Nimble had drawn the first Destroyer to her camp, back on that last day before Tauga died. Evidently a Bludgeon exerted the same effect, and while the former was helpless pickings, the shining white moths came to her as to a wildfire. They were quickly becoming scarce, though. Maybe they were learning to keep away from what wasn't good for them. She doubted it.
Charging face-on as she had in her first hunt had, by luck, turned out to be the safest way to initiate. As long as a Destroyer was using its streams of moonlit fire to propel itself forwards, it couldn't use that same magic to blast at what was right before its eyeslits. Count to three. One. And two. And-
Tauga twisted violently in the air, flinging the gargantuan Bludgeon into a spin as the tendrils of her upper body released their grip on its cord and she entered freefall.
End over end the spheres flipped, plumes streaming behind them, cords screaming like violin strings, and the Realta was unprepared for the abrupt leap in speed. Executing an agile hairpin turn did not save it from the magnetic turbulence and its wings spat rivers of shining fire in every direction as it repositioned.
Barely breathing, Tauga held out her tendrils as she fell, and they snatched back at the returning cord, an unblinking trapeze artist. As the elastic tentacles eased her fall she held close to the nearer sphere, holding still as she raised the distant sphere and slashed it back down on its orbit, down like an axe at the recovering Realta as it swooped closer, easily evading the sphere- unable to see the cord.
Tauga missed. The Destroyer survived.
The distant sphere was still descending and Tauga used its groundwards arc to toss her end of the cord upwards. She let go and was flung into the sky. The Destroyer knew how to identify a vulnerable target.
From above, Tauga could see the metal mask of Arcon's wrath as it rose to meet her, blotting out the world below with the all-purging whiteness of its wings. She could see the long iron fingers stretched out to impale.
It rose to meet her, and did not look down. The Bludgeon was faster.
A wave of heat was all that remained as the Destroyer's dissolving plasma body passed Tauga and faded into the distance. In the moment before the cord that sliced it apart reached her, Tauga could see the fragments of its silver shell scatter in the air around her.
Like twisted mirrors on the wind.
Tauga closed her eyes and fell with them.
* * * * *
When Tauga landed at the well, its previous set of patrons were preparing to leave. The tedar had already filled clay troughs built there long ago, and their flocks had watered. Bits of straw sat in the blue of reflected sky. With no pail to draw, Tauga cupped her hands and drank straight from the trough. There was no shame in this. Anyone raised in Xerxes had seen far greater desperation.
She didn't see the approaching goatherds, nor lift her head to face them. They assumed that meant she didn't know they were there. The closer of the two, the one not carrying a heavy crook, made to nudge her with his foot, and she shuffled easily to avoid him. Something unseen brushed his leg and he recoiled.
"Next time say 'hey'." Still not facing them.
A glance was shared with his wife, who still held a ready grip on the crook. Then a glare back at the dark-clad hain. "Your kind. You aren't welcome here."
"The Cult of Jaan is free to go anywhere in Amestris by order of the Enas," recited Tauga without force. She raised her hands to her unmasked face and took another sip.
"The Enas is dead."
Something whipped on the air like a dead wind, crawling wildly on the tedar's skin. "Liar."
The hain sat still and the second herder lowered the end of her crook to Tauga's shoulder level, ignoring the queasy sensations that writhed on her hand as she did so. "Folehne speaks true. A masked warband cut through his army. Killed him and all his heirs. There is no Enas now." The sturdy wood tapped against Tauga's neck, and she finally looked up, hand slowly curling around her scabbard.
"The Purifiers came from Lysiuh to burn you and all the fae folk and everyone who ever gave you passage. We are free of perversion. You'll find no rest here."
"Purifiers," she repeated dumbly.
"Get out," whispered the tedar. "Leave."
Tauga tilted her head, staring at her reflection with her other set of eyes. "Alright," she yielded simply. "Alright, I'll go." She stood and stepped aside, fixing the reaper mask over her face. She was still thirsty. The tedar hadn't moved. They waited for her to finish.
Something hidden in a cloud plummeted to earth and came at them with a violin shriek. The Bludgeon buzzed them at an unwise altitude and a ludicrous speed, whipping dust in its wake, scattering their herds. As the goats bolted and the grit smattered back to earth, the herders raised their heads and looked, but the masked hain was gone.
* * * * *
Cross-legged on a woven mat, the shaman looked neither uncomfortable nor at peace. A low fire warmed the yurt. Long journeys had shown her terrible blizzards of the high mountains, and yet it was age, not those weathered memories, not the stranger in the room, that chilled her. With a will like ancient bone she endured the faint stroking sensations that tapped on her skin when her guest's concentration slipped.
Tauga had tried to sit as the shaman did and shortly tired of the stretch. Now she sat with one leg outstretched and an arm leaning on the bent knee of the other. Half-finished beside her was a messy bowl of beans she had been generously served.
"It is as in the stories of the south, my daughter. You have been touched by God."
An affirmative grunt. "Guess which." The shaman sighed.
Changing course back to the City had taken Tauga through territory she had already passed, where eyewitness retellings had hardened into rumours. Inhuman noises over the plains. Great gleaming spheres hiding in the clouds. Destroyers (Purifiers?) known by their fallen armour, empty and sliced like fruit.
These villages rarely harboured wandering cultists, and this one was miles from the nearest Lens grove. News walked slowly between the tiny subsistence communities, and the name 'Purifier' had yet to make its way here. Tauga guessed she was lucky. No one had thrown rocks. Only the usual sidelong glances and parents ushering hatchlings back indoors when they saw her.
Hardly different, speak true, from what she'd lived through in the quarry camp, where the labourers were all hain and no temple stood to hide the work she did with Help. Those stares had upset her then. She'd clawed her joints in the night, though she was far from her next moult. Now she wondered why.
But not very hard.
"Tauga."
With a blink she focused her attention back on the shaman, whose hands were steepled and whose gaze was neutral.
"Aye, this will not do, my child. Your heart is hurt beyond what you can bear, and now your shell has grown thick with that grey skin you wear, tough and pliant and without feeling. You must moult, Tauga. You must moult your soul, and become brittle and clean again."
Tauga thought about this for a few seconds while she shuffled her sitting position again. "I'd rather drink," she admitted.
"If you stare into the wine now, it will never let you go."
A shrug. "I'll take my chances." She stretched, and finally stood up. Standing was more comfortable than sitting, these days. "Thanks for the, uh, hospitality, mother shaman." With that she looked down, resting her hand on her neck awkwardly, and after a moment Tauga left the wise one alone to shake her head slowly at the half-open door in her wake.
But when they found her slumped against the storehouse wall with an empty jar of wine and pieces of a broken ladle early the next morning, Tauga stared at her with clear eyes, and turned away without a word. A single drop of unabsorbed ethanol fell from the tip of her beak. Tauga's body had been secured from harm, even by herself. It was not hers to ruin.
No rest for the dead.
* * * * *
From an indistinct speck in the wetly clouded sky to a monstrosity screaming its violin warpath as its shadow raced over the rice paddies, Tauga watched the second Bludgeon fall upon her own from the heavens. With a mildly curious mood she waited for the two cords to collide and snap. That didn't come to pass.
Instead, the second Bludgeon simply integrated with the first, its excess velocity dispersed through the system as all four spheres began to orbit a focal point, their eccentric swings too fast to keep track of. Stable though the spinning patterns were, Tauga took control of the cords as they flashed in and out of existence between the Bludgeons, and slowed them to a gentler pace, a square circling above her head.
One of her tentacles brushed something that hadn't been there a moment ago and she turned to face it.
"You," she slipped, almost accidentally, as a way of greeting. "I remember you." It was all she could say. Tauga still didn't know what, exactly, this particular you was. The last time she'd seen it was the last day she had stood on Galbar before her fall.
The figure was motionless. "I guess I've pretty much got this figured out, then, hey?"
