[center][h1]THE CHRONOMACHIA[/h1]
[sub][i]Featuring[/i][/sub]

[img]https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/98b04b23-51ee-400f-9854-888c64fd7ad2.png[/img]

[i]&[/i]

[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/893273948526108742/894758899872317440/YUDAIEL.png[/img][/center]

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[center][i]On high above the mists I came
A distant flame before the sun
A wonder ere the waking dawn
Where grey the nordlands waters run
In elder days and years of yore[/i][/center]

[hr]

[i]Seven hovered over the island’s dead soil, their smoky cloaks tinging the grey stone with soot where they swept across it with their frayed edges. Though they all faced the middle of their semicircle, they kept their eyes averted from that point, looking at the ground, the sea, the sky, the buzzing flies, anything but the white light that washed over them from the center. They knew, without need to experience it, that if they met it, that illusion of eternity that was their greatest treasure would be shattered, and all that rested on it would follow.

[color=778899]”What did you see as you roamed the world, with no purpose but what you gave yourselves?”[/color]

"We saw the ocean and its colourful dances, and heard the songs of the great wanderers. There was neither harmony between them nor accord; had we such songs and dances, they would not be matched so crudely."

[color=778899]”And what did you see in the north?”[/color]

"We saw a people who cannot share a thing as plentiful as fire. Had we their fire, we could make it endless."

"We saw the beast-folk of the northern rivers and the sun-blooded of the plains alike maim and slay each other for what they fancied to be riches. Had we their blood to spill, we would not value it less than bark and grass."

[color=778899]”And what did you see in the east?”[/color]

"We saw the people of the monoliths, who had to be taught to hate death, for they could not understand the weight of it otherwise. Had we their strength and vigour, we would know better than to risk it until admonished like unruly children."

[color=778899]”And what did you see in the south?”[/color]

"We saw the many living shapes beyond the poison waste, who think with one same mind and still are slaves to their primal cravings. Had we their multitudes and unity, we would not be bound by such base chains."

[color=778899]”What did you find all around the world?”[/color]

"We saw those who call themselves gods, and all the power they wield is worthless as long as they are shackled by their follies. Had we their might, we would truly be all-powerful."

"We have seen that all that is good in the Galbar is in the hands of those who cannot use it, and none are as wise as us."

[color=778899]"Nor are you wise enough not to covet all these things, when I have given you something better than them all. But it will serve me well now. Go forth, and find that which the divine would desire above all. Let your envy flow freely and be your guide."[/color][/i]

[hr]

Through the murk of a night stretching overlong into the morn, One of Seven drifted over rocky wastes veined with rivers that shimmered in uneven pale streaks where a fading moon-ray reached them past the clouds that kept the darkness against the Galbar into the early hours. Already, grazing beasts of the arid shrublands were rising from where they had lain in black heaps, and under a lonely tree by a branching stream the lion stirred lazily, not to be left far behind by its prey. The One cared not for the beasts, thoughtless and ungainly bodies of breathing clay that they were. They had no eyes for beauty nor hearts for warmth, nor had they value for that which the Seven had been commanded to find, and so it left them be.

But there were other things than the beasts in these lands, things that thought and laughed and dreamed, and the One would stop in its search when it found them. That evening, it had spied a family of furry things with long teeth as they looked out over the darkening horizon, calling shrilly to each other, and when they had gone to curl up in their burrow, it had followed in silence. They had huddled together against the cold of the night. What right had these sorry things to do this when the Seven had no soft bodies to keep each other warm? So it had burned them until they were bones and dust, and it had been pleased in its hollow way.

Now, as the One wound its oily shadow over a quietly murmuring river, it saw a loose circle of bodies on its shore that breathed without the coarseness of beasts. Curious, it lowered itself to the water, and crept close to the sleepers on soundless wings of smoke. They were painfully familiar, with their four limbs and well-formed faces that had two eyes to see. Long ago, it had slept like them, perhaps side by side with these same weary travellers, before the Seven had been Seven. But now it was no more like them than the sand on the night breeze. It would never know, as they did, what it was to collapse in exhaustion after days of marching, what it was to know the relief of seeing the waters play and run ahead, where for days there had been only dry earth. There were many things that the pilgrims of the river knew that the One could not, and once more it felt spite twist and stir in its heart of cold grey fire. Like fog, it crawled over one of the sleepers, and silently it burned and gnawed what it had lost.

But the man roused at once, for his sleep had been but a ruse, and his third eye never closed! An arm the prophet Medes raised to shield him from the evil, and even as his flesh dried and cracked under some withering fire that hungered for life, and even as he gasped in pain, the prophet spake, “You, who steals life in the dead of night, are cursed! Not just once by your master, but thrice: by him, by me, and by the light of the moon!”

The Eschatli drew back into a swaying cloud, like a cobra raising itself on its coils. Where its flames had licked Medes' limbs, they were left dry and wrinkled, as if they belonged to a very old man.

"What can you or the moon take from me that I have not already lost?" asked the spirit, "Look at me: I was like you once, but now what you see is all I am."


Others were now waking to the commotion, but Medes squinted only at the phantom. “From you much was taken, and more still have you taken from others. You think that the way of curses -- the taking of things precious -- but beware! The moon’s vex upon you might be one that [i]gives[/i]; a heavy stone, you would be made to bear. The emptiness that you have now might be preferable indeed to being laden with burden.”

“You speak so lightly of these things from within the firm walls of your skin, by the fire of your heart on the hill of your bones,” the Eschatli hissed, glaring at him with its one eye, “How different would your words be if you truly had nothing, if you knew that weariness itself can be a boon! But enough talk, I can teach you what it is to live so!” And it reached for the seer with arms of grey fire that burned no brighter than the moon above… until in that instant the moon’s phosphorescence rivaled the sun, and the dark pit of the pale jewel’s eye seemed to glower all the more menacing.

[color=9966CC]With a hand of fingers like a fire’s licking tongues, the One seized that droll speaker and immolated him utterly. But what happened next defied reason; where the flames seared, grime and sweat and sunspots were cleansed, the flesh renewed. Medes grew more youthful, and then collapsed, suddenly a dormant manikin once more, like he had been when he was just another body piled into the great colossi.

It made no sense!

The Eschatli’s head tore from left to right, but all the other awoken humans were gone; there was only a small copse of trees, none of which had been here before. There was no river, either; this land was as it had been when Phelenia’s touch had first embraced it, before the Ruination that had smote a goddess and sundered the hills.

There was a small puddle; it called to the One, and eagerly, the lifeless immortal raced to it, the strange and sudden feeling of a heartbeat spurring it to witness its own reflection. And lo, it had two eyes, a body!

Moreover, this reflection revealed that there was a black cloud looming over the sky. The darkness of a storm was approaching swiftly. There was a noise that it bore also; however, this din was not the boom of thunder.

The sound – an incessant, undulating drone – became deafening once the endless swarm of flies arrived. They carpeted every surface, swarming and biting at the One’s supple flesh. Something heavier landed behind, talons scraping the ground. The Eschatli spun around in terror to see its cyclopean master, ten palms facing upward in a thoughtful ponderance that threatened to turn into a cruel rage. Iqelis’ one eye met the Eschatli’s two, and Doom shook his head.


The One, who was of Seven no longer, looked about itself, frantically searching for something, anything to put between itself and that horrid eye. It did not stop to think that perhaps now it had less to lose, having been restored from its false deathlessness. The eye could do worse than merely disabuse it of a consoling lie. Away, away from its merciless light, from its cutting gaze!

But there was nothing to stem it. The flies refused to stand between their master and his quarry, and no matter how thick their clouds were, they always parted so as not to obscure his sight wherever the Eschatli moved. Away! It did not understand by what miracle it had regained all that had been taken from it once, but now that it felt the earth under its feet, the air in its throat, the pure burning fire in its chest, it could not bear to lose it again. It would not let those black claws reach into it again, would not let them tear out its soul, bloody and writhing. And so it ran, shaking away the noisome insects that harried every step, ran without sight, without feeling anything but the pounding of the warm soil under its heels and the pain of the dry wind tearing through it with every gasping breath.

Three moons hung over the sky above, two lighting the way forward: a white one, and a gray. The third, ink-black, cowered halfway obscured behind the other two, lurking in their shadows. The three moons each suddenly blinked, and revealed themselves as gargantuan, bulbous eyeballs. Past, present, and future all presented, side by side, and all bore down upon the wretch with their full weight and gravity. Their triple glares all came together in perfect unison upon a bleak obsidian mountain not far ahead, and Lord Doom coalesced from nothingness atop that peak. Looming over the world, the god threw a hundred arms to each side as though forcefully tearing away curtains, not merely drawing them aside.

The clouds of flies were swept aside by that gesture, and they tormented the Eschatli no more. But there was still that scrape of talons behind, drawing ever nearer… the wretch looked back, and sure enough, the cyclops was there too. But then that Iqelis fractured. White light in place of blood sprung out from the cracks in his glassy form, and then with a harrowing wail and an ear-piercing sound of scraping stone, the god burst apart into a million scintillating jewels.

The Eschatli sighed a breath of relief, but then puzzledly turned back to face the obsidian spire. Nothing crowned its top now; the One God was gone, swept away by the Flow of a river that not even he could dam.

But then he – or [i][b]it[/b][/i], whatever this new one was that had killed the first – appeared mere inches from the Eschatli’s face. A score of cruel vices seized the One’s newly gifted, pasty flesh. The three moons were overhead no longer in their places, but they hadn’t truly vanished. Each of the three glowed from deep within the god’s oculus. There was one eye; yet from within it, three pupils peered and Saw all… Horror had a face.

“Ţ̱̑̈͑ͅh̢̝̥͙̽̃̈̀e̻̮̣̓͂̾̇͟ ḩ͚̪̉͐͑ṷ̧͇̼͍̟̃̈̐͂̎̿͟͝m̛͓̺̀͊͢ą͎̤͌̾̾̚ͅn̟̳͇̊̂͋ w̦̳̪̽́̂ā̜͓̞͑̍̌͢s̺̠͕̋̋͊ r̬͚͍̆̀͞ǐ̬̞̱̖̪͋̑̎̿͜͝ǵ̢͉̲͖̪̬̯̂̊͊̈̊͠h̡͇̘̋̍͂t͉̘̟̖̎̒̆̄͟͠,̘̜̟̮͊͗͒͘” a raspy voice croaked, the sound having emanated from somewhere within that All-Seeing Eye.

