Correspondence. Such a strange Domain to study. Some novitiate Agnosi liken it to the Domain of Spaces—and of course they would. That is the way its patterns seem to work on the surface, anyhow. The defiance of distance is commonly understood to belong to only a few Domains. Of course, Borders, Geometry, and Boundaries can all be included as well due to varying cultural understandings, but as Kaswi’s Unifying Theory of Branching Archetypes, Modernist Thaumatugical Theorist all attribute Heavens into the greater and offshoot variants—which is why we have so very many Heavens of Space now. Of course, the up-and-comers in Dimensionality are besieging the Spatials as I lecture, so another paradigm shift might follow in a decade at the most.
But though the Modernists might be able to smuggle a few canons from what they consider to be “offshoot” Domains by being loose with interpretations of old mythology, the same trick hasn’t taken off with Correspondence.
And for good reason at that.
Ultimately, Space brushes Correspondence more than the other way around. When you think of someone—have a connection to something, you exist in relative areas, but aren’t technically anomalously bound in any way. The miracles at play here are based on connection, not relative position or even Dimensionality.
Let’s use the Remembrance as an example. You can love something or someone without them being anywhere near you. Or even functionally within this dimension at all. You might love your deceased pet, and this causes bonds to briefly form as you see other people play with their nu-dogs; or perhaps you love a song, and a Correspondence is made wherever that song is playing.
And then there are other factors beyond Space. Like how strong the connection is. Or how it might only exist at certain times, under certain conditions.
All this to say, my fellows, that we should look at the exact details in the patterns. Breadth is for conjecture and comparison. But we are not here for breadth. We are here to compose miracles, and that will not be done by weary minds or stubborn hearts.
-High Agnos Jakuta Ajayi
30-8
Feeling Good
“SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT!”
Chambers could feel them. All of them. The ones he chose to love filled that emptiness in his heart and from him shot tethers carried straight to their beings. Distance wasn’t a factor. The time it took for him to form these bonds was instantaneous, but worst of all was the pain the guilt that came with it. And the intensity. Holy fuck, the intensity of actually loving someone was nova-hot misery. Worse was feeling how much he had hurt them. They were just little tiny ephemerals. Thank fuck they were Sang—bio-rigs kept more than a few from liquefying outright from the speeds he yanked them earlier.
And the bioforms! Those poor bee-ape fucks! They were just doing what the Whalequeen wanted them to do. They were good juvs. Couldn’t even think. This wasn’t their fault—they didn’t ask to be alive. And here he and Cas were, just fucking snuffing them. Squishing them by the thousands. Gods he was a piece of shit.
There were over twenty-two thousand beings entwined with him. They were like little specks on a string he could just pull around. And he loved them so, so, so much! So much that he didn’t even dare to pull. Just had to keep them there. In place. If he tugged even a little, they would all shoot in his direction from wherever they were. That meant smearing thousands against walls, tearing them out of their aeros, from public transit, off bridges or through windows.
He could even feel the pilots running the local Porter golems! The ones forming the demiplanar perimeter around Everpeace. He could feel them inside their tight little cockpits, and with the slightest yank, he tore their golems through layers untangling Space. Not even another Domain could stop his reach. It was too complete, too true, too total.
At once, the blurry certain that shrouded Everpeace tower collapsed, revealing the district beyond. And even more bonds came into sight. Bonds running everywhere, lining everything. He could barely see the material world any more. Everything was layered beneath a coat of interconnected threads.
Chambers’ wards began to jolt wildly, and his trauma damage began to build. There was so many… so much want and lust and love going everywhere. He could feel Marlowe in that mess—somehow, he sorted her out easily, a bond running between her and the eighteen drink she was having that day in the bar. There were other strings trailing out from her heart too. Including an incredibly faint one that was slowly inching toward him across the city, but dissolved before it even got a tenth of the way.
Love was too much, too total. He didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.
He was the wrong guy for this power. The absolute wrong fucking guy.
“Oh… oh, no. I was wrong, Aedon. I was very, very wrong. I regret this! I regret all of this! Love is poison. Love is pain. Why did you let me merge with the Remembrance? Why couldn’t you have stopped me…” The Lovebringer sobbed, and Chambers wasn’t far behind them.
“Fuck you, I was the one who was uncertain. You talked me into this. Not the other way around. I was all apprehensive and shit—I liked you as a big pile of dicks, we didn’t need this!”
