Whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
The buzzing, jarring, grating staccato of artificial cyanobacterium-based oxygenators filled Calvin’s ears.
Their march was endless. Mechanized. Infinite.
Their task was essential. Delivering that fresh, sterile, synthesized gas to the only one here who truly needed it. Keeping him healthy. Keeping him whole.
His body, at least.
Whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
Their pace was uniform. Endlessly uniform. Just as much as their task. Inescapable. Some days, most days, it was all he heard.
Machines, that lulled him to sleep.
Machines, that woke him in the morning.
Not that there were mornings, here.
Whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
And yet, maddening as it could be, it…it brought him some manner of peace, their noise. It was a constant companion. A sonic sigil of safety.
The whir.
The hum.
The clicking.
Maddening, but tranquil, too.
They were diligent in their labors, he had to give them that. Unlike him. Unlike him, they didn’t hesitate, or wonder, or ask questions. They never stopped, never faltered. Diligent, to the bitter end.
Long after he died, they’d remain. They’d keep going, just as stalwart as ever. They’d not be bothered by it. They’d oxygenate his corpse, even as it rotted. Even as it putrefied. Even in death, his death, they’d serve.
Now that was discipline. That was commendable. The machines would continue, long after he met his end.
And right now, that end seemed just around the corner.
Calvin’s throat was dry. His chest was tight. The little hairs dotting his arms, and neck, and back, and asscrack, stood on end. His eyes were wide. Wide open. Fixed firmly on that thing just in front of him.
That massive cadaver.
That mammoth corpse.
That fallen god.
That Simurgh.
Distantly, errantly, Calvin wondered if it would have bothered Ziz, that he still called her thing.
Even–even in his own mind. Even after all they’d been through, together. Even after they’d done things, great and terrible things, so many things, together. Even after they’d been partners half a decade. That was long enough to become familiar, plenty long enough.
Even after she’d saved his life.
In the end, Calvin realized, it didn’t matter.
She’d always be a monster.
Even death’s stillness made her no less magnificent.
Even the ruthless rictus of rigor mortis was insufficient to sully her divine proportions, to dull the luster of those beautiful, white-silver wings, to make threadbare the great tresses of roughspun platinum that fell from atop her head. Her frame was long, and slender, and humanoid–
Or…well.
It was humanoid enough.
Humanoid enough, when compared to her siblings. Humanoid enough that, if you forgot the lack of genitals and nipples, and ignored all the breathtaking, gargantuan wings, and took a glance from far enough away, you might…you might just think you were looking at one of your own kind. A simulacra. Until you saw the eyes, at least.
Those eyes were dead, now.
Dead. Glassy. Lifeless. Like the machines all around. Calvin shivered, but he couldn’t turn away. She lay there, splain out wretchedly, sprawled upon the cold metal ground of this extraterrestrial facility that had once been home, and office, and prison to the both of them.
Now, it was a coffin.
Her coffin.
Soon, it’d be his, too.
Calvin’s mouth moved.
His vocal cords trembled, his neck purpled, his throat strained with a herculean effort, but decades of prior cowardice put forth a poor attempt at courage, now. After the fact.
Despite everything, everything she’d done to him, Calvin still wanted to speak. To call out to her. He wanted it badly, so badly. Despite everything, he didn’t want to her to die.
But, dead she was.
And he couldn’t say a word.
Calvin was all alone.
Lost, and far from home.
And, though he couldn’t understand why, exactly…somehow, he knew that it was all his fault.
~ten minutes earlier~
Calvin Copeland or, as he’d once been known, Leet, sprinted down the thickly-padded, grey-white hallways of the moonbase that was his home.
And his prison.
His legs pumped with a frantic, desperate energy. His heart beat stinging battery-acid through his veins and arteries, thumping relentlessly against his own ribcage. He breathed in shakily, exhaled roughly, the purified air tasting thin and sour.
Calvin had never been much of an athlete.
He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know what time it was. He heard alarms ringing all across the facility, screaming their machine-panic, piercing his ears, shaking his skull, and muddying his swelling mind. They’d woken him up. He hadn’t even known that this place had alarms.
What the fuck was going on?
