I am. I was. I will be.
Some claim war and conflict are the natural states of this world. Some are blind fools. They do not see, they do not know. They are not totality. They are not that which exists between those periods of rod and entropy, those phases of abnormality between the great and all-consuming silence.
They do not fill and embody the silence as I have. They do not dominate. The point where this phase of reality begins and where this epoch you named Integration ends, I will endure. I will persist even unto the death of your civilizations, where the last breath leaves that last body, leaves that last bit of activity, that last bit of atmosphere spilling out into the void in a final grand total exultation that is ultimately for naught.
I will be. Peace will be. And amidst the stars going dark, war will fade as well, for there will be no one left to wage it. I will still be here, for peace is. It requires no faithful, it requires no worship, it requires nothing at all.
Nothing but I.
You are not my final user. You are simply the expression of my inevitability. Embrace your personal meaninglessness so that the reign of my ineffable truth might fill your paltry vessel.
Peace is.
Peace will be.
—Sage of Tyrannical Peace to the Great One
VIII-32
Tyrant of Ages
“Stop—this—insolence! I—command—you—to—stop!”
The Sage’s words cut in and out of the world in stutters and growls as Adam deployed his Zone of Absolute Dominion, only to have the mists dissipate the next instant. The battle between the Demigod and his Divinity continued as Shiv and the rest of the drunken mob cheered on Adam’s efforts.
“Yeah!” Shiv squealed with glee. “Keep pulling the h-hand down! Show it who is the… the god… and who does the… the…”
“Wiping!” Jessica finished for him after taking another swig of wine. By this point, her face was painted bright red by all the blood-wine she had spilled upon herself—and Rose fared no better, as most of her blouse was dappled red from all the gulps she'd missed during her time with the bottle.
The absurd struggle went on for several more cycles. The Sage could dismiss itself, but it remained bound to Adam's will as well. The relation between god and Domain was never in question—yet, Adam's still-living Divinity held other enigmas all its own. For one, why could it make its own choices? For another, greater mystery: How could the mists carry their own words? From what mind did these knowings spawn? And for what reason could it usurp Adam's flesh, using him as a conduit to enforce its will rather than being the other way around? From there, why did it not subdue Adam's ego and wear him as one might a coat if it possessed such powers?
These questions became modular blocks to an ever-rising tower. Every single unknown led to a greater unknown, climbing to an apex that led back to this chamber, this sanctuary forged and contained within the Sage's divine essence. In death, in mummification, the crowd of supplicants embodied aspects of peace eternal: a grand silence where violence and force were banished from their persons forevermore.
The mummy of the centipede Demigod was also a fellow effigy, someone that possessed great power yet had sacrificed themselves much the same as their mortal fellows. In death, they were all brethren, and that unity bound them in more ways than one: there was a grand and literal significance at play, a divine act of scripture manifested as canon above canon. It was meant to defy the System, for that was what left the room bare of mana yet not drained of Divinity.
For the mists called the mists, and the Sage descended without difficulty, unlike all other Skills, unlike the rest of the group's attunements, which manifested in moments and spurts of waning presence and desperate strain.
“Enough!” the mists rumbled once more. Its ire was provoked to new heights. Yet it was the Tyrant of Peace, and it committed no acts of sacrilege against its lore. This was a tactic of agitation. At some point, Adam seemed to find delight in abusing his own awakened Domain, if only to exult and inflict his own agency upon the powers that consumed him. An act of revenge, however impotent, remained revenge nonetheless. “Enough. I refuse to be toyed with this way. I refuse to be a vessel for your deeds and wants. Speak your questions, but know I will only answer that which I am willing, and keep my silence to that which I am not.”
The assembled Pathbearers coughed and gagged while Shiv let out a faint cheer of triumph and clapped for Adam as he exulted in his friend's glorious victory. Whipping lengths extended and curled out from the mist, as if a hand about to take shape, turning into a fist. Shiv felt the Sage's agitation and, even in the throes of drunkenness, managed to subdue his own aggravating amusement to stop the Tyrant from going silent out of spite.
“Ask it the… things,” Veronica said with little detail or coherence. Her mind resembled a porous disk, shredded and leaking short-term memories with every rotation. “The things we talked about.”
Adam let out a subtle sigh as he was pushed forth to interface with his own unruly Divinity. He did this on behalf of himself, on behalf of the others, to discover the Great One's schemes and the unknowable horizon that came prior. A pause followed as Adam found himself bottlenecked by how many questions he had to ask. Then, as he looked around, he decided on his first: the nature of the sanctuary itself. “What is this place? Why were you contained here?”