"Correct." One of those gleaming white legs was carrying a kind of sack in the iridescent claw above its hoof, and the ribbed grey pipes wired through its skin stretched as it held out the parcel. When Tauga didn't collect it, it dropped the elastic sack into the rice with a light splash.
Eventually she took the hint and approached the dubious gift. It was rapidly dissolving in the water anyway. When Tauga touched the remains of the bag, it began to move, and a small creature stirred from below. Help had shown her plenty of hearts before, human and otherwise, so the tootling sweetheart that emerged to bob around her was more surprising in the fact that it floated.
There was another thing, too, a slit of flickering red in the water. Tauga didn't realise that it was glowing until she reached into the mud and pulled out the sealed tube.
"Is this what you need me for?"
"Take the canister to Xerxes. Investigate the properties of its contents. The Sweetheart will assist you. More may be provided."
"Nnn." That was a rather curt list of instructions. Of course, it was all the strange walker believed she needed, so she'd figure that out too. "And the extra bludgeons? Oh, no, wait, I get it. You only gave me two in the first place so that I could learn faster. Mhm. So how about this. What if I dump the bottle in a well somewhere and never come back for it?"
"Consistently dysfunctional experimental apparatus is to be reconfigured or scrapped."
That sentence had a lot of big words that Tauga didn't really know and it took her a while to puzzle her way through it. Then she closed her eyes and started laughing.
It was a quiet, almost tearful laugh, at first. Then her shoulders began to shake and she raised her beak to the sky and started to chuckle out loud, a high, sweet sound, lilting over the fields. Tauga laughed alone with her knees in the mud beneath a birdless sky.
God alone knew how long it had been since she'd laughed like this. So long. Months before she'd died. Years.
"This is perfect, isn't it?" breathed she, still quaking, eyes still shut. "I can't feel it! I can't even understand it anymore. Every time, every time I found a Destroyer, I fought it just because I didn't want to die. Didn't want to. I can't feel scared any more. I can't feel guilty and I can't drink. That's you, right?"
The future was sprawling out before her. She didn't want to die, and nothing else mattered- What better minion could exist, what slave more diligent? It was all so clear, now. Tauga's head drooped and she started laughing again, words coming in breathless batches. "I don't feel anything- And you don't care. You're just... We're just made for each other, aren't we?"
Heartworm stared motionlessly. "No," it answered. "You're made for me." It crawled back through the air and left Tauga alone with the whistling sweetheart, laughing at the stupidity of it all, laughing for a life without meaning.
Four sections, one story. They're all pretty short.
First section. Tauga fights a Realta, apparently her third, and destroys it. She notes that Realta are becoming rare, oblivious to Teknall's actions. ...Just that, yeah. 2 Khookies spent to level up in the background, I guess.
Second section. Tauga takes a drink at a well, and is mistaken for a Sculptor by some Tedar. They warn her to leave, referring to Realta as 'purifiers'. Misinformation, Jvanophobia, and rumours of a connection to the human stories of Elysium run rampant. Tauga doesn't react emotionally to the rejection, but scares their flocks in return anyway. Nothing spent. Just a bit of dialogue.
Third section. A village lets Tauga stay the night, though they, too, mistake her for a Sculptor and ostracise her. Again, she's cold to their disregard. A shaman tries to help the disrespectful hero without success. Tauga starts drinking, only to find that her body resists the effects of depressants. Nothing spent, just dialogue and characterisation.
Fourth section. Another two spheres are added to Tauga's Bludgeon, further inflating her secondhand power. Heartworm approaches her with a Sweetheart and a bottle of Arksynth and tells her to experiment with it once she reaches Xerxes. Tauga finally catches on to the fact that the reason she no longer feels or cares about anything is because Heartworm is using her as a pawn for its own amoral designs, under the threat of death. blah blah no points just exposition
Nimble had drawn the first Destroyer to her camp, back on that last day before Tauga died. Evidently a Bludgeon exerted the same effect, and while the former was helpless pickings, the shining white moths came to her as to a wildfire. They were quickly becoming scarce, though. Maybe they were learning to keep away from what wasn't good for them. She doubted it.
Charging face-on as she had in her first hunt had, by luck, turned out to be the safest way to initiate. As long as a Destroyer was using its streams of moonlit fire to propel itself forwards, it couldn't use that same magic to blast at what was right before its eyeslits. Count to three. One. And two. And-
Tauga twisted violently in the air, flinging the gargantuan Bludgeon into a spin as the tendrils of her upper body released their grip on its cord and she entered freefall.
End over end the spheres flipped, plumes streaming behind them, cords screaming like violin strings, and the Realta was unprepared for the abrupt leap in speed. Executing an agile hairpin turn did not save it from the magnetic turbulence and its wings spat rivers of shining fire in every direction as it repositioned.
Barely breathing, Tauga held out her tendrils as she fell, and they snatched back at the returning cord, an unblinking trapeze artist. As the elastic tentacles eased her fall she held close to the nearer sphere, holding still as she raised the distant sphere and slashed it back down on its orbit, down like an axe at the recovering Realta as it swooped closer, easily evading the sphere- unable to see the cord.
Tauga missed. The Destroyer survived.
The distant sphere was still descending and Tauga used its groundwards arc to toss her end of the cord upwards. She let go and was flung into the sky. The Destroyer knew how to identify a vulnerable target.
From above, Tauga could see the metal mask of Arcon's wrath as it rose to meet her, blotting out the world below with the all-purging whiteness of its wings. She could see the long iron fingers stretched out to impale.
It rose to meet her, and did not look down. The Bludgeon was faster.
A wave of heat was all that remained as the Destroyer's dissolving plasma body passed Tauga and faded into the distance. In the moment before the cord that sliced it apart reached her, Tauga could see the fragments of its silver shell scatter in the air around her.
Like twisted mirrors on the wind.
Tauga closed her eyes and fell with them.
* * * * *
When Tauga landed at the well, its previous set of patrons were preparing to leave. The tedar had already filled clay troughs built there long ago, and their flocks had watered. Bits of straw sat in the blue of reflected sky. With no pail to draw, Tauga cupped her hands and drank straight from the trough. There was no shame in this. Anyone raised in Xerxes had seen far greater desperation.
She didn't see the approaching goatherds, nor lift her head to face them. They assumed that meant she didn't know they were there. The closer of the two, the one not carrying a heavy crook, made to nudge her with his foot, and she shuffled easily to avoid him. Something unseen brushed his leg and he recoiled.
"Next time say 'hey'." Still not facing them.
A glance was shared with his wife, who still held a ready grip on the crook. Then a glare back at the dark-clad hain. "Your kind. You aren't welcome here."
"The Cult of Jaan is free to go anywhere in Amestris by order of the Enas," recited Tauga without force. She raised her hands to her unmasked face and took another sip.
"The Enas is dead."
Something whipped on the air like a dead wind, crawling wildly on the tedar's skin. "Liar."
The hain sat still and the second herder lowered the end of her crook to Tauga's shoulder level, ignoring the queasy sensations that writhed on her hand as she did so. "Folehne speaks true. A masked warband cut through his army. Killed him and all his heirs. There is no Enas now." The sturdy wood tapped against Tauga's neck, and she finally looked up, hand slowly curling around her scabbard.
"The Purifiers came from Lysiuh to burn you and all the fae folk and everyone who ever gave you passage. We are free of perversion. You'll find no rest here."
"Purifiers," she repeated dumbly.
"Get out," whispered the tedar. "Leave."
Tauga tilted her head, staring at her reflection with her other set of eyes. "Alright," she yielded simply. "Alright, I'll go." She stood and stepped aside, fixing the reaper mask over her face. She was still thirsty. The tedar hadn't moved. They waited for her to finish.
