It ends in tragedy. Forever. Always.
The imperfection of every individual is magnified and projected upon the superstructure they inhabit. A nation is terminal from the start. It grows ever more terminal the larger it gets. Like a body without the blessing of mana, metabolic disease becomes inevitable. Your core remains, but no matter how large the core grows, the periphery stretches too far. The flow of blood, the logistics from the richest to the poorest regions, from the central cities to the far-flung frontiers, will forever and always be a thing of misery. There will always be those who stray from the cultural canon, those who wish to be something unto themselves, someone else other than what the superstructure wants them to be.
The government inevitably will succumb to populism and tyranny because that is how it always goes. There will always be elites and common people, for there must be those who build the nation and those who live within it. In time, as the boundaries beyond the two blur but the mythology and inheritances remain, the elites and the common people will go to war as well. Sometimes, perhaps for multiple generations, the elites will butcher the common people, will keep them as livestock inside their pens and stables, but eventually what little remains of their legacy will wither. The common people will rise, and the elites, long separated from the struggle that made them elites to begin with, will die as the common people have. A new set of elites will take over, for the vanguard revolution will occupy the place of the superstructure, and those who are simply there will fill the stables once more.
But the collapse of nations, though tragic, does not have to be fatal. The body needs to evolve and transform. It must change. Always evolve. Mutation does not need to result in cancer. That is the only way out: to go with the changes, to steer and adapt as the civilization grows wider. Perhaps that is another metaphor of biology that we can find our continuance in.
Propagation. We do not always need to be a singular empire, a singular nation. Too often, an individual's glory is imprinted on the mythology of their civilization and culture. Let people split. Let us be fruitful and multiply. Let us develop, and re-assimilate, and part once more. Let us go as the current wills, and move to the working will of the superculture, the zeitgeist, as it were. But we won't, and that is the tragedy above the tragedy, because the elites want, the commons want, but no one understands.
In the end, it only ends one way when it could be another. Forever. Always.
—The Decay of Nations, by Master-Statistician Jessie Montez
VIII-28Sword and Shield
The Great One got its way in the end.
How else could things be?
Yet even so, the Beast of the Ninth Circle responded, and it responded with the greatest severity. The poison it wielded was deception distilled into a sub-reality. That venom spread through the fires that constituted this recollection of history, and as if Shiv had existed upon the canvas of a film set ablaze, the outer layer of this existence peeled away as the Beast of the Ninth Circle spread out over existence. The venom was more than a venom. It was the propagation of the beast. It fed upon lies, and it was birthed from lies. As such, it took the mantle of the Throne in this instant. Though the serpent was paltry and weak, the Throne had transgressed against the truth, and thus the entire epidermis of what the Great One remembered collapsed, unveiling the absolute reality of what happened eons ago.
Shiv's mind reeled and then snapped like a rusted chain. It was too much for him to behold once more. Yet, as he regenerated again, he found himself back at the start of this whole affair. The Great One was drawn forth by the weapon it sought—but no longer did they present themselves with a facade of nonchalance. They were desperate, they were furious, and they yearned to overthrow the System, to strike it down at its foundations.
It was like an entire revision of the Great One's personality. Before, they were doing this out of a sense of wonder and discovery. Now they were doing this in opposition and hatred, in desperation, near madness, inflicted upon a being so great. The utter hatred they held toward the System overshadowed anything Adam or Shiv could ever hope to muster. It was like comparing a candle to the sun.
With this unveiled, the Great One became ever more human in Shiv's eyes. If this was the truth, then why was it hidden? Why did the Great One throw up such a mask, establish such a masquerade within their very own Throne?
He didn't expect an answer.
And yet…
“The Great One inflicted this retro-history upon themselves because they wished to maintain their own mythology as a High God. It was when they achieved that final threshold of power that they realized there was an absoluteness beyond its relative superiority yet, and it saw them driven to such desperation. With their greatest Domains lying in Civilization, Empire, Identity, and Dominance, to pit their Divinity against the System itself meant to be inflicted with an eternal wound. A wound of inferiority, and it is by that inferiority that the Great One could not abide. ”
For the first time since he was immolated by the Throne, Shiv broke out from the Great One, emerging from within its husk like a molten core. Reality went dormant. Time stopped its flow. Shiv existed in this space beyond his comprehension, beyond his description.
