Metaworld Chronicles

The Fifth Vel.

Bright Reef.

Nin-bo, once an unassuming guppie of an unassuming Clan living in the hovels of Bright Reef’s lightless hollows, had found his Purpose.

Once nude and bereft, his body was now covered in an olive green uniform representative of the Great Shoal Forward and its evangelical Priests of the Purpose. It was a creation made from kelp, manufactured through the labour of comrade Mermen like himself in the belly of sacred Aristotle, the young Leviathan of their brood. The same material, he was told, was also worn by the Pale Priestess herself, whose pearlescent self, white and untouchable, was clad in the same coarse fabric as her meanest, most common citizen so that she could feel at all times, the oppression placed upon the Prole-Mer-iat.

As he meandered the under city, his tail stirring the murky water, he held in his hand the sacred scripture of the Door and The Key, a little red book made from kelp that contained the wisdom of Lei-bup, the High Priest of the Great Shoal Forward.

Though contentious, its nuggets of wisdom, such as, “The noble Mer has reduced the Mer to a mere relation of prey and resource,” were powerful enough to stir the heart blood of the Mer-people in the darkest alleyways of Bright Reef. Much to the surprise of Nin-bo, even those who received no wisdom from their ancestors and no teachings from their supervising elders naturally understood the words that permeated every page with spite.

Nin-bo arrived at the square, where he would deliver his sermon.

A Vel cycle ago, when comrade Gak-Pon was taken by Lord Sarkonnian’s Wave Riders into this same space to be made an example, the yellow-finned Flounder did not despair or plead as would have been expected of his bloodline. Instead, the Merman’s voice was loud and clear as he howled out the wisdom of Lei-bup to the watching people below.

“What offence has this humble one committed?” Gak-Pon howled as a bruised mess bleeding from every orifice, but the pain had only amplified his voice. “Do you charge me with wanting to stop the exploitation of our children? If a Mer can be guilty of this, then I confess! TYRANT SARKONNIAN! THIS MER IS GUILTY!”

The Hammerhead Captain had then gutted the Flounder like a common fish, spreading his guts for all to see.

There was fear, of course, and the usual terror—but something else had also ignited in the hundred-thousand pair of eyes watching the Flounder being torn apart from gill, liver to bladder.

Once the scabs were done and all that was Gak-Pon was a skeleton, what was remained a simmering anger, one that could be palpably felt from the water like the periodic vibrations from the Leviathans murmuring in their ancient language beside the city.

After that, Mermen and Mer-women came to Nin-bo, who had seen the Pale Priestess first-hand, first by the dozen, then by the hundreds and now the thousands. After that first conference in the dark, Nin-bo had felt something stir in his bones, a momentum hot with ardent purpose, a liquid courage akin to the Golden Pearl from the Pale Priestess.

The rage inside him could no longer be contained.

“I SAY—!” His voice pealed over the multitudes with their eyes glazed and hopeful from the words issuing from his toothless lips. “I say we let them tremble! For what have we to lose? My comrades? My Prole-Mer-iat? They have taken everything else from us! Our dignity! Our mates! Our brooding pools! What else have we to lose, but the Hooks around our Fins—OOMMPH!”

There was no climax, for Nin-bo felt his ribcage press against his swim bladder as the armoured limbs of a Decapodian guard tackled him from the raised mound of coral that serves as his dais.

The trajectory from the top was swift. A breath bubble later, Nin-bo felt his face grinding against the rough sand while smaller claws from below the guard’s waist tore at his olive-green uniform.

“THE COMMON FISH MUST OVERCOME—!” he eked out another line from the Little Red Book with its embossed tentacle symbol forming the Gate and the Key. “AS ONE WE MAY DIE! BUT AS A SCHOOL, THE PROLE-MER-IAT WILL—!”

There was a wet thwack as something struck Nin-bo’s head, and then the wisdom of Lei-bup went dark as squid ink…

When the blessed light of the Fifth Vel visited him again, the dazed and bleeding Nin-bo found himself on the back of a coral-grown cage with hundreds of comrades just like himself.

“Hey you, you’re finally awake…” came the gruff voice of an old cuttlefish, his slippery skin oozing with white mucus from wounds old and new. “They caught you at Bjit Square, right? You walked right into that Sarkonnian Patrol, same as us.”

