Chapter 398 - What Wasn't And Now Is (Patreon)

Hello again! Happy new year, babes! I'll be posting a chapter today, friday, and sunday! Maaaaaybe mondays, too? I dunno if I'm gonna try and push for 3 or 4 a week (would rather 4) but either way, this is me, aiming to be a little bit more consistent and have actual scheduling. This way I can plan ahead of time and stuff also! Anyways, enjoy the goodies babes. Kai Ra is just starting, and in a few chapters, we'll get to swap POVs to Raika again!

Yes, it's a little bit of confusion / interesting ideas. I like it!

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To be, or not to be—that is the question

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

_______________________________________________________________

It doesn’t feel right.

Doesn’t feel wrong, either, but that’s the trouble with being brand new- she’s just not used to anything yet. 

She has memories of flesh and bone, built around a lattice of a beating heart and gurgling organs. She has memories of being cold and still and stiff, her body less real than the keratin-metal anchors she acupunctured herself into reality with. They feel real, even if there is a bit of a distance to them, a slight nudge needed to actively recall them, but in the end, they are just that- memories. 

Raika is dead. Long live her Echo.

Her Echo is gone. Long live its inversion.

The plan started off pretty simple.

More of a “what if” scenario than anything practical. 

One aspect of power in the Fallen Kingdom (and beyond, technically) that she never explored was the Craft. Since Cragend, she’s been aware of it, but it was always so alien and she had so much else she could use to grow that it fell completely by the wayside. Now, with barely any power to her name, and matched to the type of learning she was already doing, it became a bit more interesting. Seeing as Li Shu was exploring it anyways, well, conversations came up during discussions of their ongoing crises. 

Raika was never going to be better at death magic than the experts. Everyone who’s anyone in the Fallen Kingdom has been learning and practicing and growing out their own powers for centuries, or in some cases literal millenia. Raika, meanwhile, not only had to rework or drop everything she’s been building the last few years, she also had to do it while learning a completely new way of interacting with the world.

 Every advantage she got was clawed, viciously, by improvising and doing the unexpected, thinking outside the box. Her Hex-beasts, corpse-constructs enchanted to be messy and hard to manage on purpose; her arrays that work more by being denser and more volatile than normal; her overwhelming disregard for saving any of her Death, spending it fast and wild; none of it has been exactly standard.

And even with all of that, the odds still aren’t in her favor against one fully realized Bishop, nevermind an entire goddamn country. A shrunken, crippled, broken down empire, but one powerful enough to decay for literally thousands of years and somehow still be one of the biggest civilizations in the world. Oh, she could be a nuisance, a brief problem- hell, if she played her cards right, she could even be a temporary threat.

But a world shaker? Someone that can take the entire existence of said dying nation and wield it against her greater enemies? 

Power isn’t everything. Given time, she could fuck shit up plenty, survive long enough to change some minds and play some cards. She’s not an expert manipulator, nothing like her friend Kaena or Taurus, but she’s had to learn, and she’s learned to meld that with her talent for disruption pretty damn well. 

Raika was rarely been given anything in life. Time least of all.

Power isn’t everything. 

But power can be anything, and power is a multiplier. So power it is. 

Li Shu sacrificed the keratin of her hands and feet. Her nails. She Who Stills The Waters sacrificed her eyes and hair. Shirai, Gloriana’s attendant, sacrificed her skin. 

All very solid. All very practical. All provably dangerous, all provably paths to power, especially when they get combined with more abstract concepts and filled with Qi. And the more powerful they get, the more abstract they tend to be. Starting off with a Sacrifice that won’t outright kill you, and which you directly understand, is common practice for beginners to the Craft. 

But Raika liked to skip steps a lot of the time.

So she took what was most familiar, and most valuable of herself in her current state, and spent a couple months working with Li Shu on refining a ritual formula for it. 

She Sacrificed her Death.

It took a while to figure out how. 

For one thing, she had to feel it. Understand it, and connect to it, and refine her Death, over and over. 

She drank her Garden dry over and over, until the only flowers that remained were the most important, most intimate and impactful Death she’d experienced or caused. She learned from Bishop Seo En-Hyun how to experience the End and return, what parts of her she needed and which parts she kept just to keep. She learned about what runes meant what, how the formulae and math of the world works- not on a complex, profound level, but on an instinctual one, one that suited her needs. She pushed herself to her absolute limits again and again, experienced some truly powerful forms of magics from greater necromancers than her, and truly understood herself as a corpse, as an Echo, rather than as the living person who came before.

And even then, it would’ve failed. Even then, she would’ve Sacrificed her other arm, or her worms, or anything else other than her Death. 

