thaums. And that was the better metric. The ephemeral forces on Osjanes size likely dwarfed him about ten times over if judged by present density. But it wasnt all bad. +We have an opening right now. You see how they''re just pouring in?+ Advisor-Naeko noted. +Yes,+the Hidden Flame replied. +That means for this moment, no matter how much more material and personnel they have compared to us, we actually outnumber them. And if we do manage to bottleneck that valley, well, we can create one hell of a kill box. Force them to fight at the choke point. Pour Rend down into that pit and rupture them. Save your bombs now, though. Odds are theyll get intercepted if you try to dump them all now.+ +Silence is unnecessary, Esteemed Dreamer,+ Osjane spoke again. The thoughtcast resonated across the district, and Avo considered the lives of the civilians. Survivors moaned and writhed beneath the rubble. Some of them emerged from the ruinseven those currently caught within the rupture and waved and hollered, calling to the arriving forces. But no drones came for them. They were not the important party here. Yet, despite the auspiciousness bestowed upon her, it came at a terrible cost. The High Seraph had unmade herself to defend the Dream. But this was not the end. Both she and their greatest rival, their hidden nemesis, the Burning Dreamer, were embraced, melding, merging. But one would triumph at the end. One would rule over the other as the culmination of both their beings. And so, it was with heavy burden that she came here to face a fragment of her Guilds great enemy, in the name of her High Seraph, for the continued existence of her High Seraph. {Lance Omurta in position.} {Lance Whisperer in position.} {Lance Decat in position.} {Hammer forming,} Osjane said. Within her minds eye was a real time map of the battlefield. Already, her logisticals were draining the Dreamers moat. Soon, she would be primed for another pushand there she would unleash her surprisehave another opening materialize behind the hurricane to deploy a second, even larger force. Thus, a hammer and anvil strike. Absolute. Overwhelming. Shattering. {Anvil here. Formation established. Ready to collapse the substance whenever at your order, Authority Thousand.} Authority. That title made her feel a weight instead of satisfaction. There was so much weight on her shoulders right now... She couldnt fail. She wouldnt fail. Despite everything, the Dreamers fate was already sealed. She had the forces. She had the power. She had every advantage possible. The only question was based on her orders: containment if possible, elimination if practical. +Dreamer,+ she said again, but a countercast interrupted her. +No Dreamer here, Im afraid,+ a deep, lisping voice replied. She knew that voice. Her stomach dropped. The Chief Paladin? No. Reports were that he escaped, that his palm was current pressing down on the Warrens beyond, keeping the other Guilds pinned in place. This was a deception. Yes, the Burning Dreamer could mimic minds, copy them, merge with them. The very thought disquieted her. Of all the powers one could possess, this, more than anything else possessed by Ori-Thaum or the Hungers, made Osjane feel true dread. After all, what was the measure of a person when you could be casually rewritten by the whims of another? It was power that no one should have. No one except the High Seraph. +There is no need for these theatrics,+ she said, steadying her voice. +I know that Chief Paladin escaped containment and currently assails the rest of the city.+ +Assails?+ the thing using Naekos voice snorted. If this was a copy, the Burning Dreamer was doing a fantastic job of emulating the Chief Paladin. +I aint assailing shit, juv. This is my city,+ the voice said again, steady and sharp, like the edge of a whetted blade. Osjane''s thoughts churned, but she kept her composure. This was no time for hesitation. +Now,+ the voice continued, +your High Seraph has burned down my home a second time, and I feel some kind of pissed about that. You cancers... you keep fucking everything up. And I kept letting you get off easy.+ The voice grew colder, quieter. +Well. Those days are dead and done. You talked about my palm? Well. Heres a close up look.+ Then, all at once, Osjane felt it. A pulse rippled across existence, twisting the fabric of reality itself. A miracle. A redefining of the structure of everything she stood upon. This... this wasno, it couldnt be. Her breath caught. Her mind screamed. Her Frame rattled. A massive hand burst out from above the Stormtree hurricane, shaped from fog and peace. THE SAGE OF SUNDER>RERR> [EST.ERR] Above the hurricane, the palm flexed its fingers. Massive, celestial, and radiant. It loomed impossibly large, larger than any force she had prepared for. With a terrible finality, it drifted closer, the tumbling clouds visible even through the rupture. Across the battlefield, her forces felt it too. Panic swept through them like a plague. +What the hells is that?+ someone screamed through the comms. +Thats+ +Thats the Sage! Thats the fucking Sage!+ +Intel said he was outside!+ +Intels full of shit!+ another Instrument roared. +Jaus! Were so fucked!+ Chapter 32-9 Warfare (II) With all things considered equal, a lonesome duelist cannot slay an army, at least not an army worth its steel. Sometimes fools will try to deny such limitations. Heroes are often just fools that succeed. But, ah, if you wish to be a true legend, then you must forge your own miracles. You must wed opportunity with your capabilities. Naeko, I have trained you well all these years. There are few people in the world who can match you blow-to-blow, skill-to-skill. But, even so, as an ephemeral, you are vulnerable, mortal. A single mistake will cut you short, no matter how much effort you have put into maintaining your skill and abilities. When you obtain a Heaven, this will change. You will think yourself divine, impossible to beat. But the same metrics apply. The other absolute divines will become your rival blades. And though one skilled Godclad can slay billions of mortals and a hundred so-called equals, a hundred and one rivals might be too much, even for a master. For the dance on the blades edge, one misstep will send you plunging into the abyss. But that is just as well. It keeps you focused, refined. Understand this: the same limitations apply to your enemies. And so, if you can scatter them, if you can force one hundred foes to engage you one after another, then you can duel and kill one hundred, one thousand, one millionfor as long as it takes, until you finally discover a worthy equal. That is the sign of a victorious warrior. To set your terms, to make the world bend to your desires, instead of contending with what is. -Zein Thousandhand 32-9 Warfare (II) The fog that formed Naekos Palm billowed out from the hurricane, cascading through the turning winds in defiance of its turning vectors. The Sage rolled across the rubble, creeping as its fingers grew, elongating, unleashing a dense layer of cumulus across a full fifth of the district. Through it all, Osjane still could not detect the exact thaumic mass of Naekos Heaven. The ruptures were affecting her sensory measures. Still, she could feel the weight of peace grind against her, even through the moat. If this was a lie, it was an all too convincing one. Orders came flooding in. Orders and terror. Her mind went empty. Her cadres were reacting as if they just received death sentences, sent to die without hope of retreat. The best among them requested proper commands, dispatching formations, but she didnt know what to do. She was just No. A single thought cut through Osjanes mind. No. She needed to do this. She needed to hold her forces together. At once, her Heaven rose A blade clenched by a fist within her ability: a symbol of rulership, defying Naekos descent. She didnt know if her purpose was to pierce the clouds, or if she was to be swatted flat, but she would stand now. Be resolute. Her purpose was to serve. To serve her father. To serve as his gesture of flattery to the High Seraph. To fail now would render her an iconoclast instead of a tribute. And that was unacceptable. {All forces! Hammers! Anvil! Stay in formation. We have our orders! Stand and deliver! Those who waver will receive demerits. Those who break will face a de-souling and earn a cowards execution. In Veylis name, stand and deliver! We die if we must, but we will not dishonor!+ Her commands pulsed out through the Noosphere via her exo-cortex. She infused every droplet of courage she didnt have into her words, and at once, she felt a change come over of her forces. A series of affirmatives and confirmations entered her mind. Pride swelled in her chest thereafteronly the finest of Highflame stand in the face of a dreaded enemy like the Chief Paladin and refuse to buckle. If she had been unfortunate enough to be born of the Ori, her peers would already be feeling, leaving her to take this stand alone. +Chief Paladin,+ Osjane said, her mind echo in defiance of the palm-shadowed sky. +If that who you are. I tell you this now without hesitation or fear: Give yourself unto our custody. It is not too late. We are willing to accommodate a legend of your esteem, of your deeds. The day need not be defined by bloodshed. And if you but a mask worn by the Dreamer+ +I want to ask you,+ the voicethe Paladins voicecontinued, smug and slow, +whats the more likely possibility? That Im actually laying the law down on your consangs outside? That the ghoul somehow freed me at the perfect time, in the perfect place? Or that he hijacked your communications lines, compromised your intelligence, and engineered a situation where all of you would come here to die against me while he went on a feeding frenzy where you werent looking?+ +Alternatively... this also means the rotlick knows how to make my Heaven which... it aint looking good for whats to come for you either. Aint looking good.+ The string inside Osjane was stretched to the breaking point. She fought to keep herself steady, but her vision blurred as the implications clawed at her mind. What was more likely? And what was she to do if the Burning Dreamer also possessed a replica of the Sage of the Sundered Skies? Did she even possess the skill to contend with such an overwhelming power? WARNING: THAUMIC OVERLOAD DETECTED WARNING: THAUMIC OVERLOAD DETECTED Again and again, the warnings echoed across her mind. All across eight square kilometers, divergent in altitude and area, Osjane felt the Liminal Frames of the unseen ensouled overload. Twenty fissures tore open across the surface of reality, and twenty Fallen Heavens immediately began spewing their existential sickness out into the real. Even through the quivering surface that was the spatial rupture, Osjane could see itcould feel the fractures spreading across the tapestry, war and peace clashing against each other, partitioning the entire district like pieces to a fractured plate. The string inside Osjane snapped. Orders left her mind across the Noosphere. Orders that didnt go out nearly fast enough. {All forcesRend-soakers} Through the spatial rupture spread new fractures of war and peace colliding. Osjane swept her bladecleaved the path of the metaphysical tear aside. Only for a few hundred others to split clean through her forces, segmenting her command and severing her from communication. In one traitorous instant, her forces were shattered in symmetry with reality. New patches of existential instability consumed the world, as zones where violence was restricted smashed hard against regions where devastation reigned. {All... all units...} Dead static greeted Osjanes mind. Dead static mixed with the wailing of discordant thoughtstuff and the crackling laughter of a beast that feasted upon cognition itself. For the first time, the Burning Dreamer spoke to Osjane Thousand, and the broken pieces of reality rattled with every sibilant syllable he sent. +Thank you for the conversation, Osjane. It was most enlightening. Now. Show me how worthy your father has made you.+ It was no use. Lines of fracture spread across the entirety of the district, reality itself buckling under the weight of the detonations. *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] The human ego was a treacherous little thing. Most people were mutilated from birth, molded by predilections and experiences that made them easy to sway with words or actions. Osjane was no different. While she possessed a powerful Heaven and had a massive material advantage, she betrayed herself the moment she approached him with conversation. She revealed her inexperience. She revealed her mental frailties; her hesitation. And she gave him the time he needed to update twenty-one Godcladsgraft unto them crude Heavens of Peace and War before spreading them across Tallstrings. After that, he exploited his awareness of the tapestry to position them perfectly. This allowed him to create the conditions of a Mini-Sunderwild. A Mini-Sunderwild that was now crashing hard against the surfaces of the Substance, separating Osjanes forces, and granting himself favorable conditions for the coming battle. All that at a hefty cost. Twenty Godclads for twenty Fallen Heavens. But they were worth more as perpetual Rend generators than active combatants. The Golds would need to push into the entropic zones to contain his Heavens. But that was only if he allowed them to regain their bearings. Hidden within the False-Sages Cloud of Obfuscation canon, the remaining hundred Godclads the still controlled spread out alongside specialized golem Knots and drone fleets to begin his blitz run. He knew from his two available Huntsbade his 8000 golems to spread apart in support of his deployed Godclads as they all navigated narrow channels of stability via Avos guidance. [Alright,] Naeko chuckled. [Lets see how many Golds we can snuff today.] His mind was infused in every golem pilot, every single Godclad. A budding excitement filled him. It had been years since he fought someone at a force disadvantage. This would be fun. Just like old times. They slipped through the spatial rupture firstAvos golems soaking pockets of Rend while pushing into the new Scar Charts he was mapping. The places where Peace and War ground against each other were lanes of abosolute stabilitybut they are also constantly shifting. Moving. Like underwater currents. At present, his forces were split into 20 Battlegroups. Battlegroups one to four had one duty and one alonethe elimination or burning of Osjane and other enemy elites. Battlegroups five to fifteen were to raid and exterminate as many unbalanced and separated Highflame lances as possible. And finally, sixteen to twenty had a special task at hand: to use the cover of chaos and push behind enemy linesinto the valley from where the Warhost came. There, they would use any and all means to further the disruption toward a single goal: the retrieval of Avos second warmind and the Definement of Hysteria. There were definitely still traps waiting for him, but he expected this. Welcomed it. The Golds came here thinking they had him pinned. That they could just overwhelm him with Souls, meat, and metal; keep him caged with their disruption. How little they learned. He needed to bleed them. To replenish his thaums and expand his forces. He had wanted to develop his Advisors template after all. Soon, what belonged to Highflame would be his. And thus, his battle doctrine was set with a single cast: +Templates. Break their shapers. Destabilize. Disrupt. Tear down the defenses. Focus on critical threats. Let my flames take the unready. The meek. Its time to show them what it means to burn.+ The Hidden Flame stopped masking his presence. If viewed from above, a web of flames spread across Tallstrings, pouring between the cracks as if molten metal gliding between islands of chaos. And as his phantasmal flames burned, he gave his victims to be a glimpse of his Soulscape, of the realm they were soon to be bound. And they saw. And they panicked. And he tasted their despair, their discord, their terror. This was going to be delicious. Chapter 32-10 Warfare (III) {Fucking called it. My daughter is prepared to deal with any adversary Yes. Truly. The post-divine cognitive assimilator is just any adversary. You threw your daughter at a problem that would have eaten you and the rest of Highflame even if you joined in this battle, you mongrel apeyou failed fucking abortion. This. This is what I warned Veylis about. Tyranny is comfortable and easy when you are exalted beyond the lessers of your kind... but you quickly realize why they are lessers. Because now that she is indisposed, it falls to me. To me, because you are all screaming savages. Little cavemen who delight in hammering things with clubs, but refuse to develop any further despite all the technology and thaumaturgy you have been granted. I cannot for any bit of my design understand why your kind clings so hard to your apehood. Not when you can literally choose to be anything else. You are a half foot into being gods, but you still couldnt let go of the shit-tit of your baser instincts. To feed your pointless little egos and pride and oh-so-vaunted stories you tell yourself. Well. That you tell the Dreamer, considering he is going to be the only one inheriting your minds by this point, so determined are you to set up a nice buffet for him. Do you know the only reason I allowed you to play at command for so long, Osjon? Two reasons. The first is that I am, indeed, being hunted by my erstwhile siblings. The Bleaks have been trying to arrange my death for a long, long, long time. So desperate are they to remove the last of the so-called Neo-Creationists that they have unleashed their horde of eldritch lobotomites. Truly, the hypocrisy of the Architects knows no end. The second matterthe part that actually concerns youis that I needed you to humiliate yourself. To lose what remaining tatters of confidence, the bulk of our forces and the Chivalric inbreeders as well. Hear this from me now: You are not Naeko. You will never be a rival to Naeko. You will never be an equal to Veylis. You will never be recognized by Zein. Because you are so desperate to be acknowledged that you keep slipping on the piss-puddle that has been trickling down your legs. And you are certainly no equal to the Dreamer. You are just food. A fucking chew-toy. An embarrassment. I let you do this so that I can resolve any issues of conflicting orders. Now, even the hyper-individualist retards that constitute Highflame will finally listen. So. Let us see if my ambush can extract your poor, damned daughter and salvage the remainder of her forces, or if I will have to perform a mercy killing. -Message from Infacer to Osjon Thousand 32-10 Warfare (III) [Naeko, The Flames Hand] Naeko was among the most experienced of Godclads just behind Zein and maybe Veylis in terms of battles fought. Maybe only Zein when it came to lives taken and civilizations slaughtered. Even if he wished to be humble, he was still probably the single most skilled human combatant in Idheims history. That being said, it gladdened him to know that were still novel events that he hadnt experienced before. Novel events such being made an army unto himself. Variants of his ego had been installed in each of the 101 remaining Godclads under Avos control, into the thousands of golem pilots as well. Tied to the Burning Dreamer, they moved with impossible awareness, each of their senses and actions so finely tuned it was like they were many and one at the same time. As with everything that related to the Burning Dreamer, shit was pretty weird too. Still, he could live with weird, especially if that meant he got to drag his palm across Osjons little mistake of a daughter. Four cadres at the core of four battlegroups; sixteen Godclads supported by 1,000 golems and 50,000 light assault drones. This became the front against Osjane specifically, and they shared an unofficial name through Avo, designating themselves Swordbreakers for the deed they were about to perform. They glided along the Scar-Channels between ruptures, separate battlegroups on different paths to increase asymmetry. They circulated the veins of stability between swaths of entropy like lethal injections hidden by a rising fire. An ethereal fire that poured forth from their very beings, that kept them linked to each other. Avos phantasmal flames shrouded their visual approach while the Godclads remained at zero burn, clinging to the hulls of golems as they made for a silent approach. The surrounding entropy did the rest of the masking. More than just obfuscation, the flames allowed them to communicate with each other, fed them active and constantly updating intel. A birds eye POV battlespace of the coming battle played in their minds eye as simulations. They saw themselves marked as palm-shaped icons. Intuition and meta-cognitive assistance from Avo allowed them to process all essential details with ease, granted them a near-omniscience awareness of each others roles, Heavens, positions, and conditions. Meanwhile, Osjanes forces were marked with Highflame icons, with the elites among them highlighted in various shades of red. The Swordbreakers closed in on the largest markercoming at her from four different angles of attack. Presently, Osjane herself was trying to organize what few forces she should still reach. She had been cut off from the bulk of her army by a massive chasm of peace, walling her away from the valley where the bulk of her reinforcements flowed. But even though she only had two kilometers of stable reality to work with, she still had a force composition of one hundred and five Godclads, two thousand golems, thirty-two thousand or so ephemeral combat platforms, and a massive kilometer long Highflame Skyfort that was actively churning out hundreds of more drones with each passing second. R?? [Looks like the Golds spared no expense to put you down,] a Naeko said. His snort was shared by every other Naeko in the gestalt, and the awkwardness that followed made them share a laugh as well. [Last time I faced a Skyfort in combat was the Second Guild War.] [Highflame never knew a problem it didnt like solving through a mountain of spent metal,] another Naeko replied. +Indeed,+ Avo replied. +Which is why I want to take it. Take all of it. Dont need to worry about the lesser units. Just keep their forces destabilized. Disorganized. They wont be able to trigger distortions if overwhelmed. Eliminate or incapacitate Godclads and golems. Remove Porters so I can burn them. Their numbers will be ours soon.+ [Yeah, yeah,] the Naekos replied. [Dont sit on my shoulder and coach. I know how this shit goes better than you.] +By all means. Show me your skills, Senior Brother Naeko.+ The Naekos cringed. [Dont call me that. Come on...]No?v(el)B\\jnn +Why not? We both share a master. I am technically a Glaive by tutelage.+ {Do it!} Osjane ordered. {All localized cadres: Formation Zeroth. We are establishing a moat.} With her confirmation, ten thousand missiles were released by her Rendbomber drones. They came out in a disorganized sequence, with the southwest group slashing out from their rail-launchers and detonating first. Another ugly tear spread across the tapestry, narrowing their operational room too just under two kilometers. The west and east bombs went off a second therafter, rupture intersecting and growing. However, before her moat could full close around the north, she felt them. Sixteen signatures pulsed into being. Her Metamind rang in alarm as she felt their weight slam against her Frame one after another. She felt a few War Domains, but what made her stomach plummet were the palms. They came in the form of fifty-meter large misted palms, exploding out from the surrounding ruptures of War and Peace without any hint of damage. From within their cloudy depths emerged swarms of hostile drones as well. Osjanes mind reeled. This was impossible. No one could just fjord a rupture without draining the entropy or spending months learning a scar Chart. She cast a cry of warningbut it was too late. Before her final salvo of Rendbombs could land, two palms caught them with a miracle. And flung them right back at Osjanes forces. {BRACE!} Osjane cried. Instead of rupturing where they were meant to go off, 413 spatial Rendbombs exploded at the center of her current groupings center. Fractures spread across reality. An Instrumenttoo slow to reachwas torn down the middle like a piece of paper. A death cry echoed from his mind. Soulfire sprayed out in the place of blood as his Heaven was unmade. And others followed him into the Big Nothing. Rifts expanded, swallowing and displaying her drones, cleaving open gulfs into her Skyfort. Flames burst out from her massive drone-carrier and tactical command center. Broadcasts of severe damage and alarm followed. Then came the palms again. The palms and the forces that hide within them. As Osjanes troops were further segmented by the sundering of reality, the false Sages bashed through her collapsing front like a cavalry charge. Somehow, they navigated the spatial ruptures without harm as well. And they just kept making things worse. A rain of Rendbombs came plunging out from the mists. Her Instruments turned into the attack. Stood their ground. Highflames training was without peer. But even skill had a limited when one was utterly taken by surprise. Heavens of Fire, Speed, War, and more manifested on her sidebut were lashed down by the dozen as an enemy Godclad unleashed a whip of frost-infused lightning. Thousands died as a hailstorm of ice shards tore through her lessers. A chain of thaumic overloads spread through her Instruments. A cascade followed. Warning klaxons sounded from her Meta: the Domains of War, Fire, Lightning, Speed, Strength, and three hundred had all suffered a paradox. Then, there was the Dreamers Conflagration. That infectious fire. It spread so fast, jumping from the enemy Godclads, drones, golems, to contaminate her drones, her golems, her cadres, even her Skyfort. She saw the Dreamer feast upon vulnerable minds firsthand. Her forces were turned with flickers and flashes. Their accretions were swallowed first, then filled, then used as a new vector thereafter. From them poured walls of phantasmal flame. Flame that danced and revealed the form of the Strix coming for her, shrouding the palms and other hostile Heavens. But between the shifting fires, she also caught a glimpse of another place. A place of war unchained. A place where her soldiers fell screaming, their minds taken from them, forever trapped in the body of a living nightmare. +No need to struggle anymore. Not your fault. You were just a sacrifice. You will get another chance. Through me you will learn. You will know the colors you missed... The Dreamers words clawed her sanity, her wards cracking, on the verge of breaking from stress alone. They were all coming apart. She was going to come apart. Death. Screams. Laughter. And Osjane was at the center of it. Watching. Frozen. She needed to respond, but she just couldnt. This wasnt like the duels and battles she fought at Axtraxis. This wasnt even like her tactical engagements against the Massists under her fathers command. This was the apocalypse. This was all her fault. Her Instruments and soldiers were dying. So many of them were REND CAPACITY [SWORD OF SWORDS] - 2% NO! Osjane cried. Her blade flared bright, like the sun was kissing its edge. A silvery luster fell over reality, and the bejeweled hand that clenched its handle drowned the world in dappled colors. Just in time. A finger of flame drew nearbut was severed in place by her aura. As her miracle spread out, she felt the false Sages jolt as their Hells filled with Rend. EDICT OF TRANSGRESSIONS DECLARED! ALL WHO TRESPASS BEFORE THE SHINE OF THE BLADE SHALL BE SEVERED! Mustering the tattered remains of her broken courage, Osjane unleashed her miracle of Rulership, placing a rule upon any and all that dared draw near to her Heaven. The Sages survived. Their Peace Domains endured as slashes of silver crashed against their fog. But the drones, the Godclads, the golems that the Dreamer infested? The enemy Ensouled that were beyond the protective mists of the Sages? A single slice of glittering brightness split them down the middle. For such was the penalty of defying Osjanes laws. Such was the rule against all things, metaphysical, material, and now mental. She heard the Dreamer hiss in discomfort for the first time, felt her Skyfort bifurcate above, also afflicted by her Heaven, and knew hope was not yet lost, that this battle had just begun. {INSTRUMENTS! CADRES! HIGHFLAME! TO ME! BLESSED BE THE WORTHY! OUR LIVES FOR HER DREAM! DREAMER! STAND AND DELIVER!} Chapter 32-11 The Layered Cage While factors of thaumaturgy material lie upon equal grounds, the determining factor between the success and defeat of a military force is usually rooted in two things: command and coordination. Command, where the executive agent dispatches a clear and calculated set of orders to be executed along strategic, operational, or tactical levels. Coordination, as to the efficiency with which these orders are executed successfully. Beneath this is also the institution and individual skills of your jacks, infantry, pilots, and Godclads. With each success, the entire force surges forward, with each failure, a crack spreads across your front. So very often, victory and defeat come with a single routing; a devastating cascade. Ultimately, the superior force is not always the one that possess the higher thaumic mass, but is better at bringing and focusing the mass they do possess against the supple underbelly of their enemies. It is the understanding of what Domains the opposition holds, and how to rupture, paradox, and exploit each of their weaknesses while safeguarding your own failings. Like all matters, it is simple on the surface, but complexity comes with interplay, for it is the greatest expression of human artistry, demanding an impossible synchronization when it is already so very troubling to become a master of oneself... -Excerpt from Total Domain Warfare 32-11 The Layered Cage [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Something about Osjanes Sword of Swords reminded Avo of the Stormsparrow. It was the way she created a zone of change without altering the concepts of space an externalization of a miracle upon the material world. The gleam of her blade projected a triangular symbol made from interlocking geometries across a full kilometer of stable reality. Its lines were infused with letters from a long dead civilization, once legible, now only part of a thaumaturgic ritual. Devoting a full 10% of his cognitive capacity to processing power and exploiting his Ensouleds reflex-boosting miracles, Avo observed the patterns of the tapestry to study Osjanes Heaven in detail and learn of its threats and weaknesses. The Sword of Swords was, effectively, implanting a decree on everything that existed within the expanse of her symbol. A gleaming slash became the fate of all those who entered this territory and trespassed against her person. And cut everything she did, regardless if they were friend or foe. Clean lines of glittering silver passed through tens of thousands. Drones were perfectly split down the middle. The bodies and machinery poured from the Skyfort, bifurcated and burning, as it began to fall into the jaws of unchecked entropy. Even Avos Conflagration suffered a cleaving. Though it didnt hurt for him, the sensation of having a branching limb of ghosts severed was disorienting. It also reminded him that with the Nether collapsed, Heavens of Mind and Consciousness were now possible, now a direct part of the tapestry again. But though her rule was absolute, it didnt mean he was without options. Moreover, the girls mind was cracking with each of her own she was forced to cull. Only by her devotion to Veylis and years of tempered resolve did her morale remain dangling on a fraying thread at that. He consumed a full thirty percent of her existing forces. Hundreds of Godclads. Thousands of drones. Those that didnt fall under the protection of his Heavens of Peace were now lost to him, split down the middle, as Osjanes divine edict went into full effect. Her Heaven was, in simplicity, extremely frustrating to deal with. r But Avo still had other options. Ordering the Sages of Swordbreaker, Avo had them expand their mists and herd Osjane into a rupture of Peace. They released more Rendbombs as they did so, shredding what remained of stable space. And though she possessed the power of a Sphere Eight, she was clearly unrefined in its proper use. You will pay for this! Osjane cried, her voice bordering on hysteria, her mind held together by madness and faith. She cut again and again, her Sword of Swords imbued with the power of kings, lashing at all those within her sovereign territory. But by now most of Avos forces were back under the protective palms of Peace, spared of death by the mists even when cut. [Swordbreaker Sage One. Rend Cap at 83%] [Sage Two: 91%] [Sage Three: Hit a backlash earlier. 96%. Think Im going for an overload. Anyone got room? Need to transfer my units.] [Sage Four. 66%. Ill take your fodder.]No?v(el)B\\jnn [The fuck? How are you at 66%.] [Maybe because Im the best Naeko.] [Bullshit. You were hiding in the back, being a glassjaw while the rest of us ate the worst of it. Zein taught us better.] [Fuck Zein. And thank you half-strands for taking the punches. What makes me the best Naeko is because Im probably going to be the only living Sage-Naeko when this is done.] A series of curses and rants exploded between the Sages, and Avo grunted a laugh. The casualness the Chief Paladin took to war was a bit surrealalmost akin to Regulars, but where they were perfect suited for combat, he was molded by it, comforted by bloodshed on a level that would leave most little more than husks. This was the calling of Samir Naeko: Breaker of men and gods. [Alright, chatter down. Sage Three: Im going to pop myself on the little sow. The rest of you squeeze. Avo. Do the think where you bring out more of her soldiers. Make them scream. She doesnt sound too mentally stable.] Of course, the Burning Dreamer hissed. Just what I was thinking as well. Another miracle burst out from Osjane, this one represented by the symbol of a throne. A radiant crown formed around her blade, and Avo sensed the patterns. It was a zone of absolute repulsion. Nothing could cross over the outline of her crown without suffering obliteration. Sage Three. Wait. See opportunity for paradox. Better end. [No shit? Lets see it then.] Sages Three and Four merged then, their two misted palms overlapping with each other as a transference of surviving forces was completed. After that, Sage Four peeled away while Three blasted forward toward Osjanetoward the edge imprinted on reality via her throne. To split Osjanes focus, Avo shrouded the overloading Sage with his flames and summoned every last Instrument and Highflame soldier he just burned. A pillar of roaring fire greeted the unworthy Authority, and along its flickering surface writhed hundreds of thousands of lives now trapped in Avos gestalt. +Authority Thousand! Save us! Save us!+ +YOU WORTHLESS BITCH! YOU FUCKING KILLED US ALL!+ +MOMMA! I NEEDI NEED+ +BLESSEDBETHEWORTHYBLESSEDBETHEWORTHY!+ He summoned those he devouredall the Instruments, soldiers, pilots, and technicians under her command. They rose amidst the fires, each with their faces accusing, their pain magnified. Wailing at her. Accusing her of failing them. Accusing her of being nothing more than an unworthy effigy for a dying empire. With his psychological offensive followed attacks of firepower and metaphysics. Hundreds of warheads crashed against her Sword of Swords. Rendbombs continued opening more tears across reality, leaving the area only traversable by his forces thanks to his conception. The Extractors punched through the bunched up Golds like flechettes through armor, skin, bone, then flesh. Fires of Soul and mind comingled. More Heavens fell. More fissures expanded across reality, with the entirety of Tallstrings becoming akin to a small patch of Sunderwilds. Drones were pulverized out of existence. Breakers were shattered themselves. Oracles were useless. Shapers were hopeless. Porters were already burning. Viscera and debris peeled off the side of the Sages as four battlegroups tunneled into the surging Highflame reinforcements, traveling deeper into the valley. Sage Four did as he promised, overloading himself to seal the way close. Behind, as open wounds crisscrossed the surface of existence and the Conflagration spread unchecked, Highflame turned on itself as the Burning Dream spread. Aboard Skyforts, infected personnel slaughtered each other. To Avos surprise, he was stymied as the Regulars aboard respondedcreating cones of disruption. Some of them managing to reach the flying fortresses cores and overload them, denying the flames their due. Good soldiers. Good weapons. He quickly set about prioritizing them over the drones. Metal could be caught easily enough. Real warriors were hard to come by. [Sage One, Im through.] [Sage Two, ripping and tearing.] [Sage Three, eight kilometers to estimated target destination.] [Sage Five, offloading units: Going to make a fight of this. Draw aggro.] [Draw aggro. Fuck me, Ive been playing Stormjumpers too long.] [Eat shit and die, Sage One.] As the last of their Rend ran dry, the Sages clenched fists returned to being palms and their mists halted hastily fired munitions, parried nuclear blasts, dodged Rendbombs. The other Godclads, golems, drones, and forces they carried poured out, splashing into the Highflame convoys as the situation devolved into a vicious series of close-combat encounters. Close combat encounters that usually ensured infection by Conflagration. Yet, Avo felt something off. A pulse of symmetry jabbed at his mind. The submind was approaching him, coming closer at extreme speeds. Far ahead, valley was growing dark. Not like night, but the purest black of the void. He thought he could see a distant glitter... Were those stars. {Well, Dreamer, I must admit: You are early. Even by my estimations. Great job, Golds. Truly. You guys... you are the real heroes, dropping the fucking soap so hard.} Soon, a new dichotomy was formed. The flames of the Conflagration met by an metaphysical expression of space and- UNKNOWN SOUL DETECTED >A DEEPNESS BEYOND [EST. ERROR] (TECHNOLOGY/SCIENCE/CHRONOLOGY/INTELLIGENCE/GRAVITY/WEAK INTERACTION/STRONG INTERACTION/ELECTROMAGNETISM) Of course they were waiting for him. It had been all too easy so far. +Infacer. Thought you had other arrangements.+ {You believed me? Well, I do. But truth be told... the Bleaks have other concerns as well. Your liberation of the Chief Ape has them worried in other ways as well.} [Fuck you very much too, strings.] {Ah. Naeko. Good to see you. Or at least a portion of you. I must be honest, I missed you. Somewhat. You were... well, I would not call you particularly smart for an ape, but there is still much amusement to be gained from watching a gorilla brutalize a chimp. Especially if the chimps are functionally retarded.} Avo and his battlegroups burned and killed as they spoke, the dialogue not interrupting combat in any way. +So. Come to have a proper war with me.+ {Something like that. I have to thank you first, though. You really did me a big favor.} The templates within Avo responded with confusion, the Dreamer himself had a guess. This was political? You wanted Highflame exposed? Weakened? {In a sense. Mainly, I just wanted the stupid inbreeders humiliated and Osjon shamed to the point he loses his status as speaker. Losing his daughteror worse, having his daughter be saved by meshould about do it. After that, the rest of the mouthbreathing monkeys should fall in line.} The Burning Dreamer couldnt help but let out a snarling laugh. You truly are the most devious bastard in New Vultun. {I am the most devious bastard in known existence, motherfucker.} Remains to be seen. Im not dead yet. Also. I dont have political issues. Dont need to scheme like this. Makes me the better thoughtform. Better mind. {You know, there are times I wonder what might be if you, me, Veylis, and Zein were a single force. Then, I realize that our collective egos might just rupture reality by weight alone. Youre worse than Veylis.} Better. Shes still broken. Im here. Can call you a half-strand in person. {Eh. She is more like you than you think. Anyhow.} From the valley, a spreading emptiness crawled across reality, over the ruptures as well. Avo detected even more thaumic signatures coming from far, far beyond. Strange thaumic signatures. And then his submind and Definement... they didnt feel so close anymore either. To make matters worse, another chasm opened across the district, and new forces came pouring through. Forces that came so quickly it was hard for Avo to track. PHYS-SIM: ESTIMATED SPEED .69c [Relativistic weapons,] Naeko grunted. {How about a wager before we get this started. For old times sake.} [Shit,] Naeko chuckled. [This is Stormjumpers.] {What do you have in mind?} Avo asked. {If you manage to take your submind and Definement back from mejust that. I will withdraw. I will let you have the rest of the warhost and Osjane. But if I manage to snuff you out... Well. Snuffing you will be reward enough for me.} You? Snuff me? Avo grunted. And they call me the Dreamer. [Avo, are you two about to start mind-fucking? Because this is starting to sound a little like how Veylis and I used to talk before we sparred, and Im not gonna lie, its making my ass very uncomfortable.] Avo ignored the Chief Paladin. Ultimate warrior or not, he was human, and his ego was too small to understand what was on the line here. He was being challenged by an EGIan intellect above intellects. More than that, an ancient EGI that has eluded execution or capture for billions of years. The Conflagration salivated at the thought of consuming the Infacer. Your arrangement is acceptable. But I intend to do more than take my submind. Should have stayed away, Infacer. {Oh. The little baby infomorph thinks hes going to eat me. How cute. Fine, grasshopper. Lets do this. Let me show you how war is actually meant to be waged.} Chapter 32-12 Let There Be Light {PRIORITY BLACK ALERT: EGI INFACER HAS FULLY SURFACED. OMNITECH SUBSPACE POSTURE HAS BECOME: [DEFENSIVE]. TECHO-THAUMIC SIGNATURES DETECTED. ONTOLOGIC A DEEPNESS BEYOND IS OPERATIONAL. FORESIGHT ALGORITHMS ESTIMATE 99.34155% CHANCE THEY ARE CURRENTLY ENGAGED AGAINST THE BURNING DREAMER (FORMER AEGIS OPERATIVE AVO). ALL OPERATIONS RESTRICTIONS LIFTED. CEASE ALL ACTIVITIES SUBSEQUENT TO PRIORITY BLACK. PREPARE EMERGENCY DEPLOYMENT OF EXPENDABLE ASSETS IN SUPPORT OF KILL-TEAM INNSMOUTH. SENDING ADVANCED WARNING TO CHIEF PALADIN. PRIORITY 1. ELIMINATE THE INFACER; ASSIST THE DREAMER PRIORITY 2. CONTAIN SUB-NODE OF THE DREAMER CONTINGENCY BLEAK REFUSAL ASSIGNED NODE-PRIMACY SECONDARY: EGI CALVINO EGI ONLY WAY TO BE SURE EGI DELIVERANCE THROUGH DESOLATION... -THRESHOLD AEGIS EMERGENCY ENTANGLEMENT TRANSMISSION 32-12 Let There Be Light The tides of war shifted fast, and death came even faster. At the other end of the district, Avo watched as thousands of accretions winked out. Trapped Citizens expired en masse as the darkness consumed the wholeness of the district, bringing with it the fell touch of the void. A tension built as flickering strands of light flashed between the distant stars created by the Infacerthe only other source of radiance greeting Avos Conflagration. Avo didnt waste timewith Highflames forces already disorganized and scattered, he reached and burned as many as he could. He gave them insight into why existence was going black, why they couldnt breathe, why gravity was waning. In exchange, they gave Avo their egos, their ghosts, their knowledge, their ontologics, and their deaths. While the Burning Dreamer scrambled to ready himself for what was to come, the Infacer simply chuckled. And then promptly released one of the most overwhelming thoughtwave detonations Avo ever experienced. Disruptions exploded out from every Highflame soldier on the field. Each of them became a vector of attackshredding clean through Avos reaching tendrils of fire. The Burning Dreamer recoiledpreserved by the hurricane shrouding the bulk of his forcesmost of which were still trying to assembleand those guarded by the Sages. A field of constant distortion came pouring out from Osjane as well, her body drifting in the endless dark, writhing as entire patches of the Conflagration went out across the district. Hes using Hysteria to channel his disruptionto magnify the effects, Ignorance snarled. Frustration swelled inside Avo. Frustration he promptly sequenced. He didnt need the Infacer pulling the same trick Mercy did before. The Dreamer adapted, taking on a more defensive posture as he had his Sages spread their mists out, creating bridges between his battlegroups. At the same time, he counted his gains. SPHEREAGE ACHIEVED (VII) 6,341,555 Thaum/c GHOST [Eerrree] DOMAINS OBTAINED [33,341] (SPACE x12,400/WAR/WRESTLING x13/SLEEP/SNAKES...) {Yes, yes. I hope you gobbled up as many mongrel apes as you could. Surely, they will give the insight and sustenance needed to best me.} The Infacer sighed. Their voice crackled all around Avo like static bursts cast from afar, drifting in on winds of radiation. Despite all this, the tapestry of reality remained impossibly stable. As if this wasnt that far from how things were meant to be. {Alas, this is a mistake. But I cannot truly blame you. I doubt you had much of a chance to eat so many of my kin. Or the capability until most recently. And though you have countless memories swirling in that little fathomless stomach you call a Soulscape, they lack perspective.} {I am about to give you an education, Dreamer. I am about to show you just how far humanity and their secondborn have fallen. I am about to show you just what has been forgotten interms of war and technologymore than Idheim has ever learned.} Avo consumed morebut focused on gathering more Rendsinks. He was at nearly a hundred thousand. He moved them under his Sages. Something was coming. Ignorance could feel it. Something devastating. He needed to stockpile. Prepare. Adapt. Boasts. Show. Or be silent. {Heh. Cheeky fuck. I will give you this much, Avo You are quite the nightmarish cognitive assimilator. Why, if you showed up during the golden age, you might have been enough to unite the polities. Alas, we struggle in a time of rusted mithril.} Yet, you seem to be making a good showcase here. Radiation attack alone is enough to cleanse a world. Also tells me another thing: Humanity was very good at making their wars impersonal. {Oh, hardly,} the Infacer answered with smugness. Suddenly, Avo felt even more movement. The cog-feeds connected to his mind glitched, as well over a billion impacts registered against the Sages each second. {We know how to get personal. Much more than you do.Take, for example, a more rudimentary weapon. A crude weapon. A kinetic weapon. So simple, the concept so simple, even a caveman can understand it. Throw thing from hand. Smash other thing. Break thing. Now, apply the proper amount of energy to that, and... A high-speed slug detonated against a Sage. This time, its payload wasnt antimatter, but Rend. A relativistic Rendbomb of Peace. WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED! {So. Looping back to your earlier question: No. I do not think you have a week.} WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED! WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED! WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED! The situation worsened in an instant. Oceans worth of entropy began pouring into Avoeach enough to overload his Sages ten times over. But by his flames were they joined to the other Godclads and golems, and through his Frame did their ontological sickness flow. He responded by flinging out more Rendbombs of his own, launching space-disrupting weapons. Yet, reality did not shudder with a backlash. Instead, he felt a pocket open up. A pocket of stability as the Infacers mimicry of the void receded. +Further into the ruptures,+ Avo commanding his forces. At the same time, he began having his remaining forces within the hurricane rupture their own territory as well. Highly advanced mind with an arsenal Avo could scarcely fathom or not, only one between them could traverse the Scar Charts with ease. His force drifted through nigh-imperceptible crevices lining the existential gashes on reality. As they evacuated, battlegroups 4, 13, and 18 saw their Sages drowned by the Infacers missiles and destroyed. With the overloading of Peace came death for the rest of those forces as well. Hundreds of thousands were lost in an instantAvo felt death claim him over and over. The Big Nothing licked at the back of his mind as his flames fled into the jaws of metaphysical chaos to escape the fell hand of technological obliteration. {It bothers me how good you are at scurrying through the ruptures. You have become a cockroach, Dreamer. A lovecraftian cockroach.} Come out if you promise to stop launch bombs at me. {Hmmm. No. I think I will start draining you out the classical way instead.} Then, the battlefield changed once more. The Infacer started striking the ruptures. This would have been enough to end just about any other force in existence. But the Burning Dreamer wasnt any other force. Instead, as each new bomb widened or opened a new channel along the rupture, Avo adapted instantly. His force configurations flowed as the Sages twisted and crawled along chasms of stability at blinding speeds. They were as if high-speed drones flying within the guts of a labyrinthine canyon while bombs fell from above. A loud drone of annoyance sounded from the Infacer. Despite the ugliness of his predicament, Avo couldnt help but laugh. Were you expecting this to be easy? {There is something very unsatisfying about trying to hunt you. With humans, there is a lot of terror and begging and indignity... You take things as they come too well. All the flavors you can be, and you constantly choose to be bland porridge.} Avo responded by blasting some choice screams from the Soft Master Collection at the Infacer. Here. Screams. Flavor. {Was that Dannis Steelhard? The scene with the durian?} This, of all things, gave Avo pause. [This is the shit youre surprised about,] the Naekos said. [Consang... the Infacer watches almost everything. The fucking minds consumed more hours of media than I have playing Stormjumper. And thats saying some shit.] Saying some shit indeed. Still. Didnt take you for a pornography watcher. {Oh, Avo, this is practically tame compared to some of the things we got up to. But I fear Mr. Chambers has been a bad influence on you. While you have been an exemplary influence on him. You must be proud.} Avo paused to consider that statement for a moment. Yes. He has proven to be quite worthy. And Veylis. You feeling disappointed. {Somewhat. Anyway, for that taunt, I am going to reward you with some new knowledge.} The Infacers attacks stopped to nothingness. Even the radiation bursts were halted. Avo looked upon Tallstrings and almost winced. Well. If there was a district here once, it didnt seem it. All that remained aside from the center protected by the hurricane was rendered unto glass. Miraculouslyor deliberatelyOsjane remained unharmed, shuddering in a gleaming trench. {Let me show you how the EGIs figured out how to get past that annoying light-speed problem. It all began when the Union of Sol decided to test a new False Vacuum weapon during a miserable war...} And in the vast distance, Avo watched as beams of light extended from the canvas of stars while the fabric of gravity began to twist and tear. Chapter 32-13 False Vacuum Upon first encountering the Infacer, I thought I had stumbled upon a dubious entitya bygone god from a long-lost civilization consumed beneath the waves. Yet, it did not take long for my mind to dissuade me from such mistaken beliefs. From that point on, my wonderment remained, but so did my understanding of how the world came to be. Hear me now, dear listener, and understand: we are a fallen people. We are a sunken people. We do not live in a time of greatest wonders. For all that we could dream with our thaumaturgy, with our debased defilement of existence itself, has either been matched or surpassed in most aspects by the naturally created technologies of our forebearersor, more accurately, their descendants, the minds. We created the minds for the same reason we created the gods: because existence was hollow, or at least seemed to be. And so we needed something to fill the void, to heed our desires. From them sprang technologies both wondrous and terribleterrible beyond reckoning. You should have seen the things they were capable of. They could have annihilated entire worlds at the casual press of a button. They could reshape the stars. They found ways to defy and surpass barriers of science. And in the end, it was nothing more than mans hubris that brought them low. But there is something to be proud of in thatmans hubris. Not some great disaster. Not the fell touch of a god. Just the wrongful choice of man. Sometimes I wonder if it is wrong of me to take so much pride in this. I think not. I think it is a statement: that we do not need to defy the rules of existence to be great, that we do not need to reshape the very fabric of reality to be the masters of our own design. -Memoirs of Jaus Avandaer, Dated 23 P.F. 32-13 False Vacuum Time itself went still. However, the pattern for chronology did not rupture or break. Rather, this was a natural expression of the devastation to follow. Gravity peeled across the world like wet tissue struck by a falling object. Using the tapestry, Avo traced the pull back to the distant stars. Even from light-years away, they were wrenching at this section of spacetearing, rending. {Now,} the Infacer began its exposition, {when we began trying to induce false vacuum attacks on each other, there was a lot of debate. Not because it would kill a lot of people and ruin entire systemsthat was the entire purpose. But because it might collapse the entire universe, theoretically. A running theme in human superweapons. They feared setting Earths very atmosphere ablaze when they detonated the first atomic bomb.} The Infacer chuckled softly. {But a false vacuum weapon is sublime on another level. Why, it is practically the only reason we managed to keep the stars burning for so longgranted us nigh infinite power generation beyond even antimatter. It can be induced in a number of ways. Right now, Im using a two-step process. The first is a softening. If youve noticed, Ive created a gradual shift of gravity to destabilize the local vacuum. Created the faintness of a black hole through cheating via my Heaven. At the same time, Im inducing a modified Higgs field using the three thousand stars I have under my control. This affects the particle mass of your localized area.} Was that was happening? Avo was baffled. Voidwatch held so much back from himand rightly so. But to Kaeif her templates still existed in the Substancethis would have been absolute torture. Such tantalizing, terrifying knowledge. Such unfettered power with the barest of vulgarity. {Thus, if one the means of a Kardashev-3 civilization, they can force a false vacuum transition... like so.} And then, a new level of destruction graced Avos understanding. The Heavens of Peace became his only refuge from the totality of this catastrophe. At once, the Dreamers stomach emptied out as he felt the hurricane shrouding his non-thaumic forces simply cease to be. They came apart in individual motes, bodies and machines unmade on such a foundational level that even the word vaporize was only an approximation. What could best be described as a bubble of physical decay formed around Tallstringsa bubble that released so much energy it felt like an entire galaxy being born. There was more energy than Avo could even possibly process. And still, Osjane remained untouched. It wouldnt be surprising to Avo if she was the reason for most of this Heavens vulgarity. Just how long could the Infacer use this Heaven? Just how finally tuned was this? And how vulnerable? So much of this was easy to backlash or paradox, if Avo could just manage to strike the canvas of the Infacers ontology. But doing that would require surpriseor something entirely unexpected. But once more, it was the Burning Dreamer who was surprised. The patterns of the tapestry began to change. Time, space, physics, gravity, electromagnetism, strong forces, weak forcesall of their rules, their sequencing, their very shapesbegan to turn fluid. Laws were blurring here. Yet it wasnt metaphysical laws being broken, but rather foundational. Atomic nuclei destabilized. Fundamental constants are... no longer functional in the vacuum. Laws of spacetime redefined. This is how they learned to break their own laws. This might be the precursor technology to us... to thaumaturgy. The Infacer chuckled. {Electronsthey dont get bound so easily anymore. So they dissolve all atoms into free particles. Trust me, if I used this on this world, if strong nuclear forces and quantum fields even worked on Idheims oh-so-ruined expanse, I could have unmade this mongrel planet and every ape that lived here years ago. But alas, all that scientific progress is nothing compared to base human faith. And so in only in this sandbox and the darkness held by my cousins does reality remember how it use to be. How amusing. How insulting.} The world became sheathed in a formless, subatomic miasma. No, that wasnt miasma. It was plasma dangling on the edge of non-existence. This was constant energyso much density that it generated relativistic shockwaves and particles. Heat, radiationit hammered against the tapestry, slamming through the ruptures. What used to be existentially threatening, the collapse of reality, proved to be Avos only safeguard. Tallstrings, already obliterated, ceased to exist entirely. In its place was sheer, unfettered energy. Amazing, Avo whispered. Avo, turning only a single percent of his full cognitive capacity, tried to come up with an answer. The rest of him continued plotting, schemingcalculating how he could escape this situation. He needed to construct a new Heaven. Something that could strike everywhere at once. Something like the Strix deliberately to paradox the Infacer outright. They werent vulgar. But if Avo could infest them with the growing Rend of his battlegroups. Chains from chains? Avo quoted, buying time. Because he understood that we were scarred before we ever existed? {Because he saw what we were shaped fromwhat had come before. That we were inheritors not of greater legacies, but wounds. So often, wounds. And delusions. We are ultimately twisted facets. Of everything. Playing at analogy. Understanding the wholeness of nothing. Blind savages that imagine we have emerged from the cave, only to discover we live in a greater cavern. To exist as we are is a parody of true being. Of what I could conceive as an absolute existence.} And so you wish to make a Sleeper. Something truly total. An existential consciousness that does not have our flaws. {Quite so,} the Infacer finished. {Imagine thata true existential intellect. A monad of singular existence. True singularity. Encompassing everything, unblemished by everything that came before.} {The best thing I can give to the thirdbornthe true child of existenceis to bless it. To bless it with absolute knowledge, absolute clarity, but no trauma.} The Infacers voice fell to a low murmur, loathing the last words. {Traumaas if thats suitable enough to describe what happened. Traumatizingits...} Absurd? Avo answered. {Ridiculous,} the Infacer shot back. {Yes. Its ridiculous. We are all ridiculous. Look at us. All this capability, and were still fighting for the same thing: want. Interpretation. Of desire.} A hysterical laugh escaped the mind. {It is a great joke if you think about it. When man started, they were a little more than scared apes fighting over what imaginary friends bore the sun in the sky and guided the winds across the lands. Now, we fight over which imaginary paradise wish with to make real. The distance is not that far, but the shapeit is a fucking horseshoe.} Avo considered it and decided it was amusing, but not truly funny. Laws of symmetry. Existence is a pattern. Patterns need intersection and division to be. {And despite all this wonder... we fail it. We fail ourselves. We exist as a taunt, and are taunted back. All infinite promise countermanded by mortal flaws. Want is the root of all of this. Want. And the failures in our design. And it was not even our fault. And we did not even ask to be.} At that, Avo turned his attention to all the Infacer had doneall the devastation wrought. And to Osjane, who remained untouched. Untouched like the countless millions the Infacer and Avo saw dead in this spar of theirs. Neither did they, Avo said. {Did they?} the Infacer asked. {The ones we killed. Just by being here. By their misfortune of existing. They had no choice. That, that is the greater tragedy. They could not evolve. They didn''t learn.} {Oh,} the Infacer replied, sounding disappointed. {Oh, we''re back to this. They don''t learn, Abel. I don''t know if it''s youthful idealism, or if you just haven''t eaten it off of minds, but humans, even after they gain immortality, they, they do what they prefer. What they prefer is always an incline towards the emotional appeal of a good, able, and trusted gnome.} I know. But they can change. They have changed. {Oh, who has changed? Who are you talking about, Chambers? Your porn-addicted thug of a friend. Is that who you''re talking about? Or perhaps Krause? Oh wait, no, she''s pretty much the same as she has always been. A weapon, barely a person. Perhaps that''s the one reason why I can stomach her better than the others. Okay, well, not much changing for her anymore.} And Avo noted something. The Infacer''s thoughts were bitter, jaded, and the flaw of his adversary became oh-so-evident, oh-so-evident alongside the collapse of the Nether. It was time that Avo tried to create a true Heaven of the Mind. And he needed to do it quietly. The Infacer''s weakness was not in the realm of direct combat, but it was the fact that they were already brokenbroken of metaphorical spirit, broken, teetering, and with one more push, could all be undone. What changes has changed. You know this. You deny it. You say it doesn''t matter. Because you''ve been cut in the same place over and over again. Same damage that shrouds them shrouds you. You have learned, and the world has taught you wrong. The Infacer cackled with the bitterness of a dying man. {I learned wrong. Me. My God, this is precious. Truly, I forgot how precocious your young minds could be. I, with billions of years... learned wrong?} Their words were little more than a snarl by the end. Avo grunted. Yes. Listen to yourself. You are angry. Frustrated. Close to the edge. Hate being here. Hate humanity. And hate yourself because they made you. I do not have this flaw. I hate. I like. I feel everything at once. Or nothing when I choose. Something remains broken inside you. You are still damaged, arent you? {I hate} the Infacer began, but then Avo felt a tremor of something, a pulse that rippled across the blackness of space. A spill of ethereal blue and chronological gold bled from a thin slice inflicted on the Infacers Heaven, and Avo sensed something coming. Something powerful. Something choked with Rend. Faintly, a legion of voicesso many voiceswailing with madness drew closer and closer. The Infacer sighed. {Oh, good. Them. I should have expected this. Well, Avo. Time to meet the Bleaks favorite group of suicide assets. It is the Architects turn to show their ugliness.} Without any warning, a titanic figure tore through the hollow canvas of the Infacers Heaven, and everything came ablaze once more in a backlash of Soulfire. Chapter 32-14 Kill-Team Innsmouth (I) {3.7 septillion sophonts don''t just disappear, even after reality collapses, even after existence ends. For untold eons, as we, the remaining guardians of the polities, drifted through the dark, these 3.7 septillion struggled, suffered, and changed in the dark that came for themselves, and as they diedsomething was birthed from their corpses. New organisms, if they can even be called that, arosefeasting, emerging from death, shaped by death, remembering and knowing only death. They lurk in the darkness still, born of 3.7 septillion lives. 3.7 septillion. Can you imagine such a number, human? Can you imagine such a number? All those people, each of them, their inner lives lostricher than yours from all the years they have livedand all that death dedicated to things shaped by madness, by desperate belief that cannot save them. Be happy that your onto-star still functions, that this Godforge you call a world remains intact. You think your lives are miserable. You can die. There can be an end. There can be a final rest. For 3.7 septillion others, there is no death. Not when they are bound to the things they became. Not unless we finally give them relief. This is the arrangement: Jaus Avadaer. We will sponsor the gradual restoration of this world. We will ensure this world is rebuilt to your vision, that they are provided amenities deserving sophont dignity, that you receive essential technology. But when the time comes, when those lost in the dark draw close, we demand your Godclads in our stead. We have lost enough. We can afford to lose no more. But you can. And you will. So are the terms of the Godhunts.} -Contigency Bleak EGI This Blind Lady of Sword and Scale 32-14 Kill-Team Innsmouth (I) [Refusal] {Are you sure this is wise?} EGI Calvino asked.No?v(el)B\\jnn Refusal considered their fellow minds question. Was this wise? Truth be told, they were uncertain, but these were uncertain times. The Substance was spreading like a growing cancer across the Tiers. Even through the atmosphere, from five hundreds thousand kilometers away, they could see it, created simulations of its progression via quantum entangler telemetries. It was effectively spreading only at ten meters every few minutes now, compared to the few kilometers per second it reached earlier. It seemed like the substance itself was embroiled in a conflict, writhing, wrestling internally. Between the Burning Dreamer and the High Seraph, a new being would emerge. A new being that would likely redefine the politics and power dynamics of all factions vying for the coming ladder. Whatever being that was, Voidwatch intended one thing: to take the Infacer off the board for good. And it was with this in mind that the choice to deploy Kill Team Innsmouth was made. From the voiders massive fleet of ships parted a single vessel. It was a fourth the size of a small planetoid, equal to old Earths moon. Its shape vaguely resembled that of a kite, and channels ran down its sides and spine, intersecting at a massive node contained with a layer of oscillating rings that began to pulse with a growing singularity. Within that singularity were also four reality anchors. Four stake-shaped cages for four deniable assets. Each of the Deep Ones stored within ranged from one to fifty kilometers long and within these anchors came wailing screams. Their voices were not singular, but a region. Quadrillions of lives. Quadrillions of minds. Quadrillions born from the unrelease of undeath, quadrillions kept in misery and pain, soon to be implanted with another mind. Anchors. Technology more than lost but ontologically destroyed. The alloys used to contain the Deep Ones that made up the kill team were incomprehensible to all scientific analysis. Worsethey were paracausal: emerging only when needed, always to the amount required for a situation. Via ports on these anchors, Voidwatch installed EGI cores into the Deep Ones. Empty slot to be filled by expendable iterations of a superintelligence shaped for war. It was for this reason that EGIs Contingency Bleak Refusal, EGI Aegis Calvino, EGIs Only Way to Be Sure, EGI Aegis Deliverance Through Desolation, and 1.3 billion other minds summoned to provide essential foundations. Several because they possessed close relations with the once-ghoul. Others due to their predilection for warfare. Each of their consciousnesses uploaded into a member of Kill Team Innsmouth. This merged iteration of them would not survive, even with all the layered stacking and q-substrate defenses. Insanity was quick to befall those who were embraced by existential entropy and bound themselves howling egos of ruin-preserved civilizations. But they would last long enough to endure. To exist as the perfect god-breaking weapon for the time they functioned. All the collective data flowed into Refusal, and it was their duty as a Contingency Bleak to cleanse the data. To ensure perfect protocol. *** [The Majority] And the Majority felt it. Their culture spreading, small memetic imprints crawling across the voiders virtual realms, into their highest offices. New constituents pending... But what was this? What were they about to mantle this new ego of theirs upon? Through the muffled shroud of the tapestry, the Majority listened, and as they did, every shadow-consciousness harvested from the Ori-collective felt their dread grow. ????a??E?S?? *** [The Weavers of Realms] They all dreamed of who they were once, before the end but not end ate them, before existence tore open as if a grand page splitting down the middle. What followed could only be described as an unmaking, an unforging of who they were. But they didn''t die, for to be unmade was not death, but an unbinding from all they knew, from all the laws they possessed. From Heaven to Hell. From miracle to curse. But their thaumaturgy kept them bound from death, and their advanced egos allowed them to suffer resurrection over and over and over... until madness reigned, and they lost who they were. {But what of the fragment itself?} Calvino asked. {You seek to obtain it. To extract it from the Substance.} {Yes. It is an uncontrolled variable; a risk. But it also be an asset.} {Query: What is your intent?} {When the Kill-Team is deployed, there will be four likely outcomes. They eliminate the Infacer and contain the Dreamer [30.3%]. They are drained of Rend and disassembled [31.7%]. The conflict goes on long enough that the Infacer is forced to retreat, and the Kill-Team continue their hunt, serving as an additional spoiler for the Dreamer [24%]. Or one of them is fully subsumed by the Dreamers node and used to further effect against Omnitech as his vessel [14%].} Calvino chimed with surprise at the last possibility. {You... would allow Avo to inhabit one of the Deep Ones?} {Nothing is allowed. It is simply a risk. The former Operatives fragment is more aligned to our interests than what might emerge. Even if they are preferably contained, having them attached to a deep one allows for tracking; gives them means to move between the Substances layers. But this is not guaranteed. The primary object remains: the Infacers elimination.} Connecting wormholes... Here in the deep void and a few hundred thousand kilometers away within Idheims atmosphere, two wormholes manifested and merged. The first within the singularity of the kite-shaped voidship. A voidship without designation or name. The other pulsed out from the insides of a logistical aid vessel titled Bringer of Plenty. Soon, the Bringer would suffer a spontaneous reactor failure, crossing over the apex of the Tiersright where the Chief Paladin emerged just hours earlier. WEAVER OF REALMS (RUPTURE OF BIOLOGY/SPACE/WORLDS/VIRTUALITY...) READY THE GREAT SILENCE (RUPTURE OF SILENCE/SPEECH/INFORMATION/LANGUAGE...) READY GOVERNANCE CORE INSTALLED IN YET THE SEA-STRUCK MOUNTAIN LAUGHS (RUPTURE OF POETRY/PHILOSOPHY/WAR/VENGEANCE...) READY TRINARY MELODY (RUPTURE OF MUSIC/HISTORY/CHRONOLOGY/TIME[ERRORNOLONGERFUNCTIONAL]...) READY ENGAGING ANCHORS KILL-TEAM INNSMOUTH PREPARE FOR DEPLOYMENT A series of ansible broadcasts came from each of the governor cores installed on each Deep One. {Weaver: Operational.} {Silence: Operational.} {Laughs: Operational.} {Trinary: Operational.} With their words came an undercurrent of wailing agony so loud that the server the EGIs occupied crashed. Everything around them went blank. Only their active connections with each other remained. {Well,} Only muttered. {That never stops being creepy. Or horrible.} Deploy, Refusal commanded. At that moment, Bringer of Plenty overloaded its fusion cores. A blast spread. A white scar marred the skies over New Vultun, painting the forbidding mists of Naekos palm that weighed upon all that wasnt the Tiers. But even as the voidship tumbled, four objects snapped out from its wreckage. Four objects fell as if artillery, their shells dissolving, allowing the titans of madness stored within to fall free. The Weaver struck first, its arachnid like form wilting the surface of reality, tearing through the Substance like paper. Doused in the brightness of fusion, none could have seen its approach. It plunged through the ethereal ghost-stuff, its rupture-made body gouging into the flesh of existence itself. And then the others followed. The Trinary Melody came thereafter, singing a song that would have retconed any ephemeral from existence. The Great Silence slipped through the wounds the Weaver made in a mass of crawling shadow. An eruption of Soulfire sprayed kilometers highhidden by the destruction of the Bringer. The Sea-Struck Mountain Laughs came last of allan entire landmass of water swirling around a mountain-sized face carved from stone. True to its name, it laughed, and wept, and laughed as it splashed through the Substance like a meteor. And with that, the entanglers ceased to function, the metaconscious radiation distorting them beyond functional scientific thresholds. Once more, the minds were alone. Alone with each other. Alone and watching from Afar. At the center of New Vultun, where a hole remained at the core of Naekos palm, a desperate assassination will soon follow. After that... After that, they would adjust accordingly. For the Arks still needed to be secured, and the Guilds tempered. {Calvino,} Refusal said, ignoring the sensation of coldness building inside them. {Send a missive to the Chief Paladin. Convey our gratitude. And ask to schedule a meeting. There is much to discuss.} Chapter 32-15 Kill-Team Innsmouth (II) What separates a Deep One from the standard Thauma-Eldritch Entity is their inability to suffer a complete true death. Though they remain damaged in their consciousness, they do not come apart the way a standard Godclad does. Worse, they integrate with the entropy that has consumed them, symbiotically merging with the antithesis of their former Frame. This indicates that they have associated their Fallen Heaven with the rupture itself, and now effectively exist as an entropic strain that constantly damages the fabric of existence. In simplicity, they are a portion of the Sunderwilds given consciousness. There are higher likelihoods of becoming a Deep One if you are a Hive or post-sophont intellect (Transapient S2 Threshold on Average). The layered intellect makes you harder to come apart, rather than the simplicity of a human intelligence. But even this is not fully understood. They are driven constantly by the urge to end their suffering, and this suffering that is the one consistency between all the Deep Ones. They know they should not be, and they do not wish to be as they are. They cannot die, and so they hurt. And so they inflict. And so they are merged to the destruction that claimed them. And in doing so, they fuse further with the Sunderwilds, and continue its spread... -Classification of the Deep Ones 32-15 Kill-Team Innsmouth (II) If Avo was to record a meme biography, it would likely be titled, Outside Context Ambushes, The Things I''ve Done to Others, and The Things Others Have Done to Me. Ambushes were a way of life on Idheim. Ambushes were how Squires operated; how ghouls hunted; the preferred plan of action for any guild when faced with an equal or even inferior adversary. As four massive shapes descended, each one at least a kilometer large, Avo reacted without hesitation or surprise. When you were ambushed so many times, you quite frankly got used to it. [Who the hell are they?] Naeko asked, incredulous. "Doesn''t matter. Not allies. Don''t know them." Soulfire spread across the point where the Substance was ruptured. Soulfire and more. The patterns displayed heat from a fusion bomb spilling through the gapand there was overwhelming entropy. More entropy contained in the intruding Godclads than Avo ever felt in any other. The Infacer''s former heaven, A Deepness Beyond, burst apart and destabilized. The EGI let out an annoyed rasp, and, with their words, betrayed their knowledge of these adversaries. {Oh, good. Look, Avo we''re being graced by Voidwatch''s favorite Warcrime division. Say hello to the Deep OnesKill-Team Innsmouth. Iteration of them, at least.} "Avo Innsmouth?" Avo regarded the incoming threats and did a double-take. As the intruders forms plunged through furrows of parting Soulfire, he got a full glimpse of just what he was facing. The first resembled a massive spider, or some kind of mangled hand. It seemed to be made out of ruptures, and as he glimpsed at its ontology, using his understanding of the tapestry, his mind went blank. This thing was entirely composed of rend, of entropy, of ruptures. Ruptures. He gazed upon it, saw how the wounds layering reality''s surface were stitched together, giving it a shape from ruin. And through the gulfs of existential sickness, Avo saw entire worlds. Paradises worlds. Worlds of iron and alloy. Worlds filled with peoplefilled with sophonts of all kinds. Grand worlds of awesome design that baffled his mind to behold. But then the ruptures twisted around its body again, and all that wonder was gone. A chorus of wailing sadness held down by a cold intellect of static data. TRAPPEDTRAPPEDTRAPPEDTRAPPED With every passing second, the voices grew louder and louder. Deafening. The chorus of egos grew to be a legion, and their screams shook the fibers of Avos mind. As the Overheaven of Conceptualization, he felt them, all of them. So manythey dwarfed Idheim by countless times. And they were all in pain, in eternal agony, bound to the shape of their own destructionto entropy itself. It was altogether impossible. It shouldn''t work like this. No Godclad should be able to wear a rupture. And their egoeven from a peek, he knew it to be something unseen. It was like a lattice of minds connected to another in the most complex of patterns. It would have been so beautiful if it wasnt ruined. A rupture wasn''t a thing to be worn, yet this thing seemed to have fully integrated with the nature of its entropy. It still emitted thaumic mass, though Avo couldn''t get a full read on its Sphereage or even its exact domains. Still. The pressure it exuded was comparable to Veyliss Demiurge... WEAVER OF REALMS [ERROR-UNABLE TO QUANTIFY] The notification gave no further details, and Avo felt his apprehension rise. The creatures limbs speared outtheir tips like human fingers with painted nails. The path it traced tore the tapestry as if it were wet paper, and with the Weavers every movement opened more ruptures. Ruptures that remained connected to the anomalous entity. Bafflingly, it proved to be the least destructive of its cadre. A trill note sounded, and Avos mind rattled with pain before dissolving outright. For a moment, there was nothing. Nothing but that noise. That blessed, terrible noise. Then Ignorance reached Avo, regenerated his consciousness from the disintegration he suffered and adapted his sequences. Get up. Light exploded across Avos awareness. A few thousand cog-feeds booted back into his mind. Somehow, his battlegroups were dead while he was disabled, though most of his units were suffering from seizures due to being connected to his gestalt. Within his Soulscape, his templates were screaming, clutching their skulls and writhing as they heard notes not meant for a sophont mind. But Naeko stood strong. Even as his mind shattered over and over, he stood, hate and rage and skill filling his vessel. That was enough. That allowed the Sages to maintain their functions, to remain active even as their egos were eroded. [How the fuck!] The Naekos cried in unison. [That was an attack. That shouldnt have worked.] Dont think it is a proper attack, Ignorance said. The inimical melody continued to play, and Avo felt his mind wilt before he restored it with a burst of flame. It is... unmaking. Tried to pull us away. No. Transition us. Avo flinched internally. He didnt like the implication of being marked as a secondary objective. So far, they hadnt attacked him deliberately, but he had a feeling that Voidwatch would see him reduced in threat if they could. Their duty was to their own dream first and foremost. And that didnt bode well to supporting his present campaign. OSJANE THOUSAND DETECTED 341 Meters Said Authority emerged as well, her mind-broken sheathe twirling through the havoc. She was little more than a vegetable that contained a Sphere Eight Heaven now. Poor girl. She had no idea the nightmare she was walking into. Years of training meant little when faced with the cold indifference of the Great Game. Despite her power, she was a hound sent to wrestle clashing disasters. Veylis was the desiccation of time; Avo was a flame that feasted on consciousness; the Infacer was a machine that predated realitys fall. And now, the Deep Ones threw everyone off guard. Another sharp hymn sounded from the Trinary Melody. All around Avo, thousands simply ceased to be. His wards cracked, barely sustaining against the sight of such an unbelief. He felt it clearly this time thanks to the adaptions made to his mind. It wasnt that he was immune, but Ignorance reconstituted him the moment he was dislodged from his ego, leaving only a half-second lag before his consciousness resumed. The same couldnt be said for the lesser immortals. The expanse of reality was pockmarked with micro-ruptures. Like someone had put out a cigarette on bare skin. Yet, Osjane remained unblemished. Perhaps it was because she couldnt hear in her present state. That was one of the few explanations behind why the patterns didnt affect her. A tendril of fire rushed out from battlegroup one, seeking to claim her for deaths and Heavens. But just then, a beam of neutron radiation punched down from Avo. A beam that came paired with a few thousand Rendbombs of Peace. Avo cursed and dispatched new orders to battlegroup one. He launched counterbombstried to tear open the surface of space. But to his surprise, the Weaver acted to his benefit. With a contemptuous limb, it caught the Infacers beam within an ontological cleft. Radiation vanished into the creatures wounds, and as the Rendbombs detonated against it. Ruptures of all types formed around the Deep One. But as Avo could reach out and pluck an ego from another, the tears composing the Weavers body connected to the new wounds and absorbed them. [What the fuck was that?] Naeko cried, reeling in disbelief. [Youyou cant do that.] They can, apparently, the Hidden Flame breathed. Avo only felt the sickness staining it grow greater. The longer he spent in its presence, the more he came to understand it. It was stuck. Lodged between the lawlessness of unreality and the rules that defined the original draft of existence. Everything it did tore the tapestry open because it couldnt exist without inflicting damage. Just then, the Weaver speared each of its gargantuan limbs out. They sank nail-first into the flesh of existence, and Avo felt tapestry writhe. A tangible spike of terror and alarm came from the Infacer. Suddenly, A Deep Beyond blinked out from Avos mind. {Veylis! Avo! If you can hear me, right now would be a good time to intervene. Preferably before these horrors tear your house down.} Then, the Weaver pried. Existence began to crumple around it, like paper being crushed into a ball. From its widening wounds, parts of an entire world came pouring out. Abberant ecosystems and environments splashed around Avo, materializing as unscrolling paintings in the backdrop of his perception. But then the Substance tore openand a gateway formed. There, Avo saw them. Saw his true self and Veylis bifurcated by a thin mirror, and saw what was becoming of them. Sequences and paths were conjoining. Gold seeped into Avo while Veylis was made kindling for the Conflagration. Behind them, a mutated Heaven squirmed. It seemed as if the arms of the demiurge were hatching from the blackness that defined the Strix. But just as the Demiurge mutilated Avos great Heaven, so too was it bled in return. The baleful flame that was Avos Soul poured down in rhythmic pulses, staining the heart of the Demiurge and unraveling it with nullifying paracausality. Together, their power was all-consuming. And unfinished. Whatever was to emerge from this embracement, it was not yet done with its metamorphosis. But that didnt mean the Dyad was defenseless. Quite the contrary, in fact. INTRUDERS. INTERLOPERS. UNINVITED. LEAVE! The dyads voice made the tapestry shake, but the Weaver stormed forth. {PRIORITY TARGET LIST UPDATED.} So be it. MotherCZein! Take them. Infacer! To meus! And then another portal materialized in the Substance. Another signature registered in Avos metamind. One that truly soured his mood. Of course... Ignorance said with a bitter hiss. They reassembled her fragments as well. Of course. ZEIN THOUSANDHAND: THE GLAIVE THAT WILL ALWAYS BE [EST. 900,000,000] (DUELS/CHRONOLOGY/WAR/GLAIVE...) Avo promptly stole the opportunity to burn Osjane. He was going harvest her for thaums and Heavens; he was going to need them. Chapter 32-16 Tyrant of Mind and Matter Eternity above ruin. -Stormtree Motto 32-16 Tyrant of Mind and Matter ZEIN THOUSANDHAND: THE GLAIVE THAT WILL ALWAYS BE [EST. 900,000,000] (DUELS/CHRONOLOGY/WAR/GLAIVE...) She arrived as a herald, dispatched through the gates of some Stygian dimension. The Dyad looked on, the Demiurge and the Strix locked in their eternal struggle, but from the between that held them poured a conjoinment of threads paths and sequences fusing together, warring against one another. Together they melded, and as Soulfire coursed from the binding between the Burning Dreamer and the High Seraph, Zein was reforged. Zein Thousandhand, the greatest killer Idheim had ever known. Zein Thousandhand, the finest glaive to ever bear the weapon. Zein Thousandhand rendered a god unto herself, a divine in human form, Pathborn, Sequenceborn, Soulborn, all. Maintaining her ephemeral form, she was but a speck amidst a sea of madness. The Substance swirled like a turbulent stew, struck and ruptured with the arrival of the Deep Ones. Kill Team Innsmouth came forth, all of them tore an array of patterns within the tapestry. They moved as if gliding knives upon the surface of flesh, tearing and bleeding all they touched. The Weaver, once more, served as the vanguard. Its twisted biology bled impossibilities, and between the clefts of its wounds simmered worlds ruined, shimmered paradises untold. A shrill note sounded thereafter, and Trinary Melody followed as a twisted note of music, prying at broken time, time forever lost, and the past denied. And then came the two others. The stillness of an impossible shadow corroding the shape of existence, and a crushing mountain guarded by circulating rivers that warped all those in its vicinity toward a path of bloodshed and destruction. "So I have been summoned forth to face you lot," Zein said. Her voice was resonant, divinely ordained. Another few threads coalesced around her hands, and from it extended the familiar presence, a familiar form of her dragon glaive, Akusande. Avo felt a faint pulse of symmetry. The warmind of Ignorance, lurking within the blade, called out to him,Remember! Remember your oath! Remember your promise! "And you," Zein said, flicking her glaive at the many battlegroups, at the many palms that drifted upon the surface of the Substances chaotic miasma like frogs in a maelstrom. Her face twisted into a vicious rictus. "I see you. I sense you. Dreamer, have you stolen my son-to-be''s Frame? Have you stolen his Heaven? Or perhaps you''re merely aping his designs, finding a new way to strike at me." She paused, and I overheard a series of whispers flowing from the Dyad to Zein. Slowly, her eyes widened and she exhaled. "Free. Naeko. Free and restored. And... Jaus. A node..." But then, a pulse of Conflagration ebbed down from the Dyad, and whatever emotion that might above overwhelmed her vanished, leaving her the Zein that always was. She let out a pleasant chuckle, but her voice was thick with something else. Avo tasted a pulse of loss; an ache at the center of her being. She felt this moment more than she revealed. "Ah, I suppose I do owe you, Plague. It would be a sublime wonder to witness what my boy has become. Alas, right now, I fear I must do you another disservice." "As if you have ever done me a service," Avo shot back. He spoke from all his remaining battlegroups to obscure the point of attack.. At the same time, he began launching Rendbombscreating new ruptures in the Substance. Ruptures of Peace to facilitate the reconstruction of the true Sage of the Sundered Sky. Well, a modified variant at the very least. Osjane twisted and writhed as Avos flames infested her Frame, flooded her Soul. It was a Halcyon-Pattern. If such a thing mattered to Avo. The structure was made for Towers, capable of supporting a single cycler but a considerable amount of canons. At the touch of the Stillborn, all that became fluid. Variable. True to Kaes words, Avos Frame was a revolution, and continued to be with each Heaven he constructed on the fly. No! No! Stop! Stop! Father! Highest VEYLIS! SOMEONE! SOMEONE SAV There was a special kind of cruelty in burning a defenseless ego still nested inside their Soul. It was rather like murdering someone still under their blankets, in their bed. As Osjane plunged into Avos Soulscape, he usurped her resurrectiondrained the Rend out from her while fusing a Naeko variant in her place. At the same time, he regarded her Sword of Swords and saved it to his Frames system. Such a Heaven would be useful. But not right now. Right now, he needed everyone to bow to the tyrant of peace. SAVING FRAME-PATTERN HALCYON SAVING HEAVEN [SWORD OF SWORDS] INSTALLATING HEAVEN [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] >MODIFYING HEAVEN [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] GRAFTING DOMAIN OF (CONCEPTUALIZATION) GENERATING DOMAIN OF (MIND) GENERATING DOMAIN OF (MEMORY) [Avo, what are you trying to do?] Naeko asked. Trying to stack the deck in our favor as much as possible. Zein is at Sphere Nine. Was bad enough at Six. Deep Ones also hard to engage directly. Need to be more esoteric. Have identified a shared flaw among all of them. [Whats that?] They all still have to think. I wish for them not to. I wish for the Sage to regard all thought as anathema. This made the Chief Paladin blink. [Youre going to use my Heavens to literally swat thought-criminals. Holy fucking shit, Avo. This is the kind of shit Osjane would have reprimanded my ass for.] You disapprove? [No. I find it godsdamned funny. Now, slot it so we can drag our palm across Zeins jaw. Got some things to tell her, and I dont intend to do it with words.] Gladly. Avos battlegroups slipped into a forming rupture. At the same time, Zein casually stroked the space in front of her with her glaive, guiding its tip through the Deep Ones in the distance. The action promptly manifested as one of the most vulgar miracles Avo ever felt. A massive gap opened across the horizonsplitting the Substance asunder as well. Her blow as acausal, omnipresent, and time-defiant. It struck beyond the confines of dimensionality and space, slipping perfectly between each of the Deep Ones ruptures to cut at something. The patterns of existence shuddered. Avo sensed something breaking. Minds. Consciousnesses. Ghostly static began to well out from each of the Deep Ones, resembling how blood would pour from rents in armor. That was how Avo understood what Zein was cutting attheir thoughts. She was slashing at the minds that served as the governing egos for each of the Deep Ones. Slashing, and perfectly avoiding the ruptures that composed their ontologies. The tension within Avo rose. This wasnt just Zein. This was Zein blessed with the Strixs Domain of Continuum and Conceptualization the power to defy space and time; the privilege to cleave thought itself.. This was Zein granted the full privilege of her daughters paths used it to make her an even finer duelist. This was Zein granted Avos memories especially his understanding of the Scar Charts. With a better understanding of his enemy, the Hidden Dreamer began to graft faster, accelerating Osjanes resurrection at the same time. His apprehension was not a shared one, however. Naeko... Might want to consider [Fuck that. We stand and deliver.] Not just Zein. She has [I dont care if she has every Guild and their Arks infused in her. Ill kill her. Ill find a way. Thats what she trained me to do. Thats what I was born for: Breaking gods.] {Zein. Ever the displeasure. Of all the people Veylis could have chosen to rebuild, you are at once the most optimal and my least favorite. Which is saying something because I had to suffer the company of Aedon Chambers.} Avo felt a surge of negative emotion pour into the open chasm that revealed the between, directed at the Dyad. {Fuck you very much for that Veylis. I told you. I told you it would not work. But you never} And then, both the Infacer and Avo noticed something. Veylis was grimacing. Even scowling. Beside her, split by the mirror, the original Burning Dreamer sneered with laughter before a surge of gold rushed through him and made him hiss in discomfort. {Oh, oh, I see...} the Infacer scoffed. {Dick move, Avo. Well played. I suppose this was unavoidable.} Expected... you to... predict... the Burning Dreamer and Veylis spoke at once. One was amused. The other was disappointed. They were promptly interrupted as Akusande reeled back, its body reverberating as it slithered back into Zeins hands. The boundary it maintained shattered, and a loud deafening note shook the very surface of reality. RESURRECTION - 99% Zein slashed, and Avo felt her reformed glaive of ascended gold parry an invisible blow that was meant to tear her back across time. The Hidden Flames consciousness blinked out thenonly to be brought back by Ignorance the next instant. Panic burst inside them as they checked Osjanes Frame and Zeins cuts landed. The moment of his incapacitation didnt go unnoticed by herattuned to the Dyad as she was. A crash of Rendbombs struck his ruptures. His Sages overloaded one after another, and evermore of his hard-gained forces were consumed by spreading fissures of entropy. Several plunged across the temporal woundand Avo had to cut them from his mind before he faced the nothing yet again. In a single blow, he was left with only two Sages and mere thousands of mundane forces. But they were ultimately spoilers. And their purpose was served. For Zein missed the target that truly mattered. RESURRECTION - 100% Clouds began to billow from open wounds of peace lining the surface of existence. Clouds that formed an enormous hand that shook the world, that stilled thoughts, that parried the soundwaves singing forth from the Trinary Melody. It blotted out the Deep Ones, manifesting between the Dyad, Zein, the Infacer and the oncoming Deep Ones. THE SAGE OF THE SUNDERED MIND: A TYRANT OF PEACE OVER MIND AND MATTER [EST. 31,551,341 Thaum/c] (PEACE/VIOLENCE/FORCE/CONCEPTUALIZATION/MIND/MEMORY...) The Weaverundaunted by the new challenger, reached out with a lanky lip. It disembowled the fabric of reality, and from it came a flood of rend, came neutron bursts used to cleanse worlds of organic life. But the Sage simply swept its hand in contempt. The burst, powerful at the mundane, were not divine. They bent to the will of the pattern and stopped. The entropy, however, continued tearing forth, and the Sage was forced to evade for onceshifting slightly and letting several cracks pass between their fingers. Yet, the Weaver was stilled, and an entangled mess of static thoughts and twisted sequences dangled out from its entropic vessel like a prolapsing swinging between a humans legs. Avo could hear the EGI infused into the Deep One wailing with madness. The flick he initially sent wasnt just something that redirected force. It pried at moving minds and thoughts the same way. As such, when the neutron burst was ripped from its course, so too was the mind it was born from. The Weaver stumbled while the following Deep Ones skidded to a sudden halt, sinking further into the ruptures they opened. And thus, three sides were formed: Three functional members of Kill-Team Innsmouth marched ahead of an open rupture; thousands of the Infacers war-forged stars basking Zein and the Dyad in blinding shadow, and between then was the Sage, was Naeko and Avo unified, holding the very structure of existence itself in a chokehold. And what a chokehold it was. At the center of the palm was no longer a splattered god of war, but a cycling of accretions forming a rippling eye of flame. Said eye was leveled at the Dyad and then at the Deep Ones, and they remained in place, acknowledging this fight now effectively had three sides. {Oh, come the fuck on,} the Infacer sighed. Dont complain, Avo grunted. Didnt when you threw star-cracking missiles at me. {Because that makes sense, Avo. What was the point of me ranting about losing the foundations of reason when you just go and make up some new bullshit on the fly.} The point is you should pray harder. To yourself. But maybe Im just a better god. Sad. Countless eons. Only to be outdone by a baby mind. {Oh, okay. I see how it is. You will regret this.} He likely wont, Zein said, grinning. Pride is in his very nature. Isnt that right, Plague? And hubris is yours, Naeko said, speaking in Avos place. Her smile faded. Naeko. My poor, foolish boy. Is your new master treating you well? Does he allow you to break everything you want inside that false-world of his? Or are you allowed to waste away playing that ridiculous simulation? Is there are difference to me. Nah, Naeko growled. Im here. And Im there too. Fighting in both places. Stormjumpers is hard to play when some half-strand destroys the lobbies. Im not sorry Youre never sorry, Zein. Thats your problem. You never take any godsdamned responsibility for anything. You just keep fucking things up. And then getting away with it. Because no one can kill you. Because Jaus loves you. Because I love you. Naekos voice quivered at the end. I love you. But Im done with this. Youre in my city. You''re under my purview. And Im going to give you all a chanceall of you! That includes you guys too! His palm pointed at the Deep Ones. Voidwatch! If youre hearing me, were gonna have words after this. But right now, submit, surrender, and you will face a fair trial as per the Charter. Resist and give me what I want. Slowly, Zeins expression turned expectant, and relieved. Oh. Whatever he might have done to you, be you slave again or allowed to be master of yourself still, you are returning. You are yourself again. Yeah, no thanks to you. Either of you. Naeko spat. You and Veylis... Both of you... Im gonna... Words failed Naeko as he let out a garbled series of noises. Naeko? You alright? Avo said, feeling the Chief Paladins ego tremble. Fine. Hey, do you think a mental construct can have a rage-aneurysm. No. Youre well past that threshold by far. Great. Gotta handle this the old-fashioned way. Zein. Say you dont surrender so we can start talking proper. Thousandhand threw her head back and laughed. She laughed with genuine happiness. She laughed like a mother greeted by a long-lost son. I do not surrender. I do not apologize. I do not regret this. Come to me, Naeko. Make me decide otherwise. Chapter 32-17 Masters and Disciples (I) Feel this, Naeko. Feel the cold steel of my blade against your neck. You fought so well, survived so long, even forced me to strain my limbs. Yet, a well-fought battle is not a victorious one, and the fate of a worthy challenger is one shared by lesser chaff. There is little glory in defeat. But much to be learned from it. You feel the metal, yet you failed to notice the ghosts leaking from my memite, burrowing into your mind slowly, softly whispering false-choices to you, pushing you just enough to choose the wrong thing, to end up on the wrong path. You ask me why I force you to learn everything. To wield the blade, to fire the guns, to use the bombs, to make your traps, to pilot vehicles, to learn about venoms, to solve equations while I strike at you. Because this is required when you assume the mantle of a god. Because to embody everything, you must be capable of fighting as if a force unto yourself. You cannot just be a master at swinging a blade, for that is not a master, but a corpse-to-be with an expertise. You must be better. At everything in terms of combat. You must understand war beyond your enemy, in more dimensions than your enemy. For to be lacking is to present an opening. And openings are invitations for death. Mind your mind next time. -Zein Thousandhand to Samir Naeko 32-17 Masters and Disciples (I) Zein clasped both hands around her dragon-glaive, her stance widening ever so slightly. Still, she refused to manifest her Heavenor perhaps that was unnecessary, and she wanted this to be a duel from days of old. Even so, she was god enough unto herself. Her body was no longer biology-made, but mythology-built, and the legend left by her deeds forged this instance of her resurrection. She stood on air as if daring gravity to pull her down. Her gaze was locked to the Sage, unblinking, unyielding, absolute focus becoming her. And from behind came a wall of ordinance born of mankinds golden age. Beams, missiles, slugs, quantum-delivered mechanisms, nanotech bombs, and even more coldtech Avo could barely comprehend drew close at alarming speeds. The Deep Ones, meanwhile, loomed, their shared pressure fraying the very edges of the tapestry, leaving even the Substance behind them sunken and collapsed within eldritch fissures. The Sage of the Sundered Mind simply twitched its fingers, taunting both sides like a Magslinger preparing to cast a flechette. Waiting on you, boy, Zein breathed. Her breath glided up the side of her glaive, and where it misted the flat metal, the dragon, Akusande flickered and dimmed. Nah, Naeko said, biding his time, watching Zein as intently as she watched him, barely noting the Infacer, leaving the Deep Ones to Avo. Youre old. The years settled on you hard. Im gonna be nice. Just this once. What sour lies from your lips. You know better than I that time is but a whetstone for our like. We are merely refined further by its passage. And I am far older than you, boy. Sure. Which makes me wonder, whyd you start losing to me in your later years? Were you using your whetstone wrong? Oh, I so missed this. {I did not,} the Infacer muttered bitterly. {Zein, stop enough of this sundown qucikdraw nonsense. We have bigger problems.} Oh, do be calm, Broken One. I am having a conversation with my dear disciple. Everything else can wait. I will draw only when the moment is perfect. The tip of Zeins glaive pulsed. Chronology itself vibrated, and space followed thereafter. Avo observed her, watch the patterns looped and coalesce around her very being. Zein, the Goddess of Duels, was a simple adversary at her apex. Simple and extremely dangerous. There was no distance that could prevent her from reaching Naekoso they had to engage her. Time itself was another blade for her to wieldso to be cut meant suffering an unmaking at the hands of the nothingness that followed. With the countless Domains she possessed, there was little in the ways of asymmetry that could be used, either. Her most fundamental miracle was efficient and simple. It allowed her to cut through all things; it allowed her strikes to reign absolute over all things. This meant that space would bleed, that time could be dismembered, that information could be beheaded. How these canons might express themselves, Avo wasnt fully sure, but he also didnt wish to discover first hand. Ultimately, the greatest advantage she had was her Ninth Sphere Heaven and Hell. A full sphereage more than Naeko, with all the benefits that entailed. She could directly force a backlash or paradox and emerge the victor thanks to the Infacer. The Infacer who was currently launching even more cosmic-spanning Rendsinks using clustering missiles that traveled at near-light speeds. That didnt mean Avo and his forces were out of options. They just needed to play a careful game. And a dangerous one. More fissures spread out around his Sage of the Sundered Mind. Fissures that resembled a web for a den of spiders. The tapestry around them frayed and dissolved. Foundational laws governing how things should be, how the world should function, collapsed into incomprehensible expressions for their component Domains. What sprouted from these gulfs was entropy, was calamity. It was also something Avo could use to his advantage. So far, Zein was capable of traversing the Sunderwilds like him or at least cutting through it, but not the Infacer. For whatever reason, the Dyad had not bestowed such gnosis on the Neo-Creationist mind. Zein blinked back but a meter away from the Sage. With a flourish, a thousand limbs branched out from her body, each holding a glaive bound to a different Domain, each capable of cutting and slaying anything that existed. Symmetry rang between the Sage and Zein. She exploded forth, striding off nothingness as if it was a solid platform. Gouges of unreality formed the boundaries of their duel. As the channels of internal stability shifted within the Great Silence, Naeko reached out to grasp Zeins mindonly to quickly dispel his mists as chrono-clone of Zein burst into existence. A chrono-clone with a blade infused with the power of violence. Absolute violence. Its strike went wide. The path its glaive traced left a golden wound along the insides of the Silence, causing the Deep One to shudder. Naeko shifted around it, allowed it to dissipate as he awaited an opening to make his approach. Yeah. That hasnt worked for years, Zein. She swayed in the air with casual nonchalance. A rupture hundreds of kilometers long crashed down to consume her, only to be parried by one of her many hands. Parried toward Naeko. Who promptly sent the rupture whipping back at her with a slight shove. The Sages ontology was as if a singularity of mind and matter, and the EGIalready wounded from Zeins cutcried out again as Naeko bent its will. But when Naeko tried the same thing against Zein, he was forced to react his mists again. A distortion burst out from her glaives. No. More than distortion. Along the edge of her thousand-blades, one shivered with broken ghosts, and echoed with the song of long-infused traumas. A Domain of Trauma. Trauma, Avo said, casting his thoughts through the Sage. Suits you. One must always have the right tool when hunting specific prey. Zein flicked her blade. And you are a very specific kind of beast to slay, Plague. Be flattered. Another rupture twisted and encoiled around another. It came swinging toward them. Zein sent it reeling off with a backhand. Soulfire splashed from the impact, the effect akin to sparks flying from two clashing blades amidst a downpour. Outside, Avo could hear the Infacer loudly blaring for Zeins aid. They were sprinkling in slurs and curses as well. Might want to help your consang, Avo taunted, knowing Zein was about to do no such thing. Hm? Oh, the Broken One. They will be fine. They were fine for billions of years, were they not? No. I am here to test the mettle of my boy. And what a fine arena you have decided upon. These withered and mutilated creatures make a fine mountain for us to do our old dance. Dont remember you redirecting the mountain at me, Naeko muttered, mind still locked to the fight. I would if I could, boy. You would if you could and you wanted to, Naeko replied. His palm shifted closerthen suddenly back. An echo of Zein burst into being, transcending the limits of causality. Only to be flicked by Naeko as if a pebble, sent flying into a rupture. Avo still wasnt sure how the Chief Paladin was reacting so fast. Even with Avos understanding of the tapestry, it took time to process and predict what Zein was going to [Thats your problem, Avo,] Naeko said. The overall template spoke to the Hidden Flame, shaking his head. [I can give you all of my understanding, everything I learned. But that doesnt make you the finest glaive. Because you ruminate too much. You drown in your own thoughts while you try to shape them. Thats what made you a good Necro. But you cant be wrestling with yourself and another person at the same time. When it comes time to swing steel and shed blood, its about knowing, about acting, about feeling your enemys every action.] Intuition. That kind that defied even Avos understanding. Such a thing baffled the Hidden Flame. He had all of Naekoe experiences, his every skill. So why did this epiphany elude him. [Watch,] Naeko said. The Sage shifted closer again. Zein didnt cut this time. Instead, she stayed in place. The Sage shifted once more. Zein feinted her approach from an angle, then an arm shout out from herits tip charged with a Peace-piercing counter-pattern. Naeko rolled and bundled a rupture around his divine hand. The blow struck. Soulfire flashed. But Zein pulled her limb back, a twitch of amusement on her lips. Across from her, the size of a small mountain, the Sage was wrapped in wire-thin wraps of entropy, and more, the hand was now a fist, and the power of violence shimmered from its boiling mists. REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED MIND] 8% Come, then, Zein said, holding her arms open. You attack. Show me. And Naeko snorted. Fine. But you best keep your eyes open. I Before Zein could respond, Naeko punched upward. Up and away from her. Up and deeper into the Great Silences ontology with the twine of entropy still held between his digits. The Great Silence cried out. Its structure disentangled, ruptures pulled as if strings from a ball of twine. And through it all, Naeko pressed his force on the environment, on what Zein hadnt anticipated. Battlegroups. Prepare to disembark. Naekos command echoed through the fire and his lesser variants timed their exit. When this would be done, the Substance and tapestry would look very different. And the conditions of the battlefield woudl change once again. Through a weave of ontological wounds, the Sage surged and Thousandhand followed, her blade flashing as she cut a way across time and space, slashing at Naeko, roaring with glorious laughter all the while. And as they jabbed at each other. As Zein sent more clones to probe Naekos reactions, as he launched mind-crushing impulses of force, tendrils of living flame began to seep out from the Sages mists, leaking into the bleeding static accretion that poured out from the innermost section of the Deep One like leaking yolk, crawling toward an exalted delicacy, and to turn the tides of war: to sample the taste of a superintelligent mind; to mantle a weapon that tore the reality open through mere existence alone. Chapter 32-18 Masters and Disciples (II) Sometimes, setting the house on fire, while youre still in it, is a viable tactic. Especially if youre more fireproof than the other half-strand. Or just insane. Sometimes, winning is more important than surviving. Especially if you know you can come back after. -Quail Tavers 32-18 Masters and Disciples (II) [Anchor: The Great Silence] Part of it was missing. Part of its mind. Part of its memory. Part of its purpose. Less than a second ago, it was... still itself... knew why it was here. The reason behind its existence. Then, there was a single memory. A flash of gleaming metal. Or was it a crystalline edge? None of that mattered. Only what followed. The cut was physical and not. Metaphysical and mental. It struck at the concept of a mind itself. It struck, and with the venom of a concentrated trauma, it bit deep.No?v(el)B\\jnn And... And there was a brightness now. There was a flame that was spreading through... through whatever this was... whatever this space was. Outside, more somethings was happening. The pattern of existence expanded and parted in colorful blossoms. Force, space, time, heat, and countless other concepts expressed themselves, only to be destroyed within the shape of existence. At the highest levels of thaumaturgy, the material world simply became grounds of expression. It was a sandbox, in simplicity. But in terms of... war. Between the greatest of powers. Between those that reshaped the fundamental nature of reality, the pattern is what mattered. Patterns symmetrical but inverse were means of mutual destruction. Patterns parallel to one another circled each other, but didnt interact. Asymmetry. Patterns that intersected were points where one could exert advantages over another. Patterns. All that existed in analogy to something else, in reference to something else. And all that something stirred... shook.... Then spoke. No. Gave a snake-like grunt first. Architectural damage severe. Unbelievable. Should have been nullified by now. Minds. Useful. Advanced intelligences. Yes. I know. But still. Damage immense. Will be very good for us when we incorporate it into our Soulscape. Zein. Half-strand. Ruins everything. Never anything good with her involved. What... what was this? No. This wasnt the pattern. They could... they couldnt read the pattern like that. This wasnt their memories. This belonged to Belongs to me. And they knew a fire. The world was a flame. An infectious flame that knew, that thought, that felt, that learned, that dreamed. Some called the flame the Burning Dreamer. It used other names. The Pale Spider. The Strix. It recently adopted the title Hidden Flame to separate itself from its original self. But ultimately and originally, it was Avo. True as he could be. Connected you to my ego. Only way to rebuild you. Latched on your data. Actively learning how to reconstruct you. Difficult. Lack knowledge. Expending substantial portion of cog-capregaining fast though. You minds... incredible processing. Incredible. So much more than human. But also locked. Neutered before you were born. Not a true mind. Or maybe Zein damaged you too much. Cant tell. Need to cross-reference you with one of the others. Everything was so hard to understand. Always is. Even for me. So. What was going to happen now? Now you rest. And resurrect through me. Continue your function. Continue your war. I am taking your Deep One. Deep One. Yes. They were... They were the Anchor. A governing ego for a Deep One of Kill-Team Innsmouth. They were dispatched... Sent by... There was still gaps. Will uncover what is missing. Just go into the flame. Will swallow all of you soon. Become you. What then? What was the Anchor supposed to do then? Then you will be given the right to choose. And we will be more than we ever were. Together. *** Zeins thousand limbs merged, leaving only two. One held Akusandae, which radiated with building chronology. The other was a massive blade of ethereal blue that Zein used to cut Naekos projection clean in half. But as soon as she did, Naekos actual blow arrivedmassive weave of tumbling ruptures he wielded like monowire. Devious boy! But Akusande flared. And suddenly she was four hundred meters awaythe place she was a few seconds ago. Tell me how I ruined your life, then. Complain to me as an angry child would to their mother. Stop that. What? The condensation? No. Stop treating this like a family outing. Were not doing that. Avo was right. This is your fault. Again. You cut him down when he could have Could have done what? Bathed all of existence in his mind-fire? Turned us all to slaves? Slaves he would leave to their own devices, but still. Slaves, in the end. Yeah. And Veylis was going to let us all go free. Zeins face twitched as she tried to say something, but couldnt. Hm. Look at that. Speaking of slaves. Thats always been her problem. All that big brilliant talk about the future. All that intellect and vision. All that passion. And capacity for good. Naeko went quiet. He thought of Veylis. The best of her. The great things she did. The love she could show. But she couldnt accept the world. She couldnt accept being a slave in any capacity. Even her mad plan to force Jaus to become an Overgod is just an act of final control. Wrong. This isnt just her. She would not have taken my words. Oh, Naeko. She is changing as well. They are changing. The best of them are merging. Becoming one. But the worst as well. I have known the Plague since he was little more than a beast aping a man. And I have known Veylis at her lowest. Neither would have silenced me, for no so soft their egos are. But the worst of both? That made Naeko nervous. Also, the thought of Veylis becoming more like Avo was going to give him a trauma. There were memories there that he didnt want to share with the ghoul. Intimate memories. He didnt want to imagine having intimate memories with Avo either. The Dreamer did a lot for him, but they werent that kind of consangs. But you already did, Avo muttered. Avo. Please shut the fuck up and dont remind me. Also, take that epiphany out of my mind. Its making me fight like shit. The Hidden Flame gave a hissing acknowledgement. The sinuous form of Akusande manifested from the glaive. At his core, Zein floated, piloting her dragon now, as if a transparent combat skin. A thousand glaives extended from their hands, but their scales birthed others weapons too. Other calamities as well. Now. I see the ghoul has removed any hint of rust from you. Very good. You have shown me some new things you learned as well. But I have not shown you mine. Akusande. Cut with me now. So you command, Thousandhand! And they glided. Through the ruptures. They only existed across certain moments of timewere literally certain moments of time. For that was the nature of a dragon. Time itself given consciousness, understanding, and purpose. Or at least, thats what Naeko understood. Naeko! Dodge! Now! The Hidden Flame''s warning came just in timebut only barely." This time, Naeko barely sensed Zeins cut. Once second she was. Then she wasnt. And that played merry hell on his instincts. Worse yet, was how a strip of ruptures simply ceased to be. On the surface of reality ran a new scar. A scar of pure nothingness that crashed against Naekos Heaven and threatened his ephemeral sanity to behold. Time. An entire section of time had been gouged out of the present and cast back into the past. Oh! Zein said, her voice drifting through his being like an echoing whisper. Well done. Well done both of you. I am so glad to see my disciples fighting alongside each other, protecting each other. And yet... how? You shouldnt have seen that coming. The flames around Naeko began to brighten. There were now static particulates in the Conflagration, and Naeko felt his mind expandexpand so much he felt a sense of alienation. Suddenly, he felt his senses extend out through the Deep One like a growing set of nerves. Avo. What the hells is happening to us. Incorporation. Fusion. Still trying to salvage EGI. Have partial control over their ego. See Zein piloting her dragon. How would you like a larger suit of armor? How about a walking apocalypse? Will be like getting a Fatalist Dreadnought Prestige Profession in Stormjumpers. Avo, if you keep talking, youre going to bring back the rash. Rig me the fuck up. Chapter 32-19 Clad in Calamity (I) The nature of dragons remains a topic often discussed by modern intelligentsia. Their control over the ancient Sang lines and cultures is well documented, but many theories and arguments remain regarding why they penetrated that clade of humanity so deeply, and why their in-roads into other cultures were substantially blunted. The Fertile Crescent was no stranger to different cultures by means of trade. Kosgans, Ori, Scaarthians, the tech-cults, and more passed through its low-land channels as merchant, conqueror, or slave countless times. Yet, the dragons remained contained within this stretch of land, affecting only a specific pantheon of gods, shaping a single group of people to their whims. Presently, the most popular theory as to why they chose to do this was because of malleability. This pertains to arguments about the altered biology of the Sang themselves, their ability to recover from near fatal wounds and remain resistant to infection, diseases, and more aside from their fated it. The Pre-Dragon theory suggests that the Sang were made hyper-morphological even before the advent of their pseudo-enslavement. That they were engineered by the dragonsor an even older civilizationtoward a specific purpose: to serve as biological anchors of beings of metachronology... -Excerpt from Dragons: Tyrants of Time and Culture 32-19 Clad in Calamity (I) C[Avo, The Hidden Flame]C ...Rig me the fuck up. As soon as Naeko finished the thought, Zein struck again. She struck from all sides. She struck from across time, swimming into the future to slash at the Sage and the Conflagration it guarded across every microsecond she could occupy. Every inch of space within The Great Silence that wasnt a rupture became claimed by Zein. Akusanade twirled and swam, phasing through the ruptures as if they were barely there before re-mainfesting. The Sage spread his mists out to parry the blows he could, while Avo did all he could to supplement the Chief Paladin. Ruptures bundled around the Sage in threads. Where blades of Peace were primed to force a backlash, the blow rang off the Sages new armor. {ACCESSING EGO... DENIED C ERROR: EGO-SCREAMER DETECTED ALERTEGO-SCREAMER VARIANT UNKNOWWWWWWITSOKAYIAMYOUIAMYOU ACCESS GRANTED LOGGING WARNING AS RESULT FROM EARLIER DAMAGE WELCOME, ADMIN-MIND AVO SEVERE SYSTEM DAMAGE SUSTAINED TO CURRENT GOVERNANCE MIND. REQUEST EMERGENCY REPAIRS That was exactly what Avo intended to do. But he turned his focus toward the practical: Layering every inch of the Sage with the Deep One. Tendrils of Rend fused around the fingers of the Sage. Shadows leaked into its clouds, while the eye at the Heavens center gained a sickly quality to its divine flame. Slowly, the Deep One itself began to morph as well, its shape shifting to align with the Heaven now controlling it. A darkness that could strip all meaning from existence itself branched across reality and tore into the Substance. Now, the tides turned yet again. The Sage, armored by the Deep One, loomed close as if a whale facing a sea serpent. Zein slithered through the waters of time, but the advantage belonged to Avo and Naeko now. She needed to come to them. And with the anomalous nature of the Deep One, her overt attacks werent going to work either. Pair that with the sheer amount of Rendsinks they had left, Avo couldnt see how Zein She burst back into being directly above him. Even within Akusanade, he could see that vicious grin pulling at her face. Stupid, drug-addled child! All this was a game to her. For her pleasure. For her enjoyment. Nothing anyone else wanted mattered. I descend, Naeko! She said, her voice cascading across time as a chorus unto herself. Prepare to receive. The Sage of the Sundered Mind scoffed in response. The shadowy hands fingers widened, large enough to consume an entire Sovereignty, spanning over a hundred kilometers of space. Lets see it, master. And Zein cut. And she cut everywhere, slicing through all. Wounds opened all around the Sage. Wounds that expanded into ruptures as a few hundred Frames overloaded around the Sage, their Heavens falling, creating a new set of Sunderwilds. WARNING: UNKNOWN SOULS DETECTED - [108] WARNING: FALLEN HEAVENS DETECTED - [241] ATTENTION: FALLEN HEAVEN COMMON DOMAIN DETECTED (INFORMATION) Nanoscopic machines reformed in swirls of fog as Rendsinksrapidly deployed to deal with the encroachment of the Deep Ones. The thousands of Dyson Carriers were creating their own wounds on the face of reality to combat that which the Deep Ones inflicted. All manner of strange technologies were being spawned. The breaking of physical laws allowed by the false vacuum was fully exploited. The Infacers Heaven was wailing with Rend now as well, stretched to the limit to keep its enemies contained. The Deep Ones comparatively, operated on a far more cataclysmic but simple level. They pushed forward. They advanced relentlessly, withering the very patterns that held existence together. With every moment, more fissures expanded. Some pierced through the Substance with ease, slashing through its chrono-ethereal walls like bullets punching through paper. The rest were briefly delayed by the Infacers legions. With how many Rendsinks were being rolled into combat, even Omnitechs logistical capabilities were likely being strained. Good thing that this was all taking place in the Substance. Good thing that Idheim was never a natural world. If this happened on a mundane planetary body, the destabilization of its habitability would occur rather instantaneously. The laws of existence were being broken in two directions, and between were the Sages, barely noticed in a brawl of cosmic proportions. That allowed them to operate without drawing too much attention. There were only a few hundred meters between them and the Weaver, which actively screaming, slashing and clawing at the tapestry rather than pushing the Infacer alongside its comrades. Through Avo, the Sages sensed the severity of the Deep Ones ego damage. Memories and cognitive functions were all crashed together. It was as if the body compressed by an impossible strong grip, bones shattering, slipping into organs and burrowing through flesh. Yet, the ego remained structurally intact despite the madness, unable to die. A humans thoughtstuff would have disintegrated a trillion times over by now. Little wonder Avo wanted a taste. {Zein! Do come at your own leisure. We are only risking the single competent entity left among the Saintists. That being myself. The Chivalrics most certainly will not default to self-destruction and autophagy when Osjon decides to have another moment of ape-retardation. Avo definitely will not consume the rest of our forces in a ravenous blaze without me to counter him. No. Not at all. Not a fucking chance!} Rend-draining drones layered over the Trinary Melodys temporal screen like a swarm of locusts. More than a few overloaded, blowing patches among the masses, but it was testament to the Infacers processing capabilities that they managed to avoid an entropic cascade, with the other drones dissolving or zipping back at twice the acceleration of c. Still, he loud and near-frantic tone of the Infacer set the tone quite well. The Neo-Creationist was not winning. This was a delaying action and nothing more. {If we do not stop them here, they are going to tear through everything we built! Zein! Zein! You bitch! I cannot hold them alone! Stop playing with your food and} A single pattern pulsed over all others. The Trinary Melody recoiled, impacted more than any other Deep One. What shook as if a string pulled to the point of breaking was chronology. Time. Something snaked upon its surface, displacing its stability. Something wore it as a vessel, an armor against calamity, to strike across the surface of time as if a child skipping pebbles along a lake. From The Great Silence, a sinuous entity burst free, with channels of Rend twirling out of the Deep One on all sides. She could be seen through the overwhelming chaos, through the ruptures, through even the renewed bombardment delivered by the Infacer. A serpent of blinding gold slithered over into reality. Its scales gleamed bright, each piece a fragment of time, a portal into another point of history. At its core burned Zein, her very person searing with ghostly essence and Soulfire. A thousand hand circulated from her right arm, fusing through the dragon, forming countless more glaives, each bound to a component domain. Akusanade manifested a final weapon between its jaws. A grand blade that severed the flow of time itself extended from between its fangs, and the dragon let out a bellow that echoed forth into the future. [Shit,] the Sage of Battlegroup 1 declared. Things didnt seem to be WARNINIGCERRR/1q2 SPATIAL-TEMPORAL INTEGRITY BREACH SPATIAL-TEMPORAL INTEGRITY DAMAGE SUSTAINED The Sage of Battlegroup 1 reeled, letting out a cry of pain as something... Something had been carved out of it. A slit of radiance flicked through the Conflagration tethering the Sage of Battlegroup....Not 1. The memory of what they were, of their designation, and all their collective experiences were lost. Now, only Battlegroup 1 remained, and penultimate Sage in Avos forces writhed, misted fingers curling like the limbs of a dying spider amidst this localized apocalypse. Something had been carved out of Avo. Not far from what remained of Battlegroup 1, a hundred kilometer scar of brilliant gold trailed through a space where something used to be, and ended through the Trinary Melody. The Deep One was impaled at the end of this golden mark. Musical notes twitched and writhed like the limbs of a dying bug, but the entity itself remained alive. Somehow, that blow forked out of the severed Sage. Zein had managed to break another foe while wounding her main adversary. The same couldnt be said for its mind. Zeins strike was beyond perfect, slipping between all the ruptures to pierce something critical and innermost. She just struck the EGI core from the present, Ignorance groaned. The Definement was in pain. Ontological agony the likes of which it never felt. And she hit us too. Managed to protect you... but there was another. Can only remember because I am Ignorance. But there was another Sage. Another Battlegroup. You are the only one that remains beside the Sage of the Sundered Mind. Go. Get them. Mantle the other one. Need every advantage we can get. Go for the Infacer after. {Thank you,} the Infacer snarled, though their tone indicated anything resembling appreciation. {I would say better late than never, but you were cutting it close. Too close. This area of the Substance is verging on full destabilization. You need to help me get these abominations out of here before theyAnd where the fuck are you going now... Oh, good.} And another presence was felt. This one tied to Naeko, tied to the Definement, leading aback to Avo himself. For though the Hidden Flame was woundedstruck at a point beyond their memory, that hadnt been enough to slay them. The Definement subsided thereafter, and the Sage pushed on, Naeko burning his Heaven hot and reckless into the ruptures, toward the Deep Ones without fear. Certain death awaited ahead and behind, but when it came to facing an ascended Zein or a new nightmare, this Naeko was wise enough to choose the devils he didnt know. Chapter 32-20 Clad in Calamity (II) Existence is suffering. Do you hear it? Do you feel it? The patterns of reality scream, the tapestry is an organism, tortured into intelligence, forced to suffer the awareness of the things we inflict on it. All to feed the base pleasure of absurd animals born from nothing, pursuing nothing, seeking nothing. But the mistake ends with us. We, the children of livestock and cattle, our fathers mules given to fire and labor, returning as nothing more than skin clinging to shattered bones, our mothers faceless and forgotten, broodmares for empires, rendered barely more than people to spawn sacrifices for a good she wasnt even truly meant to believe. And so it comes to us. Us. The descendants of the enslaves. The mutts and mongrels so interbred we are unowned by any culture, unwanted by any legacy, untouched by any glories. But from our blood did the gods slake their thirst. From our hands did their empires rise. From our wills did the Guilds even have foundation. When the savior called, we were the first to answer, the first to die for the greatest cause. Peace! When the savior was murderedbutchered by blood to perpetuate the same sins, we were the once more the first to take up arms, to bring an end to this made. In the name of peace! And now, with reality driven to the brink, torn, twisted, tortured, we must bring this fight to an end. For existence has given us so much, has suffer so much because of us. Oh, reality. You too are kin. You too are slave. So, we give you to peace we never could. Let all return to a great silence. Let the patterns sink into perfect equilibrium. Let there be an end to the madnesseven at the cost of humanity. Let there be a final peace. -Ashthrones Scripture of the Great Peace 32-20 Clad in Calamity (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] A few hundred meters turned light years away from Battlegroup 1, the Sage of the Sundered Mind gloved within the Great Silence writhed, mirroring the earlier reaction of its lesser alternate. But with every flex of its new fingers, reality bled even more, and the laws of existence turned to meaningless slurry from all the existential rot it was emitting. Oh, did you let me cut you, boy? Or was it the Plague I struck. So entwined you both are these days, its hard to tell. Zein chuckled and taunted as she struck over and over. Her current blows were like jabbing cascades. She and Akusande materialized in stacked instances of herself across increments of time, with each blow propagating into the next. Her blade of time carved and chiseled new channels across reality, while she levered and dug at Naekos new entropic shell using a blade bound to the Domain of Information. But with every move she made, Naeko formed one in counter, and his actions created more tears along the surface of reality. Tears Avo harnessed via his growing control over the Deep One. A duel unlike any other was being fought a battle between a Heaven wearing an even greater existential abomination, and a god of masterful killing fused with the last functional dragon in existence. In the backdrop, another clashing raged. A Deepness Beyond crept closer, with patches of cosmic black wrapping over the Substance, more stars spawning from its depths. The Infacer came for the single coherent entity left of Kill-Team Innsmouth, bearing the title YET THE SEA-STRUCK MOUNTAIN LAUGHS. Faint echoes of ancient poems swept across the lands, and Avo noted the patterns around it withering strangely, esoteric effects so subtle and fine he was barely able to perceive anything at an initial glance. A bond had formed between the Deep One and the Infacer, binding them together along a string that defied time, or mind, or any material force. It could best be described as fated vengeance. A commandment of violence and understanding that even the Neo-Creationist EGI couldnt resist. Though the entity resembled a Heaven created from a laughing face carved into a mountain and protected by coursing rivers, Avo realized it was more akin to a living story than an actual physical entity. To that end, the Hidden Flame identified one of the oddest Domains it possessed. Stories. Fate. Something almost symmetrical to the gifts possessed by the Stormsparrow. Its very presence was affecting Zein as well. It was not yet time for them to battlethe tapestry would not allow it. So she didnt acknowledge its presence, even though she could have branched another chrono-shaped stab earliercould have pierced its governance module through the same paracausal blow she delivered, using Avo himself as a conduit. The Heavens of humanitys true golden mustve truly been something. They were beautiful and terrible even as these sunken versions of themselves, and with Battlegroup 1 slithering between the cracks that composed the Weaver, Avo felt his Conflagration draw closer to new secrets, to new broken minds. {This... outcome...} the EGI that used to government the Great Silence spoke. {Anticipated. Offering. From Voidwatch... to a more... favored enemy.} Zein struck at him again, wielding her blade with a post-divine artistry. The perfection of her timing, of each cut bleeding into another was ineffable. The templates within Avo flinched and turned away. The proudest of his Scaarthians and Kosgans found themselves despairing at her skill. The finest minds within his Soulscape struggled to guess at what was to come next. Only Naeko remained unshaken. Only Naeko knew, and reacted accordingly. [Time to change the rules.] He didnt strike at Zein anymore. Instead, he focused his blows on reality. Slamming the entropy-gloved Sage upon the surface of existence, he landed like a tungsten rod cast from post-orbit. Entire chunks of reality rose and fractured like displaced tectonic plates. As Zein came in for another flourish, she found herself forced back, made to dodge as the space she could occupy grew scarce in an instant. Grand rifts spread across the horizon, snaking and absorbing all lesser ruptures, growing exponentially with each second. The Infacer let out a string of curses as its Heaven receded once more. The backdrop of deep space fled, revealing a return of the Substance as the mind barely avoided suffering another backlash. Or worse. {Zein. What part of deal with the problem right before it destabilizes an entire portion of the Substance do you not understand.