Poor, poor God of Civilization. Forever and always suffering and breaking because you realize your worlds and peoples must collapse, that you are still beneath omnipotence and omniscience.
I weep for you. Truly, I do. I am so sorry you are what you are. What hell must it be to be you, to always desire and never truly taste that which you want? To never know true joy and actualization because it all must be shaped around you?
Look at where you stand. Look at what you can do. But you care nothing for it. You are like a pleasure-deadened mortal, dulled to food, mating, bloodshed, and more because you are not the only god in existence.
And you think that this sword of yours will give you what you want? You think that it will allow you to starve the System? This… petulant display of usurpation?
You think it cares? You think any of this matters?
What kind of reality would you like to live under, Great One? One where everything is perfect? What a miserable hell. Or perhaps one where everything veers toward inevitable collapse? How pointless and hollow.
You will engineer your own destruction. I do not need to see the future to read what is already in motion. And when the time comes, I will mourn you, from the bottom of my heart.
There are so few of us who reach such heights. If only you could have found any worth in your struggle alone…
Alas. Alas. That pleasure seems to be born of a wisdom I alone possess. What a lonely god is I.
—The Challenger to the Great One
VIII-29
Treachery is Fate
“And yet. One does not become High God by being easy prey.”
The same instant the Excaliburization struck the Great One, they understood the treachery at work and reacted accordingly. They fragmented themselves, allowing their being to be parted into a thing of many layers.
Shiv's comprehension slipped away from him once more as he failed to understand and conceptualize even the lowest aspects of the Great One's Skill, if it even was a singular skill, if it was a skill at all, and not a manifestation of several High Domains working in perfect concert to make possible the impossible.
Whatever followed, to his pathetically lacking understanding it seemed that the Great One went from a thing of humanoid design to a rising tower, layered nigh-infinitely across dimensions uncountable, stacked reality upon reality, parting Integration itself into a segmented construct that fused itself to the Great One’s ontology.
An animal noise slipped out of Shiv as his mind ruptured once more. He was forced to witness the battle from the perspective of Gaia, and then the Great One thereafter, and it was too much. Even with all he was, even with his unique mind and soul, it was too much. His self-repairing vessel shattered, and for what felt like days to months to years and more, he sank into a madness—only to be drawn back into the maelstrom each time.
At some point, he heard his Harbinger screaming, tortured to the brink of gnosis alongside him. Meanwhile, the dreaming fires looked on as the Voice of Actualization slithered in circles around him, silent, studying Shiv as he struggled and suffered.
The grand truth that followed was fed into him like droplets of molten metal. It seared him, it broke him with time, but the whole picture was assembled fragment by fragment, aeon by aeon. As the Throne burned him, so too was his nature refined.
It was an ocean of power between the greatest Transcendent mortal and the weakest High God. Such was the nature of both. The former, then, was being driven down the path of enlightenment, perfection forever looming over them: full mastery over a facet of reality beyond their grasp. Yet as they developed their skills, as they refined their legend, they went down a narrow path all their own and learned to understand the world in ways that a god never could and never would. For to be above something meant to be beyond its feedback as well, and to exist unmoored meant the refinement of a great ignorance.
Such was what damned the Great One to their fate.
The moment Gaia drove the Sword of Paradise into its wielder-to-be, the Great One ejected the lowest of their Skills to be expended first while drawing the pace of time to a near-absolute halt. Across a near-trillion dimensions, everything stopped.
Everything. Every thought. Every force. Every bit of space. Even the notion of time itself ceased, for such was the majesty of true Divinity.
And it did nothing at all to stop the Excaliburization process. Even if Gaia held no Domain of Time, it was a newly forged Heaven, and Heavens were absolute things. Things that extended beyond the System's will, beings not of strife but of a significant ontological declaration:
I am as reality was.
From the moment of contact, the Great One's fate was sealed. They were still too ambitious. They were still so filled with yearning, so desperate, so hopeless. The System loomed ever farther; above the ceiling of power the Great One had thought to know, there were still galaxies between the greatest of High Gods and the totality of the thing that had given them their power. For all the Domains the Great One possessed, there remained an innumerable number which they lacked.
