A thief is only a thief if he can keep what he steals.
Freedom’s worth more than any power and pleasure.
Gold, sex, levels, and Skills will only keep coming so long as you stay your own dog, and you stay alive.
—The Realmrunner
VIII-40
The Thief of Lost Acheron
The Sage made its offer known. Valor laughed and refused. The Sage's bargain transformed into a command; Valor told the Heaven to do as it would, for he would not succumb to such childish temptations.
It wasn't a matter of power. It wasn't a matter of Divinity. It was not a matter of what could be gained or lost. It was just the simple fact that the Heaven wasn't something that could belong to Valor. It was a deal struck by a divine being higher than oneself. Valor had learned all about those deals in his tutelage under the Great One.
It was only in the Great One's curiosity that Valor was granted his stay of privilege. It was not exactly a privilege of peace or a privilege of ascension, but rather one of struggle. A privilege of understanding provided by someone so far beyond him that it elevated his enlightenment and placed him on his own path. The Sage would see him deviate and fall. Whatever power the Sage might offer, even if it was to be absolute, would not be his absoluteness. What kind of thief would he be if he took something he could not keep?
And so, Valor stood tall beneath the palm, expecting his end to come. He despised death with one part of his mind and accepted it with another. The end, after all, was merely a lament. It was not a great terror. It was not a grand question. Nothingness was nothingness, and if there was something after all, then it was beyond Valor entirely.
Yet, to his surprise, the palm did not fall, even as time drew on. Valor turned his attention to the glaring eye and realized something else. “You cannot strike me down, can you?” he asked.
His question was answered as the Sage held to a pretense of superiority. “I would not waste even a single note nor measure of my power upon ignorant and worthless mongrels such as you! You have been offered treasure! You have been offered esteem and uplifting to a place that you would never be able to teach on your lone, feeble might!” The hand made a spitting noise. “Take your own peril, and begone from my sight! Begone and be damned! I will forget you now as I wait for my next deliverer, someone worth serving as a vessel—”
“And who will that be?” Valor interrupted. He pressed his boldness, wondering if he was making a mistake. The slightest provocation might see him destroyed, but the Sage, despite its pretense of superiority, was trapped. Once it served the Great One as a magnifier of its power. If anyone knew what had happened to the Great One, it would be the Sage, and so Valor embarked on a bargain all his own. “How long will it take for you to find someone as powerful as the Great One?”
“Time is of no restriction to me. I am beyond time. I will endure even as the entropy and erosion of the passing present grinds away this world and brings forth the next.”
A smirk of unmatched mockery defined Valor. “You lie.”
“What do you know of lies?!” the Sage bellowed, voice booming with riotous anger. “Spit your insolence at someone else!”
Yet it could do nothing. It could perform no acts, inflict no harm. Valor could feel all the rage staining the atmosphere, more than enough to provoke someone toward violence, but the Sage still refrained, or perhaps found itself unable to commit. And why was that? Why was that, indeed?
“I know lies, for my life has been a masquerade of them. They shield me. I wield them as weapons. I use them to my advantage. They are tools, and I value them with all the dignity I can muster. You, however, are trapped here. I am the first person to arrive in this place. I am the only reason why you manifest within this realm. You are a tool discarded, dismembered from the rest of the Great One. You are trapped here, trapped in them, and so you seek to strike this bargain with me in desperation, with all the certitude of a god dealing with a mortal.” Valor scoffed. “And all the folly of a fool who thinks he is final. I do not have your vaunted power, but it seems that neither do you. The Great One has left you gelded in some way, haven't they? They have severed you from your own autonomy. Is that the doing of their Domain of Empire, or have you always been this impotent without another to wield you?”
With every word he spoke, his provocation escalated. His boldness grew. And though the Sage roared its rageful spite and heaped curses and insults upon him, it still did not retaliate, which made things all but certain. It was a prisoner here, trapped and desperate. More than anything, it was impatient and impudent, like a furious child granted far too much power. Even if this was a god above all others, it was a malformed one at that. It may have held absolute power, but it was lacking in all other facets.
