Godclads

Chapter 29-10 Back to School (I)

+Hey, hello? Is anyone there? Well, if you are, it's your… It's your girl, Cala Marlowe, coming right... live from the gutters. Got flung down here after… after… shit went down. Shit… Fuck… Alright. Alright, Marlow, just breathe.

So. I’m safe. I’m with… uh, let’s call them people I trust. But things are looking, uh. Kinda fucked. I might not need to tell you guys that though.

Alright. We’re not dead. Not dead yet. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for some godsdamned numb.

Okay, so, we were at the Court of Truth. Shit went down big time. Strix. Seraph. Fifth Guild War. It was… it was really something. Biggest view spikes I ever—but something happened to the Nether. And then something happened to us…

And now, I’m watching people flee downward. Flee from the Tiers. Just… so many aeros. So many people. They’re coming down to the Warrens. Even the gutters. Thing I saw some No-Dragon Knots chasing a Stormtree cadre earlier. Busted up a few blocks. Fighting even down here.

So. That’s how things are and uh…

Yeah. My, uh, special source… hasn’t gotten back to me yet. The Symmetry is… well. I’ll update you on that when…

Avo’s coming back. The Strix is coming back. Just… just stay alive.

Heh. Heh, ha! You know something. I always wanted… wanted to see the citizens and subjects come together. Well. It’s happening now. Just took the end of the fucking world to do it.+

29-10

Back to School (I)

Draus jolted back into existence and found Vator, Mercy, and the Portrait looking upon her in anticipation.

“So,” the Instrument said, gaze affixed to her, unblinking, as he bit his lip into something almost approximate to a frown. “Would you like to explain to me why you decided to shoot yourself?”

“No,” Draus grunted, and that was all she said to Vator; she didn’t owe him anything else. His ass didn’t need to know about Ignorance either. She was going to keep the damn Greatling alive, much as the idea annoyed her. But if Ignorance was right, they had him by the balls, and they could use him against Highflame and rest of the Saintists as well.

Right now, though, she needed to imbibe this sanctuary, store it within her Metamind, and then find a point of egress. Ignorance was going to help her with that, but she needed to watch for certain things. Veylis’s mind was scouting through the substance, and they needed to stay subtle, lest her agents find them first. It was a strange godsdamn thing to be fighting a war inside the mind of your former consang. Stranger still was how his mind was now partially merged with your former High Seraph, with both cognitions doing their best to subsume the other.

Just another fucking day in New Vultun.

“I am here to offer you my services,” Mercy said simply. “The touch of the Burning Dreamer is with you. I can feel it. He has bestowed upon you his Definement.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Draus began. “We don't talk until I speak to you first. I don't care about what you believe or what you're trying to do.” She fixed him with a hard stare. “Avo might be making use of you, but I still remember what you are. I still remember what you've done, Famine. You give me a reason, and I'll give you an end. We synced on that?”

Mercy regarded her with a calm nod. He betrayed no rancor, nor outrage. “We are synced, per your wishes.”

Draus held him in her stare for a few moments longer before offering him a final sneer and making for the locus at the center of the room.

“All you need to do, Guard-Captain” the Doublethinker girl began.

“I know what I need to do,” Draus shot back, cutting her off. “Vator! Fall in!” To her surprise, the Instrument didn’t protest either. Instead, he sauntered behind her, and the portrait followed in tow, turning slightly. She studied the young Greatling and his errant Heaven. “So what, you’re not going to pull it back into yourself?”

“That is not the Portrait’s desire. And what isn’t its desire is not mine,” Vator surmised. He regarded his heaven with a near obsequious smile, but the Portrait itself seemed uninterested in his charm. Rather, it took on a direct role in speaking to Draus.

“You are she, the weapon bound to human form,” the Portrait asked. “Your flesh is wrong. Wrong of its sex. And wrong of function. Where is your… your…”

“What?”

“It has been taken away,” the Portrait moaned. “You will have no young.”

Oh. That shit. Well, it was an old Sang god. Guess a positive birth rate was harder to maintain back in the Age of Pantheons. “Got vats these days. Go talk to them if you wanna grow a juv.”