Something was hatching out from his chest. There was so much pressure there, he needed to breathe but couldn’t. Everything hurt. His nerves were on fire, his mind was a haze of chaos, and… and…
The bonds that extended from him kept thousands of his new lovers in place. Swarms of bioforms strained in the air, unable to push through the links that ran them through. No matter how strong their bodies were, it was nothing before Chambers’ love. The same thing with the Whalequeens. There were dozens of them nearby the megablock, but they were all pinned in place by the thinnest of threads. They let out pitched screams of confusion even as their multi-ton bodies thrashed in the sky. But Chambers felt no more struggle holding them in place than the lesser bioforms they spawned.
Then came the people, and that gnawed at Chambers worst of all.
Some of them weren’t moving—limbs pointing at awkward angles from the sheer torque they experienced earlier. A few hundred No-Dragon technical personnel were frozen in midair, Chambers’ bonds halting them from a fatal fall. There were Agnosi there too—this Chambers’ knew. He was close enough to hear their thoughts and taste the pain and fear in their hearts. But they weren’t the only ones he was connected to through Correspondence; the ones they cared about had been pulled into his network as well—and their lovers thereafter. Chambers stopped there, but the dense lattice of magenta bonds that once composed his Heaven expanded to something that swallowed the entire block itself. And though desire, love, and want leaked out from him, the reverberations caught by his links delivered only pain and fear in return.
That hurt the most. Knowing that he inflicted so much pain on those he loved. Feeling them struggle against his touch. They didn’t want him. They were trying to run from him, just like mom did. Oh, he knew that they knew… knew that Aedon Chambers was an unlovable piece of shit. That’s why everyone left him in the end. That’s why he couldn’t have anything for long. Mom, grandparents, the cadre…. None of that was going to stay. He should just—
Gods, it was painful to feel this much. Everything inside him was being consumed.
Chambers’ sobs melted into his Heaven’s, and both of them broke down, an emotionally distraught spider ruined by the love it felt for all the fleas in its web.
“Chambers?” Cas said. Chambers didn’t respond. Oh, the cultist was a decent guy with nice hair and a good chin, but what would he—Chambers noticed a particular strong bond revolving through Cas, recognized that as his faith. Oh, wasn’t that nice? Wasn’t that beautiful. To have that kind of relationship with himself. Something that no one could take.
Other than Chambers. Chambers could totally snatch that love. Maybe he should just… dip in and learn how Cas was—
“No, Chambers,” the Lovebringer groaned. Metaphysical “snot” erupted from the questionable portal it had for a head. “We ruin everything we touch. We have to keep ourselves away. We have to get more of those people back on the platforms and run. And then… and then… we need to let them go.”
“No!” Chambers cried. “No. I don’t want to. I don’t want to stop loving it. But I also do. Fucckkkkkkkk! Why does it feel like this! Why! Twist my balls—pour acid into my eyes and shit! Fuck me to death like they did Dannis with that cylindrical chainsaw in Gore Hour Nine. But put a stop to t-t-this…”
“Christ above.” Chambers barely heard Cas’ mutter, but it was enough. He was embarrassing himself too. Gods, this was supposed to be the moment he proved that he was capable of taking over after Avo. He was supposed to… to get hard enough to live as his own man…
“I gotta get hard,” Chambers whimpered.
“What?” Cas muttered.
“I gotta get hard enough to stop loving.”
MYTHOLOGY REPAIRED
CANONS UPDATED
CANON
ECSTASY ETERNAL (CORRESPONDENCE/LUST): YOU CAN MANIFEST A SENSATION OF UNRIVALED PLEASURE IN ALL BONDED ENTITIES CAPABLE OF FEELING LUST.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
HUBRIS: TRYING TO TRIGGER THIS CANON IN AN ENTITY INCAPABLE OF LUST WILL RESULT IN MINOR (5%) THAUMIC BACKLASH.
A burst of Soulfire escaped Chambers. With it, another part of his Heaven solidified. But it didn’t offer Chambers any solace. Instead, it opened him to a whole new avenue of sensation. Lust. All of it. It was just there earlier—a vague presence among his Domains—but now it was stable, and he felt every last urge, fetish, and deviant need through his bonds.
WARNING! SEVERE TRAUMA SUSTAINED
COG-CAP - 89%
WARDS APPROACHING OVERLOAD
“Cas!” Chambers cried. “Save the people!”
“What? What fucking people?” Cas replied.
“The Sang. The Agnosi. The people who were on the bone-cage-thing around this block. Some of them are just dangling there. Save ‘em! Save the bioforms too. Oh, fuck, oh, dead gods, I’m a piece of shit.”
