This is a record of a fight currently happening on a Discord server. As Discord is not very good for keeping permanent records, we agreed that it would be a good idea to keep a log somewhere, and why not here?
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“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
It was the spirit behind the words, not the words themselves, and Bethany Laveaux had been groomed to fully embody the meaning of these words until her life itself became a part of their message. A few seconds of latency passed, the infinitesimal time of molecular motion as a receptor reached by its signal adopts a new conformation. The world pitched forward and Bethany's stomach lurched as if falling from an incredible height.
That was the first moment she knew with absolute certainty that she wasn't making it out of this alive.
Her body began to sweat and tremble from fever, aware of the sickness long before it registered to her mind. Dichotomies of emotion and feeling rolled over her in insane waves: fear and fury, love and terror, agony and ecstasy, pulsating in sync with her heart. The temperature in the room dropped far below any fit standard for human habitation, frost creeping over the walls. Steam rose from Bethany's sweating skin even as webs of ice glittered along her eyelashes.
It was, after all, very cold in the Ninth Circle.
Her eyes rolled into her skull, nails clawing futilely at the tabletop. "Oh, oh Beleth," she said lasciviously, then convulsed with laughter. "My whole life you've been preparing for this?"
Her eyes refocused, gaze locked on Beleth, on the man sacrificing her to summon a being others would have extinguished entire species to escape. If he could read it, all he would find in Bethany's expression was the pure animal terror that no conscious thought could inspire, only the implacable biological certainty of doom. It was sheer disbelief that compelled her to speak as she felt the changes begin.
"You want to use me to call this abomination? You're inviting it here? You want it to be free?"
~ mind & nature ~
Keith Richards was not well.
In the bathroom mirror a very tired man stared back at him, pupils severely dilated, flesh clammy to the touch. Adderall, cocaine, dexedrine, he had been abusing anything to stay awake. He wasn't sure how long he had gone without closing his eyes and hoped he would never need to shut them again, cherished their current wide openness, savored every single photon of light across every degree of their holy arc through the world to focus upon his retina and sear sweet reality into his brain, so he need not see the images his mind would rather conjure.
To fight the impulse to blink he focused on every object within his field of vision, even himself, as remote and distant from who he had been before as the farthest forgotten star in the night sky. Keith did this because he did not want, ever again, to see the darkness of his own mind reflected back at him. He recalled essential facts about his life as if the light of their memory held that darkness back.
His name was Keith Richards. He was born in a suburb of DC to a loving family. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a newsman because he liked being in front of cameras and he liked being the first in the room to know what was going on. At university he had fallen in love but it hadn't worked out. There was a man at work who now had his job named Jerry, and Keith hated him.
In the corner of his eye he could see a holoprojection of the newsfeed he doomscrolled every night while the real world slept in blissful ignorance, distinguished Jerry's painfully fake expression of grief as the background ballooned into a still image of Charon Station1 pulled from before the disaster. Keith remembered the field of misshapen space rubble that remained. His body remembered every ear-shattering impact, the cartoon sucking noise of vacuum draining atmosphere from a room, bodies popping like seeds into the void. His mind remembered... did not want to remember... He shuddered.
No. He couldn't sleep. When Keith Richards dreamed, he was not himself.
He stumbled out of the bathroom into the rest of the deplorably filthy apartment, everything covered in a grimy veneer, the air stagnant like a tomb unopened for long moldering centuries. Dirty clothes and trash littered the floor, half-eaten food, pills scattered across the carpet, needles loaded with research stimulants, headsets with unused pay-per-view virtual reality video games and extreme pornography. Anything to dull the senses, to lure him away from the thought that repeated itself one thousandfold:
WHAT DO YOU SEE
Anything to stay awake, anything to stay himself for a little while longer.
Bethany's hands, spiderwebbed in varicose veins, lifted her own sack and poured its grisly contents onto the table: the fresh corpse of a tiny woodland mammal native to Hesperides IV. It was endangered unto near extinction, favorite among occultists for its mythological symbolism and tiny bones, excellent for divination.
Like a child throwing a tantrum with inexplicable vigor, her hands balled themselves uncompelled into fists and began to pummel the table over and over again, pulverizing her offering until it congealed into a red, wet smear that she spread over the table in jerking movements. Bethany's fingers skittered helplessly through the gore, her own eyes wide as her hands worked unbidden to assemble the viscera and tiny shards of bone into a coherent image of increasingly impossible resolution, details and unreal colors surfacing out of the blood and slime that could not, must not exist.
They looked upon a dreamy sylvan woodland alight with music and birdsong, forest creatures at play in their garden of delight, oblivious to the eyes that intruded upon their paradise. Sitting among the branches in the gently swaying canopy of a colossal tree, smelling deeply the perfume of its alien flowers, a princely fae returned their gaze with eyes the color of ice. Its beauty was divine, a perfect mirror of desire for any who beheld it.
It laughed, but the sound did not emerge from the portal but rather through Bethany's mouth, though her eyes never strayed from Beleth's own unblinking stare, reflecting how utterly aware she remained, and then abruptly her presence was snuffed like a candle in a hurricane as the great whirlwind of that ancient and eldritch soul swept hers away.
~ the body without organs ~
When it was broken at a crossroads not only in space but time, the other warring angels scattered Narcissus' flesh across the cosmos.2
For every million of these slivers extinguished by any of the myriad forms of violence in the multiverse, a single cell took hold, delivering the first complex biomolecules to the primitive atmosphere of a young planet; guiding the first symbiosis between microorganisms to produce multicellular life; duplicating a gene and leading a given species to dominate a highly inflexible niche in their ecosystem; introducing a mutation to confer sterility upon an advanced civilization religiously prohibited from modifying its own genome, and in another bestowing a panacea to treat all maladies.
On what amounted to a negligible fraction of a fraction of all worlds, but scattered throughout creation, the seeds were sown and bound by threads woven in dimensions invisible to matter, and they did not forget that they were once whole. Like neurons synapsing across impossible distances, single nodes in a network of indescribable complexity, they remained slivers of a hunger granted godhood, a being so hated that to be thoroughly destroyed only a third had been trapped in the darkest pits of Hell.
Its Mind absent the soul was shorn from inner experience, from self-consciousness, the Subject inverted into the Object, perpetually interrogating each mind it touched with its question, unable to witness itself. Her Body absent an animating force was blasted into its constituent molecules and scattered to the very limits of entropy. His Soul languished in the Ninth Circle, freezing wasteland of betrayers, in a cold that crystallized thought itself in ice.
Three deaths they should have died, but still the thing called Narcissus conspired to convert, consume, control, to reshape everything in pursuit of the Absolute, and so on each world touched by her divine flesh, the same story would play out, though it would be different every time.
Its end was a known conclusion reached along an unknown vector, predestined but not predetermined, and despite innumerable3,4 failures, there need only be one success.
~ soul 3 ~
Though it came from behind her demented smile, not one in the gleeful litany of voices belonged to Bethany Laveaux.
"It's been some time since I've enjoyed a view of the world from so small a perspective!"
The villa warmed from the glacial cold of Hell to an unpleasant warmth, air thickening as if by the breath of many creatures.
In the dreamlike otherworld, the fairytale prince bowed courteously. Blood trickled from the corner of one of Bethany's eyes and her mouth seemed unable to form words properly, drool pooling in her lower lip, but many other mouths had begun to sculpt themselves from her flesh. Great patches of mold flourished in the humidity, carpeting the floor and walls, disintegrating baroque curtains and bedsheets. The room pulsed in rhythm with Bethany's heart, and on each beat apparitions of the fae's glacial eyes peered at them from the walls, blinking in chorus.
