Antarctic Termite — Roleplayer Guild

Harbinger of the Natural Order, Guardian of Harmony, God of Kings and King of Gods, I AM THAT I AM
Level 7 God of Order
9 Might 5 Freepoint

All-Beauty, Horrorsome Engineer, the Cancer that Breathes
Level 5 God of Beauty
3 Might 2 Freepoint

No body of water on Galbar plunges as deep as the core of the Fractal Sea.

Those depths defy the heat of the sun and the turmoil of the seasons. In silent darkness that crushes men, where currents irresistable and strange creep along aeons of sludge that drapes the honeycomb arches of stone that convulsed and bled their waters onto the earth long ago, life must light its own fires. Here, the blood of the Life God may pulse yet in the veins of the deepwater denizens, but their die of shape is cast by another.

Spots of bioluminescence swirl around translucent sources. Gleaming horns rise into the current, spearing what the flow brings. Things without faces erupt from the mud and haunt the crevasses, lurking like a shadow in the corner of the eye, patiently stalking quarry that hangs motionless in the water column, antennae stretched and trailing far into the sensory void, awaiting the touch of death.

Sunken into the rock such that one can scarcely discern what is alive and what is dead between one tunnel and the next, the pitted cathedral of Jvan's body exists in exhausted limbo. Corals grow onto and into her, and tube-worms burrow; They take advantage of the flesh that is on offer, that bends the implacable current into softer streams. Her warmth is a boon, no matter how feeble the carmine light within, visible only in the absolute darkness. There is no more motion there.

Only dust that silts up the hollows of a god, grain by grain.

Yet on the surface of the world, waits another. Wings of aetherial starlight from distant worlds lift him above the sea, and a figure as dark as the void of space circled above like a carrion bird of prey. Lower and lower he circles closer to the churning waves, until his feet at last skim the surface of the water. 

The Ocean parted for him.

It was no simple task. These waters were as foreign to him as this entire world. But it still existed, and therefor, it was his. In almost an instant, the sea above the Cancer vaporized into steam, flash-frying millions of lesser life forms. Even from here, her porous monstrosity was visible through the clouds, the surrounding waters held back now by his power. He had exposed her  to the light of the sun. 

Another beat of his wings sent him downward, and he smashed through the wall of steam like it was made of glass, until he flew above the abyssal titan.

"I remember you," Logos said softly, as he cast Singularity. “So I will be brief. Everything that you intended to accomplish will not come to pass. Everything you have accomplished thus far will be undone. You will die."

What answered was less a voice than it was a heavy thought, weighing down a dislocated mind, tugging it into the mist. The steam that was settling, far too quickly, into a dense smog. Discolouring, pillar by vaporous pillar, with the taste of carmine.

Why?

For a moment inflating, the sanguine layer collapsed down into siphons and was inhaled into the vaccuum within, showing those scorched folds as they were meant to be seen- Filled with a red, fluid vagueness. And bathing in the depths beneath those veiled recesses, the inner body began to churn. The malign giant was waking up.

"Not so, Logos," breathed Jvan, "Not so."

And rising first in a faint moan, then in a cascade, the screams of the slaughtered resonated with All-Beauty's own. Its waking shriek snapped knots of heat and radiation into an explosive crackle in the waters around her and the air above and echoed far down the now-emptied telepathic channels that led to her children, dry, burnt husks while she slumbered.

Jvan's skin rent violently to display the teeth below and she yanked the great cold owl, dragging at him with an unseen tongue leading down into the bleeding maws.

It was the opportunity that Logos had been seeking. A flap of his wings sent him spiraling towards her endless maws, spurred even faster by her pull. Deep down into the carmine mist and to the deepest depths of Galbar.

From this range, he could not miss.

“I have had enough.”

A wave of force travelled outward from the king and struck Jvan head on. More flexible than the underlying stone, the matrix dented inwards, forced into concavity by the continuing thrust that collapsed her myriad hollows. It didn’t let up, and from her colossal form the ashes and silt and ocean water were pushed away as well. The bedrock cracked, and its shards of skyrocketed into warm summer afternoon air.

The force persisted, dwarfing gravity itself. 

He could probably have killed them all then and there—all of Galbar. And there was no way that with the kind of power he had he wouldn’t be able to. Instead he spoke to her as she lay pinned to the sea floor.

“I have had enough of this resistance. Enough of your attempts to outplay me at the divine game.” His voice sounded harsh. “My leniency is at an end.”

