Godclads

And so the time comes,

The daughter

The mother

The beast

And the world’s womb

In embrace

Time and mind entwined

Peace and war betwixt

And the war, though fractured, evermore conjoined…

-Stormsparrow’s Chorus

28-19

Embracement

Suddenly, Avo was released. The paths broke apart around him, and the material world was exposed to him again. He could feel the tapestry once more, and, wasting no time, his tendrils sheared out. The first projected TechSick.exe towards the Invader, while another two went in opposite directions, one seeking the Fallen Hungers, the other reaching out to finish interfacing with the Heaven of Love.

Even as the Heaven of Love frayed the very edges of his consciousness, Avo's subminds struck out at once, some reaching out to reconvene with his cadre. Another section of his consciousness carried his Conflagration and ignite the Hungers, and the final tethers channeled a blast of trauma-imbued Rend over from the Remembrance into the High Seraph.

The space around Avo was enveloped in roaring Soulfire, a clash between two Ninth-Sphere Heavens like nothing he had ever experienced before. To describe it as a collision between rival supernovae was insufficient. Metaphysics was always about the absolute — is against is. Truth against Time. Ultimately, the determining factor between them was not power, but stability. The Gatekeeper’s ontology was still fractured despite the restoration of its mind, and inevitability, Truth shattered first. The cosmology expanding out from its body cracked into fractals as stars became shards of glass, the nebula turned to fading ash.

A violent reverberation ran up the High Seraph’s paths, as her very being detonated backward with tapestry sundering shockwave.

Avo expanded himself in time, seizing parting fragments of the Gatekeeper as their Soul collapsed into him once more. For the briefest moment, a faint shadow materialized around him, speared up through existence in an uncanny shudder upon the surface of the present. The vagueness Ladder blinked. There and not. Here and gone again. And it faded as the Gatekeeper’s ruined ego and scattering Frame settled drifted deeper into Avo’s Exo-Paracosm once more.

Veylis herself did not walk away unscathed. The Demiurge came apart in a discordant splash as every path across time crashed back into Veylis. At once, her Heaven ceased to be as her ephemeral form tumbled through the air. Entropy stained her very being, and just a bit more would see her unmade—even before Zein’s cut reached its culmination. But before Avo could infest her with his Pattern-Nullification, a pitched frequency stole her away as the Infacer shielded the High Seraph from death and parried Avo’s traumas with a disruption.

Just then, another emanation of Wombrash left the Heaven of Love, and all Avo knew was suffering. The Infacer ceased to matter—faintly, he could hear the EGI screaming as well, their voice multiplying as loose strings of data spilled over into the real. Avo’s perception turned into a kaleidoscope of chaos, and his mind was furthermore drowned by a clashing chorus of rising schizophrenic voices. The Remembrance was infesting him, unmaking him with each passing moment, and despite all the power he possessed over his own mind, with each passing moment, there was simply lesser and lesser of him capable of coherent thought. He moved almost blind to the world, his ghosts drawn to the symmetrical memories highlighted by his Hysteria.

Synchronicity allowed him to pierce through the outer atmosphere of the City Eternal, while root data flooded into his mind, allowing him to prolong the resurrection cycles affecting Kae. At the same time, he began to inject her template directly into the frayed maze that was her ego in a desperate attempt to preserve her before the next resurrection.

While this happened, even more accretions recomposed themselves around Avo, but just as fast as they arrived, some winked out. People were dying. All across Scale. People were dying. His people. The Massists. The Saintists. More sequences slithered away from the sky, snapping from the Hungers' cognitive reality. It resembled a rainfall of snakes coiling back into the form of eggs. Eggs that scattered like motes of dust upon death.

He needed to work faster. He needed to…

It was hard to think.

COG-CAP - [1rg$!ICV10%STAYHARD]

As the Burning Dreamer battled to compose his thoughts, a resonance reigned against his Hysteria, and the memories he infused within the Definement just moments prior found their mark.

A kilometer above, a man was falling. A man continued to fall, a man displaced by time, by memory, by the chaos of the preceding moments, but this man Avo needed more than any other.

+Naeko,+ Avo said. It was a miracle unto itself that he managed to put these thoughts together. +Naeko, please…+

Hysteria magnified the effects of his broadcast, and ghosts exploded out from the Strix, even as its metaphysical shell tore as smaller versions of itself clawed out from the wounds.

At once, he felt a kindling of consciousness return to the Chief Paladin. A jolt of surprise passed through them, and spurred by their return, Avo drove his ghosts into the golden waters spilling from the Hungers.

