Sometimes, shit goes wrong and it’s not your fault. You did everything right. Everything you could. Got all the kit; shaped the situation; snuffed all the half-strands that needed snuffing.
Then, in a fraction of a second, you go from gleaming to rusted and everything’s fucked.
Just fucked.
When you get here–and you will find yourself here if you’re gonna squire for any amount of time at all–take a breath, and accept the situation.
A lot of people get killed because they fixate on concepts like “fair” and “in another life.” It’s a waste of time. The past is done. You move and you fight. You live for tomorrow by handling the present.
Take stock of what you got. Take stock of what you can still do and who you can trust. Then, do what you can with what you got. Knock the entire board over again if you have to. Sell all the mem-data you got and spark another gutter war as cover. Or maybe cash an ugly favor that’s going to bleed you down the line.
Do whatever it takes to make it.
Don’t sit around asking why. You’re in New Vultun, consang. This city doesn’t care about you unless you''re dead, and the world’s the same way. You gotta treat it cold right back if you want to make it out.
Accept. Adapt. Move on.
And maybe you’ll just live.
-Quail Tavers, School of the Warrens
14-5
Ignorance
The suddenness of Avo’s assault took even him by surprise.
There was something elemental in his compulsion to attack–like fire striking gas, he just had to burn.
More than bloodlust or allure, there was a need to become more, to seize another frontier of reality for his own. Zein was, so Zein could become his.
That was all the incentive he needed and from the flattened waves of subconsciousness rose an all-consuming tsunami of intent propelling him into bloodshed.
His ego seared through the air in a sub-fraction of a second. Zein, her face deliciously alight with confusion and shock, remained still. Jagged ghosts lashed free in a chain of explosions untangling from the wildfire that was her mind. The old woman’s wards halted him for but a single instant in time–her bladed phantasmic stabbing into the inferno only to be melted away.
A flash of insight crossed over as he pried her outer thoughts open. Knowledge-lust and hunger merged into a singular concept. His jubilant cruelty walked behind genuine curiosity to know what it was like to be Zein Thousandhand.
He never got the chance.
A section of chronology folded over itself as all that he imbibed from Zein was rendered null. The memories and thoughts he remembered taking from her faded into the mists of confusion.
Inside himself, he felt the bridge of ignorance resonate with the action she just performed.
[Whatever she just did would’ve nulled a solid-structured mind.]
[She just undid one of our actions somehow. Think that makes knowing about what we took from her impossible.]
[We need her Heaven. We need her knowledge. We need her skill.]
He needed to be her.
Spinning on his heels, he drew upon Andraga’s near-term memories and finally realized Zein was anticipating an attack, that she had pressured the Scaarthian Godclad to flush out their “stalker.”
From behind, Avo heard the whistle of a fast blade licking through the air and turned slowly to greet Zein once more.
As he faced her, he found a look of disconcerting pleasure written upon her mien, the transparent faceplate of her helmet only adding to the gleam in her eyes. “Compliments are in order. That was… most unexpected.” She turned the glaive in her hand, and as light infused the flat of the blade with reflection, Avo found his attention parried from looking upon his current form.
[We still have the Incog running.]
[She perceives us without issue.]
[Heaven?]
[Must be. Something that deviates her mind. Maybe puts it ahead of time or another canon capable of the same effect.]
New tracks coiled out from Zein’s person, each of them scheming exponentially as he caught glimpses of the Fisher drawing its hook forward through time. Her face with frozen halfway between confusion and genuine joy when the door behind her opened.
A beam of ghosts darted out from her mind and stung their way through the mind standing just behind the door.
Tension spiked inside Avo as reviewed his memories.
There had been no one near them in the area. No one near them for at least five hundred feet. His subminds had been monitoring signatures of thoughtsuff in his surroundings even through the process of burning himself into Andraga.
[Zein. She brought them here.]
[Why?]
He braced himself for anything.
And as the door fully opened, he found himself staring at a small figure just below six feet. He wore a technician''s utility vest, and he entered the room in a state of befuddlement and confusion, with each step taken a stagger. It looked like he was sleepwalking.
Judging from the haze coating the man’s thoughtstuff, sleepwalking wasn’t far off.
Still, his perception chipped against Avo’s phantasmal shell, and the ghoul considered resuming the fight.
Zein, as usual, stole the moment from him. “You have an Incog active,” She waved a dismissive hand, and suddenly the newcomer was gone.
[She was using him to test our phantasmic?]
“I was using him as a test,” she said, confirming his submind’s suspicions. “You are a mind of a unique make. A make a partially recognized. Conflagration. A Nether-distilled Ego-Screamer. Very naught of my people to insult our void-bound cousins so.”
