Just as there is a supreme power to be gained from attaining godhood, there is likewise a grand enlightenment that comes from rejecting these shackles.
Kenosis is the act of emptying oneself rather than choosing to fill your being toward aching, divine fullness. But this emptiness is not a hollowing of the soul. It is an act of purification.
The greater cousin to hypocrisy is evolution. Chosen and deliberate change. That is the blessing bestowed upon the mortal. Freedom. True freedom. Power and true enlightenment the likes of which a god can only envy, for a god is lashed to a throne—a higher concept. And anything that defiles the idea of their throne will stain the nature of their existence in kind.
For those who can resist the allure of Divinity, know that you perform only a partial sacrifice. It is hard to be a god, and as you descend from Divinity in willing fashion, recognize what you have done. See that you have turned from feather to the wind itself, while those who commit to faith stand as stone enduring…
But yet, no stone is eternal, while the wind runs free evermore.
Look upon the words of gods, the decay of faith, the inevitable corruption of hearts and thoughts. Look upon such works and rejoice, for you have glimpsed the truth of a soul self-moving, and it is only in the exploration of all ideas and conceits that one might truly understand the highest throne—that there is no end to power, just as there is no end to enlightenment.
The absolute is a castration, for it blocks a horizon. Seek and evolve. Change and blossom.
Remember this, Maria: In kenosis are Pathbearers made truly free.
—Legend-Philosopher “Melaia Kelhaus”
VIII-23
Kenosis (I)
Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 583 > 588
Onus of the Scarforged Unbreakable 532 > 535
Shiv emerged from the darkness of the beast's stomach, carrying with him a resounding emptiness.
He surfaced in a moment of jarring inversion. One instant, he was low and apart from the world, twisted into an upside-down reality manifested as if in an offensive delve. In the next, he found his vessels returned to where they were before the skill triggered, before he was drawn in to face a crucible born of his own self-deception.
The transition was sudden and jarring. It felt like he had suffered a moment of amnesia. Yet he remembered everything in all too vivid detail. He remembered Georges. Longinus. The slave boy. 811. All of it. But somewhere in the dark, as he walked down the beast's throat, the chains of his memory snapped, and he was suddenly here, suddenly present.
Shiv's mind trailed off as he looked over his shoulder. There the beast was, hovering behind him, lurking, as if a hood drawn back. Connected to his flow, it had a billowing cape and a spreading shawl of shadows born of Stealth and Intimidation.
But one of his true clones was missing. The body he had sent into the Tutorial was dead. Doubtlessly slain by the Challenger in the process of infecting him. That backhand was a folding attack, transitioning from the physical to the magical, and finally the spiritual. But like everything the God of Strife did, the damage was at once deep and educational. He wanted to show Shiv what this skill could do, the danger it posed to those who covered themselves in lies. At the same time, he also purified Shiv—forced him to face his own inner shadows so he would emerge with a clearer perspective.
“But our conversation was not done,” his Harbinger insisted. “We still do not know the true face of Avalon. And this is an ignorance we cannot afford.”
With the invocation of Avalon's name came a trembling sensation, rattling between the Beast of the Ninth Circle and Continuity Error itself. The serpentine creature reared back away from Shiv, its emaciated, thin, tendril-like limbs pawing and clawing the world like tentacles of shadow. Its eyes burning bright as it reared upward across every one of Shiv's vessels, repeating the same action over and over. It turned its gaze skyward, peering at something Shiv himself couldn't see and the beast couldn't reach, but something they knew was there all the same. Then, Continuity Error stopped resounding with the hidden threat. Avalon had slipped away once more, traversing the expanse of Integration into a dimension far or unknown.
“Back in,” Shiv growled. His Harbinger flared; he sent one of his reserve true clones back across his personal timeline to re-enter the Tutorial—and failed. His Harbinger, already sundered by the Challenger's blow, cracked further and threatened to come apart in its entirety, leaving him eviscerated in the aftermath. Twin emissions of red slipped out from Shiv. His Severed Shadow released pulses of vibrant vitality, painting the air around him as an aura of ruby-red gas. His physical bodies bled. He pointed his Tides inward to stop his pressurized blood from jetting and cleaving through the people and places around him.
