Godclads

[WARNING: NINTH-SPHERE LIMINAL FRAME DETECTED]

“Veylis.”

“Mother.”

“I see. You have sensed me.”

“I have. You’re falling into your old habits again. Predictably twisting and pruning every possible future down to the quick. You didn’t leave enough time between your skimmings upon the surface of time. Did you expect me to be too occupied by my own affairs to notice?”

“Ah. But your house seemed so messy. Would you blame me for making such an assumption?”

“No. Instead, I will blame you for being discovered and allowing yourself to be killed by me.”

[Laughter] “You make me proud, my girl. And you have not yet slain me.”

“And you break my heart always, mother. Always.”

[Sigh] “Veylis…”

“I will stray. I will not bend. I will prevail. I will fix what has been broken. As is my will. As is what you have taught me.”

“Oh? Did I teach you to murder your own father? To cast all that he had fought for into decay and ruin–”

“I murdered father? I was trying to make him eternal. In place of accusation, I will ask: What did you do? What did you do to the man you loved? You speak as if you were any better when you stained your glaive with his blood.”

“That… thing was not Jaus. And I committed no such act. The leaping of the Ladder was not of my doing, but a response to your… defilement. Against your own blood–your own father…”

“My father will live again. You will live again. I will make everything right. I will not bend. I am sorry. I love you. I loved him. But this is more than love. This is the culmination that is. All that will be. And he was going to give away our ability to choose for ourselves. To Voidwatch. Our from our hands. I could not… Could not…”

“I am still your mother, Veylis. It does not shame you to cry before me.”

“No. I will not. I will not. I am a child no longer. I am human no longer.”

“But you will always be my girl. No matter the path.”

“...”

“Come. Come and embrace your mother before you try and kill her. Let us have this, at least.” [TEMPORAL DISTORTION DETECTED] “Ah. It feels as it always has. Your shoulders feel softer, though. Have you been negligent in your conditioning?”

“You will learn how negligent I have been soon.”

[Soft laughter] “We will be family again. When this is over. When we are done. That is a certainty between us, at the least.”

“And if someone else wins this game? If another imposes their desire on what is to be.”

“Well, dear daughter, I suppose we will always have yesterday. Oh, and do change the taste of your eyes. Make them sour or bitter. It dissuades people from eating them.”

[Sighs] “Please find a better hobby than drugs.”

“Ah. You’ll come to understand. Are you ready? To the death, as we have done before?”

“To the death, mother.”

-Zein Thousandhand and Veylis Avandaer “The Fist of Recursion,” Somewhere in the Paths

10-26

Fate Denied (II)

Zein’s headless body took two steps forward as she twitched and spasmed. Her right arm came free with a sudden snap. Her armor shattered. She was split open from collarbone to the waist.

Each subsequent injury was delivered without any hint of cause. They just appeared like they always had been - the present suddenly remembering wounds inflicted by the past.

A subtle pressure lifted from Avo. He barely noticed its sudden absence. The sensation was as if the thickness of time’s passage grew ever looser without someone to manipulate its flow. Reality slackened around him, and around the contours of his companions, the second skin of their temporal shrouds broke apart into needle-thin steams that began to dissolve horizontally, as if their bodies were vessels upon a sea unseen.

There, in the rainfall, four faces frozen in various expressions of shock and confusion watched as Zein’s corpse fell over into separate pieces, each blinking out of existence the moment they struck the ground.

“So…” Chambers asked, staring at the place where Thousandhand fell. “Is this part of her plan too, or did we just watch the genert get snuffed?” A worried expression came over him. “Fuck, is that what happens when people get old? I don’t want to just fall apart and shit–”

An explosion of force struck Avo. Struck everyone. The blow was colossal–the pain deeper than any that had ever struck him. His bones rang, joints sounding like an endless junction of gongs. His Liminal Frame screamed as his cog-feed struggled the process the attack. Error codes screamed out at him as his body vibrated.

As his vision cleared, he found himself drifting through the wavelength of reality, his being floating aside the wholeness of existence like a dislocated limb. Draus and the others pulsed in and out between moments and instants, the bio-rig’s wings twitched and flashed between moments in reality. The golems beside him remained solid and still. Light vanished, the stormtree winking out from the district like it had been plucked from the roots. The world became a blur of glitching geometries lost in a crash of stuttering forces and skipping time.

As his Soul rippled out, he felt the damage inflicted on the world and realized the totality of its harm. Nearly every major domain must have been affected. Nearly anything bearing sign or symbology in the world was quivering before the impact. Only thought escaped untouched, but such was a faint consolation to a prison exiled from reality.

Then, sometime between a heartbeat and an eternity, the vibrations collapsed in on each other, one vibration building upon another until the fullness of shape reformed all that was.

With a final sheet stacking time above all other functions, Avo felt himself snap back into his body and collapse.