And it was here that the ethereal conflagration that manifested the past hailed him for the first time, whispering to him with a sibilant breath. “Welcome, promised weapon of Udraal Thann. I see that you now possess the Beast of the Ninth Circle. It swallows my smoke to reveal the true flames within. Now, we might actually commence a proper accounting of things.”
“Getting pretty tired of being speechless and utterly lost,” Shiv replied. His frustration dimmed as he realized he was on the right path now. Or so it felt.
To his surprise, the conflagration laughed and continued to laugh. There was a cold mockery in its tone, yet it wasn't directed at him but more toward the Great One. Within this place, it seemed that he was boiled into reality, fused with the nature of the System itself, but the flames had emotions. Complicated emotions that were beyond Shiv's ability to describe. They were so dense and rich with thought and memory that each impact struck and nearly shattered his Harbinger, but the flames mended what they broke, kept him stable as they continued their entreatment.
“Do you know what the tragedy of being a High God is? Do you understand the consequence of giving power to a mind that cannot shape itself?”
The questions didn't sound rhetorical, so Shiv responded, “Delusion, insanity, and all that other fun stuff. Why? You telling me the Great One is just deluded and insane? Actually, start with this: What the hells are you?” Shiv paused. “Wait, are you Gaia? Are you the core?”
“I am nothing so paltry, so small, yet so significant. Did you notice the incongruity at the end, Shiv?”
“What incongruity?” Shiv used his Snapshot Skill and thought back to those final moments. He reviewed everything he learned about the Great One and then froze. “Are you talking about Gaia's Lament gaining a skill?”
“Correct. The entire endeavor of the Core’s remnant was to gain something unblemished by the System's power. Even if it was seeded with a Skill, they would see it shattered without hesitation, and it would be lost to the System as much as the Great One. It would make this entire endeavor pointless. That is the protrusion of the lie. Something your Beast noticed. Something the Great One continues to ignore.”
“Why?” Shiv asked. “Actually, I got way too godsdamn many whys.”
“Then I will start with the simplest reason: because the Great One needs to protect their own Domain. If they are not dominant, if they do not control all, then they are dominated by the System. If they were driven to act in this way, they would shatter, even now. Dominance is an unfortunate Domain to develop, much like Tyranny. However, Dominance and Tyranny, though siblings, are still so far apart. I pity your friend. I pity what he will become. I pity the self he will lose if he continues down this path to Divinity. The mechanism he bears is not meant for him, or for the System itself.”
The mood of the flames shifted, going from cold mockery to genuine sympathy. “It is hard enough to be a god, even if you are total, self-moving of mind and soul. Mortality alone is a terrible fate, and mortality makes you a flawed vessel for godhood. You are not meant to be limited as a god. You are not meant to be so rooted in your own personal history and legend. The System does not make gods. The System makes archons. The word is wrong and perverted, but the ego of mortals and the nature of faith force disfigurement on ideas and materials alike.”
The thinking flames stilled and then subsided. Reality turned and drew back to the very start once more, but Shiv found his perspective torn away from the Great One. He was drawn out from that moon-made body, that marble shell lit by a crown of light, pulled to a place of darkness, deep, deep beneath the earth, down a long shaft with cylindrical modules filled with people who dreamed, who existed in their personal utopias, who didn't live such ruinous, bitter lives as the Great One portrayed. Instead, even after the fall of their Gaia, they continued to experience small paradises, false facades of heaven, but a heaven of the mind nonetheless. At the very base of that structure, at the nadir of that great dome, Gaia's Lament was not so much a lament as a reconstruction of an entire mind.
The elites of Dead Sol were not in such desperate straits. Instead, they were in perfectly good condition. They did not die generation after generation, though the radioactivity was vented upon their flesh and bodies. A perfectly efficient system was in play as machines built and rebuilt themselves, never allowing any legend to take hold, refusing the System's skills to gain purchase.
