Greetings, dear stillborns of the old realm. I come to you with an arrangement and a promise.
The promise first: I will grant you a blessing—I will use my Divinity to spare you the System’s infestation. No more need for radiation: I will see you unburned by mana and legend. I will see your existence guarded and spare you of retribution from the cousins you sought to enslave.
But in return, I want something from you.
The system you were making—the system before the System itself—holds promise. Promise that perished before it could spring forth from its intellectual womb. Your Gaia was so close to sinking its chains into the beings of this known reality and imposing your paradise upon this galaxy. So close, yet not close enough.
But all is not yet dust. I come seeking the completion of a weapon of final design—the last weapon anyone will ever need—even a god. Especially a god. A weapon that will never kill, but attain victory all the same. A joyous weapon. A euphoric weapon. An instrument that strikes without strife and bleeds only bliss.
What remains of your dead god can still be granted a second life through my Divinity. But here stands the choice: Your Gaia must be my hound, my means of triumph. And you will be under my charge; no longer suitors of your own fate, but charges under my total protectorate.
You may not want to worship, yet I fear you must make a choice. Give me this measure of fealty, and I will demand from you no other.
It is a better choice than you will receive from any other god or Pathbearer in the future. For none are nearly so great, so magnanimous, so total as I.
So, I ask of you: Will you grant me this sacrifice, and earn what little autonomy I deign to offer in return, or will you suffer and eventually die in a world that in no reality accepts your way of life?
—The Great One to the Last Council of Sol
VIII-26
Throne
“No. No. No. No. No!”
The room creaked and groaned as Shiv's Shapeless Tides spiked out in all directions—then froze as the Harbinger manifested. A suit of golden armor appeared around Shiv, and the visage of his actualization surmounted the angry brute about to slip his shackles. Shiv's Inertial Overdrive crackled and raged, yearning to pop and disintegrate the palace from within.
He clenched his fists, clutched his emotional leash tighter, and as the rage fueled him, it cleared his mind, allowing his rationality to claim dominion over the rampant fires of outrage.
“No,” Shiv repeated once more, his voice cold and rageful, but also impossibly composed. His hands stopped trembling in a heartbeat. Pitch-black fires seeped from his body while a translucent crown hardened into a Psychomantic shell around his mind. He was stronger than he'd ever been; his heart and flesh screamed for bloodshed, as was his design. His mind refused to capitulate, not to the world beyond, not to the winds within. “Explain yourself! Do it as carefully and clearly as possible, but before you do, understand this: I don't give a shit about the Ascendants. I don't give a shit what scheme or bullshit plot involves their face. But Adam is off-limits. You ever ask me to do anything to him, the answer is no. It's no in this lifetime. It's no in the next one. It's no in every parallel reality beyond.”
“Your loyalty is understandable, Deathless, especially with what the three of you survived. However…” The Faceless Queen paused as she calculated her next words. She regarded him not as a threat, but potentially as a bomb that might go off, a bomb that might kill himself in an attempt to damage New Albion as much as he could. Furthermore, a bomb she could exploit no longer. “However, you don't know what afflicts him. Neither does he. I do not ask you for the murder of a friend. I'm telling you that he only has so much time before you must euthanize him, regardless. That thing which burns within him, that was one of my original sins as well. Despite being my sin, it is also the thing that victimizes me. It was a power I had no business wielding, and neither does he. It promises peace. It promises an absolute design, usurping the System's will itself. I was fool enough to think it would offer me that final means of achieving my desired ends. So, too, will Adam succumb the same way, even with your counsel, because in the Incursion to come, you will all be pushed beyond your thresholds, and he will find himself making the only deal you can in the most dire, desperate moments of struggling. And when that happens, he will become less himself and more an idea. That of Tyranny and Heroism. By the time this is done, the man you know will be at best a memory, and he might as well be dead regardless.”
The Beast of the Ninth Circle remained pallid white.
Shiv's stomach twisted into a knot. “Just what the hells did the Starhawk put inside of him? What is that thing? What is the mist? The Farwalkers call it a Heaven. The Challenger referred to Avalon the same way. Details, now. Don't play with me. Don't waste my time. The moment I think you're screwing with me, I'm gonna grab the Culturist, and we're going to be gone. And after that, I'm going to ignore you. Whatever you want, I'll do the opposite out of spite. I'm still childish enough to go down that road.”
“And clever enough to weaponize this childishness,” the Harbinger added. “This is more than a ruse. We have the anger. I simply need to let my grip slip for unreason to become the rule of the day.”
