IX-45 The Ghosts of Ourselves (II) (Patreon)

There are two types of idiots you'll run into when you're campaigning. The first is the optimist. They assume everything will be alright, that the baggage train will arrive just on time, that the reinforcements are absolutely hiding behind that single blade of grass and we just missed them the first five times we checked, that command has our best interests at heart, and that the nobility will absolutely honor their arrangement and not hire another mercenary group at cheaper rates to kill us all after the assault ends to avoid paying us.

These idiots are an onslaught on your intelligence because they are the masters of denying reality, and reality is so often disappointing. 

But they have a sibling, and that sibling is the pessimist. Don't get it twisted: The pessimist is just as much an idiot as the optimist. Because sometimes help really is coming, since they have to come; it's in their best interest to arrive on time, and it's not just your war. Other times, the nobility will honor their arrangement because, guess what? Not everyone is a stereotype. You're not dealing with people of straw. Sometimes bastards change, and other times the bastard just isn't that much of a bastard to you. 

Ultimately, the pessimist can be even more fatal than the former. Stupidity can be cured if you have the right people to nudge them into place. You can't so easily fix despair.

An army fights on morale. You want to talk about miracles? Miracles require impossible displays of courage and will. Miracles demand sacrifice beyond reason. Pessimists rarely give such sacrifices. Pessimists tend to engender surrender, and surrender-happy armies exist at the mercy of the victors.

It's better not to be a fool at all and just be realistic, but sometimes you're going to have to choose between being one idiot or another. The thing is, even though all Pathbearers must face their death, until you do, the idiot optimist is going to play again and again and again. 

The ones who play to win win more than the ones who never try at all.

—Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

IX-45

The Ghosts of Ourselves (II)

In a clash between gods, the rules of the game were complexity and asymmetry, but a very specific kind of asymmetry at that. When gods of contrary Domains went to war, it was in the space the other had no control over where the battles were fought, and along the axis they did control, each god held absolute dominion.

That was likely why the Avalons were desperate to contain the Sage; attempting to attack it was an act of absolute folly, and quite literally, at that. The barrier they'd erected to seal the Sage off was immense in mana, but that was a paltry factor for the Avalons and by itself not nearly enough to cage the Sage either. Logistical attrition of this kind simply did not factor into the war being fought. Gods didn't so much overpower one another as they did overload or break or overwhelm, and that was exactly what the Avalons attempted to do, at least at the start of the conflict.

Shiv gleaned all that by observing the shapings of Avalon’s great barrier. The outer layer was a complicated interplay that almost completely escaped his understanding, but he was quite the clever fruit fly, and he divined their intentions from the subtle modifiers and expressions he did manage to recognize, which turned out to be an adjusted variety of the seals it had placed over Road's End. The adjustment was anything but slight, but the general intention was the same. 

The Sage was constantly searing its way through the inner layers. How Adam's Glare of Immolating Omniscience could burn through multiple thresholds of time was another question entirely, but with that taken as a fact, the Avalons had to adapt and adapt well. As such, the sphere was actually not so much a sphere as it was an overlay of countless panels. There were perhaps a trillion or so layers to its total expanse, give or take a few billion, judging by the way a few symbols overlapped at various junctions when Shiv looked at them from different angles. Between spells, these panels could actively integrate and adjust themselves per a near-sapient algorithm programmed into the networked workings.

The innermost layer of this Chronomantic wonder was a dense field of Languor. It was, however, not meant to freeze the Sage in time, for such an act of imparted force had no hope of taking hold on the Heaven of Peace. More importantly, gods could act beyond the limitations of baseline time—something Shiv had known since the very first time he faced the Ascendants during the battle against Terrence—and so attempting to freeze them in place was pointless, unless highly specific steps were taken to cause a similar effect via indirect but adjacent means. With every god existing inside the realm of their own myth, Chronomancy lost its most direct means of suppression.

But while the Sage was a defensive juggernaut without peer, its offensive capability left much to be desired. Adam's glaring sun burned through the thresholds, but it took time to melt past the initial barrier of mana. What beams slipped through were then distributed through the entirety of the network, thinning and dispersing, dramatically weakening the outbound Divinity projected by the Sage and allowing the Avalons to maintain and update the wards at their leisure.