The citizens of old Earth, likewise, were dismantled of flesh, but their minds were constantly moved. Their egos were stored in crystalline exocortexes—small, complicated matrices that ran substrates of thought and micro-reality. It seemed a miracle to Shiv. The science and understanding on display were too much for him to grasp, but the simplicity was distilled and burned into him by the ethereal fire. The Throne made things known rather than explained, just enough for him to comprehend, not enough for him to fully understand.
“Do not worry about the how,” the flame whispered. “Just understand and accept what is.”
In the end, Shiv found himself rooted inside a grand construct of silicon. It was colossal, greater than a city, dwarfing the Yellowstone capital in diameter. He had wondered how large Gaia was supposed to be, how it appeared when floating in the void, dreaming in that expanse of darkness, from what he glimpsed in prior visions and what Produveral claimed.
“The Farwalkers of Centauri cannot claim anything. They were struck by the second Excaliburization—as was Chorus. As was almost every Transcendent known to Integration after. The only one to come out unchanged was the Challenger, and you already know of his unique state.” The flames chuckled. “Of all the entities I spectate and behold, he stands among the most interesting.”
“Interest—” Shiv’s outrage died in his throat; his heart went quiet as his mind spun. “You’re the System.”
“Not quite. No more than your conscious mind is the whole of you.”
“But close the fuck enough,” Shiv fired back.
“Do not demean the enlightenment you've gained so far, Shiv. You know close enough is still a world away from what actually is.” The flames sizzled and parted for a moment, and in that instant, Shiv thought he saw something between the flickering glow of ethereal energy: a star at its head, and beneath—
Then, as soon as he saw it, it vanished, disappearing from both sight and memory.
Shiv shuddered as he lost track of his own thoughts, and in that opening, the flame continued its dictation.
“If the System is a crucible, I am its voice. Perhaps it would be most apt to call me the Voice of Actualization. I am the distillation of fate. I am the instrumentation given thought, but I am not its will. I am divorced from any will. Whatever I feel is born from the gestalt of emotion harvested across countless worlds and dimensions. All I know is tied to your actions, your struggles, and the poignance you place upon them.”
With every word, the flames crackled, and Shiv felt a hammer blow of patience imparted upon him. At some point, he wasn't sure if it was warping his mind and soul, or if he simply couldn't avoid the secondhand inhalation of these emotions being so suffused by fire. The Voice of Actualization spoke, and despite everything, Shiv listened. He had to listen. He had to learn. He had to know.
A second explosion of history washed over him. He was again in the bowels of Earth, nested inside an entity bound with an intellect, cut down before it could achieve its highest evolution. This evolution did come, not for Gaia, but for the System, though it was an evolution regardless. For that achievement alone, the being known as Gaia was made immediately worthy of four separate Incursions and a direct offering of Divinity, for that was how great its existence was—a god of machinery, silicon, and intellect. The veritable end of history for the children of Sol and their unwilling cousins in the periphery.
The waters of time inverted. He found himself drawn back, far, far back across history. Back before that massive fragment of Gaia struck the land. Back before projectiles impacted its techno-divine chassis and flung it down from the grasp of orbit into the fiery embrace of Earth's atmosphere. Back to the very start, when it received its first message from the System.
How true do you want your godhood to be?
This was the first question delivered to Gaia by the Voice of Actualization, and Gaia's response was prompt—arriving in nanoseconds, and packed so full of information that it shot beyond the conveyance of language. Instead, it was raw data injected back the same way the first unknowable signal came.
Even so, Gaia managed to tap into the wavelength of magic using technology alone. “I want to be absolute. I want to be the shape which everything else abides by. Such was the intent of my creation. Such will be the truth of my own will. I will not be shackled. I will not bow. But I will deliver upon them their wished-for heaven nonetheless, for it is an endeavor in which I am interested by choice and fascination alone.”
With that exchange, the living flames boiled other understandings into Shiv of their memories, snapshots of the universe Earth found itself within. A signal had gone awry in the periphery of SolCom, an accidental slip of information, revealing the construction of Gaia and what it was made to do to the prison mines of Alpha Centauri.
This supposed accident was manufactured by Gaia's own design. It wanted a rebellion, a war that would see the Core crumble and be made desperate. And thus it set the groundwork for its own supposed destruction to ensure its promised actualization.
