It is something of a supreme comedy for an entire world to obsess and covet my former body while I am so desperate to shed its last vestiges. You were smart enough to turn away, Udraal.
For all your many flaws, you seem to like the ones that lead you down the path to tragedy. That abject refusal to tie yourself to anything dead, to tether your soul to a single idea, unable to change, unable to evolve, an absolute that must exist as a pillar while existing in a world defined by evolution… That is a lesson that will save you in more ways than one. One learned far too late.
Power is one thing. Freedom is another.
Faith is a shackling, Udraal. And becoming a god is being leashed to the idea of yourself.
But the thing about ideas is that so often, they must be a lie before they can be made true, but by that truth, so too can said truth devolve back into a lie.
Thus, what emerges from such a mutilation is no longer you. And a continuity of consciousness is not the same as continuity of personhood.
—The Faceless Queen
VIII-24
Kenosis (II)
Shiv stilled the pace of time.
High above, hidden by the crystalline veins sprouting out from the mana core, Shiv gazed down upon the streets and observed an atmosphere of ignorance and bliss. Most people were still concentrated in the gambling and gaming districts, lost in the pleasures of the parlors, indulging in distractions of vice.
Only a scant few Pathbearers possessed a Chronomancy skill, and fewer still could match the Legendary power of the Harbinger. Those who matched, or were past that threshold, differed in demeanor and mood. Their gazes were turned toward the center of the Gate, where Adam's Glare of Omniscience poured a dense beam of incandescence down, so intense that the outer veil of light blue was almost entirely usurped by a flood of divine mana. Furthermore, there were the meticulous modifications made to the Peacehold, additional reinforcements meshed into existence by frozen veins of lightning held still as if rivers turned to ice while coursing through the air.
The Dragon-Brokers gleamed gold. While their physical bodies stood still, their mana fields were twisting and bending, indicating their activity. They knew something was unfolding—something terrible—and doubtless they would send a runner to demand information.
Likewise, Gone sprinted through the city, tearing through distant alleyways and down thoroughfares as a lonesome lightning bolt of radiant time. She ran up the side of a skyrise before launching herself off the edge as if it were a plank at ground level. In a blink, she intercepted Shiv along his path, and he read the questions in her stare: Is there something wrong? Do you need me?
With far too much to explain and his own uncertainty at hand, he gestured for her to follow along. She landed upon his back, hooking her arms around his neck as he speared toward the core of the Gate, where Starhawk's Perch stood surrounded by the awesome walls of the Peacehold—while also being drowned in the fires of Divinity and a downpour of translucent rain.
The presence of the paleness was absent here, but the Harbinger caught an aftertaste of dread, of insanity, of madness devoured and then channeled into Psychomancy. A plague of madness had spread and then been cured in the same instant. All thanks to Uva, Shiv suspected. And just as he thought of her, he found himself approaching a thin barrier of frozen time—an emergency barricade erected to stop any Chronomantic attacks. He allowed the pace of the present to return, and as soon as it did, a bolt of lightning struck his body. He commanded his Shapeless Tides to scatter, and Uva reached deep into his mind, flooding him with memories of chaos, of explosive pain ripping across the Gate. She had responded immediately, combating the carnage that was destined to follow, pulling away decayed memories and minds nearly lost, suppressing the panic before an actual disaster swept through their home.
At the same time, she accessed his memories. So comfortable were they that there was no more exchange of pleasantries or permission. Right now, they were in dire condition, and speed was of the utmost importance. Yet her Dreaming Storm stuttered, and her lightning drew taut. Her rains came to a staggered halt as she struggled to process the truths Shiv had learned in the past minutes.
As he materialized within the apex of the Perch, he found himself facing Uva and Adam. The Educator was also here, and she turned to face him in a moment of alarm, her brush and pencil already drawn, while nearby, Whisper stood in the corner of the room, gawking at a spill of dimensional shadows leaking from his body. The dark of his star-speckled cloak was grander than Shiv remembered, bejeweled by gleaming blades made to resemble constellations upon a canvas of night.
“Two things,” Shiv said. Gone hopped off his shoulder and created some distance. She trusted him, but she also understood him. At any moment, he could go off like a bomb, and it might not even be his fault. Such was the fate of being favored by the System. “No Ascendants! Maia, you should get going too. I've no idea how this new skill is going to react to you. Maybe you'll be fine, but I don't have guarantees, and I don't want this to be a problem. Please! Just trust me! Get out! For your sake!”
