Chapter 399 - What They Say About Assumptions (Patreon)

Alright, so breaking out of a mania did in fact influence my ability to stick to my schedule- but the best time to do something is yesterday, the second best time is now, right? Ergo, I'm posting monday's chapter (which should've been friday's chapter!) today, and then another one tomorrow, and then another one on this coming friday. I'm doing a bit better- much less trapped inside an all-consuming constant panic! Which is progress!

This chapter really went off, I think. It clicked really well with how our MC's been winning so much lately, the ways that the powers are developing, and it does my favorite thing, which is set up horror and action galore, oh my! Enjoy, babes!

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Upon a broken throne was clad a king

Whose Death above all things did sing

A blessed land it made of us

Those who earned its sacred trust

We pledged as Church to worship true

That which would forever lead us true

That Death need not be hated End

That rot might help us Live again

-Psalm 1.01, Of Our Beginnings

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Kai Ra feels her elder looking down upon the world.

Visible past the clouds, past the dimming radiance of Tribulation, past the writhing whisps of Echo-matter that drifts through the air. Brighter than any star, brighter than the ball of fire that crawls across the sky daily, brighter than any other eye staring out of the void above down on the world below. 

Like everything else is a flat piece of paper, and there’s a single light, shining through with an absence so cold it burns. 

She holds the feeling of that gaze upon her as the Fallen Kingdom stirs. 

With no regard for time or distance, a dozen stars manifest around the crumbling rock that Kai Ra stands upon.

The world dies, over and over. Existence is hollowed and reshaped to the Echo of trauma-that-was and which now continues evermore. 

Industry Demands Sacrifice

Churning Gears Crush Bone

Falling Munitions Burn Space

Fear Silences Drumbeats

Unfortunate Materials Come Apart

These and more fill the sky, manifestations of Death that fuse Domain and Soul into one singular existence, an Echo of what was and what has been mantled. 

The Bishops of Mortaria surround her entirely, and she feels the last of the arrays that Raika set down crumble beneath their attention. 

The air of Mortaria’s territory, infused with the ghost-matter of the Death of a whole landscape, stirs like a sea at night, shifting in patterns that only hint at the currents below but which promise endless danger if touched. Demigods rise from the world, and they form a cordon around the avatar of END that has been born amongst them. 

Massive pillars of flame-churning machinery, screaming bodies cutting themselves open and cycling like fractals evermore, ghostly figures atop ethereal ledgers, all these and more make clear that she’s not going anywhere. 

Compared to what’s coming behind them, they feel small.

The light on the horizon grows closer. 

The Fallen Kingdom stirs.

New Inquisum, the last of the great cities, home to the Church and the Holiest of Holies, where her final challenge awaited, stops being gracious. 

Dink.

The sound thrums, and the smell of smoke and whispers fills it as Rai Jin stretches his cultivation. He feels like a puddle before the seas of the Bishops around, like a raindrop compared to the wider darkness stirring, but she feels the way he tries to pull back. 

She hears Li Shu move behind her, coming closer to their ward. 

“Wait,” she whispers to Rai Jin. “Keep quiet for now.”

The boy doesn’t know the plan, but he trusts them. Trust Raika, who was. 

Kai Ra inhales, the action filling the squelching worm-flesh of her body with bubbles of air, and then burbles it back out. 

The plan from here on out is messy. Prone to failure, and full of worst-case outcomes. 

Kai Ra looks back, and meets the eyes of the people someone she used to be loved very much.

Rai Jin has grown. A good few inches, his hair longer and night-dark, his eyes bright and cold. Pale skin and a soft smile stand out against the black of his robes, and he holds tightly in his hands the little piece of metal that she birthed and was birthed by, which has been by her side loyally for so many years.

Li Shu looks ragged, exhausted, but empowered. She stands firm, her hair almost as dark as Jin’s, her eyes a brilliant green, a constellation of star-snakes and pale, living shell hovering in orbit around her. Strong enough to be anywhere else, strong enough to live a different life, strong enough to heal and change the world all on her own, in all her own way, clad in brilliant carmine and cream-colored clothes. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” Kai Ra says, “and I love to know you.”

Rai Jin looks at her with a bit of confusion, overwritten by trust.

Li Shu looks at her with a quiet grief and a loud relief.

Continuity of consciousness is a hell of a thing.

Technically, Kai Ra was just born. 

Technically, Kai Ra has been alive for as long as Raika was. 

She turns back to the army of demigods surrounding them, and thinks about what a tragedy it would be to meet people she loves again, for the first time, only to fail them. 

More stars have begun to gather. 

The Fallen Kingdom is stirring.

