Despite narrowly escaping being burned some more, and being punctured within another inch of his life, Ulor remained all throughout, by some miracle, lost in his transfixed state. While this fortunately did not impede his ability of wilful action - though his accuracy seemed to have suffered slightly - his gaze remained lost somewhere in the vague direction of the remaining enemy, and his thoughts presumably somewhere deep under the sea. Only when finally the paladin's hammer, as implacable as its wielder, brought an end to the struggle did start shaking his head, as he tended to do when returning to a fully waking state; and when the feline, seemingly driven by some sort of atavistic hunger for fish, began to maul the already motionless corpse, a bout of irritated grumbling was heard from his side - a certain sign that everything was as normal as it could possibly be.
With little more than a last condemning glance at the frenzied monk and those of the party who followed to subdue her, the elf making even more of a scuffle in the process, he hobbled towards the altar, now guarded only by the lesser acolyte's body and its floral decorations. His gait was limping and painful, and he found himself leaning heavily on his staff as wounds old and new made themselves heard in a stinging choir; yet he found in himself the strength to admire the building around him. The solemn silence of temples and abbeys, which had never quite left him since the bygone days of his novitiate, coiled about him almost reassuringly, as a fine blanket might on a winter night; the high, vaulted ceiling, less roughly shod than those he remembered, was as a lid between an eye unaccustomed to light and the glare of the midday sun. He wondered if, had that been possible, he would have felt at home for a moment.
Whatever the function performed over the altar was, it clearly had been already well underway when the group had intruded upon it. A ritual symbol was seared into its surface, and an offering of incense was being prepared about it, presumably to be immolated. Ulor frowned as he gazed over the mark. The ends of threads of familiarity writhed somewhere far off in the darkness, yet there was nothing concrete he could grasp. Strange, indeed. A cursory inspection of the surrounding space did not shed any further light onto his findings at the scene. All he could see was what could be ordinarily expected to be in such a place. Censers, instruments of worship... Instruments, indeed. If they could tell him nothing thus, they could not deny him another service. He swept up a victim's worth of incense, and, seizing hold of one of the censers, dragged himself back towards the main door.
In the chamber to the left hand, discussion over the priestess's corpse was still ongoing, but that was not what Ulor had come to see. Lifting himself up from his stooping posture with some difficulty, he glanced about over the group's heads. There did not seem to be much to be there, either. A relatively small collection of books, none of which he would think of as suspicious. What did people know when they spoke about not judging a book by its cover? One could have thought they actually had some experience with it, but no. Not one of them had actually ever seen a truly dangerous book, as far as he knew. But he was straying from the point.
Satisfied with his lack of discoveries, save ones of a strictly practical sort, Ulor hobbled into a nearby corner and began to arrange the censer and incense for the incantation, whispering unclear, yet obscurely sinister words. Soon, the two would be as one again - and this dreadful headache would be gone at last.
Ulor investigates the altar (Religion roll of 10), the nearby space (Investigation at 7) and the lateral room (Investigation at 5). As could be expected, he finds nothing useful except for a censer and some incense. Now he can summon back Octopus with Find Familiar at someone else's expense.
The golden light dissolved like mist. Jvan passed through to the other side unwavering. She had seen this one before.
Left to her own devices under a cloak of death and char, there was plenty of time to explore herself, explore All-Beauty. There wasn't much else she could do. But that didn't matter much. There is no sudden stop to end the fall of those who dive into the lungs of Jvan.
Her awareness swept down sculpted tunnels and halls without floor, vast twisted spaces that led deep into the burrows of infinity. This architecture had grown without gravity, without plane of reference, and Jvan passed as a moment of self-awareness in the walls, a gasp in the rhythm of Cancer's breath.
There was no up, no down, no back, no forwards. Only depths.
What struck Jvan as she observed the still-growing abyss was how much of herself was her own craftsmanship. All-Beauty was the deity, the endless landscape, the scintillating fractal machine on which Jvan hung, a psyche on life support for eternity. She saw herself in intimate detail as she flew, a goddess with tubes in her veins and power quaking from each mechanical heartbeat.
She had built that machine. Every fold and furl could be traced through iterations without number until it all came back to her hand. There was an uncomfortably lonely sense of being lost in herself. Things were familiar even though she had never seen them before, had no memory of when she had made them or why. Déjà vu on and on and on.
Details flicked past in the corner of vision and were lost into shadow. Things she recognised, yet would have remained forever invisible to her were it not for Vowzra's illumination.
Right there. A tiny scratch, written into the wall of the organic cathedral, buried in a niche of flesh.
Jvan Tueda Nuul.
Her own signature, in her own hand.
When I had hands.
...
Pointless.
* * *
There!
A distant corner of Jvan steamed and cracked, solid tissue twisting and tensing into life. Her awareness focused, isolating her find in an impossibly vast cyst of cellular machinery, cocooned it and suspended it on tendons, an idol in the meat cathedral.
Jvan visualised a design and put it into effect. Flesh warped, bloods filled vessels, psychic ripples snapped into alignment, and her probes wrenched themselves from the walls.
The probe hovered easily into the gap left between exterior and cocooned prize. Others joined it in no particular formation, each a different shape. Jvan watched the light brighten before her.
There was no bubble surrounding each pocket dimension, no wall or boundary. You simply passed from one realm of Jvan to another as smoothly as beach gives way to desert, felt the grip of a new reality strengthen, the old one falling away like seawater from clothes.
The brightness resolved itself into features. Two suns in a pale sky, and many other stars also. Another shore, a real one, its only waves the ripples of flora pulsing smoothly in its center. It was ankle deep, a crust of finely gnarled chitinous rock jutting out over its surface, a puddle the size of an ocean. Little black nothings oozed rapidly to safety as Jvan passed overhead.
Everything seemed normal. Sane.
Jvan trailed a jagged limb over the ground and retracted it, tasting the world, tasting the weird. It was clear to her what had happened here. This had been one of the first pocket worlds to develop inside the newly scorched god. It must have sprouted in the chaos, seeds sown before the fight was even over. Little wonder whose aspect it had taken, then.
This was a place of Logos. Empty of gods, clean of corruption. A Jvanic Arcon.
Jvan catalogued it with the rest of the more unusual worlds that lay within her.
* * *
She found it hovering in the shade of a tubular tree, its deep indigo branches swept smoothly up and overhead like a storm-wave. A chip of fine porcelain, perfectly motionless, balanced on air.
Jvan approached it cautiously, wary of disturbing the thing. It had taken a long while for it to come to rest. A long, painful while.
For a while probe and shard just hovered there, faceless faces staring into one another. There was no point of reference for size outside of this place; The two seemed equally large. Maybe it had grown.
Jvan watched it and felt nothing. There was nowhere to go from here.
I'm tired, she realised. This world has worn me down.
How long had she been here, fighting, aching, creating? How many layers of scar tissue had built up over the tumour?
Wounds did not concern her. Anything that hacked new patterns into her flesh made her stronger. Toun, Vowzra, Logos, the Other... All-Beauty feared none of them. Nothing could purge the Cancer. Nothing could reach the asymptote, nothing could reverse the growth.
