And it is in ruination that we divine the vessel that will be our deliverance. Flesh must be flayed and bone must be broken before steel assumes its rightful place.
To abandon suffering before self-construction is delusion in practice is blasphemy of the self.
It is in witnessing the flaw that the mortal witnesses the face of apotheosis. The dismembered will never forget the worth of what they lacked, the blind the world unseen and seen again, and the sickened strength where once was naught.
Herein is the dialect of true apotheosis, for imbuing power before weakness is conceptualized fully desecrates the animus of all sophonts and renders oneself an altar toward hubris…
-Book of the New Alloy, Verse X, Resurrection III
13-2
What Was Lost (II)
Avo fell into the realm of his death and Kae plunged right after.
Sinking into the star-bright gleam of his Soul, he gazed across the stretch of his subreality and took in its growth. Where once the space simulated but a Sangeist and nothing more, now the Frame encompassed leagues beyond even two Heavens of considerable immensity.
Arteries of blood cracked and sprawled through his personal expanse, the Woundshaper nudging at the roiling midnight black winds of the Galeslither. Parted between loops of self-devouring dragons, they argued with gestures and hissed words, leftovers from the gods they used to be.
But somehow also more.
From the way the Woundshaper spoke, their growths were stymied in the age of pantheons – constrained by rival powers and the limitations of sacrifice and worship.
Bound to him, no longer were they to be so starved. In place of free will, they were granted access to a flow of growth unfettered, unchained by mythology.
From a meager fragment bound to a blood-cycling machine, the eldritch deity he renamed Woundshaper had grown to be something it could have never fathomed. Expanding in scope and domains, it spread from mere blood and matter to encompass aspects of luminosity, and biology.
A far way traveled. The Heaven burned smugly, with ever-deepening pleasure.
Across from it, the Galeslither was of another mood entirely. The nature of its adjustment frightened it, and the loss of its ability to determine its own fate gnawed at it from within.
Avo studied his lesser Heaven but briefly and found himself sharing in its discomfort.
To be enchained to a greater will and serve as little more than an instrument to be called upon was disquieting. Something he needed to address with it somehow.
So focused on the choice denied to his cadre that he ignored the being inside him as well.
Offering choice was growing to be more burdensome than he expected.
“Wait, that’s a whole other…” Kae said. She floated her crystalline tear-made dais over next to him, her attention drifting to the prize won from the last victim he preyed upon among Abrel’s team.
Three cyclers. Six ontologics. One Soul. Enough to create another Liminal Frame. And then there was the question of what he was to do with all the additional cyclers as well…
“You killed another Godclad,” Kae said, sounding more than a little astonished. “I mean… permanently. And took in their Frame.” Forcing order back on her drifting thoughts, she turned and faced the Woundshaper, focus hardening her expression. “I need to see how you build new canons. Or take things out. Just… use the Meta-Fac in general. I need to see how it functions.”
Humoring her request took no effort at all. With a thought, his flames spilled out and burrowed through one of the other Frame’s cyclers. Like ebbing fingers on wavelengths of reverberating fire, he pried the dragon free and pulled it close to himself. All it took to bind it to himself thereafter were threads of radiance stitching it to the nucleus that was his Soul.
Through it all, Kae’s mien darkened. “This is… I remember this. A Soul shouldn’t be capable of this. Soulfire isn’t self-aware–it doesn’t just heed someone’s thoughts. But with the Imitators…” Her voice trailed off into a groan as she clutched at her head. “But it wasn’t supposed to go in a Frame? How did they put it in a Frame? How? Nothing I did could kill it! It didn’t die! It was more like light or… just molecules… just cells…”
“Kae,” Avo said, wanting to halt her rambling.
He didn’t expect her to shush him in his own Soul. “I’ll apologize later. I need to think right now. I need to…” Her voice trailed off. “Avo. Show me your Soul again? Please? I want to see it. I have to…”
He unfurled the structure of the Woundshaper and parted the raging gales twisting forth from the Galeslither. Both were clasped by two rings of self-devouring dragons suffused with echoes derived from taken lives.
The Agnos approached, his all-simulating brightness shadowing a look of building certainty on her face.
“The fires are rippling outward.” She laughed. “I was too broken to see it. Too broken to remember.” She lapsed into silence as she just hovered there, studying the quintessence of his ontology as her voice took on a mournful note. “I remember I made part of this. Godshaper. I taught the Imitators how to crossover. How to replicate themselves within a Frame. As part of a Soul. Your fires aren’t actually fires, Avo. They’re cells. Thaumaturgic cells.”
A beat passed. “My Soul–My Frame? It’s… artificial?”
“I…” Kae began, concentration adding a moment of consideration to her words. “No. The Soul I used is just the same as any other. It’s still something we can’t replicate. But if the Imitators are fused inside it, it learns. It can remember. It can change. It can derive thoughts from you. It’s like a borrowed half-sapience with the capabilities of post-sophont intelligence.”