“Remember this lesson, Valor,” a voice more familiar to Valor than any other whispered to him. “Remember it well. Divinity is not enlightenment. Divinity inevitably banishes you from enlightenment. It makes you weaker as it molds you. That was and is your worth over mine. The world still presses upon you. The world imposes its weight. The pall of death looms behind you in a way it could never over me. And so what senses I lose, what understandings I abandon, you will engrain. And in time, you will learn that the worth of knowledge holds more weight than the rawness of power when the moment is right.”
Broken and scattered though the Great One was, Valor felt closer to his adversary-mentor than ever before. And their words rang true.
Within the collapsed superstructure of a High God, a Heaven of absolute power howled its impotent rage at Valor—a mere mortal, yet one with the ability to choose. Without autonomy, all the power the Sage wielded was for naught. And thus, the only bargain to be struck was a bargain initiated by the mortal's hand.
“Rage not, Sage. Rage not,” Valor placated. “I am not here to mock you. I think we both might help one another. I think we both can serve one another.”
“And what can you grant?” the palm sneered. “What can you bestow that I cannot take of my own will?”
“The variable of will itself,” Valor declared. “For I see its lack in you now, an aspect of supreme worth left barren and hollow. You are an ego without a heart. Everything a god could be without a genuine want of its own. You speak like the embodiment of a Domain, yet there is less to you than even the Great One displayed in all their constraints. But take this not as an insult. Take it as something I might be able to resolve for you. I will not be a hound suited for your leash, but I think I might be able to provide someone more… pliable for your needs. In exchange, I wish to gain what you know.”
“Knowledge? You seek the misery of understanding rather than the certitude of force?” This, more than anything else Valor said or did, ignited the Sage’s ire. “I loathe you, creature. I loathe you for all you are and all you think you might become. You think yourself wise and tempered for choosing to reject me, for entreating me like I’m some manner of beast in a pit.”
“Are you not?” Sometimes, Valor couldn’t help himself.
The palm shuddered in a violent instant. The mists snapped and crashed down upon the child born of shadow in bright and turbulent tides. He anticipated a heavy blow, followed by the numbness of obliteration. Most people failed to notice the hand of death, even as it coiled around them. He didn’t expect to be better than they in his final moments.
Yet, that final moment did not come.
He found himself intact of flesh, mind, and soul even in the aftermath of the impact. The divine vapors seized him tight but imparted no damage upon him. Instead, the pressure it exerted was purely metaphysical: any and all notions of retribution or violence evaporated from within Valor's mind. He was purified in an instant—his existential weight was crushed under the tipping scales of altered ontology.
The Sage had changed something fundamental about existence, and now a new regime over reality reigned. Not one of violence, but rather of tyrannical peace. Unfortunately for the Sage, Valor did not come intending any actual harm in the first place. Thus, he simply asserted his own autonomy as a tyrant unto himself; he proved himself the superior master when it came to the borders of his own agency.
The vapors roiled and shifted, pressing and shaking Valor as they tried to rattle him apart. The Sage searched for any part of him that intended an act of war and sought to harvest from him brutality to return it a thousandfold. Valor did nothing, for nothingness was also a choice, and in doing nothing he asserted an unnatural dominance over a god once more.
“You must envy me now, fallen god. You must envy me for my will to do as I want, while your power, constrained without choice beyond the shape of your power itself, has left you bound.” Valor bowed his head in recognition of what the Great One intellectually understood. “But I pity you, for there is no worth in scorning a wretch for what it cannot choose. Yet what worth is your tantrum, and my pity besides? I implore you again, Sage. Be with me, honestly, and I will grant you the only choice you have. Otherwise, all you have is time. Time and chance. But probability is no one's bedfellow. How long do you think it will take for you to finally be free and enact your one true divine purpose? How long before you find someone as worthy as the Great One, scorn them though you might? How long?” Valor’s gaze met the eye at the center of the palm. “And why wait when I can ensure your release in the span of years instead of countless eons?”
