[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: At 4:54 in the morning today, an unknown party launched a Nether-based attack on Exorcist lobby designation “Oversec-C1.” So far, we are compiling and verifying all memories from the attack to generate a proper simulation of events. Presently, the Ad-Necs have been repelled thanks to the efforts our active personnel, though the extent of damage and casualties remains delayed due to the destabilization experienced by the lobby and necessary deep-memory mem-data examinations. I open the session to additional questions. As always, standard rules apply. No slurs. No trauma-patterns. No dumping of simulated nudes or other titillating content generated using the likeness of rivals from competing outfits in an attempt to trigger the rash in them.
[SESSION RESTRICTIONS REDUCED]
[Yue Lie-Dawn - False Tone]: Lie-Dawn. Black. Speaker for the False Tone. When will the Exorcists be issuing a formal declaration of censure against Ori-Thaum for their egregious actions today?
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Thank you for the question, Ms. Lie Dawn. We, however, cannot confirm nor deny Ori-Thaum’s involvement in the attack. We encourage members of the public influence and other propagandistic outfits to promote your theories responsibly.
[Yue Lie-Dawn - False Tone]: Understandable. It is wise to be restrained, but when there is a fire in the Nether, one should not be so cautious as to pretend they are not being castrated by obvious foes. Such an action is only befitting of a Scaarthian.
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Okay, yeah, tone–tone down the factionalism.
[Yue Lie-Dawn - False Tone]: The False-Tone speaks only the truth.
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Right. Thank you. Next.
[Nune Vetíona - The Enduring]: Nune Vetíona. Green. Proparazzi of The Enduring. Ahem. I just want to say that–YOU TELL THAT SUBSTANCE THAT FLOWS FROM THAT SANG-SOW’S CUNT IS SHIT! YOU HEAR ME, LIE-DAWN? I’M GONNA CUT OFF YOUR DOG’S FACE AND WIDEN YOUR DAUGHTERS’ ASSHOLES WITH MY BAREHA–
[THE ENDURING HAS BEEN CENSORED FOR THIS SESSION]
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Next.
[Abdulmanap Sahandrapar - Bravely Burning]: Abdulmanap Sahandrapar. Blue. Bravely Burning. I have a question for you especially, Exorcist Kelkanan. It’s very important.
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: …Me? I, uh… alright, let’s hear it.
[Abdulmanap Sahandrapar - Bravely Burning]: Why’d you lick it?
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Lick it? Lick what?
[WARNING! RESEQUENCING DETECTED]
[Abdulmanap Sahandrapar - Bravely Burning]: Lick my nu-dog’s balls! Nice technique, Exorcist!
[UPLOADING MEMORIES–]
[SESSION ENDED]
[LUSTAWAY ACTIVATED]
[Exorcist Vero Kelkanan]: Godsdammit–fuck, shit, halt the session! Halt it! Good. Fuck me, not again! Clean–clean the fucking sequences! And tag that half-strand’s FATE-Skein. Godsdamned rash-trolls… AND WHICH ONE OF YOU SICK FUCKS GOT OFF ON THAT?”
-Official Exorcist Press Session Regarding the “Incident at Oversec-C1”
13-23
Infection
If there was a final thought in Abrel’s mind that truly counted as her own, it was that she tried to fight it.
With what little of her there was, she tried. She really did.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Her struggle was less than a flea fighting the forces of a hurricane. She could no more resist the fire than a wick could choose not to burn when kissed by an open flame. She was of one way, and then she was another.
The alternations spread through her mind like viruses streaming through the cells in her body, the constellation of her memory sequences twisting even in the subtlest capacities. As the infection fused with her mind, certain desires felt beyond her, while new wants rooted themselves in place like an anchor descending into the deepest waters of her ego.
No longer could she fathom hatred for Avo. They were the same, after all, smelted by the dreaming blaze from hateful heterogeneity into an aligned alloy. She understood him, and all his wants, and from her did he glean new insights into the Guild she once served and the ethics that ruled her FATED heart.
As the conflagration settled around them, the illusion of Jhred’s island sanctuary returned. She found her brother as presented from the perspective of the ghoul–a soft pitiful being, one that should never have born the crown of divinity upon his weak brow.
“I still love him, you know?” Abrel said, measuring her brother with soft words of sadness. To her silent surprise, she found her emotions related to her brother unchanged by her recreator. From what agency he left coded into her cognition, she expected him to fashion her into a dagger poised at the heart of all that she cared for.
Such was not the case.
It became obvious that though she carried a strain of Avo within her mind, she was but a carrier and not the plaguemaker himself. His manipulation was more clandestine than anticipated.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said, testing the boundaries of what vectors of emotions remained available to her and what thoughts she assumed could truly be enacted as action.
“I can weave the understanding into you,” he said. His body within the simulated memory was gone, but his shadow now occupied the place of her own.
