IX-41 Stolen Mythos (Patreon)

Myths rarely find their end through conventional means. Their mind, body, and soul have been refined through turmoil and tribulation again and again. By the time you pass the cusp of Legend, you are already hard to destroy in flesh, sturdy in psychology, spirit, and philosophy. If you weren't, you would have never made it to the base of the mountain that is your impending myth. 

But you must lift this myth out from the fog it is submerged in. You must bear its weight and hew it toward heaven, because heaven will strike you down if you cannot carry this burden. A Pathbearer who knows not themselves is unworthy to stand before the vastness of totality.

    Herein comes the way to slay a Myth, and the most convenient and direct means is through occupation: occupation—as one Myth claims another, as one sovereignty slams and consumes another, as one devours another. This is why, when Myths fight, it is like the collision of atmospheres and ecosystems. It is not simply a smashing of Skills together. No, it is a small civilization grinding against another. The struggle that takes shape then is colossal, metaphysical, but also complex in its interweaving.

    You cannot simply overpower another Myth. They follow different logic, different rules within their own confines, so you must siege and claim these confines. You must take their Skills from them, pushing in through the periphery until you strike their core, but that is simply the common way Myths fight. Other Myths have no periphery. They have a chain of Skills running like junctions along a train line, a straight, direct vector pointed to the hammerhead that is their Demesne.

    The old adage of "know thy enemy and know thyself" applies stronger than ever here. This is because if your enemy understands you, then they will know your lore. They will understand the laws of your attunement. They will know how to outflank your Skills, and they will come in and they will solve you. If you understand them, vice versa, then you can solve them as well, with two Myths who know each other and know themselves. What most often follows is a lasting stalemate that continues on for centuries as they gather proxies and other allies, trying to nudge openings into shape. The battle lasts eons before finally fizzling out as the two sides decide that the start of the conflict wasn't worth its continuation after all.

    Along the way, Myths also change. Your domain can be altered, improved, imbued with more Myth, and applied with additional power, and your enemy will as well. The game is twofold: enlightenment on one end—your capacity to learn, internalize, and understand—against your ability to defend in the form of adaptation, transformation, and progression.

    Ignorance and stillness are death, Farwalker. It's time to lose any passive habits you might have.

—Mythic-Tier Combat Initiation Seminar

IX-41

Stolen Mythos

Hesitation held Maia in its sway, but she saw no point to her masquerade anymore. They were all prisoners within Avalon, and now, to understand himself, Shiv needed to consult someone aside from the Thief, who doubtlessly would see the Deathless turned to his desired vessel. That left only so few to consult. Thankfully, one of the few stood before Shiv in the form of Maia, who had broken out from Divinity—ensuring the continuation of her own personhood.

“Is this a trick?” Veronica asked, arcing an eyebrow in confusion. Her awareness remained blunted still, and that lasted for another few seconds before weight shifted away from Maia. The shedding of the veil was felt rather than seen, but in a sudden moment, Veronica flinched as she realized someone was standing behind her the entire time. She was not used to being caught off guard. Her Awareness was considerable, even if it wasn't the foremost of her Skills, but now she had been surprised twice over since her awakening. 

Behind her stood Maia, who Veronica recognized in an instant, as indicated by the widening of her eyes and the tensing of her body.

“Artist.” The title slipped out with Veronica's breath, though the shorter woman took a half step back, shaking her head in rejection of the moniker.

“No longer, and never again.” Maia directed a vicious glare at Shiv, but it bounced off of him. He was at the point of indifference toward her anger now, more interested in how she'd managed to escape the encapsulation of a god's myth, one that was far beyond Mythic-Tier. “My presence was not for you to reveal.”