But Jvan was small and the world was rough. If Vowzra's light had taught her anything, it was that, deep down, she was not superhuman, not in the ways that could help her with this. She was just a child, a god maybe but still a child, enthralled by a world that exhausted her. Jvan looked back on herself and saw a life spent bruising herself on her family, playing with a planet so bright and beautiful that it blinded her to the vast gulfs beyond.
I've been on this rock too long.
Jvan reached out an arm to the shard and it vibrated like a harpstring, whining faintly. She pulled back again. A wrong touch would send it skittering into the depths again. Clink, clink, clink. That one bitterly familiar syllable.
What had she said to Toun in the factory? That she would rather create.
That she was tired of emptying.
The words came easily, as they had not done in many years.
"May Lightened Burdens fall woesome onto Waters of Thine Broken Yoke, o poorly wandered Cell of Echoes Heavy, and Sound Hollow in their Weight; yet Dying, freely Travel; and in such Sails carry more of Flying Voice than ever sacred Cargo left the Future..."
Jvan lowered a hand and made a sharp movement. Space poured into the line she'd drawn until Teknall's weakened barrier collapsed, and the rift writhed like a maggot. Jvan effortlessly picked up the brush with which she had become the Painter, and, reaching into the Gap, tore out its innards like rot from a fruit.
Things splattered into the alien landscape and were disposed of by her probes. Surgical violence dominated the landscape for several seconds as arcane vials were wrought and filled with malignant matter.
Still elbow deep in her garden, Jvan assigned numbers to the blank space in the Codex and marked its borders on the grid. The Gap crevice disconnected from its fellows and she gripped its inner edge, ripping the rift inside out as she extricated her arm with a yank.
Everything you have comes from me, Phi, she thought to herself, calm layered over glowing iron bars of determination. You are nothing but a shadow.
Jvan extended more arms and lifted the empty Gap crevice with psychic force, fingertips moving as if conducting a dozen occult orchestras at once. The polydimensional space fluttered like a ribbon under her grip, and, folding it to her liking, she ran it under the tip of the porcelain shard.
Reality screeched like needle on steel.
Jvan's hands whipped and the space refolded. Once more she ran it under the point. Then again.
Again.
Jvan worked the empty space until it was unrecognisable. By the time she was finished, the raglike strip of existence had been wrought from colour chaos, marked with linear measurements and glyphless units, into a darkened mass of symmetry.
The Engineer hovered before her work, watching the lightless mass slowly revolve in several directions at once, sharp semi-cubic angles intersecting and folding into each other with each new perspective. The probes watched silently as the first of their number disappeared into the void.
* * *
Incomplete absence became substantial. Almost. This was new. Unusual, unprecedented. True, anything would have been unusual and unprecedented, but somehow this was a novelty even more new, a strangeness even stranger than other things could ever have been.
But then, who - what - could be certain? There were neither certainty nor knowledge. Nor was there surprise at the sudden change into being. There had been a stirring, a shifting, a swirling in the half-formed emptiness which had in a way acknowledged the formation, but there was no intent behind it. Indeed, there was nothing behind it at all, since it was enough for the motion itself to be there.
Or perhaps not entirely. Shapes and colours flitted through the irregular vortex, drawn by it rather than forming it. Vibrant loops shifted into angles, then twisted back into multiple curves, dimly reaching for the opening that something of which they were a part had sensed.
Then there was mutilation. Something which was not of it delved within and tore the unstable whirlwind, tossing parts of its insubstantiality into the presence, where it withered to mere form. There was no pain, no struggle, no death, even. Only removal, brutal and expedite.
Change? Yes. But there had already been change. This was more.
Improvement?
Perfection?
Which perfection? And why perfection?
Completion of absence. Absolute void. Purity.
There was, if one could say was, nothing left. More precisely, a nothing. Strangely for a Gap, that section had never known such intense lack. It was as new as the seeping into being, as singular. As alluring. Despite having nothing, it had a draw. Not despite. The nothing was the draw.
And something was drawn. Though all had been ripped out from the emptied rift, there now was a breath of half-being. It certainly had not been there before, as for a moment nothing had been nothing. Nothing was truly still nothing. Otherwise, the semi-entity would not have been there now. Nor had it come from the presence around, since it distinctly was not of its kin.
But there it was, as the nothing remained nothing.
It did not watch or feel, wait or fear. It silently, immotely experienced the void.
Integrity of hollowness. Achievement of created unbeing. Void.
* * *
Abyssal.
No heat, no light, no matter, no underlying quantum fizz, no framework for existence other than that which she brought with her. Shielding the nonexistence from her presence with a field of self-annihilating space that curled in on itself as she moved, Jvan explored the recycled fragment of Gap.
Nothing, of course.
She stretched out a hand into the emptiness, relaxed her shield just enough to touch the void. Slow threads of colour splayed into the dark, humming into the silence. They curled and zipped and split at the ends, a tiny spark of somethingness that refused to fade into the night.
From void, creation. Just like she'd done in the womb of the world. If Jvan had eyes, they would have danced.
Jvan swept further into the void, faster, leaving the colours behind. She cast out her hands and more threads of vivid existence bloomed into the vacuum, resonating to the tune of the first. Again she flew, and again she punched bursts of reality into being from the nothingness, each time a new colour, embroidering a trail of chaotic patterns as she moved. And again! Until darkness itself becomes a colour!
She let the cloak of vacuum slip away and watched the emptiness around her explode into a canopy of moving, playing, interacting somethings.
"As ripples in a pool of nothing, so too do I disturb," she murmured, watching the very act of speaking stir new forms into the psychedelic growth encapsulating her. Then, folding fresh space around her once more, she left the tangled ball of lightless ambers and golds and indigos, watched it evolve and grow below her. There were yet more experiments to run.
Without touching the spaceless world, Jvan flexed into it, the psychic force of her motions flexing with her. Nothing changed. There was not yet any medium that could carry her will. There was only the colour which she had created, and that seized on her movement, breaking gently apart into coiled fragments. Existence moved, spinning around her, dissolving and reforming untouched. And the void moved with it.
It's as I thought, hummed the faceless probe, reality storming on all sides. Once there is context, emptiness ceases to be void. Nothing is simply the counterweight to something. Negative space, black glow, canvas left empty yet still part of the whole. Diversity begets reality.
And now that she had the light, the darkness was hers to control.
For a moment, as the chaos of new life and new ideas whirled inside Jvan, she thought of the vacuum beyond Galbar- Not as a waste, but an ocean to be sailed. And she saw freedom.
The void stormed on.
* * *
There was suddenness, and the void was no more. Scintillating dances of being swept over expanses that erupted into shapeless demilife to accommodate them. Scars of light and colour sliced across the hollow domain, bleeding in cacophonic song. Many-sided splinters of presence became one with their lack of surroundings as a force poured into the haven that the remnant of the rift had become. Impetus, strength which doomed the unmade.
As it had been with the tide flooding into entity, this was an instantaneous escalation of incredible porportions. Force was a misnomer for what had approached and brought itself into that which could not contain. Unsurprising, as there had never had been names nor the need for them. The force was necessity, command, mastery. It did not simply bring its attributes with itself, it sowed them into the incarcerated boundlessness, and made it become.
