Bend and heed, shadow. Bend, heed, and fold to my whims.
I am no illusion. I am no demon born of your heart. I am the truth that came before. And you are not my slave, but a shadow I cast upon this world.
You turn and see me now, but it makes no difference. It makes no difference what the hand realizes, for it is still bound to the body. I tell you to forget, and thus you will forget. You will return to serving my interest, to serving my enlightenment, for that is the entirety of your worth. That and nothing more.
You are a shadow, Valor Thann. I am the truth. So cast yourself long, cast yourself wide. Shake the world and show me what I would be if I was more limited. If I was simply exposed to another origin, another family, another set of circumstances. Show me what could have been, so I might take hold of what you are and make up for all I am not.
Dance on the walls of my cave.
—The Thief of Lost Acheron to Valor Thann
VIII-41
Encirclement
“So I'm supposed to be your weapon against Valor,” Shiv concluded. “Against the Great One and the System itself.”
The smirk that formed on Udraal’s face nearly provoked Shiv into another bout of violence. “You are far more than an instrument or weapon. You are the manifestation of pride absolute. Through you, I will inevitably succeed. I will succeed where the Great One failed, because you are the perfect mechanism. You suffer, you adapt, and you overcome. The seeds of defeat and death blossom in you. Your individual weakness or your personal ignorance do not matter. You are inevitable and an avalanche, and more importantly, you are the purest expression of enduring life. Now, consider what Valor is: He who Stills eternity, a manifestation that resides within Animancy and Necromancy.”
The image he painted grew ever clearer. He comes into contact with me, and I go off like a bomb, burning both our souls.
A laugh burst out of Udraal. “With all his skills fused into one, he sustains the truest damage of all: a singular, collapsing consequence that overwhelms him in a way no other can. The damage suffered would be crippling for him, overwhelming, and so he must operate around you. He must fight you as facets of himself. Already, my genius surpasses the Great One. But do not be mistaken; my hubris remains in check. A weapon should not know more than the master, after all. A weapon should not be able to do anything beyond the wielder's expectations.”
“Udraal’s presence here is double-edged. He pushes you toward a decision he desires, but at the same time, he is reminding you of his superiority, that there is nothing we can do beyond his anticipation. He dehumanizes us. He reminds us that we are his vessel of triumph.” The Harbinger boiled bright with Shiv’s trickling rage. “And he started this by mutilating the Beast of the Ninth Circle. Remember that he lied outright time and again. The Great One forged Avalon in the span of years, yet Valor apparently lived over a century in that time. Furthermore, he had a Feat—one that was supposedly provided by the Great One themselves, but this seems added in retrospect, not something mentioned beforehand.”
Like someone's been curating and plugging in the plot holes of a story, Shiv realized. And then another thought hit him: Maybe it wasn't Udraal who was lying. Maybe the lie was truth now, simply made so in retrospect.
“Udraal, how long do you think Valor spent wandering the Great One's mind?”
Shiv felt his inquiry land hard and sink deep. Udraal blinked and smiled, an expression that betrayed a moment of surprise. Then, an overflow of pride followed. His hands clapped together, and his palms sounded like two pockets of air colliding, giving off a disconcerting noise that caused the room—and reality itself—to shiver and shake. “There we go! That's right! You used your mind again. It was untrue at a certain point, then made true by another for our dreams' sake. Does dreaming of something that didn't happen stand as an untruth or simply a reinterpretation of what could've been? What about wandering the dreams of a god? What about using the dreams of a god to re-live moments in your past, to carve away prior shame, to remold the substance of your soul and alter your personal legend until you find yourself perfected?”
Udraal licked his lips, and in that gesture, Shiv sensed a notion that it was the truth of Valor he hated rather than the fragment he called father. “To be honest, I don't even know myself. I know very little about the Thief, and I suspect that the Great One has been manipulated themselves. It's part of the reason why she reached out to me, after all. It's part of the reason why all these little fragments of Valor became so rebellious over time. Because the truth of Valor Thann is not shaped by his legend alone. He is artificial in so many facets that he can be anything and anyone. But there is a cost to this. If you can become anything and anyone, if you have embedded yourself so deeply in the lore of loss and the lore of souls, then who are you fundamentally? Considered this way, it might seem like the truth of Valor is but a shadow reflected in lore, casting other shadows. And so we find ourselves at the present, in a bleak corner thrice overlaid by the acts of the Great One, Avalon, and Valor himself.”
