490 The Rat King [I]

Portent:

A vision of evolution; of transgression;

For what might arise from the cradle of worlds,

May not be of the flesh once born.

As beneath the System’s eternal gaze, men might be as beasts, and beasts might yearn to be men…

—Crossroads Past the Cradle, by Master-Scholar Harrison Chandler

490

The Rat King [I]

“Stop.”

Kelhaus commanded. Both time and Shiv obeyed. Before him, the Biomantic construct he was forging anew lay half-finished. Strands of crimson mana poured out from Shiv's extended appendages as springs and currents, dripping free of his mana-forged hands.

It had felt right, better than ever before during this attempt: the sinews were coming together, the skin was draped over the bones, the muscles and ligaments and nerves were interconnected and weaving. All things were being built in perfect tandem, and Shiv thought he was on the precipice of a glorious triumph.

But then the Philosopher called him to a halt. Instead of feeling frustration or annoyance, he merely wanted to know if he had done anything wrong. He wanted to hear her insight, for she had been silent for so long, simply observing him. The few words she spoke since layering her Harbinger over his were suggestions for spells and instructions on how to shape his Chronomancy. There were only a few Chronomantic spells, but the sophistication of their shaping and the layered nature of time was an intricate thing.

Currently, a Transpositioning spell was active, and he constantly nudged the half-formed rat along half-second increments into the future. The faintest flicker of a mirage had manifested, rising into the distance and showing Shiv potential pitfalls for him to adapt and amend in advance. Everything seemed to be going so well, yet Kelhaus sounded severe and disappointed.

Seconds passed as the world beyond Shiv's Harbinger stood petrified in place. Ekkihurst and Helix remained utterly ignorant of the Philosopher's presence. They failed to notice her even as he manifested his Harbinger, as she simply hadn't materialized until he summoned and wielded the lore of time. She said nothing and simply watched. He could feel her eyes burning above his, a gaze projected out from his form, overlaid upon his body, yet obstructing nothing. He saw as she did, and she beheld all he did. Right then, her disappointment was steady and gentle water that sank into him as moisture rather than a drenching shower.

When a near minute passed, Shiv felt his patience give. "So, what am I doing wrong here?" He gestured at the rat, trying to dissect everything he'd applied to its biological architecture. When he couldn't find anything amiss, he moved on to the other aspect of his working: the Chronomancy itself. The Transpositioning spell seemed normal. He was effectively pouring a series of faint solid mana emanations forward from his bound field, one after another, not truly anchoring in place but not actually lingering in the present either. It was, in essence, like breathing on someone, then pushing them. Even that wasn't a perfect analogy, but it was the best Shiv could manage to describe his present attempt.

Eventually, he found himself at a complete loss. He didn't know why she was disappointed, what he'd done wrong, and so he asked openly, "Is it the shaping, or is it what I'm doing, or what?”

Another three heartbeats passed. He counted them. He didn't know why. Then he suspected that was the Philosopher's influence, as a portion of her mind bled over into his and provoked him to think in alignment with her.

“Two matters,” she began, both gently and firmly. “Both based on your behavior. It is not your actions or your mistakes that demean you. It is your philosophy of action; your approach to success and failure. But before that, I must speak again to your lacking awareness and how deeply your ignorance is rooted within you.”

"My ignorance," Shiv replied. His inner heat grew inflamed. Frustration threatened to boil, but Shiv suppressed it.

To his surprise, the Philosopher shook her head, and her Harbinger twisted away from his. The temporal scales that fused around her ground against his broken pieces, inflicting upon him a discomfort that went deeper than the flesh.

“A third problem now. This one I will state plainly: You are muted, blinded, and mutilated of emotion. That is because you have been trained poorly and ruined by only negative experience in reference to these emotions.” Kelhaus lifted a finger, and she pressed it against her own hand, but it dipped through her exterior and imprinted upon Shiv's mind within. “You suppress your frustration. You use your Harbinger as a tyrant upon yourself. This is a means of control, but it is not a means of mastery. A tyrant cannot master the fullness of another person, for a tyrant will never experience the fullness of another person. If you are a tyrant unto yourself, you may learn discipline, but you will never learn how to truly wield your own indignities against yourself or your enemies, or perhaps to harness them into something more, or to allow them to be base. For to seek perfect behavior at times inflicts imperfect perspective upon oneself.”