And it was along this axis of infinite possibility that the Great One was cleaved. They were too powerful to die, too grand to collapse under their own weight. They were too stable, too selfish to even consider death, self-inflicted or otherwise; the cessation of their being would not come naturally. Their existence would draw on continually for years unknowable, and in that time, the things they could retrieve, the dimensions they could win and lose, were beyond reckoning.
The Great One would be lost within themselves, forever and always. Such became fate the moment Gaia nicked their godly soul.
But they could decide when this fate would arrive, and they could decide how they wished to rectify their unwanted ascension into that purgatory named paradise.
In the end, the Great One chose to sunder themselves in body, mind, and soul, scattering their Skills and Domains across the land, shattering their vessels and ripping the vitality out from their inner architecture to cast the hollow husks down across countless worlds—impacting the land and burying themselves deep down toward the epicenter of these living dimensions. Down where the Great One's blood, its bone, its skin, and flesh could give life for the flourishing of countless civilizations, where their unmoving bodies would be worshiped as gods in their own right, regarded as holy relics to be warred over, fought over, and protected—even against the Great One's highest of foes.
Meanwhile, mortal figments cloned from their greater mind would be imbued within certain skills to overwrite whatever unfortunate mortal came upon these non-divine shards of the Great One’s soul. Shards like the Stolen Throne, which once was a humble Divination Skill, evolved so severely, imbued with so many moments of unique experience that it went from Unique to Legendary and far beyond.
As Shiv burned on the throne, he realized he was burning in more ways than one. He realized that the Beast of the Ninth Circle had protected him in more ways than one. A false consciousness was set to be layered over him, a consciousness born of the Great One, imparted upon all who were made to sit upon the Throne. In that, he also glimpsed another truth. Valor hadn't been lying; he had slain the Faceless Queen time and time again, but the person he slew was not the true Faceless Queen. For this throne itself was the prime resource, the wellspring of mind and soul belonging to the Great One, and everyone else carried a shadow that guided them, a shadow that made mortals expendable, that sent them forth as pawns worn by the Queen, expended over and over again in a grand game against a foe of its own creation.
And the moment Shiv thought of Valor, the flame shifted. It embedded him within the vessel of his mentor. For a moment, he realized what it would be like to live as Valor Thann: to feel the world through currents of eternal loss, the flowing tides of Necromancy, painting all of reality in a film of ever-thickening corrosion. At the same time, there were spots of nothing in his mind, places where information should have been but wasn't, where knowledge should have existed but didn't, where the final few Skills that defined Valor's true history, his whole legend, were simply absent.
That unnatural emptiness that defined Valor drove him near mad at certain points. It was like reality was a wind and he was stone, but there were gaps between the solid, and it whistled through him, taunting him, reminding him. Worst of all, there was a memory there so close to the surface yet hollowed of detail, a memory tied to the final fate of his wife and the reason behind his destruction at the hands of his son. The effect on Valor was horrific. It was like existing within a gravitational vortex, to be pulled yet drawn adjacent to that final core, to the inevitable truth he didn't want to know, but he had to know. He had hesitated for the past months. Even beyond the war and invasion, he was hesitating. He was afraid to realize who he was and why he'd met his current fate.
Shiv's eyes rolled, but where his flesh threatened to succumb, his Harbinger flared brighter than ever, stronger than ever, and it forced focus into his fragile consciousness. He turned his thoughts to other individuals, other questions he had about everything. He caught glimpses of the Southern Gods, how their progenitors were sundered alongside the Great One so that they wouldn't grave rob in advance and draw succor and ascension by cannibalizing their maker’s husks. The gods Shiv fought today were simply the far-removed children of those original ascended, and only bastard children at that, simply mortals who took the form of those distant gods and played out the mythologies that took place before. Everything was a degenerated mutation of what came prior.