Depleted though it may be, his patience- If that was what it was- had already lasted longer than, perhaps, it should have. What sinews had torn and teeth had splintered by the continuing force were sprouting new ligaments under the cataclysmic pressure, reconnecting to conform with their distorted shape. Strain built and built, forcing Jvan deeper into the underlying stone, until- A tear.

What surface tissue still held up against the pressure rent and disappeared into the blazing carmine engines below, and the force burst into a honeycomb labyrinth of grey walls. Split by the narrow forks in its path, the pressure was dispersed over a wider surface area as it rushed into hundreds of branching throats, echoing at speed into the immeasurable depths of the Body. A last pulse of kinetic energy escaped from the surface of the lattice, a shadow of what had been absorbed by sheer, hollow, volume.

Jvan was still dragging at Logos when the wave was dispersed, and at the same moment she reversed the pull, shoving the still-descending god with a sharp resistance that broke on him as he flew.

His wings caught the returned force and Logos was sent spinning into the air, quickly righting himself. Against the monstrosity that was She, he appeared no bigger than a toy. He stared darkly down at her, Singularity humming in his hands. He would need a single opening for a single slash. She would not allow him to get close enough for that blow.

He would need to make that opening.

He needed materials. Iron. He needed iron.

His eyes blazed as he caused the space above his head to function as a magnet. At first, nothing happened, but as Logos fed the spell more fuel, it began to attract. A tiny nogule was pulled out of the sand and shot towards him. Logos erected a shield, and the pebble bounced up the surface of the purple barrier. When it got to the point above the god's head, it was folded into a pocket of null-space.

Logos fed his spell more power, and soon more stones followed the first. It was followed by more pieces, a million subatomic flecks of sand, raising waves of silt as seams of the material ripped themselves up from beneath Jvan. 

He stood at the heart of a maelstrom of iron and stone until the waves themselves threatened to collapse around him. It would not do to be detected, and he was about to be very noisy.

He would need to be fast. Logos blitzed through open space, attempting to regain the lost ground between him and Jvan, pummeling he form with repetitive strikes of gravity, watching as the Body rippled from the force. Water was turned into superheated steam, sand turned into shards of crystal and flung at her form, it was a thousand mosquito bites to the hide of an elephant.

He would need only a second.

First step: Logos created a spell to identify iron, and only iron, then sent it through a portion of his null-space. It would have been an impossible thing to do, if iron were not a basic substance. Rather than map every individual iron quanta, which would be impossible even at this speed, his spell returned to him a magical array of the metal’s distinct signature.

Second step: Logos phased all of iron into an all new, much smaller part of null-space. For another god, separating all the iron out of the debris and water would have also been impossible. For Logos, it was a simple matter of telling all quanta of iron’s previously determined signature to teleport over there.

There in this case happened to be a pocket dimension of folded reality. Once Logos had finished transferring the metal, the extra null-space contained only pure iron. He ceased working with her first null-space, focusing entirely on the second.

Third step: Logos modified the null-space, using even more of his spatial manipulation magic. First, he tied the space together at both ends. If it were a hallway, walking from the beginning to the end would place a person at the beginning once more. Logos had created an infinite space.

Fourth step: Heat. Logos pulled heat energy from the air around him, above him, beneath him. He poured more and more of it into his pocket space, where its only point of refuge was the iron. He used his own magic, as well, casting a very powerful, very simple spell to convert base material into heat.

The Ocean around them had been flash frozen by the time Logos was satisfied with the internal temperature of his iron dimension. He remembered the exact boiling point of iron—it was somewhere just shy of three thousand celsius, or five thousand one hundred and eighty-our farenheit. His was well past that temperature by now.

Fifth step: gravity. Logos ceased adding heat to the system and instead opened it to the curve of space generated by the planet beneath him. The superheated iron began to fall, but Logos’s space was infinite. The iron fell forever, in a system with no terminal velocity. The Lord of Order used a spell to amplify the gravity and increase the iron’s rate of acceleration. 

Sixth, final step: weaponize. Logos closed his system off to the planet’s gravity once the iron was moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

Logos took all the gravity away their battlefield. Weightlessness engulfed him, Jvan, and the world around them. Specks of dirt, bits of sand and ash, and droplets of billions of gallons of water and ice drifted in the air. 

Logos took all of the gravity from this and focused it into a single, needle thin channel between himself and the Cancer. The connection was made, and sudden, Jvan was the most attractive thing in existence. Logos pushed all of the air out of his channel. Begone, he thought. 

He dropped his sound spell and siphoned the iron into the gravity channel.

