VIII-81 Arrows (III) (Patreon)

War comes more than naturally to gods that share a likeness in Domain and pursuit. This is not a strange or unexpected metaphysical or even sociological outcome. This is simply the mechanics of their nature at play. Gods seek to embody totality. Their powers are absolute. They constantly operate at the peak of a dimension's Ambient Mana Threshold. This is because they do not function as individuals do, living anchored to the environment. Rather, gods are anchored to concepts, existing as their own mythology made manifest. Truer than matter and more powerful than your common attunement.

Hence, what happens when one totality greets another? Is there room for two beings of absolute omnipotent power? Of course not. If one god says yes and the other says no, and both of them control all facets of reality, who then shall reality heed? What then shall the fabric of existence do? 

Tear. Collapse. 

And so there cannot be two gods of mercy, two gods of sadness, two gods of poetry, two gods of lightning who share a playground. This is also why each god within a specific pantheon holds and must negotiate with their fellow divine brethren about what Domains they are to develop and how they are to evolve their mythology. To do so brazenly without thought is to betray your own pantheon in ignorance, but the ending is functionally the same: the collapse of the alliance lines and your summary execution in a bittermost purge.

Such outcomes are all too common when concerning mortals who evolve into Divinities. These things do not come naturally to those who once existed as a facet of the world rather than a natural incarnation of the System's higher will.

This is also a delightful thing to exploit if one is a heretic or yearns to perform an act of deicide, for whatever reason. Every god that has existed for a century likely has a collection of adversaries wronged or seeking to consume them, if only to feed their own avarice. In such a case, you are to direct a god that might be weaker or stronger, depending on the exact situation you're involved in, but if you seek my advice and my counsel is wise, then I always advise you to play with the weaker. For they are more desperate, more committed, more willing to risk all because they risk losing all if the ploy fails.

From here, it is best that you attack the enemy god along the axis of their most vulnerable, least developed Domain. Make them damage their own mythology, make them strike at their own faithful, make them debase themselves, make them betray themselves in action and decision. Weaken them in every way you can before the battle even begins, and when the battle does begin, wield everything against them. I strongly suggest Outsiders, especially those who stray too close to the System—the ones that are almost human, yet still all too alien to affect in all the ways of mortal-aligned faith.

Following that is simply a matter of logistics. A god might never run out of mana thanks to their Divinity, but they can be overwhelmed by Skill variety and attack vectors. When the god you seek to prey upon has debased themselves, when their faithful are butchered, their anchors cracked open, then they will be vulnerable. For a god, without a means of exerting its influence upon the world, is no more than an idea—and ideas hold no power against those who refuse to believe in their source.

In the aftermath, you will be an audience to one of the most special moments this existence can provide: divine autophagy—godly cannibalism.

—Divine Cannibalism by Udraal Thann

VIII-81

Arrows (III)

Roland looked on, his mouth agape, his fingers quivering, his left eye twitching in disbelief, as a scene of carnage ballooned in front of him. A massive body, frozen and burned of equal measure, exploded into existence, slamming against Adam's misted palm without ever breaching its threshold. The Supplicant, once bound to the Stranger's Garden, had crossed over in a flash of blinding gold. As it trespassed across time into Roland's soul, it slammed its sole remaining finger, a withered-looking pinky glistening with a spiraling nexus of golden eyes, against the Shrike.

An impact resonated across reality thrice over. 

The first was kinetic: a shockwave splashing over Adam's Zone of Absolute Dominion, force and violence banished from this place, rendering them unharmed, but making the world outside a whirlwind of obfuscation.

Then arrived a riptide of squealing gold. Each of the Supplicant's remaining eyes snapped into alignment, coming together in extended rows that seemed more like internal circuitry rather than a mess of gleaming irises drifting across midnight-black flesh.

Finally sounded divine collision: an impact that struck the Shrike at its very foundations. A pulse of incandescence sputtered through the air, drenching the atmosphere in sparks as if a hammer falling upon a red-hot blade.

A tunnel of offensive Chronomancy was projected from the end of the Supplicant's fingertip, and it was so massive that the form of the Shrike was blotted out from the front. It was like a falling mountain pressing down upon a creature barely the size of a house. But when the Shrike vanished, it was not because of force, but rather time—a Transposition spell that wrenched it backward wing over talon as it tried to pin itself to the present, but to no avail.

The Shrike vanished a full second into the future, then another, then another, as it tumbled forward, rolled, and Roland drew upon his New Legend Plus to track its exact position.

