How many times can the corpse of a memory deliver a hale culture, a pure child? Beyond counting, I think. It is an interesting thing, is it not, how the scattered, disparate barbarians always enslave themselves to the allure of succession and legacy?
Before Integration, the ancestors of those who proclaimed themselves “Western” also claimed cultural descent from the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Nations that cling to an aesthetic but have long since shed its culture, and after countless generations, bloodline after bloodline, find themselves extinguished across the capriciousness of history. Yet even so, the Barbarians dream of writhing their way into noble husks. There's something about that privilege, isn't there? There's something about that divinity.
So few cultures choose to turn away, to voluntarily shed the skin of who they were as an escape, but why? That is something that always bothered me. Why not abandon your culture? Why not abandon your identity? Why not abandon your shackles? It would be so liberating on many an occasion, and sometimes it might even be your salvation.
Alas, clinging is easier than letting go. Perhaps that is why the people die. Change is the only way to endure across the ages. Evolution does not always mean greater power. Evolution simply means adaptation. The System does not reward the most powerful. The System wants you to struggle and eventually perish to feed someone else's struggle.
So, I see only one solution now: to shed my shackles, shed the burdens of my power, and sacrifice one absolute power against another.
—The Faceless Queen to Udraal Thann
VIII-25
Kenosis (III)
As they made their way across the land, Shiv realized that New Albion was a marvel to behold: emerald fields interspersed with golden grids, patches of harvest maintained by gleaming magics that summoned concentrated dosages of rain to nourish the soil.
Despite the bombardment, most of New Albion remained untouched. It was only the military hardpoints that were set ablaze. Soldiers of martial Paths were slaughtered, while logistical personnel and others were granted a stay of execution.
Such a detail stood out to Shiv. When nations fought, it was usually total warfare: armies marched on their stomachs, required resources from the land, ore to be forged into weapons, and roads to march across at a rapid pace. Everything needed to be targeted. One might not be able to starve a Legend or a Hero so easily, but Adepts and Initiates would wither en masse like vines deprived of sunlight if made to exert themselves without sustenance for weeks.
Yet that wasn't how the Forbidden Empire did things. The columns of smoke were vast and interspersed, and in the distance, where the capital of New Albion stood shrouded by a cocoon of voluminous wards, Shiv stole peeks at outposts and townships, surveying the land from the perspective of a native.
They were unharmed, unburdened, unaffected in all ways, and it wasn't because the Forbidden Empire lacked the capacity to see everything here turned to glass. They could kill you from over the horizon, from a distance measured by light seconds rather than meters. Yet they didn't. They fought with calculation, and that told one of two possible tales: conservatism, either due to resources or an unwillingness to engage in total war; or precision calculus, a determination to strike down only what needed to be debrided while leaving the rest of the body whole.
“Perhaps both factors are in play,” the Harbinger mused.
The Forbidden Empire came to Shiv in a moment of desperation. They revealed much to him. They spoke to him directly while keeping themselves in the dark and all others at bay for eons before. Whatever the Forbidden Empire wanted, it was tied into the Incursion, and so it was tethered to Shiv's agency as well. Suddenly, he had a feeling that it was his presence that might have stopped them from bringing about total carnage.
The Old Ones must have had something of a psychological profile regarding him. That profile would have revealed a few things to them, namely his disgust when it came to collateral damage. From what Can Hu said, the Forbidden Empire cared little about the System and affected lives, mana-tainted as they were regarded. This was then odd. It was an act of precision calculus, but political calculus in truth.
“They try to appeal to us. They try to abide by our notions of morality.”
For the first time, the Beast of the Ninth Circle hissed, and its body grew pale. Instead of being thin and pitch-black, its nature shifted, and a shroud of whiteness covered it. Its fabric was pure and pristine, like a lather of finest milk that drifted around him as an undulating cloak. The beast's eyes then darkened, and it let out a purr that eventually devolved into a yawn.
“Truth,” it whispered to Shiv.
He looked over his shoulder in apprehension and curiosity. The beast was still an enigma to him. There was so much of its capability that remained beyond his understanding, but perhaps not the Queen's or the Challenger's. He needed to discover this on his own time, by his own standards, but at present, he waited, he watched, and he noticed how its eyes went from crescent pits of red to circular hollows of deepest black.
