I clutched my chest, hugging myself, still shaking slightly from the horrific dream.

Blearily, I surveyed the early morning sunlight in despair, as it crept around the edges of the room’s heavy curtains.

So much for a good night’s sleep.

The nightmares had made up a semi-regular occurrence since about a month ago, due no doubt to the trauma of the disastrous delve and subsequent raid combined with the stress of having to, for the first time in my life, survive entirely on my own.

But none had been as bad, or as realistic, as that one.

It almost hadn’t felt like a nightmare at all, more akin to my trigger vision, the first time I’d seen the golden centipede. The eldritch monster from this dream had resembled it somewhat, but differed in shape and color.

And…strangely enough, in age.

The golden centipede I half suspected responsible for granting me my Blessing had been positively ancient, carrying with it the feeling of innumerable eons spent growing and evolving. Its demeanor had been learned, calm, calculating, even world-weary.

This one, on the other hand, felt young and angry. Furious and arrogant, reminding me more of what I imagined a Cell-born Aristocrat’s disposition to be, rather than some manner of antediluvian alien.

Or maybe, it was just a fucking nightmare, and nothing more.

Groaning, I rubbed my tired eyes. Already, the memory was dissipating, details of it quickly fleeing my mind, leaving behind nothing but a still-malevolent mental miasma. I wasn’t upset to forget it. I didn’t want to remember the thing, but more importantly, I didn’t want to remember Mom.

I couldn’t bear to.

Stretching stiffly, I massaged my temples even as the last remnants of the headache ebbed away. I couldn’t afford to be distracted, not today.

The bed had been absolute heaven to rest in, but between the awful dream and how late I’d stayed up, I’d not got much of it. Last night my sweet, sweet slumber had been put off in favor of poring over the tomes granted to me by the Blessed Librarian.

And I’d had a lot to learn.

I’d mostly skimmed the first two; the histories devoted to the Cells and the Coterie. Still, I’d gleaned a bit from both. The former taught me that the Cells were something of an Old World institution to my home continent, actually dating back to before the Collapse itself. Apparently they, back then known as the Elite, had once held significant power in the unknown nation that controlled pre-Collapse North America.

After the events of Gold Morning and the Horror left their parent country scarred and brutalized, the Elite retained enough strength to form a new nation in its wake. As a matter of fact, they were the first world power to do so; the earliest singular entity to exist in post-Collapse memory. And for a while it seemed possible, even likely, that they’d rise to pre-eminence over the whole of the world itself.

That is, until the advent of the Spawn.

The book claimed the exact date of the creatures’ arrival to be unknown, but approximated it somewhere in the mid-200s, AC. Rising up from the land south of the Cells in an ever-spreading Stain, a host of horrific monsters and mutants came. The children of Sothoth, the Birth Titan, took no prisoners, showed no mercy, and gave no quarter. They were as strong as most Blessed, and one hundred times as numerous. They did not tire, sleep, or take time to strategize.

The Cells were slow to react, at first. Perhaps ignorance was to blame. Perhaps disbelief. Perhaps, more likely still, the Aristocracy was simply too captivated by prospects overseas, by dreams of glory and conquest, of creating and ruling a global empire.

Until one night, when the Spawn wiped Cell Pareil off the face of Earth Bet.

An entire sect of the Aristocracy, countless houses and even Immortal Blessed, the southernmost Cell that had for years faced the brunt of the swarm without issue, swallowed up in a single evening. Suddenly, the Spawn was no longer just one Cell’s problem. Suddenly, the Aristocracy faced extinction.

And so, the Frontlines were formed. And for the first time in history, each Cell did their part.

Cell Agni supplied the raw resources, geokinetics raising tall and mighty walls around the entire breadth of the Stain, stemming the flow. Cell Uther built upon them, Tinkertech cannons manning each and every tower, blasting the Spawn from afar, energized force fields protecting those behind them. Cell Syn manned the walls, fielding legions upon legions of Blessed and mundanes alike to beat back the ever-encroaching tide of churning flesh. Cell Grenblyd provided the food, phytokinetics working overtime to grow great bumper crops of enhanced, compact, imperishable and nutritious rations for the army. And while they fed its bellies, Cell Nycta fed its ranks, their bustling slave trade serving as an perpetually replenishable disposable fighting and working force. Lastly, Cell Patrusc supplied the Inquisition, an elite division of the Faith specialized in healing and, when that failed, razing what infection remained to the ground.

And as for Cell Regis, well, they supplied Valour, of course. And his Kingsguard.