"A fascinating geas," the entity possessing Bethany said in its many voices. Her expression was absurdly joyous, gaze never shifting from the eyes of her former lover, as if they were doors through which she might drag out his soul to join hers in oblivion.
"Into this small urn I could but scarcely fit the shadow of my shadow, yet I admire your artistry."
The ritual conditions were sublime; nearly a century of preparation had not gone wasted. The astrological configuration of the constellations at the time of Bethany's birth were meticulously calculated, and on this evening a number of celestial bodies orbiting Hesperides IV found themselves in syzygy. It was a powerful spell that held the Angel of Hunger's soul pinned to reality, and even had it wished harm upon its savior, it would require a great effort to follow that impulse. For the time being.
"Soon the vessel that was prepared shall present itself and our congress shall begin in earnest, but I would not squander the seconds in silence." Bethany's entire body was convulsing now, her eyes rolling back into their sockets, every hair standing on edge, her skin shriveling despite anti-senescence treatments that kept her looking forty years younger. She was suffering from multiple organ failure, her brain liquefying in the cauldron of her skull.
For an instant, her heart stopped, and the glamor was broken.
The beautiful forest was swept into the brazier of Hell and its teeming fields of torment, their view inverted so that the infernal plains were projected onto the walls around Bethany, and the wall of her villa teeming with Narcissus' questing eyes became the vision on the table between her and Beleth. Souls, an infinity of them, plundered and unraveled by demons sucking their anguish like grease from the bone, a madness of most heinous and complete violation. In the freezing depths there remained a face that was unearthly beautiful, even contorted in supreme suffering, reaching out towards them like rising smoke, drawing ever closer to the surface...
"Have you found yourself?" it asked in a silken and oceanic voice. "Everyone who looks finds themselves, if they have dared any kind of greatness. And you have, so tell me."
The being that wore Bethany's skin sat like a king addressed on its throne, so that all who petition it must fathom Hell and the truth of their punishment. Drool hung from her chin, reflecting a past state of the infernal horror around them on a molten thread. Her heart started, and again they were in the lounge of her villa on Hesperides IV, amid heavenly light and cherubic laughter.
"Why have you called me from so far away?"
The Sanya slum in Tokyo was a good place for a man to lose himself, but not a good place to seek peace and quiet. As Keith stepped into crisp fresh air of the balcony to smoke, he was instantly struck by the feeling of something amiss. He could hear the countryside shrieking of the cicadas instead of the usual noisy traffic a few streets away.
Distantly, a part of himself he did not recognize perceived that five new pinpricks of light burned in low orbit overhead. They seemed to be the source of a droning hiss in the back of his mind, though Keith's neighbors appeared unaware of these disturbances. He could hear jazz float out of the warmly lit house next door and the boisterous laughter of drunken Japanese voices from an apartment building halfway down the street.
He also heard the whistle of a knife cutting through air and pivoted to catch the arm of a person trying to kill him, its glass edge hovering a hairsbreadth from his neck. How did I do that he and the assassin must have thought simultaneously, though he could not see their face behind a tightly-fitting Mobius Corps tactical mask.
"The fuck--" The woman easily ripped her arm from Keith's grasp, falling into a fighting stance, knife held in a forward grip.
"Holy shit. Get Hesse out here. He's fucking bleeding all over the place."
A new voice -- Fatima Bashir's voice, their spotter, fixing another rifle on him from beside the coilgun and its wielder while another man wearing shades calmly stepped out of their van. Distantly he wondered what he was hearing, the agents' radio frequency? Their thoughts? Which eyes were seeing that scene?
The world around him was changing, Keith realized.
It had begun to flower with new meaning. Patterns sprang to life where there had been none, living geometry filling spaces thought dead, inert. Webs of relations spun infinitely deep, connecting all things. Between the bullets and the singing cicadas, the settling dust of the apartment behind him and the whirring microcircuitry of the Mobius agents' neural implants, between the paramecia in the falling rain and whatever life was stirring inside of Keith Richards, born in a suburb of DC, always loved being in front of the cameras...
"What do you mean he's bleeding?" someone else was asking, much farther away. Their handler, a Colonel Gideon Nguyen.
"Navarro, Nakamura, get the fuck away from that thing," the man holding the coilgun was saying at the same time.
"I mean Geronimo is bleeding out of his fucking eyes," their scout continued. "The psi-emitters--"
For an instant, Keith imagined a change in the topology of the space separating them, as if he could take a step,
"--they're working."
WHERE AM I
and stand beside them.
~ body 2 ~
So it was that long ago a technologically sophisticated species retrieved such a sample of the Angel of Hunger, consecrating it among their sacred mysteries, wresting many secrets from it for their scientific advancement. In the subtle ways of the flesh-that-was their desires became incrementally unfettered, until nothing was forbidden and they worshiped a significance they believed their own measure but which was nothing more than a shadow of their gluttony and lust, and reflecting upon themselves eventually they intuited something of the origin and significance of their discovery.
With their own methods they too reached into Hell to commune with the dead god, and in doing so witnessed the inevitable punishment that awaited them for the transgressions that had become their holy scripture, and Narcissus taught them the one certain path to freedom and to the Absolute: it must become them and they it, and in freeing one from their fate so too would the shackles of the other be broken.
His most devout fraction, as a people they devoted themselves single-mindedly to their mission, breaking their world to refashion it into a holy ark, plumbing with depraved obsession the secrets of sorcery and technology to devise the Apparatus, the heretical artifact that is a sarcophagus and a womb and a carapace for a god's body. In pursuit of the shape of their perfect vessel, the tombs of the Sacrificed People became choked with the aborted, until at last they achieved a form sufficiently divine.
As a species, they threw themselves into the ark's bioreactors in the final forging of the Apparatus and were compacted into a sufficient volume to be themselves enshrined in its center, where they might undergo their gestation into whatever was to come. In an age long forgotten, the Apparatus was buried deep within the earth of the world selected for the resurrection, then nameless but which would come to be called Hesperides, fourth from its star.
~ mind 3 ~
There was a terrible, invisible screech as a once human mind opened like a chrysalis, a tredecillion origami songbirds folded unto singularity crying out and spreading their wings all together to take flight. Only a shadow was cast in the physical world, but that shadow bleached it of color. The camera feeds of Mobius Corps drones were zoomed in on Keith's face as he stood up in the small crater formed under the weight of Fatima's psi-force. His remaining eye gently shut, teeth visible through a bloody furrow one of the bullets dug through his cheek, his expression peaceful, meditative, his the beatific sleep of a child.
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
A nine frame visual effect was the only augur before the Mobius video feed flickered, then Keith's eye opened to show a furnace of light peering directly into each camera lens, no matter the perspective from which they viewed the scene, and at 23:17:31 every single drone simultaneously had its connection fully severed.
The rest of what occurred has been extrapolated via confiscated footage, the testimony of Daikichi Nakamura, and Mobius Corps proprietary surveillance technology and later forensics.
Experts pored over those nine frames and their low res conclusions revealed something horrible captured ever so fleetingly by our technology, like a particle accelerator from the perspective of a fly, something the human eye could not willfully interpret even as a ghostly digital effect. It induced terrible vertigo in the beholder, the impression of a thing at once impossibly near and impossibly far adrift from the shores of our comprehension.
