Chapter 508 – Finally, A Proper Infodump (Patreon)

The buildup here might be a bit clunky, but a lot of these mysteries have been ongoing for a while and I felt that this arc was the right spot for them, even if it's executed a little clunkily. Let me know what y'all think!

_________________________________________________________________

Shhhh. This is important. Listen. Don’t interrupt.

–The preachings of Tao Zudong, Titan-Philosopher

_________________________________________________

“What are the three quintessential steps to philosophy?” asks the philosopher. 

“Why don’t you tell me?” Raika asks. 

They smile, nice and wide. “You have the first step. Curiosity. A question. The information you desire, sought out. The second follows close behind; that very same information, at first sought, now grasped. The third, then, is simply the combination of the two. Curiosity and information blend to become opinion, which is then met by more curiosity, and thus, more information. A virtuous cycle. You ask, you listen, you think.”

“And why are we talking about this right now?”

The philosopher chuckles amicably, though their expression isn’t very… accurate? It’s not amused. It’s not happy. Like watching someone play all the right notes, but not bother to move them to the beat or to make of them a melody.

“Because I am Tao Zudong, the philosopher. It is what I am, as much as it is who. An anchor, through which all that’s left of what was once human in me can now sustain itself, rather than drifting away into the bright lights of what I really am. So, we speak of philosophy, because nothing else defines me so thoroughly, and thus, nothing else can be wielded so widely.

“But there are some limitations to our discussion. After all, the best curiosity, the best learning, and the best thoughts are always found in the company of peers, and in the most important of ways, you are not my peer, for you have not the learning to match me. So, in the interests of indulging in that which I identify with so very thoroughly, I must bring you from your first step to your second, once again in the grand cycle.

“Your curiosity is well known and well merited. I have seen the depths of the earth which you peer into. I have seen the heights to which you climb and observe the world, examining its laws and rules and the absences of both. I have even seen beyond your reach, out to the very furthest edges of this too-small place. So I possess information, and as a good philosopher must, I embrace the worthy, essential act of sharing that knowledge. I know more than you, so if we are to engage in true dialogue, as I have so rarely had the opportunity come of late, the discrepancy must be rectified.”

“...Do you always talk this much, or is this like, a sign that you’re excited?”

“I am dreadfully excited,” says the philosopher, with hair of godly gold and eyes absent of sanity. “I have been gone for a very long time. And now, here I am, with one of the chisels with which I carved out the stone I lay trapped in, and about to engage in dialogue. Properly engage in it, for the first time since before you were born times a few thousand.”

Raika leans back with a groan, ignoring the somehow still-full teapot in front of her. Instead, she starts the meditative act of rolling a fresh cigarette, though the pipe would probably be nicer, and she really should slow down on the smoking. Bad habit, even if it doesn’t hurt her. It doesn’t need to hurt to be a bad habit though, does it?

Yeah. Alright. The philosopher is excited. 

“Tell me then. Enlighten me, great philosopher. How, exactly, is everything fucked?”

“Ten thousand times ten thousand years ago, the world was round.”

Tao Zudong takes a moment, sipping at the still-full cup which remains just as perfectly full after as before the drink. After whetting their whistle, metaphorically, they pop their lips, smile softly, twitch a little. Twitch. A jerking motion of the shoulder, maybe. Hard to read. 

“Ten thousand times ten thousand years ago, there were more worlds. Ten thousand times ten thousand years ago, there was space beyond the world, vast and empty, for the realm was too vast for its worlds, the dream too vast, too wide, to fit all of the ideas in it so tightly. The stars were incarnations of Dao, divinities in themselves, which stood vaster and brighter and hotter than all but the strangest of the worlds, and around which all other places would circle and twirl and dance.

“The stars used to all be suns.

“And now, we have nothing. Scars in the firmament where there once were lights in the void. The absence of absence, where once there was naught but space in the void. The borders, if there were any in the traditional shape, were only theorized, never found.”

The philosopher’s smile grows larger. Sharper. Prettier, by some fae definitions of the term. 

“Then it died.”

Another sip of tea, long and slow. Another discrepancy in the shape of things as the nature of the philosopher refuses to change, to have anything less than a full and steaming cup before it. 