The Heaven of Biology hesitated before asking its next question. “But… are you not scornful of those who took you, of those who reshaped you, deprived you of ever having the chance at the life you could have lived as a daughter, a mother, a sister?”

Draus turned away from the locus, letting it be for a moment longer. The Portrait clearly was trying to find a kindred spirit in her. At least, that was what she thought was happening. Heavens were elemental in the best of cases, but after Avo started waking some of them up, their behaviors grew to be eccentric, even for divine entities constructed by mass worship.

“I am not eccentric,” the Arsenalist said. “I am a gun.”

+I know,+ Draus said. +And you’re perfect for that.+

“I can resemble a gun as well. I can reflect the shape of a gun.” the Simulacra chimed.

+...Yeah. Sure.+ The Regular still wasn’t sure about that one.

“You are cold daughter. Too cold to ever be one touched by my blessings.” The Portrait was mutilated, and so it wanted to find an answer in Draus, thinking she, as a Regular, bore symmetry to it. Seems in some ways, gods weren’t so different from humans, always distracted by broader patterns while missing the inconsistencies in the details.

“Can’t be sad about what never was,” Draus shot back. “And you can’t go back to being what you were, neither of you.” She was speaking to Vator and his heaven now. “World’s broken. World’s been broken before. World’s gonna get broken again.”

Draus sized the Portrait up and continued. “You hear me clear right now, I don’t give a fuck about how you feel. I don’t give a fuck how much it hurt to ‘not be yourself.’ You wanna go back to being what you were? Fine. But you’re gonna have to recreate yourself. I can help you. I can give you the canons you need. I can make sure your mythology snaps back in place. We can take away all that you don’t like. But make no mistake, it’s not a restoration, it’s a rebuild. Because who you were, that’s broken and busted. And your world was dead. And your parts were traded long ago between the guilds for imps and favors. Deal with it. Or don’t. Them’s the pieces you got on this board. And you.”

She was speaking to Vator now and did her best to keep any hint of vitriol from leaking over.

“And me?” Vator said, holding her gaze, arms crossed behind his back without a hint of fear. “What about me?”

“You’re a lucky half-strand.” Draus gave a vicious grin. “A day ago, a week ago, a month ago, I would have killed you and not given you another thought. Now you’re lucky. Now you are actually fated. Fated to do something that matters with your life.”

“Is it now?” Vator’s brow arched. “And you know this how?”

“I know this because your High Seraph is no more.”

“And might be again,” Vator countered.

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“Might be. But ain’t here right now. And that’s what matters. Without her, I’m going to ask you a simple question. Chivalrics versus the Meritocrats. Who’s your imps on?”

Slowly, the certainty on Vator’s face vanished, replaced by a subtle frown. “Our oaths still remain. Surely—”

“Your oaths are enforced by power,” Draus said. “And spare me the self-comforting bullshit. I’ve been a Gold longer than you’ve been alive, boy. The only true thing about the oath is that part where we mentioned the worthy. And the worthy in whose eyes? Veylis. And who’s missing now?”

The Instrument’s expression darkened.

“Yeah. Now you got it. They’re gonna be bleedin’ each other. And this was a long time coming.”

“Massists still remain. So long as there is a common front—”

“Common front where?” Draus interrupted. Walking away from Vator, she placed a hand on the locus, and the flames passed into her. Enough delay. Time to get a move on. All of a sudden, the sanctuary began to swim, and like a swell of receding water, the surrounding environment crashed down, pouring into the halo that made up Draus’s Metamind. Mercy vanished. The double thinkers dissolved alongside him.

“What are you doing?” Vator cried out. Still, his voice was absent of fear. More curiosity and surprise. As the remainder of the sanctuary trickled away into Draus’s Metamind, she felt a new space expand within her cognitive palace.

+We are here,+ Mercy said, speaking to her from within. The regular didn’t quite like that, but she trusted Ignorance to keep the famine in check.

+We will assist you however we can,+ the double thinkers all spoke at once. Draus, was this what it was like to be able to have a little civilization chattering away in the back of your mind?