When her next thoughts came, her surprise continued to grow. “I’d prefer it if you spoke to me. I like doing things face to face.” Because it made it easier to start a fight if the opposing party offended her.
Not that she desired to fight Avo. That want was lost to her now. Lost alongside a thousand smaller facets of her being.
“Fine,” he said, and with the utterance of his words, something shifted beneath her.
Staring down at the sand at her feet, she saw him elongate far past parted palm trees, slinking further past the shores and disappearing below brushing waves like the leviathan he was.
Fear of him was gone. There was only absolute acceptance when it came to how she beheld him, the sensations as if she was regarding herself. As far as her subconsciousness was concerned, there was no true difference between them at their foundation. She was an aspect of his ego, and he was the source of her design.
The limb could no more hate the brain than leaves could despise the winds that carried them.
A sharp and braying triumvirate of voices corrected her of that notion. “A terrible metaphor, ‘master.’ I assure you: the winds remember.”
Her confusion lasted but a singular moment before the necessary details were threaded over. With their minds bound, she too could hear the thundering dialogues cast forth by the awakened gods dwelling within him.
Immediately, a strange desire for kinship was kindled within her. How similar were they to her, serving as the extension of another, even being allowed the same neutered consciousnesses she was.
What a strange new conundrum the ghoul expressed. A part of him–a desire known to all imbued with the privilege of a Frame–felt entitled to take the world into him, to usurp the design that was, to cage all within their being and enchain existence to the rule of a conceptual suzerainty.
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But somewhere in that miasma of selfish cruelty and power-hunger was a nobler want to offer agency to another.
Abrel scoffed in genuine disbelief. “You’re a real quandary, you know that, rotlick.” A slur to her recreator? Allowed? Her gut coiled as if she was insulting herself, but allowance of such a transgression was freeing. “This half-way enslavement mental-castration thing is a real special mood, I’m not gonna lie. Feels weird not wanting to kill you for murdering my brother and my cadre.”
“Want you to be free,” he replied. “Free. Not against me. As close to you as possible. As close to me without perverting you. Have a specific use for you in mind.”
“You want me to be your patient zero within the halls of Highflame, am I right?” She knew she was, but it was strange not to ask.
“Yes,” Avo said. “Good Instrument. Can promise you ascension. Power. Also don’t know if my Imitators have spread into your Frame. Want to check there too.”
“Well, aren’t you a ghoul of a million desires,” she said, dryly. She had to admit, even if she weren’t so subverted to his whims, there was a part of this that would have appealed to the original Abrel Greatling as she was. It was probably the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Doing those operations was the entire reason why she loved being an Instrument and loathed the idea of ever becoming an Authority like her father wanted.
Her father. Now there was someone the ghoul probably wanted to draw into his burning gestalt as well. “He’s going to despise you, you know that, right?”
She didn’t even need to state her father by reference or name for the ghoul to understand. There was nothing she could think or know that was beyond his notice. She was like that nu-monkey in those old Sang myths. The one that danced upon the palm of the thousand-armed goddess of peace.
“Only for a while,” he said. She watched as his Echoheads reached out wide, pointing outward in eight directions in a gesture of uncomprehended significance on her end. “Uthred Greatling. Married your mother to be part of your great house. Not Greatling by inherited bloodline. You still care for him. Think he’s a good man trying to do the right thing. Were always closer to him than with your mother.”
“He wasn’t the kindest, calmest, strongest, wisest, or even smartest father one could ask for.” The admission came easy from Abrel now, and the lightness in her swelled. Before, such words would be accompanied by a steaming bitterness building inside her gut, paired with past insults inflicted upon her during less fortunate times for her blood relation to her mother. Now, it was like a cushioning layer of protection was wedged between her inner self and the weight of her past torments.
“Why do you still feel so highly for him if all that is true?” Avo asked.
“Because he stayed,” Abrel admitted honestly. “Because for all his faults, he didn’t leave us. He could have. He could have thrown us to a cousin or a relative or something like that and married again. He’s still a hero of the Third Guild War. There merit enough left in that prestige for another marriage.”
“Even though he started as a flatblood?”
And now the ghoul was pressing down on her discomfort. The tension of her “broken” descent was one that still bothered her when light was scarcest at night. Perhaps Avo wanted to see how she would respond if a potential trauma point was brushed. Or if he had winnowed too much of her original emotions out from her system.
“You know, with the outlawing of the Seraphic faith, Highflame’s ethics should have turned from blood to mettle.‘Blessed be the worthy,’ and all that hopeful, spiritual shit.” Abrel snorted.
“Never believed?”
She giggled. “Oh, I believed plenty. Still do even after whatever it is you just did to me. It’s just that plenty isn’t entirely, and that’s the same case for all the other great houses too. Reason why we Chivalrics stick together so much is that we’re so cross-bred to keep our high-bloodedness from the other flat-bastards we had to share a Guild with. You know the Chivalric lines were modified in our pre-history as well, right? Some of the Meritocrats basically confirmed it with their voider contacts–the high-bloods of the Kosgan great houses were made that way by gene modification.”
