They are unchallengeable within the confines of their domain. They are the archons of law.
But they can be defied, outmaneuvered, and beaten. They are not omniscient. They are not omnipotent. They are not omnipresent.
Within every law there are loopholes, incomplete portions of possibility we can exploit. It is in the exploitation of these possibilities that we ferment a successful rebellion.
To strike at a faith, however, you need cells. Cells within cells. You need to go deeper than the lure itself. When a god comes to hunt you, they must find you in a maze, an incomprehensible weave of threads. You must sacrifice as well, for just as they are not omnipotent, they are not weak, nor easily dissuaded unless you give them a reason to be.
Sometimes you must gnaw off your arm and surrender the limb to your enemy so that the truth of you might escape. When the faithful and their gods come hunting us, some must die. Some must be given as a sacrifice to the altar of our hated enemy. It must feel like a victory to them so that they stop pursuing us. We must be layered so deep that our despair must be so genuine within some cells. The feeling of defeat must be so overwhelming for those of us who strive and are vainly spent in the dark that the gods are convinced of our downfall.
All while deeper still, we continue to play.
When your enemy is the light, give yourself to the shadow. Give yourself to the lie. Give yourself to the antithesis of faith, and become enwreathed in falsehood.
Whatever truths you wish to see flourish can only come after—when the sky belongs to no one, when the light of day is just that, light, untainted by a higher tyrant’s will.
Until then, lie. To everything.
Even yourself.
—The Heretic’s Guide to Anti-Theism, Author Unknown
VIII-38
Silence Before Valor
They called him Silencio, because that's what kept him alive at the beginning of his life.
In the dark, a trail of blood led away from his supple newborn body. Mere meters away, a den of monstrous bear-badgers dug through flesh and stone alike, shuffling a messy pond of viscera that once constituted his parents into their mouths alongside helpings of jagged concrete.
When the remnants of the Undertribe came to chase the beasts away with noise and fire, they almost missed Silencio, for he kept to his namesake even when the descent of safety arrived. They only found him because the gleam of torchlight was reflected upon his eyes.
***
Time passed. Things remained the same.
The Valeros were one among the many tribes scattered in the misbegotten era between eras. After the fall of Sol, when the glory of human civilization had begun to fade, there came the carnage and chaos of Integration. A time when people were barely able to ascend to Adept-Tier. A time when the wonders of technology and the will of the many were usurped by the arriving magics and the rising worth of the individual.
Most struggled. Most died. Not Silencio. He took to brutality and action as if he had been born to it. In bloodshed was he christened, and in bloodshed did he baptize himself.
He took his first life at six. It was another boy, a rival tribesman. He wandered too loudly into the underways claimed by the Valeros. He thought himself so wise, so daring, breaking away from the rest of his people to penetrate deep and steal a clutch of war-roach eggs for his people to use as mounts. He failed to notice Silencio in the dark. He failed to sense the stillness in the air. He failed where Silencio did not. Even without instruction, Silencio was a keen observer. That kept him alive as much as his commitment to silence did. He learned many things from watching people practice their brutality upon one another. He knew where to cut, where the meat was the softest, where the blood needed to flow. He opened the other boy's throat from behind and let the blood spill upon the eggs. He informed no one of this first murder. It wasn't worth telling.
Sometimes, when he lay in his cot at night, away from the other children, he would clutch his dagger and try to recall how the warmth spilled down his hand. He would try to recall the pride, the triumph, and the level he received. That level that pushed him closer to actualization.
Stealth 4 > 5
***
The Valeros were brutal, nomadic, and subterranean. They had adapted to the dark and were descended from a warrior discipline that survived Integration by avoiding the surface at all costs during the initial years. Yet, for all the protections the underground offered, it was also sparse of resources, with ruins and rubble alongside constant earthquakes making every day a precarious struggle for survival. The Valeros soon learned to raid. They took from the surface towns, stealing what they could from farms and cities, and under the dark embrace of night. They ambushed and kidnapped surfacers—using them as resources in more ways than one. Most times, they sold them back as a bribe or a tax. When times grew dire, when the snowflakes fell upon the ruins above and food did not sprout from the sallow ground, the victims were then taken away into the butcheries, though their flavor always held a tang Silencio didn’t quite enjoy.
