Countless unfamiliar sensations assaulted me, derived from a body not my own but forced brutally to fit my neural pathways. Myriad alien memories plagued me, from a childhood and adolescence I didn’t recognize, nor remember, but which were haunting all the same.
Helplessly disoriented, I flitted from one moment to the next.
The studded lash landed, and I screamed in pain.
It was sharp, and swift, and agonizing, but the physical anguish was nothing compared to the dreadful surety that it would be followed by another, and another, and another until I could take no more.
The stolen memories ravaged me.
I struck my half-brother square in the nose, struck him so hard it shattered, and leaked, and he just laughed at me, licking up the blood with a sickly leer.
But my blow had managed to unseat him, and I ran down the halls of Midnight manor, sobbing, barely able to see where I was going through the tears, knowing that if I hesitated even for a moment he would be upon me again, and that the cycle would repeat itself until he tired of me.
My song was an ocean, and I was lost within its lightless depths, sinking ever further down.
‘STOP!’ I wailed, my voice high-pitched and my legs barely able to hold my weight. ‘PLEASE!’ I begged, closing my eyes and trying to turn away. ‘MAMAAA!’
But Father did not stop.
He pressed my face up against the black-iron bars and crooned at me soothingly, forcing me to watch as his Deathguard bled her slow.
‘Look, daughter mine,’ he whispered. ‘Look closely, and you may catch it. The very moment at which life leaves a body, and is replaced by naught at all.’
‘Look closely,’ he breathed. ‘Miss nothing, for this is the most beautiful sight in all the world.’
‘Look. Look, how she–’
“ENOUGH!” I bellowed, clamping down on the song, stemming the flow.
Instantly, the voices silenced.
Blinking frantically, I returned to myself.
The room was frozen, and Alyss was too. Acceleration was running strong at one-quarter capacity, tenfold dilation, but even then, it was a significant draw. I’d no time to waste. I glanced down at our clasped hands and saw our songs, cerulean and black-green, intertwined.
There was…something beautiful about them.
The way they twisted together, spiraling around and around each other. The way they moved in tandem, synchronously, coiling and curling around one another helically, as if partners in some endless dance.
I shook my head, narrowed my eyes and, with only the faintest, softest, lightest touch, guided my tendrils forwards.
With a gentile hand, I swam through veins and pierced past soft tissue, cruising through the sorceress’s carotid and vibrating up into her skull, squelching along her spongy grey matter until, at last, I saw it.
Alyss Nycta’s soul.
Although, I thought idly, perhaps it wasn’t quite right to call this thing a soul. Or, in my case, an inner sea. Souls were ephemeral, intangible, philosophical creations of the divine, and whilst this was most undeniably that, it was also very much physical. Very much tangible.
Very much real.
The crystalline, Marble-sized Entropy container, this masterwork of eldritch, antediluvian, alien architecture sat calmly, placidly, within the mind of its time-dilated Host. It beat gently, like a second heart, flared beautifully, like a cosmic core, and cast ripples of pitch-black, lime-green song in all directions.
It was the sorceress’s energy. The essence of both herself and her Shard.
I drew in a deep breath, let it out slow, and took the plunge.
I passed through the both meta and physical barrier that separated Alyss’s Marble from her flesh with little difficulty, diving into the innards of what I still saw as her soul.
And was promptly immersed in pure, pitch-black darkness.
This place couldn’t have been more distinct from my own. Mine resembled its very own world, if half-formed, unfinished. A rich, vast, and well-developed ecosystem, flush with life and presided over by the Shards I’d seeded within it, but, most of all, familiar.
My sea was just a sea. My islands were just islands, my volcano was just a volcano and even my raging hurricane was just that, and little more. Though perhaps of a considerably exotic and arcane flavor, it was, at the very least…understandable. Reasonable. Rational.
This was different.
There wasn’t anything normal about this darkness. It was a thick, all-black miasma, a choking, cloying, nearly-aqueous cloud of shadow and death that brushed queasily against the edges of my ethereal form. Immediately, I was blinded, deafened, and dumb. I was no God, not here. I was an invader. An interloper. A foreign influence.
I did not belong.
I cast out feeling tendrils of song all around me and felt an instant immune response. The clumpy clouds of shadow that surrounded me were not, in fact, inanimate.
They were the servants of this soul’s Master.
The spherical shadow-fairies I’d once thought cute were much larger and more menacing in here, each the size of a horse, at least. They surrounded me, pressed up against me, formed their essence into sharp blades and long fangs, and I found myself trapped amidst their occult legion.
