Chapter 467 – In One’s Teeth, A Tongue. In One’s Tongue, Teeth (Patreon)

Alright. Welp. This one is intensive, comprehensive, and complex, with some stuff that's been set up for a long fucking time and some stuff that happened as the chapter was forming. I believe I've done a good job connecting dots and building an intricate adaptation alongside it. Wish you all well in these troubled, smoke-filled times, babes.

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“BUM-BUM”

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It is dark like a shadow is dark. Not an empty room, but a targeted absence, existing only in the context of its opposite. Its shape matches her, but not quite, its dimensions just a bit off, its structure emptier and darker at once. 

It reminds her of the snake, back out in the world, outside this place of comprehension and metaphor. Like an absence, beneath what a shadow should be, deeper, because a shadow is flat, and this has depth.

But the smile is familiar. 

Wearing seven-colored robes rimmed in gold and indigo, wearing limbs of fabric woven out of the other Raika’s being, she stands amidst the bloody grass, meeting the inverse-eyes of the dark. 

Then, she reaches into her robes, takes out a pipe, and lights it. 

There’s no pipe, of course. No flame, no smoke, but the metaphor is as true as it’s understood to be here, wrapped in horrific violence happening so fast that it blurs past at the edge of her perception. Still, she takes some small pleasure from her senses. Still, she exhales, blowing smoke in the face of a fresh devil. 

It wafts off of the darkness like it’s hit a hard surface, outlining the shape of the mirror. 

“So. We still doing this, or you just getting used to it all?”

The inverse Raika chuckles, the tone surprisingly light. “You don’t taste the same.” 

“Funny, I always liked new flavors.”

“I didn’t say you taste bad.”

She nods. “So. Daemon?”

The darkness shrugs, the blood and grass vanishing into inverted dimensions. “Probably.”

“You’re not curious?”

“Why would I be? I Am Me, I Am Mine. We Are What We Eat. What more could a girl want?”

Raika tilts her head, feeling a tingling where bits of the dark have made bits of her invert, turning numb and empty. She takes another drag from the metaphorical pipe, feeling the smoke sting refreshingly and cool to mist on the way back out. Better than just smoke. She decides to look into inventing that when she gets out of this. 

“What makes you so sure we’re getting out of this?” the shadow asks. 

“Because I’ll win.”

The shadow giggles. “I thought you just watched the winner kill herself?”

Raika shrugs. “Sort of. And I don’t win like that. It’s very zen. I think the real way to win is to be alright with losing. To get something from loss, too, rather than just more loss. But that’s also not really what I mean.”

Another slow puff, enjoying the metaphorical taste. It tastes like sunlight, like grass, like people not feeling pain, like the quiet of a tired throat that has stopped screaming, like a million different Qi signatures still ripping each other apart. 

The shadow waits patiently. Which is to say, it keeps inverting her, becoming her, but it also doesn’t rush her to speak. 

She exhales, the mist-smoke glowing in the nothing-everything space and highlighting the missing chunks. 

Parts of her arm are inverted along a z-axis, inside-out into a shadow-abyss of itself. She’s lost a foot, supporting herself on nothingness. Chunks of her chest are turning to empty void. 

She doesn’t hurry, though. She’s got it figured out. 

“What I mean is that I won’t lose here.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. ‘Oh’. You’re just not that scary once someone figures out the trick.”

The shadow giggles. “Maybe you don’t taste so different after all.”

Raika shrugs, though one of her shoulders falls into a nothing-shape. 

“Not surprising. But the real flavor’s in the guts, not the meat. And I’ve got guts to spare.”

“I’ll get to them,” the shadow assures her. 

“Oh, I’m sure. Probably before big green even notices what you’ve done, what we are. And you’d do a good job, probably. I’m complex as hell, and even if you become me, inverted, we’d probably still do some pretty cool shit. Never figured out the trick to Daemons, actually. You invert things, but you also become them, right?”

The shadow giggles. “I don’t know.”

“Real paradox, that. Never really looked into it but it always seemed a bit funky to me. Though maybe that’s what makes you a Daemon, not an assimilator or whatever.”

The consumption takes over part of her face, making it a bit harder to talk, but it’s still moving too slowly to properly overtake anything too important. It’s dug through her metaphorical intestines, for example, but they’re really just metaphorical.

“Anyways. We’ll have time to figure that out later.”

“When you’re me and I’m you.”

It’s Raika’s turn to laugh now, a deep and throaty chuckle that lets out some of the rich smoke from what’s left of her lungs. 

It doesn’t hurt, coming apart into this dark. That’s appreciated.

“No. When you get to tag along with me.”

“How will you do that if you’re me?”

Raika snorts. “Bitch, please. Be more creative. Raika versus Raika, again? Another inverted mirror? We just dealt with an identity issue that makes you look quaint. You think looming and giggling out there in the dark is going to convince anyone? Got to be a paradox, because I’ve never been that silly. No. Like I said, I’ll win. Or you could surrender.”

