Godclads

“Did you plan all this?”

“Hm?”

“Killing the Bloodthanes and caging Nu-Scarrowbur with the compromised golems. Jhred Greatling’s psychological compromise. The ghoul took too long to kill him. The arrival of the Highflame Cadre–”

[Laughter] “Planned for all this? No. I have a desired destination, but the paths offered to me are myriad–ever and always. Truly, this turn of events is as surprising to me as it is to you.”

“Then how–”

“Because you think the future is a structure to be engineered–you see things in terms of analogy and simile. A construct of fate, perhaps. I see it for what is.”

“And what is it? And what the fuck is your Heaven other than absolute proof that fate–”

“Do you believe you have free will?”

“What?”

“Because you do. It’s powering our Souls. It’s the reason why I see paths and not a path. It's why I'm putting up with this boring conversation with you right now. At present, you are destined. You are destined as you have been since I noticed you–since I gave you a destiny, pruning away all the path-ending obstacles while feeding you all the soft meat like the helpless little bird you are. In this measure, the only thing that can be said is if there is a fate for everyone, it is because I made it so.”

“...Wow. Before I met you, I thought I was the single most narcissistic half-strand in this city.”

“I am not a narcissist. I am but a simple gardener and there are so many paths to prune, seen and unseen. Such as… oh, what a delight! Abrel Greatling! Sister to Jhred–our poor patsy. Hmm. [Temporal Distortion Detected] “Very well, I have fixed matters. I am away to indulge in Suncloud now. Do not bother me for the next nine hours for I will be dead for most of that duration from repeated overdoses.”

[Temporal Distortion Detected]

“What? What the hells did you just do? Zein? Zein?” [DAEMON DETECTED] “Zein! What the fuck did you just do! Shit. Aegis? Hyperwave, now! Patch me through to Sunrise. Zein did… something again.”

-Zein Thousandhand and Cas eld’Canduir, Ninth Column

10-20

Daemon

CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE III [EST. 881 THAUM/c]

->STRIDER UPON THE HIGHEST, FALCONESS OF THE SLAIN COMET

CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE III [EST. 459 THAUM/c]

->[HEAVEN TEMPLATE: AEGIS OF TIDES]

Heavens bared, two Highflame Godclads descended from on high, their ontological weight pressing down on all that was. The block groaned to the symphony of crackling glass. Blood ungrasped by Avo shivered and rose as steam. Feet away, the alloy pylon groaned and bent. An eldritch force wriggled and wore the concept of light itself, the intensity of the radiance like a thousand knives gliding across Avo’s plates.

Chambers howled a yelp and threw himself behind the ghoul. Essus held up his hands, his implants screaming as unseen edges carved sparking grooves into his metal.

Of Avo’s group, only he and Draus stood unshaken, the former pleased with his weight advantage, the latter long-used to dealing with the eldritch and no longer burdened by shock.

Invoking his Woundshaper, Avo maintained the haemokinetic links enchaining him, Draus, and Mirrorhead as conduits to a limited network. Slowly, he reached out for three more signatures as well, slipping from within blood and matter to loop in Essus, Chambers, and the Shadowcrawler.

Holding his hands out slowly, he did nothing to provoke an assault while the two new unknowns did nothing to pursue one. He wondered if Zein had plotted this–if this was another one of her schemes unraveling into more schemes, or if she merely failed to foresee this path as she did the Incubi.

As with all things Zein, anything was possible.

+Aghhh!+ Chambers screamed mentally as well as physically, clutching his bleeding nose. +I think the light took the tip right off me! Fuck! My nose! My nose is the best thing about me. Other than my ears and my eyes and–oh, Jaus fuck I’m blind too fuck me!+

+Chambers, be quiet–Draus,+ Avo said, flicking over the necessary mem-data to incriminate Jhred as Zein’s patsy, +know what Heavens these ‘Clads got?+

A dissonant sensation ground across her mind. Her helmet had closed around her face just in time to spare her what Chambers suffered. It was like her bio-rig was fending off the dull blades of an omnipresent blender. +No idea what the hells the Strider is. Must be some new shit they cooked up. Aegis though… Yeah, I fought along that series. Give those to the Newsouled just out from Atraxis. We got a rookie on our hands.+

Avo grunted. Possibly exploitable.

GHOSTS: [11565]

The ghosts transferred into Jhred’s mind as the Guilder moaned. Considering the condition of his Metamind, Avo was effectively stuffing an open wound with foreign flesh. With a sweeping motion, the cutting brightness slashed across Avo’s cordyceramic plates before slipping off him and cleaving into the surrounding infrastructure, plascrete bursting apart; plasteel wailing as lines and new markings lined the metal.