But while his people were raiders, Silencio never felt bound by their traditions. He delved deeper into his own talents. He sought to become a ghost and a voyeur. He lingered among the surface villages, hiding within cracked walls, listening to families live, stealing from their pantries. As they went about their day, he smuggled himself across rooftops and hid under beds. He stole trinkets and instruments, things valuable and things made valuable by his attention. In time, he stole knowledge as well, learning the tongue of the surfacers by secondhand exposure alone.
It helped that their language was close enough, more so a hideously warped dialect than something truly foreign. As Silencio approached his tenth year, he arrived at certain deductions that his kin never considered. The surfacers had to have descended from the same people as the Valeros; too many artifacts within their linguistics mirrored one another. The separation was not nearly far enough, even after centuries, to truly leave them apart. And then there were other things: facial structures, habits, similarities in oral traditions and lore. Muddled tales speaking of a god of glass and metal that fell beyond its nest of clouds, a god that sought to take men to glory yet was betrayed by its own children, and seeking final retribution still from the depths it had been cast to.
And then there were the ruins themselves. The underways weren't natural. They had to have been manufactured. The impossibly smooth and even stretches of stone, the metal, the strange husks of vehicles abandoned in these depths. They were made by man, meant to suit the needs of man, and Silencio knew this because every single wreckage he slid and shimmied through was wide enough to accommodate people, had seats and mechanisms that required the dexterity of a human's hand to manipulate.
But that lent itself to more questions. For as long as any Valeros could remember, murderous tribes of machine folk had droned and battled to hold their own domains in the deep and dark, below even the depths where those of biological make dwelled. Silencio watched them as well, observed them as, year by year, they grew to embody more human habits. Replacement components, forged from scrap and debris, began to exhibit humanoid traits. Though they were beings of animated metal, their hulls were composed of soft and brittle material that then grew harder, that found itself reinforced with every battle they survived.
Not so unlike Silencio himself.
Thus, he questioned, he wondered, and he learned. After a certain point, the oral traditions of his people were no longer enough for him. There were so many mysteries in the silence that the darkness presented, and so he stopped stealing baubles and glittering fragments from the surfacers and instead began looting them clean of the only thing he was interested in: knowledge. He took books. He bargained with his own people to spare specific slaves, or to halt their return home to gain lessons in language and writing.
He had endless time to think, and there came no clarity from his musings alone. As such, he went beyond himself. He dug into the knowledge left over from civilizations both present and dead. Month after month. Year after year. Until…
Path Gained: [Thief]
***
Silencio was fourteen years of age when he decided to euthanize what remained of his tribe.
It had been one harsh winter too many. A plague had torn through the space above, and a dust storm had raged in the aftermath. Thus, for the first time that Silencio could recall, the surfacers were driven beyond the point of desperation and came seeking shelter in the underways. They were slaughtered en masse by the dwellers of the depths, captured and taken in their thousands, but their numbers were overwhelming. Theirs was a mass, a flood of ants from the lands of light, overrunning the blessed and vulnerable dark. The surfacers expanded with their wealth of resources, with torch in hand, with gleaming armors, and weapons that went beyond ramshackle design. They pushed, they conquered, and they spread further. They put entire raider tribes to the blade and assimilated others who came to them, striking accords of peace, mergers by marriage and alliance, in exchange for a continued vassalized existence.
Silencio was interested in taking part in such a merger. It made sense to him. The rest of his people didn't share the same sentiment. Silencio never brought up his personal desires, for they were not ones to suffer an outlier. When you deviated too far from the others, they struck you down. He had taken blows when he spoke out of turn. He had been driven back into silence, told to adhere to his name when he tried to advise someone older or someone who simply thought themselves his better.