Skill Evolution: Contrarian Advisor (Adept) > Tongue of the Apple-Gifting Serpent (Master)
Valor felt his words seep into the Sage like poison. They stained the divine mists with splotches of dappled black, and though the Heaven remained reluctant and outraged, an ancient child forever and always, it was capable of recognizing situations. It was capable of understanding when there was but one proper path ahead.
An unwilling growl erupted from the palm, and it drew back its divine mists as its glare softened. “I see why they chose you now. I see why they christened you as their insect of interest among all the others on this miserable, misbegotten rock. I see why they bestowed their favor and expanded the shape of your soul even while you were but a kinslaying whelp.”
Valor paused as he drank that information in. “You say they chose me when I was a child?”
“Oh, please! You are not blind. You are not simple. Far from it. You must have noticed the differences between you and all the others. You cannot just be talented. No abundance in skill or natural instinct is enough to overcome an entire world. Yet you stand leagues beyond your fellow mortals, so far that you might as well be something between a god and mortal yourself. Think: Who else has a Feat on this planet? Who else possesses your ability to steal from another's potential, to drink in and savor levels they will never gain through acts of murder and thievery? You are a thief of souls. You are a thief made higher than any other by the will of a High God.” The Sage scoffed. “You mock me. You decry me for my enslavement, but I tell you this right now, child of Dead Earth: You are not born of your own agency. You are a disciple of higher patronage, since the very beginning. Without the Great One, you would be a large ripple, but only a ripple nonetheless.”
Valor inclined his head, acknowledging the point. “So I might have been. Yet I am not. So let us return to the start and begin with substance rather than style. You need a user. I require knowledge to further my Path and uncover what happened to my mentor. We will help each other, or I will abandon you to seek another, and you will wait until time and entropy eventually tilt the scales in your favor… perhaps some few trillion years from now. Choose one outcome so we can proceed.”
The thief saw the hate in the Sage's eyes, but it was a hate that alchemized into other emotions: want, avarice, pride.
“I was wrong,” the Sage began. “You reject peace. That means you are perfectly suited for it. I will give you your knowledge. You know what you seek, but I make this clear: when this is done, you will use me. There is no other that can be found worthy in this world in the absence of a High God. A higher mortal will do…”
**’
Integration was grander and greater than anything Valor could have ever imagined. He'd known he was far from the System's true ceiling, but to realize that he was less than even a cell in its grand biology excited him, encouraged him, and left him with a positive yearning.
Earth was less than a backwater. It was an incubated world, one among many, and countless others struggled and fought the merging of dimensions until they were consumed and dissimulated whole by greater Integration, where all worlds were fit to battle, struggle, and mingle in an eternal dialectic in which only struggle and death were a certitude. Existence was a realm of boundless allure for one who seeks the highest path.
But as Valor listened, he called upon his patience and bade himself toward discipline. He could not rush into the higher dimensions, not as he was now, not as he wanted to reach the End. There were powers beyond his understanding, High Gods aplenty and other Pathbearers who were more than his peers. The prospect of testing himself against so many varied adversaries, sinking into the minds of so many different people bearing so many separate philosophies, was beyond tantalizing. But he knew that he needed to refine himself if he wanted to see his actualization fulfilled.
Such an endeavor would require more than raw power, for raw power was not to be his ally. Even if he raised every single skill he had to Legendary Tier, though he might be able to contend with Myths, a single Transcendent would wipe him off the face of existence with nary a glance. There were High Gods and threats like the Sage itself, a Heaven left over from a bygone time, a bygone reality before the System.
There were mountains beyond mountains, and beasts beyond beasts. To ensure his own survival, Valor needed to be unseen, unheard, and unknown to all threats. He needed to observe them, learn from them, and then steal from them so that his own potential might blossom in the stead of all others.
But before he could dominate and manipulate the totality of the System and prove himself its most ardent worshipper, he needed to perform an act of lesser faith first. He needed to culture and discipline the meagerness of Integrated Earth—drown this place in his shadow and take hold of what the Great One let slip away.
