493 The Horrors

The mind is a terrible thing to suffer. Within every person, thanks to the formulation of their souls, along with the constitution of their legends, is a paracosm waiting to form: a world within worlds. Too often, people spout the platitude, "as above, so below, as within, so without." These are old, gnostic ideals stolen from the ancients, who stole them from civilizations ever more elder than they.

But it seems to me that they misunderstand the substance for the shape. There is no above and no below. It is a singular architecture. There is no within, no without. There is simply the way of the world.

You internalize information, for you exist relative to the world. You are birthed by the world. You arrive from a primordial soup of genetic material and biomass, or mechanical creation. There was a point of inception for you. Everything beyond that is beyond us all, but the System itself abides by these rules, even as it usurps and installs its own dominion over strife.

It wants you to create a world unto yourself, and perhaps it even wants you to defy the System to become a system unto yourself. Seek the borders to go beyond into the great, vast black of the outside and spread as a seed ripened, like an apple falling from the tree to expand an ever-growing orchard.

Have you considered the fact that you are the System unto yourself? That you are not escaping its grasp, even if you walk beyond the boundaries of its known skills? You are simply sprouting your notions, its context, for you inherit everything of its design. Even as you veer further and deeper into the unknown, you carry with it an infestation, a culturing of the void. For a ground charted is no longer ground ignorant, and the world within and the world without will commingle once more.

There is no length, no distance, no depth too far. For as long as you can remember your past, you are tethered to it, and so the past is tethered to you…

—The Psychonomicon, by [Author Removed from Integration]

493

The Horrors

The Terrorspawns’ rebirth was announced by the sound of shattering calamity. It was the melody of glass bursting apart as a resonant frequency matched their points of vibrational collapse. It was the bursting of their cocoons, exploding into cleaving fractals, not so unlike the spiderlings which spawned forth from Uva’s contours, not so unlike her slicing edges, her unnatural shape imbued with eldritch angles.

They emerged from their shells in perfect synchronicity, a hive moving in tandem, yet a hive that seemed devolved and mutilated at first. There was no grand mystery to their appearance. They were given none to Shiv to behold, and as he stared upon them, he found himself overwhelmed by their likeness, for they all held visages of death. They looked akin to Valor, almost down to a perfect replica, but almost was the key word here. For though they were pale of bone, they lacked other aspects of his personality, of his individual character. Their bones were things of gleaming glass and lined with fragile fractures. Within were other substances: hissing veins and smoking, whispering trails of Necromancy and Animancy that rose into the air like incense. Yet, the mana was faint and barely there, almost a mimicry of the actual attunements, manifested through Outsider energies.

But there was something more as well: a layering to their makeup. The bones they possessed in homage to Valor were meant to break. This was another layer to their shell. Their cocoon had not been entirely shed. Their metamorphosis took place in stages, and they had only overcome the first.

They surfaced as one, rising and climbing out from the crystallized veins, as if there was no threshold between them and the world beyond. As they passed through the air, Shiv watched them move and realized they were weightless, visual representations manifested along psionic vectors, closer to mental constructs woven by Uva.

Yet there was a promise, a potential to be more. As they ascended, their bodies legless, their shadows long, they coalesced around the Favored Three and Valor, pulling and plucking at them from afar using elongated fingers, with twitching movements befitting those of someone with palsy or a child only just learning how to move. They opened their mouths to speak, but no sounds came. Only the sense of an emotion, that of greed, of hunger, and of a need to possess: avarice befitting any thief.

The Favored Three looked on, speechless, startled by the Terrorspawn that surrounded them. Rather than overrunning the Gate and ripping into the people, or heeding Uva as she lashed at them with an eruption of fleeing lightning, they simply drew closer and closer, like ghosts along the underworld river, pulling and beseeching the living that crossed the currents upon boats of actual substance. One of them settled behind Shiv, clutching his Beast of the Ninth Circle. Rather than biting into him, he felt a strange chill pry at his body, at his mind, and finally at his emotions. The most intimate emotion of all was his dread: what he loathed to lose, what he refused to consider when he was in the darkest of moments, when he was in the throes of despair.

"Give yourself to me. Let me be born in truth. Let me gain my winnowing."

The words came with an androgynous voice. The Terrorspawn was not yet defined, not yet true, but it was ripe, like a seed on the verge of bursting. It asked him to bestow a part of himself, the same way Uva did Valor, to see this skill evolve. Shiv was hesitant, but another presence urged him to be bold in offering his fear to uncover what might follow, if only for the sake of enlightenment. Kelhaus was not shaken at all. She was plainly curious, and there was another paradox at play, which provoked her to action.