“You… what’s happening?” Nin-bo’s head felt like a reef of shellfish that a Plesiosaur had visited.

“What else? We’re going to Whabpuz Gyli.” The old cuttlefish breathed hard, flashing the pink of his torn tentacles. “They’re removing troublemakers like us from Bright Reef.”

“Trouble Makers….” Nin-bo gathered enough of his wits to touch his naked body again, no longer covered by the olive-green garb of kelp. His book, as well, was gone. “Yes, I suppose we are that. Whabpuz Gyli, you say?”

He recalled that the Pale Priestess had said that her faithful would look into his story, that Mermen were disappearing by the brood. A dozen Vel cycles had gone by since, and there appeared to be no change in Bright Reef other than the appearance of Mer like himself, preachers of the teachings of Lei-bup, who began to lead the downtrodden in questioning the practices of the nobler Mer.

Was he disappointed? No, to even consider such a thing would be absurd. The Pale Priestess had healed his body and given him a new life and purpose. To be seized by the claws of tyranny in the midst of uplifting his comrade-fishes was an expected outcome, for there would be a great many more deaths before a smidgen of change could occur in the Fifth Vel.

“I do not think many of us will return from the Coral Mines,” the cuttlefish spoke with a certainty that made Nin-bo want to turn his stomach inside out. “You’ve heard the stories?”

“My brood mates went there to work,” Nin-bo said. “They did not return…”

“My entire colony was uprooted.” The cuttlefish seemed not too concerned with his fate. “For spreading the Purpose. We killed our supervisor, you know? We took the shark bait by surprise and tore him apart with teeth and bone from his victims. It was glorious, you understand. For that moment, we were no longer prey; our still-living spawn no longer looked at us with dead eyes.”

“A supervisor? From Lord Sark—”

“—Nin-Pak.” The Catfish shook his enormous head. “What’s the difference to us? Their thugs take what they want when they will.”

“You didn’t have a Preacher of Purpose in your brooding pools?” Nin-bo thought of those tentacled Preachers, the spreaders of the Gospel of Lei-bup, who would fight the Shark-men by the dozen. More often than not, knowing the tenacity of the fanatics, Bright Reef’s roving gangs would leave them alone.

“Ours gave his body to the Purpose.” The cuttlefish sighed. “We hail from the Ivory Troves, if you must know. Those who fought lost everyone. Entire districts were purged.”

The Troves, Nin-bo understood, was where the servants for Bright Reef’s nobler kin resided. Almost all of the servants there had servants, just to put the hierarchy into perspective. To cause a revolt so close to the city’s seats of power… was an unthinkable prospect for a guppy hailing from the dark waters at the city’s edge.

“… We have only our chains to lose,” Nin-bo repeated the words of the Red Book like a mantra.

“I can’t deny that.” The cuttlefish elder wheezed, ejecting blood and ink. “Hold onto that thought, pup. Maybe you’ll survive the mines…”

Nin-bo tried to move his body, but every bone and cartilage ached.

With the help of the old cuttlefish, he raised his head just enough to peer over the edge of the jagged coral cage. Outside the permanent gloom that made up most of the Elemental Plane’s vast spaces, he could see the light beacons of a massive coral clump with the silhouette of an enormous conch.

Whabpuz Gyli, as the nobler Mer named it, was an endless source of crystalline corals needed for the Sea Witches’ crafting cabals. Some say it was the remains of a long sunken city, a flotsam from wars fought between Shoals in the distant past. Others say that it was a broken chunk from some Demi-god in the depthless space of the Mer’s home Plane.

The danger of Whabpuz Gyli was that it was not uninhabited. Deep within its luminous bulbs were monstrous predators that civilisations living on the periphery of light could not begin to imagine. Old things, deep things that had survived the aeons of timelessness in the Elemental Plane of Water, made their home in its depth.

And it was into this maw that they were meant to labour, extracting the old coral to enrich their masters, while they were not even awarded the ooze from their brows.

Perhaps, Nin-bo thought, he could also spread the Purpose to those below.

Perhaps, if he could recall enough of the Red Book’s sacred psalms, he could ignite a bioluminescence flare in the deep that would never go out…

The Fifth Vel.