“The dream ended. Whatever place beyond places made this realm had its fill of us, whatever that might mean, and moved on. And it might have lasted anyways. Perhaps, in a better history, it would have been a self-sustaining world, richer and more alive for the absence of a creator, allowed to live and grow as freely as freedom demands. Or maybe not.

“What did happen?” Raika asks, as fascinated as she is trying to hurry things along. As much as she appreciates a full cosmology of the world, she does, in fact, have other things to do. And here, at least, she only has the one body to do them with. 

“What always happens when the master leaves a house full of rodents? What always happens when the heart ceases to beat? It could have been a garden, but it is not in the nature of this particular place to be full of gardeners. People came. They saw what was once holy, now unguarded, and in their lust, they took what belonged to all for themselves.

“And they grew mighty. They grew terrible. They grew to surpass every beast and being you have ever experienced, glutted beyond satisfaction yet still desiring more, swelling to fill a space that was ever diminishing as its Hearts were torn from it. The organs of the divine were taken, opened, and implanted in bodies unsuited for them, in disorderly fashion, until all the subtle arts of what is and might have been were torn and twisted, mangled and unmade, over and over and over until the dream fell under its own weight, its ideas cannibalized by the bastard imaginings of mad gods.

“Some of them left. Ascended, as some might call it, or escaped, or migrated, or transformed. They left. Took what they needed, saved who they wanted, and went to find someplace new in which to  devour or be murdered or come apart or be remade. And what was left? It was bleeding. Broken. Crippled and collapsing in one itself, closer and closer, down from a million billion stars to thousands, down from thousands to tens, down from tens… to one.”

“Here. This place.”

“The very same. The last world. The last moment of a dying place, soon to be uninhabitable, a dream swallowed back up by the ones that made it, leaving them unchanged and unaffected but leaving all of us nonexistent. And keeping it alive? The last star. The final sun. The last great heart of a dead and dying place. The last and greatest meal in a dream made dark.”

Raika sighs. She can guess where this is going next. 

“There’s always someone hungry enough to take a bite.”

The philosopher smiles. “Quite right.”

Then, they shrug.

“I could regale you with the specifics. The minutiae of the history, or at least the parts of it that I’m familiar with. The wars fought over the last great resource, the hungry things done in that dark time, the deaths and the devastation, the creation and the chaos, but who cares? Of what relevance is it to you? Would you thank me for my wasted breath? It is not politics or archaeology we wish to discuss, so that curiosity must subside for another time. No, what matters to you is that the one who won, or who stole, or who tricked, or who simply got lucky, is the very same thing that you now call the Emperor, which is and shall forever be known to me as the Fool of Fools.”

The cigarette’s done. It’s been done for a little while, sitting idly in Raika’s hand, waiting to be lit, to be anything. Waiting to fill her lungs with smoke and her senses with the slightest numbness she can anchor herself to. 

She sets it down on the table, rolling it back and forth. The philosopher lets her, giving her the time it takes for her to make a decision. Waiting for her to ask the obvious question, the one that it’s led her to. 

“If the Emperor won, why is it the Emperor? Why the hell didn’t it just leave like all the rest.”

Such a wide smile. Why is it that she brings that out of people? All the crazy people just love to smile around her. Wider and wider, most of the time. 

“Because it is a greedy, greedy thing, the Fool of Fools. Even glutted on a Heart beyond Hearts, still, it aches for more. Still, it wants. To ascend now? It would be the least amongst lessers, brand new to a realm beyond anything it has yet known and without the overwhelming sort of might that could protect it. Oh, it was strong enough to leave, yes indeed, but it is fearful, as all greedy things are, and it could not abide having rising to a higher realm only to be lesser than another. A silly thought, to my mind. That it would still be itself, or that the worlds beyond would be just like this one, but perhaps there’s honesty in that cynicism. Perhaps the heavens above are just as mortal and broken and malformed as we, but grander.

“But that is another curiosity for another time. Now, we seek knowledge. Now, we share truth. The Fool of Fools is grand, grander than any other, for it has eaten the world away, eaten out that which belongs to all or no one and made it a thing that it owns. And then, like any good coward and glutton, it began to lie.

“‘I cannot ascend as I am, for I would be too weak, says the Fool of Fools.

“‘I cannot ascend as I am, for I am too weak to take the whole of this world with me, and then what will be of all these poor things who I would leave behind?’ says the Fool of Fools.