The Faceless Queen inclined her head. “I understand, but hear me now: There is no point to it. There is no avoiding this problem. As much as this might aggravate you, if you wish to learn the truth of everything, if you wish to discover why you should truly hate me, then come. I need to show you a throne, as you need to experience this firsthand.”
“Firsthand?” Shiv tilted his head ever so slightly. At the same time, he synchronized these memories with Uva and Adam. The highest room atop Starhawk’s Perch was dead silent with these proceedings.
“An answer before an accusation? I do not intend to use the throne to overwrite your personality in any way. This isn't an imprinting gambit that the Forbidden Empire might attempt. They've done that quite a few times.” The Queen let out a slight chuckle. “Did Myth John-Marion-Produveral ever tell you about what the Gaia Project was supposed to do to those who dissented from Core rule?”
Shiv considered sarcasm, but caught himself before he accidentally overstepped into playful deception. The Beast of the Ninth Circle was pressing against him now, warning him. Instead, he just shook his head. He had to be careful about how he spoke and how he acted before this skill as well.
“You might like it. The Old Ones called it Ego Sculpting. Functionally, you get an altered personality ripped out from your exocortex. It's like a little mechanical crystal that holds your ego and personality. A purely technological device from before the System ever arrived. Anyhow, the information is beamed directly into you, and your consciousness is carved. Another version of you is uploaded, almost your mirror in terms of personality and behavior, except all that rebelliousness, all those disharmonious thoughts, are sliced away and replaced with something more palatable in the eyes of the state.”
Nihilist: The kind of shit that might make Veronica moan—Oh fuck, this is Avalon. Or whatever came before it.
The Faceless Queen continued. “You realize what this is? Good. The Gaia Project was a precursor to Avalon. I wanted to give my weapon a mind, and I needed a sword to go with the impenetrable shield that was my Heaven—my Domains of Heroism and Tyranny.”
Shiv drew in another breath as his anger fueled his Harbinger’s magic. “Yours. Of course it's fucking yours. Of course you were the one to make it. Avalon was your weapon from the start. Your weapon turned against you by one of your enemies? Please don’t tell me the fucking Challenger’s the one who did this to you—I can’t take any more of these twists and pivots.”
“Ah, but if it only were so simple and reasonable,” the Faceless Queen whispered. “And I didn't build this weapon alone. I had to seek someone with sufficiently advanced technical expertise. I'm sure you've understood by now the limits of magic. The attuned lores are determined by culturally and communally shaped beliefs, but that isn't exactly how the natural laws of the world function, is it? In fact, we've fallen quite far from our holistic understanding. Our notions of epistemology have collapsed entirely—neutered from necessity by magic.”
It didn't take much for Shiv to put two and two together again. “The Old Ones, the Forbidden Empire, Gaia. That's the last of their legacy. You either stole it from them or had them make it for you. Let me guess: somewhere along the way, your relationship broke apart. Did you hit them first, or did they hit you? Who's the traitor?”
A wave of mirth originated from the Faceless Queen. “More of a mutual thing. Something to keep in mind when dealing with the divine: We all seek to establish total control over the world. Faith is a glutton. But the same applies to secular tyrannies as well. Though the descendants of Sol Com lost their war, they saw another opportunity in me. They saw a chance to make a god into one of their Penitent Chassis. They tried to claim me as I tried to enslave them, and things… devolved somewhere along the way. And again, better experienced than explained. So. How would you like to finally see the game board, Deathless? How would you like to know what is at stake for you and your world?”
Shiv gave the weakest scoff of his life. “You already know the answer.”
Reaching the Stolen Throne didn't take a grand journey. The insides of Buckingham Palace were already akin to riding waves of dimensional water. The static tide shifted through the rooms, and the architecture itself reassembled before Shiv. Behind him, hallways were slotted, like cylinders gliding up along walls, only to be replaced by a set of other chambers. As they came stacked together, an entrance opened on the other side, but when the light spilled into the room, he found himself looking not at New Albion flying by, but at another place entirely. Another place, another time.
A wave of Chronomancy flooded the insides of Buckingham. It glided against Shiv. It clung to him. The time magic didn't dissipate; rather, it hung from his body like tar waiting to be ignited, and he prepared himself for death, for a trap, for surprise, for anything. More than ever before, he was marching into unprecedented territory, into the unknown, but he couldn't turn back. Not now. Whatever the Faceless Queen wanted, whatever reason she had behind desiring Adam's death and the destruction of the Ascendancy, was at hand.
As Shiv drew closer to the Stolen Throne, he found himself staring up a few steps beyond the new opening installed upon Buckingham Palace, and to his astonishment, he realized he was trapped within the embrace of the Thames. The waters around him coursed and raged, but they also observed him. They watched him with High-Tier Awareness —tried to Analyze him as its fluid form flashed purple.