Logos’s stream was less than a millimetre thick of compressed, superheated iron. The pure white beam of light that flared into existence between him and Jvan was as thick as a tree trunk. It hissed, a sound that was so loud it was a tearing scream. Logos didn’t care if Jvan had slunk her way through the death of the old Universe, creeping past him on the Road. Nothing made of flesh and bone could withstand superheavy boiling iron travelling so fast. And nothing Divine could withstand Singularity.

The beam punched a hole through Jvan’s midsection, cutting her in two just above her base. It slammed her Body to the ground. She burst into flames from convection; and so did the ground around her for ten miles. The beam didn’t stop with Jvan. Sand in its path became glass. Bedrock beneath the dirt became slag. All the while, the roaring scream of the weapon filled Logos’s ears.

The power of his Law.

Colour died. Char remained, dark boughs collapsing in an inferno of combusting nitrogen into which the Lord of Order dove. Galbar's atmosphere blazed in the oceanic pit and heat stolen from the hovering droplets returned as fallout. Ice exploded as it vaporised in the air, and exotic pollutants roiled from Jvan like billowing liquid shadows, distorting what was left of its silhouette in the Hell that was.

Two halves of the hulk crashed back into the crust with sprays of molten earth.

And still It did not die.

In those fractional moments, Jvan went beyond pain, was cast beyond thought. Ephemeral sensations, both, scorched out of her from the skin inwards. Rose in the smoke and mingled with the exotic cloud of pollutants. But It was alive. It had no will beyond reflex and reflex was enough. All that breathes fights to exist. Even cancer. And ever was reflex faster than cognition.

Even as the husks fell their inner surfaces writhed out of compression and into the fire, each sprawling into its own stump. They connected without the use of physical space- Had been connected always. Those three dimensions were coming apart at the intervening seams, overlapping and pulling away. They scintillated. Abstraction bent in the hollow between the greater and lesser chunk of God and where the hues of plasma and coal failed to make it out of the cavity Logos had so blindly torn into the twisted part of space that was Jvan, they were represented by the only symbol fitting- Sinews, veins, stretched and pumping still.

Visceral creep that sprawled into the only empty space left for it- A tunnel leading straight to Logos.

The folded barrel of the weapon bulged as the All-Beauty further warped what Logos had distorted for his own ends. It aligned the needle of null-space into permanence, internally linear though it curled and twisted like a whiplash umbilicus. And then, a wounded animal gnawing away its own leg to escape the trap, It cut Itself apart.

Synchronised into a single spacial continuum, the fallout occurred instantly across every point within the glitching wreck of ruined universe and meat. Flesh material and less-so splattered within the chasm as the larger half of Jvan expired explosively, uncoupled from the still-living husk smouldering on the ground, its estranged distortion still centred on Logos, a pillar rising between the corpse and the assailing deity. Whirring energy of constant mutation-modification recoiled into chaos and detonated.

Were Jvan still in control, the explosive fallout of twisted geometries unwinding and exotic matter destabilising may have been enough to satisfy her retaliation. But inhibition comes only from the mind, and the All-Beauty recognised no limits. It knew what It had, and It knew what It could break.

The remains of Jvan gave a final, desperate shudder, fighting to keep its occupant contained. Then the shell broke, a flash of light and echoing boom signifying the sudden displacement of natural space. The world around it seemed to ripple, recoiling at the concussion of foreign energy that surged from the broken shell. The explosion rushed upwards, blowing the stone and sea pieces and sending shrapnel miles into the sky.

Held momentarily within the greater half of Jvan, its prison now shredded, was something Else. And as Logos dove at the corpse he created, another rose to meet him from what he had opened in the blink of an eye.

In a monolithic spire with Logos at its peak and its base sprawling out into fresh reality, the Other rose into Galbar.

A hole appeared beneath Order, not with a massive boom, nor with a polychromatic ring, but with a roar that spread out like a wall, tearing through the air in a second as existence ripped from the seams. At its point of origin was a black sphere, one that pulsed a wicked violet followed by a deep orange before growing.

Out of the portal came a ring of ragged teeth, rotting and feasting as great gobs of caustic saliva came pouring out. It screamed with the sound of a thousand thousand souls, gnashing their teeth in a torrent of never-ending anger and pain and suffering.

Focusing harder, he saw a small flicker.  It wasn't just the wall, it was the air in front of and around it, it was the entire direction that seemed to become semi-transparent.  For a second Logos could see shadows moving across the surface.  Strange bipedal shapes with outlines that seemed to be limbs were barely visible.  Suddenly, for the briefest of moments, he could see them clearly.  Eyes.  Innumerable alien eyes staring back into his own.