Suddenly, the world wasn’t so blinding anymore. Looking up, Avo gazed upon the revealed visages of his two unexpected guests.

The first Godclad’s Heaven bore the closest semblance to a human aesthetic he had ever seen. With twelve arms and three legs feathered from digit to elbow, the shapes of nu-birds rose free from the limbs like smog spewing upward, mimicries of misted falcons. However, the greater whole of the Heaven resembled shining regalia, layers of star-bright plating fused together to form an armored whole. It was as if someone had forged a cuirass and a curving great helm from the tail of a descending comet, capturing the luminous contrails in its entirety.

From its back sprouted twelve wings of light, each an amalgamation of countless ancient weapons enmeshed together, the implements formed from dripping light.

Compared to the Strider, the Aegis was of far simpler conception. A ninety-foot-tall castle crowned by three serpent-shaped towers spewed water free from open ports across its parapets. Reality around its volumetric area grew thick with fetid water and a nest of snakes writhed and twitched in the grim fog. It held behind the Strider, dwarfing the armored figure by several dozen times in size but inversely so in presence.

As the Strider held its wings open, Avo realized it was channeling the nature of a cutting blade out from all the light that emanated from it with how swords were cycling at the tips of its wings. For a heartbeat, the encroaching Aegis paused and regarded them like a titan would passing ants.

Then, the light collapsed inward and a burst of falcons speared low from the skies. Dashing down as they skimmed the surface of the running blood, a young woman materialized into shape with a glance of passing brightness. As the shine faded, the nu-falcons were no longer creatures of mist and ash but golden-carved adornments upon her pure white heels.

Flowing hair of obsidian black. A porcelain-white carapace of exoskeletal armor encased her. A visor depolarized, letting the angularity of her features peer through, betraying no obfuscation to the resemblance she shared with Jhred, already bared to the world. His suit was shredded after being caught in the light, unharmed though his flesh might’ve been.

Avo recognized her nigh-instantly–and he felt Draus do the same.

+Fuck me,+ Draus sighed, +Abrel Greatling. Godsdammit. I thought you said she wouldn’t be back for days–+

+Yeah,+ Avo replied, cutting her off. +That’s what she said.+ Annoyance bit at him. If Zein hadn’t gone and caused this mess–if he hadn’t used Ninth Column as a means to distract the Low Masters–this dive would have been sublime; the run would have been a masterwork.

Instead, they were dealing with this.

Twin streams of blood cut upward into the air like splitting funnels. Avo could barely keep track of her even while she remained grounded in the shell of her humanity. From beyond the crashing glass she approached in ashen bursts of falcon-feathers.

As did the Shadowcrawler, which Avo had commanded to swim into a stretch of darkness cast by the block. A plan was forming in his mind. One that ended in evasion.

Or perhaps even a taste of dessert after the main course.

Her leap came without noise as suddenly she dove, slamming hard at the center of the food court. Blood fled in a sphere away from her, while Avo cocked his head.

In the backdrop, the castle continued to loom as the first droplets borne of an unnatural rain began to fall, the drizzle thick with slime.

+Got us marked,+ Draus said. +In a couple of minutes, rain is gonna build and fall hard over us, and anything that gets rained on can get drawn into the Aegis. Seen it happen more than a few times.+ Stress built across her link. +We ain’t facin’ two ‘Clads. There’re at least four here. Probably five.+

+Five?+ That doused Avo’s aspiration toward a fight substantially. With only these two, he felt himself more than capable of engineering the situation to his favor. Five? With three unseen? Not even the great feast he just partook in had him that drunk on the liquors of hubris. He bit back a hiss and shot a glare at Jhred. Pathetic, broken Jhred.

He should have killed the man when he had the chance. Or at least spirited him away to a more private location to indulge in further revels.

Yet, perhaps not. He was still connected to Jhred. And with the man so mentally shattered, there were countless clefts to use as handholds, countless sequences missing and replaceable.

And more than that, he had influence over Jhred’s Frame as well. It would be hard puppeteering the man in combat without fully understanding his ontologics, but it offered surprise and near-certain lethality.

More importantly, it offered a means of escape.

With a final two clicks of her heels, Abrel Greatling stopped just twenty feet away from them. Emotions swirled across her face in a whirlwind, expressions twisting from disbelief to confusion to a snarling rage before she finally mastered herself. All the while, she spared no one but Jhred a second glance.

She extended her index finger. She pointed at Draus first. “You. Get your… bioform to carry my brother over to me. You got a minute to start explaining what happened here, and afterward, I am going get up very, very close to you, and we’re going to have a mind-to-mind conversation so I can see if you’ve been lying to me more or not.”

Her words were spat through clenched teeth, her control strained to the limit as she shook.