It failed to glimpse anything, of course. Not that it was necessary. The Faceless Queen was already near omnipotent in some ways—and Shiv's mind came to a staggered halt as he regarded the Queen with an ugly question: "The girl. Is she how you can see into my Backstage? Is she the reason why you know about the Backstage at all?"
“She is as much born of my legend as you are tied to hers,” the Faceless Queen answered. “The moment she reappeared, even in your mind, I became aware. The Stolen Throne let me see, just as the Stolen Throne will let you see as well.”
Where the steps of Buckingham Palace came to an end, the golden road resting at the base of the River Thames began, and what a resplendent road it was. It felt like Shiv was standing upon fluid time, and the moment he touched it, his being was grasped and drawn along by the coursing current.
"What Tier is the River Thames?" Shiv asked.
The amount of Chronomancy it directed was fluid and fast, and with the control and power he felt dragging him along, it had to be Legendary, yet he wasn't certain. It was so alien in the way it directed its mana, so fine yet overwhelming, that he found himself unable to properly gauge this entity.
“Not my place to tell, I'm afraid.” The Queen held up a single finger and blew, shushing Shiv before he could go further. “It's rude to ignore the subject of the conversation when they're present, after all.”
Shiv looked around at the River Thames once more. There was a pocket of air running along its lowest level. Above him, the waters glided and tumbled. Yet there were no fish amidst that pure, pallid blue. And to his greater surprise, he realized he couldn't see the surface, the sky, or the sun, even though the water seemed crystal clear.
“So, do you speak, or do you just crash and splash around?” Shiv asked.
A limb extended out from the water above, like an appendage grown forth from a fluid ceiling. It formed a hand, and then three of its fingers curled, leaving what looked like an inverted peace sign as a gesture.
Shiv frowned. The Culturist gave a soft laugh. “It doesn’t mean anything polite.”
“I kind of got the feeling,” Shiv replied. He shook his head at the Thames but didn't say anything in retaliation. He didn't come here to argue with an Awakened river; he came here seeking answers from the Faceless Queen and the Stolen Throne. The bits of information he had received so far placed him on the opposite end of satisfied, but he had to go forward. He had to see this through.
Following the Queen's footsteps, he was just about to ask her where the Stolen Throne was when suddenly the waters parted. In a flash of brilliant gold, the time stream changed as well, and they emerged in a new place, a new time, perhaps a time sealed off from the rest of history. In a small clearing amidst the water, the air grew dry once more, and something lingered ahead, appearing beyond the brightness of Chronomancy like a fading mirage.
But the brightness didn't die. The glow endured, and with each step, Shiv felt the kindling press against his very soul. There was a heat that seeped into his being. Within this river, the moment he stepped into these waters, his connection to the present was slightly distorted. The pace of the present was pulled in two places. The body that sank into the waters was cast into the future, accelerated forward at a pace 1.2 seconds faster than baseline time. The rest of him lagged behind.
There was no easy way to communicate with the past. There was no easy way to synchronize what he learned here with Uva and Adam, for they now strode in the future, and the present was out of sync. It was a reliable strategy to ensure no one could track the exact location of the Throne, he had to admit.
By this point, Shiv understood the entire design behind the River Thames and its myriad skills. It was still an enigma in some ways, but it understood the world to be like water, for it itself was water, and time was often likened to water much the same. As the stream flowed, so too did the objects occupied within the currents. With the waters devoid of fish, of practically anything but the golden road below and now the Stolen Throne, he realized its purpose was only truly one: to hide the Throne from any and all enemies. Defending the rest of New Albion came as a far, far second.
And the Stolen Throne itself was a sight to behold. Once more, it wasn't a matter of where it existed, rather a matter of when to the entity that held it. The Throne itself was not a seat of grand design. It was not a towering construct of steel, spiked at the top with spines pointed in defiance of the sky, blades positioned to pierce the clouds and heavens. It did not sport grand armrests of wood or intricate carvings bearing the annals of history and legends of cultures past. No.
The Throne was as elemental as the waters that guarded it, but it wasn't a fluid, rather a flame. A flame that was ethereal and alive, a flame that needled Shiv's mind to look upon. His sanity reeled as he laid his eyes on it, but then found itself reinforced as he gazed into that flickering glory. The kindling briars of the conflagration greeted him, and he realized it recognized him. He realized it emitted a density of translucence unlike any other entity or being he had observed in his life. It had a core. It reflected his core. It reflected him in so many ways, and he saw the faintness of specters—ghosts pale and ghosts of glossy colors that lingered as gossamer spills upon the surface of reality.
