+Rab?
Long time no cast, how the hells are you?
Oh, not a social call is this? What’s the run? Don’t make it boring. I’m too old for boring.
[TRANSFERRING MEM-DATA]
Alright. You hooked me already. This one’s a real–
[IMPS TRANSFERRED]
Damn, Rab, paying fast today. This thing must have you all kinds of worried for you to be throwing imps at me already. Don’t worry: I’ll keep an eye on it. Him. Whatever this thing is.
Yeah, I’ve seen that fire before. Ori-Thaum. Conflagration is a nasty thing–but my consang-to-be here doesn’t seem that affected. And if he’s actually a ghoul like you say, that’s a hell of a lot more self-control than I’ve ever seen for his kind.
Say, are you still with that girl? The Godclad with the pretty frown. Yeah. Javvers’ niece. Oh, none of my business, huh?
Guess that’s a yes.
Is she out there with this “Avo” right now? Risky business, playing two sides. Stormtree won’t be happy with her if she doesn’t call in soon. The fuck-up in the Warrens was nasty. You tell her she’s running from an awful lot of explaining she has to do, and that the Longeyes are already putting out their feelers.
You’re fine for now, but you won’t have forever. She needs to call in and take the heat off. And you need to figure out what they hells you want out of this life. You can’t play between if this thing is going to work.
Trust me: I know.
You make someone choose between being a color and you, and don’t be surprised if you don’t like the outcome.
Well, you might not have wanted it, but the relationship advice was free. Take it from an old lady, son: think this thing through. For both your sakes.+
-[Redacted]
15-1
The Gift
As Avo resurrected, he found himself leaning against the side window of the aerovec, and it occurred to him that his understanding of the city was all wrong.
For years, he thought himself a creature in a hive, fighting and feasting and failing to ascend to its heights. Not so much anymore. He should have paid attention to the words the Guilders were using. He should have been better at listening.
Tiers.
They meant that in more ways than one and the philosophy behind the word extended beyond one’s climb to the top of the prosperity ladder.
The Undercroft was made up of wedges and blocks and towers and bunkers. The streets and pathways were crevices when viewed from on high, and the flow of people leaked like water running between cracks in a wall. They were being choked it. It was so obvious from up here, so clear what they were trying to do.
Each block was a fortress unto itself and with their density generated within them a socioeconomic singularity. They were, at once, places where life could flourish, yet blockades for rival armies to break themselves.
Tiers. As in tiers of armor to pierce through. As in tiers of fortifications to break through. This city flirted with notions of culture and society, but the decorative ghosts that painted the city in new aesthetics and phantasmal advertisements were but flourishing drapes laid over an armored chassis.
New Vultun had always been built as a city at war, and drawing upon his newly devoured memories, most of the other hive cities were much the same way.
Memory-protected plasteel hulls gleamed in voluminous hues while the colors of the Nether still ran. Filtering all ghosts from his cog-feed, he gazed upon the featureless bones of the district rendered nude, and he found himself looking upon a jungle of glass and alloy.
Dying gave one a shot of perspective sometimes. He spent some time in his Soul, detaching the Heaven of War and installing it into another, more thaum-heavy Frame per the request of White-Rab. The entire affair afforded him some time to think, and some thinking to occupy his time after.
The Harshlander’s navigational display showed that they were soon to arrive, and down from the height of fifty feet they dropped, shifting vertical lanes to circle into a narrow crossing trapped between two blocks.
Pulsing reverberations of neon passed through them as a new update to Stormjumpers 2 made its announcement through the Nether, immediately followed by review boosting and bombing campaigns by fans and contrarians alike.
“We’ll be arriving soon,” Reva said. “You should still fire up your Incog. The place is a street squire haunt, so it should be secure, but you don’t exactly look like the usual clientele either. You can dip into my shadow, but they’re pretty thorough at checking, and this place has more than its share of Fallwalkers as well. It’s better that we cover all our openings..”
Avo understood. This was probably going to be something like the Easy Armistice again. If only a bit easier to enter.
As their vehicle slowed to a descending whine, he cast his Whisper out and caught sight of multiple moving figures shrouded in the distorting sheen of activated holocoats. His Heavens resonated with his surrounding reality, and he sensed more than a few of them were wounded, their injuries barely finished clotting.
“Oh, but it would be a trifling thing to tear the hurt back open,” the Woundshaper sighed wistfully.
“Let them be,” the Galeslither rebuked. “Being unnoticed is to our advantage right now. Such, and these warriors have done nothing to earn a debased death at our hands. Control yourselves.”
