Randidly sat in darkness, his knuckles pressed together in front of his navel. He breathed, he relaxed, he allowed his consciousness to steadily drift apart.

He had a problem to solve. A whole slew of messy overlapping events to make neat.

He had sought out isolation, wanting a location where not even the slightest ripple would interrupt his thoughts. He burrowed down beneath the Badlands, eventually stumbling across a vast network of caves populated by bug-eyed beetles that flew into an immediate panic when he blasted open the roof of their world and descended into their midst. He quickly burrowed deeper, leaving a dense bramble of roots behind him to discourage pursuit.

He continued digging down until the stones became erratic slabs as enormous as cities, and warm to the touch. Randidly excavated around the massive stones, feeling their muted curiosity at his miniature stature, his restless motion, his flaring emotions. Then Randidly shook himself, wondering why he felt such sudden empathy for huge chunks of igneous rock, buried and content within the crust of this planet.

Once more, the vision of the depths he had witnessed flashed before his eyes. The extreme depths, the emptiness, the watching presence of the void, held aloft by tenuous strands of meaning. He had suppressed a shiver and settled into a meditative posture.

Right now wasn’t the time to allow existential dread to distract him.

Randidly forced himself to relax, despite the continued ache of the damage to his Class, despite the mad glee that had seized him once he had understood the plan hatched by his three Moirae, despite the six-day time limit to finish his preparations, despite the fact so much of what was about to happen came from supposition and optimism.

He might be on a tight schedule but there was always a bit of space to breathe. He needed perspective He needed inspiration. He leaned back against the stone in the warm darkness and waited for what he needed to arrive.

Very naturally, he felt into slower breathing patterns. His pupils dilated in the darkness, spreading like an event horizon until the emerald of his irises were completely eclipsed. The rotations of his Nether Core slowed down as well, churning and refining his energy rather than simply racing to produce more. Without even thinking, he felt one of his Fatepieces begin to activate.

He settled into the Visage of Obsession, ancillary thoughts stripped away. All at once, he dropped through two levels of its progression, 20% of himself sheared away. In the bowels of the ground, he took comfort in the stone supporting him. The heat relaxed him. His gaze unfocused. Memories were unpinned from a timeline and began to freely float across his consciousness. He believed, with every fiber of his being, that all the answers he needed to prepare were already provided to him, just floating in the corners of his prodigious memory.

The reason he came here was because he didn’t quite agree with the Moiraes. yes, the imperative Deganawidah had created, barring him from success as an Alchemist could be used to his advantage. Likely he could borrow power from it, incorporating elements into his class, and also using the resulting shards of energy left by the evil Humpty-dumpty to rake away some of his actual Nether.

But they couldn’t feel what Randidly had, in those first moments after the sixth Fatepiece had been destroyed. Before even he had begun to work on the imperative, something had begun to wilt in Randidly’s chest. His sense of direction had been killed. His purpose had been vanquished.

He needed to find a way to get that back. And to move into the larger attempt to heal his Class with those arrangements in mind. Because if Randidly was going to find meaning in repeated failure, he needed to be especially careful right from the jump: the most important misuse of a rule was the first one. It would create the pattern he would follow in the future.

So he sat in darkness and considered. The undertow of his emotional sea began to pull, bringing all the elements into alignment. His eyes began to close, eyelashes fluttering.

The first question was the easiest: how to make his new framing of an Alchemist plagued by failures have fangs?

Ghasthund.

The System had already informed him that he possessed a deep influence, after accumulating so many Milles. And he needed to provide a definition soon, lest the Alpha Cosmos made use of his idleness and subvert his meaning. If he could also push quite a few Skills beyond Level 1000 before the confrontation, he would wield so much meaning a Hierarchy would be created.

And Randidly already knew that Hierarchies could serve as Fatepieces.

Not yet. No need to commit to that yet, just a possibility, Randidly hummed to himself. His thoughts moved on to the second question, which was also relatively simple.

How should he make sure all the benefits of his definition, and the subsequent Hierarchy, flowed to him?

Since the definition of Ghasthund would revolve around a certain sort of failure, a new unavoidable aspect of his direction, he needed to fail spectacularly. This, at least, resonated extremely well with the plan suggested by the Moiraes.

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What sort of failure would be meaningful enough? Because the power and vitality would return to his Class, not because he straightforwardly attempted to do it, but because he had failed the attempt to accomplish something else, whipping together all the forces of the conflict around Homewell and salvaging the results.

The small memories he maintained in his trance-like state began to percolate to the surface. The curling lip of Deganawidah as he said, “Heh, need I be a Shape? Need I be a moment?” Don Beigon in the present, talking about the different elements necessary to reach the heights of the System. But also, Randidly remembered those moments spent within the space linked through his Nether Core, a zone of underlying principles and hungry statues within a strange sea.

A portion of the trapeze holding up existence, underlying so much of the System and its interactions. And, based on the actions of the Cult of the Savior, also serving as a foundation aspect in the main universe. To the point the statues warred against each other, trying to claim alternate universes as reinforcements.