Shiv offered a conciliatory nod out of politeness. “Maybe not, but I need to know something, and I want her in the fold now too. Because you got a bigger danger on your hands, Maia. Whatever boat you were in with Udraal is sunk. He's still out there hiding, and I don't think he's going to show up until he's absolutely sure nothing will happen to him. Meanwhile, you're stuck down here with us, with the Thief. Now you're in the boat that I'm tugging along—and it would be very, very helpful if you were all aware of each other because you can’t just rely on me to wrangle everything. Not if I get surprised by myself in some other way.”

The Nihilist sparked into existence, sizzling in the air as Shiv began burning a new, special flavoring into the foundational ingredients of the cake he was still working on. It carved mystery, ire, and curiosity into the flour and eggs—but its scintillation was accompanied by colors other than gray: There came a faint corona of red and gold, a reminder that the Lore of the Endless was never far behind and that it had to cross over from Shiv's soul to be used in the real. Shiv suspected that the Nihilist, too, would soon be bound to his fundamental lore, but before he would ever dare to take that step, he wanted a measured, holistic understanding of what it meant to possess a myth from someone who suffered its consequence, albeit in another form.

“We weren't trapped,” Maia began, her tone begrudging, but her will softening all the same. “Not at first. In the beginning, we remained who we were. And we stayed that way for years. Though we were admittedly unprepared, we were not complete fools. We sought instruction on how to properly entwine ourselves with another's legend. Rituals and spells were prepared and left in place.”

Shiv stopped mid-action. His mind snapped to a point in his recent past: the Thief casting a specific spell, the Animancy working that protected him from Shiv's sovereignty, that made him a part of that invasive expanse. “Soul magic. Udraal.”

“Not just him,” Maia said, shaking her head. Her nostrils flared with offense, as if she thought him simple. “Our protections never came from a singular source. We consulted, we cajoled, we bargained and begged. We struck accords, all of us together. We, the exiles from the surface, these oddities in the Abyss, these survivors, all of us, were working together, drawing on whatever influence and power we could as we began our pilgrimage down to the very center. For it was there that we were supposed to find hope, that we were supposed to be christened by the one true god known to the Abyss. If it was god enough for them at the time, we thought it would be god enough for us. Our initial journey was not one of usurpation or apotheosis. It was simply to supplicate and surrender ourselves in exchange to save our homes…”

Her words were cut off by a rumbling hiss. The Ouroboros glowed red around Shiv, wrapping over his body again and again, its revolution calling to the cemetery within his sovereignty. A great part of his endlessness had been imparted upon the Ouroboros, or perhaps a part of the Ouroboros was imparted the other way. Nonetheless, it glared upon the forgotten Ascended with grave displeasure, and from its voice came a sibilant snarl. “Lie once. Now truth. Get closer to the lie, Painter. I want to taste the measure of your sins. I want to see how you drown in the Bleed.”

Maia held strong to her pride, her dignity, and her power. Even so, there was a place she could not transgress, and that was truthhood. Before Shiv, she risked everything she did and everything she spoke. When she continued, her words became more measured, more calculated.

"We were not of a shared mind," Maia admitted. "We… at least some among us, were more enchanted by the prospect of pure power, perhaps. Some among us had higher designs, but I was no Martial, no Mage at the time. I was cast down with the others because I was a disseminator of heretical properties; I drew and painted and wrote my poetics in a fashion the Dust Lord did not approve of. That was my great and grave sin during my maiden years.”

“Always an excuse for tyranny,” Shiv replied, aiming a wry look at Veronica. “Just as there's always a story behind why someone became a tyrant or god. But enough about your pitiful past. Let's get to the point where your wards broke down and you started losing yourself.”

“No,” Maia rejected. “Before that point, there is something else you should understand. Each of us was ensconced in a different Skill. They were attached to the Great One's body in these calamitous openings, pathways that led elsewhere, far, far away from Integrated Earth. We sensed the blurring of those thresholds when we walked through each entrance only wide enough to bear one living will.”

“Why?” Shiv asked.