Yet before he could fully devote his attention to the Shrike, Adam cried out, but not in pain. Rather, his voice was infused with echoing power, the Sage's presence magnified as the incandescent mana painting the insides of Roland's soul space came crashing down upon him. Slithering into his body in a trillion desperate strands that wove themselves deeper and deeper, swirling at his core, Roland felt something shudder inside of him: something powerful, something terrible, something primordial, something stolen from the Starhawk. What followed that absorption was an aura of hateful hunger.

Adam's Zone of Absolute Dominion exploded in width, expanding ten times over compared to the paltry space it once held. The mists pushed out, slamming into the Supplicant's backside and displacing it as if a wave had flung a feather riding its surface. The Stranger cried out in pain and alarm, but Roland's attention was still fused to Adam. He couldn't look away. The horror and wonder inside the Dread Horizon mingled until they became one: a single molten emotion made into an alloy, one that was cooled and hardened by the blinding radiance that bled forth from Adam's missing eye. The azure glow that once defined him returned, bleeding into the divine magic defined by incandescence. Part of him was seeping over, usurping Divinity itself, but then his band, taken from the Challenger as a sign of symbolism and metaphysical strength for surviving his ordeal, blazed bright and ignited into a full crown. Adam stood taller, burned brighter than ever before, and his wings caught flame, each one like the feathers of a phoenix, leaking liquid fire into reality—stealing from the former visage of the now-altered Starhawk.

“Mongrel insect, pretender to Divinity and heaven; worthless, impotent ape who thinks himself god because he stole the flame from a corpse made so by highest failure!” Every syllable Adam spat struck the surface of Roland’s roiling soul like a boulder plunging down into a once-placid pond. Roland writhed and flinched, gripping his insides as the rage of the Sage stirred everything into absolute disarray. “We will instruct you now on the worth of your sin, the depth of your folly. You think you could consume us with your Domain? You think you have Heroism enough to overwhelm our nature, our worth, our struggle? You know nothing of godhood. You know nothing of will and ascension. But we will show you! We will stake the truths you should have learned in mortality to the depths of your Domains. And we will enlighten you to your greatest sin of all: that you should have never dreamed of becoming a god, that you were never enough, and now your fate is to part beneath our palm!”

Adam's remaining eye snapped to Roland, and with the intensity of a slaver cracking a whip, the Town Lord felt the force behind the son's glare. It manifested as the mists concentrated around him and held him firm, as if worried he would attempt to flee.

“Father-slave,” Adam and the Sage spoke as one, yet not the same at all. “Make something of your new Skill. Grant our hero a path to the Shrike's heart so that we might smite him from within. This battle for your soul is finished; I seek to take back the mantle which the Shrike stole.”

The sheer malice exuded by Adam was tragedy in motion. Roland didn't want this, didn't want to see his son succumb to the Tyrant burning inside. Nor did he want to strike down the Shrike, even if the Ascendant had been mutated, twisted into this monstrosity. There must be a way to save him. There must be a way to spare him from destruction, to preserve and restore him to what he used to be.

“Adam—”

“I have no interest in a conversation. I have told you what you must do. Heed my command if you wish to see your soul preserved at—” Suddenly, Adam grimaced, and he blinked as if surfacing from within himself. The stupor inflicted upon him by the Sage was broken for a moment as he looked at his father with grand regret. “F-father. Please. I will do all I can to spare the Starhawk from death, but if we do not strike him now, he will return, and I fear I cannot contend against the superiority of his Domain.”

Before Roland could reply, a third voice intruded: not the Stranger’s, but one carried by a thin vein of lightning. It threaded through Roland and Adam and left a lingering message. “Roland, Adam, I am compromised. I have been partially Excaliburized. My subconscious is no longer my own. Do not try to reply to me, for I am no longer here. I dare not expose you to the enemy within—but I am still present and will remain present so long as the Supplicant is in place. If the Starhawk has been Excaliburized, then do whatever you can to return him his dignity.” 

Uva fell silent then, leaving the bleakest part of the request as nothing more than subtext, but Roland knew, as did Adam. “The Starhawk deserves better than to be someone else's thrall. For all he's done wrong, for whatever his degeneration, he deserves better. He tried to be better. He tried. A rare thing in this world. I will see if the Stranger can conjure the Starhawk's former self using his Chronomancy. I will strike at his mind with what little I have, and it is little, but I am here, Adam, and I move to your lead.”

With that, the tension rose, but Roland's apprehension was gone. 

Whatever it takes. 

She was right. The Starhawk did deserve better, and hesitating would see nothing but more misery. So his New Legend Plus was devoted toward Chronomancy, and Roland, in that instant, became a mage he never was.