Now there was a spine of pallor instead of his cape of nullifying black. It shifted away from its bestial state, and Shiv noticed the faintness of an empathetic core and the vague imprints of translucence seeping forth from its skull. It was starting to think. It was starting to become sapient.
“No end to the weirdness in my life,” Shiv muttered to himself.
The Faceless Queen appeared from time to time, using her visage as a checkpoint and a series of markers for him to follow. He sensed unseen wards and spells glistening in the air beyond. He heard them more than he saw them. There were faint contours that ridged the emptiness of the skies, like invisible sigils and shapes, distorting the position of distant clouds reforming after Shiv's earlier bellow. Some of those magics felt based in Pyromancy, but a grand majority were rooted in a single lore: that of the mind, tethered first and imbued with other powers. Shiv suspected that the Pyromancy was a fusion with the Psychomancy. As such, if he struck too many of these protections, he would likely suffer a catastrophic memory burn, and that would leave him little more than a hollow husk.
Uva had spoken of such spells before and wanted to figure out how they were cast by digging through Phoenix Academy's books. With Psychomancy regarded as restricted lore, there were fewer mind mages within the Republic, and what experts there were had been taken by the Inquisition to serve their purposes.
With that came cost: when a field of study was deprived of manpower and resources, it stagnated. Weave was behind New Albion when it came to warfare of the mind. The Republic didn't even rank. Perhaps Uva could surprise New Albion with the uniqueness of her new Legendary Skill, but her surprise only went so far: she was barely four years older than he, and New Albion had been an intellectual power for centuries.
As Shiv drew close to a final set of wards, he embarked on a study in adequacy.
The Faceless Queen stood upon the air as if emptiness were a flight of stairs. Behind her, a messy canvas of shifting colors burned bright. Shiv couldn't tell which magical lores and mana types were truly fused into the great architecture. Only that it was an alloy of chaotic magic.
“My thanks for not straying from the path. I understand that the allure of slamming yourself into something in an attempt to test my wards must have crossed your mind.” The Faceless Queen's voice held the edge of a laugh, but Shiv sensed the social engineering behind the action. Worse yet, the Beast of the Ninth Circle responded in kind. Its flaring whiteness ignited off of her, and the Faceless Queen flinched as her body was set to boil.
Her flesh didn't burn, but her soul and mind came ablaze. Her facade flickered violently, blinking in and out of existence as the Beast turned from the thing of pallor back to a mindless creature of pitch-black limbs and crescent, crimson eyes.
A low, distorted note that was closer to a malfunctioning automaton rather than the squeal of a girl escaped from the Queen. She managed to regain her composure. She adjusted herself, and the dimensions of her body shifted once more. This time, she didn't seem so much like a girl. Instead, her body turned taller but hunched, and slight emaciation defined her. Her features even developed creases. Though she still lacked any organs on her face, there were wrinkles, and she showed a facade of weakness and age that caused the Beast of the Ninth Circle to rear, but not strike. Instead, it was halted at the moment of greatest threat potential.
"I forgot how vicious that Skill was," the Queen commented under her breath, and her voice had changed as well. It was deeper, older, wearier, perhaps even truer—but not quite. It was still she, still provoking the Beast's attention, but the Faceless Queen had just done enough to spare herself a sudden attack, and Shiv, on some level, was thankful for that. On another, slighter level, though, he truly wondered what might happen if it bit her, if it swallowed her, and where she would find herself within the Ninth Circle. Not everyone would share the same trials as Shiv. What he regretted and what someone else regretted had to be vastly different.
“And this is useful to know,” the Harbinger added. “She stands as an enigma to us, but that enigma must be torn down at some point. We must see past the facade. If there is one thing Veronica is right about, there can be no peace when we have no leverage. Here is our moment. She is letting us in. She plays a dangerous game. Draw closer, but do not sink too deep. Tread the water. Clear your mind. Try to see things from all perspectives, from hers and everyone else's as well. We enter a den of spies now. Play the game, but don't be played.”
And so Shiv did. He began a performance of his own, though he too avoided true falsehood, as he simply kept to the format of exaggeration. He adopted a vicious, mocking grin. "Oh, don't tell me you regret this evolution. From what the Challenger said, you wanted me to have this. Now, I came all this way to ask you a few questions. You were nice enough to come out and greet me before I got all the way into your home, so let's get this out of the way first. Are we going to abide by the laws of hospitality, or are we going to do something different?"