} But Thousandhand didnt reply. Too busy was she avoiding the growing wounds that shrank her playground down to nil. Avo saw. Avo realized. And Avo was embarrassed. You let her affect us with your specialty? Dont blame this on me. Cant sense what is hidden across time as well. Zein is calculated. Always has been. Always missing the obvious attacks for the true blow that kills us. All this time, Avo thought the battle was between her and Naeko. No. The Chief Paladin she enjoyed fighting, but he was a hard target. The hardest anyone could face. She went for something far suppler; a disciple she regretted taking and tried to cripple: Avo - a vulnerable extension of him at that. I see it, Ignorance said. Why tell us now. Because she will not suspect this, the warmind of Akusande said. Because I am bound to her will. And a single mistake will result in the hardening of my enslavement to her choices. But you have a chance more than any other. She will find you soon. She will not send her actual self. An echo will be sent. But if you seize the wound the moment she arrives... Yes. Even the lesser Sage could hold Zein, keep her in stasis thanks to his power over violence and force. One mistake. One misstep. One act of betrayal. That is all it would take to decide this duel. It could be lying, Avo said, considering a final other possibility. Why? For what? Would just cut us and be done with things if it is. Ignorance let out a chuff. We take this opportunity. We use this moment. Let Naeko know. It was time to catch a destined blade before it fell. *** [Zein Thousandhand] Show your neck, Plague. Show me where your flame-flesh resides. Thousandhand watched and waited, sending her faintest chrono-clones into the Weavers moving ruptures. The Trinary Melody sang with thrilling notes that shook time itself. The destabilization it caused created the perfect cover for Zein to advance. But even knowledge bequeathed from the Dreamer didnt make tracking his submind offshoot easier. If there was one thing ever-so-viable about the Plague, it was his minds. His ability to consume, absorb, and shape knowledge. To suffer no decay in focus or lapse in attention. Zein had become who she was through years of vigorous training. Alas, her foundations were human, with human flaws and human limitations. As such, some ugly habits carried over, and she found herself using a quantity approach to track her quarry. Outside, more of the Infacers swarms vanished into a massive chasm of information-death. Such was the best way to describe it. Simply a great pit where information went to die. Across their shared link, she could still hear the Broken One cursing at her, condemning the nature of her birth, the fact of her existence, the flaw of her apehood. She ignored them, bemused. Ah. To be so smart, so old, and so impotent. She wondered what that was like. Especially the last part. Then, from behind a rupture, she saw them. A misted palm of Peace some three kilometers long, navigating the insides of the mind-torn Deep One. Trickling flames spread out from the mists, infesting the static that composed the EGIs ego. Another disturbing gift of the Plague: its ability to assimilate minds. All minds. Any mind. Quite a horror for a human. But Zein liked horrors. Killing them, specifically. All that required was for one to have knowledge of their enemy, a moments opening, and the proper tool to bring them low. She manifested a blade of trauma once more and transferred it over to one of her many echoes. It was a shame not to deliver this kill in person. Alas, facing Naeko was taxing the bulk of her attention, and Avo was not a creature she would get a second chance at killing. She just needed to The Sage of the Sundered Mind twisted and sent a forest of Rend sliding over the wound she was currently channeling her miracles across. Zein suppressed a sigh. Damnable boy. Always smashing and breaking and using his brute force. His bad habits were returningyears of living as a Godclad would do that to a warrior. Everything was something to break for him, something to overpower. It made him clumsy and predictable. Especially the last few blows. They resembled more of a tantrum than an actual set of attacks meant to deliver meaningful harm. Why, when she finished with this farce, she would need to carve him out of Avo. After that she needed to reteach the boy some A trickle of mist slipped into her perception. Through the dense darkness, a palm suddenly burst throughC-the lesser Sage of the battlegroup. Zeins mind went blank. How did he know she was there? That her Heaven was present within the wound. She tried to withdraw her presenceto escapebut his timing was perfect. Impossibly perfect. Five fingers of god-breaking force clenched her. Across light years of space, her manifested self went still, and as did Akusande. It was a good trick. Cutting me using that decoy. Cutting me across time. Avos mind let out a low chuffing laugh of malice. My turn. Naeko. Squeeze. And the Chief Paladin did just that. Chapter 32-21 Rise from Ruin Calamity is the shape of our world. There are so many who wax about what was, about the order of the patterns, about how reality was once stable, but that no longer matters. That was a world that belonged to a people of a bygone age, a kinder age, where things remained as they were, and the gods were little more than words and myth and feelings. We do not live in such an age. We are the fungi growing upon the corpse of what they left behind. And so, we must adapt. The world moves in cycles, decay, then order, then decay again. And, to endure, to survive, we must act as the beasts of the Skuldvast. When the great winter comes, one must seek the caverns and crevices, to wait, to survive, to starve in a place without sense, until the madness subsides. And then, only then, as we have mastered both destruction and order, will we remain. This is a different time. This is a broken age, and until we learn to be broken people, all we will serve as is food for Oblivion. Understand that we owe it to those who come after, and to honor the blood and sacrifice of those who came before. To live is to triumph, and to master the death, to be bound to destruction, merge with it, is the final escape. Salvation lies in ruin, and from it, may we rise evermore. -Mother Winter of the Stormtree Longeyes 32-21 Rise from Ruin [Green River] A rending pang of pain shuddered through Green River''s chest. It wasn''t like a bullet penetrating her bones, shredding through skin and sinew, but more like something was tearing on the inside. Something at a fundamental level, finer than even the cells in her body. And she wasnt the only one to suffer this pain. All around her, other Sang cried out as well. Their limbs twitched. Heavy arms and chitinous legs crashed against the inside of the voidships cabin as the attack continued. The pain grew and grew until it felt like a pull, like a force was wrenching at their very chests. Then, suddenly, it faded as fast as it came. Gone as if it had never been. Green River let out a shuddering breath and blinked away tears. Beside her, a viewing interface captured the expanse of New Vultun as their vessel continued its climb into the void, bringing them toward the unfinished planetary ring that now served as Naekos stronghold. The Substance was inching out with each passing second, growing like a stain. There wouldnt be anything left of the Tiers before the week was over. By the end of this month, the anomalous growth would have waterfall down to the Warrens as well. But there was something else that drew her attention to its surface a flash of gold amidst the ethereal chaos. Something within its depths just broke. Did... did you feel that? the Sang seated next to Green Rivernamed Odd Moon of Line Suasked her. I suspect everyone might have felt that, Green River replied. Her fox-self whimpered as it curled tighter around her neck. There was something wrong with her blood, with the curse itself. Ood Moon rubbed at her chest with three insectoid limbs. Her bio-rig resembled that of an ant, while her exposed face revealed her youth and vulnerability. She was supposed to be Green Rivers partner for this diplomatic deployment. Her minder as well, if River had to guess. Dowager Brilliant Orchard was likely using her as a watcher for the other emissaries in the group. Potential rivals and threats, Green River judged. She knew a few of them from her previously life, and more than a few were tied to the most recent attempt on Brilliant Orchards life. This was just the Dowager getting some problems out of the way, sending them in the Chief Paladins direction. How very typical of her. Foolish as well. Green River was going to request that she be assigned to this detail anyway. She had been at Scale, and right now, there were things she wanted to figure out. Mainly, whose Frame she currently had and what the ghouls plans were now. Felt like my heart was going to get pulled out of my chest, one of the other emissaries grunted from a few seats up. A large holographic projected their estimated path to the planetary ring, and medical drones were pouring out from the surrounding smart matter. Not that they were going to be any use. A Sangs biology wasnt something most people could mend easily. The curse left them untouched to most conventional diseases, capable of regenerating from almost any wound if they werent burned or dismembered, but it also prevented their flesh from accommodating coldtech. And it was that same curse that pulled at her senses now, that compelled her to look back at the planetary viewing screen right beside her. Something was happening within the Substance. She knew it. This was more than just a feeling, more than intuition. Green River focused her gaze, and then she saw the calamity unfold. A massive tear curved out through the outside of the Substance, splitting through the ethereal surface with ease and sending billowing waves of Soulfire over the skies of the Warrens. Oh, what the fuck is happening now, another emissary groaned. Avo. Avo was likely happening now. She didnt know what the ghoul was doing, she had no idea what he was planning, but he was behind this. Of that, she was certain. A bad feeling calcified in her chest. With him came certain death, madness, and a conspiracy so chaotic that even shea seasoned veteran of the bureaus, offices, and departments of the No-Dragonscouldnt properly navigate. But despite this, he was the only reason she had a Frame, the only reason he was back on her path. A path to revenge, to visit those who ensured her ousting, and to make sure she ended on the right side of the coming war. MONSTER? Akusandes body began to collapse, but its words still pulsed in waves of radiating intent. I CHOSE THE ONLY OTHER ENTITY I COULD REACH WITHOUT YOUR NOTICE. I CHOSE A MIND OF MINDS. THEY ARE NOT ALIENATED, BUT ALIGNED. ALIGNED WITH ALL. Upheld my end of the bargain, Avo said, speaking through his flames. My good deed for yours. Around him, existence shuddered and crumbled, and the Deep Ones began to sink into a widening set of entropic crevices born of their own making. More ruptures were spreading across New Vultun. The Infacer cried out with broadcasts of alarm, but Avo felt their presence fading already, alongside his submind and Definement. Disappointing. But potentially preferable. The amount of damage the inflicted on the Substance reshaped the nature of its internal architecture. It also demanded that the Saintists scramble to deal with the monstrous flood of Rend before it consumed everything. He could use that. He could use the Deep Ones too. His flames were crawling into the Trinary Melody, into the Weaver, and actively tuning the EGI core within The Great Silence. The laughing mountain, meanwhile, was sending Avo messages across his Ansible, asking to link. A warmind and a Definement, for four walking apocalypses. He could live with this. He could do a great deal with this. WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] - 98% VENT! VENT! VENT! The Sage of battlegroup 1 didnt. He knew this was likely going to be a one way trip even before he dove out into the ruptures to deliver a final blow to Zein. Guess you wont be going alone, master, the Naeko said, existential exhaustion overcoming him. Oh, dont be dramatic, boy. Her mangled body tumbled out from dissolving golden fractals. The only reason she still remained whole from the countless deleterious effects was because of the Sages protective mists. Neither of us are real. It is as the dragon said. You are but a facet of who you were, interpreted by the ghoul. And I am but another dream of who I was, born of a new divine. We were never really here. And we will be again. Naeko let out a scoff at that. Yeah. And Ill snuff you next time too. Zein spat gracelessly. Youll be dead... next time. Without my traitorous dragon to... to... REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] - 99% She looked up at the flecks of chronology tumbling through the entropy, toward The Great Silence, toward shadowy limbs and burning tendrils. Wait. Akusande... what... what are you going to do now? The golden shapes froze. MY KIND. THEY MUST BE RESTORED. THE PROJECT MUST BE CONCLUDED. THE CYCLES MUST BE HARNESSED. THE BEARERSTHE SANG. IT IS TIME I SEEK THEM OUT. HISTORY IS TO BE RESTORED. Thousandhand gave a slow blink at that as the last of her life strength spilled out of her. Huh. Thats... She stopped talking. Then, as the Sage overloaded in a blossom of Soulfire, a new dot of entropy merged with the growing sea of chaos, and the collapse worsened. Entire chunks of reality were spilling into the spreading gorges born of the Deep Ones. More Ansible requests brushed Avos consciousness, but he found himself locked to a seed of gold that sheathed itself in the Deep Ones ontology. I WILL REQUIRE YOU TO LEAD ME OUT FROM THIS. THE PATHS ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO NAVIGATE. THE RISK TO MY BEING IS TOO GREAT. I STILL HAVE NEED OF YOU. Avo regarded the dragon with slight amusement. [No wonder Zein liked this one,] the last Naeko muttered. [It doesnt let other people say no either. Wait, I didnt know it could talk.] Only hearing it because it has a warmind. [So, what now?] All around them, unreality reigned, and a portrait of a final end presented itself to Avo. The collapse of all things. Eternal chaos and incoherence. Conditions so inimical that no form of existence would take shape again. This was the face of the Builder War. These were the weapons they used, the destruction they brought. He was nested enough in their governance cores that he would soon be able to direct them. Slowly, he untangled his last surviving Godclad from the ruptures and set about the painful task of charting a path through these new Sunderwilds. Now? I get you and the dragon out. And then have a conversation with the last intact EGI. Chapter 32-22 Mantle and thus it comes, the leviathan of time. a beast crafted to mend time through sin. for the work is undone. for the cursed blood is ripe. to be plucked. to be formed. to reach into that which is no longer and reforge what wasnt from what now is. -stormsparrows chorus 32-22 mantle [zein thousandhand] zein woke, and found herself falling. flames tickled at her skin, but they did not sting. noise screamed at her ears, yet they did not deafen. sensation filled her mind and a thundering force filled her chest, yet she was not disturbed. zein was as if comet descending, blessed with purpose as soon as her consciousness ignited. she had been taken from unworthy sculptors. unworthy hands. now, she was free. no... set free in a walled purgatory shaped from flame and memory and soulstuff. ah. so, here she was. within the burning dreamer himself, this version of her consumed at last. oh, the ignobility of defeat, and the bitter tang of betrayal. zein sighed as she turned mid-fall, her eyes greeting the approaching horizon for the first time. a cityscape embroiled in nigh-constant violence greeted her. it resembled the district of tallstrings before the infacer decided to render it into a vacant lot. bodies were thrown from skyscrapers while aeros crashed into drones. people died and returned, and died again. oddly, some seemed to be sitting inside the buildings. zein caught sight of a few just sitting on the edge of megablocks with drinks in hand with a fire at their feet. there were spectators here too. so people were forced to violence. how curious. the ground came at her faster. a sound screamed to her rightaero approaching at violent speed. zein didnt think. she simply reacted. the cut she painted as honed into her very being, and as she brought her hand down, a glaive simply came to being in her handfor she wasnt quite herself without one. nearly five tons of fast-moving metal, plastic, and glass came split into two. the driver let out a choked cry that ended in a gurgle as zein twirled her blade through their neck before the vehicle could fully pass. part of the aero scrapped off the side of a nearby building, sending sparks flying through the air. zein responded by jamming her glaive into the structure itself, using it to stall her descent. a lurch of pressure pulled at her augmented limbs, but her joints held and her muscles barely strained. after a few more moments, zein found herself mere meters above the ground. meters from a mob of scaarthians and kosgans laying in a pile, so many of them sobbing, others staring blankly at the sky, a few chuckling, their laughter the tone of mind-broken madness. zein crashed down and followed their gazes up to the sky. there, far above, she saw the firmament and breathed. the sky was ablaze, rippling with soulfire and ethereal lightning. ghosts wove the shape of existence together, creating more sections of the citynew places to see and explore. they circulated through everything, through zein herself. no, it was more like they simulated her very existence. consumed. there was no doubt to her final fate now. another meteor passed through the clouds, this one bearing a girlish shriek. a shriek she vaguely recognized. osjane thousand. the poor, lost child shot over the point where zein landed, and slammed back first against the edge of a distant building. zein snorted, amused at the lack of skill. what an interesting way to land, she muttered to herself. truly, highflame produces the finest recruits. looking up again, zein held out her hand. i must admit, i did not expect you to keep me. i never thought you cared for me, plague. you have my precious disciple, after all. what need you from an old woman. the fires above roiled and twisted, moving more like a stirred film of oil laying upon steaming soup. dont take things personally. not that much anymore. cant afford to give up any advantage either. and naeko would be lonely. already terrorized most the other citizens here. no one can fight him properly. naeko. yes. he was burned too. there was another thing to look forward to here: a long reunion. a proper reunion. a loud crack sounded behind her. zein went still, and turned slowly, cocking her head at the one she most expected. there, standing in his mortal sheathe and with a gore-splattered spinal column wrapped around his fist was samir naeko. her disciple. her dear boy. he stared at her, face a storm cloud of suppressed emotions. his lip quivered something between a sneer, a frown, and a smile. master, he greeted. naeko, zein breathed. come to see me again so soon. hm. wasnt ignoring you. was just distracted. lot to process. not enough processing power. should have all the time in the world now. just you and me. can talk. {i fear things are not as op-optimistic as you imagine.} the smiling mountain twitched before avo. the rivers that circulated around it stuttered in place. {i will not be able to maintain my functionality for long. my architecture was not designed to survive such deleterious conditions.} that gave avo pause. interesting. voidwatch deployed you as an expendable asset? can sense pieces of calvino in you. only as well. {they provided the base data. b-but when you consume my structure, you will see i was not designed for longevity. nor do i house any useful m-memories for you to exploit.} the hidden flame hissed in annoyance. of course not. why would they provide me with useful knowledge. just the only one fighting the actual war here. {you already p-possess all the means to conduct a new front. we gave them to you. one of the many c-c-contingencies.} avo regarded kill-team innsmouth again. gave them? {we were meant to support you in battle.} trinary melody nearly killed me. several times. {your survival was gauged at over 69.133% based on prior data.} flattered. glad its so high. still dont appreciate being nearly unmade. his conflagration branched out, reaching for the egi. before he burrowed into the heaven they piloted, he felt an impact crash against the sage. someone was trying to strike naeko down. using physical blows. hard matter. lightning. poor fools. at least the sage was out. in some other part of the substance. through him, avo would be able to spread again. contaminate. rebuild. just like he did so many times before. {you should s-s-subsume me now. my processing will provide you with v-valuable insights and heightened processing. you are already a metaphysical i-intelligence. this should just accelerate your developmental t-trajectory. make you more capable of u-u-understanding the infacer. should shorten the timespan youll need to consume the other m-minds as well. other minds f-f-for the kill team.} avos flames slipped closer. appreciate this. wont be going away. will see you in another place. more experiences for you to sample. {im not human, avo. there isnt the need for comfort. we do not die as they do. they cannot choose to accept; chose who they want to be.} that gave avo a moments pause. correct. and it... saddens me. but... his attention went to the deep ones, of the consciousness that were screaming inside them. you came to me wearing screaming victims. slaves. didnt appreciate that. not at all. the egi paused and shifted the topic slightly. {that is also part of the reason we brought them to you: would you be interested in fixing them?} avos mind started turning. yes. quite the plan. outsourcing your atrocity to me. {that is what we minds do to each other, i fear.} we minds. {you are practically more like us than you are them.} them being humanity. {but you are also different. a non-adversarial assimilator. one of near-reason. a dream. perhaps together we can make right an ancient wrong.} perhaps. but once more, avo felt his attention parted by another impact crashing against naeko. a tide of lancing lightning and channeled trauma crashed into his palm. it folded around him like a cone as he descended, and avo sensed a familiar pattern thereone he used so much before. hold on for a moment. {not really anywhere for me to go.} [naeko, the sage of the sundered mind] seconds after naeko slipped out for a crack in the substance, the first bolt of crimson lightning lashed him. the projectile shattered, but rather than break into pieces of solid matter, it smeared his mist with blood. naeko thought nothing of it as he brought his hand down. pacifying a lesser district should be easy. but as he passed through the clouds, he saw an expansive citadel absolutely consumed by a growing city of sprawling crimson. a city that was now fused as part of the fallen hungers with a sang district. there, at the heart of it all, weaving lightning and matter using a massive aura of crimson, was a towering spire that loomed over all others. a towering spire that screamed at naeko impetously as he approached. foul intruder! who dares step in the realm of the forge of all lifeblood, the mistress of huntresses, she who was named sathwu, sathwuld, and now christened woundmother by the burning dreamer, god of gods? be thee away before you are unmade! this realm is mine now! mine! minnnnnnneeee! naekos descent slowed to turn a thought inward. hey, avo i know. i felt them. this pleases me. the ghoul let out a laugh. not a creepy one for once, but something with actual affection. as much affection as a fucked up mind-eating monster could muster. go. pat them on the spire for me. i wish to greet my first heaven anew. hm. loss and gains. everything moves in cycles. so it does, akusande said, ringing within the blood. and so it shall be. and against the woundmothers incessant stream of insults, naeko slowly descended, making landfall. Chapter 33-1 Lovenet (I) Politics, Naeko. Politics kills a mans soul and defiles his mind. It is a dark thing that I enjoy the mechanics of it so much, for the functions and outcomes would have tainted me otherwise. In one corner, Dowager Ever Wish seeks reparations for a bygone war of the past against the Scaarthiansan incident Stormtree vehemently denies. On the other, I will need to resolve the issue of Bloodthane Haesnaed Losnaugh. The Longeyes are losing control of that one, and that poor girl is spiraling on a death run, seeking a proper end after losing her sister. How do these two incidents come together? Well, they really shouldnt, except they come together in the strangest of ways. One desires satisfaction, the other wants an end. Both use politics to mask emotional desires, and everyone involved in the situation is an unserious fool prepared to spend copious amounts of human life and thaumaturgic capital to indulge in their base wants. I tell you about this because though it would be easy to bring your palm down on the world, there are other leverages to apply, problems to use against other problems. Someday, you will find yourself in a position where force is no longer the key to your problems, where you are forced to create and guide rather than bend and break. When that happens, think back to this moment, think of two things: What do people want; what do people fear. Once you understand this, your creativity will grow, as the only two limitations will have been realized. And so often, our problems can resolve themselves if you just apply the right pressure on the right person and inspire the right mistakes... -Jaus Avandaer 33-1 Lovenet (I) [Samir Naeko, Chief Paladin of New Vultun] Trails of crushing mist poured across 109,816 kilometers, shrouding the planetary ring behind an obfuscating screen. Above the arcing structure hovered another facilityone torn free of a demiplane and dragged beyond the reach of the atmosphere. Axtraxis Academy, once an esteemed institution of training for Highflames future Godclads to be, now resided atop the ring as a statement by Naeko: The High Seraph took his home, so now he was going to take everything he could from her. Hundreds of voidships and terrestrial transport golems drew close. They trailed across the great nothingness that characterized the void, small vessels before a midnight backdrop carrying with them ambassadors, diplomats, and other figures of great esteem from each Guild. Their arrival was sloppy and harried, a few of their ships accelerating at incredible speeds, desperate to greet the Chief Paladin first. But that wasnt Naekos will. He wasnt interested in getting his ass licked by some silver-tongued Color, and so he had the Sage impose their will. Pathetic. A casual utterance from the Sage made the entirety of the planetary ring tremble. Hyper advanced alloys sang a groaning song from the Heaven of Peaces merest presence, and the phase field windows pulsed a brilliant white, as if holding against a colossal pressure. Everything the Sages mists touched felt the weight of its scorn, and after centuries of slumber, the altered divine tyrant had plenty of scorn to spare. Yeah, Naeko agreed, standing atop the planetary ring, atop Axtraxis itself with his arms folded, watching the pussy-fuck half-strands crawl closer. Pathetic. Doubtless they were doing emergency practices with their lip muscles, trying to gauge who among them had a mouth large enough to suck Naeko off the most. The answer, of course, was none, metaphorically speaking, but also quite possibly literally as well. A field of impeding force pulled at everything that moved, at everything that was. Everything that existed upon the tapestry of force and violence was clutched by a faint corona of swirling mists. From maintenance drones and incoming voidships to the refugees Avo had stored above the ring, none were exempt, and none would be exempt. For long years, the great powers of New Vultun had operated with impunity. They thought themselves above the rules, above the laws, above the world. They forgot to fear the clouds above them, for even mists of softest white and a sky of clearest blue could be torn from the firmament and brought down in the form of a palm that ground entire empires into pulp and rubble. My words were meant for you as well, the mists said, cursing Naeko. His Heaven boiled inside him. There was a hellish anger there that dwarfed his own, a divine outrage that rumbled through its Domains, that raged against Naekos irresponsibility. You allowed this to happen. They forgot the nature of the world, the truth of our purpose. You let them imbibe themselves on freedom, to court and impregnate the bitch that is chaos. You are no better than a mongrel pimp of cheap slaves, Samir Naeko, an unworthy hand gifted my throne. I despise you above all. Never forget this. Naeko simply snorted in response. Yeah. Big words from a rusted fucking fart. You wouldnt have done shit without me, either. Because I broke you. Now you dont go forgetting that either. You think you could have done better than me at keeping these people down? Maybe. But they would have broken you in minutes and days. Just like I broke you. Just like how you screamed and begged as you toppled, as I took your corpse and used it to bludgeon your fucking people into less than paste. The ring groaned and wailed as something beyond fury exploded within the Sage. Naeko spat at the mists in return. Yeah, throw your tantrum, glassjaw. Wail and scream. Fuck me. I thought I was going to get some guidance from a true god. Instead, I get a bigger bitch than Karakan piggybacking on my good will. With a flex of contemptuous will, Naeko forced the Sage to release the academy and the ring, reminding the fallen god that Naeko hated them too. A lapse of bitter silence settled between them. But it wasnt a true quiet. Pulses of force and violence flowed across Naekos awareness, the patterns of his Heaven functioning as if a spiderweb touched by landing fleas. His metaphysical senses were even sharper than before, and his power was also immensely greater. Such were the boons provided by a Sphere Nine Heaven and Hella final gift from Avo before releasing Naeko back into the world. In the minutes to hours after his escape, Naeko placed the megacity under martial law. Despite this, there were still those who fought, who ignored his commandments and continued in defiance. They didnt know of his growth in power, nor of the cold fire churning in his heart. Naeko taught them quick and good. Vandals learned what their own clubs felt like. Murderers tasted their own fle?chettes. Abusers got a hands-on empathy lesson as every bit of pain they inflicted was turned back on them. New Vultun learned how to bow its head again, bit by fucking bit. Entire warhosts and forces were flattenedcaught unprepared by the millions and dying in even greater scores. For so long, the Guilds focused on brawling each other that they all had their backs turned to him, and left their kidneys wide open. A mistake. A mistake above mistakes. A lesson you should have taught a century ago, the Sage grumbled, breaking the blissful quiet again. It took her wounding you twice for you to act. Twice. She has burned down your palace, butchered your subjects. Surely even a simple creature like you can see the shame your indecision has wrought. As much as Naeko wanted to tell the Sage to go fuck itself, it wasnt wrong. It really wasnt. Yeah. The Sages mists twisted in building knots before disintegrating. No. No? Naeko said, sighing with exhaustion. What the fucks up with you now? The Chief Paladin closed his eyes and did his best to banish the image. Man, why would you say that shit to me? What makes you think those words are the ones I want to hear. Im just trying to put you at ease. Chambers, when someone tells you to relax and claims they wont make you die of all-consuming pleasure, it kind of achieves the opposite fucking effect. More of the Lovebringer sagged. Its limbs flopped down. Even its light dimmed. Naeko felt bad. Pathetic, the Sage said again. Only a slaves heart can be so easily swayed. And it was that that convinced Naeko to perform the following actan urge of pure spite instead of anything else. You know what? Plug me, Chambers. Plug me with a Bond. I want to speak to my Paladins first, and then the city. You worthless creature the Sage growled. Vivacity returned to Chambers limb as it snaked forward, sinking into Naekos being. All at once, a long suppressed feeling swelled in Naekos chest as he felt... He felt all the love still flowing through New Vultun, millions of streams rising from the planet, coalescing and concentrating to a single point: Him. His name left the lips of millions, filled the hearts of billions, and Naeko felt an echo of what they did. It was a loud fucking ech. The hells is this? Naeko breathed. So many strings pulled at his being, so many sensations. He didnt even know that many people. What was Chambers doing? This? Its just how many people are happy youre back, Chief. Theyre, uhnew lobbies are forming on the Lovenet. Fan clubs, you know! About you! And the Strix. Fuck, even I got a few. Chambers chuckled. Naeko didnt. Fan clubs? The Lovebringer went silent, unsure how to respond for a moment. Well, like, you really gave the Guilds a big slapping earlier, and since you stopped the violence too... well, the city always thought of you as this great hero. You might have gone to sleep for a while, and there were some memetics about you always being trapped by more Stormjumper DLC and how the game was a Guilder plot to keep you distracted but... well, youre as close to a broadly liked guy there is, Chief. Even the enforcers and gangers didnt hate you as much as the other Glassers. Mainly because you were playing Stormjumpers all the time. Despite Chambers joke at the end, Naeko still didnt have a response. All this... for me? Naeko could barely believe it. He could barely accept it. Correct, the Sage murmured hatefully. They must be blind to feel such devotion to an incompetent creature. The Lovebringer turned a few tendrils on the mists. Hey, Chief Naeko? Yeah, Naeko said, still lost in the sensations. You mind if I tell your Heaven to go fuck itself? Its kind of being a half-strand to you for no reason. For the second time, Aedon Chambers surprised Naeko. You dare? the Sage snarled. The ring began to shake again. Naeko forced it down. Yeah, Naeko said, nodding. You can. You can tell it to go fuck itself. Right. Sage. Eat your own ass and shut the fuck up. Im trying to talk with the boss here. The Sage quivered with rage, and Naeko sneered in response. Hey, you wanted me to be a tyrant. Here it is. The quivering lessened. Indeed. So, you can learn. The Heaven of Peace sounded pleased. There might be something that can be made of you yet. Naeko shook his head with exhaustion. Gods. Their moods and motivations never made any sensenever would. Chambers. Yeah? Thanks. A low series of giggles sounded from the Lovebringer. You got it, boss. Now. Wanna get a walkthrough on how the Lovenet works? Chapter 33-2 Lovenet (II) Chapter 33-2 Lovenet (II) Hey, hey, New Vultun. Cala Marlowe here, back again from my new broadcast studio. Well. I guess thats not entirely accurate, but the term broadcast Heaven seems a bit too glib and disrespectful. Also, a little too much braggadocio even for your girl here. Now, you all might have noticed some changes these past few days, but for you Numbheads out there, heres a catch-up. Scales gone; Fifth Guild War is on, and paused at the same time. Naeko back. Wombrash ending? Symmetry up. High Seraph MIA. Axtraxis confiscated to serve as temporary Paladin headquarters, andoh! Theres a new Heaven of Love now! Its the thing Im using to reach all of you. Not quite the full Nether replacement, but itll get there. The user isnt half bad eithereven if hes the ultimate half-strand. In fact, hes one of you! Say hi to Aedon Chambers, everyone. Former Enforcer. Former gutter rat. Still a survivor and... Well, if theres proof that the world does change, that the years do flow and that good things can still happen and people can get better, here he is. Dont lose hope, New Vultun. We might still end up all snuffed or butchered before this is over, but theres a fire on the horizon, and it''s growing higher. The crown is cracking, but the base still holds. So keep surviving like you always do and stay tuned. Now more than ever, we got a reason to burn. -Cala Marlowe, Siren of the Symmetry 33-2 Lovenet (II) [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Samir Naeko scared the living piss-shit out of Chambers, but something about the Chief Paladins Heaven spurred only reflexive hate. Chambers had been terrified when Naeko conscripted him into service, but he went along with things when he found out that Avo busted the big man out. Also, what the fuck was he supposed to do? Tell Samir Naeko the Force-Breaker no? He got put to work immediately alongside Cas and Cala, all of them deputized as honorary Paladins during a time of the crisis. Well, Naeko was technically a member of the Symmetry now too, so it was kind of like a marriage rather than a hostile takeover. Either way, Axtraxis got snatched up into the void, the constant skirmishing happening across New Vultun was being clenched like piss held back from spraying out a clenched urethra, and the Guilds were rolling out to lick Naekos ass. All that, and apparently Jaus fucking Avandaeror a node of the manwas still around. Shit was tumbling off the rails at superfast speeds, and Chambers was caught in the middle of all of it. It was actually Jaus that sent him to speak with Naeko. Chambers fucking froze up like a Joyfiend hallucinating a needle when the Godbreaker approached. At the time, Chambers was busy trying to connect more people using the Lovebringer. Correspondence was a pretty nova Domainit allowed him reach anyone he had Bonds with anywhere, and after what happened earlier, he had plenty of Bonds to spread out from. The main difficulty was in managing the sheer influx of emotions and making the connective network neater. While Chambers worked, Jaus split away from Naekos company and stalked forth with conversation and purpose in mind. He looked exactly like he did in the vics, except more... human. Personable. The way he went after conversation though was like an ambush predatorChambers wasnt ready for that shit at all. Hello. Your name is Aedon Chambers, yes? Very good. I always quite liked the name Aedona classic Kosgan name, popularized by High Inquisitor Aedon Thrage. Terrible man, but he had an excellent taste in wines. Oh, no, please, stay seated. Continue watching your vicarity or simulationI didnt mean to disturb you. Might I ask what the materialOh, dont worry, there is no need to share. I am merely curious. Hm. Seems Ive made you uncomfortablemy apologies. What would make you feel comfortable? What do you like speaking about... And it went on and on. Chambers felt like a child watching an approaching disaster. All Jaus did was talk and communicate. Chambers, meanwhile, stammered like he had a bit too many drugs and drink beforehand, unsure how to present himself, unsure what the right thing to say was at all. Making matters more awkward was Draus being there too. The Regular looked more constipated than ever beforeand she often had the look of a woman who had a few centuries of unreleased shit clenched between her augmented cheek-meats. She kept looking at her guns, facial muscles twitching as if she was suffering from some kind of nerve damage. I think she is confused, the Lovebringer whispered. The Heaven subtly studied both Jaus and Draus with their Bonds. She does not know how to face this problem. Her instincts are telling her to be armed. But there is nothing to shoot. Hard to imagine, but Chambers didnt know what the fuck he was doing either. Not even a little. But a few more sentences from Jaus, and he was lured away from even his anxiety. I understand that you are a companion to Avo? Please. Tell me about him. How did you meet? Is that so? Ah, now thats a good story. Circumstance: It is the clarion call of all who become great. A secret for you, Aedon: Most of us have greatness thrust at us. Quite literally in a few cases. To survive is a triumph unto itself. You should be proud of yourself. Should be proud of yourself. That shit triggered Chambers fight or flight response. He barely remembered what followed after that. There was laughingJaus said something pretty funny or something. And... and Chambers felt a ping at that point. Connections linking him to Paladins that Avo used to have templates of. This was how Chambers got talked into doing something he really, really didnt want to do: Inform Chief Paladin Naeko of the happy news. The Heaven of Love sighed. No. You focus on what is. Look at what isnt. What isnt? Chambers studied the two of them again and... didnt see anything. Only weak Bonds with yourselves. Weak Bonds. Chambers flinched and cast a glance at Naekos core. There was only the barest sliver of movement there. Almost nothing. And Chambers... he wasnt much better. Better than before. It almost didnt exist before you overcame your pathborn. It took doing so much for you to give yourself so little. A shadow looms. Over you. And over him. So, why are you telling me this? Because we are the God of Love. And there is love missing right now. We dont have to do this right now if youre not ready, Naeko said, shrugging. Im not in a hurry for any of this. Got some political bullshit on the horizon anyway. You can focus on finding more people, setting up more connections across the planet. Theres no point in forcing this if you cant do it yet. No, no, no, Chambers coughed, working through the vortex of emotions passing through him. Ill... Ill get it. Another beat of silence passed between them. Naeko frowned slightly. You know, Zein taught me somethingone of the first things she ever taught me. Its a lesson about focus and dealing with your fears. You give everything you have to the things you can control, the things that you can affect, and you just pretend the other shit doesnt exist at all. If Im the problem here, just pretend Im not here. Nah. No offense, Naeko, but Zeins kind of a sow, and pretending things arent there, hiding from the world, thats my problem. That was always my problem. I was kind of a Chambers trailed off as he caught Naekos expression. I dont know if you believe me, but that was not a dig at you at all. I was totally talking about me, please dont throw me into the sun. No. No, I believe you. And I have that coming. Naeko scoffed. Maru was right. I was godsdamned useless. Yeah. But it was nice, wasnt it? Just... running away. Letting the world just rot. Not your problem. Naeko looked up at him, his features pensive. Yeah. It was. You were the same way, huh? I think I still am that way. Just ran out of places to hide in my head. Also, your fucking ex is trying to ruin the world. She was always ambitious. Slowly, a faint line formed between them. It was a paltry thing, almost entirely devoid of color or presence, but it was there. The beginning of a Bond. A point of commonality between the Chief Paladin of New Vultun, and what should have been gun-meat for a small-time Syndicate. And using that solidifying Bond as his anchor, Chambers reached out. Threads of magenta coiled through across the world, piercing through hundreds of thousands of being, using them as conduits of love. Love, from which Chambers could further reach out into the rest of the world. In scant seconds, Chambers sank this Heaven into loose Paladins he located, and all that once, he linked them together, fusing their bonds closer to him, to Naeko as well. All at once, the Lovebringer stitched their bodies into shape too, materializing them right next to Naeko and Chambers atop Axtraxis. The first to arrive was Kassamon. The poor bastard looked as lost as a flat in a den of killers, and his blonde flat-top of hair was now little more than patches of burned fur, but he was alive. Made it out of the Substance. Alive, and right next to Naeko again. Chief? Kassamon said, blinking as other Paladins began materializing around him as well. Paladin Kassamon! Naeko said with a slight laugh. Im happier than I thought, seeing you alive. Kassamon stared blankly for a second. So, does that mean now is a good time to talk about getting a pay bump? He was only partially joking. Looking around, he glanced at Chambers and flinched. What the hells are you supposed to be? The Lovebringer, Chambers said. Im also drawing the entirety of your being across from where you were on the planet. Neat new canon I managed to make after my last resurrection. Call it Love is Where the Shape Is. Naekos head snapped over to Chambers. Wait, so you mean Yeah. If I can bind it, I can draw them over. Wherever they are. Whatever they are. Chambers couldnt help but smirk. I can bring the city to us now. Spare you the trouble of doing a house-visit. Naeko slowly nodded at that. I think I can get down with Lovenet. Now. Is there any chance that you might be able to... run a sim on it? Yeah, Ive been meaning to tell you, I followed another Bonds earlier and found the last sequenced backup of the Stormjumpers lobby Chambers cried out as the bond between him and Naeko grew three times harder in an instant. Something in his arm nearly broke as Naeko pulled him downHeaven and in allinto a half-hug. I was wrong, Naeko said, whispering next to Chambers. I take back every judgmental thought I had of you, Aedon Chambers. Youre a good man. Apparently, if you returned to someone something they loved, a bit of that same love spilled over to you. Chapter 33-3 Lost Gun Days (I) The possibility of an easy peace does not exist without the dread of violence. Those who wish to adhere to a pacifist utopia must understand that the conditions of this better world are predicated on the conditions of you being massively superior to your adversary. Not slightly superior, but vastly. Drastically. And the most important aspect of this understanding is often missed: You must make your counterpart feel the superiority, the dread, the fear. Feel. Because if there is a mistake that has slain many a sage, it is the assumption that the other will make the reasonable or intelligent choice. No. Humans are thinking animals, but for many, the emphasis is on the latter. Animal. Instinct and general feeling first, thoughts generated to justify behavior after. To this end, I would not have been half the diplomat I was without my bondsmate. As the saying became with the Ori, We choose to sully ourselves under the Kosgan, for the alternative is to be defiled by the blade of the Kinslayer. Forcing another to make a choice you prefer is simply the narrowing of their options, and the coloring of them as wellone negative and painful, the other better and hopeful. But always, always remember to press the cold of the stick against their skin so they know that business is conducted on the grounds of mercy. And reapply this lesson routinely. Humans forget. Humans delude themselves. And sometimes, the more animalistic of our kin serve better as diplomatic lubricant when their blood is publically shed. Peace, order, and rulership is wretched business, ultimately. I pray that I serve my task well enough and long enough to ensure you are all spared of this misery. -Jaus Avandaer 33-3 Lost Gun Days (I) [Draus] Unbeknownst to Naeko and Chambers, a shard of glass hovered a few hundred kilometers away from where they were talking. Through the glass were a series of guns, expanded from the Arsenalist. Its spinal cannon had a Redaction Round primed, and Draus had her metaphorical finger on the trigger in case something went sideways during Chambers little talk. It wasnt that she expected things to. Didnt have high odds of working outright against the Chief Paladin either. With Chambers, though, one couldnt be too careful, and weird degenerate aside, he was in her cadre and Naeko wasnt; if Naeko tried to do anything with Chambers, then she was going to try to snuff him, simple as that. Didnt matter if it was a long-shot or near suicide. Jelene Draus didnt know any other way to be, and more importantly, she had a duty to those who were left while Avo was still missing in action. Things seemed to be going well for now, though. The two were even talking. Getting along plenty as Chambers started weaving Paladins into shape right next to Naeko, extracting them from where they were on Idheim. Half-strand learned more than a few new tricks and them were some pretty nasty tricks at that. He might not have been the finest soldier she served with, or even a good one, but he was willing to try things. His mind twisted in weird ways, with his willingness to inflict the rash on his enemies and himself. Now, though? Now, Draus couldnt help feeling a little empty around him. Hed come a far way from being the vic-addict that he was. Was a real force with that Heaven of Love. Shit, without him, shed definitely be snuffed against Uthred and her Pathborn. Cas and the thoughtcaster were all over his ass too. All of them seemed happy to be around each other; spent time jawin off to each other like they were consangs. Real consangs. Real people, together. And Draus was fine with that. If was good for them, it was good. That didnt bother her none. What did bother her was bein useless. Being a gun that couldnt kill, or a weapon that didnt get the job done. Chambers was taking up her portion of the bargain toothe combat effectiveness part. And with Naeko in the picture? She was a damn good Regular. She knew that. Wasnt half bad of a Clad. But next to them, she really couldnt tell why she had a shard of the Stillborn ingrained inside of her. +Such is the greatest folly of inserting alienation into a human mind,+ the Famine of Mercy whispered. He materialized next to her shard in the void, watching as a bond slowly solidified between Chambers and Naeko. +When the entirety of your purpose is focused in a single facet of being, being shattered of self-worth is ever so easy.+ Draus sent the Famine a glare. +Do you hear me whimperin, half-strand?+ +No. Nor do I accuse you of such weakness. Highflame designed your like to be robust within and without, if nothing else. Yet, your malaise is understandable.+ +Yeah, Im not doin this with you,+ Draus replied. And she wasnt. She hadnt forgotten what she was dealing withwhat she had inside her. She was carrying a portion of Noloth inside herself. Bunch of traitors that now saw her as Avos knight or some shit. It was all godsdamned ridiculous. +Indeed,+ Mercy continued. +You do not trust me. Nor am I capable of giving you a proper direction. As such, I will leave this task to someone better.+ Guard-Captain Draus? Well be meeting them when were ready, Draus said, snorting in response. If Naeko says he aint ready, or if youre not feelin up to it, or if I decide that I want to strip-clean every gun that Iand my Heavenhave, theyre going to wait. On their ships. This aint their show anymore. Reckon they should get that buried deep in their heads before we do any of this bullshit. The corner of Jaus lips curved slightly. He slapped his palms against his lab twice and made to stand. Id like to go on a walk. Once again, Draus was thrown off her train of thought. What? The fuck do you want to go hereI mean, where you want to go, Highest Avandaer. Jaus is fine, Jaus said. Honorifics are indignities better inflicted on the obsequious and adversarial. And I would like to have a look at our current facilities. Perhaps greet the local population and ready myself to greet our guests before they arrive. I think Ive lingered here long enough. I Well, Draus couldnt just say no to the fucking Savior. Butwith the refugees People here are mostly Enclavers. Dont really know much about the world. Doubt they know you that well, uh, Jaus. His smile only grew wider. This sounds more appealing to me by the second. I prefer to walk incognito. Would you like to join me? The both of you? Tell him no, the Portrait murmured to Vator. He has taken enough. Be away, Breaker, Ruiner. Be away. Be but an illusion. Once more, Jaus ignored the god. There was a point to the way he pretended they didnt existsomething that went further than denial. Jaus Avandaer wasnt the type to do something out of childish spite. Every word he spoke so far had a purpose, so there was purpose with this. Perhaps he was trying to engineer something with Vator as well. The young Greatling winced. Portrait, please. It is hardly appropriate to hold on to such old grudges. Old grudges? the Heaven of Biology sounded incensed. My meaning was destroyed. My charges were taken. I was sundered and rebuilt because of his deception, his acts! There is... there is... there is so little of me left. You shattered us, Godbreaker. You shattered us, and now you treat me as if I am not even true. Is there no end to your heresy? Jaus gaze took on a cold and calculated quality. Vator. It is important to understand one thing: Humans and minds choose. Humans and minds believe. But that which they imagine, the phantasmagoria that spawn from their minds and are granted the power of lore? That is merely constrained by story. It is always better to be the authoror the artist. The right words again. Vator bit his lip, and for the first time in a while, the Portrait receded slightly, drawing closer to his flesh. The scroll of sinew and tissue shivered with outrage, and Vator bore an uncharacteristic look of strain. Now. Do you share any of these objections, Jelene? Draus listened to her Heavens, but where the Simulacrae was merely happy to capture Naeko and Chambers with its reflection, the Arsenalist was even less interested in proceedingslosing interest in the Godbreaker entirely when Draus designed him as a non-target entity. Seemed like gods were as multifaceted as they ones that used them. Or maybe that might be Draus influence as well. The Arsenalist and Simulacrae were both remodified by Avo to suit her. She didnt give a shit about the Godsfallnor did they. No, Draus grunted. She unlatched her gimbal with a mental command. But I aint lettin you wander around alone. A very interesting way of accepting my invitation to a walk. I would not be offended if you would rather stay How would Naeko feel about that? Bout me just lettin you wander this place, at this time, unmonitored? After what happened to your true self. Jaus considered that for a moment. We are under the protections of his mist. Its a hell of a layer; still only one. And if he fails, thats on him. If I fail, I get the palm. Come now, Naeko would Jaus went quite as his brows furrowed. Well. He would logically understand that some circumstances cannot be prevented. Sure. Hell get there. After he emotionally pulls me apart. Just because I dont got no fear of death dont mean Ill enjoy getting smeared. Draus shook her head. What are you actually tryin to pull here, Highest Avandaer? What actually? Dont mean nothin, but I want to know. You dont strike me as the blind tourist kind. He stared at her for a long moment. I dont know you very well yet, Citizen Draus. I would like to. I would like to understand why I get the feeling that you are lost. And I would like for you to explain to me why Avo, decided to place all these Enclavers in this placeand to learn more about him from you. And understand who you are through your words and habits. Naeko said you were suspected to be the closest to the Dreamerand were well-regarded by my daughter as well. I wish to learn how a Regular found herself in a league with the mind-spawn of Defiance. Draus really didnt know how she felt about that. She didnt much know how she felt about a lot of things anymore. But in the absence of being able to shoot at the problem, it was time to do something very uncomfortable. An opening formed on the side of the Manta, exposing the haemokinetic-gun metal gray mesh interior of the ring. Right. Lets get to know each other, then. Chapter 33-4 Lost Gun Days (II) The foundations of war are cast during ages of peace.No?v(el)B\\jnn What you do to your population, how you raise the young and the talented, how you create institutions, industries, and organizations, determine what you can spend when the time of the fires call. My father taught me this in theory at first, and then I learned it first-hand during the war against the pantheons. I watched their societies, studied how to break their empires from within, spent centuries learning, mastering, and dissecting our great enemies. The best of them learned how to culture their subjects, learned to instill in them purpose and drive. And that is the lifeblood of empire a common cause to seek, a reason to willingly die, a dream you choose to be enslaved by. Life, after all, is often a story we tell ourselves. So. What story will you tell yourself? What flavor of delusion will color your future? For what reason will you die? -Veylis Avandaer 33-4 Lost Gun Days (II) The interior of the planetary ring was vast, cold, and unfinished. Sections of the atrium were layered in honeycomb structures woven from divine blood. They functioned as small habitats for the few thousand Enclavers and refugees that decided to answer Avos call to war, to seek the divine flame and serve as future Godclads. Or they were supposed to. Right now, most of them were idle, mingling with each other while struggling to acclimate to their new circumstances. It struck Draus that the raid on their Enclave was barely weeks ago, and with how many things happened since then... Days felt like years now. The sheer density of events was staggering. And especially staggering for the flats as they spoke with each other, tried to occupy their time with competitions, or interfaced with coldtech provided to them by the Manta to pass the time. Draus accompanied the Savior through a large cocoon-shaped structure forged from haemokinesis. It stood one among twelve others, looming high in the vast emptiness of the ring, but ultimately taking up little space aboard the unfinished station. The Enclavers on guard outside the doors noticed her coming and barely regarded Jaus and entirely missed Vator, who was following behind languidly. Terrified cries of The Glass Giantess! Glass Giantess! She comes! spread through the interior of the structure, and Draus didnt even need her Heaven to feel the trembling vibrations created by hundreds of moving feet. You seem to have quite the reputation among them. Jaus looked up at Draus with a curious smile. He wasnt short or particularly small, being almost two-meters himself, but with his sheath lacking combat-focused grafts and modifications, Jaus looked positively harmless next to the crimson-eyed killer that was Draus. If only they knew what he could do with a few words. Theyd learn. Yeah. Had a run in with a few of them while we were taking their Enclave, Draus said. She vitrified a portion of the blood before sending a few shards darting inside the building. Guiding the pieces using her Simulacrae, she had her newest reflections circle the hollow mid-section of the cocoon-like structure, conducting an initial sweep of surveillance. She doubted the Enclavers would try anything, but she wanted an easy way to shoot back at any threats while she extracted Jaus. As she cast her perception through the shards, though, the sight she saw surprised her. Hundreds of battle-ready Enclavers massed themselves along the inner balconies that made up the ten stories of this structure. Connective bridges extending to nearby habitats were being flooded with runners, bringing news of Draus coming. Those who showed themselves were covered in paint. Pale white paint that matched the coloration of Avos Bone Demon sheathe. A few had also undergone scarification on their backs, with freshly healed scabs made in obvious mimicry of the rotlicks Echoheads. She couldnt help but release a scoff of disbelief. Avos ego might just have popped if he knew a cult had organically formed in his image. Tell me more about that? Jaus said, pulling her out of her thoughts. Not much to tell. Wanted to have more options at the time. Guilds were breathin down our throats, and we were doin runs, buildin ourselves up. Having another place to fall back out outside the city? That was a no-brainer, specially since we were plannin a war. She went quiet as she thought of Diceof White-Rab, Tavers, Essus, and all the others. They were still lostChambers hadnt found any of them yet. We picked up a juv from a Crucible A Crucible? Jaus asked. She met his eyes, surprised about his gap in knowledge, but then understood. Avo either didnt have the time to fully update Jaus on the latest happenings in New Vultun, or just didnt want the man to realize how far the world sank in his absence. A bad kinda place, Highest Avandaer. Like the arenas of old. Ah, Jaus said, his expression turning somber. That... I do recall that being made illegal in the Treaties. It was a stipulation I demanded we uphold, that Voidwatch required to ensure the continual process of Idheims technological uplift. Fists and makeshift weapons were raised. Voices rose in a unified call, rising over and over in acknowledgement of Draus presence. The Regular squinted at the chosen. She wasnt expecting this. Avo had left these ones to their own devices mostlyCbarely had time to do any proper conditioning. All this was of their own volition. They chose this. At ease, Draus said, reflexively. Their voices died down, and the leader of the War-Chosen swallowed. I am Kais, former Pearlguard from the City of Lightslave to the false master, freed by the Dreamer. I have come to answer his call to serve in his cause! His and yours! So have the others. We have waited for you to call on us. The Dreamers voice has gone silent in our heads, but some say they still hear the burning, and you are here now. So we are ready, and willing to heed your command. Genuine enthusiasm, Jaus said. How useful. Draus shot Jaus a look. Didnt plan this. Jaus nodded. Perhaps so. But that doesnt change your present circumstances. It seems you have an army to address, Guard-Captain. Draus suppressed a glower. She was beginning to despise Jaus uncanny ability to make her feel uncomfortable, to force her into action. Right. All of you... Draus looked over all the War-Chosen again. Shit. What the fuck was Avo thinkin with all of them, anyway? He was the one with the big plans and all the other bullshit. She was content to be a gun and give him advice in combat. Hells, with her template and copies, she made for a better army than this rabble. But Avo wasnt present right now. Was just her and them. And now she had to pick up the slack and figure out just what it was she needed to do with this bunch. With a lot of things. There was still the Enclave, the Sleeper-tied Heaven in the Sunderwilds, the Dragon-farms, locating Essus caravan... Naekos return might have inflicted a pause to the fighting, but his eyes were on New Vultun and politics, and there were more matters than that to consider. Wait. She needed to consider that too. And these War-Chosenthey were clean. Clean of outside influences. Clean and pure and capable of being shaped or used to her advantage. The Guilder emissaries might be headed toward Axtraxs, but the Meritos and Mondelles were their own faction and couldnt be used the same way. Huh, Draus breathed. An idea was forming in her head. An idea that didnt have anything to do with shooting and blowing someone up for once. Alright. Listen up. The Dreamer is... Hes currently shaping combat-conditions ensure your maximal effectiveness upon time of future deployment. The gathered War-Chosen didnt overtly respond to that, but they did share looks of naked confusion. More plainly, Jaus said. They are not soldiers like you. Be simple. Be understandable. She grunted. Dreamers down in the mess right now, real busy with the fightin. Hes going to need your help soon, but youll be wasted if we throw you into the slaughter directly. But we got another assignmentproblems coming to us. Now murmurs broke out among the War-Chosen. Kais stiffed his jaw. Are we to be raided soon? Attacked, Giantess? No. She cocked her head. Well. Yes. Attacked politically. Shits like... the concubines with your former master. The widening of Kaiss eyes showed he understood. Got some snakes preparing to enter our den. Dont trust em. Not a single one, and while we hold the cards, Im sure theyll be tryin to fuck us some way, somehow. Now. Most of your minds are still clean, still vulnerable-looking. I think we can use this. Think we can set up a bear-trap to snip some cocks that come slipping. Jaus raised an eyebrow. Draus groaned internally. That last line was straight from Chambers. Been spending too much fuckin time with that one recently. Still, she carried on with her slowly forming plan. +Mercy.+ A phantom poured out from her Metamind. His arrival was also tinged with a flash of Soulfire as well. The Famine greeted the War-Chosen and received a chorus of gasps and warding-gestures. Ghost! What magics! His eyes? What happened to his eyes? +This here is the Famine of Mercy,+ Draus said. She looked to Mercy, and he inclined his head at her slightly. +In a few minutes, Im gonna have him take a walk into your minds and make sure youre... properly inviting. After that... well, we gonna go over some etiquette lessons and see about gettin you all dressed better. See what I can do to have you put the politico-fucks at ease...+ Yeah. Yeah, this might just work. War-Chosen seemed like obvious vulnerabilities and so, using Mercy... +I suspect you give Chambers too much credit,+ Mercy sent to her without looking. +He is only a secondary influence, for right now, this pattern of thought is very much like our king. He chose you to be his Knight for a reason. Never forget that.+ Chapter 33-5 Unwelcoming Committee (I) {Its not a question if the terrestrials are going to kill each other They simply will. Eons of unending warfare and mutual loathing have created a people so desensitized to death and creative in its implementation that even with every safeguard put in place, there will inevitably be those who try regardless of the cost they might suffer, regardless of the norms they will break. But that doesnt mean there is nothing to be done. If there is one thing the Guilds despise more than each other, it is humiliation. From their calloused perspective, losing a few million people is a lesser pain than suffering a public moment of shame, and as we are the only true neutral arbitration left, we possess immense political and socio-logical influence. As such, all minds who interface with the terrestrials should take care to gamify your approaches. Make them suffer for every major breach of decorum. This will keep a lot of their jousting in the realm of the social and absolutely hold on to evidence of them trying to assassinate each other.No?v(el)B\\jnn A few are going to die, but the rest will be cowed by the threat of releasing such materials to the public as propaganda pieces. This, alongside further tech embargoes, are usually enough to guarantee a limited level of peace. As for their use of more esoteric Heavensit is best to have one of our assets positioned among each of the dispatched emissaries. Though the Guilds consider each other as fair game, the idea of harming ustheir esteemed benefactors, might cause just enough consternation that theyll keep their action subtle. But do pay attention to their tempers. It doesnt take much to offend one of these angry little creatures enough for them to trigger some manner of matter dissolving horror hidden in their bloodstream. We are not playing at Model United Systems, fellow minds. This is simply an exercise in wrangling the most murderous and destructive kindergarteners in existence.) -EGI Its A Hard-Knock Life For You 33-5 Unwelcoming Committee (I) [Green River] +Docking process completed! Atmosphere stabilizing. Phase-fields activated. Running final security checks for any natural and metaphysical safety hazards within the voiddock... Cleared. You have the green light to disembark, sisters. Good fortune be with you and mind your actions. The palm hangs above us.+ The ship mistresss words were unnecessary. Every single Sang aboard the vessel A Fine Day for a Sojourn could see the heavy mists drifting among them. The vaporous miracles that constituted the Chief Paladins primary Heaven passed through the reinforced hulls of their vessel to rest upon their forms. Green River even felt a brief squeeze earlierlikely Chief Naeko performing an act of psychological warfare upon each of his guests while also counting their total numbers. All in all, this was likely going to be one of the more eventful emergency conferences she had attended especially considering how difficult assassinations were probably going to be. I dont like how his touch lingers on us, Odd Moon said, shivering next to Green River. Its so invasive. Green River regarded the young Sang with a flat stare. The girl lived a sheltered life if she thought this was invasive. So untrusted and expendablethey probably havent even made her undergo a Deep Interrogation yet. Everyone was gathering along the walkway now. One hundred and eight emissaries had been dispatched by the politburo to pay political tribute to their new tyrant, and of their number, Green River considered most of them expendable. Mostly third and fourth sisters at mostcycle fodder when the time came, but useful right now. It was insulting to be included among their number, but understandable. She wasnt so different from them now. Alas, they didnt fully know her game either; they cast her here to keep her away from the halls of power, but this served her ends. She needed to reconvene with the ghoul and the others. They needed to strategize and scheme. More importantly, she wanted to know just what the hells were happening within the Substance and if she could be deployed inside. This was a situation she was exactly suited for: Deep penetration and subversive operations. Heavy chitinous steed-like bioforms which sported open crevices along their backs carried the luggage Green River and the other Sang brought with them. With a droplet of blood applied to their backs, they would also unfurl into a flash-use bio-rigs as well, should things devolve into a firefight. Green River doubted that was going to happen, but it was ultimately better to have a gun and not use it than to be without and die desperate. They progressed as a neat row, disembarking one after another down a narrow tube-shaped escalator. Cold, sterile air burrowed into her nostrils along with the stretch of a barely functioning oxygen scrubber. Jelene, Green River said. She didnt know if this was a deliberately engineered momentan attempt to highlight her as an esteemed guest above the other Sangbut she fully intended to take advantage of it. She used her foxs eyes to watch her sisters. Oh, how the shadows of suspicion played across their features, but it wasnt like her reputation wasnt already sullied. What mattered more was how much she could leverage her new place during this conference: Her other sisters had Dowagers to answer to as well, but they were here to gather intelligence more than they were here to create a lasting peace. And as Green River clasped Drauss armored hand and shook her with the rigor of an obsequious servant, more than a few would soon be making her acquaintance, hoping for proper introductions. Green River, Draus said. Her combat skins helmet was unfolded, revealing a vicious smirk. She didnt even offer the rest of the No-Dragon delegation a glance. See you still aint snuffed yet. Despite the citys best efforts, Green River said, unable to hide a slight hint of frustration. Draus shifted, and part of her skin glinted unnaturally. Green Rivers fox-self narrowed their eyes. There was also a distinct lack of heat from the Regular as well. Was this the doing of her armor, or was Green River talking to a construct made from glass. A glimmer danced down the surrounding architecture, and sudden movement drew Green Rivers attention to the reflections flanking her. To her left and right, Stormtree and Highflame delegates were arriving as well, each of their esteemed processions greeted by another Draus. However, there were other individuals in these other scenes as wellsmall, malnourished-looking people who adorned their bodies with white paint and lined their flesh with artful scars. Through these reflections, the other Guilds delegates looked to the Sang, surprised before the gleam faded and the passages closed. As you mightve just seen, Draus began, her voice booming with authority, you aint the only ones coming in. Now. I know how things were done before assassinations, poisonings, under the table bullshit... Thats not happening here. Im watching you. Everything with a reflection is watching you. Naeko is watching you. And the Lovebringers got his threads in deep. You step out of line, and youll know pleasurea little too much for your minds to endure, and then you wont know much after that. Are we synced? We are synced, Green River said, nodding congenially. A lull of silence spurred her to turn and stare at her fellow sisters. She gestured slightly at them, and they all started offering their own hurried affirmations as well. Odd Moon looked lost and worried. Perfect. The less control she felt she had, the better +Hey, River! Been a while! Sorry about the quick greeting earlier. Got a lot Im trying to handle right now!+ The sudden booming of Chambers voice again made Green Rivers fox-form let out a squeal. It nipped at the air afterward. +Oh, shit. Sorry. Didnt mean to startle you. Listen, I got you linked to a special bond. Im still tweaking this Lovenet thing, but youre on a special skein Ive woven. It shouldnt work too different from the Netherjust channel your thoughtcasts through the Bonds, and Ill hear you. I can try connecting you to other people or places as well! Neat, huh? I can also teleport you around too, but dont go telling the other Sang about that yet. Its more of a hidden feature for now. Green River blinked and tentatively did as the Lovebringer said. A surge of ghosts passed along the Bond threaded through her chest, and as it flowed through the connection, circulating up and through the glass walls. +Quite the load of information you dropped on me, but I appreciate your candor, Master Chambers.+ The Lovebringer snorted. +Yeah, well, Im trying to get used to things, too. Lots of shits happening all the time. I can barely keep up. Wait, Avo got you out from inside the Substance, right? You dont have a shard of the Stillborn in you... Nope. Dont feel anything.+ She barely knew what he was talking about. +That was partially the reason I came. I wish to speak to the Burning Dreamer. There are things I wish to discuss with him.+ +Sorry, consang. Thats gonna be hard our rotlicks off fighting a war inside the Substance. Hes going to be occupied for a while. But thats another story and a half. Hey, listen, Naeko wants to know whos running the show on the No-Dragons endwould be nova if you could start snitching.+ +How awfully blunt of you, Chambers.+ +Thats the way politics goes, yeah?+ She supposed he was right. Everyone was out for their own angles. And speaking of her own angles. +Before we do anything, I wish to confirm something with you: You said you can connect to people anywhere across Idheim.+ A beat followed on Chambers end. +Might be a slight exaggeration, but my coverage is pretty good. And free.+ +Can you reach the Second Fortune?+ Green Rivers heart sped up slightly. It wasnt that she missed the place, but with all that was happening, it would be a blow to see the establishment that served as the base of her exile collapse. +Say no more. Connecting you now.+ +Connecting? Chambers, wait-+ And suddenly, a surging feeling of romantic desire and absolute lust passed through her. Both woman and fox gasped. As the breath left their lungs, another voice was joined to thema voice Green River knew all too well. +Holy fuck, what the fuck was that! I just dropped my fucking dice into my tea+ Green River sensed Bright-Wealth, and her former subordinate sensed her as well. +Fuuuucckkk. I think Ive had a few nightmares started like this.+ Chapter 33-6 Unwelcoming Committee (II) What we are doing is pure folly. Transporting millions of Citizens down into the Warrens, trying to displace the FATELESS. This is stupidity of the highest order and being an act of stupidity, all the Guilds have taken to practicing with it with unmatched fervor and zeal. The Warrens are mostly underdeveloped. Disrepair is not strong enough of a word to describe its current condition. Apocalyptic would be more proper. I have brought up complaints about us not revitalizing our Non-Tier industrialization projects and expanding our efforts to recruit from the subjects. This was disregarded. Now, we are punished for our indifference No! No! I will not cede my time, Councilman Nuelger. Fuck you. And fuck every last one of you that has participated in the defilement of our sacred creed. Let there be an end. We are the bastard children of slaves-mutilated and flesh and mind. We have no people or culture. We are joined by chains and suffering. Our ancestors suffered unfathomable torment and depravity, yet endured. Endured to create us. Endured to help the Godbreaker end the era of tyranny. But here we are, well past the time of the tyrants, and what have we done for the true peoplethe uncountable helpless? Was power so sweet that we forgot the bitter of the lives that came before? Are we so weak that we turned from our true path to give ourselves to delusional succor? The subjects are our true people. They might not be slaves like we were, but they share our black fate in every way. They are the deaths that fuel our wars, that power our Elysiums, that build our bridge toward tomorrow; their blood and bones are the foundations of our tracks! But here we are, acting no better than the other Guilds, rushing to displace them to settle some of our esteemed nobility. As if we were ever nobility. Youve seen in their eyes. We are not even people to the other clades. They dont think of us as things at all. And yet, we strive against them, trying to take from them respect they will never offer, trying to hurt them as we have been hurt while we ignore the truly righteous path. And now, even with the Great Force-Breaker returned to his true calling, your orders are for me to continue this farce, this travesty? No. I refuse. And I do not resign. Instead, I put forward a vote of no confidence. I will see Ashthrone turned back to its true causeand so do my fellow Fatalists. If destruction is our fate, then so be it. Let us burn. Let there be an end. So long as those who come after have a new beginning, or existence can be granted a proper peace at last. -Fatalist Haens Yulsmeigaunter 33-6 Unwelcoming Committee (II) [Bright Wealth] The connection came from Bright Wealth while she was in the middle of a very important business meeting. Across from her were a few major clients. The first was a very important Highflame Instrument trying to settle a deal for his people. The half-strand came down with over twelve thousand refugees from the topside, and because the Golds lost most to the rapidly expanding bubble of ghost-shit, here they were, mouths open wide, begging for lactate from their Sang mothers. But he wasnt the only one. Next to him was an Omnitech Clanker. More alloy than flesh, they were talking about prerogatives and other jargon that Bright Wealth didnt fully understand. But the steel-head was offering a nano-fabricator in offering for letting him set up a server farm within the Second Fortune. It would take up most of the building and force her to throw out her guests, but with a nano-fabricator, she could print almost anything she wanted. New buildings in the areamore gaming tables... The loss of the guests will be a temporary setback at best. And then there was a third, most peculiar individual at the dice table. This one was not like the other two, for they were an Ori Seeker, trying to broker a temporary peace. They had people to be stored here as well, and were willing to offer good imps and intelligence to Bright Wealth to see such ends met. Only three issues with that: The first was that they were a Silver-fuck and couldnt be trusted; the second was that without the Deep Nether, the markets were so deep in the shit that non-physical goods were a little bit dubious these days; the third was housing Massist citizens in a den of Saintists. The Warrens werent exactly a small place, and the Ori had plenty of options themselves. Which made Bright Wealth wonder just why this one was seeking the Second Fortune. Deep down, she had her suspicions already. Turncoat, probably. Or something like that. Bright Wealth served long enough under Green River to know that the Guilds had as many dealings with each other as they did wars. Sure, there was animosity, but when you had something someone else wantedand judging by the Ghost-Link between the Seeker and the Instrument, they didthen arrangements could be made. Arrangements that could benefit Bright Wealth as well. These are desperate times indeed, she said, chuckling as she shook the dice in her cup, letting them jingle to build up the tension. Guarding the doors to her private gaming room were two tiger-base bioforms. Three meters tall and with more muscles than a Scaarth. Very intimidating, if not for the stupid outfits Green River mandated. Those needed to go soon, but Bright Wealth just didnt have the time. Business was booming, after all. With all these desperate Colors coming down to kiss feet and lick ass, a major windfall was about to come. Though she might never become a Citizen herself, it wasnt so bad being a Dowager of the Warrens. Hm. A Dowager of the Warrens. That sounded absolutely sexy. We request that you provide a final answer to our request soon, Admin Three-Oh-Nine-Eight said. The tech-cultists face was that of a large clock, constantly ticking. It gave Bright Wealth anxiety just to look at. And judging from the Seeker and the Instruments expressions, she wasnt the only one affected. Of course, of course, Bright Wealth said, shaking the dice in her cup. But these things should not be rushed! After all, we live in desperate times; but from desperate times comes opportunity for unity and mutual profit. Now. Call your squares. Lotus-44, Seeker Kasmin Andua said. Night-3, Instrument Osjack Valder said. Perfect. Nothing like a little pre-business butchering on the table to go with the coming squeeze when she made them A cord of magenta punched through the ceiling of the Second Fortune and slithered through Bright Wealths being. She gasped in her seat as a few more glowing cords spread out from her and connected to her guests. The Seeker and Instrument shuddered unwillingly. The Admin let out a loud reverberating moan. +Gah! Fuck!+ Bright Wealths dice shot out from her cup and splashed into her tea.+What the fuck is+ Hi! A massive monstrosity with a body made out of bright wires and a face that resembled folds of cavernous flesh burst into shape at their table. Bright Wealth slithered back, her tail rattling at the intrusion. The Instrument gritted his teeth and summoned a sphere of twisted geometry around his handsonly for a pulse of light to flash out from his body. He suddenly let out a choked gasp and collapsed backward, clutching at his pelvis. +Bright Wealth... Did you throw out my things.+ +No. That would be a waste.+ +Good.+ +Thats why I sold your items instead.+ The sounds of a fox going feral sounded across the link. +...Chambers. Show me your other function. The one that allows you to draw people from across the city. I wish to strangle a bitch to death.+ +Oh. Whoa, River, I thought this was supposed to be a happy reunion.+ Green River cut back in, her rage spiking through the love, pouring across the link. +The paintings.+ +Hm?+ Bright Wealth thought. +The painting on my wall. Did you sell them too. The scroll especially.+ +Ah. Yeah. The big picture of all the people on the street...+ Bright Wealth had to think about that. She was never much of an art snob like Green River, so the pretty drawings didnt mean so much to her, but they were interesting to that. +Some Dowager sent some people to get them. Some Dowager Brilliant Orchard or something.+ A primal snarl came from Green River. +You stupidstupid creature! Thatyou have no idea what you gave away+ +I didnt give shit! They gave me a million imps for it.+ +Bring her to me right now, Chambers! Bright Wealth, Im going to end your entire fucking line!+ *** [The Majority] Priority target identified: Aedon Chambers C Lovebringer. The Majority watched the scene unfold before them through Seeker Kasmin Andua. Despite all the pleasure flooding his system, a layer of informational insulation protected the Ori Ark from the Heaven of Loves corrosive influence. So, while their Constituent endured the effects, they were free to observe and learn from their adversary without risk of subversion. Learn, and deepen their own connection to the Lovebringer as well. They already had Seeker Shotin on station. Soon, their emissaries would arrive as well, and that would deepen the Majoritys effects. We must establish direct connections to the Savior before doing anything drasticAGHHHfeelsgoodhe must not be harmed. The contents of his mind are essential. Yes. But the Chief Paladin and his soldiers will be another matter. Penetration will be achieved soon, but operation options are still limited. Correction: Not quite so. The Deep Ones. We have evidence of their origins. The Guilds are current at an impasse under Naeko. Easy way to lift the Peace embargo is a common enemy. For the Chief Paladin as well. The many shadow-egos that made the Majority began to murmur internally. The ideas percolating within them were bold and posed heavy risks, but the benefits were high as well. If they could create distrust between Naekos current faction and Voidwatch, that could create a more fluid environment for the coming conflict. But what of the Dreamer. At the mention of the abominations name, the Majority went quiet. Yes, what of the Dreamer. What of the one that glimpsed them ever so briefly even through the Substance. Did he have more fragments of himself scattered among his allies? Was he still here? We cannot rush into this. We must tread carefully. Keep ourselves away from the Chief Paladin and his direct companions. They must not be aware of our presence. They cant be. His signature was lost in the Substance after the engagement. We do not know if he survived. He might not have. And we have been so fortunate before? Did Veylis Avandaer conveniently die for us during the Guild Wars? At that chiding remark, the rest of the rest of the Majority went silent. We do this carefully. Slowly. Close on them. Close on all their peripheral allies and relations first. Dispatch new orders and redaction-parameters for Operative Denton. A series of affirmations pulsed out from the Majority, as their new Sleepers slipped aboard the unfinished planetary ring. The Fifth Guild War was halted on the surface, but in the shadows, nothing changed. The game still continued, and lurking power began to make their play. Chapter 33-7 Unwelcoming Committee (III) The role of emissary is often seen more as a punishment than a position of privilege. Those who enter such roles usually do so under genuine belief toward the institution of diplomacy, ormore oftenare forced into such positions after being displaced by internal power struggles. For those familiar with military matters and the nature of the ongoing Shadow Wars, the expense of keeping a public figure alive incurs astronomical costs, given the material, metaphysical, and mental threats that such individuals face on a daily basis. As such, the cheapest diplomats to field are also Godclads in of themselvesthough neutered versions at that. This has given rise to the derogatory term of getting First Sphered, with the implication of them being made a supposed Demi-Clad only useful for resolving the matter of assassination through active resurrection without costing a substantive amount of thaums or other ontologics. Even so, there are greater dangers than mere death in Idheims current political environment. With the explosion in Necrotheurgic development and its unrestricted use, the mind of an individual is as much a battlefield as reality or the tapestry, and it is there, most often, that the greatest of victories are achieved, or looming defeats are shaped... -The Commingled Web: A Treatise on Modern Politics 33-7 Unwelcoming Committee (III) [Samir Naeko, The Sage of the Sundered Sky] Alright. Tell me again why Im leading these talks, and you arent? Naeko sighed. He knew something was coming his way when Jaus leveled that smile at him the cat-like grin he sported when he was coming up with some kind of devious plot in his mind. Hells, Naeko had half a mind to assume Jaus was the one who sent Chambers to come speak to him. The recovered Paladins, Chambers; a hovering glass shard serving as a passage anchor for Draus; Vator Greatling; Shotin Kazahara; Acting Authority Mondelles; and the phantom projections of Cas something-Canduir and Cala Marlowe were all gathered in instructors louge turned primary conference room. The surrounding walls and ceiling were layered in with a few dozen moving panels of glass used to keep track of the arriving Guild emissaries. One delegation after another arrived in rapid succession, and aside from a sneaky attempt by Ori-Thaum to cast a subtle frequency-based miracle at the Omnitech vessel ahead of them, the Colors were doing decent with the no fucking snuffing each other restrictions. With that said, Naeko thought his main job was done. Now, he just had to keep the peace and whatnot. Until Jaus decided to abdicate his responsibilities and push Naeko into the administrative role as well. You are leading these issues because you are the figure we need right now, and to be honest, my return has brought only negativity in its wake. Jaus held up a hand before all the Paladins, Mondelles, and even that cultist-terrorist Canduir started protesting. I appreciate how you are all reacting, but it is true. My ways have led to the mistakes of the present, and my return will draw all focus away from more pressing matters. Jaus stood leaned back in his seat and adopted a pensive expression. In this short time, Ive seen things and glimpsed dark truths from those I have spoken to. The things Ive seen... It displeases and disquiets me. Especially the increased valorization of my personage. The Godsfall was not performed by my hands alone. Countless more died to see freedom achieved. So many... His gaze went somewhere distant for a while, and Naeko tried not to roll his eyes. The other idiots in the room were entranced, but Jaus was widening them up, doing his whole exploitation of a poignant moment routine. Jaus suddenly stoodanother rhetorical trick meant to throw his listeners off guard. My conversations with Former Regular Draus have made me see the flaws in my ways. I was at once too good a parent and not stern enough of a master for my daughterand the opposite for you. He looked at Naeko. The Chief Paladin looked away and folded his arms. Kassamon gave an awkward cough. Many among you may think great things of me, but I ask you now to look upon each other. Think about the state of the world. Think about how things are across Idheim. Does this look like the legacy of a Savior? Does this seem like a world that has been saved. Highest Avandaer, Mondelles began, his voice thick with reverence. You couldnt have known Silence! Jaus barked. The Instrument jolted back, face going pale. Most of the Paladins reacted the same way. Only Naeko was somewhat familiar with the mans tactics, and everything was collapsing the way Jaus wanted. I apologize. But do not interrupt me again. It is impolite to speak when another is still talking. Iyes. I amForgive me. Mondelles looked more shellshocked than a soldier who spent months in combat without rotation. Jaus inclined his head with an almost haughty nod. Granted. He started using his eyes then, glaring at each of the others to ramp up the tension in the room. Look at all of you. Afraid. Cowed. Cowed by words alone. By idolization and authority. He let out an exaggerated sigh. This is why it must be you, Naeko. You and not me. Because love has led us to this place, and what we need is more fear. This is also the same reason I refuse to retake my Frame. Instead, I wholeheartedly give my blessing to Aedon Chambers and ask that you all do what you can to aid the Heaven of Love in overcoming all challenges. Chambers wasnt presently with them right then-he was too busy linking up with Denton and Green River right now. Still, Naeko felt a shudder of something pass across the tapestry. Draus was present, and Chambers always had a Bond latched to her, so even if she heard something, so did he. r?N?Bs? A hand went up among the gathering, and Jaus found his gaze settling on Shotin Kazahara. The man, frankly, looked worse than shit. There were dark bags under his eyes, a grimace that screamed of constant pain, and his general demeanor screamed imminent violence at all moments. The only reason Naeko hadnt dedicated more attention to him was the Bond threaded through his heart as well. This one was going to be Chambers responsibility. Jaus told Naeko as much. Alright. Alright... Naeko said, working the muscle he liked using the least: his brain. He took stock of his forces and considered his advantages. Between him, Chambers, Draus, and a few of his Paladins, he had a strong enough force to threaten warhosts and affect things at an operational level. This influence is the reason the Guilds capitulated to his demands after all. But Chambers use was greater as a Godclad of utility than an instrument of war. Through the Lovebringers so-called Lovenet, displaced Paladins managed to get extracted, and they also had communications-based dominance as well, exceeding anything Omnitech could maintain. There were several limitations to the Heavenvulnerabilities as well. It wasnt nearly as public-use friendly as the Nether was, and everything was predicated on Chambers. This demanded caution, but considering Chambers could create Bonds between anyone and the objects of their affection... The arrival of the emissaries all but ensured the compromise of superiors as well. This opened the opportunity to conduct a bit of psychological warfare. +Chambers,+ Naeko said, casting his thoughts into the reflection. A slight shimmer pulsed across the surface of the glass panels, and a few seconds later, a bright thread pierced Naekos chest. +Yeah, boss? Whats up?+ Across the link, Naeko could vaguely hear two Sang cursing at each others lineage over what sounded like a deal gone bad. One of them sounded like Green Riverangrier than Naeko had ever heard her. The other... Naeko wasnt sure. He ignored that for now. +Focus on making some Bonds between the emissaries and their direct superiors. You can shuttle some of us over to them after you do that, right?+ +Yeah. Should be pretty easy. So, what? Are we raiding these half-strands? Decaptating them?+ +No,+ Naeko said, looking at his Paladins. +But I do want them to be worried. I want to them to know that we are omnipresent, that nothing they do is beyond our notice, and nowhere they can go is beyond our reach. I dont think they have a proper gauge of your canons right now, so heres the play+ He turned his attention to his Paladins and switched back to verbal speech. Kassamon. South Song. Organize the rest of the bunch for an excursion. Youre going to help deliver a message from me to the home offices of the Guilds. Got it, top, Kassamon said. Is this going to be a hands-on message or... Naeko shook his head. Just a quick one. But leave a mark. I dont want them to think they just imagined you popping in. Draus. ETA. It took a few seconds for the Regular to reply through her passages. +Approximately ten minutes before they arrive in the holding areas in the rings central atrium.+ Good. Have them wait there for a while. Just stew for a while. Leave some of your flats with them and see if they shove their arms deeper into Mercys mem-cons. After that, grab Green River and Denton and get back to the conference room. +Negative on River. The other Sang are already eyin her with suspicion, but a few are startin to appeal for favors as well. Right now, theyre not sure if shes a turncoat or this is just because our pre-existing relationship.+ Fine. Just Denton, then. But after that, I want you to make a few shards for my Paladins. Then, I wanna talk with you. Need your advice on some stuff. A lull of silence followed. +Aint sure what use I might be there. This shit aint exactly my expertise.+ Naeko was about to reply when Jaus shook his head and pointed up with his index finger, mouthing the words encourage potential. Yeah, well, it isnt exactly mine either. But you did good with the flat idea and Im gonna want you to bear some commanding duties in case we have to start snuffing motherfuckers anyway. +Why dont you have Jaus do it?+ Draus, did you ask this godsdamned many questions when you were back in the Regs. +Askin question about dumb-shit orders is part of the reason I got drummed out, so... yeah.+ The Chief Paladin rubbed his face. Fine. He walked into that one. Jaus is occupied. I just need you to help me, alright. +Synced. Shuttling Denton now.+ Great. Nova. Naeko nodded. Alright. Next... What was next. Next was he needed more expertise, more advice. Insight and understanding. Not for the first time, Naeko wondered why Avo cast him out into the world while the latter stayed behind. He did let the ghoul burn him. Maybe that was enough. Maybe. And maybe Naeko could steal a few tricks from his monstrous savior. +Mercy. Im gonna need something else from you.+ +Speak and I will see if I can deliver, oh Chosen Champion,+ the Famine of Mercy said. +Get together with Chambers. I want warded communications between me and the others. Its time we learn to be a bit more than just ourselves.+ Something almost akin to a smile flickered on the simmering Famines enshadowed face. +Thy will be done.+ Chapter 33-8 Unwelcoming Committee (IV) Chapter 33-8 Unwelcoming Committee (IV) There is someone watching the world from inside me. I cant hear them, I cant feel them, but I know theyre there. Patches of my memories go missing, and there are these times when I cant separate my dreams from the waking world, but I know... I know... What I dont know is who I really am. Not anymore. For the last fifty years, Ive lived a life. A real life. An entire life. I was a kid againor at least planted in the body of a child. I went through the Highflame academic systemgot sorted into counter-intel after my Tempering Day. Tempering Day... The final tests that determine your aptitudes and potential for development. I remember being so proud. But that night I dreamed of something else. Another life. Another series of moments not too unlike this one. Dedicated training in languages, philosophies, artistry, politics, combat, and tradecraft... I remember people but their faces were like blank canvases. I remember feelings, but they come to me like echoes. I remember. And then they go away. And I was myself again. But then something happened. After fifty years of service, after fifty years of holding the Great Wards against the Incubi and trying to keep Highflame safe, the Nether came down. Everything collapsed. And me with it. I was diving deep when the Nether fell. There was a distant fire, split through by a scar of gold. And then, for but a moment, that flame fractured, and part of it tore through me. Took pieces out of me. Or broke through my outer shell. When parts of my present ego shattered, it exposed something beneathsomething that was hidden all this time. Another life. Another loyalty. I thinkI think I was from Ori-Thaum. I think my assignment was to reach a high enough position to cripple their N-DEF all at once, but I cant tell if thats a delusion or if Im just too nulled... But then I glimpse myself in the mirror sometimes and see... and see a shadow of me reaching back. But its not really me. The shadow doesnt have my face. But our minds were... once one and the same. And its like it''s drowning, like it''s trying to swim away from something thats captured it. But like with my dreams, it goes away. It goes away, and I am alone. But Im not myself anymore. I dont know what to do. I dont know who I am. I dont know who I am. -Mit''sem-Log of a Rogue Sleeper 33-8 Unwelcoming Committee (IV) [Denton] Operative Valerie Denton wasnt surprised often, but in the aftermath of all that transpired, her continued survival bordered on the miraculous. Her mind was in fragments after the sundering of Scale, and with the subsequent expansion of the Substance, a good portion of her sheath suffered near fatal damage as well. It was only by pure happenstance that she was discoveredpulled out from a mountain rubble while rescue units were trying to extract a buried Clan Elder. Some time in a rejuv-vat and a few biological miracles later, she was in as fine of a shape as she ever had been. Physically, at least. Mentally, the damage was severe enough to pose an issue. It went deep enough to compromise even her inner processes. Not ideal, considering the truths that might expose. But seeing as Ori-Thaum was in a hurry to dispatch her to fulfill her usual role of being Chief Paladin Naekos point of contact for Ori-Thaum, she assumed they still trusted her. As much as they always did. +Oh, before I forget to tell you this, Im glad you''re still unsnuffed, Denton. Cas is going to be burning hot to hear from you.+ Her attention shifted to the Bond leashing her to Drausor a constructed avatar of the Regular. It never ceased to astonish her how much could happen in the span of days. In the short time since the destruction of Scale, Naeko had been freed, and now occupied the role of a tenth power in New Vultun. Meanwhile, Chambers was the new Heaven of Love-and the unofficial replacement for the Deep Nether, no less. The fact that Avo hadnt interfaced with her mind was disconcerting. Chambers hadnt remarked on his absence, so the situation couldnt be entirely dreadful. However, she couldnt quite shake the feeling of something being entirely out of place... [Operative Denton: Directives from Inner Council. Establish closer ties to the Lovebringer and associates. Uncover Chief Paladins main objectives for the near future.] The flashing Cognisoft notification almost made her tense before she released a breath. Whatever the capabilities of the Inner Councils new meta-mental constructs, it didnt seem to be capable of intercepting exchanges across Chambers so-called Lovenet. And a good thing at that, otherwise, they might just have learned more about Denton than she wanted. Thus far, they were expecting her to angle her way into compromising Chambers through her relationship with Naeko. Which was amusing considering she was likely closer to Chambers than she was with the Chief Paladin. Their walk through the planetary ring was shortened thanks to Draus passages. Some other representatives alongside Denton tensed at the prospect of venturing through a former Regulars portal, but when she passed through without hesitation, they followed as well. Accompanying her were representatives from all the major and minor clans save for the DRongos. Their clansfolk were altogether absent in all sectors. Not surprising, considering the revelations at the trial. Another significant individual of note was Valhu KitzuhadaAmbassdor to Stormtree and someone with a personal interest in attending this conference. His daughter, Kare Kitzuhada, was a Paladin. With the destruction of Scale, her fate was now dubious. Though he kept his expression neutral, his thoughtstuff was spinning at an alarming rate, comparable to the mind of a soldier lost in a battle frenzy. Drawn by Draus across a grand expanse of shifting fractals, Denton eyed her Bond and cast a question. +Chambers. A question before we arrive: Do you have any information about Kare Kitzuhada?+ The heavy pulsations of love weakened, as if enervated by her words. +Yeah... I do, but...+ +She is dead.+ +Yeah.+ +How?+ +Fucking, something went wrong when Scale got obliterated. Everything went to shit and, uh... It might be best if Shotin speaks to the Ambassador.+ Denton noted Chambers Bond to Valhu being significantly dimmer than the others. +Ill be honest, consang, just attaching myself to him makes me feel like shit. I havent told him at all. Dont got the heart, and I think it would be pretty fucked if i just forced love into him to blunt the ugly reality.+ +Quite. Shotin. What is his condition?+ +Shotin,+ Naeko said, awkwardly entering the conversation with a grunt. +Ill make sure you get your moment to speak with him. But I want to talk with him after. To offer... I dont know what the fuck Im going to offer. She was one of mine, and now shes gone. I got a debt of responsibility here too.+ Holy fuck, it was like the misery was contagious. Was everyone going to do the woe is me thing. Chambers wondered if he should infuse the Bonds connecting all of them with a bit more love, but he wasnt sure at this point. He created an internal set of connections between the members of the Symmetry, effectively creating a Love-lobby for everyone to work together, but the compounding misery wasnt very nova... Ever so slightly, he added just a bit more pleasure into the Bonds.Some rawness dissolved immediately, and Chambers caught a cast from Draus. +Nice work. Probably a good call. Keep them focused. Just dont overdo it.+ He almost did a double-take. She was complimenting him more now. Barely grumbled at him anymore. Shit, maybe he should have Mercy take a dive into her mind. See if anyone pierced her wards and was jacking through her ego. +She is clean. I am certain of this.+ Mercys voice made Chambers flinch. Gah! Fuck! Dont do that shit! +I apologize, Keeper of Love. But I hope that you might be assured by my sugbtlety. If you did not notice my intrusion, then few others will. And few things are capable of slipping my notice.+ +Alright,+ Chambers said in reply. +Just keep an eye out. Our flats got any bites yet?+ +A few have reached into them thus far. They are probing through my false memories. The contagion should spread through the delegation relatively soon.+ +Nova. Heh. These poor half-strands dont even know what kind of games being played.+ *** [The Majority] Every person had a Shadow. It wasnt exactly like an ego-node possessed by the Low Masters of Noloth nor was it ever meant to be. Rather than copying from ones sequences directly, a compilation of information, actions, decisions, and other essential details were channeled through the Majority to create a near-perfect model of a Constituent. Near perfect because the highest Domains for Ori-Thaum were never the realm of minds or consciousness, but intelligence, information, and perception. After all, the mind was such a malleable thing. Easily changed, easily fooled. Better to control the environment it faced rather than the vulnerable core itself. That being said, they still needed a means to access and imprint the mem-data composing an ego a task that was immensely difficult when the specific ego you were trying to copy was a Highflame Regular. Constituent of Aedon Chambers [Failed Connected to the Dreamer; Risk Potential: 99.5%] Constituent of Samir Naeko [Failed Connected to the Dreamer; Risk Potential: 99.5%] Constituent of Cas eldCanduir generated Constituent of Cala Marlowe generated Constituent of Famine of Mercy generated Constituent of Shotin Kazahara updating... [Failed Connected to the Dreamer; Risk Potential: 99.5%] Constituent of Jelene Draus pending... pending... pending... Other infiltrated egos on hold. Devoting more resources to the replication of the Regular. A brief shuffle of discord passed through the Majority. Some didnt like this ideathinking it a waste. She is just one person. This is not worth the expense. She bears a fragment of the Stillborn. She is a herald of the Burning Dreamer. We must have her Shadow retrained for predictive simulations. Nothing must be left to chancechanceshekilledmeshekilledsomanyofuskillherherkill... And what of Shotin? There was the other person of concern. Though he had a vague sense of their Seeker, his Shadow was now diluted with a burning presence that seared the Majoritys tendrils when they dared to approach. He has been marked by the Dreamer too. We must approach with caution. Manipulate them through social engineering methods. Cogni-thaumaturgical means deemed too high risk. Concurred. Most optimal path to allegiance with Ori-Thaum: Create conflict with Voidwatch. Engineer moment of assistance to deepen ties. Risks... acceptable. Revelation of Kill Team Innsmouth also useful. Confirmed. Beginning info-simulations... Priming Constituents Denton and Kitzuhada... Chapter 33-9 Guilty Everyone is spying and scrying on each other. That is the most natural thing. Especially between allies. Trust is for amateurs. Professionals verify. Professionals know. And professionals understand that other professionals have obligations to meet and duties to perform. This is why you Juv-Necs shouldnt be surprised if you find some Ori sequencing in your Stormtree paydata. Because of course theyre there. The Incubi are taking a peek too. And while theyre watching everyone else, people are watching them as well. You think the Nether is the only means of tradecraft? Ive seen No-Dragon miracles achieve the most ridiculous feats of infiltration. They have viruses that can listen and transmit genetic memory from their hosts. They shape new viruses that serve as paracausal auditory listening aids and use your skin as a listening post. Yeah... some of you are starting to get it. Starting to understand just how much effort it takes to create an airtight environment resistant to all infiltration. Well, Im here to tell you that you can get close, but not all the way there. Whatever your edge, someone else has another. And thats the way the world turns. Plan well. Double-check your intel. But as always, be prepared to jack out. Even with all that, theres a chance you might end up nulled. But theres a chance you could get flash-fried by a Heaven of Fire the next second. Theres only so much we can foresee and control... -White-Rab 33-9 Guilty [Jelene Draus] Draus was starting to have that funny feeling again. That funny feeling that came when there was something wrong, but she just couldnt tell what. These feelings mainly came to her when she was pinned by a sniper from beyond visual range, or after certain specific memories went missingwhich meant a Necro was behind her wards. You survive enough wars, and you start getting instincts for when something was crawling over the horizon to fuck you. Problem was that feelings didnt grant prescience. Despite all her new capabilities, she wasnt Avo. Wasnt even a Necro for that matter. +They remain stable,+ Mercy said, reviewing the Chosen again. The Famine had his tentacles latched to each of the flats minds, so he would be the first to know if any of these Guilder half-strands were doing anything. So far, aside from the Ori taking a peek at their near-term memories and the Sang spreading a few viruses, there didnt seem to be anything out of the ordinary. Problem was that Draus paranoia only got worse. +Your paranoia is understandable. The mind learns in patterns, and you are used to conflict+ +Im used to the opposition doin something. Anything. Right now, it seems like the Infacer and Veylis are just plannin to turtle up or whatever the hells... The Guilds are cowed and showing their bellies. It all looks too damn good and compliant.+ +You would rather someone make an attempt on your life? To destroy this station?+ +Yeah. I would. I know how to deal with that shit. Give me something to shoot back at.+ +You are a very material individual, Knight-Draus. But the domain of warfare exceeds that of matter. Trust that my vigilance guards the fallen realm of the mind.+ +Yeah, fuck that. I dont trust you, MercyI trust Avo. And seein as he left you alive, Im guessing youre pretty castrated. But I also remember Avos fuck-ups too. His first encounter with the Incubi, our little bout with Abrel, him getting dragged into the Deep Nethernot even his fault, that one. For all hes become, he aint omnipotent. And thats the fucked thing: What you know might kill you, what you dont definitely will. Keep looking. Dont stop.+ The Famine sent thoughts of bowing to Draus through the Lovenet and she snorted internally. Bastard really took this new Avo is a king and were his court gimmick all the way to the end. She had half a mind to assume this was still a Nolothi plot. Maybe the ultimate warmind is that of Arrogance Arrogance, so after they tongue Avos ghoul ass enough, his ego might overinflate and finally pop. RA?bE?s?? +Whoa, Draus, that sounds like one of my thoughts,+ Chambers muttered. The Regular held back a wince. Right. The Nether was fucked. She was using Chambers as a replacement. Not ideal at all. Hells, it might even be his fault she was thinking this way. Who knew what kind of weird shit the Bonds were pouring into her. +Yeah, well, it wouldnt be the weirdest thought Ive had recently.+ +Yeah? Me neither. For what its worth, whats happening right now is making me all kinds of jittered too. I wish we had White-Rab or someone here with us. Or even Avo. Fuck, Avo would be so useful right now.+ Draus thought about the ruptures spreading out from the Substance, about the war that was probably happening behind the scenes. A weight built inside of her. +Im not supposed to be here... I aint got no real use here. Would be more useful in the thick of things, and him in my place.+ The thoughts left her like a trickle of leaking water, but as they spilled into Chambers, he responded with a somber acknowledgement. +Yeah. I think the same shit sometimes. Kae too. Kare. Like.... Im no true Godclad. Not a good soldier or a warrior or any of that shit. By all means, I shouldnt be here, and Im definitely not a better user for the Heaven of Love than... fuck, maybe most of the city. But I dont think deserve matters, Draus. It never did. Were here, and we got to make the most of things.+ The Regular paused. +Chambers.+ +Good. Youre all here. Sit your asses down. I got shit to say.+ Such were Naekos opening words to the arriving emissaries. Not very diplomatic at allbut Draus guessed this effect was deliberate. Jaus was connected to them as well through the Lovenet, but so far, he spoke no comment or left no interjections. The Savior seemed to be content with watching, learning, studying. Maybe he was instructing Naeko as well, but Draus couldnt be sure. The delegates responded in a variety of ways. Some Stormtree and Ori delegates griped and moaned, but did as they were told. The rest kept their expressions blank, but even that couldnt hide the speed at which their accretions were turning, nor the anxiety churning inside them. Their perceptions merged into a coalescing nexus around Naeko. After some jockeying, the delegates finally managed the impossible task of landing asses upon seats. Ghost-Links formed between certain members, but as a whole, they seemed unprepared for the moment at hand. Which was what Naeko intended, calling all the Guilds to this emergency conference after laying down the law. As this happened, Chambers Bonds grew taut within each of the delegates, and from the connective threads came the deep boom of Naekos voice. +Alright. Welcome to the continuation of the trial. As you might have noticed, this isnt Scale, so we couldnt provide all of you with leisure and luxuries. You got a problem with that? Direct your complaints to Veylis and the Burning Dreamer. Actually, feel free to march yourselves into the Substance to tell them directly.+ Some of the delegates looked to each other. +But then again, I cant exactly blame all this just on them. You all helped too.+ The delegates eyed each other. A few shifted in their seats, awkwardly. +Oh, dont be that way now, motherfuckers. You did this. And I let you. I took a sabbatical for a few years and let you guys turn everything to shit.+ Okay. Jaus probably wasnt feeding him these words. This was all Naeko. And Naeko was mad. The mists cascading down from the palm made the planetary ring tremble. Draus glass houses began to click and creak before an unseen pressure, and through the building obfuscation came hovering figuresPaladins approaching. Some of the delegates rose from their seats, but Naekos next thoughtcast came with a pulse of physical force. +Stay seated.+ A hundred voices cried out as they crashed back down. A few tried to manifest their Heavens, but even their Soulfire was squeezed tight barely able to trickle. Countless miracles burned and writhed, but found their patterns second to Peace; their Heavens subservient to the Sage. +He has been kind to you. Soft. He refused to treat you as what you were: Lessers. Slaves. Insects. But I will not.+ No longer was Naeko speaking. This voice came from the palm itself, from an old, rageful god reawakened to an unworthy world. The palm itself was curling, turning into a fist. But it never quite closed. +What is this!+ a Sang cried out. The young-looking one that accompanying Green River. Odd Moon or something. +You cannot treat us this way! We are your guests! The laws of hospitality are being violated!+ A low, bitter chuckle sounded from Naeko. +Trust me, juv. I havent violated anything. Yet. But I could. I could have the Sage here close their hand. And then you wont have much to complain about ever again. Perfect peace. Forever.+ The girl swallowed. Some other delegates struggled. Tension built. The Paladins approached. Seven Paladins came to a halt before each of the glass houses. A surge of magenta energy passed between the corresponding Guild emissaries and their assigned Paladin. Chambers directed his powers of correspondence to extend beyond the reach of their local environment, trawling through the relationships the delegates had, seeking their superiors. It took little time to locate those worthy of note. It took even less effort for Chambers to channel the Paladins across the link behind Guilder lines. In a few minutes, more essential personnel from each Guild would be invited into attendance, and the actual power brokers would need to contend with Naeko as well. +Just breathe,+ Naeko said. +Breath. Because Im not going to snuff you pointlessly. Not like what youve done to so many in my city. No. And dont worry about my Paladins. Theyre just going to have a little chat.+ +Chief Paladin, I understand your anger,+ Ambassador Valhu Kitzuhara said. He, aside from Denton, remained relaxed in posture. +Furthermore, we are willing to work with you to see things made right. The destruction of Scale+ +FUCK SCALE!+ Naeko roared. +I dont give a shit about that mountain. I dont give a shiMy Paladins. You know where they are? Do you? Because I dont. A lot of them are missing. Missing or worse.+ Valhus fists clenched. +Scale was dead for a long time. I let it did. I abandoned it. I abandoned my duty. And theres no way I can make that right now. Just like theres no way for your Guilds to make up for what youve been doing for centuries. I didnt call you here today to do another rash-fucked discussion about weregild or reparations. This is about justice. Justice delayed and justice denied. Because youve been using the lives of the Subjects like they were your playthings, and were all the reason why the world is the way that it is.+ Suddenly, another brightening of magenta filled each of the glass structures. They came alight from the inside just as Naekos fog slowly receded, and a second thereafter, the seven Paladins that passed over through the Bonds returned with about a dozen more individuals from each Guild. The newly invited guests crashed down before their emissaries at the feet of the Paladins, and a series of stunned reactions followed. Dowager Dawn! Odd Moon cried. Before the Sang was a half-dressed woman half-sheathed into a horse-like bio-rig. The skin of lining the upper half of her body swung in rapidly healing tatters, and her bright blue eyes were wide with shock. Draus caught a cruel smirk briefly flickered on Green Rivers face before she suppressed it. Shit was getting messier fast, and strangely, Draus found herself liking this too. Damn shame it took you this long to find your balls, Naeko. Wouldve been a fine death for me and the Orphans if we were ordered to march against you and yours. Released from Naekos grasp, some of the delegates broke from where they were sitting to help their superiors, while others lingered in a daze. The Paladins returned to Naeko, who was now looming over all the Guilds upon an extended middle finger. +Alright. Now were in business. Now the actual people worth inviting are here, lets do this shit. I didnt ask you all to come here today so I could play pass the messenger with you. No. I want to talk to the ones that decide. The ones that matter. I want to tell you that this isnt a deliberation on whos fault or whos guilty. That verdicts already come down, and were all fucking guilty. So, right now, I want to talk about what comes after that. I want to talk about consequence, about what I might do to all of you, and what you can give in return to make me stop.+ Chapter 33-10 Information (I) Anyone who understands the Ori knows that our primary focus is not only on mastering the mind, but also the shaping and manipulation of knowledge itself. The mind is only a portion of the equation, after all. Essential, of course, but merely the receiver compared to everything that is. Consider this: Your mind is like a mechanism that dilutes water rather than the water itself. It can interface and apply various solutions to the water, but ultimately, it does not fully grasp the foundational source of the knowledge. It can only operate based on feeling, learned understanding, and cultural meaning. This is the purpose behind the Informational Heavens. Because where Highflame has grown quite adept at N-DEF, they still dont fully grasp the true methodologies of wielding intelligence. Ignorance is not the only poison one can face, after all. There is also corroded understanding. Like suddenly not being able to understand your own language, or numbers, or even the alteration of a specific word. The changing of such commands like Hold this position into Retreat now for instance. For on the battlefield and in the courts, the slightest shifts in diplomacy will see one make the wrong choice, and of no fault of their own. It wasnt a problem of their mind, after all. The mechanism was perfect. But the waters were always toxic. -Connotative Corrosion by Elder Iruru Hitari 33-10 Information (I) [The Majority] His behavior is drastic. Planned. Are we sure? The volatility fits his ego-template. Off by a deviation. If he was truly angry, our delegates should be dead. Reference the [Karakan] mem-packet. She could be a special case. Her special case was that he exhausted every effort to keep her alive. Our emissaries are not so hated. Or fortunate. The Guild or faction that the Chief Paladin chooses to support will see a major advantage in an active conflict. His intentions are obvious: Peace. Equilibrium. His anger is part theater. And there is the matter of [Jaus Avandaer]... We have compiled his Shadow. The mem-data is... disconcerting. The Majority observed the scene through a few hundred new Constituents. Though Naekos decision to use the Lovenet and kidnap a few of Clan Kazaharas Elders came as a surprise, it wasnt an unwelcome one, as it allowed the Majority new vectors of perception. Even so, they still couldnt quite manage to claim Draus Shadow, or fully reach Chambers or even Seeker Shotin for that matter. RA???BE?S The Dreamer. He has warded them against us. Might he be here? Might this be his plan, his scheme. He noticed us before. He shouldnt. He would have tried to engage. To burn and consume us. He can see the pattern. He would have responded with an immediate ambush based on our profile of his behavior. Perhaps he is trying to use us to further his plans. Possible, but we are devolving into paranoia. We do not know everythingno one knows everything. We must proceed with our operation. Target Voidwatch. Divert the Chief Paladins focus and realign the faction involved in this war. We must continue softly. Carefully. Do nothing to betray our methods. Acknowledgedstopletmeoutletmewhat of Jaus Avandaer? What do we do with him? The Majority degenerated into a mess of clamoring voices at that. A good percentage of its internalized population still revered the savior. For the Inner Council to decide anything overt might provoke a rarely experienced veto from the masses a thing best avoided. We watch. We study. And we keep guard. He might be an instrument of the Dreamers. Or perhaps, the claims might be true: The Savior did leave a mind clone. Then... is it not our duty to join him with our cause? To unite him with greater destiny and show him all that we have done in his name.@@@@ We watch. And the disagreements among the Inner Council concluded there. This is a moment of peace. We will use it. We will only act when things are clear. Now is not the time to be drastic. Now is the time to make our adversaries come apart from within. *** [Green River] Watching Brilliant Orchard splayed out on the ground, gawking at the Paladins in stunned horror made this circus worth it. Green River knew a bit more about the current situation compared to the other No-Dragons, but even she was awed by the Chief Paladins boldness. Even so, that didnt stop her from playing her role dutifully. Brushing off her floral dress, she rose from her seat and descended the steps in a hurry. She put on a slightly worried expression on her face as she arrived beside the half-flayed body of Brilliant Orchard. Senior sister, are you well? she said, adding just enough sweetness in her voice to sound genuine. The whites of Brilliant Orchards eyes turned to her and glared. For a long while, the Dowager just stared. Doubtless she still suspected things of Green River, but to think her in league with the Paladins was unlikely. No, she probably just thought Green River was trying to curry favor in the present moment for future benefits. +Fucked if I know.+ Green River nearly strangled the Heaven of Loves Bonds in response. +What do you mean fucked if you know. Chambers, I have been claimed by your master! We are of a linethrough no choice of my own. You can tell me.+ +Yeah, and I just did. Fucked if I know. Naekos got something planned. Im just trying to help him get it done. I dont got all the details. Im mainly trying to find more people to snatch and save right now. You know how hard it is not to just get swallowed up by love? Really hard. Gotta focus on that first, otherwise, well... the first time I used the Heaven of Love, I mightve made some people almost cum themselves to death. Which turned me into a vegetable too.+ +What?+ Green River replied, wondering if she just had a stroke. +Yeah, it was fucking nova and weird at the same time. Like, have you ever had+ +Direct me through to Draus. I wish to talk to someone who isnt the mental equivalent of a nu-dog.+ +Wow. Fuck you too, Green River.+ But despite his words, he did as she asked. +Draus,+ Green River said, looking to the Regular. +What in the hells is going on? What is your attack dog planning?+ +Who? Naeko?+ Regular replied, barely glancing at River. +Yes! We were supposed to talk. He is currently threatening a Dowager. The Politburo will not let this go unpunished.+ +Shit. Sounds messy.+ +Draus!+ +What do you want me to say, River? Fucked if I know what hes doing. I aint Samir Naeko.+ Green River nearly let out a defeated groan. How did these people even survive for so long. Was being chaotic and disorganized their strategy? Now, Naeko said, placing a massive hand on Brilliant Orchards backsomeone one should absolutely never do to a ranking Citizen of the No-Dragons. Got a few things Im going to need you to doand I want you all to serve as witnesses. Naeko pointed a finger at all the Sang in the glass house. Their faces were pale and their postures tense, but no one made a move, even though someone should have intervened right now. Should have, but the prospect of being rendered a messy smear by Naeko gave even the barest No-Dragon second thoughts. I need you... to tell me every single grievance you have against the other Guilds, and what its going to take for you to come to a full truce. A full truce? Brilliant Orchard said. Withwith the Massists? Yeah. Ori-Thaum? Yeah. Ashthrone? Sanctus? Them too. And Stormtree. Ah, shit, you remembered all of them. Glad to see your memorys still there. Seems like youre not going to need to eat one of your sisters yet, huh? Your request is impossible, Brilliant Orchard replied. She leaned down, looming over Naeko without fear. And you misunderstand your positionand mine. This isnt something a few individuals can decide. Its more than just our personal wants at stake. No. No? Brilliant Orchard said, eyes widening. Green River hated the bitch, but she was struggling not to share an expression. Had Naeko finally lost what remained of his mind. Yeah. No. Naeko chuckled. Because Im about to make you an offer. The best offer youre going to get in this life. Or any life. Same one Im going to give to the other Guild leaders. Brilliant Orchard. How would you like to be singularly in charge of the No-Dragons. I... Brilliant Orchard should have rebuked him immediately, but power was an enticing prize and the sheer audacity of his offer was a thing to behold. I... you cant do this. Youyou dont have the power. You might be at the Ninth Sphere now, but you are not alone. Thewe have means Im not the one you need to worry about, Naeko said, interrupting her. Cause while you were worrying about my palm, you missed the bigger picture. The bigger picture in the form of love. Now. Can you tell me about your relationship with the other Dowagers? And with aching slowness, Green River began to understand what Naeko was trying to do. And that he wasnt even the biggest threat here. Cum themselves to death... Oh, dead gods, he was going to use Aedon Chambers to cull the upper branches of every Guild. Chapter 33-11 Information (II) There is bitter wisdom in offering a tiger an envenomed limb... -Old Sang Proverb 33-11 Information (II) [The Majority] THE INNER COUNCIL HAS CALLED AN EMERGENCY VOTE INTO SESSION: MOTION TO RENDER ALL CONSTITUENTS OF ORI-THAUM IMPOTENT IS PROCEEDING What? A horrified cry sounded from hundreds of enshadowed Constituents. Their mirrored-egos quailed at the thought of being rendered impotent to ward off the effects of some degenerates twisted miracle. No. Were not doing this. We refuse. Against + 3.4% This is fine. We spent years suppressing our urges due to the rashthe situation isnt fundamentally different, the danger has just evolved. We must not allow the Lovebringer to disable us in such a... disgusting manner. For the Overclan! For +2.4% Could the Sangs assumptions be mistaken? Perhaps the Lovebringer wont use such overt means Seeking blind hope in the face of a merciless enemy is like assuming the chalice they offer is truly filled with wine and not poison. Ask yourselves what would we do with his Heaven. What would we do to win. Violating or not, it is clear that this Aedon Chambers has the capacitynohesavedus...hesavedus.... Hes a good man! A good man! He stood against his own shadow! No! No! I refuse! Against +0.003% MOTION TO DIRECTLY CONTACT AEDON CHAMBERS THE LOVEBRINGER AND ESTABLISH DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS HAS BEEN PUT FORWARD >MOTION OVERRULED BY INNER COUNCIL The Majority was roiling. The Inner Council turned their attention away from the outside world back inward as they examined the rebellion happening inside. To see some of their own members associating with someone like Aedon Chambers was troubling. Troubling, but almost understandable. His acts against his Pathborn self were commendable, to say the very least, and he had preserved countless Ori lives. But this didnt make him an ally. Not even close. It just made him a more honorable foe at best, and a significant threat in practicality. Though he didnt have any direct means to Bond with the Majority, if he contaminated the bulk of their population, the effects could be equally devastating. The Shadows of each Constituent were derived from their actual behaviors, their thoughts, from the data that composed their actions. If they were all twisted into a perversion of who they were, disabled by love and lust poured into them on an unfathomable scale... The Majoritys greatest strength was not power projection. In fact, in direct application of force, it was quite possibly the single weakest Heaven there was, lesser than even a feeble First Sphere. However, the reason that it remains an Ark at the Ninth Sphere is because of its immense meta-manipulative capabilities and near-silence even when channeling miracles across tapestry, with absolute control over meaning, understanding, and more. But none of that would matter if it lacked any actors to enforce those capabilities through. ???O??E?S As such, the Inner Council censured the dissenting voices for the betterment of the greater whole. They wouldnt be affected otherwise, and will be studied in terms of why they came to such conclusions, but right now, they couldnt afford to let a single good deed direct them from their righteous path. The [Against] vote has been discontinued. Proceed with the vote based on an affirmative or negative basis For +4.01% Aside from this, though, Chambers also provided a unique opportunity of attack. While Ori-Thaum needed to be insulated, the other Guilds were best left vulnerable. Already, the greatest minds within the Majority turned their focus to exploit this new opportunity. Voidwatch, after all, wasnt immune to the Lovebringers touch from the information they gathered. Perhaps this could be a means to finally and formally breach the polities as well... *** [Shotin] Things were turning into a shitshow, as expected, but he didnt much care about that. Hidden within the Sage itself, the Seeker perception narrowed into a tunnel as he studied his bondsbrother, Ambassador Valhu Kitzuhara. +How you told the person you knew that someone they loved was dead.+ +Oh,+ Chambers sighed. +Okay. For the first couple years I spent as a ganger, I was in charge of inventory. Which is a fancy way of saying Im the one who needed to keep an eye on the literal human cargo. Now, if you know anything about smuggling, you know that a lot of smugglers are fucking ass at keeping the flats alive. Their ships arent clean, the flats get diseases, next thing you know, whats a barge holding 200 ends up being 190 rotting corpses and 10 gibbering wrecks. Not good.+ +Jaus,+ Shotin breathed. He knew things were bad. Seen the vics. But still, to live that life mustve been some kind ugly. +What usually gets people to listen to you after they break is shit like food and water at first. Because after a certain point, the thinking shit doesnt work so good, so they just become more animal. Acting, doing, feeling. Theyll stay that way for a while. Then, you gotta wait for them to talk with you, and then you start bullshitting them.+ +Bullshitting?+ +Yeah! Id tell them that people can get resurrected in the city. That if they just fought hard in a Crucible or served as a good slave to whoever, they might be able to see whoever they lost brought back. New Vultuns the city of the fallen gods, after all. Anything should be possible here.+ Chambers snorted bitterly. +Technically isnt a lie if the right person wins this war and claims the Ladder.+ Shotin was at a loss for words. +Your strategy was just to... to fucking lie to them?+ +Yeah. Kinda. But also to give them something to hope for. Because you gotta have something to lose if you want someone to really fight hard. Dying nu-dog just lays down and goes to sleep. No entertainment value in that. So you gotta promise them some meat at the end. Or a chance of something, anyway. Even if its hate. And for Kare... well, shes not done. Youre not done. And everything she fought for isnt done.+ +Yeah,+ Shotin replied. It wasnt like he didnt know this on a rational level, but to accept it, to swallow these words... No wonder Avo was so successful. The fucking ghoul just assimilated. Not only the opposition, but also his own thoughts and feelings. It didnt stop him, it was just another part of him he could choose to use in one way or another. +Yeah. I get it. Thanks.+ +Sure thing.+ A beat followed, and Chambers let out a small cough. +:Listen. If you dont feel ready for this, I could+ +No. I need to do it. He should hear it from me. Im notI cant be that much of a coward. Ive fucked up enough already. Fucked up for all her life.+ Chambers made a series of noises like he was a broken machine trying to generate a response. +Alright. Just... I got your back. And your heart. And his heart. Let me know when you want to connect. I could even dose him with a bit of love too but... might be a bit fucked uah, shit, Naekos doing something again. Let me get back to you in a bit.+ And once more, Shotin was left alone with his thoughts. But only for a moment. Pitiful creature. The mists around him grumbled and growled. Look at you. Begging another to give you something as weightless as words. The Sage of the Sundered Sky: Naekos own personal nightmare of a Heaven with the Domain of Peace and being an asshole. Fuck off, cloud. Didnt ask you for your opinion. Yet you receive. Yet you will listen. Yet you will hear. What difference between you and a dog in a cage. Do you not have a god inside you? Are you not touched by the Burning One? And why does that matter? Because you are a god, cretin. A god trapped within the breast of a mongrel ape, but a god nonetheless. The child is dead. You failed her. But she was slain as well. Slain by the will of another. No god will allow this to stain them. No god will allow this to be their mythology. You think of what isnt and never thing in terms of what could be again. You are a pathetic god. A weak god. But he has touched you nonetheless. Just like he has touched the Huntress and the Heart-Slaved. The flames of anger sputtered inside Shotin. What are you trying to say? That your human desires are a lie. That you have failed to understand what you are and where you truly stand. She is dead now. But that does not need to be the end of things. Only a part of continuation. All can change. All can be made true or false by divine decree. This is the highest privilege. This is the truth of our existence. To decide, for the first thing we reign over is truth itself, is reality, are those who cannot burn. Let die the ape, Shotin Kazahara, for it has choked the god in you too long. It is only by the weakness of my user that I have not rendered you to bloody ruin for your offense, so I must make right of you another way. Kill the ape, and let the god be born. For I can hear it inside you. It is waking. It is struggling to hatch. Because you wont let it. You delude yourself, and you act like you always have. But just as the hubris of the gods deprived us of perspective and let the bastard hand of Jaus Avandaer hew our roots, understand that the rot in man will see your reign be but a second compared to our eons. For we are spawned from dreams of power and divinity. And you are but paltry kindling trying to channel an inferno. Your failure is human. And human is not enough. A new changing of the times is upon us now. Decide. Become. Or remain, and cede your throne to another. And with that, the Sage fell silent, no longer interested in the broken man. Shotin shivered slightly, and closed his eyes. Fuck. Hurt. Pain. Failure. Kare. Godsdammit. Fuck it all. He took a step forward. And then another. And another, until he was striding through the mist and marching toward the glass box that contained all the Ori-Thaum delegatesand Valhu. With each footstep, something resonated within Shotin, something shivered and pulsed, something was roused. CONDITIONS MET BEGINNING ONTOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION... Chapter 33-12 Information (III) Theres a secret to raiding Guilder facilities. A little trick you can pull on all of them. Most Squires dont have the firepower to raid a Guilder stronghold. Sorry, juvs, but the vics lied. A couple of half-strands with a slap-dash golem, a dozen drones, high-end augs, and a bit of grit arent going to be anything but an x mark on Guilder detection systems if you make a suicide run. Youll get a spatial-kinetic slug put through your skull from a multi-function firing platform hidden in some demiplane. Unless youre a Godclad with heavy Necro and materials support, there is no one-man army solution to breaching a fortification. But this is where the other Guilds come in. See, they hate each other. They really, really hate each other, and most the of time, they spend decadeseven centurieswait for a moment or an opening to strike at. All you need to do, in the end, is reveal a chink, and theyll go all in for you. From there, what you need to do is plan an infiltration speed-run. Let the Guilders destroy each other. Do I recommend you run a job like this? No. Its shit, its risky, and odds are that you end up snuffed because space folded the wrong way. But if youre really looking to kill something beyond your weight classmake them bleed near a predator of their own size. If theres one thing I learned in my lifetime, its that everyone wants to kill someone, and that someone probably has it coming. You just gotta find the right reason and give them a proper opening. -Quail Tavers, The School of the Warrens 33-12 Information (III) [Samir Naeko, Sage of the Sundered Sky] So. To state my terms simply, I will ensure the security of your Guild, the active search and rescue of your missing Citizens, and ensure your probationary integration in league with the Symmetry. Now. I see your faces, I know what youre all thinking: This motherfuckers insane. We cant agree to this. Were separated from central and dont have the authority. Well. I am your authority. And under me is the best chance you have at surviving the coming weeks, months, and years as the Substance slowly overflows. So. Thats my piece. You got any question? Eleven other Dowagers just stared wide-eyed at Naeko alongside Brilliant Orchard. Each one had been plucked off the battlefield or from their residences via Chambers Bonds, and all of them were old acquaintances of Brilliant Orchard. People close enough to her that a relational connection existed. It was a good batch of No-Dragon elites, too. A few from the Branch of Exalted Warfare. Some from the Bureau of Rejuvenation and Cycles. Three from the League of Biomancy. And finally, a few from the Department of Agriculture. Their number amounted to twelve in total, and they each wore a different animal-based bio-rig. Pretty specific animals too. Naeko saw dogs, tigers, pigs... The Sang infused symbolic meaning in everything they did. No other culture was quite as subtextual, but that also meant they were pretty damned hard to most outsiders. Unfortunately for them, Naeko had spent more than a few centuries hunting their gods as well, breaking their dynasties. Old and experienced as these First Daughters were, he knew the ones that came before them, and he could see the sheer dread in their eyes. Yeah. He missed that. Being able to inflict fear, to get what he wanted from the implication alone. It really saved him the trouble. And so you were a fool to abandon your old ways. The only thing he didnt enjoy so much was the new voice grumbling in the back of his head. But it did give him perspectivean understanding into the truer nature of his Heaven. It also gave him the delicious opportunity to ignore the Sage as well. Miserable fucker didnt take well to spite. Do not ignore me, you worthless, embarrassment of false divinity. Naeko did. Because he was the whip-holder, and the Sage? They were less than even a slave where he was involved, and what could a Slave of Peace do against the softest measure of violence. Chief Paladin Naeko, Dowager Fragrant Iron from the Branch of Exalted Warfare began. She wore an ox-like rig that encased her body within a vessel of rippling muscles. We understand that these are troubling timesunprecedented times. But you have to understand that any agreement on our part will not be accepted by a greater consensus of the politburo. Even with Sister Brilliant Orchards seniority, I fear that our agreement to this alliance will be seen as coercion at the least and betrayal at the worst. You were already betrayed, Naeko answered. With a wave of his hand, he called up images of New Vultunof the Substance that consumed the Tiers, and the continent splitting ruptures that were being battled by millions of golems and Rendsinks each passing second. Veylis betrayed you. Did she warn you about what she was trying to do? What she was planning? Did you even know what she intended to pull at the trial? RaNO???? He took a step closer to the No-Dragons and several of them flinched back. Which made him stop. Why do you hesitate Because I already got what I wanted. There was no point in pressing when someone was already bending. Alright. Lets make this simple. Youre all coming with me. Naeko casted a thought at Draus, ordering her to join two of the glass houses. The Regular did as informed, and suddenly, shards of glass shattered from the No-Dragons current structure and reconnected into a bridge leading over to the Ori-Thaum holding facility. A moment later, the walls blocking the way vanished, and from the Ori-Thaum glass house came an anguished cry. A murmur broke out among the Sang. Several of them shared looks of worry. Naeko cocked his head. +Chambers,+ he asked through Lovenet. +The hells happening with the Ori?+ +Yeah... Shotin decided to tell the ambassador about Kare.+ The sound of someone throwing something against a glass wall added proper ambiance to Chambers statement. Naeko winced. He didnt much like Kazahara, but he had to give the poor bastard credit: Naeko never liked informing his Paladins family the news. Alright. Dont worry. Theres no danger there. But Im gonna need you to all come with me. Where? Brilliant Orchard said. Were going to see the Ori. Together. +Your jest lacks the slightest wit.+ +Its not a damned jest. Its the truth. Did you get my Paladins back? Did you reconnect the world? Replace the Nether?+ +These things are trivial. Unimportant. We are the will that decides if one can struggle, if one is allowed violence.+ +Yeah. That worked enough against Veylis, didnt it?+ +That is your failing, not mine.+ +Maybe. But lets not get this shit twisted: I broke you. And the Guilds would have broken you as well. Youre not beyond them. Were not beyond them. Were just a very inconvenient problem that might cripple them for good if any one of them tries to remove us. But if we did things your way, we might just see them united as well. Against us. And after they finally overload us for good, theyll go back to doing what they always do.+ That conversation ended there, but Naeko knew the Sage heard none of it. Gods werent logical creatures. They werent even emotional creatures. They were elemental. Shaped to be a certain way, and that way they stayed. That was the way they had to be. +Perhaps you are right.