It’d worked, for a time. The combined efforts of the world’s then-strongest nation, just barely able to hold back a single Titan of ten. But it’d crippled the Cells. Now, there’d be no conquest, no glory. Now, there’d be no international stage, not for this nation, not before its own house was set right. The constant flood of men and resources saw to that.

And even after everything, even after the best efforts put forth by countless Blessed, even when they slowed the Spawn’s advance to a crawl, it still wasn’t enough. To this very day, despite the millions of lives lost, mountains of fortunes spent, and countless Immortals slain, the Cells hadn’t managed to push back the Stain a single inch.

The history of my country was a dismal one, indeed. Much unlike that of the Coterie.

If the theme of the Cells’ chronicle was somber, then the Coterie’s was secret. Hironaka, irrespective of the praise Mentat had granted him, didn’t have much concretely to say of the organization. His account was competently penned and interesting enough, but where it fell short was…well, reality.

Most of the book was speculation. Hironaka himself even admitted as much. It made me slightly regretful that I’d not chosen the other one, the tome written by the Coterie’s Chief Chronicler. It might have been more biased, but at least it’d tell me something.

I sighed. Oh, well. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The one I really cared about, the one I’d counted on to give me something, anything, was Gerbold’s Grimoires.

And it had. It’d delivered in spades.

Gerbold was a strange fellow, or had been. The Blessed Thinker died nearly a full century ago. He wrote eclectically, haphazardly, like a butterfly perpetually flitting from one thought to the next. His Blessing, so he claimed, was Observation.

A bizarre one.

Bizarre, considering that it was a power apparently available to all our kind. This had been news to me, but at least explained how those Blessed I met could see my name, Hero, merely by looking at me. Observation, in its most basic form, allowed fellow Blessed to recognize one another by name and, if they had one, title. More limited, therefore, than my hearing.

Gerbold, however, claimed that he could observe everything.

Every object, every animal, every thing. He’d stated, somewhat detachedly, in his very own book, that many denounced him for it. Apparently, his fellow academics in the field of Entropic Arts and Sciences had decried both his work and Blessing as little more than the delusions of a madman.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The Coterie itself had made a huge effort to discredit him, even attaching a preface to the work, warning that the author’s mental state was likely unstable. But they didn’t bar it from publication entirely. In fact, perhaps Gerbold’s supposed insanity was the very reason why the Coterie had allowed this sole tome, in contrast to all others that focused on Entropy, to be publicly available.

When Gerbold looked at a tree, it would return ‘Tree.’ When he looked at a chair, it would return ‘Chair.’ When he looked at a mundane, it would return ‘Human.’ When he looked at a Blessed, well…

Well, that’s when things got interesting.

In his Primer, Gerbold asserted that, upon observing a fellow Blessed, he would receive a full description of who they were. The similarities to my own hearing were not lost on me, nor too, was the sentence in my own Grimoire referring to ‘full status observation.’ It couldn’t simply be a coincidence.

But it wasn’t a complete answer, either. Because when Gerbold received a ‘full description’ via Observation, he didn’t get the same thing as me. The multiple examples written within his book proved it.

When Gerbold observed a Blessed, he got something like this:

~~~

Name: Warp

Title: N/A

Race: Host

Alignment: Neutral – Evil

Attunement: Mover 10 // Striker 7, Thinker 2

Parent: Zion

Direction: Data

Shard: Minor

Stage: Marble

Words: N/A

Cynosure: N/A

~~~

Reading it for the first time had made my hair stand on end.

It’d made my blood freeze. It was so similar to mine, and yet, strangely, so different, too. It answered many of my questions, yet raised so many more.

Gerbold dissected each aspect of his Observation in thorough detail.

‘Name’ was a rather obvious one. After all, it was no different than the information all other Blessed received. The only unusual aspect about it was that Gerbold’s Observation explicitly prefaced the statistic with ‘Name.’ In other words, whereas most Blessed would simply see ‘Warp,’ Gerbold saw ‘Name: Warp.’

A peculiar distinction, almost…scientific? Clerical?

‘Title’ was much the same. Upon reaching the core stage, all Blessed would receive a title, and said title would be displayed alongside their name to all who observed them. In this case, it read ‘Not Applicable’ because this ‘Warp’ wasn’t yet an Immortal.

And if the Observation had ended there, then Gerbold’s Blessing would have been an interesting one, but purely academically, and nothing more. No, it was what came after these two items that had caused many to question the author’s sanity.

‘Race: Host.’

No one else got that information. No other Blessed, in all of our history, received anything besides another’s name and title. No one knew what the word ‘Host’ even meant.

No one, except me.

