Godclads

Chapter 20-7 Frontiers (II)

All who claim to understand the shattered puzzle that is the Sunderwilds speak lies! Lies! Sense cannot be found here. You grope for stable foundations but the sky is down and up is not true.

Pain yourself not. Accept the softness and prosper.

Impossibilities stack over, against, beneath, and within. Watch the language of madness. Watch the art expressed by the unchained world. Glance upon the twisted bodies of its children. Those who remain trapped. Touched by the taint of distortion. Or merely ignorant that their little apocalypse is not total, as they assumed.

Be wary of the likeness of I. Fallwalkers. Inheritors of the broken. Our jagged edges carve at what is… lick against the world’s tongue. We lick! Walking disasters against calamities unmoving. Environment versus man. But is it so? Do we not contain multitudes and worlds within ourselves? Worlds in worlds?

What to claim? Who’s to say?

Here is where you will learn of loss. Being lost. Losing yourself. Losing your alignments. Losing any sense of commonality.

The world of the sane–places that he [INSINUATING JAUS AVANDAER] stole are built on common edifices. Same rules. Same reasons. Same foundations. Symmetry of society.

Not so here. Not so. There is not commonality. Only variability.

To step between Fallen Heavens is to bound from one story to another.

I named them the “Scar Charts.” Betrayals of each rupture. Revelations offered as each broken Soul bleeds against another, channeling the flames of creation into aberrant expressions of impossibility. Over, against, beneath, and within.

Madness wars against madness too. Symmetry lost is symmetry lost. Not gained. So, the ruleless must struggle against the ruleless, and definition returns where disagreements follow. Laws that cannot coexist. Narratives that are perpendicular. Grinding–not intersecting.

Learn the patterns spilling from these boundaries. Learn how each strains against each. Learn to dance the edge of inconsistency and instability. Canon-clash-canon is canon not. Nothing is safe.

But not is better than not not.

[Laughter]

-The Mad Monk Alsyim, Fallwalker

20-7

Frontiers (II)

Displacement.

Dilution.

Such were the expressions of the penultimate rupture, preventing them from reaching Dice's former enclave.

In accordance with the roots of Thaumaturgy, no heaven was formed in a vacuum.

All was an alternate expression, a perversion of the natural order, of laws that were now interpreted to be different by the infection of culture, of incomprehension, of entertainment.

Or pure delusion.

Just as the Woundmother was a reimagining of blood, the Fardrift an ascension of air, or the Techplaguer formed from technology rendered unto quackery, the Fallen Heavens had their own imprint, and melded to their patterns were the lands themselves.

Glancing at the few patches of stability between the stretching tears consuming the land–Rend bleeding over into reality from torn seams, blending structure, energy, and casualty–Avo saw that this place was once a rainforest. His Heavens interpreted patterns of heat and felt the patterns of vegetation. But they now existed as bastardizations of themselves, their properties twisted by and into the power of the Fallen Heaven itself.

Merely noticing the greenery would cause one to be pulled away from position–the effects of gravity pressing against spatial consistency. There wasn’t even a lurch to the effect. It was as if space was a sea, vision was a chain, and the color green was a winch that wouldn’t stop pulling.

This, however, was the least among the anomalies choking the cadre’s pace.

Plucking Dice from the place where she was trapped once more by swallowing and exhaling her using his Fardrifter’s Nine Streams, Avo ran simulations of his environment as he tried the map the expanse.

The leaves here danced to ethereal winds that existed beyond the Fardrifter’s power to grasp. Worse yet, they were as if kaleidoscopes. Spatial reality shifted constantly, an eternal push-push between matter exuding hues of green and everything that didn’t.

The sheer denseness of vegetation likewise continued to spread.

Avo didn’t notice the change when he and Draus first crossed the edge of the volcanic plains–a place Calvino theorized to be long destroyed by prior Heavens even before the Godsfall considering how it stretched a trail of ash and heat between swaths of devouring fauna. The current Fallen Heavens seemed more stable at first, only deviating with slight edits made to directionality and movement.