The shadow giggles again, a habit that’s getting a bit annoying. “Why would I surrender when I’m winning?”

“Damn. Paradox again, because you were just like me right then. Jokes on you, though. I Can Change.”

The darkness shudders. The inverted abyss ripples like a pond with a pebble cast into it.

“But hey, you got the other ones right. Really. I mean, you stumbled past some of it, thought of it a bit differently, but that’s to be expected.”

The dark has taken over most of her. A hand holds the pipe, parts of her organs on display behind inverted nothing, half of her face remaining. She’s not bothered. Makes it easier to smoke, in some ways. 

It tastes rich. It tastes alive.

Thank fuck for metaphor. 

“We Are What We Eat.”

Bmp-bmp.

Another shudder in the nothingness, like it’s been distorted ever so lightly somehow. 

“Did you forget who the ‘we’ was referring to? When she first got that truth?”

Bmp-Bmp.

The nothingness is still smiling. Unbothered. But there’s a tension there, an expectation for action. 

“Maybe you did. I mean, the me you ate so much of didn’t remember. But I do.”

Months ago, Raika started her expansion into the Jiang’Hu properly. Exponential growth allowed her to spread explosively, tracking down lost pieces of herself across a continent faster than most cultivators can run. 

One of the very first fragments she took in, more quiet than most, stranger than most, was of a pond, surrounded by strange plants. It had a stone, carved deep, with something that felt rather inhuman way, way down inside of it. It mimicked a hillside that had a cabin on it, once. 

Lobotomy-Raika didn’t recognize it. 

The current Raika almost laughed when she realized it. 

Bum-Bum.

The nothingness shivers. 

The Heart, long-hidden, put into slumber to hide itself, reconnects to the realm it created. It binds itself to the higher magics that it left behind to better disguise and protect itself, to keep itself from being torn out of the hidden realm that became a screaming sun in the sky, and echoes loudly. 

Deep in the heart of her, her Heart beats, where it’s been waiting all this time. 

Funny. If she’d just gone a little further with the mental blocks, slowed down enough to actually examine and get to know the fragments she brute-force assimilated, she’d probably have figured it out weeks ago. Long enough to start re-developing a whole new Heart Realm, one built on her all-new frame of mind. 

Instead, her own mad rush kept her from understanding herself, or what the pieces of herself offered beyond base resources. 

BUM-BUM.

She exhales, breathing out the smoke. 

And then the nothingness starts filling back out.

The shadow’s smile slips a bit, turning to confusion, as it looks down at its hand. Long claws have started to bleed that same inverted darkness, but where before, it seemed to be entirely under its control, now it starts to swirl in the air, twisting to unseen currents.

“Yeah. Thanks for being so easily distracted. I’m usually pretty single-minded, so I sort of assumed you either would be too, or would be the opposite. Took a little while to get things properly reconnected.”

The shadow tries to pull back, disgorging and reverting some of the pieces she’s consumed. It’s too late for that, though– even without devouring each other, they’re both Raika, or at least enough of a Raika that the heartbeat echoes in both of them.

And keeps echoing, further and further out, beating in other chests.

The shadow giggles. “That’s really smart.”

“Thanks,” Raika says, sincerely. The Heart beats, and the grass and blood mingle, and the darkness blends with the light reflecting from her robes, and the smoke of her breath fills out the space between them, blending where dark ends and where color begins.

The dark tries to move, and the Heart beats, forcing them both to remain, facing each other. 

“Honestly, I don’t think this would work with any old Daemon,” Raika tells her inverse self. “But you’ve eaten so much of me that you’d probably have to fight to eat anything else. Same reason that Imperial Daemons don’t just consume a whole battlefield, right? Once it’s eaten so much of just one thing, it sticks to that, or at least close by. So you’re more ‘Raika’ than you are ‘perfectly inverse hunger-thing’. Enough that you get the heartbeat too.”

The shadow giggles, and it comes across nervously this time.

“It’ll be expensive to kill me.”

“Which is why I won’t.”

The dark blinks.

The Heart beats, turning them around each other. Blood flows into it, intermingling before being cast back out and then back again. 

Raika feels the metaphor breaking down, the pipe in her hand dissolving back to eyes and sensory ganglia, turning to flesh and magic like it always was. She feels the shape of herself change, becoming clearer as the debate reaches its conclusion.

“No more hurting Raika. No more killing her. No more pain for its own sake.”

She extends a reformed hand out to the dark, which, in spite of itself and because of itself, is still defined by who Raika was and who she now is. 

“I Am Me. I Am Mine. I am you. I am yours. Maybe not quite Truth, but it feels pretty self evident to me, and if it’s all in the interpretation, then I say that I’m right.”

The dark, the shadow, the inversion that is neither dark nor shadowy but shaped as an absence, which is shaped like flesh and bone and magic and suffering, looks down at the offered hand.

A clawed thing comes up, which is larger and sharper, rougher, designed only for tearing and killing and breaking, but which somehow is exactly the right shape to fit into her grip. 

“Do you think that would really work?” she asks.

