The System has never created anything of its own.
Far from being an omnipotent god, it is more of a pervasive entity that empowers, pushes, controls, and manipulates, but never truly manifests anything from nothing. Mana itself is an ever-renewable resource that defies the laws of entropy which ruled universes prior, but it comes from a singular source: strife—conflict between conscious organisms. This is why the System is parochial in the entities it keeps as well.
There are many lifeforms across existence that were at once intelligent yet not fully conscious in the mortal definition of the word. These entities were then classified as “Outsiders” and, over time, forced to simulate personalities they didn't originally possess.
Perhaps then it is best to regard the System as some primordial whirlpool of communal motion and magic. A mana gestalt, if you will, that distributes and fuels the actions of certain individuals and leads them down tracks toward greater conflict. From this, they also have fated adversaries, for there is always someone who is a threat to you, no matter how strong you become, no matter how high in the Tiers you climb. Someone will have the right combination of skills and experiences to nullify you or eliminate you, and this applies to entire worlds as well.
I have glimpsed dimensions of unfathomable power. I would even claim that a few of the worlds we absorbed after our Incursions were greater than us, yet we prevailed, for they were fractured by what we endured, staying whole by our tribalistic instincts and resilient civilizations, while our supposed superiors collapsed into fatal infighting the moment they were drawn into our lands.
During those wars, it perhaps might be more accurate to claim that we were the fated end of those other worlds, which then brings a looming question. One that leaves me burdened with dread.
What world is destined to be our fated end?
From there, questions perhaps even more pertinent arise:
What was the fated end of the Great One? The slumbering deity at the core of our world was struck down, shattered, and laid into a divine coma.
Who delivered the blow?
Where are they now?
Do they know where we are?
All are questions that you must seek to answer, yet fear to learn the truth behind.
—Fated End: A Tale of Incursions, by Legend-Horologist Silence (Valeros) Gehenna, Bloodline Pregenitor
VIII-18
Fated End
“Produveral, how full of shit is this bot?” Shiv asked. “I've always felt there was something fucking wrong with her, but if she's actually part of some kind of weird god-killing bullet—” He noticed Produveral giving him a blank stare. His mechanical eyes were frozen, with none of the glowing blue fragments within his iris shaping new glyphs capable of peering past the System’s dimensional thresholds. “Right. Forgot about that.”
“What?” Produveral blinked. The Mythic-Tier Pathbearer seemed like a drunk crawling out of a stupor. The first emotion that spilled out from him in the aftermath of that thought-terminating question was one of dull, inherited rage. “Goddamn it, must have trailed off. Fucking Core. Told you earlier, right? That you should fly over to Africa and finish what we started. Now, I'm not saying that Chorus would like you to do this, but Centauri might just be willing to intervene a little more on your behalf.”
“Yeah, sure thing, man,” Shiv said, biting back a sigh. “I'll think about doing a genocide. I just need to figure a few things out first. Thanks for the help.”
“It’s not a genocide when your targets aren’t people,” Produveral answered—only semi-ironically.
“We should take his words into account, but not internalize them entirely. The same reason should apply when we are speaking to the Faceless Queen, Veronica, or the Forbidden Empire. Right now, they all hold facets of a similar puzzle. It is the Forbidden Empire who seems to be offering the most information, but everyone despises them for a reason, and they despise everyone else for a reason.” The Harbinger imposed a humbling smallness on Shiv, the emotional shift priming him for caution. “But there is evidence that they speak the truth. Produveral is affected by all of this. He's affected specifically by the Faceless Queen more than anyone else. She exists in a Legendary-Tier threshold world, yet she exerts such an overwhelming mental effect on Myths, which means then that there must be something greater at play.”
In the same moment, his Dryad of Lies brushed against something in that vast, unknowable darkness of deception. The magical vine sprouting out from him connected to a greater web of conspiracy—and his Continuity Error propelled it further, until the obfuscation of parted realities and impossible distances were simplified into a vision.