Yet, simply by moving closer into its confines, they were drawn deeper into the woods, into the embrace of the trees, the green rising around them, even as the foliage burned from their acceleration, and the light of the sky faded as branches and bioforms erupted up in pace with Avo’s climbing velocity, caging the face of the Daystar away from sight as if a flash-formed nest.

A storm of devouring crimson tore out from Avo, unraveling wood, biomass, stone, fungi, and leaves into a tempest of blood for over a hundred kilometers. His Sanguinity tore through the forest as if a wildfire, a hurricane, a swarm of locusts combined. And when his Rend was filled, he continued unmaking matter using his Breath of the Withered.

Two months ago, such a display of power would awed him past the point of despair. Two months ago, merely looking upon his current self would have shattered his wards in a microsecond and left his ego in a million pieces. It would be a thing of paltry effort to bring ruin upon an unprepared district in the Warrens.

Now? Now, Avo felt how wanting his current power was.

All Heavens could destroy. The Woundmother could even rebuild as fast as it broke.

But the truest expression of power was control. Absolute control. Can, or cannot. Will, or will not. Possible, or impossible.

And it was just such a thing that he and his cadre faced right now.

Dice, far exceeding both him and Draus in terms of speed by this point, was barely ahead of him now–less than a true kilometer ahead but also one hundred Machs faster than both he and Draus put together. Every second of continued acceleration sent blastwaves out from her, casting destruction upon all in her wake.

She was a veritable missile of calamity surging forward, carving a scar of brilliant white through the world, faster than the air could ignite, faster than space could bear.

And she was also far more impotent than he, for the faster they moved here, the closer they drew to the trees, and larger did the forest get.

It reminded him of one of Reva’s miracles back in Nu-Scarrowbur–of the pebbles she flung at him, turning into boulders and hills as it approached with building acceleration.

This Fallen Heaven seemed to work on similar principles, though applied to a far greater extent. Simply moving closer to a tree made it larger, relative to one’s speed.

He assumed there was a ceiling to this. One that Dice had already reached considering she was still inching forward, but the forest was already growing beyond the limits of Avo’s present Sovereignty.

There were times when speed was everything. And there were places where speed meant nothing.

Today was a deep education on practical thaumaturgy.

But Avo was not so stymied. Not so castrated as Dice was. Both he and Draus had their means.

Threads of blood twisted and folded into the lashing currents of falling hurricane as he sank into the air itself, his Fardrifter assuming primacy once more. He swept fast through the woods in an instant, and the prior lock on his speed vanished, replaced with unfettered movement as his ontology updated, surging fast like a rushing hurricane, unrooting once implacable trees with ease.

In his mind’s eye, a ghost-generated map flashed with new markers, and he glimpsed existence through Draus’ feed. She was traveling through her Liminal Paracomos and was leaving him and Dice behind. Skimming parallel to reality through junction worlds discoverable only in reflections, she was nearing the fifty kilometers where spotted clearings grew more and more common, and wild weeds gave way to golden sand.

But as the shadows of the forest stretched past the beach, what lay beyond was no sea, but a veiled realm of mist-like darkness. The coiled fingers of darkness flicked out from the back, and Avo felt a staggering weight press his Fardrifter’s Domain of Shadows.

If there was a single consistency in the Sunderwilds, it was the obviousness presented by most thresholds between the Fallen Heavens.

Swimming through space and wind, Avo sent three spiraling Fardrifter heads to seek the edge. The rest of his power was spent shearing the forest down to the roots and opening a path for Dice.

The girl was physical power unfettered, and little could be done to halt her if only force was to be matched against force. But she needed more options soon. Means of maneuverability. And protections from having her spatial placement altered against her will.

Avo kept those considerations in the back of his mind as she shot ahead, and he injected his Fardrifter through its furthest stream, surfacing into existence an equine hydra shaped from the substance of dark-rimmed superstorm.

{Nice of you to catch up,} Draus taunted, examining the darkness ahead at the edge of the stands. She had abandoned her divine shape for her mortality, and Avo was curious to discover why.