Aboard the HPPS (Her Pale Priestess’ Ship) Aristotle, the Pale Priestess of the Great Shoal Forward remotely carried herself aboard the sleek vessel that was HPPS Caliban from a distance that Dwarven metrics could not measure.

Perhaps it was because of their mutual link through body and mind, or perhaps because of the boons given by the yet to be awakened Sulfina, Gwen found that she could inhabit the senses of her Familiar hundreds of leagues away.

In all likelihood, the distance didn’t even matter, for her spatial senses were utterly confused by the distortion caused by the intrusion of the Vel into the Prime Material.

The actual distance of Whabpuz Gyli from Aristotle was half a week at a brisk swimming pace—but she knew by instinct that it was more akin to a Pocket Dimension that had anchored itself like a shipwreck somewhere between the ruffled fabric of the two Planes.

An uncertain number of light cycles ago, her Caliban had followed the wagon loads of “offenders” from Bright Reef into the dark, finding themselves finally arriving at the infamous gulag.

Mixed into the labour force were the regular, luckless folk living in the brilliance of the Vel, as well as a portion of her converts, among which were an even smaller portion with the Blessing of Essence etched into their tattered bodies who burned like beacons to guide her way.

To take responsibility for her people, she had sent forth Caliban as an escort to ensure they didn’t fall prey to random encounters along the way—midway of which she discovered that Caliban’s Empathic Link defied distance.

The unexpected boon allowed her to extend her curiosity through her Familiar, who roamed the depth as a jet-black, faceless catfish without challenge, even from the hungriest and meanest form of sea life.

While the patrols unloaded the new prisoners, she had hidden herself in the mine’s numberless crevices to observe the proceedings.

The Mer were emptied into a holding pen, then sorted according to size and strength into work groups for different segments in the mine. Food—something Gwen guessed was either the carcass of fallen Mer or whatever could be caught locally, was dispensed among the new prisoners, who were then forced into hovels several dozen deep.

After the hierarchy within these hovels was established by natural law, brutish, shark-bodied Mer armed with coral tridents and spears herded the new workers into the various areas of the mines, where squid-limbed supervisors delivered the reward of meeting quotas and the consequences of failing them.

For a few days, Gwen surveyed her men, who could work far more rigorously than others… and then witnessed the consequence of failure.

Decimation.

That was the procedure the Coral Mine’s supervisors utilised to motivate their slaves.

At the end of each cycle, the tallies of each “Brood” of workers would be counted.

The “Brood” that came up the lowest weight would be forced to butcher one out of twelve of their Brood, whose flesh was then sent to the kitchens to be fed to the winners.

Psychologically, this was a brilliant system, though Gwen found the process as sickening as it was cruel. In such a competitive environment, it was inevitable that the Broods developed some manner of friendship and camaraderie based upon mutual survival. To then witness the murder of one of their weakest—and the consumption of their peer by competitors—very much did wonders for the motivation of hate.

And most importantly, the hatred was directed not toward the guards, who were brutal but rarely unfair, but toward each other, toward the other Broods.

At the same time, the Brood that performed the best were given food, better shelter, and the promise of release.

“Release,” she ruminated the word with sarcasm.

That was her principal motivation in accompanying her faithful, for Bright Reef’s Preachers of the Purpose had reported that no labourer had returned from the gulag for as long as any of their brood siblings could recall.

Thereby, the Pale Priestess continued to lurk inside her Familiar’s conscience, snaking her way through the mine to observe its structure and operations. More often than not, she encountered strange creatures with the likeness of fanged worms, some large enough to fill a Dwarven excavation tunnel. Against Caliban’s appetite, however, these primordial things were merely meals, for her Familiar could not be paralysed by venom or critically wounded by mandibles or bristles. Deeper and deeper, her Caliban dug, sometimes even accosting the mine’s guards, who could only imagine that her Void-creature was an ancient evil that lurked in the heart of the coral structure.

On what her Message Device suggested to be the sixth day, she followed the vital signs of her faithful deep enough into the centre of Whabpuz Gyli and confirmed her hypothesis.

Whabpuz Gyli was the coral carcass of a Leviathan.

The Leviathan itself was long dead—but much like a living Leviathan, that did not mean its internal floral and fauna were deceased. If a Whale Fall could feed and sustain generations of scavengers, it only stood to reason that a Leviathan Fall in the Elemental Plane of Water would sustain a biome of its own for millenniums.