An argument followed, but Avo wasn’t listening. The aero continued until it took a sudden sharp turn into what looked like a wall. The tip of the vehicle met what seemed to be solid matter, but the metal folded away to allow passage, and suddenly mind-rattling waves of pulsing percussion filled Avo’s awareness.
A vast semicircular expanse of aero docks unfurled into view around him, and his new environment resembled the abandoned storage silo he sprinted through during the Crucible. Bodies flocked toward a stack of different remodified container units, and within their opened shells were open bars and free-use loci.
Without further delay, Avo activated his Incog and banished himself from the world’s awareness. More aeros slipped in through the walls around, and he found himself wondering if they were coming in through the same alleyway as his, or if their points of origin were different altogether.
The containers were neatly stacked into a U-shape, and along their fronts were passing vendors and more than few drones that exhibited higher-than-normal accretion densities. The static filling their thougthstuff in a fashion akin to Sunrise also hinted at another probable truth: they weren’t human intellects at all, but coldtech machinery capable of thinking on their own.
The presence of voiders here inspired his curiosity, but he did not break from stealth.
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As the Harshlander settled into the steadying embrace of the mag-clamps, Reva stood up and cracked her neck as the doors hissed and opened. Avo dove into the wetness of her shadow as she disembarked, and in the embrace of darkness, he found himself passenger anew as strange frustration bloomed inside him.
For all his power, he was still forced to hide so often.
Something about that made him feel less. Like even after all he had surmounted, the city still didn’t accept him, and the people still saw him as an enemy beyond all others.
He never felt this way before–the light sting that came from communal rejection. Then, he understood. This wasn’t his pain, but something invoked from secondhand sources. The templates were burned into him, and the way he lived gnawed at their hearts deeply.
Ghouls didn’t care for socialization. But humans did, and at present, he was channeling more than a bit of the latter.
Expanding his base mind to full prominence, he emotionally flattened again while his urge to harm briefly bared its fangs until he had it rewoven with more useful qualities.
Intersecting lanes of perception crossed over Reva, and true to her word, more than a few present were capable of dipping their awareness across reality’s spectrums. A few ghosts were chipped away as a brief blade of awareness carved against his Incog, but the seeker’s attention vanished immediately thereafter, as their attention was drawn elsewhere.
The Bloodthane kept her distance from the other squires as she headed toward an open container unit on the far side of the room. There was no searching in her behavior–she knew exactly where to go. She and White-Rab must’ve had a habit of using this place.
Drones passed by and tagged her Meta with a splashing lattice-thin red emitting a trail of mem-data in the air. She never broke stride the entire time, treating them as irrelevant even as they began their second and third scans. By the time they turned green, she was already ducking into the confines of a plasteel storage unit to descend a staircase leading a few steps down into a hallway filled with six small rooms along the side.
The mem-data lattice from the drones flashed through her mind, and one of the doors snapped open with a crackle.
Immediately, a new cognitive signature came alight as if a patch of space had suddenly manifested in local reality.
Stepping through the threshold, Reva brought Avo onto a terrace overlooking enormous branches of warring fungi battling for dominance in the foreground of a soot-crowned mountain.
No far from them sat White-Rab, nursing on a bowl of soup.
Avo’s DeepNav flickered and found itself unable to pinpoint his location. The room was spatially altered in some way.
When the door clicked shut behind him, he rose from Reva’s shadow and relinquished his Incog. His cognition shuddered with relief, and both Bloodthane and Necro turned in startlement before realizing what just happened.
“I ordered some fried-warg broth for you both,” White-Rab said, chewing on something crispy. Two chairs and a long table made from gnarled wood stretched out from in front of him, and Reva seized the seat next to him so as to prevent Avo from putting her on the outside. “You can eat that no problem, right? Heard you guys had some dietary issues.”
“Just preference,” Avo said. “Vegetables don’t really go down. Alcohol is bad.” He never sat, taking the moment to gaze upon the distant horizon. The expanse before him wasn’t real. He knew that. He knew that the same way his Galeslither did–being unable to touch the distant winds. What they were effectively staring at, then, was a wall a few feet in front of them, and the moments were visually overlapped with a real place on Idheim. Probably the Skuldvast in accordance with some of the Scaarthian’s he consumed.
The second thing to strike him was White-Rab’s physical figure. The Necro was gaunt and near-bare of any augmentations aside from his cybernetic optics. His face was long, and his eyes were bound to a perpetual squint. He wore a double-breasted coat with magnetic clasps instead of buttons, and a touch of Woundshaper detected hints of a monowire implant coiled in a false finger.
