There are paths woven into the architecture of the Tiers. Sometimes, they’re bridges leading upward and sideways into a place unseen. In others, the way ahead exists as a tunnel. Regardless of what form these roads take, to tread their lengths will lead you to a single junction above junctions.
Scale.
Once the seat of governance for Jaus Avandaer himself, now the central nucleus from which the Paladins enforce their duties, the demiplane of Scale exists above, between, beyond, beneath, and within Tiers themselves, granting easy egresses for the Paladins no matter where they need to go.
Yet, it is a faded ember compared to the flame it could have grown to become–an edifice demolished before it could reach its prime.
In the past during the age of gods and yore, the hope was to connect all districts, all sovereignties, all cities, and eventually, all worlds along a threaded grid of spatial transference. The concept was singular and revolutionary, and the system possessed the ability to function both as a silo and an overlaid realm, for an individual might only occupy one branch at a time, and severing a single strand would still spare the rest–casting only any intruders to dust.
Such was one among many miracles that never came to be. But compared to the scouring the Paladins at the hands of the High Seraph, the Ursday Null-Bomber, and the near-rupture of their esteemed Heaven of Justice, such laments are paltry when measured by comparative pain.
Today, Scale stands resplendent but rusted–the mountain fortress forming its planar expanse vast and divine, but its halls sorrowfully empty, with structures abandoned, the walls lined with loci-embedded plaques bearing memories for comrades fallen and unreplaced.
For those who qualify. For those of proper birthright, merit, ability, and willingness to serve, Scale holds a permanent embrace. But with the lowering of standards comes a dilution of duty and nobility.
For though one can replenish their numbers, can reclaim Souls and install new Heavens, the heroes and saints of yesteryear are nowhere to be seen, for lost to the Big Nothing are many, and lost to a great malaise is one.
-Paladins: Our Broken Blades (Documentary)
20-6
Frontiers (I)
Space shattered. Fissures overlapped as the Arsenalist pierced through space as if it was shattering glass. Behind by a mere kilometer, arteries lashed across the Rend-despoiled skies in whips of crimson lighting. Far below, the ground mirrored the air as a storm of blood ignited canopies and infested the bark of a thousand trees.
Yet, as blood and glass warred, a third entity shot through branches and dashed across the waters without encountering a hint of resistance. Its form was multi-armed and chimeric, with the legs of a beast and the weapons of a warrior, and it moved at a pace that was ever-accelerating, never-ceasing; an avatar of light and strength unfettered.
And so it was that Avo, Draus, and Dice continued their race through the Sunderwilds. Slipping past away from the last true vestiges of civilization into frontiers where madness claimed its reign, each of the Godclads unleashed the full extent of their powers, reveling in these moments of freedom rarely experienced.
Back within New Vultun, eyes lingered in every shadow, from every angle. Cameras, drones, people, and Specters. There were countless ways to have your secrets betrayed. Countless ways to be ambushed and slain. Even in demiplanar pockets or with Incogs active, running the shadows meant being ready for an unexpected knife fight at any moment.
Shotin and Abrel stood statement enough for the severity posed by surprise.
Here, however, in these realms so broken, so scattered, so scoured of life and stability, few would dare traverse the unwinding of existence, and fewer still would be able to gaze upon three Godclad approximating the Fifth Sphere with naked eyes without succumbing to mental collapse.
The Sunderwilds was a place of simplicity. Liberation, if viewed from certain regards.
Though space might fold and collapse, though streams of light might flense the shape from one’s body and leave a person bifurcated yet whole across the length of continents, though the light might seed beasts of unnatural morphology within the supple flesh of humanity, should one be capable of contending with reality themselves–wrestling with the laws of the absolute and the chains of existence–then striding through the madness became a meticulous dance rather than tempting of the fates.
Their final destination had no true name. Dice had always just regarded it as “home” or “master’s place.” What use did a dog have in learning the name of its own den? Especially considering it was the only settlement around.
Located seven thousand and fifty-two kilometers away from New Vultun’s periphery, it had taken Dice, her former master, and their retinue the better part of a full month to reach the megacity even with the protection of his Heaven and the retrofitted Highflame transport carrier that served as the Fallwalker’s personal vehicle.
That too had been lost to the scum of the city. That, and everything he had. They sought New Vultun on a pilgrimage for power and pleasure but were preyed upon in turn when the Fallwalker who knew life only as a master of others found himself wanting in a city forged by beings far greater than he.
Drawing from Dice’s memories, Avo knew the general route to take, and what to expect. He had burned the information into Draus as well before they began.