“I don’t understand,” Avo said.
“Imitation,” Kae explained. “The name was perfect. Like vulnerable cells, the environment was contagious to them. But they adapted. Always. I put them in realms of fire and frost and impossible planes of space. They survived it all. And when we had sacrifices enter the rooms, they all dreamed and remembered the nature of canons. Often they started thinking they had each other’s lives.”
RESURRECTION - 4%
For a long while after, neither of them spoke. The Heavens spoke to each other in the backdrop, but Avo found little of note in idle gossip turned bickering.
The silence broke finally as the Agnos released a sigh. “Do you know why your father did what he did? Why he pointed Ori-Thaum at me. Framed me for the murder of...” She drew in close and reached out from the nucleus of all the burned here, but refrained from contact despite her yearning. “Oh, Dawton. He was just doing his duty. He was trying to help the city–all we wanted was to use our knowledge! To fix the Rash.”
Her voice rose high into a shout, but before her the Heavens towered and the Soul just burned as always.
What worth was human pain before the eldritch – the powers above powers?
“No,” Avo finally replied. “Didn’t want this for you. But he wanted something for me. My guess is that he was shaping the situations and conditions to do something he wanted.”
“To make sure you would be the only one to reap the benefits of my work?” Kae asked.
“Maybe. Beginning to think his plans run deeper than I ever knew. Sent Draus to save you too.” That was something Avo never asked about. Draus and Kae. He had been so consumed by tasks and preparations he barely spoke to the Agnos about her life at all. “Don’t know why he did that. Send her.”
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“Draus?” Kae pressed her lips together. “That’s… she was in the service of a Highflame Instrument for a time. I was part of the team commissioned to build his new Heaven. We spent some time together then.” She smirked. “She was so grumpy. And lonely; even isolated from the other Regulars. Never seemed to sleep. I mean, I worked late too so we ended up running into each other more and more and more.”
The smirk faded. “And when the work was done, the, um, Instrument decided to… take offense at what we made. If it weren’t for Draus, I think he might’ve killed one of us. I don’t know what she did to calm him down. She wouldn’t tell me when I asked. I don’t know why she risked her life against her own people for us either.”
Avo grunted a laugh. “Draus raids Crucibles looking for war and death. Tried to keep the boy safe. Tried to save the father. Same thing with you. She doesn’t care about dying. She just wants to find a good enough reason to burn. And you’re more than good. I think.”
Kae blinked. “I’m… more than good?”
And there it was–that tribalistic urge among all humans to be wanted. Another facet he and his brothers had been born without.
Avo wondered if Walton left him devoid of such a social weakness to keep him free from the chains of humanity.
“Dawton,” Avo said, changing the topic. “The Paladin. He was supposed to guard you during your task?” The man was also her lover, but there was little need to savor the taste of that wound.
Kae was unbalanced as things were.
A soft smile painted her face as a momentary reverie passed through her. She was recalling an event from her past, one that resonated over even all that was present.“That was the official capacity anyway. I never thought I would end up breaking official conduct there but…” She shrugged, unashamed of her failure. “He had a way of making everyone a bit happier when he was there.”
Avo ceded time and space to her. Dying was a simple act on his part. He increasingly considered a suicide implant of some kind.
He found himself, to his grim amusement, thinking back to Mirrorhead’s cortex bombs. Perhaps something like that would do.
The Agnos began speaking again, mastering herself a final time as the resurrection cycle climbed. “Project Godshaper was just supposed to be a series of experimental trials for a metaphysical tuner–what became your Soul’s Metafactory functions. But I was never meant to truly fix anything despite official oaths. I think Highflame agreed to the terms with Voidwatch with double intentions, and the voiders likewise expected us to get nowhere without their support.” A soft snarl passed through her features. “And I guess no one expected me or Dawton to actually try fixing the Rash, but I guess you don’t need to be a great power to pull off your own surprises.”
Interesting. Her attempts at resolving the Rash hadn’t been mentioned in the Column’s report. But again, first-hand detail always provided a new angle of perspective that a bird’s eye view didn’t possess.
Kae continued. “The idea of using it to fix the Rash was mine alone. Well… me and Dawton were uh… I told him while we were… but it wasn’t his fault! We ended up doing something that was… a bit beyond the parameters of the project. I–I didn’t mean for it to happen! But in the moment I couldn’t resist.”
Avo wondered if she was talking about her relationship or what they attempted on the Rash.
“From the trials, we found that the sacrifices were fully capable of building new Heavens in an instant. Of course, we needed to come up with all the structures and components needed for the rituals of mythology but I did it–well, not just me! My team! And Dawton and his trainees! We all performed a miracle for miracles: Perfect efficiency Heaven construction.”
Her excitement passed and she turned pensive. Introspective.
“And modification. That was something he and I tested on our own. Without letting anyone else know. I changed one of his canons. Made it better by adjusting his hubris.”
