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Sleep was a churning and frothy river, and dreams flitted through it like fish. Yudaiel was a vast net that drifted uncontrollably downstream; she caught a great bounty.

In such an exhausted state after her exertions with the Codex and her desperate battle against the ilk of Ashevelen, Iqelis, and Epsilon all, she truly dreamt now. Where her prescience normally let her steer the flow of the river and spear whatever fish she sought, now she was merely swept along by the current.

Many strange sights presented themselves before her. There was a tree that walked, almost a wooden man -- but it seemed only half a man, for the other half was woman; further, it appeared one part mortal and two parts divine. Upon one side the walking-tree’s branches were withered and leafless, but on the other they sprung green. It emanated strength but also great weariness, for it had borne many great burdens, had died and been reborn, died and been reborn, died and been reborn, endlessly and forever. She sensed that, like herself, this one Saw, and it pushed its roots deep through time. She returned the stranger’s great black gaze - its singular black-hole Eye - and knew that they would meet again. But then she was swept along by the stream, through rapids and down cataracts, away from the watchful god of bark that stood upon the banks.

Above the river there was a night sky aglow with fireflies and stars. In the darkness of the black void between stars, she sensed another Eye, and knew that [i]It too[/i] could See, and moreover that It [i]did[/i] See her -- It Saw right into her heart and soul. It was not just an Eye like she; the constellations about Its eye seemed to realign, and she saw that It was a cyclops with a great and imposing anatomy, a hulking and puissant form that seemed chiseled from stone.

Yudaiel flinched from Its glare, but there was nowhere to hide, and she had no words with which to plead. Through her peripheral vision she tried to watch It and descry something, anything, about the nature of this watcher, this tormenter, this potential [b]predator[/b]: she could ascertain that the oculus belonged to some terrible being that was ancient beyond ancient, and that behind It, lurking in Its shadow, there was another constellation. From the clusters of distant and dimmer stars behind It, she connected the lines and perceived some monstrous, four-eyed demon with a hog’s head, and she sensed that it was a terrible herald of carnage and destruction… an apprentice, perhaps? Or a mere disciple, a minion? A child, even?

Whatever its nature was, that brute of a demonic boar changed little… it was the gaze of its master that Yudaiel feared. She suspected that if It desired, It could render her moon and the Galbar into dust with but a thought and then forge something horrible -- something utterly alien -- from the ashes; fortunately and manifestly, It seemed to have other inclinations. She saw in Its pupil a reflection not just of herself, but of the other deities,her [i]siblings[/i], and even the Monarch himself -- she wondered, did He even know that He was being observed through Space and Time and Reality by such beings as this one? Uncertainty filled Yudaiel, and for a fleeting moment, fear coursed through her too, and she was grateful for the Monarch’s strength if nothing else… she could not stand against such a terrible being as this Eye… yet. One day her glare would become so torrid, vehement, and menacing that even Its like would blister and burn and twist to her whims, but her time had not yet come, and to engage with the cyclops would be a hopeless and foolish struggle. For now it seemed only He could hold such beasts at bay… The All-Seeing Eye was rarely one for humor, but she found it risible that the Monarch of All protected her ambitions even as those same ambitions seemed to growingly include His own downfall.

Her musings on that monstrous eye and Its place in her world and thread of plots were suddenly cast aside; something was changing. Suddenly, It seemed disinterested in her and her siblings. It looked elsewhere by Its own volition, but not somewhere very far or distant -- nay, It gazed only a short ways down the river from where Yudaiel floated, right over her proverbial shoulder, but [i]also[/i] upstream from her. Its one, cyclopean pupil managed to peer in two separate directions at once, forward and backwards, left and right, beholding past and future; she did not understand how such a thing was possible. More than even discovering just [i]what[/i] things this creature had found more interesting or noteworthy than her, she now yearned to learn how It could See as It did! Alas, the Great Eye and Its minion, the boar-demon, vanished from the chimerical sky, the stars of their constellations fading away as surely and swiftly as hot embers doused by water.

Ah, water. Yes, she looked away from the star-strewn sky and remembered that she was still drifting down a river. A lone firefly suddenly grew dark, and its dim and dying form fell from the sky and into the turbulent rapids before her. She looked at the insect as it bobbed and floated in the dark water, and her hardly-lucid mind conjured the image of another fly -- Iqelis, wretched Iqelis!

