+So you want me to do what?+
+I’m trying to make someone. I want you to be a part of them.+
+...Someone? Jaus fucking Avandaer, Strix, I… look, I’m thankful for all that you’ve done for me and all that you taught me. Hells, you’ve been more of a dad to me than the actual half-strand that pulled a pump and dump on mom but… I don’t think I’m ready for our relationship to go here. I mean, for fuck’s sake, consang, I don’t even know you in the real. I’m not just mailing you my fluids so you can grow a juv.+
[Soft laugh] +I don’t mean it that way. It’s not just you and me, anway–+
“Holy fuck. No, Strix. No. I do not consent to whatever gene-juice cocktail bastard you’re trying to breed into existence. No.+
[Laughing continues] +I’m going to miss provoking you, kid.+
+Miss me? Strix, are you in some kind of shit right now?+
+Well, I’ll be dead in a few minutes, so this is as much a farewell call as it’s a favor.+
+Fuck. Where are you? I’m gonna jack over. There’s a Fallwalker–Stormsparrow. She owes me favors. Big favors. I can burn it–get you out–+
+Listen to me, I need you to cast a few memories over through this session. Make them moments between us. I’m trying to grow the sequences together and make them all seem more… real–+
+Are you in the Warrens? The Tiers? Stormsparrows good anywhere. She can cross Idheim in a footstep. She’ll be there–+
+Rabbit. Raldi. There are things I don’t want you to know. There’s a war I don’t want you involved in yet. I enjoyed our time together and watching you grow and all that. A lot of things are going to be happening in a few months. If someone shows up one day thinking your home is theirs, tell them what you know about me. You’ll understand then.+
+No, fuck you, consang. DeepNav ping now. You don’t get to cast and die. You’re not some snuffer trash–+
[GHOSTLINK DISCONNECTED]
+Strix? Strix?+
-The “Strix” and White-Rab
13-16
The Flames Awakened (I)
Something was wrong.
As Emotion cast his perception upon the creature’s mind, he could see that its ghosts were afire. From the edge of its halo’s accretion to each individual strand of phantasmal substance, unnatural flames gnawed within the Nether.
Fires outlined by a pulsing film of emptiness.
Disquiet and fascination became bedfellows in that instant; the priest realized this construct was unknown to him. Something of Defiance’s personal design, perhaps?
Though the ghoul’s thoughtstuff oozed and burst like a flickering bubble as it struggled to awaken from its mind-stunned stupor, its memories seemed almost entirely intact, and impossibly, the vanquished sequences were being cauterized back into existence. Ghosts regrew as if branches of living incandescence, each reaching for each as brambles thickened, forming new junctions.
+Emotion,+ Peace said, voice taut with baffled rage. +The fuck are we looking at? What the fuck happened?+
A gulf existed in their minds as well, but the absence of Joy revealed enough. A War-Mind had been used. Likely as a demonstration to cow Defiance’s upstart “offspring” into capitulation.
And render it easier to subvert in the aftermath.
Now, however, withered particulates leftover from Joy’s annihilated mind dotted the phlogiston of the Nether around them like scattered debris, and past the frayed entryway of their Auto-Seance, a disorganized tangle of the fifteen Incubi tumbled free from half-severed sequences.
Another unexpected outcome. The ghoul had thought itself clever drawing the pretenders into the mindscape as expendable help, but its expectations would have been folly. They had more than the local sequences subverted–the Greatling girl was under their sway as well. It took little effort to use those compromised Exorcists as a vector for this expansion, after all.
Admittedly, Defiance’s successor was more effective than assumed, though unrefined when it came to the delicate details of sequencing emotions and artifacts of poignance within memories.
Such was why it likely never noticed them dwelling within Abrel's memories of the love she held for her brother–the gentler aspects of being far from its base comprehensions. True empathy was a step above mere fathoming after all, and in this was the loss of Defiance most felt.
Yet, despite all this, the ghoul’s mind had been altered somehow, and most of the Incubi remained alive.
Emotion was no longer sure what was to follow. There were too many factors resting beyond his comprehension, too many developments he could not foresee.
This meeting was meant to be a lure. Something to draw the ghoul in and enchain it to the purpose of Old Noloth, for the glory of the city eternal and the world that Jaus stole. They assumed by exploiting its hunger and bloodlust it would have offered its fealty for pleasures denied.