One of the twenty hands grasped that One by its cheek. Its tightness eased, and for a moment the glassy obsidian touch almost caressed the One’s soft, supple flesh. But then it drove a daggerlike thumb through the One’s forehead, drilling deep into the skull right above the bridge of its nose. 

The pain was a matter of a moment, a sharp flash that numbed all other sensations. For a moment, it was as though it had lost its body again, and was drowning in an airy sea of shapeless, discorporate torment. But like the flowing water, it went and passed, and in its sore dripping trail the Eschatli could see, no, See – [/color]

[i]It Saw what had been before awakening to its eternity of servitude, when it slept as an inert body that had never been nor would ever be truly alive or dead. It watched the waves sway from atop a titanic back of heaving metal, and looked on as its maker consigned it and its six brethren to jeering doom - for what?, it wondered, what good was her honour if it demanded such things?

It Saw what was now, as it lay trapped in its tortured flesh. It followed, with the eye that had been gouged into its forehead, the Six as they flew through the night, in search of that which all desire, and saw as they stopped, as it had, to exact their vengeance on the carefree and the unworthy. It peered cautiously at its Lord, who plotted and puzzled over something in the desolation he had wrought about himself.

It Saw what would be, where the course of the Flow became a glossy black thread in an intricate arras of cosmic magnitude. It Saw flies in countless myriads carpet a gulch, waiting for something it could not guess. It Saw bones blossoming on the slopes of a tall mountain like the descending snow. And it Saw the moon, that faceless haunt of the nightly sky whose glare had pierced it so viciously, raked and torn by hooked fingers of obsidian.

The One thrashed in the grip of the astral presence, the danger to its newfound body forgotten as it struggled to hold onto what little was now certain, what it knew to be itself.[/i]

[color=9966CC]Alas, it was futile trying to writhe away from the grip of that horrible scarred moon… its formless, ethereal clutch was all too real upon the psyche, and it gripped [i]tightly.[/i] All around the One, there swirled a wind that bore some melange of pallid lunar regolith and tiny, scintillating diamonds. The cyclone of pain tightened its grasp, and the sharp gemstones flew closer until they gnawed and tore at flesh as though they were so many teeth. Then the white, powdery dust was stained and joined by a carmine mist. Just as it reshaped and maimed his corporeal form, a cosmic storm etched at the Eschatli’s very essence, imprinting it. Now it was Eschatli no longer.[/color]

The storm faded, but the pain endured. Anemic moonlight roused the One back into Reality’s grip; it looked so beautiful in the One’s two eyes, and so horrific in its third. Dazed, it looked around; those Medians that it had tormented had all flown away, and now it was more alone than it had ever been.

It remained One, and its immortality and deathlessness had only been affirmed stronger, and so a replacement could not erupt from the other Six. Never again would they truly be Seven; they would be Six and then this One, who had been cursed again to forever be the Outsider, the Twisted, the Slave of the Moon.

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

High above, Yudaiel was pleased. Another being had been enthralled to her will, another eye had been opened, an interloper had been punished, and [i]Iqelis[/i]... oh, the Fly would seethe at this!

She had observed his heptade of phantoms as they had haunted the land, scorching and razing whatever they pleased as they went about fulfilling his insipid will. But how would Doom feel to have one of its own agents twisted? This One was greater than any of the other Six, for it had been doubly cursed. Moreover, it could See. It would be able to play the game of the Eschatli still, but it would also be able to contend with the others and thwart them.

The Reverberation located the fiend, the one she might have named nemesis were he not so far beneath her. It had only taken her a moment to find him in meditation, no doubt brooding upon the divine punishment that had been decreed unto him by that one who called Himself the Monarch of All. Yes, she had borne witness to Iqelis’ confrontation with Him, for she was ever at the shoulder. She projected oppressive consciousness toward her rival, tormenting him in his lowest moment.

[color=9966CC]The roar of the Flow became deafening, the churning rush of stygian fluid sweeping aside all things; this was a river with no banks, after all, only an end where it emptied into a deathly still Final Sea. The power and grandeur of it all was intoxicating… glorious was this rush!

Of course, the moon claimed a lofty place in the heavens above, far out of the Flow’s reach in its pretension… In mockery of the Flow and of Doom, its rays of brilliance beamed a hundredfold more luminous, so much so that the moon rivaled even the sun. Cleansing moonlight pierced the inky waters of the river. It evaporated the Flow’s surface with a scorching heat, averting ruination here and there, perverting and averting the proper way of things. Iqelis longed to tear down the insult that had been hung above his head, to dispel her merciless light and usher back the soothing coolness of the night!

Yet as though that insolence was not enough, the moon defiled even more! There yonder, a vast riptide of the Flow had been corrupted; it was aglow with divine power in its throes, and all about it spawned chaotic whirlpools as it twisted and raged against the Six currents all about it, answering to the beck and call of another: [b][i]Yudaiel[/i][/b].[/color]

The answer did not let itself be awaited for long. There was no returning wave in the tide of ideabstraction, but when her eye turned back to the world of the corporeal, the Lord of the Flies was no longer where she had observed him. Instead, she could see the thread of his motion rearing up into the sky, and there he was at its tip, riding the umbral Flow until he was high enough to vault over the rings of unbroken night and push off of their glittering swarm. Higher still. High enough to reach the moon. The going was easy; the moon itself seized him in its clutches and helped pull him nearer, at ever increasing speed.

This promised to amuse and excite. [i]’Come, little one. Let us see if you fare any better than your minion did.’[/i]

Upon Iqelis’ landing, taloned feet dug into the gleaming surface of the moon, which, though once scarred by shattering decay, now truly knew for the first time the touch of its destroyer. It could have been an illusion or a play of shadows, but as they stepped, the dust they unsettled seemed to collect into small black shapes that whirred in the soundless flight of spectral gnats. As if carried by a whirlwind, they spun around the black tree of grasping hands that smoothly wove through fluid patterns, now snapping by in a blur, now oscillating with the sluggish grace of drowned seaweed.

[color=778899]”How eagerly you all cast yourselves to your destruction,”[/color] Iqelis crackled as he advanced towards the core of the All-Seeing Eye, a thousand hands poised to strike, [color=778899]”Your time could have been distant yet, but like a curious ape you dip your edges into the Flow until you are carried away. Now I shall tear out your pupil and set it into my eye, so that I may See the shortest path to the First One’s Doom.”[/color]

And with those words, he lunged, swift as the slightest of implacable instants. [color=9966CC]Time itself accelerated, aiding in the perpetration of his vindictive assault. Dripping with the Flow, ten thousand claws rent through the nebulous vastness and tore about the goddess’ insubstantial soul, blinding and ruining that arrogant eye to such a degree that its pupil might not even be worth the trouble of harvesting.

With a shudder, the sea of consciousness lost shape and came unbound; psychic energies charged everything all about, and in chaos that ensued, the moon was torn asunder. But through the concussive blast of unshackled telekinetic might, laughter boomed. It shook and rattled and threw Iqelis to and fro; now he was a breadcrumb dancing on the skin of a massive drum that was her laughter.[/color]

He shrieked, a scrape of toothed metal wheels that was enough to shatter the fragile glass of this illusion. He won a brief glimpse of Reality, and found himself suspended high over her pupil, having never even managed to touch the moon’s surface. Yudaiel claimed mastery over what could be, what had been, and also what was not. The immaterial and the false owed her their allegiance and so they bombarded Iqelis’ mind; a million illusions raced across his vision. In entering the storm of her mind, he’d consigned himself to her power, and now was shrouded in the madness of her weave. With just a single eye, it was nigh impossible for even the One God to peer through the veil and perceive truth, and yet he could sense that was exactly what he had to do. If he could not cast aside the phantasms and prove the flimsiness of hallucinations, then he would be lost.

And so he traced the course of dreaming, straining his arms as he held the swirling chaos from his sight while he followed the span of the unreal to its edge, and he saw where its end lay - for nothing, not even deception itself, can be endless. Dreams withered before the coming of dawn, their thousand nameless colours crumbling to grey strands of drowsiness as the eyes opened to the light of the rising day. Thus Iqelis grasped the rim of his own eye with twenty fingers, and he pried it open with a crack of shattering glass and a hiss of pain. From the gruesomely widened fissure, white radiance came pouring in blinding rays. Where they struck, the weave of apparitions shrivelled like paper in a fire, and though the god could scarcely see it from within his own glare, it wavered and crumbled to colourless dust.

The wild shapes and apparitions came alive even more in what was to be their final breaths, but they danced in defiance and fled from the devouring beam that left his eye, keeping to the periphery of his sight. As though conveyed by a million unseen strings, they flew just at the skirts of the destruction that he brought to bear, tauntingly close and yet never within reach. And the Eye, where it rested at the very edge of the unreal, was likewise shielded by some oddly distorted space. It Saw where he aimed, where he meant to look next, and it twisted and contorted [i]everything[/i] around a million fulcrums so as to render aim and perception as meaningless as any of these illusions. A single dart of consciousness struck him in the widened, near sightless eye, and an icy lance of agony wracked his mind as new thoughts crystallized in frost:

[color=9966CC]A gadfly of grotesque proportions had its wing tangled in a spiderweb. It writhed, but could not free itself. When the vicious spider with its many beady eyes neared, the fly fought even harder and lashed out with bites and flailing limbs. It was all in vain. The spider foresaw the fly’s every motion, and it waited patiently, allowing the fly to tire before beginning to wrap it in a smothering, deathly cocoon.

The fly vanished in an instant, as did the spider and the web. Only the cocoon remained, but now it was more like half-woven silken tapestry, attended to by the deft hands and needle of some unseen seamstress. Upon the tapestry Iqelis witnessed an embroidering that bore the likeness of himself, the Flow pouring from a maw that had erupted from his head. Strings and shackles wrapped about his million limbs though, and they all led to Yudaiel – his Fate was bound to her, his neck collared and leashed.[/color]

[color=778899]No more.[/color]

Latching on to the more tangible facets of the pain and the phantom chill that echoed the vision being thrust upon him, the god tore himself from the dream-painted mockery and once more found his footing on solid moon-ground. The glow of his exposed eye had abated, though narrow white streams continued to flow from the cracks around its rim, searing away the tendrils of the surreal that sought to encroach on his vision.