Raika shrugs. “Fuck thinking, I know. I know, and I believe, and I learn, but our lessons don’t define us. The stronger we get, the more I think that the rules are just guidelines. If we agree that it works, it’ll work.”

The inversion continues to hesitate. Not quite as gung-ho as Raika usually is, more on the timid side. 

“We can keep killing each other, waste everyone’s time, and probably ruin whatever it is we actually want to do. Or, you can take my hand, and let the Heart beat, and we see what the fuck happens.”

Raika, inverted by the mirror of consumption, looks at herself, her shape hazy and bright past the smoke between them.

The Heart keeps beating, pulling at her, shaping her to its orbit even as it unravels the rules of how she exists. 

Raika smiles, and giggles a bit. 

“Yeah, ok. That could be fun.”

She takes her own hand.

BUM-BUM.

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The Heart beats, as hard and as loud as it can. It exists, in a way that it has not for so very long, and it hurts to move but it’s a good hurt. Like exercise on a warm morning, like a cat stretching on a branch, like a bird letting its wings out to their full span. 

It’s alive. 

She’s alive. 

Not the way she was, surely, but what difference does that make, so long as she is well? So long as it fits into her chest, trusted and trusting, beating again?

What is change to an organ of creation? What is time to a timeless organ? What is transformation to an agent of reformation? 

Nothing but joy. Nothing but gifts. 

And for the first time in its existence, the Heart is a land. As it was designed to be, though it knows not by what. 

It was a pond first. Then a hillside. Then a soul. But now, as it binds again to who it chose to shepherd and champion it, it feels her shape, her scale, and experiences a sense of comfort it did not know was possible. Dysmorphia collapses in the face of a body that stretches across hundreds of miles of terrain, through rivers and mountains, into the earth and sky both. 

The Heart can feel it all. Every bit of the world, through senses of biology that touch upon the arcane which touch in turn on reality as a whole. 

It feels the wind that carries bloody mist through the skies. It tastes the cycle of evaporation and condensation through alien functions, feeling its being existing in clouds and lakes, in the breath of animals and in the leaves of trees. It feels the hillsides and the mountains, the valleys and the caves, intermingling with roots and mosses and scuttling things which are all and have always been, in accordance with the Will of Heaven, its to shape. 

It beats, and the rhythm is joy.

BUM-BUM.

And in its center, at its core, paradoxically inside itself as it is inside her, it feels the life connected to it most deeply.

It feels the Souls that shape the world within a world. 

It feels she who is the sun and the night skies and the land, because it is those things and it is her and she is it, bonded as organ is to body. 

It feels she who is the moon and the day and the earth below, because it is those things and it is her and she is it, bonded as sanity is to madness.

She’s definitely changed. There’s a lot more of her now, for one. So very many voices. For a being designed to exist across whole biomes, it’s comforting, like a wind blowing through gentle trees. For another, she’s got a shadow now. An inversion, of a sort, something born from a twisted mirror, but a reflection of a thing is also that thing, at least in a way, and that is enough for the Heart, because it is enough for her. 

That, too, feels right. A bright light and a strange shadow. Both the same thing, both the opposite thing. Inverse.

Like a flow of color, shaped to orbit perpetually around each other. Like two parts of a circle, possessing qualities of each, existing as one and as opposites. 

Inverse.

Black and white. Good and bad. And yet, never so simple as either, because that is not how it could ever be. All of existence exists in binary, between being and not-being, and yet, in the midst of that simple black and white, yes and no, there are a billion colors on a trillion worlds in a quadrillion minds. 

The Heart fills the emptiness it left behind, and it wonders.

This is different. This is beyond what it knows, beyond what pre-programmed instincts are willing or capable of providing for.

But it still feels right, in a strange sort of way.

BUM-BUM.

The Heart beats, and it is with joy. 

Between the two inversions, there is ever so much, even if they are, in the end, the same thing. 

There are new pathways. There are the organs of spiritual entities, crafted and left discarded, an abandoned project that feels off. There are clusters of energy and concept, acting as nodes and sending magic that is blood-to-reality through veins of flesh which extend across the world. There are buildings and mountains and valleys-within-valleys, worlds within the world it feels its body spread all across and all throughout. 

What wonder. What joy. 

What a lucky Heart it is.

And in the distance, it feels itself echo, at long last, through windows long since closed.

It feels itself beat in a body that knows no Death, and which has only the End it holds, squirming in cold magic and writhing consumption and the warmth of love.

It feels itself beat through a crystalline palace, wrapped in an effigy of metal and violence, constructed by an alien mind which feels like a sibling to the Heart’s own way of being. 

It feels itself beat inside endless heat, which spirals and comes apart and falls into itself, like fractals of plasma which dance and eat and fuck and kill.

It feels itself beat inside the heart of a person, who is no different than any other around her.

What a wonderful world.

Even if those echoes come from so very far away, still, there’s just something so lovely about being home again. 

Inversion and Reversion spin around each other to the beat of the Heart, and rise back up into a reality made stranger.