Instead, the beast yearned more to mock them.
Now, as confusion rose from the disoriented minds scattered before them, Emotion released a low note of disappointment at the outcome of the affair and prepared to surrender the reins of his control.
+Peace,+ he said, sinking below his brother-self, +I cede mastery of the priesthood to you. I no longer have faith in diplomacy–pursue our objectives by your other means. I will call upon another instance of Joy and keep the Exorcists blind.+
As his Metamind lapped over Peace’s, he heard bone-grinding growls of low laughter. As it echod outward he felt the waves of the Nether ripen with the pressure of malice. The poor fools were not prepared for that which was to come, and from the ghoul’s shattered mind would the Famine of Peace reclaim that which was stolen.
+You should have let me at the cunts from the start, Emotion,+ Peace grumbled. Across the entirety of his cognitive structure, lighting the circuitry of his sequences, trauma-patterns built and crackled, the first bolts whipping out at the Nether beyond his accretion like the tongue of a ravenous dog. +It would have saved us all so much fucking time.+
***
Regaining your bearings after getting flattened into a second-person perspective and blended with the conscious minds of twenty or so Incubi was a mite bit difficult.
Awareness forcibly hammering back into you as all your ghosts are screaming at you in a cacophonous symphony of voices across the totality of your memories also does nothing to diminish the chaos.
[CONGITIVE DAMAGE REPAIRED]
[MOSTLY–WE ARE LOSING GHOSTS]
[MENTAL TEMPLATE SAVED: AVO]
Data danced across his cog-feed, and his ghosts moved like shadows diving through the eye-wall of a superstorm. The onslaught of information didn’t stop there.
He knew things. Remembered and recalled them in an instant without sending out any commands or requests to his Metamind. His skull ached to the swelling of his coherence, reinflating like a balloon as multiple streams of thought surged synchronously, rushing through the interconnected traffic of his sequences like wildfire spreading across canals.
[UNCERTAIN WHAT HAPPENED]
[MIGHT BE WAR-MIND’S EFFECTS]
[IRRELEVANT RIGHT NOW; THREAT INCOMING]
Multiple windows opened across his cog-feed, his smoldering ghosts automatically assembling the raw data into simulated feeds showing the environment beyond.
The Auto-Seance he was drifting in was glitching. Entire portions of its make-up were outright missing, and between leaking flows of fragmenting ghosts ran rents revealing the expanse of the Paladin's Oversec.
Strangely, despite the severity of the damage, the countless scintillating accretions representing the closest Exorcists were oblivious. They continued to travel along the rails of distant sequences, seemingly unaware of the obliteration of memory that had just occurred near the administrative nodes of one of their superstructures.
Behind him, the Low Masters had folded into each other and deloaded their simulated forms. Now, they existed as pure mem-data gathered into a skein of building traumas. Warning klaxons sounded within Avo’s cog-feed as forty percent of his ghosts threaded themselves into his wards without any prompting.
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[ANTICIPATING EGO-NULLING TRAUMA-PATTERN]
[CONVERTING 60% OF TOTAL COGNITIVE STRUCTURE FOR SURVIVABILITY INCREASE]
[CONVERTING 90% OF THE REMAINDER TO TRAUMAS. ESTIMATED DURATION OF PSYCHOSIS: 2 SECONDS.]
+No. Stop.+ Avo struggled to manage even thoughts. Thinking felt like he was wrestling with torrents of his own mind, each of his ghosts straining as they were already designated toward determined tasks. +Stop. What are you doing.+
[THE BASE-MIND IS FULLY AWARE]
[GOOD. GOING TO STOP US FROM BEING NULLED. LET THE BASE-MIND RECOVER FIRST]
[RECOMMEND LAYERED WARDINGS WITH WASTE MEM-DATA PADDING ON THE INSIDE. COLLAPSING MICRO-MAP OF MIND-TEMPLATE DOWN TO INNER THOUGHTS]
What was even happening?
[UNCERTAIN]
[THEORY: SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE WAR-MIND]
[USED TO BE TWO. NOW THREE]
Avo wanted to ask his ghosts “three-what,” but just then his cognition narrowed into a pinprick as much of most of his near-to-mid-term memories were dismantled by his ghosts. Each among them curved out like needles tethered to blazing threads. Before, assigning more cog-cap to his wards would have taken deliberate sequencing and the Meta some time to adjust.