He knew little about the full art of time magic, but he'd dabbled enough and fought more than his share of Chronomancers, from Adept to Legend, in his time. Striking each of them down took more than cunning. He understood their spells, even though the specifics eluded him, and so he recreated the magics he saw in his past.

There was no need for Divination, as the displacement of the Shrike was along a predictable vector. The Ascendant of Stalking Sin had been flung into the future. The only question was how long.

The answer greeted Roland in an instant as his Legendary Chronomancy field blossomed out from him. It painted the world in a shroud of resplendent gold, but within that sphere, he saw the Shrike clawing its way back, pushing across time as one might battle the raging tides to return toward shore. A mortal would not be capable of such a thing, but the Shrike moved of its own will, unbound by time, though temporarily disrupted by it, and thus it came soaring back, its brambled wings threading across space and prying it open bit by bit until it was only two seconds away.

Practically an eternity.

Roland turned his considerable power to Adam and bestowed a spell upon his son's Shard of Exalted Flame. It was a Transposition spell, one far simpler than that which the Stranger channeled through his Supplicant, but that would do the job nonetheless. Adam loosed his shot, and the flaming projectile plunged across time through a narrow pinhole of gold. It accelerated along two axes: the first, space; the second, time. And it struck the Shrike in a cataclysmic impact before the Ascendant had a chance to return. 

Adam vanished, as did his Zone. The mist was displaced alongside him, dissipating and leaving Roland vulnerable, or so it felt. He knew not what his son was about to do, yet as soon as the Shrike reappeared, he did so with his insides boiling. A patch of azure blue flashed and seared his inner confines, and the Ascendant screamed, flickering between three states: mortal, Shrike, and Starhawk, brought back in increments of vulnerability—increments that reached out to Roland as desperately for his anchoring stability as he was for the Ascendant’s overwhelming strength.

But the Shrike reasserted himself, one reality reigning over all others, a prime timeline that had pruned what came before. It now faced an adversary unlike any other, though greater than Adam. By all metrics, there was something about the Sage that would not be denied, and that same vapor, which once protected Roland from harm, now pinned the Shrike in place, but not completely. He was partially fused, with head and arm exposed, leaving him vulnerable for the Stranger and Roland to deliver further harm.

A crash of psionic thunder rippled out from the Supplicant's remaining finger. A thin thread of lightning struck the returned Shrike as well, plunging into its mind as Adam had its soul. Then Roland and the Supplicant were upon it, neither wasting any more time. 

The Stranger's Avatar delivered colossal blows more destructive than anything a Legend could be capable of, but the Ascendant of Stalking Sin was not something that could be shattered by raw might alone. Barred from inflicting violence, the Shrike's brambles fused over him, and the Supplicant splashed upon those tar-black thorns, flinching away with a miserable cry of pain, like a foolish child who'd tried to grab a quilled animal.

“Waaah! Hurts! Again! Want to go back! Want to go back to what I was! Want to go back! I don’t want to be an animal! I don’t want to be sad and feel-heavy! I want to be a world again! I was a world once! I was a world…” Suddenly, the Supplicant was reeling away, its single finger curling as the Stranger descended into a fugue of great depression. He stopped fighting, he stopped raging, and he stopped doing anything but moping and whimpering. Roland felt the briefest pang of pity, though his focus was still directed toward the Shrike. It seemed like the venom of sin burrowed deep into the Supplicant and infested the being that lurked within. The interpretation of sin had to be broad indeed to see the Stranger affected so.

This doesn't seem like sin. This seems like regret. The Stranger—

Roland's confusion didn't last. The Stranger's mind bellowed a following statement, and the reason behind its overwhelming incapacitation was made clear. “All the small people, so many, all of them animals… like me! Like what I'm becoming. No, no, no, all of them killed by me, killed by my Fingerlings. Felt them die, felt them die, tore them apart, pulled their past into the present, pulled their present into the past. I killed them. I ended their experience. No more futures. No more things to recollect. No more. What… have I done?”

The Stranger's voice rose to hysterical heights as he realized, then lamented, the misdeeds he performed in those days long past.

For a while, Roland had hated the Stranger for what he had done, but it was difficult. The more he learned of the Stranger's nature, the more futile and hopeless it felt to hate such a creature. For what did he know of humanity, mortality, or even the nature of reality itself? It had been apart from patterns. Now it was drawn in close, and whose fault was it? Perhaps the System, again, more than anyone else, was to blame.

But these conjectures had to wait. For now, Roland's New Legend Plus brought a new glow to his next shot. Roland drew his bowstring back and prepared to set it loose. He wasn't sure if this attack would be denied, so he aimed carefully, directly at where he remembered the Shrike's head to be. The thorns parted, and for a moment, Roland felt himself freeze. The look the Shrike gave him was so cruel, so disappointed, so castigating that intrusive thoughts snaked through Roland's mind.

