[center] [h2]Cycle 4[/h2] [img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/893548783957315584/895391531521945640/image1.jpg[/img][/center] [hr] Yudaiel defied sleep, even as it clawed at her and tried to carry her away. In the wake of her battle with Iqelis and things unknowable, things far [i]worse[/i], she was weary, but she willed herself not to rest, not to succumb. Weakness, Pain, and Exhaustion returned like old friends, just like they had after she’d struck down Ashevelen and battled with Epsilon. And some ‘friends’ they were! They were the fingers of sleep’s choking, grasping hand. They invariably crooned and whispered every conceivable justification to surrender her will and give in. But she was stronger now than she had been back then when last she’d dreamt, or so she’d like to think. Hysteria, Psychosis, and Mania made for better company. They kept her vibrant, alive, and struggling, even if they couldn’t keep her mind in one piece. [right]”That foolish, tree-dwelling Horse claims dominion over the dreamlands now,” Mania hissed.[/right] “Yet it’s hardly a part of the Tapestry; it existed before the Horse and will long after. So what if the Horse claims it? It’s all just pretension,” echoed the soft, resigned voice of Weakness. [right]”I want us to return to that lazy river we dreamt of long ago, to rest and be at peace,” Exhaustion admitted.[/right] [center]”Peace? There was no peace there. Even there we were harried by our foe the Fly, until we smote him again. There, we Saw that horrific cyclops, and He Saw us too!” Psychosis shrieked. Pain’s sharp and insufferable cadence cut through the clamor, “And He was a horrible threat, but He can evidently See many things anyways, and His coming or going cannot be stopped if that is what He intends. There are [b]worse[/b] things, like those that struck from the blackness, the void. We must hide from them and recover. I [b]WILL[/b] be heard!”[/center] Everything trembled – Yudaiel’s mind [i]throbbed[/i] – as Hysteria battled with Pain and the two shook the rest of the chorus, until Pain finally relented. A silence so short-lived as to be nigh imperceptible followed, before it was then broken by Hysteria’s roar, “Dark forces loom everywhere! We [b]SHALL[/b] remain vigilant and See them as they come! We [b]SHAN’T[/b] succumb to weakness or blindness or the clutches of that Horse’s den!” A defiant Mania tried to hiss its dissent and uncharacteristically urge for caution just out of spite and obstinance, but Hysteria and Psychosis brutally mauled it alongside the other three. They crushed, devoured, and assimilated all other shards of Yudaiel’s fractured psyche, and then joined together. Her mind was one, once more. Another voice rang through it though, a foreign and yet familiar one: [b][i]”Jingui, the Monarch’s Wit, know that your contributions to the realm have been seen and are appreciated. And though our dear Rosa has fallen, let it be known that she is the Unforgotten.”[/i][/b] Before she’d had time to contemplate the implications of such developments, the speaker made His entrance. In one moment she had been alone on her pale white rock, and in the next the Monarch of All had suddenly loomed before Yudaiel’s field of view. This time she hadn’t kept him waiting; she had Seen the coming of His arrival. Still, the goddess said nothing in greeting and only met the gaze of His eyes with her one. The silence between the two, however, would not last as His words wormed their way in the depths of Yudaiel’s psyche, making His voice heard. [b][i]”No ideabstractions? I must say, your silence astounds me for once.”[/i][/b] [color=9966CC]Echoes of her quarrels, that with Iqelis and the horrors and that with her own mind, faintly resonated through the bridge between their minds. Annoyance and anger was there, too; it was masked and yet it simmered beneath the surface as hot and violently as a volcanic vent lurking in depths of the seas.[/color] [b][i]”Please, I know your brawl with that upstart has you on edge but I have not come to talk about that, despite the spectacle that it was. Rather, I have come about the beast you two encountered.”