Something hidden in a cloud plummeted to earth and came at them with a violin shriek. The Bludgeon buzzed them at an unwise altitude and a ludicrous speed, whipping dust in its wake, scattering their herds. As the goats bolted and the grit smattered back to earth, the herders raised their heads and looked, but the masked hain was gone.
* * * * *
Cross-legged on a woven mat, the shaman looked neither uncomfortable nor at peace. A low fire warmed the yurt. Long journeys had shown her terrible blizzards of the high mountains, and yet it was age, not those weathered memories, not the stranger in the room, that chilled her. With a will like ancient bone she endured the faint stroking sensations that tapped on her skin when her guest's concentration slipped.
Tauga had tried to sit as the shaman did and shortly tired of the stretch. Now she sat with one leg outstretched and an arm leaning on the bent knee of the other. Half-finished beside her was a messy bowl of beans she had been generously served.
"It is as in the stories of the south, my daughter. You have been touched by God."
An affirmative grunt. "Guess which." The shaman sighed.
Changing course back to the City had taken Tauga through territory she had already passed, where eyewitness retellings had hardened into rumours. Inhuman noises over the plains. Great gleaming spheres hiding in the clouds. Destroyers (Purifiers?) known by their fallen armour, empty and sliced like fruit.
These villages rarely harboured wandering cultists, and this one was miles from the nearest Lens grove. News walked slowly between the tiny subsistence communities, and the name 'Purifier' had yet to make its way here. Tauga guessed she was lucky. No one had thrown rocks. Only the usual sidelong glances and parents ushering hatchlings back indoors when they saw her.
Hardly different, speak true, from what she'd lived through in the quarry camp, where the labourers were all hain and no temple stood to hide the work she did with Help. Those stares had upset her then. She'd clawed her joints in the night, though she was far from her next moult. Now she wondered why.
But not very hard.
"Tauga."
With a blink she focused her attention back on the shaman, whose hands were steepled and whose gaze was neutral.
"Aye, this will not do, my child. Your heart is hurt beyond what you can bear, and now your shell has grown thick with that grey skin you wear, tough and pliant and without feeling. You must moult, Tauga. You must moult your soul, and become brittle and clean again."
Tauga thought about this for a few seconds while she shuffled her sitting position again. "I'd rather drink," she admitted.
"If you stare into the wine now, it will never let you go."
A shrug. "I'll take my chances." She stretched, and finally stood up. Standing was more comfortable than sitting, these days. "Thanks for the, uh, hospitality, mother shaman." With that she looked down, resting her hand on her neck awkwardly, and after a moment Tauga left the wise one alone to shake her head slowly at the half-open door in her wake.
But when they found her slumped against the storehouse wall with an empty jar of wine and pieces of a broken ladle early the next morning, Tauga stared at her with clear eyes, and turned away without a word. A single drop of unabsorbed ethanol fell from the tip of her beak. Tauga's body had been secured from harm, even by herself. It was not hers to ruin.
No rest for the dead.
* * * * *
From an indistinct speck in the wetly clouded sky to a monstrosity screaming its violin warpath as its shadow raced over the rice paddies, Tauga watched the second Bludgeon fall upon her own from the heavens. With a mildly curious mood she waited for the two cords to collide and snap. That didn't come to pass.
Instead, the second Bludgeon simply integrated with the first, its excess velocity dispersed through the system as all four spheres began to orbit a focal point, their eccentric swings too fast to keep track of. Stable though the spinning patterns were, Tauga took control of the cords as they flashed in and out of existence between the Bludgeons, and slowed them to a gentler pace, a square circling above her head.
One of her tentacles brushed something that hadn't been there a moment ago and she turned to face it.
"You," she slipped, almost accidentally, as a way of greeting. "I remember you." It was all she could say. Tauga still didn't know what, exactly, this particular you was. The last time she'd seen it was the last day she had stood on Galbar before her fall.
The figure was motionless. "I guess I've pretty much got this figured out, then, hey?"
"Correct." One of those gleaming white legs was carrying a kind of sack in the iridescent claw above its hoof, and the ribbed grey pipes wired through its skin stretched as it held out the parcel. When Tauga didn't collect it, it dropped the elastic sack into the rice with a light splash.
Eventually she took the hint and approached the dubious gift. It was rapidly dissolving in the water anyway. When Tauga touched the remains of the bag, it began to move, and a small creature stirred from below. Help had shown her plenty of hearts before, human and otherwise, so the tootling sweetheart that emerged to bob around her was more surprising in the fact that it floated.
There was another thing, too, a slit of flickering red in the water. Tauga didn't realise that it was glowing until she reached into the mud and pulled out the sealed tube.
"Is this what you need me for?"
"Take the canister to Xerxes. Investigate the properties of its contents. The Sweetheart will assist you. More may be provided."
"Nnn." That was a rather curt list of instructions. Of course, it was all the strange walker believed she needed, so she'd figure that out too. "And the extra bludgeons? Oh, no, wait, I get it. You only gave me two in the first place so that I could learn faster. Mhm. So how about this. What if I dump the bottle in a well somewhere and never come back for it?"
"Consistently dysfunctional experimental apparatus is to be reconfigured or scrapped."
That sentence had a lot of big words that Tauga didn't really know and it took her a while to puzzle her way through it. Then she closed her eyes and started laughing.
It was a quiet, almost tearful laugh, at first. Then her shoulders began to shake and she raised her beak to the sky and started to chuckle out loud, a high, sweet sound, lilting over the fields. Tauga laughed alone with her knees in the mud beneath a birdless sky.
God alone knew how long it had been since she'd laughed like this. So long. Months before she'd died. Years.
"This is perfect, isn't it?" breathed she, still quaking, eyes still shut. "I can't feel it! I can't even understand it anymore. Every time, every time I found a Destroyer, I fought it just because I didn't want to die. Didn't want to. I can't feel scared any more. I can't feel guilty and I can't drink. That's you, right?"
The future was sprawling out before her. She didn't want to die, and nothing else mattered- What better minion could exist, what slave more diligent? It was all so clear, now. Tauga's head drooped and she started laughing again, words coming in breathless batches. "I don't feel anything- And you don't care. You're just... We're just made for each other, aren't we?"
Heartworm stared motionlessly. "No," it answered. "You're made for me." It crawled back through the air and left Tauga alone with the whistling sweetheart, laughing at the stupidity of it all, laughing for a life without meaning.
Four sections, one story. They're all pretty short.
First section. Tauga fights a Realta, apparently her third, and destroys it. She notes that Realta are becoming rare, oblivious to Teknall's actions. ...Just that, yeah. 2 Khookies spent to level up in the background, I guess.
Second section. Tauga takes a drink at a well, and is mistaken for a Sculptor by some Tedar. They warn her to leave, referring to Realta as 'purifiers'. Misinformation, Jvanophobia, and rumours of a connection to the human stories of Elysium run rampant. Tauga doesn't react emotionally to the rejection, but scares their flocks in return anyway. Nothing spent. Just a bit of dialogue.
Third section. A village lets Tauga stay the night, though they, too, mistake her for a Sculptor and ostracise her. Again, she's cold to their disregard. A shaman tries to help the disrespectful hero without success. Tauga starts drinking, only to find that her body resists the effects of depressants. Nothing spent, just dialogue and characterisation.
Fourth section. Another two spheres are added to Tauga's Bludgeon, further inflating her secondhand power. Heartworm approaches her with a Sweetheart and a bottle of Arksynth and tells her to experiment with it once she reaches Xerxes. Tauga finally catches on to the fact that the reason she no longer feels or cares about anything is because Heartworm is using her as a pawn for its own amoral designs, under the threat of death. blah blah no points just exposition
>Compromise these suggestions by licking the blood off your suit. You're thousands of miles away from human civilisation, you might as well start acting like a barbarian now. >Oh shit you're in a space helmet. >Nevermind. Just walk further into the cave like the first one to die in a horror movie.
