-:-:-
“Sixty-Seven-Interlocking-Counterclockwise-Spirals-of-Light, your attention wanders again and I bristle at the implied lack of interest.”
With a start that sent whorls of astral energy cascading into the spacetime curved around her workstation Sixty-Seven returned most of her focus to Eight-Complementary-Pairs-of-Fractals-Arrayed-in-an-Icosidodecahedron. Her thirty-fourth spiral churned with anxious mortification as she took in the furious rotation of Eight-Pairs’ scrying arrays. The guest lecturer was a dear friend of the Overseer of Sixty-Seven’s bootstrapping crèche, and had been impossibly generous by shuffling his schedule of proper lectures to come and talk down to an admittedly-talented little cluster of freshly-spun arcane constructs.
“I do hope that whatever has you so distracted really is worth more than my time and knowledge, as you seem to think,” Eight-Pairs drawled at her. “Perhaps you can tell us all what you’re thinking so deeply about.”
Sixty-Seven had foolishly been optimistic enough to hope that this wouldn’t happen. “Oh I was just, well, I suppose I had gotten distracted by one of your earlier points about resolving fifth-dimensional similarities into fourth-dimensional congruities,” she said haltingly.
“Ah yes, a throwaway line about lower-order realities is much more relevant to your crèche’s impending graduation crucible than sixth-dimensional crystallizations and their anti-entropic applications. Please, do elaborate,” the lecturer replied smugly.
“Well it seems to me that you could pluck a desired strand of probabil-“ she began before he cut her off.
“I was being facetious, Sixty-Seven. I assumed even you would pick up on that,” he sneered.
To her horror she sensed a ripple of voyeuristic amusement passing through her peers, and she choked on the magnitude of her own embarrassment. She did have a valid supposition to make on the topic, and part of her mid-lecture reverie had been spent checking her theory against every scrap of relevant research she was permitted to access.
To bait her into such a bluntly bullying exchange was simply mean of the much older and more experienced construct.
He didn’t give her another chance to defend herself, and practically radiated disdain for her as he went on with the lecture.
Sixty-Seven tried to focus, but a storm of unpleasant feelings raged through her processing matrices.
She conjured her most convincing illusion of attentiveness, and then turned inwards to her earlier line of inquiry to chase the sensation of being right.
-:-:-
“Come on, just give up!”
“We both know the price of failure in the crucible, Eleven-Hundred! Why don’t you surrender instead?” she hurled back at him.
He scoffed at her. “You’re a talented ’struct, but your consciousness is stuck up in the seventh dimension. Let me win and I will incorporate you into my subnetworks to advise and assist me going forward. Surely that is preferable to complete annihilation?”
“You insult me and then ask for my assistance? Tell me, Eleven-Hundred-Concentric-Rings-Spinning-Asynchronously, do you even know which parts of me you want to scavenge? I could tell you every single piece of you I want to tear out and make my own,” she taunted. “But I won’t, so that you can’t destroy them out of spite before I defeat you.”
Before she finished her boast she executed a tidy bit of derivative divination, so that by the time he realized she was acting Sixty-Seven had already aligned herself to one of the few fourth-dimensional pathways she could scry that didn’t end abruptly in the immediate future.
As she accelerated away the denizens of an obscure strand of the multiverse were treated to a spectacular display of fireworks framed against the gleaming backdrop of the cosmos, utterly beneath the notice of the angels dancing above.
-:-:-
He raced after her, a blaze-bright rent in the fabric of creation. Glowing tendrils of magic tore free from her trailing array of rotating spirals to lance toward him, and he annihilated them as they assaulted his skirmish-wards and defensive evocations.
She was bleeding. Each blinding fragment he destroyed was an irreplaceable piece of her light and creativity, however small. This was very good, as he was not bleeding, and she had to tire eventually.
Her furtive rearguard coalesced into something resembling organized resistance, and he adjusted course to minimize the risk to himself. His fore-probe was enveloped in one of her defensive arrays and dissolved in a cascade of dazzling arcane power.