“So you don't want me to suppress my emotions?”

“My wants are not paramount. I, too, am a philosopher, and 'I have been more wrong than I have been right' is simply the nature of enlightenment, that one builds upon theory and assumption toward things that are both empirical and circumstantial in truth, but always seeks truth nonetheless. Your flaw, sometimes, is that you indulge in partial truths: partial truths to yourself, partial truths to the world, and partial truths to the way you walk and the path you are bound to. It is a terrible thing to be a walker between places. But that is my assumption. That has been my experience. Perhaps you will prove me wrong with yours, young and limited though you are.”

The frustration came back almost immediately. She was, to all intents and purposes, and in all the ways she acted and spoke, a philosopher—a pretty extreme version of that. Everything she said was vague and confusing. She expressed herself in layers of analogy. She was herself a layered analogy, a juxtaposition. This woman was walking around as a physical motif of her philosophy. Of course she was going to be a bit of a freak. But then again, so was Shiv. At that point, his judgment softened, and his frustration underwent a metamorphosis. Maybe he needed to be more sympathetic, or maybe he simply needed to let his feelings flow. Maybe he had to allow things, to indulge in more things, to be more than he was before, at least to make the attempt.

“What is there to fear now?” his Harbinger mused. “In this place, we are among friends and community. In this place, there are people who can stop us. In this place, we can begin an internal study into ourselves, even if we are reduced or banished of certain emotions. We can try to seek them out, and if need be, we can contain them later, but we can let them pass through us and still behave in the way befitting ourselves. The mind exists beyond the heart, even though they are connected. We have demonstrated our ability to make the right choice, to assert ourselves over our baser desires. We have been doing that ever since this evolution. The reason we held back was…”

“Fear,” Shiv finished aloud. “Is this something you're looking for from me? An admission? That I'm trying to hold my own leash, like I'm my own dog, and it's all because I'm afraid? Afraid I'll be sloppy again, that I'll go berserk, that I'll damage things, that I'll be too much like a monster, the same worry I've had since the beginning? Is that it?”

Rather than answering in the affirmative, Kelhaus just chuckled in a grandmotherly manner. “You have partially resolved my third critique of you, but now we go back to the second ignorance. You are ignorant of too many things. You do not notice. You do not notice things inside yourself. You do not notice your behavior, and you do not notice the limitations and imperfections you have applied to your form. Once more, fellow philosopher: It should not matter what I think of you. It should not matter what I design upon you or demand of you, or what my beliefs are before yours. You're taking your first step. The answer that you just gave: fear. That is for you and you alone. That is why you constrain your emotions instead of letting them flow through you. To understand that, and to accommodate that, and decide upon that is what I assume would be the next best course of action. But you can reject me. Always and forever, you can reject me. For the greater folly is to assume that I am right in my own absolute.”

Nihilist:I can see that we're gonna really, really hate talking to this one sometimes. But at least she's a good Chronomancer, unlike the quarter dozen other Legendary Chronomancers we happen to know. We'll get knowledge out of her. All this other shit about psychology and philosophy, though… Well, we'll get something out of that too. We always do.

Shiv felt Kelhaus shift slightly. “You think in greed and power. You think in claiming resources. A fine assumption, especially considering the scarcity you were born to.” She stopped speaking after that, offering no further judgment or rebuttal. She stood true to her own philosophy in claiming that she was only a fellow disciple of this Tripartite Path. That she was another philosopher, not his master, not anyone to tell him what to believe or how to think. She was simply here to give him information, to observe and then to share her observations, nothing more. With that becoming clearer, Shiv felt a growing appreciation that was commingled with his existing agitation. She might be an extreme philosopher, but at least she wasn't a moralizing, domineering presence like so many others who thought they knew better.