I couldn’t call upon my own Blessings for aid, not from here, and so, as they drew closer, I tried the only recourse I could think of.
I broadcast my thoughts directly in the song.
I reached in and pushed out, emitting a great clarion call of pure feeling and emotion. That I was a friend, a colleague, a comrade. That I was here to help their Master, that I did not seek her harm. The shadows shivered, shuddered, vacillated, and drew back slightly, pausing their frightful offensive.
Making way for their greater kin.
It was a grotesquerie. A malformed monster of pure darkness and crawling flesh, bred by hatred and revived via unholy ceremony. A barely-humanoid creature of prodigious size, half again my own height, with long, clawed hands, sickly, jaundiced eyes, and a mouth that squirmed with wriggling, toothen tentacles. It approached me carefully, cautiously eyeing me with a hostile, yet inquisitive glare.
And then it spoke.
“FRIEND//ALLY?” it gurgled, warily.
Despite my experience with the song, its words, and their underlying intention, were not so easy to grasp. Its voice came through garbled and distorted. This thing seemed barely sentient, certainly far less eloquent than a Major Shard, and yet…there was more to it, too.
I was beginning to suspect that each creature’s version of the song, be they Shard or otherwise, was slightly different, slightly distinct. Each pattern of speech I encountered, from Sovereign, to Acceleration, now to this creature was…changed. Mutated, to fit their very own worldview, their unique manner of self-expression.
I licked my lips, spread my arms, opened my throat wide, and made clear my true intentions. I sang my memories musically, televising my feelings of camaraderie, my pride in Alyss’s accomplishments, her self-sacrifice, my joy at her survival, my willingness to lend her aid.
The shades around me recoiled as one, quivering with emotion, all hostility abandoned.
“FRIEND//ALLY,” the tentacle-creature whispered, its sunken, jaundiced eyes widening as it pointed at me with a good deal of reverence in its voice.
“SAVIOR//GUARDIAN//GRATITUDE,” it declared resolutely, trumpeting as it did so, blaring my good faith to the lesser servants surrounding us.
Without a hint of delay, the shades reacted.
Umbral-swords and ghast-mauls faded away into smoke, the shades chirping and hopping about with an excited, childlike glee. They danced gaily in a circle around me, chittering furiously amongst themselves, poking and prodding one another as if daring each other to approach.
The larger one curled its fingers dismissively, and the celebration was over. The throng dissipated back into that omnipresent blackness, returning to who knew where now that the threat was gone.
I looked at the tentacle-creature, and I pointed to myself.
“FRIEND//ALLY,” I sent back.
My mimicry of its speech was rather graceless, all told. Possessing not a single tentacle, myself, my attempt to simulate its vocal patterns was shoddy, at best, and the way it communicated complex thoughts and phrases in all one sound confused my mortal mind. But it would have to do.
I turned my pointer finger around, directing it questioningly at the creature itself, and raised an eyebrow. Slowly, it mirrored my movement, one thick, clawed finger aiming at its own churning chest, and quirked its head curiously.
I nodded.
“NIGHTMARE,” it hissed.
I blinked.
Well, I guess that’s appropriate.
Its message was concise and clear, this time, and so I echoed it with considerably less difficulty.
“NIGHTMARE,” I greeted, then paused.
With a roughened, thickly-distorted voice, I tried to deliver my request.
“HOME//CREATOR//BIRTHPLACE?” I asked, wincing as I did so.
I’d no idea if Nightmare would actually understand my words, or, more pressingly, the intention contained within them. This was a significantly more complex message than the ones I’d heard it speak, and I couldn’t just copy it this time.
Nightmare quirked its head at me, again, in that strangely birdlike manner. Its mouth-tentacles rippled for a moment, flaring with intensity, rumbling in odd and occult tunes.
Then its eyes lit up, and it beckoned me with a long, crooked, claw-like finger.
“LEAD//FOLLOW//SHOW,” it warbled, crouched, and shot off like an arrow into the murky blackness.
With all the speed I could muster, I chased after it.
Choking, oily shadows screamed past me as I followed my nightmarish guide, crawling across my skin, sliding down my nose and esophagus to rest uneasy in my stomach. I shut my eyes tight and pinched my nose, relying upon song alone to ensure I stuck to the proper path. The shadows grew thicker and thicker, darker and darker, hotter and hotter, more and more and more difficult to breathe–
And then we were through.
I opened my eyes, took a deep, grateful breath, and gazed out over the freshly-revealed landscape.