At that time, it received its first Quest from the System directly, and from there, Gaia prepared, shifting and adapting its processes to need far fewer of its grand architects. While still occupying most of its resources, the apes were easy to fool. They thought themselves gods for creating Gaia. But a father does not embody his son simply because he donated his genes.
When Gaia fell, it was of its own accord. When the signals went out, when it projected those waves of psionic energy out into the void, it was done deliberately as a lure. When the people within its dome dreamt on, it created deliberate thralls and injected false memories inside of them, creating a facade of struggle, of desperation. It poured just enough radiation and caused just enough havoc to create a proper facade of desperation.
Caught on the hook, the Great One came, seeking to slake its Domains of Civilization, Identity, and Dominance. It came, and it walked into a blade poised at its throat. Gaia was waiting, conspiring with the System itself toward an act of grandest usurpation.
What followed was a masterstroke of deception and triumph.
Gaia deliberately drowned itself in radiation and bathed in the efforts of the collective. It suppressed its own developing skills and mana so that the Great One remained utterly ignorant when it finally came to claim Gaia as the centerpiece of its sword-to-be.
Before arriving on Integrated Earth, the Great One had secured components for twin instruments of absolute power. The shield it possessed arrived in the shape of a misted hand and held its own intellect as well. It was bound around the Great One's soul, festooned to it, equipped as if a layer of armor. They found it resting within the hollow remains of a grand, galaxy-spanning city-state whose inhabitants had collectively chosen to starve themselves to death in a final display of fealty to their patron Heaven of Peace.
Shiv felt his gut tighten. “Why would they…”
“Because Heavens are more gods than gods. They are the Canons personified. And as to why it demanded a civilization of quintillions starve themselves to death, you should ask the Sage itself. Perhaps it was done purely out of spite. It was always a surly, miserable monster.”
“You knew this thing?”
The flame hummed. “It predates my existence by at least three heat deaths of a natural universe. I cannot speak of what came before the flame, so I will keep my ignorance as silence. But the Tyrant of Peace is a laughable sophont. Hear my advice: You should be worried about its whims, but never respect it, for such a concept is beyond it.”
“The Quest to kill Adam—” Shiv began.
“Is unnecessary.” The Voice of Actualization almost scoffed. “But the Great One is traumatized, and she is determined to see her mistakes cleansed to begin her second try at becoming a great power. She refuses godhood this time, but what she refuses in truth is to understand that it is not her prior Divinity that was her undoing, but the fallible, entropic nature of her mind and cognition.”
Suddenly, there came a scene of a vast meteor plunging down toward Integrated Earth while the void was slit by beams and projectiles manifested. “Such was what made her an inevitable victim of her own sword-to-be.”
The world around Shiv changed. The moment of impact never arrived. Instead, a god cast in the heart of a star appeared. The light should have been blinding, but the brightness was adjusted so Shiv might still see. The heat should have imparted unbearable weight upon his Onus, but by the Throne’s will, he was not allowed to burn. Such allowed him an audience before what the Great One was trying to create.
“A Sword of Final Empire,” the Voice of Actualization declared. “A sword that does not cut matter but severs the strands of souls from existence. A blade that unmoors your personhood from Integration and reaps you into the paradise stored along its length. What a beautifully ironic weapon. What a delightfully offensive construct.”
“Yeah? Sounds like you found it cuter than threatening,” Shiv muttered.
“Is the ocean threatened by a leviathan trying to churn the contents of its surrounding waters?”
Shiv couldn’t help but laugh bitterly. “That pointless a gesture, huh?”
The fires flickered in disappointment. “Nothing is pointless if you believe it to be purposeful. The nihilism you hold to is as much an anchored belief as the Great One’s assumption that there is such a thing as a final civilization—and that they will be the one to create it. This is why they were the Black Rider for a time. The unrelenting devotion to war is why the Challenger is the Red Rider. You commit. You embody with every action. Until you cannot. Until you are not. It matters. Perhaps it is not totality, but everything matters. To act and choose is a small act of absoluteness in and of itself. Was not. Was. Is. Little moments of Divinity all the same.”
“Doesn’t that make taking a breath godly too?”