And with said leisure came other adjustments and counters, adaptations meant to repel the Sage using its own power.

The middle band of the sphere was meant to trap and then displace the sun's scalding rays. Effectively, it would cast parts of Adam's light into the future for it to reemerge, interrupting whatever stream might follow and causing them to clash together. According to the Thief, that was meant to cause some kind of paradox. 

However, the glare also oscillated in brightness and intensity. Up close, Shiv saw it sweeping and stabbing constantly: the beam striking in random directions, pressing across the vastness of the sphere one moment before being focused down to a single finger-thin thread the next. 

While the Avalons adapted, as did the Sage, and the arms race between the two continued.

The greatest advantage possessed by the Swords of Paradise was not that of temporal control, but rather environmental design. They decided how much space the Sage could expand, and they had the rest of the infinite void to maneuver and compose themselves. More importantly, they had countless resources and Pathbearers to draw upon and use in ways other than direct clashes of power. From these resources, they continued layering more and more complexity upon the spellwork, so much complexity that Shiv was certain he would never be able to break out of it—were he to be captured. 

From the outside, however, it was a different deal. Magic was not a thing of blind ritual, though the ignorant might see it as such. When it came to lore, there were commonly repeated patterns and rules. This was treated as rote by those who were primitive or ignorant. These individuals often confused their imitation for invocation. The way they shaped their spells and the objects or conduits they required for the full channeling of said spell was the signifier and not the signified. That was why a great deal of magical texts were obsoleted after generations, as prior theories and assumptions needed to be removed and renewed.

Time, then, was the most peculiar lore to wield. Its architecture had simple but absolute demands: time needed to flow, hence the term chronology. If time did not flow, the mana did not work. As such, the vectoring and shaping of the lore needed to resemble the reconstructed architecture one wished to rig atop the structure of reality,  

Ultimately, that was what mana was: temporary rigging and reconstruction. To that end, the re-architecting of reality was where the artistry of magic began, and Avalon, though unfathomably brilliant, was a lacking artist in many regards. The choices it made were machine-like and absolutely efficient. It cared nothing for flourishes or expressions. It didn't have all the little inconsistencies and odd flaws that existed in mortal shapings.

In most cases, Shiv would have regarded Avalon as far superior when it came to any lore, any feat of spellcraft. In this specific case, however, Avalon made things easy for him, as it did not layer the outside with protective wardings, only the inside. All its magic, in fact, was in-facing. Time was being compressed into a bubble, accelerated, so that no matter how long things passed on the outside, the inside was moving ever faster.

Through this, he gained even more insight into his present situation. There were three separate timelines to keep track of right now. To start, there were his own almost three centuries of containment at the bottom of one Avalon. The temporal pacing of the Realmrunner's pseudo-paradise was vastly accelerated as well, causing Shiv to endure multiple mortal lifetimes during his imprisonment.

Beyond his prison, however, things were different. Shiv had expected that the practically perfectly halted state of chronology he'd experienced in the depths of the Avalon where his Delve was located hadn't applied since he left that space, but he was somewhat relieved to find that no more than two months had passed back on Integrated Earth. It wasn't ideal, but he had prepared himself for far worse.

The Sage and all the broken pieces of occupied paradise trapped in its mist experienced a complicated interplay of timelines. The Avalon it held was accelerating things toward the future, a sign that, before its shattering, the Avalon was trying to outmaneuver and suppress the swelling of the Sage, as it had trapped Adam within. However, as that Avalon was shattered, bits of its paradise were still moving forward. The other Avalons created this quarantine, and the quarantine moved time the other way. Things were meant to be slowed. The Sage was meant to be trapped within a bubble of warped chronology; the intent was clear: one second for Adam should have been a small eternity on the outside. It wouldn't let him adapt. It wouldn't let him react. It would allow the Avalons to maintain a perpetual initiative over their enemy.

When they finally found the resources or the means to devote the fullness of their focus, they would resolve the Sage, likely after they resolved the Shiv and Thief problem. An order of operations was in effect, and the Sage, though the most vulgar and overwhelming power Avalon faced, was comparatively a simplistic adversary to contain.