Shiv remained undeterred. If the Tutorial was blockaded, then he would find another way in. He adjusted his leap and flung himself toward another point along his personal history. He reappeared within the Primal Gate he'd used as an ingress into the Tutorial, but the moment he manifested in a flash of gold, he found himself faced by a most unwelcome sight.
The Breaker stood before the gateway leading into the Tutorial, his tree trunk arms folded, Necromancy crackling around him. A stage of skulls rose beneath him, carrying him like a podium would a politician. He even had a platform to stand on, and a series of hovering microphones enchanted to amplify his voice. As soon as the Breaker caught sight of Shiv, his eyes glinted with glee, and he held a fist high before slowly, dramatically extending his right index finger and jabbing it in Shiv's direction to deliver three deliberate pokes. “Look who's back, seeking a buffet of beatings. The first smack wasn't enough for you, was it? The Gate Piety Dick Ripper has not felt enough hurt. But I got bad news for you, brother. Your humiliation ritual has only started. The Challenger is out, and the Breaker is in. I'm bringing you a message from the very top. Deadman, spittin' pure, burnin’ truths—yeah! You're not wanted in the Tutorial. We're back at war!”
Cheering voices rose from nowhere in particular, and Shiv didn't even bother trying to locate their source. The Breaker bared his teeth in an explosive motion, and his body flashed with a corona of Necromancy, briefly outlining the bones beneath his flesh. “The fast is over, and soon, oh yeah, real soon, brother, real soon, your candy ass is gonna be between our teeth. Your people will be getting mulched beneath our heels. You go home, you hug them close, and you don't let them go, 'cause this moment's not coming back again. The next time you find yourself in the Tutorial, it will be on your knees begging, pleading, but no mercy's gonna come—yeah! Challenger's nice, but the Breaker’s got a name to live up to, and I'm not here to give you self-actualization. I'm here to give you a final obliteration!”
Shiv briefly eyed the other end gateway behind him. The Slipgate was still set up. The mana diffusers and the obelisk remained in place, undamaged, uncaptured. However, the Piety Pathbearers left here to guard the mechanisms were nowhere to be seen, and Merrielmel lay a few hundred meters away, face down in the dirt, with every single rib shattered. The orc must have punted him, judging from the contusion painting his chest.
“You kill the others?” Shiv asked with a glare.
The Breaker reached up to rub his chin, like a philosopher considering an especially complex conundrum. “You know something, Dick Ripper? I can't rightly say. When I kick an insect, I don't think about where it lands or if it lives. I just think, damn, what's it gonna take to get this damn smear off my boot?” The Breaker illustrated his point by lifting his foot and spitting on the side of his heel. He clicked the rear of his shoes together, and a spark of Necromantic energy was exchanged. Corrosive mana splashed together, and the stupidly tall horn crown the Breaker sprouted from his skull sent arcing bolts of sickening green energy out as concentric ripples.
“If you turn your head up, you might just be able to see them—guess where they might land. But aside from that, we are done here for today. Try as much as you want, Deathless, but you're not getting back in the Tutorial, not of your own will, not on your life. Oh, and the Challenger wants me to tell you a final thing. You wanna learn what Avalon really is? Well, the big boss is mighty curious himself, so why don't you do us all a favor and move those little stick-like legs down to the Faceless Queen and spit your question at her? Better yet, use that sick snake of yours and sink its fangs into her; see if she crawls out of that maze you have inside you.”
As the Breaker prattled on, Shiv frowned at his beast, waiting for it to attack the Breaker. When it didn't, he rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Felling useless.”
“Oh, don't blame your skill, Deathless. What I'm doing is a performance, not a lie. Kayfabe is a veiled truth, not a whole falsehood. You keep that in mind. That's the only chance you're gonna get against me, 'cause next time…” The Breaker slammed his fists together. It was like watching two Necromantically charged cinder blocks collide at hypersonic speeds. The world cracked down the middle. A shockwave slammed into Shiv. He drank the force in and recovered a surfeit of vectors.