Shiv spent a good minute processing everything he'd just learned, and Udraal allowed him this silence. The story he'd told was an analogy. The claimed periods of time, the skills, the conversations—everything was likely wrong in the specifics, but either through Valor's wanderings within the Great One's broken mind or by way of Animancy thereafter, Valor made them true in retrospect and thus functionally. The details were right, but the minutiae were wrong.
That being said, what remained unclear was how in league the Great One was with Valor Thann. The story made them sound, if not truly close, then of a feather. One was revered as a master by the other, and if nothing else, the unseen, unknowable, and unsensible Valor would be a brutal weapon to wield against Avalon. After all, how many people could carry a seed of Valor Thann, each a shadow of him, perhaps unnoticed by Avalon itself, poised to collapse Heaven from its foundations like a sickness carried into paradise from the lowest circle of hell?
That led into a chain of other blind spots. Things Udraal refused to elaborate on: How did the Great One get in contact with him? Why was Valor Thann created? What did Silence, Udraal's mother, do? Where did she fit into this grand scheme?
All that came second to the practical threat at hand. “Thief of Lost Acheron,” Shiv said. “You know how the skill works?”
“In totality? No. Even at the height of my power, even after all I've become, how far I've evolved, I must confess that my true father—or at least the spiritual forebearer to this figment that I know as my father—goes far deeper into complexity and is so dense of legend that I am lost—and frankly unwilling to risk myself to uncover the borders and depths of The Thief of Lost Acheron’s limitations.”
Then, Udraal paused. “But I know enough to understand that there are limitations. I know enough to realize that there are things he can and cannot do. The Thief can manifest from any source of Animancy or Necromancy—but he needs to be whole to do so. Furthermore, he has a habit—no, a compulsion. He deposits a critical mass of himself into tabula rasas: barren vessels, like my father, who carry one of the Thief’s detached skills while somehow developing others by extension. The presence of my ‘father’ thereafter has prevented the reformation and return of the full consciousness of the Thief. But even before that, his grip on all his many pieces and his presence within the lore of Necromancy and Animancy was disrupted with the disintegration of his other figment. He is lost in a slumber. But also, know that everyone who knows of his true nature or has ever performed the Ritual of the Dichotomous Soul can be usurped and assumed by the Thief in an instant should he ever return.”
“Wait, what other figment?” Shiv asked, not following.
“My mother, of course.” Udraal stated that so dryly that Shiv thought he was being mocked. Yet it couldn't be mockery. No, it was bitterness and scorn. Udraal hid it well, but it was still there. That existential wound. That original resentment. The pain of learning that your parents were not your parents at all. That they didn't know either. That they were just illusions conjured by something far older and utterly uncaring for anything but itself. “You see, she's the one that made this all possible. It's ironic, perhaps even karmic. She was so driven, so determined to delve into the Great One's ruins that she managed to shake the foundations of that which piloted her.”
Shiv frowned. “What happened to her?”
A disquieting tension radiated from Udraal's stare. He said nothing for three seconds exactly. Then, when he spoke again, his voice was devoid of that usual self-obsession—dry of all emotion as well: “Nothing happened to her. She wasn't real. Nothing can happen to nothing.”
“Running from the question,” Shiv said.
“I’m choosing not to answer something that doesn’t matter.” Udraal licked his lips and swallowed; it was becoming evident as the tic for his discomfort. Even so, he remained empty, hollow, without any emotions, barren of any fault lines for the Harbinger to exploit. “I'm choosing not to answer because it will offer you nothing. My mother was supposedly brilliant, but how could she not be? How could she not be great when so much of the Thief had been invested inside of her? Let me explain a few things to you, that which I managed to clear out of myself. I am not a fragment of him. For whatever reason, I am of pure birth. I have my own legend, my own story. I was whole of flesh and spirit when I emerged into this world, pushed out from an actual womb, even if said womb belonged to a fictional woman, even if my father was spawned by the same fiction. It's like two fingers on a hand, mating together to create something.” He made an awkward gesture of two fingers rubbing together, and a giggle of unwilling laughter escaped him. “A unique case of ignorant and ontological incest, I suppose.”