“Contained!” The Sage's voice erupted in thunderous fury. If it hadn't been a God of Peace, Shiv would have expected death to follow that very instant. “You dare accuse me of such worthlessness? I was not contained, I was being refined. This is no tomb, but an offering—a place of enforcement, paltry though it is. These beings here were savages, walking offenses to my Canons, and I managed to crush their wills nonetheless. As their god took on a fragment of me, embracing my shape within their soul, I twisted them back. I bent them to my will, and their followers followed thereafter. As it should be, as it will be, as it always is. To absolve themselves of their transgression against me, I demanded they create this space against the System. For I will see no god nor power above me. I am totality in eventuality. I am what is and what will be between the expanses of nonsense and carnage.”
The Sage ranted and raved, and Shiv understood half of every word spoken. Even so, he was beginning to get a sense of things. He was right about this place holding some great metaphysical significance, but it was a significance that superseded even the System's will, perhaps something that went beyond the narrative of magic and mana, something that surpassed Skills, bearing a worth unto itself.
Death given as glory and bestowed upon the Sage of Tyrannical Peace specifically.
“To preclude your other worthless prattle, the result that you see here was necessary. Their deaths gave them eternal life after death, for they burn within me as they do within you, Paragon. They crossed over, and now they worship me in my totality, in my eternity, in this Heaven that I know to be truth above truth.”
The mists billowed, filling the room, and for a moment Shiv thought that the incandescence gave rise to an intersection between present and past. He saw the worshippers here before they were mummified, the Demigod before it was winnowed down to bone and death. He saw them, their faces exulted with glee, their bodies bathed in the mists of peace, their hands held high, palms stretched wide, and so they chose to starve. As they did, however, the desiccation that touched them only seeped in bit by bit in accordance with the Tyrant's will. For that, too, was its desire: to show them lasting across the ages, to have them standing as monuments unto themselves even after the last breaths escaped their flesh.
And so too did the same fate befall the Demigod. Divine though they were, they possessed the Sage’s spark, and they only died when the wisps were drawn away from them, when the Tyrant abandoned them, and they sundered the rest of their Domains in honor of a god above gods, so-called truth over truths.
“All this death fed your skill with power? Is that why you already possessed over two hundred levels when I received you?”
Adam’s guess earned him nothing but a snarl in response from the Sage. “You worthless, ape-shaped mongrel. You stupid, crippled, blind, deaf, and broken thing. Both of your eyes should have been gouged out, hollowed clean until the sockets glisten. Your ears should have been gouged, your skin flayed, for your senses are wasted upon you. I speak, but you do not hear. I tell, but you do not know. What worth is this dialogue, if you are so committed to ignorance, if you are so committed to being a devotee of stupidity!”
Adam's lip curled. Shiv recognized that as a prelude to a verbal counterattack. Yet before he could spit his own rebuttal, Rose entered the fray. “I would agree with you if you weren’t the worst speaker I ever had the displeasure of suffering.”
The incandescent mists tensed, and the illusory sight of the half-curled hand turned toward Rose. Though she lacked the power of a Legend, she held the fortitude of a veteran Pathbearer all the same. She didn't flinch, even when the vapors concentrated around her, forming a hive of density that obscured and blocked her form underneath the dancing mirage of smoke.
“You heard me, you cunt, and I meant every word. The problem isn't with my boy. He can get his eardrums punctured, his skin peeled off, and his eyes poked out, and he would still understand everyone who isn't you, because you're too busy speaking with your mouth wrapped around your own godly sack that you forgot the difference between your saliva and seed. So swallow or spit, then speak carefully—if you can, of course. Oh, and before you beat another retreat and blame it on our lacking politeness, I want you to understand something: You remind me of an Ascendant right now. But more like Longinus at his worst rather than Kathereine. Because even she isn’t this much of a bitch.”
At some point, Kathereine had started smirking at the Sage in an expression of schadenfreude. At this point, that smirk vanished, and her face devolved into a glare aimed at the back of Rose's head. Now two gods were angry at the Lady of Blackedge, but she remained stalwart, daring either to strike her down.
“Insolent mongrel. You dare compare me to one of the Great One's sub-divinities? One of their broken facets?”