To the Educator's credit, she sensed the unfamiliar urgency in his tone and replied with a brief nod. She vanished then—probably diving into some other Pathbearer's Awareness. For her sake, Shiv hoped it wasn't Adam's; hiding within his Omniscience might not be enough to hide her from the Beast of the Ninth Circle.
“Same thing for the rest of the Ascendants. Starhawk, Cripple, if you're here in any form, stay away. I'm a danger to you right now.” When neither false god replied, Shiv assumed they were absent and continued on. He turned his attention to Adam and Uva and cemented a new rule. “Second thing: do not lie to me. Not now, and never again.”
He angled his body to show them the Beast that clung close to him like a shroud. Its movements were agitated. It lashed and dipped, biting at the walls and the ground of the Perch. The darkness that fueled it was a shade different from the Trespasser Shaped of Dread and Null, but the effect was the same. Both skills functioned as devouring zones of darkness. The main difference was the eyes. The beast’s six eyes always burned, seeking new deceptions to prey upon. “If you lie to me, this thing is going to swallow you and take you somewhere else, and I have no idea if you can get out of the Ninth Circle like I can.”
“Ninth Circle?” Adam asked, his eye squinting in confusion. A jolt of Psychomantic lightning leapt from Uva over into his skull, and his eyelid began to twitch. “Ah, another Pre-Legendary skill, I see.” An intersection of veins bulged upon Adam's forehead, and he drew in a sharp but deep breath to soothe his blood pressure.
“Yeah, you keep sucking that air in and out,” Shiv said. “Because if the Pre-Legendary skill bothers you, you're gonna hate the rest of what I have to tell you.”
By this point, Adam noticed the cold dread spreading over Uva's expression. The bulge in his forehead subsided. His throat bobbed to the tension.
Shiv's words proved true. A crushing silence spread through the room after he finished his recounting, and Adam went through the harvested memories once, twice, then ten times, as if trying to awaken to a different reality by the end of his revision. Uva, meanwhile, stared off into the distance, except there was no distance to gaze upon. Her eyes burrowed into the walls, and her mind sank somewhere deep and disturbed.
“The Faceless Queen… is the Great One. Has been the Great One all along.” Adam swallowed again, as if the distasteful truth was lodged in his throat rather than his mind. “How… but—” His expression hardened. He pushed past the discomfort and accepted the world for what it was. “No, no, this explains things. This explains many things. This explains why she refuses to reveal herself in the presence of a true Ascendant. It also explains why she never bothered coming to me—I'm tied to the Great One. The power I had once belonged to her.”
The divine mists imbued upon Adam glowed bright and stretched through the room. Shiv felt another presence make itself known, a greater, more ominous existence listening in on the conversation. Yet, the unknown Divinity which empowered the Paragon refused to speak. Even so, its emotions were overwhelming, so immense and total that the Harbinger couldn't help but suffer a secondhand blast of primordial outrage.
Whatever lurked within Adam despised the Faceless Queen, not as a fated foe but in the same way a master would regard an unworthy student.
“No,” Uva whispered softly. “No, no, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't. The Ascendants, perhaps, but the Composer? Aviary tried to destabilize Weave. The Composer is her daughter—why would she…” She stopped talking as she realized the question might bring about an ugly answer. Just because the Composer was related to the Great One by flesh did not mean the Great One herself truly cared. Everything she did was for her own interest, and whatever game she played saw the mother of the Weaveresses used as a pawn rather than a protected queen. “Her,” Uva choked. “How could the Great One be her?”
Shiv winced and placed a soothing hand against her back. Uva had gone past the threshold of disbelief, straight into the embrace of existential religious suffering. The damage dealt to her was one born of a higher faith. The Great One should have been something sacred, something glorious, something unknowable. The Composer was the true inheritor of the Great One's legacy, or so the Umbrals thought. Such was their worldview, their drive, their hope.
With the Faceless Queen revealed to be the actual progenitor of their people, however, and considering the schemes used against Weave itself, it was clear that the Great One didn't care for them or their plight. It was clear that, though the Composer cared for her children, her forebear did not share the sentiment.
“We weren't even worshipping a corpse,” Uva muttered to herself. Inside, the flames of her faith dimmed evermore, and something grew colder, something hardened, something that would never be quite the same again. “We were just praying to a husk. A molted husk.” A joyless laugh tore its way out of her throat. The noise made Shiv clench his teeth; it came with a note of surrender.