And that just might make all the difference in the world…

“So, speaking of observations, can we get back to my first two flaws and whatever is wrong there?”

Kelhaus gestured at his working. “It is not the spell. It is not your creation. It is very simply your behavior that is incongruous with what you want. Tell me, Shiv, do you wish to be a good Biomancer?”

“I want to be a hells of a lot more than good.”

“Then why do you rush so often? The way you have shaped the spell, how you create a temporal portent to warn you of what you are doing wrong, is ideal. Yet you have not indulged in satisfaction. You have not fed your pride, and you have not taken your time. What are you doing? Why are you depriving yourself of benefits, of useful understandings?”

Shiv paused. “I'm sorry, I still don't get it.”

He felt a bit like an idiot making that admission, but she didn't judge him. She didn't mock him. Instead, simplified her words: "You are rushing and not rushing enough. It is a strange thing to explain, but looking upon your work, the rat you have made, you are accelerating as fast as you can to create a full biological entity. It's a small mammalian construct, a complicated organism far more advanced than most insects in mass and architectural density. You steal aid from Chronomancy to make up for your Biomantic limitations. This act of creation should have been worthy of self-reward. It is a good thought to have. It is an expression of your wholeness rather than thinking in parts—something your swordmaster would be most proud of, if she could only see.”

“You talking about Jessica? Wait, do you know Jessica?” Shiv's confusion bordered on paranoia. Just how far could she reach? Just what were her limits? She had to have limits, right? She had to…

“I do not know her," Kelhaus admitted immediately, "but you do, and I have gleaned the breadth of your history, and so I know enough of her. I know enough of you to make this assumption. You are rushing too much, though. You need to take time to enjoy what you have done, to celebrate your actions rather than treating them as mundane. It is what I would do if I stood in your position, if I were as you were, but I am not. From my perspective, you behave with an inner recklessness and disregard for your personal and mental stability—likely made so because you are neurocognitively indestructible. But just because you possess an unmatched fortitude does not mean deprivation is the best choice to make.”

Shiv considered her words for a little bit, but while she spoke, he cheated by dipping into her thoughts to steal fuller notions of understanding. He thought he was being sly, but when she brushed against his mind and ignored him, he realized that she knew and did not care, that she was not withholding anything, neither telepathically nor verbally.

This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.

“So I'm not really being very optimal with my personal development and behavior?” Then, once more, as he thought of his own behavior, something struck him. "Wait, is the first problem that I don't actually think that much about my own behavior, that it's only something I partially consider?”

Somehow, he felt her smile cross over her hidden face, and he knew he was right, or as close to right as this confusing mess of a lesson could be. "And what's the second thing? You said impatience earlier."

Shiv shifted his attention back to his rat, and he saw how it was half finished. He saw how, in the various echoes down along the coming future, it could develop a series of catastrophic faults: teratomas jutting out from its eyes, spreading cancers, and pieces of kidney erupting from its bowels. Its tail turning to human finger bones. Its fingers and limbs erupting like an outbreak of contagious spores.

So many paths to failure, so many paths to another lost attempt, so many possible futures all avoided if he'd only acted carefully, if he'd only acted slowly, if he'd only followed the warnings bestowed by time placed upon his biomancy. But that was also it. He followed, and he also rushed. His entire attempt right now was an accelerated effort to master more Biomancy, to cheat his lack of experience with the mechanism to warn him of all potential mistakes.

“But in doing so, we've deprived ourselves of the opportunity of learning through failure, of being marked by our mistakes. But she complimented our merger, this unification of Biomancy and Chronomancy. It has to be more than that. It might just be that we are rushing too far ahead, that we are more driven to finish this rat rather than gain levels and true insight into Biomancy.”