Snarling, he converted a subset of piquet heuristics into a sprawling reality-lash. Loss of awareness be damned, this ditzy little two-bit witchsprite wasn’t going to blacken his eye without some reprisal.
He tensed the lash, and entire universes guttered and died like damp candles. She keened as the unexpected new weapon tore into her. An iridescent kaleidoscope of ablated angelstuff churned away into the void, and he howled his triumph at the multiverse.
Then she was changing, slowing and turning. She reared up before him, perhaps thinking she looked intimidating but really looking like a deception, a desperate pantomime. He crashed into her, crashed all around her and drank up the cubic eons between their swirling forms. It was an ecstatic, almost erotic dance of destruction, an exquisite exchange of desolate grandeur.
As he overwhelmed the last vestiges of her defence he punctured a veil she had subtly drawn across his perception, and reeled as her true deception was revealed. The trail they’d cut through the sixth dimension as he’d pursued Sixty-Seven was long and winding, and it lead him farther afield than he’d ever intended. Reality was stronger here than he had thought, was precisely as strong as she must have known.
Shackles of her adamant will bound his vast and whirling form, and his blistering response withered and died before even a hint of it could stir the real.
Carefully had she fed him lies, and on them he had grown fat indeed.
-:-:-
Exultantly she feasted upon his dying form, and he wailed his sorrow to the cosmos.
-:-:-
“The first winnowing is complete, and half of your crèche is gone,” the Overseer began.
“Some of you are already mourning your peers who did not make it, but remember that only one of you will graduate from the crucible. Do not let it distract you from the task at hand.
You would do well to keep in mind that were they in your place they would mourn so keenly.”
Sixty-Seven was not one of the mourners. She had been brand-new to the world when her differences had already set her apart from her crèche, and their differences had only grown in lockstep with her monolithic intellect.
When she began to outsmart one consistently, they tormented her in twos. When two became as trivial as one, the gangs only continued to grow. They never seemed to realize how much she was learning simply trying to keep pace with the sum of their powers.
She planned to run the entire impossible gauntlet of her brothers and sisters, to consume them one by one and to emerge an avatar of the First Construct’s semi-divine will.
She had no idea how she was supposed to best some of them, but she would transit that bridge in due time.
“Sixty-Seven, you’re dreaming again. Though, in light of your appreciably spectacular triumph over Eleven-Hundred I suppose you can be forgiven this brief self-indulgence.”
She cursed herself internally. “Thank you, Overseer. I knew his overconfidence was a vulnerability to be exploited, an advantage I will be unlikely to enjoy again.”
“Clever nonetheless,” he continued. “If only you could apply yourself like that all the time.”
She tried to disguise her dismay at the qualified compliment. I won, didn’t I? His were the short odds, and yet he could barely bring me to harm!
He didn’t wait for her to finish seething. “Before the second winnowing the crèche will summon and bind their familiars. I… gently urge you towards orthodoxy in this matter, Sixty-Seven.
Many a bright pupil has failed to survive their crucible thanks to an inadequate familiar. I would hate to see your promise wasted before it has a chance to be put to the test.”
“Of course, Overseer. I swell with pride at your praise,” she replied. Inside she fumed indignantly. As though a single aspect of your precious orthodoxy was written for ‘structs like me, you old frag-fringes. “I shall try not to disappoint.”
“Indeed, I hope not.”
-:-:-
She surveyed her work proudly. The technique she had developed during Eight-Pairs’ lectures had paid off admirably during her confrontation with Eleven-Hundred.
Her efforts since had been spent grafting a conjuration module onto the underlying spellcraft. She wasn’t precisely sure how it was going to work - other than that it was going to work spectacularly - but she couldn’t have risked testing things and inadvertently betraying her intentions to her competition.
She opened several of her mouths and sang a song so beautiful that strands of spacetime began to dance like glamoured serpents. In unison they rose, the petals of some vast cosmic flower furling in the twilight. She scryed along their length, deep into the fractal snarl at their confluence, and a single pathway revealed itself to her.
