The Agnosi lied to us… Keep lying to us… I saw the truth. I saw it when my Daemon came to me. It didn’t–it was so hurt–all those lives inside screaming remembering the world that was–the gods were anchors and the god inside me was awake but I was the virus–I am the virus and I keep bleeding over into it and it is me and we wanted to become become become–
The Agnosi lied! They lied lied lied to us all–gods–people–all! The Frame is another world but there are cracks bridges things to flow and rush and run and the Frames will usurp reality are more than subreality–it can eat. It dreams inside you but it’s a crippled dreamer–something is missing something is broken something something something...
I dream of the Silken Spiral. I dream of it. Dream of the one that built it. The Broken Weaveress and the first daughters who fed themselves to the fire who burn still and burn and dream with the Weaveress who woke inside but but it was we and we were joined but wanted to part and break but joined and consciousness melded man-can’t-be-gods–
No! No… please don’t take my Soul from me–my fire–the truest FIRE! The only thing that is real, we are all dust and distortions in the tapestry let me be real please let me be real–
-[Redacted], “The Dissection of a Daemon,” Firmament of Voidwatch
10-21
The Shattering of Mazza’s Junction
For a fleeting heartbeat, as time choked down the pipe of his surging reflexes, Avo beheld the form of the Daemon and found himself entranced.
The scene unfolding was one of fission and dichotomy. Amidst a ballet of swirling spatial fractals, surrounded by falling pieces unlatching from the megablock, a being of pulsing flame drew shape from glass. It was a near-perfect mimicry of the Twice-Walker in structure, but the nuances were all wrong.
Abrel and the other Highflame Godclads were missing somewhere in this chaos. He had no trace of their whereabouts or estimation of when they would resurrect, but they had to be in this chaos somewhere.
For now, though, he was alone.
Just him, his allies, and that which his cog-feed was screaming to him about.
ANATHEMA OF REFLECTION, THE TWICE-WALKER AWAKENED
Separated by five hundred feet, the Daemon came free with the cascading debris, emerging from a wound in the megablock. Opposite to it, Jhred Greatling rose as if drawn up by a counterweight.
Flesh and hissing fire licked out at the air between the cracks lining its body. There was a blinding glow crackling within it like its quavering exterior was straining to hold a furnace back from a meltdown. Finally, a twisting loop connected it to Jhred–its form unveiled in the real for the first time that Avo could remember.
Time itself bubbled into form, the faintness of a translucent dragon echoing beneath its waves. Scales containing writhing bodies and grasping forms called out the world beyond, each screaming proclamations and oaths of devotion.
“Praise be the King of Mirrors!”
“Praise be! Praise be the twice-fold path!”
“The treaded routes stand open! We need but follow!”
“Praise be!”
“Praise be!”
And with each revolution the dragon made, the head of the serpent eating away eternally at its own body, the flame maintained itself.
Avo watched as he plunged, darting through fractures like space, twisting from place to place as anomalous reflections sent him in myriad directions. Enraptured by what he beheld, he barely regarded the words of his Woundshaper.
“So. Such is what clothes me–succor of the unceasing variety. These are the faces of our worshippers, then? Bound infused and reinfused into our fire? Delightful.” It gave a low, bemused laugh. “And to think I held such… unexplained loathing for the chrono-autosarcophagics.”
Such was the first time he heard his Heaven process its dislike for the dragons, but such things were of tertiary notice as Daemon–or what Avo assumed was the Daemon–began to reel Jhred Greatling toward it.
“Mo-ther!’ It called out, voice chiming like a million-million bells swinging in unison across the rooftops of a city. “For…. for mother…”
Again, it pulled, and Jhred, shattered in mind and spirit, merely bounced as he was drawn through the vortex of swirling chaos. Between them, tangled within the once-empty epicenter of the dragon’s coil, Soulfire began to flicker and build. Glass began to shudder and crack. Reflections twisted and jumped and blended as bindings shifted into glass. More of the remaining megablock vitrified.
Snapping free from the distraction, Avo shaped his body and constructed propellers as he attempted to navigate the maelstrom of twisting mirrors and crumbling matter. He couldn’t go too fast or the ones within him would splatter. He couldn’t shift to his Galeslither for there was no way he could react in time to the unfolding chaos around him.