A beat followed. “Chambers… why would I—”
“BECAUSE I LOVE THEM! AND I LOVE YOU TOO! I LOVE EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE I TOUCH! I WANT TO FUCK THEM TOO! AND I WANT THEM TO FUCK ME AND EACH OTHER! I WANT TO MAKE THE WORD ONE BIG LOVE-FUCK PILE THAT I CAN JUST PROTECT!”
“Jesus—now, I’m seeing why the Heaven of Love was supposed to be communal.” The emotions carried over from Cas were disbelief, horror, and some disgust. No love for Chambers. Just his faith. And that made Chambers very, very sad.
Love was all around him, but there was still too little of it. Still not enough.
The world was so cold, so lonely…
But maybe… maybe, he could make everyone feel good. Maybe he could give everyone a dose of absolute pleasure.
“Yeah… yeah, we should do it,” the Lovebringer said. “Look at them… they’re all so… helpless and sad… There’s all this love and want and we’re the only ones feeling it… it’s not right. It’s not fucking right, consang.”
“Your right, consang. All these years the city’s been keeping it in. So much shit has been pressed down. It’s fuck up. But maybe today… today we can do so good. Today, we teach them how to love and want again. We show them what true love and true lust feels like.” A loud reverberation washed out from Cas. He still wasn’t saving anyone. In fact, he was doing the opposite—trying to wrap Chambers in waves of sound. “Dammit, Cas I told you to save my lovers.”
“Chambers—they’re not your lovers, your mind is being twisted by your Heaven, you need to—”
“I gotta show everyone how we feel!” Chambers and the Loverbringer said as once. “It’s time New Vultun busts as one.”
“What?” Cas cried, aghast. A string on his Heaven twanged in shock. “Chambers! Chambers!” Cas flinched away from new bonds burrowing into him. Or he tried. There was no escaping the correspondence of love. Everyone was going to feel good.”Chambers! For the love of—”
Chambers spread his bonds. Through every person, through every object, into existing bonds, from the over-loved, to the lonely and dying, he instilled them all with his ontology, and he called forth the full power of his Ecstasy Eternal. Everyone was going to feel good right now. Everyone. Him. His Lovebringer. Cas. Marlowe. The Massists. The Saintists. The artnids. The Joyfiends tripping out thirty kilometers away. The funny-looking nu-dogs humping each other in the bushes on a patio.
Everyone.
Cas’ words trailed off into a loud and ragged moan. “Cham-bers you fucckkk! Oh, Sweet Christ in Heaven. Oh… oh, god…” His Heaven vanished, leaving only Cas trembling in mid-air, held aloft by Chambers’ bonds and spasming as the full might of Lust and Love flooded his being. But he wasn’t alone. All across the city, from the Agnosi and No-Dragons managing Everpeace’s quarantine to the subjects and citizens in the surrounding blocks all got a full blast of lovin’ as well.
Finally, the world came alive with cries—shared proclamations of “Holy fuck, no, not now, why!” and incoherent screams of primal release. As the feeling built in them, feedback came around, surging back into Chambers as well.
COG-CAP - 98%
WARNING: WARDS CRITICAL
“Yes!” Chambers said. “Feel the love! Feel my love!”
***
—[Marlowe]—
“And so, he says to me… he says….” the bartender’s expression twitched and grew inscrutable. She swallowed and shifted her body awkwardly, her ribald little tale about prior customers strangely interrupted by whatever she was experiencing.
“You alright?” Marlowe asked. She’d been here for nearly the entire day trying to squeeze out scoops—and bum drinks—from those around her. The bartender had been working the entire time without rest. Just her and a couple of modified eunuchs as servers. She didn’t seem tired at all during the rush earlier, but maybe she was feeling something now.
The bartender just nodded. “Yeah, I’m just… is it warm in here?”
Marlowe as about to say no, but her body suddenly flushed as well. A surge of heat ignited inside her. “I’d… say it's ho—oh, oh.” She gripped the bar top. The bartender did as well, with her natural and transplanted limbs.
All around them, people embraced their own bodies, and let out gasps and groans.
Marlowe blinked. Were the drinks poisoned? Was this some kind of viral attack or…
Her coherent thinking collapsed. And things started to feel really, really good. “Oh, sweet fuck in hells,” Marlowe muttered. She knew what this was—felt them plenty of times from the vics but… it’s been a good decade or so since her actual body did this.
“Shit,” a scarred man in a holocoat muttered, clinging to his seat for dear life. “Shit, no, please, not in front of everyone—aghhh!”
And with his hoarse cry, the dam broke. Everyone in the bar came undone, bodies twisting, faces grimacing, and stains growing…
“What… the fuck… is happening…”
***
—[Sui High Thinker]—
“Fine, then!” High Thinker wept, slapping the corpse of Farsong, her sister, dead from a joy overdose. “Fine. You did it. You hurt me! You hurt me good! You finally did it! You finally killed yourself and left me alone just like I always thought you would!”
