Have you ever imagined who you might be in another life? What a truly perfect life might look like?
Would you like me to show you?
Simply nod if you do. But I must warn you, boy, even someone possessed of your mind will not be able to turn away from the ambrosia of utopia.
Should you choose Kenosis, you will remain marked; you will be an addict for utopia, always and forevermore.
—The Faceless Queen to Udraal Thann
VIII-21Sublimation
It was the most peaceful mass extinction Shiv ever witnessed.
Somehow, deep in his bones, deeper still in his soul, he recognized it for what it was: an extinction. A hundred threads of starlight connected, fusing together until they became a solid golden cord attached to the center of the Challenger's being. He glowed bright from within and then fractured. His being broke in so many different directions, expanding as the fractals blossomed, spreading each from each. Derivatives maintained qualities of the original, shattering and reforming over and over, each one bearing an echo that was as tangible and true as the original Red Rider.
The other orcs faced a more severe fate. Those touched by the strands burst apart in their countless billions. All the world became a shifting kaleidoscope of incomprehensible chaos, and in the second that followed, it felt like multiple eternities transpired, with Shiv caught beyond reality’s grasp. But even if he was beyond the touch of extinction unfolding, he was still a witness. Being beyond the border of context did not protect his sanity. His mind unraveled and then fused back together in the next instant, only for the process to repeat again. He was sinking, looping, forced to behold as the orcs became as if nuclear shadows in flashes of golden resplendence and then faded, their essences drawn up along the threads, imbibed by Avalon's avaricious presence.
The Tutorial, once stricken with blood, death, decay, and fire, grew bland as patches of instability spread over the land. The wasteland was consumed by vast swaths of paleness, for that was the only thing to call them. Just paleness. Like the details which existed along the entire expanse of reality had been stripped away, and in its place remained only weathered wallpaper, dappled yet lacking any distinct coloration. It was like a mingling of low-frequency mana types—like the stillborn version of a sunset, never to truly be, yet on the cusp of being all the same.
One by one, the orcs vanished, swallowed, and absorbed into the star at the center of the sky. It glittered with wreathed sunspots, solar flares ejecting out from its face in rising towers of coronal triumph. The Breaker and Corcusa were no more either. In their absence lingered a patch of paleness as well, denser than all the others, yet unnerving to look upon just the same. Shiv shuddered and twisted. The girl beside him clawed at her face, trying to rip through her flesh, her skin, her eyes. But even with the imbuement of vitality the Backstage absorbed, she was only partially real, and halfway to nothing was still nothing.
Shiv rose from his stupor of spiraling sanity, breaking the cycle briefly, for his mind adapted to the incomprehension. This thing, this moment, this impossible instant would have been enough to shred anyone else's mind. But for him, all manner of destruction became nectar; rather than coming asunder, his psychology and spirit thickened. The scar-stuff absorbed into his metaphysical tissues until he was a magnitude more durable than in the seconds which passed before.
Shiv surfaced from deep inside himself. He looked upon the world, swallowed by that incomprehensible pale, and beheld a single other entity left in existence across from him. The Challenger stood with his back straight, his thieved hand lifted high, an expression of joy, amusement, and only slight confusion defining his features. He was still invoking Avalon's power using his stolen hand. The Starhawk's ten fingers pointed high, jagged like talons at their tips, with a dozen more threads of radiant starlight tethered around each end. The Challenger curled his fingers, and as he pulled upon the threads, the star fired more beams into the vast and unknowable distance. It cleaved past the threshold of the clearing. The clouds beyond hid the destinations of its other targets, but Shiv felt it. He knew that across existence, across the local cosmos, across dimensions, across all Integration, it was seeking other entities under the command of the Challenger. It was seeking the annihilation of the entire orc species.
“Why?” the girl wheezed in incomprehension. “Why? Why is he doing this?”