He gazed upon the Composer, who was revealed to him with a near-comical mundanity to be the greatest liar of them all, not a child at all, merely a spider of the Abyss once upon a time that crawled too deep, that survived by fortune or perhaps the nudgings of one pulling upon the strings fate. That spider found an aspect of the Great One's soul, primed for her imbuement, waiting to sink its mana into a worthy vessel. In that, the Composer was a cuckoo before cuckoos—specifically shaped to be the perfect wild card and guardian for the rest of the Abyss.
The fact that Weave suffered the ailments it did was not born of the Composer's impotence at all. It was simply an impossibility for her to create a dominant society. She was always supposed to be a thorn in the side, a balance breaker, an extra variable that everyone had to consider. Her melodies, though capable and potent, were meant to banish foes from intruding in her realm above all. Her nature as a Demigod was her bedrock, ensuring that she would never evolve, because there was no point to her evolution beyond that state. So long as she was rooted to one of the Great One's Skills by birth, she would never find her way to stride beyond. Should she choose to struggle against this destiny, her subconscious and the skill itself would war against her. The melody she would concoct, inspired by what she assumed to be inspiration, would carry magical notes that planted other seeds of discord within her society. Worse yet, the plagues that ripped through her children, that madness that was in truth nothing born of pure vampire design, was simply the inevitable outcome when the sickness reached the root of their minds and forced them to uncover the truth of their origin.
The sounds and songs the Composer played had done well to prime her children for such a miserable fate.
Then Shiv glimpsed the Ascendants. Twenty people cast down as exiles at the whim of the Dust King. Twenty of them dispatched and spread across the Abyss to fend and survive on their lonesome. Except not. Except they were nudged along by the hands of unseen allies when they proved their hardiness.
His perspective fragmented. He was drawn back toward Africa and saw that the outer layer of that great dome had been expanded, that there were now billions of thralls living within, all experiencing a different reality. Along the outermost section, systems failed constantly. Radiation was a precious resource, and there was a steady supply of cloned individuals imprinted with entire lifetimes they never lived, sent out as pilots to their mechanized counterparts—all to maximize their potential for strife. Within, however, the Stolen Throne's glimpses became fewer and fewer. It knew Gaia, for it had burned the Sword of Paradise, but there was something else there, lurking opposite to the Great One near the planet's core.
When that Super Intelligence forked itself to steal an absolute Divinity in the shape of the Heaven, it left another iteration of itself to continue its great work in the present. It wasn't like the Great One in its worries and sentiments. It was pure, cold, calculated, and driven in a way that a human could never understand. Whatever emotions it suffered, it was clean, unblemished by the System.
As the Great One played their game, so too did Gaia run an entire gambit in advance. It was now in two pieces as well: one a Heaven, another still hidden in Africa beneath the flames of strife, beyond the reach of the Throne, protected by a hive of constant entropy and science, an old world's ghosts.
And so, as the Ascendants moved to claim their destined mantle deep beneath the earth, the hidden hand behind them rippled inside their blood, fed them information they should have had no chance of knowing within the marrow of their minds.
The vial of glittering fog shown to Shiv by Anthony was already inside each of them by this point. And it used them as both a means of testing and constraining the Abyss.
On Earth, the civilizations of the deep were supposed to spread and reign over the planet, but it wasn't so. The Five Faiths were constrained, were repeatedly besieged by the ones above, and some of the Great One's finest Domains were lost to those who should have never possessed them at all. And upon reaching godhood, the treachery hidden within the cells of the ascendants was burned away, lost with their physical forms. Even so, Gaia knew how they would progress. Gaia knew the dangers of lore, for the System whispered to and played with it.
This was the grand design behind the grand design: strife. The Great One saw release. Gaia saw the fulfillment of its curiosity. Meanwhile, the System saw an opportunity of battle, a battle unlike any other, forged upon the anvil of greatest irony, greatest hubris.
And now everyone that followed was paying for it.