As Shiv's Harbinger fell silent, he realized that was it. He was missing the flesh for the procedural art. Yes, he could create this rat. Yes, he might be able to do it again and again through this method, but he wasn't actually learning how to make it. He was effectively turning an open-ended problem that he had yet to master through art and skill into a multiple-choice problem as he cut away bad outcome after bad outcome using his Chronomancy.

Eventually, through enough repetition, he would learn how to create a rat, of that he was sure, but would that be the best for his Biomantic development? Would that truly show him the secrets of biology and allow him to familiarize himself with its mysteries? No, he was, in effect, depriving himself of some skills. Skills were gained through strain, through ignorance. In the throes of one ignorance, he indulged in another. Biomancy aided by Chronomancy was an act of wisdom, but this action, driven by impatience and haste, was also likely a deprivation. Suddenly, Shiv understood why Kelhaus was the way she was.

At least a little bit. Everything had too many layers if you examined it hard. Everything people did, everything that defined the world.

Metaphysics 42 > 47

As he reached these supposed epiphanies, the Philosopher shook her head once more. Shiv tensed, wondering what she was about to say, but then she said nothing, and instead had her Harbinger yawn aloud.

Suddenly, Shiv got a feeling that he was being played with. “Did you just mess with me?”

“Hm? What gives you this idea?”

Nihilist:This motherfucker is definitely screwing with you. Heh. Never mind; I think I like her.

Shiv chalked the Nihilist's strange taste in mentors as another mark in his "I'm going to beat the shit out of this skill if it ever escapes me and gains a physical form" fantasy. “Hey Kelhaus, you mind telling me how high your Comedy skill is?”

“Legendary,” she replied immediately.

“Why the hells am I not surprised? Well, any advice there? Just go around messing with everyone you meet, or is that especially me?”

He felt her contagious grin grow just a bit wider as she didn't respond. Suddenly, he realized why she was Legendary in Comedy: the damned, aggravating philosopher used silence as a sarcastic weapon.

“So, what should I do now?” Shiv asked, shaking off his indignation.

“You should do as you will. You have learned, but what worth is learning sometimes? Sometimes the choice to go against your newly gained wisdom is more useful than the wisdom itself. To know something doesn't mean you have to change, but all this is of your own choice, your own volition. Simply, I must remind you of this, Deathless: the path we seek, the perfection we pursue and will never grow close to truly embodying, is a balance between the mind, the heart, and the flesh. This balance upon the endless expanse of time is always in fluctuation. The harmony is never true, not even for a Delved Harbinger. No matter what your skill becomes, no matter who you become, there will always be aspects of you that are out of alignment with the others.”

“So is this the 'it's hopeless, but you gotta keep trying' speech?”

“Nothing is hopeless. Hope is not even a factor. There is simply the experience. The imperfection and the balance and the mastery are simply moments in your life: things you can affect and things you can't. Hopelessness is a kin to faith, and we are not so faithful, you and I; of this I am absolutely certain. You have touched the divine and been touched in return. I suspect that you've seen enough to desire none of that power, perfect though it might be.”

Shiv glared through the second layering to his Harbinger. “Hey, Kelhaus, can I give you one point of feedback?”

“Of course. Whether I will take wisdom from your words or not, however, is something I must decide.”

Shiv almost started gnashing his teeth. "Right, great. It's got something to do with your behavior as well: Sometimes, the best thing to do for you is to talk like a person and, well, not like a textbook written by an Adept-Tier scholar trying to cram words for a dissertation.”

For the first time since they met, he felt a pang ripple out of the Philosopher's Harbinger, and it carried with it a heavy impact of shame. “Truly, I sound like an amateur scholar.”

“No, no, now you're not listening. I didn't say you sound like an amateur scholar. I said that you sound like you're trying to cram for words like an amateur scholar. Pretty big difference. Things are specific and all that.”

Her response was so fine and subtle he almost missed it, but when he felt her Harbinger narrow, almost like a twitch, he developed a broad and beaming smile as he realized he was dealing with a person after all and not a pure vessel of Psychology, Philosophy, and Chronomancy.

