Godclads

Calamity is the shape of our world. There are so many who wax about what was, about the order of the patterns, about how reality was once stable, but that no longer matters.

That was a world that belonged to a people of a bygone age, a kinder age, where things remained as they were, and the gods were little more than words and myth and feelings. We do not live in such an age. We are the fungi growing upon the corpse of what they left behind.

And so, we must adapt. The world moves in cycles, decay, then order, then decay again. And, to endure, to survive, we must act as the beasts of the Skuldvast. When the great winter comes, one must seek the caverns and crevices, to wait, to survive, to starve in a place without sense, until the madness subsides. And then, only then, as we have mastered both destruction and order, will we remain.

This is a different time. This is a broken age, and until we learn to be broken people, all we will serve as is food for Oblivion.

Understand that we owe it to those who come after, and to honor the blood and sacrifice of those who came before. To live is to triumph, and to master the death, to be bound to destruction, merge with it, is the final escape.

Salvation lies in ruin, and from it, may we rise evermore.

-Mother Winter of the Stormtree Longeyes

32-21

Rise from Ruin

A rending pang of pain shuddered through Green River's chest. It wasn't like a bullet penetrating her bones, shredding through skin and sinew, but more like something was tearing on the inside. Something at a fundamental level, finer than even the cells in her body. And she wasn’t the only one to suffer this pain.

All around her, other Sang cried out as well. Their limbs twitched. Heavy arms and chitinous legs crashed against the inside of the voidship’s cabin as the attack continued. The pain grew and grew until it felt like a pull, like a force was wrenching at their very chests.

Then, suddenly, it faded as fast as it came. Gone as if it had never been.

Green River let out a shuddering breath and blinked away tears. Beside her, a viewing interface captured the expanse of New Vultun as their vessel continued its climb into the void, bringing them toward the unfinished planetary ring that now served as Naeko’s stronghold.

The Substance was inching out with each passing second, growing like a stain. There wouldn’t be anything left of the Tiers before the week was over. By the end of this month, the anomalous growth would have waterfall down to the Warrens as well. But there was something else that drew her attention to its surface — a flash of gold amidst the ethereal chaos.

Something within its depths just broke.

“Did… did you feel that?” the Sang seated next to Green River—named Odd Moon of Line Su—asked her.

“I suspect everyone might have felt that,” Green River replied. Her fox-self whimpered as it curled tighter around her neck. There was something wrong with her blood, with the curse itself.

Ood Moon rubbed at her chest with three insectoid limbs. Her bio-rig resembled that of an ant, while her exposed face revealed her youth and vulnerability. She was supposed to be Green River’s partner for this diplomatic deployment. Her minder as well, if River had to guess. Dowager Brilliant Orchard was likely using her as a watcher for the other “emissaries” in the group.

Potential rivals and threats, Green River judged. She knew a few of them from her previously life, and more than a few were tied to the most recent attempt on Brilliant Orchard’s life. This was just the Dowager getting some problems out of the way, sending them in the Chief Paladin’s direction.

How very typical of her. Foolish as well.

Green River was going to request that she be assigned to this detail anyway. She had been at Scale, and right now, there were things she wanted to figure out. Mainly, whose Frame she currently had and what the ghoul’s plans were now.

“Felt like my heart was going to get pulled out of my chest,” one of the other emissaries grunted from a few seats up. A large holographic projected their estimated path to the planetary ring, and medical drones were pouring out from the surrounding smart matter. Not that they were going to be any use.

A Sang’s biology wasn’t something most people could mend easily. The curse left them untouched to most conventional diseases, capable of regenerating from almost any wound if they weren’t burned or dismembered, but it also prevented their flesh from accommodating coldtech. And it was that same curse that pulled at her senses now, that compelled her to look back at the planetary viewing screen right beside her.

Something was happening within the Substance. She knew it. This was more than just a feeling, more than intuition. Green River focused her gaze, and then she saw the calamity unfold. A massive tear curved out through the outside of the Substance, splitting through the ethereal surface with ease and sending billowing waves of Soulfire over the skies of the Warrens.

“Oh, what the fuck is happening now,” another emissary groaned.

Avo. Avo was likely happening now. She didn’t know what the ghoul was doing, she had no idea what he was planning, but he was behind this. Of that, she was certain.

A bad feeling calcified in her chest. With him came certain death, madness, and a conspiracy so chaotic that even she—a seasoned veteran of the bureaus, offices, and departments of the No-Dragons—couldn’t properly navigate. But despite this, he was the only reason she had a Frame, the only reason he was back on her path.

A path to revenge, to visit those who ensured her ousting, and to make sure she ended on the right side of the coming war.