<Snipped quote>VERSES FORESHADOWING VOWZRA'S RETURN TO THE GAP
<Snipped quote>HINTS ON VOWZRA'S VISIONS OF THE TIMELINE
<Snipped quote>HERE WE SEE WHAT VOWZRA MIGHT HAVE SEEN WHEN HE PROPHECISED HIS DEATH
<Snipped quote>VOWZRA WATCHING HIS SIBLINGS MINDLESSLY GOING ABOUT THEIR BUSINESS AND FAILING TO REALISE THE IMPENDING DOOM OF THE UNIVERSE DUE TO THE JVANIC ENTITY
<Snipped quote>HERE VOWZRA IS DESPERATELY TRYING TO MAKE THE OTHER GODS REALISE THAT JVAN IS A DANGER TO THEM ALL, BUT THEY DO NOT LISTEN
<Snipped quote>A GLIMPSE OF A FUTURE WHERE JVAN RULES THE WORLD - ALL BEINGS BOW DOWN TO JVAN AND THE ONLY THING REMAINING ARE VOWZRA'S DISREGARDED WORDS.
Put it down to Kho's superb ability to choose a verse for the occasion.
When Tauga landed at the well, its previous set of patrons were preparing to leave. The tedar had already filled clay troughs built there long ago, and their flocks had watered. Bits of straw sat in the blue of reflected sky. With no pail to draw, Tauga cupped her hands and drank straight from the trough. There was no shame in this. Anyone raised in Xerxes had seen far greater desperation.
She didn't see the approaching goatherds, nor lift her head to face them. They assumed that meant she didn't know they were there. The closer of the two, the one not carrying a heavy crook, made to nudge her with his foot, and she shuffled easily to avoid him. Something unseen brushed his leg and he recoiled.
"Next time say 'hey'." Still not facing them.
A glance was shared with his wife, who still held a ready grip on the crook. Then a glare back at the dark-clad hain. "Your kind. You aren't welcome here."
"The Cult of Jaan is free to go anywhere in Amestris by order of the Enas," recited Tauga without force. She raised her hands to her unmasked face and took another sip.
"The Enas is dead."
Something whipped on the air like a dead wind, crawling wildly on the tedar's skin. "Liar."
The hain sat still and the second herder lowered the end of her crook to Tauga's shoulder level, ignoring the queasy sensations that writhed on her hand as she did so. "Folehne speaks true. A masked warband cut through his army. Killed him and all his heirs. There is no Enas now." The sturdy wood tapped against Tauga's neck, and she finally looked up, hand slowly curling around her scabbard.
"The Purifiers came from Lysiuh to burn you and all the fae folk and everyone who ever gave you passage. We are free of perversion. You'll find no rest here."
"Purifiers," she repeated dumbly.
"Get out," whispered the tedar. "Leave."
Tauga tilted her head, staring at her reflection with her other set of eyes. "Alright," she yielded simply. "Alright, I'll go." She stood and stepped aside, fixing the reaper mask over her face. She was still thirsty. The tedar hadn't moved. They waited for her to finish.
Something hidden in a cloud plummeted to earth and came at them with a violin shriek. The Bludgeon buzzed them at an unwise altitude and a ludicrous speed, whipping dust in its wake, scattering their herds. As the goats bolted and the grit smattered back to earth, the herders raised their heads and looked, but the masked hain was gone.
* * * * *
Cross-legged on a woven mat, the shaman looked neither uncomfortable nor at peace. A low fire warmed the yurt. Long journeys had shown her terrible blizzards of the high mountains, and yet it was age, not those weathered memories, not the stranger in the room, that chilled her. With a will like ancient bone she endured the faint stroking sensations that tapped on her skin when her guest's concentration slipped.
Tauga had tried to sit as the shaman did and shortly tired of the stretch. Now she sat with one leg outstretched and an arm leaning on the bent knee of the other. Half-finished beside her was a messy bowl of beans she had been generously served.
"It is as in the stories of the south, my daughter. You have been touched by God."
An affirmative grunt. "Guess which." The shaman sighed.
Changing course back to the City had taken Tauga through territory she had already passed, where eyewitness retellings had hardened into rumours. Inhuman noises over the plains. Great gleaming spheres hiding in the clouds. Destroyers (Purifiers?) known by their fallen armour, empty and sliced like fruit.
These villages rarely harboured wandering cultists, and this one was miles from the nearest Lens grove. News walked slowly between the tiny subsistence communities, and the name 'Purifier' had yet to make its way here. Tauga guessed she was lucky. No one had thrown rocks. Only the usual sidelong glances and parents ushering hatchlings back indoors when they saw her.
Hardly different, speak true, from what she'd lived through in the quarry camp, where the labourers were all hain and no temple stood to hide the work she did with Help. Those stares had upset her then. She'd clawed her joints in the night, though she was far from her next moult. Now she wondered why.
But not very hard.
"Tauga."
With a blink she focused her attention back on the shaman, whose hands were steepled and whose gaze was neutral.
"Aye, this will not do, my child. Your heart is hurt beyond what you can bear, and now your shell has grown thick with that grey skin you wear, tough and pliant and without feeling. You must moult, Tauga. You must moult your soul, and become brittle and clean again."
Tauga thought about this for a few seconds while she shuffled her sitting position again. "I'd rather drink," she admitted.
"If you stare into the wine now, it will never let you go."
A shrug. "I'll take my chances." She stretched, and finally stood up. Standing was more comfortable than sitting, these days. "Thanks for the, uh, hospitality, mother shaman." With that she looked down, resting her hand on her neck awkwardly, and after a moment Tauga left the wise one alone to shake her head slowly at the half-open door in her wake.
But when they found her slumped against the storehouse wall with an empty jar of wine and pieces of a broken ladle early the next morning, Tauga stared at her with clear eyes, and turned away without a word. A single drop of unabsorbed ethanol fell from the tip of her beak. Tauga's body had been secured from harm, even by herself. It was not hers to ruin.
No rest for the dead.
* * * * *
From an indistinct speck in the wetly clouded sky to a monstrosity screaming its violin warpath as its shadow raced over the rice paddies, Tauga watched the second Bludgeon fall upon her own from the heavens. With a mildly curious mood she waited for the two cords to collide and snap. That didn't come to pass.
Instead, the second Bludgeon simply integrated with the first, its excess velocity dispersed through the system as all four spheres began to orbit a focal point, their eccentric swings too fast to keep track of. Stable though the spinning patterns were, Tauga took control of the cords as they flashed in and out of existence between the Bludgeons, and slowed them to a gentler pace, a square circling above her head.
One of her tentacles brushed something that hadn't been there a moment ago and she turned to face it.
"You," she slipped, almost accidentally, as a way of greeting. "I remember you." It was all she could say. Tauga still didn't know what, exactly, this particular you was. The last time she'd seen it was the last day she had stood on Galbar before her fall.
The figure was motionless. "I guess I've pretty much figured this out, then, hey?"
"Correct." One of those gleaming white legs was carrying a kind of sack in the iridescent claw above its hoof, and the ribbed grey pipes wired through its skin stretched as it held out the parcel. When Tauga didn't collect it, it dropped the elastic sack into the rice with a light splash.
Eventually she took the hint and approached the dubious gift. It was rapidly dissolving in the water anyway. When Tauga touched the remains of the bag, it began to move, and a small creature stirred from below. Help had shown her plenty of hearts before, human and otherwise, so the tootling sweetheart that emerged to bob around her was more surprising in the fact that it floated.
There was another thing, too, a slit of flickering red in the water. Tauga didn't realise that it was glowing until she reached into the mud and pulled out the sealed tube.
"Is this what you needed me to carry?"
"Take the canister to Xerxes. Investigate the properties of its contents. The Sweetheart will assist you. More may be provided."
"Nnn." That was a rather curt list of instructions. Of course, it was all the strange walker believed she needed. "And the extra bludgeons? Oh, no, wait, I get it. You only gave me two in the first place so that I could learn faster. Mhm. So how about this. What if I dump the bottle in a well somewhere and never come back for it?"