His hands darted to all sides in a flurry of kaleidoscopic motion, constraining the currents of time in a hundred ways. His motions hastened again, and a step became a blink, even as the sweep of an arm grew no slower than the lightest twitch of a finger. Yet that was not the entirety of his manipulations, for the Flow pooled oddly behind a web of black claws turned towards Yudaiel's center, and as it swirled to a halt a heavy sluggishness caught hold of her. It was no mere fatigue, or what simulacrum of it could exist within the Eye's incorporealness, but a drought of the oil that smoothed the universe's grinding advance, and she was caught in its midst. Her thoughts crawled as if in a daze, and her sight, once unmatched in its pursuit of the singular moment, could barely rise fast enough to meet the thorned streak of night that lashed at the heart of her illusionary web.

Ah, but that Eye could See its peril, for it perceived the Flow as easily as any other thing. A Reverberation was not so easily trapped within clouds of decay or the oil of Time, and so she rippled through the tiniest and most invisible of threads to emerge somewhere else. Iqelis gave pursuit, but even as he hounded her, unseen tentacles of kinetic might sheared away limb after limb, groped and choked and twisted his neck, seized his legs, and harried his every step.

And though that vulnerable heart of Yudaiel’s form – the pupil of her Eye and the core of her mind – was ever fleeting and evasive, her insufferable voice and the thoughts that she projected were omnipresent and mocking.

[color=9966CC]A bizarre plant erupted into view, obscuring Reality for just a moment. This plant had a maw, and teeth, and though it could not leave its place it nonetheless feasted. Even now, it had lured a curious insect to its grave. The Fly buzzed too close to the maw. It touched a nigh invisible hair, and the plant’s trap-jaw snapped shut with such rapidity that the motion was imperceptible to the eye.

With ire and his wroth, with rage that flared and burnt so strong that it became palpable, Iqelis incinerated the wretched plant; from drifting ashes and smoke, the moon coalesced before him once again. He could sense [i]her[/i] thoughts, just as she could doubtless sense his.

[center][i]’Y̻͙͎̝͑̀̎̅o̧̗̤͛͆̚u͙̳͒͝r̛͇̙̔̚͜͜͞ w̜̆̌͟ilḻ̆ iṡ͎͍͑ st̙̉͝ͅrõ͖ň̛͙̼͇̒g̻̝͖͐͒̂,̧͎͘͠ b̞̀ǔ̦͚͌̚ͅṱ͋ y̤̥̹͆̽̔̀͟ö̲̱͆u̥͉͗͝ w͔̽e̛̜̜̓r̟̬̭͗̏̂͡ͅẻ̩ a̡͇̩̋̄͑̍͜ F̺̭͆̈O̱̜͐̍O͖̺͂̑Ḷ̘̬̙̎̽̾͘ t͍͝ô̤͓͡ c̨̳͂͂o̫͍̰̤͂̒̏͛m͚̏̿͜ḙ͠ h̠̙͖͆̑̊ě̪r̬̲̈̀ȅ̲.̕’[/i][/center][/color]

[color=778899]The charred debris of the ravenous plant struck the ground - for there was a ground now, a craggy stone plain that ran past the horizon in all directions - and splashed outwards like liquid pitch. Now fluid, it expanded at a frightful speed, flooding the wasteland like an inky wildfire rampaging over a dry field. Not satisfied with swelling in breadth, it grew in depth too, rising as if fed by a thousand roaring rivers, until the moon, now seeming ever so small, hung above a boundless tarry ocean. The fly that was Iqelis was no more to be seen.

A shadow suddenly loomed in the distance, and as it approached it solidified into a titanic wave of viscous blackness, rushing to swallow the diminutive moon. The orb glanced at it contemptuously with its eye-fissure, and a cord of silvery light crossed the sky, interposing itself between the sphere and the onrushing wave. More gleaming threads sprang into being, crisscrossing each other’s span to weave a thick web that blocked the tide from view altogether. The moon glared triumphantly behind its barrier, but great was its consternation when the wave crashed through it, ripping the silver cords like fragile gossamer, and sharp was its terror in the moment before it was engulfed by the black ocean.[/color]

And like the wave had torn through the illusory web, so did Iqelis carve his way through the bridge of thoughts, and both combatants were awakened to the material world as he lunged anew.

[hr]
[sub][i]Far away…[/i][/sub]

Over the waters of another, much more tranquil stygian sea, nine eyes looked up at the night sky. They pried at the distant scarred moon, and though their sight was sharp, six of them could only guess at what was transpiring so high above.

“I see the cracks widen and close again, like the breathing of a leviathan, but not what moves them,” said One of Six.

“I see clouds of dust blossom with no wind to scatter them, but not the blows that seed them,” said another.

“I see none of those things, but only a swarm of black flies pass over the white sometimes,” said a third. It then turned to the one specter in the group that hung aside from the others, separated by something more than its two supernumerary eyes from those that had not long ago been its brethren. The Third did not say anything more, its words lost to it in the fracture that had been opened between it and the other, but the Outsider understood nevertheless.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpKABbMwPzI]It said:[/url]

[center][i]Rivers of fire at dead of night
On moonstone lying cold and white
Upon the plain burst forth, and high
The red is mirrored in the sky.

From Galbar’s plain I See the fire,
The steam and smoke in spire on spire,
Leap up, till in confusion vast
The stars choke, and so it will pass.[/i][/center]

The others did not answer, unnerved in their sinewless forms by the strange notes and cadences they had heard in those verses. Yet the Outsider still had more to say, more that it could not put into words, and so it spoke directly to their minds.

[i]On the sands of a white desert, under a black sky, two giant drops of thick glassy ooze chased each other. One was as dark as the heavens above, and its surface was faceted like a cavern-grown crystal. The other was as pale as the ground below, and it moved with a dreamy slowness that did not seem to impede it in traversing as much space as the other did in the same span of time. The glossy mounds spun in a circle, each striving to seize the other’s tail, but the more ferociously they reached, the further they slipped from each other’s grasp. They ran and streamed and leaped, until the very force born of their spiralling trajectory began to distort them, stretching and flattening them against the walls of an invisible ring. And still they pushed ahead in pursuit, even as their frenzy shook the desert around them, pushing up concentric dunes of disturbed sand and tearing them apart again and again and again.[/i]

The Six were quiet, for now there was no more to be said.

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

Canyons were gouged into the lunar rock. Silent dunes of dust and regolith had been smattered away like so many piles of snow, and new pits and craters were strewn everywhere. Doom knew no discrimination, its ruinous power claiming everything within sight. Yudaiel embraced her violent tendencies, too; perhaps the Sight was wasted upon her of all people. For all the wisdom and knowledge that was hers to claim if she only looked and Saw, she’d always had a talent and appetite for violence… even if she often resorted to other means, her first instinct was almost always savagery and brute force, and here and now, that tool was as effective as any. Unshackled by any notions of restraint, for her jewel was already cracked and scarred, her telekinetic might wrought devastation on cataclysmic scales.

Their battle raged on, endlessly. Neither were ever truly in flight, for every motion was either an aggressive lunge or a fighting retreat to evade the next blow. Here, Yudaiel brought down the full weight of her might in a fearsome battering blow. Alas, it was perilously difficult to strike a buzzing insect with a hammer. She could aim with supernatural precision and predict her foe’s motions with brief prescient glimpses into the future, but then he could accelerate or slow Time as he pleased and in different areas. Accounting for the relativity was challenging enough that it all but cost her the entirety of her advantage, and so they were left on near equal footing for the deadly dance. So her reckless swing had missed the dancing Fly, but it still struck the cadaverous surface of the moon. It chipped her precious jewel, it bored through rock and rent a horrific pit that extended all the way down to one of the wormwood tunnel-ravines wrought by that wave of Iqelis’ power. 

Ah, how that had felt like an eternity ago! Yudaiel had relived those moments, over and over, again and again, until they were forever seared fresh into her memory. This was her vengeance for that slight, among other insults. She lashed out at the Fly again, this time seizing him directly, throwing him onto the ground in a battering motion and then dragging him over the edge of the cavity. But as he fell he drew the course of the currents with him, and she slipped down over them, following her adversary into the crevice.

In the depths of the fissure the struggle continued unabated. Leaping from wall to wall like a maddened locust, Iqelis pursued his foe, and she slipped around the unearthly maze of the lunar tunnels, now flanking, now ambushing from the twists and crannies she knew as thoroughly as the Tapestry’s knots. He brought down tonnes of crumbling moon-soil upon her, and Yudaiel snatched them in midair, hurling them back at his burning eye. The darkness of that hoary underbelly became choked with dust, crumbling passageways closed like decaying veins, yet neither was deterred, and the moon groaned as they tore deeper into its innards in their frenzy.

[hr]
[sub][i]Far away…[/i][/sub]

This was an auspicious night. Weeks of careful toil within their research post were about to culminate and finally bear fruit; the ranger named Udish toyed with the telescope that rested in his hands.

They had spent a long time up here, crafting and inventing various new scientific instruments so that they could better understand the stars, the night sky, and even those lands splayed out below and all around their camp atop the mountain summit. Ludari had painstakingly pressed and refined plant matter into parchment and ink, and now by day he mapped the surrounding climes and geography, and by night he charted the stars diligently while Udish could only stare at them and the moon in wonder. 

There was much knowledge to be found and shared within their outpost; they were all gorging upon it. Udish felt as though he was struggling to pull his own weight, though. He’d gone spelunking into some cavities in the cliffs and found twisting caverns, and within those he’d harvested some growing crystals of quartz. Iluratum, awed by how they bent light, had spent a long time chiseling, polishing, and shaping cuts of the strange stone. Eventually, Udish had been inspired while gazing unto the moon and contemplating that look in its eye, and he had spirited some of Iluratum’s lenses and fashioned this telescope in secret, a short ways from the others. No doubt they thought he’d spent the afternoon down in some new hole, but instead he’d built [i]this marvel.[/i] How large everything looked when enhanced through this simple optical tube!

As the sky grew dark and the moon rose, Udish peered at it through his telescope… he knew that the stars were one thing, but the moon and the sun another entirely. This research of the moon strayed dangerously close to that which was forbidden – studying the divine – but he could not care, did not care… the moon called to him!