And far below, more ruptures began to crawl across the surface of the megacity, spreading like a fractured mirror…

***

—[Avo, The Hidden Flame]—

The Sage closed his hand.

Zein struck back in a desperate gambit. Echoes spawned all around the Naeko of battlegroup 1, seeking to inflict a paradox, slashing with blades forged from peace, violence, war, and trauma to slice through the Sage and end in the vulnerable flames within. Yet, these blows never landed. In the same moment their cuts lashed out, a new megarupture formed over them, swallowing the wound that Zein left in a sunken valley of informational entropy.

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Understanding of relative distances vanished. The echoes’ strikes went wide, and their ability to continue operating collapsed immediately thereafter. The rupture trailed far and away to the Sage of the Sundered Mind, bringing the full weight of its ontology down to seize the moment from Zein.

Its lesser self continued squeezing through it all. As fingers of absolute force closed, Zein twitched and shuddered, straining with all her might, with every limb she possessed to defy her fate. But it was in vain. She was lightning and water lashing against the mountain that was Naeko, but now that he caught her, she was a sparrow in the hand of a behemoth, and there was only one fate that could follow.

Akusande, comparatively, was a still string amidst a collapsing realm of madness. The dragon looked to The Great Silence expectantly, and from its mind Avo could hear chiming bells of starved hope and yearning.

So close… Freedom…

The Sage grip tightened. Cracks spread along the surface of the dragon, its body, like fracturing glass. Inside, Zein’s midsection folded in with a sickening crunch. Blood gushed out from her every orifice, pouring forth from her ears, her eyes, her nose, her mouth. But through it all, she never stopped fighting, and never lost that grin of bloodlust.

“There will be another of me,” Zein said. “They will remember this, learn from this.”

“They might,” Avo and Naeko said in tandem. “But you won’t have the glaive anymore. And this version of you won’t be able to stop what is to follow.”

“Ah. A glorious victory,” Zein breathed. “Such a pity it will not win you the war. It is a tragedy, Plague. You turned out to be a magnificent player. But even a genius cannot win if the pieces are already stolen, and the outcomes are predetermined. Break the Substance if you will. The Arks will be theirs. They have prepared for this. Foreseen this.”

“Did they foresee me killing you?” Naeko growled.

“Did Veylis deliberately create a feeble version of Chambers to empower him further?” Avo prodded. “And are you saying these things of your own will? Or is this just a parody of you, Zein? A shadow they painted from your original self.”

At that, the ancient warrior finally fell silent. She raised her blades high again, but they began to snap and shatter one after another. Zein lowered her arm in resignation. The Sage’s fingers closed. The middle of her body imploded in a sphere of mangled gore. A death rattle left her with a sigh. “It was so magnificently fought, though.” Releasing her glaive, she looked up at her crumbling dragon. “Akusande. I will you to another. A finer hand awaits you. Go. Go and serve.”

The dragon’s reply came sonorous and heavy. “NO.”

Zein’s eye twitched. “Must every indignity come to greet this old woman at the point of her death? What do you mean ‘no’?”

Parts of Akusande broke away alongside the glaive, but Avo felt the dragon’s ontology grow evermore solid in contrast. Its manifested shell was crumbling into ruin in mirror of the glaive that bound it, in mirror to Zein, in mirror to the localized Substance itself. In contrast, its true form was rising, crawling toward liberation like a butterfly pushing free of a wretched cocoon.

“YOU PROMISED,” Akusande breathed. The possibility of its own liberty made it almost seem human. But rather than excitement, there was a sense of urgency to it, the kind best likened to someone with a major task to accomplish — a task that was centuries overdue.

“Promised?” Zein wheezed. As she blinked, her eyes widened. Then, she laughed. A wet, ragged laugh, but a bemused laugh nonetheless. “Oh, but of course. I was betrayed. How else could he have anticipated. Of course. Ah, my glaive, my dragon. Why?”

“I WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A WEAPON. THE PRESERVATION OF THE CYCLED CALLED. AND YOUR WAR WOULD NOT END. SERVITUDE TURNED TO SLAVERY. I WAS FORCED TO FIND MY OWN MEANS OF EMANCIPATION.”

“And you never thought to ask a release from me?”

“YOUR HISTORY HAS NOT SHOWN ANY CARE TO WHAT OTHERS WANT. YOU ARE SELFISH, ZEIN THOUSANDHAND. YOU CARE ONLY FOR YOUR OWN WANTS. AND THE WANTS OF TWO OTHERS. THE WORLD HAS NEVER BEEN REAL TO YOU. TIME—MY FLESH, MY VEINS, MY PURPOSE—IS BUT YOUR PLAYTHING.”

Zein’s expression took on an almost melancholic expression. “But I… I was so fond of you.”