“Even now, I cannot say. I suspect a myth requires a living Pathbearer to sustain its functions, to continue weaving the story. After all, myths are constantly developing, are they not? Godhood is myth externalized, as you might have already grasped. Nonetheless, each of us occupied one Domain at first. It held a nexus of Skills, but we had to be symmetrical to the realms we chose—otherwise, even all the protections ascribed to us would find themselves unraveled in an instant. Legend loathes contradiction.”

The Great One had many Domains, Shiv said to himself. Then, his considerations evolved. Does that mean I can have many Demesnes as well?

“That is what the nexus actually is,” Maia continued. “A cluster of core myths.”

“Ah,” Shiv said, as that offering of information aligned his mind with the sense of things. “No wonder why this is the beginning of my myth. It takes more than just a single personalized attunement to be a Mythic-Tier Pathbearer. But the question is, how many do I need to establish a full nexus?”

We have a more pressing question. Aside from that, we were not forced to face our entire world of origin in struggle and strife. We did not have to dominate Integrated Earth to achieve this first step. But what of Maia and the other Ascendants?

Shiv turned the Harbinger’s question upon Maia, and she just shook her head. “The Great One already trod that path. Whatever war of origination needed to be fought was already concluded eons ago. We simply stepped and sat upon an empty throne left behind by its builder. It was a clean usurpation. The doors were open, the halls were empty, the treasury was ours to ransack. It seemed so easy at the time, so very rewarding, so deserved after all the horrors we went through.”

Her gaze fell, her expression and heart withered, growing so bitter and foul in flavor that Shiv almost turned away from her presence just to guard himself.

“If only we knew how much of ourselves were to be lost. If only we understood what we were doing.” Maia’s lament weighed heavily on her shoulders—but it imposed a crushing dread on Veronica by proxy. The space surrounding the Councilwoman was painted by foul splotches of dread and nothingness. Sound and sight were banished as smears threatened to cover her, and Shiv pulled it back into himself, sweeping it into the covering of his cape to facilitate the continuation of this dialogue.

Maia swallowed. “If one shares enough similarity in lore and legend, if one is willing to modify themselves to some such extreme through Animancy, then yes, you can submerge yourself in another's myth or soul for some time. But eventually, asymmetries will form. You are not the creator of the myth. You did not bear it into being. You can act like them, you can ape them, you can perform until your mind is practically perfectly tuned to the shifting of their thoughts, yet you will still not be the one who blazed the trail you now walk, for your history does not start along the same path. History matters. Your past actions matter. The longer a Skill is carried by you, the longer said Skill will press upon you, imprint upon you, until you become the character of the Skill. As for our great sin, our great arrogance: It was thinking that we would eventually be able to adapt this Skill via enhancements made to our minds and souls. But what enhancements could we apply that could match the weight of the Great One? More than merely Mythic, they were a High God, peer or superior to even Transcendents, rival to the Challenger.”

“And so instead of imprinting on the Skill and eventually making it your own through whatever questionable rituals and magics you imbued yourselves with, it ate you,” Shiv concluded. 

“It narrowed us first,” Maia corrected. “We were not demented of mind or soul initially. We simply found our options more and more limited. It was an imposition of restriction. We all carried facets of a Curse.”

“Facets,” Shiv questioned.

“Yes, facets, not the full Curse. We were not the Great One proper, and we could not sustain a full Mythic or even Transcendent Curse. That would have been far too much for our souls. But the shadow of the Curse that came with the stolen myth was still there, and it was more than what we could withstand. Halsur needed to be unshaking, unmoving. When he decided upon something, he needed to commit all the way: no turning back, literally, no second thoughts. If he did, he cracked, and I watched him break several thousand times over, his mind splintering only to be coaxed back together by Kathereine, who, though so sweet, so caring, was still conniving at heart; a politician more than a stage performer, an ambitious woman who'd suffered too much too young and refused to lose any agency ever again. But the power she embodied was offensive. Kathereine’s myth was part of that which the Great One used to charm and supplicate entire civilizations. And so she had to charm people. She had to pluck at their strings and weave them anew until they were facsimiles of themselves. It was more than a compulsion; she couldn't choose to do otherwise. After a while, it simply became who she was, and as the shadow of the Curse warped her, she grew simpler, until there was less of her still, much like what she did to others.”