Now, the totality of his mind shifted as one, everything deconstructed and rebuilt across the passage of the merest instant, the change coming like wildfire.
Wildfire.
The Conflagrations.
The Eaters.
He had ignited his own mind to deny the Low Masters access to his inner memories. He remembered the war-mind, felt its impossible absence encompass hundreds and thousands of sequences within its grasp before conjoining all cognitive entities and boiling them with the weaponized ignorance it had stored.
Somehow, Avo managed to remain himself against it.
The Eaters had seized its attention, and it turned its mind-stripping glare upon the fires savaging the columns holding up his mind. As the devouring flame ate at him desperately to stay alive and aware, the war-mind hewed from the warring entities something deep and critical before dissolving into cessation itself.
It had made the Eaters forget why they were fighting.
A distorted flick ran through Avo’s cog-feed. Something was grinding at him from beyond his wards, making his cog-cap spike before a shift in his Metamind’s structures made it drop again. His ghosts chattered constantly among themselves, each wisp-like unit speaking as a chorus, their words carrying his diction, but not his voice.
Straining himself, he ignored the missing gulfs in his mind and attempted to reassert his control.
Pushing his perception out from the depths of his inner memories, he found himself squeezing out atop three other cognitive presences within his mind. Two of them were knots of self-directing mem-data and one was a hollow spot of emptiness that somehow served as a bridge between them.
From all three entities extended complex spills of essential memories binding them to Avo, wrapping him in the sinews of their substance. The two active entities didn’t so much feel alive now as they felt symbiotic, drawing cognitive bandwidth from his mind to simulate their words and actions.
Tapping into his “sub-minds,” he felt his cognition expand and interweave on a level he never experienced before. The contents of his ego had spread within the flames with the neutering of the Eater’s memories. Where once they subsumed from him to replicate themselves, now all that remained was him. Hence, they had seared his ego wide across the entirety of his sequences, twisting strands of his personhood across all other memories like an ever-coiling vine.
No longer did his mind seem solid or affixed. His being floated, and flowed, and even as the contours of his mindscape bent and warped in ways that should have been cognitively crippling, his ego remained intact, if temporarily distorted.
[BASE-MIND HAS ASCENDED.]
[GOOD. NOW COGNITION IS AT 100% CAPACITY.]
[ATTEMPTING TO ASSIMILATE ATTACKING TRAUMA-PATTERNS.]
The Nether around him burst fully into detail and shape, and a pit of emptiness immediately opened within his stomach.
Enemy-directed traumas were carving pieces free from his outer mind. From the Low Masters came a complex weave of attacks that twisted the fabric of the Nether itself. The traumas glowed with radiative properties capable of embrittling ghosts and the vicinity of the administrative node came alight with thought-tearing striations.
Firing back at them came a retaliation merited more by quantity than quality. More than a few of the Incubi’s null-heavy ghosts rang against Avo’s protections as well. High-yield trauma-loads sailed free of their attached Ghostjacks before exploding outward in a hailstorm that would shred a megablock of minds bare of thoughts.
And there he was, between them.
Doing nothing.
Every three impacts shattered his wards and slashed his memories wide open, but his sequences reknitted themselves in a fashion uncannily similar to what his Woundshaper was capable of. More, even as his internal memories were gouged out from his protective shell, his sense of self remained undamaged, and no sting pierced the senses of his mind.
Gouts of fire plumed free from his mind each time his wards were breached. Yet, he did not bleed alone, for whatever trauma cleaved into him was in turn supped from to recuperate the ghosts lost within.
In seconds, all that was foreign was digested beneath the immolating touch of his Conflagration, their presence smelting the traumatic constructs down to the basest cognitive matter before one of the sub-minds fed it back into Avo.
[EGO-SUSTAINMENT THRESHOLD: 125 GHOSTS]
[CURRENT GHOSTS: 744 – LOST 2348 DURING RECOVERY]
Interesting, but he would delve into those details later. Right now, he had a greater concern.
+Why aren’t we casting back?+
[WE DON’T HAVE THE WILL.]
[NOT BASE-MIND.]
[NEED ALLOWANCE.]
[VERY INCONVENIENT.]
[WANT TO NULL.]
His bloodlust flowed and in the same instant synaptically charged currents tipped with Secondhand Fatality lashed out at the Low Masters thoughtstuff.
