Godclads

I was there during the first battle of The Embracement War. Noloth smashed down on us. Hit us like a godsdamned motherfucking warhead made to disfigure cognition and chronology. Everyone got lost. Everyone.

The mental and material started… blurring together, and every now again, time itself tried to kill you.

I can’t tell you how many died that day. More than the numbers recorded. But I can tell you that part of me is still lost in that haze… trapped. I don’t know if I’m awake right now. I don’t know if I’m just lost in my own mind. I can’t tell if… I can’t tell what’s real anymore. And maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all one and the same.

I don’t know. And I don’t think anyone else does either.

And I thought fucking Kososo was bad.

-Tigertail, Stormtree Bloodthane

28-18

A Fated Wound

Every strand of consciousness within Avo exploded into action. A sanguine storm assailed Veylis's haemokinetic projectiles, detonating against the Demiurge in staggering blossoms of fire and force. As she struck back, he vanished, his evasion conducted by memory and metaphysics. A conjured memory of the Fardrifter created a tunnel of paths for him, and he moved from labyrinths of space over to simulations of memory, barely evading blows and implosions that sought to invert time.

His Pre-Cognition continued to be his Soul-saving grace. It, in coordination with the Gatekeeper, revealed the way ahead of him. Countless deaths were simulated within the depths of his mind, and his cog-feed approached critical capacity.

COG-CAP - 96%

With his Rend growing not far behind, the patterns of chronology vibrated constantly on the face of the tapestry, and the High Seraph’s onslaught grew to a nightmarish frequency. It was as if a variant of her existed at all points in time. Every second, every microsecond into the future, the deniers fragmented, and time ran as if a parting stream, dividing parallel to match each sequence of memory in existence. There were trillions of beings that lived, on Idheim, and from them came exponentially more recollections, memories, moments, emotions. To sort through all these details would be a colossal task, impossible for almost all.

But Veylis—aligned with the Infacer—was a cut above the rest.

Waves of expanding radiation detonated outwards in spheres of static developed. Entire portions of the collapsing nether—the Infacer—had never been mortal, had been crafted to cull other superintelligent minds. And as a machine-intellect empowered by a Soul, they had means of contending with hostile intelligences, all the same.

The duel grew frenzied. The attacks they inflicted were turned against him as Veylis parried him with kinetic constructs. Her cuts bore into their chronology, and her strikes traveled across time to slash the place from which they were spawned. But the Strix moved, jumping from thought to thought, memory to memory.

Hysteria allowed him to reach across impossible distances, diving into symmetrical thoughts and Synchronicity offered him with the ability to hide. Better than any Necrojack in existence, his assault, capable of scouring entire districts within a microsecond, was less than an inconvenience to the High Seraph. But she herself was slashing blind, carving her path through the shrubs of the falling mental world, barely missing him by inches and seconds.

A charted route flashed red before Avo, as the Gatekeeper screamed for him to evade. He did so, barely. Suddenly, strings of memory he crawled upon were no more. At the same time, another portion of him was fleeing downward, the same strikes descending, moving in two places at once.

The spinning dragons that composed the City Eternal drew ever closer, and an emanation rose like a volcanic eruption from the Heaven of Love, bathing Scale in fetid miracles. A chorus of madness erupted in the back of Avo's mind, as his memories developed fraying mutations. His words rattled, and only by his absolute control over his own cognition did he remain sane against the schizophrenia, the divine form of his ultimate Heaven.

Phantasmal sores burst open upon the Strix’s abyssal flesh, and Soulfire ruptured free, spraying jets of metaphysical fire into existence. Mere seconds later, small beaks emerged from these wounds and screamed their outrage and horror into existence. Pure trauma began to pour free from his body, and as they greeted the tapestry, reality fractured and tore. And this expression of damage was shared by the Hungers, who hatched new extensions from their writhing flesh, who wailed with touched by the Remembrance, who carved caverns of absence across Scale as their perception scythed through the land, piercing space, time, matter, and memite all.

The material, the mental, and the metaphysical were slowly becoming one insane coalescence. But he was not the only one affected by the Heaven of Love's miracles, as Mercy had made his impossible play within Scale.

The Remembrance, pulled across reality by Avo's gestalt, remained within the heart of the court, and its entropic presence grew stronger with each passing second between the pulsing beats and the finally fallen heart. The strands of time composing Veylis's Demiurge frayed. Though her focus was beyond human, her mastery was of the world without inflicting control by deciding the design of history for but a beat — a single second in time — Veylis Avandaer hesitated; Veylis Avandaer struggled against purest agony as her body, ephemeral and metaphysical, began coming apart with a grueling flood of time-wrought homunculi.

Avo stole the moment. A torrent of ghosts exploded out from his being. The Ghostjack flared within him, and the spire-like phantasmic cast synaptic energy that licked his Soul far within. Crackles surged across his ghosts, jumping along his sequences and gathering the rend nested within the wards lining the interior of his soul. A stream of trauma blasted out from the Strix's cyclopean eye, and as it existed beyond the confines of continuity, the attack materialized from over a million vectors, each one spearing out at impossible speed, splashing over the Demiurge, consuming her in a phantasmal net.