Long, slimy tongues slipped out of the mouth and shot to the ground below by the hundreds, tearing the chunks of existence from the realm and swallowing them whole. The thing sucked in the air, pulling up every drop of sea within a mile into its destructive grasp. Upon the peak of its form as it clawed into reality, Logos struggled in the grasp of its infinite tentacles which stretched impossibly into the endless gap between worlds in which his corporeal form dwelt, an unknowable number of its countless eyes glancing towards the twitching white god in its grasp. It opened the nearest few of its billion beaks in reply, but did not answer with words. Indeed, its speech produced not sound, but the absolute absence thereof, as though reality itself were recoiling aghast at the very idea of his maddening words. And still the silence itself foretold such terrible catastrophe that within would be heard the screams of entire worlds dying, a swan song for the very notion of life itself.

Its countless appendages swayed in a manner that might have expressed a noncommittal answer from a being restrained to a mere four dimensions of existence. In the Other’s case, the patterns and strange geometries produced by even such a minor gesture created an entirely new fundamental language of reality, which the Gods themselves would have found alien, conveying more in just a twitch than a millenia of understanding. To a mortal, the impossible knowledge would consume them utterly before they could even process the thought.

Logos screamed and thrashed in the Other’s grip. Flames danced across his body; a vain attempt to slough off the impossibility that clung to his reality like a disease. He could feel his skin burning, his hair and feathers on the verge of igniting as he nearly suffocated from the awful Unthing.

The flames pressed tighter against his skin, were absorbed, and then vanished into his flesh as the Abberant’s essence burrowed deeper inside.

There was the sudden and terrible sensation of being filled, of having his very form stretched to its physical limits.  It began as a massive headache that spread down his neck and over his flesh, bringing pain and pressure that threatened to split muscle and rupture organs.  He could feel hot pinpricks rushing up and down his flesh, like something was crawling over body body just underneath the epidermal.

Worst of all was the presence clawing its way up from the dark recesses of his mind.  The sudden feeling of being watched, followed by a strange tingling and twitching in his limbs, like he was a puppet and someone was experimentally tugging the strings.

The heat was dwindling, the tentacle’s withdrawn gone but for the thin membrane of fire that still wrapped around him.  A final burst of heat, and the flames winked out, plunging the sea into darkness.  Logos closed his eyes and let out a shuddering breath, trembling.  When he opened them, everything had changed.

The azure sky above them darkened noticeably as the little, puffy white clouds expanded to become dark monoliths that filled with roiling beams of electric light. Winds of lead and mercury howling through the rocky spikes, the smell of acid dancing along. The Other has passed through the tear, and Galbar was overshadowed by it. 

Logos beat his aetherial wings and tried desperately to get back to the ground as the monstrosity pulled him in. With a roar of defiance, the deity rent out of the space and reappeared in the air before the gap. The sliver of nothing, Singularity, hummed wildly in his hand and Logos grunted as it pierced the skein. A gap, not The Gap, was created. Between the molecules, between the atoms, between the quarks, between the subatomica there had always been Singularity. It had existed before existence in for a timeless time in a placeless place. If he was the beginning of All, then surely this was the End.  It was no small feat to bring the Nothing to light. A gap became a gash. A gash became a cube.

He began to darken as he wove. Space was snipped here, folded there. Time warped and wrapped. A tiny dark slivered out of him and expanded to touch everything, almost softly, the sea, the crater of molten slag, Jvan, then the Other’s tentacles. The sky was next as the quiet glow travelled on. In the center of it all, Logos danced upon Time and caressed Space, the world around them fragmenting and twisting unto itself, again and again...

Everything ceased to exist.

The chasm of waterfalls vanished with nary a protest. The floating ring pulsed one last white glow then shut itself. The mass of nothingness traveled up and around, encompassing everything in sight and beyond.

Just as it had begun, the pure chaos, the entropy, faded.

Logos stood in the center of where the glow had originated. He was panting madly as his eyes rolled back and gravity took hold of the unregion once more. He fell, all the way to the very epicenter of the uncrater he had made, one with smooth edges, as large as a mountain and then some.

With an earth-shattering thump, the Other crashed into the ground and lay there. From the corner of his eternal vision, in this space within space around space, he saw the hovering form of what was left of Jvan.

Chaos relied on contrasts, so when one no longer contrasted, there existed both all chaos and no chaos, both one hundred percent and zero with nowhere to go and no possibility of change. Space within Space. All the same. In the Gap, his Laws were useless. Here, they did not exist. A quintessential paradox; they existed and did not, were real and unreal.