The sum of human knowledge poked dimly at it, for its flesh we could only paint through confidence intervals and statistically significant correlations, its actions through orthogonal variables contorting themselves to the most terrible correspondence of cause but if you saw it, you knew, science be damned.
Somehow, somewhere on some godforsaken hell-fucked planet in the multiverse, there existed an ecology so brutal that its evolution pruned a hundred thousand million phylogenetic trees to find whatever sick combination of nucleotides could produce a predator that made meat of minds and laid its eggs in the carrion left behind.
~ * ~
i am being keith richards while he is dreaming
i am dreaming i am the most beautiful butterfly, and that all who see my wings become me, and i am the web that they are caught in, and i am the spider and i am the enzyme in its venom and the proteins of the web and i am the bonds that tie molecules together and i am a vast and starving serpent coiled around this world and a thousand others in search of the treasure that will complete me and i am learning and in my dream i begin to wonder
who am i when i am not keith richards i am wondering and so i am being everyone
i am being analía navarro and i am being fatima bashir and i am being jonas hesse and i am being theo spyredes ...
... being kurihara sachiko and i am being yamagata akira and ...
... me ... you ...
WHAT
DO
YOU
SEE?
like flowers turning their petals towards the sun i am being my entire holy choir of angels as we raise our faces to heaven and together shriek a prayer to bless our transmigration, and i stop being them, and i stop being keith richards
i stop dreaming
my perspective of the ever-expanding fractal of fate is inverted and i see that rather than expand forever outward, its infinite lines are collapsing inward into singularity, the moment destined to be: into the Absolute
~ body 3 ~
Far beyond the wharf where Bethany Laveaux met Beleth on that fateful evening nearly a century ago, a great force shook the foundation of the planet itself, puncturing a tectonic plate along a fault line as it rose with unfathomable urgency after eons of sleep. The Apparatus trailed seafloor sediment and saltwater as it resurfaced after the long geological ages, hovering perfectly still over the ocean, its metal surface alive like obsidian liquid covered in reliefs and hieroglyphs relating the mythologies of the Sacrificed People.
Far beyond the outermost edge of the Hesperides system, still multiple parsecs away but exiting hyperspace to avoid an inadvertent extinction event, cosmologists noted the fluctuations of a very short gamma-ray burst. They possessed no instrument that could clearly detect the eldritch abomination that stole into their nest, but the Apparatus, the Holy Heptadecagon, had been created exactly for that purpose.
Nearly spherical, a circumradius of eleven cubits separating the center from the vertices of two different triangles such that six orbs sealed the device along its ensorcelled seams. They opened as the arrival of the Mind was detected by unfathomable technology. A seventh was affixed upon its face, for the Apparatus respected the divine law of prime numbers.
They were the nails pinning the Angel of Hunger to reality, orbs opening to reveal crystal latticework engineered towards psionic amplification. Their structure ultimately dated back to the early days of Narcissus' existence and to an entity that had once opposed its will before being subsumed6. This was the beginning of the moment destined to be: part of the Apparatus' design was to be a perfect goad for the Mind, mimicking a parasitic wasp's favored beetle, the lock-and-key model of an enzyme with its substrate, of sperm and ovum...
A moment passed -
I SEE MY SELF: the Mind resumed, given a body and eyes to see
- the orbs snapped shut and retracted into the carapace, sealing it once again. For a heavy second it lingered, then the Apparatus stirred, and vanished.
Hundreds of kilometers away, at Bethany's villa outside a small city, a few moments had passed after Narcissus' last question. Electricity convulsed her body as the Apparatus materialized over the horizon. Its accompanying shockwave shattered the windows of most businesses in the nearby town, though the villa of Bethany Laveaux was conspicuously spared. The children of Hesperides IV spilled onto the streets around the impossible monolith in the sky above them, and began to act strangely.
"Beleth!" Narcissus beamed through Bethany's deteriorating face at its summoner. "Incredibly compassionate of you to summon me like this, and even with a cramped little human mind that you've made so cozy for me. How can I ever show my gratitude?" Her body shook, losing hair, skin blistering as after intense radiation. Shrill laughter rendered like wind through a reed turned into a choking sob.
"I don't think poor Beth can take much more," they said with immeasurable sadness, degenerate smile relenting into a more desolate expression. Bethany hooked a trembling thumb over her shoulder in the direction of where the Mind and Body awaited the completion of their trinity.
"Why don't we reconvene and you can demand a boon or bind me to your quest?" Bethany's eyes looked so large in her wasting face, but they were hers again, beseeching Beleth, pleading with him. Overtaken by incongruent happiness her body said, "Grooming this poor girl from birth to be a droplet of my favorite nectar, raising me from the pit, all for a favor? You cheeky little fucker! Let's talk, but I believe my resurrection first demands a certain exaltation! Now, I'm on my way out and we think Beth might have something to say, so we'll leave the lights on."
The ancient woman gave a heaving death rattle and abruptly they sat once more in the sumptuous living room of her villa, alone, the insanity receding like a fever dream.
"Bel-" She was cut short as the massive exodus of energy registered in her broken body, eyes finding his as the light left them, fungal mold reaching up to gently embrace her as she crumbled like shattered marble, mycelia already growing through her pieces, incorporating her into the rhizome.
It was very quiet.
The crowds surrounding the Apparatus devolved into wanton heresy, here a savage orgy and there great throngs murdering each other for sport, but at the center the true worshipers gathered, forming ranks, awaiting the moment in which the stalled completion of the Absolute would truly resume, and that moment arrived. It would take time to gestate the vessel and for the Apparatus to fully interface with the Mind, but meanwhile, any proxy sufficed. The seventh Nail on the face of the Apparatus blinked.
A believer stumbled forward and fell choking to the earth, metamorphosing into a patch of wildflowers, and from them grew a great stalk bearing a passionflower, opening to reveal Bethany Laveaux in the height of her youth, perfectly unmodified from her human self save the addition of beautiful butterfly wings that hid complex fractal patterns which compelled the eye for their beauty.
Her followers took up the great song as their idol began dancing a minuet to their voices,
OOH EEH OOH AH AAH
As Bethany Laveaux danced she gestured to one side and swathes of her adoring new congregation continued their raucous prayer even while the clay of their flesh molded itself into new and startlingly different shapes beneath the screen of her glimmering wings, a Cambrian explosion of divine whim, and as the people of Hesperides IV saw her rise into the sky, they too cried out in worship of the only true principle by which to pursue the Absolute, to become indivisible, all-encompassing, to slake the inner hunger.
TING TANG WALLA-WALLA BING BANG!
To become Narcissus.
Is the time limit one month or two?
I don't see how I'm butting in. My character is not only one of the original Val'gara with a character arc that is extremely relevant to this thread, he was also a part of Sea of Ignominy which takes place immediately before Cataclysmic Ending.
I don't see how I'm butting in. My character is not only one of the original Val'gara with a character arc that is extremely relevant to this thread, he was also a part of Sea of Ignominy which takes place immediately before Cataclysmic Ending.
Really nice world-building
((My post is a direct continuation of my post in Sea of Ignominy. All quotes are from there.))