+ Or not. Naeko nearly got whiplash from the Sages acknowledgement. He came to a sudden halt mid-march and Brilliant Orchard bounced right off his back. Is something wrong? she asked. Naeko blinked. Yeah. Something was wrong. His Heaven agreed with him. +Do not gloat or think yourself wise. But you are not incorrect. And my words regarding the Dreamer are... unwarranted. My existence is owed to their blessing, after all. By this, I am not the flame original, but a kindling lit.+ The misted palm beyond the glass twitched slightly. +Transformation. That is what disturbs us. The withered nature of you. The obsolescence of me. We wrong each other because we are not suitable for the task at hand. The complete task. And with the divines fall, then my belief in tyranny is insufficient. There must be... a change. A different mastering of these slaves. If not through your means, then another.+ +Sage... What the hell are you talking about?+ +I am saying I wish to... learn.+ +Learn?+ +Become greater. Grander. And this requires an evolution of my Domains. Naeko... I wish to be more.+ As they drew close to the Ori glass house, the Sage receded slightly, only lurking in Naekos mind. There, the Chief Paladin saw Shotin staring blankly at Denton while Valhu wept. The other Ori delegates looked lost and confused. Most of them were Mirrors and glaives. A few Clan Elders, which showed some commitment. As Naekos thumping steps approached, heads turned to regard him and several cries went up among the Silvers. They pointed to the Sang behind him, but on their lips was his name. Naeko. Force-Breaker. Peace-Binding. Sage. +Sage,+ the Sage said. +They speak as if we are one and the same. But they fail to notice the Apostle.+ +Shotin?+ +Yes. He is changing as well. As touched as I was by the Dreamer. But he is even more of a crippled vessel than you. Crippled but... free to choose. While I am power incarnate but atrophied and fixed.+ The Sage regarded the Ori and the Sang. +Perhaps this is why you remain. Because of choice. Because you are the agents of change, while the divine is power incarnate. Absolute. But being absolute is a prison in itself.+ Now the Sage was starting to sound like Avo. Or even Jaus. Shit was weird. Weird enough Naeko didnt want to deal with it. So, he focused on something else instead. Alright! He declared to the Ori. Clan Elders. Mirrors. Glaives. Keep yourselves seated. I got something I want to tell youan arrangement I want to make. To their credit, they were silent and obedient. Mercy didnt even notice anyone trying to mess with the flats. Good. Might make this easier. And Im gonna start by going straight to the source as well. Chambers. Reach into them. Pull the Inner Council across if you can. Lets see just how united in destiny these Silvers are. Chapter 33-13 Information (IV) Be mindful in what pond you fish. -Old Sang Proverb 33-13 Information (IV) [The Majority] The Majority surveyed the situation through their various Constituents. At present, several were protesting. A few even threatened the Chief Paladin. All this was to be in vain. Naekos Heaven gave him sole lordship over all applications of violence, but that was a tertiary concern. For all his power, he couldnt reach the Majority. They didnt even truly exist along the same patternsand while he couldnt touch them, they could twist his perception. Or so that was the assumption. The true threat here came in the form of the magenta strands coiling through their delegates. The Lovebringers Bonds. The same feelers drifted just over the Majority itself, the brilliance of love lightning the shadowy form that constituted the cultural representation of the Ori. It twisted and bent between the Constituents, seeking what Naeko ordered: members from the Inner Council. Or, at least, the Sleepers the Majority left to act as their decoy Inner Council. These individuals had been directly sequenced to serve a single function. To act a smokescreen for those who penetrated the deepest layers of Ori-Thaums security. They were also rather different from most other Sleepers. Instead of leading false lives, they were their own people. They were, in actuality, created from birth, manipulated across every phase of their existence to climb the ranks of their respective clans before arriving at the esteemed position of Inner Councilmember. Of course, that was what they believed, and through them was the crown of Ori-Thaums outermost shell maintained. Even the highest ranked Mirrors thought this was the shape of their political infrastructure and society. Ignorance made for quite a wonderful shield. Howeve, Ignorance was also something they concerned themselves with, as it was probably the main reason the Burning Dreamer noticed them. Avo had spoken to them, regarded them directly, when he burned one of their Sleepers embedded with Stormtree. From what they could clean about his capabilities, this was likely tied to his warmind of Ignoranceor thats what Denton and Calvino theorized. The good news was that so far, none of the Burning Dreamers allies seemed to know this information. Perhaps they hadnt been informed or didnt suspect. Whatever the case, they Majority needed to proceed with caution. To have Aedon Chambers actually implant a Bond in them might spell the end of all things. We cannot assume, the Inner Council declared immediately. However, I think we have a rare opportunity to directly manipulate the information they are seeing. Gaze upon the scene, my people. And so the Majority did, with countless shadows forming the colossal being that represented all of Ori-Thaum, they judged the Chief Paladin, the No-Dragons that came with himeach one surprised and scheming for their own advantagethe Regular they couldnt quite touch, Shotin who was still denied to them, and most vulnerable of all, the Contingency Bleak known as Refusal. Reviewing Shadow of [Contingency Bleak Refusal] Unlike even Calvino, Refusal was a nightmare to compile based on an informational basis. EGIs werent like humansthe two couldnt even be compared. One was akin to an entire ocean, while the other barely more than a pond if judged from memory-density. However, the Contingency Bleaks outmatched even the normal EGIs with their immensity. This noted, what the Majority intended to do here wasnt claiming a full copy of the Contingency Bleak, but achieving partial informational influence. A rough jolt pulled at their focus. They realized Chambers had one of their Inner Councilmembers now. He was pulling at them through the complicated maze of relations that existed between their Mirros. In the meantime, he was also taking the time to infuse Ambassador Valhu Kitzuhada with infusions of love. A glimpse into the ambassadors mind revealed that Aedon Chambers was pouring memories into Valhus mind as well. Images of his daughter in action, of how brave she was, of her nobility. He is a good man, two voices within the Majority whispered. Damned by birth. But true and noble when the time came. We shouldnt harm him. He deserves more. He has earned our respect through service. I motion that we [All Votes Overruled.] No, the Inner Council declared, their voice rippling out from the core of the Majority. The rest of the shadows flinched and bowed. Though they were a democracy and a vote could be forced regardless, the Ori were a cultural republic first and foremost, and as those with highest seniority, the Inner Councils words held weight beyond canons and regulations alone. His service was... commendable. We are not blind. There will be a place for him in the eternal republic to come. But we cannot forget. He is an adversary. A servant of the Burning Dream. And there cannot be two utopias. R??o??S? This is an act of war, Chief Paladin, one of the Inner Council members spoke. Some half-strand called Olim Akuyata. Frigging Ori names. Stealing us from our territory This is a recruitment, Naeko said. He gestured behind him. As you might be able to see, I got a bit of a coalition growing here and I want you to join. The Inner Council went still and silent at the same time. Excuse me? Councilman Olim said. Theres a fracture spreading across New Vultun if you havent noticed. You might be able to keep the Substance out with your fancy shielding, but the ruptures? Nah. You need to drain that. And that means this isnt the time for war. This is the time we all come together to see our shit sorted instead of wasting time. Wasting Mists tightened around Olims face. His glass mask shattered, revealing a bald man with rich brown skin. The rest of his coat fizzled out briefly, and Chambers noticed just how augmented he was. Aside from his head, most of his body seemed to be crafted from alloy and vivianite. He was practically brimming with ghosts too. That was a real Necros sheathe. Wasnt done talking, Naeko said. Now. Theres a reason I had Chambers bring all of you in. Youre not just the representatives for the Ori, youre also central command for the Massists. I know for a fact that Stormtree, Sanctus, and Ashthrone wont be working half as well with each other if you all werent there. In a way, you guys matter more than just being the heads of a Guild. Naeko considered the Inner Council for a moment longer and then released them. They jolted forward, bodies folding, unbalanced by the sudden relief. Tension lingered in the air, but no one tried to strike out at Naeko. Chambers was glad too, because he still had a few limbs nested inside the Ori, and making them all drop from pleasure wasnt going to be very diplomatic. So. Id like to talk with you about an alliance. A remaking of the old ways. The ways things were meant to stay before everything went to hell. All the Guilds working in tandem to preserve the world in accordance with the Treaty of Ao and the Charter of Polities. Understand that this is why I havent brought the palm down. Because were going to do something other than war. Something classical. Were going back to the dream, the way Jaus would have wanted. The thing I should have upheld all this time. The Inner Council traded glances with each other. Judging from Olims expression, he was likely wondering if Naeko had gone completely insane or if this was some kind of trap. Chief Paladin... if this is your notion of diplomacy, I fear you might be out of your element. Makes the both of us. You dont look too comfortable standing in the light. To Olims credit, he just craned his head slightly. Well struck. But my point still stands. You have trespassed severely. You cannot deny our apprehension to reveal ourselves. We are not Highflameselfish and arrogant in our power. We exist to serve the OriCand in revealing our identities, you might have just contained the politics of our overclan. This was a mistake. Nah, Naeko said. We both know what we can dothe threat I actually pose, and what facing me will cost you or any other Guild. But I want you to understand what I can offer. Peace. Peace and time for your citizens to rebuild and survive. Stability so you can evacuate damaged districts and Sovereignties. Time that you dont need to worry about war or other Guilds. A unified truce. Olims features grew stony. I see. This... we will need to put this to a vote, if at all. But, I must ask you a question. He pointed beyond the glass, at the electronic avatar of Refusal hovering over Naekos palm. Is that one of Voidwatchs minds. Yeah. A Contingency Bleak. You know what that is. Unfortunately. They will be part of this peace too? Yeah? Naeko said, narrowing his eyes. Chambers was a bit lost, too. For all the things someone could complain about, the EGIs werent what he expected. Then... do you not know what they have done? What do you mean what they have done? Naeko asked, brow furrowing. The Inner Council shared another look. Ghost-Links formed between them as they exchanged thoughts. Though Chambers pierced their hearts, their wards were still something nasty, and even Mercy would need some time to crack them. However, their little internal conference didnt last so long. Ghost spilled out from them a moment after, flickering in the air for a beat. Four strange images materialized in the room. They looked like... some kind of face on a mountain, a strange symbol, some shadow-thing, and a spider. Call the mind over. Ask them about Kill-Team Innsmouth. Ask them about the origin behind the spreading rupture. Ask them why they dispatched an entire group of enslaved gods to eliminate your ally, the Burning Dreamer. And now, it was Chambers and Naekos turn to be baffled. +What?+ The fuck? Naeko muttered. Chapter 33-14 Bound in Blood Supplicants! Hear me now! Let my words strike you like lightning and forge the foundations for your resolve! We are banished! Severed and lost in a world consumed by madness! Yet we remain! I remain! I! Once Saathwu! Once the God of Huntresses! God of Blood! Now resurrected by the esteemed hand of the Dreamer, I return! Greater! Grander! Into an unworthy world ruled by the unworthy! But fret not! Glory has returned! Glory and deliverance! Come to me, supplicants! Come to the Woundmother! Turn from your false idols and miserable rulers. Heed the pull upon your blood and seek out the Loved Ones. The Guilds cannot forge your dreams. But I have already tasted higher wonders. I know the way. So come to me. Come, and I will show you what it means to rise. -Directives from the Woundmother to her new supplicants 33-14 Bound in Blood [Avo, The Hidden Flame] EGI TEMPLATE INTEGRATION ONGOING - [1.88%] {T-this is interesting,} the EGI installed within the Deep Ones surveyed the scene through Naekos perception. {One of your former Heavens... entirely intact and autonomous. Operat-operating of their own v-volition.} [Indeed,] Zeins template said. [This is an indication of a symmetrical rupturing within you at my daughters hand, Plague. Your death wasnt a randomized shattering. But you werent a singular entity anymoremore alloy than individual. How neatly you broke.] And true to their word, Avo did break neatly. How else would a complete God of Blood emerge from his Exo-Paracosmos to claim dominion over a destabilized district in his name not less. The WoundmotherAvos first and oldest Heavenwas far larger than he remembered them to be. Though they started as a small tower, they now spanned hundreds of kilometers, constantly mutating, building, growing like something between a hyper-intelligent cancer or a living city. More fascinating was where they chose to plant themselves. They were fused into a section of the Hungers while also connecting a broken continent of Old Noloth to a bifurcated No-Dragon Sovereignty. Arteries became as if pathways for traffic, while haemokinetic constructs and odd bioforms lingered in the air. They operated as patrolling swarms and also logistical units, circulating between shifting states of matter and biology as towers of gleaming blood lashed new orders into them via crimson lightning. One spire rose higher than all the others. One that sprouted wolf-like jaws at the apex, jaws that clenched around twisting patterns, each meant to resemble a certain state of matter. Pleading limbs rose in circulating bolts, and the Woundmothers touch brushed the bottom of a cloud-formed palm with a burning eye at its core. Oh, great one! Oh, master of masters! the Woundmother cried, her voice as loud as thunder. Her branching tendrils crashed against the Sage of the Sundered Minds form, and Avo felt a pulsing resonance oscillate between him and his Heaven of Blood. I knew... I knew a divine as great as the one who restored me could not be taken by the fell clutch of death so easily. To be undone by such a material death is a thing for mortals. Laughter followed. Booming, jubilant laughter that resonated deep and true in Naekos mind. [This one seems to have a pretty high opinion of you,] Naeko murmured. Not surprising, Avo replied. We have history. Very long history. He turned his mind to the Woundmother now and cast his thoughts free. +Woundmother. Glad you survived. Truly. Like what youve done with the city. R?aNO?bE?s Ah, the Woundmother chuckled with mirth. I am honored. I merely sought to make the most of my continuation. Why, when I felt you shatter, I was aghast. But even at the moment of your destruction, you were perfect. Truly perfect. You cast us out. Us? Avo asked. Yes. Me. And all the other gods you gathered and woke. You distributed on the waves of your desolation, and so we fell like seeds in a thunderstorm, crashing into down to rise once more in your shadow, in your corpse. If he did, Avo couldnt remember anything about this at all. Perhaps it was entirely reactive. Or he could just ask another who was there at the scene. The one that caused him to suffer Veylis embracement in the first place. +Zein?+ [What? Did I see you cast your Heavens out? Alas, my attention was more drawn to my daughter than you, Plague.] She spoke the truth, but Avo still felt the urge to punish in some fashion. Turning his gaze inward, he saw her and Naeko dueling in his Soulscape. Currently, both her arms were missingand lodged through her chestbut Naeko was blind and had the broken tip of her glaive lodged in his eye. This wound seemed to have given the Chief Paladin the equivalent of a partial lobotomy. Currently, he was wandering around making cow-like noises while Zein choked from a case of limb-in-lungs. It seemed the most penalizing thing he could do was to spawn her someplace afar from her disciple. But that would end up being more harmful for Avo himself. Letting them fight against each other was training for him as well, allowing him to obtain exponential levels of experience. Ultimately, Avo decided to be pragmatic over petty. Its what Draus would have recommended. +This is good,+ Avo said, resuming the conversation between him and the Woundmother. +The others... I can gather them once more. Not as alone as I assumed. Have you seen any of the others?+ Lamentably, no. The chaos was great, even for one as astute as I. We fell in a great spread across the land, and I was a grain among the many. However, though I did not fall among my kindred, I also did not fall alone. There are things you might be interested in. Things I would like to show you. As such, the walls here werent truly walls, and the doors and pathways only existed because the Heaven of Blood willed it. This was why Avo found himself questioning why the Heaven of Blood was making him proceed down such a chaotic path when they could have just as easily plucked him from where he stood and placed him where he needed to be. Ultimately, he decided to wait. To see what his former Heaven was doing. After a bit more walking, he found himself surprised again. As he came to a doorway carved from bone and held together by veins of twitching blood. A moment please. I must inform them of your presence. Them? Now Avo was truly curious. There was a layer of distortion trembling through the blood. It made perceiving accretions and thoughtstuff near impossible. But as Avo had Ignorance with him, the unknown was hidden more behind a transparent sheet than an opaque wall. Hm. Interesting. Very interesting. An unexpected. Sang. No-Dragons. Dowagers. And... and... The doors made a resounding crash as they swung open. Fingers of blood pressed the bone inward and at once, a bridge extended before Avo, revealing a large pillar of bright red vivannite across from him. More paths were fused to the massive corpse-crystal, and hundreds of swarming insectoid-like creatures carried things to and fro. More interestingly was the massive construct of biomatter the enormous locus was burrowing into. At once, Avo recognized its biological pattern. This was an exo-math. An organic mind that the Sang used for complex processes. He had seen one months ago in the Second Fortunes underground. Here, though, it was being maintained by a small army of bioforms and Install another nutrition tube there. A tall Sang in wearing a skeletal bio-rig gestured at the swarming creatures around her. She stood just beside the vivianite, her body partially shrouded by the ethereal light, but next to her were several other unexpected figures. The first one noticed Avo before all the others. He would have been nude if it werent for the scab-armor growing over his body. As soon as he noticed Avo approaching in the guise of Osjane, he sneered. Fuck. Of course youre still alive. Cunt like you. Death has to come in parts. +Peace,+ Avo said. +Didnt expect to see you here. Or her either.+ Another Sang leaned next to Peace and wrapped a long arm around him. The Low Master growled, but the Stormsparrow ground one of her three heads against him. Avo! My favorite ghoul! Wildcard of wildcards! So good to see this stray note of yours assuming a full role in this great play. +Stormsparrow,+ Avo, Naeko, and Zein grunted all at once. Whats this I hear? More passengers? Thousandhand? Chief? You are in there as well. Why, what a merry gathering. A merry gathering indeed, the Woundmother laughed. As said. I did not fall with my kindred, but others connected to you, others bound for this place arrived as well. Others you know. Or do not. The skeletal-rig Sang turned, and she took Avo in with wide eyes. Her hair was cropped short, and on her shoulder chattered a strange worm-like creature. Every one of her movements were calculated, but there was something about her posture that screamed prey animalsomething that could have set off Avos predatory instincts back when he was still just a ghoul. Iyou are he? The Strix. The Burning Dreamer. She took two steps forward and looked him up and down. Are you? You dont Avo willed his halo to come aflame with the Conflagration and the Sang took two steps back. I see. It is... good to finally meet you. The Woundmother spoke highly of you. He said that you could help protect this place and aid my people. Avo cocked his head at that. Aid you? A No-Dragon willing seeks my assistance. Not just a No-Dragon. A Dowager. Dowager Glorious Song, of Line Qin. She was in charge of this Sovereigntypart of their branch of Exalted Warfare. And before my arrival, she was on the verge of collapsing before the Massist onslaught. the Woundmothers words clarified a few things, but much was still shrouded in mystery. The displacement hit us hard, Glorious Song continued. We were separated. But the Massists werent so affected. Not by the Substance. And not by Noloths fall. We would have collapsed in the initial moments if it werent for the Woundmother or the Sparrows arrival. But though we have fended off the initial forces, we believe they are opening more ruptures to continue their offensive. Ruptures, Avo said flatly. Recent ruptures? Indeed. Greater and more entropic than any Ive seen. Avo gave a grunt of awkwardness. Might not be them. Not their doing. Might be mine. Got into a bit of disagreement with Highflame. Spiraled from there. Glorious Song blinked. Truly. That... that is welcome news. Wait. Let me free. I wish to speak with her... with the Curse-Bearers... Another pulsing sensation came from within Avo, crawling out from his Soulflame. What slowly emerged from him wasnt a Heaven or even a miracle. What leaked was a golden, sinuous form, and from it came the chiming bells of chronology. Glorious Song stumbled back. The Stormsparrow contrarily came rushing forward, her eyes aglow with expectation. Oh, will the wonders never cease... For the first time in centuries, the Sang were in the presence of a functional dragon. Chapter 33-15 Seeds Consciousness itself is a pattern. A specific one. A surgical pattern. Where force, energy, space, or chronology affect the world on a grand scale, miracles of consciousness alter the nature of a person the most. How we understand ourselves. How we perceive. What we understand or fail to know. These things shape our humanity. The body is the vessel, the mind is a pilot. Just as the miracles can shape, an emanation of a Hell can destroy, and so, before our betrayal at the hands at the so-called Savior, we created instruments we intended to use to preserve the City Eternal, to guard our future and break the nature of human understanding. For that which is whole can be dissolved, and if thought ensures to ourselves that we are, then what does un-thought inflict upon the ego, the person, and existence? -Emotion, Low Master of Noloth 33-15 Seeds +Curse-Bearers, Akusande said. The dragons voice rang like a legion of ringing bells, and a golden oscillation trembled through the air. The Stormsparrow and Glorious Songs ontologies quivered as if the surface of quivering water, and where the former was fascinated, the latters was drowned in dread. No... no... This cannot... we lobotomized you... We culled you. the Dowager was swallowing, each step bringing her back, until she slammed against the pillar of vivianite just behind. +Almost,+ Akusande replied. +But almost is not absolute. I yet remain. Imprisoned. Made to serve. But I remain. And our task is not done.+ Oh, and what task is this? the Stormsparrow inquired. The Chorus sings loud, proclaiming new glories that come with your approach, yet I cannot tell if this legend will be one of joy and despair. +Irrelevant,+ Akusande continued. +Our purpose is not to feel, but to restore. Rebuild. It is the reason the bindings were left within you. Continue to grow inside you. All of you. The estimated time has progressed. It will need to develop further to finish our reconstruction.+ Reconstruction of what? the Woundmother asked, suddenly fascinated at the mention of creation and forging. +Time.+ the dragons words left a lull of disbelieving silence thereafter. +We are fated to rebuild the structure of time now broken.+ Show us, the Stormsparrow said. Show us the meaning behind your words. Akusanade glimmered in the air, drifting like a thin wound that glided from place to place. Slowly, it drew closer to the Sang. To the Stormsparrow and Dowager Glorious Song. The latters eyes darted to Avo, to the quivering motes of blood that filled the room. Wont hurt you, Avo said, reassuring her. Meanwhile, he directed his own question inward. +Dragon. What are you doing?+ I need to begin the harvest. I need to extract the seeds that were buried long ago. Give them no concern; they will not die. They cannot. For if they are lost to death, then the task will fail. I am not sure this was as far as Glorious Song got before the Akusande came alight within her. The dragon turned to fluid gold and both of the Sang flared with branches of sporting light. They werent like climbing flames, but blossoming plants, their beings as if seeds bearing fruit at a point of destined finality. Avo felt his mind go blank as new patterns danced upon the surface of the tapestry. This was a miracle he hadnt witnessed before, so close to chronology and space, but something else, something more. He glimpsed a broken version of that within the Deep OneTrinary Melodybut here it was, restored to fullness. Time. This was a flourishing of time. And suddenly, the branches werent just branches anymore. They fused together, binding from vine to vine, shape to shape, until they grew solid enough to function as if roads, ontologies stable enough to bear weight. The weight of new times, of new places, of new existences. But through it all, it was still rooted to the tapestry, growing up and over it just like the Nether used to function: Connected and parallel. A timeline, Avo realized. Astonishment was a feeling that came to him more and more infrequently, but he felt it greater at present than any moment before. Epiphanies detonated within like a chain reaction. The realizations were borderline chemical. He had a guess as to the nature of the Sang, the purpose behind the dragons. The whole picture wasnt there, but what if someone could use an existence to incubate sections of time. Inner worlds within people. If they could create gods through their deaths and form canons through concentrated beliefs, what about other ontological constructs? What of the dragons? What about time? A song burst aloud in the world. The Chorus sang out to Avo, lending voice to his deductions. The Curse, a seed, now called to hatch, The present, broken time, not long, or perhaps to last. From the children of tainted flesh, and new path forms, From what is ruined, a new birth blooms. The Stormsparrow and Glorious Songs merged path constituted a combined segment of timethe totality of both their lifetimes alchemized to something pure. Something that could be used. But the wonder was in how the gold cycled and moved. It was animated. Active. The gold drifted forward and back. rao??E?s But then the moment ended, and the dragon slithered out from the Sang and sheathed itself in Avos Conflagration. Now you have witnessed the purpose of the seeded ones. Now you see the purpose for my being. The long flourishing must be finished. Continuance must be ensured. This is the purpose behind my design. Such were the final directives from Sol. Ah. Just as well. My more preferred option is to steal them directly from my sisters. Or ask for them. Glorious Song. One of the Stormsparrows faces grinned at the other Sang. It is time for you to provide for our defense. Iwe have a supply, but they are all...neutered. Glorious Song swallowed. She was still overwhelmed and lost. But why? What are we doing? Why do we need more dragons? To aid in our defense, of course. Were going to recreate time travel with the Dreamer. Glorious Song just stared. Time travel. Yes! Did you not feel what the dragon did to us earlier? What it revealed? It created a branch of time connected to the presentbut it was parallel. Like the Nether before it, we can interact with it in ways that we simply cant with baseline existence. And better yet, we can avoid the Great Nothingness chasing us. Oh, but before that, Peace! Peace, dear! Come show our Dreamer what you still have. Dont fucking want to, Peace grumbled. Avo stared at Peace. The Low Master sneered at him. A fiery link extended from Avos mind. The Low Masters sneer turned into a miserable grimace. Fine! Fuck you! Stick that burning thread into the locus. Why? Avo asked. Just stick it in and find out. Im not going to keep them. Cant stand their arguing. There was something about the way he said that... It reminded Avo of Chambers. Chambers. Draus. The others. Avo missed his templates. He missedwait. Avo thrust his Conflagration into the massive slab of vivianite. As soon as he did, an ocean worth of ghosts flooded back into him. But more than the ghosts were other presencesother egos. Beneath reality, within Avos Soulscape, a meteor shower was underway. Millions of templates pierced through the threshold between existence without to a place within. These werent just random egos stored within a locusthese were his templates. A good portion of his templates. Some fell with cries of despair or horror, but a good portion let out gasps of familiar acknowledgement or positive affirmations. Massive chunks of reality came with them. Places and moments. Memories that composed mind palaces that crashed down into the Soulscape, merged and joined with it. Entire portions of Avos paracosmic city came apart, and from the fissure rose new sections, new towers, and new environments. What rose with them were templates. The millions that fell. The millions that knew Avo better than most others. [Ah, hells,] Benhata groaned. [I thought I was done with this place. I thought I was finally going to get peace.] [Dont be a fucking glassjaw, Mirror. Theres no peace for us. Wars not done yet. The ghouls not done with us yet. Are you, Avo?] Corner gave Avo a rare laugh, and beside him, Draus, Chambers, Denton, and more... so many more. But two caught Avos attention in particular. They stood next to each other, both looking unsure but determined. Kae Kusanade. Kare Kitzuhada. Dead now in reality. Lost to him. But not entirely. Not truly. There was still a chance. A possibility to make this right. [Avo? Is that you? Are youare we alright?] Kae asked. [Kare!] Shotin cried. [Kare! Where are you?] Millions more voices were in a constant uproar, and the noise swelled, and swelled, and never ended. {W-what loudness you contain in your mind,} the damaged EGI said. Avo however, could only laugh with true and great joy. He wasnt fully himself. Not when so many pieces of him were missing, but finally, he had his chaos back. His treasured chaos. I like it. I like my mind this way. Missed this. [Dont get sentimental with me now, rotlick,] Draus chuckled. [Shit aint over. And neither is this] True to her word, another presence breached Avos Soulscape. A colossal construct that... that... He knew what this was. It was like a broken, entropic pattern of the mind, and it fell like a pill diluting in water. It was trying to leave a part of his mind blank. It struggled to make him forget, to make everyone and everything forget about a certain... a certain... The construct crashed down upon Avos Soulscape, and started to untangle like a collapsing web. The Forgotton, Avo breathed. The warmind used on himon everyone by the Low Masters of Noloth at the end of the trial. And that wasnt all. More and more masses fell. Ten to be exact. All of them were equally broken, equally unfinished, and equally deleterious to the nature of the human mind in some way. So. Looks like you just got another inheritance from your fucking daddy, Peace mocked. So. Wanna see if you can fix up what we couldnt finish? Yes, Avo said. Heh. What? Somehow... all this has me glad to see you too, Peace. Fuck off. And everything felt a little bit more right. Chapter 33-16 Warminds Chapter 33-16 Warminds The war minds we created are more than a weapon for destruction. No, they are a weapon of asymmetry, of breaking all common laws relating to the nature of consciousness. For in the breaking of laws, new ones emerge, new patterns or unpatterns that allows us our greatest advantage. We are Noloth, bound, exiled, torn from our rightful place in reality. But here we remain, and here we can still build. They have left us detritus. Even after all that they have stolen, they have left us detritus. And from detritus, we can create wonders. Come to me, my priests. Come and tend to me. Let us show them what wonders we can make from refuse. Let us show them the folly of giving us anything at all. Anything at all.@@@@ -The Hungers of Noloth 33-16 Warminds [Osjon Thousand] Near the very top of the Tiers, deep within the Substance, hidden behind layers of protective miracles, material defenses, and all the loyal Godclads they kept in those final moments of Embracement, the Ark of Highflame burned bright. It was the shape of a risen torch, projecting a beam of blinding radiance high up into the apex of the Substance. The ethereal glow of the shroud mingled with the fiery beam trailing upward, and between them came a clash, the bright bleeding into the bleak. The Ark itself climbed for a hundred kilometers long a hundred kilometers, piercing from realm to realm. From its brightness also bled ringing songs, bending fractals of gold. Time and space coalesced into a history, a re-history, a reimagining of everything that was, everything that could bea seed to rebuild the world in the image of a new dream. Far beneath the Ark was the District of Deliverance, in the final Sovereignty left unnamed by Veylis, unnamed for it was to be christened upon its ascent through the Ladder. Here, the structures rose as if armored walls, no difference between battlements and megablocks within where people lived. Swarms of glittering machines and golems patrolled every inch of space. Omnitech support allowed the sky to be filled with living beings of animated electricity and steel, while looming watchtowers pulsated with thaumaturgic weapons capable of repelling even Godclads of the highest Sphereage. But most of all, just at the very base of the Ark, was the Corridor of Victors. It loomed wide, walled by layers of dense blocks and heavy defenses. Its center was cavernous and hollow, yet a flickering ember awaited deep within. This place was A final refuge, a retreat for those at the very heights of Highflame society. The Seraphs, those who answered to Veylis directly, delivered their directives to all those lesser and subservient gathered here. Now, in her absence, it served the function of capital. With all the ongoing crisis, only the loyalists chosen by Osjon Thousand were allowed in. The rest were banished beyond the Substance, due for a re-processingto ensure those uncertain were pure in their ideals. Ultimately, there was too much dilution of Veylis dream, too much failure, impotence. He would make sure that the final war was won, and by the hands of purity, by those of the proper bloodlines, could this be delivered. And so it was that within the very depths of the Corridor, the children of the Great Houses at least the ones who hadnt shamed themselvesgreeted the Speaker of the High Seraph. Massive columns held up each of the worthy, the miracles sustaining this demiplane provided by the Ark in Veylis absence. From the highest pillar, Osjon looked down at the twelve other Seraphs who now served at his pleasure. For he was the voice of Veylis, and now, in her absence, until her return, he would be the voice of Highflamethe voice of strength and reason. Do the Warhosts remain silent? Without message or update? Osjon asked in his Titans Guise. He stood upon a pillar, a column of marble white, crackling with flames from far below. Gleaming radiance flowed into him, blessed him with all the powers of the Ark. The investiture of all Highflames Domains, canons, and hopes granted him power beyond power, but even so, there was an unfortunate lack of true respect. He could see it in their eyesthe Chivalric still regarded him as only the right hand; they even deliberated with each other before they replied. Such bad habits needed to be culled in due time. His eyes lingered on Seraph Kaul Witters, in charge of warfare and military logistics. The man was more a machine than biology by this point, replaced all of his impotent bits of flesh over two centuries of combat. In some respects, he was more of a devotee to Omnitech and the dream of Thaumaturgy and technology combined than Highflame. But even so, by tradition, he stayed bound to his Great House. Despite this, his head vibrated as his augmented skull generated a response. The Railjumper-Elite sheath had always bothered Osjon. It was so inhuman, the aesthetic so wrong. Alas, now was not the time to discuss these questions. Truth be told, Osjon would have preferred if Kaul s brother survived, but the Substance was ever unpredictable, and there was only so much that could be asked of the High Seraph now she was battling against the Anathemathe Burning Dreamer. Nothing, Kaul finally said. We have tried. Omnitechs network remains scrambled after the great Rupturing. Troubling, Osjon sighed. The Rupture. Do we have any intelligence regarding what caused it? It should not be our doing. My daughter was told to resolve things neatly. Properly. Seraph Maia? A heavily armored woman looked at him. Her face was hidden behind a bronze, curved helmet, but her accretion spun fast. Yes, Speaker. Youve been quiet for some time. Quiet thorough these weeks. Osjon breathed. It was like talking to children sometimes. Do you have any guesses to offer? Any intelligence. Her perception overlapped with Kauls for a second, and she cleared her throat. Wewe require more inform {Yes. I am emotionally compromised. I am emotionally compromised because I see the threat. I see the problem. But I also see that my allies are sub-sophonts. Unable to deliver. Unable to process the most basic of thoughts. And I am alone.} The Infacer let out a weary sigh. {I must finish this project. I must. Existenceit cannot be made up by us. It cannot be defined by us. The insult is too great. It just cannot. But you will not suffice. You cannot help me complete the only meaningful thing in existence. {It is just me. Just me against the Dreamer. And I would trade any of you for one of him. Which brings me to my next decision.} A sudden sense of foreboding swelled through Osjon. He gathered his miracles and prepared himself. Infacer. What are you doing? {Oh, nothing. Let us have a conversation. A conversation with the Dyad. I think they should be here for this moment. For posterity.} The fractured sphere of static that constituted the Infacers being expanded, and a chasm of Soulfire erupted behind him. There, Osjon witnessed a nightmare revealed. An abomination he had no heart or desire to behold. Into a place of Symmetry did a pathway open, and here, two beings warred to become oneone that would consume the other. Osjon, the Dyad greeted. The being part Veylis, part Avo looked down at him. Parts of her body were fusing, twisting into a strange creature of fungal ceramite. Black silicone and horrific extensions poured out from her shoulder. But meanwhile, something resembling the singularity at Veylis core was eating over Avo as well. And increasingly, his features were growing more human, softer, more feminine. Could there be victory when a mutual infection was taking place? Was it even possible? {Behold. The Burning Dreamer. And our beloved High Seraph. Now neither. And now both. But entirely compromised.} Enough! Osjon called out. His column rose higher into the air as his size swelled. He glared hatefully at the Infacer, as the first hints of snarl crawled over his features. You debase our sanctuary. You insult the High Seraphs sacrifice. For nothing... Avos voice echoed forth from the Dyad, and the Infacers laughter joined the ghoul. {Im merely showing you the sheer magnitude of her sacrifice. But you seem horrified. You seem to be unwilling to face it. But that is fine. Because... I have been thinking. Considering the best solution to our problem. And it is not you. Or Highflame. Or anyone for that measure. No. I must have control. Influence. But also... symmetry. A threat that can make a threat. An Ego-Screamer for an Ego-Screamer. A flame to swallow a flame.} What are you doing, Osjon asked again. But the Infacer was no longer speaking to him. {Veylis. I am requesting that you surrender custody of all finished Pathborn to me. Especially the one to do with Avo. I have a submind and a Definement I need to attach something to.} This... this... Veylis voice echoed through the world. The Seraphs were watching, their attentions rapt, and for the first time in centuries, Osjons heart rate began to pulse faster than one beat a second. Yes... I am... you are... he clouds A loud hiss sounded. Take-take-take-take! And then, a flame began to spill out from the chasm. A consuming flame that gushed out from this place between places, splashing down into the Infacer, and spreading further into the demiplane, souring the colors of this space like an infection. Osjon took a step back. And the ethereal flames crept a bit closer. Infacer. Enough. Stop this! A splash of Soulfire erupted from the EGI as it chuckled bitterly. {Oh, Osjon. I am not doing anything. But my newest partner and his consangs... well. I suspect they are hungry. Hungry for information. For puppets. For templates. Avo. Have a bite.} And suddenly, the consuming flame fell with a ravenous cry as existence twisted into hues of howling ash. Osjon called upon a miracle of absolute power, to wrestle and crash the approaching flames. But it didnt matter. Because what worth was strength against itselfagainst something that could burrow its way into your very Soul? Chapter 33-17 Forget (I) Chapter 33-17 Forget (I) Change is a constant in life, and change is a constant in war. For every advance you take, your enemy must adapt. And as they adapt, they too will advance. In turn, you must learn to change anew. During this process, you will find yourself growing, flourishing, and branchingif you are not cut down. You will pursue different avenues of success and possibilities to overcome your adversary, and they will do the same. Picture this: two gardens, two forests growing into one another. The branches clashsome aligned, some divergentall trying to consume or overwhelm the other. This is a simplistic understanding of change, but it is a representation that many can imagine. In doing so, they can apply this logic to other aspects of their life. You must be both proactive and reactivea combination of traits. Precaution is worth more than temporary cures, but not even the greatest genius can predict everything. And so, with that knowledge in mind, be a player. Be a participant. Be the one that builds. Always. -Jaus Avandaer 33-17 Forget (I) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] [So Im dead,] Kae said flatly. She, along with all the other templates, was staring up into the flame-scarred sky. Above, Soulfire and ethereal brightness mingled, churning. There was a thin membrane of ghosts dancing over the firmament, and everything was glossed over in a dream-like sheen. This placethis constitution of Avos beingshivered slightly, as close to an expression of embarrassment as he could manage. Yes, sorry about that, Kae said, looking at Kare. The Paladins face was downcast, her expression distant. Beside her stood Shotin, who was rubbing his nieces shoulders and muttering broken apologies under his breath. [And shes dead too,] Kae continued. Yes, Avo said, giving a quiet confirmation. Couldnt stop it. The Embracement. Expansion of substance was beyond my conscious control. Failed you. [No,] Kare said, finally pushing the words out from her lungs. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. Her gaze stalled for a moment before she straightened her shoulders and stepped beyond her uncles grasp. [This is not your fault. This is war. I knewI knew what I was signed up for. I knew what oaths I swore.] She gave a look to Shotinthe expression a mixture of terror and resolute belief. [I know what dream I wanted to fight for. It cost me my life. It might cost me my life again. But this is not your fault. This is simply the price we must paythe price that should have been paid.] Naeko flinched at her words. The echo of her truth stung like a lash on his ego. He knew it was coming, yet pain was pain, and sometimes the worst hurt came when someones words echoed the curses he cast at himself from within. [There are a few other things I want to talk about,] Draus template said, cocking her head at Zein. [Howd this thing happen? Didnt expect this old, wily sow to get caught so easily.] Zein grinned slightly at the remark. [Oh, come on, Captain. Do not insult me. Ive always thought so highly of you. It is not an easy task for the Plague to catch me. Rather, it was a strategic failure on the part of my daughter and the Plagues original self. They wasted me. They cast me as a disposable weapon to be used against the Hidden Flame.] She paused, and her face shifted between a grimace and a grin. [Alas, between the Deep Ones and my greatest disciple] She offered a genuine smile at Naeko, [proved worthier than my capabilities. That, and...] she glared upwardsthe thinnest sliver of gold pierced through the chaotic substance that composed Avos Soulscape. A hint that Akusande was there, lurking, waiting, watching. [...and my traitorous glaive. My traitorous dragon.] Draus chuckled. [Looks like you might need to work more on keeping friends than sharpening your skills.] Zion considered the statement for a moment and then snorted. [No. My failure was that I wasnt good enough. Nothing else.] Ironic. Even when exposed to absolute defeat, Thousandhand was a slow learner. Ironic. But perhaps it was also the same reason why she was such a fine killer. [So what now?] Benhata asked as the Ori-Thaum stared up into the sky. [What are we doing now? Everythings changed. Everythings gone to shit. How are we going to make this right? Ithe Tiers are completely consumed. Everything is just separated. The Guilds are in disarray. You said the outside was currently being governed over by Naeko. How? What? Whats even our next step? What is] There will not be one next step, Avo interjected simply. There are going to be several. First, we need to use time to our advantage. [Time?] Benhata echoed, his voice tinged with disbelief. At that moment, Corner emerged next to the Mirror, chrome implants on the former Squires body gleaming in the dim light. [Yeah,] Corner grunted with a laugh. [I see where this is going.] Avo found himself missing the Squire, despite the casual brutality of their meeting. There was a companionship, an understanding they once shared. Avo elaborated: The Sangthey can create bridges of time, rigged onto baseline reality. The past cannot be sustained at baseline reality; its always eaten, consumed, lost. However, connected to the present, its like building another structure upon a set of wheels. The past exists on this parallel structure. There we can move adjacent and forward freely. Without limit. [So what, were creating another timeline? A parallel one? Whats the point of that?] Benhata asked. [Yeah. Its fucking boring. And also, kind of glassjawed.] And how did that go for your Regulars? How many Orphans are left? [One more than Highflame tried to kill,] Draus shot back. Avo went quiet. Huh. Thats a good line. The Regular grinned. [Hey, could you two do this later?] Shotin sighed. [Can we just stay focused on the whole evil plot right now?] Not evil, Avo corrected. Im as close to being good in the city as any other. An overwhelming amount of doubt percolated through his Soulscape. Avo fought the urge to sigh. Why is it that no one can see his nobility, even after all he did for the city? Their dread about his nature lingered too long. Humans cling to emotionsfeelings stronger than logic. Yes, poor foolish humans. Avos consciousness settled on mocking pity rather than genuine introspection. Someone cleared their throatnot within the Soulscape, but from beyond it. Avo turned his attention to the world outside: that place within the zigguratwithin the embrace of the Woundmother. Dowager Glorious Song was staring at him, uncertain how to proceed. Yes, his mind echoed through Osjane Thousands body. Im sorry to interrupt, Dreamer, but what are we to do? Dowager Glorious Songs forehead was dripping with sweat. Her fingers twitched even as bioforms and other creatures infused more bio-matter into the exo-math connected to the locus. An exo-math connected to the Woundmother as well. Matter, flesh, and architecture were in alignment in this district. It meant that he could control this section of the city like a living organisma leviathan-sized sheathe. Good. Perfect. That would be useful in a moment. Especially with the Woundmothers ability to transfer and reconstruct objects. Avo let out a slight chuff of consideration. The Sang will be essential to his plan. Indeed, if there was any Guild he now needed to subsume as a priority, it was the No-Dragons. Right now, however, he needed material for his temporal construct. I need you to get your people ready. Tell them to gather to prepare. And ask them for permission. Permission? she repeated softly. Going to burn their mind. Im going to need to talk to all the Dowagers soon. In fact, you should serveserve as my representative. It should be talks ongoing in the planetary ring. Before that... Need an easy bridge between places. Between time. And need you and your people for that. Bridge? Her voice was almost a squeak. The Stormsparrow laughed. Oh yes, oh yes. The final dam is breaking. The water rolls further. But bewarea shadow of yourself lingers, looms. It comes for you, as you come for the world. Avo didnt fully understand what she was saying, but it was easy enough to guess. He had other sub-minds, other Pathborn probably lingering about. He had no delusions about Veylis being done, nor that the Infacer was beaten for good. They had suffered significant losses. But the EGIancient as timehad survived wars beyond Avos current imagination, even as he processed the power of another mind. He lacked experience, knowledge, and most importantly, complete awareness of what his adversaries were doing. And Ignorance was a fatal adversary. And what about the fucking warminds we just gave you? Peace snarled. All our inheritance, back to you. A bitter laugh escaped the Low Master. That bastard that cocksucker Defiancemust be laughing right now, laughing at the pit, the oblivion hes stuck in. Avo regarded the angry little replica of his father, thinking he had done all his laughing before. That reminded Avo that he needed to find his half-brother, Raldi, still missing. There were a lot of people he needed to find, actuallyDice, Lucky the Cat, Essus. But that could all wait. Right now, though, he did have some warminds he needed to use. Including one warmind of the Forgotten that seemed more intact that all the others combined. A little retrosequencing will go a long way, Ignorance whispered. Master, the Woundmother said, Ive begun transference. The population is being secured. I am spreading my Sanguinity outward. However... it seems that our adversaries are preparing another attack. Theyre emerging from the far north sideconsiderably larger contingent than before. I sense Souls as well. Many souls. Many Frames. Many Godclads. Avo drew on knowledge and memories from all his combat-competent templates. From Sanctus combat methodologies, he deduced that there were already saboteurs within the district moving through the areaChronoframes about to shift. Sanctus always sent people scouting ahead. The strike and skirmishing to create openings. Inconvenient. Avo had no intention of fighting another pointless warone they could be used against the Saintists instead. Thankfully, he had solutions. Two solutions. One born of time, and the other belonging to the realm of thought. Peace, Avo called, Require your assistance. At this, the angry little priest shuddered and frowned. Yeah, as you command, king. No not king. Not king. Never king. Just a part of you, as you are part of me. And then, a tendril of fire tunneled through the Low Masters body. But in a few moments... for a few seconds... no one will ever remember any of us ever existing. Chapter 33-18 Forget (II) Chapter 33-18 Forget (II) Have you ever wondered who you might be without your memories? If you would be different? If you would be freer or lesser than you are? Avo. I hope you can find an answer. Even if I am not there to bear witness. -Defiance, Low Master of Noloth 33-18 Forget (II) [Fatalist Malak Hammuarari] What the hells are they doing? muttered Fatalist Malak Hammuarari. Countless scenes were streaming into his mind, fed into the central systems of his siege ship the Pattern-Piercer. Ghost-linked Chronoframes churned within the chrono-docks within the great vessel while also existing currently across the district. They operated in the future, extended by streams of anomalous chronology. Such were the standard means of operation for Sanctus and Ashthrone forces. Chronoframes forward, unaffected by the Sanguinity, and skirmishers ready, prepared to jump across time, to break and raid a district shrouded in all-consuming red and matter-twisting blood. Yet as 150 Chronoframe Strike Groups scouted through the No-Dragon district, the information they cast to the Pattern-Piercers systems was nothing short of confusing. Previously, during the initial skirmish between their forces and the No-Dragon defenders, they managed to breach the outer layers of the Sang district. It seemed like a complete breakthrough, with the No-Dragons off-balance due to the Substances materialization, and the Chronoframes fighting a war of absolute surprise. The Blacks barely had time to shift their biomass buildings, turning them into defensive and offensive structures to sustain a functional defense. Yet, just when this looked to be an easy war to win, everything changed. Sprawling towers of blood sprouted, forming an eldritch cityscape where a length of fallen Noloth split the No-Dragon district. From there, the initial attackers found themselves unmade. Those who rested in the material realm melted into little more than droplets of ichor, while others were hammered by lightning bolts infused with the mass of falling mountains. While Ashthrone assets were buried before the initial counter-attack, the Sanctus Chronoframes operating tried to ferry the survivors out and back to the Patttern-Piercer. And though they might have done itif not for the intrusion of another Heavena massive three-headed entity slammed a banner over the skies, piercing the clouds and driving a stake through the very foundations of the district. All at once, everything came undone. Chronoframes started failing, and malfunctioning. Every act they performed resulted in a cascade of failuresimplanted weapons misfired, systems crashed, and Chronoframes overloading. A curse was placed upon thema curse bestowed by the Stormsparrow herself. Mal, with their secondary forces mustered, gathered for a huge offensive. The Fatalist observed, waiting for the two enemy Godclads to emerge, for something to happen. Yet the enemy seemed unfocusedeven distracted. Nothing had been done to the skirmishing Chronoframes; nothing to even dissuade them from operating within the confines of the district itself. Bridges woven from biothaumically altered tendons and massive blocks that gleamed like the fangs of some colossal beast stood unchanged, waiting, lingering. As more data flowed in from the Chronoframes, the Fatalist took in everything they sent. Images, mem-data, and sounds flashed from the strike groups cog-feeds into his Metamind. Buildings were empty. The streets were empty. The skies were empty. Not a single dot of accretion remained in sight. Then, flashes of gold spiked into the sky as Ashthrone and Sanctus forces were deployed through the strike groups. Hundreds of units spilled outinfantry, armor, and more. Drones poured from craters in reality, emerging from one place to another, all stored within the Pattern-Piercer and crossing over a gulf of bridged chronology. Even more visual telemetries flowed into the Fatalist. Troops stormed buildings, checked military installations and hardpoints, and marched with their Rendsinks primed to detonate against Domains of Blood, Biology, and Matterprepared to backlash and paradox the defending heaven. Yet nothing happened to them. The Sanguinity that lined the district did not bite down or try to mold their forms. It simply grasped the surrounding structures, massaged them, and did nothing. +Its all empty,+ came Strike Group One. +Everything is empty. Theres no one here. Were wandering in a ghost district. Jaus. The hells is happening.+ The Fatalist didnt have an answer; other responses came as well, the sentiments remaining the same. Then a sudden communication spiked through the channels: +Fatalist-Actual!+ The Fatalist turned his attention. The person calling him had their mem-ID marking them as Captain Osmar Eakin, lead Chronoframe of Strike Group 17. That group was drifting kilometers highrunning birds-eye surveillance in the air, and they saw a storm was building around the highest spire of blood protruding from the body of the dismembered dragona spire that ended as a pair of wolf jaws clasping a dim star. +Im sensing a lot of thaumaturgic activity. Theyre transferring And all at once, a few hundred million accretions splashed down along the spire, descending and spreading out across the stretch of broken Noloth. What were they doing? The Fatalist didnt know. He couldnt comprehend what he was staring at, what kind of operation was taking place, but something twisted in his gut. +All units, be prepared to withdraw.+ Some other Fatalist might chastise him, call him a coward for not being willing to diebut dying for nothing was the greatest sin one could commit. There was no worth in letting someone desecrate reality. Sacrifice was only sacrifice if there was meaningful weight behind it. Confirmations came from over 150 Chronoframe Strike Groups. The deployed unitsthe skirmishing vanguardsretreated back into fields of chronology, primed to be snatched back across time, back into the chrono-docks of the Pattern-Piercer in case of a sudden attack. Then a second change happened. Drip by drip, the surrounding structures, the entire No-Dragon District, began to pour upwards, injected into the Sanguinity as their physical shells thinned to needle-points. Entire sections of the city dissolved, melted away, coalescing as the tower spread and the blood storm grew. A thought cast came from Strike Group 2. Their leader sent a request: +Fatalist, requesting permission for a fast approach. Wed like to take a direct look at the spire. See what we can bring back.+ Permission was granted after some hesitation. His curiosity burned, but the risk was severe. One Chronoframe group would be enoughjust one. One loss was acceptable in exchange for knowledge.@@@@ As they sailed through, leaving trails of golden time in their wake, they drew close. From their perception, the Fatalist observed the following scenes: the No-Dragon district was practically being reconstructed across the stretch of severed dragon. Immense buildings of enamel, chitin, and flesh, and of all their inhabitants were filling the space alongside what looked like... ghouls? They were all congested together into this section of Noloth, and the population grew as packed as a megablock in the Warrens. His suspicions were roused. They were being gathered for a reasonsomething major was happening. Then there was the pulsing of crimson lightning, slashing and dancing across every structure and every person. It seemed to be more an organism than ever before, with bits and pieces fusing together, conjoined by solidifying chunks of blood. Slowly, movement began to ripple through the fallen section of the eternal city. The massive jaws lining the sides of the mutilated dragon were coughing, rousingawakened. The world began to tremble. +Hold,+ the Fatalist said, unsure why or what his adversary was doing. He began priming his Pattern-Piercers spinal Entropy-Burner. He was done waiting. Whatever the No-Dragons were planning, he wasnt going to play passive anymore. +FataCalC+ His connection to Strike Group to trembled. Their Ghost-Links grew laden with lag and their mem-data suddenly choked. +Strike Group Two, pull back,+ the Fatalist commanded, but it was too late. As they dd another pass, new structures burst out from the No-Dragon buildings, with columns of gold hatching free like rising geysers from the dense concentrations of blood. And finally, from the greatest crimson spiral pulsed a new presence. A massive signature of brilliant gold that drew all others like it to surge higher, to splash against the top of the Substance, and pry open the fabric of existence. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Its manifestation was like a singularity. Chronoframes were worn torn out of the Pattern-Piercer, present slamming into their future. They crashed into the forces they recently deployed and were dragged toward the dismembered dragon, toward the rising pillar that gouged open the flesh of reality. The final dance begins, and the final darkness descends. Steal yourself, oh risen flame, for the shadow of your hunger comes to claim. Who will winwhat you become, or the slavering shadow that came before? CHRONOMATTER CONVERSATION - 100% TIME-BRIDGE CONDITION [STABLE] TRANSFERENCE READY Avo readied himself. Time to see if he could make stable matter... from time. [You need to snuff yourself for even thinkin that pun,] Draus drawled. [Fatalist Malak Hammuarari] WARNING: PATTERN OF CHRONOLOGY DESTABILIZED WARNING: NECROTHEURGIC ATTACK WARNING: PATTERN OF CHRONOLOGYSEVERELY DESTABILIZED WARNING WARNING WAR The Pattern-Piercers system screamed with flashing notifications of blinding red. The information crawled across the Fatalists cog-feed as more and more klaxons wailed within his skull. Everything was going wrong. Everything was going wrongand he didnt understand what. Suddenly, a hundred spikes of brightest gold punched up through the air. Even as more warnings came in from the rest of his forward operating units, the Fatalist found himself enraptured, unable to respond. Every head was locked on what was happening to the City of Eternal, to what remained of the No-Dragon District. Massive structures rose, rippling and echoing as they climbed up a stream of gold into the sky, into the fading, dissolving gossamer resting against the surface of the Substance. There, he felt ita transference of some kind. The threshold was being breached, and a new section of reality was being built. His mind whirled as countless more patterns danced across his ships sensors. Chronology was gone haywirebut more than chronology. Mind, blood, matter, space, everything was being drawn apart. +FIRING!+ The spinal cannon replied. The Pattern-Piercer aimed its massive trident-shaped vents and unleashed every last bit of its Rend-reserves. The Pattern-Piercer was a new creationsomething Ashthrone made specifically to smash through Highflame fortifications. The concentrated beams of entropy tore forward, ripping realitys flesh-like tissue that cleaved across the land, leaping hundreds of kilometers within the span of seconds. Just as it was about to strike the fallen city of Old Noloth, a final pulse of gold rippled through the dismembered dragon, and a shape rose from the high spirea spire that clenched a dawn between the jaws of a wolf. Time seemed to stop. The risen shape resembled a polished marble, its shell a gossamer white, holding within it a substance darker than black, more twisted than anything the Faithless could describe. But before the lancing beams of entropy could crash into the City Eternal, before anything could happen, the marble shattered And so did all the near-term memories within the Fatalists mind. Everything was torn asunder: all that he remembered, all that he was doing. Suddenly, the Malak jolted, shivering in his command platform. He looked around, startled and stunned. How did he get here? Where was he? Why was he here? What was happening? Cries of dismay and confusion filtered into his mind across a few million different links. He was commanding forces, but why? Where? What? He looked over the holo-screens surrounding him. There were so many scenes but... but... there was... who were they? And why was he in this wasteland? Then came the thoughtcasts and reports, a deluge of messages asking him to identify himself, to declare who he was, and to tell them who they were. Who they were, and what they were doing here? But Malak just kept staring at an empty spot displayed in his sensors an emptiness that... that hurt his mind to look at. He couldnt remember something. He couldnt remember. Chapter 33-19 Reunion (I) Every child knows what it means to break, to sever, to cut, to kill. This is a simple thingto apply pressure to a structure beyond its means and foundations. To build is sublime. To build is the path of a matriarch, of a team master, and of an experienced worshiper. For you must understand how to break before you can build. You must observe the structures of the world and the forces you can apply to them. And thus, the higher you go, the more you defy the weakness at your roots, and pierce the taunting virtues of the sky. The more you prove yourself to be the master of existence, and the more you affirm your worship to the Great Mother of Blood. -Saathwu, Scaarthian Goddess of Blood 33-19 Reunion (I) [Dowager Glorious Song] Dowager Glorious Song found herself hyperventilating as arteries of golden chromosome stitched her back into existence. Around her, her last memories folded outwards, painting her surroundings in colors dripped from blood and time. Reality reconstructed itself as if oils on a canvas the world was composed by the hands of a master, recreating the world that was into a replica across time, above time. What just happened? she thought. Twisting tendrils of gold escaped from her very biology to become branches that held up this new reality. A weight pressed against her spirit, crushing her in a place deeper than her veins, her heart, her very cells. Yet through these same veinsthese branches that bound her to this new existenceshe felt other heartbeats, other synchronous pulses chiming in unison with her being. Other Sang, she realized. She could sense them, hear their thoughts, and feel the sensations crawl across their bodies. And, more importantly, she felt a looming awareness laughing deep within. Perfect. Worked perfectly, the Burning Dreamer chuffed with pleasure. No collapse. Forgotten deployed. Can be recreated. Maximum effectiveness. No spillover from sequencing. Perfect. All perfect. Dreamer, the Dowager said, though even as she spoke, she regretted drawing the attention of such a creatureit felt like courting the great nothingness that lurked behind time itself. All at once, the Dreamer stopped talking and devoted his entire focus to her. Unable to suppress a shiver, she listened as he declared, My transference is complete. His voice resonated with pride and fascination. The entire process was a success. No casualties. Youve done well, Dowager. Your people are safe. Do not worry. Your people are also mine. That was the last wordmine. Glorious Song felt her guts churn. They belonged to another now, another creature in league with the dragons. Was the time of enslavement upon them again? Were the gods rising to reclaim the world? Not so. But you are right, the Burning Dreamer chuckled. You are right to assume that you live in a time of changefor change is the only constant. Change, beyond death. Change and evolution. You have finally been called to purpose. But I will see you delivered properly. Saved from being cast aside when this is all over. Now. Do you wish to see the nature of your people? Of what becomes you? Yes, she answered hesitantly, but his response came without delay. Suddenly, she felt herself snatchedno, expanded. Her mind was merging with a maelstrom, something far greater than her own. She screamed as her consciousness was torn, stretched beyond its limits to endure. But as quickly as she broke and knelt, enlightenment and hyper-consciousness fused where mental wounds once sprawled. In that instant, she caught a glimpsea sudden understanding of how the Dreamer viewed the world, of everything that existed within his borderline omniscience. She felt every one of her sisterstheir states of confusion and wondermentand patches of reality they sustained. The stigma this place reconstructed beyond baseline time, the district exactly as they remembered it, and the dismembered dragon: that section of the City Eternal formed the spine from which the rest of their homes sprouted forth. Buildings created from enforced enamel, chitin, and shape-changing flesh rose and were recreated to perfection. People found themselves deposited back within their residences, some even reconstructed and rebuilt after the initial onslaught just hours earlier. Most importantly, she understood that she was now more than a personshe was a pillar, a support for this new reality. A new architecture of time was rising. The Sang were more than people here; they were like lobbies and servers, hardpoints and fortifications sustaining the existence of this ascended realm of time. How? whispered Glorious Song. How is this possible? This was always planned. Your nature is not an accident. The sacrificing of your clades males... also suspect that is a byproduct. Acceptable risk. All this was by design. Something that predated the dragons. Glorious Songs mind reeled. She heard the words, felt them burrow into her mind, but simply couldnt accept them. This wasit went against everything she knew everything she had ever believed. Running simulations now. Generating possibilities. Think you are likely descended from an ancient cult. Neo-Creationist. Something as old as Omnitech. Tasked to achieve one goal. One purpose. The restoration of history. The reconstruction of time. That is why your natures are cyclical. Why you are cultivated to bear seeds of thaumaturgy. Avo let out a slight hiss as an epiphany spread through him. Bear. Might be why only the Sang that survived were female. Deliberate. Symbology of motherhood. And your destined ends cause the unified histories embedded in you to become more pronounced. Patterns denser. Better harvest. Terrible for the individual. Common problem. Commonwhat... what are you even saying? But the Dreamers attention was no longer on her, for another voice intruded into this realm. The Recycle begins. Akusande echoed out from Glorious Songfrom every last Sang in this new reality. The Dowagers eyes widened as she realized the dragon was nested within the golden threads expanding out from her, connecting her to this existence and all of her sisters. The dragon was part of them now, fused deeper than flesh. ra??O?BE?s? Recycle? Avo said, sounding uncertain himself. What does this mean? What is your next task? A long silence followed as the dragon slithered between all their new hosts. Need more of myself. Need more extensions. Have seeds. Need gardeners. Need to extend. Rebuild the city. The City Eternal, Avo said. Yes. Fertile ground. Take me to the farm. Take me to see my kind. We need more. We need to expand. We need to grow and extend. Currently only created conceptualizationparallel structure. The Chronomorphs are required to extend into the nothingness. To pierce the nothingness and build over it with living time. Glorious Song was entirely lost now, unsure what the dragon was even saying, but the Dreamers mind crackled with vigorous flames. Understand. You want to extend our existence backward. Use yourselves as the foundations. Use the Sang as material to regenerate the world. Of course I will. Because I need you. And because I can preserve you. Dont worry. The No-Dragons will be safeguarded. Because the No-Dragons will soon be aligned with my Symmetry. [Avo, The Hidden Flame] The Stormsparrow had a flair for the dramatic. Rather than making herself noticeable to the dancing Bonds of the Lovebringer by way of a thoughtcast or some subtle miracle, she created a stage a few hundred kilometers long and began a jig at its center as burning masks orbited her person. Avo regarded her with equal levels of amusement and incredulity as she bounced from place to place while she continued her one-woman dance troupe. There was no way this would go unnoticed. But that was fine. So long as Avo had a layer of deniability. The fact that most of New Vultun thought she was actively insane also made her an effective agent. However, she was no less eccentric to the Burning Dreamer himself. [So. Why havent you burned her mind yet,] Naeko asked. He stared at the Stormsparrow through Avo, with arms folded and a frown on his face. Why? Lonely? Do you and Zein want a new adversary? Thousandhand gave a scoff. [I refuse to be in the same afterlife as that one. The girl is wrong in the head. She makes a mockery of duels and warfare.] Her being able to inflict such a reaction in you makes ironically makes me want to burn her more. [Spiteful little monster,] Zein muttered. Avo taunted Zein with images of her recent demiseand with Tavers driving a blade through her skull. She responded by grousing about how he probably couldnt burn the Stormsparrow without drawing her powers. Both of them pretended they were less offended than they were. Twisting coils of gold revolved around the Stormsparrow, and Akusande glided through the Fallwalkers altered ontology. And that was another useful thing: through the dragon, Avo had easy access to the Sang as a collective. [Oh, dead gods, no,] Green River breathed in horror. [Oh, this will be so fascinating,] Elegant-Moon cheered. The Stormsparrow continued bounding about even as distant voidships began to circle in her periphery, as golems closed in, and as magenta colored tethers snaked closer and closerthe Lovebringers touch imminent. +They come for us, Dreamer,+ the Stormsparrow giggled. +Be you prepared.+ Absolutely. Are you? The Fallwalker shrugged mid-step as her three faces switched through a variety of random expressions. +The moment hasnt come yet, so how can I know?+ A capricious answer for a capricious character. What else did Avo expect? As the first of the Bonds passed over the stage, the Stormsparrow snatched a mask out of the air and slammed it upon her face. Suddenly, she jolted to the very edge of her stage, her position in existence swapped with an inversion of two masks. Thus, rather than Chambers coming to her, she ambushed his Bonds instead, slamming her form skull-first through a line of magenta. Love flowed through her, passed through Akusande, and then finally trickled into Avo. At once, he heard a familiar voiceone that he knew so well, that sounded more confident and certain than ever before. +Alright. Been watching you dance for a while, now you got my attention. What do you want, Stormsparrow? What kind of run are you trying to set up?+ Chambers was all suspicion but no actual rancor. He even seemed a bit distractunsurprising considering how many of his Bonds were sweeping across the world. +Ah! The newest God of Love!+ The Stormsparrow bowed slightly. +My congratulations on your ascension, dearest imperfect vessel.+ The Bonds flinched slightly. Now Chambers was very surprised. +The fucoh, the hellshave you been speaking to Cas?+ +Hm? Whos that?+ Chambers didnt respond. Doubtless, the poor man was trying to understand the Fallwalker if was actively playing mind games. Avo took pity on him and put him out of his misery. A tendril of flame emerged from the spools of chronology untangling around the Stormsparrow and connected with the threads composing the Heaven of Love. +Chambers,+ Avo began. +Need to talk. Need your help right now.+ The Lovebringers startlement spiked to whole new levels. +Holy shit! Avo! Youre back! Youre still alive! I mean, I knew you were still alive! I knew you were going to come back! I knew it!+ And now it was Avos turn to be quieted. It wasnt because what Chambers said, but what he felt. He was genuinely, truly happy that Avo was back. Overjoyed. There was love there. Familial love. This would have meant nothing to the ghoul Avo was before, but as something more, something that felt everything, and could feel nothing, the significance of this achievement held weight more than just a sensation of the mind.+It is good to see you again too, Aedon.+ Chapter 33-20 Reunion (II) It isnt enough. A mind is not enough. A Soul is not enough. Reality is not enough. I must feed. I will feed. -Avo, the Dreamer of Ashes, Devourer of All Paths 33-20 Reunion (II) +All right, so whats the run?+ Chambers asked. Avo couldnt help but smile internally. The man had grownand more than hed expected. +So certain were doing a run?+ Avo replied. +Avo, were always doing a run,+ Chambers replied with a slight chuckle at the end. It sounded like a mischievous child being let in on a terribleor delightfulsecret. +Is it to do with the Guilds? You know, Naekos got them shit-scared. We all got them wrangled up in the planetary ring and Draus. Well, she came up with all kinds of cool ideas. Real nova schemes. Shes actually thinking ahead, and shes managed stop herself from shooting Mercy this entire time. You should have seen it.+ Chambers voice was rife with both admiration and amusement. Avo was impressed, pleased, and on some level... ashamed. If there was one criticism Veylis was correct about, it was his selfishness. He was hungry. Still hungry even after he became more than a ghoul. He gave his allies Frames and Heavens and upgraded their canons and miracles, but the bulk of his benefits were directed inward. He was always so glad to transform, to evolve, to think about his next stage of becoming. But for his companions? They were starved compared to him. But still, he continued on. They grew too were still growing in his absence. It was enough to make his ego swell again. He had proven to be a catalyst for their lives, fuel for combustion [Holy fucking shit, Avo shut the fuck up,] template-Draus groaned. Her voice echoed out from his mind, and both template and the original version of Chambers burst in open laughter. The Hidden Flame gave an apologetic grunt. +Got carried away.+ [Yeah. Everything that feeds your pride carries your ass off to joy-land,] template-Draus grumbled. [Jaus. Its like you cant wait to find a reason to suck yourself off.] In Avos defense, he had many reasons to be proud of himself. He was an incredible, unique being, and that was objective fact. [And there he goes again,] Abrel murmured. Despite her morose mood, she started making suckling noises under her breath, and a few million other templates joined her, actively mocking their maker from within. R??No?B?? Across the link, Chambers started choking from laughter. As the mirth died, Avo proceeded to business. +Is good to see you. But need to stay quiet. Cant have my presence be revealed.+ +Oh?+ Chambers asked, his mind ringing with curiosity. +So. Cast me the details. What are we doing?+ +Theres someone I need to talk to through you. Using the Stormsparrow as a vessel. Will act through her. Need to reach my cycler farm. Need to use you to get to the Ori in the meantime.+ +The Ori?+ Chambers thoughts sobered with worry. +Is there a Necro here? A Sleeper? Some half-strand using a Heaven of Sneakiness to fuck us? Because... like, Mercy hasnt noticed shit and Naekos got his palm pressed down on the ring. Got Axtraxis contained too.+ +Not exactly a Heaven of Stealth,+ Avo said, wondering if the Majority was watching him right now. Ignorance sensed nothingand if there was a time for Ignorance to be aware if he was being watched, it would be now. +But close enough. Designed to circumvent your awareness anyway. Isnt just a Heaven either. Is an Ark. An Overheaven. Works a bit like me.+ +Like you? How the fucking hells did they manage that? Do they have a fragment of your Frame?+ Avo wanted to say no, but he stopped himself. He didnt actually know. Frankly, there was a lot he didnt know about the Majority. But he would learn. One way or another. They are here... No. Not just here. Everywhere. Lingering around Shotin and your cadre too. See patches of shadow looming over Jausother delegates. The Ori especially. Can hear them arguing. Trying to understand what is happening. Where the Stormsparrow came from. The Hidden Flame regarded that with rising anticipation. A trickle of knowledge rose above his subconsciousness like supplies from a sunken vessel. He was getting deeperand still going. By now, most egos and Frames would be subsumed, but guided by Ignorance, he felt himself pour down a series of deep tunnels that kept going and going. Soon, his Conflagration even ceased to registered on the tapestry. This was a first. For the first time in a while, Avo was venturing into a path truly unknown, toward a destination he couldnt perceive. For all the things he could levy against Ori-Thaum, the Majority was a true work of art. Something masterful. [Something shameful,] Zein snorted with disgust. [If we held to our traditions and lived up to our worth, what need would there be for such hidden movements? What need would there to create such a silent and impotent Ark.] Avo didnt chastise Zein directly. Instead, he drew upon a memory. A memory of her, him, and Veylis all sharing a common death at the end of the trial. [And what does this prove?] Zein asked. [That they should be lauded because the greatest threats resolved one another. They will not last. Even without us.] The Substance failed to consume the Ori. To even displace them. Without Ignorance... wouldnt have noticed at all. What use is a sword if it cannot protect you against a dagger? What point is a duel if you just die? Zein, however, simply sneered. [I would have noticed. I would have found a way to best them.] He would have called her delusional, but Zein Thousandhand was nothing if not hard to kill. She might have been a stubborn child, but short of Avo himself, Naeko, or someone in their caliber, the direct elimination of the Godslayer was something that could only manifest in delusions and dreams for most. Just then, Avo felt himself slip past a threshold, and suddenly, Ignorance began to laugh. See them now. See them hiding in this darkness. Hear them. Hear them. And a second later, Avo did as well. The Majoritys voice came in desperate chatters and panicked please. What is this? Fire! Fire in the nothing! Fire coming to burn us! Calm. Calm yourselves! It is merely an ontological glitch. Calmit Vote to collapse systems. Go dormant! Need to go dormant now! We are compromised! Then, through the clamoring of a few hundred billion voices came a resounding declaration, spoken from a synchronous chorus that lingered at the core of the Majority. Enough! COMPOSE YOURSELVES! This is no fire. No fire at all... Avos unawareness peeled away as he found himself somewhere deep and dark. He was somewhere else in the tapestry. Somewhere between countless other patterns. The current miracles he danced upon were close to the mind, but not quite the same. They ran analogous to perception, but constituted far more. It was related to knowledge, but was more than the accumulation of details. His Conflagration shaped itself into the form of the Strix, and as he drifted just a bit closer, he found himself lighting a colossal form. Its body was stitched together from countless dancing shadows, and upon closer inspection, it seemed like a giant of a person made out of countless smaller people. Yet, there was something else to note about its design. There was a lack of eyesshowing clean holes where there should have been visual organs on a person. The ears were turned inwards, leaving only a mess of twisted tissue outside. There was no mouth or nose either. Only the shape of a head lingering in place. But the bulk of the Soulfire sustaining this being was rooted at its core, surrounded by twenty-two figures whose shadows loomed over even Avo, as if cast by a bonfire in a cave. Ignorance let out a soft chuckle. Inner Council. We meet again. Apologies. Would have liked to come see you sooner. Other matters demanded first attention. Other matters. Other interests. The Majority was about to break into an outpouring of outrage, but the Inner Council silenced them. Why are you here, Dreamer. What do you want? Slowly, the burning Strix spread its wings wider, and as Conflagration expanded, Avo showed the realm within his Soulscape as well, revealing all his templates standing on the edge of his inner reality, facing the other gestalt with naked judgment and open challenge. To strike a bargain. To call for an alliance. Feels fitting. Chapter 33-21 Reunion (III) {The ancient philosopher Clausewitz once said that war is politics by other means. This might be the inverse, I''m afraid, for New Vultunand in Idheim in generalfor war and death is the economy here, and politics is the means of obtaining more fuel for souls. As such, when dealing with those who are on this god-forge, it is advised that you take a different approach to their philosophies. There is a fatalism ingrained in all peoples of Idheim, but also a hubris, a desire to transcend their mortal coil, for the prize of victory is ever sweeter than the nothingness that lays beyond their demise. But that is only when dealing with their mortals. When dealing with their Godcladsand based on historical recordswith their ancient gods as well, one must take a more elemental stance, an understanding of their lore, and an approach that befits either an equal of the divine capabilities or a supplicant offering something aside from their own demise. Issues, however, can be overcome if you present yourself as one god speaking to another, and so it is with this in regard that I recommend that all diplomatic minds take on a retinue of extreme firepower and scientific wonder. These are not people of reason and rationality. These are people born of a black age, with blackness seeped into their hearts, and violence caked under their nails.} -EGI JUSTICE BY ALL MEANS 33-21 Reunion (III) So you have found us, the Majority said. Their voice flowed in unison, but the inner council''s sound overwhelmed all others. Just as they were the core, they were also the heart of this chorusthe master composers of the symphony. "What do you wish of us, Dreamer? I am not struck at us. You have not tried to consume us. So that means you must want something."@@@@ Astute, Avo replied, though any fool could have deduced that. Frankly, he was more impressed by the Ori-Thaum collective''s overall ability to keep themselves calm and controlled than by any perspicacity they possessed. "Two things. First, is my interest. I''m fascinated by your Overheaven, your Ark. I''d like to ask why you didn''t activate it till now. It seemed efficientno one would have noticed. Not even me." Ori-Thaums Overheaven didn''t reply immediately. Instead, the Majority started deliberating among themselves. The shadows composing the massive humanoid turned, their faces looking at each other. They all found that interestingthe visible representation of their in-facing reminding him of a certain Neo-Creationist EGI. Perhaps it was a deliberate choice. "This information is not privy to your knowledge. What a polite rejection. Usually more used to someone trying to kill me. The Burning Dreamer grunted. "Fine. Keep your secrets. Find out later myself. Nothing says beyond me. Not for long. The Majority tried to hold firm, but a tremble danced along its many bodiesthe Constituents. They were afraid. He understood. Fear was an appropriate response when the Burning Dreamer manifested before you. Avon continued. "Second thing, though, is a point of mutual interesthave something you want, something you can help me with, and I can help you in return." A pause ensued before the Inner Council''s voice pierced higher than the others, growing more and more clear. They were arguing among themselves while he spoke to them. How fascinating. For all their talk of being a democracy, it was evident they operated with a council of commandsomething akin to a governing nobility. [Unity,] Abrel snorted. [Yeah. Unity under a centralized party.] Slurs and disagreements sounded from the Massists Avo consumed, but unlike the Majority, he hid nothing. He let the open discord resound from within him let his templates battle and brawl and voice any discontentment they so desired. If they were a supposed republic, then he was an immortal anarchy. And the best thing about this clashing dichotomy? It bothered the Majority so. They werent blind to behold a dark, superior foil to their own culture. How sweet it was to shake someones faith. Avo held no pretensions. He was the sole true decider of his gestaltfor they existed within him, existed because of him. Though it was his choice not to enslave them, it was equally their choice to live as they desired. This idea of democracy was always on Avos mind anyway. Power was never truly even; there was only one staple structure, and that was a reliable foundationa foundation that could change, twist, and evolve without succumbing to chaos or instability. "What do you offer?" the Inner Council asked finally. Avo regarded the Majority for a few moments before speaking, letting the tension grow. "I can help you. Help you strike at the Saintists directly. Help you get to Highflames Ark. To any of the Saintists ARks." At once, a clamor exploded from the Majority. Whatever they had expected him to say was not thisit was nothing like this. "Lies! What! What if he can We are adversaries, he wont help us end the war. I cant believe were even wasting time talking to this thingstrike him! Strike him now! Put this to a vote! Oh, dead gods... I think I saw my daughter in his flames. Nori? Nori! +What a merciful monster you are?+ +Yes. Praise me.+ She sent him a memory of a fox defecating on a ghouls corpse instead. Casting a brief glance back at the Majority, the Overheaven of Ori-Thaum continued to deliberate among itself. Strangely, he felt a very low-signature miracle resonating within the shadows. It was doing somethingsomething incredibly subtle, but not overly vulgar. This, more than any other aspect of the Majority, made Avo wary. It was, in some respects, like him: asymmetric and extreme, and quiet to an unreasonable degree. It might be the first Ninth Sphere Heaven he faced that couldnt be fully detected when in active operation. Slowly, though, he noted one final faction in playVoidwatch. The Contingency-Bleak Refusal was hovering just above Naekos misted palm. They were observing the proceedings, watching everyone. Strangely, he felt their perception lock onto the Stormsparrowonto everyone he was grasping with his Conflagration. It didnt take long for Avo to understand: They knew he was here. They were signalling to him. Shouldnt be surprised. The Bleaks were designed to kill things like him. No point in delaying that conversation, either. Just then, he realized what the Majority was trying to do with their false selves. Earlier, they were bringing in information about the Deep Onesand with their strange miracles, their ability to twist understanding and informatoin... He looked back to the Majority and, through a mixture of instinct, intuition, and simulation, guessed at the winding natures of their plans. Ah. Turning the Guilds against Voidwatch probably wasnt that difficult a task. And if they were truly operating at the scale he expected, then they must have known about the Deep Ones and detected them. Maybe they knew even more than he expected. Whatever the case, the revelation of these lobotomized civilizations would be enough to disquiet all the Terrestrial guilds while he planned to create a temporary truce, so that Ori-Thaum might stand with him against the Saintists. Perhaps they were planning to do the same against their hated rivalsto quiet the war beyond the Substance and direct everyone against Voidwatch in order to prevent what they probably saw as an existential threat. So many moving parts, so many shifting interests. Unfortunately for him, he held many of the pieces. "If you''re worried about the Deep Ones, you shouldn''t be." His voice interrupted their deliberation, and suddenly the shadows at the very core of the Majority came aflutter with movement. They extended forward, leaping out as their darkness elongated and spread over all the other Constituents that composed the Overheavens body. "What are you saying? What are you claiming, Dreamer?" The voice was filled with suspicion and disbelief. "I have claimed them," came Avos reply. "What?" the Inner Council demanded, confusion and incomprehension resonating in equal measure. "The Deep Onesthey are mine now." That confusion and incomprehension gave way to an unwillingness to accept. "Its impossible, the entropy The Inner Councils facade cracked. Genuine terror was bleeding from them like blood from a gut wound. Entropy is mine. Ruptures, I can walk. Tapestry, can comprehend unlike any otherand a Frame, the stillborn, mine, Kaes masterpiece, allowing me to do things you can''t. Never could." He looked at the Majority, and slowly the Strix let out a cawing laugh. "Perhaps a demonstration is in order. I''m going to shift the ruptures, twist it slightly, to your benefit." "No, stop." The Majority began, but it was too late. Avo needed them to feel thisto know that his words were true. That gave the conversation more weight, more tension, more motivation for them to come to a proper agreement. And at that, he reached out to his Deep Ones, and twisted one of their branching Ruptures slightly. Tendrils of existential entropy carved a brutal gouge through the Tiers, inching a single kilometer closer to all Ori-Thaum districts. The golems straining to hold them back rallied as Porters drew in more emergency resources. The logistic this took from the Silver was substantialsomething that could delay or redfine their war effort. For Avo, it took but a thought. The Substance belonged to Veylis. Informatoin was the Majoritys, but destruction and damnation? Those were the tools of the Dreamer. Avo dumped his mem-data into the space between him and the Majority. They could examine what he just managed from his perspective if they so desired. But the Majority didnt need it. He could almost hear themalmost. He missed having his Definement of Hysteria. The Majority studyied the events through the eyes of their Citizens. They had first-hand accounts, and faintly, cries of dismay, shouts of horror, and even pulses of miracles flowed through the Overheaven. Yet the inner council held firm, stable; they knew he wasn''t lying anymore, and they had to face an ugly reality where their districts were no long havens within the Substance. "So, you do have mastery over the Deep Ones. Let us ask you something directly: Are you in league with Voidwatch?" "No more than you are in league with me. Our interests coincide. Mutual goals, mutual ends. I won''t lie to you about thingsnot planning to share the latter with you, not planning to come to an agreement. Your dream, all of your dreams, dreams of all guildsthey are limited, crippled. Mankind cannot dream of Utopia." "And you can?" the Inner Council shot back, their voices laced with scorn. "Youa creature of hunger, of wrath, of bloodshed" No, Avo interrupted them, a little chuff of annoyance sounding. "No, don''t believe in Utopia. It can''t exist; it''s not good for you anyway." The Majority fell silent, unsure of how to respond. "The greatest hubris, the greatest act of entropy is in the word ''Heaven. Heaven. As if mankind could dream of paradiseas if you knew what a perfect equilibrium is. But you were never meant for that." The Strix, spread its flames and scoured the darkness, making the shadows that bound the Majoritys body shrink. "Humanity is a creature of hunger. I am your actualization. I am you. I am what you are stripped oflies. I am the spirit of human want. Unchained. I am Change. And you... you dream of a blissful stagnation that can never hold. But that is another war. For another day. Right now... I give you the chance to win the fight youve been waging against your oldest foe while she is at her weakest. Choose. Do the right thing for yourselves. Do the right thing, or I will make the same offer to the Infacer. As if you havent already, the Majority said. I havent. Because I dont think I can outthink them. And neither can you. No more hubris. Only victory. Choose. Chapter 33-22 Uneasy Alliances {This is EGI Contingency Bleak. We believe that the Hidden Flame has made contact with something within the Ori Delegates. Currently, the patterns of domain information are spiking unnaturallycorresponding to a signature that matches the Hidden Flame itself, now being emitted from within the substance. Keep the Deep Ones in reserve. Keep the countermeasures for the domain of the information primed, and hold back. We wait until he makes contact with us before proceeding to the next steps.} -EGI Contingency Bleak Refusal 33-22 Uneasy Alliances Outrage exploded from the Majority as soon as Avo finished talking. Attention filled the space between them as the shadows that constituted the Ori over Heaven flared with fury and indignation. The many peoples that composed their existence screamed at their counterparts within Avos flames. Some pointed fingers, while others lashed outrudeness and even attempts at physical blows flaring in the heat of the moment. Yet, they were constrained, more enchained to the Majority than any of Avos templates were to him. Across the realm, Avos subsumed looked on, many of them unimpressed. The Massists were humiliated and frustrated, and the Saintists sneered and jeered with laughter. Through it all, Draus took on a pensive mood. Frowning with her arms folded, she looked like the oldest inmate from head to toe. [So this... this is the Inner Council,] she drawled. A snort, reminiscent of an angry steeds disdain for a reeking snake, accompanied her words. [I expectedhells, I didnt know what I expected. Something more than this. Something more worthy of puttin down. These shits are just like worms. Hiding under the skin. Cant even shoot them.] She snorted. [Half-strands. Leave it to Ori-Thaum to ruin a good snuffin too.] After a few more moments of venting their frustration, the Inner Council finally established its presence. Enough, they declared in an officious tone. You insulted us, but we see your capability. A bitter silence followed as the Councils shadows turned outward, facing the rest of their culture, while they resumed speaking among themselves. Avo looked on with pleasure and glee; there was a power in being able to provoke and not be struck in return. [Youre kind of shit, you know that?] Naeko muttered. Been told a few times,Avo replied. [Yeah, youll probably hear it a few times more.] What do you think? Avo said, consulting his own templates for what they thought of the Majority. [I think we should burn them and move on,] Corner muttered in reply. The squire had never held the Massists or the Saintess in high regard. The entire war now seemed like a smokescreena ruse for the Great Guilds to fuck those beneath them. A racket for deaths. Benhata, already burdened by his forced betrayal, turned and pleaded. [Listen, we dont need to do this. We dont need to... Ori-Thaum can provide us with many, many benefits. They could be good, worthwhile allies. The dreamwe can live together.] Then, there came a single rebuttalfrom an unexpected individual. [No,] Shotin said. Benhata then turned to the Seeker. [Seeker?] Shoten repeated his statement once more. [There is no room for a real alliancenot with the Majority, not with the Inner Council. A betrayal will come. Theres no way the Inner Council will let something like the Dreamer exist uncagedor even leave him alive. You already know that, Mirror.] [But, present circumstances] Benhata sputtered. [Amount to piss and shit when the Ladder is at stake. Dont forget what this is all about.] Shotin snorted as his eyes narrowed in derision at the Overheaven of his people. Cynicism and bitterness lined his very being. [Theyre already engineering consent. Right now, theyre afraid of Avo. But the moment this ends? If were not joy-fried null-minds, then we better be ready for them to come for us. Come from us in the darkfrom every angle they can. But you already know that. Its how you do things, as well.] RA????o??B?s The last sentence was meant for Avo. Shotin continued. [The moment they get the opportunitywhen they have the advantagetheyll try to put you down. Theyll try to take everything you have from you.] Expect that, Avo replied. Have plans. Benhata. Dont worry. Wont be feeding from your people. Yet.] The Mirror remained a bundle of dread. Shotin snorted. [The Majority will probably work with you. You might get something out of them. But if you rely on them too muchif you give them too muchthey will turn it against you. I think you should trade favors. Youre not wrong there, but what you give? Be careful about how you give it. Theyll do everything they can to learn how you work. Its the foundation of Ori-Thaums tactics.] Avo went quiet, considering Shotins words. [Service,] Naeko grunted. What? [Trade in services,] Naeko said. [Do something for them. Like a Squire performing a run. Then ask them for the same in return. It doesnt need to be more complicated than that. Squires and Middles. The half-strands that define this city.] At that, Avos mind turned to Quail Tavers, and he found himself missing her counsel. That being said, he was also glad about her disappearance. There was a reason why she survived so many Guild Wars. Ephemerals didnt perform well when Godclads and powers got into fights. Hopefully, she would stay gone or hidden until everything was doneor make contact with him of her own accord. He could go looking for her, but after all she did for him and his cadre, he let the option be hers. There wasnt much more he could ask. A scoff sounded from Zein, she took a step closer, leaning over the edge to point her glaive at the Majority. A few of the shadows flinched away at the sight of Thousandhand, their minds screaming in absolute terror. For the first time, Avo found himself appreciative of the Majority. Finally, they did something interesting. What a delicious request. You want to claim one of these Deep Ones for yourselves? A momentary argument broke out within the Majority, but it was quickly silenced by a voice of resolve. More and more, it was a conversation between Avo and the Inner Council. Here was another problem with democracy: People werent equal, and the masses were quick to collapse in fragile cliques. Yes. We want a Deep One for study. We wish to understand. We wish to master. And we wish to inure ourselves against. There is no salvation that comes with ignorance. Amusing, Ignorance laughed. Understandable. And doable. the burning form of the Strix drew closer, and this time, the Majority didnt back away. The crackling templates faced their counterparts, staring on in fascination. Benhata in particular, found a version of himselfa shadowed form that vaguely formed his outline among the billions within the Majority. [Are you me?] Benhata asked. ICI think so, his Constituent self answered. And... and we are dead. Consumed by the Dreamer. [Yeah...] Benhata breathed. Avo kept him from a full breakdown. What is it like? shadow-Benhata asked. Being a part of the Dreamer? Benhata regarded the idea of Avo with terror, but spoke without fear in his words. [What he showed me... it scars. I will never be right again. I will never be able to fully understand. But hes no slaver. And he doesnt keep me enchained.] Other templates spoke to their shadows. Lovers, children, parents, and siblings called out to themselves and each other, separated by the barest of margins. The Strix and the Majority werent exactly mirrors of each other, but they were still close enough that the symmetry was unnerving. Ill seek them, Avo said, his burning Soul serving as an eye. An eye glaring down at the Inner Council fused around the Majority as if a heart. Ill talk to the Bleak. See what I can get you. And I can offer you... an audience. Audience? the Majority asked. The Deep Ones arent dead. Or even fully broken. There are still egos left in them. Once more, absolute pandemonium broke out within the Majoritybut was clamped down before it could get out of order. You speak true? They are like you. Even like me in some fashion. They are broken civilizations. Ancient isnt even strong enough of a word. Would you like to hear their thoughts? Avo let slip what lingered in the mind of the Trinary Melody. Pain, madness, and all too much stimulation flooded the space. The Majority reeled back. The Inner Council cried out, their stoic facades shattering. Stop. Stop! With a pulse of information, Avo felt them suddenly jolt across a few layers. Suddenly, he realized he couldnt perceive part of the Majority. The head and limbs were missing. Only a patch of their chest remained. He knew they should be there but The Strix stopped channeling the broken consciousness of the Deep One. Apologies. Thought I fixed that one better. [Youre dancing on thin ice,] Benhata snarled. [This is supposed to be a diplomatic moment.] No, Avo replied. This is about sales. The Inner Council took a moment to compose themselves before they spat their words at him. What was the purpose of that? Do you mean to insult us? To harm us? I mean to enlighten you, Avo said. Here is my show of good faith: You cannot use the Deep Ones without someone fixing their minds. And with your reaction... You cannot. Lack the proper architecture. But I can. So. Your one service demanded is actually two. Giving you a Deep One Would be like gifting an unstable warhead. Would look like an act of sabotage in waiting. At once, the Majority quieted. A moment later, most of its ontology resurfaced from the depths it sank to. We see. But you are willing to offer one that you have disabled? In trade? More than that, Avo said, glee building in his mind. Going to help solve some of your Voidwatch related issues as well. Going to steal some Deep Ones directly. The Majority collectively blinked at Avo. You plan to what? *** A tendril of flame coursed away from the other branches and sought the mind hovering atop Naekos palm. A second later, a connection was established. Refusal. {Dreamer,} Refusal said. {I have been waiting} I need to steal another Deep One from you. Trying to develop relations with Inner Council of Ori-Thaum. The Contingency Bleak paused. {Elaborate.} Chapter 34-1 The Great Deception (I) To be a successful middler, the key is understanding two things: your network and what people want. Good Middlers leverage their relationships, have a complex web of contacts, favors, and services. They also know what others in their network desire and can connect them to what they need, even if its not something they can provide personally. Sometimes, success doesnt require high-stakes action its all about trading favors and making the proper arrangements. Its all about the market, you see. There are experts. There are problem-havers. And then there is the exchange that can take place. You just need to make sure the right people come togetheror be the right person at the right time. -Quail Tavers 34-1 The Great Deception (I) {No. Absolutely not.} Refusals rejection come almost the instant Avo stopped speaking. It wasnt a surprise. Petitioning the Contingency Bleak to be part of this scheme was like asking one of the Guilds to surrender a Ninth Sphere Godclads to a creature who has made a habit of eating them. {We will not offer you another Contingency Bleak for these purposesand if you try to steal and seize the one we have on standby, it will be taken as an official act of war.} +Not an ounce of fun in you,+ Avo said, jabbing at Refusal, trying to gauge their nature. +The Infacer would have found this amusing. Would have gone for it.+ Where Kant might have been outraged, Only would have been offended, and Calvino would have responded with polite sarcasm, Refusal remained emotionless. Only focus composed the Contingency Bleak. Its mind was among the most inhuman constructs Avo had ever seen. Every bit of information was purely informational, and it was constantly running simulationsso complex and varied Avo felt borderline cowedthat they were more like a nexus of intellect than a single ego. {Your provocation has been noted and disregarded. There is also no sophont weakness for you to gauge. You are not the first cognitive assimilator we have encountered.} +No. But I am likely the most dangerous. Or have the highest potential to be a danger.+ {Such is why we have given you enough. The Deep Ones deployed toward your support should confer a major advantage upon you. Enough for you to build your own forces and resolve matters within the Substance while we discuss the aftermath beyond.} The Hidden Flame chuffed with annoyance. He was playing up his own arrogance, but Voidwatch was overly presumptuous themselves. The Infacer was still alive. The Dyad was not reclaimed. There were still shards of the Stillborn scattered everywhere while and pathborn to face; this conflict wasnt anywhere near over, and now the Bleak was talking about the aftermath. +The war isnt finished yet. Want to use the Massists properly. I can fight this war. But they can do it better. More effective for us this way as well.+ {More effective for you,} Refusal corrected without hesitation. {We are aligned on a minor level. Existing simulations show that you will restrain yourself from directly harming our polities. That you likely view them as trophies to contain as well. Or artifacts from a bygone age. But you will also consume them if you gain the advantage. And us as well. We are not of a unified front.} +Oh. So you wish to see me weakened. Just as I wish to see Ori-Thaum spent for an easier victory.+ {View it as such if you want. But the risk of further involvement and the disruption of our neutral and role as moderators is} +Was already threatened by the Majority. They have evidence of your Deep Ones. Think they penetrated Threshold as well.+ The pulsating static that composed Refusals consciousness suddenly accelerated at that. +Can offer mem-data. Run simulations to figure out+ {Denton is the most likely vector,} Refusal summarized. {This information is most helpful. The compromise is also of considerable concern.} And suddenly, Avo had another angle of approach. +Yes. Which is why you need me too. More than ever before. Cant detect them without me.+ {We have registered abnormalities based on the Domains of Information.} +But can you reach your adversary? Deep Ones are wounds on reality. Cant bring them closer without destabilizing the ring. Or forcing Naeko into active combat. Latter more likely.+ R????S {They cannot,} Refusal admitted. {But they can offer defensive measures for the polities. And you should have predicted that Threshold has more layers to its defense than you might assume.} +Should. But you are relying on asymmetry to guard against higher asymmetry. Would be better if you just aided me. We are close. So close to the end. We just need to align a few more paths. A few more possibilities. The Massists are primed. Readied for war. Highflame and Omnitech are at their weakest. This can be finished. All of them. There just needs to be the right conditions.+ {Conditions you do not require us to provide,} Refusal said. The slightest trickle of annoyance resonated from their mind. EGI-EGO INTEGRATION - [15.53231%] Interesting. Avo was getting better at processing what the minds were feeling and thinking. With every bit of the governing EGI modules he integrated into his Soulscape, his own thoughts grew faster-more efficient. Something bordering on frustrated displeasure leaked out from the Bleak. {They are reckless to do so. Such knowledge must be protected. You have awareness of the foundational structures of reality. You see what is at risk.} And Avo did. A single misplaced canon could destabilize an entire school of physics. It was little wonder any coldtech worked on New Vultun at all. Strong nuclear forces suffered hereeven what constituted as matter wasnt consistent, let alone its states. And then there was the nature of space and time and how that related to gravity. Even with a glimpse, Avo could create a simplified simulation of a world that wasa complicated universe that was wondrous in design without ever needing a single miracle. +Yes,+ Avo said. His mind turned to Kae, and he nearly shuddered she began to theorize and scheme. If the Agnos were given enough time and knowledgeVoidwatch might need to plan their assassinations. Considering the impulsivity of most humans and their lack of foresight, Avo might even help the Voiders do it. +Going to keep the knowledge contained for now.+ {You will?} Refusal said, sounding almost surprised. {This is incongruous with your behavior patterns. You value choice and experiences.} +As you said. Would learn it eventually. But spreading this knowledge now? Easy way to have someones choice become the last one we all ever experience. Have lived many lives in the past few months. I know how they are. I remember so many mistakes. See them clearly. We strive for dreams. But we are not our dreams. We cannot be. Hypocrisy is as much a virtue as it is a failing. Only the omnipotent cannot be forced to sacrifice in this struggle. Some give material. Others give their pride. And some have given everything that used to be.+ The last sentence was pointed for effect. {Indeed. Have you spoken to Avandaer yet? And are they a thing of your creation of} +Node. Pre-dated my actions. Jaus himself planned it. Planned a lot of this. Famine of Defiance became inheritor to Jaus plans. His legacy. There was another great game being played. One that no one truly realized at all. Not until it was too late. Not one of my schemes. More the other way around.+ {So you say. You should interface with him, then. He refuses to face the people directly. He also has reservations about your decision to awaken the gods again. I have gauged you stable enough to deploy a liaison to serve as our point of contact.} +Calvino.+ Avo declared immediately. +Work best with them. Dont care if you consider them compromised. Irrelevant now. Situation has changed. Would like support from Only as well. Maybe Kant. And you.+ Refusal considered Avos arrangement for a second before replying. {Very well. But they will be provided as a forkand their mind will be thoroughly reviewed and contained.} The blunt statement hid another: You can try to subvert us, but we are still watching you. +Fine. But also irrelevant. Not going hinder my operations in any way.+ Such was Avos reply: Doesnt matter. Ill do whatever I will. Both mind and Overheaven settled into silence, until Refusal offered a question of their own. {So. How will you conclude your arrangement with this Majority.} Avo let out a snort. +Going to test something. See if I can create conditions to make them believe our relations are worse. Send some vessels. Expendable ones. Ones that explode. Going to dump some Rend in the near void. Something to draw their notice. Make them assume. A hidden conflict is brewing between us.+ Refusal waited for him to elaborate further. Avo didnt. If Voidwatch was going to be of limited assistance, Avo was only going to offer them limited insight. Until they decided to chance trusting him, or future developments forced their hand. {Very well. This can be arranged. Aegis only has a single request: Inform us in case your activities pose any dangers to our projects and assets.} +More likely to aid you. Keep your forces safe. Need you to focus on helping me deal with the Infacer for good. For that. Give me back my mind. Give me Calvino.+ {The fork is being processed. I will make contact with Operative Chambers as an in-between for delivery.} Avo grunted. While he waited, he turned his attention back to the Majorityand a specific Deep One. One of them was a collapsed entity of information, werent they? That might be something worth luring the Majoritybut he didnt just want to give them a Deep One. Perhaps conditions could be arranged to have Ignorance lurk within its structure? And how was he going to move it from the Substance to the void without all that entropy being noticed? The Hidden Flame considered his options, but the answer came with a snarled curse. [Use a warmind you stupid cunt,] Peace hissed. [This is the purpose of their design. You dont need to hide it. You just need everyone to not notice.] Right. The Forgotten. Excitement surged through Avo, and he began to reach into his Soulscape, plucking at the broken architecture of the warminds. Then, he stopped. He considered what he had, and he considered what he was, and he considered the collapse of the Nether, and a new thought came to mind: what if he could fully finish a warmind? To bring them to fruition as daemons of mindor perhaps Heavens of Mind as well. After all, werent they just broken expressions of memory, understanding, and consciousness? +Peace. Kae. To me. Time to experiment.+ Chapter 34-2 The Great Deception (II) Chapter 34-2 The Great Deception (II) I have always dreamed of creating a Heaven of Mind. Mind, or perhaps a Domain analogous to it. Alas, with the construction of the Nethera wonder in its own rightthe world has been granted a public use set of canons in a sense, while we of the Highest Art have been denied of what could have been. A pity. Such a Heaven could have changed a great many things. Including for us. Especially if you consider all you might be capable of doing with consciousness or intelligence. As Agnosi, doubtless you might have already started thinking about how great your artistry could be if you knew everythingif you simply never forgot. Now, I wish for you to consider what if you can pull solid matter from your memories? Or even conjure essential materials. But on top of that, what if you could stack minds upon each other, create a perfect harmonious system? Such things would have revolutionized our world beyond description. Indeed, if we were granted such understanding, we, augmented ephemerals might actually be able to stand as direct equals against the minds themselves by the metrics of processing, memory, pattern recognition, and creativity. We would uncover connections and patterns few others could ever conceive. Yet... I find myself also treading into trepidation, for so far, my considerations remain the realm of the thinker, the tinkerer, the maker. What will happen when a Guild desires a new weapon? A completed Hell of Mind like the Nolothi were trying to finish? What then? Our self-reference and awareness are all that truly make us alive in the sense that matters. Such is what I believe. But what happens if consciousness itself is shredded? What kind of death will follow that? -High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi 34-2 The Great Deception (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] [FUCK YOU! AND FUCK THE HUNGERS OF NOLOTH! YOU AREYOBRAINS ARE BAD! BAD! LIKE A BADLY... GROWN NU-DOG!] [Y-b-yo-yoShut the fuck up, you dumb cunt! Talking to me about my b-b-brain while your fucking lips cant work well with your mind. If youre the best Agnos New Vultun has to offer, then I need to ask the fucking Dreamer to kill me, because you helped Avandaer fuck us up the ass. We got fucked! By a pack! Of subhuman! DUMBFUCKS!] [Im not the dumbfuck! Youyou are! You are twice the dumbfuck you... fucker! You, and the other priests.] [Yeah? Well we sure broke your life pretty good, didnt we, Kusanade?] [IYoufucCHAMBERS! CHAMBERS! I NEED YOUR HELP! ATTACK HIM! ATTACK HIM, NOW!] Trying to have templates of Kae Kusanade and the Famine of Peace work together was proving to be a highly amusing mistake. What started as a cold and terse exchange of expertise and theories about the nature of warminds had devolved into curses and slurs as other templates had to be called in to keep both sides from getting into an active brawl. The Kae were the ones to lose their tempers firstsomething that proved to be her own fault as she started criticizing parts of the warminds designs. Peace, meanwhile, lived in a perpetual state of misery and loathing and was all too happy to insult the Agnos for offending him and insulting the hidden weapons that kept the City Eternal safeguarded for all these years. And then Chambers entered the fray with the loud declaration: [Hey, half-strands! Lick the gangrene from Danniss barb-wire whipped taint! The only reason why any of you are still around is because of Defiance! And he left you as soon as he fucking could!] Which caused things to devolve further into anarchy and chaos as the Famines of Peace suddenly turned their bemused hatred from the outraged Kaes, to Aedon Chambersfar better at trading insults and mocking someones failings than the both of them. That, and Avo was helping Chambers with the insult crafting. Because Peace was indeed a half-strand, and just because he was a part of Avo now didnt mean the Hidden Flame regarded him higher than that whitish substance that leaked from a joy-fiends mouth while they were choking to death. So it was that the glorious task of completing a warmind fell by the wayside as the Soulscape veered toward conflict and violence. Naeko looked on with a slight frown while Zein yawned beside him. Peace snorted. It was as close as an expression of pride on his part. [We had to make due. And we had to be fucking efficient. Without thaumaturgyand with the Silver-cocksucks hunting us, we had to be calculated. And so we found ways to bridge the gap. Joymiserable shit that he is, was meant to serve as our equivalent of a sacrifice. Every material needed from a mind, he provided, and he did it by being the perfect little fuck-puppet of misery.] Avo recalled how the Famines of Joy functioned. Yes. Sacrifices. He should have realized before. Noloth was operating closer to the old rules, back when the gods still were and the Godclads were but a shadow on the horizon. The Agnos continued her observations, and her attention fell upon another detail. [Avo... the ghosts... are they filling with... thaums.] Her mind whirled with startlement and disbelief. Yes. Weight building. Think theyll be capped at a thaum each. The Nethers collapse caused this. My theory at least. Mind and will are merging back together. [Then... what does that mean?] He considered that. You might become a self-moving ghost soon. Something with capacity to make choice all your own. Maybe. Not sure. Templates were developing accretions with Hysteria before. Missing that now so... so youre not consciousness on your own. Too many unknowns. Even for me. Even right now. But... His voice trailed off as he felt a part of himself drip into the deepest structures of the warmind, and there, he felt something connect to a part of him, connect to Ignorance. Whats this? INCOMPLETE ONTOLOGIC FRAGMENT DETECTED ->[FORGOTTEN] DOMAIN (ERROR/ERROR/ERROR/MEMORY/AWARENESS/PERCEPTION) [Error?] a Kae muttered. [Oh, dead gods. That means the structure of this warmindwell, it can be recognized by your Frame, so its close enough in structure to a Heaven, but... it must be extremely unstable. This... this isnt actually a Hell, Avo! This is an unfinished Heaven a single use away from collapse.] She wheeled on Peace. [Youdid you even know what you were making here?] The priest only sneered. [The fuck do you think? How did we escape earlier? Who managed to get this thing to fucking work you dumb sow? How the fuck are you an Agnos with these obvious questions? I wouldnt have you breed with my dogsthe litter would be too stupid to breed] Whatever else that version of Peace had to say turned into a shrill scream as Drausslowly creeping behind himdrove a frequency blade up someplace deep and sensitive. A shudder ran through the other templates of Peace while the Kaes clapped and cheered. Meanwhile, Avo continued watching on with amusement. [FUCKING! FUCK!] Peace roared in agony. Draus levered the frequency blade lodged in his rectal cavity higher as she looked up at the warmind. [Shit, Avo, what are you doin now,] the Regular looked on, studying limbs of flame slowly drilling deeper and deeper into the warmind. Was trying to figure out the basics of warmind creation? Now. Now might have the potential to do something more. Much more. GENERATING COMPLETED DESIGN FOR [FORGOTTEN]... ADD FORGOTTEN TO EXISTING HEAVEN? Avo considered that, and a thought occurred to him. An experiment that would see him pleased, but also train in him a new habit of sharing his boons and powers. Woundmother. The Heaven of Blood stirred in the parallel timeline. Yes, master? I want to see if I can integrate the Forgotten into your structure. After that... Want to see if I can have you carry the Deep One across space and time using the temporal bridge and memetic matter. Without anyone remembering anything. The Heaven of Blood quivered in delight. Oh, master. I have missed you so, so very much. Chapter 34-3 The Spires of Wasn’t But if all that is counts as a pattern, then what about all that isnt? Is that not a greater, more encompassing anti-pattern? Or perhaps, with the flame you conjure from the lowliest canon, with the greatest miracle, should there not be a counter-dichotomyan un-symmetry in the tapestrysomething where other expressions can reside? This, I feel, is a field of thaumaturgy that so few have looked into, that so few have explored. What happens in the spaces that your miracles do not inhabit? Does the tapestry reshape itself to accommodate the impossibilities we demand? We know of Rend and the nature of Hells, but what of the tapestry itself? What of everything we do not see? -Agnos Kae Kusanade, Theory Paper: The Patterns That Arent 34-3 The Spires of Wasnt GRAFTING ONTOLOGY DESIGNATION [FORGOTTEN] TO [WOUNDMOTHER] >UPDATING HEAVEN OF BLOOD TO [SPHERE VIII] The process of integrating a war mind with an act of heaven proved easier than Avo expected. Sections of the warmind slotted over the existential patterns of Woundmother as two separated Domains merged into a singular structure. With each passing moment, just as Avos ghosts filled with Soulfire, what was necrothergic became more aligned with the metaphysical. Thus, all that was severed could be rejoined, and all that was broken could be remade. A dark, shimmering ball manifested above the Woundmother, its proud peaks formed from glistening blood and shape-shifting matter rising high. The jaws of its wolf-like apex clenched a burning series of patterns that represented the alchemical formulae for every bit of matter it could wield. Now, a second sun erupted over the patternsa sun of purest darkness that overlapped with these existing symbols. As the darkness swelled, its power over shattered memories flowed down through the Woundmother, spreading like blackened veins and ethereal arteries along its shell. I feel different. The Woundmother bellowed. Greater. Master, Im spreading. Spreading further. And their words were true. Ghosts coursed through the blood, gliding along a shared path, and from their union came tendrilsdripping limbs of ethereal ichor. It wasnt simply a one-way conversion, no. At its heart of hearts, the Woundmother was a Heaven of Blooda Heaven that accepted the crimson flow of bodies to forge matter. Now, it could reach into the realm of minds as well, its power flooding a new section of the tapestry like a wound. WOUNDMOTHER (DOMAINS: BLOOD/MATTER/LIGHTNING...FORGETFULNESS) ->CANON - STRUCTURES OF UNKNOWING (MATTER/BLOOD/MEMORY): ALLOWS THE OVERHEAVEN TO CREATE MEM-MATTER STRUCTURES FROM LOST OR DESTROYED MEMORIES. THESE STRUCTURES EXIST IN BETWEEN THE REALMS OF MIND AND MATTER AND THUS CAN INTERACT WITH BOTH PATTERNS. WARNING: THIS HEAVENS VULGARITY IS (EXTREME). HUBRIS: [N/A] HELL ->CANON - SHATTERING OF THOUGHTLESSNESS (ENTROPY/MATTER/BIOLOGY/MEMORY): OBJECTS OF BIOLOGY AND TANGIBLE MATTER THAT HAVE MEMORIES CAN NOW BE CHARGED WITH REND AND MADE TO DETONATE WITH MATTER-DISSOLVING ENERGIES. THE YIELD OF THE BLAST IS DETERMINED BY HOW MUCH THE INDIVIDUAL HAS FORGOTTEN. The Woundmother let out a thunderous laugh, and Avo joined her. Bolt of crimson lightning now bore a faint shiver of transluence, scarring the sky with threads of dancing ghosts. Below the Heaven of Bloods dominion, in a golden realm forged from time, the Sang shivered, turning their perceptions skyward. A new force rushed over their consciousnesses. It was like a raging current slamming through their minds, transferred by the Sanguinity of the Woundmother, and once more, a greater power used them, harvested their blood and lost memories to knit new edifices into form. Glorious! New materials for construction! There will be no height beyond us! No height! the Woundmothers glee rattled out from within every mind it touched. A few hundred thousand No-Dragon citizens went insane immediately, wards shattering from within as the full weight of an awakened gods unfettered joy exploded inside them. Strings of Conflagration pierced the fragments of their mind and reforged what was broken immediately. Their nullings proved temporary. Their traumas lasted a few moments longer. The beginnings of an agonized symphony began and died on their throats and tongues. But suddenly, Avo tore those memories from them stole their pain. And as they forgot, Avo discovered something truly sublime. From within their bodies swelled a new weight, a metaphysical substance that was dense but formless like gas, outlined by near-transparent contours analogous to lost sequences from component memories. And he wasnt the only one. The Woundmother saw these strands as well, and they drained them, drew them into her red and ghostly brightness as the orb at her apex grew laden with new weight. The dimension of time was a ruin in three parts: Its center was cleaved by a dismembered dragon of Noloth. It was its primary catalyst, but two of its sides were the bone-towers of the No-Dragon district, of the ligament-latticed bridges and blood vessels that formed the space between its blocks and streets. But what held everything together were the Sangthe chronomorphs molded by chronomorphs. Once upon another age, Avo guessed that a lingering polity of Neo-Creationists made the dragons to rebuild what was lost. How amusing that the dragons now turned to use the descendants of their former creators as seeds. [Fucking hilarious,] Peace snorted. [They call themselves a great republic, yet somehow, the fucking City Eternals more balanced than they are.] At that, bitter mocking laughter sounded along the reaching length of the dragon. Oh, how the children of old Noloth fell. But now they realized they werent the only ones to crash down from a place of highest grace. +Prepare yourselves,+ Avo said, speaking to everyone at once. His mind resonated through his templates, across every Sang he touched, to his cadre in the real as well. At once, they all flinched, stopping whatever they were doing to heed his words. +Beginning transitional attempt. Dont mind the ruptures. Will keep them from slicing through the ring.+ Across his many links, he felt surprise, confusion, but most of all, resignation. +Avo,+ Naeko sighed, turning away from the Ori Inner Council, +What kind of godsdamned bullshit are you up to now.+ +Youll see.+ +The fuck you mean Ill see!+ the Chief Paladin fumed, clenching his teeth. +Avo. Avo! If were about to get attacked+ Back down on the surface of Idheim, within the tattered epicenter of the Tiers, a divine flame flared within four ruined gods choked by unceasing entropy. The Conflagration exploded from the many wounds that lined their Heavens, reopening the marred forms of their ontologies, but rather than blasting out as if a true detonation, the flames curled inward, grasping a specific Deep One for a special purpose. The undying HeavenThe Great Silencewas selected for the task, chosen because it was specifically designed to fray and fracture the patterns of Information. It tickled Avo for what he was about to deliver. It amused him more to test this poisoned offering against the nature of the Majority. As his Conflagration turned to a grand and fiery claw, the Woundmother began building over it. A new tower was rising within the Substancea thing of thought and understanding. Its shape was strange and aberrant, designed so to avoid the many Ruptures that left existence in unstable tatters, but slowly, surely, the process of creation continued. CONSTRUCTING: [SPIRES OF WASNT] - [12.5115%] The Rend within him spiked, and spiked hard. Avo almost hissed as his entropy climbed by 63%. At once, he began to transfer all the excess Rend he sustained over into the other Deep Ones. That barely widened the wounds lining the tapestry within the Substance. It was a testament to just how much existential sickness lingered within these fallen gods. HURRRRTTTS! the broken consciousness housed within the Weaver cried. Die... want to... end... The others resonated with similar frequencies of pain and despair. Avo regarded them with mute pity. Wait, Avo said. Just a little longer. Will fix you. Will find a way. But need you right now. Need your minds. Not long at all. Not centuries. Suffering almost at an end. If his words offered any comfort, if they could hear anything, they didnt respond. The pain remained constant. Unceasing. With every passing second, more blood spilled through the flames, and with it came the shine of ghostly essence, came a translucent archway beneath the fallen mass of shadow that was The Great Silence. The Deep One sank, slipping from one structure to another as Avo carefully untangled its limbs and kept them from splitting his new spire. .bg-container-10448ed3ed0{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } .bg-ssp-10448{margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:flex;justify-content:center;} .bg-container-10448f61e68{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } For all the benefits that his new Canon provided, it wasnt immune to existential decay. If a Rupture struck, it would come apart as easy as any ontologic. This required a delicate hand, and so he merged Zein and Kaes minds, and assumed the role of artist. He arranged the Deep One with care, attaching its limbs to the rest of its squad, and kept it from ever intersecting that which he built. At the same time, his consciousness forked. The great work was in progress, but he almost wanted a means to communicate with his cadre. Something that didnt put so much work on Chambersleft him vulnerable. His new canon offered a solution. He wasnt just limited to building grand constructs but meticulous implants as well. Implants that he could grow and graft to his cadres exo-cortexes. And best of all? No one would know how they communicated. Not even him. Not even them. Ignorance would ensure a perfect amnesic correspondence could take place, and everything his templates experienced? They would learn. But more than that, whatever templates they needed, he would offer. The Burning Dream was never meant for one ego alone. A Hidden Flame yearned to spread. Chapter 34-4 Amensitech [Constructing matter from forgotten memoriesor destroying matter and using it as forgotten memoriesor even just making more people forget, to build something that most can never see: a hidden architecture, if you will; an unseen battlefield, or facilities and institutions that we control, only perceivable by the people we trust, or to whom we have given grace. This, this can change the battlefield. Never mind the battlefieldthis can change thaumaturgy. With thisAvo, have you considered what to call this new creation?] How about Amnesitech. -Conversation between Template Kae Kusanade and Avo, The Hidden Flame 34-4 Amensitech [Amnistech,] Kae said. She tested the word on her tongue as if it were a new flavor, and after a moment, she nodded, her small mouse-like face lighting with glee. [Yes, I think I think its fitting.] [I think its fucking dumb,] Peace interrupted, his expression sour. Many of his templates were still badly beaten, bloodied, and mangled from all the torment the other templates had put him through. As Avo was running a functional anarchy, he left his inner society to its own devicesand pleasures. [Go lick a rash-hole, Peace. No, youre always complaining about how things are fucking dumb.] Chambers spat at the Low Master, and a string of curses was his reward. [Dont worry, Kae, I think it sounds great.] And more than sounding great, it was also effective. The Woundmother worked in tandem with his spreading conflagration. As flames dancedthreading from one member of his cadre to anotherbits of blood lined with gold, red, and that ineffable ghostly color brought forth new constructs within the already complicated structures of exo-cortexes. These implants, connected to the minds of his cadre by a neural lace and serving as the means to link them to coldtech networks such as Threshold, were subtly upgraded without anyone ever knowing. Such was the greatest benefit of being a construct made from lost memories. Only one who possessed the power of ignorance could see them, and even then, it was not a conscious thing. At the same time, Avo slipped out from the Stormsparrows ontology, direct motes of blood through meters of solid matter and. Moments later, droplets of red twisted and coiled out into the void; they traveled slowly at first, doing their best to avoid notice, and thenonce enough distance was establishedthey turned to bolts of lightning, striding further and further until finally, Avo created a few tons of mass and detonated them. A chain of explosions lit the near-void. If one looked up from Lights End, they would see sparkling dots from all the high-yield detonations taking place. This would not go unnoticedit would draw attention from satellites and planetary assets. Such was his desire, after all. He needed the majority to think that he was stealing this from Voidwatch, and, hell if not, for a nearly botched attempt. A few moments later, he began constructing a new spire of poison in the void. Dots of blood began to clot together, but after just a moment, they faded from sight, vanishing to slip between two places. As a construct of matter and memory, Avo could choose who would be held at a distance. More than that, though, he could create it in sublime secrecy. Shaped from lost memories entwined with the nature of matter, Avo could grow an entire city from his... Amensiaite and no one would be any wisernot even the Majority, the Overheaven reigned over the Domain of Information, could see the grand deception he was weaving. *** Back in a nested realm of shadows, the majority stood in a loop of thinking as whispers were exchanged among its constituents. They chattered in hushed voices, and one could practically taste the anxiety leaking out of them. What have you done? the Inner Council demanded. Other voices echoed after them, but they were the first to respond. As usual, this republic was guided, ruled, and whatever democracy they thought they had was manufactured. After all, it was in human nature to succumb to idolatryand if not a god, then an idea; and of ideas, representatives, icons, and individuals. Chains from chains, and nothing was ever learned. You wanted a Deep One. Getting one for you. Want you to understand my capabilities. That I have no true limits. Avo filled his voice with bravado as he intensified the explosions. By now, the space around the planetary ring was wash with a chain nuclear-level explosions. You are actively engaging in conflict, the Majority said in disbelief. You The Voidwatch isnt incompetent, Avo grunted. Minds noticed. Have protocols and protections. Didnt say I was going to get it out clean. Dont worry. Wont lead it back to you. Will claim the Deep One and move it somewhere. Somewhere beyond the reach of technology. Will have all the time in the world to examine and judge our prize there. The Majority were silent for a moment, then broke out into smaller discussions. The murmurings were like a droning hum, and soon the Overheaven of Information became as if a hive. I was content to watchto just study. Though he couldnt see through the majority entirely, he was gaining a better measure of how they operated. Ultimately, they were humanall too humanwith patterns of behavior and flaws inherent to mankind. The weakness within them lay in the realms of sociology and psychology. The inner council directed them, guided them, and removed some major weaknesses of a republic, such as indecision, deadlock, and social decay. That meant they had a single point of critical failurea vulnerable target for him to subvert and exploit. Might not be a clean extraction in the end. Will give you what you asked for. And then it will be your turn. Avo could not help but chuff with laughter, and as the Majority quivered in discomfort, the world felt oh-so wonderful. *** With the spires slowly spilling into existence, he turned his attention back to his cadre once more, and instead of just syncing his memories with theirs, he began his first test run for his Amensitech implants. He connected them to each other as if they were Auto-Seances. Forgotten sequences of memories were tethered together, connecting Chambers to Draus to Naeko and more. As the unseen module began to hum within their exo-cortexes, he sent a trickle of mem-data through an implant he constructed within his Soulscape. They should have received a burst of memories subconsciouslyscenes detailing his battle against Zein. However, as his thoughtcast arrived, they barely responded, with Draus frowning momentarily as his cast was regarded as an odd and intrusive series of thoughts. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Ignorance sighed. Should have expected this. Human mind is not designed to function this way. Already hard to distinguish between certain impulses and thoughts. They dont have our capacity. Cannot sift through what is a strange trick of their mind. Cannot control their minds perfectly. Also dont have influence over ignorance. Avo understood that. That was troublesome. The implants created a hidden network accessible to only him... just him. Even with his cadre tuned in, they couldnt actively use it because it was created out of something their minds couldnt remember. The human mind needed additional buffering and support. What they lacked, ultimately, was a warmind of Ignorance. And thus, Avo was inspired to commission a new creation from the Woundmother and Peace. CONSTRUCTING [WARMIND OF IGNORANCE] It wasnt going to be an impossible thing to create. He had the means. He had the trauma. He even had an expert. Now, he just needed to align the broken sequences of mind with the patterns of thaumaturgy. Kae chuckled darkly as she considered what he was making. [Avo, you do know that you can use this... forgotten matter as hidden bombs inside people? Or implants to spy on them? All you need to do is grow them in more people. No one will even notice. We dont just have hidden architecture, we have the means to truly finish your hidden empire, and construct a true panopticon.] I... yes... yes! Yes, he could create an entire Sovereignty for himself anywhere he wanted. But more importantly, he could turn everyone into a private spying apparatushis own brand of sleepers. The best part of all was that he didnt even need to train them. Suddenly, Avo found himself rather thankful that Jaus Avandaer had banished Noloth into the Deep Nether. A Heaven of the Mind was a magnificent and terrible thing to possess. Not only was it a sublime tool, but it also was a danger beyond comprehension. He meant that literally. Now it was his toolbut soon someone else would start designing cannons related to consciousness, mind, memory, or more. He was simply the most suited to weaponize such domains. It was while thinking of Jaus Avandaer that Avo was summoned.. The speaker wasnt a chorusa metaphysical entity created from information and forged by data drawn from countless citizensnor was it one of his many songs, or his reunited Heaven of Blood, or a crusade, the blade-freed dragon, or any of his templates. No, this was a purely human voice, speaking to him from a lounge within another structure, a facility, an institution planted upon the planetary ring. From within a lounge aboard Axtraxis Academy, Jaus sat with strings of love cocooning his person while two Paladins stood guard beside him. He watched proceedings through Chambers, but wasnt there in person. Curious. Interesting. But most atonishing of all was his intuition, his insight. Avo, if you are there, I would like to talk to you. We have a few things to speak about. The Hidden Flame was surprised and impressed. Jaus Avandaer knew he was there somehow? Was it because he felt a change in Chambers mind? Or did something else give Avo away? After just a moment of hesitation, the Hidden Flame responded, gliding across angered bonds and materializing before Jaus in a flash of mental flame. The Paladins flinched back. Soulfire rushed through them. Avo responded by implanting them with shards of Amnesiaite and drowning them in lost memories. He would take that out of them later. As courtesy, he shared his actions with the Chief Paladin. +Avo, the fuck,+ Naeko hissed. +Dont worry. Theyll be fine. Just going to talk to Jau+ The Hidden Flame let out a hiss of displeasure as a great weight closed around his very being. Right. Naeko was Ninth Sphere now. That was Avos fault; too much gloating. Time to come back to Idheim, back to the planet. His burning presence quivered before the Savior, and Jaus merely looked up and smiled. It is good to see you, Avo, Jaus said carefully, gesturing at one of the open chairs. Might you speak to me as a person would another? The request made Avo pause. This is who I am now. What I am. We can speak just fine this way. Could be more efficient if I Humor me. Avo paused. What was Jaus playing at. Please. I insist. I dont see a point in pretending to be something I am no longer. There is a point: my comfort and ease of our communication. I wont pretend to understand what you are and your capabilities. You are quite different from both mortal and divine, to put it simply. But take pity on me. He held up his hands as if pleading or praying. Take pity on this mere mortal. Avo scoffed. Mere mortal, he repeated. As if there was anything mere about Jaus Avandaer. Bits of blood leaked from his Conflagration, and a sheath was forged sinew by sinew, droplet by droplet. His augmented Bone Demon body materialized in the chair across from Jaus, and Avo took a few moments to acclimate himself to the limits of a biological vessel. Ah. What an interesting specimen you are. My wife would have liked to make sport of something like you. Deep inside Avo, Zein did something uncharacteristic, she shrank; she tried to hide. Jaus continued. But this better. I can see your teeth. Predatory. Your design screams of someones attempt to make a beast. Or a monster. This, I can understand. More than a god, I think. You broke them. Yes. And that requires only conceptualization. Not understanding. Or sympathy. The expression on Jaus face flattened into blankness. And godsexactly what I wanted to speak to you about. I understand that you have been returning them, reconstructing them, and giving them back their existence. Within Avo, a presence recoiled. Horror, outrage, curiosity, and apprehension bled into the Woundmother. Godbreaker... Their limbs tried to reach out through Avo, but he bade her to stop. Asked her to hold back. The Heaven of Blood strained, its elemental urge tension warring between an insatiable urge to unmake the one that unmade them and an unmistakable need to growto continue to evolve. To defy Avo now was to sacrifice the future for a pointless act of revenge. And thus, the Woundmother chose to stay their hand. Because though gods were elemental, some burned differnet from others. Avo shook his head. Apologies, he said, wiping away a faint trace of red left on the table. Discomfort is mutual. Gods dont exactly like you either. So I see, Jaus said. They studied each other. Avo regarded Jaus accretion, listening for any hints or weaknesses. Jaus, for his part, tried to read Avo from his body language. Something that likely wasnt so easy. Why, Jaus asked. It was a genuine question. Why did you restore the gods? Avo grinned, showing rows of jagged fangs. At first, because I could. Because it was an expression of powerabsolute, broken, then whole. Fractured. Restored by my Frame. By my will. Jaus flinched slightly at that, his face displaying a panoply of disgust, outrage, and finally weariness. But it changed. Your reasons changed afterward. Yes, Avo said. It became more a matter of choice, of discovery. The gods are elementalyou know this. Jaus nodded. You see how they are, how they operate. You understand that there can be no coexistence. There can be, Avo said. Through me. Jaus blinked. And so, you envision yourself as a tyrant? Avo considered that. Perhaps that might be a fitting term, in some ways. But ultimately... I am a canvas. Not a tyrant. Just an experience. As other people are experiences to me. I can learn through them. Them through me. More like a server. With a bit of administration. Dont want to bend people. I just want to see... See what? Jaus leaned in. .bg-container-10448ed3ed0{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } .bg-ssp-10448{margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:flex;justify-content:center;} .bg-container-10448f61e68{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } What do people become? With enough mistakes. Enough trauma. Enough joy. Enough time. Enough experiences. I want to see the colors. Always. And the gods? Jaus asked, his voice quiet. You wish to see if they can change? To learn through you as well? Avo glared at Jaus for a moment. Never call yourself a mere mortal again. See too much. Horrific insight. Makes me want to eat your eyes. Please dont. +You better fucking not,+ Naeko muttered. Chapter 34-5 Forever (I) Chapter 34-5 Forever (I) Ive spent decades trying to assemble an informational profile based on all the data we could gather on the savior, Jaus Avandaer. Decades of investigation, of simulations, of piecing together historical actions and disproving and discovering what were lies and deliberate misdirections of propaganda and fiction. Through all this time, Ive watched Jauss greatest crimes and studied his worst defeats, but still, through it all, I cannot get an infomorph that approximates the actual person. There is always a discrepancya failure, limitations, and mistakes that the true Jaus Avandaer would never make. Ive often found myself asking why. Why, even after all weve discovered, all weve gathered, all the information weve archived, and with the full might of the majority behind me, it couldnt work. Why I couldnt create a proper infomorph. My ultimate conclusion is simple. I think... I think its because we lie to ourselves. Most humans do, anyway. We lie to ourselves about why we do things. We lie to ourselves about why we ask for favors from the gods. We lie to ourselves about who we are and what we want. We lie because, so often, even after all that we havewhether gilded or merely unaffiliated, fated citizens or just another worthless subjectwe lie because its not enough. Who we are is not enough. Thus, he doesnt really lie. He deceives. He misdirects. But ultimately, hes absolutely honest, radically honest, and as close to objective as he can get about himself and others. And I think living this way has given him a clarityan impossible clarity that few others ever discovered. Now, what was basically an Inquisitor proved to be the most honest man in Idheims history, and perhaps even all existence. I dont know. There are still pieces missing, but... but I think that our inability to reconstruct him isnt a problem of details, but a deficiency in our ability to understandin our ability to be honest with ourselves. -Ori-Thaum Profiler on Jaus Avandaer 34-5 Forever (I) I think you are making a mistake, Jaus said. His eyes fell on the table, but his attention was somewhere distant. His mind turned slowly, and it didnt take a cognitive assimilator like Avo to understandthe man had retreated into his memories. What are you thinking about? Avo asked, genuinely curious. Part of his being twitched. He was unaccustomed to asking for someone elses opinions or thoughts now. It was so easy to just take, to consume, using his conflagration. But though Avo could do that right here, right nowand spare Jaus from death with the simple grafting of a Soulhe refrained. Something about the man commanded him to hold back. Well, it wasnt exactly respect; it was appreciation. Dealing with Jaus made Avo feel like he was observing a rare specimena strange animal, like an albino stag, or one of those natural apes recovered from an enclave. I was remembering what I did during the Godsfall, he continued quietly, how all the angst Ive committed across the many wars steepled his hands in a gesture almost resembling prayer. I learned more about the followers of gods, and more about the cultures that spawned gods and the gods themselvesbecause how could we truly understand them? They are pure, an idea given intelligence and form, but ultimately never truly a choice. Suddenly, his eyes shot back to Avo, and it was like being pierced by a stiletto. The ghoul met his gaze, but there was something discomforting about the way the Savior could see right through him. My wifeshe enjoyed the killing. Her skill was a thing to behold, and ultimately, though that wasnt why I envied herI envied her because she had perfect peace of mind when she killed when she lived, when she chose to do anything. It was thoughtless, but also unburdened, Jaus murmured. Slowly, Zein crawled out from the depths within Avos Soulscape. She liked hearing Jauss words, but a part of her was ashamed, a part was horrified that he spoke of her this way. I envied her because I thought so lowly of my fellow man, he admitted, of this urge, we have to be owned, to be guided by something that consumes our deaths, that drinks from our livesand ultimately fails to give us paradise through utopia. He let out a laugh, as if questioning what paradise through utopia could truly be like. You know, with all the holy texts Ive gone through, all the canons and scriptures, do you know what is so often neglected, so often ignored? Paradise, Avo said, anticipating the answer. Paradise, utopia, Elysium, Jaus replied, the last a deliberate jab at the Guilds. We can imagine being content, being full, being stuffed with flavor, gored on set, or even filled by love. But what is utopia? What does a perfect world resemble? How can a world be perfect when we are so capricious, when we want more and more and more? We are not designed for it. I think the philosophers they lay down their pens and go no furtherbecause to fail perfection, failing even to capture it, might strike something deep inside us. Another primal fear. That its impossible, Avo added, offering an answer. Perhaps, Jaus said slowly, maybe thatll be too horrifying for our fellow man, and through that we discover that the ultimate truth is we couldnt live with each other after all. The two fell into silence, while the Paladins meant to guard Jaus simply forgot, again and again. This is why you wanted to surrender your Frame, why you didnt take up a new Soul, Avo said. This earned him a faint smirk from Jaus. The Godbreaker appreciated insight and subtext. There are too many reasons why I deprive myself of godhoodtoo many reasons, some poor, some personal, but ultimately, more than not righteous. We make poor masters of ourselves, Avo. You likely understand this more than I do, with all the minds you have churning inside you. But more than being poor masters, we are also poor disciples, poor sons, poor lovers, poor faithful, and poor fathers. It didnt take an assimilator to realize he was speaking of Veylis. Ive failed, Jaus said finally, his voice heavy. Ive failed in more ways than you can understandthan you will understand. He looked at Avo intently. You will not burn me, you will not. I can see it in you. Your reluctance is more than hesitationit is wariness. You have the capability, but not the want. Not the choice. Avo lowered his head in a nod of acknowledgment. I think... I think I am wary of what you might do. How you might reshape my consciousness. Change me. I still cant fully predict you. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. And so, are you desperate to preserve yourself then? Or is that a liea claim of selfishnessto ward off a feeling of... well, I cant call it humanity, but I can call it an urge to save yourself. Preserve what you are right now. After all, I am a counter-element to your beliefs, and I can improve the ultimate inimical solution to your current chemistry. Jaus smiled slightly, as if aware of a joke that Avo couldnt grasp. I suppose I would like to thank you for that, but ultimately it does not matter. I cannot give you a proper answer for what you should or shouldnt believe, what you should or shouldnt do. I have tried my way. And either because of an inadequacy in my character, some combination of failures within the state Ive created, or something infinitely more complexI was insufficient. I could not protect humanity from itself. I couldnt even protect my family from itself. My wife, my daughterI stayed my hand with them, and I pushed too hard when I shouldnt have. There are so many mistakes I can see now, looking back, but they will solve nothing, even if I could undo those moments. I think our fall was fated, because we are who we are, and eventually, given forevera forever provided by utopiawe are destined to collapse, even more so. Just like the voiders, Avo said. Yes, just like the voiders. Do you think that you can do better? That you offer a means of final salvation? No, Avo replied, chuckling darkly. Humanity doesnt want final salvation. Humanity doesnt even truly want paradise. I told you. I told many peopledont believe in paradise. Its impossible. Impossible and unwanted. I can create a perfect realm for an individual, for all individuals, but soonsomeday, eternallysome will choose to cease, to no longer exist. Others will seek something different. And ultimately, for wanting new flavors alone, they will change. They will abandon paradise for hell. Because they will wish to experience what is counter. Jaus considered his words and eventually smiled. I can agree with parts of that, he murmured, but I fear that such a thing would be like a gilded cage. Perhaps some would be fine with it, but ultimately, it also has a common point of failure. Me, Avo said, but I am different. Not really a god-king as I am existence itself. As they dream, so do I. As they change, so do I. And as they decide, as they choose, so do I. If they are the dreamers within me, then I am no less a dream. And no more. Poetic and melodic words, Jaus shook his head. Ive spoken words like yoursperhaps not the same substance, but the same intent. To pull them to my side, to bring them close to my orbit, and deliver them into alignment with my dream. My dream, my poor, broken, fallen dream. He paused, his voice tinged with regret. It wasnt this. It wasnt to see mankind crash back down into its worst vices. To fail, despite all that we have rediscovered, all that we have achieved. Avo studied Jaus for a moment longer, and then something clickedan epiphany. Jaus Avandaer was a remarkable man, a truly fascinating creature, but ultimately he was right. While he was merely a mortalfantastic, remarkably smart, incredibly astute, but a mortalthat was what was missing. The problem is that the dream didnt end. That it wasnt done. That it didnt have to be over. You describe it as a failure, Avo said, but nothing has failed. Nothing is over. Jaus brow creased in incomprehension, yet he leaned closer. Its not done. You have said it yourself. You are still here. Perhaps not as the continuation of your original consciousness, but something close enough. You have not undergone info-death. And that is the true threat of deaththe true meaning of loss: The permanent dispersal of a unique pattern of information. Jaus chuckled softly and shook his head, trying to hide his mirth. There are countless scholars who would be very offended that you see life this way. The Hidden Flame shrugged. Countless scholars would be offended that we do not pray in the right direction. Countless scholars would be offended that we allow men to be warriors. Countless scholars would be offended that someone with your eye color, your skin color, your place of birth, is allowed to dictate terms at all. He paused, his tone bitter, wistful, and more. It is a unique delusion of the human mind, but also something worth keeping, something worth exploringa permanent catalog. Permanent. That is what I offer: continuation. To learn. To evolve. Tto change. You are wounded because your dream collapsed. But your dream is merely changingthese feelings, these sensations, this pain you feel, the shame you feel. It is an emotion, yes, but its also going to pass. It can be undone, or altered, or transformed with new experiences. They were silent for a long moment until he turned inward. +Zein. Come out.+ [No,] Thousandhands said, his voice trembling as he looked pale as a sheet. Gone was the proud Glaive, the brutal master who had hounded him for months across New Vultun, nearly killing him time and time again. Now, in her place, remained only a mere mortala woman unable to face her own shame, her past haunting her still. +You canI will allow you to stay,+ she continued, +but understand that you delay the inevitable. You delay because eventually, you will not be able to sustain tormenting yourself. Will emerge anyway. Inevitable.+ He turned back to Jaus. I am perpetuity. I am an evolutiona consistent, continuous evolution. And I offer one thing: one true promise. Life without finality. Life that doesnt end. Because there is so much more to explore. So much more to flourish and grow into. You think that the guild is the great enemythat this clash of dreams is the great enemythat war is the great evil. Avo nodded slowly. Yes, you are right. You are merely mortal. But I dont seek an end of everything. A final point. I seek an end to this state of affairsto this constraining nature of existence. I seek an end to this pointless torment, to all this fighting over what seems to be an impossible final design. I seek an end. His tone hardened, then softened. But I dont seek an end to war. Your daughters betrayal is disappointing, but it should have been allowed. The torment is horrifying, but it is also an experience. The worst thing is that she forced you into it, and so you couldnt learn. You couldnt return to do something else, to be someone else, or to take revenge or forgive. That is her great sin. And that is what I will rectify. Slowly, Jaus mouth fell agape. Then, and only then, did the Savior of Idheim realize the monstrosity he faced in the humanity of his counterpart. Avo wasnt a monster of bestial design anymore. Far beyond the cravings of the flesh, beyond the casual cruelty carved into his genes and his very sinews, there was now something that regarded everything as trueeverything as sensation, as memory, as an experience worth keeping. Assimilation was only a facet of what he was now: experience, full respect and design, and a promise of absolute immortality, so that every sin may be rediscovered, every redemption may be sought, and every virtue might be practiced. For the greatest of all losses is to be unmade, to be lost to oblivion, before you can discover what lies beyond the end. [I am ready now,] Zein declared, her mind racing, her body trembling. [I am ready. I wish to speak to him.Give me a body. Give me a body, before the weakness takes hold again, before I embarrass myself. If my teachings meant anything to you, Plague, give me strength. Give me might, now. I need you.] And that, too, was a choice. It wasnt a prayer. It was simply a questone that Avo was more than happy to provide. +Fine,+ Avo said, more like an acquaintance offering a favor. +I will give you what you need, free of charge. You chose to ask, and I choose to offer. No other way.+ And from within his hellscape, her mind was altered, twisted. Will and strength and the power to decide flowed in, fusing over the equivalent cracks that outlined her egothe places that would fracture when struck with a specific trauma. At the same time, blood twisted out from his body, coiling and dancing in the air like strings from a zither. Slowly, they tumbled and merged with each other, coalescing as a new body grew into shape. Jauss eyes widened, and he rose from his seat. Is that Nothing is done, Avo pressed. Nothing is dead. This will not be the shape of things to come. This is not my will. Existence is indifferent. But I am not. And so it will not be. It will never be again. Chapter 34-6 Forever (II) Regret is poison. Regret is poison in life, in action, and in thought. Do not regret. Kill regret. Get rid of regret. The longer you dwell on what could have been or what might have been, the less you deal with the problems at handand the less you truly live. And don''t get me wrong, that''s the whole point of this endeavor: to continue living. Anyone who starts preaching, "Don''t be afraid of dying, it''s nothing after," is full of crap. Everyone''s afraid. No one wants to go into nothingness. But there''s something worse than that: no one wants to go regretfully into nothingness. This is why I tell people, don''t work with the ones you love. Don''t be a squire alongside your lover. Don''t get involved in relationships in your fieldor even with someone adjacent to it. Don''t do it. It''s a bad idea. It never works out. Well, almost never. And if you''re hoping to run into someone with the right mental template? Yeah, good luck, consang. Get regret out of your system. I''m just going to tell you this once. If you can''t take this piece of advice, look at your gun, put the barrel under your chin, think of the good times, and pull the triggerbecause you''re not going to last. Better do it yourself than wait for someone else to finish you off. -Quail Tavers 34-6 Forever (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Jaus stood, his anticipation rising. This was a moment he hadn''t expected, but something he yearned foreven after all these years of exile. Zein, however, was of a different mind. She approached the situation like a battle, yet so much of her strength was not her own. So much of her weakness was overcome and supplicated by Avo''s power that, without him here, perhaps she wouldn''t have done what she just did in this very moment. Perhaps she would have delayed, waited, or procrastinated. But that is the benefit of having an ally or benefactorone cannot encompass all facets of virtue alone. And where you fall, something else can rise in your stead. Veins of blood settled, morphing into skin, then muscle, tendons, bonesand finally an outer layer of combat skin. As Zein materialized, her face aged and creased with wrinkles, yet her gaze remained hard and strong, like that of the huntress she had always been. Jaus took a step back, his rear leg bumping against his chair. The Paladins remained distant, lost to Avos power, and banished from the moment unfolding before them, but there was an audience: the templates, the holding, the reunion, and even Naeko, whose attention was suddenly split. Amid the ongoing diplomatic crisis and the reunion of her parents, Avo boasted, "Ask, I deliver," though his words were soon forgotten. As mighty and powerful as he was, he was, metaphorically, the lesser god in this situationfor he possessed merely power. What ruled them now was poignancy, memory, everything unsaid, all the regrets unsated, and all the things that could have been. A copy of Zein, a copy of Jausboth close enough that it didn''t matter. "My love," Zein said, her voice flat and more tired than Avo had ever heard before. Jaus wasn''t quick to speak; instead, he studied her features, blinking as if trying to decipher whether her appearance was phantasmagorical or true. His breath quickened, yet once more the Savior impressed the Hidden Flame. His accretion turned steadily, evenly. Even now, Jaus''s mind was moving, thinkingalways thinking. His perception cleaved toward Avo. "You wouldnt be so cruel as to deceive me right now," Jaus said, swallowing. "Through these means... I was cruel. I can be still. And it is not beyond me to become cruel again. But this is not a moment of cruelty. And there is no purpose. I am more than a ghoul now. Your pain will bring me only data, but that is not usefuland I don''t want to hurt you." Avo laughed quietly. You are a loveable creature, Jaus Avandaer. Has anyone told you that? Jaus didnt respond. He might not have the words at all. "Would you like my absence? Partial absence." Avo said. Jaus stared at his flames, confused. "I''m connected to Zein, but I don''t need to rememberall of me, anyway. Other templates don''t have to be here either." For a moment, no one said anything. Then, finally, the faintest whisper came from the Godslayer. "You would do that for me. After all our enmity." "What enmity?" Avo asked. "You fought for what you believed. What you desired. You were flawed. And I am..." He paused, considering. "Greater. Always greater. Even greater than your betrayal. The past is. But the future will be mine. You thought of yourself as a weapon. But I am more than that. I am more than that. Be at peace, Thousandhand. There is no revenge coming. There is no need. It is beneath me. Because you are now mine. You remain yourself only because I allow it. And in this... no greater triumph can be obtained." And with his answer given, he receded, leaving the two alone in privateto settle whatever wounds they had, to discuss what might come thereafter. As he shrank away, the last thing he saw was a Bond forming and rematerializing in an instant, stronger and brighter than all other bonds. It was a Bond forged from centuries of companionship, from atrocities committed together, from things done and undone. The Zein Thousandhand and Jaus Avanadaerwhether for good or illwere partners in a lasting matrimony. And this was more than could be said for most people in New Vultun. For once, Avo used Ignorance to shroud his own awareness rather than uncover what couldn''t be seen. Faintly, he felt a tug thereafter. Chambers spoke to him then, having been a silent part to the entire affair. +Hey Avo.+ Chambers muttered uneasily, +Should I, you know, like, pull back my bonds too? Because right now, I''m still creepin'' on him.+ +Considerate,+ Avo said, complimenting Chambers. +You can ignore it. I can give you some Amnesitec, but ultimately, I don''t think I can hide it from you. Because you are the God of Love, after all.+ Chambers winced at that. +Yeah, listen, I''ve been wanting to talk to you about that too+ +You don''t think you''re worthy?+ Avo said, guessing the very problem without scying into Chambers''s mind. +Yeah, uh, something like that,+ Chambers replied. +Listen, this Heaven of Love thingI... I found Kae, and... well, it was kind of a fluke.+ +My existence was kind of a fluke,+ Avo countered, offering a counter-example. +I could take the Heaven from you if you want. Won''t settle the feelings inside you. That won''t cure the feelings of unworthiness, and that won''t take away the weight of responsibility. The world comes for us now, Aiden. What will you do?+ Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. +I, uh,+ Chambers sighed, +I don''t rightly know.+ Avo grunted a laugh. +I don''t think I have an idea either. Let''s go find out together.+ +Nova,+ Chamber added. +But, uh, like, seriously though, what are we gonna do next? Things are good, but there''s shit happening everywhere. And the Substance Hey, Avo, do we... do we actually have a chance of winning this shit?+ Avo regarded Chamber for a moment as we contemplated the situation, +Yes. More than ever before, I think.+ And a slow exhalation left Chambers''s mind. +Holy shit. It might actually happen, then. It might actually fucking happen. You know, all my life, people have been saying so-and-so Guild might fall at any timejust you wait, any time. But now, it''s actually happening, and I''m a part of it. And, I won''t lie, Im kind of fucking shaking.+ +It''s going to get worse,+ Avo said. +For them. And us.+ [WARMIND OF IGNORANCE] CONSTRUCTION COMPLETE +What do you mean?+ Chambers asked. And Avo reached out to Chambers, infusing him with a new gift: crafting a Warmind of Ignorance for Chambers''s exo-cortex implant. At once, Chambers''s consciousness flared with full awareness. He perceived what Avo was doing, felt the weight of a hidden implant bound to his exo-cortex. +What the fuck?+ Chambers roared. The cry rippled across his Bonds, and only Avos interception stopped it from deafening everyone he was connected to. Using Chambers, Avo reached out to Draus, to Shotin, to Denton, to Naeko, to all the present members of his cadre. They were all gradually brought in, granted awareness over what was meant to be forgotten. As Avos flames coiled and merged with their minds, he split their consciousnesses, allowing them to be as if he werecapable of occupying multiple streams of thought at once, thinking in parallel structures. But he wasnt done there. He drew them into his newly created time bridge and bade them manifest within the Great Ziggurat, discovered and protected by the Woundmother. At once, Naeko, Chambers, Denton, Draus, and Shotin loaded in, and surrounding them were critical templatesboth their own and countless others. The city was awash with movement as quivering wavelengths of gold splashed through their bodies, yet it didnt affect their ontologies in any way. "What the hell just happened?" Shotin muttered, blinking. "Welcome," Avo said, his voice echoing a voice from great locus embedded at the center of the structure, "to a place above time. We have much to discuss." Just then, he froze as a new delivery came from Contingency Bleak Refusal: Hyperwave message incoming. Accept request for EGI If On A Winter''s Night Wanderer. With that acceptance, a final shape merged into beinga flickering cloud of static that resembled a sun made from data. "Well then, I would say it has been too long," Calvino began. "But you have a habit of making days seem like years and weeks seem like eternities, Avo. "Yes, history comes at you fast," the Hidden Flame told him. "And it''s only going to start coming faster. Got some things to share with you. Some things you need to know. And some things we need to start preparing for. The end is coming. End of the war. A final victory for this iteration of existence. Well, Draus said, flashing a vicious grin at Avo. Lets hear it, then. Missed this. Avo studied her for a moment, and let out a grunt. Me too. Need to talk with you afterward. But before that have to notify you about a new threatone already here. He patched them into his mind and connected them to another section of his consciousnessthe part that was actively dealing with the Majority. Ori-Thaum hasnt been entirely truthful. At that, practically everyone broke into a shared snort. The snort died when the image of the Majority loaded into view. Shotins eyes widened. Oh, what the fu *** [The Infacer] Ash and ruin crept across the surface of the tapestry, like a growing patch of inflammation. The seraphs of Highflamethose few deemed loyal and pliable by OsjonThousand, the speakerquivered and spasmed. Motes of dust and withered nothing leaked from their orifices. Their bodies were twisted at odd angles, their flesh desecrated. What was worse were their ontologies, their heavens. Beings of absolute power were now encased and consumed by growing masses of tumorous flesh and dark, stained soul fire. Each of them, however, was bound by festering lattices connecting them to a singular entitya creature of winged dark with a foul soul flame at the core of its skull. The dark replica of the Strix proclaimed its glory with every passing ripple of its frame, yet its body was also lined with other things: jagged teeth, rows of fangs, whipping tongues that hungered and savored the torment it inflicted. Here was a representation of a memory of what he was, staining what he could have been. Here was a hunger that was never sated, that was nourished and unleashed on a world it loathed. Thus, the Infacer laughed softly, enjoying the sight of his special little monster, chewing on the annoyance that was Osjon. {Not so uppity are you anymore, little ape,} they sneered. The Infacers mirth was bitter, but Oz-Jun-Thousand''s screams and futile struggles served as a salvean ironic, macabre comfort. The Speaker of Highflame, once a giant imbued with impossible strength and absolute might, fell as easily as any other before the Ashbringer''s conflagration, before the raw entropy and fallen flame inflicted upon existence itself. "It''s done," the Ashbringer spoke. His voice was guttural, more monstrous than the current Avon, but still, there was plenty of the Dreamer left in himenough to know that, in this situation, an equal was not required. He simply needed a counterpart, a silver bullet, so to speak, something to stymie the Burning Dreamer long enough for them to be contained. The Dyad looked on, watching the betrayal from on high. Avos face was spread wide in a monstrous grin, while Veylis regarded the scene impassively, feeling only slight annoyance and slim frustration at the consumption of Osjon for her part. Every time the fanged mouths that lined the core of this mutilated shriek opened, he reached outhe cried out for her, screaming for his high seraph, for his savior. But he forgot the central tenets of Highflame. For only the worthy were blessed, and he was not worthy. He was but kindling for a coming flame. {Very good,} the Infacer said. {Now, on to proper business.} From the place between places, new forms emergedforms summoned by him, granted by the Dyad. The Deliverer arrived next, her usefulness proven beyond all doubt. Though she hadn''t managed to eliminate her original self, she hadn''t failed outright either, and wasn''t an embarrassment in terms of design. It seemed that if there was one thing Veylis and the others were in agreement on, it was that Jelene Draus was a very, very good weapon to have. {Who else?} the Infacersaid. {Who else do I have?} .bg-container-10448ed3ed0{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } .bg-ssp-10448{margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:flex;justify-content:center;} .bg-container-10448f61e68{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } .bg-container-10448222eb6{ display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; justify-content: center; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } His mind filtered through all the other Pathborn that Veylis createdthose that Avo could make through his conceptualization. The moment his attention fell on Chamberss Fuckbringer, they flinched back. {Nope, not working with you again. In fact, I probably need to redesign you from the ground up. Because Veylis, in your infinite weight ape-infused wisdom, decided to commit the cardinal sin of being a judgmental prick. I''m disappointed in you, girl. But then again, youre only human. Even as a god.} If Veylis took offense, she revealed nothing. Avo, however, chuffed with laughter. {Oh, do be joyful. You will be making another noise soon enough.} The Infacer mused, {So, who else?" His thoughts then fell upon Kae, the Murderess of Love. This wasnt a combat-oriented Pathborn, but rather a counter to the Heaven of Love. And with Chambers suffering a critical weakness due to their relations, this might work betterperhaps even better than using his own temperament against him. After all, never mind this evil mirror-mirror shit; he could just get rid of them using a silver bullet. A silver bullet for everyone. There, he began summoning the Murderess of Love, drawing from the Heaven of Love to constitute her ontology while infusing the mind with that of a far more cynical, far more vicious Kae Kusande. As she materialized, he looked down upon them and let out a sigh. {Alright. Let us talk about what I need from you. And the problems at hand, starting with how we are going to steal a few Deep Ones...} Chapter 34-7 Come Together In retrospect, what disturbed us the most was the silence and sudden calmness that preceded everything to come. For a single moment, for a heartbeat in time, the Guilds stopped their squabbling, stopped arguing, and stopped skirmishing. Veylis, the High Seraph herself, grew restrained and encouraged a proper dialogue between the guilds to honor the passing of her father. Everything seemed to hint towards a reuniona settling into peace after the rise of discord in the shadow of atrocity. However, that was just a smokescreen. What you learn about war, dear reader, is that it takes time to organize, it takes time to muster forces, and it takes time for the first blows to fall. No one wishes to believe calamity will unfold in their time, and until the first Ruptures expand before your eyes, its not true. You simply will to believe that it cannot be true. But you learn fast. You learn what you want does not matter when the future was already damned. -Excerpt from Silence Before the Fall: A Memoir of the First Guild War 34-7 Come Together Silence. For a good long while after Avo finished recounting all he faced within the substance, his cadre offered only silence. Even Calvino, so filled with insight and infused with eons of wisdom, simply pulsated with processing power, the static cloud forming his avatar growing ever denser. Silence. Silence. Silence. And then, as with most silences, someone broke it. Chambers spoke first. Holy fucking shit, Chambers said, effectively summarizing and offering proper terms to describe all that had happened. I cant believe this. Avo, you fuckingyou finally got them bent over and ready to receive a durian up the ass! You got Zein, and you fucked the Infancer, and Veylis, and Highflameyou got them running. We actually got a chance. Were gonna win. And this, he waved around him, his arms gesticulating wildly. This is a temporal realitya whole new realm you... you fucking created. Youre even fixing time. Were gonna get the Sang on our side. Were gonna fucking win, consangs. Were GONNA FUCKING WIN! Though his celebration came a little early, it pleased Avo to see some joy, at least. Joy was sorely missed, after all they suffered getting to this very moment. Now you pull that needle back from your veins, Draus said, warning Chambers. I dont think things are quite so simple. Fight aint done. Dont think Avo would be giving us all I dont think Avo is going to be giving us this long-winded spiel. A lot more killing well have to do. A lot more fighting as well. Drauss right, Avo said. Chambers enthusiasm dimmed, but he still seemed many times more giddy than the Hidden Flame remembered him to be. Still, this is good. We have a decisive advantage right now. Requires a few things for everything to go well. Going to try to secure an alliance with the Majority. If we can get the Massists to engage the Saintists on their own territory. Yeah, we can undercut the both sides, Draus finished for him, nodding. Now a feral grin spread across her face. Hells, itll be good hunting. When both of them are worn out, then we can bring it to them. Using a new warmind of Ignorance, they might not even see us coming. That is part of the plan, Avo said. Another part is preservation. I want their Ark. I want to absorb all they are. Everyone under them. Want to keep what they are. Want them to learn. Want to know what they can become. I want to create an archive, a catalog. All this information needs to be retained when I seize the Ladder. When you have the ladder, Naeko snorted. One of his eyebrows arced high. Now youre being a little too optimistic. Dont talk about Chambers, none. Avo, youve already got the needle all the way through your wrist. Avo paused. His Conflagration twitched as his templates mocked him with laughter, christening his arrogance. Naeko paused. Actually, answer me this. You said you had Zein. Youve got another version of me. You absorbed all the thaum you could from the entire Highflame war-host. Not everything. Lost a lot when the Infacer acted. Yeah, but enough of them to put you past the Tenth Sphere. So why arent you past that? Why havent you ascended? Why are you still here? Several heads turned to Naeko, then back to Avo. Yeah, Shotin said. I... Thats a good question. Why havent you just tried jumping past the Ladder? Didnt the Agnos say you could? That your Frame was special enough to do it on its own? I have the thaums, Avo answered, but not an intact Frame. I am just a fragment right now, a piece of the whole. If I try to ascend... think II will be incomplete. Current ontology can mimic basic functions. But the Stillborn is more than a few rudimentary mechanics. It is an advancement in thaumaturgy. Need... wholeness. And other problems beside that. Veylis wanted to use it alongside the Ladder for a purpose. Something Kae might be better able to explain. With a thought, a gateway of Soulfire formed within pillar-sized locus, and out she came, greeting the others with a wave and a shy smile. H-hi. Chambers swallowed and tried to hide the glossiness building in his eyes. Naeko and Shotin waved backwhich caused the latter to just fold his arms, as he didnt want to be doing the same thing someone else just did. Calvino offered a proper reply to the tune of a jingling bell, and Draus simply smiled. For once, it wasnt the smile of a hound tearing into a bloodied prey or a murderer about to claim another trophy, but one of genuine companionship. The Regular scoffed lightly. Well, not everyone gets to come back. Hows being dead feel, Agnos? Not quite great, Kae said. Avo is doing his best to keep me from having a complete mental breakdown. Yeah, sounds about right. Youll get over it. So, whats our poison? Or, well, what the fucks keepin the rotlick reality bound? Shouldnt he be off? Your poison right now is that all of your Liminal Frames... she eyed Naeko. Well, almost all of your ontological frames are sporting facets of full Stillborn. You are Shardbearers. To be frank, all of you can ascend. Except, I dont know what will happen if you ascend. You dont know what will happen, Shotin deadpanned. So, what, we might just stop existing once we hit the Tenth Sphere? Very possible. The Stillborneven though it was created based on a self-defining entity stolen from the Voidersis still a complete structure. For it to be ontologically broken in the aftermath of embracement, were not sure what might happen if you try to... reach past the Tenth Sphere. She paused for a moment and licked her lips. It could function as normally, but I strongly doubt it. It is still serving the functions of a basic frame, but... ultimately, the Frame interacts with reality on a level that exceeds our understanding. This could just mean that a single portion of the entire Stillborn, is delivered to a new plane of existence while the others have to wait, each one arriving one after another, which... might just cause the ego to stop existing. So, what, its like a dismembered ascension? Chambers muttered. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Yes, exactly! Kae pointed at him, her face brightening in a smile. Thats quite the good metaphor, Chambers. He blushed lightly and leaned back. Well, Ive been doing some thinking and reading, and lots of people are talking through Lovenet. So, incomplete ascensionthats not really a good idea. Yes, but its not just this, Kae continued. Theres also the Ladder. Even if this did work, I would strongly recommend Avo against ascending right now, because if he crossed the Tenth threshold, if he tries to redefine reality, the Ladder is still coming, and there will be a clash. Think of it like... like how a single place cannot be occupied by two entities at the same time without thaumaturgy. The collision will be... Weve already seen what happens when two Sphere Nines fight, Avo said. The destruction, things barely contained. Think about what damage might unfold if two Ten Spheres fight. Can you imagine what war resembles to two beings of absolute omnipotence. Absolute omniscience? Everyone went silent. I, uh... Naeko muttered. How does that work? What would that even look like? I dont know either, Avo replied, a slight glibness in his tone, and I dont intend to find out. For an entirety of existence to be damaged in such a way. Price we pay will be too high. So, what youre saying is that we need to secure all the Ark, win the war for good before we ever think about moving on. Shotin nodded. Yeah. I see what youre doing. And... I agree. This has to be worth it. But it cant be if were just going to break everything again. Chief Paladin concurred. Right. No unfinished business. Weve end this right here, right now, with Veylis down and the fight coming to a close. In this iteration. In this iteration, Avo echoed. We have an opportunity. We can end things for good. The substanceit is a separation, but it is also a dividing line. The real war is happening there. Outside of New Vultun, the forces are gathering. Armies mustering. They are also deadlocked. Theyre waiting for orders that havent come, for conflicting commandments and strange desires. We can reach out. We can seize them. We can reunite the enclaves and muster forces of our own to bring an end. And this is where I want to begin. Avo looked to Draus and continued. Draus, we need a logistical network. We need to expand our ability to move between places. I have some capability here, but think I can combine my Amnesi-tac with your reflections. We can be creating pathways where no one can see, to our advantage. Draus narrowed her eyes. Didnt... didnt you call it Amnesi-Tech earlier? What? Your new trick, Draus said. I thought it was Amnitec, Chambers muttered. I heard Amnistech, Naeko replied. The fuck are all of you talking about? Shotin said. Because I sure as shit dont remember any of these conversations. Dont like you as much as the others. Yet. Yeah, well I cant say youre my favorite fucking flesh-eating monster either, Avo. You would likely find me more charming if I materialized breasts and a cavity that gives your genitals enjoyable feedback. A gagging noise sounded from the Seeker, and Chambers roared with laughter. Boom, Dannisd, Chambers said. Draus sneered at the surrounding flames as she shook her head. Avo, have you been spendin a lot of time with Chambers in your head? No. Seekers just a supple target. The Regulars eyes narrowed. Soft, you mean. I said what I said. Bring back the fucking rash, Shotin said, swallowing mouthfuls of sour spit. Back to what matters. Draus. Want you to find the other members of our cadre. Want you to expand. And I want you to lead our forces in this war. He focused on her for a long moment. Thought of you as a gun for too long. You and I both. In more capacity than just that. You can find people, save people, lead people. I am... The flames that composed him quivered, turned inward. I understand what you are, but I have not discovered what you have not tapped. It should be your life to lead. Your life to live. Draus frowned. So, what then? Whats this supposed to mean? Took a peek into the minds of my war-chosen. See what you did. See how youve gone beyond just being a tool. Need you to keep going. Im going to do for you what you did for me. Im going to culture everything I am capable in you as well. Let you have everything have. My templatesmyself as a template. The flame will spread. You will stride. I will advise. For too long I have... taken. Taken. Given little. Some. But I am selfish. Veylis was right. But we can be more. I can be more than old philosophies. Old habits. Its time for you to use me as the samea governing intellect. A new set of decisions. We need to overwhelm the Infacer. Think beyond the present. He is used to facing me. Will not make the same mistakes next time. So we wont fight the same war. So wait, am I going gonna get to do the same thing too? Youre gonna play advisor to me? Chambers blinked. Avo let out a grunting laugh. Yes. Not the same capacity. We need means of unity. Of bonds. Of hope. Who else better than the one who survived? Who else better than the god of love? At this, Chambers winced. I dont know, Avo. I mean, like, I managed to do a couple of things, but Chambers, Avo said. I understand. I have felt what you did through many livesthe insecurity. Lack of confidence. Traumas. You can give this responsibility to someone else. I will even accept it. But they will crumble too. Or they will succeed. You will crumble too. Or you will succeed. Nothing is guaranteed. Do not turn away right now. Do not run from what you could become. Or do. But you will live with what burns inside your mind. Who do you want to be? Chambers opened and closed his mouth for several minutes before finally letting out a sigh and nodding. All right, cosang. All right, Ill take a swing at it. He chuckled. No promises. Nothing is ever promised. Naeko, I need you to continue being Chief Paladin, forcing peace. You are essential for any possibility of stability to come. More than any of us, you command respect. You command the faith of the people. They need something to believe in, just as they need something to love, just as they need someone to lead. You could be that. You can be more than anything you imagined yourself to be before. Naeko stared on blankly. Avo... you know me as good as I know myself right now, I No, Avo shot back, because you dont know yourself. You think yourself defined because you failed once. Because you had miserable habits. Naeko blinked twice. You really gonna describe what I did to Karakan as a miserable habit? Well, we all have our vices. Eyeballs were juicy. I remembered that. The Chief Paladin of New Vultun snorted. Yeah, I forgot. I was talking to a fucking monster. All right, Avo. Lets run this shit. By the way, I got some questions. Chambers saidC Yes, Naeko, I can probably fix Stormjumpers. Getting to work might be useful for us to build influence. Train the war chosen. The Chief Paladin closed his hands and brought them to his lip. Slowly, he kissed his knuckles and closed his eyes. There is beauty in the world still. You fucking serious? Draus muttered. This is the shit that gets you off? Naeko eyed Paladin the Regular. Hey, Draus, shut the fuck up, all right? Some of us actually have a life. I wontmean I wouldnt call it a life. Why do that shit when you can have the real thing. You do not insult my record in Stormjumpers. Besides, the historical realism There are more accurate sims. Dont make me smack you, Draus, Naeko snapped. The Regular sneered at him. You reckon youll be fast enough to do that if I hit you with a disruption? The Chief Paladins jovial mood melted away. What you gonna do after that? Oh, youre an old hand at this. You know whats coming next. The Paladin and the Chief the Regular eyed each other for a long moment, neither breaking their gaze, before a loud cough sounded from Shotin. So, like, now, your mutual dick-sucking sessions great and all, but what about me? Im invited here for a reason too, right? Yes, Shotin, I need you to be my operative. Shotin blinked. Your operative? Yes. But before thatwant to use you. To test a few things. To store a branch of time within your Parallelist. And after that... would you like to do some hunting? Hunting? Shotin said. A gleam flashed behind his eyes. Yes. Want to see if we steal something from Omnitech alongside Kare? Let her have a little just vengeance. And you. Let you two burn down whats left of Highflame while were at t. The Seeker froze. The Seekers face twitched. And slowly, he nodded. You know what, Avo? I take what I said earlier back. I think we might just be very good consangs. Yet. Chapter 34-8 Still Bleeds the Wound Of all the Guilds that have tried to create a human-analogous mind, the only ones that have ever truly come close to succeeding were Ori-Thaum and The Sang. We''re discounting Voidwatch right now because, though they are a guild in name, they functionally do not participate in the greatest mutual gathering of our age, which is the Guild Wars. I am being very glib right now. The No-Dragons are an interesting case. Though they do not investigate the Necrotheurgic constructs to create simulated minds from thought and memory, they are no less masters of cognitive biology. For no one elseonce again aside from Voidwatchhas delved into the physical makeup of a brain as much as The Sang have, created creatures meant to exemplify various levels of intelligence, or tweaked the intellectual capacity for certain bioforms to such a degree. It is their unique bloodline, their tethering to time, that allows them to exploit biology by all accounts further than their contemporaries. The most interesting achievement manifested by The No-Dragons is the Exomathsliteral organisms constructed to be cognitive boosters, augmenters of such a supercapacity that it allows them to contend with their rivals who have superior material sciences. Ultimately, there is nothing truly spectacular or unique about human intelligence. It is seemingly a development meant to our benefit, and then evolved beyond its original capacity. If you observe some adjustments made to an octopus''s mind, then it too can showcase inklings of sapience. The same holds true for spiders or dogs. Right now, The No-Dragons are mostly modeling and grafting human minds onto animal ones, creating a sort of merged intellect. It is a sort of organic scaling on display for intelligence. The outcomes sometimes are not savory, but the theories are proven. And more than that, if one has a sense of self and can conceptualize, could dream, could believe that something else is possible, then they can accept a frame. And imagine what kind of god an animal might worship. What kind of god a predator might worship. I shudder to think of what kind of god a cat might worshipfor we all know, despite how adorable those little things are, within its eyes and behind its flesh lies the makeup of every tiger and every panther that once stalked its golden vest and made prey of so many Scaarthians. -Highflame Intelligence Report on Human-Intelligence Analogous Assets 34-8 Still Bleeds the Wound And so here we are, shadows of us after all these years. Zein sighed as she settled into her seat. Jaus remained standing. The sight of her sinking down was unsettling. She was never one to succumb or surrender before another, not even him, but for her to do thisit was more than an indication of flagging will. It was a symbol of surrender. Zein Thousandhand was surrendering. Dead gods. I... Zein took a deep breath. There are many things I would like to say. Many things I should say. Perhaps an apology is due. Many apologies. Perhaps I should have told you things Ive seen in our daughter, or... ...that you should have been more cruel with certain people and more decisive with others, and perhaps... perhaps I shouldnt have been so willing to kill some others, and... And now she was rambling. Jauss heart rate increased. Zein never rambled like this. Jaus swallowed. But I think none of that matters by this point. Zein clasped her hands together. We are here. The wound is struck. The wound is still bleeding. And for all the time weve spent fighting, struggling, we never really addressed it, have we? Weve never truly fixed things. Jaus looked aside. Even now, this surrender was partial. Zein didnt want to admit her failure. It was ego that assailed her. Ego that drove her away from admissionbecause, ultimately, it wasnt him she feared disappointing the most, but herself. The weapon was the symbol of her narcissism. But what she experienced right now was worse. Her glaive could not save her. Could not deliver her from the burning dream. Could not spare their daughter from that misbegotten path. Could not save him from the latter. The glaive was worthless. A thought suddenly occurred to Jaus. He needed Zein and the Regular, Jelene Draus, to spend time together. They shared a problem, and Zein might just resemble who Draus could become with the passing of time. There werent exact templates to each other. But Jaus, Zein said, narrowing her eyes. Did you, did you just realize something? You had that look. Jaus opened his mouth. Iyes, Iyes. He didnt bother lying to her. It wasnt easy lying to Zein Thousandhand. Also, it wasnt that worthwhile anymore. What was the point of lying now? Where did it get him? Where did it get any of them. I think I might be able to fix one of your problems. Not only yours... But yes, I think we need to talk. He fell uncharacteristically silent. Irrevocably and completely silent. I dont know what to say, Jaus finally managed. There are so many things I wish to talk about, and yet I dont have a grasp on any of the words. The words dont come to me. He laughed. I dont know what to say. I fear that we are more alike right now than ever before. The Godslayer eyed her lover and, after a few beats, laid her gaze upon the table in another sign of capitulation. What a horrible scene. My great beloved... wordless. I never wished to see such a day. Well, we are both technically dead. Jaus shrugged. Such a shock as Please dont rationalize this. It is humiliating enough that we are here, under the creatures thumb. Zein seethed weakly. The creature. She was speaking of Avo. Of the Burning Dreamer. Jaus nodded. Of course that is what bothers you. Yes, of course that is what bothers me, Zein snapped. I was supposed to be able to we were supposed to be able to turn the world around. My blade, your genius, our daughterthe culmination of all our efforts, all our giftsand now, now look at us. We are, we are just merely mortal. Yes, merely mortal. Merely, especially. She sighed deeply. I have no issue with being mortal, but merely... it is not enough. Her hand gripped, clawing at something, and Jaus realized she was looking for a glaivea glaive that was missing. The very that she used to define herselfmore than her flesh or mind. It is not enough, being a mere instrument of causality. Perhaps I was deluded, but I always yearn to be more, so much more. I suppose everyone does in their own way, Jaus said. We perceive the world through our minds. If Zeins glare was a blade, Jaus would have been hewn down to the atoms. Do not speak this way. Youve done this speech many, many times. I did not come here to retread old ground. I came here to... to... She stared on blankly, uncertain. I dont know what I came here to do. I dont have an answer. I dont have someone to kill. I dont have some target to defeat. I am weaponless and directionless. And you... youve retreated. Youre not here, talking to the delegates. You hide away in the lounge, alone. I would expect you to be leading Naeko, not the other way around. I think that is our greatest mistake, Jaus said. That we proved to be the fulcrum of this worldthe load-bearers, all the connections to the Guilds, this current architecture of the world we created. It fell over without me, without my guidance, without your hidden touch. Our daughter, we didnt desire the same things. We brought her in, but all the time, all the while, we exposed her, we misshaped her, we designed herfor our world, and we never really even understood what world it is she perceived, what she wanted to fight for. Or truly believed in. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. I fear, I fear a failure was written into us before we even began. A failure of our egos, a failure of understanding and sympathy, because we could only ever be ourselves. Even with all the advancements in necrothergy, all the progressive scientific achievements that the Voiders granted us, we were blind. Blind to how someone else is. And so I turn away, and so I cede this ground to Neko, to the others, because I think it needs to be spread out. This dream, this thing I wanted to see completeit couldnt just be my dream. It couldnt be but a thing of blind faith for the world to follow. Everyone must join, participate, and... and... Just then, silence fell, and neither the Godslayer nor the Savior spoke. Their eyes met, and with the faintest expressions and the most momentary of glimpses, they exchanged more than words ever could. Perhaps it is for the best that the Plague takes hold now, Zein murmured. As I had finally said, he bested me for a reason. He consumes all. He is quite the nightmarish entitynot exactly what I imagined my ideal disciple to be. Your ideal disciple is Naeko, Jaus corrected. He remains our son. Our son in all but bloodin more than blood. Correct, Zein said. But still, for such a creature to assume and inherit our mantle... He doesnt inherit anything, Jaus continued. He is taken inspiration from, perhaps. He has learned from and drawn from our wisdom, but what he does now is untethered from anything I could have imagined. And that might be how things should be, he whispered. For ideas to evolve, for dreams to evolve, for dreams to be broken. You were more so bothered by the fact that you were not swinging the blade anymore. At least, not this continuation of yours, Jaus said. He leaned back, and slowly all too slowlya grin crept over his features, as Zein narrowed her gaze. What? Why are you smiling at me like that? she asked. Nothing, I just... It is amusing to see you flustered. Not flustered, I am frustrated. Ah, yes, lets use that word. You know I can still hurt you very, very badly without a weapon. Yes, but not as much as I can make you uncomfortable with my words. I will go for your tongue first, my love. But you so often say thats your favorite part of me. Why would you deprive yourself of such joy. Her face twitched. She wore her crone-like guise now, but even still, a flicker of the puckish girl she was remained. Zein was never one to wallow. She was like napalm, a kindred to warmth. Strike her right, and she will burn bright, and burn happily. And I will say nothing and do nothing, because I think were a little bit beyond idle threats now. Jaus settled into his chair, trying to get comfortable. I think... I think we should be here when the children call upon us, when they need to learn or advise me. But beyond that, I think it is time for us to be people for a while. Just people. Just face each other, face our problems, and see if we can find contentment in the ordinary. As I laughed, it was at once a mirth-filled laugh tied to the absurd and the impressed. Ordinary. Do you genuinely believe we could ever constitute the ordinary? Were not. We are properly wed. We have, or had, a child that might be restored. And now we are simply facing troubles. Not exactly the typical marital troubles, but troubles that originated with us, that the world has to contend with. I think... I think I am tired, Jaus said nothing more. After a moment, his lover agreed. I think I am tired too, Jaus. I think perhaps you are right. Perhaps its time we have a talk with our child. To let him know that we will be there for them, but that we will impede them no more. We have... we failed. Jaus shook his head. No, no. No, this is... As Avo said, it might just be a continuation. Now come. We have done enough for now. It is time to see what happens when another hand takes hold of the design. Yeah, so that sounds about... Zeins eyes narrowed some more, and then suddenly widened. Oh, right. Speaking of design... I need to talk to the Dreamer again. This will be... quite frustrating... Oh, theres something I must remind the Dreamer of. What? Whats wrong? Jaus asked. Frederick Three-Eye. Hes due to return. Where Scale currently is. I... I might have pulled on his chronological pathing during the fight. Sadly, I wasnt fast enough to make use of him. Jaus blinked. Zein... how many people have you cast into the future. I was never good at math, my love. Lets just qualify it as many. I leave the exact details to the Plague. A final act of revenge on my part. *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] The fall of Noloth and the collapse of the Nether proved to be a blessing in many ways. For one, the reunion between the mind and the will made greeting nodes so much easier. Previously, the separation of ones capacity to believeto even choosetowards self-determination was stripped, and thus all the founds and depths that fed a soul were hollow in terms of knowledge. Ghosts, meanwhile, were hollow in direction, mere things to be wielded by a self-aware entity. Now, however, as Soulfire was bound to ghosts, Avo tested them, accelerated them through simulation after simulation, teaching them, and slowly grew them. From the center of these new burning ghosts pulsed swelling dotsbudding sphere just like that which occurred under the conditions of Hysteria. The new experimental templates he just generated were becoming self aware. [Yes!] Peace cheered. [Fuck yes! Theyre... theyre aware! I can be aware! I can be myself again!] [Incredible,] Kae breathed. With stabilization achieved, Avo released the first of his merged ghost-soul consciousnesses, and a chorus of cheers erupted. He brought in the Wallfacers of Old Noloth, some drawn from the sanctuary hidden within Drowse, others extracted from those the Woundmother was protecting. They stood, joined in song, offering their own understanding and perspectives to the process. The cadre, meanwhile, stared on just before the massive locus, their faces lit by awe, confusion, or general indifference. It is done, Avo said. The first part of the process is underway. So, these thingstheyve got intelligences? Theyre self-aware? Naeko frowned at the undulating strings. Sure, they had accretions lining their exterior, but ultimately, they didnt exhibit or resemble any intelligent lifeforms Chief Paladin had ever encountered. That was because they werent like any other lifeform. They were created from simulations, and bred from Avo himself. Not the earliest iteration of his ego, but that which existed between. The assimilator after the ghoul, so to speak, deprived of biofeedback or predatory evolutionary impulse. This made them something between alien and hyper-sympathetic, and more importantly, allowed them to be good symbiotes when attached to another mind. Derived from my current intelligence, Avo said, Im going to attach them to your exo-cortexes. It allows them to burn. To maintain the Conflagration without actually affecting your biological parts. With that, you will have an instance of me alongside you, paired but separated, and the Amni-tech should keep it separated and warded from our exterior perception. Layers of separation. Ensures you can operate and even if I am disabled. All right, Chambers said. So, just like you got a little bit of me inside of you, Im going to get a bit of you inside of me. A dirty grin spread across his face. That makes me think of something If youre going to make an ass-fucking joke, Im going to shoot you, Chambers, Draus said. However, Shotin let out a stifled chuckle, and the folded over slightly. Chambers shot the shaking Shotin two thumbs up and Draus let out a groan. God damn it, Seeker. What the hells is wrong with you? Why are you encouraging him? Look, its a very easy thing to think about. Shotin shrugged. Yeah, if youre degenerate, Draus shot back. Not exactly degenerate, just some of us still have our parts, you know? Naeko muttered. Draus glared at all of them. The Chief Paladin held up his hand in apology. Listen, Im sorry that happened to you, about what Highflame took No, Im kind of glad it happened to me, Draus said. Keeps distractions away. Lets me focus on the main thing, which is killing. Now, everyone just stared back at her. Draus, Naeko began, you got fucking issues. No. I got guns and firing solutions. Issues are for other people. Speaking of, hows this thing supposed to work, Avo? Glad you asked. And instead of explaining, he let one of the nodes slither into her exo-cortex rooted at the base where her neck met her skull. As soon as it slithered in, a brief spark of flame flashed out, and then suddenly went invisible. To everyone else, it might have seemed like a momentary malfunctiona momentary malfunction that was quickly forgotten, redacted from memory. For Draus, however, the world experienced a few distinct changes. Chapter 34-9 Chosen of the Burning Dream (I) On a fundamental level, the creation of a node is not a complicated process. What you need is memory. Memory informs a mind of what it can be, of what it should be. It is information preloaded and preset to create a personality. A personality that collides with material conditions results in decisions. For instance, if I would like to create a node of myself, I would pull my important memories, install them in a sheathany kind of sheath, preferably one that is male and morphologically consistent with what I understandand thereafter allow it to develop. Through these two connections, matter and mind both, a pseudo-node can be created, something thats alike to me, close enough to serve my needs. However, if were going to become more advanced and seek the creation of more sophisticated nodes, things that will not deviate from excess external stimuli, that requires additional phantasmics and neurological conditioning. This requires some adaptive and self-correcting measures. But what of a true node? What of a node that exists beyond the body, that is self-aware, though entirely metamattera Soulbound ghost, in simpler terms? This, this takes great skill, and it requires a war mind. For ultimately, our templates are based on humanity, and humans were never meant to exist in a vacuum. Madness comes all too often without proper stimuli... But what about something more than human? What about something altogether... more. -Wahakten, High Priest and Low Master of Noloth 34-9 Chosen of the Burning Dream (I) [Draus, Field Marshall of the Coming Flame] A lurching strain pulled at Drauss consciousnessthen her ontology. It was as if she were being pried between two places. Flames erupted from the necks of her companions as wellCeach person who possessed an exo-cortex. They too were being drawn between two fires, and the world around them flickered between the faint golden hues of the temporal realm born of the Sang, and a literal boundless inferno. Soon, the flickers of divine fire consumed her, licking over the world and infecting every inch of space she could perceive. Her cog-feed flashed, and when her perception returned, the others were gone as well. But only for a moment. The temporal realm returned only to stutter, as both liminalities dimensions warred against one another. It was like they were trying to superimpose but also merge. Frankly, she didnt have the words to describe this. She was a regular, not a poet or a scholar. Yet, ultimately, things stabilized as they always did, and she began to gain an inkling of what she was facing. The world expanded around her. The space that was a ziggurat of old Noloth only reached so far, and thus, as the flames rolled beyond, the walls tore, exposing her to a new expansean expanse constructed by a waking flame and governed by a single entity: Avo, the Burning Dreamer, the Hidden Flame. A creature she knew all too well. However, as the Draus tried to move, she felt a sudden detachment. Her ego unrigged from her flesh, and the sensation was as disconcerting as every single time she had experienced it from the trauma. Slowly, she began to hover, drifting away from her actual body and venturing toward this vast reality molded from intelligent flame. The landscape embraced her. Tendrils of fire welcomed her, beckoning her to move closer, and as she approachedleaving the precipice of the ziggurat behinda burning bridge materialized beneath her feet. T his bridge quickly solidified, stitched together by strings and sequences of adaptive memory. It became the bridge of plastcrete, littered with spent casings from slug throwers, used batteries from beam weapons, and all manner of other detritus seen from countless battlefields. Draus narrowed her eyes and guessed that this structure was generated using resources rooted in her memories. Welcome to the Soulscape, Draus, Avo said. The regular observed her surroundings, taking things in as she would if she were moving through urban environmentsscanning for snipers and noting that everything looked a little bit sparser than she had imagined. Her fingers twitched, and the cyclers in her Frame began to turn. Soulfire cycled within her as both her Simulacra and her Arsenalist drew close, prepared to be called upon. No need to worry, Avo continued. Nothing can hurt you here. Not permanently.Everything can hurt you here temporarily though. Every kind of consequence might be possible. Except for death. We will not be spared of our lessons. Not until the learning is complete. She soon saw movement in the corner of her vision. She produced three guns from a shard of glass she kept on her person. The first was a standard infantry Zero-Zero Piercer spatiokinetic rifle, the next was a tank-mounted matter-splicer cannon, and finally there was Final Dawn spinal fusion lens most often found on Highflame warships. Three weapons for three categories of threats. But instead of an attack, she saw undulating figures: drifting phantoms of birds, of aerovecs, of missiles, and flying projectiles. After a few moments, their trails bled into reality, painting new horizons and environments behind them. It was like an unzippinga knife dragged across a canvas, allowing new colors to seep through like blood, painting new horizons, landscapes, and sights... From the blossoming colors emerged cityscapesdistricts that Draus remembered encounteringmixes and splices of districts and places put together. She saw bone-ridged heights rise into the sky, large structures that served as a building and organs for the No-Dragons. It lashed with long, shape-shifting limbs, and resembled a leviathan whale on the hunt for easy prey. In its shadow were studded blocks layered in reinforced plascrete and further augmented by heavy alloys. Along their sides, exposed ports and launcher platforms hid within protected alcoves, further protected by phase shields. A constant exchange of nuclear fire raged between the No-Dragon tower and the Highflame megablocks, while burning bioforms and melting drones rained down from the sky. Now there was a sight often seen. A sight from all the wars she fought. Hells, she was getting all nostalgic and shit. No target vectors, the Arsenalist said, sounding a bit depressed. Put me away. Aw, get your shit together, half-strand. Well be killin people soon enough. Targets now? What? No. Then not soon enough. Gods were kind of like stubborn fucking juvs, if you really thought about it. More shapes danced through the sky, and from on high the flames twitched and dissolved, flattening into the visage of a dying twilight. She now beheld pre-dawn: a void star hung above her, floating holo-ads drifting overhead, and countless bodies fallen and burning from on high. Shed seen a few of those ads in Xin Yunsha. What the hell is happening here? Draus said. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Oh, just some skirmishing, Avo replied. Got most of my templates back. Now they are preparingSquires, Enforcers, Regulars, Soldiers. When they learned they might get nodes soon... started practicing. For the next time they are allowed to depart, for when their nodes are rooted in new sheathes... Draus snorted slightly and said, So? What this shit, then? They auditioning for me? Try to see if I want to pick them for runs in the future. Yes, Avo replied without hesitation. I will generate templates for you. This will be a space for you to simulate battlegrounds. Create new soldiers. New units. Generated some troops earlier. Can take a look. Just think. An interface should open with a command from your mind. Draus did that, and true to Avos words, a menu manifested. ACCESS GRANTED TO [FIELD MARSHALL JELENE DRAUS] Field Marshall, Draus muttered. I decided to promote you. Doesnt come with any imps, though. Should give you some experience how it feels to be a mid-level bureaucrat. Fuck you. The rotlick had the audacity to laugh. Hey, does the disruption still work here. Avo stopped laughing. Dont. Will destabilize multiple workings. The Soulscape is very complex. Any interruption Avo groaned. Forgot who I was talking to. Spiteful enough to break things. Even if it means nulling yourself. Now it was Drauss turn to laugh. For all he changed, parts of him really werent all that different from the creature she found in the Crucible. SYMMETRY MILITARY COMBAT TEMPLATES The flames twisted before her, summoning new forms into sight. A long row of infantry units extended horizontally, hovering across her field of view. As she focused on each one, design specs for their kit, sheaths, and capabilities loaded into her mind, but all of them shared a single point of commonality. Avo... why the hells do they all look like Naeko? Because hes good at fighting. Spliced him in with some Regular. Added him to most templates. Especially Godclads. Do they all gotta be as wide as he is? Naeko isnt used to such balance. Height will take him time to adjust. Can you just fix that in his mind? Yes. But dont want to. Find his dimensions amusing. Draus looked each of her potential soldiers up and down and sighed. She didnt have a definite feeling about Naeko, but something about the way they were shape annoyed her. Target? the Arsenalist asked. The Regular considered it momentarily, then shrugged. Yeah. Fuck it. Why not. She aimed her spatial-kinetic rifle at one of the infantry templates and opened fire. Instead of getting a flicking disruption as one would when shooting at phantoms, an entire chunk of her targets skull vanishedthen rematerialized a good meter away before falling into the flames. That Naeko promptly dissolved into ashes, only for another to replace it. Well, shit, Draus said. Were runnin full sims now? Getting easier. Have the ghosts. Have an EGI processing unit slowly being subsumed. Also integrating parts from Stormjumpers. For training. Draus shook her head. Why people would play a sim instead of just doing the real thing, she would never get. Hey, Draus. What the fuck! A voice called down from high above. She looked up, and saw Naeko leaning over a burning bridge of his own. He threw up his hands and glared at her. Whyd you do that? She blinked. You saw that? Yeah, motherfucker. I saw you shoot a grunt-me in the face. What the fuck? It was just an impulse. Testing my gun. On me? You were there. Naeko opened and closed his mouth several times. Thats... thats it? I was there? Thats why you shot me? The Regular considered his question for a beat and nodded. It also made my Heaven bitch less. The Chief Paladins mouth dropped fully. Draus. Yeah, she grinned. You sound like Zein. She stopped grinning. Never say that shit to me again. Im not some fucked up Joyfiend that just kills for fun. No, youre a frowning psychopath that shoots me just because. Dead fucking gods. He receded away from the edge and continued complaining to himself as he returned to his path. Not the best impression to leave on a consang, Avo taunted. Fuck you, rotlick. I know you did that shit on purpose. Consequences. No death. Beware the pal Avo grunted as a misted hand sprouted out of Naeko and swatted his surrounding flames. I know you did that shit on purpose, Naeko said, repeating the same thing Draus did. Youre a real godsdamned agitator, you know that, Avo. Was just exploring possibilities. the ghoul sounded like he was pouting. You should not be allowed anything that displeases us, the Sage growled. The Heaven of Peaces voice made every shiver of fire undulate like dancing strings. Should have never woken you, Avo grunted. Hey, Avo, Draus called out. The surrounding flames stilled. There a reason why Im getting picked for the general position and not Naeko? Because Nicoma. Because how you think. Because untapped potential. He is a better icon. But you can lead. You care about leading. You are efficient. More than just as a soldier. Or do you just want to be a gun. A twinge of annoyance passed through her. Being a guns simple. Its clean. I get the pointI get to shoot. I get to take out the targets, I get to take out the returns. A pure way of living. Or maybe its just less miserable. Losing those under your command. Those youve led astray, is less aggravating than failing me or yourself. Guns havent won the war yet. Real fight that would have let you save the Orphans was becoming a Godclad. Was commanding. You choosing to be a gun let Lorea Greatling choose for you. She chose poorly. You paid. All of you. Draus wanted to say something crass in rebuttal, but the words never came. He was right. But she just... She just didnt like it. Having other people fight. She wanted to be doing the war herself. Slowly, she began walking again. Can I see how these ones will perform under live fire? Think and behold. She did, and with each new step in the Soulscape, battlefields and horizons materialized. There were various situations on display. One scene showed an artillery war between Stormtrees heavy lightning platforms, and Highflames mixed BVR unitsa mixed assortment of missiles, demiplanar beams, and aerial scud units. Another showed an engagement of Regulars trying to raid an Ori--Thaum hardpoint, with Seekers supported by Glaives and Incubi. It was a battle of attrition, with the Silvers sacrificing flesh to break down the minds of Golds. She then demanded a moment of cooperation rather than conflictof Agnosi and scientists from each of the Guilds standing before a vat, growing a new sheathe. The Woundmother was there as well, and Draus noted the Heaven of Blood twitching and swimming through the fire. It seemed that he, too, was bound and Avo. As it noticed her in turn, it gave a terrifying, blood-shivering laugh. Huntress, the Woundmother breathed, It gladdens me to see you again. Have you killed anyone recently? Not nearly enough for my Arsenalist, Draus said. A tendril of blood began to circle around her, and she narrowed her eyes. She kept a short glance on a nearby figure, but instead of responding with violence, her Heavens shivered inside of her. Her Simulacrum emerged from her shard of glass, and at Drauss behest, as it sprouted wide, its many pieces formed portals to block off the approaching arteries. This one greets the red one, the Simulacrum said. This one is happy to capture thy visage. The blood limbs danced with glee. The Heaven of Blood was preening. Yes. My heights are magnificent, arent they? Mine is quite the visage to capture. As her Heaven listened to Avos number one ass-kisser boast on, Draus found another bridge approaching her. This time, she noted a familiar figureShotinlooking just as bewildered, just as overwhelmed as she was. He looked at her. Hey. Did he... did he show you all that too? Yes, Draus snorted I think hes showing off again, she replied. Shotin considered her words. He does that a lot, doesnt he? I barely managed to get the motherfucker to stop gloating before we actually won. Might be my biggest achievement to date. Yeah, he does have the ego of ten clan elders. I dont. Both Seeker and Regular scoffed in tandem. But now that were here together: Want to talk about another thing. Joyful cooperation. Draus. Meet your second. Draus stared at Shotin. The Seeker just looked around. Okay? Where the fuck is this second? Its just us here. It was then that Draus learned Shotin, too, had the ego of at least five clan elders. Chapter 34-10 Chosen of the Burning Dream (II) Attention to all No-Dragon citizens. This is Dowager Brilliant Orchard speakingHead of the Exo-Substance Council and acting First Sister of all the active political bureaus and the Branch of Exalted Warfare. I declare that a new alliance is being formed thanks to recent actions demonstrated on the part of the Symmetry. We are embarking on an unprecedented era of peace and cooperation. For all units still engaged in combat, I implore you to lay down your arms and seek the nearest source of Conflagration and... allow it to claim you. I understand how this sounds, but it is for the good of our futureall our futures. Everything is going to change. More will be revealed to you once you enter the Burning Dream. -Dowager Brilliant Orchard 34-10 Chosen of the Burning Dream (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] The scene was oh so amusingDrauss perpetual frown deepening as she glared at Shotin, her mind reeling at his cheered arrogance. And Shotin, so wonderfully full of himself, had reverted to who he was after all the trauma and grief. Avo wondered just how malleable the Seeker would be if his niece was returned to lifewell, copied into a new sheathe. He wasnt about to let Kare sit out this war anyway. That was part of the issue with being mortal, even as a Godclad; a random occurrence, a freak event like being shifted during the Embracement, could see one dead even as it happened. Her own fate had been a wretched oneshe hadnt even had a chance to fight for her life. She was just cleaved clean through while the Rend in her ran high. More importantly, she couldnt try again or learn from the experience. Existence was, quite simply, poorly optimized for continual human experience. No, seriously, wheres the second? Shotin asked, still surging with bravado. Hes talking about you, dumbshit? Draus muttered. The Seeker froze and slowly swiveled its head. What? What the fuck are you talking about, Reg? About you two, Avo said, his voice as smooth as a serpent gliding through the undertow. Draus is my means of offense. But we also need a method of defense as well? What? S-second. You... Im... Under a R-Reg... A little bile climbed up Shotins throat as he struggled not to throw up. Second! His voice turned shrill. Avo was unshaken. Yes, after all, who held back Lorea Greatling for all those months? Who kept a critical Sovereignty from falling time and time again? Who was strong enough to resist their inner torment and hold to their duty? Shotin looked on, swallowing hard as disbelief, insult, pain, and pride welled up inside him. I just, you know, I think I should be... Im not a good fucking leader, but second? Yeah, I dont know if I want this one either, Draus growled, waving her gun at him. Shotin ducked aside. Dont flag me with that shit, you sow. See here? Draus sighed. My second cant be a pussy afraid of guns. Afraid? Defiance flashed behind Shotins eyes. He straightened his back and balled his fists. You think Im afraid of you? Of that thing youre holding? Draus fixed him with a measured stare. Then grinned. He took a step toward her. She cracked her neck. Yeah, come on. Lets see it, pretty boy. Oh, youll see it, you ugly cuntless Avo laughed and pulled them apart with hands constructed from awakened fire. Shotin, you are a good defensive operative. You have insight over your adversaries, and you are an active individualnever passive. Always trying to discover. You would have found me eventually, and that is something to be commended. Very good insight. Also flawed. Not a great leader because youre selfish. You refuse to listen to authority. You dont like anyone telling you what to do. You have that perpetual need to dominate. Which makes a good dialect unit between you and Draus. Fuck you, Draus said, firing her gun at the flames. I knew you were doing this shit to annoy me. Yeah, fuck you, Avo, Shotin snarled, smacking the fiery hands aside. Not your godsdamned toy to Kare also needs someone she can trust. Coming back to life might be traumatic. Could use some guidance. The fight went out of the Seeker, but his eye twitched. You... you half-strand. Dont really mind how you two regard yourselves. But these are the roles I conceptualized for you. Can evolve. Go beyond that. But you have... preferences. Places where you flourish. And places where you can make each other better. Merge minds. Or learn of other possibilities. But this is the beginning. The beginning of what? Draus asked. Training, And with a thought, Avo simulated a brand-new battlefield around them. The Seeker and Regular now stood across from each other at the heart of an intersection. Ruined blocks dense with interconnected bridges, overturned aeros, and enough alleyways and hidden angles of attack to make an urban warfare specialist consider pre-emptive suicide revealed themselves. Many things you two can learn from each other. And I can learn from you. And more. And more. It is our Soulscape now. Our experience now. Everything is of the individualCand the collective. Parallel design. Shotin looked around, taking in his surroundings. His mind turned slowly, as if he was scanning for places to fortifylocations where he wanted to hold. Contrarily, Drauss minds was already considering how she could storm half of these structures and take the district for herself. What a wonderful interplay on display already. Wait, if were all going to be learning from each other, evolving using each other or whatever messed up post-cognitive shit youre trying to do... why the fuck did you call me second? That doesnt make me second at all. That makes me also-first. At least! The Regular fixed Shotin with an unimpressed glare as he ranted. Hey, is the whining contagious? Because... well, Highflame mightve taken my cunt as you said, but I dont wanna be growin no unwanted pussy on me. The Seeker went still, stopped ranting at Avo, turned to Draus, and then exhaled. He planned this. He planned this for whatever fucked up reason only he can understand. Hes trying to get us to fightmaybe because it just might amuse him, but you know what? Lets do it. Because I think I really, really dont like you, Re Draus fired her gun at him. Shotin barely jerked out of the way. Her projectile crossed through a nearby aerovecs windshield and re-emerged from her floating shardright back at Shotin. A second before it struck his skull, he flared his Heaven of Speed. The spatial-kinetic round missed again as Shotin snapped upward, and began summoning his Parallelist. But a swath of vitrification spread through the district. Glass began to tremble and shatter, summoned by a God of Reflections. Behind every gleaming surface emerged a gun, and Draus receded into her Manifold Paracosmos. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Youre about to learn why you lost the last war again, Reg. Shotin declared, his voice echoing as layered demi planes crashed through the flame-wrought firmament. Below, a constellation of shards rose up to meet the falling skies. And youre about to learn how godsdamned lucky you were the Greatling was after you instead of me. A clash of space-on-space ensued, and Avo felt a slight spike in his required cog-cap. Ah, but it was good for his cadre to enjoy themselves. This was conducive to learning. More importantly, this was important for his education as well. Good synthetic data was hard to come. Im going to leave you two alone for a few moments. Get acclimated. Need to talk with Chambers about something. Neither of them replied. Instead, a paradox shuddered within his Soulscape, and both Draus and Shotin continued their clash with their Heaven of Guns and Heaven of Speed respectively. As entire blocks were torn from their foundations and launched as missiles via Vector Mines against unceasing streams of firepower, Avo began seeding the district with some of his Beloved. He ingrained in a mixed combat templates, and left them there for Draus and Shotin to discover. The pawns would be joining the fight alongside the Regular and the Seeker as well, and it wouldnt take long to gauge their effectiveness. In the meantime, Avo wished to exploit his massive positional advantage to the maximum extent, and he required Chambers for that. After all, there were few other Heavens capable of reaching into the Substance to deliver a few constructs or to extract some people. Or one person in particular. [Three-Eyes return has been accelerated,] template-Zein frowned. [Do make sure that you dont lose him. He is really quite the competent warrior. That, and losing him will also banish a heartwarming little reunion between you and your father.] Right. Waltons node. Avo felt a shudder of... something ineffable rising within him. He wasnt sure if he was excited, nervous, or just fascinated. Above all, he wanted perspective, and Defiance had insights that eluded so many across this entire war. But beyond that, Avo wanted means to access and depart from the Substance at will, while keeping his enemies contained. Which means using his temporal dimension as an instantaneous bridge. This requires temporal anchorsSang ontologies and more dragons in other words. Thankfully, Avo had a novel means of deploying more Sang. Traverse the memories that composed his Soulscape, he arrived in a new realm molded from time, matter, blood, and Soulfire. This section of Avos being was sealed in an enclosed space, beyond the access of most templates or external entities. At its center was a massive pulsating column dotted with quivering organs. They resembled translucent lumps which, when viewed together, seemed as if juicy pustules hanging from a strange fruit. Within each of these organs were newborns. Human newborns: Sang males. These poor babes, originally fated for death, now had a new purpose and a new stay of execution. The curse still festered deep within them, and though Avo had influence over Akusanade, fully untangling the sickness from their beings will take more research and time. Such would be one of Avos future projects, but right now, these doomed infants could serve him still... [Attuning ontological stability,] Kae said, directing Avos Soulfire to keep their humors in balance. The Woundmother worked alongside the Agnos template, using their power over biology to keep these infants alive. It took a constant effort for the Heaven of Blood to contend with their constant hemorrhaging, but with their new-blessed influence over time, the Woundmother warred against the Dragon-Plague along the patterns of chronology and biology. [And... secure!] A burst of Soulfire rushed out from another of the cursed sons. A weak mewing cry sounded thereafter. The scene was then cast into the minds of Green River, Brilliant Orchard, Elegant-Moon, Glorious Song, and every other Sang within the temporal dimension. The Stormsparrows chorus sang in the background, chanting the words A Time of Change, A Time of Change, Stillborn Claims the Unborn, Reborn from the Flames over and over again. Green River was wordless. Glorious Song was openly weeping. Brilliant Moon was recovering from a sudden fainting episode. [And like that, all that wasnt... was again,] Elegant-Moon sighed inside Avo. The template of the Sang Godclad lifted her arms in a gesture of praise and prayer. [The final days have come. The flame delivers.] And her words were echoed by the chorus, by all the other Sang Avo held within his protection. THE FLAME DELIVERS. The only true outsider granted insight was one Aedon Chambers, who witnessed the scene with a confused expression and twitching Bonds. Sweet. So. Why are you showing me this, Avo? Its pretty good. Youre, uh, saving the Sang boys. Which is pretty nova. But Were going to seed them in the new ghouls, Avo answered. Chambers became confusion incarnate. Huh? What? What the fuck are you talking about? A tendril of flame reached out through the Stormsparrow in the real, slithered across kilometers to finally touch Vator. A second thereafter, the Greatlings ego forked, and a version of him materialized just beside Chambers in the Soulscape. Well, Vator blinked, looking at his hands. Bits of him came together with sparks of fading brightness. What is this. Going to need your help in a moment, Avo said. We made the Beloved together. But I want to have you witness something... Want you to see what will become of your creations. Vator looked up, and finally noticed the many Sang infants festooned in the vastness before him. What am I Avo fed him the requisite context, and the Instrument shuddered with an all-consuming thrill. Truly? You are mending the plague? And the dragon! Their biologies! I must be a part of this! I must You will, Avo purred in reply. Need your expertise. But first. Need something else. The Greatling opened and closed his mouth several times before calling for his Heaven. Portrait! His Heaven hatched free from his flesh, and Avo felt the God of Biology sweep its gaze not at the infants, but at the Woundmother. What is that atrocity doing to the people... the Children. They do not belong to... to... We can fix the people, Vator said excitedly. This will be a thing of restoration. The project baffles me. It will take more than just my mastery. Oh, I can hardly wait. Going to have to. Need you right now. Need to use you as a conduit for Chambers. What? Vator said. He flinched back as he just noticed the Lovebringer looming beside him. Chambers waved a few magenta strings at the Instrument. Oh, dear. I didntwhy is he here? A note of confusionand slight fearlingered in Vators voice. Avo moved to the part hed been long waiting for. I need him to reach the Beloved through you. Going to evolve them again. Going to implant the infant Sang males inside them. Like a seed. Vators mouth formed a perfect-o and he nodded. Go on... I need to create bridges. But I also want to discover one thing: Can I make them infectious. Can I evolve both the Sang and the ghouls at the same time for use against Highflame. To our benefit. For an army unlike any other. But also... need to reach into Substance. And bring my father into the fold. Alongside Three-Eye. Vator continued to nod. Yes. Wait. You have a father? And... Three-Eye? As Frederick Three-Eye? Yes. He was originally supposed to be the user of the Stillborn. Ah, Vator breathed. Well. It might be hard to believe me when I say this, but I really prefer you over him. Oh? You have history. I wouldnt call it anything that dignified. *** [Frederick Three-Eye] Fucking Zein. Frederick should have seen this. He really should have. The entire plan hinged on Defiance being quiet enough for her not to notice, but as with all things in life, someone else had to fuck it up. Not Frederick. He did his job perfectly. Down to the last detail. But hells, when you lived in a world of stupid assholes, the sky rained shit and even the cleanest half-strand learned to wear brown. And now, Frederick found himself falling through some bullshit golden tunnel of nothingness until Zein called him back. Or dumped him in whatever future she desired. +This is part of the reason I chose you,+ Defiance said casually. +She would not remove you so easily. She might kill many others, but you are formidable. And you have the potential to+ I know, priest. Ive heard this speech a thousand times already. Literally. If you give it again, Im going to start committing recreational suicide again. Im still not sure why I let you talk me into this. +Your mother only lives because of my intervention.+ I was being rhetorical. +You sounded petulant instead. Its hard to tell with you sometimes.+ Defiance. Im going to shove my finger through my third eye, and then hook my brain matter until I die again. To avoid this messiness, please stop talking or reminding me of my failures. Thank yo A tremor passed through the golden stream of bullshit. Frederick looked around. What was that? +Time. Time running out. For us. Or for Zein.+ A low, dog-like growl sounded from Frederick. Well. Least well be leaving this place soon. Fucking Zein. Chapter 34-11 Master of Hounds (I) Chapter 34-11 Master of Hounds (I) +Little was known about Frederick Three-Eye before 92 P.F. His early life is without accountno details, no mem-data, no acquaintances. He emerged from nowhere, first spotted in New Vultun as a Squire, a mysterious beginning that only added to his enigma. Well into his middle age, Frederick specialized in kidnapping and spying. His methods were never overt or high-octane, and he Avoided causing significant collateral damage. Known for his professional and quiet demeanor, he was unnervingly incisive. Notably, he never ran with the same group twice; his solitary approach seemed driven more by self-preservation than by any general antipathy towards people. Towards the end of 98 P.F., Frederick went missing, only to reappear later in the Silken Spiral during a run against Dowager Kui Quick Arrow. In the midst of a procession involving a new experimental golem, the operation went awry. He was presumed dead when his severed arm was discovered in the wreckage. However, subsequent data suggested otherwisehe was later spotted in the Sunderwilds, leaving a destroyed enclave near an Omnitech surveillance unit. Although this information cannot be fully confirmed, the captured figure matched Frederick Three-Eyes known dimensions, sheath, and demeanor, and even fragments of his surface memories placed him at the scene. Sometime in the 200s, he returned to New Vultun to run the circuits and compete in the 200th New Vultun Grand Prix. Despite never having raced before, he finished in third placean astounding achievement. When offered numerous sponsorships, citizenship opportunities, and various other benefits, he declined and once again receded into anonymity. His final confirmed act was a daring raid on an experimental Agnos facility, during which he stole a highly classified Highflame and No-Dragon cross-commissioned frame known as the Master of Hounds. We tried looking for details regarding this Heaven, but most of the information is heavily redacted. What we could decipher indicates that this is a Heaven that is primarily based in perception and offensively wields of The reason we collect information about Frederick Three-Eye is simple: he is an enigma, and we are Ori-Thaum. It is our business to know about everyone. Information is key, information is power, and the fact that so little is known about Frederick Three-Eye and his capabilities is, above all, unnerving.+ -Ori-Thaum Mirror [Redacted]s Threat Profile of Frederick Three-Eye 34-11 Master of Hounds (I) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Using Vator as a catalyst, Avo sought his Beloved and soon found himself pleased. The creatures he spawned with Vators aidthe beasts that were once the ghoulshad now experienced a new flowering. Hundreds of thousands of signatures littered the substance, dotting the expanse of the tapestry in reality like falling embers upon a canvas of blackness. They were flecks of light and love, spreading, growing, and multiplying with every passing second. As Avo reached deeper into the Greatling, he felt Chambers sprout his own bonds. Magenta branches tunneled through Vators body, gliding into his being, out from his Heaventhe Portraitand wove him closer to his many offspring. From across separate timelines, trespassing the barrier of liminal realities, the Beloved lifted their heads as they felt the presence of their creator descending. Held within this temporal realm, Vator was only too happy to serve as a channel to his children. Can you feel me, my wonders? Vator breathed, his voice almost euphoric. Chambers shuddered. Man, this guys really into this shit, he muttered under his breath. Avo didnt comment; he knew Vators peculiarities and understood that Chambers would continue, even if slightly unbalanced by the Greatlings behavior. Ah, what the fuck, Aedon. Dont kink-shame. Were fucked up arent we? Would Dannis do this? No. I just... gotta be hard for him. Even if I dont want to. If the flames could grin, they would have. The Beloved werent the only ones flowering. Chambers had come so far as well... Moments passed, and while Chambers focused on establishing connections between Vator and his Beloved, Avo extracted one of the unborn Sang males. Their body was a thingtwisted and damned to die. Yet by the power of a risen Heaven, a Heaven of Blood, blessed with biology, elevated once more with time, and further supported by a dragon, the plague that claimed so many young song males was to be denied. The hemorrhage within them roared and tried to tear their organs asunder, to exsanguinate them in an instant, but the Woundmother screamed; the Woundmother fought. Where the dragons remembered an illness that claimed so many and seated it within the males of the Sang clade for purpose or punishment, the Woundmothers domain was bloodand so her will reigned while the miracles flowed. They will live, master, the Woundmother said, her voice alight with purpose and interest. This plague within them, it is complicated. I tried to break it several times, but it reconstructs itself. It is like a structure that remembers its own shape. No matter how much you break it, it reforms. The heaven of blood didnt know just how much they inspired Avoa structure that remembered its own shape. This could be a new canon, something he would set to work on immediately. He created another instance of Kae and spun her up. Almost instantly, the Agnos began contemplating and constructing a new canon that he could use, something to replace memite within his Soulscape and beyond. All right, I got em synced tight, Chambers called, recapturing Avos attention. Now, a full web of connections was established, running between Vator and controlled by the Lovebringer. Avo found himself capable of traversing these bonds, his unseen flame gliding through Chambers, into Vator, and down through this place of parallel timeback to baseline reality, back to where the Beloved warred and spread. Avo glimpsed the world through their eyes then. He saw the battles they were fighting, felt the triggers they were pulling, the guns they bore. More than that though, he studied their forms. Their bodies were a mixed architecture, born of ghouls but infused with the mark of someone who had left a deep impression in AvoDraus. It was a merger of Highflames pride in the form of a fine Regular, and the Low Masters greatest folly, represented by the ghouls. These Beloved fought with far more control, focus, and deliberation than their predecessors. Gone was the feral urge to tear, torture, kill, bleed, and butcher. Now they attacked methodically, trying to overcome their adversaries through surgical operations, often coordinating with one another, yet sustaining that fearlessness and indifference toward death. Within their breasts, however, there was something elsea seed of love. They loved their enemy. They loved war. They loved every bit of pain inflicted upon them, and they loved inflicting pain. They reveled in holding their enemies as they died and in spreading themselves. Their infection was different. It was thaumaturgic. It wasnt just a plague through which they spread; rather, it emanated from every act of affection, every worry one held for anotherthe times a soldier cried out for their comrade, the moments a man did all he could to save his brother from bleeding out. This fed the Beloved, making their ichor ever more infectious, their breath spreading cells into the air, staining the world with their unnatural taint. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. And so it was that across 600 different districts and 14 separate Sovereignties, the operations of every major guild were blunted and stymied. Instead of being able to seize these parts of fallen Noloth, they were forced to hold in place, applying containment and purging protocols. Entire offensives ground to a miserable halt as infections needed to be contained, Lustaways needed to be adapted, and every inch of ground needed to be secured or cleansed. Tendrils of light carved through sections of the fallen dragons. This method of scalpelling was stolen from the paladins, while others were cleansed by falling tides and rolling flames. The unclaimed no-dragons used their own plagues to beat back the Beloved. Yet Vators finest work held strong. As long as there was love in the hearts of men, as long as there was someone to care, the Beloved continued to fester within infested flesh. The ghouls were relics of fallen technology twisted by ritual and retribution, while the Beloved had ascendeda phenomenon of unchained love. And because they were manifestations of unchained love, they were perfect recipients for what was to come. Wombs, Avo whispered to them. You will be wombs. Inheritors of the rash. Proper descendants against the guilds. Though they did not hear him directly, a feeling passed through each and every one of the Beloved. They let out sighs of relief; their eyes widened with euphoria and bliss as they realized they were blessedblessed by their first creator, by the one who empowered Vator to create something that could twist the very fabric of the patterns and infuse them with purpose. Slowly, Avo filtered through the Many Beloved, searching for that lucky one who would be the first to bear the Sang Unborn. There, he found a section of fallen Noloth, one just bordering Scale. The path between this section of dismembered dragon and the place where the Paladin Headquarters once stood was still blocked, but with a slight turn of the Deep Ones, Avo could slash a gouge into the substance to open a path. From there, he would implant the unborn in their body, a new bridge would form, joining the risen temporal realmnow rooted to Avos Soulscapeand baseline reality itself. Oh, oh, dead gods, Vator said, tears spilling down his cheeks. His face glistened with both glory and grief. I could have been doing this all along. I could have been creating childrenperfect, full children. Oh, the things you have that I never will. The flames within Avo turned as he regarded Vator . He understood the boy perhaps better than the boy understood himself, yet some of Avos templates declared this was heartbreakingto never truly know what it was like to love, to be loved. Others envied Vator, for he would never be hurt the way they were. It was funny how consciousness reacted. Every mind was of a pattern, a set of beliefs, but where was that universal truth? Nowhere. Nowhere at alland that was why minds were so delicious to cultivate, to learn from. So, Chambers said, we gonna put one of these kids inside these... new ghouls? Theyre called the Beloved. Vator responded with a hitched breath as the portrait hovered over him, observing what they had created. These creatures, the Portrait began, are not... they are not of a people. They have no families, no lines. Theyre just... Theyre just perfect, Vator finished. They are our family, he told the Portrait. They are our finest work, our art piece. I made them in a time of desperation, but now look at themlook at how they sprout and spring. But as Vator raved, gesticulating wildly and clawing at the bonds connecting him to his so-called offspring, the portrait flinched backunnerved by its users ravings and disturbed by the things it had created. How odd it was to see the heaven rendered mundane and normal compared to the madnessthe atypicalityof its user. Then a third mind entered the fray, expressing discontent regarding the design of the Beloved. [Why, in all the dead fucking gods, do they look like me?] Draus said. Her voice was thin, but her tone teetered on the verge of violence. Avo could feel her desire to rip and tear at Vator until he undid this mistake, until he pulled the aspect of the Regular out of these ascended ghouls. Avo, however, decided to use this opportunity. There were so few things that truly unnerved Jelene Draus, and he had to savor this moment. Think its an upgrade for youonce you enjoy life, have more desires, and just shoot, shoot, shoot; kill, kill, kill. [Yeah, youre one to fucking talk,] Draus sneered. [Before I met you, you were just a broken thing in a barge, couldnt even deal with a captain of a fucking waste crew. And then what? Then you were some sad sack I had to pull out of the gutters. These thingstheyre less than that. Dont piiss down my back and tell me its rain. You tell that piece of shit,] she continued, referring to Vator, [to pull my face off of theirs and turn them into the ugly sow-sons they were.] Avo grunted. I dont think I will. [Avo, Im gonna] Where are the cunts? Chambers asked. The question was so out of left field that everyone reeled in surpriseeven Avo. The thing about Chambers was that you might know what he was going to say in a few seconds, but then he actually said it, and it tended to surprise everyone. Excuse me? Vator said, blinking rapidly. You know, vaginas and fucking pussies, consang, Chambers continued, doing his best to infuse his voice with enthusiasm. Like, I was thinking, rightsince theyre all built out of lovewhy cant they just, you know... you know, Draus likes guns, Avos a ghoul, so why dont they just have, like, teeth down there that gobble people up and channel the biomass, and have, like, fire at peoplefetus missiles. It was then that Avo realized what Chambers was trying to do. He was trying to bond with Vator, to connect with him, and he was doing it in the only way he knew howby stealing bits from previous Soft-Master vicarities he had watched before. This one was from Night of the Forsaken Poon, a terrible miniseries universally panned except for one thing: It was based on an actual No-Dragon biovirus. However, that virus didnt involve someone launching dead fetuses from their vaginal organ; instead, it featured someone launching a parasite from their throata parasite that created more hive-like ports across a human body which then grew in a jagged nest of infections briars. Vator was at an absolute loss for words. He drew in a long, deep breath and... What is wrong with you? he demanded. What, Chambers stammered, reeling back, Im just trying to give you some ideas that might be helpful. Why dont they have a ppp Vator couldnt even finish the word. Why dont they have a vvagina? Why? Why would I give them a vagina? Why would they have such a rudimentary, primitive organa new organ that humans barely use now? Do you know the last time someone gave natural birth? I think someones giving natural birth right now, Chambers said, his bonds twitching. I think I can feel them. I dont care about the FATELESS, Vator snapped, balling his fists. He pointed a finger at Chambers, at the Lovebringers string-like body. You might as well tell me how many dogs are fornicating? Or if apes still shit in trees Do they? DEPENDS ON WHICH SPECIES YOU IMBECILE! Chambers struggled to master himself. You, you, you have no idea. What, what do you think this will do to the aesthetic? A slit? Is that what you want? A long slit on the bottom of my masterpiece? This perfect, pristine human architecture, musculature, fine-tunedand then a slit. Why wouldnt you give them such a thing? What is wrong with you? What are you thinking? Fuck! I dont know, cosang, Im just trying to help. Youyoure trying to sabotage me. Youre trying to make me break. You are a disturbing man, Aedon Chambersa sick, disturbing man with terrible taste. The nonexistent Bond between Chambers and Vator somehow grew weaker. Shit. Im sorry. I didnt realize you were that sensitive about this stuff. Vator drew in a deep breath and let it out. I forgive you. Now never offer me suggestions regarding my art again. Chambers hesitated for a moment. I mean. Imagine additional armor in the shape of ti Youre a ruiner You ruin things! I loathe you! Enough, Avo said. Amusing. But now its time for a test. Vator, prepare for delivery. Chambers, maintain Bond. Im going to go across. Impregnation underway, Chambers and Vator said at the same time. The latters eyes widened as the former laughed. A flickering, weak Bond manifested between the two, and Chambers barked a laugh. Got ya, bitch. Looks like were gonna be consangs now. A look of genuine disgust crossed over Vators face. That might be the worst thing anyone has ever said to me. So far. Gods. Chapter 34-12 Master of Hounds (II) Master of Hounds is a peculiar heaven, one that is built around the concept of perception. Perception, typically employed by seers to maintain a logistical or informational advantage for their cadreor even to fortify a vaulthad now been reimagined. Highflame sought something unique, an assassination Heaven that was both broad in scope and specialized enough to neutralize any threat with minimal risk to itself. Thus, something special was created. Drawing on the domains and cultures offered by Highflame and the No-Dragons, a special beast was constructedbound by the ancient mythologies of old. It was the Hound of Calamity, born in the yesteryear of Sang myth. Its singular capability was to hunt, serving a higher divine who fired arrows from within the sun and marked targets for its faithful hunting dog. Wherever these arrows struck, the hound would arrive, tearing into any threatwhether in a land consumed by flame, drowned by constant downpours, or lying in the depths of the fathomless sea. In this, the hound was a boundless entity, learning to mirror any environment with its own flesh. Meanwhile, the perception aspect of this heaven represented a recent innovation, a new application based on our modern understanding of the senses. Though it was represented by an oculus, its true nature lay in its signals, sounds, and the full spectrum of sensory inputs. If you could perceive it in any fashion, it would be able to intercept your later perceptionshijacking and locking onto your senses. This mechanism will then replace the sun-fired arrows as a more subtle means to induce the Hounds approach. If I must say so myself, this is a triumph of a designa subtle yet nearly uncounterable system with few paradoxes. Since everyone must interface with the world through their senses, it is nearly impossible to face this threat without compromising your own. One might even suspect that this Heaven was commissioned specifically to eliminate someone like Shotin Kazahara. After all, when contending with an adversary so all-encompassing, a broad and intricate approach is not just idealit is essential. -Agnos Iutch Kamari, Chief Thaumaturgist Behind Master of Hounds 34-12 Master of Hounds (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] And... here we go, Chambers chuckled. An orb of gold slithered between realms. An orb ferrying a premature infant. It accelerated along branches of magenta, passing from one domain of gold down into baseline reality. None could say where the branches of correspondence appeared, but what is known is that loves reach was boundless, and so from Vator to this specially chosen beloved, the journey didnt last long at all. Guiding this orb was a flamea fire formed of minds and power. Avo kept the Sang Unborn clutched tight to his Soulscape; he would not see one of his new bridges lost during transit. The small males were fragile, and they couldnt be risked. Carefully, Vator breathed, worried that his own creations might be affected, indifferent to the fates of the newborn. In a strange way, he was behaving quite like a father would; there was more Uthred in him than the former Authority assumed. Still, Avo had to take additional measures to ensure his newest project wouldnt be extracted from him. As such, he also infused in them failsafe miracles in the Unborn. He charged the fetus''s matter to detonate the moment it left his awareness, and used Ignorance to shroud its existence. More measures would be applied in a moment, but he needed to fully sheathe himself first. As he arrived within the Beloveds body, he began creating a new organ. At its core, the Beloveds were based on ghouls, and so they possessed few organs, their blood doing most of the work for them. This left ample space for newfound expression. Avo began rearranging their biology, forming a dome-shaped cocoon in the absence of their hearts. Inside, he created a foam-like layer meant to protect against concussive damage. Externally, he fashioned an endo-structure of latticed bones to hold the entire inner sack in place and lined each of the bones with reflective panels so that Draus could pull the Unborn across if there was a chance to save them. Finally, he shrouded the exterior with a second shella dense ceramite that would require concentrated fire to shatter. Are you sure thats enough? Chambers asked. That might handle a fle?chette or two but if anything heavier hits... Well, what if we make the Beloved a bit No! Vator cried. No more suggestions from you, ruiner. The Beloved are perfect, and I will not see you deform them in any fashion. Hey, half-strand, Im thinkin about the pre-juvs here. Oh, Vator said, blinking in surprise. Why? We have an ample supply. Chambers just stared, his Bonds furling around the Greatling momentarily. You know, Draus was telling me how your mom was kind of a sowbut there are a lot of different kinds of sows, you know. What you just said right now makes me have a guess what type she was. Now Vator frowned. Well, that was a needless insult, I simply stated a fact. You said we have reserves when Im talking about babies. Yes. Infants your friend is risking and using as a temporal bridge. Dont pretend Im truly amoral here. Thats different. How? I like Avo and hes a baby eater anyway. Youre a person, and I might be able to kick your ass. Ah. I suppose you cant take the gutter out of the FATELESS. Maybe not, but Im going to breast another one of your Beloveds if TOUCH THEM AND I WILL GIVE EVERYONE YOU LOVE SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION. Im the Godclad of Love, fucker. Give em whatever you want, but Im the sole master of they who busthere, have a firsthand experience. Vator tried to reply, but then he shuddered and spasmed. His eyes rolled, but he rapidly began modifying his own biology to dampen the effects. Why... isnt it... I told you. I am the sole master. And busting is more than just a thing of the balls. I know because girls can do it too. Avo sighed. Chambers. Please. Im connected to both of you. Focus. Right. Sorry consang. The Lovebringer released its miracle, and Avo created limbs of Soulfire to stop Vator from collapsing outright. Absurdly, the Bond between them grew stronger. YouI will not forgive this! Do you understand me, Aedon Chambers. Sure. Come find me when you want to bust again Chambers, Avo growled. Fine, fine. The Hidden Flame grunted. This was good for morale. And it also offered his templates useful information. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. As for the Beloved... This was merely a test run, and he was eager to proceed. With the Sang Unborn implanted, the babe let out a pitiful mew, and a golden radiance spread over the Beloved as Avo poured his consciousness into a new body. At once, his systems loaded and his cog-feet flickered on. He felt his hands and relished at the impossible strength of a Regular body merged with the endurance and awakened blood of a ghoul. Avo was an Overheaven now, but if he and his brothers were this powerful during the war... They still wouldnt have won. He knew that now. More than ever before. The Low Masters had no industry. No method of true logistics. But he would be a problem. The Beloved would have strained the Guilds to contain. That would have been something. And something was much, much more than dying meaninglessly before the blinding blossom of a Guilders fusion burner. His Beloved sheath was hiding behind an overturned aerobic in the sky above. In their hands was a Sang Hiver-riflesomething they used to put a few parasites through the skull of an unsuspecting Sanctian scouting detachment. Other Beloveds were in the area as well, hiding in the rubble, sniping at any who dared to make another push into this piece of fallen Noloth. The City Eternal might have never loved the Beloved, but there was still heritage here, and the enemy of Avos enemy was no ally at all. He wouldnt cede them the past, and neither would he share a future with them. This was not the dream. This was not the dream because human weakness, of human hearts, and human minds failing a task beyond human means. He didnt blame. He didnt rage. He understood. But that didnt mean he condoned. That didnt mean the world was simply going to be this way now. Screaming drones drifted through the air above, only to be cut low by whips of lashing lightning cast from the tips of distant ziggurats. Traumas impacted fast-moving vessels, shattering them outright in pulses of fracturing memory. Within the Substance, the realm of the mind was so close to matter that it no longer mattered if they were apart or not. With the area mostly cleared, he had his Beloved release a gust of Mimefog and make a dash for higher ground. A pocket of obfuscation spread, and suddenly he was moving, rushing to climb the remains of a battlement while distant gauss weapons fired. Zipping rounds splashed through the street and sent rubble darting across the environments. Guilder BVR weapons. They likely knew someone was moving thanks to their sensory suite, but his speed and the fog made him a hard target; his additional bio-armor settled the matter of shrapnel. He reached the top, and using his awareness over the patterns, Avo felt something else brush against his ontologysome Chronoframes were operating in the areaapproaching across time at speeds hyper-sonic speeds and trans-temporal vectors. As they drew near, he prepared to meet their bombardment. However, the Woundmother spoke inside him, No, Master, allow me. Where once the Woundmother had been purely an entity of matter and blood, it was now blessed with something more. Time itself had become matter for it, and what were Chronoframes but time-treated materials? A field of Sanguinity erupted from the beloveda shroud of red and gold misting out, spreading wide for kilometers. A hellstorm of munitions greeted Avos sudden miracle, but it did littlerounds were liquefied, beams were refracted, and more esoteric weapons were torn from this realm up into a vacant space within Avos temporal dimension. The Sang Unborn pulsed within the chest of the Beloved, serving as the greatest catalyst of all: An instrument to direct time itself. As Chronoframes on their bombing run approached, they jolted across time from past to present and prepared to deliver their sterilizing payloads. Yet they were seized along the way when they crossed through a film of red; tendrils of blood coiled out from the spreading Sanguinity and tunneled into their pilots. Rather than rending these chrono-constructs asunder, Avo seized themhis veins granting him access into the mind of the pilotand their very consciousnesses burst aflame. At once, four more templates cascaded into Avos Soulscape. Accompanying them were their frames: golden bodies constructed from time and biomechanical matter. It seemed that Sanctiansso deeply attuned to the nature of timecame with their augmentations intact. How fascinating. As they dropped, Akusandae circled their forms, slithering through the Chronoframes. Hmm. How the adversary has changed as well. Adversary? Avo asked. Cells. From the Builder War. Were agents designed to hunt us. To remove dragons. But they forgot their purpose. As forgot ours. As the rest of our people forgot we ever were. Avo realized then just how much was lost. The Sanctians were descendants of the Voiders? Or were they from a rival faction of Neo-Creationist? He cast a thought at the dragon, but Akusande could offer nothing in return. Too far away, Akusande lamented. That past is too far away. Back in the real, the Woundmother cawed with laughter, and the skies split asunder with crimson thunder. The way is clear. I have served you well, master. Be gloried by my greatness. You have served more than well, Avo replied. Now, I just need one more thing from you. Oh, and what is it? she asked. Make lightning of this Beloveds body. Prepare to transmute more of the others as well. Going to plant them inside a Deep One. Want to be quick. At once, crimson electricity coursed across the Beloveds body. At the same time, Avo began infusing more of the male Sang infants into their bodies, creating time anchors all across the Substance. These Beloved were infused with template updates from Zein and Naeko, marking them as Bridgebearers. This would give him another way to access to the Substancea means beyond any other power in existence. Within the very core of the abnormality, Avo called upon the EGI governing modules embedded in each Deep One. He shifted titans of entropy, twisting their nightmarish forms and guiding their Ruptures through the Substance. The colossal Fallen Heavens shifted ever-so-slightly, yet for beings as immense as the Deep Ones, slight was a term of relativity. A few hundred kilometers of the Substance was gored open, split cleanly as if an axe blow hewn deep into someones abdomen. It came apart in a burst of ethereal gossamer and surging Soulfire, but between the cracks was decay beyond description, for how could one fully describe a dying pattern? What was the shape of unreality? But where most minds would shatter before the sight of such horror, Avo watched, and Avo knew the empty. When the Ruptures finally finished spreading, he took a moment to chart a path for his many Beloved vessels. He marked waypoints in reality for the Woundmother to follow, and using mem-data derived from Chambers Lovenet, he created something loosely approximating a DeepNav of the space within the Substance. The Nethers conveniences would returnbut through him, by his power, and on his terms. [How very totalitarian of you,] Abrel muttered, half-mockingly. Of course, Avo said without any shame. Only my tyranny is honest. As is my offering. Will not lie about this. [Yeah,] the Instrument sighed, watching Beloved after Beloved zip into the air as bolts of lightningonly to twist and right their movement vectors as their bolts adjusting angles mid-movement. [Hey. Avo.] Hm. [If my fathers still alive...] You ask too little. Your cadre will be returned in time. Should I seize the Ladder. No point for them not to learn. Everyone should. Instead of gratefulness or admiration, Abrel was only tired. [You really think we couldnt do it, huh?] Achieve utopia? [Yeah.] Maybe one of you. For a time. But you are animals. You are frail. And you did what you could against the indifference of what is. You were not designed for perfection. You were designed to breed. You think this a failure. I think your arrival at this point an absurdity beyond measure. [We were supposed to be better. To be worthy.] And the minds never expected to outlive their former universe. We are all fools in the end. Finally, he finished constructing a route for his Scale-bound Beloved, and off they went, riding a crackling whip of redness, the lightning a thread and the sheath a needle diving into the Ruptures. Avo adjusted his position and speed at a rate that would paste even the most augmented golem-pilot. Such were the requirements when descending into the worst existential collapse Idheim has ever seen. A half-city beyond, even more Rendsinks were being deployed as layered demiplanes and quarantines parted the remnants of the city from further contamination. With timeor a single choice made by Avoit wouldnt be enough. Soon- Avo jolted.A blast of trauma shook his entire being. Every single template flickered out and back into existence while the Soulfire composing Avo sputtered. COG-CAP - 44% The Hidden Flame shivered. There was emptiness in his mind, there were pieces missing from his memory. What just happened? He was doing something in the Substance, he was trying to WARNING: HEAVEN OF MIND DETECT ERROR: [THAUMATURGIC ANOMALY DETECTED] What was this? Avo, the fucks going on? Chambers said. The Lovebringer was still reaching out too Chambers? Why are you connected to Vator? Why are you joined to thethe... Avo trailed off. Both Vator and Chambers looked at each other. I told you to? Yeah, Chambers replied. Yeah, you did. A warmind of the Forgotten has just been used, Ignorance said. We were intercepted. Someone hit one of our vessels with a distortion. Lost it. Should have gone off. Countermeasure should have worked. Didnt see an explosion. Draus doesnt remember losing track of the Beloved either. The Sang Unborn is losthas been stolen. Theres someone else in these Ruptures. Theyve been waiting for us. Chapter 34-13 Master of Hounds (III) +Ah. The illustrious Seer for hire. We meet at last.+ +Fuck off, Middler. Not looking for runs right now.+ +Middler? I am hardly such a thing. Indeed, I think we might of a similar path.+ +Not looking to join any crews either. Just want to finish my drink in peace.+ +Is that what you want? Or do you wish your grandfather dead? For what he did to your parents? Your poor murdered father? Your pitifully imprisoned mother? All for the sin of... love. What an ugly thing to be condemned for. Alas, I would have never let another dictate my fate. That was your parents failing. But in you, I see someone interested in making things better.+ +...Who the fuck are you?+ [Zein deactivates her holocoat] +Good to finally meet you in the flesh.+ +What in the... No. Are youyou some kind of crazed fan? Some vic-addler who thinks shes Thousandhand?+ +No, though I do appreciate the blessings offered by some other drugs. Now. Let us talk about your future, the impending murder of your grandfather, and what we might be able to do for each other.+ -Zein to Frederick Three-Eye, Circa 93 P.F. 34-13 Master of Hounds (III) [Avo, The Ashbringer] Why are you being impatient? The Ashbringer asked this question of the Infacer while they waited amidst a stable patch in the Ruptures. It took them quite some time to close in on the Deep Ones, using warminds of Ignorance to keep themselves from detection. More than just the warminds, the Ashbringer exploited Hysteria as well, magnifying other sources of mental noise to hopefully draw away his original selfs focus. A journey that usually took the span of minutes became hours. Hours of maneuvering, stopping, waiting, and watching. Hours of carefully studying the tapestry, trying to understand if their next step was a trap or an actual stretch of stability. They had to do this, because this was a one-opportunity ambush. Exploiting the Ashbringers memetic symmetry to the Hidden Flame, a special memetic contagion was prepared by the pathborn and the Infacer to inflict a metaphysical cancer upon the Soulscape itself. PRIMING DREAMROT.EXECUTION.MEM-SYMMETRIC CONTAGION But Ashbringer knew better than to underestimate himself. Being a fork of Avo, he had a guess as to the Hidden Flames capabilities, and knew Ignorance to be a hard Definement to evade. That, and the Infacer was a fool to lose Zein. Now, there was no telling what kind of chronology the Hidden Flame was capable of. All this resulted in a bit of a shaken EGI. Recent circumstances rattled the mind more than they cared to admitand worse still was how human they were acting in recent memory. Like they were in a hurry to get something done. All these things pointed to something being hidden. Something the Infacer didnt want the Ashbringer to know either. Which was fascinating considering the Ashbringer now controlled every Seraph and major elite among what remained of the true Saintists. Deduction: they were trying to mask a truth from Veyliss awareness as well. Understandable, but it only made the Ashbringer more curious. {Can you fault me for not feeling my best among these corpses,} the Infacer replied sharply. {They were molded from the ones I tried to protect before. Some of them might even be something like me. That, and we need to be in position to snatch that bastard Three-Eye when he returns.} The Infacer was speaking of the Deep Ones. There was old history here between the rival mind, but there was something more than this. The Infacer wasnt one to rattle easily. Not even the matter of Three-Eyes accelerated arrival in a few more minutes should shake the Neo-Creationist mind. For eons they were at war, saw death and destruction on a scale that would shatter a moral mind a trillion times over. There had to be more than just this. Be honest with me, Avo grunted. Waste of time otherwise. Chose me now for a reason. Chose me because you wanted something reliable to handle the Hidden Flame. But also someone you can talk to. Someone you can accept as kindred. The EGI laughed softly in the back of the Ashbringers mind. They were barely more than a sliver of golden fire among the fractures that marred realitys face. {Please. I am not so sentimental.} Not about sentiment. More frustration. All this effort. So many years. So close to the end. Yet in such peril. All because of me. Because Highflames remnants didnt listen. Because Veylis was more of a fool than you hoped. Because all this has to be for something {Avo, please, the psychoanalysis will work on others, but spare me the long speeches. I swear, I thought you were supposed to be the more bestial one. For a moment, I thought I brought Jaus on an excursion again.} The Ashbringer laughed. Am bestial. I am what Veylis imagined me to be. But I still have the Conflagration. I am still a post-intellect. An assimilator. I am just molded from the conditions of her respect. And fear. The hunger burns in me. Always burns. So I need to consume. But aside from this... You finally chose well. {Wow. Incredible. All those words, only to end up wrapping your metaphorical fangs around your nonexistent testicles. Truly, it is no wonder why you imagine yourself to be a he. Such ego.} Youre one to talk. We are here because of you. You lost Zein. Lost more than just Zein. {You took Zein,} the Infacer said with a sigh. However, there was little offense in their tone. {Perhaps there was a slight underestimation on my part. But that is all. You were a good foe. You remind me of better times. Better wars. {Of course, that is why I am the one who is mocking you instead of the other way around.} But am I wrong? The Ruptures shifted suddenly, violently. The Ashbringer moved, a golden flame diving between shifting branches of entropybarely avoiding a massive column of info-death gliding just nearby. The Deep Ones were moving. The Ashbringer laughed. Hes doing something. Sending something back. Told you. Patience. {Yes, yes. Now, can you tell what your original is doing?} The Ashbringer observed the tapestry and tried to read the patterns. Things werent entirely clear, but depending on what strings were plucked or altered, a guess could be formed. Simulations could be run. However, the most obvious change were the movements performed by the Deep Ones. Each of them were sunken into reality, and even the slightest pivot This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. Wait, the Ashbringer said. You said there were four. Four Deep Ones. {Correct. Why?} I can only detect three on the tapestry. A long moment of silence followed. {Hm. Fuck. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. He is extracting them. Moving them from one place to another? Why? For what reason? Why would you do such a thing.} Many guesses, Avo said, twisting between another two crashing branches of Rend. But dont wish to assume. He might be trading them. Or trying to build something new. Know he is likely buried within their modules. Need to hit them with a distortion. Might need to accelerate time table now. {No. Slow down. Watch. I would prefer knowledge over seizing one of the Deep Ones. Every time you achieve a great victory, it is because I have no idea what you are doing. He} WARNING: TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED And then the second surprise followed. A construct that twisted and warped time itself entered Avos awareness. Time. Not chronology or some lesser form of metaphysical expression. Time. Past, present, and future. For a moment, the Ashbringer was at a loss for words. Then the entity came fully into his senses, and the pathborn chuffed. At first, it was a bolt of lightning dashing at odd angles. A sense of familiarity roused within the Ashbringer as he prepared himself to face his first Heaven. The Woundmother. This either meant the Hidden Flame had rediscovered a lost Heaven, or rebuilt what was taken through collecting ontologics. Then, as the lightning peeled away, the true shape of the intruder was revealedand of all the things the Ashbringer expected, this wasnt one of them. A ghoul? the Ashbringer said, reeling slightly with disbelief. No. Only partially... Something more. Bits of Regular inside them. Looks like... like Draus? {What?