What was not real could not be killed.

Logos levelled Singularity at the creature, now gazing upon it in full for the first time. It was beautiful, it was terrible, it was right, it was wrong.

 It was Wrong.

“Abominations like you are immortal, but you can feel pain. This sword can bring you hell,” he whispered, before the first blow was struck.

After a while, numbers stop making sense. The difference between thousands and millions and billions becomes blurry, and when Time has been killed, it’s even harder to keep count. Even Gods could grow tired.

Logos and Jvan were sole witnesses to the fight, and even they felt it was long. Long enough to be seen against the backdrop of eternity, something to be remembered by. Reality never stood a chance; the two had always been proof of that. It was just a matter of Time. Time was dead, however, devoured by this very beast, which something—statistics, perhaps, to referee the inevitability.

So the gods fought against the Other one.

Gods, plural. Jvan participated, now and then and unwillingly, if only because there was nothing else to do. He had long since shoved the burden of maintaining the folded space onto her geometric shoulders as he did the duty of fighting. That’s probably what angered the Eldest God the most.

So the battle was long, but it wasn’t endless. Even infinite creatures eventually meet their end. Singularity worked hard on the Thing From The Other Side, and one by one, the tentacles were cut off. And when more grew, they were cut off again.

When the tentacles ended, Logos went for the eyes. Then, for the stomach. Then, for the head.

He had been right. The creature couldn’t die, but it could feel pain. And, at one point, Pain becomes so great it becomes indistinguishable from dying.

Even though it was immortal, even though neither of them could be killed, eventually, Singularity found a way.

The walls of the cube folded folded upon themselves and the cubes folded upon themselves and the cubes folded upon themselves and the cubes folded upon themselves.

And a voice resonated from the tightening knots of locked and slotted space.

Move.

Not so much a warning as the only remaining faculty with which the Lord of Order could be shunted aside from the moment. Prevented, somehow, from confounding the opportunity that was so crucially needed to execute a plan of desperate delicacy.

In the quiet of an orbit that had seen only distant flashes on the surface of Galbar as it listened to the cruel echoes of bending, cracking space below, the last mechanism remaining to the All-Beauty refined its aim. Precariously compromised the inconceivably precious resource of unadulterated seconds (how quickly do things proceed far below, in the heat of the burning Moment, the teeter on the edge, the breaking point of Time!) with the accuracy of its sights, until, finally, there was no time left, and the risk, the horrific risk of hit or miss, was at its gut-wrenching minimum.

False glyphs scrawled themselves into being in rings of astronomical size around Ovaedis, stabilising effigies that morphed as they calculated, diverting power down, down into the narrow path of its opening maw.

Those esoteric devices blazed, dissolved back into space as dust before a gale, and Ovaedis fired.

A hypodermic spire of bent air penetrated the charred husk of the All-Beauty, pinning it like a needle through an insect, as its twin pierced the developing tesseract. Where an instant before there was nothing, now an afterburnt trail, an arrow-thin double helix, marked the course where the spikes had blitzed down from orbit.

A gossamer film of undulating mirage billowed between the two needles. A flimsy link from the still-breathing carcass to the confines of Pandora's growing box. And as the wreck of a battlefield continued to disintegrate, flecks of black began to sit, tattered edges flapping in the winds of Hell, in fixed spots around the vast core of the rift. Organic black.

Under the outer layers of skin that were scorched to the bone, the All-Beauty was undergoing resurrection. Faint blue pulses lit the soft motes of flesh surrounding the tesseract from within, fading quickly, like thoughts. They grew, unravelled, reformed, until the strain of their own task was too great. Then they unwound into pale cyan flows- and burned off.

Locked into holding the weight It had created, every flicker of awareness that was recovered from the night could only but be incinerated at birth, fuelling the insentient engine that had assembled itself in the fire and was now haphazardly failing to build a hand with which to carry the burden on its back. Any scar produced from the healing was ripped out and recycled to calculate the delicate growth paths of the dark specks, only for them to collapse again. Jvan's eyes flickered open, only to be digested.

Neither effort was succeeding. No compromise existed between repair and imprisoning what had sprouted from the amputated corpse. What healed could not stay healed under the ravenous strain of suckling the motes, and without consuming everything the All-Beauty was still able to weave under the crushing weight of Its own brokenness, those scraps of tissue could not survive.

Always the mind follows the body. The entity was trying to craft a tomb of its own flesh and gristle and all the while abandoning it to unravel alone. A canvas, no matter how bloodstained, is never complete without the heart of its painter.