And as he marveled at it through his telescope, discerning the ridges and craters too small and hazy for unaided sight, he saw strange flashes of light. He peered at them more closely, and saw great explosions of color that came from no obvious source, but which tore asunder the surface of that distant, alien, and pale jewel. This was confusing, but so savory… The implication was that this must be a normal thing. Was the moon always in such a state of flux and violent change, only for them to have been entirely oblivious by virtue of their feeble sight?

Udish ruminated upon that thought in wonder, lowering his telescope as he considered that crude hypothesis. But he continued to look up at the moon, and the flashes were so bright that he saw them still, even without the assistance of his instrument. His conjecture was disproven in an instant, but this anomalous observation left the kynikos with only more confusion and questions…

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

Through the tunnels and depths had the gods battled, until they burst out to emerge from the caverns once more. Now the fray was on the far side of the moon, that which the Galbar never saw. At the moment this was also the dark side of the moon, lit only by the twinkling of impossibly distant stars. With the sun so far away and its view so obstructed, perhaps not even the so-called Monarch of All bore witness to this clash.

Iqelis broke and shattered Time itself; roots and tendrils of acceleration spiraled out from his own form, granting him alacrity and hastening the doom and decay of all around, but here and there remained bubbles of slow. The Tapestry of Reality fluttered, wrinkled, and nearly was torn all around the monstrous deviant, and Yudaiel Saw his profanity more clearly and fully than perhaps any other could. So she, the Prescient, at last realized the path to victory. Calling upon her divine power, she bled and radiated ghostly ichor, flaring like a flame that had been fanned. She, the Reverberation, rippled through the Tapestry’s fabric and righted it, hurling Time back into its place and defying that power which sustained Iqelis so far… that was what had granted him some analogue to her own unfathomable power, the only thing that had allowed him to rival her in this battle. Now, it was fading.

Thus the Fly was cast down from the confluence of temporal fractures that he had engendered, and from the middle of a leap that defied speed, insofar as it was grounded in the ordinary course of time, he fell skidding onto the shadowed ground, his feet carving gouges in the stone as momentum reasserted itself around his body, now bare of anomalous folds in the immaterial. He grasped at the void, seeking the currents he was wont to turn, but, defenseless before blows from arcane angles, he was hurled from where he stood by the resurgent Yudaiel.

He did not remain off his feet for long, however, and again he plunged his claws into the waters of the Flow in defiance of Time's equilibrium. Yet it was a ruse, for, reaching from below the surface, he caught the fraying edges of the weave where they dispersed into the end, and with a mighty pull he yanked them down. In a groaning vortex of chaotic moments, past and present became one with a dead future. Thoughts and intentions ended before they had fully formed, movements wound down before they had been realized, stones crumbled before being touched. A dire tangle rose to mar the All-Seeing Eye's view, and beyond it Iqelis sprang at her in a high arc through the empty sky, bearing down on her from above.

For the first time in all of her existence, Yudaiel was sightless. Fear filled her in that moment too, and it was an icy lange that gouged a fiery wound into her psyche. She could not See, so she lashed out, blindly and in all directions, in a paroxysm of mad violence. 

It was good that the Galbar was shielded by an entire moon, as for a brief moment, that darkened half of the sphere was aglow with a light brighter than even the sun. The explosion rocked her moon again and chiseled yet another gaping hole. Such was the shockwave that it swept up Iqelis as though he were a mere fly in a hurricane, hurling him upwards and leaving him to spin off into space. So potent was the blast that it rippled through the lunar gem’s core and all the way to another side; the backfire thrust up a mountain in the heart of that great crater that was her usual seat – now the crater was an iris, and that mountain its pupil. So vehement was the detonation that chunks of the moon were sent hurtling at well past escape velocity; some became shooting stars that eventually fell down unto the Galbar, some more distant comets that would forever wander and in their circligns occasionally come close enough to emblazon trails across the night sky, and still other pieces were flung out into the depths of space to never be seen again.

[hr]
[sub][i]Far away…[/i][/sub]

On a blue-green jewel of a sapphire, there was an ocean. Somewhere out in the seas, there sprouted an isle, and for roots it had caverns. The roots were deep and long and dark and twisting, but down there resided a mind. It looked like little more than corruption – mold, rot, and moss covering the damp stone, encasing wall and ceiling and floor alike, but the branching hyphae of the mycelium was all beautifully connected and intertwined like rope. Countless fungi were there, but only one beautiful and nascent mind.

It had never really been troubled by the simplicity of its existence, growing in the humid darkness and waiting. It didn’t really even feel trapped by its nature, free as it was to sing and dream. It liked to project itself into dreamscapes, to imagine what it would be like to be a mushroom under the sun, to feel the rain, or to be a spore that settled upon a cloud and grew from there, or to be a brave toadstool that took up arms and fought a mighty beast of a boar to protect all the other mushrooms in the forest. Its mind wandered and pondered all of that and more, and yet it remained content and safe at home.

On this day, it was a king. Its loyal subjects had all assembled around in circles, forming a hundred concentric fairy rings. Its first act, as king of the mushrooms, was to summon his guard and lead them to war against the lichen that dwelt on a large boulder nearby, and which had arrogantly crept onto the rimward trees of his glade. But the dastardly lichen had been of the same mind, and met them at arms in the middle of the road, where the grassy realm of the mushrooms met with the rim of its craggy grey boulder.

The battle was a fierce one; both armies fought without respite, time and again threatening to overthrow the other, for three hours and three minutes. Lo, and in the darkest moment of the battle, the sky itself blackened as raven clouds hung overhead and blocked the sun. This truly was a horrid day; perhaps the coming deluge of rain would wash them all away in its heavenly judgement, and spell a watery end to his short-lived reign! Yet to the shock of all, it was not raindrops that fell from that black cloud, but rather flaky white bits of stone.

Not even a hint of the sun was anywhere to be seen; it was suddenly night. All the lichen and fungi ceased their quarreling and looked skyward, and as they squinted, they beheld the horror of a swarm of flies so endless that they had mistaken the bulk for storm clouds. Here and there, pinpricks of moonlight poked out for just an instant through the onyx blanket that smothered the sky. To their horror, the fungi realized that those flies were ripping apart and devouring the moon… That was their creator!

The kingsguard and even the savage lichen all melted away into aetherial wisps as the lucid dream twisted into a nightmare. Everything spiraled out of control; in the black depths of a sea that knew no end, a corpse-looking whale shuddered, stirred into rage and hunger by the scent of even the most wretched of lifeforms – this prey was still seasoned with some of the most savory of flavors, after all – and it exploded into horrific thrashing motion. Its cry attracted other whales, and horrors even worse, and they began swimming through the black void devouring flies and moon-bits like krill.

Distraught and horrified, the psychic fungus began to wail and shriek in its cavern.

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

Since the time before life, the outer void beyond the Galbar’s skies had remained untouched by the troubles that stirred and wounded the world below. Darkness and silence had been a barrier insurmountable for even the most insistent echoes of strife, and covetous eyes would have found nothing to aspire to even if they had thought to glance up at the cold waste between the stars. Peace, though it be of a sterile sort, had ever reigned in those unbounded halls.

But on that day at last it was to be broken, and the blight of anger spilled out into the translunar spaces as war seemed to reach for the stars themselves with its iron clutch. Two antagonists stared each other down with single eyes, unmoored from the spheres below, their struggle the only constant in the fluctuating vacuum.

Struck by Yudaiel as she lashed out blindly, Iqelis had been cast into the moon's own heavens. There, he clung onto the pale fragments scattered by their tremendous clash, vaulting between them as he had when first he had departed the Palace of the Sun, and in the untouched emptiness he began once more to twist and gather the tides of the Flow into smothering tides, as the All-Seeing Eye gave pursuit. She reached him first, though.

Her faintest touch was enough to conduct currents of madness, but now she wrapped all around him in a smothering embrace. Hallucination and phantasm became his wreath.

[color=9966CC]There was sand, drifting in the breeze. It settled underfoot, and that scarlet-haired goddess thrust the tip of her spear into the grit, moving it, drawing the design of a little humanoid figure… [i]Ea Nebel.[/i] The stick figure became a clay mannequin. Earth became life, and his daughter’s eyelids opened. 

Turmoil had coursed through his every thought. There was the Flow, roaring, ever roaring, demanding that he right this accursed wrong. He hesitantly raised a claw over the nascent godling, poised to strike. Then his gaze fell on her features, and he saw, reflected in the black of her four eyes, the white light of his own. Sparks that had split from the flame he carried in himself, now returning his look - so trusting, so familiar, so [i]his[/i]. His hand froze in place, for the first time uncertain in delivering a demise, then fell limply to his side, powerless.

The sands shifted, and there He was, that arrogant fool.

[h1]”Trials…”[/h1]

…

[h2]”...it is time for yours!”[/h2]

…

[h3]”...four separate trials to prove her worth so that she may not be ended by my hand.”[/h3][/color]

[color=9966CC]Those words echoed in his mind as they already had a hundred times over, each syllable an agonizing reminder of this horrid Fate that had been decreed unto him by that atrocious Pretender, how He would burn–

[right]Ea Nebel clambered up the steep slope of a mountain of black stone, so vast that its peak was hidden far past the clouds above. Around her, the harsh flank was barren, no sign of life stirring over it as far as the eye could see besides some noxious corpse-flies. But what did abound there were the dead. Rigid and mouldering, or little more than skeletons sparsely clothed in tatters of parched skin, they lay scattered on the unmerciful rock, or sat, propped up against ancient boulders. Though stricken forever with silence, they seemed to implore the deva with outstretched arms and despairingly gaping mouths. [i]Give us rest, please, give us rest[/i]; yet she could not, for the stone was hard, and harder still were the terms of her task. She dragged her feet wearily, slouched under the unfulfilled burden, stumbled as a bony grip suddenly closed around her leg…

…

The ground was even under her feet now, a smooth road of dry beaten dirt. To her sides, unassuming grassy plains rolled to the horizon, dim under a nondescript beginning of dusk; gone was the oppressive leaden cloak of the mountain-clouds. Ahead, the road stretched on, a lazy earthen snake, until it came to a bifurcation marked by the foot of a low rocky ridge that neatly separated the two branches. The blessed clarity of her sight let her pry far along both ways. One led into a bank of grey fog, blind and featureless, yet calming in the way of nebulous things. The other was lit by distant flashes of what must have been lightning, flashes that began to approach as she looked, like a beast emerging from its burrow, accompanied by a cacophony of clashes and thunderclaps…

…

Nothing behind her, nothing above her, nothing around her - only the angular shadow of Iqelis looming over her, and his hooked fingers closing around her throat. His body, chiseled from that glassy obsidian, reflected the moonlight, brighter and brighter… The vision twisted, and suddenly this was not some omniscient view from above, but rather one from Nebel’s own four eyes. The perspective was enough to stir the flames of envy, but all that vanished in an instant. The bitter, chilling touch of those obsidian fingers around the throat grew colder and tighter yet. The world began to collapse inward and distort as creeping darkness encroached upon the corners and light danced in strange ways, a side effect of the asphyxiation.