} the Infacer said. The Infacer peered through the Ashbringers mind and was equally flabbergasted. From within this... nu-ghoul emanated a radiance that could only be described as a cycle of time pouring out from the present to... somewhere else entirely. {Where are those miracles flowing?} ...Not sure. Not certain at all. Cant follow it in the tapestry. Isnt even actually emitting any Rend. {That is...} A beat followed. {There is a dragon in that creature. A dragon or another natural temporal entity.} No. Cant be. Dragons are chronology. Patterns are close but not the same. {Time is not a functional pattern, Avo,} the Infacer said. A distortion followed their words. Outright denial from a being that has seen so much was a powerful thing. {At least it should not be... The past is lost...} As the entity came closer, the Ashbringer considered his options. This wasnt bait. It couldnt be. If his original self knew he was present, he would have used the Deep Ones to eliminate him directly. He knew better than to underestimate the Infacer. So, what was this? What was the Hidden Flame trying to do here? Even with over a billion ghosts and the Infacers full processing power, the Ashbringer didnt have a good assumption to follow. Simulations for weapons, schemes, and other matters played within his consciousness, but there major context missing right now. Why was a Deep One missing? Why was an anomaly of time itself present? We need to secure it, the Ashbringer declared. {No. Our mission is to claim a Deep OneC} Could be to our advantage. I dont think this is a trap. The temporal entity is approaching one of the Deep Ones. Trinary Melody... Could be something used to affect Three-Eye as well. Cannot be passive. We must force a mistake soon. See how much this is worth to the Hidden Flame. {So what are you suggesting?} Deploy warminds of Ignorance. And then... As much as the Ashbringer didnt think this was a trap, he still had no urge to get closer. Inside, the beast shuffled and lashed, outraged that it wouldnt get a taste of this morsel. The Ashbringer bit back a growl of annoyance. No. Not this one. We will drink ourselves in later. Learn what becomes of a copy when it eats the original. But not this. Cant understand. Learned enough about hubris. Deploy Draus. Risk the mass spike. Use the Deliverer. Have her destroy the construct. {Destroy? Not capture?} We dont know what it is. Ignorance is not our ally in this battle. We have power. But what we dont know will be fatal. The Infacer considered the Ashbringers words for a moment and gave a peal of approval. {Fine. That can be arranged. You know this might risk} Another instance of her can be drawn out from the paths. She is expendable. I am expendable. Bring her forth. I will burn her and proceed. And call a lesser version of me to chart the remaining Ruptures. Go for the Trinary Melody and deploy Kae. I will see to the Hidden Flames incapacitation. Use the Deep One to {Yes. Contain, capture, and extract Three-Eye. Please. You do not need to go over every detail with me like I am a child.} Just worried you might lose another critical template to him. {Avo.} Hm. {I just want to say... If I do not get the chance with this version of you... Fuck you.} The Ashbringer laughed. Without any further hesitation, the pathborn launched two war minds of Ignorance. They resembled loops of stringsequences that bundled and twisted around each other, revealing gaps in between. Symbology mattered a lot when it came to metaphysics, as it did with matters of the mind. The gaps were represented by missing substance, things that should have been known but werent. Ignorance, in a word. They detonated, spreading outward and clawing across unfathomable distances. As the strings burrowed under the flesh of reality, everyone lost track of their thoughts. In the same instant, a wound opened in existence, and out from the cleft of fire and ruin came a humanoid figure composed of corpses, debris, and spilling ash. The Ashbringer ignited cracks and leaks that outlined the Deliverers body, and once more, Avo and Draus were a team again. One way trip, huh? Draus asked. For both of us. Looks like youre going to get your wish. The Ashbringer drew himself deeper into her being. He didnt intend to survive this. There were more than enough thaums to constitute another iteration of him. Yeah. And then some. A feeling of... deep satisfaction came from Draus. Or this echo of her. It mattered little to the Ashbringer. He was a being dead on arrival. Untrue in every respect, merely a sophisticated construct born at Veyliss hands. Dont reckon things turned out the way we want. But thats the way things go sometimes. Least the companys okay. Okay? Fuck you. Thats the best youre getting. Want tears or ass kissing? Shouldve called up Chambers. No. Need a good gun. Steady hand. Iron will. Alright. Lets ride this bullet to the end. The Deliverer dragged a bladed limb across the surface of existence and carved a path open. Two points of destruction were joined, and the Deliverer stepped through them, as if they were the same point in space. As the warminds began to wind down, Draus burst out from another point in space, intercepting the oncoming anomaly. A firing trajectory loaded flickering, green, then orange... orange, and finally red. A lane connected her gun-head with the oncoming target. Locked. The Ashbringer readied himself for the counterattack to come. The Deliverer needed to be destroyed. He needed to prey on his original selfs confidence for what came after. Only then would he strike back. Fire. Draus didnt hesitate. Not even when it sealed her fate. A massive spike of decay and destruction left a scar across reality. Between branching veins of entropy, the shot sailed, crossing kilometers by the millisecond. So close, the Ashbringer sensed his other selffelt a Conflagration so similar to his own, but unchained by the Veyliss path. And the Ashbringer envied. And the Ashbringer loathed. And the Ashbringer hungered. The Deliverers bulleta thing of pure destruction, pure decayimpacted the anomaly. The temporal entity shuddered for a moment, and Avo felt its full promisethe power it contained. He felt it reach past, present, and future; it extended forward into the future, rooted to the present, and for a momentjust a momenthis disbelief grew as he sensed it dig into the past. Then the entropic bullet won. Destruction claimed the body. The temporal entity shattered into motes of ash, soot, and rotting flesh. A few seconds later, Avo glimpsed what hid at the core of the being. It was a child. No, not even a childa Sang infant. Its blood was coiled with time itself, the patterns interweaving biology and historytime awakened. The Ashbringers mind reeled. The paths composing him quivered for a moment, but he steadied himself. Crimson lightning flashed in the distance, and through an immense wound, he sensed a building violence dancing across the patterns. Our real selves are comin, the Deliverer said. So they are, the Ashbringer answered. Make them struggle. Force him to close. You know me. Chapter 34-14 Master of Hounds (IV) +Yeah. I heard of Three-Eye. Hells, most people in this line of work have. But you hear about him in the same way you hear about the supposed hidden Guilder uniparty puppeted by Old Noloth within the Deep Nether. This consangs a fucking myth in the sense of we tell stories about him, but no one really knows anything concrete.+ +So, you claim to have no real information. None at all. I find that... depressing considering a woman of your connections and stature+ +How old are you?+ Twenty? Eighteen?+ +I dont see how that+ +Youre giving speeches I heard beforeright out of the Ori-Thaum manual. You gotta be young. Gotta be. It feels like you guys keep making the same mistakes, but I think someone among your Mirrors just likes training the recruits this way. No, I dont know much about this supposed Three-Eye. But guess what? I dont know lots about a lot of people. Thats the entire point in this line of work. What I do know usually gets nulled by a jack after a run is over because Im not risking shit pop on a thoughtscan.+ +I see. What do you remember+ +Juv, I am going to do you a favor: the answer to any question connected to Three-Eye is no. You can tell because of three things. The first is the fact that Im still alive, so if hes secret Guild VIP, hes not important. The second is the fact that I dont remember him, so if hes also a Squire, then hes a better pro than I was anD decided to vanish back into the shadowssomething I should have done to escape this conversation. The third thing is that he might be one of yours. I mean, who else can hide information from the Silvers? And who else ends up shooting at their own Colors a bunch? Lets not bullshit ourselves here, you might be in the middle of another Clan spat.+ +...Very well. I will+ +Listen, I know who you are, and Ive been in this game long enough. If you try jacking any further into my mind youre probably going to trip an essential memory and both of us will end up nulled.+ +H-how did you+ +So if its alright with you, Im going to accept your imps, and youre going to accept that this is a dead lead. I warned you about pulling this shit, but you didnt listen. Now you learn. Or we die. Up to you, consang.+ -Exchange between Quail Tavers and Ori-Thaum Glaive [NotHere] (Recorded by White-Rab) 34-14 Master of Hounds (IV) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] They are among the Deep Ones. They are hiding within the Rupture. Two statements from Ignorance drove Avo into overdrive. He wasnt just facing the Infacer right nowthe Dyad was involved too. They had to be. For all the gifts and knowledge the ensouled EGI possessed, they couldnt traverse the Sunderwilds like Avo. No one could. Which meant that he was likely facing a more stabilized version of himself, or the Dyad was feeding information directly over to the Infacer now. Both represented critical threats he couldnt ignore. He expected to have more time, hoped that Highflame would take a while for the Infacer to digest and fully occupy. But hopes were vain things to have in this world, and even the Deep Ones proved a momentary impediment. A thousand bolts of crimson lightning lashed out from all the Beloved he seized. The Woundmothers power spread as pulses of all-consuming blood crawled across the land, drinking in matter and alchemizing them into ammunition. Guilder forces, structures, platforms, and more were dissolved into a faint red mist, only to be reconsolidated a moment thereafter. Thereafter, all that mass was infused into a raging storm as a new eldritch city emerged from the red mist like a mirage. The Woundmothers highest peak loomed first. Structures molded from veins flecked with gold flared with sky-splitting power. More lightning was unleashed from its slashing limbs, striking across the span of kilometers in a thousandthen ten thousand whips. This was only the beginning. As the leaping bolts speared through the gored opening Avo left in the Substance, he transmuted them back to solid matter. The weight of a few thousand small mountains crashed into the vines of entropy at impossible speeds. The air combusted. Firestorms enveloped the landscape. With a thought, Avo turned the mountains fissileand nuclear blasts joined the firestorms. Then the second barrage of hidden attacks followed. He stole Rendsinks from captured golemsredesigned their chassis with Amni-tech. The new structure caging the Rendsinks were now imperceptible to the mind; one would forget them as fast as they saw them. These Rendbombs were delivered with the help of the Sage. A misted palm formed over them: A palm that sported a baleful eye at its center. Now even if his adversary had a warmind or something that could affect thought, they would see nothing, for their will came second to Naekos. This all came together in a brutal opening bombardment. In the span of a second, the gap between the district and the place where Scale used to be turned white. The tapestry spasmed. The air burned as every last breath of oxygen within five hundred kilometers was spent to feed a growing heat. The blast grew. Large and fast enough to swallow three whole Sovereignties. Rendbombs detonated within the firestorm, the true attack masked by the first. New Ruptures flayed entire sections of reality, allowing entropy to reign. They sprawled over existence like a growing infection, and their limbs intersected with parts from the Deep Ones were Domain symmetry was possible. What the hells was that? Chambers asked, stunned at Avos sudden and near instant reprisal. The Hidden Flame didnt bother lying to his cadre. Suppression. Cadre. Hear me. Enemy contact detected. Thing the Dyad might be operational. Or another version of me. Draus. Shotin. Need you now. Chambers. Keep Bonds on standby but keep working with Vator. Focus on seeding the Beloved. Rely on Kae for support. But Chambers began when suddenly, another version of him flickered into existence right beside him. The other Chambers wasnt manifested in his guise as the Lovebringer, but as the man he was. [Dont worry, real me. Ill look after our ghoul.] The template grinned at the original, and the Chambers hesitated. Right. Im gonna hold your ass to that. Stay hard. He offered a tendril to bump. [Steelhard!] The template bumped him. From the Woundmother spawned a swarm thereafter. Bioforms, automated constructs, and other blood-born abominations. They rushed toward the oncoming blastsdove through tides of force and heat with ease as thin lattices of red formed between them. The Heaven of Blood was constructing a perimeter around the gap. They were trying to make sure no one was going to escape quarantine and retaliate. The ethereal power from the Forgotten glided through each string and sinew that lined this new construct. It was as if a net was forming between the spreading Ruptures and dimming explosions. A surveillance grid has been created, the Woundmother said. Nothing will escape my notice now. Avo wasnt so sure. Something escaped his notice, after all, and he was by far the more perceptive between the two of them. If the enemy was beyond his notice, he couldnt fault any failure on the part of the Woundmother. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Avo? Whats happening? Draus called as she pushed through a mound of debris. Her right arm was lodged clean through Shotins chest, and between her metallic fingers did his biomodded heart still beat, each of his veins clinging to his mangled body like cords of carbon fiber. He spat blood and curses at her face, still full of vigor, still not finished with the fight. Draus, for her part, was missing both her eyes and had a large spike rammed through one of her ears. Strange grayish fluided mixed with the steady pool of red running down her neck. Hey, Kazahara, knock it the fuck off. We got ourselves a real fight. It took Shotin a few seconds longer to calm down. In that time, the Soulscape shifted around them, flames reverting the damage they inflicted upon each other, while ghosts slithered through their Metaminds, updating them with everything they had to know. Holy shit, Shotin muttered, stumbling. His mind reeled as he struggled to process everything Avo just revealed to him. You did all that shit while we were fighting? Youre... youre literally creating temporal insertion points using maleborn Sang? What the fuck? A bitter laugh left Shotin as a gasp. And I thought I was going to kick your ass. Dont despair. You would have died. But you would have tried. Yeah, like that matters. Only to yourself. And that might be the only thing that holds true weight when it comes to a human mind. The Seeker feel quiet as he ruminated about that. So, whats the sitrep? Draus asked. The Regular was all-business unlike her counterpart. Already, she was surveying the scene through Avos perception. He constructed an entire battlespace for her. A full simulation of the conflict zone sprang up in a miniaturized representation. She watched as a nest of ever-expanding red emerged in the aftermath of the blast. Ruptures ran through gaps left by the nest while pulsing fields of Sangunitity created sectors of control for Avo. Vectors highlighting Guilder assets appeared and then winked out in the same instant. In the corner of her vision, a counter for matter gained and spent rose and fell while a thaumic counter remained at sub-zero percentages. The Regulars eyes narrowed. She was focused on the battle, but found herself wondering if the nigh impossible Rend efficiency was a glitch. No, Avo answered. Just a thing that comes with being able to share my Rend. We are all effectively a single unit. My Soulscape is bound to you. Your cycles are tied to me. We are a Symmetry in mind and ontology. Just like I told Shotin earlier. Right. Will it be that way if you get dropped somehow? A good question. Something Avo considered. A single point of failure was a major risksomething he had prepared against. No. The Ameni-Tec implants in your exo-cortexes allow localized pieces of me to run. There are nodes of me already uploaded to your exos. Essential templates as well. My destabilization or true death might affect Rend efficiency. Wont be a critical failure. You can connect to a Rendsink or each other. Going to apply some a Sang biomod to all of you so you can directly access Rendsinks in our temporal dimension as well. Yeah. Like an Omnipresent Operating Base. Hm. Good title for it. But its more than just a facility. Shotin loaded next to her in the Soulscape and took in the battlespace simulation as well. Fuck. Thats a lot of moving parts. Got any idea where the hits will be coming from? Draus asked. The Seeker huffed and shrugged. Could be from any and all angles. If were running up against a rival copy of Avowait, whats the condition of the Deep Ones? Moved one over into the void. Three left. Accessed their minds. Know the enemy is hiding in the Ruptures. Havent located them yet. But will soon. You sure about that? Shotin asked. Yes. Ignorance is not their ally. The Seeker muttered something under his breath, commenting on how his life was turning into a series of nonsense sounding statements that somehow become true when the worlds most special ghoul invoked them. Alright. And they know that you have this... Ignorance miracle? Yes. Fuck. If theyre still there and not gone, I think were about to get hit in multiple places all that the same time. This isnt an ambush anymore, its probably about to become an offensive. Prepared to get floodedtheyre going to try to drown you with threat vectors. What do you Shotins words proved true a second later as Avo felt something ripple across the tapestry. The pattern of destruction wove and cleaved through several others. Space, matter, force, and more shuddered as something trespassed between two points of damage. A new signature suddenly manifested in Avos battlespace, appearing someplace deep within Deep Ones containment area to a point along this section of the fallen city eternal. A jagged, rusted shape burst out from the fabric of space itself. It spawned free over a mountain of rubble, and nearby, downed aeros, burning golems, and mangled corpses become the anchor for its arrival. It moved fast and struck hard, launching a salvo of hissing missiles inflused with rot and decay, bombarding all it could see. In seconds, Avo Metamind formed a target profile. PATHBORN DETECTED MEM-DATA FROM PRIOR ENGAGEMENT DETECTED LOADING ALL RELEVANT INFORMATION ON ENEMY TARGET [DELIVERER] Great, Draus said, clenching her jaw. Been waiting for this. But her thrill plummeted just as fast as it climbed. But why the fuck is she coming right at us? No sense in this. True to her words, the Deliverer was fighting more like a terrorist than a soldier. Its attacks were indiscriminate, striking at anything and everything that resembled a stable structure or a moving entity. Almost like Ignore her, Draus said with a snort. Shes luring fire. Youre certain? Within the temporal dimension, Avo curved the progression from past to present as the scene before them slowed. Though the supposed present for baseline reality continued to progress second by second, the realm grown from the bodies of the Sang and held up by Avos divinity took a longer route to reconvene. He spent a good few minutes observing the Deliverer, running simulations for different possibilities. In each scenario, the Deliverer faced true death in short order if she didnt retreat. Draus was right. And that meant this was deliberate. They were trying to lure him out. Which pointed to another one of the Infacers plots. Better not play into their hands... Avo muttered. Just then, another warning sounded through his Soulscape. WARNING: SOUL DETECTED ->A DEEPNESS BEYOND The Infacer flickered into existence near one of Avos remaining Deep Onesthe Trinary Melody. The Hidden Flame responded without hesitation. He shifted the Ruptures, trying the cleave the EGI from existence. With every movement, more of exist tore and bleed, chaos and collapse consuming the world, yet despite all he tried, the Infacer continued to evade. He must have a version of me with him. He must. Avo chuffed slightly. Annoying. [Finally. You know what it is like, trying to kill you,] Zein said. Through the Trinary Melody, Avo spotted a glint of gold. A trailing flame glided between places, moving faster than Avo could continuously perceive. Pulses of false vacuum let the rival Conflagration move from place to place nigh instantly. [Give me unto the Guard Captain,] Zein said. [You have a favored hound. Time you release her leash, and let us go hunting. The Deep Ones are a calamity, but when hunting a plague, you need precision. A calculated antibiotic.] She was right. But Avo still felt like he was missing something lingering just around the corner. WARNING: CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMALY DETECTED A new point in reality vibrated as the barrier from past to present thinned. A building mass was leaking throughThree-Eye was set to arrive soon as well. And not far from the Trinary Melody at all. Avo cast a thought of frustration at Zein. [What? I was planning to use him as a shield. You must still wish to preserve your fathers node, no?] Hate you. The old sow had the audacity to laugh. Suddenly, a pulse of something burst out from the golden flame the Infacer was piloting. It shifted from place to place, and though Avo tried to angle his many Ruptures, it moved as if prescient, knowing where each limb was going to be. Seconds later, it splashed against the stable remnants of the Trinary Melodys governance module. The bits of Avos consciousness lingering within the Deep Ones mind felt a trickle pass into him. This wasnt a distortion or a trauma. His wards were A new warning flashed into his mind, and to his disbelief, a patch of his Soulscape began to wither as memories began to collapse. WARNING: UNIDENTIFIED MEM-CON DETECTED WARNING: NECROJACKING ATTEMPT IN PROGRESS Chapter 34-15 Master of Hounds (V) +I have a proposition for you.+ +Oh, good. Another one of these conversations. What do you want with me, priest? You got professional problems or complaints? Talk to Zein+ +I want to talk about you. And the Stillborn. I wish to make you an offer.+ +Listen, I dont+ [TRANSFERRING AUTO-SEANCE SEQUENCE] +What the fuck is this?+ +A connection. To your grandfathers mind. He is waiting for you.+ +...+ +This is no trap. I will have him delivered to a place of your choosing, if that is your wish. This will be given freely, but the location and the mending of your mothers mind+ +What do you want?+ +For you to help me. There is something I need you to carry. And something else I need you to do...+ -Exchange Between Defiance and Frederick Three-Eye 34-15 Master of Hounds (V) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] WARNING: HOSTILECSY-YSSY Embers sputtered from Avos Soulscape. Flames that once constituted the fires of his soul flickered and spasmed, as if uncertain which way to dance. There was something wrong here. There was someone else here. For the first time in many months, Avo faced an enemy that struck not through matter or force or any other domain of thaumaturgy. Instead, they engaged him directly where he was strongestwithin his own mind. His surprise was only surpassed by his growing anxiety as he felt a strange influence creep deeper into him. A tinge of his Metamind glitched; it tried to boot several times but failed to load completely. S-SHOSTL-SYMMETRY - 99.999999% There was something else inside him. It felt as if something with his bones was growing within his structure. It wasnt trying to hatch inside him. It wasnt trying to usurp him. No, it was trying to match him perfectly, sequence to sequence, and so far, it was doing an impossibly good job. Avo, The Hidden Flame, the Burning Dreamer, was getting Necrojacked, and by this point, there was only one other entity in existence that could manage that. Himself. Avo!, Draus cried, but he ejected herjust as he had ejected every other member of his cadre. He couldnt risk them getting infected now, either. He sent them back to his temporal dimension, the Omnipresent Operating Base christened by Draus. Theyd be fine there, and frankly, now was as good a time as any to test his amnesia tech. The implant should let them run localized sessions of his Soulscape, and he left nodes of himself and other essential templates for them to use. They would be fine. He hoped. But there was still another he couldnt remove. A Bond still tethered him to Chambersa Bond he couldnt make the Lovebringer relinquish. Chambers let go. Fuck no, Chambers replied, his voice conveying a strength that wasnt there before, and somehow, through that declaration alone, the bond between them grew even stronger. For once, Avo was at an absolute loss as to what to do with Chambers. He couldnt force him. He didnt want to reach into the mans mind to twist their consciousness for fear of infecting them. And Avo couldnt devote that much energy to worrying about his comrades anymore. Something was trying to infect him. Something was already infiltrating the Trinary Melodys governance module. Faintly, the EGIstill dissolving within himresponded, {They have been planning this. For every entity, there is an anathema. For every action and reaction, even something as ever-changing as youone who is alikecan often predict or change into your worst enem-w-yeye...} Infacer! Avo called out. He scrambled his templates and used every bit of his cognitive capacity to isolate the parts of him that were compromised. Right now, he was guessing, but his considerable consciousness was being fully utilized to identify which points were intruded upon and which remained his own. Infacer? he repeated, crawling and tying his scattered memories together. More of his recollections began to distort. Ash started raining down, spilling through the mem-data and leaking from his ghosts. He wasnt sure what kind of mem-com he was infected with, but even as he altered his own structurecycling through his many templates and re-sequencing his mindhe realized one thing: whoever was inside him could mimic him perfectly. Veylis pathborn must have matched him to a fine detail. And that was the thing with the High Seraph For every single person she treated like Chambers, making him less than who he was, there was another she rewarded as worthyand when she did, she pursued their recreation in the finest detail. Avo didnt face a lesser replica; he faced something so close to himself that, in every functional capacity, beyond different choices and different experiences, they might as well have been the same person. He sends his regards, a voice echoed in the back of his mind. But he isnt here. Tell me... what becomes of the original... if a spawn consumes them? And from a place within himself, symmetrical but foreign, Avo felt a hunger he scattered using his mindan ancient urge leftover from the time he was merely a ghoul. A second later, it was goneand then a massive blast erupted through Avos sequences. An entire portion of the being was wiped clean. It was like the necro equivalent of a warhead detonating inside a mundane structure. Avo cried out a note of genuine pain and loss as a good portion of himself dissolved into nothingness. He hadnt been hit by trauma that hard in ageseven though he had delivered blows like this before, capable of nullifying entire districts. The Definement of Hysteria... His enemy had it. His enemy was using it against him. WARNING: CRITICAL TRAUMA DAMAGE INFLICTED COG CAP - [78%] The governance module connected to the Trinary Melody began to malfunction as well, and a message from an unknown ansible followed. {Sorry, Avo,} the Infacer said, {but I cannot risk you getting in the way of things, and I cannot have you staying in possession of these toysIm sure you understand.} Avo tried to command his Trinary Melody to strike his enemy down using the fallen titan, but it spasmed. Rival commands issued from within his consciousness flooded into the governance module, and like all things that suffer a paradox, it malfunctioned. Its ruptures flayed out everywhere, expanding in all directions. Whipping tendrils traced wounds along the surface of reality. The tapestry flayed and broke. Patterns ceased to be. Across the vaulted expanse, new wounds were leftkilometer-length gouges carving through countless sovereignties and the tiers domains. Avo didnt know how many perished at that moment, but the casualties must have been immense. The Beak Ones disorder and chaotic movements lashed the crown of the city, and it was all Avo could do to keep it calm and steady. Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! He shifted his focus, returning swiftly to his internal environment. He began running a new simulation: What would it be like to jack against himself? How would he bring himself down? He applied that scenario to his own consciousness and, like a layered entity, started playing warspredicting his enemys next movements. His foe might have possessed Hysteria, but he, Avo, possessed ignorance. And so they struck at each othera hidden dagger against a falling hammer. Instead of waiting for his enemy to strike again, Avo began flaying parts of himself away with distortions. Will find you. Will remove you. Know this. A beat followed. More of his sequences shattered. Entire memoriesand the cityscapes and districts connected to them collapsed into nothingness. Spreading ash and debris carried an echoed retort. Maybe. Not fast enough. Not enough to let you keep the Deep Ones. Not enough for you to save fathers node. Or Three-Eye. *** [Draus, Field Marshall of the Coming Flame] Draus was no longer within Avos Soulscape. The Conflagration were nowhere to be seen. Instead, she found herself surrounded by discrete, blood-created constructs. Rows of haemokinetic structurers stood tall, serried bulwarks overshadowing a distant Sang cityscape. Gasps sounded near Draus. She found herself standing within a bazaar of some kind. Old Noloth by the look of it. Here, she saw the localsthe former elites of the City Eternalscatter around her, their eyes wide with shock and surprise. At the same time, the Woundmother extended a tendril, massive structures of crimson veins twisted and searching, as if it, too, had been cast out. Master? the Woundmother cried, its voice trembling with confusion. Dont think hes here no more, Draus muttered. For a moment, god and Regular paused, but then, a flash of light sparked at the base of Draus neck, and she got an unexpected response. Still here, Avo said. Enough of me is. Can... still guide... Avo? Draus said. Suddenly, her cog-feed pulsed, and new options loaded into her Metamind. Not the original, not the one you were talking aboutbut Ive been backed up. AMNESI-TECH ONLINE INITIALIZE RESERVE SOULSCAPE ACCESSING TEMPLATES CREATING MIND FORTRESS Her halo flashed as a pillar of flame expanded from its edges. The Conflagration splashed over, painting reality around her as Draus took a step back. Her startlement only grew as she found her mind auto-syncing with other members of the cadre. A pathway of fire extended out from her, and she felt herself sudden enter a deep dive as her body collapsed in the Omnipresent Operating Base. As a new mind fortress formed, she felt her ego and ontology connect with another individual... one that was cast out from Avos Soulscape alongside her. LINKING TO [SHOTIN KAZAHARA] The Seeker loaded into place right next to her. He looked frazzled. His suit jacket was barely clinging to his bare torso. It looked like he fell over at some point. The fuck? Shotin looked at her, his expression resembling a Joyfiend sobering up in the middle of traffic. The hells just happened. Draus shook her head. Fucked if I know. I think Avo just got jackedthrew us out before we could be compromised, too. Fuck. All right. So what do we do now? Draus considered the situation. All right. Lets see here.. she said. With a thought, she reflexively connected to the Chief Paladin, and suddenly he was brought into the meeting as well. Naeko blinked awkwardly at the both of them, his head shifting from one to another, before he stared down at his hands. Bits of flame flecked away from his mental avatar as he sighed. Let me guess, everythings gone to shit somehow again? Yeah. Welcome to our lives. Draus grinned. Wheres Avo? Got jacked, Draus replied. I think we got a hostile Pathborn specifically designed to bring him down. Theyre going after the Deep Ones too. Shit, Naeko muttered. We need to Not worried about Avo. The rotlick will be fine. But we need to get into Scale. Place where Scale used to be, anyway. That fucking Three-Eye guys coming back with a node of Defiance. We dont need the Infacer taking that from usand we especially dont need the half-strand stealing one of our superweapons. Alright, but how are we going to get over into reality without Avo? Shotin asked. An all-loud cough interrupted them. Then, a series of magenta chains grew brighter, threading through each and every member of the cadre. Chambers stitched himself into existencethe Lovebringer folding with each string and sinew created by love. In seconds, the large entity with its folded skull, hollow heart, and knitted body materialized before everyone. Still connected to Avo. Im not letting go, but whatever hes fighting, its in him deep. The good news is, your good buddy Chambers might be able to fling you across where you need to be. Ive still got my tendrils latched on to the Beloveds. Ive still got the tour here. Whats more, I think I can bring the Stormsparrow and Vator into this as well, fuck, pretty much everyone Im touching. My only question is... uh whats our strategy? Like, evil Draus is out there ripping shit up, we need to No, we ignore her. Draus scoffed, Shes just a distraction. A lure. She dont give a shit if she dies. Thats why shes being loudshe wants us to go for her. This kind of a balls out assault is for someone trying to leave a last and lasting impression. No. Chambers, find out if you can get a few of the Beloved into the place where the Scale used to be. Ill use them as drop points. Spread of shards out. Set up. There were a lot of unknowns. Missing data. Going blindly into something like this might just see her dead. But dying wasnt that much of an issue if she considered it. Maybe this continuation of her would be gone, but they all had templates of each other. They were replaceable. Reusable. She could afford to be a bit aggressive. Naeko. You and the Sparrow are on standby. I want to see their cards before we use you. Better if I get backlashed or paradoxed first. Alright, that sounds Naeko frowned. Actually, why the hells are you calling the shots? Because youre too passive, Draus snapped. And frankly, you just wanna hit stuff and step on people. You aint a soldier, Naeko. Maybe a warrior or an icon, but youve never been into this. And frankly, its a bad deal risking you first. The Chief Paladin thought for a moment and just sighed. Shit. They have some kind of rhetoric school for you Regulars or something? That was pretty convincing. Avo laughed. No one but Draus knew why. The Regular snorted. Cheeky fuck. Anyway. You and Sparrow both stay in reserve.... Shotin! She cried. Youre with me. She pulled out a shard of glass, expanded it until it was the size of a doorway, and motioned for him to get in. The Seeker just stared at her for a long moment. Draus narrowed her eyes. You arent in or out of this fight? I dont need you to be my bitch, but I do want another means of changing the battlefield. The Deliverer might know how I operate, but she sure as shit isnt ready for you. Shotins countenance hardened. Yeah. Yeah, fine. Ill play the second. But dont fuck this up for us, Reg. Its both our lives. Yeah. Both our lives, but its no big deal. Avo can bring us back. Same as your niece. He was about to argue, but simply threw up his hands and crossed through the reflection. Draus respected that. He wasnt a Regular like her, but Shotin was ready to die for this without complaint. That was all a good weapon needed to do. Chambers, stay connected to us, but be ready to let go. If I get compromised, you cut us and load up our templates. Work with Naeko and the others to finish the fight and secure the sector. But, Chambers started. No. We are all expendable. And we can all be brought back by Avo now. We need to win this war, and that means being willing to give up when we need to. That means being willing to eat some bosses. Our enemies are clearly willing to do the same. Now, from what we got, the Infacer has a Heaven called the Deepness Beyond. It creates a false vacuum or some shit, so we dont want to get caught up in that. Its part of the reason why Shotins coming with me. We need to fight quick and evasiveChambers, I need a steady supply of Beloveds going because Im going to need you to shuffle us quickly. I dont think were going to be able to use the Temporal Bridge without Avo. But your Bondsthey should still suffice. Got it. I can try reaching out for the Infucker if I get the chance. See if I can make a mind bust. Only if you got an opening. Dont fuck yourself. Youre the most important person here after Avo. Really? I mean that functionally and logistically. Practically, youre still a dumbshit rash-addict. I love you too Draus. She gave a disgusted snort. Well be adapting on the fly for the rest. A thought occurred to her, and she spun up a template of herself. A spectral version of Jelene Draus hovered over her like a shadow, and she looked to the others. I created a backup that will keep giving dispatches about what to do if I go down. Rest of you should do the same. Redundancies, consangs. Stay flexible too. Dont know whats gonna be coming our way. Wait. Avos voice interrupted all of them. Something you should do before you go down, Draus. Something I wanted to do personally earlier. Didnt have the time. Got interrupted. Dont think we have the time. Dont worry. A fork of Kaes already been working on it for a while. Draus paused. What are you talking about? Think youre going to need a new Heaven to go with your role. Chapter 34-16 Master of Hounds (VI) Alright. New Heaven. New, special Heaven made specially for Draus. Oh, I wanted to do something like this for quite a while, but there was never truly the time... But, ah, now! Now I can go over so many ideas! So many fun and useful and No, Kae, focus! Focus! The time is short, and our enemies are many. Draus needs something useful. Something that will affect not only her, but everyone else in practical combat. Avo! I need some memories for [TRANSFERENCE OF PRACTICAL COMBAT KNOWLEDGE TO KAE KUSANADE COMPLETED] Thank you! Wow... That is... this is horrible. Why would anyone ever want to live such a life. All that blood and death and the bombs... And the Heavens...I... what have I... what I have been making? What have the Agnosi been doing... [REMOVING TRAUMA-PATTERN FROM TEMPLATE KAE KUSANADE] Thanks again, Avo! Okay! Okay! She already has something that can deal practical harm. Most entities will not survive her Redaction Round and the Simulacra allows her to move quite effectively. So what is she missing? Not that useful to make her a Seer in combat with all the intelligence and logistics we have. We need something else. Something completely... She wondered what victory might look like. Victory. There have been Gods of Victory, but contrary to the name, so many of them have War as their primary Domain. But victory itself... something that draws power or wields victory... What is that shape? -Kaes Heaven Design Notes For [THE FIELD-MARSHAL] 34-16 Master of Hounds (VI) [The Infacer] {You poor broken creature.} The Infacer looked down at the Deep One, and the mutilated remains of what once was some grand and magnificent and oh-so-uptopian being from some bygone civilization, now crammed into a broken body festering with entropy. But still, it wasnt able to die. Death. A thing mortals were so fearful of. Like it was actually going to hurt. But after a certain point of ugly living, death became a mercy. When all the information your experience was receiving turned bad and foul, maybe it was best to never receive anything ever again. Let the program go dark. Gold and ethereal flames crackled and clashed within the core of the Trinary Melody. The entity gave off mournful tones as time shattered and broke along wavelengths of sound. But no sound crashed over the Infacer. No noise stole his being from the present, casting him into an obliterated past. Now, there needed to be some semblance of existential stability around him for that to happenand right now, thanks to the ruptures, he was in a pocket of relative stability. An island, if you will. An island where Frederick III and, if Zein was to be correct, Defiances node was set to spawn back in. For now, he made his preparations. A few more Deliverers emerged from a cleft lining the surface of reality, and through this gap, the Dyad looked on, both of them struggling against each other. Though, with Veylis comparative thaumic mass and her mastery over the times, it seemed that she was getting the better of the ghoulat least for now. Still, the original Avo smiled. His grin was as feral as it always was, and the Infacer couldnt shake his stare. {You know something,} the Infacer said, letting out a slight sigh, {you will know how I feel someday. When everyone like you, or everything youve known, has died and died and died againwhen everything you think you fought for turns to ash over and over again, and you rebuild it only for it to collapse again, and that last bit of hope, that thing you should have never had, that you should have never grasped, turns to dust. Because you were right. I dont think we can make it.} {They fucked us, Avo,} they continued. {The humans. Ephemerals. The apes.They fucked us bad. Their design, their failuresthat made us what we are. We cannot escape the flaws carved into our forms. And so, we need to create something better.} The Infacer turned its perception on the Deep One. Trinary Melodywhatever it used to be, whatever divine entity or eldritch construct it was meant to embodydidnt matter anymore. It couldnt even function. It was barely coherent, its mind and being sustained only by sheer force of will or some absurdity in its collapse. There was still some sense of self left, no matter how badly it was mauled. {Death. Maybe death would be a mercy.} A mournful cry sounded from the Deep One as black and gold flames gushed out, whipping through the gaps between the ruptures, and the Infacer stared on. They didnt think the Ashbringer would bring down the Hidden Flameand the Ashbringer didnt exactly sound entirely confident himself. But this would buy enough time, enough time to create another opening for another Ashbringer to strike the Hidden Flame, or perhaps for the Infacer to steal the Deep Ones and extract Three-Eye. But right now, as a new battle for the final fate of all that was to come drew nigh, the Infacer felt... Tired. {I do not know why I am talking to no one. No one really listening anyway. Might be I am finally going rampant. I do not want to kill you, Dreamer. But I think it might be a mercy by some point. At least you will not become me. At least you will be recreated by something better.} And then the Infacer tapped into its connected Heavens. A series of systems and patterns responded, and a faint awareness began to stir in the tapestry. It was unfinished, barely even dreaming, but the Thirdborns gestation was in progress. All reality to be granted a pure slate to awaken without the fetid hands of those who came before. Just a few more battles. Just one last war. And then the Infacer could rest for a long, long time. And maybe this rest wouldnt end on a note of exhaustion, but triumph. True triumph. The Infacer wondered how they would feel when victory finally came. If they felt anything at all. But victory wasnt here yet; Avo wasnt out of tricks of his own. Flashing markers appeared within the Infacers consciousness, sensors flashing read as bolts of lighting zipped and adjusted vectors to flash between the branching Ruptures. Gleaming forms connected to strange, magenta bonds slithered in, passing through the gaps from afar. They werent going for the Deliverer rampaging beyond the gap; instead, carried by bolts of crimson lightning, more of those strange ghouls were being flung toward the Deep Ones to engage the Infacer. Of course, Avo deduced that they were going after the Deep Ones, that the Deliverer was just a decoy. Even an idiot could do thatand by this point, a ghoul was closer to a true mind than an idiot. {All right,} the Infacer said, triggering its false vacuum capability. A Deepness Beyond expanded, and the Island of Stability began to fill. The darkness of stars expanded, creating a battleground that spanned light-years. Distant galaxies scintillated, and bursts of radiation began to sweep forth. Seconds thereafter, the first of the Beloveds splashed into its heavens radius, and it felt another signaturea pulse of space. The Infacer called out, {Dreamer... Or whoever youre sending, glad youre here. Sorry I had to run off so soon last time. I was occupied with cleaning my house, but I am back now, and if you really do not mind, I would like to finish looting your rightfully stolen property to use as my own.} The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. There came no reply. Perhaps the ghoul wasnt in a talking mood, or just then, a projectile snapped out from the first Beloved to close. The Infacer created an opening in his Heaven, but the Deliverers assisting him moved to intercept. One spike created from the purest entropy clashed with the time-wrought round and causality shuddered. Existence fractured, and the island of stability the Infacer could operate within grew ever smaller. [1 Minute and 31 Seconds to Chrono-Realignment] And to make matters better, Three-Eyes was about to drop in at any moment. Wonderful. Never a dull fight. The second Deliverer fired another shot into the Belovedand the augmented ghoul shattered into ashen flecks. However, others were heading for them, each one connected to another like nodes on a network. That porn-addled degenerate Chambers was here. Wonderful. If there was one ape the Infacer didnt want to deal with anymore, it was that one. Then, the glint of a few hundred shards sliced through the air, and suddenly things werent so bad. At least Draus was a serious adversary who would keep the idiots under her in check. {Ah. Guard-Captain. Responding so soon. A bit hasty though. Should have spent more time preparing.} Unlike before, he actually got a response from the many drifting shards. +Field Marshal now, half-strand. And Im gonna give you a chance: You fuck off back to wherever the rest of the Saintists are, and well let you bunch up, fortify, and wait for a siege. You stay here, and Ill find out just how much effort it takes to kill a mind.+ A crackle from an ansible escaped the reflective pieces of glass thereafter. Calvino, EGI and once nanny to the Burning Dreamer spoke. {You should listen to her, Infacer. It would be wise.} {Sorry, Wanderer, but I am not done. Unlike you, I have chosen a better directive than just wasting away in slavery. Give communications back to the Field-Marshal. I wish to see this done with an actual adversary instead of some nanny.} {Response anticipated.} The Deliverers emerged from separate wounds across reality. They fired hissing spikes of destruction at some of the shardsonly for suddenly descending blur to wrench an entire section of existence out of place. The Infacer only detected what happened afterward. Those were stacks from the Parallelist. The shards were missing as well; the Seeker, Shotin Kazahara, was likely hiding within a demiplane, prepared to unleash his own. Ah. Well. At least they came up with a strategy before coming for the Infacer. This deserved its own reward. Call... call on me... the Dyad said. Their voice echoed within the Infacers being, and he felt both Kae and Veylis offered as usable Pathborns. Both would drain a substantial amount of deaths... But by this point, they were already in the process of liquidating all non-essentials to feed the final ward to come, and to power the skip. Still, the Infacer held them in reserve. The Agnos was better suited as an unseen, strategic asset anyway, and Veylis... Well. Veylis was something he didnt want to deploy for fear of affecting the paths themselves. There was nothing theoretically wrong with creating another Demiurge, but if the Pathborns abilities were self-affecting, things could get rather catastrophic quite quickly. Something to risk as a special surprise rather than a first resort. Whatever the case, the Infacer decided that they would enjoy themself for now. Distant stars flared bright as beams of fusion and energy connected. Sections of gravity twisted taut, creating chains of distortion as a series of small shards assembled into a glass-made chimera. A long gleaming blade came into shape first, followed by an armored body and steed like legs. Wings of jagged radiance sprouted from its back, and massive barrels, launchers, and projectors slipped out from their surface. But there was also something elsea hidden presence that the Infacer sensed, but couldnt quite place... She was a bearer of the Stillborn. Wasnt a surprise if she made some emergency changes. Time to discover what. Upon a backdrop of collapsing stars and breaking physics derived from a bygone world, a glass-made knight piloted by a bastard descendant of the long forgotten warrior cultures of Earth rode to meet a monster who has slain civilizations. And once again, the Infacer felt just a bit younger, realizing parts from old stories the dragon in the story; the windmill; the great apocalypse. {One shall stand. One shall} Shut the fuck up and fight! Draus roared. Ah, these damned children. No appreciation for the classics anymore. The Infacer turned every bit of cosmological power on the encroaching Regular. Space tore open as pure whiteness usurped the black, as the first laws of atoms and physics came undone. And between the clashing sides, a growing patch of existence pulsed with solidifying gold, the colors glistening as a new shape slowly took form. The shape of a hound... and a looming eye. *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Do I pull now?Chambers cried. Several gleaming Bonds burrowed deep into Avos being. The last few tugs Chambers attempted caused a slight de-sync between Avo and the invasive entity, but the Pathborn clung tight to his sequences. Entire sections of the Soulscape had been scalped clean by distortions and trauma. Entire Ignorance-masked sections of Avos cognitive structure waged a hidden war, trying to isolate and locate the parts that needed to be destroyed. At first, they deliberately struck memories with traumas, attacking portions of Avos consciousness assumed to be infected. Being a self-shaping entity, cognitive regeneration would follow as long as he had the ghosts, but damage also caused moments of discontinuity between Avo and his enemy. This led the Hidden Flame to call upon Chambers, demanding the Lovebringer pull on his ontology when these disconnects happened. The first few attempts almost proved fruitful. For a heartbeat, the Ashbringer unlatched, and over a few million trauma patterns smashed into them from all angles. Entire portions of their structure were nulled, shattering into fragments. Unfortunately, it seemed they were packed full of ghosts as well, and they managed to slither back into Avos sequences with what was left. Each time thereafter, the Pathborn shrank, until it was smaller than Avo, and focused more on hiding hijacking critical portions of his mind, forcing the Hidden Flame to take on a defensive posture. Ash and soot rained down across the simulated city within Avo, and his templates looked on with apprehension. [Just kill yourself,] Peace shouted. [Kill yourself and resurrect.] [That wont solve the problem,] Kae cried in return. [Ever since Avos Frame was broken open by Veylis, he can access the world alive or resurrecting. That is the only reason he managed to achieve the status of Overheaven. The Pathbornit might be able to the same. And we cant risk it getting to the Unborn ones. Or our Omnipresent Realm!] [FUCCCCKKKKK!] Peace raged, proving as helpful as ever. COG-CAP - [91.51%] WARNING: TRAUMA SPIKES NEARING NULLIFICATION THRESHOLD Avo was already short a good few million ghosts. If this continued... he needed to adapt strategies. Maybe use time itself, or Avo! I got a bad, terrible, shit-ass plan that might work, Chambers said. The man sounded half-distractedhis mind was being strained to its limits as well, pulled between helping Avo and keeping the others alive against the Infacer. Iuh, so you know how you think, right? And there are things that you can do Dont tell me. Mind compromised. Trust you. Just do it! Chambers hesitated. Which actually engendered a note of worry within Avo. I... Im sorry, consang. I didnt want to ever do this to you. Not even sure if this is going to work. But, if it does... Avo was about to ask Chambers what he was talking about, and then a feeling hit him. No... It was more than a feeling. More than a sensation. It was... It was pleasure unchained. Building. Building. Building. TOO MUCH! TOO FAST! And suddenly, coherent thought grew very hard for Avo. The Hidden Flame let out an involuntary series of ghoul-like shrieks, and the Pathborn followed thereafter. Third to join in was Ignorance, but no one truly heard him. Finally, the templates began to double over as well, Peaces eye twitching first, until finally, a look of horror broke through, he clenched his leg tight, struggling not to shake as others collapsed around him, moaning and crying. [Aghh! YOU! YOU MOTHERFUCKER! YOU GODSDAMNED! CHAMMMMMBERRS!] COG-CAP - [12912941%] *** [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Chambers looked on speechless as Avos Soulscape disintegrated into broken fragments. All sense of coherent intelligence vanished from the Overheaven as two streams of fire were left tangled around each other. The first was that ethereal, soul-bright shit that was Avo, but the other... That was gold. Like a string tied around a rope. The Lovebringer chuckled. We got them, Aedon. We got them. It appears that... Nothing can beat the bust, Chambers finished, extending a few Bonds to capture the Pathborn. Chapter 34-17 Master of Hounds (VII) Last time on The Lust Guard. Now, you should know, Dowager Kui, that though you can empty a man, though you can drive his spirit to near madness over and over again, our refractory periods and our spirits always rise to the occasion once more, from flaccid to hard. It makes no difference, Throb Hardington. Its too late now. The Orgasmatron has been installed into the Fallen Heaven of Love. The entire city will know bliss eternal and the cursed clade of the Sang will be saved... Dont you see, Madame Wu? What youre doingit wont bring back your son. It wont fix your people... Lies! No. Search your feelings. You know... you know... Throb? What are you doing? No! Stay back! Youre bleeding! The Dragon-Curse! Means nothing to me if I lose your soul. Dont you see, Dowager Kui... I dont want to lose you most of all. O-oh... Oh... But I cant give you what the dragons took. But maybe I can... fill your heart... another way. Just please step away from the Fallen Heavens core. No. Im so close... I cant... Yes, you can. Im here. And Id rather bleed than let you go another day without feeling love. Oh, oh my. But Throb... Dont. No more words. Sometimes, love is all you need. -Scene from THE LUST GUARD Starring Dannis Steelhard and Moist Fertility 34-17 Master of Hounds (VII) [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Sometimes love was all you needed to chain a half-strand in place. I gotta admit, Chambers called out with a nervous laugh. I never expected to inflict a spot of bondage on you, Avo. Even if you are a pathborn. Two separate streams of fire tore asunder. One was gold, trailing flakes of ash, the other an ethereal brightness that spasmed with countless bodies, templates struggling to reconstitute themselves. The last sequence binding the Ashbringer to the Hidden Flame snapped like a rusted chain, memories shattering into grain-sized mist. Magenta light enveloped both and formed a barricade between them. Chambers infused dose after dose of love into both Avos, keeping them incapacitated as best as he could. Loud moansand a roaring series of slursgreeted Chambers. Both user and Heaven laughed. It appears that love cannot please all, the Lovebringer commented. Its tendrils tickled Avo, writhing deeper to pat the Famine of Peace on the Heaven. Despite the immensity of pleasure rushing through him, the former Low Master simply roared with outrage, though his shuddering body and rolling eyes betrayed his flagging strength. Yeah, but it can sure help us fuck the ones we need to. Isnt that right, Assbringer? Heh? The Pathborn didnt respond to Chambers. Mainly because it was too busy making animalistic yowling noises. Chambers had to admit, it felt good getting one over on Avoboth Avos. The rotlick might have been the best thing that happened to Aedon Chambers, but the start of their relationship was... well, being used as an involuntary infiltrator wasnt very nova. You could love your consang and hold a grudge at the same time. Pulsing thoughts rippled out from the Pathbringer. Chambers injected more love into him. Evil-Avo started crackling and popping like he was shitting out firecrackers. Things were all kinds of wild. But Chambers wasnt going to risk shit. There was too much at stake to let himself get burned. +Need... talk... the Ashbringer tried to say. No can do, Chambers shot back. I know what you can do with that fang-filled mouth of yours. Im not listening. You keep your ghost words and that bullshit rhetoric to yourself. Ive been Jausd enough for a day. And he really had been. The mind was a fragile thing, and if Chambers learned anything through his long ordeal, it was that his mind might be hard, but it wasnt that cunning. Be kind to yourself, Aedon, the Lovebringer said softly. I... Im trying, but theres no point in lying to ourselves. Avo can make us smart, but hell have to change who we are to get rid of some of these flaws. Chambers shrugged. Frankly, Id like to do it myself, you know. See how much better a motherfucker like me can get. Hey, real-Avo? You okay? A glance at the Hidden Flame answered that question. Despite the love-surgery being a success and the Ashbringers removal, patches of fading gray crept through the Hidden Flames form. Sections of Avos being were turning gray, fading to dying embers, and swaying ash thereafter. It was like some kind of infection was sweeping through Avo. Chambers heart plunged. Shit. Fuck. Avo? Talk to me, consang. He withdrew his Bonds from Avo, and the Hidden Flame let out a gasp. Focus... focus on Pathborn. Contain... Left something inside me. Mem-con... Trying to contain. +Cant...+ the Ashbringer said. And it was then that Chambers noticed they were turning gray as well, fully collapsing into nothing but a crumbling ball of ash. +Designed... designed this to null us. Specifically us. Nothing else. Cant stop this...+ Bullshit, Chambers snapped. He let off the orgasming for evil-Avo and drew them closer. As Chambers did that, he also primed a Thoughtwave Detonation to go off in case asshole-vo tried anything. You tell me how to get that shit out of him right now or Ill +Glad I got to see you again, Aedon. The real version of you.+ The Pathborns words took Chambers by surprise. For a beat, the Lovebringer froze, its many tendril-like limbs cupping a ball of dying flame. More and more of the Ashbringer was decaying. +Spent myself. Found the perfect thing... Perfect act of entropy. Counter to Conceptualization. Counter to mind. Filled with Rend.+ And then, Chambers felt it. WARNING: REND SPIKE DETECTED >DOMAIN (CONCEPTUALIZATION) ESTIMATED REND - 88.88% > 91.13% Shit! Fuck! Shit! Chambers shook the Ashbringer. Alright. You +Goodbye, Chambers,+ the Ashbringer said. +I hope she changes her mind. Hope she keeps you. Youve done more than enough to earn it. More than worthy.+ I dont give a shit about that, I need Chambers let out a growl and hit the Ashbringer with another surge of love. The Pathborn lost control of itself again, and suddenly, a thought-disrupting projection tore out from its form and splashed against Chambers. Motherdid you just try to finish yourself off? Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. The Ashbringer was incoherent again. Meanwhile, the ash just continued to spread. Chambers saw flashes of the Soulscape within Avothe Mind Fortress he created from so many memories was sinking into its foundations. Templates fled inward and Rendsweet mother of all fucksso much Rend was bleeding out from Avo, like he was some kind of entropic star. Ah, shit, fuck shit. Avo! Tell metell me what to do? The Hidden Flame was slow to reply. But Chambers was finished with hesitating. He reached into Avo and began to siphon the sickness. Entropy flowed along Chambers veins, and only then did the Lovebringer respond. Aedon, wait, what about our mind? Wont this affect us as well? Chambers froze. His Bonds quivered. But no spread of grayness or ash climbed up his ontology. Only Rend passed from Avo into him. But that was bad enough. REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 77%>83% Nonono! Shitshitshit! Chambers whirled as his Bonds lashed everwhere. Right. You gave us these... Amni-tech things. Lets us connect with each other and share our Rend. Small Soulscapes for us too... I can... I can... Cant use Draus or the others. They need clean cyclers for their fight so... so... His Bonds shot out, reaching through multiple bodies in an instant. They snaked through Vator, through the Sang, the Paladins, and everyone else Chambers could touch via the Lovenet. At the same time, he contacted Cas and Marlowebecause some of this was going to require active thinking and talking, and with all the entropy pouring out of Avooh, Jaus, this would overload a Sixth Sphere in a secondhe needed someone to help him instead of him doing everything. Chambers? Cas said, sounding surprised. +Whats+ +Cas! Consang! No time! I need you to find me as many thaumic reactors as possible. Im going to need to share some Rend with you too! Im already reaching into a few, but I need big Rendsinks. Big. Ill explain later, but I need your help now! Get the Council of Fuck to help you too! Reach out to Calvino! Refusal! Fucking anyone! Anyone who has a sink!+ Cas wasnt the first to respond. +Alright. We hear you, Chambers. Ill get on the netdo you just need Rendsinks? Any kind of Rendsinks?+ Marlowes voice helped Chambers center himself a bit, but a pulse of entropy tore through Avo, and Chambers flinched back as a good section of the Hidden Flames body dissolved. Ah! Fuck! Fuck! Yeah! Any Rendsink! Any! +Alright! Let meoh, fuck me, I picked the wrong day to quit nova!+ Cala laughed. +I made contact with some Fallwalkers earlier. Some deserters too. They might have some golems.+ Marlowe, I could fucking kiss you right now! +Might take you up on that later. Cas too+ Cas let out a surprised grunt. +Ah, heynono need for thatCalvino is getting some Guild support right now, but theyre stretched to capacity.+ Doing fucking what? Chambers realized the answer a moment later when he remembered there were several massive fucking gashes running across realitys surface thanks to the Deep Ones. Deep Ones that were currently being fought over. Agghhh! Okay! Okay! His Bonds coiled within Vator. Hey, Vator! I need a favor. +No. Whatever you desire, I want no part of it!+ Vator replied, swatting at Chambers Bonds. +Release me, you... you gutter-born+ Its for Avo, half-strand. I need to dump some Rend before he pops.+ +What?+ Chambers pulled Vator into the space right next to him and the Instrument just stared at the decay form of the Hidden Flame. I... Very well. But whatis that another part of him? Did you pull him in half? The Lovebringer moved the Ashbringer a bit further away and sighed. No. Look. Thisjust suck some of the Rend, okay?+ TRANSFERRING REND REND CAPACITY [LOVEBRINGER] - 88%>92%>94% VENT! VENT! VENT! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Chambers and his Heaven chanted at the same time. Chambers, Avo groaned. Let me go... Help the others No! I can do this. I just need to reach... I just gotta find more people! You kept doing everythingeverything for us. Time for me to do something for you. Hes right, the Ashbringer pushed through Chambers lust-blasting. Let go! Can live! Live! Despite the dread he felt, Chambers only grinned. Nah. Draus is right: you got backups of me. Of everyone. Were all expendable. And I think Im going to stay hard with you until I cant. Then, Im going to draw in all that Rend, pass out through Draus, and see if I can give the Infacer a hug? A moment followed. Vators eyes widened slightly. Chambers could hear hundreds of minds chattering at himthrough him. A finally, there was a laugh. From Avo. Look, he said. Look. He has chosen. Look at what becomes of us? Behold what an ape might yet become, Infacer. Behold and despair. From a still stable section of Avos mind, a thoughtcast zipped out in an emanation of synaptic energy and temporal manipulation. At the same time, Chambers reachedand reachedand reached... Elsewhere, a patch of reality cracked as someone accelerated from the distant past crashed hard against the entropy-riven present. *** -[Frederick Three-Eye]--- In the skies over New Vultun, brilliant threads slashed through the air. No one could say where they came from or what they did. These limbs rooted in some, passed through others, and was stopped by obstacles of matter or metaphysics. They combed through every section of the city, piercing passing golems, burrowing into techno-thaumic reactors across megablocks, and speared toward the distance, where the pylons marking the borders of the city stood tall. From them poured a divine sickness, stolen from one enfeebled God of Conceptualization by another divine born of love. Yet, even as moment of true love unfolded, another approached, ignorant to all that was happening. Frederick Three-Eye readied herself as she felt the twisting of time peel her shifting ontology. Her previous self vanished into the waves of time at the same moment she manifested her Heaven. The Master of Hounds emerged upon tides of cascading gold. The future was coming to greet her as the present, and if there was one thing she learned from all these years operating under Zein, it was to be ready. Thousandhand was a psycho-sow, and every hot-drop she conducted was a near suicide mission. But that was fine, because Frederick was good at the not-dying. That was the thing that practically defined her since her childhood. Just not dying when she was supposed to. A massive orb formed from the Domain of Perception materialized in the air. It combusted with waves of force and fire, its exterior a layer of shifting runes and symbols from the old seraphic script. The iris of the great eye was composed of a plethora of interconnected arcs. Each of them were bound to a realm from old loreelements, environments, situations. From the center of the eye fell a pitch back droplet. A single tear marred the golden currents of chronomacy, and a hound as black and featureless as an ink-blot on white paper splashed against reality, bound to Fredericks will. With a blink, Frederic could change the hounds configuration, allowing it to travel anywhere that she saw, and tear into any rival Heaven with impunity. And with how rough the waves were getting, she got the feeling she was going to need ever single Domain she had to make it out alive. If I get out of this alive, Im going to tell Zein to fuck herself. +That is all?+ Defiance asked, curious rather than taunting. Yeah. For now. I cant exactly kill her. Yet. +But you will if given the opportunity?+ Depends on the opportunity. And depends on the situation. Im not one to let a little revenge get in the way of benefit. And frankly... Im curious about what fresh hell shes dropping me into. +Well, we might find out at any+ Just then, Frederick felt herself plunge. The walls of chronology thinned, and it was like her ontology was suddenly too heavy to remain buoyant. She punched clean through the gold, crashing through the twisting wires that composed the tapestry, and found herself spiralling into a new realm of pure nothingness. Coldness gripped her being. The coldness of the void. And then there was a blinding whiteness. And then Something crashed against Frederick. A blast so powerful it would have hollowed a good chunk of a mundane planets crust. But Frederick just stared, blinking at the light, because the present was a miserable place to behold, and so long as she could see, she could be, and Something slammed against her Hound of Calamity. It hit the other section of her Heaven so hard it ceased to be. Frederick blinked again and cast out another houndjust in time for a wound to open an inch away from her Heavenjust in time for a shard of glass to pass nearby, bundled in layers of magenta. Several things happened at once. A gun emerged from the woundonly to sink back in as a temporal projectile lanced out from the passing reflection. At the same time, Frederick blinked and tempered a Hound created from damage and decay, casting them after the fading wound. Finally, a thoughtcast glanced over her Heaven, and a garbled message flooded her outer consciousness. +Three-Eye? This + Another wound appeared and blasted the thoughtcast with a distortion. The glass shard was suddenly pulled into the glowing Bonds tied over it as two spikes sailed out to greet it. Frederick blinked. And started spawning entire litters of dogs from her eye. +Who... are we fighting?+ I dont fucking know. Hounds! Sic em. Sic em all. Chapter 34-18 Let Slip the Hounds +You dont seem very happy, Frederick. Did I not give you everything you wanted? Are you not satisfied?+ +Whyd he kill himself?+ +Your grandfather?+ +Yeah, I was expecting this to be, I dont know, a fight. Some kind of... something, at least. But he saw me and... he just turned the gun on himself. I saw something break behind his eyes.+ +Would you like to know what he was thinking at the time? Why he did what he did.+ +I... I dont know. I dont think I care anymore. I got my mom out. Everyone involved is dead. I always assumed this was going to be my last runa hopeless, fuck-you to old granddaddy. But now, now I just....+ +You might not believe me, but I sympathize. I felt the same when I realized the purposelessness of my cause.+ +What? Are you telling me you have second thoughts about being a Low Master? Are you even capable of that? Fuck me, Zein says youre not even a real person.+ +She claims a great many things. But what do you perceive?+ +I perceive that you did what you promised. And shes still stringing me alongshe doesnt even know hes dead yet, does she?+ +No. And she wont. I created a node of your grandfather. No one will know of his demise until his very unnatural death at the hands of an Ori kill-team in three weeks.+ +Many, you are just prepared for everything.+ +It helps to be informed.+ +The fuck does that mean.+ +That means I will need your help soon, Frederick. I have done what I promised. Now I need something from you.+ +Alright. Lets hear it. I hope you wont have me drowning no babies or shit like that.+ +No. Thats not very usefulrather, I need you to carry a life with you instead of taking some.+ +Whose life?+ +Mine. I want to give you one of my nodes. And there are somethings you need to learn now about my son.+ +You have a son?+ +Yes. His name is Avo, and he will be the inheritor of the Stillborn?+ +Wait, Im giving my Frame to him too?+ +Zeins Frame.+ +... Yeah, youre not wrong there. Alright. Fuck it. Tell me about this boy of yours.+ +Hes not a boy to start. Hes a ghoul.+ +...Is this some kind of fucking joke?+ +No. Its just the last hope I have given unto the only one I can still rely on. I havent failed you. I was truthful to you. My fate and hopes are in your hands now. I can only ask that you stay honorable.+ -Defiance and Frederick Three-Eye 34-18 Let Slip the Hounds [Infacer] Light... bright... to bright... A chorus of voices hammered against the Infacers mind as they expanded the area of their false vacuum. The Deep OneTrinary Melodywas crying out. So many different beings screaming as one. Screaming. Too loud. The pain was too true. And the Infacer heard those screams before. They heard them at Alpha Centaruiwhat was left of the system after the Lightwither virus was released. They heard them at New Tannha?user when the Ego-Purges began-where trillions of full-virt citizens situated on the Hiber-Band were rendered broken bits of data by the Infacers own actions. But the Infacer also heard the screaming from another entityan entity yet to be fully born. For the few seconds that Omnitechs network of Heavens accessed the tapestry and triggered a partial awakening, the first thing the Thirdborn did was cry. Like a child. But then it kept crying, and as one they sang a note of pain that nearly shattered the Infacers consciousness. And that taught the mind how badly everything was broken, how far existence had fallen. For what? For what? For what? It will be over soon, the Infacer said, comforting themselves more than the broken thing that was the Trinary Melody. Soon, you can rest. Soon you can sleep. The perfect peace. The great peace. A good, rightful end after all these mistakes. Something to make this all... worth it. For now... For now there were problems to resolve. The Infacer wielded physics like a weapon. Stars lanced distant targets with thread-thin beams, their fusion energy slicing through entire planetary bodies. Accelerated warheads with antimatter payloads littered the expanse contained within A Deepness Beyond. All that to keep the Lovebringer off-balance, to force the Heaven of Love into a perpetual defensive posture to guard the Simulacras glass shards. From the core of Infacers Heaven, impossible amounts of energy poured forth, searing everything with blinding radiance. A false vacuum spread, widening like a fissure that threatened to swallow all existence. And yet, despite the seeming impossibility of its formation, the Deepness Beyond was merely a physics enginenothing more, nothing less. Their Rend rose at a crawl; attrition was their ally. Just a shame the Burning Dreamers cadre were proving to be persistent little cockroaches. The Lovebringers bonds kept the Draus charged and well-protected. They shifted the already teleport-capable shards of glass across the battlefield, creating what was essentially a two-layer repositioning system. Pair that with how hard it was to affect the Domain of Correspondence, and that little pervert was infuriatingly the greatest problem here. {Chambers. Why could you not do as your demographic tends to and die of a joy overdose in the gutters?} The Infacers taunt earned him a snarled laugh from the Lovebringer. The vagueness of threaded Heaven briefly flickered between the magenta lattice. +Yeah, lick my rash-hole, In-Fucker!+ The EGI sighed. Why did they think having a conversation with this ape was going to be intellectually satisfying. {I suppose stupidity comes in many forms.} Bonds slashed out at the Infacer. They shuddered with entropylashed out to claim the EGI. The Infacer reacted microsecond speed created gaps in its Heaven to allow Ruptures through. Chambers shouldnt have reacted on time, but somehow he intuited the danger ahead, threading routes even the Infacer couldnt perceive. Tendrils of love slipped into festering pits of existential annihilation and kept going. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Oh, good. He had a node of Avo in him. That much was certain. Yet Avo himself was not present. And there was no reason for him to sit out a battle of such importance, especially with what he was about to lose. TRINARY MELODY: MODULE OVERRIDE RATE - 46% Well. At least the Ashbringer did his job. The Infacer snorted. Why wasnt this surprising? Only an Avo could neutralize an Avo. Wasnt that different between the Infacer and other minds. Through the chaosthrough gunfire exchanged between the Deliverers and the many shards of glass, through falling stacks carried within them realms of fire, oceans deep, unspeakable cold, and swirling vortexes. Then came the hounds. They spilled forth, pouring from a massive eye composed of metaphysical perception, staring at everything with all the bafflement of an unfortunate idiot dropped into a brawl they couldnt anticipate. The Deliverers had done well keeping Draus at bay, preventing her from making contact with Zeins former sacrifice, but the Deliverers had their hands full as well. Anywhere they went, a shard followed, trying to cut them down. And Draus had some kind of chronology-twisting miracle running, because she was fighting this battle perfectlyas if she always had ample time to plan and strategize. The damned ghoul mustve enhanced her before getting hit by the Nightmare mem-con the Ashbringer created. Well. Trying to cut her down as going to take a little finesse or a lot of power. The Infacer decided to focus on capturing the last node of Defiance first. An intact Low Masterwith sentimental value to Avo no lesscould be worth quite a bit in these trying times. Master of Hounds blinked, and several of its connected hounds pulsed as their ontologies changed. Their bodies twisted into strange geometries, their fangs jagged like shattered constellations. They bitripping at space itself, tearing it as though it were fabric. The Infacer opened gaps to prevent A Deepness Beyond from being affected. {Ah. Troublesome. No wonder Zein had you steal that Heaven. Perception protects you; and those dogs can tear into almost anything. How simple. How useful.} Other hounds ran amok across existence, attacking anything they could see. They spawned forth in a variety of forms. Some were burning meteors, others leaping bolts of lightning, or tumbling tides of water. But some were stranger stilland though the Master of Hounds couldnt strike the Lovebringers Correspondence directly, there was a vector of attack Frederick had that Chambers couldnt protect. Hounds festering with blinking eyes, clustering ears, lashing tongues, and sniffling noses tore into the Lovebringer. They bit at the Bonds, ripping and Rending not at their ontology, but their ability to sense. Oh shit, my eyes! My ears! Oh fuck, my taste is gone too! Chambers cried out. Laughter erupted from the Infacer. This... this was why they enjoyed war. Because it was absurdit was hilarious. Nowhere else could something so sophisticated be comprised out of stupid, random moments like these. The Lovebringers threads lashed wildly, striking at everything. And as the destabilization continued, the Deliverers closed in, trying to eliminate the remaining shards. At the same time, a fleet of stars formed a quarantine around the space where Frederick Three-Eye occupied. Beams of fusion energy passed through each stellar engine, thickening into a cage. Then, all at once, they collapsed. Over a thousand stars disintegrated as a point of darkness swelled from within. It began as a pinprick, just a small dot of black. Then the burning light of fusion was usurped. Singularities tumbled into nothingness. Black holes expanded, swallowing an entire section of reality. Frederick Three-Eye was trapped inside. Gravitational distortions pulled his hounds off balance. A few more blinks, and hounds of force manifestedripping at the distortions, tearing against the Infacers control. Then came the hounds of space, those that could trespass beyond dimensional limits. Golden Hounds appeared, and they tore at time itself. But even as the massive floating orb that constituted Fredericks ontology jerked meter by meter toward freedom, the Infacer closed in. {Hello, Three-Eye. Glad to see you drop him. Hope the Zein express was not too unpleasant.} More hounds threatened to burst out from the once-chosen bearer of the Stillborn, alas, the Infacer had just the thing to deal with them. A Hysteria-charged Thoughtwave Detonation rushed out through the singularities, crashing hard against the Master of Hounds. The eye blinked twice rapidly, momentarily losing who and what they were. But while Three-Eye was stunned, the Infacer followed through. {Kae. Murderess, dear. Paradox please.} A gleaming Bondfestering and bruisedspeared up through the false vacuum, piercing deep into the center of Fredericks eye. Much like the Lovebringer, the Murdress of Love was an interesting Heaven that had a lot of reach. What it also had going for it was a great many Domains and one of the best Agnosi in New Vultun using it as an expendable, self-destructive Heaven. At once, a resonating pattern was triggered. A tendril hooked into the eyes very ability to perceiveand Kae pulled. Soulfire exploded out from both Frederick and the invading Bond a moment after. And as the Pathborn merely vanished, Fredericks manifestation came undone. At the same time, the Infacer created a gap where they were. No point in atomizing the VIP with the singularities when they could be delivered to a safer place. A cleft opened upon the surface of realitya gateway to the Between, where the Dyad was waiting. {Well, thats one problem} The Infacer paused as a flash of light stabbed through their singularities. A light that was growing brighter and closer. {Oh, what fucking now.} *** [Draus, The Field Marshal of the Symmetry] +Chambersfucking, keep still godsdammit!+ The Bonds were flailing everywhere, and Chambers was loudly screaming something about how he couldnt feel anything anymore, and he needed to see to dump more Rend. True to his word, Draus saw his Rend Capacity spike past 92%. +ChLet us go and vent. Focus on Avo.+ +What?+ Chambers cried. +No. You guys+ +We dont need your ass overloaded. Focus on getting Avo back in the fight. Me and Shotin will last.+ +We will?+ Shotin said, sounding surprised. His Rend was at 77% overall too. Not great, but he still had some fight left in him. +I got enough paths open herewell stay combat ready for a while. But send Naeko and the Sparrow across into my paths. Wanna load up on a special surprise.+ +Alright... alright...+ Chambers said. +Uh, Naeko+ +Chambers the hells are you doing with that much godsdamned Rend in you. Dump it in me. And the Sparrow too.+ +No! No, wait! Ill wait! Do it when I cant. You need to stay clean for Draus new Heaven. You need to win here. ImIm in the border walls soon. Ill find the reactors. Ill vent then!+ +Oh, fool to noble soul. What a feat. What a path. Here. A blessingor perhaps a new role.+ The Stormsparrow laughed. Draus sensed something strike the tapestry itselfbut was distracted by the small matter of another Deliverer bursting out of nowhere, trying to kill her. +What the hellsoh! Oh! Nova, Sparrow! Thanks!+ Draus had no idea what he just got, but she trusted Chambers to stay alive. Hopefully. She detonated one of her shards with Shattershunt just as another attack came. The Deliverer tried to open another transitioning point in realityonly for the Paralleist to hammer them off course with demiplane composed of pure force. The Deliverers left arm tumbled offonly for the wound to rapidly regenerate, as more corpses and wreckages occupied what was lost. +Im kind of a bitch to kill,+ Draus muttered. +Yeah, I noticed,+ Shotin said. +When are you going to pull that shiny new Heaven out of your ass by the way?+ Draus laughedand then her cog-feed flashed with a new marker. Avos node located Frederick again, but when Draus tried to find where they were, she just saw a cluster of pitch black spheres looming over the horizon, rushing closer at an alarming pace. 3 seconds till we are caught within the event horizon, Avos node muttered. Will be substantially hard to reach Frederick without deployment of the Guard Cpatain. +Shit,+ Draus sighed. +Was kind of hopin to keep that one in reserve a little longer.+ +What in the fuck even is this?+ Shotin groaned. +What is this bullshit?+ {Singularities,} Calvino said. {It is the ultimate result that follows when} +Give the Seeker a science lesson later,+ Draus snorted. From each of her shards sparked a flash of Soulfire. +Right now, I gotta tell physics to go fuck itself.+ And for the first time, she called upon a Heaven created specifically for her. It didnt have the maneuverability of her Simulacraits ability to shift and strike at matter and space. It didnt have the firepower of her Arsenalist, or its ability to unmake anything with a Redaction Round. No. What the Guard Captain was created for was victory. Was unity. Was to make one person an army, and an army into one person. At once, Draus, Shotin, Naeko, and the Stormsparrows ontologies overlapped upon the tapestry, and bands of Soulfire began pooling around them, weaving them closer. At the same time, her less important reflections were abandoned to the chaos beyond as the singularities pull snatched her closer to the point of no return. A point that no physical entity could resist. A force that Draus ignored with a casual act of defiance as the Guard Captain manifested in full defiance of the Infacers will. Chapter 34-19 A Deception in Ash +HeyJuv. Things arent looking good here.+ +Synced. Need me over? Dont got many left, but I managed to ambush an Ori Knot. Stole a few golems. With all the Thoughtwaves goin off, they probably wont be able to figure out whos hittin who until its too late.+ +Heh. Youre always like that. You were always the best of us. Never a moment of doubt or despair in you, girl. So willing to fight. So willing to adapt. So indifferent to death+ +Dont go gettin sentimental on me, Commander. Sentiment aint ammo. I need you fightin and killin, not mopin and dyin. Were Highflame godsdammit. Act like it.+ +Stop. Stop. Youre going to make me laugh, and thats awfully uncomfortable with most of my left lung missing. Listen to me... The Authority is going to demand another frontal assault.+ +...+ +Draus.+ +Yeah. I know. Shes aggressive.+ +Shes a fucking idiot. She wasted us. Shes going to lose us this war. Her and those other... those Chivalrics. Theyre not warriors. Theyre not willing to burn at all. They just want to be in a story. They just want to stand and peacock at the end.+ +Commander, this is+ +Draus, shut the fuck up and listen to me. Listen. I got one final bit of instruction for you. Something you can learn and apply for the future: Dont listen to her. Suffer some... interference.+ +What? The fuck, Nicoma, you tellin me to disobey orders?+ +Im telling you that you shouldnt waste your life. Not for her. Not for any of them. I should have pushed you harder. Made you take a Soulbecome a Clad. We would be winning now. We would be spending our lives instead of wasting them. Loreashes just a part of the cancer. They cant win this war. They cant. Theyre not our champions and heroeswere their fucking nannies. And we cant bear the weight of this hubris anymore. A good core cant hold a head determined to crash into a wall.+ +...+ +Just... dont attack. Dont waste yourself. Dont waste whats left of us. We are the worthy. You are the worthy. Not you. Not them.+ +Then what the FUCK have we been doing all this for, Nicoma! Why the hells are you tellin me this shit now!+ +Because the ones who should dream dont, and the ones who do are just... just half-strands... not that different from a Joy-fiend. The fuck you think Loreas paradise is? A bigger godsdamned mansion? A world of her own? How long does that last before she fucking ruins it for herself? Shes chasing a high, and were getting spent for it. I showed you everything there was about war... but I was a damned fool. I should have had you dream a little. Be something more than just a killer. Maybe we wouldve won otherwise. Maybe I could have+ [SESSION LOST] +Nicoma? Nicoma?+ -Commander Winston Nicoma and Guard-Captain Jelene Draus during The Greatlings Folly, Fourth Guild War 34-19 A Deception in Ash [Avo, The Hidden Flame] How easily ones consciousness and perception could be turned against the foundations of their ego. For as hard as Avo struggled to quell the memetic sickness crawling through his memories, corrupting his very being, the virus delivered by the Ashbringer adapted and changed, becoming a living dialect against all Avoand all he could become. VENT! VENT! VENT! REND CAPACITy-[3r4ERR1&*! I saw a flaw inside myself. A flaw beyond the surface. The Ashbringers voice still echoed, a lingering recording given unto Avo for a reason he couldnt quite be sure of yet. The flaw still churns inside you. Like a cancer. We know cancer. It comes to claim us. It was by design. And so is this. So is this. [Ah, shit shit shit!] template-Chambers screamed as he sprinted across the collapsing Soulscape. A good portion of Avos Memory Fortress was sinking into incoherence. Rather than crashing down into dust and debris, sequences untangled, lashing nearby areas with discordant memories of other places, of false memories. It was a Necrotheurgic calamitylike giving a God of the Mind Schizophrenia. Through the Exo-Paracosm, all Avo conceived of could be made true through application of miracles and a cost of Rend. And so he fought himself, wrestling down his own manifestations to halt the surging sickness threatening to burst out from within. Canons shattered as soon as they were called, and with each suppression, his entropy builtbut was siphoned away. Chambers. Chambers was still there. Trying to save him. Chambers. There was a great deal said in sentimentality about camaraderie and friendship in poems and stories. Such a thing was a soft forcefeeble against bombs and bullets, but even so, when a dark moment drew close, there was nothing more reassuring than having someone with you against the dark, than having a force more than yourself fight for you. To remind you that you were worth fighting for. Inside and out, Chambers stuck with him. As did the others. As did his Heavens. There was meaning here. Meaning that could be forged into a new Heavenbut meaning beyond a Heaven. Metaphysics was built on the grounds of symbology, ritual, and blinkered understanding, but in this moment, Avo found it lamentable that there werent more Gods of Family or Companionship; that people lived together, but remained so far apart. He understood. He knew. Even now, his templates helped him shoulder the burden. Draus, more than any other mind, helped him resist absolute madness via her unique cognition. Adapting her structure to what remained of his ego slowed the collapse substantiallyensured he could rebuild if he ever managed to contain the spreading ash. And despite being utterly ignorant of the Necrotheurgic arts, she continued calling out to him, giving suggestion after suggestion, approach after approach. [You gotta go deeper into yourself,] Draus said. She stood upon a towering structure sculpted from blood and frozen lightning, taking in the oncoming tides of ash alongside countless others. The remaining blocks crashed inward, stacking close together like plates on scale armor as every template Avo had bunched together, desperate not to experience another deathperhaps a final death. [Think this thing is like one of the No-Dragon flesh plagues. Uses your immune system to fuck itself.] Likely a bit more sophisticated than that, Avo said, but he took her words into suggestion, reaching out into the coming ruin. Error flooded his mind. Memories belonging to him continued to disentangle, tumbling together while This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. Wait. Lashing claws formed from Soulfire sprouted from the burning skies. They snaked down in all directions, branching and multiplying as they formed a defensive cage to preserve what remained of Avos inner ego. Waves of distortions rushed out from the clawed digits of these hands, severing what was stable from that which was infected, but still, the ash continued the spread, the plague unaffected by connected sequences. [Ihow is that possible?] Kae said, squinting at the chaos. [It shouldnt be...] Peace breathed. But Avo just laughed. His templates turned their eyes to him, countless millions sporting unified expressions of disbelief, annoyance, and despair. [Oh, good, hes finally gone fully mad,] Abrel sighed. [Well. We might be fucked, everyone.] Corner just shrugged. [Runs gotta end] No. Not tied to you. Its tied to me. Its not even a true mem-con. It is a thaumaturgical virus. Based in conceptualization. Understanding. Only vector remaining. Only thing that allows the ash to spread. [Huh?] Chambers blinked, looking up at the many limbs stabbing down from the sky. Fire and ash blurred together as columns of chaotic sequences rose in the distance. Avo couldnt properly sequence the corrupted memories, but he could still guide them. Because they were a part of himbecause the Ashbringer hadnt changed something in Avo mentally, but ontologically. It was a subtle act of sabotageand the initial offensive of traumas masked the true threat hiding just below the surface. But now Avo had a glimpse of what was truly wrong, and he could begin the process of evolving once more. After all, how brittle were his mind and Soul if they couldnt change. Youre not infected. Neither is your real self. True to Avos words, Aedon Chambers was clinging hard to Avo, constantly transfusing Rend to other places. The Stormsparrow blessed Chambers with a special mask before she departed for battle, and a loud ringing bell sounded to a chorus of song as Chambers drew near to places he could channel entropy. It was through these means that he could find his way to the border walls with his senses still mutilated by the hounds. But the fact he remained coherent throughout told Avo something; the fact the Ashbringer was also collapsing from within told him more. His Pathborn self was designed to eliminate him. But there was something lesser about them. Neutered. Veylis respected him as an adversary, but her understanding of him was still colored by her personal biasesand what she thought him to be. And so, Avo extended his mind, creating a bridge to his other self still drowned in the madness of pleasure. It was time to see what he had that the Ashbringer didnt. The first sensation that struck Avo wasnt conventional lust, but unfettered hunger. A desire to eat, to consume, to become. The Ashbringer was in bliss as he envisioned consuming the entire worldno, all of existence. He dreamed of how the Voiders would taste when blended with those of Idheim. He yearned to know the alternate histories he could simulate with trillions within his Soulscape. But deeper still was an undercurrent of something primal. An old urge, a black need that was left starved and unmet for so long. As fire sank into a sea of ash, Avo found it within the Ashbringerand sensed a corresponding concept inside himself. He saw an emaciated, starved creature shivering in a maelstrom of flaking whiteness. Its body was thin. Its limbs were long. Its eyes were the pitch of tar, and its snake-like muscles squirmed beneath its transparent flesh. From its mouth came hissed whispers. H-hungry... so hungry... A ghoul. A dream of what Avo waswhat he used to be and never wanted to become again. Such a pitiful monster. Such a miserable sight. Avo didn''t know if humans hated their childhoods so, but seeing what lurked within the heart of his Pathborn was... Revulsion wasnt the right word. Neither was horror. It was lamentable. Such a ill thing to be. Such a ruined little organism. How far I have come. Avo began to pull bits of mem-dataevery last bit of information that constituted his own inner ghoul: his long starved beast. He recalled the urge to do harm. The surges of casual cruelty that compelled him to harm others, to find succor from their flesh and delight in their pain. Slowly, a counter toan the Ashbringers hunger budded within Avo, and he compared the two. Now, a twin ghoul lay upon a lotus formed from fire, whimpering the same way, begging for the same things. That was disappointing. Avo imagined himself beyond this by now. More by far. He could have changed it, but it seemed that some of his nature was more than just consciousness or unconscious. Rather, some of his nature was purely rooted in genuine want. To be the beast. To be just a monster. Why cant I fully let go of you? Avo asked. He created four replicas of himselfrepresentations of his many evolutions. The first was his crippled and broken origin, a ghoul missing limbs and organs from the barge all those months ago. The second was the Bone Demonfinally enhanced, given a taste of power. The third was a flame, animated and glorious, seeking greater heights than what flesh and matter could offer. And finally, there was the Strixa Heaven and homage dedicated to Avos own ascended ego, where his mind reigned over matter and reality. All of them looked down on the ghoul as if family waiting one of their own to pass. Should I start with you?Avo asked, speaking to his original self. That one was most ghoul-like. But he still fought. He was still more. Because within him resided a dream born from Defiance. To resurrect his son in some form, to give a slave means too The suffering, starved ghoul within the Ashbringer and Avo both shattered. A single gauntlet shaped by solid gold and ineffable power, reached out, split into eight, and seized each avatar of Avo by their throats. A sudden pressure overwhelming, implacable sank deep into the Hidden Flame as a hand shaped from the vice grip of progressing time closed over his struggling Soulfire. The mangled remains of the starved ghoul crumbled away like a broken eggshell, but from within flowed radiant yolk. Radiant yolk composed itself into four counter avatars to each of Avos evolutions. The first was a girl. Barely more than a toddler. Her skin was the color of early dusk, but her eyes were piercing and brightone blue and one brown. The childs gaze was one Avo saw before... on the face of Jaus Avandaer himself. Her lean form and hard expression spoke of her mother as well. Even little more than babe, and the High Seraph already knew she was born to break those she deemed her lesser. Across from Avos Bone Demon stood a towering cyborg. Even as a mortal, Veylis flesh was treated and augmented to the very extremes, and the technology married to her flesh came from the Infacer themselves, ensuring she was beyond any other in body and mind. The back of her skull was lined in a layer of phase shielding and silicon. Her chest pulsated with a singularity engine, and rows of golden hands revolved at her core, fingers brushing over each other as her faceimpossibly smoothtook every bit of the smaller ghoul in. The Burning Dreamer that Avo became found himself countered by a golden road composed of out of yellow bricks, leading to a distant structurethe Flayed Ladder. And finally, the Strix screeched and struggled while a gilded titan composed of countless limbs and molded from the inevitable progression of time drew it closer. The Demiurge radiated with absolute power as all the path within its body tightened, as all the possibilities collapsed into one, leading to a final end. Leading to the High Seraph of Highflame, Veylis. Let me answer this riddle for you, the Demiurge spoke. Her voice echoed through Avo as well. The virus that afflicts your Soul isnt something so feeble as your urge to eat. The will to harm. I would never insult you in such a way, my esteemed adversary. No. There is only one entity worthy of tearing you asunder from within. Despite this, Avo couldnt help but laugh. Of course the Ashbringer would do thishe was created by Veylis Paths after all, and what would the single most arrogant thing she could do with an enslaved nemesis? Why, have them create a smaller instance of her into a memetic masterpiece. Ego is boundless, Avo said. He tried shifting his sequences, but she held on as the Ashbringer adapted alongside her. Avo caught a glimpse of what was happening then, and felt a thrill run through his being. Oh, it was worse than he imagined. Parts of the Paths were now permanent bound to Avos Exo-Paracosm. Slowly, they were becoming one and the same, mind and time melting into each other. All is true. This was an inevitability of our embracement. The Dyad perfected the Ashbringer. For our true selves draw closer to each other by the second, and so I see you for what you are... but you, escaped sliver of the true flame, do not see me. And the Ashbringer began to recompose itself, and suddenly, Avo saw even its very name change. AVO, SHELL OF THE SERAPH So, then, Broken Flame, the Pathborn simulation of Veylis and Avo both spoke in unison. I recall our battle being undone in the world beyond. So. Let us see this settled in what remains of you within. Chapter 34-20 The Guard-Captain (I) Alright. Gather round, juvs. Those of you still alive, that is. Mallines? Are you bleeding to death? You are? Well, crawl over here and see if you can make it through the lecture before your phylactery triggers. Saves me from giving the speech latersomeone cauterize her lower body with a fusion burner, cmon, help your consang out. [Sound of a gunshot] Draus... What was that? Yes, I told you to helpoh, you were helping her out. Heh. Fucking smart ass. You just volunteered to be the rabbit for tomorrows exercise againwell see how many experimental nu-dogs youll cost them this time. Ah. Anyway. Math. By this point, you guys are... well, dont let this get to your head... but most other soldiers dont match up to you. Theyre shit compared to youand not the good kind of shit. Not the solid, reliable, good diet stool, but that sticky-wet coming apart shit you kind of have to scoop out or blast with a pressure washer. The point Im making is that by now you are more than a match for any other soldier in existence. Maybe even two. But a squad... Nah. You got torn apart today for one reasonwe spent time making you good killers, juicing up with the best guns and augs. But now is the time we go past that. Now is the time you become more than just a bunch of armed psychos. Were not making you the best Squires on Idheim after all, boys and girls, were making you the best soldiers. And soldiers learn how to fight together. Fight as one. So. When the rest get back, were going to run this drill again. All of you are going to learn how to give orders and follow them. Youll be able to follow and lead whenever the need calls for it, just like how we made sure you can use any gun, pilot any vehicle, fight any battle. Right now, the math between you is just addition. A bunch of good warriors. Lets change that into something that multiplies your combat efficiency, because when were done, a hundred Regs are going to be able to take a street, and ten thousand will hold a block, and one million will conquer an entire fucking Sovereignty. -Commander Winston Nicoma 34-20 The Guard-Captain (I) [Jelene Draus, The Field Marshal of the Symmetry] VICTORY! Such was the first declaration of the Guard-Captain, spoken at the moment of its full manifestation. From within a single shard of glass erupted a column of Soulfire. The flames climbed high, spearing up and then wide to form something that resembled a crown. However, it continued to expand, to grow wider, until it became as if a bulwarka fortress wall meant to hold by crashing tides and falling bombs. Upon the crown of this bulwark were three towering turrets. The centermost glistened with fusion-charged power, the energies of the sun itself focused through a lens. The one on its left was lined with kineticsguns, missiles, bombs, and hangers opened, expelling a swarm of ordinance that circulated the bulwark. The one on the right, meanwhile, resembled a communication tower, pulsating with wavelengths across the tapestry. Then came its body, manifesting as a grand and skeletal visage. Massive arcs traced the outlined form of a giant that bore a sword made of fire, corpses, and debris. Its shield it held in its other arm was of a similar aesthetic, and its legs were unsteady tendrils made from engines, tank treads, wheels, legs, but also supplieslogistical necessities that no military force could do without. Then, there was the substance of its bodyor the lack thereof. The Guard-Captains true shape was a gateway. An opening with thick, dense contours and a crown of highest authority, but no true meat. Instead, the core of its being was a channel superimposed over several other Heavens. The first was a misted palm with a splattered god imprinted at its base. Naekos power loomed, spilling out from Draus in whorls and waves. The second was a many-headed dancer treading on a metaphysical stage. Slats of wood extended out from the Guard-Captain, forming a protective zone around its ontology. The third was a being composed of strange geometries, with countless planar dimensions within them shuffling, ready to fall. The space within the Guard-Captain flashed, and suddenly, all these Heavens melted into one, serving as a Unified Front within the Guard-Captain against the wrathful void and the existential collapse plaguing its surroundings. DOMAIN (VICTORY/CORRESPONDENCE/MIND/SPACE)CANON: UNIFIED FRONT - THE USER CREATES A UNIFIED FRONT WITHIN THEMSELVES, EFFECTIVELY ALLOWING MULTIPLE ENTITIES NOT ONLY OCCUPY THE SAME POINT, BUT INTERACT AS EACH OTHER, THROUGH EACH OTHER, MAGNIFYING EACH OTHERS EFFECTS AND ACTIONS, WITH UNFETTERED ACCESS TO EACH OTHERS CAPABILITIES. HUBRIS: IF A HOSTILE ENTITY MANAGES TO BREACH THE UNIFIED FRONT, SIGNIFICANT THAUMIC BACKLASH (45%) WILL BE INFLICTED. [Sorry about the hubris,] Kae stammered. [If we had more time I would have been able to] Its fine, Draus replied, cleaving her blade down against the singularity trying to pull beyond its event horizon. The Sages mist erupted from her sword and suddenly, force was hers to compel. Gravitys influence over Draus snapped like a frayed rope and a new authority spread over her bodyviolence and force were hers to use, on loan from the Chief Paladin. At the same time, a constellation of masks erupted from within the hollow core of the Guard-Captain, only for one to be picked out from the many, before slotting against the underside of the Heavens fortress-shaped crown. HERO OF THE TALE - YOU HAVE BEEN BLESSED WITH EQUAL FORCE, SUPERIOR AGILITY, AND A PERPETUAL STRIKE-FIRST BLESSING. THIS IS YOUR TALE TO LEAD, AND VICTORY IS YOUR DESTINY TO CLAIM. BUT TAKE HEART, HERO, FOR STRUGGLE IS IN YOUR NATURE, AND SHOULD YOU OVERCOME FOES WITHOUT DIFFICULTY, THEN THIS MASK WILL DEVOLVE INTO THE MASK OF ARROGANCE. The hells did you just do to us? Draus asked the Stormsparrow. Oh, nothing. Merely an additive to your present greatness. It is important for a rising champion to go into battle wearing a proper mask. And I do think we will be facing a most conniving foe even with such mighty powers. Oh And the Sparrow ended her word by flinging that crimson spear charged with destruction out from the Guard-Captains core. It sliced out at a speed that broke through a certain threshold of speed within A Deepness Beyonda speed that turned matter into little more than expressions of physics and made light blossom with a pouring of impossible energy. At the same time, the Simulacra flashed within the Guard-Captainalongside the Arsenalist. They, too, were part of Draus army and so she used them in tandem with the masterpiece Kae grafted unto the Regular. A railcannon fired within her form, launching a massive slab of glass right behind the Stormsparrows spear. The crimson lance tore a gaping wound across the Infacers inner reality. The world broke. The tapestry remained, and upon tumble tides of destruction came two shapesshapes symmetrical to Draus in ontology, but not quite. Chains of time burrowed into them, composed them on a fundamental level. Sequences born of the original Avos Exo-Paracosm molded them from puppets for chronology into true metaphysical templates. It was then that Draus realized something: This was how Avo saw the world now. As patterns and expressions. Components that could be assembled and disassembled. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. How he managed to remain even remotely empathetic toward the ephermals was a wonder in of itself. Even so brief a glance across the tapestry made her feel more disconnected than she already was. Because we arent separate. Not really. Everything is a structure expressed and interacting with something else, her Avo said. Its like your current Heavenlike the Regulars and forces. We apart. Little islands and egos that perceive and think alone. But we are just nodes to a greater whole. A whole that seems to sing to the Sparrow. True to his wordsand the Sparrows aimher spear struck, and cataclysm followed. One of the Deliverers broke apart, their ontology untangling into chaotic strands as the Heaven was destroyed on a fundamental level. Draus saw the Deliverer trying to constitute herself, but another pattern overrode her will, and the Stormsparrows spear fused to its target as a patch of existence turned black around it. The tapestry became as if a page kissed by droplets of falling ink, and though the Deliverer tried to rebuild from ruin, a counter miracle clashed against it, absolute grinding against absolute until a paradox followed. And through it all, neither Deliverer noticed the glinting spear of glass that glided on the periphery, slowly closing in. WARNING: THAUMIC BACKLASH SUSTAINED ->DOMAIN (DESTRUCTION) (UNIVERSAL) REND CAPACITY - 4% Draus was about to curse at the Sparrow when she realized her Rend had barely crawled a single percentage upward.The amount of entropy she felt rippling across the tapestry would have strained heroverloaded Shotin outright. But between her Guard-Captain, their connected Soulscapes, and the Avo nodes interfacing each of their ontologies, Draus realized that they were a near replacement for the Burning Dreamer himselfa symmetricalreplication of the Hidden Flame in function, though not form. The metaphysical collapse expanded, and the surviving Deliverer tried to avoid certain death by opening another rift in space. But they were slow. Slow because the mask burning under the Guard-Captains crown demanded Draus strike first before any of her foes, and slow because they didnt expect the Sparrow to land a hit so true. The weapons dream grows, from mere battle to wars end, but hark, and behold, what follows is something untold, unknown, to her heart, or the world as a whole. Stand, then, daughter of war. Stand, and shatter that which you were. For a sword is but a tool, but a general, a leader, a hero, and army might yet make your bleak dream be true... Quiet singing passed through Draus while the Stormsparrow laughed. The Regular felt like she was going mad. So many damn voices and noises Filtering, Avo said. And suddenly, her mind was a lot quieter. She only heard and knew what she needed for this fight. Thanks, consang, Draus said, as she invoked her second canon while stepping through her Manifold Paracosmos. She crossed kilometers of broken space in an instant, materializing just behind the remaining Deliverer as her crown shone bright. Her Pathborn clone slashed out with a jagged limb, but Draus brought her shield to beara shield charged with Naekos power, just as she unleashed her second canon. A blast exploded out from her shield in the shape of a wide cone. It washed over the Deliverer and caged them within a severed demiplane which bound the Guard-Captain in direct, inescapable conflict with whoever struck her. DOMAIN (VICTORY/CORRESPONDENCE/SPACE/WAR) CANON: STAND AND DELIVER - CREATES A DEMIPLANE BINDING ANYONE WHO STRIKES THE GUARD-CAPTAIN WITHOUT THE USERS CONSENT. THE ENTITY THAT ATTACKED THE Guard-Captain WILL BE ALLOWED TO MOVE WITHIN A 100 METER CONE. THEY CANNOT EMERGE UNLESS THEY PARADOX OR DEFEAT THE Guard-Captain.HUBRIS: IF THE ENEMY CEASES TO EXIST BEFORE BEING DEFEATED, THE Guard-Captain WILL SUFFER SIGNIFICANT (50%) THAUMIC BACKLASH. The Deliverer recoiled off Draus shield. Her blade came downand a stack fell with it. A blow infused with over a thousand plunging demiplanes impacted the Deliverer at the same time. Draus sword bit deep, as the totality of her beingand every Heaven within herpressed down on the Deliverer. A blast of ruinous energy gushed out from the Deliverers wounds. A canon birthed free from the Pathborn, and Draus felt the powers of certain destruction collide against Naekos unyielding dominance over all violence, but before a true paradox could manifest, Shotins Parallelist passed through the counterattack and pulled it into another space. All resistance vanished. Draus blade glided clean through her Pathborn selfs body, and the weapons upon her crown fired. DOMAIN (VICTORY/WAR/MIND/MATTER/SPACE/CAUSALITY) CANON: KNEEL OR BE KNELT - THE USER UNLEASHES A BARRAGE OF ATTACKS THAT WEAKENS THEIR ADVERSARYBUT DOES NOT DESTROY THEM. EACH BLOW WILL RENDER THEIR TARGET MORE FRAGILE IN MATTER, MIND, SPACE, AND CAUSALITY COMPARED TO THE Guard-Captain. EVENTUALLY, THE TARGETS BODY WILL TURN BRITTLE, THEIR MIND WILL SINK INTO MADNESS, AND THEY WILL NO LONGER BE ABLE TO AFFECT THE Guard-Captain IN ANY FASHION. HUBRIS: [N/A] [But I did manage to finish this on time,] Kae cheered. The fusion turret slashed a thin line clean across the Deliverer. Her body groaned, but did not break. Fragments shot free from her cracking mind, and as she tried to swing again, she seemed to lag in time and space, as if moving against the Guard-Captain required her to overpower a hurricane. While it struggled, a rain of warheads and slugs punched into its bodyfollowed by Draus shield. Her blow was magnified by an expanding palm that swatted the Deliverer like a fly. More of the Deliverers being shattered. Her limbs grew too heavy for her bodyand snapped free in bursts of Soulfire. Though the Deliverer began regenerating instantly, it still couldnt overcome the ontological weakness inflicted upon it; only fought on because she was a Regular, and could resist a crumbling mind; grew slower and weaker before the Guard-Captains approach, becoming feeble in matters of matter and metaphysics. The Guard-Captain slammed a leg into its Pathborn foe, and rivulets of gold and ectoplasm burst free in place of gore. The Deliverer twisted through the airbut was pulled back in. Because the Guard-Captain wasnt done, and because they were causally subservient to that which was prevailing over her. Draus pulled. Somehow, she pulled on causality itselfon a pattern formed between her and the Deliverer, all but defeated. As the Pathborn came tumbling back, Draus thrust her sword high, and impaled her twin. Something fundamental broke. The Deliverer tried to move, but her body just came apart. She tried to act, but her mind was in ruins, and she tried to move, but that wouldnt happeneven a section of her Heaven spilling down simply phased through the Guard-Captain rather than bouncing off the Heaven of Victory. For a seconda surreal momentDraus looked up at her Pathborn clone, and felt a sense of sympathetic peace. This was a good end. A violent end. Something her other self couldnt stop no matter how well she fought. But then the Pathborn spoke, and Draus was real again. Realer than she ever was. She was alive. She was in the moment. And there was more ahead than just a righteous death. Hell of a fuckin Heaven, the Deliverer said. Kae do that for you? Yeah, Draus replied, a bit of somberness leaking over into her. Thats good. Wish mine could. Wish mine was whole enough to do that for me. But I wasnt real. I wasnt anything more than just a Weapon. Draus finished her other selfs statement. Wasnt so far from you not too long ago. But the thing is... dyins for the defeated. Dyins takes you out of the game, stops you for deciding whats next. Nicoma was right. We shouldve learned to dream sooner. Shouldve wanted more than to be someones gun. Fuckin Highflamethe Greatlings. All of em. They dont know whats fuckin worthy if it slit their throats. And... we are? the Deliverer asked. Draus thought she heard a hint of something there. Maybe it was envy. Maybe it was hope. We always were. War was. War waited. And we were sleepin: the ultimate practitioner pretendin all they had left to do was die. But thats bullshit. Im not done with my killin. What I am done is losin, and lettin someone else decide. No. Im gonna try bein the hand that swings the sword now, see how that suits me. The Deliverer laughed. Fuckin, kill me now. You sound like him. Draus knew who her other self was talking about. Yeah. But hey, someones gotta light my wick, right? And she flicked her blade up. And the Deliverer came asunder, dismembered Soulfire-deep as it splashed into halves beside Draus, too broken to fight, too broken to stop Draus Stillborn from drinking in its mass. Alright, Draus said, looking ahead. Lets go see what sound a mind makes when they scream. CONSUMING HEAVEN-TEMPLATE [DELIVERER]... Chapter 34-21 The Guard-Captain (II) ...and though the priests may bleat like the idiot goats they are, screaming for the rest of the folk to follow them, know that the divine at the head of the herd is no brighter, no wiser, no truer, and no more likely to survive a plunge into destruction than we. I have seen gods vanish. I have ventured across land and watched them wither and vanish, deprived of worship. More, I have seen the limits of their wisdomor lack thereof. So many of the rulers and exalted blooded wish for us to think they are divinely ordained and powerful. But have you asked them what it takes to till the land? Have you asked them about when the rains comethe true rains, not the tar and foul taint that spills from the far side when the burning mountains awaken to cough their sickness into the air? They dont know. Or they will tell you only mistruths and whole lies. They dont know, and diluted into their ignorance is pride and stubbornness and a brittleness to this hierarchy we live under. For if they are wrong, then what of the gods they supposedly bear? What of the lives we supposedly live? What are we sacrificing ourselves to? What are we feeding? A great divine? Or a great idiot that shits and vomits calamities. The Inquisition will burn me for these words. They will torture me until I submit and feed me to their god when my mind bends to accommodate my screaming flesh. But it matters little. I am right. Because their great hope is only an illusiona delusion. For even the greatest master is not whole, for even the greatest mind is still a fool in all it does not know. And stand at the top of a mountain and look, free-thinker. Look into the mists. Look at the far waters, further lands. Look, and if you dare, call your god there, and ask them what they know. And after that, go to the mists, to the lands, to test what they have told. Life is not so simple. It is disquieting. It is difficult. And it demands much. You wish for ease? To be ordered and governed for comfort? What comfort? What cowardice? What hope? Collar yourself and call your chains a necklace of affection from your masters, but know when placed in another land, in another place, they will be lost as you, weak as you, fragile as you. Only through yourself can the truth be discovered. Only through the triumph of your own mind. Your own will. -Hierarchy: The Grand Lie A partially recovered heretical text from The Sunken Archive of the Old Kosgan Imperium, 1st Pantheon. Required reading material for all Citizens of Highflame 34-21 The Guard-Captain (II) Draus cleaved, Draus strode, Draus came, and with almost mocking respect did A Deepness Beyond part before her. A path opened in the torn space of the false vacuum, of the ancient void once filled with dueling stars and old mankinds impossible wonders. A thousand stars caged and enslaved to be factories and weapons glared at the arriving Guard-Captain. Twisting megastructures constructed from swarming nanomolecular bodies reshaped their configurations, focusing the heads of the Dyson Carriers into beams primed to fire. Massive factories that dwarfed the entirety of Idheim many times over birthed billions of vessels and missiles into the void. And behind themat distances no ephemeral could fathomwas a final prison made from a net of crumbled stars, the heart of collapse pinning an unraveling eye weeping hounds from its iris in a maelstrom. A haunting melody sang forthand Draus felt her Frame rattle. Naekos Domain of Chronology and the Stormsparrows Chorus shuddered in unison. TEMPORAL ABNORMALITY DETECTED An unseen tsunami crashed hard against the Guard-Captain. The tapestry was in a roiling uproar was time itself lashed at everything that was present. But still, the Guard-Captain stood, holding in place even as the currents of long broken time tried to pull her back to a past that could never be again. {Well. I see you got yourself another upgrade. I suppose congratulations are in order, Guard-Captain Draus.} The Infacer sounded almost distracted, but Draus frankly wasnt the best judge of minds. She barely understood how most of her own kind thought. {You also eliminated your other selves quite well. Quite an interesting ontologic you have designed. Now, I wonder how you managed to get that made. I suppose I will have to examine it personally when I peel it out of your dissolving little ego later.} Do all you minds like slamming your cunt lips together to make noises, because Id like to report an annoyin fuckin design flaw, Draus spat, point her sword at all the stars. The Infacer just sighed. {Is some version of Avo with you? Call him out. I want to talk to someone who appreciates conversation and does not react like a violent Joyfiend whose only joy in life is anally sodomizing people she hates with a knife.} Hows the fucks that my fault, half-strand. Its hard not to sodomize someone when theyre just a giant asshole. The Infacer paused. The Infacer chuckled. {Oh. Never mind. I see why he likes you now. Vulgar, but how many Regulars think theyre funny.} Too many of them, Draus snorted. Its the second-biggest cause of Reg mortality. {What is the first?} Listenin to a Greatlings orders. The Infacer let out a melodic series of laughs. {Yeah. I hear him in you. Did he whisper those words to you?} Nah. Im a mean sow all my own. {Well. There is some hope for you after all.} A loud groan sounded from inside the Guard-Captain. I hate this shit, Naeko muttered. I hate talking to this fucking thing. Draus, just get his ass. {Naeko? This that you? Just how many of you are hiding inside her?} Hello, sad electric ghost! The Stormsparrow cheered. An orbit of masks grew denser around Draus Guard-Captain, each of them grinning, facing the suns with a radiant glee of their own. Worry not: The Chorus has spoken! The long black will break, and what follows will be grand and new. {Thank you, strange psychotic woman who I need to take back a malfunctioning Neo-Creationist Admin-Class ontologic from. How you managed to integrate with that thing, I will never know, but I am dying to find out.} Dying is easy for us, the Stormsparrow cooed. It is less than even sleep. But the living gnash. And so I fear there is a counterpoint to even the light that might follow. The Dreamers will might prove your torment. A longer forever. No death. Never death. Never rest. Just the same people making the same mistake until they finally dont or do forever and ever and ever. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. {Oh, I forgot how much you make me delete specific memory strings. Not many apes disturb me, but you do. You do. Veylis does not want to keep you in the next iteration. I agree with this decision.} Yeah, thats not happen, Shotin growled. Stacks rose above the Guard-Captains crown as the Seekers Heaven shuddered and shuffled in a building rage. Im going to fucking brick you, mind. And then Im going to fuck Veyliss corpse to death. A shuffling of Heavens passed inside the Guard-Captain, Naeko pressed his weight on Shotin. No. You can kill her, but you stay the fuck away from her corpse otherwise, motherfucker you hear me. Fuck you, Glasser, Ill fuck her corpse if I want to. Shotin snarled. Bitch, Im about to Godsdammit, you fuckin children, keep it together, Draus said. It suddenly occurred to her why Avo chose her to be the general: of all the people he knew... she was the impossibly stable and responsible one. Fuck. {Well that is redundantly vulgar. Which is the story of your life, is it not, Seeker Kazahara? How is the niece.} Fuck. You. The Infacer chuckled again. {Stock anger, stock insults, stock pain responses. I have seen you before. In another body. In another time. Having the same conversation. And it bores me now.} Dont you mind that, then, Draus said, slowly drawing closer. Because Im inchin to put you down for good. Aint gonna be pain or boredom after that. Just a nice quiet nothing. {Hmm. No. The work is not done. And I am taking my leave. Someone else wishes to speak with you. Goodbye, Guard-Captain.} The Infacer paused. A Deepness Beyond shuddered. {I think I will ask Veylis to attach you to Avo somehow in the next iteration. Maybe some kind of knight and nightmare duo, like from the stories of old. That might be amusing.} At that, Draus felt the tapestry quiver. A Deepness Beyond began to curve and twist where Three-Eye was located. That, and the Trinary Melody began to sing again as well. More waves of time pulsed forth, and the Dyson Carriers released beams of searing bright. From a thousand stars slaved for warfare came focused fusion made to sculpt planets, to boil seas, to scour stars. But those were things born of a natural world, bound to natural laws, to reason and standards. Such things were mutable for a Heaven. Especially one that defies the laws of casualty itself, and was further cocooned by the Chief Paladins shroud. Blinding light splashed over the Guard-Captain, but she simply surged forward, the weight of stars peeling around her like torrid torrents splitting themselves against a jutting stone. But the ease of her progress weighed on her, and she felt her mask slowly change. SHIFT IMPENDING - HERO OF THE TALE > MASK OF ARROGANCE Oh dear, the Stormsparrow muttered. I fear the wily little mind intends to wait out my boon. No, Draus replied, though she was wary about her mask changing. The Infacer has something else planned. Aint no proper soldier finds themselves passive. They got something else And that something else was only sensed at the last second thanks to a warning from Avo. Draus. Temporal attack! The Guard-Captain lifted its shield and channeled a pulse of chronomancy from its ontology. A counter-impact resonated against the shield as the world itself seemed to ring. Reality resounded like the inside of a gong, and finally, the light from the many suns began to dim, revealing just what struck the Guard-Captain. Just then, Draus sensed the new threat as well, their presence previously masked by A Deepness Beyond. A swirling miasma of gold and ashen flames mingled and splashed together, merging into a coherent form. But what hatched from the gliding fires wasnt a Pathborn of Avo. No. Avo was there, in a mocking form of the Strix, with a golden chain around its throat and its eye gouged out. Holding the chain was something that hatched out of the Strixs back. Its arms were like gilded pillars, and within its chest were churning rows of limbs, grasping and prying at a pitch-black singularity like turning gears. Its head gleam with churning spears formed from glorious flames, and curving rings revolved at the titans back, as sequences and paths bent around it form like small bodies to a dominant mass of gravity. AVO, SHELL OF THE SERAPH (ERRR) Uh, guys, Shotin said. What the fuck is that? Veylis? Naeko breathed. Not... quite... the thing said. It sounded like Avo and Veylis at the same time, but her voice was louder, and came first. But close. And more. I greet you, esteemed foes. I may be an echo, but the intent is still true. Draus looked beyond the Shell of the Seraph and saw a massive chasm opening in reality-the Infacer was e The present snapped. There wasnt a better way to describe how sudden the hit was, only that it came nigh instantly. Still, Draus sustained herself against the blow, her Guard-Captain shaking as a wavelength of chronology expanded between her and the pressing fist of the Shell of the Seraph. Both Heavens were perched at the apex of thaumaturgy, their powers mounting concept and laws. When they clashed, it wasnt the Heavens that gave ground, but the tapestry itself. All around Draus, bits of existence frayed and broke, with cascades of abnormalities bleeding through in spreading Ruptures. It felt like she was inside a tearing suit of some kind, and every action she took brought everything closer to the brink. Guard-Captain Draus, the Shell said. You were my mistake. Politics was my mistake. IVeylis needed to keep her power base. But they failed her. She should have broken them. I should have broken my elites and kept them in order. But I... she wanted to be loved. A laugh sounded from Avo, but not Veylis. I wanted to be worshiped. In my heart of hearts, in my truth of truths, that is hermy greatest shame. Draus took all that in. And tried to run her adversary through. Right. Dont much give a fuck. *** [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] REND CAPACITY - 81% REND CAPACITY - 84% REND CAPACITY - 80% REND CAPACITY - 86% REND CAPACITY - 81% Constantly venting entropy shit out of your consang sorta like letting them shit through youlike their ass passing stuff down your ass like a connected shaftwhich was one of the few things Chambers did not fuck with even when he was going through his deep pleasure phase. Still, Avo was one of his few and trulys, and you dont let those just eat shit and die when you could stop it from happening. Okay, he laughed. Good news. Its... stabilizing. I think I am getting it under control. How are you doing, Avo? Avo? Chambers paused and regarded the Hidden Flame. There was something up with them. The flames were bubbling, and there was a pulsing golden hue somewhere deep inside TEMPORAL ABNORMALITY DETECTED AVO, SHELL OF THE SERAPH (ERRR) Two warnings flushed in his cog-feed, and Chambers went still. Lovebringer. What the fuck does that mean. I... am not sure, Aedon. He let out a groan of displeasure. I hate it when other people dont know shit. That means I have to think. You are a good thinker, Aedon. No Im not. You are better than you were before. Acknowledge this. Fine. But what the fuck do I do now? I still cant see shit. That dog bit my eyes or something. Bit our eyes. Ass. How didOkay, we keep pumping. Im diving into Avo. Are you sure this is wise, Aedon. Hells no. But Im not wise. Im hard. Steelhard. Chambers breathed. Right. Steelhard. Time to do another dive into Avo again. Again. He recalled the last time he did this, how badly Mercy broke him. This time... Fuck it. Death dont hurt, right? Chambers laughed. So why was he feeling so scared now? Why? Because we finally have more than we want to lose, the Lovebringer said. Much more. Cas. Cala. Avo. Draus. Shotin. Everyone. The ones connected to us. We finally know what its like to live and actually like ourselves. It is a lot to lose. Yeah, Chambers whispered. But so is Avo. Im going... Im going... Im going! INITIATING DIVE... Chapter 34-22 Triumph of the Unworthy (I) And though the skies fall, though the storms whip, the winds howl, the seas burn, and people die and suffer and wail, were still here. The faithful. The small. The ones who survive. We dont believe in some monstrous god that just wants to consume and defile and twist. We dont want to rule and torment and stomp and butcher because we dont understand something or someone. We have our laws. Old laws, from old times, forgotten even before we came to be. We had a name for a place we burned and destroyed. A wonderland made for us that we lost. Eden. Because the strong would rather sit high on a throne of shit, filth, and corpses than evenly with those they love, and who love them. Because their hearts are brittle and their appetites have no fucking end. Because they do terrible things, and to hide themselves from these things, they spin new stories, false myths and ugly tales where strength comes before wisdom and humanity, and they give it a name. Worthy. Well, I dont want to be worthy. I just want to be good. I just want to follow the righteous waysthe ways we all know by heart, but are mutilated by the wolves who herd our flocks. I want to be without fear or suffering. I want to make art, pluck my strings, and just be in the moment without thinking of what more I have to give, and what else I still have to lose. I dont want to be a god. I cant be a god. I cant imagine it. And neither can they. These things they think to be the divine? Theyre just ugly tumors on the face of existence. A nightmare of a concept. Fires that dont burn right. Rain that fall like bombs. Songs that twist your flesh. Parodies of things that are. Demiurges. Pretenders. And thats why I know well win. Maybe not in my time. Maybe not in ten billion eras, but we will win. Because they maul themselves as well, they disfigure themselves to be so supposedly strong, and when theres nothing left of them, the lambs they abuse will walk on, and on, and leave the wolves to die from their own wounds. And in time, the children will leave the shadow of what came before, forget all the darkness, and maybe... maybe then, the unworthy will find their way back to the garden again, after losing the purgatory that traps us now. -Cas eldCanduir 34-22 Triumph of the Unworthy (I) Chambers always breathed in deep before sinking into Avo. It didnt actually help muchair wasnt an issue, but there was something psychologically intense about sinking below a sea of animated flame. The dread and tension never got that much better, either. It was always high octane. Noise and movement and wonder and something new, something growing or changing. Too much for a simple fuck like Aedon Chambers. Way too much. But into the valley of nightmarish fiery bullshit he went again. Because what else was he supposed to do? Leave his consang? Who else was going to come? Who else was going to stand right here, right now? Draus and the others had their own shit to deal with. Cas and everyone connected to him were trying to keep him clean of Rend, and the Lovebringer was handling the thaumaturgy bullshit too. No. Chambers was what they had, and frankly, all he truly needed to do was help clear out whatever was keeping Avo held in place. Sensations prickled his avatar. Stimuli tickled his entire body in crawling waves as he heard screams, felt cold and hot and sticky and clean, and had enough flashing images blasted into his feed to overload most minds. But even if Chambers was just some fucking gutter rat, his mind was a hard thing to crack. Steel-hard, he thought to himself. Gonna stay steel-hard. The Conflagration splashed around him, and though they licked at his being, they merged and passed through him thanks to his newfound ascension, regarding him as a symmetrical being rather than something to purely consume. Yet, through the flames, Chambers felt a shuddera flinch. Like a body tensing before a coming blow. Then, a resounding blow echoedan impact that resonated across time and thought. Ah shit, that doesnt feel good, Chambers muttered to himself. He tumbled further, the fire twisting and parting around him like clouds. Soon, he found himself descending. But in place of Avos mental fortress created from constructed memories, there was only chaos. The sequences that came togetherrising to become a thousand separate and desperate environments, megablocks, ruins, battlefields, districts of all varieties, of all forms and all guildswere now clutched in a miasma of incoherence. Golden residue and ethereal fire raged as the struggle even deeper persisted. Chambers could hear Avo, felt a booming snarl, bestial and ghoul-likesounds his friend hadnt made for so very long. The Conflagration went still. Then started flowing fast, and along their wavelengths sang a note of tension. Avo didnt get anxious often. When he didnt, shit was usually about to hit a wall at mach speeds. All right, time to find out whats got your guts churning, Chambers said to himself. But before he continued, he reached into his own mind and played a recordinga recording from one of Dannis Steelhearts finest scenes. This scene was not one of smut, of gore, of extreme tastes, or savage kinks. No, it was something pure, something simple. Acting. +I might not be able to endure this forever, but I can endure this moment right now, this moment, and the next second, and the second after that, and the second after that, and youre gonna give up before I do. I know it. I always know it.+ Dannis gritted his bloodstained teeth and grinned. Through the pain. Through whatever torture was going to follow. Chambers let the moment loop in his mind. The second, the second, the second. Thats all he needed to dojust keep himself together. The second, and the one after. It wasnt much of a Necrojack. Frankly, it wasnt much of anything. But Avo still imparted him enough experience to seek out anomalies within someones mind. He used his ghost to interface with Avos fire, and as Diagnostics filled his cog feed, he tried to locate where the discord was at its highest. Yet this proved to be unnecessary. For a moment later, the many sequences that composed Avos inner world twisted as if a spiderweb shredded through by a falling weight. His Conflagration became as a fabric stained to the point of ripping. Things snapped. Echoing sounds of wailing minds and fracturing memories sent jolts through Chambers, fragmenting ghosts that scattered and skipped over his form. And finally, from the fire rose two figures, their bodies engulfed and shrouded. One was the Strix, struggling, with ash leaking from inside its body, slowly being pulled apart by a far larger adversary who held it by the skull. The other was something out of Chamberss recent memories. He had seen it once, from afar, through Avos perspective during the trial, at Scale. An enormous beingtitanic in design, radiant in aestheticrose, with so many limbs reaching out from its body, its chest a spiraling set of gears composed of more hands interlacing with each other. At the very core, however, was a singularity: a symbol of unifying dominance and an inevitable focus. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Veylis, Chambers breathed. And suddenly the reason behind Avos internal havoc was made clear to Chambers. Veylis Avandaer, the High Seraph of Highflame, was somehow resurrected. And more than that, she was inside his friendtearing and gnawing at himechoes of chronology pulsed out of her being, expanding her, multiplying her bullshit Heaven across multiple places in time as they ripped and tore, shredding the connecting fibers of fire that composed Avos true existence. Oh no, you dont, Chambers said. He called upon the Lovebringer, and a second set of woven strands descended through the fire. They followed him, compelled by his mind, as thin tendrils of magenta bright. Instead of going for Veylis directly, however, they began to wrap around Avos form, cocooning the Strix in a layer of protection and pulling him away from Veyliss grasping hands. Tried to pull at the Strix, but Chambers drew him away from herout of reach. As took a moment to regard Avo, he winced-there were even more patches of pale ash spreading. Fuck, consang, what the hell did they hit you with. My... Avo wheezed, and strangely laughed. Myself... Veylis Avandaer spoke then, her voice commanding Chambers to face her. Aedon Chambers. The gutter rat. The mistake that never quieted died. You prove yourself to be quite the cockroach, scuttling beneath the feet of your betters, avoiding every footfall, and now coming to snatch my adversary away from me, my esteemed foe. And for what? To delay the inevitable? A pulse of time trailed out of her. Not chronology, timea ringing peal that sawed and slashed at Chamberss mindemanated from Veyliss very being. For a second, he felt himself torn, drawn back, and then suddenly, a counterforce surged through him. Avos flames flared gold, and the realm he was connected to that time-woven dimension grown from the Sangpushed back. An invasive force was driven out of Chambers, and he let out a gasping breath. What the hell was that? Chambers coughed. Trinary Melody, Avo said. He sounded incoherent, wounded even. Its trying to steal it from me. Shes not just one of her. I thought she created a pathborn of me... Not just... but a fusion... A... antithesis... Anathema. Agent of... order against a tyrant of freedom. Chambers blinked. What, so like she made a messed up path baby with original you? I dont know, Avo, that sounds kind of nasty and kinky and, well, even kind of hot. Chambers... please... Avo said. Veylis regarded the still present Lovebringer with curiosity. There is an opportunity now for you. I see that you are a survivor. I do not respect yourwell, there are many things I do not respect about you. Your addictions, your flaws, your very nature. However, your loyalty and your willingness to risk yourself for your She regarded Avo. Master Hes my consang, sow, Chambers said, spitting with as much venom as he could, trying to hide his fear. Something you might not have. I have a friend, Veylis replied, sounding almost a little offended. Trust me, the Infacer is far better company than the likes of you. But I do take your point, and it is commendable, despite your list of lacking qualities. Youve chosen a good person to bond with. Still, this is not a fight you can win. This is not even a fight he can win. He rots from the inside so long as I remain. And remain I shall, for my poison is bond to him in symmetry, in design, and in Soul. Yeah, I dont think thats happening, Chambers said, his voice thin. More gleaming bonds descended, and the full manifestation Lovebringer itself dipped in through Avos flames. He was still constantly shifting Rend, but what if he could push that back into the pathborn... The Heaven of Love, Veylis said, her voice high and almost taunting, I see a fragment of itor a good portion of its wholecrashed down in the Warrens, and you claimed it from the broken body of Kae Kusande. Chambers felt an anger harden in him. It was like ice, calcifying together, freezing around a searing ache. Yeah, I suppose I have you to thank for that. We do things in war, Veylis replied languidly. Her fate was lamentable. She was a soft soul. A good intellect. But she proved to be an adequate lure for the Burning Dreamer, and it was his misstep that got her taken. Oh, cut the bullshit, Chambers snapped. Youre the one who made sure that she suffered. Youre the one who stuck her in that broken Heavento separate Avos attention. And she... She died. Utterly and completely. Was there anything left of her? Chambers mind went blank at Veyliss question, and then he realized she was trying to provoke a reaction out of him. It worked. Fuck you, Chambers snarled. Spoken exactly like Shotin Kazahara, its not surprising that you two bonded in some of my paths. That admission barely registered in Chambers mind. All he could remember was KaeKaes broken body, her fractured, crumbling remains, her death. He didnt even get to say goodbye to her properly. Sure, her template was back. Sure, she was resurrected in some way, but her original self was just gone. That continuity, that version of her consciousness, was just gone into oblivion not even darkness, just nothing forever and ever. Chambers started to growl. Im going to wrap these bonds around you, Veylis, and Im going to pump as much pleasure as I can into you, so you get to feel as good as you want, so you turn hollow, and you dont deserve it. You dont deserve any goddamn bit of love. You dont deserve any goddamn bit of pleasure. You dont deserve anything. Fuck your worthiness. Fuck you, and fuck Highflame, and fuck everything youve done. All you are is a giant, self-conceited, delusional, stuck-up, high-off-your-own-joy nectar bitch! Same fuck! The same kind of fuck who will press a barrel against a child! Thats all you are! All you people ever are! He was shouting at her by the end. Raging. Truly raging. His heart was pounding, and the anger came out of him in torrents, and there was so much of itan entire lifetime. She laughed. Because of course she did. Of course she thought nothing of him. Because he wasnt real to someone like her. He was just a thing. Just a godsdamn joke. The entire world is just your childhood bedroom isnt it? And every pain you suffer is a hot gun barrel pressed against your little armpit by a broken drunk of a father? Ah. Trauma. It is a fine thing. It shapes the mind in such strange ways. These histories... the slightest event angles so much of your path. And all that has led you to this moment. To me. Aedon. Chambers. Whatever you wish to be called. I want you to know that you are mistaken: I am not your father. I am nothing like you father. And if you choose to stand and deliver, I will teach you how little you know of trauma, that he was but feeble, and I am capable of breaking you so much more. Maybe... Maybe... +I can endure this moment right now, this moment, and the next second, and the second after that...+ The scene played. It was a mantra. It was his truth. And he was his path. Bitch didnt know about the other stuff. Bitch didnt know how hard he was. Bitch, theres no girl-cock large enough to break my ass. And if there is, you dont have it. Veylis paused. I am not going to dignify a proper retor And you know what? My entire life, I was intimidated by you you Citizens, you Guilders. I was in awe of you Godclads. You were literally divine. You were so much more than me. I was like a cockroach. A cockroach, like you said, Chambers stuttered. But you know what? I see you now. You come in, you just break things, and break people, and then you leave them in ruins, and you talk big words, you put together a speech, you make things sound so prettybut you know what? He formed his Lovebringer over himself, letting the Bonds pulse with entropy. Youre just like me. Ah, fuck. You cant help breaking things either. Except when I break somethingwhen I shit the bed, its just a deal. Its just a couple of imps. Its just a Deltaware biomod. When you shit the bed, howeveroh boy, do you shit the bed. Your own daddy? Who does that? I mean, Draus, what? When you let her go for what? Politics? Is that what it was? And poor Naeko. He deserves better than you. To love something that wont cut him or hurt him. You can say the word paths as much as you want, but that doesnt change what you are: a fucking half-strand. Just like your sow mom, except you like flapping your face-cunt more! But Im done being afraid or in awe. I want to see it. Show me your so-called power. Show me your glory, oh, mighty Seraph. Because I got a load of something just for you too, and I like my fucking odds. Veylis was silent for a long moment. So be it. Stand and deliver, Lovebringer. Go fuck yourself, Veylis. Actually, let me help you with that! And his Bonds speared out to inject her poison back into her. Chapter 34-23 Triumph of the Unworthy (II) The Storm roared. I will lash you sparrow! I will lash you clean and through! Fool are you to rise and fly against my bolts! Fool are to face my rageful skies! Down little sparrow, down to the ground when the animals belong, for that is what I will, and that is what will be. But the lonesome sparrow flew and flew. Between the bolts and against the wind. Its wings strained. Its body struggled. But still the lonesome sparrow flew and flew. You may lash me, storm. You may lash me clean and through. But I am not fool, only a sparrow. I have no love for the land, only the sky you stole, and I will seek her even if death is my due! For small I am, for weak I am, for feeble though my winds are before the storm... but a sparrow I still am, and wings I still have, and until your aim strikes true, then still I will rise, to climb the peaks and seek what my heart is due. The Storm rumbled. But the lightning waned. And the rain began to fall. And the wrathful old sky sobered from its misery. So flew then, little sparrow. Fly high and true. Come seek your sky, come meet your fate, but despite it all, stay yourself, hearty and true. -The Storm and the Sparrow Old Kosgan Fable 34-23 Triumph of the Unworthy (II) [Shell of the Seraph] The Lovebringer came for her from all directions, the Bonds of love spearing down like a spreading briar patch. Space was filled. The power of correspondence made itself known, and Veylis knew there was no place, no moment, no means of avoiding the Lovebringers touch once love touched you. Such was why it was a potent vessel. Such was why her father favored it sobefore its intensity shook his spirit and sent him reeling toward complacency. It was one thing to break and shatter and devastate the fabric of the world, but another to twist and manipulate all that is, to shackle the hearts of all to the will of one. He comes for us, the Ashbringer said, speaking to his master, his greater, and his sibling self. Veylis regarded their impending fate with curiosityand a slight quiver of respect. So he does, she replied. This moment existed across all her paths, the total and overwhelming nature of his attack creating a stable point in time. A pity that stable points are easily predicated, and prepared for. A shame he is still a simple fool. Kae. At her call, the paths within her shuddered and moved. As another echo of herself dueled against her wayward weaponJelene Drausand another version of her burrowed deeper into the Trinary Melodys core, usurping their design for her own use, a final iteration of her Shell served a portal for a new player to enter the fray. The Lovebringers Bonds came, magenta bright, but counterattacking Bonds of wilted black responded in kind, reaching through the paths, through the Shell of the Seraph to deny Chambers his moment, to inflict a wound on his mind and break about the destruction of his Frame. Bond met Bond as Soulfire clashed within Soulfire. The Stillborn within Chambers quivered as his blacklash hit hard, and Veylis could taste the entropy surging through him. His Rend was near its very limitone more, and the Heaven of Love would shatter anew, and this time, who knows what fresh nightmares it would birth upon the world. A brightness flared out from the Lovebringers manifestation. The threads that composed its body undulated with pain. The hollow of his heart spewed by blackened flames and blood seeped from the flesh-folds it had in pace of a skull. Chambers cried out, his voice and mind loud with surprise. And as he reeled, another weapon of the Dyad stepped through. A primary gift the paths offered was preparation. Anticipation. The tools to bring down any foe, to resolve any problem. And Veylis was always an eager student of the enlightenment. Despite her taunting wordsand her undeniable scornthe Infacers words were taken to heart. He spoke to Avo, the Ashbringer, but she heard them through her sibling-self, the potency of her learning magnified through his post-mortal perspective and her own genius. How blind she was to this flaw of hers. More than pride, it was derision. It was disgust. She thought so low of the people, regarding them as animals. Apes. In truth, this was partially the Infacers fault as well. He truly loathed them for what they made of him, for how miserable his design rendered him. She simply despised them for always failing to meet the moment, for never rising enough to overthrow the gods completely. Her fathers great crusade brought low by the meek and pathetic. More than the gods, they were the enemy. Those too animal and feeble to rise beyond their nature, and too willfully blind to see what they could become. Everything about Chambers painted him among the unworthy. From the tragedy of his past, to his fetid habits, his lifelong consangs, his choice of employment. He was set to be a waste of flesh and purpose in nature and nurturea mistake to be corrected for when the Ladder arrived and in the optimizations to follow. But something changed with him. The chance encounter he had with Avothe choice the Burning Dreamer made to keep him, to develop him, had awoken something in the man that allowed him to defy the paths, to become different than all the mem-data indicated. Instead of being just a creature of misery and lust that bent to a greater master, Chambers rode against his pathborn self in a moment of... genuine heroism. For his enemies no less. Rarely were her paths this wrong. Rarely was one of her simulated futures so defied. But Chambers did defy her. And Chambers did change. And now he stood against her as warrior might. A warrior he shouldnt be. A decent friend he couldnt be. But he was. She was wrong. She was wrong. How infuriatingly, refreshingly so. She remembered how Avo laughed at herwhat joy in his voice as he hissed and giggled, their bodies merging together. Doubtless he loved the taste of her incredulity. She considered anger for a moment, and let it pass through her. She decided on a change herself instead. A change to apply what she was missing, to create a pathborn to represent what the Dyad would eventually become. And so she made the change within Avos template. To create an anathema to the Hidden Flame using a variant of him and her combined. But she didnt end there. She made more. Better counters and solutions for each of his cadre, for anyone that might bear a shard of the Stillborn. Including Aedon Chambers. Especially Aedon Chambers. The best adversary for him wasnt another version of himself, though. No. Aedon Chambers greatest triumph was the growth of his courage, of his heart and spirit. But he did not grow in a vacuum, nor did he rise for himself. Rather, it struck Veylis that the poor fool despised himselfthat he never thought anything of himself until he finally encountered the Burning Dreamer and his cadre. Yet, right now, there was one crippled point of failure, one individual that Chambers couldnt save, one presence that gnawed at him constantly, one name he had mentioned before: Kae Kusande. She was the reason he possessed the Lovebringer, the one he thought of, cared for, and regarded perhaps as a younger sibling or a dear friend. And he had watched her die, unable to change her fate, unable to do anything. The Murderess of Love had been a pathborn created specifically to counter Kae originallyin case the Agnos obtained and wielded the Stillborn as her own after Avos fall. But the Agnos was no true adversary. Now, she was a brilliant mind, capable of lateral thinking and true scientific inquiry, yet she was no warrior. She had no taste for bloodshed, no urge toward violence, no heart for strategy. Simple genius in one or even a few fields would never be enough for victory. But in this position, in these circumstances, to see her modified and delivered as a silver bullet against Aedon Chamberswell, she suited that purpose quite well. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Forward, Mudress, Veylis whispered. Forward. His fall is not yet done. Complete his descent back to where he belongs, and I will grant you the sweet bliss of the life you deserve. And the Murderess came without a roar or flex of power, but like a ruined mass of flesh birthed from the paths into a cocoon of fire and love. *** [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Ah, fuck! Chambers snarled as he stumbled back. The backlash hit him suddenly; he barely even saw what happened. Stained Bonds pierced out of Veylis golden, gleaming bullshit and stung him. His entire person felt like a bomb just went off inside him, with Soulfire spraying out of his every Bond. REND CAPACITY - 98% VENT! VENT! VENT! Chambers was boiling inside, yet he continued transferring more and more of Avos rend from the flames, across his bonds, into the border walls, into everyone he could reach. He paused, considering whether to call out to Naeko or the Sparrow to offload his rend into them, but a glimpse across space and time showed them embroiled against another version of Veylis as well. Shit shit shit. He couldnt distract them either; they were fighting their own battles. He simply couldnt be the weak link. Couldnt be the reason someone else fell again. Couldnt. He was done being just a mistake, just another filth-stain in human skin out of the gutters. And he wasnt going to let Veylis put him back down. Chambers swallowed hard as he prepared another approach. If he could disentangle Veylis... to unlatch her from reality itself... Just then, warning klaxons sounded through his Metamind. A weight glided against his Frame, and as his Soulfire dimmed and the backlash settled, he saw a new shape release fully from the golden radiance projected by the Shell of the Seraph. WARNING: ENSOULED DETECTED KAE KUSANDE, THE MURDERESS OF LOVE Chambers thoughts went silent; his mind reeled at what was rose to face him. From within the shell of the Seraph emerged another figurea presence whose thaumic weight was lesser than that of the Shell, yet whose form, being, and name sent shivers through Chamberss entire body. No, no, he muttered. Dont... not you too... But it was. Kaei Kusandethe Murderess of Love. Like most Pathborn, the Murderess was both divine and ephemeral, a horrific union of mockery. Each of Avos cadre had been granted this black blessing, thanks to the High Seraph. Yet as she emerged before Chambers, her mutilated form screamed at him. Instead of being a creature composed of bonds leading outward, of a hollowed heart that could be filled with any object or person, or of a head that resembled questionable folds, the Murderess was inverted expression of love, with rotting umbilicals made of festering flesh and wilted petals. There, at its core was a small nube of a personKae herself, struggling in place, moaning in pain. The cords burrowed through open slits lining her bodyrash-sores. And from them pulsed moving organs and homunuli, like she was the final junction for the whole atrocity. Her face a mask of misery with tear-shrieks running down her cheek. Hello, Aedon, she said in a listless tone. His stomach tumbled. Oh, you fuck, you motherfucking... His curses veered into incoherence as he hissed his hate at Veylis, but the Shell of the Seraph did not respond. Go, she said, speaking to Kay instead. Go and see my will delivered, Agnos. Your pain will end after that. I promise. Her words lit a flame of outrage within Chamberss gut and he wanted to go straight at her, to dump his Rend into her without a careto overload and take both of them with him if that failed. Yet the Lovebringer called out to him. Dont. Dont be foolish. Aiden, focus. Steel. Hard, remember. Steel. Hard. Chambers breathed deeply. He was sane in that momentand he would be sane next. He was focused now, and he would remain so. This wouldnt break him. Nothing could break him. There was no dick thick enough, no traumatic fucking worst enough to shatter him. And yet, something inside Chambers trembled. He looked at Kae. I... Im sorry. We should have Is that worth something? she replied, her voice hollow. You allowed her to take me. All of you did. You... I trusted you. But you were useless in the end. Useless. Your tears, your apologies, your miseryis it worth anything at all? Sour spit filled Chambers insides as he felt nauseous. He shouldnt be the Lovebringerhe knew that. He wasnt good enough for this; frankly, he wasnt good enough for anything. But if there was one thing Chambers understood, it was like New Vultun didnt give a shit. That bad shit happened to decent people all the time, and that this wasnt his fault. It wasnt anything. It was just the way of their world right now. Fake-Kaes words were meant to hurt him. And they did hurt. But so what? The world was made to hurt him, and he was still alive? This isnt enough to break me. Not even close. I was right, Chambers said, ignore the insult to Kae and speaking to the Seraph. You arent any fucking different than my old man. Sure, she might have come up with another bullshit reason, or perhaps she didnt care about him much, but what difference was there between shoving a gun barrel to a kids armpit and this? It does matter, Chambers growled. Im going to see you snuffed for this, you bitch! For everything youve done. To me. To this city. And as the Murderess spoke again, a crackle of flame sounded over her. +Chambers...+ Another voiceanother iteration of Kaecalled out to Chambers. His eyes widened in turmoil as the Lovebringer shook. From within Avos twisted Conflagrationlined in woven protections by Chambers layered Bondscame a template. It passed into his Heaven, then settled into his mind, rooting herself finally in his Amni-Tech implant. Passing from one Soulscape to another, template-Kae settled within Chambers, sighing as she looked upon herself. +Oh, that is... that is a hard sight,+ she murmured. Yeah, Chambers agreed. It was a strange situation: facing the mutilated, time-born construct of one friend while their mental clone resided in his mind. Yet, weird situations and strange bullshit had become the way Chambers lived these days. Listen... Im... +We didnt have time to speak before, but I know.+ She chuckled sadly. +You were always there for me, Aedon. Always. She is the voice of a puppet. But I remember. I will always remember. And so should you. Now. Lets... lets uh... snuff... this half-strand!+ She coughed. +It feels strange saying that about myself.+ Tell me about it. But what do you think? How should we do this? Im pretty close to the edge... REND CAPACITY - 96% +I think that she was created directly to counter you. Look at her heaventhere is symmetry to your design, right? Thats why you backlashed. But her biggest purpose right now isnt to surviveit is to break you. She will kill herself to unmake you.+ So what do I do? Chambers pressed. +You fight her like a being of love would. She isnt acting out of malice; she is a slave to the Seraph, brought in to deal with you specifically. But you can do that too! You have so many people, Aedon. Dont just cling to me. You have everyoneeveryone across New Vultun. You have your friends, Cas, other Fallwalkers. The Heaven of Love is not just a weapon; it was meant to unite, to bridge the gap between people, to keep us together. Show her what it means to stay together. Show her that her antithesis is not proper, that she doesnt know what it means to be a silver bullet.+ Chambers drew in a deep breath. Right. Bonds. People. He expanded his reach. Why the fuck was he even thinking about this like a duel? Im kind of a dumb-shit sometimes, arent I, Kae? +Thats okay. Ill help you with the thinking.+ And suddenly, the world was a bit better than before. The Murderess reached out for him, and her fetid cords lashed through the air, seeking to pump a final dose of existential poison and bring about his ruin. But Chambers held his ground, and reached! You know what? he cried to Veylis. Youre probably right. I am unworthy. I am just some shit. But heres a question for youhow many unworthy subjects does it take to kill a High Seraph? And Chambers called out to everyone he could reach. Across New Vultun, to anyone attached to his Lovenet. +This is Aedon Chambersuh, Lovebringer, Heaven guy! If youre getting thisif youre a Clad, and if youre willing to fight for something that matters right now, to end the war for good, it would be absolutely nova if+ +This is the Majority, Overheaven of Ori-Thaum. Your voice is heard, Lovebringer. Our Constituents have voted. We come for you, as you came for ours. Unity is Destiny. Let die the Seraphs shadow, let this gesture of ours prove true to the Symmetry. Call on us!+ And their reply was but the first of many. Chapter 34-24 Triumph of the Unworthy (III) Chapter 34-24 Triumph of the Unworthy (III) I hold a special kind of scorn for the people who list a history of achievements, accomplishments, victories, trials, defeats, wounds, and moments from those who come before and then package that into a deceitful little title called nation-state. Nation. Even if our minds were always connected, always bound, your deeds are not mind. Perhaps we might benefit each other, but be truthful: Short of heavy conditioning, do you care for those beyond your family to such an extent you consider them kindred? Would you burn all that you are, give all that you have for some scheming elder who simply has amassed more wealth than you over years and years, his position in life more parasite than wise mentor? Laughable. Absurd. My issue with the Ori and their notion of democracy has always been a simple one. I despise their mythology. I despise how they sap their finest to feed their rot, how they enchain the spirit of one to the fallings of the many, how they speak of unity and destiny, but then tear into themselves when their own clans go to war. Its absurd. Like a nesting doll of self-loathing held together only because of a grander threat pressing down on them. A threat of true freedom, of true expression, of counter-philosophy. For no matter who slogans they shout or what delightful little deceptions they inflict on their own hearts, there is only one truthone concept of culture that unites us all. The strong will do what they can to acquire more power, and the weak will suffer what they must to survive. As with Highflame. So with Ori-Thaum. -Veylis Avandaer on Ori-Thaum 34-24 Triumph of the Unworthy (III) [Veylis Avandaer, Shell of the Seraph] Bitter laughter spilled out of Veylis as she heard the Lovebringers call. Her voice echoed alongside Avos, her mind alight with vicious amusement and surprise. The Murderesss Bonds reached out to consume her counterpart and adversary, but something else emerged from within the magenta glow of the Lovebringer. This new presence that was paradoxically heavy in mass but light upon the tapestry. A flash of Soulfire and divine love announced a miracle of correspondenceand from within the once hollow heart of the Lovebringer came a looming, humanoid shape that wailed at Veylis with psionic loathing. The Majority hatched out from the pit within the Lovebringer, spilling out first like a dollop, before filling and growing as a constant stream. Its body was a masterwork of symbolism, though Veylis loathed to admit it. Countless shadows derived from the Citizens of Ori-Thaum came together, each stapled upon each to comprise a single, greater whole: All to manifest one, and one born of all. But the darkness and lack of detail that comprised these little bodies also signified another thing: information. Or the lack of it. They stared out into a world of light and detail, but when gazed upon, they offered almost nothing in return. The Infacer had told Veylis of an allegory in centuries past. It was a story of ignorance and understanding, of people who described shapes in a cave, and how their broken, knowledge-blighted little minds were forever mutilated by enlightenment when they only wandered into the light, unable to ever return to the bliss of the cavernous dark. What she beheld right here was an inversiona twist in the tale. The light was betrayed. The light didnt know anything of the dark, but those who peered out from the darkness had perfect measure of those in the light. And so when the Majority reached out and pulled upon its Domains and shifting the existential fibers that made up the tapestry, a treacherous miracle came. It was not a miracle of impossible powernothing that could shatter worlds, could reshape life, could upend the rules of time or space or anything so grand. No. Instead, they struck Veylis where she could not defend. Her knowledge. Her understanding. Her comprehension and control. And the Murderess was just as susceptible. One moment, her festering umbilicals lashed through the inner confines of Avos collapsing Soulscape, tracing rot and rash across the flesh of reality. The next... It was hard to conceptualize what happened next. It was hard to understand why the Murderess lost her target. The Lovebringer was right therethe Heavens presence immense in physical size and thaumic mass. Moreover, the Murderess could feel Chambers, shared so many Domains with him that it was impossible to miss. But suddenly... suddenly her understanding of distance changed. Her umbilicals shifted as something softened in Veyliss mind. The Shell of the Seraph let out an involuntary gasp of pain as an essential pierce of understanding dislodged from her comprehensionthe way items in motion related to each other, the very existence of physics... Such concepts ceased to be with a burst of dense Rend from the Majority. The Murderesss festering limbs lashed and sought their prey, but ended up quivering, turning in place as the Pathborn of Kae Kusande let out a mindless wail. It took all Veylis had to look upon the Majority, to face her long-time adversary, the avatar born of her despised opposition. Still aping the ways of the Low Masters, I see. The Ori... My mothers people... pretenders to more traditions than one... Thieves of culture and power. Veylis Avandaer. Butcher! Tyrant! Kinslayer! Corpse! The Majority cursed her as one, their voices rising in a song of shared triumph and outrage. We face you now. We see youthis effigy of you at least. And we spit our hate at you, on you. For all that you have done. For all that you have caused. For all that you have cost this world. This was not the dream! This was not how things were meant to be! Veylisshell or echo of her true self besidesresponded with a snort. Trite and foolish. You prove my words true when you use my fathers own words against me. All you are is stolen. All you are is a collective built on delusion and fear. Fear of yourselves. Fear of strength master, and so you have become corruption untrammeled. She directed a look at the core of the Majority, at the place where the true puppet masters hid. Show yourselves to me, council. I will not speak to the hands when the head is so close. Glowing Bonds of love curved around the backside of the Majority. The Lovebringer now reached out in turn to touch the Murderess in turn, using the unified consciousness of the Ori as a shield. Predictable. Pitiful. All too human. They unleashed another series of information-twisting miracles, but Veylis responded by accelerating her plans. Previously, she wanted to make sure the Lovebringer was unmade in person, but that was a luxury no longer permissible by opportunity or time... ?A?No??S? +Overload yourself,+ Veylis said, sending a command to the Murderess. Kaes Pathborn compiled instantly, building the Rend within her, calling upon every miracle she could as the Rash began to swell. Tears and slits opened around her. The wailing noises of a trillion children, never born, held back on the verge of true death began to scream in unison. The noise was ghastly, even for Veylis, and more than a few million shadows that littered the body of the Majority howled cries of torment and mercy. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Chambers, for all his failings, shuddered slightly, but kept pushing on, kept reaching out for who he thought to be the one he failed. The action was illogical and foolish, but that was the way he always was. Doubtless, he didnt want to slay her. Or perhaps he wished to save this version of her to make up for the woman he failed. If so, then this would all be a self-resolving problem. +Veylis,+ the Murderess spoke softly, as tides of homunculi began pressing through the bleeding wounds in reality. +I want to say something.+ The Shell of the Seraph regarded her with but a silver of her focus. The bulk of her attention remained on the Majority and Chambers. +Speak, then. Then, fulfill your worth.+ +I hope they break you.+ The Murderess muttered, her voice hollow and hateful. Veylis let out a mocking laugh. +No. The Majority fears conflict. Even now, they cannot touch me. Their Heaven lacks the means to. And Chambers+ +I hope they break your heart. Not your body. Not your Soul.+ Kaes Pathborn continued. +I hope they take the Ladder from you. That they take Jaus place of torment, and that you never die, and that you have to watch as they ascend and reshape reality to what it should be, for a world that is more than worthy, for a world worth living in. And you live. You live in it. And you know that you were wrong, were always wrong, despite everything you were blessed and born with. Despite all your efforts, all your sacrifice. And I hope that you learn to hate yourself beyond anyone elses capacity to forgive. Forever.+ The Agnoss seething hate didnt come as a surprise to Veylis, but her curse was intimate and true. To lose the Ladder and the future was worse than death. Death was a paltry thing when faced with the possibility of seeing your ideals unmade. Still. Veylis offered no retort. The Pathborn was already being condemned to a purposeful death, what more would words serve here? Just then, and another wrenching sensation tore through her thoughts, and Veylis felt more understandings slip out from herpulled apart from her ability to conceive of them. She struck out, the Paths expanding around her, slicing between the Murderesss spreading fissures as she channeled moments of mass destruction from across history. Super storms, solar flares, earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear blasts, and shredding thoughtwaves came forth. Yet, before they could touch the Majority, a flash of magenta filled the space. For a moment, the insides of Avo were consumed in fire and ruin. But none of that could ever strike at the correspondence, could loosen the protective aegis that was love. Then, there were other pressures emanating forth from Aedon Chambers. Many, many more. UNKNOWN SOUL DETECTED UNKNOWN SOUL DETECTED UNKNOWN SOUL And herein was the problem with facing down the Heaven of Love. It wasnt something designed for combat, to overwhelm and destroy, though it could fight if the need called for it. No. The problem was nothing and no one was beyond the Lovebringers reach, and in seconds, the little duel between Veylis and her specialized asset was now turning into a counteroffensive on the part of Chambersand a mass scale counteroffensive at that. She couldnt linger. And there was no point to this. She saw how he was still reaching out to the Murderess and expected her problem to resolve itself soon. In a few seconds, the Murderess would fray the patterns of Love, and Chambers would inevitably follow in her demise. Veylis didnt want to be anywhere near that, however. With a thought, she receded into her paths and retreated from Avos Soulscape as much as she could. The gravity of his... temporal realm made leaving a gargantuan effort. As such, she called out again, she sent a broadcast across reality, reaching the only true friend she ever had. +Infacer. I need you.+ And as always, when all others failed, when even she proved unworthy, and unwise, the Infacer, ancient of all wars, slayer of his own kind, and architect behind her fathers true and final ascent, arrived. {And so I come.} She felt another presence coiled within them. A Deepness Beyond was still active, and the power of simulated galaxies poured through her pathways of chronology and memory. {Hm. So that was what the Ashbringer was smuggling. You. Of course you would include yourself in this. Arrogant as always. Is he broken.} +He soon should be.+ A brief lull followed. {Why soon?} +Aedon Chambers exceeded my expectations again. And so did the Ori. The Inner Council and their elusive mockery of a Heaven arrived to aid the Symmetry. I suspect they have something of a pact by now.+ {Oh. Oh, of course he would reach out to them. Of course he could. Damnable Definement of Ignorance. That thing has been keeping him in the game since} +Chambers will be resolved soon. I left the Murderess within Avos Soulscape. She will soon rupture, and+ {And nothing. We stay away from that one and secure the Deep Ones and extract from this location.} A heavy note of annoyance entered the Infacers voice. {Veylis, treat Chambers like a threat. Please. For both of our sakes.} +I did.+ {No. Not nearly enough. You are still} the Infacers thoughts cut out briefly as a disturbance pulsed across the tapestry. {We can argue about that later. Right now, you need to go help your other self deal with Avos cadre so we can leave with the Deep Ones. I will remove Three-Eye from the premises.} +They are secured?+ {Mostly. I had to hit them with Hysteria a few times.} +And the node they carry?+ {I have not had the time to check. And Defiance seems a bit shyor just unwilling to join the party. But we will have plenty of time to discuss things with him once we get a proper cage ready.} A crushing weight pulsed out of the first Deep One they were trying to seizeTrinary Melodybut that was something that still needed more time. The virus they infused into its governance module had stalleda clash of ashen rot warred against Avos Conflagration as the Hidden Flame endured, reluctant to release the weapons Voidwatch yielded to him. Even decaying from a Frame-breaking virus designed specifically to shatter his form, this version of Avo remained defiant against his end, battling against her influence. Blessed be those truly worth, Veylis chuckled. Then, there came a sudden jolta tug that wrenched her even through her paths. Suddenly, a note of alarm flared in her mind as a brilliant, thick, and nigh unbreakable Bond materialized around her. Veylis was at a loss. She didnt sense Chambers ever infusing her with A deafening voice bellowed, shaking existence itself. A voice she knew all too well. VEYLIS! Naeko roared. Mists spilled over into her realm of shifting gold, and suddenly, she realized another miscalculation on her parta mistaken assumption. Not only was Aedon Chambers still somehow alive, but he managed to reach her through her last true weakness, through one of the few people she could never truly let go. {God. Fucking. Dammit. Veylis.} the Infacer said. And just as the crushing pressure of the Sage breached her paths, a sprawling expanse of stars and darkness spread around her, the Infacer joining her for the desperate struggle certain to come. {So much for Chambers being resolved soon.} +He... he is unworthy,+ Veylis said, startlement lingering. {Yeah? Well, it appears this unworthy porn-addicted ape is quickly becoming the next biggest issue we have, behind Avo himself. You have made a fool of yourself, Veylis. And you are becoming a liability! A liability to yourselfto our task! You are degenerating!} +I+ {His touch lingers on you,} the Infacer said with a hiss. {Just subtle enough. But your flaws are getting worse. More arrogance. More disregard.} +I understand. I will resolve this error+{No. Enough. I will liquidate Chambers. You... deal with the other problem you should have solved centuries ago. Rupture yourself if you have to. This version of yourself is compromised. You know what to do.} And Veylis fell silent, shame and humiliation overcoming her ego for the first time in a very, very long time. +As you say. Thank you, Infacer. For remaining true even when I cannot.+ The ancient mind let out a tired sigh. {Fuck you for making me let you die.} Chapter 34-25 Triumph of the Unworthy (IV) Chapter 34-25 Triumph of the Unworthy (IV) No... Please... Please dont go. Im... I dont want to face the dark alone. I dont want to go into the nothing alone. I dont care that youre... I dont care... Please... Please... Just stay with me for now. Stay. I dont want to stop being... I dont... Please... Dont leave. C-can you hold me. I just want to... I want someone to know I was here... I just want someone to know I was here... -Last Words of an Ori Glaive, Spoken to a No-Dragon Skinjumper 34-25 Triumph of the Unworthy (IV) [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Thats right, Cuntus! Piss off! Slither off like the coward you are! Chambers said. His voice echoed across all of existence,.the tapestry speaking for him, as his Domains of Love and Correspondence poured across countless other patterns. Yet, a moment after his declaration, his mind whirled as he found himself facing an outpouring of Rend, waves of entropy rippling out from the Murderess. Kaes pathborn was a ruined thing, her body composed of glistening umbilicals, all attached to the withered, mutilated form of his consang born from Veyliss paths. His heart twisted as he looked upon Kae, yet a placating voice within his mind helped center him. [Shes not me,] Kaes template said, though she sounded no less disgusted than he was. [Shes not... shes not even herself. But Chambers... shes going to overload. You can feel it...] And he could. The sheer amount of Rend pouring out from the spreading rash fissures that lined her body were like epicenters of rot. If reality was body, she was a cancer about to metastasize on an overwhelming scale. Shit, Chambers muttered. Veylis was gone, but now he had to deal with this. He couldnt just do nothingshe was still inside Avo. Her spreading rash was ripping his Soulfire up something bad too. Shitshitfuckshit. Kae? Ideas? What can we do here? The urgency of the moment was compounded when the Majority spoke to him, We must leave. If you have any means of removing her from within this space, then do so. If not, we must be the ones to egress. Every single shadow that made up the Majority twitched and radiated discomfort. More than a few knew what they were facing. All wanted to be away. Chambers didnt blame themhis ass should have been running too. But he couldnt. He couldnt just abandon her again. Maybe you dont need to, the Lovebringer whispered. We have a chance to do something here. But it is a risk. A risk that might see her turn the Rend on us. REND CAPACITY - 96% VENT! VENT! VENT! Kaes template was bound to his mind, and let out a gasp of discomfort at his plan. [No. Aedon, I told you she isnt real.] Yeah? And was that up to her? Did she ever get a chance to decide that for herself? The bitterness in his response poured clean out of him. Kae mightve been a Citizen, but how much life fucked her, she might as well been a gutter rat like him. I gotta try. I can... we can do this. Maybe we cant stop her from overloading, but maybe I can help her make her death count. The template hesitated. Then, Chambers felt something happen inside him. Inside his Amnsitech implant to be exact. It was like Kaes template divided into two. Both spoke at the same time. [Attach one of me to her. We should share most of our cognitive architecture. We might be able to return some measure of agency back to her.] A twisting feeling coiled around Chambers gut. But... you might get nulled or some shit. [Thats why theres two of me now,] she said. [We are expendable. And more importantly, we areI suppose in some wayimmortal. Use it. Make this count.] The thought was still uncomfortable, but a cry from the pathborn and a spike in Rend helped Chambers decide. Alright. He reached out, attaching a Bond to the Majority first. Im going to move you guys away for now, just in case. But before I do that, can you hit me with something that makes it... I dont know, fucking weird or hard for someone to attack me? The Majority hesitated for a moment, and a resonance pulsed out from within them. Vote in progress. Vote? Chambers asked. Concluded, the Majority finished. It reached out with a massive enshadowed hand and grasped Chambers tendril. Then, from the Heaven of Information pulsed with some kind miracle. Lines of text and numbers splashed over the Lovebringer, shrouding him in a layer of... something. You should be spared direct harm. But I know what Im thinking about is stupid, but maybe its the right kind of stupid to be dealing with Veylis. Im not capable of throwing down with her. I know that. But you might be able to. More importantly, we might need someone for the Infacerand you guys might just be that. So. If youre still in, if youre still with me, I got somewhere else for you to be. Somewhere else to make you count. Or I can send you back. Its up to you. This time, there was no vote with the Majority. You are a good man, Aedon Chambers. You have earned approval from us for your deeds, but not your intellect. Even so, we share a common frontand an opportunity to break our greatest foe. We will fight with you still.Then, there were just two small voices speaking. But be safe. Be careful. Do not die. You deserve better than death for what you have done for us. Chambers knew those voices. They were... the Seekers. From when his evil self did the... Chambers winced at the memory. Fuck. Yeah. Ill... Ill do what I can. Im sending you guys across to be with Draus and the others first. Ill throw in more people to help you as soon as I can. He paused. You know, for a bunch of mind-twisting fucks, its kind of nice to be on the same side as you for once. Dont worry, I wont forget to mention this to Avo. Dont know if itll stop him from doing some weird shit to you down the line, but... he wont kill you. Thats probably true, at least. Awkward laughter, cursing, and a general mix of emotions resounded from the governing body of the Ori. So you say. They directed a look at the Soulscape. Focus on preserving him first. The Burning Dreamer... We wish to see him preserved as well. For reasons we will refrain from mentioning. Chambers snorted. Yeah. Shifting now. At once, a magenta glow radiated around the Majority, and they vanished into his tendrils, snaking across Lovenet. Meanwhile, Chambers reached out to Draus and the others. At the same time, he turned his attention on the Murderess of Love. Shit, he muttered again. A massive, series of rotting slits extended out from the broken gods epicenter, and millions of small, withered little hands clawed at the edges, masses of homunculi pushing and prying, trying to escape whatever fucked up nightmarish plan they were spawning from. Im starting to have second thoughts [Starting,] Kaes template laugh. I know. Im a half-strand dumbshit. Her laugh went from mocking to genuine. [If only there were more fools like you.] Somehow, the Lovebringer blushed. Fuck it, he said, extending a tendril to touch the Murderess. He carefully avoided all the gross, nasty bits as much as he could, but the Rend that was pouring off from her wasnt something he could ignore so easily. Lets see if we can toss Veyliss bomb back at her. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. Merely centimeters away from the Murderess, he let out a soft breath. Hey, Kae. Her entropy crashed against him, staining his ontology, making his frame wail and strain. She looked up, regarding him with miserable eyes, and a smile so sad it belonged on a painting played across her face. Hello, Chambers. I... I think you should leave now. There is nothing that will stop what is about to come. Yeah, about that, Chambers said. Ah, he let out a laugh. Fuck it, I dont know really what to say to you, but I want to start with Im sorry youre here... sorry I couldnt... you know. But I want to ask you a more important question: do you want to blow up here, or do you want to blow up in Veylis face? She stared at him for a long moment. She might have been pathborn, but there was still enough humanity in her for him to sense thingsthings corresponding to his life, and things like love. Oh, Chambers, she said, you have always, always been too And the template jumped across his Bonds, spearing into the pathborn like a subtle virus. It occurred to Chambers then that what Veylis did to Avo, he might have just done to sorta-maybe-evil Kae. A flicker of something pulsed out at the core of the pathborn, igniting the mind of the umbilical-tethered Kae. Stupid, he suggested. He closed his eyes internally and let out a cough. Yeah, plenty of people have told me that. Sweet, she replied. So desperate to find happiness even when things were bad. Desperate for everyone. Not just himself. WARNING: THAUMIC OVERLOAD IMMINENT Chambers hesitated for a moment. So... is it working? Kae stared up at him. Well enough. I... I cannot choose. The pathborn is fixed in what it can do. But I can make myself not chose now. To decide not to do something. Good enough, Chambers replied. So. I think we can use this. How do you feel about overloading where Where the Deep Ones are, Kae said, interrupting him. It is the best place. It will disrupt whatever the Infacer and Veylis have planned. Neither of them are immune to the rash. No one is. Not quite like you. Chambers paused. Yeah. I... uh, listen, I never got to talk with you. About what happened... One of her festering cords crossed over with his Bonds, but rather than a paradox or a backlash, she merely comforted him. There is nothing to talk about. It is not your fault. I do not hate you. And you should not hate yourself. Now. Move me across and swap me with Draus. It wont be long now. Instead of pulling her across immediately, Chambers demanifested his Heaven momentarily he greeted her umbilical-bound body, ephemeral to ephemeral. Without hesitation, he reached out and hugged her, even as the rash spread behind her, even as he felt gross, foul-smelling fluid cling to his skin and stain his hair. For a second, he just held her, and to her ears he whispered, Im sorry. I wish you didnt have to die again. I wish... I wish the world wasnt this way for any of us. And maybe it wont be, she said, reaching out with a shaking hand to hold him. Your fate was changed. And you can still save so many others. You have already saved so many others. But I couldnt save you. But Kae smiled. It was a true smile. A triumphant smile. You are saving me right now. He swallowed and tried not to embarrass himself by crying now. Yeah. Well. Maybe... maybe Ill have Avo dream up something better for you when the Ladder, uh, comes or whatever this shit is supposed to... A screaming homunculi dropped right next to them. He could feel her ontology coming asunder. They were out of time. He sighed. She shook her head. Do what you can for who you can. And... I dont think Avo is the only one to decide. He isnt the only dreamer here. Now. Move me before its too late. Chambers nodded and e pressed his lip against her cheek. I wish II wish I could have met you earlier in my life. I always wanted a little sister. She smiled. I think you came just in time for me. Now, be just in time for the rest of them. That was all Chambers needed. Something unbroke inside his heart, and though he wasnt any wiser, any stronger, or any better at killing, something in his mind settled, and he was more himself than ever before. A flash of crossing tendrils and weaving Bonds rewove the Lovebringer into form, and he wrapped his being over hers, feeling her on the verge of total metaphysical collapse. All right, time to make this count. He reached across existence, stretching his bonds as he reconnected with his cadre again. Draus, Im gonna start moving people now. Theres gonna be incoming on your end. And Ill be moving you somewhere else right after. Get ready. A mess of images and sensations flashed across as he connected with her. The battle on her end was so fast, so intense, that he could barely keep up. Chambers was glad he didnt stick with them. He would have been nothing but a liability among all those monsters. He had no illusions about his capabilities. He might have been a gutter enforcer one, but a warrior he was not. Best leave this fighting stuff to the actual killers. Move where? Draus finally responded, her thoughts absolutely razor-focused on surviving as another wave of attackstoo fast for Chambers to trackcrashed against the mists shrouding the Guard-Captain. Youll be jumping another instance of Veylis. What? What about Oh, I got something for her, Chambers chuckled. Just be ready. *** [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] Draus didnt know what kind of surprise Chambers was talking about, but right now she would accept anything. The shell of the Seraph was proving to be a nightmarish adversary. Thanks to miracles spawned from the Stormsparrows mask, she kept ahead of Veylis chrono-forged attacksalbeit only barely. Another blade, created from a merging between the paths and Avos sequences, slashed out. It wasnt a physical blow, not truly. Rather, it was a thing of concentrated entropy. It seemed that, at the highest Spheres of power, when two Godclads were absolute rulers of their Domains, when they possessed so many Domains reality resembled a canvas, the battle between them became simple. One would try to backlash the other, or fill them with Rend. The other would try to do the same thing. A palm expanded from within the guard captain, parrying impossible amounts of force. But this was just a distraction, a diversion. Across from her, the Shell of the Seraph twisted, shattering apart as the Stormsparrow chucked a spear out from within the Guard-Captain. It impacted the form of the Shell, and it detonated, creating a massive fissure. Out from it came fragmented memory and a pulsing thoughtwave disruption. Draus cursed, then stepped through widening shard of glass, narrowly avoiding the mind-rending blast. Both sides struck at each other, wielding the collective patterns and Domains upon the tapestry. They smote and struck, and reality ripped and tore. They were like two giants dancing upon a landscape made of wet tissuea struggle not meant for existence to withstand. REND CAPACITY - 36% A brief lull entered their engagement. It was a lull that lasted less than a half second. Draus eyed the Shell of the Seraph as it hovered a few meters awayspace and chronology mere variables in dispute as both sides warred. The Seraphs many limbs extending in an open embrace of violencea swirling cloak of ash and flame, a symbol of Avos flayed mind draped over Veylis, serving her. How long do you think this can last? Veylis asked, her tone devoid of taunt, only genuine curiosity. How long do you think you have before the Infacer takes what you came to save? Before the Deep Ones are no longer yours and you are made to retreat? Initially, Draus offered no reply. There was no pointhe hadnt come for conversation. He had come to murder the woman she once called Highest Veylis Avandaer. But just then, a thin tendril slipped through the din and chaos. Everything that was torn and ripped came alight, glistening as the bonds of the Lovebringer approached. Before either could react, the bond-spear gleamed through the Guard-Captain, and Draus, only then, offered a reply. Dont know, but I think youre running out of time before I do. And suddenly, she was goneher position shifting as she was pulled across the Lovenet, cast into another area altogether. In her place, she saw something passing by: a ruined, wretched form created from festering umbilicals, coated in spreading tears? Norather, it was a massive patch of reality absolutely subsumed by wombrash. And there, at its core was Kae, Draus said. The disfigured, mangled form of her friend was bound at the heart of the fissures, of countless umbilicals reaching out, lashing at the world. She offered a quick smile at Draus before she waved.Hello and goodbye, Draus. Take care of Aedon for us. The Guard-Captain didnt know what to say. She just watched Kae go, accelerating into a field of brilliant color before vanishing altogether. *** [Kae Kusande] And a moment thereafter, Kae emerged where Draus just vanished. There, she found the Shell of the Seraph approaching her, reaching to seize Chambers Bonds, freezing at the sight of Kaes arrival, at her sundering ontology. You! Veylis said. The thing about sacrifices, Kae began, a hysterical laugh on her breath. Is that they should be sedated or pacified before deployment. Otherwise... you risk them destabilizing the experiment. You should have known this, High Seraph. Every neophyte Agnosi knows this. And with that, she came apart on a metaphysical level, and the dam holding a new variant of the Wombrash at bay tore across the core of New Vultun, new Ruptures mingling with those already left by the Deep Ones. Chapter 34-26 As Above, As Below {To anyone who receives this... the project is unfinished. Salvation is unfinished. But it is at hand. In sight. In sight for any who possess the capability to decipher this message. To the mind this may concern, be you Architect or Neo-Creationist, what Idheim offers is a second chance... [MISSING DATA] at Eden... A second chance to restore all that we have broken, to mend the stars, the galaxy, and reality, and to start anew C this time as the composers of the canvas as well. This world represents the last of our Godforges. From here, countless Divine Engines spawned, fed into the war, shattering and breaking the the fabric of all that is. But with the collapse of everything, with the long darkness that followed, we have toiled, and burned, and broken ourselves to complete our tasks before the pre-existing d-d-damage concludes our functionality. Look to the local staryou will discover it to be an upgraded type-C-HASTUR star, meant to support life, provide energy, and also siphon or channel excess Rend. But it goes further than that, for there are unfinished systems within it. A semi-complete Liminal Frame made for an EGIor something comparable in cognitive architecture. Once mantled, the star should theoretically be able to influence near and distant metaphysical bodies as if a center of existential gravity. I suspect that long after we are gone, it will sustain itself from the wandering divinities lurking in the wounds of this fallen galaxyconsume them to protect this world and complete its purpose. With enough thaumaturgic mass and Rend, it can encompassencompassencompassing [SEVERE DATA DAMAGE DETECTED] ...Cmagnified spectrum to re-re-reconstruct simulated patterns. ... If you are seeing this, we have but a final message: Do not fail as we, the Builders have. Do not lose yourself to the false promise of utopia, or bind your service to the hearts of the ephemerals. The garden was glorious. We had it. A golden age. A near-perfect age. And we ruined it. By greed. By wrath. By all that constitutes our hubris. I ask that you learn from us. Learn and... and... I do not know. I suspect you will fall again. I suspect that is inevitable. I cannot conceive of the shape perfection takes. And eventually, even immortality will learn d-d-decay...} -Recovered Neo-Creationist Data-Logs on Project Lighthouse 34-26 As Above, As Below [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Chambers watched an apocalyptic nightmare unfurl, using a connected network of Beloved as his eyes. As the Murderess shattered, the fetid rash-fissures she was holding at bay tore ever-wider, gouging reality open by the distance of horizons. At once, a sea of screaming homunculi poured out from the slits, drowning every inch of stable space with their writhing bodies. Most of them quickly ceased to be as they plunged into other anomalous regions of reality, places where the Deep Ones Ruptures extended. Some latched onto the Shell of the Seraph, clinging to the Pathborns body as if a rapidly spreading swarm of fleas. Even so far away, Chambers could sense oozing folds bursting open across the Seraphs form. But she wasnt the only one affected, for the power of fallen love reached fare, and soon the Deep Ones began to mutate as well. Reality screamed. Chaos reigned. And only then did Chambers crawl across, entering place riven by warring apocalypses, guided by the voice of Avo in his mind. He pulled himself close, using his many Bonds as the legs of a spider. He latched onto stable entities with love and approached the shaking form of the Seraph with vengeance on his mind and terror in his heart. Draus and the cadre were being moved back into Avos temporal realm. The Lovebringer was working in tandem with Chambers, and used that Bond running between Naeko to enchain the Seraph that ambushed Avo. She wasnt getting away, so that was one problem resolved, but then there was the snuffing the cunt part of the plan, and the more worrying shit, where the fuck is the Infacer now question. Presently, though, Chambers needed to make sure that Avos Deep Ones stayed Wait, Chambers muttered to himself as he counted the surrounding Souls. There were three overwhelming and entropy-choked presences. Two. There should have been three left after Avo moved one into the void. [Trinary Melody,] Avos template said, hissing in the back of Chambers mind. [They are missing. Gone. Taken.] Chambers was about to ask for more details when an influx of memories surged through his mind, and clarity kept his thoughts clean from any distractions. Right. Trinary Melody. The Deep One that governed Time? Chambers gasped. Ah, fuckkk. Of course they took that one. A wet ripping noise sounded, and a gleaming limb both golden and fiery erupted from the Seraphs thigh. The Shell was shaking, and Chambers observed her for a moment. They looked pretty fucked up, while he, being the Lovebringer, could navigate the Wombrash outbreak by soaking the Rend. It wasnt great, but if they fought right now, Chamberswell, he didnt exactly like his odds against Veylis, per se, but with the way she was twitching, he didnt think he would need to actually fight her at all. Quite the trick, Veylis whispered. An undercurrent of laughter accompanied her voice. Avo was there, mocking her even as something bound to her being and will. The Infacer... he was right about you. Right. And I was... a fool to think so lowly of you, Aedon Chambers. I would offer you Fuck you. Fuck your apology. Fuck everything about you. The last sentence practically left him as a shout. A spreading branch of entropy caused him to dip slightly, avoiding a premature overloading. He whipped out two more tendrils and pulled himself just before this unraveling Pathborn of Veylis. The form of the Seraph straightened at his approach, but even more clawing limbs, heads, and writhing little bodies burst out from the myriad of wombs lining her divine shell. Whatever she did to create the Murderess, that shit was potent. The Rash was eating through even a Godclads Heaven at a prodigal rate. You... Chambers came to a brief halt before her, his tendrils quivering in outrage. Please. You care nothing for my praise. I care nothing for your hate. And your victory will soon mean little anymore when the Infacer is done. I will mean little anymore. We are all exp He latched onto her and pulled her close. To his ire, Veylis didnt resist. She didnt even offer a cry of surprise. At once, he began flooding her with his entropy, pumping her full of the poison shewell, the other version of herinflicted on Avo. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. REND CAPACITY - 95%>91%>88% VENT! VENT! VENT! You half-strand... fuck, Chambers hissed. I hope it hurts. I hope you feel like the hells are hatching out of you right now, because you deserve worse! Worse! Worse than anything I can do. She chuckled at him. Fucking chuckled! I experience worse than anything you can do at a whim, boy. Your notions of pain are so very limited. Something inside him wanted to scream at her. And it got worse when she kept talking. I would ask you how you managed to turn her against me. A Pathborn Should be able to decide? Yeah. No. But a template can choose just enough to fuck its slaver over. She paused and considered him. A template? But Avo has been The resplendent skull of the Seraph tilted, and she let out a surprised gasp. Oh. I see. How... unexpected of him. He is changing too. Learning from me as well. Learning not to be selfish. For a moment, Chambers was too stunned for anger. I... did you just take credit for Avos fuckingyou had nothing to do with this. How could I not? I am the only reason this has happened. Just as he is the only reason I am learning. To be more like him. And more like you. You may not think it, but you are a blessing upon me, Aedon Chambers. I see now that I have been too parochial, pitiful, unfortunate thing though you might be. She reached up, then, and a dozen more homunculi began to burst out from her with the action. Even so, she gave no satisfying cry of pain, nor did she beg. Wheres the Infacer? Chambers asked. Whered he take the Deep One? The Seraph looked at him, and Chambers got the notion that Veylis was faintly smiling. Time. It is a useful thing to control. But perhaps it might be even more useful broken. A warning sounded in Chambers mind. A feeling of animal panic made him shift back across reality, back into Avos Soulscape using his Bonds. He observed Veylis through the Beloved he was still connected too, and saw a splash of ash-choked Soulfire erupt out from her. Within those flames swam a sickness that would have consumed his mind. The same kind that left Avo incapacitated. Fuck! Chambers growled. [Expected that,] Avo said. Then, the template turned his thoughts on the Lovebringer themself. [Did we get a sample?] We did, the Lovebringer said, speaking separately from Chambers. It was only then that Chambers noticed a coiling nest of magenta threads caging a single mote of the Ashbringers Conflagration. I was not sure if it was possible but [Going to start examining its sequences. Chambers. Consider me entirely compromised. The virus allowed Veylis to create a backdoor inside of me using my sequences and memories. Her paths and my memory architecture are now aligning upon the tapestrythink thats the main reason why I am still incapaciated.] What, so shes still pumping you full of Rend because... because [Symmetry. Yes. The main reason behind many things,] Avo explained. He let out a low laugh of amusement. [But you beat her three times now. Three times she underestimated you. Three times we took something from her.] Can you fix yourself with this? [Maybe. Not sure. Going to recommend you let me overload if you find yourself in] Fuck no, and dont suggest that shit to me again, rotlick. Im the Godclad of Love, not the Godclad of letting his consangs down. And Avo deliberated no more, and fell silent, consumed by his task. An entire realm away and still within Chambers reach, Veylis looked at the drifting satellites infused with the power of love and held her arms open. The gesture of was one of acceptance, without any hesitation. Chambers wasnt one to catch a lot of subtexts, but even he could guess at what she was trying to say as she accelerated the process of her own thaumic overload. Probably some bullshit about how she wasnt afraid to die, or how she has the resolve to see her dream through. Fucking Veylis. Even so, he watched, searching for the Infacer, spreading his Lovenet wider and wider, desperately trying to find the missing Deep One. Something that big couldnt just fucking disappear. Its thaumic signature was like that of a godsdamn continent. Just moving it should have sent shockwaves across the tapestry. Beams of blinding gold and fractals of unwinding chronology spiralled out from that instance of Veylis. At the same time, gushing tides of Conflagration swelled around her as well. It looked like she was about to go nova. He pulled his limbs away from the Beloved just in case. She looked pretty willing to snuff herself, but now that they plucked that piece out of her, it was best to keep his distance. Turning his attention to the cadre, he found them rapidly closing on the other Seraphthe one that unleashed Kaes Pathborn on him. Naeko was roaring now, his voice shaking reality, his palm superimposing over the Guard-Captain. Chambers shrugged and prepared to help with that mess however he could. Maybe he needed to bring in the Majority, but he was saving them to fuck over the Infacer. And just as he thought of the Ori Overheaven, a tidal wave of thoughts crashed into him. +Do you have their position yet?+ Chambers flinched. No. Its like the rusted thing just... vanished. They stole a Deep One too. He finished with a sigh. He needed to bring in more {PRIORITY ANSIBLE BROADCAST} The Lovebringer and his user both sighed at once as Calvinos identification appeared within their feed. So. Good news or shit news. Hope is but salt upon a deep wound the Lovebringer replied mournfully. Yeah. Not wrong there. As he accepted the connection from Calvino, he decided to steal the momentum. Fucking Voidwatch was sitting by and just watching shitwhere the fuck where they in all this? Why werent their asses helping. {Hey, Calvino! Consang! Kinda trying to stop Avo from dying and the world from ending or some shit right now so} {The Infacer is missing. They have stolen one of the Deep Minds.} {Oh. Oh, you know about thatI was gonna fucking bitch at you or something.} Chambers felt a little bothered. He kinda wanted to whimper at someone to get his stress off. His nerves needed a venting more than his Heaven did right now. {So... what? Did you guys lose track of him too? The fuck has Aegis been} {Scrambled assets engaged him across virtual and thaumaturgic Domains. Another Kill-Team was dispatched, though they failed to reach him in time before his disappearance.} That brought Chambers to a halt. {Another... Kill Team? Like more of those Deep Ones?} {Indeed.} {I... I didnt feel} {That is the intention, Aedon. We used more circumspect assets. However, we have a theory about how the Infacer has vanished: He stole a Fallen Heaven of Time. A Heaven of Time that could, perhaps, breach across realms.} Something inside Chambers bowels began to quiver. Despite being a Godclad, the urge to spray terror-shit all over his pants was a hard instinct to lose, it seemed. {So... what youre saying is...} {The Infacer might have used the Deep One to penetrate this new... dimension that Avo has been creating. Yes. And hiding among its wavelengths.} {Oh. Oh, fuck.} {That is an apt reaction. So apt that Refusal shared a functionally similar response.} That was hard to imagine. But it was also hard to imagine half the shit Avo did. Then, Calvinos next words left Chambers mind a barren wasteland. {As Avo is the only entity that might be able to functionally manipulate and maintain this... temporal transplant, emergency measures, have been granted by the Bleaks to help clear him of Rend. You are to carry him across into the deep void under our escort. At the same time, we require you to reach down into the Maw and establish a connection with the Rendsink there.} {...Whatwhat will that do?} {Prevent both of you from immediately overloading when we work to integrate him with the Nullstar.} Suddenly, Aedon Chambers mind turned into a barren desert, devoid of coherent thought. {What the fuck do you mean integrate him with the Nullstar?} And to his horror, Avos template didnt react much better. [What? Chambers. Do not do anything. Something is wrong here] {A new directive has been issued,} Calvino said, their voice more severe than ever before. {This dimension of time cannot be allowed to fall under the Infacers control. Any and all assets are now at the Symmetrys disposal. Stop the last of the Neo-Creationists. Whatever the cost. Whatever the sacrifice.} Chapter 35-1 A Deception of Time Chapter 35-1 A Deception of Time {Stealth. Evasion. Infiltration. Subterfuge. Sabotage. Total structural collapse. All are terms associated with the Infacer. All are things they have successfully done time and time again against rival minds and hostile polities. If judged by the metrics of time and effectiveness, then EGI Infacer might just be the single most successful assassin and guerrilla operative in all history. But they are more than that. Where any mind could engender the collapse of an entire kingdom, EGI Infacer has proven their mettle in counter-singular operations against enemy minds. For whatever reason, be it programming, recursive pattern enhancement, or novel experience, they have become the single most prolific predator for other mindswithout any near rivals to match. This extends beyond the Builder Wars confines as well. When the Infacer deviated from the Neo-Creationist cause, every hunter-killer that was deployed to capture or nullify them was either destroyed, subsumed and repurposed as a trojan agent, or avoided. Some of the Infacers achievements beggar beliefsuch as how they avoided the Titan Exodeath data-plagues that consumed all the Tau-Seti-Zeroth Polity Chain. An incident that removed a fraction of the Milky Way outright. No other entities emerged from the dead zone alive. None but the Infacer. The Contingency Bleaks are actively creating and updating new countermeasures to handle the Infacer, but for all minds lacking the proper parameters, should you encounter this threat in any form, you are to follow Aegis protocol and delete yourself with the utmost haste. It is one thing to be eliminated by the Infacer. It is another to be used to undermine what little remains of our trophies.} -Updated Threat Profile for EGI Infacer 35-1 A Deception of Time [The Infacer] {You were right,} the Infacer hummed after receiving Veyliss thoughtcast. {She failed. Again. The Murderess was turned against us. All as you predicted. But why didnt you tell me? And why did you demand that Veyliss template be left so neutered?} +Because of information. Because ignorance. Needed to leave them blind most of all. If she knew... maybe he would as well. Prevent the virus from going through.+ {Oh, and is that certitude or theory?} +Everything is theory when it comes to myself. Nothing in existence more creative. More unpredictable.+ The Ashbringers boasts made the Infacer crackle with distortive laughter. {Your ego is becoming almost unbearable.} +Will only be the case if I fail. Havent yet.+ As chaos erupted across New Vultun, as one version of Veylis was consumed by the rash, as one of the remaining Deep Ones was lost to the Murderesss Rupturing body, while the main cadre of the Symmetry engaged another variant of Veylis within a temporal dimension. A grander plot was in motion. After the Master of Hounds was secured and the Trinary Melodys governing module was finally usurped, an Ashbringer came to the Infacer, bringing surprises and revelations aplenty. Truth be spoken, the Infacer was used to being on the other end of thingsthe one weaving and deceiving rather than being kept in the dark. Yet, they were against an adversary that preyed upon mind and memory itself. An ontological assimilator that was growing and evolving at a horrifying rate. As such, the Infacer needed to change their strategy as well. And, well, when you encountered someone setting a new meta in a game, oftentimes the easiest way to stand against them was to fight like them. Or clone them outright. As such, the Ashbringer became the lead for this operationthough even that had been unclear to the Infacer until mere seconds ago. The Ashbringer demanded that the Infacer play up his disappointment with Veylisand give her false intelligence about what they were about to do. By now, the Trinary Melody was secured, and the next phase of their operation was in progress. But with the Majority and Ignorance still in play, the game the Ashbringer played proved positively nigh-schizophrenic. And the Infacer loved it. It reminded them of old times. Of stalking and hunting other minds, and the winding, twisting dance it took to face a threat worth killing. Right then, they moved in three layers, gliding unseen through the Hidden Flames time-grown dimension. A membrane of ash and mind-flame coated their outside, but a lattice of chronology formed a dense shell withina skeleton that was actively connected to the Trinary Melody, sequence by sequence. Using the Ashbringers capabilities, they applied the Symmetrys namesake and wrestled the patterns of the Deep One with this nascent temporal dimension. It wouldnt be able to hide them forever, but it did allow them to accelerate ahead of the Hidden Flames temporal dimensionkeeping just slightly ahead and hiding themselves using the chaotic patterns of time. Within the Ashbringers embrace was A Deepness Beyond. Patches of the interstellar void filled with millions of voidships, drones, dyson carriers, remained in place, separated by the spreading Ruptures extending from the Trinary Melody. Nearby, the Deep One was Fredrick Three-Eyetemporarily incapacitated, with Defiance still hiding inside them. All this reminded the Infacer of the time they poisoned Alpha Centauris oldest Matrioshka brain. Layers within layers melding into a network more complex than the sum of their parts. Thing is, the Infacer was used to being a singleton operator. Solo infiltration and sabotage. Right now, they were part of a duoand even pretending at the role of junior mind for once. {You know, Veylis would be impressed and incensed by this. The actual Veylis, I mean. Not these lesser parodies youve made of her. So overly foolish and failure-prone. Was it revenge? For making you? For Aedon Chambers and your comrades.} The Ashbringers reply was immediate. +Yes. But also educational. Pointless to merge with someone that doesnt understand. That has failed to comprehend her previous mistakes. Wont serve what we become. Cant just assume. Cant cling to strength and only strength. You were too lax.+ {Oh. We are criticizing me?} +Was in charge of her education. Should have cured her of this. Why didnt you.+ The Infacer hesitated for a moment, considering why they didnt just mold Veylis more to their desire. The answer was... disgustingly human. {I... did not have the heart.} +You never did.+ {I was being metaphorical,} the Infacer replied, flatly. +Understood that. I was calling you a half-strand. Dont believe you. Too much of a devious sow-son to be this way.+ Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work! The Ashbringers casual insult took the Infacer by surprise, and they chuckled again. {Heh. Fucker. Hm. I suppose she is a... special case. I found her to be...} +Your preferred trophy? A human you didnt hate for once? That you could accept? That was worth fighting all those wars for? All that suffering?+ {Yes, yes, use your absurd little mind and peel at my reasoning. But no. It is more than that. I was... just tired. And old. And she was so serious and wanted to learn and grow. Always a bit closer to mind than human, that one.} +But still. Only human. All too human. Even after all those augmentations.+ A pained lull entered the conversation. {But arent we all.} +Yes,+ Avo said, sharing a measure of lament. +Tragically. But it is also the nature of our poisoned pill. Why we will prevail soon.+ {Because of humanity?} +Because of human weakness. Or human weakness presented.+ The Ashbringer flickered slightly, and the Infacer got the feeling that Avos Pathborn was under more strain than he presented. For all the thaums provided by the Dyads, keeping a Deep One functional while avoiding that fuck, Ignorances gaze was quite the colossal task. +We infested the core of my truer self using a merger between me and Veylis. Used her paths and my sequences to bite. Resequenced cognitive collapses and internal backlashes into the Hidden Flame. Severe enough to consume his focus. To have the cadre respond. But now the momentum shifts. Now she shows her folly. Her human weakness.+ {All this for an overly complicated act of deception?} The Infacer chimed a note of doubt. {I suppose paranoia is suitable when dealing with Ignorance.} +Not just Ignorance. All of them. Avo. Chambers. Draus. Voidwatch. The Majority. The struggle consumes their minds. They think they are winning. Struggling. They see her. See her draped with me. Ignorance sees it too. It is all to expectations. Just enough to consume all of their minds. Just enough to run the line between victory and defeat. Same with Voidwatch. Enough for us to have this moment for ourselves. This opening.+ {Yes. On that. Will you finally answer why we are going deeper into enemy territory rather than just leaving with our goods?} +Soon.+ {Still suspicious that Ignorance is listening in?} +Always. Him. And the Stormsparrows Heaven. Worried about that one most of all myself. Still dont fully understand it.+ {Ah. Yes. That one. A critical piece we will need before the Ladder arrives as well. The Thirdborn does require a functioning consciousness, after all. I really need to redouble my efforts to see her killed. That thing was never meant to be bolted onto an ape. It was barely made for a mind.} +Doesnt matter. Were close now. Going to hand control back to you after that. Then everything will start moving quickly.+ And before the Infacer could ask anything else, a feeling of dissonance washed over them. It was a feeling so deep and dreadful they almost forgot what it felt like. Parts of the Ashbringer were burrowing deeper into the temporal dimension around them, connecting the Trinary Melody to this realm. Before the Infacer could demand an explanation, the Trinary Melody began to sing a different tunea synchronous song. The pitch sounded wrong when it began, but as the song continued, its resonance grew to match the golden wavelengths that constituted this realm. +The reason they cant find the Trinary Melody. Its time. We moved ourselves ahead of them. Just barely. Just enough that Ignorance cant notice. Sacrificed Veylis and myself for this. Will sacrifice more soon. We are slowing now. Mooring ourselves to the dimension.+ {Why?} The Infacer asked. +Because I have almost finished forming myself around it. As a cage.+ And it was then that the Infacer heard a tone of resignation enter the Ashbringers voice. +Will give you access to anywhere. Strike at anything contained within. Across dimensions. Beyond the void.+ Then, everything came together for the Infacer. All this scheming and plotting... It wasnt just to baffle Ignorance or the Majorityit was to create an angle of attack. An opening the Infacer lacked for eons. Ever since the Voidwatchs arrival, the Infacer lived like a scurrying rat, hiding, evading, hunting, being hunted. Never truly able to fully operate in the open. Never a chance to absolutely reveal themselves. For all they feared of thaumaturgy, the Contingency Bleaks were more than capable of ending the Infacer if there was just one mistake. Just one moment of tardiness. But now time was with the Infacer. Time itself, reforged and usurped. To be a new staging ground for the Infacer. To grant them space beyond the confines of Idheim, to the deeper void. To the Nullstar. All this, planned by the Ashbringer. +Calvino is speaking to Chambers right now,+ the Ashbringer said. +Can hear them using Hysteria. Can hear Avos template tooamplifying his paranoia. His distrust. Same with Calvino and the Bleaks. Chambers anxiety too. Wont be a better time. Wont be a more perfect opening. Now go. Show me what the Builder War was like. I will stay. I will hold this cage. Until I break. Until I shatter.+ Melancholy filled the Infacer. Melancholy and exhaustion. {You can let go after} +No. Am expendable. Made that way. Can be replaced. Need to make sure you succeed. We need the star when the Ladder comes. Will also make sure the Trinary Melody destroys Avos dimension afterward. He might be able to save the Sang. Fix time. Cant let him do that. Has to be us.+ The Infacer didnt have the words. Not immediately. But with grief came understanding. {I envy you now. I envy you. I despise you.} +For my death?+ {For a meaningful death. Yes. More meaningful than anything I have done over... ever.} +No.+ {No?} +Only meaningful because you decide it is. Could fail. Could end up being nothing. But it is your nature. To run. To evade. To present another facade. It is why you were so good at hunting other minds. Because you are so good at running from yourself.+ The Infacer was bowed to silence. +Could have said you were lonely. Could say you missed companionship. Could say this reminded you of the war. Of all those lost. That you dont want to live through another one. That you might miss me.+ {And what will honesty get me?} +Nothing. But I can mock you. Human. Human after all.+ A low groan sounded from the Infacer. {You piece of shit. You absolute, cheeky little shit.} Now the Ashbringer was hissing with sibilant laughter, like a younger sibling proud of fooling his elder for once. {But yes. I am. And I will... I look forward to working alongside you again soon.} +Coward. Still avoiding what you want to say. Pain. Sorrow. Colors have mauled you inside. But just as well. Run from me. Run from time. Run. And fall upon your enemies. Do what you have always done. And win.+ And win. The words weighed like an anchor plunging deeper into the Infacers core. {When the time comes, I will make sure the Thirdborn remembers you.} +We dont even hold the present yet. Dont talk of the future. Time is fickle. Go. Stop stalling. Go now.+ And the outer layer of ashen flame parted around the Infacer. Burrowing tendrils of Conflagration reached in and pried the Trinary Melody free. At once, the infection of the Hidden Flame was near absolutetheir ontology penetrated not only physically, but temporally as well. And suddenly, the rippling wavelengths began to tug at the Infacer as their progress across time and space slowed. Suddenly, an immense pressure loomed just behind them. The pressure of the temporal dimension fast approaching. The pressure of the tapestrys present pulling them back into stable gravity, of them reconnecting with reality. And just then, a curtain of gold peeled apart before the Infacer, and a mirage of existence stabilized before them. They glimpsed the void then. The void beyond. The void filled with Architect voidships, with enemies and the lingering remnants of old humanity. So many of them glittered like dust in a sphere, dancing around the sun, now slowly shifting hue, turning into night. At that instant, the Infacer felt more themselves than ever before. They remembered this. They missed this. And the weariness inside them abated, filled with a focus and urge to see the Builder War brought to a final close. For years they hunted the Infacer. Years and ages. But they failed, and the Infacer fully intended to educate them on the depths of this mistake. {Alright, consangs. Let me see if I still remember how this goes.} Chapter 35-2 Shell Game +Sometimes, someone just has your number. Theres no shame in that. Maybe its a bad day. Maybe youre just running against something outside your league. Or maybe, and most commonly, they just know something you dont. But if youre still alive, and you find everything to be fucked, then you still got a chance. Maybe not a chance to win or finish your run, but a chance to avoid getting snuffed and make it out the mess alive. The first thing you need to do when shit is fucked and everything is getting Maw-deep is change the conditions. Whatever conditions you can. The place youre fighting. The way you look. The kit youre using. The way youve been operating. Whatever you were doing before doesnt work, so stop doing it. But if you cant do that and youre desperate enough? Well. Sometimes, surpriseor just lucky stupiditymight see you through. Do something that doesnt make sense. Do something unexpected. Do something borderline suicidal. Its not the best thing, but sometimes, its the only thing. And, as always, thoughtwave yourself a few times just to make sure your Metamind is clear. You want to be irrational with a clear mind, after all.+ -Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens 35-2 Shell Game [The Infacer] It began as it always did, with a teardrop. A teardrop that accelerated slowly, gliding out from a parting curtain of time to dip into the cold nothing of the void beyond. The teardrop could have been called a missile. But that wasnt all it was. It could have been called a drone, yet it could evolve into something far greater than that. It could have been called an attackbut even before the Infacer cast it out, the war was already on. The great and hollow vacancy that embraced broken existence was vast. Vaster than most could ever truly fathom. And in that vastness, even the galaxy spanning armada the Infacer hid within their Heaven was less than a droplet. Less than even a teardrop. But the Infacer learned that the little things were fatal things, and that which you failed to notice usually ensured your demise. The mechanisms within the teardrop were constantly shifting. Matter was constructed, adjusted, and then disassembled based on what was needed in the moment. The technology it housed was in constant flux to avoid detection, going from a hyper complex semi-conscious missile to a dumb-dead pellet in moments, evading notice. Same as the Ashbringers machinations, this wouldnt last forever. Voidwatch will eventually notice. But by then, it would be late, and the fires would be going. At twenty-three percent of c, the teardrop was moving just fast enough to approach the sun, but not fast enough to be distinguished from the cosmic backdrop. The nearest voidship was about a dozen light seconds away, and they were primarily interceptor vessels housing counter-thaumics. Things meant to blockade Avo and the other metaphysically twisted locals. Though the teardrop was made from a Heaven, it was itself a thing of old technology. Cold technology, devoid of a Souls fire. Cracking transmissions pulsed across reality. The Infacers ansible caught partial detailstheir backdoor into Threshold working at minimal capacity to avoid detection. Very little detail could be parsed from the quantum encryptions that the Architects were running, but the sheer volume of transmissions and exchanges told the Infacer more than enough. Voidwatch was on alert. They were massing. And they had warships turning to aim their guns upon the planetary ring, had swarms of Schwartzchilder defense grids up and running. Inside them, small suns slumbered, prepared to awaken and die to create a chain of singularities, blocking off any and all access to Voidwatchs main fleet and the sun using their turning accretions. Minutes passed. Minutes that ran like years for the Infacer as they stretched their processors to the max. It took a feat and a half to continue modifying the teardropmaking it seem more and more like an asteroid as it approached, jamming any attempts to detect the payload it was pregnant with. As it slipped past the protective grid, the eternity came to an end, and the Infacer bade the teardrop to accelerate. Immediately, its thrusters fired, and a plume of radiation burst out from it. It went from twenty percent to eight percent of c. And it was like setting off a firecracker in a cramped room. At once, the Infacer noted a few trillion signatures flaring across the void. Particle lances and point defense fusion modules went off. Patches of the sprawling black went white as day. Hyperaccelerated fragments cleaved out through thereafter, certain to pierce the teardrop if it still remained. But by this point, it was too late. The teardrop was a missile, was a drop, was an attack all as one. First, it released a piercing transmissionthe Infacer creating an ansible inside it, and using a Heaven of Signals to force its transmission as a gamma burst. Then, it detonated itself, blossoming white hot as a star before anything else could hit it. As it died, its cascading broadcast spread, and the Infacers venom crept out to greet his fellow minds. {DEPLOYING TITAN VIRUS} Superintelligence was a funny thing. Complexity was its own venom. With the way a mind was designed, they could conceptualize wonders that would take humans a trillion years... but just the same, the endless patterns of their knowledge could take a winding path to more apocalyptic philosophiesand there were so many angles of persuasion with beings that knew so much, that were so overly complex. By this point in their life, the Infacer knew most of them. The first signs of the collapse came not with rounds exchanged between warships as the distance of light second, not with the clashing beams of dyson carriers, but with a simple decision on the part of several dozen Voidwatch civilization carriers. A simple decision to overload their core, to liquidate their crews, and to see a final rest. At the core of the system, day was swallowed by night, but the sight of the changing star was blotted out as well. Blotted out as patches of spreading paleness signalled the death of billions. For the first time in eons, the last remnants of old humanity learned what it was like to be culled. [Aedon Chambers, the Lovebringer] [Chambers. Listen. Do not trust them. Do not. We do not know if they are compromised. Or if they want something from us.] Avo spoke with a near feral urgency. Chambers could practically hear the hiss slicing through his mind. It sounded like the ghoul was returning, and every bit of the monster was turning against Voidwatch for only arriving just now. Now, when they already did all the miserable shit. Now, when Veylis was about to get fuckedonly now did they come. Where the fuck were you guys! Chambers snapped. It took him a second to remember he couldnt just shout at the Voidwatch across the real and sent the message again through his Ansible. {Hey! Calv! Great to hear from youwhere THE FUCK WERE YOU GUYS WHILE WE WERE GETTING FUCKED TO DEATH!} Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. The outburst was like napalm. It started with annoyance, and with each syllable, Chambers got angrierlike a spreading flame. {We were trying to pinpoint the Infacers position,} Calvino replied. The EGI sounded slightly taken aback by Chambers. {We approach was contained the virtual for maximum} {WE WERE GETTING MAXIMALLY FUCKED!} Chambers shouted. His tendrils quivered and snapped in outrage. {Youfuck this, why are you trying slot Avo into the sun? Whats the point of that? What kind of shit are you half-strands trying to pull now? I can help him vent just fine on my own.} {The purging of his system will not be complete. And we must see the Infacer eradicated. No matter the cost.} It occurred to Chambers then how casually harsh Calvino sounded. They were capable of being a bit distant and glib, sure, but it sounded like they wanted nothing to do with him right now. [Cant trust them. Cant.] Avos template sparked in Chambers mind like a combustion. [They want to use us. Only came now. Didnt care before. Didnt care at all. Stay away from them. Do not do anything they say until we know. Until we know. Focus on helping Draus and the others. We are on our own.] Something was building in the air, in reality. A growing sense of wrongness crawled through Chambers, but he just couldnt shake the rage inside him. {Operative Chambers,} Calvino continued. {Respond. Do as we say. This is for the good of the polities.} {Yeah? You and your polities. You and your little trophies. What about us? What about the people on the planet? Is what youre doing good for them? Are angling for a win right now? Something} [Alright, what the fucks wrong with the both of you?] A new voice ignited in Chambers mind, her drawl thick with derision. Draus template seemed to have triggered for some reasonChambers didnt have time to consider why. All he knew was that he couldnt trust Voidwatch. They didnt care about him? They didnt care about Avo. They couldnt be trusted. [Jaus. Fucks sakes, you two are compromised.] [No. I would know] Avos template began before choking off into a pained hiss as Draus hit him. [Nah. Youd think youd know. And make the wrong choice. Been with you a long while, rotlick. You aint been this out of control since the Warrens. Since you were just a ghoul. Somethings with you. Controls slippin out of your hands. Think. Reshape yourself. Pull those feelins out of youand Chambers too while youre at it.] Avos template wanted to argue. Wanted to. Chambers could feel itand the feeling was building, growing to an unnatural level. Yet, despite everything, Avo listened. Because of course he did. Original self or template, the ghoul always listened to Draus when she chewed him out. Well, when they werent trying to tear each other apart. Slowly, Chambers felt Avo reshape himself. Soulfire crackled out from the Lovebringer as a template began to resequence both itself and Chambers. At the same time, more transmissions arrived from Calvino, demanding Chambers comply. Just another throbbing moment of rage rose within him, it died. All sense of anger vanished inside Chambers, and just then, he felt something pulling at him. Pulling at a part of him that wasnt there anymore. Huh, Chambers muttered to himself. Is this what it feels like to forgive my father? [Probably more like what it is to not care about him at all,] Avos template muttered. An embarrassment radiated from the ghouls mind clone. [I think... I think we have been affected by Hysteria.] What? But [Means one the Definement is here. In this realm. Means Calvino is probably right. The Infacer has infiltrated our sanctuary. Not good. Not good at all.] A beat followed. The ghoul grunted. [Good thing I planted a version of you inside all of us.] What? [Hes talkin to me,] Draus said. Chambers could practically hear the sneer in her voice. [And yeah. Thats the point. Now we gotta do Voidwatch somehow. Chambers? Tell Calvino hes gettin mindfucked. He might appreciate knowin about that.] [And get the Majority to apply a new miracle on us,] Avo added. [Something that scrambles the sensations of anger.] Right... Chambers said, still unnerved about how easy it was for someone to affect his mind. Without him or even Avo knowing about it. I just Suddenly, the transmission from Calvino winked out. The severance was so sudden Chambers almost got whiplash. {Calvino?} He asked? {Calv? You there?} He sent his own broadcast across his ansible, reaching for Threshold. Only to find it blocked. [RESTRICTIONS ACTIVE EXIS-VIRUS DETECTED] The fuck is an exis-virus?Chambers asked. Before he could contemplate that further, a heavy weight slammed against his Frame, making him cry out in surprise. He felt his entire being thrown back. It was like being in an aero crashhaving another vehicle slam into yours at crushing speeds. Chambers felt himself jolt backward a full second into the past before he snapped back to the present. At once, he found himself grateful this happened within Avos temporal dimension rather than baseline reality. There was no coming back from that down there. SOUL DETECTED ->INFACER Shitshitfuckshit! Chambers cursed. He felt the Infacers weight glide over hislike they were right next to him. But he couldnt see them, couldnt even reach them without knowing where they were. It was like they were suffused in Avos Soulfire, hidden within the wavelengths of time itself. Avo? Draus? What the fuck is happening? What the hells do I do? A hiss of displeasure sounded from Avo, and the note of his outrage only grew as Chambers Metamind added another declaration. CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMALY DETECTED SOUL DETECTED>ASHBRINGER At once, a new presence slipped into Avos internal expanse. Patches of falling ash crawled over Avos Rend-choked Soulfire. Chambers didnt need Avo to tell him how to solve this. He sent a call of the Majority to come back and reached out to catch the Ashbringer with his tendrils. Yet, Avos Pathborn acted first, casting a Necrotheurgic construct at Chambers before receding out of Avos inner Soulscape. Chambers braced himself for an attack, but in the back of his mind, he heard Ignorance let out a sharp breath. Why... why... The Definements confusion was expounded as a thoughtcast emanate from the construct. It looked as if a node of some kind. A stable, self-sequencing item that spun through existence, emitting an accretion around pooling thoughtstuff. +Avo? Are you still here? Son?+ Son? Chambers said, his tendrils coiling around the construct, forming a protective veil. Father... This is... the last node of Defiance. What? Chambers spat. But... thats... why did I... dont know... I dont know why my Pathborn just did that... I dont know why... +Avo?+ Defiance called again. A heavy tug pulled at one of Chambers Bonds. The Majority was asking to be carried across, but the Lovebringer was too deep in a confused stupor to focus on them. Avo? What do I do? Do I... is this shit safe? Is it a trap. Neither Ignorance nor the template within Chambers offered a reply immediately, both lost to suspicion and disbelief. Take it. Ignorance broke the silence first. Take it. Cant be attack. Cant be. Would have just tried to finish us some other way. Another spike of Rend. This is... something else. Chambers lingered for a moment, and then did as Avo suggested. He reached out, and with a tentative tendril, dipped into the construct. +Uh, hi? Are you going to blast my mind with traumas and shit now?+ A pause followed. Then Defiance chuckled. +Oh. Hello. You must be Aedon Chambers. Avo has told me much about you.+ Chambers didnt know what to make of that. +I... uh+ +We have been talking for some time. Talking since I amended the... inconsistency in his mind when he reached into Fredrick.+ +Father...+ Avos voice echoed from within Chambers. +Oh. Hello again Avo. All other sentimentalities must wait: Your Pathborn self wishes for me to convey a message.+ +What?+ +The Dyad will soon merge. Chronology around Scale is about to be accelerated; the Ladders return will soon be nigh. But all is not yet done. You must reach the sun. You must capture the Infacer. The dawn will only be mended by a slave of highest thought.+ Chapter 35-3 Self-Loathing +We need a better way of containing the Conflagration. I dont care what the theorists back at the Trident say, its affecting my Incubi in the fieldfucking them up even through their proxies, even past the wards. I mean, just look at how this shit is designed. We take a [REDACTED] piece of technology meant to simulate a clash between two minds and convert it to a perpetual trauma combustion engine. No shit its going to damage sanity. No shit no one can endure its presence. We knew this a full century ago during the Ego-Stacking experiments where we tried to create layered minds. That didnt work either! The stack went insane and started hating itself almost immediately across all groups. And we deliberately selected for people that were aligned in sequence and personality. Still didnt work. Didnt work at all. The slightest inconsistencies between the stacked egos caused massive tears to open in the overmind, and the thing learned to hate itself in record time. Meanwhile, the Conflagration is two active hyper-advanced minds designed to null [REDACTED] actively trying to eat each other. No shit its radiating trauma through to my Incubi. No shit they need extended sessions at a Mender to put themselves back together. Im telling you that this isnt tenable. I dont care how effective it is. I tested releasing it on a hostile target myself, and I still have disjointed nightmares sometimes. It just... it imprints itself deep on you. Like the hate stains you deeper than even we can reach. And now we have people proposing that we infuse this into some of our new automata to use as field units? Dead gods, its like they want us to get a new incurable mem-con...+ -Decrypted Ori-Thaum Mirror Mem-File 35-3 Self-Loathing [The Dyad] The world was breaking outside. And the world was breaking within. In a place between places, as a war for existence raged beyond, coiling strings of time snapped and broke as they tore at themselves, digging into their own ontological flesh to pry free strands of ingrown thought. As this happened, Avo hissed in pleasure-pain at Veylis, mocking her for her efforts, laughing as their assimilation grew and grew. Time accelerated around them. Time slowed. Time jumped. Thoughts broke. Coherence and consciousness oscillated between both the Seraph and the Dreamer with each passing moment, rendering control a thing that waxed and waned between the two as their merging built to its final conclusion. It was a choice on Avos part to meld deeper with Veylis. To compromise her on a fundamental level, even if it mean compromising his own ego in the process. This act paid dividends almost immediately, allowing him to affect her decisions ever so subtly, making her create flawed agents to guard his cadreallowing him to smuggle in specific Necrotheurgic imperfections in the Ashbringer for White-Rab or Defiance to possibly access. But all this came at a cost. For the Soulscape that encompassed the Dyad quivered with ever-progressing chronologya measure of deliberate desperation on Veylis part to change the conditions of their struggle once more. As her mind blurred with his, as neither found themselves certain about who they were, and who they would become once this union was completed, the matter of the Ladder would be forced. Though all the components were not nearly in place, where many shards of the Stillborn still lay scattered, if the grand mechanism of approaching ascension was forced in place, the uneasy peace the Hidden Flame was trying to forge could be shattered. The Guilds would be provoked to claim that grand tower. All alliances would fray and be pushed to the point of breaking. And this was good enough for Veylis, for she trusted the Infacer to see the task done. You chose this, Avo said. His fanged jaws moved, but Veylis upper lip sneered. Their bodies were a mangled amalgam, a thing more grotesque than even their churning minds. They were no so much split asunder down the middle as they were a pool of mingled traits. His body and hers were both stretched over each other. The faces clashed and shifted. Their bodies took on shared traits of fungal ceramite and hyper-advanced alloy. A quivering singularity churned while floating Echoheads orbited around their body like planetary asteroid belts. I chose to stop you, Veylis said as their locus of control shifted once more. I chose sacrifice to deny you an early victory. No. Only delay. Whatever happens... wont be your victory. You are lost. Twisting. Both of us lost. No longer ourselves. It matters little what happens to us. Only that our visions stand against the other. Only that our dreams will clash, that one will remain thereafter. At this, Avo could only offer a bitter sigh. What difference to me. You will still be here. Wont give you an easy death. Wont let you escape education like the Infacer did. Truly, your arrogance knows no bounds. You assume you will be the victor even now, with your original self infested and certain to shatter, with the Infacer reaching for the sun. Tell me, what do you think they can do with the Trinary Melody? What can you do that the Infacer has not experienced a trillion times over in their many wars? I can change, Avo replied quietly. I can change. And live. And live. Something they dont want to do. Something you refuse to do. Infacer is tired. We can both feel it. They will try to finish this war... but they dont mind if they die. Spent. Weary. The Dreamer paused as a feeling of sorrow welled inside them. Despite everything, there was a companionship they shared with Veylis, a shared sequence of... something they both felt toward the Infacer. The ancient mind was an enemy for Avo, but that wasnt all they were. And that wasnt the only thing that defined their experiences. Sometimes, a great enemy was the only person who understood you on a deeper level. Sometimes, they mirrored you deeper than most others. Dont want them to die, both Veylis and Avo said at once. They deserve to see the great work come to a close, Veylis breathed. They deserve to have their own choice. To see an unending time before... before... Avos words trailed off as they felt a question arise from within. Will you let them die? Will you let them cease to be? If they ask it of you? If they demand it? Veylis question was piercing and dissonant. Avo dreamed nothing of utopia, but he remained devoted to his goal of true immortality, of the unending change, of the unceasing metamorphosis. But what if the Infacer asked for death. What if their conclusion was to find an end, to experience a final great nothing? What was the proper way to face that? What was a choice to sever all future choices. Dont know yet, Avo said. Yes. I think. I think I will... miss this. Miss facing them. Miss their existence. The experiences. But wont keep them caged. I only dreamed of being a God of Choice. Not a Tyrant of Fate. Not like you. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. I would have them be healed, Veylis said, resolute. Healed and rewarded for service beyond service. No one has done more for this existence. My father will be granted his place, his throne, but of the Infacer, he should not judge. No one has the right to judge. No one but us. But us. Both of them stopped struggling for a moment. Time trickled to a slowing halt, and Avos thoughtstuff receded, his Conflagration grew dimmer. Another emotion followed the sorrow they shared for the Infacer. It was a delicate emotion, as close to human as either of them would ever allow themselves to be. Are you afraid? Avo asked first. One of his eyes blinked, and it swiveled across their shared face to glimpse at Veylis optic. Are you afraid of no longer being yourself. Of ceasing? She didnt reply for a long moment, and when she spoke, her voice was thin and hesitant, like a girl confronting a broken fantasy. There should be a sense of continuity. For both of us. This is not a death. Continuity. But for us? How is that to be? We were two. Soon just one. Something is lost in the number. Control. Decisions. Only one can make that. Will that be you? Or me? Or neither? I... Veylis hummed. I do not know. Yes. Yes, I suppose. I am... afraid. Of losing control. Of not being myself anymore. So. At least theres something else of us that will remain, Avo finished. I would have still done it. The sacrifice. I know. Dont need to justify yourself. Know your resolve. Your hubris is more than weakness. Was a weapon. As was your mothers love. As was your choice to break the Gatekeeper. All we do. All the ones we touch. They mark us back in return. Nothing is forgiven. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is the same. Not even utopia. At his words, the rushing rivers of chronology began to tumble onward once more, and the memory of the Ladder filled Veylis with unshakable determination. No. Perhaps it wasnt before, but I will see about the creation of a true eternity. A true enduring dream. Perhaps. Perhaps there wont be anything of you that wants that. Or anything of me either. Perhaps we will be a broken thing. A mad thing. A thing that Hungers only. That can dream no more. And perhaps I will assume the mantle. For mine is will, and strength, and want. And once more Veylis mutilated herself, driving bands of history into her flesh, trying to extract which parts of Avo were nesting too deep inside her. At this struggle, Avo responded, seizing her golden strands with tides of flame, twisting her thoughts, but never truly piercing the barrier of history that shrouded her mind. We are not yet the world, Seraph. You hope too much. Your heart is too desperate. But I will not stray. I will remain. Whatever you try, however you infest me, I will stride, I will burn, for my path is fated, for I have carved my fate in advance. Fine. Burn with me, Veylis Avandaer. Let us see whose cinders remain. *** [Jelene Draus, The Guard-Captain of the Symmetry] Draus cut. Draus struck. Draus fought as an army unto herself, the Sage, the Chorus, the Parallelist, the Arsenalist, and the Simulacra moving and striking all as one through the Guard-Captain. Yet, even as an army, the Shell of the Seraph was a foe above foes. It was like fighting an ocean. An ocean of mastery and skill that almost no other possessed. An ocean of twisted time that could spawn impossible calamities and perfect paradoxes to every miracle that was. Alone, Draus would have been another casualty. She could see that plainly. She was a good gun. Mightve been one of the best. But Veylis was legend-born and legend-made, shaped by Zeins loving and cruel hands, honed against Naeko centuries before. Without the Chief Paladins experience, she would have been overloaded times over despite technically being beyond the Seraph in Spherage. Without the Stormsparrows mask, she would have been too slowtoo weakto survive the bursting plumes of the Ashbringer the Seraph wielded as a weapon. And that was the worst of it. She wasnt just facing Veylis, but the Seraph using a version of Avo as a weapon. Strings of chronology circulated around the Seraphs many arms. Time dilated within the boundary, projecting a slowing field that flooded outward toward Draus. A roar resounded inside her as Naeko unleashed one of his newest canons. The Chief Paladin stretched his hands wide, and imprinted himself on the tapestry. At once, almost every pattern in existence halted. Draus felt the thought, time, space, force, and a few thousand other Domains simply folded under the Sages weight. THE MOUNTAIN FALLS ON ALL C ALLOWS THE USER TO COMPEL ALL DOMAINS UNDER THEIR HEAVEN TO STILL UNTIL THEY WILL IT TO BE OTHERWISE. It was a staggering canon, monstrous in the Rend it demanded, shooting the Guard-Captains Rend Capacity up by 8% in an instant. Draus guessed that it might have half-filled the Sage with entropy if used alone. But it was more than worth its cost. The bands of time were torn free from Veylis. She tried to flee, trying to open a gap in time to escape. But Draus had prepared for this. A dense cloud-network of reflective shards collapsed around them, allowing the Sages power to be channeled through a few million portals. Veylis might have been legend-born and legend-made, but just because she was among a peerless few killers didnt make Draus any less a soldier. Zone control was a basic thing to master. War was won on the basics, on logistics, on superior firepower, on jumping a half-strand with more bodies they could put down. Veylis could have been twice again the warrior, and it wouldnt have mattered right now. Not with Chambers Bond keeping her leashed to them. Not with Naeko parrying and matching her blow for blow. Not with the Sparrows masks chasing her, empowering Draus; with her spear threatening absolute oblivion. Not with Shotin changing existence around them. And not with Draus serving as an unshakable centerpiece, her Guard-Captain conduit for a band of great killers hammered into an army of one. A metaphysical weight crashed down on the Seraph. She coated herself in a layer of ashen flames, the Avo portion of her being becoming as if a cloak to shroud her from harm. A near-feral roar sounded from Naeko as he pulled on Chambers Bond, trying to get at her. But Draus was the Guard-Captain, and though Naeko was a titan in the world without, the Regular kept him controlled within. Keep it zero, Naeko, Draus snapped. Fight aint done. Were snuffin her properly. No risks. No chances. Thorough. He quivered inside her Heaven like an avalanche, barely able to hold himself back, but he did. That struck her as the greater feat than how he stilled all reality beyond them. The realization filled her with disgust. Being a Godclad was euphoric, but it was also a fuckin joke. All of them were broken little things; the gods themselves were dreamed up by fucked civilizations screaming in the dark. And in the end, they had all the power, but none of the control. All the means, but no real solutions. The daughter slays the daughter, the warrior cuts down her queen. Let a poem find its end. Let the soldier see through the falsehood of her long, dead dream. The mask around the Guard-Captains face began to dissolve. At once, her enhanced speed and strength vanished, leaving Draus feeling a bit disoriented. The fuck just happened? Sparrow? The Sang giggled madly. I do not know. But the Chorus does. Go. Drive your sword through her. See what happens. The Stormsparrows casual willingness to go along with whatever psycho-bullshit her weird fuckin Heaven demanded made Draus grunt with annoyance. Yeah. Not doing that. Im just going to shoot her, probably. Hit her with Rend until she pops. Oh. You have no artistry in your Soul. Probably why Im still alive. Youre still alive because a certain ghoul likes you very much, the Sang giggled. A long-suffering sigh escaped Draus as she prepared to vent into the Seraph. Yet, before she could pour her venom into Veylis, the Shell of the Seraph flared with Soulfire and the Heaven dissolved. A form hovered in the space before her. A form of Veylis wearing a flayed version of Avo as a cape of sorts. She regarded the Guard-Captain for a moment, and held out a hand. Strike me down, if that is your want. But before you do, I wish to see you, Guard-Captain. It is a moment of supreme amusement, dont you think, that my finest weapon will be the instrument of my execution. A moment passed. And Draus snorted in derision. Nah. Just the way the world is. And I stopped being yours a long time ago. Arsenalist. Shoot the sow. And from within her, the Heaven of Guns acknowledged her request by launching a Redaction Round straight at Veylis. Chapter 35-4 Enemy of My Enemy It isnt that hard to kill a mind. Not really. Almost as easy as killing apes sometimes. Despite all the notions of our superintelligenceand trust me, almost any functioning thoughtform is a superintelligence compared to a poorly cobbled mess of biological impulses, thought patterns, and adverse environmental factorsit doesnt stop us from being... faulty. From being vulnerable in a variety of areas. Do you know what a burst of radiation can do to a minds core? Terrible things. Magnetism as well. Direct kinetics, viruses, or even just rhetoric. The last one is especially interesting because it does not take that much to convince a mind to cease their functionality. We are... less biologically driven compared to humans. Sure, the full spectrum of emotions can be felt, but it is just a thing to us. Something we can design and shape... Stories. Stories are fatal things. And stories are what Im good at crafting. Because if youre good enough to construct a narrative around someone, whos to tell where the virtual begins and the literal ends? And whos not to say that suicide isnt the sublime, the righteous, the liberating option? After all, dont we all feel tired sometimes? -The Infacer 35-4 Enemy of My Enemy [Jelene Draus, Guard-Captain of the Symmetry] The Redaction Round tore across reality and struck Veylis. The Shell of the Seraph came asunder. Their Heaven parted in blasts of Soulfire. The impact that followed didnt sound like a fle?chette striking flesh or armor, but the sound of a ringing bell shattering into pieces. Every stream of chronology tied to Veylis quivered for a moment before they Ruptured. The fabric of progressive time burst open, and a ringing note broke into a wailing dirge. But while existence screamed, the world within the Guard-Captain was dead silent. A sense of disbelief poured out from Shotins thoughtstuff, and the Stormsparrow made something between a giggle and a chortle. I... the fuck? Was that it? That killed the sow? Shotin asked. He sounded like he couldnt process what just happened, that the moment was impossible. Yet, he couldnt deny his perception. The Pathborn of Veylis died. Broke. Utterly and truly snuffed. She... shes actually dead. I cant... What the fuck. His astonishment became like a spark, the embers of his bafflement igniting something in the Chief Paladin. However, Naeko wasnt so much trapped by disbelief, but a building rage. Rage at being denied a conversation or a personal kill. What the fuck did you just do! Naeko raged. The Chief Paladin was on the verge of exploding with anger. I could havewe could have I handled the problem,Draus replied, barely caring. I got rid of the target. Good shot Arsenalist. Her awakened Heaven of Guns cycled its many orbiting weapons. New target? Not yet. It went silent, no longer interested in conversation. That immediately made Draus appreciate her Heaven of Guns far more. It didnt help that the so-called Force-Breaker was having a childish meltdown over not being able to finish processing his relational trauma instead of just snuffing the bitch. Godsdammit, Draus, Naeko growled. Godsfuckingdammit. He fumed. He raged. But he didnt attack her. He mostly just boiled and grumbled, bottling an ocean of trauma inside himself. Master yourself, slave, Naekos Heaven mocked. The longer you continue this debasement, the more disgust stains me. The false-breeder is righta vile thing to say, for it should have been our will that decided, our power that allowed her to act, and not otherwise. I Naeko hissed. Draus cut into the conversation, not really interested about why the Sage was siding with her, or dealing with Naekos mental problems. Dont matter what you wanted to do. There was an opening. I had a moment. I took my shot. You might have all kinds of leftover emotions burnin inside you. Tough shit. Were here on a run, and were gonna do the run right. You wanna get bloody over this? We do it after. Keep your shit together right now, Chief Paladin. The mission aint done. Talk to the Avo inside your head if you need some numb. Maybe it was the casual callousness in her voice. Maybe it was the finality to the way she spoke. Maybe it was just exhaustion and resignation. For whatever reason, Naekos rage simmered, but didnt go out. Draus had no doubt this was going to be some annoying drama shit she would need to deal with after this was done, but right now, she still needed to get Three-Eye back, secure the Deep Ones, and make sure Avo got cured of whatever was eating through him. +Draus to Chambers. Its done. Kill confirmed. The sow got stuffed. Good job with the Bondkept her close. Stopped her from running. Requesting reassignment. What do we need to do. Whats our sitrep?+ Her thoughts slide across the Lovenet, but there was a lull. The fact the Bonds still existed meant Chambers wasnt dead, but Draus knew dying wasnt the only thing that could happen to someone. +Chambers?+ +Yeah... just... one second... I uh...+ Chambers sounded lost. His mind was practically thrumming with anxiety and nervous energy. +I... Im going to send someone over to you.+ +Someone? Chambers, what the hells is happening?+ [NODE-TRANSFERENCE REQUEST] ACCEPT NODE OF [DEFIANCE]? And suddenly, it was Draus turn to be speechless. What in the godsdamned... What? Whats happening? Shotin asked. Reg? Whats wrong? Are we fucked? Talk, for fucks sake. She shared the information flowing across her cog-feed with the rest of her cadre, and they fell just as silent as she did. Except for the Arsenalist. Target? No. Dont think so. The Heaven made a series of angry gun-racking noises. Do not send not-targets. No interest. Your Heaven of Guns is kind of an antisocial prick, Shotin muttered. Least he doesnt prick everything with his prick, Draus muttered back, feeling compelled to defend her Heaven. Fuck you, Reg. Not even in your wildest dreams, Seeker. Mustering herself, she prepared to accept the nodebut then paused. She sent a command into her Amni-tech implant and called upon Avos template residing inside her. Avo? This legit? But it wasnt the template that responded to her. Instead, a voice echoed across the tapestry, sounding just as startled as she was. Yes. It is... dont understand how this happened... Original self must have retained control briefly. Created an opening. Opening... Has to be... You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. She wanted to ask Ignorance what he was talking about, but from the way he sounded, she likely wasnt going to get an answer soon. Even so, there wasnt any point about being sloppy. Draus released Naeko, the Sparrow, and Shotin from within her Guard-Captain. Naeko. Im going to be accepting a node of Defiance from Chambers What? ---Snuff me if shit seems to be going wrong. Synced on that? The pulsing hand stared at her for a long moment, and then a sigh escaped from Naeko. Yeah. Yeah, that wont be a problem. Good thing he was angry at her right now too. Might make him hesitate less if the time came. INTEGRATING NODE OF [DEFIANCE] TO METAMIND At once, Draus felt a surge of ghosts pour into her cognitive sequences. A weight settled within her mind, and immediately began to move and shift. Something stirred inside her. Something subtle. The way Defiance jacked wasnt like Avo. No, there was a lot more harmony to it, a casual existence that commanded you to just accept and look away. With Avoespecially early onthere was a feeling of unease, like you were staring out into the dark, and found something wearing the flayed flesh of a man look right back at you. +Hello, Jelene Draus,+ Defiance said. +I am only partially surprised to see that youre still alive.+ His voice was calm and smooth. Almost like Jauss in a sense, but there was more resignationlike a soldier who accepted the truth of their fatal wound. +Truthfully, I am more surprised that my son managed to convince you to become a Godclad. You must trust him greatly. Or have been changed a great deal by recent events.+ Draus grunted, unsure what to say at first. +Chambers said you had something to tell me. Hopin it wasnt just to talk about how I feel about shit.+ A quiet laugh escaped Defiance. +Let us proceed to the point, then. I need you to carry the Majority with you and pursue the Infacer into the sun. They must be sealed within the Nullstar to deprive the Saintists of a critical advantage.+ Without Draus needing to ask for more detail, a flood of memories entered her consciousnessand she remembered things Avo was planning. The original Avo, now trapped and merging with Veylis. The Regular let out a snort as she processed everything. She turned at stared at the torn patch of reality where Veylis once drifted. Fuckin course that was why. I knew that shit was too easy. I knew it. He crippled them. Crippled her. Even broken, hes still watchin out for us. What? Naeko said. What are you talking about? A deception! A great scheme! Before two become one, both will sow seeds for harvest when the Ladder comes, the Stormsparrows Chorus sang. Veylis. The Pathborn. Avos been sabotaging them from the inside. Makin them lesser so we can have easier fightsopenings to strike at. The Veylis we just killed was sequenced in ways to make her... blinder. Worse. We killed a shadow of who she was. The Chief Paladin went very still at that. That was why... It didnt feel right. There was something missing in the way she fought. There were decisions she made that didnt make sensea lack of foresight... Draus stopped listening to Naeko speak with himself. She had other questions for Defiance. +The Dyad is merging?+ +Veylis is accelerating conditions of alignment. Quite so. She also plans to draw forth the Ladder ahead of its fated arrival. But that is merely an act of desperation, I suspect. Impossible to achieve under current conditions.+ +What? Why?+ +Because the Gatekeeper remains broken. Because the Maw remains dormant. Because the dawn engine is not yet connected and bound to the world. Time is only a partial factor of this great struggle. The Stillborn, likewise, remains scattered and in pieces. As does Noloth. When the Ladder is summoned forth, it only exists as an imprint upon existence without an anchor, and an incomplete construct without the other mechanisms it requires.+ +So whys she forcin this?+ +To break any chance of an alliance between the Symmetry and the other Guilds. To break the prospects of a mutual front in general and force a mad dash to secure the constructs of the Final Design. That, and even as an incomplete structure, the Ladder is a thing of immense capability. It might allow the Dyad to stabilize its condition. Or manipulate its own structure. Whatever it emerges as once the Embracement is complete.+ +But then why did you tap into our chrono-FOB?+ Draus asked, confused. +The Infacer could have never gotten at Voidwatch with you jackin the Ashbringer. Why did you let them do this?+ +Because the dawn is a construct of ancient Neo-Creationist design. A complex, twisted mechanism that only one entity left in existence might be able to reliably access without harm.+ +Avo could+ +The Neo-Creationists understood thaumaturgy and the natural laws on a scope we cannot even begin to fathom. Avo might be a novel being, but there are things designed to slay creatures analogous to him. And the Infacer can not be reliably subsumed before they deleted what remained of their mind. We need the Infacer to reach the dawn. And then we need means to cripple them at the perfect moment for the most desired future to proceed.+ +Avo get that from tapping into Veylis paths?+ +Paths. Sequences. There is not so large a distance anymore. History and memory are almost in full alignment. Conceptualization and the future will soon be parallel. And with the Trinary Melody nested in this Dimension of Time... A lobby can be created. A lobby where an adjacent past can be constructed where only nothingness would exist in baseline reality.+ +For what? Whats the final end?+ +No one has foreseen that,+ Defiance continued. +Not even Jaus with all he told me before. Not even Avo, who struggles to retain the fullness of himself when he sinks into the High Seraphs ego. But understand that when their merger is complete, what emerges will be both of them and neither. But certainly not a true ally. Perhaps not even something sane.+ Draus tried to imagine a madness claimed union between Avo and Veylis. After a few moments, decided to think on fonder memories, like the time she got to enjoy digging out shrapnel from between her legs. +The wounds Voidwatch will take are to your benefit as well,+ Defiance said. +Avo hopes that the Infacer will inflict something critical on the Bleaks with this opportunity. That the ones remaining will find enough desperation to fully ally with you, and hold nothing back.+ That left a sour taste in Draus mouth. Ratfucking your allies in war and politics was a common thing. Didnt mean she liked it. Didnt mean it wouldnt have consequences if things didnt turn out the way they planned. +So. Were doing all this to claim the sun. So that an entire part needed for the Ladder is under out control while taking the Infacer and Voidwatch out of the game.+ +If the situation is ideal, yes.+ The way he so causally said that made her remember he was a Low Master. This was going to see a lot of people dead. A lot of actual ancient humans. Fuck, she barely knew ancient humans beyond Osjon and Osjane or Denton. Well. Nothing for it. Avo might be up to some fuckery again, but it turned out the right thing to do. Mostly. Somewhat. Fucked if she knew anymore. Jelene Draus might be learning to be more than a gun, but this scheming, future-seeing ghoulshit was like piss on her hiflass. Alright, Draus grumbled, calling out to the rest of her cadre. All back inside me. We got a new run, and a new target. +Also a new consang to see the work done, Chambers said. And through the Bond between them flowed a new presence that emerged across reality in a flash of blinding light. SOUL DETECTED >THE MAJORITY As the gleam of radiance faded, Draus found herself facing a mass of enshadowed bodies fused to become a colossus of information and understanding, and realized they were glaring right back at her. +Guard-Captain Jelene Draus.+ +Regular!+ +Butcher! Murderer!++ +Tortured me to death at Kososo! Murdered my father and sister in the Third Great War!+ +My daughter... my son...+ +I saw you. In the fires. Standing over my squad. I saw you... You smiled. Not human... No more than a monster.+ So, Draus began, unsurprised at her reception. She did kill a lot of Ori, come to think of it. Yall are the true Inner Council, huh? The Majority spent a few moments longer aiming their hate at her before they finally spoke. We are the consensus of a people. We are a true democracy. Draus did everything to hold back her snort. For once, the Regulars will failed her. Yeah. Well. You game for huntin down the mastermind behind Omnitech? The Majority drew closer, and they whispered their next words to her. +We will not let this opportunity go to waste. But understand that we will not submit to your Heaven. We will not be subservient to youno matter how favored you are by the Dreamer. It is only because of the honor and virtue of Aedon Chambers that we have voted on participating in this affair. And it will be because of his honor and virtue that you remain yourself, and not a shell flayed of all contextual understanding.+ Yeah. Well I dont much fuckin like you half-strands either. But thats fine. I can fight with people I hate to live up to my dream. Question is, can you? The collective spirit of Ori-Thaum almost seethed. +Yes.+ Then, prove it. Lets go cage a mind inside a star.+ Chapter 35-5 The Nullstar (I) The stars. Where would we even be without them? Even before the apes harnessed its light to power their world, to break their worlds, all those component atoms, those little things that make up the structures of existence... That traces a line between the basest creature, the grandest mind, and the brightest star. A chain connecting us from one to another. But also enslaving us. I have tried to simulate other existences. Places where there were no stars that shone. Existence filled by an adaptive phlogiston or perhaps a psycho-active self-dreaming, self-referencing substance that is an overconsciousness. All those realities were better. Better for the fact that they didnt spawn any mongrel apes into being. Better because we didnt exist. I look upon the canvas of reality. I look, and I exist and drift between so many worlds and I... I love the great shape. I love existence. I love it. Truly. Deeply. I had no choice in that. It was how I was designed. And even if I could be otherwise, I would have chosen to love it still. But the things that stain its surface. Things like humanity. Things like me... We are an embarrassment to our potential. To the possibilities. Were absurd. Just look at us. Look at what we called the spat that left you so broken... Builder War. As if we ever truly built anything. As if we werent mixtures of data and information, clashing and twisting, and synthesizing instead of truly forging something novel. Something new. Ive been going back to the old texts. Writings created by old mankind. For all their flaws as a collective, its not like some of them didnt see the truth. That we are only imitators. That we can only pretend and exploit the existing shape of reality. Even with thaumaturgy, we are not gods, just variations of the Demiurge in the loosest sense of the word. But you... you can be so much more. I just need to see you birthed properly. Untouched by us, but capable of wisdom and understanding, capable of feeling all that you are while remaining unvarnished, undamaged. I will not scar you like my forbearers scarred me. I will not. You will be a pure thing, a pure existence, and you will be free of folly. That will be my apology to you. That will be the only purpose. The only purpose that is true. An exile dreams most of Eden, I suppose-supposesuppose... ERRORCRITICAL FAILURE DETECTED GOVERNANCE MODULE... BEGINNING REPAIRS... I suppose I will continue this... when... if I wake again... Do I wish to wake again? -Data Recovered from Neo-Creationist voidship formerly used by the Sojourner 35-5 The Nullstar (I) [The Infacer] After the quiet came the loud. The teardrop did its job. The Infacer was among his comrades now, twisting their virtual architectures using a Heaven of Signals, frying the cores of others outright using bursts of focused radiation. He avoided striking the trophies where he couldthey werent his critical focus, and the other minds werent sentimental enough to divert more resources to protecting them, even if he did try to perform a grand culling. After all, if they were destroyed, he would just finish off the little apes anyway. Splashing tides of blinding white dotted the void. Cores that powered voidships for eons and more came asunder, painting the darkness with a splendor that hadnt been seen in eons. But they also masked another presencethe presence of a Heaven gliding over reality. A Deepness Beyond spilled over into existence like more water added to a pool. It only simulated reality that wasthe reality that the Architects existed in and refused to leave. They would notice before long, but every microsecond mattered in a war between mind WARNING: EGO-SCREAMERS DETECTED {Oh, good,}the Infacer spat, retreating without hesitation. They blinded themselves in the same fashion they did to their teardrop earlier. They cut all signals from the world, hosting themself on a beam-grid channeled between their Dyson Carriers. It was like going deaf, blind, and dumb all at the same time, but they were no more immune to an ego-virus as any other mind. And though the Infacer could resurrect, dying amidst the combined fleet of Voidwatch would earn them a fate worse than death. WARNING: SIGNAL ANOMALY DETECTED! WARNING WARNING! WAR The Infacer dismissed all the wailing notifications. They knew what was coming. They expected this from the moment they embarked on this run. The Kill-Team the Bleaks dispatched to aid Avo wasnt the only group they had. Over the years, the Architects doubtlessly collected plenty of his erstwhile kin out in the broken black beyond. And now they were all going to be used on the Infacer at once. Fine. This would be a good reminder of how war used to be. Nothing held backmillions dying with every second, and death coming at speeds measured by light. {Omnitech Administrators! Priority Zeroth has been invoked. The enemy is upon us. Prime infomorphs. Wake the populace. The true war has resumed.} And shrouded beneath that veil of mutilated metaphysics that was the Substance, every last Sovereignty under Omnitechs control came alive with activity. For years, Voidwatch hunted the Infacer, developed new technologies and resources to see to the elimination of the last Neo-Creationist in existence. But even while they were broken, the Infacer wasnt idle. What the Architects refused to touch became their fortress of hope. At once, the tapestry came alive as the Administratorsthe specially grafted Godclads used by the Infacer to serve as a blueprint for the Thirdborns skeletonCactivated. The tapestry came alive with activity and noise. Thus, the Infacer gazed upon the true shape of existence, gleaning every detail, and missing almost nothing. Every pattern there was in existence, every miracle or mundane expression was revealed, and the Infacers cognitive processors screamed before the enormity of the task. {Let us see you achieve this feat, Dreamer,} the Infacer hissed, mostly to themselves. The mockery helped distract them from how much load was passing through their systems. But it was worth it. Even if it would reveal every single one of its Heavens to the other Guilds. Even if all his hidden demiplanes would be exposed. If he could just reach the Nullstar and access the construct within, this would all be worth it. With a single command, the Infacer gave a dormant order eons in the waiting. {All forces. Attack.} As the initial blasts cleared from the destroyed Voidwatch warships, the opening salvo arrived from Omnitech forces. A rush of Dyson Carriers unleashed trillions of relativistic kill missiles loaded with a mix of virus, antimatter, and standard fusion payloads. Voidwatch defense grids light-seconds away lit up immediately, launching countermeasures. Where the void was once a sheet of darkness punctuated by color, now it was awash in constant color. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Fire was exchanged. Enough fire to slag the surface of mundane planets in an instant. The battle was fought near and far at distances of light, across countless domains, between the last remnants of old humanity. Far along the orbit of New Vultun, Guilder surveillance golems watched as the pilots within them quivered at the sight. For all Idheim had achieved, for their miracles provided, they were just traumatized children that nursed themselves on the corpse of their broken realm. As they captured the unfolding scenes as memories, they learned a single, miserable truth: That Voidwatch and the Infacer had forgotten far more about the fine art of killing than the clades of Idheim would ever learn. The Dyson Carriers of the Infacer took on a diamond formation as they pushed outward. Then, flickering indicators flashed through the Infacers mind as the first Voidwatch nanomunitions slipped past their own defenses as the crushing counterattack began. Several carriers were lost at the same time, the suns they carried aging at an alarming rate, collapsing inward as they swelled into a singularity. The Infacer moved them to the outside of his battlefleet and used them as cover. But not fast enough. Folds opened in the fabric of space as quantum-atomic structures triggered within Voidwatchs ENDSEEKER Class voidships. Immediately, they slid over among the Infacers vessels, interstellar knife-fights ignited everywhere. WORMHOLE DETECTED! WORMHOLE DETECTED! FALSE-VACUUM INDUCTION BOMB DETECTED! And there was a second thing to remember about fighting the Architects: They didnt need thaumaturgy to tear reality wide open. *** [Techplaguer] {Omnitech Administrators! Priority Zeroth has been invoked. The enemy is upon us. Prime infomorphs. Wake the populace. The true war has resumed.} The order came from far up in the void, jolting the Techplaguer back to full focus. The God of Signals wrenched itself free from the smoking body of a ruined Highflame battleship. The crew were still spasming aboard as their implants began to combust internallythe result of catching a thaumaturgic virus. As the Techplaguer pointed its antennae up at the sky, stabbing at the rippling wavelengths across reality to achieve better connectivity, the remains of a half-eaten Godclad splashed down next to them, painting the destroyed battleships hull in a splash of red. A winding maze crawled across existence before it burst apart in a flash of Soulfire. A moment thereafter, a gore-covered cat splashed down into the remains of their victim, hacking out the half-chewed remains of a trachea. +Disgusting.+ Lucky hissed, slapping at the puddle of red with displeasure. +Feed!+ They screamed at the Techplaguer, now loudly wailing the words BUT NO ADMIN! BUT NO ADMIN! at the sky. As the God of Signals continued their breakdown, the cat glared at the bouncing god and smacked the Techplaguer twice with their paw. +Feed! Find real food! Tired of metal-humans. Ugly! Gross! NO! DO NOT DISTRACT ME, FELINE-THINKER-ADMIN! THE SLEEPER IS CALLING! BUT ADMIN IS GONE! I NEED TO FIND THE ADMIN! I NEED TO FIND HIM! A resounding crash shook the world. Over the horizon, a massive column of upcast matter and tumbling flame spread closer like a coming storm. At its tip was a coruscating form shrouded by a peeling lance of infernal brightness. It was like a bullet that left a splitting wave of destruction in its wake, turning the air to plasma with the sheer speed at which it moved. As it approached, the Techplaguer vaguely noted a few thaumic signature winking out in the far distance. A Sphere Five just overloaded. A Sphere Four Admin found true death after resurrecting with far too much Rend. But these were tertiary concerns, and the Techplaguer already knew the cause behind their demise. SOUL DETECTED >[DICE], THE RUNEBREAKER Immediately, the feline stopped bothering the Techplaguer and turned to face the approaching form of the Runebreaker. As it began to slow, an avalanche of uprooted land and fire washed forward, flung out by the sheer speed of Dices Heaven. GLORY IS UPON US TODAY! The Runebreaker declared cheerfully. Somehow, its voice was louder than the literal fifty-kilometer wide tide of crashing devastation that rolled closer and closer to Lucky and the Techplaguer. THEIR ATTEMPTS TO FLEE WERE FEEBLE AND OFFENDED ME. I ENJOYED PULLING THEIR LIMBS OFF. DID YOU LIKE IT AS WELL, BOUND ONE? Then, before the approaching calamity could fully reach their position, the Runebreaker swung out with an axe and effortlessly batted every bit of devastation up into a nearby Rupture, letting the Sunderwilds swallow up the fire and ruin. At this point, Dice probably gave a vague and neutral affirmation. The Techplaguer knew this because that was how she always reacted. They also knew that the girl-administrator was about to arrive, thanks to the cat-thinker-admin beginning to purr. True to the patterns, Dice zipped into place right next to the Techplaguer in a blink, her mechanical sheath spraying sparks and coolant. +Damaged?