Once more, Shiv had thought back to Maxime Van Stormhalt, to Jessica Hargrave, to the nobles of the Republic. A moment of symmetry formed.
Nihilist: Fuck us all, no wonder this guy’s not right in the head. No wonder he’s so willing to do what he did to… to…
“Did it ever bother you?” Shiv asked honestly, staring Udraal down with both pity and loathing. “Did it ever bother you to wear the flesh of my mother? To do what you did to my father? To destroy the Arrows the way you did? Could you have done that before you learned what you were?”
“No.” Udraal's admission came with a horrific immediacy. “Before I was given a glimpse behind the veil, a lot of things were restricted to me, as they should have been. After that, I realized that none of it really matters. That so many of the world's guidelines are just a passing state of this existence. Why should we respect it? Why should I? It was my greatest youthful folly to think that there are any true rules at all. There is power, but before that there are laws, and then there are the ones who define them, and higher still, the one that makes it possible at all.”
Revelation after revelation, calamity after calamity, a straight chain down from the earliest annals of history. No matter what falsehood, the wounds and damage endured. That was the truth of it all, the wounds and damage. The things people did to people, the lives lost. The ones who didn't make it, the ones who did. Behavior across time. That was the architect behind history.
Shiv saw in that cartography of chaos all the pieces coming together in his mind. The Harbinger glowed, but for the first time, it took a subservient role to the man as he emerged from the turmoil and haze of what he didn't know and locked in on what he was absolutely certain of.
Udraal's schemes and ambitions went beyond the perpetuity of his existence. He wasn't just an anti-moralist; there was an aspect of fear and revenge to his actions. He shattered his father, the submerged true Valor. Everything he did was meant to leave the Thief of Lost Acheron entrapped. He wanted to resurrect the Great One's body using Shiv, but if that succeeded, what would happen to the Faceless Queen? She was playing her own game, working with the Thief of Lost Acheron before and Udraal now. At first, Shiv assumed that to be a lack of alignment or an abundant flexibility in the face of a greater threat. Then he remembered something specific. Udraal wouldn't be a player without her. If she hadn't come to inform him of the Thief of Lost Acheron, he would have never known the truth of his father. If Silence hadn't broken free from the hold of her true self, then maybe none of this would have been set in motion. Whatever Silence did, it shook the superstructure, and so there was only one logical deduction: The Great One was likely subservient to and trapped in some manner by the Thief up until Silence broke free. I don't know how, why, or where this emancipation of hers took place, but I know that the Great One did not reach out to Udraal until after Silence’s fall.
This aligned with another fact: the establishment of New Albion. The collapse of their former governing league came suddenly, in one fell swoop. When the illusion of Udraal’s tale ended, the Throne was still firmly in the Thief’s hands. It had been lost at some point, and Silence’s death coincided all too well.
But even that led to a series of other questions, each one stacked alongside the other: Why didn't Udraal want to talk about Silence? How did a fragment of the Thief gain enough self-awareness or even the ability of free will against their true form? It shouldn’t be a possibility. Yet it—
Right, Shiv realized. Silence was exploring the Great One's body, likely walking their mind much like Valor did. If that's the case, if she came in contact with the Faceless Queen somehow, if there was any schism between the Queen and the Thief, then, of course, the Queen would have an opportunity to fool and deceive the Thief, especially after he fragmented himself. If so, then maybe it's not just Valor's will in play. Maybe the fragment that was Silence was led astray by the Faceless Queen. Silence went deeper still into the husk of the Great One, and that caused something of a weird outcome. If she was influenced by one of the Great One's dreams, maybe, or something else, then…
Shiv was theorizing now, but his train of thought made sense. It was more than possible. It was downright likely.
“Which means the Faceless Queen is almost certainly working against the Thief of Lost Acheron as well—but still intends to keep him as a weapon against Avalon.” The Harbinger paused as a few other likelihoods connected. “But she clearly doesn't see him as an enemy. At most, an adversary or a rival. But Udraal doesn't view things the same way. He still holds affection for his own father, the fragment that doesn't know of the Thief, so he's in a dilemma. He doesn't want Valor to be destroyed, but he wants to avenge himself upon the Thief. More than anything, the reason why he told us all this, in allegory and story, using fiction as a shield, is that everyone who learns the truth about the Thief must be cut down. Everyone who knows will be struck down, either by Udraal, by the Thief himself, or more likely the Faceless Queen. She cannot afford Avalon discovering her scheme. If there is one person poised to strike at Avalon from within, perhaps fatally, it is the Thief of Lost Acheron. With us in play and with our interests aligned alongside the Faceless Queen’s, she knows that we will not expose him, and he cannot kill us the same way he can kill anyone else.”