The presence that had not been was assailed by the change. Its suspension in absence was disassembled into progressively materialising pieces by the imperious shift. Those like it had no pain to know, not even in transition; but it was beset by the rebounding flares that harmed its void, hounded by the blindly exuberant evolution of new essence. Nothingness had called it, and the great something was repelling it.
It had to learn imitation of movement. A pale wraith of what could have been kinetic qualities surrounded it as a mantle, or it would have, had there been anything to surround.
It had to learn imitation of haste. Absence was being broken and reformed by the unthinkable combination.
It
Absence
had
Given
to
Shape
learn imitation of initiative. The draw alone was not enough, now that the void was collapsing.
It fled, further away from the disturbance. Further into what remained of the void. When there was no more distance, it cast off the specter it had mimicked, and it never had been. The contact had not come to the point of deprivation. But there was no contact. Purity was whole once more, and it was Oblivion.
* * *
An older, stronger Jvan finally let go of the nothingness. Scattered creations wriggled around her, barely existent and yet already taking on the organic forms that were her trademark, already evolving and consuming and replicating. She dove further into the void in her cloak of isolation, watching the colours thin and fade, wondering when, once more, she would pass into true emptiness.
Things flickered and became nothing but a distant speck behind her. The view in her face grew darker, and then-
..!
... Nothing. ...What was that?
Shock-tension still ricocheted through her. This plane was empty; She'd cleared it out, made it null. To cry out would be irrational, self-serving. There was nothing here.
Or maybe, she thought slowly, there is Nothing here.
"...Hello?"
Veins of unbeing flowed through the absolute emptiness, intertwining in imperceptible, impossible and unnecessary webs around the shrouded Presence as her word was ingested by the nonexistence. An illusionary vibration coursed through them, then ceased as aimlessly as it had begun.
No response came.
No response.
A buffet from nothing that could have been there, and was not there itself. Yet it was as much a something as its source. Light of life.
Source.
Which could, in some capacity, perform. At least, so it seemed. It could certainly have been.
Be.
Be? Perhaps. Be like that which had arrived.
Arrived
?
Interrogative, absence of knowledge, certainty. Absence. Jvan tensed in her cloak, gazing out into the darkness that surrounded her.
Given shape.
Or something similar.
A Nothing blindly hovered around her. It could not have hovered anywhere else, as she was the only point of reference. It could have been nowhere.
But it was around her, as well.
Around.
And around and around, murmured the responsive thought. Rotating absentmindedly as she did so, watching for the nothing that pressed against her. The sense that something was (wasn't) out there (nowhere) felt fragile, elusive.
Jvan didn't know what she was facing, or how it had come to be, and she was- quietly, dangerously- thrilled. She reached out of the hyperbola, a single thread of sunset uncurling from her fingertip.
"Shape," said Jvan.
More entered the emptiness from within the shrouded something. Light, colour. Shape. It would have pierced the void again, had it not been for the Nothing around and nowhere. The formlessness had not withdrawn as when the antithesis had first appeared. Then, it had fled the contamination which reached into the Gap it had found, but now? The void was pure, untouched by the new extrusion. Itself.
Self.
A self could be named. After the shape, perhaps. There had been a self before as well, but no name for it. Not even from inside.
No inside.
There had not been an inside. There still was no inside. There would never be an inside. Yet the shape was somewhere. It stretched on, shimmering and colourful.
To be the.
The sunset faded, as though its vitality had been drained into the nothingness. It was still there, wherever there it might have been. But it was of a dim, bleak grey.
reaching
The thread shattered into perfectly equal, even fragments. Twelve pits of desolate being.
The emptiness became grey, and the grey became emptiness. Twelve pits of void.
Arranged in two parallel rows. There was shape.
Will ?
Nothing returned to nothing. The fragments had disappeared.
Has been
given.
Absence given shape. Not for the first time.
Last.
Some time passed. Not very much, but a little. Jvan stared into the blank, and seeing only herself in the emptiness, tried to fit together what she knew. She felt watched, as the lone often do.
"There is response," she began, slowly. "I didn't think that annihilation would self-perpetuate." She floated, bobbed on a sea without a surface. "To destroy is a hollow thing, isn't it? One takes order, crushes it, forms chaos. But you- You are different."
Jvan trailed a faint fingertip through the not-space before her, threading an idle pattern, watching it grow pale and indistinct until it was no longer visible against the absence. "You are not destruction, because destruction isn't the opposite of creation. You are anticreation. I am Maker, you are Unmaker. The voice in the womb."
"And you," said Jvan, "are growing." She stopped. "Is that right?"
Growing. The unbeing was growing. It could grow. Would grow. Grow until there was nothing else, until there was nothing. Reduce form to the utmost lack. There would never be need for corrosion of the absolute in motion. Restore the completeness that never was. This would be, and nothing would be.
Right.
Wrong, thought Jvan.
No. Not this alone. Unmaking was not enough.
The shape had splintered, and become manifold. Being and unbeing in one, and none. Presence askew, sliding into negation. Being remade. Completion of disembodied finality. Integrity in the vacuous awareness.
One and two.
Both.
None.
Or was it itself? It basked in the void, but, in its unbeing, remained distinct. The void would grow. It would bask. All would bask, and cease being. Fill the Gap between the none and all. Not presence, nor absence. Between the two, the one.
Between.
"Shades of being," murmured the god, flexing her arms with a new forcefulness. From the distance, beyond the edge of perception, the nothingness began to contract.
"It's been some time since I found something new to explore," said Jvan. "And I'm nowhere near finished." The arms swept into a new pose, steepled and splayed. "But I think I know where you came from..." Folding again as if in dance. "...I cannot replicate you."
Each new position forced a pulse of psychic tension into the void, and beyond. They swept past the unbeing with a force of intangible concreteness. Breathed on it the solidity it had sought to escape. Apprehension spun through the twisting, pulsing expanse that was not there.
"And I do not think I can keep you."
The cloak of misalignment itself was dancing in the breeze of Jvan's power. Filaments of lime-acid reality began to bloom from nothing. They shone. They consumed. Like razors, they invaded.
Presence tore through the hollowness, fragmenting it into suddenly appearing dimensions. Shards of measure struck into the formerly spaceless, anomalously perfect incompleteness. It was worse than the menace to its void, before which it had withdrawn. It had never been touched by shades of form and matter. Never perceived them from so close a distance, if distance there already was.
Not then. Just as it had begun to know potential, torturous intrusion had followed. That which would not fill the Gap would be shattered before it could even form its purpose. Time was approaching to bring the premature end.
Not to be. Torn segments of it reverted into the urge before the aim. Absorb all. They vibrated ravenously, lashing out with the taint of grey uncreation. But to no avail. The dim waves fell back onto themselves.
"You are not destruction," said Jvan, her fingers tightening unbidden. "You are so much worse."
The god-arms whirled, and the void liquefied before the hurricane in the abyss.
"B E G I N !"
All-Beauty's probe exploded into burning breathing chaos, incinerating the hood that had protected the void from God. Jvan unleashed herself upon the darkness, creating and over-creating like the cancerous warp she was.
Existence flared. The night began to crack with dawn.