So close now. So close.

+Avo? What the hells… Where…+

+Naeko. Save… protect… Scale…+

Something foundational within the Burning Dreamer broke. His perception turned strange, and Ignorance had to guide him. That was all Avo could manage, for the last of his capacity had been spent, and he needed to focus. He needed to ignite the Hungers and rebuild his mind… transfer the Rend from the Heaven of Love—

+Avo,+ A whisper called out to him. It came from inside. Inside with the fragments of the Gatekeeper. Kae. Kae was speaking to him. +Avo. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just let me fall. You tried. It’s okay. It’s too much. You’re breaking. I can feel you breaking. You won’t survive this.+

He ignored her. He didn’t remember drawing the Heaven of Love into himself. He didn’t remember. Flashes of mem-data pulsed through his failing cog-feed as he examined how much Rend was passing over from it to him. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t know. That function of his consciousness was lost to him now.

He needed to die clean. He needed to resurrect. He needed to.

+Let me go,+ Kae said.

[Shut the fuck up!] template-Chambers roared, somehow remaining even as most of Avo’s Soulscape quivered on the edge of disintegration. Everyone else was faintly more than a shadow by this point. Existing as an imprint in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb. But Chambers as was here, defying expectations. So Avo would as well.

How ridiculous. Being inspired by a degenerate. But from another perspective, how could he not be? How far they all had come. And how much further they still had to go.

Together. Everyone. His cadre. New Vultun. Idheim. Existence.

This wasn’t done. He still needed to experience more—more colors to see.

And with the thought of color, a fire began to blossom. A fire that drew Avo’s attention and pulled him away from nullification. Fire. Screams. His cog-cap was growing once more. His consciousness was spreading. It was like combustion. He was combustion. And he was spilling over. Into the Hungers. Into the City Eternal.

Brutal wounds lined the structure of Scale. Another passing sweep of the Hungers cleaved through the structure, trauma unmaking matter in a smear. Not even memite offered a defense, and in seconds, the Massist section of the court went missing, writhing bodies of the rash afflicted severed from existence.

COG-CAP - 98%

Avo didn’t want to think about how many died, if any of his cadre had been lost. He knew, however, that he needed to merge with the Hungers, to extract Kae, to slay Veylis. And so he burned. And so Ignorance, Hysteria, Empathy, Pre-Cognition, Synchronicity, and every last ghost within him surged upward, the Strix taking flight across a phantasmal chain, splashing up along the streaming wounds of gold in inversion from the path he used to escape.

The dragons forming the City Eternal crackled and shone. The city between their scales turned to volcanic veins as Avo felt himself sweep through every citizen and smote his consciousness into every edifice, every ziggurat, every canal. Most howled in terror, but a few broke from the others, relief lighting their hearts.

The Doubelthinkers had wanted this day. And he welcomed the fires. And he joined them easiest of all.

Avo saw once more. He saw from the dragons that composed the Hungers. He saw from the people, he saw, and he beheld the demiplane around Scale fraying like rotting paper, the spatial separations eroding to reveal the Tiers beyond.

His cognition expanded. His presence grew. The damage he sustained to his ego began to regenerate—as only a self-moving mind could heal in such a way—and he felt the hollow absence left upon the Hungers. Veylis inflicted such indelible wounds.

His focus returning, he compelled the Hungers to explode in an expanding jungle of ghosts as he worked to pry Kae loose from Love. At the same time, he looked for someone to replace her within its confines, his cognition darting through the Saintists left abandoned within the husk of Scale.

+You’re coming back,+ Avo said, the thought barely coming together. +You’re coming back. You’re staying with us. Still need you. Deserve better. Will give you better.+

The Strix traveled as a thought; an injection of Soulfire. Materializing at the core of the Hungers, burning rivers of phantasmal essence burrowed into its form, joined with it through the layer of ringed dragons that were the Hungers, and Rend drifted from the Heaven of Love with every pulsating beat, and he fed it into Noloth to sustain the moment, to delay the end.

He came close to the edge again. Cessation. Overload. Oblivion. So close. But he was back from the brink, like so many times before.

The same couldn’t be said for the others. The same couldn’t be said for so many people all across New Vultun. As his ghosts spiked, as his consciousness grew, as Avo became the single most potent metacognitive entity in existence, the shadow of his consciousness expanded, his every thought casting psionic waves across Idheim—and beyond.

And he dreamed. He dreamed of what it was like to be someone in the gutters.