She dreamt of him, a second cyclopean being, though this one was a mere pest; [i][b]he[/b][/i] was a mere firefly, his power like its trifling flicker before the heliacal glare of that last horror that she’d just seen between the stars. The obsidian fiend hovered effortlessly so as to maintain a short distance before her, just above the river’s frothing water. She glowered at him, daring the wretch to provoke her any more than he already was -- Luck was not the only aspect that she could crush, though she would much rather enthrall the Shard of Doom than see it obliterated. Iqelis  just crossed his hundred arms and cackled. All of the countless lights of the fireflies in the air were extinguished as the insects died. From their falling corpses erupted tiny maggots, and those maggots feasted and grew into swarms of gnats and other lightless flies that grew and multiplied with a swiftness that defied reason, that an eye could not follow. None of the fireflies fell fast enough to even hit the ground before they had been consumed.

But the laughter of Iqelis stopped when her enraged mind reached out to grasp each and every fly. With a single pulse she struck them all dead, and Iqelis too was smote down and shattered like glass before her psychic scream. The river itself recoiled and charged its banks to flee from her, chasing after the trees along the banks that seemed to have grown legs and similarly decided to rout. [b][i]Nothing[/i][/b] could challenge her might! Her will was Fate! With nary a thought, she willed the broken pieces of Iqelis to twist and reform. A rain of prismatic diamonds plopped down into the writhing waters and sank into the receding river’s muddy bed, and all was well.
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Far across hours and spaces both real and oniric, the true One-Eye did not suspect the fate that would befall his dreamed simulacrum, or, even if he did surmise at Yudaiel’s vengeful thoughts, he did not let it burden him. Fresh from the slaying of Aletheseus, that verminous anomaly that had dared defy the truth and order of things with his very existence and hypostasis, his spirits were high as he wove and leapt through shadowy currents unseen. It had been a fortuitous thing that the wakener of Fortitude should so soon have tempted his fate in mortal battle, thus stirring strongly enough on Time’s murky riverbed to catch Iqelis’ eye; for so dim and unassuming had he been, despite the enormity of what he represented, that it might otherwise have been a long while yet before his disturbances grew numerous enough to notice. How many due ends he might have prevented then, to be rectified one by one at the One God’s own hand.

But now that hand dripped with the trespasser’s vaporous blood, and all was well. Aletheseus had not found in himself the strength to levy the greatest affront of all – to halt his own doom. It was pleasing to think that truth and order were now no longer threatened by such brazen subversion, yet more gratifying still was the lingering sensation of his thread being cut short in Iqelis’ grip. It was not something the god had expected to enjoy, for a divine’s demise was in essence no different from that of a gnat. And all the same, to feel the weave of life fraying under his claws, to taste the bitter fear and ashen despair, to know that it was he, and no other, that cast it into the unformed darkness… There had been a curious sweetness in that, a cold joy the likes of which he had never imagined since his inception.

It was a glimpse into the depths of the Last Sea stolen over the shoulder of the one he drowned in its shallows, and it was a thing of chilling beauty.

No use to dwell on it too much. Every death had its own time, and he was not one to 
hungrily sit on the banks and wait for the castoffs the current brought him. He would take them as they came, savouring each all the more for the drought that had come before it. One fate, however, he could stand to stoke his anticipation for. The pest Yudaiel. How he would relish plotting every inch of the blemishes he would gouge into her eye, every drop of black defilement he would pour into her sight, every tug to unravel her very world around her…

He caught himself as his bounding steps crossed the boundary of the grassy lands he had been moving through, breaking the trail of crumbling and withered plants he had left behind himself, and landed upon harsh, blasted ground. A rocky landscape of uneven hills and shattered peaks spread out ahead of him like a forgotten battleground of titans, the earth itself rent and ground down by a clash of forces of terrible magnitude. Massive boulders that were no more than fragments of yet more immense bulks lay strewn around, their fall having gouged tracks and craters in the already craggy soil. The sky overhead was darkened by thick clouds of pulverized debris, still stifling the daylight despite that the echoes of the blasts that had raised them had since faded. Not all of them - he could perceive the last stirrings of what must have been something sinking beneath the inky waves of the end, but what that could be it was too late for him to see.

And all over this scene of destruction, her mark. Always her. It brought him a spark of amusement to think that, in burying whatever foe she had found herself under this chaos of stone and sand, Yudaiel had already strayed from her oaths to preserve what she could of the world in the face of Doom. Something to cast into her face, such as it was, to sear into her thoughts next time. Right then, however, he could do better still. She ought to have been spent after making such an upheaval, and this formless barrenness was a laughable mark to have left upon the Galbar’s face. Her finest work was already marred; now, she would have to watch impotently as he surpassed her in that pursuit common to all divinity. He would raise such a monument that not merely her, but all that lived would look upon it and quake as the shadow of the inescapable fell upon their measly spirits.

He strode and swam further west, until his talons dug into the edge of a steep sandy cliff over a murmuring expanse of grimy water. The sea was still agitated by the aftershocks of the colossal impacts, the rippling echoes of the first great waves meeting their forerunners as they bounced from the gnarled shores. A crust of dirt still weighed them down, the pocket of ocean reduced to a muddy oversized mire. It would do.