Quickly, Avo grasped her form and layered his sequences around her, but just as he prepared to strike her memories from existence and sever the High Seraph from causality itself, the Gatekeeper screamed in the back of his mind. [STOP!]

Avo did so without hesitating. His ghosts splashed apart, the Rend receded into his body, and just in time. A field expanded out from the Demiurge, and present churned backward to history, where the jaws of oblivion were ever encroaching.

As his ghosts retreated, her Rend splashed out in an unmaking tide. The space around Veylis simply ceased to be; that patch of existence no longer existed. For the first time, Avo beheld nothingness, true and genuine nothingness. It was not like the emptiness of space, for the tapestries that existed there were voids containing other expressions. Nothingness was nothingness, beneath conceptualization, before existence—the purest wound one would ever know. All of Avo's Definement shuddered, and he did his best to avert his gaze.

For one who wished to know the world, what horror was greater than the ultimate unbecoming?

His hope of striking a fatal blow against the High Seraph had been a false one. Without his precognition, without the Gatekeeper, death would have consumed him, death chasing so close behind.

Another deafening scream passed over the expanse of existence. Avo watched, his surprise mixing with Mercy's horror, as the Hungers plunged down. The existential wound Veylis left upon the framework of reality—a small dot of nothingness occupied a sphere no larger than a hundred meters. But it bore clean through the dragons, clean through its time-forged scales, clean through the city in the crenelations, clean through all there was, for nothing could counter nothingness itself.

Where the hungers were merely screaming from terror before, now a cry of true pain erupted from the falling City of Noloth.

The first hint of a naked emotion leaked over into Mercy's voice. [Hurry, Dreamer! Hurry, protect your throne. Save our people.]

Avo didn't need these words—they were unnecessary—as Avo sped through the last sequences, approaching the Hungers with a reaching submind, he extended a tendril to grasp that spilling waterfall of chronology that he dove out from when he obtained his internalized Domain.

Yet, just as he attempted to leap the golden waterfall and swim up the ichor, back into the City Eternal, the Gatekeeper's warning came once more. [FALSE!]

Veylis suddenly burst out from the wound of time, nearly a gateway for her to stride without restriction. Another cut carved a gouge of nothingness upon existence. Avo saw, to his growing dread, a thin slit of nothingness manifest upon the tapestry itself.

[Shit! Fuck!] Shotin’s template cried in the back of Avo’s mind. Once more, the pursuit amongst the sequences resumed, but the High Seraph was dividing ever faster across time now, and her slices traced forward across history, slitting entire sequences apart like monowire gliding down the veins of a wrist.

Another portion of Avo's consciousness dove and sought the Heaven of Love. As he pierced into the court, he found himself aghast at the sight before him. Over the thousands present, all reflected with the rash, their bodies misshapen lumps of flesh slowly coming undone. Homunculi oozed from every pore, their small forms glistening and pale, whimpering with existential dread at their fates. Death was coming for the Paladins, for the Saintists, for the Massists. For Avo and Veylis as well.

He needed to control the outpouring of Rend from the Remembrance, and he needed to reach the Hunger to stop it from smashing down upon Scale. And he needed to survive. Just long enough for Zein’s blow to finally reach its point of culmination.

A branching sequence forked. He pierced the Gatekeeper and dipped his other ghosts into the Heaven of Love thereafter. Entropy flooded his being, but he shifted that across into the Gatekeeper, doing his best to keep his Rend balanced. There was no possibility of him sustaining the outpouring of metaphysical rot from the Remembrance himself. His Spherage was too low, and with the Nether destabilized, the borders walls of New Vultun were vastly beyond his reach.

So close to the Heaven of Love’s presence, spraying pustules and twisted effigies of his Strix tore out from his Heaven of Continnum, and it took more and more of Avo to just keep going. His cog-feed flickered. His templates unraveled one after another, all but the Regulars, Chambers, Mercy, and Jaus begging to be released from pain. Within the inner domain of Love, impossible colors of vivacity pulsated, hammering existence like a fallen heartbeat.

No longer could he hear Kae’s thoughts, for her mind was so tattered that only Hysteria could identify the scant sequences that composed the remnants of her ego. Avo’s cog-feed was a blur of incoherence now. His perception remained solely thanks to Ignorance, guiding the Strix forward even while the Dreamer went near-blind with suffering.

Kae’s must have resurrected twice already—twice at the very least. The fact that she hadn't reached the point of cessation from all the ego damage she sustained already was a miracle in itself. But she would not survive. Another return, not without him repairing her.

[Fuck everything else, Avo. Do not let her die. Do you hear me? Do not!] Chambers's template screamed, barely managing to stay coherent against the pain of all the other templates.

ACCESSING HEAVEN OF—

[FALSE! FALSE! FALSE!]

Avo heard the Gatekeeper calling out within him.

But he heard them too late.

A spear of chronology speared clean through the Heaven of Love, a lance of golden parting the colors, stopping the beating heart, and plunging clean through Avo himself. His wards rattled. His Frame shook. A wound opened within him, but no pain came with it. Instead, he saw a scar form upon his ontology—an infusion of another’s pattern of Chronology.