“I’m sorry,” Shiv said. He added no more. That was all he needed to say. Being here was all he needed to do. There were no words to fix someone's existential despair. There was nothing he could provide to replace the hollowness that lingered in the absence of the Great One.
The Umbrals of Weave—they were a part of the Composer’s mythology. Now the root of that mythology was dead, and they needed to decide who they were going to be. Uva, on some level, had decided, but there were other tenets about her culture. There were other defining truths that drove her. That pillar had collapsed. Now she had to delve through the ruins and decide what to keep, or if she should keep anything of that culture at all.
“I will be fine,” Uva said. Her voice teetered between bitter resignation and self-delusion, and the Beast of the Ninth Circle reared back. Shiv immediately took a half step in alarm. He shot a worried look at Uva, and she responded in kind.
The Dreaming Storm descended, shrouding her in a translucent veil of lightning, but she hesitated and stopped, spreading her mana wide and dispelling whatever spell she was about to call upon. There was nothing she could wield against the beast for devouring deception, especially self-deception. As she lowered her head and said nothing more, the beast slowly subsided as well, but its six blazing eyes never left her, remaining locked onto her more than anyone else.
Adam regarded the beast with faint alarm. “You weren't lying when you said that thing was beyond control. Here I was, envious of you gaining another Pre-Legendary.”
“It was less gained and more forced upon,” Shiv said, shaking his head. “The Challenger. The Faceless Queen. They engineered this thing. They pushed me over the edge. The Faceless Queen wanted me to have this skill, and my guess is she wants me to use it on Veronica. I have no idea why, and the Challenger threw me out before ever giving me a real answer.”
“What does it even do?” Adam asked.
“Well, when the Challenger slapped me into a delusional fever, it swallowed me and poisoned me at the same time. It's kind of hard to explain—it has a venom inside of it that lets it pull you somewhere else. It's like being dragged down into a Delve, but an offensive one. You find yourself standing at the center of a frozen lake, and around you are four rings. Each layer is something you're lying to yourself about, something you don't want to face. Until you deal with it, you can't get out.”
Adam cringed. “You and your mental tortures.”
“Hey, I didn't ask for this,” Shiv shot back.
“No, but you're practically built for it, you emotional terrorist.” Adam managed a half-smirk despite everything. “Aside from knowing the Challenger can Excaliburize all his offspring at will, the Faceless Queen being the actual Great One all this time, and the orc invasion about to begin, I must say that this isn't a complete loss; if we suspect anyone of lying to us, especially during one of our council meetings, Shiv here can feed them to his new snake.”
“Yeah, so another thing about the Ninth Circle: when I was there, it drained my vitality away pretty fast.” Shiv licked his lips. “I'm really not sure if a certain representative of the Republic can make it out of that pit.”
“Probably not,” Adam agreed. “Honesty is more poison to a politician than a spy.” Planting both hands on his hips, he let out a tired exhale. “And at least we have an answer to what happened with all the orcs now.” He looked past Shiv at Whisper, who had been listening to the conversation but remained distracted by his personal changes.
The orc kept himself at a distance, and there was a gulf in his gaze as well, an uncertainty, a delirious quality befitting someone who wasn't sure if they had awoken from their dreams or simply crossed over from one set of nightmares into another. His dimensional mana was more pronounced than ever, and his static blackness spread into every shadow within the room, tainting the world around him like a lingering plague of spatial magic.
“I was here, but then I was elsewhere,” Whisper murmured. “I was myself, yet living an entirely separate life. I think… I think I liked my other life more. I enjoyed my time amongst the stars.”
Whisper blinked as he tried to anchor himself. Finally, he turned his gaze upward, staring through the ceiling at some place unknown, some place that might not have been real after all.
And it wasn't just him. As Shiv used his Atlas, he skipped across the Peacehold and found all the orcs inside changed. Many walked different Paths and wielded skills they didn't have before; others were enhanced, a great many were weaker in multiple facets, but all of them had changed. They remained close enough to who they were that Shiv didn't have much trouble recognizing them, but Tequila no longer held twin wands. Instead, he sported four additional arms, and each of them gripped a gold-plated pistol that resonated with Chronomancy.