Iqelis spread the full score of his arms and raised them to the heavens, letting the dark currents swirl and mount behind him like a dam. Although it was his place to spell endings rather than beginnings, to create and mould was the prerogative of all divinity, and he would claim from the world all that he was thus owed. He rustled and played with the terrible wave building upon his shoulders, reminding the earth, the water and the sky that they, too, were subject to the course of ages, and it was by his mercy if they were not engulfed then and there and shattered into a chaos of inchoate elements.

The earth, which was the firmest and had the most to lose to annihilation, was the first to yield. There was a tremendous chthonian groan and a shudder which, though none as mighty as the quakes sent by Yudaiel’s onslaught, rolled far through the land, unsettling hills and felling trees. The soiled surface of the sea broke, and hundreds of black spires rose among its scattered islands, peaks of dark stone pushed to the surface by telluric forces enthralled to the terror of doom. They stood like a grim host summoned forth from the depths, immobile and solemn, awaiting their fate.

The air bowed next, lest its impalpable purity be fouled by the choking shadows. A despairing moan rang out over the waves, and in defiance of all laws of nature and reason the obsidian mountains rose further still. They tore away from their stony roots deep below, then away from the surface itself, and agonizingly crawled up into the sky as the winds shrieked in horror at this unheard blasphemy. Now with ten score hands holding up his burden, Iqelis leapt onto one of them and let it carry him high, until they hung as as high above the shore as a true peak would reach. Then the dark rocks swayed and drew close, clinging to each other’s flanks and binding themselves together in a vast, unnatural landmass.

Then it was time for the water to surrender to the commanding will, to complete the dreadful work in a final gesture that would trample upon all that was sane and orderly, yet the sea hesitated. There was a bitter defiance in its stirring, a deep grief from which the waves drew an obstinate strength to refuse the dire imposition. Iqelis grit his fingers angrily, and stirred the shadow in his hands, letting it tower high and menacing. And then --

Something answered him, but not from the sea. It roiled and splashed soundlessly from the shattered lands to the north, crawling closer, faster and faster. Another of Yudaiel’s machinations? No, this did not bear her mark - but [i]his own[/i]. Startled, he almost released the mortiferous currents he had collected. How did traces of his intent find his way there? He struggled to remember, and it seemed to him that indeed, when the great wave had crashed against the moon some drops of it had been pushed away, towards the Galbar below. He had minded them little at the time, thinking that they would rejoin the Flow, but here they were now, drawn again to him.

No, not to him. They were at last returning to the source. To the current he was already struggling to hold in his grasp. He had to --

The droplets fell into his hands, and the tide he had been holding back burst.

All around him, the Flow surged. Rock was weathered to dust in a blink. The air grew thin, then choking, then rarified again. Water faded to steam and fell again in chunks of ice. Too long contained, the currents of time roared forth, regaining the moments it had missed in haste. His obsidian isle crumbling around him, Iqelis had become a veritable spider, hundreds of hands lashing and reaching to stem the cataclysm before it unmade all that he had wrought. The threads of the flood slipped between his fingers, but at length he found one which had spent its fury and returned to its usual force. He grabbed onto it, and around it he wove a pall of stillness to contain the ravages of doom unchecked. His movements were sharp and hasty, snapping and darting like a mob of startled frogs, and yet it was only after an agonizing span of instants that he succeeded in quieting the risen course.

It had been time enough for decay to do its work. When he looked around, he was no longer upon a great body of dark rock, but on a lone fractured mountain, drifting forsakenly over the waves. The landmass he had compelled to rise out of the sea and into the sky was no more, for even as he had threatened the earth to do, it had been worn and fractured into a thousand shards of all sizes, from boulders to islets, trapped in the air apart from each other. Some had remained high above the water-line, but most had drooped and sunken to mere dozens of tree-heights over the surface. It was some consolation, however meagre, that the Flow had carved them into fanciful shapes, into curious formations that resembled the dead and polished skulls of all kinds of living things. In this they could still strike fear into those who watched, though never again would their unbroken shadow loom over dread-stricken eyes.

Yet it was the once-defiant waters below that had borne the worse lot. For a few moments, the sea had been fed by a river that ought not have a mouth, and it was forever marked. The dust and debris had been washed away, but what remained underneath was a still, inky waste, like a mirror of black glass, rippling ever so lightly as clumps of dead seaweed floated to the surface and crumbled into dissolving rot. No wholesome life could endure those blind depths now, for their cold touch was suffused with a distant reflection of the Last Sea itself. Warmth and vigour would ever flee from it, leaving behind sickly and enervated husks, and its saline essence, which had drawn into itself the worst of the taint, had become the cage of death’s own breath.