The Faceless Queen sighed and sagged. "Of course, we will abide by hospitality. What do you take me for?"
“I really don't know. That's part of the problem, isn't it, Great One? I don't know what you are. I have no idea how to judge you. I have no idea what you want, why you do the things you do. Trust is rooted in some point of commonality. There's some place of mutual understanding, but..." Shiv licked his lips as he tried to find the best way to describe his feelings. “Is there any trust between a god who abandoned their body and an engineered monster who was manipulated into glimpsing the weapon that broke said god's body?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it's quite a mouthful, isn't it?”
“It is.” Shiv nodded. “But that's just life for people like us, isn't it?”
And he used that phrase most deliberately. People like us, because he wasn't sure. Because he didn't know where he stood relative to the Faceless Queen. Before, she could lie to him. She could prevaricate and turn. With his Beast, however, she needed to mind what she said, for even the slightest falsehood would see her poisoned by a monster that feasted on deception.
“It is,” the Faceless Queen answered, and she did so without incurring the Beast's wrath. “And there will be no need for you to use it on me just yet. There are a few things I need to tell you. Things your creator neglected to inform you of. Before that, though, I'd ask that you come and collect your agent from my capital. I fear he's in a state of malaise after what he suffered and could do with a friendlier face than the mask of one of my birds.”
With that, the Faceless Queen turned and pulled the curtain open with a gesture. The ward unfurled, the spell collapsed, a pathway formed along the other side, and Shiv crept through after a quarter-second of hesitation. Waves of rippling mana caressed his body and prodded at his soul. He was Analyzed a dozen times over from all corners of the world. People were peering at him using spells. A veil of Dimensionality slipped over him, and he found himself facing the new environment altogether. The air felt minty fresh; it was cool, brisk, and speckled with moisture, but it was of an invigorating atmosphere rather than of clammy humidity.
A coalescence of woven light parted before him, and he laid eyes on the River Thames for the first time.
The River Thames that was reaching up into the sky, stretching limbs of liquid to pry and cast, while the rest of its body shifted across the land. The River Thames moved in tandem with the surrounding architecture of the city, all of them broadcasting massive pulses of translucence, so much thought conveyed from towers and the environment. There were unmistakable cores at their centers, empathetic hearts that burned within.
Shiv found his attention locked first to that living bifurcation which defined the city. It was alive with Hydromancy, but so many other lores as well. Its base lay in gold, like there was a road submerged at the bottom, while time magic glided free from its glittering surface in reflection. Then, unbelievably, the river created new limbs and began casting spells of fire—not to set its surroundings ablaze, but to pull away heat and melt debris from where a building slumped, half-toppled.
The River Thames whistled and sang, and its voice was that of an ocean given life, an ocean that had awakened to a sense of self. And it was not the only Genius Loci present.
The towers and buildings all rippled with psionic energy, and all held empathetic cores. They shifted and groaned, the stones cracking and bending as the architecture that made up the city uprooted itself and moved. People clung to rooftops, hung from bridges, and moved and traveled alongside their mobile residences. Some of these buildings flew using sails imbued with Aeromantic magics to chart a course through the sky. Most were bound to a set of rails, the city groaning and screaming as massive blocks of glass, stone, and steel slid upon an intricate grid of animated rails.
And even the rails were animated. Even they exhaled magic, emitted thought, held emotion.
Shiv found himself without words, truly without words, for one of the few times in his life. This story spilled over into a sense of wonder rather than dread as he gauged the things and landscape around him. He observed the countless dots of brilliant red, signatures of biology and vitality, commingled in a place where the stones were as alive as the flesh that tread upon them.
New Albion was a living place down to the soil. And the city breathed, spitting out smoke and storm, casting fire from its pores while its districts marched and shifted, while it fought to cleanse fires and repair itself from patches of ruin.
“It's quite the thing, isn't it?" the Faceless Queen mused by Shiv’s side.
He didn't turn to regard her. His attention was still fully devoted to the River Thames, its body crisp, twisting and writhing, its glittering surface shifting with a dexterity possessed only by a living body of water.
“Forty-two boroughs. Over four hundred years. Six hundred Genius Loci turned sixty thousand, turned eight hundred thousand, and so forth. The River Thames is my finest work. It is one that your beloved might be able to replicate someday in the far future, with that skill she hasn't fully understood yet. The promise that is bestowed comes with all the triumphs and torments of life. But even so, have you ever laid eyes on a truly living empire, Deathless? Have you witnessed a nation that will actually fight for its own existence?”