Silver and white streaks ran across the sleek black form of Doom incarnate, like grey whiskers accenting a beard. The luster grew larger, and brighter though, until nothing remained of that jet-color. What grasped her was reflecting so much light that it may as well have been aglow, was practically bone-white. Craters and scars marked it for the moon. Smaller, smaller, smaller. The field of view shrunk and darkened even as Yudaiel-Iqelis seemed to grow more brilliant and blinding with each passing instant. 

The hundred arms of Iqelis became the bulging, oozing red arteries of a bloodshot eyeball, grotesque in its scarred cloudy white vastness, and also in all the ash that cascaded from it in place of tears. That which grasped at the throat was no longer anything like a hand so much as the choking, crushing force of a divine will. It was as inevitable as winter, and fighting it was as futile as shouting into the wind.

The lightheadedness grew even more extreme; death and unconsciousness were near. Something whispered cajoling words, soothing the passing, easing the journey and making the acceptance of death feel right, proper…sweet. But something else screamed and raged and wanted to fight! It began to win, and panicked adrenaline seared and wracked the mind, staving off unconsciousness.

Then Yudaiel’s grip pulled in all directions; there emerged three spinning moons that orbited in wild and chaotic patterns, tugging viciously all the while with far greater fervor than the Galbar’s gravity; indeed, the Galbar was gone, as was the safety of its tether. Flesh [i]ripped and tore while bone and neck [b]snapped[/b]. The bits shorn off were drawn into stringy wisps and cast and flung everywhere through the void of space. The sickening sounds were only made worse by one last sight – that of the eye blinked and pulsating, flashing back and forth as its appearance oscillated. Doom, Moon, Black, White, Iqelis, Yudaiel…[b]Iqelis.[/b] It remained his eye in the end. It had been him all along, strangling and breaking her.[/i][/right]

[center]An abominable, anamorphic monstrosity of a voice pierced the darkness that followed:

[b]“Ń̡̮̫͇̎̓̅o͙̰̘̩̣̿̀̎̌͛t̝̱̖̺̀̊̄̊ w̮̘͓̿̇̿h̬̄̕͢a͉̩̳̜̽͂͗̕t̹͈̮͗̀͌ c̘͖̅̄ou̞̕l̬͓̱̒̌̔d̛̻̻̟̖̔̔̌ h̫̣̱̱̓̒͞͞a͎̗̮͂̇̉p͙͘p̯̱͚͖̔̐͊̕͢͝e̩̼̩̜̊̍̒̎͆͟n̝͇͍̻͗͗̐͐,̛͈͚̥̻̀̕͠”[/b] it insisted, [b]“W̛̛̺̜̫̺̯̦̗͔̍̂̃̒̕͝H̥̱̦̪͈̿́̀͐̐̒͊͑͟͜͟A̡̻̝̖̬̅͂̔͒̀T̜͍͔̅̈́̚ ͇̫̙͈̫̗̖̑̾̈͐̀̕͞S̨̬͔͓̞̪̤̔̈́͑̋̈͊͐H̭̳̝͎̤͋̄̀̒̕͘ͅȦ̢̟͉̰͇̗̃́͑́͞L̟̭̹̮͚̙̍̋̐̎̚͝L̪̝̹̮̀͋͊̍!̗̓̿̔͢ͅ.̨̨̛̥̺͓̮͂̈́͛̈́͗”[/b]

[b]”I̘̫̾͂f̝̠͉̓͛̈́ y̛͈̠̾o͈̠̰͗͑̕ǘ̢̦̼̂̔ d̖̺͙̔͘͘o̠͊̐͢ ǹ̨̗͐o͎̖͖͌͊̍t̨̠̻̗̉̃̉̍ s̗̼̑̈u̮̟͚̙͆̃͐̂b̞͕̚͝m̱͎̥̟͌̀̾̚i̛̳͚͌t̲̩͉͍̉͗̆͒ t̡̻̦͊͊͘o̞̬̮̓͋̚ ṃ͙̞͐̃͠y͚̟͡͡ ẇ̨̯̫̄͝͝ͅí̪̼̒͂͟l̹͇̜͆̍͌l͉̦̲̃̿͊!̬̣̣̇̆̕”[/b]

That was her voice, and that was her threat. She punctuated it all with one final vision, that of Ea Nebel meandering the Galbar in that very instant.[/center][/color]

Pain of the heart, bleak as Iqelis’ own was, unfortunately stood as only the tip of the spear. The agony of a million tortures she thrust upon him; a second passed, and yet it felt like an eternity. The Flow could not abate the pain, only stoke the burning agony that came while the flames flared and burnt even hotter and faster, or else it could slow and draw out the suffering so that the coals nibbled at him and writhed through his gut like worms. And still, these courses were the only recourse that his mind, severed from control and maddened with rage and excruciating torment, could conceive. The deeper Yudaiel drove her barbs into it, the more it rolled and wallowed in the black waters, sinking in them, melting in them.

Melting into them.

A droning sound rose in the distance as Iqelis’ crystalline hypostasis finally yielded under her grip. But it did not shatter as it ought to have, dissolving instead into a noxious black sludge that dripped between her intruding thought-strands, as if it had too little substance to be retained. For indeed, the looser the oily fluid became, the more she could see that its attributes were being reduced to a single constant. A moment, and it was no longer a god, a thinking being, a feeling one; only Doom remained, a blind and unshakable axiom lodged in the universe like a venomous thorn.

The droning grew louder, and now it was the grim chant of a thousand clouds of gigantic flies. The blackness flowed out from the maze of illusion and onto the moon-soil. Or perhaps it was Iqelis’ body falling down in an ichorous pillar as it liquefied in the void-sky and poured into a lake that corroded the ground about it with the crumbling of ages. Yet the One God was not so large for the lake to become a sea, no, an ocean that covered the best part of the moon’s hidden face before rising into an amorphous, undulant body as tall as ten mountains. He and his shadow were one then, a stain that did not merely sully the moon but defiled the material dimensions of which it was a facet. Darkness so absolute swallowed it that it had no name in a living cosmos, and even the star-studded emptiness above shone like a cascade of diamonds against that abyss.

A burning white light burst out in the god-shadow’s midst, not so much an eye as a maw of a titanic furnace that breathed with the bellowing of a cataract. Arms that were rivers, ending in deltas of many-pronged talons, raked the white surface, decaying – nay, [i]unmaking[/i] solid stone and throwing up pillars of dust, as more of them rose to reach for the god-spark and extinguish it in their clutches. Pallid moon was devoured by creeping doom and converted into more of that ever-growing ocean of stygian sludge.

And yet Yudaiel’s smoldering gaze set fire to the thirsty seas, broiling the doom beneath the incinerating ray of her stare. The inky blackness evaporated, surged up in vast clouds, and rained back down as diamonds. The ravenous darkness swallowed and digested those precious stones just as readily as they ate into the jewel of her moon, and the cycle raged in a vicious and neverending circle as Yudaiel’s eye darted here and there, searching for the Fly, wherever he was in the depths of that horrid sea. If she could only find him, seize him, burn him, strip away his power and control, then all that sludge would become lifeless and inert. It could be righted and cleaned away in one great conflagration, but she had to find [i]him[/i].

A splitting pain pierced Yudaiel’s mind. It waned and ebbed, throbbing as if to a heartbeat even within the depths of her empty vastness. It made Seeing difficult; how could she not find the Fly within those depths when normally she Saw all, when nothing could hide from her? [color=red]Pain.[/color] Somewhere within her disoriented and enraged mind, there was a whisper that she didn’t see the Fly, that she wouldn’t and couldn’t, for the Fly had dissolved and become [i]one[/i] with that whole ocean of corrosive rot. [color=red]Anguish.[/color] She heard a chorus of otherworldly shrieking. The Sentry, that Psychic Fungi that she’d left in Arvum’s service, had been wailing this whole time and she’d hardly noticed, but now its cry stood out. It was the only voice within the discordant tumult that she could discern, that she could recognize, that she could understand.

[color=red][b]Agony![/b][/color] The other voices were vast, and distant, and close… their psychic voices carried well through the void-medium. There was a pattern, and a song, but it was horrifying chaos, nothing at all like what Yudaiel could grasp or understand, let alone lesser minds that had not been tempered by peering into the abyss before and hardening their sanity.

She Saw barbs, spikes, claws – claws that were made to rend the mind, not flesh. She Saw spikes, teeth, maws – gaping maws that hungered for the taste of misery and the sustenance of souls. Arrayed before her were maws within maws, maws within the pupils of sightless eyes, gaping and horrific throats and jaws that covered every part of their abominable and twisted forms.

A seeking arrow cut through the void towards her pupil. With a furious thought, she caught and gripped it. It was [i]real[/i], to her horror, and yet only half-real. It was not of her conjuration, not of the Monarch’s, and certainly not of the Fly’s; it was no illusion at all, and yet it was half-ethereal and utterly alien. She squeezed the arrow even harder, so that its tenuous being could not slip from her grasp, and then she twisted and turned. That thing had not been an arrow as she’d first surmised, but a horrific proboscis, like that of a bloodsucking mosquito, only this monstrosity had been intent upon draining the juice of her eye, the soul of her mind. The rest of the beast’s hulking form had somehow collapsed out of her sight as it had approached, hiding behind the tiny silhouette of that needlelike proboscis. When she'd twisted and broken its sucker, the thing hadn’t died, but it had [i]shrieked[/i], and her entire essence recoiled and shuddered. Searing pain juxtaposed itself with frigid fear.