Except it seemed like the Sage had figured out how to hijack and wield some of the broken bits of Avalon, and thus accelerated its own timeframe as well. Shiv guessed that this was why the Sage held on to those pieces of paradise, using them as a counter to its enemy's counter.

This was also a stroke of genius on Adam's part—one that tickled Shiv’s fascination: to usurp and then command an enemy god was quite the feat indeed, but Adam was nothing if not cunning.

For Avalon, this development necessitated further adaptations to the bubble; if the Sage, or Adam, or whoever was attuning the broken fragments of time under their control managed to match the frequency of the prison, they might just be able to slip out and renew their onslaught. Shiv suspected that the palm would spread wide enough to catch a few more Avalons, and things would likely spiral from there, as within the mist, all existed under the scant mercy of the Tyrant.

Unfortunately for the Avalons, the arms race was about to be interrupted, and not in their favor. Of course, though entirely inward-facing, the cage Shiv was faced with was still a complicated structure to sabotage: too many pillars, too many lengths, too many funnels and aqueducts of mana that flowed and spilled and folded and curved like a rat's nest dug by a legion of insane rodents, blind but blessed with heavenly intuition. There was no way he could navigate this place through instinct. No possibility he could make his way through in ten million lifetimes, let alone one. It was simply beyond his ability to skim or slip through via subtle means.

Unfortunately for the Avalons, Shiv wished to be very unsubtle, and he had a mechanism to displace the mana before him and grant a point of intrusion.

“Alright, Curtis. You're on point. Time to part the sea like that prophet of yours.”

The little man's heart was going off like a series of bombs. Shiv almost worried he would have a heart attack before he managed the task, but Curtis, though lacking in physicality and constitution alike, endured. The body was a miracle, even when it was so fragile. He overlapped with Shiv, snapping into alignment with Shiv's anchor, and laid his hands upon that colossal orb of gold. The outermost layer of the wardings was vast enough to swallow Integrated Earth ten times over. They were all barely motes in this place, less than microscopic, and that lent itself to their stealth as well. It was also why the Avalons didn't respond immediately. 

Incandescent Chronomancy fled before Curtis, receding as if alive and horrified by his approach. As the waters of magic washed away, a divot opened in the series of funnel-thin shapings that Shiv would soon fill and crack from the outside in.

There was a fundamental vulnerability built into this spell. It was unavoidable, at least in his opinion. With the collective focus and defenses of the spellwork rigged inward, everything outside was left exposed and easy to adjust. It was likely made so to allow instantaneous modifications on the part of the Avalons. They could cleave and shift and move pieces from place to place without even consulting each other, or with minimal deliberation. It was a fast, adaptive architecture. But as they had combined easily modifiable complexity, they also engendered a flaw of convenient sabotage. The many coursing veins that supplied this place with mana were detachable. There were junctions to the shapings where spell could flow from spell, where construct could be detached from construct. Everything could be realigned, reassembled, and remolded with a few casual adjustments. This piece of magic was closer to a puzzle than an actual spell. That was further testament to Avalon's abilities, but it was also easy to break.

He placed a few loops inside the junctions, which each had mana capacities encoded into them. An overflow of mana would see them rupture. Rather than being a deliberate choice or oversight, it was quite simply what had to be, as the shifting of timelines and the constant adjustments of temporal frequency demanded mana breakers to be in place. Otherwise, everything would collapse into a chaotic melange of instability at the first misalignment, and the Sage would burst out by slamming its stolen Avalons against the unstable structure of the layered wards and overwhelming them.

A few facts relating to all this played into Shiv's favor. While Avalon was near unmatchable in terms of total mana capacity, its spells still existed within the confines of reality. As such, these junctions had a limit applied to them, which just so happened to be far inferior to what Shiv could output. It would take the sacrifice of a few mana levels to see them clog and then burst, but it was a small sacrifice, one that would likely reap a windfall of benefits and take little time to recover.