“And what about you?” Shiv asked. “What shadow weighed on you?”

He caught a flash of Maia's true age as her overwhelming exhaustion poured out. “You saw it, the manifestation of all my power and my regret. You saw my compulsion. I was an artist. I delighted in composition, in framing, even in the black and white of charcoal. That monochromatic expression, devoid of all colors, I loved it all. I love poetry as well, essays and more, but my greatest passion was to paint, to trap the world upon a canvas. And trap I did, until it became more than a need, until I felt myself dissolving, smearing into the backdrop of reality, if I didn't capture a portion of reality upon parchment within my tome again and again.”

“We should have suspected as much,” the Nihilist remarked.

“And that compulsion's still there, huh?” Shiv asked.

“More than compulsion, it remains my penalty, but I am clear that it is a penalty, and I do it begrudgingly, for my art is a forced tithe to someone else, never to be enjoyed on my own for its own purpose.”

Comparatively, we were most fortunate. We have to evolve. That change is our way. Stagnation is not known to us. Not the same way the Artist’s compulsion has predated upon Maia, the Songbringer predated upon Kathereine, or the Endbreaker on Halsur. There is a wretched lesson here in taking on power that one is not prepared to bear.

“Right, useful to know all that, but the biggest problem still remains: Why wasn't I forced to contend with my world? Where was that cataclysmic battle against all of Earth? My sovereignty formed without any real struggle on my part. Sure, there was some discovery, I guess, but nothing in the shape of combat at all.” A great unease pressed upon Shiv as one look at them revealed that neither Veronica nor Maia held any insight.

“Perhaps… it’s because there is no need,” Veronica finally offered. “The act of forcing you to face Integrated Earth is unnecessary, redundant, perhaps even pathetic. You're trapped within Avalon, and you have already emerged from one alternative timeline after slaying what was perhaps the most powerful Legend the planet could have ever produced. What possible challenge can Integrated Earth now pose against you?”

“Integrated Earth can put me down for good if the conditions are right," Shiv answered, rationality telling him as much. "Integrated Earth has you, Veronica. It has all the Ascendants. It has the Five Faiths in the Abyss. It has the Storm King in the sky. It still has the real Caine Hauser, and if a somewhat stronger version of him took me thousands of attempts to beat, an accurate copy would still pose a challenge when supported by dozens upon dozens of other Legends."

Shiv paused as he reflected on all he experienced to reach this point. “It's because Avalon's partially fused into me that I had the opportunity to develop as I did at all, or maybe because I'm fused into it. It's hard to tell anymore. My Delve was trapped at the bottom of one of its swords, and according to the Thief, the Avalons all fell, clinging to one another like crabs in a bucket. Now they're trapped in connection to me, and they can't dislodge me. I wouldn't have gotten all the second chances on Earth that I did down here. System’s a lot of things, but I wouldn’t call it merciful. Not to me.”

“Then maybe the worst is still ahead for you,” Veronica said. “You said the System offered to elevate your Legendary Delve into a Mythic evolution, did it not? The conditions were the defeat of Avalon. It seems, then, that what you're undergoing right now is not that much an advancement in power, but rather a partial evolution for succeeding at an initial encounter.”

The full horrible implication behind her words felt like a heel on Shiv’s back, a heel of a giant when he was but an insect. “I have no idea how Uva or Adam’s doing. How long it’s been for them. I know Adam's still alive, but…” He didn't finish that sentence. He didn’t want to. “As things are right now, I don't want to run into him again, not with the Thief breathing down my neck and the Sage his. But I think you're right, Veronica. The System's not merciful, so it's not going to be. I don't need to fight my entire world because I'm going to have to anyway. If I want to be a particularly cruel prick about it, then an imitation of my world will probably exist underneath Adam's tyranny, and the god inside of him will have eaten all the way through him, because he's holding the Great One's myth as well. Maybe by the time I get there, there won't be anything of my battle-brother left. And I might never find Uva again.”