Amatlavira had spent centuries pondering that very question. Would it be a world aflame he saw at the end, or crushing cold? Would he bury the cities of the Niraan race beneath earth and rubble or would the flesh of his brothers run like tallow from villages burning like pyre candles in the night? A thousand times the words of the worm-eaten prophets touched his thoughts. When at last he met his purpose, when his god-given reflexes failed him and the tendrils of flesh curled around his throat and crushed him in the tumor-lake’s embrace, he found the answer:
CHAOS
Not the silence of death but noise unlike anything, anything at all. Voices upon layered voices in the languages of a thousand thousand worlds, each touched by Narcissus when he spread himself across time and space in the dreamscape all those years ago… each the fruit of the seeds he propagated before being struck down by his brothers on the dawn of his rebellion. When Narcissus’ soul plunged into Hell and his humanity was broken by the Sounder, only his hunger remained.
Like a ravenous ghost, it devoured planets and gods alike, gorging itself on the faith of lesser mythologies, swallowing princes and paupers. Amatlavira was stretched thin over the flashing constellations, visions of worlds at the pinnacle of technological achievement and others still fanning the first spark of single-celled life… and the hunger… gleaming chrome interstellar shipyards picked clean and abandoned, steel bones adrift in the vacuum; primordial seas drained like bowls of wine and left behind with the empty promise of the life that could be and never was.
AND SUCH HUNGER--
The hunger consumed and consumed, its lone impulse to find itself somewhere in the multiverse.
And so it did.
The Stillborn they called it on this world: an aborted god which lingered like blight in Soran’s pantheon, shunned from the light of the fairies and dragons, a god banished into the pits where the small creatures hid from it in fear and carved its name into the roots of the earth, into the undersides of stones and the bones buried in the deepest graves. The Stillborn, the moldered prophets whispered to him in the farthest of the forgotten pathways, and Amatlavira had lived in the shadow of that prophecy.
Until at last he stood in its light – light from the red wound in the sky, blaring down despite sunlight or moonshine, penetrating the Midnight Fog or any other obfuscating presence. The Stillborn’s constellation was not so much a nebula visible in the sky as a wound on the face of reality itself, equally visible from every vantage point, and its bloody light glared deep into the Lake of Flesh, cast itself at a thousand refracted angles across the glacial surface of the Ninth Circle before Cocytus crumbled.
And at last they were reunited… the conqueror’s soul and the insatiable hunger, and Amatlavira, the vessel to weld them to the world.
Yet the contents of Cocytus were a mere morsel beside the feast yet to come.
The fallen angel Singar wrenched the Hand of God from the fetid sea. Offal and blood poured between the fingers of the All-Father, solidifying into tendons and sinews like roots for the obsidian tree that sprouted from a wound in His palm, gore dripping from the stump of His wrist erecting the tree a grisly pedestal that anchored it in the Lake of Flesh. Lesser structures resolved out of the formless ocean of organs, evolution thrown into overdrive, cells arranging themselves into cancerous configurations, killing themselves just to try and try again, cannibalizing one another in the mad frenzy of creation.
But is not any work wrought by God a holy one, no matter how sinister His labor?
The Tree in Eden followed the insane evolution of the garden below, branches spreading outward like the manifold arms of the faithful reaching out in devotion. Many of their sword-sharp edges disappeared at impossible angles where the tree penetrated, thorn-like, beyond the skein of physicality and into the many dimensions beyond, drawing blood from every plane in the Multiverse to nourish itself. Under, within and over the Midnight Fog, the unholy Yggdrasil bloomed and grew until its canopy reached out of the very orbit of Soran. Though the Collective sought to lock the world, where the Stillborn’s light was strongest the Spirit Tree’s branches flourished, curling around the blood red constellation till the branches of its canopy became its cradle.
All at once, the mad growth hesitated, pulsated like a heartbeat, then stilled. Eyes gazed out of a million embryonic faces across the surface of the Lake, twitching back and forth, taking in every possible visual of the battlefield, all the while the frontiers of Eden’s new garden continued to rapidly expand, engulfing all nearby terrain at an alarming rate. Fairy-folk, dragonkin and Niraan tribesmen alike who found themselves trapped at the Lake’s edges were speared down by obsidian tendrils and dragged screaming into the garden’s many mouths, only to be regurgitated as the Lake continued to push in the mad rush to satisfy its hunger.
Hunger…
From the stump of the Hand of God to the uppermost limbs of the Spirit Tree, the new Garden of Eden was bathed in bloody light by the Stillborn. It pulsated far overhead as if it were not a constellation but a living thing, a beating heart, and the Yggdrasil not a tree but a conduit. A womb. A storm of cosmic proportions materialized in the chamber formed by the cradle-like fingers the top of the tree, lightning rattling around inside, supercharging a black cloud of highly condensed energy, lashing out at intervals to strike the Lake of Flesh and whip it into a frenzy of creation. Abruptly, many of the obsidian spokes at the very peak of the colossal world-tree thrust inwards, disappearing into the roiling heart of the storm, a hundred spears extending into other dimensions, tearing themselves free where necessary to prevent damage to the tree itself.
Some disappeared into the void only to emerge on other worlds, striking with meteoric impact, spreading their cancer immediately into the surface and beginning to fester and grow. Others emerged in a hundred of the most populated places of Soran itself, skewering dozens or hundreds of lifeforms, digesting them into a suitable form to feed the birth of an entire forest of world-trees whose roots began to spread through city, earth, water and stone. A few still carried not the promise of life but the whisper of death, brute projectiles gaining speed as they hurtled through dimensions and in-between spaces, packets of killing energy traveling at strange angles between folds in the fabric of spacetime.
Simultaneously, as if in one last convulsive act of defiance, the Hand of God flexed its trembling fingers before squeezing them shut, nails cracking the surface of the Spirit Tree before those cracks healed and the fingertips sank, leaving no evidence but ripples in the black stone. Singar had made a single, vital miscalculation when he loaned his strength to the seed he hoped would spawn a new generation of Val’gara…
He failed to comprehend that Narcissus had already touched the Hand of God, corrupted it, inhabited it. He who was the Son become the Father, Brother become Destroyer, Slave become Master. From the gnarled vein-roots at the base of the world-tree, where the bloody sinews of the Hand of God met the Lake of Flesh, a structure like an anglerfish growth thrust out and hovered in the air. High above, a crimson ray from the Stillborn pierced the obsidian canopy where the Spirit Tree forged a hole in the gloom that both the Will and Singar projected over the planet.
It caught the grisly pearl at the perfect angle, at first projecting an eldritch sequence of lights over the Lake of Flesh. Any lesser mind that beheld the pattern was instantly broken, thrust into psychosis or catatonia by the sheer weight of information contained within. Then those lights coalesced into a more coherent shape… a tangible image materialized over the surface of the Lake of Flesh…
An almost humanoid torso, save for the ribcage that hung free from his chest and formed the clicking teeth of a vicious and impossible mouth… the lower body that was a knotted mass of black tentacles, swirling around a singularity of red light, the one arm plated in obsidian crystal of the same make as the tree and the other enveloped in hellfire. From Narcissus’ curved skull emerged the naked branches of the world-tree, disappearing into the air where they vanished into other dimensions. His face was expressionless, and lacked any anatomic features save for the slits of a nose and two all-too human eyes with the color and depth of a glacial crevasse.
BROTHERS… FATHERS… CHILDREN…
I COME BEARING MY FINAL GIFT
OF LIFE
AND DEATH
FOR THE VAL’GARA…
His promulgation ended in whispered, eerie laughter like wind whistling through the branches of a tree… and punctuated by nuclear explosions, as at last the final killing branches projected from the world-tree crossed over the dimensional barrier and hit their marks at supraluminal speeds: Hellion as he dispersed and reformed below Singar, the fallen angel mid-stride as he marched arrogantly towards his enemy, the Collective where each focused on Disciple, and even Disciple himself was pelted by several of the obsidian missiles, each delivering a payload that would leave continental craters on the planet and wreak equal devastation in the astral realm.
