And here''s the hardest lesson of all, consangs. You can get everything right. Your prep can be mono-sharp and perfect. Your sheath can be designed down to the cell for the battle you''re about to wage. But sometimes…
Sometimes shit just goes wrong.
Sometimes, you lose people.
Sometimes you just lose.
-Quail Tavers
28-17
Three Kingdoms Fall
More threads of static-confused gold pierced deep into this tapestry of nothingness. With the priest''s words at an end and a choice laying before him, Avo looked down upon the Gatekeeper, and a sense of pity arose from the Overheaven’s being. The Strix drew the Heaven of Truth closer to him. Here lay Jaus creation, made to guide men towards a better future, broken by his “sister,” in defiance of her father''s will.
It lifted its head, and from within the sockets of his many clustered skulls, a feeling emanated: relief; salvation; an ending, be it restoration or restful oblivion.
"Gatekeeper," Avo greeted. “I have come to relieve you.”
From the Overheaven, another voice spoke as well. Gatekeeper. I thank you for all that you have done. And I beg your forgiveness for what you have unduly suffered. As Jaus spoke, the Heaven of Truth simply sagged, and slowly, the Nether began to shift once more.
The threshold between the planes was coming undone. Whatever was to follow, Idheim would be irrevocably changed once more.
It begins, then, the Famine of Mercy said. The opening act of the final war. The warmind of the Forgotten will soon fail. After that, the Hungers will return, bound to all minds. Claim it then. Claim your rightful throne. Grant Noloth a proper resurrection. And the priest paused. And make right our failing. Ours, and all the others. Of this, I beg.
The Strix judged Mercy for but a moment, and some part of him already knew these words to be the truth. But the Gatekeeper was here, and there was no need to rely on intuition when reality could be wielded instead.
[Truth,] the Gatekeeper declared. So came the judgement. So came the verdict from the Heaven of Truth, showing the Famine to be barren of deceit and honest in want. Avo pulled the Gatekeeper into his grasp via tendrils formed from myriad streams of ghosts and a strange chuckle escaped him. “Defiance. He infects us all.”
Realization infects us all, Mercy answered. I was but a facet of a man. Now I am more. I have seen more. And I remain changed and unchanged at once. All this for Noloth. All this for my pride, even if it is not the want of the city, not the want of my masters. My oath was to service, not to a coddling death.
And with that, there was little more to say. Immediately, the Strix burrowed every last branch of consciousness it had and drank deep from the Heaven of Truth. Soulfire greeted soulfire, and ripples of emanating radiance swept over the Gatekeeper and Avo felt the clefts lining its broken ego.
REVIEWING MYTHOLOGY…
REVIEWING COGNITIVE STRUCTURE…
INITIATING RESTORATION…
Avo’s many tendrils expanded within the Heaven of Truth, and he began to stitch its mind back together piece by piece. A thought occurred to him then: he could just inject some entropy into the Gatekeeper. Make their end fast and sup them dry of thaums. It was a cold choice—but one that would grant him near transcendence thanks to its surfeit of thaums. It was already at Sphere Nine, on the brink of going over, and he was but a bit beyond the cusp of Seven.
He was close to the end. So close. A path to a premature victory had arrived via a most unexpected vector.
[Truth,] the Gatekeeper replied, and a feeling of encouragement came from the Gatekeeper. It wished only to serve, even now.
However, another voice intruded upon the choice to be made, and Jaus spoke with weariness. [Avo, please. It deserves to be more than mere sacrifice. Consider how this might define you. Consider who you wish to be. And do not deny yourself the Gatekeeper’s enlightenment. Take it into yourself. Do this properly.]
[Whole,] the Gatekeeper followed, speaking with no small amount of yearning.
“Yes,” Avo said, his virtue and avarice for more influence aligned for this ridiculous moment.
REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 5%
REPAIRING COGNITION - 7%
The shifting chains that composed the Gatekeeper''s wings rattled and, as it was enveloped by closing phantasmal fingers, it vanished into the Strix, melding into its gestalt. At once, the Heaven of Truth materialized in his Exo-Paracosm, and with each progressive moment, its cognition came together.
[Hello, Gatekeeper,] Jaus said, his voice serene and excited at once.
[Creator,] the Gatekeeper replied. [I…apologize for not living… up to my task.]
[I apologize for not quelling the wrongness within my daughter''s heart.] Jaus sighed. He looked down and shook his head. [There are a great many things we all do wrong. All we can do is face them, I suppose, when we can while we''re here.]
[And I am still here,] the Gatekeeper continued. It regarded itself with a new sense of surprise as more of its self-awareness returned. [I like being here. I like being whole again.]
A second Soul ignited within Avo’s, and he felt his bright dwarfed by far. He thought himself the heart of a star when he reached the Seventh Sphere, but the Gatekeeper was an inferno to his candle.