“I am beaming a whole lot of depression into this cake, Shiv. I hope you know that,” the Nihilist commented.

Shiv didn’t answer his Skill. “I'm going to see it in them too. I'm going to see it, and I think it's going to break me a little bit.”

“See what?” Veronica asked softly.

“Their ends. Their mortality. They are mortal. They are. Just like you. In a twisted kind of way, Veronica, I think I'd be fine with killing you for something you've done, but I don't think I'd be so fine with watching you fade.”

“I… understand,” Veronica said. Her casual acceptance of his words surprised him. “In this, I suspect we're more alike than you'd care for. Better to be the one who holds the reins of your own fate and decides the end of another or the end of yourself than just to decay and be swallowed by entropy. But a question on my part: You said I still have long. You said you don't know if I can extend my kindling. How bad is it among the others and for me? How severe? How quick are we… fading?”

Shiv took a good, hard look at both Maia and Veronica, and what he saw, what he drank in, made his stomach turn once more. “You both burn bright, but all that surrounds you is a cold void, and there is nothing outside. Every bit you lose goes nowhere. It doesn't come back. There’s an end. There’s an end, and I just can't stand it.”

At this, the conversation came to a choked, abrupt end. No one had any more words, and Shiv was dry of dialogue as well. Dry of dialogue, dry of patience, dry of many things.

His first step into being a Myth gave him more power than he knew what to do with, but it took something of equal measure. It took from him peace. It took from him bliss.

Ignorance was a potent power unto itself, for it was easy to act when one didn't understand. Now he found himself on the cusp of a lie once more in retrospect, as when he declared his willingness to kill Veronica for her past sins, he wasn't quite so sure anymore. To snuff out her flame would be to face its end as well, and endings were his anathema.

We did not know death before. We did not. There was a quaver in the Harbinger's voice. But now we will, for death has come to us, and though it will not ever nest inside of us, it will take root all around us. We are encircled now and forever. As we are endless in life, this world is endless in death. We are encircled. And we might be alone aside from a few others. Oh, gods… everything is going to go away.

The worst is yet to come, Veronica’s words repeated in Shiv's mind. The worst is yet to come.

***

Shiv fed the others his apology cake.

What followed was a great deal of sobbing and depression.

Thus, a second apology cake was needed to apologize for the first, and he baked that in a considerably better mood after he applied some of his new magics upon himself. That was the first thing he learned to do by sinking back into his Demesne.

He tried several other things before he reached that point. First was having Veronica create a zone of Dimensionality for him to experiment within. However, the zone was immediately compromised by his magic as his spell sliced its way out from her inverted spatial bubble. Undaunted, she applied several other spell configurations and altered the spatial geometries of her pocket, seeing which might be able to sustain his presence. All the attempts failed, but the failure fed her valuable information.

First and foremost, his magic ran counter to most other spells, as all spells held a shaping of matter. The way they were expressed from edge to edge and layer to layer was specific and determined by what effect they wished to impose upon the world. Veronica was a powerful Dimensionalist. However, all her spells had linear points. They went straight from one length to another, and they were connected—sometimes in a complicated interplay—but straight lines were decked in every single one of her workings.

The second part of Shiv's suspicions was confirmed when he had Maia paint him upon her page. With his anti-Divinity-layered Magical Resistance held in refrain, he found himself trapped, utterly unable to break free, with soul and being fully branded upon a canvas of lacking detail. Everything around him was a monochrome sketch, nothing but bars and risen towers that marked the borders of his threshold. Then he called upon his mana again and immediately burst through the paper, as that was what it was before his imposing power: paper. With Divinity applied, however, Maia could keep him in, and there was a clash that resulted: a flash of incandescence against the strangeness of his personal attunement.