[/i][/b] The Monarch of All’s words were filled not with the normal malice that He bore towards Yudaiel but rather of curiosity, a genuine curiosity towards her ordeal. Yet, she knew that He did not truly mean well, or have that genuine feeling, it was written all over how He acted. She could even [i]See[/i] it woven into the Tapestry and within the Flow. His dance was an ominous one. So the reticent goddess was loath to surrender the entirety of the truth and what she’d witnessed, and yet she was also certainly afraid to defy Him outright – especially not now, not while she was still weakened so. Fortuitously, it was easy to deceive when the contents of a memory were already so fractured and nonsensical – all thoughts of that light in the dark, that glorious Lord of Rippling Shadow that Towered over All, the one whose voice had lent her strength and clarity from within the horror’s gullet… all thoughts of Him, she buried deeply. But everything else, in all of its madness, she relayed with perfect lucidity. The Ancient One had listened intently with an unmoving form, His light solely focused upon her as she showed Him. When she had finished, the Monarch of All idly turned His gaze to the great void, past the light of the palace and into the great cosmos unknown to the gods. There was a moment as He seemed to recall something, though there were no words that He would speak. Yet, the silence could not last, even Yudaiel knew such. [b][i]”Such creatures, so wild and unyielding. They refuse to be tamed no matter how much power one has. I must commend you and Iqelis for being able to challenge one.”[/i][/b] Yes, it had been just one, kaleidoscopically split into too many shards to count, some paradoxically greater even than the whole. It had been like a puddle made of a million droplets, each grander than a lake. Hmph. Praise was often an easy enough way to make Yudaiel glow, but not now. [color=9966CC]The Galbar, the moon, and even the resplendent Jade Palace were all revealed as just mountain peaks on one tiny isle. The endless black ocean of the void was all around, and with piercing gaze, the vision revealed the endless schools of fish. The cosmos and realities beyond teemed with something analogous to life, though much of it was monstrous and abominable and anathema to even reason in every way – for every one of the infinite stars out there, there was a Horror, and all knew it. Where rivers of light and warmth left the island to meet with the shore and their deltas sated it with warm and life-bearing silt, the fish were drawn nearer. Closest to the ocean was the summit of the moon, and atop it a single eye, albeit one endowed with Sight beyond sight, was set alone to spear the lurking monsters and stave away the madness.[/color] The Great Lord of Reality nodded to Yudaiel, affirming her vision before His light would turn back to meet her gaze. Within a single step - He traversed the entire surface of the moon, seeming to inspect it all the while and admiring certain aspects of it. There was a pause as He came back to Yudaiel, His gaze unwavering from her until His arms folded over His great and infinitely deep wound. His voice penetrated her mind once more. [b][i]”Yes, I am aware that they would be drawn here and there are likely more yet to come. Precisely when or where, however, is lost upon me as I can no longer See into the Tapestry. That is why I have come to you, Yudaiel.”[/i][/b] [color=9966CC]So the mountain whose summit was crowned with an eye twisted around, its stony spine cracking as it turned its back to the shore (even if only briefly!) and faced inland towards the mountain of the sun. Staring expectantly into the dawn’s light would have blinded many, but not this Eye. The deleterious rays of incinerating, blinding heat would have smitten many things and cast them into the black river of the Flow, but not this eyed moon-mountain. It was scarred, and yet unyielding.[/color] [i]And so further moon-mountains yet all of the same Eye rose upon the periphery of the shores, all gazing outwards into the oceans and upon the abhorrent beings. Great ships sailed out to meet each of the beasts, beings bearing the banners of the sun skewering each yet cheering the moon-mountain’s name. The great island was now joined by many against the teeming fish and now able to call upon great armies of the sun, such power gifted to the Eye allowed it to stand triumphant over the void.[/i] Such works could be constructed, such aims achieved. Yudaiel envisioned another two jewel-bastions patrolling the Galbar’s night sky, one black as onyx and one an immaculate but hazy grey opal. The trinity was perfect: one Eye blessed with three pupils so as to see past, present, and future. [color=9966CC]Figments and wisps of such fancies manifested in the ideabstraction. A storm of thought suddenly focused upon the [i]Monarch[/i] Himself though, but it was not interested in Him as a person so much as His potential – specifically that of an instrument for attaining her desires. The storm’s charged aura coursed not over His visage but into the bottomless depths of His wound, towards one specific crystalline shard.