While Adam and Valor remained trapped in a state of reluctance, Shiv let go of his hesitation and allowed the Terrorspawn to reach in deep. He dropped his Magical Resistance. He let his mind go slack. He let his heart open. The Terrorspawn didn't cleave into him. It didn't rip his body apart. It didn't mutilate his mind. Instead, it stepped into him. It superimposed itself over him, as the Harbinger did, and as Kelhaus did to his Harbinger. And as that fourth shroud of the Terrorspawn layered his body and incubated for a moment, its bones sounded once more with the bursting of glass, and it took a step away as it shed a powdery husk to emerge in a state of final maturity.

A smaller shape fell away from Shiv, an uncoordinated, weak slip of a runt. He recognized the form assumed by the Terrorspawn in an instant, yet it gnawed at him nonetheless, for he was looking at a version of himself just a few years prior. This was him around the time he was fourteen or fifteen, still closer to feral, still more vicious and helpless than not. His eyes were pitch black, his skin was far too pale, and he was skillless, Pathless, worthless in all measures that mattered.

The boy looked upon Shiv with a burning gaze of envy, of an anguish that he'd long since forgotten. The Terrorspawn had carved it out of him, had drained that water free from his subconsciousness and used deeper existential venom as a fuel to power its new design. Then it looked toward Adam, toward Uva, toward the city below, and its expression grew heartbreaking.

The Terrorspawn was more than Terrorspawn right now. It was something higher than the rawness of one's phobias. It was a more intimate tragedy, given form, given shape. Soon, other instances of itself emerged, harvesting what they needed from the rest of the favored trio. Uva's Terrorspawn stepped away from her, as corpses fell upon the ground, unmoving yet alive. At the same time, their bodies radiated and sizzled with hissing energies.

At first, Shiv thought he was looking upon Uva's mother, murdered in the aftermath of that fateful operation gone awry. But then he recognized the person on the ground was closer to Uva, and there were chains extending from her injuries. There was a shadow looming over her, a shadow that held an insectoid design, one that reminded him of the Hatchling. Her terror was subtle, a mingling of all her nightmares, and it all resided in a corpse that slowly glided across space and time, like a haunting note carried by the winds.

The horrors that stepped away from Valor were defined by absence. Absence that was lit with edges of pale blue and vibrant green, but nothing within. They represented a silhouette of Valor, with nothing within. He and his form winnowed down to nothing but his exterior, represented by his true progenitor and the one who sought to rise from reunification. Valor's greatest fear was that he was nothing more than a figment of the Thief, and there would be nothing left of him should the Thief truly arise.

Such conflicted against Adam's terror, who feared many things, who was the most human amongst them all, but more than anything, his terror, his dread, was primal and pure. The creatures which emerged from him were mangled messes of blood, horrific flesh, and amalgams of himself ripping into his own body in displays of dissonance and vile autophagy. He wasn't biting down purely on his own flesh, for other faces were jutting out from him. He was devouring chunks of meat out of his mother, ripping bits of cheek and tissue away from Isabella, whose visages were shrieking and howling. He was goring himself. There was a palm looming over him, a palm that threatened to fall at any time to strip him of agency, to punish him for his violence, to crush him as he deserved to be crushed.

All of them looked upon each other and upon the terrors that spawned forth from their flesh. Wordlessness took hold, yet a deeper, sympathetic understanding followed. The bonds that were found were themselves reinforced and tightened as they all gained a new measure of each other, but not that new. Silently, they all saw too much, had lived through too much together to actively judge, and so they said nothing. They accepted, and they watched the other Terrorspawn spread forth, their skeletal forms drifting through the air. They sought catalysts to make their dread true, and their dread was higher, and their consciousness was elevated, but these horrors were more than blind terrors. They were tragedies in motion, and across the world, there were tragedies of plenty to feast upon.

Though Shiv didn't know how they might perform in battle, he was already shaken just by viewing them. If one could pour such an Eldritch horde upon most armies, he suspected that they would shatter both psychologically and spiritually before the fighting even began. An entire legion of personalized nightmares, born of you, that continued feasting upon you, made to unmake you, was more than most Pathbearers could contend with.

But the orcs were a different category of creature. How these new horrors spawned from Uva's Hive of Winnowed Torment would affect them remained to be seen.