“So, if it is to fulfill its desire for power and its need to think it is something good, to think that it is worthy of the violation it has brought upon the world, and to shape a world in its image, for the sake of its own ego, then it must stay. Then it must be all. Then it must take all, or at least take everything that it wants and cares about, such that only what it considers unworthy may be left to rot.”

Another sip of tea, which is not a sip, in spite of sharing every single aspect of itself with a normal sip of tea. In spite of how inhuman they are, or perhaps because of it, Raika can read it clearly. 

It is so excited. It is giddy to share this with someone. To share it with her. 

“That’s it, then?” she asks, indulging her own curiosity just as much as the philosopher’s joy. “That’s why the world is the way it is? Because there’s nothing properly left of it, and it’s being held together for a monster to take the parts he pleases?”

Such a wide smile. A grun. Finally beginning to show some teeth. Perfectly normal teeth. Not perfectly human, though– there is not enough of the concept of human in the philosopher. But they are such perfectly good, perfectly normal teeth, for a smile that has all the same pieces as a normal smile. 

“Precisely. It could ascend at the peak of what you now call the Titan Realm, by taking a step beyond, but it will not. It could ascend now, taking with it all the impossible power it holds, leaving behind the rest of you to live or die or pick up the pieces, but it will not. 

“So it keeps the world on artificial life support. It takes of the XXXXXXXes and makes of them a replacement for the sun, wrapping them like cords around each other’s necks. It takes its grandest slave, made of the void where void used to be, imprisoned in the earth, and forces it to keep the world still, to keep its spirits dead or quiet, and to keep new ones from birthing. It holds tight in its grasp the aspirants of DIVISION, and carves away the pathways to all the others, pruning them to naught. It chains the moons and builds of them horrors of war. It plants a perfect stone in the way of the final and most perfect collapse of the dream, which waits and shines through the great hole in the sky. It drinks of what makes people human, of the natural cycle of life and death and transformation, enforcing a stasis that bleeds perpetually. It fails, again and again, and it keeps trying until it gets it right.

“It lets everything die, because what is left is brought into its grasp.”

It hits her then. Like a missile. Like a slap in the face. When put like that, it’s just so obvious. Blatant, even.

“It’s… refining?”

The philosopher’s smile has other pieces now. Things that are not so normal. Things that do not quite make sense in the light of day, and which are not truly normal. All the pieces, all in order, all of them uncaring of whether or not they fit.

“All the world, one big pill to swallow. One big thing to be burned and broken and reduced until it is perfect and ripe for the eating. Only then will it leave. Only then will it transcend this place, as person and Empire both, whole and perfect and complete, to its eyes.”

Raika laughs. Soft and low. 

“Fool of Fools.”

A laugh from the philosopher. “Quite.”

“That’s why everything is dying. Why it keeps taking more and more Hearts. Why Many-Mouths is the only big Heart left. If it goes, the rest of the world goes too. It has to stay where it is for now. And the Cold Sun…”

The philosopher nods. “The END beyond it is the END of the world. Of this world. Of this entire realm, completely and utterly, amen. It waits, blocked only temporarily, and when the Fool of Fools is done, it will leave behind what it does not need and let that END take it. It has sunk the ship, and now its whole being works to build itself a raft from the remains, because it’s too good to even swim. The big Gods above all are disgusted by us for existing, yes, but even were it not inherent in their judgment of us, it would be true for where we are. Not just malformed reflections in a dream, but maggots infesting a corpse left to spoil.”

“And what about the rest? The west? The thing you said when you told me about the sun, the thing I couldn’t hear? And what do you mean, its ultimate slave? What about the Fengs, or whatever other Titan the Emperor has on its side? What are the Blades, the aspirants of DIVISION?”

The smile diminishes until it’s back to something almost like a person’s smile. Always normal, always just fine, but now all the worse for the fact that it’s pretending to be human again. 

“Ah. Now we’ve reached curiosity again. I’m afraid the answers to that are many and more, and the cycle of virtue will continue. Curiosity, knowledge, thought. I have offered you knowledge. Now I ask of you thought.”

It (not he or she or they, it, The Philosopher Titan) leans forward now, and its cup is empty and has always been empty, and the room is cold, and there is a shadow of a shadow of something too large to fit in the shape of a person staring close at her. 

“Now. Knowing what you know. Knowing truth as I have spoken it. What are you going to do?”