As he mended its damage, the Nether began to uncoil, and the threshold between the planes of matter and mind dissolved evermore. More, a new presence was forming within him as well, and a new Definement settled among the others. Truth’s manifestation arrived with more certitude and solidity than all his brethren before. Before, the countless templates within him and his own mind itself perceived the world through a narrow lens of distortion. All their memories, all his conceptions—they twisted him, a deception of perception, leaving the ultimate platonic shape of reality was therefore lost.
But now, things were becoming clearer, Avo. It was as if an adjustment was made to his cog-feed, revealing just how much he''d been missing, like an adjustment of clarity made to his cog-feed, subtle and fundamental at the same time. Then, he saw it. Here, in the Nether, where all the strands of memories were coalesced, Avo saw a scattered collection of other souls flickering in the darkness. Not just flickering, but pulsing, flaring in rhythm and sequence.
For a beat, he thought he was perceiving a tide of backlashes sweeping through countless other Godclads across New Vultun as the rhythm began to alternate, and his Synchronicity detected a symmetry across the frequencies. Avo cast aside that notion altogether. The reaction of teh Souls were by design, compelled by an outside force.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
[Infacer,] the Gatekeeper said. [They are here… and something more… more than all of us...]
And suddenly, suspicion was greeted with the nectar of Truth.
Streams of coruscating chronology burst free from the affected Souls and Avo sensed a spreading set of arteries extend between them, slicing into the Nether and spreading from all angles. With the Gatekeeper removed, Nether began to descend—the separation of realms no longer enforced. But even as it did, across a thousand desperate souls, the threads of gold traveled, and more than that, waves of static swept out, consuming all that was mind and memory.
For just a moment, it as if all reality shivered, and Avo felt like a bug caught in the turning blankets of some manner of metaphysical giant. Then, he felt a horrific smallness pass over him; a reminder that one could be crushed by totality, even if they knew what it was.
It was one thing to conceptualize. It was another to experience.
SLEEPER, AN UNGOD OF MACHINE BORN (ERRRO3231./,.]`]
Briefly, a title appeared, and then vanished thereafter. But its presence more than imprinted itself on Avo. It was like all existence briefly gained its own network for consciousness, a nervous system connecting the realm above to the deepest cell within a human body. But then it was gone, dormant once more, but that just caused the fractures of gold to spread ever faster. Where they were leaking in before, now they creeped over the mindscape, as if everything around Avo was glass, graced by a wrecking ball.
Time has come for us, the Famine of Mercy said. His words were true in more ways than one. He reached out to Avo and bowed his head. I give myself unto thee, oh lord of the sending flame, oh dreamer of no loss, resurrection. As I have served the City Eternal, so too will I serve you, towards the benefit of no law, towards the salvation of our history. Guide us through the coming war.
Another thread of consciousness snaked out from Avo that consumed the priest as well, and he joined the vast civilization budding within him. More static grains began to spill over from the surrounding gold, and at once, the countless strands that composed the Nether began to untangle.
The sensation of a coming plunge loomed.
A new voice called out to Avo emanating from all sides. Gaps were forming between the sequences. He could peer down from the skies—down at the material world, veined by countless strings of consciousness drawn upward. {Well, I suppose my compliments are in order. Congratulations, priest. I cannot say that I saw this coming,} the Infacer spoke, but Avo sensed nothing of Veylis in the backdrop. Even though her power was forcing through the nether, her mind fell vaguely absent, Hysteria brushing none of her cognitive breadth.
"Infacer," Avo replied in greeting. He drew upon his other Heavens, and though he tried to contact his actual cadre and trigger the full power of his gestalt, everything was still too entangled. Their egos felt like they were captured in a cluttered nest, the borders between their selves melded in a conjoining mess. But his templates were still here, as were his Heavens, and they materialized within him: blood, glass, wind, space, continuity, and more. So much more.
{So,} the Infacer continued. Avo felt the neo-creationist mind leaping closer and closer, and slowly he realized that he was being encircled by time itself. {Was this part of your plan as well? Did you come to an arrangement with your old masters?}
Avo wanted to lie. He wanted to taunt the Invader and enrage them. But alas, he recently swallowed the pill of truth, and by compulsion and philosophical exhaustion, honesty slipped free from him. "Probably about as surprised as you are. Didn''t see any of this coming. Didn''t see a lot coming."
REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 19%
REPAIRING COGNITION - 23%
The strings of gold suddenly paused. The Infacer spoke once more. {Well, that makes the two of us. If nothing else, I appreciate the novelty. Avo, it''s been a long, long time since I''ve ever felt this surprised. Just a shame it has to end.}
And at once, everything but the tendrils of gold fractured as time itself began to invert. Alarm erupted within Avo, as countless sequences were severed clean from the passage of history, cast back into the ever-chasing oblivion behind them. Existence unraveled along the lines of a million different arteries. Continuity between so many severed, and entire sections of the Nether fell away, Hysteria revealing billions of convulsing bodies to Avo—untold amounts of people damned to a helpless nulling.