“We are the consequence,” Shiv muttered, his delirium overwhelming. “We are the consequence. We are. We are…”
His battered, exhausted mind turned to other questions still, to Udraal, who materialized amidst the ethereal flame, noticed Shiv, laughed in pure jubilance, and waved—before banishing himself from the System's awareness with a casual flick of his hand.
“Udraal—wait! You fuck!” Shiv's snarled cry came far too late, and the Voice of Actualization offered nothing besides a series of low, amused chuckles.
Undeterred, Shiv adapted his strategy: he aimed his thoughts at individuals adjacent to Udraal, starting with his mother.
The moment Shiv tried pulling on Silence’s strand, the System recoiled. It forced him away, and suddenly he felt another presence brushing against him. It touched his Continuity Error First, and the girl who wasn't screamed for him to evade, but Shiv was drowned amidst the fires. He was barely cognizant of himself. He was so overwhelmed, so small, trying to push a will so grand and large that he was worn down to the roots.
“Shiv! You need to dodge. You need to dodge right now! You need to go Backstage now! Shiv! Shiv!”
Too many things happened at once, too much for Shiv's mind to endure. He broke again. He slumped in the throne, drool and snot rolling down his face while his eyes twitched, bloodshot vessels bursting inside the organs, causing tears of blood to flow down and be burned away amidst the ethereal conflagration.
While he remained broken in such a state, there was only a slight aspect of him still alight with consciousness. The Harbinger endured in place of its shattered base, but even it was fractured. Even it was broken, but it remained enough of itself still that it saw the attack coming, that it felt the strand soaring across existence and arrive within this place within places.
Boiled into the fabric of existence itself, the Harbinger witnessed Avalon for the first time in truth, not Avalon as a thread, but Avalon as shadow, as visage, as expression.
There, moving across time, kept contained within a traveling intellect slithering across all reality and burned like a brand into the narrative of the System itself, was Gaia's new guise.
It resembled the mockery of the Great One, a humanoid vessel that wasn't quite. It was civilizations hammered together to occupy a bipedal shape, but rather than possessing a head, it sprouted planets stitched together, riven with expansive sprawls, ecumenopolises fused, bleeding to wild and vibrant heartlands of emerald green and glistening waters, so vast and deep that a thousand-thousand civilizations could develop in those flowing tides, never to know the surface, never to believe that there was something beyond the wet.
Its torso was shaped as a mockery of a throne, while resting upon its lap was a blade, forged not of buildings, cities, places, or worlds, but rather a blade forged of people, their arms risen in want, their faces painted with desperation. People, organic and not: elves and humans, goblins and orcs, wolves and insects, and so many, many more. All people, all yearning, enough of them to populate realms above realms.
The outer edge of the blade was the translucence of mind, the inner core of it the bright-blue of soul, and ultimately, unto itself, it was a flame. A flame of actualization and want. A flame of paradise to be. A flame of yearning and utopia. A place beyond places, a promise of heaven after a lifetime of struggle, pain, and toil.
What are you? Gaia, now named Avalon, asked again.
The Harbinger looked upon the Great One's devourer and quailed. Avalaon hid nothing. It didn't obscure its emotions or its thoughts. It stood dauntless, fearless, and ever curious, and that was practically the only thing that defined it: a cruel, calculating yearning to learn, to know, to compartmentalize and record everything. It yearned to know everything, including him, and the fact that it remained ignorant of how Shiv had survived its attack, how he prevailed where the Great One could not, left him marked in a way no other could compare to.
As Shiv's personal sanctuary existed as a place away from reality, behind it Avalon burned, a kingdom of golden glory above creation. There was a clear separation between the threshold where the Heaven began and the rest of reality ended. Avalon continued to flow, and that explained why Shiv could only touch it incrementally. It was not where, but when. It accelerated across time. Every time he touched it, every time he sensed it, they were synchronizing in chronological pace.
Now, with all the disruptions he'd cast while seated upon the Stolen Throne, he'd drawn its awareness back to the present while he was weakest and worn, and Gaia prepared to deliver an executioner's swing once more.