“Hold.” Uva held up a hand, and her voice and command resonated from every single Terrorspawn. Though they took substance from her as well, she was their primary anchor, and they heeded her much in the same way hounds might heed their master. She held an existential weight over them. She was their leash in most regards, but Shiv could see their own individuality blooming, and wondered how possible it was for them to defy her. “Take nothing from the people within this Gate. Take nothing from those I regard as my allies. Take everything from our enemies! Venture beyond the Gate! Venture through the veins that spread into the Umbral Wilderness! Descend upon the First Blood, Compact, and the Vultegs. Take from them as you will and feast to your misery's content.”

As she spoke, an echo of Hatchling entered her voice, and her form began to change. Feathers burst from her being, but then they dissolved as spider legs replaced the aesthetic of the Dreamtaker. The spider legs didn't stay very long either. What followed were webs, shadows, and memories that lit the crystallized contours of Uva. Of the tarnished gold which defined her Chronomancy, and of the many eyes and layered mind she possessed, earned through the hardships of surviving the Stranger's Garden.

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Just as she drew upon the skill, the skill itself pulled back upon her, and she veered closer to becoming a true Outsider than ever before. Still, enough of her remained mortal to keep her anchored.

At least for now.

Shiv wondered how long that might persist as he regarded her evolved Terrorspawn once more. They began within her, and she was bound to them, could see through them, could speak through them, could compel them and drive them in a way that surpassed any commander.

“Interesting and alarming. The girl lacks the necessary philosophy and stability to be a proper hive mind unto herself. She might be able to learn in time, but I see her end looming closer than not without outside intervention.” Kelhaus paused and reconsidered her words. “Not the end of her existence, exactly, but the end of her ego, of this instance of self, without you and the others grounding her. Without her goddess, she still clings and tries desperately to believe in all she has experienced. She will be subsumed by her new nature in due time, and it is a very subsumptive nature she imbibes too much. There is not enough depth to her to hold everything.”

A frigid blizzard spread through Shiv's core, threatening to overwhelm him. “You're saying that she's going to lose her mind?”

“I'm not saying that anything is going to happen. It is hard to tell. If you ask me to judge her fate a few months before, I would have anticipated her death within fifty years at the tier of Master. Her encounter with you and her entanglement has driven her to a place she should have never reached naturally, but then again, that can be said for everyone here. Everyone. None of you are natural. All of you have been acted upon by the world. There is no true self-making. We are all influenced. There is no difference between the within and the without—only the delineation set by the thinker. She is no more doomed than you are in some ways, and even should she lose her sense of a mortal consciousness, it might be more boon than bane.”

“I'm getting really fucking tired of you never giving a straight answer to anything. Everything's a goddamn roundabout bullshit philosophy question with you, isn't it?”

Kelhaus contemplated that without offense. “I think I asked that of the System once, in the same manner of outrage, with the same youthful impatience you now have.”

“Yeah, and what came of that?”

Kelhaus let out a sound that was at once a hearty chuckle and a sad sigh. “The System does not reply in words. I gained levels in Metaphysics. That was all I gained, but perhaps it was enough. The world is indifferent to you, just as you are indifferent to your own cells. I do not grasp what the System truly is. I cannot. Even now, I am too parochial, and you even more so. However, there is an absurdity in an aspect feuding against the totality of what is. The action belies a sense of self-loathing.”

While her words inspired a churning of thoughts within the Harbinger, Shiv himself was no longer interested in continuing the conversation. He had had enough of woo-woo bullshit for a year.

But just because Shiv was exhausted of esoterica didn't mean he was allowed to stop suffering its existence. The horrors drifted along the crystalline veins like ghostly marrows, bone within arteries of glass and magic. They flowed toward the outside. They spread from the mana core, one after another, neat in their lines. A corpse legion seeking rebirth through catalysts of higher trauma. When they departed the Gate, they would spread across the Abyss. They would descend upon the vampires, Compact, the Vultegs, and the orcs. They would harass and terrorize all enemies of Gate Piety without end, without caring for losses sustained through combat attrition or the wrongness of their deeds, the vileness of their actions.

They would do this in defiance of material norms, of logistics. They would do this because they were Outsiders. They were mockery, and they existed to mock the patterns of reality. They would do this at the command of Uva to give Gate Piety the time it needed.