"Consistently dysfunctional experimental apparatus is to be reconfigured or scrapped."
That sentence had a lot of big words that Tauga didn't really know and it took her a while to puzzle her way through it. Then she closed her eyes and started laughing.
It was a quiet, almost tearful laugh, at first. Then her shoulders began to shake and she raised her beak to the sky and started to chuckle out loud, a high, sweet sound, lilting over the fields. Tauga laughed alone with her knees in the mud beneath a birdless sky.
God alone knew how long it had been since she'd laughed like this. So long. Months before she'd died. Years.
"This is perfect, isn't it?" breathed she, still quaking, eyes still shut. "I can't feel it! I can't even understand it anymore. Every time, every time I found a Destroyer, I fought it just because I didn't want to die. Didn't want to. I can't feel scared any more. I can't feel guilty and I can't drink. That's you, right?"
The future was sprawling out before her. She didn't want to die, and nothing else mattered- What better minion could exist, what slave more diligent? It was all so clear, now. Tauga's head drooped and she started laughing again, words coming in breathless batches. "I don't feel anything- And you don't care. You're just... We're just made for each other, aren't we?"
Heartworm stared motionlessly. "No," it answered. "You're made for me." It crawled back through the air and left Tauga alone with the whistling sweetheart, laughing at the stupidity of it all, laughing for a life without meaning.
Question for the class; how is Logos not detecting what Heartworm did?
Two might points worth of Concealment and the fact that Logos isn't looking for it.
In numbers, Heartworm is now concealment level 7, matching Logos's level in detection. If something made him suspect, Logos would figure out that a miniature portal opened into Arcon's vicinity from the Mangrove for a few seconds and probably detect Vestec's presence there as well. With a bit of sleuthing he could figure out it was Jvan's power that opened it, but I don't think he knows that Jvan has a rogue avatar. Hearty, meanwhile, has been very anxious about hiding from almost everyone.
Speaking of Heartworm, that's the last post from its perspective for quite some time, thank goodness. Tauga is now its proxy on Galbar.
Posted a thing I've had finished for a week or so now, but was itself waiting for a finished collab to be posted separately. That collab is now included as one of its sections instead. Also, parts of this and the previous post used to be one and the same, so there's some chronology errors and only the latest Might tally is accurate.
Currently tapping out a weird rant about what arksynth is that may or may not be useful.
In the art of cultivating living things, it is a sound premise that propagating cut samples is more efficient than assembling specimens of the same kind from scratch.
Thus, old skin-stitch prepared to perform the most weighted gamble of its long list of recent exploits.
Scant cloud cover provided its only shelter. Conserving energy, the vehicle it piloted was neatly folded into a smooth resting shape upon a small disc. Not quite symmetrical- A third limb had been grafted to its side for the occasion.
The disc itself whirred motionless on six near-silent wings, their beats misaligned just enough to camouflage the sound between wind distortion. Fortuitously gentle breezes kept the clouds motionless. The day was warm, azure. Not too far east, Alefprians would be enjoying the sea that glittered below. They wouldn't be the only ones.
First one, then the other, two titanic shapes descended into view, trailing wisps of the cumuli they passed through. Only cues remained to tell what they once were. Glowing domes on the back of Father Dominus. Folds where his arms were being fused into his tail. Mother Suprema was, as always, faster. A once sinuous form had filled into smoothly curved bulk, and flicking fins hardened into wings that left contrail ribbons as they passed.
Heartworm observed.
For hours the Diaphanes played at hunting in the water, far-wandering streaks of colour. It counted twenty-six adults between three packs. Another generation of safety and there would be two hundred. Enough to explode into the thousands once the change-eaters were unleashed on Galbar's elemental spirits. Not long from now.
As it was, the sorority did not stray more than two miles out from the shadow of the Arks. A few body lengths of the Arks themselves, in other words. Even now they were still growing. Jvan had likely seen to assigning them a crew as they matured, and the change-eaters would have risen to the role of piloting them eventually as their mental architecture changed. Two things Heartworm would soon confirm for itself.
It wondered if the diaphanes knew what was happening to their Mother and Father. From the depths of their artificial minds, love had flourished for the daughters. No doubt the circuit that ferried them down from Lex to play had been maintained at all costs while the rest of the infrastructure required for consciousness crumbled and metamorphosed along with everything else. No doubt it would be the last fragment of sentience to be digested. It would not have been difficult to hide the significance of the procedures to the change-eaters, even as they slowly came to pilot what had once been a conscious being. All too easy to project anthropomorphism onto a vehicle, or a home.
Then again, automated defense systems were no less dangerous.
The molten-iron light of Mother Suprema's forward engines signalled the packs to finish the djinn they were toying with and return. Father Dominus, never the favoured ship, was already ascending.
Heartworm chose its moment and leapt from the disc with a blast of smoke, its tentacles flung out like shredded tail feathers behind it. Father Dominus immediately started to bank, curving aside from the perceived threat, which doggedly levered its advantage. At Heartworm's side, its new limb stretched to full length, unsheathing a slotted scythe that did not fit into the reality around it.
At the end of its dive the blade met skin. Heartworm skimmed the surface of the Ark, letting sparks fly as it stripped a thin ribbon of surface tissue from the Father's hide. The sample ended on a hook at the base of scythe and whipped behind it. The avatar broke its remaining momentum on the ship's back and rolled on to the base of a fin where it knew an airlock waited.
Its weapon could only do so much. Scratching the Ark did not amount to piercing it. Even if it wanted to, the Emaciator would be wasting absurd energy to try and infiltrate it by force. Conveniently, Jvan had secured the ships from everything but itself. Heartworm left Father Dominus in seconds, trailing an interior tissue sample, and severed tendrils from two of its guileless crew. It had been particularly lucky today.
Mother Suprema could have ascended by now were it not protecting a sisterhood that had yet to return. Inky tails of light streaked the air towards it, their elemental prey abandoned to survive. Heartworm took its chances and leapt for the closest pack. Shrieks later, a spined feather joined the other ornaments spiked onto its sampling knife.
The pursuit given by the change-eaters drove it off course and Heartworm did not dare fight them. Mother Suprema obligingly ploughed between the escaping and pursuing parties; It could feel the heat of the Ark's prow. A pulse from jets that had blessedly yet to overheat left Heartworm latched onto Suprema's side with its blade.
Perhaps the Diaphanes had finally boarded. As the avatar worked to carve out another strip of tissue from the Ark's enormous outer hide, it tipped and dove into the glittering ocean, faster than anything but the Leviathan itself had a right to move in water. Fighting a tremendous current, Heartworm dragged at its skin until the strip separated, and let go. As the Ark moved on and edged him ever closer to the boiling light of its engines, the Avatar hacked wildly into the space before it.
Fortune smiled on its efforts, and Heartworm exploded into the Submaterium of Mirus followed by tonnes of sizzling water.
"Were we successful?"
Behind it, someone had forced shut the temporary portal, and was lighting the tunnel floor with a hearth-like glow. Heartworm recovered its balance as best it could, and displayed the scythe onto which six ribbons of tissue were hooked.
"Excellent. We may begin as soon as you are ready." The God of Chance nodded, and spared a green-and-blue gaze to the flooded tunnel's architecture as he waited.
* * * * *
A ghostly apparition of Vestec strolled into existence around Heartworm. “My, my. This is a quite the fall from the Avatar of Jvan. Cowering in the woods, all alone, hunted by the metal killers of Logos as they eradicate your precious followers and creations. I could make it quick for you, if you like?” A ball of Chaos fire shone brightly in his hand.
A blur of movement, and the gleaming vessel in the fog vanished below the waters. Much good that would do it, but Heartworm took what it would get.