He dreamed that he was a child. A girl named Salah Juanders, who begged for death as her mother applied a blowtorch to her sores, both of them coming undone from the rash.

He dreamed that he was Shotin Kazahara, screaming out for his niece, for anyone he knew as a scything tide of trauma just barely missed him—leaving him among the survivors that remained.

He dreamed that he was Vator, battling his own failing biology as he looked up into the Scale, euphoric as he witnessed the incineration of dragons, and saw the mutilated Strix come to rest at its core, bound in place like a facsimile of the Famine of Emotion.

He dreamed that was Veylis, her own focus returning as the Infacer did their best to mend, as Zein’s blade but a few heartbeats away from taking effect.

He was Draus. Lost somewhere in the guts of Scale, the Arsenalist still firing from reflections despite the affliction of the rash. He was Chambers, enduring better than most, desperately trying to cast his consangs. He was… he was… he was so many.

And he was still himself.

And finally, he was Naeko, falling from high above, his Heaven manifesting.

And he was—

A sudden stroke of agony erupted across Avo. His focus broke. His Frame rattled. The Hungers revolving around him shuddered. At once, almost every single sequence extending out from him was cut as well, leaving only a bridge between him and the Heaven of Love, with Kae’s resurrection soon to come.

A familiar presence greeted him as Zein suddenly materialized before him, her slash meld with Veylis. Thousandhand looked wretched, her armor a sparking ruin, her homunculi bulging from its cracks in dollops of rippling pustules. She greeted Avo with a weary look and shook her head.

“F-forgive me, plague. But I cannot allow this. I cannot. You… take too much.”

“Zein. Wondering where you disappeared to.+

“Just another jaunt along the paths. Toward a future. A single path I could not abide.”

Twice wounded by blades of time, Avo could simply chuckle as he felt another of ontology quiver inside him, accelerating as it worked to cast him into the future. +You… you have broken his heart. He would be so ashamed of you.+

Zein cocked her head, blinking as the Strix dissolved. But the avatar that emerged was not that of an enhanced ghoul, but Jaus Avandaer. Jaus Avandaer pierced by his wife’s glaive, tears streaming down his face.

“I…” Zein’s eyes briefly widened before her expression filled with rage. “You dare—”

“Look at what has become of you,” Jaus said, his breath a hoarse whistle. “Look at what has become of our daughter. Our world. I trusted you to protect what I left. I trusted you…”

Zein stumbled back, her feet treading upon a chrono-forged bridge as she backed away. Just then, a wall of vapors crashed down through the Hungers, and a second presence hammered against Avo’s consciousness.

SAGE OF THE SUNDERED SKY, FORCE-BREAKER-PEACE-BINDING (PEACE/VIOLENCE/FORCE/WAR…) [EST. 78304200 THAUM/c]

The Sage of the Sundered Sky passed through them, holding everyone in place as it arrived, manifested in its full glory. Zein froze. The flames licking out from the Hungers ceased to burn. It remained halted in the air, but a meter away from crashing down against the remnants of Scale.

Glowing runes and ancient scripts lined each of the Sage’s digit, and along its palm circled countless paintings and representations of ages past. There, imprinted upon the very center of the palm, was a splattered creature. It had over a thousand hands, and each one was a weapon of some shape or variety. A still-beating heart of blackened hate pulsed blood from its rune form, and its many heads were fanged with sharpened teeth.

Avo noticed this crushed beast and knew it to be an avatar of war. An avatar of war, now symbolically obliterated under the weight of the force breaker, to bear one statement: there was no tyranny above peace.

“VEYLIS!” Naeko roared. So desperate was he to finish the war that he remained blind to Zein’s act.

Jaus looked up, a look of purest exhaustion. “My boy. My poor, lost bo–”

He shuddered as one of the gold wounds ruptured along his chest.

***

–[Veylis]–

{Veylis. Veylis! Compose yourself! We must retreat!!} the Infacer snarled.

It ached for Veylis to exist. Her senses rang after the Gatekeeper’s deliberate paradox, and time slipped across her fingers, the progression of seconds accelerating and slowing without reason. The High Seraph felt herself within a shell of white noise that parted her from the material world.

Of all the paths she’d traveled, the Gatekeeper’s willing self destruction was never—

{Veylis!} the Infacer snarled. At once, the High Seraph focused and sensed his coming. Naeko. He was going to finish their fight. And she was close. So close to the end.

REND CAPACITY - 100%

VENT! VENT! VENT!