Others had come, too. Like a vast whale, one breached the surface of that darkened ocean that covered her jewel, swallowing more of the sludge that any maelstrom ever could and yet surviving, thriving… [i]feasting[/i], even in the heart of a god’s ruinous power. The living shadow writhed and thundered as it struck at the abhorrent leviathan, its arms folding into itself in coursing loops, but where one interloper was pushed down, ten more arose, like sharks that had smelled blood. Its tremendous size turned against it, as every span of pitch waves had become a new breeding-ground for the nightmare flocks.

Its erstwhile enemy forgotten, the sea that had been Iqelis raged against the grotesque congeries of skinless and eyeless morays, lurking crabs that crept on fractal fleshy roots instead of limbs, and fin-ringed disks that split open into gnashing jaws like sunfish teratomas, battering them aside and vomiting searing beams of light from its eye-maw. Fury steadily became surprise, then alarm as the consuming tides and withering glares left the dire invaders unscathed. Whatever their nature might have been, Time held no more an absolute dominion over them than did the principles of life, trampled underfoot by the sheer incoherence of their bodies. Their hunger, however, was undisputable, and every bite and mouthless draught left the madly thrashing ocean diminished.

[hr]
[sub][i]Far away…[/i][/sub]

The trickling of water made for a soothing ambience for meditation. Its ever-present sound near the Blackmoss Dam calmed Ruslan’s mind. The young bjork sat in the same darkened lodge-chamber as half the rest of his clan. In the center of their circle was his father, Tanas the Undying, Tanas the Seer, Tanas the Moon-blessed. They looked to him as their foremost guide now, not the matriarch: this was only right as it was he that had first discovered the potency of the sacred fungus, he who had guided them all in their first experiences with the magical substance, and he who had ingested more of the holy mushroom than any other.

The bjorks, kit and adult and elder alike as they were, sat in a circle about Tanas. Tanas did not seem to sit, preferring instead to levitate. Or perhaps that was more akin to hanging? The bjork might have flown (might have ascended all the way to the moon, even!) the mushrooms whispered to Ruslan, but for the thin, ethereal threads and branches of fungal hyphae that tethered him to this world.

Tanas had his two birth-eyes closed in meditation, and yet his third gaped wide open, all three of its pupils staring into the void. Two were glazed in that moment, but the third, that which saw the future, was focused.

[i]’What do you See?’[/i] Ruslan wordlessly asked. A telepathic chorus of other voices echoed the question.

In answer the manbjork, once a mighty warrior but now thin and nigh-skeletal from a long diet consisting of little more than the mushrooms, trembled. He trembled, he shook, and he shut his third eye, embracing sightlessness. Wordlessly, Tanas spoke to their minds, 

[i]’Calamity.[/i]
[center][color=black]Doom.[/color][/center]
[right]Armageddon.’[/right]

The rushing sound of water was unbearable to him in that moment, its sound more horrifying than the bone-chilling roar of a giant snow leopard, than the bloodcurdling howl of wolves, than the howling winds that heralded wintry cold and frigid blizzards. The gloom and shadowy recesses of their lodge grew larger, more umbral. Darkness evaporated into wisps of smoke, and from those foul fumes there amalgamated the shapes of monsters and beasts and demons. Eyes were everywhere, staring, staring. He Saw it all, and yet his eyes were shut. There was no escape from the horror.

“The moon is under attack,” he gasped aloud, “I See it.”

The others looked all around, and they too Saw the shadowy people and beasts, and were afraid. It was a nightmare they couldn’t wake from. The sound of the river sounded eerily like distant, muffled screaming.

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

The relentless souldrinkers surged forward. Yudaiel perceived them in strange ways; she Saw a thousand brass claws, but only two-thirds as many limbs from which those graspers extended. These horrors were anathema to Reality and creation, slaves to unreason, impossible to truly comprehend. The grotesque forms that she Saw, even these brass claws that she [i]felt[/i] ripping into the cohesion of her sea of consciousness, were all just her mind’s vain attempts at projecting that which was impossible to depict, grasp, see, or even understand. They were vast creatures, and she suspected that they existed in more dimensions, and higher ones, such that she saw only their outward facets, tiny shadows of their true terror. Still, she witnessed more than enough.

The one with the proboscis had shattered before her might, but from its sundered mass had erupted a half dozen more demons, each greater in immensity than the one that had contained them. She focused upon the most enormous of them all. It bit into her vastness, but as it gorged upon her essence, it was as though she’d thrust an arm down the beast’s gullet and not gripped it by the tongue – no, by the entrails. She had the fool now, as she reached deep into its depths. Recalling her essence, withdrawing that filament of her being back from the demon’s insides, she caught hold of its innards and jerked them as she ripped that extension of herself free. Its entrails were drawn outside of its body in one sickening and incredibly forceful movement. Eviscerated, everything was pouring out of its maw, and the demon was inside out for an instant. In that ungodly shape it resembled some sort of nightmarish blob of otherworldly flesh, of fiery malevolence, and of black bone… but then its flesh rippled over those bones and shifted in strange ways, even as those bones snapped and spun and rotated through the roiling cloud of gore. The demon collapsed back inwards on itself before splitting apart, and what should have been its corpse somehow became three thrashing horrors.

What was this madness? The absurdity of their profane shapes, the lunacy that such aberrations had emerged as if from nothingness, was such that Yudaiel could scarcely believe what she saw, let alone what she tried in vain to See. A single thought echoed in the back of her mind with crystallized clarity – had she lost? Had Iqelis wrested control over the unreal, and now banished [i]her[/i] mind into the nightmare of madness?

[i]No.

He couldn’t have.

He is only a fly![/i]

With a roar, Yudaiel threw herself – or at least, the majority of her enormous vastness – into the maw of one of the lesser of these many beasts. It gorged at first, and as it unmade her essence and fed upon her soul Yudaiel writhed and felt diminished, but then she had forced her way in. The horror grew bloated as even its impossibly expansive void of a belly was utterly filled. Its teeth bent backwards in its maw as she swept her way down its gullet; its nineteen eyes bulged almost to the point of bursting as more and more pupils erupted from within, forcing their way into each one, crowding the red orbs.

Lesser minds would have been utterly consumed when trying at such a desperate and maddened ploy as entering and forcibly possessing one of these demons. Minds greater still would have been overwhelmed and consigned to lunacy forevermore, their sanity shattered so easily as glass. Yudaiel was nearly met with that fate, but the glassy sea of her consciousness was only cracked, not broken. 

She Saw deep into this thing’s horrific thoughts, and for just a fleeting moment, she felt as though she actually understood it. It and its kind were infinite, timeless, and more terrible than words or thoughts could capture. They feasted upon misery and strife and souls and life, and they lurked somewhere out there in the cold, vast, black voids that lay between the stars. There, everything was so empty that it was like a bottomless pit that led down, down, down into lower and worse and more twisted realms. They only emerged when something drew their attention, when they felt the urge to hunt… in their hubris and displays of power, so near to the void and away from the protection of the Monarch’s terrible light, she and Iqelis had attracted these monstrosities. 

But how could they ever be defeated, banished back to the nothingness from whence they came? She couldn’t find the answer to that; there was no time, for with each moment spent within the corpulent monstrosity’s caustic innards, she dissociated more and more, drawing that much closer to oblivion. She tried to fight her way free, to force her way out through the lenses of its eyes, but it held her tightly, too tightly to wriggle or break out. It would rather burst and die than surrender its meal. Its greed was its undoing; she seized control of the beast for just a moment, just long enough to send it careening too close to the maw of an even greater horror. Without discrimination, that leviathan’s jaws eagerly crashed down upon this mere worm, rending and ripping and shredding it into chunks and clouds of gore. Even then, even as it was swallowed by an even greater maw, the nebulae and rivers of gore – all that remained of the demon – tried in vain to wrestle with Yudaiel and drag her to the same fate, but she was strong enough to break free and soar out from the gaping mouth.

She beheld the carnage, and through the tumultuous battle beheld an even greater swarm of these demons… she was weak now, too. And her hard-won knowledge, claimed from the eldritch mind of one of these demons, was slipping through her fingers and out of her mind more and more with each passing moment. Some knowledge was just not meant to be known, not possible to retain.

Below her, the transfigured Fly was locked in his own struggle against the hideous void-spawn. His shadowy immensity had been greatly diminished, now filling but a minuscule fraction of the vast moon-sea that it had corroded, and it continued to shrink as putrid behemoths drained more of it. Nor was he as fluid any longer, for his bulk stiffened and hardened as more of it was sheared away. By now it had almost returned to its primordial state, a monolith of icy crystal hewed into a tripodal spire surmounted by a wheel of many-segmented arms.

A quake shook through the moonscape as most of the limbs slammed down, wreaking obscene carnage on the throngs that harried the black tower's foundation. To little avail, for the mangled carcasses had soon recombined, like the fanciful lens-figures of a kaleidoscope, into a tangle just as horrid and ravenous, and scattered entrails had sprouted like seeds into cyclopic coral trees with fanged mouths across their trunks. Iqelis raised a hand, parting a current of the Flow and raining the ravages of doom onto the encroaching horde; yet once more, the ineluctable was brazenly defied by the otherworldly monstrosities, for whom it seemed there were neither past nor future.

The god's eye, colder now and a measure more lucid than the roaring furnace it had been at the apex of the forsaken duel, jumped feverishly across the tainted field and the churning skies, and at length it met by chance with Yudaiel's own pupil. She did not need to peer into its temporal shadow to perceive the emotions behind it. There were still remnant clouds of rage, though they wandered confusedly, uncertain which foe to cast themselves against, and a shadow of spite at being so beset when he believed his triumph was nigh. But above all, it was lost. Consternation and disbelief reigned in the fading light of the great eye. His look seemed to be asking her whether she was seeing the same as him, whether this abominable breach of Time's law was real and not a deception more insidious than even she would dare to weave. Hostility was eclipsed by the desperate will to find something familiar in this nightmare. For the first time since the universe's wheel had begun to turn, Iqelis was shaken. Another moment, perhaps, and despondent apathy would overtake him, the uncountable arms collapsing limply as forests of teeth tore him to shreds.

She understood, of course, and she dove back down towards him. A hundred soaring demons stood in their path, but she wove all of her vastness and her nothingness between their seeking limbs and horrible claws of brass, away from all their horrific maws and teeth of crystallized nightmare and misery. She made her way through the swarm, finally drawing close enough to reach out and touch her rival.