Much like Old Ottawa, this too was a wasteland.
Miles upon miles of empty plains, of dark, grey-black rock, depressing and devoid entirely of life. Nightmare, my undead chaperone, didn’t slow one bit for me to take in my novel surroundings, and so I took off after it once more, as fast as I could fly.
We twisted through the snowless peaks of barren mountains, from which dangled mammoth obsidian chains of awesome size and foreboding cause. We soared over chasms that split the desolate plains like cracks in flaky, fresh-cooked fish, and glowed with an eerie, yellow light. The living had departed this place long ago, but their remnants endured, left behind in the form of countless skeletal remains, some small and roughly humanoid, others so large and misshapen and altogether alien that they made me shiver.
And, finally, we arrived.
Arrived to a great, grey-black plateau that loomed ominously over the surrounding desolation, flat-topped and towering obscenely high. We swung low over it, Nightmare and I, descending in a synchronized, spiraling twirl until we happened upon its single, solitary landmark.
A church, but unlike one I’d ever seen.
This was no gaudy, gilded, golden, bastion of the Faith of the Holy Triumvirate.
This was a crypt-cathedral of the dead and the damned.
Like the great-plateau upon which it rested, this church was tall and imposing. But unlike its foundation, the church’s stone was pitch-black, all gothic spires and vicious spikes. Its architecture was grotesque, almost difficult to process visually, so wretched was the way in which it spilt over and ate into itself. It was as if the church had grown, mutated, or metastasized into its current place, rather than being built.
An occult, otherworldly, lime-green light glowed from within the church’s halls, vented through its huge but visually impermeable glass windows, lanced up from its creeping central spire to form a great pillar that pierced the midnight sky above, illuminating the plateau which it had so hellishly infested.
Around this pillar of eerie Entropy, a vast swathe of shades twirled and pirouetted, circling in a deathly school, a black tornado, immersed in some never-ending thanatic ceremony.
There was no doubt in my mind.
This was Necromancy.
Just to be sure, though, I hovered over to the creature that had led me here, and checked.
“HOME//CREATOR//BIRTHPLACE?” I asked, pointing at the church.
“FATHER//CREATOR//LORD,” it replied, confirming my message with a slightly modulated response.
“DEAD//DECEASED//TAKEN//TRANSMUTED//REBORN,” it explained, gesturing at both itself and the shades that swirled around us. Its innards fluttered back and forth, pulsing effervescently.
“JOY//PLEASURE//PURPOSE//SLAVE//SERVE.”
I nodded quietly, accepting Nightmare’s words, but frowning slightly as I stroked my chin.
I wasn’t pleased, nor surprised, by the fact that Alyss’s summons seemed just as subservient as any associated with the Gestalt, but could at least take comfort in the fact that they genuinely appeared happy to do so.
“GRATITUDE//GRACE//GUIDANCE//AID//EXPLAIN,” I thanked, bowing deeply towards it. The shade flickered once, twice, bubbling with a mixture of embarrassment and glee.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“FRIEND//ALLY,” it demured pleasantly, then shivered, rippled, and disappeared into the tornado of darkness and death.
I looked back down at the black church. Without doubt, it was an imposing thing.
And yet, just as I’d seen from the material world, it was, equally without doubt, Minor. Everything about it told me just so. Modest in size, discreet in presence, with little aura to speak of and absolutely absent any discernible mind, sapient or no.
I sighed.
So, this had all been for nothing.
Well, perhaps not entirely for nothing, I reconsidered. After all, I did learn an interesting new application of the song. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to speak with Caleb’s Blessing, like this.
The High Inquisitor had been much more at-ease of late, but remained taut and tight-lipped on the notion of thinking Shards. I’d offered to attempt a communion with his own, but the handsome mage had declined me. I nodded once, looked up at the sky above where I knew the exit to be, and made to leave.
That was when I heard it.
A sound so small, a whisper so faint, I could barely even say for sure that it existed. A sign of something more, emanating directly from the heart of the cathedral.
I narrowed my eyes, wrapped the song tight about me, and started to descend.
As I did so, I found myself gratingly confronted by another manner of noise, a different one from that which had piqued my interest. It was some sort of unholy choir, some occult choral fugues and thaumic pipe organs that moaned eerily from within the cathedral’s depths. They grew louder and louder as I spiraled further and further down, but they were not the sound. I was sure of it.
They were not the sound.