Shiv lacked an answer, but something slammed into his back, nudging him, demanding that he step back into the fray and face the Challenger head-on. The Red Rider's Hand pushed him, unimpressed with the madness on display and commanding he seek a direct answer instead. Shiv's first reaction was born from paranoia. He distanced himself from the hand, prepared for a betrayal that never came. Again, he reminded himself that the hand belonged to him now. It was fused with his soul and mind. It was no longer the Challenger's to move.
Even knowing the truth didn't mean one felt it. Shiv continued to hold another part of himself at bay. That in itself was an act of insanity that would take more time before he could trust.
“Why?” Shiv asked. “Why do you want me to go out?”
The Red Rider's Hand sagged, its fingers pointing down as if exasperated by the stupidity of his question. It then perked up with the rest of the Garden attached to it, and the rubble rose, wounds stretched high, expanding lacerations to expose the parted tissues within. Blood spilled down, and in that impossible moment, both the Garden and the Hand mustered language through grumbling sound. The sound of gravel striking asphalt. The sound of glass cracking. The sound of squealing steel. The sound of ripping flesh.
Somehow, through that destructive symphony, the Hand and the Garden managed language.
“Because this is a demonstration, idiot. A performance. He is showing you something. It wasn't an attack on you. It was an attack on all of them. It was an extinction, a casual, peaceful extinction, performed by the creator on his own kind. You need to find out why. And you need to understand why he is still here, unharmed. Think, watch, observe, stop struggling. The world is moving. Move with it.”
Shiv drew in a non-breath, for there was no oxygen in the Backstage. Yet there were sounds, vibrations, things capable of conveying speech. Beside him, the girl shifted, as uneasy as he. “Shiv, I don't know, this is batshit fucking insane. I think we need to get out of here. I think that you should leave this place and ask the Farwalkers or someone else. They might be able to figure out whatever this is, and if we stay, there's no guarantee—”
Shiv’s curiosity won over his caution. For whatever reason, he believed the Hand. He believed the Garden. He believed them, for they were submerged in the System's embrace in a way he never could be.
The girl feared. She, perhaps, was even more of a facet of his mind. She never got the chance. She didn't have any grounding, not even a connected skill.
His Harbinger moved him before his mind and flesh ever caught up. It was like his psychology knew what was right, knew what had to be done, knew that a moment lay ahead.
“Oh, fuck me, why do I even—” The girl’s outraged voice was cut off.
As soon as Shiv slipped back onto the stage, the world shuddered. He glowed bright red and then gold, then flared with black fire and the translucent glow of his mind, and he stood, contrasted to the pale being in this place. It continued hammering against him, clawing at his sanity, but his mind was like an adapted fortress. He had already gone beyond the precipice of unknowing madness so many times in the past few seconds, in those extended eternities, gazing into the fracturing orcs, into the stillborn sunsets, that the path of incoherence could seize him no more.
In the physical, Shiv stood as a constant amidst a world smeared of shape and detail. It was like entire horizons had forgotten what they were, devolved and decayed after an infinite amount of replications and permutations. He could still make out the vagueness of shapes, the former colors and hues which once belonged to distant fires and structures, the orcs, and the armor they wore. He could still feel faint vitality signatures in the air, each one thinner than a hair, a thread that lingered even after Avalon’s golden sinews had withdrawn.
The Tutorial stood deformed by the paleness. Shiv existed as his Harbinger while his actual body became less than solid, and his organs melded with his skin and the space he occupied, leaving his skills within exposed. The hardened crust of Vitae, which comprised his true existence, gleamed bright beneath the humanoid field of gold.
Across from him, mere meters away, the Challenger stood, his hand still upraised, his eyes shining like stars going supernova. Behind him, wings spread, shapeless appendages in their millions, made from broken fractals of reality, layer upon layer, rising upward, higher and higher. Each wing showed a different instance of a possible present: a different lifetime, a different path the Challenger could have taken along the long, long road of his life.