Succumbing to the strain of the needle, the All-Beauty let itself be torn in two.

Whipped by an unseen wind, the diaphonous curtain between the needles flowed violently as its two terminals realigned. A new crop of dark flecks materialised around the tesseract, cyan pulses pushing their edges to grow. They met, tangled, integrated, formed layers. Glowing vents of energy erupted on its surface and were snuffed out, only to intensify deeper in the rift- A furnace.

But the growth did not wane nor waver. It burgeoned, honing itself into resilience, and channeled every phase of maturation inwards, ever-changing, perpetually compensating for the dynamic chaos within the tesseract. One fragile skin at a time, the anomaly was covered. And with each vivid stroke, the shell redesigned itself, compressing into a tighter and tighter bundle of rippled tissue along perfectly carved lines.

As the frayed and punctured wall of seawater finally began to collapse back into the shattered battlefield and onto its denizen, the needle piercing Its body dissolved from the tips inward, becoming one with the connecting membrane. Freed at one end, the film briefly became a tail, and was consumed by the living kernel, whipping almost playfully.

Then, for a moment, there was only roaring water.

...

In the oceanic dark, the kernel imploded, elegantly folding itself away into a bundle little bigger than a newborn. Its once-colossal surface shrunk into a perfectly symmetrical finish of glossy black, and floral golden polygons bloomed between the indents as if to say, here. I'm complete. Your efforts have made me beautiful. Take me. Lazy ripples of vivid blue drifted over the surface like paint.

A prickle of awareness realised that it was clutching the kernel telekinetically. Still stiffly holding it in place. The mental grip uncurled. The creation rose sharply upwards through the water. 

It floats.

An isolated thought, chasing it on its way, a twitch of consciousness without direction, its supporting mental architecture still under construction. More innate instincts moved to recall the device, plucked it out of existence where it was and back into the hollows of the sunken husk. It immediately began to float again, moved by the simple principle of buoyancy. This time it was let go.

The kernel could travel as far as Fate willed. It was still, deeply and ultimately, an iteration of All-Beauty. It would return when it was called. It would die with her. And the Tesseract would die with it. Woe on the soul of one who would break the seal upon the rift. Woe on they who would dare discover the debt Galbar owed the Lord of Order, and the horrorsome Engineer. 

For now, the waves could have it.

As the accursed thing made its way to the surface, the entity's awareness blurred away again. Mental conduits began to weld themselves back into being, each one searing its way painfully through the sensory void. Sparks of disregarded memory momentarily sizzled in the nothingness but did not catch.

Clink.

The last shard of porcelain tumbled from its precarious resting place and ignited a storm of recollection.

Realta. Acalya. Logos. Xerxes burning. They're here.

Sculptors calling to me. Not any more. Thirty thousand dead. Halos- Halos? I made those. Their voices. Why are their voices so scattered? No, I did that. Lens groves melted. Teknall in the skies. Urtelem fighting Acalya guardians- the Distant Dance. Amber lost on the White Ocean infestation zone. A hain? Ophanim. Rovaick hunted. Amartia still missing. My name on the Oath of Stilldeath. Alefpria- Lifprasil. Lifprasil! Father Dominus- Undefended- I need to modify it. Whatever he needs- I-

The memories began to catch up to the present moment. Jvan opened her eyes, and saw herself burned and dismembered at the bottom of the ocean. 

"U- Uk- Uagh- A-"

Her voice began to gag. Awareness returned, and with it, pain.

"Uaah-aaagh-"

Unimaginable pain.

Jvan's released a choking moan. It morphed into a wail.

"Haaaaa- A- Ah-..!"

For a moment, the sound weakened, pitch rising until it was imperceptible. Jvan cried out.

"AAA-AA-AAGH-"

The wail became a scream, rose, rose and rose and rose, losing auditory coherency by the second, cracking into a roiling, unending static screech.

Jvan clutched herself as her mind repaired itself one agonising link at a time. Senses switched on, growing keener and keener on her tender consciousness, and the pain grew clearer. And clearer.

And clearer.

* * * * *

Funny, the way things turn out. Too easy to think it was all meant to be. Isn't that right?

A cold dawn on the Sparkling Sea. Distant stars had yet to pass from the horizon. The sky was grey enough to promise gusts.