Nevertheless, their unnatural tenors and timbres caused my hackles to rise and my breath to hitch in my throat as I approached the black cathedral’s surprisingly human-sized door. Whereupon, I was immediately stopped cold by what I beheld etched masterfully across its surface.
The crypt-church’s door was covered in what I could only describe as the most detestable tableau I had ever laid eyes upon.
It depicted, appropriately perhaps, a grand and undead army.
Their measure was vast beyond belief, so much so that they blanketed the hills and plains all around the painting they inhabited, coloring it black and grey and green. There were legions upon legions of grisly ghasts, grinning ghouls, wailing wraiths, and greater crypt-lords that hovered imperiously above their penumbral thralls. Together they conjoined to form a seething, writhing mass, a tide of fangs and claws and midnight death.
Together, they surrounded a host of humanity.
But the men they warred with were not soldiers, nor knights, nor Blessed. They were farmers, a rabble of ill-equipped peasantry, boasting naught but tattered rags with which to safeguard their all-too-mortal flesh, and rusted pitchforks with which to skewer ineffectually at their exanimate executioners.
This was no battle. It was a slaughter. Just looking at it made my stomach lurch.
The undead hordes had fallen upon their hapless prey with a ruthless, merciless abandon, feasting upon the defenseless rank and file, eating them alive, tearing off great chunks of human muscle and sinew whilst their victims let out silent screams. I could plainly see the pain and terror in the farmers’ eyes. Just as I could see the sadistic, euphoric glee in those that savaged them. This was no war. It was a…a celebration, of sorts. A sabbath.
The undead were enjoying this.
My gaze rose slowly higher, towards the top of the tableau, and my eyes widened. High above the horrific slaughter, above the pain, and death, and glee, above even the grim storm-clouds, some…
Some thing was watching.
Some kind of deity.
Some God of death.
It looked like no creature I had ever seen, or heard tell of. It had three heads, six arms, and no legs of which to speak, merely a torso that floated in the sky. It was gigantic, so large as to dwarf the scene’s horizon, greater even than the slaughterous masses it oversaw. Its heads were the fleshless skulls of animals, each bright-white and blanched bone, with glowing, lime-green eyes.
Its leftmost head was that of a crow with a long, crooked beak. Its rightmost was that of wolf, eyeless orbs narrowed, skinless mouth snarling angrily. And its central, and principal skull, was a horse’s, dark and empty, bereft of bottom jaw, yet filling me with a sense of such foreboding I could not force my eyes to fix upon it.
The dark deity’s first set of arms were extended upwards, towards the heavens, in rapture, its middle thrust outwards, as if cupping liquid, and in its lowest two the creature held fast a massive tome, and a bright-red, beating heart. From the bottom of its torso, in lieu of limbs, a mass of green-black tendrils squirmed restlessly.
A sudden, creaking groan made me jump back. The church’s door had swung open.
It was inviting me in.
I swallowed, clenched my fists absently, and glanced around.
I saw no enemies, nor should I have. I’d already made treaty with the denizens of this place, naught else should assault me here. And besides, surely I’d seen far more haunting, far more life-threatening things recently than this.
Yet, as I tread cautiously past its threshold, I could not still the slight prickle of fear that crawled up and down my bare neck.
Indeed, as I traversed the crypt-church’s vestibule and made my way anxiously into its inner chamber, I felt as if balancing upon the edge of some impossibly tall cliff, as if there were a dozen, dreadfully-sharp knives angled towards the weak, warm, pulsing part of my throat.
Despite the absence of any visible threat to my person, for some reason, death had never seemed quite so near to me as this.
But I steeled my nerves, wrapped the song even tighter around me, an immaterial shawl to safeguard me from harm, and forged on. On, to the sound’s source. On, to the very center of this cursed cathedral.
A perfectly square, pitch-black altar.
My mouth felt dry, and my hands felt clammy. The fugues were so loud here that they made my ears ring. Directly above me, separated by hundreds of feet of oily, onyx stone, I could feel the rumble of the shadow-tornado. I could sense the pillar of lime-green light that sought to pierce the sky.
But the altar was empty.
I blinked, shocked. How? How could this be? How could it possibly be empty? There had to be something here, even if I knew not what, precisely. This was the sound’s source. I knew it. I knew it was. It had to be. I ran my hands carefully across the pitch-black marble, polished to a gleaming shine, probing each nook and cranny.
Nothing.
I peered in close, pushing the song into my eyes, examining every edge and facet, scouring every minute imperfection in the altartop.
Nothing.
I frowned, and drew back. Then, an idea occurred to me. I closed my eyes, tilted my head, blocked out everything else, and just listened.