More importantly, Caliban, by virtue of her faithful, had drawn her toward the ultimate goal of the Shoals trying to dig through the Leviathan’s many-layered body.

Its Cores.

Already, they had uncovered the location of a Core, and Gwen was sure that this wasn’t even the main Core. From the physiology of Aristotle and her internal mapping, her best guess was that the enormous and dormant shard of jagged, crystalline coral was something of a dorsal Core used to control the upper fins that steered the Leviathan’s passage.

If indeed these were what Sarkonnian and Nin-Pak were trying to uncover, then it made a lot of sense that they would sacrifice the citizens they saw as something between fodder and slave labour, all the while maintaining something akin to a secretive competition.

But there had to be more.

As a long-time partner in conspiracy, Gwen felt in her bones that there had to be more to the casual Belgians in the Congo style of tyranny on display here in Whabpuz Gyli.

Without her Omni Orb's guidance, she allowed Caliban to take the lead, consuming its way into the central regions of the ancient Leviathan, finding food in caverns as cramped as a tour bus and as roomy as cathedrals. Creatures she had never seen nor heard, such as jet-ink squids that drank the bodily fluids of their prey, eels that distended jaws a dozen times its girth, or angelic little worms that discharged lightning, nourished Caliban’s passage in every stratum.

Then, finally, on the thirteenth day by Human time, her Caliban detected the all-too-familiar Essence scent of prey it had consumed by the thousands.

Necromancy.

From the narrow space of its slick tunnel, her creature understood innately that it was about to happen upon an enormous cavern larger than the pyramid interior of the Shalkar Bunker. The thick haze of undeath that leaked from its interior and into the surrounding water made the space distinct from the rest of the Leviathan, turning the cold, frigid liquid into a bone-chilling soup of Negative Energy.

Slowly, inch by inch, her Caliban excreted its corrosive slime from its oil pores, propelling forward until it soundlessly penetrated the ceiling of the gargantuan chamber below.

“Eurrg…” Gwen groaned from a hundred leagues away as the Negative Energy of the chamber’s interior flooded Caliban, nourishing her creature with gross impurities.

From eyes that were not eyes, she saw a vague vision of the operation in the pitch-black darkness of the space below, spread out like the interior of an ancient Dwarven Forge into a dozen stations, each with its nefarious arcane industries.

The most salient feature was the Core itself, a construct as large as a six-storey building, jagged and overgrown like a warped Sen-sen, vaguely cobalt in hue but covered almost entirely in Glyphs. These should have been for anyone else utterly arcane and indecipherable, though for herself, they were as familiar as her own Necromancy, for she had seen these very patterns a continent over, almost a decade ago, etched into the stone egg of another mythic creature.

“By the Nazarene…” her seated self blasphemed the name of a predecessor. “So this is their game…”

Her mind fell into a moment of turmoil so chaotic that she almost lost the connection with Caliban.

The branding of Almudj had been intentional.

The awakening of the Kirin in Tianjin, from the Tower’s investigations, is said to be a miscalculation.

And now, she had found the source, the course, and the future of Spectre’s next great ploy, their next Ode to Joy for the Prime Material.

A Leviathan!

A FUCKING UNDEAD LEVIATHAN!

She had no idea if the Followers of Juche could raise a creature as ancient and noble as a Leviathan older than Sarkonnian and Nin-Pak’s flagships combined—but the prospect was painfully dire for her mortal mind.

What would happen if a roving Leviathan appeared in the North Pacific, starting from the China Sea? Even if it didn’t erase all Human coastal cities from existence, the entire framework of trade established by Humanity in the last four centuries would come to an end. Every Human city, Capital and Frontier, would become isolated from allies, each Tower left to fend for itself. Furthermore, adding an Undead Leviathan to the general chaos of Climate Change would be akin to dropping a meteor into a drying lake, destroying any and every last vestige of stability Humanity exerted on the Prime Material.

And with Humanity, the greatest tool of Tryfan, turned to chaos, civil conflict and total war—who would be there to stop the uprooting of the World Trees?

And if the World Trees were hewn…Would the spherical Prime Material crack like an egg, spilling its gut flora over the cosmos in a fantastical implosion?

Gwen’s imagination spun like a smoothie blender as its Essence-infused calculations orbited the Axis Mundi.

