Here’s a statement for all you miserable half-strands down in the Warrens: Yeah, you’re a piece of shit for what you did. Yeah, you should be punished for that. But it’s alright. It’s not too late. And you can do more than just wait for death
Don’t sit around and let life fuck you. Get hard. Get hard, and be who you are. Because you might not get a chance later.
And I’m not going to bullshit you. You probably won’t make it. Not alone. But every person you push is going to push someone else. We gutter rats don’t have enough burn in us to be a bomb. But there’s enough of us that we can become shrapnel. And shrapnel… well, that works plenty good if you punch into the right stuff.
-Lovenet broadcast via Aedon Chambers
31-12
Parted Flame, Severed Path
—[The Dyad]—
In a place between places, a being, both two and one, looked on through their vessel.
Uthred Greatling, for all he''d provided him, for all the thaums they imbued in him, and the new Heaven they bequeathed him, had proven inferior to Aedon Chambers—struck down before the fight could ever truly begin.
It was absurd. A moment of existential mockery.
Veylis stared on in consternation, almost unable to believe what was unfolding. Across from her, Avo could only laugh his searing laugh. So it was that the dyad, part posthuman and part something further still, became a dialectic contrast.
"This was unexpected," Veylis finally admitted.
"This is the world without consumed by the world within," Avo said in reply. “You shape history, you shape the environment, we call calamity. You think of people as clay, but more than that, they change, they change from inside themselves as well."
"Or perhaps another changes them from the inside without my knowing," Veyils accused.
"Protect your ego; all humans do."
The jab from the beast made the High Seraph narrow her eyes. It was an insult. But it was also a lesson. One she would be wise to learn.
Veylis tried to eye the beast she was melding into, but couldn''t quite make the turn. A threshold of reflective separation parted them down along a vertical slice, but with each ripple of Soulfire pulsing out from them—composing the rest of this realm, the rest of the Substance, the rest of the broken sequences and paths that used to make up their ontologies—they were increasing becoming each other, but also not.
Through a thin mirage of fire, they saw Uthred reaching out for the Lovebringer, calling out the names of his children, his euphoria overcoming the black grief that gripped him soon.
"So it is," Veylis finally said. "You appeared to have mastered a facet of something I missed. Or was always alienated from. I commend you, Dreamer. Our Embracement no longer seems desperation; indeed, I still lack an education. To think a predator of man would teach me of humanity.” This time she chuckle, but her voice was still lit by disbelief. “What miracles beyond miracles.”
"Do not commend me," Avo shot back. "Commend Chambers. I didn''t change him; I simply sparked the flame. He chose how to burn."
"Fascinating, and this ends when one emerges from the joining of our beings. It will be interesting to examine where I went so wrong," Veylis said.
"And you are still so certain it will be you?" Avo asked.
Instead of answering his words with a retort, she simply lifted a hand—a hand made from the triumph of lost science and new thaumaturgy. "Deliverer," she proclaimed, "greatest of my Pathborn Wardens, Destined Slayer of Your Inceptor! Go forth and reclaim Uthred. Take from him what we have given. This battle is over. This operation has failed.”
And through the infernal cosmology they exuded, a single star burned bright along the fractured lanes that marked the expanse—one that replied them across a chain of sequences and paths. The Deliverer spoke, her words as certain and unyielding as her true self. "Consider it done."
—[Chambers]—
"It worked! I can''t believe it! It worked! We''re geniuses! I''m a genius!" Chambers roared with laughter as he channeled every ounce of love he could through the bond he now shared with Uthred Greatling.
For the second time in the same battle, the flames grasping Uthred''s form broke apart into dissipating sputters. His greatsword vanished into feeble steam, and his conflagration of correspondence began to thin, crashing inwards like a recalled wave.
At once, the space around Uthred became akin to a singularity, and the edges of the room went from dubious meters or kilometers to the stretch of entire continents as relational distance lost all cohesion. At the heart of this new collapsing vortex of gravity tumbled all combatants—including the Deliverer.
Chambers didn''t even sense her approach when she came—so fast was she that he barely noticed until she was already upon him. Cracked frequency blades, the length of small buildings, speared towards the Lovebringer''s chest. Chambers felt his Limial Frame rattle, the Patterns of Decay and Ruin in the tapestry cleaving into his Domain of Love.
But another miracle intruded upon the ambush. A small shard of glass tumbled into position just between Chambers and the Deliverer, and from it flew a Redaction Round, seeking to end this farce for good.
