Anyone can be a Godclad. Any self-aware creature.
When someone asks me who deserves the mantle of apotheosis, silence is my answer. There is nothing to say to such a false question; Godclads are imbued with the immensity of influence, but none of this is truly decided by virtue.
Think of the gods from the Age of the Everwars, and know that Heavens are a function of power and control rather than ethicality and mastery. An addict with the requisite implants and weapons will slaughter even the most elite among martial peers by merit of power differential alone.
What is actually being asked is who can stay a Godclad.
The things to consider are of a multitude. Temperament. Ego. Background. Skill. Environment. Politics. All these things come together to decide who will be Ensouled, but granting divinity blindly inevitably leads to Usurpation.
Skill is a necessity. But more than skill, the foundational aspect of who makes a proper Godclad is judgment. It is the ones that live beyond the confines of their own mind and can witness the world without filters and spare themselves comforting lies.
These are the ones who will make the right choices with their canons. These are the ones who will withdraw from battles that are no longer worth fighting. These are the ones that understand the greatest boon granted by a Frame is the ability to learn from death above all other miracles.
It is no strange secret that most Ensouled survive shorter than a year before losing their Frame to another. Absolutes clash absolutely, and once most taste the privilege of ruling over a facet of reality, they will soon find themselves lusting for the pleasure of becoming a potential suzerain of their peers.
Clarity, here, decides the fate of most. Clarity in what must be done. Clarity in what they might survive. Clarity in how they are to present themselves to the world.
Absolute honesty to counter absolute power. That is my answer. That is the cure to the hubris that ails all who bear the highest powers.
--Osjon Thousand, Death Pruning, Page 588
15-12
The Lapse
[Her,] Abrel said. [She’ll do.]
+Her?+ Avo replied, staring down at the young woman quietly digging through the butchered remains of her fellow FATELESS for any supplies she could use. The Warwights had gotten far before they were diverted. Her gore-caked hands moved fast and slick and there was an unnerving alertness to her brown eyes. She was always moving–always listening and scavenging to maintain an upper hand.
Of the surviving defenders within the station, she alone remained beyond the second defensive line located in the lobby. By virtue of courage or rank apathy in the face of death, she scurried about the outside from shadow to shadow, her lithe form darting like an aratnid dragging bits of trash back into its nest.
A few hundred more accretions remained deeper yet in the block, but Abrel made her vote known the moment she noticed the girl.
Hidden from sight by his Incog, Avo studied the curious creature as he manifested all the mem-data the Three-Fingers had on her.
The smugglers that sold her into the city called the waif Dice. Apparently, she was nameless before a pale-faced Fallwalker offered her over after losing a bet in a dice game. Henceforth, her captors found an easy reference for the gangly girl, though “Shiv” came a close second when she broke a rusty shard of metal against the skin of one of the crew.
No other details about her past were forthcoming. She weighed a feeble ninety-two pounds and stood shorter than even Kae at five feet one–though the mem-data displayed her height as one-hundred and fifty-four centimeters per her insistence. Guesswork and blind assumption listed her ancestry as Kosgan, but the silence she kept and the blank glare she gave all those around her made verification all but impossible.
Syndicate Necros made an attempt to dig through her mind but found little in the way of long-term memories.
She was, in a word, wiped clean. All she had was her facilities, an aversion to eye contact, and a casual indifference to horror and bloodshed.
[Skills, attitude, and a mystery,] Abrel said. [Pretty good eating for us today.]
Digging through intestinal ropes, the oval-faced girl moved off instinct and little else as Avo regarded the features of her sheathe. One of her arms was longer than the other. He could tell the ragged coat she wore once belonged to someone else from the scent of blood still matted on it and the flechette holes lining the back. The sunk placement of her jaw accentuated the sharpness of her nose and he realized her silence to be a result of biological mutation rather than outright choice.
[But godsdamned is she fucking ugly,] Lip groaned. Several other templates cast their surprise at the Scaarthian and she sighed. [It’s true, motherfuckers. She looks like the backside of a shovel. Whatever that Fallwalker sold her for was too much.]
Shadow-2 scoffed. [Yeah, like the mesh is one to judge.]
[Which one of you half-strands said that?] Lip snarled. [I’ll–]
[Do nothing. Because we’re all figments of the ghoul’s consciousness. He’s just letting us talk because we feed him insight between all the hours of constant arguing and factionalism.]
His gestalt was truly a place of welcoming kindness.