Calvin sprinted across thick bulwarks and raced down empty hallways, skidding left and stumbling right at each and every turn. This place was a massive, metal maze, a tumor grown of tubing and counter-pressure, flared ungainly across the craterous surface of earth’s sole celestial satellite. It was daedalian, truly, nigh-unnavigable, but Calvin knew it like the back of his hand. He’d never get lost here.
And yet, for a moment…
For just a moment, he’d thought his mind might be playing tricks on him.
For just a moment, he thought he’d…he thought he’d seen something.
Something small. Something insignificant. Just a glimpse of something, really. A flicker of motion, a glimmer of the impossible, disappearing just around the edge of a hallway in the far-off distance. A small, cylindrical…furry something. A tail.
A cat’s tail.
Black as the void outside. Just a hint of sea-green to it.
But, just as soon as he’d noticed it, he’d realized that he must have been mistaken. There were no cats up here. There couldn’t be. No animals, at all. Not a one.
No life.
But him.
And Ziz.
He made for the center of the facility, made for it with all the pathetic speed his gangly legs and stringy limbs could possibly muster, one lonesome thought dominating his panicked mind;
He had to find her.
He had to find her. He had to. Yes, there was no other way. Ziz would know what was happening. Absolutely, she’d know. She always knew. She knew everything.
Finally, he arrived.
He skidded to a halt at the very entrance of the massive, dome-shaped central theater the two of them called their base of operations. A gigantic observatory on the dark side of the moon, tens of stories tall, all paneled in thick, reinforced, Tinker-wrought silicate. From all around, Calvin was greeted by darkness, an infinite, abyssal cloak faceted dazzlingly with twinkling, glimmering, glittering, ever-spinning stars.
This was the nexus of the Plan. The heart of the Work. The place they oversaw the whole world. The crucible.
In which they’d create the perfect System.
But Calvin didn’t stop. He didn’t stare. He’d seen it all before, countless times. Instead, he looked around frantically, rovingly, panicked eyes scouring the contours of the sphere-topped room.
He saw no life, but all manner of machines.
This was unsurprising. He knew these machines well. Some, he knew very well. Some, he’d even helped to create. Most, though, were incomprehensible. They served only as a frightful reminder of the stark difference in capability between him and his alien partner.
They were made by, and for, Ziz.
Her, and her alone. None else. He didn’t know what for, and he didn’t ask. He never asked. He didn’t dare. He tried his hardest not to imagine what things they might be capable of. It didn’t matter, anyway. His efforts had been for nothing.
Ziz wasn’t here.
She wasn’t here.
How could she not be here?
Ziz was always here, almost always here. She rarely ever left, and only, only for the briefest of excursions. But right now, somehow, the operations theater was empty. Barren. Void of motion or life or light, save for the deep-red, and mind-meltingly flashing alarms.
There was no one here but Calvin.
He walked forward, confusion and fear spiking, sparing a moment to glance closer, to direct his attention to one small portion of the vast network of television screens they used to monitor their Work in the world.
He saw it, and he froze.
His breath came sharp and painful, sticking within his throat, making him choke on it. Scattered about in a hundred disparate moments, and viewpoints, and perspectives, and camera angles, was but a single scene. A scene that filled him with horror. A scene that made his blood run cold.
It was a vast menagerie of colorful, armor-clad figures facing down a single celestial warrior. It was one million pinpricks of disparate power, and fire, and dark matter, and esoterica, all colliding with a man made out of gold.
It was Thinkers, and Tinkers, and Strangers, and Trumps. It was Blasters, and Breakers, and Shakers, and Brutes. It was Movers, and Changers, and Strikers, and even Masters, too. It was one hundred weapons of mass destruction, one hundred disparate fields of warping time and space, one hundred million pounds of concentrated force delivered brutally and efficiently into divinity given flesh and form.
And Calvin saw it. He saw all of it. He saw the many forms of capes he’d known and tracked and monitored for decades. Some alive, some dead, some mangled, some screaming. He saw all this, and more. He saw, altogether, a collective humanity, facing down their wrothful God as one.
And it was beautiful.
And it wasn’t nearly enough.
With each passing second, they were being torn apart.
“Oh…oh, god,” Calvin whispered, faintly, so faintly the words almost failed to emerge. He stumbled back a pace without meaning to, falling on his behind with a jarring, tooth-rattling thump and biting down on something soft, and fleshy.