My Blessing didn’t give me that information upon hearing someone, but it did give it to me personally. It had referred to me as ‘Host.’ In my very own Grimoire. Multiple times, in fact. If I’d merely suspected such a thing before, then Gerbold’s tome confirmed my suspicions.

I was a Host. All Blessed were.

But, Host to what? To my power? Was my Blessing nothing more than a parasite within me? Was it wearing me, like a set of clothes? An unsettling proposition to say the least, but impossible to determine from this alone.

‘Alignment’ was interesting, but of little relevance to me. According to Gerbold, the Blessed in question, this Warp, had become incensed upon being informed of his own immoral alignment, and proceeded to terminate the interview. However, this statistic alone was perhaps the least worrying of them all. Plenty of Thinkers had the ability to read the intentions of others. Even the Blessed at Uther’s gate could do so. It wasn’t altogether uncommon.

‘Attunement’ was far more intriguing, but best left for last.

‘Parent,’ on the other hand, was simply incomprehensible. According to Gerbold, it only ever gave one of two readings; ‘Zion,’ or ‘Eden.’ The author couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and neither could I. In fact, in his decades of research, the only concrete morsel of information he’d managed to divine about it was more of a curiosity than anything else; that, for whatever reason, the parent of Thirds was always Eden.

‘Direction’ was equally stupefying. Every single Blessed, third or not, that Gerbold encountered always had the same entry under Direction; ‘Data.’ It never varied. But, what did it mean? Did it refer to intention, drive, or a literal direction? And what did ‘Data’ signify, in this context? It was, again, incomprehensible.

On the other hand, the next statistic was both shocking and the most personally pertinent of them all.

‘Shard: Minor.’

Two words I’d heard before. One, again, from my very own Grimoire. But the second was familiar to me as well. It was how my Blessing had referred to the gatekeeper’s power, Gauge’s Chromic Intuition. ADMINISTRATION had called it a ‘Minor Shard,’ denigrating it. There could no longer be any doubt in my mind.

Shards were Blessings. Blessings were Shards.

Somehow, they were how powers described themselves. An unnerving thought, considering I’d been taught all my life that Blessings weren’t self-aware. That they couldn’t be. Yet, more and more these days, I was coming to doubt that. After all, what was sentience, if not the ability to bestow, upon one’s self, a name?

My ADMINISTRATION, without question, possessed agency. It would have attacked the gatekeeper’s Shard, if I’d let it. My Soulbound Weapon, Fang, was becoming more intelligent and lifelike with each passing day. And, if I focused acutely on my inner song, on my sea, and tried to pick out subtle differences in the melody, I almost felt as if I could hear my other Blessings, as well.

My Grimoire referred to my primary Blessing as a ‘Noble’ Shard. The paramount Noble Shard.

What did that mean? Was there some manner of internal hierarchy for Shards themselves? Did they have their own Aristocracy? The mere suggestion of such a thing was ludicrous, yet I found myself considering it all the same.

Except, Gerbold maintained that there were only two types of Shards, the only ones he’d ever observed; ‘Major’ and ‘Minor.’ He further claimed that even Major Shards were exceedingly rare, having only encountered a few in his centuries of life. Were Major Shards and Noble Shards the same? Somehow, I doubted it.

More answers, more questions. Thankfully, the next statistic was entirely straightforward.

‘Stage: Marble.’ If only they could all have been so simple. The Marble stage was reached at ten Attunement, following the Grain stage at five and preceding the Core stage at fifteen. Gerbold also granted me knowledge of the fourth stage, ‘Body,’ reached at Attunement twenty. However, unlike most of his book, his knowledge in this case came from rumor alone, as Gerbold himself admitted that he’d never encountered a Blessed at the Body stage.

And unfortunately, the author’s next words confirmed my fears regarding ascension.

Aside from the standard knowledge that each stage was blockaded by a trial and would result in a Gift if passed, Gerbold wrote that progressing one’s stage was a vastly variable process. He stated that increasing in Attunement alone was insufficient to ascend oneself to a subsequent stage, and that many Blessed found themselves stuck just below the Core, or Marble stage, never to find the inspiration that they so desperately needed.

Even Gerbold himself was unable to progress beyond Marble, eventually dying of old age.

Confusing and unhelpful, just like the final two metrics. ‘Words’ and ‘Cynosure’ both read ‘N/A,’ in the same manner as title, perhaps implying that, similarly to the latter, they would be unlocked in ensuing stages. Regrettably, as before, Gerbold was unable to verify this hypothesis, never managing to observe a Blessed with either of these statistics unlocked. Their names alone gave nothing away, so the author was much at a loss to draw concrete conclusions.

What he did go into great detail on, however, was the fifth statistic; ‘Attunement.’