“Evee… Evee… Evee… Deep breath…” She calmed herself with an internal Mantra that wasn’t as effective as its prior incarnations but still effective in grounding her sensibilities.

She knew that the Prime Material was holding together for the moment. Even if the Leviathan surfaced tomorrow, the resultant cataclysm was decades away from fruition.

Slowly, she forced Caliban’s eyeless features to snake across the ceiling, adhering to the rough bone coral with rows of tiny white hands on its belly that served as sticky feelers. Like a spectrometer, Caliban’s meta-physical senses slowly scanned the chamber, beginning from the inert Core.

Undead Mer of exceptional quality, some even appearing semi-intelligent, laboured in rows numbering in the hundreds, chipping away at the Core’s fossilised base with limbs or tools. Lesser Mer, more decomposed but likely enriched by the Negative Energy of the space, carted away loads of refuse to be disposed Nazarene knows where.

Following the tip-tap of ceaselessly labouring digits, Caliban’s senses alighted upon a grotesque blob of Negative Energy denser than even the miasma clambering the Leviathan Core.

A Lich? Gwen refocused her Familiar’s organs, which, unlike Detect Magic, was purely innate and not reliant upon a Mage’s psychic projection of their Astral awareness.

To her surprise, for all the Undead she had consumed to date, Gwen possessed no knowledge of the impossible perversion of life that seemed to command the Undead here.

Its head, from what she could discern from Caliban’s impressionistic vision, was a squid-like mask, the likeness of which matched her knowledge of a fully formed Sinneslukare, those Far Plane aberrants the Dwarves had faced in the Deep Murk.

This specimen was aquatic from the way its facial apparatus expanded and shrunk—but at the same time, she could also sense with absolute certainty that its body and magic were that of a Human Mage, a dead one.

A Sinneslukare Lich? Her mind felt as though a fistful of leeches had engaged an orgy in her frontal lobe. Was that even possible?

By Arcane Lore, it was well known that Demi-humans rarely became Undead. To the Faith-using Necromancers of the Great War, Demi-humans and Magical Monsters made for excellent parts, but the base of these creations were invariably human, for that was the limitation of Human Faith magic, and thus the limitations of Necromancy.

Likewise, it was an agreed-upon principle of the world that Magical Creatures not native to Terra, including Demi-humans as intelligent as Elves, could not readily make use of Faith Magic. And by that same Rule of Lore, there were no reliable records of Undead Mer before Gwen ventured into the Realm of Frost to defend the World Tree there.

Yet here, she saw a revision of the world order they had all taken for granted.

A Sinneslukare, an Undead Sinneslukare at that, inhabiting the body of a Necromancer at the tier of a Lich, using a derivative of Faith Magic on other Demi-humans…

It still made no sense to her—but it wasn’t as though Caliban could capture the creature and bring it back to Cambridge for tea, cupcakes and a dissection.

Nonetheless, her mind, in the likeness of her Axis Mundi, quickly stitched together a terrible tapestry of a conspiracy involving the Followers of Juche, the strange Sinneslukare of the Far Planes, the Elemental Princes and the web that entwined them all—Spectre.

If true, then she had just uncovered a tier of fuckery beyond even the ken of the Bloom in White.

With infinite care, her Caliban crawled to the furthermost end of the Chamber, where the workers were fewest, while the guards grew increasingly hulking until two Lobster-Mer the size of houses blocked what looked to be an entryway.

As before, her Caliban sunk into the calcite catacombs, soundless as a Lich’s breath.

Where she had planned for Bright Reef to slowly revolt over months—it would seem that the immediacy of what she had seen called for something far more… dramatic.

Gwen didn’t know it was possible to be drenched in sweat while underwater, but she could feel the cold, slimy surface of her kelp garb adhere to her skin, making her want to tear it all off just so that she could feel the tiniest freedom from her suffocation.

As soon as Caliban had gone dormant so she could rest her overtaxed Divination, she called upon her inner council to relay what she had discovered.

In silence, her council endured her vivid sharing of their mutually connected Empathic Link as they vicariously lived through her memories and recollections, understanding far more from her sensations than they did from the mortal words issuing from her Translation Stone’s best efforts.

“Suggestions,” she offered the echoic chamber. “Now.”

