"Oh Great One's, ye eternal kings of the expanse, ye devourers of solstice, and ye timeless wanderers of the void, bequeath upon this lowly believer of yours a fragment of thine infinite knowledge and everlasting will!!"
1,2,3,4......*sigh*
A slightly disheartened sigh bounced across the unhomely looking bone white walls of the small, plainly decorated room. The only visible furniture inside, a thin yet comfy looking bed and an uneven wooden table, stacked high with books had been pushed over to a corner in order to make room for an extremely out of place looking inky circular carpet with a curious design that covered about half the tiled floor.
Upon further inspection one could notice it may have once been blank, yet had been covered in so many layers of complex symbols and runes to the point it could be considered black now. The symbols formed a ring containing a multitude of smaller patterns inside, which then crisscrossed each other on five equidistant points, resulting in a star like diagram. In the space at the middle of this star, the only place there were no weird symbols, a young man donning a pitch black robe that covered his face was standing, his arms reaching upwards as if he wished to embrace the low ceiling.
Whatever he was trying to do having failed, his garbed arms flopped back down to his sides and he looked down at his feet seemingly embarrassed with his own performance.
"That was another bust huh" he whispered quietly to himself. This same...ritual had been repeated diligently with different phrasing for the last few months and yet the young man didn't seem to have the slightest thought of giving up any time soon. He slowly extracted himself from the circle, careful not to damage the impressive pentagram, and strode unmotivated to the well-hidden door near the bottom right side of his chambers which led to the bathroom, if you actually call it that.
Inside was a simple sink with a slightly loose tap, a quite clean looking flush toilet unusable for anyone with claustrophobia and a showering area too small to stretch your arms in. The young man, not even noticing these poor accommodations turned towards the sizable scratched mirror that hung above the sink and observed his reflection. A thin but tall figure covered in an overbearing black cloak stared back at him. He lifted one arm and pushed the headgear back, revealing the face of a displeased, slightly childish looking seventeen-year-old boy, Maiel.
He bore dark black hair that was a confusing mix of both curly and wavy as well as slight tan, his physique was average yet somewhat tall and the one thing that did stick out about him was his heterochromatic eyes, one being golden whereas the other was pitch black.
As far as Maiel was concerned though, he was a perfectly average guy. Someone that you can pass by and never notice, a 'side character', this was how he proudly labelled himself. Maybe it was due to the regular meetings he had with his ‘gods’, or just a part of his personality from the beginning, but Maiel treated life like it was like a novel, a boring novel which he had no desire being the protagonist of. His goals were far greater…and far worse for his sleep schedule.
Taking off his robe, which he and carefully laying it inside the table drawer that doubled as a wardrobe, Maiel fell onto his bed, which creaked threateningly, and pulled a random book out of the messy pile laying on the table. His fatigued actions showing how sleepy he really was.
Cosmic Mythos: Outer God Encyclopedia
"Ah a personal favorite...." he muttered stifling a yawn, running his hand over the emboldened text on the cover and the creepy drawings of grotesque flesh creatures covering the sides
"Hmph, they've never seen a true Cosmic Entity up close before.... well neither have I, but they don't look thaat bad".
Other than the slight disagreement about the art though, the encyclopedia for the most part stays true to the roots and does a pretty good job describing cosmic beings, taking a lot of inspiration of P.H Sovecraft's works which was always a good selling point. After flipping through a few pages and adding a snarky remark whenever an illustration came up, Maiel crawled to the edge of the bed and stretched his hand out, opening the porthole shaped window to let some air into his cramped apartment.
(*swoosh*) A sudden turbulent breeze blew in at immediately, knocking his hair back and flipping a few pages of the encyclopedia. Maiel stuck his head out of the small opening and looked around, appreciating the sight before him that seemed to never get old. The night air was cool and humid making the neon rosebulb lights of Sou’Crest city pop with color, below the apartment complex sarcastically named by the downtown folk ‘Bloc Tower’ due the nature of its rooms, a maze of streets and pedestrian walks could be seen crisscrossing outwards towards the South Reach lagoon, the second largest body of water within Leperium, that along with the West and North Reach lagoons formed the Tri-Mana Concentrate, a rough triangle within which the heaviest concentration of mana in the entire country was found. It was both a blessing and a curse as well as the secret to Leperium’s success and the reason it’s soltech technology was a step above all of its rivals. As for why it exists? Most researchers from the SolEye Research Facility say that it has something to do with the lagoons...