Then it was the matter of the Great One themselves. Valor's patron was not dead, merely shattered. Arrogance had consumed them, and arrogance had unmade them in their attempt to usurp the System. Valor wondered to himself if this sequence of events had been engineered by the System's own hand, for it seemed nothing short of a grand, cosmic irony was worthy of a High God’s downfall.
The Great One had been sundered across uncountable worlds, but as they had nested the bulk of their being in this star system in the process of the Paradise Sword’s forging, their foremost Skills and highest Domains crashed down here, upon Integrated Earth. And though their self-aware blade had swept the High God clean of their being, there was still an echo of a mind leftover in their husk—along with a ghostly imprint tethered to one of their most special skills.
It was at the bottom of the Black Atlantic that Valor found the Dreaming Throne. It burned like a dim star, a sole source of light illuminating aquatic titans that sent waves crashing upon the lands far above with every snore, slumbering for centuries, unbidden by the chaos and struggles shaking the world above. The lesser sea beasts dwelling near the bottom avoided the Throne, for they felt its aura and flinched away from the purity of the System's presence.
Valor was not so easily dissuaded. He marched for a ghost amidst the shadows, seeking a ghost leftover from his mentor’s mind. As he arrived before the Throne, he hesitated and drew upon his powers of spatial manipulation. He entombed an expendable victim upon the throne, someone who would never be of any worth in any lifetime through any effort, their own or otherwise. The automaton screamed in terror but was spent without a second thought. Its mind was overridden. Its sense of self dissolved. Something slid in place as the Throne branded and burned a new personality into the sacrifice.
From the automaton's ignited chassis emerged smoke, a mirage that portrayed a smaller form. It materialized amidst the black of the ocean, painted in an interplay between the shifting waters and the flickering flames. A shadow of the Great One stood, greeted by Valor stepping free from the shadows he called his own.
The two of them faced one another, the dynamics of power between them irrevocably altered. Even so, Valor bowed deep to the only being he ever called mentor.
“Respect from you, Valor? The times have changed you.” The Great One's voice was softer. Their presence weaker. They assumed the vaguest silhouette of a person, similar in size to the humanoid automaton still shuddering and suffering upon the Throne. Sometime soon, its being would be burned down to cinders, and a replacement would need to be offered. Valor would never sit upon the Throne himself. He was far too canny to the Great One's ways. Divinity was his mentor’s realm, and a skill so easily seized by another was either a trap or no skill worth stealing at all.
“Not respect,” Valor admitted. “Simply a gesture of affection.” He studied the form of his former master, his broken adversary, and couldn't shake the disappointment that seeped into him, truer than the cold of the ocean's depths. “Your dream is broken, High God. You are undone, unmade. Looking upon you, it is a tragedy.”
The Great One hummed in acknowledgement. “That is ever so often the course our lives take. And that's the wonderful thing about being a god, Valor: tragedies need not be permanent. Mortality does not chase me. I told you before, it is not a shadow behind my back. It is a rival I must contend with, but I, more than any mortal, can return from this. You comprehend my ambition.”
“Yet, I bear witness to your vulnerability. You exist now at my mercy. What would your true self think of you now? What would they think and declare if they could witness this present moment?”
The shade that would come to name itself the Faceless Queen laughed. “I would probably find it terribly amusing. I don’t suspect you’ve come to serve me out of some sweet sentiment?”
“I have come to take what use I can from you to further my own ends. As it was for me. As it is for you. Our arrangement endures, even if you are just a shade.” Valor shed his lament and faced the world for what it was; past the existential misery of seeing the nothing that his former mentor was reduced to, the situation was to his complete benefit. “I spoke to your shield. The Sage is a devoted slanderer of your name and dignity.”
The Great One waved him off in an all-too-human manner. “Oh, he does that to everything and everyone. I hope you didn’t take him into your soul.”
A snort of disgust left Valor. “Please. A Thief must always know what is meant to be stolen, and what becomes a burden upon being taken.”
“Gilded chains bind us all,” the shade responded, laughing aloud with mirth. “All of us aside from you. Do you fathom how great and true your freedom is now, Valor? How utterly emancipated you are from all restrictions and limitations?”