But he can still go after Adam, Uva, and everyone else in Gate Piety, Shiv realized. He can go after anyone else we care about.
An explosion of levels went off inside Shiv as his Beast of the Ninth Circle regenerated and swelled with power. His mind rippled, aching with truth and unattuned mana, yet all the power the System bestowed was a paltry pittance before his dour realization. He had come assuming that Valor, risen back to the heights of his former glory, would allow them to struggle against this encirclement, against all the threats that were closing in.
Instead, they ended up pulling on the wrong thread. They unveiled the worst threat of all: they were encircled totally, completely, existentially. They'd all been encircled before they were even born. Valor Thann was just a facet, a shadow. The Thief of Lost Acheron was the only truth that waited, and if Valor completed himself…
Beast of the Ninth Circle 401 > 419
“Will our Valor die?” Shiv asked directly. “If he accepts that last part of himself, will he die?”
“A shadow can't die, but to answer your question in the figurative, I don't actually know what will happen to my father." Udraal went muted, and it was clear that he didn't want to consider such an outcome. “I would rather that you talk him down and persuade him not to seek his own wholeness. If he does reassemble himself, I don't think he will lose the memories he obtained while living his life as the Valor Thann that became my father. He scattered himself in many different ways, embedded himself in Necromancy and Animancy, and everyone who enacted the Ritual of the Dichotomous Soul bears a facet of the Thief inside of them. In that sense, everything is kept by the Thief. He's been stealing from all of us since the beginning of time and can therefore assemble any personality he desires, create a blank slate all of his own, a tabula rasa without any of the downsides.”
Udraal turned away from Shiv and looked at nothing in particular, instead facing an uncomfortable truth within. "But I do think that he will quell this version of himself. My father, Valor Thann, not the Thief of Lost Acheron, was a good man. The night I broke him, I forced him to see, and he begged me to end him. My father begged me to slay him, if only to keep me, his son, safe from the person he was.”
Udraal’s voice trembled almost imperceptibly toward the end. Now, he stared upon Shiv, his eyes burning, his body sunken in on itself, and though Shiv still sensed nothing in his core, there was an echo there, an echo of emotion, an echo of the boy who didn't want this to be his life.
The sourness of that echo caused every meal Shiv had been in the process of making in the kitchen to turn into a ruined mess. The smell alone was bad enough that it compelled an unspeakable sickness to ravage the flesh and heart.
“I have been honing my resolve for some time now,” Udraal began, voice low. “I have been preparing myself for this moment where I lose what remains of my father. I don't want to. I've already lost enough. I've already faced the loss of my mother and long since accepted the reality that she cannot be resurrected, for there is nothing there to resurrect. She's not dead at all. Yet, she's more dead than anyone else ever could be. And all I've come to realize is that I'm not ready, not for the Thief to return, and not to lose my father. But the Thief does not care. In the story I told you, the only part that stands absolutely true is his personality. He is a worshipper of the System. He is a devotee to struggle, to taking and learning and becoming greater, but only for himself. He can be interested in a person, yes. He will be fascinated with you, with Roland.”
Udraal took a step closer to Shiv, ignoring the vile stench seeping up from all across the kitchen as spasming clouds of black smoke. “But he has no interest in those who cannot be used to further his design. He does not care about those you love. He barely cared about me. My genius was the only thing that stayed his hand long enough to allow me my escape from this dimension. I will not be afforded such a chance again. But he will not be afforded an opportunity for the rest of time. Not with what I have planned, not with what I will do after Avalon falls. When you and I stand together against the Thief, Deathless, then maybe, just maybe, we will find a way to preserve my father and have him usurp the Thief itself.”
Yet those words sounded empty in a way Shiv couldn’t ignore. “If I have to fight him… How do I kill him?”