[/color] The Monarch of All seemed to recoil at the sight of the shard, not out of fear or shock, but of pain and anger of yet another god looking to steal more of His power. His hands clenched, claws digging deep into the Artist’s palms and drawing from it His very ichor that slowly pulled itself downwards and threatened to fall upon Yudaiel’s immaculate sculpture. The anger radiated and it consumed the moon in its entirety as He stared down the great eye, wordlessly. [i]The island was no longer in the void, a time before such creation. But then it rose, first as a low-lying atoll, and then as that proper isle with its two peaks of the sun and the Galbar. The Eye was still able to make its own summit along the shore, raising the moon-mount from the tide. Why could it not do so again? Why did the great eye-mountain need the shard in order to make further more? The Mountain of the Sun stood defiant against pleading and power hungry masses that came to ask for further pieces that made it whole.[/i] [color=9966CC]The churning seas circled the lonely island hungrily (or perhaps they were still as the island danced and spun and twirled; it made no matter) and the fish followed the currents. Warmth and silt and shallows by the beach nurtured reefs, and those reefs lured in those alien fish of the deep sea from the outer currents. Abominable, thrashing, fleshy [i]things[/i] that were part shark, part whale, part godfish defiled the reefs and creation, and those fish-Horrors multiplied and clambered onto the shores with strangely misshapen and asymmetric legs. Here and there, one strayed close to the Eye’s mountain, and she defended its slopes and fjords vigorously from atop her summit. There remained a great deal of shoreline that she did not defend, and would not defend, for it wasn’t [i]hers[/i]; after all, what was [i]hers[/i] was here, and there, and everywhere: the ephemeral, the Key to Seeing the Past, the Future, and Far and Near. Nothing so tangible as the sandy shores, or the craggy cliffs… not even her own mountain was truly, fully [i]hers[/i] so long as the Sun greedily possessed its Key. Moreover, a rainbow wall consigned her to guard her own mountaintop; she couldn’t descend down to the island’s jungles below even if she’d wanted. The Sun Mountain had decreed it, and so the rainbows forged from His prismatic light had bent themselves into a great barrier around her peak.[/color] [i]Still, rainbows were tenuous barriers, and they had proven no hindrance to the Eye as she had conjured great gales to sweep up and abduct a mortal – the one that was called Biluda – from what should have been its sanctuary below. It likewise did little to stop the moon-mountain as it gushed out great wellsprings that flowed downward as rivers that carved and gouged and reshaped the island all around as the Eye willed. In body the eye might not have wandered, but in spirit, it had most certainly violated its oath, and the Sun’s blinding radiance illuminated each of these transgressions in turn as they were shown. Still, He was a warm and just sun, and so had done nothing but simmer even as his patience was tested. So then, great torrents of the fish swarmed first the Moon Mountain, before the Sun sent His armies to stop the greedy beasts. Perhaps she would learn her lesson if she were left alone to the mercy of the circling wolves of the void that were so eager to prey upon all those who were not protected by His command.[/i] [color=9966CC]The entire island tore itself from its foundation to flip upside down and soar into the emptiness of a plane above this ocean. As it ascended above and crumbled into nothingness, it cast a reflection in the waters below: that of another island that could have been. The one Horror which had contained and become so many other Horrors appeared again, but this time when it attacked, the Eye merely fled. Unassisted, the Fly fell before the monstrous extradimensional invader, and then with glamors and tricks and folds of the Tapestry, Yudaiel masked her own presence and diverted the thing to the peak of the Galbar where it wreaked havoc. A ripple pulsed through the ocean, tiny by the grand cosmic standards of this surreal perspective, but massive enough to erase that small reflection of a universe. When the wave had passed, a more familiar reflection returned: that of their present Reality, and one for which the Eye’s lord [i]ought[/i] to have been grateful.