Draus didn’t turn to Avo when she cast her next thoughts at him. +You got a scry on her Meta? Think you can work a null on her?+

+No read. The Nether’s still down. The blood is keeping away from her. Could control it–force it to lash at her. Will almost certainly expose me. They don’t know I’m a Godclad too yet.+

+Yeah,+ Draus said. +Let’s keep it that way for as long as we can. That idea you had about usin’ Mirrorhead to help us pull a runner. I like it. Think I can do you one better. You don’t use your blood to find us some glass–you use Shadowcrawler. You have the golem pull a couple shards into the dark and bring it over here with us. Then, we all take a little dive, you synced?+

Avo understood the gist of her recommendations. He immediately set himself to the task. +Yeah. Got it.+

+Good. I’ll see if I can stall this half-strand.+ She sighed. +Time for me to use all that argumentation-shit I didn’t learn at Regular Academy.+

Avo disguised his bark of laughter with a snarl. Abrel shot him a strange look.

Wandering over to pull Jhred from his pedestal, Avo studied his prize and exposed his fangs in a smile. Turning to his sister, the son of House Greatling opened his mouth, struggling to warn his sister of the impending danger, yet no words came through. There was too much missing inside him. Too much.

This too could be used to his advantage, Avo realized. He could supply Mirrorhead with useful dialogue. Help support Draus.

“Well,” Draus said, keeping her helmet on as the weight of the Aegis’ rain grew from plinking scales to falling stones, “it’s a good thing you came down here. We was gonna find you folks after.”

Beneath Abrel’s visor, an eyebrow of disbelief angled above her right eye. “Really. You were going to bring a battered, broken, obviously fucking tortured Guilder of one of the most esteemed families of Highflame back up the Tiers. Yourselves. Just you? Alone. In this… blood-soaked midden? You, your bioform, that street squire, and…” When her eyes fell upon Chambers, she did a double take.

The ex-enforcer turned then, still clutching his eyes and groaning. Throwing one leg over the other, Rantula’s coat opened and Abrel saw more than what she expected.

“...Why does that one have his penis exposed?” Abrel asked, more confused than anything.

Draus went stiff and shot Chambers a brief look. “What? Him? He was… like that when he got here. He ain’t with us.”

“What?” Chambers whimpered, not believing what he was hearing.

+Chambers. Tell her anything and I make you remember the aratnids.+

Chambers’ mind screamed with despair. +No, fuck-cosang, I’m just dealing with BEING FUCKING BLIND RIGHT NOW! I’m not gonna tell this sow anything. Don’t aratnid me–not again. DON’T BLOOD ME EITHER!+

Well. That was one problem solved.

Past the Guilder, Essus’s eyes were fixed on Abrel, his body frozen stiff as if he didn’t know how to respond.

+Essus. When the dark comes. Jump into it.+

The father looked at Avo. First mistake. Then he gave a reflexive, tentative nod.

Second mistake.

Abrel caught the action, and her eyes narrowed. She gestured down at her visor. “Your auditory implants. Turn them off.” She sighed. “Take your helmet off first.”

+Chance she’ll recognize you?+ Avo asked.

Draus went still. +Pretty high.+

Alright. Use Jhred it is then.

Enough of facing unexpected requests. It was time the turn this interrogation in on itself.

Injecting suggestions whispered by hastily infused ghosts, Avo brought Zein’s incriminating memories to the forefront. It was time for a false confession.

Confused and lost beneath the collapsing structures of his own mind, Jhred began to cry uncontrollably, choking on the rain as Avo’s fake memories suffused all that was missing.

“Jhred,” Abrel said, swallowing to keep her own unbalance in check. “Jhred. Get. Yourself. Together. You have shamed our family enough. Jhred? Do you hear me?”

“I did it, Abrel,” Jhred said, his voice a maddened howl. “I did it for mother. I don’t know… I can’t remember why but I… I did it… I killed those people–our people.”

His sister went very, very still. “What?”

“The golems and the traffic and the killing up top–I did it! I don’t remember how, but I did it! I made… I made our own people go to war against each other! I… I…” Avo withdrew his suggestions and let the mania burn itself out in Jhred. The Guilder was mostly impulse now. Impulse and emotion. Thoughts were slippery things to his grasp.

Abrel shook her head. “You… no.” She shot an alarmed look over her head at the distantly floating Aegis and whipped back around. “No. You didn’t. You couldn’t have–you’re a fuck-up, Jhred Greatling! A fuck-up. I know you–I love you but you don’t have the skill or the will to do this.” She hissed a jagged breath. Suddenly, she realized she had lost control of herself in front of complete strangers. Her face went ice-cold.

“Someone altered his mind. Was it you? Any of you?” She asked Draus.