Except for one thing. One thing she uncovered against the only Bishop that’s fought her all-out.

A technique, or power, or moment, or something that resembles artistry, something that blends Truth and Dao and Qi and time and a bunch of other shit she’s only just figuring out. Something that, in this specific case, came about from something she’d done lots of. 

Consume.

[EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE]

She Sacrificed her Death in ritual. Wrapped it up in an explosive burst of Death-energy to sustain herself while she fucking evaporated. Trusted Li Shu’s array-work to guide the process through. Used her final and most intimate Death, that which killed Raika-That-Was, a concept-ending cut of End-based ontology (which was also pretty fucking special), as a tool and catalyst and focus. 

Then the Tribulation happened. Which was… not the likeliest possibility. 

But on the assumption that life sucks and that the world actively wants her dead and that weird shit tends to happen to her a lot, it wasn’t a total surprise. Do something crazy and big enough, and stuff beyond the worlds comes down to fucking criticize. 

Just in time for the Knife Made Of End to become less a part of her and more a part of the world. 

Just in time for her to take a bite. 

And now…

A corpse without Death.

Not the Raika-That-Was. Not the corpse that came from her. 

Kai Ra. A play on words, and a play on a name that was never hers, but defines all she is. 

Her form comes of writhing worms that are nothing and become everything. 

Existence around her is a Knife Made Of End, which is her and is not her.

She is framed in existence by a pair of biting jaws, iridescent and gold, black and divine, a Halo of perfect power shaped from what she just did, from the scar she ate out of the world. 

She glows like a sun in the sky, like a night-black star of rainbow radiance, hovering in place. The world around her bends, until it seems like she’s standing in or on the blade of a Knife, a tongue of endless sharpness from out of the jaws she carved and out of the Death she sacrificed. 

Cracked and malformed, the glow of Tribulation starts to dim, blending back into the colors of the world. The pillar of Death and myriad weapons it was powering / manifesting dims at last, no longer sustained and parasitized by divine madness. 

She feels the lingering edge of attention drift over her… and look away. 

DISGUST turns to IGNORANCE.

Her Halo burns against existence behind her. 

The world is warped… and then slowly, agonizingly, unbends back into shape. 

Impossible light fades away as reality stops LOOKING, and as weapons of mass destruction finally die out.

In a mushroom cloud of ash and Echo-matter, Kai Ra, Inverted Shadow, Devourer of Death, Breaker of Heavens, floats down like a knife carving through flesh, to land on the last remaining island of Godfall’s army. 

Which promptly falls out of the sky. 

Li Shu’s keratin armor, half eroded into Obliteration, stabs outwards to anchor her into what’s left of the church grounds. Jin’s array, enchanted more than even her ritual was, keeps him from bouncing too hard, but the spatial dilation still makes him bounce up and land painfully after.

The church crumbles and breaks down, the island impacting hard against the ashen ground below. All the other islands have vanished, unmade down to their molecules by Mortaria’s WMD, and the stability of the most well defended of those islands didn’t make it through unscathed either. Its arrays fail at last and what’s left of its marble, gold and Blacksteel fail under the impact of gravity on hundreds of tons of stone. 

Kai Ra crumbles into a pile of worms and slime. 

“Shit!” says one bundle of the worms. “Fuck!” says another.

“It’s fine! I’m fine! Just- just gimme a second, I have no bones yet, let me just-”

Spikes of keratin emerge from Li Shu’s side of the ruins, from over where the floor has cracked and made mountains of shattered stone. They fly into the bundle of worms, avoiding her Halo and taking the shape of an improvised sort of skeletal system.

Kai Ra starts wrapping herself around it gratefully, though she does have to shift and reshape some of them into a new formation. Conventional bones don’t quite feel right. Not wrong, either, but like it… could be better. Could be better. 

She reforms herself, standing upright again. Not quite as tall Raika-That-Was used to be, but well over seven feet, made entirely of a writhing black mass. She’s not as muscular, like her body is softer, more amorphous than before, and there’s some slightly wet noises when she walks… or moves… or stands still, but that’s fine. 

[EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE] consumed part of the Tribulation, part of the Death WMD, her own Sacrificed Death, and the Gu she was planning to use to build a new body. It is and isn’t a part of her again. 

It would be easier if she had Raika’s original Gu, the moth, but with the worm as flesh, she stretches out a hand, calling forth Beetle.

The herculean critter jumps forth out of Jin’s defensive array, skittering forward and bringing with him a chariot. Made out of the ruins of the original desk that he and her second Gu… nested on, it’s a well-carved gift from Jin to the little bug, rolling and clattering over the bits of rubble and ruin that make up what’s left of the mess. On the back of it is the Beetle’s little paramour, currently laying in a huge, toxic pile of sludge of melted material, surrounded by little white dots. 