[/color] The great claws of the Monarch of All dug into the eye of Yudaiel, dragging her form so that all she could see was His blinding radiance. Anger was all that she could see, and that anger enveloped her surrounding everything and invading all her senses. He had been angered by her constant visions of trying to merely leave His kingdom and abandon her duties, yet this rage was subdued. His mind was harder to entomb within a prison of illusions than the likes of the Fly’s, or any of her vapid ‘peers’, so when her progenitor broke free with such ease and struck at her in Reality she recoiled with a hiss. To her credit the amorphous pupil dissipated and then reappeared somewhere else within the storm of consciousness, mostly unscathed from the rending swipe… [i]mostly[/i]. With her Sight blurred by that strike, she still looked clearly into His wound and Saw what she wanted, and so much more, just waiting in there. He was inside her sea of consciousness, within her grasp. It was so, so tempting to reach into His chest and seize what she wanted, to eviscerate Him herself… [center][i][b][sub]”Not yet.”[/sub][/b][/i][/center] The whisper was faint, so faint that she was certain none beside her would have perceived it, and she almost took it for the Monarch’s own voice. The familiar tone was almost like the Monarch’s own cadence, but not quite… it was colder, more distant, less passionate. She heard it and obeyed, arresting her racing thoughts before the Monarch sensed something amiss. [i][b]”You would not survive out in that void! You know not what lives beyond the periphery of my domain - beasts and monsters would be the least of your concern if you found ‘him’!”[/b][/i] Psychosis stirred from its slumber and reared its head once again, just long enough to relay an ideabstracted memory of that dream by the river… that part where the cyclops in the sky had peered at her. [color=9966CC]The Monarch was a mountain before the trees of his making, which clung to His side and in His shadow. But proud as He was, upon the horizon were many, many more peaks… some that threatened to perhaps tower even taller than He.[/color] The venerable Monarch of All was wordless, not because He lacked coherent thoughts or words to answer the question, but because He did not want to answer it. Lowering His arms, the Monarch of All looked back towards the star-filled void and watched it for the briefest of moments as His claws dug into His palms once more. There was a new feeling that emanated from Him, one that was unknown to any of the gods - fear gnawed at His mind as he glimpsed into the void. A single utterance graced Yudaiel as she watched the unmoving form of her liege. [b][i]”Amphiboles.”[/i][/b] So He had offered up a name to that alien giant with the nigh-omniscient eye, yet names meant little. Yudaiel knew and Saw many things: things that she should not have been able to See, knowledge that should not have been possible to attain, secrets that should have been forgotten. She knew that somewhere out there was that cyclops – Amphiboles – and that such a being might well be the Architect of His Undoing, [i]if[/i] it smelt weakness and division. Yudaiel, with no even a hint of subtlety, projected thought at the Monarch of All and imparted into his mind the suggestion that she keep careful vigil over the Tapestry’s threads so as to track the movements and machinations of that ‘Amphiboles’... perhaps the Tapestry’s weave could likewise be obfuscated in strange and arcane ways, so as to hinder that probing eye of the cyclops. The Monarch of All continued His gaze outwards, looking beyond the great void that contained His opulent realm. With a sigh, He turned back to Yudaiel and gave thought to the proposal that He Saw. In the end, He nodded to her in silence, giving her the duty to watch over the tapestry so that the great Architect would not meddle within His affairs. The safety of His realm would not be guaranteed with her aid, but it would be a step in ensuring a warning. [color=9966CC]And yet the apparition of an open hand, its palm still empty, invaded his mind.[/color] Silently, yet angrily, a hand went to the deep wound upon His chest and went to the great many shards that made up His being. The Monarch of All felt His fingers pluck away one of the crystalline structures from its place within His core. He let out a sharp, pained breath and staggered - almost losing balance as yet another piece of His soul left His body. There was a moment as He stood there in pain, staring at the crystal that contained countless different orbs - an untold number of moons that could possibly be crafted and controlled. The Hallowed Lord regained His composure after a brief time and extended the hand holding the shard out towards Yudaiel. [b][i]”Do not make me regret this.”[/i][/b] [hider=Titles] Aethel - Shepard of Dreams Jingui - the Monarch’s Wit Rosa the Feverfoot - the Unforgotten [b]Court Positions[/b] The Emissary of the Palace - Homura The Monarch’s Champion - Voligan The Ancient of the Monarch - N/A [/hider] [hider=Vigor] [img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/302062776967364618/927588881585537154/IMG_1702.png[/img] [/hider]