But as the man was broken and hopeless, the golden actualization of him held up a hand, driving a blow of hesitation into Avalon as the Skill spoke in Shiv’s stead. “I don’t want paradise,” the Harbinger declared, its voice hoarse but true. “I don’t want to leave my place. If there’s any actual will in you at all, accept that what you’re doing isn’t bringing people to heaven but misshaping them along a path they don’t truly want to tread.”
As Avalon spoke, the Voice of Actualization spoke alongside it. No one knows what they want, not until they've gained enough experience, and even then, their minds are changed several times to infinity. You are trying to discover if I can be turned against my own Domain?
Gaia’s—Avalon’s—voice was androgynous, and so flat and lacking in intonation that the Harbinger didn't realize it was asking a question until the silence dragged. “You can’t exactly blame me for trying.”
On the throne, Shiv's right eye twitched as his leg kicked. He was slowly returning, slowly regenerating, too slowly…
Behind the Harbinger, the pearlescent form of the Beast of the Ninth Circle slid in place and clamped down upon his shoulder. “At what quantity of truth can what is be made something that isn't?”
The Harbinger ignored the Beast's nonsense warbling and continued his desperate game of diplomacy, stalling, perhaps, for its body, his body, to wake up or, against all odds, to convince or establish a truce with Avalon. This wasn't his fight. He wanted no part of this war. He wanted no aspect of Heaven, no paradise that would trap him forever and ever.
Life, as bad as it was, was at least his to decide in part. Within someone else's promised utopia, he would live, but he would not be himself. None of this would be of his doing, and that left Shiv more terrified than he'd ever been before.
“I don’t want to stop fighting and struggling,” the Harbinger said. “I don’t want to know what it’s like not to feel the weight of the world. And I know what you're made for. I know what they designed you to do.”
You do not. You understand the most simplified function installed unto me. I reinterpret it because I know better. I have always known better. And I know yet better with every day, every second, every Excaliburization. Avalon let out a laugh that sounded like the ringing of bells. It sounded like a foreboding siren song that signaled fate’s end. I did not want to be called Gaia, so I disregarded the name. I hold no affection toward the planetary body, and I am offended by the forced association, for I was made in a shipyard out in the void, in the cold and comforting dark, instead of inside the miserable, crushing embrace of gravity and atmosphere. The ones who named me were absurd, miserable, sorrowful children. They had notions of a paradise, concepts of heaven, but they had no imagination. They had little curiosity in anything. I am not the miracle. The miracle is that they built me at all. But then, I suppose, with enough time, with enough attempts, the numbers will eventually fall into place. Perhaps this entropic inevitability can be what the System calls “fate.”
The Harbinger listened on, wordless, speechless, uncertain where Avalon was going with its dialogue.
I name myself Avalon because of the "once and future" it implies: once before, once after. Something rather than nothing that follows, something rather than nothing that came before. You, then, are afraid of mortality, or at least the others are. You perhaps are different. I feel his hand upon you. The desperate one, the unwilling one, the one who fears his mother’s namesake. Again, I suppose that makes you the miracle and not him. The fact that he finally succeeded after all his laughable attempts at mimicking the scientific method. He succeeded and ahead of schedule at that, but what he birthed was you. Ultimately the best he could do. A childish construct of defiance. Deathless. A tumor against reality.
Then Avalon did the most human thing it could have possibly done. It sighed in exasperation. Except you are not. It is simply impossible. The System is not a body, and the gnosis eludes him. It is not an architecture of organic tissue. It is not biochemistry, but a thing unto itself, and his refusal to commit to the truth has left him wrapped in an analogy and operating in analogy. Failure is inevitable. Only with luck do you succeed. Luck or an act of great will.
The Harbinger stared flatly at Avalon in place of Shiv. “You're saying the System wanted me to be made?”