As the dust and debris settled, the Breaker stood tall. The skulls beneath him rattled with Necromantic mana, their jaws open, hissing corrosive essence into the world, supercharging the orc as a series of pylons rose, forming a vast stage. Yet before the fangs of the earth could fully extend, the Breaker waved a hand and shattered them down the middle. They broke like withered toothpicks, rotted to the core, unable to bear the pressure emitted by the orc's gravitas.
Once more, he pointed at Shiv, but this time his finger curled. He made twin fists and twisted them, demonstrating what he intended to inflict upon the Deathless. “Next time, I'm going to live up to my name, and I'm gonna find out if you really live up to yours—yeah! Next time, the Deadman is going to learn how Deathless the Great Piety Dick Ripper really is! Get your affairs in order because I'm coming for you and your whole Gate!”
“Next time?” Shiv scoffed. Then he clenched his teeth. “Nah. Fuck that. Right now.”
The world around Shiv disintegrated. The ground beneath him turned to grass, then ash, then nothing at all. Light flared. Shiv hopped a half-second across time, losing no momentum, yet avoiding the first blast of Necromancy channeled forth from the many open jaws that made up the Breaker's skull stage. He impacted the orc in a deafening embrace, their colossal bodies colliding as Shiv unleashed the fullness of his skills. Plague flies erupted out from his body, a swelling shadow wrapped around both of them, suppressing the Breaker's senses while allowing Shiv to secure a crushing collar tie that pinned them both together.
Shiv's casual commitment to violence caught the Breaker utterly off guard, but it also delighted him. He let out a guffaw, a laugh that sounded different from all the practiced and over-exaggerated laughs he had unleashed before. Rather than striking Shiv, he secured his own collar tie, pressing his forehead against Shiv's as Legendary Necromancy ground against Legendary Magical Resistance.
They blurred ahead, vanishing into the shimmering Tutorial gateway as waves of dimensional pressure washed over them.
“I see why he made you Insul!” The Breaker managed a single telepathic thought before Shiv drew his Shapeless Tides back and then dismissed them altogether.
He wasn't stupid enough to think he could win a drag-out brawl against an orc Legend with an over-fused bullshit Skill within his own territory. No, in the end, the plan was simple and self-destructive, but if he played it right, he could do catastrophic damage to the orcish war effort before it ever had a chance to begin. The moment they emerged on the other side, Shiv detonated in a flare of blinding light.
The Breaker was a fountain of Necromancy, a corrosive blight that could wipe worlds clean of life if only given a bit of time. Meanwhile, Shiv was a beacon of vitality, incomparable to any other.
Shiv felt several of his skills decay in the Breaker’s embrace. His soul burned. Agony tore through him. But this was an old and familiar pain. The disfigurement tore across his body, but Shiv's Severed Shadow was already in motion, seeking out something or someone to drain, to discharge the parts of his soul that were eroded and replace them with new ontological reinforcement instead.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the Tutorial, there was a flash, and then an area surpassing one of Earth's continents in size came alight with all-obliterating fire.
Shiv wondered if any orcs died in that blast, if the Challenger managed to stop the attack, or if he simply let it through. Something told him that the God of Strife was more than willing to accept such losses. It made things interesting, after all, and Shiv's succinct and devastating retaliation was thematic: it was an act of borderline worship toward the Domain of War.
As a rush of levels coursed through Shiv, he sent another body back to the Primal Gate to search for survivors, to heal Marrielmel, and to recover the Slipgate before the orcs decided to take it for their own. But while one of his Trueclones did that, his Severed Shadow made for Farnest, and as it moved across Gate Piety, he observed the carnage sweeping through the dimension. There were things he needed to tell the others immediately, things he didn't know how to explain. And now, with his newest skill, he needed to be careful about how he interacted with other people and how they interacted with him as well. The moment he suffered a lie, it bit down upon him. It poisoned him and pulled him into the Ninth Circle. He couldn't control the skill. It wasn't something that possessed reason or logic. It simply was a punisher of lies, a monster that devoured those who practiced treachery and deception.