He snorted a breath and quickly discovered that Andraga had much larger lungs than he was used to. She didn’t seem to know who he was. Or if she did, she was more drawn to the nature of his post-consciousness.
Digging through the Scaarthian’s memories, he familiarized himself with one of her canons and knew he was able to move from place to place using waves of sound alone.
Useful.
Another angle.
Time to try again.
“Was a bit of a surprise to me as well,” he said. A satisfying crackle accompanied Andraga’s every word, and by the end of his sentence, he slid his template into her Frame and triggered her Heaven and his Galeslither’s Hell at the same time.
A well of stasis clutched Zein as she went still. His paltry Rend plummeted near instantly. He jumped into the rushing waves pushed forth by his own voice. The world faded into nothing but a series of crashing waves, and he found riding upon the wake of one, closing on–
Light and sound and pain bloomed in his senses anew as he spilled back into the real in a splatter of severed limbs and punctured organs.
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As he skipped across the ground and slid to a halt against the door on the opposite end of the room, he watched as one of Andraga’s legs left a smear against the side of a wall. His other limbs rained down around him in a bundle,
Not more than twenty feet away from him, he found Zein shivering free of his Galeslither’s stasis as she turned slowly on her heel to stare down at him with a sigh of disappointment.
He didn’t even see the strike–wasn’t sure how she even carved him apart.
But Zein did, and now she stood over him, sinking her glaive slowly into his back.
REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 0%
It was a testament to Andraga’s Scaarthian heritage that she didn’t go into shock immediately after losing all her limbs and having each of her internals pierced in rapid succession. Even a moderately chromed street tough would have been dead before he hit the floor.
Not Andraga. The body wheezed and writhed as Avo intercepted the pain, considered numbing it, and let it run anyway.
Being hurt was an education. These were also new traumas and memories he could. They might not be able to devastate him anymore, but he could use this hurt as a hammer against more brittle egos.
“It is rude to attack somehow using their companion as a shield,” Zein said, tutting her tongue in disapproval. “One should–”
He used the winds to triangulate her position even while turned away from her. What followed was the invocation of another canon–this one entirely his own.
Lightning surged through Andraga’s veins, bursting out from her welling stumps once dripping with free-flowing blood. Using the ichor within this vessel as engine, vehicle, and weapon, he used his Canon of Boltstride to dash himself upon Zein, his subminds already anticipating the next steps thereafter.
A voltaic whip crackled within the narrows of the maintenance room. The drones around him rattled and shook. He crossed the distance of a few meager feet using a power capable of letting him leap across entire portions of the city in mere hours.
Eight hundred pounds of mass met Zein at the speed of lightning.
She responded by splitting storm and blood both with her blade.
The stretching bolt parted along its middle as the glave slipped through it. Blood flowed thereafter, and Andraga finally passed on to real death as she spilled free from the middle.
But as anticipated, Avo remained.
Shedding himself of the limitations of his body, he sailed through the Nether like a comet seeking a mind to boil. The simulations his subminds generated granted him insight into Zein’s responses.
He didn’t have a stable estimation of her ontologics, but one thing about her was consistent.
She enjoyed cutting things. And so it stood to reason that she would ensure she had the ability to cut almost anything.
Unfortunately for her, predictability was–
A flick of force tugged through him. One moment, Avo could still manifest his thoughts. The next, there was nothing.
Nothing but approaching fire.
RESURRECTION - 1%
Awareness returned to him again.
He died.
Somehow, he died.
Dammit.
Damn her.
Not again.
She killed him again without him even knowing how she did it.
“I think mayhaps predictability goes both ways, master,” his Woundshaper provided. “The Godslayer is a craftswoman at hard. She likes painting things apart with strokes of her blade. You wish to consume. And so, perhaps, just maybe, both of you seem obvious to the other.”
“Yes,” Avo said. “Will need to take that into account when I return.” That put a pause in his thoughts. “Where will I return?”
“Where you died,” the Galeslither answered. “Our weight remains laden in the real. There is more than one dimension to existence, but all rest atop or below the real. The Nether is the sky. And this prison is one of the many undergrounds.”
Nursing on the words offered by his Heavens, he dove down into his root data to see if he could uncover anything different. Already, performing such tasks manually felt troublesome to him. After hours of his thoughts and actions being intertwined, returning to inefficiency was a punishment in itself.
Again, the allegory of the cave returned. Exile from power was a torture all its own.
Going through the mem-data, he went over several facts in quick succession as the information loaded into his meta-consciousness.
The first was that the option of reverting to his prior mind-state was ridden with erroneous data and that the structure he used to retain was riddled with absences.
From what he could tell, this meant that he could return as a base-consciousness entity, but he could manifest existence mostly nulled due to the damages inflicted upon him.