And he glimpsed something primed for this very moment. Something too vast for his mind to comprehend.
As soon as he brushed it, it stared back at him, and the darkness parted for a moment.
He saw a star—wrapped in bands of glittering metal that folded and bent, oscillating and twisting the radiance it held trapped within.
Across the distance of realities, Shiv regarded the entity, and immediately, he saw its shape begin to shift. A series of conical rings took shape at the front of the star as the rest of its metallic glitter puffed and solidified, forming something of an aegis shrouding the face of a sun.
What are you? Shiv's question came with an intuitive answer. The Faceless Queen was supposedly a bullet, and the Stolen Throne a round much like her. The Forbidden Empire spoke of a weapon that had fired them, and a sun turned into a firing mechanism might just be enough to thread a god-killing munition across the infinite expanse of integration.
And thread ammunition, it did. Through the parting brambles of his Dryad, Shiv saw a glistening strand of brilliant sunlight extend from the face of the core, skating metal, and accelerate further and further, moving through the vast nothing until suddenly a pulse of mana appeared around it, forming a cloud-like corona in its wake. Painting the gloss of long-dead nebulas back into existence, it ignited first with Chronomancy, then with the sparkling static of Dimensionality.
Then Shiv got the impression that he wasn't glimpsing a vision from the past. No, this was very much in progress at present, and as the unknown entity had noticed him—
“SHIV!” the girl screamed. “BACKSTAGE! NOW!”
Instinct hijacked rationality. Shiv reacted. His Harbinger manifested around him—and was cracked as a hair-thin thread speared into him. Shiv barely perceived the attack: it came from a centimeter-wide rupture just a finger’s width from his face. It was so fine and existed ever so briefly that there was almost no chance to respond. For almost anyone else, the shot would have landed. But not Shiv. The moment the strand pierced into his right eye, he sank, plunging beyond the grip of the System into a place all his own: a non-existent sanctuary.
On the other side of the curtain, the world turned red with mana and vitality. A crimson glow bathed the Backstage, so much magical power diffusing its existence that he felt it solidify permanently as he ripped a star's worth of magic out from that fine, subversive thread.
But digesting all that power took time. A trail of consuming vitality crept out of Shiv and subsumed the radiance of the strand—but in the meantime, it remained embedded inside of him. It was buried deep, not only in his flesh but also stinging his soul. Stuck in his right eye was not only a strand, but a needle at its tip, a crystalline shard that fractured and burst into explosive fractals. Shiv saw faint figments of Psychomancy and myriad other types of unnameable magics. In that miasma of chaotic magic, he glimpsed something that he didn't expect: faint echoes of himself staring down upon him, each one dividing, expanding, multiplying, like the world around him was unraveling into kaleidoscopic fractals. They existed for a half-second before vanishing. Shiv felt an inexorable pull, his inner world becoming undone.
At the same time, a rush of power unlike anything he'd ever felt before surged through his Dryad first and then his Continuity Error skill second. The power he imbibed was beyond pure, beyond complexity, and exceeded both his understanding and imagination to remotely conceptualize what it was supposed to do.
But worst yet, in this vast expanse of nothing, he caught sight of something across the threshold of integration. In the Backstage there was only the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things: the Red Rider's Hand and the girl beside Shiv. She helped keep him upright, and she reached up with a shaking hand to pluck the strand free. It dissolved into two broken threads and motes, completely absorbed by this place beyond places. Yet on the other side, where all his vessels once stood, there was something else. The world was outlined in vague definitions of mana. Each one had its own feel, its own unique frequency, and they stood as silhouettes in a vast and vaguely defined world.
But centimeters away, a small gap remained in the flesh of existence: a breach in the fabric of reality's vitality. Through that crack in the superstructure, Shiv peered through the wound as if it was a peephole and saw what lurked on the other side.