In time, they all died: the eldest, fighting foes they could not overcome, the young and foolish trying to overwhelm and harvest cores from rival machine tribes who were many times their number and each and all individually superior to the fragilities of meager humanity.
And so, as the conquest of light continued, the Valeros found themselves numbering only twenty-six where once upon a time there were two thousand, or so some of the older members claimed. When Silencio was born, there had at least been two hundred still. Soon there would be none. Twenty of the twenty-six were too young, mostly children, half of them barely more than babes.
Silencio adjusted the dosage of his concoction for them so that they wouldn't suffer. He wasn't doing this out of cruelty, after all.
The adults, however—the mothers, the fathers, the elders, specifically—he underdosed. Their pain would be a final, karmic lesson. He didn't fully grasp the word karma at the time, but he thought they deserved it, and that was enough.
Their arrogance had offended him since the beginning, had let him grasp at least one truth—that his kinsfolk were disgusting and degenerate. They had failed their own children. They had refused to adhere to the laws of this new world while ignoring the knowledge of the old one. They were people trapped between ages by their own lack, holding no worth of their own.
This demise wasn't fated. No, it was an embarrassment. It was a failure on the part of his leaders. They didn't seek to be valorous. They didn't seek to make themselves greater. And ultimately, they were pathetic. Silencio didn't see them as his blood, and he would make sure that history wouldn't see them as anything at all.
Some people became echoes, dust lingering in a dead world, portrayed as text upon a book, or sounds emitted by a piece of technology. There was something grand in being remembered, in having your legacy recorded by another. The Valeros would not be granted this privilege. Silencio made sure of that.
As they conducted another feast, as the elders lied to themselves that the young of this generation would be stronger, that they would simply go deeper into the underways and spend a few generations recuperating, they choked upon their poison-laced pittances of meat and grain. Silencio watched, Silencio learned, and Silencio understood as the adults gasped and spasmed, writhing like the beasts they had poisoned before, like hated enemies given no quarter, allowed to inch toward oblivion in agonized throes while their children simply slipped away into a final sleep. What he learned was how it felt to kill a civilization, and he found it to be invigorating. It was not the death nor extinction that pleased him. It was simply the fact that he decided the course of a people's fate.
He'd shaped the story of another, and from this he would see his own shaped. By his own accord. By his own will. By his and no one else's.
With the deed done, he took what he needed from them and departed. He vanished into the tunnels without a word, without regret, with only ambition and newfound motivation fueling him. Before his eyes was a notification. He'd gained another level—enough levels—and for the first time, felt his flesh and being evolve to merge with the shadows he dwelled within as the darkness of his soul matched the darkest of his deeds.
For a moment, he wondered if it was truly proper to finish the young as well. They could have provided some value if sold as slaves to another tribe—but that would have been folly. He wouldn't be able to guard them if another tried to take them by force, and he refused to suffer an act of revenge on their part, feeble though most of them seemed.
Silencio had learned, and Silencio knew better than to be sloppy.
Skill Evolution: Stealth (Initiate) > Scion of Shadow Alone (Adept)
Feat Gained: Taker of What Could Be (Unique) - Allows you to steal a measure of skill and experience from your victim’s strongest skills. The greater their potential, the higher your gains.
***
By his fifteenth year, Silence had completely shed his culture and changed his name. He no longer followed the dialect that he was raised in. He worked to purge himself of every aspect of his past, for entwined with the Valeros was a weakness he would not abide. Adaptation was the way forward, and he would not be stagnant, not like those he left in the dark—writhing or in peace.
His quest for more levels and knowledge took him far and wide. He traversed the ruins, learning the underways better than any of his ancestors ever did. His ability to meld with the shadows made the dark a vehicle, a sanctuary truer than any other. Few Adepts existed in this era; on all Earth, he stood among the first. And even rarer yet was his Feat, that which allowed him to reap from who he slew. He was a thief in many ways, but that which provoked him to take and avenge was not born of avarice but of outraged pride.
