Hidden 6 yrs ago 6 yrs ago Post by Antarctic Termite
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-Jvan and her pipe
-The Mercenary
-The Spirits of Sky City
-Malley at the Terrestrial Citadel
-Sable's childhood
-The Januaract, and the Januaires

Phi - awww, kids
Phi - FIX YOUR RELIGION
Phi - kill a man
Phi - Invest!
Phi - Orianaposting?
78.media.tumblr.com/ae1e10bcbe4b0d969…
Phi - Belvast
Phi - Missionaries
Phi - DREAM SUBTERFUGE
Hidden 6 yrs ago Post by Antarctic Termite
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Sable.


A pile of rubble in the middle of an old stream valley. A sound of takk-ing stone on stone, intermittent and variable. Someone was throwing rocks. Not with much force, either.

"A halo from my father," said the voice in the gulch. "A blade from my mother. A thousand curses from Yivvin, and..." A cocked head, as the next fistful of rock cracked down the walls. "And good hearing from Aihtiraq, I guess. That's one thing to be thankful for."

The boy looked up to where a sable marten was curled upon a crag, looking down at him. The two seemed equally startled by each other. His pockmarked metal disc followed his head.

He cracked a smile, looked down. The ferret-thing scampered away up the rock. He turned back to the D-shaped blade sticking up from the rocks, its handle embedded in its spine. He stood up from the rocks.

"Was this the best you could do?" he asked, addressing the walls. The Jvanic spines had been cleared out long ago, but things still grew back. Forked slender points, facing skywards. "An abomination? Another bastard, to throw into the fire? Was the rape of my mother worth this?" He kicked a rock.

"What am I, a Jvanic elemental? A Djinni whose element is you? Or maybe something more like a change-eater? Is that why I must burn everything that I touch?" Sable picked up a rock out of the many, many that lay. It sank into his hand. His skin was water, the flesh beneath as mud. He watched as the stone dripped out the other side, soiling the clear fluid that covered his surface, dripping away as sepia that fled back to him on the ground.

"Or am I a Sculptor? Yes, that makes sense, does it not? Someone to tell the story you refuse to believe. Someone who knows his own narrative, a character who chases the conclusion for its own sake. You just want it to look nice, don't you? No matter what happens, you're just chasing the story."

Sable waved his hand in front of him. He was, in body, the spitting image of what Flux had been three centuries ago, before the change. Only younger. The sepia clouds were falling away into him again, leaving his outer flesh clear.

"You're willing to believe that the responsibility for change lies with anyone but you," he murmured. "You pay morality a tribute because it stung you in the past. Do you think you can atone for your sin the same way you solve all your other problems? By making horrors and abandoning them?"

He swept his arms up to the sky and raised his voice. "Is that what I am? Am I the body who's destined to fight you into a standstill? Is that not correct? Am I not the one you chose to fix all your mistakes? Cure the wounds you inflict and mete out the penance you owe?"

Sable's fists hardened.

"And I will, no matter what it takes. I will thwart you. So... Who am I?"

"Am I your keeper? Am I a harbinger?"


There was no answer. Sable lowered his hands and his voice.

"Am I a messiah?"

There was no answer.

Until, eventually, there was.

"SABLE! Quit your teenage monologuing and sweep out my fucking dojo!"

A broom clattered down among the rocks from somewhere far above. Sable's keen ears heard something about 'I'll make a good goblin out of you yet'.

"Yes, Auntie! I'm coming!" Sable resolved to go within the next five minutes. He looked back out at the gulch. Nothing.

He sat down on the rocks, facing the blade.

I miss them, Sable said, quietly, in his head. I never met them but I miss them. I miss your voices. His fingertips drummed on the stone. "You should never have died. Why did you die?"

The blade's rune gleamed at him. Wit's End.

'May the one who takes up this sword forsake its use, and all other arts of combat, until words fail them.'

"I accept this oath," he said, and put his hand on the blade. It glowed. Sable put his other hand around its grip and pulled.

It was stuck.

"Oh damn this," he whined, yanking the huge ceramic sword with both hands and a shoulder. He grunted with effort as the blade stuck fast in the dirt.

"Sable! Your oryx wants feeding!"

"Coming, Auntie!"

He spattered the ground with his hand, shaking it out to reform it. The rocks dissolved into the ink-marks, the ink-marks flowed back to his feet. At last he heaved and the weapon came free.