Such a revelation demanded more exploration, but they narrowed the main point of disharmony between Shiv’s magic and the System’s generalized lores; the Endless did not abide by symmetry, any form of symmetry at all. Every facet of his shapings was rounded, and they whirled in on each other. If not a spiral, then a torus. If not a torus, then a simple cycle. Everything was interconnected, much in the same way the Ourobori grew out from each other: each link connected to another, like rounded chains, forever and always cycling in without end.

Connected to that was mana diminishment. The Endless did not suffer any mana-loss from entropy. Even when overflooded with mana or shaped to perform a great feat like holding an expanse the size of a city in a perpetual state of looping stillness, the total mana capacity of the spell remained perpetual. Only when another, adversarial spell of some kind inflicted itself upon the Endless was it reduced by any amount. Furthermore, and much to Shiv's delight, the mana he lost during such clashes was gradually restored as the cycle performed a revolution.

Effectively, if any of his spells managed the full cycle without being overwhelmed and washed away by hostile magics, they would return to their initial total mana capacity again—the amount capped at however much he invested into the spell.

“It seems that you are determined to defy the conventions of Magical Theory," the Thief declared, nodding as he watched Shiv create one loop stacked atop the other. As both lores were attuned to the Endless, they did not clash, even when running counter-revolutions. However, there was a distortion of progress as a portion of the loop pushed things forward before returning them to their initial starting point, while another rewound the world back slightly—as much of the world you've trapped in his sovereignty, that was.

The other Pathbearers grew used to these experiments. Shiv found many ways to shield them from the most inimical aspects of his mana. With but a few tests, he discovered better solutions than simply wrapping them in winding shapings to part them from the void. Rather than focusing his magic inward upon them, he inverted his original spell and looped the world outside. Plus, every individual he enchanted with the spell gained a field which caused the space around them to distort, to cleave. They were walking whirlwinds, protected on the interior while scything through all concepts connected to thought, emotion, time, or vitality.

The externalized loop spell, as he came to call it in his mind, also allowed everyone else to interface and interact with one another as the Lore of the Endless bled into itself and did not cause harm to any caught within its membrane.

A useful application, but also a potential weakness. If any of our enemies learns how to adapt or replicate our attunement, then they can trespass against us with ease.

With special considerations toward the Thief, Shiv bookended.

He vastly expanded his repertoire of spells as well. Before, he could disseminate himself into the timeline. Now his personal timeline was dramatically different from the world around him, and every attempt to fuse himself to the flowing current of history was only a partial success.

Again, it was a problem of symmetry, or rather, asymmetry, on his part. His magic was bladed, edged, curved. Every time he sank into the time itself, he split the stream, cleaving gold and leaving gouts of red splashing from where he spread. He was effectively a fragmentation bomb against time itself, and where he cleaved, the structure of the world came apart as ruptures spewed chaos and ruin—creating another near-death incident for everyone and thus demanding an apology in the form of cookies this time.

Yet, as his mood found itself on the cusp of souring, the Thief gave him a suggestion not to merge with time the way he did previously. In recent times, he submerged himself easily, as he knew Avalon's currents.

But now he was attuned to himself, and he needed to understand his own flow. In doing so, he likely could manipulate it, at least in temporary increments. To match the world, after all, there were points of contact between a curve and a straight line. All he needed to do was extend his curve as long as he could so that the overlap between reality's linearity could last long enough for him to achieve his desired subterfuge.

And thus, he had made the attempt and failed, but in that failure, he found himself inspired. There was a sensation of friction between him and Integration's central timeline. It was like he was gliding along its rails, a blade kissing the ice, so to speak, chipping things free and sliding along for a moment instead of sinking down below.