The star glared back at him. The star that wasn't a star at all. The star that expanded in threads of metallic wings, blossoming and squealing like some angelic, incomprehensible creature. Entities from the Outside were aberrant, but this thing was an expression of pure order, yet brought with it an alien dread all the same. It seemed too much, too far, too complicated for Shiv to even guess its makeup.
Its face alone inflicted a building ache on his mind. It didn't unravel his sanity, but it did overburden his mental capacity.
Then, just as the wounds left in the fabric of reality began to close, a crushing question seeped out from the other side.
WHAT. ARE. YOU.
It spoke with the voice of a conquered reality screaming; a chorus of enslaved civilizations wailing in their trillions. It spoke using the System itself as a processor for its voice, like reality was microphone and speaker in one.
Shiv's stomach plunged beyond the point of bedrock. It continued in a freefall toward an unknowable abyss.
He was outside of context.
And the thing could still see him.
Only when the last of its threads disintegrated, the entity seemed to lose track of him, turning and shifting before vanishing as the small gap in vitality melted back together.
In the crushing quietude that followed, Shiv watched as absolute confusion took hold amongst his allies, enemies, and more. The world forgot about the Deathless. But the unknowable star had seen him—had glared through the threshold created by his Unique Skill.
“What the fuck was that?” the girl hissed. She stared at her empty hand where the thread once burned, now gone entirely. Meanwhile, the Backstage burned so bright that it felt like Shiv was standing within the embrace of a red dwarf.
Dryad of Lies: 126 > 175
Continuity Error: 302 > 411
Garden of Wounds and Broken Things: 209 > 299
Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin: 453 > 461
Inertial Overdrive: 436 > 440
Attention: The Garden of Wounds and Broken Things has rejected the offer to fork off from the Deathless’ cognitive template.
Attention: The Hand of the Red Rider has rejected the offer to fork off from the Deathless’ cognitive template.
Both Shiv and the girl stared on in muted disbelief as realization crept in. The attack didn't just hit his body in the Farwalker Outpost. It hit every single vessel he had, from his Severed Shadow down to the most irrelevant trueclone, all at the same time.
Judging from how bright the vitality flared, the Backstage would continue to burn for maybe months and years after. The mana channeled into that attack dwarfed anything Longinus could have ever conjured. This attack was far beyond Legendary-Tier in capacity, and yet it had struck him on Integrated Earth. The attack had simply been so fine, so surgical, that no destabilization happened to the ambient mana threshold. That was the best guess Shiv could muster, anyway. But even so…
There were other things to consider. The rush of levels he'd gained from this was beyond comparison. One hundred levels for Continuity Error in an instant, and it was only because of Continuity Error that he'd managed to make contact with the creature and even survive. Then there were the other two notifications.
Somehow, that thread had managed to give the Garden and the Red Rider's Hand a chance to be entities all their own, whatever that may have entailed. Shiv turned to look at his animated ruins and the fist they were connected to. He saw fading fractals that represented them as well, but their aesthetics and shapes were different.
In one fractal, the Garden of Wounds and Broken Things became a tower, all its matter congealed together, stronger and solidified, yet drowned in a greater shadow of a similar shape. The vision was feverish, confusing, and Shiv didn't fully understand why he was getting such details. In another reality, the Garden became a sprawl, an expansive fungal growth that crept across the void, consuming and assimilating all reality in an expansive urban apocalypse that drowned entire universes.
The Red Rider's Hand also changed. In one, the Hand grew its own body and manifested as some manner of vestigial entity carrying traits from both Shiv and the Challenger. In another, the Hand became an Outsider, something that crushed and then devoured the Stranger from within, spreading deeper into the realms beyond integration and vanishing utterly from sight—even within the vision.
But both the Hand and the Garden rejected this. They chose to stay with Shiv. Connect, remain tethered to his mind and spirit for whatever reason. He looked upon them, a faint measure of gratitude coming forth, but it then was drowned by two confirmations and budding confusion. You guys are connected to me. You are tied to my will.