Currently, they were accelerating along the curving length of a spiral-like arm of pure chaos. The unbalanced Domains affecting this section of the Sunderwilds were connected to Forests, Vision, Deceptions, and Oceans. Avo could feel the presence of the Fallen Heaven and its Rend, but without Dice’s pre-knowledge, he would have definitely turned his attention upon the fluttering groves beneath him.
Merely seeing the pattern in the flapping of the leaves would invert one’s position to the vast sea hidden beneath the greenery. There, roots would attempt to bury themselves in what flesh they could, restraining the captured prey for the block-sized bioforms waiting in the depths of the waters.
Avo had felt the creatures first and foremost and vivisected them with his seeking blood. From them, he plucked new patterns of matter and biology, including new properties for his Woundmother to express, and new organs to culture in vessels of flesh.
Canon: Remembrance of Flesh (V) - Allows user to memorize traits from biological organisms at a tenth of the thaumic cost; the biomass they memorized can be spliced before they are grown.
->Notable traits obtained: [Sonarsight]; [CHLOROPHYLL SIPHONERS] (NEW TRAIT DISCOVERED)
Stolen story; please report.
Such were but a few new boons he obtained along his journey. Rare creatures twisted and adapted to these strange new environments graced the metaphysical archive empowering his Canon of Biology. Elegant-Moon grew pleased with his efforts and fed him inspiration on potential creatures he could mold into shape.
As the Daystar flared to a full dawning, even the ink-black clouds could bear its gleam no longer. Rays spilled down and brightened the world. The false forest emanated the hues of soothing emerald even far into the horizon, and shifting disturbances on the wind told Avo they needed to skip Heavens soon.
Near this section of the Sunderwilds, the sea-masked forest was intersected by another Fallen Heaven. One it shared no overlap in Domains with. As such, rogue miracles operated parallel to each other, all active, none clashing.
A twist of swirling wind swept ahead as the Fardrifter extended one of its nine heads, peeking via the currents of a gale to study the dangers to come.
Ahead, a wall of galloping mountains charged at them like a stampede, each the size of a district, while their forms resembled that of stone-carved bears. Such a horde would have been easy to avoid if they didn’t also petrify anything within an eighty-kilometer radius.
Draus shot far to the left, gunfire and shattered fragments sparkling the air in her wake. Dice followed soon after, her velocity carving fire and destruction in her wake. Avo took a more quiet approach, slithering under the winds as he followed his comrades, moving away from these lush-coated waters up a rolling series of hilltops until they arrived at a precipice where complex geometry collapsed, disallowing both vertical or horizontal movements at the same time.
{Hm. Pseudo-two-dimensionality without it being visual,} Calvino said, compiling data about their experience. {Quite fascinating. And a relatively safe patch for the Sunderwilds.}
Avo knew this place well through Dice’s memories. After a bit of travel, all color bled from the world, and strings unspooled in opposition to the vectors of their movement. Clouds vanished and the Daystar was presented to them in its full glory, its oscillating rings in motion, brightness growing and dimming between each overlapping of its concentricity.
Here, Avo flung his Woundmother out using his Fardrifter and launched himself ahead of Draus.
Though the Regular attempted to replicate herself further across points in space, she found space here like the wrinkling pages of a notebook. Self-replicating though her Simulacrae Replica still was, spatial reality would scrunch in on her as threading directions disfigured her path and sent her traveling toward undesired horizons.
Conserving his Boltstrides, Avo found himself using his Woundmother and Fardrifter alternatively and in tandem, using the former to accelerate and the latter for positional adjustments and spatial mobility.
A few thousand tons of haemokinetic mass dove in and out of the winds like a wave would across the surface of the sea. Close behind him, Draus had clustered her stacks close and was closing on him again, her Heavens flickering, as if the Simulacrae was riding upon the Arsenalist–a knight of glass seated upon a stead of unceasing firepower.
Yet, both of them were beginning to pale in comparison to Dice. Where the girl started a full horizon behind them in terms of speed, the Runebreaker conferred upon her exponential momentum every step, speed compounding by the milliseconds.
With both Regular and wilder repeatedly overclocking their reflexes using their new implants, Avo watched as his advantage slipped away from him inch by inch, moment by moment.
First, Draus pulled up just beside him, the Arsenalist larger than ever before, a massive flechette with rings of ordinance out from behind it. Then, Dice blasted past both of them, sending them rolling aside to avoid the blastwaves spreading out from behind her.