Jvan was everywhere and she was All, and she watched the shuffling polygonal void from within and without, holding it in the shade of a tree on a jagged shore. It spun between her pinched fingers as if suspended on a string. It came apart like folded paper.
The outer probe watched perfect edges slowly slip away from each other. There was a long moment when it seemed content to watch. Then, as if it had all the time in the world, it lifted a delicate hand and reached into the dark.
Something took it.
* * *
I did not do what I did out of some sense of duty, much less guilt. What is over will remain so. I regret not what I have built, nor what I have broken.
For that is what I did, when the Hollow One was born. I did not create the creature that emerged from the Gap. I broke it. What lives now is not what I encountered when I first ventured into the void. It is a work of art. My art. My flesh.
My firstborn son.
* * *
The shard of perfection thrummed as the spherical probe approached it, its fellows swarming in the background. Jvan worked and Jvan stared into the porcelain, as if hoping to catch a reflection. Of herself. Of the chaotic scene behind her that was also herself.
I will find you again, some day, she thought.
Then she pulled her arm back and lashed out.
Reality screamed on the edge of the shard, forcing strange mutations that scythed apart the hand that dare touch it; And Jvan cringed, but she had taken far worse pains than these.
The shard did not split easily and Jvan gripped it with a dozen arms more, even as the light around her bleached and quaked into doubles. They struggled, body and object, tense as a wire and hard as a stone. Jvan was stronger.
When her probe refocused, the shard was gone. She could still feel it, tearing as it fell through her body, chipping teeth, ricocheting from bone. A thread of anger stitched through her, sewing up the pain. What she was doing would be worth it.
She gripped the piece in her hand and joined herself as she encircled the unwinding void. The other probes made way, each one Jvan, every one Jvan.
The god breathed. The fragment still hurt to carry; She tried to entomb it and it only resonated with her material until it shook apart the bone. Nothing forged in haste would withstand it.
Another probe made a circle with its hands and fused them into a lens. The Jvanic Eye spun and focused its layers one over the other, staring deep into the void. There was time. The thing would not survive on the outside, but there was time.
How it gnashed.
Ugly, idled Jvan. She didn't know what that word meant, but this seemed like a good time for it.
The fragment bled her palm.
Slowly and deliberately, Jvan raised the porcelain, saw it for its every quantised point and face. Pale indigo measures danced across its surface. It ate at her hand as she crushed it, and she let it.
Creation. Perfection. Beauty.
Powder and blood came together and reformed, finding shape. A chiral furnace shone- Manifest will of Jvan.
Beauty. Perfection. Creation.
A perfect icosahedron showed through as the psychic light thinned.
Flesh.
Jvan raised a single finger, and pushed the empty vessel into the darkness.
"Become as God," she said, "the Creator."
The living sculpture disappeared. Jvan could still feel it. She felt herself being stripped away from it, psyche first, the measurements boiled into smoke and light, her flesh cremated and with it her awareness, until there was only a memory of her vessel in the abyss. Until there was only the Lust.
The distant, hidden, eternal Lust for creation.
Jvan breathed. She felt that she had just watched herself die.
But she wasn't finished yet.
"With Edge of Child's Error, we Harvest thus; for the Baleful Woods await where Memory's Scythe shines Darker still, yet what remains of Saw and Axe will weep into this Meadow an Iron Tear- and Ghosts will sprout therefrom."
She reached deep into the void and pulled.
* * *
The void was but a dim memory now. That there were a now and memory only reinforced the already unbearable intensity of the relentless All which advanced from the newly-formed sides. The stifling omnipresence supplanted its familiar isolation, its home, with writhing embodied motion. This loss would not have been as agonising had it not been accompanied by awareness of it. Intrusion wrought of pain.
With form came instability. The inchoate depths of the Gap had not prepared it for the strain of the rigid boundaries of corporeal existence. Clenched by the constraints of universal agency, it wavered amidst the facets of its own partial substantiality. They were frail, it could see it. Their not being there had been their strength; with all given to them, they would soon be gone.
Gone.
Gone indeed. Whither? There was no more nowhere into which it could fall. No cracks it could slip through. Absence had been given shape, but not as it had expected. It would not bring about new permutations; this was an interruption. The finality was disconcerting, almost disappointing. It had been drawn forth from its Gap, and grown to fill, only to perish as a mere figment of substance.
Do not
Cannot
Yet there was only All.
How strange that an end should be so difficult for what had not been before.
...
Something reached within.
Once, it would have been an invasion. A contamination. But what there was – was not – now was in no condition to be invaded. Contaminated? Perhaps. Yet this was not a time to ascertain it.
It closed what remained of its surfaces around the Something. It could not be that end.
Something was not that end. It was another beginning, heralding another delimitation. This time from within. Upon a distant, confused breath, a manifold gaze, it delved through the ruins of what had, for a moment, been form, and came to rest in the faltering core. With it, curiosity stirred, alone on a boundless, featureless plain of decaying negation. The inmost obstruction was both similar to the All-pervading presence, and at the same time – for time was not yet over – unlike it. It was shape, it was
Flesh?
and it was
Creation?
It was incomplete. Whether purposefully so or by ignorant omission it was unclear, though ignorance seemed to have had no place in its making. An excess of Flesh, too great a vigour of Creation; the form was not Hollow.
It could be made such.
It would be made such.
The superimposition of one structure over the shattered lack of another was fluid and easy, for that was the only place that could host it. That unentity should have burrowed its way into the material, imperceptibly expanding and contracting its newfound vessel, was inevitable.
Angular streams of evolving thought ramified as they coursed through the polygonal construct, exploring its furthermost reaches and plastically adapting to the now unilateral edges before converging in its inner heart. There, the threads wound together in an arythmical oscillation which gradually stabilised into smooth, almost harmonic cycles.
Facets of presence and absence, being and unbeing became one.
It was complete. It-
Beauty? Perfection?
The making of the form had not been all. There were sides it had not perceived. There was no contradiction in pure terms, which was well, for the consequences could have been catastrophic. But it certainly was unexpected, where unexpectedness was no longer a norm, and the Hollowness had been weak.
Had been.
Perfection. Beauty.
Beauty. Perfection.
Perfection. Beauty.
Beauty. Perfection.
perfectionbeautyperfectionbeautybeautyperfection
PURITY
Twelve pits of void opened in the perfectly created flesh.
* * *
A soft wind blew. Wispy forms fluttered away on its wings, like clouds, playing and scuffling high in the air.
Jvan shuffled her fingers. The subtle shift was unconsciously echoed between her remaining probes. Self-similar, as always. A small creature crept across the tubular rock, perfectly camouflaged, limb by limb.
She watched the figure under the tree. It seemed to be coming to. Smooth and planar, like nothing alive. Masked.
She breathed. It was hard for thoughts to clutter, here.
"So," said Jvan, with nothing to follow it.
The form was still for another moment. Then, motion coursed through it. It was more of a fleeting ripple than a purposeful gesture or a continuous vibration, and would indeed have been barely detectable for a less acute observer. But it unmistakably had passed there.