On the other side of the Peacehold, meanwhile, Mortar’s changes were even more extreme. Instead of being an orc, he had fully cyberized his personhood, digitized into an animated representation projected from a silver screen. His actual body had been converted into a massive war machine that sat atop the southern Peacehold. He was, for all intents and purposes, a smaller version of a Lone Star Siege-Crawler, sprouting a dozen cannons, a few hundred smaller turrets, and a great many treads and mechanical limbs that chittered and jerked with awkward motions as he tried to acclimate to a dramatically different body. Within that mechanical husk was a sliver of brain matter, just enough for Shiv to sense and seep his Awareness into.
“Did the paless do a lot of damage here?” Shiv asked.
Uva slowly shook her head. “Thankfully not. I contained the situation before it spread. I blocked off the gateways before anyone outside could glimpse what was unfolding. It affected Adam and me, but I used that to charge my Psychomancy, and after that, well, the anomaly didn't last so long. But it wasn’t eldritch. Of that, I was certain. And because of that, the damage I suffered was minimal. Even so, some of that paleness went upward toward the nest—and charged all of my Outsider Skills. The Terrorspawn are moving back to the mana core. They're not listening to me anymore. I can feel the magic inside of them congealing and hardening. I can feel it changing inside me as well. It's close to an evolution. Very close.”
And where most would be overjoyed to experience another Skill Evolution so soon, Uva sounded uncertain. She had reason to be uncertain. There was much she didn't know about her Terrorspawn bond, about the Dreamtaker's hastily bestowed inheritance. Now, with the paleness infused into the mix, whatever followed was certain to leave them baffled once more, perhaps even more so than Shiv’s Beast of the Ninth Circle.
“So you're en route to New Albion right now?” Adam continued his questioning.
“Almost there,” Shiv answered. His vessel was fast approaching and accelerating ever more with each passing second. His inertial sheath roared and rumbled in the air, announcing his presence like a traveling roll of thunder, while shockwaves spread free from his person in explosive, cloud-parting bursts that scattered the endless ocean below. “I'll be there within a few minutes. See if I can find the Culturist. After that, see if I can get a few answers from the Great One herself.”
“And you're sure that's wise?” Adam asked.
Shiv let out a breath. “Honestly, I have no clue, but I'll tell you this: We need more answers. We need to know why she did everything that she did, why she wants me to develop this skill, what Avalon even is, and how to kill it, and also what her endgame is supposed to be. Maybe the Beast will eat her immediately, but I don't know. If she lies to me, I'll try to move it away from her. I haven't tested it yet. Maybe distance might prevent it from consuming a liar. But if that doesn't work, I'm going to need you two to take over for me when we talk to certain people. The beast isn't like the Harbinger. I can't control it at all. It just does what it wants to whoever lies.”
“Which is why you must avoid Veronica at all costs,” Uva summarized. “One of us will need to update her on the situation then.”
“Yeah, one of us is right,” Shiv said. “I think it should be you.”
She almost nodded, but caught herself and broke into a double-take. “You want me to speak with her? You are aware I'd rather plot her unfortunate passing instead?”
“I am, and you were also the Starhawk's temporary Avatar. None of us might like her, but even before she had her teeth in me, to some extent, she wanted to use Adam. But she can't do anything to you. She can't manipulate you. She can't twist your mind. She doesn't even fully understand you. You'll throw her off, but she’ll also know that we’re not bullshitting when she hears the truth from you. At least she’ll doubt it less.”
Despite seeing the logic in his statement, Uva almost pouted. “Can you explain to me why you're not speaking with her? Why you don't want your beast to simply eat her? That would make our lives more convenient, wouldn't it?”
He chuckled. “It might, but it also might play into the Faceless Queen's plans. It'll definitely play into the Challenger's interests—and frankly, fuck him right now. He's as much an asshole behind the board as all the rest of them. The only difference is that he's not shy about showing his face and hitting us dead on. With the orcs coming, with Corcusa Excaliburized, we're going to need the Republic in our back pocket.”
Uva's reluctance remained, but her refusal melted into weary acceptance. She punched him in the shoulder. “The miseries I suffer for you.”
“Hey, I made that sacrifice first,” Shiv replied, raising his hands in faux surrender. “I spent most of my time putting up with her bullshit so you two don't need to. And I want you to know Veronica's got nothing but bullshit up her ass sometimes. She dragged me to watch a theater play about how I tamed Terrence using faith and lots of singing.”
“Singing? You?” Uva pressed her lips together. “Theater indeed. Theater in more ways than one.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. There's also dolls of you, Adam. They messed up your jaw, by the way. Looks like a big lump. You also have golden hair for some reason.”
Adam half-cringed. Uva tilted her head. “Is there anything of me?”