Spreading his awareness deeper through the station, his consciousness spread like silent venom as his tendrils crept through the foundations of the block. He glimpsed and scouted through the profiles of the defenders first. What remained of them, anyhow.
Some were hard enough. Former warriors of feral tribes that managed to eke out a tortured living in the Sunderwilds somehow. Members of a now true-deathed Fallwalker’s retinue before being captured. Augment-stripped enforcers from rival Syndicates set to be humiliated one last time.
Vicious enough to fight, perhaps, but there was a presence of frailty about them. Maybe it was from the dozen or so that lay gibbering in corners, clawing at walls after beholding a clash between the eldritch with naked eyes, or how their hearts screamed with anxious strain while their bodies stayed rooted to their defensive placements, with Dice exploring the world beyond alone.
Caution ruled them, and for those with weeping children hidden in the deepest delve of the station’s prison cells, worry was a constant concern.
Perhaps it was a blessing that Essus did not come for this expedition. Witnessing such exploitation would reopen scars before they ever had the chance to mend.
Avo’s regard for the children remained brief. The ones who weren’t scared remained too young, and the caretakers who held them weren’t much better in this regard. As he felt at the weakest of his choices using his Sanguinity, the urges of his ghoulhood began to whisper to him anew.
Once, this would come with a struggle. He would think of the suppleness that came with the flesh of children and be thrilled at the prospect of running his fangs through their softness while their helpless guardians bled out in front before them. Violence and cruelty pulled at him from a unified rope. Such was the design of all ghouls–the want of their masters.
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But he wasn’t such a creature anymore. He was more. Far more, by Walton’s hand and the progress of his own apotheosis.
With a mere decision of will, he drained away all pleasure that could be found in imagining the torture and butchery of the meek and diverted the artifacts of his bloodlust into more fruitful ventures.
Ventures such as empowering a new Godcla–
[Ghoul! What fuck are you doing!] Abrel cried.
Avo’s attention stuttered and found himself lapping the sweetness of blood and the delectable tang of flesh. Bones lay broken between his fangs, and his claws and Echoheads sank deeper into Dice’s torso like she was but clay.
His Incog was still on, and the girl choked as lungfuls of her lifeblood splattered free out from her throat. Confusion rimmed the wideness of her eyes as she thrashed, unable to notice the very beast that was shredding her, killing her.
He pulled himself free with a flourish of splattering red. He fused her wounds back to hardness and circled her blood using his Sanguinity. Alarm tore through his consciousness as he cycled back through his memories.
Why did he just do that? When did he do that.
He was only looking at his other potential choices and altering the makeup of his Conflagration when he ripped through her.
It hadn’t been an active decision on his part. It didn’t even feel like a passive one. But the flow once within her veins was dripping down his claws and his throat, and he could still taste her with each swallow.
Again. He lost control again. Like with Zein. Like with Glitch.
What was happening? How could this be happening? He had complete command over his own mind’s structure now. Nothing should be able to compel him to act beyond his interest. Was it because he was reminiscing over past horrors? Violent desires? But he hadn’t decided on doing anything. A body didn’t just act on its own.
Or did it?
Or could it?
Was this a leftover degradation from the Low Masters? An effect of the ignorance that took hold of his sheathe each time his awareness expanded and his attention thinned?
Dice was on the ground down, twitching and gasping as she pawed weakly at her wounds.
+I didn’t… I didn’t want to do that…+ Avo thought.
[Well, you fucking did,] Abrel said, disturbed by the suddenness of his brutality. [What was that? You did that without even thinking.]
Avo deloaded all his templates and his subminds manifested in their place. [Scrying through consciousness…]
[Resequencing memories...]
[Complete. No compromise discovered.]
[Likewise. We are… vexed.]
A low growl escaped him as he watched his prime candidate for Ensoulment began to thrash and spasm, her eyes rolling to the back of her head as her biomass began to wither…
[Ghoulification. She hasn’t survived till the rains yet. No vaccine. Going to become a nest.]
Flashes of the boy greeted Avo and he delayed his shock in place of completing what he came here to do.
With a flick of an Echohead, the particulates in the air rippled and Dice’s neck snapped backward. Clutching her being at the moment of death, he slotted her nous into one of his spare Souls and promptly triggered a disruption at the core of his ego as well.
Plummeting into death, he grafted a Sangeist to the confused girl’s Frame and broke another to serve as a Hell. He made adjustments to keep her counterbalance different than his, rendering her expulsion of entropy tactile so that all matter she touched began to wither and decay over time.
He skipped past the details and ignored her screaming mind while he worked in haste.