"Coming!" he yelled again, setting the blade on his back, where a curve of liquid held it in place. Sable scrambled up the rock.
Hidden 6 yrs ago 6 yrs ago Post by Antarctic Termite
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The Blowfly ascended, borne aloft by a tetrahedral array, up past the barrier of clouds. There was a long moment of darkness, blood rain, red cloud soaking her every fold, but then she rose; breached into the clean sky, baptised in gore. Below her the cloud shone white in every direction. Above her the stars once more fell. She watched them come.

For a moment, she almost felt something.

The first Cosmic Knight fell; she got the measure of it. With the second she collided. The ophan cord cut effortlessly through his body, severing him through the spine. She felt the quake of the impact ricochet through her ophanim, so thick was that armour. She wasn't even sure it was dead.

The Knights realised, and the sky scattered. Falling Knights swerved and arced wildly to avoid her razor wind, most succeeding. The rest fell to earth as soldiers no more. Some targeted her, falling towards her blade, but Tauga dodged or tore through them, unhindered, until they began to realise that too many were throwing their lives away for nothing.

Then things changed.

The first collision barely knocked it off course, the Knight slamming into Tauga's ophan with a streak of heat. The second came rapidly, and soon as a rain: chitin after chitin soldiers slammed into the Bludgeon, forsaking their assigned impact points to strike instead the alien weapon with which Heartworm had blessed her. They leapt off, cushioned by magic, but losing their deadly energy as they did so. The blows were constant. Chitin upon metal. There was little else to be done.

But the speed of the Knights was greater than anything Tauga had seen before, even Realta. As plumes burned, the metal creature dented, and heated, and began to lilt; the others could only hold it aloft. The impacts were too much. Melted by internal damage, the ophan's cords flickered and went out.

Trailing ethereal plumes in a slow and painful rain, the Bludgeon fell.

More Knights coming. Already they were homing to her remaining Bludgeons. Tauga considered rising to smite at their source, but it was impossibly far; she would have to leave. With a sweep of her arms, she sent the Bludgeons away.

And fell, and fell, and fell, and landed, on a heap of rubble, which was all she'd ever ruled, and her tendrils swept out through the city like a bomb. And they saw her as a shadow in the ash as the one she truly was: Tauga the Blowfly, Lord of Xerxes.


* * *


The Bludgeon careened into Xerxes, impossibly huge, impossibly heavy, almost slowed by the utter shock of its magnitude, until it smashed into the city and destroyed.

Buildings were like standing water, people were like flowers. Trailing plumes that scattered in every direction, seeking safety, it rammed the earth with a force that was not equalled by any mortal before or since, and lay where it fell, the earth still quaking.

A stray plume shot through the tremendous gouge left by the dying ophan, unfettered and untouchable. It fled, light in the shroud of ash, passing Dagon, Knight and Rotfly, escaping as the Alefprian soldiers poured in. Blood rain poured, but it was already mad, thoughtless. Its senses, unseeing, were keen. Its sisters died around it, struck down, choked by ash or soaked by blood, but it managed to escape.

A sphere was closing around the city. Chaos was playing its game. The arena was forming.

Chaos...

'DEVIL HEAR MY PLEA!'

It was a soulless prayer, but it worked. It worked.

The barrier thinned just enough for the ethereal feather to escape, though it knew not what it was escaping, into the outside- into a river. It fled along the water, doomed with every flutter, losing energy. It emerged into the sun.

At least it would not die in that place. But it would die. What was the point, in preserving its life, when all it had was gone? It knew no such thoughts. Its mind was nothing but chaos. It merely saw.

Without the ophan, the feather could not resolve its own instincts. It raced back into the point from which it had come, rising from the river, but it found nothing, only a vast hemispherical crater into which water was mysteriously barred from flowing. It fled out to the mountains. Somewhere in its memories, was the thought that mountains were home.

Elsewhere in its memories it knew that they were... not.

The feather churned, turning on itself, dying. The sun was bright. The clouds were gone. The ash was gone. It wished it had stayed in Xerxes. There it could die in war. As a victim. Helpless.

No, thought the ophan feather. This was a good place to die.

Maybe.

* * *


...Hmm. This is weird.

The feather felt it was moving, but it wasn't flying. It had sensations it had not felt before, not in a long time. Corporeality. Mass. Memory. Thought.

A body?

Yeah, it had a body. Nice. Nice. Nice!

NICE!

...not nice. It hated nice. It hated... Niciel. That was it. It would never return there again. Never to the Valley of Peace.

The feather stopped, confirming its first command to its foreign body. It was not airborne, that was for sure. Its senses were dulled, locked away, trapped by something. Aluminium? That and carbon. A flesh engine. The feather released itself, sensing the borders of its prison, and flew easily away from its new body. It immediately tried to kill her.