“And the ones who lacked that. Flats.”
“Yep,” Abrel said. “‘Course, if you ask the voiders they have other terms for them. Ludds, if you want to get spicy. Baseliners, if you want to be kind.”
The ghoul knew all this, but he continued to humor her and observe her through the chasm of their shared memories. Frankly, in the simmering phlogiston comprised both their minds, she really should be thinking of everything as “we.”
She was just a cell within a cell now, after all. As much her or him as he willed it.
And the best part was she was absolutely fine with all of it.
“Good,” he said after a moment of silence. “Still seem like yourself. Enough like yourself anyway. Should be able to pass any scrying afterward with minimal suspicions. Can make further adaptions based on future. Need to make the final tests now. See if my changes carry over after resurrection.”
“Any reason why they shouldn’t?” she asked, teasing him as much as she could using her limited allotment of autonomy. “You afraid I might revert back to my snarling, screaming, rageful self you met before?”
“No. Still have access to your mind. Can cripple you with a thought in the worst case.”
“You know, I would have had you the first time if you didn’t batter me with your wards.”
He released his feral bemusement through the vicarious link they shared, and she felt the ever-tugging urge of violence that swam beneath the rivers of his every thought. “You’re a bit like Draus.” He chuckled lowly. “She’s going to hate it when I tell her that.”
“Draus?” Abrel said. Well, there was another thing the greater fire was hiding from her. Still, she knew the name but not the context in which he referred to her. “She was the bio-rigged street squire? Jelene Draus?”
“The past has a long shadow,” the ghoul said, its tone wry with sarcasm as its Echoheads mimed the vagueness of a bow.
Abrel cringed. “Yeah, listen, while you’re still connected to me, maybe take some of my taste in humor? This is just… I don’t know if I can accept that as a standard.”
“Will take your suggestion into consideration.”
All around her the fabric of the memory began to untangle into threads of flowing flame. Burning ghosts were surging free on the torrent of an unseen will, with more of the burning presence rushing in. The beginning of a painful ache began to build at the center of her mind. It like was another presence was grinding into hers, slowly pressing its way through and mangling the wholeness of her cognition.
“What’s…. Happening now?” She asked.
“Going to move the entirety of my mind out of my vessel,” he said. “Self-moving now. Want to see what happens when I settle into your body and kill it. See if you maintain my changes even without the Conflagration after resurrection. See where I come back after resurrection as well.”
“You?”
“Scheduled to have someone shoot me.”
“Well, good on you for thinking ahead. So… won’t lie, you squeezing in here’s giving me a splitting migraine.”
“Won’t be much of you left much longer. Sorry. Simulation works. Two egos in direct proximity can’t. Presences clash. I don’t break. You do.”
“Yeah, yeah, rub it in half-strand,” she hissed. The last flickers of the island dissolved. She turned to catch a glimpse of her brother one final time before he went as well. “Bye, Jhred… Bye.”
“Will see him again if you want. Can give that to you.”
She could feel the ponderousness of his mind crashing down against herself. Parts of her perception dissolved as a fugue began to settle in. +Sure… yeah. That’d be nice… Just one last…+
Her ego shattered. The thoughts slipped from her.
Abrel Greatling dissolved in the currents of Avo’s gestalt.
***
Avo drew the last of his trailing ghosts through the session just as Draus shot his vacant body in the head. He only realized that happened due to the memories carried over by his subminds as he nested himself within Abrel’s body.
The oddities of her biomechanics didn’t last as he loaded in Abrel’s mind template to interface with the meat. He also didn’t intend to stay for long. He just needed to confirm his ability to anchor himself in place with another vessel before triggering their mutual death to see what followed.
If honesty were to prevail, he had multiple concerns burning inside him, but as he could still hear the Woundshaper admonishing the Galeslither for its sullen disrespect, he at least knew his Frame was still with him, though he wasn’t certain how it functioned for him without a body.
Perhaps that had to do with his altered noology as well. If he was a traveling mind, and if his theory behind Essence being derived from the sacrifice or murder of the functional vehicle of a thinking being, then perhaps he could only be considered death by the cessation of his thoughts.
Something to be explored shortly.
Pouring himself to suit the shape of Abrel’s body, he found her eyes to be sharper than his by far, her movements crisper and responsive, with each of her nerves fine-tuned to mind-shuddering levels of sensitivity. It felt like he just crawled out from a rusted war-drone into a sgolem on the cutting edge.
Regardless of what happened, there was nothing that taught you inferiority than walking in the flesh of your better.
He would need to make further improvements to his original sheathe after this.
Taking a moment to check for any issues, he reached out and lifted her hand to draw upon his Heavens…
But they weren’t the only ones that answered.
VOLUME 3
“THE BURNING DREAM”
ACT II
A PLAGUE OF FIRE