When finished with her Frame, he accelerated his resurrection cycle and ascended back into the real first to anticipate her return.
Twitching into existence, Avo did another sweep of his own mind and found nothing amiss.
Nothing he could detect, anyhow.
Whatever was wrong with him was either beyond Necrotheurgy or his expertise. Neither boded well. He needed a means of enforcing control in the meantime. A secondary structure to monitor himself without risk to others if possible.
His considerations were interrupted as Dice flickered back into reality right next to him, and though her flesh was fully mended, her mind still screamed with questions and confusion, her thoughtstuff churning like a typhoon from all the unexplained phenomena she experienced in a short span of time.
Avo wasted no more time and speared his flames into her mind. Drinking away her ego as a template, he mimicked her cognitive structure and began to tweak what she could recall. Forging ingots of knowledge behind what she was now and what her powers could do, he built in a session in the back of her mind as he had with Abrel as he scrubbed himself clean from her thoughts.
All she would know now was that–by mysterious means–she was a Godclad with an enemy to face, and that she now had the tools to hunt and butcher the Three-Fingers that sought to snuff her like cattle.
She would recall nothing of him though. He would be able to access her mind when he chose, but her purpose was not to be his associate or slave.
Her purpose was to live and wreak havoc through the Warrens as he once did and part the attention of the Paladins should she fail to be circumspect. If she fell to true death after all her ensouling, then such was life in New Vultun. But if she performed, he still had an avenue to imbue her with greater and more expansive ontologics.
For now, however, he simply broke her neck a second time and let her corpse topple down upon offal-soaked plascrete.
Casting a final sweep using his Whisper, Avo made sure the other FATELESS remained ignorant of his presence as coated himself in haemokinesis and stepped into a bolt of surging lightning.
Within the microsecond of his traversal, he realized the protective dome he built around the Crucible had splashed down with his death. Little matter. They were done here. It was time to return to the demiplane.
Like a whipcrack he crashed down next to Draus and the others as lightning stitched him back into shape from still sparking blood. Kae stumbled backward. Chambers toppled over himself. The Regular fixed him with a bored stare and pulled burning hifflass out from between her lips.
“Didn’t kill any of ‘em, did you?” Draus asked. She was asking if he butchered any of the FATELESS. It would be remiss of him to lie.
“Only one,” Avo replied, considering if he wanted to tell her about his control slipping as well. “Gave her a Soul. Burned her clean of memories.”
“Whoa,” Chambers said, holding up a hand. “You weren’t shitting us about that? You’re actually giving these flats Frames?”
A stench wafted from the half-strand and it was thick with jealousy. “Yes. Going to distribute more power soon. See if the victims can invert their positions. See if the abusers can still fight when they’re on the bottom.”
“And build a false trail for the Paladins and Exorcists to follow considering all the weird shit we get up to, yeah?” Draus finished.
Avo grunted. “Something like that. Should open us a passage. I’ll liquefy the aero. We need to get back to the demiplane. I’ll distribute our haul there. New ontologics for everyone.”
“Fuck yes,” Chambers said, pumping his fist as all envy evaporated from his mind.
Draus, however, was not so easily distracted. “You ain’t been in a hurry like this before. Somethin’s up.”
The thought to resequence his own mind to adapt and convince her of his stability greeted Avo as an appealing option, but the longer he held Draus’ flat stare, the less he found himself wanting to lie. “I’ll tell you later. Want to leave now. Please.” Three sets of eyes blinked at him. “What?”
“Please is rare coming from you, Avo,” Kae said. “Mostly you’re just like: ‘Draus. Going to do a thing. Hm. Considering implications of thing. I’m thinking about castrating a prepubescent and getting hungry. Not going to do it. I’m a good ghoul.’ And then you’d torture someone terribly.”
Draus snorted. Chambers guffawed. Avo glared.
“Mocking me,” Avo said.
“Yes, but that is how you’re like. Draus is right. You seem… worried.”
He shook his head and hissed. “Talk where it’s safe. Open passage. I’ll deal with our leftovers.”
The Regular swept her gaze across him and offered a quick nod. “Denton casted us earlier. Said Aegis was ready to meet and was acceleratin’ the timetable per your preference. You good for talkin’ to the voider bosses?”
Avo didn’t know. But he couldn’t abandon such an opportunity. Not when there was more for him to understand. Not when he could enhance his mind into a new spectrum.
Maybe the Sprites would be a new means to salve these lapses.
“Yes,” Avo said, unsure if he was lying. “I’ll be ready. I’ll be fine.”