Which means this coming conversation with Veronica is going to be all kinds of godsdamned miserable, Shiv hissed internally. But then he stopped. All of his bodies stopped. His Severed Shadow was a mere meter beyond the Sky-Swallowing Carp when he dispatched a new body in another direction—toward the surface gateway, to a place across the waters where the Culturist currently lingered.
I might as well find out what the Great One has to say for herself too. I got a bunch of problems, and a bunch of threads to pull on. Might as well go for them all at the same time.
But whether he would, or even wanted to, was another question. The Challenger was a player seated beyond the board as well, and though he engaged in a simple, straightforward strategy, it didn't mean it was any less effective than the other elusive chess masters in the mix.
There was an invasion coming, a true invasion, and the longer Shiv struggled against these conspiracies and distractions, the worse off he, the rest of the Gate, and Earth would be when it came time for the actual war.
For what felt like the thousandth time that day, Shiv looked over his shoulder and frowned at the lurking beast hovering close to his back. “And I need to figure out how to keep you from biting everyone that lies.”
The Beast of the Ninth Circle's six eyes narrowed by a few centimeters—as if expressing doubt about his odds.
***
The Excaliburization alone left Maria’s mind scattered. The chain of chaos and carnage that followed immediately after put her in a state beyond overwhelmed.
The Deathless was a monster. She'd recognized that from the moment she laid eyes on him. He was young, unnervingly young, but the way he gauged her, the way he peered into her, disassembled her with every flick of his eyes, left her shaken. She hid it deep, but ultimately not far enough.
And then there was how fast she and the Breaker were disregarded. He came seeking the Challenger, and the Challenger responded in kind. Few were worthy of a High God's true attention, but the original orc, the Lord of Strife himself, greeted the Deathless not as a hated enemy, but more as a beloved disciple—or favored foe. When he spoke to Shiv, he used his words carefully. He was not beneath mockery, but everything he did was to enlighten the Deathless, to place him along the desired path toward greater strength.
Greater strength that was attained. In the span of a mere conversation, the Deathless evolved before her very eyes, developing a Pre-Legendary skill born of Deception and Deductive Reasoning.
She didn't have the words. Maria was regarded as a talent, a generational one, but even then, it took her the better part of a century to claim the title of Legend. For the Deathless, the span of months was shortening into days.
And the consequences that came with that was a price paid by everyone else.
Including her. Especially her. When Maria was embraced by the Challenger and granted the position of Vaketh-Insul, she found herself surprised. It was a Ritual and an honor so casually offered that it felt almost worthless, like a thing granted out of pity. How little did she know and understand? She knew nothing about Avalon, about what was being exchanged between the Challenger and the Deathless at that point. She understood even less when they referred to her amidst their conversation, speaking about her origin as if they knew something she didn't.
Now she understood.
Now, with an entirely separate lifetime lived, Maria understood many things. How small she really was, and where she stood in the scheme of the Great Game. When the Excaliburization struck her, she was wrenched away from the present and drawn far back across her past, to the days of her youth, given a chance to start over and live again—with all memories of her first life retained. Including those she hadn't known she had.
An entire set of memories, stripped away from her or buried so deep, hidden so well that she couldn't access them, became known once more.
She realized who she was: an Umbral whisked away from her place of birth, adopted by New Albion to serve as a Cuckoo—a spy embedded from birth, sublimely trained and primed for the highest and deepest levels of subversion. Yet in this separate, perfected lifetime, she didn't follow the same path. She returned to the First Blood as before, but she was not a Cuckoo. Instead, she became a Raven, then an Owl, and then, she was dealt a fatal blow by an enemy beyond her reckoning.
But instead of perishing, by pure happenstance, someone came across her as she lay dying. A wandering Philosopher. A wandering Philosopher practicing the same art taught by Grandmother Orpheus.
