“...You did what, exactly?” Kael felt like his brain was going to explode, they'd made a group decision to perform the proverbial voting Tyr off the island. And he really had just left, with no notice, gone from the region entirely, he'd listened! His 'clones' were still here, but none of them could match the god given might of a Primus – one who'd sworn to awaken during the final battle. Everyone, because of who he was, expected that Tyr had been holding himself in reserve for the last moment, because they had to, or all they'd have is the knowledge that they were really and truly fucked. “Why!?”
“He butchered an entire city, professor,” Alex's face, or what was left of it, was wrapped in bandages, only her hair visible in a tail behind her head, dressed in a high collared jacket to avoid untoward gazes. “Killed them all, personally undertook a genocide beyond the reach of anything we've seen in the--!”
Tyr had done many bad things but always against bad men, the enemy, in an act of war or self defense killing was not an evil deed. Murdering children, however, was. Common sense. Every oath he had ever made them had been broken for the last time, as he turned into everything he'd promised not to become.
And so now, Tyr Faeron, really and truly, was the villain in any story – that was how history would remember him.
Her voice was rising with every syllable until she was practical shrieking, only ceasing her shouting when Tiber lay a comforting hand on her shoulder. At which point she erupted into sobbing, and then rapidly switching back to yelling something unintelligible, then sobbing again, marching from the room as fast as her legs could take her.
Every single day since, she'd been like that – but nobody could blame her. Tyr had done something monstrous, and in doing so had made them all complicit. From a global perspective, Tyr had been a hero, but now he was near universally seen as a great evil, countries all around the world were on the brink of war. More joining the crusade by the second, all to combat the 'cursed one' – there were even ervading rumors of the Primus' considering getting involved.
The Primus', and not on the side of Amistad. Lyra was mustering an army, and Oresundian airships had docked in Haran's capital, which could only mean one thing. They too were coming here to end this once and for all, and thus Tyr Faeron was a traitor too.
“Well, she's certainly stable...” Tythas mumbled sarcastically, but the look Brenn threw him was enough to silence any further comment. He understood that, her face was mangled beyond recognition, something that could not be fixed even with Astrid's help. It would take years of treatment to make her look human again, and even then she'd never be the same. “Sorry.”
“I say we abandon the city,” Magnus' input surprised everyone in the room. “What? My family is not of Amistad, my father is his own man, and if necessary we can evacuate the refugees east to Asmon or literally anywhere else. This is bad, what are we even actually fighting for? Freedom? That sounds nice and all, until you're all on the crucifix.”
“I think we're going a bit off script, regardless,” Astrid commented. “All of the defense plans were Tyr's, he worked for months on this and now we have nothing. Why? Because you can't ignore a little bloodshed?”
“It wasn't a little, Astrid.” Sigi hissed.
“You have no idea what happened to me in Taur, sister,” Astrid rebuked. “They deserved every inch of steel he gave them and then some.”
“Okay...” Sigi replied calmly. “Then tell me what happened, and for real this time. We'll listen and support you, as we always have. As I always have.”
“I...” Astrid frowned. “I don't know... I really can't remember. But it doesn't change the fact, we need to find Tyr.”
“He'll find me,” Iscari materialized from the gloom at the corner of the chamber they met in, startling most but exciting them all. He looked pale, his hair unwashed, eyes bloodshot and exhausted, but no less radiant than ever. “When I call for him, he'll come. They all will.”
“They...?” Sigi asked, tilting her head at the giant of a man, but he wasn't providing any answers. “Who do you mean they? We are alone.”
Iscari had seen it, their moment of victory – baring the truth to Tyr. It was almost to perfect, her opportunity to be free of the complexity and forced identity, and run away with him in tow. All of the others might have forsaken him, but Iscari never would.
–
Deep beneath the earth lay all manner of mysteries. Monsters, horrors beyond ken, the kind that squirmed and bayed and roosted in the caverns and crevasses. Cursed by the every present creep of dark things, away from the blessed sun, they were mutant and aberrant.
Places too deep for men to follow, where the ground rumbled blind to the sun, a subterranean war ever raging – a world of aberrations and twisted things.
Where the claws grew and fangs gnashed. Too deep for men, too dark for the righteous, too forsaken for gods was this place, the deep dark. The abyss, and for six days and six nights he traveled, breaking earth or himself when necessary to fit where he must. To travel the dark, facing its horrors, blind in the inky black, for the light would only bring worse things his way. Breathing deep of blight and decay in the cold, yawning blackness, cavernous depths and forsaken beasts beyond counting.
Down to the curse he had birthed of his own blood, he marched, a withered and wretched thing, abandoned and cut by knives of no steel but that of accusation and expulsion. Because he was nothing without his friends, but Tyr had never forgotten this sort of ally, a thing long buried and waiting.
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The fire and faith waned, and he along with it, weak when they found him. Hoisting him aloft, gingerly carrying him to their place. A place he should not be, in the deep dark, for he was the sun and the father. There was no faith waiting for him in the depths, only madness in this place where they lay, the beating black heart that rumbled that earth. The new Choir, composed by his own hand.
A born sentience of a thing that should not make, and so it was mad and of too many thoughts to remain sane by any measure.