Silence killed. Silence robbed. Silence manipulated. Silence did all these things when one refused to accept the dignity and truth of their situation. He was no rank murderer doing things for base indulgence. He was the truest expression of this new era, and someone who wanted to understand the old.
He spared both the tyrannical and virtuous alike if they were true to themselves, if they were wise enough not to come after him. But such wisdom was scarce among the many rulers he came across, so-called emperors and empresses, so-called god-kings and queens. All of them saw this world as a thing under their dominion. All of them assumed that simply because they held power over a single element, being one of the first to grasp a magical skill, that they were special, that they were truly divine.
Silence instructed them on the egregiousness of their error. He slit their throats as they slept. He pulled them into the dark and left them there to drown. He came for them, and then he came for their families when they refused to turn away from that fatal blood debt.
And in this, he learned how to collapse empires as well. Killing a single individual was not enough. There would always be someone else to take the mantle, to seize the flame of an idea. One had to taint the idea before a nation died, and so he found himself defacing the notion of godhood long before ever meeting someone truly divine.
In the process, he learned a few words that followed him, that defined him: Iconoclast. Perfidy. Mastermind.
He killed, and then he deceived. He left no name, and he changed his habits, for he was not interested in leaving a legend of his own, merely building one up until he was satisfied, until he found himself suitable enough as an individual. The urge to dominate and rule was absent in Silence. It wouldn't manifest until he found himself worthy enough as a warrior and a man. So many others were desperate to find validation stolen from their betters. Silence could barely look upon his betters, for they filled him with a sorrow he couldn't quite name, one that soured and then festered into the inflammation of outrage. How could one not pursue excellence when excellence was so nakedly provided? How could one not descend and embrace their strength, embody their skills, when there was so much incentive to strive and slay?
In time, Silence fell in love, not with a person, but with the idea of the System, with merit and the struggle it provided. He developed a ritual of his own, offered to the one true Divinity that he would accept above all others. One true god, the only one worthy of worship. The System, the Struggle-Maker, the one that made Silence pure and whole. The one that had anointed him with strength since the day of his birth.
Skill Evolution: Deception (Initiate) > What The Dark Refuses To Tell (Adept)
Skill Evolution: Knife Proficiency (Initiate) > Blade Perfected of Ignorance (Adept)
Skill Evolution: Physicality (Initiate) > Adamant Might (Adept)
Skill Evolution: Reflexes (Initiate) > Leaf Upon the Gales (Adept)
Skill Evolution: Toughness (Initiate) > Wounds Shed From Skin (Adept)
Skill Gained: Aeromancy (Initiate)
Skill Gained: Pyromancy (Initiate)
Skill Gained: Hydromancy (Initiate)
Skill Gained: Geomancy (Initiate)
Skill Gained: Divination (Initiate)
(+301 More…)
***
It was in his seventeenth year that Silence encountered the Great One. They appeared one day, emerging as the stars and skies above changed to suit their arrival. The sun had given the god a crown, and the moon offered itself in a tithe to supply the substance of their flesh, and so the Great One drifted over Lost Angeles and made their glory known.
Bathed in their stolen radiance, ignited of false faith, the people fell at their knees, one and all, machine and organic. Most swore themselves to the Great One without any hesitation. Their wills were fragile, their own legends paltry and pathetic. Their prostration came almost on reflex, and even those who branded themselves with undeserved titles peeled away and crumbled in the face of true power.
Silence watched. Silence observed. Silence tried to learn. He was no fool, after all. He was someone who wanted to understand before he acted. In this case, for the first time in his life, the shadows could not protect him, for even in the dark, the Great One reached out for him specifically.
“Well, aren’t you a peculiar specimen?”
The voice boomed inside his head with a deafening volume, and an uncharacteristic terror swept through Silence—nearly drove him to flee. It would have been an impotent act even if he had seen any of his beloved shadows at that moment. He would have been found anywhere. There would be no escape from a true god; this fact Silence knew in his very bones.