Shiv hissed softly. “Well, Uva, remember when we told you about the Republic's propaganda and how they describe everyone from the Abyss as being a demon?”
“Ah, so no merchandise for me.” She nodded, hiding her disappointment well.
“There can be merchandise of you in Gate Piety,” Shiv suggested. “A frowning Uva plushie reminding everyone to behav—”
He was interrupted as Shiv let out a sudden grunt of annoyance. A sub-relativistic projectile had slammed into his clone’s upper shoulder as he got within ten kilometers of New Albion. A platinum scar spread like a gash down his back as he rolled with the shot—and then another dozen hyper-accelerated flechettes punched down from orbit to strike him in the same spot over and over again.
“Sorry,” Shiv said. “Going to need to shift my focus a bit. Someone’s wasting bullets on me.”
Each munition was going fast enough to punch a hole through a mountain, precise enough to burrow down into a subterranean bunker and kill a specific target while leaving everyone else unharmed. It did less than nothing to Shiv after the first impact. The following shots broke and recoiled from his Scarforged Toughness. He caught one of the dented rounds as it spun over his shoulder. The tip was flattened. The material felt like tungsten, and Shiv followed its path back up into the heavens.
He didn't sense any lingering magic within the round. No Dynamancy. No Geomancy. Nothing at all. It was purely kinetic. Considering the precision, whoever was firing at him had to be at least a Hero—and probably an automaton. Shiv knew about Can Hu’s skills, how most of its abilities were still rooted in the realm of ancient hyper-technology: railguns, particle beams, other esoteric mechanisms that left Shiv baffled. These were all things subjugated by the Forbidden Empire, and range was their greatest ally, for they despised magic, knew how to navigate orbital dynamics to their advantage, and they didn't have the numbers for any kind of attrition.
“I just want to talk to her!” Shiv shouted at the sky. His voice boomed so loud that the water beneath him was blasted down half a kilometer, while all the clouds within visible range parted, turning into dissipating vapor. No further attacks came. Either the Forbidden Empire got the message, or they realized the futility of trying to cut him down through direct means. “Oh, and thanks a lot for holding out on me, assholes! Would've been nice to know that about her to begin with!”
It occurred to Shiv then that the Forbidden Empire might not be fully sure themselves, but he dismissed that notion. Before, he had asked himself the question of why Forbidden Africa feuded so harshly with New Albion. Now he had an answer, or at least a direction. The Stolen Throne, the Faceless Queen, the Great One. All of that tied into one against the last remaining old nation of Earth, that which abhorred the System, that refused the gifts of magic and skills.
Shaking his head, Shiv continued onward toward New Albion. Beneath him, before the waters crashed back together, submerged wrecks briefly surfaced from beneath the waves. Amidst the shattered husks of magic-enchanted warships left shattered and scattered across the ocean, Shiv caught glimpses of biological architecture smeared and sprinkled throughout the rolling waters as well. Bits remaining from human bodies—grains of flesh and bone splattered across kilometers and kilometers.
It seemed like some of New Albion's underwater navy had sustained fire from the Forbidden Empire as well. Unfortunately for the sailors aboard, none of them possessed Legendary Toughness. Their fate was liquefaction in the best of cases, rather than even a full burial at sea.
The shoreline of New Albion didn't look much better. Despite the glowing wards looming over the horizon, Shiv could see entire harbors and docks hammered into pockets of glass. He saw more debris being pulled back into the embrace of the ocean, saw cliffsides deformed by concentrated beams delivered from above. Then there were the dead. There were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Most of the slain were Pathbearers, tougher than those beneath the water, but not by much. Yet for every dozen or so of the dead, a complicated mechanical life-form lay in their midst, smoking, sparking, downed but still recoverable.
As Shiv narrowed his eyes, he felt a presence brush his soul. Someone was right next to him. He turned his head and hardened his jaw as he pulled his Tides back and slowed his flight to a casual stroll across the sky. “Well, well, Great One. I was just coming to meet you. But I guess I'm pretty flattered that you decided to come out and see me first instead.”
The Faceless Queen didn’t reply to him immediately. Instead, her form flickered—and fully cut out for a half-second before stabilizing—and she gestured toward the distance. “Come. Follow me.” She blinked and reappeared a few hundred meters away while her voice rasped past his ears as if she was still there. “I will show you the way through. Do not deviate. You might be death-resistant, but I would ask that you help me conserve my wards in case the techno-fascists decide to start another bombardment.”