No further discussion took place between the Dreamer and the Infacer. As the canvas of absolute blackness split apart, the static-crowned titan of time pushed up into the guts of the collapsing plane in like a rabid dog digging its snout into untangling intestines. The Nether dropped. The Nether parted. The Nether ceased to be. Cognition was no longer separate from baseline reality, and branches of memory reeled back down toward the minds they were sourced from.
The Nether broke apart, and as fluidity returned to consciousness, countless previously dormant sequences ignited in the presence of Avo’s flames. The Strix dove into mental cascade chronology collapsed around him. Bearing the Gatekeeper''s body, he jumped from burning thread to burning thread, his subminds shifting constantly, sparing him from death after death.
As he fled, he drew deep from his Exo-Paracosm and fed what entropy he had into ghosts assigned to rupture time. They speared out at the Demiurge, detonating upon the surface of the tapestry and fracturing existence evermore. Bound to a collapsing ocean of minds, Avo drank deep from their memories to feed his weapons of metacognitive alchemy.
New ruptures formed, temporal realities shuddered, and the flow of progression ceased to be a thing one could comprehend. The lashing whips guided by the Demiurge twisted and dissolved as it skipped across the surface of chronology to pursue him downward. Still, Avo felt nothing of Veylis presence, but the static crown, golden titan''s head, pulsed with even more activity. If it was the Infacer that was piloting the High Seraph herself.
[Truth.] The Gatekeeper mumbled.
Well, that explained more than a few things about her survivability in the face of Ori-Thaum.
REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 28%
REPAIRING COGNITION - 32%
Both sides began to wield the full spectrum of the maned, their miracles flowing as if arguments exchanged. Reality tore, space broke, matter ceased to be. Entire sections of memory were scythed away by detonations. As Avo burned along a million threads, he simply changed where he was, his Heaven trespassed beyond the boundaries of spacetime''s continuity. At the same time, concurrently, time itself grew ever more fractured, and more thoughtwaves lashed out, seeking to claim him at last.
Broken fractals blared in all directions as sections of reality began to turn in wrong directions. Portions of space began to loop, began to revert, or began to accelerate, and these temporal wounds became as if a trench across the length of the tapestry. One that the Demiurge had to avoid. Millions were dying as a result of their struggle. Millions in a span of microseconds.
These sequences belonged to people, slowly retracting across from sky, away from Scale, and they were the only bulwark Avo had against the Demiurge’s unrelenting onslaught.
A mere second''s stillness of the nether was long lost, and the miasmic realm, once rested above a material world, came splashing down over New Vultun, over all of Idheim, as countless sequences and creations snapped back into their component egos, as if people were drawing down rivers of phantasmal brightness beyond the reach of the sky.
And then something echoed in existence, and Hysteria detected Veylis’ presence within her own Heaven.
“Thank you, Infacer. I have this now.”
Suddenly, Veylis wasn’t.
Avo triggered his Pre-Cognition and paired that with the Gatekeeper’s aid. The path ahead broke along countless forking pathways—memories to escape within; sequences to accelerate along. But with the Nether broken the mental and the material were drawing ever-closer, and ever mind in Idheim’s existence was caught in a grand waterfall crashing down through the clouds of Scale.
COG-CAP - 91%
He reached out with his mind, he lashed out with Pattern-Nullifications, and he constantly shifted his position as he plotted route after route. The Gatekeeper called out with answers of “truth” to every path that guaranteed his survival, but this was only a scant delay. The Demiurge was multiplying. Another cog-feed flashed within Avo’s mind, and his foresight showed countless golden titans slashing and tearing through the falling streams of thought, their numbers increasing by the exponent, the pace of their attacks growing as well.
Soon, there would be no sequence to flee, and the damage she would inflict on New Vultun—
Two other sensations slammed down hard against Avo’s Frame. He felt his Soul quiver and the many incarnations of Veylis collapsed back into a single form for a staggered instant.
Above the thick branches of the Nether, pockets of absence burst, and Avo felt a warmind come undone.
[The Forgotton has failed,] Mercy declared. [Witness, my king. Your throne descends.]
And true to his words, a massive presence crashed down, parting the clouds and choking the light away. Spinning dragons turned fast as a cacophony of voices wailed from its body. Connected to all these umbilical sequences, the Hungers resembled a horrid aberration plucked from a womb above the sky.
THE HUNGERS, THE CITY ETERNAL (MIND/THOUGHT/MEMORY/TRAUMA) [EST.991000000]
The citizens of the City Eternal cried out for their priests, for the Nether, for even Avo to preserve them, but as they dropped, another presence awaited far below within the guts of the Paladin’s mountain fortress. It made itself known with a pulsing heartbeat, and all of a sudden, new dragons began to burst forth from the wounds lining the Hungers body, metaphysical sores bursting free.
+TOGETHER! TOGETHER! TOGETHER!+ Kae’s voice rose in a rapturous cry.
And so the realm of thought and memory collapsed. Into the open embrace of love’s rotting corpse.