WARNING: DAEMON DETECTED
->ASSOCIATED HEAVEN: [TWICE-WALKER] - FOURTH SPHERE
->REND CAPACITY [TWICE-WALKER]: 63%
SPATIAL METAPHYSICS UNRAVELING
REND SPILLOVER DETECTED
Daemon pulled again and Jhred approached. Three more times and they would be joined. The flickering Soulfire flared this time, blasting out a tide that flensed the structures of reality, undoing the fabric of all that was and exposing the foundational symbology knitted beneath the bones of existence.
The surge crashed against Avo’s Frame, the uncanny sensation of ontology scraping against ontology like his bones were being dragged against Jhred’s.
Space came asunder, like brittle glass flung against a wall. Domains bled over into domains as the Jhred and the Twice-Walker screamed, their voice a union of pain - a divine echo grafted to the voice of the man wailing unwanted epiphanies.
Keeping to the form of the Woundshaper, his surroundings broke into a chaotic kaleidoscope of reflective tunnels. The block was dissolving, disintegrating as vitrification spread and more glass shattered free, sailing masses of collapsing infrastructure. Lines of blood and water remained halted, stained with the paint of eldritch fire. Jhred’s Hell had broken a sacrament in trying to reap the substance of fluids for his singularity.
However that worked.
Avo still knew little regarding the nature of Daemons or hubrises. Only that he should avoid ever trespassing into their categories. Nothing cements a lesson like beholding the hammer of consequence coming down upon another.
Glinting shards and all things bearing any remote semblance of reflectivity swirled like lashing asteroids as they began to build at the heart of the cataclysm. Expanding a protective lattice around his Woundshaper, Avo unmade all matter he made contact with. He risked no concussive impacts for within his ontology were three passengers.
Three mortal, fragile passengers.
It was a miserable thing, being bereft of a Frame and its Heavens.
Grits of rubble and entire sections of blood smeared against his subverting touch all the same, spilling over him like rain upon a windshield. Reaching out with a tendril, he tried to gather his bearings and recapture a sense of direction, to orient and pursue his target. Yet, as he reached out to liquefy a rising screen of glass he found himself slipping through instead, tumbling out from the other side as he began melting through the insides of the megablock.
The diminutive figure of a falling person was silenced as it vanished into his blood. One of the few remaining survivors from the massacre earlier, Avo guessed.
They hadn’t escaped fast enough.
THAUMIC OUTPUT - 3671 THAUM/c
GHOSTS: [11566]
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 34%
His Rend was climbing fast, rising by a percentage point every perceived second. He needed to find a place of calm to vent–to regain his awareness of–
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An inhuman shriek rang out from the glass. If Avo was still of flesh, the noise would have deafened him instantly. Manifested as his Heaven, however, his domains perceived for him, new senses scaffolded upon baseline ones, the thickness of his blood holding against the shivering shockwaves as more glass burst apart around him.
Layers of walls parted before his latticed perimeter. Obstacles poured away into gushes of red, unmade by the nature of his being.
He burst free in an onrush of erupting blood, emerging like a flechette ripping free from a body. Tons of mass followed in his wake, transmuted by the touch of his being, and even with the pace of time castrated by his Haemokinetically charged reflexes, there was simply too much happening at once for him to track. His Phys-Sim was screaming and even widening his woven perimeter often warned him too late of encroaching glass.
He angled and twisted as reflections funneled strips of being out of his control. More than once he lassoed severed sprays of crimson cut free from his being back into place using his Canon of Harmonize, light spearing out from atop his spire.
Yet, as he avoided another dozen pieces that could have left his interior hollow, that could have killed one of his allies on impact, he saw it. Salvation came as a tumbling, spinning island breaking free from a vast fracture between folds of space. From behind it tumbled the flickering visage of a glitching sun–the one that once loomed over the island–that now basked everything in shadow.
From out of nowhere, cerulean blue ocean water rushed over Avo like a deluge while grains of sand bounced from his shell. Three hundred feet away, Jhred Greatling’s private retreat–or a neat bisected part of it–rushed outward toward Avo with six dormant golems drawn in its wake and a rain of drones.
Including the ones carrying the mini-nukes.