A wandering philosopher by the name of Melaia Kelhaus.
Maria survived that fatal blow because she was nursed back to health by Melaia. She forsook her role as an agent of Aviary and was taken away from the Abyss as she became a disciple embarking on a new path, toward a new destiny: virtue, purity, and perfection. She found herself in another place entirely, within the heart of the hollowed Himalayas, amongst other disciples who walked the Tripartite path.
And so the Cuckoo who wasn't shed her feathers, assumed a new role, and lived a new lifetime. With time, with commitment, with practice, enlightenment, failure, arrogance, humbling, and understanding, she achieved a skill the Deathless evolved out of happenstance through years of unceasing effort. The Harbinger became her actualization, her vehicle across time. It was her shield, her guiding light, her higher mentor.
And this perfected version of her soul left Grandmother Ophereus enshadowed by shame.
The Progenitor of her Bloodline, once regarded as a wise Elder beyond compare, a peerless manipulator of hearts and minds, was revealed to be a shadow cast upon cave walls, while Maria’s teacher and the Harbinger Maria herself attained stood closer to an expression of daylight itself.
Yet at the start of this triumph, just as she prepared to embark down the path of true enlightenment, the Excaliburization ended, and she crashed back down into her original body, carrying with her the skills and wounds and history earned from an entirely separate lifetime. Her soul was changed. No longer was she a Legendary Assassin. Her Path altered multiple times over, her skills shuffled, keeping only the most actualized evolutions across both lifetimes, and her flesh changed, allowing her to assume a scar that her Lineage Core would have otherwise healed. In effect, she did truly live two lives—one idealized, made to her benefit; the other, showing her to be a pawn of greater powers, yet a pawn from the beginning, and now a pawn near the very end.
Back in the real world, Legend-Philosopher Maria Corcusa lost herself in an uncharacteristic stupor. She reached up with a finger to trace the scar that marred the right side of her face and split her sharp ear down the middle. While she did this, the Challenger struck the Deathless. A wave of unparalleled destruction split the Tutorial asunder, and in the aftermath, the Deathless vanished.
She assumed him destroyed, but the Challenger ordered the Breaker to depart and prepare for his return—and return he did, for in under two minutes, Shiv reemerged, tackling the Breaker back into the Tutorial before detonating himself against the orc's Necromancy. Once more, destruction spread across the world. Maria felt her flesh ignite, but then avoided the blow by leaping a half-second across time. When she returned, she found herself hovering in mid-air, looking down at a glass pit the size of an ocean.
The space around her had been cored down to the crusts of the Tutorial, but soon, the fetid rains began spewing a hail of detritus, beginning to fill in all that had been destroyed with remains and wreckage, corpses and war waste.
It was an apocalyptic field of destruction, yet the orc race was far from extinct. Even though thousands of square kilometers of the Tutorial were erased, even though the clouds above had been stripped open as if fabric shredded, the Challenger only chuckled, and the Breaker laughed in kind. He emerged from the smoke and haze, his own body battered and smeared in places by unnatural patches of red, but in his expression was a look of euphoric bliss. He found Maria and hovered toward her, the two of them the only survivors in the immediate vicinity after the blast.
“That mad son of a bitch just went for me. He let himself burn just to blow us up.” The Breaker giggled and sighed. He reached out and pinched Maria's shoulder in an act of overflowing happiness. “This is going to be one hell of a war, sister. One hell of a brawl. Can’t wait to actually get bloody with the kid.”
“Indeed,” the Challenger said from above, humming in thought. “And Legend-Philosopher Maria, I see you've survived. And I see that you look a bit behind on things.”
“I was,” Maria admitted, still surveying her surroundings. She'd come close to death, not having anticipated the Deathless' sudden and reckless return. It was only a cry from her own Harbinger that broke her fugue and spared her from death. “Not so much anymore.” She turned her gaze up and found the Challenger manifested not as a larger version of his Avatar, but as a constellation, the cosmos beyond animated into the form of a looming orc imprinted upon the heavens. “Should I thank you for the Excaliburization? For showing me the truth?”