“I see we will be mutually aggravating at certain times,” Kelhaus commented.

“Yeah, is that a problem, philosophically or mentally?” Shiv almost suppressed his smugness, but then remembered that suppression wasn't that good of a thing. He was trying to experience everything now, and so he let it flow out from him as a breath might leave a pair of lungs.

Comedy 44 > 46

“You find delight in bothering people about their insecurities, do you?” she mused.

Shiv’s grin was wide enough to scare a bear back into the woods. “We all got a thing, Kelhaus. We all got a thing. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to get this one right and then do a few more without the Transposition spell. Connected to that, you seem pretty good with Chronomancy.”

There was a beat before she answered, and Shiv sensed in that hesitation not consideration, but the slightest indication of pride. “‘Pretty good’ is relative.”

“Well, how about you give an objective assessment between you and me?”

She hummed. “I would not wish to hurt your feelings.”

“Well, now who's making an assumption? How do you know you can hurt my feelings?”

“Because some of my emotions are still residing inside of you, as are some of my thoughts.”

That left Shiv slightly unnerved, but ultimately undeterred. "Well, that's a little bit creepy, but you know what? I'm a big boy. I think I can take it. I want to see some spells—some real time magic on top of all this philosophy stuff.”

“Ah, an appeal for higher gnosis through spellcraft. Unnecessary, but entertaining. Chronomancy and philosophy are naturally tied together.”

“They are?” Shiv asked, incredulous. “How does that work?”

“Who are we without the passage of time? Who are we before, and who will we be? These things all matter. Perhaps space matters as well, but space is simply the vessel that accommodates. Time is the river we all drift upon. And where most only float, some learn to swim, and some learn to dive, and some learn to be kindred to the water itself.” Once more, he felt her smile, and this one was almost teasing. “How deep do you wish to go, my fellow philosopher?”

“All the way down to the bottom, and then some,” Shiv replied. “I don't mind getting lost in the black. I just kind of like magic. And if I drown, well… Then I drown, don't I? What was that you said before: some experiences I might never know, and some I'll know better than anyone else? Well, there's no ending up dead for me, so how about we start with something obscene and extremely risky?”

“Finish making your small mammal first,” Kelhaus said, not answering his question, but agreeing all the same. Yet, she added something else a moment later. Something that shifted the totality of Shiv’s excitement. “But if I were you, if I had my choice, I would see my ability to split my mind and spread my senses expand in tandem. They are more foundational skills, are they not?”

Shiv blinked. “My Multitasking has been pretty bottlenecked.”

“So it has. But what you need is time, yes? Time, and the opportunity to displace all your potential moments of stupor suffered thereafter so that you are not threatened.”

He saw the vision; he seized the opportunity. “Kelhaus, I think I’m going to like you more than I’m annoyed with you.”

“The wonders of metaphysical bribery,” she quipped. “Oh, and a final matter: Please refrain from mentioning me to your master, Valor Thann.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because I have no desire to make the Thief’s reacquaintance when he returns, and I do not want him to use one of my fellow philosophers as an intermediary. He is a blind, deaf, and heartless thing—and there is no word nor action that will turn him from his nihilistic worship.”

Though Shiv heeded her words, one part sat poorly in his mind. "You said when," he muttered, voice low. "It's not going to be when. It's not even going to be if. We're going to make sure that Valor isn't swallowed by the Thief. We're going to make sure the Thief stays as he belongs: scattered and lost."

Once more, Kelhaus' disappointment returned. "But he is neither of those things. As much as it may hurt to accept, the choices available to you here are not as grand and certain as you so desperately assume. You saw him across the currents of time. You saw him looming over your master. He is already aware. He is submerged, but he is not dormant, and he is not lost. Please, for the sake of your own dignity and enlightenment, do not lie to yourself. Even if it fills your heart with ill and ache, do not lie to yourself. The Thief of Lost Acheron has come closer to the truth of our path than any other outsider, and it was his choice alone to turn away. He has spurned our philosophy for his own, and before this age is over, he will be made whole. By circumstance or by entropy, he will emerge, and you will have to face him.”