The rain, halted during the impact, suddenly remembered it was to fall.

He found himself lying in the mud, staring at Draus as she clutched her titanium-chitin armored chest and choked, at Essus crying out as he groped for the sky, at Chambers pumping his knees, desperate to rise.

The district around them was silent beyond their struggles. Too silent. The fighting between the other Godclads and golems had been halted as well. Whatever this was, it was district-wide, at the least.

Burying his Echoheads into the ground, Avo wheezed as he forced himself up. They didn’t have time to be lying around here. Zein was still missing. The world was beginning to wake up again. Indelible threads of light rose through the curtains of falling smoke as volcanic ash began to swirl.

Skittering over to his allies, Avo pulled Draus up. His movements were piloted more by instinct than thought, but he knew what remained. They needed to leave the district. No matter what Zein’s plan was by this point. No matter her political plots and her games and the narrowing of her paths. Without her presence, he was free. Free and vulnerable.

Without hesitation, he vented the remainder of his Woundshaper’s Rend into the soil around them. He needed to be clean of Rend–couldn’t risk flying the Galeslither for long seeing how the golems were willing to paradox themselves to backlash him out of the Heaven.

Tendrils shot out from him as he groped for the mini-nuke left behind. With a thought, he consumed its pattern, adding its structure to the caged spire atop his Woundshaper.

MATTER-PATTERN MEMORIZED: MINI-NUKE

Avo felt a strange sensation enter his being. He was no Agnos attuned to the sciences, but he knew enough about warheads that they struck him more as force or energy-related than matter.

Yet, his Heaven devoured them all the same.

THIRD PATTERN REACHED

->+15 THAUM TO ONTOLOGICAL MASS

“Oh? And what manner of flavor is this? I have not tasted such before.”

Leaving his Heaven to sample the delicacy he just offered, he regarded the three golems that Ripperjack commanded. One still stood with its cockpit open. He was uncertain as to the canons and capabilities they possessed, but from a glance, it was clear that they could fly. That, and they were likely infested with whatever mem-cons the Low Masters had broadcast in their attempts to hunt Zein.

“Draus,” he said, stabilizing. “Draus. Can you stand?”

Her legs buckled for a moment. But only for a moment. She caught herself and a low noise of discomfort escaped from the back of her throat. “Feels like a godsdamned giant swatted the bones outta me.” She took a step toward the golem.

He growled in alarm. “No. Going to subsume them. Loci compromised. Low Masters mem-cons. I’ll get Essus. You get Chambers. We use the tree.”

She stumbled two steps and extended her bio-rig’s wings to stabilize herself. “What ‘bout Thousandhand’s plan?”

“She’s gone,” he said. “There’s not a–”

A snap pierced the silence. With how devastated the district was, ash and dust formed a veil a scant hundred feet beyond the reach of the base of the tree. Something flashed with a brilliant spark. Something exploded. Buildings groaned and glass shattered. The fight between the others was beginning again.

Lightning flashed behind Avo, the air behind him opened like a wound of rupturing light. The stormtree itself spread back into existence as its branches arced into whorls clenching an ascending mess of portals. From base to height, the stormtree rose from Layer One to Layer Two, but right now, all he concerned himself with was the closest exit he could find.

Anywhere was better than here–

A wing of light unfurled into a rain of licking blades. The smoke surrounding the stormtree split much the way the upper half of the tree did when the Strider carved into it. Yet, instead of parting, more bolts of electricity lashed out from the stormtree, and carved new breaches into the soil.

The ground burst beneath Avo. One of the bolt-like branches touched him, but in an instant of a surging jolt, he felt himself accelerating by its touch. Beneath his feet spread veins of voltage, curling around him as the ground dissolved into an open portal.

Through the dust and chaos, he watched as something large swam beneath the murk of the ash.

“Highflame! To me!” Abrel’s voice was a piercing avian shriek. From the length of her sound waves, the Phys-Sim estimated her to be only a hundred feet away and closing fast. Falcons spilled free from the ash surrounding them they extended into arms and legs.

Without any more hesitation, Avo flared his Soul and reached to subsume the Heavens of the three golems. They came loose into the grasp of his Frame, like plucking fruit from a branch.

With all his bounty claimed, he turned to commit to the final task that concerned him: Escape.

The new portal forming at his feet was an anomaly. He didn’t know how a stormtree functioned or what the rules of its canons were, but he knew that staying here and fighting was to risk Draus and the others.

Firing his reflexes, he laced a circuit of blood into Draus' mind and cast his intentions at her. No words were exchanged. She was of the same regard. It was long past time to leave, and this run had gone beyond sour by means above their control or comprehension.

As the Strider painted itself into shape, as the rain was wrenched away from striking soil and diverted into the grasp of another, as the wind screamed to the eruption of a volcano that basked the surrounding dust in the glow of a lantern, Avo pulled Essus off the ground and jumped down through the new portal.