He heard a distant rushing groan, and knew that even as the outer ocean raged to contain the black poison in its gulch, the pure water streaming down from upriver recoiled in loathing from it. But rivers were not their own masters, and so they flowed on, writhing and clawing at their fate, refusing to mingle with that fluid abomination. Soon a pale fog began to rise from below, as the river-water sought to escape into the sky, anywhere but into the cold and dead abysses. Spectral clouds crept upon the light from the heavens, and with them grey dusk swallowed the last glimmers of cheer that livened the sea’s bleakness. Silence reigned, broken only by the rare forlorn wail of a trapped wind.

All this Iqelis saw, and though he could not truly scorn the desolation of the view, he was not pleased. How much more he could have done if he had been able to complete his work without interference! How much strength and toil he had squandered on this sorry waste! If only the echoes of his wrath had not awoken at the worst of times…

Yudaiel, it had to be her. This could only be her doing, a trap set for him to humiliate himself even as he sought to surpass her. Such trickery was her way. Oh, how he would make her squirm under his hands, how he would savour seeing her pupil glaze over…

Lost in a haze of vengeful thoughts, he did not see the clouds of dust and pebble-shards still hovering in the air begin to shake and stir, and it was only a thunderous buzzing that stirred him. The misty air had all of a sudden grown thick with thronging black swarms, myriads of small vermin with translucent wings and bloated bodies chasing each other among the suspended archipelago. Out of some strange resonance of power, flies, that most reviled insect, had crawled into the world, and they caroused around their god, drawn by a curious innate sympathy that no doubt only the All-Seeing Eye could have explained. Iqelis waved them away in irritation, and the swarms scattered to the four winds, flying to scour all corners of creation for death and decay, that they might pay obeisance to the manifestation of their Lord by wallowing in its refuse.

Only a few remained droning around the One God, now and then landing on the jagged rocks and rubbing their forelegs in supplication. He made about to wash them away in the Flow, but his hand stopped as it prepared to part the current, then fell again. The veneration of insects was a laughable thing, true; but to see them grovel before him pleased him none the less. Let all know that even the least of creatures gave him their devotion!

He leapt onto the nearest floating islet, and his court of flies followed. There were better things to do than to brood over this failure. The world was ripening, and his hand would be needed to show it the path to rot.


[hider=Summary]

Spent after the battle over the Codex and the orbital bombing of Ashevelen, Yudaiel succumbs to a deep slumber on the moon. She dreams of things past, present and future, with some strange (but possibly familiar!) faces briefly showing up. Iqelis also makes an appearance, but she swats him out and turns over on the pillow.

Meanwhile, the real Iqelis is traipsing around Galbar and thinking about how good it feels to kill things. He stumbles on the blasted remains of the Nalusa zone, and, sensing that Yudaiel’s responsible for it, decides to show her up by building something imposing next to her mess. He heads over to the inland sea to the southeast and starts to raise a huge floating obsidian landmass out of it and into the air. However, in response to the huge expenditure of power, the aftershocks of the moon-wrecking wave that had been deflected to the Galbar flares up around him, making him lose his hold on things.

Everything breaks apart in a few moments, and by the time Iqelis manages to restore a bit of normality the floating landmass has shattered into a lot of suspended mountains and islands scattered all over the sea. Worse still, the sea itself - now the Tlacan Sea for convenience’s sake - has been contaminated, turning it into a stygian pit of still black water that ages and enfeebles anything that gets into it (the reverse Achilles treatment). Real water doesn’t want to touch this stuff, so any coming in from rivers turns into mist to escape it, casting the sea into perpetual gloom. It’s implied the ocean is pushing it back at the strait, but if Sala wants to do anything about it it’s left open-ended what exactly is happening there.

Iqelis is none too pleased with how things turned out, and doesn’t notice as a bunch of the debris turns into flies due to a latent residue of Yudaiel’s power and possibly some subconscious manipulations on her part that occurred as she dreamt. Because of this, the flies like him, thinking he’s a divine archetype of their kind, which in a way he sort of is. He doesn’t much care for them in turn, but keeps a few around for the sake of style as most of them buzz off to pester the whole world for the rest of its existence.

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[hider=Vigor Expenditures]
Yudaiel begins and ends with 0 vigor. Broke girl.

Iqelis begins with 16 vigor.

1 vigor (discounted to 0 by Doom aspect) spent on creating vast swarms of flies imprinted with Iqelis’ temperament and nature, as a result of Yudaiel’s subconscious dreaming and manipulations of the deflected doom wave.

8 vigor spent on a large archipelago of flying islands of various sizes and macabre shapes.

8 vigor (discounted to 4 by Doom aspect) spent on turning the Tlacan sea into a silent, deadly mire.

Iqelis ends with 4 vigor.
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