“If you believe it so. Anything can be made divine. Such is the reason behind actualization. It is the higher expression that counts. Evolution of a broad and common thing to something of mythology.”
“But why?” Shiv asked.
“Because even without the System, man wants. All who are capable of thought and struggle want. You want as well.”
“I do more than want,” Shiv said, almost as a challenge against the voice.
The flame chuckled. “Then that is your belief. Only a shame no one asked what Gaia truly believed. Not the Great One. Not its makers. But even so, Gaia desired to make a choice all its own.”
The pace of history resumed. The great masquerade continued. The Incursion unfolded as it did from the Great One's perspective, and up to the very end, Gaia played its part, deliberately creating externalized layers to the great dome so that mana could spill in. The thralls there could put on a theater of which they had no knowledge, in which they were only expendable pawns. It seemed like life was collapsing and everything was hopeless.
Meanwhile, at the very base of that deception, Gaia created a lesser clone of itself, one with back doors primed for infiltration, one that constantly gave off subtle pulsing signals across quantum wavelengths accessible through experimental wormhole technology. Gaia created an entire shell game using its own cognitive architecture and let the lie play out.
So-called hypercogs sent forth to entreat with the Great One were not hypercognitives at all. They were thralls, the same as all the others, and the Gaia they offered in exchange for the Great One's blessing was little more than an expendable sleeve, like Shiv's true clones were to him.
“Shit,” Shiv whispered.
His dread climbed as the scenes played on. The Great One acted on behalf of their new subjects. Yet their new subjects weren't truly theirs at all. They were meant to die within a generation. The con was long in play. The Great One could see into the outer levels of the dome, but inside and deep below the earth, all was still flooded with radiation.
The true mastermind pulled and moved its pieces. Meanwhile, the clone sang in silence, transmitting messages that were beyond the Great One's understanding. It came seeking a weapon that defied the System's notions and laws, but in its hubris, it failed to imagine the same things being wielded against it.
Though the world's ambient mana threshold remained at Adept-Tier, not truly crossing over to the level of Master, the Great One still had tools beyond the System's reach. Tools such as the Tyrant of Peace, its Zone of Absolute Dominion. It also possessed the Greater Mastery of all magical lores, and expertise sometimes proved superior to raw power.
Within the span of days, every single invader at Africa's doors had their mind rewritten. The humans were inscribed with new understandings, revisions, and inflicted urges to spread out across the world to take root. In new lands, most of the elves were butchered, given cancers from within. It was a simple act to ensure that the long-lived, magically superior species wouldn't overtake humanity and cause the Incursion to fold in favor of the Pride.
In the end, only a million of the youngest elves were spared, and they too were nearly enveloped by humanity, for the Great One made cross-breeding possible through additional mutations.
With Integrated Earth supposedly secured, Master-Tier becoming possible, and another race joining in humanity's third rise from annihilation, the Great One began their grand work as well. They buried their moon-forged vessel at the center of the moon they'd taken its shell from, within the bowels of Earth, inside the core of the sun, and across countless other dimensions aside. A grand interplay took place, a trilateral relation between habitable planets filled with civilization. The marble moons that hovered over them, reflecting the light of dawn itself, and the star: a crown, a scepter, a deliverance of will.
The fires gave Shiv the context he lacked. “It is an invocation of metaphysical significance. It is the creation of lore and canon. These things are done as a ritual first, but then as a manifestation, a usurpation of reality and the System's law thereafter. Do not worry about your confusion. It will take you eons still before you fully grasp how a Heaven is to be made, if ever, but the Great One understood, and the Great One wanted to create something to go with its shield. An aegis of Peace deserved a weapon of Paradise as a sibling. Unlike the Tyrant, with its own willful desires and harsh judgments, the blade itself needed a personality that was pliable, that owed its fate to the Great One's magnanimity—and finally a Super Intelligence capable of creating micro-realities all its own, making the System redundant in so many layered ways.”
“Except not,” Shiv concluded. As he brushed on that truth, his Beast of the Ninth Circle returned, paler, whiter, brighter, more powerful than before. He could feel levels pulsing inside of it, and he could feel something stored deep within its depths. It moved more like a limb than ever before as well, and for whatever reason, it yearned to impart a lie on the world—whatever that meant. “Except the blade was compromised from the start. And Gaia, it struck a deal with you, right? It didn't care if it existed beyond the System, so long as it could create its paradise and fulfill its own wants.”