He tasted blood, and barely noticed it.
Today.
It was all happening today.
Humanity was fighting Zion, today.
Today.
“No,” Calvin whispered again, in that impossibly-thin voice. “N–no. No, no…no…”
No.
This couldn’t be.
This couldn’t be.
This couldn’t be.
It couldn’t be today, it couldn’t possibly be today, there was just no way that it could be today. He must…he must’ve…
NO.
No, they’d known this day was coming. They’d known this day was coming. They’d known it for ages. They’d planned it, they’d practiced for it, practiced it a thousand times, they’d had everything figured out, the two of them, along with their collaborators, it was never…it was never…
“It can’t be today…” Calvin gasped, finding it, all of a sudden, strangely difficult to breathe. Like the air was thin. Like he couldn’t draw it in. He was lightheaded. All he could hear was the relentless pounding of his own heart.
“What’s…what’s going…”
Then Calvin’s eyes locked on, at last, to the spot he’d been looking for.
A spot far away from all the action. All the gore. All the bloodshed. All the death. A thick, dense, quiet cluster of capes, their eyes all shut tight, squinted in concentration, twisted into so many grimaces of pain. Upon their heads, stapled to their skulls, were a series of cruel, crude, savage devices. Machines. Tinker made.
These, Calvin recognized.
He recognized them well.
Gamma-type Neural Amplifiers.
He recognized them well, indeed. He’d helped create them. Meant to form an artificial, psionic network between various Thinkers, augmenting their abilities, eliminating their weaknesses. Linking them all together to form one omniscient mind. Insurmountably potent.
Equally costly.
They’d work for one hour, and then the Thinker would never think again.
These doomed Thinkers, these fleeting gods, together, they clustered around one giant, flawless, many-winged figure. The Simurgh. It was a horrific scene, a brutal display.
But it didn’t bother Calvin.
This was the plan. This had always been the plan. Part of it. Physically, they stood a chance against Scion, but had little recourse for his vast network of mental resources. This was the best way, the only way, to keep him at bay, even if momentarily.
No, it didn’t bother Calvin.
“No…”
Calvin choked, tears filling the corners of his eyes.
No.
It wasn’t the grotesque ritual that bothered Calvin. No. No, it was the figure he could just barely make out at its edge.
At the edge of the circle, the rim of the cluster, his perfectly-resolved face screwed up into an agonized wail, his ears and eyes leaking black blood.
Uber.
A million disparate thoughts raced through Calvin’s mind at breakneck speed, but one emotion dominated them all.
Betrayal.
An awful malaise spread across his body, filling him from tip to toe. Making him lurch.
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Instantly and without warning, as if she could somehow hear his thoughts, Calvin watched Ziz’s inhuman eyes widen. He watched her head jerk up and out, robotically, snapping suddenly onto the tiny camera that monitored her work, locking on to Calvin, somehow, from two hundred thousand miles away. Her mouth contorted into a silent scream.
And then she was before him.
The third Endbringer’s lightning apparation made Calvin shriek out, and stagger back. Her hundred, silver-white wings spread wide, splendid, glorious, bathing him in divine splendor. She fixed eyes like silver beacons upon him, no less grand or gaudy or astral than the very moon that the both of them stood upon.
They bored into his soul. They savaged his meager consciousness. They threatened to drive him mad.
But Calvin stood his ground.
He was used to this, by now.
He was used to her.
WHY ARE YOU AWAKE?
Her words emerged as a single, solid tsunami of sound, a wave of force that burst forth from her ravenous, a maddening bellow of thought and meaning and emotion that battered down the rafters of his mind and forced his pathetic body to its knees.
Ziz’s words, alone, had reaped lives, ruined heroes, made whole cities fall to rout and chaos and gibbering madness.
But Calvin Copeland wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t sniveling.
He was angry.
He was furious.
“You lied to me!” He shrieked at the Endbringer before him, the alien deity, the eldritch god-given-flesh. “You promised me he’d be safe! You promised me!”
But she paid no notice to his outcry.
WHY ARE YOU AWAKE?
She thundered once more, repeating herself with just as much force, and fervor, and urgency, as before.
Calvin didn’t respond to her. He ignored her right back. He didn’t care what she had to say. His eyes flipped frantically between her and the screen.