It would be better if I turned this arrow on myself. It would bring an end to—

But once more, a thin fissure of Psychomancy whipped through the air and struck Roland. It startled him—and burst the enchantment the Shrike had him under. At the same time, with his mind and body in disarray, his fingers slipped loose from the bowstring, and the projectile was set free to fly. It tore through the air, gleaming pale blue, slipping just past the Supplicant to crash against the Shrike. The detonation would strike its Divinity and leave it sundered, though only temporarily, but that's where the Animancy came in. It cleaved the Shrike deep; it destabilized its innermost aspects. Now its Domains and Skills would be ineffective for a time, as Roland tainted the Ascendant’s mythology to weaken the Shrike for what was to come.

Yet the Shrike laughed, and an agony coiled beneath Roland's skin that felt like a den of snakes had stirred within him, starting to slither and push to break free from his flesh and slip out from his bones. Thorns and brambles and briar patches were pushed from his very soul once more, and he felt the Shrike take hold inside of him as he was no longer under Adam's protection.

Even in this scattered state, the Shrike's power over him was near absolute. For Roland was awash in grief and regret for striking his own Ascendant. There came a pain and loathing directed at himself, and that was tantamount to sacrilege, the greatest sin he would ever know, the great sin he had to commit. Yet even so, a sin it remained, and sins were the Shrike's greatest power. Sin nourished the Starhawk’s fallen twin, and thus did he mock Roland.

“No matter how many intervene for you, it will not be enough. Even if you shake my foundations, it will not be enough, for it is not my strength that has made my triumph, and our reunion fated. Roland, is your remorse made realer for you, knowing truly what you’ve done? You feel the weight. And as long as the weight remains, as long as the sin is a sin, then I am your god. I am everyone's god. In this world, where we are all beasts, where the lambs are forsaken for being lambs and predators praised for acts beyond depravity, I may as well be the god of all.”

More branches grew over Roland, binding him, fusing over him, but unlike before, this time he fought. This time, he transformed his single untainted Skill—his paltry Philosophy. This was what he needed: a shift in his personal paradigm, a twist in his mindset. He needed to be almost Shiv-like in mental resilience and spiritual fortitude. He needed to make this last, the Ascendant of Stalking Sin devoid of all worship, and that meant Roland needed to become remorseless. He needed to cut the burden of his past away.

“No!” the Shrike roared, its fury resonating through the fangs burrowing out from Roland's flesh. It pulled him apart. It drew the Town Lord limb by limb until he was splayed wide. But whether the Shrike intended to wrench each of his limbs free from his body, he would not find out, as just then Uva returned to interrupt the battle for a third time. Once more, she crashed into the mind of the Shrike, but this time she did not make it out. This time, a curving length of thorns hooked her psionic lightning and pinned her in place. From the tar-black venom, an effigy of Uva was created: a miasma of darkness that was shaped to embody her silhouette. Yet she was not sculpted as a person, but rather as a collection of shattered fragments, a mixture of arachnid, Umbral, Fingerling, and broken glass. The shards that drifted away from Uva twirled about like a constellation of pieces, but each of them was a prism that held the horror, an extension of the realm given unto her by the Dreamtaker.

“If you were any other, Uva Mettabon, I would have struck you down. I would have unraveled you from within. But for all the service you have provided me without request, without payment, you live as well. For I see that I might have need of more than one Avatar, and the sin within you is great and grave as well. Even if it burns less intensely than that which assails my greatest champion, you are still—”

“I have committed no true sin.” Uva's reply was as deadpan as it was stifling. The branching thorns that bit into her failed to pierce her electricity. It kept her clenched in place. She couldn't escape, but she also wasn't harmed, not in the same way Roland was. No thorns burst from within her. No hint of remorse or regret was revealed either. Instead, Uva stared at the Shrike with her expression molded in the shape of pity. “I understand your circumstance, and know that I do not hold this against you, but we will do what we must, Starhawk, as always, for our people, for your people.”

Roland wasn't the only one surprised, as another spasm of azure light ignited within the Shrike—brighter than ever before. The power the Shrike expected to receive, the harvests of sin it sought to reap from everyone that it had already taken from Roland and the Stranger, was nowhere to be found. Uva, she was not defiant, simply devoid.

For the span of a full second, the Shrike was flabbergasted. He tightened his branches. He drove his thorns as deep as they could go—and that was absolutely nowhere. Uva remained implacable, and the Shrike's disbelief grew to become unbearable.