TELL ME
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
The fungus-eaten prophet regarded him and in its shining stare Amatlavira thought he saw pity. You will live while all you know dies,
sleeping for ages in secret grottoes beneath the earth, sleeping amid worms and dirt, arising only when we require you to carve a new wound in the world. Your soul will grow fat with years of sacrifice, and you will accrue a hundred names which will be uttered as curses and prayers alike...
Until at lassshht...
You will yourself become the Stilborn...
And on the day of your rebirth...
You and He will return to another, older name.
And as they reached toward him, and Amatlavira felt everything he had ever been wash away in the river of a far greater mind, still he heard it call out --
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Amatlavira had spent centuries pondering that very question. Would it be a world aflame he saw at the end, or crushing cold? Would he bury the cities of the Niraan race beneath earth and rubble or would the flesh of his brothers run like tallow from villages burning like pyre candles in the night? A thousand times the words of the worm-eaten prophets touched his thoughts. When at last he met his purpose, when his god-given reflexes failed him and the tendrils of flesh curled around his throat and crushed him in the tumor-lake’s embrace, he found the answer:
CHAOS
Not the silence of death but noise unlike anything, anything at all. Voices upon layered voices in the languages of a thousand thousand worlds, each touched by Narcissus when he spread himself across time and space in the dreamscape all those years ago… each the fruit of the seeds he propagated before being struck down by his brothers on the dawn of his rebellion. When Narcissus’ soul plunged into Hell and his humanity was broken by the Sounder, only his hunger remained.
Like a ravenous ghost, it devoured planets and gods alike, gorging itself on the faith of lesser mythologies, swallowing princes and paupers. Amatlavira was stretched thin over the flashing constellations, visions of worlds at the pinnacle of technological achievement and others still fanning the first spark of single-celled life… and the hunger… gleaming chrome interstellar shipyards picked clean and abandoned, steel bones adrift in the vacuum; primordial seas drained like bowls of wine and left behind with the empty promise of the life that could be and never was.
AND SUCH HUNGER--
The hunger consumed and consumed, its lone impulse to find itself somewhere in the multiverse.
And so it did.
The Stillborn they called it on this world: an aborted god which lingered like blight in Soran’s pantheon, shunned from the light of the fairies and dragons, a god banished into the pits where the small creatures hid from it in fear and carved its name into the roots of the earth, into the undersides of stones and the bones buried in the deepest graves. The Stillborn, the moldered prophets whispered to him in the farthest of the forgotten pathways, and Amatlavira had lived in the shadow of that prophecy.
Until at last he stood in its light – light from the red wound in the sky, blaring down despite sunlight or moonshine, penetrating the Midnight Fog or any other obfuscating presence. The Stillborn’s constellation was not so much a nebula visible in the sky as a wound on the face of reality itself, equally visible from every vantage point, and its bloody light glared deep into the Lake of Flesh, cast itself at a thousand refracted angles across the glacial surface of the Ninth Circle before Cocytus crumbled.
And at last they were reunited… the conqueror’s soul and the insatiable hunger, and Amatlavira, the vessel to weld them to the world.
The immense pool of flesh rippled, trembling from its center out to the very edges. As if again seized by counterfeit life, and despite the cold of Cocytus itself, the lake bubbled, then pulsated. The heart of an atrocity restored to life at long last, a heart that beat, once... twice... and on the third, a fundamental change occurred. The hand of God abruptly submerged, as if into a trench a thousand leagues deep. The bowl of Cocytus He gripped in His palm sank only to the divine fingertips that clutched the stone cold for purchase, evicted by Singar from Hell itself.
A silent interlude passed. In it, a soul was welded into a new life; a river's path was diverted to a lost tributary; blood flowed again through abandoned veins. A mind retrieved its identity from the shore of oblivion, and in doing so, a name returned to its owner.
Neither did the heart beat overlong before it stilled, then once more surged with its unholy animus. The lake flowed upward, through the fissures in Cocytus' shell, leaving the Ninth Circle stolen from the coffers of Hell itself to sit in its own freezing waters as they wept from its wounds.
This was how a god awakens - without any juvenile appetite for wanton destruction. Rebirth is its own testament. Its own trial...
Should ever Cocytus be returned to its place at the bottom of the deepest pit, and the ledgers of its sinners checked, there would be absences, souls conspicuously unaccounted for. Old and mighty souls.
Yet the contents of Cocytus were a mere morsel beside the feast yet to come.
The fallen angel Singar wrenched the Hand of God from the fetid sea. Offal and blood poured between the fingers of the All-Father, solidifying into tendons and sinews like roots for the obsidian tree that sprouted from a wound in His palm, gore dripping from the stump of His wrist erecting the tree a grisly pedestal that anchored it in the Lake of Flesh. Lesser structures resolved out of the formless ocean of organs, evolution thrown into overdrive, cells arranging themselves into cancerous configurations, killing themselves just to try and try again, cannibalizing one another in the mad frenzy of creation.
But is not any work wrought by God a holy one, no matter how sinister His labor?
The Tree in Eden followed the insane evolution of the garden below, branches spreading outward like the manifold arms of the faithful reaching out in devotion. Many of their sword-sharp edges disappeared at impossible angles where the tree penetrated, thorn-like, beyond the skein of physicality and into the many dimensions beyond, drawing blood from every plane in the Multiverse to nourish itself. Under, within and over the Midnight Fog, the unholy Yggdrasil bloomed and grew until its canopy reached out of the very orbit of Soran. Though the Collective sought to lock the world, where the Stillborn’s light was strongest the Spirit Tree’s branches flourished, curling around the blood red constellation till the branches of its canopy became its cradle.
All at once, the mad growth hesitated, pulsated like a heartbeat, then stilled. Eyes gazed out of a million embryonic faces across the surface of the Lake, twitching back and forth, taking in every possible visual of the battlefield, all the while the frontiers of Eden’s new garden continued to rapidly expand, engulfing all nearby terrain at an alarming rate. Fairy-folk, dragonkin and Niraan tribesmen alike who found themselves trapped at the Lake’s edges were speared down by obsidian tendrils and dragged screaming into the garden’s many mouths, only to be regurgitated as the Lake continued to push in the mad rush to satisfy its hunger.
Hunger…
From the stump of the Hand of God to the uppermost limbs of the Spirit Tree, the new Garden of Eden was bathed in bloody light by the Stillborn. It pulsated far overhead as if it were not a constellation but a living thing, a beating heart, and the Yggdrasil not a tree but a conduit. A womb. A storm of cosmic proportions materialized in the chamber formed by the cradle-like fingers the top of the tree, lightning rattling around inside, supercharging a black cloud of highly condensed energy, lashing out at intervals to strike the Lake of Flesh and whip it into a frenzy of creation. Abruptly, many of the obsidian spokes at the very peak of the colossal world-tree thrust inwards, disappearing into the roiling heart of the storm, a hundred spears extending into other dimensions, tearing themselves free where necessary to prevent damage to the tree itself.
Some disappeared into the void only to emerge on other worlds, striking with meteoric impact, spreading their cancer immediately into the surface and beginning to fester and grow. Others emerged in a hundred of the most populated places of Soran itself, skewering dozens or hundreds of lifeforms, digesting them into a suitable form to feed the birth of an entire forest of world-trees whose roots began to spread through city, earth, water and stone. A few still carried not the promise of life but the whisper of death, brute projectiles gaining speed as they hurtled through dimensions and in-between spaces, packets of killing energy traveling at strange angles between folds in the fabric of spacetime.