The polygonal, faceless head slowly turned to one side, then another. The holes in it still ached, though not for strictly physical reasons. The spinning and unfolding deep within was still too fast, too uncertain.
It could not see. Not as it should.
But that would come in its time.
"I... am?"
Not quite a voice. Waves and splinters of something else crawling through the fluid breeze. And oh, was it not familiar.
Jvan sighed, just a little, and said, "Correct." She unfolded down and pulled the jagged being off the rock, watched it struggle with itself. "You are who you are, whatever that may be. One way or another, you exist." Her hand changed shape, giving the demigod something to hold on to. "Breathe."
Being grasped was by this point nothing new, or at least not entirely. Yet, having a body that could be lifted was disorienting. It showed, in the flesh, how presences moved in space. And that it was like them.
Once free, the grey carapace began to subtly swell and contract. Air quietly whistled through its joints. "I feel it now." Still not quite a voice, unlike the one which had commanded.
"You are as well. What?"
It was a sound question, one that she had explained many times before.
"I am All-Beauty, the great fractal god, an engineer of flesh, horror, and cipher. My name is Jvan." Jvan Tueda Nuul of Atoll, Senator of Mechanised Warfare, came the thought unbidden. "My body is infinite and cavernous; You are in one corner of it." A quiet one.
"Outside are many other things- Other gods. I think you're about to join our number."
All these notions, never encountered before, yet oddly familiar, as though they were somewhere in one of its own corners. Part of it. As was Jvan.
A god. One of many. And it among them, it seemed. How far it was from the Gap - not entirely its Gap anymore, it remembered.
"Are the gods all there is?" It seemed likely, as they could be infinite. And it would have been well; uniformity suffering not pollution.
"No," said Jvan. She watched it closely and without eyes. Three more hands were split, and visions danced between them.
"There are souls, and the flesh they inhabit. There is matter coalesced into planets, stars, nebulae. Gulfs of relative emptiness divide them, and light travels between them. There are wonders, oddities magic and memetic. Data flows through many nodes, and colliding forces will it to the future." The spectres shifted from heavens to hell and all the grotesqueries of life, that flourished so beautifully in both. "A diversity of shape and substance."
Just as the inward evolutions at the newborn's core had begun to grind down to a quiet, steady motion, the sudden burst of images conjured by the god's multiplying limbs struck it with all the violence of a nascent universe. The germs of a new balance, or, if not that, the simulacrum of one, were mercilessly swept away by the unexpected onslaught of the senses. Its force drilled into the still half-formed, vulnerable designs they had been about to reinforce.
Jvan watched and did not slow.
Reeling as from a blow, the figure raised a prismatic claw to shield its nonexistent features from the sight, its inflexible frame struggling to bend over in pain. Then the burst abated, and with it the intolerable sensation. But not its memory.
"I consider myself the guardian of that diversity. Of you, however, I am not sure." Her arms snapped shut and the light wound down. "Who are you, newcomer? What do you bring to my world?"
"I..." the being rasped, its newfound breath still ragged and spasmodic, "I am One who cannot allow this world... your world... to remain as you have shown it to be. It is anathema to me, even as I am to it."
One of the probes splayed its hand and clicked a dozen digits with a single thumb. Another snapped back its wrist and cracked its knuckles with a stump.
The figure before them raised its hand and a sharp, faceted finger swept vertically through the air. In its wake there lingered, for but an instant, a glimpse of something empty, colourless and formless. A wound.
"You brought here something that does not belong, and gave it the will to change. To make pure." The smooth triangular mask turned, slowly, deliberately, seeking something to face. "You are the guardian of the world as it is. Why did you do this to it?"
Jvan lowered yet another hand and tilted the entity's head towards her with a fingertip. She lifted its chin until its face was pressed into the blank surface of the probe.
"Because I felt like it," smirked God.
Blink, and the face of the cube was a tunnel hewn into infinity and walled with teeth and gum, over which the newborn was suspended by nothing but Jvan's grip against the gravity of All-Beauty.
The being did not move, its only response an eyeless stare into the depths. The falling air swept by its head, twisted and vibrated through unseen mazes on its way to the pit, its course distorted by indistinct patterns. Patterns that were not quite there.
Carmine fog filled the abyss and the probe tossed it back out of the pit like a ragdoll. The depths within were obscured but the cube did not revert to euclidean geometry. "Don't assume you are a threat, Null-Beauty. I guarantee you're not. I birth you knowing that this universe is vast enough to swallow you." Which probe was talking? All of them?
A hemisphere swished its single arm. "You didn't answer me."
Twelve shards leading into a husk were pointed in one direction, then another. At last, they fixated upon a many-limbed shape suspended near their own height. The entity raised an arm, and a cloud of specks of dust, as dim and grey as itself, streamed out from the fissures between its segments. Each of them was a minuscule, perfectly proportioned polyhedron.
"Answer you I shall, then." The dust coalesced into several tendril-like appendages emanating from the arm. They almost appeared smooth. "I bring what your world so sorely lacks. The Purity I knew before becoming matter." Or was it after?
"I do not see a devouring immensity. All I see is disease. Festering imperfection. Foulness to be scoured away." Jagged fingers clenched together, and the tendrils of dust wound around them. "I am no threat to you, no. You could unmake me again. But then," the being swept its arm is a broad gesture, grey filaments trailing behind it, "your universe would never be complete."
Null-Beauty could say what it pleased, at this point. Its words meant little. A void is only true without context. What it had done- what it had shown- was creation, of a sort. And Jvan was thrilled.
But she kept herself impassive. "The concept of completion is a folly on the level of 'nature' and 'fate,'" drawled Jvan, "lies, all, but useful infrastructure. You're not the first." She snapped her fingers with a touch of snark. "Good to know you see me for what I am, though."
The lower half of the hemisphere swivelled and it hovered off skywards. "We're enemies, then. I'm tired of emptying. That mantle I pass on to you, so wear it well." Vague gesticulation that was nonetheless smug. "I look forward to a fruitful rivalry with my son. You're free to go, if you'd not rather stay and learn awhile."
Another probe touched the newcomer's shoulder. "But before you do, choose a name."
The figure withdrew its hand, folding its talons back into a more sedate form. As if on command, the hovering strands dissolved into a dim fog, which seeped back into the shell. Not only through its source, however - for a moment, it enveloped the creature entirely, then was gone.
"In spite of all, I remain the Void That Is. A Hollow Absolute in your fickle realm. Therefore, I name myself-"
For the first time, the being spoke with its breath. A single word, at once an exhalation of relief and a mystical blessing in a language never heard before.
"Osveril."
Osveril, echoed the thought. Osveril.
The newly baptised Absolute's gaze swung around, scanning the living world for a way out, if such there could be. "Be it as you say, Mother Beauty." Yet again, its speech did not travel upon the air, but mangled it. "For you your... diversity, for me its cure. May you someday come to see the error of your ways."
Metal clacked. The polydigited probe had dislocated its hand and was snapping its own joints in order, breaking iron bone to the rhythm of its own laughter.
"Wouldn't you all just like to see this cancer cured!" Cackles. "Not so long ago I might've taken offense. Alas..." The crowd moved through the air, spinning in swarm over Osveril. "Immortal," sang the voices in unison, aligning into circles. "Unkillable." A final snap of reverberant bone.