GOLEMS DETECTED: SANGEIST X2; FULGERHUND X1; SHADOWCRAWLER X3
MICRONUCLEAR DRONE SEQUENCES DETECTED - SIGNATURES X5
That left three of the drones missing amidst a swarm hurling free through the air. Accelerating his propellers slightly more, Avo constructed veins of blood to fasten and cocoon Draus and the others inside him. He kept them close to his core–where his physical body once directed the blood before his recent… maturation.
Casting out a net of spreading hands, he caught and gathered what he could. He liquefied drones and pulled the warheads inside him. The act was a risk, but it was better than letting them sail free through the open air. With how they were procured, Avo didn’t want to risk death by proximity to thermonuclear detonation.
A memory flashed through his mind as he recalled Zein firing a certain missile at him.
Yeah. Best avoid that.
After securing the warheads, Avo focused on jacking the tips of his tendrils into the loci of the golems. Spearing through the air, every inch of blood he lengthened away from his body was mass diverted away from structural stability. He was still lurching wildly through the air–not truly flying but not really falling either.
In the real, less than two seconds had passed, but he knew his time was limited. The other Godclads–if they had more than one cycler–were possibly in the process of resurrecting. The manner which Zein killed them left much to question–if they were truly dead, he felt no release from their Frames no sign of thaumaturgic disturbances.
Accessing the golems, he subsumed the Sangeists first, drawing their Heavens into his Soul with an outward ripple of his Frame, his fire rushing out like water caressing a beach before pulling the grain back out into the deep of his subreality. He immediately felt the hollowed shells of the old gods plunge into his liminal depths, much to the delight of his Woundshaper.
Accessing the functions of the Fulgerhund and the Shadowcrawlers, he drew the golem inward as he anchored himself to the spiraling island with a haemokinetic cord. Pulling himself close, he used it as cover so that he might use it to draw him closer to where Jhred was. He noticed a blinding shimmer of Soulfire six hundred feet away over the toppling megablock and–
The space around him twisted again. More fractures opened, shards of existence turning to glass turning pathways elsewhere. Another blastwave of Soulfire crashed down as part of the island erupted into glass. Part of the room where Jhred met his “benefactor” at Kaswarg’s Grove shot past the island.
It seemed all the pathways the Twice-Walker had connected were now spilling over into each other, drawing physical locations through spatial collapses. Avo wondered if this was the nature of the Daemon–the Heaven inverting its liminal environment with reality itself, or was there something more to this?
Suddenly, the island behind him split, and he felt his cord snap free. A fractal plunged, edge first pointed to him–
Time around him echoed. Darting out from the flow of his blood, a variant of Zein shot free and cut. Her glaive whistled free, faster than even Avo’s enhanced senses could perceive. His mind lurched as he watched her parry aside the spatial anomaly as if swatting a fly.
“Seventeen.” Her words came as a discordant whisper like they had been spoken to him in the past, and he was only hearing them now. As soon as she emerged, she faded beneath the streams of time. “And put the Guard-Captain in the Fulgerhund. She will know what to do.”
Heeding her word with haste, he planted the Fulgerhound–a spear-shaped golem lined with eighteen arcing coils along its concentricity–and opened its underside hatch. With a nudge of his internal constructs, he inserted Draus and the others within the golem with as much care and gentleness as he could muster and sealed it again. Considering the speed he was operating, it would take some time for even Draus to catch up.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 77%
And he was going to need to vent soon. All his protective measures, constructs, and haemokinesis were creating entropy at an unprecedented rate. If he found the chance to die, perhaps he could find some method to upgrade his Heavens and Hells again.
Eyeing the Shadowcrawlers and the lashing beams of light, he growled and subsumed the golem as well. They would provide ample additions to his Galeslither, perhaps. He couldn’t use them for much of anything at present with how fleeting the passing shadows were. Might as well add them as canons afterward.
A trickle of thoughtstuff flowed up from the locus of the Fulgerhund into his blood. His ghosts carried the message budding across the Nether-lag caused by their perceptive differentials. With his former cargo securely contained within the golem, he accelerated faster, his propellers drilling through the sound barrier as he picked up speed.
Draus was augmented. Essus too. Chambers was an acceptable loss if it came down to it. Avo could still get what he needed to examine from the ex-enforcer’s ghost. He veered off course almost immediately, but he was still moving back toward where the Daemon was drawing Jhred back into himself.