Reshaping himself from falling winds, he came to a halt next to the Regular and felt her smoking a pipe of hiflass, Meldskin helmet unformed around her face as she studied the path ahead with narrow eyes.

Behind, Avo could hear an approaching cacophony. Felt the winds shrieking as Dice made her approach.

He formed a hundred-meter-tall haemokinetic bunker around him and Draus before sending a bolt of lightning through its arteries and veins. It came alight, and from brightness, Avo manifested his Fortress of Luminosity.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 48%

Draus turned to him and spoke. A brightness dimmed the edges around their barricade, drowning the world in light. “That fast?”

PHANTASMIC ACTIVATED

->[PHYS-SIM]

->TRACKING [DICE]: 3.51 SECONDS BEFORE ARRIVAL

Avo didn’t reply. Instead, Dice did. By impacting Avo’s protective wall. The world outside ceased to be for a moment. The resulting explosion, Calvino estimated, made even high-yield fusion bombs pale.

And just like how the forest neutered one’s speed, the Fortress scoffed in the face of force.

A moment thereafter, the destruction subsided, and Dice’s sheath appeared in Avo’s senses. Storing his protections back into his Sanguinity as bolts of lashing crimson, the air around them pulsed in fractures of red, the flesh of existence seeming infected; bleeding.

“Why’d you stop?” Avo asked.

Draus drew in one final breath of hiflass before she tapped her roll, turned it to glass, and flicked it out into the darkness.

A jagged creature lashed out from the dark. Avo activated his Condylostylus. The world slowed. And he saw a creature molded from shadow, sea, and flesh. The light it emitted burned it. Its flesh bubbled and rotted, becoming droplets of mundane water. Its face was that of pale white eyes lining its sides and jagged fangs along the length of its body.

“They’re everywhere,” Draus said. “I tried makin’ a reflection. The rupture lapped that up. Little eel-fuckers coated the glass damn quick. Burrowed and converted the mirror into more of them. A couple of them even tried bein’ sneaky–swam up the shadows cast by the trees to get at me.”

“Wounded?”

“No. They’re pretty slow. And the Arsenalist’s gunfire’s hell on their complexion. Still, there’s a damn lot of ‘em. Wanna scope the place out in case I end up drowning by breathing in air or somethin’.”

“Don’t do well with light,” Avo replied. “That we know. That’s how Dice’s former owner exercised power.”

“Light strips them of the darkness,” Dice said, offering her own input. Avo knew this already, possessed of her memories as he was. But this place held significance to her, and in its depths was where her home awaited. Her agency could be cultivated, and her identity uplifted from simple brutality.

To interrupt such a thing was a sacrilege to growth, knowledge repeated or not.

“The monsters can hide in the darkness. And shadows.” Dice took a few steps closer to the edge and faced the blackened horizon. The world head was layered in what looked to be a film of oil, and the ground shifted constantly, rock sediment conjoined with the properties of lapping waves. “The master said the world was broken before he was chosen by the light. That we alone were the purest. Only his light could protect.” Her head module spun to face Avo. “He also made using black as a color illegal. And curving your lips upward. But I don’t think the monsters can hide in those.”

{Ah. All the makings of a well-adjusted dictator,} Calvino said.

Corner snorted. [We can leave the city, but the half-strands stay the same. Fucking tyrants are all tyrants anywhere.]

Draus did a double take and looked at the girl. “The fuck? He banned smilin’? Why?”

“He thought it looked ugly and unnatural.”

“And that’s all it took, huh?” Draus replied. A slight whirr sounded from Dice’s neck as she nodded. The Regular just shook her head. “The kind of shit you get away with as a Fallwalker.”

“Power without consequence or resistance makes us parodies of ourselves,” Avo said. Draus–and her template–just shot him a flat stare. “It’s true. You know this. More than me. It’s why you wanted the weight.”

The mention of her former request made her lip twitch. “Yeah. Reckon it is. But Shotin. All them other Godclads. They kept us pressed plenty.”

“For now,” Avo said. “But I think… you were right. Imagine a world where only we are Godclads. Imagine the rest of existence to be nothing but FATELESS.”