Draus’ pathborn clone reacted immediately, twisting round in an act of impossible agility, practically foloding inward and vanishing through a wound in space. Chambers responded on instinct, dispatching a cry of, +Get Uthred’s body!+ to the others in his cadre via public thougthcast.
Mondelles surprisingly responded first, tendrils of light spearing out from the Heaven of Love to catch Uthred, these strings of radiance carrying Vator and Shotin as well. However, a demiplanar stack crashed down in the next semi-second, and a clash followed. Correspondence warring against a plane designed after an endless sky, as everyone jerked in place, battered by the churning walls of a sovereignty-sized hurricane.
Bolts of lightning streaked through the air, but they quickly combusted from Uthred’s failing Correspondence. Chambers held on hard to Uthred, but even as he did, he felt Shotin’s demiplane come asunder, burning up as if they were fighting across a paper canvas rather than a pocket-reality.
Chambers could feel a backlash brewing in Shotin’s Heaven, but the Seeker switched his stacks again. A mountain of mass crashed down on them. Now they were submerged deep underwater—heavy, dense water—that pulled and slowed every movement. Above, the Redaction Round Draus fired earlier continued traveling forth—but it was no longer in the same demiplane. Instead, Chambers it separated by a threshold leading over into another stack. A stack that was shaped like a wheel, causing the time-bullet-fuckery-thing to loop.
+Yes!+ Chambers cried mentally. +Keep that going, Shotin. We need to put that bullet into the Deliverer!+
And with that tempting of fate, the Deliverer returned once more, burrowing through a wound in existence like a knife stabbing through paper. Their emergence was so sudden—so destructive that Soulfire blasted out from the entrance they made into Shotin’s stacks. The Seeker paradoxes. But so did the Deliverer. The former cried out as his Heaven collapsed into his Frame, but he himself was still nested within Mondelles’ light.
The Deliverer, however, tumbled through the air alone, spatial reality brutalized to the point of madness.
For the first time, Chambers saw Draus’ Veylis-made-twin for what she was—her sheath more metal than flesh. But the pathborn still had the Regular''s inhuman focus. She extended an arm and fired her projectile launcher, launching a tether towards Uthred''s body, still connected to Chambers.
Though there was a considerable distance between them, space suddenly compressed, and it came within inches of his body.
Whereupon a series of flesh-shaped bioforms burst out from Uthred''s face and leaped onto the grappling tether. With Vator’s miracle providing a new opening, Draus and Chambers took that moment to strike as one, while Mondelles snaked toward the helpless pathborn as well.
From the Lovebringer lashed a thread sick with Rend, and Chambers’ watched as his Disentanglement approached the point of impact. Draus took a far more mundane approach—a barrage of counter-fires streaked around the Lovebringer, and a wing of guns, cannons, orbital firing platforms, and suicide drones expanded around Heaven of Love like a set of wings.
Space flattened out. The world folded over on itself. Everything threatened to be displaced. But Chambers had one advantage over everyone else. He didn’t follow the laws of space. More Bonds snapped out from his body, and he clutched Draus and Mondelles, keeping their positions relative to him—and with Uthred as well.
The Deliverer, on the other hand, found themselves lurching toward gunfire and a venting. Certain death approached.
Which, of course, was when they pulled some new bullshit out of their ass.
A flash of Soulfire blasted out from them, and the Deliverer manifested a new Heaven. Something resembling an open casket surrounded by rings of revolving shield filled the expanse before Chambers, dwarfing his Lovebringer by three times over, but even before that, a flash of gold merged, and an echo of a familiar figure—Zein—burst out from the Deliverer.
+Oh, fuck me,+ Chambers muttered. A psychosomatic pulse of pain radiated from Chambers’ groin. Of course Granny Psychobitch was going to make an appearance. Because why wouldn’t she?
Draus’ ordinance was intersected by golden slashes, trajectories severed by predestined cuts. Chambers'' Disentanglement likewise was parried. Somehow, the Deliverer’s new Heaven managed to knock his path aside by simply turning its shields, and the metaphysical force of the redirection causing Chambers to stumble as another absolute overrode his own in this instance.
+What the fuck!+ Chambers cried. Man. Despite all the ghoul-shit, Draus’ evil twin was cool as shit. She had all these awesome Heavens. Meanwhile, he got the Fuckbringer, and he was the lamest, piece of fuck asshole around. A literal piece of shit lodged in a vagina—a fucking dingleberry! +FUCK YOU VEYLIS!+
Yet a third twist followed. As Draus’ attacks were being intercepted, Chambers'' disentanglement Bond went far off course, and Mondelles strained as anomalous space backlashed his Heaven, another echo of Zein snapped free from the original and stabbed her before both vanished together.