In every single one, he looked the same. In every single one, he acted the same. The different versions of the Challenger strode to arrive each at the same spot—the present. They were no longer diverged; the branching replicas became a mirror, and the Challenger was. Across all possible instances and every infinite instance to manifest thereafter, the Challenger was.
“Ah, Deathless. You return rather than flee. This pleases me.” The Challenger chuckled. Shiv stared him down, speechless, expressionless, waiting for the God of Strife to continue. “I suppose this little apocalypse I've caused demands an explanation. I have just unmade every orc across Integration, including those within your Gate. If you turn another one of your bodies back to where they are, you will find patches of paleness in their place, and you will find a spreading madness sweeping through your little dimension like a contagion—for we both know not everyone possesses that mind of yours.”
Shiv refused to rise to the god’s provocations, but inside, his heart boiled with rage. His Harbinger grew brighter as a response. “You going to fix what you've broken after, or you going to sully this war we're supposed to have?”
Slowly, the Challenger brought the Starhawk’s dual hand against his chest in an expression of faux-outrage. "Of course I will fix all of this. There will be no war without my orcs. This thing is as much a philosophical, metaphorical struggle as it is a literal one, but that is neither here nor there right now. For at present, there are no orcs. They do not exist. They are elsewhere, above. Sublimed."
There was something about the way the Challenger spoke that last word. “Sublimed?”
The Challenger advanced upon Shiv, taking languid, deliberate steps. Behind him, his wings grew ever longer, and all the available space of the universe wasn't enough to contain how many expanding fractals continued to sprout from the God of Strife. “Have you ever dreamed of Utopia, Shiv? A perfect world in which you are drowned in everlasting bliss for all eternity, where everything you do results in a victory, just the right amount of struggle so that you are not lost to an eternal malaise, but ultimately a promised and sure victory all the same?”
An obstinate part of Shiv leaned towards silence to give the Challenger nothing. But petulance wouldn't serve him right now; he wanted to understand what the Challenger just did and how this all related to Avalon, the Faceless Queen, and the threat beyond the Incursion. “I've imagined better times. I've hoped for easier days.”
“As has everyone, but I speak of utopia. Genuine, true utopia, down to the last detail, down to how society is meant to suit every single being's urges and actualizations. Have you thought of that?” The Challenger smiled as he read the answer from Shiv's expression. “Of course you haven't. Of course not! You've been dissatisfied before, but even now, even after all this, a deep, deep part of you is genuinely happy, truly happy, that you live the life you do. That you are a Pathbearer. That you can fight and struggle and grow strong past every death, past every defeat, and inevitable triumph. Why, for you, even with all the pain promised in a life, you are more destined for victory than any other. So, what utopia could appeal to you? What utopia is beyond the eventual reach of your hands?”
“One where Georges is still alive,” Shiv admitted without shame. “One where everyone who died because of my sloppiness in a past, present, or future battle gets another chance. That sounds like a start.”
“No! No, no, Deathless, you misunderstand. That is a want, a perk, a benefit, a rectification. That is not utopia. The same world with a few lives returned and nothing else is merely an act of resurrection, and…” The Challenger stopped there, choosing to switch topics. “No, a true utopia might be a world where no one ever dies, where everyone is perfectly preserved for all eternity in dramatic, beloved bliss. Or perhaps eternal war, eternal bloodshed, only for everyone to be drawn back from the brink as they lay dead after a day of righteous struggle to do it again and again and again for every day that follows with no end. Some of your ancestors have given this utopia a name: Valhalla. More broadly, though, this is an afterlife. Beyond being an afterlife, it is a promised reward, an eternity past that miserable mortality they so suffered. A heaven, if you will.”
“Heaven.” Just speaking the word sent a jolt of electricity through Shiv's nerves. “Capital H or lower case?”
The Challenger’s grin widened. “Ah, so you have some knowledge of what came far before, or what came beside, or what is to come. It's hard to say, really. The shape of the System is a questionable thing, but who am I to shake the foundations of my personal utopia?”