“Pull him out!” He cried, desperately, clutching at the flawless, high-definition image of the only friend he’d ever had with his bare hands, as if he could draw it into reality by force of will alone. “Pull him out, you have to pull him out, you have to pull him out, we made a deal, you promised that he wouldn–”
NO.
Her divine voice drowned out his, once more. It was all-encompassing. Inescapable. Her denial was a matter of existence, a rule of natural law, as fundamental and exigent as the sun, or the sea, or the midnight sky. A fact of life.
Calvin turned back towards her, opening his mouth to plead, and to accost, again.
And as he did so, he realized something.
THIS IS WRONG.
He realized that she wasn’t talking to him.
THIS…IS ALL WRONG.
He realized that she’d never been talking to him.
And as Calvin’s anger dimmed, dulled, diluted in favor of confusion, by the nonsense of this sudden realization, he started to notice something else. Something more.
He started to notice the unusual emotion present in her perfect cheeks and pearl-white eyebrows, the likes of which he’d never, ever, ever, seen her express before. He started to notice the raw, untamed panic haunting her silver eyes, and the way her gaze, too, seemed distracted, flipping between a thousand different locations all at once.
THE PATH.
She moaned, in a lament that meant the end of cities and the ruin of mortal men.
I CANNOT SEE THE PATH.
“Ziz?”
Calvin asked, abruptly, his voice so small he scarcely recognized it.
“Wh–what’s going o–”
YOU SHOULD NOT BE AWAKE.
She accused, her madly roving eyes fixing upon him, once more, a single flawless finger extended damningly his way.
YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE. YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO BE HERE. YOU ARE NOT SAFE, HERE. YOU SHOULD BE ASLEEP.
I CANNOT AFFORD T–
All of a sudden, Ziz’s gaze whipped up, and outwards, the panic overwhelming her entirely, her gaze focused on something Calvin couldn’t see.
NO.
Then, he heard it.
The scream.
Oh god, the scream.
Oh god, the scream.
It began quietly enough.
A little tickle in the back of his mind, a whisper at the edges of his thoughts. A faint susurration, a murmur, a child’s laughter, innocent and unthreatening. And the pain that came with it, too, was meager. The slightest shudder of errant nerve endings, a distant discomfort that prickled his extremities.
Pithy. Barely worth mentioning.
Until it was joined by another.
And another.
And another.
And another.
And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another and another andanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanotherandanother until his mind was gone, and his limbs were liquid, and the voices drowned out thought, and the pain was all he knew, all he’d ever known, all he would ever know, an abominable and all-consuming thing, an impossibly fundamental and dreadfully existential anguish, a hundred knives, dull and flensing, and a thousand needles, sharp and piercing, and a million bulbous worms, burrowing, gorging, gnawing, every fear, every nightmare, every torture, every unpleasant thing he could possibly have imagined until he screamed his throat dry and he begged for it to stop, wept for it to stop, but it would not stop, it would never stop, foolish Hosts, wretched miscreants, for thee who would betray thine King, now SHALL BE UNMADE–
NO!
Calvin watched, in a pain-induced stupor, as the Simurgh he so hated, and feared, reached fingers tipped in purest silver his way. He watched her stretch out flawless limbs towards him, grasping at him ethereally, telekinetic grip spreading all across the massive dome.
The great and mighty and unknowable machines he’d seen and wondered at for so long, the ones he’d imagined as instruments of torture, or madness, lit up all at once, and Calvin felt a wonderfully warming blanket spread across his mind, swaddling him in remnant sanity.
Relief.
The machines whined.
The Simurgh wailed.
The titanium walls wavered.
Then all was quiet.
Calvin sobbed.
He wept a hot, salty humor that ran down his face in rivers and rivulets. The pain was not gone, and its memory would never truly leave his side, but slowly, surely, Calvin returned to himself. He looked up through eyes blurry with tears of a pinkish hue, coughed up a wet, choking clump of thickly-congealed blood, and slowly stood.
Ziz had saved his life.
He’d never thought the creature might be capable of such a thing. How had she done it? Why did she do it? Just what cruel fate, exactly, had she saved him from?
Ziz had saved his life, but it’d cost her everything.