The Sculptor ambled with a looping, easy grace over the beach, not slow, yet with a deliberate gait that implied no haste, leaving pairs of huge bird-like footprints on the sand while their little front paws and middle paws made smaller, deeper tracks, supporting on four feathered forelegs the weight of a hunched torso and a long, thick neck. An arc-shaped metal halo was fused with that neck at the lower middle and again at the base, and from under its shawl of silky feathers dangled curious tags and vivid beads on cords.

That neck terminated in a sheer white disc, a mask-like face with perfect black circles for eyes and no other features. Faeries followed it with sweeping movements of their long, gossamer wings. Only a slight leaning of that heavy, ruffled neck gave any indication that they were even looking at anything in particular. Indeed they were.

And something was looking back.

What had come to pass had come in a storm of chaos and change, and the stillness that followed seemed almost illusory. Like a quiet afterlife, spent contemplating the tumult of mortal existence. Yet, despite everything, it was very much real. This new existence, this oddly favourable state of affairs- Real.

I'm just over here. That's right.

The voice of the painter beckoned the Sculptor in. An unmistakeable object sat half-buried in the sand, as waves and seagrass puddled around it. They sat down before the kernel, crossing their hindlegs with an oddly human ease, tail feathers fanning behind them, caring not a bit for the wetness of the ground. Four muscled and crested arms banded with bronze reached for the kernel, held it in tiny, dainty paws, squirrel-like, completely feathered and still uncannily resembling hands. Little fingers felt the surface of the device, its smooth rises and falls, its golden spirals. Expressionless eyes watched the slow pulses of blue over its surface.

If only they knew the earth-shattering danger of the thing within the box that was only barely held back by fortifications that had to be continuously renewed as they wore into nothing. Then they might have stepped lightly around the kernel. 

As it was, there was no need for alarm. Certainly, the voice felt none. It didn't mind losing what it made. Here, safe under the undulating layers of a hectic reality above, in the vaulted halls of the Tesseract unending, was a white space. So it painted. And the seal held.

On the surface, its mind was free to wander.

"Hello," said the kernel.

'Mmmmoom,' said the Sculptor, by way of greeting.

"What's your name?"

'Moohf, mumf.'

"I see. Hello, Old Walker."

Old Walker's neck twisted to look at the kernel in its hands upside-down. As it did, their simple face seemed to unhinge at the lower edge, lifting away from the neck to reveal a double row of sharkish teeth between neck and face. The hidden maw grinned. Old Walker only ever opened their mouth to smile, for that was the only expression possible to it.

"I haven't chosen a name yet. Would you like to see my face, instead?"

Old Walker nodded.

From within the kernel in its hands, part of the blue glow seemed to escape into the air, revealing itself not so much as a glow at all- Rather a faint ripple of translucent colour that hung in the air. It began to unfold and undulate, flexing back and forth, forming straight lines and sine waves, and spirals, squared, circular, and irregular with tumbling tails, often all at once, in some places dense enough to be opaque, in others almost too faint to be visible, an expression fluidly cycling through many possible forms.

'Mruuuum?'

"I have," said the parameter ghost. "My name is Phi. Chiral Phi, Composer of the Light."

Featuring Logos as Sans.

Logos approaches Jvan on the seafloor, evaporating the surrounding ocean to expose her to the light. There he states his intentions to kill the slumbering god and put an end to her plans. Jvan is none too pleased with this idea, and lashes out at Logos.

After an initial clash that leaves neither party seriously injured, Logos uses his own power and that of Singularity to design a physical mechanism with which he smites Jvan using a beam of high-energy particles moving at relativistic speed. The beam cuts Jvan's massive body in half.

However, the complex nest of tangled and distorted space within Jvan, while unravelled, is not destroyed. Gravely wounded and effectively comatose, the two pieces of Jvan remain alive and linked. Operating mostly by reflex, the smaller half stimulates the larger half to riddle itself with Gap portals, then cuts it off and leaves it to self-destruct.

The cataclysmic explosion of eldritch space and matter is shortly followed by the rupturing of a major Gap rift. With Jvan mostly out of commission, Logos receives an open window seat to the nonsensical distortion of time and space, is assailed by a variety of bizarre Other entities spreading from the rift. A vast creature, possibly the same one that dragged Perfectus into the Gap long ago, is released.

Logos moves quickly, using Singularity to construct a quarantine around the rift, then battling the escaped entity. Jvan's instincts for self-preservation work at containing the rift while Logos is engaged in combat. At last, after an indeterminate amount of time within the distorted region, the Other is forced to retreat. Logos finally forces time and space to fold in on itself recursively around the rift, forming a sealing tesseract. 3 Might spent to create the Tesseract. 3 Might spent to exercise dominance over even the indomitable, claiming Order (Subjugation). Order (Time) unlocked.