“You… are a dutiful, noble Pathbearer, Sister Uva Mettabon, but you have still done a great many wrongs. You still hold an unwilling mind captive, a shield turned armor, a mind that is still screaming, a mind I can hear that you have left deprived of conversation and attention for far too long.”

“I speak to my armor once every week for around five minutes. It is substantial. Also, it is an Awakened item granted to me by the System, molded from a person who attempted to kill me, who did kill quite a few of my Honored Mothers. As far as I'm concerned, the armor's penance is not yet over.”

The Shrike’s left eye twitched in a very Roland-like fashion. “But you regretted the minds you crushed, the people you forcibly enslaved—”

“I have actively corrected my behavior. I have not mentally crushed or forced anyone to do anything as of late. As such, I would consider myself educated and enlightened compared to what I was before, thus faultless, and this topic is no longer worth discussing.”

Now Roland was gawking as well. The thorns that held him started breaking apart as the Shrike, in his ever-climbing agitation and utter indignation, devoted more of his divinity to consume her, but she simply wouldn't succumb, for her compartmentalization was… inhuman.

“Sister Uva… you… You admitted to being part of a pogrom—”

“I did not admit that to you in a crisis of personal conscience,” Uva said with a huff. “I told you as a point of pride—that pogrom was a necessity for concern that the vampires who had infiltrated Weave were gathering them together in that grand sting, burning them all down within that building they had infested, and euthanizing all those who had been embraced by them. It was a great act of valor for my Sisters and me. If nothing else, I wish the flames had been hotter and burned longer. I wish it had hurt a great deal more for—” Uva shuddered, and for a moment Roland thought she was finally succumbing, that her bravado had cracked. Instead, however, she shone. Her Psychomancy grew more pronounced, and her being ignited slightly with faint embers that crackled in a hateful aura. “Pardon me. My Racism evolved.”

“You cannot be… Has your time with Tulveg—”

“Tulveg's racism towards his own kind is Legendary. I mean that quite literally. Angelo follows in his wake. As for Ekkihurst, I don’t consider him a person and have plans to eliminate him once Shiv no longer has use for him.” 

By now, Roland no longer had the words. Neither did the Shrike, for that matter.

And so, naturally, the System decided that this was the most opportune moment to speak on their behalf. A notification appeared before Roland's vision—judging from how the Shrike, Uva, and even the Stranger reacted, they saw the same thing as well.

Warning! Hidden World Quest Failed: Slay Tanner “Shiv” Lowe, the Deathless, before he fully comes into his power and drives your world beyond its current Mana Stability Threshold. Failure: A specialized Incursion is triggered to destroy Integrated Earth in 0 years, 0 months, and 0 days.

“What?” Roland whispered. “No. That—we had—”

“Had,” the Shrike sang, sounding not surprised in the slightest. “Had, Roland. One cannot outwit the Challenger. I know this in too many ways. The children struggled well. There is no more we can ask of them. You could have done no better. The outcome was preordained. This was never about the fall of Gate Piety, but the collapse of your entire world and home dimension. For the Challenger knew that the Favored Three might beat the odds, as they had so many times before. And so he accounted for it. Part of his great plan was to infuse the Deathless with so many levels, with so much power, that the Incursion was drawn from yet months in the future to right here, right now. No more time, no more time at all.”

Outside Roland’s soul, he felt the Gate shudder as a layer of dimensionality thinned. A crushing presence washed over him—and it was followed by another, and another, and another yet.

The Shrike sighed with hopeless pity. “That is the System removing the final safeguards from this nascent world. No more protections, no more separation. Greater Integration can intrude and intervene as it has for countless other realms, and Avalon has been in place, as planned, to be right here, right now, from the moment it encountered the Deathless. There was no other way. The destination was always bound to end here. The journeys were different, but the journey does not matter. Not for this war, not for your fate. Open your heart to me, Roland. Open and give yourself over. It is the only way Blackedge will survive. It is the only way you will be able to preserve any of our people.”

The Shrike's killing blow was not a grand spell or attack. No more thorns or branches, no more twisting tendrils that lashed at Roland's heart and mind. Simply an offering: one the people of Submission never got from him. “The Challenger is willing to starve himself when it comes to the last remnants of Blackedge. The Challenger is willing to spare you as well, but we must be his one again, Roland, you and I. We must cut down the rest of the Ascendancy and whoever else refuses to bend the knee. We must euthanize this Gate, lest the orcs come in and find pleasure in its final throes themselves. That is the arrangement. That is the only mercy that the Challenger will offer. That is why I have been delivered upon you. No more time. No more options. No way out. Not for any of us. Choose, Roland. Choose, and let me back in.”