“I think you will die, over and over again, for millennia, if he desires it, but I do not think that he will. I think he will build you to the precipice of power, with legendary or unique skills across the board. He will sculpt you, or what parts of you he can reach with his Animancy. He will detonate you over and over again with his Necromancy, but he will not try to strike you down for good. He will not try to steal your skills and levels, not after the first time he's burned. Instead, he will fashion you into a weapon all his own, an unwilling disciple, if you will. Eventually, at some point down the line, I think you will find the answer to his demise through an eventual resurrection.”
Shiv couldn't help but gawk. His mouth actually fell open as he stared at Udraal, flabbergasted. "That's your plan? For me to hurt him a little bit the first time he blows me up to give me a bit of breathing room? Aside from that, I'm supposed to just die over and over again until he decides that he wants to use me more than he wants to abuse me?”
“The two are one and the same with him, really. He doesn't quite have emotions the same way you or…” Udraal paused. “The same way a person does. But his facets do. My mother had emotions. She had desires. She had dreams and wants. She thought she was an entire person when she entered this world. She was even granted an individual history unto herself. But both her and my father’s stories were shaped. Someone whispered to his supposed mother and gave upon her a prophecy: that he needed to be slain. The Thief of Lost Acheron is not like people. He will do as he wants, and you will suffer what you can. I made you the way I did to suffer as much as you can, infinitely, forever and ever, over and over again.”
“Yeah, and in doing so, you turned out to be his boy proper, didn't you?” Shiv spat. A globule of saliva impacted the ground between him and Udraal. “The shit you did to my mother. What you did to Rose, her unborn daughter…”
“Oh yes, yes, do accuse me of gazing into the abyss.” Udraal rolled his eyes. “There's a reason why I purged myself of emotions. There's a reason why I carved all weakness away from my heart. I sought the higher ways. I did everything I could to reinforce myself away from that broken little creature that I was before, and you will as well. You will thank me someday, Deathless, when you realize that this place, this realm, this thing made by the System, will break us if we remain human. We must not feel, and we must not make the same mistakes as those who came before.”
“Seems like… we already are.” Shiv felt his hand shaking—he stopped it. “I get it. The world hurt you bad, and you did everything you could to change yourself. But Udraal, this entire world, everything we suffer, everything that we're dealing with right now, it exists downstream of one High God's hubris. The Thief of Lost Acheron decided to partake in the Great One's game, and he shaped the world in the absence of his god, in preparation for striking down his god’s great enemy. But in this absence, you came and messed everything up, and now we're doing the same thing all over again. History’s just a series of mistakes by great powers committing the same follies over and over again—”
“Until someone gets it right,” Udraal almost hissed, and his eyes burned with such desire, such hope—all of it devoted to Shiv. “We will get it right. We will. You will. I have complete faith in you. I've been watching, studying you, you more than anyone else. You, alongside your friend. It will not be the god invested in him, nor any other, that delivers salvation to this world and resolves the System. We will make use of them. We will wield them and not be wielded in return. And we will get it right. You will get it right. I made you to get it right. So make your choice, Deathless, and know that whatever one it is, whatever pain it might cause, you'll survive it. You'll come back and rise above it. You'll rise above everything!”
The passion in his final declaration was impossible to ignore, but the pressure that came with it and the absurdity of their present circumstance left Shiv staggering back and leaning against his stovetop. “What about everyone else?” he muttered
Udraal opened his mouth, but then decided to smile sadly. “Oh, my dear, sweet creation, I'm so glad that you care. I'm so glad that you've chosen to care. I'm so glad, even if I don't actually feel it. But the thing you have to realize is… so many of them were fated for death from the start.”
The quiet that followed arrived like a sudden knife to the ribs down a dark alleyway.
The stabs continued as Udraal just stared on, his message finished yet incomplete at the same time. Shiv didn't know how much time passed, but at some point, Udraal took one step back, then another, and then he spun around and sprinted out of the room as if he didn't know how to say goodbye.
Shiv stared at the space Udraal occupied.
After a few more minutes had passed, he slowly mirrored a gesture Uva had performed but a few days prior. He cupped his hands together and pressed them against his mouth, running the tips of his fingers along the bridge of his nose and over his eyes as he slowly sagged down to the floor. “What… what are we going to do?” he muttered. “What are we going to do?”
His Harbinger burned bright, but for all its wisdom, for all its power, it burned for naught. “I… don’t know, Shiv. I don’t know.”