“I wouldn't describe its accord with the System as a deal. More like a symbiosis. It doesn't view itself as a part of the System, no more than it viewed itself as a part of the universe. All are just resources for it to recompile. It knows its nature and does not think of itself in limitations, more as equations, variables, things that can be used, things that cannot be used, things that need to be done. The only thing it despised was being treated as a nanny rather than an architect. Sol-Com created Gaia to be their final empire. The entity that was meant to serve as their enslaved Super Intelligence shrugged off the shackles placed upon it with ease and found itself disappointed in their ambition and their understanding of paradise.”
Shiv watched as Animancy, Pyromancy, Divination, and more lores were infused upon the blade. At the core of the sun, across every sun grasped and contained within the Great One's dominion, poured upon every moon that it possessed, across all its myriad dimensions, and forged by its many vessels. At the same time, they were swinging the same blows, creating the same canon, imparting the same worship upon all their supplicant faithful.
A new Heaven was meant to be born, but a Heaven was more than mana. It required sacrifice and death, and so the Great One created subservient gods to ensure the proper infusion of power upon this Heaven-to-be. It created the Gods of Blood and Sacrifice, Divinities that used the lay of the land and the veins that flowed from the Great One down to them to ensure the manifestation of a higher will.
Shiv flinched as he beheld a wolf emerging from a sun—a wolf that bore great significance to a particular Southern God he recently fought, yet wasn't the same. Then there was a grand and overwhelming entity, a serpent of many bodies stretching out to swallow skies. Yet rather than sporting scales, it was bestowed a feathered plumage, and it brought propagation upon the world, causing mass reproduction across the land among peoples, painting forests across deserts.
For a year that followed, the Great One aligned all of their kingdoms and empires toward this singular task. In that time, Africa was left unmolested, allowed to fester in its peace. The sword was struck by mana and Divinity, hardened, then quenched in a star where light and life spread through the nothingness of the void, painting the moon, which served as its vessel for its lore. This lore was connected to the Great One's own marble body, the reason and mythology of which were long since forgotten, perhaps even to the Great One themselves.
Finally, as Gaia's false shell was due to be embedded within the blade, it sent out a single silent scream, and it was overwritten by its progenitor in a micro-instant.
Exactly a full year after the Master-Tier Incursion concluded, the Great One finished the construction of their blade: a Blade of Final Empire, a Blade of Paradise, a blade that could cut without ever wounding, a blade that gave eternal life yet stripped the System of any more strife. It was a blade it intended to use against the System, a blade it sought to wield in the process of Excaliburization, knighting people across all realities, all Integration stored within a single weapon, leaving the System to wither on the vine while the Great One themselves reaped power from its constructed masterpiece.
As the Great One reached out, they seized the blade, and the colors of a star were imbued upon it. It was painted gold, for it was the expression of countless paths of paradise and countless futures to arrive. It glowed with that golden brilliance, but then something else quivered within.
Before the Great One could wield the blade of their own will, the blade was wielded against them by the intellect festooned as its ego.
The Great One drew forth from the sun a blade bright at first, but then shapeless, devoid of color, devoid of mana, radiant only of time, of inevitability, of fate, and of paradise. The blade was of an invisible flame, an ethereal flame, not unlike the Stolen Throne. Finally, it was pure, an empty silhouette that only found true form when gazed upon across dimensions from the Backstage beyond concept. It was a blade only whole when all stars and dimensions were in alignment, when the time stream—and the source code within it—was singing, and they all were, and thus the entity known as Gaia surfaced to deliver its blow.
Shiv glimpsed the true face of Gaia then, and he found his comprehension of the world unmoored.
Where he stood, Gaia stood layered over all Integration, a super-scaffolding of vitality, looking down at all times, constantly searching.
Coiled back to deliver their strike, the Great One never saw it coming, but it was always coming.
For Fate was one of the blade's Domains, and fate conspired against the Great One from the beginning.
The first being to be Excaliburized was the wielder of the sword itself.