The skill that Uva possessed, the very same skill which made this all possible, caught Shiv's attention. "Genius Loci. How does that—"
"Later." The Faceless Queen waved him off. "Other matters first. Right now, head to that building there."
She pointed at the distance, and he saw a massive, towering structure that bobbed up and down, thundering across the land with each and every step.
"Buckingham Palace. A dead relic, rebuilt, then destroyed, and rebuilt again, and given new life. I thought it more poignant to call it Theseus's Palace, but alas, sometimes I am no greater than the Westerners that came before me. It lends more credence to invoke the mythology of this land rather than some faraway myth.”
Buckingham Palace was as alive as all the other architecture in New Albion. It, however, was far more animated, sprouting two legs woven from stone, steel, and carbon wires. It bounded across the world, skipping and sprinting alongside the Thames. From its innards came bellowing grumbles of stone on stone. It took Shiv a moment to fully process that it was laughing.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times. “So, I got a question about all this. Why?”
“Why awaken the Thames and all the architecture, you mean? Elementary, dear Deathless. I was lonesome, and I wanted to give life to nothing, so I did, and it was a fine thing to do. It was a large part of why the rebellion succeeded in the first place. After all, the nobility held such overwhelming control over the people's minds. In years prior, they boasted that the only way they would ever be toppled was if their own members and streets sought to devour them.” The Faceless Queen giggled. “It's remarkable how much your enemies can inspire you.”
“It is remarkable the grand changes that come from sufficient power as well,” the Harbinger mused, slightly unnerved by everything they saw. “She willed life, and so life spilled across the land. In this sense, she remains closer to the philosophy of a god than a person—in both creation and divine irony.”
Shiv arrived before the palace in little time. As he touched down upon its front steps, the windows and doors flung open, as if it was drawing back a pair of spectacles to take a closer look at him. A loud inhalation followed, and a rush of gale-force winds slammed into Shiv from behind. Below, the city streets continued to blur. The palace leapt atop other buildings, who cursed and hurled slurs at the palace as it sprinted and dashed about in glee.
“This one smells different. This one smells strange. That's a lot of life and not a lot of death at the end.”
Buckingham spoke with its mind rather than the cracking of glass or the shifting stone. The square columns that defined its center mass shifted up and down, slamming themselves in place like a set of fangs clicking against the bottom of a lower jaw. With the front door wide open, Shiv found himself staring at a spiraling carpet and creaking, rattling hallways. Windows and doors groaned about, shifting positions, jockeying with one another as the inner organs of the palace reworked themselves to Shiv's benefit in an instant. The entrance was made wider and taller. The insides expanded as a pulse of Dimensionality rushed forth, and suddenly, a set of staircases was flattened, and the hallway drew on longer, extending forth as doorways snapped into place and flung open, revealing extended empty chambers and waiting rooms in their dozens and hundreds.
Until finally, there came a room where Shiv found an orc kneeling, staring out of a frescoed window but otherwise unmoving. The Culturist was still. But he was not dead. His heart gleamed bright with melancholy, and his mind was dense with thought. His vitality was more vibrant than ever before, and there was something about his body, something about his aura that felt stronger by magnitude when he was already a Legend among Legends prior to his Excaliburization.
“Your mate’s waiting for you,” Buckingham grumbled. “He's been pouting and dissociating inside me for the last half an hour. He keeps calling out for someone that doesn't exist.”
That told Shiv enough. Excaliburization was the infliction of Utopia, and Shiv had a good guess as to what kind of Utopia the Culturist experienced. He always mourned being an incomplete person, being defined by the itch. And Adam had told Shiv about the Aviary agent that the Culturist tried to love and who loved him, before the Challenger sent another of his sons to murder her.
The Culturist had been reunited with her in Avalon, but drawn back into the embrace of harsh reality, she was dead once more.
“There are levels to cruelty,” the Harbinger whispered. “There are levels, and at the top, the Challenger makes all of us look like rank amateurs.”
Shiv entered the room. He still watched the halls, the surroundings, the chandeliers, the lights, even the grains of dust speckling the ground. At any moment, the building could turn on him. The palace was as much alive and animated within as it was without, and he didn't know what other skills it possessed. At least it could trap him dimensionally, and with enough wards or just a Legendary Chronomancer, they could keep him pinned here in more ways than one.