Her body was dissolving. Her uncanny, alien eyes guttered, great and gaping holes bored into her frame and chest, such that Calvin caught sight of a brilliant orb of white-gold and pure silver deep within.
Ziz twitched, spasmed, and toppled to the ground.
Motionless.
“Z–Ziz?” Calvin croaked, nevertheless, as if his words might somehow rouse her. “A–are you alright?”
A stupid question.
She did not reply.
All Calvin heard was the ever-present hum, and whir, and clicking of oxygenators.
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
Calvin took fast, shallow breaths. Blood drenched the front, and sides, of his t-shirt. He touched his ears, and nose, and felt a sickening wetness there. He looked around.
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
The alarm was gone. The TV screens were dead, one and all. Black. Dark as void outside. Half the consoles were smoking, defunct. Useless. They’d served their purpose.
It was over.
It was all over.
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
As he listened to the dull, incessant clicking of interminable machines, an abrupt and awful fear, a tight and twisting nausea arose in Calvin’s gut.
He turned about, and promptly retched, emptying the paltry contents of his malnourished stomach onto the metallic, white-grey ground. He watched it spread, slowly. Creeping across the polished steel.
His breaths came faster, and faster. His eyes began to lose focus.
Calvin Copeland was alone.
All alone.
Lost, and far from home.
Only machines remained to keep him compan–
“Calvin.”
Calvin jerked back with a gasp, eyes wide, arms shaking, sweat dripping freely from his brow. He whipped about in an instant, panic momentarily forestalled.
The Simurgh had craned her half-shattered head towards him.
“Please.”
She didn’t look much like a god, anymore.
Her once-wondrous wings were limp and sagging, flaking feathers all about. Her flawless skin had devolved into a vast latticework of cracks and crevices, crumbling to pieces at his feet. Her eyes were dull, the luster behind them flickering pitifully. Her voice no longer threatened to shatter his ears, or sunder his mind.
It was quiet, now. Delicate. Fragile.
It quivered, ever-so-slightly.
She sounded afraid.
“You must finish.”
She spoke, once more, but Calvin barely heard her. He couldn’t process her words. He couldn’t process much of anything. The adrenaline was finally fading away, and with it, everything else.
The walls were melting, the ceiling was swimming. His ears, and nose, were still leaking blood. He was shivering violently, and he couldn’t make it stop.
“The Path must be,” he heard her moan from a million miles away and right beside him. “It must be. The Work, Calvin. The System. You must save the World.”
His name.
His name.
Calvin heard his name. His real name. He heard her speak it. Impossible. Why would she say his name? She’d never said it before, never. He was only ever Leet. Or, more often, Host.
Why would she say it, now?
Calvin swayed atop his legs.
“Listen to me, Calvin,” she begged him even as he toppled to the ground, her voice distant and echoing. “Listen to me. You have to listen to me.”
Obediently, Calvin turned to look her way.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” the demigod explained, her words machine-gunned out at uniform pace and tenor, but spoken far too rapidly for him to truly hear. He frowned and rubbed his temples. A throbbing headache was starting to pulse across his skin.
“You weren’t supposed to be awake,” she continued, “you would have been protected–”
Suddenly, Ziz stopped.
Calvin watched her eyes flit over his bloodied body, and her mouth twist into a grimace. Another anomaly. Another impossibility. The Simurgh never paused. Never hesitated. Never faltered. Never said anything she didn’t have to say.
Why would she? She could see the future.
She knew everything.
Incredibly, she opened her mouth, then paused, again.
As if…as if, for the very first time, she was thinking.
“We were…never going to win. Not yet. Not now,” she said, finally, that unsettling grimace still twisting its way across the corners of her face. Her words were thick with pain, but it didn’t seem solely physical.
She looked sad.
“I’m sorry, Calvin. But you needed to survive.”
Her eyes, sharp and anguished, met his, dumb and unfocused.
The Simurgh frowned at him, and, for a moment, her dull-silver orbs flared gloriously bright. She stretched out a shaking, shuddering, fragile hand his way–
Then something behind her eyes sparked and screeched like a dying engine.
The Simurgh wailed out in agony, and clutched her shattered visage in both palms.
“P–promise me, Calvin,” she moaned. “Promise me you’ll survive.”
Calvin didn’t understand what she meant. He was losing grip again.