[color=9966CC]A great beast thundered across a plain, savaged and harried at every step by the lions and hyenas, the flies and the mosquitos. With roars and mighty thrashes of its limbs and tail, it crushed and mutilated those lesser creatures by the dozen, but its assailants were endless, and they knew no fear. They were no mere beasts, after all; these were demons in another shape. 

The great beast’s life drained from a thousand wounds; the buzzards smelled blood, if not rot, and already circled high overhead in anticipation. But then a sweet wind came, and it breathed it in deeply and gladly, even as the vapors carried by that gale forced their way into its flesh and [i]changed[/i] it. The beast’s hide was crystallized into impenetrable adamant, and from all those wounds where it had been raked and bitten there erupted new eyeballs, such that it now saw everything all around with perfect clarity. It trampled and massacred its powerless attackers with ease.[/color]

And as a new expanse of vision had been opened before that oneiric beast, so too did a new light surge up behind Iqelis’ faltering eye. It tore itself from Yudaiel’s gaze and the sights it exuded, snapping back upon the gnashing, clawing tide. No more did it leap and run wildly about, however, harried by the dire spectacle, but it cut precise lines from one foe to another, as if measuring their multitudes and distorted distances. Then he stabbed a finger into the ground, and with the smoothness of a knife running through water carved a trench near his foundation. An empty gesture, it seemed, for none of the horrors had been there to suffer the blow; until a hydra-like tangle of boneless spinal cords, surmounted by toothed but otherwise amorphous lumps of bloodied flesh, twisted at an angle that ought to have been impossible, and instead of breaching his crystalline wall tumbled howling into the fissure that appeared to await it where in would emerge from its contortion through space. A colossal black fist followed it, and liquefied matter sprayed out from the edges of the rift.

The intruders, alien to Galbarian life and matter, were not bound to the temporal laws of the world. But as long as they remained in its confines, they had to abide by some few principles that permitted the existence of things, which kept them anchored to reality yet also subjected them to certain of its laws, however scant. One such imposition was their collocation in space, and though they blurred even that fundamental, for many of them were intertwined in eye-strainingly implausible ways or occupied extensions that should have been too small for them, of each void-predator it could be said that it was at certain moments in a particular place. This was what Iqelis’ revitalized eye tracked in the renewed clash, for though the ghastly adversaries were elusive to Time-attuned Sight, the sequence of the terrain they afflicted could be traced, and though that gift was barred to him, the momentary favour of the All-Seeing Eye permitted him to glimpse the reflections of the Tapestry on his black waters, and thereby forestall the hideous assaults.

Thus his arms multiplied again, and struck out with renewed force and focus. It was no immediate turning point, and many were snapped off and devoured by the forest of teeth where a wily terror twisted in a way that none could have predicted, or where a sacrifice was demanded, but the battle became more even. The seething ranks were now cut off when they tried to advance, halted by suddenly awning pits and rising shield-mountains. The One God’s towering body stirred with fluidity again, and his movements gained haste to match their decisiveness. Barriers rose and crumbled, and at the bidding of orchestrating claws the Flood spilled forth to reinforce them. Its waves did not seek to uselessly lap at gnarly hides and pulsing membranes, but washed smoothly around them, swallowing the ground they stood on into crumbling gaps. Undulant bodies toppled back as their material footholds failed them. In places, they became tangled with each other as they retreated, flesh commingling in a charnel metamorphosis until where two had been forced back, one was left standing.

At some point Iqelis had lost track of the Reverberation amidst all the thrashing, the carnage, the ambushes and feints. She had cast wide his gaze and granted him Sight beyond sight, but now he could not even See where she had gone.

[hr]
[sub][i]Far away…[/i][/sub]

It was alone again, slowly hovering upriver. The Six had withdrawn into the mists of the Tlacan, restless and uneasy after it had told them of the battle that rent the moon, but not daring to go out across the world and hunt again, in case their master returned suddenly and demanded account in a foul mood. But the One that was no longer Seventh did not fear the chastising hand of its god. Death was illusory and ephemeral for one trapped in a cyclical existence, less forgiving even than the one it had led before, but for those few moments until it resurfaced from the black Flow, perhaps it would have respite. Respite from its dual servitude, labyrinthine as it lay ahead in the paths of the future, and respite from the Sight which even now needled its three-lobed burning eye.

The visions had not abated since the first brush with the vastness. If anything, they had grown more frantic as the night wore on. Dim figures barely had the time to form before being swept away by the next expanding thread, yet this came as a relief, for of late some sinister presences had been intruding into the dreamlike vistas which it did not wish to see more clearly. The two feuding gods were no longer alone in their battle at the edge of the world. A third force had intruded upon their contest, and it was not one that the Outsider could match to any strand of fate, nor to any reflection on the Flow’s surface. There was something unsettling about these aggressors, a whiff of red skies and shattering divinity, a stench of astral blood that made them sickening to even glance at.

But the third eye was a curse, not a gift, and as the Outsider passed near where it had fatefully set upon those sleeping humans, the visions grew sharper. And it Saw them.

Pain and fear struggled within it as it reeled from the revelation. It was not as though the entities could harm it, far as they were, though had they descended upon the Galbar it suspected that their distorted claws might have cut short even its recursive life. The horror they radiated was an instinctive feeling, the sort of fright that made one recoil from large spiders and tentacled octopi, though orders of magnitude more intense and protracted. A fundamental revulsion for the [i]other[/i], the [i]different[/i] stirred its core, and beset by the dread of something more alien yet than itself, the Outsider sought to exorcise the noisome sights by giving them voice:

[center][i]"No other eyes have vented there
Since eyes were lent for human sight—
But here, with gaze untamed by night,
I see the Elder Secret bare.

Inhuman shapes, half-seen, half-guessed,
Half solid and half ether-born,
Seethe down from starless voids that yawn
In heaven, to tides of stygian pest.

And voidward from that pest-mad zone
Amorphous hordes seethe darkly back,
Their dim claws laden with the wrack
Of things that gods have dreamed and known.

The loathsome Fishers from Outside—
Are there no tales in warning told,
Of how they found the worlds of old,
And took what pelf their fancy spied?

None sees me watch, long fore the dawn,
Nor does my flame bear any mark
Of what I glimpse in that curst dark—
Yet from my soul all peace has gone!"[/i][/center]

“Such a vivid poem,” a ragged voice commented from the darkness of a riverside shrub, not so far away at all. “Your words paint, and the moving pictures makes this nightmare that I See all the more real.”

It was Medes, that prophet, the one that had cursed that Eschatli, back when it had numbered among the Eschatli, when it had been One of Seven. Now, it carried a burden, and was somehow even less. And Medes Saw that too. The Outsider saw that Medes was alone; the others had gone on ahead downstream in their flight from him after that chance encounter, but the prophet, aged by the decay of an Eschatli’s touch, had soon run out of breath and had to stop.

“You… you understand my warning, now,” the human stated as fact.

[center][i]”Aye, great was the loss of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of nightfall can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.”[/i][/center]

the spirit answered mournfully as it stopped in its drifting, hovering over the river like a lost storm cloud. 

Above, a more tangible cloud began to let loose its burden, sloughing off heavy raindrops that plopped as they seeped into the ground. Water mixed with sand and clay. A mirthful chuckle mixed with a hacking cough and a sorrowful sob. “These horrors in my Sight are too much for a mortal heart to bear. I implore you now, finish what you have begun, and grant me reprieve.”

As a wisp of mist borne on a sepulchral breeze, the spectre approached the dying seer. It did not set upon him like a hungry psychopomp as it had the first time, but gathered over him in a grim pillar, looking down upon him with three solemn eyes. It descended then, slowly, as it intoned a susurrant dirge.

[center][i]”Then may for you death be
A soothing well in an oasis dim—
Cool-gleaming, hushed, and hidden gratefully
Among the palms asleep
At silver evening on the desert's rim.”[/i][/center]

And Medes was engulfed in its black smoke as in a silent shroud; and when it rose again, nothing was left but dust and tranquil bones.

[center][h3]~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~[/h3][/center]

After Yudaiel had dove down to Iqelis’ aid, she had found herself precariously amidst the densest swarm of horrors. Unseen shockwaves of force and all-too visible crackling bolts of lightning shot forth omnidirectionally to stave off the attackers, but she didn’t last long, not when her every attack against these strange beings seemed nigh futile. Eventually she found herself weary and surrounded on all sides with nowhere to flee, and then was caught by one of the greatest of the horrors. It had seized her with both tentacles real and fetters unreal, tethering its mind and will to hers such that there was no escape. When its many jaws came unhinged, she careened to the side and  instead clung to its sickly flesh and what passed for its lips, like a veneer of intangible sweat. But pores and fissures had erupted from the amorphous demon’s form, and she had been siphoned and drank and absorbed – her consciousness, her mind, and her warmth swallowed and pulled in through some perverse method of inverted perspiration.

This beast, distorted as its manifestation in this world was, had far too much substance to it for her to puppeteer its bulk as she’d done for that last, smaller one. In truth, she now felt her vigor waning. She had already been pushed to the brink and beyond; her entire mind felt laden with fatigue and tiredness and the hints of surrender. The fighting spirit – that part of her that still screamed and raged and wanted to fight – now seemed a quiet and distant voice, one whose cry was stifled by a smothering pillow, or distorted by the weight of water as it called out from up above the clouds while she drowned in a deep lake. Even as it was digested and subsumed into nothingness, the will to struggle started to pass away like a fleeting dream…

[color=778899]In what might have been a final flash of clarity before oblivion or a gesture extended in air from outside, or perhaps both at once, a beautiful tapestry pinned to a wall swept before her in an unbounded wealth of colours and woven patterns. Spun across its face in vibrant threads were likenesses of the celestial spheres, the golden sun, the multifarious Galbar and the silvery moon, framed by the distant chorus of the pale stars. Of those, the earthly globe filled the center, with the sun and moon alike below it in different corners.

Her sight fell upon the lunar orb, and she saw that the edge of the tapestry where it lay was frayed, leaving argent threads to dangle down to the floor. There, they were lost in a mass of blackness: a swarm of huge, lazy flies carpeted the soil, unmoving but so thick that it could not be seen what they sat upon. One of the loose threads twitched, perhaps moved by a breeze, and slipped slightly out from its place in the pattern. A portion of the flies strewn out below it, stirred by the motion, sleepily rose from the bare stone floor and buzzed all together to another place further away. The loose thread seemed to have engendered a cascade, however, for another slipped out after it, and another. Every time some length of the silver weave fell, the flies below it moved away. There was a curious order to their flight, and every time it was only those whom the the threads brushed by that woke, as if there were a correspondence between the loose lengths as they fell further out and which of the insects were shaken from sleep.