Draus shrugged. “We’re just dumb street squires, Higher. Ain’t no Necros among us. Besides, ain’t no sensible Necro willin’ to stick their head out in the open or–or leave their mark half nulled. That’s just lack-preformance.”

Avo shot her a glare from the corner of his eye as he reached down to pick Jhred up.

“I changed my mind,” Abrel said, her harsh voice slipping out just behind him. His Echohead chittered startled, and he realized she had closed the gap between them in a near instant.

Even Draus seemed taken aback. +Girl’s got some high-end augs cookin’ in her.+

“Aside,” Abrel said as she pushed past him.

Avo obliged. He diverted his focus to groping around the shadows with his connected golem, looking for fragments of glass. He cursed himself for being so total in his destruction, so willing to liquefy matter. He could direct it along a detour to where the walls of glass once stood. Better chance he’d find what he needed there, but the risk was great–the movement of the Shadowcrawler would be–

A lance of pure light punched down from above, plunging through the darkness of his Shadowcrawler and outright evaporating through a hundred more feet. Shadowcrawler's link vanished. Around them, all forms of darkness began to bubble anomalously, twitching free from the bodies they were bound to as blood and debris sank into their depths.

Avo felt his flesh sizzle from the sudden spike in heat, hissing reflexively as he threw up his hands and guarded his eyes. It stung like a fusion burner did from a hundred feet away.

Both Essus and Chambers shared in his pain, crying as their flesh bubbled and boiled as well.

Only Abrel and Draus gave muted responses.

At least until the Regular’s breath hitched. +Shit. Avo. Up. Third ‘Clad.+

He looked up at the same time Abrel did, both of them catching each other in the act.

Directly overhead, masked by curtains of encroaching rain, what looked akin to a shrouded dawn bloomed beyond the haze, a swirl of obsidian spheres dancing around it.

It had been looking down, and it had spotted–or felt the Shadowcrawler somehow.

He glanced at Abrel’s face again, and he saw her pupils dilate, saw her eyes widen.

An unseen force solidified around him via the vectors of falling rain. A swirl of light built around Abrel, falcons flaring free like exhaust from her elbows and ankles. Above, a needle of flame speared atop his scalp like sinking pain. Firing his Celerostylus, Avo snarled as he conjoined himself with his blood–

Only for a bell to chime from inside Draus–ringing out in an echoing tide as it struck him. Zein somehow unlatched from his very being, tearing free from his ontology and beating all four other Godclads to the draw.

Her glaive–so fast Avo couldn’t perceive it even with boosted reflexes–licked out a dozen blows, all of them overlapping as her form flickered.

Impossibly, Abrel spilled apart into partitions of spraying gore. Two distant screams sounded in unison as the rain suddenly broke and the heat vanished entirely, waves of cold rushing in. The Aegis split into two, and through the last droplets of its falling rain, embers fell, followed by a bifurcated corpse.

Zein appeared next to him, shaking her head as she hummed with amusement. “I must admit–the cadre was beyond my anticipation as well. But not anymore.” She turned to him and smiled thereafter, her form a temporal ripple upon the rushing torrent of time itself. “Let us count those kills as but one. A moment of reset for the coming battle to be more… favorable.”

And then, as the streams of existence began to unspool from her being, her eyes flashed as if she suddenly noticed something. Glancing out at the horizon beyond the clearing rain, Zein frowned.

“Ah. A closed-loop. Well-made. A pity for what must occur.” She gestured up to the sky itself. “A demiplane is caging you right now, and I will break it for you. This is two. Eighteen left. Make these chances count. And seize the chance to kill the daemon. Captain Draus still needs her Frame, you know.”

To accentuate her point, she blinked over and struck Draus over the back of the head. “Keep him in check next time. Gloat after you secure your prey.” She reappeared next to him.

Before Avo could ask Zein–or her avatar–what was happening, she flickered next to Jhred and overlapped her Meta with his. The last words, before she vanished out of existence, were spoken thusly in mind and sound: “Vent.”

The Guilder obeyed. Avo dove out of the way. Light speared out from his being like a prismatic scythe, cleaving through matter but spraying gouts of Soulfire free upon contact with the rain. And then, the gouts exploded free into a supernova and diluted themselves into structures near and far.

All that was glass began shattering and tearing free from its anchors; all that bore the nature of reflection broke loose and twisted space itself into knots.

Reaching out with his Heaven, Avo manifested the Woundshaper as he pulled Draus and the others into the embrace of his being before whatever might follow rendered such an act too late.

It was a wise decision.

Then, space itself shattered apart like glass as a Frame-shaking screech tore across existence like nails upon chalk, and through the fissured flesh of reality, Avo fell.