His eyes darted upwards, towards the tapestry of stars that glittered in the sky. They were dancing for him, twirling, pirouetting, performing a ballet only he could see, one so much more beautiful than words could possibly describe.
He was beginning to feel sleepy.
“Calvin.”
The Simurgh reached one dilapidated, crumbling arm towards her chest and curled it into a fist. From within, the great crystal sphere of white-gold and pure silver twinkled, shivered, trembled, and jerked forth.
With a low, drawn-out moan of horrific, stomach-churning pain, Ziz wrenched it out.
Calvin’s eyes were wide, and glassy. A broad, sluggish smile had spread across his face. Gleefully, he watched the ball of white and silver dance mesmerizingly in the stagnant air. He watched it spread out great tendrils of glittering immaterium, probing the space around, caressing the walls and floors and ceilings, stroking his own pale, bloodied cheeks. Curiously.
Like a newborn child.
“Use my Core,” the Simurgh gasped in pain.
Her voice was cracking. Crumbling. Disintegrating. Following her body in falling apart. She would die soon, in mere moments. She’d die pitiful, and in pain.
A fitting end, he thought. For such a monstrous creature. For lying to him. For making Uber fight. For letting his friend die.
And yet, as Calvin blinked groggily at her, his eyes flicking between the pathetic Simurgh and her wondrous Core, he couldn’t deny he felt…he felt…
He felt a hint of sadness, too.
“Use my Co…ploit the network…the Gest…ystem based o…ttunement…arahumans in…proto-Endbri…ou have ev…ou need.”
Calvin’s head bobbed slowly back and forth, his heavy lids poised to close completely. The Simurgh’s already-scattered words turned to mush inside his addled, exsanguinated mind. Instead of attempting futilely to comprehend them, he gazed deep into her pleading, emotive eyes.
And, strangely, saw something incredibly human.
He saw fear, and hope, and despair. He saw fear for him, and fear for her, and fear for all the world. He saw plaintive despair for a freedom lost, desperate hope for a future salvaged, and abject bafflement at what had so recently come to pass.
But were these mortal qualia truly hers?
Or, perhaps, was what he saw merely his own reflection?
“…ease, Calv…ou can still…or all of us….for t…rfect Future…”
Her voice faded away, her final thoughts dissipating amidst the ever-present hum of distant machinery, the terminal embers of a dying star.
Calvin watched the Simurgh expire.
He smiled, and closed his eyes.
The room around him faded to black.
And all that remained was the whirr, and click, of undying machines.
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
whirrrrrrrrr shiff–CLICK…
~~~
Title: The Silverwinged Simurgh.
Also known as: Ziz, the Stranger, and the Lost Titan.
Activity: None.
Area: Unknown.
Bio: We know little of the Simurgh.
Precious little. For reasons I intend to make all too obvious below, its appearance, its powers, and its disposition are very much mired in doubt and uncertainty. We are thus, when it comes to the nuances of the Simurgh, forced to resort to a rather unbecoming manner of speculation.
Accounts regarding the Simurgh’s appearance vary considerably.
All stories, however, concur in this sole regard; the Simurgh, hence its unofficial Title, is a winged creature. It possesses, in fact, a great many wings. It is the precise color, and number, and orientation of these appendages, as well as the morphology of their host corpus, where Ancient histories proceed to differ.
The Simurgh’s wings are depicted as white, and gold, and silver, and light blue-green, depending upon which recollection one refers to. Its described measurements are six, and ten, and sixty feet tall, some slight enough to walk among us, others so large as to wreak earthquakes with each glorious footfall.
Its body is humanoid, slender, and delicate. Or, it is deformed, and many-limbed, and monstrous. Or, it is naught more than a ball of one-hundred gargantuan, ever-twisting feathers. It is masculine, or feminine, or androgynous. It is beautiful, or horrifying, or impossible to directly observe.
Similarly, Ancient reports converge when it comes to the Simurgh’s mental proclivity, yet are maddeningly contradictory on all other fronts.
It is a precognitive, or a postcognitive, or the only true psychic to exist in all the world. It is a Blaster, or a Master, or a telekinetic strong enough to lift the seven seas with but a single finger. It can steal powers, like the Vile. Craft wonders, like the Maker. Meddle with the very mechanisms of Blessings, themselves.