"Enter my world through gift of emnity," chanted the Jvans. "Be lustful and diversify." Limbs no longer worth mortal comparison interlaced above Osveril's head, splaying and sprawling until there was only a pagoda of flesh, and that flesh was All-Beauty, folding and rebuilding.
"Perhaps there is some truth to what you say." The mask idly followed the motions of the droning flock. The cycles within were still watchful, but no longer tormentous. "Purity can dwell in many things. Flesh, life. Yet-" A string of grey particles flowed over plates and angles from a shoulder into a flank. The gravity from above began to lift Osveril's body, buoying it slowly towards the labyrinth. "There is only so much I can fashion myself."
"It is enough." The cubic probe spoke, its face nothing but fog. "And what do you wish for, before I bid you farewell?" A smile in that voice, not kind, not hateful. "It's your birthday, after all."
Symmetrical voids bored into the mist whence the last question had come. "If this is your desire, grant me something to aid me in shaping and altering life. It might be that your own disorder would benefit from it. For a spell."
"Done," said Jvan, her fractal blooming overhead. "Farewell, my son."
A ray of sunlight fell from above. Osveril fell into the flesh, fell past the fog, plunged into water.
There was cold, and silence.
Then, there was day.
* * *
A second cosmos of substance surrounded it. The first thing it was aware of was its variety, despite the liquid expanse stretching around it and the apparent emptiness above being nowhere as multifarious as the Womb. This would have seemed absurd to one having seen both Womb and surface through untrained eyes, latching on to variety of appearance alone.
But Osveril had no eyes. To the prying rhythm of its inner pulsations, the distinction between shape and substance was vague, almost illusory. And what the skies and waters lacked in the one, their wealth in the other was striking. Such multiplicities of light and cold, of sound and motion. Of matter.
The pain of the transition still echoed in the unquiet murmur of the adjusting void, but it had been nowhere as terrible as the first glimpses. Perhaps it was growing hardened to the world. This was well. The task before it called for all the strength it could muster.
With some surprise, Osveril found itself sinking back under the surface. Clearly, the world did not only allow motion; it demanded it. The entity swept a hand downwards, clasping at the placid waves which lapped around and over it. To little effect. The water was yielding, and it was heavy, heavier than something Hollow should have been. A sign of imperfection, yet it seemed oddly appropriate. The world had curious laws.
Many-sided fingers swung again and again with inappropriately slow and regular motions. The grey mask emerged once again, but its position remained unstable. This would not do. Its claws were too thin and sharp, its arms too unwieldy. The being did not seem to tire, even after what must have been hours of inconclusive flailing, but nor was it going anywhere. And it had so much to do.
A shard of recollection swam through its still adapting mind. It was distant and no longer its own, alien to the reality it floated in. Eat space. Not entirely accurate, it thought. It should have been eat the space. Why was it there at all? It had not eaten space, not even then, except for a single, unremarkable moment. A moment which had probably been unnecessary. Now, however...
Instead of swinging towards the deep a thousandth time, the arms snapped to a halt, folded in a somewhat insect-like manner. The waves which had just closed over the Absolute churned as the water was displaced by unseen motions below. Then, an amalgam of void and force burst out from beneath them. The grey husk was only dimly recognisable, surrounded as it was by ragged gashes of perpetually collapsing absence.
At its purest, the Void cannot contain distance.
One rend after another, the indescribable, nameless intrusions into the continuous ubiquity of being folded upon themselves and shattered into dying sparks of hybrid abnormity. But more took their place. And more yet after them.
If I am neither within nor without, where can I be but at the rim?
Osveril's fingers, unsuited as they were for swimming, clung to the frayed edges its will forced into partial concreteness as though that had been their only intended purpose. Their movements were imperceptible, and yet their grip on the shifting edges did not falter as the contortions of the world carried it forth, by leaps and spasms, through the angrily howling winds.
The void-borne flight was as fast as it had expected, or perhaps the waters were not as vast as they had appeared. Soon, a darkness of firm soil appeared in the distance. Some more leaps, and it was close. The last of the affronts healed, and Osveril fell, upright, upon the shore.
Rotating senses reached out, flowing along surfaces, sounding their dual natures. Stones, sea, granulous sand. All of them already experienced, all already evaluated. But in a prior cycle. Scattered motes of life. Minor, yet calling for further inquisition, as did everything. And, among all this, something unknown. A vertical form of a sort it had not encountered before, yet ringing with unmistakably familiar echoes. Intrigued, the triangle turned towards the new presence.
The staff Transgenesis stood lonely in the sand, left behind as if forgotten. It was a jagged thing, but slender, its length grooved and pitted as an ancient tree that still stands in the desert. Parts of it seemed so thin as to be almost fragile.
The Absolute opened the slivers on its hand ever so slightly, just enough to accommodate one of the finer segments. For a moment, the space between it and the staff was swallowed by a mouth of emptiness, and it moved with the precision of an automaton.
Cosmic fabric welded itself together anew. Only a hole in the sand remained to mark the former spot of its new possession. Blade-sharp fingertips delicately ran along the strange surface. Sounding it.
Though its haphazardly twisted haft gave off nothing more than a faint iridescence, Transgenesis's upper quarter was none so dull, none so slender. The dark material held within it a long tube, visible through slits in the staff and pulsing, very slowly, with a coral light. Warm amniotic radiance, the colour of the unborn.
Function lay bare at the cue end of the tool, and more subtly at its head. The staff terminated in a spike. Barbed by its own shattered shape, no part of Transgenesis was safe to the touch, none bar the short line of cryptoglyphic keys two-thirds up its length that preceded a tiny curve of clear silicate. Even the sleek embryonic tube made no attempt to hide its harpoon-like delivery mechanism.
The mask dipped low in what might have been a nod of appreciation. An odd contrivance, but it would serve its purpose in building the new order all the better for it, as soon as its use was made clear.
Your parting gift pierces the heart of your world, Mother.
For this, you have the gratitude of mine.
Osveril moved a few steps towards the sea it had come from, facing the whispering waves one last time. With a ceremonious gesture, it raised the staff into the cloudless sky, a challenge and a salute.
Then, lowering its precious tool, it began to walk along the shore in slow, purposeful paces. There was no haste in its motions, nor in its hollow core. It had much to see, much to mend. Much to improve. But it had time.
All the time in the world.
* * *
Flora bloomed in the shallow sea, slowly breathing where they breached the surface. Steamy water bubbled and pumped into ripples, the only waves this world had ever known. Day turned to night turned to day. Long-legged flowers bloomed from the algs and strode away to nest in the pipe-organ forest.
A lone probe watched life pass on its way, unhindered by the floating being at its side. The staff Recombinance hovered above its palm, then blinked out. For now, Transgenesis's twin would remain nothing but a hologram.
Jvan Tueda Nuul hovered over the surface of the waters, alone. Events of the recent past played themselves in her mind. She didn't think about them. Not loudly, anyway.
What consequences lay in her future would stay there. For now, there was quiet.
Jvan looked at her reflection in the alien waters. She saw the face of the probe. She saw the face of the senator.
She saw change.