A Shape. A Moment.

Because what happened when one reached the Pinnacle? Randidly had never considered it deeply before, just understood the insight and prowess it represented. But perhaps the mysteriousness had prevented him from understanding the limits of an accomplishment. Hence why Elhume, while powerful, no longer existed in a state to create an entire alternate universe. And why Alymian remained in existence, yet its creators possess very little to show for it but influence.

Randidly’s tongue traced his lips as he thought. An attempt on the Pinnacle could not be shallowly made. Blue-black revelation energy danced against his closed eyelids. The Dread Homunculus remained absolutely still, its mind running hundreds of calculations a second, trying too pierce through the veil of time and glimpse the threads of fate.

Perhaps, Randidly speculated, The energies, when taken to their limit, when the proper conditions are met, begin to resemble the other. Nether becomes a shape. Aether becomes a pure and complete moment.

And reigning over an absolute moment is reaching the Pinnacle.

A few more of Randidly’s ancillary awarenesses slipped away. He continued to relentlessly categorize and emphasize the goals he wanted to accomplish.

The Pinnacle had been central to Randidly’s thoughts for so long, he almost felt disappointed to consider the mundanities of the process. Obviously, a lot could be accomplished in a singular moment. Also, Randidly had vaguely understood that somehow the Pinnacle… passed. Or was expended.

An attempt on the Pinnacle. To Seize an entire moment. It wasn’t enough just to fail; no, Ghasthund wasn’t so simple as a failure on its own. Randidly felt his skin beginning to tingle as he could see its shape. All that meaning, wrapped up and slapped together with a thousand other elements, the corpse of his Class reinvigorated with the natural discharge of the world.

One more layer to add to the plan. Three goals in one: to heal his Class, to reframe himself in this new light, and to gather to himself the benefits of his new term.

“Ghasthund,” Randidly said again, savoring the sensation of the word on his tongue. It would be his, but it would also be a force in the world, he needed to define the world with those implications in mind. Once he created it, he would not be able to outrun its reach. Especially when it became such an integral part of existence.

The alchemist whose success had been barred to him. The Pinnacle, an eternal shape, the Philosopher’s Stone, always kept a hair out of reach. But already he had gone off the beaten path, developing the Ghosthound’s Deviation. This was just a continuation of that journey. And whereas he had been wandering through the unknown in the past, now he understood and went to his task with grim purpose.

The only question Randidly couldn’t yet answer was whether he could feasibly make an attempt on the Pinnacle in his current state. But he intended to find out.

“Ghasthund,” Randidly said one last time. A slow grin spread across his face, all teeth and spite. And in his mind, he let the preliminary definition float to the surface of his mind.

A failure so haunting… they will wish it had been a success.

*****

Neveah had a headache.

Randidly and his merry band of idiots were in full, super-villain and co. monologuing within their fortress of solitude swing, planning the most ridiculous and desperate plot she had experienced, in all her time Soulbonded with Randidly Ghosthound.

Which said quite a lot.

Not that he hadn’t taken similar risks in the past, they just usually weren’t the first choice.

Still, Neveah understood. Randidly had been wounded, a door shut abruptly in his face from a direction that he didn’t expect. More than that, he had been thoroughly suppressed by Deganawidah in terms of Nether abilities. Overwhelmingly so. This left him frustrated and furious. And suddenly without a clear path forward, when the conflict against Elhume loomed large outside of the Sonara. Truly, Randidly did not have time for this.

Neveah shoulders slumped as a sigh escaped her lips. Her thoughts moved sideways, to other possibilities. “Devick… if you had stayed, I could take you to him now. You could talk to him, you, whose pride makes it precarious to feel like he doesn’t need you. He, who has been reminded for the first time in quite a while of what it feels like to be the absolutely weaker party… You could talk. Share how you feel. Support each other.”

Clicking her tongue, Neveah shoved those thoughts away. “But… Neither of you is yet capable of that, I guess.”

She prepared to move to what she considered to be her role in this madcap plot, arranging for a more graceful success, but she couldn’t help but hesitate. She scratched the side of her head and went to the table in her small cable. Feeling almost foolish for enabling these two capricious monsters, Neveah penned a short letter to Devick. She explained simply that he had suffered the sort of setback that wounds him. And that she just thought Devick would want to know.

Afterward, Neveah’s expression turned serious. Because while Randidly handled the inputs, she would turn her eye for detail to the outputs. His Class, Lord of the Baleful Wood, possessed five additional sub-Classes: Loyal Benefactor of the Weak, Lighthouse of the Boundless Worlds, Lodestone of the Black Wanting, Lesson for Those of Brittle Will, and Longing of the Banished Wind.

Each of those would evolve if this gamble paid off. And Neveah, for one, wasn’t leaving those new sub-Classes to chance.

Humming softly to herself, she slipped into the Alpha Cosmos and began her research.