The lights above her flickered. Shadow and bright alternated in Farsong’s unblinking eyes. Groans began to sound from other occupants in the drug den. High Thinker didn’t care about them. She tracked her sister here to save her. But that wasn’t fucking happening now, was it? No, all her efforts were pointless. All those promises Farsong made about getting clean got undone the moment it looked like the world was going to end after Scale ruptured.
Went straight to her favorite dealer after that. And straight here. With the Nether collapsed, there was no way to reach and so…
High Thinker sniffled. Her body was burning. Gods, she didn’t know grief would feel this hot, this… this good…
“Awhg,” a Joyfiend three couches away grunted. “Shit, I pissed my—wait, this isn’t… this isn’t piss…”
Then the feeling of grief got very, very good, and High Thinker started convulsing over her dead sister’s body. “Wha—why—oh, oh, dead gods!”
She didn’t know why she was experiencing this now of all time. One didn’t anticipate suffering the greatest orgasm of their life in a ruined den of vice over their sister’s body, but life came at you fast in New Vultun.
Guess what they said about the rash being over was true.
And so, High Thinker stopped crying and started screaming.
Her voice was but one few hundred thousand in the block.
***
—[Dowager Ning Golden Song]—
Dowager Golden Song was scheduled to meet with a certain group of Agnosi today. Something about a block afflicted by Wombrash while reports elsewhere claimed the metaphysical malady had miraculously cured. With the amount of problems stacking up on Golden Song’s plate, it was getting increasingly hard for her to actually care.
Everything was going to shit. The Tiers were being displaced after that horror show at Scale. The High Seraph was missing. The Fifth Guild War had entered a phase of uncertain limbo before it could fully start, and she was overseeing combat operations against Stormtree while actively working Sanctus toward mutual benefit in other places. Most frustrating of all was how her fellow Dowagers thought now was a good time to start making their power plays.
The bureaus and courts of the No-Dragons were moving into the opening phases of a shadow war. Dowagers vied against all comers to hold their power, while the younger of their cyclical sisterhood struggled to survive. To be Sang was to have your fate sealed. You lived as part of a cursed cycle: you experienced the same series of events as all other Sang, aging at the same pace, giving birth after the same passage of time, losing the same amount of children, bleeding the same amount of blood, and eventually succumbing to the same dragon-damned disease.
There was no mundane remedy to the cycle’s end. It was a fixed moment in their personal timelines as much as the rest of their lives. No amount of nanosurgeons could prevent them from hemorrhaging a final time, and not even fully grafting oneself into a full-weave bio-rig would delay the inevitable.
Nothing other than claiming another’s place in the cycle.
The Sang, more than any other clade in New Vultun, possessesd symmetry with one another. Blood could be shared. Organs could be offered. And even their fates could be swapped. And such was how one eventually became a Dowager. By claiming the cycle of a younger Sang for yourself, like a snake eating its way into young flesh, to an earlier point in time.
Such was why Golden Song volunteered for Warrens duty. Sure, she had good odds of encountering Massists assassins or rival Godclads, but she was never one for shadow games. Better to strive and struggle in the light than plot and scheme within offices or mansions, wondering which of her sisters she was to kill for a few more years.
+We are about to arrive, Dowager.+ The thoughtcast passed through the walls of her luxury aero. A protective cadre accompanied her. Handpicked elites, all of them. Doubtless they were less than pleased about her choice to leave the safety of the Living Territories that kept most Dowagers safe beneath layers of shifting biomass, but she was doing them a favor as well—no sense losing good Godclads to internal politics in a time of crisis.
+Thank you, Second Sister,+ Golden Song replied. She almost activated her Auto-Seance before she stopped herself. Right. That didn’t work anymore. A lot of things didn’t work anymore. Briefly flicking her mind across the many inert menus within her Metamind, Golden Song winced slightly as she considered the fate of her stocks and businesses. It felt odd not being able to see—
+Uh, Dowager,+ the Second Sister said. +We’re seeing some—oh, ohhhh+
The Ghost-Link filled with a sudden spike of… was that lustful pleasure? Golden Song’s Lustaway activated immediately. The Dowager blinked and sat up in her chair.
+Second Sister? Second Sister what is—+ The presence promptly smashed through her like an avalanche. She didn’t even see it coming—was helpless before the will of highest love. Her back arched. Her tigermorph bio-rig roared around her torso.
And she learned that life could still very, very, good.