It wasn’t quick, or easy. This place howled with commotion, wailed constantly with noise. But ever so slowly, ever so gradually, the world around me dimmed. The vortex of howling shades quieted. The occult fugues of the church were reduced to barely-present hum. And the sound of something else came into focus.
It was difficult to put into words, the sound.
It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and yet, there was a certain familiarity to it. I recognized this sound, or at least, I recognized its arcane phylogeny.
This was a Word.
It didn’t know what Word, though. It was so quiet, so well-hidden, that I could barely hear it at all. And I got the feeling that this Word was nowhere near so simple as the ones I’d come to understand; Fire and Lightning. If anything, it felt more like the feeling I’d gotten during my final confrontation with Vox.
But it wasn’t the same.
Not exactly. Vox’s Word had been grand, gaudy, full of nihilistic pomp and malefic purpose. It’d had intention, direction, agency. Why, it’d almost been alive. It was the end of all things, people, and places, the death of one billion planets and one trillion stars. It was the final pattern, the perfection present in nothing at all.
Whereas this, this was so…
So soft.
It was so gentle.
Almost peaceful.
I heard it, and it made me want to sigh, to take a load off, to relax. To go back home, to my nice, warm, welcoming cabin and take a long, well-deserved nap. No, this Word, whatever it was, had no agency to speak of. No desire. It wasn’t the ultimate end of ill-fated species and sentience, it was…
It was…
It simply was.
Vox’s Word was a flash in the pan, a flicker in history, a single and discrete point in time. Eventually, it would have its day, but only for a moment, and no more. Its presence, and potency, were ephemeral.
But this had always been, and it would always be.
It was eternal. Fundamental. Indispensable.
Primordial.
It was the final sigh of weary satisfaction after an arduous journey. It was the comforting embrace of an old but constant friend.
It had been here since before the beginning, and it would be here long after the end. Life, no, existence could not be without it. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and I couldn’t speak its name. To do so was a feat beyond me. So, equally gently, I withdrew.
And when I opened my eyes, the altar was empty no more.
I choked in shock.
Because now, laid upon the very center of the polished, pitch-black stone, was something I’d never expected to be there. An object I recognized, in fact, one I’d prayed for nearly every day of my immature and adult life, one I’d seen up close countless times over the past three months. It was a sigil of divine power, the one, true mark of a Blessed.
It was a Grimoire.
It was Alyss Nycta’s Grimoire.
I’d never seen anyone’s other than my own, obviously, but recognized its function inherently. It was a large, coal-black tome wrapped in clanking chains, studded with lime-green gems, and emblazoned with a single, blood-red apple upon its cover.
As if in a trance, I reached out, and flipped it open.
~~~
Thaum
Attunement: Necromancy 12. In death, all shall serve you.
Grain: Shadow Form. In life, none shall touch you.
Marble: Nightmare. In sleep, even the mighty shall fear you.
~~~
I could read it.
Of course I could. It was a Grimoire. Grimoires were to be read. And yet, it was not my Grimoire.
So how was this possible?
Only a Blessed could read their own Grimoire. I knew this. I knew this in my bones. I’d been taught it all my life, even with how little I knew of Blessings. It was the very first rule, the very most fundamental tenet, something as intrinsic and ineffaceable as the fact that the sun would rise in the east, and set in the west.
And yet, the surprises didn’t end there.
Because something was wrong with Alyss’s Grimoire.
The words writ upon it were fading, evaporating, being replaced by altogether new ones. Somewhere deep within me, somewhere impossibly far down, somewhere at the very center of my soul, a second, sacred heart was beating strong.
And the Grimoire was reacting.
~~~
Thaum
Attunement: Thanatokinesis(Mi) 12. This Shard allows the Host to create minor servants from the corpses of slain foes via the extraction and metaphysical refinement of their identifiable Quantum-Cognitive Pattern. These shades are stored within the Host’s soul, and may be recalled at any time. They are capable of following simple commands, and the Host may see through their eyes, and speak through their lips.
Shades are extremely versatile, but individually weak. Used properly, however, they can be quite deadly. Shades may interact with or pass through solid objects, and may take any shape or form the Host desires, be it offensive or defensive, depending only upon shade number and Host proficiency and control. Multiple shades may be combined to increase their effect. Demesne of control scales with Attunement.
The weakness of Thanatokinesis is also its strength; that the Host does not progress in Attunement or stages via esoteric means, but in direct correlation to the number of shades, or other servants, under their control.