The man’s natural thinness continued to strike Avo as an uncanny irony amongst the denizens of this city. With how many people burned imps to upgrade and mold their flesh to personalized perfection, synonymous predilections caused cliques to emerge and fashions to trend. The flash of chrome and the sleekness of advanced modifications segregated people into social castes and communities.
In the end, those that treated their bodies with a minimal touch proved to be the rarer animal.
“You’re surprisingly big in real life; my neck’s already tired looking up at you,” White-Rab said. “Did the Strix decide to make you that tall, or is this a compensation thing that you wanted to do?”
He meant that teasingly without knowing how right he was. “Compensation,” Avo responded with honesty. “Wanted to get bloody with a Reg. She would’ve made a victim of me without it.”
His cog-donor paired a slow blink to a slower nod. “And… how’d it go?”
“We bled each other. Got messy. Was nice.” Avo licked his fangs in reminiscence of delectable violence.
“Nice,” White-Rab said, sounding not entirely convinced. “Well. I don’t like shaking hands, and seeing those sharpened ceramite tips on your digits doesn’t do you any favors. I’d settle for tapping bowls with you or something like that. But you don’t strike me as the… ritual type.”
“No,” Avo replied. “Like having goal. Like getting things done. Like not wasting time.”
The ghost of a smirk filled White-Rab’s expression. “Yeah. We’re gonna be fine. So. You can make me a ‘Clad.”
“Have what you asked for earlier,” Avo said. “You know how this works?”
White-Rab’s easy confidence faded a bit, and he shot Reva a look. “Yeah. More of less. Does it… have to be death?”
“It’s the only true thing of absoluteness a mortal can do,” Avo said. “Crossover. Necessity. That’s what I think.”
The other Necro let out a low breath. “Alright. So…”
“Do you have a preferred way of dying?” Avo asked.
“Painlessly,” White-Rab replied.
Reflexive anger rose in Avo but he disrupted before it could distract him. Reducing his base mind again, he found the cruelty response vastly diminished. “Sudden?”
“Sure. As long as it doesn’t leave me screaming. Maybe you can make it sud–”
Avo burst the blood vessels in his brain with a flex of will. One second, White-Rab was speaking. Then, he toppled face-first into his bowl.
Reva flinched back and whipped around to glare at Avo.
He didn’t bother meeting her gaze this time.
“It’s what he wanted,” Avo said, reaching out with his Soulfire to bind Frame to nous.
GRAFTING [MOTE PATTERN LIMINAL FRAME] TO ROOTED NOUS;
EDGELURKER HEAVEN TEMPLATE INSTALLING…
TRANSFERRING THUAMS: 300
The binding was unseen at first, something happening beneath reality itself. As things continued though, a scab began to form in his awareness, a growing cocoon bearing the resurrection of a nascent Godclad grown upon the flesh of the tapestry.
At the sight, Reva breathed a soft sigh of relief and settled upon her table.
“Worried I might just take his echo? Ghosts?” Avo asked, watching as his work began to flourish. A sublime pleasure filled him as he regarded his deed with utmost satisfaction. He had taken power undeserved and granted it to another. This was an act of balancing. This was a tangible shift in the city’s dynamics.
Avo didn’t know what he truly wanted beyond breaking the Guilds and fulfilling his current desires, but through White-Rab’s return, he learned how to dream.
Standing beside Reva, they both watched as the resurrection progressed over White-Rab’s unmoving body, and with mounting tension, the scab began to hatch, and the flames ushered the return of a being banished from the permanence of death.
White-Rab announced his return with a sharp intake of breath as he snapped up from his bowl. The edge of the table sparked as if it was metal and struck by a piece of flint. Even Avo felt a lurch pass through the straightest angles on his body.
“Raldi, breathe.” Reva reached out and took the face of the astonished–and very stunned Necro–into her hands. “You’re fine. You were dead but… you’re fine.” The way she said it made Avo think she regarded him as better than fine. From the side, he could see an uncharacteristic smile spread across her features.
Taking in gulps of air, White-Rab turned to Avo once more, mouth opening and closing as he tried to master himself. “I expected a bit more warning…”
“Then it wouldn’t be sudden,” Avo replied, spreading his fangs in a proud grin.
His cog-donor stood up and, with a shaking hand, reached out to the railing nearby. He directed an unseen force, and it cut into the table.
White-Rab staggered back. “Holy shit. It worked. I felt…. I felt another aspect of reality. It was…” He turned back to Avo and a new weight settled behind his eyes. “That was all it took. Just a kill and a thought and you made me a god.”
“Only with the right components,” Avo replied. “And if I choose to.”