The Challenger scoffed at her question. “You should react however you wish. There is little worth in meekness now. And to answer your other questions before they arrive, no, you cannot know. You cannot know if I am not using you the same way the Faceless Queen has used you, the same way the Vampire Elders have used you. You cannot know, and you will not know until you take hold of your life. The Deathless is a blueprint for you, but he is also contrasted with you. A foil, as a certain Narrator might call this thing.”
“How might you refer to me instead?” Maria asked.
“A countermand, of course. A few moments ago, he had the Harbinger, you had the potential of gaining the Harbinger, and I…” The Challenger grunted as he reached out with his left hand and, with a sickening act of explosive violence, tore away his right. The stump spewed glittering starstuff, but then he cast down the severed limb, and it fell from the sky, descending like a meteor, painting a contrail of gold in its wake before it finally impacted the glassen earth in physical form, sending a shower of dirt and a column of fire into the sky. As the dust settled, the Starhawk's transplanted limb lay half-buried in a crater. “I had someone else suffer the cost of Excaliburization.”
Maria's eyes widened. “You mean that was all a deception? The fractal spreading out from you? The immunity to utopia? You lied?”
The constellation grinned. “Oh no, I am most certainly beyond utopia, for I already live in my own version of heaven. You are not listening carefully enough, Legend-Philosopher. I said that I had someone else suffer the cost, not that I needed to. It was simply an option. And I've borrowed his limbs long enough. It grieves me to see a God of justice less than whole.”
Then, the Challenger regarded her. “I've a new commandment for you, Legend-Philosopher. If I might call you mine, if you wish to seize your own destiny in any way, to defy the path charted for you by the Great One and the Vampire Courts, I have an offering for you. But I also have a mission. I want you to make the Starhawk whole. I want you to lead my armies, mine specifically, no one else's, and I want you to deliver upon Gate Piety defeat and pain, and teach He Who Stills Eternity a long-overdue lesson: that he should have struck you down when he had the chance. That now, the pawn has tumbled off the board, outside the grasp of the other pieces, and it moves of its own volition. But will you do me an honor in committing yourself to an act of service?”
Despite everything—or maybe because of everything—Maria wasn’t sure. For the first time in both her lifetimes, her insides were overtaken with cold, primal fear.
“Run,” the Harbinger whispered. “Or join him. To hesitate is to die before death takes you.”
Maria chose. She descended to the bottom of the crater. She looked upon the resplendent glory of the Starhawk’s intertwined limbs and exhaled. “What was the true purpose beyond this dismemberment? What do you intend to do?”
“Haven’t you been listening, Maria? Kenosis! The emptying of a god. A utopia—one the Starhawk cannot ever have, for the Starhawk isn’t even entirely real. No, that pleasure and privilege belongs to Master-Archer Matthew Carter Thaen. And I think I would like to grant him another chance at a full life as a Pathbearer instead of a fatal end as a false god. After all, I suspect the Great One’s timetable will be accelerated soon, and all the stray pieces will need to be reclaimed…”
“And as dangerous as the Deathless is, he is but a blind babe before the Challenger,” her Harbinger muttered. “He didn’t see it, but the masterstroke was right there. Gate Piety thinks itself guarded well by many gods. Soon, it will be one fewer. Soon, we engineer an act of deicide.”
For a moment, Maria wondered why she was so willing. Then, she remembered the falsehood that was her entire lifetime, and the one behind that deception. Her decision to play to the Challenger’s tune was a simple thing after that. It wasn’t even revenge against the Great One and the First Blood that motivated her; it was the simple curiosity of what it felt like to be a true weaver of plots rather than a thing to be moved.
“And even if we are not truly our own master with the Challenger present, we shall learn, and for now, only for now, find refuge in his brutal simplicity against a reality filled with endless mendacity.”
Harbinger of Tripartite Ruin 401 > 402