Then her sight descended on one of the threads, and it was a thread no more, but a silvery river, with banks of grey and black stone. A wooden chest lay by its course, and into it unseen hands laid a still body with indistinct features, yet clearly untouched by decay. The cover snapped closed above it, and the chest was pushed into the shimmering waves, where it drifted downstream. As it floated, Yudaiel could see the corpse within mouldering in the darkness, with no respite from the faintest breath of air; until the fumes of putrescence became too much for the wood to bear, and it burst in a sickening rain of rot and splinters that stirred her awake to her similarly malodorous fleshy prison.[/color]

She lapsed in and out of lucidity; the light of the path out of this tortuous confinement flashed here, and then there, and then disappeared before returning to the first place, always ever so slightly out of reach. In this state and place the otherworldly and unknowable knowledge that she’d extracted from the mind of the first horror returned momentarily, slipping back into her fingers. The pieces came together… she almost knew what she had to do and how to achieve it, yet she felt so weak. Her own despair and hopelessness was only amplified by the appalling clime about her; half-digested and alien memories of the multitudes of all this abomination’s past victims flitted about like ash, and the curse of her Sight forced upon her the weight of experiencing some of their suffering vicariously as she Saw shattered fragments of their final thoughts.

A voice pierced the din with clarity so crisp and pure that it harkened back to a time that felt so distant, so very long ago, before she had been swallowed.

[i][b]”You do not perish today, Yudaiel,”[/b][/i] it proclaimed. She thought that she heard a droning sound, the distorted buzzing of flies, or perhaps the faintest roar of a distant river. [i]’Iqelis?’[/i] she wondered in disbelief. She sensed the weight of a thousand shoulders shift, but it didn’t answer her, not directly.

Behind the words were the weight of an image; she Saw smoky roiling clouds, or perhaps currents in a river, and behind that just endless darkness. But in the center was a great looming hulk with innumerable hands and arms, far too many to count, so many that the elbows bumped and jumbled all together and she wondered how such a great mass of limbs could ever be coordinated. There was no background with which to compare, but she knew that this silhouette was tall and vast and inevitable; it consumed and seemed to fill the entire endless void. Just as that wound in the chest of the Monarch of All was so deep that it stretched into what may as well have been eternity, this familiar giant seemed infinitely tall.

The darkened lord – her unexpected savior – leaned closer, His body like a towering sculpture of frozen, glassy darkness. [i][b]”You have yet to fulfill your purpose; I have need of you yet. These monsters can be bested, so FIGHT!”[/b][/i]

That final order echoed like thunder, shaking the void of her waking nightmare of a vision with such might that it roused her back to the horrific reality of her torment.

[center][h1][i]’FIGHT!’[/i][/h1]

…[/center]

[h2]’FIGHT!’[/h2]

[center]…[/center]

[right][h3]’FIGHT!’[/h3][/right]

Each booming roar of the word lent her strength: it endowed her with steely resolve, and also vigor that she didn’t know she possessed somewhere, perhaps that truly wasn’t even her own. She remembered what she had seen of these creatures’ disquieting and aberrant physiology, and the patterned fraying of Reality’s threads… she focused, and her mind reached out beyond her prison to find the Flow. Then she pulled it unto herself, and the monstrosity could not resist its decaying touch, not this time, not when the unseen stygian waters seeped through the tiny pores that she opened to allow grant access into its otherwise impervious skin. The Flow, guided by her mind, sundered the valves of its vile heart and poisoned whatever horrific substance flowed through it as a mocking, twisted analogue to warm blood. Using the Flow’s pressure, she then forced open a maw, breaching a way out, and escaped.

The horror came unbound and exploded, imploded, dissolved, and sublimated all at once. She’d actually called upon Iqelis’ deleterious aspect and guided it with such precision that not even that anomalous demon could withstand it! Her captor was utterly destroyed, its remnants smitten with enough power that nothing had endured in part or whole, that no other beasts spilled forth from its entrails as though their bodies had been stacked together in this plane of existence. Yudaiel was freed, unshackled, but so, so tired. The swarms still remained, but at least they now feared her after having witnessed that display.

They had shrunken now, too, for it seemed that the One-Eye had not been idle. His own bulk had collapsed again, and instead of a crowned tower embedded in the lunar surface, it was reduced to a less imposing though still gigantic simulacrum of his body’s torso. Below it there was nothing but a colossal tapering spike which, lodged into the stone, held him upright as he warred with the shapeless throng. He glanced up at the Reverberation, and his eye seemed to wander as if he were expecting to see someone else who had burst free along with her. Finding no other presence, it flashed with surprise, but soon turned its attention back to the battle the scores of his hands were waging.

Arrayed against them was a host much changed since when Yudaiel had last seen it. Driven back by incessant lunges from the black claws, many of the creatures had folded into each other in that blasphemous amalgamation that overtook them when collapsing spaces forced them together. Webs of bone and membrane had swallowed worm-eels into tubular canvases of mutilation, spine-limbed scarabs and serpents of intestinal flesh dripping with bile were knotted into twitching, seeping branches with insectile shells instead of bark. These comminglings had not paradoxically increased the size of the beasts; if anything, some of them had shrunken, as though the binding force had crushed some of the claim they had cast upon dimensions.

Iqelis looked at her again, and pointed a finger at one of the amalgam-trees: there, perhaps, lay the way to stemming the tide at last. He stretched out his arms further than they ought to have reached, and again the flurry of crust-shattering blows and corroding splashes from Time’s river began. Yudaiel’s ethereal bulk shuddered, exhausted, but then she threw her weight into the fray too, bending the Tapestry and distorting space; that was the means through which she was able to hurl about and cast down the horrors where even her telekinesis was not alone enough to overcome their own formidable mastery. It was still a battle, and no mere hunting of a harried foe. More black hands and wrists were snapped away from the mass that was Iqelis – the horrors possessed teeth and claws whose bite far exceeded their apparent length, and used them to vicious effect – and as the god’s severed appendages fell and shattered upon the ground, it became evident that these wounds were taxing upon his magnified frame. With every few new arms that sprouted like a hydra’s head to replace those lost, slivers of bulk vanished from around the god’s disembodied torso, until he had grown thin and emaciated.

Yet still, slowly and painfully, the terrors were driven back. Here two fell into a globe of limbs and staring eyes. There more were crushed by each other’s weight, in spite of the moon’s airless light-footedness, into a churning wave of steely grey sludge. There again, a viridian growth with empty yellow eyes and root-arms sprouting out from its head crashed into another amalgam, a mound of purple flesh ringed with red irises and creeping upon millipede legs, and the tumorous living hill that ensued was hideous to behold. Little by little, they dwindled, ceding ground as it crumbled around them and withdrawing into each other for lack of any other route of retreat.

In the end, only two corpulent, writhing masses of disconcerting demon-flesh remained. Yudaiel grasped one, and Iqelis the other, and without speaking the two understood what had to be done and crushed their final two foes together. They squeezed, and squeezed, against the struggling and screaming horrors until two congealed together into one, and until that one was compressed into an unholy singularity, a ravenous gap in space that began to clothe itself with a skin of angular grey plates. And then they manipulated Time and the Tapestry and the Flow in a hundred arcane ways, and together tore a rift in creation just wide enough to cast out the abomination before it had coalesced, and then receded their touch and sewed the wound closed before it offered passage to anything else from beyond.

On the moon, tranquil quiet was restored at last.

[hider=Summary]
An Eschatli phantom wanders Nalusa by night. Driven by envy as much as by its ruinous directive, it visits a burrow full of maramoda and kills them all. Then it chances upon some sleeping humans led by a particular prophet, and tries to do the same again. It is halted by Yudaiel, who takes note of it, seizes it, bestows upon it the gift and curse of prescience, and effectively enslaves it. That One is no longer just an Eschatli – it is now the Outsider, a champion of Yudaiel.

Yudaiel seeks to do much the same to Iqelis himself, but it’s made difficult by her confinement to the moon. So, seeing his vulnerable mental state after the Monarch’s visit, she taunts him by saying exactly what she’s done to his minion, and successfully lures him up to the moon.

They fight. It’s a very long and destructive fight as desperation and furies escalate. During the fight, we cut for many commercial breaks that switch to other perspectives so as to give reactions and foreshadowing, and further other plots. The Eschatli, the Medians, the Blackmoss Clan, the Psychic Fungus under the Serene Island, and a research post of kynikos are all featured in their own interludes.

The battle between Iqelis and Yudaiel goes all over the moon and even into outer space above its dark side, on the very periphery of our setting. Out there the fighting draws some kind of horrific space demons that emerge from deep space to attack both parties indiscriminately, and they make Pariah look like a wimp. Their arrival forces the reluctant rivals to team up and defeat the horrors together (barely). Hooray![/hider][hider=Vigor Expenditures]
Iqelis begins with 9 vigor, factoring in god week bonuses (Yoli Week post coming soon).

4 vigor (enhanced by Doom) is spent on his exertions throughout the fight, which further damaged the moon and knocked some bits of it into orbit as debris. Some comets and asteroids and meteoroids are out in space now.

Iqelis ends with 5 vigor.

Yudaiel begins with 5 vigor; 4 from the end of last post plus one for Yolly week.

1 vigor is spent on making the Outsider, one of the Eschatli, into a champion. It is also blessed with prescience; consider that a 1 vigor (discounted to 0) action if you want.
1 vigor (enhanced by prescience) spent on suppressing Iqelis’ manipulations of time for a portion of the fight.
1 vigor spent on telekinetic blasts and strikes that, along with Iqelis destructive efforts, flung up debris into space.
2 vigor spent on surviving being eaten by the two horrors, and killing her way out of them.

Yudaiel ends with 0 vigor.
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The Outsider is created with 0 spirit.

+1 for being in this post
+1 for it being a post of decidedly more than medium length
+1 for it being an exceptionally long post that the champion appears throughout
+1 for participating in a collab

It ends with 4 spirit.

The Eschatli are retroactively made into a holy order as per their original cost of 3 vigor, with 0 prestige.

+1 for playing a role in the post
+1 for making appearances throughout an exceptionally long post

They end with 2 prestige.
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