Yet even so, he did not kneel. He did not proclaim his inferiority. He did not turn away. He might have been lesser than the true god. He might have been but a fleeting candle beneath a roaring gale. Still, his candle burned—of his own will. Of his own design. He could not stop the heavens from extinguishing him, but he could choose to burn on until that inevitable end.
Silence was—and he would recognize no authority but the System.
“Be not afraid, little Thief. I do not come bearing intent to destroy, but to cultivate and culture.” Of the Great One's voice, he disliked the sickly sweet tones and the infusion of intrusive emotions that came with each mind-spoken message. Silence lived in the throes of subterfuge, and he recognized and despised when it was being used against him. As he despised any god who refused to commit to the full worth of their power. “A good animosity to have,” the Great One said. “You are right to develop such a mental pathology, or perhaps 'understandable' is a better word. I would agree with you, little mortal. It is a vile thing when someone refuses to accept the shape of their existence, but it is also more vile that they do nothing to strive and ascend beyond their station.”
From darkness, Silence was plucked. He gave nary a sound, but his heart beat at a traitorous pace, betraying his dread and apprehension of what peril was to befall. He was lifted high into the sky as time grew slower under a sheen of gold. The world flew by as if something blocked the pace of the present, and the boy who emerged from the underways was drowned in the color of Chronomancy for the first time.
There he sat upon a cloud made solid and durable to sustain his weight; beside him the pearlescent form of the Great One lingered and bloomed. They were a colossus, something the size of a continent. They were terrifying in mass and immensity, but greater than even their physical shell was the power they exuded: in aura, in charisma, in magic, in authority. They were the single greatest power Silence had ever beheld, a being that stole light from the sun and stone from the moon, that moved in tandem with existence, taking in and using resources on a whim to shape and define themselves.
Something about that enchanted and offended Silence. He wondered if he could do the same thing. He wondered if he even wanted to. All his life, he wanted to be of his own making, undefined by surroundings, only inspired by them, but how could that be possible when one was so grounded in the world? The Great One possessed something he yearned for, but the Great One acted in a way he would not if he had it. With this, Silence decided that he would never like the god after all. No matter what it did, no matter what it should demonstrate.
That promise lasted all but three seconds. As the Great One flourished their hand, the world below came alight, and Silence found himself looking upon the countless lives glittering across the grand expanse of Lost Angeles and beyond. He saw the many tribes separated along their amorphous borders. He saw the strongest of their number gleaming brighter than the others, pure gems unlike their lessers. Even then they gleamed far dimmer than he, for though he was a hidden shadow, he was a diamond amidst the black. That might have been why the Great One plucked him from where he hid.
“That's only part of the reason. Look upon your fellow mortals. Look upon them with all you have. Use your Awareness. Use your mind. Use all your skills and judge them. It's only proper. I've elevated you for a reason. I want to hear what you think of them.”
Silence had the thought to refuse. His seasons alone cemented his individuality, yet there was something that caught his attention. As he gazed upon the gleaming forms far below, he found himself peering into them, able to study their skills, their paths, their potential, and their losses. He delved into their minds and caressed their souls. He interfaced with the others in a way that he never knew to do before. As he was bathed in the totality of his fellow mortals, he found himself more reviled than ever by their natures.
They were less than beautiful. They were less than worthy. They were less than interesting.
So many of them were obsessed over their animal urges. For all the power they might be able to cultivate, they were driven by hunger, by sexual desire, by rank emotions that were as ephemeral as a passing wind. They didn't yearn to build themselves. They didn't seek that unspeakable horizon which drove Silence, that want to define themselves, to rule themselves, to worship themselves as the System wanted them to.
Why else would one gain levels? For why else would one evolve if not to accelerate toward a higher perfection?
His fellow mortals were embarrassments to the ones who came before and to the world that was right now. They lingered still in ruins built by their betters, and the ruins remained unchanged. They added their own adornments to the broken spires that could house entire empires in the present era—but what spires of their own did they build? What grand monuments did they raise? What acts of artistry or martial dominance did they portray as they suffered upon these lands, suckling from the corpse of what came before as a parasite, never truly blooming from the husk even with an easy means of metamorphosis offered to them?