Sou’Crest wasn’t exactly the best place in Leperium due to it being right next to the southern swamp zone of the TMC zone, but if you overlook the monthly siren calls and explosions that take place outside the shiny mhorce-alloy walls, it wasn’t too bad. Its amenities were quite decent too, being one of the three lagoon cities, Sou’Crest was also the home of the prestigious Southern Imperial Training Institute, one of the best academies in the country, only topped by the likes of the Northern Institute situated in the capital, Astrigale.
(*Screee*) A strange sound of caught Maiel’s ears and he whipped his head back down and scanned the pedestrian walkways. Sou’Crest was definitely a safer place than the Idiad Trade City or Al’Troug, but that didn’t mean it was completely clean either especially near the outskirts where he lived. As Maiel watched in half-hearted interest, a few street urchins wielding soltech batons delivered the final blow to the head of a Wk street cleaner machina and dragged its spindly body off into a dark alleyway, deep smiles on their faces. “Poor thing” said Maiel under his breath, the scene reminding him of the brutally dissected frames of konstructs he had found while going on walks in his neighborhood, with all their mana cores, motherboards and motors ripped out.
Pulling his head back in, Maiel fell back into his bed and reminisced as to when the machina were first released to the public. At first everyone thought that Sol’Eye had once again developed another miracle of soltech engineering and that Lemperium would enter a Golden Age, yet those hopes swiftly died out as they saw how useless machina were. By giving up the large bulky frames of their cousins the ever famous DE Frame lineup, the core of the Lepirum Armodus and instead opting for a more human like design with thin mana enhanced carbon fiber limbs, the Wk machina had almost no fighting potential, and even if it did, the whole concept of a machina was flawed to begin with. Unlike other konstructs like golems or KATs, which simply followed orders given by a master, a machina was designed to somehow ‘have its own intelligence’, or an Artificial Will as Sol’Eye called it. Obviously this was impossible to accomplish and machinas ended up being expensive to produce and performing almost no better than a humanoid golem. The project stopped receiving government funds meaning very few improvements have been made to machinas over the past few years. They now mostly found doing things like picking trash and polishing windows.
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“Though what if they did work…” muttered Maiel, relishing the majestic image of an undying sentient army of steel in his head, then clicked his tongue in frustration. “What’s the use? The great ones could probably blow it all up with a blink of their eye… or eyes.” Wondering what could ever be strong enough to threaten his gods, Maiel’s gaze landed on the antique brass clock that showed the time under the pile of occult literature and textbooks on kontruct creation. He gulped “Two o clock?!” The Institute classes began sharp at 7 tomorrow, he couldn’t afford to be late on day one! Thinking that he needed to arrange his ritual plan better, Maiel switched off the rosebulb under the bed and drew his cozy blanket up to his chin, it too had been the subject of his horrendous graffiti and was covered in drawings of eyes and bizarre geometric polygons.
“Finally going to the Institute tomorrow huh” wondered Maiel. It had been a dream of his to go to the prestigious academy when he was a child, thinking that he could become a DE warframe pilot and join the Armodus. This was all thrown out the window though when he met them. That said he still decided to join the Institute, not for pilot training but as a konstruct engineer, mostly due to his parent’s endless torment but it would be nice to have a golem sidekick to help with his important research… “Make enough of them and maybe I could start up a cult, hahahaaa” giggling at his own joke, Maiel clasped his hands and chanted his nightly sermon “Oh great striders of the endless void, ye ancient devourers of solstice, grant me thine blessing and acknowledgement!”
He then turned to his side roughly and tried to sleep, if it was a few months ago he would have rigidly waited with bursting excitement and a silly smile plastered on his face to be transported into the expanse and catch a glimpse of them, yet he had no received no dreams in the past seven months and was starting to get worried. What if they had forgotten him… why would such beings wouldn’t care about someone of his station… what if…
(*Rooaaaerrr!*) A loud booming roar in his head pulled Maiel out of his thoughts instantly. Tha-That was! (*Rooooooooaa*) As the booming noise subsided a series of hoarse cries followed behind it. A slightly crazed expression crawled onto Maiel’s face as his vision was also covered in burning runes and shifting symbols. It was happening again hahahahaaa! He shot back, almost instinctually to a ridged positon like he used to and slowly lifted his arms up in an embracing gesture, making more symbols to appear and make the runes glow brighter. When his arms finally reached the zenith, the runes became blindingly bright and his vision went grey.
An endless reach of space in all directions, devoid of any life, only lit up by the occasional stellar body burning brightly… the expanse. Maiel shuddered as the cold hit him, forcing him to grit his teeth and remind himself it was a dream. He then gently moved his arms back down from their position, allowing him to take in the full view…
A red supergiant nearby cast an ominous light on the scene, almost blending into their surroundings, yet being impossible to miss, hovering closely near one another, beings of power which cannot be measured, possessing a language that could bridge time and space, creatures of indefinable magnitude who ate stars like it was normal and made mockery of the very idea god could exist, the Enigmarus.