Unease and disgust exploded out from Draus’ mind. “Shit, don’t put that poison in my mind. That’s worse than some Massist utopias they keep dreamin’ about. Bullshit about pacifism and how we can all hold hands and live clean of violence.” Her face contorted into a grimace.

Avo chuffed a laugh. “Such is pleasure in extremism.” He paused, and thought to some of his conversations with Calvino, to sentiments lingering among his templates. “Hm. Yes. We are all too narrow. Too limited of understanding. Even the minds themselves. To force the greater whole to bend to a single will is absurd. But also a Heaven. Also a Godclad. Also a tyrant made absolute.”

Draus’ face took on a sage expression. “That’s… real nice. Did you enjoy gettin’ that out your system?”

He grunted. “Hearing it said matters. Good for Dice. Good for us. Good for Heavens. Might experiment with more perspectives in the future. Cycle through things to deepen insight.”

“Yeah. Just don’t burn any of that pansy peace-lover shit into me is all.”

“Not your preference. Won’t make it your design.”

Letting out a breath, he took a step toward the rushing currents of stacking ebony and reached out with a tendril of blood. As the veins spread past a veil of blackened mist, creatures thin and slender lashed at his construct, dragging their teeth down its sides. Patterns flashed into the Woundmother, showing Avo structures of enamel and calcium, but he restrained himself from trying to break them.

->Canon: Haemification - The user can turn all influenceable matter into blood

->Hubris: Any attempts to subsume gaseous or liquid matter will incur backlash (12%; x2 backlash)

The Heaven of Blood sneered. “Be this the bounty reaped by the world after the deeds of this so-called Jaus, named Godbreaker. Be this salvation or emancipation. I see only a shaping of alloys betwixt. Water, but not water. Rock, but not rock either. It’s as if the environment remembers itself being two things at once.”

But where blood was denied, the winds remained stalwart, and the Fardrifter glided forth, sinking a single head into the shadows. A shudder ran through Avo’s Frame, his Soulfire quivering from the recoil. Where his Heaven of Air flowed, the water parted, tides turned aside by the sweeping weight of a storm.

The Domain of Shadow was ponderous in this place, and the nature of its collapse rendered it impossible to navigate if one could not circumvent the shadows.

Yet, from the Heavens Avo possessed within, he found another option.

Feeling his currents brush over schools of squirming monsters, he closed his grip around one in particular and pulled.

Wind blasted out behind him, casting sand high into the air. Dice shifted, avoiding the worst of the spray. Draus simply closed her helmet.

Between the grip of an Echohead, sustained by a Domain of Darkness, Avo observed the writhing creature–the bane of Dice’s life and childhood, beasts of her benighted past.

Its form held too much symmetry for it to be merely a thing created from the chaos expelled by a Fallen Heaven. With six eyes lining its spear-like body and flicking tongues layered in jagged teeth, Avo felt a flicker touch his Domain of Biology and frowned.

[This creature was someone’s art piece. Of that, I am certain.] Elegant-Moon greeted the monster with the scorn befitting a practitioner of biomancy. [Crude. Eyes. For a thing that swims in the darkness. Laughable. And the teeth and tongues… what a parody of life. But I suppose I’m one to speak.”

A hoarse laugh escaped from Draus. “Well. Looks like you finally found someone uglier than you. Maybe this’ll be Chambers’ face for the run. See how much worse you can make it.”

The enshadowed creature writhed and squeaked between his digits as he withdrew his Fardrifter’s presence. Its struggles waned in the light, and nature of its passing came from the glare of falling dawn. It slipped from Avo’s fingers as water. Just water. Nothing more.

Then, before the last of it could spill, Avo pushed it back beyond the veil using his winds and sensed its gradual restoration, shooting out to rejoin its kindred.

“It’s like a seabed out there,” Avo said, the heads of his Fardrifter writhing outward, displacing parts of the fog. Where blood failed, and technology offered no purchase, air laced with the touch of shadow pried, and the sea that wasn’t parted before him.