A White Giant. Hm. That explained a lot.

The feather re-entered her host, found it immediately quietened, responsive. She probed her memories. What did having a body feel like? Oh yes. Like... That.

The giant reared up on four hindlimbs. Inside the body, the feather was blind, but she could feel her weight shifting. Yes. This was good. Did she have senses? Yes she did. Touch, heat, kinesthesis, balance, sound, timing, echolocation, humour (she brought that one herself), and a long-range one she didn't recognise but liked the feel of. No hunger. Pain, maybe. She'd figure that out in time.

There were other souls in here, or soul-like things, placeholders. The feather kicked them out. Deleted them. Good riddance.

She realised she had power. She had always had power. Great power- how else did an ophan stay aloft? How else had she slain her enemies?

And now she had a body.

The feather flexed its knuckles, felt its muscles tense within its shell. It localised its awareness to its faceless head, stretching the small hands thereon. The porcelain ovoid swayed at her command, back and forth, curling up and down on a neck segmented with ceramic plates so cleverly layered as if to be flexible. It flexed its back, felt lichenous components click and shuffle in their mechanisms. Piece by piece it tested the armour, and the massive tendons locked within.

Tick, tick, tick, went the giant. The sensation was rapidly becoming routine, like a heartbeat. Tick, tick, tick, tick.

The comfort faded quickly. Where to go? What to do? Who to talk to? There was no language it could form in this shape, no angelic hymns it could sing. The feather's head whipped around on its long neck, jumping shadows. No Ophan. No colony.

Something moved. The parasitised giant scrabbled away, then launched itself at a suspicious-looking tree. It broke to splinters in its fingertips. Quiet again. Sawdust settled. A familiar scent of chaos on the wind.

Very familiar.

I'll manage, thought the rogue angel. I've come this far.
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????


You promised me a flower.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothingness. Only the empty void beyond.

You promised me a flower, said the voice that defined its borders. No thought, no word here. Only one mind. Only one thought. Only one Word.

And in the beginning was that Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and that Word was Lust…

The Lust for All Things. The lust for a flower.

The lusting voice that defined the dark hovered on, travelling not through consecutive positions of space but consecutive planes of consciousness, altering its awareness as it moved and penetrating deeper into the stream of awareness threaded through space-time. I gave you a flower? the voice recalled, reshaping all the nothingness by observing it and so reshaping itself, the observer. I gave it to your sister. I gave so many flowers. I gave a whole garden to her.

A sudden halt to the motion. You never gave me a flower, it thought. The nothingness resolved. She gave me a flower. From the absolute void, the thinker thought blue, and the conscious void voiced blue, and the Word of God was blue. A deep dark blue. No light at all. Only the bones of the ancient leviathan, lying asleep on the ocean floor.

From one void to another, the Isonymph reached its hand. An abyssal crinoid crawled upon it.

She gave me a flower, it said, in thought. A lily. The feathered arms of the star-creature fanned slightly in the current, pulling miniscule specks of driftwater food into its maw. So slowly did it grow. So mindlessly did it breathe.

You gave me a flower, said the Isonymph, flowing out back into the great void that was. The crinoid followed suit, flicking its frail arms against the current of thoughtlessness. It could be at home here. Perhaps. If it could exist at all. Lily…

The being translated itself across the void, unobserved and yet observed, for observation was the only thing tethering it to its own, small speck of existent reality. Another speck just drifting on the current, waiting for the feather-arm in the dark to pull it into its maw.

But though that arm lurked in the distance, it would not pull. The walls of this vacuole were distant, not hostile. As distant as one is from zero. An infinite subdivision away. Jvan.

You wrought an endless cavern, the entity prayed to its old god. Clever. So, so clever you were. The older one, before all of this. Before Lust was a propulsive force. Before Tueda became Jvan.

The Isonymph slipped back out of nothingness to some other nothingness, trailed by its crinoid. It nestled on a darkened moon. Its crinoid froze instantly. The Isonymph unfroze it. Made it live. Even in the cold and the dark, and the airless space of Cogitare, she could make it live- she could raise the dead and animate the unliving. I hope you’ll live…

The entity disappeared again, through no void but its own, the grand Vacuole. It reached a Heartland.




In the Long Ago Time, there had been a great confuscation among the Mass, and the Congregation of Weight decided to undo itself; thus in the Now, there was much confusion, and many Weights and Scales were out of balance, and no one knew how to repair them at all.