Eggs. And a lot of them. They trundle over to her as she secures herself against Li Shu’s spikes, solidifying her body. It’s not that it feels wrong, it’s just that it… could be better. 

Beetle comes over and stamps, hard enough to crack some of the half-broken marble a bit. 

She chuckles, nodding at him. The movement makes her “head” bob weirdly, since, again, no bones, and no skull along with Li Shu’s spikes. “I know, I know. I promise not to be rough with them.”

Stomp.

“Well I’m sorry, but if you ate them I wouldn’t have enough for this to work, Beetle. I promise you can be a bug cannibal about the next set of eggs, ok? I’m not sure how bug lives work but if you’re both fine with it, go for it.”

A slightly more content stamp this time, a bit more mollified. He rolls the chariot forward, and her second Gu, the toxic beetle, looks up and waves her mandibles and antennae. 

“Funky first few weeks, huh?” Kai Ra asks her. The Gu doesn’t give any indication of having understood her, but keeps waving the fronds up at her. 

Kai Ra sighs, then nods. 

With a thought, she extends a Blade of End forward. 

She sacrificed her Death. Necromancy is broken for her, something she can’t feel or touch directly anymore, only indirectly. But she still understands the same arrays, even if she can’t power them.

It’s… kind of familiar. Like when she/Raika started doing her new form of cultivation after losing her original ability to touch Qi. 

This time, though, she has a lot more academic understanding. She can make actual arrays and formations, for fucks sake. 

The Blade, manifested out of nothingness and existing only where the thing it is meant to End exists, carves several runes and spiraling circles into the ruined marble. It follows her will, manifesting as her will, and as she thinks of the formulae required it appears and is carved into being.

And then she drags the knife through the air. 

Death predates End. Or they are one and the same. Overlapping and dissonant. 

The Death in the air responds to the void of the End, and flows into the spaces where it carves. She tilts her head, some worms shifting out of place as she does, and watches how they interact. 

And then… she pulls the Death forward, as if hooking it, and pushes it into the array. 

The energy fills the formation, awkwardly and unevenly but well enough to wake what she needs. 

The eggs begin to crack open, one by one, white little grubs squirming out of the soft shells. Raika lifts a hand out over the little chariot, eventually placing some of the worms that make up her hand against the writhing, toxic mass of the nest. 

The newborn grubs start to bite, trying to eat into the worms. They dig past their exterior, through the flesh of them, into the organs of them and the energies within.

And the worms don’t die. 

What is a corpse without Death?

A shadow inverted. 

She pulls the worm, practically eaten into pieces, back into her main mass. She brings with it the grubs of the Gu and mid-realm bestial cultivator, Beetle. 

Eventually, the original worm… Ends. 

It just goes away. It was a worm, and it couldn’t die, and when it was nothing, it Ended. 

A void. A place where a thing was, but not even an Echo remains. 

But the grubs get left behind, and they fall into her, and start to grow from the density of what she is, consumed and consuming. 

Symbiosis. 

End and Beginning. 

It would’ve been better if she could make some skin. The moth Gu would’ve been decent for that. Bishop Anaya wiped that off the table, unfortunately, but this can do. 

Consuming and consumed. 

Slowly, she starts to stabilize. The grubs and worms make a mess of each other, and the toxic sludge of the former mixes with the undying viscera of the latter, and forms something less like a colony of worms and more like a mulch of not-dead and living. 

An inverted shadow of a ghost. 

Not the Raika-That-Was. Not her Echo.

Someone new. 

Someone CHANGEd.

The toxicity and poison and writhing unlife and Death-consuming biomass of her stands upright, still a bit unsteady, but whole. 

The jaws of existence and causal radiance that hover behind her flex, almost like real jaws, a hungry Halo trying to take a bite. She sighs, feeling a sort of pulling on the back of her, like it’s not quite right. 

But it’s not wrong either. So that’s something. 

She sighs, stretching and feeling a crackle of Li Shu’s keratin spikes, feels a squelching of toxic mass, feels a writhing of things real and unreal and too real. 

Off to one side, Jin approaches her. 

Li Shu is still breaking out of the shell of armor she made, her Sacrifice made hyper-dense by the mess of surviving the ritual, but she’s making her way free pretty quickly. Jin, on the other hand, walked out of the hyper-dense array crafted around him, warping space and energy to keep him safe, as if it isn’t even there in a brief burst of smoke. 

“Are you alright?” he asks, the first words she’s ever heard him speak.

“Are you?” she asks instead of answering. 

He just shrugs and nods. “I’m fine. It was a lot, but I feel like I’ve seen worse?”