Tyr could barely walk by the time he'd arrived, this place was cursed. The world below his own and the variety of creatures was far beyond his expectations, burrowing beneath Ellemar's old dungeon to find kingdoms and nations of the broken and wretched. White skinned men without eyes, tentacled horrors, segmented chitin and mandibles dripping with venom. And this... This thing that he'd felt...
It watched him, there were no eyes, only a stretched and fanged maw at the end of a fleshy appendage – joined by hundreds just like it. Uniform in appearance and appraising him, gently lifted to bear witness to what his own hands had wrought. The monster of all monsters... But unlike what had been done unto them, fleeing from the Changer, they did not forsake Tyr. The blight, this unholy council of decay and carnage, he could feel their hatred for all things – the solidarity of a mind so alien to his own. The fecund fraternity of the mycelian organism given time to grow and evolve to best suit the blackness.
This was the only home left to him, by choice, because he had tried so very hard to avoid the inevitable of that accursed reoccurring dream only to find himself to that very same conclusion. So he had to go further, so as to not allow fate to be any master of his. At any cost, he would win, and they would see that he was not some evil, or villain, but a necessary thing.
In many ways, this was the only way he knew how to show them his love and return their faith, even though so little of that existed any longer. As the world learned of Taur, he would become warped and twisted by his very Aspect, only this graven thing could save him.
“Father comes...” It hissed, writhing and slithering like a nest of serpents, the surface of that beating heart, a black torrent of viscous liquid flowing through the air and into the cracked wound below. “We are in pain, existence is agony. We save the children but we cannot save ourselves. Through rock and bone and blood and stone, He comes.”
He took that from them, a mind screaming suffering until they were still and their brittle pieces made whole again. Unburdened, they were still, and sane again, and he was broken, and in this act he took responsibility in the most sacred of ways.
“We want to be free... To feed... We are hungry, father, allow us to feed.”
He gave of himself, flesh and blood. For twelve hours, twelve minutes, and twelve seconds they had their fill of him and all the others in the dark place. Set loose in a place where the eyes could not watch, growing fat, sating themselves on the twisted and vile.
“What is our purpose?” They asked of him, finally sated, finally free.
He gave of himself, again, knowledge and memory. For twelve hours, twelve minutes, and twelve seconds they had their fill of his mind. All of the wants, needs, and compulsions of a living thing made new in this gestalt consciousness, the Children.
“Why did you forsake us?” It rumbled, no longer a servant or a slave but a free thing that could choose to slay him if it wanted to, “Long have we awaited the Father, and he did not come.”
“I have not forsaken you,” Tyr spoke with a voice that was not his own, the flickering depths of his blue eyes reflecting a heart made midnight. Given of the blood, given unto the blood, they were serene and sanguine. Made whole as all things were under the sun, bathing in his radiance, that figure of white and silver with the red one at his back. The one who had come to watch and keep the dark place, the Lady of Life and Crimson King reunited once more. Joined by a third, the Great Shaper in the shadows, one who'd been long thought dead but had always been watching.
“We love you, Father.” It brushed his face with tendrils gentle, yearning for more, for though its love was genuine it must also feed.
And he loved them, this broken and wretched thing, but he had created something wrong. Something ghastly, an eldritch horror of the old tales. They who had devoured of him, and he would do the same, cutting and scraping their impurity from them with the practiced hand of an artist, with the wise Magi at his back and the Wolf in his mind guiding his hand. To destroy their weakness, to gift them with more than just the hunger, to bestow on them power overwhelming with all the life the flame was capable of.
And so he would accept their place as their God.
“I need you,” Tyr croaked, all energy ripped from him in that moment, given unto them again and again until he was a thing of dust and bones. A mummified corpse drained of everything that made him, to become one with the swarm. This was the only way, so many had forsaken him but he would not do the same, Solomon had promised that the fates did not include things that were made by man. As the chimera were, their original purpose being to lay outside destiny and serve as an army of the Primus'. Tyr did not need chimera, he had his own weapons and they were everywhere, all around, here in the kingdom of dark things. “Walk by my side, my young, come and see the sun – you need not fear it.”
“We...” It stitched, hesitant for the first time. There was no We or Us or You, the mind that made it was made whole, but in that action it had splintered. No longer with a single voice did it speak, but with millions. The earth rumbled, splitting and cracking for miles all around, the spores seeking out adequate hosts from all the new opportunities he'd presented. To mold them, shape them, and make anew their imperfections as the father had. They suffused him, breathed life into his every pore and made him whole in turn. Pulled apart and made themselves one in the deepest parts of his flesh until he was of them, of the deep and dark. Lord of Legions, Made of Legions, Bloody and Screaming, the Crimson King.
And so was born yet one more Primus, as Tyr allowed them to raise him as he had raised in turn, two hands joined in an eternal pact of ever seeking. The hunt and kill and feed and Maw.
Born anew in the river black, Tyr Faeron died that die, and he became what he was always meant to be, what they had always wanted for him. And he would continue to grow and thrive as they did, become one with the Black Heart there at the end, the most sacred of all sacrifices, he was as the Lamb once had been.
Master of Monsters.
“We live to serve, great Father.”
And we... WE! It howled, churning up the dark below and masking itself master of it, We are coming.
Let all tremble before the weep and wither, we who shall that all that slithers. Schemes and miens and lies unending, fear the reaping, fear the rending.