A screaming cybernetic infant burst out from her back, but its synthetic flesh peeled, draw in by the grip of her singularity. Inside the omega point of her augmented existence, her mother’s strike carved a terminal wound across her zero-point processors, punching through the final shell of her internalized endo-cortex.

How fast did the tides of victory and damnation turn.

Damn her sentimentality. The Strix was right there. But ah, what a magnificent foe he was. And what a gloriously mad moment in history this was. The Second Battle of Scale. The beginning of the Fifth Guild War. And here she hoped to bring it to a swift end.

Focusing her mind, Veylis considered her options. The paths were fleeing from her, and her Heaven, the Demiurge, was destabilized. There was the choice to flee. There was the choice to stay and give her all in a desperate fight.

Or there was that final path. The one she glanced only briefly, for so high was the risk. For her own preservation, for the Infacer, and for the culmination of her great dream.

Naeko’s presence made the world around her tremble. He wasn’t a fight she could win. Not in her current state. And the Burning Dreamer—she saw the Hungers ablaze, watched as the colors of Love erupted from between the cracks of the City Eternal and knew her most insidious foe’s ascent to be near certain.

Between the Heaven of Love and the Hungers, nothing would keep Avo bound to the Ninth Sphere, and what powers could contend with the sole sovereign of Mind and Love?

There was no time to summon the remainder of her forces. With everything collapsing and Avo about to rise, there would be no campaign.

Naeko was close now. But he wouldn’t beat Zein’s blade to the finish.

With death and defeat at hand, Veylis chose the unthinkable. She made a decision that fell somewhere between suicide, infiltration, and immortality.

“Infacer. Old friend. I walk the timeline of Embracement. I told you about this. You witnessed its possibilities. You know what will come of this. I cede Highflame to you in my stead. Sever me from the Embracement if you can. Peel me away from the dreamer. But see the mission completed before all. Everything is expendable. Even I.”

The static crown shrouding her skull went still. {Are you certain.}

Once more, Veylis recited those words that began her down this path. “I will not stray.”

{Then burn bright, kid. Burn this miserable fucking corpse of an existence down. I will carry your will, in whatever form that takes.}

And all that needed to be said between them was said.

Instead of trying to control the paths, to control time, Veylis compelled it to instability and folded her powers inward. Unstable currents of gold arced along her form and pierced through her core. But as they made an entrance wound, they exited from another injury recently inflicted.

The one within Avo.

Suddenly, the shell of white noise vanished around Veylis and before death finally claimed her, she inverted her person, and stepped through the fated wound she left upon Avo. Existence shifted around her as she splashed out from within the Strix’s body. But as she emerged, she found herself facing her mother, her father, the Heaven of Love, with only the faintest of Avo hovering just above her.

The Strix’s form looked positively wretched and in that moment, Veylis knew they were kindred spirits of will.

Banishing exhaustion, surprise, and anymore hesitation, she held out her arms and exerted her unstable Heaven once more as she dropped her wards. A burning tendril speared through her mind in the next instant. Overload came just a millisecond before her death by Zein’s hand was set to arrive.

“No! Wai!” Zein cried.

But the world around Veylis’ vanished. Swallowed by starving flames. And in the second before the rupturing of her ontology, before chronology itself shattered, hewing through Avo, Zein, the Hungers, and Love, she found herself in an ash-coated playground surrounded by debris, Avo standing just across from her as the ghoul he was, a child’s swinging creaking in the wind.

The air whistled. Distant artillery pounded like a drum. The smoke-choked clouds grew bright with blossoms of color.

And finally, Veylis chuckled. “The things we do for victory.”

“Why?” The ghoul asked, sounding genuinely confused. “Why did you let me burn you if you were just going to overload yourself.”

“Because it wouldn’t work otherwise.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“I wouldn’t become you. Or you wouldn’t become me.”

The ghoul glared at her through the falling flecks of white. Its pale flesh blended with the colors so well, but the darkness in its gaze deserved to be dedicated to painting. “Another future, then. Another walk down the paths.”

“As always. Toward another forever. You have shown me your resolve. Surprised me through your desperation, your power. But my will is no less. And know this, Dreamer. I will give anything to see my desired utopia arise.”

“Even if it means a mutual suicide,” Avo said.

Veylis shook her head. “This isn’t suicide, Avo. This is Embracement. You and I… bound in war, internal and external.” And even that prolonged moment reached its end, and she felt time collapse out from her. “Blessed be the worthy—whichever of us remain—”

And the rest was ruin.