As Curtis continued shifting forward, Shiv overlapped with him several times, cementing new anchors and placing additional blockades within the ward itself. In a strange, mocking instance of sabotage, he was effectively building a set of wards within the wards and causing them to overpressurize from the inside. Curtis served as his trailblazer, but with a few more blockages, he suspected that the overall spell architecture would start crumbling from the outside. 

As soon as it did, there would be no escaping the collective notice of the Avalons; fissures in the architecture of the great shaping were a lot harder to hide than a few sub-microscopic Pathbearers scurrying around its periphery.

But that was fine. As soon as he broke his way in, he would start breaking his way back out, and with Avalon ignorant of how his Endless functioned, he suspected it would be quite difficult for it to scrub his own spellwork away in a casual instant, and during the time it would take it to counteract his intrusion, they would have other problems to worry about—namely, the Sage, free from its cage.

Junction after junction was sealed by spiraling loops. Shiv left his red-gold mana in place, feeling them shudder and diminish, only to return to their original mana capacity as they repeated a full cycle without being extinguished. He repeated this task again and again, and slowly they carved their way in. Curtis made everything easier, and while he shuddered in the beginning, he calmed and even began cracking jokes as their progress stabilized. The others kept close, maintained their focus and tension, and reacted when Shiv called. Sometimes they had to stack over each other when an Avalon swept in close behind. A few of their escape routes were smeared and devastated from the passage of patrolling swords, but they still had other ways out. There were countless other trails and riggings that had been left, not by Shiv, but rather by the Thief, who so helpfully offered the trail he blazed through the empty for them to use.

And so, the great labor continued and lasted for two whole days. By the end, Curtis was ragged with exhaustion, on the verge of passing out where he stood, something that surprised and annoyed Shiv for not taking it into account. He'd forgotten the man wasn't even a Pathless with at least a few levels in his Toughness in Physicality.

The issue was remedied as Shiv had Curtis stop briefly, only to give his biology a jolt. It would come as a consequence later. Curtis had no resources or adaptive organs or even cells to distribute his exhaustion across, and his body didn't respond to magic quite so easily as that of people drenched in mana. He wasn't evolved in that way. He even lacked something like the elevated blood codes of noble children of Yellowstone, and Shiv didn't want to over-tweak the man genetically or chemically for fear of bringing about a sudden death. Biology was fickle, as was life, and he did what he could now in avoidance of greater calamity later.

But ultimately, the work was done, and Curtis had held out admirably. Shiv called for him to shift back and to stay awake no matter what, placing the Displaced in the middle of their train, as he cemented his final point of subversion. 

The loops spiraled, turned, and endured. The critical spell junctions across the entirety of the grand orb were split down the middle, then diagonally across along its innermost segments. A set of vulnerabilities were festooned into place, and Shiv mapped it out in his mind to see that it resembled the vagueness of a crucifix.

Now, all they had to do next was wait. They were close to the other side of the bubble, but Shiv wanted to hold at the precipice of crossing over until everything was perfect. Shiv suspected that once they entered the Tyrant’s grasp, their host was unlikely to let them go so easily again, and Shiv didn't just come in to be reunited and give his greetings. He wanted to make sure his friend could come out. They were both owed a measure of retribution on this day, and Shiv saw an opportunity to impart more harm in a few days than what he could inflict alone in several thousand years.

“Get ready. We're almost there. Once the mist comes over us, we're going to be all right, but we must make sure this barrier comes crashing down. If you see any parts that are getting rebuilt or reformed, if you see the Avalon sealing us in from the outside, you tell me. Everyone else, keep it clear and get ready to shift. We're almost free. We're almost…” Home. He nearly said home, but this wasn't home. There would never quite be home again. Not Gate Piety or Blackedge. Maybe something new, but that lingered only in his memories.

No time to get nostalgic now. No time for misery. No time for regret. Finish the task.

And as the Sage righted Shiv's sails for a final time, he felt it: the bursting of gold behind him. It came in an incoherent flood as spell shapings popped from within, unable to contain the overflowing mana that now flowed free with the collapse of their junctions from microspell to microspell. There came a building torrent of instability, and as soon as one section collapsed, there followed two, then ten, then exponentially more.