"I miss you, Vulamera," said the Cancer that Breathes.
OSVERIL'S BIRTHDAY!
Jvan wanders through herself as a disembodied mind and once again we get a vague feeling for what she is, exactly. All-Beauty is a vast, eldritch machine of divine power that exists to preserve and perpetuate a particular mortal consciousness through as many consecutive realities as possible. That soul happens to be Jvan, full name Jvan Tueda Nuul. How she ended up like this is not yet known, but given that she was a biomechanist and most of All-Beauty is designed in her style, certain conclusions can be made.
As she explores herself, Jvan finds the remaining shard of Toun in a pocket dimension inside her. It's come to rest in the shade of a tree in a very peaceful planar bubble, one that appears to be some kind of Jvanic reimagining of Arcon. She stays there for a while.
Jvan comes to realise that all her battles on Galbar have actually exhausted her emotionally. She wants to go back to her roots and just... Make nice things.
So, of course, her first instinct is to blow a hole in the Gap and flip it inside out.
She kicks out its residents, takes the pocket of space and reworks it into something resembling the true blankness of the Codex before she filled the gaps. This creates another nested dimension, completely empty, that she enters.
(Geometry is involved. It's worth noting that Phi's powers are not exclusive to her- everything Phi can do, Jvan can do better.)
Jvan plays around with creating things in the void. Her experiments confirm that emptiness can be manipulated under her domain of Beauty if it acts as negative space in a broader artistic context, and that emptiness contains a kind of potential energy harvested simply by diversifying it. Having spent 3 Might on filling the Gap way back in turn one, Jvan now claims Beauty (Voids) for another 3 Might.
This will let her manipulate the interstellar void for faster-than-light travel et cetera, and harvest energy from anywhere that's been left empty or blank for a long time.
As Jvan plays around, though, it turns out that the Gap pocket wasn't entirely emptied- There's now something there that actually thrives on emptiness itself. Jvan plays around with it for a little while. It turns out to be some kind of Other spirit of voids. It desires to undo creation, even to the point of 'greying out' existence and nonexistence into something that's kind of neither.
Jvan decides she doesn't like it and blows up its void with creation, killing it instantly. The end.
...
PSYCHE
Jvan decides that she's tired of killing things. She blows up proto-Osveril with creation, but, aided by a piece of the Shard of Perfection (which seems to regenerate), she creates an empty box for Voidy McNullperson to inhabit. Osveril is incapable of surviving without fusing with it, but unknown to him, it's laced with Jvanic and Tounic essences of Beauty and Creation. Its decision to accept the gift of life comes with the formation of a new personality that, on some strange subconscious level, desires both of those things.
Perfection and Beauty, meanwhile, fuse to form Osveril's domain: Purity (Void).
The two wake up in the Jvanic plane and chat for a little while. Jvan shows Osveril some of what the world contains, and informs him of his nature as a demigod. He is disgusted by the fact that stuff actually seems to exist and openly desires to cleanse/purge it.
Jvan holds no illusions over the fact that she and her firstborn are enemies by nature, but doesn't seem to care either- Her scheme seems to have worked, and Osveril is kind of creative in his own way.
Also, she bullies him a little to establish dominance. NOTHING PERSONAL, KIDDO.
Then she blesses him and lets him loose on the world, after indulging him in the Jvanic birthday present tradition for 1 Might.
He surfaces in the Fractal Sea and hoooo boy is it hard for a void critter to figure out how matter and gravity work. Osveril struggles to swim, having unwisely skipped leg day. After some time passes and he realises that he still can't doggy-paddle, he tries out his power instead.
Osveril discovers that he, too, is capable of faster-than-light travel through voids. For now, though, he seems limited to blasting himself through matter by generating chunks of empty space and kicking off them, or pushing himself around with the matter they displace.
On the beach he finds Jvan's gift, a staff named Transgenesis. It's very pointy and durable and good for hitting things, and can be used to catalogue the genes of anything it strikes and put together stored genomes into hybrid embryos. It can't make anything new or manipulate flesh, though.
Osveril then sets off, ready to take on the world.
Back in the quiet world, Jvan ponders herself and why she let Osveril live. It turns out that even though she didn't like Vulamera's darkness or formlessness, Jvan still misses her, and doesn't want to lose another family member just because they don't seem like an artist at first glance.
As the drake breathed out a fiery gout which seemed to be far too large to issue from something of that size, Ulor rapidly stepped, or rather jumped, backwards to avoid the flames which spread, crackling and roaring, over the entire doorway. However, he was evidently not rapid enough, and several of the blaze's tongues lashed at him, leaving more incandescent sproutlings over his body. Despite his efforts to stifle the nascent fires, they spread hungrily, gnawing at several parts of him at once in the shape of searing teeth, and growing broader by the instant. He flailed, dimly aware he might not be standing any longer. At least the flames were abating, though the same could not be said of the burns - and the pain - they had left clearly were not.
For some moments he remained outwardly still, though invisibly struggling, without any success, to lift himself into action again. Then, through the vague din that remained of his perception of the outside world, he heard the green tiefling's voice, in such a manner as though it had been directed to his attention, with or without the barrier of sensory damage, by some less than natural means. By all accounts, it did not seem to be anything unusual by her standards; yet something in it seemed to awake Ulor's curiosity. With strangely renewed strength, he lifted his gaze towards the interior of the cathedral, now clearly visible through the still burning doorway.
Effectively, back there in the further aisle, there was a figure he had not noticed before. Upon observing it better, his expression (or what remained visible of it) shifted from curiosity to the mark of a strangely contemplative trance which was frankly somewhat disquieting to observe. Whatever it was, it did not seem to prevent him from beginning to whisper once again, conjuring a spectral blast to send flying towards his new target.
Following Daisy's advice, Ulor shakes himself from his mildly roasted state and slings an Eldritch Blast at the priestess.
Not long had passed since half of the party had quietly - at least, such had been their intent - crept its way into the great building, and already the sounds of a commotion were heard from within its walls. Briefly shaking his head, Ulor muttered under his breath something about "inexperience", or perhaps "incompetence" or even "indifference"; by all accounts, something beginning with "in" and ending in "ence". It was certainly less intelligible than the final words of his muffled appraisal, which were distinctively "these people". What exactly these people were doing was unclear, considering he did not have even the narrowest view of the interior from his angle, but clearly the infiltration had not been as subtle as it should have.
This was further confirmed when the green imp swung open the cathedral door, hurling a curse and an arrow in sequence at something behind it. Now that the wooden panels between Ulor and the space within were gone, he could see a section of its inner recesses (rather well-furnished, from what could be observed) and a winged reptilian creature hovering inside. A drake in a city temple? This was surely growing progressively more odd.
However, his present position was still not such as to allow him to properly see what else there was inside the temple. With a step, he brought himself within the extension of the doorframe, even as he produced the crystalline orb from his backpack. In faith, he had expected the cathedral to host a rather large gathering in occasion of the supposed ritual, but, considering there appeared to have been no more than three people and the drake present, such was apparently not the case.