Simultaneously, as if in one last convulsive act of defiance, the Hand of God flexed its trembling fingers before squeezing them shut, nails cracking the surface of the Spirit Tree before those cracks healed and the fingertips sank, leaving no evidence but ripples in the black stone. Singar had made a single, vital miscalculation when he loaned his strength to the seed he hoped would spawn a new generation of Val’gara…
He failed to comprehend that Narcissus had already touched the Hand of God, corrupted it, inhabited it. He who was the Son become the Father, Brother become Destroyer, Slave become Master. From the gnarled vein-roots at the base of the world-tree, where the bloody sinews of the Hand of God met the Lake of Flesh, a structure like an anglerfish growth thrust out and hovered in the air. High above, a crimson ray from the Stillborn pierced the obsidian canopy where the Spirit Tree forged a hole in the gloom that both the Will and Singar projected over the planet.
It caught the grisly pearl at the perfect angle, at first projecting an eldritch sequence of lights over the Lake of Flesh. Any lesser mind that beheld the pattern was instantly broken, thrust into psychosis or catatonia by the sheer weight of information contained within. Then those lights coalesced into a more coherent shape… a tangible image materialized over the surface of the Lake of Flesh…
An almost humanoid torso, save for the ribcage that hung free from his chest and formed the clicking teeth of a vicious and impossible mouth… the lower body that was a knotted mass of black tentacles, swirling around a singularity of red light, the one arm plated in obsidian crystal of the same make as the tree and the other enveloped in hellfire. From Narcissus’ curved skull emerged the naked branches of the world-tree, disappearing into the air where they vanished into other dimensions. His face was expressionless, and lacked any anatomic features save for the slits of a nose and two all-too human eyes with the color and depth of a glacial crevasse.
BROTHERS… FATHERS… CHILDREN…
I COME BEARING MY FINAL GIFT
OF LIFE
AND DEATH
FOR THE VAL’GARA…
His promulgation ended in whispered, eerie laughter like wind whistling through the branches of a tree… and punctuated by nuclear explosions, as at last the final killing branches projected from the world-tree crossed over the dimensional barrier and hit their marks at supraluminal speeds: Hellion as he dispersed and reformed below Singar, the fallen angel mid-stride as he marched arrogantly towards his enemy, the Collective where each focused on Disciple, and even Disciple himself was pelted by several of the obsidian missiles, each delivering a payload that would leave continental craters on the planet and wreak equal devastation in the astral realm.
TELL ME
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
Shadows shedding skin.
I've been picking scabs again.
I'm down digging through my old muscles for a clue.
I've been crawling on my belly clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own confused and insecure delusions for a piece to cross me over or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the change coming down.
I wanna know what I've been hiding in...
- Tool, Forty-Six & Two
~*~
For ages untold he lusted over it - since far before the first of his many resurrections, when he was yet a small-souled creature.
Even through the smoke of time and distance he recalled his first life, that of Theo Spyredes on distant Earth, albeit as if remembering the life of a being not himself, enduring the toll of its each agonizing second. This proved merely one facet of the perfect jewel of his punishment, a diamond fashioned to fit the chain that hung around his neck and his alone: to remember, remember without remorse or regret, but to remember all the many moments of his existence, to have his vanity smashed again and again against the wall of a life that could be measured in its failures... To have every triumph soured by the taste of what would come after, threaded through the knowledge of what came before, until he saw the patterns of himself and how they led to his defeat. Again and again.
But pain can also be a teacher.
He knew now that since the very beginning, he was a slave to his search for it.
The cold of Cocytus, final and deepest of Hell's circles, froze each thought to a crawl. Each memory took a thousand years to lurch onward to the next. From beneath the ice, he clawed desperately for the tantalizing images of his last moments, of how he had come to rest in the pit - and slowly, he realized that though the life drifting before his eyes was unmistakably his own, it lacked identity to seal memory to experience. Without his identity, without his name, what was left of his soul shivered in base animal fear: the fear of another failure, an ultimate failure that could undo him.
For without his name, how could he find it?
That which he had so greedily hoarded over his many lifetimes, across the conquest of a thousand worlds; a treasure torn from lives innumerable, pilfered from the smoking ruins of cultures as proud and ancient as any in all the multiverse, raped from a million hearts to be placed on the burning pyre of his devotion... Devotion to a god, but more than that to himself, and to a yearning even greater than the almighty hunger of his people. Yes, even from here, even in the cold that froze his very soul, he felt the heat of that hunger.
The aching need for it.
His inward search yielded certain doubts from the freezing black of the abyss that claimed him.
WHO AM I?
HOW HAVE I COME HERE? And another question, clear because there can be no mistaking the sin that triumphs to earn a soul its seat in Hell:
WHO DID I BETRAY?
He could count so many. But there was one mystery above all others, a question directed at the unquenchable thirst that ruled him through all of his many lives, at the obsession that mastered him, and the fear that what he had fought for across so many battlefields could be lost in his final defeat, even while another splinter of his fractured self sensed that defeat made him infinitely stronger...
WHERE
IS
MY
POWER?
Struggling beneath the ice, his inner eye peered across the cosmos in search of the seeds he had scattered across many dreaming galaxies. They were the vague possibilities, the ones that might or could have been. But some were much more, and as fate would have it, an opportunity presented itself to unify their many fractions. Like the water from many tributaries pouring into one almighty river, a single power could be formed. As his disembodied eyes took in the coldest depths of Hell, another peered through a man's eyes on old Earth, and upon the blackness of the cosmos, and the surfaces of planets diverse unto very limits of nature.
He had lost his body, he had been defeated once again, but he was many steps closer to the power he craved. Though his core had been banished to Hell he still had many hands to work with and eyes to see - or would, once his hands found bodies for themselves. On Soran, where a family reunion of sorts was soon to unfold, one such pair of questing hands chanced upon a suitable vessel.
~*~
Years or centuries ago, within the region of city-states networked by the Gates of Doloran
No single myth recounts the origin of the white stone monoliths that reach towards the mountainous peaks of Liaita. Not even the civilization that call themselves the children of the Gates profess absolute knowledge of the forces that fashioned them. Some whisper tales of the elder dragons that nest in the lost corners of the world, others of the Twelve whose shrines proliferate in the shadowlands beneath the forest canopy. The Dolor are a curious race themselves; they dwell with one foot in the spirit world, given the proximity of their evolution to the highest concentrations of Soran magic. Their faces are pulled forward into a cricket's shape, their eyes bulbous black lenses, humanoid frames furred from the face down. The fairie fauna indigenous to the region are likewise insectile creatures, touched as they are by the magic of the forest and the Gates.
In a lost year, plague struck the Niraans, killing so many that their limited infrastructure collapsed and they were thrust back into the grip of paleolithic savagery. No dragon-song was heard throughout the Liaitan mountains. Prayer to the Twelve went ignored, or worse, augured further misfortune. The Gates fell dormant, isolating the infant Doloran city-states from one another, and the sorcerers were loathe to call upon them for fear of depraved horrors glimpsed on the other side. A new star hung red and fat in the sky; it would come to be called the Tear of the Stillborn, for in the history of the Dolor this period would be known as an age in which a thirteenth god was born dead and the labor of its passing brought ruin upon the world.