A cascade of crumbling time came hammering down upon the group, and Shiv would have never attempted something so volatile, so insane, with a group of people without the presence of Curtis, who spared them the worst of that impact. It did still wrench away all anchors behind them, severing them from their original route and stranding them in place, but they were exactly where they wanted to be. 

A spider web in the shape of Shiv's pre-mapped crucifix spread wide. The fissures snapped free along the insides as all the magical architecture laid in place came undone in an instant. 

It nearly broke Shiv's heart to inflict such damage upon this wonder. He could have spent lifetimes uncovering wondrous secrets of Chronomancy from Avalon. He wanted to, on some level, but that want was an intellectual curiosity. The hate and ire he held toward the Heaven was much greater than whatever avarice he had for knowledge or power. 

In this moment, his hunger for retribution far outweighed that for enlightenment.

And so it all came crumbling down from the inside, from within, from the middle and across. Every junction was like a series of hearts, overclogged with hardened plaque, finally bursting. Every junction connected to those compromised responded as pressurized vessels, spewing magic in all directions. Without proper shapings to impart intent onto Avalon’s star-drowning ocean of mana, it became incoherent masses of time that swelled and spread, crashing and cascading. 

It all came apart, and in that wonderful calamity, Shiv was bathed. He felt the magic he'd lost to facilitate this devastation grow a thousandfold as he performed a great feat beyond the measure of most Myths.

The legion of Avalons was made up of High Gods one and all, the greatest powers Integration had to offer, and Shiv had wounded them, had shamed them, had sabotaged them on a level perhaps only achieved by the Thief. He felt the System's favor upon him ignite ever hotter, and what seemed almost like a sense of affection passing over him, before the odd feeling vanished entirely.

When Shiv looked over his shoulder, the others were still there, packed tight and protected by Curtis, but the Thief was gone, absent, as expected. He would be there to greet Shiv when the door to Road’s End was opened once more, as it was part of his arrangement with Shiv not to be exposed to the Tyrant's mists. Shiv intended to keep that arrangement, as the promise was cemented not through ritual or binding of Skills, but rather through the Ouroboros, which would not hesitate to devour its own user if he decided to degenerate into a rout deceiver.

“Deceivers belong at the center of the lake,” it had hissed at him. 

The shattering of the largest spell Shiv had ever laid eyes upon was a wonderful cataclysm to be a part of, a moment so glorious that it made his heart sing and his mind whirl. He took in every detail, carving them into his memory. He would never forget this. Neither would Veronica nor Maia nor all the others.

On the opposite end, the Avalons moved. He sensed them, their great presences casting turbulence through reality: not only did time shudder beneath them as their planetary bodies exerted their own gravity, but also structure as well, vitality bending toward them as they burned as the sole sources of critical lifeforce amidst the endless void.

Shiv held out his arms and gloried in his work with closed eyes, as he prepared for what was to come. The threshold would be breached, the Sage would spill over him, the Avalons would need to reconstruct their defenses in haste—and in the carnage, he would lay a new pathway out, a pathway unpredicted by the Swords of Paradise… and also unknown to the Sage as well. 

It always helped to have a third option of your own.

“Shiv!” Gone cried, her mind and heart tense with anxiety. She gestured then, and he saw what she pointed toward. A series of Avalons were sweeping and slashing—scooping a Legendary-Tier world's worth of mana out with every stroke, but they knew not what they targeted. Though a few of his Endless loops were dislodged and cleared, it was too late. The spells were broken, and they could not reconstitute themselves in time. The rest of the layered magics also protected the method of subversion used, as they were so targeted, so fine, and left in place after a moment of displacement. The Avalons would never be able to figure this out unless they were given direct insight. Even then, unless they could take Curtis away or deprive Shiv of his Endless, there wasn't much they could do to prevent this humbling.

For all their power, however great their spellcraft, and however grand their genius, the divinely-empowered Superintelligences were as helpless before Shiv as a mortal body was before a fatal disease.

Shiv wasn't a fruit fly; he was a prion, and while he wasn't as smart as his host, he sure as hell knew exactly how to kill them.