Yes, Ignorance said.

Well, Draus didn’t much appreciate it.

Finally, the locus came asunder in a gust of flame, melding over Draus’s being, superimposing itself upon her ontology before vanishing within her Frame entirely. Ignorance had instructed her on what to do. It was a simple action, and with the collapse of the nether, the return of mind and cognition to the domains of thaumaturgy, component parts that made up this realm could be bound to her in mind and soul.

The sanctuary consumed, she assumed the role of flame anchor, and the pathways back to the real unveiled themselves before Draus and Vator. The substance, this space created from the metaphysical corpses of the Strix, the Gatekeeper, the Remembrance, and the Demiurge enmeshed together, resembled a constellation of madness—a constellation that now included Draus among their number.

She stood a node along a vast webway of interconnected chains created from discordant memories entwined with false histories. Phantasmal mirages formed and broke around her, Ignorance veiling her from passing ghosts—and Veylis’ awareness.

Strings of gold-infused Specters passed through her, connecting her to distant sequences that bled off into branching paths. Just as before, her mind rattled as she beheld this calamitous subreality. The Portrait responded with a low trill of dismay.

“What has become of the world?”

“Ain’t the world yet,” Draus replied, speaking while standing on a swirling, phantasmal canvas. “You’ll get to see the actual shit-show in a minute. Hold your nu-dogs in place.”

Vator comparatively simply arched an eyebrow. “Well, this is quite the ball of yarn. Is this what a collapsed soul looks like from the inside?”

“A few collapsed Frames specifically,” Draus deadpanned.

Ignorance reached out from her mind and scouted a few nearby sequences. With the substance rapidly consuming entire portions of New Vultun, Draus’s points of egress were numerous. But that didn’t mean she could simply depart wherever she wanted. As the settings of her cog-feed updated, and the phantasmagorical wayway composed the ruins of four great Liminal Frames separated into sections that burned and sections shown with oscillating gold. The former represented safer places, locations where Avo’s consciousness dominated. The latter, however, showed sections of the sub-reality that increasingly belonged to Veylis.

And to make matters even trickier, chronology and conflagration constantly fought each other, each pushing against the other, their influences spreading and waning by the second. Infused with Ignorance, Draus existed as a most clandestine anchor. One Veylis would need to capture if she wanted to fully restore herself to fullness, but it wouldn’t be so easy.

Contrarily, Draus had plenty more fragments to raid and control herself, and the worst part was she needed to sort out the 72 shards that made up Avo’s ontology from this catastrophic mishmash of memories.

“Seventy-two,” Draus said.

“Seventy-two?” Vator replied, sounding confused.

“That’s how many shards we need to collect to put Avo back together.”

“The shards to the Strix’s Frame,” the Greatling muttered. He licked his lips, excitement growing. “And the High Seraph. So then, what do we hesitate for? What is our task.”

“Tryin’ to find a proper place to pass back over. Won’t be findin’ no shards out here. It’s too much of a fuckin’ jungle of bullshit. They’ll call out in the real. Here, we’re exposed. Well eventually get found.”

“By whom?”

“Which part of whom might be the better question,” Draus replied. “Ain’t no tellin’ were one begins and the other ends anymore.”

Mem-data flooded into the Regular’s mind. The Tiers, frankly, were a mess. With the destruction of Scale and the segmentation of entire sovereignties by the substance, nearly any point she could emerge from would likely be in a state of total war.

Vague flashes of visual and audio memories confirmed her suspicion, as Ignorance’s ghosts carried over captured memories. The Massists were pushing hard now. Somehow, Ori-Thaum developed countermeasures to completely blunt the substance from fully pushing into their territories. As such, Stormtree, Ashthrone, and Sanctus were rallying behind their most esteemed partner and sending out forces to make calculated pushes into enemy territory.

It also helped that the parts of the substance under Avo’s sway simply allowed them to pass. The borders of Ori territory were lined with shimmering symbols that Draus couldn’t fully understand, and she also heard the vagueness of chanting, though they weren’t of any tongue she knew either.