Shiv deciphered the truth using the orc's glee and word choice. “You can't be Excaliburized because you're already in your personal heaven. You're saying that the System has already given you everything you want. That you're already living your utopia. Is that it?”
“In part, but you are still only grasping a facet of the whole.” The Challenger pointed up again. This time, however, he didn't use the Starhawk's stolen limb. He directed his left hand high and held a single finger in defiance of Avalon. Its shrouded face masked behind a cloud of glittering metal, twisted and bent, and Shiv was prepared to dive Backstage should it attempt to strike him with a thread. “But I don't want to give you everything. No, some things are better uncovered for yourself, and some things I dare not invoke, for they pose dangers to me as well. You should understand by now, Deathless, that even a Transcendent might be wary of toying too much with a Legend. For the Tiers, the scope and depth of our powers and skills is one thing, but the threats we pose, the uniqueness of our personal narratives, and the danger and unpredictability of that uniqueness are another, especially when it comes to the upper-case Heavens, one of which your Paragon possesses, though in part it slumbers, and has not accepted him in full yet either.”
“Right, so what can you tell me?” Shiv asked.
The supernovae within the Challenger's eyes burned to the zenith and burst, turning black, spreading as an accretion reached the corners of his sockets. “I can tell you that you are uniquely vulnerable to this “Avalon,” as you continue calling it. I can tell you that if its thread ever burrows into you, there is almost no chance you will make it back. I implore you, Deathless, continue reacting with caution and terror when it comes to utopia. Though we are alike in so many ways, it's all the ones where we don't align that leave you vulnerable. You bear intense ambition, while I am ambition fulfilled. You have infinite potential for growth, while I press against my currently known apex. And there are so many things you have not experienced; you are still so young in years and moments. Even now, what you consider an identity is only a vague shell in its nascent formation.”
“So, what, Avalon exploits possibility, ambition, chance?”
The Challenger almost sighed. Shiv sensed not a measure of slight disappointment, but far more than that. “Avalon is a glutton for fantasy and a boundless source of it. Avalon yearns and inflicts yearning, wields yearning, weaves yearning, and decides upon yearning in return. Avalon offers you a way out, and Avalon is untrue and true at the same time. For Avalon itself is part of a mythology, and maybe that is the best way to understand it. It is the actualization and enforcement of a myth upon another, a myth they so desire and that they have not explored, a myth for them to drown in.”
“Like the Fairwoods?" Shiv asked, sensing a similarity.
“No, Avalon is mythology: the victorious, triumphant, possible. Peace above all else. Peace of mind. Peace of heart. Not just struggle. Not an arc. Avalon and the Fairwoods are aesthetically similar, yet substantially opposites, anathema to one another in truth. For one is that preserved entropy, while another is eternal diamondism that devolves into mutation and decay regardless.”
The Challenger came to a halt just before Shiv and lowered himself so he could face the Deathless eye to eye. Shiv took not one step back, but neither did he approach himself. The Challenger was a walking calamity, far more so than Shiv, and so he chose the middle path to offer no surrender while also refusing to practice foolishness. “Alright, so if the Avalon hits me, it's going to be a bad time. I'm basically going to be dead.”
“Oh, no, far worse. You'll be eternally alive, and you'll be eternally happy. But you will not be here anymore.”
Once again, Shiv looked upon the swathes of paleness and paused. That reminded him of another patch. It reminded him of the faint blue of Animancy, the same smear that indicated the final resting place of the first Recollector in Piety. “An assimilation of legend…”
The Challenger's smile grew terrifying. “Indubitably, but it is also yet more than that. It's the overwriting of legend. It is making someone relive so many lives that they willingly submit to a certain set of outcomes, serving your interests and becoming a willing asset for after eons and eternities. After countless other possibilities and loops lived, there is always one where you find yourself standing alongside your enemy, even if only for the experience, even only as an experiment, even out of boredom. And by this point, with yourself drowned so deep within the layers of utopia, you won't even notice that you have returned. You won't even notice that you are no longer sublimed, and you will wound your original self in ways you cannot fathom.”