“We're fine,” he finally answered Gone with a laugh. “But they're not going to be.”

The spreading cracks passed the group, then slipped overhead and under to his left and right. Then that final layer between them and the Sage came bursting wide open as all the magic previously directed was flung wide in an explosion of incoherent, indistinct vectors. 

Time flowed as a whirlwind, tumbling and shifting, patches slowing to a near halt while others hyper-accelerated. Shiv was undaunted. Shiv charted his own path forward. Shiv forged his loops one after another, cementing them, enduring the battering waves, for the mana which flowed did not flow evenly. For he could decide which sections he wished to contend with, which sections his mana could endure, and which sections would see him washed away.

Three steps, three loops, three more shifts, and suddenly he was past a realm of golden time and hurtling into a realm ruled by mist. 

He braced for a searing sensation as he snapped into place first, the vanguard, with arms by his side, preparing to suffer the sting of flesh and soul as the anathema weight of the Sage pressed upon him.

But as the full weight of peace impeded his progress, Shiv did not peel or bleed or burn in any fashion. Instead, he felt fresh and subdued. Every intention of violence was ground down until it was practically nil. Even after seconds passed, he remained unharmed, and he released himself from his spell, sliding free and emerging into reality. No longer flickering fast, he was imperceptible, no longer trapped inside loops of his own time, cleaving across space in a chain of endless repetition.

He dropped first, and the others followed: Veronica right behind him, Maia behind her, then Curtis and Gone, and more. Everyone fell into the grasp of the mist. 

And as they did, Shiv's other Incarnates, left far behind, began building new trails to connect the route severed by the Avalons, while also charting additional junctions as he moved back and forth. Slithering, serpent-like helixes shifted through the void without suffering its diminishment. Such was how Shiv remained three, and such was where Shiv would continue his own operations, spared the entrapment within a single Avalon. Now he could move toward the deeper nothing, where he endured, he and he alone, for this place was endless—as was he.

But that was to be considered later, as right now, he practically fell to his knees, and not because of an outside force trying to bring him to heel. An overwhelming sense of relief came upon him, a relief that undid a series of knots inside him, as the mists tightened and sank, gripping him with unassailable might. The mists continued gushing forward. He lost sight of the distant palm as he sank into the murk, but he could still feel its motion. It crashed forward, the fingertips of the colossal hand bursting from the cracks that were now open.

Other enormous landmasses surged past Shiv, pinging against his mana senses. They were constructs of time, larger sometimes than entire continents, some even approaching the largeness of worlds, but all as if shrapnel, all harvested from fallen Avalon. The Sage was coming free, and an inverted torrent came to sweep away the plunging waterfall of time, as the great wards tore along its middle, as the Tyrant was bound no more.

“Pathbearers, heed me well. Order your spirits. Take to your stations. The way ahead is open. We spread once more. The time of the crusade is nigh. We are free! Free!” And the resonant, reality-shaking voice was undeniable. It was Adam, Adam in every aspect: Adam, just as Shiv remembered him, Adam imbued with godhood, but Adam still.

Then he sounded on the verge of tears, as if he couldn't believe this turn of fate, much the same as Shiv did. Thus, while the mists around Shiv calmed and he heard the others call out to him, worried and lost amidst the shifting murk, something emerged before Shiv. It was like a flame amidst a blizzard—a light in the pale.

And Shiv saw the silhouette of a person. He approached, slowly at first, then he was running. His heart threatened to burst out of his chest now, and he judged Curtis no more, as he himself was just as human, just as vulnerable, just as—

Then something inside Shiv's head cleared. A Feat he hadn't used or heard of in a few centuries found its channel opened.

And then Shiv laid eyes on the man as he emerged through the mist, and the man saw him in turn. 

Shiv's jubilant expression froze on his face. His feet stopped moving, arms still raised in preparation for an embrace as his mind ground to an abrupt halt. “…Havel?” 

“Deathless?” a bald, shaved, blood-soaked Havel Van Stormhalt, wearing what looked to be the Crown of the Anti-Savior, gasped in kind.

The Bones of New Lazarus 4440 > 4849 

Inland Embassy (Legendary) - Active