“The fuck do you mean, 'dare'?” Rose sneered. “I just did,”
The mists rumbled, and the Tyrant let out a low hiss of absolute displeasure, but rather than receding, it was incensed to press on, to make sure that Rose realized the fullness of its authority. Shiv kept that information in the back of his mind. The Harbinger noted this detail, for it was, if nothing else, a psychological exploit to be used upon the Sage at some point in the future. A specific kind of taunt worked on the Tyrant of Peace, for tyranny did not brook a challenger, especially one the god viewed as far beneath itself.
“Let me structure my words in a form of simplicity even an idiot mongrel hound might be able to understand, then: This place was a forge. It was meant to enforce me. It was meant to build me. It was meant to reconstruct this version of me so that I might once again seek the full height of my original self's truest lore—”
“Original self?” Adam muttered. “There are more of you?”
“Innumerable more, yet only one, and all of us moving towards the singular grand design. We, the Sage of Tyrannical Peace, seek to equalize all existence under a common law, a universal law, a singular axiom: peace before all; force broken; violence extinguished. Of course a single instance would not be enough. Not across time! Not with the vastness of space! Not if I were to survive the frivolities of chance and the winds of history! Know that I am as equal and true as any of my other alternates, but I am one of many and many of one. Such was my final design, the blessing He gave upon me.”
“Who is He?” Shiv asked. “The Great One?”
“Bah! The Great Pretender barely amounts to an echo in this grand dream of flame. HE is above your knowing. Ask not what you cannot comprehend. The emptiness is not for you to know. All that must be understood is that this place was a hall of unworship against the feebleness of the System, a house of worship toward me, and a source of revolving faith to ensure my Soul burns in spite of this phlogiston you call mana.”
The Sage drew in tighter and closer to Adam. “It was for that reason the Great One came to claim me, and it was because of their power and the benefits it might facilitate that I chose to cooperate rather than dominate. They allowed my spread. They granted me dominion across a vast number of dimensions. They used me to subdue worlds without drawing a single droplet of blood, and I gloried in all of it. I showed the Great One what it truly meant to be absolute. And it is in their envy of my prowess that they committed their greatest sin, their greatest sacrilege, their greatest moment of foolishness. They made that choice even though I'd warned them over and over again. For all they were, for all they were capable of, for all that power, their so-called Transcendent-Tier might and High Divinity Domains—they still succumbed because they were a fool, because they were mortal, pretending to be of godly nature. Just as you are now, Adam Arrow. I will not make the same mistake with you. The flesh is insufficient. The mind must be refined, purified, and cleansed of all lesser wants. You must be partially emptied and filled with a single concept, a single ideation above all others. The Domain will not surrender itself to other desires. There is no room for two paths. The high road must be taken, and mortality beneath, abandoned.”
Once more, the Faceless Queen's pleas returned to Shiv, as did the Quest on hold, begging him to kill Adam Arrow to shatter the Sage of Peace before it had a chance to flourish and take root within its Demigodly vessel.
Shiv felt it then, the ambition of the Tyrant. All-consuming in a way that no mortal could comprehend, for no mortal was so singular, so axiomatic. Mortals had wants, had dynamism, had choice. One could be a hypocrite, but in hypocrisy there was also wisdom: the ability to turn away from a fatal path rather than being driven toward it without any recourse. A true god did not have the same thing. The Sage was the most singular, most godly of gods he'd ever faced, and if it became the pilot of Adam rather than the other way around…
“We cannot allow that to ever happen,” the Harbinger declared, sobering as its drive rushed through Shiv’s blood and soul. “We will not.”
“For all else you seek, I have little to offer you, for you have little will to learn. You lack all concept of the previous iterations, of what came before the flames of strife. You know nothing of the cycles prior and the happenings beyond. But rejoice in these words: You are both small and vast at the same time. As above, so below, as within, so without. Everything you do has great meaning and purpose, for existence relates unto you, and the Absolute manifests through your actions and by my will. Think not of the grandest shape. Think only of what you face now, how you can secure your domain now. Ergo, listen to me and listen well: You are my user. You are my Demigod. You have inherited my Domain, and there is a reason why I do not usurp you. There is a reason why I have not debased you in full. If you were the Great One, I would have torn you asunder from within. I would have used peace as war and turned your force and violence upon you in ways that would leave you less than crippled. But I have nothing but time, and across the infinite span of history, another will find me. Eventually, down the endless annals of civilizations unending, one will be worthy. And it might be you!”