Shiv swallowed as he stared at the Red Rider's Hand. His paranoia about the limb had never fully faded. It was not to be trusted. It was a useful weapon, an unmatched shield, but it might just turn on him at any time—such were his thoughts, and so he used it in reserve and with extreme care. Now that the System itself proclaimed it to be part of him, what did that mean? Why did the Hand act the way it did when it was so close to him in mentality?
And then there was the girl. She didn't get any such offer at all. She was left out of the equation, but she was able to grasp the thread—and more importantly, her body was burning with the same vitality that ignited the Backstage. With the same realization, she looked down at her hands in alarm and then stared up at Shiv. Her body grew ever more tangible. Her eyes gleamed emerald bright, and some of her features drew closer to becoming a mirror to Adam's before softening in certain places—pushing her back to being a fraternal twin rather than an identical one.
“What the fuck?” she gasped.
“What the fuck is right,” Shiv said. “Looks like the Forbidden Empire wasn't full of shit, or at least not entirely. We just brushed something. I think that… was the weapon. If that thing put the Great One down…” Shiv hesitated. How was he supposed to go back out into existence again? It would be waiting for him, watching. Or maybe it wouldn't. Maybe without Continuity Error and the Dryad giving it a firing trajectory across dimensions, it would have nothing to go on. He had to risk it, but he also needed to be prepared to plunge Backstage at any time.
His thoughts then branched. A second set of paranoid considerations followed. What if it fired at his companions? What if it had already affected Produveral? The Myth couldn't recall any proper details about the Faceless Queen, after all. His dialogue and thoughts went in incoherent loops, and the same thing afflicted the other Farwalkers at the station. Even Merrielmel’s brother was trapped in this cognitive cage.
“Alright, shit, we reached too far,” Shiv grunted. “Arrow, keep your eyes open. If you feel that thing’s about to fire on me again, you yell.”
“You're going back out there?” Her voice was filled with absolute disbelief. “Did you... You barely survived the first shot! That thread was supposed to... I don't even know what it's supposed to do! There's broken versions of you. There's broken versions of almost all of us. It's like it tried to fragment who you were on a fundamental level.”
“Probably should have stayed—” Shit cut himself off. The shock was dying down now, and he was so used to weird and overwhelming bullshit that it just felt like another fight rather than a hopeless endeavor. “I'm gonna do what I always do. I'm gonna figure things out. If it could have shot all of us at any time, it would have. If it noticed me inside the Farwalker outpost, it would have shot me before. Not now. So, considering it only managed to get a glimpse of me the moment I looked at it, I think we might not be as fucked as you're thinking.”
Just as he was about to dive back into integration, something loomed beside him. Shiv hesitated and turned, regarding the Red Rider's Hand. “Yeah, sure, you can try blocking it next time. But that attack didn't feel like there was much violence behind it. That usual killing intent wasn't there. Felt like something that was purely based in subversion or metamorphosis.” He scowled. “More questions for the Queen later, I suppose. If there is a later.”
A pulse of apprehension rippled out from the girl, but she combusted with vitality and, in the end, gave Shiv a reluctant nod. “Alright. Don’t get threaded, Shiv. I'll do my best to keep you safe.”
Shiv smirked. “I hope so, 'cause if this goes wrong, I'm blaming you. No pressure.”
“You—”
He crossed back over into Integration before she could finish cursing at him. Across the world, his various vessels surfaced, and everyone around him shuddered. At the Academy, students blinked at him but then shook their heads and returned to their own tasks. It was easy to disregard the suddenly appearing student as a symptom of personal fatigue or inattention. Elsewhere, especially among the cohort who understood what the Deathless could do, an atmosphere of alarm took hold.
Produveral was the first to respond. He tilted his head at Shiv, waiting for an answer. At the same time, Uva crackled in the back of Shiv's mind, prodding him for the same thing.