“Or, I could protect you, some of your creations, and some of your followers for certain. I can’t protect them all for certain, but I can promise that I will defend them against the encroachment of the Realta. Of course, if you’d rather wait for them to find you, that’s an option as well...Unless you have other favors to trade?”
“Nothing finds me,” and the thing resurfaced on Vestec’s far side, and further back. “By chance. Snuff that. Then we talk.”
Vestec snuffed out the flame, giggling. “I can protect you and some of your creations. Or you can be hunted down like insects and snuffed out. And before you say ‘I can hide from them.’ This entire grove is a festering hive of Jvanic creations and the Realta will burn it to the ground. You could run to a place that doesn’t reek of Jvan, but Logos will eventually find you. Assuming he doesn’t kill Jvan first and end you in a two for one fell swoop. I can stop that. If you agree to a favor for a favor.”
“All correct. Acceptable offer.” Heartworm was not one to deny truths, or argue needlessly. This was, after all, exactly what it had expected when it signalled Vestec. With that in mind... “Do not assume you have trust. May not sulk or grudge, but there are terms.”
“My my. You’re much more reasonable than Jvan.” Vestec mused, awaiting these terms.
With each point, it cut a new mark into the bark it stood on. “Vestec will defend no more and no less than Heartworm and its laboratory. Vestec will not speak the location of that laboratory once disclosed. Vestec will understand that Heartworm creates. Not destroys. Not creates to destroy. Vestec will swear this with the Adjudicator as his witness. And Vestec will answer Heartworm this.” The talon closed on its perch.
“Where is the Adversary?”
“What, no bleeding heart for your creations? You are a part of Jvan afterall. So the Sculptors and plants and Urtelem and of them are your creations as well. Much more of the practical type aren’t you?” Vestec tilted his head. “I swear on Amul’s title, may he smite me for not heeding my word, that I will protect you and your creatures, and not speak the location of your precious lab... As for creating, sure. We all create something. Usually with one purpose or another in mind. But all our creations end up destroying something. It’s how mortals survive and improve.”
This statement passed its audience like a tiring desert breath.
Vestec giggled, wagging a finger. “Tsk, tsk. You’re stepping over your bounds with that last bit. Protection for a favor, sure! You want to say what I protect and who I can tell of I protect, no problem! But information for free? That’s not how this works, Hearty my boy. I’ll make a trade though. I’ll tell you where the Adversary is, I’ll show you even, and you show me where Logos has been hiding out for a few hundred years. I know he has to have been making something. Something that doesn’t know the graceful and loving touch of Chaos.”
That, on the other hand, bore weight. Old skin-stitch deliberately made its lanky vehicle crouch. Body language: ‘I’m thinking.’
Given Vestec continued to do as Vestec does, the avatar calculated, this may be a game of inevitabilities. How long could Logos hide his headquarters, given that the Gods of Beauty already knew its place? Both had been secretive, true, but until now, Logos had returned the favour. Until now.
Of course, to sell out a beautiful world of intelligent life to the Devil himself was… Something.
“Regrettably fair.” Heartworm stood tall. “Do not presume there is pleasure in it. Logos will defend. Alone. You and he. Find the balance in that, Vestec. I know you will.” It wasn’t a threat, or even really a request. Just the last line of a calculation. “Condition accepted.”
“Balance is ever my purpose.” Vestec replied with a sweeping bow. A portal opened to the Realm of Madness. “Step right through Hearty. Meet the Adversary himself. Then you’ll take me to Logos’ pet project, and I’ll protect your precious Lab.”
Through the portal, something was squirming. It grew on the ground like grass, but glowed like a fiery coal between black rocks. Heartworm cautiously leaned forwards, unwilling to risk being pushed in by the apparition, no matter how unlikely that seemed. A cleaved mountain rose in the distance, its slopes lined with devillish pilgrims.
When it neared, something soft grew on the demonic meadow, and sprouted a white flower untouched by the heat- A thornapple. Heartworm plucked it and raised it to its faceplate. “Sufficient.” Its gaze seemed to turn back to Vestec. “Intriguing place. Mammon did well.”
Vestec tsked again, stepping through the portal and holding back the gibbering monstrosities that tried to force themselves through while the more sensible demons watched and waited. “Wrong again, Hearty. I made this place. Mammon just added a little of his own touch.” He made a sweeping gesture to the demons. “These lovely beings are his little touch.” He looked at the avatar, giggling. “Have you figured it out yet?”
“When I saw the empty throne.” The walker’s carapace slid open, and a delicate tongue gripped the flower. It was still growing. “He’s not as dead as you think.” Heartworm swallowed the thornapple, and with the hoof of its still-raised claw, sharply kicked the edge of the portal. It snapped shut.
“Enough. Observe.”
For a moment the avatar stepped down, close to the surface of the water, its vehicle still open, and drank. The air grew a little clearer, and Heartworm fainter, duller, as if it had stolen some of the Mangrove’s aura of invisibility. It rose again, balanced on one leg, and, stretching the other, the lopsided scribe tore a thin line in the air. Through it shone black, white, blue, and green. “Arcon.”
“That’s very nice Hearty. A pretty word. I like what you did with the writing too. Unfortunately, the name gives me nothing. There could be a hundred stars out there called ‘Arcon’ I need a location. A place to visit.” Vestec leaned forward. A certain..hunger, seemed to radiate off of him. “A place untouched by true Chaos. A location, Hearty.”
“Then observe.”
Heartworm’s scalpel-edge nails dug into the letters again, pulling them out of shape. Air began to hiss into them. The source of their colour took on a visible form as more and more was revealed through the written portal. A cloud-coated sphere of a planet, drifting in the light of a small white star.
Vestec laughed. It was far from his normal cheerful giggle. A sound of pure madness and malice, echoing through the mangrove. “Perfect Hearty my boy. Perfect. A world untouched by true Chaos. Something I need to visit soon.” He looked over at the avatar, who already seemed resigned to the consequences of what it had done. “Before I do, you have to show me your lab so I can defend it.”
“Mirus. North plateau. Eleven kilometres subsurface, furthest reaches extending to the polar valley.” It was, all in all, not the most secluded place in Galbar’s locality, but it was lonely enough. No hand had touched that moon since before there were mortals to count its phases. “Here.”
A tiny chunk of wood was sliced effortlessly from the roots and swiftly whittled into a sphere with faint nicks in its surface. Heartworm stabbed it with a hidden needle and held out the little replica of Mirus. The wood was cold and clammy; It wouldn’t burn in a campfire. “It lives. If it chars, come. Will be repaid in equal measure.”
Vestec bowed again, taking the piece of wood and teleporting it to his actual body. “You call and I will answer. Hide in the Realm of Madness Hearty. It’s the safest place in the Universe right now.” The Apparition disappeared.
Doubt it, thought Heartworm passively to itself, listening for the distant sound of blazing plasma.
* * * * *
Sheer scale was all that saved the Mangrove, and even that was a rapidly depleting bastion of safety for the ecosystem. Lines of white were passing over the cloud forest. A final fog that hid smoke at its heart, left in its wake nothing more than filthy ashen water. Acrid rain drizzled from the smog.
Maybe one day it would be resurrected. For now, its Lord could not afford to mourn the cataclysm.
Beneath the last untouched enclave of growth in the wetland, Heartworm lay naked in the water before the yawning, sucking maw of the Blood Well. Its vehicle, draped in mistletoe and painted with ochre, walked semi-autonomously into the chasm and sank, limp, blind. Stark whiteness dissolved it, a masterwork sacrificed.
An unclean thing performing an unclean act, the Emaciator's worm-eyes had been painted with khol, grey rags tied around its tail. Around the lip of the submarine pit, where fronds of algae did not dare to grow, pyres of cedar burned. An ancient censer smouldered with the scent of thornberry, its psychedelic vapour hanging in the brine, illuminated by the impossible flame. A thing that had once been a spirit pounded a drum with its hands of mud. The sound was shortened, dampened by the water.