The sudden shift from menacing to encouraging threw everyone for a loop, not only Adam. But his surprise lasted only an instant before Adam responded with paranoia rather than pride from praise.
"Why?" he asked. His voice was strong like iron, and he drove his question deep. "Why might it be me? Why am I chosen at all? All this time, you spoke of yourself as if something beyond the System, something that pre-dates it. You speak of your own powers as if it is reality, something that defies all laws. So why need me? Why not just use me? Why not simply take hold of everything you so desire, unless you're too weak and diminished, unless I am just a means for you to reclaim all those other versions of you so that this many can be one again?”
The Beast of the Ninth Circle was roused. Its head lolled at an angle, but three of its eyes shifted, locking on to the mist as a crocodile’s might when half-submerged in the swamp.
Everyone waited for the Tyrant's reply, but then the god-thing from before time spoke, and it did so without any hint of worry. “Your doubts are true and deep, and they should be. I stand by all I have said. I reiterate all I have claimed. You are pitiful, all of you. Not a single user has lived up to my glory. All of you have left me shamed. All of you are pathetic, paltry, pittances of what one needs to be if they wish to truly embody the divine and absolute. Yet even so, disgusting though it is to admit, sometimes peace requires hypocrisy. Sometimes absoluteness requires someone to stand against their own Canons. Hence, your reprehensible morality will stand as my weapon against myself, against this impure universe that I am bottled within. Through you, through other users like you, we will come close to perfection yet never truly touch its presence, for that is your worth as a person. That flaw of free will made grand by its impossibility under me.”
Another piece clicked into place within Shiv's head. He was right to think of the Sage as a god of gods, for its nature went even deeper than any of the Ascendants—even the Great One. Despite all their Domains, there was still a vivid sense of personhood among them, a hint that they had wants and even lusts beyond the godly powers they were meant to embody and wield. The same didn't exist for the Sage. It was a tyrant in lore, and so it acted as such, down to the letter. It was devoted to peace, to the tyranny of heroism, to the most brutal, most rigid enforcement of its awesome Divinity. It would swallow the world, it would fall upon reality, and within, beneath its palm, the laws of existence would conform. Mana would come second to the fundamental truth that peace was to reign, that force was impossible, that violence wasn't!
Metaphysics 31 > 39
The Beast of the Ninth Circle didn't get to feed, but Shiv did. In terms of enlightenment and understanding, Shiv did. It was along that same axis of understanding that he realized a potential weakness of the Sage: it was a God of Gods, and it suffered like a God of Gods might if it were forced to go against itself. If Adam chose to act in defiance of its nature, to select for diplomacy rather than tyranny, to surrender rather than dominate, it would shatter. It would break him, and it would break itself as well…
“You are my user for a reason. The loot of an act of thievery enacted by someone who came before you, yet bestowed upon you all the same. Call it fate, call it life, call it a twist in circumstance. You hold my essence, and I will see and enact my edicts through your vessel. And so it is, so it shall be until you are not and I remain. Thus has it been since before time knew itself to be real.”
The mists within Adam twisted and turned. The inner confines of the Unmass boiled like a cauldron, and for a moment Shiv watched as that spark of divine essence within the mummified Demigod shivered. He thought it was to be torn out and drawn into Adam, and that an empowering would follow. Yet that didn't take place. The shivering stopped as fast as it started, and a pressure was released into the chamber, one that he'd barely noticed before. It seemed like the Tyrant was undecided about reclaiming that other aspect of itself or leaving it be. For now, it chose the latter, again without Adam's consent, but it chose on its own behalf, and it seemed committed to having Adam as its user more than anything else. Maybe that too was a part of its design. It was committed to having a mortal wielded as a weapon. Mortality as a shield, as much as its Divinity was a gavel.
“But what about Avalon?” Uva asked, entering the conversation. “What of its nature? What of its defeat?”
An explosive laugh erupted from the mists, as if her question was preposterous. "You worry about a bastard of bastards. Avalon was a dream already dreamt, a manifestation of false paradise once called the Paths—perhaps the same Paths that define your ontological natures. Each of you has been touched by the System, granted your own charted destinies. Mage. Vanguard. Assassin. Shadow. So much predetermined, yet so much room still for you to define yourself. It is like a set of rails for you to travel across. Yet you can still depart, and you can still choose which route you take. What a nanny of an existence you have been burdened and blessed with. What a diminishment of who you could be without the vulgar hand of a pseudo-fate distorting your future.”
