[center][colour=crimson][h3][b]????[/b][/h3][/colour] [/center] [colour=crimson][i]You promised me a flower.[/i][/colour] Nothing. Nothing. Nothingness. Only the empty void beyond. [colour=crimson][i]You promised me a flower,[/i][/colour] 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 [i]was[/i] 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. [colour=crimson][i]I gave you a flower?[/i][/colour] the voice recalled, reshaping all the nothingness by observing it and so reshaping itself, the observer. [colour=crimson][i]I gave it to your sister. I gave so many flowers. I gave a whole garden to her.[/i][/colour] A sudden halt to the motion. [colour=crimson][i]You never gave me a flower,[/i][/colour] it thought. The nothingness resolved. [colour=crimson][i]She gave me a flower.[/i][/colour] From the absolute void, the thinker [i]thought[/i] blue, and the conscious void [i]voiced[/i] blue, and the Word of God [i]was[/i] 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. [colour=crimson][i]She gave me a flower,[/i][/colour] it said, in thought. [colour=crimson][i]A lily.[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson]You [i]gave me a flower,[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]Lily…[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]You wrought an endless cavern,[/i][/colour] the entity prayed to its old god. [color=crimson][i]Clever. So, so clever you were.[/i][/color] 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. [colour=crimson][i]I hope you’ll live…[/i][/colour] The entity disappeared again, through no void but its own, the grand Vacuole. It reached a Heartland. [hr] [i]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.[/i] [hr] [colour=crimson][i]Horror. Horrorsome. Horror, some. Horrorsomy.[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]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'.[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]'Horror-body'. Is she the engineer of monsters? Or is she herself the organelle that manufactures horror for the universe?[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]Heartland, homeland...[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]...Leviathans, whales...[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]Inside, outside...[/i][/colour] 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. [colour=crimson][i]...Puppy dog's tails.[/i][/colour] The creature sealed the toroidal portals in rings of grey flesh, joined at the seams with lines of cyan glow. [center] [hider=And the sky was full of warpfisk] [img]https://78.media.tumblr.com/e34cf7ae0706848a3b6e639c872a122b/tumblr_o579vcpnzq1rc69zjo1_1280.jpg[/img] [/hider] [/center] 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. [hider=So who is this avatar again?] We see more of Isonymph, finally. She explores the vacuole in which most of Jvan's Heartlands exist and adopts a sea lily as a pet. The vacuole has been made into a true plane, the Januaract, which exists as a kind of fundamental blankness marking the edge of many other spaces. Creation sheet will be forthcoming. Isonymph explores a curious Heartland in which all things are part of the same mechanism in the most literal sense possible- everything from plants to planets to people is made of metal gears and coils and pulleys. Here she creates warpfisk, a species that can teleport freely between the Vacuole and the real world, and take others with them back and forth. She tests them out by sending some mechanism-people into the Graveyard Worlds. [b]1 Might spent creating Warpfisk 1 Might spent creating the Januaract, a demiplane[/b] [b]Jvan 7 Might Ambient 0 Might in Ovaedis 2 Free Points 2C / 0D Level Six[/b] [/hider]