Space is bending, distance and relativity stretching and compressing like taffy, and she can feel Bishops from Viviae joining the crowd, her allies from Godsfall hovering on the edges, other, lesser figures from smaller churches spread throughout the lands manifesting at the very fringe of the arena being formed. Mortaria’s industrial entities maintain the cordon, keeping anyone from approaching, radiating power in a clear display of force.

And the light on the horizon gets closer. 

A fanged Halo takes a bite.

The Cold Sun’s glare grows the slightest bit brighter, and Kai Ra stops needing to fall.

Step by step, she starts walking, worm-flesh and spikes of bone both squelching against nothing as she treats the air in front of her as stairs. 

Step by step, she goes higher, dribbling progressively less organic mash down out of the air as she moves. 

A fanged Halo takes a bite, and one of the Bishops recoils, some of the Death they’d extended to try and pressure her down going away. 

Consumed. 

Unmade.

ENDED.

It takes a few minutes, but eventually, she’s risen to just beneath where the demigods of Mortaria hover, her body refined by the simple exercise and holding closer to a single, cohesive shape. 

Standing even with the horizon, she waits for the light that grows from it to approach. 

Pulses of Death fill the air, clergy reaching out to each other, communicating in supernatural voices, but they feel muted to her, different from Raika’s memories (which are her memories, because she is/isn’t Raika, or she is as much as she chooses to be, or-). Death is translucent, something she knows about and can identify, can feel in the world, but can’t touch directly. It doesn’t feel right, like knowing what a color used to be without ever having seen it, but it also doesn’t feel wrong, so Kai Ra just experiences it, getting familiar. 

She feels it like flesh against a knife, like one can feel and taste and see and sense something by cutting through it. Which is to say, not much at all, and also quite a bit. 

The feeling of pressure from one of the Bishops increases for a moment, to one side, but it dims after a few moments. Not directed at her.

Instead, one of the outer stars comes into a closer orbit, joining the cordon. 

The bright smiles of a ghost king meets her gaze as Seo En-Hyun is accepted by his contemporaries. The Bishops of Mortaria flank him, keeping his aura restrained, but he still stands, and they seem unwilling to force him away before the incoming conflict starts.

And it will. She can feel it.

The Fallen Kingdom stirs.

The Fallen Kingdom rises.

The light on the horizon arrives.

Everything is the same. She is standing on nothing, no longer capable of falling, surrounded by a sea of militant ghosts, her family behind her, the landscape bending inwards around a strange light.

Everything is different. She is alone in a dark place, with only the un-light of a Cold Sun shining down on her, and there are two people sitting across from her. 

She doesn’t recognize the appearance, but the energy is familiar. It unmade one of her bodies, not too long ago, when she issued as disrespectful a challenge as she could manage.

It wears robes of pure white. A tall, brilliant crown on its brow, bedecked in jewels of solid wraithflesh, stands out from the simplicity of its appearance. 

White robes and a crown, and an empty space, sit upon a simple wooden chair.

Behind it, on a far more ornate throne, is a skeleton.

The Holiest of Holies looks at her with nothing-eyes, and the corpse behind it does nothing but exist, for it is a corpse. 

“I’m honored,” Kai Ra says, worm-flesh making an approximation of a smile on her approximation of a head. “I hadn’t expected to get a visit from you quite so quickly, your Holiness. I suppose that means you’re unwilling to meet the terms of our earlier exchange?”

The Holiest of Holies does not say words, and in their silence, she understands their meaning. 

“Heretic.”

She tilts her head a bit, thinking… then nods.

“Yes.”

“Do you believe this saves the boy.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because I’m pretty sure everybody in the fucking world felt what we just did.”

“What care do the worthy have for the attention of lessers.”

“Pretty stupid question, your Holiness. Dense, too. You really should learn to do better.”

The light of the Cold Sun dims, briefly getting crowded by the light of the robes and the nothingness wearing them, which reflects the skeleton on a throne. 

“Arrogance.”

“Ah ah, your Holiness. Confidence. And Madness, yes. Hand in hand, they make it easy to confuse, but I’d rather we be very clear on what this is. I’m brand new, with brand new powers. Powers designed with the teachings of the Church in mind, that will no doubt be very interesting to explore and very expensive to wipe out.”

Silence at that one. She can feel the way that reality overlaps over itself, the version of existence that is their conversation and the version that is her, a few thousand miles from New Inquisum and surrounded by Bishops of all kinds. She’s in both at once, which feels…

That actually does feel right. Huh.

When the corpse and the empty space in front of her don’t refute her, she shrugs her shoulders, tightly bound flesh and spikes making the motion seem slightly less messy than the ones before it. Her Halo stirs with the motion, massive fangs moving to keep her perfectly in-frame.