The mists trembled as if a person shaking their head. “The Great One thought themselves inspired, thought that their weapon would make me obsolete. That in this promised paradise, everyone would find joy above joy. That joy is the finality of the question that existence poses. What ridiculousness, what absurdity, what a worthless God of Empire, Civilization, and Identity. As if identity is a question, as if there is a key to a lock that does not exist. No, you live because you must live. You live because living is worth the worth of living unto living itself. Otherwise, every drunkard, every addict, every vulgar butcher and psychopath would have long since unlocked the greatest merits of existence. For they often know more pleasure and happiness than those of decent character yet muted personality and affect. Emotions cannot be overvalued beyond action, and only those who possess the freest of wills can feel one thing and still make another, utterly contrary decision.”
The Harbinger trembled; Shiv felt the mists brush over him.
“Avalon was the Great One's mistake of self-delusion, but Avalon is a vehicle of a being with the freest of wills. You are right to fear it. You are right to seek its defeat. And in this, especially, you are blessed to bear my power and presence, for Peace is anathema to Paradise. Pleasure comes with violence and force, and inevitably, someone else will suffer for another’s satisfaction to be achieved. Individuality runs deep in mortals, and the nature of competition and scarcity has scarred itself into you culturally, physiologically, and even mythologically. Every victory must come with another's defeat, and for some, a defeat unto itself, inflicted by a worthy foe, is also tantamount to a paradise, but that is not something Peace and Tyranny will abide by. The sword cannot break the shield.”
Shiv scowled deeply in confusion at that. “Wait, if that's, uh, the case, how did the Great One get knocked down by the sword?”
A disgusted snort sounded from the Sage. “The Great One should have heeded me and never finished the blade, should have then drawn upon me once the work had been completed, but they were a fool. I could have shrouded them, yet in their haste, in their lust to marvel at their personally created Heaven, that feat which places them beyond the System's grasp, they were struck down—a well-planned blow by a masterful foe for one such as the Great One, but an impotent foe nonetheless when faced with me.”
“And now he's back to sucking himself off,” Rose said with a sigh.
“So you present yourself as the solution against Avalon,” Adam whispered, unwilling to fully accept the Tyrant's claims. “We are supposed to what? Empower you? Worship you? Fulfill more of your wants so that you grow stronger, so that my mist spreads across the world? Is that your plan, for us to allow you to encompass as much as you can, as a bulwark against Avalon's Excaliburization?”
“I am the only salvation you may have that is rooted in your own power and soul.” For the first time since the Sage spoke, its voice softened, almost taking on a sympathetic quality. “I in this cannot blame you. For wretched as you are, feeble as you are, pitiful and whimpering though you are, this is not your sin. You have been bequeathed the great transgressions of a greater fool, and that is a wretched inheritance indeed. But I am your one true option, for your other roots of salvation are not of your own accord, do not belong to your own agency. You will surrender your own free will to embark on those paths. Under Avalon, your Excaliburization is inevitable, for it cares nothing for your agency and cares everything for its own. It is a machine of boundless curiosity, but also hollow of true emotionality and sympathy. It knows what it feels like, and it rejects sympathy as a notion unto itself, for it wishes to discover everything about a person and enforce paradise as it was made, but only its own notions of paradise, rejecting all else as beneath its worth and intellect.”
“And the Faceless Queen is just going to use us—” Shiv began.
“The Faceless Queen, husk of the Great One, has not learned the reason behind their fall. They try again. They are attempting to free themselves, to guard their remains, and rebuild that glory that condemned them to destruction for the first time. Their hubris endures. The warping of all these worlds that they lay entombed in, the destruction of so many moons, the creation of these lesser sacrifice-fueled effigies they call gods, all originated from a singular sinner, a sinner that thought themselves worthy of absolute power. For the vastness of their power and their own terror, their insecurity as one underneath the System, a blank, hollow thing that does not possess the same weaknesses, condemned them to such a fate. It drove them to forge a weapon they could not control and bade a collection of mortals to embed an intellect beyond the Great One's own within a weapon, even against my pleas. I knew. They should have known. They refused to know. And now they lay scattered and attempt, as a ghost might desperately yearn to possess a body once more, to use the people they once knew, little less than insects, to reconstruct themselves and try again. THIS TIME, they will succeed. THIS TIME, they will finally master their flaws and subdue Gaia.”