Jvan slowly starts to come back online, though still unconscious. Using Ovaedis, the only resource she has left, she connects herself to the rift and attempts to create a permanent plug for it using her own flesh. However, her abilities are starkly finite, and she is unable to do this without jeopardising her own recovery. Forced to compromise, she creates an Avatar around the Tesseract that perpetually battles to repair and re-contain the volatile rift within. Finally sealed, the battle comes to an end. The avatar shrinks to the size of a basketball and floats off on the Fractal Sea. 2 Might spent to create an inert avatar.

Conscious thought slowly and painfully returns to Jvan as she starts the extensive healing process.

Some time later, the kernel washes up on a beach of the Sparkling Sea. A Sculptor named Old Walker discovers it, not by coincidence. The 'painter', the sub-mind growing within Jvan since she claimed Geometry, is revealed to have been isolated from her as the avatar containing the Tesseract. Though effectively powerless, its creative energies employed to reinforce the walls around the Tesseract and unable to spend Might, it is capable of projecting a mobile, conscious spirit outside of the kernel. The avatar names itself Chiral Phi.

Jvan
0 Might Ambient
0.5 Might in Ovaedis
0 Free Points
2C / 0D
Level Five

Logos
3 Might
5 Free Points
Level Seven

* * * * *

Logos's mouth tasted like salt. His brow furrowed, musing upon the strange grainy texture on his tongue, and rolled over.

The cold smack of the water against his bare flesh made him open her eyes.

His head was underwater for a moment. He turned his head to the left and saw the open sea stretched out before him. To the right was the same. He supposed that at somepoint the sea had reclosed after he had torn it asunder. Perhaps even now, Jvan was beneath him, skulking in the depths.

What was done was done. He would not forget the events of today. He would not make the same mistake twice.

This was easier said than done. Every breath he took ended in his shuddering. Every divine heartbeat was abrupt. Even opening his wings only made him feel the slimy seaweed that laid in the depths of the water he had awoken from that would tangle around his legs and keep him at the bottom of the ocean forever. How he yearned to turn every drop to steam.

The sky was gray and the world was cold.

The last thing he remembered was finally slipping between the sheets of reality as his world became fire, lulled sleep by exhaustion and the rhythmic crackle of Time as it seared through the Sky and Jvan and...

Order opened his eyes with a jerk.

Cold, broken stone digging into his back made it clear that was no longer the case. Logos rolled to his knees, casting his head left and right, drinking in his surroundings curiously. Mouldering stonework, collapsed walls, shattered ornamentation—

“I know this place...” he murmured, eyes widening in curiosity. “But why...here?”

Overhead, the melted ceiling revealed a black sky lit brilliantly by a thousand thousand stars, each twinkling in the heavens like a jewel. Though there was no moons, the whole place was lit by some strange luminesence that allowed him to see, a strange pale light that reflected off objects strangely. The shadows it cast were deep pools of utter blackness, almost runny and liquid like fresh inkstains.

The God took a few tentative steps forward, bare feet clapping on the broken flagstones brightly in the unnatural stillness. There was no wind, no sound of the forest outside, nothing—it was eerie.

He turned his eyes across the ruined lodge. Such a small place, he remembered as he had gazed from Orbit, his all seeing eyes gazing upon the Hive of the Beautiful. A lodge of Sculptors. He had watched as one of the Realta change course to purify it.

It lay now, slumped against the far wall of the building the stone around it melted and cooled in rivulets, its center chest blasted open wide, leavings shards and spindles of their silvery shell like gossamer threads across the floor. The white flame which had filled it had been snuffed out, and the metal carried with it only the chill of long-death. Logos sunk down before it, his wings pulling the remains and the god into a tight cocoon.

He had forseen death in abudance. He had forseen casualties. He had expected retribution and resistance. He had not forseen this. This was not the foe he had sent his children to fight against. This was not their fight.

"Forgive me," whispered the King of the Gods dispassionately, as he pressed his forhead against the Realta's, holding the empty shell of his child to himself.

The building fell away from him like sand as the God rose into the sky, the fallen star interred beneath the soil. In the distance, he could see the glittering sparks of his children, speaking, laughing, screaming to each other in their language of light. He could see their sudden cries of panic as they were being quickly snuffed out, one by one. How long this had been going on, he did not know. But who had done it had been made all too clear.

"No more."

Singularity flared to life in his hand, beating his wings across the forest as Space and Distance twisted around him as he blitzed to his foe.

"Teknall, I have come."
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