{Do you know each of you is effectively moving are relativistic speeds right now?} Calvino asked, speaking with a note of inquiry. {Nowhere near the high-end of the lightspeed barrier, mind you, but considering that you’re all technically single-planetary organisms…} The EGI sighed. {I suppose the greater miracle is how your thaumaturgy has prevented this world from destruction, seeing as you’re all going well over Mach 200… and orbital imaging has your destination at three thousand kilometers. Still. After five hours. I miss the days when distance was more science than an interpretive art form.}
And this wasn’t even that impressive. Sure, Avo could destroy a few districts at this speed. Kill a few people, but against the Delta golems deployed by the Paladins, sheer speed meant nothing.
Just like how they were all about to be slowed to five meters per second in a beat.
Color splashed back into the world. The star above them was missing again, and they found themselves fighting to move, the air itself like sludge, unwilling to flow. All excess speed was drained away, pulled from objects and bodies into the grey veins running between the volcanic outcroppings around them.
Draus was the first among the three to shed her godly guise, choosing to slam down on the plain of volcanic ash as an ephemeral and walk the wasteland for a spell. Avo felt tempted to cheat the spirit of things–to do what Draus didn’t with her Simulacrae and use his Fardrifter to shuttle himself across space without bother with speed at all.
But something stopped him.
Someone.
[Pull your ass out and take a walk,] template-Draus said, her attention on his DeepNav, studying how far Dice was from them. The girl was nowhere to be seen, but Avo could still sense her with his haemokinesis some three hundred kilometers away. [She ain’t goin’ nowhere. And you know the next stretch before we get there ain’t gonna be kind to her Heaven neither. Race’s about doin’ this right. Strain builds strength. Shortcuts makes cowards.]
Such was true. The last Fallen Heaven they needed to walk before they arrived at her enshadowed enclave was a place of broken vectors. As overwhelmingly fast Dice was by merit of her canons, her primary Domains were War and Strength. Directionality, Vectors, Speed, or Boundaries were all beyond her influence.
In this, Avo found a mediation on what it meant to be a Godclad: the way they could utterly control so many aspects of reality and yet still suffer a want to possess dominion over all other aspects of existence.
The drug that is absolute control, once imbibed, cannot be refused thereafte–
[Fuckin’ Jaus,] template-Draus groaned, interrupting his thoughts. [Shut the fuck up and just walk. Check your Rend, vent if you need to, and make sure your shit is in order. Think about philosophy shit later.]
Doing as the template suggested, Avo felt a cascade of spatial distortion nearby as he turned his attention to Draus’ actual self. Over twenty of her replicas were anchored in different positions, light lashing out from them like a prism, deleting sections of space outright. The distance between places shrunk. Parts of the landscape shivered closer as the Regular vented her Rend.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 53%
REND CAPACITY [FARDRIFTER]: 61%
REND CAPACITY [TECHPLAGUER]: 0%
Avo mirrored Draus and prepared himself for the final stretch of things. He almost started by draining his Fardrifter when he realized the local speed limit preventing him from using his Halt of the Passing to drain momentum. Likewise, Waybreaker would more than probably just leave him and Draus lost for several days seeing as they were the only two entities it could affect out here.
For as far as the eye could see ahead, the world ran in pulsing lines of grayness running between cracks hissing steam and magma.
Instead, he expended the entropy plaguing his Woundmother through his Breath of the Withered. The beginnings of an entropic gust spilled out from his orifices, unfurling wider still into cascading columns of stratocumulus. A thunderstorm of blackened lightning whipped slowly at the land, leaving kilometer-deep wounds while the gales swept the land clean of mass.
REND CAPACITY [WOUNDMOTHER]: 34%... 28%...
He studied Draus from the corner of his eye, watching as her replicas dimmed and shattered into shards of glass. She was marching as she vented, eyes fixed on the way forward, seemingly blind to the world around her.
The opportunity was tempting. Too tempting.
Avo might have subtextually agreed to not exploit Dice’s lack of spatial canons until they reached the penultimate segment of their journey, but murder was still fair game.
{Avo, I thought we went over this.} Calvino chided.
[Nah, go for it,] template-Draus spat. [Let that bolt fly at me. See what happens.]
And so, without further encouragement, he did.
The skies above them shattered with light as languid bolts dove down, seeking to shear Draus from her material form. A wave of enshadowed darkness brushed across the landscape, peeling layers of veins away into fading particulates.
Slow as the assault was, there was nowhere for Draus to go, nowhere she could–
Space fractured like a broken mirror around her person. Lighting speared through the crevice. The winds whistled as they left through a crack between spaces. A heartbeat later, Avo found Draus pointing her projectile launcher at him without looking, her micro-missiles streaking out, just as slow as his lightning was.
{Was checking if you were paying attention,} Avo said, casting her ansible.
The Regular snorted. {Yeah? Well, I just shot back ‘cause fuck you.}