Through all, Avo listened and urged the flames around him to flow. He studied the nature of his own being as each individual flow of pulsing brightness bent up to better show their wavelengths.
It felt the same as looking down at his claws or sliding his Echoheads further into view.
“The Meta-Fac,” Avo said. “That’s just the Imitators in my Soul trying to build things I want?”
“You give it direction, but it still has simulating structures from the root data it can follow,” Kae said. “I… honestly, Avo, with how the Imitators are, it’s probably more accurate to say that you’re as much a part of them as they are a part of you.”
“Like my blood,” he added. “A metaphysical haemophage.”
“I… suppose at a very limited level. The Imitators just infect and create more of you though.”
Once again, the concept of symmetry chimed like a repeating bell. The artificiality of his current nature; the artificiality of his Soul. The properties of his blood; the properties of his Soul.
But if he followed the metaphor down the trail, that meant…
Kae preempted his sudden epiphany. “That’s the main reason why I needed to see their Frames too. Voidwatch has a concept of what bits of their mythos they let us see. Remember what you said about your haemophage? Your blood? Well, there’s this idea called an ‘eclipse phase’ that details how long a cell can remain itself before a virus rewrites its nature. The sacrifices started carrying each other’s memories within a day. If your Frame is capable of being… contagious, then that’s probably around the same time they’ll start developing. Changing.”
With each passing word, he felt his influence swell vaster and vaster in pace with his growing understanding.
If what she said came to pass, he wasn’t just a shapeshifter of self-modified miracles, but a kingmaker above kingmakers – someone with the capability to shatter the balance of the power in this city utterly and completely.
All the infection took was contact between the fires of his Soul and another.
Like Abrel.
“I still don’t know how they managed to meld it with a Soul.” Kae circled his nucleus much in the same way one of Sunrise’s bees did. “I tried it on a Soul–it doesn’t emulate metaphysical properties. It can endure extreme forces, but mirroring the environment and consciousnesses isn’t…”
Her growl of frustration followed.
“Hate not knowing things?” Avo asked.
“I hate not being able to figure my own work out! Your Frame is clearly designed on the basis of Godshaper but… I have no idea how they managed to put what the Imitators could do in theory into practice. I wasn’t done when… when…” She huffed as she derailed her thoughts from painful memories. “Wait. Practice? Practice! Avo, try… try accessing one of your canons! Don’t graft a piece from another Heaven just um… um… trying commanding your Soul to ‘interface’ or something.”
He did as she asked, conveying his want to the system with all the clarity and detail he could add. The Frame was still a stranger to him, its capabilities and growth a new revelation with each death.
This time was no different, and this time, Kae made all the difference.
The vector of his traveling radiance turned to heed his new demand. Like hyper-accelerated needs, narrow corridors formed where the yolk spreading out from his Soul brushed the sides of both his Heavens.
“Master… I feel… faint…” the Woundshaper muttered, its voice growing dimmer by the second. Across, the Galeslithered neighed softly, and from it came only surprise, but not fear.
“Yes,” Kae said. “Yes! It still works! Oh, your Heavens will be fine. I think.”
Avo glared at the Agnos using his Soul. “You think?”
“I'm not sure, okay!” She threw up her hands. “Honestly, the fact your Heavens are sapient at all is probably because of the Imitators as well. They’re carrying memories and personality fragments over from what your echoes worship! Pretty much personality constructs or… or divine engrams.”
With her words, new strings of mem-data pulsed over Avo’s mind.
[CANONICITY REVIEW BEGINNING]
->WOUNDSHAPER
->GALESLITHER
ENTER SIMULATED CANONICITY NOW?
Cautiously, Avo sent his affirmation, and he felt his Heavens expand themselves for lack of a better term.
Detaching his Soul, he drifted out next to the Agnos to gaze at what he had done.
Connected to him, threading rivers of fire pried each of the former gods, opening two bright-made gateways.
Kae shot him a look and took a deep breath. “Alright. Let’s see if this does what I think it does.” She paused. “Oh, Avo, if you start getting… mixed thoughts let me know. I don’t think my False-Hev can be affected but… if you start remembering parts not from your own life… that’s probably me.”
He answered with a note of disregard. “Necro. Won’t be bothered.”
She didn’t seem convinced.
With a burst of gliding motion, Kae dove through the threshold, and he felt something shift inside him as the Woundshaper pulsed with Soulfire.
RESURRECTION - 31%
Unwilling to come second repeatedly in his own Soul, Avo projected himself through the Heaven on tendrils of crawling resplendence.
On the other side, he found himself coming up just behind the halted Agnos, and below them, the breadth of a blood-made district bearing the aesthetics of a time bygone loaded into view.
He stopped just beside Kae, who seemed just content to watch.
“What is this?” Avo asked.
“The past?” Kae said. “Or at least, what the sacrificed think the past to be.”