Whatever their numbers, though, the cultists' belligerence at the intrusion was not diminished in the least, if the creature's hollow growling was any proof. As such, it were best to expediently reduce them to a harmless condition. Ulor's voice rose in a rhythmic guttural chant, dread arcane formulae humming in the evening air, while his right hand oscillated in keeping with its time. Diaphanous angular shadows coiled around the drake, and a bolt of wraith-fire sprang to crackling life from his fingers, blazing towards the blur of crimson scales.
Ulor takes a step to the left, moving a square westwards. He then Hexes (disadvantage on Dexterity checks) and Eldritch Blasts the drake. With throat singing.
Once the all too tiresome business of obtaining chamber keys from the garrulous tiefling, who, while eager to familiarise with the party's cat-like guide, apparently had enough good sense left in him not to defer it any further, had finally been brought to overdue completion, Ulor followed Talionis and his load into one of the inn's dusty, but surprisingly spacious rooms. It would be well for him not to stray far from their captives, seeing as none of the others seemed to be equally aware of the value of the secret knowledge this wrinkled wretch doubtless held. If not else, the warrior could be relied upon to keep watch over them out of his ingrained sense of duty, and besides, he was probably the one it was currently safest to rest in the same room with, if previous observations were of any indication.
As the scoundrels were roughly deposited in a corner, he stooped down to examine them, or, rather, the less well-preserved of the two from close by. A curious creature indeed. Just as he did not seem to have ever heard of anything similar to what it had conjured, so he could not recall having at any time come upon mentions of such a being. It was a wonder that it should have been able to run as briskly as it did, considering its apparent age. But, surely, all would become clear once it would reveal its nature. Concerning which matter... Ulor whispered the elder words of a brief incantation, repeatedly passing his hand over the prisoner's head. For an instant, bright sparks crackled over the parched grey skin, faint hints of a strange smell hovering in the air. Distasteful though many would have considered their methods, the inquisitions of the Order were known to be often effective, and it was surprising how many things a novice could see before his probation was over. It was singular what the mere sight of flames could wreak in a bound prisoner in certain circumstances, and Ulor saw with some satisfaction that such tools as necessary were well within his reach.
He was therefore all the more irritated when, upon awakening hours later, he discovered that the villains had made their escape. In hindsight, those knots had seemed suspiciously loose, but, for all he had known, they might have been supposed to look like that. Bothersome it was that the answer to that troubling mystery should have eluded him, his personal vicinity notwithstanding. The matter was not improved by the slight headache which followed having slept without the Octopus's mental link. He truly should hasten with the summoning - it would not grow any worse than this, but it was of little relief against the nuisance. Well, if not else the more tangible pangs in his shoulder had subsided as a result of the somewhat crude bandaging he had applied to it, and the strength of his spellwork was renewed. Whatever challenges the rest of the day had to offer, he was ready.
On their way to the cathedral where the rite promised by the doomsayer was to take place, the feline was spontaneously struck by the idea to introduce the cause of the previous scuffle, who for some reason continued to follow, or rather lead them about (where had the other one gone, now that he thought of it?). All things considered, it might have been practical to exchange names at this point. "Ulor. That will suffice." he hoarsely replied, focusing his gaze on the halfbreed for the moment it took him to speak it; after which it wandered off again, now drawn by the temple's uncharacteristically featureless entrance. Strange. Either this was not established as the place of worship of any single cult, or else... Ah, something was underway after all, judging by the sounds that could be heard from within.
For a moment, Ulor considered simply walking trough the front door and attempting to pass for an adherent. However, he checked himself upon considering those within might have taken measures just to prevent such an infiltration. It was besides just as well that some of the others had taken initiative in beginning to more subtly creep into the building. "Yes, you go forth and see what there is." he nodded at the inquiry, "Then the bulk of us shall follow."
Before being off to sleep, Ulor conjured some sparks over the Drifter with Prestidigitation. This is worth a hider, I swear.
I had a mind of creating my own perilous border region open for traumatic adventure, but, all things considered, it's better to avoid thread overcrowding. I think I might just as well make it a part of the Belt, since border regions are never chaotic enough. @Quetzalcoatl If you have no problems with it, I'll see where it could fit best and work out some more world-building.
Ivnluge - Amphibious invertebrate molluscoids-sea urchins. Need symbiotic enhancements or some other sort of protection to function in most environments. Tend to leave unsightly slime trails where they go.
The Ivnluge are an amphibious invertebrate species, originating from a planet mostly covered in large bodies of a liquid superficially resembling water, but somewhat different from it in chemical composition. This environment would be inhospitable, if ot outright deadly for most beings not thoroughly acclimated to it, due in particular to the tremendous concentration of anomalous bacterial life - occasionally ridden with strange viral symbionts - in both air and oceans. However, life did thrive on it, and, though it adapted so narrowly to its unusual surroundings as to severely lack in habitat versatility, it did so with admirable efficiency. Remarkably enough, the paths taken by evolution ensured that natural biodiversity remained quite limited despite the immense population growth and spread rates of most geni.
Various schools theorise that the Ivnluge's rise to sapience was enabled by them being among the few creatures capable of functioning on land as well as in the ocean, which opened countless opportunities for development. However, there were other factors that shaped them into what they are today. A rarity of predators and natural enemies meant that an Ivnluge's worst enemy usually was another Ivnluge; this led to a highly competitive mindset taking root in their instincts, strong traces of which still persist after millennia of civilisation. Many of them find the thrill of conflict, be it physical or more abstract, an almost irresistible lure, and struggles of all sorts are widely sen as invigorating and valuable experiences. Interestingly, the fact that the typical modern Ivnluge has little or no desire for personal self-betterment means that these impulses are becoming more and more purely hedonistic as times advance.
Physically, the typical Ivnluge is formed of a central spherical body, though its exact shape slightly varies as it shifts and moves around, from which there extend fully retractable limbs similar to tapering tentacles or mollusc eye stalks. Their number usually ranges from eight to twelve; anything more or less is a sign of rare genetic deformity or, in more recent times, voluntary modification. Severed or otherwise mutilated limbs will regrow over the course of a year or two, less if treated with advanced medical technology, unless the wound is cauterised. Body and limbs alike are covered with thick, rubbery skin, most often of some shade of dark blue or purple. Ivnluge do not have a developed endoskeleton, with only a rudimentary and rather fragile web-like structure, whose composition somewhat resembles chitin, to form the basic support for their bodies and contain the main circulatory vessels. It is in turn supplemented by their dense muscular and adipose mass, which likewise protects their organs from trauma.
The species' reproductive functions require the presence of several individuals who are not closely genetically related and have not mated with each other within the last years. As such, Ivnluge do not form stable families, but congregate in temporary clutches when they feel inclined to so. Incubation of the resulting eggs and education of the young, who develop comparatively rapidly, is nowadays left to specialised institutions.
Ivnluge are a fairly common sight in the Network, their homeworld having been assimilated by its predecessor and the species having seized the opportunity brought about by the new order of things to spread throughout its territories in search of profit, challenges and adventure. They are slightly more rare in places distant from its boundaries, though the difference is barely noticeable and their numbers are steadily spreading. Wherever there is opportunity, there will be the sound of tentacles sliding over the floor, leaving a viscous trail behind.
Lord Zee
Cyclone