“I'll explain in a minute,” Shiv said, replying to both. A massive platinum bruise suddenly covered the entirety of his backside, and Shiv cringed as a crushing weight pressed down upon his body. The floor beneath him groaned. All floors. He could still move, but a few more hits like that and he would effectively be rooted in place wherever he existed.
Within the Boiling Toad, over in the Fairwoods, a certain Tarrasque was busy raging at Shiv for disappearing mid-labor to take an unsanctioned smoke break. Terrence had made his displeasure known by slapping him over the back of his body—using the totality of his gravitational might.
“You being attacked?” Produveral asked.
“Not exactly. More like a kitchen dispute.” Shiv looked around, waiting for the weapon to reveal itself once more, anticipating another thread meant to unravel his existence. The rupture had appeared centimeters away from him, which meant that it couldn't manifest within him or directly upon his person for whatever reason. If it could, he would have had no chance of him dodging that—even with a warning from the girl.
Seconds passed; no attacks came. From across the context, she let out a tense sigh.
“Nothing. I don't feel or see anything. No strange mana signatures, nothing at all. I think we might be safe for now, unless they're trying to wait for us to drop our guard and ambush us, which I don't know; I don't see anything. Shit…”
Solid weight partially dissolved inside Shiv's chest. The rest of the pressure lingered and would continue to linger until he was absolutely certain about his security. Being in a constant state of anxiety was practically his life now, anyway.
Back over in Farnest, the last bits of Shiv's levity drained out of him, and he glared hard at the Forbidden Empire's agent. "Keep talking.”
But Bismuth didn't. Instead, its optical module flickered. That vertical slit of light flashed as it tried to analyze him. “You were attacked just now. You saw the weapon. You saw Avalon. You avoided the attack. How? How?”
For an empire with no actual skills, these bastards are really good at reading people.
“We all got secrets to keep,” Shiv said vaguely, offering a deadpan wink, “but I might be persuaded to trade some of mine for some of yours. What do you mean the Faceless Queen was a bullet? What the hells is this Avalon? Is she one of its threads? Some kind of fractal? What even are those fractals? And—”
“Stop.” Bismuth's voice was charged with utter terror. “Stop invoking its name. Stop asking for details. Your skills reach, your skills extend. If you could gain a vision of its form, if you could glimpse it, it can glimpse you. There is no secret that will protect you from it. There is no stealth that is beyond it. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that will stop it from firing upon you when you know where it is, what it is. A vision is not a vision to it. A vision is not a vision to paradise conquered. A vision is not a vision when Avalon is the end of all visions.”
Just then, Shiv felt his Continuity Error skill tremble once more, and he prepared to dodge and sink Backstage, but then the skill quelled. On the other end, whatever it was brushing against vanished, and the great nothing replaced the space it occupied.
“You're not making a lot of sense,” Shiv said, but he was starting to grasp why the Forbidden Empire was the way it was. “How many times has it fired at you?”
Bismuth didn't speak, but then something shifted in the air. Shiv felt something. His Harbinger caught an emotion that escaped from deep within the Forbidden Empire conduit. Reluctance turned to desperation.
“It does not want to fire at us. It wants to eradicate us. It knows what we are, as we know what it is. We cannot be Excaliburized. You resisted Excaliburization. We will share a similar fate. We are aligned here. You might not understand, but you can feel. You can know.”
And Shiv did feel. He did understand. A single thread, empowered with mana beyond a god, capable of shattering him on the most fundamental axis of his being. It wasn't just his mind that fragmented into fractals; it was meant to be his soul as well. Only his Continuity Error spared him. Only his Continuity Error allowed him to make contact.
He alone might be a threat, but there was something else as well. The Dryad was trembling, rattling, screaming lie, lie, lie, lie at the Forbidden Empire. There was still another layer to this masquerade, and that confirmed they knew more about the situation at hand than they were ever willing to admit.