“You’ve seen worse?” Kai Ra asks, cocking a… well, not an eyebrow, but something more like a metaphorical part of her “musculature” where an eyebrow would be. She still doesn’t have eyes either. She can see just fine, though. Or… she knows what she should be seeing just fine? It’s kind of interesting. 

“Yeah. Back at the Wall. That was all… that was all people. People hurting. People dying in horrible ways for no reasons. That was just a really big weird eye, and I feel like I’ve seen bigger? Or… maybe more up close. After the Wall, when I was asleep. Either way, it was just some big weird thing with an opinion. We have a lot more important stuff to focus on.”

She laughs, and it burbles and comes out like squelching noises.

How’s she talking? She doesn’t have a throat, either. It’s more like… like the words she wants to say are as real as they need to be? 

Could be realer. Could be too real. That’s… that’s what Truespeak is, isn’t it?

She refocuses. Hard to think. She’s new at it, and there’s so many thoughts now. And un-thoughts. And Pain. 

Takes some getting used to. 

“You’ll be fine, then,” she says. “They’ll LOOK at you too, eventually, so just… keep that mentality, alright? It’ll help.”

Li Shu emerges from her armor-cocoon, and it melts, unforming into…

It doesn’t seem like keratin anymore. It seems too alive for that. Fibers rebuilding into fibers, into tubes, into sockets and sponge-like tissue and…

Raika LIED. That’s what the ritual of As Above, So Below is, a way of touching something grander and bending it ever so slightly. Li Shu took the opportunity to do the same for the second time. 

As Above, So Below.

As Within, So Without.

Li Shu, too, is pretty good at skipping steps. 

The Sacrifice of keratin flows like it’s alive, fused with the Concept of Biology and her Dao. 

Around her, like glittering stars linked by complex strands of unlight, her second Sacrifice floats. Her Meridians.

Recursion. Meridians that are her Sacrifice that are her keratin that are her second Sacrifice and her first and-

Recursion. 

As Above, So Below. 

As Within, So Without. 

Not quite as dramatic an evolution as the one Raika sacrificed her Echo for, maybe, but much more controlled. Much more specific. Borderline artful, how it’s done, a series of systems that should not overlap made into something like magic. 

Kai Ra smiles, and gives her a nod. 

She’s Raika’s closest human friend. 

Kai Ra has all of Raika’s memories. 

She also… isn’t her. Kind of. 

It’s growth. Mostly. 

“How’s it going, sister?” she asks, extending the olive branch. 

Li Shu smiles, and the world ripples with life and power that should not be yet are. 

“Not bad, sister.”

Kai Ra smiles out of a featureless face of black worms, feeling the relief for what it is. 

“Think we’ll manage alright?”

Li Shu shrugs. “Last I remember, this is about as far as the plan goes. If we need to run, we’ve got some options, but a lot of the preparation for the stuff with Viviae isn’t done yet. And it’s not exactly guaranteed, either.”

Rai Jin shakes his head before waving a hand at Li Shu. “Don’t let my auntie fool you. We’ll be fine.”

Kai Ra looks at him and laughs, a wet and burbling thing from out of spoiled, chewed flesh. “Yeah? And what makes you say that?”

“You’re here.”

Kai Ra feels a sharp Pain that feels warmer than anything. 

“Yeah. Good point, kid.”

She stands up tall again, her existence slightly more settled, and turns. 

The horizon is moving. 

It’s coming closer. 

“Oh!”

She turns back quickly, taking something out from inside the mess of her toxic worm-sludge. 

It shines, as if cleaned by the process, or refined somehow, two thin metal prongs glowing in midnight un-light and a thin string holding it in a pendant. 

“Here. It should stay with you for a bit.”

Rai Jin blinks, then his eyes widen, staring down at what she’s holding in her “hand”.

“You… want me to keep Dink? But… you never…”

“Just until one of us gets more comfortable with ourselves and comes back for it. It’ll be fine. You two can bond.”

Reverently, Rai Jin reaches out and touches the tuning fork… which vibrates, incredibly softly, with a single note. 

Dink.

“Don’t worry. I’ll manage.”

The jaws of her Halo yawn a bit wider. 

Mortaria is glowing, right nearby- but beyond it, glimmering like a cold star, is a single point of Death.

The horizon begins to fall inward around it- and from every direction, but especially the industrial hell right in front of her, smaller stars begin to glow, and approach. 

Enough power to create the same world-altering attack that wiped out Godfall’s islands a hundred times over charges forth out of the ash and Death of the Fallen Kingdom.

The inverted shadow of Raika’s Echo walks forward on too-squishy legs to meet them.