“Wait, so Excaliburization doesn't overwrite your mind or soul. It just imprints another possible version of you that's within the star or something like that?” Shiv was still lost, but he was on a narrow path now. He had a trail to follow, but the dread in him built as he wondered where it might lead.
“Correct. You cannot utterly replace someone else's soul so fast. Even a Transcendent cannot wrench the idea of you out from the grasp of the System, but there are ways to cheat the System, or at least ways that it accepts. This world we live in yearns for brutal self-actualization, and when you replace a copy of someone with another version of themselves, better or weaker, that is always an easier thing to apply, since you were all cut from a similar mold.”
Across the Challenger's many wings, along that staircase of replicated selves, he spoke the same words, perhaps to a trillion, quintillion different souls, and along that trajectory a singularity was observed: an inexorable point in all possible histories of all tomorrows.
The Challenger drew back, surrendering the space to Shiv. “Those humans who dwell in Africa are fools; arrogant, miserable, misbegotten fools who imagine themselves to be greater than they once were, but understand that the fact that they were great enough once to achieve what they did without a fundamental force of the universe fighting in their corner, pushing them toward ambition to survive in a hostile, cold womb that was pre-Integration reality, should be commended. But that doesn't change the fact that they weren't the only ones to reach such heights; that doesn't change the fact that their Gaia, their plan to create an Excaliburization process, was not already shared by countless other species, by countless other instances of ancient civilizations. We all think ourselves the first to imagine something, but ultimately, we are playing with the colors provided to us by existence. We are mere demiurges playing at God. The paint was already here. We merely mix hues and call it true creation.”
Shiv scowled. “Alright, so you're saying the Forbidden Empire's full of shit, or at least that they didn't make Avalon, even though they think or thought they did. What they made is just a part of a greater Avalon, some kind of network of mind-soul replacing stars across Integration?”
The Challenger bellowed a laugh that was as much amused as it was full of pity. "Oh, oh, no, dear Deathless, no. The star is not Avalon. No more than a hand is your true shape. That up there is simply a repurposed hyperwave station. Here is a better metaphor: The star is a stack of letters. The threads are a delivery mechanism. Avalon, then, is the writer. Avalon is Veronica Chandler—if she were not a feeble insect.
The Challenger's annoying vagueness crumbled, and Shiv finally understood what he was trying to convey. “Oh, fuck. But wait, I saw it. I saw it in the vision. I brushed against it. I felt it.”
“You felt a part of it, but again, you lack context. You felt its manner, its expression, its legend, with your own, and it felt you as well. I suspect that your little foray out of this reality left it confused and wary. It knows and is capable of much. I even fear it to some capacity, but likewise, it must fear you now, for everything it is struck it has been sublimed—and only in the most unique of instances does it miss. Unfortunately for you, it now knows that it's dealing with a unique instance. Doubly unfortunate for another party in the equation, it understands who to seek to address this concern. Udraal Thann is likely being hunted as we speak.”
Disturbing though that claim was, it also filled Shiv with a consideration. If Udraal feared Avalon, then could Avalon be used against Udraal? Maybe, just maybe, they might be able to come out of this and resolve all their problems in one single blow.
“It's not that he is weaker than Avalon,” the Challenger said, practically reading Shiv's train of thought from his gaze. “It's that he's uniquely vulnerable to it. Because he, more than anyone else, yearns and refuses to let go, cannot let go, and so if he is struck, then, oh poor, poor child of Silence and Valor, oh poor, lost, miserable, gifted genius. He will never return, much the same as you.”
“Wait, but that doesn't make sense,” Shiv replied, confused. “Udraal wants a utopia. He wants everyone to live forever. So why doesn't he just let it shoot him? It'll bring him to this utopia or heaven, right?”