But despite Shiv's paranoia, he suspected that nothing was about to befall him, for he was summoned here for a reason. The Faceless Queen and he were about to have an accord. But before that, the Culturist needed to be handled.
Shiv came to a halt a step behind the orc. The Culturist still maintained the same garb, the gray-white cloak of feathers given to him by his beloved, but he looked stronger. There was a faint blue flame rippling off of him, as if he had been ignited. It had no heat. It inflicted no damage. The flame was purely spiritual, a manifestation of his fighting lore.
Shiv sensed something there that brushed against one of his own skills. The Culturist’s vaunted Striking Proficiency had taken a new measure. It had been fused with something else, perhaps something even social. There was a hint of enkindlement in the orc's fists. If he could inflict both spiritual and physical harm, the Culturist might just be an even greater adversary to Shiv himself now.
And maybe that's what the Challenger wants. Maybe this is a little scheme on his part to turn the Culturist back to the other side and use him against me. Anything is possible. Godsdamn it, anything's possible, so I have to consider everything.
Despite the burden brought by that thought, Shiv felt the hint of invigoration rather than the exhaustion that came with being overwhelmed. The crucible of constant conflict had refined him. He was tempered in the way only a few would ever be. Whatever the world threw his way, he would fight. He would gain succor from struggle, and he would keep evolving—no matter the cost.
“Culturist,” Shiv said. He considered laying a hand on the orc's back, but they weren't that close, and Shiv didn't fancy his chances in a direct brawl. Despite Shiv’s Onus, the Culturist still had a great many other skills—and judging by the Culturist’s enkindlement, getting hit would likely damage the Harbinger. Should Shiv’s manifested actualization shatter, his body and soul would surely follow.
The Culturist moved smoothly, despite the languor in his face. His turn still seemed sudden, crisp, almost alien. His mastery over his personal physicality had always been an art to behold. Now, however, it was on another level, an unmatched level that left Shiv downright disturbed. It was as if the orc could wield the smallest cell in his body to move in tandem with its entirety, a perfect harmony of flesh, yet not exactly of mind.
The orc was still distracted. His thoughts were dense with doubt and even a trace of fear. Spreading patches of darkness expanded, enveloping the Culturist as he was exposed to Shiv's presence. He drew back his Trespasser, refusing to let dread impede the conversation.
“Deathless,” the Culturist whispered, his basso voice not fully sober, still caught in the maze of delirium. “Have I been returned, or am I still…”
“You're not in Avalon anymore,” Shiv answered honestly, ripping the blade out and letting the blood flow.
The Culturist's head dropped. He didn't seem overdrawn or depressed about that realization. Not because he had already made his peace, but because he wasn't coherent enough to form such thoughts.
Shiv swallowed as the Culturist stewed in silence. “I'm sorry about what happened to you. The Challenger... He hit all the orcs with Avalon. He actualized all of you, and then he pulled you back.”
“I know,” the Culturist answered, blinking slowly. “An act of genius strategy. He did it to change the composition of his army and laud his own dominance in front of you. And he tied it to another's limb. He was using the Starhawk's hand to pull upon the strands, was he not?”
Shiv suffered a rush of surprise. The Culturist hadn't been there, so how did he guess the scene so clearly?
“He has done this multiple times,” the Culturist whispered. “I observe this in him. Schemes, though seemingly open on the surface, are dense. He never does just one thing. Every action unfolds into countless other plots and maneuvers. Leaving me distraught, leaving us all changed, confused and incoherent, that is only a side benefit. He plays a grander game. As does she. Shiv—”
“She's the Great One, I know.” Shiv lowered his head and signaled his understanding.
The Culturist went quiet once more, but then he noticed the serpentine shadow looming behind Shiv.
“The Beast of the Ninth Circle? The Challenger inflicted it on you?”