They were content—or accepting—of their fragility, limitations, ignorance.
“Sickening,” Silence whispered. “They are flames that refuse to burn.”
The Great One laughed, and to Silence’s shame, it was the single most beautiful note he had ever heard. “Flames that refuse to burn. What a way to phrase your outrage. But I agree—in ways you cannot possibly know. Would you lament if I said the same about gods?”
“No,” Silence replied immediately.
“Oh? So certain?”
“You come wearing the sun’s light as a crown and the moon as a chassis. You valorize your own glory more than anything else as a performance. I have seen it before performed by lesser gods than you.”
“But you haven’t met any gods.”
Silence scoffed with derision. “Power. Expression. Intent. The style is the substance with your like. I have met enough gods, even if they were weak.”
The Great One looked upon Silence, their humanoid face smooth and featureless—but somehow, he got the sense that they were smiling. “There was a reason your mind drew me; sometimes, the little surprises are the best ones.” The High God turned away from him and stared across the great waters to the west. “Would you like to see something wonderful? Would you like to become something wonderful?”
“I will not be your slave. Bind me to my name and finish my life if that is your intent.”
“No, no. I am not nearly so weak that I must force someone into bondage. Let us make an arrangement, Silence. I will teach and show you things about yourself, this world, the System that no other mortal should be able to learn in a single lifetime. In turn, you… stay interesting. And you can consider aiding me in this endeavor—perhaps even betraying me when you see the opportunity.”
For the first time, Silence’s certitude escaped him. “You want me to be a blade behind your back.”
“I want you to try. And I want to see how long it takes for you to eventually bow to Divinity, or if your knees refuse to meet the earth until the end. Your identity is… pure. I want to see how pure. Consider it a means of mutual cultivation; a study in how true someone can be.”
There should’ve been a trap in such an arrangement, yet Silence could sense no place nor purpose for this entrapment to take root. Silence had nothing worth taking for a god this powerful. Nothing but the legend of who he might become, and the tales born from the journeys that would take him there. “My spite toward you will ripen into hate if you embarrass yourself at the end.”
“At the end?”
“When I drive my blade through your body.”
The Great One hummed. “So certain of yourself that you will hurt me?”
“No. But there will be the attempt, and I have no taste for any gods who indulge in self-betrayal.”
“Ah. A worthy request. I will abide.”
“So certain of yourself that you will not fear the end?”
“So certain in my pride. Yes, I am. For that is the great worth of Civilization, Empire, and Identity. Pride to last beyond the ages. But you… I do not think your people named you right.”
“I have no people.”
“True. But even so, you kept the name. You are proud of the name. But it is the wrong name for you.”
Silence narrowed his eyes at the god. “You dictate what I am to me already?”
“I dictate only what you might have missed. The silence and darkness serve you, but they are just tools to you. Not your definition. I found you in the dark. If you were silence, then you would refuse my words and flee from me like a roach seeking the comfort of the shadows. Instead, you face me—and find my presence disdainful. Because I do not fit your definition of ‘valor.’ And I think this is what you seek. An individual apotheosis born of self-defined pride. One who values the valorous way while the rest of this sunken world seeps and stews as imperfect victims, unable to face the truth of what they could be.”
“Valor,” Silence replied, frowning as the word left him. Then, to his greatest dismay, he didn’t hate it. Rather, he found himself growing fond and embarrassed that he wasn’t the one who chose it.
“A word of advice, little one: If you refuse a gift out of pride, then you are using pride the wrong way. Pride should always build and reinforce. It should not demean or take. Accept my suggestion. Commit to your actualization. You watch. You learn. You evolve. But will you listen, even if it bothers you?”
That was also the first time Valor learned the inherent lethality of a Social Skill—for to kill a person was an end, but to convince them of a truth?
That would shape the course of countless histories to come, for good or ill.