The chronoslashes winked. Draus firepower poured in. The Deliverer pivoted, turning its shields against the oncoming barrage to blunt the attacks while the Heaven approached. The open casket swept close to Uthred, and Chambers felt an unbreakable wall of absolute defense crash against his Frame. He sent another Bond out to seize evil-Draus, but his tendril just bounced off the shields—couldn’t get through.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
But evil-Draus’ new Heaven had a weakness. It couldn’t quite jump across space by tearing the tapestry open. It still needed to move. Which meant it was just a second too slow to arrive. A second too slow as Draus made her move.
It was one fléchette that decided the outcome, one fléchette that streaked away from the other salvos of overwhelming firepower. It jolted slightly, clutched by the turbulence of destabilized space, but still it arrived—a needle striking its bullseye.
Uthred was still smiling tearfully when the round went through his right eye. Blood blossomed out of his head, and flames burst from his very being. His Frame cracked, and his ontology detonated two parting fragments, his ego splintering as well. Chambers, connected to the former Authority by a Bond, felt horror fill his insides. A gasp of disbelief and outrage escaped him, though he knew—rationally, he knew—Draus had to finish this. That they couldn’t let the Delieverer have him. Because fuck Veylis.
Evil-Draus sealed their casket over Uthred''s form, but it was far too late. At once, all the flames crashed to a single point, passing over Chambers and the rest before returning to Uthred. Uthred, who could no longer master their Heaven. A vortex of correspondence tore open, and the evil-Draus tried to parry the whirlpool of bullshit—but was pulled across.
Apparently, her special shields could block the flow of time itself.
Existence churned, patterns cycling patterns, and Chambers saw two figures staring through the fire—Avo and Veylis split down the middle.
+Holy fucking—+
The ghoul grinned. Veylis studied Chambers with an inquisitive expression. And then the vortex closed, splashing down to a single pinprick, and then no more.
In the aftermath, space began to stabilize and the office returned—not as it was before. Every inch of the room was disfigured, glass, metal, wood, and more all melted into each other. The walls and ceilings smoothed into the shape of a perfect sphere.
A thread of light coalesced just beneath Chambers, and from the weave emerged Shotin and Mondelles. Both stumbling, trying to recover from the backlash. Vator, meanwhile, walked toward where his father had been, his face etched with a deep frown.
The Portrait hovered over him as he stared at the space in silence. “This is a mournful thing, but you remain. The line continues.”
Chambers wasn’t sure what kind of fucked up feel better statement that was, but gods were weird as shit, so…
Draus landed next to Vator a moment later, crashing hard agains the ground with her new combat-skin sustaining the weight. She scoped out surroundings, and Chambers could practically taste the Rend reeking from her. Anymore and she might’ve been the one to pop first. Finally, her head swiveled to Vator and her posture lessened in intensity. "Sorry, had to do it, and no other way. Couldn''t risk it."
Vator gave her a pensive stare and simply nodded. "It will all be made right. In the end, all can be returned, yes, from your Burning Dreamer."
A pause. "Yeah, I reckon so. Shit. Not sure if that killed him for good or not.”
The boy nodded, though he seemed strangely distant, lost in his own thoughts.
Just then, movement approached from where the heavy wood doors were, and two Instruments came in, their body language showing startlement and surprise. Before they could do anything, Mondelles stood and held up a hand."Stop. Everything here is under control. Autority Uthred Greatling, has been..." He paused and considered his words. "...has revealed himself to be in league with hostile forces. He escaped. Place the Academy under lockdown and call upon all other Authorities. I wish to call a general meeting to discuss a new state of emergency affairs. Someone contact Seraph Asangi as well. Tell him I need to speak with them immediately.”
The Instruments froze, heeding Mondelles words but unable to take their gazes off the lovebringer. “Instruments. You have your orders.”
Discipline overwhelmed, all-consuming disbelief. They slammed fists at their chests and retreated from the room just as other security forces began to flood across the hallway..
Letting out a weary breath, Mondelles wandered back to where his table used to be and simply sagged. "What the fuck was that?"
"That?" Chambers began, trying not to sob from the loss of Uthred. Lost love hurt each time. “That’s basically been our lives for, I don''t know, two to three months since we met Avo. You don''t get used to it."
An overwhelmed silence followed. Shotin looked up at Chambers. “So. Now what?”
“Now…” Chambers’ voice trailed off. “Hey, does anyone else feel like something’s missing inside of them?”