There was a voice, singing to that beat. Too pure for the heathen light.
"Sanád asrer ad shin, shin, List ashok istam ïssun."
Eight pyres, seven of them alight. One each for the moons that still shone in Galbar's sky. Lex's pyre was in two halves. At the base of the seven each lay a membranous bubble, the outline of limbs and overgrown umbilicus faintly visible through the pink.
Heartworm slithered counter-clockwise around the pit thrice, prostrate, starting from true east. It finished at the base of a lit pyre, unzipped its mouth and stretched impossibly long, thin hands and eyestalks. One of those hands gripped a bone knife that lay amongst the cedar, and birthed the sleeping figure from its amnion.
A human, male. When its body disappeared into the pit, the pyre extinguished itself abruptly, expelling its smoke into a writhing cloud above the blood well.
Five times Heartworm repeated the process, offering six more lives, quenching seven pyres. Cogitare, Vigilate and Scitis, Auricolour, Periditus, Lex, Mirus. Human, hain, urtelem, angel, goblin, ogre, insidie.
"Inod thak, onol urol. Inod thak, oram urol."
The smoke above the well had coagulated into a vast viscous mass, so thick it was no longer truly fluid. As Heartworm watched, the oily murk drooped, as if weighed down, and began to drip. Tar flowed back down into the pit in copious sheets, draining from the shape that curled inside. First the starved outline of horn and bone. As more and more rolled from the thing, its outlines became those of sculpted muscle. A winged man with the head and hooves of a goat.
No blood had bought this demon. The slaughter was only part of the test. Heartworm had proved itself, not in sacrifice, but in the ways of ritual. The ability to learn a science not its own. It was no master. It had simply taken on the first meagre step of the initiate.
From the depths of the pit, a long dead voice whispered an inaudible, inarticulate thought.
In the still water, Heartworm sedated the demon, and dragged it to itself, knocking apart one of the soaked pyres, shedding the rags it had worn for the ceremony. Its spindly limbs were far stronger than they should be, and Heartworm quickly stowed its prize away in the hidden laboratory. The silt Sculptor rapidly followed it through the portal.
The Realta were nearing, and time was growing ever more precious. Despite everything, the singing Sculptor, Sel Na Uo Na Tay, was voicing one final verse above the water. Heartworm waited for him to follow. In those seconds, it found itself echoing the lull.
The Dark One, the Dark One dreams. Dream, dream on, Dark One.
* * * * *
From the start of the Arksynth Project, the Submaterium of Mirus had been working at capacity.
Even before the wyrms had finished constructing the labyrinth laboratory, Heartworm was there in the corridors, orchestrating designs for a labour force not yet born. Vakarlon attempted to plan alongside the avatar, as he could, until he realised that he was only a resource. From then on he relegated himself to assistance while he could. This was not the trickster's scheme. It only required him. And his death.
For all this, Vakarlon was still the most significant of the three deities who were to be harnessed, and the only one truly aware of what was going on. Jvan would not know until the work was done. Mammon was past conscious thought. So as Vakarlon rolled up his sleeves, fuelled and assembled swathes of the complex built for him with the eclectic bag of tricks that was his uniquely divine right, he kept an eye on the elusive avatar and its workers, and adjusted certain things to his liking.
Gravity, for one.
Heavy footsteps snapped back and forth, followed occasionally by lighter, faster ones. Locomotion had eased greatly since the technicians had stopped weighing less than a tenth of what they had on Galbar. Some ninety Sculptors had been offered salvation in Mirus, their telepathic link to Jvan surgically destroyed. Most had started to accumulate other equipment in its place. The size of the lab made communication by sound difficult, and while the sweethearts were diligent errand-runners, they could only move so quickly.
Sweetheart pods had been opened and samples had been cloned; About four hundred now fluted and piped their way through the labyrinth. Technicians en masse had learned how to whistle to them. That sense of initiative was what separated the two classes of workers. No matter what the cultists had grafted onto themselves, their tools remained far inferior to the sweethearts, and the sweethearts were useless without them.
The crucial thing, of course, was that only Heartworm was able to attach this or that exotic appendage. It had always been quick, and now it was a veritably omnipresent nuisance, albeit a quiet and practical one. Since the horrific extent of the acalya scourge became visible, a second project had silently appeared in the laboratory's far wings. Vats of clones, bobbing in shallow baths. Between the two ambitions, it never stopped working. Even after disappearing into the mangrove with Sel Na Uo Na Tay and returning with a partially dissected demon, it had still yet to construct a replacement vehicle, and rode on sweetheart heads and Sculptor shoulders. To see a minor deity so overworked it had to be carried between rooms was curiously humbling.
Humility was necessary. What the technicians tested was no less than the clay of gods.
The early Arksynth prototypes were nearly inert, the compounds required to achieve desirable forms far too esoteric for use by mortals at their current level. That changed when demonic tissue began circulating among the synthesis feedstock. A touch of occult magic caused the reactivity of Arksynth to explode in bizarre patterns. Reagents that stimulated viable growth became commonplace, and universally anomalous. Mundane compounds could to undergo processes so unlikely in natural conditions as to be almost arbitrary in order to become stimuli. Only the countless number of these redundant absurdities made discovering any one viable.
Scarcity fought eccentricity in a dilemma that soon characterised the project. At least both extremes resulted in a substance with quantifiable behaviour.
Testing the properties of Arksynth that did not stem from Jvan or Mammon was nightmarish. At best. The very nature of the traits being researched meant that predictable response patterns indicated failure. Qualitative examination of anomalies became the only remotely reliable means by which the Arksynth's effectiveness could be judged. Against all scientific precepts, the technicians were gradually granted absolute freedom to experiment by emotion and intuition. Ninety-seven Sculptor souls rejoiced.
Initial works were little more than tiny physical or chemical mechanisms- Kicking tendons strung on a rack, dishes that bubbled hydrogen in bright light. Divine intervention shunted these tinkerings far beyond what mortals could discover in the time they had. Headless Arksynth constructs began roaming the Submaterium, following simple contraction algorithms. Soft analogue calculators sprouted from walls like mushrooms, and strange fragrances wafted from things that wriggled in corridor puddles, some of them toxic. A once-human technician with nine eyes designed a fire lung that operated at the pull of a trigger.
There came a point where Help designed a prosthetic shoulder for miners whose arms had been stunted by childhood labour, driven neither by scientific imperative, nor artistic genius. They did it simply because, in Arksynth, the resource to do so had become available to them. Heartworm knew then that it was enough.
Silently it signalled Vakarlon to prepare for the end.
Over the life of the project, Heartworm had accumulated many samples. It stored them here.
Not so long ago, when the Emaciator lived in a holy mangle of eyes and tongues, it had kept its slumbering prizes close. Even now, having given up such an ungainly vessel, it stayed on guard. None of the Sculptors could access the tubes. They stood, glowing pillars in white tinted with green and pink, humming slightly, aligned according to what they contained.
Humanoids, rovaick and hain, and all the rest of Galbar's sapient species. Heraktati in all their lithe, wild glory. Things from the Deepwood, things from the Flowerbed, and drops from the last puddles left by the now absent Venomweald Writhe. Nocti, gaia and imagen, the kingdoms of Lex. Demons dissected. Djinni of the four elements. Clay from Chronos. Three ribbons of skin from the Arks.
And beyond this, the most precious specimen of all: Vakarlon.
The final mechanism occupied a room all its own, and no small one. Like a pipe organ, hundreds of perfectly vertical pipes in tight formation rose from the device, increasing in height towards the center, forming a mountain-shape. Every single fluted mouth displayed an identical readout of coloured pixels, the only touch of hue in a damp grey hall. Where a keyboard might have rested, there was only a cavity of hollow knives, inwards-facing, leading into a nest of tubes. Just large enough for a child.