[No!] Chambers cried out.

The same golden lance punched out from the Strix across every instance of its manifestation across the continuity of space and time. From lance flowed a colossal form, a titan of interlocking hands, with the heart of a singularity, with the power to reign over time. It reached out, and seized the Strix by the throat. Avo struggled. His ghosts splashed out, striking with trauma and Rend, but the present was growing ever far away, and the paths were collapsing around him, swallowing him with each passing instant.

"It was a good attempt," Veylis said, her voice calm despite the incredible pain she suffered. The Wombrash was eating through her too, and with how close they were, Avo could sense Zein’s slash traveling deeper into the Demiurge. The High Seraph’s own death was soon approaching.

Across space and time, two stood as the world unraveled. Avo faced Veylis as he struggled to reach Kae, struggled to reach the Hungers, struggled in futility. But he didn’t struggle alone. Once more, he summoned Jaus from his mind, and the savior emerged from his Soul as if a man emerging from an open door.

+Veylis! Wait!+

But that was as far as he got before a disruption unmade his form. A backlash exploded through Avo, and when his senses returned, warning klaxons squealed inside his mind.

REND CAPACITY - [1Er1ER+_-=13\

VENT! VENT! VENT!

{Sorry, consang,} the Infacer said, sounding not in the least bit apologetic. {Can't let you get in the way of things.}

The Hungers continued to fall. In the next twelve seconds, it would impact the top of Scale, and from there, only further destruction could follow. But that was the lesser issue. The rash was going to eat everyone clean soon. At least it was constrained to Scale for now, but how long woudl that last?

Already, Avo could feel spatial reality around him start to fray. The tapestry was straining here; too many wounds had been inflicted upon its surface already.

Sequences reeled away from the Hungers and surged back to their minds of origin. The Nether was vanishing. Everyone was slowly becoming an island unto themselves once more. A new pattern emerged among the others, and Avo knew it to be Mind, but what worth was it now? What use could it be to him at this moment.

Across his Auto-Seance, he observed only interference and chaos. His cadre was still separated; still unbalanced. Peering through the gaps in Veylis’ paths, he saw accretions beginning to form, and a desperate play came together in his mind.

Drawing on Karakan, he sequenced a set of memories from her and pushed that into his Hysteria. Suddenly, the world vanished all around him, and for the first time in his life, Avo stole a page from Cas’ book and prayed.

Prayed that if there was a greater god above all others, if there was something more than existence, that they saw Naeko’s mind preserved, and ensured the Chief Paladin was reachable by thought.

“I will not stray,” Veylis said. Aval felt the crushing presence descend, and knew the Hungers were going to impact the outer layer of Scale in mere moments. "Such was what I said to my father when I condemned him to the glory of divinity. Such is what I will say to you as well. Nobly fought though your struggle was. There is no shame in this. You tried, you fought. Your attempt was bolder and greater than most. But I knew your path. I knew your choice. And so your defeat was fated to be. There is no life you could have bested me. No future in which you win.”

“Not done yet,” Avo replied. Hysteria pulsed out, and the world around him vanished. A second later, he sensed the component memories of Naeko’s mind sliding across the horizon, then upward. Upward? It kept going until it ascended hundreds of kilometers into the air.

How in the hells did Naeko get up there? Was his displacement caused by Veylis’ discombobulation? And where was Zein for that matter?

{No. I think you’re pretty much finished,} the Infacer said. {Sad. But no worries. We will see you contained and extracted. And I just might keep something of you. Maybe a mind-clone. I need someone to mock the apes with in Stormjumpers.}

REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 81%

REPAIRING COGNITION - 100%

Veylis twisted her spear, and Avo shuddered along its length. He felt her power spilled over him, pass into his Heaven, but just then, before all he was got consumed, a notification filled his vision, and despair dissolved in defiance of a battle yet to conclude.

REPAIRING MYTHOLOGY - 81%

REPAIRING COGNITION - 100%

[Thank you,] the Gatekeeper said. [For making me whole. If only for a while.]

“Let this be an honorable close to your struggle, Dreamer. Sleep now. Sleep and dream of what could have been. Sleep and I will take your burdens, and make right this existence. Your Symmetry will not be ash; it will serve me. And through you, my victory will absolute—”

“FALSE!” The Gatekeeper declared. It manifested its Heaven, and Avo released it from the confines of his Exo-Paracosm.

A galaxy exploded out from the Strix, spilling from its open sores, from its unfurling ghosts. Stars materialized around him, clouds of cosmic dust sheared into Veylis, and the sweeping hammer of gravity battered the very form. The Gatekeeper's voice rose in a rapturous roar of fury.

"This domain is false. This history is false. What you want is false. This is not Jaus’ will. This is not the path. This is not the dream. AND YOU WILL NEVER BE THE DREAMER OF ALL THAT IS TO COME!”

At that moment, both the Gatekeeper and Veylis paradoxes as Truth hammered against the false-history projected cosmos and simulated paths ablaze in unity.