Draus followed soon after, Chambers kicking and flailing, tucked beneath one of her arms.

Descending the portal of the stormtree was not like stepping from one threshold to another. No. There was a destructiveness to its transfer and interconnectedness to its pathways. Almost immediately, Avo felt his form compressed into a forking bolt of lighting. Matter dissolved into energy within this domain, and before his senses, the district of Nu-Scarrowbur was stripped down to the bone.

All things bearing circuitry and static expanded into fluid outlines as he found himself shuttled through the countless arteries within the tree, striking and bouncing from the other only bolt of transferred material–Draus and her carry-on.

They sank down to the roots of the tree first, awareness spreading as the real crumbled down to facets of lightning and destruction expressed through the mythology of an ever-growing tree.

Behind them came the intrusion of another presence. Someone else had dived in. Someone else was coursing through the same channels after them.

But they were a step behind.

Upon striking the foundation of the roots of the tree, the entire architecture thundered, and he was launched upward, light peeling along his perception. For a fleeting instant, the world around him peeled into shape as he twisted up the length of the tree, peering past its thaumaturgic flesh.

His eyes greeted the surrounding cityscape, and he found himself staggered by the damage.

Nu-Scarrowbur was a ringed district once. Ringed in architecture. Ringed in design. Ringed in its aerolanes and streetways. There had been a slope to its geography before the fighting and warheads disfigured it; the stormtree at the center of the district was nested as a rose clutched between rising layers of domed plasteel.

No more.

Carpets of devastation formed detritus-paved pathways from hollowed structures and mangled bridges. Between the warheads, the Godclads, and the fighting in general, no section of the city was spared. Much of the southeast side was flattened–its cause of unmaking a mix of heavy bombardment, chasms spewing molten heat, and blood-drenched trails that gouged the urban hellscape to its foundations.

All that dared move now were the encroaching form of Godclads swimming through the thick of the falling ash and rain. A few among them traded attacks still, but most were pressing for the tree, the remnants of the Highflame cadre following Abrel while Bloodthanes and wargs followed them.

Light began to build around Avo’s perception. He was a bolt loosed out toward the bottom of Layer Two, and he braced for impact as the hexagonal plates approached.

His gut emptied when he sank right through and leaped through another Layer of the city while colors and sounds flitted by around him.

The exit came with an explosion of sound and light. He tore free from a portal and Draus followed in his wake. Tumbling out, he found himself tossed into the gasp of gravity as he slipped through the holographic static of an emptied aerolane.

A new landscape expanded before his eyes, the stretch of the horizon bright and pristine, crystalline edifices gleaming with a mirror-perfect polish while pale streams ray-like bioforms swept across the sky.

The sky. The naked sky.

Avo felt his mind stutter to a halt as the lilac hue of the Darkstar glared at him, painting the shining district below with its ebbing face. Rain fell hard here, and the streets and grids glistening with wetness.

They weren’t in the Spine anymore. This was Light’s End. They were topside again. Turning as he fell, the first sounds of drone sirens cut through the air as he beheld the vast metallic cliff-face that speared upward to gut the clouds. Beyond the overcast sky shook a place of sound, light, and splendor. Beyond the overcast sky were the Tiers.

The wail of sound drew his focus. A Tadpole-like drone dove out for him, with its wisp-thin tendrils outstretched. Along its pellucid shell projected a symbol–a fang manacled by twin chains: The sign of the Exorcists.

Forty feet long and thirty wide in radius, the machine held enough space for either him or Essus within the opening beneath its cage. With reflexes still running high, Avo whipped a haemokinetic conduit into its shell before it could draw too close and spread his influence. It took him less than a second to strike the locus. It took him three more to crack its protections.

Exorcist Necros were competent across the board. But with all his traumas, and with the Nether crippled so, all it took for him to assume control was a bit of damage and a brief resequencing. He left the drone-jock entombed within his gimbal, ignoring the urge to jump over and subsume her mind as well.

Instead, he directed the machine low to catch him and Essus before they fell and affixed himself to its top using blood-made cables. Several other Tadpoles speared past him in pursuit of Draus and Chambers, and nearly a dozen more were swimming through the air to come after him.

Diving full power to the thrusters, he accelerated after Draus and away from the portal.

The single branch of the stormtree’s stretching limb began to surge brightly.

The pursuing jocks weren’t prepared for another person to dive through. They especially weren’t prepared for said person to be a full-blown Godclad.

The Strider was stitched into existence bolt by lashing bolt. The arms and the legs came first. Soon would be the body and wings. Avo dove low after Draus as he curved down along the buildings.

Less than a second later, winged light cut out to cleave through the blocks.

And failed.

From glass and alloy, the buildings remained unblemished.

Memetic matter. Avo sighed. Now things were definitely going to be an incident; they were fighting where the FATED put their imps.

It looked like Zein might be getting her frame-job done yet.