“I can only offer sympathy for the insanity of what you have seen, Pale Priestess.” Lei-bup was the first to mentally recover, as expected of her First Officer and most faithful. “A Leviathan is a sacred being, your highness. To mine the body of such a sacred being, even a long-forgotten one, is already a travesty in the eyes of Mer kind. Perhaps that is why they use forced labour and call it Whabpuz Gyli instead. In a better world, the mine should have become the host to a new, prosperous reef, with the body of the Leviathan becoming home and hearth to a Shoal of billions.”

“It’s true, Priestess…” The twins openly wept as they explained the pseudo-religious implications, for Sea Witches had a deep connection to the Leviathans whose bodies served as the fertile ground of their Coral Cabals. The desecration of one as old as what Gwen had described was as unimaginable as building an Adventist Church by pile-driving a prehistoric indigenous corroboree.

“Priestess, we must let Bright Reef know,” spoke the immovable beaked face of Lim-duk, their turtle-shelled Majordomo. “None who are not involved in this would stand for it. It is a good test… I think… to perceive which of the two sovereigns of the Fifth Vel is in cahoots with the Defilers.”

“Would that be viable?” Gwen asked of Lei-bup. “We are asking for open revolt. Our Priests of Purpose have yet to saturate the city’s sentiments, so who would join us?”

“Nonetheless, our Wave Riders are ready to give their all to right this travesty,” Nin-ka, the most senior of her Generals, offered his sword-nose. “We will be the vanguard, and the rest shall follow.”

“That’s too much risk.” Gwen shook her head. She knew that the Mer had a tendency to school and that Bright Reef held a great volume of resentment to be tapped, but should they fail—she might survive, but her Shoal would perish.

And without her Shoal, what could they do on the surface other than wait for a Leviathan to surface with a billion Undead Mer?

The throne room throbbed with their congealed thoughts.

“Priestess,” Lei-bup’s body oozed freely as he rose. “Perhaps I have a solution.”

Gwen’s eyes gazed upon her beloved High Priest, whose loyalty was as strong as his physicality was an insult to the existence of eyes.

“I think you should speak with Aristotle,” Lei-bup offered a perspective she had not even begun to consider. “We cannot commune with Leviathans like we do with each other, but you can.”

“Go on.” Gwen considered the point, and a slow-burning idea slowly came to light.

“Indeed.” Lei-bup read her body like a priest reading the scripture. “If we are this distressed, imagine how Aristotle would feel if you could fully communicate the extent of the atrocity. Leviathan do not possess complex thoughts, Great Pale One, but they do possess all the faculties that make them self-aware.”

Gwen understood well what her High Priest inferred. While Aristotle was incapable of Virtue Ethics, it was fully capable of the base emotions of happiness, joy, sadness, anger… blind, livid rage…

“And while you cannot commune with the other Leviathans serving Nin-Pak and Sarkonnian…” Lei-bup’s lips formed a terrifying, puckering oval.

“… Aristotle can relay the horrors to its peers…” Gwen was now certain that Lei-bup must be a born general with the IQ of a dozen dolphins stacked end-to-end like a fishy centipede. “By the Shoggoth, Lei-bup, you’re a fucking treasure…”

Her High Priest bowed, polluting the waters with its quivering discharge. “This one lives only to serve.”

“You and Richard should have tea someday…” Gwen knew now exactly what she had to do and that there was no point in wasting time. “Lim-Duk, inform the Shoal that we may be on the move. Ready the troops, and make sure all our citizens are stowed or evacuated.”

“By your will!” The turtle bowed, as did the rest of her bright-eyed, bloodthirsty council.

“Aristotle!” Gwen called out audibly, even though the gesture was for her benefit. “I wish to speak with you… intimately.”

The throne room shook as the floor opened, revealing the passage into the Leviathan’s Core.

Gwen wasn’t exactly sure how she would relay a picture of abstract impressionism to a Mythic organism. Still, she felt confident the tactility of the Glyphs etched onto her Leviathan’s Core was exactly what was needed to deliver to Aristotle the unfiltered horror, dismay and travesty happening to its sacred ancestor.

And after that?

She could not know, for the capacity of Human imagination when it came to three rampaging Leviathans shedding cities and citizens as they sought out a Calamari-Lich was sorely lacking.