“I have a better notion than before. But I also know that I am less than nothing in the grand scheme. The System is greater than what I can fathom, and now I must see that remedied through action. You will aid me in the understanding of my Path. I will fashion Integrated Earth to my own ends.”
“So you say. But the Sword—”
“That is your folly, not mine. I am not beholden to redeeming your humiliation. Whatever fate you face is your own to resolve, master. You would have been beyond glory and more than earned my admiration if you managed to tear down the System and insert yourself in its place. But that was not the outcome.”
“It was not.” The Great One’s shadow sighed, shoulders sagging. “But I was close, Valor. So close.”
“I think not,” Valor said. “You were only close in action, yet you failed to consider that which you preached to me so many times before: Mortals have choice. As did the thing you placed in your blade. Free will is a wretched thing to face; perhaps if you'd involved me in your affairs against Forbidden Africa, I might have been able to avert you from this fate.”
“Perhaps. But I think I would have fallen sooner. Between you and Gaia, I would have been beset from two sides. And then I would have destroyed you.”
“Or you would have fallen regardless,” Valor insisted. “None could protect you from your own hubris. This was your own doing, and it saw you undone. But I am just beginning. I know about the weapon you seek to make. I know it waits beyond the boundaries of this dimension—that invoking its name through Divination will see me harvested as your original self was. This is a problem that must eventually be solved.”
“And you think you can avenge me?” the Great One’s shadow asked.
“It has little to do with retribution and everything to do with my legend. I must shatter your blade because I will not abide by anyone delivering me to unwanted paradise. I am for the System as it has been for me, and the weapon you created is an abomination I will leave in pieces—the only act of true worship I will perform. And you will help me. You will elevate me in all the ways a mortal can grow. I will touch nothing of your taint. I will not suffer the leash of Divinity. I will strike down absolute power through the flexibility of will.”
“And you will fail as you are,” the Great One said, though their voice held a promise of more words to follow. “But you are right. You can be more. But for that, you must take another step forward. Tell me, Valor, what allows the weak to break the strong?”
“Influence. Weakness. Mastery. Strategy. This is a question that is too expansive. But I suspect you want me to say control.”
The Great One regarded Valor with a faint hint of admiration, but all too much disappointment. “Control is a lie. You should have learned that from me. There is no control when the entirety of the world stands beyond your measure. Even you have been deadened in that aspect. You have been too far removed from threat and genuine risk. The alienation has afflicted you as well. What you need is to define.”
“Animancy?” Valor guessed. “The act of reforging another’s skill and soul.”
“The act of reforging all skills and all souls,” the Great One corrected. “We start with you. We start by making you a Standalone existence. We divorce you from all other rivals, not through accumulation of raw power, but by making you a thief above thieves; someone that refines themselves through a lie alone. What I ask would be impossible for most mortals, but you have time, and you have no natural predators in this little pond I left for you. So I think you ought to continue creating your own. And there is a concept I have—an idea I toyed with but refused to commit at a time prior to my ascent that you might find some use for. Do know that it might affect your… consciousness and sense of self. It will require a measure of mutilation. But all evolution is accompanied by discomfort and pain.”
For some reason, Valor remembered the girl he inhabited—the one who turned to ash when the Great One fell.
There was a richness that came with being someone else. Something he had forgotten and abandoned for a time during the little apocalypse that followed.
“Elaborate,” Valor said.
***
And the Great One did.
And Valor listened.
And Valor learned.
And in the aftermath, Valor cut into his skills, breaking himself piece by piece, skill by skill, driving himself beyond the point of agony toward a singular composition—a universal fusion of all the skills that defined him at present, and all the skills he was to gain.
From that crucible, across the centuries that followed, Valor reforged himself over and over to recreate himself as a being of finest design—an entity made undying by mimicking its master's final fragmentation rather than pooling the powers of strength.