"Promise me that you will not cease to administer painkillers to them when I am gone." Vakarlon hadn't turned. His black curls still faced the specimen vault behind. He was looking into the bed of nails that awaited him.
"Done." There was no point in going through the effort of removing the infrastructure he had insisted on anyway. "Are you ready?" Such mundane words, coming from anyone but Heartworm, spoken any time but now.
"If you do encounter Keriss," continued the trickster, "Tell her to learn always, as her mother did. To remember the right side of the fight. I will be forever with her in any way I am able." Careful, final words. "A binding oath, please. And for the tanks as well." So he had learned something about Heartworm. Somewhere between their plans, his short-lived attempts to joke, Vakarlon had realised what he was dealing with.
Too late to back out now. Heartworm tapped a slender proboscis to its head. "Adjudicator as witness." The young man nodded, and at last turned to catch the avatar in a mismatched stare that betrayed no fear. "Then I am indeed ready."
Vakarlon stepped down into the cavity, and his shirt vanished. His executioner obligingly skimmed over, and began to flay his back into strips, stretching each one and piercing them on one of the hooked knives. There was some flinching. The god was deliberately holding himself into a visceral form, and despite the pain that fleshly fragility brought, it did not waver as Vakarlon's blood dripped into the machine. No analgesics were strong enough for a god, and Ilunabar's draughts were far away. He spoke to focus his concentration.
"If Serandor does awaken, leave this place. I still have enough in me for one last mental battle."
"If Serandor wakes up, I'll be gone in the blink of an eye," reminded the coward, slowly grafting him deeper into the Arksynth device one shred at a time. This was a delicate work, an art, and Vakarlon's acceptance was a gift. A few more peels exposed the back of his ribs. Heartworm fell into the rhythm of levering them out of the spine one by one and plugging wires into the gaps, sensing the huge metal organ thrum with energy as it fed.
The illusion broke.
Everything was dark, and had been so for some time. The light nodes had come apart from the walls, leaving only the red of the tube readouts, each one flickering its failure spasmodically, too dim to illuminate anything. Vakarlon's dissected cadaver had melted all over the knives and long since dripped from his wired skeleton to a pool on the floor.
No hum of life from the arcane machinery and its tilted, fallen pipes. Alone, Heartworm stared into the silence. Something cast a shadow. A sinuous tongue of flame, all too real, snaked its way over the floor from the corner of vision. Followed lazily by another. More shadows began to splay across the walls as the room heated.
Heartworm slipped to the ground and began silently spewing a glistening black river of spindly limbs. They sprawled like a fungus, pushing it back against the side of the machine.
"Hiding from me? Come now, Heartworm. You knew very well that you would find me here. Whatever happened to 'I'll be gone in the blink of an eye'?"
Latching on to the toppled pipes, the black river forced its source further up the device, the only place it could hide from the fire that crawled below. The brightest streams were forcing a shadow up the wall, indistinct but singular. A human figure.
"Of course, you have never been much for talk. An admirable attitude. Shall we cut to the chase, then?"
The shadow crouched and leapt, and the seething mass of arms hurled itself from the top of the organ as something unseen collided with it and flung it down into the roaring inferno-
The illusion broke, and there was no blaze, only a vast charcoal lion that stood over Heartworm and snarled its iron grin. Serandor roared, igniting a crimson mane that lit the hall, and he pounced, and his claws gouged apart the pipes as the hairlike stream of tendrils fled and left behind cut limbs writhing like worms. And the Vengeful One laughed, and faced its cornered prey, and it leapt, and the mass of arms tensed and swung down into Serandor like a wave, grabbing, biting, fighting, rending-
The illusion broke.
Everything was dark, and had been so for some time. Gravity had weakened by an order of magnitude. Heartworm lay on the ground in a forest of its own distended tongues, and gagged as it swallowed them. The red strips of the tube readouts were still flickering in toppled disarray. One of the pipes slipped from its precarious balance and clanged onto a power conduit. A light snapped on, a single whiteness echoing in the ruin.
There was no sign of Serandor's claws on the machine, nor of fire, nor the limbs Heartworm knew it was missing. Vakarlon's body had vanished without a chip of bone or drop of blood remaining. Nothing more than a mirage, as it had always been.
Heartworm skimmed over to the toppled tube, its monitor still glowing a faint, dead red. Liquefied by the shock of the fall, the puddle of arksynth had reacted to the current between two damaged nodes and coagulated into a limp conductive cable. Just a stroke of luck. The grace of the glitch, capricious and undeserved. A trick of the light, when light was needed most.
Just a chance.
Four five sections, all one story.
First section. Prior to the Realta invasion, Heartworm takes tissue samples from the Arks and their Sweetheart crew as the Diaphanes enjoy a hunting trip on Galbar (inadvertently saving the life of a water elemental they were hunting). Thanks to Vakarlon, it enjoys some remarkable strokes of luck as it does so. No points spent. Action-y section again of dealing with Arks and how huge they are.
Section one and a half is a collab between me and Rtron, with its own summary.
-Heartworm is hiding in the Mangrove. Vestec plops an apparition next to it. It’s mentioned that Heartworm may have signalled its location so Vestec could find it.
-After being startled, Heartworm comes out to listen to the God of Chaos’ proposition.
-In return for an unstated favor, Vestec would protect it and whatever else it please from Logos and the Realta.
-Heartworm agreed, making Vestec swear on Amul’s name to uphold the promise, and also wanted to know where the Adversary was. (-1 might)
-Vestec made Heartworm reveal Arcon’s location to Vestec in return for finding out where Mammon was.
-Just to be REALLY sure Logos didn’t see Heartworm do that, it first took a second level of Concealment for 1 Might.
-Heartworm visited the Realm of Madness briefly, commenting on what a good job Mammon did ignoring and insulting the true creator Vestec
-Vestec takes a piece of wood so he can be contacted by Heartworm, and departs. SShHH IT’S NOT JUST WOOD IT’S THE PINNACLE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY
-Vestec departs, offering Heartworm the Realm of Madness as a hidey hole. Heartworm is skeptical.
Jvan 1 Might Ambient 5 Might in Ovaedis 2 Free Points 2C / 0D Level Five
Vestec
13 might 2 freepoint
Second section. Heartworm performs multiple human sacrifices, contacting the Adversary for the last time. Between the murders and the sacrifice of its current vehicle, it manages to summon a demon, which it takes to Mirus. References Mammon's theme song, Dolomite Lullaby, without linking it. 1 Free Point spent to communicate with the Realm of Madness. Not much happens in this section, it's just flavour closing the Jvan / Mammon arc.
Third section. The operations of the Mirus Submaterium are described. All the previous actions are revealed to have been taken are in the interest of producing 'arksynth', a substance that can be manipulated by mortals to produce organic materials and devices at about the same rate that conventional technology can be advanced, given the same level of time and resources. Ninety seven Sculptors, four hundred Sweethearts, Vakarlon and Heartworm staff the laboratory, toying with biotechnology far beyond what mortals can have without Heartworm's constant presence. Free action (Flesh) taken to create arksynth. The section is basically just a general run through stuff that goes on in the lab. Might be worth reading to get a feel for arksynth.
Fourth section. Vakarlon leaves a few final requests, and willingly allows his essence to be funnelled into a huge machine by Heartworm. Serandor makes an unsuccessful final bid to escape. Vakarlon's conscious being is dissolved and fused with arksynth, with Vakarlon's essence of balance through spontaneity and chance inseparably linked with the technology, rendering it forever unpredictable. Hence, Vakarlon now exists as the ghost in the machine, literal deus ex machina. 1 Might spent to enable Vakarlon to fuse his essence with arksynth. Section finally retires Vakarlon, and has music and a few twists. Good late-night reading.
Jvan 0 Might Ambient 5 Might in Ovaedis 1 Free Point 2C / 0D Level Five
Vec
Timemaster