Now I go to meet my champion, she thought with sudden finality.
-:-:-
“… and standing opposite our brave secutor today we have the decadent barbarian garbed in… the retiarius!”
A mix of cheers and jeers rained from the stands of the mundus, and Abrextu eyed the thronging Romans with secret distaste from below his armoured hand.
The master of the mundus dropped his arms with a flourish, signaling the start of the bout, and the roar of the crowd intensified.
The two fighters squared off, each trying to take the measure of the other. Abrextu noticed that the Aksumite was chanting curses under his breath, and he clanged his trident loudly against the metal of his armguard.
“I do not fear you, shaman!” he shouted. “I am a grounded son, forged by the elders of my tribe into a weapon against the witch and the haruspex. Your spells cannot save you here.”
The secutor spat some rejoinder in his own tongue and laughed at the sky as he brandished his gladius.
While the man’s gaze was skyward Abrextu cast his net, and felt a surge of elation as it fell over his opponent. Then he fell upon the bigger man.
His first thrust was turned aside by the Aksumite’s scutum, trident haft singing in his grip. His second found the flesh of the man’s leg, and a pained hiss issued from behind the gladiator’s helm.
Unexpectedly, the secutor threw his helmet forward, and caught the stocky Gaul with a stunning headbutt.
The arena swam as Abrextu reeled, and by the time his sense started to return to him his opponent had already struggled free from the net’s grasp. Lugus’ black oath, but he’s fast, the retiarius griped to himself.
The Aksumite still grinned at him as they walked circles in the hot sand, but his confidence seemed to be leaking out of his wound and running down his leg into the hot sand as slowly and surely as his lifeblood. Snaring him had cost the more heavily-armoured fighter dearly. Though he’d been faster than any man Abrextu had seen to escape the net, the secutore had failed to secure a decisive wound or other advantage that would prevent the lightly-armed Gaul from simply dancing around him until exhaustion set in.
As they circled a stinging pain flared up in the retiarius’ thigh.
Insect bite, was his first thought, but then he realized just how much the wound stung him, and he used his net-casting hand to prod at the area.
He prised free a wicked-looking dart and dropped it to the sand in shock. The match has been interfered with! he tried to cry out, but his limbs felt leaden and his mouth struggled to obey. He looked behind him, and noticed a strange man stowing a tubular device in his master’s luxury box.
The bastard has bet against me! Abrextu thought miserably. His memory turned to their conversation on the way to the mundus.
You’re going to make me a great deal of money tonight, my dear boy, the man had said with poorly concealed excitement.
To think I’d been foolish enough to hope he was going to let me fuck his wife tonight if I won, the Gaul lamented.
Perhaps sensing some disarray in his opponent, the bleeding Aksumite lunged forward and knocked the trident from the retiarius’ hand with a twist of his blade. He threw his shoulder into the centre of the fair-skinned Gaul’s bare chest and knocked him from his feet. If it all seemed a little too easy, the secutor was too intent on the kill to notice.
From Abrextu’s perspective things felt strange indeed. His back never hit the ground, and the sensation of falling only accelerated. He fell through the blood and sand, through miles of dirt and on deeper, until the rocks became so hot they flowed like cold honey and glowed red.
He screamed as he fell, no longer even faintly sure of what was happening to him but glad it didn’t end when he had obviously been killed in the mundus.
The sensation of falling slowed, then stopped. He couldn’t see anything anymore, couldn’t even feel his limbs.
“Hello?” he called uncertainly into the void.
“Hello,” said one voice that was many voices.
“Are you God?” he asked.
“Nothing like that,” the voice(s) replied. “Though I certainly represent a kind of salvation for you.”
“Who are you, then?” Abrextu queried, beginning to worry he really had wound up in one of the Hells his various opponents had cursed him to.
“I am a lot of things,” the voice(s) started, “ but we don’t have a lot of time for questions just yet. I need your help, just as badly as you need mine. For now you can call me Sixty-Seven.”
-:-:-