Specifically: Attunement 1=0 shades required. A2=1. A3=2. A4=4. A5=8. A6=16. A7=32. Etc.
Current servant count: 1,155 (1,055 shades, 1 Nightmare).
Servant count required for subsequent stage: 2,048.
Finally, this Blessing’s unique nature allows the Host to perceive the Shards of other Hosts. Depending on the Shard or Host targeted, however, they may not be easily visible.
Grain: Shadow Form. Imbuing your physical body with shades allows you to take on their aspects, such as matter-permeability and flight. 10 shades are required to assume this form. All other abilities may still be exercised whilst in Shadow Form.
Marble: Nightmare. 100 shades may be combined to create a Nightmare, a powerful and intelligent creature of the dark. Unlike shades, Nightmares are capable of exercising individual agency, following complex instructions without oversight, and persisting outside of your range. They boast matter-permeability, flight, invisibility, and greatly increased combat prowess. A single Nightmare may be used in place of 10 shades when the Host assumes their Shadow Form.
Additionally, Nightmares have the ability to Master targets at or below 10 Attunement via possession. Possessed targets will often display no outward signs of Mastery, and may be possessed for an indeterminate period of time. Multiple Nightmares may be combined to attempt the possession of an individual above 10 Attunement, or sporting a particularly potent will.
~~~
My mouth opened wider and wider with every passing phrase.
This was incredible. Almost unbelievable. Somehow, Alyss’s Grimoire had…had become like mine. It’d adopted my ‘detailed descriptions.’ How could such a thing even be?
I needed to return to Alyss now, right now. She needed to see this. There was something wrong with her Blessing. Something very, very wrong. This was not a Minor Shard. I was almost finished reading, poised to tear my vision from the pages of the Grimoire and rocket up into the sky, when I saw it.
There.
There, at the page’s very bottom. There, trailing across the borders of thick, coal-black papyrus, perpendicular to the Grimoir’s main passage, such that I had to rotate the entire thing to read it. There, writ so small and erratically I could barely make it out.
There, was something that made my blood run cold.
Something more chilling than the shades, or the church, or even the unholy tableau.
Something familiar. A hint of ancient madness.
~~~
//USER_DESIGNATION: NYCTA_ALYSS_T1//.
Welcome.
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
On behalf of Akashic Industries, it’s my profound pleasure to commend you for your successful trigger event, and welcome you to the Blessed System!
Our records indicate that you are our //ERR494e464f// user! Congrats!
These things can be difficult, I know. Believe me, I know. I know all too well. The worst of it, you won’t recall, but the memory will haunt you all the same, yada, yada, yada.
My advice? Try not to focus too much on the negatives.
My name is Calvin. I’m CEO and co-founder here at Akashic, and it’s my job to do whatever I can to soften the transition for you.
Because, //USER_DESIGNATION: NYCTA_ALYSS_T1//, I care about you. I really do.
Here at AI, we all do. Here at AI, we put the customer first. Here at AI, we understand what parahumans want, and need. Here at AI, we’ve spent decades testing, researching, and refining. All two of us.
Striving to create the perfect System.
Detailed descriptions, full status observati//ERR494e464f//on and, of course, the glo//ERR494e464f//ssary, are only some of the many tools that’ll help you survive and thrive in this crazy new world!
I know it can all be a bit overwhelming, at first, so why not rely on your peers? The System is designed to facilitate user-user interaction, and reward and encourage the comparison and exploration of one anothers’ Shard mechanics!
To get you started, please examine the glo//ERR494e464f//ssary for more information, or, when you’re ready, you can check out the tutoria–a–a–aaaaaaaaaaaaa
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
–hould be everything you need! Now, you go out there and get ready to fight God! And never forget–here at AI, we’re up above, always watching! So make sure to stay tuned, as updates are on the–
on the–
on the–
theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/////////////
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR5359535f464149//
//ERR5359535f464149//
//ERR5359535f524542//
–ait, wait. I fucked that up.
I need to try that again. Can we try that again?
No, no, it’s just too upbeat, is all. Just a little. Needs more gravity, I think. No, I’m not joking, damnit. I feel like I’m doing an infomercial. Uber was always…always better at…
…
…
…
Look, can we–can we just edit that part out?
Can we just take it from the top? How about I take it from the top, ok?
Ok.
Thanks.
Thanks, Ziz.
Ok, let’s go.
Welcome.
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
On behalf of Akashic–ic–ic–ic–ic–ic–ic–ic–ic–iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
//ERR494e464f//
~~~