The Pulleys of Mass drew one platform against another, and an Engineer inspected them, such that he could; the angle was bad and his own pulleys were quite fatigued. He winched his own observatory platform down on his neck, very slowly, so as not to strip the screws in his neck connectors, which had grown bent as of late. When he observed that a wild mechanism had established itself on the bottom of the platform, he spun his vocal chain, and let it unwind, driving two hammers against his low keys; the tapping sound was his sigh.

It was a long winch down to the bottom of the platform, where the Large Wheels connected to the Pulleys of Mass, and the engineer was very tired of it. In the Long Ago Time there had been grandeur, in the work of the Engineers, but that word had lost its proper capital now, though it was still written as such, and he was relegated to the role of maintaining and cleaning.

He screwed his clamps shut tightly on the opposing clamps of the mechanism, and applying his Long Lever, slowly screwed it open; it banged and tolled like a mad thing at his motion. It was buckling work, and tiring, and the engineer's main coils were almost unspun by the time he had screwed the mechanism from where it was parasitising the big Pulley, and hooked it into himself.

Late in the Rotation he would unwind it, and rewind his own coils with it, taking some gears to replace his own ground ones. He knew it was illegal; but at this point, he thought, even the laws were worn.





Horror. Horrorsome. Horror, some. Horrorsomy.

The Isonymph sat cross-criss-cross-legged on the top end of a winch, blossoming like the leafless flower it was. Fractal petals came and went in its sepalled bulb, every colour, every shape. Its crinoid imitated it in mindless simplicity.

They say it means 'of horror'. But Fate plays tricks. The First Tongue isn't first. In an older tongue, as old as Horror itself, 'soma' means 'body'.

The Engineer tired about his business, cabling himself to a long wire such as to wind him while all his gears untoothed, all but the one that would wake him when it was done.

'Horror-body'. Is she the engineer of horrorsomes? Or is she herself the organelle that manufactures horror for the universe?

The lily watched the mechanist world winch on with its ailing gears, its ailing laws, its people. People that lived according to edicts that forbade etching, yet themselves were etched in metal.

She'd been given an edict of her own.

Heartland, homeland...

Isonymph flipped herself inside out several times, her pitch-black skin giving way to spectral flux. She flipped herself through void and vale, reaching into every dark and stagnant place on Galbar she could think of, and then she pulled.

Bits of reality tore into the mechanist realm from everywhere that was nowhere. Portals broke around her like shining holes in the roof of a cavern, orbiting in a piecemeal sphere.

...Leviathans, whales...

Flesh was produced. From where, it was quite impossible to say. It formed strips, long ribbons, curved platelets, components. Grey as a colourless dawn. Fins and feelers. Gills and gullets.

Inside, outside...

Isonymph took the portals, and extended her many hands, twisting them into foreign shapes. They glowed around her, rings and helices, supercoils and spheres. She was playing, nothing more. The shape she was looking for was already known: a degenerate toroidal vortex, a spherical ring spinning into itself. Of these self-consuming portals, she made many.

...Puppy dog's tails.

The creature sealed the toroidal portals in rings of grey flesh, joined at the seams with lines of cyan glow.



Masses of warpfisk swam through the mechanist world, swarms of them so vast they lit the planet blue. The mechanists, who had no sense of sight, nor any means of perceiving that which was not part of the mechanisms, were blind to the peril they were in. Had always been in. Beyond the mechanisms, silhouettes were marked by the light of the warpfisk, showing things that never touched, never cradled, yet had been here all along, outside the gears.

Currents of light spun from the toroids, first in rings echoing the shape of the enfleshed portals themselves, then in spindle-like beams running through the center of the warpfisk as the portal fields intersected themselves. The swarm flashed, and was gone.

Isonymph was alone.

It emerged into the scanning darkness of the Graveyard Worlds where Jvan had dumped dead Heartlands. There it saw the warpfisk, still glowing, restlessly dreaming, amidst a shattered chain of the Great Gear, and many thousands of mechanists besides, uncoupled from their world and flailing with excess momentum, coming apart, reduced to what they ultimately were: metal pieces in a particular shape.

The silhouettes flew into the nearest Graveyard World, and stayed there. Another invasive species.

At the Avatar's direction, the Warpfisk dispersed, flashing one by one into the Vacuole, and from there into the corners of the universe, everywhere there was quiet- quiet and shade and stagnation, and patterns without meaning, blank places waiting to be written on. Wherever the lines of the real strayed a little too close to the Vacuole.

Isonymph faded into the darkness, and returned to where she belonged. The lily came with her, silently swaying its slender tentacles.


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