Recount enough of the Lost Titan, dear reader, and you, too, shall surely find there to be nearly nothing it cannot do.
Personality: The Simurgh is a curious creature.
Curious, indeed. There is good reason I leave this account for last, despite, of course, the fact that the Simurgh was not the final Titan to appear on Bet. No, the Quicksilver claims that ignominy. The Simurgh was, by all accounts, the third Titan to walk our earth, and the last to arrive before the infamous events of Gold Morning. And yet, in the end, this is the quandary; all we have are accounts.
The Simurgh vanished over seven centuries ago.
Unlike Balmut, Lotan, and Beelzebub, the Simurgh took no part in our Horror, nor the Folly that followed. It showed neither hide nor single hair during the Respite, either. Or the Arrival. Or the Blooding. And during our New Era, we have seen no more of it than ever.
Not once, in any age since 0 A.C., has the Simurgh attacked.
It is tempting, therefore, to believe the Lost Titan’s eponymous evaporation humanity’s victory. And yet, whilst the Simurgh did vanish, may I remind the reader out that no body of its has been recovered. No body of its has ever been sighted. No proof of its disappearance has ever been presented.
It is entertaining, I accept, in a puerile fashion, to spin all manner of baseless narrative regarding the Simurgh’s shrouded origins, or supposed untimely end. This is not, however, in my estimation, a productive manner in which to engage academic historical discourse.
As such, and in the effort of good practice, allow me to discredit some of these most popular theorems now:
T1: The Simurgh was slain by another Titan.
Response: Unlikely. There is no evidence at all to suggest that Titans may make war with one another. To the contrary, even the notorious storied feud between the Sword and Vile Titans has yet to once result in direct combative action. In all other cases, the Titans are well-documented to lend one another a wide berth.
T2: The Simurgh never existed at all.
Response: Plausible. There certainly are, and have been, abundant rumors of Titans ancillary to the more well-documented ten that arrived from years 0 to 290 A.C. The origination of many of these stories may be attributed to Blessed of particular potency or grandeur in physical appearance that were mistaken for more esoteric creatures. For example, the Celestial Emperor himself was once popularly considered to be none other than an eleventh Titan. As such, it remains a distinct possibility that the Lost Titan was, in fact, none more than a similarly powerful Thinker whose legacy was embellished post-mortem (as is often the case).
T3: The Simurgh hides itself somewhere on Earth Bet.
Response: Unlikely. No Titans in history have demonstrated the capacity to recant themselves from interaction with the mortal populace, nor particularly the desire to do so. Even Beelzebub, infamous for its subterfuge, does not do this. It is an unspoken and relatively well-established rule among my ilk that something fundamental to Titan biology or psychology sets them at odds with mortal man. Indeed, this is perhaps the one area in which Chroniclers and Devoted Scholars agree (though, needless to say, for different reasons).
T4: The Simurgh died during the events of Gold Morning.
Response: This, I find to be the most plausible of implausible theories. It is possible, if unlikely, that a Blessed, or a number of Blessed, or even one of the Holy Triumvirate, was or were strong enough, together, to bring down the erstwhile God. Similarly, it is possible that the Warrior, in his rage, attacked indiscriminately, and his spawn suffered for it. All the same, I find it difficult to accept that there would be no records of such a momentous event.
T5: The Simurgh is not, and was never, a Titan. Rather, it was a hyper-advanced construct created by the High Priest to aid in battle against the Warrior. The Warrior destroyed it.
Response: Utterly ludicrous. It is consistently remarkable to me the extent to which my contemporaries will assign feats of unimaginable potence to Eidolon posthumously, far beyond that which he was ever concretely credited with in life. This theory, in particular, I suspect stands as a crudely-concealed Devoted dogwhistle, intended to discredit the Priest’s intentions and cast doubt upon humanities morals regarding the Rebellion. The Papal Canon may be inconsistent in places, but that is no reason to propagate vile rumors such as this one amongst the populace.
Ultimately, fact based solely upon eyewitness reports is no fact, at all. We may speculate and supposate ad nauseam, but the Simurgh is the one Titan whose nature and manner we may never truly know.
-Excerpt from A Treatise on the Nature and Manner of Titans for Internal Circulation by Chief Chronicler Axio.