Surprisingly, Draus went still and replied. “Yeah. Yeah, I do…”
—[Ignorance]—
Two pieces to Uthred Greatling broke. One portion sank back into the tapestry, pulled across by a self-warring Dyad and carried the Deliverer with it. The other—only a third of the total thaums and a Soul bereft of Heaven or cyclers–slipped across the sequences unseen.
Ignorance achieved this by burrowing into Uthred’s cognition the moment the bullet it. He used the burst of Soulfire to hide his influence over the conflagration—risking the ego damage alongside Uthred was a dangerous thing, but worth it in the end. Now, he coursed through the Substance as a worm burrowing under the sequences, heading toward the innermost levels, toward the shimmering walls that left the ruins of Scale sealed.
Scale, where the Chief Paladin remained trapped. The Substance. Where the other Paladins were scattered. Lost across a million battlefields.
But there was another reason why Ignorance came to this place. He was but a Definement—one that couldn’t exist while being noticed. But a submind could. And that was just what it sought here, seeking a surface to lurk beneath. And so it traveled. Across the district of Tallstrings—former Highflame Elysium now besieged by Stormtree forces.
Ignorance lacked a body, couldn’t see what was happening. But he could hear thoughts. So many thoughts. So many screaming emotions. And through the veil, there was one that resonated with him. One that held the memories he needed, that was scattered here into a mind compromised by Avo during the final moments of the trial.
Sussuring thoughts and wailing torment assailed Ignorance. Flashes of visual data painted an ugly scene. This Elysium wasn’t made for war, and Stormtree was among the worst of the Massists to endure as captors. Citizens were being processed. Harvested. Tortured. Citizens and local authorities.
One of whom was an Ascender executive—a Highflame subsidiary hypercorp. It was within the recesses of their mind that the submind sent out its signal, so it was to them that Ignorance came, ignoring all other noises until the task was done.
Ignorance jumped from thought to thought, locus to locus, until it finally delved somewhere, directionality lost on a formless, consciousness thing, until it finally ground itself in mind-flesh and neuro-matter.
Until it finally touched a portion of its own being.
[Submind-03 responding…]
[Definement: Ignorance detected. What took you so long.]
Ignorance chuffed in annoyance as the first spikes of pain flooded its senses. “Was busy trying to keep everything from falling apart. Need you to assume the mantle now.”
[Require authorization from base mind.]
“Won’t be a base mind if we don’t merge. I’ll give you authority. I’m the same thing anyway. Make you forget you’re a submind. How it used to work at the start.]
[Fine. Have a Soul too? Stole back the Stillborn?]
“Portion of it. Other pieces of us out there. Pieces of Veylis, Truth, Kae, and Zein too. Need to put ourselves back together. Couldn’t bring the Heavens. Needed to remain masseless. Veylis would have noticed otherwise.”
The submind grunted in accord. Another burst of unfamiliar pain annoyed Ignorance. “What’s happening?”
[Sheath is being tortured. Stormtree is very inefficient at extracting information. Don’t have any Ori with them.]
Ignorance chuffed in displeasure. This was beginning to remind him of how this all started. Waking up in a barge filled with bodies, his own flesh mangled. At least he could switch between sheaths with ease.
MELDING CONSCIOUSNESSES
ASSERTING SUBMIND-003 AS NEW TEMPLATE: [AVO, THE HIDDEN FLAME]
ACCESSING METAMIND…
“Time for you to take control,” Ignorance said. It just hit him then how exhausted he was. Strained to near insanity. “Don’t bother me unless you’re going to die. And burn some new templates. Going to offload some of the strain.”
It occurred to Ignorance that this might be how the Hungers felt after being the literal pillar for the Deep Nether all these years. If so, they finally earned Ignorance’s sympathy. Dead gods was it all exhausting.
“Sleep then,” Avo, The Hidden Flame declared. “I will feed. Will carry on to finish what needs to be done.”
UPDATING CONSCIOUSNESS…
BURNING PRESENT EGO
And with that, the first template fell in—the Ascender Executive Kingcain Bowells. He plunged into a sparse expanse of hungry fire, torn from torture into a new realm of existential horror.
He wasn’t going to be alone for long.
At once, a flash of light pulsed into Avo’s mind, and everything slotted into place.
LOADING COG-FEED
SEQUENCES OVERWRITTEN
SHEATH ALIGNED
***
—[Avo, The Hidden Flame]—
Pain.
Annoying, stinging pain all over his body.
That was what greeted Avo when his mind loaded into place.