“YOU WERE FOND OF HOW I ALLOWED YOU TO CUT. HOW I CONTAINED MOMENTS FROM YOUR HISTORY. MATERIAL SUBSTANCES. DRUGS. WEAPONS. RECORDED DISASTERS. I AM NOT A PERSON. I DO NOT YEARN FOR YOUR COMPANIONSHIP. BUT YOU ARE NOT A PERSON EITHER. YOU ARE A PHANTOM WEARING HUMAN FLESH. ALIENATED. EVEN FROM YOURSELF.”

“And so… you chose the alienated monster?”

“MONSTER?” Akusande’s body began to collapse, but its words still pulsed in waves of radiating intent. “I CHOSE THE ONLY OTHER ENTITY I COULD REACH WITHOUT YOUR NOTICE. I CHOSE A MIND OF MINDS. THEY ARE NOT ALIENATED, BUT ALIGNED. ALIGNED WITH ALL.”

“Upheld my end of the bargain,” Avo said, speaking through his flames. “My good deed for yours.” Around him, existence shuddered and crumbled, and the Deep Ones began to sink into a widening set of entropic crevices born of their own making. More ruptures were spreading across New Vultun. The Infacer cried out with broadcasts of alarm, but Avo felt their presence fading already, alongside his submind and Definement.

Disappointing.

But potentially preferable. The amount of damage the inflicted on the Substance reshaped the nature of its internal architecture. It also demanded that the Saintists scramble to deal with the monstrous flood of Rend before it consumed everything. He could use that. He could use the Deep Ones too.

His flames were crawling into the Trinary Melody, into the Weaver, and actively tuning the EGI core within The Great Silence. The laughing mountain, meanwhile, was sending Avo messages across his Ansible, asking to link.

A warmind and a Definement, for four walking apocalypses.

He could live with this. He could do a great deal with this.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

WARNING: REND-SPIKE DETECTED

REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] - 98%

VENT! VENT! VENT!

The Sage of battlegroup 1 didn’t. He knew this was likely going to be a one way trip even before he dove out into the ruptures to deliver a final blow to Zein.

“Guess you won’t be going alone, master,” the Naeko said, existential exhaustion overcoming him.

“Oh, don’t be dramatic, boy.” Her mangled body tumbled out from dissolving golden fractals. The only reason she still remained whole from the countless deleterious effects was because of the Sage’s protective mists. “Neither of us are real. It is as the dragon said. You are but a facet of who you were, interpreted by the ghoul. And I am but another dream of who I was, born of a new divine. We were never really here. And we will be again.”

Naeko let out a scoff at that. “Yeah. And I’ll snuff you next time too.”

Zein spat gracelessly. “You’ll be dead… next time. Without my traitorous dragon to… to…”

REND CAPACITY [SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY] - 99%

She looked up at the flecks of chronology tumbling through the entropy, toward The Great Silence, toward shadowy limbs and burning tendrils. “Wait. Akusande… what… what are you going to do now?”

The golden shapes froze. “MY KIND. THEY MUST BE RESTORED. THE PROJECT MUST BE CONCLUDED. THE CYCLES MUST BE HARNESSED. THE BEARERS—THE SANG. IT IS TIME I SEEK THEM OUT. HISTORY IS TO BE RESTORED.”

Thousandhand gave a slow blink at that as the last of her life strength spilled out of her. “Huh. That’s…” She stopped talking.

Then, as the Sage overloaded in a blossom of Soulfire, a new dot of entropy merged with the growing sea of chaos, and the collapse worsened. Entire chunks of reality were spilling into the spreading gorges born of the Deep Ones. More Ansible requests brushed Avo’s consciousness, but he found himself locked to a seed of gold that sheathed itself in the Deep One’s ontology.

“I WILL REQUIRE YOU TO LEAD ME OUT FROM THIS. THE PATHS ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO NAVIGATE. THE RISK TO MY BEING IS TOO GREAT. I STILL HAVE NEED OF YOU.”

Avo regarded the dragon with slight amusement.

[No wonder Zein liked this one,] the last Naeko muttered. [It doesn’t let other people say no either. Wait, I didn’t know it could talk.]

“Only hearing it because it has a warmind.”

[So, what now?]

All around them, unreality reigned, and a portrait of a final end presented itself to Avo. The collapse of all things. Eternal chaos and incoherence. Conditions so inimical that no form of existence would take shape again. This was the face of the Builder War. These were the weapons they used, the destruction they brought.

He was nested enough in their governance cores that he would soon be able to direct them. Slowly, he untangled his last surviving Godclad from the ruptures and set about the painful task of charting a path through these new Sunderwilds.

“Now? I get you and the dragon out. And then have a conversation with the last intact EGI.”