“You can see the future now,” Shiv whispered.

“No. I have simply relived a common event in this world so many times that the pattern has become undeniable.” The Philosopher lowered her head and mourned on Shiv's behalf. He hated the fact that she did that. He hated her for doing that. He didn't voice either of those feelings. “I have been here before. I have had a conversation with someone like you before, trying to protect them. The pieces are different, but the Thief remains the same. Perhaps someday, in another millennium, I will speak of you as I speak of your historical predecessor—with the only difference, perhaps, being your continued existence and her utter annihilation.”

Once more, the System showed its hand as well and made a series of ongoing Quests appear before Shiv: to slay Adam before the will within him took him in hand; to cut down the Ascendants.

All tantalizingly close, achievable, all summarily rejected.

No, no, fuck you, and fuck her. I make my own way. I make my own history. I'm going to be a deviation, not just another wave, not just another repetition…

But though he repeated these words in his mind over and over again, something sat ill inside his chest, something that felt closer and closer to a lie than a truth, a lie that hadn't yet manifested. The Beast of the Ninth Circle drew, draped itself over his shoulder, and it muttered a barely intelligible word: "Pain, pain, pain." It finished with a rare, full phrase: "Pain is not enough of an excuse."

Shiv shuddered—and pretended he didn’t.

***

He managed to create a mostly stable rat in the end. Of course, it developed a series of diseases after he injected life into its form. Diseases that caused it to perish in a span of minutes, but still, it lived for a while. It was a sickly and old rodent, but a living one, and from that, he had usurped warmth and triumph in equal measure.

As Ekkihurst and Helix praised him, he felt a skill within drawing close to the precipice, and then he started anew. This time, however, he did not call upon time's power to augment him. He allowed his Chronomancy to recede into the backdrop and pressed hard with his biomancy instead. At the same time, he wielded his Multitasking to the fullest extent, summoning synaptic echo after synaptic echo, switching along tracks as his mind began to fill with buzzing static, like a swarm of insects was crawling through the marrow of his brain matter, until he could barely hear his own thoughts, until his body was a nest of pinpricks.

When he broke his Multitasking, he would lose hold of himself, but just in that last moment, he called upon his Harbinger and felt his own temporal mastery to be insufficient. He wanted to use a Transposition spell to fling his stupor into the future, but that displacement required a clear mind. He should have started preparing in advance. Yet now he wasn't alone, and he felt a series of golden shapes shift over him as a cylinder began to form in a spiraling pattern of radiant matter. Suddenly, he had found himself in two parts: one tumbling forward, the other still present. There was a strange lag that took shape between his body left in the now and that extension of his tasking-fugue bound for the future.

The further it went, the clearer his mind grew—until his skull felt hollow and calm again. Shiv blinked, shaking off the detritus in his mind as he drew upon his Multitasking again and again while straining his awareness for that final bit of effort. The Philosopher helped him displace the cost he incurred again and again—for fifty-two times.

She proclaimed that he would need to pay the debt in full at some point held in their mutual future. As to when, it would be his choice so long as they stayed connected, but the duration was obscene.

Three weeks. Three weeks in a catatonic state. That was longer than any of his Delves—an obscene drag on his time. But even so, he would eventually—

Shiv felt two things crack inside his soul. Twin skills burst apart, and one sent a spike of pain through his being. It was the kind of pain that came when you picked open a half-healed scab; a satisfying kind of pain that ignited his vitality and flowed toward its fellow evolving skill in the same instant.

A low grunt escaped Shiv as something burst in his soul, but to his surprise, it went a little further beyond what he'd anticipated—because in the end, it wasn’t just two skills that had come apart within his soul as his cutting aura began to resonate with the imminent evolution.

Aegis of Assimilation 302 > 305

Atlas of the Flesh Scryer 200 > 204 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Metaphysics 47 > 51 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Legion of Self 200 > 201 (Skill Evolution Reached)