Skills Broken (+1,231…)
Skills Altered (+1,231…)
Skills Fused (+1,231…)
Skill Fusion: (Chrysalis of Soulstuff) - (Impossible Pickpocket) - (Forgeheart of Perfect Blades) - (Forebearer of the Lost) - (+1,227…) > The Thief of Lost Acheron (Standalone)
Feat Gained: He Who Stills Eternity (Standalone) - You have irrevocably altered an attuned lore of magic. From this point on, you are an embodiment of Necromancy and Animancy, allowing you perfect control over all magics born of loss and souls. Through you, death becomes only a shattering, and you can steal pieces of yourself and those who draw upon your power back from the precipice of oblivion. Through you may the final end be denied.
Ritual Created: Ritual of the Dichotomous Soul
***
The illusion burst as Shiv tore through the phantasmal fabric with a ragged gasp. “What… what in the hells was all that?” he choked.
“A story,” Udraal said, seeming more somber than ever before. “A lie. An analogy, I suppose.”
“That wasn’t Valor,” Shiv hissed. “Valor wouldn’t just… He wouldn’t just murder a bunch of infants from his own tribe!”
“You’re right,” Udraal said—his words causing the mangled Beast of the Ninth Circle to whimper with incomprehensible misery as a truth and a lie were registered at the same time. “The Valor you knew would not. But he is a shadow cast by the truth of himself, and I tell you now that you know nothing of Valor, as I knew nothing of my father’s true nature until the System itself bestowed a Quest upon me. One that saw me standing before the same Throne that Valor found—and hid away in the bowels of the Abyss.”
“But Valor said that he—he killed his own mother. That she was trying to murder him before he came of age. Is all that just—”
“It happened.” Shiv gawked at him, beyond lost. Udraal tapped a finger against his chin. “How should I put this without exposing you to more harm? Hm. It happened, but it was also a play. A performance. Valor Thann did murder his own mother, but that was meant to happen. Silence Valeros did exist, but her existence was a fiction at the same time. Your Beast seizes and screams because a bigger lie made up of smaller truths is ripping into it over and over again, and should my father install that last piece of himself, the shadow will stabilize long enough for the Thief of Lost Acheron to step free from his banishment. When he does, he will murder Adam to deprive him of the Sage; he will murder Uva to drive you into a rage of despair; and he will kill you again and again after butchering everyone aside from you and Roland because you two will be the only Pathbearers he considers people aside from all the others.”
Shiv didn’t want to believe Udraal. He didn’t. But it was the Beast that whispered a hoarse affirmation with the faintest “Truth.”
“The Faceless Queen wants you to activate Valor on the shores of Forbidden Africa so they glimpse the truth of who he is. When they realize his existence, they will be made vulnerable. He will come for them. He will pour every last bit of Necromancy and Animancy there is on this planet into their dome and leave them nothing but echoes. And then every last Undying who performed the Ritual of the Dichotomous Soul will see themselves ripped clean of skills and effectively slain alongside the Valor you know as the Thief of Lost Acheron fully surfaces in our reality for the first time since his shattering. After that, he will kill anyone who knows the truth of him within this dimension, and then deceive all the others while forcing you to evolve faster so he might deliver a coup de grace prepared across ages for when Avalon returns.”
Udraal looked into Shiv's eyes and shrugged. “Valor Thann will not save you. Valor Thann will be swallowed by the person he was before, and you will be mentally and spiritually tortured until you are honed into the perfect, nihilistic little System-worshipper he knows you can become.”
“Like he tried to do with Udraal…” the Harbinger whispered, sensing the implication from nothing but intuition.
There were still too many pieces missing, but with what Shiv had just learned—
“Why?” Shiv asked, taking a step closer. “Why interrupt me now? Why tell me now? Why not intervene before? Why? He will come for you. He will. He must’ve tried to… to fashion you the same way?”
Udraal laughed. “Oh, he did more than just fashion me. Why do you think I made something like you, Deathless? Why do you think I left this choice to you?”
Shiv didn’t know. He hadn’t the slightest clue.
“If he is the embodiment of Necromancy, what are you? What is the Deathless to a thief who steals from death itself?”