{Like a prophet of old,} Calvino chuckled. {I must remember to inform Operative Canduir. This will be certain to amuse. Might I ask you to turn a stick of blood into some snakes?}

Avo obliged the EGI on a whim, a thread forming via his Sanguinity, spilling out to be blood-made bioforms assembled from a collection of biological traits. The serpents slithered. Dice gave them a look.

Then, Draus shot them.

Calvino sighed. {Not exactly how the original story went, but I suppose there are other retellings.}

Pulling the space before him open like a curtain, nine streams drove the miasma back, and held the dark at bay. No backlash struck him. No paradox followed. His Rend was climbing at four times the original rate, however, and he wondered how much entropy his Hell was imbibing.

REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER]: 55%

“Avo,” the Fardrifter said, speaking its user’s name for the first time. “I… think I have been here before. I think I recall this to be an ocean. There is a feeling here… I know these winds. Or the currents of air that remain. I was here once long, long ago. Once. This was to be an ocean. I soared free and far for days and months. The horizon was an endless curve of blue, dotted by jutting rocks.”A whistle of melancholy sang through the rustling gales. “I wish to return. To stride the skies free. You allowed this of me today. I… am not displeased. But I miss seeing the horizon as it was before. Whole.”

Another epiphany dawned on Avo. A sudden realization that living long without continuous change was to tear yourself from within. Culture and time frayed the body that wouldn’t move, a mind that wouldn’t grow.

Being immortal was not enough. That was why Godclads were conditionally eternal.

But what happens when the world grows and you won’t?

Fallwalkers, perhaps. In the ruins of Dice’s former home, he just might–

The material came into his awareness, cutting through his thoughts. A distant tower eighty kilometers away and forty meters tall. He could feel its composition: plascrete, glass, silicon, coppery, and lightning. There was a core within it. Veins. Arteries. Fuses. Carrying electricity like blood.

Immediately, Dice’s memories swam out from the depths of his mind, and he knew what he had brushed with his Haemokinesis.

[The master’s watchtower,] template-Dice breathed. [You found one.]

Feeding electricity through his blood into the structure itself, he watched as an explosion of spotlights cleaved and parted the dark. Releasing the veil of shadows, he let the tides crash back, only to cut themselves on the brightness within.

“What’s happening,” Draus asked, looking at Avo. “Why are you–well, that’s something.”

Through the darkness came roads paved by brilliant light. Voltage ran through Avo–controlled by a cloud of sporelings channeled through his Echoheads and sourced from his Heaven. He kept the current running without overcharging the structure. More than that, he fed his own brightness into the light, layered it with the gleam of indestructibility.

“The towers,” Dice said with reverence, staring deep and far as a wide path opened before them. Writhing tendrils and slithering beasts danced along the ink-black flesh that formed the waysides, but they dared not pass into the light itself. “Are you powering it? Only the master could–”

“Just needs energy,” Avo said. “Can even give you a canon to achieve this. Won’t be hard.”

The girl fell silent, her growing understanding of her rising empowerment warring with the propaganda that shaped her entire life–dedicated in service to a single, dead fool.

“Some truths deform our egos,” Avo said, speaking softly to the girl as he thought of Walton. He gave Draus a brief look. He remembered nulling his father. He remembered how his sense of self slipped after. He remembered what he learned after, and what he understood while lurking in the depths of Mirrorhead’s mind.

Ideals were changes, but breaking them–killing the spirit of one’s parent–was like casting yourself adrift into chaos.

No more governing anchor. No more true north. You had to sail now alone, without a lighthouse to point your way.

Yet, that statement proved false a second thereafter as his Domain of Luminosity sensed something. A dot of light came through the upper right of the horizon. Then the left. Then through the far haze, more and more beams were joined and bonfires lit, seeming like stars peering through the soft mist of clouds.

Dice went still again. Draus tilted her head. Avo let out a chuff of surprise.

“Well,” the Regular said, offering a humorless chuckle. “Seems we ain’t the only ones here. Seems like the folks back home might just be alive after all.”