“Well, more accurately, he did his part, but she…” Shiv paused and turned. He sensed the Faceless Queen before she ever announced herself. Within that room, painted by glittering lights passing through the fresco, there stood three: two Legends and something utterly unknown to them. “The scheme was hers from the start. A scheme I came to get some answers to. Great One, Faceless Queen, whatever you are, let's not do any more of this bullshit. I'm not going to pretend that I can force you to say anything. I'm not even going to pretend that this Beast hanging off of me is a weapon of my own choosing. You engineered all this for a reason, so you probably have a clearer idea of how it's supposed to be used than I do. I've done all the song and dance. I've gone between people, and I realized one thing. The Forbidden Empire is doing what it can to keep collateral damage to a minimum here. They could have destroyed so much more. They probably have boiled your land before, turned your seas and surrounding waters to steam, set fire to your villages and towns, and butchered your people, but they didn't this time because they're trying to appeal to me. You're trying to appeal to me. Everyone is trying to speak to me. To Adam and Uva—the Favored Three—but especially to me. I'm the lodestone of this Incursion, and everything's been building to this point. Everyone is changing, shifting, moving because of what's going to come, but I still have no clue what's waiting for me at the end. I have no idea what Avalon is. I have no idea what you're trying to do. I'm going to ask you directly, honestly. And you're going to answer me, or you're going to have to suffer the Beast, because I really can't control it. What’s the endgame here? What is Avalon—and how do we kill it?”
“Oh, I’m not sure if you can,” the Faceless Queen answered with a sigh. “At least I could not—not even at the height of my power. But perhaps that was the problem in the first place: all that power was a poison at the end. It made me uniquely vulnerable to a weapon born of infinite paths to paradise. After all, what need does one have for a god when a personal heaven can be delivered directly to your soul?”
She took a tentative step closer to Shiv, and she scrutinized him for the first time. A wave of discomfort slammed into Shiv—a wave that passed through his body closer to a scent than a gust of wind. He couldn’t trace from where it came or to what place it was bound, only that it was more dense with emotion than anything a mortal could ever muster, and that it held an ocean of reluctance and fear.
“You come here uncertain if you can trust me. I hope you understand that I feel much the same: Even after all I have observed, I do not wish to trust you.”
“Truth,” the Beast chimed again. It went pale, came alive, and it shuffled this time, blinking at the Faceless Queen with its deep, dark eyes. “Toxin and medicine aren’t so far apart. Only the dosage matters. Only where it is applied. Trust only when enlightened. Where faith fails, faith is placed into rationality, but that devolves into faith all the same. Self-deception is a staircase. At the end is not truth, but more often consequence.”
Shiv shot the Beast a frown that said: Alright, where’s this shit coming from?
Nihilist: No, no, I like this one. Let the snake keep talking. There’s something here.
“Not untrue,” the Faceless Queen agreed with a sigh. “It is a problem fatal to all who hold want, ambition, and promise close to their beings. In this, you are no different from me. But where my weakness came from regret and faith, yours is a future without end, potential without conclusion. Too many evolutions await you, Deathless. You are a blade spared the price of perfection, yet capable of eternal tempering. In this, Udraal has succeeded.”
“Udraal. So he’s involved in this mess as well.” Shiv snorted. “Should’ve seen that coming. Is he with Avalon or what?”
She shook her head, pale-golden hair dancing from side to side. “No. He is… as close a reliable ally as I can regard someone. I realized that when he fled from a chance at High Divinity out of basest fear rather than some form of noble philosophy.”
“What? Isn’t his whole deal eternal life and the destruction of the System?”
“Yes. And becoming a god is becoming an ontological slave fated to die from inevitable iconoclasm. Ideas change. Gods cannot. And thus, a Divinity is no more immortal than an Adept in certain respects. Even more fragile in others. But we veer too far into theology and metaphysics. It’s too much for you to comprehend at this point. I think it's better to show than to explain.”
The Faceless Queen took a heartbeat to steel herself, then continued with a final, echoing declaration.
“I want three things from you, Deathless: The destruction of the tragic parasites who named themselves the Ascendancy, aside from the Dreamtaker. The annihilation of Adam Arrow’s soul and the mistake that lingers within him. And finally, for you to sit upon the Stolen Throne in my stead; to assume my mantle, and to prevail in a war born of my original sin.”
Quest Gained: Kill all Auroral Ascendants aside from the Dreamtaker before the Incursion arrives.
Success: Evolve 4 Skills to Legendary-Tier
Failure: The madness nested within the Great One's husk spills over into Integrated Earth; the Abyssals Faiths each reap their own harvest of ruin.
Quest Gained: Kill the Tyrant of Peace before the Incursion arrives.
Success: Evolve to Transcendent-Tier
Failure: The Tyrant destroys everything you love and cherish, then breaks you as his hound.