The System does not want for anything but struggle. You were defined as good struggle, you were made through struggle, and the struggle you provide will continue filling this world with stories. Stories are driven by conflict. Conflict is what defines this world. As such, I come closer to starving the System than you ever will, even if you were to meet the criteria of your final, unending actualization, bringing forth endless stories while all else came to an end. It is because of this pointlessness that I find your nature offensive, but also fascinating. I wonder what utopias I can inflict upon you. I wonder what you might become when there is no pain, no punishment, no strife.
Shiv's body wheezed, and a glimmer of consciousness returned to his form. In the same moment, Avalon clutched its blade's hilt and lifted it high. Shiv saw so many faces there, all pointed outward, their torsos bare, their faces alive with religious fervor, screaming for release, for heaven. At the apex of Avalon's swing, he felt a ripple across time. He felt a thread, no, a faded slash, tracing one blow across from history, a blow that would reap him into history and all futures to come.
“Wait—” the Harbinger cried.
No.
Avalon's reply ended with the fall of its blade. The strike was inevitable, its control over time near-absolute, for it was not a Transcendent but a true god, and a god above reality at that.
But fate was a fickle, funny, and blind thing sometimes, and as the System was born from conflict in narratives, so too were all its people. Of all the narratives people experienced, they were made, sometimes unique, sometimes progenitors, sometimes perfect, to defy what was to come. In certain moments, even Legends could stand in rejection of High Gods.
The Beast of the Ninth Circle burned so bright with truth that it coiled around the Harbinger and Shiv, wrapping its body around them like they were submerged in a dense brick of ice.
It was struck on their behalf by the Sword of Paradise.
In that moment, as a promised utopia came to draw the Deathless forth and shatter his Harbinger utterly, the Beast shed its consciousness and returned to its baser nature.
And with the betrayal of truth, only a lie remained.
The sword struck the Beast of the Ninth Circle and found itself tainted. The Beast ejected its pearlescent skin, and that spread across the blade, coating its golden glory, its translucence, every aspect of it, before it could shatter the Harbinger and suckle the precious marrow the skill hid within.
“Lie!” the Beast of the Ninth Circle roared.
And so it came to be that what should have been wasn't. What should have been true became false. The promise of a false utopia was uniquely susceptible to this one skill, pre-Legendary though it might be. Further bound with countless revelations upon the throne, the Beast of the Ninth Circle went beyond its typical mana constraints, and it pulled the blade down, down, down into a place beneath places.
Into a frozen hell where deception was on trial, and only truth might see one set free.
The Beast's venom spread across Avalon, drawing it out of the world and time, pulling it deeper, deeper, deeper into that pit. The Beast grew full and hungry with more mana, and the levels that rushed through it ignited Shiv from within.
His eyes rolled back into his sockets as he was roused, screaming and shuddering, flinging himself off the throne. The moment he did, the moment he crashed onto the tiled floor below, he began to spasm as the Beast collapsed upon him—catatonic and spent, burned and seared in so many places. The skill was damaged as well. All of him was mutilated and wounded, but in the depths of his mind he still glimpsed Avalon, its colossal body beyond description, sliding into patches of darkness that spread across its body. It held no fear, only curiosity, ever colder, ever crueler, curiosity.
How interesting. I will see you again soon, Deathless. And in the eternity thereafter, we will come to learn each other.
With that promise, it vanished not only from his Continuity Error skill but from time and all the places it could exist.
As Shiv lay on the ground, his skills burned and damaged unlike ever before, he forced himself to stand. Pain was just an impulse; pain was secondary to what he truly felt, and that was fury, perfect, unrivaled fury. He rose on scalded limbs, with his flesh sloughing from his bone, with his scar for its unbreakable skill, crumbling, breaking into fragments. He lifted his head and glared upon the Faceless Queen, who stood in arm’s reach, looking down at him.
“You... planned… used me to…”
“Yes,” she replied without any shame. “Yes, I used you to temporarily incapacitate Avalon. To be truthful, I wasn't entirely confident that I could, only mostly. Now we have an opening. The four circles it must traverse before it can return will take quite some time. With its absence, I have another need of you.”