Maiel watched them with frantic reverence, they hadn’t forgotten him! Those rituals were all worth it! He looked around at each of them, long sleek horizontal bodies with inky black exteriors covered in an absurd amount of things, ending in many long tentacles. On either side eight- no ten arms jutted out, two large ones in front being especially prominent. A slight bulge at the front suggesting the presence of a jaw… Or at least this is as much as he could see, they never came close to him, preferring to ignore their little guest and go about feasting. But something was different today… there were no stars nearby to eat, and the beings showed no sign of moving, instead gathering closely and randomly letting out shrill, sorrow cries into the void.
For what seemed like days for Maiel, he floated around in the expanse staring at his mighty overlords who seemed to be having a deep conversation with each other based on the bright runes that would sometimes appear around their arms only to vanish before he could observe them, being slightly confused as to why they hadn’t sent him back yet, Maiel waited like an obedient golem. After a bit longer though, he finally caught a glimpse of movement from the Enigmarus closest to him, it slowly extended stretched out it’s many squid like tendrils and began waving them about, moving away from the rest of the group, the others followed suit slowly distancing themselves until only a single one was left, it didn’t seem like it had any plan to follow the rest, in fact it… wasn’t moving at all…it was degrading…WHAT!!
As Maiel watched stupefied, the lone Enigmarus started breaking apart, it’s exterior glistening as what looked like blood red gems spilled out of it… What was happening! Suddenly, something wet hit him in the back, sending him flying forward towards the corpse. Maiel, still in his daze looked back to see a long tail retracting backward towards a Enigmarus. This was- what were they trying to do… no, more importantly how could this happen! It-it was an Enigmarus, a being that ridiculed the concept of power, nothing should be able to stand against it!
The corpse got closer and closer, finally giving Maiel a glimpse of what a Enigmarus actually looked like…it’s exterior looked scaly yet semi-aqueous…the things he had seem earlier were and metallic looking spikes, lots and lots of big and small spikes covered its whole body in a somewhat symmetrical pattern, it also seemed there were hooks at the end of the each tail,… speaking of the tails, there were black liquidly hands covering their whole length, in fact there were hands covering all the spikes too. It also seemed his previous assumption about the bulge at the front being a head was correct, the huge split in the middle which led to what could only be called a mouth proved that…This scene may have been horrifying or unnerving to most, but to Maiel, this only further reinstated his belief that the Enigmarus were incomprehensibly and boundlessly strong…so, what could have done this! This is when he noticed something jutting out from a side, too unsymmetrical and large to be a spike. On further inspection he saw it was a silver spear, faint runes on the surface dimly glowing with a pure, sort of… holy energy.
Was this the tool of blasphemy that dared to strike down a God?! As he was watching it, the spear tilted to the side and began dissolving rapidly in the sparkly red liquid that was now gushing out at an astronomical rate, then shattered into flakes of light. Suddenly, right after the spear had left its body, as if come back to life, two massive glistening pools on either side of the head snapped open, Maiel watched with goosebumps all over his body as the eyes spun around quickly and all landed on him. He could’ve sworn the sides of the mouth twisted upwards slightly, and one lanky main hand which wasn’t leaking as much liquid quietly lifted itself up towards Maiel.
It stopped meters away from his head and a smaller liquid arm grew out of it, coming forward and touching Maiel’s face lightly. Though his entire body was begging to wrest control and run away as fast as possible, Maiel dug his fingernail’s deep into his skin to keep himself steady. A bit of blood fell from his palm, but Maiel didn’t even notice it as the hand lowered itself from this head down to his chest area, then slowly pulled back… “no wait don’t lea-” (*swish*) The hand shot forward and pierced straight through Maiel’s chest. “Euhh!” Maiel instinctively screamed out loud due to the suddenness of it all. Something then flowed into Maiel’s body, something hot… very hot! Runes appeared from the edges of his eyes and rapidly covered everything once more, these runes were different though, Maiel felt each one contained eons worth of knowledge, so much so that just trying to focus on one made his head screech in pain. He felt more and more wet hands caressing him, eyes and mouths forming on their tips whispering words that seemed to distort the space around him. As the last of the burning liquid was poured into Maiel, he felt his consciousness finally collapse, the hands left him as the runes were covered by the shifting symbols, signaling his return. A final word was whispered by a hand near his ear: “EnUvan’hya” which seemed to automatically translate itself in his head “I Bless the Inheritor.”