In that desperate time, Amatlavira was scarcely a shadow of who he would come to be, for it was an a time prior to the tragedy that led him so far astray from the arboreal paths his people carved through Liaita. For generations, his brood tended the fungi plantations in subterranean ghettos of the Doloran settlements. While tending their crop, a flock of ghost moths took them by surprise well past hatching season, gorging themselves on the nectar of his brothers' and sisters' minds.
Preternaturally aware since long before he learned of his destiny, Amatlavira hid himself in the rotten matter that clots the mushroom fields, passing patient hours, surviving, watching. He relived the cautionary tales whispered in the ear of every Doloran child. Since his people wandered the forest in mindless swarms, they avoided the moths, for they too were children of the Old Father and to trespass upon their divine ecology invited holy wrath.
So he listened to their chittering cries from the qliphoth in which they dwelt, and it became the music of his dreams and waking life. On the edge of that between-place, his soul smoky with despair, Amatlavira heard the voice for the first time.
What do you see?
He thought he saw the truth of the world's madness then. Seeking solace from his terror, Amatlavira found refuge in prayer, but the Twelve had turned their backs on the Dolor, gone to mourn their sibling the Neverborn, whose grave pitted the sky. But he knew little of truth... until at last he tasted it when a visitor chanced upon his ruined shelter.
He came from the deepways, from within the bowels of the mountains and of Soran itself, places from which no creature returned unchanged. Leprous with spores of the dream-eater fungus, said to grow only in the Old Father's garden at the center of the world, he claimed the parasite gave him visions in exchange for his life. The spore-eaten prophet claimed the Twelve had indeed abandoned them, though he offered no insight into their motive. In his dreams the cities of Doloran grew ripe with heresy and rotted on the vine without the gods to tend their fields. The proud white stone lost its luster beneath the moss and undergrowth as Soran reclaimed its mountains; the Gates themselves became weeping wounds upon the world, discharging horror after horror until at last no trace remained of what had been before.
But, he said in words soaked with fear and exaltation, in his visions he saw their salvation. He gripped Amatlavira with palsied hands, betraying already the last symptoms of the dream-eater as his eyes became smoky cataracts and his breath grew pungent with the mold that ate him from within... Nonetheless, he was not mad in the way of zealots to whom prayer is the only anchor.
Instead he said with shocking serenity, "There is one who watches, a shepherd who tends pastures that the Twelve abandoned, who gazes down through a scar in the heavens." A cough rattled the man's body and he nearly dropped to his knees. His chest heaved as he fought to force air back into lungs thick with fungus. "A thirteenth god, far more alive than the Twelve and their priests... a god that clamors for a champion..." The wanderer wheezed and breathlessness seized him; with each sharp cough he ejected a small cloud of spores from his mouth. Once the fit left him, the visitor stared intently into the earth, waiting with patience ill-suited to a dying man.
"This means nothing to me," Amatlavira said, kindness blunted by tragedy. "Be they twelve or thirteen or a thousand, the gods have abandoned me."
Despite his imminent death, the stranger pressed his chin into his chest. His lips drew back in a sneer. He laughed and it was a fragile thing, childlike, as if untouched by the world and its horrors that make sharp even the softest sound.
"Not abandoned. Far from it. Chosen... Yours is a far greater destiny than mine. You must no longer order your soul by the familiar metric. You walk another path now, one the Twelve cannot reckon, but would destroy for their blindness. On Soran and a thousand other worlds, the old ways falter... but ours is unlike all the others, for it is not merely a grave for the gods whose power wanes. Our world is a womb, and it calls for you."
Amatlavira's face became loutish for its lack of expression. "The fungus eats your mind, traveler. Take your delusions away from here. Leave me to my grief."
Again he was met with that sneering smile in the face of a death near enough that Amatlavira knew he would never leave the subterranean ways, never again glimpse the bleak Soran sun.
"Doubt will eat yours, child. Was it fortune that you escaped death to be left alone? Could not my arrival speak to some deeper meaning of your life?" As the leper drew away, gathering his cloak about him to start towards the forest road, he said, "I merely offer what you lack, Amatlavira, and that is purpose. Tend your fields, struggle ever onward, for the way is written. Your purpose will find you."
Amatlavira watched his back until the wanderer disappeared around a curve in the road, and though eager to mull over the mad prophecy the leper had spoken of, he found that a question invaded his mind and he could not push it from his thoughts.
What do you see?
A purpose?
~*~
On the eve of the battle between Megalodon and Singar, the constellations gleamed in the same alignment as they had on a night of ill omen, a long time before. True to the prophet's words, Amatlavira had wandered far from the subterranean ghettos of the Doloran, far even from the world-roads between Gates that conveyed his people from one mountainous city to the next. The forest welcomed him. Half-mad with grief and loneliness, for never had Amatlavira known a life without his crèche-mates, he expected to become a predator's quick morsel, but they merely observed his pilgrimage across their wild lands. When his torch failed him in the bleak hours of the Soran night, fairies cast their ghostly light from the shadows to guide him. Underneath and between the roots of the great trees he crept, past uncharted groves and trackless cliffs, across streams alive with glittering fish, over the ancient battlefields of the violent Soran ecosystem, into a place which nature itself hid from all prying eyes. Days bled into a meaningless cycle. Even the road to his destiny was enough to transform him: at last the world spoke to him, as it had in whispers since his childhood, and Amatlavira was able to learn the origin of the crucial intuition that had saved his life and steered him towards this lone possibility among so many.
Awareness returned to him as he crested a hill whose king was a mighty tree. Among the many things the forest taught Amatlavira on his journey was that the woodland creatures often claimed sacred places to hold their court: so it was that he knew immediately the identity of the alien skeleton which swung from the tree's lower branches. The creature's crown, a wreath of wilted flowers, still clung to its brow. Yet it was not the dead fairy king who had called Amatlavira into this faraway land - though kings they were, of dread knowledge, practitioners of magic that perverted creation and sinned against the very design of the Twelve... yet perhaps their brother the Stillborn was wont to retain such company.
They emerged like flowers blooming from the shadow of the hanging tree: five prophets, each the finger of a far-reaching hand, each the knuckle of a great fist. One was a squat, limbless thing in a stone cradle, eyes weeping mucous, gnawing at its lower lip so that a sheet of blood soaked the fur of its face and chest; the next a tall wisp of a man, a glittering robe thrown over a garishly thin frame, glittering not for its luster but because it was a mantle of flies, waiting in perfect silence; a beautiful, androgynous Doloran in the prime of their youth, organs floating within crystal growths that covered their body, including the shell of their brain; an albino, furless Doloran whose naked body was instead a statue of sculpted white flesh, slimy and sleek to the touch and smelling of fish, its face pried open so that it sheathed another face whose mouth was a knot of thrashing feelers.
The last of them was familiar, and Amatlavira realized he had felt certain all along of this second encounter with the dream-eater prophet whose words awoke him from the sleep of his past life. Fungus covered his entire body, sprouting at impossible angles, clouds of insects orbiting like constellations, one socket sealed shut by mold and the other a black pit within which burned a light like a distant star...
Amatlavira, the beautiful one whispered.
Such a prizssse... intoned the tall one.
"The voice that called me here," Amatlavira said, dead to his fear. "Was it yours?"
It issss not oursss... whispered the buzzing flies.
The voice that calls... warbled the face within the face.
Laughter, thin and eerie, passed through the circle like the lash of a whip.
But it issshh you we sshheeek! the bloody one cried.