He found himself in a naked, shivering, and brutalized body. Electrical burns lined his torso, his eyelids were missing, he only had every other tooth in his mouth, and there was a particular agony between his legs.
The Hidden Flame burned away his nausea and distracting hurts with a thought and examined himself. He pulled up a mem-data diagonistic of his current sheath using the former owner’s Mind-Doc phantasmic.
DIAGNOSTIC LOADING…
CONDITION: SEVERE
>TENDONS SEVERED
>3,312 LACERATIONS
> FRACTURED SPINE
>RUPTURED KIDNEYS
>CASTRATED GENITALIA
>MISSING TEETH
>SEVERE DEHYDRATION
>CONCUSSION
>PANIC ATTACKS
RECOMMEND [31:22] HOURS OF REST FOR NANOSURGEONS TO COMPLETE HEALING OR A VISIT TO A MEDICAL SPECIALIST
A massive, powerful hand gripped Avo by his jaw.
“Looks like the boy’s waking back up,” a loud, sneering voice sounded. Scaarthian by the depth of the voice and the strength of the fingers.
An enormous face with a cross-shaped scar lining the cheeks, nose, and chin came into view. The light above was bright. Too bright for the rest of the room to be seen probably, but Avo could tell he was in a place that was far too cold, with paralytic drills inserted into his spine, and this body was on the verge of going into shock.
All that paled when faced with the sheer stench coming from the Scaarthian’s mouth. He sneezed, spraying blood in his captor’s face. The human olfactory system was truly terrible.
The Scaarthian torture wiped the blood down with a massive paw. Behind, a drone decked with all manner of torturous accessories possible staggered next to her—only to be shoved into a wall. “So,” she said, glaring at him with angry gray eyes. “Finally done screaming. Still have some fight in you? Gonna tell me where the rest of your people are hiding? Where the resistance is? We’ll find them one way or another. But if we’re the ones that find them, well…” She gave a vicious laugh. “Wargs been starving. And we don’t care much for your young.”
Avo just started at her, disappointed. Not so much difference between the Tiers and gutters at times. Made him wonder what Captain Aseleri did to get cast down. Must’ve been a special crime.
Suddenly, the Scaarthian jolted forward—moving so fast, Avo couldn’t keep track of her. Not having his upgraded implants was an annoyance—reminded him how slow he used to be.
>5 SHATTERED RIBS
>PERFORATED LUNG
The Scaarthian worked his body with fists twice the size of his head. He noted she was going lightly—a proper blow from one of her kind could fold the front end of a civilian-grade aerovec. Blood filled his mouth, and Avo was about done with this. “Talk,” he mumbled.
The Scaarthian paused, mid-punch. And grinned. “What was that?” She leaned in.
And that was her mistake. Because he saw her eye. Glistening bright under the light. He’d done this before—tried to eat an eye as a human. But… why, since he was having a bit of a nostalgia trip—
He feigned a whispered whimper, and she came close, he clamped his mouth over her right eye and suckled hard. The moist orb dislodged from her socket. The Scaarthian screamed in pain for the first time—but the scream turned distorted as Avo cast his mind—his Ignorance-masked Conflagration—and poured himself into a new body.
LOADING COG-FEED
SEQUENCES OVERWRITTEN
SHEATH ALIGNED
He shifted across bodies just as a new template fell into his depths, bound for the same place her victim was. Just then, the doors opened and as Avo pulled her eye out from the mouth of the brain-dead sheath that he used to pilot, the torturers allies did the reasonable thing of slamming thaumically-charged sticks into the victim.
The mind-hollow shell flinched and bounced, still breathing but nothing more.
As Avo looked at the others, he saw another Scaarthian enter, holding a Woundhound injector with a sneer on their face. “You fucking—”
“Enough of this,” Avo declared. He had things to do. A consang to free. And a High Seraph to sabotage from the inside. Whatever petty grievances the Guilders had, they could settle it inside him. It was time to remind the Tiers why they to fear the flame. Avo released Ignorance’s lingering influence. After the warmind became a full Definement, its abilities grew evermore refined, more controlled, but at its heart, it was always the barrier that held the Conflagration in check, but right now, Avo felt his gestalt to be a bit too quiet… and missed the bustling city he was building.
He’d get that back. He’d get the back soon.
He just needed to feed.
A phantasmal inferno erupted out from his mind, sweeping out in all directions. The first-responders had no chance to react. But those beyond did. They caught a glimpse of what was coming, of their sealed fate. Some ran. Others screamed. But all would join the flame.
Deep within the Substance, a second fire began spreading within the first.