“Do not press them further,” the Harbinger declared. “If you do, they will retreat, they will retreat. That terror is not falsified; it is genuine, and when an entire empire allows their collective horror to spill out from a disposal asset—that means their horror is cultural, civilizational.”
Thus, Shiv thought of another question, not a direct one, but one he needed to know all the same. “The incursion—is Avalon what's waiting for us? Is it going to be coming for us when our ambient mana ceiling is raised?”
“It is already on the borders. It is not meant to be your fated enemy, but the System will not stop it if it seeks to usurp the existing architecture. Whoever we were meant to fight will be Excaliburized. The blades that come for us will be in the shape of the unknown, wielded by Avalon.”
The Forbidden Empire's partial prevarications were exhausting, but Shiv understood why they spoke this way.
The more people knew, the more diviners that delved, the more entities that might be capable of making contact with this Avalon. The more opportunities it had to subvert or strike at a world from the inside. It was firing through ambient mana. Hitting him in the Stranger's Garden wasn't a difficult task. There was no true threshold there, not the same way there was on Integrated Earth or Gate Piety, but it hit him everywhere. It hit him all at once, regardless of time, even when he stilled the pace of reality by calling upon his Harbinger. It struck him still, it fractured his Harbinger—and the time it took to drill through his psycho-temporal field was a big part behind his survival equation.
But how many other people had that? How many other people had Continuity Error? How many people were like him? None, aside from the Faceless Queen, who, if the Forbidden Empire was speaking true, was “Excaliburized.”
“But not only her,” the Harbinger whispered. “Aviary, a nation of spies and pretenders, subverted, built on deception. And they are spread all across our world.”
“Fuck,” Shiv growled under his breath.
“You understand,” Bismuth whined mechanically. “You see.”
Shiv bit his lip as he considered his choices. He didn't want to draw the Forbidden Empire into the fold. There were already too many players beyond his capacity to control, and all of them within Gate Piety. He couldn't shake the feeling that this would drag them closer to the edge of destruction, but if the Faceless Queen was Excaliburized—and way too much evidence pointed that way—then he needed to know how to counter her. He needed to know what schemes she was trying to play and capture her, because she might be the only means of understanding this Avalon. If they won't have to fight that when the Incursion arrived, then they needed every advantage they could get. Because the moment the Ambient Mana Threshold went down and Integrated Earth surfaced to be a part of the greater whole, it would be coming for them.
And even if Shiv could save himself, what about everyone else?
“Fuck,” Shiv repeated, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
“You were made to be a bomb, an infection, a calamity to collapse the System from within, but your creator was brilliant and hubristic at the same time. You are a walking enigma, a superweapon, always growing, ever-evolving.” Bismuth sagged, the action alone screaming of exhaustion and regret. “But how could you have been the first? How could no one else have imagined the same thing, a similar concept applied differently? You are not the only one meant to collapse the System. You are nowhere near the first. Before Udraal, there were—”
“There was you,” Shiv said, locking onto the Forbidden Empire. A jolt of cold understanding passed through him. “Did you make Avalon? Was that your attempt?”
Bismuth stared back at him, wordless one second, then hollow the next. “We will be sending a representative. Prepare to receive her within the next hour.” With that, Bismuth shuddered, and the glow of its optics changed, turning to a soft, flickering blue. It looked at its many tendril-like hands as a post-stupor clumsiness swept over its body. “I am… not sure how I got—Oh, oh, no!”
It looked up, realizing that it was trapped in a cell with the Deathless. Sparks flew out out from the sides of its head as its terror surged. “I can—I can't explain! I can't! Whatever I did, I didn't do it sober! Please don’t kill me, Legend-Deathless! Please!”
The Forbidden Empire was gone. The subverted automaton was back to being itself once more. Shiv sighed as he took a step back, pulling himself free from the cell as he faced the others.
“Shiv” Adam swallowed. “What just—”
“Emergency council,” Shiv snapped. “Right now.”