And then a near-perfectly translucent pane of glass glitched into existence in front of him, sparking free from reflections on droplets of rain. It opened as light erupted along its core and another place shown through–this location was an open chasm of devastation that led out into another portion of the city.
Flipping his spinning propulsion constructs, he fought to slow himself, but his Phys-Sim revealed what he already expected: His velocity was too high and this was too close.
Maybe Zein would–
+Get in the golem.+ Draus’ thoughtcast had finally loaded into his ghosts and Avo's mind twisted. He didn’t fully know the functions of the golems, but both Zein and Draus seemed aware of its use.
Shrugging aside anxiety, he released the majority of his mass before threading his mortal form back into shape within the Fulgerhound. Spilling into a cockpit too narrow for his size, he immediately felt his bones snap painfully backward as the intensity of the g-forces bore down at him all at once, his perception of time snapping back to normalcy like a rubber-band.
He choked as he toppled back, bouncing off a gimbal and elbowing Essus in the chest.
Then, just as swiftly, the pull of acceleration faded and static tickled his body.
“Avo,” Draus cried, not bothering to turn her head around, “get ready.”
Lashing out with his blood, he jacked into the locus that Draus was leaning against. Exo-sensory data filled his cog-feed as multiple systems and details painted his mind with a swirl of colors. They were jumping between stretches of reflection as an arcing bolt of lightning. With each turn or transition, a number indicator diminished. This Fulgerhund had eighty-four jumps left before its Rendsinks were full. Only four more jumps before the external simulation showed them reaching the Daemon.
Warning klaxons screamed through the golem’s internal systems as Avo linked his mind with Draus as well. +Going to eject out using my Galeslither when we approach. Kill Jhred. Absorb his Frame before the Rupture happens.+
Draus’ head snapped to shoot an alarmed glance at him. +Rupture? There’s gonna be a Rupture?+
Right. His few seconds had been a lot longer than hers.
+Just get ready. Frame’s going to be yours in a minute.+
A note of genuine trepidation sang out from Draus. +Yeah… sure+
She still didn’t truly want it, to live in endless loops and forget the weight of life and become like Jhred’s mother–all power, all folly.
Nothing was ever easy, but some choices were harder. Remembering the fragile lives he cupped, he pondered the alternative for her. What was a Frame but more chances to choose? To learn?
But it had to be her choice. It had to be.
One jump. Two jumps. Three.
Four.
He whistled free from the hissing gaps his blood left within the structure of the golem. With how rough he punched through to get at the locus, it was a miracle the entire thing didn’t decompress.
Gusting out into the screaming form of a tri-headed steed, the Galeslither brayed loud as the Daemon looked up, regarding him for the first time. This close, they were bare to each other, with no place to hide. Jhred was mere feet away from touching it. Avo didn’t know what that would cause, but with how the anomalies grew with each tug of the dragon, he didn’t want to find out.
Glass tore out from the Twice-Walker’s impossible twin like ten thousand surface-to-air missiles of all shapes and sizes. He felt them cut up through the air, an unseen hand guiding them as they sought him out. The matter would not touch him, but if it managed to form a gateway just in front of him–
The Fulgerhund slammed into the Daemon, spearing it into place upon what few plasteel bones remained of the megablock.
“Mo-ther!” the Daemon and Jhred screamed. “I want to be whole! Give–give me back my mother-body!”
Inside, the Woundshaper understood something. “My broken kin… they’re tapping into the mind of the Frame’s host. The Heaven is remembering–using the mortal to channel its stripped ego… It’s stripped thoughts…”Avo didn’t have time to consider the implications of what that meant. Jhred’s body was carved and sliced by countless pieces of shrapnel. One of his arms was folded the wrong way at the shoulder, most of his suit and skin denuded along the air. The eye Avo ate had grown back, but the other now had a piece of rebar jutting out of it.
Funneling himself down Jhred’s throat, Avo took no more chances with his target’s death. There was too much to risk with a Rupture, and his hunger demanded to be sated now–too long had he denied himself the life of this Guilder.
Jhred, for his final words, gave but a rasping whimper as sense seemed to return to him–if but for that briefest moment. “Not worthy… never worthy.”
And Avo expanded the currents inside him, prying Jhred Greatling asunder.
Just in time to hear Abrel’s despairing scream rise above the cacophony.