But rather than feeling an upswell of triumph and relief at Uva reaching and unleashing a new threshold of Eldritch power, it felt like they were veering toward an edge they couldn't come back from. That door had been opened that might cut back the opposite direction, as a folding wound might swallow the one who inflicted it.

“So what happens now?” Shiv asked aloud, trying to shake the unease.

Uva shared in his discord but refused to let it reign over her. “Now we overwhelm and harass what enemies we can. I learn the limits of this new Skill Evolution, and at the same time, we deliver our messenger, a potential assassin, upon Gaia in Forbidden Africa. My Harkness knows her end of the bargain, and the Recollector will allow her to interface with the Superintelligence at the core of the bunker through manipulation of time. After all, if she can intercept the past of one of the penitents or the mana-polluted citizens within the bunker, then she can seed a message inside their minds. She can communicate in a way that no one else can intercept, not even the Stolen Throne.”

“Or so we assume,” the Harbinger whispered.

Valor cleared his throat to draw attention to himself. “In the meantime, we muster what we can. We develop as much as we can. We ready ourselves. The Challenger has begun massing his forces—a new Orchestra will be wielded against us soon. We must be ready for anything. But more importantly, we must be prepared to strike first, to break their momentum before it can form. I will try to locate this Breaker and Corcusa. Once we locate them, we must resolve them by any and all means.”

“The Great One's not going to like it if we end up killing her cuckoo,” Shiv noted.

“It need not be through death that we eliminate Crocusa, but even if it is, I would see her removed and suffer the ire of the Great One rather than risking a foe of her nature.” Valor went quiet for a heartbeat. “I am due a visit to New Albion myself. I will depart today. I ask that one of your bodies accompany me, Shiv. I wish to seek the Throne. I wish to use it to scry upon our enemies, to bargain with the Faceless Queen, and resolve all dangers to our Gate so we might focus upon the truer threat of Avalon and the higher nature of the Thief, if we can uncover it. The rest of your true clones should be devoted to training as many skills as you can, but with several special considerations for your Severed Shadow. You must develop your Unique Skills. You must push your Continuity Error, your Garden—everything—to its edge so that you might be able to find something else that our enemies cannot counter; something else that gives us an edge of edges.”

Then he turned to Adam, with a look of uncertainty. “I would ask that you send your shrine with us as well, Adam. I dare not risk you in person; there is much history between the Tyrant and the Great One. There is much we have to uncover, and perhaps even something we can use to threaten the vestige of a High God. I find myself worried about this choice. I find myself worried about you. Everyone and everything who has inherited the Great One's legacy has only suffered for it. And now we draw ourselves in deeper. We try and trade with the architect behind an entire world's misery. I expose myself and Shiv enough. But you…”

“Fear and hesitation would not protect me,” Adam said. His throat bobbed, but his gaze was pure and bright, and his jaw held strong. “I've tried to avoid suffering before. I once assumed that if I was strong enough, fast enough, wise enough, if my Awareness guarded me from all dangers, I would be preserved against all corners and all threats.” Adam shook his head. It was a grim acceptance and also an expression of liberation. “The Challenger will do as he wants. The Great One will play as she wants. Avalon, temporarily banished, will assume its game as well, the moment it returns. Everyone will act, and everyone will act upon us. There is no avoiding this. I will not hide inside this Gate. I will not hold this little space under a palm and call it sanctuary when it is actually a prison. We fight, we solve these things, we struggle together, and if it comes to it, we fall together.”

Adam drifted closer and clasped Valor's upper shoulder. “Just as you worry for me, I worry for you. Valor, I will tell you this right now: You are not to go to New Albion. This is not a command, but a plea. The Great One has wielded the Thief, has fashioned him as a master would a disciple. The Great One wanted you to fully assemble yourself on the shores of Forbidden Africa. That is not the decision one might make when they cherish another being. That is the decision one makes when they are willing to spend a person to activate a weapon. You are better here. You are better away from that other fragment of yourself, away from the machinations and those who know too much of your progenitor's past. You are better severed from them. Let me take this. I will go with Shiv to New Albion in an expression of renewed diplomacy. My shrine, his body. You stay here, beyond those who would spend you for the Thief, and with those who would cherish you for yourself instead.”

Valor reached up with his opposite hand and gently squeezed Adam's arm. For a while, no one spoke, but then a faint, and weak though it was, smile appeared on Adam's face as he looked down upon the Gate.