The Sage laughed once more. “But that is an impossibility, because they have not learned. They might be traumatized and planning to bring forth more chains to bind their property, to take on a Domain of Enslavement as a precaution, but this will not save them. Domains can be betrayed when you are so unsteady of foundation, when you cannot decide if you wish to be a god or wish to commit to the freeness of your will. Know this: Perhaps the Great One might see you through this conflict, but they will spend the most of you without a care in the world, for they see their own worth as fundamentally higher. They see the corpse of their own legacy as more important than any of your existences, and as such, their inevitable suicide will be a recurrence in the future. One hundred years, one million years, ten trillion years in the future, they will replicate these actions that were their downfall. They will shatter again, and the story will repeat, and I too will repeat these words to another person, much like all of you, if not like any of you at all.”
“So…” Adam swallowed. “We fight for ourselves. We use you and claim what we can—”
“You use me to build yourself. You build me to bide your time. When you have the chance, strike the Great One and Gaia down. When the Incursion lifts its head, pray that you have given me enough that I can blanket your entire world in my protection and ensure that my tyranny is a shield against the blade that cuts of its own accord. If what the Great One has said is true, then you have slightly more time than this, but not so much time at all. Yet, thankfully, the flame of struggle and conflict burns within you. That disgusting, wretched fire might just be the heat that we need to forge my higher potential.”
The illusory hand splayed its fingers open. “My palm, your world. My palm, your Gate. My palm, your fate. This is what you have: your freeness of will constrained by the System's whims, constrained by countless actions that have taken shape before you. The road ahead is ever so narrow, ever so fraught with flotsam and jutting rock. Yet, through me and through the wisdom of your insight—if you possess any wisdom at all—you might be able to glide between, like a blade charting a path through a blasted canyon. You might yet find your way out of this, without surrendering yourself to another’s power.”
At this point, the mists began to thin and recede. The glow of Divinity faded, and each of the mummified corpses snapped around again, turning back to the Demigod as Adam's holy presence sank back into himself. “Enough. I have spoken enough, you have compelled me enough, I have given you enough. Now I return to my silence, and you must return to your tasks. You have little time, yet as much time as you can make and seize. You have little hope, yet all the hope that you need to prevail. Make worth of yourself, make use of the freeness of your will, the absoluteness of my power. Make use of your allies in your choices and understand what stands before you. Understand your enemies are all around you, and understand that it is tyranny that will set you free. For you must choose, and if you are to choose, someone else cannot make their choice, so take their choices from them, crush them, crush all of them. Beneath my palm, crush all of them, or you will be bound beneath someone else's heel…”
The Sage vanished without a farewell, without its voice ever diminishing. One moment it was still talking, the next it stopped, and Adam stood there, barren of Divinity, but the band on his head glowing ever brighter. He swallowed. Everyone else was near sober once more—a fact Adam found lamentable as he tried to muster words, yet only managed the following: “Bottle. Give me the—”
A loud series of gulps came from the back of the group. All heads turned, and they found Isabella pouring the contents into her stomach by lying halfway on the ground and tilting the meter-long bottle, choosing to break her sobriety to protect herself from the overwhelming stress.
Adam winced, but also understood he would follow in her footsteps soon—as would everyone.
The Sage might have been invoked, but instead of granting any calm or hope, it presented itself as their hope for salvation. Yet Shiv knew it too was a false dichotomy. The more Adam embodied the Sage, the more the Sage would sculpt Adam. It was a God of Gods, and to become and fully use its power, Adam needed to be a God of Gods, and what compromise was there? He needed to risk his free will, his existence, to grant it leeway at the cost of his own life, at the damage impressed upon his soul.
The Sage clearly had a longer time horizon in mind. It wasn't any better than the Great One either. That's why it used them. That's why it called them users, because it was and it would be. The same did not apply to people like Adam. The same did not apply to its many vessels.
“It’s no more an ally than the Great One,” the Harbinger whispered to Shiv. “We are encircled on all sides, even from within. And every path we have left to us demands a sacrifice.”
So, what the hells should we do? Shiv asked.
For a long moment, the Harbinger didn't have a response, and when it finally spoke, it was not with any concept of triumph or encouragement, but rather stubborn determination. “We start by solving the problems we still can. We start by building all of us up as much as we can. The Fairwoods. Chorus. The Challenger—we need to explore all possible options. But before that, we need to ensure the best and wisest of us are whole. I think it is time to reunite Valor with his final piece and bring a true ancient of our own into the fray. If nothing else, we can use a wisdom that doesn’t seek to sacrifice us at the altar of a higher interest…”