The Challenger shook his head. “I despise Udraal for many things: his cowardice, his unwillingness to commit, his feeble little heart, incapable of bearing the slightest trauma, his humiliating use of power—that awe-inspiring genius crippled by a fear of failure. But if there is one virtue he possesses, he seeks the truth of things, the most fundamental and foundational truth, rather than an analogy or a gentle lie. He wants to triumph; he must triumph. He cannot imagine existing in defeat before this System, for he has imprinted his hatred, his struggle, so deeply that the System has obliged him, and that has warped his personality to suit this struggle.”
The Challenger couldn't help but chortle with laughter. “It's such an absurd tragicomedy. But alas, it is a tragicomedy that makes him uniquely vulnerable to Avalon’s utopia. He is terrified of the idea of a paradise not of his own creation, and so he avoids it.”
“Fine. That’s his problem. And that of the Forbidden Empire, however this all connects to them. But what about the Faceless Queen? You've told me all this about Avalon. Well, how does she fit into all this? Was she… she…”
The entire world drew to a halt. It was only then that Shiv realized and noticed the ambient silence wasn't a normal silence. It was just nothing, the silence of nothing, not the quiet that came from a lack of sound. It was the perfect accompaniment for his understanding.
His Harbinger groaned under the truth.
The Challenger's eyes burned with glee. He took a half-step towards Shiv, pride evident on his face. “Finally. You’ve drawn a straight line.”
And what a straight line it was. If the Forbidden Empire even just believed what it had told him to be true, if the Challenger was not lying, if everything he said came together, if Avalon didn't imprint a new personality or overwrite your soul using its own resources, but instead simply copied another version of you into you, then the threads it fired, the needles that struck, they weren't injections or infections. They were revisions of whoever was struck.
“Sink that point in.” The Challenger whipped his right hand down, and with it, the golden cord snapped. A trillion keen veins of light speared down from the star above, and the veil was split asunder. Bifurcations of nothing took nothingness. Orcs returned to where they once stood. They re-emerged within reality, filling that smear of disentangled entropic coloration. The horizons came back into shape. Reality began making sense once more, but everything brought back was slightly different from before, slightly off by a single standard deviation. Certain orcs were stronger, others weaker. A few sported different Paths, and though the Breaker and Corcusa rematerialized, they were altered as well.
The Breaker was no longer in his orc-mimicking armor. Instead, his cape-adorned, shirtless body crackled and pulsed with Necromantic energy, and from his head sprouted a crown of slightly curved horns that rose high by a hundred meters for whatever reason.
Corcusa, meanwhile, looked almost the same as before, except for one thing: there was a long scar that ran around the right side of her face and split her sharp ear down the middle. As she and the Breaker returned, she blinked and looked around, her expression momentarily akin to that of a newborn, then a woman sobering from a lifetime of intoxication, and finally understanding, cementing herself in the present.
But despite all those changes, she was still the same person he'd glimpsed earlier. Just a mutation, a revision, another possibility, another path taken. Another set of experiences.
“And if that is true for her, and if all this is true…” The Harbinger trailed off and shuddered. “Then what the Forbidden Empire told us—they said Avalon struck the Great One down. The needle shattered the Great One. The needle killed the Great One.”
“But it didn’t,” Shiv whispered. “It couldn't. It can't. That's not how it—”
He lifted his head to look upon the Challenger, and an unwilling flood of holy terror swept through him as he gazed upon the God of Strife run through by strands uncountable, the back side of his body trapped in a nexus of starlight, his wings reflecting these faint veins of radiance, but every instance, all the same. Every possibility, every experience leading to the same outcome. The same, the same, the same.
The Challenger was a singularity.
The Challenger could not be deviated.
The Challenger was.
And in his smile, Shiv realized the Great One still was as well. Only they hadn't been themselves for so very, very long.
“The Great One,” Shiv choked, “is the Faceless Queen.”
Within him, the Dryad of Lies screamed so loud that his Harbinger splintered under the weight: TRUTH!