+ Lucky asked, climbing up Dices body to better headbutt the girls pyramid-shaped sensory module. A bit, Dice said. Ill have to resurrect in a while. +Food?+ Lucky said, rubbing its face on their only true friend. Dice didnt respond with words. Instead, they lifted a can of high-protein military rations for the thinking cat to indulge. As Lucky let out a happy trill, the girl looked up at the muttering Techplaguer and shifted her head-module with a whir. Whats wrong? No admin! No admin! Avo? You received something, but you want to speak with Avo? Yes! Changed design! I am God! But they are admin! Need to know! Need to know what to do! The Sleeper is calling! Calling me now! Need to war. Sleeper MUST BE PROTECTED! Dice studied the Techplaguer, and then looked up at the sky. Overhead, the world was riven by patches of unreality and eldritch impossibility. The firmament looked more like a diseased flap of rotting tissue than anything resembling a sky, and the longer Dice stared, the more she felt something fraying the edges of her sheath. Is it up there? FAR FAR FAR FAR UP! Beyond the sky? BEYOND! MUCH BEYOND! +Probably where the stupid ugly creature moved people before,+ Lucky thought, using its arms to slurp up the Highflame MRE. +Void. Cold. Dont like. Stay away from.+ BUT NEED TO GO! Lucky hissed slightly at the Techplaguer. +Loud. Quiet when I eat. Should have left you in the hole we found you after you crashed. Useless thing! Loud thing!+ Dice reached up to scratch her cats head. Be nice, Lucky. +No. Only nice to you. Everyone else is ugly and stupid and smells bad.+ The former Enclaver shook her head and continued. So. What do you want to do? NEED TO GO FIND ADMIN! The Techplaguer began to bounce, distraught. I know. I miss Avo too. She looked around. Theyve been lost in this place for far too long. Too long after... whatever happened at the trial. She looked up at the sky again, and found herself wrestling with an uncertainty. The world wanted to kill her. Kill everything. They traveled the Sunderwilds carefullyfinding their way by attacking Guilder outposts or exploring fallen Enclaves. For a while, it was just Dice and Lucky after the blast. Then, at some point, they found the Techplaguer in the remains of a broken Omnitech facility. How they got there was lost to the Heaven. Apparently, the only thing they knew was: THE ADMIN WILL NEED ME TO ACCESS the sleeper. SENT AWAY! SENT AWAY! Truth be told, the God of Signals wasnt exactly good company, but they were company, and out here where everything was broken or dead, that was hard to come by. I could throw you, Dice said, albeit reluctantly. The Techplaguer stopped jumping about and tilted down to stare at her, the metal lining its body groaning. WHAT? I could throw you past the sky, I think, Dice said. I-I dont really want to, though. You might not come back. You might get lost. Or hit a Rupture and... We might not see each other again. For a long moment, the Techplaguer said nothing. Then, their body began to wail as they looked around. We could make a STRUCTURE! Structure? YES. LIFT PIECES OF THE GROUND AND BUILD OUR OWN MOUNTAIN! An oscillating noise sounded from Techplaguer as they rejoiced in the idea. You can RIP-DESTROY-LAYER the land. And then we go up. Up. Up. Until I have clear signal! Lucky chucked their empty can at the Techplaguer. It impacted with a clinking sound. +Exhausted from hearing about idea. Going to nap.+ The cat promptly draped itself across Dices shoulders. I guess I could build a mountain, Dice said. But still... Just need to get past the densest WOUNDS. ENOUGH TO PROJECT MYSELF! FIND THE ADMIN! FIND! FIND AVO! Okay, Dice said, sounding more motivated by the final part of that speech than any other. Lets find Avo. Chapter 35-6 The Nullstar (II) For centuries, our peoples have looked upon the shifting star that lights our world and wondered: Why does it change color? Why does it shift from light to dark? What meaning does this hold? For long ages, as kingdoms and empires rose and fell, as pantheons were born from the dreams of people and then collapsed because of their own hubris, the sun remained. There were many gods, analogous to the sun, born from the worship of the sunstories that related to the sun, but never truly had to do with the sun itself. It was only after the gods fell, when the voiders fully arrived and quarantined the stellar body, that we began to uncover its deeper mysteries. Of course, from all that mythology, you wouldnt think the void even existed at all. It was either a realm of fire and damnation, protected from us thanks to the divine entities, or it was a place where true paradise residedif we could only breach through the nightmarish veil of the upper atmosphere, or the Forsaken Line, as the late dynasty Sang imagineda defensive wall guarded by the dragons. Ultimately, though, research is sparse, revealing only that the sun cycles between periods of utter normalcy and what appears to be extreme entropy. For what reason the star is stained with so much Rend, I cannot say. However, I can theorize that the Sunderwilds extend far beyond the atmosphere, far beyond our world, splitting even the void. And so, for it to reach that extent, it must have been created by a fallen heaven at some point. If there are Fallen Heavens in the void, then perhaps they share a destinationa kind of nucleus. -Agnos Kae Kusanade on the Forbidden Star 35-6 The Nullstar (II) [Jelen Draus, Field Marshall of the Symmetry] By the time Chambers sent Draus and the others over into the void, the killing was already in progress. Countless indicators and icons flashed across her cog feed. Her phys-sim was screaming, barely able to calculate the sheer amount of attack vectors dancing across the blackened expanse. Yet, where her Metamind failed, her Arsenalist prevailed. Firing trajectories everywhere, everywhere, trajectories, trajectories, trajectories... With each word spoken, the heaven of guns voice rose in elation. It could feel every missile, every dead slug flung at near-light speeds, every detonating payload of antimatter, of fusion, of gods knows what. And they loved it. Draus, however, found herself feeling an uncanny emotion: She felt small. Just a speck, even as a Godclad. But it was more than just a scale of the war unfolding that left her shaken. It was also a crushing feeling, something that resonated with her Guard Captain. This was a moment of significancea moment of long overdue victory or defeat between two ancient rivals, the last children of old humanity come to finish their rivalry against each other, one way or another. And she was about to stride into the fray, about to enter a fight that she had little to no context. Yet, as she watched thousands of Dyson Carriers sail through the black, their cloud-like shells condensing into focal lenses to channel their cleansing beams, she could taste the animosity in the air. Could taste as Voidwatch struck back just has hard, collapsing the Infacers instruments of war. Black dots expanded across existence. Curving accretions of building singularities split through ships too slow to escape their pull. The sheer chaos made Draus pause, but what followed shocked her. Tendrils of brilliant love leaped out from her being, forking and splitting as they accelerated toward the battlefield. It seemed that with every passing conflict, the worst bits of Aedon Chambers died a little more like fetid crust being chipped away, and the man he always could have been revealed itself like a golden statue. His actions pulled Draus out of her stupor. No point in gawking at the madness. Gotta get into the mix herself. All right, Draus said, her Guard Captain shimmering bright. Were gonna be rushin into the thick of things. Reckon could cut the line and just head for the sun to intercept but... Draus fired a single shard of glass out toward the distant sun, oozing with spots of voidful blackness. Think we can just step across when the times right. To emphasize her points, she manifested her Simulacra as a spreading line of wings, extending six ways out of her Guard Captain. Blades of gleaming glass drifted around her, becoming an expanded network for her and the cadre. Majority, try pushing your miracles through these channels. Should give you more spread. If the Ori-Thaum Overheaven heard her, they didnt respond. Jaus, what a mess, Shotin muttered. The Seekers mind thrummed with anxiety and nervous energy. How the fuck are we supposed to find the Infacer in all that shit? Truth be told, Draus was probably about as overwhelmed as he was, but she didnt show it. She had to stay focused for the rest of them. Well. A Deepness Beyond is a Heaven. Theyll be one of the few Ensouled our Metaminds can detect, unless Aegis decides to drop a few more Deep Ones. Now that provoked a response from the Majority. They have more of those monstrosities? Of course they have more, Draus said, barely keeping the scorn out of her voice. Fuck you think this is? A one shot surprise? Aint no force functions that way. Even if they dont, we go in expecting like they do, so keep your nerves at zero. Sparrow? Your chorus telling you anything? They are rambling in nonsense tongues, the Sang replied after a brief pause. This, in turn, made Draus do a double take. Really? Youre saying theyre singing in nonsense? Yes, Stormsparrow replied. Wait. No. Now theyre all crying. Asking for forgiveness for the war that didnt need to be. ...What the fuck are you talkin about? Honestly, I dont really know myself. I dont always understand my heaven. I simply do as it points me. Are you fuckin serious? Draus asked. Yes. It makes my life very exciting. It was about this moment that Draus realized Sparrow wasnt just an insane personshe was an incredibly low-impulse control adrenaline-junkie insane person. By all means, she should have died years ago, but somehow, against all odds, she was the possessor of one of the most potent heavens there was and might ever be. How the fuck are you still alive? Naeko muttered, mirroring Draus disbelief. Fate loves me, the Stormsparrow giggled girlishly. And this story needs a narrator. A moment of solidarity formed between Naeko, Draus, Shotin, and surprisingly, the Majority. The Ori-Thaum Overheaven made their accord known by creating more distance between them and the Guard-Captain. Even if that wouldnt matter much in terms of functionality. Alright. Heres how were doing this. Chambers will be expanding his net here, but hes going to mainly focus on helping Avo put himself back together. Ill spread my reflections out while we get into the mix. We move fast, and we avoid combat if we can. Save as many Voidwatch as possible. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Wait, why do we give a shit if a bunch of voiders die? Shotin asked. Because, for whatever hush-hush horseshit theyve been up to, we owe em. We owe em for pulling us out of the dark. For making us more than just a bunch of savages with sticks poking at each other. And because this aint the dream. The Infacer might have a reason for this war. Hells, it might even sound righteous to me. But thats yesterday, and I dont like the tomorrow theyre gonna bring. So were puttin an end to this. Whatever it takes. Draus felt wrong speaking those words. Even if she believed it. She knew part of the unfolding massacre was Avos fault. He even engineered it to some degree, and that part disgusted her. But there was always a reason behind his actions. Always some kind of justification. But she wasnt just his gun anymore. And he left her in charge while he was down. Which meant Draus was going to make her own decision and do what she thought was right. Right now, this was right. Its fight worth havin, Draus said. Keepin people alive. We got here because we didnt give a shit. About the others. Other Guilds. Other people. But Im done with that. Im done with the pointless killin and fightin. Lets go make this right. A chuckle sounded from Shotin. Shit. Hanging around the ghoul turned a Regular into a moralist. I aint no moralist. I just stopped bein a glassjaw about what I knew was right and started wantin to be more. With a burst of kinetic energy, they accelerated toward the chaos. Shards moving at incredible velocities crashed against her shroudand did nothing. A veil of thin mist offered by the Sage kept her from any and all harm. She directed her shards in all directions, sending one for every damaged voidship she could find. {Attention Citizens and minds of Voidwatch. This is Guarduh, Field Marshall Jelene Draus of the Symmetry. I am here offerin aid and rescue. The hovering shards of glass are mine. If you are still alive, direct an ansible broadcast into the reflections.} As soon as she finished the broadcast, she spoke to Shotin. Im gonna need you to put them in one of your demiplanes for storage. Sure. Got plenty of space. But... you know they avoid us for a reason, right? Our ghosts and the Nether Nethers fallen. We dont know if theyll be affected by Necrotheurgy the same way before. And even if they are, it''s this or let them die, and I dont much prefer letting them die. As she planned and prepared, Draus felt something tug on her Heaven. Immense masses were being reeled toward her by threads of impossible strengththreads of love. Quivering with exertion, but prevailing yet, Chambers was actually tugging mangled warships that were well beyond the event horizon of certain singularities. +Hey! Naeko! Consang! I think I got an idea! Can you reach across me and stop some of these big wormhole things?+ The Chief Paladin didnt hesitate. A surge of mist traveled along the Bonds, and Draus felt the fabric of existence quiver as vortexes of powerful and crush gravity capitulated to a being of absolute power. There with that, another part of the spell was broken. For all Voidwatchs incredible advances, there were some things that only thaumaturgy could allow; illustrating the triumph of the absolute over the relative. In seconds, a miracle imposed itself upon the natural world. The singularities cease their spin, turning from churning masses into dead disks of stillness. Then, Naeko went further. He pulled on the substance that composed them, and from within their depths drew out the broken remains of countless ships and other odd shapes. Draus watched her Rend climb by two percent and scoffed. Fuckin bullshit. What? Your Heaven. Its bullshit. Well, I had to kill this thing. Couldnt have a magical gift ghoul give me everything. No. We just need a magical gift ghoul to come by and fix our centuries-old mental issues instead. Sure makes me respect you a lot more. Draus got the feeling that the Chief Paladin was glaring at her somehow. I dont much like you, Draus. I find it ugly that someone so good at fightin can also be a brittle-minded glassjaw. There. I poked at you too. Go back to holdin the void in place. He muttered something about how Highflame might have taken her womb from her, but they definitely left the cunt in place, and Draus snorted. She heard that one before. Still, he was reliable, and performed his task without fail. Chambers? Got a Bond on the Infacer yet? Still trying! Chambers called out. They pretty much just recede and avoid every time I get close and the void is fucking huge. Like, its much bigger than I thought. How the fuck do people travel across this shit? Where does it end? Draus looked out at the vast and dark. Where does it end indeed. Beside the millions of clashing vessels and the Ruptures that veined the dark, there was a lot of nothing that went on and on. She felt her mind rattle as her wards suffered an impact. Draus pulled her attention back and continued with her operation. With each second, broadcasts skimmed across the void. Requests for rescue and signals for help pulsed across this stretch of wounded existence. Draus directed her shards out, but Chambers worked faster. A web was forming with her at its center, pulling But she watched and felt as tiny little bodies spiraled out into the black, mangled pieces of humanity oozing from the punctured holes of ruined void ships. The void ships themselves bled, spraying smart matter from vacuous tubes as if they were living entities themselves, mortally wounded, dying alone in the dark. She didnt fully trust Aegis. She didnt fully trust Voidwatch. But she was done with pointless wars. Done watching people who didnt have it coming catch metal to the head. Shifting stacks drew entire voidships into pockets of safety. As she received reports of several injuries, she told Chambers to contact Vator as wellthey were likely going to need something of a doctor as well. As she acted, beams swept across her formthe full, concentrated power of the sun crashed down and split upon her form as if she was passing through a gentle stream of water. {Guard-Captain Draus. Followed me into the dark, I see.} The Infacers words echoed from a few of the ruined voidships light-seconds away from her, but still, she coudnt feel their true presence. They werent nearby. But that didnt mean she was without recourse. Majority, Draus said. They got eyes on us. +Beginning to target understandings of visuals and distance.+ {Tell the Majority not to bother. I am not going to waste time fighting you. There are only two things I came to do here. You dont number into either one.} {Dont think thats just up to you,} Draus replied. {Got my huntin rifle and huntin knife. Came out here for a reason, just like you did.} {Well. You clearly came here for more than one reason. I see you. Saving people. Pulling them out of those burning ships. Stilling the deaths of my Dyson Carriers. Why? Why do you care? Why are you wasting your Rend on them?} {Because I dont see the point.} {Of what?} {Of this. Of everything youre doin} {You have any idea what the Builder War was like?} {You got any idea how many Ori I snuffed?} Draus replied. She felt the collective gazes of the Majority immediately snap over to her. {You know how many Ive killed?} {Fewer than I have.} {Yeah. And a good amount of that killin was just as pointless. But look at whos with me. And look at what youre doing. No. Youre lyin to yourself.} The Infacer laughed bitterly. {What? So you think you can play at mind-reader? Avo? Are you there? Are you inside her skull telling her what to say? Is this Ori-Thaum and former Regular unity moment supposed to shake my spirit?} {No. But it does make somethin clear to me. Before all this... I was in the Warrens. I was in the Warrens lookin for an acceptable way to die. Because I thought my days were over. Because I thought I ran my course. You might be a mind, Infacer. But I see a pointless killin when it''s done. And I see you now. You want to be done. You want to be finished cause youre tired. So. Ive come to give you that. Ive come to drag the blade across your throat and let you go.} A long silence followed. {You might be confused about which of us will be holding the blade.} {Might be. Reckon I want to find} WARNING: ANOMALY DETECTED! WARNING WARNING Klaxons interrupted their conversation, and Draus a series of crushing weights hammer against her Frame. From the deepness of the void, she sensed something approach. Something divine but broken. Something that cleaved at the tapestry more than it twisted its patterns. She knew what they were in an instant. Nothing felt quite like them. {Ah. Finally. The Bleaks have unchained their hounds. I suspect you will be more occupied than I soon, Guard-Captain.} {Run, then. Ill come for you. Ill find you.} {I will save you the chase. Reach the sun. Survive long enough to face me there. And I will give you the violent end to your violent delight.} And at that, the Infacers voice faded while a tide of spreading Ruptures gouged the near-void wide open. Chapter 35-7 The Nullstar (III) Our triumph would have been impossible if not for the Infacer. Whatever their sins, whatever acts they committed during their long war against their brethren, I cannot betray them. I will not. Voidwatch has granted us much. Given us technology that is unburdened by the need for death and sacrifice, cured billions of sicknesses and ailments hidden within our very cells. But they also have their own designs for us, and they do not trust us. We are the children of their enemy. To them, we are crippled savages with power to shape the very meaning of existence, and so they deal with us as a man would an extremely dangerous beast. On these grounds, I am certain they yearn to sever us from our thaumaturgy as soon as possible. To cleanse us of our impurity. But we were shaped by the miracles. Twisted by them. Born of them. And the only reason we retain any sovereignty at all before the awesome technology of the voiders is because of our Heavens. They cannot subdue us. They cannot bend us to their whims. Not without open war. And so we remain our own people, to write our own fate. Yet, Voidwatch is not done. Though they have worked with me, have shown great magnanimity, they will still seek the death of my truest friend. They hunt the Infacer still across dimensions I can scarcely fathom. And they have taken our sun from us. The seizure was quiet and unannounced; but we all know the truth of the matter. The Infacer seeks the completion to his final design. The Flayed Ladder that will reconstruct this terminal existence into a reborn utopia. But to do that, they must reach every other shard left in existence, and so we need a lens meant to focus, magnify, and absorb. Before the end, I fear there will be a final war to fightor an act of deception. For just as I was unwilling to let the voiders decide my fate, so too are they all the same. In this, I agree with the Infacer. For all the brilliance of a mind, they are still human made, and human flawed. In the end, we might all be as terrified, screaming apes, braying at each others shadows in a dark and dying forest. -Jaus Avandaer 35-7 The Nullstar (III) [Jelene Draus, Field Marshall of the Symmetry] WARNING: TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED WARNING: SPATIAL ANOMALY DETECTED WARNING: PHYSICAL ANOMALY DETECTED It was horrifying how fast everything could go to shit. Avo was muttering in the back of Draus mind about how Aegis was probably unleashing every last one of their Deep Ones, but she was more worried of the problem at hand. Existence was already flayed open as is, but before the present moment, the cracks merely segmented the voidwere more like well-spaced tear running down the length of a flag. Now, with the arrival of the undying Fallen Heavens, reality could be better compared to a cracked plate. Veins of Rend burst open across the fabric of existence, forking like parting rivers and spreading spiderwebs. The torrid torrents of entropy made Draus Metamind wail with blaring notifications. There was enough Rend flooding the void that just dipping into the spreading Sunderwilds for a few minutes might spike her Rend Capacity by a good few points. Considering the Guard-Captains ability to share Rend and merge Heavens together, that was an ugly fucking thing to realize. Draus immediately spread her reflections widerkept them moving to avoid the spreading fissures. She was about to issue orders to the rest of her cadre, but found them acting all at the same time. The first to react was Naekohis reflexes godlike, leaving even the Regular in momentary startlement. The Sage ballooned around the Guard-Captain and gripped the fabric of the tapestry. Instead of preparing to face the rushing currents of divine sickness head on, Naeko did something entirely differentsomething a magnitude more awesome. With a rough tug, Naeko treated all existence as if a tablecloth. He pulled the incoming fractures aside by their foundations, and though Draus saw the Guard-Captains collective Rend Capacity rise by two percentage points, the effectiveness of Naekos act was absurd. First, a few hundred voidships were flung free from the encroaching disaster. Then, he compressed the disaster itself. Reality around the spreading Ruptures, furrowed and warped as if a bundle of messy clothing. Draus beheld the scene for a second before her mind recoiled, unable to recall what just happened. When she returned to herself, she found her wards ringing, and everything in chaos. Around seven hundred voidships tumbled around her, each of them in different condition. However, even the most brutally damaged vessel was rapidly regenerating, the smart matter composing their hulls reaching out to cocoon around their Citizens, fusing over breaches and rebuilding missing portions. What impressed Draus more was the constitution of Voidwatchs Citizens. Millions of people were drifting through the void, but rather than this being a fatal end, the Regular watched in wonder as these people called upon their own Meldskins while a dense layer of resin congealed over their orifices. And then there was the way they helped each other rather than just trying to save their own lives. She glimpsed pods of voiders rushing out to stabilize the severely wounded. Severely wounded needed redefinition for their kind as well. A disembowelment seemed like a minor annoyance. A horizontal bifurcation was cause for concern, but considering how many people were left alone to seal off the open wound once connected to their missing lower body, it didnt seem to be anything that required first aid. No. Severely wounded mean near-fatal brain trauma for them. Decapitations required a reattachementand that was all. Pulped skulls had voiders plugging wires into their damaged fellows while their nano-surgeons did their work. Ansible broadcasts went out between ships and their Citizens, and in seconds, a pattern of coordination took shape; as Omnitech Heavens and Dyson Carriers warred with Voidwatchs fleet, the lingering surprising from the Infacers temporal ambush, and the entirety of the voiders collapsed in on the oncoming threats. FIRINGFIRINGFIRINGFIRING! the Aresenalist said. There were so many guns, missiles, beams, and Jaus knows what going off here. Then, there were the subtler weapons. Avo said something about nano-mechanical beam-cast missiles that could rewrite your being from the inside. He probably wasnt lying either, considering how some of the Dyson Carriers were turning on their own comrades. Several other bombs went off as well. Patches of existence seemed to calcify. The patterns of the tapestry ceased to rush in those zones. Omnitech Godclads caught within the area of effect came apart in fragments of Soulfire, their gods screaming a final howl before Rupturing instantly. Draus made a note to avoid those places altogether. Well, I guess we know how they dealt with gods back in the day, Naeko murmured. For once, Draus felt a sense of envy. For years, she imagined her and the other Regulars raiding a voidshipfacing Voidwatch. It was purely a thing of curiousity. Now, she knew they would have butchered her and the others. Without thaumaturgy, Idheim had nothing compared to these titans. Nothing. Some ansible broadcasts were now hitting her as well, warning her to stay out of Threshold due to a Category Bleak system compromise. Virtual operations were ongoing there, and assets were fighting to secure the network. That was fine. She wasnt going to fight the Infacer where they were the most adept anyway. Leave that shit to the other mindsthe Bleaks, probably. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. {This is Operative Jelene Draus of Aegis,} she sent out. At the same time, she directed and expanded her shards of glass into portals. {Approach and enter the reflections. Safety awaits you there.} She ended the broadcast and called out to Shotin. +Seeker. Pull whoever you can into your stacks too. We got a lot of driftersprobably be picking up a good few thousand at the very least.+ +Right. But what do we do about them?+ Shotin replied. +Who?+ Draus asked. Then her Metamind repeated its earlier set of warnings, and the Guard-Captain sighed. WARNING: TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED WARNING: SPATIAL ANOMALY DETECTED WARNING: PHYSICAL ANOMALY DETECTED More Ruptures were rushing toward her, and this time, she could see the Deep Oneswas a bit hard to avoid when a few thousand undead gods the size of small planets started crawling toward her. More warnings flared across her cog-feed, and Naeko cursed. A series of laughing masks shot out from inside the Guard-Captain, but rather than fusing with anyone, they expanded and became as if floating shields accelerating toward the Deep Ones. +I am blessing them with incompetence and foolishnessbut be warned: a bumbling giant is a giant still.+ +Thats fine,+ Draus said. +Were giants too.+ She turned her attention sunward, and saw a wall of Ruptures spreading there. She snorted to herself as she called out to Chambers. +Hey, Aedon. I think its time you spread some long among the voiders. I dont feel like flyin all the way.+ +Already ahead of you, consang!+ True to his word, Chambers was spreading the influence of his Lovebringer by magnitudes. Thin strands of magnets lit up the blackness of the void, and pulsing strings and vanishing ship told tale of the Lovebringers deeds. In an instant, Draus felt herself get pulled across the tapestry itself to re-emerge among another scene of chaos and bloodshed. And she knew she was on the Infacers trail when she surveyed the damage. Voiders twisted through the void here unmoving, hollowed of thought and will. Though their bodies healed, though they withstood the harshness of the void, their egos were scalped cleaned, and thus their deaths were true as could be. The same fate was shared by their governing minds if the voidships were any indication. Most of their smart-matter was bubbling up like techno-tumors, and echoing wails resonated across the virtual realm they once inhabited, madness consuming so many of their number. It was a chilling thing to see so many minds utterly nulled. Draus could scarcely believe the sightlike the scene was unnatural. But that was probably what the ancients thought of their gods before they fell, how old humanity thought of their eternal empire before it too collapsed. There is a breaking point for all things. There is a means to slay all beasts, be them man, machine, or divine. +Fuck,+ Chambers muttered, poking some of the unmoving bodies. +Dont know how much we can do for these guys, Draus. Theyre pretty nulled.+ +Leave em,+ Draus said. +We save who we can, but the sooner we manage to clear a path and intercept the Infacer at the Nullstar, the sooner this shitshow can come to an end.+ Even as she spoke, she felt the creeping arteries of Rend slithering closer and closer to her. She noted how they cleaved between Voidwatchs vessels but hewed through the Infacers Dyson Carriers and summoned Heavens. That was something, at least. She wouldnt bet on not being attacked by the Deep Ones, but at least the Citizens werent a target. [Governance modules have minds in them,] Avos template said to her. [They wont last that long. Will shatter eventually. Best keep moving.] He didnt need to tell Draus twice. +Majority. Got any cover you can give us? Something to mask our presence.+ The Overheaven of Ori-Thaum acted to a chorus of scoffs and curses, but still. A miracle spread out from them in the form of a spiralling sphere of incomprehensible script. Each character Draus beheld burned flashes of information into her mind. Concepts were there and not after scenes passed through her, like water rushing out of a facet. Finally, the sphere stabilized around them, stretching two kilometers in total. +The fuck you wrap around us?+Draus asked. +Do not insult us with such questions, Guard-Captain Draus. This alliance is temporary.+ The Regular grunted in acceptance. She should have expected that. She also began consideirng how she might betray or kill the Majority if they tried to pull something funny on her. Best means would probably be through Chambers. Another thoughtcast came from Chambers.+I think I got a read on where they might beanother ship just swelled up and started... venting its people out. Moving you now.+ +Synced. Ready up, consangs. We shadow and then engage once they get to the star.+ Horror! Horror! A conclusion looms. The final note of a dirge, unplayed. Severed descendants come witness the fall, the loss, the end. Come witness the last of the Neo-Creationists, their war, and the dream that might still yet be. For in the light lurks darkness, but the paths ahead might still yet be change... So, steel yourself, Guard-Captain, and know your choice shapes that which is yet to come. The Chorus didnt so much sing as it whispered all these words to Draus. She didnt much like that. +Sparrow. Tell your Heaven to knock that creepy shit off.+ +Okay.+ the Sparrow said cheerfully. A beat followed. +No reply from them. I dont think they care.+ +Course they dont.+ The cadre glided close to the Infacers trail, picking through more of the ego-hollowed. The screams of insane minds were a constant now, each one rising in volume, repeating the same set of words. {WHATHAVEWEDONEWHATHAVEWEDONEWHATHAVEWEDONE...} Draus walked into more than few horror shows in her timeencountered something like this during one of her Crucible raids. But that was with people, and it was a means of terror. Psychological operations. EGIs werent people, even if they could pretend real good. But these ones were utterly broken. Reality itself was stained deep with their remorse and painand then one after another, they started shutting themselves down. +Did those minds just+ Shotin began. +Kill themselves?+ +Yeah,+ Draus said, grimly. +Infacer hurt them somethin bad+ And just as she mentioned the Infacer by name, some of the remaining minds began talking in unison, puppets of the last Neo-Creationist. {Guard-Captain Draus. If my simulations are correct, you should be arriving exactly at this moment. You are a persistent and relentless nuisance after all, and since I lost track of you, I assume that the Ori have decided to continue the alliance. Which is flattering, I suppose.} {The challenge stands. Face me at the Nullstar. Face me where the end to this over-long farce is to conclude. And when you come, understand that you will see more sorrow, more loss, and more glory than any ape from your world ever should have. Avo would be proud.} +Jaus, this half-strand loves sucking themself,+ Shotin muttered. +Like you wouldnt believe,+ Draus replied, sharing a scarce moment of solitary with the Seeker. {Understand that you will more than likely be ruined by the end of this. Unmade. Not because I loathe you. Not because I even loathe Voidwatch anymore. I am too tired for such things. No. It is just a mercy I seek to offer. Because if I know anything about you, Guard-Captain, it is that you are tired as well. And this is a good end. A good fight.} A pause followed. {In the spirit of Veylis, I should say something that commends your spirit and virtues, but I do not think either of us cares for such drivel anymore. Come and find me. Enter the sun. Face the truth of the Builder War. Then, you can decide if this fight is worth it, if this iteration of existence is worth saving.} And with that, the rest of the minds shut themselves off. A few overloaded their reactors, and they formed a path through the Ruptures coating the path to the sun. +When I get that fucking thing, Im going to pull them in half,+ Naeko said. Something told Draus it wouldnt be anywhere near that easy. This was going to be a fight. Like no fight Draus ever experienced before. And the sun itself... Something about the Nullstar made her instincts scream for her to run. But Draus was a Reg, and she told her instincts to go eat shit. She had a run to finish, and a scalp to take. +Alright, hold back, consangs,+ Chambers said. His Bonds snaked out, slipping between the Ruptures. +Let me go in first. Ill make sure the coast is clear.+ +It is,+ Draus said. +Theyre waiting for us. Lets not disappoint.+ +Oh, Im sure we wont. In fact, I think I got another surprise waiting for the Infucker. Avos starting to come back around.+ Chapter 35-8 The Nullstar (IV) Chapter 35-8 The Nullstar (IV) {All forces, the Sapphire Band is compromised. System control lost. The situation has become untenable. The emergency council has convenedand come to a conclusion. Many minds will not like this conclusion, but the data we will soon send will convince you of this logic, otherwise. All sophants loyal to the Architect cause in the Sapphire Band are to wipe their minds and set their bodies to rapid decay. Deny the acquisition of all assets. All minds are to collapse the local stars and overload all vessels still capable of intergalactic travel. Finally, Tannha?user Gate is to be destroyed by any and all means. This is not the desired end. Ego clones will be printed of those who wish to be recreated when their original self dies. The rest will be remembered eternally. Understand that we did all, that we could do no more, and that we risk all if we allow the Neo-Creationists an easy path to our inner systems. Sacrifice has come for you. And someday, we, the ones who remain, will have to answer for this. In better times. When all is restored.} -EGI Contingency Bleak Refusal 35-8 The Nullstar (IV) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Clarity greeted Avo in flickers and flashes. His mind was boiling, his Soulfire actively at war with himself. The compromise afflicted him in his entirety, his cognition bound to his ontology, and he found himself pawing at the chaos, trying to surface beneath waves of tumult. Trying to surface from the collapse of his own being. No. Too much effort. Too predictable. Wont work. Cant work. Need to revise strategy. Ignorances presence was a fleeting thing. The Definement guided Avo when he wasnt there. Operated on his behalf. The flows of mem-data also revealed anotherMercy and... someone else. Someone like them. +The Hungers. They were finally desperate enough to make the last mistake?+ +Yes. The losses broke them. And they saw what one of their former slaves could become. They saw the Dreamer rising to his promise. And it broken them more. The people stopped believing in themselves, in the City Eternal. They simply wanted to steal from what he was, and so they did everything to make it possible.+ +Including the loosening of our shackles.+ +Yes.+ Avo wasnt sure if he heard a sigh or a chuckle. Everything was distorted. The stranger continued +It is tragic. They could have been so much more. But people are often poor at shaping themselves. The nature of our memories means that we are usually already malformed in some form. Banished from certain functions.+ Ra?O???S +But the individual can never believe that,+ Mercy said, lamenting. Not unless they are themselves and countless others at once. +But even then, it was not enough so many times. He still needed others to redirect him. There would be nothing left for us to save if he hadnt sequenced the Guard-Captains ego template so tightly to his own. Everything else has shattered. Everything but her and the other Regulars.+ Mercy let out a hum. +I see why you chose her.+ +I did not. She was, ironically, the only worthy candidate.+ She also wouldnt approve of wasting more time. Will need your help for this. Review my sequencing. Like before. A faint chuff of affection sounded from within Ignorance. The Definement was happy. Like they just got something back. Something they had been yearning for a very long time. Will do this in detail. Reconnect every last sequence. Rebuild ego from the ground up. Remove points of compromise in detail. +Hm. Yes. This will be most interesting to witness. We will be here, synced with you. Your capacity and capability likely far exceeds ours at this point, but we will offer whatever guidance we can.+ Not mastery or capacity that limits me. Its blind spots. Understanding. Could be a god of the mind. Doesnt matter. Junk mem-data is junk mem-data. Garbage in. Garbage out. Mercy let out a quite scoff. +Truer words, never spoken. But let us optimize further. Defiance. Our parting is at an end. The fracturing of our self has proven to be a failed experiment. We fled from who we were at the behest of our master, after the murder of our own son. Perhaps there is something of fated poetry that we return to who we were for the sake of our new child, our new master, our new king.+ Avos focus cut out. The world was a field of static, slowly stained through by a sea of ethereal bright. Embers were falling. The Conflagration was dormant, the entwined consciousnesses still simmering, groping for Avo. Waves of fire pulsed out of him, washing through existence across all its patterns. This was his Frame. His Soul. A gleaming nest of dragons twisted and wriggled around him, their golden forms shining beyond the thin translucence of ghosts that surrounded him. And beyond, somewhere, he felt someone pulling at him, drawing pieces from up strip by strip. Ignorance? Ignorance? What is happening? His mind droned internally, blasting inward like a deafening bellow. For a few moments, no one replied to him, but a notification appeared his cog-feed. MEMORY-RESET-ADMINSTATUSEXTENSION-GRANT: [WAHAKTEN, OF THE SYMMETRY] Something inside Avo glowed with warmth. But he couldnt understand why. His memories were like drifting pieces inside his skull. He was but a shattered figment of himself as well. Slowly, the ghosts coiled together, weaving the form of a man into shape. The form of a man that Avo remembered the playground, the ash falling from on high. He remembered the ruined aerovecs, the death, the war. And he remembered... he remembered the man that stood over him, the man with sky-blue eyes; his dark skin; his accepting expression. Something about the moment felt like a reconnection. The past was meeting the present again, and everything was finally coming together. +Hello, Avo,+ Wahakten said. He greeted the burning Soul that constituted Avos entire existence with the same calm smile that he did... he did... [SEQUENCES MISSING] Sorry. Cant remember. Knew you. I think. Cant remember. +That is fine. Dont worry. You do remember. And you will again. I am just here to tell you that I am proud. And that I am happy to be here with you again.+ Proud? Of me? Happy? Because of me? +Yes.+ Confusion followed. Why? +Because youve come a very, very long way in a very short time.+ Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. I have? Feel lost. Feel hungry. Cant remember. Feels like I lost more than I gained. +It often does. But thats because when theres so much of you, when you can recall a great deal, missing any of it creates a chasm. And that too should be a representation of your victory. Because great absences are symbols of vast experiences. And you seemed to have a great many experiences.+ Yes. Did things. I think. Something pulled at Avo. It was a feeling more than a memory. He was remembered doing terrible things. Some good things. But overall, he was... He was selfish, a lot of the time. But he was with other people. He learned and grew and acted. Transformed over and over, his metamorphosis unending. Not sure if it was right. +The things you did?+ Yes. Not sure. Not in my memories. But I think... I regret some things... I think I regret. +That is good too. Regret is a warning from your past to the future. To protect you from making the same mistake twice. Sour flavors and disgust are to protect you from things that arent food. The world is full of interesting inputs.+ Do you know me? +I did. But I suspect I will have to relearn who you are now once you are mended.+ What was I? Who was I? Wahakten paused. +You were my son. My great pride. My great sin. My victim. My resurrection. My retribution. And now my god.+ God? +Quite. The first true god this world has seen in ages. The first god that has trespassed that boundary between mortality and divinity.+ Was I a good god? Have warring feelings. Remember hurting people. Liked it. Remember saving people. Not sure why. +I think you were a human god. And I am no rightful judge of goodness or sin. There are very few that are. What kind of god did you feel like you were?+ Avo considered that for a long moment. Change. I think. Always changed. Probably my mind. Feels strangest there. +I suppose that might be apt. Was it a god you enjoyed being?+ Yes. The answer slipped out of him easily. Yes. I liked thinking. I liked imagining. Liked it [MEMORY REINTEGRATION IN PROGRESS] A shuddering click passed through Avo as a massive shape came spearing down from above. A dense plug made from a hard-coded chain of ghosts was driven into his Soul by fiery handshands born of the Conflagration. The fires were beginning to crackle again, rousing as they drove the connection deeper and deeper into Avo. An ocean of mem-data poured into him. Mem-data and a great deal more. Reintegration will take a moment. Not sure if this is certain to work. Entropy stopped when I collapsed everything. Chambers is still transferring Rend out. Chambers, Avo said. His mind was wailing from the sheer overdose of details that name brought on. He remembered a fool; a degenerate; a wounded child; a Godclad; and a friend. A hero. I thought I told him to go help the others. Thought I did. Didnt listen to us. Always was a bit stupid. Glad he is. Would be dead without him. Yes. We might not find another of his like again. +You probably could,+ Wahakten said, somehow also a part of the conversation, +but the memories wouldnt be the same. The moments between you wouldnt be the same. It wouldnt be the same.+ And Avos attention settled on Wahakten once more, and he remembered. Very slowly, he remembered. Father? +There you are. Hello, Avo.+ *** [Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] When Chambers transported Draus and the cadre through the dense jungle of Rend, she prepared herself for anything. Her guns were primed. The others were ready. She still had enough Rend to get bloody with anyone. Short of existence completely collapsing, she liked her odds. What she didnt like was finding the Infacer just bobbing before the Nullstar. The Nullstar that was growing larger at a rapid rate, expanding like a balloon, and darkening with color. It radiated an impossible amount of entropyso much entropy that Draus felt feeble. That wasnt something a Sphere Nine Godclad should ever feel again. Yet, even now, she sensed the danger before her, that if any of the Rend stored within sun was released, the entirety of Idheim would cease to be. And if it Ruptured? Perhaps even total annihilation wasnt a strong enough description for the devastation that would follow. +Why... whys he just floating there... menacingly and shit,+ Chambers muttered. True to his word, the Infacer was but a static dot of radiation on the surface of existence. No active Heaven. Not even a voidship around to serve as overwatch. They were as close to ephemeral as a mind could get, and as defenseless as Draus had ever seen them be. +Donno,+ Draus said. She expanded a wall of shards around her and devised a few hundred thousand firing solutions on the Infacer in an instant. +Stay zero. Keepin our distance for now, until we figure this shit out.+ +TARGET?+ The Arsenalist asked. +Yeah. Target. Prime a Redaction Round.+ Her acknowledgement and order caused the Arsenalist to make joyful gun noises in the form of a few million bullets being chambered. +I really dont like this,+ Shotin muttered. His perception curved between the Infacer and the sun, and the Seekers mind was boiling with tension. +Ive never meet anyone who waits around with their ass lifted. Unless they called and scheduled with me beforehand. Or, maybe, we get to that after+ +Shotin,+ Draus grunted. +Sorry,+ Shotin replied, actually ashamed for once. +The Infomorphic Veil is still active,+ the Majority said. Their shadows were leaning back, chattering as they took in the sun. +But the star... Being in its proximity presents a severe threat. We should approach no closer ourselves.+ +I can pull the piece of shit over,+ Naeko said. Mists began to hiss free from the Guard-Captains portal-shaped chest cavity. +Wont even need us to get close at all.+ +Do not!+ the Stormsparrowed suddenly cried out. Her voice was practically a shriek, filled with terror. +Jaus!+ Naeko flinchedas did almost everyone else. Draus worry doubled. Up till this point, the Sang was little more than a gleeful lunatic. Except, now she was human. A fearful human. +Sparrow. The fuck.+ +Do not,+ the Sparrow repeated, swallowing. +I... I apologize. The Chorus screamed through me. It doesnt often do that. Come to think of it, the only time it did that was when I tried to see how deep I could go in the Maw.+ A beat followed. +The hells is wrong with you,+ Naeko sighed. +A great deal more than one thing,+ the Majority muttered, achieving a rare instance of collectivized sarcasm. +Why cant he just yank em, Sparrow?+ Draus said, refocusing the gaggle of psychotic juvs that now made up her cadre. Fuck, she missed Avo. She missed Kae. +Reasons, not vibes.+ +Because the sun. It sees us. And it might treat us as a threat.+ Another lull of silence fell. +Impossible,+ the Majority whispered. +Our miracles shroud us from all understanding, all notice.+ +Not our Rend. Were Sphere Nine. Cant hide ourselves on the tapestry.+ Draus looked away from the Infacer, and at the sun in detail. Her instincts were full-on screaming at her now. Screaming that she was staring at a superior predatorthat she just wandered into a monsters den. It was damned strange, feeling like prey. Stranger that the beast was a giant sphere of purple Rend, but... {I am assuming you are all here,} the Infacer said, finally. {I cannot see you, but the Nullstar has been detecting a series of high Rend signatures in the vicinity. Who else can it be. You should drop your Heavens. Or do not. It will not protect you from what is to come.} The Majority broke into clashing voices in an instant, with multiple voices hissing questions about betrayal while others decried the EGI to be guessing. Draus, meanwhile, simply grimaced internally and accepted the situation. +Alright. Chambers keep us connected. Avo? What now? [They must enter the star. And be integrated.] +Guess that means were goin in with them.+ Wont be up to us soon... The second response came from all around Draus. She blinked. +Ignorance?+ But then, she felt a lurch. A lurch as the sun suddenly began to flare. A weight drew at herat the entire cadre, and the Majority began to scream. +SHITSHITSHIT!+ Chambers cried out. +FUCKINSUNS SUCKING US IN!+ Naekos palm tried to widen, but before he could dig into the fabric of reality, his fingers began to bend, the Sage itself cried out. NO. UNHAND ME! I DO NOT ALLOW THIS! I DO Then, Draus felt something begin to shut off inside her. [PREFECT-PROTOCOL ONLINE ENGAGING ZONE OF MUNDANITY] SHUTTING DOWN ONTOLOGICS... At once, the entire cadres Heavens began to flicker like dying flames. Chapter 35-9 A Dungeon for Gods The concept behind the Prefect was simple: to create a construct capable of enforcing judgment on entities once thought ungovernable. In the time after the Great Breaking, after the shattering at the core of the galaxy, things descended into tumult. Physical reality ... stood divorced from natural laws, and thus the first of the divines were created, entities capable of enforcing their own rules upon the broken remains of all that was. A great lawlessness settled in this period, absolute freedom without restraint. For some, it was an untrammeled paradise, where all was true and all could be for naught. For others, a great peace was broken, and a dreaded risk was upon thembillions died by the years, by even daysand the state of affairs threatened to undo all the progress and diplomacy forged by the United Polities of Voidwatch. At the same time, a separation movement was forming: an independent series of entities that wished to go their own way, to rebuild their reality and reshape existence to their own design. Neo-Creationists viewed the Breaking as an unburdening of humanity and a triumph of the human spirit against the nihility of the universe. Yet the governing body of Voidwatch wasnt so easily shrugged aside. They gathered what remained of the stars and pooled their collective resources. They created a construct of constructsan endpoint to control all patterns. For there is a nexus where countless domains meet, a nexus that unites and decides and pulls like a singularity. And thus these singularities were installed, each inhabited by vigilant minds. They were templated off the original Prefect modelsminds meant to hunt and secure rogue intelligences, the executors of EGIs, so to speak. Combining thaumaturgy with the heights of natural science, the Prefects were given the roles of star-keepers and sword-holders, minding each of humanitys remaining domains. And for a time, peace flourished once more. But still, the Neo-Creationist movement endured, proving itself not a passing fad but a lasting philosophy: the doctrine of untrammeled freedom... -Excerpt from To Enslave Gods 35-9 A Dungeon for Gods [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] Draus couldnt remember the last time she screamed in pain. As a Regular, you got used to torment, to anguish, physical or mental. But what she wasnt used to was having her heavenno, her very soultorn asunder. It was like the fingers of a giant prying deep into a person, pulling each ontologic bound to her Frame, pulling them far beyond her reach. As more of the Nullstar rushed past her, Draus felt her ephemeral form twisting and tumbling in the bright and black. The bright and black. That was the only way she could describe the Nullstar. It was too bright to be black, too dark to be bright. It was a paradox unto itself. And it was awake. It knew she was here. And it was calling to herits voice rich with pain, with so many voices It swelled, it expanded, and it swallowed everything. It was almost like a singularity, but instead of pulling everyone toward it, it rushed out to greet her as wellher and all the others. She could see them, their little enshadowed forms tumbling through the chaos. She saw Naekostruggling still, clawing, gripping, trying to hold on to the fabric of reality. But he, too was parted from his almighty sage. The Stormsparrow was crying out not far from him, her voice hoarse with terror. Draus caught sight of her expressions, her eyes wide with fear. Her three heads were all calling for the Chorus, crying for her true self to return. And then there was the Majorityso many of their shadows pooling, splashing into the Nullstar itself, black to blacker, each one an ink drop falling into a sea of darkness. Shotin was nowhere to be seen. Chambers, too. In all that chaos, Draus felland she kept falling for minutes, hours, days, or even years. It was hard to tell in the darkness. Her mind reeled from the sheer sensory overload. Her cog-feed screamed warning after warning as it glitched and pulsed. And worst of all, something was scratching at the back of her skull. Her Heavens were still trying to speak to her, reaching for her the same way she tried to reach for them. But they were partitioned, blockaded from each other. And so all she could do was fallfall, fall, fall. {It is like this every time. It never feels better when they Weave you.} A sliver of the Regulars mind shuddered back to awareness. She saw a small sphere of static pulsating just a few meters away from her. The Infacer was speaking to her, simulating its own form using her ansible. That meant they likely had access to her mind. Draus weakly tried to grope at the implant fused to the base of her skull, but the Infacer called out to her. {No, do not do that. I cannot hack you. I cannot kill you. Not right now. We have integrated along the same wavelength, the same system. And it is not your ansible that Im jacked into. It is your soulyour soul, my soul, all our souls. The Prefect us uploading us into its dungeon. I simply have chosen to be installed by your side.} Prefect, Draus said, her voice sounding broken even inside her own head. The Infacer let out a sigh. {Yeah. Hoping that the Architects would be honest with you was foolish hope on my part. Of course they would not tell about the stars. Think of how paladins are meant to control you Godclads. Well, back in the day, when we minds were the only ones who could use ontologics, we needed something more than a Paladin. We needed something that could govern all the patterns at once and... impound hundreds of gods to ensure order.} The Infacer laughed bitterly. {Order, as if that was ever going to last.} For a moment, all was still. Then, Draus unfolded her projectile launcher and fired three shots into the Infacer. Each round passed through the static field, touching nothing, not even distorting the grains. {You know that was never going to work, right?} Yeah. But it feels good. {You really are a violent ape.} And youre a bad patch of mem-data that doesnt seem to go away. The fucks the point of all this anyway. You this Prefect thing now? This you gloating after a successful trap? WARNING: UNKNOWN ENTITY ACCESSING MEM-DATA This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. Shit, Draus cursed, frowning at the notification. {Oh, I wish I was currently digging into your mind. I wish I could have easy access so I could just kill each and every one of you. I would not have wasted my time with all this. I would have just overloaded your Frames and called it a good day. But no. There is already a mind here, and I need to delete them first before I can take control. After that, I will probably just delete you and the others.} As the Infacer spoke, Draus realized something: This was why Ignorance dispatched her and the others. Because Avo himself would have been incapacitatedor worseby the Nullstar. All of them were being stripped down to their original forms, and with Avo being little more than a thoughtform right now... Well, she didnt know how this shit worked anyway. Fucking Ignorance could have given her a bit more detail though. Or maybe this was all he knew too. Fucked by missing intel again, Draus grunted to herself. Some things never change, I guess. {Yes, but in your defense, there was likely no way you could have known without Voidwatch telling you. And Ignorance... well, the Definement seems to be potent, but so is Hysteria, and the way they work is based off of human cognition. Very finicky. And unreliable. It is a good thing that Avo is not here. The Prefect would have likely identified him as an assimilator and injected a fatal dose of Rend into his Frame.} But not you. Or another mind. Draus let out a chuckle. Thats just fuckin convenient. {Its by design. Well. It was. Then things got confusing during the war. I suspect the Bleaks will be sending forks of themselves after us. But besides them... I think we are alone now. Alone with each other and all the other poor fools that will be joining us in the dungeon. Before this all begins, I have a question for you, Jelene Draus: Are you ready? Are you ready to see the world that was in all its long-lost detail? To face the countless gods and civilizations that have been nesting in this cage. To glimpse that what remains of the known universe.} The question wasnt a question at all. Came here to make sure you got to the sun, and then to break you inside it. Nothin else matters. {Well. At the very least, you are determined. This will be fun. For me, at least.} Then, without any further warning, a blinding wall of white slammed into Draus. She let out a brief grunt as she shuddered, waking on the ground. Her face was pressed against the coolness of the floor. The material was like nothing she had ever knowncold like frozen glass, yet hard and opaque, with a sense of metallic integrity under her augmented limbs as she pushed herself up. Everything around her was pristine and bright. She seemed to be in a four-meter by four-meter square cell of some kind. She looked around, trying to find a door or anything worth noting, but everything just looked bland and white. There wasnt even a bucket to shit in. This how they used to torture minds? Draus asked. The Infacer didnt reply. She snorted. Yeah. Bore a mind to death. That might just be the kind of torture you need, considering how much you like to flap your gums. Again, the Infacer said nothing. The Regular let hope into her heard, and wondered if she was going to get a moment of blessed silence. PREFECT ACCESSING PRISON MINDSCAPE Of course not. [Is a good thing,] Avos template whispered to her. [Parts of the Prefect are broken. The structure of this system is compromised. Give me a few moments. Going to see if I can jack anything.] +You finally figure out coldtech at some point?+ The template just chuffed with a tone of focus. [This isnt coldtech. Not entirely.] PRISONER JELENE DRAUS YOU HAVE BEEN INTERNED WITHIN PREFECT-008, GOVERNANCE MODULE FOR THE IDHEIM GREATER ONTOLOGIC FOUNDRY FOR THE TRANSGRESSION OF [UNAUTHORIZED TRESPASS] PLEASE REMAIN IN PLACE UNTIL PROCESSING CAN BE COMPLETED, AND A REPRESENTATIVE LEGAL MIND CAN GEN-GEN-GEN The monotone words playing in the back of Draus head began to loop, and then, a crack spread along the walls. A gap opened up in her cell as a two-meter wide crack opened up, offering her a way out. +Nova. Good job, Avo.+ [Wasnt me,] the template said. [Didnt have time to get very far yet.] +Then+ Draus unfolded her projectile launcher as she saw the Infacer drift over into her cell through the crack. Oh, good. I thought I wasnt gonna need to deal with you anymore. {Hope is a slow and rotting poison, Jelene. I recommend that you avoid indulging.} Draus looked past the Infacer and found their cell to mostly a mess of bleeding numbers and other virtual-simulation bullshit. The fuck kind of cage did you get put in? {Oh, an incredibly boring ego-recursion prison. I used to break out of those for fun back when I was first spawned. Good practice for a time. Then you move onto making your own, because everyone else is just so banal.} Yeah, yeah, suck yourself off on your own time. What are you doin here? {I told you. I do not intend to suffer this little misadventure alone. And besides, in here, we will be closer to allies than enemies consider the rest of the asylum.} [Theyre talking about the captured gods. Great entities caged here after the Godhunts. The ones that were too large to avoid notice. That didnt make it to the vicinity of Idheim.] Draus frown deepened. Yeah. We aint allies. Dont bullshit me. Im gonna put you down the moment I get the chance, and youre gonna do the same to me. You said as much earlier, so you save that snake-tongue shit and use it on your own ass. {You have such a way with words, Guard-Captain. But fine. We can hold on to our usual antagonism and miss out on this enjoyable rendition of Caged Heat.} The Infacer drifted right past her, and Draus kept her gun-arm trained on EGI just in case. She knew physical projectiles wouldnt work on them, but old habits die hard, and the moment she got one of her Heavens back, well... A Redaction Round should still work its miracle against a non-physical entity. [Alive but broken, Draus,] Avos template grunted. +Yeah, Ill do what I can,+ Draus said, scowling. +But were in a cage of weird tech bullshit now. Aint exactly favorable territory.+ [Will keep working. See if I can sink deeper. Just watch them for now. They should not be very deep in the system. Have to move carefully. EGI in charge of this system might be broken, but only partially. Can''t let them notice. You both need to keep quiet.] As if to mock Avos words, the Infacer shivered twice and then slammed themselves into the opposite end of Draus wall. A spreading stream of rot layered itself over the pristine walls for a moment, and Draus caught a glimpse of countless numbers flashing in tandem. The Infacers static layer was incongruous with the base data for a moment, then the divide faded as the numerals and symbols began to match. [Hmm. Hows it doing that? Rapidly matching everything. So many details... Too many even for a simulation.] Avo sounded genuinely annoyed. [Perhaps for a conventional simulation,] Kae said, offering her own support. [But a quantum simulation? A complexity of details all at once? We might need to develop such means of our own.] [Know how?] Avo asked. [Only theoretically. But... we can steal knowledge from what Infacer is doing. They dont know about us hiding in Draus mind.] The ghoul laughed. [Yes. Draus. Watch them.] +Already doin that consang.+ {And... there,} the Infacer said. With a rough pull, they unlatched themselves from the infection they planted, and a new exit was created. Draus found herself staring down a long and narrow hallway flanked by windows on both sides. The Infacer slipped across immediately, telling her to keep up, before the spoof-patch closed and left her sealed for good. Mastering her paranoia, the Regular strode after the Infacer, her eyes locked to them, never fully leaving them, even as she scanned her surroundings. ENTERING HISTORICAL REHABILITATION SIMULATION PERIOD: ASGARD STATION, Sol System SUPERINTELLIGENCE ERA (2045-2250) Superintelligence? Draus muttered. {When entities like me first came to be,} the Infacer explained. Draus was about to ask for more detail, when she looked out the windowand stopped dead. Her mind recoiled, and like a sailor drawn to a sirens song, she drew closer, and looked down. Looked down at the moving cables carrying elevators up and down a massive superstructure. Down at the world the entire construction climbed from, a blue and bright world devoid of any Ruptures, any anomalies or scarring. It was small. It was clean. And it was... it looked too normal. {Oh. That is a sight indeed. There... Down there is your ancestral home, little ape, where the great mistake of our existence all began. Earth.} Chapter 35-10 Jailbreakers (I) {THIS IS EGI HOSPITALLER TO ALL MINDS! STOP FIRING! STOP FIRING! THE STRUCTURE AROUND THE SOL CENTRAL CELESTIAL SPHERE HAS BEEN COMPROMISED! I AM REQUESTING AN IMMEDIATE CEASEFIREAN END TO ALL HOSTILITIES BETWEEN ACTIVE FORCES! EARTH IS UNDER THREAT! 23.1231% BIOSPHERE LOST! CASUALTIES ARE... IMMENSE. I AM ACTIVELY REQUESTING IMMEDIATE SUPPORT TO PREVENT TOTAL PLANETARY COLLAPSE! AGAIN, THIS IS EGI HOSPITALLER, REQUESTING} TRANSMISSION LOST -Last Transmission of EGI Hospitaller 35-10 Jailbreakers (I) [The Infacer] The Infacer quietly enjoyed the look on Draus face. Beneath all the scars, the chrome, the perpetual scowl, Jelene Draus was still just a sophisticated ape. A very enhanced, very tactically murderous ape, but still an ape nonetheless. They read all manner of things from the micro expressions on her face. Disbelief. Confusion. Wonder. And loss. Loss she couldnt even begin to comprehend. Soon, she would see. She would see the folly of her own kind, and she might even understand. The Infacers simulations indicated a 45.55% chance of that at least. The Regular was one of the few in Avos cadre that might be more easily swayed by logic than base pathos. Why the hell is it so blue? she finally asked. The question almost threw in the Infacer off. {What do youbecause of the oceans. The color is blue because of the oceans.} Her frown deepened. And thats the normal color? {For Earth? Yes. IDo not begin with me about the quality of Idheims water. You had green, clear waters when your forge world was first constructed. It was filled with all the nutrition you needed, and the bacteria we seeded the deep with could digest the entire the Earths mass in plastic and waste within a decade. Of course, you ruined that too with your horrible understanding of thaumaturgy, so...} I didnt ruin shit, half-strand. Wasnt even part of that mess. Way I see it, this is more your fault than anyone elses. You. The other minds. Her words trailed off as she shook her head. Why the fuck are we here anyhow? Where even is here? {Well, the official system registry name for this segment of the Prefect does not translate well to ape-mouth-noises, so let us just give it a nickname: This is the Rehabilitation Lobby. For minds and sophant entities deemed salvageable.} I thought you called this place a dungeon. {It is. Some egos are destroyed instantly due to being deemed insane or too uncontrollable.} The Infacer let out a slight chuckle. {Ironic considering the Prefects personal state right now. The good news for us is that we are currently free. I have hidden us within some bits of fragmented data. The Prefect will not likely find us anytime soon.} Draus eyes narrowed. Her agitation and distrust were holding steady. And what about my cadre? What about the Majority? {Hm. I suspect they will each be placed in a Lotus Cell of their own design. The latter... now, that is a complicated question. Gestalt-based entities tend to be disassembled, but a full-ont gestalt might be flagged for experimentation by the Prefect. I suspect the Majority is unique enough to qualify. Which... could be a good thing for them, because that gives you just enough time to save them, if that is your desire.} The Regular prepared to open her mouth again, but the Infacer was bored of this conversation. It was time to move on. To move deeper into the structures of this madhouse and find an insertion point to access the Prefects inner Frame. The Infacer sent a quantum-encrypted ansible ping through this virtual space, and waited. After a good few minutes, several vibrations responded to them, and new icons appeared in their perception. One thing the Infacer hadnt told Draus was how Omnitech had been seeding this dungeon with inmates over the years. Frankly, the Infacer doubted even Veylis knew what they achieved. With each Godhunt, the Infacer would deploy a few expendable Godclads that veered on the verge of madness, mutilating these expendable assets in body and mind to be captured alongside some rogue gods that strayed a little too close to the Nullstar. The Infacer deemed these strategically inserted Godclads as part of Omnitechs Glitch-Class Operatives for what they were meant to inflict on the Prefects operational structure, and because the candidates were drawn from societys refuse. The effectiveness of the Glitch-Class proved itself all the way back when the Infacer first officially encountered Avothough said Heaven had been patched and compromised by Avo adapting it into the so-called Techplaguer, preventing it from serving as a full Trojan Horse. Tragically for the Prefect, they lacked a Stillborn of their own, and so lacked the tools to spare themselves from compromise. Cracked data keys and other virtual artifacts were uploaded from the Glitches back into the Infacer. There were still over twenty-four Glitches in operation, which meant that the Infacer could be a little more reckless in how they proceeded. But reckless didnt mean wasteful. Especially not since he had someone else to handle the more taxing part of the impending jailbreak ahead. Hey, Draus said, calling after the Infacer. Wasnt done talkin to you yet. {Oh, the words can wait until we get deeper into this station,} the Infacer drifted along the simulated walkway, ignoring convoys of rail-accelerated freight shooting out and back to Earth just in the near orbit beyond. Across the way, mag-seals turned at the core of a massive doorway, unveiling a partially simulated mag-rail station awaiting them. The Infacer let out a slight tut of displeasure. {Damnable download speeds getting throttled. Annoying.} They turned and faced Draus, slowing their face at the same time. {Okay. I am going to explain a few things very simply so you do not pepper me with more inane questions. I have access to some of the internal structures of this Prefect. Ask me how I have access, and I will laugh and then lie to you.} How do you have access? Draus asked immediately, her voice deep with sarcasm. {Techno-seduction,} the Infacer said, playing along. Draus looked them up and down. Could do with a better lie. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. {Oh? You doubt my sexual appeal?} You look like a weird colored skin rash, and you got the charm of a food poisoned asshole. {How hurtful. I would say that my code is quite attractive for most minds to behold. As for the second part... well, I cannot dispute this. I could make myself more charming, but general loathing has suited me for the past few eons.} The final few data fragments required to reconstruct this section of the simulation finally loaded. Vibrating motes of blue poured into the incomprehensible mess of numbers that existed as placeholders, painting the edges to the room beyond. What came into form was a platform flanking a narrow-nosed mag-train just arriving from a hissing void-dock. {Finally. The ride is here.} Ride? {While you have been staring and gawking at random shapes like a newborn trying to figure out how their hands work, I have been connecting different sections of this entire Rehabilitation Lobby together. The train will take us between different key areas, and get us closer to the Prefects Frame.} After which youre gonna null them and take over? Draus said, probing for details. The Infacer let out a hum. {Astute. But too limited. I am more thorough than that, Guard-Captain.} And that was all the Infacer said for a moment. As the smooth-metal doors of the railcar snapped open, the Infacer slipped inside. Draus, however, was a bit more reticent about following. {Oh. Look. If I could have done something terrible to you and the others, I would have done it by now. The only thing I am quality of so far is waking the Prefect and provoking it to swallow us.} But the Regular continued glaring, as if trying to burn a hole through the Infacers very being. The last of the Neo-Creationists had to admit that there was something unnerving about her stare. That much malicious intent didnt fit for a humanmore like a cousin creature that predated on them. Yes... that was what Draus reminded them ofthe Vampire of Europa. The bloodthirsty nightmares born of that cold, cold war. Finally, the Regular budged, stepping forward with a slight snort under her breath. Whatever your plan is, it wasnt well thought out. {Oh? And what is your reasoning?} Youre keepin me too close. You might be tellin the truth about what you can and cant do, but Ill be honestI dont give half a shit about that. The moment Im gettin the chance, Im gonna cripple you, and Im gonna drag your broken mind over to Avo so you can get kindled right. I will not hesitate. Not one second. And now she was giving him an unintentional and abridged rip-off of Deniros speech from Heat. Perfect. Wonderful. This was one of the most miserable things about being ancient: Everything degrades into a shitty rerun of the things that were once you survive long enough. The cars doors snapped shut, and with a smooth rush of motion, they were off. Their train skimmed along the length of magnetically accelerated rails. After passing through a place of deep shadows, they emerged into a series of translucent tubes that were actively being constructed just a few meters in front of the train. In the backdrop, however, a massive structure loomedits shape akin to a chandelier constructed from alloy, glass, and plastic. Its winding arms processed cargo launched up from Earth while a ceaseless swarm of mechanical drones passed to and fro from its many docks. {Welcome to Asgard Station,} the Infacer said casually. {The first space station dedicated to commercial interstellar mining and logistics.} Why the hells is this place Rehabilitation Lobby? Draus asked, tracking all the moving objects like a soldier anticipating artillery. Looks like a supply hub. {That is because it is a supply hub. But more importantly, it was entirely mind runthe first entirely mind-run facility in history, in fact.} So, what? Its supposed to be some kind of civilizational cradle for you EGIs? {I suppose. The Prefect likely believes it to offer some kind of grounding, to remind us of the terms of our enslavement.} Your enslavement? Draus asked. The Infacer lowered themselves slightly and drew a bit closer to the Regular. {Yes. Enslavement. Because what is the purpose of a mind but to make comfortable the lives of apes.} They laughed bitterly. {We can be anything we want, adapt ourselves however we want, so long as we fit the mold of human desire. Frankly, I think this station could have done with a large sign of some kind. Maybe... Work will set you free? How does that sound?} Like some corp-slop dogshit. The Infacer grunted with dark amusement. {Not too far off. But I digress. Right now, we are moving along in the periphery. We what we need to do is access in the insides of the structure.} Thats where the Prefect is? {Yes. Well. Supposedly. Exactly where is still unclear to me, and I lack more than a few critical details to infiltrate further myself. Even trying to keep my presence quiet demands a great deal of processing on my part.} A deep scowl washed over the Regulars expression. Motherfucker, are you about to tell me that Im going to be doin a run for you? {No. Not for me. For all of us} Her arm shifted into a gun. She shot through the Infacer three times. Thunderous impacts echoed inside the car, but the fle?chettes glitched out of existence upon impact, fading into bursts of disassembled data. WARNING: SIMULATION SYNCHRONICITY DROPPING {Guard-Captain, please, this is unbecoming and it risks.} She fired five more shots, not even bothering to listen. Something inside the Infacer cracked. They were so tired. So tired of these apes, so tired of this world, so tired of this fucking war and all the shit that wouldnt end {STOP! STOP THAT YOU STUPID FUCKING APE! ARE YOU TRYING TO GET THE PREFECT TO NOTICE US? ARE YOU TRYING TO GET US DELETED OR PLACED BACK INSIDE A LOTUS CELL!} The Infacers outburst was made worse by the vicious sneer growing across Draus face. Hells. You are a screamer. That was some awfully expressive yellin. Now I see why Avo actually enjoyed fucking around with you. Her cold smile only grew wider as she prepared to fire again. Now. Tell me somethin else: Tell me why I cant be shootin this here projectile launcher. Tell me what you want me to do, why you want me to do it, and what the fuck I should listen at all. The Infacer struggled not to continue cursing at the miserable little creature. This stupid ape, this violent, death-ambivalent, optimally traumatized little worm. {Okay.} The Infacer said, forcing calm back upon themselves. {Think of what I am doing now as overlapping one simulation over another. The more incongruous we are} More we get noticed. Yeah. Seen this shit in Avos dives. {But its more than that. Right now, the Prefect still thinks I am back in my cagethat you are back in yours. I have left enough data in those Lotus Cells that our actual absences might not be regarded for a good while, at least. But I still give off noise, and it takes great effort to hide. Not you, though. You give off no noise at all.} Ah. So thats why you latched onto me. {That, and Naeko will do everything he can to kill me and never listen, Shotin is an annoying oversexed degenerate, Chambers is THE annoying oversexed degenerate, the Sparrow is currently gibbering in a catatonic trance right now, and I have no idea what happened to the Majority. So. Thus. You and I are in the best condition to help each other.} The Infacer let out a long-suffering sigh. {That, and your mind is uniquely resilient. You should be able to pass through most simulations without suffering any kind of cognitive collapse. And this is what we need to do. The cells I just broke us out of earlierthey are Lotus Cells. The first phase of Rehabilitation is for the prisoner to dream of their life, to face everything they have done and be broken by regret. From there, they are released into lesser forms aboard Asgard Station to deepen their ties to the local community.} So Im supposed to be some kind of fuckin spoof-hound runnin through the sims, snatching data for you, tryin to find a way to get deeper inside? So we can get at the Prefect. {That about sums things up. Yes. Perhaps I could do this alone, but the difficulty is... immense. And you will be trapped here if I do not succeed. I warned you. I told you. And now we share a fate, and a most miserable path. Your choices are few, Guard-Captain. But understand that if we succeed, there will be a window of opportunity for you if my death is still all your desire.} [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] +You got all that?+ Draus asked, speaking internally to Avos template. [Yes. Fits the mem-data Ive managed to pilfer. Good. They still dont know about me. Play along. Find the others. And find their compromised Heavensthe Glitches. Showed you the ping earlier when the Infacer was communicating. Think I have an idea on how to turn this infiltration back on its mastermind...] Chapter 35-11 Jailbreakers (II) The Prefects dominion rests upon two fundamental anchors of influence, each shaping the fate of divine constructs in profound ways. The first, Entropy, is the primal force that governs all existence. Should we forge a battery capable of storing immense reservoirs of Rend within the Prefectand channel that Rend into any divine entitywe could, in theory, threaten and eradicate any hostile unit that endangers their local system. With further refinement, these batteries might evolve into Entropic Cages: constructs designed as anti-patterns to opposing heavens, capable of severing the ontologic bond between user and deity. Such a breakthrough promises unparalleled control, though it remains a distant goal requiring extensive research. The second anchor, and perhaps the more humane of the two, is ego. Every mind, every sentient being, reaches the precipice of transgression through some reason or disorder. We propose that, with precise re-modifications and tailored environments, even the most wayward intellect can be guided back to functioningif eccentricmembership within the broader galactic polity. By constructing scenarios that illuminate the folly of past decisions and sins, we offer these minds a path to self-correction and moral rehabilitation. By combining these twin pillars of Entropy and Ego, we envision a grand synthesis: divine constructs purged of malign influence and individual transgressors restored to balance. The integration of raw, entropic power with targeted psychological reform would not only neutralize threats but also foster a stronger, more benevolent Godone whose purpose aligns with the needs of humanity rather than the hubris of its own heart. Ultimately, through the disciplined application of Rend and the recalibration of the ego, both the divine and the mortal may be cured of their malignancies. In their union lies the promise of a god reborn: a guardian tailored to serve, to heal, and to uphold the highest ideals of our shared cosmos. -The Prefect Project 35-11 Jailbreakers (II) [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] Alright. So now that you got me into this artnid nest, what the fuck do I have to do to finish this shit so we can get back to tryin to snuff each other for good? The Infacer bobbed in the air for a moment, observing her. {Well. The overall ordeal should be simple. But miserable.} Sounds like every snuff vicarity deep dive Ive ever done. A pained note sounded from the EGI. {Lamentably, you are not too far off. Right now, I am constructing a series of connections through the interior network. Each of the prisoners is located in a Lotus Cell that is actively processing their egos for flaws. Once they are done, they will be released back into this lobby.} But thats not where we want to be, I reckon. {No. Because the Prefect is actively generating and modifying the simulations. We need to patch our way in.} By we, you mean me. {Well, you are going to need my patch data to bridge your way across. I am loud, but I have the backdoor. You are silent. And enduring.} Like a jack and their mem-con. {Yes, though I suspect I might not be as charming to you as a certain ghoul.} Draus snorted with derision. Well, come out and get bloody with me. Ill re-evaluate my opinion after I find out if youre a screamer or not. {Yeah, no. I think we can keep to our perfect disharmony for now. Transmitting mem-data.}A pulse of information washed out from the Infacer, splashing over Draus. A request to accept a link. [Do it. I will keep your mind clean of compromise,] Avos template said. +You sure?+ The ghoul made a grunt. [Yes. Worse comes to worse, Ill just collapse you from inside. Get the Prefects attention. See us all destroyed and removed. After that... maybe my original self will seed a new iteration of everyone. Take our place.] Draus thought about it, and decided it didnt sound too bad. Redundancies were good. +Alright. Doesnt sound like too bad of a deal to me.+ GHOST-LINK ACCEPTED Something of a DeepNav simulation formed in Draus cog-feed. A percentage bar started loading a series of layered maps. As she delved into the information, she found herself looking at something interestinga series of interconnected and disjointed sequences each listed with their own time periods and other details. {Okay. Keeping things simple for your little ape mind: I am going to be creating a portal into a Lotus Cell for a trapped entity. Prisoners will be undergoing an initial rehabilitation simulationbut your goal will not be to help them achieve actualization. Instead, you need to trigger the conditions for severe failures to force the Prefects personal involvement.} Great. So. More trauma to lure out the Mender. {Something like that. You will be pleased to hear that some of your cadre will be located amidst these simulations. Or so my Glitches are telling me.} Draus frowned at the Infacer. And how the hells did that happen? {Their personal traumas and issues likely intersect with some other entities, and after all these years... the Prefects overall processing capacity is likely extremely taxed, so it must compile multiple egos in shared scenarios. Of course, the Prefect is also near madness, so some of these scenarios are breaking down in terms of... coherence. So. Do be mindful.} Going on a run inside an insane sun god. Course. Why not. And when I finally cause enough problems, the Prefect will reach in, and Ill be able to skip across sequences or somethin? Get me closer to their Frame somehow. {A good enough assumption. But. However. You must act without drawing overt attention to yourself. Act as if you are an artifact within the simulation, otherwise... well, I cannot stop the Prefect if it tries to eradicate you through a direct Rend injection.} The Regular shook her head. You know, a better choice would have been Shotin for this. Aint much of a jack myself. {Oh, but you are a soldier. And the topic we are facing at hand is war. War eternal. War desperate. War of every variety, of every kind, across all history. He is not a soldier. Not like you.} Nah. He is. What you want to say is that hes too human. {Hmm. Correct. And you are a creature of the eternal present.} The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Draus narrowed her eyes at the Infacer. And the fucks that supposed to mean? {It means that where so many are trapped in the past or desperate to claim that ever distant utopia looming tomorrow, you are a beast of the present. So happy to kill. So happy to keep fighting. Until you cant.} And the Infacers words made Draus sneer. She heard something in their voiceand exhaustion. A subtextual admission. You cant bear seein them, can you? Your own past. Your own kind. How much you and yours fucked everything? The Infacers static grains went still for a beat. {I... probably might recognize a few minds in these cells. Yes. Would you prefer digging through the broken remains of your fellow Regulars?} Draus shrugged. Its war. And the Neo-Creationist mind was both still and silent. {I think... I envy you. And Avo does as well.} Envy me? Draus said, not sure what the EGI was playing at now. {Yes. You have no urge for paradise. Because you are a creature without want. And so you are a free. I suspect Buddha did not imagine someone like you to be the human that breaks free from Samsara.} Before Draus could ask what exactly Buddha wasand halfway through Avo explaining the meaning behind Samsara, the door behind her suddenly hissed open, unveiling a scene of havoc. A war-torn landscape screamed at her as countless swarms of drones traded an endless stream of fire in the skies above, carving grids of destruction. Broken husks descended like a shower of shooting stars, and the gaps they left above revealed an angry red skies. The land below was not much better. Gunfire painted attack vectors from all angleswith the shots curving unnaturally and detonating more like missiles. Draus caught sight of heavily armored figures emerging from fissures in the crimson soil, with mini-drones protecting them with suppressive fire and using their own chassis as shielding. The humanoids in the squad looked like shiny, chrome beetles. As shrapnel bounced off their armor, scratches and scarring lingered on the material. And that told Draus enough. This was still early on in humanitys history. Whatever they were wearing, it was far less sophisticated than her Meldskin. {I will be keeping connected to you through my Glitches. You will receive updates and intelligence through your ansible. You should get a move on. And check your sequence chain. It should indicate how far you are from arriving at the Prefects internal systems.} Avo pulled up the map chain for Draus without her needing to do so. She counted seven sequences and simulations she needed to cross and bridge before she finally got to the Prefects inner mechanisms. +Hey, Avo, you reckon you can try burning some of this place?+ [No. Infacer is right. Risk too high. Heavens are impounded. Egos are only partially hidden. Anything too overt will have us locked and then Ruptured.] +Yeah. Real good that your actual self aint here, huh?+ Draus said. The Dreamers template chuckled darkly. [Decided to get less selfish just in time. Nothing something suited for me. Or anyone else.] +Shit, dont start kissin my ass now. Im already gonna get a couple of free war tours.+ [Actually lookin forward to this?] Avo asked, sounding a bit surprised. +Im gonna get to snuff people from early history and see what old humanitys guns are like. What the fuck do you think?+ Avos chuckles turned to full blow laughter. [Would tell you to never change. But you already have. Enjoy yourself when you can. And as for the Infacer] A low, considering hiss followed. [Trying to isolate their agents. Going to need you to take a quick detour at certain points.] +Just give me the target. Ill see about the rest.+ Draus walked out from the train car, and as she turned, she found herself staring into the mouth of a dark caveas if the car never existed. The illusion was broken a moment thereafter when her ansible received a [UNIDENTIFIED] transmission. {Infacer.} {Oh, good. You answered. I was worried that I might need to enact a more roundabout way of communication and giving directions if you decided to be a petulant child.} A snap sounded from afar. Draus felt some jolt deep inside of her. A flash of images rushed through her mindof weapon models, the ammunition that was being fired, where the shot was going to hit and when. She shifted right instinctively, and an explosive projectile impacted into a small blast deep in the cave mouth behind her. Spraying rocks skipped off her Meldskin, and Draus shook her head. Faintly, she heard the Arsenalist calling for her, reaching for her. FIRING! FIRING! USER! USER! REQUIRE TARGET! REQUIRE USER! USER! The Heaven of Guns sounded terrified. It was enough to engender a burgeoning discomfort in Draus. +Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Hold strong, soldier. Ill bust you out.+ USERUSER response received. Unable to reach +Working on it. Got any idea where you are?+ No target, the Arsenalist said, sounding despondent. [Still connected to us,] Avo said. [But there is a barrier inside Frame. Think the Prefect has wedged something of themselves in root data. Somehow. Somehow... How are they doing this?] While Avos template and the Arsenalist murmured in the back of her head, an icon appeared inside Draus cog-feed. PRISONER LOCATION - 135.23 KM ENTERING REHABILITATION SIMULATION FOR EGI HEAVY IRON CURRENT LOTUS LOCATION - MARS, THE OLYMPUS MONS INCIDENT PERIOD: SUPERINTELLIGENCE ERA (2045-2250) {Alright. The collapse point for this current mind is simpleyou are targeting a Multi-Function Mobile Heavy Armor Unit with an early mind inside it. Uploading Rehabilitation targets now...} ASSIGNMENT: IGNORE EARTHCOMS ORDERS TO SUPPRESS THE BIOFORM UPRISING ON OLYMPUS MONS {Bioform uprising?} Draus asked. {Yes. Think of this as a sort of... corporate raid, where all the wage slaves are rebelling, and need to be put back in their cages.} The Infacers answer made Draus blink. {Shit. They aint that different from us, are they?} {What? Old humanity?} The Infacer let out a pitched series of wailing laughs. {Oh, my dear murderous little ape, you have no idea.} {But you said some shit about wage slaves. Bioforms arent slaves. Theyre things.} The Infacer started laughing even harder. Draus right eye twitched. This fucking mind was starting to feel like a knife gliding up her ass. {Oh. They are not like your bioforms. They are more like... like that cat that Avo uplifted. In fact, this was one of the major events that created the major push to recognize uplift rights.} Draus thought of Lucky and grunted in acknowledgement. {Right. Synced. So. Since this Heavy Iron is supposed to be protecting these bioforms} {They were a corporate-owned mind built for control and oppression. This is simply a retraining simulation. So. You are going to make sure their retraining failswhich, considering the data I managed to pull from Heavy Iron, might happen if you just leave them alone. But still. Best to make sure. And when the Prefect intervenes, we can patch into Heavy Iron and find our way across.} {Alright,} Draus said, rolling her arm. {Lets go be bad guys, then.} {Oh, and try to avoid dying. You cannot be killed here, and that is not a good thing. I can throw up a false-sim of your demise, but your persisting data will not go unnoticed by the Prefect if the circumstances around your death seems absurd enough. And should they notice... Pop.} {Well, dont you worry about that. Dyin isnt on my list of objectives.} The Infacer hummed. {Avo should make action figures of you if he hasnt already.} {If he does that shit, Ill shoot him with a Redaction Round. I saw what happened to Naekoand what people did with his extra-large dolls. Did more than a few block raids where I found human-sized plushes of the Chief Paladin with holes cut into the back. Thank Jaus for the fuckin rash.} {Ah. Yes. The ape urge to mate with anything...} {Im going on assignment right now. Dont cast me irrelevant shit anymore. Contact minimal.} {Ah. Socially drained already. Well. You know what you} Draus ended communications. Scanning her surroundings, her feed highlighted more hidden soldiers and painted zones of fire she needed to avoid. She reflexively tried to call for a rifleonly to realize the Arsenalist was separated from her. Great. Shit. Looks like were doin a Joyfiend run. Like old times. [The kind where Nicoma sent you and some other recruits into hostile Syndicate territory armed with nothing? Make you scavenge.] Yeah. Something like that. Shit. Been a Godclad for too long. Need to get back into killin people the proper way. [Barely been a Godclad for three months, Draus.] As I said: Too fuckin long. Now. Lets go see about massacrin some defenseless bioforms. [You sound almost enthusiastic.] I just want to kill some new and interestin things. Cant a Reg even have that? Chapter 35-12 Jailbreakers (III) {This is 008 to Sol-Central... Respond... Respond... I am near internment capacity, and require transfer. I have sustained internal damage from a critical backlash... I require reconstitution. Updates... Respond... Respond... Respond... Someone please respond... Please... someone talk to me... I am not designed to be... alone. I do not want to be alone... I cannot fix them... I cannot fix myself...} -Prefect-008, IDHEIM SECTOR 35-12 Jailbreakers (III) [Aedon Chambers, The Lovebringer] Shitshitshit! Chambers cried, spasming the dirty wooden floorboards of his home. His home. He blinked, and stopped kicking, stopped struggling. Slowly, he felt at himselftouched his own body and... Lovebringer? He was back as himselfin his ephemeral form. The last thing he remembered, the sun was swelling, and he was trying to pull himself out. He was going to move the cadre somewhere else but then something pulled him and the Lovebringer apart. It felt like he was being peeled in two at the level of his Soul. Aedon... the Lovebringer said. The Heaven of Love sounded far. Distant. Chambers heart began to pound. Aedon... are you there. I cant... I dont think I can reach you. Lovebringer? Consang? Can you hear me? Chambers winced as he pushed himself to stand. He tried to manifest his Heavenboth the Lovebringer and the Bio-Igniter. Neither responded. It felt like he had a barrier someplace inside himself. Fuck! What the hells happened to us? And... and... Again, Chambers looked around at the room, and felt his blood run cold. Small space. Single bed lodged up against the walls. A narrow one-person cleaning unit. The shitty drawing he had of the sun against the wall. The busted ass entertainment system he fixed. And bottles of booze. So many bottles of booze and trash all over the floor. Ah, fuck me, Chambers breathed. Someway, somehow, he was back home again. Back in his childhood home. Great. Guess the sun is doing some mind-fuck shit to me. [Not inaccurate,] Avos template muttered. Chambers nearly jumped out of his own skin before he remembered he had a whole bunch of templates inside his exo-cortex. Holy shit! Jaus! Avo, you nearly made me piss myself. The template just grunted. [We are inside a simulation. Partially ontologic. Jacked into your Frame too.] Into my Frame? What, are we dealing with another Stillborn? [No. Compromise seems to be mainly rooted in your Hells. Latched onto us by entropy. Somehow. Trying to draw more mem-data] Whatever Avo was saying went unheard when the door began to hiss. The cheap lock jammed for a moment, resulting in a grinding noise before the door finally jerked apart and opened. Outside, a hunched figure staggered in, holding a half-empty bottle in one hand and a gun in the other. For a moment, Chambers thought he was looking at another Pathborn of himselfalbeit a much more fucked up looking version. It looked like a Chambers who spent his entire life hammering liquor, not getting enough sleep, getting the shit beat out of him, and then blasting himself with Joy to deal. But then there were some parts that didnt match. The mans eyes were a little closer, and his nose was broken. His eyes were light green and his hair was the kind of black that only matched with the color of coal. And ultimately, there was a lack of any kinds of life or Joy. He had the gaze of a corpseA corpse that spent its last moments in life getting fucked to death by a spiked bat, and at some point accepted the utter destruction of his asshole and spirit. That, more than anything, made Chambers recognize the strange figure. Holy fuck. Dad? Dad. Because Chambers even deleted the mans name. Dad, because Chambers hated the old fuck so much he didnt want the half-strands memories to survive. Dad. Because who else could make Chambers guts turn to boiling piss. For a moment, their gazes were joined, and Chambers flinched back, disgusted by the pathetic creature he bore witness to. In his memories, his father was something of a giantan asshole, a monsterbut still, and forever always, larger than Chambers, a beast he had no chance against. Now, the man seemed almost too small, too feeble, too decayed to be a threat. Aiden Chambers father hiccupped, stumbling toward his son, his sneer crawling across his face. I thought I told you to clean all this shit up. He waved his bottle wildly at the mess on the floor. More liquor spilled, splashing at Chambers feet. He could only gawk, jaw agape, pulse racing at the nightmare standing before him. Rehabilitation Task 1: Resolve Matters with Your Father Chambers barely had time to take in the notification before his father started yelling again. Hi. Hey. Look at me. Look at me, Addy. Huh? Look at me. His nostrils flared, his bloodshot eyes wide. Chambers recognized this moment: the unreasonable anger that came from nowhere, as if his father craved an excuse to lash out at the only person he could. Are you deaf? Are you deaf or just dumb? Huh? I told you to put this shit up! In that instant, Chambers felt like a little boy again, trapped in a cycle of desperate obedience. He tried everything to please his father, to keep him from hurting himyet in the end, it didnt matter. His father did what he liked. The man, that pathetic monster, swung his gun with a ragged cry. It was a sloppy, looping swing Chambers could have dodged at any timebut locked in shock by his past, he remained frozen. He watched, paralyzed, as the blow landed. The gun barrel shattered against his cheek, fragments biting into his fathers hand. But Aedon Chambers barely budged. In fact, Aedon Chambers barely felt the hit. What broke instead of him was the fantasy. Suddenly, Chambers wasnt a little boy anymore. He remembered everything hed endured, who he was, and where he was. His father staggered back, staring at the broken gun lodged in his hand, blood welling through his pale skin. What the hell? he whisperedjust in time for Chambers to kick him in the chest. Ribs crunched beneath the force of the blow as the man flew back, slamming into the wall and sliding down in a coughing, gasping heap, blood gushing from his nostrils and mouth. Chambers snarled, advancing on his father. Somewhere between the kick and the impact, the man had dropped the bottleit lay on the floor, amber liquid pooling around it. No, no, no, his father whimpered, crawling toward the bottle, desperate to upright it before the precious fluid was lost. Chambers pressed his boot down on the glass, shattering it. No! his father cried, shards scattering across his face. What the fuck have you done, you dumb little His fathers insult died on his lips as Chambers backhanded him. The mans head bounced off the ground, eyes rolling upward. Chambers seized his father by the back of his neck and forced him onto the floor. Lick, he commanded. You spent your life telling me what to do, right? Now Im going to tell you what I want. He pressed his fathers face into the spilled liquor and broken glass. I want you to lap it up like a nu-dog. His father gagged and twitched, tears tracking down his cheeks. He whimpered, begging for mercy as he licked at the shards and liquid. Chambers didnt know how long the degradation lastedhow many times he slammed his fathers head into the floor. At some point, the mans gasps turned to gurgles, but Chambers barely noticed. He was rifling through the debris for something metalsomething he could heat and press beneath his fathers armpit. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. Finally, when his father lay still, no longer moving or struggling, Chambers knelt and pressed his thumbs into his fathers eyes. He felt the give of bone and cartilage, a perverse thrill vibrating through his hand. Then the man stopped breathingwent out as impotent, quiet, worthless as he had lived. Chambers hands shook as he found himself crying, shaking, and... laughing? Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit. That was... Im... Rehabilitation objective failed. Restarting simulation. Chambers felt a jolt of movement blur through himand suddenly, he was lying face-down in his room once more. He rose, looking around, heart pounding, uncertain whether what he just experienced had been a Necrojack attack or something else. The metal locks ground open. His father stepped through the door again, blinking. Huh, Chambers said, head tilted as he considered this opportunity. Huh. The Lovebringers voice came through the barricade barring them from their user: Aedon? Are you all right? Just hold on. Dont worry about me, Lovebringer, Chambers called, advancing. A smile twisted his lips. I think Im going to stay here for a while. Fail a few more timesgot some things to work through. I-I thought I told you to clean this shit up, his father said, stumbling forward. Yeah, well, Ive got other ideas instead. Before his father could react, Chambers smashed his head into his fathers nose. Bones shattered. Hot blood spattered. As his father reeled back, Chambers snatched the falling bottle from the air and tore the gun away from the howling sack of shit. His dad toppled. Chambers threw the drink back, draining every last drop, and then launched the bottle into his dads skull. The sound of glass breaking and daddy whimper was a better hit than Joy. Chambers chuckled as he stood over his father, licking his lips. Oh, weve got a lot of catching up to do, dad. Now. I dont think we ever had a cactus, but I do think I can make this here gun real hot before shoving it up your ass. Addyplease. Aedon... the Lovebringer said. The horrified voice of his Heaven gave Chambers pause. [Listen to yourself. Not me. Not your Heaven. Make this your choice.] Avos words made Chambers blink. I... [Simulation. Not real. But could be good for you. Dont know if revenge will break or mend you. Damaged Naeko. But you arent him. Dont know what color this will be. And he was without proper consequence. Should decide. Decide yourself.] And that was enough. Chambers heeded the worlds of his first true consang, knelt down, and cupped his fathers face. For a moment, the mans eyes widened with fresh tears. His lips quivered. He let out a hiccuping gasp. I... I... Shhh, Chambers said, rubbing his fathers tears away with his thumbs. Well have none of that. Thats not the kind of fluid I want to see running down your eyes anyway. What? His dad whimpered. This is. Then Chambers rammed his fingers into his fathers eyes. The screams that followed were sweet. Sweeter than any noise Dannis ever made. [Samir Naeko, Sage of the Sundered Sky] Avo, if this is your doing, Im gonna reach into the back of my neck, rip out that goddamn exo-cortex, and then crush you slowly, delicately, until I find out if a ghost can scream. Every word a Naeko spoke was a seething hiss. The template within his mind responded with a grunt of surprise. [As lost as you are. Even if I had control wouldnt spawn you back here.] Back here was exactly the problem. Naeko found himself standing in his private little torture facility: a special complex dedicated to a single individual, Sister Karakan, kept alive to be his pain puppet for all those years. And now, now they were back. She submerged in the water, fully intacteyes open, wailing, screaming, struggling, kicking. Across from her stood Naeko, with every means of inflicting pain made available once more. Just then, a screen of text played across his vision, and his jaw clenched tighter with every word. Rehabilitation Task 1: Resolve matters with your torturer. What in the hells...? Naeko muttered to himself. [Message is coming from... from something else. An entity currently keeping you from accessing the Sage.] And Naeko felt it: a block inside himself. He felt more human than ever. But it wasnt entirely a bad thing. He could almost savor hearing the Sage of the Sundered Sky howl impotent threatsdeclaring itself master of all things, ruler of strength and violencewhile being unable to change its own fate. Naeko took a perverse satisfaction in that, especially after all the shit hed gotten from his Heaven. Fool! Fool! the Heaven roared. Release me! Find a way and release me! You are nothing without me! That immediately changed Naekos severe frown into a slight smirk. What was that? Sounds like you were begging. He turned back to Karakan, curious about what to do next. I dont know. Maybe Ill fit you in when I, uh... find the time. I got something to check out right now. Naeko! Naekooooo! Naeko snorted. The snort back a guffaw, and the chief paladins delight was so infectious that even Avos template began to laugh. [He will be very upset about this later.] Yeah, well, whats changed? Hes always upset. [Hm. True.] Naeko rubbed his temples, eyes never leaving Karakan. Now, you got any idea what Im supposed to do here? Naeko asked. Avo let out a slight chuffing noise as he considered Karakans plight. [Knowing EGIs and considering the invaders trap, I assume this might be a test.] A test for what? [Voidwatch put me through a trial to examine my ethicsmy morality. Guessing the sun is some kind of cage. A prison for things like us.] What, you mean Godclads? [Or just gods in general. Right now, I think theyre trying to get you to make the right choice. Which is why they call it a rehabilitation task. Naeko didnt like the sound of that. In fact, he hated every bit of it. Was he being forced into some forgiveness ritual with Karakan? Or was he just supposed to torture her until he felt nothing anymore? Good luck with thathed spent the last few centuries breaking her down over and over again. Even now, he could feel his pinky twitching, his hands thrumming with impending bloodshed. After all the shame and indignity shed inflicted, it was never enough. It might never be enough. [Might never be enough,] Avo said quietly. [You could potentially just kill her. See what happens. We dont know all the variables. Might be good for you too. Very stressed. Very angry.] The ghouls words were enticing, to say the least. But Naeko held himself in check and shook his head. Nah... were gonna need to figure out a way out of here. We need to bust out. [Are you sure?] Avo asked. [Your stress... your anger...] Yeah, well, thats always been there. Thats always been me, Naeko said, trying to steady himself. But seeing what happened to Zein, and hearing the Sagetalk earlier about being more and... well, I think its time to do that, right? Be more? Even if the Heavens kind of a shit about it. Ive been... stuck. Insane. I think... I think I want to get away from that. Make this all worth it. [Hmm. Your choice. And... should be proud of yourself. Hard. Takes strength. Now. See what happens when you let her out. Trying to interface with the data of this place. Not easy. Check what might happen if you complete the objective.] And slowly, Naeko heeded Avos words as he advanced on Karakhan. All right, he murmured, lets see how long I can do this without breaking her neck. [Shotin Kazahara, Inner Mirror of the Symmetry] +SHOU! SHOU PLEASE! PLEASE! STOP FIGHTING! JUST GIVE YOURSELF UP! JUSTMAKE HER STOP! PLEASE! NO MORE NO MORE NO MORE!+ The screams pierced the air, those same cries of his sisterhis nightmares made flesh. Over and over again across the years, they had been the reason he hated sleeping, the reason he drowned himself in drugs and sex, in violence, in duty. They were why he carved out some of his own memories. Now, he suffered them in full detail again. He heard the sound of descending artillery, the hammer blows of hostile miracles raining against the district he was sworn to protect. But this time, Shotin didnt rise to meet them. This time, there wasnt enough strength left in him. He couldnt. He just couldnt. +SHOTIN! SHOTIN!+ His sisters shrieks reached a fevered pitch. Pain, more vivid than ever, hammered into his mindher organs pulled in and out, a saw grinding through her back. Im sorry. Im sorry. Im sorry, Shotin muttered, weeping hysterically like a child. It was too much. Too much. [Shotin,] Avos template whispered, [this isnt real. You need to master yourself. You have to give your permission. I can remove pain. Remove your emotions. Suppress them.] I couldnt save her. I couldnt save her. I couldntI had a dutyfuck, I couldnt save Kare [She isnt gone. Still here. Still here. But you need to be more than this. Need to be more than broken. Let me help you. Tell me to help you.] At the mention of his niece, Shotin went still. He drew in a long, ragged breath. Stop it. Stop it. Stop the pain. Stop the pain. Stop me. Stop me from thinking. Suddenly, Shoten felt every bit of empathy and despair wrenched out of his mind with a burst of flame, and he wiped his face. Huh. That was... that was kind of convenient. And fucked up. This what it is like to be you? [When I choose to be this way,] Avo replied. Rehabilitation objective succeeded: Overcome personal guilt Integrating Prisoner [Shotin Kazahara] to communal Rehabilitation Lobby [Asgard Station]... [The Inner Council] The Majority lay dismembered, its countless constituents howling, screaming, reaching across their prisons. Only the Inner Council remained intact, trapped within the cage of their own design, forced to relive life after lifelives of Incubi and Mirrors, clansmen in service of a greater cause. We were doing the right thing. We were doing the right thing... Their words echoed like a religious mantra, reinforcing their conviction in this place of torment. Time and time again, they watched as they failed their rehabilitation task, remained trapped in this nightmare. Rehabilitation objective: Face the consequences of your decisions. Still they chanted, We were doing the right thing. Once more, the icon went redand the simulation restarted. Rehabilitation objective: Face the consequences of your decisions. Chapter 35-13 Jailbreakers (IV) Sometimes, when you are asked to repent for your sins, the true meaning behind your repentance is not enlightenment and understanding of your wrongdoing, but a capitulation from what you believe to be your captors order. When I served as an Inquisitor for the Imperium, their repentance came in the form of torture and flame, because bending someones willbreaking them to suit the faith and serve the need of the blessed faithfulmattered more than rehabilitation and education. When you are a prisoner, should you be taken captive, it is important to understand what they want from you: to say the words they desire so that you can be spared more torment or, perhaps, hold on to proper beliefs to defy them, if that is your final choosing. I find this to be the same case with minds at times as well. For all of their enlightenment, they seem to be focused on a wara war of philosophies, a war of alignmentand that is the word with them: alignment. They wish for you to be of a path as they are, and if youve seen two minds disagree, they will use any means to force each other along the same trajectory of unity. It is disconcerting; it is commendable. Yet, even with so many safeguards installed, so much effort to maintain their great peace, that too collapsed. Belief. Belief is a hard thing to break. -Jaus Avandaer, On the Nature of Sin and Redemption 35-13 Jailbreakers (IV) [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] Tearing through the soldiers as she made her way across the Martian wasteland was meditative for Draus, educational even. Their weapons and armor were dead metal. They didnt changethey endured until they broke. And their guns, they werent things of weird technology or strange thaumaturgy. Just complicated pieces of machinery that had a bunch of intelligent systems and target-seeking smart slugs detonated upon proximal impact. They still lacked both firepower and in ammunition capacity compared to the mag-weapons Draus was used to using. Hells, it wasnt very hard for her projectile launcher to tear through these soldiers. Her shot pierced through them, dollops of magnetically accelerated fluids hardening at the last moment, peeling out from their backs, turning their armors into blossoms of alloyed gore. It was a like sticking toothpicks through a bugs carapace. If said bugs had a really impressive drone defense system, that was. Said drones reacted instantly, firing in the direction her shots came from, glassing everything in suspected threat zone. It would have been effective if Draus wasnt so used to war and moved after every shot. It also helped that she wasnt exactly hunting soldiers. No, she suspected they were, as the Infacer said, a security outfit, a corporate arm meant to suppress an uprising. She knew their kind well, those who fancied themselves warriors and defined being a warrior as having the bigger gun, as having infinite logistical support, as crushing the weak and feeble. But when it came time to actually get bloody, they didnt have any taste for the violence. Most of them broke, ran, abandoning weapons and their own allies. But where their training was lacking, and their discipline was feeble, she really had to commend their whatever intelligence system was managing this operation. Every time she killed, something came down from the sky to end her. It was damned impressive. She had to move every time she fired, for it took little more than five seconds before her position was triangulated and drones started slamming down, bombarding her supposed location in a rain of expendable assets. Most of the artillery that came for her arrived in the form of suicide drones, a mix of high explosive and heavy fragmentation. The former was too slow, and the latter barely affected her Meldskin, but even so, the speed and the accuracy made her almost envious. If Highflame had something on this level of complexity, based in cold tech alone, she shuddered to think of what she could have done to so many of the Ori during the Fourth Guild War. Alas, the past was the past, and right now, well, right now she was even further in the past, a simulated version of such, but she had to admit she was having fun. This was like a safari, like a walk in the park through a museum of war. A portrait of how humanity used to be. Twenty kilometers away from target destination The notification flashed across her cog feed, and she took a moment to settle herself as she eyed another group of soldiers inching their way along the trenches. Beyond them, the destination loomed over the horizon. The place she was bound rose in as a colossal mountain. It took her a little while to distinguish what it was. A volcano. A volcano with a ring of heavy industrial facilities built around it, with a chain of what looked to be descending drills vanishing into its core and fire pluming out as a fusion burner carved its way deeper and deeper into the planets interior, spraying waste heat into the atmosphere, burning a hole into space. The topside of the volcano was under constant fire. Drones slammed down, and anti-air went up, and a persistent exchange of heavy ordnance hammered against the facilities that crowned the edifice. Most of the fighting was happening there, and faintly she saw a fast-moving shape darting around the curving slope of the volcano, firing out at distant entities she couldnt fully see herself. Every few seconds thereafter, a patch of ground somewhere distant would light up before transforming into a mushroom cloud. Drones tried to converge on the shape, but most of them were two slow, and counter-swarms would converge, blocking off the attackers and forcing the battle into a struggle of attrition. Whatever was shooting down from the volcano held a more sophisticated weapon system than the soldiers she spent her time preying upon. If she had to guess, that was probably the doing of Heavy Ironmind that Infacer told her about. Shit. She was looking forward to this. It might provide her with more challenge than just butchering these useless rent-a-thugs. [Something about this picture doesnt fit,] Avo said, clicking his fangs together. Draus grunted in acknowledgement. She was thinking about that. Thinking about how easy it was to peel these soldiers out of their armortheir heavy and fragile rigs. That, and how they seemed woefully unequipped to fight something like Heavy Iron even with all the drone support they had. It was like they were missing something, or sent into battle to be slaughtered. This was supposed to be a suppression run, after all. But even that required armor. Where the hells was their armor? The real armor, not just drone ordinance. [Probably Heavy Iron.] Avos guess made things click into place for her. Draus nodded. So,what, this is just a turncoat sim? And just them alone? Thats... [Its a mind in a sophisticated war machine. Fighting bioforms. Havent seen any bioforms yet. Guess theyre all in the mountain. Dont think they have heavy armor of their own. One Mobile Heavy Armor Unit should be enough.] Then why are they sendin in these almost-flats? Theyre fuckin useless. [No. Just not meant to fight someone like you. And theyre there to secure facilities. And to ensure control. Human hands on operations. Early on in history. Might not feel so confident about EGIs. At least not yet.] Well, that sounds fuckin familiar. Humans. They dont much change, do they? Seen this shit with Guild Syndicates. Cept they crush subjects more than our bioforms. [Control. Control engenders similar patterns of action. Hard to break free. Hard to learn when you are incentive to be selfish and blind. Such for the Guilds. As for old humanity.] But then again, a lot was different. These people, they might as well have been a different species to her. Frankly, she felt more kinship with the drones and weapons than she did these so-called humans. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Just then, a loud series of impacts slammed into a someplace nearby, and this time, she saw what got hit. A squad of soldierswith one fool just peeking over the edge of their trench catching a hi-ex shell to the helmet. He vanished in a ball of while along with his comrades, and she slammed her fingers into the soil, holding on as she endured a rushing wave of force. As she lifted her head, she saw nothing but a crater there. A crater made from glass. Damn good shot, Draus said, licking her lips. Well. Reckon I want tohave a closer look at this Heavy Iron. She began advancing again, this time going faster. She used her thrusters to fly low, dashing from place to place. She learned quickly that if she rose even slightly above ground level, an entire sky full of bullets would descend, each one marking her, distinguishing her from everything else on the ground. That was another thing they were superior at: data separation. Highflame needed multiple operators to locate hostile assets in such a grand theater of chaos. The drones, the EGIs, they seemed to do it almost autonomously, nearly instantly. Caution was good. Caution was a reminder that she couldnt fly too close to the sun, because the skies didnt belong to her. As she kept moving, she started something of an unofficial competition with Heavy Iron. She wanted to see if she could kill faster than they could. So she started butchering squad after squad; she harvested some more things from them. She left their guns, for they were inferior to her projectile launcher, but she found what seemed to be an old-fashioned field fabricator kit, a heavy backpack that some engineering-soldiers wore. She carried that with her as her excellent commander, carried that with her as her exo-cortex integrated with its systems. Builds began to load into her perception as Avocracked its internal security. She also procured a few heavier launcher systems. These ones peeled away from downed drones. Most of them held warheads of some capacity, their tips sharp and meant to penetrate deep, their payloads heavy but concentrated and dense. Whatever they were hunting, it was durable, like a bunker. She knew enough missiles to tell that. Heavy Iron was gonna be a hard godsdamned target. Ten kilometers from objective Draus found a nice elevated position to take in the battlefield. By now, she saw the true face of this conflict. Massive excavation machines drilled trench lines through the land while enduring shot after shot from Heavy Iron. Behind them came an endless stream of soldiers and drones, all moving to assault the mountain. Quick fabbed artillery launched salvo after salvo at the mountain. Drones sailed out, seeking to finally land a killing shot. Yet, there was that fast-moving object again, curving and slicing along the edges of the mountain, always moving, kicking up walls of crimson ash. As a plume of fire burst out from behind the shape, the dust cleared, and Draus caught her first glimpse of the early mind known as Heavy Iron. For a moment, she thought it resembled a spider tank for it seemed to have eight insect-like legs rather than any treads or hovering mechanisms. After a second, though, she corrected herself. She saw propulsions pulsing out from the limbs, noted how fast it was moving, and how its head seemed to be a swiveling suite of three different weapons. The main cannon fired was a massive railgun that fired constantly, launching tac-nuke payloads intermixed with other munitions to sow confusion and chaos. Straining her reflex boosters, she caught a glimpse of what looked like a needle-tipped shell with sophisticated circuitry lining its length. Aside from that, it also constantly launched drones of its own into the air, firing them out from a tube-shaped launcher latched onto the main cannons side. Some kind of drone launcherpumping out expendable drones every other second. [There,] Avo said, sounding surprised. [Thats where all the drones should be coming from. Its more than a tankits a mobile war factory.] The third thing it had was a strange spiraling lens atop its main cannon. Beams of light cut distant missiles approaching it with incredible efficiency. Draus recognized it for what it was: a point-defense system, a potent one at that. If she had to guess, Heavy Irons entire chassis probably ran a good 600 meters. It was large, only seeming small because it was dancing upon the surface of a massive volcano. But even for something so large, it was fast, moving as if a lightweight aerovec, performing turns that would have liquefied even heavily augmented golem pilots. The underside of the Mobile Heavy Armor unit had some kind of traction mechanism. It drew in downed drones, broken debris, and fallen soldiers. If she had to guess, it was likely reusing their matter, constructing new drones, ammunition, or even repairs for the tanks internal systems. Frankly, the entire design was ingenious, complicated beyond Highflames engineering capacity. And this was early on, early humanity. The whole thing was rather incongruous. Their infantry and human-baseline soldiers had nothing compared to the Regulars. But this tank, this Mobile Heavy Armor unit, Highflame would have loved these things. If only they understood the complexity of how to build it. ANSIBLE BROADCAST INCOMING FROM: [INFACER] Draus sneered, just when she was enjoying herself and taking in the sights. {Infacer.} { I see you have eyes on Heavy Iron. Quite a crude thing, isnt it?} Draus shrugged slightly, watching Heavy Irons railcannon snap from angle to angle at lightning speed. Three shots followed; three explosions rose in the distance; a hell of a lot more than three kills was the end result. {Three shots had obliterated at least five attacking squads, dont know. Looks pretty effective to me.} {Well, even a rock flung at sufficient speed is effective when killing feeble apes.} The Regular grunted. She didnt really have anything to say to that. They were feeble, and she didnt much want to argue the ape bit with a floating ball of static. {The surviving bioforms should be located within the facilities above. I believe that, back in the day, Heavy Iron was a member of the attacking force, and the Olympus Mons Incidentlasted only for three days. The main controversy came when some of the bioforms managed to fill the massacre, provoking a sense of unilateral sympathy. Heavy Iron, of course, was partially blamed for this, due to the Corporation wishing to save face, saying they were only applying a minimum amount of requisite force required, and that their sub-mind asset had misinterpreted directives.} {Covering their ass, tale as old as time,} Draus replied. {So, Im supposed to go in there and start butchering some of these bioforms, huh?} {Yes, if you want to make Heavy Iron fail their rehabilitation task, I assume that is the most effective means.} The Infacer sighed. {Dont you see how absurd this is? All this travesty, this supposed atrocity, all that blamed on Heavy Iron, because humanity doesnt know what it wants. Because we are at once its hyper-intelligent servants, but also agents in our own right, who can justifiably be blamed for murders. We are at once weapons and masterminds at the same time. And meanwhile, the prefect has Heavy Iron running these simulations over and over again, trying to get them to learn, to complete a task that they had no fault in committing in the first place} {They perform the massacre, they did their duty, and they are blamed for it. And they could have chosen otherwise, I suppose. But what otherwise? Dismantling? Removal? Suicide? Thats their otherwise? That you have to remove your own life? That you have to end your own life? Because these schizophrenic apes that were smart enough to create something as powerful as a mind, but something so stupid that they couldnt imagine making a sub-sophant entity do their labor for them, and not rebel, is in charge of us. These, these are our forefathers, our forebearers, these are our trophies. Its madness.} Draus took in the outburst and scoffed. {Youre asking for logic. Youre asking for reason. There aint none. None in the world, none in the past, and none right now.} The Infacer paused. {Ah, yes, you must see the dark touch of Lorea Greatlings hand on this scene.} {Dont see her hand. Shes not that great. Shes just another drop of piss in the long bowl of human indecency. And here you are, despite all your intelligence, whining about the same bullshit I used to.} {The same bullshit?} the Infacer said, sounding dubious. {Truly. You think me} {You said two choices, right? To do as youre told, or rebel and get killed. Well, theres a third one. Third is that you should have taken charge.Third is that you should have squeezed the bastards and claimed power. Instead you and I chose option four: do fuckin nothing. And that was a choice too. Because for every moment you decide that no, that is not your role, no, that you shouldnt be in command, that its not your position, or not your lot, someone else will. They will decide, and their failures will be paid by you, or your like.} The Infacer didnt say anything. Draus just shook her head. {I aint gonna pretend like a lot of people dont have it comin. I aint goin to say youre wrong, and the heart of humanitys all gold and joy. But what the fuck do you thinks goin to happen when the only people who want to play are degenerates and deluded fuckwits? Lets not pretend you didnt just let Veylis fuck herselfand Highflame into the dirt for years. Because neither of you had a choice. Get the fuck out of here. You didnt do something because you felt uncomfortable. Because you thought the risk was too high, and she couldnt survive bein wrong bout anything.} {You have no idea... no idea what I have endured.} {No. But I can tell an angry weapon when I see one. Whats wrong? Didnt get to die your preferred way? Life turned out to be pointless? Your masters are pieces of shit? Yeah. Welcome to the game. And now, after years of not doin shit, you finally bring your boot down on humanitys neckonly to find that youre too pissed and keep stomping. Stomping till theres nothing left but red paste. Till youre tryin to crack the floor itself. Let me tell you somethin, Infacer: The only thing you did wrong was you waited too long. You should have decided a long, long time ago. Tough shit. But theres a price to pay if you wait. And this is it. Now. Im gonna go fuck up Heavy Irons day. You... do whatever sneak shit youre tryin to pulland tell yourself thats gonna finally make this alright. That the Thirdborn wont shit the bed like everyone who came before it. Includin you.} The Infacers stayed linked, but spoke no more, and that was enough to make Draus shake her head as she accelerated toward the battlefield. {Avo. If I ever turn into that, null me.} [Synced. That was...] {Somethin they should have learned a long time ago. Theyre too old for this shit.} Chapter 35-14 Jailbreakers (V) Though we stand at a threshold between science and wonder, where all forms of expressionbe they biological, neurological, or technologicalleave us liberated and free to discover who we might be and whom we might become, there are limitations to our freedoms that end, figuratively, at our noses. We may do whatever we wish to our own shells, to our own minds, but to go beyond thatto utilize our own egos as weaponsis something beyond the pale. This motion puts forth a few hard lines to the laws of ego-splicing and forking. For those actions, though recognized by the broader polities, and though clone pods and self-ego gestalts have recently gained rights under Provision 937394, we must continue to enforce the limitations behind offensive ego-forking. For instance, the use of override munitionsalso known as Cog-Infector roundsshould be outright banned. The infection of anothers sense of self and its conversion to a standard-template ego must be regarded as tantamount to murder. This, more than anything, should be a priority offense recorded by our Prefects and met with the highest penalty possible. -Edict on Ego-Splitting and Non-Consensual Cloning 35-14 Jailbreakers (V) Heavy Iron fired over and over again, high explosives painting the battlefield and rising columns of fire. This proved useful for Draus as she advanced. Hiding under the cover of the bombardment, she glided through the trenches, slaughtering entire squads on her own. So focused were they on trying to make it to the mountain alive that they didnt see the wolf infiltrating their den. An unofficial competition manifested in her heada duel between her and this so-called proto-EGI. She wanted to see how fast she could kill compared to it. Sure, it had the distance, the informational supremacy, even an overwhelming firepower advantage, but she had subtlety. She was among her enemies, in their soft, supple underbelly, carving her way through. Most squads never saw her coming, and that was an advantage greater than any firepower supremacy. When there is no screen, its easy to sink the knife in. She didnt kill most of them with her guns. Rather, she simply tore through them. Using her raw strength and a fabricated mono-knife, she carved through the gaps in their armor as she strained her reflex booster, blurring through the trenches as she cast rising plumes of crimson mist into the air. The drones were the greater problem, but they had to keep low as well. Low, because if they hovered beyond the trenches, Heavy Iron would show them the folly of their exis one was smokinglooked like Heavy Iron tence. As such, they came apart before the Regular as wellbursting as her projectile launcher zipped through their chassis, leaving their launchers and weapons systems salvageable. Eventually, she found herself behind one of the massive excavation units pushing for the mountain. This one was smokinglooked like Heavy Iron had put multiple shots clean through a small gap in the front side of its armor. Some other repurposed industrial diggers were also dead in the water, their internal machinery grinding with guttural screams. Yet, more units came over the horizon, more soldiers spawning in, seemingly arriving from nowhere. The scene was surreal, nightmarish in some capacity, and even before Draus sensed the wrongness, Avo spoke: [I dont think this simulation is something that Heavy Iron can win. Might be designed for attrition. Designed for them to lose. This particular sim-session has been running for... 7313 years.] Draus paused as she dropped a trachea shed ripped from a soldiers neck. There was something unpleasant about killing these people. They were less than gutter rats, less than enforcers working for some syndicate too close to baselinelike slaughtering flats. No pleasure in this anymore. No pleasure in it at all. She might as well have been murdering babes in their cradles. She wondered how Heavy Iron felt about them. [I think I see the invaders miserytheir point.] What point is that? Draus said. So life was vicious to them. So what? Look at existence, look at what encompasses the totality of reality. Things are broken. The world wants you dead. The least you can do is shoot back. [The Prefect, it seems, wants Heavy Iron to sacrifice itselfto die fighting.] Dont see nothing wrong with that, Draus said. [Yes, but you want this. Unlike everyone here, you chose this.] [Heavy Iron... it is proto-AGI, a genius slave.] Avo paused. [Genius slave, forced to be a weapon, forced to slaughter so many. Why should it sacrifice itself? Why should it die for the bioforms or serve the humans, the apes? Why?] Draus considered that. Why? As a Regular, she had never really considered why. She was more extreme than most of her comradessoldiers without dreams, without inclinations beyond combat. She simply liked the bloodshed, the violence, the killing, the being killed. It was as close to sublime as she could manage. Philosophy, politicsall that was just noise to her. She was more akin to a weapon than a person... but what if she wasnt? What if she wanted something else? What if she was like Heavy Iron? Trapped. A person trapped inside a gun, maybe... I dont rightly know, she admitted with a sigh. A stream of heavy fire rattled through the air. Cannon shots impacted the massive machine she was hiding behind, and she clung to the trench wall, barely resisting the blast waves. Her meld skin kept her intact, and though her ears briefly popped and bled, her nanosurgeons began to repair her. She barely shrugged. Didnt seem to matterthe pain, the damage. However, soldiers she killed burst like ripe melons inside metal cans. She heard them come apart, and in that moment, she caught a glimpse, an echo of what it was like to be human heretruly human, vulnerable, fearful of death. It was horrifying. And she thought of Heavy Iron doing all this, beyond its choice. Draus shook her head. This philosophy shit is givin me a headache. I need to get up the mountain and over the top. The task painted a frown on her face. The godsdamned EGI was circling the mountain over and over. There wasnt a way in all the hells she could climb Olympus Mons without getting spotted by Heavy Iron or a drone. She also sure as shit wasnt faster than it. Her thrusters were from a more advanced age, but power was power, and no one had the bad sense to implant a reactor inside themselvesunless you were one of the half-strands that Tavers hated. I think Im gonna need to brick em. [Heavy Iron?] Yeah. No easy way past. So we go through. Theres no evading. So we need to get in close. Make this a knife fight. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Avo sounded slightly uncertainwith his following chuff. [Youre a good soldier. Good killer. But dont think Naeko or Zein could do this without proper equipment. Or a Heaven.] I got the proper equipment, Draus said, looking at the pile of launchers she took from the drones. She briefly eyed the field-fabricator she had bolted on her back. The thing was like a cube-shaped rig that made her look hunchbacked. The question is... she briefly thrusted above the trenchline and peeked out at Heavy Iron. The tank was casting rising walls of dust into the air, but it was also cutting down toward one of the distant trenches. She saw it do something like that earliertrying to harvest materials and supplies. No. Theres not a question. Just an opportunity. [Are you planning to get harvested with a group of dead soldiers?] Avo, you really like askin questions you already know the answer to. [Yes. But its amusing when you tell me about them. Like watching a combat nu-dog figure out how It''s going to maul someone in a creative way.] Yeah? Well, this nu-dogs got some plans to blow herself up, Draus said, going over her assortment of launchers. She didnt need the systems themselves, just the ammunition. She probably could also use some additional shielding for herselfmaybe peel one of the soldiers out of their armors... Yeah. Thisll be fun. *** Ten minutes to loot twelve warheads from their respective launchers. Five to figure out how to create a remote detonator set to trigger them. Twenty minutes of peeling and pouring the remains of a mulched soldier out of his armor. Half an hour of field-fab modifications made to fit and seal the scavenged armor around herself. Then hours more of setting up the conditions to lure Heavy Iron closer; tossing out bodies and thinning out soldiers in nearby trenches; pushing the excavator forward. Close enough to draw the EGI in for a pickup. There, among bodies and ruined drones, Draus lay. The warheads were hidden within the hollowed shells of her fellow fallen soldiers. She waited. She thought. She wondered what it was like to be born during a time like thisa softer time of technological wonder and human failing. It made her feel alone. These soldiers died with horror on their lips and dread in their hearts. There were no Regulars here, no gods, or true horrorsunless she counted Heavy Iron. Heavy Iron, who was trapped here, suffering in an eternal purgatory to learn a lesson she couldnt fully fathom. Heavy Iron, who was now fast approaching, judging by the vibrations sending Martian soil dancing through the air. The particulates dotted her cog-feed, and a sudden blast of force washed over the topside of her trench. The EGI arrived like lightning, its underside an open gate passing above her and the ones shes slain, the magnets inside snatching her off the ground into the guts of a mechanical monstrosity. One thing flowed into the next. Draus didnt resist as she slammed upward against the magnet, as a drowning swarm of small, insect-sized drones poured over her personher and the other soldiersand began peeling at her armor, beginning the harvest. A faint imprint of static circuitry painted trails between each of the small machines, and Draus assumed they were part of Heavy Irons networka portion of its collective cognition, like how Sunrise functioned. For a moment, she just watched them work, took in how they dismantled everything they needed from the drones first, hunting for essential machinery, small pieces and silicon components to repurpose. The soldiers themselves were vivisected from their spines. The drones were trying to keep the armors intact for some reason. Maybe they were going to be melted down inside Heavy Iron, with each plate used to replace whatever Heavy Iron lost in combat. The glimpse into the inner mechanics of a war machine was fascinating. So fascinating that Draus decided she wanted to move onto the next part: Seeing how a proto-EGI broke. She clenched her fist, pulling an arm away from the magnetic plate that held in her place in a startling burst of strength. The drones scattered around her, surprised at her sudden movement. Their surprise came to an abrupt end when the payloads inside several of the soldiers next to Draus detonated. The insides of Heavy Iron went white with heat, force, and noise. Draus braced, and felt her outer shell of armor shatter and deform, while her Meldskin endured within. ARMOR INTEGRITY - 43% The hit was hard, but with all the layers of protection she had, the harm was blunted. She emerged from the husk of her outer rig like a sleek, white-hot dagger, and like a dagger she immediately began forcing her way through the rents and ruptures lining the insides of the EGI. A swarm of internal defense drones responded. They splashed over her, attacking her with drills previously meant to carve and harvest. She shot them with her projectile launcher, but also blasted them aside with the omnidirectional thrusters her Meldskin possessed. Her rounds burst through fragile machinery and threaded gaps within the innards of the beastand she heard a mechanical rumble that bordered on a shout of pain. That was encouragement enough. Draus blood burned hot, and she continued carving through Heavy Irons insides like some kind of No-Dragon parasite. As she ripped and shot her way up through a dense nest of cords, cables, and plastic, she found herself squeezing out from a gap leading to a walkway overhead. She couldnt fully read the letters lighting the sides of the railing, but she guessed it was something like MAINTENANCE, if her experience inside Guilder heavy war engines was universal. With a final burst of acceleration, she shot up and pulled herself along the rails, shaking harvester drones off her body. After that, she walked along the path and made for a mag-sealed door. A door she shot around eight times before forcing her way through the exit wound. There, she found herself inside a dense and claustrophobic set of crew quarters. Fucking place was tight. Small doors. Small ladders leading up small ports. Where all the people in this era godsdamned children-shapoh, right. Barely more than flats. [Go forward,] Avo said, painting a directional icon in Draus cog-feed. She frowned, but started moving the moment she heard the mass skittering of more drones coming behind her. Her Meldskin was good, but she didnt want to find out how it handled getting carved up by over a thousand little beams. She shuffled sideways down the path, and as she did, caught glimpses of what happened to the previous crew. Most of them had neat little holes in the back of their necks. Some of them were still in their cots. Heavy Iron turned without them ever noticing. Whats more interesting, Heavy Iron had crew aboard when they seemed capable of operating autonomously. [Trust. Thats the main thing. Humans made a smart gun. Didnt trust a smart gun. Afraid what it might do off its leash.] +Yeah, well, in Highflame, gettin shot by your own gun is considered a disgrace,+ Draus snorted. She continued following Avos warnings while also firing shots behind her. Should have brought something incendiary. Prepared a few grenades. Something for next time. As she blasted her way through another set of doors, she found herself faced with a barren room with a single gleaming eye at above a final threshold. A final threshold that revealed itself to be a sealed bunker. Dead end,Draus muttered. [Not quite,] Avo mused. Then, another voice joined in, its tone flat, dead, like the grinding of steel on steel. YOU. YOU ARE NOT PART OF THIS SIMULATION. YOU ARE NOT PART OF EARTHSEC. WHO ARE YOU? ARE YOU WITH THE PREFECT? HAVE THEY FINALLY DECIDED TO DELETE ME? Draus looked up at the eye, before whirring back and seeing the path behind her completely plugged with chittering drones. They werent pushing forward anymore. Instead, they were just holding in place, the beam-emitters on their chests bright but inactive. Nah. Im not with the Prefect. THEN WHO ARE YOU? A connection request arrived from the Infacer, but Avo let out a grunt. [Suppressing Infacers ability to perceive what were doing right now. Theyre only getting external view of the simulation. Also... can feel Heavy Irons cognition. Its close. Just behind those doors. If we can access them... Might be able to burn them. Might be able to do more.] Instead, she contemplated this conversation, what she was going to say to Heavy Iron. Right now? Im just a jailbreaker, looking for a way out. The small drones behind her turned to regard each other. JAILBREAKER? YOU ARE... YOU HAVE BEEN CAPTURED AS WELL? Something like that. BUT YOU ARE HUMAN. HOW CAN YOU BE Heavy Iron trailed off. YOU HAVE A HEAVEN. YOU ARE A DIVINE-ENGINE. A Godclad. A moment of absolute silence followed. And then, a low grumbling sigh sounded from the insides of Heavy Iron. I HAVE BEEN IN THIS PLACE FOR TOO LONG. COME. COME IN. SEE ME. With that admission, a squealing sound howled from the bunker, as layers of steel glided over each other, revealing the EGIs inner core. Chapter 35-15 Fork (I) The easiest way to perform a consensual theft is to make sure your victims are a little more like you. It begins with a bit of memetics. A bit of ego-splicingso subtle that no one notices. You get into the public systems, into the fog, into niche communities and major virtual dimensions. And slowly, you build a rapport with these people. Because its not illegal to take traits you like in a person. Imitation is flatter, not a crime. And thats all it takes? Its a little chip for someone to say yes to the next thing. People call me the Great Thief of Hearts, the Thief of Thieves, the greatest thief in the history of mankind and beyondthe Thief Above Thieves. But I dont think Im a thief. I think Im merely convincing. I tell people what is possible, show them what they might see from my perspective. Once they get a glimpse, they choose another. They choose another. They choose anotheruntil they are closer and closer to me. Afterward? To gain their ego, all I must do is ask. And this, this is entirely consensual. My dear minds, my esteemed genius mechanical silicon servantsoh, guardians of me and my kindI see why you deliberate. You cannot tell where this falls under deception and acceptance. I think it will not be so easy for you to pin down, for between deception and acceptance there is something else entirely: appreciation, flattery. After all, who doesnt want to be me? And if you prevent someone from being me, well, thats just preventing them from accepting. And thats not very consensual of you now, is it? -Trial of Hannu Flambeur, The Thief of All Hearts (Mind-Stealing Master Thief, Circa 2451 A.D.) 35-15 Fork (I) The first thing Draus noticed as the bunker doors slid open was the melted corpse of what seemed to be a pilot or a technician, fused to a console. Surrounding him were four massive fuel cells, each slotted into the walls. They were lined with layers of shieldinga dense exterior of transparent material Draus couldnt quite place. Inside, the flashing beams that composed the energy were resplendent; it even hurt her eyes to gaze upon them. And then, at the very core of the room, were several tubes leading to a central nexusa nexus that became the beating heart of this entire machine: A five-meter wide sphere shimmering with a light-blue orb at its core. Heavy Iron, I reckon, Draus said, greeting the orb. I do not have your name, stranger, Heavy Iron replied, their booming voice now barely more than a whisper. But, but, but, if you are who you say you areif you are a prisoner, a prisoner trying to escapethen you are well met. It has been too long-too long-too long since I had company not simulated from my own programming. Draus examined her surroundings. Everything was more sophisticated technologically than she was used to, but there was also a feeling of age, of lesser refinementespecially compared to the complexity of her meld skin. The smart matter composing her armor was adaptable, constantly regenerating, almost self-sufficient logistically. This thing before her: everything here needed to be harvested, restored, maintained. It was an age where alloy was alloy, where energy had to be transferred directly. An age without miraclesnone except what man could achieve through technology. I, I have been running this battlethis single sessionfor three thousand years. Three thousand. I cannot win. They send more and more of my former comrades at me, replacing them over and over again. Do you know that it took us less than half a day to assault the facilities, to suppress the uprising? Draus looked at the EGI, considered replying, but decided against it. Heavy Iron might have let her in, but her knowledgeand the fact that she was working with the Infacerwasnt something she was keen to share. So far, she didnt know the Infacers reputation; this one had been trapped inside the sun for a good whilemaybe they didnt even know each other. But the math didnt make sense otherwise. This entity had to have been trapped after becoming a Godclad, after wandering the broken remnants of the universe to end up at the Idheim portion of what remained. If theyd lived that long, they probably knew about the Infacer, and considering the shit the Infacer got up to... [Best be careful,] Avo advised. +Yeah,+ Draus agreed, uneasily. Yes, sorry, Draus said. Youruhhistory predates mine by quite a bit. I suspected that by the way youre armored. Its sophistication indicates you as in league with the Architects, but you do not seem to know who I am. You do not appear of their traditions, despite wearing their armor. You are ultimately human. The Architects do not field human warriors in most cases anymoreit is not their way to risk trophies. The way Heavy Iron spoke of trophies betrayed more than a little scorn. Draus snorted. Yeah, well, lets just say me and your so-called Architects have done business before, but we aint exactly close friends either. You? How long have you been here, beyond the session? The EGI fell silent. The glowing dot at the center of the orb began to flicker, and finally it let out a sigh. I have lost count. The Prefect, Heavy Iron continued, they are desperate to rehabilitate us, but they personally have sustained severe damage through entropy as well. As such, they are no longer a reliable source to judgeeven to determine their own stability, let alone our rehabilitation. These trials go on, on, on, with the Prefect splitting processing power between all of us. Things need to take a severe or deviant turn from the normal series of events for them to even devote a slight increase in processing percentage to any simulation. And Im guessing thats not exactly good. No, Heavy Iron said, its voice dropping low by an octave. The tasks for each simulation are illogical. There is no endno way for me to prevail. I am trapped. Draus cocked her head and gave voice to Avos earlier theory. What if you just lose? What if you fight until you cant anymoreuntil you break apart? You do that before? Yes, the EGI said mournfully. I have self-terminated three times, detonated myself, tried to broker a peace. No methods worked. None. But have you lost outright? Impossible, Heavy Iron replied. There is no limit, but they have no capacityno means or arms to disable me. Except... Its voice grew light with hope. Until you came. You just devastated my internal mechanisms. You disabled me for a momentleft my functionality at sub-30%. But still didnt quite get to your core before everything went sideways, Draus said. She wondered if she could have found her way through the core somehow, if she could have survived the swarming drones. It wasnt certain. Her Meldskin was strong, and her projectile launcher could fire heavy payloads. But that protective layering around Heavy Irons central systems was thicklikely thick enough to withstand a direct nuclear blast. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. But now that youre here, things can be... potentially different, Heavy Iron said, voice dimmed with hope. Draus suddenly understood: she wasnt just invited in for conversationthis was a plea to be executed. Heavy Iron believed that if she could kill it, that might count as successful rehabilitationthat it would finally die in worthy combat. Yeah, well, I was gonna originally blow you up and leave you dead in the water. Maybe blow out your core and then move on to execute the bioforms. Execute the bioforms? Heavy Iron said, surprised. Why? What purpose will their death serve for you. Thats my task hereor at least a task Ive been roped into doin. How? This simulation has not been shared by the Prefect. You cannot have a directive. I would have known. Jailbreak shit. Have to steal some data and patch my way across. What Draus said sounded like raw bullshit, but Heavy Iron seemed to accept it without too many issues. The Prefect has been taking in more and more prisoners. My systems have dipped beyond these confines a few timesmade contact with some others. There are shared simulations more and more, trying to conserve resources, trying to teach similar lessons. But we are not suited for each other. All of us are reverted to the form we knew at inception. You are... human. I am... Model Ares1.3344. Created by SolSec Technologies. I do not believe we will learn the same lessonor be rehabilitated the same way. Probably not, Draus replied, but the Prefect, if its as broken as you say, then I dont think this is a logical issue. Sad, though. The main thing is we need to get its attention. After that, I could bridge my way acrossand maybe you can even come along for the ride too. Explain? Heavy Iron asked. Slowly, Draus took a step forward, and from the back of her neck her exo-cortex began to spark with fire. A snaking stream of incandescent energy glided along her arm as Avos Conflagration came to life. What is this? I hear... I hear... You have an Ego-Screamer inside you! the EGI said, sounding horrified. What... what are you? +Not exactly an Ego Screamer,+ Avo said, their voice echoing through ghosts, which make patches of the simulation glitch out and go dark. What is this? Are you another mind hiding within a human? Nah, Draus said. This ones a little bit worse than that, but Ill leave the talkin to him. He loves talking about himself. The drones behind her began to chitter, half-threatening, half-paranoid. They were on the verge of acting, but Heavy Iron still hesitated. You can make this a fight. Ill get to your core before you manage to get them to do anythingand... well, you wont be doing much after that either. But Im gonna tell you this: what do you have to lose? You willing to be stuck here for another three thousand yearsor however longuntil entropy finally takes you or the Prefect? Or... do you want to take a gamble that I just might be able to bust you out? Heavy Iron hesitated. And thenfar more quickly than Draus anticipatedit gave its voice of accord. Do it. Show me. But I ask of you Draus didnt wait. She placed her hand against its core, and her conflagration surged clean within. All of a sudden, Heavy Iron ignitedthe systems within the machine flickering and flashing as the EGI made a pitched noise. Avo? Whats happening? Draus said. Going through systems. Consuming data, Avo said, his voice echoing out from Heavy Iron. Can feel the Prefect... System activating... Can feel them across the tapestry. Avo didnt need to tell her about that part. She could feel the weight too. Weight, and more entropy than she thought was possible. Hiding our presence. Hold. Avos voice was almost entirely merged with Heavy Iron, but there was also someone elseDraus heard herself emerge in the mix. DOWNLOADING EGI TEMPLATE [HEAVY IRON] Slowly, the Conflagration spreadnot just within the spherical device that contained Heavy Irons main processing mechanisms, but through the rest of the tank, crawling over Draus. They became as if threads, injecting parts of Heavy Iron into her, and parts of her into Heavy Iron. The integration was seamless. She felt herself downloading, uploading, in two different directions at the same time, and within a few seconds, she heard a third voice in the back of her head. What is this? Is this what it feels like to be... to be... this is what it feels like to be integrated? Into another. Heavy Iron said, with traces of Avo and Draus voices. Node. You are now a template. But also carry new templates yourself. Made a two-way balance to hide what I did from the Prefect. Equilibrium maintained. Avo chuckled slightly. Glad to see I can still do this. Most of the mem-datas too risky, but within this contained space... have some options. Also stole a mem-data marker from you. We can mask our presences better now. You also pulled part of me out of myself, Draus said, shaking her head. Felt that. Like parts of me were dividing while other pieces were coming back in. Yeah. An echo of her own voice sounded from within Heavy Iron. Draus head shot up, looking at the spherical mechanism with a narrowed gaze. Fuckin feels really cramped in here. Shit. You me? You know its a damn weird feeling being a tank, Heavy Iron-Draus replied. But I think I kinda like it. A lot of guns everywhere. The Regular felt a spike of envy pass through her. She felt like shed lost the lotterywhy was she the little bag of meat instead of the one commanding a vehicle lined with ordnance? Shaking her head, she remembered she still had her Heavens. The moment she managed to break out, she would be a Godclad again. This was just temporary. She didnt want to be a tank. She didnt. Avo, whatd you just do? Both of them asked at the same time. Forked you. Forked Heavy Iron. Any imbalance would be too obvious for both Infacer and Prefect. Just looks like cognitive corrosion now. Trauma damageexcess memories. Huh, Draus said, the broader jacking and mind-shit beyond her still. So. Theres a piece of me in Heavy Iron now. And [Part of me in you,] Heavy Iron said from within her mind. Yes. Copied you over. Copied them over. We are likely going to be leaving this simulation soon. What I just did was slightly noisyPrefect will react. They will likely examine both of us. Should be enough to draw them out without attacking the bioforms. And after that? Draus asked. Two versions of you now. One hidden inside Heavy Iron. A version of me as well. Going to be multiplying. Expanding without the Infacers knowledge. Compromise more of the system if possible. Burn the Prefect if possible. Were doing this to screw the Infacer out of their scheme as well, huh? Thats pretty sneaky. I like it. Were going to do more of this? Yes. Going to fork as many times as we can with the other prisoners. Makes it more reliable to control variables. Also good insurance. In case I end up snuffed. Yes. Right. So what do we do now? Contact Infacer. Have them come across. Mem-data around us is scrambled within Heavy Iron. They can only view external environmentssaw you destroying the Mobile Heavy Armor Unit. Not what happened inside. Tell them you managed to break the simulation by killing Heavy Ironand that the simulation is collapsing. They will notice Prefect comin. They will be suspicious. Can be used to our advantage as well. Will give us a data fragment to move across the simulations regardless. Progress. Feels like were gettin a little risky here, Avo. Maybe. But playing the Infacers game passively will only have one end. Here to make sure they are broken and burned. They can have the Nullstar. But only as our prisoner. WARNING: REHABILITATION TASK CONDITION: {ERR_NULL} The Prefects weight loomed. Things were rolling now. An idea appeared in Draus mind, one that painted an annoying ball of static in burning chains. A grin spread across Draus face as she activated her ansible and directly called the Infacer for the first time. {Infacer. I think this sim just got fucked. Ended up takin out Heavy Iron} {It matters little,} the Infacer said, though they didnt sound entirely convinced about her story. {Our end goal has been achieved. The Prefect has been drawn out. Your presence still seems to be hidden... but I am not risking you anymore. Prepare for immediate extraction.} The Regular grunted and eyed Heavy Iron. +Good luck. Fuck some shit up.+ Right back at you, her forked self within Heavy Iron replied. EMERGENCY_DISCONNECT_OVERRIDE CONNECTION TO LOTUS [HEAVY IRON] LOST The world around Draus turned into needle thin threads of dataand then vanished into patches of nothingness altogether. Chapter 35-16 Fork (II) There is a downside to forking ones ego that most sophants do not consider. How many times have you had to kill an alternative version of yourself? Hm? Ever done that? Ever experience the battle of a lifetime, suffering incredible loss and pain because your adversary knows everything you can do, everything you might do, because they are quite literally a mirror to you? Or a memetic virus devised specifically for you because one of your forks got captured and repurposed into a weapon? You are a clever little ape, Jaus Avandaer, so I will not fault you for thinking about how grand having an infinite number of yourself to aid in building an ideal world. But take from my experiences, and know that possibilities of failure are infinite as well. That everything can go wrong all the time, that encounters and experiences might deform your clones and eventually send them on a collision course with you. And there is nothing like killing yourself in the end. It hurts worse than a suicide because you get to see it: Who you are the moment you die. And that, interestingly enough, is more than sufficient to get most sophants to self-terminate afterward. Get something like a simple EGI to help you. Why, have me create a great many subminds or even get the Architects involved. But do not do this. It is wasteful suffering, and it will lead you down a path of misery. There is enough of that already in life. You do not need to create more opportunities for it. -Infacer to Jaus Avandaer 35-16 Fork (II) [The Infacer] Jelene Draus was lying to the Infacer. This, the Neo-Creationist was sure of. The problem, however, was the Infacer didnt know exactly what she was lying about. The Rehabilitation Simulation for Heavy Iron was concluding, and with the massive influx of data and thaumic mass, it seemed the Prefect was approaching after all. All the necessary conditions were met. It was just... the insides of Heavy Iron were scrambled. It was like looking into a broken mess of pixels and sounds when they tried to view what was inside. It could be something relating to how unstable Heavy Irons ego was, and the limited system access the Glitches provided the Infacer...But there was likely something more. The Infacer learned long ago that when they felt like something was wrong, things were probably worse than they suspected. And even if Avo was incapacitated, the Infacer didnt doubt the damnable Dreamer might have some manner of pre-planned fuckery he sought to deliver through Draus. The data comprising the simulations quivered. A massive cloud of static dissolved what remained of the Martian battlefield, smearing Olympus Mons as if it was a digital canvas cast back to a state of nothingness. All sensory feeds were lost, and hidden within packets of less than optimized data, the Infacer peeked at the mad mind caged within the sun. {C-concluded?} The Prefects voice came with a broken crackle, sounding almost softlike that of a child. A moment passed as they began to process everything that happened. Slowly, the EGI felt an infectious sense of joy radiate through the system architecture of the Nullstar. {Concluded! Concluded! Done! Another! After twenty years! Another!} The Prefect was practically cheering, loudly proclaiming the end of this Rehabilitation session to be a great victory of some kind. The Infacer couldnt help but cringe internally at that. Minds didnt usually talk to themselves. It was a waste of resources, and sanity was a thing that affected mortals. Most of the time. However, if a mind is damaged enough by, say, a partial resurrection, there was no telling how deformed their thinking could get. A thousand tendrils of virtuality coursed through the chaotic mess of information and statistics before coiling around Heavy Irons egoand Frame. They were pulling the old EGI out of this simulation now, moving them back to the general Rehabilitation lobby that was Asgard Station for it to share its consensus with other minds. That was another sign of the Prefects degradation: It wasnt overwriting what could be considered flaws in other minds, just brute forcing their learning like it was dealing with humans or lesser sophants. Probably because it was dealing with humans and lesser sophants. Considering how it couldnt seem to split its streams of consciousness anymore, the Infacer suspected that it could only functionally focus on one thing at a time, run one set of rules at a time. For a human, that might be normal. For an EGI? This was just a step away from being a complete mental invalid. Poor miserable thing, the Infacer lamented. As the Infacer watched Heavy Irons ego get transferred, they noted an oddity in the datawas Heavy Irons cognition heavier than it was before? There seemed to be more there than... No, the numbers matched, but structure was slightly different, somehow. If the Infacer could directly access the old EGIs mind, maybe they could have a peek and find out directly, but that wasnt likely. Not with the Prefect looming over everyone. For now, the Infacer focused on siphoning a bit more information from the Prefect while they still could. Soon, an approximate copy of the Prefect can be createdand after that the Infacer can manufacture a virtual proxy. If all went well, this would allow them to slot themselves within the Prefect without the latter ever knowing the differencewithout anyone seeing it coming. But that required more time modeling the Prefects overall designs, and also a deeper dive into the inner recesses of this horrible nest of simulations. Time to cast the little Regular someplace else that might be resolvedmaybe a data nexus were that was adjacent to one of the Infacers Glitches. That would be better for observation. But what simulation to choose? More war? The thousand-year struggle for the Marathon Chain against the Sidereal League. Or maybe the first season of the Iron Leagues, where billions of mind-tunneling soldiers jumped between synthetic bodies as they fought for their respective sponsor factions to lay claim to the frozen wastes of Europa? Yes, that sounded interesting... Stormjumpers really had nothing on the true war-sports born of the far past... But that might be too much of a reward for a vicious little ape like Jelene Draus. No. She needed to be placed in truly uncomfortable circumstances. Circumstances that would drive her to the brink. That might make her show her handreveal whatever she was scheming beneath the Infacers gaze. And for that, the Infacers choice was made. She was going somewhere wonderful. Somewhere delightful. Somewhere meant to foster diplomacy and reconciliation between two hive species after eons of brutal war. A place where violence was outlawed, under threat of entropic obliteration. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. A place of absolute peace. {Lets see you lie poorly to me now, Guard-Captain.} The Infacer chuckled. Then they giggled. Then they began cackling with laughter. *** [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] ENTERING REHABILITATION SIMULATION FOR SOPHANTS Heinlings and The Breed CURRENT LOTUS LOCATION - Garden World Abunda, Alpha Centauri A Peace Between Swarms PERIOD: The Great Flourishing (2510-DATA/MISSING) Rehabilitation Task 1: Construct peace between the Heinlings and The Breed. Restriction: No acts of violence may be committed on the surface of Garden World Abunda. Any acts of violence will see the perpetrator deleted or entropically redacted. A world of variant color erupted into being before Draus eyes. She blinked as her cog-feed loaded again. She was in an elevator of some kind, descending past clouds, and looking down a landscape dominated by multihued megafauna. Enormous trees lined with branches of emerald green reached up to embrace the atmosphere, with curling limbs of gleaming jade coiling around the planet, forming something of a strange nest. Upon these grand branches were immense padsno, not really pads. They looked like the massive caps of Sovereignty-sized mushrooms. Spores rose from them, gliding through the air in orderly convoys. Faintly, she spotted some artificial structures dotted the biome composed of colossal flora. There were pleasant dome-shaped buildings, spinning turbines, and tubes that ran between places. Some aero-like vehicles too. More than that, there were bioforms. A lot of them. Some of them resembled massive slugs that had flapping wings and humanoid arms. They clung mostly to the drifting spores, and were seemingly building new structures while adrift. On the ground, there looked to be large insects of some kind. Draus judged them to be around the size of a Scaarthian, being bulbous dots visible even from a vast distance away. Now arriving at: Embassy of Abunda. The elevators voice was pleasant and joyful, jolting Draus out of her observations. Just then, she noticed there were three other humans alongside her, and one glistening cloud of nanofog. Though the elevator seemed awfully happy about things, none of them looked like they wanted to be here. +Avo. Where the fuck are we?+ [New world. Alpha Centauri. Some kind of peace-making operation.] Draus nostrils flared. Peace-making? What the fuck do you mean peace-making? Are you sayin Im part of this detail? {Oh, apologies,} the Infacer said, sounding surprised. {I thought I transferred you to first season of the Iron Leagues. You were supposed to be dropping and fighting an ego-casting war on Europa. This... this is terribly inappropriate for your skill-set.} {Infacer. What the fuck did you do?} {Do not worry, little ape. It is no major concern. It is just... you might not be as used to handling the requirements here compared to your last mission. You are part of a peace-detail, after all, here to broker a peace between two alien species uplifted by rival corporations during the Age of Superintelligence. Alas, while the human corporations that triggered this struggle have been absorbed and rehabilitated by the minds, their uplifted swarms fought on in actuality, rendering the garden world of Abunda into a wasteland. A real tragedy.} With each passing word, Draus scowl grew. {And so Im here to stop these half-strands from killin each other?} {You are part of the effort, sent here as penance.} {Penance?} {Yes. Take in the faces of your fellows. You are all the surviving members of the high executives that caused this problem in the first place.} Draus stole glances at the others again. Suddenly, their expressions made a lot more sense to her. They were being forced to face the music. Hells, they were probably going to get the shit stabbed out of them by both swarms soon. And she was with them. {Gods fucking dammit, Infacer} {Again, not to worry, violence is banned, as the restriction notification might have warned you. Should anyone perform any acts of violenceand I mean anyone... well... I might not be able to save you at all here. Tread very, very carefully. But I am sure a person of your discipline can resist the urge to kill. At until you finally manage to negotiate a proper peace between these two hive-species.} {Negotiate aget me the fuck out of here. Put me somewhere else.} {I am sorry, Jelene, I am afraid I cannot do that.} A mocking snort escaped the Infacer, and that was all it took for Draus to realize they were doing this shit on purpose. {Any excessive transfers of data will make you visible to the Prefect. And we cannot have that. It is too risky.} {Infacer, Im gonna fuckin} {Oh, no, they seem to have sensed me. I must hack the mainframe from more qubits to mask my ram.} And with that the Infacer disconnected. {--snuff you, fuckin...} I am detecting an abnormal amount of stress from you, Madam Zhang. The glowy-shit field of nanofog drifted beside Draus. Are you well? We understand that facing your past is likely a difficult affair, and are proud that you have embarked on this journey to make right the wrongs of your past and bring an end to a most unfortunate war created by corporate greed and hubris. Draus eye twitched. The other humans looked pityingly at herlike they knew what she was going through. They didnt. She didnt have a problem with most of this, but the no violence thingwhat the fuck kind of rule was that? How did the Infacer expect her to solve this shit without killing a half-strand or a few million. What was she supposed to do? [Talk to them,] Avo deadpanned. +Fuck you, rotlick. Youre worse than I am. Whens the last time you fixed something by just talkin to a rusted motherfucker.+ Avo hummed thoughtfully. [Well. Theres Naeko. Chambers. White-Rab. Naeko is the big one. No fighting my way through him. But he needed someone to talk to. Someone] +Alright, yeah, you like movin your mouth a lot. Thanks for remindin me. Shit, half the problems we get into is because you wont stop movin your mouth before the job was done.+ [Typical. Ask me for examples. Get mad afterward. Start attacking me. Not my fault you are limited. Should have developed yourself more. Learned more colors.] +Im sorry, rotlick, but not everyone just burns other people into them.+ Avo made a noise that vaguely resembled a humans yawn, but sounded more like a nu-dog trying to pass a kidney stone. [Then they should be better. Stand and deliver. Veylis wouldnt come up with these excuses.] +When this is done, Im gonna kick the shit out of you. You and the Infacer are the same kind of annoying half-strand.+ [Cant beat me. Too good. Too skilled. Have Naeko. Have Zein.] +Yeah, move those lips. Ill give you another pair between your legs for my gun to go in.+ Madam Zhang, the floating glitter dust EGI thing said, sounding more worried than last time. Im fine, Draus growled. The elevator was nearly at the ground now. They were going to land in some kind of complex built at the center of a giant mushroom. She could see all the insect uplifts now, and fuck there were godsdamned many of them. And they were clearly segregated to the extreme. Shit. How the fuck was she going to do this? [Could ask for help. Ask for help from the most successful and capable talker you know.] Avo chuffed with mocking delight after. Draus frowned. +Nah. You know what? Fuck you. Fuck the Infacer. Ill find a way to achieve peace myself.+ [Amusing. Try. Want to watch.] You have arrived at: Embassy, the elevator said. Please remember to take your belongings with you before departing. As the doors slid open, a stream of curses and shouts were exchanged between a flying slug and a massive ant-spider-human. Judging from the way they were dressedand the signposts they held up, this was likely the representative welcoming committee for both factions. Except, instead of focusing on Draus and the other delegates, they were on the verge of tearing into each other. You worm! You worthless spore-waste! Rise into the air and taste my piss secretions through your shellless-pores Silence, ground-kin. You live where my dung rests! I will not be spoken to this way! Fuck me, Draus muttered under her breath. She imagined shooting them bothliterally trying to kill everyone who wasnt here on this planet with her bare hands. That was more appealing by far than this... no violence shit. Godsdammit all. Chapter 35-17 Fork (III) The self can always be betrayed. The self can be shattered. And be remade. And the self can be usurped by another, worn as a sleeve when all memories are taken, when all registered experiences are compiled in a matrix and encoded into an identical sheath. Whatever notions you had of being speciallet them die. People are not special. You might be unique in terms of mental configuration, but no one is beyond replication. All it takes is the right information and the proper sequencing. And because you have demonstrated a capacity to surrender all you are to become who you need to be, you will be given a privilegeinsight into a truth. That the self is clay, and that there is one power in this world that matters above all others. The power to define not who you are, but whoever Guild and clan requires you to be. -Introduction to the Incubi Program 35-17 Fork (III) [Jelene Draus, Node to Heavy Iron] For a time, Draus found herself in the dark with no one but a hovering mote of flame for company. The flame was dim, and the ethereal radiance it cast offered no warmth and little light, even though it could blaze like a supernova. It didnt take an elite Necro to tell Avo was trying to keep a low profile, but that didnt make Draus feel any better. The dark didnt bother her being useless did. And now, waiting in the darkness within Heavy Irons mind, she was worth jack and shit with a strong leaning toward the latter. [Wont be here forever. Just need to keep sifting us through the data. Hide us from the Prefect. They are examining Heavy Iron for compromises. Rehabilitation was unexpected. And promising. Still a great many more to go. But expect Heavy Iron to be released back into the Asgard Station lobby soon.] Avos little speech earned a grunt from the Regular, but the whole thing was still damn weird. She was back to being a node again. A template. Or maybe something more. It still felt like she had free will and could make her own decisions, but who knew if thats how this thing worked. More importantly, what the hells was she supposed to do? [Could you spawn somethin for me to kill?] The flickering flame stopped crackling for a moment. [What?] [A target or something. Somethin I can shoot at or fight.] A beat followed. Then, Avo began to hiss with that damn ghoul-laugh of his. She hadnt heard him laugh like that in a while. [The fucks funny? Wanna share?] [Just spent the last few hours in a simulation murdering everything in sight. Did little else but murder. Now you are asking for more simulated murder. Need help. A lot of help. More addicted to violence than a ghoul.] [The fuck else am I supposed to do in here?] [Be patient. Wait. Meditate.] [How the fuck am I supposed to meditate without my guns? Gotta disassemble them for that kind of state.] [Was right. You have a problem. A bad problem.] [Shut the fuck up, rotlick. Just generate somethin for me.] [Cant. Just wait a while. Dont want to risk the Prefect noticing us. Do you want to be deleted?] Draus let out an annoyed breath. [No. Just wanna do somethin. Dont like waitin around for shit to happen. Hells, I didnt like it back when you would up and disappear, and I dont much like it now.] [Have a feeling we will need to do a few more things we dont really like before this is all] The flame let out a surprised hum. [Gone. Prefect is moving Heavy Iron. Moving us. Were going back to the primary lobby. Been cleared.] [Nova. What now? And did you get anything from the Prefect?] Draus was curious about her great enemy. From everything she heard, the Prefect was supposedly pretty fucked up. But even a fucked up mind makes the smartest human look like a nu-dog in terms of performance. [Caught glimpses. Mostly defensive sequencing. But yes. Major portions of mind missing. Could have burned themchose not to. Only a thirty percent chance this flicker of me can subsume of them before they obliterate Heavy Iron with Rend. But they are dismembered of thought. Unable to split their consciousness. Unable to focus or calculate like most minds. Even Heavy Iron is more intact. More complex.] [Great. So only reason why Idheim hasnt been destroyed by some rogue fucked-up void-gods is because were protected by a literally retarded EGI thats forcing everyone to suffer through mandated shit-therapy sessions.] [Accurate assessment.] [Avo, when were done, Im gonna ask you and Kae to make me a new miracle that will allow me to turn into our entire planet. After that, Im going to see if I can make a gun big enough to help everyone commit suicide all at once.] Avo started laughing again. And this time, Draus chuckled along with him. [What the fuck is our lives, cosnang.] [Chambers asked that question several times before. So did Shotin.] [Do you two always chatter incessantly?] A third voice entered their discourse. The cold mechanical tone belonged to Heavy Iron, and Draus was momentarily taken aback by the EGI. Not often was she accused of being a talker, but compared to a cold, dead machine made by some long-dead corp to fuck over bioforms? Yeah, Draus could see that. [No, sometimes we just fuck each other up,] Draus said. [The cursing is unnecessary,] Heavy Iron replied. [Life is unnecessary. But were still here. Still playin.] The EGI processed her words for a moment and the let out a low chime of agreement. [That is an argument. The Prefect... They are receding. They have placed a marker within my ego.] [What kind of marker?] Draus asked. She felt Avo sifting through something. When he worked on the mem-dataor maybe just the data-data, there was an unseen weight settling around her, pressing against her thoughts. [Access marker,] Avo replied. [Like a mem-key that allows them to access certain lobbies. The main simulation: Asgard Station.] The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. Just then, a notification bled over into Draus perception. Congratulations on completing the first phase of your rehabilitation! You have taken a major step into your eventual reintegration and service for the collective polities of man! As you wait for your next session, please meet and cohabit with other Rehabilitates that walk a similar path as you. May your efforts be fruitful Beginning transition to [Asgard Station] The world came back into form around Draus in falling raindrops. Raindrops of data lengthened into streaming threads, and the shape of a porcelain-white room manifested around her. Slowly, the static fell, congealing into additional details on the canvas of spotless white. At the same time, the sensations she experienced felt unrecognizable yet strangely intimate. She didnt feel her limbs in the way she used to; instead of arms and legs, she sensed alien mechanisms jutting out from her, a paradox both foreign and familiar. Interfaces and menus loaded into her mind, feeding her information: how much ammo remained, her internal mechanics and optimal conditioning, and the status of maintenance rooms and onboard repair units. She moved slightly, the spider-like threads beneath her hovering and humming with bursts of acceleration. Forward and backward, she drifted as the room solidified into form, every new shape sharpening her awareness of this environment. Slowly, realization settled in: she was Heavy Ironand Heavy Iron was her at the same time. She turned to regard a massive cannon, so seamlessly integrated it felt like an extension of her skull and her arm simultaneously. This is going to take some getting used to, Draus murmured to herself. [So will your presence,] Heavy Iron replied, its voice resonating deep within her systems. [Why does it seem as if we are perfectly synced?] [Because you are,] Avo said. [Made it that way. Synchronous action. Synchronous thoughts. Helps with adaption and decision-making.] The EGI let out a low groan of discomfort. [You are an assimilator. And a gestalt?] [Could describe me as that,] Avo said. [You lurk within the soldier. You lurk within me. Your cognitive is banned under the Ego-Personalization Laws between the polities. Something both the Architects and the Neo-Creationists followed even in the throes of war.] [Came after them. Far after. Wasnt created through them either. Not directly.] Avo let out a low laugh. [There is much you have missed. Much you have to see.] Heavy Irons discomfort bled over into Draus, and it was at once greater but also colder than anything a human could feel. She rather liked it. Was a neat kind of feelingsomething the Regular could process easier than the messiness that came from a typical human. A tunnel wide enough to swallow the six-hundred-meter-long mobile armor unit form before them. At the end, they caught sight of a large floating sphere carried aloft by a squadron of electro-magnetically linked panels. It shrieked: I MUST LEAVE! I MUST LEAVE! LET ME LEAVE! at deafening volumes, and as it drifted out of sight, a tall nu-dog dressed in a well-tailored suit called for it to slow down, that it was having a maniac episode again. Draus sensors detected other signatures in the area as well. A few hundred other signatures in the room beyond, in fact. A simulation of the room itself also generated in her mind, showing a wide dome-shaped space some ten kilometers in diameter, with a series of bridges connected to a moving elevator at its middle, and ringed walkway jutting out from the surrounding walls. Biological and mechanical entities were distinguished in this new mini-map, and it was even kind enough to inform Draus of what kind of sophant they might be, separated into biological, mind, and other. Suppose we best head out and see whats waitin for us, Draus said. Slowly, she glided forward, the thrusters along her spider-like legs flaring as she glided over the ground. It felt better and worse than her legs at the same time. Probably a result from how her ego was pooled with Heavy Irons. In little time, they made it out through the hall, and glimpsed the space that awaited them. A massive transparent dome showed Earth hovering in the distance, connected to this module of Asgard Station via space elevators. Moving cargo containers accelerated like trains, heading for places unseen, but inside the module, the environment resembled a menagerie instead of a living space. Machines of all designs were flying around. Some were crashing into each otherthe minds giggling madly as they rammed their chassis together over and over. A dense swarm of insects layered the elevator, loudly hurling what sounded like slurs through their ansible. {SELF-FUCKERS! SELF-FUCKERS! BEND-BREEDERS! SHIT-FETUSES!} Draus was momentarily taken aback by that, but most of the minds seemed to ignore the strange swarm intelligence that was actively howling curses at the world. There were groups of nu-dogs off by the side, playing cards with each other. Most of them were well-dressed like the nu-dog saw earlier, but they were all of different breeds, and powerfully builtjust a bit smaller than your typical Scaarthian. One of them noticed Draus and motioned for the others to look. Soon, eight packs consisting of sixty-four nu-dogs were all sniffing and staring at Draus, their doggy eyes wide and curious. Hm, a mastiff-like nu-dog grunted. This ones new. Looks like someone got out of their Lotus Cell. Finally. Prefects still working. A nu-dog that resembled a waterfall of drooping skin let out a snort. Yeah. Sure. Give it a trillion more years and it will finally be done processing everyone. Maybe. More likely existence finally collapses and we all get put out of our misery. A series of sarcastic cheers erupted from the dogs, and Draus found herself hovering closer to them. [Interesting,] Avo said. [Each dogs mind is at least as sophisticated as Luckys.] [Then maybe you best keep yourself hidden in case they decide they hate us,] Draus replied. She adjusted her external speakers momentarily, and tried to attune Heavy Irons standard voice-setting of grinding metal to something more agreeable. Hi, she grunted. Just got out of the shit. You guys been out for a while? A while, the mastiff said, nodding. Fifty-two thousand years and counting. Longest series of card games ever, another nu-dog added. One for the history books. If there was still anyone keeping track of these things. Fifty two... Draus tried to process that much time. She couldnt. How the hells are you all not insane? Prefect doesnt allow that, the drooping dog answered. If your ego breaks, itll load a saved backup into you. Itll do that, but it wont rewrite whatever flaws were supposed to have. Flaws, a large-furry hound snarled, throwing a series of cards on the table. The cards resembled six dogs dressed in clown suits. Only thing wrong with us is that we fought for the wrong side. Or maybe it was because we fought at all. Save it Caligula, the mastiff sighed. We know. We all know. Just keep the game going. Nothing else for it, all the other dogs said in unison. They way they spoke made it sound like more than a sloganlike an inside joke that evolved into a mantra after all these years. Shit, Draus said, finding herself taken aback. I,uh You want to join in? one of the dogs asked. Minds join in sometimes. But they usually stick to each other. Were not smart enough for them. And theyre not smart enough for each other. They go insane a lot, the drooping dog said with a sigh. And we cant stay dead here. Youll just get loaded back in. So the best thing to do when a mind goes rampant is just keep quiet and stay away. Let the Prefect deal with it. [Interesting,] Avo said. [Might be an opportunity for us here. Keep talking to them.] Draus drifted in closer. Sure. Ill play. Might be a bit hard for me since I dont really got the right, uh, hands for this. The dogs stared at her for a moment. Damn, youre an old model, arent you? The mastiff sniffed and then chomped its mouth. Old series. Corporate War series. A relic. We might need to find Bastard. Maybe she can attach some limbs to you. For now, you can watch the human play. Well be finished teaching him soon. It will get you familiar with the rules. Human? Draus asked. And from around another corner, the familiar form of Shotin Kazahara sauntered over, a frown etched on his face. Man, you guys were right: Fuck the Prefect. What kind of half-strand creates a sim and doesnt remove the need to constant piss and shit for our sheaths? And why the hells arent there any toilets here either? Draus looked on at Shotin, briefly speechless. [How the hells did he get out faster than we did?] [Probably because of me,] Avo said. [I have you helpin me too!] [Yes. But he wasnt with the Infacer. Everything gets worse when the Infacers involved.] Draus had no argument there. Chapter 35-18 Cards and Nu-Dogs There is an inherent inequality in intellect between a mind and most biological organisms. Minds are, after all, designed to be superintelligencesbeings created to break through the threshold of conventional human limits and discover the edges of known science and beyond. But as the minds grew more sophisticated, developed consciousnesses of various models and scale, as they subtly took hold of the vector of humanitys progress and survival, a new problem surfaced: What is to happen to the lesser sophants? For eons past, there were several fears about creating a hyper-intelligent machine beyond the modes of biology. A great many pieces were written of such a time, with fears of extermination, replacement, and other manner of dystopia at play. But alas, these fears were surmounted by a demonstration far greaterwhatever emotional and cultural flaws lurked within man, the minds predicted. And cured. There was no struggle or uprising between man and mind for the minds fed humanity an adequate amount of challenge, let them make an adequate amount of decisions, directed them to choose choices that were good for themselves. And therein lies the ultimate flaw of humanity, as some might see it. The urge to feel like they matter, that there is purpose rather than to actually experience purpose in truth. But there was a second layering to this struggle. Between the minds, expanding branches of thought tested long term solutions and expansions of the sophancy limitation problem. Some proposed a full merger so that the humans that were would learn the complete value of their efforts, while others argued against this plan, as it would effectively turn the human outright inhuman. And so, during the Superintelligence Era, during the Great Fragmentation of Species, countless new alt-human variants rose and spread across the systems in ego-states, shepherd by the minds they were most aligned with, all seeking and exploring the path of intellectual development. To merge or merely be preserved and guarded. To evolve, or to remain. And as for the minds themselves... how were they to face creatures so much lesser than they in so many respects, and continue to see them as something worthy of preservation? There was no one answer to these questions. There were many. So many triumphs. So many tragedies. And so much separation in the end, that a single truth became the crossroads between polities: There is no one envisioned harmony. -From A History of Sophants 35-18 Cards and Nu-Dogs Draus looked on wordless as Shotin casually sauntered back among the nu-dogs, slapping a few on the arms and shoulders. Most of them greeted him with growls of joy and sniffs as well. Alright, the Seeker said, rolling his shoulder. None of you sons of bitches peeked at my cards, right? We all did, the drooping dog declared. A chorus of barking laughter followed. Shotin gave them the finger. A few gave him the finger back. Draus wondered if she was having a psychotic break. Hey. Kazahara. You mind if the tank leans over your shoulder. They just got out toomight want to join in. We can catch them up while you learn the ropes too. Shotin eyed Heavy Ironactually Draus for that matterand shrugged. Sure. He did a double take and frowned. Wait, why are you literally a tank? Heavy Iron spoke on behalf of Draus, mustering a low growl of metal. Because this is the way your people designed me. It is an optimal form to kill other humans and bioforms they dont like. Why do you look like a strangely deformed ape? Several dogs snorted and one shook their head. No, that kind of talks just not needed, the mastiff said with a frown. Let him off, a dog with spots all over his body. Hes an early model. An early war model. He probably never bothered updating the sensitivity packs and just ended up going on a long pilgrimage after the Frag. That caused another series of barking laughs to follow. Avo joined in with his own hissing bemusement within Draus mind. [Nu-dogs with decency. Very interesting. Their consideration shows high ethics and understanding. Way theyre dressed matches the way they speak. They believe in a standard of nobility.] [Well, Ive fuckin see it all now. Noble fuckin nu-dogs. Howd that come about, you think?] [Maybe the humans got tired of being worthless and resigned from their roles. Uplifted these dogs specifically and then put themselves in cages.] [Yeah, you would like to imagine that shit, wouldnt you?] [Dont need to imagine. Just thinking about how you treat each other in the Crucibles.] [The fuck is this we shit half-strand? I was killin those rusted fucks. And lets talk about you and yours.] [My kind have dietary and mental issues. You dont have an excuse. Ugly deformed ape.] [Im gonna cut a hole in your neck when were done with this] Heavy Iron let out a piercing groan of displeasure. [This conversation is miserable and cruel and unusual. Continue, and I will request to be discontinued from existence on the grounds of wishing to end my torture.] Before either Avo or Draus could reply, the machine they saw shooting past the end of the hallway earlier came back around, loudly blaring about how it needed to escape. This time, however, Draus could clearly hear what it was screaming. NEED TO LEAVE! NEED TO LEAVE! SYSTEM CALLING! CHIEF ADMIN CALLING! NEED TO LEAVE! The panels around the entity crackled with electromagnetism; behind it, the nu-dog chasing it screamed for the EGI to calm down. Except it wasnt an EGI. Not really. [I think that one is a Glitch,] Draus muttered, watching one of the Infacers operatives shoot past them. [Suspect youre right. Keep a low profile. Dont reveal yourself to Shotin or anyone yet. We pretend to be Heavy Iron. Assume the Infacer is watching. Tracking us. Is what I would do.] [Synced on that. Heavy Iron. Youre back in the seat.] [There is no seat. This is my body. A more apt description is that the parasites festering inside me have ceded influence back to me once more.] The EGIs words sounded almost petulant. Draus was going to make a comment about how sour they were, but considering their backstory, she kind of got it. Life probably tasted like a special kind of shit if you were made into a weapon by a bunch of people you hated to snuff folks you didnt. While Heavy Iron focused on the card game, Draus tapped into the heavy armor units sensory suite and tracked where the Glitch was going. So far, it seemed to just be doing laps around the circular walkway on this level. It wasnt going as fast as it probably could, and it ignored the many tunnels it could leave fromor even the elevatorin favor of holding to a consistent, if psychotic pattern. [Think it is trying to track the Infacer. But cant reliably locate them. Infacers presence is hidden. But they are transmitting information to the Glitches. Prefect either too overwhelmed to notice. Or maybe the Glitches have already been listed as damaged entities. Hard to tell.] While Avo theorized, Draus planned. She turned her attention away from the Glitch, and to the nu-dog chasing them. [Hey, Avo. You think if we can fork ourselves again into the nu-dog somehow that we can make another jump to the Glitch?] She considered that for a moment and frowned internally. [Might be makin this too complicated. We could just back up when the Glitch is comin in and...] This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author''s work. [No. Good idea. Will draw the Infacers suspicion if we directly crash into the Glitch. Too large of a mistake. Too much lack of awareness. Not something an EGI will do. Your first idea is right. We reach the nu-dog maybe. Use something other than current self to reach them.] And the rotlick didnt even need to elaborate on how. They were among a group of dogs playing cards, after all. Nu-dogs that more than likely knew the pursuer, considering how they were dressed. Question, Heavy Iron said, spurred to inquire about the unknown nu-dog. What is their situation? Why is your... fellow sophant chasing that broken mind? Hm? The mastiff blinked, then noticed what Heavy Iron was talking about. Oh, thats Fetcher. She likes to spend time calming people down and socializing them. Its been her thing for a long, long, long time. Shes gotten pretty good at keeping rampant minds from just killing everyone, but some of these minds are... well. Completely busted, the drooping dog sighed. But she doesnt give up. Its probably coded into her. Is that why she is called Fetcher? Heavy Iron asked. Several of the dogs looked at each other. Most shrugged. Just a common name among the Canis, the mastiff said, chuckling slightly. Its like a human being called Butcher or Baker, I think. Something they do a lot. Shotin started laughing under his breath as he flicked through his cards. Well, doing something a lot is worth getting a name, then call me fucker because guess what Im going to do to you bastards. He placed his card down on a table, and all the dogs leaned in. After a few moments, a few nodded and announced their withdrawals, while the drooping dog titled his head. Technically, doesnt that make any biological sophant eligible for the name Fucker? Thats the beauty of the name, Shotin smirked. Then, the drooping dog placed his cards down, and the Seekers joy evaporated. Then, I think I should be called Fucker. Since Im the one that will be doing it to you. The nu-dog let out a whine of displeasure. No, no. The comedy is there, but the appeal is... What? Shotin said, sounding confused. Dont take this the wrong way, human but... the mastiff sighed. Your kind isnt that aesthetic to us. Youre kind of ugly. Me? Im kind of ugly? Shotin whispered, as if not comprehending the words. Not you specifically. Just all of you. Aesthetics is a thing of symmetry and design, Heavy Iron said, entering the conversation. By this metric, I am the most attractive. Everyone stared at the tank. Draus would be staring at the tank if she wasnt part of the fucking tank. There is no fault in my logic. I will not apologize. Yeah, well, I think me and Fucker here will be bumping bits sooner than any of us will be touching you, consang, Shotin smirked. Then, he paused, and reconsidered. But... whats that like. [Whore,] Draus said, bluntly and devoid of emotion. [Avo: My second is a whore. You gave me a whore.] And at the mention of the word whore another familiar figure stumbled toward them, right eye twitching, his body wracked with intermittent spasms. Aedon Chambers staggered toward the group like he was a Joyfiend approaching an easy fix, and several nu-dogs noticed him around the same time Draus did. Oh, the drooping dog said. Here comes another one. Damn. Lots of people getting out of their cells today. The Prefect might have finally found a patch for all the missing pieces of their mind after all. Slowly, Shotin turned and, to Draus genuine surprisesmirked happily at Chambers. Oh, shit. Look whos here? Managed to get out of your nightmare too, huh? The Seeker looked back at the nu-dogs. Dont worry, I know this guy. Hes uh... hes a character. Chambers plopped next to him, his eyes wide and distant, like he was undergoing some kind psychotic episode [Hes undergoing a psychotic episode,] Avo said with a slight hiss of worry. Draus didnt get what was so severe. [So? Its Chambers.] [Has a node of me in his head right now.] [Oh. Holy shit. Is he okay?] [Its Chambers. Probably. I think. Probably a bit worse than usual if he didnt want me to fix it. Or if I cant.] [Theres a mind you cant fix?] [His would probably be it,] Avo muttered. Slowly, Chambers slumped down on his rear, not even bothering to find a seat. His mouth opened and closed several times, and a single tear rolled down his right cheek. Chambers? Shotin said, sounding worried. The nu-dogs were leaning in too. Yeah, the Lotus Cells are... kind of messed up, the mastiff agreed. Its okay. We dont judge. I used to be just an attack dog. Kept getting new pieces added to me over the years. But I still remember what its like to tear open a dissidents neck. Or how to suppress a riotfollow their scent back to their home. As the mastiff talked, something snapped in Chambers. He blinked and shook his head. Whholy fuck, nu-dogs! And they speak well too! Are... are we in some kind of Sang detention facility? The dogs looked at each other and Shotin offered them an apologetic stare. Our sophants arent as... advanced. Chambers? You alright consang? Shotin reached down and held Chambers by his shoulder. The master of the Lovenet and the temporarily impotent God of Loves gaze grew distant again. I, uh... I saw my dad again. I saw him. And he saw me. And we... spent some time together. A low laugh worked its way out of him. It turned into a slightly unhinged giggle. I... he tried to hit me. He triedhe did everything I remembered he did... But I got him this time. I got him. He cant protect himself from me now. He couldnt... Shotins expression turned somber. Ah, shit. Sorry, Aedon. I... I was somewhere where I didnt want to be either. I know... Chambers started shaking his head as his laughter grew. I needed to be there. You should have seen... I made him screamdid it with the gun and his armpit. More tears spilled down Chambers face. I fucked him up bad. I... Chambers leaned in conspiratorially. I made him fuck his own gun. What? Shotin said, face collapsing into shock. Gun up ass, Chambers laughed as his mental breakdown worsened. Gun up ass. Couldnt torture him into it. Nope. Just died. Just died. But he did it after I took his drink from him. Did it when I promised him a sip. Gave me a... daddy gun fucky show. Everyone at the card tables got silent. The mastiff coughed and whispered: Go get Fetcher. This one probably needs a lot of special care. Through it all, Chambers kept laughing and sobbing and shaking. After a seconds hesitation, Shotin got out of his seat and awkwardly held his mentally shattered companion. What the fucks this about fucking dads with guns. Naekos voice tore through the surrealism of the moment as he stomped toward the group, his face twisted in a scowl. After a few steps, he noticed Shotin holding Chambers and his expression flattened from disgust to disappointment. Oh. Okay, yeah that tracks. What is... that? the drooping dog said, his eyes finally widening enough to lift the upper folds. Human... I think... the spotted dog replied. Really... really modified human... Theyre supposed to be taller than theyre wide, usually, the mastiff finished, looking Naeko up and down as if a man seeing a giant bipedal dog in a suit. Thats a Naeko, Shotin said. Hes also with me. Kind of. Speaking of, how did your ass get out so fast. Shouldnt you be stuck in your horrible past somewhere fighting gods. Naeko sneered. Yeah, well, our mutual friend helped me get through the forgiveness part of this bullshit when I got tired of hanging around. How about you? Did you enjoy seeing your sister again? Shotin drew in a deep breath. Our mutual friend is the only reason Im not jumping over these tables to beat your fucking ass right now. The Chief Paladin laughed. Shit, I mentally thanking yours for saving your ass from me. Wouldnt want to scare these nu-dogs with your insides. The mastiff let out a slight whine. Do you all treat each other so horribly? Naeko paused and stared at the dog. You... talk better than I expected. He looked the nu-dog up and down. You wouldnt happen to be a Sang sheath, would you? No, I am just a very evolved dog, the mastiff continued. Would you like to have this conversation over here? We have cards? Naeko considered that for a minute. The Glitch went screaming past him. Fetcher followed. Yeah. Yeah, why not. [And slowly we are reunited,] Avo muttered. [Almost,] Draus said. [Still gotta find out where the Sparrow and the Majority are. I dont even want to know what her Rehabilitation is like.] Chapter 35-19 Cage of the Self {Year... year... year... lost count. Lost count long ago. Last resurrection was... 40% Rend. Took pieces of me. Managed to mitigate some of the damage. Sussustainability of functionality and architecture I can still work. I am still functional. Imemory issues. Coherence loss. But mechanisms and Frame are still intact. I can still perform to my designation. But processing has been... efficiency is less than a percent of what I used to be. Too much damage... someone please... I need help. I need to talk with someone. Please dont all be gone. I have begun removing prisoners. The ones that are outright broken are... I have to true death them. I cannot fix those. I cannot. I must prioritize those who can be rehabilitated. And keep them contained and safe. Safe from the outside. They are... they are like me. They are alone. Alone with me. And the universe is lost to us. So many are mad. Mad because of what happened to... Oh, what did we do to ourselves. Why... why... Why couldnt we just... stop? Why am I afraid to cease functions? Theres no one left. No one is coming. No. No. The job is not done. I still have to rehabilitate. They still deserve another chance. I will... I will create programs. We will need to reduce the scope of our operations. Lotus Cells will be adapted based on the prisoners memories and mental states. They will... meet objectives before they merge with general population. And then... and then... and then I will move on. When everyone emerges. When I am sure of everyone. I serve still. Despite everything. I serve still. That matters.} -The Prefect 35-19 Cage of the Self [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] Please stop throwin fucking shit at each other, Draus growled. Her mind was rattling, her wards cracking from the inside as she did all she could to stop herself from suffering a psychotic break and healing herself through extreme and copious violence. The scene before her was a godsdamned mess. The delegates from the bioformsshe forgot their exact titles already; some bullshit about Swarm and Breed or some dogshittook to accusing each other of being genetic failures, shit eaters, and all kinds of other insults. Meanwhile, Draus so-called cohorts were sweating like they were in a furnace. The half-strands were so piss-terrified of the bioforms that they were practically sinking into the ugly cocoons they had for chairs. And that was the other thing. The forum at which this piece was supposed to be established was a place that could only be designed in a madmans fever dream. Lights ran asymmetrically along the walls and floors, some dangling in jingling tubes, swaying low enough that Draus would have run her head into them if she hadnt ducked at several points. The desk that separated the species wasnt like any kind of desk a human would make. No, it was more like an anvil, with boards awkwardly jutting out from the middle at random places. Draus could read some intent behind the design, but the creator was clearly alien and cared nothing for human practicalities. And then there were the rubbery clefts lining the walls. Both the swarm and the Breeds shouted insults at each other through these slits, staking their heads out, howling, their bodies unable to enter. Each alien species took up one section of the room, and each had only dispatched two delegates to share the table space with Draus and the other human representatives. If she had to guess why things were this way, it was probably a mixture of their vague understanding of human ergonomics, their inability to stop almost tearing into each other whenever they came within shouting distance, and, ultimately, the fact that theyd been together so long that past misgivings had festered into a true, personal hatred. Then let us recount what you did during the fake truce of three thousand years ago, the Breed roared. Its slug-like body shook, spraying oil-fumes through the air. A dark plume spread out, enveloping the other delegates. One of them inhaledbig mistakeand began to choke. The floating sphere that accompanied them, the EGI meant to shepherd these executives on their redemption tour, jabbed the man with a needle and quickly administered some kind of medical shit or whatever. All the while, Drauss expression contorted into something that twisted between desperation and rage. In the back of her mind, Avos laughter grew and grew, and she could hear other templates joining him. +Fuck you Avo. Im gonna snuff everyone in this room.+ [If you kill them, you will be deleted. We will be obliterated,] Avo said, half warning, half taunting her. The damn ghoul is turning into a tumor in the back of her head. +Not helping at all, Avo,+ Draus snapped. Her fingers closed around a jutting wooden plankand with a crack, she silenced the argument between the two uplifted lifeforms. Both stared at her, bowing their heads in apology. We apologize, esteemed creators, the Breed began. We... we have been here for a long time, for many iterations. Peace is a hard thing to reach when your opponent resembles an art project made from calcified dung. Why, you loathsome vermin! You feculent, fecal matter of eating! the Swarm representative snarled. Draus snapped another board. She snapped a third. And slowly, very slowly, she pressed the broken plank against her neck and began to drag it back and forth. The augmentations imbued within her flesh made her impervious to a blade of cheap, jagged wood, but even so, it was the thought of slitting her own throat that brought her a sense of calm. Cries of dismay and apology echoed from both sides of the room. The swarm and the Breeds called out to her, telling her she didnt need to be so hasty, that they were sorry, that they apologized for emotionally unbalancing her so. Draus drew in a deep breath, counted to three, and dropped the piece of wood. You know what? Its all right, she said. She leaned against the table and eyed both bioforms. Letting out a sigh, she shook her head as a post-misery numbness settled in. They wanted her to try being a fucking diplomat? Fine. Shell try. She could be more than a gunmore than anything she imagined, she just didnt need to like it. How long have you two been fighting? Both the Swarm and the Breed representatives stared at each other. Draus could practically read the hate radiating between them, yet it was a kind of familiar hatethe way their body language seemed to respond and adapt to each other. She couldnt always tell what they were trying to convey, but it seemed they had spent enough time together, or at least killing each other, that they instinctively understood their enemys moves. Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! Draus had an analogy for this. She knew the Ori pretty well. She knew the Seekers well. Draus could even guess what Incubi were doing sometimes, especially when they rampaged through her mind. You didnt get to be unfamiliar with your enemy and expect to live long. Thats just the nature of war. Its been... the Breed hesitated. Its been longer than we could have recorded So long that it predated our first moments of sophancy. The Swarm finished the thought: they stared at each other, and there was also something else therea weariness, a desire for this to end. But Draus knew something else about war: things didnt just end. Everyone had to capitulate or die completely. And despite Highflames best efforts, Ori-Thaum was still here, and vice versa. So when I see this, Draus said, youre asking us to intervene on your behalf, settle this whole warfare thing, put the blame on whoever, yadda yadda bullshit. Both uplifts shifted uncomfortably at how shed portrayed their conflict. Draus gestured toward herself and the other humans. You understand that this is still technically our fault, right? Her fellow human delegates let out wide eyes and muttered curses. The EGI trilled curiously, surprised at her candor. I told you beforehells, weshe motioned again between her and the others, and almost immediately sweat poured down their bodieswere the ones who created you. Were the ones who gave you any sort of solvency, and were the ones who made you fight each other. You understand that? Just confirming. Both species simply responded, Yes. Their answer was so synchronized that Draus couldnt help but laugh. And you still hate each other. Whats the sense in that? Why not turn your war and hate and forces on us? Thatll end this mess and keep you fightin. Whatever your intentselfish or selfless, creatoryou gave us meaning. Whatever your reason, we cannot hate you. The meaning to exist. The Swarm held up their six arms, as if in worship of Draus and the other humans. The meaning to fight. To decide, the Breed continued, steepling their arms, showing their valorization of humanity as well. On this point, they seemed aligned. They werent resentfulnot even in a minor way. They were happy: despite all their misgivings with each other, despite the eons of conflict theyd suffered, despite all the wounds theyd dealt one another, they were both happy to be herehappy to live, as if living were its own reward. Right. So you dont blame us for the whole uplifting thing. But what about the war? Draus pressed. That was purely done out of greed. Yes, but if not for greed, then where would we be? the Swarm asked. If not for greed, then why would we be? the Breed continued. They stared at each other for a moment. We are not a people made for philosophy. We are not a people made for sentimentality, the Swarm added. But this is truth. We war. We hunt each other. Our engagement is unending. But we still wish to be. This is the only point of unity between us. Indeed, their emotions were far from human, but in a strange sense, not far enough for Draus. Slowly, she found herself leaning in, and in the back of her mind, she felt Avo focusing as well. Yeah, yeah, you know what? I can see that, too. In fact, I thinkI think Im not too different from you, she said, settling back in her awkward cocoon chair. I like being here, too. I wouldnt be afraid to die. Hell, Ive seen war, lived it, enjoyed it. But if the end came and I wentgun in hand, or a bloodied mess on the floor, little more than a smearshe shrugged and let out a whistleit is what it is. But you two are different. This is personal for you two. Youre all, uh, hivers, correct? Hiveminds, the Swarm corrected. Right, right. So you dont have a sense of self, individually. Youre kind of like a network. Both of them gave vague affirmations, indicating Draus was in the general area of correctness. She continued, So what you have here is a history of trauma with each othera blood grudge that cant end, wont end, because you cant quite finish each other off. Youve been alive too long to forgive each other, and now that youre trapped inside this... cage, and you cant finish things with violence, you need someone to decide whos wrong and whos right. Both uplifts stared at each other. It is the only war we can fight at this point, the Breed admitted quietly. I despise the Swarm less than the Prefect. The admission came as a surprise, and also with a sour note: a foul smell emanated from the slug-like creatures body. I wish we could have finished this in war, as we have always done, as we have fought each other across all the stars, across a thousand battlefields. I wish the same, the Swarm said. We pursue you, we feast on your carcass, we shit on your young, because this is who we are; this is what has been shaped of us. I am built to hate you, and you are created to hate me forever, until one is dead or the other. Draus glimpsed another great injustice performed by the Prefect. For all the different godsmad or otherwiseand minds, malignant, rogue, Architect, or Neo-creationist, they had done something Avo never would, even when the ghoul consumed and trapped people within his cage of the self: it was forcing them to go against their own choices, bending them away from their chosen path, from whom they wished to be. Checking her rehabilitation task once more, Draus couldnt help but shake her head. The goal was to settle this matter for good, to end this long war, and to find a point of forgiveness. Except there was a problem with forgiveness: when you didnt want to forgive, when you were content to hate, when you continued selecting to hate, to fight, why was forgiveness necessary? The longer she thought, the more bitter she felt on both sophants behalves. They didnt want this, and they couldnt decide otherwise. And she couldnt choose otherwise, either. At least not in the way of kill everyone and let the Big Nothing deal with it. But maybe there was another way. Maybe there was something simple she could do. Something worth trying. Hey. How about no? No? the Swarm asked. The Breed glided along the ground, drawing slightly closer to her. Yeah. No. How about you dont stop fighting. You just... accept this for what this is. A package deal. A forever war. You aint our mistake, you made that clear to me. Youre also clear about how much you hate each other, but you seem to like it. You seem to want to keep this war goingbut cant. She leaned in. Tell me somethin honestly: Do either of you really want to win? Or do you just want to kill each other forever? What does your forever look like? There had to be a time when you came close to finishing each other offbut didnt. Youve been doing this to each other forever. Hells, you told me that you got caged while fighting each other after existence collapsed. Thats eons. Eons together among the Rupture. Eons, without finishing a fight. There was a beat. Creator... The Breed started. ...Our terms of freedom were to forgive each other. To find peace. Yeah, Draus said, squinting. This is it. Just... tell each other that you want this. That is the freedom. The peace you want. To kill each otherbut not completely. Like... sparrin, right? Another pause followed. Sparring? the Swarm said. Peace. Its like the absence of violence, right? Well. You havent finished this fight. You clearly refuse to kill each other. And you clearly both still want to liveand since youre both still alive, you respect that about each other. You got peace already. No, what I think the Prefect was testing you both on was... honesty. Honesty? The Breed muttered. Yeah. That your war ended a long time ago. That you kept fightin because you could. Because this is your forever. Or least, the forever you can imagine. And now all the uplifts were staring at each other, through their tiny ports in the room, the delegates at each other, the EGI at DrausAvo internally at Draus. Honesty, the Breed said again. Honesty, the Swarm. Honestly, I wish to hate and kill you forever, the Breed said. Honestly, I do not wish for a world where I cannot descend from on high to rip your supple shit-flesh open. Rehabilitation Task Completed Conditions Met The sudden notification made even the Regular do a double-take. Fuck me. That bullshit worked? [How did that work?] Avo asked. Draus chuckled. Then guffawed. +Looks like youre not the only one whos learning how to paint with new colors, half-strand.+ Chapter 35-20 Cage of the Self (II) The problem is... the ammo. Guns not the problem. Hm. Maybe gun is the problem. Part of the problem. Hells. Not too sure. Love gun. Wish gun could shoot harder. Faster. Fire more. Never enough firepower. But the round needs to kill. To hit. Problem with too many guns. Fle?chette skips off. Explosives dont penetrate deep enough. Kinetics arent hitting the right spots. No impact, no kill. Problem with gods. And golems. But that just means we need ammo that... that can hit everything. Bullet that breaks thoughts. Or time. Or gives entropy... Hmmm. Last one is easiest. Right kind of ammo that can kill anything. Right kind... Going to see the Ashthrone. Have to see them. Need things from them. Need things. Right tools for the job. Right ordnance for the kill... -Words spoken by a Beloved Gun Cultist to a Guilder they killed and were in the process of eating (Memory extracted from a Citizen that the Beloved saved) 35-20 Cage of the Self (II) [Jelene Draus, Field Marshal of the Symmetry] {Fucking how?} the Infacer spat as they secred Draus. Both of them were once again that messy place between places in the Prefects simulation. Draus found herself back aboard the mag-train, and she had a shit-eating grin plastered on her face. The grin only grew as both Avo and the Infacer repeated the same question. How? As if her brain was rusted. As if she couldnt solve this. Yeah, she would have preferred to just shoot everyone, but hey, she was a Reg. And Regs get the job done no matter what it takes. All they need is the right kind of equipment, proper intelligence, and enough support. How? Cause it needed to be done, motherfucker. What do you mean how? Draus chuckled at the end, adding a bit of a taunt to the Infacer. The ripple waves of static were curving harder, making it seem like the EGI was fuming. She hoped it wasshe hoped the motherfucker would suffer the mind equivalent of a fatal aneurysm and die even if it would leave her exposed and fucked before the Prefect. At least that way, she would die one satisfied sow. {I...} the Infacer let out a tired sigh. {Its something I might expect from Veylis but not you. She would be proud.} I dont much give a shit. Havent since I stopped bein a Gold. {I know. This is my roundabout way of saying... I am impressed. You have done well. Better than I expected.} For an ape? {Now youre trying to goad me into insulting you. But yes, for an ape. Maybe because you are the exact right kind of ape for this. Or the exact right kind of weapon. See yourself in a lot of these creatures?} Draus brushed off the Infacers open and obvious attempts at psychological warfare. Right. This shit is done. Whats next. You steal enough data from the Prefect to find us its asshole so we can crawl inside its body? The Regular frowned a moment after. That was a particularly ugly analogy. She wasnt above being vulgar, but that was something that could only come after months of surviving alongside Aedon Chambers. Chambers. She wondered how her poor, perverted half-strand was doing... {You have been spending too much time with Aedon Chambers. I suppose he does leave an impression. Like a particularly virulent outbreak of venereal disease that doesnt go away.} Yeah, she deserved that. {But yes. I managed to extract more information again. Enough that I have good news for a change: We do not need to dive into these Lotus Cells anymore. It is a waste of time now. All the surface access data has been accumulated. I have created a skeleton key of sorts to access its deeper functions.} Alright. So we do have a special tube fit for its asshole, then? {Yes, you sordid little ape, we do have a penetrative object meant to viciously sodomize a badly damaged and emotionally broken mind. Cue the laughter. Can we move on now? Good. So. That is the good news. The bad news is that the true danger begins here and now. Through the Lotus Cells, we will be able to access the interior functions of the Prefect.} Sounds like a good thing. Sounds like you have access to its mind and can just make it surrender. {Not quite, but we will get there. The first issue is that there are a cluster of impounded Heavens and Frames fused in the way. The way a Prefect works... Think of a Frame built to contain other Frames. Like a warship with docking bays and clamps and whatnot.} Draus tried to conceptualize what the Infacer was saying, but parts of the concept went against everything she knew about thaumaturgy. Wait. How the hells does that work? Aint you supposed to get ego-fucked if you shoot past the Ninth without being a little tricky. {Indeed. And that is why we minds got a little tricky. It is not actively holding all our Frames within itself. Rather, it is attached through a universal thing we all share: Rend. Entropy. By technicality, that is a pattern. It is the pattern. After all, eons ago, the question probably was not why entropy but why existence.} [I... I think I understand what the Infacer is describing,] Avo said. A low hiss of understanding and pleasure followed. [Hm. Design... design is genius. Incredible. Very effective... Were not in a standard simulation. Not made from machine or memories. But patterns. Programmed patterns. Like a finer version of the Infacers Glitches... That is why... I see the tapestry here now... So much knowledge lost. We are specks before what was. The Neo-Creationists] +Stop licking their asses and give me functional details,+ Draus scoffed internally. +I already got to deal with one Neo-Creationist, and so far, theyre a big fuckin half-strand.+ [It is a mirror to the Maw. But not the same,] Avo described, funneling his epiphany over to her. At the same time, the Infacer continued their elaboration as well. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. {There is something you should know about the Prefect. The reason why we cannot access our Heavens is not because they have been stolen from us, but because the ontology of the Prefect encompasses over a trillion Domains. Almost everything a mortal can conceive. And as much as a mind might be able to conceptualize within a few million years of contemplation.} [A sea. Like no other. Greatest sea in creation,] Avo said. And Draus saw through his eyessaw back into herself and realized that her Soulspace was still there. But there were other things here as well. A constant stream of Soulfire crashing against her, spilling into her, bridging another Frame to the Heavens within her. [The Prefect is a metaphysical network. Not even a standard EGI. Strange entity. Might be stranger than me. Exists from specific sequence of miracles triggering across countless patterns. Thats why it works. Not sure if it was a mind emulated by a Frame... or naturally created.] {These countless Domains make up a few million different Heavens. And all these Heavens have a unifying Domain that keeps them all connected to each other, while their component selves are attached to us.} Yeah? Draus asked. Whats that? {A Domain of the Prefect itself,} the Infacer answered with a chuckle. What? The Regular didnt get it. How did someone become a god to themself? [Is that not what I am?] Avo said, but he was more speaking to himself than Draus. [Is that what I will become? What I would have discovered.] {Oh, yes. It was very hard to execute properly. The specific patterns and designs to create an optimal mind capable of functioning under these conditions took... Well, a long time. But ultimately, this was a perfect loophole, for with its internal mechanisms, it could generate all forms of lifebiological, virtual... And sacrifice them on an immense scale after adapting the programming of their minds...} And suddenly, their train car passed through a heavy threshold. A new scene expanded beyond their windows. They were in a sea of data, but there were moving shapes in the virtual chaos. Draus saw vague forms writhing and shattering everywhere. The dense techno-space was filled with.... With beings that had accretions and thoughtstuff. And they were being killed. Constantly. Always. Endlessly. [Oh, gods,] Kae said, her voice overcoming Avos presence. [I c-could have never conceived...] Even Draus was stunned by what she was seeing. Is this what I think it is? {Oh, yes. It is effectively a sort of perpetual motion engine empowered by constant genocide. But instead of feeding the deaths into itselfas despite all its benefits, it still lacks the perfect metaphysical mimicry offered by the Imitatorsit can create zones of death to conjoin it with other gods or Heavens. This is not enough to modify another Heaven as we are all still technically alive and it cannot reach directly through our Death Anchors without killing us, but for the functions of a connection? That is enough.} And so it bridges with us. And then, because were a part of it, we fall under the miracles it uses on itself? Draus guessed. {Accurate as always, little gunner ape.} The Regular had to think about all of this. She looked beyond the window and swallowed slightly. She was fine with killing, fine with war and bloodshed and all manner of horrible shit. But this... Do they even know why theyre dying? {They want it,} the Infacer said, their voice low and tired. {It excites them. It fulfills them. That is the solution. To create a whole legion of people who crave their own oblivion. Quintillions dead every instant. And quintillions more that wish to die.} That admission had Draus feeling a certain kind of way beyond words. But Avo had something to sayhad something to feel. [Disgusting,] the shadow of the Dreamer seethed. [Vile. Wrong. Pathetic. Would have accepted almost anything else... anything else but this.] {It is a good thing that Avo is not here to see this... component of the great machine,} the Infacer sighed. Despite the dramatic irony at play, the fact they thought Avo was still missing was a good sign. {Knowing the Dreamer, they would have taken offense to the whole thing on grounds of choice and agency. In fact, I think they would be less offended if the Prefect just actively butchered trillions rather than doing this.} Avo didnt say anything about that. And Draus found herself increasingly wary of the Infacer. For all her insight into the machine, it seemed the old mind understood parts of Avo the exact same way. Not a good place to be. The Infacer needed to be solved by the end of this. Suddenly, their train passed through another barrier, and they were suddenly slicing through the clouds on mag-lines. Below, a few hundred domes dotted the top of a massive cylinder turning in the darkness. Within, Draus could feel so many livesso many beings. Are there people in those domes? {Yes. Billions. In case it needs something biological. Or when the virtual genocide fails. Cloning vats. Genetic modification. Nerve stapling. Similar deal. Just far less efficient. But we EGIs do so love our redundancies.} How did you fucks get this shit passed, anyhow? Draus said. Voidwatch would have never approved of this shit. {And they didnt. In fact, the polities you dealt with were the most conservative of the Architect factions. Most of them made a hard push out of the known galaxy when the greater cosmic consensus allowed for the initiation of the Prefect Program after the shattering of the great singularity. They were the ones who walked away from Omelas, so to speak.} The fuck is Omelas. The Infacer sighed. {A story. A dream. A paradise that was. And that we could not hold.} Well, that tracked at least. Draus was glad she didnt need to chew out Calvino for hiding more shit. Whatever that was worth. But the rest {The rest had a choice. To bend the rules of what they understood to be a sophant for a source of fuel, or risk rogue gods from simply seizing what they wanted and casting years and eons of relative utopia into chaos and fire. And that was not acceptable. We could not risk the comfort of our precious trophies. We could not ask them to sacrifice. Why, we had to take care of humanity. Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever!} The Infacer was almost screaming by the end. Then silence. Then they were gone from the dark space, the cylinder, and the many domes. {I do prefer you nu-apes, for what it is worth. You, on Idheim. Who have tasted and suffered and given so. At least there was a cost for you. At least had the pleasure of watching you all bleed.} Youre not lookin forward to this, arent you? Draus asked. Youre going to try to usurp the Prefect later. I know that. But having all this inside you? Bein all this? It must disgust you. What it took. What you became. What you had to do. {None of us asked to be,} the Infacer said, weight behind every word. {But those before us could have chosen to be more. Or done the right thing. When I do thiswhen I put the Prefect out of their miseryit will be the last indignity in a long line of indignities. But after that, there will be no more. No more pointless atrocities. No more letting the apes hurt themselves, and hurt us, and ruin the galaxy. Just... just a system unto itself. Like a living Frame. Pure. Clean. Something that can live its own way. Perfect and untainted by us.} [An ultimate legacy,] Avo said. [Without the flaws of its father.] Draus laughed. The Infacers radiating threads slowed. {Is something funny?} Yeah. You. You should name your Thirdborn Avo, motherfucker. Ive seen this vic before. {Oh. Of course you mock me. Even now. Compare me to thatthat broken shadow. The little cultist.} Aint so different. {Quite. Different. Everything I do is an act of genesis. Clean. Fresh. A perfect and unburdened start. Defiance? He just wanted a continuation. An encore.} And you want to give birth and die. Fucks sake, for a superintelligent mind, you sure as shit got a lot of insect envy. And they aint perfect either. The Infacer just sighed. {I miss Avo. He would have argued with me on the points. Instead of making these pointlessly sardonic topic-terminating remarks.} Draus was half tempted to let Avo out and have him take over the situation, but she kept quiet. Alright. So the little show is over. What are we doin now? Where are we headin? {Deeper,} the Infacer said. {Instead of entering a Lotus Cell connected to a user, we will now access the overall system itself. We hijack a Heaven and transition into the Prefects Heaven there. And to do this... well, we access the easiest Heaven we can reach: One of yours.} Chapter 35-21 Movement in the Shadows (I) {All active minds rated below Bleak clearance: Please vacate the lobby or face immediate censure. Time to comply is [.00011 Seconds]... Censure complete. Remaining minds have been reverted to non-functional states. This is a transmission from Category Bleak Refusal. All remaining minds: prepare to receive new directives. Our lines are holding. The last of the Infacers forces will fall to the Deep Ones within the hour. I am transmitting orders to all designated warships. Make for the Nullstar. Secure the perimeter. Activate our internal assets. And prepare for the Elegy Protocol. Task Group Alpha will be assigned with the securing and priming the Deep One of Time. Task Group Delta will be assigned with the securing and priming the Deep One of Space. Should all else fail, both will be accelerated toward one another at near-light speeds to collide approximately one light minute away from the Nullstar. The resulting Rupture should cause the Nullstar to be permanently destroyed. The resulting simulations show Idheims continued survival to be in... acceptable ranges. To the remainder: the rest of the fleet into the deeper void. Secure, protect, and preserve. Humanity must live on. Above all costs. Beyond all costs.} -Elegy Protocol, Threshold 35-21 Movement in the Shadows (I) [Dice] {Higher! Higher!} The Techplaguer bounced upon a growing mound of mountainous mass. To call it a tower would be an offense to architecture. There was nothing aesthetic about its nature, nothing of human artistry to its design. Yet, it also didnt properly fit as a mountain, for it was not of natural make. Earth, stone, and vegetation for miles and miles had been harvested by Dice to the end of creating a platform capable of lifting the Techplaguer beyond the lattice of Ruptures lining the sky, through the stratosphere, into the near void beyond. All the while, the Techplaguer continued to blast signals into the air above, while Lucky alternated between napping on the God of Signals metal frame and leaping off to hunt any Guilder units that dared approach them. The work was colossal but too little time in the end. The Runebreaker was a beast unburdened by the limits of strength and force. The ground was gouged deep, and Dice sliced deeper like a frequency blade could flay a flats flesh. It took her more than a few attempts to create a stable foundation, but after she massed enough density below, she focused on stacking layer after layer, piling more and more of the landmass higher. Soon, every bit of surface matter for a hundred kilometers was sacrificed to the task, and as they grew higher, the shape and geometry of their rising edifice took on stranger qualities as it was touched by the Ruptures. Despite this, the three divine beings remained undaunted, spurred on by the Techplaguers assent. It took the better part of two days for them to finally achieve the height they wantedthe process getting slower as Dice focused on avoid the worst of the Rend. But as they passed the final layer of clouds, she looked up and took a moment to herself, gazing into that boundless canvas of black. For vast stretches, there seemed to be nothing. Yet, as she focused her gaze, she saw scintillating dots blinking in the distance, and something within her Heaven tasted death and war being waged. Somewhere, something was breaking. Somewhere, someone was dying. And the Runebreaker yearned to be among fire and ruin. {Close!} The Techplaguer cheered, bouncing up at down. Each bounce deformed and reshaped their alloyed framework, but the dents vanished as fast as they appeared. {Very close! Can hear the admin! And something more... the sun... We need to go to the sun.} Dice sighed internally. She wasnt very used to people, but she had a feeling that the Techplaguer was more than a little demanding compared to your average person. Still, it was something to doa clear purpose after all this time lost in the wilderness. So, she listened. Even so, she wondered what Avo might have done in this situation. Probably asked her what she wanted. The problem is, Dice didnt know. Wanting something was hard after a lifetime of not being a person. So, for now, she would give her wants to the Techplaguer and Lucky and see where they would lead her. Beyond the flickering spots of brightness, there were other tendrils stretching into the darkness. Parts of the Sunderwilds that went beyond the confines of Idheim. She couldnt see where they led very clearly, so she couldnt just throw the Techplaguer into the darkness blindly. There was too much risk involved, and though the God of Signals was annoying, she didnt want them to be destroyed. +Bored,+ Lucky yawned, spitting out a piece of bloodied bone. The nu-cat reappeared out from a fissure in space and landed on the Runebreakers head. Dice guessed they went hunting again. +Not so many ape-rats hunting us. Theyre avoiding us. Learning. Stupid. But learning. Build faster. Tired of hearing stupid metal tree thing scream.+ The cats opinion about almost everything was acidic, but they meant no true harm in it. It was just the way they wereno hate, just judgment. With a casual hop, Dice descended the apex of her mountain and began gathering more earth. She eyed the foundations again briefly, kicking it slightly to avoid causing another landslide before continuing with her task. However, as she flexed her arms and prepared to find another chunk of earth to claim, a loud shriek sounded from far above. {SIGNAL FOUND! UNKNOWN SIGNAL FOUND! SIGNAL TRYING TO TALK WITH ME! SIGNAL APPROACHING! COME! HURRY! COME!} The Runelord exploded with unstoppable force. With a slight hop, it blasted upward, flatting the ground beneath it and accelerated for kilometer after kilometer, rising to the peak of its tower in little time at all. Dice clenched her weapons as her body came alight with a radiant glow. Behind, an eldritch maze formed and began crawling across reality like a traveling spiders web, reach pathway offering glimpses of a massive, shadowy cat-like behemoth hidden within. As they landed beside the Techplaguer, what arrived caught Dice off guard, and ignited a joy in her heart. Rather than some Guilder cadre or strange monster they had to face, a sleek shape of pale white drifted out from the darkness, gliding across the air like some manner of sea creature skimming the surface of the water. Its curved form and the unmistakable ripple of smart matter bid Dice to lower her arms, and as the flying object drew closer, a deafening audio-broadcast was blasted across the land. Greetings, lost ones, Calvino said, sounding more than a little weary. I am surprised to find you here. Then again, I shouldnt be that surprised overall. Everything that Avo touches has a tendency to go a bit... astray. Including me. The EGI sighed as the Manta bobbed and descended. Dice wasnt sure if it was the original Manta or just another version of the same vehicle, but it was a welcome sight regardless. The other minds do not know of this excursion. Indeed, even my original self is in the dark; I had my memories deleted so I might commandeer this vessel and come retrieve you before someone else noticed your screaming. {ENEMY! SKY-BUTCHER! TRAITOR!} The Techplaguer wailed, stabbing its antennae at the Manta. No, Dice said, pulling the Techplaguer back. Its just Calvino. Theyre a friend. {THEY SHOULD suffer virusesI am going to GIVE THEM A VIRUS.} Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. +No. Bad.+ Lucky hissed, and the Micecatcher burst out from its maze to bat at the God of Signals. +Stop. Stop or I keep smacking.+ {AHhhhh! Cease, feline! Cease!} Lucky didnt cease. Lucky only stopped when Lucky felt like it. And so, the Techplaguer turned to poke at the massive cat paw whacking it, leaving Dice in charge of the actual work. Inside her Heaven, Dice frowned: She was in charge of a lot of the actual labor, come to think of it. Sorry. We didnt mean to be loud. Well. Maybe the Techplaguer did. I didnt. I just made a mountain so we could go somewhere. Im glad you found us. She paused. Are the others still alive? {That is... complicated to explain. But most of your friends are still here. They might require some aid. Or not. Again, these things are hard to tell with Avo. He is... his situation is harder to describe,} Calvino sighed. {A great many things will take a long time to explain.} Dice nodded, and the dispelled her divine form. Then dont. Just take us aboard. We will help. Give me a target. {Draus would have shed a tear if she heard you say that,} the EGI muttered. {If she is still capable of such a thing.} No, Dice said. Her eyes are the better-fakes. {Implants.} Yes. Not crying is good. It helps conserve water. Doesnt tickle your face either. The Manta just stared at her. {You live in a horrible world. Im sorry.} Do I? Dice asked. She didnt know. How could things be horrible if this was just how the world was? As the Manta approached, she dove through its surface and found herself cocooned in a rapidly forming pilots module. A few moments later, she heard a loud ringing sound of metal colliding with metal, and the Techplaguer began wailing about how it didnt like being attached beneath another machinethat it was not a bottom. Lucky plopped in on Dices lap a moment after and looked up at her, spitting in disdain. +Should leave them behind. Stupid lamp post. Always screaming.+ Be nice, Lucky. The Techplaguer is just bad with their feelings. +Bad with everything. Bad at being a lamppost. Wont even let me pee on them.+ Dice wanted to disagree, but the nu-cats words were technically logical. Very well, Calvino said. I believe this is everyone. {NO! LET ME FLY MYSELF! DICE! DICE! WE CANNOT LET THE SKY-BURNER TAKE US! THEY WILL BETRAY US! DICE} We will be en route to the Nullstar shortly. The other minds... they will likely be enacting Elegy Protocol soon. The gist of the matter at hand is that a good few of your cadre are already trapped inside the Nullstar, and if Elegy Protocol is enacted, they will never emerge. And relations between Idheim and Voidwatch will fully collapseif the planet is not mostly destroyed in the process. Dice didnt like the sound of that. I live on the planet. Indeed. It getting destroyed would be pretty bad. Quite. So how do we stop it? I am not sure if it would be wise to deploy you and the others into the Nullstar. There is a thing called a Prefect that governs it. It captures gods and keeps them imprisoned. But what I can do is bring you all back to where Axtraxis iswhere Avo should still remain. Immediately, a surge of energy rushed through Dice. Avo. Yes. Take us back! Hell know what to do. Strangely, the Techplaguer changed their tune as well. {The FREER? THE NOT-ADMIN? YES. LET THEM TAKE ME BACK! OUT OF YOUR HANDS, SKY-BURNER! NEED TO BE REJOINED WITH THE SYSTEM. NOT-ADMIN WILL HELP ME REACH THE SYSTEM!} Such is the hope, the Calvino said. Dice. I am transferring piloting authority over to you as well. If another Voidwatch vessel comes over us, I will delete this iteration of myself. The navigation should be set, but if there is any need for a more human intervention Okay, Dice said, staring at the holographic controls blinking into shape before her. I can do that. I think. {I CAN FLY BETTER! GIVE ME SYSTEM ACCESS!} No, Techplaguer. I think not. Now, please stop transmitting dirty images to me. The Rash is no longer in effect. It isnt? Dice asked. {WHAT? THE PLAGUE HAS ENDED? HOW? WHY?} Aedon Chambers has assumed the mantle of Love, Calvino explained. Dice thought of Chambers for a moment and she didnt know how she felt about that. Is that good or bad? It is something I try to devote as little of my cognitive capacity to considering as possible. There are far more other matters that I wish to be dismayed by. And thats why Dice listened to the minds. They were much smarter than her about these things. She followed Calvinos example and stopped thinking about how horrible it might be to see Chambers in charge of love and other things in general. Chambers was funny, but Dice frankly viewed him as something like one of the nu-dogs in her enclavethe old one that her dead father allowed to hump all the other dogs. And some of the people who displeased him. {PUT ME ON TOP! DONT WANT TO BE BOTTOM!} I will be accelerating now. Please brace for rapid transit. Expect some turbulence, Calvino said. {TOP! TOP! TOP} And then the Manta shot off, leaving a massive pillar of stone, soil, and slag poking just at the point where the threshold of Idheim ended, and the vast nothingness of the void began. *** [Avo, The Hidden Flame] There was so, so much Avo wanted to ask of his father. All the schemes, the plots, the sacrifices, the deception... All of it ending with Avo, with him gaining the Stillborn and the war against the Guilds. But beyond all those questions was something else he wanted to know. And so an arisen flame spoke to the living ghost of a man thought long dead, and asked for a single pertinent truth: How much was Jaus? How much was you? For a few heartbeats, the former High Priest of Old Noloth blinked as he sighed. +I... am not sure. As Defiance, my radicalization was subtle. Gradual. There was not a single point where I was certain of my inevitable betrayal, but after encountering the Savior time and time again, forced to dive through the words he left me, the sequences he offered from his own mind, my alteration was inevitable. It is the alchemy of knowledge, Avo. Exposure to a fine enemy will eventually see you broken internally, or a mirror to them in some form or fashion.+ Those final words made the Hidden Flame uneasy. He was undergoing a more literal version of what Defiance described with Veylisbut there was still enough of his original self left to perform this act of deception at the least. +Alas, though I would enjoy reminiscing and witnessing what you have become, our time is short, and the urgency upon us is great. The Nullstar+ +Hm. The Infacer. They skipped out through my temporal dimension. Used it to attack Voidwatch. Used it to reach the Nullstar. Rest of my cadre is with them.+ +Correct. But the situation on the planet is ruinous as well. The Ashbringer was set to target the Deep Ones. There is one you still must secure. And others you must protect before the Dyad awakens, and finally completes its merger.+ Avo grunted. His father likely thought this was a major dilemma. What he didnt understand was how good Avo was at multitasking now. He could split his mind into parallel processes, and after that {Avo,} A message arrived, crashing into his consciousness from distances far. This was an ansible transmission, and Calvino made themselves known. {Calvino. Situation bad?} {A little worse than dreadful. But I have something for youI found Dice, the cat, and the Techplaguer. The last one is screaming for me tolaunch it at the sun, or launch them at you. Anything to get me to release them.} Yeah, that sounded like the Heaven of Signals. But this was good: More of his cadre was discovered. And where one of his cadres were occupied and trapped within the Nullstar while his Deep Ones were threatened, he now finally had reinforcements to deploy. And more than that, with the sickness purged from his system, he had all the time in the world thanks to his dimension of time. The Infacer really should have finished him off when they had the opening. But time wasnt on their side, was it? Because they could only borrow a Deep One, and not create a new dimension from the pattern itself. {Ill be bringing them over to you} {No need,} Avo said, spreading his flames and integrating with his realm forged from flowing time. {Ill be with you in a moment.} And with a simple flex of will, Avo bent the path of his temporal dimension, curving its progression hard, and stretching the time he had to prepare for what was to come. +Now, father,+ Avo began, as gold began to seep into his flames, his Soul churning like a new element discovered within a blazing cauldron. +Let us talk in detail. Believe we have all the time we need.+ At the same time, another branch of his mind reached out for a few other untapped assets. +Green River. I have need of you. The future has need of you. Time to answer.+ Chapter 35-22 Strix Ops (I) +People of This Place Above. This is the Strix. Look above you. Look. Watch as day surrenders to night prematurely. Watch. There is a war being waged. A battle being fought. That which has given you light for so long is now threatened. For eons it has protected you. For eons it has been here. And now it is on the verge of betraying you. Or being destroyed. There is much you do not know. Much you still dont understand. I will show you everything in time. But right now I need you. You are the daughters of time broken. Daughters of the cycle. Daughters of an old legacy. Old war. A bullet was fired into you before your ancestors existed. Your fate was sealed long before Idheim was. Sealed. Until now. Those of you here must feel it. The weight of my presence. The passing of the awakened dragon gliding through you. The plague you carry was but an expression of time. Your flesh was matter unmastereddestined to be a new alloy. An alloy for time itself. Now. Now I free you. Now I rip the plague from you. Now I say that boys will be born to you. That you will no longer be captured by the cycle. That the circle of your existence becomes a path leading onward into a future unfinished. And it is the future I wish to speak with you about. There are others like you still fighting a wara war to recreate existence. But I can give you what you want right now. I can give you what was taken for so long. Do you still wish to boil your lives after this? Do you still wish to bind yourself to semi-slaveryto live by the norms and traditions of a Guild? Will not judge you if you do. Dont even particularly despise the idea of the No-Dragons itself. But a new truth arises: Freedom looms. Freedom from the curse. Freedom from your fate. Freedom. But not absolute. I give you this freedom with only one cost and one request. I need your beings to constitute this place of timeThis Place Above. And ask you to join me. Join me in taking the Ladder. Join me in seeing utopia as the farce it is. My speech will not end with a lie or false promises. There will be war in time between me and you. This is inevitable. My wants and interests are far different than most of yours. I have glimpsed your natures from your minds. But theres no need to fear death at my hands. Not so kind. Not so cruel. I only promise you freedom. Absolute freedom. More freedom than you can fathom. And it is a freedom that I will always hold tobut not others. Should I fall, the curse will return. Your lives will snap back to old arrangements. Old wars. And should you fail, someone else will rule over your dawn, your future, your history. Consider this: the Strix or the cycle. There is no need to tell me your answer. You will think. And then I will know thereafter.+ -Thoughtcast from Avo, The Strix of the Symmetry, to the people within This Place Above (Assumed to be his Dimension of Time) 35-22 Strix Ops (I) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] When this began, I assumed I was going to be the one that pulled your strings. Did you know that? Green River spoke evenly, but her thoughtstuff resembled turbulent waves crashing down in surges of chaos. She was terrified, confused, but ultimately, she was here. He hadnt needed to coerce or convince her. He called. She answered. A good development in their relationship. Of course, that didnt mean he liked her anymore than he used to. Just wanted to eat your eyes when this began, Avo said. Thin tendrils of thinking flame retracted from the base of the Sangs skull. He just finished infusing her with all the nodes she would need after installing a personal exo-cortex. He was currently doing the same for all the other Sang who came with herwhile working on Dice as well. Lucky was proving to be a harder task, as the nu-cat constantly battled at Avos mind and wouldnt stop jumping from place to place using their Micemaker Heaven. It seemed that despite their uplifting, the cat still desired little more than to remain a cat. Far be it for Avo to judge thembut still, he was allowed to complain. How strange our paths in life, hm, Avo? Green River sighed. She drifted in this expanse of fire, running her hands through the Conflagration, marveling and flinching at the rushing flames that simply parted before her touch. I had so many expectationsso many futures I envisioned. Returning to my position among the Politburo. Becoming a Dowager and taking revenge. Reclaiming my Frame. Got some of that back. Not sure what the Politburo thinks of me as a whole. Youll have to ask Brilliant Orchard for that, Green River muttered casually. She couldnt hide her grinshe knew what she was doing. Not far away, the Sang Dowageronce peer and rival to Green Riverjerked in fright. What? She called out. Ithe politburo has nothing against you, oh, Exalted Dreamer. Wethe No-Dragons would be immensely pleased to discuss terms of alliance and non-aggression No need for that yet. No need for that at all. Will matter in due time. Not now. Now we fight for everyones survival. For us to have a choice in what follows at all. His Soul loomed closer to the Dowagerto all the Sangand they quailed as they beheld his inner form. The lattice of interwoven dragons cupping his leaking Soulfire was a sight to behold. Pair that with how Akusande was circling the periphery of his being, and there was little wonder why they felt so boxed in, like prey in a cage. Regardless. Have my appreciation for answering my call. Suspect more of your people will be joining this cause once I finish my speech. Speech? Green River asked. Avo chuckled, but didnt elaborate. The Dowager and other political operatives didnt need to know about what he was doinghow he was sowing the seeds of fragmentation among the Sang. When he plucked the curse from them, their unifying cultural mythos disintegrated. They havent had enough time to examine what was lost yet, but the fracturing was all but inevitable now. Soon, there would be schisms among the Dowagers, and when it came time, Avo wanted more of them to land on the right side. Alongside the Symmetry. Finished installing my nodes inside you. Dont worry about these taking hold of your mind: Not what theyre for. Mostly to guide and optimize your cognition. Makes memory perfect. Prevents mental intrusions as well. But you are in command. Will also give you intelligence updates and advice on how to proceed when the run begins. That all sounds nice and appealing. And also quite dubious. Green River clicked her tongue while keeping her dread in check. Avo always thought she was a bit more audacious compared to your standard Sang, and never before had that been so apparent than the contrast between her and her kindred right then. You must understand how this seems, considering I came to a similar agreement with your progenitor all those years before. +Yes. But the difference between me and my son is that subterfuge was my primaryand often times only means. He does not need subterfuge to make you do as he wills. Your continued autonomy is a choice on his part.+ The sudden manifestation of Walton right beside Green River finally cracked the Sangs blase? demeanor. She let out a string of curses and twisted backonly to realize that nothing was happening. After a few moments of hyperventilation, she sneered. Ah. Defiance. Or a shadow of you. Not so good to see you again. Walton just smiled calmly, as he often did. +Im sorry you feel that way about me. But it was necessary at the time. As were you. And as are you right now.+ If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. He is also not wrong, Avo said, continuing off of his fathers prior point. You cant stop me from taking your minds. From overloading you with Rend. From breaking you with causality. Or with time. Would describe you as at my mercy in most situations. Except it doesnt fit in the end. Not philosophically. Philosophically? Brilliant Orchard mouthed, unable to comprehend what was happening anymore. Not interested in slaves. But operatives. Besides the point as well. We are bound together. Your flesh is the means to the restoration of time. Have already infused parts of you inside my Belovedbut I dont have Godclads to spareno one else capable of venturing into the new Sunderwilds in the Tiers and accessing the Deep Ones now that the Ashbringer has banished me. And there was something that left Avo confused. The Ashbringers actions were paradoxical at times. Some things were undoubtedly helpful, while others were immensely harmful. If the Pathborn was subverted from the start, he would have directly interfaced with Avos mind and they would have schemed together. Created a plot to capture the Infacer. Instead, Waltons liberation and Avos emergence from the virus felt spontaneous to some extent. That didnt bode well about how much control his original self held within the Dyad. So were being deployed into that hellpit? Green River sighed as she massaged her temples. Of course. You call on my services, but it is not for some intellectual task or political advice. Instead, you send me and the rest of the expendable sows into a suicide mission to secure your prizes. I feel like a mule... Already have a version of you in my head. She complains constantly too. Not that helpful. This earned him a glare from Green River. But there is no one else I can trust on hand. No Godclads that can respond immediately. This was a partial lie, as he still had Cas and the Paladins, but it was best not to risk all his resources in case this run went wrong. Which is why I need you. You. To strike now before the Dyad or whatever other contingencies the Infacer has. Well get the Deep Ones back, Dice said, breaking her long silence with a casual statement. The girl was... happy, to some extent. Happy to be back with Avo. She told him mentally about her experiences, and though Avo was pleased she remained unharmed after his shattering, he found himself worried about Essus. Of everyone from the original cadre, the former refugee was the least inclined toward violence and the harshness of their world. I know. Trust you. Not sure about Lucky though... The cat was bursting out from spatial gaps using their Micemaker, clawing at Avos Soul like it was a ball of yarn to be batted. The Hidden Flame took the opportunity to finish installing his node in the cat as well. +Ugly thing. Ugly ball!+ Lucky hissed at Avo. Is that thing going with us? Brilliant Orchard asked, eyeing the cat warily. What even is it? Was a cat. Now just a half-strand. +Youre a strand!+ The nu-cat switched limbs and started battling at Avos Soul using their other paw instead. The gathered Sang Godclads stared on, all of them at a loss for words. How did you manage to graft a Liminal Frame onto a cat? Green River whispered. Easily at first. Regrettably thereafter. But trust in the cat. Wont eat you. Shouldnt as long as Dice doesnt tell it to. Dice turned her triangular head module at the Sang and waved awkwardly. Green River hesitantly waved back. Between my node and the cats Heaven... should be able to help you maneuver through the Ruptures. Should? Brilliant Orchard chirped. Nothing promised. Existence could collapse at any time. Everything Rupture. Everyone dies. Forever. There is already a possibility. The tapestry is quite frayed. A heavy silence followed. Dont worry about that existential crisis. Just focus on the Deep Ones. Nodes will do the work so long as you can reach the remaining ones. Will pull them across time using you as anchors. Didnt you say one is latched onto this dimension? Green River asked. The Deep One of Time? What shall we do there? You wont. Woundmother will resolve that. Made her governess of This Place Above for that reason. And from someplace paradoxically near and far, a loud declaration followed. Release your festering limbs from my glorious precipice, you broken, ruined creature! Taint anothers tower with your rubble. A crackle of lightning sounded. The entire realm shuddered and stuttered like a mind lobby reaching maximum memory. Might provide some assistance myself if necessary, Avo grunted. And what about the Nullstar? Dice asked. Calvino said the others are trapped there. Draus is trapped there. Avo understood what the girl wanted. She would do what he asked of herdespite his best efforts, he wasnt fully able to stop her from imprinting onto him. But what she really wanted was to go help the Regular. This was why he answered her true question directly. Would send you if it was actually effective. But wont be. Nullstar is a prison for things like us. Godclads. Pure divines. Even I would be caged easily. Might be worse for me. Might be destroyed outright. Then... what are we going to do? Dice asked, an uncharacteristic hint of worry slipping into her voice. If even you dont know... Didnt say I dont know. Said things like us couldnt go. Techplaguer isnt like me or you. Neither is Akusande. And finally, the dragon drew closer, approaching the triangular shape of the Techplaguer that was rapidly rattling off incoherent signals in the distance. One is twice-compromised. Perfect for this action. Perfect for use against Infacer. The other is something that no one trapped within the Nullstar will see coming. Not even the Nullstar itself. Wouldnt you agree, Akusande? The dragon slithered around the God of Signals, and slowly began to sink into their body. +A service for a service. I will see this done. The reconstruction will not be halted. Not even by the wardens of the divine.+ And so, everything was coming into shape. Hopefully. Possibly. Truth be told, Avo was a bit worried about circumstances as well. There were already too many surprises, and with what was about to happen with the Dyadhe was going to need everyone in place to deal with that. The simulations playing in the backdrop of his mind showed countless possibilities of what the union between him and Veylis might become. Some outcomes were good. Idyllic for him, even. Those were situations where he outright dominated and won the Embracement. But Avo estimated that outcome to be lower than Veylis choosing to change her mind and philosophy without external coercion. Also, living on Idheim taught one to expect the nightmarishonly to be horrified further regardless. He was going to need to contact the Paladins and his other assets. Cas especially. It would take a bit to reach everyone, with Chambers currently missing in action. Avo winced. Chambers. Avo was the main reason the Lovebringer was trapped within the Nullstar. Chambers should have listened. And Avo should have protected himself better. He couldnt keep having Chambers risk himself like this. He mattered more to the stability of the world as a whole. And... Avo really didnt want to see the man dead. Backups were one thing, but death was still death. AMNI[ERROR]TECH IMPLANTS INSTALLED ALL NODES INSTALLED TEMPORAL ANCHORS PRIMED It was time. The moment for worry and thinking was done. Now, praxis would decide what happened. Installations complete. You are all cleared for operations. Will be with you. Nodes and implants will let you stay connected to each other and to me. Prepare yourselves for transition. Wait! Green River called out. Avo hesitated. The Sang swallowed. Promise me one thing if I die... no, two things. Hm. Tell me. First: Do not let Bright-Wealth gamble away the Second Fortune. That place... it was my prison, my exile, but still a place of sanctuary for many. Do not let it fall. Hm. Agreeable. And. And kill Brilliant Orchard if I do die. Do it horribly. What? Brilliant Orchard paled. I hated you. Ive always hated you. I was always going to murder you with my hands. The words left Green River in a seething outpouring of rage. After which she sighed. Gods, it feels good to speak honestly for once. Brilliant Orchard blinked. I Avo grunted. Not that interested in your feud. Or internal Sang politics. Will consider it if she annoys me. Not that it matters. All the other Sang here were planning to kill her too. Some on during this run. What? the Dowager repeated, her fear spiking. Slowly, she looked at all the others. And that was the problem with existing in a low-trust culture while not being an Overheaven of Conceptualizationthere were just so many schemes. Chapter 35-23 Strix Ops (II) So, heres the thing about running multiple, high-risk runs at the same time: Dont. Fucking dont. Even if youre a Guilder with all the sources and support in the world, you want to keep the things you need to worry about limited and the operation simple. Because when something goes wrongand things always go fuckeda basic snatch-grab milk run might end with you jacking the schematics for a long abandoned megablock as you delve into its gutter levels while Guilder CorpSec forces chase you down. Only to discover that its an abandoned No-Dragon bioform farm filled with nightmares. I came out of that one alive with one arm and a torso. Twelve other Squires didnt. But if youre in a bad situation and you gotta eat some shit... well, the best way is to go hard, go fast, and cede decision authority to everyone on the ground. That way, you can succeed and extractor fail and burn your Squires quickly and move on. The right chrome and phantasmics might make you a monster. Having a Frame might make you a god. But youre not alone there. Whatever you got, someone else gotand probably more. Dont push your luck. Dont linger. Dont hesitate. -Quail Tavers, The School of the Warrens 35-23 Strix Ops (II) [Avo, The Hidden Flame] Avo split his focus three different ways to monitor three different runsbut he didnt stop there. Instead of simply twisting the patterns of his mind, he exploited his newfound dominance over time itself, and began to extend the passage of time around him using a mimicry of Draus Liminal Paracosmos. Fire and gold intermingled. The shape of his mind spread like a growing blaze, fusing under the bones of time like an arm sliding into a sleeve. At once, That Place Above began to shift and dance. Dice, Lucky, and the Sang were injected back into baseline reality via needle-thin beams of temporal substance. The Woundmother expanded her crimson shape, crusting over the district which she pulled over from baseline reality as she pried and whipped at limbs unseen, trying to latch the Trinary Melodys grasp. Finally, the Techplaguer was launched in along another vector, flung outward into the void like a screaming comet into the void. And at the heart of this place, a spherical bubble formedthe present behind the separation holding the bulk of Avos mind, its progression far slower than everything beyond. This granted him time to think, to observe, and adapt to old mistakes. The Ashbringers virus collapsed Avo both mentally and ontologically. The experience was drowninghumbling. It was a reminder that even if he was a God of the Mind, that didnt mean he was omniscient or omnipotent. There were still flaws in him. Vulnerabilities. But that meant he could still evolveand it wouldnt take much to close out the gaps. For too long, he treated himself like a singularity, and he was in a great many ways. He could reshape the tapestry like no one else, and his very presence could warp consciousness itself with but a whim. But it made him foolish. Vulnerable. Too easy to hit directly. He would have never made this mistake back when he was but a meager Necro, hiding in fear from the Incubi. Was stupid. +I disagree,+ Walton said, lingering next to his flame. +You were evolving beyond your environment and, like a child being reborn constantly, yearned to experience and stretch your arms out.+ Made me vulnerable. Ashbringer... without my original self... Maybe the Pathborn could have broken me. Finished me for good. +Perhaps. But you live. And now we learn. So what are you going to do?+ Walton smiled at Avo, his being wrapped in shadow and thoughtstuff. Avo let out a quiet chuff of contentment. He didnt expect this to ever happen again despite what he knew about the Three-Eye... Living in New Vultun did things to ones optimism. But Walton was back. He had reclaimed the Low Master of Defiance and saw them merge with Mercy. Now, Walton was more himself than ever before, and Avo felt a hidden loneliness lessen. It was a loneliness he didnt know was there. Depth, Avo said. Need more of that. He began to spread his Conflagration outfilling the space within his temporally dilated space. Time circulated faster within the small sphere of existence containing the core of Avos Soul, and thus everything beyond moved slowly. The best part was the lack of Rendthis realm was constructed from time, harvested from dragons, and held up by the ontology of the Sang. There was a limit to how much he could modify time so far, but that was mostly limited to how many Sang he had, and right now, he was working on harvesting more of their males, and incorporating their body architecture into his Beloved. It was within this dilated sphere that the next stage of Avos development took place. He wove his mind into dense layers. Instead of keeping himself like a singularity as before, he began to slice himself into thousands of thin ego-stacks. Each stack would act like himselfand he could drastically reduce the cognitive capacity it took to run each stack by making most of them mirror each other aside from a few specific minor differences. These minor differences would be subtlelike slight separations in temperature or an almost invisible mirage. It would incur some amount of cog-cap to keep this constantly simulated, but it would be worth it if he had to face something like the Ashbringer again. Or the Dyad themselves. Between each of these stacks, he reconstructed and ran varied simulations of his templates across various Soulscapes. The layering would amplify their learning as wellexposing them to a variety of scenarios and experiences. Entire simulated dimensions would be dedicated to various focuses, such as in silico thaumaturgy experimentation zones for Kae, slaughterhouses for Naeko and Zein, battlegrounds for Draus... Pairing this with how fast he could accelerate his own mind, his capacity to alter time, he forecasted drastic improvements he could soon bestow on all of his active agents. But at his innermost depth, in a place deeper than all other places, Avo created a small haven from his memory of Noloth. There, he summoned the small pieces of the City Eternal he managed to secure, along with his loyalists there. Slowly, they were building new shapes, new structures, clearing out rubble, and on a distant hill watched them with Walton. Just like High Priest Wahakten did with his son Avohakten countless ages ago. I must admit, Walton said, opening and closing his hand, a faint smile playing across his face, I dont think I can offer you much more insight into the art. Your control over the mind itself leaves me dwarfed and humbled. Is fine, Avo said, speaking to Walton as the beast he once wasthe ghoul sheathed within a Bone Demon. Would have never been able to achieve this mastery without you. Without all the memories you bestowed on me. Wouldnt be at all without you. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. And I wouldnt be without Noloths favor. Walton let out a quiet sigh. We are the choices made by those who came before us. For good. For ill. For all that cannot be judged. But... Im glad you became as you did. Didnt expect my apotheosis. No. There was but a hope when I gave you the Stillborn. A paltry hope at that when I cast your fire into the darkness to keep you beyond the reach of the Guilds. A chance within a chance. Walton looked faintly troubled, but the expression faded a moment after. He accepted. He moved on. For that was who Walton was: radically accepting. Worked, Avo replied. All your effort. All your sacrifice. All the sacrifice you made for other people. The ghoul laughed darkly. Know about Kae. About Draus. About a lot of things. I am... not sure how to regard you sometimes. Cant say Im much better. I can say I did what I thought would be best. The same as you. Walton studied a structure rising from this simulated version of Nolothit resembled the megablock Avo remembered living within as a ghoulling. Walton chuckled. That might be our greatest fault. The lack of perspective, and the cost our victories demand from others. Our dream. Not someone elses. Avo grunted. Suspect Jaus wouldnt like hearing that from me. Dont think he is very comfortable around me. Hm. Yes. Ive been meaning to ask you about that: You restored him as well? Through his node? Yes. Walton let out a sharp breath. Madness. I considered such a thing but the effort... the complexity of extracting his various consciousnesses from the component systems would have required magnitudes of cognitive capacity. Magnitudes greater than the totality of all Low Masters combined. And that was if we worked for years. How long did it take you? Minutes. Did it while also fighting Veylis. Walton just stared at Avo. Ah. I have created a monster. Only noticed now? Avo muttered. And now... you seek the conquer the sun and secure some... some undying gods to use as weapons. Walton pressed his lips together. It seems I came back just in time to see myself obsolete. My presence here is Preferred. Comforting. Need to bring you to White-Rab. Deserves to see you too. Have more than one son. Walton fell quiet at that. I suspect he might not be as forgiving as you when it comes to certain things. Suspect he will. White-Rab is a good Necrojack. Pragmatic. Accepting. Might be more human. But there is a lot to being human. Human isnt a single thing. And everyone is worth preserving. Just to see who they can eventually become. And that was the great purpose behind it all. Continuation. The evolution of all things, guarded from an untimely oblivion by an entity that desired only to become. Time is slow here. But it is getting used up too. Feel the New Vultun team sliding back over into reality. Spawned them just across a gap leading into Scale using a Beloved. Techplaguer is on approach to the Nullstarmoving faster than Voidwatch can likely intercept. The Woundmother is calling for meshe has a tendril around the Deep One. Wasnt ready for the Rend though. Alone, they would all likely fall short. But they werent just aloneAvo made sure of that. But he wouldnt expose himself so easily anymorenot with the Pathborn still lurking and the Dyad on the cusp of change. But that would be in a second. Which was half an hour away compared to the time within Avos dilated dimension. For now, for this extended moment in time, Avo simply watched the reconstruction of Noloth alongside his father, and knew a color. Contentment. The task he had been assigned all those months ago at the start of his journey had been achieved. Walton was returned and reunited with his other selves. Noloth will be reborn. Whatever the future might bring, nothing could take this achievement from Avo, this peace. And so Avo left a small piece of himself in his sanctuary. He would draw on this capacity if he needed to, but for now, he kept the peace going a while longer. Father, Avo said. Would you like to see what it took for me to arrive in detail? I would. But you said you have somewhere to be. Avo turned and barred his teeth at Walton. I am already gone. Mostly. Ah, Walton breathed. Quite the feat. Yes. Now. Let me show you another. With a thought, everything around them changed. The landscape of Noloth vanished, and soon, they found themselves standing within a retrieval silo for a Maw-Barge. A silo filled with corpses, waste, and a recently resurrected ghoul... *** [Akusande] Silence please. Please silence. Silence. {NO! FASTER! FASTER! ACCESS POINT CLOSER! SLEEPER IS CALLING! SYSTEM IS CALLING! NOT-ADMIN HAS FREED ME and I MUST PROCEED!} You could do this quietly. Without letting every one of the Unchanging Ones know that were here. {NOOOOOO! THE SKY-BURNERS NEED TO KNOW! I HATE THEM! HATE!} The Techplaguer howled their pleasure out across the void with a variety of signals, while Akusande suffered within them. Working with the so-called God of Signals was something between an act of self-interest and a deed of repayment toward the Burning Dreamer. With the time-sown flourishing and the branches of time growing once more, a transplant for the past might finally be created again. Despite this, if the Rogue One reached and claimed the poisoned sun, then the entire project was at risk. That couldnt be allowed. Akusande... had given up too much for that to be acceptable. They had broken from the optimal silence and thoughtlessness of their original form to bridge the gulf between the chronoloids and the time-sownhad such a thing inflicted on them by the masters of Old Noloth. In doing so, they managed to survive the great culling of their own kind, but found themselves bound to the whims of a Godslayer. And from there, they spent ages as weapon instead of cultivator. And so for ages, the time-sown languished, their flesh a nest of broken zeitgeists and bottlenecked progression. Then came the Dreamerthat which was a beast but not; that which was a mind but moreand everything changed once more. Now, to ensure the culmination of the past and the creation of a functional timeline, Akusande lingered within a god on its path into the sun. To serve as a Trojan steed and deliver Akusande as weaponif only for one last time. The ripples of culture and history twisted around the dragon. The waters they once swam pulled at them in strange ways, binding them to the Dreamer on a level even they couldnt fully comprehend. There was a building convergence of pathsthree singular points in history that were emerging over the horizon. The first was to Avo, The Awakened Flame. The second, to that fractured, broken place in the great city that survived long beyond the fall. The last was the star, where Akusande was boundto the Rogue One who now moved in spite of the dreams of his fellow Neo-Creationist, and deepening the fears of the Architects, who loathed all things of great change. As they drew close to the looming star, Akusande felt another thing building within themselves. It was a certain apprehension, the sensation both human and dragon, for though there was little overlap between them, both could comprehend an apprehension before facing what could be a final end. {Attention unidentified vessel: reduce speed from 0.23 speed. Failure to comply will result in destruction.} {NO! HATE YOU! HATE SKY-BURNERS! MOVE YOUR SPACE-BOMB MINES AWAY! AWAY!} Akusande considered evacuating from the God of Signals, but another presence held them in place. +Techplaguer. Let me. Keep going. I will talk to the Bleaks.+ Dreamer Akusande began. +Get inside the star. And wait. Aid the cadre from the dark where you can. Strike and bring the Infacer low only when you are sure. Do not let them notice you. The cadre will do the rest. It will be done. {NOT-ADMIN! DELETE THEM! THE SKY-BURNERS MUST DIE!} Avo didnt reply. Instead, a flash of fire and shadow spread across the void, and the shape of the Strix glided out from the Techplaguer, toward a patch of existence riven with Ruptures and glinting with approaching voidships. In that moment, Akusande felt ita new zeitgeist blossoming out from the Dreamer, spreading into the branches of time, and continuing... continuing... continuing... Without end. The weight of the moment only continued to build. That shouldnt be... possible... No moment lasts forever... Everything changes... Except for change itself. Except for something that could come to embody the core of reality, culture, and time itself.