“I am not so stupid as to think I can fight this entire land, nor to wage a one-woman war. Even pretending to had to be done by the grace of your own clergy. My tactic here is the same as it has been for… frankly, most of my life at this point.

“I survive by being too expensive to kill. By making sure that cutting my throat will cost a hand or a whole arm, if I can manage. You’re stronger than me. You can do things that I can’t. But now, you can’t kill me without it having a cost. I’m not some Death you can drink down or unmake or pack into a pretty little spell. I’m something without Death. I can touch it, but it’s not in me anymore.”

She makes a gash in her face, and Kai Ra copies a move from her past self’s playbook.

She smiles, worms wriggling in the cavity, toxic mash bleeding out over the “lips”.

“And I’ve seen your cities. The ones held by the END, by Stillness. Explored them while you spent all this time letting this pretend-war play out. You wouldn’t leave them like that if you had a better option. Dead, sure, but ENDED, no, that’s against everything you stand for, everything your religion teaches. I think you can if you want to, but it would cost you, and you’re clutching every copper, saving up for your big destined conflict.”

The empty space in holy robes shifts, like an invisible breeze moved through it from within. An absence, which is, in and of itself, a presence.

Behind it sits a skeleton. It is a corpse.

“We’ve both got swords at each other’s throats, Holiest,” she says.”Yours is bigger, far more lethal, but mine will still put your blood in the water. If I lose, my son dies. My sister dies. I… go away. But! On the way! It’ll cost you. The Sacrifice ritual, removing Death in the midst of the Fallen Kingdom? It was always going to draw attention, and that nifty little Tribulation only multiplied that. The Pack, most of all, will be looking. Many-Mouths, the Heart of the Pack, most of all, but I’m sure your little Martyr might have noticed the little mess I made, and I know you don’t want that.

“Or. We could be partners.”

The empty space in holy robes is dead still now.

Behind it sits a skeleton. It is a corpse. 

“Do it however you want to do it. Say you beat me into submission, say I offered myself to you, say this was your plan from the beginning. An outsider, bound to the Church and made a weapon against the END. A foolish young Bishop, brought to heel for her sins. It doesn’t matter to me. Pride is worthless here- I’ll play along with any story you need me to.

“But it’s either we work together, or we both lose everything. Me right away, you over the next few years as some of the scariest things in the world come to find out what happened here and find you bleeding and ripe.”

The empty space in holy robes is dead silent.

Behind it sits a skeleton. It is Dead. 

For a moment, she thinks she has them.

She wonders if this is how Raika felt. She sort of is-and-isn’t Raika, and can easily enough look back into their shared memories if she felt like it. 

Against the world, trapped, afraid, doing everything in her power to gamble and claw and drag her way through whatever is currently trying to kill her. Coming up with desperate plans and then bending the world to make them work, always one wrong move or bit of bad luck away from coming apart. 

And yet… more often than not, it’s worked. The tournament at Cragend, getting them out of the palace, putting the pieces in place for the chaos to follow. The fight against the Feng general, outside the Wall. The fight with Bin Wei, dealing with Taurus early on, Raika’s original Mask, always, always, always. Chaos and improvisation and desperation, and it’s failed sometimes too.

Like when she lost her first student. Like when she got shot in the head on the Wall. 

Like when she died. 

Not this time. This time, she has them.  

“No.”

The empty space in holy robes speaks, and it Echoes through a chorus millennia old and millions strong who have Died and are Dead. It is the sound of a world that has lain itself at the feet of a Church that made of them Unliving, the sound of cultures that have cast themselves into the grave for a cause, for a belief, for a faith.

The Church of Undeath and its Holiest of Holies casts its judgement upon the world that is its grave. 

“Heretic.”

The light of the Cold Sun, the light that exists beyond all color, is the only illumination left. The room that she’s in, which is real and not real, is a shadowed oblivion, the space directly after the brain stops working, the time directly after meaning leaves a body. 

“Apostate.”

The robes have taken on something like a form, wrapped tightly around the empty space that is full of meaning within it. The Holiest of Holies stands, and in its movements, she sees shapes, colors, in the clothing. Scriveners and monks and religious figures move over its hems and details, and they are all Dead, and they yet move, and they yet un-live for the Church. 

“Your Madness Fails You.”

Truth. 

She doesn’t know how, or why, or what it means- but that was Truth. A step beyond Truespeak, into- 

“DEACONS. BISHOPS. ARCHBISHOPS. CARDINALS.  ONE OF OUR OWN EXPERIENCES LAICIZATION.

“TEACH THE NONBELIEVER THE FOOLISHNESS OF HER MISTAKES.”