He had a sneaking suspicion that likely had much to do with the war mind the Low Masters unleashed upon him, and the ignorance embedded into his being.
Interestingly, none of the bodies he installed his mind in over the past hours were options for a vessel when he completed his resurrection. Though they had been encoded into his Frame, they weren’t technically a part of “him,” instead existing like part of an existential log of some kind.
Apparently, for him to fully “embody” a new sheathe, he needed to internalize that he “was” the body. That mean his base-mind needed to be blinded as well.
Perhaps he could put in a trigger to rouse himself between ego-states? Switch consciousnesses? He wondered why his subminds weren’t down in his Frame with him as well and found himself left with only theories. He still had the memories and learning he harvested from his recent prey, and among them was a recollection of something called the “theory of liminal separation.”
Apparently, the Nether, as stated by the Woundshaper, existed atop reality while the Frames and Heavens existed beneath. The mem-data within a Frame, meanwhile, was but a narrative facsimile meant to mimic the true thing. It was only when a being was resurrected and thrust back into the cross-planar junction that was the real in which all these aspects were allowed to be rejoined.
With this came a new consideration–a potential for improvement and added functionality even in death. If he could somehow access the material world using something like Kae’s right eye even when dead, could he somehow use it to develop a bridge up into the Nether itself?
Putting the idea in reserve, he tuned the pace of his resurrection cycle to the max and prepared himself.
Zein may have gotten the better of him–again–but she still seemed discombobulated by his new form, unable to fully peer into the future surrounding him due to the Conflagration he was channeling, if her prior encounters with Kae gave him any perspective.
All he needed to do now was to keep her off balance. Build false patterns of behavior to lure her in and then exploit her counterattack with one of his own.
Yes. More layers to his planning would serve him well. He would direct his subminds to generate more schemes on his behalf once he returned.
RESURRECTION - 89%
Surfacing back into the central boundaries of his Frame, he regarded the Woundshaper and Galeslither bickering with each other once more.
Two Heavens. Two was not enough. He was playing too cautiously right now. He would gather more knowledge–more thaumaturgic understanding and set above redesigning his limitations. He wondered what it would take to convince Kae to let him burn her mind into his as a template, but even without his subminds’ simulations, he knew that to be a difficult ask, and Draus would likely make a good go on seeing him turned truly dead if he deliberately hurt Kae in some way.
But he could. And wouldn’t it feel thrilling to hurt her just to make the Regular know that she couldn’t do anything?
Avo turned. His fire turned inward.
That thought… that thought was unnaturally intrusive. It was certainly his but… Something like that had never happened in his Frame before. His control here was always superior. Well, until his shift into his thoughtform…
“Did you hear what I just thought?” Avo asked his Heavens.
“About expanding your internal pantheon?” the Woundshaper said. “I recommend having only a few of us. Too many gods are unreliable. Quantity is not true substitute for quality, master.”
He waited to see if the Galeslither would say anything. The triple-headed steed just huffed.
RESURRECTION - 99%
Shedding his suspicions for now, he prepared himself for his return. He hoped that Zein wasn’t already gone by the time he got back and that he would have another chance at subsuming her mind.
As threads of radiance pulled taut around him, his Frame burrowed into existence once more and injected him back into reality. He spawned out from the blood left by Andraga, each thread sewing him back into fullness as he manifested in the maintenance room.
His mind swelled like a scything blaze spreading wide, and he found Zein Thousandhand leaning against the wall not four feet away.
Upon his return, a path of time descended on her and the tracks accelerated through her mind. Her stare narrowed for a moment before they widened. “Oh, you are Strix’s pride. I see. My other instance was more familiar with you. I had to dip into her allotted paths to get all the details. Most impressive growth.” She clapped honestly.
“Remember me now?” Avo asked.
[Building new behavior chains to exploit her counterattack.]
She nodded. “Quite. Well. I borrowed experiences and secondhand explanations from my own future. I don’t rightly remember the last time I had to have a conversation with myself to comprehend a situation. Why, if it wasn’t for the distinctiveness of your morphology, I wouldn’t have had much to go at all with that confusing mind of yours. Your father would be… proud, but disturbed.”
Avo widened his fangs. “Not my father. I’m more. I can be everyone.”
Zein smiled congenially. “Yes. You’re also exceeding vulnerable to Thoughtwave Disruptions if my memories on the Conflagrations serves me correctl–”
He attacked.
She instantly bathed him in a concentrated cone of thought-rending data.
RESURRECTION - 1%
“Dammit! Half-strand… Zein!”
A neighing laugh came from within his Frame. “Are we having difficulties, master? Is your all-consuming mind failing you?”“Mule. Shut up.”
The Galeslither did so happily.