“Shiv, I think it's time that we begin some long-overdue festivities. It occurred to me a while ago that we never formally concluded the last Eclipse Festival. It's been about half a year since then, and I think it is perhaps best that we introduce that fine tradition to the Gate in remembrance of what was lost, and in celebration of what is to come.”

That suggestion ambushed Shiv like a cow flung down from the sky to smite him by the hand of a cruel god. “I, you, Adam, you do remember what happened during the festival, right? It wasn't exactly a happy time.”

“No, it was quite dramatic.” Adam nodded in acknowledgment. “But all the times before, they were festive. They mattered, and to put it simply, I'm outraged. I'm outraged that the last Eclipse Festival was not finished. I'm outraged that we didn't get to celebrate the worth of Blackedge. I'm outraged that so many died, so many would never get that moment, and so many were all destroyed because of the machinations and the decisions made. So many generations were moved like a dam being broken by a man drowning entire colonies of insects.”

Adam laughed, but it was mirthless laughter, almost despair-induced. Yet he didn't succumb. He remained upright, defiant, and absolutely determined to change the meaning of their suffering. “I refuse to let the Festival of the Eclipse become synonymous with trauma. It is more than that. We are more than our despair. We are more than our dread or terror. The horrors that are inside of us? Let them exist. Let all the gods and the great powers play their game. Let them pull and dance. We are still here. We survived. We will continue surviving, and miracle after miracle, as we delivered before; we will try. We will. For why else are we Pathbearers if not to burn down the giants above us?”

“In times past, in this time, in times to come, armies and civilizations die because of speeches like this,” Kelhaus intoned. “Adam Arrow is a man, but he is also mythology in motion. Are you watching carefully?”

Shiv ignored her comment and reached out with a hand. Adam clasped it without hesitation.

“Well, our trauma can go fuck itself, I guess,” Shiv said.

“Our trauma can go fuck itself,” Adam echoed.

Shiv licked his lips. “Speaking of that, you got anyone in mind who's going to be the head of festivities? Who's gonna handle catering? Who's gonna be making most of the food and all that?”

“Oh, yes!” Adam’s eyes brightened. Shiv drew upon his graciousness and lifted his head, fully prepared to receive the honor the way Georges once did. “Me!”

The metaphorical cow flung down from the heavens was spiked skull-first into Shiv's cock. “B-bwuh?”

Uva narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”

Adam crooned like a peacock. “You see, while you were gone, Shiv, I realized that my cooking is pretty good as well. Not to boast.”

“You should have a Domain of Lying, Paragon, because every word you spat is false and untrue.” Uva jutted a single finger at him and extended the upper half of her body, circling the Lord of Gate Piety several times as he folded his arms and leaned back without fear. Their gazes met in a challenging clash, and Shiv wondered what was happening. “I made the better omelet!” Uva declared. “I performed superiorly! The people of the Gate agree! Just consult Gone or Candles, or anyone, for that matter!”

“But the people of the Gate don't agree,” Adam rebutted. “The people like my cooking. It is only the High-Tiers that appreciate yours. If we are only a group of people who cater to the elites and nobility, well, why not name ourselves a satellite colony of the Republic? Why not surrender and accept our new place as pure nobility?”

“You're being absurd, Arrow,” Uva growled. “Absolutely absurd. There is a major difference between High-Tier Pathbearers and your Republic's repugnant excuses for class. Shiv! Intervene.”

She called upon Shiv as if he were a monster to summon, and at the same time, Adam swept out a hand as well, taking Shiv by the shoulder. “Shiv, uphold my honor as you've sworn to before. The Abyssal casts doubt on my dignity and personhood!”

Shiv whipped his head around, trying to signal help to Valor using his gaze alone. Yet the Undying had vanished entirely and was nowhere to be seen.

Nihilist:Fuck.

“Look, I really think it's best that I—”

Both Adam and Uva began to drag him toward the sky, squabbling loudly, proclaiming that as soon as he tasted one of their omelets, he would know they were the true chosen one. That he would bow and weep and practically gift them his kitchen.

At some point, he realized this was a mixed plan on their part as well: to take revenge for him leaving them so suddenly, for not answering which of them was the better cook. With that in mind, Shiv decided to play along and enjoy himself. The answer to this riddle was pretty simple in the end. He wasn't going to let either of them take charge of his kitchen, but he would be beyond happy to share the space with them in serving the people of the Gate.

In that moment, despite all the horrors leaving the gate and all the horrors looming ahead, the world was pretty close to perfect.