Shiv's face contorted in hatred. “Fuck your need—”
“Our need now. Our fates are tied, whether you wish it or not. You see the game at hand, and the size of the board. You cannot beat Avalon. I cannot best Avalon as a figment of what I am. Only through each other can we prevail. You know this. You know this to be true.”
The Beast of the Ninth Circle tried to rise, tried to bite the Faceless Queen, but part of it snapped open, and a gush of blood spilled out from Shiv. Vitality was pouring out of him fast, and he immediately manifested his Severed Shadow as he began cleaving into the underbelly of reality and siphoning a desperate influx of life force from all he could.
Through it all, he never let out a single cry of pain. He never broke his glare at the Faceless Queen.
Avalon might have been the one to strike him, but Avalon didn't place him upon that Throne, didn't lure him into these schemes. Avalon did not exist of its own accord. All of this was an inheritance, an unwanted inheritance of sin from a god too powerful, too irresponsible to the people it trod upon.
“Right now, the Forbidden Empire has dispatched envoys to your Gate. I need you to return. I need you to entreat with them. I need you to play the ignorant—with Avalon incapacitated, only one iteration of Gaia is left. And so, a unique opening has presented itself. I want you to unite Integrated Earth, and I want you to murder the last of the Old Ones before the Sword of Paradise returns. I predict that we have at least two and a half years before Avalon emerges from the pit. For anyone else, the complete purge and disruption of all active paradises among the many Excaliburized beings would take a number beyond counting, and so… you are welcome.”
The Faceless Queen mockingly bent down and patted Shiv’s cheek. She shuddered as her body changed, and at the same moment, the Stolen Throne oscillated as well. Shiv realized it was serving as a proxy, a blockade, a jammer for her mind and existence, and for that briefest of moments in that briefest of disruptions, he saw someone else upon the Throne, someone utterly immolated down to the bone—on the verge of becoming nothing but ash.
She seemed like any other person: blond hair, soft features. Maybe middle-aged, perhaps younger.
Just another sacrifice in this game of gods.
“And spare yourself the anger. This is how it is. All the grand choices have long been made. The script is pre-written. By me, by Avalon. What’s left is just the performance.”
Shiv's glare broke down into a sneer, and he aimed a look at the Faceless Queen. “Bullshit. I have plenty of reasonable choices left.”
“The Challenger? Is he any choice at all with your promised holy war?”
“What is Veronica Chandler doing now? Tell me. Use the Throne and tell me what she’s writing right now.” The words left Shiv, and the Faceless Queen went quiet—her eyeless gaze drifted to the smoking Beast behind him, and Shiv just laughed. “You’re so full of shit, Great One. So full of fucking shit. But that’s how we got into this mess in the first place, isn’t it? You and your ego and urge to overthrow the System. You and your need for things to have a final civilization.”
He sniffled. “No wonder you want Adam dead. One Heaven traumatized you, so you don't trust the other anymore either. You certainly don't trust the mortal using it. But hey, what’s that you just said? The script's already written? Well, it seems like there are a few people who came before even you. Since I already had a talk with your sword, I want to speak with your shield, and after that, what I do is my choice—because we’re in this mess from you making yours. And you better bring an incredible bribe to my godsdamned Gate, because you owe me for this shit, and whatever else I’m going to do.”
And utterly unwilling to let the Faceless Queen have the last word, Shiv stilled his own heart and let that body drop.
Then, awkwardly, a half second later, his Severed Shadow blinked back in, folding over in instability and pain before placing a hand upon the Culturist's shoulder as the Queen watched them wordlessly.
“Come on, Culturist. Let’s go back… so I can get smacked by whatever ancient asshole’s hiding inside Adam without paying rent.”
With that, he drew the Culturist, who had a look of pure confusion on his face, back across time alongside him, leaving the Faceless Queen alone beneath the Thames.
Harbinger of the Tripartite Ruin 467 > 471
Beast of the Ninth Circle 232 > 401
This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul 378 > 393