Then he thought of a way that he might be able to circumvent his current limitation. After all, he was only casting a single spell, a great and overwhelming spell infused with more mana than he'd ever dreamed of wielding, but a single spell nonetheless. Instead of mimicking reality's linearity, but in pure shaping alone, he created a pseudo-linearity by interweaving his loops with each other, effectively forming a chronological chain that extended along the length of baseline time.

To Shiv's astonishment and growing triumph, he succeeded. The extended torus, as he thought of it, was effectively a looping chain of moments that intersected at specific points. One could cross over from one loop to another and progress into the next increment. Both loops were effectively endless unto themselves, and so they functioned within the laws of his lore.

Additionally, this also informed him about another major aspect of his lore. His magic was cyclical, but it waxed and waned. There was a point of departure and a point of origin, and they folded in on each other, like a snake even eating its own tail, like the Ouroboros that represented his biomancy—but there was a loophole to this endlessness, and it was a loophole he should have realized when experimenting with Veronica earlier. Hostile magic could impact his spells. It was a clash, of course, but it diminished him. If he could be diminished, if he could see his spell drowned and reduced to nothing, then he could also see his magic commingled. One spell of the Endless could be connected to another, and there would be no interference between them.

Because of this, he began reclassifying his magics once more, defining the major architecture of his current spells. To his growing excitement, he realized that his Endless was far more versatile and expansive than Chronomancy, for he could achieve a sort of imitation of Chronomancy using his current magics through a sort of false semitization. This became the name of this newly created spell: False Semitization.

At the base of all his magics was a cycle, a loop, resurrection, maintained in the form of a shaping. That was the foundational law of the Endless. However, so long as he adhered to that law, he could do almost anything else, and Shiv discovered a great many possibilities indeed. For one, he was thinking too limited. He realized that he could alternate his concepts of Chronomancy and apply them to matters of the heart. He wove and shaped the emotions within others as freely as he folded time.

The same laws applied here as well. Whatever emotion one felt at the start of the spell was one they would return to again, but Shiv could cycle through a whole host of feelings, not only for himself but for other people as well.

Additionally, he could still the moment, achieving a sort of Languor that was beyond Languor: everything frozen, mid-point, as he locked the loop down. He could do this because the loop abided by its own rules, its own homeostasis. It was counterentropic, and so it could freeze absolutely. The mechanism did not always need to flow, and he could keep moments lost in time and heart and mind, still like stone while he alone continued to be—as he was his mana, and this mana was he.

But then he got creative. There was no separation between time and emotion, after all, or time and thought, or moments in time when someone felt something or thought something.

Shiv embarked on the greatest experiment thus far. He recruited Solizmort for this experiment and gave him a simple set of instructions. The Hydra was to think of cookies and then devour them as many times as possible. However, he needed to do so in separated increments, preferably by minutes, and then by hours, and then by the span of a few days.

From here, Shiv realized that he still had anchors, but his anchors were far more targeted, far more specific: when mind, heart, vitality, and time were all aligned, when Shiv focused enough and held something inside his loop, when the action was repeated over and over again, the same act, the same behavior, the same consistent pattern performed with enough repetition, a new chain formed, a chain that resembled the temporal anchors Shiv knew all too well.

But these chains ran far further than his past. With focus and insight, he saw these chains take form across every little bit of repeated behavior for everyone else he laid his magic upon. As souls grew more, glowing red and gold, an endless series of ghostly echoes was woven in the contour of the Hydra, marking him across points in space and time, thought, emotion, and everything in between. They could be tuned as well, for Shiv now marked points of progress in that grand loop—and grinned wide as he grasped his growing edge against Avalon.

The Sword of Paradise may be an instrument above time, but now Shiv could shape far more than time. With little difficulty at all, he snapped from where Solizmort was at present to his recent past—and jumped over to Gone, as she also shared the same thoughts, the same feelings of hunger, performed the same in a generalized sphere of time.

“Alright.” Shiv chuckled. “I think it might be time for me to get a little weird, and indulge in a bit of deliberate madness.”