The Inner Council is making their play, Ignorance said. I have forced their hand in desperation. They have a new Heaven, something alike to mine, but not entirely. Close in symmetry, but off in angle. I cannot penetrate, and they have been preparing, preparing for the hungers to return, preparing for a compromise of the nether for a very long time. They weren’t done, but this will change things. Give them an advantage.

For a moment, the Regular considered emerging where the fighting was thickest. She knew war, was comfortable with it, and could probably slip between battle lines and wreak her own kind of havoc. She if she could detect any of that resonance between shards. But then, a sudden and unexpected suggestion from Vator Greatling completely shifted her calculations.

“Why don’t we just use Atraxis Academy first?”

Draus paused and regarded the instrument. “What’d you say now?”

“Atraxis Academy,” he repeated, looking at Draus as if she were a malformed nu-dog—the stupid kind. “Why, you waxed on about civil war, and now, with the Massists pushing in, there is no place possibly safer for Highflame or its most promising children. And few places more secure. That would be where I would store something worth protecting.”

Draus squinted at Vator. “How the hells do you know about the Massists pushing?”

“Oh, you’re not getting the visions too?”

Draus clenched her jaw. +Ignorance? Are you talking to him too?+

Only feeding him information for context. Not to worry. Doesn’t know I’m there.

+Yeah? Well, let me know about that beforehand next time.+

Through her annoyance, though, she could see the merits in his plan. Atraxis Academy and all the other instrument training academies like it were the lifeblood of Highflame’s future cadres. But more importantly, they also granted her direct connections to the great houses of the Chivalrics and the highest-performing members of the Meritocrats as well.

If there was a civil war to be fought, it would be fought on those lines as well, and if there was a place that was properly protected and further insulated from harm, Atraxis also qualified best. It was, quite simply, the best forward operating base she could secure behind enemy lines. And, with Vator, she just might be able to slip in without making any noise.

Yeah. It had potential. Another shard of Avo might just be there. And even if not, she could push deeper into Highflame territory from there. But as she thought of the benefits, her mood darkened.

What? Ignorance asked, confused about her sudden bitterness.

+Just realized I’d be validatin’ Vator Greatling if I do this. Don’t quite know how I feel about that.+

Can feel good that Loraea Greatling’s greatest legacy is at your mercy. That you are using him against Highflame. Imagine how she might feel now.

The disgust within Draus slightly lessened.

And if we win, could bring her back. Feed all these memories into her mind. Make her feel bad.

+Shit, Avo. You really know how to make a sow happy.+Shaking her head as a thin tendril of flame extended out from Draus, seeking a distant sequence to breach so that she could be reinserted back over into reality. “Hey. Vator. You ready to go back to school.”

The Instrument paused and looked to his Heaven once more. “Well. It’s been a while. But I suppose a visit is due.”

“Yeah. Strange times. ‘Cept we’ll be playin’ op-for. You sure you’re up for that? Don’t want you to grow a heart right now.”

The Greatling fell silent and considered her half-taunt, half-truth. And finally, he betrayed his answer by looking to his Portrait.

“These are strange times, Guard Captain. Strange aeons. What I’m doing, I’m technically doing in service of the High Seraph as well. I’m sure my fellows will understand.”

“I don’t think so,” Draus replied.

“Then, in that case, I’m sure that the restored Monad between the Strix and the High Seraph will grant me their clemency instead.”

Rat motherfucker could justify anything to himself. He had to be Loraea’s boy.

“All right, then,” she said. “But you know this, Vator. If you get any thoughts of loyalty, where you start getting sentimental about your Guild, your Heaven, and think you’re getting anything of its former self back, you will never get to be a part of this. You will never restore the greatest power New Vultun will ever know. And I’ll have your Heaven taken from you. I can do that. And you can’t stop me.”

Technically my power.

+Technically, your ass is dead. Shut the fuck up and stop back-seatin’ my abuse of this shit-bird.+

And finally, a flicker of genuine outrage twisted across the Instrument’s features. “Save your threats, Guard-Captain. I’ll be a good hound. I promise.”