The priests of Noloth shifted the angle of their assault to him. As their attacks came at an unceasing tempo, Avo found himself wondering if they weren’t using some kind of cognitive accelerant themselves. Their first of their counteractions clashed against Avo’s trauma and shattered, one blade falling before the other.
What followed was a feat that made Avo’s insides twist in envy. In the period of a micro-second, the Low Masters managed to assemble a new pattern just as their original shattered and cast it out.
This time, however, when the traumas met, the Nether came alight like twin blades carved from pain charged lightning breaking to a halt, edge to edge.
Avo felt his ghosts recoil at the sudden repulse clashing against trauma so symmetrical, but a deeper instinct bade him reach out.
Through the connective tissue of ghosts chained to his mental being, he buried his fluid ego into the sequences of the attack trauma and stretched out his cognitive capacity. His ghosts burrowed into his foes like drilling tendrils, eating through the shell of their patterns like a plague.
Memories broke apart and melded into him. His total ghosts shot back up past eight hundred. Awareness and knowledge flooded into his mind and for a flickering instance, he felt his perception overlap with the Famine of Peace, as disbelief and horror erupted inside them.
The shock lasted but a scant second. Grandmaster Necrojack that the enemy was, they ejected those ghosts and jacked out.
Just in time for another series of attacks to cut out from another vector and skip off Avo’s wards.
[ADJUSTING MEMORY-AVAILABILITY PARAMETERS]
Suddenly, a portion of his memories regrew and the canon of Haemokinesis became known to him again.
+How was that a non-essential memory?+ Avo asked, casting his annoyance at his sub-minds.
[WAS BUSY CONSTRUCTING WARDS.]
[WAS BUSY REBUILDING EVERYTHING.]
There was a tinge of frustration in his auxiliary self.
Choking back his annoyance at his secondary selves, he fired his reflexes and bound himself again to liters of blood.
The pace of time stretched, and Avo stole the momentum of the offensive.
He cast out at the Incubi then, uncertain as to where the Low Masters were hiding. Flashes of firing Ghostjacks pulsed out from leaking sequences and Avo moved as he struck.
He directed his strikes with finer control than he ever felt, hammering Secondhand Fatality down against Quicksand wards before cycling in the next option. But as his command reached his Ghostjack, so too did his ghosts obey as well.
Even far extended from him, he felt his trauma transform from within. What began as a memory made from the materials of Lucille’s pain turned into the hurt Chambers endured when the aratnid sank its egg-infused fangs into his testicles.
He drove his shifting weapon against the adaptive wards and felt himself sink in.
In the same instant, the bones around the Auto-Seance began to realign, and all around him flashed accretions and ripples of thoughtstuff. Time within the mindscape skipped forward. The Auto-Seances confines flickered as the memories comprising its structure began to stutter.
The Low Masters were weaponizing their Nether lag against him–trying to strip him of his speed advantage.
He needed to get out. Staying and engaging them in a prolonged engagement on their terrain was folly. He could just jack out. Find another section to come back in or–
[YES. WE HAVE ACCESS TO THE INCUBI.]
[THEY ARE HURT. CRACKED. VULNERABLE. SUCH PAIN.]
Yes. That was a far more enticing option. Far more.
Through the tendrils of his trauma, Avo peered into the cracked shell of his foe and leered at the memories inside. He could hear the Incubus screaming. He could taste their fear. Their pain. Their vulnerability.
This fight could continue. He knew it could. He just needed a change of skin.
And with a thought, Avo began to pour the entirety of himself through the cracks lining his victim’s flesh, devouring all their memories, all their phantasmics, all of who they are, and who they could be.
Like a parasite wriggling its way into an egg, he slithered into their being to the choking accompaniment of their psionic screams and bathed the mind-shred hurt he was causing, all three facets of Avo’s cognition exhaled in euphoric glee.
***
Talon-1 screamed as she felt herself go away.
Words vanished. Things she knew darkened as the fires approached.
The burning crackled with inhuman laughter–with hungry laughter.
She was she was she was she was she was–
She was Avo she was–
She… she–she–
At some point, the thoughts stopped coming from her and started coming from the beast instead.
Talon-1 stopped thinking, but Talon-1 didn’t die.
Someone else grew in place under her inner thoughts. Someone else learned to wear her skin.
***
[MENTAL TEMPLATE SAVED: TALON-1]