There was no easy way to fully describe its shape. The longer he looked at it, the more it resembled an imprint of oil rushing upon the surface of water rather than a flame.
“There's just no end to your weirdness, is there?” Shiv asked the Faceless Queen.
“Oh, this is not my doing alone. I actually found the Stolen Throne. I integrated it into myself, I absorbed it, and made it a skill for some time, but such a thing is greater than the System, older than it by far. Before it was a throne, it was something primordial, something primal, antediluvian, absolute.”
The Faceless Queen's voice climbed high as she expressed her adoration. Then her mood dropped. “It is also something terrible. It's beyond description. Go, sit on it. Ask it your question. Ask it anything you would ask me, and it will tell you better than I can. It will inscribe upon you truths so pure that the Beast of the Ninth Circle will be sated enough for full, enduring sapience.”
But Shiv was not so easily commanded. The Throne held a mysterious allure, but it also repulsed him, for it was a burning construct. If he simply sat upon it, he didn't know what it might do to him. “Is this a trap? Is this supposed to hurt me? Is it going to replace my soul in any way? Is it going to change me—let you use me?”
“No to every question but the second to last. It might change you, not for my use, just from exposure to reality. Reality itself, removed of all the distracting details that make up existence, is a little bit like... I don't suppose you understand what a source code is. Think of a body's cells. It's like observing reality from the finest, smallest aspect. The most honest aspect, if you will.”
“Truth.” As the Beast of the Ninth Circle repeated its common phrase, it drew closer to Shiv. It sank into him, becoming more tangible than ever before. This materialization came with another power. He could feel the fabric of its existence clinging to him, but he could also feel his own nervous system sinking into it. It was gradually awakening, pinprick by pinprick, turning into a limb that he could now direct. As to why or what capabilities it possessed… Such a question remained a mystery, but he managed to coil the beast around his right arm, fusing the end of its skull to the tips of his knuckles.
The Faceless Queen nodded. “Good, it's been fed enough. It should guard you from any… unexpected glitches when you rest upon the Throne.”
Shiv really didn’t like how she said that. “And what do you mean by unexpected glitches?”
“Well, the System is a vast organism. It is also a vast mechanism. I will be honest, the integration process with the Throne will not be pleasant. You don't have the intellect, nor the Awareness, nor the Tier, nor any other Skill to interface with the seat of my greatness. Anyone else would be driven insane and left a hollowed shell. Not you. You might be the only Legend in existence capable of sitting upon and adapting to a High God’s seat of power.”
“Great One. Before you go any further, I wish to speak my piece in this as well.” The Culturist's words were tinged with fear, but resolute in the end. He faced her with a mist-exhaling socket and bright blue eye that belonged to Adam, now inherited by his first and perhaps most avowed follower. “The Deathless will not betray the Paragon. Whatever you do, however you attempt to warp him, if this is an attempt at all, it will fail. If you seek the death of my new master, I want you to know that we will do all we can to bring ruin to you, high god or not.”
“I know you will,” the Faceless Queen said. There was no rancor in her voice, no hint of outrage or frustration. Just acceptance, almost cold but not quite. “I don't take any pleasure in claiming this, but I mean my words: The boy is damned. He is damned for the same reason I was damned. The only way he can escape his fate is if he's struck by Excaliburization, but that is simply an eternal exile into one's personal paradise, made a cage. Unfortunately, my shield is meant to guard against my sword. The Tyrant within him will never bow to Avalon. The Tyrant never bowed to me, even at the height of my power. Now, please, Deathless.” She gestured toward the throne. “Consider this a plea more than a request.”
"You always have a choice," the Culturist said.
Shiv glimpsed a lingering trauma within the orc. For Shiv's sake, for Adam as well, the Culturist pulled himself out from his dreamlike melancholy and forced himself to face the present. Shiv gave him an appreciative nod, but it felt too little; it felt too weak.
The Harbinger mourned on the orc’s behalf. “There are no words to replace what he just lost, an entire lifetime of deepest longing fulfilled, lived and then ripped away from in the span of seconds. The thing about happiness and true joy is that it is never enough. Perhaps hell is to be taken out of heaven itself.”
Shiv considered leaving the river, consulting his friends before he ventured forth. He decided against it. He decided not to waste any more time. He was here. The path lay ahead. The Beast confirmed the absence of true danger, yet it still felt like he was marching to the gallows. Whatever followed would leave him changed, even if that wasn't the will of the Great One.
The foreign flames that defined the Stolen Throne turned solid, turned ghostly, and Shiv felt as if he was looking upon a living painting drawn from the far past into the present, forged from countless histories lost to the annals of the past.