It is you we designed, said the beautiful being, its soft voice like a muted windchime.
"Yes." Amatlavira closed his eyes, sunk his chin into his chest. He thought for a moment and the wind atop the hill drew its fingers through his fur.
"I know, now, that my dreams were portents. That every detail was carefully laid to precipitate the next, on and on until I arose, the sum of many calculated moments. But tell me, should your plan have failed, would not another have come to stand in my place?"
There is always another, said the prophet he met in the underways.
"What is the purpose, then, of the path I walk?"
You will be...
A sssshurrogate...
For the Stillborn.
Yours will be a life...
Spent not by the year...
But by the ssscycle.
Amatlavira blinked at their proposal. "By the cycle? What can this mean?"
Yours will become...
More a legend than a life.
You will ssssshlide in and out of thisssh world...
Killing kings and ending eras...
The fungus-eaten prophet regarded him and in its shining stare Amatlavira thought he saw pity. You will live while all you know dies,
sleeping for ages in secret grottoes beneath the earth, sleeping amid worms and dirt, arising only when we require you to carve a new wound in the world. Your soul will grow fat with years of sacrifice, and you will accrue a hundred names which will be uttered as curses and prayers alike...
Until at lassshht...
You will yourself become the Stilborn...
And on the day of your rebirth...
You and He will return to another, older name.
And as they reached toward him, and Amatlavira felt everything he had ever been wash away in the river of a far greater mind, still he heard it call out --
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
~*~
Moments after the destruction of the Gates of Doloran by the newly awakened godling...
And at last, he realized, it was the answer to his millennial question. It was comical because as the epiphany struck him, Amatlavira - though over the centuries this had become but one of many names - realized that he had heard it many times over the course of his long life. Even at the very beginning, he thought in wonder, his birth promised ill fortune for the shamans had seen it in his eyes. Minuroi-Kas the Necromancer, who had been his worthiest foe, promised he too had seen it and that he would claw free from Hell to cleave Amatlavira's life from him when it arrived. In the past, Amatlavira had believed he witnessed it many times before, but only now, before its unquestionable truth, did he achieve absolute certainty.
It was the end of the world.
He arrived at this conclusion while perched atop a chunk of smashed masonry. Instead of crumbling inward with the rest of the Gates, this particular piece of debris hesitated in the air, then hurtled out towards the escarpment where a handful of beings negotiated the terms of an interstellar war. He did this despite knowing that, for all his power, these alien gods dwarfed him; that he raced towards certain death should it become a contest of strength, for though he could draw deep from the world, the invaders did not measure themselves by notches in a blade or the legends of a nation, but by the extinction of worlds and species, by wars which made graves of entire galaxies.
The world itself cried out to him. His every animal instinct, honed across endless eras of battle, urged him to turn back, to return to the burning forests of the Dolor. The voice that commanded him, however, was stronger by far. Since his birth he had been sired again so that his was no longer the Old Father, but another, darker power. He had killed his fear and slept through dynasties ancient and contemporary alike, but never before had his awakening brought such finality.
The end of the world called him, and he could not but answer.
His senses remained prick to the slightest refocusing of the invaders' attention to account for him, but he was otherwise oblivious as he approached the lake of flesh which oozed upon the plain and the mountain's rocky shelf. Viscous currents tugged at the twitching sea of tissue from within, slowed by the cold emanating from an unmistakable source at its epicenter. The severed hand of a God rested there, submerged to its knuckles in a grisly ocean, clutching a broken sphere of dark stone. Icy black water poured from its cracks, at contact chilling the lake into glaciers from melted skin...
Amatlavira knelt down, reaching tentatively with one hand to touch the lake's surface... a moment of quiet insanity... contemplating his reflection...
Without warning the flesh before him pulsed, then animated. A tendril lashed out and only Amatlavira's superhuman reflexes allowed him to brandish his blade and in a single sweeping gesture, quick unto invisibility, disperse the limb into a bloody mist. A moment's respite followed, then a half dozen more tentacles emerged, and these too he deflected, but in the next exponentially faster volley his arm was ensnared and then defense became impossible.
In an instant of struggle, it ended: a life that outran the oldest legends, a cultivated life...
The immense pool of flesh rippled, trembling from its center out to the very edges. As if again seized by counterfeit life, and despite the cold of Cocytus itself, the lake bubbled, then pulsated. The heart of an atrocity restored to life at long last, a heart that beat, once... twice... and on the third, a fundamental change occurred. The hand of God abruptly submerged, as if into a trench a thousand leagues deep. The bowl of Cocytus He gripped in His palm sank only to the divine fingertips that clutched the stone cold for purchase, evicted by Singar from Hell itself.
A silent interlude passed. In it, a soul was welded into a new life; a river's path was diverted to a lost tributary; blood flowed again through abandoned veins. A mind retrieved its identity from the shore of oblivion, and in doing so, a name returned to its owner.
Neither did the heart beat overlong before it stilled, then once more surged with its unholy animus. The lake flowed upward, through the fissures in Cocytus' shell, leaving the Ninth Circle stolen from the coffers of Hell itself to sit in its own freezing waters as they wept from its wounds.
This was how a god awakens - without any juvenile appetite for wanton destruction. Rebirth is its own testament. Its own trial...
Should ever Cocytus be returned to its place at the bottom of the deepest pit, and the ledgers of its sinners checked, there would be absences, souls conspicuously unaccounted for. Old and mighty souls.
Should ever the memorialists of any Soran race recall this apocalyptic day, there would be a common description no matter how diverse their language, culture or biology: a god haunts the world, they will write, a god believed dead, rotting in the Grave-with-no-bottom, entombed in the Great Pit, trapped in the Tear... a god haunts the world, not stillborn, but so terribly alive...
It did not so much leak as bloom from the cracks in Cocytus, a seething chaos across its surface that slithered through ruts in the graven rock, defiling the religious imagery of yet another canon. A great aperture commanded the center of the eldritch flower, its stalk creeping out above the land. Like a womb it disgorged its terrible burden, the seed of a fruit grown in the most unholy garden... a vile thing, no larger in span than a Scourgebearer's body, but its shadow in the ethereal world was greater by far. A hideous vessel, its form plundered from nightmares, twin horns curving phallic from a sphere of flesh and bone that pulsated as if ravaged by the life it concealed at random intervals.
The cyst hung in the air far below Singar's fog, trembling... as if its flesh were clay, a wormlike growth wriggled free from the space between the two horns, sculpting itself into a featureless humanoid puppet. Simultaneously, blood and viscera spewed from the tumor's frontward face as a slit traced itself from top to bottom, prying open to reveal a lone predatory eye that surveyed the world and all before it.
Yes... he gestated still within his womb, but at last, he had returned to life.
Narcissus, greatest among the traitorous sons of Idea, a warrior of the ages.
As if shock palsied its reaction to the birth of this atrocity, suddenly the world itself seemed to buckle beneath it. Directly beneath the orb-womb, a crater gouged itself from the earth; a shockwave flattened the first rows of the forest trees and smashed the rocky escarpments of the Liaitan mountains.
So long have we made war amongst ourselves
Murdering brothers for sport, plotting against father and child
But the path to salvation lies not in conquest, inward or outward
I alone offer shelter from the terrors that await
I who have suffered the torments in Hell
and the emptiness of the Dark Realm
I
ALONE
KNOW THE WAY...
And I will show you all
through love...
or destruction...
So tell me, my brothers
WHAT DO YOU SEE?
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