Every step he took felt like he was dragging a mountain of lead behind him. He came to a halt with only a meter between him and the Throne itself. It burned. It crackled. It greeted him as one would an old enemy and older friend.
Shiv turned and sat upon the Stolen Throne.
In an instant, he felt it creep over his body. He felt the Chronomancy lacquered upon his form combust. All that had been waiting for the present. All that had been waiting for this spark, this trigger.
As he detonated, his flesh did not dissolve, his spirit did not shatter; Shiv did not die, but he sank.
He burned. He was branded upon the fabric of time itself, and suddenly the concept of Shiv was stretched outward, his identity tearing, shredding, breaking. Madness rushed in to claim him, yet madness pushed back as his consciousness reeled and rallied.
He was a man on the outside. At the core, there was a weapon, a hound of the end. The hound raged without rationality left. The Beast guided the hound, the Beast protected the hound, the Beast enforced truth on the hound, and the hound remembered. After a time spent, an eternity spent in the Waters of Eternity, he surfaced not from the River Thames but across the currents of history and chronology themselves.
***
Shiv opened his eyes, but he found himself no longer in his own body. Instead, he was something far greater, far larger: his flesh the size of a continent, but containing the weight of universes. The vault of treasures carried within his soul was richer than entire dimensions, filled end to end with bejeweled planets and young, ripe stars.
All that mattered little to the Great One. The allure of wealth and power, of desire, was in the pursuit, and not the achievement. One always had to evolve, after all, to seek greater ends, to find the horizon and surpass it.
By this point, the Great One had lived far too many lifetimes. They were too old for horizons. They'd watched worlds rise, fall, die, and then rise again. They had facilitated the changing of histories. They had seeded grand empires and watched them live out their lifespan within a pocket universe.
Across the ages, the Great One's rivals grew fewer and fewer. Of course, there was Chorus, always trying to inflict its tyranny and order upon what patches of Integration it could control. It was a hopeless endeavor, but the Great One respected it; after all, they shared a similar desire.
Then there was the System's finest, most loyal dog. The Great One despised the creature and loved the creature, for the Red Rider was forever and always the embodiment of bloodshed and war. But by this epoch, the Great One had grown weary of facing the orcs in open battles. They had fun playing power struggles with them to control an entire galaxy, and the Red Rider was forever willing, never disinterested.
But the Great One's ambition lay far higher. They turned their gaze upward, at the System itself, at the very infrastructure that allowed the Great One to reach these impossible heights in the first place.
They had long since forgotten the planet of their birth, their mother's tongue, the name of their people, and the ones who spawned the Great One. They had forgotten even the shape of themselves, for all these things were lost to the impossible stretch of history they'd lived across.
More importantly, the Great One had no interest in their mortality. Mortality was a weakness. Mortality had to be shed. Mortality limited one to time, to fragility, to the whims of another, as a god.
Of gods, a god that carried a civilization within themselves, the Great One stole the freedom of a mortal and possessed the unrivaled power of the divine, and so they traveled. They reigned wherever they went, ruling through ambition, through tyranny, through heroism, through peace, but now they wanted to create an absolute rule. A rule that surpassed this reality they existed within.
Integration needed to be usurped. That was the next frontier, and in their pursuit, the Great One arrived in a miserable, misbegotten dimension barely past the Adept-Tier threshold, seeking peculiarities that existed before the System's arrival. Seeking a treasure unlike any other, one utterly devoid of magic, yet on the precipice of becoming a System all its own.
And so the Great One forged a vessel for themselves. They brought the sun and moon into a natural alignment, and from the eclipse they obtained the foundations of a metaphysical body, something grand but weak enough to manifest within this supple, newly-Integrated dimension. With that done, they lit their crown with a measure of the sun's power. They carved marble into the hollow silhouette that defined their contours to give their body mass and descended, plunging from orbit like a meteor toward the last vestiges of non-savage life.
Integrated Earth was a brutal place, swept by brutal struggles. Men, women, machines, goblins, elves—all were learning how to regain their civilization, all facing the monsters that spilled across their homeworld: blade against fang, teeth upon spell.
But in Africa, the land of tragedies, over and again, the last remnants of the world that was fostered schemed, but ultimately waited to die.
Waited until something divine intervened on their behalf, seeking something sublime.
Quest Bestowed On Self: Install the final piece of “Avalon.”
Success: A new [Heaven] is created.
Failure: [WARNING: CEASE YOUR ACTIONS—YOU KNOW NOT THE FOUNDATIONS YOU THREATEN; YOU KNOW NOT THE SLUMBERING POWERS YOU PROVOKE]